RTHK: Pell given 6 years in prison for child sex abuse Australian Cardinal George Pell has been sentenced to six years in prison for sexually abusing two choirboys, the most senior of a string of recent Catholic priests to be punished for child sex offences. Pell, who has maintained his innocence and plans to appeal, appeared in a Melbourne court after being convicted on five offences including oral rape and molestation of the boys in 1996 and 1997. The 77-year old sat impassively, as Judge Peter Kidd graphically described his "breathtakingly arrogant" attacks. In sentencing, Kidd said the former Vatican number three's "may not live to be released from prison" as he described a "brazen and forceful sexual attack on the two victims". The judge set the minimum sentence Pell would have to serve at three years and eight months, due to his "otherwise blameless life". The cardinal faced a maximum 50 years in prison for the five charges. Pell was found guilty of cornering the two boys, who were aged 13 at the time and on scholarships to the prestigious St Kevin's College, in the sacristy after Sunday mass at St Patrick's Cathedral in December 1996, when he was archbishop of Melbourne. The boys had "nicked off" from the rest of the choral procession and were taking swigs of sacramental wine before the cardinal found them, opened his robe, exposed his penis and sexually assaulted them. "There is an added layer of degradation and humiliation that each of your victims must have felt in knowing that their abuse had been witnessed by the other," said Kidd. The judge added that the attack, and another two months later, in 1997, when he forced one of the boys up against the wall of a corridor and grabbed his genitals had a "profound impact" on the life of his victims. One of the victims died of an accidental heroin overdose in 2014 having never disclosed the abuse he suffered at the hands of Pell. Pell is the most senior member of the clergy to be convicted of historical child sex abuse. Until recently he ran the Vatican's finances and helped elect popes. With global attention on historic abuse within the Catholic church, Kidd however stressed that it was Pell rather than the Vatican that was on trial. He began the hearing, which was broadcast live, by stating that Pell was "entitled to the balanced and steady hand of justice" and lamenting "lynch mob mentality" among some of the public. "You are not to be made a scapegoat," he said. Pell did not take the stand in his defence, but in a video of his police interview in Rome in 2016, he called the allegations against him "deranged falsehood" and "a load of absolute and disgraceful rubbish". Pell's conviction - which has been criticised by prominent commentators and friends of the Cardinal - came about as a result of a retrial after the first jury was unable to reach a verdict in September. Media outlets were unable to report the guilty verdict until last month, when a suppression order was lifted after a second trial mounted against Pell - involving allegations stemming from a Ballarat swimming pool in the 1970s - was dropped. One complainant in that case, who alleged he was molested by Pell, has launched civil proceedings against him, as well as against the State of Victoria, the Sisters of Nazareth and Child and Family Services Ballarat. (AFP) This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Hong Kong: CS to attend UN meeting Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung will depart for Geneva, Switzerland tomorrow to attend the plenary meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government officials will attend the meeting as members of the China delegation. The UNHRC will further discuss and formally adopt the outcome report of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review on China including the Hong Kong SAR. The China delegation will be headed by Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Le Yucheng. Mr Cheung will speak at the plenary meeting in his capacity as the delegation's deputy head. The UNHRC Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review held a review meeting on November 6 last year to examine the third report submitted by China including the Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions, and adopted the outcome report on China on November 9. The report has been uploaded to the Constitutional & Mainland Affairs Bureau's website. During Mr Cheungs absence, Secretary for the Environment KS Wong will be Acting Chief Secretary. This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. By Jun Ji-hye An increasing number of IT startups and manufacturers have begun working to develop educational robots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to offer more personalized education in accordance with each student's characteristics and needs, industry officials said Wednesday. Cho Hyun-gu, left, CEO and founder of education startup Classting, poses with Chang Kyong-sok, CEO of Wonik Robotics, in the latter's headquarters in Pangyo, Gyeonggi Province, March 8, after signing an MOU to jointly develop an AI robot for education. / Courtesy of Classting ITS another bleak Christmas for some store owners in Downtown Port of Spain. This is the second year store owners are saying things are very slow, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Express visited Excellent City Centre at Frederick Street, Port of Spain, yesterday afternoon, and there was not much foot traffic, as has been in previous years, during the Christmas season. IF you need to get an MRI scan at a public hospital, you may be in for a long wait. The South-West Regional Health Authority (SWRHA) says it has a waiting list that goes to December 2022 for people to access MRI services. Speaking during a Public Administration and Appropriations Committee meeting on Wednesday evening, SWRHA director of Health Dr Pravinde Ramoutar said the Authority has been faced with challenges in providing this service, and there is little capacity at the other RHAs. Firm grapples with labor conflict, tax probe, leadership vacuum By Baek Byung-yeul Kim Hyung-rae, former Oracle Korea CEO Concerns are growing over the future of Oracle Korea as the Korean unit of the U.S.-based database integrated systems provider has been struggling to deal with deteriorating labor-management relations, a tax investigation and the exodus of senior officials, according to industry officials Wednesday. Oracle has been in a state of shock after CEO Kim Hyung-rae and nearly a dozen senior officials, including three vice presidents, decided to quit. Oracle Korea said Wednesday that its CEO will soon leave the company for personal reasons. His abrupt departure is reportedly due to his failure to manage labor-related issues and boost business performance. In addition, the Korean unit has been in the hot seat for its poor labor management system. Its union began an 83-day walkout May 2018, demanding fair compensation and enhanced working conditions. The union members returned to work, but its leaders held a protest in front of ASEM Tower in southern Seoul where Oracle Korea's branch office is located. Oracle Korea also has been in conflict with the government after the National Tax Service imposed 314.7 billion won of penalties in 2016 after discovering that it transferred 2 trillion won of operating profit between 2008 and 2014 to overseas tax havens. Company officials in the industry said the string of scandals and controversies may damage the firm's dominant status in the database management service (DBMS) market here. "Large companies, which have been Oracle's main clients, are planning to diversify their data management system by adopting cloud computing services. This will have a negative impact on the business," said an official who wanted to remain anonymous. Oracle Korea has gained its biggest revenue here in the DBMS market, a collection of programs designed to store, process and change information on databases. The firm had about a 60 percent market share in the sector in 2018. The dispute between labor and management is another issue the firm has faced. Oracle Korea said the firm is working closely with the union to reach an agreement, but the latter claimed the management had not been actively engaged in collective bargaining. The union claimed employees have not had any wage increases over the past 10 years and have struggled with heavy workloads as some of them worked about 80 to 100 hours a week before the 52-hour working week system was introduced in 2018. Ahn Jong-cheol, head of the union, argued that the string of resignations of the firm's executives is a condemnation of Oracle's poor labor management relations. "The resignations began in January after officials from the firm's headquarters in the U.S. witnessed the demonstrations of the union," Ahn said. "Oracle Korea held a press conference introducing its cloud service in Seoul, Jan. 29. We held a strike in front of the conference building, and executives from Oracle headquarters in the U.S. took a lot of photos of us. After that, an executive dealing with labor management relations left the firm in late February," he said. Ahn said the U.S. headquarters is taking this seriously, regarding how the strike will impact its other overseas branches. "Though the U.S. branch has no union, employees of its European branch do. Not only the unions in European countries but also overseas branches in Asian countries where there aren't any unions yet are keeping their eyes on what's happening in Korea," he said. It is your duty as Prime Minister and Minister of Health to provide whats best for your citizens. The jabs have been provided and are still available to all who want it. But what about those who do not want it? By Nam Hyun-woo The Korea Corporate Governance Service (KCGS), the country's leading proxy advisor, has decided to side with Hyundai Motor over the company's proposed dividend policy and the appointment of independent board members, it said Wednesday. The KCGS is the latest in a growing chorus of investor advisers here and abroad, which have recommended Hyundai Motor shareholders to vote for the company's plan of paying 3,000 per common share, and oppose U.S. hedge fund Elliott's demand for the company to pay 21,967 won per share during the automaker's March 22 shareholders' meeting. Four other advisors Institutional Shareholder Services, Glass Lewis, Sustinvest, and the Daishin Economic Research Institute are also backing Hyundai. In its report, KCGS urged shareholders to "not use their rights" on Elliott's demand, saying the "dividend is appropriate when it is paid at a stable pace on the basis of long term policies, and Hyundai Motor's proposal is in accordance with this." Elliott's demand would force Hyundai Motor and its affiliate Hyundai Mobis to return 7 trillion won ($6.2 billion) to shareholders through special dividends, which is more than 4 times Hyundai Motor's net profit of 1.65 trillion won. Elliott has also demanded Hyundai Mobis to pay 26,399 won per common share. Proxy advisors cited this as the grounds for their opposing opinion on Elliott's demand. Both Sustinvest and Daishin Economic Research Institute said the dividend Elliott demanded was "excessive" and would likely "undermine the company's mid- and long-term value." Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis also cited similar reasons for their siding with Hyundai. "Major proxy advisors in and outside of Korea have all supported Hyundai Motor's proposed dividend policy," a Hyundai Motor Group official said. "It seems they have highly evaluated the virtuous cycle of the company's sustainability improving shareholders' value." Over naming three independent board members, the advisors showed mixed response, with Institutional Shareholder Services alone recommending two Elliott candidates. - Macron is visiting three African nations including Kenya - The French leader will stay in Nairobi for two days before jetting out - State House confirmed Macron will attend a UN Assembly on environment A plane carrying French President Emmanuel Macron landed on Jomo Kenyatta International Airport few minutes after 2pm on Wednesday, March 13, for a two-day state visit. Macron headed straight to State House where he received a 21-gun salute before inspecting a guard of honour and later held a closed door meeting with host President Uhuru Kenyatta. Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens. READ ALSO: Ethiopian Airlines: Maombi ya kumuaga rubani yafanyika ingawa mwili haujatambuliwa French President Emmanuel Macron inspects a guard of honour. Photo: Uhuru Kenyatta/Facebook. Source: Facebook READ ALSO: Uhuru says he looks forward to Kenya electing woman president in his lifetime Though a communique had been sent out indicating the two leaders would hold a joint public address, Uhuru through Facebook noted Kenya and France would continue to enjoy a cordial relationship. "I am delighted to welcome my friend President Emanuel Macron of the Republic of France at State House, Nairobi. Kenya and France maintain cordial relationships that have allowed to stimulate growth in different sectors in the benefit of our peoples," he said. During his stay in Kenya, the 41-year-old president will attend a United Nations Environmental Assembly and tour the Nairobi Railway Station. Do you have a life-changing story you would like us to publish? Please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690 and Telegram: Tuko news. The Kenyan Man With No Penis | Tuko TV Source: Tuko By Nam Hyun-woo President Moon Jae-in will meet CEOs of foreign firms in Korea on March 28, which will be the first meeting of its kind since Moon took the helm of the country two years ago, according to Cheong Wa Dae and foreign business chambers Wednesday. A Cheong Wa Dae official said Moon will hold the meeting with foreign company CEOs at the presidential office. The official confirmed that attendees will include American Chamber of Commerce in Korea (AMCHAM) Chairman James Kim. Approximately 40 CEOs of foreign companies here are expected to attend the meeting, and many members of AMCHAM and European Chamber of Commerce in Korea (ECCK) will likely attend. AMCHAM is currently selecting participating member companies, but has yet to decide which CEOs will meet Moon. An ECCK official also confirmed that its Chairman Dimitris Psillakis will attend the meeting and it is selecting participating members. After Moon was sworn in as the country's chief executive in 2017, he had several meetings with domestic conglomerates and middle-market firms, but no foreign companies were included in the meeting. The meeting came amid foreign firms' growing demand for deregulation and proper communication with the government. In November, five foreign chambers of commerce the United States, Britain, the European Union, France and Germany adopted a joint statement asking the government to make its regulatory environment more predictable and consistent. In the same month, the ECCK published a white paper containing 123 requests for the regulatory plans of the Moon government, expressing disappointment about inadequate communication with foreign firms here. The new patrol boats will free up Japanese destroyers, such as the Kurama. Photo from the South China Morning Post By Julian Ryall Japan is to begin building a new class of light patrol ships for the Maritime Self-Defence Forces in 2020, the defence ministry has confirmed to the South China Morning Post. The new warships will be designed to carry out reconnaissance and surveillance missions within Japan's territorial waters, freeing up the destroyers that have been used in recent years to patrol waters close to the Diaoyu archipelago, which Japan controls and refers to as the Senkaku Islands but which both Beijing and Taipei claim sovereignty over. An official in the ministry's press office confirmed that the new vessels' primary tasks would be patrolling, although no decision has been made on where they will be based or how soon they will be deployed. Similarly, the official said, no decision has been announced on a budget or the companies that will build the vessels, which were first proposed in the National Defence Programme Guidelines approved by the government in December. The guidelines say the defence force will operate patrol ships but do not specify areas of operation. There is little debate, however, over the biggest threat that Tokyo perceives to its territorial integrity. The Diaoyu Islands, known in Japan as the Senkaku Islands. Photo from the South China Morning Post "Japan sees China as a rising threat to its maritime interests and its inherent territory, and that means primarily Okinawa and the Senkaku Islands," said Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies at the Tokyo campus of Temple University. "Deploying more ships in that area is designed to send a message to Beijing that Japan is not going to acquiesce and will continue to press and defend its claims", he told the South China Morning Post. "But neither side is going to back down over the question of the islands, so we have this cat-and-mouse situation in which, I suspect, China will continue to probe and test and assert its own claims", he said. "And every time a Chinese ship intrudes into Japanese territorial waters around those islands, Beijing will say that it is asserting its rights, and then Japan will respond in kind. "Both sides are putting their markers down and the waters there are a potential flashpoint." The potential for a minor incident or an accidental clash escalating rapidly is clear from an incident in September 2010, Kingston said, in which the Chinese trawler Minjinyu 5179 collided with a patrol vessel from the Japanese coastguard within Japan's territorial waters around the disputed islands. A Japan Coast Guard's patrol boat, left bottom, discharges water against Taiwanese fishing boats near disputed islands called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, in the East China Sea, Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2012. AP-Yonhap Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, left, listens as Chinese Vice Premier Liu He talks while they line up for a group photo at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China February 15, 2019. Reuters-Yonhap By Wendy Wu They may have left the spotlight of centre stage, but top trade negotiators from China and the United States continue to work furiously on the details of an agreement to resolve the countries' deep-rooted economic standoffs and end their prolonged trade war, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told a Senate committee on Tuesday. They may have left the spotlight of centre stage, but top trade negotiators from China and the United States continue to work furiously on the details of an agreement to resolve the countries' deep-rooted economic standoffs and end their prolonged trade war, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told a Senate committee on Tuesday. Lighthizer, who is in charge of the U.S. side of the trade talks, said at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Tuesday that the Trump administration's hope was that "we are in the final weeks of having an agreement but I'm not predicting one". "There still are major, major issues that have to be resolved," he added, "and if those issues are not resolved in a way that's beneficial to the United States, we will not have an agreement". Lighthizer said he would hold another telephone negotiation with his Chinese counterparts on Wednesday, after a phone conversation with them lasted two hours Monday night. Chinese state media reported that Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He had a telephone conversation with Lighthizer and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin at 7pm on Monday, discussing some key issues concerning the text of a trade agreement, without elaborating on details. Lighthizer said at the hearing that he was on the phone "up to 9 o'clock" Monday night and that the discussion went through many "very, very complicated issues". U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer testifies before House Ways and Means Committee hearing on U.S.-China Trade on Capitol Hill in Washington U.S., February 27, 2019. Reuters-Yonhap "We are working, more or less, continuously. I will be on phone again with them tomorrow," he said. "If we have an agreement, it would be 110 to 120 pages. It's very, very detailed and very specific". Asked whether a deal could be expected to emerge by the end of the month, Lighthizer said only that "we will see". "We are either going to have a good result or we are going to have a bad result before too long, but I'm not setting up a specific time frame it is not up to me," he said. "The president will tell me when the time is up, or the Chinese will." As a gesture of goodwill during the negotiations, the U.S. has delayed raising the tariffs levied on US$200 billion of Chinese products from the current 10 per cent to a new level of 25 per cent, a move which had been scheduled to take effect March 1. There have been hopes that an enforceable deal could to address persistent issues including technology transfers, market access, China's hefty industrial subsidies and its failure to protect intellectual property rights. Jake Parker, vice president of China operations at the U.S.-China Business Council, said that China has incentives to reach a deal but is also facing domestic pressures for any agreement to "not be viewed as capitulation to the U.S". China's President Xi Jinping (L) and US President Donald Trump attend a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 9, 2017. AFP-Yonhap The following is a release by the Elections and Boundaries Commission on the recount request Two paragliders die in Gliderport collision Two paragliders, Glenn Johnny Peter Bengtsson of Carlsbad and Raul Gonzalez Valerio of Orange County, died after a collision above the Torrey Pines Gliderport around 2:40 p.m. March 9, authorities said. The solo pilots crashed into each other about 35 feet in the air, became entwined and plummeted onto the steep cliff face, about 45 feet below the edge, said San Diego Lifeguard Lt. Rich Stropky. Valerio was certified to fly on his own; Bengtsson was working on his certification, but had flown 20 to 25 times, Stropky said. He added that the less experienced pilot was flying south when he made a hard right turn into the path of the northbound pilot. The lines leading from their harnesses to their canopies entangled. Authorities did not know whether the fatal injuries were caused by the initial impact or the cliff crash. When we arrived, we had no reason to believe the injuries were fatal, Stropky said. Its a very tragic, tragic incident here this day. City Council member Barbara Bry said at the March 11 City Council meeting: My heart goes out to their families. I support an investigation to provide the families and the paragliding community with clarity to avoid further incidents. Motorcyclist killed in Gilman crash identified Authorities have identified a motorcyclist who was killed in a crash while using a bicycle lane to pass slower-moving traffic on a La Jolla street earlier this week. Danny Jay Chehaiber, 32, was struck by an SUV on Gilman Drive near University of California San Diego around 8 a.m. March 5, according to the Medical Examiners Office. Chehaiber had been riding his motorcycle northbound alongside the sidewalk when he was hit by a 2004 Toyota Highlander that turned into a driveway directly in his path, according to information from San Diego police. He was taken to Scripps Memorial Hospital by medics but never regained consciousness. No one else was injured in the crash. Police Blotter Feb. 11 Grand theft, 5600 block Taft Ave., 5 p.m. Feb. 23 Petty theft, 1200 block Opal St., 6:30 a.m. Feb. 24 Argument with threats, a landlord and a tenant were involved in a verbal argument, when the tenant verbally threatened to hurt the landlord, 5300 block La Jolla Blvd., 1:48 a.m. Battery with serious injury, the victim was punched in the face and thrown to the ground by her neighbor, 500 block Marine St., 6:50 p.m. Feb. 26 Fraud, 1300 block Caminito Arriata, 2 p.m. March 2 Vehicle theft, 2600 block Torrey Pines Road, 12:01 a.m. Vehicle theft, 1200 block Prospect St., 3:07 a.m. Vehicle break-in/theft, 300 block Rosemont St., 5 a.m. Misdemeanor vandalism, 900 block Opal St., 3 p.m. March 3 Residential burglary, 7100 block Caminito Olmo, 12:30 a.m. Vehicle break-in/theft, 8300 block Cliffridge Ave., 9:15 a.m. Vehicle break-in/theft, 1000 block Agate St., 8:30 p.m. March 4 Vehicle break-in/theft, 8800 block Villa La Jolla Drive, 3:40 a.m. March 5 Grand theft, 6600 block Avenida Andorra, 7 a.m. Petty theft, 7100 block Fay Ave., 8:40 p.m. March 6 Vandalism, 8800 block Villa La Jolla Drive, 11 a.m. Residential burglary, 5200 block Cass St., 1 p.m. Grand theft, 5700 block La Jolla Blvd., 4 p.m. Vehicle theft, 1100 block Virginia Way, 5 p.m. Vehicle break-in/theft, 5000 block La Jolla Blvd., 9 p.m. March 7 Vehicle break-in/theft, 1000 block Sapphire St., 10 p.m. March 8 Vandalism, 7300 block Brodiaea Way, 6:15 p.m. Compiled by Ashley Mackin-Solomon from San Diego police reports Russian occupation forces launched three attacks, using the weapons banned under the Minsk agreements, on positions of Ukrainian troops in the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) area in eastern Ukraine over the past day. In the zone of action of tactical force East, the enemy used 120mm and 82mm mortars to fire on Ukrainian positions near Pavlopol (25km north-west of Mariupol); hand-held antitank grenade launchers and small arms outside Avdiivka (17km north of Donetsk), the JFO Headquarters press centre reports on Facebook. In the zone of action of tactical force North, Ukrainian defenders came under 82mm mortar fire in the area of Krymske (42km north-west of Luhansk). No casualties among Ukrainian troops were reported. According to the intelligence, two invaders were killed and four more were wounded over the past day. Today, the enemy has not opened fire yet. The Joint Forces reliably control the enemy on the contact line, adhering to the ceasefire agreements. ol Ukrainian Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak and Turkish Ambassador to Ukraine Yagmur Ahmet Guldere discussed defense cooperation, in particular, its strengthening in the Black Sea region. "During the meeting, the sides discussed the state and prospects of defense cooperation between the countries, as well as the security situation in the Black Sea region. The parties also discussed the Ukrainian-Turkish cooperation in the defense sector. The sides expressed interest in strengthening naval cooperation in the Black Sea, intensifying the military and political dialogue on regional security issues, as well as increasing the pace of defense and industrial cooperation," the press service of the Defense Ministry of Ukraine said in a report. Poltorak noted during the meeting that the Republic of Turkey was a key strategic partner of Ukraine and had a great influence on the development of the security situation in the region. ish Europe and the United States should strengthen the transatlantic partnership in the light of possible spread of Russian aggression. Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, former commanding general of the United States Army Europe, made a corresponding statement at the conference in Prague dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the membership of the Czech Republic and other Visegrad Four countries in NATO, the Czech news channel STK reports. If we are not fully united, it will immediately induce them [Russians] to resort to aggression, the General said, adding that Moscow would use any cracks in the Alliance. Hodges is convinced that NATO needs to build up capacities in the Black Sea region. "It is the area where Russia commits the greatest and strongest acts of aggression. If the West does nothing with the annexation of Crimea, it is quite possible that Odesa and, probably, Romania will be occupied next," he said. According to Hodges, the Alliance must clearly understand the threats it faces in order to continue to be successful. In this context, the General noted that terrorism is dreadful, but NATO must also counter potential threats posed by Russia and China. ol Ukraine's energy independence, as well as the efficient use of energy resources, is the mission of all levels of government that must be carried out daily. Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Groysman said this during the forum "From Energy Efficiency to Energy Independence" held in Kyiv today, the Government portal reported. "Our energy independence is the mission that we must carry out on a daily basis, keeping in mind that we are subjected to constant attacks by the enemy. Energy independence is critically important because power industry has always been a kind of hybrid weapon against Ukraine. And now we are well aware that reaffirming of energy independence is in our hands," Groysman said. According to the prime minister, new possibilities for performing the set tasks were provided by the decentralization reform, which enabled the transfer of resources to the communities to improve the quality of life. Over the years of reforming the communities have better realized how to use these opportunities. An example is tariffs and the state of utility networks. "If we invest in energy efficiency, we will be able to achieve a new quality of services, while they will become more available for the population. Therefore, it is vital for us to invest more in energy efficiency, energy independence, cease the reliance on standard costs. I call on everyone let's shape the policy in such a way as to achieve energy efficiency and energy sufficiency. Therefore, we will reach high standards of living. I am talking about real things," Groysman stressed. The ExportImport Bank of the United States, which reopened its two programs in Ukraine after a five-year pause, started to register first transactions on certain projects. Alex Gordin, Managing Director of Broad Street Capital Group, told Ukrinform on Tuesday after a meeting organized by the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC) in Washington. According to Gordin, after EXIM officially resumed two programs in Ukraine in December 2018, it is now engaged in processing a package of first transactions. In particular, this concerns the projects on the creation of solar power plants. "Many companies deal with the installation of solar power plants because it is profitable, and several have already started to buy this equipment in the United States to install them in Ukraine," said Gordin. In addition, according to him, a number of agricultural producers, who need to purchase agrarian equipment, seeds, consumables, also launched the work on purchasing these products from American companies. As Ukrinform reported, the U.S. EXIM Bank decided to resume its cooperation with Ukraine after a five-year interruption. EXIM reopened its programs for both private and public sectors. The U.S.-Ukraine Business Council called this step a terrific signal to U.S. companies seeking to supply the Ukrainian market with U.S. goods and services. In addition, it also sends an encouraging message to investors on the improving economic condition in Ukraine. The short-term EXIM programs of the bank, in particular, provide additional guarantees, a kind of non-payment insurance, for exporters to sell their goods and services in Ukraine. Medium-term programs are primarily aimed at supplying U.S. equipment or launching small projects in Ukraine. iy The Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) assures that Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, which the company will receive at the end of March, will be utilized only after the approvals from the US, the EU, Ukraine. "An aircraft will be brought into commercial service only when the mandatory procedures are carried out to confirm that an aircraft meets all safety requirements and when the permits for the flights are received from the aviation authorities of the USA, the EU, and Ukraine at least," reads the statement of the UIA. In addition, it is reported that the UIA is interested in upgrading the fleet with modern aircraft models. As of now, there are no Boeing 737 MAX planes in the UIA fleet, but three airplanes of this model are expected to be delivered to Ukraine by the end of 2019. At present, the UIA is in active dialogue with the manufacturer of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft and closely follows the course of the investigation into ET302 flight crash. On March 12, UIA spokesperson said in a commentary to Ukrinform that the company expected to receive one Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane in late March and another two airplanes of the same model by the end of this year. ol U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Russia's annexation of Crimea and aggression in eastern Ukraine an attempt to gain access to Ukraines oil and gas reserves. He stated this at IHS Markits CERAWeek conference in Houston, the USA, Reuters reports. Pompeo urged the oil industry to work with the Trump administration to promote U.S. foreign policy interests, especially in Asia and in Europe, and to punish what he called bad actors on the world stage. The United States has imposed harsh sanctions in the past several months on two major world oil producers, Venezuela and Iran. Pompeo said the U.S. oil-and-gas export boom had given the United States the ability to meet energy demand once satisfied by its geopolitical rivals. We dont want our European allies hooked on Russian gas through the Nord Stream 2 project, any more than we ourselves want to be dependent on Venezuelan oil supplies, Pompeo said, referring to a natural gas pipeline expansion from Russia to Central Europe. Pompeo called Russias invasion of Ukraine an attempt to gain access to the countrys oil and gas reserves. Syrian refugees walk through the flooded streets of Dalhamiya informal settlement in Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, January 2019. UNHCR/Diego Ibarra Sanchez (Brussels, 13 March 2019) On the eve of the foreign ministers meeting at the third Brussels Conference on Supporting the Future of Syria and the Region, three UN Principals today warned that the Syria crisis is not yet over and called for sustained and large-scale support to vulnerable Syrians, refugees and the communities hosting them. As the crisis enters its ninth year, humanitarian needs inside Syria remain at record levels with 11.7 million people in need of some form of humanitarian aid and protection. Some 6.2 million people are internally displaced and more than 2 million boys and girls are out of school in Syria. An estimated 83 percent of Syrians live below the poverty line, and people are increasingly vulnerable due to the loss or lack of sustained livelihoods. Without an immediate and substantial injection of funds, life-saving provisions of food, water, health care, shelter and protection services will likely be interrupted, said UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock. It is vital that the international community remains by the side of every woman, man, girl and boy in Syria who need our help to meet the very basic requirements of a dignified life. If donors provide the funding, we can implement the plans to help achieve that. The situation is also driving the largest refugee crisis in the world. There are over 5.6 million Syrian refugees and up to 3.9 million impacted members of host communities in the neighbouring countries. The UN is therefore urgently seeking increased funding to help people in need through a US$3.3 billion appeal for the response inside Syria, and a $5.5 billion refugee and resilience plan for the neighbouring countries. Having just visited Syria and Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Im deeply troubled by the widening gap between their massive needs and the support being made available for the international refugee response. Eight years into the largest refugee crisis in decades, around 70 percent of Syrian refugees live a razor-edge existence below the poverty line, said the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi. Reduced assistance due to funding cuts means that refugees are forced to make agonizing choices every day, such as taking children out of school to work or reducing meals. They are also vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. It is essential that the international community stays the course in supporting the millions of Syrian refugees who live in neighbouring countries and still require protection and assistance. No less support needs to be extended to the local host communities and governments who have been sheltering millions of Syrian refugees for the past eight years, said Grandi. Help is also needed for those refugees and the much larger number of internally displaced people who are choosing to return home, in very difficult circumstances. Host countries and their communities need predictable financing to continue the support for refugees, ensure national services are available, and to expand opportunities for both refugees and citizens. They have generously hosted refugees, offering asylum and protection, opening public services, enabling more and more refugees to participate in the local economy and building the resilience of refugees and hosts alike. "In Syria, poverty is soaring, basic service infrastructure is damaged or destroyed, and the social fabric is strained to the limit, said Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator. Host governments and communities in countries neighbouring Syria need our support to stay the course in extending their generosity to refugees while at the same time maintaining the momentum of their own development path. We need the international community to increase its support for resilience both in Syria and in neighbouring countries. Despite generous funding by donors in 2018, only 65 percent of the $3.4 billion required for the inside-Syria plan last year was received. The regional refugee and resilience plan requesting $5.6 billion for 2018 was 62 percent funded. The three UN Principals jointly call on the international donor community to pledge generously for 2019 during the high-level conference tomorrow. For more information on this topic, please contact: For OCHA Jens Laerke, [email protected] , +41 79 472 9750 , +41 79 472 9750 David Swanson, [email protected] , +962 791 417 882 For UNHCR In Amman, Rula Amin, [email protected] , +962 (0)790 04 58 49 , +962 (0)790 04 58 49 In Geneva, Andrej Mahecic, [email protected] , +41 79 642 97 09 For UNDP The Act was backed by 427 congressmen. The United States House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the United States Congress, has backed the Crimea Annexation Non-recognition Act. "The House of Representatives of the U.S. Congress has approved the Act, which determines the policy of the United States on non-recognition of sovereignty of the Russian Federation over Crimea, its airspace, or its territorial waters," the Embassy of Ukraine in the USA wrote on Facebook. Read alsoU.S. congressman expresses strong support for Ukraine's accession to NATO The document also prohibits U.S. federal departments and agencies from carrying out any actions or providing any support that may be interpreted as such, which is contrary to the aforementioned U.S. policy. The Act was backed by 427 congressmen. As was reported earlier, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stressed in the July 25, 2018 Crimea Declaration that "the United States rejects Russia's attempted annexation of Crimea." What is more, early in March 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump signed the Continuation of the National Emergency with respect to Ukraine, according to which sanctions against the Russian Federation in connection with the occupation of Crimea remain in force. If theres one thing Muirlands Middle School student Luke Lansky has learned from his recent completion of the Mission Trails Regional Parks Five-Peak challenge, its always read a contract before you agree to the terms. As unexpected as that may seem, it makes sense to him and friend Danielle Davis. (Danielle) asked me if I wanted to go on a hike with her and her mom, so I agreed to go on one hike. Just one! he insisted. Danielle interrupted, giggling, (You agreed) before we sent you the terms and conditions! We said in the contract that by completing this hike you nominate yourself to do the Five-Peak Challenge with us! You didnt have to agree before you read it. But it all seemed to work out for the best. From mid-January to Feb. 23, the two trekked at least one of the Mission Trails Regional Parks five hikes per weekend as part of the challenge (one weekend, they completed two in one day). Using a map provided by the Mission Trails Regional Park, hikers can complete the challenge by reaching the summit of all five peaks (on authorized trails only) in any order and within their own timeframe. Hikers must prove their accomplishment by taking a photo next to the sign at each summit. The five peaks are Cowles Mountain (pronounced coals, not cow-wells, by the way) that tops at 1,594 feet and is 2.46 miles; Pyles Peak at 1,379 feet and is 2.79 miles; Kwaay Paay at 1,194 feet and 1.2 miles; South Fortuna at 1,094 feet and 2.37 miles; and North Fortuna at 1,291 feet and 2.69 miles. Danielle Davis and Luke Lansky celebrate reaching another summit. Courtesy Contrary to her recent achievement, Danielle said that hiking has never really been my favorite thing, but when you have a friend, it makes it more fun. (Hence, the terms and conditions that guarantee she has some companionship.) The hikers also brought the Davis family dog, Fenway, who Danielle said had a ball and enough contagious energy to make the excursion easier. Joined by Lukes mother Aimee, the first in their five-fold endeavor was Kwaay Paay, and despite its shorter distance to the summit, is one of the steepest hikes offered. I chose that one first because I wanted to sleep in and it was the shortest in miles, Danielle said. It turned out to be really hard because it was so steep. And after the first hike, she added: We had such a great time and wanted to keep going, but we didnt have a plan for which one to do next. It wasnt that organized. The most challenging Luke nicknamed El Diablo, and it involves hiking Cowles and Pyles Peak in the same trek. In order to get to Pyles, you have to go through Cowles, Danielles mother Lara Davis explained. On the map, it doesnt look intimating. But it was a nine-mile, multi-hour endeavor! All said, Luke opined: I felt really accomplished. My favorite was North Fortuna because it was the last one and had a river going through it because of the rain. There wasnt a bridge or anything, so we just walked through the river, which I really liked. We knew it was going to be a challenge, and for us it was really hard, but when you get to the top it is all worth it. There are such good views and such a good feeling. Danielle echoed: I felt sore, but accomplished. On the last hike, we had lunch at the top of the mountain and it was just amazing. Lara, proud of their achievement, added: It is such a great resource and opportunity, and Im really glad they did it. Danielle has since extended the terms and conditions to which Luke shakes his head in apprehension to next take on the San Dieguito River Valley Conservancy Crest to Coast trail challenge, which includes five hikes between Julian and Del Mar. Credited with being less challenging than the Five Peaks, the Coast to Crest Trail Challenge goes through June 30 so they have to complete it by then. Reluctantly agreeing to the next challenge, Luke said: The next time you ask me to do something, Im going to ask to see the terms and conditions first! Ukrainian crew members are protected by the Third Geneva Convention. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has said Ukrainian sailors captured by the Russian Federation in the Kerch Strait could be considered prisoners of war (POWs). "Ukrainian crew members apprehended by Russian authorities in the Kerch Strait on November 25, 2018 could be considered as prisoners of war and protected under the Third Geneva Convention," the OHCHR said in a report on the human rights situation in Ukraine from November 16, 2018 to February 15, 2019. Read alsoU.S. diplomats urge Russia to immediately release Ukrainian sailors rather than conduct psychiatric exams It is reported the Russian Federation, the occupying power in Crimea, has still not granted OHCHR access to the peninsula in line with UN General Assembly resolution on the territorial integrity of Ukraine 68/262 and resolutions 71/205, 72/190 and 73/263. "OHCHR monitors the human rights situation on the peninsula from mainland Ukraine. The Russian Federation continues to apply its laws, in violation of international humanitarian law applicable to an occupying power, resulting in grave human rights violations, disproportionately affecting Crimean Tatars," reads the report. UNIAN memo. On the morning of November 25, Russia blocked the passage to the Kerch Strait for the Ukrainian tugboat "Yany Kapu" and two armored naval boats "Berdyansk" and "Nikopol," which were on a scheduled re-deployment from the Black Sea port of Odesa to the Azov Sea port of Mariupol. The Ukraine Navy Command noted that the Russian side had been informed of the plans to re-deploy the vessels in advance in accordance with international standards to ensure the safety of navigation. The Russian coast guard ship "Don" rammed the Ukrainian tugboat, damaging the Ukrainian vessel. As the Ukrainian boats were heading back in the Odesa direction after being rejected passage via the Kerch Strait, Russian coast guards opened aimed fire on them. All 24 crew members on board were captured and later remanded in custody for two months, being charged with "illegal border crossing" (the sailors are facing up to six years in prison). Three crewmen were wounded in the attack. Russian-controlled "courts" in occupied Crimea ruled that all 24 detainees should be remanded in custody, after which they were transferred to the Moscow-based Lefortovo and Matrosskaya Tishina detention centers. Moscow's Lefortovo district court in the middle of January 2019 ruled to keep the Ukrainian sailors in remand until the end of April 2019. The money will be also allocated for replacement of any weapons or defensive articles provided to the Ukrainian government from the inventory of the United States. The U.S. Department of Defense has asked $250 million for the Ukrainian military and national security forces in the Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 budget request. Read alsoU.S. House of Representatives backs Crimea Annexation Non-recognition Act "The FY 2020 budget request for EDI [European Deterrence Initiative] includes $250 million to provide assistance and support to the military and national security forces of Ukraine, and for replacement of any weapons or defensive articles provided to the Government of Ukraine from the inventory of the United States," the document says. As UNIAN reported earlier, in September 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump signed the bill on the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2019, which provides for $250 million in security assistance to Ukraine. According to the document, $250 million was allocated, among other things, for military exercises, the provision of military equipment, lethal weapons and logistics support, and the replacement of previously provided weapons or military goods. The list also included reconnaissance support of Ukraine's armed security forces. The agreement is valid until March 31, 2019 inclusively. Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister on European and Euroatlantic Integration Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze has explained why Ukraine did not terminate the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership with Russia ahead of time. Read alsoKlimkin comments on Russia's list of Friendship Treaty "violations" "I will tell you why we did not terminate it ahead of time and why it was important to pull out of it under this procedure. Because during this period we were able to take advantage of the opportunities to file all lawsuits against the Russian Federation, and we can continue to do so on the basis of the violations of the Treaty committed by Russia until March 31, 2019 inclusively, as the agreement is still valid until that moment," she said, according to Ukrainian Pryamiy TV Channel. "And this means that all these violations, such as the illegal annexation, and the invasion of eastern Ukraine, and this attack and aggression in the Black Sea-Azov region, in the Kerch Strait, all these things are documented and are grounds for us to sue the Russian Federation," Klympush-Tsintsadze said. As UNIAN reported earlier, on December 10, 2018, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a law on non-prolonging the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership with Russia. On December 11, the law was published in the parliament's bulletin Holos Ukrainy. On December 12, the law on non-prolongation of the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership with Russia from April 2019 came into force. The Treaty is expiring on April 1, 2019. UNIAN memo. The Treaty between Ukraine and the Russian Federation was signed in Kyiv on May 31, 1997, for a period of 10 years. The Verkhovna Rada ratified the document on January 14, 1998, while the State Duma of the Russian Federation on December 25, 1998. The Treaty entered into force on April 1, 1999 (from the date of the exchange of ratification instruments). According to the Treaty, its validity was to be automatically extended for the next ten-year periods if neither of the parties declared its will to terminate it at least six months prior to the expiration of the next ten-year period. The trip is already on Putin's agenda. Russian President Vladimir Putin has scheduled a visit to Crimea to celebrate the anniversary of the occupation of the peninsula. Read alsoU.S. House of Representatives backs Crimea Annexation Non-recognition Act The trip is already on Putin's agenda, the Russian news agency RBC reported, citing three sources close to the Russian presidential administration. The occupying authorities have already announced a number of official events in Crimea and the city of Sevastopol on March 15-18. UNIAN memo. Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea in March 2014 after its troops had occupied the peninsula. An illegal referendum was held for Crimeans to decide on accession to Russia. De-facto Crimean authorities reported that allegedly 96.77% of the Crimean population had voted for joining Russia. On March 18, 2014, the so-called agreement on the accession of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol to Russia was signed in the Kremlin. The West did not recognize the annexation in response to which sanctions against Russia were introduced. Ukraine's parliament voted to designate February 20, 2014, as the official date when the temporary occupation of Crimea began. The United States doesn't want its European allies to be hooked on Russian gas through the Nord Stream 2 project. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said the Russian Federation is using gas pipelines to put political pressure on the people of Ukraine. Read alsoEU confirms Nord Stream 2 threatening its internal market "We all know the story in Russia. It invaded Ukraine to gain access to oil and gas reserves. It in turn deprived Ukraine of the possibility of developing those resources for itself and using its pipelines and its networks to bring energy to its own people. Rather, it uses those pipelines to put pressure political pressure on the people of Ukraine," Pompeo said at CERA Energy Week's "Reshaping the Energy Future" conference in Houston, Texas, on March 12, 2019. "We don't want our European allies hooked on Russian gas through the Nord Stream 2 project any more than we ourselves want to depend on Venezuela for our oil supplies," he said. "This need, this desperate need for diversification is why we exported more crude oil last year to countries all across the globe," Pompeo added. MEPs urge the EU to expand its East StratCom Task Force, set up in 2015, into a fully-fledged structure within the European External Action Service, to address Russias hostile propaganda. The European Parliament strongly condemned Russia, China, Iran and North Koreas increasingly aggressive actions, which seek to undermine the foundations and principles of European democracies as well as the sovereignty of all Eastern Partnership countries. Taking stock of the EUs latest efforts to counteract hostile propaganda by third parties, MEPs on Wednesday, March 13, called upon member states to consider developing a robust legal framework at both EU and international level to tackle hybrid threats. In the resolution, adopted by 489 to 148 and 30 abstentions, MEPs want to raise awareness about Russias disinformation campaigns, as this constitutes the main source of disinformation in Europe. MEPs urge the EU to expand its East StratCom Task Force, set up in 2015, into a fully-fledged structure within the European External Action Service, to address Russias hostile propaganda. Read alsoUkraine SBU blocks Russian special services' attempt to meddle into presidential elections MEPs call for social media companies, messenger services and search engine providers to be regulated by law. Companies failing to speedily remove systemic fake news should be held to account. Furthermore, authorities should be able to identify and locate authors and sponsors of submitted political content. Also in their resolution, MEPs strongly condemned third parties interfering in elections and referenda. "Member states are invited to amend electoral laws that would enable them to proactively counteract threats stemming from disinformation campaigns, cyberattacks, cybercrimes and violation of freedom of expression when voting," the EP press service wrote. Member states should support EU-associated countries and the Western Balkans to ensure a robust defense of their electoral processes from malicious propaganda activities, MEPs say. Read alsoUkraine's ministry of information policy presents White Book of info-ops against Ukraine In a vote on Tuesday, Parliament also adopted legislation to protect the May 2019 European elections from data misuse, following the findings on the UK Brexit referendum and the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal. The new rules introduce financial sanctions against European political parties and foundations that may deliberately misuse personal data in their European election campaigns. Disinformation poisons hearts and minds. We can no longer deny the fact that our institutions and societies are targeted by the Kremlin's hostile propaganda, which is part of a broader strategy. Fortunately, we are more experienced, determined and united to counter such activities. Our answer depends on resilient societies, transparent media and encouraging pluralism while avoiding censorship. Said rapporteur Anna Elzbieta Fotyga. The resolution takes stock of the follow-up by the European External Action Service on the last EP resolution on EU strategic communication to counteract propaganda, which was adopted on 23 November 2016. MEPs have noted that other major disinformation players are China, Iran, and North Korea. The Serbian Orthodox Church recognizes only the Ukrainian Orthodox Church belonging to the Moscow Patriarchate. The Serbian Orthodox Church has refused to recognize the newly created Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) as canonical and calls it "an artificial confederation of schismatic structures." Read alsoNew Orthodox Church of Ukraine may reach deal with Romanian Church on recognition "The Serbian Orthodox Church considers the intrusion by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew into the territory of the Russian Orthodox Church and his decisions related to Ukraine to be non-canonical," the Politika pro-government Serbian newspaper wrote, Ukraine's TSN news service reports. "The Kyiv-based Metropolia cannot be equated with current Ukraine as it has been under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate since 1686," according to a letter allegedly sent by the Serbian church to other churches. They also added the Serbian Orthodox Church recognizes only the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, headed by Metropolitan Onufriy, which is part of the Moscow Patriarchate. Serbia also "recommended" that all its bishops and priests refrain from liturgical and canonical communication with "Epifaniy [head of the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine] and all those who are in unity with him." The Belgrade newspaper reiterates such a position of the Serbian Orthodox Church was expected, since its bishops' council in November and January expressed a critical attitude to the decisions of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. The Cherkasy-based "writer," who is a Russia native, had been working under a supervision of Russian curators, the SBU press service notes. The Security Service of Ukraine reports its operatives have blocked the distribution of provocative anti-Ukrainian material aimed at inciting religious hatred. The detainee, a Cherkasy-based "writer," who is a Russia native and a member of the Writers' Union of the Russian Federation, had been working under a supervision of Russian curators, the SBU press service notes. Among the materials distributed on Russian-language online resources were articles condemning the creation of the new independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine and Constantinople's move to provide the Tomos of Autocephaly to the OCU. Read alsoRussia to continue campaign promoting religious tensions in Ukraine media During a search of the perpetrator's home, security officials revealed and then sent for forensic examination computer equipment with provocative materials stored on it. Investigative actions are under way. As UNIAN reported earlier, the SBU said its military counterintel unit had exposed and documented the activities of a special information group codename Sapfir set up by Russias military intelligence (commonly referred to as GRU) in the occupied Luhansk, as well as a human intelligence network of Russias intelligence services in the territories under control of Ukrainian authorities, that's according to Serhii Levchenko, head of military counterintel. The group was led by a Russian lieutenant colonel on active duty, and tasked with destabilizing the situation in Ukraine applying methods of hybrid information warfare, including with the use of social networks. There were no Ukrainian army casualties. Russian-led forces mounted three attacks on Ukrainian troops in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, in the past 24 hours. Read alsoUkrainian army destroys enemy fortified positions near Yasynuvata (Video) "No Ukrainian army casualties were reported in the past day. According to intelligence reports, two invaders were killed and another four were wounded," the press center of Ukraine's Joint Forces Operation said in an update on Facebook as of 07:00 Kyiv time on March 13, 2019. During the period under review, the Russian occupation forces opened fire from 120mm and 82mm mortars, hand-held anti-tank grenade launchers and small arms to attack the Ukrainian positions near the town of Avdiyivka, and the villages of Pavlopil and Krymske. "Since Wednesday midnight, Russian-led forces haven't attacked Ukrainian positions yet," the report said. No official confirmation has followed yet. Terrorists of the so-called "Donetsk People's Republic" ("DPR") have shot their "commander" after a reprimand for drinking alcohol and fled to the other self-proclaimed "Luhansk People's Republic" ("LPR"). Read alsoFormer leader of "DPR election commission" surrenders to Ukraine MP (Photo) "Militants in the 'DPR' shot their commander after he had reprimanded them for drinking alcohol, then they fled to the 'LPR,'" officer of the 53rd separate mechanized brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Anatoliy Shtefan wrote on Facebook on March 12, with reference to a tweet by Anton Semakin. No other details of the incident were reported. No official confirmation has followed yet. As UNIAN reported earlier, member of the Russian-led forces in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, Andrey Grishchenko aka ZAS, was eliminated in Luhansk region on March 7. The motive for the shooting is not clear, police say. Two teenagers have opened fire at a school in south-eastern Brazil, killing at least seven students and one employee, police say. The shooting happened at about 09:30 local time (12:30 GMT) when the students were on a break at the state school in Suzano, near Sao Paulo, according to the BBC. At least 10 other people have been wounded. Police say the hooded gunmen killed themselves after the attack. While gun crime is common in Brazil, shootings of this nature are not. The school has some 1,000 primary and secondary students, aged between six and 18. Read alsoExperts point to flaws in official version of Kerch massacre probe The identities of the victims and the alleged attackers - who were said to be former students at the school - have not yet been released. The motive for the shooting is not clear, police say. "I was in the classroom during our break. I thought [the sound] was from bombs. When I realized they were gunshots, I stayed there. I only left when the police arrived," teacher Sandra Perez told O Estado de S.Paulo newspaper (in Portuguese). Sao Paulo state governor Joao Doria tweeted that the victims had been "cruelly murdered". Muellers investigation has shown signs of coming to a close and he is expected to soon deliver a report to the Justice Department. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sentenced to a total of seven and a half years in prison Wednesday after a federal judge rejected his appeal for no additional time and rebuked him for his crimes and years of lies. Within minutes of the sentencing, prosecutors in New York brought state charges against Manafort a move that appeared at least partly designed to guard against the possibility that President Donald Trump could pardon him. The president can pardon federal crimes, but not state offenses, according to The Associated Press. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced Manafort to nearly three-and-a-half years in prison on charges that he misled the U.S. government about his foreign lobbying work and encouraged witnesses to lie on his behalf. That punishment is on top of a roughly four-year sentence he received last week in a separate case in Virginia. He is expected to get credit for the nine months of jail time hes done already. Read alsoManafort sentencing highlights Russia probe looming over Trump CNN The sentencing hearing was a milestone moment in special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election campaign. Manafort was among the first people charged in the investigation, and though the allegations did not relate to his work for Trump, his foreign entanglements and business relationship with a man the U.S. says has ties to Russian intelligence have made him a pivotal figure in the probe. Though the judge made clear that the case against Manafort had nothing to do with Russian election interference, she also scolded Manaforts lawyers for asserting that their client was only charged because prosecutors couldnt get him on crimes related to potential collusion with the Trump campaign. The no-collusion mantra is simply a non sequitur, she said, suggesting that those arguments were meant for an audience outside the courtroom presumably a reference to the president, who has expressed sympathy for Manafort and not ruled out a pardon. It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved in the federal conspiracy charges related to his foreign lobbying work and witness tampering. Reading from a three-page statement, Manafort asked for mercy and said the criminal charges against him have taken everything from me already. He pleaded with the judge not to impose any additional time beyond the sentence he had received last week in a separate case in Virginia. I am sorry for what I have done and all the activities that have gotten us here today, Manafort said in a steady voice. While I cannot undo the past, I will ensure that the future will be very different. The 69-year-old, who arrived in court in a wheelchair, said he was the primary caregiver of his wife and wanted the chance for them to resume their life together. Wednesdays sentencing comes in a week of activity for the investigation. Muellers prosecutors on Tuesday night updated a judge on the status of cooperation provided by one defendant, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and are expected to do the same later in the week for another. Muellers investigation has shown signs of coming to a close and he is expected to soon deliver a report to the Justice Department. 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Ireland Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe Dr. Misaki Wayengera, a researcher attached to the Department of Pathology at Makerere Universitys College of Health Sciences, has reached the final race in the WHO Africa Innovation Challenge after impressing judges with his ground-breaking invention that diagnoses hemorrhagic fevers. After futile efforts to attract funding from the Ugandan government, in 2013, Dr. Wayengera finally won a US$100,000 grant from Grand Challenges Canada to create Pan-Filovirus Rapid Diagnostic Test, a paper-strip test, similar to the one used in pregnancy but used in detecting Ebola and Marburg viruses. The award-winning researcher, who holds a Bachelor of Medicine and Human Surgery from Makerere University, a masters degree in Bioentrepreneurship and a Ph.D. degree in Pathogenomics from Toronto, Canada had been working on Ebola since it first broke out in Gulu, Masindi, and Mbarara districts of Uganda in 2000. Stories Continues after ad So, by the time of inventing the Pan-Filovirus Rapid Diagnostic Test, Dr. Misaki Wayengera was way north of the 10,000 Hour Rule. To commercialize his project, Misaki told thisisafrica.me in 2015 that he needed about US$100 million to build a facility that will house state-of-the-art laboratories. Other finalists in WHO Africa Innovation Challenge In the final race of WHO Africa Innovation Challenge, Misaki Wayengera qualified alongside two Ugandans: Denis Oguzu Lee for his startup National Ambulance Service and Wasswa William for PapES. The National Ambulance Service is a mobile, on-demand, hyper-local ambulance, police and fire service call and dispatch emergency system for Android and iOS. The innovation aggregates various types of private and public emergency services and allows the nearest required service to be dispatched immediately to the patient at the fastest possible time. PapES has been developed for automated diagnosis and classification of cervical cancer from pap-smear images. The tool also takes into consideration the patients cervical cancer risk factors. A cytopathologist analyses the patients cervical cancer risk factors and the tool generates a result on the possibility of cervical cancer. Must read: Rwanda opens $4.5 million coding school Subsequently, the cytopathologist can upload the pap-smear to segment the image using the developed techniques and extract cell features. In all, 30 finalists were picked from 2471 applications. These will then proceed to showcase their projects on the opening day of the second WHO Africa Health Forum in Praia, Cape Verde on March 26. The best teams will then be connected to business angels and investors to support them in their next phase of growth. WHO regional director for Africa Dr. Matshidiso Moeti said the extent of the response to the challenge affirms the enthusiasm among young people to make a difference and contribute to the health-care system on the continent. Health innovators have found a new home at WHO, where their innovative ideas will be supported in partnership with our network of stakeholders, she said. March 13 2019 The University of Edinburgh has furnished its architecture and landscape architecture students with a new design hub following conversion of a former police training school at Chambers Street. Robertson and Collective Architecture carried out a 3.1m refurbishment of the four-storey space as part of a wider campus improvement programme, creating an accessible general teaching space in the process. David Cairns, managing director of Robertson Central East, said: This has been an extensive refurbishment and I have no doubt that the new teaching spaces will be of huge benefit to students and staff alike. We are extremely proud of the quality of the modern new facilities whilst retaining key features of the 1887 Grade C listed building. Mark Robinson, chief executive of public sector procurement specialists Scape, added: The project will have lasting benefits beyond the build process, which promises to help provide our industry with the next generation of architects. The university recently refurbished the Edinburgh College of Art and Murchison House. The United Kingdom's potential withdrawal from the EU Customs Union and Single Market may cost Belgium more than 42,000 jobs and a 2.35 percent drop in the national GDP, CEO of the Federation of Belgian Enterprises (FEB) Pieter Timmermans said on Wednesday BRUSSELS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 13th March, 2019) The United Kingdom 's potential withdrawal from the EU Customs Union and Single Market Belgium more than 42,000 jobs and a 2.35 percent drop in the national GDP, CEO of the Federation of Belgian Enterprises ( FEB ) Pieter Timmermans said on Wednesday. The UK House of Commons is set to vote on a no-deal motion later on Wednesday after rejecting the updated withdrawal deal agreed by the UK government and the European Union a day earlier. "Belgium's losses could amount to 2.35 percent of GDP and more than 42,000 jobs," Timmermans told reporters. According to the RTBF broadcaster, 5,000 of the 25,000 Belgian companies that do business with UK companies have already prepared for the consequences of Brexit. The authorities of Flanders claim that Brexit to a greater extent threatens this most economically developed and populated region of Belgium. In this regard, the head of the regional government, Geert Bourgeois, called on Flemish companies to be prepared for this outcome and redirect their businesses to new markets. According to estimates of international consulting company Deloitte, Brexit will hit Belgium, Germany, France and the Netherlands harder than other EU member states. The consequences will mainly be felt in Flanders, which accounts for 80 percent of Belgian exports to the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is one of Belgium's top five economic partners, consuming about 9 percent of Belgian exports worth a total of 32 billion Euros ($36.2 billion). Belgium mainly exports cars, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food, beverages, textiles, synthetic materials and manual mechanical equipment to the United Kingdom. (@ChaudhryMAli88) HOUSTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 13th March, 2019) Kazakhstan is willing to invite Russian companies, including energy giants LUKoil and Rosneft, to explore for new reserves in the country, Kazakh Energy Minister Kanat Bozumbayev told reporters on the sidelines of the CERAWeek conference in Houston, Texas. At the conference Bozumbayev was asked if it was possible that new reserves would be discovered in the country.The minister said in response that Kazakhstan would come up with a new state program for geological exploration this year. "We are inviting international oil companies. I have already discussed it with [LUKoil CEO Vagit] Alekperov," Bozumbayev indicated, adding that Kazakhstan had "very comfortable relations" with the company. In addition, the minister noted the positive nature of cooperation with Russia's Rosneft. He also mentioned ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell as companies that potentially might be involved in exploring country's reserves. According to Archbishop Sebastian Shaw of Lahore, mobile phones are a source of distraction and can lead to addiction. In an age of widespread popularity of the smartphone to remain connected, a Pakistani archbishop has called on his faithful to refrain from using their smartphones for an hour during Lent. Speaking to the faithful at the Sacred Heart Cathedral, last week, Archbishop Sebastian Shaw of Lahore called for "an hour of fasting from smartphones to avoid distractions during the 14 Stations of the Cross and Sunday Mass. Mobile phones, he said, are like having Satan stashed away in your pockets when you come to church." Lent Lent is a 40-day period when Christians pray, do penance, fast, abstain and engage in almsgiving and good works in preparation for their holiest feast, Easter, the triumphant resurrection of Jesus from death. The period is in imitation of the 40 days that Jesus spent in the desert after his Baptism, facing the temptations of the Devil, before he began his public ministry. Smartphones Pakistan and its young people are no exception to the revolution of the smartphones sweeping across the globe. There are at least 155.4 million mobile phones in the country with a population of some 197 million population. According to the Pakistani telecommunications authority, about 63 million users have signed contracts for 3G or 4G connections. Studies have shown that in Asia especially South Asia - there is a lack of knowledge of how the internet works and its dangers. In Pakistan, around 69 per cent of the population do not even know what the internet is. Addiction Archbishop Shaw wants to warn young people against developing an addiction to the smartphone, like drugs. He lamented that young people keep sending messages even while they are praying." Instead, he said they should use Lent to analyze their life and give up habits and behaviours that distance them from others. Be firm in the face of temptation," he urged. In Pakistan, the use of mobile phones inside churches is also a security issue, related to terror attacks. For this reason, Church authorities have banned taking photo or video, including during religious holidays like Easter and Christmas. Bishop Samson Shukardin of Hyderabad agreed with his fellow bishop in Lahore. "Although it is a great source of information at ones fingertips, the unbridled use of mobile phones is most dangerous for young people, he said. He pointed to the harmful radiation from mobile phones and their use for wrong purposes and said they can destroy families. Distraction? Adeel Pratras , a young Catholic, disagrees, with the views of the bishops saying they are too harsh. The 28-year old leader of the charismatic movement in St James parish in Karachi said that regarding the smartphone as satanic sends a wrong message to other Christians and faiths. The closest collaborators of Pope Francis, greeted him Wednesday morning, on the 6th anniversary of his election, pledging him their support and closeness. By Robin Gomes Some 65 officials of the Roman Curia who are on their annual Lenten spiritual exercises along with Pope Francis, Wednesday morning greeted the Holy Father on the 6th anniversary of his election as the head of the Roman Catholic Church. Before the morning Mass, on the 3rd full day of the March 10-15 retreat at the Casa Divin Maestro in the town of Arricia, just outside Rome, Italian Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the prefect emeritus of the Vatican Congregation for Bishops, addressed the Holy Father on behalf of the retreat participants. On behalf of all those present, I would like to tell you, Your Holiness, that we rejoice and are full of joy in being able to celebrate this morning Mass together with you and presided over by you, Card. Re said. I would also like to tell you that we ask that the Lord be your light, support and comfort in your task of confirming your brethren in faith, of being the foundation of unity and of showing everyone the way that leads to heaven, the 85-year old cardinal said. Card. Re concluded asking the Holy Father's blessing and assured him they are truly close to him with great affection and sincere devotion. It was on 13 March 2013, that Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected as the head of the worldwide Catholic Church. He was elected in the 5th ballot on the second day of the conclave that was held following the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI on 28 February 2013. The 82-year old Pontiff is the first Pope from the American continent, the first Jesuit Pope in history and the first Pontiff who adopted the name of Italys popular Saint Francis of Assisi. Six days later, on 19 March, the feast of St. Joseph, Pope Francis inaugurated his pontificate with a solemn Mass in St. Peter's Square in the Vatican. Various political and religious leaders from around the world attended the event. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) Board of Directors today made a monumental decision that will revolutionize Southern Nevadas transportation. The 14-member Board approved a recommendation to select Elon Musks The Boring Company (TBC) to design, construct and operate a people mover for the Las Vegas Convention Center via a loop of underground express-route tunnels that could carry passengers in autonomous electric vehicles at high speeds (Pictured: High-Occupancy Autonomous Electric Vehicle (AEV) running between Exhibit Halls). The innovative project has the potential to connect Downtown, the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Las Vegas Boulevard Resort Corridor, McCarran International Airport and beyond. Las Vegas has maintained its reputation as a leading travel destination because we are driven by innovation and hospitality, said LVCVA CEO and President, Steve Hill. This project is an example of how our leading principles can create an experience benefitting our community and valued visitors. Currently in the midst of an expansion, the Las Vegas Convention Center will span 200 acres when complete in time for CES in 2021. Conventioneers walking the facility from end to end would log approximately two miles creating the need for an on-property guest transportation solution. In 2018, Las Vegas had more than 42 million visitors. The Las Vegas Convention Center hosts more than 1 million convention attendees annually. The Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada carries approximately 12 million passengers per year within the Las Vegas Boulevard Resort Corridor. Las Vegas is a high-energy, high-technology destination equipped to welcome the world, and we are excited to deliver a system that will help visitors efficiently navigate the citys many offerings, said Steve Davis, president, The Boring Company. Founded by Elon Musk, TBC is a leader in innovative transportation technology. Its projects include a Research and Development (R&D) Test Tunnel in Hawthorne, California. The R&D Test Tunnel represents a fully operational 1.14-mile Loop system that cost less than $10 million per mile including internal tunnel infrastructure. The LVCVAs TBC recommendation is a result of a multi-step process that started in 2018 with a request for information to gauge interest. A request for proposal was then issued. Interviews with the selected finalists were conducted by an evaluation team who determined the recommended company. The evaluation team was comprised of representatives from the LVCVA, private organizations including a Las Vegas resort property, and consultants in transportation systems, and automated people-mover construction and operations industries. Following todays decision, TBC and the LVCVA will determine specific design, construction and operational plans and negotiate a contract for final approval by the LVCVA Board in a subsequent meeting anticipated by June 2019. TBCs existing proposal indicates the underground loop system offers reduced total costs, less disruption to pedestrian and vehicle traffic, and faster construction time than traditional ground or above-ground options. The loop will be designed to meet the full spectrum of ridership needs, including demands from future expansions, with a potential capacity of up to 11,000 passengers per hour. The estimated system cost is between $35 million and $55 million depending on route, number of stations and size of stations. Las Vegas is on the cutting edge of technology and this project reflects the incredible work thats taking shape right here in Southern Nevada, said LVCVA Board Chairman and Clark County Commissioner, Larry Brown. Its exciting to have the Las Vegas Convention Center campus at the forefront of this historic development in our destination and we look forward to this new mass-transit solution with The Boring Company. Tourism is the engine that drives Southern Nevadas economy, and one of the greatest opportunities for continued growth is business travel. Through expanding and renovating the convention center coupled with innovations in efficiently and effectively moving locals and visitors within the destination, Las Vegas will not only retain its status as the No. 1 conventions city, it will ensure the economic future of the entire destination. Ian Hatton, chairman and founder of Enterprize Energy Speaking at the UKs Vietnam Towards a Low Carbon Energy Future conference in Hanoi on March 12, Enterprize Energys chairman and founder Ian Hatton provided an update on the progress of the project proposed between 20 and 50km offshore, Binh Thuan province (Ke Ga Cape), where an average wind speed of 9.5 metres per second has been recorded. On January 22, the prime minister directed Enterprize to prepare and conduct a survey programme, feasibility report, and formal proposal to put 3,400MW of the project into the National Power Development Plan VII. On March 11, the detailed survey and workplan to evaluate the 2,000 square kilometre Ke Ga zone was submitted by Enterprize to the Ministry of Industry and Trade for approval. The contents of the plan include full environmental impact assessment, geotechnical research, wind resource assessment, grid connection and impact analysis, plus the design of sub-structures for offshore turbines and sub-stations, a project execution plan, and a financing plan. The contractor for the entire survey plan is Electricity Construction Consultancy JSC 3 (EVN PECC3), supported by Enterprize Energys technical team and technical advisers from UK companies such as ODE, APEM, and Braemar. Financial planning is supported by Societe Generale, appointed by Enterprize Energy to lead this process. Enterprize Energy aims to construct the initial 600MW phase of the Ke Ga area by 2023 Enterprize Energy has adopted an accelerated, parallel-processed schedule to promote the rapid development of the Ke Ga zone. It has previously announced the selection of MVOW to supply wind turbine generators, the design of sub-structures by Vietsovpetro, and their fabrication by Vietsovpetro and PVC-MS. Societe Generale has been appointed as lead advisor for project financing and structuring. In the presentation, Ian Hatton announced that Enterprize Energy would be engaging with ODE to further develop the Articulated Wind Column (AWC) foundation, which can provide a cost-effective turbine foundation solution for water depths from 70 to 150 metres. We see real potential for this foundation in Taiwan, Vietnam, and Japan. Enterprize has already identified prospective sites in Vietnam and Taiwan for its deployment, Ian Hatton said. It is a great example of technology transfer from the oil and gas sector, an area where the UK has been an exemplar of engineering excellence in successfully opening up energy resources in extremely challenging marine conditions. On March 7, Hatton was invited to address the Central Economic Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam, contributing to the development of future energy policy for Vietnam. He is the first non-Vietnamese person to be invited to present to the committee. This is a great honour for the Enterprize Energy team and me to be able to contribute our experience to Vietnams future energy policy development, he said. It comes in our tenth year of operation, a year where we have made progress in Taiwan with the Hai Long project, which signed the PPA for the 300MW 2A phase out of a total of 1,044MW. Additionally, in the UK, we are preparing to participate in the drilling of a gas production well in the southern North Sea to complement our plans to develop a natural gas and offshore wind hybrid, he said. Googles Gmail and Driver got global errors About at 9 AM (local time) on March 13, nearly 3,000 people announced that they could not send mail by Gmail. This error affects globally including Vietnam, according to the reports on DownDetector. Google has been reported on DownDetector In addition to Gmail, the Google Drive storage platform also receives 600 error messages. Most users who are unable to scan the virus before downloading and cannot view the Pdf file online. In a statement on their service website, Google said: Were investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behaviour, according to Theguardian. Gmail has more than one billion users. Those affected were unable to send emails, receiving an error message that said Message could not be sent. Check your network and try again. Others experienced problems opening attachments. Global users reported about Google errors In the world, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, some areas of the US, and Australia recorded the most people in trouble. A Boeing 737 MAX airplane is pictured on he tarmac with its signature winglet and fuel efficient engines outside the company's factory on March 11, 2019 in Renton, Washington. (Photo: Stephen Brashear/Getty Images/AFP) "The Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia with immediate effect is suspending the operations of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft flying to or from Malaysia and transiting in Malaysia until further notice," said a statement from the regulator's chief executive Ahmad Nizar Zolfakar. READ: The nations, airlines grounding Boeing 737 MAX aircraft The statement noted there had been "two fatal aircraft accidents involving the Boeing 737 MAX 8 in less than five months". No Malaysian carriers currently operate the model, the aviation authority said. It did not say which airlines regularly operate the planes in the country's airspace. However, flag carrier Malaysia Airlines has ordered a number of 737 MAX aircraft, and the government on Monday ordered an urgent review into the planned purchase. Earlier Tuesday, Singapore and Australia both barred Boeing 737 MAX planes from their airspace, while airlines around the world have grounded the jets. On Sunday, a new Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board. The crash came after a Lion Air jet of the same model went down in Indonesia in October, killing 189. RMIT Vietnam is offering scholarships to prospective and current students alike There will be 64 scholarships for prospective undergraduate students, 18 scholarships for prospective graduate students, and 30 scholarships for current students. The scholarships for prospective undergraduate students, which cover from 25 to 100 per cent of tuition fees, will be allocated across 13 different categories, including presidents scholars, academic achievement, international, opportunity, creativity, languages, technology, women in technology, logistics and supply chain management (Saigon South campus), professional communications, digital marketing (Hanoi campus), the Professor Nguyen Van Dao scholarship, and the Luke McLachlan scholarship. Presidents Scholars, the most prestigious scholarship which covers 100 per cent tuition fee, will be awarded to eight outstanding high school students who have achieved exemplary academic grades and demonstrated outstanding community engagement and leadership potential. The candidates will progress through two selection rounds, including application approvals by independent judges and an interview in English. This year Creative Scholarships will provide opportunities for students to study undergraduate programs in design, design studies, and fashion (merchandise management). In addition to the application forms, students will have to submit a portfolio for assessment. RMIT Vietnam president Gael McDonald said that the universitys annual scholarship programme is part of its effort to give back to the country and broader community. RMIT Vietnam operates under a not-for-profit model, with profits remaining in Vietnam and reinvested back into the university by presenting scholarships, improving teaching facilities, and sharing teaching methodologies with local universities, McDonald said. In the past 17 years, RMIT Vietnam has awarded more than 1,111 scholarships worth over VND272 billion ($11.8 million) to young people from all over Vietnam and around the world. Our approach to quality is driven by a focus on the student experience, and in particular on delivering digitally-enabled, industry-relevant, and work-integrated learning experiences, she explained. The inauguration of Nestle Vietnam's biggest distribution centre in North and North-Central Vietnam The Bong Sen centre, located on the premises of the Nestle Bong Sen production plant in Thang Long II Industrial Park in Hung Yen provinces My Hao district is kitted out with most state-of-the art production and management technologies, such as Obiter Robot and SAP, helping the company to optimise storage, while reducing workplace risks for workers. Nestle Vietnam is the first company in Vietnam to make efforts to use cutting-edge automation technology Obitor Robot in its Vietnamese distribution system. The new centre will help significantly shorten distribution time of the companys products to consumers in the northern and north-central regions, while propelling the development of the local economy. The new centre will help significantly shorten distribution time of the companys products to consumers in the northern and north-central regions, while propelling the development of the local economy. Also on the occasion, Nestle Vietnam announced the plan to add MILO instant drink production lines to its Nestle Bong Son plant, helping to double the plants production capacity. The plan helps scale up Nestle Vietnams total investment in Hung Yen province to more than $100 million by 2020. Addressing the event, Bui The Cu, Deputy Chairman of the Hung Yen Peoples Committee, hailed the companys significant contribution to the provinces budget despite its short operations from May 2017. With the new distribution centre, Nestles quality products will come to consumers faster and more hygienically, while reducing transportation time, costs, and related risks, said Cu. He also praised Nestle for its leading role in 4.0 technology application through the application of Obiter Robot technology in the distribution centre to optimise the use of land and assure labour safety. I hope Nestle will be an example for other enterprises to follow, Cu added. The interior of the Nestle Bong Sen distribution centre According to Beatrice Maser Mallor, ambassador of Switzerland to Vietnam, Nestles long-term investment vision for and commitment to Vietnam reflects the countrys potential as an increasingly attractive business location. Nestle in Vietnam is much more than just a range of popular consumer goods. The Nestle brand is intrinsically linked to some of Switzerlands core values. Among these is an uncompromising commitment to the highest possible quality standards. This new distribution centre, with modern facilities, including the use of robotics, will contribute even more to better food hygiene in Vietnam, thus enabling the healthier and happier lives of Vietnamese consumers, she said. Nestle Vietnams managing director Ganesan Ampalavanar said the launching of the Nestle Bong Sen distribution centre is a testament to the companys commitment to long-term investment, sustainable and inclusive development in Vietnam. We are happy to see that the Nestle Milo brand recorded an impressive growth in the northern region nearly two years after the Nestle Bong Sen plant was put into operation in Hung Yen, and that it is listed among the premium nutritional drinks by consumers, said Ampalavanar. In Vietnam, Nestle operates six factories with more than 2,300 employees. Through continuous investment expansion, the companys total investment capital in Vietnam has reached $560 million. Nestle Vietnam was conferred a certificate of merit by the Ministry of Planning and Investment for its outstanding achievements in Vietnams 30-year foreign investment journey and was listed as one of the 10 most sustainable businesses in Vietnam in 2018. Voters queue to cast their ballots at the '3.26 Pyongyang Cable Factory' during voting for the Supreme People's Assembly elections in Pyongyang AFP/Ed JONES With participation figures that Western democracies would never achieve, millions of North Koreans head to nationwide polls every five years to elect the rubber-stamp legislature known as the Supreme People's Assembly (SPA). But with only one approved name on each voting slip in the isolated country, which is ruled with an iron grip by Kim Jong Un's Workers' Party, the result is never in doubt. This year's turnout fell a tiny fraction short of 100 per cent as those "abroad or working in oceans" were unable to take part, the North's official KCNA news agency reported. "Single-minded unity" is one of Pyongyang's most enduring slogans and as in 2014, the votes were in the weekend elections were 100 per cent in favour of the named candidates. "All the electors participated as one in the election to cement our people's power as firm as a rock," KCNA said, citing a report released by the Central Election Committee. "One hundred percent of them cast their ballots for the candidates for deputies to the SPA registered in relevant constituencies," it added. A detailed list of the 687 candidates was not immediately available, but the North's official Korean Central Television on Tuesday read out the names of elected members. Surprisingly Kim Jong Un's name was not among the called, an official of Seoul's unification ministry in charge of inter-Korean relations told AFP. In 2014, Kim received a 100 percent turnout in his Mount Paektu constituency, with 100 percent in favour, according to KCNA. Kim's apparent exclusion was "unprecedented" and "puzzling", said Lim Eul-chul, professor of North Korean studies at Kyungnam University. "While it's hard to say conclusively, Kim could have calculated it would make the country look more like a normal state if he didn't carry an extra title of deputy to the legislature when he already holds the country's highest rank," he continued. Kim is officially chairman of the Workers' Party and chairman of the State Affairs Commission, the top government body, although his late grandfather Kim Il Sung remains the country's Eternal President despite dying in 1994. The current leader's younger sister and close aide Kim Yo Jong was among the newly elected SPA members, the South's Yonhap news agency reported, citing Pyongyang state media. Critics say the North's election - with its total absence of electoral competition - is largely a political ritual to enable the authorities to claim a mandate from the people, while reinforcing loyalty to the government. After casting his ballot on voting day, Pyongyang resident Ri In Yong, 61, told AFP the election was and "occasion to demonstrate to the world the single-minded unity around the Supreme Leader comrade Kim Jong Un". Ordinary North Koreans always express unreserved support for the authorities when speaking to foreign media. "In other countries they select and vote for candidates from different parties with different political views," Ri said. "In our socialist system the people vote for the candidate." Hanois High-Level Peoples Court has decided to reduce the prison sentences for 13 defendants involved in an online gambling ring, considered the biggest of its kind uncovered in Vietnam so far.- VNA/VNS Photo Trung Kien On the last day of the eight-day appeal trial in Phu Tho Province yesterday, the court accepted part of the appeals of 13 defendants while rejecting those of the 23 others. It upheld the rulings on the two masterminds behind the ring, Phan Sao Nam (former Chairman of the Board of Directors of the VTC Online Telecommunications Co. VTC Online) and Nguyen Van Duong (former Chairman of the Members Council of the Hi-tech Security Development and Investment Co. CNC). Nam will spend five years behind bars for organising gambling and laundering money. Duong will serve 10 years for the same offences. Although Nam and Duong did not appeal against the verdict of the first-instance trial, they were still brought to the appeal trial because they were included in the appeal lodged by the Phu Tho provincial Peoples Procuracy. The high-level court also upheld other rulings from the previous trial and rejected the Phu Tho procuracys appeal. The Phu Tho Peoples Court held the first trial in November 2018, trying 92 defendants charged with involvement in the online gambling ring. The defendants also included former police generals Phan Van Vinh and Nguyen Thanh Hoa. While Vinh got nine years in prison for abusing position and power while performing duties, Hoa received a 10-year sentence for the same offence. They did not appeal the rulings. China has grounded its 7373 Max 8 (centre) since the crash of a second Boeing jet in Ethiopia. (AFP/GREG BAKER) Following the second deadly crash of one of its aircraft, some US politicians also have called for the plane to be grounded while the investigation continues, but regulators so far have not taken that step. "Two brand new Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes crashed in 5 months. If China has grounded all 96 of its 737 Max 8s, then Southwest, American, and United Airlines should really do something to reassure the American people that its 737 Max 8 airplanes are airworthy or ground them too," Maryland resident Eugene Gu said on Twitter. A growing number of Americans are expressing similar doubts on social media, and some are cancelling or rebooking flights on this single aisle aircraft, which accounted for one-third of Boeing's profits in 2018. Britain, Germany, France and three Asian countries have banned the plane from their airspace, and others have grounded them, and the Twitter hashtag #GroundBoeing737max8 was created to urge the US authorities to do the same. WHAT IS MY PLANE? Southwest Airlines and American Airlines have been swamped with calls since the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 on Sunday shortly after take off, which killed all 157 passengers and crew. In the wake of a similar crash in October of a Lion Air flight in Indonesia, many American passengers aren't waiting for the investigations to conclude. "We are fielding some questions from customers asking if their flight will be operated by the Boeing 737 MAX 8," Southwest spokeswoman Michelle Agnew said, adding that they are working with those who want to rebook on another flight at no charge. That is not the case at American Airlines, which charges a fee for any change or cancellation, a spokesman said. The cost range from US$200 for domestic flights to US$750 for international flights. And "fear" is not recognized by travel insurance as a reason to reimburse passengers for a flight cancellation. FEAR OF FLYING Pilots and flight crew also have grown increasingly cautious. The Airline Personnel Union (APFA), which represents American Airlines employees, has told its members not to board a 737 MAX 8 if they do not feel safe. The Association of Flight Attendants formally called for an investigation by the US Federal Aviation Administration. "In the wake of a second accident, regulators, manufacturers, and airlines must take steps to address concerns immediately," it said. Like the Airline Pilots Association, the AFA warned against jumping to conclusions. But US politicians were less hesitant after Britain, China, Australia, Indonesia and others pulled the planes out of service. Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren said, "The FAA should follow their lead, reverse their decision, and immediately ground this plane in the United States until its safety can be assured." And Senator Mitt Romney said on Twitter, "Out of an abundance of caution for the flying public, the @FAANews should ground the 737 MAX 8 until we investigate the causes of recent crashes and ensure the plane's airworthiness." The FAA said on Tuesday the investigation of the latest crash continues, and it "will make decisions on any further steps based on the evidence." In the wake of the Lion Air crash, the FAA ordered Boeing to update its manual and training requirements, and complete "flight control enhancements" including to its anti-stall systems no later than April. Boeing chief Dennis Muilenburg lamented the latest tragedy, but had no doubts about the safety of the plane. "We are confident in the safety of the 737 MAX," he said in an email to Boeing workers. The Viet Nam Maritime Administration has requested that associations, seaport companies and shipping companies be exempted or allowed to pay reduced service fees for containers stored at seaports for a long time.- Photo tapchitaichinh.vn The proposal was laid out in document No 646/CHHVN-VTDVHH, issued on March 7 to create favourable conditions for the owners of the containers to release the goods stored at seaports. The administration, under the Ministry of Transport, also proposed container owners and associations of industries such as the paper association, plastic association and steel association co-ordinate with shipping agents and seaport companies to review which containers will get fee exemptions or reductions. Relevant agencies would then fix exemptions and reduced rates based on the review and existing regulations. The administration proposed the associations announce the policy to their members and then closely co-ordinate with state agencies to craft a plan that minimizes damage to all involved parties. The associations were asked to send feedback from their members to the administration before March 15. According to the document, as of January 25, 2019, the national seaport system has stored more than 24,100 scrap containers, including 7,000 containers at Hai Phong seaport. If the container is kept at port for less than 90 days, enterprises could still be carrying out procedures to clear customs in accordance with regulations. However, about 3,000 containers have been in a port for more than 90 days. Authorities are actively looking for the owners of those containers to request they move them. A Boeing 737 MAX 8 is pictured outside the factory in Renton, Washington. (Stephen Brashear/Getty Images/AFP) Despite the aviation giant's assurances that the plane is safe and reliable, the European Union, Britain and India joined China and other countries grounding the plane or banning it from their airspace as they await the results of the investigation into the crash. But the US has so far refused to take similar action against the American aerospace giant's best-selling workhorse aircraft. "Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft," Federal Aviation Administration chief Daniel Elwell said in a statement. A new Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. That followed the October crash of a new Lion Air jet of the same model in Indonesia, which killed 189 people shortly after takeoff from Jakarta. Despite Boeing's assurances that the plane is safe and reliable, the European Union, Britain and India joined China and other countries that either grounded the best-selling plane or banned it from their airspace as they await the investigation into the crash. The widening actions against the aircraft puts pressure on Boeing - the world's biggest plane manufacturer - to prove the MAX planes are safe, and the company has said it is rolling out flight software updates by April that could address issues with a faulty sensor. The full extent of the impact of the aircraft bans on international travel routes was unclear. There are about 350 MAX 8 planes currently in service around the world. Air Canada, for example, announced it was canceling flights to London following Britain's decision to ban the aircraft. The EU aviation safety agency also closed European airspace to all MAX planes. It noted that the "exact causes" of the Lion Air crash were still being investigated. "At this early stage of the related investigation, it cannot be excluded that similar causes may have contributed to both events," the agency added. 'PRECAUTIONARY MEASURE' India joined the list of countries to ban the jet, a day after saying it had imposed additional interim safety requirements for ground engineers and crew for the aircraft. Elsewhere, Turkish Airlines, one of the largest carriers in the world, said it was suspending use of its 12 MAX aircraft from Wednesday, until "uncertainty" was clarified. Low-cost airline Norwegian Air Shuttle, South Korea's Eastar Jet and South Africa's Comair also said they would halt flights. The developments sent Boeing shares tumbling another six percent, after a five percent drop Monday, wiping billions off its market value. US President Donald Trump weighed in with a blistering tweet: "Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly." "Pilot are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT," he wrote, referring to the prestigious university. Trump later spoke by telephone to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who assured him the aircraft is safe, an industry source told AFP. US carriers have so far appeared to maintain confidence in Boeing, which has been ordered by the FAA to make changes to flight systems and pilot training procedures. The move was not enough to reassure the UK Civil Aviation Authority, which said it was banning the planes from UK airspace "as a precautionary measure." Global air travel hub Singapore, as well as Australia, Malaysia and Oman, were among the other countries to ban all MAX planes from their airspace. China, a hugely important market for Boeing, has ordered domestic airlines to suspend operations of the plane. 'SIGNIFICANT INNDUSTRY IMPACT' Boeing has described the MAX series as its fastest-selling family of planes, with more than 5,000 orders placed to date from about 100 customers. But not since the 1970s - when the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 suffered successive fatal incidents - has a new model been involved in two deadly accidents in such a short period. Thomas Anthony, head of the Aviation Safety and Security Program at the University of Southern California, said increasing automation of planes means crews have less experience flying manually. "So it's not just a mechanical, it is not just a software problem, but it is a problem of communication and trust," he said. The plane involved in Sunday's crash was less than four months old, with Ethiopian Airlines saying it was delivered on November 15. It went down near the village of Tulu Fara, some 60 kilometres east of Addis Ababa. Ethiopian Airlines chief executive Tewolde GebreMariam said the plane had flown in from Johannesburg, spent three hours in Addis and was "dispatched with no remark," meaning no problems were flagged. Investigators have recovered the black box flight recorders, which could potentially provide information about what happened, depending on their condition. Phu My Plastics Production JSC will use Honeywell technology to produce propylene On March 12, 2019, Honeywell (NYSE: HON) announced that Phu My Plastics Production JSC will use Honeywell UOPs C 3 Oleflex technology to produce 306,000 metric tonnes of polymer-grade propylene per year at its facility in Ba Ria-Vung Tau province, Vietnam. The plant will help meet growing domestic demand for plastics in Vietnam and other countries in Southeast Asia. This is the first award for a propane dehydrogenation technology in Vietnam. Honeywell UOP will provide technology licensing for the Oleflex process, the process design package, proprietary and non-proprietary equipment, on-site operator training, technical services for startup and continuing operation, and proprietary catalysts and adsorbents. Honeywell UOPs C 3 Oleflex technology uses catalytic dehydrogenation to convert propane to propylene. It is designed to have a lower cash cost of production and higher return on investment compared with competing technologies. The technologys independent reaction and regeneration sections enable steady-state operations, improved operating flexibility, and high on-stream reliability. This Oleflex unit will use low-priced and widely available propane to make propylene, which can be made into polypropylene, one of the most important materials for making plastics, said Jose Miramontes, regional general manager of Honeywell UOP Asia-Pacific. This new capacity will enable Vietnam to meet its own rapidly growing domestic demand for plastics, supplanting propylene products that it currently imports. Honeywell UOP, a leading technology provider for the oil and gas industry, also licenses C 4 Oleflex technology, which converts butanes to butylenes, the primary ingredient for making high-octane fuel additives and synthetic rubber. Including this project, Honeywell UOPs Oleflex technology has been selected for the majority of propane and isobutane dehydrogenation projects awarded globally since 2011. Since the technology was first commercialised in 1990, Honeywell UOP has commissioned 30 Oleflex units for on-purpose propylene and isobutylene production. Global production capacity of propylene from Oleflex technology now stands at more than 7.3 million metric tonnes per year. Phu My Plastics Production JSC is mainly engaged in the manufacturing and sale of plastic packaging. The company's leading products include laminated polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene (PE) bags, flexible intermediate bulk containers (FIBCs), as well as woven PP sheets, among others. These products are consumed in Vietnam and exported to overseas markets, including Brazil, France, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Honeywell UOP is a leading international supplier and licensor of process technology, catalysts, adsorbents, equipment, and consulting services to the petroleum refining, petrochemical, and gas processing industries. It is a Fortune 100 technology company that delivers industry-specific solutions that include aerospace products and services; control technologies for buildings and industry; and performance materials globally. Its technologies help everything from aircraft, buildings, manufacturing plants, supply chains, and workers become more connected to make our world smarter, safer, and more sustainable. The United States hardens its stance in nuclear talks with North Korea. Human rights remain a concern for Rohingya. Under cover Down Under revealed. Hard times for big companies in Asia. Studying a living fossil, and the popularity of pawning. There are growing calls for the U.S. government to ground the Boeing 737 MAX 8 after two of the jets crashed within six months, killing all on board. Several dozen countries have banned the plane, but so far the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has only ordered the American jetliner manufacturer to upgrade the planes' software. White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara has more. Most Venezuelans continue to endure life without electricity. Schools and businesses are closed, stores and supermarkets are nonoperational, and hundreds of Venezuelans are seeking water and cellular signals throughout Caracas. President-in-dispute Nicolas Maduro assures his people the power grid problem is a result of U.S. cyberattacks, while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blames Maduro's socialist administration. Cristina Caicedo Smit reports. The recent arrest of a former official in Cameroon for alleged corruption has sparked a debate over whether the government is actually trying to stamp out corruption, or is cracking down on anyone it sees as a challenger to longtime President Paul Biya. Former defense minister Edgard Alain Mebe Ngo'o was arrested along with his wife and three of his close collaborators. Political analyst Eugene Mbida says Mebe Ngo'o had occupied several strategic positions, including the director of Biya's cabinet, police chief, minister of transport and defense minister who was instrumental in arresting people considered as opponents of Biya. Mebe Ngo'o was widely viewed by Cameroonians as the emblematic future president, according to Mbida. At least two dozen former government officials have been arrested and imprisoned in Cameroon over the past 10 years, including a former prime minister, several ex-ministers, and heads of state-owned corporations. The charges against Mebe Ngo'o have not been made public, though corruption is said to be the cause of his arrest. The other officials were arrested on embezzlement charges, but they say they are political prisoners who are suffering for raising their voices against Biya's 37-year stay in power. 'Prisoners of conscience' Former Health Minister Urbain Olanguena Awono, in his book titled Mensonges d'Etat (Lies of the State), says he and other detainees are "prisoners of conscience." Jacques Mfeugue of the Yaounde-based Center for the Promotion of Good Governance says the only way for citizens to know if officials are stealing from the public purse is if officials are forced to declare their assets before taking office. In addition, he says, Cameroon should upgrade the audit bench of the Supreme Court to an autonomous court that investigates financial crimes. The government denies that Biya persecutes those who oppose him and insists that it fights only corruption. It says the country has lost about $1.5 billion in stolen funds over the past decade, and that the anti-corruption body recovered about $260 million last year. The Vaticans former treasurer, Australian Cardinal George Pell, has been sentenced to prison for sexually abusing choir boys. Handing down the sentence Wednesday, the judge said Pell would be listed as a sex offender for the rest of his life. Pope Francis will now have to decide what will happen to his former close advisor. The 77-year-old cardinal was sentenced in Australia to six years by Victoria County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd. The judge read the sentence, making it clear Pell would immediately start serving time in prison, although he has lodged an appeal that will be heard in June. "I set a non-parole period of three years and eight months," said Kidd. "That means you will become eligible to apply for parole after serving this non-parole period. Your release on parole will be a matter entirely for the parole board." No reaction was immediately forthcoming from the Vatican. The sentence came down on the very same day Pope Francis marked six years as head of the Catholic Church. He is on a weeklong spiritual retreat outside the Vatican, as is customary for him at the start of the Christian season of Lent. Pope Francis could decide to defrock Cardinal Pell, as the pontiff did in February with the archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, for similar issues. No decision is likely to be made until Pell's appeal is heard. And Pell is not expected to return to Rome unless he is successful in overturning his conviction. In the event he is successful, it is unlikely Pell will be welcomed back in Rome. The more likely scenario is that he will no longer serve in any Church role but given his age and failing health, he likely will be granted a pension. Under Vatican rules, Church officials normally resign at the age of 75 although the pope can choose to extend their service. If the conviction is upheld on appeal and Pope Francis decides to defrock him, Pell stands to lose not only his freedom for some time but also the perks he enjoyed as a senior official of the Vatican, namely a home close to Saint Peters Square and a car and driver. Whether he would be able to maintain any financial support and health care would have to be discussed. He would no longer be allowed to celebrate Church sacraments. Convicted child abuser Cardinal George Pell, a former senior adviser to the Pope, has been jailed for six years for abusing two altar boys in Australia. He is the most senior Catholic official to be convicted of such offenses. He has appealed against his conviction, arguing his trial had a "fundamental irregularity. Cardinal George Pell was told he had shown breath-taking arrogance and a callous indifference to his victims when he sexually assaulted them at St. Patricks Cathedral in Melbourne in the 1990s. Pell was the citys archbishop at the time, and was unanimously found guilty by a jury last December, a decision that could not be reported until last month for legal reasons. He has been sent to prison for six years, but could be eligible for parole in three years and eight months. The chief judge, Peter Kidd, said the cardinal should not be a scapegoat for the failings of the Catholic Church, which is facing a global child abuse crisis. The conviction of a man who was Australias most powerful cleric has sent shock waves through the Church, where Pell was one of Pope Francis's closest advisers and a former Vatican treasurer. The 77-year-old Australian cleric had been seen as the Church's third most powerful official. Judge Kidd said his crimes deserved a significant punishment. While it is a matter of speculation as to how long you will live, the fact is you are of advanced years and are entering the last phase of your life. Like anyone in their late 70s your health will decline in time. I am conscious that the term of imprisonment which I am about to impose upon you carries with it a real, as distinct from theoretical, possibility that you may not live to be released from prison, Kidd said. Pell has strenuously denied any wrongdoing. His appeal against his conviction is expected to begin in early June. His legal team has argued that the jury's verdict was "unreasonable" because it relied too heavily on the evidence of one person. Senior bishops from around the world gathered in Rome last month for an unprecedented summit into the global child abuse scandal. Police in Bangladesh have filed criminal complaints against tens of thousands of people for violence-related cases in recent years. But the opposition and rights activists say most of the cases, allegedly involving bombing and rioting, were made up. Opposition parties claim most of those targeted were their leaders, workers and supporters, and that the government used the law enforcement agency to crack down on its political rivals. Police in Bangladesh registered thousands of criminal cases on incidents that had not taken place in real life at all. Fictitious cases were filed against many people who were dead, infirm or migrant during the period of the falsely-claimed violent incidents in the country, Hong Kong-based Bangladeshi rights activist Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman said. In Bangladesh, police can file criminal complaints against anyone without having to provide any evidence, whereas charging them officially with a crime takes place in court and requires a level of evidence that the person charged was likely to have been involved in the crime. Police filed cases against as many as 2.5 million leaders, workers and supporters of our party in the past nine or ten years. Almost all cases were related to violence and rioting. They filed these bogus cases simply to keep our leaders and activists away from political activities, said opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) senior joint secretary Ruhul Kabir Rizvi Ahmed. Long history of allegations Police in Bangladesh have long been accused of abduction, enforced disappearance, extrajudicial killing and other abuses. While the government denies the abuses, several international human rights groups say they have documented human rights violations committed by the countrys police and other law enforcement agencies. Rights activists note the number of criminal cases began rising sharply after police began targeting opposition party leaders and workers in violence-related cases in recent years. A couple of years after Sheikh Hasina became the prime minister in 2009, her government began cracking down on the opposition forces, largely using the countrys law enforcement agencies, said pro-democracy activist Pinaki Bhattacharya. When opposition political activists demonstrated in the streets some years ago, police used canes and guns to keep them under control. The opposition parties are too scared to take to streets these days. In this situation, in a proactive step, police have made it a new practice to harass the political opponents of the government by filing the suits against them, Bhattacharya told VOA. Police filed cases against people who were dead, too sick to move and even away in jail during the violent incidents in which they stood directly accused. It shows the bogus nature of the cases, he added. Dead man accused of bombing? In one instance, police filed a violence-related case against a BNP leader, linking him to an incident which did not take place while he was alive. [BNP] leader Nurul Islam had died in August. But, police filed a case against him charging that he took part in a bomb attack in September. They filed the false case just because he was a BNP leader, said a relative of Islam, who does not want to be identified fearing reprisal from the police. The government insists that police action in the cases has not been politically motivated. In all countries the opposition always levels such allegation against the government. This is political statement. Such statements are exaggerated, not based on facts. Police arrested those [opposition] people not on political ground. They were arrested on charges of breaking laws, creating chaos etc., said Iqbal Sobhan Chowdhury, Prime Minister Hasinas media advisor. However, rights activists refuse to accept that the cases against the opposition were not politically motivated. Bangladeshi American political scientist Ali Riaz said that police in Bangladesh have implicated tens of thousands of innocent people, including those who are physically disabled and children, in frivolous and fictitious criminal cases. The jails are holding more than their capacity. When innocent people with no political connections are facing so many cases and experiencing such traumatic situation, we can understand what the opposition activists are going through for the past years. It shows how authoritarian the government has become and the extent of persecution of any dissent, said Riaz, who teaches at Illinois State University. Election rigging During the recent general election, several general election candidates from the opposition alliance said police blatantly sided with the Awami League to ensure victory for Sheikh Hasina. Many of our party leaders and workers became victims of enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killing after police picked them up. A week before the general election armed ruling party goons laid siege to my residence. Police openly said they could not provide safety to me, said Mosharraf Hossain, who was an opposition BNP candidate in the general election. But Chowdhury said the charge that the police helped the government rig the general election in favor of the ruling party was baseless. These are mere statements. But, these are not based on facts because the opposition till today could not justify their allegation that the election was rigged. They held public hearing. In those public hearing they could not establish their allegation, the Hasina advisor said. British lawmakers are set to vote Wednesday on whether Britain should leave the European Union without agreeing on any of the details of its departure. The so-called "no-deal" Brexit is opposed by Prime Minister Theresa May, but lawmakers have resoundly rejected the agreement her government struck with the EU. The House of Commons voted 391-242 against the latest version of May's plan on Tuesday, setting up the Wednesday vote. If lawmakers reject a no-deal Brexit as well, a third vote will come Thursday on whether to ask the EU for more time beyond the March 29 deadline to figure out how to conduct the divorce. EU member states would have to approve any extension. Ahead of Tuesday's defeat, May implored lawmakers to adopt the deal she negotiated Monday with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker for "legally binding changes" to ensure that the border between EU member Ireland and Britain's Northern Ireland would remain open after Brexit. But the outcome mirrored a January vote on an earlier plan, which May lost even more decisively, by 230 votes. After losing again, May, the Conservative Party leader, told the House of Commons, "I continue to believe the best and only way" to quit the EU is "in an orderly way." She said the next options "are unenviable choices" leaving without a deal, or asking for more time to negotiate after already spending months to reach terms of the now-defeated pacts. Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain's main opposition Labor Party, told the parliamentarians, "The government has now been defeated by an enormous majority. The prime minister has run down the clock, and the clock has run out on her." He called for a new election. Before Tuesday's vote, May told lawmakers, "The danger for those of us who want to deliver, to have faith in the British public and deliver on their vote for Brexit, is that if this vote is not passed tonight, if this deal is not passed, then Brexit could be lost." Key opponents to her plan quickly emerged. Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party said May had only made "limited" progress in negotiating the new terms, and said its 10 members in parliament would vote against her plan. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the EU had made "clear, far-reaching proposals" to address Britain's concerns about the deal. But she deflected a question about whether she was willing to delay the British exit from the EU if British lawmakers could not agree on a plan. The original deal, rejected two months ago, called for a backstop agreement that would keep Britain and the EU in a customs union until they agree on a new trade agreement. Opponents in Britain's parliament said they were concerned about being locked into EU rules instead of being able to gain full control of trade policies. May said the new terms agreed to on Monday would ensure the backstop deal is not a permanent part of Britain's exit from the EU. The Labor Party rejected the plan, saying it still does not go far enough to allay its concerns. Juncker warned that Britain is running out of options. "It is this deal, or Brexit might not happen at all," he said. The governor of the U.S. state of California plans to announce Wednesday a moratorium on carrying out death sentences. In prepared remarks seen by news organizations ahead of the official announcement, Governor Gavin Newsom says, "The intentional killing of another person is wrong." He cites cases of innocent people being convicted for crimes they did not commit, and sometimes even executed. Newsom also says cases involving capital punishment disproportionately affect minorities, the mentally ill and those who do not have enough money for costly legal representation. The moratorium will involve an executive order to withdraw the state's lethal injection protocol. None of the 737 inmates currently on death row in California will be released or have their sentences changed. California last executed an inmate in 2006. Rights groups praised Newsom's decision. Alison Parker, U.S. managing director at Human Rights Watch, said the governor "has taken a strong moral stand" and that the group hopes other states will follow his actions. Criticism came from some law enforcement organizations. Michelle Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, called Newsom's moratorium "hasty and ill-considered," and said he was going against the will of the people of California. In 2016, a ballot initiative that would have ended capital punishment in the state failed, while another to speed up the often lengthy process narrowly passed. The death penalty has been abolished by 20 of the 50 U.S. states. Governors in Pennsylvania and Oregon have instituted their own moratoriums to stop executions. There were 25 executions in the United States last year, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center. Thirteen of those cases were in Texas. Democrats are largely lining up behind House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her wait-and-see strategy on any impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. Moderate and even some of the most liberal House Democrats said they were supportive of the speaker after she told The Washington Post that she's not for impeachment, at least for now. Impeaching Trump is "just not worth it," Pelosi said, unless there's overwhelming support. While some in her caucus may disagree on certain points, the majority of Democrats endorsed Pelosi's approach. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said a unilateral pursuit of impeachment by Democrats would be an "exercise doomed for failure." "I see little to be gained by putting the country through that kind of wrenching experience," he said at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings said impeachment "has to be a bipartisan effort, and right now it's not there." Cummings said his sense is that "this matter will only be resolved at the polls." Even one of the strongest proponents of impeachment, freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, said Tuesday that she is "absolutely not" disappointed in Pelosi. Tlaib, who attracted attention the day she was sworn in by using a vulgarity in calling for Trump's removal, said the speaker has always encouraged her to represent her liberal Detroit district. Tlaib stressed that she is going to continue to push for impeachment, but echoed Democratic leaders' caution in first calling for a committee process that investigates Trump. "That doesn't mean we are voting on it, it means we are beginning the process to look at some of these alleged claims," Tlaib said. Democrats have launched multiple probes into Trump's White House and personal businesses. Those investigations, led by Schiff and other House committee chairmen, are intended to keep the focus on Trump's business dealings and relationship with Russia, no matter what comes from the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., a member of the House Judiciary Committee and a leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Pelosi's comments are "probably a reaction to everybody wanting to go to the end of an investigation when we haven't started." Pelosi's approach could also provide cover to some of her members, including freshmen who were elected in November from "red-to-blue" districts where impeachment is politically fraught. California Rep. Katie Hill, one of those freshmen, praised Pelosi's approach. "If it's going to be a political disaster for us, then we're not going to do it," she said. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., noted that the majority of freshman members have not been outspoken on impeachment, and that the Senate remains controlled by Republicans. "Nobody thinks there is going to be a conviction in the Senate, unless circumstances very substantially change." Pelosi has long resisted impeachment as a drastic step that should only be broached with "great care." She rebuffed calls when she first held the speaker's gavel, in 2007, to start impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush. Having been a member of Congress during President Bill Clinton's impeachment, she saw the way the public turned on Republicans and helped Clinton win a second term. Last year, heading into the midterm elections, Pelosi discouraged candidates from talking up impeachment, preferring to stick to the kitchen table issues that she believes most resonate with voters. The approach paid off, as Democrats won back the House majority for the first time in eight years. In a caucus meeting Tuesday morning, Pelosi encouraged Democrats to "keep our eye on the prize" as "we look at what this president is doing to this great country." Impeachment was not discussed, according to an aide who requested anonymity to discuss the closed meeting. Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., a member of House leadership, said Democrats ran on an agenda of controlling health care costs, raising incomes and fighting corruption. "We're working very hard to deliver on those things, and I think the speaker wants to make sure we stay focused on that," he said. When Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 plummeted to earth Sunday, killing all 149 passengers and eight crew members, the captain, Yared Getachew, was en route from his adopted home, Ethiopia, to his country of birth, Kenya. Although he was the youngest captain at the airline, 29-year-old Yared had completed the route between the East African nations capitals many times. A veteran pilot with more than 8,000 hours of flight time and more than 10 years of experience, Yared is being remembered not only as an accomplished flyer but also a special child. Yareds father, Dr. Getachew Tesema, a surgeon, told VOAs Amharic service his son was an A student, a swimmer so strong that classmates nicknamed him Mr. Fish and a young man engaged to be married. He was hard working and respected everyone, old or young, Getachew said. People loved him and respected him, and he was a blessing in so many ways. He was very close to me. The fifth of six children, Yared was born in Kenya in 1989. His mother, Rayan Shapi, is also a doctor and is Kenyan. Yared excelled in school and returned to Ethiopia for college, later becoming a pilot for the largest airline in Africa and completing additional training in the United States. I convinced him to go to Ethiopia for education instead of South Africa. I brought him here. I have other children, but I thought he would bring change to Ethiopia, Getachew said. Authorities have launched an investigation into the cause of the crash, and details are emerging about the final moments of the aircraft, which fell to earth just six minutes after takeoff. Flight tracker information shows the Boeing 737 MAX-8 jets vertical speed was unstable, and Yared had radioed air traffic control to request a return to Bole International Airport just after taking off. Eyewitnesses reported seeing smoke from the rear of the aircraft before it crashed, according to the Associated Press. I just hope that they would have one stone to commemorate him, for history or for the next generation, Getachew said. Not only for him, but everybody who was lost. Something in their memory where their names are carved. Thats my only wish. I lost a son whom I loved. As the world seeks answers about the second deadly Boeing 737 MAX-8 crash in less than six months, Yareds father has yet to reconcile life without his son. My brain is numb, Getachew said. There isnt anybody in the family that could repress how good he is. He was a special generation, a special being. A proposed permanent U.S. military base in Poland, nicknamed "Fort Trump," is one step closer to becoming a reality. Negotiations on establishing the base are "ongoing this very week," Kathryn Wheelbarger, the acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. Wheelbarger's comments came as John Rood, the undersecretary of defense for policy, met with his Polish counterpart to work out details of what Rood called a "generous offer" from Poland, according to defense officials. Warsaw has offered to contribute at least $2 billion to place permanent U.S. forces and assets in Poland, a NATO ally, in an attempt to deter any possible Russian aggression. NATO has expanded its presence near Russia's borders to reassure its eastern members, a buildup Russia has described as a threat to its security. "We've come forward with, we think, a very serious, robust offer, and we're working out some of the technicalities this very week," Wheelbarger said. "We hope to have a very solid foundation to work from coming out of this meeting today." She added that it would most likely take six months to a year for any base agreement to be finalized. Permanent base seen as 'helpful' The U.S. military would not need to start budgeting for the base for at least two or three years, according to Army Gen. Curtis "Mike" Scaparrotti, the head of U.S. European Command. Asked about making rotational U.S. forces permanent in Poland, Scaparrotti told lawmakers he's "perfectly content with the large forces that we are rotating," but a more permanent base would be "helpful." Negotiations on the proposed base with Warsaw come amid reports that the Trump administration is considering a plan in which wealthy nations such as Germany, Japan and South Korea would be required to pay the full cost of U.S. soldiers deployed on their territory, plus 50 percent more for the privilege of American defense. Wheelbarger denied that the "cost plus 50" idea was being discussed for European allies, telling lawmakers, "My understanding is that rhetoric came from conversations from the Pacific; it's not a conversation we've had in my portfolio at all." Iranian authorities have sentenced a human rights lawyer to 33 years in jail and 148 lashes for campaigning against making headscarves compulsory for women. Nasrin Sotoudeh, 55, a prominent Iranian human rights lawyer and women's rights defender, has been in Tehran's Evin prison since last June after she defended women who removed their headscarves in public. She represented women who were protesting against the mandatory headscarves for women, many of whom filmed themselves taking off the garment and posing it on social media. She was arrested last June and charged with spying, spreading propaganda and insulting Iran's supreme leader, her lawyer said. Sotoudeh was sentenced on Monday, March 11. A judge at a revolutionary court in Tehran, Mohammad Moqiseh, said on Monday Sotoudeh had been sentenced to five years for assembling against national security and two years for insulting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. In 2016, she had been found guilty in absentia of espionage charges and sentenced to five years by the court. The sentences announced so far total 12 years, but Sotoudeh's husband said Monday she had been condemned to decades in jail. Sotoudeh's husband, Reza Khandan, wrote on Facebook that his wife was sentenced to "38 years in prison and 148 lashes." Khandan wrote: "Five years of prison for the first case, and 33 years with 148 lashes for the second." By the "first case", Khadan was referring to an intial case where Sotoudeh was found guilty in absentia of espionage charges and sentenced to five years by the court. The new ten-year sentence is the longest of seven different verdicts totalling 33 years bundled together in the case, Daily Mail reports. "But only the longest sentence will be served, which is encouraging corruption and debauchery", Khandan said on Tuesday, March 12. This is not Sotoudeh's first stint in prison. Sotoudeh already spent three years in prison after representing dissidents arrested during mass protests in 2009 against the disputed re-election of the ultra-conservative president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. She was arrested in 2010 by security forces and later sentenced to 11 years in prison, Aljazeera reports. She was also banned from practising law for 20 years, before the Lawyers' Court at the Tehran Bar Association overturned the ban on her legal practice in August 2014. During her time in jail, Sotoudeh staged two hunger strikes in protest against the conditions in Evin and a ban on seeing her son and daughter. She ended up spending 3 years out of the 11 years and was released in September 2013, shortly before Iran's then-newly elected President Hassan Rouhani, who had campaigned on a pledge to improve civil rights, attended the UN General Assembly. Amnesty International has condemned the sentencing of Nasrin Sotoudeh. Philip Luther, Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Research and Advocacy director, said: It is absolutely shocking that Nasrin Sotoudeh is facing nearly four decades in jail and 148 lashes for her peaceful human rights work, including her defence of women protesting against Iran's degrading forced hijab laws. He added: Nasrin Sotoudeh must be released immediately and unconditionally and this obscene sentence quashed without delay. Amnesty noted that Sotoudeh's sentencing is the harshest the group has documented in Iran in recent years, suggesting that the Iranian government is increasing its repression on activists and rights defenders. A senior Iranian security official on Wednesday accused regional powers of spending money on "suspicious nuclear projects," and warned that such threats would force Tehran to revise its defense strategy. Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, did not name the countries but a proposed transfer of U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia has raised concerns in Tehran. The United States, Israel and other allies say Iran's own nuclear program is a threat to global security. Iran insists its atomic work is entirely peaceful, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued a religious decree against the development of nuclear weapons. "Some countries in the region are spending their petro-dollars on suspicious nuclear projects that can endanger the security of the region and the world," Shamkhani was quoted as saying by Fars news agency. "New threats like this will force us to revise our strategy based on the nature and geography of new threats, and predict the requirements of our country and armed forces," he added. Animosity between Washington and Tehran bitter foes since Iran's 1979 revolution has intensified since U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from an international nuclear deal with Tehran last May and re-imposed sanctions lifted under the accord. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused the United States last month of hypocrisy for trying to wreck Iran's nuclear program while seeking to sell nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, Tehran's regional rival. A group of Iranian lawyers has added its voice to international criticism of Tehran for sentencing a female colleague to additional years in prison in relation to her work in defending Iranian rights activists. In an open letter to the Iranian people dated Tuesday and sent by one of the authors to VOA Persian, the group of 16 lawyers said the multiyear sentencing of lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, announced by Iranian state media Monday, violates the Iranian constitution's commitments to human rights and fair trials. "It is a source of shame and shows a lack of tolerance in dealing with lawyers who are critical of the system, a sign of the weakness of the judiciary," said the letter, also published online by Iran's Human Rights Activist News Agency. "We praise Sotoudeh's integrity, passion and independence in fighting for justice and human rights, and call for her unjust sentence to be overturned," added the lawyers. Sotoudeh was arrested at her home last June after she defended women detained earlier in the year for staging street protests against Iran's compulsory hijab law. In reports published Monday, Iranian state media quoted judge Mohammad Moghiseh as saying Sotoudeh was sentenced to seven years in prison: five years for "crimes against national security" and two years for "insulting" Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. At the time of her 2018 arrest, Iranian authorities informed Sotoudeh that she also had been found guilty in absentia of espionage and sentenced to five years in prison in that case. London-based rights group Amnesty International posted a Monday report saying authorities at Tehran's Evin prison, where Sotoudeh is jailed, informed her this week that her new sentence was 33 years and 148 lashes for a case involving seven security-related offenses. Amnesty said it was not clear if Moghiseh's announcement of a seven-year prison term for Sotoudeh was related to the case involving the seven charges. "If [Moghiseh's] report was referring to the same case, Amnesty International cannot currently explain why the information appears to contradict that provided to Sotoudeh by the office for the implementation of sentences in Evin prison," the group said. In a Facebook post Monday, Sotoudeh's husband Reza Khandan wrote that his wife has been sentenced to a total of 38 years in prison and 148 lashes, with five years for a first case and 33 years for the second. His reference to a "first case" appeared to match the five-year sentence for espionage, handed down to Sotoudeh in absentia last year. Khandan told the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) that he got the figures from Sotoudeh in a phone call that lasted only a few minutes without time to get into details. International backlash U.S. State Department Deputy Spokesman Robert Palladino criticized the latest sentencing of Sotoudeh, sarcastically asking Khamenei whether it marks the "new era of justice" that he talks about. In a Tuesday statement, the EU described Sotoudeh's sentencing as a "worrying development." "The EU expects an immediate review of her sentence as well as the conviction of her husband Reza Khandan, who was sentenced to 6 years' imprisonment in January 2019," an EU spokesperson said. "The European Union also expects Iran to ensure that both Khandan and Sotoudeh's right to appeal their sentences is protected." Amnesty denounced Sotoudeh's sentencing in stronger terms. "It is absolutely shocking that Sotoudeh is facing nearly four decades in jail and 148 lashes for her peaceful human rights work, including her defense of women protesting against Iran's degrading forced hijab [veiling] laws," said Philip Luther, the group's Middle East research director. "Sotoudeh must be released immediately and unconditionally and this obscene sentence quashed without delay." There was no immediate response by the Iranian government to the international backlash against Sotoudeh's new sentence. Sotoudeh previously served three years in prison from 2010 to 2013 for security-related charges relating to her human rights work, which has won her several international accolades. Islamic State fighters launched new counterattacks against U.S.-backed forces Wednesday, as the militants clung to the terror group's last scrap of territory in northeastern Syria. An unknown number of IS fighters have been hiding in a small area by the town of Baghuz covered now by bullet-ravaged campsites and broken buildings. But officials with both the United States and the Syrian Democratic Forces say they have been taking cover from airstrikes and artillery fire in a complex system of caves and tunnels below ground. "Daesh (IS) carried out two counterattacks with heavy weapons, snipers, VBIED's [vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices] and suicide bombers," Zana Amedi, a media official with the Kurdish YPG militia, which has been supporting the SDF, tweeted Wednesday. "They're taking advantage of the smoke end [sic] dust," he added. The SDF press office told the Reuters news agency both attacks had been repelled. Earlier Wednesday, SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali told Reuters that IS had tried using a group of suicide bombers to blunt the SDF's advance into the IS-held enclave, but failed. "There were suicide vest attacks by a group of bombers who tried to blow themselves up amidst our forces," he said. "Our forces targeted and killed them before they reached our positions." Prior to the latest IS counterattacks, Syrian Democratic Force officials had been voicing optimism in recent days that the battle against IS was nearing an end. "The operation is over, or as good as over, but requires a little more time to be completed practically," SDF spokesman Kino Gabriel told al-Hadath TV on Tuesday. But despite a continual bombardment by both coalition aircraft and artillery positions on the ground, at least some of the terror group's fighters have refused to give in. In an audio recording posted online Sunday, an IS fighter claiming to be in Baghuz called on other followers to find inspiration in the fight and take action. "My brothers in Europe and in the whole world ... be fierce and hard on the crusaders," the fighter said, according to a translation by the SITE Intelligence Group. "Kill them and displace them in revenge for your religion and your dignity." In a video, likely recorded in February in Baghuz, another fighter says death would be a "victory" for the last of the IS defenders as they never lost their faith. Still, the SDF said about 3,000 people, almost all IS fighters and their families, evacuated Baghuz on Tuesday, some leaving even as the fighting raged. Officials also reported that three Yazidi women and four Yazidi children were rescued by SDF troops as they moved into part of Baghuz abandoned by IS fighters during the battle. The SDF launched its final assault on the IS enclave late Sunday after pausing operations for nearly a week to allow more than 20,000 civilians, many related to IS fighters, to evacuate Baghuz for displaced persons camps. Hundreds of fighters also surrendered. The commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, Gen. Joseph Votel, warned U.S. lawmakers last week the evacuations were not a surrender, but a "calculated decision" and part of a strategy to allow the terror group to complete its transition to a clandestine insurgency. Despite losing administrative control over almost all the land it once held in Syria and Iraq, U.S. defense officials caution IS still has "tens of thousands" of fighters working either as part of sleeper cells or as part of an active, clandestine insurgency. A series of reports issued starting last year warned IS could have as many as 30,000 followers and fighters in Syria and Iraq, with officials cautioning they remain "well-positioned" to rebuild a physical caliphate. An Israeli organization has minted a coin emblazoned with the face of Nikki Haley, President Donald Trump's former ambassador to the United Nations, to commemorate her defense of Israel in the world body. The Sanhedrin, a Jewish organization that dreams of restoring the Jewish Temple, where ancient temples once stood in Jerusalem's Old City, is one of three religious groups behind the Haley coin. She supported Israel and she told the truth ... that all the United Nations, all its agenda, is to destroy Israel, Hillel Weiss, spokesman for the group, said Wednesday. She acted in a manner that represented biblical tenets, he added. Weiss said that Haley's decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Human Rights Council and her criticism of what Israel and the U.S. say is an anti-Israel bias at the U.N. earned her the recognition. His group's coin features Haley's face set against the United Nations building with a Jewish menorah on the front, and a stylized rendition of the Jewish Temple on the back. The collector's item costs $65 for silver and $90 for gold, plus shipping, according to its website . Haley, a devout Christian who helped strengthen ties between Israel and the American evangelical community, has attracted the adoration of Israel's religious and nationalist right wing. Haley became known at the U.N. for her hard line against Iran and her derision of the Human Rights Council. She often chided the council for focusing singularly on Israeli abuses and neglecting poor records of other states a stance lauded and echoed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In her last pro-Israel gesture after announcing her surprise resignation last fall, she proposed a resolution condemning the Hamas militant group for violence against Israel. Haley also championed President Trump's decision to cut all U.S. funding to Palestinian refugees and recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Trump, a hero to the Sanhedrin group for that very reason, is the face of the group's other coin, first minted last year. The token depicts Trump alongside the Persian King Cyrus. Weiss said he has sold 20,000 of the Trump coins so far. The Trump administration's decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, celebrated by Israel, prompted the Palestinians to sever ties with Washington. The Palestinians seek east Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war, as the capital of their future state. Proceeds from the biblical coins, the website says, will go toward preparations for establishing the third Jewish Temple an aspiration with explosive political implications. The hilltop spot that housed the biblical Temples is revered by Jews as the Temple Mount, the holiest spot in Judaism. Today it is considered the third-holiest site in Islam, home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. The competing claims to the compound serve as a frequent flashpoint of violence. U.S. President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sentenced to an additional 3 years in prison Wednesday for conspiracy linked to his lobbying efforts in Ukraine for a pro-Russian political party, adding to the nearly four-year term he was handed in a companion case last week. In failing health, the wheelchair-bound Manafort apologized to U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in a Washington courtroom, saying he was ashamed of his actions and pleaded for mercy. "I am sorry for what I have done and for all the activities that have gotten us here today," Manafort told the judge. "While I cannot undo the past, I will ensure that the future will be very different." But Jackson told the 69-year-old Manafort she could not ignore his wrongdoing, telling him, "Saying I'm sorry I got caught is not an inspiring plea for leniency." Jackson, who had revoked Manafort's house arrest and jailed him last June after hearing allegations that he tampered with witnesses, imposed a 73-month sentence on Manafort. But she said 30 of the months would run concurrently with the 47-month term he was already sentenced for financial crimes. Together, the two sentences total 7 years, although Manafort will be given credit for the nine months he has already spent behind bars. Shortly after his sentencing, a New York grand jury accused Manafort of 16 counts of mortgage fraud to obtain bank loans. Withering assessment of crimes Prosecutor Andrew Weissman did not recommend a specific sentence for Manafort but delivered a withering assessment of Manafort's crimes, saying they "go to the heart of the American criminal system." The prosecutor said Manafort's crimes spanned more than a decade, that he had concealed his foreign lobbying work, laundered millions of dollars to avoid U.S. taxes and coached witnesses in the investigation to lie. Manafort, who led Trump's presidential campaign for three months in mid-2016, said he was the primary caregiver for his wife Kathleen and wanted the chance for them to resume their life together. "She needs me and I need her," Manafort told Jackson. "I ask you to think of this and our need for each other as you deliberate. This case has taken everything from me already -- my properties, my cash, my life insurance, my trust accounts for my children and my grandchildren, and more." Possible Trump pardon Hanging over the Manafort saga is the possibility that Trump could free Manafort by pardoning him. After the verdict, Trump said he hadn't considered the issue but added, "I do feel badly for Paul Manafort." White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said earlier this week that Trump would "make a decision when he's ready." The Manafort case is part of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The charges against Manafort, however, were not related to his work on the Trump campaign, but rather his work on behalf of the pro-Russia political party in Ukraine. Manafort pleaded guilty in an agreement with Mueller's team to fully cooperate with the Russia probe, but Jackson ruled he violated the terms of the plea deal by lying to investigators. Manafort's case, while specifically dealing with his lobbying in Ukraine and financial crimes, is at the center of Mueller's Russia investigation. Prosecutors said during his case that Manafort shared campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Manafort business associate identified by prosecutors as having ties to Russian intelligence. The prosecutors say Manafort and Kilimnik met secretly during the U.S. presidential campaign and that their encounter cuts "to the heart" of their investigation whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to help him win. Mueller's investigation appears to be winding down, although no end date has been set for him to deliver a report on his investigation to the Justice Department and Attorney General William Barr. Mueller's prosecutors late Tuesday updated a judge on the status of cooperation by another defendant, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about his contacts with Russia's former ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak. The prosecutors are expected to do the same later in the week for Rick Gates, a Manafort business associate and former key Trump campaign aide, who pleaded guilty to fraud and lying to investigators. Mueller and federal prosecutors also have secured guilty pleas for various offenses from Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen and former foreign affairs adviser George Papadopoulos, while also indicting long-time Trump adviser Roger Stone. The Defense Department has approved a new policy that will largely bar transgender troops and military recruits from transitioning to another sex, and require most individuals to serve in their birth gender. The memo outlining the new policy was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, and it comes after a lengthy and complicated legal battle. It falls short of the all-out transgender ban that was initially ordered by President Donald Trump. But it will likely force the military to eventually discharge transgender individuals who need hormone treatments or surgery and can't or won't serve in their birth gender. The order says the military services must implement the new policy in 30 days, giving some individuals a short window of time to qualify for gender transition if needed. And it allows service secretaries to waive the policy on a case-by-case basis. Under the new rules, currently serving transgender troops and anyone who has signed an enlistment contract by April 12 may continue with plans for hormone treatments and gender transition if they have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. But after April 12, no one with gender dysphoria who is taking hormones or has transitioned to another gender will be allowed to enlist. And any currently serving troops diagnosed with gender dysphoria after April 12 will have to serve in their birth gender and will be barred from taking hormones or getting transition surgery. The memo lays out guidelines for discharging service members based on the new policy. It says a service member can be discharged based on a diagnosis of gender dysphoria if he or she is "unable or unwilling to adhere to all applicable standards, including the standards associated with his or her biological sex, or seeks transition to another gender." It adds that troops must be formally counseled and given a chance to change their decision before the discharge is finalized. Palm Center, a California research institute, protested the new policy Tuesday. Director Aaron Belkin said, "The Trump administration is determined to bring back `don't ask, don't tell,' a policy that forced service members to choose between serving their country and telling the truth about who they were." The final legal injunction blocking the new policy was lifted last week, allowing the Pentagon to move forward. But restrictions on transgender troops are likely to face ongoing legal challenges and have been slammed by members of Congress as discriminatory and self-defeating. The memo was signed by David L. Norquist, who is currently serving as the deputy defense secretary. Criticism of new rule Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., said in February that barring service by transgender individuals "would cost us recruits at a time when so few Americans are willing to serve." She spoke at a hearing in which transgender troops testified that transitioning to another sex made them stronger and more effective members of the military. Until a few years ago service members could be discharged from the military for being transgender, but that changed under the Obama administration. Then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced in 2016 that transgender people already serving in the military would be allowed to serve openly. And the military set July 1, 2017, as the date when transgender individuals would be allowed to enlist. After Trump took office, however, his administration delayed the enlistment date and called for additional study to determine if allowing transgender individuals to serve would affect military readiness or effectiveness. A few weeks later, Trump caught military leaders by surprise, tweeting that the government won't accept or allow transgender individuals to serve "in any capacity" in the military. "Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail," he wrote. His demand for a ban triggered a legal and moral quagmire, as the Pentagon faced the prospect of throwing out service members who had willingly come forward as transgender after being promised they would be protected and allowed to serve. And as legal battles blocked the ban from taking effect, the Obama-era policy continued and transgender individuals were allowed to begin enlisting in the military a little more than a year ago. Numbers, Cost An estimated 14,700 troops on active duty and in the Reserves identify as transgender, but not all seek treatment. Since July 2016, more than 1,500 service members were diagnosed with gender dysphoria; as of Feb. 1, there were 1,071 currently serving. According to the Pentagon, the department has spent about $8 million on transgender care since 2016. The military's annual health care budget tops $50 billion. Last year, all four service chiefs told Congress that they had seen no discipline, morale or unit readiness problems with transgender troops serving openly in the military. But they also acknowledged that some commanders were spending a lot of time with transgender individuals who were working through medical requirements and other transition issues. The five transgender troops who testified in February said their medical transitions took anywhere from four weeks to four months and they did most of it on their own time. All said they were fit to return to deploying afterward. Pyongyang is likely to reject Washingtons big deal approach toward denuclearizing North Korea as indicated by signals the country has been sending through missile launch preparations, said experts. U.S. Special Representative Steve Biegun laid out President Donald Trumps approach toward denuclearizing North Korea at a conference held by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Monday, saying, We are not going to do denuclearization incrementally. Biegun also said sanctions imposed on North Korea will not be lifted until North Korea achieves complete denuclearization. Washington took an all-or-nothing approach or big deal approach toward North Koreas denuclearization when it began its negotiations last year but gradually shifted to a phased, incremental approach, which is favored by Pyongyang, until the Hanoi summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. And weeks before the Hanoi summit, Biegun seemed to suggest in a speech at Stanford University that the U.S. would pursue a step-by-step approach toward achieving agreements made at the Singapore summit last June. Now, the U.S. has resumed its initial big deal position, and Biegun said last months Hanoi summit faltered because North Korea asked the U.S. to lift basically all the sanctions while offering to dismantle a portion of their nuclear program. Scott Snyder, director of the U.S.-Korea policy program at the Council of Foreign Relations, said the Hanoi summit revealed the U.S. has reverted to its original position. It turns out that going for a big deal almost brought the U.S. back to its initial negotiating position, said Snyder. And it raised the bar in terms of what both the U.S. was willing to give to Kim Jong Un, but also in terms of what the U.S. was expecting from Kim Jong Un. Biegun also said that North Koreas chemical and biological weapons would be unacceptable at the Carnegie conference. Robert Manning, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will not accept the U.S. position. Kim has been clear and consistent from his first meeting with (Chinese President) Xi (Jinping) in Beijing that North Korea wants to move forward in a phased synchronous process, said Manning. The leaders first met in March 2018 before the first inter-Korean summit was held in April. Pyongyang will not accept the idea they give up everything, trust the U.S. and then they get some benefit, Manning said. It is too asymmetrical. Evans Revere, acting assistant secretary at the State Departments Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs during the George W. Bush administration, said, Pyongyang will reject U.S. efforts to pursue a big deal requiring North Korea to give up the entirety of its nuclear weapons and related weapons of mass destruction program because it considers them the key to the survival of the regime. Revere said North Korea will consider giving up its nuclear weapons only when the current level of pressure increases to an existentially overwhelming array of sanctions and pressure. He continued, The current sanctions and other measures have not reached the level necessary to compel the shift we seek. It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will be able to muster the diplomatic, political and moral leadership necessary to achieve the end it seeks. Since the Hanoi summit breakdown, movements have been detected around North Koreas missile facilities suggesting the country is not living up to its commitments made at the first summit and possibly preparing to launch a missile. Commercial satellite images showed North Korea rebuilding the Sohae Satellite Launching Station at Tongchang-ri, which Pyongyang began to dismantle after the first summit with the U.S. in Singapore. There were also movements around the Samundong facility that suggest preparations may be underway for a test missile launch. Experts see these activities as North Korea signaling its refusal to accept the U.S. position. Kim Jong Un is sending a warning to Washington that hes prepared to resume satellite launches if theres no agreement on lifting sanctions in exchange for some measures toward denuclearization, said Gary Samore, the White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction during the Obama administration. Robert Gallucci, chief U.S. negotiator during the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis, said North Korea is expressing its unhappiness over the position taken by the U.S. at the Hanoi summit which was rejecting its offer to dismantle the Yongbyon nuclear facility in exchange for receiving sanctions relief from the U.S. Christopher Hill, a chief negotiator with North Korea during the George W. Bush administration, said he would be surprised if North Korea would fire a missile, but because all the presidents men are getting less patient, firing a missile would be the end of this diplomatic phase. Lee Jo-eun, Ahn So-young contributed to this report which originated with the VOA Korean Service. The Defense Department is reviewing a number of military bases to find a location that can house up to 5,000 unaccompanied migrant children as the U.S. braces for a surge of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border this spring. The Department of Health and Human Services submitted the request for space late last week, as Homeland Security leaders warned that tens of thousands of families are crossing the border each month. That flow, said Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, will grow worse this spring as the weather gets better. Meanwhile, HHS Secretary Alex Azar told lawmakers at a House budget hearing Tuesday that he had had no advance knowledge of the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy, which resulted in hundreds of migrant children being separated from their parents and placed in his department's custody last spring. Had he known, Azar said he hopes he would have raised concerns. The Pentagon last summer approved the use of Goodfellow Air Force Base near San Angelo, Texas, for an HHS request to accommodate up to 20,000 children. Legal and environmental requirements were finalized, but HHS never came back with a formal request to actually use the base. Officials said that the extra space wasn't needed, and there also were concerns that HHS didn't have the money to construct needed housing and other support facilities at the base. Army Lt. Col. Jamie Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday that since this HHS request is smaller than last year's, the department is doing another review. It's unclear if the Pentagon will once again propose Goodfellow as the location or if there is another military base that may already have facilities that could accommodate the smaller-sized group. HHS is now asking for $1.3 billion in the 2020 fiscal year budget and the creation of a contingency fund of up to $2 billion. We have requested quite a lot, but at the rate we are going with the kids coming across the border, it is quite a burden financially, Azar told the House Energy & Commerce Committee. Under questioning from Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., Azar told lawmakers that he was not consulted about last year's zero tolerance policy that resulted in immigration authorities separating several thousand migrant children from their parents. Once the families were separated, the children were considered unaccompanied. HHS has traditionally been responsible for providing temporary shelter to unaccompanied migrant children crossing the border. I was not aware that that policy was under consideration when the attorney general announced it, Azar said. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions made the announcement in early April of last year. Azar said he hopes he would have raised significant child welfare issues had he been consulted. His comments shed light on a chaotic period during which President Donald Trump was forced to roll back the family separation policy in the face of strong public disapproval and orders from a federal judge. It fell to HHS to carry out the judge's directive reuniting families Congressional investigators have previously found that other government departments and agencies were surprised by the zero tolerance decision, but Azar has not generally discussed his own role in public. He said it took a while to connect the dots and realize the impact on his department. Much of his early information came from following press reports, Azar said. I was very disturbed by it, he said. Under questioning from Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., Azar said he was disheartened that senior officials in his department who apparently had an early inkling that migrant families were being separated did not immediately alert him. Im disappointed I did not know that, he said. Canada has banned from its airspace the model of an American-made jetliner that crashed and killed 157 people Sunday, leaving the United States as the world's most high-profile country to continue to allow the aircraft to remain in service. The new Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft has crashed twice in less than five months, killing nearly 350 people. Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau told reporters in Ottawa that Wednesday's decision was made after receiving new satellite data that showed a possible similarity to a previous crash. WATCH: Trump Grounds Boeing Plane After Intense Pressure Canada's action followed confirmation that the pilot of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 reported internal control problems, while pilots in the U.S. filed at least five complaints in recent months about the aircraft model. Some of the complaints appear to involve the same anti-stall system, according to a U.S. Federal Aviation Administration database. Complaints are filed anonymously to improve the reporting of safety problems. Ethiopian Airlines spokesman Asrat Begashaw said the pilot asked to return to Addis Ababa, from which the flight had departed. "In fact, he was allowed to turn back," Begashaw told the Reuters news agency. Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg confirmed the pilot's problems in interviews with The Wall Street Journal and CNN. U.S. President Donald Trump's administration continues to resist growing domestic and international calls to ground the 737 Max 8, even as Trump discussed the issue Tuesday in a phone call with Muilenburg. The Boeing executive reassured Trump the aircraft is safe, company and White House officials confirmed. Muilenburg called Trump after the president complained Tuesday on Twitter that planes "are becoming far too complex to fly." The call was in the process of being scheduled prior to Tuesday. The two men have developed a relationship since Trump was elected. Boeing donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund and the two men met later at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to discuss the new Air Force One presidential aircraft that Boeing is constructing. Trump applauded Muilenburg last June at a National Space Council meeting, calling the CEO a "friend of mine. A great guy." As a key military contractor, Boeing is a major lobbying force in Washington. Boeing spent $15 million on lobbying last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Boeing also has close ties with the U.S. government, particularly with the Federal Aviation Administration. After decades of using outside experts to certify the safety of aircraft, the FAA changed its approach in 2005 with the creation of a new program through which Boeing and other U.S. aircraft manufacturers could select their own employees to help certify their planes. About two-thirds of the Boeing 737 Max 8, the company's newest plane, were pulled from service within two days of Sunday's crash. U.S. House Transportation Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., has suggested the FAA could be conflicted by its roles as an aviation industry advocate and regulator. The Senate plans to conduct a hearing on airline safety. Trump has resisted calls for the jet to be grounded until the cause of the crashes is found and planned modifications of software are installed for the aircraft's automatic anti-stall system. Boeing also said in a statement Tuesday that it had no plans to ground the Max 8, while the FAA said its own review of available data showed no basis for doing so. Boeing announced on Monday that it was developing a "flight control software enhancement for the 737 Max, designed to make an already safe aircraft even safer." The initial crash of the Max 8 involved a Lion Air domestic flight in Indonesia on Oct. 29, 2018. The plane plunged into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people on board. During Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines flight, the plane nosedived minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on a flight to Nairobi, Kenya, witnesses said. The flight data and cockpit voice recorders from Flight 302 have been recovered, the airline announced Monday. Begashaw confirmed Wednesday that the black box that contains the records would be sent to Europe for analysis. Begashaw did not indicate which country would conduct it. VOA's Steve Herman contributed to this report. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is trying to make it harder for Republicans to avoid an embarrassing Senate rebuff of President Donald Trumps effort to steer billions of extra federal dollars to building barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border by declaring a national emergency. As the White House and GOP senators sought a compromise on curbing a presidents power to unilaterally declare such emergencies in the future, Pelosi said Wednesday that the House would not take up that legislation if it passed the Senate. GOP senators are hoping that if Trump endorses that bill, more Republicans would oppose a separate resolution, set for a vote Thursday, that would block the border emergency he proclaimed last month. If Trumps border emergency stands, he could divert $3.6 billion from military construction projects to build border barriers, even though Congress had voted to limit him to less than $1.4 billion for such construction. Pelosis move seemed aimed at persuading GOP senators wavering over the resolution disapproving Trumps border emergency that they would get no political protection by supporting the bill curbing future emergencies because it will never become law. Republican Senators are proposing new legislation to allow the President to violate the Constitution just this once in order to give themselves cover, Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement. The House will not take up this legislation to give President Trump a pass. It has long looked like the Republican-run Senate would join the Democratic-led House in voting to block Trumps border emergency. That would set up the first veto of Trumps presidency. But there have been signs that opposition by a few GOP mavericks is softening. Some Republicans think Trump went too far in declaring an emergency, but they also are eager to avoid defying a president popular with conservative voters. An administration official said Wednesday that the White House is skeptical there will be enough votes to head off a Senate defeat Thursday and is reluctant to back limits on future declarations unless a victory on the resolution is assured. The official was not authorized to publicly private conversations and spoke on condition of anonymity. GOP Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina and others are trying to work out a compromise with the White House over future emergencies. They also were among five GOP senators who met privately Tuesday at the Capitol with Vice President Mike Pence as Republicans tried to find a way to bolster support for Trump. Tillis and three other GOP senators have said they would vote with Democrats to support the resolution blocking Trumps border emergency enough to assure its passage, assuming all Democrats vote yes as expected. At a closed-door lunch Tuesday, Tillis suggested he could be open to backing the president, said two people familiar with his comments. One said Tillis told his colleagues he could change his vote if Trump was indeed ready to curb presidential powers to declare emergencies without Congress approval. The two spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal private conversations. A Tillis aide did not return messages left for him. Tillis faces a potentially tough re-election fight next year. Republicans control the Senate 53-47, meaning that four GOP defections would be enough to send the resolution blocking Trumps border emergency to the White House. The others are Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky. Paul said earlier this month that there were at least 10 GOP senators prepared to oppose Trumps emergency. But he now expects fewer defections. Still, Congress would be highly unlikely to muster the two-thirds majorities needed to eventually override a veto. But approval of the resolution would highlight a clash in which Trump was being forced to protect his signature campaign promise by vetoing legislation sent to him by a Republican-led Senate. Congress has never before voted to overturn a presidents emergency declaration. Under a 1976 law, presidents have wide discretion in determining when a national emergency has occurred. Congress can vote to block an emergency declaration, but the two-thirds majorities required to overcome presidential vetoes make it hard for lawmakers to prevail. Lees proposal says a presidential emergency would last 30 days unless Congress votes to extend it. It would apply to future emergencies, not Trumps current border emergency. A vote on Lees plan was expected after Congress returns from a recess later this month. The strongest chance of blocking Trumps border emergency is likely several lawsuits filed by Democratic state attorneys general, environmental groups and others. Science BioAgilytix Europe appoints new Scientific Officer 12.03.2019 23:19:11 - (live-PR.com) - BioAgilytix, a leading global bioanalytical testing laboratory specializing in the bioanalysis of biopharmaceuticals, is pleased to announce the appointment of its new Scientific Officer for BioAgilytix Europe, Dr Lydia Michaut. Lydia brings a wealth of experience in immunology, genetics, gene therapy and regulated bioanalysis to the company, and is perfectly placed to liaise with clients to ensure that BioAgilytix delivers - BioAgilytix, a leading global bioanalytical testing laboratory specializing in the bioanalysis of biopharmaceuticals, is pleased to announce the appointment of its new Scientific Officer for BioAgilytix Europe, Dr Lydia Michaut. Lydia brings a wealth of experience in immunology, genetics, gene therapy and regulated bioanalysis to the company, and is perfectly placed to liaise with clients to ensure that BioAgilytix delivers high quality laboratory services tailored to their specific needs. Passionate about life sciences, Lydia obtained a PhD in molecular biology and innate immunity from Louis Pasteur University, Strasbourg where she studied with Nobel Laureate Professor Jules Hoffmann before taking up a postdoctoral position with the world-renowned developmental biologist Professor Walter Gehring at Biozentrum, University of Basel. After 15 years in academia, Lydia moved to Swiss pharma company Novartis, where she became one of the first members of staff dedicated to the scientific interface between the company and bioanalytical contract research organizations. She also acquired expert knowledge in regulated bioanalysis supporting the clinical development and approval of biological drugs, as well as in bioanalytical strategies specific to gene therapy compounds, such as qPCR and immunogenicity assessments. A key part of Lydias role in the pharma industry has been communication with regulatory authorities, including the European Medicines Agency, the US Food and Drug Administration, the Japanese Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency, Health Canada and the China Food and Drug Administration. This involved ensuring compliance with the latest guidelines for the duration of a study, and correct completion of all the necessary documentation prior to submission to the relevant authority. A decade of experience in this role has given Lydia an in-depth understanding of what clients look for in a bioanalytical testing laboratory, which will be invaluable in her position at BioAgilytix. I have been fortunate to work with some very high caliber scientists, learning a great deal from them. I am thrilled to be joining a forward-thinking company and look forward to putting this knowledge and my experience in the pharma industry to good use in my challenging new role. Its a very exciting time, said Lydia. Global Chief Scientific Officer for BioAgilytix, PD Dr Arno Kromminga, commented: We are delighted to welcome Lydia to the company as we grow the business. Her expertise and experience in working with regulatory authorities worldwide will be crucial to helping support our clients bioanalytical needs. About BioAgilytix BioAgilytix is a leading bioanalytical testing laboratory specializing in large molecule bioanalysis. With laboratory locations in North Carolinas Research Triangle area and Hamburg, Germany, BioAgilytix provides PK, immunogenicity, biomarkers, and cell-based assay services supporting the development and release testing of biologics across a number of industries and disease states. BioAgilytix offers assay development, validation, and sample analysis under non-GLP, GLP, and GCP, as well as GMP quality control testing (i.e. product release testing, stability testing, etc.). BioAgilytixs team of highly experienced scientific and QA professionals ensures high quality science, data integrity, and regulatory compliance through all phases of clinical development, and is a trusted partner to many of the top global pharmaceutical and biotech companies. For more information, visit high quality laboratory services tailored to their specific needs.Passionate about life sciences, Lydia obtained a PhD in molecular biology and innate immunity from Louis Pasteur University, Strasbourg where she studied with Nobel Laureate Professor Jules Hoffmann before taking up a postdoctoral position with the world-renowned developmental biologist Professor Walter Gehring at Biozentrum, University of Basel. After 15 years in academia, Lydia moved to Swiss pharma company Novartis, where she became one of the first members of staff dedicated to the scientific interface between the company and bioanalytical contract research organizations. She also acquired expert knowledge in regulated bioanalysis supporting the clinical development and approval of biological drugs, as well as in bioanalytical strategies specific to gene therapy compounds, such as qPCR and immunogenicity assessments.A key part of Lydias role in the pharma industry has been communication with regulatory authorities, including the European Medicines Agency, the US Food and Drug Administration, the Japanese Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency, Health Canada and the China Food and Drug Administration. This involved ensuring compliance with the latest guidelines for the duration of a study, and correct completion of all the necessary documentation prior to submission to the relevant authority. A decade of experience in this role has given Lydia an in-depth understanding of what clients look for in a bioanalytical testing laboratory, which will be invaluable in her position at BioAgilytix.I have been fortunate to work with some very high caliber scientists, learning a great deal from them. I am thrilled to be joining a forward-thinking company and look forward to putting this knowledge and my experience in the pharma industry to good use in my challenging new role. Its a very exciting time, said Lydia.Global Chief Scientific Officer for BioAgilytix, PD Dr Arno Kromminga, commented: We are delighted to welcome Lydia to the company as we grow the business. Her expertise and experience in working with regulatory authorities worldwide will be crucial to helping support our clients bioanalytical needs.About BioAgilytixBioAgilytix is a leading bioanalytical testing laboratory specializing in large molecule bioanalysis. With laboratory locations in North Carolinas Research Triangle area and Hamburg, Germany, BioAgilytix provides PK, immunogenicity, biomarkers, and cell-based assay services supporting the development and release testing of biologics across a number of industries and disease states. BioAgilytix offers assay development, validation, and sample analysis under non-GLP, GLP, and GCP, as well as GMP quality control testing (i.e. product release testing, stability testing, etc.).BioAgilytixs team of highly experienced scientific and QA professionals ensures high quality science, data integrity, and regulatory compliance through all phases of clinical development, and is a trusted partner to many of the top global pharmaceutical and biotech companies. For more information, visit www.bioagilytix.com Contact information: BioAgilytix Contact Person: eMail: eMail Author: Sophie Woodward e-mail Web: http://www.kdm-communications.com/ Phone: 01480 405333 12.03.2019 23:19:11 - Disclaimer: If you have any questions regarding information in this article please contact the author. Please do not contact Live-PR.com. We are not able to assist you. Live-PR.com disclaims content contained in this article. Live-PR.com is not authorized to give any information about content and not responsible for content posted by third party. U.S. President Donald Trump criticized the California governor on Wednesday for his plan to impose a state moratorium on carrying out death sentences against convicted killers. Trump tweeted that the move defies voters and leaves friends and families of victims "forgotten." In prepared remarks seen by news organizations ahead of the official announcement, Governor Gavin Newsom said, "The intentional killing of another person is wrong." He cited cases of innocent people being convicted for crimes they did not commit, and sometimes even executed. Newsom also said cases involving capital punishment disproportionately affect minorities, the mentally ill and those who do not have enough money for costly legal representation. The moratorium will involve an executive order to withdraw the state's lethal injection protocol. None of the 737 inmates currently on death row in California, the country's most populous state, will be released or have their sentences changed. California last executed an inmate in 2006. Rights groups praised Newsom's decision. Alison Parker, U.S. managing director at Human Rights Watch, said the governor "has taken a strong moral stand" and that the group hopes other states will follow his actions. Aside from Trump, criticism came from some law enforcement organizations. Michelle Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, called Newsom's moratorium "hasty and ill-considered," and said he was going against the will of the people of California. In 2016, a ballot initiative that would have ended capital punishment in the state failed, while another to speed up the often lengthy process narrowly passed. The death penalty has been abolished by 20 of the 50 U.S. states. Governors in Pennsylvania and Oregon have instituted their own moratoriums to stop executions. There were 25 executions in the United States last year, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center. Thirteen of those cases were in the southwestern state of Texas. Just when it looks like North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may restart his ballistic missile testing program, U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed trimming the missile defense budget, as one set of deterrents is delayed by two years. The U.S. Missile Defense Agency charged with developing, testing and fielding a ballistic missile defense system will delay the expansion of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system by two years because of a delay in the redesign of the Raytheon Co-made "kill vehicle" the system uses. A "kill vehicle" pops off the top of the defending missile above the Earth's atmosphere and seeks out and destroys the attacking missile's warhead. The GMD is a network of radars, anti-ballistic missiles based in Alaska and California, and other equipment designed to protect the United States from intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMS. The expansion of the field of interceptors in Alaska from 44 ground-based interceptors, or GBIs, to 64 had been slated for completion in 2023. But the delay, due to technical issues and not connected to the cut in the agency's budget, now means that the placement of the additional 20 interceptors will not be operational until 2025, the MDA said Tuesday. "The important thing is to get it right, and if we're going to build more GBIs, we want to put the best kill vehicle on the top of it," said Tom Karako, a missile defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. At the same time, North Korea has been pushing ahead with its nuclear weapons program after a summit meeting between Kim and Trump in Hanoi ended abruptly on Feb. 28 without an agreement on denuclearization. New activity has been detected at a North Korean ICBM plant, South Korean media said Thursday, as Trump said he would be "very disappointed" if Pyongyang rebuilt a rocket site. In the budget, the Missile Defense Agency, or MDA, saw its appropriation cut by $1 billion to $9.4 billion. Previous budget boost Michelle Atkinson, chief financial officer of the MDA, told reporters, "What you are seeing in '20 actually looks like a decrease, but it's really just the declining funding," as the agency comes off recent financial injections. Trump's smaller request comes on the heels of a significant budget boost last year after several North Korean missile tests. The MDA projected a budget of $9.2 billion in 2021, and $9.1 billion in 2022, continuing the trend of declining funding. One Pentagon-wide effort in lasers that could be used to defeat missiles saw investment slow dramatically. After nearly doubling just the MDA's budget for directed energy from $109 million in 2018 to $224 million in 2019, the Pentagon as a whole plans to invest only $235 million in the technology in fiscal 2020. Among other proposals included in a recently published Missile Defense Review is one involving lasers mounted on drones aimed at stopping missiles just after takeoff in what is called the boost phase. During this portion of the flight the missile is most vulnerable, flying at its slowest speed, easily detected by the heat from its engines and incapable of evading interceptors as it accelerates to break out of the Earth's atmosphere. Belatedly following the lead of more than 30 other countries, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has ordered the immediate grounding of the entire Max series of Boeing jetliners. The action to halt all flights of the new planes in American airspace is a quick and sudden reversal of the stance taken by the manufacturer, the U.S. airlines flying them and the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump that there was no reason to order a grounding despite fatal nose-dive crashes of the Max planes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. "I didn't want to take any chances," Trump replied when asked by reporters in the White House Roosevelt Room after he announced Wednesday afternoon that all the newer 737 variants would stop flying temporarily. "We just felt it was the right thing to do." WATCH: Trump Hopes Grounding Won't Last Long The action was "a very tough decision from the standpoint of a company of Boeing," added Trump, contending that while he could have further delayed the decision, "I felt it was important both psychologically and in a lot of ways." The president cited new information and physical evidence that weve received from the site and from other locations and through a couple of other complaints. Trump predicted Boeing will solve the problem: Hopefully, they will very quickly come up with the answer. But until they do, the planes are grounded. The flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder from the crashed Ethiopian Airlines flight arrived Thursday in France where they will be analyzed by the governments BEA air accident investigation authority for more information about what caused the plane to go down. WATCH: Trump Grounds Boeing Plane After Intense Pressure Boeing, shortly after Trump concluded his remarks Wednesday, issued a statement saying that while it continues to have full confidence in the safety of its 737 Max series, it has determined, after consultation with the FAA, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and aviation authorities and its customers around the world, that out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircrafts safety it recommended a temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet, which totals nearly 400 planes. Several U.S. carriers use the Max series: Southwest Airlines has 34 Max 8 planes in service; American Airlines has 24 and United Airlines has 14 planes of the slightly larger Max 9 version. Together those aircraft account for nearly 300 daily flights. "We are doing everything we can to understand the cause of the accidents in partnership with the investigators, deploy safety enhancements, and help ensure this does not happen again," said Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg. The FAA, in its statement, said the decision to ground the jets was made as a result of additional data gathered, as well as new evidence collected at the site and analyzed on Tuesday. "This evidence, together with newly refined satellite data available to FAA this morning, led to this decision," according to the agency. Canada, earlier Wednesday, temporarily banned flights of all Max 8 aircraft, which has crashed twice in fewer than five months, killing nearly 350 people. That decision was made after receiving new satellite data that showed a possible similarity to the Ethiopian crash, Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau told reporters in Ottawa. Canada's action followed confirmation that the pilot of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 reported internal control problems, while pilots in the U.S. filed at least five complaints in recent months about the aircraft model. Some of the anonymous complaints appear to involve the same anti-stall system, according to the FAA database. Ethiopian Airlines spokesman Asrat Begashaw said the pilot asked to return to Addis Ababa, where the flight had departed. "In fact, he was allowed to turn back," Begashaw told the Reuters news agency. Muilenburg confirmed the pilot's problems in interviews with The Wall Street Journal and CNN. The Trump administration had continued to resist growing domestic and international calls to ground the 737 Max 8, even as Trump discussed the issue Tuesday in a phone call with Muilenburg. The Boeing executive reassured Trump the aircraft is safe, the company and White House officials confirmed. Muilenburg called Trump after the president complained Tuesday on Twitter that planes "are becoming far too complex to fly." The call was in the process of being scheduled before Tuesday. The two men have developed a relationship since Trump was elected. Boeing lobby and donations Boeing donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund and the two men met later at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to discuss the new Air Force One presidential aircraft that Boeing is constructing. Trump applauded Muilenburg last June at a National Space Council meeting, calling the CEO a "friend of mine. A great guy." As a key military contractor, Boeing is a major lobbying force in Washington. Boeing spent $15 million on lobbying last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Boeing also has close ties with the U.S. government, particularly with the Federal Aviation Administration. After decades of using outside experts to certify the safety of aircraft, the FAA changed its approach in 2005 with the creation of a new program through which Boeing and other U.S. aircraft manufacturers could select their own employees to help certify their planes. About two-thirds of the Boeing 737-Max 8, the company's newest plane, were pulled from service within two days of Sunday's crash. U.S. House Transportation Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio has suggested the FAA could be conflicted by its roles as an aviation industry advocate and regulator. The U.S. Senate plans to conduct a hearing on airline safety. Trump had resisted calls for the jet to be grounded until the cause of the crashes is found and planned modifications of software are installed for the aircraft's automatic anti-stall system, which may have played a role in both accidents. The software fix is expected to take months, FAA officials said on Wednesday, although the agency's acting administrator, Daniel Elwell, said he does not know for how long the Max series will be grounded. The initial crash of the Max 8 involved a Lion Air domestic flight in Indonesia on Oct. 29, 2018. The plane plunged into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people on board. During Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines ill-fated flight, the plane nosedived minutes after take-off from Addis Ababa on an international flight to Nairobi, Kenya, according to witnesses. President Donald Trump signed a wide-ranging public lands bill Tuesday that creates five new national monuments and expands several national parks. The new law also adds 1.3 million acres of new wilderness and permanently reauthorizes the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which supports conservation and outdoor recreation projects nationwide. It's the largest public lands bill Congress has considered in a decade, and it won large bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate. More than 100 land and water conservation bills were combined to designate more than 350 miles of river as wild and scenic, and to create nearly 700,000 acres of new recreation and conservation areas. The new law also withdraws 370,000 acres in Montana and Washington state from mineral development. Trump signed the bill in the Oval Office during a private ceremony with acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and a bipartisan group of lawmakers, the White House said. Bernhardt, who is awaiting Senate confirmation to become the department's permanent leader, issued a written statement calling the law "extremely beneficial" to the American public. The Land and Water Conservation Fund expired last fall after Congress failed to agree on language to extend it. Lawmakers ultimately voted to make the fund permanent, though its yearly funding will be subject to the annual appropriations process. The fund is one of the most popular and effective programs created by Congress, and it has supported more than 42,000 state and local projects nationwide since it began in 1964, using royalties from offshore oil and gas drilling to fund conservation and recreation projects. Trump has said he wants clean air and clean water, but his administration has rolled back numerous environmental regulations, deeming them burdensome for business. The president has publicly doubted climate change and pulled the U.S. out of a multinational pact that aims to slow the rate of global warming. He installed a former coal lobbyist to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, while Bernhardt is a former energy industry lobbyist. Meanwhile, the budget proposal Trump released Monday would cut the Interior Department's permanent and discretionary funding for the conservation fund by three-fourths. The law is named for Rep. John Dingell, who died in February. The Michigan Democrat was the longtime chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee and played a leading role in laws dealing with health care, the environment, civil rights and the auto industry. Three new national monuments to be administered by the National Park Service and two others to be overseen by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management will be created under the law. The new monuments are the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Mississippi; the Mill Springs and Camp Nelson national monuments in Kentucky; the former Saint Francis Dam site in Southern California; and the Jurassic National Monument in Utah. In December 2017, Trump took the rare step of scaling back the sprawling Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, which were created by Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, respectively. Trump had accused Obama and Clinton of exceeding their executive authority by creating both monuments, each of which had encompassed millions of acres of land. Republicans say the new monuments were created the right way, through the legislative process and not by a president wielding his executive powers. Trump's move marked the first time in a half century that a president had undone these types of land protections. Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives gave a cool reception to the replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement on Wednesday as the top U.S. trade negotiator opened a campaign to win broad support for the accord in Congress. Several Democrats said a closed-door meeting between United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and their caucus failed to ease their concerns about the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement's (USMCA) provisions on labor, biologic drugs and some other issues. A USTR spokeswoman declined to comment on the meeting. The support of Democrats, who control the House, is considered important to passage of the USMCA, and Wednesday's meeting at the U.S. Capitol signaled that the Trump administration has a lot of work to do to address the party's concerns. Democrats questioned whether new labor standards aimed at ensuring workers have the right to organize can be adequately enforced, as this depends partly on Mexico passing new labor laws. "What you're hearing is that a lot of people don't think it's good enough," Representative Pramila Jayapal said of USMCA after the meeting, adding that she was concerned the new pact would not solve the biggest shortcoming of NAFTA, which allowed Mexican wages to stagnate. "We know that when you don't have strong enforcement provisions, you are essentially facilitating the outsourcing of jobs and bad worker protections and undercutting of U.S. workers," said Jayapal. NAFTA dealt with labor provisions in an unenforceable side-letter, allowing unions in Mexico to remain weak and wages low, drawing factories from the United States and Canada. While USMCA's labor chapter is part of the trade agreement itself and requires Mexico to adhere to International Labor Organization standards, Democrats questioned whether this could be adequately enforced through a state-to-state dispute settlement mechanism. The Mexican government expects its Congress to pass a labor bill by the end of April that it says will strengthen the rights of unionized workers and fulfill its commitments under USMCA. Mexico "could say they passed the laws, but the laws could be very weak," said Representative Judy Chu, a Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee. She said Lighthizer told Democrats that he believed that Mexico's labor law would meet the terms of the agreement and that any enforcement issues could be resolved through a subsequent agreement following ratification. Jayapal added that Lighthizer said this could be addressed through implementing legislation. Some Democrats said that Lighthizer listened closely to their concerns and that he would work to address them. "He understands the concerns of our caucus and he knows we're not there yet," said Representative Bill Pascrell. Other Democrats raised concerns about the prospect for higher drug prices resulting from the USMCA's provision for 10 years of data exclusivity for biologic drugs. The United States allows 12 years currently and negotiated a five-year exclusivity period in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which President Donald Trump declined to join in 2017. Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat who opposed several previous trade deals, called this an "absolutely unbelievable giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry." House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, whose panel will handle the USMCA legislation, said the meeting did not provide any further clarity on the timing of the Trump administration's submission of implementing legislation to Congress, or when a vote might occur. The U.S. State Department is painting a grim picture of violations and abuses in countries that already have dismal records in its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2018. Venezuela On Venezuela, the report cited extrajudicial killings, the stifling of free expression, and restrictions on political participation. It said the May 20, 2018 presidential vote that re-elected Nicolas Maduro was deeply flawed, adding that the vote was boycotted by the opposition and condemned by the international community. The State Department report also pointed to issues including pervasive corruption and impunity among all security forces and in the Maduro government; trafficking in persons; and the worst forms of child labor, which the government made minimal efforts to eliminate. The situation on the ground is deteriorating. Its so tragic. The humanitarian conditions there are just awful. You have people starving, cant get medicine to the sick, said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in an interview in Houston. Iran On Iran, the report said the governments human rights record remained extremely poor and worsened in several key areas. The high-profile case of Iranian attorney Nasrin Sotoudeh was featured in the report. Sotoudeh, who represents political prisoners and women that protested against the countrys compulsory hijab law, was arrested on June 13, 2018, on national security charges. She was sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes. We are outraged, said State Department deputy spokesperson Robert Palladino in Tuesdays briefing, This sentence is beyond barbaric. The human rights report also pointed to issues including executions for crimes without fair trials; arbitrary killings and forced disappearance; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; systematic use of arbitrary detention and imprisonment; unlawful interference with privacy; severe restrictions on free expression, the press, and the internet. China On China, the State Departments human rights report said the government significantly intensified its campaign of mass detention of members of Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang). Authorities were reported to have arbitrarily detained 800,000 to possibly more than two million Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslims in internment camps designed to erase religious and ethnic identities, said the report. Secretary Pompeo said China is "in a league of its own" in human rights violations. Other issues include arbitrary detention by the Chinese government; physical attacks on and the criminal prosecution of journalists, lawyers, petitioners, and their family members; severe restrictions on religious freedom; the forcible return of asylum seekers to North Korea, where they have a well-founded fear of persecution; and official repression of the freedom of speech, religion, movement, association, and assembly in Tibet, according to the report. China says it is running a deradicalization program and that the camps are vocational training centers to teach people about the law and the Mandarin language. Chinese authorities said Tuesday that the camps in Xinjiang will "gradually disappear" if a time arises when "society does not need them." Samuel Brownback, the U.S. ambassador for religious freedom, said Friday during a speech in Hong Kong that China's detentions are not proportionate to any real threat it faces from extremism. "China is not solving a terrorist problem by forcibly moving women, children, the elderly, and the highly educated intelligentsia into mass detention centers and internment camps. Instead, they are creating one," he said. U.S. lawmakers are pressuring the Trump administration to take stronger actions against China. The House Foreign Affairs Committee told Pompeo last week it "appears the administration has taken no meaningful action" on the matter. Pompeo said the administration is considering sanctions against Chinese officials responsible for rights abuses against the Uighurs in Xinjiang. United Nations investigators say intercommunal attacks that killed more than 500 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo were orchestrated. The investigators from the U.N. human rights office in Congo say the attacks may amount to crimes against humanity. The clashes between the Banunu and Batende communities took place in Yumbi territory, in Mai-Ndombe province, between December 16 and 18. U.N. investigators who went there found the violence was planned and carried out with the support of traditional chiefs. U.N. human rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani says the investigators verified at least 535 people were killed and more than 100 others injured. These figures are most likely an underestimate," she said. "The number of casualties is believed to be much higher as the bodies of some who died are believed to have been thrown into the Congo River. It is also not possible to confirm the number of people who are still missing as an estimated 19,000 people were displaced by the violence, 16,000 of whom crossed over into the Republic of Congo. Shamdasani says fights between the two communities over land and fishing resources have broken out in the past, but never on this scale. She says the violence was triggered by a dispute over the burial of a Banunu chief. She says the similarity of the attacks carried out over a three-day period across four different villages indicates prior consultation and organization. Certain chiefs of the Batende-majority villages were cited by many sources as having taken part in the planning of the attacks. The investigation concluded that the crimes documented in Yumbi may amount to crimes against humanity of murder, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, as well as persecution, said Shamdasani. The report warns violence is likely to flare up again if the tensions and resentment between the two communities are allowed to fester. The U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, is calling for the perpetrators of the crimes to be punished. She is also urging the government to establish a truth and reconciliation process to address the problems between the Banunu and Batende communities and prevent further violence. U.S. Special Representative for Iran, Brian Hook, blasted Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's visit to Iraq and accused his government of trying to control Iraq by fueling sectarian conflict in the country. In an interview with Alhurrha TV, Hook said Rouhani's visit is not in the best interest of the Iraqi people, adding that Iran does not support the security and sovereignty of Iraq. "When President Rouhani comes into Iraq, you have to question the motive," Hook said Monday. "I think what Iran would ultimately like to see happen is Iraq turn into a province of Iran so that they can create a military highway across the northern Middle East that the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps can use to ferry missiles and weapons." Hook said Iran is "the last revolutionary regime on earth," and it is trying to further destabilize the Middle East by reinforcing the sectarian divide. "The Iranian regime wants to replace a national identity. They want to dissolve it and replace it with a Shi'ite identity. This has been the core of their foreign policy to create sectarian divisions. They want to do that in Iraq, as well." The U.S. official's comments come as Rouhani arrived in Baghdad Monday and met with his counterpart, President Barham Salih, as a part of his three-day state visit to Iraq aimed at bolstering Tehran's influence and increasing commercial ties with Iraq. According to Iraqi and Iranian officials, Rouhani and his delegation of 32 business people have signed several preliminary trade deals with Iraqi officials, including a major plan to build a railway linking the neighbors and easing visa restrictions. "At a time when the United States is seeking to pressure the Iranian nation with its unjust sanctions, we need to develop and deepen our relations to stand against them," Rouhani said. Rouhani claimed "world powers" were behind terrorism in the Middle East, adding that "Zionism and those who want to dominate the wealth of the countries of the region" were the root causes of instability. He said his country played a key role in helping Iraq defeat the Islamic State, but more work was needed to achieve regional stability. "Today, Iran and Iraq are enjoying the closest relations with each other," he stressed. The Iraqi government, which is now trying to eliminate IS insurgents after regaining control of all its territory under the group, says good relations with Iran is key for accomplishing full stability. While hosting Rouhani Monday, President Barham Salih thanked Iran for its support during Iraq's fight against IS and stressed the need for future cooperation. "The victory that was achieved against IS in Iraq was an important and huge victory, but incomplete, as the eradication of that sick, deviated line of thought and extremism requires more sustainable regional efforts and cooperation," Salih said. Iran-Iraq relations Some experts see Rouhani's visit as an attempt by Iran and Iraq to take their relations to the next level as the fight against IS calms down in the region. Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told VOA that Iranian officials hope the visit can accomplish three goals: strengthening and deepening Iran-Iraq relations; sending a strong signal to the U.S. and Iraq's neighbors about the scope and breadth of Iran's relations in Iran; and messaging Iranian audiences about the success of Iranian foreign policy in the Middle East. "Iran's influence in Iraq has so far been mainly deployed through military means, either by offering direct assistance to Iraqi forces in their fight against ISIS, and mainly by training and assisting Iraqi militias. This visit might be the beginning of shifting this relationship to a state-to-state level, hopefully introducing some checks and balances on what has so far been unrestrained and unaccountable action by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard," Slim said. Other experts, however, say deepening relations between Iran and Iraq face some challenges. Iraqi officials will ultimately find themselves between two countries with great influence but conflicting interests. Naysan Rafati, the Crisis Group's Iran analyst, told VOA that Iran could try to extend its influence in Iraq from the military to other areas such as culture, a move that might threaten U.S. interests in the region. "Iran is certainly playing the long game in Iraq, which is what you'd expect, given their history and the fact that they're neighbors," Rafati said. "But as the U.S. tries to check Iran's regional influence, Iraq could increasingly emerge as a theater for rivalry between Tehran and Washington," he added. The U.S. State Department is painting a grim picture of violations and abuses in countries that already have dismal records in its "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2018." Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday highlighted abuses in Iran, South Sudan, Nicaragua and China in his remarks on the release of the report. "I wish I could say that the record of every country evaluated in this year's report is spotless or even improved, but it's simply not the case," Pompeo said. This year's report evaluates the practices of roughly 200 countries and territories. Venezuela In Latin America, the report cited extrajudicial killings, the stifling of free expression, and restrictions on political participation in Venezuela. It said the May 20, 2018, presidential vote that re-elected Nicolas Maduro was "deeply flawed" and was boycotted by the opposition and condemned by the international community. The State Department report also pointed to issues including "pervasive corruption and impunity among all security forces" in Venezuela and in the Maduro government, "trafficking in persons and the worst forms of child labor, which the government made minimal efforts to eliminate." "The situation on the ground is deteriorating. It's so tragic. The humanitarian conditions there are just awful. You have people starving, can't get medicine to the sick," Pompeo said in an interview in Houston. "The human rights situation in Venezuela is terrible" and is only getting worse, said Ambassador Michael Kozak from the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, adding the denial of U.S. medical and food aid by the Maduro government only exacerbates its humanitarian crisis. Iran On Iran, the report said, "The government's human rights record remained extremely poor and worsened in several key areas." The high-profile case of Iranian attorney Nasrin Sotoudeh was featured in the report. Sotoudeh, who represents political prisoners and women that protested against the country's compulsory hijab law, was arrested on June 13, 2018, on national security charges.She was sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes on March 12, 2019. "We are outraged," said State Department deputy spokesperson Robert Palladino in Tuesday's briefing. "This sentence is beyond barbaric." The human rights report also pointed to issues including executions for crimes without fair trials, arbitrary killings and forced disappearance, harsh and life-threatening prison conditions, systematic use of arbitrary detention and imprisonment, unlawful interference with privacy, and severe restrictions on free expression, the press and the internet. China On China, the State Department's human rights report said the government significantly intensified its campaign of mass detention of members of Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang). Pompeo said China is "in a league of its own" when it comes to human rights violations. "Today, more than 1 million Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs and other Muslims are interned in reeducation camps designed to erase their religious and ethnic identities. The government also is increasing its persecution against Christians, Tibetans and anyone who espouses different views from those or advocates those of government or advocates change in government," said the top U.S. diplomat. Other issues include arbitrary detention by the Chinese government; physical attacks on and the criminal prosecution of journalists, lawyers, petitioners, and their family members; severe restrictions on religious freedom; the forcible return of asylum-seekers to North Korea, where they have a well-founded fear of persecution; and official repression of the freedom of speech, religion, movement, association and assembly in Tibet, according to the report. China says it is running a deradicalization program and that the camps are vocational training centers to teach people about the law and the Mandarin language.Chinese authorities said Tuesday that the camps in Xinjiang will "gradually disappear" if a time arises when "society does not need them." Samuel Brownback, the U.S. ambassador for religious freedom, said Friday during a speech in Hong Kong that China's detentions are not proportionate to any real threat it faces from extremism. "China is not solving a terrorist problem by forcibly moving women, children, the elderly and the highly educated intelligentsia into mass detention centers and internment camps. Instead, they are creating one," he said. U.S. lawmakers are pressuring the Trump administration to take stronger actions against China. The House Foreign Affairs Committee told Pompeo last week it "appears the administration has taken no meaningful action" on the matter. Pompeo said the administration is considering sanctions against Chinese officials responsible for rights abuses against the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Reproductive rights missing Separately, critics on Wednesday pointed to the fact that the report does not highlight countries that commit human rights abuses around reproductive health. "For the last 25 years, most of the world has recognized that empowering women to control their bodies helps them and their families to access other rights, but you wouldn't know that from today's report," said Sarah Margon, Washington director at Human Rights Watch. "The State Department is essentially deciding that a significant set of women's rights are not human rights at all," she added. It is the second time since 2012 the State Department's human rights report eliminated references to women's "reproductive rights" since 2012. President Nicolas Maduro's government scrambled on Wednesday to return power to western Venezuela following heavy looting in the country's second largest city, while China offered to help the South American nation end its worst blackout on record. Power had returned to many parts of Venezuela after a nationwide outage last week, with the country's main port terminal of Jose, which is crucial for the country's oil exports, resuming operations. The ruling Socialist Party blamed the outage on an act of U.S. sabotage, accusing President Donald Trump of being responsible for several cyber attacks on Venezuela's main dam. But power supplies remained patchy in the sweltering western state of Zulia, where anger after nearly a week without power overflowed into street violence. Over 300 businesses looted Looters smashed shop windows and made off with merchandise in more than 300 businesses across the state, located along the border with Colombia, the Zulia chapter of business organization Fedecamaras said in a statement. "About 100 people came into the store and took all the food, the point of sale terminals," said Maria Centeno, 29, the owner of a store selling food and furniture that was looted on Sunday. "They were people from the community. The police came by and they told me to sort it out myself." Following the wave of pillaging on Sunday, many businesses sold off their remaining merchandise on the cheap on fears that they, too, would be hit by mobs. The country's top food company, Empresas Polar, said four facilities in Maracaibo, Venezuela's biggest city after Caracas, the capital, had been sacked this week, with looters making off with water, soft drinks and pasta. The Information Ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment. In Maracaibo, once known for flashy displays of oil wealth, people nervously bought food, some of them crying, at the few business that remained open. Gasoline lines stretched for blocks. Many worried how they would continue eating. "In my house I have one kilo of rice and one kilo of lentils," said Jose Navas, 53, a security guard. "That's what I'll eat today. What will I eat tomorrow? This is really bad." China Support China on Wednesday said it was willing to provide help and technical support to restore electricity, and backed Maduro's assertion that the problem was the result of sabotage. Maduro's critics have scoffed at the sabotage explanation, insisting that rampant corruption and a decade of incompetent management by state authorities were to blame. A technical problem with transmission lines linking the Guri hydroelectric plant in southeastern Venezuela to the national power grid likely caused the blackout, experts said. With no electricity, hospitals struggled to keep equipment running and food rotted in the tropical heat. On Monday, Venezuelans unable to obtain potable water for home use formed lines to fill containers from a sewage pipe. The United States is preparing to withdraw its remaining diplomats in Venezuela, an effort that will not involve the U.S. military, after Maduro on Tuesday ordered them to leave within 72 hours. Reporter released Venezuela authorities on Tuesday night released reporter Luis Carlos Diaz, who had been seized by intelligence agents the day before amid state-media accusations he had been involved in the blackout. A judge ordered him not to leave the country and prohibited him from making public statements a move rights groups slammed as another example of a growing crackdown on media and free press. "The prohibition on speaking to the media constitutes a new form of censorship that seeks to prevent the public from knowing what happened during the arbitrary detention of Luis Carlos Diaz," rights group Public Space wrote on Twitter. Migrant children fleeing alone from Venezuela's economic and political crises, along with destitute Venezuelan migrants arriving without documents both make easy prey for human traffickers in Peru, anti-slavery experts said Tuesday. About one in 10 Venezuelans 3.4 million people have fled their homeland in recent years. After Colombia, Peru is home to the second-largest number of Venezuelan migrants, with more than a half a million having settled there, searching for food and a better life. From 2017 to 2018, authorities in Peru recorded more than 1,700 victims of human trafficking, of which about 10 percent were Venezuelan, said Jose Ivan Davalos, head of mission for the U.N.'s International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Peru. "This figure could increase because of the vulnerable condition in which this population [of migrants] arrives in the country," Davalos said in the capital Lima during an anti-trafficking event. "Many people who arrive, they arrive without documentation, without being able to identify themselves, and above all, boys and girls who are not accompanied arrive, and they can be easily recruited [by traffickers]," said Davalos at the event that brought regional governors and officials together. He added that, on average, about two victims of trafficking are reported every day in Peru. Poor and hungry teenage girls and women are most likely to become victims of sex trafficking, experts said. Lured by false offers of free travel and well-paid work as waitresses, dancers or cooks in mining areas, migrants can end up forced into prostitution and made to work to pay off their debts, according to prosecutors. In Peru's Amazon jungle area of Madre de Dios, the heart of illegal gold mining, there are dozens of bars and brothels used by miners. In the past year, raids by police in Madre de Dios also known as a hot spot of sex trafficking have led to the rescue of Venezuelan women and girls being sexually exploited. Alejandro Delgado, an official at Peru's interior ministry, said combating "the scourge" of human trafficking requires local and national authorities and countries in the region working together. "It's a phenomena that we can't tolerate, we can't allow that people, above all women and girls, to be treated as objects. It's inhumane," said Delgado, who heads a commission against human trafficking and illegal migrant smuggling. Peru's "porous borders," including those with Ecuador and Bolivia, allow traffickers and their victims to move around with ease, Marisol Perez, a former justice minister said. "We don't have the capacity to control our borders," she said. The number of women participating in politics globally is rising, but slowly, says a new report from the Inter-Parliamentary Union. The report found that in 2017, the number of female parliamentarians grew by 1 percentage point over the previous year to nearly 24 percent, while the proportion of female ministers is at an all-time high at almost 21 percent. "The fact that 75 percent of legislators are men, really?" Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of U.N. Women, said at a joint press conference with the head of the IPU to launch the report Tuesday. "That's a lot of men making laws for all of us." There is also a shift afoot in the kinds of portfolios female ministers hold, noted IPU President Gabriela Cuevas Barron. "Women continue to hold portfolios considered 'soft' on social affairs or family, children or youth, however, the trade industry portfolio is among the top five ministries held by women globally for the first time," Cuevas said. "Strikingly, more women are in charge of portfolios traditionally occupied by men compared to 2017." She said that globally in 2018, 30 percent more women ministers covered defense, 52.9 percent more covered finance, and 13.6 percent more covered foreign affairs compared to the previous year. On the flip side, IPU said women's participation in top-level leadership is down from 7.2 percent of elected heads of state to 6.6 percent, and from 5.7 percent of heads of government to 5.2 percent. There are also 11 countries that have no female ministers. Quotas A key factor in improving female participation in politics and reaching gender parity is quota systems. "The analysis shows that countries with well-designed gender quotas elected significantly more women to parliament than those without," said IPU's Cuevas. "It's absolutely clear that legal quotas, that affirmative action when it is well-designed it really changes our reality." She said that if women can bring institutional changes, then cultural changes will follow. However, quota systems only work when they are implemented. "We have almost perfect legislation when it comes to gender equality, it's the implementation that is lacking," Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic told reporters. "We have the quota system in parliament, however, none of the parties respect it." She said the last Croatian elections showed the number of elected women was the fewest since Croatia's independence in 1991. "The parties rather pay fines than respect the quotas," she said. Croatia ranked 98th out of 191 on the IPU list of women parliamentarians. 'Radical measures needed' Iceland, which ranks 21st, has not seen even progress. In 2016, there was nearly gender parity; however, in 2017 elections, the number of women dropped to 38 percent. "My party has a quota system, the majority of Icelandic political parties have a quota system, but not all of them, and you can actually see from the results of the election how it goes for women," Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir said. "I think radical measures is what is needed, unless we are going to stay here talking about gender inequality for the next century." U.N. Women's Mlambo-Ngcuka agreed. "We need to make a strong case about democracy being for the people, by the people, not for the people by the men," she said. "And, therefore, create very concrete thresholds that political parties must cross in order for them to have legitimacy in parliament. If in their own party they are unable to represent most of the people who live in the constituencies that they are trying to lead, we have to question if they really are a true representative of the people." Lungelo Ndlovu, Thomson Reuters Foundation BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Despite a dry year, Sazini Moyos maize crop had been pushing up tassels and she anticipated a decent harvest - until her farm outside Bulawayo sweltered through a record five-day heatwave in late February and early March. Now she fears almost her entire parched crop is a write-off. Im very disappointed, I have lost a lot of money buying expensive seed and fertilisers. All my energy used in tilling the land has gone to waste, the 40-year-old farmer in Matabeleland South province told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. According to the Zimbabwe Meteorological Services Department, the province this month suffered five consecutive days of temperatures on average 2 to 4 degrees Celsius above the normal March high of 32 degrees. In low-lying Beitbridge, near the border with South Africa, the high temperature hit 38.7 degrees (101 degrees Fahrenheit), the met office said. The heat, which made already dry conditions worse, has hit both crops and livestock, said Obey Chaputsira, the administrator for Matobo District, a drought-prone, low-lying area of Matabeleland South. The crop situation currently is very bad, he said, with grazing areas and water supplies for livestock also affected. Since last year, his area has seen 200 livestock deaths linked to drought, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. This month, the United Nations launched an international appeal for $234 million in emergency aid for Zimbabwe, where drought is expected to affect a third of the countrys crop and leave 5.3 million people needing assistance. Zimbabwes annual maize consumption is 1.8 million tonnes but farmer groups said this years drought-hit harvest may be less than 1 million tonnes. Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube said the country had 500,000 tonnes of the grain in strategic reserves. Joseph Gondo, principal director of the Department of Crop and Livestock, confirmed that the countrys harvests are expected to suffer as a result of the unusual heat. Crops that are on the tasseling stages are the most affected by the heatwave. We encourage farmers not to apply fertilisers at this moment, he said. Gondo said other districts across the country also are struggling with dry conditions. Some farmers have already lost their crops while others continue hoping it rains because their crops still have a chance, he told Thomson Reuters Foundation. Food insecurity in both rural and urban areas has increased across Zimbabwe this year, with Matabeleland North and Matabeleleland South provinces hardest hit, according to the Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committees (ZimVac) lean season monitoring report for 2019. Agritex agronomist Kennedy Mabehla said crop assessments across Zimbabwe were underway, with a report on expected yields for the year due out after April. The dryer and hotter conditions are in line with predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has said rising emissions could lead to more frequent droughts, hotter conditions and more extreme weather across southern Africa. Across the globe, the years 2015-2018 have been the hottest four years ever recorded, meteorologists said. Reporting by Lungelo Ndlovu @lauriegoering ; editing by Laurie Goering HARARE (Reuters) - Doctors said on Wednesday that patients in Zimbabwes biggest state hospital were dying due to a lack of medicines and basic supplies, brought on by a cash crunch that has crippled the economy. In a rare protest by senior medical staff, dozens of doctors picketed outside Parirenyatwa Hospital. They said they were only able to treat emergency cases and urged the government to provide the equipment they needed to do their jobs. I am just seeing patients, make a diagnosis and send them away to die, said gynaecological oncologist Bothwell Guzha, adding that the hospital had no cancer drugs left. The southern African nation is acutely short of dollars, the currency it has used since in 2009, causing price spikes and shortages of basic goods, medicines and fuel. Plans to float a new transitional local currency introduced last month, the RTGS dollar, have been delayed. In a subsequent meeting with Health Minister Obediah Moyo, the doctors described shortages of painkillers and syringes and said nurses had to wash and re-use bandages, which increased the risk of infection. Azza Mashumba said the theatre in the maternity unit she heads had not been working for some time, forcing doctors to delay ceasarean operations, sometimes with fatal results. I come to work to certify dead (baby) bodies, thats not why I am here... We are not working, we are not helping patients, she told the health minister. The doctors said Moyo had told them the government would speed up the purchase of equipment and other medical supplies. At the turn of the year, junior doctors held a 40-day strike for better pay and conditions that crippled public hospitals. It ended without a deal being reached and with doctors threatening further stoppages. (Reporting by Philemon Bulawayo, Writing by MacDonald Dzirutwe; editing by John Stonestreet) The East Limestone Fire Department is headed to the big screen. The department tweeted photos Wednesday from its crew supporting scenes for the movie Only Easy Day filming on Birchbark Street in Athens. According to a story on Newsrep.com, Only Easy Day is described as a film about a former SEAL battling with PTSD, substance abuse, self-destruction and ultimately homelessness. It is also a film about redemption and regaining control over a life that has spun out of control. (Read their full report here) You also can learn more about the movie, expected to come out later this year, here and here Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is joining President Donald Trump at the White House today to participate in a briefing on the impact of drug trafficking at and between points of entry at the southern border. Marshall's office released this statement after the event: Attorney General Steve Marshall joined President Donald Trump at the White House today to brief him on the impact of drug trafficking at and between points of entry at the southern border. I want to thank President Trump for his willingness to listen to state and local law enforcement on the destructive toll that drug trafficking is taking on our communities and families in Alabama and elsewhere along Americas southern border, said Attorney General Steve Marshall. Due to Alabamas proximity to Atlanta, a major distribution point for drugs, and to Texas, a border state, Alabama has become a prime transit point for drug trafficking. The reality is that drug trafficking in my state, and across this country, is largely the result of an unsecured border. By failing to address this, everybody should understand that we are setting up law enforcement for failure. I also conveyed to the President that drug trafficking drives violent crime. Just in the past year in Alabama, we have had multiple incidents of violent crimeincluding crimes against childrencommitted by illegal immigrants who were here because of their roles in various drug-trafficking organizations. Even after being deported, sometimes multiple times, these criminals return to the drug trade and commit crimes against innocent Alabamians. It is reprehensible that we let this happen in America. Attorney General Marshall represented the nations state attorneys general and state law enforcement in todays briefing with the President. The Attorney General has been an outspoken supporter of the Trump Administrations efforts to construct a border wall along the U.S. frontier with Mexico as an effective barrier to block drug smuggling and human trafficking. Other participants in the White House briefing included, Jim Carroll, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy; Carla Provost, Chief, U.S. Border Patrol; officials with the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Customs and Border Protection; as well as law enforcement officials from Arizona, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas. Last August, Attorney General Marshall participated in a White House panel discussion on protecting Americas borders that included high-level officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, as well as governors and senators from other southern border states. A huge and powerful storm system winding up over Colorado and Kansas Wednesday afternoon will be the biggest player in our weather through the end of the week. It will bring wind, rain, a risk for severe thunderstorms, and some weekend chill to the Tennessee Valley. The wind was already evident across the area Wednesday. Gusts to 25-30 mph have been recorded throughout the afternoon. Winds of 15-25 mph with gusts to over 30 mph will remain possible through tonight and Thursday. Rain is next. It will start increasing between 2 AM and 6 AM early Thursday morning. Areas of rain be around during the day Thursday. The rain may break up, which would allow the atmosphere to warm and energize before a stronger line of storms arrives Thursday evening. If the rain breaks up, that line of storms will have potential to be severe. Damaging winds will be the biggest threat, but an isolated, brief tornado cannot be ruled out. If the day is more rainy and warming is limited, the severe weather risk could get shut down before it starts. It's always best to plan for the worst case scenario so you aren't caught off guard. Updated Timing For Severe Thunderstorm Risk The timing may vary, but new data Wednesday evening shows the arrival of the severe weather threat 1-3 PM west of I-65, 3-5 PM along I-65 and I-565, including Huntsville, Madison, Athens, Decatur, and Fayetteville, and 5-7 PM in Sand Mountain. The severe weather threat will end by 10 PM. Wind will ease on Friday, and some colder air will arrive in the Tennessee Valley behind the exiting storm system. Friday's highs will not be any warmer than upper 50s. The weekend will be colder with highs in the lower 50s and lows in the low-to-mid 30s. Slow warming on Monday and Tuesday will lead to the next chance for rain next Wednesday. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, meets with deputies from the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and armed police before attending a plenary meeting of the delegation of the PLA and armed police at the second session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC) in Beijing, capital of China, March 12, 2019. Xi delivered an important speech at the meeting on Tuesday. (Xinhua/Li Gang) BEIJING, March 12 (Xinhua) -- President Xi Jinping on Tuesday stressed fulfilling the set targets and tasks of national defense and military development as scheduled. Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks when attending a plenary meeting of the delegation of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and armed police force at the second session of the 13th National People's Congress, China's national legislature. This year is the key year for completing the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects. The entire armed forces must clearly understand the importance and urgency of implementing the 13th Five-Year Plan for military development, firm up their resolve, intensify the sense of mission, forge ahead with a pioneering spirit, and go all out to carry out the plan so as to ensure that the set targets and tasks are fulfilled as scheduled, he said. Xi called on the whole army to adhere to the guidance of the thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era, fully implement the Party's thinking on strengthening the military for the new era and the military strategy for new conditions, concentrate on war preparedness, and intensify reform and innovation. On implementation of the plan, Xi stressed that it is imperative to strengthen overall planning and coordination, as well as make breakthroughs in key areas. Xi pointed out that it is necessary to take into consideration the overall situation and coordinate the task plans, resources, and management procedures to ensure orderly advancement of various projects. Focusing on the overall layout of the plan, the military should give prominence to key projects including urgent necessities for military preparedness, crucial support for combat systems, and coordinated projects for the reform of national defense and armed forces, he noted. Xi stressed the formulation of the 14th Five-Year Plan for military development should serve the demands of the national development, security and military strategies, and should take into account both the actual condition and long-term development needs. [ Editor: Zhang Zhou ] Chinese tourists violate Rome's no drone policy. Three Chinese tourists were detained by Rome police after being caught flying a drone over the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine on 13 March. The tourists, aged between 22 and 25, face charges for violating the ban on flying drones in the capital, and their device was confiscated by police. In October 2017 the American internet personality Logan Paul got himself in trouble for breaking Rome's no-fly zone drone policy. It was not ignored and it was on the radar and we did talk about it, but it was sort of like another problem on top of everything else, said David Hickton, former U.S. attorney of the Western District of Pennsylvania, who co-chaired the task force. The big problem at the time was opioids in pill form. Fentanyl was episodic at that time. It looks so different to me today than it did then. Now, it looks like its own problem. At the time, it looked like a spike problem. The Takacs is widely considered to be one of the best quartets around. It was founded in 1975 by four students at the Liszt Academy in Budapest; cellist Andras Fejer is the only original member. First violinist Edward Dusinberre is British; violist Geraldine Walther and second violinist Harumi Rhodes are both Americans. A cosmopolitan point of view is certainly one of the quartets strengths, but perhaps even more remarkable is the alacrity with which the newer members have become seamlessly integrated into the ensemble. Their rich, fruity, yet lean sound, unanimity of attack and discerning intelligence remain consistent. When the tour ends, theres an optional $15 tasting that includes samples of four beers two standards, including the Draught Stout (which tastes almost as fresh as it would in Dublin), and two of the experimental beers. Its fun, but not essential, although the tasting happens next to a display of Gilroys sketches of Guinnesss toucans flying past the Golden Gate Bridge, Mount Rushmore and other American landmarks. Theres also a chance to peek into the 1817 Restaurant, a fine-dining option with seared sea scallops or hanger steak with a stout demi-glace (both $32). More affordable bar food, such as large metal bowls of Chesapeake crab poutine ($16) and Irish dip sandwiches ($12), are available in the taproom. I understood her skepticism, since I went into this story with my own. Id never heard of Williamson before receiving the assignment, and I had no previous experience with either spirituality or self-help. Williamsons best-selling books like the 1992 blockbuster that made her a spiritual star, A Return to Love struck me as both esoteric (meditations on how fear is a hallucination taking us away from God) and oversimplified (if you surrender to God, you will receive what you need). But their message is one of love and community, and during our time together, I found Williamson compelling. Despite the similarities to Trump that I outlined in my piece (her lack of experience; her celebrity; her reliance on family members as close advisers), she felt, in many ways, like the inverse of Trump, exhibiting deep historical knowledge, compassion and a weirdly effective tactic of pointing out Americans own culpability in where weve wound up as a country. Media Matters was founded in 2004 by conservative writer turned liberal activist David Brock with a mission to rebut conservative media rhetoric. The nonprofit organization has publicized inflammatory comments by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Don Imus (leading to an ad boycott of the former in 2012, and the firing of the latter in 2007). Most of its energies over the years have been aimed at Fox News and its current and former stars, such as Bill OReilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Carlson. Unless the situation changes in the United States, the decision to travel on a Boeing 737 Max 8 rests in the hands of the passenger. Before you book a flight online, check the aircraft type scheduled for your desired route. The grid of results usually displays the model along with the departure time, flight number, layover city and other details. For example, passengers on a Southwest flight from Washington Dulles to Las Vegas via Denver fly on a Boeing 737 Max 8 for both legs. However, a later flight through Atlanta uses a Boeing 737-800. Unnikrishnan said the airlines also share this information on their apps. The crisis stabilization center will be the first of its kind in the city and one of only a few nationally. It aims to divert some of the 16,000 people who go to hospital emergency rooms in Baltimore every year because of drugs and alcohol even when they do not need acute medical care. Police arrested Luis Hernandez Rivera, 54, on March 5, on charges of aggravated sexual battery and rape of a child. Nosal said that Alexandria police are determined to investigate sexual offenses whenever enough information exists, no matter when the offense occurred. There is no statute of limitations on sex crimes in Virginia. A third sentence-reduction path, available to older inmates such as Manafort, 69, is the Elderly Offender Home Detention program, first tried in 2009 and relaunched by the First Step Act this year. It allows for inmates who are over 60 and have served two-thirds of their total sentence to be released to home confinement, said John B. Webster, a Nashville prison and sentencing consultant. The Bureau of Prisons determines who may be released and their decision cannot be appealed, Webster said. Let me be very clear: I accept responsibility for the actions that led me to be here today, and I want to apologize for all I contributed to the impacts on people and institutions. While I cannot change the past, I can work to change the future, Manafort said from his wheelchair, turning to face Jackson. I want to say to you now, I am sorry for what I have done and for all of the activities that have gotten us here today. The spending plan which will be up for final approval in the House this week before moving to the Senate has no tax or fee increases for residents. The House added $325 million for public school education and a raise for state workers who did not negotiate one with the administration but reduced money for some of Hogans tax credits and programs to boost charter and private schools. We were hoping that we would get to $15 by 2023 but I think were at a point where we are looking forward and excited that hundreds of thousands of low-income workers are getting much-needed and long-overdue raises, said Ricarra Jones of the Fight for $15 coalition. Were hoping the Senate and the House will reject the governors proposal and move forward with whats on the table right now. The following information, provided by the Montgomery County Police Department, shows selected offenses reported to police. Crime reports may be based on preliminary information that is subject to change as a result of further investigation. Rippon Blvd. and Jefferson Davis Hwy., 12:39 a.m. March 3. A 23-year-old Alexandria man was arrested for shooting an acquaintance during an argument in a parking lot. The acquaintance later died from his injuries. The shooter was charged with aggravated malicious wounding, with additional charges to be filed as a result of the death of the acquaintance. In the thefts, police said they were sent Tuesday morning to the 7500 block of Maple Avenue where one theft was reported. They said they learned that a total of 14 thefts had occurred on that block and in the 7600 block. Vent windows had been broken out to give access to the cars, police said. These were among reports received by the Calvert County Sheriffs Office and the Maryland State Police. Anyone with information about these crimes is asked to call the Criminal Investigation Division at 410-535-2800 or 301-855-1194, the Crime Solvers line at 410-535-2880 or the state police Prince Frederick Barrack at 410-535-1400. A few days later, the autopsy findings as well as Websters videocam were made public. On the video, Webster can be heard saying that Black was schizophrenic. But the way he and the other officers handled the case was not in accordance with the towns guidelines for handling people suspected of having a mental illness. The coalition is now pressing the town to fire Webster, who remains on administrative leave. The other officers involved work for nearby police departments and were off duty at the time. But the coalition wants them held accountable, and more protests are planned. We had been hopeful all along, with the black boxes being discovered so soon after the incident, that we could get them on a table and start pulling data to help us inform our decision one way or another about whether to ground the airplanes, Elwell said. That process was lengthened more than I had hoped, to the point where the boxes still are in Ethiopia. But at least now we have a plan to get them out of country. I do not believe that a civilized society can claim to be a leader in the world as long as its government continues to sanction the premeditated and discriminatory execution of its people, Newsom plans to say. In short, the death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian. Construction crews in Winston-Salem spent more than an hour attaching a harness and a cage-like metal frame to the statue of an anonymous soldier, then hoisted it from atop its pedestal with a large crane. A small group of people watching clapped and cheered as the statue was taken down and placed on a flatbed truck. The column and base were then dismantled and removed piece by piece, with workers finishing up in the afternoon. I dont believe one company or one product was the cause of the opioid crisis. I and many others understand the opioid crisis to be very complicated, with many contributing factors, but this program that were discussing is very simple, Landau said. The motivation has really nothing to do with who did or who didnt cause an opioid crisis or litigation. Its really meant to save lives. In the United States, the acid drizzle of stomach-turning revelations might become a deluge now that 45 states attorneys general have contacted Shapiro about possible investigations in their states. It is highly unlikely that the abuses and conspiracies of silence about them are confined to Pennsylvania. Asked whether this might be, cumulatively, the worst crime in U.S. history, Shapiro says: perhaps, considering the power of the guilty institution, the scale and prolonged nature of the crime, and the sophisticated criminal coverup. He speaks of charging the guilty when possible; many predatory priests have died, and statutes of limitations shield others the way you would typically charge the mob. The misuse of the neocon label reached an absurd extreme in a Post op-ed by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in January. The Trump administrations embrace of the self-proclaimed new leader of Venezuela, Juan Guaido, he wrote, reeks of the highly ambitious social engineering that has been at the cornerstone of neoconservative thinking for a century. The old gang is back at it. Leave aside the fact that someone who wants to nationalize the entire health-insurance market is hardly in a position to accuse anyone else of social engineering. The bigger issue: Who exactly were the neocons of 1919? To Khannas credit, when I called him out on Twitter, he corrected himself, writing that he meant the 21st century. But, he added, I have been consistent of talking about the neocon thinking that led to the Iraq blunder and what followed. Putting aside the generic question of rewriting history, Jackson would be a far better representation of what my alma mater strives for today than a president who did his best to set white supremacy in stone for generations to come. Its the Edna Jacksons of the world who are the true backbones of our educational system, and in my opinion naming the school after her would be a perfect way to express this. Its certainly not the first instance of Trump pulling Republicans from their moorings. The one-time party of fiscal discipline just received a budget from Trump proposing years of trillion-dollar deficits. The party of free trade is now condoning Trumps trade wars. The party of law and order blesses Trumps attacks on the Justice Department and the FBI, and the party of personal responsibility accepts his payment of hush money to an adult-film actress. The party of internationalism complies with Trumps rapid pullouts from Afghanistan and Syria, leaving former vice president Richard B. Cheney to fume privately to Vice President Pence about Trump snubbing allies and cozying up to autocrats. A party that professed a commitment to the United States social compact is now silent as Trump proposes deep cuts to Medicare. Another bill, H.R. 51, has been introduced by Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), the Districts nonvoting delegate, that would make D.C. the nations 51st state, carving out the premises of the U.S. Capitol, the Mall and monuments, and other federal property into an enclave that would remain under federal jurisdiction. The legislation has a record number of co-sponsors for a D.C. statehood bill, and Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, has committed to holding a hearing and markup this year, increasing prospects for House passage. It is, of course, a far different story in the Senate, where Republicans have no interest in a measure that, given the Democratic predominance of the Districts electorate, would likely lead to more Democratic seats in Congress. However, the process that brought Mr. Trump to this conclusion was erratic. Though not an expert on flying (despite his previous ownership of a failed airline), Mr. Trump responded to the Ethiopian crash, which killed 157 people on Sunday, by musing on Twitter about purported technological excesses of contemporary aircraft. Worse, the president took a phone call from the chief executive of Boeing, one of the most politically influential companies in the country, who insisted that the planes were safe and lobbied against grounding them which is supposed to be the FAAs decision. Meanwhile, every other nation, including close U.S. aviation partners such as Canada and Britain, was barring the planes, and senators and other politicians of both U.S. parties were urging the FAA to do the same. The numbers become even more concerning when you talk with our Border Patrol agents. I spent 20 years as a builder and developer in South Texas, and I have had the opportunity to meet with our brave men and women at our southern border many times over the past few years and hear straight from them what they need. Our agents on the frontlines tell me for every apprehension they make along the border, there is another person who gets into our country undetected. They know that drug cartels and human traffickers are using migrants to their advantage. The more migrants the cartels can push toward our border agents, the less likely those agents can detect and stop drugs and experienced criminals from finding their way across our border. Thats why a wall is so necessary. Photo taken on March 12, 2019 shows the scene of a plenary meeting of deputies from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region at the second session of the 13th National People's Congress in Beijing, capital of China. The meeting was opened to media. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang) [ Editor: Zhang Zhou ] Among the findings was expert analysis from two college professors who found that the proportion of absentee ballots requested but not returned was anomalously high in Bladen and Robeson, the two counties where Dowless worked. The analysis suggests that in addition to allegedly orchestrating the collection, filling out and forging of ballots in the 9th District, Dowless may also have been responsible for discarding ballots. The speech was the first of a series of policy addresses Schultz plans to make in coming weeks to lay out his vision of a post-partisan presidential campaign. His advisers say he has been encouraged by the reception to his book tour over the last six weeks, despite criticism from many Democrats that he could divide the anti-Trump vote, a notion he rejects. On Tuesday, six months after the initial approval, a congressional committee gave the final sign-off on a program that will allow Capitol Hill interns to be paid. The amounts may seem small, a maximum of $1,800 a month for each intern, but that can be the make-or-break difference for people like Beatriz Reynoso, 30, who is interning on the House side during the spring semester while studying at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Democrats on the panel asked Ross, one of Trumps wealthiest Cabinet officials, for more information about those inaccuracies in a February letter. But Ross responded that he was not ready to answer questions on the matter. Democrats may try anyway, but theyll allow him to submit responses for the record. I felt the need to let some people know I, too, was a survivor, she said during the hearing. I was horrified at how my attempt to share generally my experiences was handled. I almost separated from the Air Force at 18 years of service over my despair. Like many victims, I felt like the system was raping me all over again. Matey, a former deputy chief counsel to ex-New Jersey governor Chris Christie who was confirmed 54-to-45 earlier this week, advanced in the Senate despite objections from both of his home-state senators, Democratic Sens. Robert Menendez and Cory Booker. They said the White House did not consult with them on the nominee, and they declined to return Mateys blue slip, which for decades has served as a permission slip of sorts for a judicial nominee to proceed. In the interview, Pelosi said she does not believe that Trump is up to the job of running the country. Asked whether he was fit to be president, she countered: Are we talking ethically? Intellectually? Politically? What are we talking here? When a reporter said all, she said he was not. Shanahans limited foreign policy experience, particularly with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has prompted some uneasiness on Capitol Hill. A few Senate Republicans have openly criticized his unwavering loyalty to the president, particularly on Trumps controversial announcement that he was withdrawing troops from Syria, and questioned whether he could disagree with Trump in private when appropriate. He did not serve in the military. What were doing is saying, Hey, you know what current law is? Follow current law. . . . To suggest that were down here doing something to protect our republic from its inevitable demise is ridiculous, Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.) said on the House floor Wednesday, ahead of a procedural vote on the resolution. The attorney general has committed to being transparent with Congress and the public consistent with the rules and the law . . . exactly what this resolution asks for, exactly what hes already committed to. The other countries grounding the 737, its their decision, he said. It doesnt seem to be a decision based on anything happening in their countries with the experience of their flying public or of their pilots. But I do understand why they would ground them. But in terms of whats going on in the U.S., until the FAA says something different ... I would get on that airplane. The 54-to-46 vote marks the second time in recent months that the Senate has rejected the United States continued participation in Saudi Arabias bombing campaign against Yemens Houthi rebels, waged in the name of holding back Irans expansion in the region. But the Saudi-led effort, which has at times targeted civilian facilities and prevented aid shipments from getting to Yemenis, has been faulted by human rights organizations for exacerbating what the United Nations has deemed the worlds worst humanitarian catastrophe. For us, it was appropriate in the extreme precaution of safety that we had to ground the airplane, he said. I recommend that it is the right thing to do because safety . . . should be the first and extreme precaution [that] should be taken, and that is what has been done. We have friendly relations, Wardak said in an interview in Kabul. They are happy with my services, and I am safe at work and on the highway. She said she had taken several property cases to local Taliban courts and praised their efficiency. She also said she had quietly ignored Taliban demands not to admit female patients without a male relative at their side. So many men have been killed in fighting that women may have no one to bring them, she said. The 88-year-old cleric, who is rarely seen in public and whose views are almost always delivered through intermediaries, said in a statement that he welcomes any steps to strengthen Iraqs relations with its neighbours . . . based on respect for the sovereignty of the countries and no interference in domestic affairs. The statement was widely interpreted as a reference to Iraqi Shiite militias that are ideologically linked to Iran, which supports them with money and weapons. May said: If the House finds a way in the coming days to support a deal, it would allow the government to seek a short limited technical extension . . . to provide time to pass the necessary legislation and ratify the agreement we have reached with the E.U. But let me be clear, such a short technical extension is only likely to be on offer if we have a deal in place. There have been signs that Saudi Arabia might be intending to release some of the activists. Hathlouls family said she was recently forced to sign a document requesting a royal pardon from the Saudi monarch, King Salman, for her alleged offenses. Relatives of the detainees were also surprised that Wednesdays hearing was held in criminal court, after some were told earlier that the women would be tried in a specialized court reserved for more serious terrorism offenses. The 6th Circuits jurisdiction covers Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit issued a similar ruling in 2012 upholding an Indiana law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit went the other way in a challenge to a Utah law in 2016, over the objection of Neil M. Gorsuch, then sitting on that appeals court and now a Supreme Court justice, who wanted to rehear the case on procedural grounds. According to Nadler, Whitaker did not deny that he had been directly involved in conversations about whether to fire one or more U.S. attorneys. He also did not deny that he had been involved in conversations about the scope of U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Bermans recusal from the Cohen case, Nadler said, and whether subordinate prosecutors at the Southern District of New York went too far pursuing the campaign finance case in which Cohen has implicated Trump. The state charges, for example, reference an email in which Manafort tells someone they need to be at his Howard Street property, so it appears they live there. It was revealed at Manaforts trial in federal court in Virginia that he had told a lender his daughter and son-in-law were living at the condo, when in fact it was used as a rental. After consultations with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military, Trump wrote at the time. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you. The policy of this Administration is to engage with other governments, regardless of their record, if doing so will further U.S. interests, he wrote in the preface. At the same time, we recognize that U.S. interests in the enduring stability, prosperity, and security of a world filled with strong, sovereign states will only be served if governments respect human rights and fundamental freedoms. U.S. officials say the Trump administration has no plans to seek the forward deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe once again, but the breakdown of the treaty threatens a return to an era in which Europeans worried about Russian nuclear missiles that could strike their cities within a few minutes of launching. The systems the Pentagon is planning to test are similar to the missiles that the United States deployed in the 1980s, although without nuclear warheads attached. The deployment of those missiles fueled tension with the Soviet Union that ultimately led to the conclusion of the INF Treaty. Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Airlines and countries around the world have grounded Boeing 737 Max jets or banned them from their airspace following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed 157 people on Sunday, five months after a similar Indonesian Lion Air jet plunged into the ocean, killing 189. Here's a look at those countries and airlines: Australia Australia has announced a temporary ban on flights by 737 Max aircraft, although none of its airlines currently operate them. The Civil Aviation Safety Authority said Tuesday that the ban will affect two foreign airlines SilkAir and Fiji Airways that use them for flights to Australia. Brazil Brazil's Gol Airlines has suspended the use of seven Max 8 jets. The airline said it hopes to return the aircraft to use as soon as possible. Gol said it has made nearly 3,000 flights with the Max 8. Advertisement Loading Canada Canada on Wednesday closed its airspace to the Max 8. Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau said a comparison of vertical fluctuations found a "similar profile" to the Lion Air crash that killed 189 people in October. Canada lost 18 of its citizens in Sunday's crash, the second highest number after Kenya. Cayman Islands Cayman Airways, a Caribbean carrier, has stopped using its two Max 8 jets. President and CEO Fabian Whorms said the move starting Monday will cause changes to flight schedules. Cayman is the flag carrier of Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory. China China has 96 Max 8 jets in service, belonging to carriers such as Air China, China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines. The civil aviation authority directed the planes to be grounded indefinitely on Monday. There were eight Chinese citizens on the Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed shortly after taking off on Sunday. Advertisement Ethiopia A spokesman for Ethiopian Airlines said it grounded its remaining four Max 8 jets as an "extra safety precaution" while it investigates Sunday's deadly crash. The airline is awaiting the delivery of 25 more Max 8 jets. Will my flight be affected? Probably not. The percentage of 737 Max jets in the global airline fleet is tiny at the moment. At the end of February, Boeing had delivered 376 to airlines and leasing companies around the world. The global airline fleet comprised 24,400 planes at the end of 2017, according to Boeing. Europe The European Aviation Safety Agency has issued a directive grounding all 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft. EASA said in its emergency airworthiness directive Tuesday that "at this early stage" of the most recent investigation, "it cannot be excluded that similar causes may have contributed to both events." The grounding applies to all European Union airspace. Fiji Fiji has suspended all Max 8 flights in and out of the country. The decision only affects one operator, Fiji Airways. Advertisement Hong Kong Hong Kong has banned the operation of all 737 Max aircraft "into, out of and over" the key Asian aviation hub beginning Wednesday evening. The announcement from the Civil Aviation Department said the ban would continue "until further notice." It said the department has been in close contact with the FAA and other the relevant organisations, including the two airlines, SpiceJet of India and Russia's Globus Airlines, that use the aircraft to operate flights into and out of Hong Kong International Airport. Iceland Icelandair Group has temporarily suspended operations of its three 737 Max aircraft until further notice. President and CEO Bogi Nels Bogason said Tuesday that the company will follow developments closely and work with local, European and US authorities on any steps that need to be taken. He said the temporary suspension won't impact the company's operations, as it only affects three aircraft out of a fleet of 33. India India has grounded all 737 Max 8 planes. A statement late Tuesday said the planes "will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations." The statement did not say how many planes were affected. Advertisement Indonesia Indonesia has temporarily grounded Max 8 jets to inspect their airworthiness. Director General of Air Transportation Polana B. Pramesti said the move was made to ensure flight safety. A Lion Air model of the same plane crashed in Indonesia in October. Indonesian airlines operate 11 Max 8 jets. Lion Air, which owns 10 of them, said it will try to minimise the impact of the decision on operations. The other Max 8 jet belongs to national carrier Garuda. Japan Japan grounded all Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 jets a day after the US, citing the Federal Aviation Administration's decision to cease flights because of "new information" indicating some similarities with a fatal Lion Air crash in October. New Zealand New Zealand has suspended Max 8 flights in and out of the country. The decision only affects one operator, Fiji Airways. No New Zealand airlines use the Max 8 planes. Advertisement In the meantime I rang around the hospitals to try and find (the client), she said. The Perth woman's eyes after the burns and midway through the removal. There was a case in Perth a couple of years ago where they surgically separated the girl's glued eyes and I didnt want her to have to go through that pain. But Ms Ambler was quickly contacted by the technician and later got in touch with the client, who was driven by her boyfriend to Ms Amblers Joondalup salon about 9.15pm that night to remove the lashes. It was actually worse than I expected," Ms Ambler said. "The pictures didn't show how bad it was and I had to not show her in my face how bad it was - as she had been through enough. The eyelash removal process lasted nearly two-and-a-half hours, with Ms Ambler unable to remove all of the adhesive. The removal process took nearly four hours. "We got all lashes out, plus the adhesive left over her face," she said. "We couldn't removal all traces of adhesive; thats how bad it was after hours of a removal but she was tired and was at her limit so we stopped. I got home 1am that next morning. "She had a wedding to attend the next day and this was her very first time having extensions. She had to wear sunnies at the wedding and her eyes remained very sore." A follow-up revealed the woman had been very lucky. "As bad as it is, she's very lucky the chemical burns were not in a serious part of her eye and she has not had any blindness or lasting damage," Ms Ambler said. Loading The technician who worked on the client has since left the industry for the time being. Ms Ambler has worked as a lash technician for more than five years and has won over 20 international awards for her work, but has consistently voiced concerns about the sliding standards she has seen in eyelash extension training in Western Australia. "We are getting a massive influx of so-called technicians that do a quick course, or watch something online, open up from home [usually] under the table, so no taxes, insurance or accountability if they were to injure a client [and they] are destroying the industry due to poor quality, unsafe work and poor health and safety standards," she said. Ms Ambler's concerns were echoed by national industry body, the Hair and Beauty Association. Loading HABA secretary and WA salon owner Helen Golisano said the state's lash industry had become "open slather". "Right now, weve got people training others who arent qualified to train. The internet and social media opened up a whole floodgate of unqualified businesses," she said. "Anyone can walk off the street and do it. There are several suppliers in Perth who will sell their equipment to anyone including people who are not qualified. "Ultimately the bare minimum standard is that no one should be able to buy a professional-level product without a professional qualification. "I believe they should at least have a Certificate IV diploma of beauty. They need to learn the diseases and the infections that can happen when working with the eyes." Ms Ambler said it was also important to be mindful of beauty colleges offering the certificate, and said students should do their research before signing up to a course. The eyelash extension industry is currently unregulated in WA. Some local governments impose regulations on operating businesses, but there is no universal hygiene and product standard that must be followed by eyelash technicians. The Department of Health confirmed it had regulations regarding skin penetration procedures including waxing, manicures and other beauty treatments and the Hairdressing Establishment Regulations 1972, but both set of regulations do not cover eyelash extensions. A Department of Health spokeswoman said there were plans to adapt the regulations to reflect new trends in beauty treatments. The Department of Health is currently developing new regulations which will replace the Health (skin penetration procedures) regulations 1998 and the Hairdressing Establishment Regulations 1972, she said. The girl's eyelids became significantly swollen. "The new regulations will expand the powers of authorised officers to regulate beauty therapy procedures such as facials, spray-tanning and massage, enabling them to apply penalties or close a premises if they arent complying with infection control requirements or their operations pose a health risk. "The regulations are expected to be completed in approximately two years." However Ms Golisano said due to the fast-paced, changing nature of the industry, government was often slow to keep up and did not prioritise it. "Ultimately there are no standards. Its interesting because the growth in the industry is massive, but the government tries to justify not regulating it because ultimately no ones died yet," she said. People need to understand we charge more because we know about infection control. We use proper sterilising units; we use the proper glue so your lashes wont fall out within days. We treat them professionally and with precision. Its an art, really." Ms Ambler said until the industry was forced to operate on regulations, there were certain red flags clients should look for when picking out a lash technician, including businesses that only accepted cash; say they will agree to work before seeing clients natural lashes; or fail to provide proof of insurance and recent training. Technicians should also never agree to apply "long and thick" lashes without seeing a client first, and a client's eyes should not be red after an application. A woman who used a knife to slit the throat of her 81-year-old mother told her she was "going straight to the Lord", a Perth court has heard. Just hours after she killed her mother security footage obtained by 9 News Perth shows the woman placing a bucket of blood outside Parliament House in what seems to be a bizarre blood ritual. Tania Denise Shayler is on trial in the Supreme Court of Western Australia charged with murdering Margaret Mitchell in Stratton in June 2017, but claims she is not guilty due to unsoundness of mind. The court heard on Tuesday that Shayler believed it was "God's thought" for her to kill her elderly mother. Advance Australia has raised almost $400,000 it will use to shore up the positions of key Liberal Party conservatives ahead of the federal election including that of former prime minister Tony Abbott. The emerging grassroots organisation, which wants to be the conservative answer to left-wing activist group GetUp!, claims 27,500 members and a $395,000 war chest raised from 2000 "mainly small donations". It will focus on the seats of Dickson, Deakin, Boothby and Warringah, held respectively by Peter Dutton, Michael Sukkar, Nicolle Flint and Mr Abbott. Tony Abbott meets Joy Latos, who despairs at the campaign to try to oust him from the seat. Credit:Jessica Hromas So far, Advance Australia has concentrated on Mr Abbott's seat of Warringah, where it is up against an onslaught of community groups, including GetUp!, that have pledged to oust Mr Abbott in favour of independent Zali Steggall. Gmail and Google Drive services are back up and running, the technology giant has told customers, after suffering a global disruption that left users complaining they were unable to access their files or send emails with attachments. The issue was first reported on social media at around 1pm AEDT, and complaints came in from North America, South America, Asia, Australia and Europe. The Down Detector Gmail outage map as at 3.30pm Wednesday. In a statement on its website posted about 5.45pm the company said the problem with Gmail was resolved. "We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support," it said. Authentic American Populism In the age of President Trump the public characterization of an American First movement bears the sharpest criticism and condemnation from the Deep State and foreign enemies. Those sincere patriots who retain a valid historic understanding of the post World War II era, recognize that the New World Order was the actual victory of that contrived conflict. With the death of the American Republic, the globalist international community of oligarchs has imposed a planetary enslavement. Part of their goal is to obliterate independent nation states and destroy indigenous cultures. Genuine populism is the foe of this elite demonic crime syndicate, who is promulgating hell on earth. The struggle to revive an America First policy had many advocates over the last century. One such standout advocate was Willis A. Carto. In the account, an Overview of a Remarkable Career in the Global Public Arena, the remnant of true nationalism had a vigorous defender. In the account Willis Carto: Champion Of The American Right, the research of George Michael a political science professor who has studied and written extensively about the political right, is featured. Professor Michael was granted exclusive access to Willis Carto in preparation for his must-read book Willis Carto and the American Far Right, conducting numerous personal interviews which allowed him to obtain a deeper insight into Cartos views and activities since he became active in the right wing struggle shortly after WWII. Describing Carto as undoubtedly the central figure in the post-World War II American far right, Michael outlines Cartos efforts to promote the various causes associated with the right wing in America. "Willis Carto is a man who has done more to advance the agenda and causes of the right wing in post-WWII America than any other single individual. Over the years, he has published a variety of newsletters, newspapers, and journals, covering some of the most important and controversial issues facing not only America, but the entire world. Carto has never backed down from or avoided the uncomfortable realities that so many in the media and political establishment cowardly acquiesce to or traitorously facilitate. Confronting the organized Jewish community, the Israel lobby, race hustlers, cultural Marxism, the war on White America, and false narratives of history particularly as they relate to WWII Carto has been, and remains, in the vanguard of authentic American nationalism, populism, and truth-telling. He has been persecuted, stabbed in the back, and slandered yet he has persevered and today he stands as the most iconic and influential figure in the American right wing." Relying on the censored internet to obtain accurate information on Carto can be a daunting task. The same can be said about the Liberty Lobby organization and it is even harder to find old publications of The Spotlight. Well, for starters, review the news archive which lists many of the hundreds of articles that have appeared in The SPOTLIGHT since it first went on-line in 1997. Within the reporting, opinions and activist efforts of Liberty Lobby the most motivated pro American Revolutionary Patriots had a clarion voice that expresses the true nature of political combat and the social society. The problem with the current crop of lobotomized electorate is that their IQ has dropped off the scales of empirical measurement. The phony outrage over the 'so called' "PC" hate proponents is an essential part of pushing real history into the black hole of condemnation. A direct link between purging the factual chronicles found in the publications from Liberty Lobby and the rapid demise of our western civilization is proof that facing the truth is too frightening for the timid and brain dead. Contrast this absurd and obscene Newspeak that comes out of the corporatist press, social media and altered state progressives that strive to control the popular culture with the wisdom of Colonel Curtis B. Dall, the former son-in-law of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (and an outspoken critic of FDRs policies). Mr. Dall signed on as chairman of Liberty Lobbys Board of Policy, the populist institutions formal membership organization and this author had the privilege to share a private conversation for over an hour at the 25th Liberty Lobby convention in Washington DC back in 1980. Colonel Dall confirmed the treason of FDR and the globalist plan of a NWO. The formation of the United Nations and NATO were initial steps to establish the surrender of America as the last bastion of individual natural rights. Defending a Constitutional Republic is essential to achieve an American Populism ethos. Sadly, President Donald Trump has yielded to the systemic forces of the swamp. Allowing NeoCon Trotsky Bolsheviks and Marxists into his administration is substantiation that the establishment is still in control of government. Appointing number one daughter Ivanka and husband Jared Kushner to positions of power is the single greatest mistake of his presidency. Allowing a Kabbalah cult to make policy in the west wing is just as bad as letting Ilhan Omar wear a hijab as she tries to pass Sharia Law in Congress. The only difference is that Ilhan Omar, Is ABSOLUTELY Right - The Jews 100% Control The US Government, And It Is NOT "Antisemitic" To Point Out The Truth! There is no doubt that Liberty Lobby would condemn an Israel-First government purity that demands full allegiance to Zionism. Also, The Spotlight would never endorse an Islamic Imam Sharia Society. American Populism opposes any faction that places a foreign country or an international body of globalist elites over the legitimate citizens who pledge their only loyalty to our own national sovereignty. Now that it has been several years since Willis Carto passed on, take the time to discover the validity of the America First movement. Progressives, corporatists and banksters are all globalists. When Trump delivers a Stephen Miller written speech, reflect upon the authenticity of the message. However, the political reality for President Trump is that he cannot control his own staff, much less his own elected party officials. Do not succumb to false hope, only a Liberty Lobby viewpoint can restore the nation. SARTRE Discuss or comment about this essay on the BATR Forum http://www.batr.org "Many seek to become a Syndicated Columnist, while the few strive to be a Vindicated Publisher" 2019 Copyright BATR - All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors. 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication. US Federal Borrowing Crosses the Rubicon A year ago, Republicans in control of Congress suspended the cap on federal borrowing. The limit was automatically re-imposed on March 1st. Politicians now have a few months to hammer out legislation to raise the cap as the Treasury employs extraordinary measures to fend off default. The federal deficit is mushrooming once again. The 2017 tax cuts have taken a bite out of receipts at the IRS and economic growth has not met expectations. This years borrowing to fill the gap between government tax revenue and expenditures may reach a trillion dollars for the first time since 2012. If Washington politicians follow the usual script, we can expect Republicans to posture as fiscal conservatives and then relent either just before or just after a federal shutdown. Democrats will chastise the GOP for playing politics with Americas sacred responsibility to pay its bills. This drama has played out dozens of times over recent decades and is therefore likely to repeat once more this fall. Perhaps it wont, though. The Associated Press notes that there just arent many people in the Capitol who even pretend to care anymore when it comes to deficits. The AP quoted former senator Judd Gregg from New Hampshire on Sunday: The president doesnt care. The leadership of the Democratic Party doesnt care. He should also have included Republican leadership, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who have reliably supported metastasizing federal debt. Meanwhile, the socialist Left has touted so-called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as the mechanism to fund the economy-killing Green New Deal and any and all other government boondoggles. At its core, MMT advocates for perpetual money printing to fund government spending. There has already been one government shutdown this year. Congress and the President may decide another one, for the sake of a bit of theater around the borrowing limit, is not a good idea. Genuine conservatives in the Republican Senate are few and far between. President Donald Trump released a portion of his proposed 2020 budget which calls for 5% cuts in non-defense domestic discretionary spending. He is requesting $8.6 billion in funding for a wall. Needless to say, he will be vehemently opposed by House Democrats, and many expect Trump to compromise. In any event, should the Presidents budget be enacted, officials estimate the budget might balance by 2034. The borrowing cap is going to be raised as always. Even the will to pretend to fight against limits is fading. 2019 may be the year when the fiction of a federal borrowing limit is removed all together. By Clint Siegner MoneyMetals.com Clint Siegner is a Director at Money Metals Exchange, perhaps the nation's fastest-growing dealer of low-premium precious metals coins, rounds, and bars. Siegner, a graduate of Linfield College in Oregon, puts his experience in business management along with his passion for personal liberty, limited government, and honest money into the development of Money Metals' brand and reach. This includes writing extensively on the bullion markets and their intersection with policy and world affairs. 2019 Clint Siegner - All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors. 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication. British Prime Minister Theresa May attends the Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons in London, Britain, on Feb. 27, 2019. Theresa May promised on Tuesday that the members of parliament (MPs) would be given a choice to vote on no-deal Brexit or delayed departure from the European Union (EU) if her deal is rejected in a meaningful vote in mid-March. (Xinhua/British Parliament/Jessica Taylor) LONDON, March 12 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal was rejected again on Tuesday by MPs in the second meaningful vote in the parliament since January, increasing uncertainty about how the country will leave the European Union. MPs voted against May's revised EU withdrawal agreement by 391 to 242, another heavy defeat since Jan. 15, when MPs rejected May's Brexit deal by a margin of 230. The voting started at around 1900 GMT, with the prime minister heading for a defeat. A hoarse prime minister, who was carrying on her last-ditch battle to save her Brexit deal just hours before the crunch vote, failed to win over the ERG, a major faction within her Conservative Party. The United Kingdom is scheduled to leave the European Union on March 29. May's Brexit deal was voted down on Jan. 15 in the heaviest parliamentary defeat of any British prime minister in the modern era. "I profoundly regret the decision this house has taken," May told lawmakers in a short speech right after the voting. She added that the choices facing Britain were "unenviable", but because of the rejection of her deal. "They are choices that must be faced," she said. May has secured legally binding changes to the deal on Monday night, but rebel lawmakers of her Conservative Party and those from the opposition Labour Party had said that these changes were not enough to persuade MPs to back the agreement reached by London and Brussels in November 2018 after years of painful negotiations. "The reality is that nothing has changed," Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Labour Party, said in the parliament. "Nothing has changed. Not one single word was changed." Corbyn said the Labour party put forward the idea of "remain and reform" in the referendum campaign. With her Brexit deal rejected again in the parliament, the prime minister then faces a possible defeat on a second vote on Wednesday to prevent a no-deal Brexit on March 29, and a third vote on Thursday to extend the Article 50 divorce process, likely until the end of June. [ Editor: Zhang Zhou ] Is Britain At The Edge Of A Political Cliff? Recent news that Theresa May was unable to convince members of Parliament to even consider her current deal as well as the future political and societal consequences of any failure to move ahead with an orderly Brexit deal. The question before traders and investors is how will this reflect in the global markets and how will currencies react to this new? The GBP (British Pound) appears to be poised to a breakdown move aligning with our Fibonacci Arc structures. These arc structures help us to understand where inflection points are likely in the markets and where bigger moves may initiate. The current Arc level, near current price, is indicating that any failure of an upside move will likely prompt a downside move to near 0.739 or lower. US Dollar US Dollar chart by TradingView The overwhelming vote to deny Theresa Mays Brexit deal came down to 391 Against and 242 For the current Brexit deal. It is likely that the British Parliament will continue to break down into warring factions as a contentious future political outcome will play out. The people of Britain are still wanting to complete the Brexit while it appears Parliament has yet to come to terms with the process. We believe this current event will be somewhat isolated to Britain and European nations, yet be believe there could be a larger contagion even if other nations attempt to push their desires to leave the EU as well. Overall, time will tell how this plays out with global investors. Our first impressions are that the global markets will move lower on this news and that currencies could find new weakness as this chaos continues. Please take a minute to visit www.TheTechnicalTraders.com/FreeResearch/ to read all of our most recent research including our very details 5-part global economic research post. This post is very important because it shows you predicted price levels going all the way into 2021 and highlights why this new bull market may just be getting started. Find out why www.TheTechnicalTraders.com is dedicated to helping you find and execute better trades and stay ahead of these market moves. Chris Vermeulen www.TheTechnicalTraders.com Chris Vermeulen has been involved in the markets since 1997 and is the founder of Technical Traders Ltd. He is an internationally recognized technical analyst, trader, and is the author of the book: 7 Steps to Win With Logic Through years of research, trading and helping individual traders around the world. He learned that many traders have great trading ideas, but they lack one thing, they struggle to execute trades in a systematic way for consistent results. Chris helps educate traders with a three-hour video course that can change your trading results for the better. His mission is to help his clients boost their trading performance while reducing market exposure and portfolio volatility. He is a regular speaker on HoweStreet.com, and the FinancialSurvivorNetwork radio shows. Chris was also featured on the cover of AmalgaTrader Magazine, and contributes articles to several leading financial hubs like MarketOracle.co.uk Disclaimer: Nothing in this report should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell any securities mentioned. Technical Traders Ltd., its owners and the author of this report are not registered broker-dealers or financial advisors. Before investing in any securities, you should consult with your financial advisor and a registered broker-dealer. Never make an investment based solely on what you read in an online or printed report, including this report, especially if the investment involves a small, thinly-traded company that isnt well known. Technical Traders Ltd. and the author of this report has been paid by Cardiff Energy Corp. In addition, the author owns shares of Cardiff Energy Corp. and would also benefit from volume and price appreciation of its stock. The information provided here within should not be construed as a financial analysis but rather as an advertisement. The authors views and opinions regarding the companies featured in reports are his own views and are based on information that he has researched independently and has received, which the author assumes to be reliable. Technical Traders Ltd. and the author of this report do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any content of this report, nor its fitness for any particular purpose. Lastly, the author does not guarantee that any of the companies mentioned in the reports will perform as expected, and any comparisons made to other companies may not be valid or come into effect. Chris Vermeulen Archive 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication. Netiquette Die Kommentare auf weltwoche-daily.ch dienen als Diskussionsplattform und sollen den offenen Meinungsaustausch unter den Lesern ermoglichen. Es ist uns ein wichtiges Anliegen, dass in allen Kommentarspalten fair und sachlich debattiert wird. Scharfe, sachbezogene Kritik am Inhalt des Artikels oder wo angebracht an Beitragen anderer Forumsteilnehmer ist erwunscht, solange sie hoflich vorgetragen wird. Personlichkeitsverletzende und diskriminierende Ausserungen hingegen verstossen gegen unsere Richtlinien. Sie werden ebenso geloscht wie Kommentare, die eine sexistische, beleidigende oder anstossige Ausdrucksweise verwenden. Beitrage kommerzieller Natur werden nicht freigegeben. Zu verzichten ist grundsatzlich auch auf Kommentarserien (zwei oder mehrere Kommentare hintereinander um die Zeichenbeschrankung zu umgehen), wobei die Online-Redaktion mit Augenmass Ausnahmen zulassen kann. Die Kommentarspalten sind artikelbezogen, die thematische Ausrichtung ist damit vorgegeben. Wir bitten Sie deshalb auf Beitrage zu verzichten, die nichts mit dem Inhalt des Artikels zu tun haben. Das Nutzen der Kommentarfunktion bedeutet ein Einverstandnis mit unseren Richtlinien. Unzulassig sind Wortmeldungen, die Nichts mit dem Thema des Artikels zu tun haben Kommerzieller Natur sind andere Forumsteilnehmer personlich beleidigen einzelne Personen oder Gruppen aufgrund von Rasse, Ethnie oder Religion herabsetzen in Rechtschreibung und Interpunktion mangelhaft sind verachtliche Abanderungen von Namen oder Umschreibungen von Personen enthalten mehr als einen externen Link enthalten einen Link zu dubiosen Seiten enthalten Nur einen Link enthalten ohne beschreibenden Kontext dazu Als Medium, das der freien Meinungsausserung verpflichtet ist, handhabt die Weltwoche Verlags AG die Veroffentlichung von Kommentaren liberal. Die Online-Redaktion behalt sich jedoch vor, Kommentare nach eigenem Gutdunken und ohne Angabe von Grunden nicht freizugeben. Es besteht grundsatzlich kein Recht darauf, dass ein Kommentar veroffentlich wird. Weiter behalt sich die Redaktion das Recht vor, Kurzungen vorzunehmen. Plans to transform a former nursing home into a new community care center are moving forward for The Bridgeport Rescue Mission. The Park City nonprofit completed its purchase of the former Astoria Park Nursing Home, 725 Park Ave. BRM paid $2.15 million for the defunct building which will soon house several services. Bridgeport Rescue Mission has the vision to renovate this building to be the home of a care center which will enable us to expand our capacity to meet the basic human needs of the hungry, homeless and addicted, said Executive Director, Terry Wilcox in a press release. This marks BRMs largest purchase, Wilcox added. The five-story, 61,344 square-foot nursing home closed two years ago after the state Superior Court took control of its operations because of financial woes. The site is adjacent to Optimus Health Cares primary care building on Black Rock Avenue. Rescue Mission set its sights on the nursing home last year, with plans of revamping it and expanding the Missions services. The nonprofit, which is headquartered at 1088 Fairfield Ave., provides food, shelter, clothing, education, job training and counseling for the urban poor and addicted of Coastal Fairfield County. The transaction was handled by Baldwin Pearson and Company Inc., which represented BRM; Fairfield-based Angel Commericial represented the seller, Laureate Astoria LLC, in the transaction. We are pleased that this building will be repurposed to help those in need, said John Angel, president of Angel Commercial, in the press release Plans are to use the former Astoria Park to house the missions faith-based, nine-month residential substance abuse recovery program, whose graduates can move in to the supportive housing as they seek employment and re-establish their lives. Wilcox has said the recovery program could expand to 150 beds with the added space. A free choice food pantry, is also part of Wilcoxs plans for the refurbished facility. Lastly, the missions administrative offices at 87 Washington Ave. will be folded into the Park Avenue site. Wilcox has said renovations to the building would cost up to $10 million. Rescue Mission received a $2 million gift from philanthropist and retired Playtex president Joel Smilow of Southport toward that goal. The nonprofit still has to come up with the remaining funding for the renovations, but the completed facility will be renamed the Joel Smilow Care Center at Bridgeport Rescue Mission. Contributions from Brian Lockhart Jordan.grice@hearstmediact.com HARTFORD The Childrens Committee forwarded a bill to the House on Tuesday that changes vaccine exemption forms to notify parents of the current law. The bill had initially sought to remove school nurses as a person approved to witness a parents signature on a religious exemption form. That language was scrapped in favor of adding a disclaimer to the top of the form to let parents know a nurse has the right to refuse to witness their signature. The bill squeaked through committee on a 8-6 vote. Three Democrats joined three Republicans in voting against the measure. The new language would also require the Department of Education to send one written notice to each local and regional board of education and the Association of School Nurses of Connecticut a statement that says any school nurse can acknowledge or refuse to acknowledge a religious exemption. Connecticut allows attorneys, judges, family support magistrates, town clerks, justices of the peace, and school nurses to sign the religious exemption forms. There are some nurses that have problems signing these papers and they have rights as well, Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford, said. She said there are other people who can sign the form. However, some parents objected to the legislation because not all the officials capable of signing the form also have to comply with health privacy laws under HIPAA. Sen. Kevin Kelly, R-Shelton, said individuals have the right to privacy regarding their medical records. He said the other individuals on the list are not bound by HIPAA like the school nurses. He said asking them to have others acknowledge their forms are asking them to breach the privacy they have in their medical records. In 2015, the General Assembly passed a law that required parents to acknowledge their religious exemption annually. That was a year after one of the worst measles outbreaks in the U.S. following its elimination in 2000. This seems not to be a legislative issue. This seems to be an education issue, Rep. Noreen Kokoruda, R-Madison, said. She said the legislation does nothing that isnt already current law. Why would we need more legislation to educate people when its the law? Kokoruda, who voted against the bill, said. Rep. Gary Turco, D-Manchester, said the best practices say vaccinations are very important to childrens well-being. Were seeing cases across this country now where people arent vaccinating and there are serious consequences to that, Turco said. He said Connecticut allows for a religious exemption and theres nothing in this legislation that changes that. Rep. Patricia Wilson Pheanious, D-Ashford, who also voted against the bill, said the nurses are only being asked to acknowledge the signature of the parent. Theyre not being asked to make a judgment, Wilson Pheanious said. Sen. Derek Slap, D-West Hartford, said he knows theyve been getting a lot of emails from constituents on both sides of the issue and one of the arguments against the bill is the slippery slope argument. This is not getting rid of a religious exemption, Slap reiterated. This is not putting another obstacle in the way of parents claiming a religious exemption. This is simply restating what current statute already says. Those who oppose vaccinating their children for religious reasons believe the bill could be used as a vehicle to eliminate the religious exemption to vaccines. Kokoruda said parents have every reason to be concerned that the bill could be used to eliminate their religious exemption. She said legislation intending to do one thing becomes something else all the time. Its the nose under the carpet, Kokoruda said. .. .I just think this is the first step toward totally getting rid of religious exemptions. Rep. Liz Linehan, D-Cheshire, said shes given everyone her word that she has no intention of using this bill a vehicle for getting rid of religious exemptions. Linehan said she would like to eliminate the religious exemption, but will use another piece of legislation to accomplish it. "I've made it very clear that I'm 100 percent for getting rid of the religious exemption, but you have my word that this bill is not the vehicle," Linehan added. The governments of Canada and Ontario are investing over $14.4 million for affordable housing projects in Northwestern Ontario through the Investment in Affordable Housing (IAH) program. Patty Hajdu, member of Parliament for Thunder BaySuperior North and minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour, along with Steve Clark, Ontario's minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, announced the funding initiative on Tuesday. Fifteen projects will provide a total of 127 affordable housing units to individuals, families, seniors, adults with disabilities, families seeking shelter from domestic violence and Indigenous people across Northwestern Ontario, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. "Every Canadian, no matter their age, physical abilities, or background, deserves a safe and affordable place to call home, Hajdu said. The federal and provincial governments have partnered together to deliver the IAH program since 2011. Under IAH, the two governments are investing a total of $1.9 billion for improving access to affordable housing across the province. "We know that a home is the foundation for so much in our lives it's where we raise our families and build our communities, and we are proud to be a part of this investment to open up housing opportunities for people who need it most, Clark said. 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. Program/Operation Assistant, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Organization: UNDP - United Nations Development Programme Country: Ethiopia City: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Office: UNDP Addis Ababa Closing date: Tuesday, 26 March 2019 Job ID: 21899 Practice Area - Job Family: Management - OPERATION Vacancy End Date: (Midnight New York, USA) 26/03/2019 Duty Station: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Education & Work Experience: G-Bachelors Level Degree - 2 year(s) experience Languages Required: Desired: English Amharic Grade: SB3 Vacancy Type: Service Contract (SC) Posting Type: External Bureau: Africa Contract Duration: One Year Background UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security. Placing womens rights at the center of all its efforts, UN Women will lead and coordinate United Nations system efforts to ensure that commitments on gender equality and gender mainstreaming translate into action throughout the world. It will provide strong and coherent leadership in support of Member States priorities and efforts, building effective partnerships with civil society and other relevant actors. In this context, UN Women Ethiopia Country Office (ECO) is seeking to hire a Programme/Operation Assistant to support the Operations team. While the position is based in Addis Ababa, the role encompasses travel requirements within the different regions of Ethiopia in support to various Implementing partners. Under the guidance and supervision of the Operations Manager and working closely with operation team members, the Programme/Operation Assistant provides financial, procurement and administrative process services in the Ethiopia Country Office, ensuring timeliness, efficiency and transparent use of financial resources and delivery of services in accordance with organizational financial rules, regulations, policies, procedures and approved allocations. The Programme/Operation Assistant promotes a client-oriented approach consistent with UN Women rules and regulations, standard practices and guidelines. The Programme/Operation Assistant works in close collaboration with the operations and programme staff in the ECO to exchange information and ensure consistent service delivery. Duties and Responsibilities Summary of Key Functions Program Analyst-Ending Violence against Women and Girls (EVAWG), Addis Ababa Organization: UNDP - United Nations Development Programme Country: Ethiopia City: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Office: UNDP Addis Ababa Closing date: Tuesday, 26 March 2019 Job ID: 21900 Practice Area - Job Family: Management - PROGRAM MANAGEMENT Vacancy End Date: (Midnight New York, USA) 26/03/2019 Duty Station: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Education & Work Experience: I-Masters Level Degree - 2 year(s) experience Languages Required: Desired: English Amharic Grade: SB4 Vacancy Type: Service Contract (SC) Posting Type: External Bureau: Africa Contract Duration: One Year Background UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security. UN Women Ethiopia Country Office (ECO) Strategic Notes (SN) 2017-2020 and 2019 Annual Work Plan (AWP) focus on supporting the development objectives of the Ethiopia Growth and Transformation Plan II (2010/11-2014/15) in relation to Pillar 8 on equity and empowerment as well as being aligned with United Nations Development Assistance Framework (2016 - 2020). The Country Programme Division under the leadership of the Deputy Country Representative manages the Programme support to Ethiopia including Joint Programs. In its work for 2017-2020, UN Women ECO is focusing on four main development result areas: 1) Women supported to lead and participate in decision-making at all levels; 2) Women, especially the poorest and most excluded, are economically empowered and benefit from development; 3) Women and girls live a life free from violence; and 4) Governance and national planning fully reflect accountability for gender equality commitments and priorities. One of the priorities programme of UN Women ECO is Ending Violence against Women and Girls (EVAWG). In this area, UN Women works with key partners from government, civil society and UN organizations in development and humanitarian settings to address legal gaps and strengthen policy frameworks with regards to protecting women survivors of violence and their rights; to expand the provision of legal and protection services to women; and to provide awareness raising initiatives on legal instruments and mechanisms and sexual and gender-based violence. To implement its Ending Violence Against Women and Girls (EVAWG) as part of UN Women Ethiopia Strategic Note (2017-2020), UN Women Ethiopia is seeking a Programme Analyst - Ending Violence Against Women and Girls (EVAWG) to strengthen delivery of its EVAWG program and advancing womens right and coordination of broad-based national partnerships in this area. While the position is based in the UN Women Ethiopia office in Addis Ababa, the role encompasses travel requirements within the different regions of Ethiopia. Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. BOEINGS 737 Max jet found a sweet spot for the companys growing base of customers around the world: its a bestselling workhorse with low costs, minimal upkeep and an ability to cram in more passengers. The airplane would prove perfect for mid-range flights that could maximize profits for carriers. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. BOEINGS 737 Max jet found a sweet spot for the companys growing base of customers around the world: its a bestselling workhorse with low costs, minimal upkeep and an ability to cram in more passengers. The airplane would prove perfect for mid-range flights that could maximize profits for carriers. As it boosted production, Boeing boasted that pilots didnt even need flight simulator training to fly the new Max 8 jets. That helped the Chicago-based aerospace giant sell thousands of them, deepening relationships with China and fast-growing markets like Indonesia and Ethiopia. Ultimately, it powered a stock rise that added billions to the companys value. "We aspire to be an enduring global industrial champion," CEO Dennis Muilenburg told shareholders in a 2017 address commemorating the companys 100th anniversary, "a top performer in every aspect of our business, delivering superior value to our customers, employees, shareholders, communities and partners." But the crash of a 737 Max 8 in Ethiopia on Sunday the second in less than five months threatens to undermine Boeings reputation around the world for safety and reliability. Already, China the companys most important foreign market has grounded the 737 Max 8. Analysts said Boeing would need to get to the bottom of what caused the crash soon or face a backlash from potential customers and investors. Then on Tuesday, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency suspended all flights by the 737 Max as a precautionary measure while investigators probe why an Ethiopian Airlines aircraft plunged to the ground near Addis Ababa, killing 157. The March 10 crash occurred less than five months after a Lion Air 737 Max 8 plunged into the Java Sea off the coast of Indonesia. The global rush to halt flights is leaving Boeing, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Canada isolated, a day after they expressed confidence in the jetliners airworthiness. Jurisdictions including China, Australia and Singapore had already grounded the Max, as had airlines from Latin America to Africa and the Middle East. But the spread of the ban to Europe deals a major blow to Boeing as it grapples with the aftermath of the tragedy in Ethiopia. In the U.S., Southwest Airlines and American Airlines Group are still flying the 737 Max 8, the model that crashed March 10 in Ethiopia just minutes after takeoff. United Continental Holdings flies the Max 9. Air Canada has 24 Max 8 aircraft, while WestJet Airlines Ltd. has 13 Max 8s and Toronto-based Sunwing Airlines Inc. has four. In a statement Monday, Boeing said no new safety guidance is planned as of now: "The investigation is in its early stages, but at this point, based on the information available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance." The FAA endorsed the Max 8, issuing an "airworthiness notification," but saying that it would "continuously assess" its safety performance. While investigators descended on the crash site to determine what happened, China, Indonesia and Ethiopia grounded the planes. Investors battered Boeings stock, which fell more than 12 per cent in early trading Monday before rebounding and finishing the day down 5.4 per cent, a resurgence indicating investor confidence in the stalwart company. Boeing fell almost six per cent Tuesday, to close at US$376.79 in trading in New York. The company has lost about US$29 billion in market value this week. But analysts at Jefferies investment bank estimated the worst-case scenario a software problem causing a full grounding and halt to deliveries of the 737 Max 8 could cost Boeing about US$5.1 billion, or five per cent of the companys annual revenue, within two months. The 737 program is expected to generate about US$32 billion for Boeing in 2019, Jefferies estimated, making it one of the companys largest sources of business. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The crash comes as Boeings commercial business has been surging, even after the October crash. And with a backlog of 5,900 airplane orders, or about seven years of production, that is valued at US$412 billion, Boeing predicted continued growth in 2019. One of Muilenburgs goals for the company has been to better integrate its major business units commercial jets, defence, space and services under a strategy he has called "One Boeing." In 2016, Boeing celebrated its 100-year anniversary, a legacy that marches in lockstep with the history of American aviation, from the dawn of commercial air travel in the years after the Wright Brothers first flight to the bombers that helped to allies win the Second World War, to the F-18 Hornets and 747s in use today. The Chicago-based giant has more than US$100 billion in revenue and 153,000 employees worldwide. But now that investigators are probing two crashes that have killed a total of 346 people, the company is facing a crisis involving its core business and a threat to the reputation it has built. The FAA said that it was "closely monitoring developments" and that it planned to join the National Transportation Safety Board, which was working with Ethiopian authorities investigating the crash. But it did not ground the planes. Boeing has delivered 354 of the jets globally and has 2,912 on order, according to market estimates maintained by Boyd Group International. The jet that crashed Sunday was one of five 737 Max 8 planes operated by Ethiopian Airlines, which has 25 more on order. Washington Post The province giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other, the Manitoba Rural Hotel Association says. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Angelo Mondragon, Manitoba Rural Hotel Association president and Notre Dame Hotel owner, sees the provincial governments proposed legislative changes as a mixed bag. BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES The province giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other, the Manitoba Rural Hotel Association says. The provincial government has tabled a bill that will let rural hotel owners expand their liquor vendor product line with coolers and ciders. Previously, only urban hotel vendors could sell those products. However, the government is seeking to allow private liquor outlets found in many rural grocery stores to sell single-serving domestic beer (such as the extra large "king can"), opening a new area of competition between liquor marts and rural hotels. King-can beer, which start at a size of 473 millilitres (compared to a regular 355-millilitre can), is a significant market for rural hotels. "Theyve given us something but theyre also taking something away," said Angelo Mondragon, association president and owner of the Notre Dame Hotel in Notre Dame de Lourdes, about 110 kilometres west of Winnipeg. The provinces prohibition against cooler and cider sales by rural hotel vendors has been contentious. In 2012, the then-NDP government allowed 110 hotel vendors in urban locations to sell products such as Smirnoff Ice and Motts Clamato Caesar, but not 140 rural hotel vendors. The move was meant to protect grocery-store liquor outlets. Mondragon said he appreciates that the current Tory administration has rectified the discrepancy, but wondered about the effect of letting rural liquor outlets sell single-serving beer: "Is that just robbing Peter to pay Paul?" Meanwhile, Manitoba Hotel Association president Scott Jocelyn believes the changes will help rural hotel owners. "Were hoping the gain is more than the loss," he said Tuesday, adding the association is also working to help some rural members sell cannabis in the future. At least 20 rural hotel vendors have been pre-qualified to sell cannabis, he said. That means once the dust settles on the first wave of retail outlets, the province will look at giving out licences in areas not being served. That could mean new opportunities for rural hotels, which are already handling a controlled substance, so long as its municipality approves. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "If someone is going to retail it, why not rural hotels?" Jocelyn said. He said rural hotel beverage rooms and vendors are important to their communities but they need more revenue streams "to support all the great things theyre doing, all the people theyre employing, all the taxes theyre collecting." Liquor marts in towns without a hotel vendor can sell beer. The Manitoba Hotel Association said consumers will benefit from the latest change. For example: during camping season, people are often looking for coolers and ciders but havent been able to get them from hotel beer vendors and they often cant get them from grocery-store liquor marts because they close by 6 p.m. and may not be open on Sundays. Manitoba liquor laws require legislative changes to permit rural hotel vendors to sell coolers and ciders, but only require an administrative change to liquor-store rules. bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca TORONTO - The chief executives of Canada's five largest banks collectively earned roughly $63.2 million in total compensation during the 2018 financial year, up about 12 per cent from the previous year. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Bank buildings are photographed in Toronto's financial district on Wednesday, June 27, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Tijana Martin TORONTO - The chief executives of Canada's five largest banks collectively earned roughly $63.2 million in total compensation during the 2018 financial year, up about 12 per cent from the previous year. Based on the banks' latest proxy circulars, Toronto-Dominion Bank's chief executive Bharat Masrani received the highest overall pay for the 12 months ended Oct. 31, 2018 at $15.3 million in total compensation, which includes elements such as base salary, performance-based incentives and pension value. That's up roughly 23 per cent from Masrani's $12.4 million in total compensation for the 2017 fiscal year, marking the biggest annual pay bump among the five bank chiefs. The second-highest paid banking chief executive was Royal Bank of Canada's Dave McKay, who saw an eight per cent pay increase to $14.5 million in total compensation, followed by Bank of Nova Scotia's Brian Porter who received $13.3 million, up 3.2 per cent from the previous year. The Bank of Montreal's chief executive Darryl White received $10.1 million in total compensation in his first full year at the helm, up 22 per cent from fiscal 2017. The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce's chief executive Victor Dodig received roughly $10 million in total compensation in the 2018 financial year, up 6.5 per cent from a year earlier. Excluding pension value and other miscellaneous compensation items, the five bank CEOs earned roughly $54.7 million in total direct compensation, up roughly 6.5 per cent from the 2017 financial year. While a double-digit overall pay bump may make some bat an eye, the increase in compensation is reflection of the complexities in the financial sector that these CEOs face, said Bill Vlaad, president of financial services recruitment firm Vlaad and Co., which also monitors compensation trends. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The banking sector employs tens of thousands of people and each of the five financial institutions has a growing international presence, he said. What's more, as more Canadians do their banking digitally, these banks are deploying more complex technology, Vlaad added. "There's a lot of pressure on these CEOs, more so than for a traditional CEO of an operational company," he said. "I think that justifies a great deal of their compensation."These pay hikes came as the Big Five banks delivered a collective $43.2 billion in net income for the 2018 financial year, up nearly 7.2 per cent from the prior year. The banks continued to churn out profits despite worries over stricter mortgage lending rules and trade uncertainty. However, the volatility in equity markets last year also put pressure on the banks' valuations. When comparing the share prices of each bank from the beginning of the 2018 financial year on Nov. 1, 2017 to the end on Oct. 31, 2018, the results are mixed. At one end of the spectrum, Scotiabank's stock had slipped roughly 11.3 per cent during that period from roughly $78 to $70. RBC's shares in that period slipped one per cent from $96 to $95. BMO and TD's shares increased by roughly 3.6 and 3.4 per cent, respectively, to approximately $97 and $72 during that time frame. CIBC, at the higher end of the range, saw its shares increase from $107 to $112, or about 4.7 per cent. Most of the banks outperformed the S&P TSX Composite Index during that period, which slipped roughly 6.25 per cent to 15,027.28 on Oct. 31, 2018. "Any company can justify increases in compensation if the shareholders are also making return on their investments that well exceeds the market," said Vlaad. Companies in this story: (TSX:TD, TSX:RY, TSX: BNS, TSX:BMO, TSX:CM) OTTAWA - Canada still hasn't seen the evidence China used to block canola shipments from one of Canada's largest grain producers, International Trade Minister Jim Carr said Wednesday in an interview. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Minister of International Trade Diversification Jim Carr takes part in a Canada 2020 panel discussion in Ottawa on Thursday, Dec. 13, 2018. International Trade Minister Jim Carr says Beijing has yet to provide an explanation for China's decision to block canola shipments from one of Canada's largest grain producers. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick OTTAWA - Canada still hasn't seen the evidence China used to block canola shipments from one of Canada's largest grain producers, International Trade Minister Jim Carr said Wednesday in an interview. A Chinese government spokesman has said Beijing's move this month to suspend canola imports from Richardson International Ltd. came after "hazardous organisms" were detected in the company's product. Carr said Canada is pushing to solve the economically important matter but it needs China to provide proof to back up the claims. "We continue to ask Chinese officials for any evidence that this canola has any problems that can be proven with any scientific base or any scientific evidence and so far we've heard nothing," he said in a phone interview from Saskatoon, where he was talking to business leaders about making the most of opportunities created by Canada's major trade deals. "It's a concern because we are a major exporter of canola to the world and we produce the finest canola in the world. It's a very important part of our trade mix and we want to get to the bottom of it and we want to get to the bottom of it fast." Alberta Premier Rachel Notley issued a statement last week demanding that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fight for canola farmers and all related jobs. "We are calling on Ottawa to stop its navel-gazing about its internal controversies and fight back," she said. Notley added the issue could cost Alberta farmers hundreds of millions of dollars and lead to a loss of up to 3,000 jobs. China's decision to reject shipments of one of Canada's key exports comes with the two countries in a diplomatic dispute that erupted after the December arrest of Huawei senior executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver at the behest of the United States. On March 1, Canada's Justice Department gave the go-ahead for the extradition case against Meng, which marked the formal start of the high-profile process that has thrust Canada into a highly uncomfortable position between the two superpowers. In the days following Meng's arrest, China arrested Canadian citizens Michael Kovrig, a Canadian diplomat on leave, and Michael Spavor, an entrepreneur, on allegations of engaging in activities that have endangered Chinese national security. The men remain in Chinese custody and their arrests have been interpreted as attempts by Beijing to pressure Canada into releasing Meng. China also sentenced another Canadian, Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, to death in a sudden retrial of his drug-smuggling case. Asked whether there's a link between the Meng case and the canola impasse, Carr said the government has no evidence of one. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "We're treating it as a science issue, which is why we're pressing Chinese officials to show us the science." Carr said the federal government has been contacting Chinese officials in Beijing and at the country's embassy in Ottawa to find out why the blocked canola is considered to be "anything less than the very high (quality) canola that we know we are shipping abroad." On the status of formal Canada-China trade talks in general, Carr described it as a "difficult period" in a very long relationship that, for example, saw Richardson sign its first deal in China in 1910. "It's difficult because of the detention of Canadian citizens and we have been very clear about the importance of resolving that issue," he said. "There are always conversations between officials, but I would say that it's not an active period of those kinds of discussions." Carr said he looked forward to talking about Canada's recently ratified trade agreements in Saskatchewan, which he noted is the province with the most diversified export markets. He said 44 per cent of Saskatchewan's exports last year were shipped to countries other than the United States the most of any province. SINGAPORE - A growing number of airlines around the world have grounded their Boeing 737 Max 8 jets following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed 157 people on Sunday, five months after a similar Indonesian Lion Air jet plunged into the ocean, killing 189. Some airlines and countries that have grounded the aircraft so far: Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 12/3/2019 (1003 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. In this photo taken Monday, March 11, 2019, three Shanghai Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 passenger planes are parked at the Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai, China. U.S. Aviation experts on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 joined the investigation into the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jetliner that killed 157 people, as a growing number of airlines grounded the new Boeing plane involved in the crash. (Chinatopix via AP) SINGAPORE - A growing number of airlines around the world have grounded their Boeing 737 Max 8 jets following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed 157 people on Sunday, five months after a similar Indonesian Lion Air jet plunged into the ocean, killing 189. Some airlines and countries that have grounded the aircraft so far: ___ ETHIOPIA A spokesman for Ethiopian Airlines says it grounded its remaining four Max 8 jets as an "extra safety precaution" while it investigates Sunday's deadly crash. The airline is awaiting the delivery of 25 more Max 8 jets. ___ CHINA China has 96 Max 8 jets in service, belonging to carriers such as Air China, China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines. The civil aviation authority directed the planes to be grounded indefinitely on Monday. It said the order was "taken in line with the management principle of zero tolerance for security risks." There were eight Chinese citizens on the Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed shortly after taking off on Sunday. The authority said it will consult the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing before deciding when to lift the ban. ___ EUROPE The European Aviation Safety Agency has issued a directive grounding all Boeing 737-8 "MAX" and 737-9 model aircraft following two recent accidents. EASA said in its emergency airworthiness directive Tuesday that "at this early stage" of the most recent investigation, "it cannot be excluded that similar causes may have contributed to both events." "Based on all available information, EASA considers that further actions may be necessary to ensure the continued airworthiness of the two affected models." It says companies may make one noncommercial flight to return their planes to a location where they can be inspected. The grounding applies to all European Union airspace. ___ BRAZIL Brazil's Gol Airlines has suspended the use of seven Max 8 jets. The airline said it is following the investigation closely and hopes to return the aircraft to use as soon as possible. Gol said it has made nearly 3,000 flights with the Max 8, which went into service last June, with "total security and efficiency." ___ SINGAPORE Singapore has temporarily banned Max 8 jets and other models in the Max range from entering and leaving the country. The civil aviation authority said it was "closely monitoring the situation" and the ban will be "reviewed as relevant safety information becomes available." SilkAir, a regional carrier owned by Singapore Airlines, has six Max 8 jets. It said the ban "will have an impact on some of the airline's flight schedules." ___ UAE The UAE's General Civil Aviation Authority said its ban on the aircraft in its airspace was "a precautionary measure." The 737 MAX is the workhorse of the Dubai government-owned budget carrier FlyDubai. It operates 11 Boeing 737 MAX 8 and 2 MAX 9 jetliners. Its total fleet is around 60 aircraft, including other models of the 737. ___ CANADA Canadian charter airline Sunwing is suspending use of its four Boeing 737 Max 8 planes. Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau said he has no plans to ground Canada's fleet of 737 Max aircraft, but that "all options are on the table." ___ VIETNAM Vietnam is banning Boeing 737 Max planes from flying into its airspace. Dinh Viet Thang, director of Vietnam's civil aviation authority, said Wednesday that airlines flying those models of planes will have to change the aircraft for safety purposes. The ban lasts until further notice. None of Vietnam's four airlines uses the Max model planes in their fleets, but Korea's Eastar Jet, Thai Lion Air and Malaysia's Malindor Air fly those planes to Vietnamese destinations. ___ INDIA India says it is immediately grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 planes after Sunday's deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash. A statement late Tuesday says the planes "will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations." The statement does not say how many planes are affected. ___ AUSTRALIA Australia has announced a temporary ban on flights by Boeing 737 Max aircraft, although none of its airlines currently operate them. The Civil Aviation Safety Authority said Tuesday that the ban will affect two foreign airlines SilkAir and Fiji Airways that use them for flights to Australia. The authority said Singapore's SilkAir has already grounded its 737 Max jets, and that it is working with regulators there and in Fiji to minimize disruptions. It said that Fiji Airways has two 737 Max 8 jets in its fleet. Fiji Airways and Fiji's Civil Aviation Authority said they would ground the fleet until more information is known about the cause of the Ethiopian Airlines accident. ___ CAYMAN ISLANDS Cayman Airways, a Caribbean carrier, said it stopped using its two Max 8 jets starting Monday. President and CEO Fabian Whorms said the move will cause changes to flight schedules. Cayman is the flag carrier of Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory. ___ INDONESIA Indonesia said it would temporarily ground Max 8 jets to inspect their airworthiness. Director General of Air Transportation Polana B. Pramesti said the move was made to ensure flight safety. A Lion Air model of the same plane crashed in Indonesia in October. Indonesian airlines operate 11 Max 8 jets. Lion Air, which owns 10 of them, said it will try to minimize the impact of the decision on operations. The other Max 8 jet belongs to national carrier Garuda. ___ MALAYSIA The Civil Aviation Authority said no Malaysian carriers operate the Max 8, but that foreign airlines are banned from flying the plane in Malaysia, and from transiting in the country, until further notice. ___ MEXICO Mexican airline Aeromexico has suspended flights of its six Max 8 jets. Aeromexico said it "fully" trusts the safety of its fleet but ordered the grounding to ensure "the safety of its operations and the peace of mind of its customers." It said other planes will take over the routes usually flown by the Max 8. ___ OMAN Oman and the United Arab Emirates barred flights by Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft. Oman's Public Authority for Civil Aviation made the sultanate's announcement, without elaborating on its reasoning. State-owned Oman Air operates five Max 8 aircraft and said it was rescheduling other planes for its flights. ___ SOUTH AFRICA Comair, the operator of British Airways and Kulula flights in South Africa, says it has grounded its Boeing 737 Max 8 while it consults with Boeing, other operators and technical experts. A statement does not say how many planes are affected. It says the decision was made without intervention from regulatory authorities. ___ SOUTH KOREA South Korean airline Eastar Jet said it would suspend operations of its two Boeing 737 Max 8 planes and replaced them with Boeing 737-800 planes starting Wednesday on routes to Japan and Thailand. The airline says it hasn't found any problems, but is voluntarily grounding the planes in response to customer concerns. ___ TURKEY In a statement on Twitter Tuesday, Turkish Airlines CEO Bilal Eksi said all Boeing 737 Max flights are suspended until the "uncertainty affecting safety is cleared." He added that passenger safety was the company's priority. ___ ICELAND Icelandair Group says it has temporarily suspended operations of its three Boeing 737 Max aircraft until further notice. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. President and CEO Bogi Nels Bogason said Tuesday that the company will follow developments closely and work with local, European and U.S. authorities on any steps that need to be taken. He said the temporary suspension won't impact the company's operations, as it only affects three aircraft out of a fleet of 33. ___ NEW ZEALAND New Zealand and Fiji have suspended Boeing 737 Max 8 flights in and out of the two countries following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jetliner. The decision only affects one operator, Fiji Airways. No New Zealand airlines use the Max 8 planes. OTTAWA - Transport Minister Marc Garneau is closing Canadian skies to the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, effectively grounding the planes over safety concerns arising from the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that killed everyone on board, including 18 Canadians. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. OTTAWA - Transport Minister Marc Garneau is closing Canadian skies to the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, effectively grounding the planes over safety concerns arising from the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that killed everyone on board, including 18 Canadians. The decision to ground the planes is a precautionary move that was made after a review of all the available evidence, Garneau told a news conference Wednesday in Ottawa that was twice delayed by what he called new incoming information. "There are and I hasten to say not conclusive but there are similarities" between the Ethiopian Airlines flight profile and that of a Lion Air flight involving the same aircraft that crashed off the Indonesian coast in October, the minister said. Those similarities, he said, "exceed a certain threshold in our minds with respect to the possible cause of what happened in Ethiopia. This is not conclusive, but it is something that points possibly in that direction, and at this point we feel that threshold has been crossed." The "safety notice" means none of the aircraft or a new version, the Max 9, which isn't as widely used can fly into, out of, or over Canada, he added: "I will not hesitate to take swift action should we discover any additional safety issues." Garneau tipped off his American counterparts just before the announcement about the Canadians' change of heart on the aircraft. Hours later, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would follow suit. Trump said he had told American airlines about the decision as well as Boeing and all agreed with his administration's decision. Any planes in the air will be grounded upon landing, and remain on the ground until further notice, Trump said, while Boeing works on a fix to the aircraft's software. "The safety of the American people and all people is our paramount concern," Trump said in announcing his decision. A Sunwing Boeing 737-800 passenger plane prepares to land at Pearson International Airport in Toronto on Wednesday, August 2, 2017. Transport Minister Marc Garneau faced an escalating dilemma Tuesday over Boeing's 737 Max 8 aircraft, which a growing number of countries have grounded or banned in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 people Sunday. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov While aviation experts warn against drawing conclusions until more information emerges from the crash investigation, numerous jurisdictions, including China, Germany, the United Kingdom and the European Union, had grounded the Max 8 or banned it from their airspace before Canada and the U.S. did. Garneau said evidence about multiple Boeing 737 Max 8 flights suggests a worrying correlation between the Ethiopian Airlines crash and the tragedy in Indonesia less than five months ago. In certain circumstances, the planes' systems try to tilt their noses down, contrary to the efforts of pilots a pattern that was seen in both flights before they crashed, he said. "I would repeat once again that this is not the proof that this is the same root problem," he emphasized. "It could be something else." Passenger-rights advocate Gabor Lukacs said Wednesday that it would be prudent for Garneau to suspend use of the aircraft until questions are answered about what caused the Ethiopian crash. "Generally, one should always be erring on the side of caution when it comes to safety questions," he said from Halifax. "If there is enough evidence of a potential harm, and in this case I think there is evidence of potential harm, then the prudent thing is to ground those aircraft." He said airlines should allow passengers to rebook on other planes or cancel their tickets without penalty if they have apprehensions about flying on a Max 8. Garneau said affected travellers should contact their airlines to find out what to do, he added. "There will be some disruption, there's no question about that," he said, but safety is more important. He said he hopes the planes will be flying safely within weeks. In a statement Wednesday, before the order from Transport Canada, Air Canada spokeswoman Isabelle Arthur said the airline has a "flexible rebooking policy" that includes options to change flights to another aircraft if space permits, but wouldn't indicate if that comes with a fee. Transport Minister Marc Garneau speaks about the grounding of all Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes in Canada during a press conference in Ottawa on Wednesday, March 13, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld "Based on real information and data, and ongoing consultations with government safety regulators including Transport Canada and the FAA, we have full confidence in the safety of our fleet and operations and we continue to operate the 737," she said in an email. Calgary-based WestJet Airlines said it is contacting all affected customers to arrange alternative travel plans. "We respect the decision made by Transport Canada and are in the process of grounding the 13 Max aircraft in our fleet," the company said in a statement late Wednesday. "We have 162 aircraft or more than 92 per cent of our overall fleet that remain in service." Air Canada, along with Southwest and American Airlines, had been the major outliers in resisting a grounding of the planes. Air Canada has 24 Max 8 aircraft (out of 184 in its main fleet), which it uses mainly for domestic and U.S. routes. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Air Canada cancelled London-bound flights from Halifax and St. John's, N.L., after the United Kingdom banned all Boeing Max 8 jets from its airspace. The U.S.-based Boeing had said it had no reason to pull the popular aircraft from the skies and did not intend to issue new recommendations about the aircraft to customers. The Federal Aviation Administration had backed the jet's airworthiness before reversing course early Wednesday afternoon. Garneau said the American authority is "an extremely professional organization" and Canada is "very comfortable" with it as a certifying agency for American makers' airplanes. Companies in this story: (TSX:AC, TSX:WJA) with files from Alison Auld in Halifax and the Associated Press TORONTO - The cannabis company backed by members of the Tragically Hip band has agreed to a friendly takeover by Quebec-based HEXO Corp. in an all-share transaction valued at $263 million, sending shares of both companies higher. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. A general view of cannabis plants are shown in a grow room at Up Cannabis Inc., Newstrike Resources' marijuana greenhouses, in Brantford, Ont., on January 16, 2018. The cannabis company backed by members of the Tragically Hip band has agreed to a friendly takeover by Quebec-based HEXO Corp. in an all-share transaction valued at $263 million. The transaction is unanimously supported by the directors of both companies but requires approval by Newstrike shareholders. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young TORONTO - The cannabis company backed by members of the Tragically Hip band has agreed to a friendly takeover by Quebec-based HEXO Corp. in an all-share transaction valued at $263 million, sending shares of both companies higher. The companies say in a joint statement the deal would give HEXO the capacity to produce about 150,000 kilograms of cannabis annually and to realize $10 million of annual synergies. HEXO chief executive Sebastien St-Louis, who co-founded the company, said the addition of Newstrike would to take HEXO to the next level on its journey "to become one of the largest cannabis companies in the world." "We're extremely proud of our record of execution, and today are committing to achieving over $400 million in net revenue in 2020, St-Louis said in a statement. Shares of HEXO in Toronto were up nearly six per cent in afternoon trading to $7.83 after the deal was announced. On the TSX Venture exchange, Newstrike's stock was up more than 11 per cent in afternoon trading to 50 cents a share. The deal announced on Wednesday is the latest sign of consolidation in Canada's cannabis sector. In December, cannabis company Aleafia announced a deal to acquire licensed producer Emblem Corp. Last year, Aurora Cannabis Inc. acquired rivals MedReleaf Corp. and CanniMed. In November 2017, CanniMed had announced an all-stock deal to acquire Newstrike. However, Aurora later launched a hostile-takeover bid of CanniMed and after a months-long battle, the two companies signed a friendly deal, abandoning the plans to acquire Newstrike. As part of the deal announced Wednesday, Newstrike shareholders are being offered 0.06332 of a HEXO common share in exchange for each common share held. Based on the value of HEXO shares at the close on Tuesday, the offer would be worth nearly 47 cents per share. The transaction is unanimously supported by the directors of both companies but requires approval by Newstrike shareholders. RBC Capital Markets is acting as the financial adviser to Newstrike, the latest evidence of Canada's largest banks warming up to the pot sector. Newstrike also has the right to accept a superior proposal in certain circumstances, with HEXO having the right to match any proposal within five business days. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The proposed deal would result in Newstrike shareholders owning 14 per cent of the combined company, with the rest owned by HEXO shareholders. That's about four per cent above Newstrike's closing of 45 cents per share at the close on Tuesday. The two companies also have established distribution agreements in eight provinces, excluding New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador. "Our strength in Ontario and English Canada clearly complements HEXOs strong position in Quebec and creates an industry leader," Newstrike chief executive Jay Wilgar said in a statement. "I believe this transaction is beneficial to our shareholders, customers, and employees. We look forward to working closely with the leadership team to complete this transaction." Companies in this story: (TSX:HEXO, TSXV:HIP) LONDON - Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are once again being cast as monopolies that have become too powerful for society's good, a recurring theme that's increasing the pressure to rein them in. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. FILE - This photo combo of images shows the Amazon, Google and Facebook logos. A review into competition in the U.K.'s digital market says the country needs tough new rules to help counter the dominance of big tech giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon. The independent review published Wednesday, March 13, 2019 says global tech giants don't face enough competition and that existing rules are outdated and need to be beefed up. (AP Photo, file) LONDON - Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are once again being cast as monopolies that have become too powerful for society's good, a recurring theme that's increasing the pressure to rein them in. A 150-page report commissioned by the British government depicts big digital companies in search, social media, advertising and e-commerce as threats to competition, innovation and personal privacy. Meanwhile, the music streaming service Spotify filed an antitrust complaint in Europe against Apple, accusing it of stifling competition through its control over the iPhone's operating system and app store. Wednesday's dual attacks provide more fodder in a worldwide debate about whether stricter rules need to be drawn up to handcuff or even break up leading tech companies as they try to extend their tentacles into new markets. "What you're seeing is a broad recognition that there is a problem," said Matt Stoller, a fellow at Open Markets, an institution that studies corporate monopolies and advocates for more competitive markets. In the U.S., Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren last week proposed breaking up the biggest U.S. tech companies, saying they have too much market and political power. That high-profile missive further emboldened long-time critics such as former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. In a recent opinion piece for The Guardian newspaper in Britain, Reich compared Facebook, Google and Amazon to "robber barons" who built business empires on innovations in the late 19th century and were eventually broken up to foster more competition. "I think we are seeing a turn of the pendulum," Reich said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press. "I think Silicon Valley executives really need to take a hard look in the mirror." The British government's new report was led by Harvard University professor Jason Furman, who was a chief economic adviser to former President Barack Obama. The report found that global tech giants don't face enough competition and says that existing rules are outdated and need to be strengthened. "The digital sector has created substantial benefits but these have come at the cost of increasing dominance of a few companies, which is limiting competition and consumer choice and innovation," Furman said. "Some say this is inevitable or even desirable. I think the U.K. can do better." As for Spotify, the streaming service's beef with Apple centres on a 30 per cent tax that digital services have to pay to use Apple's "in-app" payment system, making Spotify subscriptions more expensive than Apple Music. That same commission system recently prompted Netflix to stop accepting new subscription sign-ups through its iPhone app, as Apple prepares to unveil its own rival service. "There is now a shared aspiration, which is the power of the tech platforms being reduced," said Blair Levin, a policy adviser to New Street Research and a former chief of staff to a Federal Communications Commission chairman. Apple didn't respond to requests for comments on Spotify. Google and Amazon also didn't respond to request for comment on the British report, while Facebook declined to comment. But in the past, all four companies have fiercely defended their business practices and attempted to make cases that there is still ample competition in their respective markets. And the companies' supporters, including legions of lobbyists hired to influence lawmakers, note there is little evidence that their actions have hurt consumers by driving up prices or degrading the quality of their services many of which are free. Nevertheless, Britain's House of Lords recently called for a new digital regulatory authority to provide overall oversight. European Union authorities also have faced down big tech companies. EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager has slapped whopping fines on Google and ordered Apple to pay back billions in back taxes. EU, German and Austrian authorities are looking separately into Amazon's marketplace platform over complaints of unfair practices. Although the U.S. government has yet to take similar action, the Federal Trade Commission recently created a task force focused on anti-competitive behaviour in the industry. Britain's financial secretary, Philip Hammond, said the country's government would respond later this year to the report's recommendations, which must be approved by Britain's Parliament to take effect. Recommendations include setting up a new "digital markets unit" tasked with giving people more control over their data by using open standards. That would let people move or share their personal information if they switch to a new digital service. The report's authors said making it easier to switch would result in new digital services while creating new business opportunities to manage the data. The report also recommended: Getting big companies to share key data with startups, while safeguarding personal information. The report said data sharing can help foster innovation and new business ideas. The panel cited as an example Uber's release of data to help improve infrastructure and planning decisions. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Drawing up a code of conduct to lay out acceptable behaviour for tech companies in their relationships with users. The report said clarifying unfair conduct would allow disputes to be resolved more easily. Rewriting rules so authorities can better stop digital mergers likely to "damage future competition, innovation and consumer choice." Critics have contended one way tech companies protect their turf is by using their cash and stock collectively worth trillions of dollars to buy promising startups before they can evolve into competitive threats. ___ Liedtke reported from San Francisco. AP Technology Writer Rachel Lerman contributed from San Francisco. ___ This story has been corrected to fix the spelling the Harvard professor's last name. It's Furman, not Fuhrman. OTTAWA - Opposition MPs erupted in fury Wednesday after the Liberals used their majority on the House of Commons justice committee to delay an opposition attempt to call Jody Wilson-Raybould to testify again on the SNC-Lavalin affair. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Justice Committee Chair Anthony Housefather waits to start a committee meeting in Ottawa, Wednesday March 13, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld OTTAWA - Opposition MPs erupted in fury Wednesday after the Liberals used their majority on the House of Commons justice committee to delay an opposition attempt to call Jody Wilson-Raybould to testify again on the SNC-Lavalin affair. The meeting was called as an emergency session by the three Conservatives and one New Democrat MP, after the Liberals used their majority last week to put off having the discussion on future witnesses until March 19. That is also the day the federal government will drop the 2019 budget. Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre kicked things off with a motion to summon the former attorney general back no later than tomorrow, saying she "was not allowed to complete her testimony" the first time. But after two Conservatives and NDP MP Tracey Ramsey laid out the reasons the committee should bring the former star cabinet minister back to speak a second time, Liberal Francis Drouin moved to suspend the sitting and reconvene on March 19 as originally planned. Thus far no Liberals have said publicly whether they will agree to call her a second time. She testified the first time on Feb. 27, in a four-hour session where she laid out her case that the Prime Minister's Office had put sustained pressure on her over four months last autumn to change her mind on diverting a criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. The engineering and construction giant faces charges of bribing foreign officials in Libya. Poilievre tried in vain to raise point of order demanding his motion be fully dealt with before Drouin's but according to committee rules, a motion to adjourn takes precedence over anything else the committee might do. The Liberals, with five MPs to the opposition's four, prevailed. The discussion on future witnesses, including Wilson-Raybould, will now be next week, in private. Opposition MPs were incensed, leaping to their feet and shouting out epithets like "shame," "coverup" and "despicable!" Conservative Michael Barrett pointed across the committee room floor at Drouin and yelled that he hoped Drouin knows how to "translate 'coverup' " into French when he spoke with reporters outside the room. Drouin shrugged off the criticism. "The committee has already expressed its wishes on March 6 to have this particular hearing on March 19 so it's as simple as that," he said as he left the room. Poilievre told the committee he wanted Wilson-Raybould to appear again to answer claims made by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's former top aide Gerald Butts. Wilson-Raybould quit the federal cabinet in mid-February, a few days after the allegations of improper pressure arose. When he testified, Butts put the dispute down to a series of miscommunications and misunderstandings. Poilievre said it wasn't fair that Butts got to speak about things that happened between the time Wilson-Raybould was shuffled from the Justice Department to Veterans Affairs in January and the day she quit cabinet a month later, while the former minister herself felt bound by cabinet-secrecy obligations. Trudeau could have let her speak openly, he said. Both Butts and Wilson-Raybould were freed to speak about matters often protected by cabinet confidences, and in her case, solicitor-client privilege, by a waiver issued by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in late February. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The waiver does not, however, allow Wilson-Raybould to speak about the period after she was shuffled from Justice to Veterans Affairs, including her conversations with Trudeau about why she quit cabinet. Poilievre said Trudeau needs to extend the waiver because something clearly happened in that time that was so "egregious" it pushed Wilson-Raybould to quit. But Poilievre said Trudeau doesn't want Canadians to know what that is. "He sent in his majority to shut down that discussion without a debate and ensure that Canadians will never know the truth," Poilievre said after the abrupt end of the meeting. "If they were going to let her speak, they could have done it today ... Justin Trudeau is transforming the justice committee into the Justin committee." New Democrat MP Tracey Ramsey said Trudeau himself has benefited from a double standard. "We've heard the prime minister speak very freely about a period of time that Ms. Wilson-Raybould has not been able to speak about," Ramsey said. "Today, (Liberals) signalled to Canadians that they aren't interested in the truth." The opposition also points out the committee did hear a second time from Privy Council clerk Michael Wernick and deputy justice minister Nathalie Drouin, after Wilson-Raybould's first appearance raised additional questions to pose to them. A retailer at Kildonan Place shopping centre is raising the alarm over what he says is a deteriorating situation of theft and violent incidents, and mall managements foot-dragging on addressing the security concerns of tenants. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. A retailer at Kildonan Place shopping centre is raising the alarm over what he says is a deteriorating situation of theft and violent incidents, and mall managements foot-dragging on addressing the security concerns of tenants. The man who the Free Press has agreed not to name as he fears losing his job for speaking out runs a shop at the Winnipeg mall and says the situation has worsened in the wake of changes to security protocol last year. After three incidents on the same day last week including a female employee being assaulted during a theft he said he felt the need to call attention to the issue. "In every other shopping centre Ive ever worked in, security helps, they assist, they detain people; but here, unless it happens in their hallway, its not their problem," the person said. "When it became public knowledge that the security isnt going to detain or intervene, or if you run out the door theyre not really going to follow, everything started getting worse." At the start of 2018, the mall significantly peeled back security support to stores, the man said. He shared two internal Kildonan Place memos with the Free Press that were sent to retailers by mall management, informing them of updated security policies. "Security officers are required to strictly adhere to the provisions of the Criminal Code of Canada when involved in any arrest. As such, they cannot make arrests on behalf of tenants for offences that they did not personally observe being committed," reads one of the memos. "The responsibility of loss prevention lies exclusively with the store. Although the security department is available to assist, for legal and liability reasons, the amount of assistance given is at the discretion of the security department and is limited." Since security guards are not stationed inside stores where they could witness thefts, employees are forced to engage in citizens arrests if they want to stop shoplifters. The man said he feels mall management has left tenants and their employees to fend for themselves and predictably thefts and violent incidents have been on the rise. Internal memos state responsibility of loss prevention lies with the store, and security would only help in a limited capacity. (Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press) The memo makes clear security staff at the mall are employed to protect the common area and ensure the safety of the staff and patrons, and would no longer be assisting stores with incidents to the same extent it had previously. According to the Kildonan Place website, the Transcona-area mall boasts more than 100 retailers and services. Since then, the source said thefts are happening on a daily basis and culprits largely go unpunished even when caught in the act. In addition, theres been a rise in confrontations sometimes violent with visitors to the mall, he said. "Yesterday, a girl in a clothing store, who was working alone, was assaulted and robbed by somebody. She ran into the hall and yelled for help from security and the (suspect) turned around and assaulted her, pushing her down onto the ground," the man said. He also described a recent incident he said was particularly disturbing that involved a man wearing a mask at a common play area for children. "This man had been thrown out of a store for wearing a mask. Then, after hes escorted into the hallway, he climbs over the wall into this daycare area and starts yelling about how, These are Gods children," the source said. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "He started picking kids up and holding them in the air and saying, These are Gods kids. There was no security anywhere nearby to make sure these kids are safe from stuff like this. Theres someone whos clearly crazy and nothings being done about that." The Free Press reached out to Kildonan Place management for comment on March 7. A written response was sent to the Free Press Wednesday morning. "The safety and well-being of our shoppers, tenants and employees is a top priority for us at Kildonan Place. The number of security officers at the mall is the same as it was last year (except for a brief time in the busy Christmas period, when we brought on an additional security officer as we do each year," the statement reads. "As always, we remain vigilant and responsive regarding security and we communicate with our tenants on a regular basis to ensure their needs are met. We are responding and will continue to respond and are ready and able to make any security-related changes that may be required to ensure a continued safe, enjoyable experience for everyone at the shopping centre." ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @rk_thorpe In the midst of inconsolable grief, the friends of Danielle Moore the 24-year-old Winnipeg woman killed in Sundays Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 plane crash are attempting to pressure Canada into joining a growing list of countries grounding or banning Boeings 737 Max 8 aircraft. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 12/3/2019 (1003 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. In the midst of inconsolable grief, the friends of Danielle Moore the 24-year-old Winnipeg woman killed in Sundays Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 plane crash are attempting to pressure Canada into joining a growing list of countries grounding or banning Boeings 737 Max 8 aircraft. Moore, originally from Scarborough, Ont., was travelling on the plane to Nairobi, Kenya, to participate in the United Nations Environment Assembly. (Facebook photo) "Its baffling to me that an industry that prides itself on its safety record doesnt want to take action on two planes, brand new planes, going down within six months of each other," said Kellen Deighton, whose brother Colby Deighton was Moores long-term boyfriend. "My brother is incapacitated physically right now. Ive never seen a man so broken. The first few days have been spent trying to console him, but now we want try to do something to get Canada to take this problem seriously." The Ethiopian Airlines crash, which killed all 157 people on board, including 18 Canadians, has led to mounting concerns over similarities to the Lion Air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 people last October. An Air Canada Boeing 737 Max aircraft arriving from Toronto prepares to land at Vancouver International Airport in Richmond, B.C., on Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Air Canada cancelled London-bound flights from Halifax and St. John's Tuesday and Wednesday after the United Kingdom banned all Boeing Max 8 jets in its airspace. (Darryl Dyck / The Canadian Press) The Lion Air incident also involved a Boeing 737 Max 8 crashing shortly after takeoff in clear flying conditions. Now authorities from the U.K, France, Germany, China and Australia, among other countries, have begun to act, ordering bans or groundings of the jetliner until further notice. Canadas Transport Minister Marc Garneau spent Tuesday meeting with experts and soliciting advice on how to deal with the mounting concern. He said Tuesday he had no plans to ground Canadas fleet of 737 Max 8 aircrafts, but maintained "all options are on the table." Boeing 737s continue to fly Canadian skies MONTREAL - Transport Minister Marc Garneau faced an escalating dilemma Tuesday over Boeing's 737 Max 8 aircraft, which a growing number of countries have grounded or banned in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 people Sunday. click to read more MONTREAL - Transport Minister Marc Garneau faced an escalating dilemma Tuesday over Boeing's 737 Max 8 aircraft, which a growing number of countries have grounded or banned in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 people Sunday. The 737 Max 8 continues to fly in North American skies, but is grounded in the European Union as well as Australia, China and other states following the tragedy. Before clearing his schedule to meet with experts, Garneau said Tuesday he has no plans to ground Canada's fleet of 737 Max 8 aircraft, but that "all options are on the table." "That could include grounding the planes, but at the same time I will evaluate all possibilities and not jump to conclusions before we can clearly evaluate the situation," Garneau said. By Tuesday evening, 34 airlines had grounded the Max 8, leaving the majority of the nearly 390 Max 8s currently in service around the world confined to the hangar. Air Canada, along with Southwest and American Airlines, are the major outliers. The union for Air Canada flight attendants says the company is allowing flight attendants who don't want to fly on Boeing 737 Max airplanes to be reassigned. The Canadian Union of Public Employees issued a statement Tuesday asking the company to put the safety of passengers and crew first. Air Canada did not respond to a request for comment by time of publication. "We continue to monitor the situation and based on current info, and recommendations by government safety regulators, Transport Canada, the FAA, and the manufacturer, we will continue to operate our normal B737 schedule and our current re-booking policies remain in place," Air Canada said in a tweet Tuesday. -The Canadian Press Close "Not only have we been dealing with the tragedy of Danielles death, but also the horrible and negligent response from the Canadian government and also Air Canada and WestJet," said Iain Coates, who was a friend of Moores. "It almost feels as if people are behaving as though this tragedy didnt happen. I know Im sensitive to this because I have a personal connection to it, but Canadian citizens died and it seems like there are pretty straightforward steps they could take to make sure no more Canadians die." Air Canada has 24 Max 8 aircrafts, while WestJet has 13 Max 8 planes in its fleet. Sunwing Airlines has an additional four Max 8 planes. Given the prospect of 737 Max 8 model continuing to fly Canadian skies, Deighton said he and other friends of Moore feel the need to act. "Im not a terribly political person, but in all of this I just keep thinking about Danielle. She was the type of woman that if she had an opinion about something, she was going to hit the ground running the next day to make something happen," Deighton said. "She was a dreamer, but she also had drive. I keep thinking about her and am trying to bring the same energy and drive that she would have." The group of Moores friends have begun reaching out to as many local politicians as they can, including MPs Robert-Falcon Ouellete and Jim Carr, both who represent the federal Liberals in Winnipeg. The group also started a Twitter account to try to raise awareness about the issue. Ethiopian Airlines had issued no new updates on the crash as of late afternoon Tuesday as families around the world waited for answers, while a global team of investigators began picking through the rural crash site. (Mulugeta Ayene / The Associated Press) Ultimately, the group is hoping they may find a way to speak to Minister Garneau and express their concerns with Canadas decision not to ground 737 Max 8 planes until an investigation can be completed into what if any issues the model has. "I dont claim to be an aviation expert, obviously. I know there are financial aspects to this. But the idea of profit over people is baffling to me," Deighton said. "Minister Garneau said, Were not going to take any action until we have concrete evidence of what the issue is. That seems totally backwards to me, a full-180." At the very least, the group hopes Canadian airlines will offer fee cancellations to customers who are scheduled to fly on a 737 Max 8, but dont feel comfortable doing so, Coates said. Flight Centre travel agency has said Canadian airlines will not waive such fees. The Boeing logo appears above a trading post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Shares in the aircraft maker fell Tuesday amid safety concerns following another deadly crash involving its most popular plane. (Richard Drew / The Associated Press) "I think grounding the planes immediately would be the correct first step, because ignoring the severity of the safety concerns seems wholly inappropriate," Coates said. "Some accommodations from the airlines would also be great. Allowing flyers the ability to reschedule or choose another flight without fees, allowing them to take safety into their own hands, would be a compassionate response." Moore, originally from Scarborough, Ont., was a devoted environmental and human rights activist who had been en route to Nairobi, Kenya, to participate in the prestigious United Nation Environment Assembly, at the time of the crash. With files from the Canadian Press ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @rk_thorpe Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The funding dispute between city hall and the provincial government is not going away anytime soon. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 12/3/2019 (1003 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. The funding dispute between city hall and the provincial government is not going away anytime soon. Mayor Brian Bowman told reporters Tuesday the province needs to account for the disbursement of funds promised to the city for roadwork that has caused the city to scale back its residential street work this year. Bowman said the province needs to explain "how and when the province determined, in their view, that they have met their (financial) obligations, and an explanation of why the city wasnt advised until 2019, when the 2018 budget was adopted in 2017." The former NDP government had committed $250 million in a five-year program to provide city hall funds for road repairs and reconstruction, for the years 2014-2018. While the city says the provincial government made a $50-million contribution as part of that agreement in 2017, it provided only $10 million in 2018 which would have been the last year of the deal and informed city hall in January that the agreement had been fulfilled and there would be no more funds. In addition to the $40 million, the province also informed city hall recently that its road commitments to the city would be restricted only to a previously announced agreement for regional roads leaving the city short a further $28 million it was expecting for local streets. City officials have denied provincial statements that city was told last year the provincial government was scaling back funding for Winnipeg's local street-renewal program. Council will be asked to support a motion from its public works committee calling on the province to provide the outstanding $40 million and to commit to a renewal of the local street-reconstruction program. Finance Minister Scott Fielding told reporters last week, when releasing the provincial budget, that the city had received the funding it was owed. City officials revealed last week that as a result of the provincial shortfall, they had to cancel plans to repair 53 residential streets and 11 back lanes this year. As a result of the provincial funding shortfall, the city had to cancel plans to repair 53 residential streets and 11 back lanes this year. The Empress Street project (above) is still proceeding and is expected to be finished next year. (John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press files) A request to the Manitoba government from the Free Press for the same accounting of the $250 million Bowman is seeking was ignored; instead, a government spokeswoman repeated many of the same, sometimes irrelevant, responses offered previously by provincial officials: "We have met all commitments." "Under our budget the city remains the most generously funded city in Canada for operating support." "There is no hole in road funding the city is responsible for developing its own budget and the assumptions it makes when it builds its budget." "There has been full clarity." Bowman said the province needs to show city hall, and the public, how it arrived at that decision. "We feel we are owed it," Bowman said. "There were four years in which (the province) made good, including the current government, on that five year, $250-million plan." Council will be voting on its 2019 budget March 20. Bowman said if the province makes good on all, or any part, of the outstanding $40 million, it would be directed to the cancelled local street program. aldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca The Pallister government is modernizing the family law system to make it less complex and adversarial, allowing for matters such as child custody and support to be settled outside of court. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. The Pallister government is modernizing the family law system to make it less complex and adversarial, allowing for matters such as child custody and support to be settled outside of court. On Tuesday, it introduced first-of-its-kind legislation in Canada that would result in a three-year pilot project created in Winnipeg to test a new family dispute resolution model, to be launched early next year. The Family Law Modernization Act (Bill 9) would create a new dispute-resolution process, in which a resolution officer would work with families to sort out property, custody and child support issues. Disputes that cannot be resolved through this process would proceed to a second phase, in which an adjudicator holds a hearing and makes a recommended order. The recommended order would be deemed to be a court order if neither party objected to it within 35 days. If an objection was filed, the court would resolve the dispute by confirming the adjudicators recommended order or making another order. "Our current family system is failing too many families and children," Justice Minister Cliff Cullen told a news conference. "The traditional court-based system is complex, its adversarial, its expensive and ultimately damaging to many Manitoba families." Assuming Bill 9 is passed this spring, the reforms would begin to be instituted this fall, with child support matters being handled administratively. That would immediately ease the pressure on a clogged court system. Once the dispute-resolution pilot project is established in Winnipeg next year, the new administrative process will be mandatory for most types of family disputes, including disputes involving property, child and spousal support, child custody and access. Exceptions to this process would include where a court order is needed on an expedited basis (for example, where there is risk of a parent removing a child from the province without the other parents consent), or where an existing order prevents the parties from communicating with one another due to domestic violence. Another exception would be couples undergoing divorce proceedings under federal law. However, couples going through a divorce may still use the dispute-resolution mechanism to work out several issues they could bring before a judge. The Progressive Conservatives announced their intentions to reform the family law system 17 months ago. An advisory committee comprising judges, lawyers and community leaders helped drive the process. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Allan Fineblit, the lawyer who chaired the advisory committee, said he was "very pleased" with the proposed legislation. "It looks like it captured what we recommended." In rolling out the reforms, the province has hired local company North Forge Technology Exchange to help it design the new programs. It is estimated 3,000 to 5,000 Manitoba families are affected by separation or divorce each year. Most currently rely on the courts to resolve child custody, support and property matters. If the system operates as envisioned, family disputes will be dealt with more quickly and collaboratively, while helping clear court backlogs. Divorce proceedings can be especially expensive. According to a 2015 survey by Canadian Lawyer magazine, the average cost of a contested divorce in Western Canada was more than $18,000. larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca A lack of leadership from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is behind the apparent disconnect between the federal government and Manitoba, Conservative MP Candice Bergen said in Winnipeg Tuesday. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 12/3/2019 (1003 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. A lack of leadership from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is behind the apparent disconnect between the federal government and Manitoba, Conservative MP Candice Bergen said in Winnipeg Tuesday. Bergen (Portage-Lisgar), the Opposition House leader, made reference to recent feuding between Ottawa and Premier Brian Pallister over Manitoba's delay in accessing federal funding. "At the federal level, there's been a lack of leadership, " Bergen said in an interview following her breakfast speech to the Manitoba Heavy Construction Association. "You have provinces are realizing, 'Oh, we have to fend for ourselves' because the federal government is more interested in picking a fight with us than helping us. Then, that ends up trickling down," she said. "I think that's definitely what we're seeing. I put the responsibility for a lot of this squarely at the feet of the prime minister and his approach to federal-provincial relationships and the fact that he pits one area against another and has just picked a lot of fights with them." The rhetoric between the two levels of government has been ramped up in recent weeks after Liberal MP Adam Vaughan of Toronto said on a radio call-in show that Pallister's government was refusing to take federal dollars to house people due to a "clash of ideologies" over budgets and debt. A key bone of contention is about $1.9 billion available to Manitoba in federal funding for projects in the province over the next decade that is sitting on the table, stalled by the need for individual proposals or final deals. More than half are under an infrastructure program called Phase 2 and many require the province to pony up money first in order to receive the federal funds. Bergen said improving federal-provincial relationships and reducing western alienation would be key points for Conservative leader Andrew Scheer if the party was to form government after the election in the fall. "Under a Conservative government, you're going to see strong relationships again between the feds and the provinces and it will be through ministers... who actually know their regions and that's going to make a big difference as far as getting infrastructure money out," she said. Provinces so far have accessed just $7 billion of $14 billion from Phase I of the federal New Infrastructure Program, she said, referring to the March 29, 2018 budget watchdog report. A Conservative government would eliminate the carbon tax, Bergen said. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "It's just a tax grab," she said, adding Conservatives would get rid of the tanker ban on the B.C. coast, reduce or remove the GST on home heating bills and reverse Bill C-69 to allow more pipelines to be built in Canada. The Liberals have berated the Tories for promising to unveil their environmental policy almost a year ago. Bergen said her party will announce its policies in the near future, and that a ban on the dumping of raw sewage in waterways will be one of them. Bergen said Scheer's middle-class roots give him insight into everyday issues facing Canadians such as paying bills and trying to save for vacations while Trudeau's privileged upbringing clouds his vision. "He (Trudeau) talks about his family fortune. He really has had a much easier life financially. He's not really had to worry about paying bills, making ends meet. He certainly hasn't ever had to run a business, make the payroll," Bergen said. "We've seen a prime minister who just keeps racking up the deficit and he expects other people to keep paying for it. You'll see with our policy, it really does put people before government and politicians. I think it's kind of a switch in attitude." ashley.prest@freepress.mb.ca Members of the Manitoba legislative assembly were focused Tuesday on an issue larger than partisan politics: a new report on the life and death of Tina Fontaine. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Members of the Manitoba legislative assembly were focused Tuesday on an issue larger than partisan politics: a new report on the life and death of Tina Fontaine. In the morning, Manitoba advocate for children and youth Daphne Penrose released her findings from a special investigation into the teens death. During a sombre afternoon question period, MLAs reflected on how the child welfare system among other groups failed Tina, 15, a ward of Child and Family Services. Tinas body was pulled from the Red River on Aug. 17, 2014. Her death ignited calls for a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. "Well continue to emphasize that this is an issue that all Manitobans need to get behind," Premier Brian Pallister told reporters. "That we have failed our children in the past is indisputable. That we need to make sure we do everything in our power to give every Manitoba child opportunity and security is, I think, beyond debate." In the house, NDP Leader Wab Kinew underscored Tina was the reason some of the MLAs entered politics, but government couldnt fix the systemic problems that failed the teen on its own. Kinew noted Indigenous families and communities also need to "do the heavy lifting" to make sure they are well. "Indigenous men, such as myself, have to do the hard work of becoming better husbands, partners, fathers and sons in our community. Indigenous men, such as myself, have to leave the party lifestyle behind. We have to end domestic violence. We have to conquer toxic masculinity in our communities. And this is crucially important," he said. "That said, there is a very important role for government to play and that is to support these communities and individuals doing the hard work." Pallister responded to Kinew by saying the days of "finger pointing, blame-placing (and) looking to the past for faults" should be over. "And we should be able to focus together on learning from those tragedies and now moving forward," the premier said. The provincial government wouldnt unequivocally commit to implementing all five recommendations laid out in Penroses report Tuesday, but said it will review them and act accordingly. Penroses suggestions include phasing out school expulsions and suspensions, when possible, to keep children in the classroom, and developing youth-focused mental-health and addictions supports in Manitoba. Finance Minister Scott Fielding (a former families minister) answered questions on behalf of Families Minister Heather Stefanson, who was away sick. He said the province has been working on "a number of" Penroses recommendations already and will continue to do so. The minister also noted the province has made headway on 25 of the 34 provincially focused recommendations outlined in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada report and about 90 per cent of the recommendations in the Phoenix Sinclair inquiry. Phoenix, 5, was murdered by her mother and stepfather in 2005. "My point is weve taken some strong action on these other recommendations that have come forward, so clearly, we need to hear what the childrens advocate said, and well be taking action on it," Fielding said. "We want to continue to make sure that children dont fall through the cracks in the CFS system." Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. NDP MLA Nahanni Fontaine wanted to hear stronger assurances Penroses report would be taken seriously. "I think that today of all days and particularly in respect of Tina Fontaine and the role that she played in galvanizing Canada today of all days would have been the day to have a very vocal and firm commitment to these five recommendations," she said. Meanwhile, Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont emphasized the need to improve more than just the child welfare system. "(Penroses report) covers prevention, its about victim services, it talks about mental health," he said. "Those are other areas where we need investments and we really need to follow up... because it hasnt been happening." jessica.botelho@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @_jessbu The path to the Winnipeg General Strike of May and June 1919 saw the citys increasingly militant labour movement active on many fronts in the year prior to the dispute. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Opinion The path to the Winnipeg General Strike of May and June 1919 saw the citys increasingly militant labour movement active on many fronts in the year prior to the dispute. May 1918 saw civic workers strike. A tentative agreement was hammered out, but Winnipeg city council adopted a resolution calling for a permanent ban on civic-employee strikes, and stated such a clause must be part of any agreement. This was a move labour viewed as a declaration of war. The Trades and Labor Council successfully called for sympathetic strike action, and thousands of non-city staff walked off the job, responding to the call from machinist Dick Johns, who said, "You have the right to demand anything you have the power to enforce." Senator and federal labour minister Gideon Robertson and Winnipeg business leaders moved quickly to conclude an agreement based on the previous tentative deal, minus the offensive no-strike edict. In the end, it was a near-total victory for civic employees and the broader Winnipeg labour movement. In December 1918, the Trades and Labor Council moved to strengthen its hand as the body that would conduct general strike votes. It further decided that a majority of the total membership voting would authorize general strikes, thereby reducing the role of locals and individual unions, in deference to the council. The council also co-sponsored the now-notorious Walker Theatre meeting along with the Socialist Party of Canada. More than 1,700 workers called for the repeal of federal wartime legislation that suppressed labour rights. The meeting also called for withdrawal of all Allied troops from Russia, and sent solidarity greetings to Russian workers. In March 1919, Winnipeg sent a large contingent of delegates to a gathering of western Canadian unionists in Calgary. This convention arose out of western frustration with the September 1918 convention of the Canadian Trades and Labor Congress, where western delegates felt the conservative majority from Eastern Canada, one that still embraced craft-union principles, blocked adoption of a more militant agenda for labour. Some 237 delegates from the four western provinces assembled in Calgary for a three-day convention that began on March 13, 1919. The delegation kicked off with the unanimous adoption of a resolution calling for the "abolition of the present system of production for profit." The convention then moved to reaffirm the demand for the repeal of all wartime orders-in-council and the release of all political prisoners. It also called for withdrawal of all Allied troops from Russia by June 1, 1919. The above decisions clearly indicate the influence of Winnipeg labour, as the resolutions mirrored those adopted at the Walker Theatre in December 1918. The Calgary convention also demanded government agreement to movement toward a six-hour day and five-day work week, also by June 1, 1919. The centrepiece decision of the gathering was an agreement to move away from craft unionism to an industrial organizing model, whereby all workers of an industry would be united through trade-union organizing and membership, thereby increasing the power of labour as a whole. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. A convention committee took this decision and returned a day later to recommend the creation of "One Big Union" to achieve this movement to industrial unionism, calling for a vote of all workers on this recommendation. This, too, received support of the convention. The convention ended with more resolutions and solidarity greetings to Russian workers. This was the political climate of labour in general, including Winnipeg workers, in the spring of 1919. The Calgary convention received wide media coverage, not all of which was supportive. Winnipeg unionists were so frustrated with Winnipeg Tribune coverage that they called for a boycott of the paper. This concerned the Tribune, which offered to print verbatim the full transcript of the Calgary convention 10 full pages. Winnipeg labour leadership agreed to call off the boycott once the Tribune agreed to print 20,000 extra copies of the 10-page spread, which labour used as a special insert in its own paper, the Western Labor News. This development further served to educate Winnipeg workers, both union and non-union, on labours developing views on a range of issues. The convention was but one part of a complicated path to the Winnipeg General Strike. Labours grievances regarding erosion of wages, unemployment, the evils of capitalism and the need to better organize itself had firmly taken root in Winnipeg. These grievances and demands for respect for industry-wide collective bargaining rights would soon erupt into Canadas largest open-ended general strike, later in that fateful spring of 1919. Paul Moist is a retired labour leader and a research associate with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in Manitoba. The City of Winnipeg budget is always affected by the provincial budget, but this year Mayor Brian Bowman did his best to reverse that situation. Before, during and after the release of the citys budget, the mayor lobbied hard to explain the injustices of the premiers position, and to put his stamp on the provincial budget. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Opinion The City of Winnipeg budget is always affected by the provincial budget, but this year Mayor Brian Bowman did his best to reverse that situation. Before, during and after the release of the citys budget, the mayor lobbied hard to explain the injustices of the premiers position, and to put his stamp on the provincial budget. The mayors complaints are not unfounded, and were highlighted in last years Alternative Municipal Budget. Lack of provincial funding for transit, waste water treatment and other initiatives to deal with climate change is putting Winnipeg at a severe disadvantage. Reducing our $6.9 billion infrastructure deficit requires a Herculean effort that the city alone cannot muster. But it was not any of these existential issues that led the mayor to suggest that property taxes could be increased by an additional seven per cent (a threat no one took seriously). In order to get his point across he tied lack of provincial funding to Winnipeggers favourite knee-jerk issue: road maintenance. The 2019 road budget is reduced to $86.4 million from $128.4 million, and the mayor placed the blame for our shoddy roads squarely on the shoulders of Premier Brian Pallister. It is true that the city is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard spot. On one hand, it is reliant on a provincial government irrationally committed to austerity. On the other, it is accountable to voters who the administration fears would revolt at the sort of tax hike (more than seven per cent) required to make up for more than a decade of tax cuts by previous administrations. The provinces contention that Winnipeg receives more provincial money than other Canadian cities has been convincingly refuted. But it is true that increases to Winnipegs property taxes have fallen far behind other Canadian cities. According to the budget documents, compound tax increases between 1998 and 2019 were 102 per cent for Vancouver; 142 per cent for Edmonton; 127 per cent for Calgary; 122 per cent for Saskatoon; and, 95 per cent for Regina. In the same time period Winnipegs residential property taxes have gone up 17 per cent. So when Provincial Finance Minister Scott Fielding says that the city needs to get its spending under control, one has to wonder, especially because he used to be a city councilor and should understand the many challenges the city faces. If the mayor were to really bring in a substantial property tax increase, one that allowed it to deal with these challenges, the province would likely cut transfers based on its dyed-in-the-wool aversion to higher taxes. That aversion came to fruition with the tabling of the 2019 provincial budget and its one-percentage-point decrease in the PST. The cut will decrease provincial revenues by $325 million per year, so we should not be surprised that health and education spending will decrease in real terms, that infrastructure spending will go down by two per cent or that transfers to municipalities are under siege. Ironically, this reduction was only possible because of the $324 million increase in federal transfers, money Pallister was loathe to accept when in opposition. Minister Fielding took his governments tax aversion to new heights by claiming that the PST reduction would lead to 900 person years of employment and that wages and salaries will grow by $50 million/year, with nominal GDP to increase by $90 million. Even if we were to take these questionable estimates at face value, they would have to be netted out with the loss of jobs and higher-than-average wages that will result from the decrease in infrastructure spending, and the loss of spending power stemming from the public sector wage freeze. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. We also have to consider the cost to Manitoba families of significant decreases and omissions in spending. With post-secondary funding being reduced by $6 million and capital funding frozen, students will be paying more in tuition. There is no money to match federal bilateral agreements, meaning that the province is leaving federal money for health care and housing on the table at the same time as it is consistently underspending on health care and social housing, leaving Manitobas most vulnerable in limbo. Fielding pointed out that the PST decrease will kick in six years to the day that the NDP increased it. What he neglects to mention is that the increase was brought in to deal with the $1-billion cost of dealing with the 2011 flood. It will be a great irony if costly flooding hits again, in the very year his government drastically reduces revenue. The common dilemma arising from both budgets is one of tax and debt aversion, while claiming to maintain services. The city continues pandering to the business community by consistently reducing the business tax despite the benefits businesses derive from city infrastructure, and the fact that Winnipeg is already one of the lowest-cost jurisdictions in North America in which to do business. It has yet to consider new sources of funding, such a commuter tax, at the same time as it avoids increasing property taxes so we can climb out of the deep hole the lengthy tax freeze threw us into. The province has also curried delight from business with the decrease in the PST at the same time as it implements a broad austerity agenda. This strategy does not prevent business from demanding access to a highly educated and healthy workforce, and decent infrastructure. Advocates of ever-lower taxes are fond of pointing out that theres only one taxpayer. By the same logic, theres only one voter: eventually that voter will figure out we cant have ever-decreasing taxes and pay for our coveted social programs, especially as the costs of dealing with climate change and income inequality really hit home. Lynne Fernandez is the Errol Black Chair in Labour Issues at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Manitoba office. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Opinion Are you ready for artificial intelligence in schools? You may already know that researchers believe AI is likely to predict the onset of diseases in future and that youre already using AI every day when you search online, use voice commands on your phone or use Google Translate. Maybe you heard the Canadian government has invested millions of dollars in AI research during the past few years and is emerging as one of the global leaders in AI research. But did you know that some companies are developing AI for use in schools, for example in forms such as AI tutoring systems? Such systems can engage students in dialogue and provide feedback in subjects where they need extra help. As an educational technology researcher, I am interested in how educators apply technological advancements. My concern is improving and facilitating education by holistically combining educational philosophy, psychology, sociology and technology. Parents, educators and the general public need to understand AI and its potential educational implications. This matters so we can we can initiate informed discussions. Technology impacts learning With the advent of each new technology, educators have had the opportunity to see how it impacts learning. For example, in the 1930s and 40s researchers studied the impact of typewriters in the classroom on elementary student reading skills even while typewriters had wider commercial and economic applications. Still, many technological innovations have been met with skepticism. In particular, the potential impact of new technology on youth and children has often been the cause of alarm. Yet some skepticism and anxiety is related to tendencies to treat technology as an unavoidable progression that can be quickly embraced without asking pertinent questions about privacy or profit. When it comes to technology in schools, there are social, ethical and economic questions. For example, how do schools decide what technologies to invest in? Today, the North American and European educational technology markets are expected to grow from $75 billion in 2014 to $120 billion in 2019. It is necessary to consider at the policy level how education about new technologies, including AI, fit into larger socio-economic development and how children and youth may be impacted. The rise of AI and 'deep learning' The first digital technology in the form of computers did not enter public schools in a mainstream way before the mid-1980s. Internet-based technology and online learning was becoming a concern for researchers studying educational technology in mid-to-late-2000s because computer and then internet use was becoming more prevalent in schools. AI technologies are also a form of internet-based digital technology, but are more advanced: the computer scientist John McCarthy coined the phrase "Artificial Intelligence" to describe the science and engineering of enabling a computer system, software, program and robot to "think" intelligently like humans. AI-based systems derive their knowledge firstly from the initial data, programs and algorithms provided by human programmers. Secondly, they "learn" through their own experiences and observations without being explicitly programmed. This second source of knowledge is termed machine learning (ML), named by Arthur Samuel in 1959. ML works on different algorithms and a preferred one is called deep learning, which works on artificial neural networks (ANN) consisting of nodes and inter-linkages. The word "deep" implies that the data have to pass through many layers of computations. The more data these machines based on deep learning receive, the better they perform. Virtual assistants sometimes used today, like Amazons Alexa or Apples Siri, that are capable of oral interaction, use deep learning. So do chatbots that respond to online customer requests. This is possible because AI technology is programmed to compare the information provided to it by the learner or user with the vast amount of preloaded datasets to find commonalities and patterns. Such virtual assistants for the classroom have been seen at the university level. Forbes Magazine reports that several companies are developing tutoring platforms that use AI for pre-kindergarten to college-level students. AI for tutoring is possible because the technology is programmed to compare the information provided to it by the learner or user with the vast amount of preloaded datasets to find commonalities and patterns. Or heres a different example of AI at school: AI can be used to float "smarter" opponents in board games. For example, school chess clubs could use AI as a learning tool. AI programs have unseated some of the best global board game players, providing exalting moments to AI developers. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Issues with AI Some researchers believe AI will not replace teachers. Others point out the need to confront ambiguous questions raised by the reality that teaching-learning interaction can now occur without the personal mediation of a teacher. What must be remembered is that AI tutoring or other technologies cannot substitute for teacher or parental engagement and supervision. We must also look at what criteria will be used to evaluate the appropriateness of all new technologies for children and youth in schools. Students and teachers data privacy and security mechanisms should also be taken into consideration before introducing either internet-based or AI programs for learning and teaching. Love or hate AI, the truth is that it will keep progressing. Being aware of its nature and potential must guide further development and use. Neha Shivhare is an assistant professor at the Dayalbagh Educational Institute, India, and a visiting scholar at Simon Fraser University. This article was first published at The Conversation Canada: theconversation.com/ca. It's a dirty political trick, slipped surreptitiously into a piece of omnibus legislation on the eve of what could very well be a snap spring election. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 12/3/2019 (1003 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. It's a dirty political trick, slipped surreptitiously into a piece of omnibus legislation on the eve of what could very well be a snap spring election. Late last week, journalists and political operatives were somewhat surprised to find, tucked deep in the dark recesses of the Progressive Conservative government's budget implementation bill, a proposed amendment to election financing laws that would eliminate a major source of public support for candidates and political parties: the rebate for a portion of election-related expenses. As is the case in most jurisdictions across the country, Manitoba has provided rebates of up to 50 per cent of eligible election expenses for both candidates and parties, as long as they received at least 10 per cent of the popular vote. The rebate was hardly a perfect tool of democracy, but it did help level the electoral playing field to some extent. Rebates are not paid until long after an election has been held and parties and their candidates have filed their expense returns. However, the mere existence of a rebate allowed established parties to secure valuable loans or lines of credits from banks to fund their campaigns. These loans were repaid, in large part, by the rebates. By eliminating the campaign expense rebate and then calling an election a few weeks later, Pallister would be deliberately ensuring that his political opponents would be unable to mount competitive campaigns. No matter how you look at it, Pallister's strategy is cynical. It is, however, in keeping with his past behaviour on the election financing file. MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Premier Brian Pallister said he wouldn't call an election during a flood watch. In 2016, his first year in office, the premier eliminated a per-vote subsidy paid to parties and dramatically increased the maximum political donation to $5,000 from $3,000. As he did back in 2016 with the per vote subsidy, Pallister argued the campaign expense rebate was an improper use of taxpayer money. "That's a subsidy directly to political organizations that does nothing for Manitobans." In actual fact, the rebates did quite a lot for Manitobans, particularly those who value a diverse and competitive political marketplace. In addition to functioning as security for loans, the rebates allowed parties that rely on smaller individual donations to compete fairly with those that draw wealthy, deep-pocketed donors. Parties like the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba. Eliminating rebates, and increasing the individual limits for political donations, seems to be part of a slow and steady effort by the Pallister government to roll back reforms to election financing laws designed to lessen the influence of big-money donors. "It's simply not responsible to be making these changes," said Duff Conacher, co-founder of Ottawa-based Democracy Watch. "It's anti-democratic and unethical. It is a charade to give wealthy donors more influence in our electoral process." Fair and effective election financing demands that steps be taken to prevent any one donor or group of donors from using the size of their donations as a lever to influence government, Conacher said. Any measures that increase the amounts of money that can be donated, and that eliminate public funding sources, are by their very nature anti-democratic, he added. JOHN WOODS / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES Then-NDP leader Greg Selinger and his wife vote in the April 2016 election that would sink his party. An election financing regime that had fairness as its principal goal would increase the amount of public support for political parties in a proportional manner that connects the amount of money to the number of people who support it, either through donations or votes, Conacher said. Quebec, for example, provides grants to candidates and parties based on how much money they raise, and a subsidy calculated on the number of votes they receive. "This is, ultimately, the most democratic way to support political parties," he said. But what if the government of the day did not want to support all political parties? Well, then you'd have what's happening in Manitoba. There is no doubt that on the basis of fundraising efforts alone, Pallister's Tories have a distinct advantage. They are raising more money than the NDP and Liberals combined, which is not unusual for a first-term government with a huge majority and no immediate prospect of losing the next election. However, circumstance is not the only thing driving the Tory fundraising machine. Even before he won in 2016, Pallister made it clear to his caucus and party officials that fundraising would be job one between elections. PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Brian Pallister on election day in Portage la Prairie. Prior to assuming the leadership in 2012, the Tories were a hot mess when it came to fundraising. A handful of Tory MLAs were notorious for hoarding donations for their own constituency warchests, and remitting little or no money to the central party. That was then. Now, party sources confirm that every MLA has been given hard fundraising targets for the central campaign. Failure to meet those targets is met with swift and angry condemnation from the premier himself. Dan Lett | Not for Attribution A weekly look at politics close to home and around the world that is sent every Tuesday. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The changes to election finance laws are particularly dubious in the context of a possible snap election call. Pallister seems to realize that he's on thin ice in this regard, and took steps Tuesday to end speculation about a spring election. Sort of. In a scrum with journalists, and in a video posted on Twitter, Pallister promised he would not call an election "during a flood watch," referring to the most recent update from the province which has identified a high likelihood of spring flooding this year. However, he specifically wouldn't say if he would drop the writ if and when the flood threat had passed. So, if no spring blizzards hit the province, and the rivers remain within the confines of their banks, you can be sure two things will happen. One, the people who live in the immediate proximity of our great rivers will breathe a sign of relief. And two, the premier will revisit his pledge to avoid a spring election. dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca SAGKEENG FIRST NATION It feels like every reporter in Winnipeg is here, and every television camera for miles. They arrived after sunrise, drifting into a gymnasium painted in bright colours, air thick with the scent of sweetgrass and the ghost of a tiny, soft-spoken child who once must have scampered over its floor. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 12/3/2019 (1003 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. SAGKEENG FIRST NATION It feels like every reporter in Winnipeg is here, and every television camera for miles. They arrived after sunrise, drifting into a gymnasium painted in bright colours, air thick with the scent of sweetgrass and the ghost of a tiny, soft-spoken child who once must have scampered over its floor. By now, her name has crossed oceans. For years, Sagkeeng First Nation Chief Derrick Henderson fielded calls about Tina Fontaine "from all over," he says, from media outlets across Canada and beyond. In death, her name became a torch, a light on all the evils that lurk in the shadows and steal life from Indigenous women and girls. It was not love that failed Tina that, she always had. It was systems that failed her, and that story is not new. Countless Manitobans embraced her then, after she was dead. We wept for her, and rallied for her, and watched the trial of the man accused of killing her with anxious attention. We gathered again when he was acquitted in February 2018, holding her name close, trying to breathe justice into existence by the power of memory alone. She never asked for any of this, though. She was just a child, hurting, searching for a place to fit in. Despite all of this, despite the trial and the rallies and all the words written, we still don't know much about how she died. What is sadder than that, is that we heard almost as little about how she lived, about what chasms opened up underneath her feet that sent her on that inexorable fall to the streets, and the river. That is the gap that Manitoba Child Advocate Daphne Penrose's new report hopes to fill in. At 115 pages, it is split between a retelling of the pivotal events of Tina's 15 years of life, and a set of recommendations. And this is the least we can do, to bear witness: open the report, which is publicly available online. Read it. See how far you get before you start to cry. RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Manitoba Child Advocate Daphne Penrose gets a hug from Sagkeeng Coun. Marilyn Courchene, after Penrose released a report into the 2014 death of 14-year-old Tina Fontaine. In the Sagkeeng gymnasium, I make it as far as page 39. At that point, the report picks up the short thread of Tina's life on the afternoon of July 17, 2014, when she is is released from a short-term detox, picked up by a child and family services worker and stashed in a downtown motel. No plan was made for Tina then, the report notes. There is no assessment of her situation, and no supports given. Right then, in full view of the people charged with protecting Tina, her life is coming unravelled. Over the next few weeks, she will bounce in and out of shelters; one month later, on Aug. 17, 2014, a recovery team will pull her body from the Red River, wrapped in a Costco duvet and weighed down with stones. But that is the end of Tina's life, and the advocate's report concerns itself mostly with the beginning and middle. How she was born to struggling parents, and raised from age five by her great-aunt, Thelma Favel, who loved Tina and, limited by a customary guardianship not adequately recognized by authorities, did the best she could for her. RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Sagkeeng Chief Derrick Henderson answers questions from the media after the release of the report into Tina Fontaine's death. It was not love that failed Tina that, she always had. It was systems that failed her, and that story is not new. Mostly, those failures broke loose after Tina's father, Eugene Fontaine, was murdered in 2011. The loss seemed to send Tina reeling; as time went on, she started skipping school, began dabbling in drugs, ran away from home. Yet none of the authorities in Tina's life seemed to recognize the urgency of her pain. In 2013, victim services told Favel that the family wasn't eligible for wage compensation, since the kids hadn't been living with their father and he hadn't been working; they did not mention, in that rejection letter, that the family could access counselling. In fact, nobody in positions of authority moved quickly to get support for the girl. When a CFS agency finally did refer Tina for counselling in the summer of 2014, the family couldn't go: child welfare workers had made the initial arrangements for Beausejour, and they didn't have a car to drive the 75 kilometres from Powerview. RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS The 115-page report is split between retelling Tina Fontaine's life and making recommendations to lessen the odds of another case like hers happening. These parts of the report are painful to read, almost maddening. Over the years, and especially as her life spiralled onto the street, Tina's case bounced between workers from no fewer than five different child welfare agencies, who sometimes debated who was responsible for her case in an labyrinthian game of back-and-forth calls. Now you are up to summer 2014 in Tina's story. Nobody in these pages knows it yet, but the clock is ticking. The thread of her life is fraying: she turns up at youth shelters, finds no beds, leaves. Police find her with a drunk man in a car and let her go. Hours later, she is passed out in an alley. She is taken to hospital, and then to a hotel. Authorities deliberate what to do with her. Youth workers make conflicting assessments of just how vulnerable she is. Your chest aches to shout at them through the pages, praying for a different ending than the one that is coming, the one we have borne witness to for the last five years running, the one that cannot now be undone. Someone get her now. There's no time. Just anyone, go find that girl and take her home. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. And then she is gone. She vanishes from the report on her life, as silently as she does from the world. On Aug. 14, a manager with CFSs StreetReach program emailed the police missing persons unit, and called Tina's case "a jurisdictional nightmare with a bunch of different agencies playing hot potato, its your case not ours bottom line is there have been numerous concerns documented in our (CFS) system that this child is being exploited" RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Tina Fontaine's cousin Melena Bittern holds a sign in support of her cousin near the centre of the Oodena Circle with family during rally for Tina at the Forks Feb. 23, 2018. The manager promised that they would start looking for her the next day. By then, it was already too late: she was almost certainly already dead. Now, it is time for action. The advocate's report marks the end of what the public will learn about Tina, both her life and her death. With nothing new to say, the media that has peppered Sagkeeng for the last five years will go away. Her name will fall from the headlines, though never from her family or community's hearts. In a way, that is a mercy: if the lessons of what failed her can be learned through this report, and changes enacted through careful consideration of its recommendations, then her memory can at last be given to rest. And then, she can at last be what she ought to have been: just a child, just loved, and forever missed. melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca WASHINGTON - The U.S. is issuing an emergency order Wednesday grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft "effective immediately," in the wake of the crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people, President Donald Trump said. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Mike McDaniel, director of Houston High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas, left, and Carla Provost, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, right, listen as President Donald Trump speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Washington. Trump said the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft "effective immediately," in the wake of the crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci) WASHINGTON - The U.S. is issuing an emergency order Wednesday grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft "effective immediately," in the wake of the crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people, President Donald Trump said. Many nations had already barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 from its airspace, but until Trump's announcement, the Federal Aviation Administration had said that it didn't have any data to show the jets are unsafe. Trump cited "new information" that had come to light in the ongoing investigation into the incident. He did not elaborate. "All of those planes are grounded, effective immediately," Trump said during a scheduled briefing on border security. President Donald Trump speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Washington. Trump said the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft "effective immediately," in the wake of the crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci) Trump said any airplane currently in the air will go to its destination and then be grounded. He added all airlines and affected pilots had been notified. Trump said the safety of the American people is of "paramount concern," and added that the FAA would soon put out a statement on the action. Trump said the decision to ground the aircraft "didn't have to be made, but we thought it was the right decision." Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The president insisted the announcement was co-ordinated with aviation officials in Canada, U.S. carriers and aircraft manufacturer Boeing. "Boeing is an incredible company," Trump said. "They are working very, very hard right now and hopefully they'll quickly come up with an answer." In a statement, Boeing said it "continues to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX." The company added that it had decided "out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircraft's safety to recommend to the FAA the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of 371 737 MAX aircraft." Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg said the company was "supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution." __ Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann and Kevin Freking contributed to this report. The photo taken on March 12, 2019 shows an embroidery work at a rural traditional craft cooperative in Liping County, southwest China's Guizhou Province. Cultural and creative project in Liping County, serving as a part of the local poverty alleviation projects, provides skill training for women living in poverty. Participants are inspired to design tie-dyeing products, embroidery and other exquisite handicrafts. (Xinhua/Yang Daifu) 6 1 [ Editor: Zhang Zhou ] American Consumer News, LLC dba MarketBeat 2010-2021. All rights reserved. 326 E 8th St #105, Sioux Falls, SD 57103 | U.S. Based Support Team at [email protected] | (844) 978-6257 MarketBeat does not provide personalized financial advice and does not issue recommendations or offers to buy stock or sell any security. Our Accessibility Statement | Terms of Service | Do Not Sell My Information 2021 Market data provided is at least 10-minutes delayed and hosted by Barchart Solutions. Information is provided 'as-is' and solely for informational purposes, not for trading purposes or advice, and is delayed. To see all exchange delays and terms of use please see disclaimer. 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L. de C.V., Agile Airband Ohio LLC, Agile Connect LLC, Agile IWG Holdings LLC, Agile Network Builders LLC, Agile Networks Indiana LLC, Agile Networks Site Development LLC, Agile Towers LLC, Alternative Networking LLC, American Tower Asset Sub II LLC, American Tower Asset Sub LLC, American Tower Charitable Foundation Inc., American Tower Delaware Corporation, American Tower Depositor Sub LLC, American Tower Guarantor Sub LLC, American Tower Holding Sub II LLC, American Tower Holding Sub LLC, American Tower International Holding I LLC, American Tower International Holding II LLC, American Tower International Inc., American Tower Investments LLC, American Tower LLC, American Tower Management LLC, American Tower Mauritius, American Tower Servicios Fibra S. de R.L. de C.V., American Tower Tanzania Operations Limited, American Tower do Brasil - Cessao de Infraestruturas Ltda., American Tower do Brasil Communicacao Multimidia Ltda., American Towers LLC, BR Towers, Blue Sky Towers Pty Ltd, Blue Transfer Sociedad Anonima, Broadcast Towers LLC, CNC2 Associates LLC, California Tower Inc., Cell Site NewCo II LLC, Cell Tower Lease Acquisition LLC, Central States Tower Holdings LLC, Colo ATL LLC, Colo Atl, Communications Properties Inc., Comunicaciones y Consumos S.A., Connectivity Infrastructure Services Limited, DCS Tower Sub LLC, Eaton, Eaton Towers (Lilongwe) Limited, Eaton Towers Ghana (M) Limited, Eaton Towers Ghana Limited, Eaton Towers Holdings Limited, Eaton Towers Kenya Limited, Eaton Towers Limited, Eaton Towers Niger S.A., Eaton Towers Uganda Limited, Essar Telecom Infrastructure, Eure-et-Loir Reseaux Mobiles SAS, GTP Acquisition Partners I LLC, GTP Acquisition Partners II LLC, GTP Acquisition Partners III LLC, GTP Costa Rica Finance LLC, GTP Infrastructure I LLC, GTP Infrastructure II LLC, GTP Infrastructure III LLC, GTP Investments LLC, GTP LATAM Holdings B.V., GTP LatAm Holdings Cooperatieve U.A., GTP Operations CR S.R.L., GTP South Acquisitions II LLC, GTP Structures I LLC, GTP Structures II LLC, GTP TRS I LLC, GTP Torres CR S.R.L., GTP Towers I LLC, GTP Towers II LLC, GTP Towers III LLC, GTP Towers IV LLC, GTP Towers IX LLC, GTP Towers V LLC, GTP Towers VII LLC, GTP Towers VIII LLC, GTPI HoldCo LLC, Ghana Tower InterCo B.V., Global Tower Assets III LLC, Global Tower Assets LLC, Global Tower Holdings LLC, Global Tower LLC, Global Tower Partners, Global Tower Services LLC, Gondola Tower Holdings LLC, Grain HoldCo LLC, Grain HoldCo Parent LLC, GrainComm I LLC, GrainComm II LLC, GrainComm III LLC, GrainComm LLC, GrainComm Marketing LLC, GrainComm V LLC, Haysville Towers LLC, IW Equipment LLC, IWD Equipment LLC, IWG Holdings LLC, IWG II Holdings LLC, IWG II LLC, IWG Miami LLC, IWG Towers Assets I LLC, IWG Towers Assets II LLC, IWG-TLA Australia Pty Ltd., IWG-TLA Canada Corp., IWG-TLA Encanto 1 LLC, IWG-TLA Encanto 2 LLC, IWG-TLA Encanto 3 LLC, IWG-TLA Encanto LLC, IWG-TLA Holdings LLC, IWG-TLA Media 2 LLC, IWG-TLA Media LLC, IWG-TLA Telecom LLC, IWL-TLA Telecom 2 LLC, Idaho Tower Company LLC, InSite (BCEC) LLC, InSite (MBTA) LLC, InSite Borrower LLC, InSite Co-Issuer Corp., InSite Guarantor LLC, InSite Hawaii LLC, InSite Issuer LLC, InSite Licensing LLC, InSite Towers Development 2 LLC, InSite Towers Development LLC, InSite Towers International 2 LLC, InSite Towers International Development LLC, InSite Towers International LLC, InSite Towers LLC, InSite Towers of Puerto Rico LLC, InSite Wireless Development LLC, InSite Wireless Group, InSite Wireless Group LLC, Insite Wireless LLC, Invisible IWG Holdings LLC, Invisible Towers LLC, JT Communications LLC, LAP Inmobiliaria Limitada, LAP Inmobiliaria S.R.L., LL B Sheet 1 LLC, Lap do Brasil Empreendimentos Imobiliarios Ltda, Lease Advisors-AU PTY LTD, Loxel SAS, MATC Digital S. de R.L. de C.V., MATC Infraestructura S. de R.L. de C.V., MATC Servicios S. de R.L. de C.V., MC New Macland Properties LLC, MCSU Properties LLC, MHB Tower Rentals of America LLC, MIP III Iron Holdings LLC, MIP III U.S. Iron LLC, Microwave Inc., Municipal Bay LLC, Municipal-Bay Holdings LLC, New Towers LLC, PCS Structures Towers LLC, R-CAL I LLC, RSA Media Inc., Repeater Communications Group I LLC, Repeater Communications Group II LLC, Repeater Communications Group III LLC, Repeater Communications Group IV LLC, Repeater Communications Group LLC, Repeater Communications Group V LLC, Repeater Communications Group VI LLC, Repeater Communications Group of New York LLC, Repeater IWG Holdings LLC, Richland Towers LLC, Signum/IWG Tower Corp., Southeast Network Access Point LLC, SpectraSite Communications, SpectraSite Communications LLC, SpectraSite LLC, T8 Ulysses Site Management LLC, TLA PR-1 LLC, TLA PR-2 LLC, Telecom Lease Advisors Management 2 LLC, Tower Management Inc., Towers of America L.L.L.P., Transcend Infrastructure Holdings Pte. Ltd., Transcend Towers Infrastructure (Philippines) Inc., Turris Sites Development Corp., Turris Sites IWG Corp, Tysons II DAS LLC, UNIsite, Uganda Tower Interco B.V., Ulysses Asset Sub I LLC, Ulysses Asset Sub II LLC, UniSite LLC, UniSite/Omnipoint FL Tower Venture LLC, UniSite/Omnipoint NE Tower Venture LLC, UniSite/Omnipoint PA Tower Venture LLC, Vangard Wireless LLC, Verus Management One LLC, Viom Networks, and Virdi IWG Holdings LLC. Bank of Cyprus Holdings Public Limited Company, through its subsidiaries, provides banking, financial, and insurance services to individuals, small and medium sized enterprises, and corporate customers. It offers current, savings, notice, instant access, and fixed term deposits; housing, student, consumer, business, syndicated, project, and shipping finance; and debit, credit, and prepaid cards. The company also provides hire purchase, factoring, guarantee, insurance, asset and wealth management, investment banking and brokerage, custody and depository, transfers and payment, and digital banking services. In addition, it is involved in property trading and development activities; land development and operation of a golf resort; management administration and safekeeping of UCITS units; administration of guarantees and holding of real estate properties; collection of the existing portfolio of receivables, including third party collections; and provision of card processing transaction, auction, and secretarial services. As of March 30, 2021, it operates through a network of 95 branches in Cyprus, as well as representative offices in Russia, Ukraine, and China. The company was formerly known as Bank of Cyprus Public Company Ltd and changed its name to Bank of Cyprus Holdings Public Limited Company in January 2017. Bank of Cyprus Holdings Public Limited Company was founded in 1899 and is headquartered in Nicosia, Cyprus. Read More The Bank of Nova Scotia provides various banking products and services in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Colombia, the Caribbean and Central America, and internationally. It operates through Canadian Banking, International Banking, Global Banking and Markets, and Global Wealth Management segments. The company offers financial advice and solutions, and day-to-day banking products, including debit and credit cards, chequing and saving accounts, investments, mortgages, loans, and insurance to individuals; and business banking solutions comprising lending, deposit, cash management, and trade finance solutions to small businesses and commercial customers, including automotive financing solutions to dealers and their customers. It also provides wealth management advice and solutions, including online brokerage, mobile investment, full-service brokerage, trust, private banking, and private investment counsel services; and retail mutual funds, exchange traded funds, liquid alternative funds, and institutional funds. In addition, the company offers international banking services for retail, corporate, and commercial customers; and lending and transaction, investment banking advisory, and capital markets access services to corporate customers. Further, it provides Internet, mobile, and telephone banking services. The company operates a network of 952 branches and approximately 3,540 automated banking machines in Canada; and approximately 1,400 branches, 5,200 ATMs, and 22 contact centers internationally. The Bank of Nova Scotia was founded in 1832 and is headquartered in Halifax, Canada. Read More Blackrock Silver Corp. engages in the acquisition, exploration, and development of mineral properties located in the United States. It primarily explores for gold and silver deposits. The company's flagship property is the Tonopah West silver-gold project that consists of 97 patented and 17 unpatented claims covering an area of 4.5 square kilometers located in the Silver State of Nevada. It also holds interest in the Silver Cloud project that consists of 572 mining claims covering an area of approximately 45 square kilometers located in Nevada. The company was formerly known as Blackrock Gold Corp. and changed its name to Blackrock Silver Corp. in March 2021. Blackrock Silver Corp. was incorporated in 1999 and is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. Read More There is not enough analysis data for BlackRock MuniYield Pennsylvania Quality Fund. 4.7 Community Rank Outperform Votes BlackRock MuniYield Pennsylvania Quality Fund has received 84 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes BlackRock MuniYield Pennsylvania Quality Fund has received 37 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment BlackRock MuniYield Pennsylvania Quality Fund has received 69.42% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about BlackRock MuniYield Pennsylvania Quality Fund and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe MPA will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe MPA will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next Royal Bank of Canada operates as a diversified financial service company worldwide. The company's Personal & Commercial Banking segment offers checking and savings accounts, home equity financing, personal lending, private banking, indirect lending, mutual funds and self-directed brokerage accounts, guaranteed investment certificates, credit cards, and payment products and solutions; and lending, leasing, deposit, investment, foreign exchange, cash management, auto dealer financing, trade products, and services to small and medium-sized commercial businesses. This segment offers financial products and services through branches, automated teller machines, and mobile sales network. Its Wealth Management segment provides a suite of advice-based solutions and strategies to high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals, and institutional clients. The company's Insurance segment offers life, health, home, auto, travel, wealth, annuities, and reinsurance advice and solutions; and creditor and business insurance services to individual, business, and group clients through its field sales force, advice centers, and online, as well as through independent insurance advisors and affinity relationships. Its Investor & Treasury Services segment provides asset, cash management, transaction banking, and treasury services to institutional clients; correspondent banking and trade finance services for financial institutions; and short-term funding and liquidity management services. The company's Capital Markets segment offers corporate and investment banking, as well as equity and debt origination, distribution, sale, and trading services for corporations, institutional investors, asset managers, governments, and central banks. Royal Bank of Canada has a strategic partnership with Royal College Of Physicians & Surgeons Of Canada to support the needs of Canada's medical specialists. The company was founded in 1864 and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Read More Brookfield Infrastructure Partners L.P. owns and operates utilities, transport, energy, and data infrastructure businesses. The Utilities segment operates approximately 2,000 kilometers (km) of natural gas transportation pipelines in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Minas Gerais; approximately 2,200 km of electricity transmission lines in North and South America; and approximately 6.6 million electricity and natural gas connections and 1.1 million smart meters, as well as operates metallurgical coal export terminals. The Transport segment offers transportation, storage, and handling services for freight, bulk commodities, and passengers through a network of 5,500 km of track network in south of Western Australia; approximately 4,800 km of rail in South America; approximately 4,200 km of motorways in Brazil, Chile, Peru, and India; and 37 port terminals in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Europe. The Energy segment offers natural gas midstream and storage services through approximately 15,000 km of natural gas transmission pipelines; and 600 billion cubic feet of natural gas storage in the United States and Canada. This segment also provides heating and cooling services to customers, and energy solutions, as well as serves approximately 24,900 natural gas, water, and wastewater connections. In addition, the Energy segment provides water heater rental; heating, ventilation, and air conditioner rental; and other home services in Canada and the United States, as well as 270,000 contracted sub-metering services with in Canada. The Data Infrastructure segment offers services and critical infrastructure to the media broadcasting and telecom sectors; and data storage services and infrastructure to enterprise customers. The company was founded in 2007 and is based in Hamilton, Bermuda. Brookfield Infrastructure Partners L.P. is a subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management Inc. Read More SunTrust Banks, Inc. operates as the holding company for SunTrust Bank that provides various financial services for consumers, businesses, corporations, institutions, and not-for-profit entities in the United States. It operates in two segments, Consumer and Wholesale. The Consumer segment provides deposits and payments; home equity and personal credit lines; auto, student, and other lending products; credit cards; discount/online and full-service brokerage products; professional investment advisory products and services; and trust services, as well as family office solutions. This segment also offers residential mortgage products in the secondary market. The Wholesale segment provides capital markets solutions, including advisory, capital raising, and financial risk management; asset-based financing solutions, such as securitizations, asset-based lending, equipment financing, and structured real estate arrangements; cash management services and auto dealer financing solutions; investment banking solutions; and credit and deposit, fee-based product offering, multi-family agency lending, advisory, commercial mortgage brokerage, and tailored financing and equity investment solutions. This segment also offers treasury and payment solutions, such as operating various electronic and paper payment types, which comprise card, wire transfer, automated clearing house, check, and cash; and provides services clients to manage their accounts online. The company offers its products and services through a network of traditional and in-store branches, automated teller machines, Internet, mobile, and telephone banking channels. As of December 31, 2018, it operated 1,218 full-service banking offices located in Florida, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia. SunTrust Banks, Inc. was founded in 1891 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Read More Principal Financial Group, Inc. is a financial company, which offers financial products and services to businesses, individuals and institutional clients. It specializes in retirement solutions, insurance, and investment products through its diverse family of financial services companies and national network of financial professionals. It operates its business through following segments: Retirement and Income Solutions, Principal Global Investors, Principal International, U.S. Insurance Solutions and Corporate. The Retirement and Income Solutions segment provides retirement and related financial products and services primarily to businesses, their employees and other individuals. The Principal Global Investors segment provides asset management services to asset accumulation business, insurance operations, corporate segment and third party clients and also refers to mutual fund business. The Principal International segment offers pension accumulation products and services, mutual funds, asset management, income annuities and life insurance accumulation products. The U.S. Insurance Solutions segment operates through two divisions. Specialty benefits insurance division consists of gro Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Abbott Laboratories: 3A Nutrition (Vietnam) Company Limited, ABON Biopharm (Hangzhou) Co. Ltd., AGA Medical Belgium, AGA Medical Corporation, AGA Medical Holdings Inc., ALR Holdings, AML Medical LLC, APK Advanced Medical Technologies LLC, ATS Bermuda Holdings Limited, ATS Laboratories Inc., Abbott, Abbott (Jiaxing) Nutrition Co. Ltd., Abbott (UK) Finance Limited, Abbott (UK) Holdings Limited, Abbott AG, Abbott Asia Holdings Limited, Abbott Asia Investments Limited, Abbott Australasia Holdings Limited, Abbott Australasia Pty Ltd, Abbott B.V., Abbott Bahamas Overseas Businesses Corporation, Abbott Belgian Investments, Abbott Bermuda Holding Ltd., Abbott Biologicals B.V., Abbott Biologicals LLC, Abbott Bulgaria Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Capital India Limited, Abbott Cardiovascular Inc., Abbott Cardiovascular Systems Inc., Abbott Delaware LLC, Abbott Diabetes Care Inc., Abbott Diabetes Care Limited, Abbott Diabetes Care Sales Corporation, Abbott Diagnostics GmbH, Abbott Diagnostics International Ltd., Abbott Diagnostics Technologies AS, Abbott Doral Investments S.L., Abbott Equity Holdings Unlimited, Abbott Equity Investments LLC, Abbott Established Products Holdings (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Finance Company SA, Abbott Financial Holdings SRL, Abbott France S.A.S., Abbott Fund Tanzania Limited, Abbott Gesellschaft m.b.H., Abbott GmbH & Co. KG, Abbott Health Products LLC, Abbott Healthcare (Puerto Rico) Ltd., Abbott Healthcare B.V., Abbott Healthcare Costa Rica S.A., Abbott Healthcare LLC, Abbott Healthcare Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Healthcare Private Limited, Abbott Healthcare Products B.V., Abbott Healthcare Products Ltd, Abbott Holding (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Holding GmbH, Abbott Holding Subsidiary (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Holding Subsidiary (Gibraltar) Limited Luxembourg S.C.S., Abbott Holdings B.V., Abbott Holdings LLC, Abbott Holdings Limited, Abbott Holdings Poland Spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Hungary Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Abbott Iberian Investments (2) Limited, Abbott Iberian Investments Limited, Abbott India Limited, Abbott Informatics Asia Pacific Limited, Abbott Informatics Canada Inc, Abbott Informatics Corporation, Abbott Informatics Europe Limited, Abbott Informatics France, Abbott Informatics Germany GmbH, Abbott Informatics Netherlands B.V., Abbott Informatics Singapore Pte. Limited, Abbott Informatics Spain S.A., Abbott Informatics Technologies Ltd, Abbott International Corporation, Abbott International Enterprises Ltd., Abbott International Holdings Limited, Abbott International LLC, Abbott International Luxembourg S.ar.l., Abbott Investments Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Ireland, Abbott Ireland Financing Designated Activity Company, Abbott Ireland Limited, Abbott Japan Co. Ltd., Abbott Kazakhstan Limited Liability Partnership, Abbott Knoll Investments B.V., Abbott Korea Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Bangladesh) Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Chile) Holdco (Dos) SpA, Abbott Laboratories (Chile) Holdco SpA, Abbott Laboratories (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Abbott Laboratories (Mozambique) Limitada, Abbott Laboratories (Pakistan) Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Philippines), Abbott Laboratories (Puerto Rico) Incorporated, Abbott Laboratories (Singapore) Private Limited, Abbott Laboratories A/S, Abbott Laboratories Argentina Sociedad Anonima, Abbott Laboratories B.V., Abbott Laboratories C.A., Abbott Laboratories Finance B.V., Abbott Laboratories GmbH, Abbott Laboratories Inc., Abbott Laboratories International LLC, Abbott Laboratories Ireland Limited, Abbott Laboratories Limited, Abbott Laboratories Limited - Laboratoires Abbott Limitee, Abbott Laboratories NZ Limited, Abbott Laboratories Pacific Ltd., Abbott Laboratories Poland Spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Laboratories Products B.V., Abbott Laboratories Residential Development Fund Inc., Abbott Laboratories S.A., Abbott Laboratories SA, Abbott Laboratories Services Corp., Abbott Laboratories Slovakia s.r.o., Abbott Laboratories South Africa (Pty) Ltd., Abbott Laboratories Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Abbott Laboratories Trustee Company Limited, Abbott Laboratories Uruguay S.A., Abbott Laboratories Vascular Enterprises, Abbott Laboratories d.o.o., Abbott Laboratories de Chile Limitada, Abbott Laboratories de Colombia S.A., Abbott Laboratories de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Abbott Laboratories druzba za farmacijo in diagnostiko d.o.o., Abbott Laboratories s.r.o., Abbott Laboratories(Hellas) Societe Anonyme, Abbott Laboratorios S.A., Abbott Laboratorios S.A., Abbott Laboratorios del Ecuador Cia. Ltda., Abbott Laboratuarlari Ithalat Ihracat ve Ticaret Ltd.Sti, Abbott Laboratorios Lda, Abbott Laboratorios do Brasil Ltda., Abbott Limited Egypt LLC, Abbott Logistics B.V., Abbott Management GmbH, Abbott Management LLC, Abbott Manufacturing Singapore Private Limited, Abbott Mature Products International Unlimited Company, Abbott Mature Products Management Limited, Abbott Medical (Hong Kong) Limited, Abbott Medical (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Abbott Medical (Portugal) Distribuicao de Produtos Medicos Lda, Abbott Medical (Schweiz) AG, Abbott Medical (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Abbott Medical (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical Australia Pty. Ltd., Abbott Medical Austria Ges.m.b.H., Abbott Medical Balkan d.o.o. Beograd (Novi Beograd), Abbott Medical Belgium, Abbott Medical Canada Inc./ Medicale Abbott Canada Inc., Abbott Medical Danmark A/S, Abbott Medical Devices Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical Espana S.A., Abbott Medical Estonia OU, Abbott Medical Finland Oy, Abbott Medical France SAS, Abbott Medical GmbH, Abbott Medical Hellas Limited Liability Trading Company, Abbott Medical Ireland Limited, Abbott Medical Italia S.p.A., Abbott Medical Japan Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical Korea Limited, Abbott Medical Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Abbott Medical Laboratories LTD, Abbott Medical Nederland B.V., Abbott Medical New Zealand Limited, Abbott Medical Norway AS, Abbott Medical Overseas Cyprus Limited, Abbott Medical Sweden AB, Abbott Medical Taiwan Co., Abbott Medical U.K. Limited, Abbott Medical spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Middle East S.A.R.L., Abbott Molecular Inc., Abbott Morocco SARL, Abbott Nederland C.V., Abbott Nederland Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Netherlands Investments B.V., Abbott Norge AS, Abbott Nutrition Limited, Abbott Nutrition Manufacturing Inc., Abbott Operations Singapore Pte. Ltd., Abbott Operations Uruguay S.R.L., Abbott Overseas Cyprus Limited, Abbott Overseas Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Overseas S.A., Abbott Oy, Abbott Point of Care Canada Limited, Abbott Point of Care Inc., Abbott Poland Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Procurement LLC, Abbott Products (Philippines) Inc., Abbott Products (Spain) S.L., Abbott Products Algerie EURL, Abbott Products B.V., Abbott Products Distribution SAS, Abbott Products Egypt LLC, Abbott Products Limited, Abbott Products Limited Liability Company, Abbott Products Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Products Operations AG, Abbott Products Operations LLC, Abbott Products Romania S.R.L., Abbott Products Tunisie S.A.R.L., Abbott Products Unlimited Company, Abbott Resources Inc., Abbott Resources International Inc., Abbott S.r.l., Abbott Saudi Arabia Trading Company, Abbott Scandinavia Aktiebolag, Abbott Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, Abbott South Africa Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Strategic Opportunities Limited, Abbott Trading Company Inc., Abbott Universal LLC, Abbott Vascular Devices (2) Limited, Abbott Vascular Devices Limited, Abbott Vascular Inc., Abbott Vascular Instruments Deutschland GmbH, Abbott Vascular International, Abbott Vascular Japan Co. Ltd, Abbott Vascular Limitada, Abbott Vascular Netherlands B.V., Abbott Vascular Solutions Inc., Abbott Ventures Inc., Abbott West Indies Limited, Abbott drustvo sa ogranicenom odgovornoscu za trgovinu i usluge, Advanced Neuromodulation Systems Inc., Alere, Alere (Shanghai) Diagnostics Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Healthcare Management Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Medical Sales Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Technology Co. Ltd., Alere A/S, Alere AB, Alere AS, Alere AS Holdings Limited, Alere BBI Holdings Limited, Alere Bangladesh Limited, Alere China Co. Ltd., Alere Colombia S.A., Alere Connect LLC, Alere Connected Health Limited, Alere Connected Health Ltd., Alere Diagnostics GmbH, Alere DoA Holding GmbH, Alere GmbH, Alere GmbH (Austria), Alere GmbH (Germany), Alere HK Holdings Ltd., Alere Health B.V., Alere Health BVBA, Alere Health Corp., Alere Health Sdn Bhd, Alere Health Services B.V., Alere Healthcare (Pty) Limited, Alere Healthcare Connections Limited, Alere Healthcare Inc., Alere Healthcare Nigeria Limited, Alere Healthcare S.L., Alere Holdco Inc., Alere Holding GmbH, Alere Holdings Bermuda Limited, Alere Holdings Pty Limited, Alere Home Monitoring Inc., Alere Inc., Alere Informatics Inc., Alere International Holding Corp., Alere International Limited, Alere Lda, Alere Limited, Alere Limited (New Zealand), Alere Medical BVBA, Alere Medical Co. Ltd., Alere Medical Pakistan (Private) Limited, Alere Medical Private Limited, Alere North America LLC, Alere Oy Ab, Alere Philippines Inc., Alere Phoenix ACQ Inc., Alere Pte Ltd, Alere S.A., Alere S.r.l., Alere S/A, Alere SAS, Alere San Diego Inc., Alere Scarborough Inc., Alere Spain S.L., Alere Switzerland GmbH, Alere Technologies GmbH, Alere Technologies Holdings Limited, Alere Technologies Limited, Alere Toxicology AB, Alere Toxicology Inc., Alere Toxicology S.r.l., Alere Toxicology Services Inc., Alere Toxicology plc, Alere UK Holdings Limited, Alere UK Subco Limited, Alere ULC, Alere US Holdings LLC, Alere s.r.o., Alisoc Investment & Co, Amedica Biotech Inc., Ameditech Inc., American Generics S.A.S., American Medical Supplies Inc., American Pharmacist Inc., Antares S.A., Apica Cardiovascular Limited, Aquagestion Capacitacion S.A., Aquagestion S.A., Arriva Medical LLC, Arriva Medical Philippines Inc., Arvis Investments Limited, Atlas Farmaceutica S.A., Avee Laboratories Inc., Axis-Shield AD III AS, Axis-Shield AD IV AS, Axis-Shield AS, Axis-Shield Diagnostics Limited, Axis-Shield Ltd., BBI Animal Health Limited, BBI Diagnostics Group 2 Public Limited Company, Banco de Vida S.A., Bioabsorbable Vascular Solutions Inc., Bioalgae S.A., Biohealth LLC, Biosite Incorporated, Bosque Bonito S.A., Branan Medical Corporation, Brandex Europe C.V., British Colloids Limited, CFR Chile S.A., CFR Interamericas EL Salvador Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, CFR Interamericas Nicaragua Sociedad Anonima, CFR Interamericas Panama S.A., CFR Pharmaceuticals, California Property Holdings III LLC, CardioMEMS LLC, Caripharm Inc., Cephea Valve Technologies, Cephea Valve Technologies Inc., Colibri Medical Aktiebolag, Comercializadora y Distribuidora CFR Interamericas Honduras S.A., Concateno South Limited, Concateno UK Limited, Consorcio Tecnologico en Biomedicina Clinico-Molecular S.A., Continuum Services LLC, Cozart Limited, Dextech S.A., Diagnostik Nord GmbH, Distribuciones Uquifa S.A.S., Domesco Medical Import-Export Joint-Stock Corporation, Duphar International Research B.V., Endocardial Solutions, Epocal (US) Inc, Esprit de Vie S.A., European Chemicals & Co, European Drug Testing Service EDTS AB, European Services S.A., Evalve Inc., Evalve International Inc., FARMINDUSTRIA S.A., Fada Pharma Paraguay Sociedad Anonima, Fadapharma del Ecuador S.A., Farmaceutica Mont Blanc S.L., Farmacologia Em Aquicultura Veterinaria Ltda., Farmacologia en Aquacultura Veterinaria FAV Ecuador S.A., Farmacologia en Aquacultura Veterinaria FAV S.A., Fernwood Investment S.A., First Check Diagnostics LLC, Focus Pharmaceutical S.A.S., Forensics Limited, Forestcreek Overseas S.A., Fournier Pharma Corp., Fournier Pharma GmbH, Fournier Pharmaceuticals Limited, Framed B.V., Gabmed GmbH, Garden Hills LLC, Global Analytical Development LLC, Globapharm & CO LP, Glomed Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Golnorth Investments S.A., Gynocare Limited, Gynopharm Sociedad Anonima, Gynopharm de Centroamerica S.A., Gynopharm de Venezuela C.A., Hi-Tronics Designs Inc., IDEV Technologies Inc., IG Innovations Limited, IMTC Finance B.V., IMTC Holdings B.V., IMTC Technologies Inc., Ibis Biosciences LLC, Igloo Zone Chile S.A., Igloo Zone S.L., Inmobiliaria Naknek S.A.C., Innovacon Inc., Instant Tech Subsidiary Acquisition Inc., Instant Technologies Inc., Instituto de Criopreservacion de Chile S.A., Integrated Vascular Systems Inc., Inverness Canadian Acquisition Corporation, Inverness Medical (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Inverness Medical Innovations Australia Pty Ltd., Inverness Medical Innovations Hong Kong Limited, Inverness Medical Innovations SK LLC, Inverness Medical Investments LLC, Inverness Medical LLC, Inverness Medical Shimla Private Limited, Inversiones K2 SpA, Inversiones Komodo S.R.L., Ionian Technologies LLC, Irvine Biomedical Inc., Kalila Medical, Kangshenyunga S.A., Knoll UK Investments Unlimited, LLC VeroInPharm, Laboratoires Fournier S.A.S., Laboratorio Franco Colombiano Lafrancol S.A.S., Laboratorio Franco Colombiano del Ecuador S.A., Laboratorio Internacional Argentino S.A., Laboratorio Synthesis S.A.S., Laboratorios Lafi Limitada, Laboratorios Naturmedik S.A.S., Laboratorios Pauly Pharmaceutical S.A.S., Laboratorios Recalcine S.A., Laboratorios Transpharm S.A., Laboratory Specialists of America Inc., Lafrancol Dominicana S.A.S., Lafrancol Guatemala S.A. Sociedad Anonima, Lafrancol Internacional S.A.S, Lafrancol Peru S.R.L, Lake Forest Investments LLC, Lightlab Imaging Inc., Limited Liability Company Abbott Laboratories, Limited Liability Company Abbott Ukraine, Limited Liability Company VEROPHARM, Lung Fung Hong (China) Limited, Mansbridge Pharmaceuticals Limited, MediGuide LLC, MediGuide Ltd., Medscreen Holdings Limited, Metropolitana Farmaceutica S.A., Midwest Properties LLC, Murex Argentina S.A., Murex Biotech Limited, Murex Biotech South Africa, Murex Diagnostics Inc., Murex Diagnostics International Inc., Natural Supplement Association LLC, Negocios Denia Sociedad Anonima, Neosalud S.A.C., Nether Pharma N.P. C.V., NeuroTherm LLC, Normann Pharma-Handels GmbH, North Shore Properties Inc., Novamedi S.A., Novasalud.com S.A., Nutravida S.A., OJSC Voronezhkhimpharm, Omnilab Iberia Sociedad Limitada, OptiMedica, Orgenics France SAS, Orgenics International Holdings B.V., Orgenics Ltd., PBM-Selfcare LLC, PDD II LLC, PDD LLC, PT Alere Health, PT. Abbott Indonesia, PT. Abbott Products Indonesia, Pacesetter Inc., Pantech (RF) (PTY) LTD, Pembrooke Occupational Health Inc., Penagos S.A., Pharma International Sociedad Anonima, Pharmaceutical Technologies (Pharmatech) S.A., Pharmatech Boliviana S.A., Polygon Labs S.A., Quality Assured Services Inc., RF Medical Holdings LLC, RTL Holdings Inc., Ramses Business Corp., Recben Xenerics Farmaceutica Limitada, Redwood Toxicology Laboratory Inc., Rich Horizons International Limited, SC VEROPHARM, SJ Medical Mexico S de R.L. de C.V., SJM International Inc., SJM Thunder Holding Company, SPDH Inc., Saboya Enterprises Corporation, Salviac Limited, Scanax AS, Sealing Solutions Inc., Selfcare Technology Inc., Shandong Abbott Dairy Product Co. Ltd., Shanghai Abbott Medical Devices Science and Technology Co. Ltd., Shanghai Abbott Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Shanghai Si Fa Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Sinensix & Co., Spinal Modulation LLC, St. Jude Medical, St. Jude Medical AB, St. Jude Medical ATG Inc., St. Jude Medical Argentina S.A., St. Jude Medical Asia Pacific Holdings GK, St. Jude Medical Atrial Fibrillation Division Inc., St. Jude Medical Brasil Ltda., St. Jude Medical Business Services Inc., St. Jude Medical Cardiology Division Inc., St. Jude Medical Colombia Ltda., St. Jude Medical Coordination Center, St. Jude Medical Costa Rica Limitada, St. Jude Medical Europe Inc., St. Jude Medical Export Ges.m.b.H., St. Jude Medical GVA Sarl, St. Jude Medical Holdings B.V., St. Jude Medical India Private Limited, St. Jude Medical International Holding, St. Jude Medical LLC, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings II, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings NT, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings SMI S.a r.l., St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings TC S.a r.l., St. Jude Medical Mexico Business Services S. de R.L. de C.V., St. Jude Medical Middle East DMCC, St. Jude Medical Operations (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., St. Jude Medical Puerto Rico LLC, St. Jude Medical S.C. Inc., St. Jude Medical Systems AB, St. Jude Medical Turkey Medikal Urunler Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Standard Diagnostics Inc., Standing Stone LLC, Swan-Myers Incorporated, TC1 LLC, Tendyne Holdings Inc., Tendyne Medical Inc., Thoratec Delaware LLC, Thoratec Europe Limited, Thoratec LLC, Thoratec Switzerland GmbH, Tobal Products Incorporated, Topera GmbH in Liquidation, Topera Inc., Tremora S.A., Tuenir S.A., TwistDx, UAB Abbott Laboratories, UAB Abbott Medical Lithuania, Union-Madison Realty Company Inc., Unipath Limited (dba Alere International/aka Cranfield), Unipath Management Limited, Unipath Pension Trustee Limited, Veropharm, Veropharm Limited Liability Partnership, Vida Cell Inversiones S.A., Vida Cell S.A., Vivalsol, W&R Pharma Handels GmbH, Western Pharmaceuticals S.A., X Technologies Inc., Yissum Holding Limited, ZonePerfect Nutrition Company, eScreen Canada ULC, eScreen Inc., ( ), and Abbott Laboratories Baltics. There is not enough analysis data for Curzon Energy. 4.7 Community Rank Outperform Votes Curzon Energy has received 36 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes Curzon Energy has received 16 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment Curzon Energy has received 69.23% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Curzon Energy and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe CZN will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe CZN will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next The following companies are subsidiares of Molina Healthcare: Aetna & Humana - Medicare Advantage, Affinity Health Plan, AmericanWork Inc., Better Health Network, Camelot Care Centers Inc, Children's Behavioral Health Inc., Choices Group Inc., College Community Services, Dockside Services Inc, Family Preservation Services Inc., Family Preservation Services of Florida Inc., Family Preservation Services of North Carolina Inc., Family Preservation Services of Washington D.C. Inc., Family Preservation Services of West Virginia Inc., Florida NetPASS LLC, Hclb Inc., Magellan Complete Care, Maple Star Nevada Inc., Maple Star Oregon Inc., Mercy CarePlus, Molina Clinical Services LLC, Molina Healthcare Data Center Inc., Molina Healthcare of Arizona Inc., Molina Healthcare of California, Molina Healthcare of Florida Inc., Molina Healthcare of Georgia Inc., Molina Healthcare of Illinois Inc., Molina Healthcare of Iowa Inc., Molina Healthcare of Louisiana Inc., Molina Healthcare of Maryland Inc., Molina Healthcare of Michigan Inc., Molina Healthcare of Mississippi Inc., Molina Healthcare of Nevada Inc., Molina Healthcare of New Mexico Inc., Molina Healthcare of New York Inc., Molina Healthcare of North Carolina Inc., Molina Healthcare of Ohio Inc., Molina Healthcare of Oklahoma Inc., Molina Healthcare of Pennsylvania Inc., Molina Healthcare of Puerto Rico Inc., Molina Healthcare of South Carolina LLC, Molina Healthcare of Texas Inc., Molina Healthcare of Texas Insurance Company, Molina Healthcare of Utah Inc., Molina Healthcare of Virginia Inc., Molina Healthcare of Washington Inc., Molina Healthcare of Wisconsin Inc., Molina Holdings Corporation, Molina Hospital Management LLC, Molina Information Systems LLC dba Molina Medicaid Solutions, Molina Medical Management Inc., Molina Pathways LLC, Molina Pathways of Texas Inc., Molina Youth Academy, NextLevel Health Illinois, Pathways Community Corrections Inc., Pathways Community Services LLC, Pathways Community Support of Texas Inc., Pathways Health and Community Support LLC, Pathways Human Services LLC., Pathways of Arizona Inc., Pathways of Delaware Inc., Pathways of Idaho LLC, Pathways of Maine Inc., Pathways of Massachusetts LLC, Pathways of Oklahoma Inc., Pathways of Washington Inc., Providence Community Services, Providence Human Services, Raystown Developmental Services Inc., The Game of Work LLC, The RedCo Group Inc., Total Care Medicaid plan, Transitional Family Services Inc., Unisys -Health Information Management, and YourCare Health Plan. The following companies are subsidiares of Exxon Mobil: AKG Marketing Company Limited, Aera Energy LLC, Al-Jubail Petrochemical Company, Ampolex (Cepu) Pte Ltd, Ancon Insurance Company Inc., Barnett Gathering LLC, Barzan Gas Company Limited, Caspian Pipeline Consortium, Celtic Exploration Ltd., Coral FLNG S.A., Cross Timbers Energy LLC, Ellora Energy Inc., Esmeroon Oil Transporta Imperial Oil Limited, Esso (Thailand) Public Company Limited, Esso Australia Resources Pty Ltd, Esso Deutschland GmbH, Esso Erdgas Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH, Esso Exploration Angola (Block 15) Limited, Esso Exploration Angola (Block 17) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Angola (Overseas) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Chad Inc., Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria (Deepwater) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria (Offshore East) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria Limited, Esso Exploration and Production UK Limited, Esso Global Investments Ltd., Esso Italiana S.r.l., Esso Nederland B.V., Esso Norge AS, Esso Petroleum Company Limited, Esso Raffinage, Esso Societe Anonyme Francaise, Exxo Holdings Inc., Exxon Azerbaijan Limited, Exxon Chemical Arabia Inc., Exxon International Finance Company, Exxon Luxembourg Holdings LLC, Exxon Mobile Bay Limited Partnership, Exxon Neftegas Limited, Exxon Overseas Corporation, Exxon Overseas Investment Corporation, ExxonMobil (China) Investment Co. Ltd., ExxonMobil (Taicang) Petroleum Co. Ltd., ExxonMobil Abu Dhabi Offshore Petroleum Company Limited, ExxonMobil Alaska Production Inc., ExxonMobil Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., ExxonMobil Australia Pty Ltd, ExxonMobil B Resources Company, ExxonMobil Capital Finance Company, ExxonMobil Capital Netherlands B.V., ExxonMobil Central Europe Holding GmbH, ExxonMobil Cepu Limited, ExxonMobil Chemical France, ExxonMobil Chemical Gulf Coast Investments LLC, ExxonMobil Chemical Holland B.V., ExxonMobil Chemical Services (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., ExxonMobil China Petroleum & Petrochemical Company Limited, ExxonMobil Development Africa B.V., ExxonMobil Development Company, ExxonMobil Egypt (S.A.E.), ExxonMobil Exploracao Brasil Ltda., ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Malaysia Inc., ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Norway AS, ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Romania Limited, ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Tanzania Limited, ExxonMobil Finance Company Limited, ExxonMobil Financial Investment Company Limited, ExxonMobil France Holding SAS, ExxonMobil Gas Marketing Europe Limited, ExxonMobil General Finance Company, ExxonMobil Global Services Company, ExxonMobil Golden Pass Surety LLC, ExxonMobil Holding Company Holland LLC, ExxonMobil Holding Norway AS, ExxonMobil Hong Kong Limited, ExxonMobil International Services SARL, ExxonMobil Iraq Limited, ExxonMobil Italiana Gas S.r.l., ExxonMobil Kazakhstan Inc., ExxonMobil Kazakhstan Ventures Inc., ExxonMobil LNG Services B.V., ExxonMobil Lubricants Trading Company, ExxonMobil Oil Corporation, ExxonMobil PNG Limited, ExxonMobil Petroleum & Chemical BVBA, ExxonMobil Petroleum & Chemical Holdings Inc., ExxonMobil Pipeline Company, ExxonMobil Production Deutschland GmbH, ExxonMobil Production Norway Inc., ExxonMobil Qatargas (II) Limited, ExxonMobil Qatargas Inc., ExxonMobil Ras Laffan (III) Limited, ExxonMobil Rasgas Inc., ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company, ExxonMobil Russia Kara Sea Holdings B.V., ExxonMobil Sales and Supply LLC, ExxonMobil Technology Finance Company, ExxonMobil Ventures Finance Company, ExxonMobil Ventures Funding Ltd., Fujian Refining & Petrochemical Co. Ltd., Golden Pass LNG Terminal Investments LLC, Golden Pass LNG Terminal LLC, Gulf Coast Growth Ventures LLC, Imperial Oil Limited, Imperial Oil Resources Limited, Imperial Oil Resources N.W.T. Limited, Imperial Oil/Petroliere Imperiale, Infineum Italia s.r.I., Infineum Singapore Pte. Ltd., InterOil Corporation, Jurong Aromatics Corporation Pte Ltd, MPM Lubricants, Marine Well Containment Company LLC, Mobil Australia Resources Company Pty Limited, Mobil California Exploration & Producing Asset Company, Mobil Caspian Pipeline Company, Mobil Chemical Products International Inc., Mobil Corporation, Mobil Equatorial Guinea Inc., Mobil Erdgas Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, Mobil Exploration & Producing Australia Pty Ltd, Mobil International Petroleum Corporation, Mobil Oil Australia Pty Ltd, Mobil Oil Exploration & Producing Southeast Inc., Mobil Oil New Zealand Limited, Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited, Mobil Producing Texas & New Mexico Inc., Mobil SerLimited, Mobil Venezolana De Petroleos Inc., Mobil Yanbu Petrochemical Company Inc., Mobil Yanbu Refining Company Inc., Mountain Gathering LLC, Mozambique Rovuma Venture S.p.A., Palmetto Transoceanic LLC, Papua New Guinea Liquefied Natural Gas Global Company LDC, Permian Express Partners LLC, Phillips Exploration LLC, Qatar Liquefied Gas Company Limited, Ras Laffan Liquefied Natural Gas Company Limited, Ras Laffan Liquefied Natural Gas Company Limited (II), SPI Limited, Saudi Aramco Mobil Refinery Company Ltd., Saudi Yanbu Petrochemical Co., SeaRiver Maritime Inc., South Hook LNG Terminal Company Limited, Tengizchevroil LLP, Terminale GNL Adriatico S.r.l, Trend Gathering & Treating LLC, Wolverine Pipe Line Company, XH LLC, XTO Delaware Basin LLC, XTO ENERGY, XTO Energy Canada, and XTO Holdings LLC. Glanbia plc operates as a nutrition company worldwide. It operates through three segments: Glanbia Performance Nutrition, Glanbia Nutritionals, and Glanbia Ireland. The Glanbia Performance Nutrition segment manufactures and sells sports nutrition and lifestyle nutrition products in various formats, including powders, ready-to-eat bars and snacking foods, and ready-to-drink beverages through various channels, such as specialty retail, e-Commerce, and gyms, as well the food, drug, mass, and club channels. The Glanbia Nutritionals segment engages in the manufacture and sale of cheese, dairy and non-dairy nutritional and functional ingredients, and vitamin and mineral premixes. The Glanbia Ireland segment produces and sells a range of value added dairy ingredients and consumer products. This segment also sells animal nutrition and fertilizer products; and operates a chain of agricultural retail outlets in Ireland. The company also engages in the financing, research and development, property and land dealing, receivables management, management, property leasing, business service, and weight management solutions businesses. It operates a portfolio of brands, including OPTIMUM NUTRITION, SlimFast, BSN, ISOPURE, NUTRAMINO, ABB, think!, Amazing Grass, and BODY&FIT brands. Glanbia plc was founded in 1964 and is headquartered in Kilkenny, Ireland. Read More Spirent Communications plc provides test, assurance, and analytics solutions for devices and networks in the Americas, the Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. It operates through Networks & Security and Lifecycle Service Assurance segments. The Networks & Security segment provides high-speed Ethernet/IP performance testing for the development and validation of new equipment, networks, and applications for cloud and mobile; consulting services, test tools, methodologies, and security validation solutions; global navigation satellite system (GNSS) simulation products; and positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) solutions, as well as develops test methodologies, tools, and services for virtualized networks and cloud. The Lifecycle Service Assurance segment offers lab-based testing of mobile core networks and cellular and Wi-Fi devices; solutions that reduce the time and cost to turn-up new services, as well as to diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve issues with production networks and services; and automated test solutions and services for mobile devices and supported voice, video, and location services in the lab or on operational networks. It also offers automated wireless test solutions and methodologies to the wireless industry and communication service providers, as well as chipset, device, network infrastructure, and Wi-Fi equipment vendors. The company was formerly known as Spirent plc and changed its name to Spirent Communications plc in May 2006. Spirent Communications plc was founded in 1936 and is headquartered in Crawley, the United Kingdom. Read More There is not enough analysis data for Gouverneur Bancorp. 4.5 Community Rank Outperform Votes Gouverneur Bancorp has received 61 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes Gouverneur Bancorp has received 29 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment Gouverneur Bancorp has received 67.78% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Gouverneur Bancorp and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe GOVB will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe GOVB will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next Reinsurance Group of America, Inc. is a holding company, which engages in the provision of traditional and non-traditional life and health reinsurance products. It operates through the following segments: U.S. and Latin America; Canada; Europe, Middle East, and Africa; Asia Pacific; and Corporate and Other. The U.S. and Latin America segment markets individual and group life and health reinsurance to domestic clients for a variety of products through yearly renewable term agreements, coinsurance, and modified coinsurance. The Canada segment offers individual life reinsurance, and to a lesser extent creditor, group life and health, critical illness and disability reinsurance, through yearly renewable term and coinsurance agreements. The Europe, Middle East, and Africa segment serves individual and group life and health products through yearly renewable term and coinsurance agreements, reinsurance of critical illness coverage that provides a benefit in the event of the diagnosis of a pre-defined critical illness and underwritten annuities. The Asia Pacific segment comprises individual and group life and health reinsurance, critical illness coverage, disability, and superannuation thr Read More Heidelberger Druckmaschinen Aktiengesellschaft, together with its subsidiaries, manufactures, sells, and deals in printing press and other print media industry products in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia/Pacific, Eastern Europe, North America, and South America. It operates through Heidelberg Digital Technology, Heidelberg Lifecycle Solutions, and Heidelberg Financial Services segments. The company offers printing machines, including digital, offset, narrow web, screen, and inline-flexo printing, as well as remarketed equipment; and finishing equipment comprising cutting, die-cutting and embossing, folding, inspection, folding carton gluing, and hot foil stamping. It also provides technical services, such as installation and relocation, maintenance and cleaning, remote support, repair, and overhauling services, as well as service parts; and performance services consisting of performance evaluation, color management, training, upgrades and retrofits, monitoring, output optimization, print shop optimization, and investment planning. In addition, the company offers financial services; and consumables, such as CtP printing and analog plates, films, platemaking chemicals, proofing materials, toners, glues, staple cartridges, hole punching supplies, inks, coatings and varnishes, blankets, rollers, chemicals, pressroom supplies, cutting knives, banderoles, dispersion glues, binding glues, stitching wires and sealing threads, and folding carton gluing supplies. Further, it provides software solutions; and consulting and other services in the field of mechanical, engineering, electronics, and electrical engineering, and the metal industry. The company was formerly known as Schnellpressenfabrik AG Heidelberg and changed its name to Heidelberger Druckmaschinen Aktiengesellschaft in 1967. Heidelberger Druckmaschinen Aktiengesellschaft was founded in 1850 and is based in Heidelberg, Germany. Read More Ibstock plc manufactures and sells clay and concrete building products and solutions primarily in the United Kingdom. Its principal products include clay bricks, brick components, concrete roof tiles, concrete stone masonry substitutes, concrete fencing, pre-stressed concrete, and concrete rail products. The company provides facing bricks, walling stones, architectural masonry products, cast stones, facade systems, and retaining walls, as well as lintels, sills, and arches; and cladding solutions; roof tiles, chimneys, soffits, and roofing accessories; and fencings, caps and copings, bollards, balustrades, path edgings, and urban landscaping products. It also offers floor beams, door steps, gully surrounds, screed rails, insulated floorings, and hollowcore products; and rail and infrastructure products, such as troughing, cable theft protection, boards, blocks, bases, catchpits, and inspection chambers. In addition, the company offers engraving, cutting, and bonding services; floor beam and block design, supply, and fitting solutions; bespoke concrete products; and staircases and lift shafts services. Its products are used in new build housing; repair, maintenance, and improvement; and infrastructure markets. The company sells its products under the Forticrete, Supreme, Anderton, and Longley brands to customers in the construction industry. Ibstock plc was founded in 1825 and is headquartered in Ibstock, the United Kingdom. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Iron Mountain: AB Archyvu Centras, AB Archyvu Sistemos, AB Archyvu Sistemos Estonia Branch, AS Archivu Serviss, Accutrac Software Inc, ArchivesOne, Archyvu sistemos, Arhiv-Trezor d.o.o., Ausdoc Group Pty Limited, Ausdoc Holdings Pty Limited, Bonded Services (International) B.V., Bonded Services Acquisition Ltd., Bonded Services Group, Bonded Services Group Limited, Bonded Services International Limited, Bonded Services Limited, Box Butler, Britannia Data Management Limited, Capital Vision Holdings SAS, Capital Vision SAS, Connected Corporation, Cornerstone Records Management, Crozier Fine Arts, Crozier Schweiz Ag, Custodia S.O.S. SA, DBJ Limited, DMS Storage s.r.o., DigiGuard, Disaster Recovery Services Limited, Docscan Cape Town Proprietary Limited, Docscan Proprietary Limited, Docu-File JHB Proprietary Limited, DocuTar Iratrendezo es Tarolo Szolgaltato Kft., DocuVault, Docufile (Pty) Ltd, EAC Invest, Eurospags Investments ApS, EvoSwitch, F.T.S. (Freight Forwarders) Limited, F.T.S. (Great Britain) Limited, F.T.S. (Road Transport) Limited, FTS Bonded Limited, Fairfield Fine Art, File Express Limited, Film Media Services Limited, First International Records Management AG, First International Records Management LLC, Fleet Freight Limited, Fontis International GmbH, Fortrust, G4S Secure Data Solutions Colombia, Glenbeign Records Mangement (GRM) DWC-LLC, Global Logistics Worldwide Limited, Haworth Group Holdings (UK) Limited, Haworth Group Limited, Hays IMS, Helcom Limited, IG2 Data Security, IM Mortgage Solutions LLC, IMI Investments Two Ltd, IMSA Peru SRL, IO.com, Information Storage Consolidation Co, Iron Mountain (Deutschland) Service GmbH, Iron Mountain (Espana) Services S.L, Iron Mountain (Gibraltar) Holdings Limited, Iron Mountain (Ireland) Services Limited, Iron Mountain (Nederland) Data Centre B.V., Iron Mountain (Nederland) Data Centre Holdings B.V., Iron Mountain (Nederland) Data Centre Services B.V., Iron Mountain (Nederland) Services BV, Iron Mountain (Schweiz) AG, Iron Mountain (UK) Data Centre Limited, Iron Mountain (UK) EES Holdings Limited, Iron Mountain (UK) PLC, Iron Mountain (UK) Services Limited, Iron Mountain A/S, Iron Mountain Acquisition Holdings Pty. Ltd., Iron Mountain Argentina S.A., Iron Mountain Arsivleme Hizmetleri A.S., Iron Mountain Asia Pacific Holdings Ltd, Iron Mountain Asia Pte Limited, Iron Mountain Australia Group Pty. Ltd., Iron Mountain Australia Group Services Pty. Ltd., Iron Mountain Australia Property Holdings Pty Ltd, Iron Mountain Austria Archivierung Gmbh, Iron Mountain BPM SPRL, Iron Mountain Belgium NV, Iron Mountain Bulgaria, Iron Mountain Canada Operations ULC, Iron Mountain Ceska Republika S.R.O., Iron Mountain Chile S.A., Iron Mountain Chile Servicios S.A., Iron Mountain Cloud LLC, Iron Mountain Colombia S.A.S., Iron Mountain Cyprus Limited, Iron Mountain DIMS Limited, Iron Mountain Data Centers LLC, Iron Mountain Data Centers Services LLC, Iron Mountain Data Centre Pte. Limited, Iron Mountain Data Management (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Iron Mountain Data Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Iron Mountain Deutschland GmbH, Iron Mountain Do Brasil Ltda, Iron Mountain Document Holdings Sweden AB, Iron Mountain Document Storage Services LLC, Iron Mountain EES Holdings Ltd., Iron Mountain Enterprises Sdn. Bhd., Iron Mountain Espana SA, Iron Mountain Eswatini (Pty) Ltd, Iron Mountain Europe (Group) Limited, Iron Mountain Europe Ltd., Iron Mountain FZ-LLC, Iron Mountain Finland OY, Iron Mountain France S.A.S., Iron Mountain Fulfillment Services Inc., Iron Mountain Global Holdings Inc., Iron Mountain Global LLC, Iron Mountain Group (Europe) Limited, Iron Mountain Hellas SA, Iron Mountain Holdings (Europe) Limited, Iron Mountain Holdings (France) SNC, Iron Mountain Holdings Sweden AB, Iron Mountain Hong Kong Ltd., Iron Mountain Incorporated, Iron Mountain India Private Ltd, Iron Mountain Information Management LLC, Iron Mountain Information Management Services Canada Inc., Iron Mountain Information Management Services Inc., Iron Mountain Intellectual Property Management Inc., Iron Mountain International (Holdings) Ltd, Iron Mountain International Holdings BV, Iron Mountain Ireland Holdings Limited, Iron Mountain Ireland Limited, Iron Mountain Korea Limited, Iron Mountain Latin America Holdings Sociedad Limitada, Iron Mountain Lesotho (Proprietry) Limited, Iron Mountain Luxembourg Sarl, Iron Mountain Luxembourg Services S.a.r.l., Iron Mountain MDM Limited, Iron Mountain Macau Limited, Iron Mountain Magyarorszag Kereskedelmi es Szolgaltato Kft., Iron Mountain Management Services GmbH, Iron Mountain Mayflower Limited, Iron Mountain Mexico Holding S. de RL de CV, Iron Mountain Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Iron Mountain Mexico Servicios S. de RL de CV, Iron Mountain Mortgage Finance Holdings LLC, Iron Mountain Mortgage Finance I LLC, Iron Mountain Nederland B.V., Iron Mountain Nederland Holdings B.V., Iron Mountain New Zealand Limited, Iron Mountain Norge AS, Iron Mountain Participations SA, Iron Mountain Peru S.A., Iron Mountain Philippines Inc., Iron Mountain Poland Holdings Ltd, Iron Mountain Polska Services Sp z.o.o., Iron Mountain Polska Sp. z.o.o., Iron Mountain Receivables QRS LLC, Iron Mountain Receivables TRS LLC, Iron Mountain Records Management (Puerto Rico) Inc, Iron Mountain Records Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Iron Mountain SRL, Iron Mountain Sdn. Bhd., Iron Mountain Secure Shredding (Pty) Ltd, Iron Mountain Secure Shredding Canada Inc., Iron Mountain Secure Shredding Inc., Iron Mountain Services Private Ltd, Iron Mountain Services S.A.S., Iron Mountain Shanghai Co Ltd, Iron Mountain Singapore Pte. Ltd., Iron Mountain Slovakia s.r.o., Iron Mountain South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Iron Mountain South Africa Holdings (Pty) Ltd, Iron Mountain South Africa Information Management (Pty) Ltd, Iron Mountain South Africa Records Management (Pty) Ltd, Iron Mountain South America Sarl, Iron Mountain Southeast Asia Holdings Limited, Iron Mountain Sweden AB, Iron Mountain Taiwan Ltd., Iron Mountain UK Services (Holdings) Ltd, Iron Mountain US Holdings Inc, Iron Mountain Vietnam Company Limited, Iron Mountain d.o.o. Novi Banovci, Jigsaw Freight Limited, Jigsaw Pieces Limited, Jin Shan Limited, KDM Spectrumdata Pty Ltd, KH Data Capital Development Land LLC, Lane Archives Technologies Corporation, Livevault, Marshgate Morangis Sarl, Mimosa Systems, Nettlebed Acquisition Corp., Novo Group Limited, Novo Holdings Limited, Novo Overseas Limited, NxtGen Data Center & Cloud Services, OEC Records Management Company Private Limited, OSG Records Management (Europe) Limited, OSG Records Management Center LLC, OSG Records Management Centre LLC, OSG Records Management Crypto LLC, OSG Records Management Foreign LLC, OSG Records Management LLC, OSG Records Management LLC (Ukraine), OSG Records Management LLP, OSG Services sp. zoo, Oda International Management Corporation NV, Osrecki d.o.o., PT Iron Mountain Indonesia, Preferred Media Ltd, Prism Integrated Sdn Bhd, Recall, Recall (London) Limited, Recall (Shanghai) Ltd., Recall Europe Finance Ltd., Recall Europe Limited, Recall GQ Ltd, Recall Holdings, Recall Holdings Limited, Recall India Information Management Pvt. Ltd., Recall International Pty Limited, Recall Italy SRL, Recall Limited, Recall Overseas Holdings Pty Limited, Recall Shredding Limited, Recall Technology Pty. Ltd., Recall Total Information Management India Pvt. Ltd., Record Data Limited, Royal Seal S.R.O., SIA RIATech, Saracen Datastore Limited, Shanghai Iron Mountain Data Storage Co. Ltd., Shuttle SRL, Startify, Superior Storage Limited, UAB Confidento, and Xepa Digital. The following companies are subsidiares of SAP: Abakus, Abakus Europe Limited, Abakus Ukraine Limited Liability Company, Adatfeldolgozasban Informatikai Kft., Altiscale, Ambin Properties Proprietary Limited, AppGyver, Ariba, Ariba Czech s.r.o., Ariba Inc. Palo Alto, Ariba India Private Limited, Ariba International, Ariba International Holdings, Ariba International Singapore Pte Ltd, Ariba Slovak Republic s.r.o., Ariba Software Technology Services (Shanghai) Co., Ariba Technologies India Private Limited, Ariba Technologies Netherlands B.V., Beijing Zhang Zhong Hu Dong Information Technology, Business Objects, Business Objects Holding B.V., Business Objects Option LLC, Business Objects Software Limited, CNQR Operations Mexico S. de. R.L. de. C.V., Callidus Software, CallidusCloud, Christie Partners Holding C.V., Clear Standards, ClearTrip Inc., ClearTrip Inc. (Mauritius), Cleartrip MEA FZ LLC, Cleartrip Private Limited, Coghead, ConTgo Consulting Limited, ConTgo Pty. Ltd., Concur (Austria) GmbH, Concur (Canada), Concur (France) SAS, Concur (Germany) GmbH, Concur (Japan) Ltd., Concur (New Zealand) Limited, Concur (Philippines) Inc., Concur (Switzerland) GmbH, Concur Czech (s.r.o.), Concur Holdings (France) SAS, Concur Holdings (Netherlands) B.V., Concur Technologies (Australia) Pty. Limited, Concur Technologies (Hong Kong) Limited, Concur Technologies (India) Private Limited, Concur Technologies (Singapore) Pte Ltd, Concur Technologies (UK) Limited, Concur Technologies Inc. Bellevue, Contextor, Coresystems, Crystal Decisions (Ireland) Limited, Crystal Decisions Holdings Limited, Crystal Decisions UK Limited, Emarsys, EssCubed Procurement Pty. Ltd., Extended Systems, Factory Logic, Fedem Technology AS, Fieldglass Europe Limited, Financial Fusion, FreeMarkets Ltda., Frictionless Commerce, Gigya, Gigya Australia Pty Ltd, Gigya Ltd., Gigya UK Ltd, GlobalExpense Limited, Highdeal, Hipmunk, Hybris (US) Corp., Hybris GmbH, Inxight Federal Systems Group, KXEN, Khimetrics, LLC "SAP Labs", LLC "SAP Ukraine", LLC SAP CIS, MaXware, Merlin Systems Oy, Multiposting Sp.z o.o., Nihon Ariba K.K., OpTier, OutlookSoft, OutlookSoft Deutschland GmbH, PLAT.ONE, PT SAP Indonesia, PT Sybase 365 Indonesia, Pilot Software Inc., Plat.One Inc., Plat.One Lab Srl, Plateau Systems LLC, Quadrem Africa Pty. Ltd., Quadrem Brazil Ltda., Quadrem Chile Ltda., Quadrem Colombia SAS, Quadrem International Ltd., Quadrem Netherlands B.V., Quadrem Overseas Cooperatief U.A., Quadrem Peru S.A.C., Qualtrics, Recast.AI, Right Hemisphere, Roambi, Ruan Lian Technologies (Beijing) Co., SAF, SAP (Beijing) Software System Co., SAP (Schweiz) AG, SAP (Schweiz) AG Biel, SAP (UK) Limited, SAP (UK) Limited Feltham, SAP AZ LLC, SAP America, SAP America Inc. Newtown Square, SAP Andina y del Caribe, SAP Argentina S.A., SAP Asia (Vietnam) Co., SAP Asia Pte Ltd, SAP Australia Pty Ltd, SAP Australia Pty Ltd. Sydney, SAP Belgium NV/SA, SAP Beteiligungs GmbH, SAP Brasil Ltda, SAP Brasil Ltda Sao Paulo, SAP Bulgaria EOOD, SAP Business Compliance Services GmbH, SAP Business Services Center Nederland B.V., SAP CR, SAP Canada, SAP Chile Limitada, SAP China Co., SAP China Co. Ltd. Shanghai, SAP China Holding Co., SAP Colombia S.A.S., SAP Commercial Services Ltd., SAP Concur, SAP Costa Rica, SAP Customer Experience, SAP Cyprus Limited, SAP Danmark A/S, SAP Deutschland SE & Co. KG, SAP Deutschland SE & Co. KG Walldorf, SAP Dritte Beteiligungs- und Vermogensverwaltungs GmbH, SAP EMEA Inside Sales S.L., SAP East Africa Limited, SAP Egypt LLC, SAP Erste Beteiligungs- und Vermogensverwaltungs GmbH, SAP Espana - Sistemas Informatica, SAP Estonia OU, SAP Fieldglass, SAP Financial, SAP Finland Oy, SAP Foreign Holdings GmbH, SAP France, SAP France Holding, SAP France Levallois Perret, SAP Global Marketing, SAP Hellas S.A., SAP Holdings (UK) Limited, SAP Hong Kong Co., SAP Hosting Beteiligungs GmbH, SAP Hungary Rendszerek, SAP India (Holding) Pte Ltd, SAP India Private Limited, SAP India Private Limited Bangalore, SAP Industries, SAP Industries Inc. Newtown Square, SAP International, SAP International Panama, SAP Investments, SAP Ireland Limited, SAP Ireland US - Financial Services Designated Activity Company, SAP Israel Ltd., SAP Italia Sistemi Applicazioni Prodotti in Data Processing S.p.A., SAP Italia Sistemi Applicazioni Prodotti in Data Processing S.p.A. Vimercate, SAP Japan Co., SAP Japan Co. Ltd. Tokyo, SAP Kazakhstan LLP, SAP Korea Ltd., SAP Labs, SAP Labs Bulgaria EOOD, SAP Labs Finland Oy, SAP Labs France SAS, SAP Labs India Private Limited, SAP Labs Israel Ltd., SAP Labs Korea, SAP Latvia SIA, SAP MENA FZ L.L.C., SAP Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., SAP Malta Investments Ltd., SAP Mxico S.A. de C.V., SAP National Security Services PA, SAP Nederland B.V., SAP Nederland B.V. s-Hertogenbosch, SAP Service and Support Centre (Ireland) Limited, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP d.o.o., SeeWhy, Signavio, SuccessFactors, SuccessFactors Inc. South San Francisco, Sybase, Syclo, TopTier Software, Triversity, Vimercate, Virsa Systems, Visiprise, Wicom Communications, and conTgo limited. Kodal Minerals Plc engages in the exploration and evaluation of mineral resources in the United Kingdom and West Africa. The company explores for lithium and gold deposits. Its flagship project is the Bougouni Lithium project located in southern Mali. The company holds 100% interest in the Bougouni West lithium project, which covers an area of 200 square kilometers located in southern Mali; and holds 100% interest in the Nangalasso project located in southern Mali, the SLAM Project located in Mali, the Dabakala project located in central Cote d'Ivoire, and the Korhogo project located in north central CAte d'Ivoire. Kodal Minerals Plc was incorporated in 2010 and is based in London, the United Kingdom. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of TransUnion: Accupost Corporation, AppLock Limited, Auditz, Autolocator (Pty) Ltd., Beheer en Beleggingsmaatchapij Stivaco B.V., CIFIN S.A.S, [email protected] plc, Callcredit Data Solutions Limited, Callcredit Information, Callcredit Lead Generation Limited, Callcredit Marketing Ltd., Callcredit Public Sector Limited, Callcredit Spain S.L.U, Centro de Informacion y Estudios Estrategicos Empresariales S.A., Centro de Operaciones Servicios de Informacion Estrategica S.A., CheckMend Ltd., Coactiva Limited, Collection Africa Ltd., Confirma Sistemas de Informacion S.L., Credit Bureau of Carmel & Pebble Beach Inc., Credit Information Services Limited, Credit Information Systems Company Limited, Credit Reference Bureau (Holdings) Limited, Credit Reference Bureau Africa (Pty) Ltd., Credit Reference Bureau Africa Ltd., Credit Reporting Services Limited, Credit Retriever LLC, Crivo, Crown Acquisition BidCo Ltd., Crown Acquisition Consumer Ltd., Crown Acquisition MidCo Ltd., Crown Acquisition MidCo. 2 Ltd., Crown Acquisition TopCo. Ltd., DMWSL 617 Ltd., DMWSL 618 Ltd., DMWSL 619 Ltd., DMWSL 620 Ltd., DataLink Services, Datalink Services Inc., Decision Systems Inc., DecisionMetrics Limited, Diversified Data Development Corporation, Drivers History Inc., Drivers History Information Sales LLC, FT Holdings Inc., FactorTrust, FactorTrust Inc., GMAP Japan KK, GMAP Marketing Consulting Shangahi Co. Ltd, Healthcare Payment Specialists, INSDEC LLC, IS Resources Inc., Immobilise.com Limited, L2C Inc., L2C Inc., Link Marketing Inc., Link2credit Inc., Moussoro Participacoes Ltda., RTech, RTech Healthcare Revenue Technologies Inc., Recipero, Recipero Inc., Recipero Limited, Regional Data Systems Limited, RentPort, Rubixis, Rubixis Inc., Rubixis Technologies Private Limited, STS Vail Beheeren Administracion S. DE. R.L. DE C.V., Servicios y Asesoria S CO BC SA de CV, Signal, Soluciones de Informatica de Centroamerica (SICE) S.A., Source USA Insurance Agency Inc., Tenant ID Limited, Title Insurance Services Corporation, Trans Union Central America S.A., Trans Union Chile S.A., Trans Union Content Solutions LLC, Trans Union Costa Rica S.A., Trans Union Guatemala S.A., Trans Union Honduras-Buro de Credito S.A., Trans Union International Inc., Trans Union LLC, Trans Union Nicaragua S.A., Trans Union Real Estate Services Inc., Trans Union Software Services Private Limited, Trans Union de Puerto Rico Inc., Trans Union of Canada Inc., TransUnion (Mauritius) Limited, TransUnion (Proprietary) Ltd., TransUnion Africa (Pty) Ltd., TransUnion Africa Holdings (Pty) Ltd., TransUnion Analytic and Decision Services (Pty) Ltd., TransUnion Asia Ltd., TransUnion Auto Information Solutions (Pty) Ltd., TransUnion Baltics UAB, TransUnion Brasil Sistemas em Informatica Ltda., TransUnion CIBIL Limited, TransUnion Colombia Ltda., TransUnion Consumer Solutions LLC, TransUnion Credit Bureau (Pty) Ltd., TransUnion Credit Bureau Namibia (Pty) Ltd., TransUnion Data Solutions LLC, TransUnion Digital LLC, TransUnion El Salvador S.A. de C.V., TransUnion Exchange LLC, TransUnion Financing Corporation, TransUnion Global Holdings LLC, TransUnion Global Holdings LP, TransUnion Global Technology Center LLP, TransUnion Healthcare Inc., TransUnion Holding Cyprus Ltd., TransUnion ITC (Pty) Ltd., TransUnion Information Group Limited, TransUnion Information Services Limited, TransUnion Information Solutions Inc., TransUnion Information Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd., TransUnion Intelligence LLC, TransUnion Interactive Inc., TransUnion Intermediate Holdings Inc., TransUnion International Holdings LLC, TransUnion International UK Limited, TransUnion Kenya Limited, TransUnion Limited, TransUnion Ltd., TransUnion Marketing Solutions Inc., TransUnion Netherlands I B.V., TransUnion Netherlands II B.V., TransUnion Rental Screening Solutions Inc., TransUnion Reverse Exchange S de R.L. de C.V., TransUnion Risk Advisory Inc., TransUnion Risk and Alternative Data Solutions Inc., TransUnion Rwanda Limited, TransUnion S.A., TransUnion Soluciones de Informacion Chile SA, TransUnion Soluciones de Informacion S de R.L de C.V., TransUnion Teledata LLC, TransUnion UK Holdings Ltd., Tru Optik, TruSignal, TruSignal Inc., TrueLink, Trustev, Trustev Limited, Vail Holdings UK Ltd., Vail Systemen Groep B.V., Verifacts LLC, Visionary Systems Inc., Worthknowing Inc., eBureau, eBureau LLC, iovation Inc., iovation Ltd., and process benchmarking limited. There is not enough analysis data for Marijuana Company of America. 4.7 Community Rank Outperform Votes Marijuana Company of America has received 144 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes Marijuana Company of America has received 64 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment Marijuana Company of America has received 69.23% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Marijuana Company of America and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe MCOA will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe MCOA will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next New Jersey Resources Corp. is a holding company. The firm provides safe and reliable natural gas and clean energy services, including transportation, distribution, asset management and home services. It operates through the following segments: New Jersey Natural Gas, NJR Clean Energy Ventures, NJR Energy Services, NJR Midstream, and NJR Home Services. The New Jersey Natural Gas segment provides regulated retail natural gas service to residential and commercial customers in central and northern New Jersey. The NJR Clean Energy Ventures segment invests in, owns and operates solar projects. The NJR Energy Services segment manages a diversified portfolio of natural gas transportation and storage assets and provides physical natural gas services in the U.S. and Canada. The NJR Midstream segment serves customers from local distributors and producers to electric generators and wholesale marketers. The NJR Home Services segment provides heating, ventilation and cooling service, sales and installation of appliances services to its customers, as well as solar installation projects, and is the primary contributor to home services. The company was founded in 1981 and is headquartered in Wall, Read More Nuveen Connecticut Quality Municipal Income Fund is a closed ended fixed income mutual fund launched by Nuveen Investments, Inc. The fund is managed by Nuveen Fund Advisors LLC and Nuveen Asset Management, LLC. It invests in the fixed income markets of Connecticut. The fund invests into undervalued municipal securities and other related investments the income from which is exempt from regular federal and Connecticut income taxes. It seeks to invest in investment grade securities with an average maturity of around 17 years. The fund employs fundamental analysis with a focus on bottom-up stock picking approach to create its portfolio. It benchmarks the performance of its portfolio against Standard & Poor's (S&P) Connecticut Municipal Bond Index and Standard & Poor's (S&P) National Municipal Bond Index. The fund was formerly known as Nuveen Connecticut Premium Income Municipal Fund. Nuveen Connecticut Quality Municipal Income Fund was formed on January 12, 1993 and is domiciled in the United States. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Procter & Gamble: "Procter & Gamble Services" LLC, "Procter & Gamble" LLC, Agile Pursuits, Agile Pursuits Franchising, Arbora, Arbora & Ausonia, Arborinvest, Billie, Braun (Shanghai) Co., Braun GmbH, Braun-Gillette Immobilien GmbH & Co. KG, Celtic Insurance Company, Compania Procter & Gamble Mexico, Compania Quimica S.A., Corporativo Procter & Gamble, Cosmetic Products Pty. Ltd., Detergent Products B.V., Detergent Products SARL, Detergenti S.A., Eurocos Cosmetic GmbH, FPG Oleochemicals Sdn. Bhd., Fameccanica Data S.p.A., Fameccanica Industria e Comercio Do Brasil LTDA., Fameccanica Machinery (Shanghai) Co., Fater S.p.A., Fountain Square Music Publishing Co., Gillette (China) Ltd., Gillette (Shanghai) Ltd., Gillette Aesop Ltd., Gillette Australia Pty. Ltd., Gillette Canada Holdings, Gillette Commercial Operations North America, Gillette Diversified Operations Pvt. Ltd., Gillette Egypt S.A.E., Gillette Group UK Ltd, Gillette Gruppe Deutschland GmbH & Co. oHG, Gillette Holding Company LLC, Gillette Holding GmbH, Gillette India Limited, Gillette Industries Ltd., Gillette International B.V., Gillette Latin America Holding B.V., Gillette Management LLC, Gillette Nova Scotia Company, Gillette Pakistan Limited, Gillette Poland International Sp. z.o.o., Gillette Poland S.A., Gillette U.K. Limited, Gillette del Uruguay, Giorgio Beverly Hills Inc., Hyginett KFT, Industries Marocaines Modernes SA, LLC "Procter & Gamble Novomoskovsk", LLL "Procter & Gamble Distributorskaya Compania", Laboratorios Vicks, Liberty Street Music Publishing Company, Limited Liability Company 'Procter & Gamble Trading Ukraine', Limited Liability Company with foreign investments Procter & and Gamble Ukraine, MDVIP, MERCK KGAA NPV, Marcvenca Inversiones, Modern Industries Company - Dammam, Modern Products Company - Jeddah, New Chapter, New Chapter Canada Inc., Olay LLC, Oral-B Laboratories, P&G Distribution Morocco SAS, P&G Hair Care Holding, P&G Industrial Peru S.R.L., P&G Innovation Godo Kaisha, P&G Israel M.D.O. Ltd., P&G K.K., P&G Northeast Asia Pte. Ltd., P&G Prestige Godo Kaisha, P&G Prestige Service GmbH, P&G South African Trading (Pty.) Ltd., PGT Health Care (Zhejiang) Limited, PGT Healthcare LLP, PPI ZAO, PT Procter & Gamble Home Products Indonesia, PT Procter & Gamble Operations Indonesia, Phase II Holdings Corporation, Procter & Gamble (Chengdu) Ltd., Procter & Gamble (China) Ltd., Procter & Gamble (China) Sales Co. Ltd., Procter & Gamble (East Africa) Limited, Procter & Gamble (Egypt) Manufacturing Company, Procter & Gamble (Enterprise Fund) Limited, Procter & Gamble (Guangzhou) Consumer Products Co. Ltd., Procter & Gamble (Guangzhou) Enterprise Management Service Company Limited, Procter & Gamble (Guangzhou) Ltd., Procter & Gamble (Health & Beauty Care) Limited, Procter & Gamble (Jiangsu) Ltd. China, Procter & Gamble (L&CP) Limited, Procter & Gamble (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Procter & Gamble (Manufacturing) Ireland Limited, Procter & Gamble (Shanghai) International Trade Company Ltd., Procter & Gamble (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Procter & Gamble Acquisition GmbH, Procter & Gamble Administration GmbH, Procter & Gamble Algeria EURL, Procter & Gamble Amazon Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Amiens S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Argentina SRL, Procter & Gamble Asia Pte. Ltd., Procter & Gamble Australia Proprietary Limited, Procter & Gamble Azerbaijan Services LLC, Procter & Gamble Bangladesh Private Ltd., Procter & Gamble Blois S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Brazil Holdings B.V., Procter & Gamble Bulgaria EOOD, Procter & Gamble Business Services Canada Company, Procter & Gamble Canada Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Chile , Procter & Gamble Chile Limitada, Procter & Gamble Colombia Ltda., Procter & Gamble Commercial LLC, Procter & Gamble Commercial de Cuba S.A., Procter & Gamble Czech Republic s.r.o., Procter & Gamble DS Polska Sp. z o.o., Procter & Gamble Danmark ApS, Procter & Gamble Detergent (Beijing) Ltd., Procter & Gamble Deuttschland GmbH, Procter & Gamble Distributing (Philippines) Inc., Procter & Gamble Distributing New Zealand Limited, Procter & Gamble Distribution Company (Europe) BVBA, Procter & Gamble Distribution S.R.L., Procter & Gamble Eastern Europe, Procter & Gamble Ecuador Cia. Ltda., Procter & Gamble Egypt, Procter & Gamble Egypt Distribution, Procter & Gamble Egypt Holding, Procter & Gamble Egypt Supplies, Procter & Gamble Energy Company LLC, Procter & Gamble Espana, Procter & Gamble Europe SA, Procter & Gamble Export Operations SARL, Procter & Gamble Exportadora e Importadora Ltda., Procter & Gamble Exports, Procter & Gamble Fabricacao e Comercio Ltda., Procter & Gamble Far East, Procter & Gamble Finance (U.K.) Ltd., Procter & Gamble Finance Holding Ltd., Procter & Gamble Finance Management S.a.r.l., Procter & Gamble Financial Investments LLP, Procter & Gamble Financial Services Ltd., Procter & Gamble Financial Services S.a.r.l., Procter & Gamble Finland OY, Procter & Gamble France S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Germany GmbH, Procter & Gamble Germany GmbH & Co. Operations oHG, Procter & Gamble GmbH, Procter & Gamble Grundstucks-und Vermogensverwaltungs GmbH & Co. KG, Procter & Gamble Gulf FZE, Procter & Gamble Hair Care, Procter & Gamble Hellas Ltd., Procter & Gamble Holding (Thailand) Limited, Procter & Gamble Holding France S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Holding GmbH, Procter & Gamble Holding S.r.l., Procter & Gamble Holdings (UK) Ltd., Procter & Gamble Home Products Private Limited, Procter & Gamble Hong Kong Limited, Procter & Gamble Hungary Wholesale Trading Partnership (KKT), Procter & Gamble Hygiene & Health Care Limited, Procter & Gamble Inc., Procter & Gamble India Holdings, Procter & Gamble Indochina Limited Company, Procter & Gamble Industrial - 2012 C.A., Procter & Gamble Industrial Colombia Ltda., Procter & Gamble Industrial S.C.A., Procter & Gamble Industrial e Comercial Ltda., Procter & Gamble Interamericas de Costa Rica, Procter & Gamble Interamericas de Guatemala, Procter & Gamble Interamericas de Panama, Procter & Gamble International Operations Pte. Ltd., Procter & Gamble International Operations SA, Procter & Gamble International Operations SA-ROHQ, Procter & Gamble International S.a.r.l., Procter & Gamble Investment Company (UK) Ltd., Procter & Gamble Investment GmbH, Procter & Gamble Italia, Procter & Gamble Japan K.K., Procter & Gamble Kazakhstan Distribution LLP, Procter & Gamble Kazakhstan LLP, Procter & Gamble Korea, Procter & Gamble Korea S&D Co., Procter & Gamble Lanka Private Ltd. Sri Lanka, Procter & Gamble Leasing LLC, Procter & Gamble Levant S.A.L., Procter & Gamble Limited, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing (Thailand) Limited, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Belgium N.V., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Berlin GmbH, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing GmbH, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing SA (Pty) Ltd, Procter & Gamble Marketing Romania SRL, Procter & Gamble Marketing and Services doo, Procter & Gamble Maroc SA, Procter & Gamble Mataro, Procter & Gamble Mexico Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Mexico Inc., Procter & Gamble Middle East FZE, Procter & Gamble Nederland B.V., Procter & Gamble Netherlands Investments B.V., Procter & Gamble Netherlands Services B.V., Procter & Gamble Nigeria Limited, Procter & Gamble Nordic, Procter & Gamble Norge AS, Procter & Gamble Operations Polska Sp. z o.o., Procter & Gamble Overseas India B.V., Procter & Gamble Overseas Ltd., Procter & Gamble Pakistan (Private) Limited, Procter & Gamble Partnership LLP, Procter & Gamble Peru S.R.L., Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals France SAS, Procter & Gamble Philippines, Procter & Gamble Polska Sp. z o.o, Procter & Gamble Portugal - Produtos De Consumo, Procter & Gamble Product Supply (U.K.) Limited U.K., Procter & Gamble Production GmbH, Procter & Gamble Productions, Procter & Gamble Productos de Consumo, Procter & Gamble RHD, Procter & Gamble RSC Regional Service Company Ltd., Procter & Gamble Retail Services BVBA, Procter & Gamble S.r.l., Procter & Gamble SA (Pty) Ltd, Procter & Gamble Satis ve Dagitim Ltd. Sti., Procter & Gamble Seine S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Service GmbH, Procter & Gamble Services (Switzerland) SA, Procter & Gamble Services Company N.V., Procter & Gamble Services Ltd., Procter & Gamble Share Incentive Plan Trustee Ltd., Procter & Gamble South America Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Spol. s.r.o. (Ltd.), Procter & Gamble Sports and Social Club Ltd., Procter & Gamble Sverige AB, Procter & Gamble Switzerland SARL, Procter & Gamble Taiwan Limited, Procter & Gamble Taiwan Sales Company Limited, Procter & Gamble Technical Centres Limited, Procter & Gamble Technology (Beijing) Co., Procter & Gamble Trading (Thailand) Limited, Procter & Gamble Tuketim Mallari Sanayii A.S., Procter & Gamble UK, Procter & Gamble UK Group Holdings Ltd, Procter & Gamble UK Parent Company Ltd., Procter & Gamble Universal Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Verwaltungs GmbH, Procter & Gamble Vietnam, Procter & Gamble d.o.o. za trgovinu, Procter & Gamble de Venezuela S.C.A., Procter & Gamble de Venezuela S.R.L., Procter & Gamble do Brasil S/A, Procter & Gamble do Brazil, Procter & Gamble do Nordeste S/A, Procter & Gamble-Rakona s.r.o., Progam Realty & Development Corporation, Redmond Products, Richardson-Vicks Real Estate Inc., Richardson-Vicks do Brasil Quimica e Farmaceutica Ltda, Riverfront Music Publishing Co., Rosemount LLC, SPD Development Company Limited, SPD Swiss Precision Diagnostics GmbH, Scannon S.A.S., Series Acquisition B.V., Shulton, Surfac S.R.L., Sycamore Productions, TAOS - FL, TAOS Retail, Tambrands Inc., Temple Trees Impex & Investment Private Limited, The Art of Shaving - FL, The Dover Wipes Company, The Gillette Company, The Gillette Company LLC, The Gillette co., The Procter & Gamble Distributing LLC, The Procter & Gamble GBS Company, The Procter & Gamble Global Finance Company, The Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Company, The Procter & Gamble Paper Products Company, The Procter & Gamble U.S. Business Services Company, This is L., US CD LLC, Vidal Sassoon (Shanghai) Academy, Vidal Sassoon Co., WEBA Betriebsrenten-Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, Walker & Company Brands, and iMFLUX Inc.. The following companies are subsidiares of TE Connectivity: 999 Arques Corp., ABB ENTRELEC terminal block business, ACC Telecommunications, ADC Chile Limitada, ADC Communications (SEA) Pte. Ltd., ADC Communications (UK) Holding Ltd., ADC Communications (UK) Ltd., ADC Communications Hong Kong Limited, ADC Telecommunications Equipment (Shanghai) Co., AMP Amermex, AMP Products Pacific Limited, AMP Taiwan B.V., AMP Trading B.V., AMP de Venezuela, Acalon Holdings Limited, Advanced Fiber Products LLC, Advanced Fiber Products Limited, Advanced Tube Technologies, AdvancedCath, AdvancedCath Technologies, Alpha Technics, American Sensor Technologies, Betatherm (R&D) Limited, Brantner Holding Company, Brantner and Associates, Butterfly Management SAS, C.S. Tyco Decisive Inc., C.S. Tyco Dependable Inc., C.S. Tyco Durable Inc., C.S. Tyco Reliance Inc., C.S. Tyco Resolute Inc., C.S. Tyco Responder Inc., CII Guardian International Limited, Cablotec GmbH, Carrier Kheops Bac SAS, Catheter and Disposable Technology, Celis Eletrocomponentes Ltda., Cima de Acuna S.A. de C.V., Clarebury Pty. Ltd., Codenoll Technology Corporation, Communication Expert International Investments Limited, Compagnie Deutsch Distribution SAS, Compagnie Deutsch SAS, Comtec Systeme GmbH, Connecteurs Electriques Deutsch SAS, Corcom, Corcom West Indies Limited, Cotsworks LLC, Creganna, Creganna Captial Holding Ireland Unlimited Company, Creganna Finance (US) LLC, Creganna Finance Ireland Limited, Creganna Luxembourg SARL, Creganna Medical Devices, Creganna Medical Pte. Limited, Creganna Medical Technology Unlimited, Creganna Medical s.r.l., Creganna Regulatory, Creganna Solutions Limited, Creganna Solutions Unlimited Company, Creganna Tactx Singapore Limited, Creganna Unlimited Company, Cregstar Bidco Limited, Critchley Group Limited, Crompton Instruments (South-East Asia) Pte. Ltd., Deutsch, Deutsch Connectors Hong Kong Limited, Deutsch Connectors Manufacturing (Shanghai) Co., Deutsch Connectors Trading (Shanghai) Co., Deutsch Finance SAS, Deutsch GB Limited, Deutsch Group SAS, Deutsch India Power Connectors (Pvt) Ltd, Deutsch Israel Ltd., Deutsch SAS, Deutsch Servicios S. de R.L. De C.V., Deutsch Subco Limited, Deutsch UK, F.A.I. Technology (Hong Kong) Limited, First Sensor, Grangehurst Enterprises Pty. Ltd., Hirschmann Car Communication, Hong Kong Sensors Technologies Limited, Howard A. Schaevitz Technologies, Intercontec Connector System (Shanghai) Co., Intercontec Produkt GmbH, Intercontect Pfeiffer Industrie-Steckverbindungen GmbH, Jaquet North America, Jaquet Technology Group AG, Kemex Holding Company, Kenabell Holding Limited, LADD Distribution LLC, LADD Distribution Limited, LSA, MEAS Asia Limited, MEAS Europe SAS, MEAS France SAS, MEAS Ireland (Betatherm) Limited, MEAS Norway AS, MEAS Shenzhen Limited, MEAS Switzerland S.a r.l., MEAS US Holding, MP&E, Measurement Specialties, Measurement Specialties (Chengdu) Ltd., Measurement Specialties (China) Ltd., Measurement Specialties (China) Ltd. Production Branch, Measurement Specialties Foreign Holdings LLC, Measurement Technology (Chengdu) Ltd., Medical Engineering & Design, MicroGroup, Morlynn Ceramics Pty. Ltd., Nikkiso-Therm Co., PT KRONE Indonesia, PT. Tyco Electronics Indonesia, Pfeiffer GmbH & Co KG, Pfeiffer Verwaltungs GmbH, Polamco, Polamco Limited, Potter & Brumfield de Mexico, Precision Interconnect LLC, Precision Subsea AS, Precision Wire Components, Precision Wire Holding Company, Produxx, RAYCHEM-RPG Private Limited, Raychem (HK) Limited, Raychem (Shanghai) Trading Ltd, Raychem China Limited, Raychem Dominicana S.A., Raychem Industries BVBA, Raychem International LLC, Raychem International Manufacturing LLC, Raychem Juarez, Raychem Limited, Raychem Ltd., Raychem Pacific Corporation, Raychem Saudi Arabia Limited, Raychem Shanghai Cable Accessories Ltd, Raychem Technologies Limited, Rochester Wire and Cable LLC, SEACON Advanced Products LLC, Seacon (Europe) Limited, Seacon Global Production, Seacon Produtos e Servicos Opticos e Eletricos Ltda., Sensitive Object, Servo Interconnect Limited, Shanghai CII Electronics Co., Shenzhen Century Man Communication Equipment Co., Sibas Electronics (Xiamen) Co., TCN Holding (Luxembourg) S.a.r.l., TE Connectivity (Barbados) SRL, TE Connectivity (Denmark) ApS, TE Connectivity (HKZ) Holding Limited, TE Connectivity (Kunshan) Company Limited, TE Connectivity (Netherlands) Holding S.a r.l. - Irish Branch, TE Connectivity (Schweiz) Management AG, TE Connectivity (Suzhou) Co., TE Connectivity Argentina S.R.L., TE Connectivity Australia Pty Ltd, TE Connectivity Colombia S.A.S., TE Connectivity Connectors (Suzhou) Co., TE Connectivity Distribution (Thailand) Limited, TE Connectivity EMEA Holding GmbH, TE Connectivity Germany GmbH, TE Connectivity HK Limited, TE Connectivity Holding International II S.a r.l., TE Connectivity Holding International II S.a r.l. Luxembourg (LU) Schaffhausen E-Finance branch, TE Connectivity Holding International II S.a r.l. Luxembourg (LU) Schaffhausen branch, TE Connectivity Holding International II S.a r.l. (Ireland Branch), TE Connectivity Holding International S.A., TE Connectivity Inc., TE Connectivity India Private Limited, TE Connectivity Investments Holding S.A., TE Connectivity Investments Holding S.A. Luxembourg (LU) Schaffhausen branch, TE Connectivity Ireland Limited, TE Connectivity LATAM Holding S.a r.l., TE Connectivity LATAM I S.a r.l., TE Connectivity LATAM II S.a r.l., TE Connectivity Limited, TE Connectivity MOG Europe S.a r.l., TE Connectivity MOG Holding S.a r.l., TE Connectivity MOG Inc., TE Connectivity MOG Sales GmbH, TE Connectivity Manufacturing (Thailand) Company Limited, TE Connectivity Manufacturing Sdn. Bhd., TE Connectivity Morocco SARL, TE Connectivity Nederland B.V., TE Connectivity Netherlands (Poland II) Cooperatief U.A., TE Connectivity Netherlands (Turkey) B.V., TE Connectivity Netherlands Cooperatief U.A., TE Connectivity Phoenix Optix Inc., TE Connectivity Seacon Phoenix Inc., TE Connectivity Sensors Germany GmbH, TE Connectivity Services India Private Limited, TE Connectivity Solutions GmbH, TE Connectivity South Africa Proprietary Limited, TE Connectivity Spain, TE Connectivity SubCom S.L.U., TE Connectivity SubCom Spain Holding S.L.U., TE Connectivity Technology Solutions Limited, TE Connectivity Tunisia Sarl, TE Connectivity ULC, TE Connectivity US Group Holding Inc., TE Connectivity Vietnam Holding Company Limited, TYCO Electronics Polska Sp.z.o.o., TYCO SUBMARINE SYSTEMS INC., TacPro, Tactx Medical, Taicang Speed & Spin Sensors Co., Taliq Taiwan Limited, Tappat Engineering Pty Ltd, TechDevice Costa Rica Limitada, TechDevice Holdings, TechDevice LLC, The Whitaker LLC, Transoceanic Cable Ship Company LLC, TyCom Holdings II SA, TyCom Networks (Peru) S.A., Tyco Electronics (AMP Korea) Malta Limited, Tyco Electronics (Dongguan) Ltd, Tyco Electronics (Gibraltar) Holding Limited, Tyco Electronics (Gibraltar) Limited, Tyco Electronics (Korea) Malta Limited, Tyco Electronics (Kunshan) Ltd, Tyco Electronics (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Tyco Electronics (Qingdao) Ltd., Tyco Electronics (Schweiz) Holding II GmbH, Tyco Electronics (Shanghai) Co., Tyco Electronics (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., Tyco Electronics (Suzhou) Ltd., Tyco Electronics (Zhuhai) Ltd, Tyco Electronics AMP Guangdong Ltd, Tyco Electronics AMP Italia Products S.R.L., Tyco Electronics AMP Italia S.R.L., Tyco Electronics AMP Korea Co., Tyco Electronics AMP Manufacturing (S) Pte Ltd, Tyco Electronics AMP Qingdao Ltd., Tyco Electronics AMP Shanghai Ltd., Tyco Electronics Austria GmbH, Tyco Electronics Belgium EC BVBA, Tyco Electronics Brasil Ltda., Tyco Electronics Canada ULC, Tyco Electronics China (Gibraltar) Limited, Tyco Electronics Componentes Electromecanicos Lda., Tyco Electronics Corby Limited, Tyco Electronics Corporation, Tyco Electronics Czech s.r.o., Tyco Electronics Del Peru S.A.C., Tyco Electronics EC Trutnov s.r.o., Tyco Electronics EC Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, Tyco Electronics Eta Limited, Tyco Electronics Finance Alpha GmbH, Tyco Electronics Finance S.a r.l., Tyco Electronics Finland Oy, Tyco Electronics France SAS, Tyco Electronics Germany Holdings GmbH, Tyco Electronics Group S.A., Tyco Electronics Group S.A. (French Branch), Tyco Electronics Group S.A. (Ireland Branch), Tyco Electronics H.K. Limited, Tyco Electronics Hellas MEPE, Tyco Electronics Holding Corp., Tyco Electronics Holding France, Tyco Electronics Holding S.a r.l., Tyco Electronics Holdings (Bermuda) No. 7 Limited, Tyco Electronics Holdings (Bermuda) No. 7 Limited Taiwan Branch, Tyco Electronics Hong Kong Holdings No. 1 Limited, Tyco Electronics Hong Kong Holdings No. 2 Limited, Tyco Electronics Hong Kong Holdings No. 3 Limited, Tyco Electronics Hungary Termelo Kft, Tyco Electronics Idento, Tyco Electronics India (Gibraltar) Limited, Tyco Electronics Industrial Y Comercial Chile Limitada, Tyco Electronics Integrated Cable Systems LLC, Tyco Electronics Ireland Limited, Tyco Electronics Israel Ltd., Tyco Electronics Italia Holding S.r.l., Tyco Electronics Japan G.K., Tyco Electronics Lambda, Tyco Electronics Latin America Holding LLC, Tyco Electronics Manufacturing Singapore Pte Ltd, Tyco Electronics Mexico, Tyco Electronics Middle East FZE, Tyco Electronics Motors Ltd, Tyco Electronics NZ Limited, Tyco Electronics Netherlands (Germany Holding) S.a r.l., Tyco Electronics Netherlands (Gibraltar China) Cooperatief U.A., Tyco Electronics Netherlands (Gibraltar India) Cooperatief U.A., Tyco Electronics Netherlands (India) Cooperatief U.A., Tyco Electronics Netherlands Holding B.V., Tyco Electronics Norge AS, Tyco Electronics Philippines, Tyco Electronics Precision Engineering Ltd., Tyco Electronics Printed Circuit Group LP, Tyco Electronics RIMC Holding LLC, Tyco Electronics RUS OOO, Tyco Electronics Raychem GmbH, Tyco Electronics Raychem Korea Limited, Tyco Electronics SIMEL SAS, Tyco Electronics Saudi Arabia Limited, Tyco Electronics Services GmbH, Tyco Electronics Singapore Pte Ltd, Tyco Electronics Subsea Communications LLC, Tyco Electronics Svenska AB, Tyco Electronics Svenska Holdings AB, Tyco Electronics Technology (SIP) Co., Tyco Electronics Technology (SIP) Ltd., Tyco Electronics Tecnologias S. de R.L. de C.V., Tyco Electronics UK Holdings Ltd, Tyco Electronics UK Ltd., Tyco Electronics UK Ltd. (Kenya Branch), Tyco Electronics Ukraine Limited, Tyco Electronics Uruguay S.A., Tyco Electronics Verwaltungs GmbH, Tyco Electronics Wireless Systems B.V., Tyco Electronics de Venezuela, Tyco Elektronik AMP Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Tyco Global Networks Ltd., Tyco Iberia, Tyco International Services GmbH, Tyco Networks (Argentina) S.R.L., Tyco Networks (Italy) Srl, Tyco Networks (Netherlands) B.V., Tyco Networks Iberica, Tyco Submarine Systems, Tyco Submarine Systems C.A., Tyco Submarine Systems de Argentina S.A., Tyco Telecommunications Ltd., Wema Americas LLC, Wema Automotive System Private Limited, Wema Environmental Technologies (Shanghai) Co., Wema Environmental Technologies (Shenzhen) Co., Wema Environmental Technologies Ltd., Wema System AG, Wema System AS, Wema System Hong Kong Limited, Wema System Production and Distribution HK Limited, Xiamen Delixing Electric Equipment Businesss, and motec Montage GmbH. Raymond James Financial, Inc., a financial holding company, through its subsidiaries, engages in the underwriting, distribution, trading, and brokerage of equity and debt securities, and the sale of mutual funds and other investment products in the United States, Canada, Europe, and internationally. The company operates through Private Client Group, Capital Markets, Asset Management, RJ Bank, and Other segments. The Private Client Group segment provides securities brokerage services, including the sale of equities, mutual funds, fixed income products, and insurance products to their individual clients; and borrowing and lending of securities to and from other broker-dealers, financial institutions, and other counterparties. The Capital Markets segment offers securities brokerage, trading, and research services to institutions with a focus on sale of the United States and Canadian equities and fixed income products; and manages and participates in underwritings, merger and acquisition services, and public finance activities. The Asset Management segment engages in the operations of Eagle, the Eagle Family of Funds, Cougar, the asset management operations of Raymond James & Associates, trust services of Raymond James Trust, and other fee-based asset management programs. The RJ Bank segment provides corporate loans, SBL, tax-exempt loans, and residential loans. The Other segment engages in private equity activities, including various direct and third party private equity investments; and private equity funds. Raymond James Financial, Inc. was founded in 1962 and is based in St. Petersburg, Florida. Read More Phoenix Group Holdings plc engages in the long-term savings and retirement busines in Europe. The company operates through UK Heritage, UK Open, Europe, ReAssure, and Management Services segments. It engages in the management of insurance policies, which include active and closed life insurance products. The company also provides workplace pensions, and customer savings and investments products under the Standard Life brand. Its retirement solutions business includes vesting annuities and bulk purchase annuity business, where it acquires annuities and deliver the financial stability for secure pensions. The company also offers a range of financial products for the over 50s market under the SunLife brand, which cover life cover, equity release, funeral plans, and home insurance. Phoenix Group Holdings plc has a strategic partnership with Standard Life Aberdeen plc. The company was formerly known as Pearl Group and changed its name to Phoenix Group Holdings plc in March 2010. Phoenix Group Holdings plc was founded in 1782 and is based in London, the United Kingdom. Read More 11 hours ago AP-NORC Poll: Income is up, but Americans focus on inflation WASHINGTON (AP) Americans' overall income has accelerated since the pandemic, but so has inflation and a new poll finds that far more people are noticing the higher prices than the pay gains. Two-thirds say their household costs have risen since the pandemic, compared with only about a quarter who say their incomes have increased, according to a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Read Article iShares Core MSCI EAFE ETF's stock was trading at $52.50 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, IEFA stock has increased by 42.4% and is now trading at $74.76. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. The following companies are subsidiares of Tyson Foods: APF Legacy Subs LLC, Advance Food Company LLC, AdvancePierre Foods, AdvancePierre Foods Holdings Inc., AdvancePierre Foods Inc., Aidells Sausage Company Inc., Allied Specialty Foods Inc., American Proteins Inc, Artisan Bread Co. LLC, Australian Food Corporation Pty Limited, Australian Food Corporation Trust, BRF, Barber Foods LLC, Bosco's Pizza Co., Bryan Foods Inc., C.S. Grain LLC, C.V. Holdings Inc., CBFA Management Corp., Central Industries Inc., Chefs Pantry LLC, Clovervale Farms LLC, Cobb (Hubei) Breeding Co. Ltd., Cobb (Shanghai) Enterprise Management Consulting Co. Ltd., Cobb Ana Damizlik Tavukculuk Sanayi Ve Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Cobb Columbia S.A.S., Cobb Europe B.V., Cobb Europe Limited, Cobb Peru (Andina) S.A.C., Cobb-Heritage LLC, Cobb-Vantress Brasil Ltda, Cobb-Vantress Inc., Cobb-Vantress New Zealand Limited, Cobb-Vantress Philippines Inc., Coominya AFC Pty Limited, Coominya AFC Trust, DFG Foods Inc., DFG Foods L.L.C., Don Julio, Egbert LLC, Equity Group - Georgia Division LLC, Equity Group - Kentucky Division LLC, Equity Group Eufaula Division LLC, Equity Meat Corp., Flavor Corp., Flavor Holdings Inc., Foodbrands America Inc., Foodbrands Supply Chain Services Inc., Gallo Salame Inc., Global Employment Services Inc., Grow-Out Credit LLC, Grow-Out Holdings LLC, Haimen Tyson Poultry Development Co. Ltd, Hudson Foods Company, Hudson Midwest Foods Inc., Hybro Genetics Brasil Ltda, IBP Caribbean Inc., IBP Foodservice L.L.C., IBP Inc., International Affiliates & Investment LLC, Jiangsu Tyson Foods Co. Ltd, Keydutch Finance B.V., Keydutch Holdings I LLC, Keydutch Holdings II LLC, Keydutch Investments B.V., Keystone CLJV Holdings Limited, Keystone County House Road LLC, Keystone Foods, Keystone Foods (AP) Limited, Keystone Foods Holdco LLC, Keystone Foods Intermediate LLC, Keystone Foods LLC, Keystone Foods Pty Limited, Keystone Management Inc., Keystone Trading (Shanghai) Company Limited, LD Foods LLC, M & M Express LLC, M&M Restaurant Supply (MI/OH) LLC, MFG (USA) Holdings Inc., Mac Food Services (Malaysia) SDN. BHD., Madison Foods Inc., McKey Food Services (Hong Kong) Limited, McKey Food Services (Shandong) Limited, McKey Food Services (Thailand) Limited, McKey Food Services Limited, McKey Luxembourg Holdings APMEA S.a.r.l., McKey Luxembourg Holdings S.a.r.l., McKey Luxembourg S.a.r.l., McKey VI Holdings Limited, Myung Seung Food Company Ltd., National Comp Care Inc., New Canada Holdings Inc., Oaklawn Capital Corporation, Oaklawn IT Solution Private Limited, Original Philly Holdings Inc., PBX inc., Pierre Holdco Inc., River Valley Ingredients LLC, Rizhao Tyson Foods Co. Ltd, Rizhao Tyson Poultry Co. Ltd, Rural Energy Systems Inc., Sara Lee - Kiwi Holdings LLC, Sara Lee Diversified LLC, Sara Lee Foods LLC, Sara Lee Household & Body Care Malawi Ltd., Sara Lee International LLC, Sara Lee International TM Holdings LLC, Sara Lee Mexicana Holdings Investment L.L.C., Sara Lee TM Holdings LLC, Sara Lee Trademark Holdings Australasia LLC, Saramar L.L.C., Shandong Tyson-Da Long Food Company Limited, Smart Chicken, Southern Family Foods L.L.C., Southwest Products LLC, TF 20 B.V., TF 5201 B.V., TFA Leasing LLC, TFA Opportunity Zone Fund LLC, TFI of California Inc., Tecumseh Poultry LLC, Texas Transfer Inc., The Bruss Company, The Hillshire Brands Company, The IBP Foods Co., The Pork Group Inc., TyNet Corporation, Tyson (Shanghai) Enterprise Management Consulting Co. Ltd., Tyson Americas Holding Sarl, Tyson Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Tyson Breeders Inc., Tyson Chicken Inc., Tyson China Holding 2 Limited, Tyson China Holding 3 Limited, Tyson China Holding Limited, Tyson Deli Inc., Tyson Europe Holding Company, Tyson Farms Inc., Tyson Farms QOZB LLC, Tyson Foods Brasil Investimentos Ltda., Tyson Foods Canada Inc., Tyson Foods Europe (Netherlands) B.V., Tyson Foods Europe GmbH, Tyson Foods France S.A.R.L., Tyson Foods Germany GmbH, Tyson Foods Group Limited, Tyson Foods Holland B.V., Tyson Foods Huadong Development Co. Ltd, Tyson Foods Iberia Alimentos S.L.U., Tyson Foods Italia S.p.A., Tyson Foods Korea, Tyson Foods Netherlands B.V., Tyson Foods Products Limited, Tyson Foods Scotland Europe Limited, Tyson Foods Scotland Sales (Europe) Limited, Tyson Foods UK Limited, Tyson Foods Wrexham Limited, Tyson Foods oosterwolde B.V., Tyson Fresh Meats Inc., Tyson Fresh Meats Sales and Distribution LLC, Tyson Global Holding Sarl, Tyson Hog Markets Inc., Tyson India Holdings Ltd., Tyson International APAC Ltd., Tyson International Company Ltd., Tyson International Holding Company, Tyson International Holding Sarl, Tyson International Service Center Inc., Tyson International Service Center Inc. Asia, Tyson International Service Center Inc. Europe, Tyson Mexican Original Inc., Tyson Mexico Trading Company S. de R.L. de CV., Tyson New Ventures LLC, Tyson Opportunity Zone Fund LLC, Tyson Pet Products Inc., Tyson Poultry Inc., Tyson Prepared Foods Inc., Tyson Processing Services Inc., Tyson Refrigerated Processed Meats Inc., Tyson Sales and Distribution Inc., Tyson Service Center Corp., Tyson Shared Services Inc., Tyson Storm Lake Holdings LLC, Tyson Warehousing Services LLC, Tyson of Wisconsin LLC, Uninex SA, Universal Meats (UK) Limited, WBA Analytical Laboratories Inc., Wilton Foods Inc., Xamol Consultores e Servicos, and Zemco Industries Inc.. Xcel Energy, Inc. operates as a holding company, which engages in the generation, purchase, transmission, distribution and sale of electricity. It operates through the following three segments: Regulated Electric Utility, Regulated Natural Gas Utility and All Others. The Regulated Electric Utility segment generates, transmits and distributes electricity primarily in portions of generates, transmits and distributes electricity in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, Colorado, Texas and New Mexico. In addition, this segment includes sales for resale and provides wholesale transmission service to various entities in the United States. It also includes commodity trading operations. The Regulated Natural Gas Utility segment transports, stores, and distributes natural gas primarily in portions of Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Michigan and Colorado. The All Others segment engages in steam, appliance repair services, nonutility real estate activities, processing solid waste into refuse-derived fuel and investments in rental housing projects that qualify for low-income housing tax credits. The company was founded in 1909 and is headquartered in Minneapolis, MN. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Quaker Chemical: AC Products Inc., Applied Surface Concepts Holdings Ltd. , Binol AB, Binol Biosafe OY, Commonwealth Oil Corporation, DA Stuart India Private Limited, DA Stuart Shanghai Co, ECLI Products LLC, EFHCO LLC, Engineered Custom Lubricants, Engineered Custom Lubricants GmbH, Epmar Corporation, G.W. Smith and Sons, GH Holdings Inc., GHG Lubricants Holdings Limited, GHGL London Ltd., GHI Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Global Houghton Ltd., Houghton (Shanghai) Specialty Industrial Fluids Co. Ltd, Houghton Argentina S.A., Houghton Asia Pacific Co. Limited, Houghton Australia Pty. Ltd., Houghton Benelux BV, Houghton CZ s.r.o, Houghton Canada Inc., Houghton Denmark AS, Houghton Deutschland GmbH, Houghton Europe BV, Houghton Holdings Limited, Houghton Iberica S.A. , Houghton International, Houghton International Inc., Houghton Italia S.p.A., Houghton Japan Co. Ltd., Houghton Kimya Sanayi AS, Houghton Magyarorszag Kft, Houghton Mexico S.A. de C.V., Houghton Oil (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd., Houghton Polska Sp. Zo.o., Houghton Romania S.R.L., Houghton S.A.S., Houghton Sverige AB, Houghton Taiwan Co. Limited, Houghton Technical Corp., Houghton Ukraine ToV, Houghton do Brazil Ltda., Houghton plc, Internationale Metall Impragnier GmbH, Lubricor Inc, Lubricor Inc., Lubricor Mexicana S.A. de C.V., Lubricor USA Inc., MIH Acquisition Company LLC, MX Systems International Ltd, Maldaner GmbH, NP Coil Dexter Industries, New Houghton Brazil Inc., Norman Hay Engineering Ltd., QH Chemical Limited, QH Europe BV, QH Holdings Limited, QH International Limited, Quaker (Thailand) Ltd., Quaker Australia Holdings Pty. Limited, Quaker Chemical (Australasia) Pty. Limited, Quaker Chemical (China) Co. Ltd., Quaker Chemical B.V., Quaker Chemical CV, Quaker Chemical Canada Holdings Inc., Quaker Chemical Canada Limited, Quaker Chemical Europe B.V., Quaker Chemical Holdings South Africa (Pty) Limited, Quaker Chemical India Private Limited, Quaker Chemical Industria e Comercio Ltda., Quaker Chemical Investment Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Quaker Chemical Limited, Quaker Chemical MEA FZE, Quaker Chemical Operacoes Ltda., Quaker Chemical Participacoes Ltda., Quaker Chemical S.A., Quaker Chemical S.r.l., Quaker Chemical Services EURL, Quaker Chemical South Africa (Pty.) Limited, Quaker China Holdings B.V., Quaker Denmark ApS, Quaker Houghton (Finco) Ltd., Quaker Houghton Holdings Limited, Quaker Houghton Holdings Ltd., Quaker Houghton International LP, Quaker Houghton Ltd., Quaker International Holdings LLC, Quaker Italia S.r.l., Quaker Russia B.V., Quaker Sales Europe BV, Quaker Shanghai Trading Company Limited, Quaker Spain Holding SLU, Quaker Specialty Chemicals (UK) Limited, SB Decking Inc., SIFCO Applied Surface Concepts (UK) Ltd, SIFCO Applied Surface Concepts LLC, SIFCO Concepts Sarl, SIFCO Concepts Sweden, Sterr & Eder Industrieservice GmbH, Summit Lubricants Inc, Summit Lubricants Inc., Surface Technology (Coventry) Ltd, Surface Technology (Dalian) Co Ltd, Surface Technology (East Kilbride) Ltd., Surface Technology (Leeds) Ltd, Surface Technology Aberdeen Ltd, Surface Technology Australia, Surface Technology Holdings Ltd., TecniQuimia Mexicana, Tecniquimia Mexicana S.A. de C.V., Thai Houghton 1993 Co. Ltd., Ultraseal Asia Limited, Ultraseal Chongqing Limited, Ultraseal Germany GmbH, Ultraseal International Group Ltd, Ultraseal Machinery Dongguan Ltd, Ultraseal Shanghai Limited, Ultraseal USA Inc., Unitek Servicios De Asesoria Especializad S.A de C.V., Verkol S.A.U., Verkol SAU, Wallover Enterprises Inc., Wallover Oil Company Incorporated, Wallover Oil Hamilton Inc., and Wuhan Quaker Technology Co. Ltd. The Oneida County Board of Legislators approved the addition of six extra special patrol officers for the county. The six extra positions will be part-time and will fill contracts with Adirondack Central School, as well as Vernon-Verona Sherrill school districts. These special patrol officers are different than full-time school resource officers who serve a number of different reasons. SPOs are retired, uniformed members who provide security services to schools. "It's exciting because now like I've said it before, we're down to just one school district left in Oneida County that doesn't have armed security in it, said Maciol. Sheriff Maciol says the county is currently working with that school district to add a special patrol officer. County Executive Anthony Picente says this would finish out his initiative of getting armed guards in every school in the county. HERKIMER, N.Y. -- A total of 100 firefighters from multiple departments fought those two fires, at two Herkimer businesses Wednesday. NewsChannel 2's Joleen Ferris has more on the kind of day for which you really can't prepare. Wednesday evening, firefighters were back at the Altrux fire on Route 28, putting out hot spots its a day firefighters won't soon forget. A fire broke out at neighborhood bar, the Ole V.I., on South Washington Street, in Herkimer, around 8:17 a.m. Wednesday. The building was lit up in orange from within, by the flames firefighters from multiple departments fought so desperately to extinguish. As firefighters still struggled with this fire, another broke out at Altrux, a heavy equipment repair shot on Route 28 in the town of Herkimer. There were other challenges, too, once firefighters got on the scene they realized the structure of the building was made of steel making it difficult to open and vent the roof. The causes of both fires are under investigation, and state fire investigators were at both scenes. CAMDEN, N.Y. A Camden woman is facing charges of child endangerment. Authorities said she pepper sprayed her 15-year old child and pushed her 12-year old while she was drunk and high on pills. Deputies with the Oneida County Sheriffs Department said they responded to Moran Post Road in Camden Tuesday evening for a reported domestic dispute. An investigation revealed that during the dispute, Tammy M. Joy, 37 of Camden had sprayed her 15-year old child with pepper spray and had pushed her 12-year old child. The 15-year old child was treated at the scene by Camden Ambulance. Authorities said Joy needed to be to taken by ambulance to Rome Memorial Hospital for further evaluation due to ingestion of alcohol and prescription medication. Joy was arrested and charged with felony criminal contempt, two counts of endangering the welfare of a child, and two counts of harassment. Joy was taken to Oneida County Sheriffs department - awaiting arraignment. The investigation is ongoing. BOONVILLE - The community came out in droves Tuesday to voice their concerns about the possible closure of Forestport Elementary School. Adirondack school board officials are considering closing the Forestport school due to decreasing enrollment and a need to save money. At a school board meeting at Boonville Elementary School, parents voiced their concerns about the possibility. My daughter is in a class that has seven kids, said Nicole James, a parent of Forestport students. One of my other children is in a class that has 16 kids where are they going to put all those kids? And then when I asked them which classrooms they were going to move, theyre moving AIS students. The students who need special care and special attention theyre being moved into smaller classrooms. A parent of Boonville students, Kathy Hennessey, is in support of the possible school closing. I would like to see the integrity of the whole district and to me that means having to close the smaller ones," Hennessey said. For the longevity of the district as a whole to maintain our whole districts, opportunities for all students then we are looking at having to closing not just Forestport but maybe even this building. If the school closes, Forestport students would attend Boonville Elementary School, which could double class sizes and make for a longer commute for Forestport students. School officials say the decision could lead to eight staff members losing their jobs. I think theres better options, James said. If Forestport comes around where we have more people living here, our schools already gone but we cant get that back. School officials have until March, 26 to make a decision on the future of Forestport Elementary School. TIPPECANOE COUNTY, Ind. (WLFI) - Three bids have been placed for the second phase of the Tippecanoe County Fairgrounds project. Phase two will include the construction of a new 105 thousand square foot building. The building will include the coliseum and other facilities. The north and south barns on the grounds will also be replaced. The bids ranged from around three million dollars to just under three point eight million. Tippecanoe County Commissioner David Byers says he expects the new construction to be received as well as the original coliseum was by newspaper writers 80 years ago. "One dated in April 1936 talked about when they were building the fairgrounds then. Part of it was it's not just a fairground, it's for the entire community. And that's really what this building is, said Byers. Byers said the new facility will have several uses. "Whether it be wedding receptions, whether it's trade shows, banquets and still a livestock facility too, said Byers. The winning bid will be determined at the next County Commissioner's meeting. Construction on the new building is scheduled to begin after this year's county fair. FRANKFORT, Ind. (WLFI) - Crews battled at fire at a Frankfort restaurant Wednesday morning. Around 3:30 a.m., firefighters were called to Los Amigos Mexican Restaurant. The restaurant is on McKinley Avenue on the west side of the city. This is the fourth fire crews have battled in the city since January. Related: Frankfort house fire ruled arson Early morning barn fire leaves animals dead Multiple buildings lost and 2 families displaced after Frankfort fire DELPHI, Ind. (WLFI) - West Washington Street in Delphi is back open from Dreifers Avenue to North 9th Street after a "large structure fire" Wednesday morning. That's according to the Carroll County Sheriff's Office. That's on the northwest side of the city. The call came in around 4:40 a.m. Delphi Fire Chief Darrell Sterrett says five buildings and six cars were destroyed. News 18 was told it started in a chicken coop and spread to a garage, two sheds and a house. There was also heat damage to a nearby church. A homeowner and his son were inside the home at the time. They were able to escape the fire. No injuries have been reported. Delphi, Camden and Flora fire all responded. Crews were able to put the fire out and have left the scene. TIPPECANOE COUNTY, Ind. (WLFI) Last year Tippecanoe County leaders took a chance with funding wall art to revitalize Wabash Avenue. Now the neighborhood is seeing a reward beyond just having nice views. It has inspired the Tippecanoe Arts Federation to continue funding public art projects across the community. TAF has six new art projects in the works this year starting as early as July. One includes a "Wabash Walls Two." This comes after the success they've seen with the murals in the Wabash Avenue neighborhood. Wabash Avenue hasn't always held the best reputation in the community but because of the new art murals, neighbors say the neighborhood isn't like it used to be. It's been really sweet, it has definitely brought a lot of people out that we haven't seen, said Wabash Avenue Resident Monica Hainje. I think it has brought people into the community. People go up and down the street, all the time you see them stop, look and see bewilderment on their face, said Wabash Avenue Resident Heather Bueno. I definitely think our business picked up because of the murals, said April OBrien, Sacred Grounds manager. Especially that first probably two or three months we saw a lot of new faces. Tippecanoe Arts Federation Executive Director Tetia Lee said they had a purpose when bringing wall art to the Wabash Avenue area. Our project at Wabash walls, that is a traditionally marginalized community, said Lee. What we were able to do was work with the residents of the neighborhood and create themes and subject matter for each of the murals that then the artists interpreted. Lee said public art can bring many positive effects to a community. Removing community blight, increasing safety and security for our area, bringing in job opportunities, having community and economic development, said Lee. This push for more public art isn't only to improve the current community but to also make it a place more people would want to live. Our goal is to really be seen on an international level as a place that is worth going to as an arts destination, said Tetia. TAF is looking to hire local artists to help with future art projects. The organization is hosting a workshop Wednesday, Mar. 13 at Tippecanoe County Public Library, McAllister Room A (627 South Street) for artists interested in doing public art. It's free for TAF members and $25 for non-members. You can register here. INDIANAPOLIS - The Tippecanoe County Superior Court 7 bill is headed to Governor Eric Holcomb's desk. According to State Senator Ron Alting's office, the Indiana Senate passed House Bill 1173 unanimously. The bill was designed to help with increased cases in the county. As we previously reported, Tippecanoe County commissioners approved funding for courthouse upgrades to prepare for the possible addition of the new court. If approved, Superior Court 7 will need to be up and running by January of 2021. Minister of Water Resources E Jingping receives an interview after the third plenary meeting of the second session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 12, 2019. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang) 18 1 [ Editor: Zhang Zhou ] Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. We attempted to send a notification to your email address but we were unable to verify that you provided a valid email address. Please click here to update your email address if you wish to receive notifications. Otherwise, you may click here to disable notifications and hide this message. This is the sixth in a series of articles on the recent Berlin International Film Festival, the Berlinale, held from February 7 to 17, 2019. The first part was posted on February 15, the second on February 22, the third on February 28, the fourth on March 5 and the fifth on March 11. This years Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) once again presented a number of documentary and feature films from eastern and southeastern Europe. Some took a new and refreshing approach. After years of films dominated by images of hopelessness and social decline following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia, clear signs of resistance and rebellion are emerging. A satire between anger and melancholy is the description given to the Macedonian film God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya by director Teona Strugar Mitevska. It was awarded the Ecumenical and German Film Guild jury prizes at the end of the Berlinale (the latter award has been handed out since the 1970s to the best art house film). God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya In this reviewers opinion, the films lead performer Zorica Nusheva also deserved to win the festivals best actress award. Mitevskas film opens in European cinemas May 9. This enchanting work expresses both the anger and the longing for equality and justice prevailing in the tiny Balkan country of Macedonia, which became independent after the Yugoslavia war of the 1990s and is now called North Macedonia following the settlement of its dispute with Greece earlier this year. The plot is based on events that actually took place in the small Macedonian town of Stip in 2014. As part of an annual ritual on Epiphany, the Christian feast day, a Macedonian Orthodox Church cleric blesses a wooden cross and throws it into the river, from which a pack of young men try to recover it. The one who finds it first is supposedly blessed with luck for a whole year, according to Orthodox religious tradition. This time, however, Petrunya (Nusheva), a young unemployed female historian, also plunges into the icy waters. She is first to fish out the cross and holds her prize triumphantly in front of the assembled television cameras. A woman has rescued the crossthis is not in the clerical playbook! Petrunya is forced to defend her find against the combined power of the church, police, judiciary and her male rivals. She must also stand up to the media, which sensationalizes the event. Contrary to the claims of various reviews, God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya is not a tract about gender issues. With wit and a light touch, the film shines light on the dire social reality in this post-Yugoslav mini-state ruled by a corrupt capitalist elite aided by the church and the rest of the establishment at the expense of a desperately poor populace. With a population of just over two million people, nearly a quarter of the Macedonian workforce is unemployed, while the jobless rate rises to 47 percent among young people (2017). The opening scenes reflect this reality: a barren, godforsaken hill in winter, with a few straggly power lines running into the void. The scene is gradually animated by liturgical chants, and a small procession led by a priest takes the foreground. Already the director is working with a certain twinkle in her eye: only a handful of people follow the Orthodox priest, as a young man, bearing a particularly large cross, hastens to join the procession. In his haste, the cross snags in a treetop and the young man nearly tumbles down the steps leading to the river. The next scene features Petrunya hiding under a blanket. Her mother pushes a breakfast roll toward her. Why should she get up? She is out of work, despite having a first class degree in history. Her mother drives her to another job interview at a textile factory. A well-inclined neighbour is boss of the factory and has an office job for her, the mother says. But put on something pretty. Tell him you are 24, not 32! Petrunya gets up. She is not very slim, has a broad face, and is no beauty, not the type of model that a nouveau riche Macedonian wants for his front desk. Nevertheless, her disarmingly open demeanour exerts a certain fascination. She borrows a flowered dress from her girlfriend, who survives by selling clothes online. Then Petrunya tosses on an old-fashioned, black plush coat and goes to meet the factory boss. The latter is sitting in a glass office in the middle of a workshop, like a king surrounded by his ladies-in-waitingmere seamstresses who eye Petrunya suspiciously. The allegedly well-intentioned neighbour looks down from above on Petrunyas dress, and in a bored voice asks her age (Petrunya: 30 ... hmm, 32) and about her education (a degree in history). Then contemptuously: Whats the point of history! Finally, he becomes obnoxious and vulgar (I would never f*ck you). Of course she doesnt get the job. A little later, she jumps into the river in her flowery dress and plush coat and rescues the Three Kings Cross. Relaxed, she lies on her bed at home later with the cross between her bare breasts, her face beautiful and smiling. She merely wanted the right to be happy, Petrunya later tells her friend to explain her leap into the water. The forces of the state and the church dispute her right to happiness. What follows is a number of hilarious scenes at the police station around the question of what constitutes democracy. At the beginning of her interrogation, the police inspector asks Petrunya: Are you religious? She answers the baffled official with the question: Are you gay? She is not prepared to answer any questions about her private life, she adds. In another scene, the police chief and his friend, the priest, stand in front of a window. What should they do with the woman and the cross, the chief asks, handing the priest a glass of schnapps (Watch out, thats pretty strong). This cross belongs to the church, says the priest. A woman cannot keep it. Well, says the policeman. But thats not a law. We have a constitutional state under the rule of law! The priest straightens his gown and shrugs. Yes, but there are also clerical rules. How else could we maintain support for the church? While Petrunya is being held at the police station, although she has not been officially charged, a horde of the half-naked men who had dived for the cross romp in front of the building. They unleash their hatred and lust for revenge into a television reporters microphone. The mob includes a number of aggressive skinheads, seemingly a hint at the right-wing gangs running amok in the former Yugoslav republics. The bustling television reporter (well played by Labina Mitevska) is the second leading character in the film. She embodies the type of self-absorbed media person who seeks to reduce all issues to the cliche of womens struggle against men. Her thesis, i.e., that Petrunya wanted to send a signal against the prevailing medieval patriarchy, is met with incomprehension by her interviewees. Petrunyas parents answer her pompous questions with disarming simplicity. For her father her daughter is a good person. When asked if they pray, the father answers no, the mother yes. At the police headquarters, where Petrunya waits to be released and talks to a young policeman who admires her courage, the reporter interviews workers passing by, What do you think about the scandal surrounding the woman with the cross? The first one replies: Dont you have other problems to worry about? Who is doing anything about our criminal government? And the next one says: What if God has been a woman from the outset? He provides the catchphrase for the films title. The reporter is unable to organise an interview with Petrunya. Finally, her boss pulls her off the story. The scandal has lost its appeal. In an interview, the films director, Teona Strugar Mitevska, explains that from the start her team had no intention of making a feminist film. Even the girl who actually jumped into the river in 2014 would not have held such a view. Her film is rather about the fight for justice and equality. We need a belief. We all need hope that we can create a movement that can change things. In this context, a notable exchange takes place in the police station. Petrunya is once again questioned about her study of history: In which special area have you focusedAlexander the Great? the police inspector asks. Petrunya shakes her head. No, the Chinese Revolution. Why is that? the astonished policeman asks, Dont you care about our history, the history of Macedonia? Petrunya responds: I want to combine communism with democracy. Although not taken further, this remark suggests a new and interesting development to be observed in several countries of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. History is returning, against a background of a growing wave of strikes and protests against social inequality and the corrupt capitalist regimes that emerged following the break up of Yugoslavia. What was Yugoslavia under Tito and what is socialism? From this standpoint, the film ends on an optimistic note. Petrunya leaves the police headquarters with a cheerful look. She leaves the crowd behind her, hands over the cross to the priest (I do not need it anymore.) and follows a trail upward in the snow. UK Prime Minister Theresa May lost another vote Tuesday evening on her proposed European Union (EU) Withdrawal Agreement, with MPs voting against it by 391 votes to 242a majority of 149. With just 16 days to go before the UK is scheduled to leave the EU, no deal has been agreed on trading relations after Brexit. This was the second crushing defeat for May in what has been termed a meaningful vote by MPs. In January, her deal was thrown out by a majority of 230, with 432 MPs against in the biggest vote against a sitting prime minister in history. Tuesdays vote was the fourth worst defeat ever suffered by a sitting government. Voting against May this time were 75 hard-Brexit Tory MPs and the 10 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MPs upon which the Tories depend for a majority. May promised MPs after Januarys defeat she would seek to win concessions from the EU. A sizable section of the Tory party, up to a third of its MPs, organised in the European Research Group (ERG), are opposed to the section of Mays agreement that includes a backstop for Northern Ireland to ensure tariff-free trade with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member state. The backstop keeps the UK aligned to EU customs rules, with a minimum of regulatory differences between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. In the intervening weeks, May secured no significant concessions from the EU. On Monday, hours ahead of the vote, she announced a breakthrough in last minute talks in Strasbourg with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. The pro-May, pro-soft Brexit (keeping access to the Single European Market) Daily Mail ran a front-page photo of EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier kissing May as proof of a breakthrough Brexit deal sealed with a kiss. However, the Withdrawal Agreement text remained unaltered. All that was agreed was a unilateral statement from the UK government which defined the backstop in tortured language as a joint interpretative instrument. The backstop was not intended on the part of the UK or EU to be permanent, it said. May also brought back a joint political statement asserting that the UK and EU would work to implement a new trading relationship by 2020, hopefully making the backstop unnecessary. Prior to the vote, Mays Attorney General Geoffrey Cox told parliament that, though Mays assurances reduced the risk that the United Kingdom could be indefinitely and involuntarily detained, the legal risk of being tied to the EU after Brexit remains unchanged. If a post-Brexit trade agreement could not be reached between the UK and EU, the UK would have no internationally lawful means of leaving the backstop without EU agreement. Lawyers employed by the Tories hard Brexit European Research Group (ERG) MPs declared that the new assurances, do not materially change the position the UK would find itself in if it were to ratify the withdrawal agreement. The DUP said it still rejected the deal as sufficient progress has not been achieved at this time. Parliaments main chamber was only half full as MPs showed their contempt for the prime minister as she opened yesterdays debate. The verdict of the Financial Times was that May had lost control of Brexit after her revamped exit deal was overwhelmingly rejected by 149 votes leaving her authority in shreds. Following her defeat, May confirmed that further votes will be held on Brexit today and tomorrow. There is to be a non-whipped free vote this evening on whether or not the UK should exit the EU in a no deal Brexit. May had to concede this, given that a large section of anti-EU Tories would have rebelled against her anyway. Leading Brexiteer Boris Johnson said in the debate that Mays deal has now reached the end of the road. No deal was the the only safe route out of the EU, he added. MPs across all parties are expected to heavily reject a no deal Brexit. Therefore, another vote will be held on Thursday to allow MPs to seek an extension to the formal Article 50 exit process from the EU. The dominant Remain wing of the ruling elite views such a delay as a step towards its overall goal of a second EU membership referendum aimed at reversing the 2016 Leave result. However, there is at present no majority in Parliament in favour of a second referendum, with many Labour MPs in seats that heavily supported Brexit likely to defy the party whip if party leader Jeremy Corbyn imposes one. The eight pro-Remain Labour MPs who recently left the party to form the Independent Group in Parliament see their main function as preventing the Brexit crisis ending in a Labour election victory under Corbyn, and instead are working across the political divide to ensure that the UK stays in the EU. Corbyn has done everything possible to police the political crisis facing British imperialism and to enable a solution in the national interest. Mays deal is clearly dead and no-deal must be taken off the table, he insisted after the vote. He called on the house to come together to prevent May from threatening us all with the danger of no-deal, knowing full well the damage this will do to the British economy. Corbyn said Labour would again put forward proposals for a negotiated customs union, access to the markets and the protection of rights. Making no mention of a second referendum, he timidly suggested that maybe its time for a general election so the people can choose who their government should be. The stalemate in parliament gives expression to the extraordinarily weakened position of British imperialism on the global stage. Speaking to Sky News, pro-EU Tory Dominic Grieve warned that the crisis facing the British ruling class would only deepen for years to come. Opposing a no-deal Brexit he said, What is going to happen is that the moment we are out is the debate is going to resume in an equally debilitating form but with the UK really weakened in its international standing, no longer in the EU, a supplicant in terms of negotiation for the future [EU] relationship, and with a deeply divided parliament, and in my case the Conservatives deeply divided, but the Labour Party is equally divided, and unable to come to an agreement and we should avoid that. The failure of the EU to offer May anything significant represents a tightening of the thumbscrews by European powers. This was confirmed in a letter from Juncker to European Council President Donald Tusk, clarifying that if the UK was still in the EU in late May, it would be obliged to take part in the EU elections scheduled for May 23. Spokesmen for Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker issued a statement declaring, On the EU side we have done all that is possible to reach an agreement Given the additional assurances provided by the EU in December, January and yesterday, it is difficult to see what more we can do. If there is a solution to the current impasse it can only be found in London. Brexit is a manifestation of the ongoing breakup of the EU under conditions of a growing trade war and escalating inter-imperialist conflicts. There is no outcome that can rescue British imperialism from its further descent into a global maelstrom. The author recommends: The Brexit crisis and the struggle for socialism [29 January 2019] Cambridge University made a bid to take part in a military propaganda scheme designed by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD). In 2017, the MoD announced it was seeking an academic partner to create a centre to conduct psychological research in its efforts to build a stronger military. As part of the Human Social Science Research Capability (HSSRC) programme, according to an MoD presentation, the centre would be involved in the targeted manipulation of information in the virtual and physical domains to shape attitudes and beliefs in the cognitive domain. The six major areas of research the programme would focus on are: personnel, training and education, humans in systems, human performance, and, notably, understanding and influencing human behaviour. Influencing human behaviour, the MoD claimed, would follow a full-spectrum approach in order to achieve geopolitical and strategic aims, including military, non-military, overt and covert means, within the rule of law. As reported by Varsity, Cambridge University was one of the four finalists in the running to house the proposed centre. According to documents obtained by the paper, Cambridge proposed to make a bid for the centre in partnership with the private defence firm, Frazer-Nash Consultancy, which would provide the primary interface with industry and cover work that requires high levels of security clearance. If selected, the HSSRC programme would have provided Cambridge researchers with 20 million for research projects as well as 6.9 million in core funding. This amount, the proposal stated, will provide a significant surplus over the actual cost to the University of managing the programme. Cambridge also estimated that, as prime contractor, it would be in a better position to compete for additional research funding associated with the programme amounting to 42 million, over a four-year period, with the potential for a three-year extension. The programme was meant to be housed in a new research centre, to be known as the Centre for Strategic Futures, with the possibility of transforming it in the long term to a profit generating programme management consultancy. Varsity reports that the proposal, discussed during a General Board of Faculties meeting in June 2018, had the support of the Heads of the School of Arts & Humanities and School of Humanities and Social Sciences. The Head of the School of Clinical Medicine, Professor Patrick Henry Maxwell, was quoted as supporting the proposal because it could contribute to supporting students mental health, while the MoD described it as designed to deliver a skilled and capable workforce equipped ... to meet Defence requirements. The document published by Varsity is redacted and generally describes the proposed research centre by means of sanitized language characteristic of the corporate world. The sinister substance of the proposal is, however, unmistakable: there are ongoing and well-funded attempts on the part of the governments armed forces to covertly influence the UK population. A Guardian article reporting on the MoDs secret cyber-warfare programme illustrated more vividly the Orwellian character of these efforts, which are reported to go back at least to Britains 2010 Strategic Defence Review. In describing one of the few concrete instances of manipulation that have been exposed, the Guardian reports how chatbotscomputer programmes that make human-sounding small talk and which have been used in everything from customer relations to sex industry marketingcould take on military roles in intelligence and propaganda operations to influence targets. Quoting other defence industry reports, the article describes how an influence bot could be deployed in both covert and overt wayson the web, in IM/chatrooms/forums or in virtual worlds. Concerning the adverse effect that the unmasking of a non-declared bot would have on the subject, and their wider group, the report advises, for the bot to withdraw if it thinks it may be compromised. In the early days, it may be better that the bot activity is declared and overtin the same way as much broadcast and UK plc promotional activity. The fact that prestigious universities such as Cambridge are making these kinds of sordid activities their business is alarming. The universitys proposal exposed by Varsity notes with satisfaction the financial windfall that would result from its adoption. It identified as the proposed head of the programme an English professor who writes on Beckett, along with six unnamed academic theme leaders, looking forward to the promising interdisciplinary collaborations that could result from it. This shows just how widespread and normalized a culture of collaboration with government and military efforts on the part of faculty appears to be at Cambridge. However, Cambridges involvement with the HSSRC programme has not gone without opposition among staff, with Varsity reporting last Friday that 41 academics have signed an open letter of protest. Addressed to Vice-chancellor Stephen Toope and the director of the Universitys Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Professor Steven Connor, it states, We do not believe that the role of a public university is to involve staff in armed conflicts by acting as a supplier of contract research to the MoD. It concludes, We are also appalled that, according to the minutes of General Board, the potential reputational risks associated with participation, were to have been mitigated by a targeted communications effort, fully funded through the programme. In other words, one of the first targets of information manipulation would have been the very people whose taxes pay for the research in the first place, including members of staff and students at the University not involved in the programme. We call on the University and CRASSH not to seek future funding under this or similar schemes. The proposal was brought up to the universitys General Board for consideration because its authors feared a potential backlash, given the nature of the programme and its connection to the MoD. They reassured the board that the potential reputational risks of being involved in the programme, could be mitigated by a targeted communications effort. In other words, the new propaganda centre offered assurances that it would simply deploy its techniques on the university community in order to pre-empt opposition. These efforts are further exposure of the lies of Theresa Mays Conservative government and its surrogates in the media, who are attempting to convince a sceptical population that the most pressing danger to democracy are the sinister efforts on the part of Russia to deceive and manipulate public opinion. As this report exposes, it is the government that is in fact systematically engaged in these kinds of operations. While Cambridge University ultimately decided to pull its bid to lead the programme, its level of collaboration with the defence industries and the MoD remains staggering. Varsity earlier reported that at least five of the colleges in the University of Cambridge had investments in arms manufacturing companies totalling over 6.5 million. Emmanuel College holds the largest amount, with nearly 2.9 million invested in two arms companies, Airbus SE and United Technologies. Moreover, Cambridges decision to move on does not halt the MoDs efforts to find a reliable academic partner. Nor is there any information about which universities remain in the running for it. It should be noted that Cambridge recently granted a prestigious fellowship to Noah Carl, a proponent of eugenics, and is attempting to intimidate students who have protested his appointment. Rather than centres of science and learning, universities in major capitalist countries are becoming more and more closely integrated with business, government and the military. Indias unemployment rate was the highest it has been in 45 years in 2017-18 according to a government survey recently leaked to the Business Standard, an influential Indian daily. Conducted by the governments National Sample Survey Organization or NSSO, the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) found that Indias unemployment rate averaged 6.1 percent in the last fiscal year. This figure grossly underestimates the unemployment crisis wracking Indiaas a closer reading of the PLFS itself revealsand gives only a faint inkling of the social misery confronting working people in a country with no social safety to speak of. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Modi are suppressing the survey, refusing to release it to the public although it was completed in early December, three months ago. This is because the surveys findings put the lie to the governments claims of having delivered development and shed light on the human costs of its ruthless pro-big business policies. With national elections to be held in multiple regional phases this April and May, the government is acutely sensitive to anything that undercuts its claims to have presided over a world beating annual growth rate of 7 percent. The data in the leaked survey shows India has faced a growing employment crisis since the 2008-9 global financial meltdown and economic slump; that this crisis worsened in the years immediately preceding the 2014 election, when the BJP swept to power on a promise of jobs and development, and grew still more dire during the first four years of BJP rule. Less than half of those of working-age are employed One of the most striking findings of the PLFS is the steep decline in the Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR), that is in the percentage of Indians aged 15 to 24 who are economically active, whether as wage-laborers, farmers, hawkers, shop-owners, artisans or other self-employed. According to the most recent PLFS, the Labour Force Participation Rate fell from 63.7 percent in 2004-5 to 55.9 percent in 2011-12, and in the following six years fell a further 6.1 percentage points to just 49.8 percent in 2017-18. This means that out of a total working-age population of 860 million, only 428 million were economically active in 2017-18. While the PLFS shows the jobless rate to have increased to its highest in 45 years, the LFPR figures indicate that there are tens of millions of hidden unemployed, that is of people who have given up looking for work and are now entirely dependent on their relatives and or scrounging and begging for their survival. This has explosive implications and has already led to the eruption of large-scale protests by jobless youth and impoverished peasants and landless rural labourers. Soaring youth unemployment The BJP government-suppressed PLFS shows that youth unemployment has risen steeply since 2011-12 and is much higher than in the overall population. For instance, the unemployment rate among rural males aged 15-29 years jumped more than three-fold, from 5 percent in 2011-12 to 17.4 per cent in 2017-18, and for young women it almost doubled from 7.8 percent to 13.6 percent. In the same period, urban youth joblessness more than doubled, with female urban youth unemployment reaching 27.2 percent. Overall the urban unemployment rate was 7.8 percent in 2017-18, far higher than the 5.3 percent rate that reportedly prevails in rural India. However, these figures are deceptive. Many of those considered as rural employed are trying to eke out a living by tilling tiny plots of land and by hiring themselves out as day-labourers to better-off farmers. So miserable are the conditions in rural India that millions leave for the cities each year. Another striking aspect of unemployment in India is the increasing number of female workers who are dropping outor more correctly being expelledfrom the workforce. In 2005-06, 49 percent of females between the ages of 15 and 49 reported that they had engaged in work in the previous 12 months. Ten years later only 31 percent did. Over 90 percent employed in the informal sector According to the last NSSO survey on employment, which dates from 2011-12, 92 percent of Indians who were employed were either self-employeda category that includes tens of millions of hawkers and small tradersor employed in small-scale retail outlets and production facilities. What this means is that less than 35 million persons are employed in the so-called formal economy, comprised of larger private and state-owned companies. Only the formal sector is subject to minimal government labour standards, and only workers employed in the formal sector receive a modicum of benefits and have any assurance of regular pay. The rest work in the informal economy, receiving poverty wages and working up to 7 days a week, in haphazard and often hazardous conditions. In rural India, where some 900 million people reside, the vast majority live in abject poverty. The suicide of impoverished small peasants by the thousands each year has been an entrenched and normal phenomenon for the past two decades. The governments National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), which promises 100 days of unskilled manual labor annually to one member of every rural household, has been starved of funds by Modi and his BJP since they came to power in 2014. This is because the BJP and its big business backers view this threadbare attempt at poverty alleviationdaily wages are between 160 and 260 rupees ($2.20-$3.60 US)as a waste of funds, and decry it for distorting the rural labor market, that is artificially inflating rural wages! For the past several years, the NREGS has been running out of funds in the middle of the financial year. This has resulted in delays in the payment of wages for weeks and even months. Last year as many as two-thirds of NREGS workers were not paid on time. As a result, increasing numbers are dropping out of this program. According to the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), a private business information company, that in some ways collects better statistics than the government, the jobless crisis is far worse than depicted in the most recent PLFS. The CMIE estimates Indias current unemployment rate to be 8.6 percent and says the Indian economy lost 11 million jobs last year. In December, the All India Manufacturers Organisation (AIMO) reported that Indias manufacturing sector had lost 3.5 million jobs since 2016. It placed the blame for these losses on the twin shocks of the late 2016 demonetisation of 86 percent of Indias currency and the introduction in 2017 of the regressive national Goods and Services Tax (GST). The Modi governments response to such reports has either been silence or vituperation. It responded to the Business Standard article outlining the findings of the most recent PLFS by denouncing it as a politically-motivated smear campaign. Dharmendra Pradhan, Union Minister for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, rubbished the findings of the governments own NSSO with these words: There is no authenticity to this information. If some people have cooked up some report and they put their imagination, I do not have any answer. NITI Aayog, another government agency deployed to counter the bleak picture painted by the PLFS, pointed to the 3 million new cab drivers for Uber and Ola since 2014 as proof of stellar job creation. No matter how Modi and the Hindu-supremacist BJP try to sugarcoat the stark reality of mass unemployment, it is clear that Indias economic growth both under their tenure and that of the Congress Party-led government that held office from 2004-2014 has occurred at the expense of jobs both in numbers and in quality. Meanwhile, the wealth of Indias capitalist elite, including its freshly-minted crop of 140 billionaires, has swelled. In 2015, Indias top 1 percent owned 53 percent of the countrys total wealth. By 2017 this had shot up to 73 percent, meaning the other 99 percent unequally shared the remaining 27 percent. Whatever party or combination of parties forms Indias government after the coming election, the immiseration of the vast majority of Indians workers and toilers will continue for all of them, from the BJP and Congress Party to the Stalinist CPM, are committed to perpetuating pro-investor policies. Cheryl Sanchez is a regular attendee at the Solidarity Vigil that has been maintained outside the Ecuadorean Embassy by the Julian Assange Defence Committee since 2012. Cheryl She was attending the vigil because Julian Assange needs all the support he can get. He has done a great job as a journalist exposing the war crimes of the criminal state of the USA plus her friends. It is important that we come here and stand up for free speech, stand up for journalism, stand up for a publisher who has given us so much information. Julian Assange is not a criminal. Julian Assange is an international hero who deserves a Nobel Prize for peace. I started coming down here when there were the problems in Venezuela. WikiLeaks has provided all this information and provided safety for whistle-blowers and shared it with us for free. And they have risked their lives for it. I havent seen the last person to do that in a long time. We had an inclination this was going on but when he gave us all that information, now we know how far back it has been going and what lengths they [the imperialist powers] will go to protect their crimes. And we know they are doing this up to this day. They are doing it in Syria, in Venezuela. Asked her thoughts on the jailing of Chelsea Manning, Cheryl said, Chelsea Manning is a very honourable person who has decided not to give false accusation and false witness on WikiLeaks. She knows that if she did, she could never live with herself. She is a hero. She knows this is a trip-up to trick her into selling out. Asked her view on growing support internationally for Assange and Manning, Cheryl said, I think people are now getting the facts and not the fake news. There are now a lot of outlets online to get real information, like the World Socialist Web Site and then there is Unity4J every Friday night. There is [journalist] John Pilger still shouting out, so I think there is a rise of real journalism online and it has brought back the fight and struggle back to the forefront again. Asked why she thought Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and other politicians who claim to defend democratic rights have not spoken out in defence of Assange, she replied, Their careers. She added, I think he cant do these things because if he does, he may just lose the leadership of the Labour Party. It seems like the Labour Party just cannot get rid of the Blairites and all the deep-state people. Blair is still there hovering around in the background like Dracula and they are all dancing to the tune of Israel and the Zionist lobby. Unless they can get free of the Blairites, I think that party will end up getting dissolved. I think there have to be more protests outside the US and Australian embassies to let them know that we know they are all complicit in trying to frame up Julian Assange. They are trying to get him in America under the Espionage Act of 1917. It is lawfare, using the law as a weapon. We have to get active, reject the fake TV news and get real news and act upon that. If people are asleep they can get away with a lot, but if we are awake they cannot. We have to keep fighting. Natalie is a mother who came to the embassy a few months ago to support Assange. She came from Wales to support Saturdays vigil. Its a shame the mainstream media wont cover it. They dont want him free is my feeling. I first found out in 2010 about WikiLeaks with the Collateral Murder video. Natalie Asked her thoughts on Chelsea Mannings jailing, she said, Its shocking as the West is supposed to be free. I think all we can try to do is make more noise. Asked why she chose her banner, she said, Im so over a surveillance state. Whatever happened to privacy? Paul is from London and said, Im here because we have a political prisoner who has been effectively denied his liberty in the centre of London for almost 10 years. His position has already been made clear by the UN Special Rapporteur for several years that there is absolutely no excuse for his effective detention. His conditions of life are being made worse and absolutely intolerable. It is disgraceful and it saddens me that we dont have people [here] every single day. I came to the last rally in August. I had to come here again as I feel so strongly about it. Although Im not a member of the Socialist Equality Party, Im very much in sympathy with everything they stand for. I saw the advert for this on the WSWS. Its the most important thing I could be doing. We owe so much to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Our understanding of the world would be so much poorer had it not been for the work of WikiLeaks over the years. Im aware of the rallies in Australia too and Im really glad there is an upsurge of support there. I read the recent piece by John Pilger on what it is like to visit him and the conditions are just appalling, the way that everything they say is spied on. Asked his thoughts on the jailing of Chelsea Manning, Paul said, Its extraordinarily courageous and a very brave and remarkable gesture on her part. Its not something she could take lightly given that she had already spent years in jail. She is writing her name in history and she will get out again and continue fighting as we all must. We have to oppose these dreadful wars and all this secret stuff being done in our name with our tax money, like the undermining of legitimate governments. The idea of a secret grand jury [that Manning refused to give evidence before] is just weird. Justice that isnt seen to be done is not justice. Anyone is supposed to be able to walk into any court room, as a member of the public and observe. That is a democratic right. No one is under an obligation to testify in a way that might incriminate themselves. That is a basic part of our criminal law and has been for hundreds of years. The rights of the citizens in law, constitutional rights are just as important. People lose sight of the fact that there is supposed to be a process of justice. There is no process of justice as far as Julian Assange is concerned. Justice is being perverted. Its so clear, especially after what has happened to Chelsea Manning, that the whole purpose is to get him to the US to make him face some kind of a trial to possibly lock him away for ever or even to kill him. Daniel is from Italy and lives in London. He said this was the first time he had attended a protest in defence of Julian Assange. I am interested in the fate of Julian Assange. Journalists have power to bring news to people and they have great responsibility. They have to bring the truth and not just some garbage to sell. So those journalists who are not doing their job are also helping to keep Julian Assange in here. They are not real journalists. They are just people doing what they told to do. He continued, That is why you now have more and people getting their news though the non-mainstream media. Daniel WikiLeaks told the truth about torture taking place in various countries and the real truth about the Iraq War. Because of what WikiLeaks did people are more questioning. I think Venezuela would be getting bombed right now if there werent people questioning what the US is doing and looking into it. So many lives have been saved already because of WikiLeaks. Asked his view of the recent rallies in Australia, Daniel said, They have been very effective, and I think they should be recurring events. We have to protect Assange and get him out because the world is going very bad for everyone. Jamie Ewing lives in Portugal and said, Its disgraceful the way the political powers, big money and the media are doing things held illegal by the United Nations, under our noses. Jamie The more support we generate on the streets in support of Julian Assange, like the yellow vests [in France], the more the government is likely to listen. I take my hat off to Chelsea Manningto have suffered in prison and to take such a stand [refusing to testify against Assange]. Jamie has little faith in the class justice of the US political establishment, saying, If Assange is extradited to the US, the judge in Virginia has a 100 percent conviction rate for such cases. Claire said, Im in support of all whistle-blowers. It began with Dean Issacharoff [Israeli soldier who is leading a campaign against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank]. Claire Im a life-long Labour supporter, but I feel like giving my membership up because Corbyn hasnt supported Assange. All his life he has been a speaker for human rights, and its shocked me hes gone so quiet. The anti-Semitism campaign in the Labour Party is taking away your right to express your opinion. I support Palestine. Peter from Norway is 28. He said that he was attending the vigil to learn more, and to see how many other people feel the same way. Assange has done so much good, theyre saying [the exposures of WikiLeaks] are the only true journalist work in the past period. If theres one thing worth demonstrating for, its free speech. I want to hear what Assange has got to say. Sara, a young woman, said, Im here as a concerned citizen. It took me a long time to figure out that I could do something, even if its just this small act of showing up in solidarity with other people who believe in freedom, freedom of the press. We can sometimes feel powerless as individuals and I feel like this rally gives us the opportunity to realise some of the power we actually have. If we all participated in society in this way then we would live in a very different world. Asked what she thought of the role of the establishment media in the fate of Assange, she said, It shows how the media can contribute to the persecution of people, its a tragic situation. It is important that people understand how we must be skeptical of what were being told in the mainstream press. Here we have someone [Assange] who is providing a wealth of true information, making it available and then leaving it up to us to decide what to make of it. That is the real role of objective journalism. Give us the facts and let us decide. Ive been following WikiLeaks and Assange for years but only when I came to the embassy and saw with my own eyes did I realise, Wow, this is almost unbelievable, how hes being treated. To think that somebody, for doing the good that theyre doing, could be persecuted in this way! When this happens to someone, you have to defend them. I think ordinary citizens, and especially real journalists, ought to be out here. The one thing I would say to Chelsea Manning and other whistle-blowers who are courageous enough to do what they do is thank you, because it inspires other people. All power to her that in the face of such terrible injustice she can just stay strong and keep going. I want her to know, there are people supporting you. Indian supporters of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) held a public meeting on March 10 in Kolkata, the West Bengal capital, to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Fourth International. The audience included students from Jadhavpur University. The meeting was livestreamed on Facebook and followed last Novembers 80th anniversary meeting in Chennai, the Tamil Nadu capital. During the campaign for Sundays meeting, the Indian Trotskyists spoke with and won support from important layers of workers, including railway employees, and students from several universities in Kolkata. Palash Roy, a long-standing member of the ICFI supporters group, chaired the event and warmly welcomed Sri Lankan Socialist Equality Party (SEP) assistant secretary Deepal Jayasekera, the main speaker. Roy told the meeting that the ICFI is the only party that continues the fight for the unity of the international working class based on the program of world socialist revolution. Arun Kumar, from the ICFI supporters' group, noted that the Kolkata meeting was being held under conditions of intense political and military tensions between nuclear armed India and Pakistan, with deadly consequences for millions of people in the region. Although the Indian and Pakistani ruling elites have currently backed away from an all-out war, the danger remains, he said. The bellicose remarks made by Indias Modi government, and Pakistani Prime Minister Khans reply in kind, indicate that these tensions could rapidly spiral into a catastrophic nuclear conflict. Kumar told the audience that the decades-long rivalry between the two countries was rooted in the partition of then colonial India into a Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu-dominated India by the departing British imperialists. The communalist division, he explained, was imposed with the assistance of both parties of the national bourgeoisieCongress and the Muslim Leagueand the Stalinist Communist Party of India (CPI). He pointed out that the geo-political tensions in South Asia produced by that partition have escalated to dangerous levels by the US military-strategic offensive against China and Washingtons efforts to closely integrate India into this agenda. Kumar said that Prime Minister Narendra Modis war-mongering campaign against Pakistan was backed by all the parties of the Indian political establishment, including the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and the CPI, as well as Maoist parties like the CPI (Marxist-Leninist)-Liberation. He concluded by explaining that the only way to prevent the outbreak of a war was through a unified struggle of the working class in South Asia to overthrow the reactionary state system created in the 1947-48 partition, and its replacement with a Union of Socialist Republics in the region, as a part of the struggle for world socialist revolution. SEP (Sri Lanka) assistant national secretary Deepal Jayasekara carefully reviewed the history of the Trotskyist movement, tracing the principled struggle waged by Trotsky against the Stalinist bureaucracyfrom the formation of the Left Opposition in 1923, in the fight against the bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian Communist Party under Stalin, to the founding of the Fourth International in 1938. He explained how the ICFI was established in 1953 to defend Trotskyist principles against the liquidationist Pabloite revisionism that had emerged within the Fourth International. Deepal Jayasekera addressing the Kolkotta meeting Jayasekara stressed the important struggle waged by the Trotskyist movement in South Asia and added: The political and theoretical battles conducted by the pioneer Trotskyists, who founded the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) in 1935 and later the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI) in 1942, against British imperialism and its national agents, i.e., the Ceylonese and Indian bourgeoisies, inspired fighters for socialism throughout the world. These struggles contain vital lessons for those who want to fight for socialism today. The speaker detailed the BLPIs courageous and principled opposition to the 1947 partition of India and its fight for the socialist unity of the working class across Hindu and Muslim communal lines. He explained the LSSPs subsequent nationalist degeneration, a process that began in the early 1950s and was encouraged by the Pabloites, culminated in its entry into a coalition government with the bourgeois Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) in 1964. Jayasekera pointed out that the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), the forerunner of the Sri Lankan SEP, was founded in 1968 as a section of the ICFI in the struggle against the LSSPs betrayal. Referring to the ICFIs decades-long fight for Marxism and the perspective of world socialism, Jayasekera said: Under conditions of the very advanced levels of the globalisation of the capitalist economy, all nationally-based organisations like the LSSP in Sri Lanka and the Stalinists in India have collapsed, in the sense of defending even the most basic needs of the working class. What has been powerfully vindicated is the program and perspective of international socialism, defended and developed by the ICFI and its sections. The fight conducted by the Fourth International and the SEP to build the revolutionary leadership of the working class on the perspective of socialist internationalism is intersecting with the mass struggles now emerging internationally. This objective situation has opened up very powerful opportunities to build Socialist Equality Parties, as sections of the ICFI, in India, throughout South Asia and internationally. Jayasekera concluded by urging the audience to undertake a serious study of the history and perspectives of the Fourth International and to join with us in building the Indian section of the ICFI. After weeks of youth protests against Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflikas attempt to seek a fifth term in office, the working class is emerging as the leading force in the struggle against the National Liberation Front (FLN) regime. Strikes have spread to mass transit, auto, education and the critical natural gas sector, as millions march demanding the fall of the regime. The movement in Algeria is at the heart of an international resurgence of the class struggle and of political opposition among workers. In France, deep anger against President Emmanuel Macron has erupted independently of the unions in the yellow vest movement, amid a strike wave against European Union (EU) austerity stretching from Portugal to Berlin. Teachers' strikes across the United States, the maquiladora strikes in Mexico and strikes across the Maghreb are being organized via social media, against the union bureaucracies. The FLN will give nothing to demands for jobs, a better future and the end of the dictatorship of the capitalist clique around Bouteflika. Backed by Paris and the other imperialist powers, it has suspended April 18 elections, aiming to keep Bouteflika in power until it can halt the protests. Nearly a decade after workers' uprisings toppled imperialist-backed dictators in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, new international revolutionary struggles against capitalism are being prepared. The lesson of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings is the need for a Trotskyist revolutionary vanguard in the working class. Without this, despite heroic struggles by millions of workers, middle-class pseudo-left parties like Egypts Revolutionary Socialists (RS) and Tunisias Workers Party (PT) were able to block a working class seizure of power in both countries. At each step in the revolution, they advanced the lie that imperialist-backed military juntas or Islamist parties would grant national democratic reforms, politically disarming the working class and enabling the ruling class ultimately to restore the old dictatorships. The eruption of a working class movement against the FLN is a historic vindication of the International Committee of the Fourth Internationals (ICFI) struggle for Trotskyism. The petty-bourgeois left insisted that the FLNs coming to power after the 1954-1962 Algerian independence war against France proved that neither working class struggle against capitalism nor a Marxist vanguard party were needed to build a democratic and even a socialist society. Todays movement of Algerian workers demanding jobs, social equality and democratic rights against the FLN explodes this lie. The Algerian war was a heroic struggle, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and defying French imperialisms resort to mass torture and repression. In the 1962 Evian accords ending the war, however, Paris handed power in Algeria not to the working class, but to the FLN. While it inscribed a pledge to build socialism in Algerias 1963 constitution, the FLN was a bourgeois party. It based itself neither on workers' committees in the workplaces nor on the expropriation of capitalist property. But petty-bourgeois anti-Marxist groups, such as the Pabloite renegades from Trotskyism led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, hailed the FLN. Having split from the Fourth International in 1953, which opposed their attempt to liquidate the Trotskyist movement into Stalinist and bourgeois nationalist parties, the Pabloites promoted the FLN as one of many movements that would supposedly replace the Fourth International. These ranged from Castros guerrillas, who took power in Cuba in 1959, to the capitalist regimes that emerged from the partition of India imposed as part of formal independence from Britain in 1947. Pablo claimed the Algerian war was the living permanent revolution, which from a united anti-imperialist national struggle is transforming itself irresistibly into a profound social revolution in the quest for its true nature and achievementas a proletarian and socialist revolution. On this basis, he accepted a position as an FLN advisor, until he had to flee General Houari Boumedienes 1965 coup that ousted President Ahmed Ben Bella. The ICFI alone fought to elaborate a socialist perspective for proletarian revolution in Algeria. Against advocates of an unprincipled reunification of the ICFI with the Pabloites, led in the United States by Joseph Hansen, the Socialist Labour League (SLL), the ICFIs British section at the time, defended Marxism and Trotskyism. In 1963, the SLL wrote: Hansen made great play of the SLLs condemnation of the Evian agreement between the Algerian government and French imperialism. We said this was a "sell-out." Hansen said that here was an ultra-left mistake, showing failure to recognize that at least Evian included national independence and should be welcomed as a victory. We proceeded from an analysis of the class tendency which has asserted itself through the FLN leadership in arriving at a compromise with French imperialism, preventing the Algerian people from going on to win their own revolutionary demands. Those who concentrated on the "victory" only helped Ben Bella to deceive the masses, and turned the energies of socialists towards alliances with the bourgeoisie rather than the construction of an independent revolutionary party. Nearly 60 years later, this analysis and Leon Trotskys Theory of Permanent Revolution, the perspective underlying the October 1917 revolution in Russia, has been confirmed. Trotsky established that in countries with a belated capitalist development, the capitalist class, tied to imperialism and fearing the working class, cannot lead a democratic revolution. The struggle for democratic demands can proceed only if it goes over to a socialist revolution, led by the working class and drawing behind it the other oppressed classes in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and establishment of a workers' state. Only through the struggle for world socialist revolution, to expropriate the capitalist class and place the world economy under the democratic control of the workers, can the necessary resources be mobilized to build a truly socialist and democratic society in the former colonial countries. The Algerian regime, tied to imperialism and fearing the workers, proved incapable of building a democratic, let alone a socialist, society. Algerias natural gas wealth, instead of serving to build industry, create decent-paying jobs and improve living standards, was funneled into the bank accounts of a parasitic clique of capitalists around the FLN leadership. The struggle for democratic rights can proceed only if it goes over to a socialist revolution against the FLN, led by the working class and drawing behind it the other oppressed classes. The growth of the international class struggle opens vast political horizons for workers in Algeria. The expropriation of the financial aristocracy by the working class on an international scale can place the economic resources needed to build a truly socialist and democratic society in the hands of the workers in the former-colonial countries. But none of this can be accomplished on the basis of a nationalist program: rather, the struggle for socialism requires a decisive turn to the international working class. Such struggles require a ruthless break with Pablos political descendants. The Pabloite Socialist Workers Party (PST) and its ally, Louisa Hanounes Workers Party (PT), which has propped up the FLN since the PT's birth during the FLNs failed democratization in the 1980s, are preparing a trap. Today, the PST is calling yet again for democratic reform of the FLN, carried out in alliance with the PT, human rights groups and Algerias pro-government trade unions. It writes: The left wing of the popular camp proposes for its part, in a more or less coherent way, a solution from below giving the people a voice and immediately re-establishes it in its role of sole sovereign via the perspective of electing a Constituent Assembly... The PST proposes to unify the democratic, anti-free market and anti-imperialist forces, bringing together all parties, unions and social movements sharing this perspective. The key task is to prepare a struggle for socialism by the working class, which means an irreconcilable break with middle-class forces such as the PST. Its pledge to build democracy is propaganda from union bureaucrats, academics and professionals terrified of a movement from below threatening the privileges they derive from their links to the FLN. Desperate to tie the workers and youth to the regime and, as in Egypt and Tunisia, organize defeat, they are hailing the FLNs maneuver to keep Bouteflika in power as a first step back and a model of what the current movement should achieve. The basis for a socialist struggle against these tendencies is to be found in the historical and political perspective of the ICFI. For workers and youth entering into revolutionary struggle, the turn now is to the construction of sections of the ICFI in Algeria and in countries around the world. Family members of some of the men killed in New Zealands 2010 Pike River Coal (PRC) mine disaster have denounced the failure by police and the Department of Labour (now called WorkSafe) to keep track of evidence that could hold vital information about what caused the explosion. The precise cause of the underground explosion on November 19, 2010, which killed 29 men in the mine on the West Coast of the South Island, has not been established because the mine has not been re-entered. A royal commission in 2012 found that the PRC board of directors did not protect the workforce from harm and ignored numerous warnings of a potential catastrophe. The mine had no suitable emergency exit, faulty methane gas sensors and inadequate ventilation. The company, which was in debt to its shareholders, did not undertake necessary improvements because it would have slowed production. No one has been held accountable for the catastrophe. In 2013, PRC was found guilty of multiple health and safety violations but did not pay a fine or reparations because it was bankrupt. Similar charges against PRC chief executive Peter Whittall were dropped in a sordid agreement between his lawyers and the Department of Labour (DoL). Police also decided not to lay any charges. For years, the families of those killed have fought for the mine to be re-entered and forensically examined, and for the prosecution of those responsible for PRCs appalling lack of safety. They have faced countless obstacles, including the suppression by police of video footage taken inside the mine and attempts by the 20082017 National Party government to permanently seal the mine entrance. The families campaign gained widespread support in the working class, leading the Labour Party, the Greens and NZ First to promise in the 2017 election campaign that they would re-enter the mine. The Pike River Recovery Agency, established by the Labour-led government, is due to begin the operation in May after more than a year of planning. Police have said the investigation will be reopened. It is now clear that the police and DoL never conducted a serious investigation of the disaster as a potential crime. On February 17, Tony Forster, a former chief inspector of mines who is now an independent advisor to the Pike River families, told TVNZ that a crucial piece of evidence cannot be located and has apparently not been forensically examined. A door to a control panel on the mines underground fan was among the debris photographed shortly after the explosion. It had been blown out of the mine, up a 111-metre ventilation shaft. Forster said he was told the mangled door was removed from the mine site by helicopter and taken to the PRC office within days of the explosion, but what happened to it is unknown. Tests could reveal whether the control panel was a source of ignition. The royal commissions report noted that the mine had a large amount of electrical equipment, some of which was neither intrinsically safe nor flameproof. The families lawyer Nigel Hampton told the media he does not recall the royal commission being shown the control panel door during its hearings. Bernie Monk, whose son Michael died in the mine, told Newshub: Weve known this has been a cover-up for a long time, and thats why weve fought so hard to bring things out into the open... The country deserves to know the truth of whats happened at Pike River. Sonya Rockhouse, who lost her son Ben, told the World Socialist Web Site that Pike River was the only coal mine in the world known to have its main ventilation fan installed underground, instead of in the open air. Its not safe, she said. How it ever got passed [by DoL regulators], I dont know. Notes from a police debrief meeting in April 2012, which were released to the families and made public on February 19, admitted that the handling of evidence in the aftermath of the explosion was disorganised and diabolical. We were told it was shambolic up there, Rockhouse said. Nobody really knew what to do. It was a crime scene, 29 men had been killed. From the beginning they didnt follow protocols, they didnt bag and tag like youre meant to with a crime scene. That door wasnt the only thing that got lost. They lost cameras up there. A whole lot of pictures were given to the police and none of them were labelled, nobody knew who took them. Its very murky who was in control of [the evidence]. Weve had a couple of different stories, I dont know if well ever know. Andrew Little, the minister responsible for the Labour Party-led governments plan to re-enter the mine, told Radio NZ he did not know where the missing door was, but would be surprised if [the police or WorkSafe] dont have stored somewhere all of the exhibits and the material they collected at that time as part of their investigation. The police, however, have not located the door. WorkSafe issued a statement on February 18, stating evidence custody was not its responsibility, effectively washing its hands of the whole affair. Journalist Rebecca Macfie wrote on the Spinoff that in the early weeks of the operation, the police did not regard Pike as a criminal investigation, and therefore couldnt seize evidence and had to rely on the DoLs seizure powers. The DoL had a blatant conflict of interest in investigating the disaster. The royal commission found that the government regulator failed to shut down Pike River mine despite repeated warnings of safety violations. The miners families are demanding an independent inquiry into the disaster and are optimistic that the re-entry of the mine will provide new evidence. Whatever the outcome of the re-entry, however, the WSWS warns that the government has no intention of bringing to justice those responsible for the tragedy. A genuine investigation would raise too many questions about the role of successive Labour and National Party-led governments in creating the pro-business environment that paved the way for Pike River. Since the 1990s both parties had systematically dismantled the DoLs expert mining inspectorate and allowed mines to self-regulate their safety procedures. In 1992 the requirement for worker-elected safety check inspectors was scrapped. Any real investigation would also have to examine the role of the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU), which represented about half of the 140 miners at Pike River. The union, now called E Tu, made no public criticism of the mine during its operation and did not call any strikes over health and safety. EPMU leader Andrew Little, now a leading member of the Labour government, defended Pike River Coal immediately after the explosion, telling the New Zealand Herald on November 22, 2010, there was nothing unusual about Pike River or this mine that weve been particularly concerned about. The author also recommends: New Zealand government seeks to contain outrage over Pike River mine disaster [6 January 2018] The courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning was sentenced to jail by the US government on Friday after she refused to testify before a secret grand jury against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. WikiLeaks published Mannings Collateral Murder cockpit video in 2010 along with other leaked documents that exposed to the war crimes committed by the US military. Posters for the rally to free Chelsea Manning The International Youth and Students for Socialist Equality (IYSSE) and Socialist Equality Party are leading the fight to organize opposition to the attack on Manning and Assange by holding a series of meetings and rallies across the US. The IYSSE campaigned for the rallies at college campuses throughout the US, where students and youth voiced powerful support for the freedom of Manning and the defense of democratic rights. Alycia Alycia, a journalism student at NYU, said, Arresting Chelsea Manning is setting a dangerous precedent. The people should be able to hold the government accountable. This is what she was working for. Hardly anyone among the journalists is openly defending her. Dayna, a theater student at NYU, said, Im attending [the rally to defend Manning] because I think that theyre holding her in prison, without proper medical care, simply because she wont falsely testify, which is disgustingly undemocratic. She risked everything to expose the imperialist machine, and I think that same machine is using this flimsy excuse to make an example of her to discourage others from damaging them further. Cheree Cheree, another NYU student, told the IYSSE, I love whistleblowers. I think [Chelsea] is a hero. I believe the American people have a right to know these things. Its admirable that she and Edward Snowden are still continuing their efforts. Ill join the rally! Elias, also an NYU student, said that he supported the rally because the only way I can keep the ideals of public service alive is work like this rally, to ensure that when institutions abuse the trust we give them, we call them out and demand a system that works for us, for the people, not the elite, the people with money. Noah, a student from Northern Virginia Community College, said that the incarceration of Manning was an attack on democratic rights. Manning and Assange were being punished for exposing war crimes committed by governments around the world to the working class. For this reason, Noah said, the only people that can free Chelsea Manning, along with Julian Assange, is the international working class. An attack on Manning is an attack on the working class as a whole. Rhi, a biology major at Northern Virginia Community College, felt Manning had been right to refuse cooperation with the Trump administration. Manning rightly demonstrated a distrust in the grand jury process, being that it is a facet of the U.S. judicial system which functions as nothing less than an arm of the state. She called the attacks on whistleblowers an increasingly desperate attempt to quash political dissent and cover up the casualties of American imperialism. She declared that youth and students had the duty to defend her unreservedly and unequivocally in her fight to survive possible detention. Elias Linda, a psychology major at San Diego State University, said, I think its imperative that workers and students come to the defense of Chelsea Manning and demand her release. The fact that she is being jailed for uncovering the murderous war crimes of the US and refusing to testify against Julian Assange is disturbing and should concern everyone. Her imprisonment has far-reaching consequences and implications for us all and for anyone willing to put their life on the line for exposing the truth about the US military apparatus. Jonathon, a student at Eastern Michigan University, said, Chelsea Manning is one of many who want to bring to light the role of American imperialism in the massacres of civilians that are going on abroad that the United States is willingly committing. It is horrifying because of how it is ingrained into American society that America is the one which holds up democratic rights, America is the one which protects individuals, America is the one which is going around the world trying to keep people safe, and yet America is the one which is killing them. Jon I used to be a Democrat, a staunch nationalist, because that is what my parents were. But I began to realize that I was more to the left because I believed in peoples rights and I believed that there should be more equality for everyone. I started seeing how much of a wealth gap there really was and how unfair it was and how so many people could be oppressed. And that is when I found true socialism, rather than Stalinism, and being able to align myself with it. Luke, a high school student in Midland, Michigan, said that the American ruling class has knowingly issued a provocation to the world over, threatening the freedom of the press and democracy itself with the jailing of one of its strongest voices. Chelsea Manning, like the man she has valiantly put her freedom on the line for, has once more become a class prisoner of the sadistic political superstructure that couldnt get its fix with just seven torture-riddled years of imprisonment. It can only be through the organization of the working class and students around the globe in opposition to this appallingly grotesque assault on democracy and the freedom of the press orchestrated by the oligarchs of the land of the free that Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and the voice of truth and democracy can be saved. On March 7, the Washington Square News (WSN), New York Universitys student newspaper, removed from its website a witch-hunting article published on March 5 that equated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, and criticism of the Trump administration with fascistic violence. The article began, Womens March Co-Chair and accused anti-Semite Linda Sarsour is set to speak at Skirball [Center for the Performing Arts] later this month, and continued from there to accuse Sarsour of anti-Semitism on the basis of a crude amalgam because one of Sarsours co-chairs attended an event where Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan gave an anti-Semitic speech. The only NYU student quoted by the WSNs original article is a representative from TorchPAC, a Zionist club. Based on the flimsy claim that Sarsour is an anti-Semite because an associate attended an anti-Semitic speech, the WSN likens Sarsour to fascistic street gang leader Gavin McInnes and far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. There was no statement from the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, which invited Sarsour to speak, nor was it reported that Sarsours speech, on refugees and immigration, is co-sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace. WSN Editor-in-Chief Sakshi Venkatraman admitted the piece was written with a clear bias and was sensationalist and wrong. Venkatraman also acknowledged that the comparison to McInnes and Yiannopoulos was clearly a reachand disrespectful. NYU students were quick to oppose the original article. One comment on the original Facebook post said, didnt think this publication could get shittier but here you are equating feminist/human rights icon with capital N Nazis. Another said, Absolute bullshit that WSN is actively pushing the whole anti-israel=anti semitism thing when Jews and Palestinians on campus have been tirelessly disputing this. For each step NYU students take forward, WSN takes two back. NYU student activists have criticized WSN for perceived bias in favor of the administration and against activists. The decision by several editors to green-light this scurrilous article came amid a right-wing campaign against Representative Ilhan Omar for pointing out the influence of the Zionist lobby in Congress. There is a similar campaign in the UK against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, which also seeks to tar any criticism of Israel or of capitalism as anti-Semitic. This cat was let out of the bag when an anti-Corbyn Labour MP, Siobhain McDonagh, responded in the affirmative to a question posed to her by a BBC reporter: In other words, to be anti-capitalist you have to be anti-Semitic? Corbyn was physically assaulted on March 3 amid this hysterical campaign. The past year has also seen criticism of Sarsour and two other Womens March co-chairs based on alleged anti-Semitism, spearheaded by right-wing Zionist publications and CNN journalist Jake Tapper. After the WSN article was taken down, the New York Observer, formerly owned by President Donald Trumps son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner, attacked NYU for the planned Skirball event along the same lines. The World Socialist Web Site does not share the political views of Sarsour, whose activism is well within the Democratic Party. However, the attempt to brand her as an anti-Semite is a vicious right-wing slander. She has repeatedly, forthrightly and explicitly condemned anti-Semitism on social media and has worked with liberal Jewish organizations. The evidence of anti-Semitism cited by her critics consists of her legitimate criticisms of Israel and Zionism, the guilt-by-association of her co-chairs ties to the Nation of Islam, and her appearing at the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March (which included Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson and the mothers of Sandra Bland and Trayvon Martin). The campaign against bogus left-wing anti-Semitism, now rearing its head at NYU, has a broader significance. As the WSWS has noted: A central aim of this campaign is to fabricate a supposed growth of left-wing anti-Semitism, in large part to divert attention from the actual cultivation of far-right and neo-fascist forces, many of which are openly anti-Semitic, by capitalist governments from the Trump White House in the US to Macron in France, the grand coalition government in Germany and the far-right Netanyahu government in Israel itself. This campaign actually provides fuel for the very real and dangerous growth of anti-Semitism. To the extent that the Jewish people are identified with the crimes of the Israeli state and criticism of Israel is equated with anti-Semitism, ordinary Jews are made more vulnerable to fascistic efforts to whip up anti-Jewish sentiment. The International Youth and Students for Social Equality at NYU condemns the bogus campaign to equate legitimate opposition to Zionism, the Israeli state and capitalism with anti-Semitism. The growth of far-right and fascistic movements, including the revival of anti-Semitism, poses immense danger to the working class worldwide. The neo-fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the anti-immigrant ravings of Trump are closely associated with the reemergence of real anti-Semitism whose function, now as in the 1930s, is to redirect opposition to the status quo along racist and nationalist lines. The article in the Washington Square News against Sarsour, the attempts to smear as anti-Semitic Corbyn and his followers in the Labour Party and the Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, by the Democratic Party itself, only serve to mask the fact that state actors, including the Netanyahu regime in Israel, are making alliances with and cultivating the most right-wing and fascistic forces. The IYSSE has been in the forefront of the struggle against the rise of fascism and clarifying its social roots and the methods of fighting it. At Humboldt University in Berlin and at other German universities, the IYSSE has combated the ideological rearming of German imperialism and the rehabilitation of Hitler by extreme right-wing professors such as Jorg Baberowski and his allies in the university administration. The IYSSE will be presenting this struggle to NYU students, faculty and staff at a significant event in April featuring Christoph Vandreier, author of Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy and the Return of Fascism in Germany. We urge everyone seeking to oppose the genuine rise of fascist and anti-Semitic tendencies to attend our meeting, The Threat of Fascism and How to Fight It, on Thursday, April 18, at 6:30 p.m., in Lecture Hall 95 of the Global Center at NYU. For more information on the IYSSE at New York University, visit our Facebook page or contact us at iysse@socialequality.com. Organizing this meeting series entails substantial costs. The IYSSE is not funded by the banks and corporations or wealthy non-governmental organizations. If you believe this meeting series is important, donate as much as you can to pay for international travel, printing, promotion and other costs. Last week, the Sweetwater Union High School District (SUHSD) in San Diego, California announced it would hand out 87 pink slips to administrative support staff for the 2019-2020 school year. The district faces a more than $68 million deficit and plans to cut at least $22.5 million in the next academic year alone. The notices will be issued March 30 and will affect administrative staff, program directors and assistant principals at various school sites across the district. SUHSD is the largest secondary school district in California. Its more than 1,500 teachers work with some 42,000 students and over 32,000 adult learners in southwestern San Diego County, near the US-Mexico border. The cuts to administrative staff are only the initial round of mass layoffs and cuts to occur over the next two academic years and will play a central role in upcoming contract negotiations. The current contract between the Sweetwater Education Association (SEA) teachers union and the district is set to expire on June 30. The SEA and SUHSD met in a March 2 closed session to discuss the pink slips. Open hearings will be held over March 13 and 14, and a tentative agreement will be revealed at a March 25 board meeting. Initially, the SUHSD budget deficit was revealed in October 2018 due to the findings of newly hired CFO Dr. Jenny Salkeld. But a recent investigation by the San Diego Union Tribune revealed that a recently retired auditor, Frances Martinez, had discovered financial mismanagement nine months prior in April 2018 after performing an internal audit of the districts finances. Among her findings, Martinez discovered that Sweetwaters finance department was illegally conducting wire and phone transfers of millions of dollars from the districts clearing account, a practice prohibited by state law. Additionally, Martinez reported highly unusual accounting delays. In one instance, Sweetwater finance staff took up to seven months to deposit money from the districts clearing account into the county treasury. The clearing account is intended as a temporary holding place for money awaiting deposit to the county treasury. Martinez uncovered that the finance department used clearing account funds to pay settlements, bond interest, a consultant and a technology lease, among other things. A wire transfer payment was not posted in the districts general ledger until three months after it was made. In December 2018, an external audit was made by the state Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT). The audit revealed evidence indicating a cover-up of the districts financial problems. In a board meeting held on December 17, FCMATs chief executive officer Michael Fine revealed that 302 entries in the districts accounting system were manipulated to show that the district had more money than it actually did. The audit also uncovered that the district had omitted four months of payroll from the books, overestimated enrollment and state funding for three years, and engaged in possible illegal borrowing practices. The district has been taking loans from a special tax fund, called Mello-Roos. Fine warned the loans may not be covered under the tax arrangement and are on track to exceed levels allowed under state law. The district responded with an empty statement, with promises to cooperate with auditors and root out the problem. Alleging that the district officials had knowingly covered up the systematic manipulation of funds, Sweetwater superintendent Karen Janney refused to comment on the possibility of fraud. FCMAT officials have declared that SUHSD is at risk of going bankrupt, which could result in a state takeover of the district. Due to the financial crisis, SUHSD is currently under review by a San Diego County Board of Education fiscal adviser who has the authority to stay or rescind any decision made at the district level. Since revealing the budget deficit to employees and the public last October, the district, with the assistance of the Sweetwater Education Association (SEA) teachers union, has wasted no time in formulating ways in which cuts to schools will be implemented. The SEA fundamentally accepts the fraud and/or mismanagement and has assisted in establishing the framework for carrying through the over $68 million in cuts. In response to demands by teachers and education staff to oust the board and implement financial transparency, the SEA told teachers that current superintendent Janney was preferable to the previous board leadership and that the removal of the board would only risk a state takeover, mass layoffs and school closures. The SEA and SUHSD have already pushed through layoffs and closures in the Adult Schools within the district, an end to credit recovery for students and cuts to after-school programs such as tutoring. Additionally, career technical education and extra support teachers, known as curriculum intervention specialists have also been terminated. The union and the school board worked together to develop and pass a Supplemental Early Retirement Plan (SERP) for older teachers just before the winter break. Arguing that the SERP would significantly offset the deficit, the board and the union created a plan for teachers to retire early, and in the middle of the current school year. Teachers were told they could receive up to 85 percent of their final salary if they retired at the end of the semesterby December 21, 2018or 65 percent of their final salary if they retired in June 2019. Approximately 300 teachers chose to take early retirement. Some 94 teachers retired in December and the rest will leave in June 2019. Also included in the SERP agreement were two unpaid furlough days for all teachers. The early retirement and furlough deal was sold to teachers by the SEA as a means of protecting everyones jobs, but more pink slips are on the horizon. The SERP agreement also contained wording that protects new teachers from getting pink slips for the 2019-2020 academic year. However, according to a clause in the contract, this can be overruled in the case of a Reduction in Force (RIF), or renegotiation with the SEA. These instances of mismanagement, i.e., corruption at the district level, are not isolated events but are symptomatic of the direct and intentional looting of public education by the state and a reorientation toward privatization. California has faced decades of cuts to education resulting in the deterioration of conditions in public schools and working conditions for staff and teachers. At the federal level, efforts at privatization have been on the agenda since the 1980s, regardless of which party was in power. The role of the teachers unions has been central to the looting of public education. The unions have suffocated the anger of workers by suppressing strikes and repackaging the unending cuts to education as victories. What is happening in Sweetwater is symptomatic of the larger attack on public education across the state of California, as well as on a national and international basis. The WSWS has closely covered the growing teachers revolt across the world, which has now spread across five continents. With a budget deficit and upcoming contract negotiations in June 2019, SUHSD teachers and staff face similar attacks as teachers in Oakland and Los Angeles: increased class sizes, lack of on-site resources for students such as nurses and psychologists, cuts to school programs and the increased privatization of schools. A warning must be issued to San Diego teachers: they must begin discussing the lessons of the Oakland and Los Angeles strikes, which resulted in sellout contracts imposed on the membership by the unions, which line up with the Democratic Partythe very party spearheading charterization and privatization in the state. Students and teachers must reject the line of the district and the unions that they should be made to pay for the corruption and embezzlement of funds. In order to wage a fight to defend public education teachers need to form rank-and-file committees, completely independent of the unions, and begin discussing and preparing a statewide strike, directed toward ending the budget cuts, charterization and school closures. Washington announced late Monday that it is withdrawing all of its embassy personnel from Caracas in what may signal preparations for a direct US military intervention to consummate the protracted regime change operation unleashed against Venezuela. This decision reflects the deteriorating situation in Venezuela as well as the conclusion that the presence of U.S. diplomatic staff at the embassy has become a constraint on U.S. policy, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement. Pressed at a State Department press conference Tuesday as to what Pompeo meant by constraint, Elliott Abrams, the Trump administrations special envoy for regime change in Venezuela, said that it was prudent to take these folks out because their presence made it more difficult for the United States to take the actions that it needed to do to support the Venezuelan people. Asked whether military intervention was being prepared and if the Maduro government should see Pompeos statement as a threat, Abrams, a former Reagan administration State Department official who oversaw vast war crimes in Central America in the 1980s and was convicted of lying to Congress about an illegal operation to fund the contra terrorist war against Nicaragua, responded that he would continue to say, because it is true, all options are on the table. He refused to answer a question as to what military options had been drawn up by the Pentagon for a Venezuelan intervention, saying that it would be foolish for me to go further in spelling out the nature of the Trump administrations threat. Abrams also warned that new and more punishing economic sanctions were being prepared against Venezuela and that secondary sanctions, including against China, were another option that remained on the table. The US State Department also issued an extraordinary travel warning, urging US citizens not to visit the country and telling those who are either visiting or residing there to leave. Venezuela broke off diplomatic relations with the US after Washington instigated and then recognized the January 23 self-swearing in as interim president of Juan Guaido, a right-wing legislator and long-time US political asset who had only a short time earlier been installed as president of the countrys opposition-controlled National Assembly. In response, the government of President Nicolas Maduro ordered the withdrawal of all US diplomatic personnel. The US pulled out all US dependents and non-essential officials, leaving behind a skeleton crew. The Venezuelan government responded angrily to Pompeos announcement, insisting that it had issued an order Monday that all remaining US personnel leave the country within 72 hours after talks between the two countries about establishing interests sectionsde facto embassies operating under the protection of a third powerto continue minimal diplomatic relations had broken down. Pompeos announcement of the withdrawal of US personnel came only hours after he had appeared before a State Department press conference delivering a heated diatribe against Venezuela and socialism but failing to say anything about the emptying out of the US embassy. In his prepared remarks, Pompeo described Cuba as the true imperialist power in the country and condemned Russia for the deals secured by its state-owned oil company Rosneft in Venezuela and its provision of military equipment to the Maduro government, including portable air defense systems. The rant by Pompeo, a former right-wing Republican congressman from Kansas, expressed US imperialisms overriding aim of asserting untrammeled control by US-based energy conglomerates over Venezuelas oil reserves, the largest on the planet, and its concern that a direct US military intervention will come at a considerable cost. The escalating US threats have been made in the context of the evident stalling of the regime change operation centered upon the attempt to foist Guaido upon the Venezuelan people as the countrys legitimate president. An attempt to trigger Maduros downfall by means of a bogus humanitarian aid intervention across the Colombian border ended in a fiasco on February 23 after the opposition failed to mobilize any significant popular support, and the Western medias indictment of the Venezuelan government for burning truckloads of dubious aid was exposed as an act carried out by gangs organized by the right-wing opposition throwing Molotov cocktails at Venezuelan security forces. The US-orchestrated regime change operation has attempted to exploit the protracted blackout that cut off power to at least 70 percent of the country from late last Thursday. Government officials stated that power had been restored to most of the country by Tuesday, but school and work were suspended for a fourth consecutive day on Wednesday. Pompeo, Abrams and Senator Marco Rubio, the right-wing Florida Republican who has played a major role in setting the Trump administrations Latin American policy, have all gloated over the suffering inflicted upon the Venezuelan people with the cutoff of light and water for millions across 18 of the countrys 23 states. The Maduro government has blamed the power outage on a cyberattack mounted by US imperialism, which it claims targeted the computerized system of the Guri dam, shutting down its turbines. While government officials have yet to present conclusive evidence of an attack, Caracas has vowed to present such proof to the United Nations. Others in Venezuela have stated that the nationwide power outage was the result not of outside intervention, but rather of the failure of the government to invest in and maintain the countrys electrical system, as well as the loss of key technical personnel who have left the country. The executive secretary of the Federation of Electrical Industry Workers, Ali Briceno told the media that a power overload had ignited a fire that knocked out three high voltage lines triggering a shutdown at the Guri dam, and that the personnel trained to deal with such a crisis were no longer there. In an article published by Forbes, Kalve Leetaru, a senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber Homeland Security and former fellow and instructor at the Georgetown University school of foreign service, writes that the scenario of the US sabotaging Venezuelas power grid is actually quite realistic. Remote cyber operations rarely require a significant ground presence, making them the ideal deniable influence operation, Leetaru states. Given the US governments longstanding concern with Venezuelas government, it is likely that the US already maintains a deep presence within the countrys national infrastructure grid, making it relatively straightforward to interfere with grid operations. He continues: Widespread power and connectivity outages like the one Venezuela experienced last week are also straight from the modern cyber playbook. Cutting power at rush hour, ensuring maximal impact on civilian society and plenty of mediagenic post-apocalyptic imagery, fits squarely into the mold of a traditional influence operation. The article added that Venezuelas aging power system offered a perfect target for such operations since the blame for grid failures typically falls upon government officials for failing to adequately oversee that infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Trump administrations proposed budget for fiscal 2020 includes $500 million for aiding the democratic transition in Venezuela, under conditions in which State Department funding for all of Latin America is set to be slashed by 27 percent to only $116 million. A Harris poll exclusively reported by Axios has found that a larger majority of youthMillennials and Generation Zare embracing socialism and policies associated with it. The increasingly positive view of socialism is a continuation of a trend recorded in the last few years. According to the poll, which was conducted in February 2019, 61 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 (born after 1995) view socialism in a positive light. Furthermore, 73.1 percent of Millennials, those born between 1980 and 1994, and Generation Z, those born after 1995, believe the government should provide universal health care, and 67.1 percent think college should be tuition-free. The top three voting issues for Gen Z, according to the Harris poll, are mass shootings, racial equality, and immigration policy and treatment of immigrants. Millennials top issues are access to health care, global warming/climate change and mass shootings. A similar 2018 Gallup poll found that 51 percent of Americans between 18 and 29 viewed socialism positively, while less than half of the same age group found capitalism agreeable. The Gallup polls inclusion of ages 25 to 29 makes an exact comparison difficult, but the results from the new Harris poll suggests an increased interest in socialism compared to last year, an ongoing trend since the aftermath of the Great Recession. The source of the interest in socialism is not hard to find. American youth are part of a generation that has experienced nothing but economic crises, social degradation, unending violence, and the deteriorating living conditions of the working class. Many are without access to decent paying jobs and are forced to live with their parents. The average student graduating from college with debt has a total debt of nearly $30,000, with no guarantee of employment. Furthermore, research shows that Millennials are the first generation set to be worse off than their parents. Youth have grown up in the shadow of the war on terror and have been subject to police brutality and gun violence at home and in schools. The US militarys murderous campaign in the Middle East is immensely unpopular among youth. For the fifth year in a row, police have killed over 1,000 people, and last years March for Our Lives was a response to the stream of school shootings that claimed the lives of hundreds of children. The widespread support for socialism terrifies the ruling class, which fears above all that the growth of working class struggle over the past year will acquire a socialist orientation and perspective. The US has seen an escalating wave of strikes and workers militancy. From 2009 to 2018, strike activity jumped from 124,000 work days lost, to 2.8 million, an increase of over 2,000 percent. Last month, US President Donald Trump unleashed a tirade against socialism and declared a global crusade against it. He declared the United States would never be a socialist country in the State of the Union speech. Trumps speeches are a direct appeal to ultra-right forces in the US and spout the poison of nationalism and xenophobia. For their part, the Democrats have had two distinct but parallel responses. A dominant faction of the party establishment has hastened to repudiate any association with socialism. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris recently told reporters she was not a democratic socialist but a progressive Democrat. In 2017, when responding to an NYU student asking about the future of the party, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi declared, Were capitalists. The Democrats have worked with the pseudo-left to promote identity politics and the claim that race, gender and other identities are the dividing forces in society instead of class. The promotion of middle-class politics over the class divisions in society is aimed at dividing the working class, undermining class consciousness, and therefore socialist consciousness, and advancing the interests of privileged layers of the upper-middle class. On the other hand, there are figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are tasked with channeling opposition to capitalism behind the Democratic Party. Significantly, Millennials and Generation Z will make up 37 percent of voters in the upcoming 2020 elections. Large sections of young people are responding favorably to Sanders second presidential election. Ocasio-Cortezs Green New Deal, and Sanders denunciation of big banks and Wall Street, are part of a desperate effort to prevent the leftward movement of workers and young people from breaking with a political organization that advances a right-wing, militarist, anti-working class and pro-capitalist agenda. Borderlands 3 Vault Card 2 Available Now For Director's Cut Owners With New Legendary Loot and Skins Black Friday Sales Go Live on Xbox Store, With Huge Discounts on Tons of Titles The debate on ruling Fideszs membership in the European Peoples Party (EPP) is actually about immigration, as the EPP members approach to the issue is determined by their stance on migration, Gergely Gulyas, head of the Prime Ministers Office, said in Budapest. Earlier in the day Manfred Weber, EPPs group leader and spitzenkandidat for the European parliamentary elections, held talks with Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Budapest. Fidesz had several conflicts with the parties that initiated its exclusion from EPP even previously because almost all of them had voted in favour of mandatory migrant quotas, Gulyas told a press conference. He said Weber and Orban shared the intention that Fidesz should remain an EPP member, with the two sides having an interest in an agreement. Gulyas added, however, that both sides have some boundaries which they are unwilling to go beyond. Orban made it clear that Hungary cannot and does not want to make concessions in terms of defending its external borders, rejecting migration and protecting Christian culture, no matter what internal conflicts this approach generates within the EPP, he said. The government welcomes that Weber has informed Orban about his plans, among which defending external borders and halting migration are priorities, Gulyas said, adding that this is why Hungary can support the German politicians quest to become president of the European Commission. Weber made it clear that if he were the EC president, he would take resolute action against migration and for the defence of external borders. This is a common cause, Gulyas said. Weber also stressed the need to totally halt illegal immigration, he said. Concerning Webers previous requests to the Hungarian government, Gulyas quoted Orban as saying that the billboards warning against measures planned by Brussels would be replaced by ones that promote the governments family policy measures. The prime minister also said he had not wanted to insult anyone with the expression useful idiots and if someone still feels offended, he is prepared to apologise, Gulyas said. The minister added that the government considers the future of the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest as guaranteed. The two sides exchanged views about the future of Europe and the tasks of European institutions, too, Gulyas said. The next European Commission should focus in the most important issues, he said, noting that over the past few years the commission had failed to address the demographic situation, halt migration and keep Britain, Europes second biggest economy, within the EU, Gulyas said. MTI Photo: Monus Marton In central Europe, 61 million of the 83 million voters reject migration, a survey published by the Nezopont Institute showed. The survey was conducted in nine countries on a sample of 1,000 asking the respondents opinion on migration. In Hungary, seven million of a total of eight million voters reject non- European migration. In the Czech Republic, 8 million, in Poland, 22 million are against it, Nezopont found. The number of pro-migration voters is around or below 1 million in Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia, it said. In total, 61 million voters in the region reject and 16 million approve of migration, it said. The survey was conducted in Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia in February. I am honored to join you today for this commemoration, and on behalf of the American people, I thank the Hungarian people for your friendship and partnership as Allies over the last 20 years. I am committed to making this partnership even stronger, and I am confident that it will grow as we move forward together. One of the many things I admire about the Hungarian people is your deep awareness of your history and your commitment to remembering the formative events of your past. I know that later this week you will celebrate the memory of your brave ancestors who heeded the call for freedom and liberty in 1848. Our presence here today is also about remembering some important events for Hungary - events that are again rooted in your enduring desire for freedom and liberty. 30 years ago, the Hungarian peopleand many of your neighbors across Central and Eastern Europe chose to end the darkness of communism and pursue a path of liberty, free from government control over what you say, how you worship, the way you make a living, and where you travel. 20 years ago, Hungary chose to defend and solidify the choice for liberty by joining NATO, after 85% of Hungarians who participated in a national referendum said yes to joining the alliance. We recognize that the last 30 years have not been without hardship and challenge, but there is no doubt that these events were wins for Hungary. Hungarians are safer, freer, more prosperous, and have more opportunities because of these choices. And the United States and other NATO members are better and stronger because we have Hungary as an ally. The Hungarian government has clearly honored the will of its people by taking an active and committed role in NATO over the last 20 years. To cite just a few examples: At the moment, close to 1000 Hungarian soldiers are serving side-by-side with allied troops in NATO, EU, and multi-lateral peacekeeping missions that make our countries safer; To make the alliance stronger, Hungary is actively modernizing its military and purchasing NATO-compatible equipment, and is on track to meet its NATO commitment to spend 2% of its GDP on defense; Hungary is hosting the Heavy Airlift Wing at Papa Air Base, which provides critical support to NATO operations; Hungary is also home to NATOs Center of Excellence for Military Medicine and the NATO Force Integration Unit; And we welcome Hungarys initiative to host a NATO Regional Special Operations Command Center and establish a NATO Multi-National Division Central that will further facilitate NATO coordination and operations in the future. Hungary is also strengthening its bilateral security relationships with NATO members. I am pleased that weve been able to conclude negotiations for a new Defense Cooperation Agreement between the United States and Hungary, which will bring our security cooperation into the 21st century and prepare us for the challenges that we face together as allies. I look forward to signing the final agreement soon. These contributions demonstrate Hungarys commitment to the NATO alliance, and the Hungarian people are rightly proud of this work and remain highly supportive of NATO, based on the public opinion research that we see. However, the story isnt over. The world is full of new and complex challenges to our alliance - challenges to our values, to our liberty, to our sovereignty. We cannot take for granted the benefits that flow from the important choices that Hungarians made which led to the pivotal changes in 1989 and 1999. There are more choices ahead. Ive heard some remark that Russia is not a military threat to Hungary, because the two countries dont share a border. However, in todays world, its a mistake to think only in terms of tanks crossing a border. All NATO members face aggressive cyber security threats and misinformation campaigns from Russia designed to destabilize us, weaken our unity, and disrupt our democratic processes. Moreover, Hungary does share a border with Ukraine, a country that faces the full brunt of Russian aggression on a daily basis, from cyber attacks and rampant misinformation campaigns to violent provocations and outright conventional warfare. Already more than 10,000 Ukrainians have lost their lives and 1.6 million Ukrainians have been driven from their homes. A close and high-level NATO relationship with Kyiv is in every allys interest. As Secretary of State Pompeo said during his historic visit here last month, Central Europeans should be under no illusions about Putins intentions. An authoritarian Russia is not interested in the freedom and sovereignty of smaller nations. We must resist the Kremlins cynical attempts sow discord in our alliance, whether it is through disinformation campaigns or attempts to mimic Western institutions to buy influence in the region. Even the best of allies will occasionally have disagreements, but we cannot lose sight of what makes us strong- our unity as NATO allies. China does not share a border with anyone in NATO, and yet it also threatens freedom in the region. Like Russia, it is an authoritarian power that does not share the aspirations of freedom embodied in NATO, and it will use its economic power to subvert the rule of law and achieve political power. The United States has made no secret about its concerns over the role certain suppliers may play in our growing telecom networks. It is absolutely vital that every NATO member ensure that the networks we use to share sensitive security and defense information are secure. And weve all witnessed the threat from terrorism, in the United States, in Europe, and in many other places. Following the devastating terrorist attacks of September 11, NATO invoked its Article 5 collective defense provision for the first time. We will never forget that Hungary, as one of NATOs newest members, voted to stand with the United States in that decision. Terrorism remains a threat, and as allies we must stay unified and vigilant. NATO as a whole is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year, and it is without a doubt the most powerful and successful military alliance in world history. No other institution or country or geopolitical power can offer the security and respect for sovereignty and personal liberty that NATO offers. Just as the United States was surrounded by allies in the difficult and painful aftermath of September 11, Hungary can also rest assured that, as a NATO member, it too will never stand alone in its defense. NATO is a win for all of us, and we are honored to stand with you and work with you as we continue to strengthen it for the future. Thank you." Source: U.S. Embassy Budapest Everyone that knows her loves her, Lindsay Fairley says of her 16-year-old-daughter, Karlie Guse, a high school junior who adored classic movies like Grease and Sixteen Candles. Shes very well-liked and popular, Fairley says, noting that she especially misses her daughters quick wit and quirky humor. Although Fairley, who lives in Nevada, hasnt seen her daughter since before she went missing in October 2018, Fairley refuses to speak of Karlie in the past tense. In fact, Fairley clings to hope that her daughter who lived with her father and stepmother in Bishop, California will return home alive and well. Karlie is one of many kids who go missing in America each year. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reports that there were over 400,000 accounts of missing children in 2018. According to Fairley, Karlie attended a small party with her boyfriend on October 12, 2018, the night before she went missing. They allegedly smoked marijuana there, and, as Fairley was told, Karlie grew agitated. According to what Fairley heard from witnesses, her daughter was acting really scared and paranoid, Fairley tells PEOPLE. NBC News reports that Karlie called her stepmother, Melissa Guse, to pick her up from the party. Melissa Guse told NBC that they got home around 9 pm, ate dinner and Karlie headed to bed. Guse allegedly saw her stepdaughter in bed around 5:45 a.m the following morning, but when she went to check on Karlie again later that morning, the girl was gone. Shed left her cellphone and other personal belongings at home. She was reportedly wearing gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt. For more information about Karlie Guses disappearance and the stories of other missing young people, subscribe now to PEOPLE or pick up this weeks issue, on newsstands now. Melissa Guse and Karlies father, Zachary Guse, told NBC they headed out to search for Karlie as soon as they realized she was missing. According to the Mono County Sheriffs Office, there were sightings of her walking between 7 and 7:30 a.m. that day, and Fairley says there have been a few other potential sightings in the intervening months. But the family doesnt know where Karlie is today. The emotions come in tidal waves at the least expected times, like when youre walking and you hear something that reminds you of her, Fairley says. Its not like her to journey off into the unknown. I miss our conversations, our talks, how shed make me laugh. If you have any information about the whereabouts of Karlie Guse, please contact the Mono County Sheriffs Office at 760-932-7549, or the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at 1-800-THE-LOST (1-800-843-5678). SYDNEY, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Virgin Australia have assured the public that they will not introduce any new aircraft to their fleet unless completely satisfied with its safety, the airline said on Wednesday. The statement came after Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines crash which killed all 157 people on board. Just five months prior, another Boeing 737 MAX 8 operated by Lion Air also went down in Indonesia, killing 189 people. With the aircraft now under the microscope of the globe's aviation authorities, investigators are examining whether there could be a fault in the plane's automated systems. As a result, several nations have decided to ground the model until more about the cause are known. While Virgin Australia do not currently have any Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft in their fleet, the airline has 30 of the aircraft on order from the U.S. manufacturer which are due to be delivered in November. Estimated to value around 172 million Australian dollars (121.45 million U.S. dollars), Virgin Australia said we are ly monitoring the situation and will continue to work with Boeing, Civil Aviation Safety Authority, and other relevant authorities as more information becomes available. "Safety is Virgin Australia's No. 1 priority," Virgin Australia said. [ Editor: WPY ] Lawyers for Covington Catholic high school student Nicholas Sandmann on Tuesday filed a $275 million defamation suit against CNN, saying the networks coverage of the students encounter with Native American tribal elder Nathan Phillips in January constituted a vicious attack against his client.In short, the false and defamatory gist of CNNs collective reporting conveyed to its viewers and readers that Nicholas was the face of an unruly hate mob of hundreds of white racist high school students who physically assaulted, harassed, and taunted two different minority groups engaged in peaceful demonstrations, preaching, song, and prayer, according to the suit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Kentucky.The CNN accusations are totally and unequivocally false and CNN would have known them to be untrue had it undertaken any reasonable efforts to verify their accuracy before publication of its false and defamatory accusations, the suit added, citing four TV broadcasts and nine online articles it considers defamatory.Also Read: Covington Student's Lawyers Call Washington Post Editor's Note 'Grossly Insufficient'Sandmann seeks $75 million in compensatory damages for the reputational harm, emotional distress, and mental anguish caused by CNNs false attacks as well as $200 million in punitive damages.Contrary to its Facts First public relations ploy, CNN ignored the facts and put its anti-Trump agenda first in waging a 7-day media campaign of false, vicious attacks against Nicholas, a young boy who was guilty of little more than wearing a souvenir Make America Great Again cap while on a high school field trip to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the suit reads.Reps for CNN did not immediately respond to request for comment from TheWrap.Also Read: First Amendment Lawyers Say Covington Student Has No Case Against the Washington PostLast month, Sandmann filed a similar suit against the Washington Post, seeking $250 million. After the filing of that suit, the Post said in a statement provided to TheWrap, We are reviewing a copy of the lawsuit and we plan to mount a vigorous defense.A video posted on social media Jan. 19 depicted an edited version of events that occurred the day before. It shows several students and Nathan Phillips, and some viewers believed the teens were mocking Phillips.The clip sparked widespread outrage and condemnation, but Sandmann denied any racist intent, and told the Associated Press he was trying to de-escalate the situation.A longer video of the incident posted Jan. 21 showed that Phillips and his group had first initiated the encounter with the Covington students and that the students had earlier been subjected to harassment from a different organization. Several media figures subsequently disavowed their initial statements about the incident.Pamela Chelin contributed to this report.Read original story CNN Slapped With $275 Million Defamation Suit by Covington Student Nicholas Sandmann At TheWrap Lawyers for Covington Catholic high school student Nicholas Sandmann on Tuesday filed a $275 million defamation suit against CNN, saying the networks coverage of the students encounter with Native American tribal elder Nathan Phillips in January constituted a vicious attack against his client. In short, the false and defamatory gist of CNNs collective reporting conveyed to its viewers and readers that Nicholas was the face of an unruly hate mob of hundreds of white racist high school students who physically assaulted, harassed, and taunted two different minority groups engaged in peaceful demonstrations, preaching, song, and prayer, according to the suit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Kentucky. The CNN accusations are totally and unequivocally false and CNN would have known them to be untrue had it undertaken any reasonable efforts to verify their accuracy before publication of its false and defamatory accusations, the suit added, citing four TV broadcasts and nine online articles it considers defamatory. Also Read: Covington Student's Lawyers Call Washington Post Editor's Note 'Grossly Insufficient' Sandmann seeks $75 million in compensatory damages for the reputational harm, emotional distress, and mental anguish caused by CNNs false attacks as well as $200 million in punitive damages. Contrary to its Facts First public relations ploy, CNN ignored the facts and put its anti-Trump agenda first in waging a 7-day media campaign of false, vicious attacks against Nicholas, a young boy who was guilty of little more than wearing a souvenir Make America Great Again cap while on a high school field trip to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the suit reads. Reps for CNN did not immediately respond to request for comment from TheWrap. Also Read: First Amendment Lawyers Say Covington Student Has No Case Against the Washington Post Last month, Sandmann filed a similar suit against the Washington Post, seeking $250 million. After the filing of that suit, the Post said in a statement provided to TheWrap, We are reviewing a copy of the lawsuit and we plan to mount a vigorous defense. Story continues A video posted on social media Jan. 19 depicted an edited version of events that occurred the day before. It shows several students and Nathan Phillips, and some viewers believed the teens were mocking Phillips. The clip sparked widespread outrage and condemnation, but Sandmann denied any racist intent, and told the Associated Press he was trying to de-escalate the situation. A longer video of the incident posted Jan. 21 showed that Phillips and his group had first initiated the encounter with the Covington students and that the students had earlier been subjected to harassment from a different organization. Several media figures subsequently disavowed their initial statements about the incident. Pamela Chelin contributed to this report. Read original story CNN Slapped With $275 Million Defamation Suit by Covington Student Nicholas Sandmann At TheWrap Photo credit: Courtesy From Esquire We take bourbon way too seriously these days. We argue incessantly about it on Twitter and Reddit. We tell people they are wrong for liking certain brands or drinking it a particular way. We spend exorbitant amounts on rare releases, then make fun of people for doing the very same. And we come to bars and liquor stores armed with a ridiculous amount of knowledge about the truth behind the stories distilleries weave. Some of this is actually helpful in understanding what's out there, while a lot winds up being useless bourbon bloviating. Bourbon, and all whiskey really, is subject to passionate obsession, and how you feel about it is entirely subjective. But there are a few objective bourbon truths: It must be made from a mash bill containing at least 51 percent corn, aged in new charred oak containers (not necessarily barrels, even though virtually all bourbon is aged in them), and distilled in the U.S.; and it must meet certain proof requirements, which you can Google if you are interested. Other than that, there is no wrong or right, despite what blowhards online and at bars might tell you. If you like to sip Pappy Van Winkle from a Baccarat crystal tasting glass, thats just fine. If you prefer drinking Jim Beam out of a red plastic cup with a healthy pour of Coke, thats cool, too. Dont let anyone whiskey-shame you for your personal preferences. However, if you are in the market for a little guidance as to what might be a quality bourbon to tryone that you can actually find for less than $100 per bottle (or much less than even that)here is an updated list of 10 great bourbon brands to drink in 2020. Photo credit: Hearst Owned Knob Creek Jim Beams Small Batch Collection was created by former master distiller Booker Noe in 1992, at a time when bourbon was struggling for relevance. Yeah, hard to imagine now. There is no real meaning behind the term small batch, so for many brands it simply means smaller volume than other whiskeys they produce. There are four Jim Beam Small Batch expressions available: Bookers (barrel-proof, filtered only for char), Basil Haydens (mild, 80-proof, high-rye bourbon), Bakers (recently relaunched as a single barrel release), and Knob Creek. While this last whiskey may not be the flashiest, its arguably the most consistently excellent, with rich caramel and brown sugar flavor, along with that signature Jim Beam nuttiness, shining through. The 100-proof Knob Creek lost its 9-year-old age statement a few years ago, but Beam is bringing it back. And if you want something closer to Bookers with a higher ABV, there are several Knob Creek single barrel releases to choose from, the most recent of which was Quarter Oak, a bourbon finished for four years in smaller casks to increase the interaction between the whiskey and wood. Story continues Shop Knob Creek drizly.com Photo credit: Hearst Owned Wild Turkey Wild Turkey is a classic, unpretentious American whiskey brand that permeated the publics consciousness well before Matthew McConaughey was named creative director back in 2016. The distillerys flagship expression is bottled at 101 proof, giving this inexpensive but always dependable bourbon a slightly hotter, spicier edge than other comparable whiskeys. Wild Turkey generally bottles liquid aged for at least six years, and the barrels are given the more intense No. 4 alligator char to help deepen the flavor as the whiskey ages. It also has some higher-end releases like Masters Keep, the most recent of which was Cornerstone Rye, and the smaller batch Russells Reserve lineup. Though you really cant do better than the humble 101 (dont waste your time with the 81-proof version), look out for these recently announced bottles this year: Masters Keep Bottled in Bond, Rare Breed Rye, and Russells Reserve 2003. Shop Wild Turkey drizly.com Photo credit: Hearst Owned Elijah Craig Evan Williams may be Heaven Hills star budget bourbon, but Elijah Craig, which is aged for a few more years, is worth the extra $15 to $20. Elijah Craig used to carry a 12-year-old age statement, but the brand dropped it a few years ago and whiskey fans lost their collective shit. This is the new reality for bourbon drinkers, and its only as bad as you convince yourself it is. Case in point: The no-age-statement Elijah Craig is still very good, and I challenge anyone to distinguish between the two in a blind taste test. But there are limited releases of the 18- and 23-year-old expressions floating around out there, and the Barrel Proof is definitely worth a try for a blast of high-proof Heaven Hill whiskey that retains the 12-year-old age statement. (New to the Elijah Craig family is a rye whiskey, a solid addition made using the barely legal rye recipe of 51 percent rye grain.) In an era of limited release bottles that get a lot of press but are nearly impossible to find, its smart to spend your hard-earned cash on something reliable and affordable like this sweet, fruity bourbon. Shop Elijah Craig reservebar.com Photo credit: Hearst Owned Four Roses If it isnt already, Four Roses Yellow Label should be your go-to budget bourbon (though the label isnt actually yellow anymore). Its great in cocktails, you can sip it on its own, and it is hands-down one of the best bourbons you can find for 20 bucks. The Single Barrel is an excellent whiskey too, but for something tasty and more moderately priced, check out Four Roses Small Batch. The distillery used two mash bills and five yeast strains to create 10 different recipes to work with, and four of these recipes were used to make Small Batch. The newer Small Batch Select uses six recipes, its non-chill filtered, and its bottled at a higher 104 proof. Generally, the bourbon is about six to eight years old, with the spice from Four Roses high rye mash bill nicely complementing the fruity notes from the yeast. Shop Four Roses drizly.com Photo credit: Hearst Owned Michter's The new Michters Fort Nelson Distillery is up and running in Louisville, a small operation with stills producing whiskey that will be bottled in a few years time, although the main production facility remains the much bigger Shively distillery. The Michters range includes bourbon, rye, American whiskey, and sour mash whiskey. And while these arent the cheapest bottles you can find, they are some of the best. The Michters team carefully selects contract-distilled barrels of whiskey before blending the liquid into an incredibly balanced flavor profile that hits all the right notessweet, spice, vanilla, cocoa, and more. Go ahead and pick up a bottle of the 10- or 25-year-old bourbon if you can find it (sorry, you probably cant), or the bold Barrel Strength Rye, but Michters US1 is what you should turn to for everyday drinking. Shop Michter's drizly.com Photo credit: Hearst Owned Old Forester Old Forester is a storied bourbon brand known for making inexpensive whiskey that has seen a big resurgence over the past few years. And its finally getting the respect it deserves by releasing some truly fantastic new expressions in its Whiskey Row series, like the 1920 Prohibition Style and 1897 Bottled In Bond. Theres also the annual Birthday Bourbon, one of those coveted unicorn bottles that people line up outside of liquor stores to get the night before it hits shelves. But the core lineup has long been full of solid options. The Classic 86 Proof clocks in with slightly higher alcohol content (and more flavor) than your average baseline bourbon, while the Signature 100 Proof is a bartenders best friend. Dont forget to try the new Old Forester Rye while you're at it, a 65-percent rye whiskey that is soft and sweet on the palate. Shop Old Forester reservebar.com Photo credit: Hearst Owned Maker's Mark You havent fully explored the bourbon category until youve tried wheated whiskeyor in the case of Makers Mark, whisky (they spell it like the Scots). "Wheated" just means that wheat is used as a flavoring grain in the mash bill instead of the usual rye, along with the requisite corn and malted barley. Makers Mark chooses red winter wheat, resulting in an instantly recognizable soft and sweet flavor with a nice, lasting finish. Sure, Pappy Van Winkle is also a wheated bourbon, but why even consider that when you can find Makers Mark virtually everywhere for a fraction of the price? If youre looking for Makers with some extra kick, check out Cask Strength, an uncut bourbon that is still very approachable with a relatively low barrel proof of 108 to 114. And recently, the distillery has been furthering its innovation with the lengthily named Makers Mark Wood Finishing Series 2019 Limited Release: Stave Profile RC6, which is basically Makers finished with different proprietary wood staves to develop unique flavors. Shop Maker's Mark drizly.com Photo credit: Hearst Owned Colonel E.H. Taylor, Jr. There is so much great bourbon coming out of the Buffalo Trace Distillery. All of the liquid that will become future Pappy Van Winkle and ultimately get sold for thousands on the secondary market is distilled there. Likewise for the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection, a series of remarkable bourbon and rye whiskeys that is also impossibly hard to find. Then theres the eponymous flagship Buffalo Trace bourbon, yet another inexpensive whiskey of very high quality. But the best bourbon produced by Buffalo Trace is the E.H. Taylor, Jr. line, with the Small Batch Bourbon leading the way. This is a bottled-in-bond bourbon (meaning its 100 proof and at least four years old) that is named after an important figure in distilling history. Its also an incredibly flavorful whiskey that never disappoints. All of the whiskey in the E.H. Taylor lineup is bottled-in-bond (with the exception of the Barrel Proof, which has a higher ABV), including experimental limited releases like Amaranth and Cured Oak. Shop E.H. Taylor drizly.com Photo credit: Hearst Owned Barrell There are bourbon brands that source their whiskey, slap a label on it, and call it a day. Then there are companies like Barrell Bourbon, which carefully selects stock from various whiskey-producing areas, tastes and blends innovative combinations, and frequently releases new batches without being afraid of missing the mark. Barrell doesnt deal with that problem very often though, as is the case with its newest bourbon, Batch 023, a blend of 10-, 12-, and 15-year-old bourbons. The brand doesnt just do bourbon, however. Barrell Rye Batch 003 (aged between four and 14 years, sourced from America, Canada, and Poland) is in the works, as well as 18-year-old Whiskey Single Barrels and the Barrell Whiskey Private Release series (blends finished in different barrel types) that are due out this spring. Shop Barrell drizly.com Photo credit: Hearst Owned Woodford Reserve Woodford Reserve is a relatively new brand. Although the distillery operates on a site where bourbon has been made since the 1800s, Woodford wasn't introduced until 1996 by parent company Brown-Forman (which also owns Jack Daniels and Old Forester). The whiskey has become a bar staple over the past 25 years, and the flagship bourbon is the main reason why. Its sweet and just a little bit spicy, with prominent notes of vanilla and fruit. Theres a Double Oaked version too, which is matured for a second period of time in lightly charred barrelsall supplemented by rye, wheat, and malt whiskeys. The distilling team also experiments with mash bills and maturation with Woodfords Masters Collection and Distillery Series, as well as the annual Batch Proof Series; the current release takes the proof up from Woodfords standard 90.4 to 123.6. Shop Woodford reservebar.com You Might Also Like Did Nicki Minaj get married? On the newest episode of her Beats1 show Queen Radio on Apple Music, Minaj, 36, referred to her new man, convicted sex offender Kenneth Petty, as her husband. Every night when I get out of the shower, my husband takes this really good lotion that we just bought, and he massages my feet, and rubs them, and he rubs each toe individually, and the heel, and the ball of my foot, and he does it all, Minaj said on the show, which was recorded from London ahead of her March 14 concert in Birmingham. It is not immediately clear if Minaj is actually married or is just using the term loosely. A rep for the rapper did not immediately respond to PEOPLEs request for comment. Minajs comment comes just a few days after the Barbie Dreams rapper shared a photo of herself and Petty, 40, in France captioning it, Bae out in Paris. Kenneth Petty and Nicki Minaj Minaj then shared a romantic photo of Petty holding her in his arms as the two took in the view of the Eiffel Tower at Place du Trocadero. Its bigger than a tower, I aint talking about #Eiffel, Minaj captioned the shot, quoting her own lyrics from the track Anaconda. PARIS I LOVE YOU!! Minaj confirmed her romance with Petty back in December when she posted a series of photos of him from her birthday celebration in Turks and Caicos. Minaj shared two photos one that features her posing with her leg wrapped around Petty while he looks at her lovingly another shot of him looking off into the distance along with a caption quoting lyrics from Adeles 2015 hit, Hello. Did you ever make it out of that town where nothing ever happens?its no secretthat the both of usare running out of time, Minaj wrote. Story continues Minaj disabled the comments on the post debuting her new relationship after fans started slamming her for being with Petty due to his criminal past. Petty is a level two registered sex offender in New York, which means hes considered a moderate risk of repeat offense and will be required to register as a sex offender for life. According to online records from the New York Division of Criminal Justice Services, Petty was convicted in April 1995 of attempted rape in the first degree for an incident that occurred in September 1994 involving a 16-year-old girl. He was sentenced to 18 to 54 months in prison, but it is unclear how much time he actually served. Minaj responded to a fan in the comments, writing, He was 15, she was 16 in a relationship. But go awf Internet. Yall cant run my life. Yall cant even run yall own life. Thank you boo. TMZ reports Minaj has known Petty since they were teenagers and is confident hes matured. The site reports sources close to Minaj claim the mother of Pettys girlfriend at the time filed the charges because she did not approve of him. RELATED: Nicki Minajs New Boyfriend Kisses Her Feet in Hot Tub as She Laughs on Romantic Getaway Neither a manager nor a rep for Minaj returned PEOPLEs request for comment. Kenneth Petty and Nicki Minaj Petty also pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the shooting death of a man named Lamont Robinson in 2002, according to a criminal complaint obtained by The Blast. According to The Blast, Petty plead guilty to the manslaughter charge in March 2006 and served seven years in prison after being sentenced to 10. Petty was released in May 2013, and had been on supervised release for five years until May 2018, records accessed by PEOPLE show. Tucker Carlsons show slipped a bit in demo ratings on Monday, which was the Fox News hosts first episode since Media Matters unearthed old audio of Carlson making crude remarks about women and statutory rape during radio interviews.Last nights program drew 2.895 million viewers, with 495,000 of those coming from the key adults 25-54 demographic. Those numbers topped all of Tuckers cable news competition, but theyre down from his quarter-to-date averages. Versus last Monday (2.862 million) and the same night last year (2.791 million), Carlsons latest episode ticked up in total viewers.Fox News is behind us, as they have been since the very first day. Toughness is a rare quality at a TV network, and we are grateful for that, Carlson said, addressing the online boycotts against him, during Mondays show. We will never bow to the mob, ever, no matter what.Also Read: Tucker Carlson Continues to Deliver Massive Ratings to Fox News - Despite the BoycottsCarlson is the host of cable news No. 2 show, sitting just behind fellow Fox News program Hannity, which airs after his. That means Carlson owns his 8 p.m. hour among direct competition, and that claim holds true for both total viewers and among adults 25-54, which is the key demographic for companies advertising on news programming.We can extrapolate that even further: Carlson has the most-watched show at 8 p.m. in all of cable, including the ESPNs and HGTVs of the world. Among his main demo, Carlson currently ranks below ESPN and USA Network.For 2019 to-date, Carlson episodes are averaging 2.937 million total viewers per episode, with 525,000 of those coming from the main demo.Also Read: Tucker Carlson Says 'Fox News Is Behind Us' After Past Audio ResurfacesCarlson has lost dozens of sponsors after a series of comments led to backlash. In December, he said that immigrants made the United States a poorer and dirtier country. Carlson subsequently lost more advertisers after suggesting that high-earning women had become a cause for social ills in the U.S. and warned that men would not want to marry them.The latest outcry arose after liberal watchdog group Media Matters on Sunday dropped a compilation of years worth of audio that documented Carlsons regular appearances on the the radio show of Florida shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge between 2006 and 2011. In the recordings, Carlson made disparaging remarks about women, including calling television host Alexis Stewart c-ty.Media Matters caught me saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago, Carlson said on Sunday. Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, how about this: Im on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch. Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why.Read original story Tucker Carlsons Ratings Dip in 1st Show Since Resurfaced Comments About Rape, Women At TheWrap Tucker Carlsons show slipped a bit in demo ratings on Monday, which was the Fox News hosts first episode since Media Matters unearthed old audio of Carlson making crude remarks about women and statutory rape during radio interviews. Last nights program drew 2.895 million viewers, with 495,000 of those coming from the key adults 25-54 demographic. Those numbers topped all of Tuckers cable news competition, but theyre down from his quarter-to-date averages. Versus last Monday (2.862 million) and the same night last year (2.791 million), Carlsons latest episode ticked up in total viewers. Fox News is behind us, as they have been since the very first day. Toughness is a rare quality at a TV network, and we are grateful for that, Carlson said, addressing the online boycotts against him, during Mondays show. We will never bow to the mob, ever, no matter what. Also Read: Tucker Carlson Continues to Deliver Massive Ratings to Fox News - Despite the Boycotts Carlson is the host of cable news No. 2 show, sitting just behind fellow Fox News program Hannity, which airs after his. That means Carlson owns his 8 p.m. hour among direct competition, and that claim holds true for both total viewers and among adults 25-54, which is the key demographic for companies advertising on news programming. We can extrapolate that even further: Carlson has the most-watched show at 8 p.m. in all of cable, including the ESPNs and HGTVs of the world. Among his main demo, Carlson currently ranks below ESPN and USA Network. For 2019 to-date, Carlson episodes are averaging 2.937 million total viewers per episode, with 525,000 of those coming from the main demo. Also Read: Tucker Carlson Says 'Fox News Is Behind Us' After Past Audio Resurfaces Carlson has lost dozens of sponsors after a series of comments led to backlash. In December, he said that immigrants made the United States a poorer and dirtier country. Carlson subsequently lost more advertisers after suggesting that high-earning women had become a cause for social ills in the U.S. and warned that men would not want to marry them. Story continues The latest outcry arose after liberal watchdog group Media Matters on Sunday dropped a compilation of years worth of audio that documented Carlsons regular appearances on the the radio show of Florida shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge between 2006 and 2011. In the recordings, Carlson made disparaging remarks about women, including calling television host Alexis Stewart c-ty. Media Matters caught me saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago, Carlson said on Sunday. Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, how about this: Im on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch. Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why. Read original story Tucker Carlsons Ratings Dip in 1st Show Since Resurfaced Comments About Rape, Women At TheWrap People from outside Hollywood keep asking me about the college bribery scandal. I live here, after all, and I have a bunch of college- and postcollege-age kids.They want to know, of course, how common it is for people to bribe their way into elite universities. Even my kids want to know who else was doing it.How do I know?The fact that I had never heard the slightest suggestion that there was a bribery ring implicating a fake charity, a professional SAT test-taker, college sports administrators and desperate celebrity parents looking for the kind of guarantees life is not supposed to give you none of that matters.Also Read: Lori Loughlin's YouTuber Daughter Olivia Jade Is Dropped by Sephora as College Admissions Bribe Case UnfoldsTo everybody else, thats what Hollywood represents. Two actresses and an owner of CAA (TPGs Bill McGlashan, who exited the firm last week) may as well be the entire industry. A culture of privileged cheaters. (And of course Lori Loughlins daughter Olivia was on the yacht of USC chairman Rich Caruso in the Bahamas when the indictments came through).Coming on the heels of an endless stream of disclosures of alleged sexual assault by famous actors and powerful executives, of sexual harassment, rape, casting couch extortion and thank you, Michael Jackson pedophilia, its pretty damn ugly.My cynicism calculator has gone off the charts. Its hard to fathom that Emmy and Golden Globe winner Felicity Huffman might face jail time after being charged with a felony shes accused of committing on behalf of her daughter.Meanwhile the international media is still feeding on the carcass of Everybody in Hollywood knew about Harvey Weinstein. (I just gave another interview on the matter last week to a major French TV network.)And the Michael Jackson documentary Leaving Neverland is raising questions about the late pop stars circle: Who knew what and when and why and how and what do we do now?Also Read: 'Generation Wealth' Director on Why Kardashians, Trump Dominate Our Culture (Video)Bennett Raglin for Own NetworkIm getting tired of making excuses for our crowd.When I moved to Los Angeles just over 20 years ago, my biggest fear was raising my children in this culture. At the time, documentarian Lauren Greenfield had just published Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, a photography book chronicling the absurdly lavish lifestyles that wealthy and privileged children in L.A. enjoyed. I wrote an article about the book and emerged further terrified that my kids friends would have birthday parties in the penthouse suite of the Four Seasons Beverly Hills, that every bar mitzvah would be on the Sony lot and that by the end of high school theyd all end up in rehab.That turned out to be an oversimplification. Not false necessarily, but not the whole story. And by comparison, I cant say that our political leadership and the titans of tech measure up any better than Hollywood parents. (Full disclosure: two of my children went to or still attend USC one of the universities implicated in the worst abuses and one of them knows Olivia Loughlin, though not well.)Like most of the readers of this post, I know that the Hollywood community is mainly made up of hard-working men and women with solid values, who chose to become the worlds storytellers because of their passion to share and communicate. And yeah, maybe to get rich and famous too.But it seems that we live in a time that all our assumptions will be challenged, when our sacred idols will be left in ruins, and that the values we believed in as a democratic society equal opportunity, social justice will need to be restated and reaffirmed in a way that does not lead to hilarious parody Lori Loughlin clips on Twitter.But for now, prepare for a not-short period of a caricature of Hollywood and what we are all about.Read original story Hollywood Cynicism Finds a New Low in College Bribery Scandal At TheWrap If youve been searching the internet for Felicity Huffmans mug shot since yesterday and Lori Loughlins since this morning then we can let you know that your search is over because they arent likely to be released. A spokesperson for the Department of Justice confirmed to TheWrap that mug shots are only released by the U.S. Marshals under very specific circumstances that do not apply here, and that the ones for Huffman and Loughlin will not be released. In the Central District of California, it would be very uncommon for the federal Marshals to distribute a mug shot to the public, one criminal defense attorney told us, backing the DOJs answer. Also Read: Lori Loughlin Surrenders to FBI in College Admissions Cheating Case That is consistent with the U.S. Marshals stated policy, which can be found in full here. It is USMS policy to release photographs of fugitives or other prisoners only for law enforcement purposes, it reads. When a fugitive has not yet been captured, the Task Forces and district offices may determine whether a law enforcement purpose would be served by release of photographs to the media or public, the policy continues. Once a prisoner has been arrested, the general rule is that no release should be made because release of photographs of that prisoner to the media or public would not serve law enforcement purposes. Also Read: Felicity Huffman's Bond Set at $250,000 in College Admissions Bribe Case There is a means for media to possibly get the mug shot using the Freedom of Information Act, or an FOIA request. In that case, the USMS will still not disclose booking photographs unless its Office of General Counsel determines either that the requester has made the requisite showing that the public interest in the requested booking photograph outweighs the privacy interest at stake or that other factors specific to the particular FOIA request warrant processing that request consistent with existing Sixth Circuit precedent. Story continues But there is a chance the mug shots can get out another way. Also Read: William H Macy Called Daughter's College Application Process 'Stressful' Months Before Admissions Fraud Scandal Most of the time, a mug shot is taken when someone is processed, whether at the state of federal including the Marshals level. A U.S. Marshals public information officer told TheWrap the Marshals dont have a place to hold prisoners, so if they need to be detained, usually at a local jail, the local jails sometimes take their mug shots and they sometimes release those. However, Marshals cant disclose where someone is being held, and without that information, obtaining the mug shots through this route becomes unlikely in Huffman and Loughlins cases. On Tuesday, Loughlin and Huffman, along with 46 others, were charged with paying bribes of up to $6 million to get their children into top universities like Yale, Stanford, Georgetown and USC, according to charging documents. During a press conference in Boston on Tuesday, Andrew Lelling, U.S. District Attorney for Massachusetts, said this was the largest college admissions scam ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice, totaling $25 million in bribes. The official charges for both actresses were conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud. If convicted, they could each face up to five years in prison. Huffman made her initial court appearance on Tuesday and was released on $250,000 bond. Her next court date is March 29 in Boston. Loughlin surrendered to the FBI on Wednesday morning. She will appear in a federal Los Angeles courtroom Wednesday at 2 p.m. PT. Read original story Why Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlins Mug Shots Probably Wont Be Released At TheWrap William H. Macys comments about his daughters college application from several months ago resurfaced on Tuesday following news of his wife Felicity Huffmans arrest as part of an alleged admissions fraud scheme. Were right now in the thick of college application time, which is so stressful, Macy told Parade magazine in January, discussing his oldest daughter. Huffman was one of 46 people arrested on Tuesday, with authorities accusing the Desperate Housewives star of paying $15,000 into a bribery scheme that hired entrance exam administrators to cheat on behalf of prospective applicants. Also Read: Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin Arrested in College Admissions Cheating Scam Case According to an affidavit, Huffman paid to participate in the college entrance exam cheating scheme on behalf of her oldest daughter. The document added that Huffman later made arrangements to pursue the scheme a second time, for her youngest daughter, before deciding not to do so. Macy was not identified by name in the affidavit or charged. The couples older daughter Sofia, 18, is a student at Los Angeles High School of the Arts and an aspiring actress, according to Macys interview. I am voting that once she gets accepted, she maybe takes a year off. God doesnt let you be 18 twice, he said at the time. I know from casting, if you need a 25-, 26-year-old actress, there are a lot of them out there and theyre really good. But if you need a 15-, 16-year-old actress, its tough. Sofia looks young. I think this is an opportunity for her. But its just my opinion, and well see what she wants to do, what Felicity thinks and how the chips fall. My daughter Georgia, shes interested in politics, political science and pursuing that. Shes in a very academic school and killing it, he said. Read original story William H Macy Called Daughters College Application Process Stressful Months Before Admissions Fraud Scandal At TheWrap JERUSALEM (AP) Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot has come to the rescue of a fellow Israeli celebrity in a spat with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Gadot, who typically shies away from politics, is rallying behind Rotem Sela, one of Israel's top models and TV hosts, who drew fire from Netanyahu for criticizing his fearmongering election campaign against the country's Arab minority. Sela's rebuke of Netanyahu, and her call for equality for all Israeli citizens in an Instagram post, prompted the prime minister to take to social media himself and lecture her that "Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, and of it alone." Gadot responded late Sunday with her own supportive post for Sela to her more than 28 million followers on Instagram: "Love thy neighbor as yourself. This isn't an issue of right or left. Jew or Arab. Secular or religious. It's an issue of dialogue," Gadot wrote. "Rotem, my sister, you're an inspiration to us all." Netanyahu, who is in a tight race for re-election, has tried to rally his religious and nationalist base with charged accusations that his challengers will form a coalition government with Arab political parties. The strategy has drawn charges of incitement from Arab leaders and other political opponents. Arab parties have never sat in a governing coalition. Over the weekend, Culture Minister Miri Regev, a Netanyahu surrogate in the ruling Likud Party, repeated his mantra in a television interview. Sela, best known in Israel for hosting a pair of popular reality shows, was watching at home and responded angrily. "What's the problem with the Arabs? Good heavens, there are also Arab citizens in this country," she wrote to her hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram. "When the hell will somebody in the government tell the public that Israel is a state of all its citizens and that all people are born equal?" Netanyahu, who has a team of young tech-savvy assistants devoted to his social media outreach, quickly responded by correcting Sela that his government had passed a law enshrining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. He followed up the next day with another shot at the beginning of his weekly Cabinet meeting. Story continues "I would like to clarify a point that, apparently, is not clear to slightly confused people in the Israeli public," he said. Israel "is the national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people," he said. Sela, whose account was quickly bombarded with nasty comments, vowed to keep speaking up, wishing for a leadership that "gives real hope for peace, equality and love instead of incitement and divisiveness." While Israeli entertainers, like their American counterparts, have reputations for holding liberal views, they have generally been wary of expressing themselves politically in recent years for fear of harming themselves commercially. Many performers rely on government grants and municipal contracts, so taking an unpopular stance could cost them financially. Netanyahu has previously seized on controversial comments during election periods to bunch such entertainers together with the media and other "elites" to galvanize his traditional, working-class base. In the current campaign, he has taken aim at Israeli Arabs, who make up about 20 percent of Israel's nearly 9 million citizens. He has zoned in especially on prominent Arab lawmaker Ahmad Tibi and, using his own nickname, saying the election has come down to "Bibi or Tibi." Arabs hold full citizenship rights, and Netanyahu has allocated considerable budgets to their communities to try to close wide economic gaps. But they are also frequently discriminated against, and come election time have become a convenient boogeyman for Netanyahu. Israeli hardliners accuse Arab citizens of being disloyal for sympathizing with their Palestinian brethren and with enemies elsewhere in the Arab world. Facing a possible loss in the last election in 2015, Netanyahu helped turn the tide with a midday video in which he warned his supporters that Arab voters were heading "in droves" to the polls. Though he later apologized, Netanyahu and his allies appear to be deploying the same tactic this time around. "Recently, we are being exposed to an unacceptable discourse toward Israel's Arab citizens," Israel's ceremonial president, Reuven Rivlin, said Monday. "There are no second-class citizens and there are no second-class voters. At the ballot box we are all equal, Jews and Arabs." Tibi tweeted that for Sela's stance to be considered brave indicated the "dark times we live in." Regardless, the 35-year-old secular Jewish woman from Tel Aviv has become their unlikely champion. "In Israel 2019, to say that the meaning of democracy is a state for all its citizens and that Arabs need to be full citizens yes, that demands great courage," tweeted Ayman Odeh, head of the joint Arab-Jewish Hadash party. "Rotem Sela, we don't know each other, but well done." ____ Follow Heller at www.twitter.com/aronhellerap California Gov. Gavin Newsom announces moratorium on death penalty, calls decision 'personal' originally appeared on abcnews.go.com California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a moratorium on the death penalty Wednesday, halting more than 700 executions in the state and drawing criticism from President Donald Trump. The executive order grants a reprieve to 737 inmates on the country's largest death row and halts the use of the death penalty in the state, according to the governor's office. During an exclusive sit-down interview with ABC affiliate station KGO, Newsom called the decision "personal" and "moral" for him, while also pointing to what he sees as systemic racial and economic inequalities in the criminal justice system. "I cannot in good conscious sign death warrant for someone," Newsom told ABCs Eric Thomas from the governors mansion. "This is coming on me... I just cant do it." Newsom has long been an opponent of the death penalty, but he said in the interview that the question was largely academic until he was elected governor. Now, he would be asked to approve a death penalty protocol in the state, and he says it is "raw and emotional." "This is not a quick response," he went on explaining his decision. "This is not a political response this is a deeply held belief." "I have to live with myself," he continued, but acknowledged that he thought "good people" would completely disagree with him on this issue. Citing criminal justice figures in his state and around the country, Newsom added he thought that poor Americans and racial minorities are too often treated differently under the law. "The American justice system is completely broken, and we all are perpetuating it. The systemic racism, the implicit bias, the overt bias, the whims of prosecutors based on geography, based on the will of people in the moment, fear and anxiety... until we address that I dont think we can do what Saudi Arabia is doing and what North Korea is doing," he added. Story continues Early Wednesday morning, Trump tweeted his dismay at the governor's move, expressing solidarity with the family and friends of victims. Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers. Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2019 This Sept. 21, 2010, file photo shows the interior of the lethal injection facility at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to sign a moratorium on the death penalty. (The Associated Press) The decision is especially controversial considering that California voters rejected a ballot measure that would have repealed the death penalty in 2016, but Newsom said he was elected for his judgment. Newsom, who signaled that he wanted to move on the issue when he first took office, cited high costs, racial inequities and lack of deterrent as key reasons behind the decision. (MORE: Prosecutors to seek death penalty against 23-year-old accused of killing Ohio sheriff's detective) "The death penalty is absolute. Irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error," he added, noting that the state had spent $5 billion since 1978 to keep inmates on death row and that across the country more than 100 citizens on death row have been found innocent. "I do not believe that a civilized society can claim to be a leader in the world as long as its government continues to sanction the premeditated and discriminatory execution of its people," Newsom added. "If you rape, we dont rape you back," he went on during the interview. He called the entire American justice system broken. "In short, the death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian," he said. Newsom, a Democrat, said he is not issuing commutations for the convicted and that he does not believe life sentences should be changed. California's last execution was in 2006, under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The executive order will also close the execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison, which has never been used, and withdraws Californias lethal injection protocol Sharon Sellitto, a victims advocate whose brother, Paul Cosner, is believed by authorities to be a murder victim of serial killers Charles Ng and Leonard Lake, told ABC she is "heartbroken" by the governors decision. (MORE: Nevada inmate whose execution was called off found dead) "He's not the judge, not the jury and was not at the trial," Sellitto told ABC News in a phone interview Tuesday evening. "He should be concerned with the victims, not the perpetrators." In 2001, a San Francisco Superior Court judge officially ruled that Cosner "was the victim of murder at the hands of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng." Sellitto said she received a phone call Tuesday night from the Department of Corrections Office of Victims Survivors Rights and Services giving her a heads-up about the governor's announcement and providing her with a contact in his office if she wished to speak to anyone further about his decision. "Awful, just awful," she said. "Nobody should use the word 'justice' in my presence again." Mike Semanchik, managing attorney for the California Innocence Project -- which works to exonerate inmates on death row -- cheered the move. "Conservative estimates suggest 4 percent of people on death row are innocent. That conservative estimate means 29 of the 737 people are awaiting execution for a crime they did not commit," Semanchik tweeted Wednesday. "Thank you, Gavin Newsom, for eliminating the risk of executing the innocent!" "It has been my dream for many years that we would end the human rights violation known as the death penalty in California," Justin Brooks, director of the California Innocence Project and a Professor at California Western School of Law, said. "It is certain that as long as there is the death penalty there is the risk of executing innocent people. I am proud of our new Governor for taking this bold step." Kim Kardashian West, who has championed criminal justice reform and successfully lobbied President Donald Trump to commute a Tennessee woman's life sentence, said she was "very supportive" of the governor's decision. I have met with and am very supportive of Governor Newsom and his decision to help bring an end to the California Death Penalty. Racial bias and unfairness run deep throughout the justice system but especially when it comes to the death penalty. Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) March 13, 2019 And we should not be okay with the risk that an innocent person could be executed. I hope we can turn toward better solutions that focus more on healing victims of trauma and prioritizing fairness and justice. Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) March 13, 2019 Criminal justice experts said Newsom's decision will most likely be challenged in court. The Association of Deputy District Attorneys, which represents about 1,000 deputy district attorneys in Los Angeles County, called the decision "hasty and ill-considered." (MORE: State attorney to seek death penalty against bank mass shooting suspect) "The voters of the State of California support the death penalty," Association President Michele Hanisee said in a statement Tuesday amid rumors about the governor's decision. "Governor Newsom, who supported the failed initiative to end the death penalty in 2006, is usurping the express will of California voters and substituting his personal preferences via this hasty and ill-considered moratorium on the death penalty." Hannah B. will be the next 'Bachelorette' originally appeared on goodmorningamerica.com Hannah Brown will be the next bachelorette for the show's upcoming 15th season! "I feel all the emotions," Brown said when it was announced on "The Bachelor" finale Monday, adding that she is "very grateful." Brown, 24, competed on the most recent season of "The Bachelor" for Colton Underwood's heart but was sent home week 7. The University of Alabama graduate turned interior designer hails from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and holds the 2018 Miss Alabama USA title. (MORE: The biggest moments from 'The Bachelor' Women Tell All episode) Here's what you need to know about Brown, who earned the nickname "Alabama Hannah" on Underwood's season for her love of the Crimson Tide: She's on good terms now with Underwood On the "Women Tell All" episode of "The Bachelor," Brown spoke about her split with Underwood and where they are now. "Ultimately, I was very shocked when I went home just because I didnt understand why I got to get to that part of your life if you didnt have those feelings for me," she told Underwood about meeting his family. "I dont understand it, and it made me mad. But I think that you had every right to do this the way that you feel was necessary." "Getting your heart broke sucks, but I grew as a person," she continued. "I think we all grew, and I hope youre so happy and you get to choose somebody every day and they get to choose you back and I hope that for myself." "Im cool with you. I hope youre cool with me, and thats where I want to be," she added. Her career in pageantry was a big part of her life Story continues Brown's Instagram is filled with photos and videos from her time serving as Miss Alabama. In one of the clips, it's revealed that Brown has "spoken with over 1,000 elementary students about the importance of childhood literacy." The announcer also states that Brown was a trained dancer for 16 years. In another video, Brown discussed how participating in beauty contests has impacted her life. "My family has seen me grow significantly because of being in pageantry," she told Alabama NewsCenter. "It has really amplified me as a person." "I have been able to talk to really anybody from all aspects of life," she continued. "It has given me a lot of confidence in times when there is both positive and negative light shed on me." Miss Alabama Hannah Brown works to bring joy to the lives of others from Alabama NewsCenter on Vimeo. (MORE: Chris Harrison says 'it was over' when Cassie broke Colton's heart on 'The Bachelor') She also revealed she has struggled with anxiety and depression, in the clip, and said she planned to build her platform around finding confidence and realizing your self worth. "I'm not a doctor, I'm not going to be able to fix everything," she told the outlet. "I'm not going to be able to end mental health -- the crisis that we have -- but I am here to encourage people and to be a light and to be like 'Hey, I've been there, but here I am today and I have joy. You can get out of it.'" "I've been in a dark place, but there is light in darkness, and that's my message," she added. On the "Women Tell All" episode of "The Bachelor," she also spoke about her insecurities and the problems she's faced in life. "For me, I have a pressure to be perfect, and I come from pageants," she said. "It wasn't always the best. I would put on whatever I thought people would want to see in me. It's always been something that I've struggled with." Her relationship with Underwood taught her what kind of love she wants Brown also spoke about how her time with Underwood showed her what she is looking for on the "Women Tell All" episode. "This experience and the relationship that I have with Colton just allowed me to see myself in a different way and be vulnerable with who I am and who I want to be and what type of love I want to have and receive," she told Chris Harrison. "It just really allowed me to see what I want," she added. She said she's looking for someone to love her "fiercely." "I think we all deserve somebody to love us in that way, love us but know it's us and fight for us," she said. "Choose me no matter what." Trump, ignoring Democratic senators, set to name 2 judges in California originally appeared on abcnews.go.com It has opposed President Donald Trump's policy changes on asylum seekers, stood in the way of his travel ban and even blocked his effort to defund sanctuary cities. The rulings, all by judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, have produced repeated presidential tongue-lashings. Now, as the president continues his record-setting pace of filling vacancies on the federal bench -- something that will leave a lasting imprint on American jurisprudence for years to come -- Trump is poised to fill two vacant seats in California on the 9th Circuit Court, despite objections of the state's two Democratic senators. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, who's seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, have voiced their repeated opposition to nominees Daniel Collins and Kenneth Lee. The two senators have attempted to withhold their approval, something that historically might have amounted to a senatorial veto. But Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is moving forward with a confirmation hearing for both men on Wednesday, ignoring the fact that both senators failed to return what are called "blue slips." The more-than-100-year-old Senate tradition allows a senator from that state to fill out a form -- printed on blue paper -- to indicate approval or opposition to a particular nominee. More often than not, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee -- regardless of party -- would insist on receiving the "blue slip" approval of a state's senators before proceeding with a confirmation hearing. Graham said he would work with Democrats to find "common ground" on lower court nominees, but that he would not "give a veto" to senators, regardless of party. He has the considered support of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has called the confirmation of judges his "top priority." McConnell effectively changed the "blue slip" convention when Trump took office. Story continues PHOTO: President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn of the White House, on March 10, 2019, in Washington after returning from Mar-a-Lago in Florida. (Al Drago/Getty Images) (MORE: President Trump blasts judge's ruling blocking asylum restrictions, predicts he'll win in Supreme Court) And Republicans are poised to go further as they look to change the Senate rules, with or without Democratic support, to dramatically reduce the amount of debate time lower court and executive nominees receive before final approval. "We're still hoping to have bipartisan support to go forward with the standing order," McConnell has said of the coming rules change. "In the absence of that, it's still my desire to try to achieve that." With the confirmation Tuesday of Paul Matey, former deputy chief counsel to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, to be a judge on the 3rd Circuit Court, Trump has now appointed 35 jurists to the appeals bench and effectively flipped the 1st Circuit Court to a majority appointed by GOP presidents. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, when asked about the pace of confirmations, said, "It's one thing we can get done for sure that's going to last a long, long time." But Democrats have blasted the moves. "I know this is what my friend, the majority leader cares about -- a hard-right bench. He doesn't care about the qualifications. He doesn't care about moderation," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Monday in a floor speech, adding, "He's running a conveyor belt of political partisans, many with extremely thin legal resumes." (MORE: After rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts, Trump fires back on Twitter) Conservatives have long railed against the 9th circuit, seeing it as too liberal, but Trump has said so repeatedly, recently calling the court "a disgrace" after it opposed him on border security. The president even provoked Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to speak out last year after he called a particular jurist on the federal court "an Obama judge," in the wake of a ruling related to asylum policy changes. "Justice Roberts can say what he wants," Trump vented on Twitter at the time, "But the 9th Circuit is a complete & total disaster. It is out of control, has a horrible reputation, is overturned more than any Circuit in the Country, 79%, & is used to get an almost guaranteed result." A group of Sacramento women who were en route to Mexico for a bachelorette party got banned from an American Airlines flight by an employee who said the brides mother appeared to be drunk. The women had just landed in Phoenix and were attempting to board their connecting flight to Cabo San Lucas when they were denied, according to Fox 40. But Amber Granlund, a bridesmaid who spoke with the outlet, claims it was a misunderstanding, and that the brides mom was just nervous about traveling. Want daily pop culture news delivered to your inbox? Sign up here for Yahoos newsletter. Shes in her 50s, almost 60s, Granlund said. There could have been something else going on. Granlund admitted that the mother of bride had consumed one or two drinks before boarding but was definitely not intoxicated. It wasnt drunken behavior, she said. Granlund even took it upon herself to try to sort things out with the airline employee, to no avail. The worker can be heard on video insisting, She is not traveling, OK? She is too intoxicated. As the bridesmaid tries to defuse the situation and get her group on the plane, the employee warns her, You need to calm down. Women on their way to a bachelorette party in Mexico were denied travel by American Airlines, but eventually made it to their destination. (Photo: Courtesy of Fox 40) The employee then says, If I have to call the police, I will do so. But Granlund says it was too late. They had already called the cops at that point, she told the outlet. About eight of them showed up. Granlund said the group included pregnant women and breastfeeding moms, as well as some in their 50s. They had invested a combined total of $30,000 in the trip they had all been looking forward to before the stressful incident took place. She said most of the women had spent the night peacefully in the airport, sleeping on the floor. We had about a good full day of no airline drama, she said. The bridesmaid said the fiasco set the group back about $16,000 and caused a great deal of distress. The airline reportedly offered to give the group a partial refund on the flights they missed and had to rebook, but they havent yet received it. Granlund said theyre mostly upset about how they were treated, though. Story continues Yahoo Lifestyle has reached out to American Airlines for comment. A spokesperson for the airline told Fox 40 that some of the women became irate after being told the brides mother couldnt board, and that they posed a safety risk to crew members and other passengers. These passengers were subsequently denied travel on this flight. Granlund said most of the group ultimately did make it to Mexico for the bachelorette party. But she called the airport situation a complete mess that could have been avoided, absolutely. Yahoo Lifestyle also reached out to Granlund and the rest of the bridal party for an update on the situation. Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. AMC apologized Larry Shelton, who was accused of illegally entering a Phoenix movie theater. He proved his innocence in a Facebook video. (Screenshot: Facebook/Larry Shelton) Black Lives Matter Arizona will protest outside an AMC movie theater for the racial profiling, harassment, and mistreatment of a man incorrectly accused of sneaking into a Captain Marvel screening. On Friday night, Larry Shelton, 40, a mortgage banker in Ahwatukee, Ariz., was watching the movie at an AMC theater in Phoenix when he got up to use the restroom and re-fill his beverage. Im walking back to my seat with my cup when a manager runs up and said I entered the building through an exit door, Shelton tells Yahoo Lifestyle. He was very nasty with me and told me to leave. Shelton told the employee he was wrong and that he should verify his suspicion on a security camera. He continued to his seat and as he ate popcorn wearing his 3D glasses, a security guard told him to leave. Shelton refused, filming the argument for Facebook. Shelton recorded another video in the theater lobby, where police officers were standing. These guys said you didnt have a ticket, said an officer, indicating the manager who said, Sir, you walked in an exit door and my staff warned me they did not sell you a ticketI am sure. Nobody scanned your ticket. Shelton presented his movie ticket and the manager said, Oh yes, this is a ticket that does look like it was purchasedbut you should have shown me the ticketyou walked in [from] the exit door. Do you know how embarrassing this is? said Shelton. He asked for a refund and the manager said, Youre not getting a refund. You violated our code of conduct by turning a flashlight on in the theater. Shelton tells Yahoo Lifestyle that showing his ticket to the manager would have ended the misunderstanding but he felt defensive. The exit door I supposedly snuck into was too far from the theater I was sitting in I would have had to teleport there by the time the manager stopped me. The Phoenix Police Department tells Yahoo Lifestyle that no laws were broken. Black Lives Matter Arizona is picketing an AMC Theater in Phoenix for unfairly accusing a man of sneaking into the movies. (Screenshot: Black Lives Matter Arizona/Facebook) Sheldon sent an email to AMC alleging discrimination. The company response, a copy of which Shelton shared with Yahoo Lifestyle, partly read, We deeply regret the mistake in misidentifying you Story continues An AMC corporate spokesperson tells Yahoo Lifestyle, AMC deeply regrets that this avoidable situation occurred. Based on our initial investigation, including interviews with the theatre staff and our outreach to the guest, this situation could have been handled differently to minimize frustration, and weve offered our sincere apologies to Mr. Shelton. Regarding what transpired, a member of the theatre team, acting on information about unauthorized access to the theatre through an exit door, approached a guest in the area, who was reentering an auditorium mid-movie. When the guest declined to show his ticket stub, the manager called for security, and when the guest again declined to show his ticket stub or leave the auditorium, the theatre called the police. Once police arrived, the guest produced his ticket. We understand that Mr. Shelton feels he was treated with bias, said the spokesperson. Equality is of the utmost importance to AMC, which is why unconscious bias training is required for all AMC management associates, and we will be reinforcing that training at this theatre. Shelton was offered free movie passes and popcorn and drink vouchers from the company. However, he is seeking legal counsel. I felt very ashamed, he says. On Tuesday evening outside the theater, Black Lives Matter of Arizona will protest for Shelton, who will also join, alleging racial profiling, harassment, and mistreatment. Kat McKinney, president of Black Lives Matter tells Yahoo Lifestyle the managers actions were appalling. This employee tried to intimidate Larry, even when he was proved wrong, McKinney tells Yahoo Lifestyle. Thankfully, we have videos to prove that racism continues to exist. The organization asks for a national boycott of AMC Theaters. An apology will not stop us, says McKinney. We cant lose an opportunity for change. Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. An Ethiopian Airlines flight bound for Nairobi crashed just minutes after takeoff on Sunday, killing all 157 people onboard. The plane carrying the passengers on the doomed flight was a recently acquired Boeing 737 Max 8 model, which is the same aircraft involved in the Lion Air crash in Indonesia in October of last year. Debris of the crashed airplane of Ethiopia Airlines, near Bishoftu, a town some 60 kilometres southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on March 11, 2019. Boeing is deeply saddened to learn of the passing of the passengers and crew on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, a 737 MAX 8 airplane, Boeing said in a statement on Sunday. We extend our heartfelt sympathies to the families and loved ones of the passengers and crew on board and stand ready to support the Ethiopian Airlines team. Boeing added it is sending a tehcnical team to the crash site to provide technical assistance under the direction of the Ethiopia Accident Investigation Bureau and U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. Immediately after the crash, Ethiopian Airlines grounded all of its 737 Max 8 planes out of an abundance of caution. It is too soon to know what caused the crash, however several nations have also taken the step of grounding planes of the same model. Chinas Civil Aviation Administration issued a statement Monday morning requiring its domestic airlines to temporarily ground all Boeing 737 Max 8 jets before 6 p.m. local time, the Washington Postreported. Just a few hours later Indonesias domestic airlines also suspended the use of the Boeing 737 Max 8 plane. Next, Cayman Airways made the decision to ground its two 737 Max 8 planes as well. While the cause of this sad loss is undetermined at this time, we stand by our commitment to putting the safety of our passengers and crew first by maintaining complete and undoubtable safe operations, and as such, we have taken the decision to suspend operations of both our new Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, effective from Monday, March 11, 2019, until more information is received, Cayman Airways President and CEO Fabian Whorms said in a statement. Story continues A piece of the fuselage of ET Flight 302 can be seen in the foreground as local residents collect debris at the scene where Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed in a wheat field just outside the town of Bishoftu, 62 kilometers southeast of Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Flight 302 was just 6 minutes into its flight to Nairobi, Kenya, when it crashed killing all 157 passengers and crew on board. Several more countries are also evaluating the use of 737 Max 8 planes including India, which announced it is reviewing the situation and will issue new safety instructions by Tuesday. According to The Washington Post, Vietnams Civil Aviation Authority said it would not license the use of the Max plane in the country pending the results of investigations and remedial measures. Morocco and Mongolia, authorities suspended the operation of Boeing 737 Max 8 planes flying in each country, The Washington Post reported. In the United States, Southwest Airlines doubled down on the safety of its fleet, sharing in a statement: Our fleet of Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft are operating as planned today and we plan to operate those aircraft going forward. American Airlines added in its own statement it has full confidence in the aircraft and our crew members. One of the things you cant help noticing when you talk to Oscar Isaac is just how incredible he is at playing the part of Oscar Isaac. Its not that hes putting on a performance. But when you talk to Oscar Isaac, the public idea of Oscar Isaac begins to make a tremendous amount of sense. We talk a couple of days before the release of Netflixs new Triple Frontier, an action-adventure heist/American military allegory flick (its a lot) that Isaac stars in, and Isaac manages to, within the span of a few minutes, quote Shakespeare and express guilt about shoplifting in his college days. In other words: Hes sensitive with a risky streak. Its no wonder the Internet has declared him its boyfriend (and more recently, its husband). This quality, of course, is part of what makes Isaac so compelling to watch when hes playing an actual role. He seamlessly shades his characters with duality; by turns he can play dour and charming, cerebral and clueless. Take Triple Frontier. Isaac portrays a character, Santiago Pope Garcia, who is essentially a stand-in for Donald Rumsfeld. Hes tasked with rallying an all-star gang of ex-Special Forces agents (played by Ben Affleck, Charlie Hunnam, Pedro Pascal, and Garrett Hedlund) to execute a covert heist of a South American drug lord. Its an ill-fated, and perhaps misguided, operation, but Isaac makes you believe that nothing can go wrongand, moreover, that what theyre doing is inherently right, all while emitting a sense of manifest failure. On the heels of turning 40, Isaac hasnt given much thought to where he wants to take his talents for portraying complex characters next, only that he wants to scale back. Doing the circus thing can get tiring after a while, he says. Though, it wont be long before he talks about what a thrill it was to train for a daunting high elevation chase scene. The change of tune comes off genuinely; he digs a good adventure, but also wants to settle down. Its both. And its Oscar Isaac, so you believe him. Story continues 584247861CC00210_Premiere_O Steve Granitz/Getty Images Happy birthday! Thank you. Did you do anything exciting? We had a little bit of a house party. We just moved to a new place. So we thought, Why not trash it? Have a party. It was a pretty big birthday [40]. As you move into middle age, are there new kinds of roles you're interested in playing? No, not necessarily. But it's just kind of fun to start a new decade. Do you have a philosophy in terms of how you choose roles generally? Oh no, if only. Things would be so much easier. Choosing roles is really more like falling in love. I don't have a specific type that I'm looking for. It's just kind of if I read the thing or speak to the director or see some art that's connected with it and it incites something where I can't stop thinking about it, then I keep moving towards it. Tell me about how you fell in love, then, with the character of Pope in Triple Frontier. I worked with J.C. [Chandor] on A Most Violent Year. That had gone well. And I knew he was somebody I could trust in the editing room. You could try lots of different things and he won't make you look like an idiot. And then he talked to me about the kind of guy this is, the parables behind the whole movie, it being an allegory to the way the United States has operated throughout the world, and how in some ways my character is the Donald Rumsfeld of the story. [Pope] says, Look, we can do this. We can take out a really bad guy. We'll be rich. We'll be in and out. No problem. And so there's a bit of hubris there about their skillseven though these characters are incredibly skilled. But he underestimates the team's greed. Once I became involved, we started having conversations. We thought an interesting complicationand one thing that would make it not feel so clichewould be making the character of Pope actually from the area that he's been working in. There's a familial connection to it, so there's something more at stake. He wants to take out this guy not just as a trophy but because he actually thinks it'll make a difference. In Annihilation you also played someone in the military. And I read that you at one point had considered joining the Marines. Is there something about diving into that military world that attracted you? Yeah. That's definitely something I had been into when I was younger, and I had imagined that that was an avenue I could've gone down for my life. And I was very near going to boot camp and starting that whole process, and then other things happened that took me away from that. So I think there's always something inside of me that wonders about the What if? of it. I can be quite a good student when it comes to certain things. So learning the mechanics of working with the weapons, learning about situational awareness and clearing the room, the team-building exercisesall those things, I got very excited by. And also, there was a lot of high altitude training. What was that like? What was cool was that all of us had a different physical task. Garrett [Hedlund] was the MMA fighter and there was a whole MMA fight that ended up getting cut down quite a bit. So he ended up spending a lot of time training that way, training with jiu-jitsu. Petro [Pascal] spent a lot of time with the cockpit and flying. And then Charlie [Hunnam] and Ben [Affleck] both found things that were specific to their characters. And for me, I knew that I was having to do this extended chase sequence in Colombia, which was between 10,000 and 13,000 feet, depending on exactly where we were shooting. So I knew that was something I needed to train for just so I'd be able to do more than one take without throwing up. And I found a place here in New York that's a hyperbaric chamber that's able to replicate what it's like to run in different altitudes. They have a treadmill in there. And an oxygen mask, and even a tent you could sleep in at night to get your blood saturated with oxygen. When you were preparing, what kinds of things did you learn about the military that surprised you, or that you didn't know when you were considering joining the Marines way back when? I was a kid back then, so I didn't know much. I was like, I'll get fit. I'll get money for college. I'll go in there because some of my friends are planning on going in there as well. There were some people I admired who had been. This was like 1998. But the reality of it is the amount of sacrificenot just physically, but emotionally. Being separated from your family for long, long periods of time. And especially special forces guys, who are just the elite, top of the top. There's this sense of [it being] these tough guys, these killers, chest-pounding guys. The truth is the people we spoke with [have] humility and soft-spokenness and ethical codes they go by, [theres] lack of rejoicing in violence, the desire for connection, and the way deadly force is viewedall those things I found to not be cliched adolescent ideas of what being a military guy is. The movie is very much an allegory about the American military and the country's greed. But how did you internalize the individual sense of greed that you're portraying in the film? There's something that's epic about it. It's a very primal tale. Macbeth is the same thing. Macbeth is a heroic soldier. The entire first part of Macbeth is everyone saying what an incredible soldier Macbeth was, what he did, how he was fearless, courageous, how he saved his men. He is the hero. And then that little thing gets in there like an infection, this thought, What more could I have? "What do I deserve for everything that I've done?" And thats mixed with the violence the person is seeing. So that for me was very interesting. Noble people who have a tragic flaw that brings them down. For my character, it was less the money. It was more revenge, taking out this one guy he's been hunting since he's been down there. He actually believes that if he cuts down this head, the rest of the thing will fall. Did you return to moments in your life or career where you caught yourself letting greed get the best of you? I think when I was in college I definitely did some damage at the Tower Records across the street. And the Barnes & Noble... And a couple liquor stores. There was a sense of, I am a college student. I can barely make ends meet over here. This is a big company; they're not going to mind if I take this book of poetry. So I could justify snagging a few items here and there. But of course Tower Records closes down, and I can't help but feel at fault. Its not your fault. It was a flawed system. They had the bargain DVDs right next to the place where you walk out. So you could just put [your bag] right there next to it, go through the metal detectors, and then reach back and grab your bag. Do you think you could graduate from Barnes & Noble theft and pull off an actual heist? No. I wouldn't know where to begin or what to do. Anything I know about it is from movies. Are you a fan of the heist genre? I like the heist genre thrown on its head. My favorite movie is Dog Day Afternoon. And that is another thing where it's like, Let's do this thing. We're going to rob a bank. In and out of there. And everything that happens after that is, to me, the most exciting part. It's people in extreme situations. I worked in a hospital when I was younger, and that's something I learned a lot from, seeing people in extreme situations. You see the entire spectrum of humanity in those moments. As a musician and a big music fan, how do you use music to get yourself in the mindset of a role? I've done that for ages. Often for me, it's less specific about, This makes me think about this thing. It's more about what gets me to a place of readiness, openness. What makes me feel connected to the earth a bit more. Sometimes I'll put together music that I find inspiring thematically, or tonally. But I think if it's something that needs any real depth of emotion, there's this one guy named Ernst Reijseger, an incredible cellist who did the soundtrack to Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I listen to that and it puts me in a primal state. It opens me up so I'm able to receive anything that's floating around inside without judging it too much. Were you listening to that for this role? For this one, there were a couple moments when I did. But I think I listened to a lot of Sepultura, a Brazilian hardcore metal band. It gave a sense of the chaos and the violence, and it has some Brazilian kind of tribal elements to it. So it felt like a bit of a mix of everything they're getting involved in down there. What's the best piece of direction you've gotten in your career? The first one that comes to my mind was just like the sweetest way of saying "Tone it down." A great writer, Hossein Amini, he came over and in the sweetest way said, "The camera is just not able to capture what you're doing right now. We don't have the technology yet to get what you're doing. So you just have to bring it down a bit so we can capture it on the camera." My editor insisted I find out about the footage you filmed for the Disney Parks upcoming Star Wars-themed lands. Is there anything you can tell me? I'm afraid I can't, because actually I don't really remember [laughs]. I think some of it happened in the middle of filming the actual movie. So they were like, "Hey, today you're coming in and you'll be in the cockpit." So it's those kinds of situations. I'm sure I'm in the cockpit and I'm screaming about something important. Dubai (AFP) - Bahrain on Wednesday sentenced a liberal opposition figure to six months in jail for tweeting criticsm of Sudan's president who has been facing protests against his rule, rights groups said. Ibrahim Sharif, a founding member of the secular National Democratic Action Society (Waed) party which was dissolved in May last year, was also given a 500-dinar fine ($1,300) by Bahrain's lower criminal court. Amnesty International and the Britain-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD) denounced the sentence against Sharif. "Bahrainis are being made to pay a hefty price for simply expressing their views," said Amnesty's Middle East research director Lynn Maalouf. "It is flabbergasting that someone can be made to appear before a court and stand trial, let alone serve a sentence, for simply having expressed their opinion on Twitter." Amnesty said the prosecution was based on a December tweet by Sharif in which he said "get out of here, man" and "the time has come for freedom for the Sudanese and the departure of the dictatorial president". The tweet, accompanied by a picture of Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir said that during his rule "civil wars have piled up, the South seceded, and he has impoverished, starved and degraded the kind and noble Sudanese people". Bashir's three-decade rule has been rocked by nationwide protests since December. Amnesty said Sharif will appeal the verdict and pay bail in order to stay out of prison until a decision by the appeals court. Article 215 of Bahrain's penal code stipulates that anyone who "publicly insults" a foreign country or its leader can be imprisoned for up to two years in jail. "Today's judgement is a slap in the face to freedom of expression and demonstrates the paranoia of the ruling family about the exposure of the human rights abuses of their fellow Arab dictators," BIRDS's advocacy chief, Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, said. Story continues Sharif, a Sunni who supported Shiite-led protests in a failed 2011 uprising in the Sunni-ruled kingdom, was released from jail in July 2016 after having served a year, on a charge of inciting hatred against the regime. He had served a four-year jail term after the protests were crushed before being released under a royal amnesty in June 2015. His party was dissolved in May 2017 as part of Bahrain's crackdown on dissent. By Dave Graham MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Nearly 11,000 people were evacuated on Wednesday from the Mexico City offices of Spanish bank BBVA, including one of the capital's tallest skyscrapers, where police sent in a team of bomb experts following anonymous threats. BBVA said in a statement it did not believe the threats were real, but evacuated its headquarters in the 235-meter (771-foot) Torre Bancomer, as well its Parques Bancomer offices in the upscale Polanco neighborhood as a precaution. "Fortunately everyone is out of the buildings ... they are all safe," a BBVA spokesman said. Myriam Urzua Venegas, the city's emergency services chief, told local television station TeleDiario both emails and phone calls warned of "a possible explosive device" in the Torre Bancomer. It could also be a false alarm, she added. A crowd of office workers from the towering office building, a landmark of the Mexico City skyline, milled around sidewalks just before 1 p.m. local time (1900 GMT) along a busy stretch of Paseo de la Reforma boulevard in the city's capital. Moises Gutierrez, a police officer at the scene, said a team of around half a dozen experts had not detected any explosive device inside the building almost two hours after entering. Workers outside the Torre Bancomer, which opened in 2016, said they were told to go home for the day after they received instructions on a loudspeaker to evacuate the building. "We weren't told why," said Cynthia Sanchez, 32, who came down the stairs via an emergency exit from the 14th floor. The crowd of hundreds of workers outside the tower quickly dispersed leaving a few dozen police and an ambulance with flashing lights at the entrance to the 50-floor tower. BBVA said its local branches continued to operate normally. (Reporting by Dave Graham; Writing by Anthony Esposito and David Alire Garcia; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel, Jonathan Oatis and Diane Craft) Minsk (AFP) - The editor of a Belarusian independent news website avoided jail on Monday but was fined by a court in Minsk in a case denounced by rights activists as censorship. Marina Zolotova, editor-in-chief of Tut.by, was fined 7,650 Belarusian rubles ($3,400) for "unauthorised" access to services provided by the state news agency BelTA. She was detained in August last year with several other journalists. BelTA accused them of failing to pay subscription fees. Zolotova faced up to five years in prison after being accused of negligence for failing to control her subordinates as they logged in to access BelTA's wire. "I was pleased that the sentence turned out to be softer than what the prosecutor had asked," a smiling Zolotova said in court. She thanked colleagues for their support in the case before hugging her crying mother. Zolotova implied the accusations made against her were a pretext for authorities to put pressure on her popular publication. "This case is much deeper and more serious than the case of unauthorised access," she said after the ruling. "The essence of it is to deal with Tut.by and independent media, to show who is in charge." The charges were brought against Zolotova despite the fact that BelTA makes its stories freely accessible soon after subscribers see them. Rights watchdog the Council of Europe and NGO Reporters Without Borders expressed concern at the time of her detention last year. Zolotova said she had not yet decided whether to appeal the ruling. Tut.by is the biggest independent news site in Belarus. In July last year, a Minsk court jailed independent journalist Dzmitry Halko for four years for allegedly assaulting a police officer. Ex-Soviet nation Belarus, ranked 155th out of 180 in Reporters Without Borders' world press freedom index, has been ruled by President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994. In 2016, the European Union lifted most of the sanctions it had imposed in recent years against Lukashenko and other Belarusians, in a move to encourage progress on human rights. But Belarusian authorities have ramped up efforts to control the media since major anti-government demonstrations in 2017, with independent journalists and civil society activists facing pressure and harassment. BERLIN (Reuters) - Berlin's BVG transit authority said it will offer women a 21 percent discount on Monday to mark Equal Pay Day and call attention to one of the highest gender pay gaps in Europe. "Women in Germany earn 21 percent less than men. Time to do something about it," the BVG transit authority said, adding that Germany's gender pay gap is the second highest in Europe, behind only Estonia. The gap is less than 5 percent in Italy. Earning that much less means that a woman would have to work 442 days to earn as much as a man earned in 365. Counting the difference - 77 days - means women essentially work for free until March 18 each year. The transit agency said it was working to boost women's share of its workforce to 27 percent from the current 20 percent, and already ensured equal pay for women and men in all job categories. "Our goal with this campaign is mainly to call attention to the problem, and to stand for pay equity as a company," it said on its website. A number of businesses in Berlin, including photo shops, opticians and the Ellington Hotel, will offer women a 21 percent discount on goods and services on March 18. (Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Swantje Stein, editing by Ed Osmond) DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) Sen. Bernie Sanders has hired four key Iowa staffers and three veterans in New Hampshire, building out a team of old and new staff as he makes his second Democratic bid for president. The Iowa team, in particular, showcases the Vermont senator's emphasis on grassroots organizing and an effort to diversify his staff following allegations of sexism and sexual harassment against some of Sanders' top 2016 staffers. Leading the team is Misty Rebik, Sanders' Iowa state director. She previously worked on LGBTQ rights and education advocacy for One Iowa, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, and served as a regional director for Planned Parenthood, where she created the organization's first transgender care program in Iowa. In 2018, Rebik worked as campaign manager for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cathy Glasson, a union leader who embraced Sanders' progressive policy priorities in her failed bid. Another new addition is Jess Mazour, who will serve as Sanders' political director. Mazour was most recently lead organizer on the farm and environment team at Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a progressive advocacy group, and was a Sanders delegate in 2016. Her hire underscores the emphasis on rural issues that the senator has made a focus of his 2020 bid as he hopes to defeat President Donald Trump. "I've spent over six years organizing grassroots rural Iowans impacted by factory farming, corporate agriculture, and other rural issues in parts of the state that went for Trump in 2016," Mazour said in a statement. "It's clear Iowans want clean water, health care, living wages for workers and fair prices for farmers." Sanders has also brought back Evan Burger to serve as his Iowa caucus director and Pete D'Alessandro to serve as a senior adviser to his team. Both worked on Sanders' 2016 campaign, Burger as the senator's advance director and D'Alessandro as his campaign coordinator. Burger most recently worked for Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement as a senior organizer, while D'Alessandro made a failed bid for Congress last cycle. Story continues The returning hires are notable, as many of Sanders' 2016 staffers have been snapped up by other Democratic presidential hopefuls. At least three of his 2016 Iowa campaign staff, including his former caucus director, Brendan Summers, went to other campaigns, while other staffers don't plan to return to politics this cycle. Sanders' previous state director, Robert Becker, was dismissed after being accused of sexual assault by a former staffer, an allegation he denied. Becker was just one of a number of high-profile Sanders staffers accused of improper behavior during the 2016 campaign, and a number of former staffers signed a letter requesting a meeting with Sanders to discuss what they said was "sexual violence and harassment on the campaign," according to Politico . The senator publicly apologized, and his campaign now has protocols intended to address some of the issues that staffers faced in 2016. Sanders recently made his first swing through the state as an official candidate, drawing hundreds of fans for three rallies across Iowa. His team said Sanders enters the Democratic primary race in a stronger position than 2016 when he orchestrated a surprise second-place finish in the caucuses that catapulted his campaign to national prominence and facing more scrutiny, as a top-tier candidate. In New Hampshire, three veterans of Sanders' 2016 run joined his 2020 campaign there. Sanders won the New Hampshire primary by 22 points in 2016. Joe Caiazzo will be the state director for Sanders after working as the Rhode Island state director for Hillary Clinton's 2016 general election campaign. Carli Stevenson, a seasoned New Hampshire politico, will be the deputy state director and communications director for the campaign. The campaign has also retained Kurt Ehrenberg as its New Hampshire senior adviser. Ehrenberg was the New Hampshire state director for the unsuccessful effort to get Sen. Elizabeth Warren to run for president in 2016. He then became the New Hampshire political director for Sanders during his 2016 presidential campaign. ___ Associated Press writer Hunter Woodall in Concord, N.H., contributed to this report. As the number of countries grounding the Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes grows following the deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash, some flights that have a connection to the aircraft have been cancelled or delayed and the list of impacted flights could grow. China, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Australia, Argentina, the European Union and others have all grounded the planes after an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashed on Sunday, killing all 157 people aboard. The crash marks the 737 MAX 8s second deadly incident in less than five months in October, a Lion Air jet crashed in Indonesia soon after taking off, killing all 189 people onboard. In the U.S., the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Monday that it had confidence in the 737 MAX 8 aircrafts, and said the MAX 8 was still airworthy. Boeing said in its own statement that safety is a core value for everyone at Boeing and the safety of our airplanes, our customers passengers and their crews is always our top priority. While Southwest Airlines and American Airlines two U.S.-based carriers that operate MAX 8 planes have said they will continue to fly the aircrafts, flights across the world have been grounded from at least 27 airlines. Carriers like China Southern Airlines and Norwegian Air took their MAX 8 flights out of service as of Tuesday. Because the U.S.-based carriers are not changing their policies, many passengers booked to fly on Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircrafts are unlikely to be able to cancel or rebook their flights without paying a penalty fee. Southwest does not charge a change fee for rebooked flights, though customers are required to pay the cost in fare difference if they schedule a new itinerary. How the global efforts to ground the MAX 8 aircrafts will affect passengers whose flights are cancelled and delayed will depend on the number of these jetliners each airline has in its fleet, according to Ahmed Abdelghany, a professor of operations management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Airlines that primarily depend on MAX 8 planes to transport passengers will be more affected than ones that only operate a small number of the aircrafts. Story continues Some airlines will get a big hit, he says. Some will not. A shortage in aircraft capacity is likely, according to Abdelghany. Its also unclear how long certain airlines can afford to keep MAX 8 aircrafts grounded. For every 50, 60 aircrafts, you might have one thats coming out of maintenance, he says. Most airlines dont have spare aircrafts. Abdelghany says he expects that most passengers scheduled to fly on a MAX 8 plane that might be cancelled will be kept up to date on their airlines plans in advance which should help to quell crowding in airports. What will happen next is largely up to the airline in question. Some may be able to accommodate passengers on a later flight or different aircraft, while others can work with other airlines or airports to find new itineraries for passengers. China, the worlds biggest market for the aircraft, has grounded 97 jets so far, according to industry publication Flightglobal. China Southern Airlines, which operates at least 22 737 MAX 8 aircrafts, has grounded all flights with these planes. FlightAware, which tracks flight cancellations and delays, finds that 30 China Southern Airlines flights have been cancelled as of Tuesday. Most of the cancelled flights are Boeing 737-800 or Boeing 737-700 jets, according to FlightAware. Norwegian, which has 18 MAX 8s in its fleet, said it would stop flying the aircrafts until further notice in a statement. The airline acknowledged that its customers will face cancellations and delays due to grounding the MAX 8 flights. The airline also operates more than 110 Boeing 737-800 aircrafts, which were not affected by the temporary grounding. We would like to apologize to customers who will be affected by temporary cancellations and delays, but the safety and security of our customers and colleagues will never be compromised, and once authorities advise to cease operations we will of course comply, read a statement from Norwegian. Silk Air, which operates out of Singapore, announced that it was withdrawing its fleet of six MAX 8s until further notice. The grounding led to the cancellation of six flights between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, according to the airline. The U.K.s decision to ground MAX 8s also impacted the TUI Group, a holiday airline that flies to different destinations in Europe from Britain. TUI decided to ground all of its Boeing 737 MAX 8 flights across all airlines used by the group. TUI will inform customers booked from tomorrow on respective flights about alternative transportation, the group said in a statement. Update on the current situation with Boeing #737MAX 8: pic.twitter.com/711F0Hztjg TUI Group (@TUIGroup) March 12, 2019 Passengers unsure about their aircraft type or flight status should check in with their airlines to see if there are any changes in their itineraries, Abdelghany advises. Disgraced Australian Cardinal George Pell was on Wednesday sentenced to six years in prison for the "brazen" sexual abuse of two choirboys, in what the judge lambasted as a "grave" abuse of power. The former Vatican number three -- who managed church finances and helped elect two popes -- was sentenced in a Melbourne court on five counts, including oral rape and molestation of boys in 1996-1997. Judge Peter Kidd, his remarks broadcast live on television, said the 77-year-old was guilty of "appalling offending" and "breathtakingly arrogant" attacks that took advantage of his position of authority over the boys, then aged 13. Kidd said the cardinal, with his "significant history of cardiac problems", would be eligible for parole in late 2022, but acknowledged he "may not live to be released from prison". Wearing a black shirt without his usual white clerical collar, Pell sat largely impassively, hands interlaced on his lap, as Kidd graphically described his "brazen and forceful sexual attack on the two victims". He stood as a sentence well short of the maximum 50 years was set by Kidd, who cited Pell's "otherwise blameless life". "You have effectively reformed," Kidd said, noting the 22 years since the abuse. "You are not a risk to the community." Pell signed the sex offenders' register before leaving the court in handcuffs for an undetermined facility. The cardinal, a household name in Australia with friends that include prime ministers and business magnates, maintains his innocence and will appeal. The prospect of further legal proceedings and the relatively short sentence tempered victims' response to the news. "There is no rest for me," the victim named only as "J" said in a statement, read by his lawyer Vivian Waller. "I appreciate that the court has acknowledged what was inflicted upon me as a child," he said. "Everything is overshadowed by the forthcoming appeal." Story continues The father of the other victim, who died of a drug overdose in 2014, said through his lawyer that the length of Pell's sentence was "disappointing". Pell was found guilty of cornering the two boys, who were on scholarships to the prestigious St Kevin's College. The attack took place in the sacristy after Sunday mass at St Patrick's Cathedral in December 1996, when he was archbishop of Melbourne. The boys had "nicked off" from the rest of the choral procession and were taking swigs of sacramental wine before the cardinal found them, opened his robe, exposed his penis and sexually assaulted them. "There is an added layer of degradation and humiliation that each of your victims must have felt in knowing that their abuse had been witnessed by the other," said Kidd. The judge added that the attack, and another two months later in 1997, when he forced one of the boys up against the wall of a corridor and grabbed his genitals, had a "profound impact" on the lives of his victims. - 'Church not on trial' - Pell is the most senior member of the clergy to be convicted of historical child sex abuse and his future inside the Church is now far from clear. But with global attention on historic abuse within the Catholic Church, Kidd stressed that it was Pell rather than the Vatican that was on trial. He began the hearing by stating that Pell was "entitled to the balanced and steady hand of justice" and lamenting "lynch mob mentality" among some of the public. However, tensions ran high outside the court, with one self-declared abuse survivor breaking down in tears as he listened to a broadcast of the hearing, and another assailing Pell's departing lawyer with cries of "dirty money". Jeremy Gans, a legal expert at the University of Melbourne said the prison term was short but "roughly what everyone expected". "It would be hard for Pell to complain overall that the sentence was too excessive," he said. Pell did not take the stand in his defence, but in a video of his police interview in Rome in 2016 he called the allegations against him "deranged falsehood" and "a load of absolute and disgraceful rubbish". During a pre-sentencing hearing in February, Pell's lawyers submitted 10 character references for the cardinal - including from former Prime Minister John Howard and Australian National University vice-chancellor Greg Craven. Pell's appeal has been slated for a hearing on June 5 and 6. The conviction -- which has been criticised by prominent commentators and friends of the cardinal -- came about as a result of a retrial after the first jury was unable to reach a verdict in September. Media outlets were unable to report the guilty verdict until last month, when a suppression order was lifted after a second trial mounted against Pell -- involving allegations stemming from a Ballarat swimming pool in the 1970s -- was dropped. Pius Adesanmi Pius Adesanmi (Photo from the Canadian Press) There were 18 Canadians among the people aboard an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 jetliner en route to Nairobi when it crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10. Officials confirmed that day all 157 passengers from more than 30 countries died in the crash. The Canadians on board include a mother and daughter from Edmonton, a Carleton University professor from Ottawa and several people affiliated with the United Nations. Heres what we know so far about the Canadian victims of the crash. Pius Adesanmi Carleton University graduate Halima Sogbesan described the Nigerian-born professor in a social media post as someone who made the campus feel like home to his students, and who told them they were capable of great things. Adesanmi taught in the Ottawa universitys Department of English Language and Literature and the Institute of African Studies, and was a well-known writer in Nigeria, reports the Globe and Mail. According to Benoit-Antoine Bacon, the schools president and vice-chancellor, he was a towering figure in African and post-colonial scholarship. On the day before the crash, Adesanmi shared a photo of himself with his passport on Facebook, along with the bible verse, If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. Amina Ibrahim Odowa and her daughter Sofia Faisal Abdulkadir Odawa, 33, and Sofia, 5, were both from Edmonton, where CBC reports Odawas two surviving daughters are in the care of their grandmother. Odawas bother said the Somalian-born mother flew out of Toronto with her daughter on Saturday. They were on their way to visit family in Kenya, where Odawa grew up. The Toronto Star reports Odawa immigrated to Canada in 2006. Derick Lwugi Derick Lwugi was an accountant for the City of Calgary who leaves behind a wife and three children, aged 17, 19 and 20. According to multiple reports, the family has lived in Calgary for 12 years. Story continues Lwugi was on his way to western Kenya to visit his and his wifes parents when he became a victim of the crash. His mom was not feeling well, Lwugis wife, Gladys Kivia, told the Canadian Press in an interview from Calgary. In an interview with the Globe and Mail, Kivia described him as someone who loved people, and could be relied on to help a friend in need. If people had any needs or problems, he was there to, you know, organize people around that family or whatever they needed, she said. In a tweet on March 10, Calgarys Mayor Naheed Nenshi said he was absolutely crushed to learn of Lwugis death. Danielle Moore Danielle Moore had been invited to attend the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi and was on her way there on the Ethiopian Airways jet when it crashed. Over the next week Ill have the opportunity to discuss global environmental issues, share stories, and connect with other youth and leaders from all over the world, she wrote on Facebook a day before the crash. I feel beyond privileged to be receiving this opportunity, and want to share as much with folks back home. Born in Toronto, she was living in Winnipeg, where CBC reports she worked for the charity Canada Learning Code. Moores brother David Moore described her in a message to CBC via Facebook. She always strived to make the world a better place, he said. Peter DeMarsh Peter DeMarsh was chair of the International Family Forestry Alliance and former chair of the Taymouth Community Association in New Brunswick, where he lived. A post on the Kenya Forest Service Facebook page said DeMarsh was travelling to Nairobi to attend a workshop on access to international climate finance for small holder farmers. David Coon, leader of the Green Party of New Brunswick, offered his condolences to DeMarshs family on social media. My deepest sympathy to Jean and their son Luke, he said. Goodbye old friend. You gave so much of yourself in service to the common good. Jessica Hyba Jessica Hyba has been identified by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees as one of its Canadian-born employees. According to the UNHCR, she was working as its senior external relations officer. In a social media post, Gillian Barth with CARE Canada identified Hyba as a former colleague and friend. She was a devoted humanitarian and cherished mother, Barth said. The world has lost an irreplaceable human being. Stephanie Lacroix Stephanie Lacroix had just graduated from the University of Ottawa in 2015, and by 2018 she was working as a project officer with the United Nations Association in Canada. According to her LinkedIn profile, her job involved engaging young Canadians in national service projects through the UNs Canada Service Corps. She was also a board member of the African Community Fund for Education Canada and a former volunteer with Free the Children. In a post on Facebook, her uncle, Gille Lamarche, described Lacroix as a young beautiful service leader. Lamarche said Lacroix was living her dream after completing an honours degree in international studies. RIP my beautiful niece. You are loved and will always be. You leave an exceptional legacy of love and service, and will be missed by thousands, he said. You left your mark without a doubt and made a BIG difference. Earth lost an angel, and heaven gained one more. CBC reports Lacroix grew up in Timmins. Micah Messent Micah Messent, an Indigenous relations analyst with the BC Public Service and environmentalist, described the aim of his work as constructively deconstructing the status quo. It was that work that called him to Nairobi, when he was invited by the United Nations Association of Canada to attend the fourth session of the UN Environment Assembly. In a post to Instagram, he said attending the assembly would provide him with a chance to meet with other passionate youth and leaders from around the world and explore how we can tackle the biggest challenges that are facing our generation. According to his LinkedIn profile, Messent graduated from Vancouver Island University with a bachelor in indigenous studies in 2017. Dixit-Vaidya family Six members of a Brampton, Ont. family were among the victims of the crash that killed 18 Canadians. Spanning three generations, they are being remembered within their Brampton community as loving people. Sisters Anushka Dixit, 13, and Ashka, 14, were on the jet with their mother, 37-year-old Kosha Vaidya, their father, 45-year-old Prerit Dixit, and Indian grandparents Pannagesh and Hansini Vaidya. The family was travelling to Kenya for a safari, CP reports. Although the grandparents were originally from India, they lived in Kenya for several years before moving back to India, and Kosha was born there. This would have been her first trip back to her birthplace in decades. It was not immediately clear if Pannagesh Vaidya and Hansini Vaidya were Canadian citizens, but they are not. Angela Rehhorn Like so many other victims of the deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash, Angela Rehhorn was on her way to Kenya with the United Nations Association of Canada to attend the UN assembly in Nairobi. The Canadian Wildlife Federation confirmed March 11 that Rehhorn, one of the organizations Canadian Conservation Corps participants, died in the plane crash. According to a statement by the federation, Rehhorn was a recent graduate of Nova Scotias Dalhousie University but had already made tremendous contributions to the future of conservation. The release said she had just completed volunteering her time to do species surveys in Canada and was developing a citizen science project on bat conservation. It said she planned to gain more experience studying marine environments. Angela shared the excitement and optimism of volunteering and working to improve our world. Her life is an inspiration to us all, said Rick Bates, CEO of the Canadian Wildlife Federation. Darcy Belanger Darcy Belanger helped found environmental non-profit Pavarti.org, and it was the organization that confirmed his death with deep grief in a statement on March 11. At the time of his death, Belanger had been working to spread awareness about an initiative called the Marin Arctic Peace Sanctuary. Belanger had taken time off from his job as director of professional development at construction company PCL to travel to Nairobi for the UN Environment Assembly, the statement said. Admired for his courage, outstanding achievements, and noble qualities, Darcy was a hero in every sense of the word. He was passionately devoted to the protection of all life through the realization of MAPS, the Marine Arctic Peace Sanctuary, the statement said. Darcy was truly a champion and a force of nature, one whose passing leaves an unimaginable gap in this work as well as in the lives of his family, friends and colleagues. Ameen Ismail Noormohamed Ameen Ismail Noormohamed was a 72-year-old Canadian citizen who lived in Nairobi and Toronto and travelled between Kenya and Canada. Global reports he had been in Toronto visiting his sister and was on his way back to Kenya when he became a victim of the Ethiopian Airlines crash. Rubi Pauls One of the youngest victims of the plane crash was nine-month-old Rubi Pauls, a Canadian, who was on her way to meet her grandfather for the first time in Kenya. Grandfather Quindos Karanja says Rubis grandmother, 60-year-old Ann Wangui Karanja, her mother, 34-year-old Carolyne Karanja and her seven-year-old brother Ryan, and sister Kerri, who was four were also on the flight. Only Rubi was a Canadian citizen. Dawn Tanner Dawn Tanners son, Cody French, described her in a Facebook post as an extraordinary woman who made her sons proud with her acts of kindness and compassion toward others. You have played a major role in shaping who we have become, he said, addressing his late mother. We are both so fortunate to have had you as a Mother and we can both live the rest of our lives knowing, wholeheartedly, that Hunter and I were your world and that you were extremely proud of both of us. Tanner was a 47-year-old Hamilton-area teacher, whose death was confirmed by the Grand Erie District School Board, CBC reports. With files from the Canadian Press. Brest (France) (AFP) - An oil slick was heading towards the French coastline on Thursday after an Italian cargo ship sank in the Atlantic carrying 45 containers of "dangerous materials", authorities said. The sheet of oil, 10 kilometres (six miles) long and one km wide, could hit parts of the country's southwest region near the port city of Bordeaux this weekend. "According to our forecasts, fragments could reach some areas of the coast in Nouvelle-Aquitaine by Sunday or Monday owing to bad weather, which also risks making the anti-pollution operation more difficult," environment minister Francois de Rugy said Wednesday. France will deploy four ships to help battle the oil slick at sea and will prepare for a clean-up operation on land, he added. The Grande America was en route from Hamburg in Germany to Casablanca in Morocco when a fire broke out late on Sunday. All 27 people on board were evacuated the following day as the fire worsened, before the ship sank some 300 km west of the town of La Rochelle on Tuesday. "For now the possible pollution risk consists mainly of the 2,200 tonnes of heavy fuel oil on board," Jean-Louis Lozier, head of the regional maritime authority, told reporters in Brest on France's Brittany coast. Lozier said the hybrid ship's Italian owner Grimaldi had indicated that 365 shipping containers were onboard, "of which 45 are carrying dangerous materials", as well as around 2,000 vehicles. The fire is thought to have broken out on the car deck before spreading to a container, however the cause is unknown, Lozier said. "Around forty containers fell into the sea before the ship sank," he said. "Most of them where badly damaged by the fire." The contents include a hundred tonnes of hydrochloric acid and 70 tonnes of sulphuric acid. The pollution risk posed by the chemicals "would be very localised", Lozier said, adding most of it would have already burned in the fire. Story continues "Dilution in the ocean would not have serious consequences for the environment." But French environmental campaign group Robin des Bois (Robin Hood) said the group intends to file a complaint at Brest district court over the environmental damage. "Two thousand vehicles -- it's a car crash at the bottom of the sea, representing hundreds of tonnes of toxic materials in an area very rich in fish, plankton and marine animals," said Jacky Bonnemains, spokesman for the NGO, adding he also feared possible coastal pollution. Local authorities have opened an investigation and the ship's owner has been warned to "take all necessary measures to contribute to the fight against pollution", the environment minister said. Trump announces FAA grounding all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 planes in US after Ethiopia crash originally appeared on abcnews.go.com President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that the FAA was ordering the immediate grounding of all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft in the U.S. The decision comes after days of mounting pressure from other countries that left the U.S. as one of the last to make the call following a deadly crash in Ethiopia. The safety of the American people, of all people, is our paramount concern, Trump said, adding that the grounding would take effect as soon as the planes landed and would continue until further notice. "Pilots have been notified. Airlines have been all notified. Airlines are agreeing with this," he said. The crash in Ethiopia on Sunday, which killed all 157 people on board, was the second deadly crash of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane in just five months. The president said the decision to ground the planes was made based on new evidence that had come to light. "The FAA is prepared to make an announcement very shortly regarding the new information and physical evidence weve received from the site and from other locations and through a couple of other complaints," he said. "Weve had a very, very detailed group of people working on the 737 8 and the 737 9 new airplanes. Were going to be issuing an emergency order of prohibition to ground all flights of the 737 Max 8 and the 737 Max 9 and planes associated with that line." PHOTO: President Donald Trump speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, March 13, 2019, in Washington. (Evan Vucci/AP) Shortly afterward, the FAA issued a statement reversing its earlier resistance to grounding the planes, saying "the agency made this decision as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analyzed today. "This evidence, together with newly-refined satellite data available to the FAA this morning, led to this decision," the FAA said. "The grounding will remain in effect pending further investigation, including examination of information from the aircraft's flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder." Story continues In an important caveat, Trump said the decision to ground the planes "didn't have to be made" but was made for a number of reasons, he said, including "psychologically and a lot of other ways." The president said he'd spoken with the Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, as well as the CEO of Boeing and the acting administrator of the FAA. All agreed on taking the action, the president said. In an explanation of how the decision to finally ground the planes was made, a White House official told ABC News' Chief White House Correspondent Jon Karl that up until Wednesday morning "the data was clean" but after Canada shared the satellite data indicating a possible connection, Chao recommended to Trump that the planes be grounded. It marked the first time Trump directly expressed sympathy for the victims of the crash, calling it a "terrible tragedy." The president also called Boeing an "incredible company." Just Tuesday, Boeing's CEO had lobbied Trump against any grounding, but the company reversed its stance after Trump's announcement, issuing a statement in support of the move. We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution. Safety is a core value at Boeing for as long as we have been building airplanes; and it always will be," the Boeing statement said. At the same time, the statement said, "Boeing continues to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX." Soon after the order, the FAA also said the "black boxes" from the crash -- the flight data and cockpit voice recorders -- would be scheduled for transport to France Wednesday evening for analysis. The delay in reading out the black boxes, which had yet to be analyzed three days after the crash, played into the decision to ground the Boeing 737 MAX 8 and NAX 9 aircraft, acting FAA Administrator Dan Elwell told ABC News' Chief Transportation Correspondent David Kerley. As soon as they get them on the table it will help, Elwell said, adding that our decision process was lengthened more than I would have hoped. Ethiopia had agreed to send the recordings from Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 abroad for analysis earlier Wednesday, though a destination had not been announced. Officials agreed the country didn't have the technology required to analyze the black boxes, which hold key information on how and why the plane crashed. The boxes are damaged, making data retrieval more difficult. A key question is whether the plane's advanced flight management system -- the autopilot -- might have played a role in the most recent crash as it did in the fatal crash of an Indonesian Airlines 737 MAX 8 last October. In that crash, it appears the pilots failed to disengage the autopilot when the plane's nose began pitching up and down, perhaps because they were unaware of how to do so. In the aftermath of that crash, at least two U.S. pilots who have flown the Boeing 737 MAX 8 submitted anonymous reports to NASA, which has an aviation safety reporting system, saying their aircraft suddenly pointed its nose downward after they engaged in autopilot. The accounts were first reported by the Dallas Morning News and obtained by ABC News from NASA. The pilots disengaged the autopilot, manually corrected the unexpected motion and continued to climb as planned. The flight continued uneventfully after that. Its unclear from the reports if the pilots were both on the same flight or on two separate flights. In a third report, a pilot reported feeling like the flight manual and training for the Boeing 737 MAX wasn't sufficient. (MORE: What you need to know about the Boeing 737 MAX 8 that crashed in Ethiopia) Any and all details are in high demand by authorities and families of the victims arriving at the crash scene in recent days. Airline customers also increased pressure with overwhelming concerns about flying on the Boeing 737 MAX 8 until the safety of the plane can be better assured. By Wednesday afternoon, the MAX 8 and MAX 9 were grounded by every country or major airline in the world, including the three airlines operating the aircraft in the U.S.: American Airlines, Southwest Airlines and United, which operates a MAX 9, the longer sibling of the MAX 8. (MORE: At Ethiopia plane crash site, a new pilgrimage of grief) PHOTO: Relatives react at the scene on March 13, 2019, where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed on March 10, 2019 shortly after takeoff near Bishoftu, in Ethiopia. (Mulugeta Ayene/AP) In addition to Canada's announcement to ground the jets Wednesday, the European Union and the U.K. stopped or banned all Boeing 737 MAX 8 operations on Tuesday, following the decisions of Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Oman and Ireland to ban the plane from flying in and out of those countries. As countries and airlines continued to ground the popular plane, flights consistently dropped from the approximately 1,200 Boeing 737 MAX flights per day tracked in the week leading up to the crash on Sunday. Trump's announcement Wednesday was a marked shift from previous statements from both Boeing and the FAA, which had backed the plane's safety until the FAA emergency order. Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg on Tuesday told the president that the company continued to believe the MAX aircraft was safe, while the Elwell of the FAA maintained that it was extensively reviewing data and would take action if any issues were identified, but had not seen any "systemic performance issues" that would provide basis "to order grounding the aircraft." ABC News' Matt Gutman and Robert Zepeda contributed to this report from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. ABC News' Jon Karl, David Kerley and Jeffrey Cook contributed to this report from Washington, D.C. Brussels (AFP) - Talk is swirling of a possible delay to Brexit after the latest rejection by lawmakers of Britain's divorce deal, but the EU demands clear political "choices" from London before it will agree to it. On Tuesday, MPs rejected the Brexit withdrawal plan that Prime Minister Theresa May had agreed with EU negotiators -- leaving Britain in limbo just 16 days before it is due to leave the bloc. Delaying Britain's departure beyond March 29 seems increasingly inevitable if both sides want to avoid a chaotic "no-deal" Brexit, but Brussels insists a delay will not be granted if it simply prolongs uncertainty. "Today we are in the hands of the British political system," European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans told the European Parliament. "They should tell us where they want to go from now. The solution will have to come from London." Brussels has made clear it will not renegotiate the deal thrashed out with Britain over two years of tortuous talks and which has now been resoundingly rejected twice by lawmakers. The latest crushing defeat, on Tuesday, came despite May securing further guarantees from the EU in last-ditch talks in Strasbourg. British MPs will vote Wednesday on whether to accept leaving the EU with no deal in place. If they reject this option -- as they are expected to do -- they will vote on Thursday on whether to ask for Brexit day to be put back. - Tell us what you want - The EU's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier echoed Timmermans' message, bluntly telling London it must decide what it wants from Brexit before Brussels would consider a delay. "It is the responsibility of the United Kingdom to tell us what it wants in a future relationship, what is its choice, the clear line that must be its own," he told the European Parliament. "That's the question that is open and to which we await a response, and it's the question that must be answered even before any decision on an extension. Story continues "Why would we prolong the negotiation? To do what? Because the Article 50 negotiation is finished, we have a treaty, it's there," he added, referring to the withdrawal agreement. Barnier's call means "the British need to change their Brexit model -- either to a soft Brexit inspired by the Norwegian model or by cancelling Brexit," Eric Maurice, an analyst at the Robert Schuman Foundation, told AFP. Norway is not an EU member but is part of the bloc's single market, respecting EU rules on free movement of people, goods and capital. Choosing this model, or staying in the EU's customs union, would resolve the problem of the Irish border "backstop" which has blocked the withdrawal agreement in Westminster. But these options are unacceptable to Brexit hardliners in May's Conservative party, whose support she needs to get any deal approved. - 'Prolonging the agony' - The British have "never known how to choose" but that will have to change now, one puzzled European diplomatic source observed. "Changing the form of Brexit would require an authority that May no longer has. Defining the future relationship might take new elections," Maurice said. The prospect of a snap general election would give the EU a solid reason to agree a longer delay than the short extension mooted up to now, but would also risk "prolonging the agony," according to a diplomat. A long delay "assumes a political choice by the British -- a major change like new elections, a new referendum or the revocation of Article 50" the diplomat said, referring to the process of leaving the bloc. By setting these conditions on any Brexit delay -- which would need the unanimous approval of all 27 remaining EU members in any event -- the bloc wants to show that it will not give London a blank cheque. But another diplomat predicted that a "good reason for an extension will be found". "At the end the question for the heads of state and government is... do we want to push the UK over the cliff, do we want chaos on the island of Ireland and uncomfortable situations in France or Germany," the diplomat said. By Ron Bousso and Gary McWilliams HOUSTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary Of State Mike Pompeo will meet with top oil executives before he addresses a conference on Tuesday, seeking to get them to help the administration's effort to boost crude exports to Asia and to support its policy of isolating Iran, according to three people at two companies briefed on the agenda. The outreach represents a significant new effort to sway industry executives to the Trump Administrations energy dominance agenda that seeks to advance diplomatic and policy objectives through rapidly expanding U.S. oil and gas exports. The effort has won success in convincing nations including China, Poland, Japan and South Korea to purchases more U.S. oil and natural gas. Pompeo plans on discussing how to boost U.S. energy dominance worldwide, but particularly in Asia, and further isolate the Islamic Republic of Iran, which the United States re-imposed sanctions on last year, through strengthening ties with other Middle East nations, the people said. The location and time of the meeting was unclear. Following the meeting in Houston, Pompeo is set to speak at IHS Markit's CERAWeek conference, the oil and gas industrys largest annual gathering in the United States. He was scheduled to meet State Department employees in the late morning, according to an official schedule. Executives from major companies including Chevron Corp, Total SA, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, ConocoPhillips and Occidental Petroleum Corp have been invited to the closed door meeting. Representatives from a number of those companies are scheduled to speak earlier in the day at CERAWeek. Occidental declined to comment. Chevron had no comment. A Total representative could not immediately be reached for comment. The other companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A U.S. State Department spokesperson did not immediately comment on Pompeo's schedule but did say that Frank Fannon, the department's top energy diplomat, was meeting with energy companies on Tuesday in Houston to talk about the Asia policy. Story continues According to two of the sources, Pompeo was expected in the closed door meeting to discuss the Trump administration's plans for the Middle East Strategic Alliance (MESA), which would form an alliance of Sunni Muslim countries in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Egypt and Jordan, as the White House seeks to restrain Iran. That group has become mired in a dispute between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, both important U.S. allies in the region. The lead U.S. negotiator for the alliance, Anthony Zinni, left the position earlier this year, putting a plan to promote Arab security and battle extremism in jeopardy. Tuesday's sit-down was also expected to include discussions on the United States policy in Asia. Dubbed 'Asia Edge' by the administration, it aims to grow Asian energy security by further expanding U.S. oil and gas exports to the region, according to the sources. The success of Asia Edge is highly dependent on what private industry does and then the work the government can do to support that, the spokesperson at the State Departments energy bureau said. The main message is how we can work best with the companies. Consequently engaging with the CEOs, especially on Asia Edge, is key because they're playing a much bigger role than we would have seen in other types of similar issues." The United States produces more than 12 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude, making it the world's largest producer, and it is the world's biggest exporter of refined products like diesel fuel and gasoline. It has expanded sales of fuels, crude oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Asian customers, including China in a bid to dominate worldwide energy trade after a four-decade ban on crude exports was ended by President Obama in 2016. The United States now exports more than 3 million bpd of crude. The Trump White House has also imposed harsh sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, both members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), removing more than 2 million bpd of oil from daily global supply. After the Iran sanctions were imposed, the United States granted waivers to eight countries that buy Iranian oil. The waivers, aimed at avoiding a spike in global crude prices, are due to expire in May. Some are not likely to be renewed, though analysts believe India and China, among the world's largest crude buyers, will continue to receive waivers. Brian Hook, the State Department's top Iran diplomat, is scheduled to speak at CERAWeek in Houston on Wednesday morning on current U.S. policy on Iran. (Additional reporting by Ernest Scheyder in Houston and Timothy Gardner and Lesley Wroughton in Washington; Writing by David Gaffen; Editing by David Gregorio) Bissau (AFP) - Guinea-Bissau's historic ruling party appeared well placed to form a coalition government Wednesday after winning weekend elections in a result likely to perpetuate its long-running standoff with President Mario Vaz. In announcing provisional results, the National Election Commission said the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) had secured 47 of parliament's 102 seats after winning 46.1 percent of the vote. But the result was just short of an outright majority, leaving the party dependent on smaller factions to build a coalition. And the result could well plunge this poor, volatile West African state into a new round of confrontation between PAIGC and Vaz, analysts warned. Another 48 seats were taken by two opposition parties, with the final seven seats won by factions who on Tuesday agreed to back a PAIGC-led government. The announcement sparked jubilant celebrations at PAIGC's headquarters where chanting supporters banged drums and saucepans, and cars honked their horns. "So far there has been no challenge," said election chief Pedro Sambu, who said turnout in Sunday's legislative ballot stood at more than 84 percent. The one-time Marxist party has run this tiny state of two million people for most of the 45 years since independence from Portugal. - Long crisis - Sunday's vote aimed to draw a line under a crisis that erupted in August 2015 when Vaz sacked his prime minister Domingos Simoes Pereira, who heads PAIGC. Vaz, who also came from the same party, then appointed a string of prime ministers but none garnered sufficient support to achieve a majority in parliament. Parliamentary work was snarled for two years -- sparking frequent strikes by civil servants who went unpaid because of delays in approving the budget. In April 2018, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) brokered a deal which led to the installation of consensus premier Aristide Gomes, allowing parliament to resume its work. Story continues Gomes was given the caretaker role of preparing for fresh legislative polls, which eventually took place on March 10 after a string of largely technical delays. The new coalition lineup will play a key role in choosing the next prime minister. That is likely to hand the role of kingmaker to Nuno Gomes Nabiam, who heads the five-seat APU-PDGB which has agreed to back a PAIGC-led government. Nabiam ran against Vaz in the 2014 presidential elections but was beaten in the second round. Vaz's five-year term ends on June 23. - Powerful opposition - That leaves two parties in opposition -- the Madem-G15, led by PAIGC rebels, which picked up 27 seats, and the Party for Social Renovation (PRS), which won 21 seats and is reputedly close to part of the military hierarchy. Ahead of the vote, the two parties concluded their own pact, meaning they could constitute a powerful opposition of 48 MPs. The outcome of the election may confirm fears that gridlock may flare again, say commentators. "Nothing suggests that these elections will make it possible to resolve the problems undermining the country," UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had warned ahead of the vote. He pointed to the option of a future revision of the constitution to clarify the roles of president and prime minister, both of whom wield executive power. - Coups and cocaine - Wedged between Senegal and Guinea on Africa's west coast, Guinea-Bissau has a notorious reputation for volatility. It has seen 16 coup attempts since independence, four of which have been successful. International sanctions remain in place since 2012 after the last violent seizure of power. The country's porous coastline and chronic instability have made it a target for Latin American drug lords trafficking cocaine to Europe, implicating members of the elite. During Sunday's vote, police in the capital Bissau said they had found nearly 800 kilogrammes (1,700 pounds) of cocaine in a Senegal-registered truck, the biggest drugs haul in a decade. DUBLIN (Reuters) - Ireland's position that it will not make plans for managing its border with Northern Ireland in a no-deal Brexit until such an outcome emerges remains unchanged after Britain outlined its plans, European Affairs Minister Helen McEntee said. "We have always said what our plan is, and that if it came to the stage where a no-deal was the only likely outcome, then we would need to engage with our colleagues in the UK but also with the UK. Not after a no-deal, this is when it has became apparent that a no-deal is the only likely option," McEntee told national broadcaster RTE. The British province of Northern Ireland would temporarily not be subject to the no-deal tariff plan laid out by London on Wednesday. McEntee said she agreed with the head of the Irish Farmers' Association that the tariffs flagged on beef and dairy products would be "absolutely disastrous" for Ireland's agriculture sector. (Reporting by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Catherine Evans) Geneva (AFP) - Senior Israeli officials on Wednesday delivered a detailed critique of a UN probe that accused its soldiers of possible war crimes in Gaza, saying investigators ignored key evidence, notably over the role of Hamas. Last month, the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on the protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory said Israeli troops intentionally shot children, journalists, health workers and other civilians while responding to unrest in the Gaza strip between March 30 and December 31 last year. Israel immediately denounced the report as biased and rejected its findings. But a senior Israeli delegation that travelled to Geneva days before the probe is set to be adopted by the UN Human Rights Council offered more criticism on Wednesday. In a briefing with journalists, the delegation accused UN investigators of downplaying both the violence in the protests and the fact that Israel says the unrest was orchestrated by Hamas. The Islamist group that controls Gaza is considered a terrorist organisation by Israel, the United States, the European Union and others. The UN commission said the protests were not instigated by Hamas and were generally peaceful in nature, arguing that Hamas was therefore under no obligation to intervene. "For the commission, Hamas is completely absent from this report. They see no Hamas, they hear no Hamas," said one Israeli official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorised to speak on the record. The Israeli delegation provided evidence that it said proved Hamas's involvement throughout the protests, including in coordinating serious acts of violence targeting Israeli troops. "Hamas has complete control of these events," the official said. The commission also provided a list of victims it described as civilians, including Naji Abu Hojayeer, identified as a 24-year-old mechanic shot in the abdomen by Israeli troops. The Israeli delegation said that after checking the commission's list it easily established that some of the victims, including Hojayeer, were militants. Story continues "We thought that the report was definitely unprofessional," the Israeli official said, adding that the UN team lacked military knowledge and did not "understand international humanitarian law." - Intent - Among the most strident accusations by the UN team was that Israeli forces deliberately shot and killed people that were clearly identifiable as children, journalists, health workers or disabled. The Israeli official denounced that finding, insisting that troops were only allowed to use live rounds against those who posed "a real and imminent threat." Civilians who were amid the unrest may have gotten hit if a sniper missed or by a bullet that passed through its target, the official said. But, the official added, Israel probes every fatal act involving its forces and has opened 11 criminal investigations connected to the Gaza unrest. "We have been trying to deal with these events in the best non-lethal way possible," the official said. More than 250 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since March 2018, the majority shot during weekly border protests and others hit by tank fire or air strikes in response to violence from Gaza. Two Israeli soldiers have been killed over the same period. Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel's army said Wednesday it has uncovered a unit created by Hezbollah across the ceasefire line in the Syrian Golan Heights and led by a commander previously jailed over an attack on US forces. With President Bashar al-Assad regaining control of southern Syria with the help of Russia and Hezbollah backer Iran, Israel is concerned a front against it could be established there. Hezbollah, based in neighbouring Lebanon, has also been supporting Assad in Syria's civil war. The Shiite group is among Israel's main enemies and the two fought a war in 2006. Israel said the new unit had been established without Assad's knowledge, and some Israeli media reported that part of the aim in publicising it was in hopes Syria and Russia would move to stop it. It alleged the new unit, "masterminded" by Hezbollah, had been set up "to eventually control teams of Syrian operatives who will launch attacks against Israel". "We are not going to allow Hezbollah to establish a terror infrastructure on the Golan capable of striking Israeli civilians," said Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus, Israeli military spokesman. "We hold the Syrian regime responsible for anything that happens inside Syria aimed at Israel." The army said the unit was in the establishment and recruitment stage and was not yet operational. Hezbollah began establishing it in the summer of 2018, it said. It said it is led by Hezbollah commander Ali Musa Daqduq. In 2012, Daqduq was released by Iraq due to lack of evidence after being accused of plotting to kill five US soldiers in the Iraqi city of Karbala. Daqduq was captured in 2007 on suspicion he had helped organise an attack that led to the deaths of the five soldiers. He was held by American troops until he was handed over to Iraqi officials in December 2011. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said "what we've uncovered today is just the tip of the iceberg. We know a lot more." Story continues "I have a clear message for Iran and for Hezbollah: Israel knows what you're doing. Israel knows where you're doing it," he said in a video message. - 'Now and forever' - Israel says a previous such unit was established in the Syrian Golan under the command of Samir Kantar and Jihad Mughniyeh. Both were killed in separate 2015 air strikes attributed to Israel. According to Israel's military, the new unit was seeking to revive infrastructure left behind by the former one. "The field operatives who fill the ranks of the network and act exclusively in Syria are composed of various groups and networks who previously took part in terrorist activity in the Golan Heights under the notorious network of Kantar and Mughniyeh," the army said. Some have had training in sabotage, sharpshooting and firing Grad rockets, it said in a statement. Syria, Hezbollah and Iran had not responded to Israel's allegations. The suspected unit is a part of a complex series of challenges Israel says it is facing in war-torn Syria. It has pledged to stop its main enemy Iran from entrenching itself militarily there, carrying out hundreds of air strikes against what it says are Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria. With elections approaching in Israel on April 9, some suggested Wednesday's announcement may have had political motivations since it could help burnish Netanyahu's security credentials. Foreign Minister Israel Katz dismissed such suggestions. The announcement also comes amid a new push by Netanyahu to have Israel's sovereignty over the part of the Golan it has occupied since 1967 recognised internationally. Lindsey Graham, an influential US senator allied to President Donald Trump, toured the Golan with Netanyahu this week and vowed to work to have Washington recognise it as part of Israel "now and forever". Israel seized 1,200 square kilometres (460 square miles) from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it in a move never recognised by the international community. Japan said Wednesday it will not submit a motion against North Korea's human rights record at a UN panel for the first time in more than a decade. The decision comes as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe explores ways to engage North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in an effort to resolve a row over past kidnappings of Japanese nationals by Pyongyang agents. Abe, who rose to national political fame with his hardline stance against North Korea, has toned down his rhetoric against Pyongyang as US President Donald Trump actively courts Kim, holding their second meeting earlier this month in Vietnam. Abe is now putting more effort into meeting Kim to resolve the abduction issue. "Having reviewed the outcome of the US-North Korea summit meeting as well as various conditions surrounding the abduction and other issues, we have decided not to submit a draft resolution on the situation of human rights in the DPRK at the current Human Rights Council being held in Geneva," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a regular briefing. For the past 11 years, Japan has joined the European Union to jointly issue a motion to condemn human rights conditions in North Korea. Tokyo believes North Korean agents kidnapped at least 17 Japanese nationals to train its spies in language and customs in the 1970s and 80s. After years of denial, North Korea admitted in 2002 that it had taken 13 Japanese civilians. Campaigners, however, believe the disappearance of up to 470 Japanese may be linked to North Korea. CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) The Latest on the political and economic crisis in Venezuela (all times local): 12:30 p.m. European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini says no military action from inside or outside Venezuela would be acceptable to resolve the "dramatically" deteriorating situation in the country. She told the U.N. Security Council in New York on Tuesday that "a solution cannot be, and should never be, imposed from the outside." But she said that "an international initiative can help build a peaceful and democratic way out of the crisis." She noted that an International Contact Group with European and Latin American countries has been created "to help create the conditions for a political process that would lead to free and fair presidential elections." Mogherini said the EU is also working with U.N. agencies "to ensure that humanitarian aid reaches those in need inside and outside of the country following the key principles of humanitarian law, and avoiding any politicization of the aid delivery." ___ 12:10 p.m. Venezuela's chief prosecutor Tarek William Saab says he's launched an investigation into opposition leader Juan Guaido over suspicions he was involved in an attack on the country's power grid. Tarek William Saab announced the probe Tuesday, saying the electrical failure has sparked violence, robberies and looting. Venezuela's power grid failed Thursday evening, leaving most of the nation in the dark and with limited phone and internet service. Venezuelan officials accuse the U.S.-backed opposition of mounting a cyberattack on the system. Guaido and the U.S. blame years of mismanagement and corruption for allowing the once-wealthy country's infrastructure crumble. Guaido has declared himself interim president and demands new elections, arguing that President Nicolas Maduro's re-election last year was invalid. ___ 9:55 a.m. Spain's Foreign Ministry says it is trying to find out from Venezuelan authorities why a journalist with dual Spanish and Venezuelan nationality has been detained. Story continues A Foreign Ministry spokesman said Tuesday the Spanish embassy in Caracas is in contact with the family of reporter and activist Luis Carlos Diaz. The spokesman cannot be identified in media reports because of internal ministry rules. Venezuela's National Union of Press Workers says on its Twitter account that Diaz went missing Monday afternoon. It says that later, in the middle of night, a unit from the feared SEBIN intelligence police turned up at his home and took away computers, mobile phones and money, among other items. Diaz's wife, Naky Soto, tells the union the police broke in. ___ 9:45 a.m. Nicolas Maduro's government says the U.S. decision to pull its last diplomats out of Venezuela is due to a breakdown in negotiations with Washington and effectively says "good riddance." U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the U.S. is withdrawing its remaining embassy staff from the country, citing Venezuela's deteriorating situation and "constraints" on U.S. policy caused by their continued presence. Maduro's government had already cut ties with the U.S. over its recognition of opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela's rightful leader. The U.S. decided to ignore the decision but still withdrew most of its staff. Venezuela's foreign ministry said Tuesday that talks on keeping some representation collapsed due to hostility from Washington. It said the presence of U.S. diplomats entails risks for peace and stability. ___ 7:10 a.m. Russian state oil company Rosneft is rejecting rejected accusations by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that it is violating sanctions on Venezuela. Pompeo said Monday that Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin "continues to throw a lifeline" to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. He said Rosneft was buying crude oil from Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA "in defiance of U.S. sanctions." Rosneft disputes what it calls "groundless accusations" and says any contracts it has for oil purchasing in Venezuela pre-date the introduction of U.S. sanctions. Rosneft is a major foreign investor in Venezuela as a partner of state-owned PDVSA, which is under U.S. sanctions. Sechin was personally sanctioned by the U.S. in 2014 shortly after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine. Mexico City (AFP) - Reporters Without Borders said Tuesday it had asked the International Criminal Court to investigate the murders of 102 journalists in Mexico from 2012 to 2018, calling the rash of killings a crime against humanity. Another 14 journalists have gone missing in the same period, the media-rights group said. It urged the Hague-based court, which handles the most serious international crimes, to investigate the killings and kidnappings as a targeted campaign against the press. "These crimes against humanity... (constitute) a generalized and systematic attack on a civilian population: journalists," the secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, Christophe Deloire, told a news conference. He accused authorities of "evident complicity" in the killings under the two presidents in question, Felipe Calderon (2006-2012) and Enrique Pena Nieto (2012-2018). Reporters Without Borders and Mexican rights group Propuesta Civica, which are jointly pushing the ICC to act, said they would ask Mexico's new President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to file a case before the court. Only the court's member states, prosecutor or the United Nations Security Council can bring cases before the ICC. Mexican officials are "very positive" about the initiative, and Lopez Obrador is open to the idea, said Emmanuel Colombie, Latin America representative for Reporters Without Borders. The watchdog group ranks Mexico as one of the deadliest countries in the world for journalists, behind only war-torn Afghanistan and Syria. The explosion of journalist murders in Mexico has coincided with a wave of violent crime driven by powerful drug cartels and fueled by political corruption. The vast majority of the murders have gone unpunished, as do more than 90 percent of violent crimes in Mexico. The Daily Beast U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New YorkWhen the feds raided Jeffrey Epsteins Manhattan mansion in 2019, they unearthed a trove of evidence including binders of CDs containing tens of thousands of photographs.Some of those never-before-seen imagesreleased by federal prosecutors this weekdepicted happier days of the late sex-traffickers romance with his alleged accomplice, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who is accused of helping him groom and abuse four underage girl By Lesley Wroughton and David Brunnstrom WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department on Wednesday slammed human rights violations in China, saying the sort of abuses it had inflicted on its Muslim minorities had not been seen "since the 1930s." U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo highlighted abuses in Iran, South Sudan, Nicaragua and China in the department's annual "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices," but told reporters that China was "in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations." "For me, you havent seen things like this since the 1930s," Michael Kozak, the head of the State Department's human rights and democracy bureau told the same briefing, referring to abuses of China's Muslim minority in the Xinjiang region. "Rounding up, in some estimations ... in the millions of people, putting them into camps, and torturing them, abusing them, and trying to basically erase their culture and their religion and so on from their DNA. Its just remarkably awful." "It is one of the most serious human rights violations in the world today," he said. While Kozak did not elaborate on his comment about the 1930s, he was apparently referring to the policies of persecution of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. China had initially denied there even were camps, Kozak said, adding its explanation now that they were for voluntary labor training "does not match the facts." "But at least we're starting to make them realize there is a lot of international scrutiny on this," he said. China's Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on the report, which comes at a time of closely-watched trade negotiations between the United States and China aimed at resolving a tit-for-tat tariffs dispute. Xinjiang Governor Shohrat Zakir said on Tuesday that China was running boarding schools, not concentration camps, in the country's far western region as the U.S. ambassador for religious freedom called the situation there "completely unacceptable," and said sanctions against Chinese officials under the Global Magnitsky Act remained a "possibility." The administration of President Donald Trump has weighed sanctions against senior Chinese officials in Xinjiang, including the Communist Party boss there, Chen Quanguo, who as a member of the powerful politburo is in the upper echelons of China's leadership. Beijing has warned of retaliation if Washington were to target Chen and the administration has yet to act despite complaints from U.S. lawmakers. The State Department report said Chen had replicated in Xinjiang policies similar to those credited with reducing opposition to Communist Party rule in Tibet, where he was previously stationed. INTENSIFIED DETENTION CAMPAIGN The report said that in the past year, China had significantly intensified its campaign of mass detention of members of Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang. It said authorities there were reported to have arbitrarily detained from 800,000 to possibly more than two million Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs and other Muslims in camps with the aim of erasing religious and ethnic identities. Pompeo said the Iranian government had killed more than 20 people and arrested thousands without due process for protesting for their rights "continuing a pattern of cruelty the regime has inflicted on the Iranian people for the last four decades." In South Sudan, he said, military forces had inflicted sexual violence against civilians based on their political allegiances and ethnicity, while in Nicaragua, peaceful protesters had faced sniper fire and government critics had "faced a policy of exile, jail or death." The report also revised its usual description of the Golan Heights from "Israeli-occupied" to "Israeli-controlled." A separate section on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, areas that Israel captured along with the Golan Heights in a 1967 war in the Middle East, also did not refer to those territories as being "occupied," or under "occupation." In Myanmar, the report said press freedom had declined and journalists had reported that self-censorship had became more pronounced because of the trial and conviction of Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were jailed for seven years after being convicted in September of breaking a colonial-era official secrets law. The reporters had been working on a Reuters investigation into the killing of 10 Muslim men and boys by security forces and Buddhist civilians in Myanmar's Rakhine State. Responding to the U.S. report, Amnesty International criticized the Trump administration for engaging with governments, including that of Saudi Arabia, "regardless of their human rights record, if doing so will advance U.S. interests." The State Department report highlighted Saudi Arabia's killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and said it had not provided a detailed explanation of the direction or progress of the investigation. A CIA assessment and a Senate resolution have blamed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for ordering the killing, something Saudi officials deny, but President Donald Trump has said Washington will remain a "steadfast partner" of Saudi Arabia even though the prince may have known about the plan. Republican and Democratic U.S. senators said this month they were frustrated with the Trump administration's failure to provide more information about the case and vowed to push for a stronger response. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton and David Brunnstrom; editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Paul Simao and G Crosse) Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts (Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM) Sen. Elizabeth Warren's call to break up tech companies by reversing merger and acquisition approvals could be a red flag for the industry's in-house counsel, accounting for extra precaution in deal negotiations. A March 8 blog post from Warren, D-Massachusetts, outlines the presidential candidate's plan to "break up the biggest tech companies." Warren said that, if elected, she would appoint "regulators committed to reversing illegal and anti-competitive tech mergers," including Facebook's acquisition of competitors WhatsApp and Instagram and Google's acquisition of Waze. "It is possible to challenge transactions that have already closed," said Mark Ostrau, a partner and the chair of Fenwick & West's antitrust and trade regulation practice group. But that doesn't mean it's easy. Both Ostrau and Neely Agin, an antitrust partner at Winston & Strawn, compared separating integrated acquired companies to "unscrambling an egg." Usually, Agin said, the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission break up finalized deals that cause competition issues but were not large enough to trigger a Hart-Scott-Rodino pre-merger filing. She noted regulators rarely reverse their decisions to approve a deal, most often in cases where companies were not fully transparent and new information emerges. Warren's plan would be unusual, but not impossible to enact. Agin said if Warren's enforcement plan ever does go into play, large tech company breakups could lead to fire sales on subsidiaries such as Instagram or Waze, with Facebook or Google forced to sell at a below-market price. The increased risk in tech industry M&As could play into future deal negotiations, according to Ostrau. "The technology industry companies have to take into account that there is a spotlight on them, and that the transactions are likely to get a lot of scrutiny," Ostrau said. "Theyll need to factor that into their risk assessment." According to Agin, there are precautions legal teams can take to avoid M&A deals ending in a fire sale and trouble with regulators. First, she said, do what's best for the customer post-mergerraising prices or cutting popular items shortly after a deal could raise red flags to regulators, especially if the deal didn't trigger an HSR filing. She noted in retroactive M&A investigations regulators are able to see the deal's impact on the market. Pre-deal investigations are based on predictions alone. If counsel are worried a proposed deal could raise antitrust concerns but doesn't trigger an HSR pre-merger filing, Agin suggested giving regulators a voluntary heads-up. "You can call and let them know, 'Hey, we're working on this transaction, it's not reportable but we'd love to come in and talk to you about it and get you comfortable,'" Agin said. "Then, if you go through that process with them and give them the opportunity to review it, rather than ducking and hoping they don't see your deal, you get a similar benefit and comfort that you would have if you had an HSR reportable deal." Photo credit: YouTube From Popular Mechanics The V-22 Osprey is built to transport U.S. special operations commandos long distances, and mid-air refueling comes with the territory. This video certainly makes Osprey refueling look like a harrowing experience, yet this is a job the aircraft carry successfully out around the world every day. The Air Force made the decision to buy a fleet of long-range special operations transports after Operation Eagle Claw, the 1980 failed attempt to rescue American hostages from Iran. The complexity of the ad hoc rescue mission, which saw Air Force pilots flying Navy helicopters and refueling from a secret staging area in Iran, contributed to the missions failure. The Air Force wanted its own fleet of aircraft that could fly a similar mission profile without landing. Today the U.S. Air Force has a fleet of 46 CV-22 Osprey tiltrotors. The above video shows a CV-22 from Cannon Air Force Base flying over the valleys of New Mexico before linking up with a KC-10 Extender aerial refueling tanker, a military version of the now defunct DC-10 jetliner. The KC-10 rolls out an refueling drogue, basically a weighted hose dragged from the back of the aircraft, and the CV-22 gently steps up to start taking on gas. The CV-22 is one of the few Air Force planes that uses the drogue method for refueling, as most of the services fighters, bombers, transports and special mission aircraft take on gas from a pylon that is slowly lowered from the tanker into a receptacle built into the aircraft. Photo credit: YouTube The Osprey's tilt-rotor design further complicates this mission. Before meeting up with the tanker, the crew rotates the tiltrotors twin rotors from the vertical position-where it flies like a helicopter) ninety degrees to the horizontal position (where it flies like a fixed-wing aircraft). You can see how Osprey refueling is theoretically more dangerous than other forms: You now have two large sets of whirling rotors ripping away at thousands of rotations per minute mere feet from the refueling drogue. Story continues Photo credit: SSG Phillip Steiner, U.S. Air Force Is it dangerous? In 2016 off the coast of Okinawa, a Marine Corps MV-22B Osprey clipped a refueling drogue during a nighttime exercise. The Osprey flew on but the pilot decided to ditch in the water near shore. All five Marines on board were injured, but fortunately no one was killed. The Marines chalked it up to pilot error . So yes, it is possible for a catastrophic incident to take place. That said, there are more than two hundred Ospreys in service worldwide with the Air Force and Marines, and aerial refueling missions almost certainly take place every day--and at night. Training, training, and more training make all the difference between something that seems almost crazy dangerous and routine. ('You Might Also Like',) Riyadh (AFP) - Ten Saudi women appeared in court Wednesday for the first time since being detained last year in a sweeping crackdown on activists, ratcheting up scrutiny of the kingdom's human rights record. The trial of the women, who have been held for nearly a year without charge, comes as Saudi Arabia seeks to placate international criticism over last year's brutal murder of insider-turned-critic Jamal Khashoggi. Prominent activists Loujain al-Hathloul, Hatoon al-Fassi, Aziza al-Yousef and Eman al-Nafjan were among those who attended Riyadh's criminal court, where they heard the charges against them, court president Ibrahim al-Sayari said. Family members of the women -- some of whom allegedly faced torture and sexual harassment during interrogation -- were permitted to attend the court session, but a group of around two dozen foreign journalists and Western diplomats were barred from entering. Visibly distressed relatives huddled together outside the courtroom, clutching handwritten appeals for the judge as they waited their turn to see the detainees inside. The charges against the women were not disclosed to the public. But London-based rights group ALQST said they were held under the kingdom's sweeping cyber crime law, which carries prison sentences of up to 10 years, based on their contact with "hostile entities" including human rights organisations. - 'Escalating repression' - Sayari said the women would have access to independent lawyers for the trial, a right that family members claimed they had been denied for the entire stretch of their detention. "It now seems that the authorities will charge the women's rights activists, after keeping them in detention for nearly one year without any access to lawyers, and where they faced torture, ill treatment and sexual harassment," said Amnesty International's Middle East campaigns director Samah Hadid. "The authorities are now treating defending women's rights as a crime, which is a dangerous escalation in the country and their crackdown on human rights activism," Hadid told AFP. Story continues More than a dozen activists, many of whom campaigned for years for the right to drive, were arrested in May last year -- just a month before the kingdom ended its longstanding ban on female motorists. Some were subsequently released. At the time the activists were accused by some government officials of undermining national security and aiding enemies of the state, while state-backed media branded them as traitors and "agents of embassies". Human Rights Watch researcher Adam Coogle said the trial and alleged mistreatment of the women "is yet another sign of escalating repression in Saudi Arabia". "Authorities should immediately halt these unfair proceedings and release any activist charged solely based on their peaceful activism," he told AFP. - Paving way for release? - Amnesty and the family of Hathloul, who was among the detainees allegedly tortured and sexually harassed, had feared the women would be charged with terrorism, as they had been expected to appear at a court set up to handle terror-related cases. But relatives received a last-minute call informing them the case had been shifted to the criminal court, without being told why. The move has triggered speculation the trial -- shrouded in secrecy -- could pave the way for the release of the women, after the crackdown prompted scathing criticism against Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Some detainees, including Hathloul, were recently made to sign letters in prison requesting a royal pardon from King Salman, family members said. "Terrorism charges are very hard politically for the Saudi government to go soft on, but criminal charges may open the door for an acquittal," Bessma Momani, a professor at Canada's University of Waterloo, said. "The Saudis need to change the page on this file badly -- its economy and success of its reform drive hinges on removing the negative perceptions that the arrests of these women has caused," she told AFP. Prince Mohammed's much-trumpeted drive to modernise the conservative kingdom has been dented by the detentions, part of a wider crackdown by Saudi authorities on activists, clerics and critics in recent years seen as stamping out political dissent. The arrests have resulted in further pressure on Saudi Arabia, which has faced global outrage over journalist Khashoggi's murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last October. Last week, 36 nations condemned Saudi Arabia over the murder, in a rare censure of the wealthy oil-rich kingdom at the UN Human Rights Council. By Alexandria Sage Tesla Inc Chief Executive Elon Musk has until the end of the day on Monday to explain why he should not be held in contempt for recent tweets that U.S. securities regulators say violated a September fraud settlement. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission asked a federal court in Manhattan to hold Musk in contempt after he tweeted about Tesla's production volume, saying he breached the agreement requiring him to get company approval before sharing any material information on social media. The renewed public battle between Tesla's CEO and the SEC adds pressure on Musk, the public face of the electric vehicle-maker who is struggling to make it profitable after cutting the price of its Model 3 sedan to $35,000. Tesla has backed off a plan to close all its U.S. stores and will instead raise prices of its higher-end vehicles by about 3 percent on average. Musk on Feb. 19 tweeted to his more than 24 million Twitter followers that Tesla would make around 500,000 cars in 2019. He corrected the tweet four hours later to say the annualized production rate at year-end 2019 would probably be about 500,000, with deliveries of about 400,000. A lawyer for Tesla and Musk told the SEC that the CEO believed the substance of the tweet had been pre-approved and disseminated when the company released fourth-quarter earnings in January. The September settlement between Musk, Tesla and the SEC resolved an SEC lawsuit over claims Musk made on Twitter in August that he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private at $420 per share. The SEC called those tweets "false and misleading" and a go-private deal never materialized. As part of that settlement, Musk stepped down as the company's chairman and he and Tesla agreed to pay $20 million each in fines. Musk had called the regulator the "Shortseller Enrichment Commission" after the settlement, and tweeted that "something is broken with SEC oversight" just one day after the SEC started pursuing the contempt order. Hours later, U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan set a March 11 deadline for Musk to respond. Story continues On Monday morning, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton declined to comment when approached by Reuters at an event in Washington on what penalties the agency planned to pursue against the billionaire. Legal experts have said the SEC could try multiple avenues, including a higher fine, imposing further restrictions on Musk's activities or removing him from Tesla's board or helm. Tesla published a new communications policy in December for executives as part of the settlement. It called for Tesla's general counsel and a newly designated in-house securities law attorney to pre-approve any written statements about Tesla that could be material. A disclosure controls committee, made up of board members Brad Buss, Antonio Gracias and James Murdoch, was tasked with overseeing compliance with the new policy. (Reporting By Alexandria Sage in San Francisco and Sonam Rai in Bengaluru; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli, Bernard Orr) Khartoum (AFP) - A Sudanese appeals court on Wednesday ordered the release of a senior opposition politician after she was jailed for taking part in protests against President Omar al-Bashir's rule, her family said. Mariam al-Mahdi, deputy chief of the country's main opposition Umma Party, had been sentenced to jail for a week on Sunday by an emergency court after security agents arrested her while she was taking part in a march against Bashir's rule. She was arrested outside her party office in Omdurman, the twin city of the capital, as police broke up the march called by protest organisers to challenge a nationwide state of emergency imposed by Bashir on February 22. "The appeals court freed Mariam and she is now at home," her sister Rabah told AFP. Mariam's lawyer Ubada Abdelrahman also confirmed the release of the opposition figure. Mariam and Rabah, the two daughters of Umma Party chief and former premier Sadiq al-Mahdi, have participated in protests after their father threw his weight behind the movement. Bashir swept to power in an Islamist-backed coup in 1989 after toppling Mahdi's government. Bashir's three-decade rule has been rocked by nationwide protests since December, and the veteran leader has ordered a slew of tough measures to quell the demonstrations. He has imposed a state of emergency across the country, banned all unauthorised rallies and set up the emergency courts to probe violations. Protests initially broke out on December 19 after a government decision to triple the price of bread amid a broader economic crisis in the country. They soon escalated to nationwide rallies against Bashir's administration. But since the state of emergency came into effect the scale and intensity of the rallies have shrunk. Officials say 31 people have died in protest-related violence so far, while Human Rights Watch says the death toll is at least 51 and includes medics and children. By Andy Sullivan and Jan Wolfe WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sentenced to about 3-1/2 more years in prison and was hit with a fresh set of criminal charges in New York on Wednesday, drawing sympathy from a president who declined to say whether he would issue a pardon. Manafort, 69, is due to spend a total of 7-1/2 years behind bars when the sentence by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson for crimes related to secret lobbying and witness tampering is combined with another of just under four years issued by a different judge in Virginia last Thursday. He has already served nine months of the sentence. The veteran Republican operative has received the longest prison term yet in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election. It amounts to a sharp fall for a man who earned millions of dollars as an international political consultant to pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine and dodged more than $6 million in taxes by hiding his income in offshore bank accounts. That money could have been used by the government to help pay for veterans' hospitals and other services, Jackson told Manafort, who was brought into the courtroom in a wheelchair because of a condition called gout. "Why? Not to support a family, but to sustain a lifestyle at the most opulent and extravagant level possible. More houses than one family can enjoy. More suits than one man can wear," Jackson said, referring to Manafort's previous luxuries. Just minutes after Jackson read her sentence, the Manhattan district attorney unveiled a separate indictment charging Manafort with residential mortgage fraud and other New York state crimes, which unlike the federal charges cannot be erased by a presidential pardon. Manafort faces up to 25 years in prison on the three most serious charges. "No one is beyond the law in New York," District Attorney Cyrus Vance, a Democrat, said in a statement. Trump, who in November said he had not ruled out giving Manafort a pardon, on Wednesday said that "I have not even given it a thought." "It's not something that's right now in my mind. I do feel badly for Paul Manafort - that I can tell you," the Republican president told reporters at the White House. Trump has called Mueller's investigation a "witch hunt," and Manafort's lawyers have argued that this case does nothing to prove that the campaign conspired with Russia. They have noted that the crimes sending him to prison stem from his lobbying work, not his time with Trump's campaign. "But for a short stint as a campaign manager in a presidential election, I don't think we'd be here today," Manafort lawyer Kevin Downing told Jackson. Jackson suggested that the "'no collusion' mantra" was simply aimed at winning a pardon from Trump. Jackson added that Mueller's ongoing investigation could yet reveal that Manafort worked with Russian interests during the campaign. 'A HARSH LESSON' Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said Manafort had engaged in an extensive cover-up that deceived the U.S. government and the American public, and continued to try to undermine the investigation even after he pleaded guilty. "He engaged in crime again and again. He has not learned a harsh lesson. He has served to undermine, not promote, American ideals," Weissmann said. Manafort, clad in a dark suit and a purple tie instead of the jail garb he wore to his Virginia sentencing, apologized for his actions and asked Jackson not to impose any prison time on top of the 47 months he was given by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis in Alexandria. "This case has taken everything from me already - my properties, my cash, my life insurance, trust accounts for my children and grandchildren, and even more," Manafort said. "Saying 'I'm sorry I got caught' is not an inspiring plea for leniency," the judge told Manafort. She also said Manafort's expression of remorse rang hollow. "It's hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved," Jackson said. Jackson had ruled on Feb. 13 that Manafort breached his agreement to cooperate with Mueller's office by lying to prosecutors about matters pertinent to the Russia probe including his interactions with a business partner they have said has ties to Russian intelligence. Jackson's sentence builds on what many legal experts called the surprisingly lenient sentence from Ellis when Manafort was sentenced for his August 2018 tax fraud and bank fraud convictions - far shy of federal sentencing guidelines. Ellis last week praised Manafort's "otherwise blameless life." The sentence Manafort received from Jackson was well below the 10 years he could have faced for the two criminal counts to which he pleaded guilty in September 2018. Jackson showed little sympathy for the argument by Manafort's lawyers that his failure to disclose lobbying activity on behalf of Ukraine was little more than a paperwork error. In a chaotic scene outside the courthouse, Downing said Mueller's two cases against his client had shown "no evidence of any collusion with Russians," as protesters called Manafort a "traitor" and a "liar." Mueller is preparing to submit to U.S. Attorney General William Barr a report on his investigation into whether Trump's campaign conspired with Russia and whether Trump has unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe. Trump has denied collusion and obstruction and Russia has denied U.S. intelligence findings that it interfered in the election to boost Trump. Manafort is one of the 34 people and three companies charged by Mueller. Others who have pleaded guilty include former campaign aides Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos, former U.S. national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen. Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone has pleaded not guilty. (Additional reporting by Karen Freifeld and Nathan Layne in New York; Editing by Will Dunham) Once again, an almost brand new Boeing Co. 737 Max 8 crashes not long after takeoff as it flies erratically and pilots ask to return to the airport. The crash Sunday morning of a jetliner in Ethiopia bears unmistakable similarities to the Oct. 29 tragedy off the coast of Indonesia involving the same model, prompting questions about whether a design issue that arose during the earlier accident could be to blame. China ordered its carriers to ground all 96 of its 737 Max jets, while Indonesia said it would also halt flights after Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 went down in a field shortly after takeoff Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which originally certified the 737 Max, said it was in the early stages of its investigation and has seen no evidence there is a link between the two accidents. It issued a notice Monday to other nations saying it saw no need to ground the plane but said it would mandate design changes by April stemming from the Indonesia crash. The stakes for Boeing and one of its most popular models are enormous. But veteran crash investigators and the airline say theres too little data to draw a direct tie between the two at this stage of the investigation. U.S. pilot unions, who were critical of Boeing after the Indonesia accident for withholding information on design changes in the 737 Max, were also cautious. We would never speculate on the accident or anything at this point because its just too new, said Jon Weaks, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, said Sunday. Flight ET302 took off from Addis Ababa about a little before 8:40 a.m. local time and went down about six minutes later, killing all 157 aboard, according to a statement from the company. Its crew had reported an unspecified problem and asked to return to the airport, airline Chief Executive Officer Tewolde Gebre Mariam said at a press conference. The planes initial flight track was very unusual at a time when airliners typically climb steadily to get safely away from terrain and to reach altitudes where engines burn more efficiently. Story continues Instead, it twice descended briefly during the first two and a half minutes after liftoff, according to tracking data provided by FlightRadar24.com. The planes vertical speed was unstable after take off, the company said in a tweet. You want to keep the airplane climbing, even during flap retraction, to get it away from the ground, said John Cox, president of Safety Operating Systems and a former airline pilot who participated in dozens of crash investigations. Thats what makes the descent so unusual. That is something the investigators would want to look at. He cautioned against drawing conclusions however. At this point, its just too early, he said. The Ethiopian planes speed and the fact that it didnt climb much were also highly unusual, said Roger Cox, a former investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board who was also an airline pilot. The Ethiopian plane reached a speed of 230 miles per hour as it was still on the ground or just lifting off, according to FlightRadar24. Within a minute, it had reached an estimated 316 miles per hour, according to the companys data. Its extremely unusual to go that fast, particularly that low, Cox said. Its not something thats acceptable on a typical airline flight. Cox compared the flight path to a plane in an airshow, which intentionally stayed low to the ground and flew at a high speed. If the FlightRadar24 speed estimates are correct, the plane was traveling at more than 440 miles per hour during its brief flight. It had only climbed 1,400 feet from the runway two minutes after lifting off. Because the Ethiopian plane was apparently out of range of FlightRadar24s Addis Ababa ground station, the flight track doesnt include the last few minutes of the flight, including its final dive. Photos of the wreckage indicate it hit at a high speed and broke into small pieces. Investigators have recovered the cockpit voice and flight-data recorders, Ethiopian Airlines said Monday, a significant step forward in piecing together what happened. Ethiopian Airlines issued a statement cautioning that further investigation will be carried out to find the cause of the accident. Lion Air Flight 610 dove into the Java Sea in October about 11 minutes after takeoff as pilots struggled to handle a malfunction that prompted MCAS to repeatedly command a dive. All 189 people aboard died. While Indonesian investigators have identified multiple failures of the airlines maintenance and raised questions about the pilots actions, one of the factors under review in the investigation is Boeings design. The FAA is working with the Chicago-based planemaker on a design changes and upgrades to its pilot training manuals to reduce the chances that such a failure could cause an accident in the future. External reports are drawing similarities between this accident and the Lion Air Flight 610 accident on October 29, 2018, the FAA said. However, this investigation has just begun and to date we have not been provided data to draw any conclusions or take any actions. One difference between the two crashes: Indonesia Air said pilots on prior flights with the doomed jet had reported mechanical problems. The crew of the Ethiopian 737 hadnt reported any mechanical issues on an earlier flight from Johannesburg, the airline said. The Lion Air plane lost altitude dozens of times before it crashed as the jets computers, thinking it was in danger of losing control, continually tried to push down its nose. The pilots countermanded the aircrafts software over and over, pulling it back into climbs, until they failed to do so and it crashed. The Ethiopian planes flight track is at least partially similar, said John Cox, who flew earlier versions of the 737 during his career. However, for at least the time that it was tracked by FlightRadar24, it was flying mostly level at a range of 7,700 feet to 8,600 feet altitude. Many other things could have caused the plane to climb and descend, Cox said. For example, if pilots were handling an unrelated emergency and were planning to return to the airport, they could have deviated from their altitude simply as a result of being distracted by the emergency, he said. Whats more, Boeing issued a bulletin after the Indonesian accident alerting pilots that the plane might initiate a dive on its own and reminding them that a pair of switches in the cockpit can disable the motor that pushes the nose down. All 737 pilots have been made aware of the potential and what would cause it, Cox said. Other carriers say they are monitoring the latest accident. We will closely monitor the investigation via Boeing and the National Transportation Safety Board, American Airlines said in a statement. The carrier flies 24 Max 8 aircraft. The Boeing single-aisle model, revamped with larger engines, is the latest version of a jetliner that has formed the backbone of global fleets for five decades. Southwest Airlines Co. is the largest customer, with 31 of the 737 Max 8 aircraft in its fleet. We have been in contact with Boeing and will continue to stay close to the investigation as it progresses, Southwest Airlines said in a emailed statement. We remain confident in the safety and airworthiness of our fleet of more than 750 Boeing aircraft. Southwest and American said last week that they hadnt yet received any information from Boeing about a software update for MCAS on the Max. Both carriers said their planes havent experienced any problems related to the MCAS issue that investigators have focused on in the Lion Air crash. Boeing said in a statement it is deeply saddened to learn of the passing of the passengers and crew on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and will be assisting investigators. WASHINGTON, March 13 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sentenced on Wednesday to about 3-1/2 more years in prison for charges arising from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russia's role in the 2016 U.S. election, with the judge giving him a stern lecture about his lies and criminal behavior. The sentence of 73 months in prison imposed by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington came six days after a different judge gave Manafort a lenient term of 47 months - just under four years - in prison in a separate case in Virginia, with credit for nine months he already has spent behind bars. Jackson said 30 months of her sentence will run at the same time as the sentence in the Virginia case. That means the combined sentence will be six years and nine months. Unlike at his sentencing hearing last week, Manafort said he was sorry for his actions, but Jackson then told him his expression of remorse rang hollow. Jackson told Manafort that he had lied repeatedly and committed fraud repeatedly, and there was no good explanation for the leniency he sought. "Saying 'I'm sorry I got caught' is not an inspiring plea for leniency," Jackson told Manafort, who was brought into the courtroom in a wheelchair because of a condition called gout. Jackson sentenced Manafort, a veteran Republican political operative who earned millions of dollars working for pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine, for two conspiracy charges to which he pleaded guilty in September 2018 in Washington. Manafort, 69, had not showed any remorse at his sentencing in his other case last Thursday. "I am sorry for what I have done and for all the activities that have gotten us here today," Manafort told Jackson on Wednesday. "This case has taken everything from me already - my properties, my cash, my life insurance, trust accounts for my children and grandchildren, and even more,"Manafort added. Story continues "The defendant's insistence that none of this should be happening to him ... is just one more thing that is inconsistent with the notion of any genuine acceptance of responsibility," the judge told Manafort. Jackson said at the outset of the sentencing hearing that she would not be influenced by last Thursday's sentence imposed by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis in Alexandria, Virginia, where Manafort was convicted in August 2018 by a jury for bank fraud, tax fraud and failing to disclose foreign bank accounts. That 47-month sentence was two decades below the upper limit of federal sentencing guidelines, prompting criticism among some legal experts that it was too light. Jackson could have given Manafort up to 10 years in prison in the Washington case - five for each of the two conspiracy counts. Jackson ruled on Feb. 13 that Manafort had breached his agreement in the Washington case to cooperate with Mueller's office by lying to prosecutors about three matters pertinent to the Russia probe including his interactions with a business partner they have said has ties to Russian intelligence. Manafort wore a dark suit and tie to the hearing. At last week's sentencing, Manafort wore a green prison jumpsuit emblazoned with the words "Alexandria Inmate" on the back. In the Washington case, Manafort was sentenced for conspiracy against the United States, which included a range of conduct from money laundering to unregistered lobbying, and a second conspiracy count related to witness tampering. During Wednesday's hearing, Jackson ruled that Manafort should get a tougher sentence because he acted in a leadership role, directing others to participate in a crime. But Jackson said Manafort should get credit for accepting responsibility because he pleaded guilty to the conduct at issue, though he later breached his cooperation deal with prosecutors. Mueller's team did not make a specific recommendation on Manafort's sentencing in the Washington case. But prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said during the hearing that Manafort had engaged in an extensive cover-up that deceived the U.S. government and the American public, and continued to try to undermine the investigation even after he pleaded guilty. "Paul Manafort's upbringing, his education, his means, his opportunities could have led him to be a leading example for this country. At each juncture, though, Mr.Manafort chose to take a different path," Weissmann said. "He engaged in crime again and again. He has not learned a harsh lesson. He has served to undermine, not promote, American ideals," Weissmann added. Jackson's sentence may mark the end of a two-year-old legal battle between Manafort, a veteran Republican political operative who worked for Trump's campaign for five months in 2016, and Mueller, who made exposing Manafort's covert lobbying for pro-Kremlin politicians in Ukraine a centerpiece of his Russia probe. Manafort's lawyers noted that none of the Mueller's charges against him related to the special counsel's core mandate: collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. "But for a short stint as a campaign manager in a presidential election, I don't think we'd be here today," Manafort lawyer Kevin Downing told Jackson, and asked her to take media coverage of the case into account in determining the sentence. Manafort started his statement to Jackson by saying that his statement before Ellis last week did not adequately reflect his contrition. Trump has not ruled out a presidential pardon for Manafort, and after last week's sentencing said "I feel very badly" for his former aide. A pardon might not, however, end Manafort's legal troubles. The Manhattan district attorney's office is pursuing criminal charges against Manafort, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters last month. The charges, which originate from unpaid state taxes, could not be erased by a presidential pardon, which are only applicable to federal crimes. The two criminal cases pursued by Mueller case caused a stunning downfall for Manafort, a prominent figure in Republican Party circles for decades who also worked as a consultant to such international figures as former Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and Yanukovych. Mueller is preparing to submit to U.S. Attorney General William Barr a report on his investigation into whether Trump's campaign conspired with Russia and whether Trump has unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe. Trump has denied collusion and obstruction and Russia has denied U.S. intelligence findings that it interfered in the 2016 election in an effort to boost Trump. Manafort is one of the 34 people and three companies charged by Mueller. Several others including former campaign aides Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen have pleaded guilty, while longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone has pleaded not guilty. (Additional reporting by Nathan Layne and Karen Freifeld in New York; Editing by Will Dunham) British Prime Minister Theresa Mays 11th-hour attempt to salvage her governments Brexit deal was thrown into disarray on Tuesday evening, as lawmakers voted down her agreement with the European Union for a second time in two months, with just 17 days to go before Britain is scheduled to leave the E.U. The vote, by a margin of 391 votes to 242, is another blow to May, who rules with a wafer-thin working majority and has lost the support of most of her cabinet according to some reports. Mays defeat means the U.K. is on track to leave the bloc without an agreement that would have stopped raised tariffs on trade and uncertainty about citizens rights. But lawmakers will finally be given the chance to vote on Wednesday night to avert such a no deal Brexit, and likely delay Britains exit date, too, in what could be yet another blow to Mays government. Lawmakers forced the government to allow that vote, and most analysts now believe lawmakers will vote overwhelmingly to do so. That would trigger yet another vote on Thursday on whether to ask the E.U. to delay the date of Britains exit, from March 29 to some time further in the future. May had hoped that the looming March 29 Brexit deadline, and warnings of chaos from the Bank of England in the event of a no deal Brexit, would pressure lawmakers who voted against her deal in January to change their minds. And although her defeat was by a smaller margin than the record-breaking one she had suffered that month, (by 432 votes to 202,) it was not enough. This was a bad deal in January when it was rejected by the largest margin in parliamentary history, said Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party. And it is a bad deal now. As May defended her deal with a hoarse voice at the Parliamentary dispatch box before the vote, she was heckled from the benches by calls of nothing has changed a reference to a comment she herself had made after the disastrous 2017 election, which she had called intending to increase her authority going into Brexit negotiations, but in which her party instead lost its majority. Story continues Tuesdays drama topped off a hectic 24 hours in British politics. On Monday night, May had held a late-night press conference with the European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, where she triumphantly said the E.U. had agreed to a legally binding change on the backstop, a key sticking point of the plan among critical lawmakers. A legal instrument that would keep the border open between Northern Ireland, (a part of the U.K.), and the Republic of Ireland, (a member state of the E.U.), by applying certain E.U. laws to Northern Ireland, the backstop proved unacceptable to many lawmakers because it would violate the sovereignty of the U.K. government. Mays claim to have settled those fears was shattered by Tuesday morning, when the U.K.s attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, gave legal advice to lawmakers saying that the legal risk remains unchanged of Northern Ireland being trapped in that backstop arrangement with the European Union. To many lawmakers who had voted down Mays deal for the first time in January because of concerns over the backstop, Coxs advice provided evidence that their concerns had not been sufficiently met. After losing her voice, May lost her vote. Now, if the Westminster bubble can agree on one thing, its that what happens next is totally unpredictable. CAIRO (Reuters) - The United Arab Emirates' General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) banned the operation of all Boeing 737 MAX models in UAE airspace, Emirates News Agency (WAM) said on Tuesday. GCAA added in a statement that the ban was a precautionary measure following the Ethiopian Airways crash. GCAA will "continue monitoring and re-assessing the situation as more information is obtained about the accident," it said. Flydubai is the only UAE airline operating the MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircrafts. (Reporting by Nayera Abdallah; Editing by Robin Pomeroy) Boeing is upgrading the stall prevention software on its 737 MAX, industry sources said Friday, as French investigators scoured black box data from the latest of two deadly crashes involving the aircraft in recent months. The MAX has been grounded worldwide following Sunday's Ethiopia Airlines disaster that killed all 157 on board, and the fallout has left the company, regulators and airlines scrambling to respond. Boeing will fine-tune its MCAS system -- implicated in the crash of a Lion Air 737 MAX 8 in Indonesia in October -- within 10 days, said two sources, who cautioned that the cause of the latest crash has yet to be determined. Boeing has halted deliveries of its top-selling model ahead of the software patch, which was already underway prior to the latest incident near Addis Ababa. Asked for details about the timeline for the fix, a Boeing spokesman Friday would only say it would be installed in "coming weeks." The black boxes from the Ethiopian craft, which was only a few months old and crashed minutes after takeoff, are being analyzed by the French authorities to determine the cause of the accident. An Ethiopian delegation delivered the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, which were damaged in the disaster, to France's BEA air safety agency to begin the investigation on Friday. The Lion Air crash also came just minutes after takeoff, killing 189 people, and US authorities say there is evidence of similarities between the accidents. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said findings from the crash site and "newly refined satellite data" warranted "further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents." Several American pilots also reported issues with the MCAS and the FAA said it had ordered Boeing to issue a fix by April. The aerospace giant held a conference call on Thursday with at least three carriers using the 737 MAX and gave them the patch, one source said, and the other airlines will get it early next week. Story continues Meanwhile, American pilots have raised questions about the training provided to the flight crews. One who flew a MAX 8 on Monday told AFP that US-trained pilots -- many of whom come from the military -- would have been able to react quickly to the MCAS flaw, if that occured in the accident last weekend. And Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger -- noted for his safe landing of a damaged plane on the Hudson River in New York without loss of life -- questioned the lack of experience of the Ethiopian first officer on the doomed flight, who reportedly had only 200 hours of flight time. "A cockpit crew must be a team of experts, not a captain and an apprentice," he said on social media. But he also worried about the lag in getting a software fix installed. "It has been obvious since the Lion Air crash that a redesign of the 737 MAX 8 has been urgently needed ... and the announced proposed fixes do not go far enough." - Boeing shares hit - Thousands of miles away, distraught families were demanding answers as they visited the deep black crater where the plane smashed into a field outside the capital, disintegrating on impact. Ethiopian Airlines, Africa's largest carrier, sent the black boxes to France because it does not have the equipment to analyze the data. The information that they contain helps explain 90 percent of all crashes, according to aviation experts. An FAA emergency order has grounded 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft until further notice, effectively taking the aircraft out of the skies globally. The move came after a growing number of airlines and countries decided not to fly the planes or ban them from their airspace until it is determined there are no safety issues. US President Donald Trump told reporters the "safety of the American people and all peoples is our paramount concern". Trump and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed exchanged condolences Friday, Abiy said on Twitter, with the US president praising Ethiopian Airlines as a "strong institution" and offering technical support. The 737 MAX series is Boeing's fastest-selling model and it is still relatively new with fewer than 500 in service. There are 74 registered in the United States and 387 in use worldwide with 59 carriers, according to the FAA. Boeing's shares have fallen 10 percent since Sunday's crash -- wiping out about $25 billion in value -- after regaining some ground Friday after report that a fix was coming soon. - 'Panicky voice' - According to the flight data recorder, the pilots of Lion Air Flight 610 struggled to control the aircraft as the MCAS repeatedly pushed the nose down after takeoff. At least four American pilots later complained of the same problem with the aircraft, according to documents reviewed by AFP on the Aviation Safety Reporting System, a voluntary incident database maintained by NASA. In two anonymous reports on flights just after the Lion Air disaster, US pilots disconnected the autopilot and corrected the plane's trajectory in response. The Ethiopian Airlines pilots reported similar difficulties before their aircraft plunged to the ground. According to The New York Times, air traffic controllers observed the Ethiopian Airlines plane "oscillating up and down by hundreds of feet" prior to the crash. Speaking in a "panicky voice," the doomed aircraft's captain requested permission to return to the airport almost immediately after takeoff as the plane "accelerated to abnormal speed," the newspaper reported Thursday, citing a person who had reviewed the air traffic communications. "Break break, request back to home," the Times quoted the pilot as saying just prior to the crash. "Request vector (direction) for landing." Boeing was criticized after the Lion Air crash for allegedly failing to adequately inform 737 pilots about the functioning of the stall prevention system. Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde GebreMariam said the doomed flight's captain was an experienced aviator with more than 8,000 flight hours. burs-ft/hs By Mariela Nava and Brian Ellsworth CARACAS/MARACAIBO, Venezuela (Reuters) - President Nicolas Maduro's government scrambled on Wednesday to return power to western Venezuela following heavy looting in the country's second largest city, while China offered to help the OPEC-member nation end its worst blackout on record. Power had returned to many parts of Venezuela after a nationwide outage last week, with the country's main port terminal of Jose, which is crucial for oil exports, resuming operations. The ruling Socialist Party blamed the outage on an act of U.S. sabotage, accusing President Donald Trump of being responsible for several cyber attacks on Venezuela's main dam. Energy supplies remained patchy in the sweltering western state of Zulia, where anger after nearly a week without power overflowed into street violence. Looters smashed shop windows and made off with merchandise in more than 300 businesses across the state, located along the border with Colombia, the Zulia chapter of business organization Fedecamaras said in a statement. "About 100 people came into the store and took all the food, the point of sale terminals," said Maria Centeno, 29, the owner of a store selling food and furniture that was looted on Sunday. "They were people from the community. The police came by and they told me to sort it out myself." Following the wave of pillaging on Sunday, many businesses sold off their remaining merchandise on the cheap on fears that they, too, would be hit by mobs. The country's top food company, Empresas Polar, said four facilities in Maracaibo, Venezuela's biggest city after Caracas, had been sacked this week, with looters making off with water, soft drinks and pasta. The Information Ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment. In Maracaibo, once known for flashy displays of oil wealth, people buying food at the few business that remained open worried how they would continue eating. Gasoline lines stretched for blocks. "In my house I have one kilo of rice and one kilo of lentils," said Jose Navas, 53, a security guard. "That's what I'll eat today. What will I eat tomorrow? This is really bad." CHINA SUPPORT Venezuela, which has long suffered from high crime rates and shortages of basic goods, plunged into a deep political crisis in January when Juan Guaido, the head of the opposition-controlled congress, invoked the constitution to assume an interim presidency, arguing Maduro's 2018 re-election was not legitimate. The move has put Venezuela at the heart of a geopolitical tussle, with the United States leading most Western nations in recognizing Guaido as the legitimate head of state, while Russia, China and others support Maduro. The United States is preparing to withdraw its remaining diplomats from Venezuela, an effort that will not involve the U.S. military, after Maduro on Tuesday ordered them to leave within 72 hours. China on Wednesday offered to provide help and technical support to restore electricity, and backed Maduro's assertion that the problem was the result of sabotage. Maduro's critics have scoffed at the sabotage explanation, insisting that rampant corruption and a decade of incompetent management by state authorities were to blame. A technical problem with transmission lines linking the Guri hydroelectric plant in southeastern Venezuela to the national power grid likely caused the blackout, former energy company officials and local engineers have told Reuters. Despite the resumption of shipments from Jose, Venezuela's oil industry remains troubled and is struggling with the impact of U.S. sanctions on state oil company PDVSA. Two storage tanks exploded at the Petro San Felix heavy-crude upgrading project on Wednesday, sources said. With Maduro still in control of state functions and retaining the loyalty of the armed forces, Norway's foreign ministry said on Wednesday it would be prepared to act as a mediator or facilitator of talks between the government and opposition. "We are in contact with both sides in Venezuela and can contribute if they so wish," said a Norwegian foreign ministry spokeswoman. The Nordic nation, which has not recognized Guaido as the president, has a long history of brokering peace processes worldwide, most recently when it helped seal a 2016 deal between the government of Colombia and Marxist FARC rebels. But dialogue with Maduro is a nonstarter for many opponents, who accuse him of using previous negotiating processes to buy himself time and divide the opposition. "Our position is the same: the conditions are not ripe for mediation or dialogue," said opposition legislator Fernando Sucre, adding that there had not been talks with Norway. "The agony of the Venezuelan people has increased because of the electricity disaster, and it cannot keep being extended." (Reporting by Mariela Nava, Brian Ellsworth and Vivian Sequera; additional reporting by Gwladys Fouche in Oslo; Editing by Daniel Flynn, Leslie Adler and Rosalba O'Brien) Washington (AFP) - The US no longer refers to the Golan Heights as an "Israeli-occupied" territory in its latest annual human rights report, published Wednesday, though the State Department insists the wording change doesn't mean a policy change. The report now calls the area the "Israeli-controlled Golan Heights." When asked about the change on such a sensitive Middle East subject, a senior US official told reporters in Washington "there's no change in our outlook or our policy vis-a-vis these territories and the need for a negotiated settlement there." "This, by the way, is not a human rights issue, it's a legal status issue," said Michael Kozak of the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. "What we try to do is to report on the human rights situation in those territories, and so you're just trying to find the way of describing the place that you're reporting on," he said. "And 'occupied territory' has a legal meaning to it; I think what they tried to do is to shift more to just a geographic description." And another semantic change that appeared in last year's report showed up again this year, with a section titled "Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza," instead of its previous "Israel and the Occupied Territories" heading. President Donald Trump, who has shown robust support for close US ally Israel, recognized Jerusalem as the country's capital in 2017, defying international consensus much to the chagrin of Palestinian leaders, who view Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state. Israel seized much of the Golan Heights from Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War and then effectively annexed it in 1981, a move that was never recognized by the international community. Israel and Syria remain technically at war after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, though a demilitarized border zone established through an armistice had long been relatively calm until the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011. Influential Trump ally US Senator Lindsey Graham said Monday during a visit to the Golan Heights with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would push for US recognition of Israel's sovereignty over the strategic region "now and forever." When the peak of summer arrives in Alaska and the radiant midnight sun hangs in the northern sky, tens of millions of salmon make their move. They race up rivers, leap over waterfalls, and clog narrow streams with their hefty, five-pound bodies. It is then that Alaska's Bristol Bay home to the largest run of sockeye salmon on the planet comes to life. Wolverines, foxes, lynx, and bald eagles descend upon this untrammeled realm. And the most dominant creature of the land, the brown bear, saunters down to these rivers. It's here that the bears grow fat, stripping the skin off of salmon like it's string cheese and devouring the pink flesh and fatty brains. "For the bears that live in Bristol Bay, the salmon are basically everything," said Mike Fitz, an ecologist and former park ranger in nearby Katmai National Park home to the globally popular bears of the park's bear cam who reside in the Bristol Bay watershed. The salmon, after spending two or three years fattening up in the ocean, return to Alaska and provide bounties of food for bears while enriching the Alaskan ecosystem with nutrients. "Salmon affect every strand of the food web," said Fitz. "They transcend boundaries between the ocean and land in ways no other organism can." "This is the largest remaining salmon population in the world," said Carl Safina, an ecologist at Stony Brook University. "Its a precious, humanly-valued, and indefinitely sustainable resource that is heavily relied upon by people." Indeed, in the summer of 2018, over 62 million sockeye salmon returned to Bristol Bay millions of which were caught by the region's flourishing fishing industry. It was the bay's largest-ever recorded run of salmon. But unease now looms over the region. This winter, the Trump administration restarted an environmental review that might allow a Canadian mining company, Northern Dynasty, to bore into the ground at the Bristol Bay headwaters the source of the bay's rivers in pursuit of copper and gold. Such an unprecedented project, called the Pebble Mine, would dig up 73 million tons of material each year, bringing the risk of lasting change and possibly irreversible harm to this salmon-dominated wilderness. Story continues "How does helping this underfunded Canadian company make America great again?" asked Joel Reynolds, Western Director and Senior Attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). "It is absolutely preposterous," added Reynolds, who flew over the remote, proposed mining site in 2018. The Bristol Bay watershed. The star marks the spot of the proposed Pebble Mine. Image: epa The idea of a Pebble Mine isn't new. The Obama administration's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scrutinized the project, concluding that the mine "could result in significant and unacceptable adverse effects on ecologically important streams, wetlands, lakes, and ponds and the fishery areas they support," and placed a slew of restrictions on the project. The mine's prospects looked dismal as investors fled. "All the money had left the project," said Reynolds. "The project was on the verge of going away." But now it's back. "The Trump administration threw that project a lifeline," said Reynolds, referencing the reopening an environmental assessment. "There's no question about it." In 2017, CNN reported that then-EPA chief Scott Pruitt known for disseminating climate-denialist talking points to his staff met with Pebble Mine brass to discuss the project. Following the meeting, the EPA confirmed that Pruitt had allowed the environmental review to proceed. Now, the ball is rolling. The Army Corps of Engineers, one of the federal agencies tasked with approving the Pebble Mine's permit, released the initial draft of an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on February 20. Following possible revisions after the public weighs in, the Trump administration will use this report to decide whether or not the environmental impacts of the project are acceptable. There's a significant amount of environmental risk to consider, as the isolated project essentially requires building infrastructure for a town: two water treatment plants to discharge mined water into the Bristol Bay's streams, a 188-mile-long natural gas pipeline to power the mine, pits for mud-like mining waste (known as tailings), a roadway for trucking, and a new port to unload mined materials onto ships. Any member of the U.S. public has 90 days to read and respond to the draft. SEE ALSO: Will cockroaches really inherit the Earth? While the NRDC is not inherently opposed to the technological necessities of mining in the 21st century ("The world needs minerals that's why mining exists," said Reynolds) and demand for copper is expected to increase over the next 30 years, the consensus among diverse parties is that this land the pure Bristol Bay watershed and its teeming natural bounty simply should not be gambled on a temporary 20-year mine. "It's the wrong mine in the wrong place," said Norm Van Vactor, president of the Bristol Bay Economic Development Corporation. Brown bears fishing at the McNeil River Falls, north of Katmai National Park. Image: drewhh / wikimedia commons The Gamble Although Bristol Bay has seen exceptional salmon runs over the past several years which in 2018 left the Bear Cam bears with a surplus of these 4,500-calorie sacks of nutrients there are periods of terrific runs followed by grimmer years. It's the natural course of things. The bad years will inevitably come again, said Van Vactor, a Bristol Bay resident. That's all the reason not to gamble on Bristol Bay's health, he said. "Why on top of that [bad years] would we want to risk really screwing this thing up?" asked Van Vactor. "At the end of the day, do we really want to risk what is truly one of mother nature's wonders of the world for copper and gold? I dont think we do," he added. The famous and rotund Bear Cam bears of Katmai National Park inhabit the greater realms of the Bristol Bay watershed, but there are other salmon and brown bear populations living in and around the headwaters zone that would experience a much more significant impact from any pernicious threat from mining (like elevated levels of heavy metals in the water), or a more sudden disaster (like a breach of mining waste). Still, many Katmai bears, who migrate in and out of the park's invisible boundaries, would almost certainly be impacted by the far-reaching mine's roads, construction, and development in the region, noted Fitz. The Upper Talarik Creek (shown here) flows through the Bristol Bay watershed. Image: Epa Northern Dynasty, who represents itself through an organization called the Pebble Partnership, maintains that the project will not damage the Bristol Bay watershed, nor the rich fisheries Alaskans rely on. "We will coexist with the other industries," said Mike Heatwole, the Vice President of Public Affairs at the Pebble Partnership. Heatwole added that the company has worked with "very experienced fish biologists" to ensure the mine could operate without harming Bristol Bay's natural resources. That means no "population-level challenges to fish and wildlife resources," he explained. Reynolds isn't so sure. "Thats what they have to say to be allowed to move forward in Bristol Bay," he said. "They'll say it even if it isn't true." Relative position of Pebble Mine compared to Katmai National Park. Image: nps There's no question that Pebble Mine will need to satisfy a slew of both federal and state regulations for the treated water they discharge into the ecosystem, air quality standards, and plans to close everything down when they've mined all the copper. But these regulations won't guarantee the continued vibrancy of Bristol Bay, long after the mine shutters for good. "At the end of the day it's death by 1,000 cuts," said Van Vactor, noting how the incremental rise of development inside sensitive river habitats stoked the collapse of the salmon fishery on the U.S. West Coast. "It didn't happen accidentally," added Van Vactor. "It's almost like people in the Lower 48 have this generational amnesia," said Fitz, describing the destruction of the Pacific Northwest fisheries. "We don't realize what it was once like. It used to be flooded with fish." Sockeye salmon gather at the mouth of the Brooks River in Katmai National Park. Image: Katmai National Park Though the Pebble Mine is just one development, Fitz emphasizes that this is how all the nation's most infamous environmental degradations began. "You can see it across the history of wildlife mismanagement across North America," said Fitz, which has also resulted in still devastated populations of grizzly bears and wolves. "It's those incremental steps that end up devastating salmon runs." The disappearance of salmon is also evident on the East Coast. "Hardly any Atlantic salmon come back to New England," noted Fitz. "It can happen to Bristol Bay, too," he said. The decline of wilderness and wildlife in the lower 48 states leaves places like Bristol Bay as a particularly valued resource. It's a largely undeveloped world whose profusion of life is nearly unparalleled. The untrammeled region is the rare instance of nature in the 21st century reaching its maximum promise. "It's potential is fully realized," said Fitz. A single industrial development here notably one requiring extensive infrastructure would be all the more visible. To ecologists and biologists, the Pebble Mine would exist as a glaring gouge with a host of threats. "It is the single most important land-use decision in North America in our lifetimes, and certainly one of the most important decisions in the world," said Safina. In 2007, the Pebble Mine brought equipment to the Bristol Bay headwaters to test drill for minerals. It's teeming with copper. Image: Al Grillo/AP/REX/Shutterstock For many of Bristol Bay residents, like Van Vactor, threats to their resource are all the more frustrating because the Trump Administration has only given the community 90 days to read an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) that's hundreds of pages long, before responding to it. "It's all about trying to fast-track this thing, shove it down our throats, and move on," Van Vactor said. The EIS is rife with missing data and damning realities, said the NRDC senior counsel, Reynolds. The document acknowledges a permanent loss of 3,458 acres of wetlands and other waters along with 73.2 miles of streams, he said. But that's not all. "The EIS fails to consider worst-case scenarios for the project, relies on untested and unrealistic claims about water treatment, and fails to address the economic feasibility of the project," said Reynolds. When the 90-day comment period closes and the federal government begins assessing the public's concerns, the region's brown bears will have just started waking from their six-month winter slumber. It marks the renewal of an environmental battle that ecologists thought was buried. But it's been resurrected. "This is one of those monsters thats hard to kill," said Safina. "You think its dead, but then it comes back in a sequel." Riyadh (AFP) - Ten Saudi women detained last year in a sweeping crackdown on activists appeared in court on Wednesday, an official said, intensifying scrutiny of the kingdom's human rights record. Prominent activists Loujain al-Hathloul, Hatoon al-Fassi and Aziza al-Yousef were among those who attended Riyadh's criminal court after being held for nearly a year without charge. The women would hear the charges raised against them ahead of a trial, court president Ibrahim al-Sayari, told reporters and western diplomats -- who were not allowed to attend the first hearing of the trial. Family members of the women, some of whom allegedly faced torture and sexual harassment during interrogation, were permitted to enter the court. The charges against the women were not immediately disclosed to the public. More than a dozen activists were arrested in May last year, just a month before the historic lifting of a decades-long ban on women drivers. Most were accused of undermining security and aiding enemies of the state. Some were later released. Hathloul was one of the activists who faced sexual harassment and torture during interrogation, according to her family and rights groups. The Saudi government has rejected the allegation. Amnesty International and Hathloul's family feared on Tuesday the women's rights activist would be charged with terrorism. The trial was expected to take place at Riyadh's Specialised Criminal Court, established to handle terrorism-related cases but widely used to try political prisoners. But family members of the detained women said on Wednesday they received a call from authorities at midnight, informing them the trial had been shifted to the criminal court. No reason was given. Hathloul was held for more than 70 days in 2014 for attempting to drive from neighbouring United Arab Emirates to Saudi Arabia. The crackdown has ramped up international criticism of Saudi Arabia, which has faced global outrage over journalist Jamal Khashoggi's murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last October. Last week, 36 nations condemned Saudi Arabia over the murder, in a rare censure of the wealthy oil-rich kingdom at the UN Human Rights Council. You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close Concerned that ongoing clashes with the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip could spread to the West Bank, Israeli security forces are working to prevent the flow of weapons from the territory to Israel proper. But it turns out that weapons smuggling is easier than one might think. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter A Ynet investigative team, consisting of a reporter, a photographer and two guides succeeded in smuggling a (toy) weapon from the West Bank city of Hebron to the southern city of Arad, in a journey that took 25 minutes, devoid of any security checkpoints. Gun running (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg) The tranquil green scenery of the South Hebron Hills conceals the reality of a thriving gun-running industry in the area. The journey was conducted along a known smuggling route that the state claims has been blocked off. The perpetrators of the deadly terror attack in Tel Aviv's Sarona compound in 2016, which left four Israelis dead, used this route. Our first stop is the settlement of Avigayil, south of the Yata refugee camp, near Hebron. We entered our vehicle with the model gun and began driving southward on the dirt path. Aside from two locations where the military tried to erect a barricade, the going was quite smooth. The length of the smuggling route is only 9.2 km from Yata to the Green Line boundary between Israel and the West Bank, and a further 13 km to Arad. South Hebron Hills route (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg) We met no security forces along the route. Paradoxically, we hoped to get caught. We only saw Palestinians making their way from Yata to the nearby towns. A few kilometers outside of Arad, we encountered a suspicious vehicle, its license plate erased, travelling the in the other direction. Most of the journey takes place in a military zone broadly designated as Firing Range 918 encompassing 33,000 dunams (8,154 acres). There are 12 Palestinian villages in the territory, which was declared a closed military zone in the 1970s but Palestinians have continued to build there to this day. In 2017, Regavim (a pro-settler NGO that monitors and pursues legal action against unauthorized construction by Palestinians or Bedouins) appealed to the High Court demanding that the state seal off the smuggling route. The state testified that the route had been blocked in three locations, but Palestinian smugglers have since reopened it. (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg) The court was notified of the developments and has since ordered additional measure be implemented; but as we discovered travelling the route, the route remains entirely passable. Attorney Roni Pelli of the Israel Civil Rights Association, which represents the local Palestinians, said that the route serves the local residents for transporting water, food and medical equipment. With regards to any smuggling, that is the armys duty to prevent, she said. The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) says that the route is known to law enforcement and has been blocked on multiple occasions, as recently as three weeks ago, but has yet again been breached. Britain's Parliament has dealt a major blow to Prime Minister Theresa May, resoundingly rejecting her Brexit deal just 17 days before the U.K. is due to leave the bloc. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter Lawmakers voted by 391 to 242 against the deal, the second time they have defeated it. UK Parliament voting on Brexit (Photo: AFP) The House of Commons threw out the agreement by an overwhelming majority in January, sending May back to the EU to seek changes. On Monday, May said she had secured "legally binding" changes to allay lawmakers' fears -- but it wasn't enough. Lawmakers will now vote on whether to leave the EU without a deal on the scheduled date of March 29, or to ask the bloc to postpone Britain's departure. May sais she "profoundly regrets" the House of Commons rejection of her deal Tuesday and said delaying Britain's departure won't solve the underlying problem. She added Parliament will be given a chance to "decline" leaving the EU without a deal on March 29 in a Wednesday vote. If that is the choice, Parliament will decide Thursday whether to seek an extension that would delay Britain's departure date. Anti-Brexit protesters in London (Photo: AP) May cautioned that the EU will need a reason to approve a delay. The European Union said in response to the vote that the British Parliament's rejection of the revised divorce deal "has significantly increased the likelihood of a 'no-deal' Brexit," and that its members "have done all that is possible to reach an agreement." The statement said the European Commission and EU members will continue to prepare for Brexit happening without a deal in place and "ensure that we will be ready if such a scenario arises" on March 29. The EU said it will "expect a credible justification" if the UK asks to postpone its departure The Israel Defense Forces have uncovered a terrorist infrastructure in the Syrian Golan Heights, designed to serve as another front against Israel. The terror unit, comprised of Hezbollah fighters and called the Golan File, is currently working to gather intelligence on Israel and the border area. Syrian President Bashar Assad apparently was not aware of Hezbollahs secret operational activity in the country. The Israeli military has uncovered a covert terror network set up by Lebanese terror group Hezbollah on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, in order to carry out attacks against Israel, the IDF said Wednesday. The network was established without the knowledge of Syrian President Bashar Assad, the army said. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter The terror network, called The Golan File, is currently in the preparation stages, stockpiling weapons, recruiting members and building secret military infrastructure, according to the IDF. The infrastructure and technology the network presently has at their disposal is being used in order to gather intelligence in the Israel-Syria border area. The activity of the Hezbollah operatives goes largely unnoticed in Syria due to their ability to assimilate into the local population. Hezbollah operatives from the secret network (: ") X Hezbollah operatives constantly patrol the border with Israel in order to identify areas along the fence vulnerable to infiltration attempts and collect information on the activities and routines of the IDF troops stationed there. The operatives apparently also use positions of the Syrian army to gather intelligence information, with the help of Hezbollah fighters involved in the civil war. "These operatives have been attempting to establish an additional terrorist front against Israel and destabilize the region over the last year," said Brig. Gen. Amit Fisher, the commander of one of IDF's northern divisions. He warned that Israel will "not allow any attempt by Hezbollah to entrench itself near the border and we will act with all our might." Hezbollah fighters from the 'Golan File' (: ") In December, the IDF launched Operation Northern Shield, a weeks-long project that uncovered and destroyed Hezbollah tunnels dug from Lebanon into Isrsael in other to carry out attacks on the local population. The Israeli military says Hezbollah operative Ali Musa Daqduq is the network's commander. Daqduq was part of the Hezbollah force in Iraq, fighting the American troops alongside the Iraqi insurgents back in 2006. He was involved in an execution of five American soldiers there and spent five years in an Iraqi prison. After being released in 2012, he returned to Lebanon as part of a deal negotiated between Hezbollah and the Iraqi government at the time. WASHINGTON -- US President Donald Trump can't get enough of Rep. Ilhan Omar. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter As Democratic lawmakers try to turn the page after the liberal legislator's use of anti-Semitic tropes ignited an embarrassing, intra-party fight, the Republican president is trying to prolong and weaponize the issue for his 2020 campaign, asserting during a private weekend fundraiser that Democrats "hate" Jews. While Trump publicly muses about winning over Jewish voters for his re-election, his motivations are more complicated and expansive. The president's rhetorical escalation also is designed to unsettle the Democratic primary debate, exploit an issue that can energize his supporters and move past his own history of toying in anti-Semitic motifs. Neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting 'Jews will not replace us.' Donald Trump called the marchers 'fine people'. (Photo: AP) Trump on Tuesday promoted comments by former model and 2016 campaign staffer Elizabeth Pipko, who said on Fox & Friends that "Jewish people are leaving the Democratic Party." Pipko, who serves as spokesperson for the group "Jexodus," which bills itself as speaking for "Jewish Millennials tired of living in bondage to leftist politics," saw her comments amplified by Trump on Twitter. "There is anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party," she continued. "They don't care about Israel or the Jewish people." Her comments mirrored Trump's charge on Friday that Democrats had become an "anti-Israel" and "anti-Jewish" party, responding to the House voted a day before to disapprove of all prejudice in response to Omar's invocation of "dual-loyalty" charges against American supporters of Israel earlier this month. Speaking later that evening, Trump went even further in an appearance before Republican National Committee donors, charging that Democrats "hate" Jewish people, according to a person who heard the remarks but spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the president's comments at a private event. Trump's press secretary Sarah Sanders subsequently declined to deny that the president believes Democrats hate Jews. Omar had sparked a political firestorm that derailed the Democrats' focus on investigations of the Trump administration, including a public back-and-forth over how, or even if, her party should condemn her comments. The ultimate resolution, which passed the House overwhelmingly, didn't call out Omar by name. Ilhan Omar (Photo: MCT) As a small percentage of the nation, American Jews are not a particularly significant voting bloc, nor is Israel their decisive issue of concern. And both parties acknowledge the controversy is unlikely to alter dramatically the electoral votes of the American Jewish community, which has skewed decisively toward Democrats for more than a generation. Stoking the fight also gives Trump an opportunity to deflect criticism of his own rhetoric, invigorate evangelical Christians for whom the Israel issue is a powerful motivator and paint Democrats into a radical corner. It also plays into Trump's attempt to cast Democrats as radicals ahead of the 2020 campaign, said conservative commentator Seth Mandel, executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine. He noted that Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders pushed back against efforts to condemn Omar's comments. "It makes it very easy to say they're just adopting whatever the socialist says." Sanders kept the controversy alive on Monday by criticizing Democrats for failing to explicitly repudiate Omar. "It's something that should be called by name," she said. "It shouldn't be put in a watered-down resolution." Sanders pointed to Republican condemnation of Rep. Steve King earlier this year, including stripping the Iowa Republican of his committee memberships, after he made remarks supporting white supremacy. But King had long espoused racially charged ideas, and the GOP only took action after it lost its majority in the chamber. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, warned that Trump's politicization of the issue "threatens the bipartisan support for Israel." Donald and Melania Trump in Jerusalem with President Reuven Rivlin (Photo: GPO) "The problem is that the president sees it somehow as a way to make some kind of political hay and a wedge," she said. "And he keeps addressing it that way. And I just think it's a mistake, as someone that's a strong supporter of Israel, that he keeps doing it." Hallie Soifer, the executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said her group welcomes Trump's focus on the issue of anti-Semitism. "He himself has emboldened anti-Semites in our country by both repeating anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories," she said. "He has no credibility with Jewish voters." Trump has been among the loudest critics of Omar, including last month when he called on her to resign from the House, or at least resign her post on the Foreign Affairs Committee over her suggestion that Jewish money drove support for Israel. But Trump himself has repeatedly deployed some of the same tropes that sent fire toward Omar. He was slow to condemn the white supremacists, and in 2016 he circulated an image of a six-pointed star alongside a photo of Hillary Clinton, a pile of dollar bills and the words "most corrupt candidate ever." And he told a group of Republican Jewish donors he didn't expect to earn their support because he wouldn't take their money. Trump tweeted the image on the right before deleting it and replacing the Star of David with a circle but adding the phrase 'America First' "You want to control your politicians, that's fine," he told the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2015. Ultimately, the group and many of its donors backed Trump. Brooks said Trump's comments were meant obviously in jest and any suggestion otherwise is "unfair and ridiculous." "Jexodus" is hardly the first time Trump has tried to peel away minority voters from the Democratic coalition. He has pushed the "WalkAway" and "Blexit" movements to win over black voters to the GOP, but those efforts proved to have limited, if any impact. According to AP Votecast, a survey of more than 115,000 midterm voters and 3,500 Jewish voters nationwide, voters who identified as Jewish broke for Democrats over Republicans by a wide margin, 72 percent to 26 percent, in 2016. Over the last decade, Jewish voters have shown stability in their partisanship, according to data from Pew Research Center. Jewish voters identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party over the Republican Party by a roughly 2-to-1 margin. Norway's attorney general ruled Tuesday that a Norwegian Muslim rapper who said "f*cking Jews" during a concert was not engaging in anti-Semitic hate speech, but rather legitimate criticism of Israel. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter The initial incident took place in June 2018, when rapper Kaveh Kholardi, who is of Iranian origin, was performing on stage at a municipal festival in Oslo. He asked the audience if there were any Muslims in the crowd. When some people responded, Kaveh wished them a happy Eid. He went on to ask if there were any Jews, and when no one reacted, he said "Fucking Jews." He then said, "Just joking." Kaveh Kholardi According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the organizers of the family-friendly event, which was supposed to celebrate diversity, complained to the rapper. Kholardi had five days before the incident written on Twitter that f*cking Jews are so corrupt. Kholardi later claimed that the comment at the concert had been taken out of context and was a joke. He was, the rapper wrote on Facebook, "neither a racist nor anti-Semite. Local Jewish leader Ervin Kohn complained about the comment to police, calling it hate speech and incitement, but was told that it "falls within the freedom of speech of performance artists to make provocative and satirical statements." This finding was supported by State Prosecutor Trude Antonsen, who found that while derogatory and offensive, the remark did not constitute a criminal act. Kohn then appealed to Attorney General Tor Aksel Busch, who on Tuesday dismissed his appeal on the grounds that the "f*cking Jews" remark seems to be targeting Jews, it can however also be said to express dissatisfaction with the policies of the State of Israel. Norwegian pro-Israel group MIFF called Buschs decision alarming because he finds ambiguity where there is none, JTA reported. Israel's deputy ambassador to Norway, Dan Poraz, called the ruling "bizarre." "The attorney general rejected an appeal against his decision to close the case against the Norwegian rapper who yelled 'F*cking Jews' on the grounds that it could be interpreted as criticism of Israel," he said. "I have lived in Norwary for the last four years and have no doubt that most Norwegians were disgusted by this anti-Semitic comment." Israeli military detained early Wednesday 29 Palestinians in the West Bank suspected of involvement in terrorist activities and violent disturbances. The security forces seized weapons and hundreds of thousands of shekels during the arrest operation. Turkish President Recep Tayyip has called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "thief" and a "tyrant" in the latest spat between the two leaders. The dispute comes after Erdogan's spokesman denounced Netanyahu as a racist for saying that Israel was the nation-state of the Jewish people only. Netanyahu then struck back calling Erdogan a dictator and criticizing the country for imprisoning journalists. Speaking at an election campaign rally on Wednesday, Erdogan addressed Netanyahu as "the thief who heads Israel" in reference to corruption allegations against him. The row over Rotem Sela, who dared to express her opinion on full equal rights for Israeli Arabs, had one impact: It proved that in these elections, aside from the eternal question of "yes to Bibi, no to Bibi," there is a race among some right-wing candidates to be the most vocal, most vociferous and most extreme in their stand against the Arab sector. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter This race is being run on the right, but it has had a paralyzing effect on the Blue and White party, which does not want to be portrayed as a movement that intends to replace Benjamin Netanyahu by embracing Arab MK Ahmad Tibi. President Reuven Rivlin's pointed remarks supporting full equality between Jews and Arabs were a reminder that the Likud of today is not the party of Rivlin, never mind Menachem Begin or Yitzhak Shamir. Moshe Feiglin and Ynet reporter Inbar Tvizer (Photo: Ori Davidovich) The inauguration of the 21st Knesset will mark the disappearance of the last vestiges of liberal Likud, of Ze'ev Jabotinsky's ideology of full respect and equality for the Arabs of Israel. Moshe Feiglin, on the other hand, left the Likud years ago, but it is closer today to his positions than ever. Feiglin is a revelation to young, secular supporters of the center-left. He emphasizes that he is primarily liberal when it comes to the issue of religion and state, and a staunch supporter of the legalization of marijuana, but is hiding an extremely hawkish platform in every other arena. Arabs, Feiglin suggests, would have to pass a loyalty test if they wished to become citizens. The Oslo Accords would be canceled, and the Palestinian Authority would be viewed on a par with Hamas, namely, a terrorist organization and the enemy. He wants to enshrine in law a ban on the courts overturning any legislation, and the government would be able to replace the attorney general at any time. According to Feiglin, "elected officials will not have to comply with the advice of their attorney general." Feiglin succeeds where others have failed. He creates an agenda; people are talking about him and he is always being interviewed. He is present, generating interest. Neither Bennett, nor Gantz, Lapid and Ya'alon, nor Meretz or Gabbay have so far managed to set any kind of agenda in these elections. This also works to Netanyahu's great advantage. Every political novice knows that whoever sets the agenda in the month before the elections will do well on polling day. The buzz around Feiglin's Zehut (identity) party, has already put it over the electoral threshold - and in some polls it has as many as four or five seats. Feiglin is filling arenas in secular, liberal, left-wing Tel Aviv. His call for the legalization of marijuana has already forced the prime minister to announce that he would also back such a move after the elections, in a clumsy effort to prevent young Likud voters from running into Feiglin's waiting arms. Moshe Feiglin, leader of far-right party Zehut (Photo: Yair Sagi) Four weeks to go until the elections, and ongoing developments have seen the attorney general's call to indict the prime minister virtually vanish. Anyone who thought that Mandelblit would be a deciding factor in these elections was apparently very wrong. But Feiglin could be. Twenty years after his conviction for sedition, he could be kingmaker. And this is where he is causing alarm among Likud officials, for with his loathing of Netanyahu, they fear Feiglin could well recommend to the president that Benny Gantz form the next government. Whatever the outcome, whether he makes it back into the Knesset or is kept out again, Feiglin is already a winner. Israel's warming relationship with the Gulf states is intensifying and for the first time, a kosher catering company has been established in Dubai. Kosher food is also expected to soon be a feature on Gulf airlines, and that is not all - a kosher restaurant is also planned for the United Arab Emirates. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter The kosher catering company, Kosher Arabia, will serve all the Gulf states. It was founded by Ross Kriel, a Johannesburg-born lawyer who heads the Orthodox Jewish community in Dubai. The kosher food section at a February 2019 intefaith conference in Abu Dhabi At present, the company serves only dairy food, fish and vegetables. For now, it has no kashrut supervisor and it is doubtful that one will ever emerge, but the company passed the kosher test last month when Pope Francis visited the UAE. The pope attended, among other things, an interfaith dialogue conference in the capital Abu Dhabi, where a kosher dining area was set up for the Jewish attendees. Pope Francis and Sheikh Ahmed Al Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al Azhar, embrace during a meeting in the UAE (Photo: Reuters) Also present at the event was US Orthodox Rabbi Marc Schneier, who heads the Jewish-Muslim Interfaith Understanding Foundation and serves as a Jewish affairs advisor to the rulers of the Persian Gulf. "It was so exciting to stand in line for kosher food in Abu Dhabi at a conference convened by Muslim leaders," says Schneier. "I ate fish and vegetables and a dessert." According to the rabbi, the catering company was established partly to serve Jewish business people and tourists who visit the Gulf. He is currently discussing the next step with senior Gulf officials - opening a kosher restaurant in Dubai. Rabbi Schneier with Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa "Many Jews visit the Gulf states, and they need kosher food. If there were such a thing here, more Jews would come there and everyone would benefit the Jews from the kosher food, and the locals are from an increase in tourism. Schneier said talks are also underway for Kosher Arabia to supply food to the Gulf airlines for the benefit of Jewish passengers. "These are the steps that symbolize rapprochement," he said. BAGHDAD - Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric told Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Wednesday that Iraqi sovereignty must be respected and weapons kept in state hands, a veiled reference to increasingly influential Iran-backed militias. It was the first meeting between an Iranian president and the 88-year-old Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who rarely weighs in on politics but exerts wide influence over Iraqi public opinion. Sistani welcomed "any steps to strengthen Iraq's relations with its neighbours ... based on respect for the sovereignty of the countries and no interference in domestic affairs", a statement from his office said. "The most important challenges facing Iraq are fighting corruption, improving services and keeping weapons in the hands of the state and its security services," it added. The meeting came on the third day of a visit by Rouhani to Iraq which aimed to project Iran's political and economic dominance in Baghdad and expand commercial ties to help offset renewed U.S. sanctions meant to isolate and weaken Tehran. The US State Department changed its usual description of the Golan Heights from "Israeli-occupied" to "Israeli-controlled" in an annual global human rights report released by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter A separate section on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, areas that Israel captured along with the Golan Heights in the 1967 Six-Day War, also did not refer to those territories as being "occupied" or under "occupation." Benjamin Netanyahu and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the Warsaw conference on the Middle East (Photo: AFP) According to Israeli journalist Amit Waldman, an official at the State Department said that the language did not reflect a change in US policy, and that the word occupied had not been used due to the fact that the report focused on human rights and not legal issues. The 2018 human rights report also did not refer to the West Bank as occupied territory. Israel left the Gaza Strip in a unilateral 2005 evacuation known as the disengagement. Since 2007, the Strip has been ruled by the Hamas terror group, with access through Israel and Egypt under strict control by the two countries. Clashes along the Israel-Gaza border (Photo: AFP) The US government has released a human rights report every year since 2011. Until 2018, the section dealing with Israel and the areas it captured in 1967 was entitled "Israel and the Occupied Territories." This section included Israel, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Last year, however, the section was called "Israel, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza." There was nonetheless a reference to " 1967, the occupation of the West Bank." The State Department made clear last year that the change in terminology did not reflect a shift in US policy, but rather due to the decision that using geographical names of the areas discussed would make it easier for the reader. The report comes two days after Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, visiting the Golan with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, called vowed to push for US recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. L-R: Sen. Lindsey Graham, Benjamin Netanyahu and David Friedman on the GoIan Heights on Monday (Photo: GPO) The Golan is not disputed. It is in the hands of Israel and will always remain in the hands of Israel, Graham said from a cliff overlooking Syria, where Syrian flags could be seen fluttering in the distance on buildings damaged in the countrys civil war. My goal is to try to explain this to the administration, he said. This is not the first time that the Trump White House has broken with decades of bipartisan American policy on the Middle East. Last year, the administration moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to KJerusalem and recognized the city as the Israeli capital, which the international community had refrained from doing due to the unresolved conflict with the Palestinians and the sensitive nature of the subject of Jerusalem to both Jews and Muslims. LAS VEGAS -- Hundreds of millions of dollars will be at stake in a Nevada courtroom when attorneys for a Hong Kong businessman tell a jury on Wednesday that Las Vegas Sands owes him hundreds of millions of dollars for helping the company open its first resort in Macau 15 years ago. Richard Suen argues in court papers that he and his business, Round Square Co., are due at least $328 million for introducing company executives to Chinese officials. Sands puts the amount at $1 million, after losing two previous trials arguing that Suen should get nothing. Opening statements from both sides in Las Vegas will outline the breach-of-contract case that Clark County District Court Judge Rob Bare has told jurors could take seven weeks. Sands founder Sheldon Adelson isn't expected to testify for health reasons, but the jury is expected to see video-recorded prior testimony from the casino mogul. The company has said the 85-year-old billionaire board chairman, CEO and Republican national party donor is receiving treatment for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and has not been at the company's Las Vegas offices for more than two months. If you think the police can eliminate Telegrass, you are mistaken, said Amos Dov Silver, founder and director of the popular online marijuana distribution network, only hours before Ukrainian police raided his Kiev hotel room. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter Police cannot do anything to us, it will take them years to bring this down, said Silver in a defiant interview to Yedioth Ahronoth just before the cannabis empire he founded was dealt a lethal blow , two years after it was founded, with the arrest of 42 senior operatives in a major police sting Tuesday. Silver They began asking me to refer them to reliable people (buyers or sellers), he continues. And from there it developed gradually. First with fictitious Facebook profiles, then it became too much and we moved to Telegram where we began building a complex, secure system And we improved with regards to customer complaints regarding quality, prices and market competition. I believe that competition is the solution. He says that competition in the cannabis market reached a point where the sellers have to seek out buyers instead of the other way around. In the past, a dealer would not have to invest in marketing; today they must invest much time and energy in branding. Do you recall dealers advertising three years ago? Certainly not, Silver responds. The two things that have developed in recent years are the amount of openness in the market the public is accepting of openly discussing cannabis use; and increased competition. More people are competing over the same market share so they use more radical resources to attract attention Many dealers have developed clever bots to help with sales. I speak with dealers and they tell me that they spend large amounts of money and that in todays market, it isnt sufficient to just have good quality substance but you must also understand branding and marketing. Dealers are running complicated operations compared to the past. Things have changed. Currently, it is quite complicated to manage a dealers operation And Telegrass adds difficulty because each dealer is on his own, he responds. As the man in charge of Telegrass, are you involved in all the content and advertising? Can you veto certain content? Certainly; together with the others we came up with standards regarding what is legitimate and what isnt. But outside, anyone can advertise as they see fit, as long as we can control our own content. What has stopped the police from putting an end to your business? Firstly, your premise is wrong; they cannot simply do that All of our databases are stored on encrypted servers and the police dont have access. One of the suspects in court (Photo: Motti Kimchi) Say that an undercover cop manages to bring down one dealer we still have 4,000 dealers, he boasts. It would take the police four years to take them all down, if they put aside all their other tasks, they lack the manpower. Now consider also that all our dealers check the customers Facebook and ID prior to a sale. It isnt simple and chances are that a judge would release us with a slap on the wrist and the police will be disappointed. There is really nothing they could do. Assaf, a Telegrass customer told Ynet: I want to take this opportunity as a citizen to thank the police for taking upon themselves this matter and doing the work Considering the amount of resources and energy being invested in this I find it quite bizarre. Will you have trouble acquiring the substance? I dont think so. Grass, cannabis and all of its derivatives, including medical grade, for those suffering from serious illnesses, as well as those who merely want to use cannabis for its calming effect and personal pleasure, its all very common in Israel on a very large scale." Does Telegrass still work? There are many dealers who have cultivated a small community of people who trust them, friends and people with medical conditions. Many have turned to Telegrass out of frustration of what they experienced in dealing with the Health Ministry(s cannabis department). These small communities will continue to exist. Telegrass provides a great service where the state fails. ANKARA, Turkey (AP) -- The latest quarrel between the leaders of Turkey and Israel continued for a second day Wednesday as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan labeled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "thief" and a "tyrant." Follow Ynetnews on Facebook STRONG> and Twitter Speaking at an election campaign rally, Erdogan called Netanyahu "the thief who heads Israel" in a reference to corruption allegations against the long-seated Israeli prime minister. Erdogan; Netanyahu (Photo: Reuters, MCT) Netanyahu fired back on Twitter, describing the Turkish president as a "dictator who sends tens of thousands of political opponents to prison, commits genocide against the Kurds, and occupies Northern Cyprus." Israel and Turkey were once close allies, but diplomatic relations between the two countries have chilled in the past decade. Under Erdogan, Turkey has become a vocal critic of Israeli policies dealing with Palestinians, sparking frequent verbal feuds with Netanyahu. At Wednesday's campaign rally, Erdogan criticized Israel's closure of a Jerusalem holy site Tuesday after Palestinian suspects hurled a firebomb at a police station. There were no injuries in the incident, but police shuttered the site, which Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims the Noble Sanctuary. The site reopened Wednesday without incident. "You are a tyrant," Erdogan said, addressing Netanyahu at the rally. "You are a tyrant who slaughters 7-year-old Palestinian kids." The Israeli prime minister responded in his tweet. "It's best that he doesn't get involved with Jerusalem, our capital for 3,000 years," Netanyahu quipped. "Erdogan can only learn from us how to respect every religion and protect human rights." The last war of words started Tuesday when Erdogan's spokesman called Netanyahu a racist for saying Israel was the nation-state only of the Jewish people. Netanyahu struck back, calling Erdogan a dictator and criticizing the Turkey for imprisoning journalists. STRASBOURG - The European Union should formally suspend Turkey's negotiations to join the bloc, EU lawmakers said on Wednesday in a symbolic rebuke of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who Western governments accuse of widespread abuses of human rights. Forging a common European Parliament position on Turkey's long-stalled EU bid, lawmakers voted 370 in favour and 109 against, with 143 abstentions, for an official freeze of the membership process, which would jeopardise some EU funding. EU governments have the final say in any suspension. "Sitting in a cell for 17 months without knowing what you are being accused of, that is reality in today's Turkey," Kati Piri, a Dutch centre-left EU lawmaker who sponsored the non-binding resolution, told the plenary in Strasbourg. She accused Erdogan of a "witchhunt against his critics", referring to what the EU says is a crackdown on dissidents, the collapse of an independent judiciary and a turn towards authoritarianism that are incompatible with the bloc's values of democracy and freedom of speech. Ankara dismissed the vote as meaningless. Turkish ruling AK Party spokesman Omer Celik called it "worthless, invalid and disreputable". By BRYAN HELLIOS [email protected] Hurley After hearing updates regarding recreational trails from Iron County Outdoor Recreation Enthusiasts during Tuesdays meeting, the Hurley City Council decided more information is still needed before it could act. ICORE is asking the council to pass a pair of resolutions. The first would have the city of Hurley adopt Iron Countys Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan so the city could be eligible for certain grants. The second asked for the city to apply for Department of Natural Resources grants to purchase the railroad grade through town the trail would run on. The council voiced its concern to ICORE about incorporating all of Iron Countys plan in Hurley, as some of Hurleys plans might differ from the county. The council also raised reservations about the final cost associated with the purchase and if the Canadian National Railroad would require a survey before selling the land. Representatives from ICORE and the council agreed to table the resolutions in order to gather more information and to clarify the resolutions. ICORE is working to extend a non-motorized trail from the trailhead between Montreal River and Second Avenue to Cary Park and ultimately connecting to a second trailhead in the city of Montreal. Those involved with the effort told the Daily Globe they are hoping to seek grant funding in next years grant cycle. Along with extending the trail, organizers are also working on improving the Hurley trailhead that runs, parallel to Silver Street. In other business, the council: Approved giving $2,000 to the Hurley area Little League. Tabled action on sewer rates until a accurate assessment of commercial and residential rates could be completed. Moved into closed session to discuss potential litigation regarding County Highway D power for lift stations. Adopted a resolution to borrow $83,200 for budgeted capital outlay purchases of vehicles. The council also heard reports on the following: The K9 unit from Vilas County performed a walk-through at the Hurley school March 5 and no issues were found. Changes regarding sex offender ordinance will be occurring within the city. The chief of police will keep the council notified as he receives more information concerning the changes. Discuss the sale of vaping products containing nicotine to minors. The chief of police indicated the new squad car has arrived and bids are going out for stripping of the equipment from the old car. Editors Note: Daily Globe reporter Richard Jenkins contributed to this story. By RICHARD JENKINS [email protected] Bessemer A Minnesota man told Gogebic County Circuit Judge Michael Pope he was delivering heroin to the area when the Gogebic Iron Area Narcotics Team arrested him in Ironwood last September. Brandon Lee Bible, 35, of Minneapolis, made the confession Tuesday as part of his guilty plea to a pair of felonies. Bible pleaded guilty to the delivery or manufacturing of heroin and resisting/obstructing police officers as part of a plea agreement. In exchange for the pleas, a charge of tampering with evidence and a three charges from a second case involving contraband in the Gogebic County Jail will be dismissed at sentencing. Prosecutor Nick Jacobs also agreed Bibles two sentences will be served concurrently and he wont bring any additional charges related to a series of controlled buys police completed prior to Bibles Sept. 10 arrest. Bible also acknowledged he was a habitual offender, which can extend the potential maximum sentence he faces. He testified a jury convicted him of being in possession of a pistol or assault weapon in Minnesota in 2012. Bible was arrested at the welcome center on U.S. 2 in Ironwood Sept. 10, according to information presented in court. He testified he picked up heroin in Duluth and drove to the welcome center, where he was waiting to hear from the person he was delivering it to. Police pulled up on me as I was smoking some of (the heroin), Bible said. He testified he put the foil he was using to smoke the heroin in his mouth and refused repeated commands to spit it out, the basis for his resisting and obstructing charge. Bible is scheduled to be sentenced April 30. For Anytime Fitness co-founder and property investor Jacinta McDonell, success is more than financial; its also about extending a hand to the disadvantaged. As entrepreneurs, we can sometimes focus too heavily on business and reinvesting without having a longer-term plan on a stable financial base. This is what property brings to us, she says. My passion is to find properties that have uplift and can create revenue to give back. AT A GLANCE First purchase: Property in Leichhardt, Sydney, purchased at age 24 Best property: Family home in Byron Bay Best investment: Human Kind Project Foundation McDonell contributes to initiatives aimed at ending poverty and hunger in Malawi, and her personal properties are not exempt she has even rented out a family home in Byron Bay and given a percentage of the profits to the Human Kind Project. We have just moved out of our home in Woollahra to complete a large renovation involving all of our trades, to generate revenue through the rebuild to fund a project for our foundation. We expect it to be able to donate over $100,000 in 2019. WANT TO BE FEATURED? Are you living the good life thanks to your portfolio? We want to hear from you. editor.yipmag@keymedia.com.au News Washington, DC - Vice President Mike Pence met today with His Majesty King Abdullah II of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to discuss the bilateral relationship, the fight against ISIS, and regional dynamics. The Vice President expressed the Administrations commitment to supporting Jordans economy and congratulated His Majesty on the successful London Initiative meeting last month in the United Kingdom. The two leaders also discussed President Trumps decision to maintain a residual U.S. presence in Syria and opportunities to work more closely on countering terrorism in the region. Hosting Vietnamese Ambassador Tran Thanh Cong, who came to present his letter of credentials on March 12, President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi affirmed that Egypt will create favourable conditions for Ambassador Cong during his term of office in the country. He recalled his impressions and the outcomes reached during his official visit to Vietnam in September, 2017, while expressing his pleasure at the positive development in the two countries relations. Ambassador Cong said he will do his best to contribute to further promoting cooperation between the two countries. He briefed President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi on Vietnams recent socio-economic development achievements, foreign policies, and international integration progress. The Government and people of Vietnam wish to strengthen cooperation in various areas with Egypt, the diplomat said, noting the orientations and targets during his term of office towards promoting bilateral cooperation. News Washington, DC - A new report from the U.S. Border Patrol proves that only the willfully ignorant can doubt that were dealing with an immigration crisis. The entire system right now is at full capacity, agent Manuel Padilla said. Actually, its overwhelmed. Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 66,000 migrants at the U.S.-Mexican border in February. Thats the highest total for a single month in almost a decade. In February 2017, families and unaccompanied children made up 27 percent of those arrested or deemed inadmissible at the southern border. Two years later, its 62 percent. Why the change? According to immigration expert David Inserra, loopholes in U.S. immigration law are the culprit. Combined with a weak asylum process, they are creating incentives for adults to use children as pawns to get into the U.S., he writes in The Wall Street Journal. Consider the unintended consequence of the Trafficking Victim Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008. It requires the Border Patrol to treat unaccompanied alien children from countries other than Mexico differently. Border Patrol turns them over to the Department of Health and Human Services and lets them enter the U.S. pending an immigration-court hearing one that may be years in the future. Another loophole is more recent: a 2016 court case that requires the Department of Homeland Security to release all children, including those accompanied by parents, from custody. [T]heres been a spike in asylum claims by those who say they face a credible fear of prosecution. Its not hard for most of them to pass their initial hearing, but the immigration-court system that is supposed to give them a final ruling has a backup that averages two years. What happens in the meantime? Most then simply disappear into the U.S., writes Mr. Inserra. Read the full column here. News Washington, DC - On March 15, 1995, by Executive Order 12957, the President declared a national emergency with respect to Iran to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States constituted by the actions and policies of the Government of Iran. On May 6, 1995, the President issued Executive Order 12959, imposing more comprehensive sanctions on Iran to further respond to this threat. On August 19, 1997, the President issued Executive Order 13059, consolidating and clarifying those previous orders. The President took additional steps pursuant to this national emergency in Executive Order 13553 of September 28, 2010; Executive Order 13574 of May 23, 2011; Executive Order 13590 of November 20, 2011; Executive Order 13599 of February 5, 2012; Executive Order 13606 of April 22, 2012; Executive Order 13608 of May 1, 2012; Executive Order 13622 of July 30, 2012; Executive Order 13628 of October 9, 2012; Executive Order 13645 of June 3, 2013; Executive Order 13716 of January 16, 2016; and Executive Order 13846 of August 6, 2018. As outlined in National Security Presidential Memorandum-11 of May 8, 2018 (Ceasing United States Participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and Taking Additional Action to Counter Irans Malign Influence and Deny Iran All Paths to a Nuclear Weapon), the actions and policies of the Government of Iran, including its proliferation and development of missiles and other asymmetric and conventional weapons capabilities, its network and campaign of regional aggression, its support for terrorist groups, and the malign activities of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its surrogates continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. For these reasons, the national emergency declared on March 15, 1995, must continue in effect beyond March 15, 2019. Therefore, in accordance with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency with respect to Iran declared in Executive Order 12957. The emergency declared by Executive Order 12957 constitutes an emergency separate from that declared on November 14, 1979, by Executive Order 12170, in connection with the hostage crisis. This renewal, therefore, is distinct from the emergency renewal of November 2018. This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress. DONALD J. TRUMP THE WHITE HOUSE, March 12, 2019. News Birmingham, Alabama - A federal jury in Birmingham, found a father and son guilty Friday of multiple charges for their roles in investment fraud and bank fraud schemes in which they stole over $10 million from individual investorsincluding multiple former professional athletesand Alamerica Bank of Birmingham, Alabama. Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Departments Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Jay E. Town of the Northern District of Alabama and Special Agent in Charge Johnnie Sharp Jr. of the FBI Birmingham Field Office made the announcement. Donald Watkins Sr., 70, of Atlanta, Georgia, was convicted on seven counts of wire fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy. Donald Watkins Jr., 46, of Birmingham was convicted on one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy. Sentencing is set for July 16 before U.S. District Court Judge Karon O. Bowdre of the Northern District of Alabama, who presided over the trial. The jurys verdict today sends a clear message: Donald Watkins Sr. and Donald Watkins Jr. are frauds, plain and simple, said Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski. They induced their victims to part with more than $10 million of supposed investment capital and used it to support their lavish lifestyle. I want to thank the prosecutors and law enforcement agents for their hard work investigating and prosecuting this case. This was a case about deception and greed at the expense of too many, said U.S. Attorney Town. The findings of guilt for these two individuals should forewarn anyone who would seek to defraud investors so brazenly. We appreciate the labor of the jurors whose role as citizens in this process is so critical to our system of justice. We are also grateful to the Alabama Securities Commission and the Department of Justices Fraud Section for allowing their personnel to engage in this prosecution. Both of the men found guilty today are financial predators who truly represent pure greed, said FBI Special Agent in Charge Sharp. We are pleased that the defendants in this case are being held accountable for their crimes and we will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to investigate and prosecute those who commit these types of financial crimes. According to evidence presented at trial, between approximately 2007 and 2013, Donald Watkins Sr. sold economic participations and promissory notes connected with Masada Resource Group, a company that he ran as manager and CEO. Investors paid millions of dollars after Donald Watkins Sr. and Donald Watkins Jr. falsely represented that the money would be used to grow Masada, which Donald Watkins Sr. described as a pre-revenue company that supposedly had technology that could convert garbage into ethanol. Instead of investing the money into Masada, however, Donald Watkins Sr. and Donald Watkins Jr. diverted funds to pay personal bills and the debts of their other business ventures. The evidence showed that victim money was used to pay for Donald Watkins Sr.s alimony, hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes, personal loan payments, a private jet and clothing purchased by Donald Watkins Jr. and his wife. Emails introduced at trial also showed that Donald Watkins Jr. and Donald Watkins Sr. planned to obtain millions of dollars for these purposes from one victim on multiple occasions, when they knew that their victims trusted them to put their money to use in growing Masada. The defendants scheme eventually grew to include another business venture, Nabirm Global, a company that Donald Watkins Sr. claimed held mineral rights in Namibia. Donald Watkins Sr. also defrauded Alamerica Bank, an entity in which Donald Watkins Sr. was the largest shareholder, the evidence showed. In order to pay hundreds of thousands in litigation expenses associated with another one of Donald Watkins Sr.s business ventures, the defendants, Donald Watkins Sr. executed a plan to use a straw borrower to take out money from Alamerica Bank and give it to them. This straw borrowerDonald Watkins Sr.s long-time mentor and a prominent figure in the Birmingham communitytook over $900,000 in loans from Alamerica Bank and then immediately permitted Donald Watkins Sr. and Donald Watkins Jr. to use those funds for their personal benefit. The investigation was conducted by the FBIs Birmingham Field Office. Trial Attorney Kyle C. Hankey of the Criminal Divisions Fraud Section and First Assistant U.S. Attorney Lloyd C. Peeples III, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Beau Brown (on detail from the Alabama Securities Commission) and Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Xavier O. Carter Sr. of the Northern District of Alabama prosecuted the case. News Augusta, Georgia - Kim Anh Vo, a.k.a. F@ng, a.k.a. SyxxZMC, a.k.a. Zozo, a.k.a. Miss.Bones, a.k.a. Sage Pi, a.k.a. Kitty Lee, was arrested this morning in Hephzibah, Georgia. Vo was charged by a criminal Complaint with conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a designated foreign terrorist organization. Vo is expected to be presented before Magistrate Judge Brian K. Epps in Augusta, Georgia, federal court. Assistant Attorney General John C. Demers for National Security, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman for the Southern District of New York, Assistant Director-in-Charge William F. Sweeney Jr. of the FBI New York Field Office and Commissioner James P. ONeill of the Police Department for the City of New York (NYPD) made the announcement. As alleged in the criminal Complaint, unsealed today: In April 2016, Vo joined the United Cyber Caliphate (UCC), an online group that pledged allegiance to ISIS and committed to carrying out online attacks and cyber intrusions against Americans. Since that time, the UCC and its sub-groups have disseminated ISIS propaganda online, including kill lists, which listed the names of individuals for example, soldiers in the United States Armed Forces and members of the State Department whom the group instructed their followers to kill. For example, on or about April 21, 2016, the UCC posted online the names, addresses, and other personal identifying information of approximately 3,602 individuals in the New York City area and included a message that stated: List of most important citizens of #New York and #Brooklyn and some other cities . . . We Want them #Dead. Between April 2016 and May 2017, Vo worked on behalf of the UCC to recruit others to join the group and assist with the groups hacking efforts. Between January and February 2017, Vo recruited other individuals including a minor residing in Norway to create online content in support of ISIS, including a video (Video-1) threating a non-profit organization based in New York, New York, which was formed to find and combat the online promotion of extremist ideologies. Video-1 contained messages such as, You messed with the Islamic State, SO EXPECT US SOON, followed by a scene displaying a photograph of the organizations chief executive officer and former U.S. Ambassador (CEO), along with the words: [CEO], we will get you. On or about April 2, 2017, the UCC posted online a kill list containing the names and personal identifying information of over 8,000 individuals, along with a links to another video (Video-2). Video-2 displayed messages stating, in part: We have a message to the people of the U.S., and most importantly, your president Trump: Know that we continue to wage war against you, know that your counter attacks only makes stronger. The UCC will start a new step in this war against you. . . . and We will release a list with over 8000 names, addresses, and email addresses, of those who fight against the US. Or live amongst the kuffar. Kill them wherever you find them! In subsequent scenes, Video-2 contains what appears to be a graphic depiction of the decapitation of a kneeling man. Vo, 20, of Georgia, is charged with one count of conspiring to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The maximum potential sentence in this case is prescribed by Congress and is provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendant will be determined by a judge. Mr. Demers and Mr. Berman praised the outstanding efforts of the FBI New York Field Office, New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, and Atlanta Field Offices Augusta Resident Agency. Mr. Demers and Mr. Berman also thanked the United States Attorneys Office for the Southern District of Georgia. This prosecution is being handled by the Offices Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Shawn G. Crowley, Sidhardha Kamaraju, and Jane Kim are in charge of the prosecution, with assistance from Trial Attorney Elisabeth Poteat of the Counterterrorism Section. Our directory features more than 18 million business listings from across the entire US. However, if we're missing your business, add your business by clicking on Add Your Business. 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Manikchandra Gupta, 45, owner of Khushbu Rice Mill, and his employee Gopal Shah, 40, were returning to their village Laheri under the Parsathua police station, on Tuesday night when they spotted some people stealing rice from the mill and raised an alarm. The burglars, however, attacked and overpowered them and threw them into a canal after tying their hands and feet to their own Bullet motorcycle. Their bodies were recovered by villagers on Wednesday morning, a district police officer said. Police have lodged a case and is looking for the culprits. Air India on Wednesday issued a statement announcing that its flights on Delhi-Madrid and Delhi-Birmingham routes will be suspended from March 16 till further notice. The airline cited "operational reasons" behind the move. Air India's expenditure on flights to Europe and the US have significantly increased after Pakistan has kept its airspace closed since February 26 due to the Balakot air strike by the Indian Air Force (IAF). The airline took to Twitter to make the announcement. Air India has also asked the passengers of the flights to claim a full refund. "Due to operational reasons, the following Air India flights are suspended with effect from March 16, 2019, till further notice." The airline then said that AI135 Delhi-Madrid flight, AI136 Madrid-Delhi flight, AI113 Delhi-Birmingham flight and AI114 Birmingham-Delhi flight would be suspended. The airline said that AI117 Delhi-Amritsar-Birmingham flight and AI118 Birmingham-Amritsar-Delhi flight would also be suspended too. "We sincerely regret the inconvenience caused to our valued passengers and request passengers to collect full refund," the airline added. New Delhi: Global investment company Blackstone and realty firm Embassy will hit the capital market with the country's first real estate investment trust (REIT) to raise up to Rs 4,750 crore, while it has received Rs 876-crore commitment from strategic investors. Embassy Office Parks, joint venture of Blackstone and Embassy, has entered into unit subscription agreements with strategic investors to allot them 2,92,08,800 units for Rs 876.3 crore. These investors are American Funds Insurance Series, New World Fund INC and SMALLCAP World Fund Inc, according to a regulatory filing. The REIT issue will open on March 18 with a price band of Rs 299-300 per unit. The issue closes on March 20. The total issue size is 12,95,56,000 units. Embassy Office Parks had in September last year filed the draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) with market regulator Sebi to launch REIT, touted as Asia's largest in terms of portfolio size of 33 million sq ft. REIT is an investment tool that owns and operates rent-yielding real estate assets. It allows individual investors to make investment in this platform and earn income. Sebi had notified REIT's regulations in 2014, allowing setting up and listing of such trusts, which are popular in some advanced markets. "We will launch our REIT in few weeks," Embassy Office Parks CEO Mike Holland had told PTI on February 24. "We already have a strong book of anchor and strategic investors. The REIT will be successful as in other countries and Embassy Office Parks will set a precedent for the REIT in India," he had said. Banking sources had earlier said the internal rate of return (IRR) for unit holders is expected at around 9 percent in the first year and about 18 percent in a five-year horizon. Embassy Office Parks, a leading player in commercial real estate, has put 33 million sq ft of office and hospitality assets under its proposed REIT comprising of seven business parks and four city-centric buildings spread across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune and Noida. Out of the 33 million sq ft, about 24 million sq ft area is operational at 95 percent occupancy and yielding rental income of over Rs 2,000 crore annually. Another 3 million sq ft area is under construction and 6 million sq ft area in pipeline. Embassy Office Parks' rental income is expected to rise by 55 percent in the next three years as it expects to lease area at a higher rent. The JV firm has top MNC clients in its commercial projects. More than 50 percent of the rents come from Fortune 500 companies. Clients such as Microsoft, Google, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan have their base in the office parks. Unlike the housing segment, the commercial real estate sector is doing well and attracting huge investments from domestic and global investment firms. Rising demand for co-working space is also fuelling demand for office properties. New Delhi: British oil firm Cairn Energy Plc Tuesday said its holding in Vedanta Ltd has dropped to just 0.1 percent after the Income Tax Department sold most of its 4.9 percent stake in the company to recover a retrospective tax demand. Besides realising about Rs 5,000 crore from selling the shares together with redemption proceeds on Vedanta Ltd preference shares, the Income Tax Department has also seized Rs 1,140 crore of dividend due to the British company as well as Rs 1,590 crore of tax refund in an unrelated case, Cairn said in its 2018 financial earnings statement. The company reported a net loss of USD 1.1 billion in the year ending December 31, 2018 "resulting principally from a write-down of Cairn's investments in India", it said. Cairn discovered India's biggest onland oilfield in Rajasthan in January 2004. It later sold the India business Cairn India to Vedanta in 2011 for USD for USD 8.67 billion. It, however, held a small stake of close to 10 percent in the company. Cairn India was in April 2017 merged into parent Vedanta Ltd. Subsequent to that Cairn Energy held a 4.9 percent stake in Vedanta Ltd. In the earnings statement, Cairn said it had in January 2014 received a notice from the Income Tax Department, requesting information relating to the group reorganisation done in 2006. Alongside, the Income Tax Department attached the company's near 10 percent shareholding in Cairn India. In March 2015, the tax department sought Rs 10,247 crore in taxes on alleged capital gains made by the company in the internal reorganisation. "In that notification, the tax department claimed to have identified unassessed taxable income resulting from certain intra-group share transfers undertaken in 2006, such transactions having been undertaken in order to facilitate the IPO of Cairn India Ltd in 2007. The notification made reference to retrospective Indian tax legislation enacted in 2012, which the tax department was seeking to apply to the 2006 Transactions," the statement said. "In addition to attaching shares in Vedanta Ltd, the tax department seized dividends due to Cairn from those shareholdings totalling Rs 1,140 crore. The Income Tax Department has also notified Cairn that a tax refund of Rs 1,590 crore due to Cairn as a result of overpayment of capital gains tax on a separate matter in 2011, has been applied as partial payment of the tax assessment of the 2006 transactions," it said. Cairn in March 2015 initiated an international arbitration against the actions of the income tax department, during whose pendency, the attached shares were sold. "Between May and October 2018 the tax department sold off 99 percent of Cairn's equity shareholding in Vedanta Ltd and seized the proceeds of USD 608.8 million. Shares were sold in multiple transactions at prices ranging from Rs 286.83 (USD 4.25) per share down to Rs 229.68 (USD 3.23) per share. The tax department also seized the proceeds of USD 104.3 million on the redemption of the preference shares in October 2018," the statement said. Cairn is currently restricted from selling its remaining shares in Vedanta Ltd. Cairn's principal claims in the arbitration, initiated under the UK-India Bilateral Investment Treaty, are that the assurance of fair and equitable treatment and protection against expropriation afforded by the treaty have been breached by the actions of the tax department, which is seeking to apply retrospective taxes to historical transactions already closely scrutinised and approved by the Indian government. "Cairn's plea is therefore that the effects of the tax assessment should be nullified and that Cairn should receive recompense from India for the loss of value resulting from the 2014 attachment of Cairn's shares in Carin India Ltd and the withholding of the tax refund, which together total approximately USD 1.4 billion," the statement said. All formal hearings and submissions have now been made and the arbitration tribunal is in the process of drafting its award. Cairn said the assessment by the tax department of principal tax due on the 2006 transactions is Rs 10,247 crore plus applicable interest and penalties. Interest is currently being charged on the principal at a rate of 12 percent per annum from February 2017. Penalties are currently assessed as 100 percent of the principal tax due. "The Group has legal advice confirming that the maximum amount that could ultimately be recovered from Cairn by the tax department, in excess of the assets already seized, is limited to the value of Cairn's (India) assets, principally the remaining ordinary shares in Vedanta Ltd," it added. NEW DELHI: Private carrier SpiceJet became the first airline to suspend Boeing 737 Max from its fleet following Directorate General of Civil Aviation's decision to ban the aircraft. The low-cost airlines retweeted it communications head Tushar Srivastava's statement which says, @flyspicejet has suspended Boeing 737 Max operations following DGCA's decision to ground the aircraft. Safety and security of our passengers, crew and operations are of utmost importance to us. The airlines added that it will be working together with the regulatory authority and the manufacturer to attain normalcy in operations and minimise passenger inconvenience. India on Monday joined Britain, France, Germany, China and a growing list of countries in banning Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft from its skies. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) took the decision in the aftermath of Ethiopian Airline plane crash last Sunday which killed all 157 occupants of the plane - including six Indians. "These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations. We continue to consult closely with regulators around the world, airlines, and aircraft manufacturers to ensure passenger safety," the DGCA said in a statement. In October 2018, a Lion Air jet of the same model crashed in Indonesia, killing 189 but no evidence has emerged to link the two incidents. In India, SpiceJet has twelve 737 MAX 8 planes while Jet Airways Ltd has five. In a statement on Tuesday, SpiceJet said, "The Boeing 737 MAX is a highly sophisticated aircraft. It has flown hundreds of thousands of hours globally and some of the world`s largest airlines are flying this. "We are actively engaged with both Boeing and the DGCA and will continue to put safety first, as always. We have implemented all additional precautionary measures as directed by the DGCA on Monday." Boeing also released a statement. Safety is Boeings number one priority and we have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX. We understand that regulatory agencies and customers have made decisions that they believe are most appropriate for their home markets. Well continue to engage with them to ensure they have the information needed to have confidence in operating their fleets. The United States Federal Aviation Administration is not mandating any further action at this time, and based on the information currently available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators, it said. New Delhi: The Delhi Police Crime Branch arrested a fugitive terrorist of banned terror group Khalistan Commando Force. The accused has been identified as Gursewak and is believed to be an aide of Jarnail Singh Bhinderwale, who was killed by the Indian Army in Operation Blue Star in 1984. He was arrested by the police on March 12 at Delhi's ISBT. According to Delhi Police, Gursewak was planning to re-constitute his organization on instructions of Khalistan Commando Force chief Paramjeet Singh Panjwad, who is currently in Pakistan. He was also believed to be in regular touch with Jagtaar Singh Hawara and other militants lodged in different jails in India. Gursewak has been involved in more than 50 sensational cases of terrorist activities, murders of police officials and police informers, robberies at banks and police stations, robberies in Punjab when terrorism was at peak during the 1980s. He has spent over 26 years behind prison in different cases. As per records available, he had absconded two times from police custody in Delhi and Rajasthan. He was also believed to be in regular touch with some Pakistan-based terrorists, police said. Non Bailable Warrant for his arrest were issued by the Patiala House Courts in two cases as he was evading trial in these cases. Presently, the accused was planning to re-constitute his organization on instructions of KCF chief Paramjeet Singh Panjwad, sitting in Pakistan. New Delhi: The government is likely to launch an additional offering of CPSE-Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) on March 19 to raise at least Rs 3,500 crore, officials said Tuesday. The ETF sale through follow-on fund offer (FFO) will come with the option of retaining up to Rs 5,000 crore through green shoe option, they said. "The additional offering of ETF would be on March 19. The base issue size has been fixed at Rs 3,500 crore, with an option to retain additional subscription," the officials said. During the last offering in November, the government mopped up Rs 17,000 crore, the biggest disinvestment transaction through ETF. The proceeds from the ETF sale will help the government move towards meeting the Rs 80,000 crore disinvestment target set for the current fiscal. As on February 28, the government has realised Rs 56,473.32 crore as disinvestment proceeds against the target of Rs 80,000 crore during the current financial year (2018-19). The CPSE (central public sector enterprises) ETF comprises shares of the 11 state-owned companies, including Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, Coal India, Indian Oil Company, Oil India, Power Finance Corporation, Rural Electrification Corporation and Bharat Electronics. NTPC, SJVN, NLC and NBCC are the new entrants in the ETF basket. CPSE ETF was set up in 2014 and the government has so far sold stake in 10 companies in the basket in four tranches, raising Rs 28,500 crore. NTPC carries the highest weight in the index at 19.59 percent, followed by Coal India at 19.17 percent, Indian Oil Corp at 18.98 percent, and ONGC at 18.92 percent. New Delhi: A day after India banned all Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft that are currently being used by airline companies in India, Ministry of Civil Aviation Secretary Pradeep Singh Kharola said that the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) will closely monitor fare movement from tomorrow (Thursday). The move comes after two crashes in less than six months involving planes of this make, the latest being Ethiopian Airline B737 Max 8 aircraft ET-AV crash on March 10, that killed 157 people including 4 Indians. Adressing reporters in New Delhi, he also said that the aviation watchdog will ensure that grounding of aircrafts do not to affect passengers or operations. The Aviation Secretary told reporters that DGCA has isued NOTAM to bar 737 flights in Indian Airspapce. SpiceJet today cancelled 14 flights in 2nd half of the day. It operates more than 500 flights daily and has around 12 such aircraft in its fleet.. Kharola said that DGCA will monitor fares on dail basis and airlines have also agreed to check on predatory pricing following the last moment cancellation of several flights. In the afternoon, Spicejet issued a statement saying, "While a majority of passengers affected as a result of these cancellations have been accommodated by SpiceJet on alternate flights, rest have been offered a full-refund." "SpiceJet has presently announced cancellation of 14 flights for today and will be operating additional flights from tomorrow. Of the 76 planes in our fleet, 64 aircraft are in operations and we are confident of minimizing the inconvenience to our passengers and attain normalcy in our operations," it added. India has joined countries like the UK, France, Germany, Malaysia, China, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and South Africa in banning the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft. In October last year, Lion Air, of the same make, crashed killing over 180 people in Indonesia. FAIZABAD: The litigants in the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid land case on Wednesday appeared before a three-member Supreme Court-appointed panel as it started an attempt to find a solution to contentious issue through talks. A total of 25 litigants met the three-member mediation panel led by former SC judge F M I Kalifulla at Avadh University in Faizabad. The panel, which also includes spiritual guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and senior advocate Sriram Panchu, has been given eight weeks time by the top court to look at the possibilities of resolving the dispute amicably. The panel members arrived in Faizabad on Tuesday and it is likely that they would remain in Faizabad for next three days. The meeting was also attended by Uttar Pradesh Advocate General Raghvendra Singh and Additional Advocate General Madan Mohan Pandey. Talking to PTI, Swami Avimukteshwaranand of the Ram Janmabhoomi Punruddhar Samiti, said the meeting began at 10am and it was held in a 'harmonious' manner. The participants also included Nirmohi Akhara's Mahant Dinendra Das and Triloki Nath Pandey who is representing Ram Lalla Virajman, Mahant Dharam Das appearing for Ram Abhiram Das and Mahant Suresh Das of the Digambar Akhara. Swami Chakrapani and Kamlesh Tiwari attended the meeting as representatives of the Hindu Mahasabha. Litigants Iqbal Ansari, Mohammad Umar and Haji Mahboob also attended the meeting. Maulana Ashhad Rashidi represented Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind at the meeting. The head of the UP Shia Waqf Board, Waseem Rizvi, and representatives from the Sunni Waqf Board also participated in the meeting. Earlier, notices were issued by the Faizabad administration to the 25 litigants on behalf of the panel. Only the participants were allowed to enter the meeting area. Faizabad District Magistrate Anuj Kumar Jha told PTI that strict security arrangements have been made on the university premises to conduct the meeting in a peaceful manner. The three-member mediation panel was appointed by a five-member SC bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi last week. While appointing the panel, the SC bench had said that "utmost confidentiality" should be maintained in the mediation proceedings. Before appointing the panel for mediation, the top court had said that the issue is not about 1,500 square feet of land, but about religious sentiments. "It is not only about property. It is about mind, heart and healing, if possible," the bench had said (with PTI inputs) Ahead of the Lok Sabha election, the Centre on Wednesday informed the Supreme Court that the Central forces deployed in Assam for the process of National Register of Citizens (NRC) will not be withdrawn for election purpose. A bench comprising of Chief Justice (CJI) Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Rohinton F Nariman will hear the matter next on April 10. In 2018, ahead of the release of the second and final draft of NRC on July 30, the Centre had sent over 22,000 central paramilitary troops to step up security in Assam and adjoining States. According to a local media, a total of 220 companies of the CAPF (Central Armed Paramilitary Force) were additionally sent to ensure law and order. Among all the forces the largest contingent is from the CRPF (53 companies), then Sashastra Seema Bal (41), followed by BSF (40), ITBP (27), CISF (20) and lastly by the Railway Protection Force (5). A total of 34 companies of the special auxillary police were also sent. A company of paramilitary comprises 100 personnel. Earlier on February 5, the apex court had slammed the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), saying that it was trying to stop the work related to the NRC. The top court said that the MHA doesn't want the NRC to carry on and hence as it doesn't want to cooperate, every time it comes up with different stories to destroy this process. Coming down heavily on the Centre over the NRC process, the SC had rapped the Home Ministry for its plea seeking to stall the NRC work for two weeks keeping in mind the role of Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) in the election duty. The top court had reiterated that the July 31, 2019, deadline for the completion of NRC exercise, of making the final report, will not be extended. The court had also said that the election and exercise of NRC should not be affected. The first draft of the ongoing NRC process was released on the intervening night of December 31, 2017, and January 1, 2018, wherein the names of 1.9 crore of the 3.29 crore applicants were incorporated. During the publication of first part draft NRC on the expiry of midnight 2017, there were 85 CAPF companies in Assam. The Lok Sabha election will start on April 11 and continue till May 19 in seven phases. The counting of votes will take place on May 23. NEW DELHI: Following Tuesday's order of immediate ban on Boeing 737 Max, the Directorate General of Civil (DGCA) extended the timeline allowing all airlines to ground the aircraft by 4 pm on Wednesday. The timeline was extended keeping in mind situations of international flights and positioning of the aircraft at maintenance facilities. "In continuation to the decision of DGCA to ground the B737 Max operations, further clarification follows. B737Max operations Will stop from/to all Indian airport's. Additionally no B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit Indian airspace effective 1600hrs IST or 1030 UTC. The time line is to cater to situations where aircraft can be positioned at maintenance facilities and international flights can reach their destinations," tweeted the Civil Aviation Ministry. Additionally no B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit Indian airspace effective 1600hrs IST or 1030 UTC. The time line is to cater to situations where aircraft can be positioned at maintenance facilities & international flights can reach their destinations.(2/2) Ministry of Civil Aviation (@MoCA_GoI) March 13, 2019 The Civil Aviation Secretary also called an emergency meeting of all airlines at 4 pm on Wednesday in the national capital. Directed Secy to hold an emergency meeting with all Airlines to prepare a contingency plan to avoid inconvenience to passengers. While passenger safety is a zero tolerance issue, efforts are already on to minimise the impact on passenger movement as their convenience is important, tweeted Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu. Directed Secy to hold an emergency meeting with all Airlines to prepare a contingency plan to avoid inconvenience to passengers. While passenger safety is a zero tolerance issue, efforts are already on to minimise the impact on passenger movement as their convenience is important https://t.co/9ZlJXFzvGY Suresh Prabhu (@sureshpprabhu) March 12, 2019 Following the Ethiopian Airline plane crash last Sunday that claimed 157 lives, the DGCA banned all Boeing 737 Max 8 over the Indian airspace. DGCA has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately. These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations, tweeted the Civil Aviation Ministry. As always, passenger safety remains our top priority. We continue to consult closely with regulators around the world, airlines, and aircraft manufacturers to ensure passenger safety, it added. As always, passenger safety remains our top priority. We continue to consult closely with regulators around the world, airlines, and aircraft manufacturers to ensure passenger safety. (2/2) Ministry of Civil Aviation (@MoCA_GoI) March 12, 2019 India now is a part of the growing list nations which includes China, France, Germany, Malaysia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, UK and South Africa to ban this particular model of Boeing aircraft from its airspace. The sharp worldwide reaction followed after the last week's Ethiopian Airline crash and the Lion Air plane crash in Indonesia in October 2018 which claimed 189 lives. Private carrier SpiceJet, which has twelve Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes, suspended the model from its fleet following DGCA's order on Tuesday. @flyspicejet has suspended Boeing 737 Max operations following DGCA's decision to ground the aircraft. Safety and security of our passengers, crew and operations are of utmost importance to us, retweeted it communications head Tushar Srivastava's statement. The airlines added that it will be working together with the regulatory authority and the manufacturer to attain normalcy in operations and minimise passenger inconvenience. Jet Airways operates five 737 MAX 8 aircraft, although several have been grounded over non-payment of leasing dues, reported Reuters. SRINAGAR: People's Democratic Party (PDP) president Mehbooba Mufti Wednesday said a result-oriented dialogue with all stakeholders is the only way to make peace in Jammu and Kashmir permanent. "The PDP has always been a staunch advocate of political process for the resolution of Kashmir (issue) and has been asking the government of India to hold meaningful dialogue with the Hurriyat, Pakistan and with other stakeholders," Mehbooba said at a party workers' convention in central Kashmir's Bandipora. "A result-oriented dialogue with all stakeholders is the only way to make peace in Jammu and Kashmir permanent," she said. The former chief minister said past decades showed that a muscular approach would not work in the state. "This muscular approach and political patch work will not take us anywhere as this has been tried for many decades and hasn't yielded any positive outcome," Mehbooba said. "It is unfortunate that some people still believe in the efficacy of these methods and are trying to repeat the old mistakes which will be meaningless and will prove counterproductive," she added. Mehbooba said people were well aware of the policies of her party and how it had always preferred to stick to its principles over power. Speaking about Article 35A of the Constitution, she said it could not be challenged in any court of law. "The state of Jammu and Kashmir, as part of the republic (of India), secured its unique position and the same cannot, in any way, be contested in any court of law," the PDP chief said. "Article 35A is a matter of life and death for the people of J&K and no one has the authority to challenge the very identity of people of the state in any court across the world," Mehbooba said. The Supreme Court is hearing a bench of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of Article 35A, which accords special rights and privileges to the citizens of Jammu and Kashmir and bars non-residents from acquiring any immovable property in the state. WASHINGTON: Failure to designate Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist would pose a threat to regional stability and peace, the United States said on Wednesday ahead of the crucial UNSC sanctions' committee meeting to decide the fate of the Mumbai terror attack mastermind. Several reports suggest that the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) 1267 sanctions' committee decision on the JeM chief will be held on March 13. China is likely to block the move of Azhar's designation as a global terrorist. Responding to a question on China's potentially blocking move, US Department of State Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino said, the United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal. Regarding Masood Azhar, the United States and India work closely together on counterterrorism efforts, and that includes at the United Nations. And our views on Jaish-e-Mohammed and its founder are well known. JEM is a United Nations-designated terrorist group. Azhar is the founder and the leader of JEM, and he meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations. JEM has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability and peace, he said adding that the Trump-led administration is working to ensure that the designation list is updated and accurate. The UNSC's 1267 committee is expected to take a call on the French-led proposal, backed by the US and the UK, on the listing of the JeM chief as an international terrorist on Wednesday. The chair of the committee notified that if no objection is raised by member nations against the proposal by 1.30 am Indian Standard Time (3 pm New York Time) on March 13, Azhar will be listed under the 1267 ISIL (Daesh) and Al-Qaida Sanctions List. The hearing comes nearly a month after the ghastly Pulwama terror attack led by JeM terrorists that killed more than 40 CRPF personnel on February 14. India has repeatedly urged the UNSC to put Azhar under the UN terror list. "All members of the UNSC are aware of JeM training camps in Pakistan and the JeM chief's presence in Pakistan. We call upon all members of UNSC to list Azhar as a designated terrorist under 1267 UN Sanctions Committee," Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said. China has once again hinted at blocking the move, stating that "a responsible solution" can only come through discussions. When asked about India's appeal and China's stand on the issue, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang Monday said, "First I would like to say that the UNSC as a main body of the UN has strict standards and rules of procedures. Some reports have knowledge of inside information the UNSC. I don't know that can be counted as an evidence." "China's position on the designation of a terrorist by the 1267 Sanctions Committee is consistent and clear. China adopted a responsible attitude, follows the rules of the procedure of the committee and participated in the discussions in a responsible manner. Only through discussions can we come up with a responsible solution," he said, as reported by PTI. Beijing so far has blocked the move to list Azhar as a UN-designated terrorist three times. Washington: The US has said that Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar meets the criteria to brand him as a "global terrorist" by the UN and China's opposition to the move to "update" the designation list went against the interests of Washington and Beijing in achieving regional stability and peace. State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino's significant remarks came on the eve of a crucial decision by the UN Security Council on listing Azhar as a global terrorist. The Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), headed by 50-year-old Azhar, has carried out many terror strikes in India and was involved in the attack on Parliament, the Pathankot air force base, army camps in Jammu and Uri. It also claimed responsibility for the February 14 Pulwama suicide attack which left 40 CRPF personnel dead. In the aftermath of the Pulwama attack, three permanent members of the UNSC- the US, Britain and France - have moved a resolution to designate Azhar as a global terrorist under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council. All eyes are on China, which has in the past blocked India's bids to get Azhar listed as a UN-designated global terrorist. "Azhar is the founder and the leader of the JeM, and he meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations," Palladino told reporters at his daily news conference. The JeM, he said, has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability and peace. The US and India work closely together on counterterrorism efforts, and that includes at the United Nations, he added, noting that their views on the JeM and its founder are well known. However, he refrained from making a direct comment on the deliberations inside the UN on this issue. "The United Nations Sanctions Committee, their deliberations, are confidential, and as such we don't comment on specific matters, but we'll continue to work with the Sanctions Committee to ensure that the designation list is updated and accurate," Palladino said. "The United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal," he said in response to a question on previous successful attempts by China to block the UN designation of Azhar. China, which is one of the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council, blocked India's efforts in the past to list Azhar as a global terrorist, saying there is not enough evidence against him. Amidst a mounting global outrage in the wake of the Pulwama attack by a suicide bomber belonging to the JeM that led to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan, the US, Britain and France hope that Beijing would act wisely and would not oppose their move this time. At least one person was killed and five others injured after a fire broke out late on Wednesday evening at an oil well of Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The incident which took place at Geratpur in Ahmedabad. At least 10 fire tenders were rushed to the spot. This is a developing story. More details are awaited. BEIJING: Hours before the UN Security Council is to take up a proposal to declare Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammed chief Masood Azhar a global terrorist, China on Wednesday once again hinted that it is highly unlikely that Beijing would support the move, saying only "the solution that is acceptable to all sides" can help in resolving this matter. The fate of the resolution to designate Masood Azhar as a global terrorist by the UNSC will become clear in less than 24 hours after the end of deadline to raise objections to the proposal. France, the UK and the US had moved the proposal to designate Masood Azhar a global terrorist under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UNSC on February 27. "I could reiterate that China will continue to adopt a responsible attitude and participate in the deliberations in the UNSC 1267 Committee," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang was quoted as saying by PTI. It is notable that China is a veto-wielding member of the UNSC and it has earlier used its veto power thrice to block the move by India and other UNSC member nations to designate Azhar. China has been repeatedly saying that the solution to this issue should be acceptable to all. Asked to comment whether the proposal will be discussed on March 13 and Chinese government is in touch with other UNSC member nations on this issue, Lu said, "First I want to clarify that I don't recall saying anything about the deadline about the UNSC committee and other UN subsidiary bodies". Commenting on the issue of listing the JeM chief, Lu said that Beijing always adopts a responsible attitude and take its decision after engaging in consultations with various parties. "The discussions, I want to say must follow the rules and procedures of the relevant bodies and only the solution that is acceptable to all sides is conducive for resolving the issue," he said. It may be recalled that China's Vice Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou had visited Pakistan few days ago and met Prime Minister Imran Khan and Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa and other senior officials of the Pakistan government. Meanwhile, India reiterated on Saturday that all UNSC members know that Masood Azhar and the training camps of JeM are in Pakistan and it is the duty of UNSC to designate him as a global terrorist. The JeM is responsible for carrying out many terror strikes in India and it had also claimed responsibility for the February 14 Pulwama attack, which resulted in the martyrdom of 40 CRPF personnel. (with PTI inputs) NEW DELHI/UNITED NATIONS: In less than 24 hours, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) 1267 sanctions committee will take the crucial call of listing Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist. The French-led proposal, backed by the United States and the United Kingdom, will be passed if no UNSC member nation objects to Azhar's enlistment under the 1267 ISIL (Daesh) and Al-Qaida Sanctions List by 12.30 am Indian Standard Time (3 pm New York Time) on March 13. But it all depends on China. Beijing, which has blocked India's bid to list Azhar as a UN-designated terrorist on three prior occasions, has hinted on following the same route. To understand why the proposal to designate Azhar as an international terrorist is being deemed crucial, we need to understand the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UNSC. 1267 ISIL (Daesh) & Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee The 1267 and Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee was established in 1988. The committee was renamed as 1267 ISIL (Daesh) and Al-Qaida Sanctions committee. The criteria for adding a name or group to the list is to provide evidence of acts or activities indicating that an individual, group, undertaking or entity is associated with ISIL (Da'esh) and Al-Qaida. The Sanctions List currently contains the names of 262 individuals and 83 entities and was last updated on 28 February 2019. Hafiz Saeed, al-Qaeda, JeM, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Boko Haram are some of the names on the list. As per the UNSC, these include: -* Participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing, or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf of, or in support of -* Supplying, selling or transferring arms and related material to -* Recruiting for; or otherwise supporting acts or activities of, ISIL (Da'esh), Al-Qaida or any cell, affiliate, splinter group or derivative thereof. What do the sanctions include? There are three chief sanction measures under the 1267 ISIL (Daesh) and Al-Qaida Sanctions committee: 1. Assets Freeze All states and nations will have to immediately freeze the funds and other financial assets or economic resources of designated individuals and entities. 2. Travel Ban All states and nations are required to prevent the entry into or transit through their territories by designated individuals 3. Arms Embargo All states and nations are required to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale and transfer from their territories or by their nationals outside their territories, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, of arms and related materiel of all types, spare parts, and technical advice, assistance, or training related to military activities, to designated individuals and entities, says the UN. If the Azhar is adopted in the 1267 ISIL (Daesh) and Al-Qaida Sanctions committee list, he becomes a UN-designated global terrorist and the sanctions come in to force with immediate effect. In other words, Pakistan will have to immediately freeze funds and other financial assets of Azhar, prevent his movement to other states and monitor his activities. The proposal to designate Azhar under the global terrorist list was moved by France, UK and US on February 27. It was under the no-objection period for 10 working days, the deadline of which ends at 3 pm Wednesday (12:30 am IST). The UN sanctions committee makes its decisions by consensus of its members. Following February 14 terror attack in Pulwama, India has been involved in hectic diplomatic and political parleys to highlight Pakistan's role in terrorism. NEW DELHI: India slammed Pakistan at the 40th Session of the Human Rights Council for its constant covert support to terrorism and raking up the Kashmir issue and situation of minorities in the country. In the Second Right of Reply, First Secretary at India's Permanent Mission to the United Nations in Geneva Mini Devi Kumam said, "Despite its public commitment in January 2004 not to allow its soil or territory under its control for terrorism against India, Pakistan continues supporting terror attacks against India, the latest being the Pulwama terror attack last month." She reminded Pakistan of its "infamous distinction" of hosting 132 UN-designated terrorists and 22 terrorist entities. Mini Kumam, First Secretary, Permanent Mission of India to UN during 40th Session of UNHRC in Geneva: Confirmation of using UN proscribed terror organization, Jaish-e-Mohammad as instrument of state policy by Pakistani military or political leadership is already in public domain. https://t.co/5wA7WB3Fgw ANI (@ANI) March 12, 2019 The development came ahead of the decision on listing of Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar under UN terror list by United Nation Security Council 1267 committee. The Indian diplomat said, "India has been repeatedly urging Pakistan to take action against Jaish-e-Mohammad and other UN proscribed terror organizations and prevent Jihadis from being trained and armed inside Pakistan." Pakistan based Jaish-e-Mohammad took responsibility for the Pulwama terror attack that killed more than 40 CRPF personnels on 14th February. On the issue of Islamabad raking up situation of minorities at the world body,Kumam while highlighting how "India is a secular State and safeguarding the rights of minorities forms an essential core of our polity", said, minorities in Pakistan face "blasphemy laws, systemic persecution, discrimination, denial of basic rights and freedoms, enforced disappearances and killings." She further added, "Pakistan today stands out as the country having more cases of blasphemy than the rest of the world put together in the past few years." Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has consistently tried to raise the issue of minorities in India in last 3 months while turning a blind eye to situation in his own country. New Delhi also rejected Pakistan's false narratives on Kashmir saying Pakistan "consistently misled the world" regarding its involvement in the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir starting from its "aggression in 1947 and stationing its large troops in the Pakistan occupied territories in violation to the international laws." India and Pakistan will hold a meeting on Thursday to finalise the modalities for setting up of a corridor linking Gurudwara Darbar Sahib in the Pakistani town of Kartarpur with Gurdaspur district in Punjab. The meeting comes amid heightened tension between the two countries following India's air strike on a terrorist training camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and subsequent retaliation by Pakistan. The meeting will be held on the Indian side of the Attari-Wagah border and India is likely to urge for the hassle-free travel of its pilgrims to the shrine, according to news agency PTI. India may also request Pakistan to allow the visit of the Indian pilgrims to the gurdwara without any passport and visa. It might also ask Islamabad to insulate them from any propaganda by Khalistani separatists, PTI reported quoting official sources. In 2018, there were reports that pro-Khalistan banners were shown to a group of Indian pilgrims while they were on their way to two Sikh shrines. In November 2018, India and Pakistan agreed to set up the border crossing linking Gurudwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur - the final resting place of Sikh faith's founder Guru Nanak Dev--to Dera Baba Nanak shrine in India's Gurdaspur district. Kartarpur Sahib is located in Pakistan's Narowal district across the river Ravi, about four km from the Dera Baba Nanak shrine. Sources said the government has identified 50 acres of land for the Kartarpur corridor and it would be developed in two phases. The Indian delegation will comprise of Union Home Ministry, Ministry of External Affairs, Border Security Force (BSF), the Punjab government and the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) representatives. The Deputy High Commissioner to India Syed Haider Shah, who reached Punjab's Amritsar on Wednesday, said it is an initiative of Pakistan. "It is an initiative of Pakistan. We want to open Kartarpur corridor so that Sikh people from here (India) can visit in Pakistan. The meeting will be held tomorrow (Thursday)." Reacting on the no visa for visit Kartarpur corridor move, he said that it will be discussed on Thursday. The Pakistan delegation is scheduled to reach Amritsar on Thursday and only Shah arrived on Wednesday. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on Wednesday expressed disappointment after China blocked a proposal in the UN Security Council to ban Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammad's chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, in a major blow to India. The proposal to list Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UNSC was moved by France, the UK and the US on February 27, days after a suicide bomber of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) killed 40 CRPF personnel in Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir, leading to a heightened tensions between India and Pakistan. In a statement released by the MEA after the move, it asserted that India will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on Indians are brought to justice. "The ISIL (Daesh) and Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee (1267 Sanctions Committee), upon completion of the no-objection period on 13 March 2019, was not able to come to a decision on the proposal for listing Mohammed Masood Azhar Alvi under the UN Sanctions regime, on account of a member placing the proposal on hold," said the MEA statement. "We are disappointed by this outcome. This has prevented action by the international community to designate the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a proscribed and active terrorist organization which has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on 14 February 2019. We will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens are brought to justice," added the statement. The government expressed gratefulness for the efforts of the member states who moved the designation proposal. "We are grateful for the efforts of the Member States who moved the designation proposal and the unprecedented number of all other Security Council members as well as non-members who joined as co-sponsors," added the statement. Minutes before the deadline was about to expire, China put a "technical hold" on the proposal, a diplomat at the United Nations told news agency PTI. The diplomat said China asked for "more time to examine" the proposal. The proposal was the fourth such bid at the UN in the last 10 years to list Azhar as a global terrorist. According to the listing rules of the Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee, if no objection is received by the end of the no-objection period, the decision will be deemed adopted. But retreating its steps, China put a hold on the proposal just as the deadline was about to end. Ministry of Defence on Wednesday filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court in Rafale case, saying the documents submitted by the petitioners in the Rafale review case are sensitive to national security as they are related to war capacity of French-made combat aircraft. "Ministry of Defence in its affidavit before the Supreme Court says the documents attached by the petitioners in the Rafale review case are sensitive to national security which relates to war capacity of combat aircraft," news agency ANI reported. Ministry of Defence in its affidavit before the Supreme Court says the documents attached by the petitioners in the Rafale review case are sensitive to national security which relates to war capacity of combat aircraft. https://t.co/OiPKVuZV5p ANI (@ANI) March 13, 2019 The Defence Ministry added in its affidavit that those involved in the leakage of these papers are guilty of penal offences including theft by unauthorized photocopying and leakage of sensitive official documents affecting National Security. The affidavit also stated that an internal enquiry in this matter was started on February 28. "Those who've conspired in this leakage are guilty of penal offences including theft by unauthorized photocopying&leakage of sensitive official documents affecting National Security. These matters are now subject of an internal enquiry which commenced on Feb 28," the Ministry of Defence said in its affidavit. MoD in its affidavit:Those who've conspired in this leakage are guilty of penal offences including theft by unauthorized photocopying&leakage of sensitive official documents affecting National Security.These matters are now subject of an internal enquiry which commenced on Feb 28 https://t.co/L8kdzCRtp4 ANI (@ANI) March 13, 2019 The Centre also told the top court that unauthorisedly accessed documents were used by the petitioners to present selective and incomplete picture of confidential deliberations on national security. On February 6, the Centre had informed the SC that confidential documents related to Rafale aircraft deal have been stolen from the Defence Ministry. During the hearing, Attorney General K K Venugopal had told the apex court that the petitioners seeking a review of verdict delivered by the SC dismissing all pleas against the purchase of Rafale are relying upon the stolen documents. But Attorney General Venugopal changed his stand after two days and claimed that the Rafale documents were not stolen from the Defence Ministry and what he meant in his submission before the apex court was that "photocopies of the original" papers were used by petitioners in their application. The open court hearing in the case started on Wednesday before a three-judge bench comprising Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justices S K Kaul and K M Joseph. During the hearing, former Union ministers Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie and advocate Prashant Bhushan, who had jointly filed the petition, claimed that important facts were suppressed by the Centre when the SC had dismissed a batch of PILs against the Rafale deal in December last year. NEW DELHI: Union Minister Smriti Irani on Wednesday launched a scathing attack on the Gandhi family and their alleged role in the Bikaner land scam case and Rafale deals. In the past 24 hours, many reports have come proving that the Gandhi-Vadra family has been flourishing Dynastic politics. The new facts which have come to the fore clearly establish a relationship between Rahul Gandhi and arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari, said the Minister of Textiles at a press brief in the national capital. Questioning Gandhi family's link with Dubai-based NRI businessman CC Thampi and Bhandari, Irani says, CC Thampi is a name that figures in probe with regard to not only a petroleum deal under UPA but also financial violation with regard to land transaction in Delhi NCR amounting to Rs 280 cr. A relationship b/w CC Thampi and arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari is publicly known. Sanjay Bhandari, an arms dealer with close links to Robert Vadra is also under investigation for defence deals and his desperate desire to be a party to the ill-gotten fruits of corruption during UPA regime. Hence, the nation has come to a conclusion, that Rahul Gandhi's intervention in the defence preparedness of our country stems from his pursuit not only of individual politics but his personal commercial interests, his personal family interests, she added. In connection with Rafale files, involvement of Sanjay Bhandari has been found in how documents are stolen from Defence Department and info is provided to defence contractors. Relation between Sanjay Bhandari and Robert Vadra were established in relation to benami properties in London, she said. "The Gandhi and Vadra family have exploited this country," she added. With ANI inputs The Supreme Court on Wednesday lambasted the Assam government, stressing that it was non-serious about the issue of deportation of illegal migrants. This has gone too far. This has become a joke, said the apex court. Questioning Solicitor General Tushar Mehta during the hearing, the court asked about the whereabouts of the foreigners, whether the foreigners tribunal was functioning and whether the law and order machinery of Assam government was taking measures to implement the order passed in this regard by the tribunal. The court has asked the Assam government to file a detailed report on the functioning of Assam's foreigners tribunal by May 27. How seriously Assam is considering this matter is quite evident from the absence of any officer to brief you in the matter. An officer sitting here (resident commissioner) files an affidavit on detention centres in Assam, says the bench led by CJI The SC also recalled an order passed on this issue in 2005 and said that Assam government must have studied that order passed in which the top court had said that Assam is facing the threat of external aggression. The apex court asked the Government of India and Assam that what steps have been taken by them to tackle this issue. The SC minced no words in saying that it does not think that no steps had been taken to tackle this problem and ordered Assam government to inform the court about the number of persons declared foreigners by the tribunals, number of persons at the detention centres and number of persons sent back to the country of origin. Meanwhile, the Assam government informed the SC that the Assam's foreigners tribunal had declared over 50,000 migrants as foreigners in the past 10 years and around 900 migrants who had been declared foreigners were being kept in six detention centres. The SC made the observations while hearing a plea filed by activist Harsh Mander through advocate Prashant Bhushan on the plight of foreigners in Assam's detention centres. In his plea, Mander has claimed that the foreigners were kept in detention indefinitely just because they were not Indians. Two Pakistani Air Force jets were detected flying at a supersonic speed near the Line of Control (LoC) in Poonch sector of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), as reported by news agency ANI on Wednesday citing government sources. The defence radars of the Indian Air Force (IAF) on Tuesday night detected the jets around 10 km from the LoC. Loud bangs were heard in the area which was due to the sonic booms. In the wake of the incident, all the Indian air defences and radar systems are on high alert. This comes weeks after the Pakistan Air Force on February 27 had transgressed into the Indian air space in Jammu and Kashmir and tried to target Indian military positions before they were chased away. In the dogfight, one F-16 fighter jet of Pakistan Air Force was shot down by the Indian Air Force, which also lost a MiG-21 Bison plane. Subsequently, there have been a number of instances of Pakistani drones spotted in Rajasthan. Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman was captured on February 27 by the Pakistan Army after his MiG 21 Bison was shot down and he ejected. He landed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir (PoK) across the Line of Control (LoC) where he was manhandled by local villagers. He was later rescued and taken into custody by the Pakistan Army. He was released and returned to India after being in Pakistan's custody for almost 60 hours. On February 26, the IAF targetted the Pakistan-based terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammad's (JeM) biggest training camp in Pakistan's Balakot in a pre-emptive strike. Tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after 40 CRPF personnel were killed in a suicide terror attack by JeM on February 14. Thirteen days after the cowardly attack, IAF's Mirage-2000 fighter jets bombed JeM's camp at Balakot. The Markaz Syed Ahmed Saheed training Camp in Balakot was headed by Mohammad Salim alias Ustad Ghauri, the brother-in-law of JeM chief Maulana Masood Azhar. The terror camp was hit hard at between 3.45 am and 3.53 am by IAF's Mirage 2000 fighter jets in an operation which lasted around 21 minutes. The pre-dawn airstrikes by IAF destroyed at least three Jaish control rooms in Balakot. Intelligence agency sources claimed that at least 42 trained suicide bombers, who were living in the Jaish's camp in Balakot, were completely destroyed during the IAF strike. As per sources, most of these suicide bombers were waiting at the launch pad to enter India and wreak havoc. Union Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal on Wednesday slammed Congress leader Navjot Singh Sidhu calling him a Pakistan agent and cited it the reason that he speaks about Pakistan. Taking a jibe at Sidhu for claiming that his cordiality with Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has worked for the construction of Kartarpur corridor, Badal said that it was the Cabinet who gave approval for the building and development of the corridor. On November 22, the Cabinet had approved the building and development of the corridor from Gurdaspur district's Dera Baba Nanak to the International Border (IB) with Pakistan to facilitate pilgrims from India to visit Gurdwara Darbar Sahib at Kartarpur in Narowal District of Punjab, Pakistan. "You got it done from there but who got it done from our govt, who passed it in the cabinet? He can say what he wants, he is Pakistan agent, he obviously has to speak about Pakistan," said Badal. Reacting to the comment, Sidhu's wife Navjot Kaur Sidhu retorted that "people should be ashamed of talking like that". "We Sikhs believe it was the wish of Guru Nanak Ji and prayers of Sikhs that this corridor opened. We've earlier also said that we don't want to take credit for it. These people should be ashamed of talking like that," said Navjot Kaur Sidhu. The BJP leader also took a dig at former prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi of hurting the Sikhs. She alleged that it was because of Jawaharlal Nehru's decision that Punjab was divided, adding that the border could have been 2 km more. After the 1947 partition, Punjab was divided into two parts, while one part came to India, another part went to Pakistan. She further alleged that to suppress the Sikhs and to demoralise them, Indira Gandhi attacked the Golden temple. "If Punjab was divided, it was Jawaharlal Nehru's decision, that border could easily have been 2 km more. To suppress the Sikhs and to demoralize them, after Jawaharlal Nehru broke Punjab, Indira Gandhi came and attacked the Golden temple." The union minister appealed and urged the Sikhs to support Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP government as people are getting justice in the 1984 riot case and the Kartarpur Sahab corridor has also been given a green signal. She added that the Congress and the Gandhi family will derail these issues on some pretext. "I appeal to Sikhs, finally we're getting justice for 1984. Finally, we're getting Kartarpur Sahab corridor, if you don't stand by PM and this govt, I can assure that Congress and Gandhi family will derail this on some pretext of talks and terror," said Badal. New Delhi: A number of Hurriyat Conference leaders arrested in a terror funding case accused the NIA on Wednesday of delaying the case, which also involves Lashkar-e-Taiba chief and 26/11 Mumbai attacks mastermind Hafiz Saeed. The NIA had accused Saeed and others, including Hizbul Mujahideen head Syed Salahuddin, of "conspiring to wage war against the government" and fomenting trouble in the Kashmir Valley. Some of the accused arrested in the case, including Farooq Ahmad Dar alias Bitta Karate, Mohammad Akbar Khanday and Raja Mehrajuddin Kalwal, besides hardline pro-Pakistan separatist Syed Ali Shah Geelani's son-in-law Altaf Shah alias Altaf Fantoosh, told the court that their bail applications are pending for a long time and the probe agency was seeking repeated adjournments. The submissions were made after the NIA sought adjournment on their bail matter on the ground that its Special Public Prosecutor was not available today. Meanwhile, Naval Kishore Kapoor, an UAE-based businessman arrested in the case, requested through advocate Shariq Reyaz that his bail application be heard separately since allegations against him were different than the other accused persons. The court had earlier allowed the Enforcement Directorate to quiz Kapoor after Special Public Prosecutor Nitesh Rana, who is representing the agency pro bono (without charging), told the court that his interrogation was required to unearth the money laundering and the money trail. During the hearing on Wednesday, Advocate Rajat Kumar, appearing for Dar and other jailed accused, blamed the NIA for delaying the matter. "I am pressing for the bail for my clients. Case is being delayed for some time now, only on the ground that Zahoor Watali's (co-accused) bail is pending with the Supreme Court. My case is entirely different. "The case is going on for last two years. Kindly give me an early date of hearing. For last several dates only adjournment is being sought continuously," he told the court. The court has now posted the matter for further hearing on April 6. The NIA had earlier filed a charge sheet against the accused persons, also including Hizbul Mujahideen head Syed Salahuddin, in the case accusing them of "conspiring to wage war against the government" and fomenting trouble in the Kashmir Valley. The 12,794-page charge sheet and annexure, also alleged that officials of the Pakistan High Commission here were passing on money through businessman Zahoor Watali, who has been arrested, to separatists. The separatist leaders have been accused of taking a cut before handing over the money to foment trouble. Saeed has been accused of using the services of Watali for passing on the money to separatists and some individuals who were actively indulging in stone-pelting in various areas of the Valley, the NIA said in the charge sheet. The agency has charged Pakistan-based terrorists Saeed and Salahuddin, besides 10 others with criminal conspiracy, sedition, and under stringent provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. All the 10 arrested accused are currently in judicial custody. The agency has charged the Hurriyat leaders with acting under the overall guidance of and instructions from Saeed and Salahuddin, and their "Pakistani handlers". They have been accused of plotting strategies to launch violent protests. Saeed, Salahuddin and their Pakistani handlers informed people about the agenda of violence through "protest calendars", the NIA said. These calendars were released through newspapers, social media and religious leaders, it said. These acts were aimed at creating an atmosphere of terror and fear in Jammu and Kashmir, the NIA alleged in the charge sheet. New Delhi: In a tragic incident, a 25-year-old man was shot dead in broad daylight by terrorists outside his house at Pingleena village in south Kashmir's Pulwama. The deceased has been identified as Ashiq Ahmed Naik. As per reports, two bike-borne masked terrorists shot Nayak on his head outside his residence and fled from the scene. He was immediately rushed to a nearby hospital by the locals where he was declared brought dead by the doctors. Following the incident, a joint team of Army and SOG launched a cordon and search operation in the area to nab the assailants. According to preliminary information, the terrorists are believed to from Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad outfit. However, an official confirmation on the same remains awaited. According to police, Naik was a former Special Police Officer. He had joined the Army's Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry (JAKLI) but had left it midway after failing to cope up with the excessive training. Naik was enrolled in the Territorial Army on January 15, 2018 and went to Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry on March 21, according to Army sources. In September 2018, he applied for a three-day leave after which he did not return to the infantry, said Army sources. Following this, he was declared a deserter by the Army on September 17, 2018. Army informed that he was technically a civilian after being declared a deserter. New Delhi: Karnataka BJP president BS Yeddyurappa on Wednesday said that the first list of candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections is most likely to be finalised by the party on March 16. The veteran BJP leader said that Karnataka BJP Core Committee would meet on March 15-16 after which he would travel to Delhi with state leaders and the first list of about 20-22 seats out of 28 will be cleared. The BJP presently has 16 seats whereas Congress and JD(S) have 10 and 2. Yeddyurappa also said that almost all 16 sitting BJP MPs are likely to get the ticket. Calling the Congress-JD(S) rule in the state a 'Tughlaq Darbar', he said that it lacks understanding with each other and it would benefit BJP in the elections. He also pointed at the infighting between the coalition parties and said that people were done up with this government. "Other than transfer racket and corruption, nothing is happening. It is like a Tughlaq Darbar is going on...There is no understanding between coalition parties and their leaders. ...Kumaraswamy is a Chief Minister limited to four or five districts and not for the state," PTI quoted him saying. He expressed his hopes on the party winning at least 22 out of 28 seats in the state. "I have this confidence and we are all working unitedly in that direction," Yeddyurappa said. To a question about BJP attempting to come to power in the state once again after the Lok Sabha results, he said, "Right now, our aim is to win more than 22 seats in the Lok Sabha polls. More than 20 Congress MLAs are opposing Kumaraswamy and they are not ready to accept him as the Chief Minister. Let's wait until the polls results are out, after that I will come back to you," he added. (With PTI inputs) BANGALORE: Senior BJP leader and Lingayat community strongman BS Yeddyurappa has claimed that his party will form the government in the southern state of Karnataka ''within next 24 hours'' if it manages to win at least 22 seats in the upcoming Lok Sabha election 2019. The former Karnataka chief minister also urged the voters to vote for BJP if they wanted their state to usher in a new era of development. If the people of Karnataka give us 22 seats in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, we will form the government in Karnataka within 24 hours, BS Yeddyurappa was quoted as saying by news agency ANI. BS Yeddyurappa, BJP: If the people of Karnataka give us 22 seats in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, we will form the government in Karnataka within 24 hours. (10.03.2019) pic.twitter.com/xkWUAWaMAc ANI (@ANI) March 13, 2019 BSY, as Yeddyurappa is popularly known, made these remarks while addressing a rally at Yaragatti village on Tuesday. His controversial remarks came just two days after the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced the schedule for the Lok Sabha election 2019. BSY, who is the leader of the opposition in the Karnataka Assembly, also exuded confidence that his party will win most of the seats in Karnataka. All this comes several weeks after the southern state witnessed an intense political drama which appeared to pose a threat to the stability of the JDS-Congress coalition government here. It all began after two Independent legislators withdrew support from the ruling Congress-JDS alliance triggering accusations and counter-accusations of poaching of their MLAs in what came to known as 'Operation Lotus'. As per the announcement by the ECI, Lok Sabha Election 2019 will be held in seven phases beginning from April 11 till May 19, followed by counting of votes on May 23. The polling will be held on April 11, April 18, April 23, April 29, May 6, May 12 and May 19 for 543 Lok Sabha seats across the country in which nearly 90 crore voters would be eligible to vote, Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora said on Sunday. Assembly elections will also be held in Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and Odisha simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls, the CEC said. However, elections for Jammu and Kashmir assembly have been deferred, the EC said citing security reasons. The state has been under President's Rule after the ruling alliance between the BJP and Peoples Democratic Party fell apart last year. New Delhi: Congress president Rahul Gandhi, who on Wednesday interacted with students of Stella Maris College in Chennai, sparked a controversy when he accused former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's policies for the current situation in Jammu and Kashmir. "When Congress came to power in 2004, Jammu and Kashmir was on fire. The Vajpayee's policies had set fire to Kashmir. We decided to tackle the situation strategically. We isolated Pakistan and we were successful in putting pressure on them. We engaged people of Jammu and Kashmir," he said. The Gandhi scion claimed that terror attacks had come down drastically during the tenure of Congress in 2011-13. "The UPA government built a bridge to the people there and it was done between 2004 and 2014. There was no terrorism from 2011-13," he stated. Rahul also blamed the Centre for not strategically and systematically handling the terrorism issue in the state. "As soon as Narendra Modi assumed power in 2014, he made a huge mistake of forging an alliance with PDP in Jammu and Kashmir for the sake of power. And today, his policies are allowing Pakistan to carry out terrorist acts in India. Rahul underscored the need to engage the people of Kashmir and bring them on our side. "The Prime Minister's policies pushes the people away so you cannot fight terrorism with one-off gestures," he said while interacting with the students. "Pakistan is going to use every opportunity to carry out terrorism in India. It's out duty and Indian government's duty to save the lives and they are not doing it strategically," he said. Rahul also questioned that government that why the Pulwama terror attack wasn't stopped in the first place. On February 14, at least 40 CRPF troopers lost their lives and several were left injured in a terror attack, carried out by Jaish-e-Mohammad suicide bomber in Pulwama. He further claimed that Congress pursued a policy of systematic and strategic approach in Jammu and Kashmir and said that the Modi-government at Centre did not follow a similar policy. "The Congress followed a multi-pronged approach when it came to power in 2004 and toed both systematic and strategic lines and it was successful," he said adding it led to diplomatic isolation of Pakistan. GUWAHATI: Having stolen a march on its rivals whose proposed 'Mahagathbandhan' remains amorphous, the BJP said Wednesday it has "sealed" electoral alliances with a bevy of parties in the north-east where it resurrected its ties with the AGP in Assam after an estrangement of two months. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav, the party's pointsman for the north-east, held a string of meetings with regional satraps here and in Nagaland's Dimapur that went on well past Tuesday midnight before making the announcement on social media platforms. The number of seats that the BJP and its partners will contest in the eight states of the region will be declared on March 16 in New Delhi, Himanta Biswa Sarma, Assam minister and convenor of the North East Democratic Alliance (NEDA), the regional avatar of the NDA, told reporters. "This alliance has the potential of winning not less than 22 out of 25 seats in the region and play an important role in seeing Modi-ji as the PM once again," Madhav posted on Facebook. Madhav met Nagaland Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio, his Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh counterparts Sarbananda Sonowal, Conrad Sangma, N Biren Singh and Pema Khandu, besides Sarma, the BJP's frontline strategist in the north-east. "It was a hectic day of parleys yesterday in the North East. Sustained negotiations at Dimapur and Guwahati with different senior leaders. Have finally sealed the alliance and electoral understanding between the BJP and all major parties in the North East," he wrote in his Facebook post. "The BJP, NPP, NDPP, AGP and BPF will fight together in Assam, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh with the mission of defeating Congress party at the hustings. In Tripura, the BJP will fight the elections together with IPFT, our alliance partner," Madhav said. The BJP, which had won just seven of the 25 Lok Sabha seats in the eight states in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, is in the ruling coalition in seven of them now. The saffron has its chief ministers in Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Tripura, while its NEDA partners are in power in Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland. Pawan Chamling's SDF, however, continues to rule the roost in Sikkim where it is in power for the last five terms since 1994. Madhav's negotiating skills were at play when he persuaded the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), which had walked out of the NEDA remonstrating against the Citizenship (amendment) Bill brought by the Centre just two months ago, to return to the grouping amid whimpers of protest within the regional party. "After discussion, BJP and AGP have decided to work together in the coming Parliament election in Assam to defeat Congress," Madhav tweeted early on Wednesday. "Announced it at Guwahati in d presence of Himanta Biswa Sarma of BJP and Atul Bora and Keshav Mahanta of AGP," he wrote, adding that the Bodoland People's Front (BPF) will be the third partner in the alliance. The AGP had three ministers in the BJP-led Assam government-- Atul Bora, Keshab Mahanta and Phani Bhusan Choudhury. Their resignation letters had not been accepted even after the AGP severed its ties with NEDA. On Wednesday afternoon, Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal invited them to take charge of their ministries which they promptly did. The AGP was bitterly critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the citizenship bill that sought to grant Indian citizenship to various non-Muslim minorities from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, who fled religious persecution in their countries, after six years of residence in India even if they did not possess any documentary proof. The AGP called it a "communal" piece of legislation aimed at settling Bangladeshi Hindus in Assam which, it claimed, was detrimental to the interests of the indigenous people. The BJP-AGP-BPF alliance had defeated the Congress in the 2016 assembly polls, bringing to an end its unbroken stint of 15 years in power. Madhav said the Sikkim Krantikari Morcha, the main opposition party in Sikkim, will be its coalition partner in the state. "While the Opposition is still talking and talking about 'Mahagatbandhan' (grand alliance), we already have ours in place in the North East and the rest of the country. The NDA is a much stronger coalition today than before," Madhav's Facebook post said. In a significant political development, the Congress and the JD(S) on Wednesday reached a seat-sharing pact for the Lok Sabha elections in Karnataka. As per the agreement, Congress has decided to give eight out of the 28 Lok Sabha seats in the state to JD(S). HD Deve Gowda's party will contest from Uttara Kannada, Chikkamagaluru, Shimoga, Tumkur, Hassan, Mandya, Bengaluru North, and Vijayapura constituencies. It seems that JD(S) has managed to get some seats of its choice as the seats which fell into the regional party's kitty include Shimoga, Tumkur, Hasan, Mandya and Bengaluru North. Congress will field its candidates from Chikkodi, Belagavi, Balakot, Kalaburagi, Raichur, Bidar, Koppal, Bellary, Haveri, Dharwad, Devanagere, Dakshina Kannada, Chitradurga, Mysuru, Chamarajanagar, Bangalore Rural, Bangalore Central, Bangalore South, Chikkaballapur and Kolar. Congress President Rahul Gandhi met JD(S) General Secretary Danish Ali at Cochin, Kerala on Wednesday to finalize the Lok Sabha constituencies of Karnataka. Few days ago, JD(S) patriarch HD Deve Gowda had said that the two parties were yet to reach an agreement over seat-sharing and Congress President Rahul Gandhi will take a call on this matter by March 15. The Congress agreed to give Tumkur, which it had won in 2014, to JD(S) but the grand old party did not give any other seats that it had won last time. The party also kept Mysuru seat with itself. It is to be noted that Mysuru is the home district of former chief minister Siddaramaiah. Sources said that the JD(S) had initially demanded 12 seats from the Congress but later eve Gowda had said that the party was not focused only on the number of seats. He had said that the JD(S) would be happy to settle for 10 seats too. On the other hand, the Congress was unwilling to give more than six seats to the JD(S) but the party agreed to eight after Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy's meeting with Rahul Gandhi. Though the Congress-JD(S) alliance is in power in Karnataka, the two parties share a rather uneasy relationship. Sources said that JD(S) is planning to field Deve Gowda's grandsons - Prajwal and Nikhil - from Hassan and Mandya. Some senior JD(S) leaders are against this idea and it remains to be seen whether Deve Gowda will give in to family pressure or take steps to keep his partymen happy. In 2014 Lok Sabha election, the BJP had won 17 seats, while the Congress and JD(S) had finished with 9 and 2 seats respectively. The BJP had polled 43% of votes, while the combined vote share of the Congress and the JD(S) was around 52%. New Delhi: There are over 9,000 service voters in Delhi, according to the national capital's electoral roll published this January. The electoral roll is being continuously updated ahead of the Lok Sabha polls scheduled on May 12 in Delhi, officials said. There are 9,023 service voters in Delhi as per the electoral roll published on January 18, according to the data shared by the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Delhi. Personnel of the armed forces, central armed police forces and state police personnel deployed outside their constituencies are considered as service voters. Diplomats and other support staff serving in embassies are also service voters. The Election Commission had said in February that there was a substantial increase in the number of service voters in the country enrolled ahead of the Lok Sabha elections as compared to 2014. A total of 16,62,993 service personnel have been enrolled as service electors in the country in the electoral roll 2019, it had said. In 2014, the corresponding figure was 13,27,627. Delhi CEO Ranbir Singh had said on Monday that around two lakh people have been added to the electoral roll in Delhi in the last two months, taking the total number of eligible voters till date to 1.39 crore. "On January 18, the total number of voters in the electoral roll of Delhi stood at 1,36,95,291. So, there is an increase of nearly two lakh voters since then," Singh said. He, however, said nearly 90,000 voter applications are currently being processed and asked first-time voters to apply as soon as possible to get their names enrolled in the electoral list. The number of first-time voters, aged 18-19, in the electoral roll stands at 1,58,314, he told reporters here. Singh also said authorities will keep a strict vigil on social media platforms to check the spread of fake news and hate speech to ensure free and fair polls, and asserted that "appropriate action" will be taken against violators. NEW DELHI: West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee may campaign against Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his Lok Sabha constituency Varanasi in the run-up to the crucial 2019 polls. The Trinamool Congress chief, who has expressed confidence of her party winning all 42 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal, had dropped hint on Tuesday that she may visit Varanasi and campaign against PM Modi. Full Coverage: Lok Sabha Election 2019 I might even go to Varanasi if Akhilesh Yadav (Samajwadi Party chief) and Mayawati (Bahujan Samaj Party president) call me. They have my moral support, the West Bengal Chief Minister said. Seen as a major figure of the anti-BJP front, Mamata Banerjee recently brought leaders of 23 opposition parties on one platform during her January 19 rally in Kolkata. The next meeting of the Mahagathbandhan (grand opposition) is on March 15 which Banerjee will miss due to prior commitments in Kolkata. Mamata had been extremely vocal about the Narendra Modi government and its functioning and vowed to defeat the BJP-led NDA alliance in the Lok Sabha polls. Attacking PM Modi, the firebrand TMC chief said, "This is a challenging election for PM Modi and we are seeing a number of strikes - and I mean political strikes, don't misquote me - like demonetisation. I had opposed demonetisation from the beginning; people have suffered a lot because of it." Mamata 'Didi' also warned that the upcoming Lok Sabha polls will sound the "death knell" for the BJP and bring an end to Narendra Modi's "reign of fear". The Trinamool Congress supremo said the electoral battle will be between a "united India and some isolated people" as she mounted a scalding assault on the BJP and the PM. "The 2019 Lok Sabha polls will sound the death knell for the BJP and give people freedom from the reign of fear of Narendra Modi. It will be a fight between a united India and some isolated people," she said in a press conference after releasing the first list of TMC candidates for all the 42 Lok Sabha seats in the state. Mamata Banerjee reiterated her Modi hatao desh bachao slogan. Making the announcement, Mamata Banerjee said, "Moon Moon Sen will be our candidate from Asansol, Satabdi Roy from Birbhum." Mamata also announced that her party would be contesting from Odisha, Assam, Jharkhand, and Andaman and Bihar seats. Polling for the Lok Sabha elections will be held in seven phases starting April 11 and will conclude on May 19. The counting of votes will be on May 23. West Bengal will have polling in all seven phases, beginning April 11 and concluding on May 19. Congress President Rahul Gandhi kickstarted the partys campaign in Tamil Nadu by addressing a string of events spread across Chennai and Nagercoil in the Kanyakumari constituency. The Gandhi scions first engagement was at Chennais Stella Maris college where he addressed around 3000 students, of whom many were first time voters. Later he also addressed the media at a star hotel in the city, after which he left for Nagercoil in South TamilNadu to address a UPA public meeting. Nagercoil falls under the Kanyakumari parliamentary constituency, which has been a stronghold of the national parties BJP and Congress. The incumbent Member of Parliament from Kanyalumari is Pon. Radhakrishnan of the BJP who is serving as a Union Minister of State for Finance and Shipping. This is also the lone parliamentary constituency held by the BJP in the state of Tamil Nadu. In the upcoming polls too, a close contest is expected between him and the candidate who would be fielded by the Congress. The Congress is part of the DMK-led alliance in Tamil Nadu and has been allotted 10 of the 40 seats spread across Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. The alliance also consists of smaller parties from the state such as the IUML, CPI, VCK, MDMK, CPI(M), IJK and KMDK. The DMK looks to make significant gains in the Lok Sabha polls as they drew a blank in 2014. The party also pins its hopes on the anti-incumbency wave against the AIADMK which won both the 2011 and 2016 state elections, while also sweeping the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, with 37 seats. Speaking at the press conference and public meeting the Congress President made several references about the current Governments decisions and how his party would make changes to them once elected to power. He also took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for not having addressed a press conference during his tenure. Rahul also went on an offensive regarding the Rafale deal and alleged that the Prime Minster and Anil Ambani have stolen 30,000 crores from the Indian Air force and that they would be convicted. In his address Rahul mainly focussed on the state of the economy, unemployment, agrarian distress. The plans he envisioned ranged from simplifying the current Goods and Services Tax, decentralizing power and governance, minimum basic income guarantee to also reserving 33% of jobs for women. Tamil Nadu specific issues such as solving the Cauvery dispute, capture of fishermen by Sri Lankan Navy, release of Rajiv Gandhi assassination case convicts and the NEET exam also were highlighted. At the public meeting in Nagercoil, DMK President M K Stalin reiterated that Rahul Gandhi would be elected Prime Minister, while Rahul was quick to return the favor and address Stalin as the future Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. It was at a similar political event in December last year, during the unveiling of the Karunanidhi statue in Chennai that Stalin had proposed Rahul Gandhi as Prime Ministerial candidate. However, at the press conference earlier in the day, Rahul Gandhi himself said it is arrogant for us to make a statement on who will be the Prime Minister. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi amidst reports that he might contest the Lok Sabha poll from West Bengal. The TMC supremo said that she will ban the PM like demonetisation. Mocking the PM, she added he can contest in all the 42 Lok Sabha seats in the state if he isn't confident and the ruling party isn't scared of him. "Notebandi ki tarah bandh kar denge (Will ban him like demonetisation). We are not scared, let him contest in all 42 seats if he is not confident," said Banerjee. The chief minister added that though she respects PM Modi she will not vote for him. "I respect him as a PM but I received a message that I must vote for him. I dont like him. Ill not vote for him," said the CM. Taking a jibe at the BJP, Banerjee called the party uncultured. "The MP who called Moon Moon Sen sensational shows how uncultured the party is. She is the daughter of Suchitra Sen. First the MP has to learn to speak a better language," added the chief minister. She also urged the Election Commission (EC) to investigate those who are carrying cash in helicopters and chartered flights. The CM accused the BJP of running fake news handles and spreading fake news. She added that instead of combatting fake news they are appointing media observers. Banerjee alleged that the saffron party is trying to control the media at the national level. "EC must investigate who are carrying cash in helicopters and chartered flights. BJP running fake news handles and spreading fake news. Instead of combatting fake news they are appointing media observers," added Banerjee. Speaking on Union Minister Ravishankar Prasad, she called him an expiry minister. "Who is he? He is expiry minister. Ask him Asthana kiska officer hai (Ask him whose officer is Asthana)? The RBI governor also resigned. This is an undeclared super emergency," said the CM. Rakesh Asthana is the former CBI special director. She added that she has written a letter to PM Modi seeking salaries of the BSNL employees. "I have written a letter to PM seeking salaries of BSNL employees," said Banerjee. NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has written yet another blog in which he had appealed to the voters of India to participate in large numbers in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections 2019 for the sake of a strong and robust democracy. In his blog, the PM reminded the voters, especially the young ones, that elections are round-the-corner and all those who are eligible to vote must exercise this power to elect a stable and strong government. In his blog titled ''Four requests for a stronger democracy'', the Prime Minister requested the top opposition leaders to urge people to come out in large numbers during polling in their respective areas. ''A high turnout augurs well for our democratic fabric,'' the PM said in a tweet. ''I appeal to @RahulGandhi, @MamataOfficial, @PawarSpeaks, @Mayawati, @yadavakhilesh, @yadavtejashwi and @mkstalin to encourage increased voter participation in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. A high turnout augurs well for our democratic fabric,'' the PM said in his tweet. I appeal to @RahulGandhi, @MamataOfficial, @PawarSpeaks, @Mayawati, @yadavakhilesh, @yadavtejashwi and @mkstalin to encourage increased voter participation in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. A high turnout augurs well for our democratic fabric. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 13, 2019 I call upon KCR Garu, @Naveen_Odisha, @hd_kumaraswamy, @ncbn and @ysjagan to work towards bringing maximum Indians to the polling booths in the upcoming elections. May voter awareness efforts be strengthened across the length and breadth of India. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 13, 2019 The PM began his blog by making four genuine requests to the voters and asked them to first get themselves registered for polling, check all facts before the polling in their area, plan their schedule carefully so that they don't fail to cast their vote and encourage others to vote. Four requests for a stronger democracy. An appeal to the voters of India, especially my young friends. https://t.co/sGsfK0p5lQ Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 13, 2019 PM began his blog by calling ''voting'' as one of every citizen's ''prime duties.'' The PM recalled that in the last few elections, various states and at the Centre, had witnessed record a turnout. Urging the voters to continue this encouraging trend, the PM requested them to vote in record numbers in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. ''I particularly call upon influencers from all fields, including politics, industry, sports, films and other walks of life to take the lead in spreading voter awareness and value of high voting,'' the PM said in his blog. In a blog written on the occasion of 89th anniversary of Dandi March on Tuesday, the PM had targeted the Congress and said the "anti-thesis" of the Gandhian thought is the main opposition party's culture. Citing Mahatma Gandhi, the Prime Minister said, "Mahatma Gandhi taught us to think of the plight of the poorest person" and "we have seen and thought about how our work impacts that person." "I am proud to say that in all aspects of our government's work, the guiding consideration is to see how it will alleviate poverty and bring prosperity. Sadly, the anti-thesis of Gandhian thought is the Congress culture," PM Modi said. The Prime Minister said that while Mahatma Gandhi did not believe in inequality and caste divisions, "the Congress sadly never hesitated from dividing society." "The worst caste riots and anti-Dalit massacres happened under Congress rule," he alleged in the blog post. Congress general secretary for Eastern Uttar Pradesh Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Wednesday met Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad at a hospital in Meerut, a day after the popular Dalit leader was arrested by the Uttar Pradesh Police for alleged violation of the model code of conduct. Priyanka Gandhi was accompanied by Uttar Pradesh Congress Chief Raj Babbar and Congress general secretary for Western Uttar Pradesh Jyotiraditya Scindia. Chandrashekhar Azad was taken in custody while he was leading a procession that included cars and motorcycles on Tuesday. The police said that Azad violated the model code of conduct by using more than the stipulated number of motorcycles. Hours after his detention, Azad fell ill and was admitted to Anand Hospital in Meerut. Police said that Azad and some of his supporters were taken into custody when they were planning to take out a procession to Muzaffarnagar on motorcycles and other vehicles. Talking to media after meeting Azad, Priyanka said that the media must not give any political connotation to the meeting. "He is a young man who is struggling & raising his voice, but this govt is trying to suppress his voice. I am here because I like the energy & the way he raises voice for youth," Priyanka told ANI. Priyanka lashed out the BJP government, saying it has become so arrogant that it wants to crush a young man. The Congress leader said that her visit was not aimed at inducting Azad into the Congress. She added that Congress likes his enthusiasm and his willingness to raise voice on important issues. Sources, however, claimed that by meeting Azad, Priyanka is trying to woo Dalit voters in Uttar Pradesh and make Azad a challenger against BSP, which had decided to keep Congress out of the SP-BSP alliance in Uttar Pradesh. On Sunday, Azad had flagged off the Hunkar rally, which was supposed to end on March 15 at Jantar Mantar in Delhi. Azad, meanwhile, has announced that he will ensure that Prime Minister Narendra Modi faces defeat from Varanasi and will not hesitate from entering the fray himself if the SP-BSP alliance fails to field a strong candidate. Chandigarh: Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) president Sukhbir Singh Badal on Wednesday claimed that voters in Punjab were keen to "teach" Congress a "lesson" in the upcoming general election for "betraying" every section of the society. Speaking here following the working committee meeting of the party, Badal said that he had visited 85 assembly segments of the state last month and found that people had made up their mind to "teach a lesson" to the Congress. "The Lok Sabha elections will witness the SAD sweeping the state and will pave the way for the assembly election victory in 2022," Badal said, adding that the Akali Dal would observe March 16 as 'Vishvasghat divas' (betrayal day). The working committee also discussed the party's strategy and poll campaign as well as authorised Badal to nominate candidates for the Lok Sabha polls. The SAD chief hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi for forming a Special Investigation Team (SIT) for reexamining the anti-Sikh riot cases. He also thanked Modi for taking "special interest" to establish the Kartarpur Corridor to facilitate Sikh pilgrims. Senior party leader Balwinder Singh Bhundur spoke on the alleged politicisation of the probe into the Kotkapura and Behbal kalan police firing incidents by the Congress government. He accused SIT member Inspector General of Police Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh of acting at the behest of Congress leaders against their political opponents. The SAD's working committee also condemned the Pulwama terror terrorist attack and appreciated the "decisiveness" shown by Modi in ordering an air strike on the Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist camp in Balakot in Pakistan. The resolution which was passed by the committee, hailed the PM for successfully isolating Pakistan internationally. The committee also condemned Congress politicians including Kapil Sibal, Randeep Surjewala, Shashi Tharoor, Navjot Sidhu and rebel AAP leader Sukhpal Khaira for allegedly questioning the armed forces. Another resolution was passed by the committee, thanking Modi for giving "unprecedented priority" to the celebrations of the 550th?birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev by deciding to give the status of Heritage City to Sultanpur Lodhi, besides recreating "Pind Baba Nanak Da" and holding international seminars. Mumbai: In a dig at NCP chief Sharad Pawar over the entry of Maharashtra Congress leader Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil's son Sujay into BJP fold, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray Wednesday said he believes in fulfilling demands of sons of others, and do not use them for "cleaning utensils". In a major embarrassment to the Congress, Opposition leader Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil's son Sujay joined the BJP Tuesday, as he couldn't get a ticket to contest his maiden Lok Sabha poll from home turf of Ahmednagar. Sujay called on Thackeray at his residence here on Wednesday to seek Sena's support for his candidature. Ahmednagar falls in the kitty of the Congress' alliance partner, NCP, which was not ready to vacate the seat for Sujay. "Like my own son, I also care for children of others. It is not Shiv Sena's style to use children of others to wash utensils. Sena is for the common man," Thackeray said. On Tuesday, Pawar justified not leaving Ahmednagar seat for Sujay to contest. "Sujay Vikhe Patil goes from one party to another and insisted on a specific seat to fight elections. Fulfilling his immature desires is not the responsibility of other parties. One should himself fulfil his son's desires, I will fulfill my child's. Why should I fulfil another's desires?" Pawar had said while taking a swipe at Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil. Thackeray said Sena has almost finalised a list of the party candidates, which will be released in the next two days. As per the seat-sharing deal between the BJP and the Sena, the Uddhav Thackeray-led party would contest 23 out of total 48 seats in Maharashtra. Responding to a query, Thackeray made it clear that his son Aaditya won't contest Lok Sabha polls this time. "Sena founder Bal Thackeray did not hold me back from fighting elections, and similarly, I will also not hold back my son Aaditya from contesting. He will contest when he wishes to. However, this time, he will not fight elections," Thackeray said. When asked about the relations between Sena and BJP post-tie-up, Thackeray said both the parties have finalised an electoral alliance, and there won't be any "stone throwing" from either side. CHENNAI: Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC) led by former union minister G K Vasan on Wednesday joined the AIADMK-led alliance in Tamil Nadu and got one seat to contest as an alliance partner in the upcoming Lok Sabha poll. With TMC's inclusion, the AIADMK has almost concluded the alliance formation in the state. The senior leaders of both the parties signed the seat-sharing agreement during a meeting in Chennai. AIADMK Coordinator and Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam announced the decision on inducting the TMC into the alliance. The TMC has now become the eighth partner in the alliance, which also included BJP and PMK among others. As part of the agreement, TMC has also agreed to support AIADMK in the bypolls to 18 assembly constituencies on April 18. O Panneerselvam also told reporters that TMC would support the AIADMK in three more vacant assembly segments as and when bypolls were held. In a related development, the DMK has approached the Election Commission and the Supreme Court seeking conduct of bypolls to the three seats and the polling for the 18 seats. It is to be noted that the bypolls for 18 seats will be held together with the Lok Sabha elections. Few days ago, the ruling AIADMK had allotted seats to its allies including seven to PMK, five to BJP and four to the DMDK and one each to Puthiya Tamizhagam and Puthiya Neethi Katchi. The lone seat in Puducherry was allotted to AINRC. New Delhi: Markets extended rally for 3rd straight day on Wednesday amid continued buying by foreign investors. The BSE Sensex jumped 216.51 points or 0.58 percent to 37,752.17 while the NSE Nifty edged higher by 40.50 points or 0.36 percent to 11,341.70. Major gainers in the Sensex pack were Indusind Bk, Yes Bank, Bajaj Finance, HDFC Bank, SBI, HCL, Reliance, HDFC, ICICI Bank, HUL, Bajaj-Auto and Infosys, rising by upto 4.15 points. On the other hand Axis Bank, L&T, Powergrid, Maruti, NTPC, Tata Motors, ONGC, CIL, Tata steel, Sun Pharma, Vedanta and Bharti Airtel ended in red, falling by upto 4.08 percent. On a net basis, foreign institutional investors (FIIs) bought shares worth a net of Rs 2,477.72 crore while domestic institutional investors (DIIs) were net sellers to the tune of Rs 990.48 crore, provisional data available with BSE showed. Among sectoral indices BSE bankex, finance, realty and energy realty indices surged up to 1.42 per cent. On the other hand BSE telecom, metal, power, teck and healthcare indices ended 2.60 percent down. New Delhi: Markets regulator Sebi on Tuesday withdrew the 20 percent limit on investments by Foreign Portfolio Investors in corporate bonds of an entity. In a notification, the regulator said the restriction is being withdrawn in accordance with a circular issued by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). In June last year, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) had mandated that no Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs) shall have an exposure of more than 20 percent of its corporate bond portfolio to a single corporate. However, the central bank in February lifted the restriction in view of market feedback. To give effect to the directions of the RBI, the regulator said provisions of its June 2018 circulars with respect to exposure of more than 20 percent "stands withdrawn with immediate effect". NEW DELHI: A suspected ISI agent arrested by the security agencies from Rajasthan's Jaisalmer, had taken 22 days training in Pakistan, sources claimed. Nawab Khan alias Nabiya was arrested on Sunday for allegedly leaking confidential information about the activities of Indian Army. 36-year-old Nawab Khan is a resident of Ganga settlement in Jaisalmer. According to sources, Nabia was sharing information about the Army movement near the border to Pakistan's ISI for nearly a year. The agencies suspect that Nabia was given a time-bound task by his Pakistan handlers to share crucial info regarding the Indian Army's movement near the border areas, especially in the aftermath of the suicide attack on CRPF convoy in J&K's Pulwamaon February 14 which resulted in the death of at least 40 troopers. Nawab Khan has been booked on spying charges and a case against him has been registered at the special police station of CID (Special Branch), according to ADG Intelligence Umesh Mishra. Sharing more details, the ADG said that Nawab had gone to Pakistan on a religious pilgrimage last year along with his parents. A close relative of Nawab arranged a meeting between him and the ISI officials at a hotel in Pakistan. Soon after this, he was trained for about three weeks in Pakistan. After coming back to Jaisalmer, Nawab Khan started monitoring the activities of the Indian Army and sent all confidential information in the code language through his mobile phone to ISI. Khan used WhatsApp and Voicecall to share information with his ISI handlers. In lieu of his work, Nawab Khan was provided money, which was credited to various bank accounts linked to him and his parents. His phone and other communication devices were seized by the security agencies and are being examined by the experts. Actor Harish Uthaman is pretty popular for playing antagonist roles on-screen. He was last seen in Vinaya Vidheya Rama as Ballem Balaram and is now on a break for some time. In an exclusive chat with the actor, he talked about how he is looking for roles which demand something different from him and beyond the levels of being just an antagonist. I have done many films in the last five years and in most of those films, I played an antagonist. Very few positive roles I was offered. I think there is a lot beyond being a villain on screen. So I wanted to take up some roles which will give me a scope to perform a lot and explore the actor within. From a cabin crew member, I became an actor and I dont want to waste the opportunity which very less number of people get, said Harish. Asked what made him say yes to the role of Ballem Balaram, he said that he wanted to work with a director like Boyapati Seenu and when he came to him with a role, he couldnt say no. When the director came to me and narrated the role, he told me that it is a very small role and has screen space for a very short time. But he gave me all the liberty to give my best to the role. He allowed me to modify the character. He made me feel very confident as an actor, he added. The actor is going through a couple of scripts and once he decides which is the best for him, he will be making an announcement. Actor Upendras upcoming film 'I Love You' will hit the screens very soon and the teaser was unveiled recently at Prasad Labs, Hyderabad. Upendra and the team of the film were present at the event. Besides the team, Dil Raju, Lagadapati Sridhar, Sanjana Archana and YVS Chowdary graced the event. Directed and produced by R Chandru, the film is touted to be a romantic one. Talking at the event, Upendra said, "We need writers and directors like Chandru. People ask me what is the secret of my youthful look. I would just say that I started from zero. When you start from nothing, you realize that there is everything in nothingness. You have to be the most creative. I had to do small-budget movies with newcomers and I had to push myself every time so that no scene in the movie would bore the audience. I always unlearn to learn and relearn. Too many thoughts can play a spoilsport. Let us have fresh thoughts always." Upendra has a very special market in Kannada, Tamil and Telugu film industry. And he was last seen in Son of Satyamurthy, a Trivikram directorial. The actor is popular for his negative shaded and action-packed roles. Speaking on the occasion, Dil Raju said, "Back in the late 1990s, I would find Upendras movies quite crazy. It's only after reading the script of 'Arya' that I understood the nuances of balancing a negative character in a way that the audience love. I wish that 'I Love You' will become a big hit in both Telugu and Kannada." The release date of the film is yet to be announced. The film is set to release in several other languages also. New Delhi: The Income Tax department officials, who raided almost dozen properties of a close aide of former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati on Tuesday, have recovered Rs 1.64 crore cash, expensive pens worth lakhs and documents of assets worth Rs 225 crore. Yesterday, the IT sleuths raided the New Delhi and Lucknow residences of retired IAS officer Net Ram in connection with alleged tax evasion case. The officials recovered several Mont Blanc pens worth Rs 50 lakh and documents of assets worth Rs 225 cr including Rs 1.64 crore cash in the raids. IT officials said the raids were unleashed for suspected tax evasion running into several hundred crores of rupees. More than a dozen locations were searched in all. Net Ram is believed to a close aide of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati. A 1979-batch IAS officer, he held key positions during Mayawati's tenure as Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister in 2007-2012. Post his retirement, he became the Principal Secretary and advisor of the BSP chief and even contested Lok Sabha elections on BSP ticket. New Delhi: The BJP on Wednesday urged the Election Commission to declare West Bengal as a "super sensitive state" to ensure fair Lok Sabha polls there and demanded that central forces be deployed at all polling stations in the state. A BJP delegation including Union ministers Ravi Shankar Prasad, Nirmala Sitharaman, J P Nadda and party's general secretaries Bhupender Yadav and Kailash Vijayvargiya met top officials of the poll body and apprised them of their demands. Briefing the media after the meeting, Prasad said, "We have requested the Election Commission that the state of West Bengal should be declared as super-sensitive. And have also demanded that central forces should be deployed at all polling booths in the state." He said the party has also requested the poll panel to transfer those police officers whose electoral impartiality is questionable as well as the withdrawal of former Kolkata Police Commissioner Rajeev Kumar from election duty. The BJP is trying to make inroads into TMC's bastion state (West Bengal) which has 42 Lok Sabha seats. In 2014, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) won 34 seats, the Congress four, while the BJP and CPI(M) bagged two seats each from the state. The state assumes importance for the saffron party as it aims to win a sizeable number of seats there. The BJP delegation also alleged that Congress chief Rahul Gandhi broke the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) and complained to the poll panel regarding the same. "The party has requested the Election Commission to take action against Rahul Gandhi for levelling unverified allegations against the prime minister yesterday in Ahmedabad, where the model code of conduct is already in effect," Prasad said. China on Wednesday again blocked move to designate Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad's (JeM) chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist in UN Security Council, making it the fourth such move since 2009. The proposal to list Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UNSC was moved by France, the UK and the US on February 27, days after the Pulwama terror attack was carried out by a suicide bomber belonging to the JeM that led to heightened tension between India and Pakistan. Reacting to China's move, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) expressed disappointment. It asserted that the committee was not able to come to a decision on the proposal on account of a member placing the proposal on hold. It added that India will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on Indians are brought to justice. "The ISIL (Daesh) and Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee (1267 Sanctions Committee), upon completion of the no-objection period on 13 March 2019, was not able to come to a decision on the proposal for listing Mohammad Masood Azhar Alvi under the UN Sanctions regime, on account of a member placing the proposal on hold," said an MEA statement. "We are disappointed by this outcome. This has prevented action by the international community to designate the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), a proscribed and active terrorist organisation which has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on 14 February 2019. We will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens are brought to justice," added the statement. "We are grateful for the efforts of the Member States who moved the designation proposal and the unprecedented number of all other Security Council members as well as non-members who joined as co-sponsors," further added the statement. China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, and an "all-weather ally" of Pakistan has blocked India's proposal from being adopted by the Sanctions Committee in 2009 and 2016. In 2017, Beijing also blocked a move by the US, the UK and France to designate Azhar as a global terrorist by the UN. A UNSC designation would have subjected the terrorist to an assets freeze, travel ban and an arms embargo. An assets freeze under the Sanctions Committee requires that all states freeze without delay the funds and other financial assets or economic resources of designated individuals and entities. The travel ban entails preventing the entry into or transit by all states through their territories by designated individuals. Under the arms embargo, all states are required to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale and transfer from their territories or by their nationals outside their territories, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, of arms and related material of all types, spare parts, and technical advice, assistance, or training related to military activities, to designated individuals and entities. Hectic diplomatic and political parleys had preceded the closely-watched March 13 deadline as New Delhi reached out to member countries of the 15-member UNSC. In the wake of the terror attack in Pulwama, India launched a major diplomatic offensive against Islamabad, holding briefing for envoys of 25 countries, including from the five permanent UNSC members -- the US, China, Russia, the UK and France -- to highlight Pakistan's role in using terrorism as an instrument of state policy. India also handed over to Pakistan a dossier on "specific details" of involvement of the JeM in the Pulwama terror attack. Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi on Wednesday said that his country was facing a "challenging situation" on the western front with India and on the western front with Afghanistan. Qureshi made the admission while addressing the Business Leaders Summit in Islamabad. He, however, stressed that the top focus of Prime Minister Imran Khan is to strengthen the country's economy, which is currently in shambles. "We have a challenging situation on the western front in Afghanistan and we have a situation brewing on the eastern front. You saw what happened in the last few days post-Pulwama," PTI quoted Qureshi as saying. It is to be noted that both India and Afghanistan have repeatedly asked Pakistan to take credible measures in order to curb terrorism and terror groups operating from its territory. Talking about relations with India, Qureshi said that Imran Khan had shown his willingness to forge good relations with New Delhi after coming to power. "Prime Minister Imran reaffirmed that Islamabad will take two steps if New Delhi takes one. Pakistan wants to solve issues with India through negotiations," he said. Qureshi added that several steps have been taken by the current government to boost Pakistan's economy and steps have been taken to create investment opportunities in the country. "When Prime Minister Khan came into power six months ago he inherited a lot of challenges, including corruption and other socio-economic ills, which had to be overcome," Qureshi noted. He remarked that PM Imran Khan is committed to increasing bilateral trade with Iran, China and other countries of the region. Qureshi lauded China and said that Beijing is currently a strategic partner of Pakistan and Islamabad is interested in transforming this relationship into an economic partnership. (with PTI inputs) DOHA: US and Taliban negotiators wrapped up their longest round of peace talks on Tuesday with progress made but no agreement on when foreign troops might withdraw, officials from both sides said. The 16 days of talks, in which the United States also sought assurances that the Taliban would not allow militant groups to use Afghanistan to stage attacks, are expected to resume in late March. The negotiations in Doha, Qatar included the Taliban`s political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and a U.S. team led by special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. Khalilzad, an Afghan-born veteran U.S. diplomat, said the sides made progress on discussions about counter-terrorism assurances and a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. "The conditions for peace have improved. It`s clear all sides want to end the war. Despite ups and downs, we kept things on track and made real strides," Khalilzad said on Twitter. The Taliban have held multiple rounds of peace talks with the American team led by Khalilzad but have so far refused to talk to the Afghan government. "When the agreement in draft about a withdrawal timeline and effective counter-terrorism measures is finalised, the Taliban and other Afghans, including the government, will begin intra-Afghan negotiations on a political settlement and comprehensive ceasefire," Khalilzad said. SOME PROGRESS Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the sides made progress on the issues of withdrawing foreign forces and preventing future attacks on other countries from Afghanistan. But, in a statement, he stressed that no agreement was reached on a ceasefire or talks with the Afghan government. A spokesman for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani tweeted that he hoped to see a long-term ceasefire agreement and the start of direct talks between the government and Taliban soon. The talks were held in a closed-off banquet hall at the five-star Ritz-Carlton seaside hotel on the southern end of Doha. Qatar has hosted the Taliban`s political office since 2013 and has looked to position itself as an important regional player for conflict resolution. "We appreciate how difficult it is to end 18 years of war. Qatar looks forward to resumption of the talks in the coming weeks," said Qatar`s lead mediator Mutlaq Bin Majid Al-Qahtani. No date has been set for the next round. Khalilzad said he would return to Washington to brief U.S. and international officials. Talks ended on a day in which Taliban insurgents stepped up pressure on the battlefield, killing 20 Afghan soldiers and capturing another 20 in western Afghanistan. In another province, officials said an air strike killed both Taliban fighters and civilians. About 17,000 foreign troops are based in Afghanistan as part of a U.S.-led NATO mission to train, assist and advise Afghan forces. Some U.S. forces carry out counter-terrorism operations. The United States has been pushing the Taliban to agree to a ceasefire and to talk with Afghanistan`s government, which the militant group considers a U.S. puppet regime. "The U.S. officials were pressing the Taliban to declare a ceasefire, but our leaders were clear that a ceasefire can only be announced after the foreign force withdrawal announcement (is) made," said a senior Taliban commander privy to the talks. Another Taliban source said on condition of anonymity there was frustration on some issues during the peace talks and that a senior member of the Islamist group told U.S. officials at one point that the Taliban are "not their servants" and need no U.S. approval for any future decisions. Washington intervened in Afghanistan in 2001 to help overthrow a Taliban government that had sheltered Osama bin Laden`s al Qaeda group, responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States. A U.S.-led international force has fought since then against a Taliban insurgency. The foreign presence peaked in 2010 at more than 130,000 troops including 100,000 Americans, but was sharply cut back after 2014. Nearly 3,500 foreign troops including 2,300 Americans have died in Afghanistan. The United Nations has tallied the deaths of more than 30,000 Afghan civilians since 2009, most killed by insurgent attacks. Tens of thousands of members of the Afghan security forces and an unknown number of insurgents have also been killed. The event was chaired by Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh and Myanmar Minister of International Cooperation U Kyaw Tin. Reviewing cooperation in different fields since the eighth meeting in May 2015, the two sides applauded efforts by their countries ministries, sectors, localities, and businesses to boost relations in a result-oriented manner. They noted the growing political trust and cohesion through frequent mutual visits and meetings at high levels. Most recently, Vietnamese Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong paid a state visit to Myanmar in August 2017, and Myanmars State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi made an official trip to Vietnam in April 2018. At the meeting, the officials agreed to enhance connections via all channels, including between the two countries parties, governments, states, parliaments, and localities. Vietnam and Myanmar will actively carry out cooperation mechanisms, build an action plan for implementing the comprehensive cooperative partnership for 2013-2023, promote the realisation of agreements reached during high-ranking visits, and increase people-to-people diplomatic activities. The countries will also set up a defence policy dialogue mechanism in 2019; boost collaboration in fighting trans-national crimes; conduct negotiations on a treaty for mutual assistance in criminal matters; and work together to deal with non-traditional security issues, especially terrorism, trans-national crimes, environmental security, and water resources security. Highlighting breakthroughs in economic links, they noted Vietnam is currently the ninth biggest trade partner of Myanmar, with bilateral trade reaching US$873.9 million in 2018, up 5.5% from the previous year. With such a growth trend, they believe that the figure will hit the target of US$1 billion in the near future. Additionally, Vietnam ranks seventh among investors in Myanmar, with 18 projects worth over US$2.1 billion in total. Participants at the meeting said partnerships have reaped encouraging outcomes in transport, agriculture, culture, sports, tourism, finance, banking, information-communications, and education-training. They also agreed to maintain and promote peace, security, stability, safety, and freedom of navigation and overflight in the East Sea; respect international law, particularly the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea; resolve disputes by peaceful means, not militarise nor complicate the situation; carry out the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea; and soon finalise a substantive and effective Code of Conduct in the waters. During the event, the two sides also agreed to keep coordination and mutual support at regional and international forums, especially within the framework of ASEAN, the UN, the Ayeyawady-Chao Phraya-Mekong Economic Cooperation Strategy, the Cambodia-Laos-Myanmar-Vietnam cooperation, the Greater Mekong Subregion, and the East-West Economic Corridor. Deputy PM and Foreign Minister Minh asked Myanmar to consider reducing the licence waiting time for Vietnamese investment firms, along with the list of Vietnamese goods that need to be licensed before they are imported into Myanmar. He also asked for detailed guidelines on Myanmars laws for Vietnamese businesses, and a timely settlement of obstacles facing Vietnamese investments. Minister U Kyaw Tin affirmed his countrys support for Vietnam when it holds the ASEAN Chair in 2020, in a bid to step up the ASEAN Community building, strengthen the blocs solidarity, and raise ASEANs role in an evolving regional architecture. He also reiterated Myanmars support for Vietnams candidacy for non-permanent membership in the UN Security Council for 2020-2021. The 10th meeting of the Joint Committee for Bilateral Cooperation will be held in Myanmar in 2021. A father and son who were hospitalized after their wife and mother died from a gas leak at their home have been transferred to Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx New York, Pennridge Regional Police Department said this morning. Pennsylvania Horticulture Societys Harvest program ends season with almost 19,000 pounds of produce donated and $30K raised to fight food insecurity South Africa: SCOPA pleased with term's work The Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) has expressed satisfaction at its work and legacy achieved in the past five years. In a statement issued on Wednesday, the committee said it had today adopted its legacy report. The report details the work of the committee over the past five years which will assist the new Scopa committee in the sixth Parliament. Scopas legacy report indicates that in the past five years the committee has identified critical issues, such as financial mismanagement; non-adherence to supply-chain management; inadequate internal control management; evergreen contracts, particularly in state-owned entities; leadership instability; non-compliance with laws and regulations, particularly the Constitution, the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA), Treasury regulations, the Public Service Act and public service regulations in government departments and state-owned entities, the committee said in the statement. In five years, the committee held 150 committee meetings, undertook 12 oversight visits and conducted one joint oversight visit with another committee. Challenges identified during the oversight visits included officials and senior management disregarding legislation such as the Constitution, the PFMA, Treasury regulations and the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act, among others. Scopas key achievements include it role in ensuring the termination of the Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) contract, which was declared irregular and was renewed irregularly. Another key achievement was its role in requesting that the South African Social Security Agency negotiate with the South African Post Office (Sapo), to establish whether the role performed by CPS could be done by Sapo. An agreement was reached to award the contract to Sapo, thereby saving the state a substantial sum of money, the committee said. The committee also referred cases of possible corruption to the Anti-Corruption Task Team (ACTT) for further investigation. It scrutinised contract management and awarding of tenders at the State Information Technology Agency and the Forensic Data Analysts contract at the South Africa Police Service. The committee also intervened in municipalities and other government offices defaulting on debt payments to Eskom. Scopa also intervened at the Public Investment Corporation, the Department of Water and Sanitation, and at the Department of Public Works (prestige contract). Committee chairperson Themba Godi said the Scopa is grateful for the relationship it had with the Office of the Auditor-General, the National Treasury, ACTT, the Public Service Commission, the Special Investigating Unit, the Association of Public Accounts Committees and the Southern Africa Development Community Organisation of Public Accounts Committees, which assisted Scopa in its work. SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. The event was held on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Azerbaijani diplomatic sector (1919-2019) and the 60th year since Vietnams President Ho Chi Minh visited Azerbaijan for the first time (1959-2019). In opening the conference, Deputy Foreign Minister of Azerbaijan Ramiz Hasanov said the foreign ministries of both countries have made unceasing efforts to promote bilateral cooperation. He stressed that Vietnam is an important partner in Southeast Asia of Azerbaijan. Vietnamese Deputy Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son recalled the close traditional friendship between the two countries, noting that thousands of Vietnamese students had received university training in Azerbaijan, and hundreds of military and civilian Azerbaijani experts had volunteered to go to Vietnam to help the Vietnamese people in their national defence and construction. According to the Deputy FM, the two countries foreign ministries have maintained close coordination since the establishment of diplomatic relationship, contributing to strengthening the trustful and close political ties. The two foreign ministries have also worked with other ministries and agencies to implement agreements reached by the two countries leaders, gradually perfect the legal foundation for bilateral cooperation. Besides, the two foreign ministries have kept regular consultations on international and regional issues of mutual concern while coordinating closely at regional and international forums for the interests of both nations and for peace, stability and development in the world, Deputy FM Son said. Participants at the conference agreed that the diplomatic sector should play a key role in bolstering cooperation between the two countries, thus serving each nations cause of national development and common interests. They exchanged opinions on the achievements, advantages and difficulties faced by Vietnam and Azerbaijan in their socio-economic development, and the progress of bilateral ties since the two countries gained independence. Welcome to Morningstar.co.uk! You have been redirected here from Hemscott.com as we are merging our websites to provide you with a one-stop shop for all your investment research needs.To search for a security, type the name or ticker in the search box at the top of the page and select from the dropdown results.Registered Hemscott users can log in to Morningstar using the same login details. Similarly, if you are a Hemscott Premium user, you now have a Morningstar Premium account which you can access using the same login details. At a conference held in the province on March 11, Nam requested that safety be ensured for all activities held in the framework of the event, as well as for the accommodation of both domestic and foreign participants. Specific plans must be well prepared for the Day of Vesak, he said, adding that ensuring security for the event is a prioritised mission for the police in the coming time. Meanwhile, Secretary of the provincial Party Committee Nguyen Dinh affirmed the significance of the event to both the country and the localitys socio-economy. The provincial Party Committee and Peoples Committee have directed competent authorities to make meticulous preparations for the event, he added. The UN Day of Vesak 2019, themed Global Leadership and Shared Responsibilities for Sustainable Societies, expects over 10,000 participants, including dignitaries, monks, and leaders of Buddhist organisations; scientists and researchers; and Buddhist followers from over 100 countries and territories all over the globe. Tam Chuc Pagoda in the northern province of Ha Nam will be the hosting venue of the 2019 UN Day of Vesak. (Photo: VNA) The event is a chance for Vietnam to promote its nation, people, and culture, as well as the solidarity across its various regions, thus affirming the Party and States policy of ensuring religious freedom. Vesak, the Day of the Full Moon in the month of May, is the years most sacred day to the millions of Buddhists around the world. It was on the Day of Vesak two and a half millennia ago that the Buddha was born. It was also on the Day of Vesak that the Buddha attained enlightenment, and it was on the Day of Vesak that the Buddha in his 80th year passed away. The UN General Assembly internationally recognised the Day of Vesak in 1999 to acknowledge the contributions that Buddhism, one of the oldest religions in the world, has made and continues to make to the spirituality of humanity. The UN Day of Vesak was first held in 2001. Tomfoolery Outdoors and Massie Creek Paddlers present the 14th annual Paddling Film Festival at the historic NEON in Dayton, OH on March 14 at 7:00 pm. The Paddling Film Festival is an international adventure film tour presenting the worlds best paddling films of the year whitewater, sea kayaking, canoeing, SUP, action, and lifestyle in more than 120 cities and towns across Canada, United States and around the world. With 26 inspiring paddling films shortlisted for the World Tour, including the 10 festival category winners, audiences will see hairy whitewater action, sea kayakers exploring remote coastlines, northern river canoe expeditions, international river travel films, motivating environmental documentaries and grueling kayak fishing battles. Tickets can be purchased online for $11. A Paddling Film Festival pre-party will be held at Mudlick Tap House in Downtown Dayton inviting guests to join the local paddling community for drink specials, a delicious meal and raffle prizes courtesy of our sponsors. Wear your lifejacket to the event to promote safety and be entered for a chance to win unique Tomfoolery Outdoors surprises. Please join us for an urban hike to The NEON from Mudlick Tap House to add a little adventure to your evening. Hike begins at 6:30 pm. It is a 1-mile round trip experience. Attracting paddlers and outdoor enthusiasts, audiences can expect a fun, social and entertaining event inspired by compelling films like: 100 miles Features an Alaskan expedition using packrafts to explore and fish a remote and braided river system Big World David Morton and his seven-year-old son, embark on a week-long standup paddleboard journey down the Karnali and Bheri Rivers in western Nepal. Feel of Vision A former Navy Petty Officer turned extreme adventure athlete, became the first blind person to whitewater kayak the entire length of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in a solo kayak. Junk Paddle An Australian outdoor educator demonstrates how to build a paddle by collecting rubbish wood between a train station and his office. Global Water Consortium #SUP4Water Local outdoor enthusiast Pete Savard leads a team (including his 15 year old daughter) down 444 miles of the Susquehanna River on Stand Up Paddleboards to raise awareness and funding for a sustainable clean water initiative in developing countries. Live the Moment A group of women paddlers gather together on a white water river adventure in Quebec to share their mutual values and love for paddling. The Passage Nate Dappen and his brother join their father and uncle on a canoe trip along the Inside Passage from Washington to Alaska, completing a journey started in 1974. Confluir The Maranon River in Peru cuts through the Andes Mountains as it flows into the mighty Amazon River. 20 proposed dam projects threaten this free flowing gem of a river. An international team of scientists raft the river while documenting the natural and cultural resources that would be affected by proposed dam projects. We are Send A group of extreme whitewater kayakers paddle the worlds biggest whitewater and tackle numerous waterfalls in this intense short film Big Head Todd and The Monsters and Toad The Wet Sprocket have announced plans for their 2019 Summer Tour. The co-headline run will include a stop in Huber Heights, OH at Rose Music Center on Wednesday, June 12th. ABOUT BIG HEAD TODD AND THE MONSTERS Big Head Todd and the Monsters are not that big on anniversaries, so there wont be any big hoopla over the fact that the band is officially crossing the three-decade mark this year. Thirty years would seem like something to commemorate, especially with the same core lineup, an achievement few other name-brand bands can boast of. Yet right now theyre less about celebrating stability than volatility, in the form of their eleventh studio album, New World Arisin, which makes good on its forward-facing title with what might be the brashest rock and roll of their career. The old world cant rest on any laurels, and neither will they. If theres a dominant musical motif to New World Arisin, its straight-up rock-pop, says Mohr. That contemporary approach might come as a slight surprise to hardcore fans that saw the Monsters take a seriously rootsy turn or two in the last 10 years. The band embarked on a side project, dubbed Big Head Blues Club, that saw them paying homage to Robert Johnson and bringing in venerable guest collaborators like Charlie Musselwhite and the late B.B. King. The heavy blues influence that dominated their alter-ego band carried over some into the last actual Big Head Todd and the Monsters album, 2014s Black Beehive. That element isnt altogether missing in New World Arisin. But this time the blues take a definite back seat to the unapologetically mainstream instincts that had Big Head Todd going platinum in the mid-90s with the album Sister Sweetly, which spawned the rock radio hits Broken Hearted Savior, Bittersweet, and Circle. The history of the group actually stretches farther back from the 1987 point at which they took their name. The core members came together at such an early age that its hard to know exactly how many candles to put on their collective cake. They began playing original music in earnest in a nascent Colorado music scene that then consisted almost entirely of cover bands. A debut album, Another Mayberry, arrived in 1989, though it would be another four years before Sister Sweetly made them a national phenomenon. The only personnel change in these three decades has been the addition of a fourth member, putative new guy Jeremy Lawton, in 2004. While they enjoy a robust fan base around the country, their success is outsized in Colorado, where theyre practically the unofficial state band. Thats evident in their ability to sell out Red Rocks, the most revered amphitheater in the nation, where theyve headlined 19 times. Whats clear is that Big Head Todd is one multi-headed rock monster, easily traversing the most accessible hooks and the heaviest grooves. Its not surprising that they would appeal to any audience or sub-audience that values durability over flavors of the moment. ABOUT TOAD THE WET SPROCKET Celebrating 30 years as a band, Toad the Wet Sprocket is still making music and touring with the same spirit of unwavering independence that started it all over three decades ago. 2019 marks two important milestones for Toad. One is the 25th Anniversary of their Platinum albumDulcinea, originally released in 1994, which featured the hits Fall Down and Somethings Always Wrong. The second is the 30th Anniversary of the bands very first album Bread & Circus, which was re-released commercially in 1989. The band is thankful for the continued help and enthusiastic support of their fans, which helped spur the release of All You Want and also serves as inspiration for the band to tour and play live. They also continue to support their most recent releases, New Constellation (2013) and The Architect of Ruin EP (2015). Toad the Wet Sprocket share in the kind of musical chemistry that can only come from meeting in high school and writing, recording and touring on albums over the course time. After Bread & Circus, they followed with Pale in 1990, fear in 91, Dulcinea in 1994, and Coil in 1997, as well as some compilations along the way. While most will still feel the comforting familiarity of the Billboard-charting hits, Walk on the Ocean, All I Want, Somethings Always Wrong, and Fall Down, fans will also be well familiar with tracks with lyrics that resonate for so many life milestones like The Moment, I Will Not Take These Things for Granted and so many more. Tickets go on sale to the general public beginning at 11am on Friday, March 15th at Ticketmaster.com, RoseMusicCenter.com. Dates, times and artists subject to change without notice. All events rain or shine. I have the blueprint to the ... Chief Justice Zhou Qiang (left) and Procurator-General Zhang Jun deliver work reports in Beijing on Tuesday. [Photo by Feng Yongbin/China Daily] Pressure still high on graft during supervision reform China has kept up the pressure in the fight against corruption while making progress on reform of the country's supervision system in the past year, according to work reports of the top court and top procuratorate released on Tuesday. Thirty-two officials at or above ministerial level were charged last year with graft, including Sun Zhengcai and Wang Sanyun, said Zhang Jun, procurator-general of the Supreme People's Procuratorate, during the work report to the top legislature. Sun, former Chongqing Party secretary and former member of the Political Bureau of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee, was sentenced on May 8 to life in prison for taking bribes of over 170 million yuan ($25.3 million). Wang, former Party secretary of Gansu province, stood trial in October, and no verdict has been released yet. As a result of an unwavering resolve to bring the corrupt to justice, about 33,000 people in 28,000 cases were convicted of taking bribes or dereliction of duty last year, Chief Justice Zhou Qiang said in the work report of the Supreme People's Court. Another 2,466 people were convicted of offering bribes last year amid a heavy crackdown on bribery, he said. The large quantity of corruption convictions shows that China is unswervingly advancing the fight against graft, and reform of the country's supervision system has played its role, said Jiang Laiyong, a senior law researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The 13th National People's Congress approved the amendment to the Constitution and the National Supervision Law in its previous annual session last March, laying a strong legal foundation for an upgraded anti-graft task force and bringing all people with public power under supervision. Zhang said in his report that procuratorates have coordinated smoothly with supervision commissions at all levels to keep the pressure on corruption. "We have enhanced cooperation with the new commissions to push forward standards on work procedures and evidence collection to handle duty-related crimes," he said. Supervisory commissions are State anti-corruption agencies. The National Supervisory Commission is the highest State supervisory organ, and all provincial, city and county-level regions have their own supervisory commissions. Establishing supervisory commissions at all levels is considered a major political reform. Leaders of supervisory commissions are elected by people's congresses at the same level and are supervised by legislative bodies. Prosecuting departments agreed to take a look at a total of 16,092 suspects alleged to have engaged in graft and who were handed over by supervision commissions nationwide, according to the SPP report. Prosecutors charged 9,802 of them and decided not to charge 250 people, the report said. The others remain under investigation. "The new commissions have integrated the country's scattered anti-corruption resources and cultivated a professional supervision team, serving as a powerful deterrent to corruption," said Guo Yong, director of the Center for Anti-Corruption and Governance at Tsinghua University. Judicial and procuratorial organs have also kept a close watch on mafia-like gangs and crimes that affect people's daily life such as pollution and drug security. Prosecutors charged 61,188 suspects involved in organized crime or local mafias last year, and about 350 people were charged with serving as a "protection umbrella" for such criminals, according to the SPP report. Zhang said prosecutors were guided by the principle of "no one is let off, no one is wronged" while handling such cases, and struck down 9,154 cases filed by police as gang-related crimes. In cases linked to pollution, 42,195 suspects were prosecuted for damaging the environment and resources last year, an increase of 21 percent year-on-year, he said. International UK Theresa May to vote against no-deal Brexit Britains Prime Minister Theresa May speaks to lawmakers in parliament, London, Tuesday. (AP) London, Mar 13 (IANS) | Publish Date: 3/13/2019 12:05:51 PM IST UK Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday said she will vote against a no-deal Brexit at the end of the month as she warned MPs that they faced hard choices after rejecting her deal for a second time. Battling a sore throat during Prime Ministers Questions, she insisted the UK can still leave the EU with a good deal and that she understood the voice of the country on Brexit, the BBC reported. UK MPs will vote at 19.00 GMT Thursday (12.30 a.m.) on whether to block the UK from leaving the EU without an agreement later this month. Wednesdays vote will only apply to the March 29 deadline and would not rule out the prospect of a no-deal exit later this year, if Parliament is ultimately unable to agree a way forward. After the House of Commons rejected Mays Brexit deal by 149 votes on Tuesday, the EU warned the risk of a disorderly Brexit had never been higher. Its chief negotiator Michel Barnier said the EU cannot go any further in trying to persuade MPs to back the agreed terms of exit and the UK had to break the impasse. May on Wednesday faced renewed pressure from opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to abandon her dead departure plan. He called on the Premier to change course after the defeat. He said the deal had been decisively rejected and it was time for May to change her red lines. The Prime Minister has been stubbornly declaring that the only choice is between her deal and no deal, Corbyn said. Last nights vote finished off her deal. Tonight shes not even showing the leadership to whip on no deal. Corbyn asked which way May would vote on the government motion, for which Conservative MPs will have a free vote. She replied: I will be voting for the motion standing in my name. Dismissing calls from Tory MPs to embrace a no-deal exit now, May said her deal remained the best way to honour the 2016 referendum result. I may not have my own voice but I understand the voice of the country. I believe we have a good deal. No deal is better than a bad deal but I have been working for us to leave on March 29 and leave with a good deal. The EU urged the UK to take responsibility for its actions. Again the House of Commons says what it doesnt want. Now this impasse can only be solved in the UK, Barnier told the European Parliament. The EU, he suggested, had gone as far as it possibly can to satisfy MPs concerns over the agreement, particularly in relation to the backstop, an insurance policy to stop a hard border on the island of Ireland. If the UK still wants to leave the EU in an orderly manner, this treaty is, and will remain, the only treaty possible, he said. By PTI NEW DELHI: Air India Wednesday announced that it is suspending its flights on Delhi-Madrid and Delhi-Birmingham routes from March 16 till further notice due to "operational reasons". As Pakistan has kept its airspace closed since February 26 due to the Balakot air strike by the Indian Air Force, Air India's expenditure on flights to Europe and the US have significantly increased. In a tweet, the national carrier said, "Due to operational reasons, the following Air India flights are suspended with effect from March 16, 2019, till further notice." The airline then said that AI135 Delhi-Madrid flight and AI136 Madrid-Delhi flight would be suspended. It added that AI113 Delhi-Birmingham flight and AI114 Birmingham-Delhi flight would also be suspended. The airline said that AI117 Delhi-Amritsar-Birmingham flight and AI118 Birmingham-Amritsar-Delhi flight would be suspended too. "We sincerely regret the inconvenience caused to our valued passengers and request passengers to collect full refund," the airline said. A man checks the wreckage of the airplane of Ethiopian Airlines (ET) which crashed earlier near Bishoftu city, about 45 kms southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, March 10, 2019. All 149 passengers and eight crew members aboard ET 302, bound for Nairobi, Kenya, are confirmed killed, the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation (EBC) said. (Xinhua/Ethiopian Airlines) BRUSSELS, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Many European countries announced on Tuesday to ground Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft following an Ethiopian Airlines plane crash on Sunday. The Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 bound for Nairobi, Kenya, crashed shortly after taking off from the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board, drawing renewed scrutiny of the plane after an 2018 crash of the same model in Indonesia claimed 189 lives. British Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) announced to block the Boeing 737 MAX from any operator arriving, departing or overflying British airspace. A spokesperson for the CAA said on Tuesday that they have taken a "precautionary measure", as they do not currently have sufficient information from the flight data recorder. "The Civil Aviation Authority's safety directive will be in place until further notice," the spokesperson said. According to the CAA, there are currently five 737 MAX aircraft registered and operational in Britain. A sixth was planned to commence operations later this week. Following Britain's move, the Hannover-headquartered world's largest travel group TUI has stopped all flights with the aircraft type, including all airlines in the group, said a spokesman. Germany banned the flights by Boeing 737 MAX 8 in its airspace. German Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer told the broadcaster n-tv that "Security is absolute. Until all doubts have been cleared up, I have ordered that the German airspace is closed to all Boeing 737 MAX plane with immediate effect." The German Transport Ministry said on Monday that there are no Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes in operation by German airliners. The government of Netherlands, Belgium and France's DGAC civil aviation authority also ordered its airspace closed for Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft, while Austrian transport minister announced similar move until further notice. The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) has decided to temporarily suspend the operation of all variants of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft into and out of Irish airspace with immediate effect. The decision has been taken taking account of the unprecedented loss of two Boeing 737 MAX in recent months, and based on ensuring the continued safety of passengers and flight crew, which is the IAA's No.1 priority, IAA said in a statement. On Monday, Italy's Codacons consumer association urged the Italian Civil Aviation Authority (ENAC) to immediately ground all Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes in use in Italy. "In view of the preceding, wholly similar incident in Indonesia, and circulating reports on lack of pilot training in flight correction software, measures must be taken immediately to safeguard air transportation safety," said Codacons President Carlo Rienzi in a statement. "We urgently call on ENAC to categorically ground all Boeing 737 Max planes present in Italian airports," Rienzi wrote, adding that Sardinia-based airline Air Italy "already has the model in its fleet, and has ordered a total of 20." ENAC confirmed that Air Italy flies three Boeing 737 Max airplanes, which it "operates in full compliance" with Boeing and U.S. Federal Aviation Administration requirements "issued after a similar incident took place in Indonesia." Speaking to La Repubblica newspaper in an interview on Monday, veteran airline pilot Danilo Recine from the National Association of Civil Aviation Professionals (ANPAC) pointed out that, while the causes of the Ethiopian Airlines flight crash are still unknown, "it is possible" that the plane's sensors malfunctioned. "In the Lion Air crash (in Indonesia) last year, some of the parameters sent to the cockpit, such as speed and altitude, were wrong. The machine reacted with countermeasures to correct something that was not happening in reality...and the pilots could not override the system manually. We could be looking at something similar." By Express News Service BENGALURU: In 2017, a 26-year-old woman from Nepal was gang-raped in an abandoned building in Avadadevanahalli village. Though a year-and-a-half has passed, Suma (name changed) is yet to receive compensation from the Nirbhaya fund. So far, she has received only Rs 2,00,000 from the Victim Compensation Fund of the state government. Women and child rights activists state that the funds are not enough to bear hospital, counselling and other expenses. Despite us providing Rs 25,000 and another Rs 15,000 from the Indian Christian Womens Movement (ICWM) and the North-East Solidarity, the funds are not sufficient. We ask the government for a speedy mechanism and that there is a functioning system such as a 24x7 helpline, activist Brinda Adige said at a press conference. CE had earlier reported that only 60 victims of sexual crimes in the city have received compensation since 2011. Cynthia Stephens, activist and member of the ICWM, stated that the victim compensation schemes from both the central and state governments have not been utilised properly. Sumas hip bones are still fractured and she is undergoing physiotherapy. With her condition, she cannot go for work. Hence, we ask that the government respond immediately and take action against the perpetrators, Stephens said. The activists protested saying that they are outraged over the inaction of the authorities. Domestic and gender-based violence, sexual harassment at the workplace, continue abated. Victim-protection, victim compensation are still a far dream for the survivors, Adige said. She added that there is a need for magistrates, judges, prosecutors, and the police to work in convergence. On November 23, 2017, Suma was raped by a gang of bike-borne men at the abandoned building in Avadadevanahalli village near Anekal. The victim clearly made a statement before the magistrate that she was sexually assaulted by a gang of six men. By Express News Service CHENNAI: A 28-year-old man allegedly killed his neighbour after learning that his wife had left him and was residing with the neighbour, in Sriperumbudur. Police said, Balaji and his wife Vanitha (25) had a one and-a-half-year old son. Balaji suspected his wife to be in a relationship with their neighbour Ganapathy (36). Recently, Vanitha had gone missing, leaving her son with the husband, said a police officer. On Sunday, Balaji learnt that Vanitha and Ganapathy had rented a house in the same locality and were living together. Angered over this, Balaji allegedly killed the man in his house and escaped, added the officer. Hearing his screams, the neighbours rushed Ganapathy to hospital, where he was declared brought dead. A case was registered and probe is on. By Express News Service NEW DELHI: A 50-year-old Czech woman, who illegally entered India from Nepal after she was allegedly tortured by a Buddhist leader there, was rescued and sent back to her country, the Delhi Commission for Women said on Tuesday. According to the Commission, the foreigner lost all her papers, passport, visa and money in the process of entering India. On reaching Delhi, she approached the Czech embassy for getting herself an emergency passport, but they could not help in arranging a visa for her repatriation, the Commission said, adding the foreigner then e-mailed to DCW chief Swati Maliwal for help. The woman told the DCW that she had joined a Buddhist sect in Nepal in 2012 after the untimely death of her son in her country. The woman alleged that she was chained and subjected to all kinds of abuse there. The Czech woman claimed she managed to escape and returned home with the help of a few foreign tourists. She returned to Nepal after four months to save other women from falling prey, according to the Commission. She spent four years running from pillar to post, but failed to move any authority against the well-connected Buddhist leader...over time, her friends who were financially supporting her in her quest for justice, backed off, the DCW stated. It added Czech woman was reduced to penury and could not renew her visa so she started living as an illegal immigrant. In December 2018, some German tourists came to her rescue and helped her cross over to India. It took a few visits to the visa office and a lot of convincing by DCW staff before her visa application was accepted. Once the visa was issued, she left India and is now safely back in her country, the Commission said. By Express News Service NEW DELHI: A special court on Tuesday, rejected the bail plea of Delhi-based lawyer Gautam Khaitan, who was arrested in connection with a money laundering case. Opposing his plea, the Enforcement Directorate informed Special Judge Arvind Kumar that Khaitan was controlling the modus operandi and was responsible for routing money. The ED has already attached assets worth Rs 8.46 crore of Khaitan, an accused in the VVIP chopper scam case, as a part of a second criminal probe against him for allegedly possessing undisclosed foreign accounts. Khaitan was misusing his connections and clients, including the ones inherited from his father, to launder money through a variety of accounts in Dubai, Mauritius, Singapore, Tunisia, Switzerland, the UK and India, it said. The ED officials said the accounts included those belonging to his undisclosed shell companies outside India. Khaitan, in judicial custody, was arrested on January 25, a week after the Income Tax Department conducted raids on his offices and various other properties in Delhi and the National Capital Region. Khaitan was earlier arrested in September 2014 for his alleged involvement in the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper deal. He got bail in January 2015 and was again arrested along with Sanjeev Tyagi, another accused in the case, on December 9, 2016, by the CBI. He later secured bail. The CBI charge sheet had described Khaitan as the brain behind the AgustaWestland deal. K Krishnachand By Express News Service THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: World-class roads with streamlined traffic. That makes the capital city unique compared to other cities in the state. Thanks to the City Road Improvement Project (CRIP) initiated under the Thiruvananthapuram Road Development Company Ltd (TRDCL) which developed and maintained 42-kilometre stretches in the city over the past decade. However, the state government is likely to replace TRDCL as it allegedly failed to complete necessary maintenance work on the developed roads at various parts in the city. Kerala Road Fund Board (KRFB) is the nodal agency of CRIP. Last month, PWD served notice on TRDCL regarding lapses in work completion. The notice made it clear that works under the CRIP would be handed over to the KRFB if TRDCL failed its duty. Sources cite crises in the parent company, IL & FS, could be the reason to the delay in completing work. Launched in 2005, CRIP had entered into an agreement with TRDCL to construct and maintain roads for 30 years. This resulted in the government seeking legal advice to replace the company. As per the agreement, the TRDCL is responsible to look after the maintenance of 42 -km roads from 2022 to 2030. Hence, the government may need to pay hefty compensation to TRDCL once the agreement is terminated. Nevertheless, Anil Kumar Pandala, former TRDCL vice-president said the government could not 'terminate' the agreement with the company as it comprises conditions to entrust TRDCL for a period of 30 years. He also said TRDCL could not take up maintenance work in the city due to non-payment of annuity fund from the government. "The government was supposed to pay a sum of C26 crore to TRDCL on an annuity basis over the past one-and-half years which hasn't been paid yet. Along with it, the government had failed to pay C9 crore in the last decade. We did correspond with the government about the shortage of funds for the maintenance works. Yet, the government did not pay heed and blamed the company. We transformed the entire city with good roads and traffic islands. But how can a company continue working without funds?," said Pandala. Meanwhile, TRDCL carried out repair and maintenance works after a loan from IL & FS. Pandala also said IL & FS debt crisis has not affected TRDCL as it is a separate company. "TRDCL and IL & FS are two companies. In fact, TRDCL is a special purpose vehicle formed with a public-private partnership model. So the company won't be in crisis anymore," he said. He added that the government had neither completed the 'Dispute Resolution Mechanism' in the agreement nor complied with many clauses in the agreement. Earlier, the governments laxity in releasing Rs 19 crore of the arbitration amount of Rs 124.947 crore has put the concessionaire, TRDCL in a fix. As a result, the work remaining on the second and third phases of CRIP had come to a halt several times. According to KRFB officers, they had sent repeated reminders to TRDCL over the delay in completing the works at major junctions in the city. "In fact, TRDCL has not responded to our correspondence. We had also warned the company about their failure to complete the work on time. The company has also not repaired the roads KRFB had demanded to repair on time," a top KRFB officer said. By Express News Service VIJAYAWADA: With the YSRC all set to announce the first list of candidates for the Assembly and Lok Sabha elections, ticket aspirants, who were given enough indications that they might be denied ticket this time around, are slowly coming out in the open expressing their dissent. On Tuesday, the dissent literally reached the doorsteps of YSRC chief YS Jagan Mohan Reddy. A section of leaders from Uravakonda in Anantapur district staged a protest in front of Lotus Pond in Hyderabad against giving ticket to sitting MLA Y Visweswara Reddy. The agitating leaders urged the party chief to give Uravakonda Assembly ticket to former MLA Y Sivarami Reddy. Sivarami Reddy, whose brothers are YSRC MLAs from Mantrayalam and Srisailam Assembly constituencies respectively, enjoys formidable clout in the district. Sivarami Reddys group made it clear that they would not support Visweswara Reddy if he is given Uravakonda seat. Party leaders said that it will be a difficult task for Visweswara Reddy to win without the support of Sivarami Reddy. Senior party leader YS Vivekananda Reddy pacified the protesting leaders and assured that the issue will be taken up with Jagan. Meanwhile, sitting MLA M Sunil Kumar of Putalapattu constituency in Chittoor district had to face some embarrassing moments when he was made to wait for more than two hours outside the residence of Jagan in Hyderabad. Interestingly, senior party leader and Punganur MLA Peddireddy Ramachandra Reddy, who spotted Sunil and his family members outside Jagans residence, completely ignored him. It is learnt that Ramachandra Reddy is against giving ticket to Sunil Kumar and wanted to give the ticket to a leader of his choice to prove his dominance in the party in the district. After waiting for more than two hours and all his efforts to contact seniors failed, Sunil Kumar is said to have left the place empty-handed. Meanwhile, in a related development, Potluri Vara Prasad, popularly known as PVP, an entrepreneur and closely associated with Jagans family, is likely to join the party on Wednesday. He is likely to be fielded from a Lok Sabha segment, sources said. YSRCs 1st list likely to be out today The YSRC is likely to release its first list of candidates on Wednesday. It is said that the first list will consist of names of around 60 candidates for the Assembly elections. The remaining candidates will be named in the next couple of days. By Express News Service After debuting to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the new Spiderman in directors Joe and Anthony Russos Captain America: Civil War, Tom Holland will once again team up with the Russo brothers for a true-life drama titled Cherry. The film is written by The Path writer Jessica Goldberg and will be based on the semi-autobiographical book by Nico Walker a former Iraq War army medic with severe PTSD who falls into opioid addiction and begins robbing banks, ultimately being imprisoned. Walker, from whom the movie rights were acquired for $1 million, is currently serving prison time and is expected to be released in 2020. This film will go on floors once the brothers Avengers: Endgame, which will reportedly also feature Tom Holland releases next month. Incidentally, films that are under post-production, bankrolled by the brothers 17 Bridges and Dhaka also stars Chadwick Boseman and Chris Hemsworth who play Black Panther and Thor in the Marvel Universe. By PTI TORONTO: Honey bees may help monitor pollution in cities and help pinpoint the exact sources of environmental pollutants such as lead, a first-of-its-kind study has found. The study, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, analysed honey from urban beehives in six Metro Vancouver neighbourhoods. The researchers tested for miniscule levels of lead, zinc, copper and other elements and carried out lead isotope analyses -- similar to fingerprinting -- to identify where the lead came from. "The good news is that the chemical composition of honey in Vancouver reflects its environment and is extremely clean," said Kate E Smith, PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia in Canada. "We also found that the concentration of elements increased the closer you got to downtown Vancouver, and by fingerprinting the lead we can tell it largely comes from manmade sources," Smith said in a statement. Metro Vancouver honey is well below the worldwide average for heavy metals like lead, and an adult would have to consume more than 600 grammes, or two cups, of honey every day to exceed tolerable levels, researchers said. They found the concentration of elements increased closer to areas with heavy traffic, higher urban density and industrial activity such as shipping ports. Places like the city of Delta showed elevated levels of manganese, which could be a result of agricultural activity and pesticide use in the area. The researchers also compared the lead fingerprints of the honey to those from other local environmental samples like lichen from around British Columbia, rock from the Garibaldi volcanic belt, sediment from the Fraser River and trees in Stanley Park. They discovered that the lead fingerprints of the honey did not match any local, naturally-occurring lead. However, the trees in Stanley Park and the honeys from downtown displayed some striking similarities that pointed to potential manmade sources of lead. "We found they both had fingerprints similar to aerosols, ores and coals from large Asian cities," said Dominique Weis, senior author of the study. "Given that more than 70 per cent of cargo ships entering the Port of Vancouver originate from Asian ports, it is possible they are one source contributing to elevated lead levels in downtown Vancouver," Weis said. Honey is able to provide such localised "snapshots" of the environment because honey bees typically forage for pollen and nectar within a two- to three-kilometre radius of their hives. "Honey sampling can easily be performed by citizen scientists in other urban centres, even if they lack other environmental monitoring capabilities," said Smith. The team will continue to study how honey analysis might complement traditional air and soil monitoring techniques and test the efficiency of honey as an environmental monitor in other cities. By Online Desk Netizens across the world are currently facing one common issue: Facebook and Instagram are down! The social media platforms have not been able to send or receive messages, neither can you like any post. Although users are able to open their social media accounts, they are unable to access the Messenger App. On Instagram, you can neither like nor direct message anyone, the button to post new comments were also not working. According to downdetector.com the main affected areas are New England; Texas; Seattle, Washington; parts of Latin America, including Peru; the UK; India; and the Philippines. Earlier messaging app WhatsApp too was not working. Many users had reported that they could not receive or send any messages/photos in the past few hours. Facebook has taken to Twitter to post an apology and explained the situation: We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack. Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019 Frustrated users have taken to Twitter to vent out their anger. Check out some hilarious reactions: facebook: ill be down for a while, can you support yourself? instagram: pic.twitter.com/igOR28fahu (@suplicador) March 13, 2019 Facebook and Instagram are down. You will have to live your life for its own sake now. God (@TheTweetOfGod) March 13, 2019 Me When I tried to run to Facebook and #Instagram on my lunch break to save me from talking to people and they were both down #facebookdown pic.twitter.com/XOLt50oZK9 Deborah Wanjala (@deborahwanjala) March 13, 2019 Rajkumari Sharma Tankha By Express News Service Ethiopia is least likely to be on your wishlist for a holiday but when you happen to be one of Indias first female wildlife biologists, the African nation could be your favourite destination, especially if you are looking forward to capturing the rarest of the rare wolf in the world through your lens. It was around three years back that Dr Latika Nath planned a trip to Ethiopia to study wolves, of which only 400 are alive, in their natural habitat. Soon, her list of must-dos on the tour increased. After all, there were hyenas of Harar, the Gelada baboons, the Abyssinian owl and the Rock Churches of Lalibela and Lucy. She then chanced upon some information on the tribes of the Omo Valley which left her completely stunned. The more she read about it all, the more her inquisitiveness grew. Dr Nath wanted to know more about these people who lived around Mago and Omo National Parks their cultures, their customs, and their lifestyles. And all this culminated into a trip to Ethiopia. The result was over 60,000 images that documented the life of these tribal people and the breathtaking natural beauty of the region. A coffee table book was surely in the making! When I spent time with the people of the Omo Valley and saw how they were on the brink of a tumultuous change that could affect their lifestyles and cultural identity, I decided that it was essential that I record as much of this as I can and document this incredible heritage for future, says Latika. But the going wasnt easy. It required loads of work as at some of these locations there are no places to stay or eat while to photograph the tribes, she not only needed to live in those regions for several days but also travel to villages in the interior. How did she manage? I had to transport mobile camps to these areas from Addis Ababa. It took many months to organise the camp and also the private charters to these remote areas, she says. Ethiopia is still opening up to tourism. Many areas of the country are remote and not well connected to the outside world. The people are not used to tourism. In some of the regions, the tribes were antagonistic, however, for the most part, the people were friendly, she informs. Though many tribal communities across the world, including the communities in Asia and Africa and the aboriginal communities from Australia, are fabulous artists and dancers, the people of the Omo Valley are masters when it comes to the art of body painting and decoration, she says. In multiple visits over two years, Latika took over 60,000 photographs. Clicking was perhaps not that difficult, but selecting which ones to include in the coffee table book was! She examined close to 60,000 photographs to select the 230 that would be in this book. The composition, subject and appeal of the photograph is important for me. Plus the photograph also has to be technically perfect. But in the end I go with my gut instinct, she says. What came out was a breathtaking coffee table book (CTB) titled Omo: Where Time Stood Still. It was launched at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January this year. And what about that rare wolf who triggered the trip? Oh. I managed to click him as well. It is an incredible animal. I spent some time in the Bale mountains where they are found and managed to get some beautiful shots, she says adding that she besides the wolves she also managed to click endemic and rare species of birds and animals on the trip. Chief Justice Zhou Qiang delivers a work report of the Supreme People's Court (SPC) at the third plenary meeting of the second session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 12, 2019. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei) BEIJING, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Chinese judicial and procuratorial organs have maintained high pressure on law violations, including graft, local mafia and "Peppa Pig" copyright infringement, to safeguard justice, social stability and development. The judiciary also endeavors to serve the country's all-round opening-up, the Belt and Road Initiative, and high-quality development, according to the work reports of the Supreme People's Court (SPC) and the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) delivered to the annual national legislative session Tuesday. Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders including Li Keqiang, Li Zhanshu, Wang Yang, Wang Huning, Zhao Leji, Han Zheng and Wang Qishan attended the plenary meeting of the session at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Chief Justice Zhou Qiang and Procurator-General Zhang Jun highlighted progress made in the past year when delivering the reports. "The top court has punished crimes, protected the people, and resolutely safeguarded national security and social stability in accordance with the law," Zhou said. The SPC handled 34,794 cases in 2018 and concluded 31,883 cases, up 22.1 percent and 23.5 percent year on year respectively. Local courts saw an increase of 8.8 percent and 10.6 percent in the cases they handled and concluded. The top procuratorate has "based its work on people's increasing demands for democracy, the rule of law, fairness and justice, security, and a better environment in a new era," Zhang said. With unwavering resolve to bring the corrupt to justice, Chinese courts concluded 28,000 graft cases involving embezzlement, bribery and dereliction of duty last year. Among the 33,000 people involved were 18 former officials at the provincial level and above. Meanwhile, 32 such former high-ranking officials, including Sun Zhengcai and Wang Sanyun, were charged. Sun is the former Party chief of southwest China's Chongqing municipality, who was sentenced to life in prison in May for taking bribes of over 170 million yuan (25.29 million U.S. dollars), while Wang, former Party chief of Gansu Province, stood trial in October, accused of using his position for bribe-taking. A total of 2,466 people who offered bribes were convicted last year amid a heavier crackdown on bribery. Prosecutors handled work-related criminal cases transferred by supervisory commissions involving 16,092 suspects in 2018. Among them, 9,802 have been prosecuted. The courts also targeted corruption among their own ranks in 2018, with 1,064 court staff investigated and punished for abusing the power of their positions. Making headway in the campaign to combat organized crime and root out local mafia, Chinese courts concluded 5,489 related cases in 2018, which involved 29,000 criminals, while procuratorates across the country approved the arrest of 73,385 suspects involved in such crime, among whom 61,188 were indicted. Addressing pollution, China prosecuted 42,195 suspects for damaging the environment and resources last year, up 21 percent year on year, and the courts concluded 2,204 cases involving crimes of environmental pollution. Strengthening intellectual property protection, Chinese courts concluded 288,000 cases related to intellectual property rights (IPR) of first instance in 2018, marking a year-on-year increase of 41.8 percent. Meanwhile, 8,325 suspects were prosecuted for criminal acts such as infringement of patent rights and trademark rights, up by 16.3 percent. A tribunal for IPR-related cases was set up at the SPC last year to further strengthen the judicial protection of IPR. In addition, the judiciary improved legal service of China's all-round opening-up. The courts concluded 15,000 foreign-related civil and commercial cases of first instance in 2018. Among the cases was one handled by the Hangzhou Internet Court, which adjudicated a copyright infringement case last August and ordered two offending Chinese companies to compensate for the economic loss of British animation "Peppa Pig" character's copyright owners. Looking into 2019, the SPC and the SPP will continue to ensure legal guarantees for sustained and sound economic and social development and strengthen their team building, according to the reports. Vowing to deepen judicial reform this year, Zhou said, "The SPC will uphold the principle of administrating justice for the people to enhance their sense of fulfillment, happiness, and security." Impressed by the judicial initiatives in the work reports, Lu Man, an NPC deputy from Jiangsu, said she noticed that the judiciary has rectified a number of wrongful convictions and many problems that incurred strong public dissatisfaction have been effectively solved. "The people feel the progress of fairness and justice," she said. 2019 is a key year for the sprint to finishing building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. "I expect the judicial system to continue to serve as a 'reassuring pill' for the common people, and escort our country to achieve the centenary goal," she said. Shevlin Sebastian By Express News Service THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: At the International Marina near the Bolgatty Palace resort, Frenchman Djillali Zaknoun is placing diesel cans on a small cart on the bank and then pushing it on the gangplank to his 44-feet long yacht Donazita (Portuguese, for a lady). His partner and friend Patrycja Lukasiewicz, who is from Poland, is folding dried clothes on the deck. The sunlight is so strong that the bare-bodied Djillali has patches of red all over. The couple is mounting preparations for their onward trip to Djibouti (2,047 nautical miles) in Africa. It is a straight line on the map, across the Indian Ocean. The duo has been on a world trip for the past four years. They started at Deauville in Northern France and went to Buenos Aires. Some of the other places they visited included Chile, Easter Island, Pitcairn Island, Cook Islands, Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Vanuatu, Indonesia, East Timor, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and now, India. We have stayed away from big places and visited all these small islands, says Patrycja. When the people see us, they feel an attraction, because, in these places, only three to four boats arrive in a year. So they are really happy when new people arrive. They give you bananas, coconuts and papayas as gifts. Initially, the pair will have to go and meet the tribal chief and get his permission to stay. Patrycja will never forget her stay on a tiny island Woleai in Micronesia in 2016. Somehow, the women came to know that her birthday was on November 15. So they gave her a surprise party. They made a dish called the coconut crab, as well as cassava, fried bananas and a papaya salad. They made flower garlands for me and presented a striped sarong called the lava lava, says Patrycja, who used to work in a publishing house. The women sang songs in my honour. It was an unforgettable experience. Asked about her learning experience on the trip, Patrycja says, People may have different traditions, clothes or behaviour, but underneath, they have the same preoccupations. Some want to get married, a few want to start a family, some are happy with their spouses, others are not. They worry about their teenage children and the future. And they have happy moments when the husband gets a good job or they are able to buy a new house, or their child has done well in school. I realised people are the same wherever they are in the world. Meanwhile, Djillali has finished hauling up all the cans to the yacht, and then he puts on a blue T-shirt and settles down for a chat sipping a coke. Asked about the plastic menace in the oceans, he says, I am sorry to say this but the problem is most severe in Asia, off the coasts of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and India. We stopped fishing because we would only catch plastic packets on our hooks. Adds Patrycja, A few days before we reached Kochi, we were sailing and there was a big group of dolphins. They usually like to race with the boat. They swim and jump in front of us. It is a beautiful sight. But in the Arabian Sea, they were swimming in a large field of plastic. Djillali, who has a family business which is now run by his son, suggests a solution but it is not immediate. Only education can change this, he says. So, you have to start with the children. At the same time, you have to be patient because the plastic will not go away soon. To break a feeling of sombreness, the couple invites me to check out their quarters. As you go down the wooden stairs, you step into a room which has a dining table with a semi-circular sofa on the left and a kitchen on the right. Right next to it is the communication apparatus, including the wireless. Behind that, through a very narrow entrance is the guest bedroom. The bed is shaped like a triangle. In the evenings, Djillali sits in this room and watches films on the laptop, says Patrycja. Beyond the kitchen is the main bedroom which again is very narrow. At one side is the washroom. It is a bit cramped, says Patrycja, as she leans against the kitchen sink. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of fish on the menu. We catch different types of fishes like tuna, marlin, shellfish, and the mahi-mahi (common dolphin fish), says Djillali. One marlin we caught was six feet long. We ate it for almost three weeks for lunch and dinner. Incidentally, they travel at 5 knots (less than 10 km per hour) and usually depend on the sails to travel. It is only when there is no wind or they have to enter a harbour that they use the engine. On the open ocean, they keep sailing for 24 hours, because of the presence of many ships and fishing boats. So they have to be careful. At night we take turns, says Patrycja. I sleep for three hours, then Djillali wakes me up and then he goes to sleep. But when the couple is wide awake they are having the time of their lives. By PTI NEW DELHI: The choice is between Mahatma Gandhi's India and Nathuram Godse's India with love on one hand and hate on the other, Congress president Rahul Gandhi told his party's booth workers here on Monday, a day after the Lok Sabha polls were announced. In an all-out attack against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Gandhi flayed him on a host of issues such as the Rafale deal, Doklam, employment generation, national security and the alleged agrarian distress. "You have to decide, you want Gandhi's India or Godse's India. On one hand, there is love, brotherhood, on the other is hate, fear. Gandhiji was fearless, stayed in jail for years, but spoke with the British with love, while (Veer) Savarkar wrote letters to the British apologising and asking to be let off," he said. Hitting out at the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the issue of national security, the Congress chief said 40 CRPF personnel were killed in the February 14 Pulwama terror attack carried out by the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), whose chief Masood Azhar was released from jail by the saffron party. "These people with 56-inch chests, you would recall, in their previous government, the current National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval, went in an aircraft with Masood Azharji and handed over Masood Azhar in Kandahar," he said sarcastically. "Two of our prime ministers were martyred. We don't bow before anyone," he added. Azhar, along with two other terrorists, Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar and Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, was released from jail in 1999 by the then BJP-led NDA government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee in exchange for the passengers held hostage on board the IC 814 flight, which was hijacked to Kandahar in Afghanistan. The BJP latched on to Gandhi's reference to the JeM chief as "Masood Azharji" to hurl a "Rahul loves terrorists" barb at the Congress president. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE The opposition party hit back, accusing the saffron party of deliberately twisting Gandhi's comments, which it claimed were made sarcastically. Gandhi also slammed Modi over the Rafale fighter jets deal, saying five years ago, the "chowkidar" (watchman) had come to power and said he had a "56-inch chest" and would fight corruption. "People earlier used to say, 'acche din ayenge'. Now you just say 'chowkidar' and everyone else says 'chor hai' -- this is due to the Congress," he said. The prime minister spoke for an hour-and-a-half in Parliament, but could not answer four questions on Rafale fighter jets, he added. "He talked about the Congress, Rajiv Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, but did not utter Anil Ambani's name," Gandhi said in a reference to the allegation that the industrialist was favoured in the Rafale deal. The Congress chief said Modi kept talking about Make in India, but his shirts, shoes and phone, with which he took selfies, were made in China. He also asserted that the Congress would come to power in the upcoming general election and fix a minimum income for all the citizens of the country. Rattled by the Congress's announcement of minimum income guarantee, Modi had announced Rs 3.5 a day for farmers, Gandhi claimed. The Congress waived farm loans within two days of coming to power in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, he said. Taking on the prime minister over his China policy, Gandhi claimed that the Chinese prime minister gave a "clear message to the PM that I know you, you are a weak person, I will send the Chinese army to Doklam and you cannot do anything". Modi bowed before China and offered a truce, he claimed. "Narendra Modi backs off when someone stands up to him," the Congress chief said. In Delhi, shops were sealed and both the BJP and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) did nothing while the drive was on, he said, touching upon the issues in the national capital. Gandhi urged his party's booth workers to work hard and win all the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi in the upcoming polls. By PTI LUCKNOW: The chiefs of Uttar Pradesh alliance partners SP and BSP met here Wednesday hours after Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi paid a surprise visit to Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad at a Meerut hospital. SP president Akhilesh Yadav met BSP chief Mayawati after newly appointed Congress general secretaries Priyanka Gandhi and Jyotiraditya Scindia met Azad. When contacted, Samajwadi Party spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary said the two leaders met to discuss joint public meetings and rallies, being planned for the Lok Sabha polls. Meetings are being held constantly as the election is around the corner and the poll campaign has to be launched full scale after Holi next week, he said. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE The alliance has left two seats for the Congress in the state and will honestly support it on them, said Chaudhary. Meanwhile, a senior SP leader, who did not wish to be named, claimed Priyanka Gandhi's visit to the Bhim Army chief was in reaction to the BSP president ruling out any alliance with the Congress. "But Mayawati is not someone who will yield to any kind of pressure. This alliance will not come under pressure. It has already given two seats to the Congress," he added. Mayawati had Tuesday snubbed the Congress by slamming doors on it for an electoral alliance for the Lok Sabha polls anywhere in the country. The SP and the BSP recently forged an alliance on 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state. As per the deal, the SP will contest 37 Lok Sabha seats in UP and the BSP 38, leaving three for the Ajit Singh-led Rashtriya Lok Dal and two for Sonia Gandhi (Rae Bareli) and Rahul Gandhi (Amethi). The seven-phase Lok Sabha elections begin on April 11. By PTI NEW DELHI: The Civil Aviation Ministry will hold a meeting with airlines at 4 pm on Wednesday to prepare a contingency plan as a number of flights have been cancelled following the grounding of Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, a senior government official said. On Tuesday night, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced its decision to "immediately" ground the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft that are currently being used by airline companies in India. "We will ground all 737 Max 8 aircraft, which are currently in use by Indian airlines, by 4 pm today," a DGCA official told PTI on Wednesday morning. READ MORE | India bans Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft after Ethiopian Airlines crash The decision came days after a 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by the Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa killing 157 people, including four Indians. SpiceJet has around 12 such aircraft in its fleet. Jet Airways has five, which have been already grounded. "The meeting regarding a contingency plan will happen with airlines at 4 pm Wednesday," a civil aviation ministry official said. A DGCA spokesperson, on Wednesday morning, said," The B737Max operations will stop from/to all Indian airport's. Additionally, no B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600hrs Indian time or 1030 UTC." "The time line is to cater to situations where aircraft can be positioned at maintenance facilities and international flights can reach their destinations," the spokesperson said. In a statement Wednesday, SpiceJet said," SpiceJet has suspended Boeing 737 Max operations following DGCA's decision to ground the aircraft." "Safety and security of our passengers, crew and operations are of utmost importance to us and we will be working with the regulator and the manufacturer to attain normalcy in our operations. "We are confident of accommodating the vast majority of our passengers and minimise inconvenience," the airline said. On Sunday, a 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa killing 157 people, including four Indians. The incident on Sunday was second such crash involving the 737 MAX 8 aircraft in less than five months. In October last year, an aircraft operated by Lion Air crashed killing over 180 people in Indonesia. The European Union and many other countries across the world have already banned the use of 737 Max 8 aircraft in their respective airspace. In a tweet on Tuesday night, Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu said,"Directed secretary to hold an emergency meeting with all airlines to prepare a contingency plan to avoid inconvenience to passengers." "While passenger safety is a zero tolerance issue, efforts are already on to minimise the impact on passenger movement as their convenience is important," he tweeted. By PTI NEW DELHI: AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal Wednesday appealed to the Congress to join the proposed alliance between his party and JJP but his offer was snubbed by his Haryana-ally, which said it can "never have any truck" with the Congress. Kejriwal earlier on Wednesday told reporters that an alliance between AAP, Congress and Jannayak Janata Party would defeat the BJP in the state. "Let's come together in Haryana to defeat the BJP," Kejriwal said. However, within minutes after Kejriwal's comments, the JJP issued a strong-worded statement, saying it can "never have any truck" with the Congress. "The JJP has been formed on the ideology of late Choudhary Devi Lal who has always fought against Congress so JJP will never enter into any alliance with the Congress and will not be part of any alliance which includes Congress," JJP's national general secretary KC Bangar said. The JJP can enter into an alliance with only like-minded parties whereas the ideology of Congress does not match with its views, he said. However, Bangar said the party is strengthening its organisation in all 10 Lok Sabha and 90 assembly seats. "It is capable of fighting elections in all these seats," he said. On Monday, Congress President Rahul Gandhi ruled out any alliance with AAP in Delhi and asked his party workers in the capital to win all seven Lok Sabha seats following which Kejriwal said his party would win all seven parliamentary seats in Delhi "on its own". AAP had supported JJP in the recent Jind By-poll in Haryana and both parties have been in talks to ally for the Assembly elections scheduled later this year. By PTI GUWAHATI: Burying the hatchet, Assams ruling BJP and Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) have struck an alliance. The decision was made late Tuesday night at a meeting in a hotel here in the presence of BJP general secretary Ram Madhav, partys Assam leader Himanta Biswa Sarma, AGP president Atul Bora and its working president Keshab Mahanta. The decision comes just two months after the AGP had severed ties with the BJP and pulled out of the Sarbananda Sonowal government protesting the Centres move to get the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 passed in Parliament to grant Indian citizenship to immigrants belonging to six persecuted non-Muslim communities from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. A section of AGP leaders, including two-time former Chief Minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, was opposed to the alliance. There are reports the BJP offered governorship to Mahanta in Mizoram. He has denied it. Kummanam Rajasekharan had recently resigned as the Governor of Mizoram. The BJP and the AGP are likely to discuss seat-sharing arrangement on Wednesday. However, the BJP is understood to have already offered three seats Kaliabor, Barpeta and Dhubri to the AGP. If that is the case, it will be a raw deal for the AGP that ruled the state twice between 1985-90 and 1996-2001. Barpeta and Dhubri are the strongholds of minority-based All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF). The two seats are currently held by the partys chief and perfume baron Maulana Badruddin Ajmal (Dhubri) and his brother Sirajuddin Ajmal (Barpeta). Similarly, the Kaliabor seat has been held by the family of three-time former CM Tarun Gogoi since 1991. Currently, Gogois son Gaurav Gogoi is the Kaliabor MP. The BJP reportedly urged AGP leaders Atul Bora, Keshab Mahanta and Phani Bhushan Choudhury to return as ministers. They had quit the Sonowal ministry after the AGP had pulled out of the government. Alliance and the resultant seat-sharing arrangement had done wonders for both parties in the 2016 Assam elections. The BJP had grabbed 60 of the states 126 seats to form the government with allies AGP, which had won 15 seats, and Bodoland Peoples Front. By PTI PATNA: Intensive negotiations are on the cards for the opposition grand alliance in Bihar as top leaders of the formation will meet in New Delhi on Wednesday to thrash out the thorny issue of seat-sharing for 40 Lok Sabha seats in the state. The general election is scheduled to begin on April 11 and will continue till May 19. Polling on the different seats will be held in Bihar in seven phases. The 'mahagathbandhan', as the grand alliance is called in local parlance, comprises old allies like the Congress and the RJD, besides new entrants such as Upendra Kushwaha's RLSP, Jitan Ram Manjhi's Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM), Sharad Yadav's Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) and the Vikashsheel Insaan Party (VIP), a fledgling outfit floated by former Bollywood set designer Mukesh Sahni. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE The grand alliance also seeks to have an electoral understanding with the Left Front, which has three constituents in Bihar the CPI, the CPI(ML) and the CPI(M), and the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party (SP) and Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The talks would be centred around a tentative formula wherein the RJD will get the lions share of 17 seats, followed by 11 seats for the Congress and four for the RLSP. The HAM, LJD and VIP would get one seat each, according to sources in grand alliance. It has also been proposed to leave five seats for the Left parties, the SP and the BSP as a goodwill gesture, which may come in handy for the Congress that has substantial stake in adjoining states of West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. The sources said the RJD, which is likely to be represented at the Delhi parleys by its heir apparent Tejashwi Yadav, has misgivings over agreeing to the formula which would require it to drastically scale down its stakes. The RJD had fought on 27 seats in the 2014 general elections, though it managed to win only four. The Congress has been reportedly playing hardball, threatening to pull out of the alliance and go it alone in the Lok Sabha polls if asked to settle for a formula where it gets less than a quarter of the total number of seats. Kushwaha, who gave up his ministerial berth in the Narendra Modi government to quit the NDA and join the grand alliance, may find himself vindicated if the RLSP ends up with four seats, which would be twice the number he was reportedly offered by BJP president Amit Shah. However, Jitan Ram Manjhi's demands that range from "readiness to contest 20 seats" to a number "more than that of even the Congress" or greater than what "later entrants like the RLSP" were to get squirmed when reporters approached him with queries about the tentative formula on Tuesday. "This is all media speculation. We are sure that we will get a respectable number of seats given the fact that our party has the largest support base after the RJD. But, if we do not get a respectable share we will still work towards strengthening the Mahagathbandhan," he told reporters. "After the rounds of talks with alliance partners on March 13 and 14, we will be holding our parliamentary board meeting on March 15 where further decisions will be taken," Manjhi said. The rumblings within the 'mahagathbandhan' is being closely watched by the NDA, comprising the BJP, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's JD(U) and Ram Vilas Paswan's LJP. "We have already announced that the BJP and the JD(U) will fight 17 seats each leaving the remaining six for the LJP. Announcement of candidates will be made before the notification for the first phase on March 18," a senior NDA leader said, . "We have no problem with the Mahagathbandhan announcing its nominees before us. They may wallow in the impression of having stolen a march. We would be getting the opportunity to make last-minute strategic decisions," the leader said. By PTI NEW DELHI: The EC has issued a show-cause notice to Delhi BJP MLA Om Prakash Sharma for putting up two posters featuring him, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and IAF Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman on Facebook. The Election Commission (EC) has asked him to take down the post and give a reply by Thursday. The Lok Sabha elections is scheduled to begin on April 11 and will continue till May 19. Polling in Delhi will be held in two phases. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE The posters, shared on social media on March 1, feature Modi, BJP chief Amit Shah, the IAF officer, and Sharma, who represents the Vishwas Nagar seat in the Delhi Assembly. "Pakistan has bowed down. Our brave soldier has returned. It's a big diplomatic victory that Modiji has brought Abhinandan back in very little time," the posters read. District Magistrate, Shahdara, K M Mahesh, told PTI, "We issued a show-cause notice to Sharma on March 11 for posting posters featuring Abhinandan Varthaman on Facebook." READ MORE : EC asks political parties to avoid photos of defence personnel on posters during campaigning "He (Sharma) has been asked to furnish a reply by 11 am Thursday. It's a violation of the Model Code of Conduct and appropriate action will be taken," Mahesh, who is also the returning officer, said. Referring to its December 2013 letter to all political parties, the poll panel had recently asked them to refrain from making references to the armed forces while canvassing for elections. The directive had come against the backdrop of a picture showing a hoarding with images of Varthaman and leaders of a party. By Express News Service BHOPAL: Several ministers of the erstwhile Shivraj Singh Chouhan government, who tasted defeat in the 2018 Assembly polls, are now eyeing seats for the Lok Sabha elections There are 29 seats from Madhya Pradesh up for grabs. At least seven former ministers are believed to be lobbying for tickets, particularly as there is a strong possibility of the sitting MPs from those seats being denied re-nomination from the same seats. Former MP Jails minister Antar Singh Arya is lobbying through his contacts in the partys central leadership to contest from Khargone seat. With possibility of sitting BJP MP Subhash Patel being denied ticket this time, Arya (who lost from the Sendhwa seat in the Assembly polls) and Gajendra Patel (son of BJP leader Umrao Singh Patel) are being seen as frontrunners. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE In the Khandwa-Burhanpur seat, former Women and Child development minister Archana Chitnis, who lost the Assembly polls to Independent candidate Surendra Singh Shera from the Burhanpur seat, is reportedly lobbying through at least two senior leaders in the state and central unit. Former revenue and home minister Umashankar Gupta is eyeing the Bhopal Lok Sabha seat, which has been a saffron citadel since 1989. He lost from the Bhopal Dakshin Pashchim Assembly seat. Another former minister, 71-year-old Jayant Malaiya, who was the finance minister but lost the Assembly poll from Damoh, is lobbying to try his luck from the Sagar LS seat. Leaders in the partys state unit however, were not pleased and said these former ministers could hurt the party. By PTI AHMEDABAD: A Gujarat High Court judge Wednesday recused himself from hearing a plea of Patidar community leader Hardik Patel seeking a stay on his conviction in a 2015 rioting case. The 25-year-old had joined the Congress at a party rally in Gandhinagar on Tuesday and expressed his desire to contest the Lok Sabha polls. "Not before me," Justice R P Dholaria said while recusing himself. In July last year, a sessions court had sentenced Patel to two years' imprisonment for rioting and arson in Visnagar town in 2015, when the Patidar quota stir started gaining momentum in the state. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE Due to the conviction by the court in Mehsana district's Visnagar, Patel was barred from contesting polls, as per the Supreme Court order. Therefore, the Patidar leader had moved the high court seeking a stay on the conviction. Though the high court granted him bail and suspended his two-year sentence in August last year, his conviction was not stayed by the court. Nation needs eight new nuclear power units annually, official says Visitors look at a stand demonstrating China National Nuclear Corp's technology during an industry expo in Beijing. [Photo by Cui Nan/China News Service] China should start the construction of eight million-kilowatt nuclear power units annually by 2030 to ensure the steady development of the nation's nuclear industry and technology, said Liu Wei, a deputy to the 13th National People's Congress and general manager of China Nuclear Power Engineering Co Ltd, a subsidiary of China National Nuclear Corp, the State-owned nuclear power company. China is expected to see its total power consumption in 2030 reach 8.5 trillion to 10.5 trillion kilowatts, with clean energy accounting for more than 45 percent, said Liu. If nuclear power is to account for the global average of 10 percent of total electric energy production, China needs to start construction of eight million-kilowatt nuclear power units annually by 2030, he said. China has pledged to increase its total installed nuclear capacity to 58 gigawatts by 2020. It had 45.9 GW in operation as of January. Work on the construction of unit one of China's first nuclear power plant this year, located in Zhangzhou, Fujian province, is expected to start on June 30. With an average construction period of 60 months for each unit and a 10-month interval between each two units, the first unit is forecast to become commercially operational in 2024, followed by the second one in 2025. Joseph Jacobelli, a senior analyst of Asian utilities at Bloomberg Intelligence, said: "Slow approvals as well as delays in the commissioning of new generation reactors may delay the government's ambition to have 58 GW in operational capacity." China is expected to lead a surge in nuclear energy growth in Asia in the next five to 10 years, he said. China National Nuclear Corp currently has 21 nuclear power units under operation, with installed capacity reaching 1,909.2 million kilowatts. It has participated in the design of the Hualong One reactors, a domestically-developed third generation reactor design, which is seen as another big step in the development of China's domestically developed third-generation nuclear power facilities. The company had 58 nuclear power units under operation and construction by the end of 2018, it said. By PTI NEW DELHI: A member of the banned terrorist group and an associate of Jarnail Singh Bhinderwale, who was killed by the Indian Army in 'Operation Blue Star' in 1984 was nabbed by the Delhi police, officials said on Wednesday. The accused Gursewak Singh (53), is a member of Khalistan Commando Force (KCF) and was planning to re-constitute his organization on directions of KCF chief Paramjeet Singh Panjwad, who was based in Pakistan, police said. Singh was also in touch with Jagtaar Singh Hawara and other terrorists lodged in various jails in India including Tihar jail, police said adding Gursewak was arrested by the crime branch from ISBT Delhi on March 12 where he had come to meet one of his contacts. Gursewak was previously involved in more than 50 cases of terrorist activities, murders of police officials and informers, robberies in banks and police station among others, said Ajit Kumar Singla, Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime). He remained in jail for more than 26 years in different cases and was in regular touch with some Pakistan based terrorists. Police said Singh was born in a farmer family residing in Raikot village in Punjab's Ludhiana district. His elder brother Swaran Singh was a member of terrorist group led by Bhinderwale in Punjab in 1980s. Gursewak also joined the group in 1982, the police official said. In 1984, when Binderwale was killed, most of his associates fled to Pakistan where they were trained and supported by ISI. During that time, Gursewak joined the newly formed KCF constituted by terrorist Manveer Singh Chehdu and actively participated in anti national activities, he said. Gursewak along with his associates remained involved in dozens of murders of suspected informers of Indian security agencies and bank robberies in Punjab, Delhi and Rajasthan. In May 1984, the accused along with his associates, Labh Singh, Gurinder Singh and Swaranjit Singh had also killed group editor of Hind Samachar newspaper Ramesh Chander in Jallandhar, Singla said. In 1986, Singh along with his associates attacked the residence of Julio Riberio, Ex-DGP Punjab in Jallandhar. In the same year, the accused along with his associates killed eight police personnel of Punjab Police while freeing the KCF Chief Jarnal Labh Singh and terrorists Gurinder Pal Singh Bhola and Swaranjit Singh from police custody in court complex in Jallandhar after a shootout, the officer said. The accused persons had also attacked on a police station in Punjab and robbed 16 rifles, six carbines, cartridges, two revolvers, police jeep and a Fiat car. The accused along with his associates had also killed all nine members of a family in Punjab, he said. Singh remained in jail and most of the time in High Risk Ward of Tihar Jail till 2004 for period of about 18 years. While at Tihar Jail, he planned to smuggle arms including AK-47 and explosives from Pakistan in order to carry out an attack in Delhi. However, this conspiracy of the accused persons was foiled by Crime Branch of Delhi Police, which arrested two terrorists from the area of Punjabi Bagh on July 9, 1998, the officer said. After coming out of jail in 2010, he remained involved in several cases of robbery and was arrested thrice by Ludhiana Police in 2014, 2015 and 2016 respectively. During this period, he remained in contact with Paramjeet Singh Panjwad. He was again arrested by Delhi Police in 2017 under the Arms Act. He is facing trial in a case in Patiala House Court and was not attending the court following which the court had issued non-bailable warrants against him, police said. Prasanta Mazumdar By Express News Service GUWAHATI: Assams ruling BJP and regional Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) have buried the hatchet and struck a poll alliance. The decision was made late Tuesday night at a meeting here in the presence of BJP general secretary Ram Madhav, partys Assam leader Himanta Biswa Sarma, AGP president Atul Bora and its working president Keshab Mahanta. Ram Madhav later tweeted: After discussion, BJP and AGP have decided to work together in the coming Parliament election in Assam to defeat CongressBPF (Bodoland Peoples Front) will be the third partner in the alliance. The decision comes just two months after the AGP had severed ties with the BJP and pulled out of Sarbananda Sonowal government protesting the Centres move to get the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 passed in Parliament to grant Indian citizenship to immigrants belonging to six persecuted non-Muslim communities from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. As an immediate fallout of the latest political development, AGP leader Lachit Bordoloi resigned from the party. He described party leaders, responsible for the alliance, as opportunists. A section of AGP leaders, including two-time former Chief Minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, was opposed to the alliance. Mahanta was not available for comments on Wednesday. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE AGP general secretary Manoj Saikia, however, told reporters that the partys stand on Citizenship Bill would remain the same. We have aligned with BJP keeping in mind political equations, he asserted. It was learnt that although the alliance has been forged, the seat-sharing arrangement is yet to be finalised by the two parties. The AGP had three ministers Atul Bora, Keshab Mahanta and Phani Bhushan Choudhury who had quit the Sonowal ministry in January after the two parties had fallen apart. As the two have now patched up, Bora and Mahanta assumed charge as ministers on Wednesday. Choudhury is likely to follow suit soon. BJP president Amit Shah had recently made it clear in Assam that the party would pursue the issue of Citizenship Bill in the future. The Congress slammed the development as a drama by the AGP. The AGP is hungry for power. By aligning with the BJP, the AGP has proved that it is against the people of Assam. Their protests against Citizenship Bill were a drama, state Congress chief Ripun Bora said. Alliance and the resultant seat-sharing arrangement had done wonders for both BJP and AGP in the 2016 Assam elections. The BJP had grabbed 60 of the states 126 seats to form the government with allies AGP, which had won 15 seats, and Bodoland Peoples Front. By PTI NAGERCOIL: Launching a frontal attack on the AIADMK-BJP alliance in Tamil Nadu, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi Wednesday alleged the state government was controlled by the Prime Minister's Office, something that has never happened before. In his first public rally to launch the UPA poll campaign in the southern state, Gandhi said "Today, the government in Tamil Nadu is controlled by the Prime Minister's Office." By levelling the accusation, the top Congress leader sought to strengthen the narrative being pursued by ally DMK to target the AIADMK and its coalition partner the BJP. He also touched every other issue being vigorously pursued by the DMK including the 'attack on Tamil language and culture,' by the BJP-led NDA and the need for a push to the manufacturing sector in the State. The DMK has been alleging that the AIADMK government was being controlled by the BJP government at the Centre. The M K Stalin-led party has also been claiming that the AIADMK was pressured into going in for a tie-up with the BJP. FOLLOW OUR FULL ELECTION COVERAGE HERE "In the past DMK and AIADMK fought each other, there were big leaders on both sides. However, never was a government in Tamil Nadu controlled from Delhi," Gandhi said, kickstarting his campaign here in Kanyakumari district. Reciprocating DMK chief Stalin's gesture that he will be the Prime Minister, Rahul Gandhi said Stalin will be the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. "Within a few weeks, Rahul Gandhi will become the Prime Minister. In your (Gandhi's) hands the country will be safe we believe," the DMK chief said, sharing the stage with Gandhi at a grand UPA poll rally. The DMK believes that the bypolls to 18 assembly seats would usher in a regime change in the State. Bordering Kerala, Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu is the only district where both the Congress and BJP have significant clout for decades. Gandhi said Prime Minister Narendra Modi felt he could "capture" any Indian institution and control any state by "blackmail" and that he can pressure different states from Delhi. The top Congress leader said Modi was absolutely wrong and none can pressure and control the Tamil people. In his first rally after his party inked a poll pact with the DMK, he said Modi had said he wanted to be "chowkidar and not Prime Minister." However, "after saying that, the chowkidar gave Rs 30,000 crore to Ambani," he alleged. The Prime Minister's "entire foundation is built on lies," he said and quoted Tamil saint poet Tiruvalluvar's verse on truth in Tamil, which meant that truth would triumph (apparently referring to the Rafale deal). "Tamil Nadu has always stood for truth. And the truth will put Narendra Modi in jail," he said. Gandhi said leaders like late DMK patriarch Karunanidhi and former Congress Chief Minister K Kamaraj will continue to live on since they represented the people's heart. While attacking the Congress, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had recently said former Tamil Nadu chief minister Kamaraj always wanted a government in power which has zero tolerance towards corruption. Attacking the PM and the Hindutva ideology, Gandhi said, Modi was not only attacking "Tamil people," but also every state and every language. "They believe that one idea should be imposed in the country, which cannot be done. We are not going to let Modi or RSS distort your language and culture. Not going to allow them to change your history," the Congress chief said. He said the DMK-Congress alliance was not just political but the parties were wedded in the ideological sphere as well which was a meeting of "hearts and minds." While Tamil people were for truth, Modi only spoke lies, he alleged and listed the reported claim of the Prime Minister to "deposit" Rs 15 lakh in bank accounts, and creation of two crore jobs. He vowed to give a push to the manufacturing sector in Tamil Nadu, if voted to power and said the state could play a central role in competition with China in manufacturing and generate jobs. A brand 'Made in Tamil Nadu' will be developed, he said. DMK has alleged that several industries had gone to neighbouring states in the AIADMK rule which was refuted by the government. "Today whenever you look at a cell phone or a shirt it says Made in China. When we have a government in Delhi and Tamil Nadu, behind cellphone, shirt and pant, we have to write 'Made in Tamil Nadu'," he said. He assured 33 per cent quota for women in Parliament and state Assemblies and a job quota to an equal extent. If voted to power, his party would carve out a separate ministry for fishermen welfare, Gandhi said. The NDA government has come up with a separate department for them. Citing the protests led by Tamil Nadu farmers in the past in Delhi, he said his party-led State governments had waived farm loans to assuage their pain. However, the Prime Minister has "handed," the entire insurance sector to his friend Anil Ambani and everything was designed to help the richest in the country, Gandhi alleged. On the issue of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, (NEET), he earlier told reporters in Chennai that it was "discriminatory," against youngsters in the state and that was something "we will look into and I think it is resolvable." DMK had demanded to take Tamil Nadu out of the purview of the NEET to ensure social justice. Recreating scenes witnessed during Prime Minister Modi's previous visits to Tamil Nadu when he faced black balloon protests from MDMK and DMK, Hindu Makkal Katchi staged a demonstration protesting Gandhi's visit near here. HMK cadres claimed that it was due to the Congress party's alleged inaction that Tamils in Sri Lanka were killed during the civil war in 2009 in the neighbouring country. Also, the State was not getting its share of water in river water disputes, they alleged. Tweets like #VanakkamRahulGandhi, #GoBackRahul, #GoBackPappu also trended on microblogging site Twitter. By Bloomberg Officer Javed Khan was trying to feed a cow in the backyard of his police station. His men had picked up the animal from the road after the Uttar Pradesh government asked the police to set an example by adopting stray cattle - the latest twist in Indias age-old tension between Hindus, who worship cows, and Muslims, who eat beef. Reports of clashes between the two groups have surged after a clampdown on cattle trading and illegal abattoirs prompted dairy farmers to abandon unwanted livestock on the streets. No one cared about stray cows before, said Khan, wearing his service revolver and police radio. Now people call us to help if a cow needs to be protected. The tightening of rules by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, backed by Hindu nationalists, has created a media storm in the country just as politicians begin campaigning for a general election. The rising population of strays has been blamed for trampling crops, causing road accidents and setting off a spate of extra-judicial killings. The issue has polarized a country of 1.3 billion people that is almost 80 percent Hindu and also home to the worlds third-largest Muslim population. Cow vigilantes have killed at least 44 people in the past three years, according to Human Rights Watch. While cow slaughtering is banned in most states, including Uttar Pradesh, previous administrations never strictly enforced the laws. The difficulty of selling cows for slaughter has angered some dairy farmers who relied on the sales for extra income and disrupted the countrys leather and meat industries. Damage to fields by wandering cattle has also hurt crop farmers, a key voting bloc for Modis Bharatiya Janata Party, which faces a general election between April 11 and May 19. So-called Gau Rakshaks, or cow protectors, have taken to the Internet to ridicule those in the cattle trade and convince people to look after cows. Its already creating mistrust in the country, said Himanshu, who goes by one name and teaches economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He said unproductive cattle have to be disposed of as they are not giving farmers any return, but cow shelters are not enough as the number of stray animals will keep increasing. The government should find a long-term solution. Many of the headlines are from the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, ruled by Modis BJP, where about 40 million Muslims make up almost a fifth of the population. Police in the state, home to the Taj Mahal, registered a case against 24 people for evicting students and teachers from a primary school so they could use the building to house stray cattle, according to a report in the Indian Express in January. Modi has his electoral district in Uttar Pradesh, which sends more lawmakers to parliament than any other state and is likely to be a key battleground in the election. The region is ruled by the BJPs saffron-clad Hindu monk Yogi Adityanath and was the scene of one of Indias worst religious clashes when Hindu mobs razed a 16th-century mosque in 1992 in Ayodhya, triggering deadly riots that killed at least 2,000 people, mostly Muslims. Modi has to find a balance between appeasing hard-line Hindu supporters and the nations more than 260 million farmers who are already upset about falling commodity prices and lower wages. The prime minister has promised to pay 6,000 rupees ($86) a year to farmers who have less than 2 hectares of land, a $10.6 billion gift that will widen the fiscal deficit. The cow issue will dethrone the current government, said Jagvir Singh, 50, a wheat and millet farmer in Uttar Pradesh. Stray cows are everywhere. They have made our life hell. One in five of the worlds cattle and buffalo are reared in India and the nation is the worlds second-largest beef exporter, after Brazil. Exports dropped 20 percent to 1.67 million tons in 2018 from the record shipments of 2014, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture data. The South Asian nation also produces 2.5 billion square feet of leather a year, 13 percent of global output, much of it for a large domestic footwear and garment industry. Dairy cows live for 12 to 15 years, but typically produce milk only for about 7 years, when they are bearing calves. Millions of cows become unproductive each year, and many, along with unwanted male calves, are simply abandoned. According to the latest livestock census, there were some 5.3 million stray cattle in 2012 in India. To stop strays entering fields, some farmers have erected fencing or hired guards to shoo the animals away, but for many the cost is prohibitive. Fencing costs about 50,000 rupees an acre, while guards charge 500 rupees a day. In a village about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Khans police station, 50-year old Ashok Kumar is waving a stick to drive a herd of stray cattle out of his potato field. The animals depart and cross the road into the field of Sunahari Lal, an older farmer, whose crops are trampled. Its a common sight now in agricultural communities in India, a country ranked 103rd out of 119 in the Global Hunger Index. The government has made our life miserable, said Kumar, who also grows wheat. If we beat cows for destroying crops, we might go to jail and wont get bail for months. Its the people abandoning the cows who should be behind bars. But cows are deeply embedded in Hindu mythology. Kamadhenu, the mother of all cows, emerged from the churning of the oceans after a battle between gods and demons, fulfilling the needs and ambitions of all and providing milk for food used in religious rituals. Paintings of Lord Krishna with cows are common in Hindu households. Cow is our mother, Modi said in February in a holy town of Vrindavan where Lord Krishna is believed to have spent his childhood. No one in India can forget the debt of cows milk. Few practical solutions have emerged. The Madhya Pradesh government said it plans to acquire 6,000 acres of land to build shelters, according to the Hindustan Times. But this would only accommodate about 100,000 animals. In February, the federal budget allocated 7.5 billion rupees for a cow program. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath proposed using taxpayers money to fund shelters. Officials plan to tag strays with barcodes to build a database and are trying artificial insemination technology to ensure only female calves are born. There should be enough shelters to protect cows, but right now they are being built only on paper, said Ramvir Singh Ponia, a 50-year old farmer from Sujat Nagar who grows mainly wheat and potatoes on his 12-acre farm. The problem is people quietly abandon their unproductive cows in the night. Mostly, the country is relying on volunteers like Akhil Manglik, who runs a bovine shelter for some 350 injured animals. This place is like a hospital for cows, he said. Once a cow enters here, it never leaves. It costs about 60 rupees a day to keep a cow in India, translating to about $1.6 billion to accommodate all the nations strays, not counting the cost of lost agricultural land. That leaves Modi with a dilemma summed up by farmer Trimohan Singh in Uttar Pradesh. A home without a cow is a devils place, he said. But the main problem in our lives now is cows. They are destroying our crops and we cant do anything about it. Namita Bajpai By Express News Service Kanpur/Unnao: As one reaches halfway through the Lucknow-Kanpur Road, rows of small potato heaps arrest one's attention. It's the Dahi Chowki market of Unnao, an outlet for locally grown vegetables. However, it turns into an impromptu TV studio-like debate forum, when sellers find a reporter in their midst. Just as it happens in studios, 'panelists' here also are sharply divided in their allegiances. So, in Dahi Chowki, it's the BJP vs the Samajwadi Party. And what about the Congress which sent Anu Tandon to the Lok Sabha from Unnao in 2009 before the Modi wave swept everything away? Is Priyanka Gandhi a 'game-changer'? Tomato grower Sunder Lal is not impressed by the presence of Priyanka Gandhi at the helm of Congress affairs in UP. What will she do? She is Indira Gandhis granddaughter, not Indira Gandhi. We have seen the 10-year rule of Manmohan Singh. He did nothing. Here no one -- neither Priyanka Vadra nor Rahul Gandhi -- will be able cast a spell, he says in a definitive tone. FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE The fanfare with which the Gandhi scion was launched in Lucknow last month finds little traction here. While Sunder Lal says he would vote for a strong nation, his fellow trader Rajendra Yadav vouches for the development work carried out by Akhilesh Yadav during the SP rule in the state. In Shuklaganj, about 20 km away, Raju Mishra, a trader, seconds Sunder Lal. "Whatever presence the Congress has here is because of its candidate Annu Tandon, who has maintained her links with the constituency in the past five years," says Mishra who owns a showroom of readymade garments. He claims nothing will change in the Congress. Here Priyanka Gandhi will have no impact in the current election, claims Mishra. A first-time voter, Anukriti Singh seems to be smitten by Priyankas personality but doubts her effectiveness this time. Few people are familiar with her here. Like Rahul Gandhi, she too is likely to say that the PM is a thief. She will not have any impact, says Anukriti, a second-year student pursuing BA in a local college. If the Congress has pinned its hopes on the Priyanka factor to lift its fortunes in UP, no impact is visible yet. Similar trends can be seen in neighbouring Kanpur, which has a sizeable number of Congress voters and elected the party candidate in 2004 and 2009. Sri Prakash Jaiswal, a former minister in the Manmohan Singh government, had finished runner-up during the sweeping Modi wave in 2014. In the era of social media, when WhatsApp and Facebook shape public opinion, it is difficult to find a neutral person who can talk without showing his political leanings. Kanpur's Atul Seth, the vice-president of the Provincial Industrial Association, UP, is one who speaks quite objectively. Despite being critical of the Congress and its dynastic politics, he has genuine concern for the Grand Old Party. He accuses Congressmen of lacking guts to stand against a family which is no more relevant to run the party. Congress is headed for doom under the present leadership. This dynastic streak has to stop if the party has to be revived. Priyanka is a better politician than her brother but how far she will be able to assert herself under his leadership is debatable, says Seth, ruing the fact that the Congress is imposing Gandhi scions on the nation despite having other deserving leaders. Although few doubt her potential as a future leader, if she takes a full-fledged plunge and doesn't limit herself to the family bastion, there are doubts galore about Priyanka working any magic in these elections. Even a traditional Congress supporter like Saud Ahmad, a leather exporter, feels that Priyankas appointment is too late. She has not been there on the ground even after being appointed on January 23. Congress could have capitalise on the euphoria created subsequent to her appointment and launch. But it is too late and that impact has vanished in the post-Pulwama airstrike narrative now, adds Ahmad. However, Amarjeet Singh Manu, manager of the famous Gurdwarabhai Bannu Sahib in Kanpur, feels the people's pulse favours the Congress after Priyanka Gandhi was given charge of the party in UP. At least she will speak the truth unlike PM Modi who is nothing but a jumlebaaj, says Manu, believing that Priyankas appointment will win Muslim support back for the Congress in the elections. Anoop Kumar Gupta, an advocate and member of the Kanpur bar association, sounds hopeful that Priyanka Gandhi will be able to move the Congress in a positive direction but certainly not now. In this election, people will vote on the basis of the candidate. For Priyanka to be effective, the Congress will have to change the president and hand the baton over to her, claims Gupta. Dr Vivek Dwivedi, principal, Bramhanand Degree College, affiliated to Kanpur University, feels that Priyanka Gandhis impact may give a boost of 1-2 per cent to the vote share of the Congress in UP but nothing more. If they think that by pitching Priyanka Gandhi in the fray now, they can compete with Modi, they will be proved wrong, says the academic. Most also point out that she has been missing in action for a whole month after the Lucknow roadshow. Vishal Agarwal, a prominent jeweller of the city, feels the Congress as an organisation is too weak. They dont have dedicated cadre in booths. The first task Priyanka Gandhi has in hand is to put the house in order. She needs to re-organise the party and re-orient the party worker, which is not possible now with elections knocking at the door, he says. Santwana Bhattacharya By Express News Service AHMEDABAD: Ganapatibhai has come with his family and young brother-in-law to the much-ballyhooed Ahmedabad rally of the Congress, just to see Priyanka. Hundreds of kilometres away from eastern UP, the turf earmarked for Priyanka Gandhi Vadra as party general secretary by her brother and party president Rahul Gandhi, theres no limiting the publics interest in her, it seems. Yes, he hastens to add, And also Rahul Gandhi. Baki sab ko toh dekh hi chuka hoon...(the rest I have seen!) But theres no doubt in the pot-bellied Ganapatibhais mind that witnessing this debut the first public rally of Priyanka outside the pocketboroughs of the Gandhi family in UP, that too in Gujarat makes him feel special. There are many more like him, and the crowd indeed is substantial. But, as the election season warms up (quite literally, the sun is already blistering the skin), whats his takeaway from this family outing? FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE Before he can answer, his twenty-something bro-in-law chips in, Poora Indira Gandhi hai! (Shes all Indira). As the small crowd that gathers looks at him quizzically, he adds a bit embarrassedly, I havent of course seen Indira, but Ive heard Priyanka is like her. Is this the Congress brahmastra then? Priyanka, on Modi-Shahs home turf, trying to lend a touch of Indira-like aura to the partys narrative? Not quite. Its a Rahul Gandhi show. For Priyanka, that enables a soft launch, thats all. At Sabarmati Ashram, she took a backseat, almost merging with the rest, not trying to stand out as the newest Gandhi on the block. At the CWC meeting, she sat chatting with her fellow general secretary, Jyotiraditya Scindia, not crowding the stage with brother Rahul. Later at the rally, she did take the podium but the firepower and the direct, high-decibel attack on PM Modi was left to Rahul. Priyanka made her speech sound as low-key as possible. I dont make speeches, I am just sharing my feelings with you... she said, softly smiling, entirely in line with the Congress tactic of having no build-up around her debut, to ensure she neither overshadows her brother nor create some unforeseen twist in the script. But her flawless Hindi (she once credited Amitabh Bachchans mother Teji Bachchan for her grip on the language) and her ability to nuance her speech made her stand out nevertheless. Idrisbhai, a resident of Ahmedabad, said after the rally, What I appreciated most is that she said what she had to say without using bad words. There was little doubt, though, who she was targeting, To those who talk about fitrat (nature), the fitrat of this nation is to seek the truth, the fitrat of this nation is to blow away the winds of hate with love. Not so long ago, in another Ahmedabad rally, Modi had talked about the fitrat to avenge every wrongdoing and hunt down terrorists in their own backyard. That of course was a swipe at Pakistan. Billing the current Lok Sabha polls as no less than a second fight for independence, Priyanka took the usual digs on the illusory two crore jobs and Rs 15 lakh in every account, also womens security. But what marked her pitch was her direct appeal to the voters, phrases like Its your nation, built by you, ask questions think and decide, and not get swayed by all that comes your way. Also, that a vote is a weapon that is to be used with awareness a weapon that will not hurt or harm anyone, but will strengthen your country. Can Priyanka make a difference? Maybe to some voters who would care to listen. For the rest, much of the ensuing game will be hinging on candidate selection and the internal dynamics of the Congress party. Congress is a party of great leaders: Hardik AHMEDABAD: Its a party of great leaders and great legacy, like that of Subhas Chandra Bose and Rajiv Gandhi. Talking to this newspaper after his formal induction, thats what Hardik Patel cited as his reason for joining the Congress. The leaders of the GOP, on their part, offered Hardiks entry into the party as an example of its viablility among the youth and the not-so-priviledged. The young Patidar leader had famously or infamously led the movement for reservation in government jobs and education for his community in Gujarat. On Tuesday, on the sidelines of the CWC meeting, he made formal what had only been a tacit partnership. Hardik Patels outfit Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti had supported the Congress in the local body elections in 2015 too, before the assembly polls in 2017. Not to much tangible benefit to either, though it became a vehicle for expressing Patel anger towards the BJP. Many felt his decision to become a Congressman has much to do with his ambition to contest the Lok Sabha polls. By Online Desk Right from the Kiki challenge to the 10-year challenge, social media is filled with challenges. They usually receive an enthusiastic response but are they going to change the world - or even your neighbourhood? The answer is usually 'no'. However, the viral 'Trashtag Challenge' is definitely making the world a better, cleaner place. To put it simply, it's the social media version of Swachch Bharat, encouraging youngsters to keep their environment clean. Ever been angry that public places are filled with litter? Then, this is the perfect challenge for you. Wait no more for someone to clean the place, instead, you can do it yourself. Remember, change starts at home. How to go on with the 'Trashtag Challenge'? 1. Spot a messy, unclean place. Click a picture. 2. Get into action. All you need to do is collect the trash and clean the place. 3. Once the place is clean, click a picture again with the collected trash. 4. The before and after photos of the place mark the success of Trashtag challenge. Often social media challenges are criticised as armchair activism. But, with the trashtag challenge going viral, it is proven that social media can make the world a better place. Here are some of the posts by the people who have taken up the 'Trashtag challenge:' Along the Potomac River south of Washington, DC #trashtag pic.twitter.com/n2uPL52LZG Robbie McNeil (@RMcNeil2105) March 10, 2019 Cigerattes are not just harmful for your lungs but also to our environment. According to a report, cigarette butts are the largest source of trash in the world. #trashtag challenge, after just ten minutes (finished with over a kg of cigarette butts) pic.twitter.com/lMFfTDIecg (@1emongrab) March 12, 2019 With Swachch Bharat mission, a lot of efforts were taken in India for a cleaner environment. It is no surprise that Indians are doing their part in the Trashtag Challenge too. I don't have a before-and-after picture, but here's a couple of pictures of me with my family picking up trash from the road side whenever we made a rest stop. #trashtag pic.twitter.com/TygYf2dM13 Adhiti (@frizhbee) March 10, 2019 Here's a picture of students from Nagaland taking up the challenge Trashtag mission in Bengaluru Even corporates are contributing to a cleaner environment. Here's Mahindra Rise doing their part. The #TrashTag Challenge is an excellent reminder of how cleanliness can enable communities and the environment to Rise. Watch how Mahindra employees came together for a cleaner country here https://t.co/Cc7vHq8VZN#RiseForGood #RiseAgainstClimateChange pic.twitter.com/j8Ydwat9xo Mahindra Rise (@MahindraRise) March 11, 2019 It's great that people have taken the 'Trashtag Challenge' seriously. This is truly the most important challenge we need to complete. But, where does all the collected waste go? The one question that should haunt us right now is whether we have a system to dispose of the waste in an eco-friendly way. By PTI NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court Wednesday reiterated that it will not extend the July 31 deadline for publication of the final National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam and said the NRC work and Lok Sabha polls can go on simultaneously in the state. The Centre informed the top court that 167 companies of Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) deployed in the state will not be diverted for poll duty. A bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice R F Nariman said requisite manpower and technology needed for publication of final NRC by July 31 will be provided. "We will not extend the deadline for publication of final NRC on July 31, 2019. Lok Sabha polls and NRC work can go on simultaneously," the bench said after state NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela submitted that some of the officials engaged in the NRC exercise have been assigned poll duty. Hajela also said he needs them back to join the NRC exercise post-poll in order to meet the deadline. "Till elections in the state are over, I have to work with current set of people. But after the polls, more people will be needed for the NRC work. I will also be needing IT people for quality checks and data entry to meet the deadline of July 31," Hajela said. ALSO READ: SC pulls up Assam govt over inadequate functioning of foreigners' tribunal, seeks details by Mar 27 The bench said, "All we are concerned is meeting the deadline of July 31. After the polls more manpower and technology support will be provided. How you do the work is your concern," the bench told Hajela. Attorney General K K Venugopal, appearing for the Centre said that the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has passed an order by which 167 companies of CAPF currently engaged in NRC work will not be withdrawn from the state. The top court posted the matter for further hearing on April 10 and said that in case of any difficulties faced in the publication work the bench would meet every month for 10 minutes to take stock of the situation. On February 5, the apex court had observed that the Centre is "hell bent" on stalling the Assam NRC work while rapping it for seeking suspension of the process during the polls citing non-availability of security forces. The court had reiterated it would not extend the deadline of July 31 and also directed that 3,457 state government officers be kept free for NRC work and asked the Election Commission to "examine the case of exemption of officers, in the rank of District Magistrates, Additional District Magistrates. From transfers which are likely to be made in view of the elections". The Centre had said that in 2014 Lok Sabha polls, 2,500 CAPF companies were deployed and this year, around 2,700 would be needed to ensure law and order. It had said 167 CAPF companies, which are presently overseeing NRC works in Assam, would be sent to other parts of the country during elections. The top court had said on January 24 that the July 31, 2019 deadline to finalise the NRC cannot be extended. The draft National Register of Citizens for Assam was published on July 30, 2018 in which the names of 2.89 crores of the 3.29 crore people were included. The names of 40,70,707 people did not figure in the list. Of these, 37,59,630 names have been rejected and the remaining 2,48,077 are on hold. The first draft of the NRC for Assam was published on the intervening night of December 31, 2017 and January 1 in accordance with the top court's direction. Names of 1.9 crore people out of the 3.29 crore applicants were incorporated then. Assam, which had faced an influx of people from Bangladesh since the early 20th century, is the only state to have an NRC, first prepared in 1951. By PTI KOLKATA: Slamming the BJP for urging the poll panel to declare West Bengal as a "super sensitive state", Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee Wednesday alleged the saffron party was trying to hide behind central forces as it can't win any seat in the state. Noting that the Election Commission has to take care of all political parties, not just the BJP, Banerjee said the poll panel is a constitutional body and should not be influenced by the canards spread by the BJP. The BJP has urged the Election Commission to declare West Bengal as a "super sensitive state" to ensure fair Lok Sabha polls and demanded that central forces be deployed at all polling stations in the state. "What is the reason behind demanding that all booths be declared sensitive in the state? This is an insult to the people of Bengal. The BJP can't win a single seat in West Bengal. That is why they are trying to hide behind the central forces," Banerjee told reporters. Taking a dig at the BJP, she said the party should ask for deploying one paramilitary personnel for every voter, and even then the TMC will emerge victorious in all the 42 Lok Sabha seats in the state. "How are they preparing the list of sensitive booths? Since we are fighting (BJP president) Amit Shah and (Prime Minister) Narendra Modi, Bengal is being targeted. The Election Commission should act impartially," the Trinamool Congress chief said. Maintaining that Bengal is the most peaceful state in the country, Banerjee asked whether or not killings in the name of cow vigilance is considered a crime. "What is happening in Uttar Pradesh? How many people have been lynched in the name of gau-raksha? Is it not an example of poor law and order situation?" FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE Soon after the Election Commission Sunday announced seven-phase polling in West Bengal, the opposition parties had claimed it is a reflection of poor law and order situation in the state, while the TMC alleged the central government had "misled" the poll body with wrong input about the situation. Banerjee said the claims made by the BJP regarding lapse in the law and order in Bengal are "blatant lies". "Let them declare all the people in Bengal as sensitive. Every year so many festivities take place here. Close to 60 lakh people come here during the Ganga Sagar Mela, crores come during Durga Puja every year, and not a single untoward incident has been recorded," she said. On the BJP's demand that a media observer be appointed for Bengal, Banerjee alleged that it is the saffron party that is trying to control the media at the national level. "Never ever the TMC has tried to control the media. The media is free and fair in Bengal. The demand for appointing a media observer is actually an insult to the people of the state," she said. The BJP is spreading fake news in the state and across the country, the chief minister alleged. "The Election Commission must seriously look into the expenditure of the BJP. The party is using photos of the prime minister and the armed forces in political hoardings. We have complained against it," she said. The BJP is eyeing a number of seats in West Bengal, which has 42 Lok Sabha constituencies. In 2014, the Trinamool Congress won 34 seats, the Congress four, while the BJP and the CPI(M) bagged two seats each in the state. By PTI NEW DELHI: India Wednesday expressed disappointment soon after China blocked yet another move at the United Nations to designate Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed's chief Masood Azhar as a "global terrorist". In its reaction, the External Affairs Ministry, without naming China, said the UN's 1267 Sanctions Committee was not able to come to a decision on the proposal to list Azhar on account of a member country placing the proposal on hold. The proposal was a fourth such bid at the UN in the last 10 years to list Azhar as a global terrorist. China has been blocking the moves. The External Affairs Ministry said India will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that leaders of terror groups involved in heinous attacks on Indian citizens are brought to justice. "We are disappointed by this outcome. This has prevented action by the international community to designate the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a proscribed and active terrorist organisation which has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on February 14," the MEA said. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, the UK and the US on February 27, nearly two weeks after the Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed. The JeM had claimed responsibility for the attack. "We are grateful for the efforts of the Member States who moved the designation proposal and the unprecedented number of all other Security Council members as well as non-members who joined as co-sponsors. We will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens are brought to justice," the MEA said. The Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee members had 10 working days to raise any objections to the proposal. China put a hold on the proposal just before the deadline to raise any objection to the move was coming to an end. An inkling of China's stand on the issue came during it's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang's press conferences on Monday and Wednesday in Beijing when he was asked about the proposal to list Azhar as a global terrorist by the UNSC. In 2009, India moved a proposal by itself to designate Azhar. In 2016, India again moved the proposal with the P3 -- the United States, the United Kingdom and France -- in the UN's 1267 Sanctions Committee to ban Azhar, also the mastermind of the attack on the airbase in Pathankot in January 2016. In 2017, the P3 nations moved a similar proposal again. However, on all occasions, China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Security Council, blocked the proposals from being adopted by the Sanctions Committee. China intends to build 6,800-km railway, including 3,200-km of high-speed railway, with $119-billion investment by 2019, Lu Dongfu, Party chief of China Railway Corporation, also a National Peoples Congress deputy, revealed at the ongoing Two Sessions. The intended railway lines will cover projects linking Beijing, Hebei, and other major locations across the country, as well as 14 remote and destitute areas, which accounts for two-third of Chinas railway infrastructure investment ,Lu Dongfu said in an interview with Peoples Daily on Friday. In particular, the engineering feasibility study report on the Sichuan-Tibet Railway is expected to be finished by June this year and construction will start soon afterward, Lu said. The railway climbs from southwest Chinas Sichuan province, which is located several meters above sea level, to the Roof of the World of Tibet Autonomous Region in southwest China, which has an attitude of over 4,400 meters. In addition to increasing coverage, China will also enhance its Fuxing bullet train this year. The number of this bullet train will be expanded to 450 pairs. Meanwhile, the trains cafeteria and Wi-Fi services will also be improved by the end of the year. Since the first high-speed train at a designed speed of 350km/h put into service in 2008, China has cumulatively constructed 29,000-km of high-speed railway, which occupies more than two-third of worlds total mileage, creating a miracle in engineering construction. The popularization of Chinas bullet trains has greatly benefited the Chinese people. Some 9.95 billion trips were made by the end of last month with an annual increase over 30%. Jyoti Punwani By Four chance encounters after Pulwama proved once again what this writer has always felt, that social media is not reflective of ground reality. The war cries drowning WhatsApp groups after at least 40 CRPF jawans were blown up in Kashmir on February 14, made one believe that the entire country was engulfed in war hysteria. After all, WhatsApp is now a national addiction. But casual conversations with three men, far removed from one another in social background, reassured me that social media had not completely killed common sense. The questions asked by an auto driver, a doctor and a lawyer in three separate social milieux in Mumbai were similar. The attack had left them wondering how such a large quantity of RDX could have got through the innumerable security personnel stationed in the Valley. And why had the warnings of the possibility of such an attack not been heeded? These three men are far removed from the anti-nationals who doubt everything the ruling party says. The lawyer, in fact, has represented the BJP government a number of times. Their questions sprang partly from J&K Governor Satya Pal Maliks admission of a failure of intelligence, which had been front-paged in all newspapers the day the Pulwama attack made headlines. Their uneasiness about the timing of these two events were confirmed by BJP veteran Yeddyurappas declaration that the Balakot strike would help his party sweep Karnataka in the coming elections. Soon after, the Jharkhand BJP president made the same prediction for his state. Even if these two leaders had not spelt this out, the politicisation of Pulwama and Balakot by the ruling partys topmost leaders have been obvious to even those not politically inclined. The faces of the slain jawans and that of the freed Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman have formed the backdrop to stages where election rallies have taken place, and hoardings asking for votes for the ruling party. You dont need the brother of a slain jawan to tell you that the politicians milking the death of the jawans dont bother to visit their families. But are these politicians merely reflecting the national mood? Does the nation in fact want war, as social media suggests? This brings me to the fourth encounter I had a few days after Pulwama with two vegetable vendors from Tamil Nadu. A casual remark by a customer on the poor quality of vegetables available these days was enough for the father-son duo to launch into a diatribe against the kind of development being pursued, that was destroying not just their livelihoods, but the earth itself. As they railed angrily against once pristine rivers getting polluted, expressways, the mining of ancient hills, and police firings on and mysterious disappearances of those protesting all this, a conversation with them five years back played out in my brain. I recalled their belligerent words that their vote would be for Narendra Modi, because only he could put Pakistan in its place. Today, these vendors are not alone in being besieged by fears that have nothing to do with Pakistan. It might seem unbelievable, but the struggles for survival being waged by large sections have not come to a standstill after Pulwama and Balakot. Indeed, a day after the Balakot strike, the Centre had to beseech the Supreme Court to stay its order to 21 states to evict almost 12 lakh tribals from forests. The war cries could not stop tribals from marching in large numbers across states, including the capital, to get the Centre to act. No fear of being labeled anti-national stopped Dalits, angry at the slashing of reserved posts by the 13-point roster system, from joining tribals in imposing a Bharat Bandh last week. Be it hugging trees slated for cutting for another unnecessary road in Nagpur, or working class commuters in an overcrowded hall in Mumbai complaining about the hardships caused by the deliberate reduction of buses by what was once the countrys best public transport corporation, urbanites are leaving their TV sets and actually taking to the streets to fight for whats dear to themand its not war. Maharashtras kisans embarked on yet another long march to its capital days after Pulwama; and in Uttar Pradesh, teachers in Lucknow and traders in Kanpur struck work and blocked the streets. Not even the shock of Pulwama could make the Gujjars of Rajasthan agitating for reservation get off the train tracks; they called off their agitation only after the Rajasthan government gave in to their demand. There exists this world too, though it doesnt figure in WhatsApp groups, and the press pushes it to the inside pages. But to discover it, we need to turn away from the overwhelming stranglehold of social media and the screaming television anchors enacting war in their studios. We need to also make the effort of looking beyond the headlines and front pages of our newspapers. It would be worth the trouble to do all this to discover that war is not exactly the topmost concern of our fellow citizens. Jyoti Punwani Freelance journalist based in Mumbai Email: jyoti.punwani@gmail.com By Express News Service NELLORE: In a major setback to the TDP, Venkatagiri municipal chairperson Donthu Sarada, along with two other councillors, joined the YSRC in the presence of party chief YS Jagan Mohan Reddy in Hyderabad on Tuesday. Two councillors Challa Mallikarjuna and Kasa Parameswari of Venkatagiri municipality and TDP leader from Dakkili A Mallikarjuna Reddy shifted their loyalties to the YSRC on the occasion. According to sources, the TDP had bagged 22 wards out of 25 in Venkatagiri municipality. Of the 22 councillors, 11 are reportedly against local MLA Ramakrishna. There was also animosity between Donthu Sarada and the MLA as the former had been doing charity works in Venkatagiri municipality without his knowledge. She has donated `3,000 to `5,000 personally to each family, who lost their family members. Venkatagiri MLA had allegedly warned the chairperson to stop her charity works in the area. Despite warnings, Sarada continued her activities. With this, the gap widens between the two. Even the MLA has taken up development works in the civic body limits without informing the chairperson. At one point of time, Sarada had decided to resign from the TDP. But, Municipal Administration Minister P Narayana, Water Resources Minister Somireddy Chandramohan Reddy and TDP district president B Ravichandra convinced her and assured that they would resolve the issue soon. They also held discussions with the MLA. Even after repeated discussions with Ramakrishna, there was no change in the situation. Ramakrishna had been trying to dominate the chairperson. He had not given any priority to the chairperson several times in the council meetings, said a follower of Sarada. By PTI BENGALURU: After weeks of speculation and tough negotiations, the coalition partners in Karnataka have finally reached an agreement on seat sharing for the Lok Sabha polls. While JD(S) will be contesting eight seats, Congress will put up its candidates in 20 seats. The deal was inked in Kochi on Wednesday evening where JD(S) General Secretary Kunwar Danish Ali met Congress chief Rahul Gandhi. Interestingly, Alis attempt to meet Rahul earlier in the day in Delhi had failed. As per the agreement, JD(S) got to retain its fiefdoms Hassan and Mandya and, for all the hard bargaining it had done earlier for 10-12 seats, it got Bangalore North, Shimoga, Udupi-Chikmagalur, Bijapur, Uttara Kannada and Tumkur. Congress gets the remaining 20 seats including all those where it has sitting members, except Tumkur, which is presently represented by Muddahanume Gowda. The MP had migrated to Congress from JD(S). Congress General Secretary in-charge of Karnataka, KC Venugopal, said, The deal has been approved by Congress president Rahul Gandhi. While some political watchers say, the seat-sharing shows that Gowda has had the last word as Congress had to give up Tumkur despite leaders like Siddaramaiah and G Parameshwara stoutly maintaining that sitting MPs will not be disturbed, others say Congress prevailed over Gowda because the party still got to keep JD(S) down to eight seats, while Gowda had been speaking of sharing seats in 1:2 ratio. Reacting to the development, JD (S) leaders termed it as a give-and-take deal and that they are satisfied with it as they have got Tumkur, Bijapur and Uttara Kannada which they had been demanding. Apart from other seats, JD (S) was keen on getting Chikaballapur, Chitradurga and Kolar, which are held by Congress MPs, and the Mysuru-Kodagu seat in Siddaramaiahs home district. Sources said the JD(S) insistence on those seats had delayed the process. By Express News Service MYSURU: Sumalatha Ambareesh, wife of late actor-politicians MH Ambareesh, dug her heels in as she made her intentions clear on Tuesday. I will contest from Mandya. I will not go back on my word or rethink, said the actor. Appealing to people not to believe rumours being spread, she said that she would not go back on her decision. Her only confusion was whether she would contest independently or on a Congress ticket, and this would become clear before March 18, she said. A few people are using social media to mislead voters, Sumalatha said. She said she believes in the faith and emotional attachment of the people and the blessings of Ambareesh, and no one can stop her from contesting. J Santhosh By Express News Service CHENNAI: Prime minister Narendra Modi is a big fan of smartphone apps. The Swachhata app, through which citizens can register complaints regarding sanitation issues, was one of the many smartphone apps that was launched by his government. The front end of the app is simple - one can lodge complaints on things, say like uncleared garbage, and get it redressed. But if one looks at the back end of the app, it lays bare how the union government in the last five years has intruded into the domains of the State and municipal governments through things as innocuous as algorithms of smartphone apps, political observers say. Let's see how. The Swachhata app was indeed helpful for the common people. But what is invisible to the eyes is that all the complaints raised in the app would be routed through the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. The union ministry holds the local municipal corporation officials accountable for addressing the sanitation issues. It is good that the common people may get the garbage in their street cleared, but that the union government is getting involved in sanitation, a domain of the state government as per the Constitution, altered the very basic structure of governance followed since Independence, it is pointed out. What is under threat are the powers enjoyed by state governments and whether the state governments which are much closer to the people and reflect the popular sentiments better than the union government - are losing their hold on domains granted to it by the Constitution. Since the Indira Gandhis regime, it was under Modis rule that the urge to centralise powers at New Delhi starting from sanitation to education was keenly felt. Almost every non- BJP chief minister had raised concerns over the Centre encroaching on the powers of the state governments. In Tamil Nadu, the most talked about episode was Governor Banwarilal Purohits visits across the State, collecting petitions from people and his direct meetings with state government officials. Governors, being representatives of the union government, are just a figurehead of the State. But when faced with criticisms for intruding into the realm of the State government, the Raj Bhavan (Governors residence and office) released a legal opinion which claimed that the Governor has all powers that state ministers have. It was not just Governor Purohit in Tamil Nadu, even Prime Minister Narendra Modi directly held meetings with District Magistrates in a few States, clearly bypassing the chief ministers of those states, observers say. Defence Minster Nirmala Sitharaman also held a review meeting with district collectors in Tamil Nadu - things that never took place during the rule of J Jayalalithaa a or M Karunanidhi. The Central governments involvement in domains of state governments was not just tokenism in terms of union minister directly interacting with the bureaucracy in the States. Under the Smart City scheme, all the major infrastructure projects in the cities were tightly regulated by the Central government in the form of norms it set for the state governments to avail the funds. Though the state governments also contributed funds for the infrastructure projects under the Smart City scheme, the decision making power was skewed in favour of the union government. The most far-reaching impact was on the finances of the state governments. Introduction of Goods and Services Taxes, among other things, had taken away the powers of the state governments in collecting taxes and had made them highly dependent on the union government for funds. The commanding position the union government achieved in terms of control over the public funds was evident when Prime Minister Modi declared in a public meeting in October 2017 that the union government will not release funds to those States that are against development. Modi had often stressed on cooperative federalism when talking about relations between the Centre and States. But when state governments were told to follow the instructions of the Centre, the state governments in turn did not get much. The refusal of the Central government to exempt Tamil Nadu from National Entrance and Eligibility Test (NEET), despite the unanimous resolution passed by the state assembly, is an example. By PTI NEW YORK: Amid talk that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen again lied to Congress, Cohen's lawyer sent a letter Tuesday to the head of the House Oversight Committee clarifying Cohen's testimony that he never sought a pardon from the president. Michael Monico told Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., in the letter that Cohen, once President Donald Trump's personal attorney, had asked his lawyer to explore the possibility of a pardon before Cohen left a joint-defense agreement and turned against Trump last June. Cohen hasn't done so since Monico said. Monico denied Trump's claim, in a tweet last week, that Cohen had personally asked him for a pardon. Cohen's public committee testimony last month "could have been clearer and more complete" when it came to pardons, Monico wrote in the letter obtained by The Associated Press. Cohen's remarks about not seeking a pardon pertained to the time after his split from Trump, Monico said. "In retrospect, while the sentence could have been clearer regarding the time frames, the sentence is true, and Mr. Cohen stands by his statement," Monico wrote. Cummings' office didn't immediately respond to messages. Congressional investigators appeared to be zeroing in on the president's pardon power as Democrats embark on a series of sweeping investigations into Trump's political and personal dealings. Cohen declared under oath on Feb. 27 that "I have never asked for, nor would I accept, a pardon from President Trump." That statement, with millions of people watching on television, set off a firestorm that culminated on Friday with Trump's tweet calling Cohen a liar and alleging he had "directly asked" for a pardon. Before that, Cohen's lawyer and spokesman, Lanny Davis, and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani went back and forth in dueling interviews, trading their own versions of events. "Bad lawyer and fraudster Michael Cohen said under sworn testimony that he never asked for a Pardon," Trump tweeted. "His lawyers totally contradicted him. He lied! Additionally, he directly asked me for a pardon. I said NO. He lied again!" Cohen, who is slated to begin a three-year prison sentence in May, denied that in a tweet of his own minutes later. He called Trump's allegations "just another set of lies." Monico reiterated that denial in his letter to Cummings, saying Cohen never asked Trump for a pardon and that Trump never offered one. Monico said Cohen had asked his previous lawyer to ask about a possible pardon after an FBI raid on his New York City home, office and hotel room in April 2018 because Trump had "publicly dangled the possibility of pardons when commenting about ongoing investigations." "With that in mind, as a past member of the joint defense team, Mr. Cohen asked his then-attorney to discuss with another Trump attorney possible pardon options consistent with the President's prior public declarations," Monico said. Nothing ever came of that effort, he said. Giuliani said last Thursday he was contacted in May or June about a possible pardon for Cohen. He said his answer was that the president "is not going to consider or give any pardons now." "As I have said in the past, the president has the right to, and that doesn't mean he won't consider it when the investigation is over," Giuliani said. "But there are no plans to do so." As the controversy grew over Cohen's pardon remarks, his legal team stressed that he was one of Trump's closest confidants and if he wanted a pardon, he would have just asked Trump himself. There is nothing inherently improper about a subject in a criminal investigation seeking a pardon from a president given the president's wide latitude in granting them. But investigators want to know if the prospects of presidential pardons were somehow offered or used inappropriately. Congressional investigators are also looking into whether anyone on Trump's legal team tried quietly to reach out to Cohen last year before he turned on the president and as his legal problems mounted. The House Judiciary Committee, which is conducting a probe into possible obstruction of justice, corruption and abuse of power, sent letters to the FBI, the Justice Department and others for documents related to possible pardons for Cohen, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. All three have been charged in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible coordination between Russia and Trump's presidential campaign. By PTI ADDIS ABABA: Ethiopia said Wednesday it would send the black boxes from last weekend's deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash to Europe for analysis as urgency mounted for answers amid safety concerns for the Boeing 737 MAX 8. The second deadly crash involving the plane type in less than six months prompted governments worldwide to ban the American aerospace giant's bestselling jet from their airspace. The move has heaped pressure on Boeing to provide proof the workhorse is safe. In Ethiopia, families of victims were taken to the remote site Wednesday where the plane smashed into a field with 157 passengers and crew from 35 countries, leaving a deep black crater and tiny scraps of debris. Ethiopian Airlines spokesman Asrat Begashaw told AFP the company would decide by Thursday which country would examine the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder recovered from ill-fated Flight ET 302. ALSO READ | Ethiopian plane crash: UN consultant Shikha Garg's husband to bring back her mortal remains "We are going to send it to Europe, but the country is not specified yet," said Asrat. Another airline spokesman, Biniyam Demssie, said Ethiopia did not have the equipment to read the black box data, which it is hoped will provide crucial information about what happened. The Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 was less than four months old when it went down six minutes into a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi on Sunday, disintegrating on impact. Asrat said families of the victims from Kenya, China, America, and Canada, as well as diplomatic staff from embassies, were at the crash site. "Many of them, families and friends, they arrived, and they are on site." Experts have pointed out similarities to the crash of an Indonesian Lion Air jet last October, killing 189 passengers and crew. Both planes reportedly experienced erratic steep climbs and descents as well as fluctuating airspeeds before crashing shortly after takeoff. Questions have honed in on an automated anti-stalling system introduced on the 737 MAX 8, designed to automatically point the nose of the plane downward if it is in danger of stalling. According to the flight data recorder, the pilots of Lion Air Flight 610 struggled to control the aircraft as the automated MCAS system repeatedly pushed the plane's nose down following takeoff. ALSO READ | India bans Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft after Ethiopian Airlines crash The pilots of the Ethiopian Airlines plane reported similar difficulties before their aircraft plunged into the ground. Boeing came in for criticism after the Lion Air crash for allegedly failing to adequately inform 737 pilots about the functioning of the anti-stalling system. Demssie told AFP the pilots of the doomed flight had been trained. For "every new technology, we provide training at Ethiopian Airlines," he said. On Sunday, the company's CEO Tewolde GebreMariam said captain Yared Mulugeta Gatechew, 29, was an experienced aviator with more than 8,000 flight hours. Tewolde told CNN Wednesday there were "significant similarities" between the Lion Air and ET 302 crashes. "There are a lot of questions to be answered on the airplane." In a separate interview with BBC, he called for all Boeing 737 MAX models to be grounded. A dozen airlines have grounded the plane, while Lebanon, Egypt, Serbia, Vietnam, New Zealand and Hong Kong became the latest countries to ban it from their airspaces Wednesday. All European Union countries, as well as major hubs such as the United Arab Emirates and Australia have already done so. ALSO READ | Boeing 737 Max ban: Aviation ministry calls contingency plan meeting at 4 pm "At this early stage of the related investigation, it cannot be excluded that similar causes may have contributed to both events," the EU aviation agency said. Low-cost airline Norwegian Air Shuttle has said it will demand financial compensation from Boeing, as the implications of the mass grounding for the airline industry remained unclear. The United States, however, is resisting calls to ground the MAX series, which is Boeing's fastest-selling model, with more than 5,000 orders placed to date from about 100 customers. "Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft," Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Daniel Elwell said in a statement on Tuesday. There are about 350 MAX 8s in service around the world. Thomas Anthony, head of the Aviation Safety and Security Program at the University of Southern California, said increasing automation of planes means crews have less experience flying manually. "So it's not just a mechanical, it is not just a software problem, but it is a problem of communication and trust," he said. By PTI WASHINGTON: Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar meets the criteria to be designated as a "global terrorist" by the UN and China's opposition to the move counters a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, the US has said. State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino's remarks came on the eve of a crucial decision by the UN Security Council on listing Azhar as a global terrorist. The JeM, headed by the 50-year-old Azhar, carried out many terror strikes in India and was involved in the attack on Parliament, the Pathankot air force base, army camps in Jammu and Uri. ALSO READ | 'Responsible solution' can only come through talks: China on UN banning Masood Azhar It also claimed responsibility for the February 14 Pulwama suicide attack which left 40 CRPF personnel dead. In the aftermath of the Pulwama attack, three permanent members of the UNSC - the US, Britain, and France - have moved a resolution to designate Azhar as a global terrorist under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council. All eyes are on China, which has in the past blocked India's bids to get Azhar listed as a UN-designated global terrorist. "Azhar is the founder and the leader of the JeM, and he meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations," Palladino told reporters at his daily news conference. The JeM, he said, has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability and peace. The US and India work closely together on counterterrorism efforts, and that includes at the United Nations, he added, noting that their views on the JeM and its founder are well known. However, he refrained from making a direct comment on the deliberations inside the UN on this issue. "The United Nations Sanctions Committee, their deliberations, are confidential, and as such we don't comment on specific matters, but we'll continue to work with the Sanctions Committee to ensure that the designation list is updated and accurate," Palladino said. "The United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal," Palladino said in response to a question on previous successful attempts by China to block the UN designation of Azhar. China, which is one of the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council, blocked India's efforts in the past to list Azhar as a global terrorist, saying there is not enough evidence against him. Amidst a mounting global outrage in the wake of the Pulwama attack that led to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan, the US, Britain and France hope that Beijing would act wisely and would not oppose their move this time. By Online Desk The cow is considered a divine animal in India. Cow meat (beef) is a big deal and has even cost several lives. Hindus worship cows and the holy animal is often referred to as mother. For this Hindu man in New Zealand, it was nothing less than a nightmare when he got to know that he ate beef mistakenly. The blame is on the supermarket that misguided him. According to Stuff, Jaswinder Paul bought 'lamb' from Countdown Blenheim supermarket in September last year. Only on cooking and eating it did he realise it was not lamb but beef. Now, Jaswinder wants the supermarket to pay for his trip to India to 'cleanse' himself. The reason he is insistent - he has to close the shop he runs to visit home and forgo the income from there. He claimed his family had not spoken to him since the day he mistakenly ate the beef and told them of it. Speaking to Stuff, Jaswinder said, "According to my religion, I have to go back to my country and do sacred things for four to six weeks and be purified by priests, so I can continue on my religious path. It's a long process." Jaswinder had in fact approached the supermarket in September 2018 itself with his complaint. A spokeswoman representing the supermarket admitted the error was at their end. They apologised and offered him a replacement too. A gift voucher worth $200 was also given. But, Jaswinder didn't respond. Now, several months later, he has approached the supermarket and asked them to help him cleanse himself. "I don't want to go to court against a big corporation. I just want to go home. I understand this looks like a simple matter, but for me this is very hard. I break my religion (vows) because of someone else's negligence. I know my society back from my home will not accept me with this breach of the religion's conditions," he told the paper. By AFP ROME: Women's rights defenders protested outside an Italian court on Monday after it emerged that two men accused of rape were cleared by female judges because the alleged victim looked "masculine". "For shame!" shouted about 200 demonstrators gathered at the court of Ancona in central Italy, accusing the justice system of misogyny and a "witch hunt", according to video footage posted by Italian media. The reasons behind the 2017 acquittal were only made public on Friday when the country's highest court of appeal ordered a retrial, according to the Cronoche Ancona daily. The men, both Peruvians, had initially been convicted in 2016 of raping a Peruvian woman in 2015, but the Ancona appeals court threw out the charges, saying the woman's story was not believable. The woman had claimed one of the men raped her while the other stood guard after they had spiked her drink with drugs. Doctors said her injuries were consistent with rape and found traces of a date rape drug in her blood. But the judges ruled it was "not possible to exclude the possibility that it was" the alleged victim who "organised the 'exuberant' evening," according to the reports. They said the man accused of rape "didn't even like the girl, to the point of having stored her number in his phone under the nickname 'Viking', an allusion to an anything but feminine figure, rather a masculine one". "The photograph present in her file would appear to confirm this," they added. The case will be reheard from scratch by a court in Perugia at at date yet to be determined. China Post issued a commemorative stamp to mark the 40th National Tree Planting Day in Beijing on March. 11, one day ahead of the countrys arbor day. The stamp is the first one in China released to commemorate the National Tree Planting Day. With a face value of 1.2 yuan ($0.19), the commemorative stamp bears the image of a green tree. The trunk of the tree is designed based on a pair of forearms, and the branches are embodied in palms and fingers. The stamp is designed to call for the public to plant trees and improve ecological environment. In the center of the tree shows the figures 3.12, the date of the National Tree Planting Day, and above the figures are leaves ornamented by cityscape, rivers and mountains, as well as birds and white clouds. The stamp carries the best wishes of building clear water and lush mountains for a beautiful China via plantation. It is printed with special green ink, which enables the tree in the stamp to present a different look under ultraviolet, such as the number 40 signifying the 40th National Tree Planting Day, and the Chinese characters meaning jointly building a beautiful China by performing the duty of tree planting. Chinas National Tree Planting Day was set on March 12 on 1979 at the sixth session of the 5th Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress. At that time, Chinas forest coverage was only 12 percent. Now the figure has been lifted to 21.66 percent. In addition, the forest stock volume of the country also grew from 8.656 billion to 15.137 billion cubic meters, with man-made forest area topping the world. China has become a country of the worlds largest increase in forest resources, and the green increases in China contributed much to the global ecological governance and won high praise from the international community. By AFP KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia has closed 34 schools after hundreds of people fell ill when toxic waste was dumped into a river, the education minister said on Wednesday, warning the situation was getting worse. A lorry is believed to have dumped the waste in southern Johor state last week, sending toxic fumes across a wide area and causing those affected to display symptoms of poisoning such as nausea and vomiting. About 300 people, many of them children, received medical treatment after inhaling the fumes and scores have been admitted to the hospital, according to official news agency Bernama. Reports said it was unclear what type of poisonous gas had been emitted near the industrial town of Pasir Gudang. Education Minister Maszlee Malik said he visited the area and saw scores of students being brought by ambulance to a makeshift emergency centre. He then decided to order the immediate closure of 34 schools. "Unfortunately, the situation has become more critical," he said in a statement. "The education ministry views this seriously as it involves the lives of students and teachers and school workers." A man suspected to have been involved in dumping the waste will be charged in court as soon as Thursday, the environment minister said. He faces up to five years in jail if found guilty of breaking environmental protection laws. By PTI ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Wednesday expressed disappointment over India's decision to not issue visas to Pakistani journalists to cover the first meeting between the two countries on the Kartarpur Corridor. The meeting will take place on the Indian side of the Attari-Wagah border on Thursday. More than 30 Indian journalists covered the kartarpur ground breaking ceremony in Pakistan last year. They also met PM & were hosted by FM for a dinner during their stay #PakKartarpurSpirit (1/2) Dr Mohammad Faisal (@DrMFaisal) March 13, 2019 A Pakistani delegation will visit India on Thursday for the meeting, which would be followed by an Indian delegation's visit to Islamabad on March 28. Regrettable that #India has not given visas to #Pakistani journalists for the #kartarpur meeting tomorrow. Hope the #PakKartarpurSpirit & meeting tomorrow will bring a change for the better for people of both countries (2/2) Dr Mohammad Faisal (@DrMFaisal) March 13, 2019 India and Pakistan agreed to open up a special border crossing linking Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Pakistan's Kartarpur - the final resting place of Sikh faith's founder Guru Nanak Dev - to Dera Baba Nanak shrine in India's Gurdaspur district. The corridor will facilitate the visa-free travel of Indian Sikh pilgrims to Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur. By AFP ADDIS ABABA: Shimon Misha flew from Israel to Ethiopia to collect the remains of his colleague, Avi Matzliah, one of 157 people who died when a Boeing 737 crashed just minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa Sunday. "There is a mother and sister and brother. They're waiting for a body to bury," Misha told AFP Tuesday as he waited with other next-of-kin at the Ethiopian Skylight Hotel for news on the remains of lost loved-ones. He had gone to the crash scene, a blackened crater with debris scattered around it, hoping to find anything that had belonged to 49-year-old Matzliah, but he was prevented by investigators. Even though there is no body, "still there are sentimental parts they can find in this mess," said Misha. He added he was looking for Matzliah's tefillin -- a small leather box containing scripture that observing Jews wrap around their arm with a long strap. "We hope to find it because it's made of tough leather." ALSO READ | Ethiopian plane crash: UN consultant Shikha Garg's husband to bring back her mortal remains Matzliah had been on his way to close a business deal for telecoms firm Radwin, where he worked with Misha. Ethiopian Airlines has said Israel had two nationals on board Nairobi-bound Flight ET 302, which slammed into a field six minutes after liftoff early Sunday, killing 149 passengers and eight crew. Israel's consul to Ethiopia, Opher Dach, said rescue and recovery specialists had flown to Addis Ababa from Israel to "come to help". "According to the Jewish belief, we need to bring Jewish people to burial in 24 hours, maximum 48 hours," he told private broadcaster Citizen TV in Addis Ababa Tuesday. "We wanted to go in very quickly and start identifying everything", even pieces of clothing. "We think everything matters". For a Jewish funeral, a body or part of a body is needed, even blood, tissue, or DNA left behind on a person's personal items. My duty Most of the remains from Sunday's crash had been gathered in a hangar, said Dach, adding: "Hopefully, we will have some more information in two days' time." "It's my duty to bring Avi home," added Misha. "We never leave somebody behind." Ethiopian Airlines, meanwhile, was making arrangements for Kenyan relatives of lost passengers to travel to Addis Ababa. Kenya was hardest hit by the tragedy, with 32 citizens among the 157 people on the ill-fated flight, followed by Canada with 18. About two dozen UN staff were among the dead. ALSO READ | Ethiopia to send black boxes to Europe as questions mount over crash "Concerning families and relatives who'd like to travel, we're ready to... take them to Addis, give them accommodation, then constant updates will be given," the airline's Kenyan operations manager Yilma Goshu Gobena said. Kenyan mourners are expected to start arriving on Tuesday night. The airline, Africa's biggest, said Monday it had found the plane's two black boxes with cockpit voice and data recordings, which it is hoped will shed light on the cause of the tragedy. This was the second crash of Boeing's top-selling 737 MAX 8 passenger jet in less than six months -- all 189 people on board an Indonesian Lion Air flight died last October. Growing numbers of countries have banned the model from their airspace or grounded fleets since Sunday's crash. Ramananda Sengupta By Express News Service NEW DELHI: Intense Indian diplomacy to put Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Maulana Masood Azhar on the global terrorist list, came to nought on Wednesday with China placing a technical hold on the proposal at the UN Security Council meet in New York.The proposal was moved by France, the UK and the US on February 27, after a Jaish suicide bomber killed 40 CRPF soldiers in Jammu and Kashmirs Pulwama.The UNSC sanctions committee members had 10 working days to raise objections to the proposal. Shortly before the no-objection deadline ended at 3 pm New York time on Wednesday, China placed the technical hold. This is the fourth time in 10 years that China has blocked UN action against Azhar. Foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale, who is in Washington as part of the annual strategic dialogue, has been meeting several senior administration and government officials to convince China not to block the proposal again. ALSO READ: Jaish was used by Pakistan intelligence to target India during my tenure: Musharraf A disappointed foreign office later said, We will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens are brought to justice. Thanking countries that piloted the proposal to designate Azhar as a terrorist, the foreign office pointed to the unprecedented number of all other Security Council members as well as non-members who joined as co-sponsors. ALSO READ: Jaish propaganda machine continues to purr in Pakistan, nerve centre Rawalpindi China had earlier hinted that it would exercise its veto, though it was under pressure from the US and France. Azhar is the founder and the leader of the JeM, and he meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations, State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino told reporters at his daily news conference on Tuesday. The United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal, he said. The first proposal to proscribe Azhar was moved by India in 2009. ALSO READ: Pak military contradicts foreign minister, says Jaish does not exist in country The four attempts By PTI WASHINGTON: The US Senate on Wednesday confirmed another of Donald Trump's controversial picks for a powerful federal judgeship, as the president leaves an increasingly prominent mark on the nation's courts. Neomi Rao was confirmed on a party-line vote of 53-46 in the Senate, where Trump's Republicans hold the majority, despite her past writings that some critics have interpreted as blaming survivors of sexual assaults for being attacked. At 45, Rao now becomes a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most powerful benches in the country, replacing Brett Kavanaugh who endured a bitter confirmation battle last year after Trump named him to the US Supreme Court. During that hearing Kavanaugh faced allegations of sexual abuse dating back to his time high school. In Rao's own hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she distanced herself from some of her early writings, saying she penned them during "a time of exploration." ALSO READ | Brett Kavanaugh swings US Supreme Court to the right "If a woman drinks so much that she cannot choose, well, getting there is part of her choice," Rao wrote in a review while studying at Yale University in the early 1990s. Democrats were united against her. They accuse Rao, a lawyer who until now headed the administration's office of regulatory affairs, of weakening protections for consumers and the environment. The US Constitution stipulates that the president nominates federal and Supreme Court judges for life. The Senate has to date confirmed 90 of Trump's judicial nominees, as the president seeks to reshape the federal judiciary to make it more conservative. "Will soon be 145 Judges!" Trump tweeted at the weekend, referring to the dozens of his nominees awaiting confirmation for federal district courts and circuit appellate courts. Several of the vacancies in the 860 permanent judicial positions have been filled with jurists that earned stamps of approval from the conservative Federalist Society. Many of the new judges are young. Last week the Senate green-lighted Trump's pick Allison Jones Rushing to a US appeals court despite concerns about her experience. Born in 1982, she could spend several decades on the bench. MANILA, March 12 (Xinhua) -- China was the Philippines' biggest supplier of imports with 22.2 percent share of the total imports in January 2019, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) said on Tuesday. "Import bills to this country posted an increase of 24.5 percent or an amount of 2.01 billion U.S. dollars, from 1.61 billion U.S. dollars in January 2018," the PSA said. South Korea was placed second with an import value of 789.56 million U.S. dollars in January 2019 or a share of 8.7 percent, the PSA said, adding that imports from this country decreased by 12.3 percent, from 899.99 million U.S. dollars in January 2018. The PSA said Japan ranked the third, contributing 8.7 percent or an import value of 789.00 million U.S. dollars in January 2019. This recorded a decrement of 6.2 percent from the January 2018 value, amounting to 840.75 million U.S. dollars, the PSA added. The PSA said the United States came fourth with a 7.2 percent share of the total import bills in January 2019. "Its total import bills contracted by 7.3 percent, from 701.65 million U.S. dollars in January 2018 to 650.68 million U.S. dollars in January 2019," the PSA said. Thailand came the fifth with imports valued at 602.67 million U.S. dollars in the past January or a share of 6.7 percent. Import bills from this country increased by 11.7 percent, from 539.65 million U.S. dollars in January 2018, the PSA said. Philippines' total external trade in goods in January 2019 reached 14.31 billion U.S. dollars, reflecting an increase of 2.9 percent from the 13.91 billion U.S. dollars recorded value in January 2018, according to PSA. Of the total external trade, the PSA said 5.28 billion U.S. dollars or 36.9 percent were exported goods and 9.03 billion U.S. dollars or 63.1 percent were imported goods. Furthermore, the PSA said the Philippines' balance of trade in goods (BoT-G) increased to a 3.76 billion U.S. dollars deficit in January 2019, from 3.16 billion U.S. dollars deficit in January 2018. Wilkes County split between Congressional Districts 10 and 12 Wilkes County has been split between Congressional Districts 10 and 12. According to the maps finalized by the General Assembly, the majority of Wilkes County has been enveloped by Congressional... Chinas trade war does affect Georgias economy; Chris Clarke Chris Clarke, the CEO of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, broguth new facts to light during rotarys weekly meeting. The issue of globalization and the rise of China may seem... Cobb and Harden selected to play in Border Bowl Washington-Wilkes Tiger Varsity Football players Dalen Cobb and JoVares Harden have been selected to play in the annual Georgia vs. South Carolina Border Bowl football game. Scott Skadden, a broadcast... Chinas Micius, the worlds first quantum communication satellite, is able to preliminarily meet the demands of secure communication of relevant departments, said Pan Jianwei, a leading Chinese quantum scientist and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He made the remarks when introducing the progress of the self-developed satellite at a press conference for the second session of the 13th National Committee of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) on March 10. In the past two years, scientists have increased satellite-to-earth quantum key distribution by 40 times for the Micius, enabling the satellite to transmit 400,000 encryption keys just in one second, said Pan, who is also a member of the 13th CPPCC National Committee. Micius, also known as the Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS), has two main targets, Pan introduced. It aims to realize secure quantum communications between satellite and ground stations, and verify the non-locality of quantum mechanics raised by Albert Einstein at space scale. Micius outperformed our expectation, as it only took a couple of months to complete the scientific experiments that were planned to be finished in two years, Pan said. It allowed Pan and his team more time to improve the satellite in the past three years, and practical progress was made by the scientific experiments satellite. At present, the Micius only functions at night due to the interference from the strong sunshine at the daytime. According to Pan, he and his team are planning to build a medium-high-orbit quantum communication satellite to offer 24-hour services. The satellite will be able to generate encryption keys at any time, so as to fulfill the demand of information transmission in future commercial application, Pan said. Information security is closely related with public interests, and personal privacy is not the only sector concerned, Pan said. He took autopilot technology as an example, saying that a highly secured remote-control system is very much needed for future vehicles to prevent potential hacker attacks that might hinder driving safety. Quantum communication, featuring theoretical unconditional security, can significantly enhance the information security, Pan noted. Scientists are working hard to expand the coverage of quantum communication technology, and trying to lower the cost to have the public share the benefits of the technology at an early date, he added. Financial Secretary Paul Chan today explained the proposed amendments to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance. Speaking to reporters after a radio programme today, Mr Chan said he had heard the concerns raised by the business community regarding the proposed arrangement on extradition. He said: Firstly, the reason or the justification for the extradition must be an act that is considered to be criminal in both Hong Kong and the jurisdiction where this act has been committed. That is, it must be criminal in nature in both jurisdictions. Secondly, the court in Hong Kong will be the gatekeeper as there will be a court procedure in deciding whether the extradition is allowed. And there is full right of appeal for the individual concerned. He added Secretary for Security John Lee will further explain the proposal to remove any misunderstanding. He is in the process of collating views and suggestions. These concerns surely will be brought to his attention. In taking the matter forward, he will give these concerns due consideration, Mr Chan said. A Marange woman was recently sentenced to eight years in jail for killing her son because he had been sent home from school for not having a pen. Lydia Kahwema appeared before Mutare High Court judge Justice Hlekani Mwayera facing charges of culpable homicide and will serve eight years in jail after four years were suspended for five years on condition that she does not commit a similar offence. Prosecuting, Mr Malvern Musarurwa told the court that Kahwemas 13-year-old son, who was in Grade Seven, was sent home from school by his teacher on February 26 at around 9am because he did not have a pen. This annoyed his mother who assaulted him with an electrical cable all over his body several times. After the assault, she hit the boy against the wall several times until he started to bleed from the nose and mouth. He vomited and fell unconscious and was ferried to Mutare Provincial Hospital where he died on admission from the severe injuries. The boys body was taken to Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals for post-mortem were the doctors concluded that the cause of death was due to traumatic force. Herald Get the news faster. Tap to install our app. Access Newser even faster. Click here to install our app on your desktop. X (Newser) The most senior Catholic ever convicted of child sex abuse is on his way to an Australian prison, and a judge acknowledged Tuesday that there is a strong chance Cardinal George Pell will die there. Victoria state County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd sentenced the 77-year-old to six years in prison for abusing two 13-year-old choirboys in 1996, NPR reports. "I am conscious that the term of imprisonment ... carries with it a real, as distinct from theoretical, possibility that you may not live to be released from prison," he told Pell, who will be eligible for parole in three years and eight months. The former Vatican treasurer was once the church's No. 3 official. story continues below One of the two victims, identified in court as "J," said that while he is glad Pell is going to prison, "everything is overshadowed" by the appeal, which will be heard in June. The second victim, "R," died of a heroin overdose in 2014 and his family didn't learn of the abuse until after his death. Lawyer Lisa Flynn said R's father is glad there has been a conviction, but he believes the abuse destroyed his son's life and is saddened by a sentence he feels is too short, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. "Today has to be the start of the end of abuse within the Catholic Church," Flynn said. "This sentence may empower and hopefully will empower more survivors and victims to come forward." (Read more Cardinal George Pell stories.) The power of gratitude in the workplace If you knew that expressing gratitude to a colleague would improve their life and yours, would you do it more often? A new study by Portland State University researchers--business professor David Cadiz, psychology professor Cynthia Mohr, and Alicia Starkey, a recent Ph.D. graduate in psychology--together with Clemson State University professor Robert Sinclair, exhibits a positive relationship between expressed workplace gratitude, physical health and mental health. The study, "Gratitude reception and physical health: Examining the mediating role of satisfaction with patient care in a sample of acute care nurses," shows that being thanked more often at work predicted better sleep, fewer headaches and healthier eating, because it improved nurses' work satisfaction. Improving Self-Care in a Stressful Work Environment The study involved a group of Oregon nurses, a profession that has a particularly high rate of burnout. Cadiz discusses the findings and how applying the research can have a significant impact on quality of life and job retention by preventing stress-related illnesses and disease. "Nurses tend to have a thankless job. It's very physical, and they're often being screamed at by patients who are at their lowest. When nurses receive gratitude, it boosts them," Cadiz explains. "This type of study helps us understand how to keep nurses in the workforce in a healthy way. Nurses strongly align their profession with their identity and often look out for patients more than themselves. The gratitude matches up with their identity, gives them satisfaction in a job well done and ultimately increases self-care." Many people inherently connect their identity to their job and feelings of appreciation within their roles. Employers who understand and react to this can create positive social and economic change. Gratitude is Good Business From an organizational, policy and leadership perspective, Cadiz says that employers should create formal or informal opportunities for people to express gratitude. Including gratitude in a business plan is an essential step that many business leaders miss, and that omission can have financial consequences. "Employees that receive positive feedback are healthier, and that can impact the bottom line," adds Cadiz. "Preventing headaches and other stress-related symptoms means fewer sick days, and, in this case, cuts down the cost of replacement nurses and overtime pay." These small changes can have a dramatic fiscal impact over time, which can result in more staff, better pay rates and increased benefits. The big takeaway--express gratitude when you see someone doing a good job. A positive feedback loop impacts you and those around you, and can ultimately shape a healthier and happier community. ### This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. E-commerce has driven up sales of agricultural products through deeper infiltration in the countryside of southwest Chinas Guizhou Province in recent years. Hua Xi, an agent of Chinas online marketplace Taobao, is a witness of the changes that e-commerce has brought to the countryside of Tongren in Guizhou over the past 11 years. After college graduation in 2008, the 20-year-old of Dong ethnic group opened a shop on Taobao as a part-time job in Wenzhou, a fertile soil for small businesses. In 2012, Hua and her husband turned the part-time job into a full-time career and the business prospered under their efforts. I received hundreds of orders each day, and the sales volume of one underwear product even stood among the top three of the kind on Taobao, Hua said, attributing the achievements to the help of the booming e-commerce. In April 2015, Hua left Wenzhou to become an e-commerce entrepreneur under a Rural Taobao Project in Wanshan town of Tongren, her hometown. Thanks to the improvement of supporting policies such as e-commerce policies, logistics distribution, online payment and credit services, the Tongren site became Alibabas first city-level pilot Rural Taobao Project in the country. Im obsessed with selling local products to customers in other places and buying products for farmers via online platforms, Hua said. Under her efforts, local goods, including honey, wild kudzu root powder, hand-made rice noodles, and rice wine were sold to rest of the country. In recent years, e-commerce has acted as a pushing hand in Guizhous efforts to sell more local products to places out of the mountains, creating opportunities for targeted poverty alleviation, Hua said. In 2018, Hua set up a sales platform to boost sales of Guizhous agricultural products and local goods. The platform has over 110,000 members and 5,000 distributors. She believes that as e-commerce develops, more people would know about Guizhous local goods. In the same year, Hua was elected as a deputy to the National Peoples Congress (NPC), becoming the first national legislator from grass-root e-commerce entrepreneurs. Hua, who is also deputy secretary of the Tongren Municipal Committee of the Communist Youth League, said its her responsibility to help young people like her become rich. In addition to business environment, the term private economy was mentioned for eight times, and small- and micro-sized enterprises (SMEs) for twelve times in the government work report 2019, Hua said, adding that she is most concerned about private economy in the report. In Huas view, digital economy will drive common development of the entire industry chain, and the implementation of the digital countryside strategy will play an important role in increasing farmers incomes. As China is going through consumption upgrading, rural e-commerce entrepreneurs could sell high-quality goods to a larger market via e-commerce platforms. This is the value of e-commerce to increase farmers income and promote consumption upgrading, Hua said. (Newser) Patricia Dowdy, one of Stephen Hawking's former nurses, has been banned by a UK professional regulator for not providing adequate care to him, per the Guardian. Dowdy, 61, had cared for the theoretical physicist for eight years, but she was suspended in 2016 by the Nursing and Midwifery Council due to several misconduct allegations. These included financial misconduct, dishonesty, and not having the correct qualifications, among others. After a six-week private hearing, the NMC decided she'd failed her duty of care and hadn't learned from her mistakesshe will no longer be able to practice as a nurse. "The Hawking family are relieved this traumatic ordeal has now concluded and that as a result of the verdict, others will not have to go through what they suffered from this individual," a family statement noted. Family members thanked the council after the verdict, per the AP. story continues below Hawking was diagnosed in 1963 with motor neurone disease at the age of 21. Given just two years to live by doctors, he survived until last year; he died at his home in Cambridge, England, at the age of 76. The investigation was prompted after the scientist's three children lodged a complaint with the NMC, per the Times of London. The NMC's Matthew McClelland says he has "remained in close contact with the Hawking family throughout this case and I am grateful to them ... and others for sharing their concerns with us." Thursday will be the year anniversary of Hawking's death. (Read more Stephen Hawking stories.) (Newser) The pilot of a doomed Ethiopian Airlines flight reported having "flight control problems" soon before the crash, the airline's CEO says. "He was having difficulties with the flight control of the airplane, so he asked to return back to base," Tewolde GebreMariam tells CNN. The CEO says controllers granted captain Yared Getachew permission to return to Addis Ababa at around the same time the Boeing 737 Max 8 disappeared from radar, just six minutes into the flight. All 157 people on board died. GebreMariam says the airline believes the "similarities are substantial" with a Lion Air crash last October, which also involved a new Max 8 that went down within minutes of take-off. More: Still flying in the US. The FAA has refused to ground the Boeing 737 Max 8, leaving the US in an increasingly small minority, the BBC reports. The European Union, China, and Australia are among those that have banned the plane from their airspace. They were joined Wednesday by New Zealand, Thailand, and Vietnam. story continues below Black boxes . Ethiopian Airlines spokesman Asrat Begashaw tells the AP that the black boxes from the flight will be sent overseas, but they haven't decided which country they will be sent to. "What we can say is we don't have the capability to probe it here in Ethiopia," he says. . Ethiopian Airlines spokesman Asrat Begashaw tells the AP that the black boxes from the flight will be sent overseas, but they haven't decided which country they will be sent to. "What we can say is we don't have the capability to probe it here in Ethiopia," he says. A call to Trump . Sources tell Bloomberg that Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenberg called President Trump Tuesday to personally assure him that the Max 8 is safe. . Sources tell Bloomberg that Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenberg called President Trump Tuesday to personally assure him that the Max 8 is safe. Airplanes "too complex." The Muilenberg call came after tweets from Trump in which he questioned the safety of modern aircraft. "Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT," he tweeted, adding that "old and simpler" is often "far better." "I dont know about you, but I dont want Albert Einstein to be my pilot," he said. Statement from the FAA . Acting FAA administrator Daniel Elwell said late Tuesday that the agency's review of "aggregate safety performance from operators and pilots of the Boeing 737 Max ... shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. . Acting FAA administrator Daniel Elwell said late Tuesday that the agency's review of "aggregate safety performance from operators and pilots of the Boeing 737 Max ... shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. A "very cozy relationship. " The New York Times looks at the close relationship between the FAA and Boeing. The regulator has created a program that lets companies like Boeing choose employees to help certify their planes. "Its a very cozy relationship, said Jim Hall, the former head of the National Transportation Safety Board. The manufacturer essentially becomes both the manufacturer and the regulator, because of the lack of the ability of government to do the job. " The New York Times looks at the close relationship between the FAA and Boeing. The regulator has created a program that lets companies like Boeing choose employees to help certify their planes. "Its a very cozy relationship, said Jim Hall, the former head of the National Transportation Safety Board. The manufacturer essentially becomes both the manufacturer and the regulator, because of the lack of the ability of government to do the job. Bipartisan calls to ground planes. Lawmakers from both parties have called for use of the Max 8 to be suspended, but officials say they don't want to cause unnecessary fear, the Washington Post reports. "Those planes should be pulled down and inspected. The flying public is owed that, says former transportation secretary Ray LaHood, who served as a GOP congressman before joining the Obama administration. (A safety expert gave a telling answer when asked about the aircraft .) (Newser) President Trump's first veto is on the horizon. The Senate will vote Wednesday on a resolution demanding that the US end its military support of the devastating Saudi-led war in Yemen. The bipartisan resolution invoking the War Powers Act, seen as a rebuke of Trump, passed 56-41 in December following the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, but the Republican-controlled House did not take it up. It did pass the Democrat-controlled House last month, but will be voted on again. Citing "senators' rising anger" over a lack of accountability in the killing, the New York Times reports the resolution is expected to pass, though perhaps with fewer Republican votes than in December, when the White House warned of a presidential veto. story continues below It said the resolution "would harm bilateral relationships in the region and negatively impact the ability of the United States to prevent the spread of violent extremist organizations," per Politico. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a co-sponsor along with Republican Sen. Mike Lee, instead called it "enormously important and historic" in a Tuesday statement. "The humanitarian catastrophe has only gotten worse in Yemen, and our intervention there is every bit as unconstitutional as it was then," he said. If the resolution gets Trump's first veto, the second shouldn't be far off. Trump has said he will veto a resolution overturning the national emergency declaration to secure funding for his border wall, which the Senate votes on Thursday. More on that here. (See the toll of the Yemen war here.) (Newser) Their parents didn't even know they were pregnant when British couple Chloe Wilkinson and Patraic Walsh-Kavanagh unexpectedly welcomed their little one, 14 weeks early and thousands of miles from homein Singapore, where they are now stranded. The UK couple had been traveling around Asia and Australia since December 2017. Wilkinson found out she was unexpectedly pregnant in November of last year, and they decided to return home to the UK, at which time they planned to tell their families the happy news. But on their way home, during a two-day stopover in Singapore, Wilkinson was rushed to the hospital Feb. 19 with an infection. At 24 weeks pregnant, she found out she was at too much risk of preterm labor to fly home. On Feb. 26, baby Lorcan was born weighing just 1.9 pounds, per the Mirrorand it may be three months before he is stable enough to travel. story continues below In addition, the couple has been hit with $185,000 in medical bills, the BBC reports. The travel insurance they purchased before they left on their trip doesn't cover pregnancy, and without working visas they can't seek employment. As such, they've turned to crowdfunding: Walsh-Kavanagh's sister started a GoFundMe campaign that has so far raised more than $70,000. An update says the baby is "proving stronger than anyone expected." Wilkinson has been discharged from the hospital, and she and Walsh-Kavanagh are using money they made working in Australia to rent a flat near the hospital. "Lorcan's been fighting with all his might and we are bursting with pride at the strength he is showing so far," she says. "However, we are on our own, a 14-hour flight away from our family and friends, and it has been a very difficult start to parenthood whilst Lorcan remains in hospital." (World's tiniest baby boy survives.) (Newser) Nicholas Sandmann's promised lawsuit against CNN has arrived in federal court in Kentucky. For allegedly being painted as the "face of an unruly hate mob," the Covington Catholic High School student who stood face to face with Native American activist Nathan Phillips during a January incident at the Lincoln Memorial seeks $275 million in compensatory and punitive damages. His suit lists four CNN broadcasts and nine online articles as "defamatory" or falsely accusing the 16-year-old and his classmates of "engaging in racist conduct," per Reuters. CNN "took something straight off Twitter that had been in essence manipulated so that it told one story and they reported it as the truth," a lawyer tells Fox News. (A $250 million suit was filed against the Washington Post.) (Newser) A woman in Slovenia claims she slipped and accidentally cut off her own hand while sawing branches off a tree. Police, however, say the 21-year-old chopped off her hand on purpose, thinking it would set her up for life. For police, the life and injury insurance taken out in advance of the January incident is too convenient to overlook. Per ABC News and AFP, the unemployed woman with no source of income had made just two or three monthly payments on the coverage from five separate companies, which would've provided a lump sum of $430,000 after her injury, monthly payments of $3,388 for 10 years, and smaller payments after that. story continues below Instead of a payday, the woman and a 29-year-old relative are facing up to eight years in prison in Slovenia, where the average monthly net income is about $1,100. Per the BBC, two other relatives were detained but released. Police say the woman's family was complicit in the fraud involving a circular saw at their home in Ljubljana. They note relatives brought the woman to a hospital without the left hand, which had been severed above the wrist, because compensation would've been three times higher for a permanent disability. Police retrieved the hand, which was reattached. "Her hand is recovering well," per a police spokesperson. (Read more insurance fraud stories.) (Newser) David Mamet and Felicity Huffman go way back. The playwright/director had her as a student decades ago, but their 35-year history is outpaced by that of Mamet and Huffman's husband, William H. Macy. The men have been friends nearly 50 years, and "I'm crazy about them both," Mamet wrote Tuesday in an open letter in the wake of Huffman's arrest as part of the DOJ's college admissions bribery scandal. Deadline has his full letter, which opens with this: "I worked for very many years in and around our Elite Universities. I am able to report that their admissions policies are an unfortunate and corrupt joke." Mamet writes that unqualified students can get into top schools through myriad routes: being a legacy or having a large donation made can grease the wheels, for instance. story continues below "I do not see the difference between getting a kid into school by bribing the Building Committee, and by bribing someone else. But, apparently, the second is against the Law," he writes, noting it's "unfortunate" but a "universal phenomenon" for a parent to make a poor choice out of her "zeal for her children's future." He closes with how he thinks Huffman's case should be handled: Apply the "Texas Verdict": "Not Guilty, but Dont do it Again." As for whether something worse could befall Huffman and fellow indicted celeb Lori Loughlin if convicted, Today and People talk to legal experts who say prison time is a possibility, but likely a remote one. NBC legal analyst Ari Melber puts it like so: "You could imagine if they cooperate this not being the kind of thing where the feds want to jail a bunch of parents." (A January interview Macy gave is now somewhat awkward.) (Newser) Earth is sick with multiple and worsening environmental ills killing millions of people yearly, a new UN report says. Climate change, a global major extinction of animals and plants, a human population soaring toward 10 billion, degraded land, polluted air, and plastics, pesticides, and hormone-changing chemicals in the water are making the planet an increasing unhealthy place for people, says the sixth "Global Environment Outlook," released Wednesday at a UN conference in Nairobi, Kenya. But it may not be too late. "There is every reason to be hopeful," report co-editors Joyeeta Gupta and Paul Ekins told the AP in an email. "There is still time, but the window is closing fast." What you need to know: The report, issued once every few years, uses the word "risk" 561 times in 740 pages. But while "unsustainable human activities" have imperiled "the ecological foundations of society," changes in the way the world eats, buys things, gets its energy, and handles its waste could help fix the problems, the report notes. The report is "a dramatic warning and a high-level road map for what must be done to prevent widespread disruption and even irreversible destruction of planetary life-support systems," says Jonathan Overpeck, the University of Michigan's environment dean, who wasn't part of the report. story continues below The scientists said the most important and pressing problems facing humankind are global warming and loss of biodiversity because they're permanent and affect so many people in so many different ways. The report notes conservationists are divided on whether Earth is in a sixth mass extinction. While 1.5 billion people now get clean drinking water they lacked in 2000, water quality in many regions has worsened, the report says. Plastics and other litter have invaded every ocean at all depths, the report says. People getting sick from diseases caused by antimicrobial-resistant bacteria in water supplies could become a major cause of death worldwide by 2050 unless something can be done about it, the report says. Land is getting less fertile and useful. The report says degradation "hot spots," where it's difficult to grow crops, now cover 29% of all land areas. (Read more climate change stories.) We use cookies. By Clicking "OK" or any content on this site, you agree to allow cookies to be placed. Read more in our privacy policy (Newser) Del Hall has reasons for giving up all food for Lentinstead of just, say, chili dogsand relying solely on beer for calories. And those reasons are not what you might assume. He'd like to break his cycle of making bad food choices, Cincinnati.com reports. But mostly he wants to emulate 17th-century monks, who may or may not want to be dragged into this. "Just like the monks used to do it back in the 1600s, I'm going to do the same thing," Hall said in a YouTube announcement. "I really feel good when I fast," he added. He'll allow himself black coffee, unsweetened tea, and sparkling water, but no solid food. "My pendulum doesnt swing toward moderation," said Hall, who's the sales director for a brewer. story continues below There were indeed Catholic monks who relied on beer alone during Lent in the 1600s, CNA reports. Paulaner monks in Bavaria weren't allowed to have solid food during Lent. But they weren't consuming off-the-shelf brew. They made their own doppelbock-style beer, a strong drink packed with carbohydrates and nutrients. The monks later sold the beer, and the doppelbock sold today by the Paulaner Brewery is a descendant of the monks' Lenten brew. (This has been done before; see here and here.) Chinese Vice Minister of Science and Technology Zhang Jianguo speaks to the media after signing the agreement to set up the body called Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKA Observatory) in Rome, Italy, on March 12, 2019. An international treaty for the establishment of an intergovernmental organization overseeing the delivery of the world's largest radio telescope was signed here Tuesday. (Xinhua/Cheng Tingting) ROME, March 12 (Xinhua) -- An international treaty for the establishment of an intergovernmental organization overseeing the delivery of the world's largest radio telescope was signed here Tuesday. Ministers and high-level representatives from seven countries -- Italy, China, Australia, UK, The Netherlands, Portugal, and South Africa -- signed the agreement to set up the body called Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKA Observatory). Sweden and India should follow, after going through a domestic process of approval, bringing the list of founding members to nine. LARGEST SCIENCE FACILITY "The SKA will be the largest science facility on the planet, with infrastructure spread across three continents on both hemispheres," the SKA Organization said in a statement. Two networks of "hundreds of dishes and thousands of antennas" will be developed along hundreds of kilometres in Australia and South Africa, while the SKA headquarters would be in the UK. "This will be one of humanity's cornerstone physics machines in the 21st century, together with facilities like the James Webb Space Telescope, CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the LIGO gravitational wave detector, the new generation of extremely large optical telescopes, and the ITER fusion reactor," the organization added. Over the past five years, more than 1,000 engineers and scientists from 20 countries have been contributing to design the SKA Observatory, which was expected to "help address fundamental gaps in our understanding of the universe." Foe examples, experts explained, it would allow astronomers "to study gravitational waves and test Einstein's theory of relativity in extreme environments, investigate the nature of the mysterious fast radio bursts, map hundreds of millions of galaxies, and improve our understanding of the evolution of the universe." A REAL BEGINNING Presiding over the ceremony, Italy's Minister of Education, University, and Research Marco Bussetti hailed the signature of the treaty, which came at the end of a path started with a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) inked by eleven countries in UK in Aug. 2000. "The SKA project is the icon of the increasingly strategic role that scientific research has taken on in contemporary society," the Italian minister said. "Participating in the forefront of such an extensive international project is a great opportunity for the Italian scientific community, both for the contribution our many excellences can provide, and for sharing the big amount of data that SKA will collect and redistribute," he stressed. Processing the "unprecedented amounts of data emanating from the telescopes" will indeed require two of the world's fastest computers, with some 600 petabytes to be stored and distributed to the scientific community worldwide every year, according to the organization. A good return on investment for the countries and the companies involved in the project was also expected, with contracts worth about 700 million euros (789.9 million U.S. dollars) for the construction of the SKA due to be awarded from late 2020 on. "For a project that has been going on for a long time, and that has now had several years of very serious developments arriving at the end of the design phase, this signature is the real beginning," SKA Board of Directors Chair Catherine Cesarsky remarked in a video message. "This is a historic date that everybody will remember: SKA is a project that will be used for the next twenty, thirty, fifty years," the astronomer added. CHINESE CONTRIBUTION After signing the first MoU to establish the Int'l Steering Committee of the Square Kilometre Array in 2000, Italy was among the first countries involved in the project with its National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). China was also among the signatory countries of the 2000 Memorandum, and the Ministry of Science and Technology officially stepped in the SKA program in the pre-construction phase on behalf of the Chinese government in 2012. Since 2013, a dozen Chinese universities, industry and research institutes have taken part in seven design consortia, according to the official presentation. In a short declaration after taking part in the signature ceremony in the Italian capital, Vice Minister of Science and Technology Zhang Jianguo highlighted the importance China attached to the project. "With seven countries officially signing the SKA Observatory Convention today, we believe more members will join SKA in the near future," Zhang said. "We are certainly looking forward to working with all our partners... contributing Chinese strength for the world's largest radio telescope to explore the universe and Chinese wisdom to address the cosmic dawn, the cradle of life, and other common concerns of mankind." Tuesday's signature would now give way to the legislative ratification process in the signatory countries. The SKA Observatory could enter into force by 2020 at the earliest, and, in any case, after five countries including all three hosts (Australia, South Africa, and UK) have ratified. (Newser) Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was on Wednesday sentenced to 73 monthsbut just 43 of those months additional, reports CNNwith a judge in Washington showing him a small dose of mercy. In what the AP describes as a "calm and steady voice," Manafort read from a prepared statement, asking US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson to limit his prison time to the 47-month sentence he was handed last week in a separate case related to tax and bank fraud. He faced up to 10 years in this case. Jackson had the ability to make her sentence concurrent; Axios reports 30 months of Manafort's sentence will be served in that manner. More: All told, he'll serve 7.5 yearsrelated to these two cases. After news of his new sentence broke, more breaking news: The Manhattan DA's office has indicted Manafort on state charges alleging he ran a yearlong mortgage fraud scheme. The New York Times reports he faces 16 counts related to millions of dollars in loans he got after allegedly falsifying business records. Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr., said the investigation into Manafort, begun in 2017, "yielded serious criminal charges for which the defendant has not been held accountable." But that investigation was paused to allow federal prosecutors to also look into the loans; the Virginia case included counts related to them, and Manafort was found guilty. As such, the Times predicts Manafort's lawyers will cite double jeopardy in challenging the indictment. The AP reports New York's move is being viewed as a safeguard against a possible presidential pardon, as President Trump can only grant pardons in federal cases. story continues below Wednesday's sentence is tied to the 69-year-old's efforts to conceal his lobbying work for a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party from the government, and in court, Manafort offered an apology. In doing so, the Washington Post notes he acknowledged he didn't do the same before receiving his first sentence. ABC News has the specific lines: "In my previous elocution, I told Judge Ellis that I was ashamed at my conduct that brought me into his court, and for that, I said I took responsibility. Apparently I was not as clear at saying what was in my heart so for you I say to you now that I am sorry for what I have done." Manafort also cited his 66-year-old wife, for whom he is the primary caregiver: "She needs me, and I need her. I ask that you think of this and our need for each other as you deliberate today. Please let my wife and I be together." USA Today's take: "Manafort's abrupt transformation from a globe-trotting political operative with mansions and lavish clothing to a frail-looking, wheelchair-bound, gray-haired inmate who, in his own words, had been 'humiliated and ashamed,'" is now complete. (Read more Paul Manafort stories.) (Newser) With the Apollo 11 moon landing's 50th anniversary around the corner, Buzz Aldrin and his family are making peace. The storied astronaut is dropping a lawsuit against two of his children just as they stop seeking legal guardianship of the 89-year-old Florida resident, Florida Today reports. "This was the most charitable way to manage a difficult situation, as this year, which marks 50 years since we first step foot on the moon, is too important to my family, the nation and me," says Aldrin in a statement from a consulting firm. Things were uglier back in June 2018, when Aldrin filed a lawsuit accusing children Andy and Jan and longtime Aldrin business manager Christina Korp of abusing credit cards, concealing financial information, and slandering Aldrin by telling people he had Alzheimer's disease and dementia. story continues below Filed in response to Andy and Jan's guardianship move, Aldrin's suit also aimed to oust Andy as controlling trustee of an estate supervising memorabilia worth millions. Aldrin's kids said in return that "opportunistic agents" were exploiting him. Andy also ordered Morgan Stanley's private wealth-management division not to move assets from two accounts in the trust, or face damages, the Orlando Sentinel reported in February. But with Aldrin and his family organizing separate July moon-landing galashis at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, theirs at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and tickets up to $3,500 a pophe said the dismissals "will help restore family harmony." But he didn't mention their gala: "It will be an event to remember!" he said of his. "Onward!" (Read more Buzz Aldrin stories.) We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form Let us know what you're seeing and hearing around the community. Submit here This year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China. Over the past seven decades, Chinas diplomacy has forged ahead through various difficulties and hardships. The country has amazed the world as it is moving closer to the center stage. Such point can be further illustrated by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yis remarks at a press conference on the sidelines of the national legislatures annual session. He noted that Chinas diplomacy has established a fine tradition with distinctive features, including independence as the cornerstone of China's foreign policy, concern for the common good of humanity, pursuit of equity and justice, commitment to win-win outcomes, the mission of facilitating domestic development, and dedication to serving the Chinese people. What he said drew an outline of and presented the world with the core values of Chinas diplomacy. Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy is the fundamental guideline of Chinas diplomatic work in the new era, and it points the way for navigating through a complex array of issues in today's world. China firmly safeguards national sovereignty, security, and development interests, and devotes itself to the joint construction of a new type of international relations and a community with a shared future for mankind with other countries. It is creating beautiful scenery of the modern world. Chinas efforts to inject certainties to the world are obvious to all. Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia recently hailed the importance of China when reviewing the post-crisis situation of the world. It said that China stood out as a stabilizer when the world was facing huge uncertainties. The world is experiencing profound changes unseen in a century, as unilateralism impacts global systems, protectionism threatens world economy, and populism hinders national governance. Stability is necessary for the future peaceful development of the world. The more changes the world goes through, the more stabilizing factors are needed. Working together with global partners, China firmly protects the international systems with the United Nations (UN) as the core, defends the international rules based on international law, and builds an open world economy under the concept of multilateralism. These endeavors are no doubt precious contributions to the stability and development of the world. Chinas efforts to inject new energy to the common development of the world are universally recognized. The second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation (BRF), to be held under the theme of Belt and Road Cooperation, Shaping a Brighter Shared Future, is expected to boost high-quality development of the Belt and Road cooperation and mark the beginning of a new round of common development of China and related countries. The cooperation documents signed between China and 123 countries, as well as 29 international organizations on the joint construction of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) demonstrate the support and confidence of the international community for the Chinese scheme. China always practices what it plans. That is a compliment paid by the people from the Belt and Road countries. Against the backdrop of the global economic slowdown and the drop in the growth of international trade and investment, to broaden the BRI cooperation has become a common aspiration of more countries, as it will bring tangible benefits to the people. China is playing an increasingly prominent role in providing constructive solutions to the resolving of international hotspot issues. It has always adhered to equity and justice on international hotspot issues, and committed to the settlement of issues through peaceful dialogues and consultation, gaining wide trust of the world. Besides, China is also making efforts to create possibilities of and conditions for consensus expansion, playing a constructive role in promoting peace through talks. According to an investigation carried out in 133 countries and regions by American analytics and advisory company Gallup from March to December last year, international community has become more positive toward China. The public opinion exactly demonstrates the charm of Chinas diplomacy in the new era. Holding high the banner of building a community with a shared future for mankind, China is standing on the right side of history, and is standing by the common interests of the majority of the countries in the world. The major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics showcases Chinas generosity and responsibility, indicating that the country will make more and greater contributions to the world peace and development. Three former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Company have pleaded not guilty to professional negligence in connection with the 2011 nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Former TEPCO Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata and two former vice presidents were indicted on charges of professional negligence resulting in death and injury. All three have denied the charges. Lawyers for the executives gave their closing argument at the Tokyo District Court on Tuesday. The lawyers referred to an in-house report that management received three years before the accident. It said massive tsunami waves could hit Fukushima Daiichi, according to calculations based on the government's long-term assessment. They said the basis for the calculations was unreliable and that it was standard procedure to hand the matter over to the Japan Society of Civil Engineers for further consideration. The defense team denied the executives put off countermeasures, adding that it was impossible for them to foresee and prevent the accident. The trial, which began in June 2017, ended on Tuesday. The court is expected to deliver its sentence on September 19. The former CEO of Olympus, who blew the whistle in 2011 on a massive accounting scandal at the medical equipment maker, has won a London court battle over alleged wrongdoing linked to his A64 million (A9.4 billion) pension. The Olympus U.K. subsidiary KeyMed sued Michael Woodford and former company director Paul Hillman in 2016, alleging they had breached their duties as directors and trustees of a defined benefit pension plan and conspired to maximize their pension benefits by unlawful means. London High Court Judge Marcus Smith said Monday he saw no evidence of dishonest or improper conduct by the company veterans, adding that any failings identified by KeyMed could be attributable to aan innocent failure of processa in a busy company. aIn these circumstances, I find that the defendants acted honestly and did not breach the duties a dishonestly or at all,a he said in a judgment. Woodford, who joined KeyMed as a 20-year-old salesman in 1981 and rose through the ranks to become Olympusa first foreign chief executive in 2011, was fired two weeks into the top job after persistently querying unexplained payments. He then alerted global authorities and the media. Olympus initially said Woodford was fired for failing to understand its management style and Japanese culture. But the company later admitted it had used improper accounting to conceal investment losses, and restated years of financial results. In September 2012, the company and three former executives pleaded guilty in Japan to cover-up charges. Kagawa Prefectural Police have arrested a 36-year-old woman for allegedly strangling her mother to death at their residence in Takamatsu City on Monday, reports Fuji News Network At around 4:00 p.m., Chiho Nishida, of no known occupation, allegedly used an electrical cord to fatally strangle her mother, 66-year-old Etsuko. About seven hours later, Nishida telephoned her older sister, who lives outside the prefecture, to report that she and their mother had gotten into a fight. Her sister then alerted emergency services. Nishida shared the residence with her mother. Police arrested her on suspicion of murder early on Tuesday. During questioning by police, the suspect admitted to strangling her mother but denied ahaving an intent to kill,a police said. A 44-year-old man accused of fatally stabbing his father-in-law at the victimas apartment building in Kisarazu City over the weekend fled the scene after the crime via taxi, police revealed on Tuesday, reports TV Asahi According to police, Shoichi Ishikawa used a knife to stab Norihisa Ishikawa, a 71-year-old member of the Kisarazu City assembly, at the entrance of the 12th-floor residence on the night of March 9. After his wife alerted emergency services, Norihisa, who had suffered several stab wounds to his abdomen and back, was later confirmed dead at a hospital, police said previously. In the latest development, police have revealed that Shoichi boarded a taxi in front of a convenience store located approximately 1 kilometer from the residence about 4 hours after the crime took place. He then rode the cab to Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo, a drive that took approximately 1 hour. aIam came for work,a he told the driver. aBecause I have to return to Okayama I am in a hurry.a Upon exiting the cab at a bus station in Shinjuku, he handed the driver a blood-stained 10,000-yen note. Police subsequently apprehended Shoichi at an unspecified location in Tokyo early on March 10. At the time, he was in possession of a knife and an unspecified blunt weapon. Upon his arrest for murder, Shoichi partially denied the allegations. aI did not intend to kill,a the suspect was quoted by police. He was sent to prosecutors on Monday. Police are still seeking a motive in the case. In 2015, Norihisa was first elected to the assembly. Still serving his first term, he was scheduled to run in a unified local election in April. With the goal to increase domestic forest coverage to 23.04 percent by 2020, Chinese political delegates gathered in Beijing for Chinas Two Sessions, the nations top political meetings, and pooled their wisdom to achieve the target of Beautiful China. China has made significant progress in ecological construction and civilization in the past four decades. Specifically, forest coverage area has increased to 2.08 million square kilometers from 1.15 million square kilometers, bringing green coverage to 21.66 percent from 12 percent. In addition, the area of planted trees in the country has reached 78,670 square kilometers, ranking first worldwide. In terms of forest resource area and accumulation, China has maintained double-digit growth in recent years, which is faster and larger than any other country in the world during the same period, Liu Dongsheng, a deputy director of the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, said in an interview with Peoples Daily on Tuesday. Liu, also a member of National Committee of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), pointed out that the policy of returning farmland to forests benefits farmers. At present, forest conservation and other emerging industries account for one-third of local incomes, and more supportive policies will be introduced to further increase their earnings. To fulfill the target of Beautiful China, the country plans to resolve existing problems in nature reserves and strengthen their management via more comprehensive institutional and legal construction, according to Liu. Efforts at the community level are also necessary for the country to realize its target. Energy saving and low-carbon transportation should be popularized among citizens to stimulate green development, said CPPCC member Zhu Xiao, also vice president of Nanjing Normal University. The federal government has banned Boeing 737 Max airplanes from flying into Nigerias airspace following a fatal crash in Ethiopia over... The federal government has banned Boeing 737 Max airplanes from flying into Nigerias airspace following a fatal crash in Ethiopia over the weekend. (FEC) meeting, presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari. Hadi Sirika, minister of state, aviation, disclosed this to state house correspondents at the end of the federal executive council(FEC) meeting, presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari. Regarding Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9, that has been in the news recently, there is no cause for alarm as there is no operator in Nigeria that is using that type of airplane, he said. The Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority, whose mandate it is to issue advisory, has already issued advisory that nobody should fly into Nigeria or out of Nigeria using Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9, pending the determination of the actual cause of the crash in Ethiopia and also pending the outcome of the response of the manufacturer, which is Messers Boeing. Regardless of the enormous safety records of this plane 737, it has caused concern in the world of aviation and you know aviation is universal, whatever affects one affects the other because aircraft will be flying in and out. So, we have issued directive that no operator with Boeing 737 Max 8 or Max 9 should operate into and outside our airports and this is being carried out. He said although two Nigerian airlines had placed order for the model, it would take two years for the aircraft to be delivered. Sirika said two years is enough time for Boeing to rectify the problem leading to crashes. Regarding Air Peace and Arik orders, whether those orders were confirmed or intent, it is to our knowledge in the ministry that they wont be in the country until the next two years or so, he said. And this is enough period to sort out whatever problem it is with that plane. The world of aviation will not be sleeping just as we in Nigeria will not be sleeping. And it is normal standard practice that once a particular aircraft type is involved in accident back to back, it is withdrawn from the market and see if there is something they are doing wrong. And if it is confirmed that a particular problem say for instance, landing gear, they will issue an instruction to ground such plane worldwide until the problem is fix. The 157 persons on board the ill-fated aircraft were killed. Two Nigerians: Pius Adesanmi, a professor, and Abiodun Bashua, an ex-diplomat, lost their lives in the incident. Sundays crash was the second involving Boeing 737 Max 8 model in less than six months a Lion Air plane of the same model crashed in Indonesia in October last year, killing 189 people. According to Al Jazeera, Boeing has delivered about 350 of the approximately $120 million each 737 MAX 8s till date, with more than 4,500 in total ordered since 2017. Vice Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Peter Obi has expressed concern over fall outs from some states in t... Vice Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Peter Obi has expressed concern over fall outs from some states in the last Saturday gubernatorial and state assembly elections, particularly in Rivers state. He said that the President Muhammadu Buhari-led All Progressives Congress, APC, government had become so shameless in their desperation and have become brazen in perpetuating their rigging agenda. Obi urged the international community to take note of the oppression going on in Nigeria. The former Governor of Anambra state, in a statement Tuesday night, said that the militarization of election to the extent of carrying collation center to a military location and denying international observers access were clearly unacceptable and a grave breach of democratic norms. He said that needless involvement of the military has aggravated the situation in Rivers state and wondered why the undue interest in Rivers, a well known PDP stronghold. He said that the Rivers state Governor, Nyesom Wike should be the last to face this type of harassment given his popularity among his people. Obi stated that all reasonable persons within and outside the country who desire the growth and sustenance of democracy in this part of the world should rise up and condemn what is going on in Rivers state. Any reasonable person should know that Gov Wike is the last person to be harassed knowing what he has put in just in four years in the delivery of democracy dividend, he said. The Governor of Lagos State, Akinwunmi Ambode, on Wednesday, said that buildings within the vicinity of the collapsed building at Ita-Fa... The Governor of Lagos State, Akinwunmi Ambode, on Wednesday, said that buildings within the vicinity of the collapsed building at Ita-Faji, on Lagos Island, would be subjected to integrity tests. Ambode said this as he visited the scene of the collapsed three-storey building, which housed a primary school. He said that if any of the buildings failed the integrity test, it would be demolished. This area and building here will be undergoing an integrity test. As you can see some of the buildings have been marked for demolition We have been receiving pleas from house owners from the area. Notwithstanding, we will go ahead with the integrity test and any building that fails the integrity test will be demolished. Nollywood actor and filmmaker turned politician, Desmond Elliot, has thanked his constituency members as well as his family and politica... Nollywood actor and filmmaker turned politician, Desmond Elliot, has thanked his constituency members as well as his family and political associates for his victory at the Saturday gubernatorial and house of assembly polls which held in 27 states in the country on Saturday. Desmond, who sought re-election as member representing Surulere at the Lagos State House of Assembly, took to his Instagram account to show his appreciation. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you Surulere, Surulerians, Everyone, he wrote, attaching a thank you poster bearing ready to serve and with the All Progressives Congress, APC, logo emblazoned on it. Thank you for giving me another opportunity to serve. I promise to be better and give more than my best to make you proud. To those I may have hurt, offended, knowingly or unknowingly pissed off, ahh to those who can NEVER see anything good in me, Im very sorry. I dedicate this victory to God Almighty. To the memory of my Late Father Engr Emmanuel Elliott. My late Step mum. I dedicate this to all SURULERIANS you made it happen again. In several other posts, he then listed his political associates. The Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) yesterday arraigned one Ajayi Temitope Charles at the Kwara state High Court on a fi... The Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) yesterday arraigned one Ajayi Temitope Charles at the Kwara state High Court on a five-count charge on internet fraud. The accused person, who pleaded not guilty to all the charges before Justice M. Abdulgafar on Wednesday, was allegedly caught with a document in his possession with intent to defraud unsuspecting members of the public. In the first count against the accused person, who is also known as Teresa Simon, it was said that, on February 28, 2019, in Ilorin, he had in his possession document in his Gmail account containing false pretence, with intent to defraud, and thereby committed an offence contrary to sections 6, and 8 (b) of the Advance Fee Fraud and other related offences. It was also said that the accused person in the second and third count had in his possession document titled, Hangout with Rodney Dean, and Hangout with Paul Thompson, respectively, adding that he printed out the document from his Gmail account. Temitope Charles, who pleaded not guilty to all the charges when the charges were read to him, said in his statement that the male adult finder site on his system was meant to appear as a woman to find friends and nothing more. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Lagos Zonal office, on Tuesday, arraigned Ecobank Plc before Justice Saliu Seidu o... The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Lagos Zonal office, on Tuesday, arraigned Ecobank Plc before Justice Saliu Seidu of the Federal High Court sitting in Ikoyi, Lagos on a five-count charge bordering on conversion of funds to the tune of $50,000 and N9.2million. Ecobank is facing trial alongside one of its employees, Anieka Udoh. One of the counts reads: That you, Ecobank Plc and one Anieka Udoh, whilst being an employee of Eco Bank Plc sometime in 2009, at Lagos within the jurisdiction of the Honourable court, negligently failed to exercise due diligence in relation to conduct of financial transactions with Major General Umaru Mohammed and fraudulently converted Major General Umaru Mohammeds Ecobank MasterCard Account No. 0015052989 from debit card to credit card and consequently debited Major General Umaru Mohammeds account in the sum of over USD 50,000 (Fifty Thousand United States Dollars) without the knowledge and authority of Major General Umaru Mohammed. Another count reads: That you, Ecobank Plc and one Anieka Udoh, whilst being an employee of Eco Bank Plc sometime in 2009, at Lagos within the jurisdiction of the Honourable court, negligently failed to exercise due diligence in relation to conduct of financial transactions with Major General Umaru Mohammed and fraudulently converted Major General Umaru Mohammeds Ecobank Domiciliary account to Naira account Number 0015052989 without the knowledge and authority of Major General Umaru Mohammed and consequently left a debit of N9.2Million in the said Naira account. At the scheduled arraignment on March 7, 2019, the first defendant, Ecobank had no legal representative. However at todays sitting, the first defendant, Ecobank Plc represented by E. Majemite, pleaded not guilty to the charge preferred against it. Counsel to the second defendant, Udoh O.J. Owoh informed the court about a pending application for bail on behalf of his client, who pleaded not guilty to the charge when he was arraigned. In her response, counsel to the prosecution, Bilkisu Buhari, objected to the bail application, stating that the defendant is a flight-risk if granted bail. Justice Seidu, after listening to both parties, admitted the second defendant to bail in the sum of N20 million and two sureties in like sum. One of the sureties must be a relation to the second defendant, resident in Lagos and have a landed property in Lagos, whose title documents must be verified by the court. The second surety must be a civil servant on grade level 16 in Lagos. The judge also directed that the credentials of the second surety must be verified by the court. The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria ( FAAN ), has given British Airways, Turkish Airlines and six other international airlines Mar... The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria ( FAAN ), has given British Airways, Turkish Airlines and six other international airlines March 31st deadline to move into the new international terminal at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja. The Authority said the relocation of the airlines would enable it commence renovation work at the old terminal. So far, out of the 13 international airlines operating in Abuja, five have moved into the building leaving out the eight. The airlines that have moved are; Ethiopian Airlines, Air Cote dIvoire, ASKY Airlines, Air Peace and Emirate Airline. The airlines that are yet to move are; Turkish Airlines, British Airways, Lufthansa, Africa World Airlines (AWA), EgyptAir, RwandAir, Air France, and Arik Air. This was disclosed in Abuja on Wednesday after Emirate Airline made its debut into the new Terminal by the Regional Manager, North Central FAAN/Airport Manager NAIA, Mr. Sani Mahmud. The Boeing 777 aircraft marked A6-EBJ landed at exactly 3:00pm with 176 passengers and 16 crew members. Speaking after the aircraft landed Mahmud said: One of our biggest operator into Abuja, The Emirate Airline commenced flight operation into the new International Terminal today. It arrived with 176 passengers and 16 crew. The aircraft type is Boeing 777. We have now five international airlines operating in the new Terminal out of 13 but we have met with the remaining airlines and we gave them 31st of this month to move into the new Terminal that was commissioned by Mr. President on the 20th December, 2018. We believe we gave them ample time for them to have moved into the terminal and the old terminal is due for renovation. So, we have given them till 31st of this month to move into the new facility and we the management of FAAN will commence renovation in the old terminal. On whether there would be sanctions if any airline fails to move, he said: We are confident that they will move because they have all been given offices and the connectivity is in place. So they will move. On when renovation work would commence at the old terminal, he said: We hope that contractors will start as soon as the airlines move because the renovation work has been budgeted in this years budget. He also disclosed that the Federal Government will come up with a policy on what Terminal C will be used for. One of the passengers aboard the Emirate aircraft was the immediate past Inspector-General of Police, IGP Ibrahim Idris. Idris who had been on vacation after he handed over arrived the country in company of his wife and female toddler. He commended the government for putting up the facility and expressed optimism that the facility will be maintained. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has released a list of the house of representatives members who emerged victorious ... The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has released a list of the house of representatives members who emerged victorious in the February 23 elections. With 211 seats, the All Progressives Congress (APC) is clearly the majority in the lower chamber of the national assembly. Next to APC is the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which has 109 seats. Redemption Party (PRP), two seats too. The All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) won five seats, the Action Democratic Congress (ADC) got three seats, while Action Alliance (AA), won two and the PeoplesRedemption Party (PRP), two seats too. The Allied Peoples Movement (APM), African Democratic Party (ADP) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) won one seat each. Despite the partys majority in the house, it still does not have two-third. The green chamber has 360 members and the APC needs to have 240 members to get two-third majority. Should the ruling party win more in the 25 seats that have not been declared, it will achieve this feat. Here is the list as released by INEC: Here is the full list: 2019- NATIONAL-ASSEMBLY-RESULT-HOUSE-OF-REPS Women of Dong ethnic group have embroidery work at a rural traditional craft cooperative in Liping County, southwest Chinas Guizhou Province, March 12, 2019. Cultural and creative project in Liping County, serving as a part of the local poverty alleviation projects, provides skill training for women living in poverty. Participants are inspired to design tie-dyeing products, embroidery and other exquisite handicrafts. (Xinhua/Yang Wenbin) Gunmen have attacked the Divisional Police Command at Afuze, headquarters of the Owan-East Local Government Area of Edo, killing the Div... Gunmen have attacked the Divisional Police Command at Afuze, headquarters of the Owan-East Local Government Area of Edo, killing the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) and three other officers on duty. The hoodlums also attacked the office of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in the town, and destroyed electoral materials and burning down a police van in the compound. The officers killed in the attack were: Supt. Tosimani Ojo, the DPO of the station; Sgt. Justina Aghomon, a pregnant woman, Insp. Sado Isaac and Cpl. Glory David. A witness, Mr Godwin Ikpekhia, on Wednesday said that the incident occurred at about 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, while many of the officers in the division had gone on outside duties. We only heard gunshots and nobody knew what actually happened until Wednesday morning. The divisional police officer, alongside three other officers who were on duty were killed on the spot, inside the building. The hoodlums didnt just stop at that; they went to the INEC office and were shooting sporadically at policemen who were on duty there. Election materials and a police van at the INEC office were burnt by the hoodlums, he said. The Edo Commissioner of Police, Mr Muhammed Danmallam, who visited the scene, said that investigation would commence immediately. Danmallam vowed that those responsible for the attacks will be brought to book. Urgent steps will be taken to curb the increasing cases of criminality in the Owan axis of the state, he said. It was gathered that the attacks on officers and men of the Nigeria Police have become quite unusual in the Owan area. On July 14, last year, four police officers were killed at a checkpoint in the area and burnt inside their Hilux Patrol van. The Kaduna State Government on Wednesday imposed a dusk to dawn curfew in Kajuru local government area of the state where there has been... The Kaduna State Government on Wednesday imposed a dusk to dawn curfew in Kajuru local government area of the state where there has been a series of attacks recently. According to a statement issued by the government spokesman, Samuel Aruwan, security assessments had necessitated the imposition of a dusk to dawn curfew in all parts of Kajuru Local Government Area, effective from today, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. He said the dusk to dawn curfew was also extended to Kujama and Maraban Rido, which were located in Chikun Local Government. The statement added that the curfew in the affected areas would be from 6 pm to 6 am daily, until further notice. Some residents of Ita-faji have appealed to the Lagos State government to stop developers from constructing houses beyond three storeys... Some residents of Ita-faji have appealed to the Lagos State government to stop developers from constructing houses beyond three storeys. The residents who spoke with our correspondent lament the high number of lives that have been lost to the collapse of such buildings in the past. They also appealed to the government to stop churches and school owners in the area from using high-rise buildings as their base for operations They also alleged that the collapsed building had been marked for demolition but government officials failed to carry out the demolition because the owner bribed them. The building has been marked for demolition, but the government officials always take a bribe. The building has been giving signs of weakness but whenever government officials come, the owner always bribes them. There was general laughter when President Muhammadu Buhari asked Rotimi Amaechi, minister of transportation, and Adebayo Shittu, his c... There was general laughter when President Muhammadu Buhari asked Rotimi Amaechi, minister of transportation, and Adebayo Shittu, his communications counterpart, to take the opening prayer at the ongoing federal executive council (FEC) meeting. As soon as Buhari announced the name of Amaechi for the Christian prayer, one of the minister shouted no election, amid laughter. Buhari had referred to Shittu as minister of communications, Oyo State, eliciting laughter among the ministers. Shittu failed to deliver Oyo for Buhari in the February election as Atiku Abubakar, candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) won the presidential election in the state. Atiku won with 366,640 to defeat Buhari who scored 365,229 votes. The APC in Oyo also lost the governorship poll to the PDP. Like Shittu, Amaechi, who was the director-general of Buharis campaign, failed to win the state for the president. The newly posted Commandant of the Nigeria Police Academy Wudil, Kano state, Assistant Inspector General (AIG), Zanna Mohammed Ibrahim h... The newly posted Commandant of the Nigeria Police Academy Wudil, Kano state, Assistant Inspector General (AIG), Zanna Mohammed Ibrahim has warned cadets of the Academy to desist from acts capable of leading them into cultism and other vices. Addressing the cadets at the institution on assumption to duty, Zanna said his administration would not condone any act that would undermine humanity or discipline of the Police force. Zanna also urged the cadets to shun all unruly act and behaviours such sodomy, adultery, theft and or un-permitted trip among others. The AIG, who lamented that indiscipline among cadets, assured that discipline must be rooted in the institution. I will not tolerate anything that constitutes indiscipline. You must have self-esteem as police officers, most of our officers are timid I encourage you to have confidence, that is what is lacking in Nigeria Police today. On welfare, he assured the cadets of the Inspector General of police readiness to improve their welfare, stating that IGP has promised to transform the institution. The Senate will today open debate on the general principles of Budget 2019, Senate President Bukola Saraki assured on Tuesday. Sar... The Senate will today open debate on the general principles of Budget 2019, Senate President Bukola Saraki assured on Tuesday. Saraki scheduled the date of the debate of the fiscal document shortly before the upper chamber adjourned a plenary session in honour of a member of the House of Representatives, Temitope Olaoye Sugar, who was killed in Ibadan last Saturday by unknown persons. President Muhammadu Buhari, on December 19, last year, presented a Budget of N8.6 trillion to the joint session of the National Assembly for consideration and passage as this years Appropriation Bill. Christened Budget of Continuity, the 2019 fiscal document is planned to continue the countrys drive for inclusive economic growth, diversification and sustainable development. Saraki urged his colleagues, who have contributions to make on the budget to list their names for proper coordination of the debate. He said that the debate will take two days, today and March 19 to enable many senators to contribute. The conclusion of the debate of the general principles of the 2019 Appropriation Bill will pave the way for its reference to the Appropriation Committee for further legislative action. Saraki also mandated the Ad-hoc Committee on the New Minimum Wage Bill to expedite action on its assignment. He directed Senator Francis Alimikhena to take over the chairmanship of the committee in the absence of its substantive chairman, Senator Olusola Adeyeye. The House of Representatives, which had earlier debated and approved N30, 000 as the new national minimum wage as proposed by the Federal Government, also adjourned sitting for its slain member. The Green Chamber adjourned plenary in less than 20 minutes after resumption from the general election break. Speaker Yakubu Dogara regretted that Nigeria was yet to move away from politically-motivated killings. The late Olatoye represented Lagelu/Akiyele Federal Constituency. He chaired the Committee on Urban Development & Regional Planning before his death. Dogara also announced the death of a former member, Bethel Amadi, who also died during the break. Amadi was former President of the Pan African Parliament between 2012 and 2015. The Speaker, who sauntered into the chamber at about 11.35am exchanged greetings and banters with his colleagues by the aisle before assuming his seat. After the opening prayers, he announced his approval of the last votes and proceedings after which he broke the news of the death of the two lawmakers. He called for prayers for the repose of the souls of the departed which was said by the Chief Whip, Hassan Doguwa and Tobi Okechukwu. Speaking with reporters after the plenary, Dogara condemned killings across the country, adding that Nigeria should not be experiencing killings during elections. He said: It is unfortunate that we lost our colleague and many other Nigerian during the elections due to electoral violence. This is so unfortunate for us as a nation and even for our democracy. The Commissioner of Police in Sokoto State, Mr Aminu Koji, on Wednesday, confirmed the killing of two police personnel, Asp. Abdulla... The Commissioner of Police in Sokoto State, Mr Aminu Koji, on Wednesday, confirmed the killing of two police personnel, Asp. Abdullahi Maisaje and Sgt. Usman Ibrahim, while they were on election duty. Addressing newsmen in Sokoto, Koji said the officers were ambushed by gunmen on their way to Isa Local Government Area on Friday, March 8 for the March 9 Governorship and State House of Assembly elections. The commissioner sympathised with the families of the deceased, adding that they died in service of the fatherland. He urged the families to consider the deaths as an act of fate, saying, God gives and God takes. Koji announced donations of two million Naira to the family of Maisaje and one million Naira to the family of Ibrahim from Governor Aminu Tambuwal. The commissioner commended Tambuwal for the gesture. He said the donation was not compensation for the dead as no amount could equate human life. Koji handed over the money to wives of the deceased persons. Mrs Maryam Abubakar, the wife of Maisaje, thanked the governor for the gesture. She said her husband left behind nine children, comprising four males and five females. The decision to hold the launch at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in the heart of Londons Hyde Park, an ultra-modern white pavilion of sweeping arches, was anything but random, as Ulysse Nardin CEO Patrick Pruniaux pointed out. Before anyone had even got their hands on the watch itself, the first images of the new Freak neXt projected onto a screen at the press conference clearly showed why. The spectacular minimalist architecture of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery provided the perfect backdrop to the most recent iteration of the Freak collection. Ulysse Nardin Freak neXt was unveiled at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, in London Ulysse Nardin The Freak neXt incorporates the most recent of the technological evolutions on which the collection is built. In 2014 we saw the Ulysse Anchor with its constant force escapement in silicon, which features two minute flexible blades that support an anchor that is thus able to pivot without friction at the centre of the escapement. The Grinder automatic winding system introduced in 2017 also used blades set into a frame to support the rotor, resulting in a decrease in friction. This flexible blade technology is at the heart of the new neXt flying oscillator, the flagship innovation of the Freak neXt, developed by Ulysse Nardin in collaboration with Sigatec, a company that specialises in silicon micro-components, which Ulysse Nardin co-owns. neXt flying oscillator Ulysse Nardin As its name suggests, the neXt flying oscillator has no central pivot or balance bridge; instead, its suspended in mid-air, much like a flying tourbillon. Friction is reduced to a minimum (the only friction is with air) and the absence of a pivot makes lubricants unnecessary. The neXt flying oscillator is based on four layers of silicon micro-blades 16 microns thick 32 strips in total which form a 3D architecture of 16 delicate triangles superimposed in four parallel layers. The absence of friction has made it possible to treble the oscillation frequency, bringing it up to 12 Hz (86,400 vph). The UN-25X calibre of the Freak neXt, which features the Grinder automatic winding system, generates a 70-hour power reserve. Ulysse Nardin With its white rubber perforated strap, 45 mm platinum case with luminescent white rubber bezel and lateral bars in the same colour, the Freak neXt is all stark modernity. The rapid oscillations of the oscillator draw the eye to its blue hue that shades into purple or green, depending on the angle of the light. The minute wheel is made of blue silicon. At night, a Superluminova treatment gives the bezel and case a green glow, echoed by the four phosphorescent tubes surrounding the bridge of the baguette movement, which indicates the hour. Although the Freak neXt was presented as a concept watch, Patrick Pruniaux hinted that series production could be on the cards for the coming year. Following the famous design of the Speedmaster BA145.022 (see below), the new Speedmaster Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Limited Edition has been crafted from an exclusive new 18K gold alloy and is powered by a brand new manual-winding Master Chronometer calibre 3861. This Limited Edition Speedmaster of 1,014 pieces is delivered with a five-year warranty. Speedmaster Apollo 11 Edition Limitee 50e Anniversaire Omega 18K Moonshine Gold The case, bracelet, dial, hour-markers and hour-minute hands have all been created in 18K Moonshine gold - a unique new alloy whose colour is inspired by the shining moonlight in a dark blue sky. In a paler hue than 18K yellow gold, Moonshine gold offers high resistance to the fading of colour and lustre over time. Case and bracelet The polished and brushed 42 mm case features the asymmetrical caseband of the 4th generation Speedmaster. The brushed-polished bracelet bears thefivearched-links-per-row design and a grooved clasp with an applied vintage O. Burgundy Ceramic [ZrO2] Bezel Remaining true to the historical piece of 1969, OMEGA has included a burgundy bezel ring this time in ceramic [ZrO2], according to a special patent pending process, with its tachymeter scale in Ceragold. Following the first generation of the Speedmaster tachymeter scale, which graduated to 500 units per hour, this new model features a marker dot above 90 (also known as Dot Over 90 or DON). Onyx and Black The vertically brushed step dial is marked Au750 for the use of solid gold and is enhanced by the facetted black onyx indexes set in the polished hour-markers. All the hands are filled with black varnish. The unique caseback The outer caseback ring features the mechanically engraved markings 1969-2019, the limited edition number highlighted in burgundy, and an uncoloured Master Chronometer. The inner decorative ring in 18K Moonshine gold has undergone two separate laser ablation processes, as well as two PVD colour treatments in blue and black. This has produced the following results: a matte-finish blue ocean that surrounds a partial world map of the American continents (in polished finish), with a glimpse over the rockets lift-off site Cape Canaveral, and a matte-finish black background which accentuates polished markings including, APOLLO 11 50th ANNIVERSARY and THE FIRST WATCH WORN ON THE MOON. Finally, a domed lunar meteorite inlay representing the Moon has been set into the cavity of the ring. The Earth and the Moon on the inner ring have been produced in true proportion (3.67 : 1 in diameter). Omega Movement This Speedmaster is driven by the Omega Master Chronometer Calibre 3861 a manualwinding movement with Co-Axial escapement, silicon Si14 balance spring, Moonshine gold-plated main plate and bridges and burgundy markings. Vintage Logos There are a number of vintage Omega logos to be found throughout the design including on the dial, crown and bracelet clasp. Crater Box Inspired by the original packaging of the BA145.022 model in 1969, Omega has created a new crater box that will house each Limited Edition timepiece. The panels of the box are in grey ceramic with 3D printing of the lunar surface. Since every panel is structured differently, no crater box will be alike. The top panel of every box is printed with the image of the Sea of Tranquillity and the landing position of Apollo 11. Omega Buzz Aldrin with President and CEO of Omega Raynald Aeschlimann Omega How Omega reached the moon Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the lunar surface on the 21st of July 1969. The Apollo 11 mission is certainly the most celebrated moment in Omegas considerable space heritage. But the journey to reach that point began more than 10 years earlier, in 1957, when the very first Omega Speedmaster was launched. Thanks to its robust, reliable and easy-to-read design, the Speedmaster became known as the pilots choice and was adopted by those in the U.S Air Force. Many of those aces became Mercury astronauts in NASAs first manned space programme and, in 1963, one of those astronauts, Walter Schirra, took his own Speedmaster CK2998 on the Mercury- Atlas 8 mission. Orbiting the Earth six times, his privately-owned model became the first OMEGA watch worn in space. By 1964, NASAs space programme was accelerating rapidly and it officially went in search of one watch that it could rely on for all of its manned-missions. Flight Crew Operations Director, Deke Slayton, issued a request for wristworn chronographs from different watch manufacturers around the world. Several brands, including Omega, submitted their timepieces for the punishing tests such as thermal, shock, vibration and vacuum examinations amongst others. Only the Omega Speedmaster survived these tests and, as a result, it was declared Flight Qualified for all Manned Space Missions on the 1st of March 1965. From that moment, Omegawas the only supplier of watches for NASAs Human Space Flight Program. It was trusted throughout the following Gemini Program, and, of course, the Apollo Program which had its sights set on the moon. James Ragan, the NASA engineer who qualified the Speedmaster in 1965 has spoken about the importance of Omegaby saying, The watch was a backup. If the astronauts lost the capability of talking to the ground, or the capability of their digital timers on the lunar surface, then the only thing they had to rely on was the Omega watch they had on their wrist. It needed to be there for them if they had a problem. The original Speedmaster BA145.022 Speedmaster BA145.022 Omega The success of Apollo 11 was fervently celebrated around the world in 1969. On the 25th of November that year, a special Astronaut Appreciation Dinner was held in Houston, Texas, in tribute to the moon landing heroes. The dinner was especially notable for a certain Omega Speedmaster that was presented to the astronauts in NASAs space program. The watch, Speedmaster BA145.022, was crafted from 18K yellow gold and included a rare burgundy bezel, as well as an inscription on the caseback that read, to mark mans conquest of space with time, through time, on time. This gold Speedmaster housed the calibre 861 and was Omega's very first commemorative numbered edition, with only 1,014 models being produced from 1969 to 1973. The very first of these was created for US President, Richard Nixon, with number two allocated to the US Vice President Spiro Agnew. These watches, however, were later returned to Omega due to the US governments strict gifting protocol. Speedmaster BA145.022 Omega Model numbers 3 28 were given to the NASA astronauts, including 19 of those who were present at the gala dinner in Houston. This also included three models that were awarded posthumously to the three crew members who died during Apollo 1 Virgil Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. Watches 29 to 32 were offered to Swiss watch industry leaders and politicians, without any engraved number. The public were given the opportunity to purchase model numbers 33 1000. Although these models had a different caseback inscription, reading OMEGA SPEEDMASTER, APOLLO XI 1969 and O THE FIRST WATCH WORN ON THE MOON, they remained highly sought-after due to their rarity and connection to space. They also came in an exclusive moon crater presentation box, which itself is a prized collectors item today. Model numbers 1001 1008 were later presented to the astronauts of Apollo 14 and 17, while models 1009 1014 were reserved for other personalities. For true Speedmaster fans, the BA145.022 is one of the great highlights in the chronographs iconic history. Not only is it a beautiful watch to look at, with its blend of gold and burgundy, but it also pays the highest tribute to the NASA astronauts who delivered mankind to the moon. The young man was trying to catch a moving tram pulling out of Raml Station in northern Alexandria but lost his balance and fell under the tram's wheels A 16-year-old student died Tuesday after a railway tram in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria ran over him, Al-Ahram Arabic news website reported. The young man was trying to catch a moving tram pulling out of Raml Station in northern Alexandria but lost his balance and fell under the tram's wheels. Tram movement was partially suspended for close to half an hour. In 2018, the government announced a project to renovate and upgrade the tram system in Alexandria. The project, which is set to be completed in early 2022, aims to increase passenger capacity to between 250,000-300,000 riders per day and is estimated to cost around 360 million euros. In 2017, the Ministry of Investment and International Cooperation signed a 100 million euro deal with the French Development Agency (AFD) to upgrade Alexandria's Raml tram line, known as the Blue Tram, which connects the city's western and eastern sections. AFD will cover 100 million of the new project's total budget of 360 million euros, with another 180 million provided by the European Investment Bank. Search Keywords: Short link: Egypt's civil aviation ministry said on Wednesday that it is barring all Boeing Co 737 MAX planes from its airspace and airports after a crash in Ethiopia that killed 157 people. Sundays crash, which claimed the lives of six Egyptians among the casualties, was the second since October involving this Boeing model. The ministry "has taken a precautionary decision in favour of passenger and aviation safety by barring the passage, landing and takeoff of Boeing B737/Max aircraft in Egyptian airspace and airports," the ministry said in a statement. Egypt's foreign ministry is working together with Ethiopian authorities to repatriate the bodies of the victims. Egypt's state-owned airline EgyptAir does not own any Boeing B737/Max aircraft nor does it plan to include them in its future plans to develop its fleet, the ministry said. No other Egyptian companies own the aircraft as shown in Egypt's aircraft register, the ministry's statement added. A safety evaluation of the aircraft model is underway with the involvement of international civil aviation authorities, the aircraft manufacturer and relevant safety agencies. Egypt is among several countries around the world that are banning the aircraft. The European Unions Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) suspended all flights in the bloc by the 737 MAX. The UK, China, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia, India and others have temporarily banned the plane. Other countries including Serbia and New Zealand also banned 737 MAX flights on Wednesday. The United States has said it would not ground the planes Search Keywords: Short link: During the meeting, the duo discussed the possibility of the participation of Egyptian military production companies in the implementation of several projects in Tanzania Egypt's Minister of Military Production Mohamed Al-Assar received Wednesday Tanzanian Defence Minister Hussein Ali Mwinyi to discuss means of joint cooperation in the fields of military and civilian manufacturing, a statement by Egypts Ministry of Military Production read. El-Assar told Mwinyi that the Egyptian ministry has been assisting Egyptian companies in building the Tanzanian Stiegler's Gorge dam. The dam is being constructed by the Egyptian Arab Contractors Company. Stiegler's Gorge Hydroelectric Power Station (SGHPS) is a planned 2,100 megawatts (2,800,000 hp) dam that is expected to produce 5920 GW of power annually. Tanzania has been considering establishing this power station since the 1960s. When fully developed, it will be the largest power station in Tanzania. During the meeting, the duo discussed the possibility of the participation of Egyptian military production companies in the implementation of several projects in Tanzania. The two officials agreed on an exchange of visits by technical staff from both countries to identify opportunities for cooperation on the ground. Meanwhile, Mwinyi expressed admiration for Egypt's progress in the field of military industries and national projects currently being implemented, praising Egypt's role in cooperation with African countries, especially after Egypt's assumption to the presidency of the African Union. Search Keywords: Short link: South Africa: SACU, Moz make progress on impending Brexit South Africa, together with the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) and Mozambique, have made significant progress on negotiations with the United Kingdom on the impending Brexit. Briefing reporters on work being done regarding preferential trade arrangements after the British exit (Brexit) from the European Union (EU), SAs Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies said much progress has been made between the SACU, Mozambique and the United Kingdom (UK). This as the UK is scheduled to leave the EU on 29 March. As part of SACU, South Africa together with Mozambique, have been working with the British government to try to negotiate an arrangement so that should there be a hard Brexit, without an agreement, then we would have an agreement in place that would ensure that theres no interruption of our existing trade, Davies said. We have reached an agreement on a huge number of issues. We agreed to the rollover of the EPA [Economic Partnership Agreements] on a bilateral basis, said the Minister at the briefing held in Cape Town. The briefing comes after British Members of Parliament (MPs) on Tuesday voted against Prime Minister Theresa Mays Brexit Withdrawal Agreement between the EU and the UK. Today, MPs will vote on a no deal option. During negotiations with SACU and Mozambique, several issues came to the fore. Led by Botswana, issues raised by the group included that of the recognition of sanitary and phytosanitary certificates, which are issued to individual exporters. These are valid for exporters into the EU. We [South Africa], including SACU and Mozambique, wanted a recognition of those existing certificates for a period of time. We have secured this and at least an assurance that there will be an easier, cheaper process of changing them, said Davies. The Minister said a resolution was reached for the EPA under which South Africa does not get duty-free quota access for its products into the EU. A number of South African products, including agricultural products, were given tariff rate quotas under the EPA. We had to set those. That work has already been done. We have reached an agreement. It shouldnt be a bad deal as far as thats concerned, said Davies. Issues not concluded While there has been some level of success, there are other outstanding issues that are yet to be resolved, such as that of cumulation under the rules of origin. The Rules of Origin facilitator defines cumulation as a provision that allows considering goods obtained in or processing taking place in one free trade agreement (FTA) member country as originating in another. The UK wants SACU and Mozambique to recognise full cumulation on anything they have from the EU, which the group can concede for a period of time but not in perpetuity. Under the EPA, we dont get cumulation in reverse, said Davies in explaining the anomaly which involves South Africa not getting duty free entry of canned fruit into the EU. The EU does not allow peaches from South Africa to be put in tins in Eswatini and then exported as tinned fruit into the EU because theres a tariff quota for canned fruit from South Africa, he said. The group will not try to establish a regime on cumulation that will allow a continuation of the status quo. South Africa needs auto components from the EU and UK to be recognised, together with components from South Africa, to access the UK market. Davies spoke of the need to open up this conversation, which wont happen until Britain leaves the EU. The group is set to have a ministerial engagement for further negotiations on Friday after the conclusion of two votes by British MPs. We will then understand where we are. Our intension is to try and finish this negotiation if we can and then take an agreement to Parliament next week. Whether we make it or not depends on the outcome of discussions on Friday, said the Minister. Tariff schedule and implications Meanwhile, the UK on Wednesday published its schedule of tariffs that it will charge countries if it leaves the EU without any agreement. If it leaves under the terms of the Withdrawal Agreement -- which entails no transition period from the time it leaves the EU and under which EU laws would stop applying immediately to the island nation -- the status quo would continue until the end of 2020, while it negotiates a long-term agreement with the EU. If they leave without an agreement, then they would revert to the schedule that is put in by the EU into the WTO [World Trade Organisation] in the 1990s, said Davies. In a number of cases, the tariffs would be higher than what would be charged under the EPA. However, the published schedule has indicated that a number of items that the group exports would be duty free (agricultural products like oranges, grapes). What would not go in duty free are automotives. We have to deal with that issue bilaterally, said Davies. Products like beef, pork lamb, poultry and sugar will be subject to tariffs for SACU members and Mozambique. It would not include automotives, which will be a big problem for us [as South Africa]. It would not include beef for Botswana. It would not include sugar for Eswatini -- that would be some of the difficulty, Davies said. Parliamentary processes While the UK has a 29 March deadline, the clock is ticking much faster for South Africa with regards to reaching a deal. Our clock is ticking faster than their clock. Their clock goes until 29 March. Our clock goes until next week. If we dont conclude, we will not be able to get something through Parliament, he said. This comes as South Africa, which will go to elections in May, is set to dissolve the National Assembly next Wednesday. Davies, however, said this is not the end of the world if negotiations are not concluded on Friday, as there are several fall-back options. We could have a non-binding MoU [Memorandum of Understanding] or we could just use the announcement that was made today while we continue to negotiate. We have to play it as it unfolds. If they didnt make this announcement, our fall-back would be better than the WTO terms for the EU, which would apply but it would be for 12 months and not include some of the things that are of importance for us, said Davies. British MPs will today vote on whether the UK should leave the EU without a deal. And if they do, the Prime Minister will ask MPs to vote on whether the scheduled 29 March date should be pushed back.-SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Slovenian Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Miro Cerar discussed with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi ways to bolster mutual cooperation in Cairo on Wednesday. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry attended the meeting with Cerar, who is visiting Egypt for the first time. The officials discussed how to boost trade between the two countries against the backdrop of ongoing meetings of the first round of a joint Slovenian-Egyptian economic committee in Cairo, which was agreed upon during talks between El-Sisi and Slovenian PM Marjan Sarec in Vienna in December. Shoukry and Cerar discussed cooperation in maritime transport, energy, health and tourism, as well as boosting small- and medium-sized projects. They also addressed available investment opportunities in Egypt, the Egyptian foreign ministry said in a statement. The two ministers also signed a consumer protection deal. Slovenian President Borut Pahor visited Egypt for the first time in December 2016, where he discussed boosting trade and economic relations with Egypt during talks with El-Sisi. Search Keywords: Short link: French President Emmanuel Macron launched his latest Africa visit with stops in Ethiopia and Djibouti on Tuesday aimed at shoring up military and economic ties in an increasingly strategic region. The French leader also announced that Rwanda had invited him to attend the 25th anniversary of the country's genocide, after years of tensions between the two nations over France's role at the time. Macron said France would send a representative without confirming he would go in person. The French leader, who is in Kenya on Wednesday for a United Nations environmental summit, has visited Africa multiple times. Macron in Ethiopia met with reformist Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, whose country is shaken by Sunday's deadly crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed 157 people. As France joined much of the world in grounding or banning the Boeing model involved in the crash, Macron said that his transport minister was ``studying the matter with all the technical departments, and well-reasoned decisions will be taken in due time.'' France and Ethiopia also signed a joint defense agreement to help strengthen French involvement in the region, including in the fight against extremism and maritime piracy in the busy Red Sea corridor to the Indian Ocean. Abiy and Macron also visited the churches of Lalibela, carved out of rock centuries ago. The Ethiopian leader noted that the French government last year pledged to support restoration of the churches. Macron earlier was in Djibouti, a small but strategic nation that is home to the military bases of several countries including France, China and the United States. The French leader offered support to boost Djibouti's economy, and President Omar Guelleh called on French companies to invest in local infrastructure. Djibouti is located on one of the world's busiest shipping lanes. Search Keywords: Short link: In 1976, hundreds of diehard Beatles fans became convinced that the mysterious album 3:47 EST by the band Klaatu was actually a new release from The Beatles in disguise, after a DJ in Providence, Rhode Island played one of its songs on the radio. Shortly afterward, Steve Smith discovered the album at the newspaper he worked for, Rhode Islands The Providence Journal, listened to it, and became immediately intrigued. The album contained no photographs, no identifying information at all, and the bands The Day the Earth Stood Still reference echoed the cover of Ringo Starrs album Goodnight Vienna. Smith heard Starrs drumming, Harrisons guitars, Lennon and McCartneys voices in the psychedelic songs. Though he wasnt a music critic or reporter himself, he persuaded the paper to publish a feature in which he suggested Klaatu could be The Beatles. The Klaatu Konspiracy spread. An Australian fan issued a 34-page booklet on the case. Executives at Klaatus label, Capital Records Canada, refused to confirm or deny, enjoying the publicity, as Smith recalled in a 1997 interview. More specifically, hedging his bets, writes Ken Raisanen for WOAS FM, Smith concluded that the mystery band could be 1) The Beatles. 2) A couple of the Beatles with other people. 3) A Beatles-backed band. 4) A completely unknown but ingenious and talented band. If the American Smith had caught an episode of Keith Hampshires Music Machine on CBC two years earlier, he would have seen the evidence of number four (see the real Klaatu play California Jam in 1974, above). But the band otherwise made an effort to obscure their identity. As Klaatu bassist Jon Woloshuck told Goldmine magazine in 2013, one reason for the air of mystery they cultivated is that we were just three guys from Toronto. They wanted the music to speak for itself, and nobody knew who were anyway. They were amused by the rumor. It caught us by surprise, says drummer Terry Draper, but they didnt think much of it at the time. We were all big Beatles fans, and we were hoping they would reunite. At the time, the idea of a reunited Beatles wasnt all that far-fetched at all. These attitudes may have been prevalent, but Klaatu wasnt deliberately setting out to tap into them, they say, but to do music that was on par with late 60s progressive bands like King Crimson and The Moody Blues. Theyre clearly also channeling The Beatles, whether they admit it or not. Still the rumor did us as much harm as good, says guitarist Dee Long. It got us noticed, which was great, but also led to a situation where we could not ever really measure up to expectations. Hear what Beatles fans and Klaatu conspiracists heard in 1976 in the song Sub Rosa Subway above from 3:47 EST, and learn more about the Klaatu conspiracy theory in the Polyphonic video at the top. Related Content: How the Paul McCartney is Dead Hoax Started at an American College Newspaper and Went Viral (1969) Did Lennon or McCartney Write the Beatles 1965 Song In My Life? A Math Professor, Using Statistics, Solves the Decades-Old Mystery A 17-Hour Chronological Playlist of Beatles Songs: 338 Tracks Let You Hear the Musical Evolution of the Iconic Band Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Algerian President Abdul-Aziz Bouteflika withdrew his candidacy for a fifth term in office this week, postponing the countrys presidential elections and promising a comprehensive process of reform In a message to the nation this week, Algerian President Abdul-Aziz Bouteflika announced his decision to retract his bid to seek a fifth term as president and to postpone the countrys presidential elections that were to be held on 18 April. He also promised substantial changes in the governments composition, a comprehensive and inclusive National Conference to draw up a new constitution that would be put to a referendum, and then new presidential elections to be held under the supervision of a new independent national electoral commission. Bouteflika also signed a decree terminating the duties of Algerias current Independent High Commission for Elections headed by Abdelouahab Derbal. Bouteflika said that he understood what had motivated so many of his fellow citizens to take part in the mass demonstrations that had swept the country in recent weeks and stressed that once again, I laud their peaceful character. After the presidents message, Algerian Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia tendered his resignation, and Bouteflika signed a decree creating the post of deputy prime minister and appointing Interior Minister Noureddine Bedoui as the new prime minister and adviser for diplomatic affairs Ramtane Lamara as the new deputy prime minister. Observers expect that he will assign veteran diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi with the task of steering the interim phase in the capacity of chairman of the newly announced National Conference. The state news agency the Algerian Press Service (APS) featured photographs of Ouyahia with Bouteflika, Bouteflika with Deputy Minister of Defence and Army Chief of Staff General Ahmed Gaid Salah, and Bouteflika with Brahimi. All were taken after the presidents return from a private visit to Geneva on Sunday where he had undergone periodic medical checks, according to a statement from the presidency. Bouteflika said in his message to the nation that he had never intended to seek a fifth term as president. My health and my age only permit me to perform my last duty for the Algerian people, which is to lay the foundations of a new republic that will serve as a framework for the new Algerian system of government to which all aspire, he said. This new republic and this new system will be placed in the hands of the new generations of Algerians who will become the actors and beneficiaries of public life and of the sustainable development of the Algeria of tomorrow. The decision to cancel the elections was taken in response to the pressing demands put to him by the Algerians and in order to calm the fears they express, he said. The new changes will be an appropriate response to these demands. The National Conference is to be an inclusive and independent forum endowed with all the powers necessary for the discussion, elaboration and adoption of all types of reforms needed to form the basis of the new system of government that will enable the launch of a national transformation of our nation state, Bouteflika said. It would represent the whole spectrum of views and components of Algerian society, and it will have complete freedom in the performance of its activities under a multi-member leadership chaired by an experienced and universally acceptable independent national figure. The conference will have until the end of 2019 to complete its work, after which the draft constitution it prepares will be put to a popular referendum. The conference will also have the sovereign power to set the date for new presidential elections conducted under the exclusive supervision of a new independent national electoral commission, the mandate, composition and operations of which will be established by a specific piece of legislation. The decision to create the new commission, Bouteflika said, had come in response to a demand that has broad support among Algerian political parties and that has often been recommended by the regional and international electoral observation missions that Algeria has invited and welcomed during previous election periods. In order to ensure that presidential elections are held under indisputable conditions of freedom, regularity and transparency, a government of technocrats will be formed. This government, which will enjoy the support of the National Conference, will assume the supervision of public administration and national security and will assist the new independent national electoral commission. Algerias existing Constitutional Council will assume, with full independence, the powers granted to it under the constitution and the law with regard to presidential elections. Lakhdar Brahimi, who paid a courtesy visit to Bouteflika following his return from Geneva, said that he had had the honour to be received by the president who informed me of important decisions he was in the process of making. The voice of the people and of the youth in particular has been heard. A new and constructive phase will begin soon, which will remedy many of our problems, Brahimi said at a press conference following the meeting. He lauded Algerias youth for the spirit of responsibility they had showed in the earlier demonstrations, winning the admiration of all at home and abroad. He said he hoped we will continue to treat each other with this kind of responsibility and mutual respect as we turn this crisis into an occasion for development and reconstruction. Brahimi served as UN and Arab League special envoy to Syria until May 2014. He is a member of the African Unions Panel of the Wise and of The Elders Organisation founded by late South African president Nelson Mandela. Ramtane Lamamra served as Algerias foreign minister under former prime minister Abdel-Malek Sellal before being appointed as presidential adviser for diplomatic affairs a few weeks ago. It seems likely that Algeria will rely heavily on Brahimi and Lamamra to steer the country towards a new second republic. The first, dominated by the National Liberation Front (FLN), was established over six decades ago following the countrys independence from French colonial rule. Before Bouteflikas message was broadcast, the Algerian media continued to cover the mass demonstrations in the country that were increasingly gaining momentum as they had been joined by a general strike. On Sunday, merchants across the country shuttered their stores, and train and airplane services were paralysed. Many merchants and workers organised a strike on Sunday in Algiers and other parts of the country, in tandem with peaceful marches by students, APS reported. It added that the strike had been initiated by anonymous calls circulated across social-networking platforms. Some merchants had closed their stores in response to these calls, whereas others had done so out of fears of the marches that have been seen in the capital and other parts of the country. In addition to Algiers, the eastern cities of Constantine, Skikda, Annaba, Batna, Taraf and Khanshleh and the southern cities of Ouargla, Ouadi, Ghardaia, Laghouat, Adrar and Bachar were the most affected by demonstrations. According to the APS, there were no major clashes or security incidents. In an unprecedented development, on Monday, more than a thousand Algerian judges announced that they would refuse to supervise the presidential elections if Bouteflika insisted on running. Algerian Justice Minister Tayeb Louh, said to be a member of Bouteflikas inner circle, called on the judges to remain neutral and to refrain from intervening in political affairs. Judges must abide by the duty of restraint and avoid anything that might cast suspicion on their impartiality and independence, he said. They must be fully aware of the weight of responsibility that falls on them, and this responsibility must in all circumstances be consistent with the principles stipulated by the law and the code of ethics of their profession. Deputy Minister of Defence Ahmed Gaid Salah, who has been appearing frequently in the press, said that the Algerian National Peoples Army, the worthy heir to the National Liberation Army and the Algerian people share the foundations of a future-looking vision for the Algeria of tomorrow. Speaking at the annual meeting of organisations training members of the army on Sunday, he said that incentives existed to unify the vision for the nation and that these had been shaped by a shared vision of history. In another unprecedented development on Monday, six parliamentary blocs boycotted a session dedicated to a vote on three government-sponsored bills. MPs from the Movement of Society for Peace, the Workers Party, the Islamic Renaissance Movement (Ennahda), the Rally for Culture and Democracy, the Future Front and the Social Forces Front assembled in the parliament building in Algiers and declared their support for the popular movement against Bouteflikas bid for a fifth term as president and demands for a political system governed by the rule of law. *A version of this article appears in print in the 14 March, 2019 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: Algerian elections postponed Search Keywords: Short link: The Palestinian Authority is refusing to receive slashed clearing funds from Israel. But is this a viable move that will get Israel to reverse course The decision by the Palestinian Authority (PA) not to accept reduced Palestinian clearing funds from the Israeli occupation generated a variety of reactions, from those who support the move to others who denounce it. Since Israel is approaching elections, its reaction to the decision will be delayed. The economic conditions of most Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip, are abysmal and cannot withstand such a manoeuvre. The Israeli government decided mid-February to withhold 502 million shekels ($138 million) of Palestinian clearing funds, which is how much the PA pays out to released prisoners, the families of those detained in Israeli jails, and families of martyrs. Israel withheld the amount paid to Palestinian families and former prisoners in the past year, according to Israeli media. According to the Paris economic protocol signed by the Palestinians and Israelis in 1994, the latter collects taxes on goods coming through its border to the Palestinian territories, and transfers them monthly to the government in Ramallah. Nassif Muallem, a Palestinian political analyst, said the Israeli government, especially Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, is facing legal problems related to claims of corruption. Netanyahu wants to deflect attention from his own troubles, prepare for the elections and campaign for himself. Muallem continued that if the PA accepts being short-changed on clearing money, it would mean it implicitly agrees with Israels viewpoint that the money is spent on terrorists (as Israel claims). Israel could later use this to file international court cases on all the funds or donations to martyrs and victims of the Palestinian cause, whether by individuals, institutions or governments. Muallem approves of the PAs position and wants public support to grow so it remains strong amid current conditions, and to force Israel to reverse its decision. Muallem added that in the past Israel manipulated clearing money in 2006/2007 and 2008/2009, but that the PA was able to receive all the funds, albeit late. Israel is obligated to comply with signed agreements, especially since they were sponsored by the world community. He believes that in the end Israel will be forced to reverse its decision and hand over all the clearing funds, but it will take some time for that to happen. He noted that the more steadfast the Palestinian masses remain, the more likely Israel will capitulate. The 2010 Arab summit in Kuwait agreed to provide an Arab financial safety net worth $100 million per month to assist the PA if Israel withheld clearing funds, a decision the PA wants Arab countries to implement now. Nasr Abdel-Karim, an economics professor at the Palestinian Birzeit University, said that government spending is divided into four categories: salaries and wages; operating expenses; transfer expenditures; and capital spending. He said it would be wise to halt operating spending because it does not impact the rights of citizens, including monthly spending on travel and privileges for officials, communications, and fuel for officials and senior administrators which is beyond need and at the expense of the public treasury. This is followed by capital expenditures, such as buying the latest vehicles, offices for officials, renting offices, as well as revising payroll spending since many civil servants are not working and getting paid. If the PA does not pay full salaries, this will decrease spending but will also create an arears obligation for the government which will accumulate over time, he said. This would be in addition to the governments commitment towards importers in the private sector and the PAs debt to local banks. Abdel-Karim described the PAs decision to decline the clearing funds as too hasty. This is not a strategic decision to cause a confrontation or clash with Israel, he said. It is an improvised decision by which the PA is trying to threaten Israel that the situation on the ground can get worse. Abdel-Karim expects the crisis to continue until after the Israeli election, since, for purely electoral reasons, it does not seem Netanyahu will reverse his decision to slash the clearing funds. We have one month until the elections, followed by 70 days of consultations to form a new cabinet. I do not expect a resolution before that time, said Abdel-Karim. The deadlock could extend to beyond that, depending on the outcome of the elections. Abdel-Karims estimates are similar to those of the government, as noted in recent statements by Palestinian Finance Minister Shukri Bishara, who said that Israels decision could be an opportunity to overhaul the economic and financial arrangement with Israel. This may work out for the better, he said. Israels decision puts the PA on a path that will be difficult to reverse. Israel takes a three per cent commission worth 20 million shekels every month instead of collecting taxes from Palestinian citizens. We must take these funds back, and we have other demands to restructure relations with Israelis, but there is only procrastination and no progress. It is time to change this reality by all means. Bishara continued that until the end of 2018, the Palestinian government received $1.3 billion in loans and banking facilities, which makes up 10 per cent of total deposits in the banking system, and 15 per cent of total credit facilities. This is a small percentage which means there is room for more borrowing, he said. We will borrow but wisely. We will not take a single penny unless we are able to pay it back. Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Malki said there are global diplomatic and legal efforts to pressure Israel to stop meddling with Palestinian revenues, including identifying international courts in preparation to filing a case against Israel to make it comply with international law and bilateral agreements. Samir Abdallah, an expert at the Palestinian Economic Policy Research Institute-MAS and former planning minister, argued that if the PA decides to borrow this will be viable for a month or two, but Palestinian banks are incapable of infinitely lending the PA, especially since the PA has already borrowed nearly $1.4 billion from the banks. Abdallah urged the PA to take a firm decision to stop importing Israeli goods because that could cause Israeli companies to pressure the Israeli government. Nael Moussa, another professor at Birzeit University, said that it is not possible to annul economic agreements with Israel, which are naturally linked to political agreements. We are subject to Israels practices due to geographical, spatial and temporal realities, and if we dont find another political reality that is not under Israeli control we cannot dispose of the agreements, he said. Tarek Al-Haj, dean of economics at Al-Najah University in Nablus, agrees and opined that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas wanted to diplomatically send a message to the world that Israel is not implementing agreements, while the world turns a blind eye on the Palestinian cause. The PAs options in dealing with the clearing funds issue are limited. Domestically, the campaign to boycott Israeli goods should gain traction, as stated by Fatah Deputy Chair Mahmoud Al-Alul. He said the committee in charge of implementing the decisions of the Central Council decided to prepare a list of Israeli goods that have local substitutes so they are not imported anymore. Israel is concerned that Palestinian refusal to receive the clearing funds will trigger security instability in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israeli Radio quoted Israeli security sources expressing concern that Abbas will deduct the shortage from funds to Gaza, which will further deteriorate conditions there. Mahmoud Al-Habash, an adviser to Abbas, said the decision could impact security coordination with Israel and undermine security agencies and civilian systems. The US accused the PA of manufacturing a crisis by refusing to receive the first instalment of monthly tax funds transferred from Israel in 2019, and the Security Council held a closed meeting to discuss the matter based on a request by Kuwait and Indonesia. US Special Envoy for Peace in the Middle East Jason Greenblatt attended the meeting, and was quoted by other UN diplomats at the meeting as telling the 15 members of the Security Council that it is inappropriate to focus on Israel as the cause of the crisis. The Palestinian Authority chose to manufacture the current crisis, he said. The US mission to the UN did not comment on Greenblatts statements, while the Palestinians denounced Israels decision as piracy. Greenblatt was quoted by diplomats as saying that payments to the families of martyrs and prisoners give incentive for more acts of terrorism. Last year, the US also approved legislation to slash aid to the PA if it did not stop this assistance. Diplomats said Greenblatt called on the Security Council and others to join the US in urging the PA to stop making these payments. *A version of this article appears in print in the 14 March, 2019 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: A matter of principle Search Keywords: Short link: A high-level delegation headed by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is visiting Iraq this week, to be followed by a further stop in Syria An Iranian delegation headed by President Hassan Rouhani is visiting Iraq for three days this week, and it includes Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif who was at the centre of controversy in recent weeks over his tendered, but refused, resignation. The visit is intended to showcase Irans good relations with its Arab neighbours, and it will shortly head to Syria on the invitation of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, who has invited Zarif to ease tensions caused by his own unprecedented visit to Tehran. Zarif is believed to have resigned in protest over not being informed about or invited to a meeting with Al-Assad in Tehran. Commanders of the Iranian Al-Quds Forces had apparently persuaded the Syrian president to come to Tehran without the knowledge of high-ranking diplomats. Some saw this as an attack on the Iranian government or an indication of the forces power in political affairs. Zarif remained in his position, however, and his resignation was not accepted by the regime as the damage his absence could have caused was greater than the achievement of having Al-Assad in Tehran. Zarif is considered to be a skilled diplomat who for the first time has brought prestige to the Islamic Republic. Raised in the United States and gaining a PhD from an American university, he worked at the Iranian mission at the United Nations in New York and then served as ambassador to the UN before becoming foreign minister. This background gives him good knowledge of the West, and it helped Iran to achieve its nuclear deal with the West after years of haggling and difficulties experienced by former Iranian governments in their communications with the West. Rouhani has another two years to go ahead of the next presidential elections in Iran, but it is unlikely he can complete this journey without Zarif. This has led even head of the Al-Quds Forces Qassim Solimani to publicly praise Zarif, saying that Iran has only one foreign minister, who is Zarif. However, while Zarif was in Baghdad preparing the ground for the presidents visit, the media in Tehran reported that Solimani had received the highest-ranking military award in Iran, the Order of Zol-Faqar, from supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Khameneis recognition of Solimanis services is being seen as part of plans to increase the profile of the Revolutionary Guards, of which the Al-Quds Forces are a part, in Iran. When Al-Assad visited Tehran, Solimani greeted him at the audience with Khamenei and then again, and without Zarif, at the audience with Rouhani. As testimony of Solimanis place within the hierarchy in Iran, Khamenei said that Irans regional ambitions were more important than the dialogue with the West or relations with the United States. He trusted activists like Solimani more than he trusted politicians, he said. Solimani is said to have masterminded Irans presence in Iraq and Syria in recent years, and he was commander of the operations in Lebanon against Israel during the war of 2006. He is thus a well-known figure to Iranians. His footprints can be found from Afghanistan in Central Asia to the Middle East, and his frequent presence in the media in recent weeks could be evidence that Khamenei intends to let Solimani run in the next elections or give that role to a member of the Revolutionary Guards. Khameneis endorsement or support could boost a candidates election prospects even two years ahead of the elections. The Iranian public was likely stunned to hear that Solimani had received the countrys highest military award, because its existence has not been mentioned over the past 40 years of the Islamic Republics history. The late shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was a recipient of the 2nd class star of the highest military award of the former Empire of Iran, the Order of Zol-Faqar. The award has apparently existed since the beginning of the Qajar era in Iran in the 18th century, and it was continued during the Pahlavi period. It is interesting to learn that the Islamic Republic has decided to keep the award. Pictures of the late shah with the award are being emphasised unofficially these days, more than the pictures of Solimani with the medal on his chest after the gift by the supreme leader. They are another reason for the Iranian public to remember how Iran was under the old regime and how it is today. *A version of this article appears in print in the 14 March, 2019 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: Iranian visit to Baghdad Search Keywords: Short link: We have used your information to see if you have a subscription with us, but did not find one. Please use the button below to verify an existing account or to purchase a new subscription. Having grown up surrounded by the charming chaos of New York City nightlife, it's only correct that Blu DeTiger shot her newest music video in a hip Lower East Side club. Accompanied by a group of fellow partygoers (including Nicky Ottav), she dances her way through the streets of downtown before landing inside of a disco ball-lit club. It looks like the place to be, however, one can only assume that wherever DeTiger goes is place to be. With a co-sign from electronic duo The Knocks and a resume that includes House of Yes and numerous chic warehouse parties, she's on a fast-track to stardom. Related | 100 Women Revolutionizing Pop "Mad Love," DeTiger's newest track, is an ode to all of her liveliest nights out with her crew just don't fuck up her fun. Her chants are accompanied by a bobbing bassline and a whole lot of cowbell, proving that the production is indeed groovy in the most literally sense. It's a radio-ready hit, and her friends know it; dressed in neons and the latest club fashions, they dance throughout the video on bars, in VIP booths, and in the middle of the street. Not quite summery, but too fluorescent for cold weather listening, "Mad Love" is the spring transition to the blistering heat that we've all been waiting for. PAPER sat down with Blu DeTiger to talk about the new track, performing with The Knocks, and creating her own shade of nail polish with Floss Gloss for her tour merch. Watch the PAPER premiere of "Mad Love," directed by Luke Rathborne, below. What inspired you to write the new track? This is an attitude song and a girl power song. It says "I have a lot of love and good energy to give but don't mess with me and waste my time." Sometimes when I'm DJing, people with a bad vibe come up and take me out of my focus. I love when people come up to me with love and support and appreciation, but this song talks about the flip side. It can be as simple as someone coming into your space (physical or emotional) and disrupting your vibe or flow, or someone actually trying to hit on you at the club when all you wanna do is dance and have fun with your friends. I got mad love, but if you start putting negative energy into my life I'm going to get off that immediately. Good energy only! Musically and production-wise, it's an amalgamation of my influences. It has the funky bass groove and pops, house-y chord stabs, vocoder, distorted guitar and jazzy piano flutters coming in and out. The composition is particularly groovy. Are you setting out to make music people can dance to, or are you interested in exploring more downtempo themes? These songs are inspired by movement. I've been moving forward, fast, dancing, working, hustling, touring, etc., so these songs are coming from that place. In general, dance is what I relate to and gravitate towards the most. I'm interested in exploring downtempo themes and will definitely do it whenever I'm feeling that way. What kind of music do you like to play in your sets? I play everything, but I love playing disco, funk, and soul music. That's what I grew up listening to and those are the bass lines I studied and practiced for hours on end to get better at my instrument. But it always depends on the night sometimes I play everything from Drake to Travis Scott to Jennifer Lopez to Prince. Other times I'm on late at night doing a house set. Photo courtesy of Rachel Cabbitt What inspired the video? Are those your friends you're dancing with? It was shot at this club Better Days in the Lower East Side, formerly known as Happy Ending. It's one of the clubs in NYC where I first started DJing consistently, and where I had some of my first real club DJ gigs. And yes, those are my friends! The actual music video is very real and authentic in that it's just me and my friends laughing and dancing together at a club that I go to and DJ at regularly. We had so much fun shooting this. How was touring with The Knocks? It was amazing. I was the opener, doing my own set with original music, DJing, singing, and playing bass. I was also playing bass, synth, and guitar, and singing backup for The Knocks during their headlining set. I loved touring and performing every night. We have the best time together. "I got mad love, but if you start putting negative energy into my life I'm going to get off that immediately." I also saw that you have your own nail polish collab out what motivated you to put this out as your merch? I love wearing accessories that match, especially blue ones. For my first tour as a solo act I wanted to do something in addition to the classic merch t-shirt. The nail polish is a collaboration with Floss Gloss, a brand I love. The color is my favorite shade of blue and it matches my bass and some of the outfits I've been wearing on tour. I like doing nail polish as a merch item because it's a product for glowing up a small way to accessorize but makes you feel glamorous. This blue shade specifically is dark and sexy and empowering. And that's how I want my music and shows to be! What kind of sounds are you interested in exploring in the future? I definitely want to continue exploring dance music genres, especially fusing classic funk with modern dance music. When I say "Britney on Broadway" you probably a performance that would look a lot like her Vegas residency, except the narrative tale of a young pop princess' rise to overnight stardom, taking us through the different elaborately costumed eras of Britney, the crushing pressures of fame and beauty, the melt downs, the love affairs, and her ultimate phoenix-like transformation into a peppy Instagram spectacle. Fabulous costumes, glitter, snakes, latex, back-up dancers, the works. Nope. The first time the theatrical drama of Britney Spears' catalogue will be brought to the stage will be as the soundtrack to a feminist anti-fairytale that has nothing to do with Britney Spears. Chicago theatre owner James Nederlander, according to The New York Times, announced today that he is producing a musical to the tunes of Britney titled "Once Upon a One More Time." "Once Upon a One More Time," according to the Times follows a women's book group of disenchanted Disney princesses including Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty who spend their days reading Grimm's fairy tales. After they wish for something more interesting, a fairy godmother delivers a few copies of Betty Friedan's second wave feminist manifesto The Feminine Mystique. Like the unhappy suburban housewives Betty Friedan originally wrote it for, "their lives are altered in unexpected ways." "Cinderella is having an existential crisis" screenwriter Jon Hartmere told The Times. "And she has a posse of famous princesses, and her stepmother is the main antagonist, and there's also Prince Charming and a dwarf we've never met the eighth dwarf and a narrator who is unhappy his system is being dismantled before his eyes." He continued: "These women have been in this hermetically sealed world, and then they start to get deeper into modern ideas second and third-wave feminism and also explore how stories are passed down to us, and where we get our norms from. But it's also superfun and funny." Oh. Boy. On one hand, the raw pop cultural subject matter of Britney Spears, Betty Friedan and the Disney princesses mushed together into a one narrative could be utterly fascinating and hilarious. Cinderella turning "Oops!... I Did It Again" into a feminist protest anthem definitely has potential to be subversive. On the other, the whole "upending fairytale tropes" and "this princess doesn't need saving!" thing has been fairly done to death on the stage and the screen in recent years (Frozen, Snow White & The Huntsman, Stardust, Enchanted, the 27 forthcoming live action remakes of Disney movies). Reconciling all the flaws and contradictions of second wave feminism and avoiding the most cliche "strong, independent woman" subversions Disney's archaic contours, all while Snow White and Rapunzel do duet choreography to "Womanizer" while keeping it "superfun and funny" is certainly a daunting task. But on the other hand, could be brilliant??? Jon Hartmere, the writer behind The Upside (interracial buddy comedy starring Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston) and rock musical "Bare" about gay christian teens, wrote the screenplay. Kristin Hanggi ("Rock of Ages") will direct and Keone & Mari Madrid (Justin Bieber's "Love Yourself" music video, World Of Dance) will create the choreography to musical's 23 songs from Britney's catalogue, which include "a couple of deep album cuts" plus all the hits. We're extremely excited to find out if they can pull it off. "Once Upon a One More Time" will open for the public on Nov. 13, and to run until Dec. 1 at the James M. Nederlander Theater in Chicago, with hopes of transferring to Broadway after it's first run. NYC has unveiled their 2019 headliner: queer, androgynous cultural force of nature Grace Jones. Jones will perform at Saturday, June 29's Pride Island party (formerly Dance on the Pier), the second night of the multi-day Pride weekend festivities at Hudson River Park's Pier 97. The crowd will be warmed up by Brazilian drag star Pablo Vittar and Teyana Taylor who is one of Jones' many young disciples (she paid homage to Jones in her PAPER cover shoot as well as Kanye's "Fade" video). The line-up also includes pop artist Amara La Negra, NYC DJ Johnny Dynell, as well as DJs Abel and Morabito. The headlining performer for the Sunday, June 30 concert has yet to be announced. Related | Welcome to Planet Grace Jones The selection is a testament to how Jones, at 70, remains a force within music, art and culture's boldest corners. Jones recently walked in Tommy Hilfiger x Zendaya's stunning Paris Fashion Week show, which cast only Black models, stunting across the stage to her own song. We have Jones to thank for many of music's contemporary rule-breakers. Aside from Taylor, she's cited as prominent influence of folks like Rihanna, Grimes, Gaga, Annie Lennox and Santigold to name a few. "I couldn't be more excited to perform in front of my LGBTQIA+ friends and the community that's supported me for so many years during WorldPride 2019 | Stonewall 50," says Jones. "Saturday's Pride Island lineup will be a celebration of everything that the community stands for and will go down in illustrious history." Last year NYC's Pride Island was headlined by Kylie Minogue. Previous headliners include Ariana Grande (who's currently at the center of a debate about straight allies' role in Pride), Fergie, Nelly Furtado, Patti LaBelle and Tegan & Sara. Pride takes place this year from June 1 to June 30, with special events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Find out more about 2019 Pride here. Photo via Getty It's every Internet user's worst nightmare: to log onto Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit and see your own face staring back at you underneath a sardonic caption. Nineteen-year-old Jazmine Stabler knows about this all too well. A student at Auburn University, she was born with a facial tumor and has had nine surgeries in attempt to remove it. However, in 2014, she finally got to a point where she decided she was content with her appearance and opted to stop trying to get rid of it. "I've always been very confident in my appearance, that's how I was just raised," she says, before admitting that it took a while to get to that point. And while she's quite happy with herself at the moment, earlier this month, that was briefly derailed after a tweet using her old prom photos went viral on Twitter alongside the caption, "IGNORE YOU WILL HAVE 10 YEARS OF BADLUCK." "Why post me? I'm just over here in Alabama living my best life, attending college, minding my own business," Stabler says, pointing out that her response has since gained even more traction that the initial tweet. "Talk about people who need to be posted about. Don't worry about me!" Unfortunately though, trolls using her happy moments for clout is nothing new to her. According to her, those same prom pictures first went viral last April and, again, it was thanks to a stranger on Twitter who stole her photos. It didn't stop there, as Stabler says she noticed the exact same meme using her photos appearing on Facebook in December. And though she "squashed it then," she didn't expect it to keep popping up, especially in the same, tired joke format. "People tend to bash what they don't understand," she says, before putting things in a more positive light. "My pic went viral and I've been dealing with that, but there's also so much love pouring in. It outweighs the bad." That said, as bullying expert Dr. Scott Poland points out, this sort of online behavior is difficult to pursue any sort of legal or criminal action against, though he believes various social platforms have begun to improve their ability to take action when complaints of cyberbullying pop up. Unfortunately, that tends to only curb the phenomenon on one platform, which then leads to the spread of the meme onto other social media sites. "People tend to bash what they don't understand. My pic went viral and I've been dealing with that, but there's also so much love pouring in. It outweighs the bad." "The Internet makes it not able to get away from," Dr. Poland says, before explaining that social networks make even a move across the country "not necessarily a fresh start" for victims of cyberbullying an unprecedented change from bullying in the past. As demonstrated by Stabler though, there's thankfully one way to counteract the hate in an effective way. "I'm very active on Twitter, but I guess they thought I didn't have one, and I wasn't going to see it and stand up for myself," Stabler says before explaining that her response kicked off a flurry of positive support that has ended up dwarfing the initial reaction to the other meme. Which brings up another interesting point. In the few years or so, celebrity-based memes (though those are also sometimes unnecessarily cruel) have begun to take over a space previously dominated by memes utilizing photos of everyday people who aren't on Tik-Tok after all, when was the last time you saw a Scumbag Steve meme? It appears that targeting unwitting, regular people as meme fodder seems to be a practice that's on its way out, and as Stabler theorizes, it's probably because everyone's on the Internet now. And what does that mean? An increased possibility of a call-out a la Stabler's clap-back. "I feel like they didn't expect me to see it," she says. "Because people meme celebs all the time, but usually the celebs don't care." However, things are a lot different for everyday, regular people like herself, whose cyberbullying experience goes viral. Obviously, people tend to this kind of thing mostly because they don't think they're going to get a reaction but now that everyone seems to be on the Internet, maybe this is something that will become much less prevalent. After all, when there's accountability, there's less of a likelihood for damaging, toxic behavior to continue. But does this mean it will only work if the person whose photo is being used takes matters into their own hands? Unfortunately, yes. As Dr. Poland says, "The more people that are online, the less likely somebody's going to stick up for the victim" which means that people are less likely to rally against the perpetrator unless someone else has already paved the way, like Stabler herself. And that's an issue. "It goes all the way back to early sociological research about Kitty Genovese in New York, who was screaming for help [as she was being murdered], because there were so many people who heard her," he says. "They all thought somebody else would get involved." So what exactly can we do then? Well, it's complicated, but Dr. Poland does suggest that the real solutions are "going to have to come from the younger generation themselves." The takeaway? We need more galvanized reactions and continued call-outs of trollish posts. And hopefully, that won't just be left to the people being targeted in the first place. Welcome to "Internet Explorer," a column by Sandra Song about everything Internet. From meme histories to joke format explainers to collections of some of Twitter's finest roasts, "Internet Explorer" is here to keep you up-to-date with the web's current obsessions no matter how nonsensical or nihilistic. LGBTQ rights are on a roll in India. In September of last year the Supreme Court struck down the hated Section 377, which criminalized gay sex. In February, Mumbai hosted its first LGBTQ Pride March since the ruling, and the energy and excitement was palpable. The crowd was estimated at 15,000, which is nothing compared to Madrid, Rio or New York, but is a major crowd by Indian queer standards. PAPER sent photographer Anai Bharucha to document this historic day in South Asia's gay history and, as expected, she found a stream of super-energized, super-excited LGBTQ folks and allies celebrating the recent advances. A few marchers wore masks, which was the usual way gay people protected their identity at queer events in the past but mostly people were out loud and proud. Are you discovering the Sprouse twins late in life? It's okay to admit. Most likely you were at least vaguely familiar with Dylan and Cole during their Disney Channel tween idol days, when they had blonde highlights and played titular characters on The Suite Life of Zach and Cody and its spinoff The Suite Life On Deck, and are now a little confused. Both brothers went on acting hiatus when Suite Life wrapped in 2011, but over the past couple of years they've returned to screens and gossip columns with a vengeance, forging two completely new identities. The Sprouses have attained that hard-to-grasp Instagram-level fame where people over the age of 30 have no idea who they are, but little sisters around the country are obsessed. They are suddenly, and despite a long history of bad hair choices, cool. Related | On the Edge of Luxury With Cole Sprouse But which one is which? One owns a meadery, one acts on Netflix, but due to being identical twins, Dylan and Cole look exactly the same. Which makes pinning down their re spective personalities and acting credits a little tricky. Never fear! Below, a definitive guide to telling America's most influential twin twenty-somethings apart their out-of-print biography unfortunately costs $176.98 on Amazon, so this article is the next best thing. Careers Cole (L) and Dylan (R) in 2011 The Sprouse twins are 26 years old, both born in Italy on August 4, 1992. Their parents were apparently English tutors in Tuscany at the time, which sounds idyllic. They named their sons after Nat King Cole and Dylan Thomas, which is incredible I would absolutely love to meet these people. Dylan is older by 15 minutes. The family moved back to Southern California four months after the twins were born. As Mary Kate and Ashley can testify, cute young identical twins are an asset in Hollywood, where child labor laws prevent any one kid from filming for more than three hours per day. Cole and Dylan or their poetry-loving parents, I guess were soon taking advantage of the twin loophole. They scored a joint role playing Patrick Kelly on the ABC series Grace Under Fire, and in 1999 they made their feature debuts playing the son of Adam Sandler's character in Big Daddy Cole was in one less scene than Dylan. But then Cole (not Dylan) starred as Ross's son Ben on Friends. He had a crush on Jennifer Aniston! Dylan and Cole were cast in The Suite Life of Zach and Cody in 2005. Dylan was Zack, Cole was Cody. During their Disney Channel tenure they were earning a reported $40,000 per episode, plus profiting off clothing lines and merchandise. They were, at one point, estimated to be the world's wealthiest twins. Perhaps seeking more normal lives, in 2011 both brothers enrolled at NYU's Gallatin School, where Cole studied archaeology and Dylan studied game design. As a student, Dylan briefly worked as a restaurant host, "as a way to try a new experience, working somewhat below the means I'm used to, as well as a way to socialize and get out of the house." He also commentated several Super Smash Bros tournaments. Cole and Dylan both graduated in 2015. This is where their paths diverge. Both brothers faded almost totally from the public eye until Cole emerged from relative onscurity to play Riverdale's Jughead Jones in 2017. With the exception of Cole's brief role on Friends, this was the first time the brothers hadn't shared a role. But Dylan seems fine about it! He maintains an enigmatic social media presence, owns a meadery in Williamsburg, and starred in a Camila Cabello music video. Appearances Dylan (L) and Cole (R) in 2010 Okay! This is the important bit. I've determined that there are three easy-ish ways to physically tell the Sprouse twins apart the shapes of their faces (Dylan's is slightly rounder), heights (Cole is slightly taller), and hair colors. In the past, they've both rocked truly heinous blond ponytails, but right now Cole has dark brown emo hair (because the character he plays is a weirdo, if you haven't noticed) while Dylan has what's presumably his natural shade of light brown. Behold their most recent public appearance together: Dylan (L) and Cole (R) earlier this month It's trickier when you're not looking at a side-by-side comparison, though. For solo images, there are a couple of tricks to remember. Dylan has two freckles on the left side of his neck, whereas Cole has two on the right thank you to this fan-made montage video, set to a Michael Buble song, for helping me figure that out. They also have different beauty marks: Dylan has a mole above his lip, Cole has one on his chin. Love Lives Lili Reinhart (L) and Cole Sprouse (R) earlier this month Probably the number one thing to know about Cole Sprouse is that he is dating his onscreen love interest Lili Reinhart the Betty to his Jughead. They're happy together, it seems like! Lili has publicly confirmed that she enjoys having sex with Cole, and they enjoy posting cute photos of one another on their Instagram grids. Dylan, too, is engaged in a high profile romance with model Barbara Palvin. They've posed for a Valentine's Day W cover and everything. Also, at age 11, Dylan once dated fellow tween star Miley Cyrus for 24 hours. "We met on her set, I believe, and we dated, and then Nick Jonas walked by and it was over," he explained during a Jimmy Kimmel appearance. What could have been. Personalities and interests Cole (L) and Dylan (R) in 2001 As their Tuscan origins would suggest, both Sprouse twins are cultured in their interests. Cole is an accomplished photographer, and has participated in several archaeological digs. He once unearthed a Dionysian mask in Bulgaria? Cole also has a flair for poetry he once wrote this ode to his mom: "I love you mom, you are the best/You're better than all the rest/And if anyone ever takes us apart/I'd repeatedly stab them in the heart." Meanwhile Dylan, who calls himself "the human version of the stussy S" in his Instagram bio, is a video game obsessive and master brewer at his own hipster meadery. He told PAPER last year that he enjoys "being hands-on with the process, making a mixture, using the paddle that stuff might seem unglamorous to other people, but I've come to love it." He prefers to act in film roles over TV, and has only seen one episode of Riverdale. To truly understand the crucial personality differences between Dylan and Cole, look no further than the autobiographical statements published on the twins' now-defunct official website in 2008. Here's Dylan: "I was born 15 minutes before Cole, and I still use it to my advantage hahaha. I love surfing, snowboarding, playing video games, walking my dog, Bubba, acting and pretty much anything that is fun to do. I'm not sure if you want to hear a funny story about Cole and me, but here's one anyway. One morning, our school was planting new trees. I was playing on them when our principal told everyone in our school not to. I broke a limb off a tree and I said that Cole did it. The next morning at assembly when all the kids were sitting down, they announced his name and he got into really big trouble. I let him take the blame for a while, but then I told the principal it was really me. So, I was beaten with a stick. Just kidding!!!" And Cole: "I was born in Arezzo, Italy 15 minutes after Dylan in a small hospital called Clinica Tanganeli. We were delivered by Senora Maggie, a midwife who had hand-delivered at least half the town since World War II. I love animals. I'm really into superheroes. I love snowboarding. I'm very outgoing. I'm usually the hit of the parties. I like rock music. What I like in girls is a funny personality, not a crazy fan. I like a girl who is down-to-earth and doesn't get worked up over anything not the kind of girl who is so worried about how she looks that she has to put on pounds of makeup!" Now you know. Despite the euphoria that overwhelmed the streets of the Algerian capital on Monday evening after President Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika announced he did not intend to run for a fifth term, the very next day thousands of students and youths took to the streets in several cities rejecting what they called a trick from the old guard. The scene may seem like a generational conflict, but it is actually a struggle by the new in the government, politics, the economy and culture, whether young or old. Bejaia, a coastal city, has witnessed a strike that paralysed its harbor, according to the Algerian satellite channel Ennahar. In Algiers, hundreds took to the streets to demonstrate against the president and his decisions. But otherwise, life was normal, according to Reuters reports. President Bouteflika made a lengthy statement to the Algerian people on Monday evening in which he announced his decision not to run for a fifth term, as well as the postponing of the presidential elections to 18 April and the sacking of Ahmed Ouyahias government and the appointing of Interior Minister Noureddine Bedoui as the new prime minister. He has also said that an independent inclusive national commission will draw up a national charter which will shape the new Algerian system before the end of 2019. Local newspapers have speculated that the head of this national commission will be veteran diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, although the man himself has not announced that the Algerian president has appointed him to this post. State television has aired Bouteflikas meeting with Brahimi as well as the Army Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Gaed Salah, whom the AFP has described as the second most important man in Algeria after the president. The Algerian president also met with resigned Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia, his successor Bedoui, and Ramtane Lamamra, the newly appointed deputy prime minister and foreign minister. The Algerian crisis worsened after the president announced his candidacy for a fifth term despite suffering the aftereffects of a brain stroke in 2013, making rare public appearance and being unable to speak clearly. The opposition believes that Bouteflikas decisions are just a political manoeuvre which many think is unconstitutional, because the presidents term cannot be extended except in times of war according to the Algerian constitution. Activists have questioned who is behind announcing the presidents candidacy and the submission of his file to the Constitutional Council, even though Bouteflika said in his message to the people that there will be no fifth term. There was never any question of it for me given the state of my health and age." President Bouteflika has been ruling Algeria since 1999, helping end the so-called Black Decade (1991-2000) where 200,000 Algerians were killed according to unofficial estimates. His first term has coincided with a hike in oil and natural gas prices, which the country relies upon heavily. This in turn contributed to creating a climate where contractors enjoy political influence in a country where power is in the hands of the military institution, the old Mujahideen against the French occupation, and the Liberation Front Party politicians, which include, of course, Bouteflika. During this period, the rate of unemployment did not radically improve. Algeria, half the population of which is under 35, has suffered from an employment problem since the end of the 1980s. France, Algerias former coloniser and the Western country with the biggest interest in the North African nation, has welcomed Bouteflikas decisions. The question now being asked is will the president remain in power after the election date in April, and if so, on what constitutional basis? The mechanism of selecting the national commission members is also unclear. In addition, in a country divided between the forces of loyalists and the opposition, it is difficult to reach a consensus on the figures that would participate in the government the president has promised. Moreover, Algeria is a pivotal country for the nations of southern Europe (France, Italy and Spain), which rely heavily on Algerian oil and natural gas, as well as the Sahel countries in Africa (Chad, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mauritania). The threat of instability in Algeria is heightened by its growing population, which has reached 40 million, and it being the largest African country by land area. It is also one of the main importers of oil and natural gas within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). There is also news currently circulating in local newspapers and social media about a faction war within the loyalist side among the businessmen, the military institution, the Liberation Front Party politicians and the bureaucracy. At the same time, the opposition and protest movement are even more fractious, where parties enjoying universal power are absent from the street aside from the Islamists, who still seem to think that they can govern the country. The Islamists (the Islamic Salvation Front Party) won in the first stage of the first parliamentary elections held in Algeria in 1991, which was overturned by the army in the same year, thus driving the country into the Black Decade. The ascendency of the Islamists may be troubling for many countries, although they could receive support from others. This may push the Country of a Million Martyrs into a conflict that the army has vowed will not take place. Search Keywords: Short link: Reformist Iranian Politician Abolfazl Ghadyani Ordered to Copy Out by Hand Supreme Leader's Book 03/13/19 Source: Center for Human Rights in Iran Ghadyani Sentenced to Three Years Prison in Third Conviction for Criticizing State Policies Abolfazl Ghadyani: "I will be a thorn in the eyes of dictatorship for as long as I live." Veteran Iranian politician Abolfazl Ghadyani has been sentenced to two years in prison for the charge of "insulting the supreme leader" and one for the charge of "propaganda against the state," the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) has learned. Ghadyani has also been ordered to copy out by hand three books including "Doshmanshenasi" (Enemy-ology), a collection of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's political views about his enemies. Ghadyani will be eligible for release after serving two years after the application of Article 134 of the Islamic Penal Code, which states that prisoners convicted of up to three charges should serve "only the maximum punishment provided for each offense." "To better understand the Islamic Republic's doctrine, I recommend that you carefully read the court's verdict," Ghadyani's son, Morteza, tweeted on March 9, 2019, with a copy of the verdict issued by Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran presided by Judge Iman Afshari. The verdict is "entirely a political statement" issued by the Islamic Republic's judicial system under the influence of the Intelligence Ministry and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), he added. The 73-year-old reformist politician and senior member of the Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution of Iran Organization (MIRIO) has been publicly critical of Khamenei's rule and repressive state policies. The court's ruling was based on an open letter Ghadyani wrote in February 2013 in which he described the Iranian leader as a religious "dictator." "For an old man like me, who spent his youth in prison for fighting for freedom and against dictatorship [before the 1979 revolution], there's no greater pride than to spend the last years of my life on the same path," Ghadyani wrote. He added: "Ali Khamenei has registered his name on the list of history's dictators and as a violator of the rights of the people of Iran. He should know that harsh prison conditions and long sentences will not discourage me from expressing my views and opposing his dictatorial rule. I will be a thorn in the eyes of dictatorship for as long as I live." The verdict was issued in absentia as Ghadyani refused to appear in court to protest the unjust legal process. The preliminary verdict could be appealed within 20 days. Ghadyani Convicted for a Third Time for Criticizing Supreme Leader This is the third time the veteran politician has been convicted of "insulting the supreme leader" and "propaganda against the state." The first time was in January 2011 when Ghadyani was sentenced to a year in prison, which he nearly completed before being sentenced to an additional three years in January 2012 for writing open letters that were critical of the country's leadership. Reza Amirkhani, the author of one of the books Ghayani has been ordered to copy by hand titled Hekayat-e Sistan (The Story of Sistan), has condemned the verdict. The book is about one of Khamenei's official visits to Sistan and Baluchestan Province. "First of all, a book should not be forced [on people] by a judge. A book has to find its own audience and be read by choice. If the courts are going to order books to be read as punishment, then we need to make changes in the copyright law to require prior consent from the authors," Amirkhani wrote on Instagram on March 10, 2019. The verdict was also criticized by Ali Asgari, the director in charge of publishing Khamenei's speeches and writings, who said the judge showed "poor taste" in using Khamenei's book to impose punishment. "The Office for the Preservation and Publication of the Supreme Leader's Works has made no recommendation to the courts to force convicts to read his books and we believe such an action is contrary to the spirit of cultural activities," he told the Revolutionary Guards-affiliated Fars News Agency on March 11. During a speech in March 2018, Khamenei falsely claimed, "no one under the Islamic Republic is pursued or put under pressure for being opposed to the government." CHRI has released a video about some of the most well-known cases of people being sentenced to prisonin Iran for peacefully opposing state policies. Iran's President Rouhani meets with Grand Ayatollah Sistani on final day of Iraq visit 03/13/19 Source: Press TV In a historic meeting, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has held talks with Iraq's top Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in the holy city of Najaf on the final day of his landmark visit to the neighboring Arab state. Rouhani sat down with Ayatollah Sistani at his residence on Wednesday after visiting the shrine of Imam Ali, the first Imam of Shia Muslims. President Rouhani at the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf (photo by Islamic Republic News Agency) Rouhani is the first Iranian president ever to have met with Ayatollah Sistani. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Ambassador to Baghdad Iraj Masjedi were also present at the meeting. So far, there have been no reports about what has been discussed at the meeting. Journalists and photographers are rarely let into Ayatollah Sistani's meetings. Iraq's senior Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani Grand Ayatollah Sistani is known as the spiritual leader of Iraqi Shia Muslims and one of the most senior clerics in Shia Islam. His fatwas have significantly contributed to shaping Iraq's political structure. In June 2014 - when the Daesh group unleashed its campaign of terror and destruction in Iraq - Grand Ayatollah Sistani called on his followers to rush to the national army's help in the fight against the terrorist outfit. The fatwa helped bring together Shia fighters, Sunni tribesmen as well as Christian and Izadi volunteers under the umbrella of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), commonly known as Hashd al-Sha'abi, to reverse Daesh's gains and ultimately end the terror group's territorial rule in Iraq in late 2017. Later on Wednesday, the Iranian president is scheduled to meet with other senior officials and clerics in Najaf. Rouhani visited the shrines of Imam Hussein (PBUH), the third Shia Imam, and his half-brother Abbas ibn Ali, in the holy city of Karbala on Tuesday. Heading a high-ranking delegation, Rouhani began his official Iraq visit on Monday, which featured several meetings and the signing of memorandums of understanding for the expansion of bilateral ties in various fields. In a joint statement, the two neighboring states hailed Rouhani's Iraq visit as a "turning point" in efforts to strengthen "strategic" cooperation based on non-interference in each other's internal affairs. Iranian Lawyers Join Global Backlash to Iran's Sentencing of Rights Defender 03/13/19 By Michael Lipin, VOA A group of Iranian lawyers has added its voice to international criticism of Tehran for sentencing a female colleague to additional years in prison in relation to her work in defending Iranian rights activists. Iranian defense attorney Nasrin Sotoudeh stood up for women's rights. Now she has been sentenced to 38 YEARS in prison https://t.co/UHiWgGiBRs. #FreeNasrin pic.twitter.com/FCcXXUA0YN IranHumanRights.org (@ICHRI) March 13, 2019 In an open letter to the Iranian people dated Tuesday and sent by one of the authors to VOA Persian, the group of 16 lawyers said the multiyear sentencing of lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, announced by Iranian state media Monday, violates the Iranian constitution's commitments to human rights and fair trials. "It is a source of shame and shows a lack of tolerance in dealing with lawyers who are critical of the system, a sign of the weakness of the judiciary," said the letter, also published online by Iran's Human Rights Activist News Agency. "We praise Sotoudeh's integrity, passion and independence in fighting for justice and human rights, and call for her unjust sentence to be overturned," added the lawyers. Nasrin Sotoudeh with her husband Reza Khandan (file photo) Sotoudeh was arrested at her home last June after she defended women detained earlier in the year for staging street protests against Iran's compulsory hijab law. In reports published Monday, Iranian state media quoted judge Mohammad Moghiseh as saying Sotoudeh was sentenced to seven years in prison: five years for "crimes against national security" and two years for "insulting" Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. At the time of her 2018 arrest, Iranian authorities informed Sotoudeh that she also had been found guilty in absentia of espionage and sentenced to five years in prison in that case. London-based rights group Amnesty International posted a Monday report saying authorities at Tehran's Evin prison, where Sotoudeh is jailed, informed her this week that her new sentence was 33 years and 148 lashes for a case involving seven security-related offenses. Nasrin Sotoudeh is a national treasure in #Iran. Why? Because she has bravely stood up for women's rights. For children's rights. For a safer, fairer Iran. Yet, for this, she is serving 38 years in prison & will be flogged 148 times. #FreeNasrin now. pic.twitter.com/9KAHQ4qd2v Amnesty International (@amnesty) March 13, 2019 Amnesty said it was not clear if Moghiseh's announcement of a seven-year prison term for Sotoudeh was related to the case involving the seven charges. "If [Moghiseh's] report was referring to the same case, Amnesty International cannot currently explain why the information appears to contradict that provided to Sotoudeh by the office for the implementation of sentences in Evin prison," the group said. In a Facebook post Monday, Sotoudeh's husband Reza Khandan wrote that his wife has been sentenced to a total of 38 years in prison and 148 lashes, with five years for a first case and 33 years for the second. His reference to a "first case" appeared to match the five-year sentence for espionage, handed down to Sotoudeh in absentia last year. Khandan told the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) that he got the figures from Sotoudeh in a phone call that lasted only a few minutes without time to get into details. International backlash U.S. State Department Deputy Spokesman Robert Palladino criticized the latest sentencing of Sotoudeh, sarcastically asking Khamenei whether it marks the "new era of justice" that he talks about. In a Tuesday statement, the EU described Sotoudeh's sentencing as a "worrying development." "The EU expects an immediate review of her sentence as well as the conviction of her husband Reza Khandan, who was sentenced to 6 years' imprisonment in January 2019," an EU spokesperson said. "The European Union also expects Iran to ensure that both Khandan and Sotoudeh's right to appeal their sentences is protected." Amnesty denounced Sotoudeh's sentencing in stronger terms. "It is absolutely shocking that Sotoudeh is facing nearly four decades in jail and 148 lashes for her peaceful human rights work, including her defense of women protesting against Iran's degrading forced hijab [veiling] laws," said Philip Luther, the group's Middle East research director. "Sotoudeh must be released immediately and unconditionally and this obscene sentence quashed without delay." There was no immediate response by the Iranian government to the international backlash against Sotoudeh's new sentence. Sotoudeh previously served three years in prison from 2010 to 2013 for security-related charges relating to her human rights work, which has won her several international accolades. This article originated in VOA's Persian Service. Shahram Bahraminejad contributed from Washington. About the author: Michael Lipin covers international news for VOA on the web, radio and TV, specializing in the Middle East and East Asia Pacific. Follow him on Twitter @Michael_Lipin Top U.S. aircraft manufacturer Boeing Company said Monday that it is planning to make a safety upgrade to software that is to be deployed across the 737 MAX fleet in the coming weeks. Boeing said it is working with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to develop the software enhancement, which the FAA hoped to mandate with an Airworthiness Directive no later than April. The Boeing announcement came one day after an aircraft of Ethiopian Airlines crashed Sunday morning, killing all 157 passengers and crew members on board a 737 MAX 8 plane. The plane crash was the second fatal incident involving the same model in five months. Another Boeing 737 MAX 8, flown by Indonesia's Lion Air, crashed soon after takeoff from Jakarta in October last year, killing 189 people. Boeing did not make direct reference to Sunday's air crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 while announcing the software upgrade plan on Monday, but it offered its "deepest condolences to those who lost loved ones" on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. The aircraft giant said a Boeing technical team is at the crash site to provide technical assistance to the local authorities. Boeing said it has been developing a flight control software enhancement for the 737 MAX for the past several months in the aftermath of the Lion Air Flight 610 tragedy. Despite Sunday's air crash in Ethiopia, Boeing said that the 737 MAX is "a safe airplane that was designed, built and supported" by its skilled employees. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Finance Committee of Parliament has given the go-ahead for some GH2 billion to be approved for the issuance of a sovereign guarantee for the Ghana Amalgamated Trust (GAT) Limited. This is aimed at lending support to some indigenous Ghanaian banks. The Ghana Amalgamated Trust was formed off the back of reforms within the banking sector to enable some five banks come together and be able to meet the minimum capital requirement. In order to meet the minimum capital, Agricultural Development Bank (ADB), National Investment Bank (NIB), UMB Bank, Prudential Bank and the merged BSIC and Omni Bank were to receive assistance from government. When the issue of government support came up, the Minority caucus refused to give backing to the formation of GAT and the intention of giving financial support to the distressed banks. According to the Minority, the establishment of GAT is illegal since no parliamentary approval was given to its formation. Following this disagreement, the matter was referred to the Finance Committee of Parliament, which upon several deliberations has now given the green light for Parliament to debate and approve an amount of GH2 billion in aid of the five banks. During its sitting on Wednesday, March 13, the Committee recommended that Parliament adopt and approve the request to issue the said amount to help GAT. The Committee by a majority decision further recommends to the house to approve the waiver of the Guarantee fee totaling Ten Million Ghana Cedis (GH10.00Million) being 0.5% of the guarantee amount as determined by the Minister of Finance in accordance with Article 174(2) of the 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Ghana and Section 66(5)(a) of the Public Financial Management Act , 2016 (Act 921), the Committee noted. It is, however, uncertain whether or not the Minority will still disagree despite the Committees approval. Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video GLAUCOMA, also known as the silent thief of sight, is a disease which makes the eye go blind with no warning signs. The signs only show at the last stage of the disease. It is also the second leading cause of blindness after cataract. Untreated glaucoma results in blindness because of the irreversible damage it causes. According to the President of the Ophthalmological Society of Ghana (OSG), Dr Michael Gyasi, Glaucoma is a disease that has no symptoms at the early stages and when the symptoms start showing, that is the moment nothing can be done about it, this is the reason why people need to go for regular eye screening to make sure even if they get infected, they could be detected at the early stage and treated. He said Ghana was one of the highest ranking countries in the world affected with glaucoma and over 700,000 Ghanaians were living with the disease. He stated this on Monday (March 11) in Accra when the OSG organised a free eye screening at the Ledzokuku Municipal Assembly (LeKMA) Hospital as part of activities marking the Glaucoma Week celebration. This years World Glaucoma Week is scheduled for March 11 to 16 and the OSG is collaborating with the Glaucoma Association of Ghana (GAG) and the Ministry of Health (MoH) to celebrate the week with free glaucoma screening and free public education to highlight the importance of getting an early disease detection and treatment. Blindness Dr Gyasi further disclosed that the disease accounted for over 19 per cent of all cases of blindness in the country indicating that it was the most important cause of permanent blindness in Ghana. He explained that the disease was caused by damage to the nerves which connected the brain to the eye, pointing out that this damage was caused by pressure on the nerve which resulted in the human vision gradually fading away. According to him, the disease was hereditary and could also be transferred from one parent to his or her offspring, hence the need for people to go for regular check-ups. Glaucoma Week An Ophthalmologist at the LeKMA Hospital, Dr Aseye Aidam, said they would organise free eye screening at the LeKMA Hospital for about 300 people, adding that on Thursday, March 14, the screening would be taken to the Medical Reception Centre at the Burma Camp and also to the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital with the climax taking place at the Accra Regional Hospital on March 15. Awareness creation Secretary of OSG, Dr Dziffa Ofori-Adjei, advised that more attention needed to be given to the disease to help deal with its eradication. Source: Daily Graphic Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Russian warplanes carried out a strike co-ordinated with Turkey on a militant weapons store in Syria's rebel-held Idlib province on Wednesday, the defence ministry said, according to RIA news agency. The strike targeted the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militant group's store of drones and other weapons that it planned to use in an attack on the Russian air base at Hmeimim in western Syria, RIA cited the defence ministry as saying. Search Keywords: Short link: Some stakeholders in the Ashanti Region, have expressed reservations about the requirement that allowed Ghanaians abroad to register under the Representation of the People Amendment Act (ROPAA), based on the provision of a valid resident permit. They argued that this could disenfranchise most legitimate Ghanaians since failure to produce a residence permit of a host country does not make one less a Ghanaian, and recommended that that part be expunged from the requirements. The most important thing on the part of the EC was to establish the nationality of applicants and not to delve into the legality of their stay in the foreign countries. The stakeholders, however, agreed with the other conditions such as a valid Ghanaian passport and proof of dual citizenship. These views were expressed at a consultative forum to solicit for inputs from stakeholders in the Region on the implementation of ROPAA. It was held At Akyawkrom near Ejisu in the Ejisu Municipality. Arranged by a nine-member ROPAA Consultative and Implementation Committee, the forum was attended by representatives from political parties, civil society organizations, professional bodies, traditional rulers, religious leaders and the media. The committee chaired by Dr. Eric Bossman Asare, a Deputy Chairperson of the EC has been touring various regions in the country to collate views and recommendations of major stakeholders in the implementation of ROPAA. The provision of a valid resident permit as one of the requirements for registration took center stage of the discussions led by Dr. Benjamin Kumbour, a member of the committee. Participants took turns to argue for the removal of that condition for registration since not all Ghanaians abroad had residents permit. The committee presented a report by a previous committee formed in 2011 and invited the participants to make inputs and recommendations. It is expected to put together a document as a roadmap for the implementation of the law after the stakeholder engagements. A Constitutional Instrument (CI) would also be laid before parliament for consideration to pave way for the operationalization of the law. Dr. Asare said the stakeholder engagement had become necessary despite the 2011 committee report due to a number of reforms that the EC had introduced since then. He said the exercise would assist the EC to implement the law in a way that would reflect the collective interest of the citizenry. It would be recalled that one Kofi Boateng and four others took the EC to court in 2017 over its failure to implement the ROPAA which had been passed by parliament since 2006. The court presided over by Justice Anthony Yeboah upheld the application of the petitioners and ordered the EC to take steps to implement the law within 12 months. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has stated that Fly Zipline Ghana, operators of drone delivery services, which is contracted to augment the nations health delivery, will start operation by April, this year. The company will use drones to deliver essential medicines and pints of blood to remote parts of the country where they are in dire need. He gave the assurance when he officially opened the 5th Conference of the African Health Economics and Policy Association (AfHEA) yesterday in Accra. He said government had decided to set aside 2.5 per cent of taxes on goods and services to boost healthcare delivery in the country. Particularly in such far-away places in the countryside where the road network is too terrible and health personnel are unable to immediately transport patients to health centers in the cities, drone services come handy. The Vice President explained that the government decided to take advantage of such technology to ensure cost-effective healthcare delivery, which would in turn help to achieve the universal health coverage of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). With about 14 million Ghanaians expected to benefit from the service, Fly Zipline Ghana, operators of the drone delivery services, would convey 149 key medical supplies across the country. According to Dr Bawumia, governments policy to supply one ambulance to each of the 275 constituencies by June, this year, would enhance healthcare delivery as part of the inclusive transformation agenda. Additionally, he indicated that the NPP administration was bent on implementing programmes and interventions to improve lives and sustainable development. The programmes include the National Health Insurance Scheme rolled out in 2003, Free Senior High School (SHS) Policy and the digitisation of the health sector. Parliament, last year, gave approval to Fly Zipline Ghana to operate in the country to improve medical services in deprived communities. Ghana thus becomes the second nation in Africa after Rwanda to adopt the drone technology for distribution of medical supplies. The four-day conference, which also marks the 10th Anniversary of the Association, is under the theme: Securing Primary Healthcare for All, the Foundation for Making Progress on Universal Health Care in Africa. The meeting attracted more than 450 members of the Association, comprising health experts and practitioners, researchers and students, who would discuss health outcomes, policy analysis and health financing, to facilitate decision-making in the health sector in Africa. The Vice President called on health practitioners and key stakeholders to find solutions to health problems since the continent lags behind in a lot of health indicators. Dr Bawumia also expressed worry about the high infant mortality rate in Africa which threatens efforts to meet the SDG target by 2030. He called for increased investment in healthcare infrastructure and human capacity by African countries to achieve primary healthcare towards meeting the global healthcare benchmark. Dr Chris Atim, Executive Director of the African Health Economics and Policy Association, in a remark, said the association, which was established on March 12, 2009, seeks to aid African countries to achieve quality healthcare for their citizens. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Attorney General and Ministry of Justice says it received cabinet approval for the payment of GH67.3 million to Construction Pioneers as judgement debt as far back as 2013. This was after the 2016 Auditor Generals Report cited the ministry for infractions resulting from failure to comply with the Ministry of Finance Budget Implementation Instructions 3.8, which requires that all judgement debt claims exceeding GH10 million should be submitted to cabinet for approval prior to final settlement and payment. When queried, the report explained that the ministry could not provide any documentation with regards to the court judgement adding that the failure of management to investigate the cause of the direct debit for appropriate action resulted in the anomaly. However, Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Gloria Akuffo, told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament in Accra yesterday that the ministry was authorised by Cabinet through a letter dated July 29, 2013 to pay the above amount to Construction Pioneers. She said payments were made in two tranches in February and April of 2015. The judgement debt was after arbitration between Construction Pioneers and the government of Ghana. The authorisation from cabinet was received way back in 2013 but we did not have it readily available to furnish the Auditor General during the query. We apologise for the delay in presenting it, she stated. On why the Ministry released GH250,000 to the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) without any documentation, Madam Akuffo stated that the sum was to fund a special operation which was not to be disclosed. She said disclosure of the details and nature of the operation would have jeopardised the exercise and the intended purpose. Quizzed on why the Ministry took GH1.1 million from the Registrar-Generals Department to be able to meet expenditures on conferences and seminars, the Attorney General said her outfit was forced to seek financial assistance due to inadequate budgetary allocation. Mr. Chairman, I agree there is no legal backing for the support we receive from our agency. The fact is if these support do not come in, our activities and the work, which sometimes include foreign engagement, we do for the country will come to a halt and the consequences will not be desiring. Budget allocation to the ministry is wholly inadequate for the work we do. But we have taken note of the recommendations in the Auditor Generals Report to account for it and we have done that, she added. She stated that the ministry has also closed four bank accounts, which were dormant and was against the Controller and Accountant Generals Department (CAGD) directives to maintain a single treasury account, and had transferred the balances to the government chest. Deputy Minister of Roads and Highways, Anthony Karbo also told the committee that his outfit was realigning the scope of some road projects to curb growing debt owed contractors in the country. The debt, he said was as a result of project contracts being awarded without the availability of earmarked funds. We have taken a different approach and this is to realign the scope or terminate some contract as recommended by the Auditor General. The realignment is that if a contractor has been engaged on a project which was not budgeted for, we agree to halt the project and pay for the work done. Going forward, the strategy is that no contract will be awarded without a matching fund, he said. In order to deal with leakages in the collection of road tolls, Offei-Annor, Acting Chief Director, Ministry of Roads and Highways, said the ministry was awaiting approvals to automate all toll booths to help in revenue generation. Source: Ghanaian Times Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Ashanti Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has alleged that former President John Mahama has invested more than half of his ex-gratia into funding thugs and hooligans and for this reason would find it very difficult to make a bold statement from its disbandment. His comment comes in the wake of President Nana Akufo-Addos bold statement in calling on the two major political parties in Ghana to disband vigilante groups. In a recent address to Ghanaians, President Akufo Addo served notice to initiate legislation to ban vigilante groups if voluntary disbandment by political parties is not feasible. Delivering his third State of the Nation Address in Parliament on Thursday, February 21, 2019, President Akufo Addo appealed to the leaders of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to come together immediately and fashion out measures to end vigilantism in Ghana politics. After commending President Akufo-Addo for the bold statement, Mr. Bernard Antwi-Boasiako who is popularly known as Chairman Wontumi insisted that out of desperation for power, former President Mahama has used a chunk of his ex-gratia to buy sophisticated weapons for his militia group known as the Hawks to cause atrocities during elections. Four persons alleged to be members of the pro-NDC vigilante group The Hawks suspected to have carried out the shooting at the Regional Office of the NDC have been declared wanted by the Ashanti Regional Police Command. The incident claimed one life while one person is in critical condition at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital and according to Chairman Wontumi, The killing which occurred in-front of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) executives in the Ashanti Region was carried out by boys who work for John Mahama. They are part of the Hawks, a group founded by Joseph Yasmin and sponsored by John Mahama. He continued that If the taxpayers money, used to pay John Mahama as his ex-gratia would be used by him in acquiring weapons for his thugs, then I am calling on the State to halt the financial assistance to him. He is a rebel leader and not a Statesman. He is a gangster who has a lot of criminals working for him. He can never be bold enough like President Akufo-Addo to call for the disbandment of vigilante groups. Mr. Bernard Antwi-Boasiako explained that Ghanaians should applaud President Akufo-Addo for his brave decision to halt vigilante groups under his watch. 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. Featured Video An elder of the Convention Peoples Party (CPP), Mr Robert Okyere Frimpong-Manso, has said any discussions on ending the worrying trend of party vigilantism should not be limited to the two political parties NPP and NDC alone but it must include all registered political parties and other key stakeholders. Lauding President Akufo-Addos appeal to the leaders of the two main political parties NPP and NDC to agree on appropriate measures to bring an end to the unacceptable and worrying trend of party vigilantism in the country, he however, said it is important the discussions on voluntary disbandment of vigilantes is not limited to the NPP and NDC alone. Speaking to the Daily Graphic by a telephone from his base in Kumasi in the Ashanti Region, the 79-year-old man, popularly called R.O., said the vigilante issue was assuming an alarming dimension, and as such must not be treated lightly. We are talking about the security of the nation and we need all hands on deck to nip the rising canker in the bud, he stressed. Deeply rooted In the view of Mr Frimpong-Manso, who traced his political history from Ghanas First President, Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, political party vigilantism was deeply rooted in the activities of both the NPP and the NDC, and that its voluntary disbandment by the two parties would not come easy if there was no goodwill. Mr Frimpong-Manso who is a former Vice-Chairman of the Council of Elders of the CPP and the Ashanti Regional Organiser of the Ghana Young Pioneers, noted that it would not be an easy task to disband the party vigilantes if there was no goodwill from the beneficiaries. Today, according to Mr Frimpong-Manso, it is the NPP and NDC who are engaged in party vigilantism but tomorrow it could be the CPP or PPP, and for that reason no effort should be spared to get rid of the canker in its entirety now. Criminal law He noted with regret that there is an existing criminal law in the country but the police are ineffective to enforce it because they are always under the control of the political party in power. This is the more reason why we need a broad stakeholder debate and exchange of ideas on the voluntary disbandment of party vigilantisms to inject trust and confidence in the whole process. Ghana agenda He also stressed the need for a national agenda that would include security matters. Expatiating further, he said that elsewhere in the advanced world, there was continuity of the national agenda, saying the situation where in Ghana, projects are curtailed with a change of government undermines sustainable development. He said that Ghana was 62 years old and could only boast significant infrastructure built by Dr Kwame Nkrumah. Mr Frimpong-Manso, who spent years in exile in London, said there should be no reason why the nations peace and security should be compromised. Source: Daily Graphic Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The National Democratic Congress (NDC) has announced that it will not partake in the Presidents proposed bipartisan dialogue to stem political vigilantism in the country. The veiled announcement was contained in its second correspondence to the President on the subject an obvious response to his earlier one to the partys embattled National Chairman, Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo. In the correspondence, President Akufo-Addo told Mr. Ofosu-Ampofo that the issue should be restricted to the NDC and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), with no foreign arbiter. In what is appearing to be an endless exchange of open correspondences between the President and the NDC National Chairman on the vigilantism talks, the opposition party said it would be a tragedy to go forward on the narrow basis of only the two major political parties considering the gravity of the matters to be considered and the danger that the threat of unregulated use of force by unauthorized armed groups poses to civil society, and indeed to those who bear arms lawfully as mandated by the 1992 4th Republican Constitution of which you are the principal guardian. In his response to the Ofosu-Ampofo correspondence of 28th February, 2019, the President insisted that such a dialogue should be restricted to NDC and NPP something the former is demurring. Political Feast The NDCs political feast of the so-called militia training at the Castle which was described by the government as mendacious stood prominent in the correspondence. We cannot restrain ourselves from drawing Your Excellencys attention to the recently broadcast documentary by Manasseh Azure Awuni of Multimedia Company on the activities of an illegal militia operating from Christiansborg Castle Osu, an annex of the Presidency, it said. They missed no time in pointing to the discredited documentary. Castle Matters The Museum and Monuments Board has even denied that the Osu Castle is a security structure in opposition to the NDCs description as such. The NDC took a swipe at the ruling party, claiming the assertion that the Castle vigilantes are sponsored by the NPP has not been challenged something which is far from the truth. The Information Minister has swiftly denied the charge. NDCs Position In defending its position for broader participation in the dialogue on vigilantism, the NDC stated that the stakeholders in the struggle against political violence cannot reasonably be limited to the two largest political parties. Facilitation Touching on the facilitation of the dialogue, the NDC said: We are not looking at a principally juridical process. As indicated, we envisage large and complex citizens process. There will be several different stakeholders with different perspectives and priorities. Political Establishment The sad fact is that the expertise required in facilitating such a dialogue does not reside in any meaningful way in the current political establishment as much as it does in civil society and in the international community. Indeed, a significant element of the crisis we currently face is the winner-takes-all culture of our national politics. Much as it agrees with the President that the NDC and the NPP have been the most successful parties of the 4th Republic, it however claimed that our parties do not represent the full scope of Ghanaian opinion as your letter suggests, adding that an important driver of political violence is the fact that increasingly large sections of society do not feel represented by the political establishment and do not have faith in its constitutive institutions and their process. Highest Bidder The NDC highlighted the problem of citizens resorting to violent self-help. Some of the militias degrading our politics also provide land guard services to the highest bidders in our cities or double as galamsey or illegal logging enforcers in our rural areas. The same forces that protect prominent politicians are engaged in communal violence around chieftaincy disputes. The NDC and the NPP cannot do it alone and we need important assistance from the wider society to achieve lasting verifiable solutions that will assure peace and security to our citizens, our parties and our nation. International Support The NDC pointed out that the problems facing Ghana are not peculiar to the country and called on international organizations to help find solutions. These include ECOWAS, the AU and various UN agencies. Ghana is a member of these bodies and is entitled to call on their resources to assist in resolving critical problems. This is not in any way a surrender of our sovereignty or a declaration of a lack of faith in our own abilities. We see it rather as an act of responsible regional and international citizenship and transparency. President Akufo-Addo in his letter to the National Chairman of the NDC kicked against this anyway. Test for Belief The question of turning to a bipartisan approach in tackling political violence should be put to Ghanaians to decide, the NDC said. We respectfully request that you invite the public and entities such as the Ghana Peace Council or the various expert institutions to weigh in on this debate. We have already begun to sound out to other stakeholders and believe that there is considerable interest in participating in a process such as we have described. The correspondence, like the earlier ones, was copied the National Chairman of the NPP and the Chairman of the National Peace Council, a man Mr. Ofosu-Ampofo ordered NDC members to insult as captured in his leaked audio recording. Legislation With the NDCs lack of cooperation, it is hard to tell what the option is for the President. He had said that he could use legislation to give backing to ban vigilantism should the bipartisan approach refuse to fly. It is unclear whether this missive would prompt a response from the President now that it has become evident that the NDC is uninterested in the bipartisan dialogue. Source: Daily Guide Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Minister for Parliamentary Affairs and Member of Parliament (MP) for Suame constituency, Hon. Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu, has expressed worry at the rate at which former MP's are dying. Describing the former National Chairman of the NDC and former Member of Parliament for Biakoye Constituency, Dr. Kwabena Agyei as a good man, he noted that the trend is disturbing. He says he has contributed immensely to the development of Ghanas Parliament and that the likes of him has really made Ghanas Parliament to be one of the respected Parliaments across the world. Speaking on Okay FMs 'Ade Akye Abia' programme, the Majority leader who recounted days of working with him in parliament said as a junior parliamentarian then, he learnt a lot from him. He however noted that parliament has over the last months lost a great number of parliamentarians including former Member of Parliament for Efigya Sekyere, Henric Yeboah, Joe Donkor, Lee Ocran and now Dr. Kwabena Adjei. "During their days in parliament, they challenged us to learn a lot as new parliamentarians who were taking up roles in parliament under the leadership of JH Mensah who was the minority leader," he said. "With time we are losing these fine parliamentarians who have contributed immensely to the development of the country," he added. A former National Chairman of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Dr. Kwabena Adjei, has passed. He died Tuesday morning at the Greater Accra Regional Hospital, formerly Ridge hospital. The politician, who was the Chairman when the NDC won power in 2008, had been battling with a protracted sickness first reported in the media in August 2015. He died three days after marking his 76th birthday on March 9, 2019. Dr. Adjei graduated with a PhD in Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, U.K in 1973. He ventured into politics in 1978, getting elected as a Council Mmember of the Jasikan District Council in the Volta region. The Psychology lecturers political decline began after 2014 after he lost his National Chairmanship post to Kofi Portuphy. It ended his bid for a third tenure after first winning the position in 2005 while the party was in opposition. He was re-elected in 2009 Source: Isaac Kwame Owusu/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. Featured Video Former Deputy Minister for Youth and Sports, Joseph Yamin, has denied making any comment that the NDC will make Ghana ungovernable. According to him he has also never made any comment about the NDC vowing not to disband their vigilante groups. A member of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) believed to be one of the founders of the partys Vigilante Groups, 'The Hawks', Joseph Yammin, has cynically said that the opposition party will not disband the vigilante group on any day. He said his position is hinged on the fact that the vigilante group is a recognized organ of the NDC. The Hawks is a recognized taskforce in the NDC party. They perform their roles like members of the party and provide security for the party, he revealed. But speaking on Okay FMs 'Ade Akye Abia' programme, the former deputy Ashanti Regional Minister explained that he has never made any comment purporting to create some disaffection for the party in this time when government seeks to disband vigilante groups. He indicated that the last time he spoke on a radio station was on the 6th of March, and that he never said anything in relation to politics so he is surprised why some newspapers will attribute something like that to him. However, in a statement signed by the General Secretary of the party, Mr. Johnson Asiedu Nketia, he indicated that the party has taken notice of several media publications attributed to a member of the party, Mr. Joseph Yammin under the headline: NDC WILL NOT DISBAND HAWKS TODAY, TOMORROW OR EVER. "The Functional Executive Committee of the NDC wishes to state unequivocally that the above statement does not in any way represent the views and/or position of the party," the statement said. "The party wishes to reiterate its unwavering commitment to the process of disbanding all political vigilante or party militia groups in the country. Our position on this issue is a matter of public record and has been extensively spelt out in recent correspondences from our National Chairman, Mr. Samuel Ofosu Ampofo to the President of the Republic of Ghana. As a law abiding and peace-loving party, we will continue to support and participate in any effort aimed at ending the culture of political violence. The party takes a strong view to this issue and has since invited Mr. Joseph Yammin to clarify the said reportage. Source: Isaac Kwame Owusu/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. Featured Video *Nigerian Brothers Involved Jussie Smollett Attack Confirm $3,500 Check From The Actor Was Payment For Training & Not His Hate Crime Attack It was previously reported that Jussie Smollett made a $3,500 check to two Nigerian brothers to stage his hate crime attack, but now the pair have confirmed the check was for a training program. According to TMZ, the $3,500 check made out to Abel Osundairo, 25, and his brother Ola Osundairo, 27, who are bodybuilders was for training to prepare the former Empire actor for an upcoming music video shoot. Abel and Ola's attorney, Gloria Schmidt, told TMZ the $3,500 check was compensation for a training and nutrition program designed to help Smollett bulk up for a music video. Schmidt denied a reporter's suggestion that the brothers could be in legal jeopardy if they lied to police about the check. "Absolutely not," Schmidt said. "I don't know what the prosecutors have said or not said, but I know in terms of their legal analysis, they're not in any peril." She said Smollett "took advantage" of the Osundairo brothers. "What this case really is about is a person in a position of trust who really betrayed my clients and took advantage of them." The Empire star had told police that two Trump supporters attacked him and yelled racist and homophobic slurs while pouring bleach on him and tying a rope around his neck outside his condo on Jan. 29. The 36-year-old was arrested on Feb. 20 and charged with one felony count of lying to the police. He also faces federal charges of mailing a threatening letter to himself. Chicago PD Superintendent, Eddie Johnson accused the actor of paying the brothers $3,500 to help him stage the attack. They told police Smollett promised to pay them an additional $500 when they returned from a trip to Africa. Jussie Smollett is due back in court on March 14. Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Rising duo stars Akwesi Adjei Amponsah and Cyril Amponsah Popularly known as SBL (Same Blood Line) has released a game changing song to address the issue of social depression and pressure among the youth. The song is collaboration between SBL and Ghanaian pop icon Samuel Frimpong Adu known as AMG Medikal titled I KNOW. the group expalined that, the song "is a social responsibility song to inspire the youth especially, to never give up, hold on to their dreams with their heads high for a better future despite challenges faced by young people under current economic hardship. It is also call on government to ensure friendly working environment for the youth." The Song I Know tells a story of a young hustler trying to make it on the streets of Accra Ghana with all odds against him. Watch below video 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. Featured Video Venezuela's main oil export terminal, Jose, has resumed operations after a power outage halted activities, according to two sources familiar with the matter and Refinitiv Eikon data. The port halted exports, the lifeblood of the OPEC nation's economy, after a massive blackout that began last week. Power has been restored to many parts of the country in recent days. "The terminal has re-established operations," said oil workers' union leader Jose Bodas. He added that upgrading facilities that convert heavy crude from Venezuela's key Orinoco oil belt were still recirculating product to keep the systems running, but not producing new product. While the terminal was functioning, shipments had not yet resumed. No oil export tankers have left Jose since March 7, according to the data. Search Keywords: Short link: Parents of Ariel Kouakou, Frederic Kouakou and Akouena Noella Bibie embrace during a mass in Montreal, Tuesday, March 12, 2019, in honour of their son. One year to the day after a young boy went missing in north-end Montreal, his photo reappeared across the city Tuesday as supporters marked the sad anniversary and attempted to provide answers to his distraught family. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes FILE - In this Feb. 27, 2019, file photo, Cardinal George Pell arrives at the County Court in Melbourne, Australia. Pell was sentenced in an Australian court on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 to 6 years in prison for molesting two choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral more than 20 years ago. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill, File) 8 March marked the anniversary of the death of Abdel-Fatah El-Kasry (1905-1964), also spelled as El-Quossary, the comedian who spent his life making millions laugh, but lost his sight and mental faculties in his final months. Nobody knows for sure the real date of birth of El-Kasry, even if sources report he was born 15 April 1905. Through extrapolation we can establish from certain incidents in his career that he was born before the end of the 19th century by a year or two. He was brought up by a father working in gold ornamentation in El-Gamaleya quarter in the heart of Old Cairo. El-Kasry learned at the College de La Salle, fulfilling the wishes of his father, who aspired that his son will be a well known government official. However, the little boy was attracted to something else theatre. After El-Kasry watched the Fawzi El-Gazayerly Theatre Company shows, he neglected his studies, and then his fathers profession. He went wholeheartedly into acting, joining Abdel-Rahman Rushdy Theatrical Company in 1917. After a brief period, El-Kasry joined the George Abyad Company, run by one of the great thespians of tragedy in theatre. However, he did not find what he wished for there and became more interested in comedic performance. The company's owner advised him to focus on this kind of drama and predicted a great future for him. Indeed, El-Kasry joined theatre companies one after the other, until he ended up in Al-Rihani Company, one of the most famous comedy companies in Egypt at the time. There, Naguib Al-Rihani shaped the character of the master, which El-Kasry became famous for both on stage and on screen. He remained in the company until the death of its owner in 1949, after which he moved into the Ismail Yassin Company, formed in 1954, until he stopped acting due to health problems in his final months. As for the silver screen, Abdel-Fattah El-Kasry began his cinematic career in Master Bah Bah (1935, Shukri Mady) starring Fawzi El-Gazayerli, El-Kasry's childhood icon. In the following year, he acted in His Highness Wants to Marry (Alexander Varkas), starring Naguib Al-Rihani. Then he participated in many films, such as Something Out of Nothing (1938) and Life in the Darkness (1940), both by Ahmed Badrkhan. Unfortunately, these films were lost so we miss the opportunity of getting a closer look on the early artistic features of El-Kasry's persona on the screen. Omar Bey (1941, Niazi Mostafa) starring Naguib Al-Rihani is considered the oldest screen image of El-Kasry and the first landmark in his cinematic career. In this film he didnt present a wholly comedic performance, but blended the role of villain with comedy, due to Al-Rihanis presence in most of El-Kasry's scenes. Indeed, El-Kasry often played in his early beginnings villainous roles mixed with comedy, or combined comedy with villainy. This was evident in one of his most significant early roles, which is The Black Market (1945, Kamel El-Telmissany). However, El-Kasry didn't gain his wide popularity through these roles. Throughout the 1940s, the man proved for filmmakers the breadth of his special comedic talents. Thus, when the 1950s began the artistic features of his screen persona, for which he became famous, crystallised. Between 1950 and 1951 he acted in 19 films. The most important are Hard Luck (1950, Barakat) and My Mother-in-Law is an Atomic Bomb (1951, Helmy Rafla). El-Kasry was successful with all the directors with whom he worked. His collaboration with Fateen Abdel-Wahab, the long experienced comedy director, yielded perhaps his best and most important films, which started with The House of Ghosts (1951) followed by The Lawyer Fatma (1952) before ending their collaboration with two other films, Miss Hanafy (1954) and Son of Hamido (1957). His four collaborations with Fateen were more like variations on one character. However, El-Kasry was capable of clinging to this fine margin of difference between traditional master in Miss Hanafy and the person affecting being knowledgeable in The Lawyer Fatma, and the fisherman and owner of the Normandy Two boat. After his three final films, Lady Sukkar (1960, El-Sayed Bedeir), The Family Tree (1960, Sherif Zaly) and The Bahari Girls (1960, Hassan El-Seifi), El-Kasry stopped acting. On another level, El-Kasry achieved cumulative success with Abbas Kamel, the low-class comedy pioneer director in films such as Mermaid (1947), Horseshoe (1949), My Lovers Window (1951) and Lady Fairouz (1951). The succession of these films and Abbas Kamels insistence on presenting El-Kasry in the mould of the master with a sense of humour led to an increase in the audiences attraction to this loveable character. El-Kasry wasnt pedantic comedian. He was simple to the extent that makes you feel like he wasn't acting. He relied on his skillfulness in using his tools, such as intonation, facial expressions and his eyes, as well as his special way of walking and his flabby body. All these mannerisms were enough to raise the audiences laughter. Some accused him of being stereotypical because he didnt seek to develop his performance range. This can be rebutted by saying that it wasnt required from him to do more, else we would miss the simplicity of the genuine personality. Perhaps his simplicity was the secret of his screen appeal. El-Kasrys success was self-made. He was successful with the emergent middle class following the end of World War II in the mid-1940s, and was also successful with the growing attention to the peasantry and workers following the July 1952 Revolution. His presence as a comedian was firmly footed and has remained captivating through the 55 years that have passed since his death. 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 Search Keywords: Short link: Have you ever wanted to witness an eclipse from the depths of a canyon system or from the skies in an airplane? What about your dream of watching the night skies come alive, dancing with the colors of the Northern Lights? Your dreams can come true. Join expert guides and your fellow space enthusiasts on a thrilling Planetary Society expedition. Antarctica, Alaska, China, Mexico, Lake Baikal, the Grand Canyon, TahitiThe Planetary Societys partner in travel since 1999, Betchart Expeditions, will take you on the travel experience of your dreams. The Michigan Licensing and Regulatory Affairs Bureau issued a cease and desist order against Barclys Construction in Dearborn Heights. LARA issued the order after investigating a complaint against the company. During the investigation, it was uncovered that the company was unlicensed and had been illegally performing building services for clients. The order prohibits Barclys Construction from practicing as a residential builder without possessing a residential builders license issued by LARA. The company has the right to request a hearing within 30 days to respond. According to the state, violations of the Occupational Code may lead to administrative, civil and criminal sanctions, including a maximum fine of $25,000 per violation. A person not licensed under the Occupational Code as a residential builder who willfully violates the code may be subject to criminal penalties. Before starting a home building project, ensure that you hire a reputable residential builder who is properly licensed with the State of Michigan, Bureau of Construction Codes Director Keith Lambert said. Verify their current license status and check for any consumer complaints or disciplinary action by looking it up on the LARA website. Lambert said consumers can call 517-241-9316 to get answers about companies they may be working with. Homeowners should also check with their building department to determine what construction permits are required, and that the residential builder has obtained them, he said. The business is registered to Ali El-Lakkis and has been operating from 6818 Drexel St., Dearborn Heights, since March 2013, according to records. A history detailing whether the company was ever licensed wasnt immediately available. President Donald Trump signed a package of bills honoring the late U.S. Rep. John Dingell this week. It is one of the largest land conservation bill packages in history. The package of bills to protect and conserve public lands was signed into law as U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-12th District), Johns widow, stood next to Trump. The John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management and Recreation Act promotes conservation, recreation, historic preservation, and cultural resource protection in Michigan and across the country. John Dingell is looking down on everyone today and saying well done, Dingell said. The package of bills includes a permanent authorization of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) which is the countrys premier program to conserve public land and improve outdoor recreation. Also included in the package are designations for 1.3 million acres of new wilderness, protections for a million acres of public lands from mining, and measures to save taxpayers $9 million. This landmark public lands legislation is the product of years of work and months of bipartisan, bicameral negotiations, and includes support from key conservation, sportsmen, and environmental stakeholders. The provisions in this bill will safeguard our nations conservation legacy for decades to come, Dingell said. John Dingells entire life was driven by his love of hunting and fishing, and his passion for the outdoors, protecting our natural resources, and addressing the challenges faced ensuring we conserve Americas wild plants, fish, animals, and their habitats. Had he ever been hired as a full-time park ranger as a young man, he might never have run for Congress. She continued to talk about why the bills would make her husband happy, specifically the permanent authorization of the LWCF. He would be particularly happy that the LWCF has finally been permanently authorized. Almost twenty years ago he started fighting for this with his friends Don Young, George Miller, Billy Tauzin, and Chris John, Dingell said. LWCF funding has protected some of this countrys most treasured natural resources, while creating jobs, supporting local economies, and providing countless opportunities for recreation. Since 1965, LWCF has provided over $3.9 billion for over 40,000 projects in every county across the country with every $1 invested returning $4 in economic value. This has benefited every Congressional District, county and state in the country. Preserving our beautiful and iconic places matter to us all-and was the reason for initially establishing LWCF in the beginning. Under this bill, the MotorCities National Heritage Area will see an authorization increase of $2 million. In Michigan, LWCF has already invested more than $329 million to protect forests, wildlife refuges, lakeshores and to increase recreation access. t public lands, historic sites, and increase recreational opportunities. From backcountry trails and boat launches to rivers and community parks, LWCF has protected places like Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, Hiawatha National Forest, Keweenaw National Historical Park, North Country National Scenic Trail, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, Pilgrim River Forest, and Sleepy Hollow State Park. LWCF which has funded 42,000 projects across the country, bringing tremendous economic benefits and returns on investment since it was established in 1965 has expired twice in recent years. Todays bill reauthorizing the law removes it from future political consideration and prevents any future expirations. Among other measures, the bill will impact the country in the following ways. Recreation *Authorize the Every Kid Outdoors Act for seven years, providing every fourth-grader in the U.S. free access to public lands; and *Include a bipartisan sportsmens package designed to enhance access for hunting, fishing, and other recreation activities on public lands and waters. Conservation and Job Training *Expand protections under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act to over 370,000 riparian acres, including segments along the Lower Farmington, Salmon Brook, Wood-Pawcatuck, and Nashua rivers in New England; *Expand the Ocmulgee National Monument in Georgia; *Designate several new National Heritage Areas in Arizona, Washington, and West Virginia; and *Establish the 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps to increase job training opportunities for youth, veterans, and Native Americans on public and tribal lands. Habitats *Reauthorize the Fish and Wildlife Partners program, which would give assistance to private land owners for restoring, enhancing and managing their land to improve fish and wildlife habitats; *Reauthorize the Multinational Species Conservation Fund, which makes targeted investments to protect African elephants, Asian elephants, great apes, marine turtles, tigers, and rhinos; and *Establishes prize competitions for innovative approaches to wildlife conservation, invasive species control, and poaching and trafficking issues. Public Lands *Designate more than 1 million acres of wilderness on federal land in California, Oregon, Utah, and New Mexico; *Add five new national recreation areas; *Expand Joshua Tree National Park, Death Valley National Park and Mojave National Preserve; and *Cut off new mining activities in areas north of Yellowstone National Park and outside North Cascades National Park. African American History *Protect the home of Medgar and Myrlie Evers, passionate advocates for justice and equity during the Civil Rights Movement; *Expand the Reconstruction Era National Monument into a National Historic Park; *Create a Reconstruction Era National Historic Network to coordinate historical preservation and education efforts; *Reauthorize the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Historic Preservation Program. The Forgotten Enlightenments event featured discussion of Islamic heritage relevant to the arts, as well as a film screening and sound performance On 9 March, Forgotten Enlightenments, an event at the Goethe Institute in Doqqi, summarised the results of a unique artistic workshop that took place in Cairo in the previous days. The curators and artists involved in the project invited an international and Egyptian audience to share freshly gathered impressions and showcase the artwork of some of the participants. The initiative by HALLE 14 Centre for Contemporary Art (Germany) and Out of the Circle Organisation (Egypt) aims to draw attention of the artistic community to the rich heritage of Islamic civilisation and its contribution to global knowledge. Cairo, with its mutiple cultural layers and facets, is probably suited for this purpose like no other city in the world. During the immersive workshop, a group of selected young artists from different cultural backgrounds and creative fields were visiting historical locations in Cairo, sharing their discoveries and emotions with each other along the way. Forgotten Enlightenments This moving laboratory of art ideas saw a lot in just four days, including the Nilometer, the Oum Koulthoum Museum, the Museum of Islamic Arts, Abdeen Palace, the Citadel of Saladin, and Mohammed Ali Mosque, under the able guidance of Dr Heba Nayel Barakat, head of curatorial affairs at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (IAMM), as well as other specialists in the field. Prominent galleries such as the Townhouse, Contemporary Image Collective and Medrar were also part of the programme. Stating the purpose of the project in his speech 9 March, Michael Arzt, artistic director of HALLE 14, underlined the relevance of addressing the topic in todays world, and admitted a lack of awareness in modern culture about the achievements of Islamic civilisation. Elham Khattab, founder and curator of the Out of the Circle Organisation, pointed to the significance for artists in the Islamic world of rediscovering their own heritage. Forgotten Enlightenments On behalf of participants, the eloquent Mehreen Murtaza, representing Mantiq of Mantis publishing house from Pakistan, expressed hope to continue the contemporary art dialogue that has been initiated. Also present at the event were visual artists Sukaina Joual (Morocco), Anahita Razmi (Germany/Iran) and Islam Shabana (Egypt), who took part in the workshop. The experimental documentary film Spin by Ginan Seidl explored the theme of rotation from the perspective of Sufism and theoretical physics, using contemporary audiovisual language. The open discussion after the film screening took time as the audience was eager to suggest their interpretations and share thoughts on related matters. This sadly left little time for the sound performance by Yara Mekawei. The activities in Cairo are a part of a larger project Forgotten Enlightenments: Unknown Stories about Islam in Contemporary Art, which will result in a large exhibition in HALLE 14, Leipzig (27 April-4 August), with the support of the Federal Cultural Foundation, the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony, the Institute for International Relations, and the Goethe Institut Cairo, in collaboration with Allianz Cultural Foundation. Forgotten Enlightenments 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 Search Keywords: Short link: 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 Welcome Guest! You Are Here: Making The Most Of It All The holidays came upon us quickly this year it feels like, but correspondingly we have gotten into the holiday spirit much earlier than usual! We... Letters To The Editor LIRR Station Concerns A copy of this letter was received at theoffices of the Queens Gazette. November 30th, 2021 Phillip Eng, MTA LIRR President Dear... Most deaths in children aged 5 to 14 in India, China, Brazil, Mexico are preventable March 12, 2019 - Most deaths of children aged five to 14 in India, China, Brazil and Mexico arise from preventable or treatable conditions, suggests a new study published today in The Lancet. Led by Dr. Shaza Fadel, lead child health epidemiologist at the Centre for Global Health Research (CGHR) of St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, Canada, the study found that deaths from road traffic injuries, neurological conditions, drowning and childhood cancers were common in all four countries from 2005 to 2016. In India, death rates from communicable diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis and vaccine-preventable diseases were nearly 20 times higher than in China, and 10 times higher than in Brazil and Mexico. China saw more deaths by drowning than any of the other countries. Boys aged five to 14 had higher death rates than girls from nearly all injuries. There were substantial reductions in communicable diseases across all countries, with faster progress in girls than boys, narrowing the gender gap traditionally seen. "Most of these deaths are avoidable and for those caused by medical conditions, many of them are treatable," said Dr. Prabhat Jha, director of CGHR and Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and senior author of the paper. The research examined mortality from 2005 to 2016 in India, China, Brazil and Mexico using more than 240,000 interviews of families with a death or death certificates. These countries are home to 40 percent of the world's children aged five to 14, and with over 200,000 deaths represent just under a quarter of mortality at these ages. The investigators chose these countries also as they had at least 10 years of nationally representative high-quality data. "About one-million deaths occur worldwide at ages five to 14, and to address this unrecognized burden, it is crucial to understand the causes of these deaths," commented Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta, co-director of the Centre for Global Child Health at the Hospital for Sick Children, who was not affiliated with the study. He added, "This remarkable study provides us clear directions as to potential targets and interventions needed to reduce deaths at this age to complement the great progress made in younger children." Based on their findings, the researchers called for a broader set of interventions than those from the maternal and child health programs that target children under five. They hope to see more countries monitoring the deaths and investigating their causes in other settings, most notably countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In India, Dr. Jha leads the Million Death Study, one of the largest studies of premature deaths in the world. Because most deaths occur at home and without medical attention in India, hundreds of specially trained census staff in India knocked on doors to interview household members about deaths. Two physicians independently examined these 'verbal autopsies' to establish the most likely cause of death. "Death in children aged five to 14 should be rare around the world," added Dr. Jha. "With cost-effective, feasible and affordable interventions, substantial declines in deaths in this age group are possible." ### About St. Michael's Hospital St. Michael's Hospital provides compassionate care to all who enter its doors. The hospital also provides outstanding medical education to future health care professionals in more than 29 academic disciplines. Critical care and trauma, heart disease, neurosurgery, diabetes, cancer care, care of the homeless and global health are among the Hospital's recognized areas of expertise. Through the Keenan Research Centre and the Li Ka Shing International Healthcare Education Centre, which make up the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, research and education at St. Michael's Hospital are recognized and make an impact around the world. Founded in 1892, the hospital is fully affiliated with the University of Toronto. About Unity Health Toronto Unity Health Toronto, comprised of Providence Healthcare, St. Joseph's Health Centre and St. Michael's Hospital, works to advance the health of everyone in our urban communities and beyond. Our health network serves patients, residents and clients across the full spectrum of care, spanning primary care, secondary community care, tertiary and quaternary care services to post-acute through rehabilitation, palliative care and long-term care, while investing in world-class research and education. For more information, visit http://www. unityhealth. to . About the Dalla Lana School of Public Health The Dalla Lana School of Public Health is a Faculty of the University of Toronto that originated as one of the Schools of Hygiene begun by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1927. The School went through a dramatic renaissance after the 2003 SARS crisis and it is now the largest public health school in Canada, with over 850 faculty, 1,000 students, and research and training partnerships with institutions throughout Toronto and the world. With $34.4 million in research funding per year, the School supports discovery in global health, tobacco impacts on health, occupational disease and disability, air pollution, inner city and Indigenous health, among many other areas. For more information, visit the website. Note: Video materials, local press releases and a brief PowerPoint (with graphics) are at http://www. cghr. org/ child A post-embargo link for journalists will be available here: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)30220-X/fulltext Media Contact: Michael Oliveira Manager, Media Relations St. Michael's Hospital 416-864-5047 OliveiraM@smh.ca This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Algeria is in search of a new political legitimacy. The political elite can listen and adapt or go the way of the wind The Algerian Revolution, or the War of Independence in the 1950s and the early 1960s, was a great inspiration for Arab revolutionaries and nationalists, including the Egyptian generation I belong to. It was a golden era of fighting for independence, freedom and national dignity. For this, the Algerian people set an example in sacrifice rarely seen in modern Arab history. The fierce struggle for independence from French rule that had spanned 130 years marked our imagination. It still does. Algeria, for my generation, has been known as the country of one million martyrs. We have considered them ours, for both Egypt and Algeria were fighting for the same ideals and objectives back then in this epic era in the annals of an ascendant Arab nationalism. Revolutionary leaders in the two countries were, in fact, brothers in arms. Gamal Abdel-Nasser in Cairo and Ahmed ben Bella, and later on Hawari Boumediene, in Algiers were the uncontested leaders of Arab nationalism in its heyday. Their power, appeal and reach went beyond the Arab world to the developing countries of the Third World. That is why we follow with great concern developments unfolding in Algeria in reaction to the nomination of President Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika for a fifth term in the next presidential elections scheduled for 18 April. The demonstrations across Algeria Friday, 8 March, proved that popular mobilisation challenging Bouteflikas nomination is not going to wither away. Time is not on the side of the governing elite in Algeria. This nomination has unleashed a massive protest movement that has cut across all political parties, classes, professionals, genders and even the ranks of the ruling party, the National Liberation Front, that had led the fight for independence, thus gaining an unparallelled political and historical legitimacy. Being one of the youngest leaders of the Algerian Revolution, Bouteflika was elected president in 1999 on the strength of this legitimacy. He is the last surviving symbol of the national struggle for independence and the last companion of Boumediene. He succeeded in meeting two existential challenges that faced Algeria in the last 30 years. The first was leading Algeria out of what is known as the black decade (la decennie noire in French), 10 years from 1991 till 1999 that cost Algeria 200,000 dead at the hands of the precursor of the modern-day Islamic State terrorist organisation that carried the title of the Islamic Armed Group (or GIA in French). He called for a national reconciliation that echoed throughout the country and rallied the Algerian people behind their historic president and the National Liberation Front. The second challenge was how to protect Algeria from the devastating storms of the Arab Spring that almost destroyed all Arab republican regimes. Sceptics have argued that the Algerian political establishment, because of the great financial resources at its disposal due to high oil prices on the international market, was successful in buying political stability and in shielding Algerian society from the havoc and upheaval seen in other Arab societies. Such an argument misses the point. The fear of the return of the black decade was probably the reason why Algeria sailed through the turbulent period that struck the Arab world in the last eight years. In addition to the historic legitimacy that Bouteflika incarnated in the 20 years of his rule. For many years this historic legitimacy translated into political legitimacy. But it seems that Algeria has reached a crossroads. The mass movement against a fifth term for the ailing Algerian president appears to signal the end of an important cycle in the political history of Algeria. Those young men and women born in the last four decades have neither sentimental attachment to the national struggle of their fathers and forefathers nor do they connect with the political legacy of either the president or the National Liberation Front. Their ambitions and aspirations lie somewhere else. They want to have a say in determining the future of their country and their own personal future. It should not have been like that. Quoted in the weekend edition of The Financial Times, dated 9-10 March 2019, an Algerian university student said: We have to keep coming out demonstrating. We have to keep coming out on the streets, because the authorities have shut down the media, broken political parties and banned independent trade unions. They repress all free expression, even on social media. Before these protests I had no hope, but now I see a chink of light. The fault lies with the ruling party that has failed to anticipate that times change in politics. You cant freeze history for an indefinite period. Algeria is in search of a new political legitimacy that will reflect the ambitions of the rising Algerian youth. In this search. Algerian political parties and forces should be conscious of the risky road ahead. Algeria, aside from the fact that terrorist groups have eyed the country and have been operating in those surrounding its borders, be that in Libya, Tunisia or sub-Saharan Africa, will not hesitate to regroup within Algeria if developments allow. Needless to say, the stability and security of Algeria will greatly depend on how the present highly tense situation is managed, not only by the president and the National Liberation Front, but also by all political forces. For the present struggle should not be seen as a fight for the highest office in the land, but rather a fight for the soul and the future of Algeria. It will set the stage for a new Algeria anchored in a glorious past of national independence, freedom and national dignity. In other words, to stabilise Algeria in the context of a continuity and change strategy. The irony of the situation is that the only political figure who is able to steer Algeria on this road is President Bouteflika himself. I wish he could. He should have prepared his country for a smoother transition of power during his fourth term that began in 2014. In fact, he promised, in a national message to the Algerian people, that if re-elected he would not complete his constitutional term of five years and would call for a national dialogue to prepare Algeria for the post-Bouteflika period. Till further notice, the army has sided with Bouteflika. However, there is a question mark over how long the army will support the Algerian president if mass demonstrations continue unabated. The Army Chief of Staff General Ahmed Gaid Salah, issued two statements prior to 8 March vowing to protect public order and stressing that the Algerian armed forces will not allow the return of terrorism. Algeria is on the threshold of a new uncertain era if Bouteflika disappears suddenly from the scene. However, the Algerian people, in calling for new directions for their country, to take into account the changing of the times, inspire once again other Arab republics that the safest way to ensure the stability of their political systems is to respect the peaceful and orderly transfer of power. To perpetuate one-man rule leads nowhere but to instability and turmoil. Enduring political legitimacy is only anchored in constitutional rule, scrupulously respected and upheld by rulers. This is the lesson of the Algerian popular protest against a fifth term for President Bouteflika. The Arab republican regimes without a single exception should listen carefully to what the Algerian university student said, as quoted above. Otherwise, the political costs of not heeding his message are greater than any ruling elite and special interest groups could bear, anywhere across the Arab world. A bon entendeur. *The writer is former assistant foreign minister. *A version of this article appears in print in the 14 March, 2019 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: From Algeria with love Search Keywords: Short link: Rantoul, IL (61866) Today Partly cloudy early with increasing clouds overnight. Low 34F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight Partly cloudy early with increasing clouds overnight. Low 34F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. The 1919 Revolution had extraordinary impacts on both national and democratic life in Egypt, setting the stage for the decades to come, writes Walid Abdelnasser This month marks the centennial of the 1919 Revolution in Egypt that took place almost 37 years after the British occupation of the country started. T he revolution changed the course of history in Egypt over the following decades, not only on the political, economic, social and cultural levels, but also at the constitutional, legislative and legal ones. Much could be mentioned regarding this significant anniversary, as the revolution had multi-dimensional impacts on different areas of Egyptian history and society. My argument here is that the main relevance of the 1919 Revolution lay in the fact that it constituted the most important stage in the national democratic revolution of the Egyptian people. However, it was only one stage in this democratic revolution. Some historians refer the roots of the struggle of the Egyptian people back to the period preceding the French Expedition to Egypt in 1798 and more specifically to the 16th and 17th centuries, while others refer to the nationalist constitutional movement that took place under the khedive Ismail in the 1860s and that continued under his successor the khedive Tewfik and culminated in the Orabi Revolution in 1881. Although this movement succeeded in producing a constitutional document, the first in Egypts modern history, and it also produced a parliament and witnessed popular opposition against the growing foreign, and more specifically English and French, influence in the country, it was eventually defeated at the hands of the British invasion and subsequent occupation of Egypt in 1882. The period between the British occupation and the 1919 Revolution was characterised by sub-periods of pessimism and optimism as far as the national and democratic aspirations of the Egyptian people were concerned. While the period directly following the British occupation was predominantly quiet for the Egyptian national democratic movement, a revival of this movement took place towards the end of the 19th century and in the first years of the 20th century. These years saw several varieties of the national movement seeking liberation from foreign occupation, including those who wanted to get rid of the British occupation but return Egypt to some sort of Pan-Islamic affiliation, whether under the mantle of the Ottoman Empire or outside it, and others who sought complete national independence. A third group preferred to argue for modernisation efforts that would prepare the Egyptian people for national independence. The period saw the rise of nationalist figures, particularly Mostafa Kamel and Mohamed Farid, and the establishment of the National Party at the hands of these two legendary individuals. Although their struggle did not succeed in achieving Egypts independence, their National Party played an instrumental role in the 1919 Revolution. This was particularly the case due to the active role played by leading figures in the party in the clandestine guerrilla warfare that went hand in hand with the popular revolution and that targeted the British troops in Egypt. It proved influential in eventually forcing the British to reconsider their position regarding the occupation of Egypt and to make what they considered to be major concessions in this regard. There is no doubt that the 1919 Revolution achieved a lot on both the national and the democratic levels. On the national level, the struggle of the Egyptian people and their legendary historical symbol Saad Zaghloul during the revolution and after a number of subsequent cycles of revolutionary movement and relative calm forced the British occupying authorities to issue the 28 February 1922 Unilateral Declaration. According to this, Britain granted Egypt its formal independence, but with four important reservations, including the security of the communications of the British Empire in Egypt; the defence of Egypt against all foreign aggression or interference, direct or indirect; the protection of foreign interests in Egypt and the protection of minorities; and the [British position in the] Sudan. Although these reservations were rejected by most Egyptian political forces at the time, in de facto terms the declaration served as the basis for recognising Egypt as a sovereign state and for all subsequent steps in that direction. In the light of the declaration, Britain committed itself to supporting Egypts application for membership of the League of Nations, the international organisation which was one of the results of World War I. However, the declaration gave only incomplete independence, and Egypt had to go through following rounds of struggle in order to reach the stage of complete independence. These included the 1935 student revolution forcing the political parties to agree to close their ranks and form a national-unity government under the leadership of Mostafa Al-Nahhas, the successor of Saad Zaghloul in leading the Wafd Party. This government then negotiated with the British and concluded the famous 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty. Then came the popular struggle in the aftermath of World War II that defeated the draft Sidki-Bevin Treaty between Britain and Egypt and the national liberation war in the Suez Canal Zone after the unilateral abrogation of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, again instituted by Al-Nahhas, prime minister at the time and another legendary figure in the modern history of Egypt. The national liberation war in the Suez Canal Zone intensified after the 1952 Free Officers Revolution, thus contributing to the successful conclusion of the October 1954 Anglo-Egyptian Agreement under late president Gamal Abdel-Nasser that brought to an end the British occupation of Egypt. As far as the 1919 Revolutions struggle for democracy is concerned, the Egyptian people managed to draft the 1923 Constitution after it, one of the most democratic in the modern and contemporary history of Egypt, which was supposed to lay the foundations for a constitutional monarchy. The constitution contained a lot of important provisions that provided guarantees of democratic rights and freedoms, as well as of the separation of powers among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the state. The 1923 Constitution established what could be considered as the infrastructure for a healthy and sustainable democratic system. The revolution also culminated in a multi-party system and parliamentary elections in 1924 that led to a landslide victory for the majority Wafd Party led by Saad Zaghloul, who became the countrys first prime minister under the new system. However, history tells us that the Wafd Party ruled only for slightly more than seven years in the period between 1924 and 1952, due to the frequent and repeated interventions of king Fouad and his son king Farouk in the democratic process. Both men were responsible for continuing violations of the 1923 Constitution and the disruption of the functioning of the political system, and they assisted the rule of minority political parties, most of them offshoots from the Wafd Party, and of the British occupying authorities that remained in real control of many things in Egypt. Even during some periods of the rule of the Wafd Party, the Egyptian political scene saw cases of the violations of basic rights, such as during the confrontation between the first Saad Zaghloul government on the one hand and the labour unions and communist movement on the other. Moreover, in the period following World War II, the political system produced in the aftermath of the 1919 Revolution proved incapable of absorbing new and rising political forces on the left as well as on the right, these becoming increasingly popular in the streets but having no legal recognition. Yet, these shortcomings should not lead us to underestimate the impact of the 1919 Revolution on Egyptian politics, economics, society, culture and the arts. Thanks to this revolution, Egypt lived through a liberal, or quasi-liberal, era. It was this that gave birth to Banque Misr set up by Talaat Harb with its affiliated national industries, that led Egyptian women to acquire unprecedented status at all levels, and that produced so many talents in all areas of culture and the arts, including literature, cinema, theatre, media and the press. Those talents enriched the cultural and social life of Egypt and the Arab world over the years, or rather the decades, to come. * The writer is a commentator. *A version of this article appears in print in the 14 March, 2019 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: Honouring Egypts 1919 Revolution Search Keywords: Short link: Share Tweet Pin 6 shares Note all articles are independently researched and written by myself. However, if you buy via one of the links it may be an affiliate and I may earn a small commission. I suppose this almost counts as Steve McQueen Lego, as this is a 1967 Ford Mustang Lego set. As you are no doubt aware, the Ford Mustang was at the heart of Steve McQueens Bullitt movie. Now, Lego hasnt christened this set the Steve McQueen Bullitt Lego set, but this set is based on the car of that era. The plate says 1967 and with Bullitt made around that time, you can see that Lego is definitely playing to that market. But it has taken care to keep just far enough away from the movie car. No green shade here (the model set is blue) and stuck in some racing stripes too. There are also customisable options in this 1,471-piece set too, should you like the ideas of turning a classic Mustang into a muscle car. In short, this is the car of the era, but not quite a replica. I can only assume there would be rights issues if you got too close to McQueens car. The finished model has an air scoop, five-spoke rims with road-gripping tyres and a detailed interior with seats, radio, mid-console gearstick and working steering. Open the boot to store items and lift the bonnet to reveal a detailed Ford Mustang V8 engine with battery, hoses and air filter. The set also includes a printed mustang grille badge and two GT emblems and if you want to rework the car, the set also includes a supercharger, rear ducktail spoiler, beefy exhaust pipes, front chin spoiler and a nitrous oxide tank. Finally, you get to choose from a selection of license plates. Now the bad news. This set has been ridiculously popular since it launched and right now, there is only the option of a back order. Saying that the back order will be shipped by the 4th April 2019 if you secure one at a price of 119.99. Find out more at the Lego website My relationship with the 1919 Revolution is somewhat strange. The 7 March, marking its anniversary, also happens to be my birthday. On that day 28 years before my birth, Egypts historic leader Saad Zaghloul and his comrades were sent into exile. The second time I met with the 1919 Revolution was in the office of the late Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, then chief editor of Al-Ahram. Heikal asked me to lay out a book entitled Fifty Years Since the 1919 Revolution. This was in 1968, one year after the 1967 Setback. While we are busy building modern Egypt, we have neglected the role of the 1919 Revolution in building the Egyptian character, Heikal told me, adding that it was time to go back to our history in order to restore our rights. One hundred years have passed since the 1919 Revolution, which was staged by Egyptians against the British occupation of Egypt. It was a revolution in which students, landowners, peasants and all segments of society took part. Egyptian women also played a major role in the 1919 Revolution. They took to the streets and joined hands with men. It was also the 1919 Revolution that opened the door to a cultural and educational leap and to an independent economy. The 1919 Revolution, as the prominent politician Mohamed Abul-Ghar has said, laid the foundations for the largest civil society in the Middle East in the first quarter of the 20th century. Saad Zaghloul adopted the motto that religion is for God, and the homeland is for all during the 1919 Revolution, and Moreno Cicurel and Youssef Qattawi, two prominent Egyptian Jews, joined his liberal Wafd Party. Egypts Jews played a significant role at the end of the 1919 Revolution, sitting in the then House of Representatives and Senate. They held ministerial seats and they were advisors to the king. In 1969, Al-Ahram commemorated 50 years since the 1919 Revolution. Heikal revealed his intention to publish a study covering the revolution, and this work, prepared by the Al-Ahram Centre for Egyptian Historical Studies, relied on official British documents deposited at the Public Records Office in London. The centre announced that these documents would be published in Egypt for the first time. The late historian Ezzat Abdel-Karim, then professor of modern history and president of Ain Shams University in Cairo, wrote in the introduction to the study that when he had heard about Al-Ahrams decision, he had had mixed feelings, however. The 1919 Revolution is a great national event in our modern history. It was the most effective factor in building the Egyptian nation and Egyptian political life in the 20th century. Numerous studies of the 1919 Revolution and of Egypts contemporary history have appeared, Abdel-Karim said, wondering how the new study would contribute to the objective and scientific study of the revolution and befit its important status. The fact that British documents were a main source for the study also worried Abdel-Karim. It is extremely risky for a historian to rely on just one source. Relying on British documents written by British ministers, the British high commissioner and British army commanders makes that risk even greater, he said. The study, published in 35 instalments in Al-Ahram, was the first work of the Al-Ahram Centre for Egyptian Historical Studies. Later on, it was decided to compile all the material in a book, and Abdel-Karim was asked to edit the material and write the introduction. I accepted without hesitation. I felt that I could offer a service to the history of my country if I participated in lending the study a scientific nature and ridding it of any non-objective elements, Abdel-Karim noted. As he wrote in his introduction, Abdel-Karim rearranged the chapters and was keen on making sure that the whole represented the results of balanced research. In addition to using the British documents, I appealed to memoirs written by Egyptian politicians at the time of the 1919 Revolution, he said. He pointed out that he preferred to leave the documents to depict events as they stood, allowing readers to form their own judgements. Moreover, we do not assume that the book is a purely academic study. But it is a serious and objective one that could be the beginning of further studies of the 1919 Revolution, Abdel-Karim concluded. For his part, Heikal in his preface to the book said that it was the first work to be published by the new centre. In founding its new centre, Al-Ahram sought the help of distinguished professors of history, Heikal said. We agreed that the 1919 Revolution heralded the beginning of Egypts modern history, and that it was wrong to think that our modern history started after the 1952 Revolution, he added. Fifty years after the 1919 Revolution and in the gloomy climate prevailing in the wake of the 1967 Setback, we thought of publishing glimpses of the story of this great revolution. Our argument was that peoples at times of crisis desperately need inspiration. They can get this inspiration from their own history, Heikal concluded. *A version of this article appears in print in the 14 March, 2019 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: The 1919 Revolution and I Search Keywords: Short link: PM discusses workflow in projects of services in capital Sanaa [13/March/2019] ANAA, March 13 (Saba) - Prime Minister Dr. Abdul Aziz bin Habtoor met on Tuesday with Mayor of Capital Sanaa Hamoud Obad, in the presence of the Ministers of Planning and International Cooperation Abdulaziz al-Kummim, Social Affairs and Labor Obeid Bin Dhebaa. The meeting discussed the level of service activities witnessed by the the capital in this period, specifically related to the asphalt work, paving of many of its streets, the rehabilitation of others, as well as the effort to complete the remaining work in area of the junction of the bridge Madhbah-sixtieth in the light of directives of the President of the Supreme Political Council and to seek the solutions required to overcome causes of stumbling. Obad reviewed the most important projects and activities included in the plan of Municipality of capital Sanaa for the current year, especially in the areas of priority infrastructure. He pointed to the progress of the projects funded by a number of humanitarian organizations, which come in the framework of joint efforts to restore damaged facilities, especially schools, as well as the replacement of a number of dilapidated sewage networks . He stressed the efforts of the municipality of the capital to continue to show the bright face of the capital of the Republic of Yemen, despite the enormous challenges imposed by the continuation of the aggression, the siege and the comprehensive economic war on the Yemeni people. He praised the support of the Government of National Salvation and its responsible interaction with the municipality's vision, programs, activities and efforts. AA Saba Arrangements to mark 4 years of Yemen's steadfastness, in face of coalition, discussed [13/March/2019] ANAA, March 13 (Saba) - A meeting was held Tuesday in Sanaa under the chairmanship of Ahmed Hamed, the director of the Office of the Presidency of the Republic, which included Information Ministers Dhifallah al-Shami, Education Yahya al-Houthi, Endowments and Religious Guidance Najeeb al-Ajji. During the meeting, the arrangements made by the Special Committee for organize the ceremonies to mark four years of resistance to saudi-US aggression were discussed. At the meeting, Hamed indicated that many work had been prepared by the Committee, stressing in this regard the importance of interaction at all levels to make the event a success. For his part, Minister of Education pointed out the importance of highlighting this event to emphasize the legendary steadfastness of the Yemeni people in the face of aggression over four years, stressing the need for more concerted efforts of all at the official level and popular for the success of this important event. AA Saba The Congress will fight the Lok Sabha elections on economic issues such as minimum income guarantee scheme, farm loan waiver, jobs and the "flawed" implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST), party president Rahul Gandhi indicated on Tuesday while setting the tone for the party's campaign for the general election. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who was appointed Congress General Secretary in-charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh, made her eagerly awaited debut speech in Gandhinagar after the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting on Tuesday and showed that she can be a big crowd puller for the party in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections. She referred to the Lok Sabha polls as "another independence struggle" and told the people not to forget the "real issues" confronting them as the BJP-led government sought to build its election narrative on nationalism, the strikes on terror camps in Pakistan and the achievements of the Narendra Modi government. Priyanka said she had come to Gujarat and to the Sabarmati Ashram for the first time and sought to touch an emotional chord with the audience as she narrated how the visit to Mahatma Gandhi's ashram had reminded her of the freedom fighters. She did not name Prime Minister Narendra Modi but made sharp attacks at his government. In contrast, Rahul Gandhi was far more direct during his speech in Gandhinagar on Tuesday, as he again referred to Modi as "chor" (thief) and accused him of corruption. Gandhi talked of the unfulfilled promises of the BJP and accused Modi of being a friend of the rich who was not concerned about the farmers and the common man. Gandhi also stated what his party will do if it came to power. In a state known for its trading and business culture, he made a major announcement that if voted to power, the Congress will reform the GST regime and bring about a "single GST rate" instead of the present five. Gandhi also told the audience how the Congress had implemented farm loan waiver quickly in the states where it was in power. He also accused Modi of failing to fulfil his promise on jobs. Gandhi also indicated that the Congress will take on the BJP-led government on issues of national security and stated how the previous National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government had released Jaish-e-Mohammed founder Masood Azhar -- the man behind the Pulwama suicide bombing that killed 40 CRPF troopers. Congress President Rahul Gandhi Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said his party is firming up electoral alliances across the country to fight the Lok Sabha elections. Speaking to the media here, Gandhi said the Congress had stiched electoral alliances in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Jharkhand and talks in Jammu and Kashmir were in the final stages. "It is only the BJP that doesn't have an alliance," Gandhi said. Declaring that the Congress-led United Progress Alliance (UPA) will win the Lok Sabha battle, Gandhi said the new government will investigare the corruption in the purchase of Rafale fighter planes. Gandhi said the Rafale plane's capability was not being questioned and thanked The Hindu newspaper for "exposing" Prime Minister Narendra Modi's parallel negotiations in the Rafale deal. Economic growth, he said, was related to the country's mood and it cannot happen when there were inter-state fights. "We will bring harmony in the country so that everyone, including Tamils, feels that India is for everybody," Gandhi said. Disagreeing with the view that the BJP had gained an edge in the electoral contest after the air strike on terror camps in Pakistan, Gandhi said: "Pakistan will take the opportunities that are available." He said the question to be asked is what did the government do to prevent the suicide bombing in Pulwama that killed 40 CRPF troopers and why the then BJP government released Masoor Azad, the architect of the Pulwama attack. Gandhi said unemployment, plight of farmers and attacks on various institutions. Terming Modi as a great flop over job creation, Gandhi said India had the highest unemployment levels in 45 years. Stressing the importance of small and medium enterprises (SME), he said that job creation was under attack due to demonetization, GST and unfriendly departments like Income Tax. According to him, the plight of farmers will be the second major electoral issue. The third issue is the attack on various institutions, different culture and languages, by the Modi government, he said. "The basic idea of BJP is to capture every single institution and run it out of Nagpur, where RSS is headquartered," he said. According to him, Vice Chancellors of Universities were appointed who are oriented towards a particular ideology. Terming the Tamil Nadu government as being remote controlled by the Prime Minister's Office, Gandhi said Tamil people should run their own government. "There is a feeling of assault on Tamil language and culture. This feeling should be removed." He said that if voted to power, the UPA would create a dedicated Ministry for fisheries and the Cauvery river water dispute with Karnataka would be settled. Queried about his stance on the release of seven persons sentenced for life term in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, he said: "There are two issues involved - personal and legal. The legal issue will take its own course. "We are a forgiving people. We don't have animosity towards anybody. It is for the court to decide," he added. Defying global opposition to terrorism, China has vetoed sanctions against Masood Azhar, the chief of the terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), extending cover to him and Pakistan that protects him. On Wednesday, China was the only Security Council member to oppose the proposal spearheaded with renewed vigour by France with British and US backing at the al-Qaeda sanctions committee to declare him a global terrorist and impose sanctions on him. Wednesday was the deadline to take a decision in the current cycle and because of Beijing's veto - officially known as a technical hold - the proposal will remain on hold for at least three months. In New Delhi, the External Affairs Ministry expressed disappointment over the outcome. "This has prevented action by the international community to designate the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a proscribed and active terrorist organization which has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on 14 February 2019," the statement said. India affirmed that it acewill continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens are brought to justice". The US had said on Tuesday that China's opposition to designating Azhar as an international terrorist runs counter to the mutual goal with the US of regional stability. As the founder and leader of JeM, Azhar "meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations" for a global terrorist subject to its sanctions, State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino said. The Council's sanctions committee on the Islamic State and al-Qaeda and linked terrorist groups - known as 1267 committee after Council resolution's number - needs a consensus for its decisions. China had shown some flexibility last month on the issue of JeM last month, when it went along with a Council statement condemning in "strongest terms" the Pulwama attack calling it a "heinous and cowardly suicide bombing" and noting that the JeM claimed responsibility for it. Because of the growing revulsion against terrorism, Beijing felt boxed in. Partly to assuage it, the Council made it a statement, rather than a resolution so it would not have a formal vote. However, Azhar has been the redline for Beijing and as it has for a decade protected him. Although Pakistan flouts the other decisions of the committee by allowing various terrorist groups under sanctions like the JeM itself to operate, adding Azhar would have increased pressures on it over support for terrorism. Before Azhar's case was taken up by the committee, Beijing indicated it would block the sanctions on him. Using convoluted diplomatic language, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told reporters in Beijing, "China will continue to adopt responsible attitude and participate in the deliberations in the UNSC 1267 Committee" and "engage in consultations with various parties and properly deal with this issue". Last week, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou visited Pakistan for talks with that nation's leaders. He declared that Beijing was Islamabad's time-tested friend and woul stand by it. British Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal was rejected again by MPs in the second meaningful vote in the UK Parliament since January, increasing uncertainty about how the country will leave the European Union. MPs voted against May's revised EU withdrawal agreement by 391 to 242 on Tuesday, another heavy defeat since January 15, when MPs rejected May's Brexit deal by a margin of 230, Xinhua news agency reported. The voting started at around 1900 GMT, with the Prime Minister heading for a defeat. A hoarse Prime Minister, who was carrying on her last-ditch battle to save her Brexit deal just hours before the crunch vote, failed to win over the ERG, a major faction within her Conservative Party. The UK is scheduled to leave the European Union on March 29. May's Brexit deal was voted down on Jan 15 in the heaviest parliamentary defeat of any British Prime Minister in the modern era. "I profoundly regret the decision this house has taken," May told lawmakers in a short speech right after the voting. She added that the choices facing Britain were "unenviable", but because of the rejection of her deal. "They are choices that must be faced," she said. May has secured legally binding changes to the deal on Monday night, but rebel lawmakers of her Conservative Party and those from the opposition Labour Party had said that these changes were not enough to persuade MPs to back the agreement reached by London and Brussels in November 2018 after years of painful negotiations. "The reality is that nothing has changed," Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Labour Party, said in the Parliament. "Nothing has changed. Not one single word was changed." Corbyn said the Labour party put forward the idea of "remain and reform" in the referendum campaign. With her Brexit deal rejected again in the UK Parliament, the Prime Minister then faces a possible defeat on a second vote on Wednesday to prevent a no-deal Brexit on March 29, and a third vote on Thursday to extend the Article 50 divorce process, likely until the end of June. SNc Channels: Search About Salem-News.com Mar-12-2019 12:22 TweetFollow @OregonNews Impostor Lures Activist to Israeli Police Sting An interview with Frank Romano conducted by renowned documentary film director Guy Davidi. Frank Romano, interviewed in Paris by Guy Davidi. (March 6th, 2019) (SALEM, Ore.) - An interview with Frank Romano has been released, a precursor to the larger story, conducted by renowned documentary film director Guy Davidi. Guy Davidi and Emad Burnat co-directed the film 5 Broken Cameras which was nominated for a 2013 Academy Award and won the 2013 International Emmy Award. It also won a 2012 Sundance Film Festival award, as well as the Golden Apricot at the 2012 Yerevan International Film Festival and Armenia, for Best Documentary Film. Activist Romano's work in Palestine and Israel is discussed, and in particular, the attempts by himself along with other activists to prevent the destruction of Al Khan al Ahmar, the Bedouin village. Romano warns Netanyahu of the strong ICC case against him as a war criminal, especially if he destroys Al Khan al Ahmar! In fact, many believe the Regulation Law directly violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, and will be grounds for a case against Israel in The Hague. The Regulation Law allows for the seizure of private Palestinian property, in an effort to retroactively legalize settlements built on stolen land. The Palestinian village of Khan al Ahmar is at imminent risk of demolition because it is located near Jerusalem on land between an Israeli settlement and one of its elite suburbs. Simply put, Israel's plan would link the Israeli settlements with West Jerusalem, and completely cut off Palestinian access to Jerusalem. The residents of Khan al Ahmar were forcibly relocated to this area in 1951 from the village of Tel Arad in Israels Negev Desert. The residents are mostly Bedouin, who make their living by herding livestock. Today, the village has 160 structures including a school, clinic, mosque, and many homes. The school serves nearly 200 students, including many girls, from the village and surrounding area. Romano describes his arrest, imprisonment in Jerusalem, and his eventual release. He explains why he was later forced to go underground in Ramallah, a city controlled by Palestinian police, to avoid arrest by Israeli police. Romano was lured out of Ramallah to return to Al Khan al Ahmar, in Area C which is controlled by Israeli police, on February 23rd, for an interview with a well-known French journalist. Eager to publicize the struggle for survival of Khan al Ahmar, Frank Romano agreed to the meeting. Unfortunately, the people he trusted were actually Israeli agents. It was a trap! As soon as the interview had begun, standing in front of the village of Al Khan al Ahmar with the impostor journalist, 4-5 Israeli police cars drove up and arrested Romano, returning him to prison. He was deported to France the next day, on February 24th. This interview was conducted in Paris, France, on March 6th, 2019. Watch the VIDEO below, by director Guy Davidi: What can you do for Khan al Ahmar? PLEASE MAKE TWO CALLS, TO THE ISRAELI EMBASSY AND THE STATE DEPARTMENT: Contact the State Department through your usual channels. Urge U.S. Consul General Donald Blome to visit Khan Al Ahmar school this week and to do all he can to prevent demolition. (Please note: Diplomats from the U.N., the E.U. and many European governments, along with Palestinian officials, visited and are expressing concern to their Israeli counterparts. Staff from the U.S. Consulate visited Khan Al Ahmar on March 5th.) Call the Israeli Embassy to say you care about peace, and you care about the children of Khan al Ahmar. Please express your concern about the destruction of their school, and their families' homes and livelihoods. Please say that the demolition of a school does not serve the cause of peace. Ask that Justice Sohlberg recuse himself for conflict of interest from further deliberations on this case and all future cases involving villages in Area C. Ask the Government of Israel to instead approve the master plan of the village of Khan al Ahmar and recognize the human right of Palestinians in Area C including the Bedouin to live, build, earn a living and go to school in their communities. _________________________________________ Israel | Palestine | Racism | Justice | Most Commented on Articles for March 11, 2019 | Articles for March 12, 2019 | SNc Channels: Search About Salem-News.com Mar-12-2019 22:13 TweetFollow @OregonNews Native Oregonian Returns to Roots as First CEO of Oregon FFA Dooley started his FFA career at Dayton High School, where he raised Holstein bottle calves, sheep, and hogs. Oregon FFA has hired its first CEO, Shawn Dooley, a former Oregon FFA State Officer and American FFA Degree recipient. (CORVALLIS, Ore.) - Shawn Dooley, a former Oregon FFA State Officer and American FFA Degree recipient, will serve as the first CEO of Oregon FFA. Dooley begins work on March 18 and will manage the Oregon FFA Association, Oregon FFA Foundation, and Oregon FFA Alumnithree entities that have previously operated independently but with parallel aims. Dooley joins Oregon FFA just in time to attend its annual State Convention, which begins on March 22 in Redmond, OR. As Oregon FFA CEO, Dooley will report to the newly established Oregon FFA Joint Board, which is made up of representatives of the Association, Foundation, and Alumni, and a student representative. Kirk Maag, who chaired the CEO search committee, remarked that Oregon FFA is thrilled to welcome Shawn back to Oregon. His business acumen, proven leadership, and deep roots in Oregon agriculture align with our goals for the CEO position. Oregon FFA will be stronger with Shawn at the helm. Joe Matteo, who is majoring in natural resource policy and management at Oregon State University, served as the student representative on the search committee. Joe commented that he believes Dooley will create an even stronger student experience by enhancing the framework that supports Oregon FFA by closely aligning the work of the Association, Foundation, and Alumni. For his part, Dooley believes the CEO position allows him to return to his FFA roots and to his degree in agricultural education from OSU. My time in the FFA provided me with the foundation for my entrepreneurial and leadership skills, Dooley commented. Im excited to work with ag teachers, volunteers, and financial supporters of Oregon FFA to continue to provide leadership development and technical skills opportunities for FFA members. "Theres no better training ground for Oregons next generation of ranchers, landscapers, veterinary technicians, ag engineers, and civic leaders. Dooley started his FFA career at Dayton High School, where he raised Holstein bottle calves, sheep, and hogs. He also farmed spring wheat and worked on a local dairy cleaning barns and moving irrigation. But Dooleys participation in FFA wasnt limited to production agriculture. He also participated in various public speaking and leadership development events. During Dooleys senior year of high school, he was elected to serve as a State Officer for Oregon FFA. Dooleys FFA experience was a springboard for future career opportunities and success. Following his year as a State Officer, Dooley started working at the local feed store, Valley Feed and Supply in McMinnvillenow Buchanan Cellarsand continued working at the store during summer vacations while going to school. And while at Oregon State University, Dooley put his FFA leadership experience to work when he served as student body president. After graduating from OSU, the skills Dooley developed through FFA took him to Purina Mills where he worked in the Willamette Valley, Southern Oregon, Phoenix and Seattle before moving on to Absorption Corpnow Healthy Pet LP, a small startup manufacturing company selling pet supplies. During Dooleys tenure at Absorption Corp, business boomed through sales to Petco, Petsmart, Walmart, and independent pet stores, and exports to 17 countries. Most recently, Dooley worked as a national and international business consultant, specializing in sales, marketing, and distribution of pet supplies and value-added food products. Source: Oregon FFA _________________________________________ Oregon | Agriculture | Business | Most Commented on Articles for March 11, 2019 | Articles for March 12, 2019 | A proposed 40-story apartment development in East Village got high marks Wednesday from the design committee of downtowns planning agency, Civic San Diego. The 613-unit complex would have a six-story building, a seven-story building and a 40-story tower reaching 400 feet. The proposed buildings, at the corner of Park Boulevard and Broadway, are spread apart to avoid an earthquake fault through the center. The area in between the buildings would be turned into green space for residents. If approved, it will be one of the tallest residential towers in the city, and the fifth-most residential units for a downtown complex. A timeline for construction is not set but could be approved within the next 12 months. Design committee members praised the project from developer Liberty National Corp. for making good use of a site that had an earthquake fault on it, as well as slopes on every side. The site is bounded by Park Boulevard, 13th Street, Broadway and C Street. Advertisement We are getting a very dense project, committee member Jennifer Ayala said. Unlike another block, not too far away, with a flat site and no fault and no restrictions. Look at what we were able to get on a site with a bit of creativity. Getting downtown developers to build denser developments is a focus of the agency, but doesnt always work. Developer JPI in September proposed a 318-apartment project on a full block site in East Village that could have held up to 900 apartments. Civic San Diego ended up approving the project when JPI added 50 more apartments. Rendering of the Park and Broadway building at night. (Civic San Diego) Architect Bob Lisauskas of Baltimore-based CallisonRTKL said it tried to use the earthquake fault at Park Boulevard and Broadway as an opportunity. Its almost a canyon of green space, he said. Plans including fencing around the green space but committee members were concerned the public would not have access. Some ideas were having part of the space opened to the public or having set hours when the public is allowed access. I would love to see that available to the public, during the daytime at least, said member Theodore Shaw. It can be a real amenity for not just residents and shoppers, but people that come through the neighborhood. This is the second major East Village tower proposed this year by San Diego-based developer Liberty National Corp. Its other proposed project is a 40-story tower on the south side of B Street. Both projects will not include low-income housing on site, and the developer will instead pay millions in inclusionary housing fees. It will pay $4.8 million in fees for the Park and Boulevard project. Mark Schmidt, principal of Willmark Communities, is listed as a corporate officer on the project. In July, Willmark paid a $4.75 million dollar settlement to a group of tenants that alleged the company had a practice of unlawfully retaining security deposits of tenants, or levying bogus charges when tenants moved out. Willmark denied any wrongdoing. Efforts to reach Schmidt were unsuccessful. The Park and Broadway project intends to include 18,852-square-feet of commercial space and 634 parking spaces. The 60,182-square-feet is located next to a stop on the San Diego Trolley and near San Diego City College. Next for the project is a second meeting in front of the design review committee, then a meeting in front of the entire Civic San Diego board where it could get full approval. Rendering of a skydeck at the proposed Park & Broadway condo tower (Civic San Diego) Business phillip.molnar@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1891 Twitter: @phillipmolnar ALSO Is San Diego County done building single-family homes? San Diego County apartment rush continues. More than 4,500 planned for 19 New Tijuana condo towers will hit record heights The past two years have been tough on Qualcomm shareholders, as legal battles and a slowing smartphone market have weighed down the San Diego companys stock price. On Tuesday, Qualcomm executives gave their perspective on the direction of the company going forward at its annual shareholder meeting, touting the potential of ultra-fast 5G wireless networks to help turn around the prospects of the cellular technology firm. Obviously over the last year or two years we have seen a number of legal and regulatory challenges, Chief Executive Steve Mollenkopf told shareholders. I would encourage people to think about what is on the other side of this and who is best positioned to benefit from the transition to 5G. In the more than two years since Apple and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed lawsuits against Qualcomm over its patent licensing business practices, the companys market value has plunged from $97 billion to $66.4 billion. Advertisement During that span, the company also sidestepped a hostile takeover attempt by rival Broadcom and abandoned a proposed $43 billion acquisition of NXP Semiconductors after Chinese regulators balked at approving the merger. Since the NXP deal failed in July, Qualcomm has repurchased $22 billion in its own shares and focused on 5G technologies. These new 5G networks will begin rolling out this year in the U.S. and elsewhere. Theyre expected to deliver uber fast speeds and imperceptible transmission delays to myriad products ranging from smartphones to connected cars to smart cities infrastructure to automated factories. 5G will usher in what we think is an invention age, and Qualcomm creates many of the technologies that are required to enable that transition, said Mollenkopf. More than 30 electronics firms are expected to release 5G devices based on Qualcomms technology this year, including smartphones from Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, ZTE, OnePlus and others. How Qualcomm gets paid for this wireless research and development work is at the center its legal fight with Apple and regulators. Mollenkopf said It is important that the company defend what the shareholders own and the value of its intellectual property. . The company has managed fight on several legal fronts while continuing to invest in 5G technologies so it can take advantage of all this tremendous economic change that will occur with 5G after these (legal) issues are done, he said. Asked by a shareholder to rank the most important lawsuits and outline scenarios if Qualcomm is successful or not, General Counsel Don Rosenberg pointed to the FTC case and the upcoming Apple trial in San Diego federal court as having the most potential impact. A bench trial in the FTC case wrapped up in late January. Both sides are awaiting a ruling by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh. Rosenberg said Qualcomm believes the FTC failed to prove that the company violated anti-monopoly laws. Still, if the opportunity presents itself, the company would be willing to settle the case before Kohs decision. But one way or another that is going to be determined very soon, and that will have some significant impact moving forward, said Rosenberg. An adverse ruling in the FTC lawsuit could require Qualcomm to change its business model around patent licensing, though it likely would appeal, Rosenberg said. A jury trial in the Apple lawsuit is slated to begin April 15. Asian contract manufacturers that build iPhones stopped paying patent royalties to Qualcomm more than two years ago at Apples behest. A victory would result in billions in back payments to Qualcomm and affirm the validity of its patent licensing contracts. Meanwhile, Apple and the iPhone assemblers say Qualcomm has overcharged for its cellular patents for years. They are seeking reimbursement for these alleged overcharges, which could add up to billions of dollars. In addition, other companies that license Qualcomms patents could stop paying if the jury finds in favor of Apple. If we lose, we are going to have to appeal and ultimately win, but we will not collect the billions of dollars that I talked about, and will have to see what happens in terms of others and what actions they take, Rosenberg said. Business mike.freeman@sduniontribune.com; Twitter:@TechDiego 760-529-4973 Four months after revamping the style and service model of his flagship restaurant Urban Solace, owner and chef Matt Gordon announced Tuesday that he is closing the North Park eatery as well as its sister restaurant, Solace & the Moonlight Lounge in Encinitas. The restaurants final day of service is Wednesday, March 13. Gordon could not be reached for comment, but wrote about the plan to close in an email on Tuesday afternoon. It is with a heavy heart that I write to you today, he wrote. We have come to the very difficult decision that Solace Restaurants have run their course here in San Diego. It has been an uphill battle for quite some time now, and its just time to move on. Last fall, Gordon announced plans to dramatically revamp the North Park restaurant, which opened in fall 2007. He expanded breakfast/brunch service from one to seven days a week, and he reinvented the dinner menu to a shareable plates concept to supplement a hopefully more robust social bar experience for diners. The changes were accompanied by an interior refresh. Advertisement In January, Gordon talked to the Union-Tribune about the challenges he faced as a traditional restaurateur in a changing marketplace. The fine dining industry is in transition and traditional dinner menus were no longer as popular with diners, particularly with younger patrons who prefer a more social dining and drinking experience. Adding to this challenge was the evolution of North Park over the past decade. When Gordon and his wife, Young Mi, opened Urban Solace nearly 12 years ago, the neighborhood was more oriented toward sit-down restaurants. But in recent years, a number of bars, quick-service and fast-casual eateries have crowded the market, making it harder to compete in a more traditional, service-heavy style. Urban Solace continued to attract loyal and older crowd for its dinner service and Sunday brunch, but sales were declining just as labor and food costs were on the rise. Gordon and Mi also refused to compromise on the quality of their sustainable and natural ingredients. The North County couple was committed to a from-scratch, preservative-free menu because that is how they feed their children. The closure of Urban Solace and Solace & the Moonlight Lounge, which opened in 2011, follow the closure of a third restaurant owned by the couple, Sea & Smoke, which operated in the Flower Hill Plaza shopping center from 2013 to 2016. In his email, Gordon said he and his wife are grateful for the support theyve received over the years. We love you all and thank you and San Diego in general for the wonderful 12 years that we were able to live out our dreams, he wrote. Urban Solace at 3823 30th St. in North Park and Solace & the Moonlight Lounge at 25 East E St. in Encinitas will be open for service through March 13. To say goodbye to longtime guests, the Gordon family will be at the North Park location from 5 to 7 p.m. Wednesday and at the Encinitas location from 7:30 p.m. to close. To help empty the bar and pantry, bills will be discounted by 25 percent. Visit barsolace.com. pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com. Twitter: @pamkragen A federal appeals court appeared skeptical Wednesday of efforts by the Trump administration to throw out Californias sanctuary laws. During a hearing, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals considered an appeal of a lower-court decision upholding most of the package of state laws. The judges appeared unlikely to block the centerpiece of the package a law that prohibits police and sheriffs officials from notifying immigration authorities of the release dates of immigrant inmates. The Trump administration has argued that the state was creating obstacles to enforcement of immigration laws. Advertisement Judge Milan D. Smith Jr., appointed by President George W. Bush, acknowledged that Californias law made the work of immigration agents more difficult, but suggested it was not illegal. Because its an obstacle, it doesnt mean it is illegal, right? he said. Smith also said that requiring states to help immigration officers would probably violate the U.S. Constitution. I am not seeing a violation of federal law by the state of California, he said, adding that the prohibition on helping immigration authorities was inconvenient, no doubt. Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz, an appointee of President Obama, suggested there was no federal law that requires state cooperation. Are you entitled to the aid of the state government in enforcing the immigration laws? he asked. At another point, Hurwitz asked, If there is no affirmative obligation to help, is the failure to help an obstacle? He added: They are not required to be helpful, are they? He suggested the law posed an obstacle to immigration agents only because it makes their job harder. There is nothing in this statute that allows [the state] to prevent you from taking custody of immigrant inmates after their release from state jails and prisons, he said. Judge Paul J. Watford, also an Obama appointee, asked several questions about whether immigration authorities could still do their jobs even without Californias help. The Trump administration sued California in March 2018 to invalidate three sanctuary laws. The other two laws allowed the attorney general to inspect immigration facilities and restricted employers from cooperating with immigration agents. The 9th Circuit asked more critical questions about those laws but did not indicate clearly how it would rule. Hurwitz appeared concerned about the provision in the law giving the attorney general access to immigration facilities. He asked if the court could simply block a provision in the laws without overturning them outright. A lawyer for the state said the court could do that. U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez, appointed by George W. Bush, upheld the first two laws, rejecting only a provision in the third that established fines for private employers who voluntarily allow immigration agents to visit workplaces. maura.dolan@latimes.com Twitter: @mauradolan The San Diego County Superior Court put a call out Wednesday to fill two vacancies on the countys juvenile justice commission, a citizens body that examines the operations and administration of the local juvenile justice system. The deadline to apply is April 12 to fill the open seats on the state-mandated, court-appointed commission, which conducts annual inspections of Juvenile Hall and other jail facilities, inquires into the operation of county-run group homes, and makes recommendations to the juvenile courts presiding judge. The selection process for the San Diego County Juvenile Justice Commission includes an application, an interview with a current commissioner, and a final interview with the presiding judge of the Juvenile Court. Prospective commissioners must also undergo a background check and fingerprint scan. Advertisement Commissioners are paid a stipend of $25 per meeting, with a maximum of two meetings held per month. Applications are available by accessing this link on the San Diego Superior Court website at sdcourt.ca.gov. dana.littlefield@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @danalittlefield Bacteria have evolved quite a list of survival mechanisms to help them escape the effects of antibiotics. Now scientists at UC San Diego think theyve spotted another key evasion trick: Magnesium. Science has known for a long time that this element plays an essential role in cell biology. For example, adenosine triphosphate, the chemical compound known as ATP that fuels a wide range of activity including muscle contraction, activates only after binding with a positively-charged magnesium molecule. We simply cant go without the element thats No. 12 on the periodic table. But a recent study from a research team at UC San Diego finds that mighty Mg also plays a role in helping bacteria stave off the deadly affects of antibiotics that work by disrupting the function of ribosomes. These are the molecular machines inside cells that build critical proteins and other compounds responsible for a wide range of important functions. Advertisement When antibiotics stop their ribosomes from functioning properly, bacteria lose their ability to multiply, said Gurol Suel, the biological physicist who led the research team. Antibiotic resistance is considered among the most serious problems in medicine. In 2013, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that resistance is responsible for more than 2 million illnesses and 23,000 deaths nationwide each year. It appears, Suel added, that bacteria are able to selectively increase the amount of magnesium flowing through their innards when antibiotics are present, supporting the structure of ribosomes and the long strings of genetic code called ribonucleic acid they contain. Its not clear, he said, exactly how magnesium accomplishes this feat, but experimenting with Bacillus subtilis, a hardy microbe commonly found in soil and often used by biotechnology companies for the mass production of enzymes, showed that magnesium intake increased in the presence of antibiotics. And, those who were exposed to plentiful magnesium tended to survive antibiotic attacks more readily. Our results make us think about how incredibly ingenious these small organisms are in terms of coping with antibiotics, Suel said. There are some limitations of this research. Bacillus subtilis is not a known superbug pathogen and the doses of antibiotics used in the study were less intense than those that would be used by doctors treating an antibiotic infection in a patient. But Suel said he hopes that publishing the results in Cell, one of the worlds top life science journals, will get others thinking about the possibilities of limiting magnesium intake as a way of fighting antibiotic-resistant invaders. The key is to inspire and have people think along lines and in directions they may not have thought of before, Suel said. Health Playlist On Now Video: Why aren't Americans getting flu shots? 0:37 On Now Video: Leaders urge public to help extinguish hepatitis outbreak On Now San Diego starts cleansing sidewalks, streets to combat hepatitis A On Now Video: Scripps to shutter its hospice service On Now Video: Scripps La Jolla hospitals nab top local spot in annual hospital rankings On Now Video: Does a parent's Alzheimer's doom their children? On Now Video: Vaccine can prevent human papillomavirus, which can cause cancer 0:31 On Now 23 local doctors have already faced state discipline in 2017 0:48 On Now EpiPen recall expands On Now Kids can add years to your life paul.sisson@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1850 Twitter: @paulsisson A San Diego church that has housed thousands of asylum seekers who have no place to go will no longer serve as an overnight shelter. Rev. Bill Jenkins, head of Christ Ministry Center, made the announcement late Monday after the church came under the scrutiny of the citys fire marshal for exceeding its capacity. His church on Meade Avenue first began housing migrants when thousands of Haitians arrived at the San Diego border from Brazil in 2016. Most of the arriving Haitians moved on from San Diego to places like Miami or New York, and the church continued to take migrants in need from around the world, sometimes housing individuals for months before they were able to find more permanent housing. Ive tried to provide a bed for anybody and everybody who needs it, Jenkins said. Advertisement Safe Harbors Network, an organization that grew out of Christ Ministry Center when the number of Haitians needing care exceeded what Jenkins felt his church could provide, will continue, he said. The organization has found other churches and individual homes to help care for asylum seekers waiting for their court dates who dont know anyone in the U.S. Jenkins hopes that network continues to grow, and quickly, because he needs to find beds for all of the people currently staying at the Meade Avenue church before the end of March. Our goal is to continue to do what we can to help, Jenkins said. Im not going to turn my back on them. Were working to find a place for them so theyre not on the street out in the cold and in the rain. Robert Vacchi, deputy chief operating officer with the city of San Diego, said that the city had been working with Christ Ministry Center for about a month over its occupancy issue. It offered the church the possibility of a 60-day permit if it made certain adjustments. If the church wanted to be a permanent shelter, it would need to change its occupancy from assembly to residency, which would require more structural changes, Vacchi said. They can do that, Vacchi said. They just have to make sure they take the proper steps to make sure theyre complying with the building code. Jenkins said that when he realized how much changes to the building for a long-term solution would cost, he decided it would be best to voluntarily close. He emphasized that he doesnt blame the fire marshal for the situation, and that the city had been trying to work with him. I believe in the city code. I know why we have the city code, Jenkins said. He is, however, frustrated that in a moment when state and local officials have voiced support for helping arriving asylum seekers, his shelter is having to shut its doors. Since the federal government changed its policies last fall to release asylum-seeking families without helping them arrange travel to their final destinations across the U.S., another shelter opened up in San Diego to help. The San Diego Rapid Response Networks shelter has been in the spotlight since then. It has seen support from elected officials at the state and local levels, including a site in a San Diego County building and visits from Gov. Gavin Newsom. That shelter moved from site to site over the first few months of its existence. It, too, had to work with the city for temporary permitting to resolve occupancy issues, according to Vacchi. Jenkins supports the Rapid Response Network and its shelter, and he sees the work his shelter was doing as complementary to their work. While the Rapid Response Networks shelter provides a temporary reprieve to asylum seekers after theyre released from federal custody until theyre able to make plans to reunite with family or friends across the country, Christ Ministry Centers shelter takes in those who need somewhere to stay for longer because they dont have anywhere to go. I dont know where theyre going to send them after we close down, Jenkins said. Most of the people who have ended up in his shelter are women and children, he said. One woman who arrived in recent weeks came straight from a hospital after giving birth, he said. He plans to continue offering services like free medical clinics, transportation, English classes and collections of food and clothing during the day. All those things that were doing now, Jenkins said. We just cant have folks sleeping in the building. Immigration Videos On Now New developments in family separation case 9:53 On Now A San Diego woman volunteered as a medic in Texas helping migrant families 2:35 On Now Immigration policy protests in Carlsbad nearly cancelled after permit issue 1:38 On Now When children are separated from their parents at the border, here is where they go next On Now Prospects of a deal for 'Dreamers' may hinge on separating Trump from hard-liners on his staff On Now What is DACA? On Now Border wall prototype contractors selected On Now Video: Ukrainian boxer wins asylum in U.S. On Now 30 apprehended after Border Patrol agents discover tunnel On Now Video: Kurdish diaspora prepare to vote on independence Follow me on Facebook for live updates about immigration news kate.morrissey@sduniontribune.com, @bgirledukate on Twitter Parliament on Wednesday voted, twice, that Britain should not leave the European Union without a proper withdrawal agreement, signaling that lawmakers will also ask European leaders for permission to delay Brexit. The no-deal votes were in many ways symbolic - taking the temperature of Parliament, rather than setting concrete policy. The wishes expressed by lawmakers do not tie the hands of the British government, nor do they commit the EU to any action. Prime Minister Theresa May conceded there was a clear majority against a no-deal Brexit, but she warned lawmakers that the legal default was that Britain would still leave without a deal on March 29 unless another agreement is reached. May said her government could ask the EU for a short extension to implement a deal if it passed by next week. If no deal is passed, May said she would be forced to seek a much longer delay. Advertisement The prime minister was, in essence, alerting, even threatening, lawmakers that if they do not agree to some kind of Brexit deal fast - namely hers, which has been rejected twice, or some other compromise still be crafted - then Brexit will recede into the far future. May said, If the House finds a way in the coming days to support a deal, it would allow the government to seek a short limited technical extension... to provide time to pass the necessary legislation and ratify the agreement we have reached with the EU. But let me be clear, such a short technical extension is only likely to be on offer if we have a deal in place. She continued that if the British Parliament is not willing to support a deal in the coming days, and as it is not willing to support leaving without a deal on 29 March, then it is suggesting that there will need to be a much longer extension. A delay of any length would need approval by leaders of the other 27 EU member states, who have repeatedly said they want a clear plan from action from Britain. It is a signal of rationality that has just come from London. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas tweeted. But now is the time for the British to say what exactly they want to bring the Brexit deal to a successful conclusion. Because time is running out. A longer delay would require Britain to participate in European parliament elections in May. I do not think that would be the right outcome, May said. But the House needs to face up to the consequences of the decisions it has taken. If Parliament votes repeatedly to say the moon is made of cheese, it doesnt mean the moon is made of cheese, said Rob Ford, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester. Parliament can say, repeatedly, that they dont want no deal, but the legal reality is that no-deal will happen unless they vote for something else to happen. Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, warned Parliament that an extension is not a gift. And it is not clear what price the EU might extract for an extension, he said. European leaders have grown anxious that May is losing her authority and her way, fighting against a raucous, divided Parliament and increasingly assertive Conservative Party rebels who want to leave European Union with no deal. The chief E.U. Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, asked aloud why there should be any further discussion with Britain or an extension of the departure date. He said that nearly three years of talks had reached their end. Why would we extend these discussions? he asked the European Parliament. The negotiations, he said, are done and dusted. We have the withdrawal agreement. Its there. Barnier warned British lawmakers that they were bringing their state to the brink, whether they liked it or not. We are at a critical point. The risk of a no-deal has never been higher, he said. I urge you, please, not to underestimate that risk or its consequences. Many hardcore Brexiteers, while a minority of the overall Parliament, embrace the idea of no deal Brexit. I hope that Parliament will vote not to take no deal off the table, Conservative lawmaker Boris Johnson told the BBC before the vote. Johnson, who is one of the favorites to replace May, said: Its crazy to disable yourself as you go into a negotiation. . . why would we shoot ourselves in the foot like that? May clearly hopes to put pressure on those Brexiteers who previously voted against her deal but who shudder at the thought of a long delay - or possibly losing Brexit altogether. Still, some hardliners said they would press on voting against Mays plan. Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the influential European Research Group, told Parliament said that he would keep voting this down however many times it is brought back. If all hope for a deal crumbles, May could resign, or she could pivot and call for a snap election. Or Parliament could demand another Brexit referendum. After warning the House about the perils of no-deal, Exchequer Phillip Hammond said Mays government and lawmakers should to start to map out a way forward towards building a consensus across this house for a deal we can collectively support to exit the EU in an orderly way - suggesting possible moves toward a softer Brexit. While the chaos in London rattled other European capitals, there was also some satisfaction that the British Parliament appeared to fear a no-deal Brexit as much as Europe does and might favor a softer or more gradual departure. An extension is better than no deal, said Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, speaking in Washington a day ahead of planned meetings with President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. If Britain decided to reconsider its red lines, Varadkar added, theyd receive a very generous, very warm and very open response from EU member states. In Brussels, EU ambassadors gathered to plot out their next moves. Most countries appeared willing to accept some sort of delay. But there were disagreements about what Britain would have to promise in order to receive an extension. Mays domestic brinkmanship gives little time for EU leaders to lay the diplomatic groundwork for their response ahead of a two-day summit that begins March 21. Some EU policymakers groused that proposals that could set off EU-wide earthquakes typically get aired at least a few days in advance. And though most European leaders would welcome a Brexit reversal, the necessary consensus for a long delay is less clear. Some EU policymakers watched with amazement at Wednesdays maneuvers in the House of Commons, noting the energy being expended on the so-called Malthouse Compromise - a proposal that the EU sees as the Brits attempting to preserve the divorce deal while stripping out the parts that would guarantee an open Irish border. It was roundly defeated. Brexiteers have been accused of chasing unicorns, conjuring up magical solutions to complex situations like the Irish border problem. That may have been what the European Union Council President Donald Tusk - known for setting off social media - had in mind when he posted a childs unicorn drawing on his Instagram account. The Washington Posts Quentin Aries in Brussels and Adam Taylor in Washington contributed to this report. First published by The Washington Post U.S. health regulators are moving ahead with a plan to keep e-cigarettes out of the hands of teenagers by restricting sales of most flavored products in convenience stores and online. The new guidelines, first proposed in November, are the latest government effort to reverse what health officials call an epidemic of underage vaping. E-cigarettes typically heat a flavored nicotine solution into an inhalable vapor. Federal law bans their sale to those under 18, but 1 in 5 high school students report using e-cigarettes, according to the latest government figures. Under proposed guidelines released Wednesday by the Food and Drug Administration, e-cigarette makers would restrict sales of most flavored products to stores that verify the age of customers or include a separate, age-restricted area of the store for vaping products. An international group of scientists and ethicists are calling for a temporary global ban on making babies with edited genes. Its the latest reaction to last Novembers announcement that gene-edited twins had been born in China. That development was widely criticized as risky and unethical. Wednesdays call for a moratorium came from 18 researchers from seven countries. They presented their proposal, which has no legal authority, in the journal Nature. They want a temporary ban of perhaps five years that would allow time for discussion of critical technical, scientific, societal and ethical issues. Advertisement They proposed that once those discussions had taken place, individual countries could decide on what to allow. About 30 nations already prohibit making babies with edited genes. Its essentially banned in the U.S. After days of resistance, the United States on Wednesday followed its counterparts around the world in grounding the Boeing 737 Max 8, the aircraft involved in a deadly crash in Ethiopia on Sunday and another several months ago in Indonesia. Federal Aviation Administration officials said that airplane tracking data they viewed Wednesday and new evidence from the wreckage of the crash in Ethiopia showed similarities to the crash in Indonesia, leading the agency to ground both the 737 Max 8 and the Max 9, another aircraft in the series. President Donald Trump announced the abrupt about-face Wednesday, after U.S. officials found themselves nearly alone in allowing the planes to remain in the air. As recently as Wednesday morning, both Boeing and the FAA had continued to say it was safe for the planes to fly. Advertisement Any plane currently in the air will go to its destination and thereafter be grounded until further notice, Trump said at an afternoon news conference. The safety of the American people, and all people, is our paramount concern. But there were growing questions about the slow response to the crisis and whether the nations top air-safety officials acted quickly enough to protect the flying public. Trump took the unusual step of consulting personally with Boeings chief executive earlier this week. In the months leading up to the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, U.S. pilots had expressed exasperation about the aircrafts systems, which they said limited their control of the planes, according to a confidential safety reporting system hosted by NASA. Pilots complained of inadequate training on automation-assisted flying systems, unfamiliarity with the controls, anxiety that prompted them to engage autopilot earlier than normal, and at least two instances where the plane pitched downward or maneuvered against pilots inputs. Some of the pilot complaints were first reported by the Dallas Morning News. The FAA denied that the pilots complaints were indicative of problems with the automation system that has been cited as a factor in the Indonesia crash, but some pilots specifically noted that system as a possible cause of flight-control problems in their reports to NASA. Trumps announcement came hours after one by Canadas transportation minister grounding the jets. Canada had been the last major holdout besides the United States. China was the first major power to ground the planes, followed by countries around the world. On Tuesday, the European Union and several others did the same. Chinese officials said they acted after the FAA failed to do so. The FAAs emergency order Wednesday states that the similarities in the Ethiopia and Indonesia tragedies warrant further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents that needs to be better understood and addressed. A McLean, Virginia-based aerospace firm, Aireon, used its plane-tracking technology to help investigators get a clearer idea of the way the Ethiopian Airlines plane was moving and how that compared to the Oct. 29 Lion Air flight, acting FAA administrator Daniel Elwell said. An initial batch of raw data was essentially too fuzzy to be helpful, and the FAA lacked the ability to refine it into usable form on its own, Elwell said. But Aireon, with help from Boeing and the National Transportation Safety Board, were able to refine the initial return of the satellites to create a description of the flight, Elwell said. The track of the Ethiopian Airlines flight was very close - and behaved very similarly - to the Lion Air flight. Aviation experts said the two planes headed up and down multiple times after takeoff. A preliminary report by Indonesian authorities found that a faulty sensor prompted an automation feature on the plane to repeatedly force the plane to descend, until it crashed and killed all on board. The investigation into the causes of the Ethiopian Airlines crash is in the earliest stages, and it is not clear whether hardware problems, software problems or some combination of factors caused the crash. Elwell said that we still have a lot to learn before we can say they were the same cause and effect. Elwell also said important physical evidence was pulled from the wreckage linking the two flights, though he said he could not describe it because the United States is a party to the active investigation. Yet that evidence helped us have more fidelity on the flight track, what was happening during the flight, and that evidence aligns the Ethiopian flight closer to what we know happened in Lion Air, Elwell said. Thats about all I can say. The order will ground more than 70 aircraft. In the United States, the aircraft is used by American and Southwest airlines, which combined have 58 Max 8s in their fleets. United Airlines has 14 of the Max 9 planes. Boeing said that it continues to have full confidence in the safety of the Max 8 and Max 9 but that after consulting with the FAA, the NTSB, aviation authorities and its customers, it decided to suspend operations of its global fleet of more than 370 Max aircraft. Boeing has determined - out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircrafts safety - to recommend to the FAA the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of 371 737 MAX aircraft, the company said in a statement, adding that it supported the FAAs decision. We are doing everything we can to understand the cause of the accidents in partnership with the investigators, deploy safety enhancements and help ensure this does not happen again, the company said. Officials at American Airlines - which, along with a union representing its pilots, had reiterated its belief that the planes were safe to fly - said they were now being grounded out of an abundance of caution. Our teams will be working to rebook customers as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience, the airline said. Southwest said it was immediately complying with the FAA order, noting that it operates a fleet of more than 750 Boeing 737s and that the 34 Max 8s in its fleet account for less than five percent of our daily flights. While we remain confident in the MAX 8 after completing more than 88,000 flight hours accrued over 41,000 flights, we support the actions of the FAA and other regulatory agencies and governments across the globe that have asked for further review of the data - including information from the flight data recorder - related to the recent accident involving the MAX 8, Southwest said. Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau said he issued a safety notice grounding the flights Wednesday after newly available satellite data was reviewed. My experts have looked at this and compared it to the flight that occurred with Lion Air six months ago in October, and . . . there are similarities that sort of exceed a certain threshold in our minds with respect to the possible cause of what happened in Ethiopia, Garneau said. At a Wednesday afternoon news conference, Elwell, of the FAA, said delays in getting the damaged flight-data recorders to a place where information could be retrieved contributed to the agencys decision to ground the planes. Ethiopia has the capability to read black boxes but not heavily damaged ones as in this case, he said. The plan was to have them on a plane to France on Wednesday night, he said. We had been hopeful all along, with the black boxes being discovered so soon after the incident, that we could get them on a table and start pulling data to help us inform our decision one way or another about whether to ground the airplanes, Elwell said. That process was lengthened more than I had hoped, to the point where the boxes still are in Ethiopia. But at least now we have a plan to get them out of country. Asked what role U.S. investigators will play in analyzing the black box data, Elwell said, per international protocol, Ethiopia is taking the lead - their soil, their aircraft, their airline, he said. But he said U.S. inspectors have been cooperating with their Ethiopian counterparts from the onset of the tragedy and will continue to do so. Together, FAA and NTSB are helping [the] Ethiopian accident investigation board, he said. The preliminary report on the Oct. 29 Lion Air Flight 610 crash found that a device known as an angle of attack sensor had mistakenly indicated the planes nose was too high, prompting the planes automation software to push the plane downward. The Lion Air pilots fought to raise the planes nose but were unable to, sending the plane crashing into the Java Sea. In November, an American Airlines spokesman said that the airline followed all procedures outlined by Boeing and in an emergency directive from the FAA in the wake of the Lion Air crash. The airline said Wednesday that it has reviewed data for more than 14,000 flights since the Lion Air crash and has not seen a single anomaly related to the sensor. At American, we have not had similar issues regarding an erroneous Angle of Attack during manual flight, spokesman Ross Feinstein said, responding to questions about pilot complaints and concerns about flying a Max 8. Americans fleet of 24 Max 8 aircraft first went into operation in November 2017 and have a combined total of more than 46,400 operating hours and nearly 18,000 cycles. Officials around the world had cited the absence of clear information from the Ethiopian Airlines plane to call for the Boeing jets to be grounded. The data from the two flight recorders are eagerly awaited as investigators look for connections. After China grounded the plane Monday, most countries followed suit, including much of Europe. Bans were also issued by India, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Turkey and Hong Kong. Ethiopian Airlines chief executive Tewolde GebreMariam told CNN on Tuesday that the pilot reported flight control problems and asked to return to the airport. He cast doubt on the airworthiness of the 737 Max. Two major fatal accidents on the same airplane model, brand new airplane model, in six months - so there are a lot of questions to be answered on the airplane, he said. In remarks to local media, Tewolde also revealed that pilots received additional training from Boeing to fly the 737 Max after the Lion Air crash. After the Lion Air crash, questions were raised, so Boeing sent further instructions that it said pilots should know, he said, according to the Associated Press. Those relate to the specific behavior of this specific type of aircraft. As a result, training was given by Boeing, and our pilots have taken it and put it into our manuals. Elwell said he expects a software fix developed by Boeing after the Lion Air crash to be finalized in the near future. Were hopeful the final touches and tests and evaluation of the software amendment, or the software addition to the Max, will be ready within a couple months. We have not tied the order specifically to the software patch, he said. Elwell said he is confident that the patch is going to be an enhancement to the system and make it far less likely that crews, if faced with that very anomalous situation, far less likely to have to deal with that particular malfunction. Im looking forward to getting that implemented. The Washington Posts Paul Schemm contributed to this report from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Faiz Siddiqui, Aaron Gregg, Josh Dawsey and Felicia Sonmez contributed from Washington. First published by The Washington Post As British lawmakers voted on what to do next about Brexit, Aodhan Connolly monitored the political drama in London with a large dose of frustration. Connolly, director of the Belfast-based Northern Ireland Retail Consortium, said Wednesday that retailers were in a nasty bind by not knowing what exactly to expect from Britains planned exit from the European Union, which is scheduled for March 29. Businesses have been unable to make contingency plans because they dont know what British officials will do next, he said The biggest problem is uncertainty, he said. To observers like Connolly, British officials have not done much this week to clear up how the government will manage a break from the 28-nation EU bloc. Advertisement The day after resoundingly rejecting British Prime Minister Theresa Mays Brexit plan, lawmakers on Wednesday voted against leaving the European Union without any deal at all in hopes of avoiding almost certain economic chaos. Parliaments vote of 321 to 278 indicated that, despite endless infighting, politicians from all parties were worried about the turmoil expected in commerce and other arenas if Britain were to leave the bloc on March 29 or ever without a plan in place. May, however, emphasized that Parliaments votes on the matter were not legally binding and that the legal default remained that Britain would leave the EU on that day. Options include leaving the EU based on the May agreement that lawmakers already have rejected, seeking a new deal despite EU leaders saying theyve presented their best offer, seeking an extension on the deadline, or pursuing a second referendum on whether to exit the bloc, May said. That would risk no Brexit at all, damaging the fragile trust between the British public and members of this house, she said. The vote came 24 hours after a tumultuous day in British politics. On Tuesday, lawmakers rejected Mays revised EU withdrawal agreement despite last-minute changes she had hoped would win over a majority of lawmakers. It left the prime minister, Parliament and the European Union unclear about a way forward and with little time to come up with a new plan. Managing the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, has been a significant stumbling block to successful Brexit negotiations. British lawmakers were unhappy with a so-called backstop agreement that would take effect if talks over a future trade deal deadlocked. The agreement would keep the whole of the U.K. inside an EU customs union, and Northern Ireland would remain linked to some rules of the more extensive single market. The Democratic Unionist Party, which May depends on for her majority in Parliament, voted against the revised deal. It said creating different trade agreements between Northern Ireland and mainland U.K. was unacceptable. Euroskeptics in Mays Conservative Party also objected to Britain not being able to unilaterally withdraw from the backstop, and voted no. May sought assurances from EU leaders that the backstop would not be legally binding, but despite a last-minute dash to the French city of Strasbourg the extra written guarantees May secured did not go far enough. On Wednesday, May spoke with a hoarse and faltering voice in Parliament after days of difficult conversations and late-night negotiations. She said that she knew the voice of the country and understood that the British who voted 52% to 48% to leave the EU in a 2016 referendum still wanted to leave the bloc and that leaving with a good deal remained her main priority. I believe we have a good deal, she said. No deal is better than a bad deal, but I have been working for us to leave on 29 March and leave with a good deal. Opposition Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn said May needed to accept that her Brexit strategy, which was rejected by lawmakers in January and again Tuesday, was in tatters. Her deal has been twice rejected and is now dead, he said, urging May to look at alternative proposals, including one put forward by his party that would see Britain remain in a customs union with the remaining 27 EU nations. But the EUs chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, emphasized that the bloc had gone as far as it could to come up with a divorce deal that was acceptable to all sides and that the ball was now firmly in Britains court. If the U.K. still wants to leave the EU in an orderly manner, this treaty is, and will remain, the only treaty possible, he said in Strasbourg. I urge you please not to underestimate the risk [of no deal] or its consequences. No matter the outcome of Wednesdays vote and efforts to put contingency plans in place, the risk of a chaotic, unplanned Brexit cannot be ruled out. To postpone the March 29 deadline, all remaining 27 EU members would have to agree, and many want a clear indication of what exactly an extension would achieve and how long it would last. The British Parliament was prepared to vote Thursday on whether to pursue an extension. The EU also has other business, including European Parliament elections in May, that could further complicate additional negotiations. If the divorce has not been finalized by then, Britain could be faced with the awkward situation of putting forward candidates for the body despite having no intention of remaining in the EU long term. To prove that it is ready for all eventualities, Mays government started to reveal some of the measures that it planned to enforce to protect trade and industry if a no-deal Brexit were to become unavoidable. Tariffs would not be placed on up to 87% of goods entering Britain from the EU apart from some industries, such as agriculture, which it would seek to protect. On the island of Ireland, no checks would be imposed on goods traveling from the Republic of Ireland, an EU member, to Northern Ireland, which would leave the EU along with the rest of the U.K. Connolly slammed this idea, saying it would create a smugglers paradise. He lambasted Parliaments defeat of Mays deal on Tuesday night by 149 votes, 391 to 242. The deal wasnt perfect by any means, but there were some really good things in there, he said. Its the most vulnerable households who are going to feel this first. Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, who spearheaded the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union, said he still expected the country to eventually break away from the EU. In the end, we are going to get Brexit because the genie is out of the bottle, he said in a television interview. The trouble is we have some battles to fight. Boyle is a special correspondent. The State Department released its annual human rights report Wednesday with blistering criticism for China, a pass for ally Saudi Arabia and less harsh views on North Korea. The report says the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi government agents last year constituted a human rights abuse because it was an arbitrary or politically motivated killing. But it avoided assigning blame despite the reported conclusion of U.S. intelligence services that the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, most likely had approved the operation. The prince, who is the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, is close to President Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Advertisement Trump and Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo have publicly cast doubt on the princes responsibility for the Oct. 2 slaying, when Khashoggi was strangled and dismembered inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Michael Kozak, a senior State Department official who oversaw writing the human rights report, dismissed as opinion-driven speculation that Mohammed ordered the killing. That investigation is still underway, Kozak told a news briefing after the report was released. For North Korea, the report dropped the word egregious when describing abuses that ranged from forced labor camps to torture and extrajudicial killings, conditions that have not improved despite nuclear negotiations between Trump and the countrys ruler, Kim Jong Un. Kozak said the Trump administration has been at the forefront of trying to expose what North Korea is doing, although Trump, who has met Kim twice in the last nine months, has not publicly condemned its human rights record. Implicitly, its egregious, Kozak said of North Koreas behavior. Its still one of the worst human rights situations in the world. At the same news conference, Pompeo singled out Iran, South Sudan, Nicaragua and China for criticism. He said even some of our friends, allies and partners are guilty of abuse, but he did not mention any. The annual human rights report has been mandated by Congress since the late 1970s and usually spurs at least some criticism of its review of abuses around the globe. Activists bemoan what they see as the Trump administrations downgrading of human rights concerns. Pompeo rarely mentions the issue in public when he is abroad, although his aides say he often brings up individual cases in private discussions with foreign rulers. The policy of this administration is to engage with other governments, regardless of their record, if doing so will further U.S. interests, Pompeo said. Human rights groups said Pompeos call for engagement sends a signal that despotic leaders can continue to abuse their populations. It shows that the U.S. doesnt care about human rights and will forgive or forget even the most atrocious human rights abuses, Amnesty International said in a statement. China, with Iran, came in for special criticism in the State Department report. China is in a league of its own, Kozak said, noting the detention of more than 1 million Muslims was something not seen since the 1930s. He said China is attempting to erase the culture, religion, the DNA of Muslim Uighurs. The White House has said Trump may meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in coming weeks in an effort to resolve trade talks between the two countries. For the second year, the State Department report did not mention reproductive rights for women as a fundamental human right. Kozak said the term was omitted because it included abortion for some advocates. For Israel, the report no longer refers to the West Bank and other Palestinian-dominated regions over which Israel holds sway as occupied. The Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in 1981, was referred to as Israeli-controlled. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sought to persuade other countries to recognize Golan as part of Israel, and has received support from some U.S. conservatives. Occupied territories has a legal meaning and we were trying to shift to more of a geographical description, Kozak said. It is the legal situation that creates the abuse, responded Sarah Margon, Washington director of Human Rights Watch. In the report you can see that where the administration wants no daylight between itself and a particular ally, they are not grappling with the hard issues from occupied territories to [the role of Mohammed] in the killing of Khashoggi. For more on international affairs, follow @TracyKWilkinson on Twitter San Diego officials are hoping to capture more tax revenue from large research, manufacturing and construction projects with a revamped incentive program that would allow companies to share more of the taxes they generate. The proposal, which was approved by the City Councils economic development committee last week, would increase from 25 percent to 45 percent the share companies receive when they form a tax partnership with the city. Such partnerships allow cities to keep more of the sales and use taxes generated within their borders by reducing the amount they must share with the county and other government agencies. Companies are generally reluctant to participate in such partnerships, though, because they require a state application and detailed reports on taxable transactions and other complex accounting efforts, city officials said. Advertisement Under the current program, only four companies have such tax partnerships with the city Intuit, IPS, Novartis and Alesmith and the last deal was reached in 2006. Were trying to create a program that looks a little bit different to see if this has the ability to bring in additional revenue, said Christina Bibler, a program manager in the citys Economic Development Department. Time will tell in the next 12 to 18 months. Bibler said city officials hope the spike from 25 percent to 45 percent, which was recommended by a consultant, is substantial enough that companies will believe it outweighs the costs of the more complex accounting and record keeping. She noted that the revenue the city would be sharing with the companies is revenue the city wouldnt get if the companies hadnt agreed to the tax-sharing partnerships. Only companies generating at least $5 million annually in taxable economic activity are eligible for the program. I think it makes a lot of sense to move on this as an opportunity, said Councilman Chris Ward, chairman of the economic development committee. I hope it will be attractive and start to produce multiple wins. The proposal comes six months after San Diego made sweeping changes to its business incentive program after an audit criticized it for lack of transparency, outdated goals and failure to boost the citys low-income neighborhoods. The revamped program has more specific eligibility criteria and requires businesses to show they wouldnt have expanded their workforce or facilities without city incentives. It also sharply expands outreach efforts to firms across San Diego to help the program shed its image as being available only to businesses with connections at City Hall. david.garrick@sduniontribune.com (619) 269-8906 Twitter:@UTDavidGarrick Rallies and protests aimed at saving the regions last roller skating rink have prompted San Diego Councilman Scott Sherman to seek legal advice on what the city could do to prevent the imminent sale of the rink to a developer. More than 16,000 people have signed a petition to save 44-year-old Skateworld in the heart of Linda Vista, and multiple rallies have been held in recent days in hopes of stopping the sale so the popular rink can remain open. Supporters say the rink is a community gathering place, a relatively inexpensive recreation opportunity for families, and a place where at-risk teens spend after-school hours constructively. Sherman said Tuesday hes almost certain the citys hands are legally tied by a state law that requires public land previously owned by redevelopment agencies to be sold to the highest bidder, regardless of their plans for the site. The city owns the land where Skateworld is located. Advertisement But Sherman has asked City Attorney Mara Elliott to analyze the law and see if there is any wiggle room or gray area on the sale of the land, which has been owned by the city since California dissolved redevelopment agencies in 2012. I want to make sure that what I understand is the law, and the actual law, are the same thing, Sherman said. I would love to be able to do something to make Skateworld stay, but we have to make sure were doing everything legal along the way. The family that has owned Skateworld since it opened in 1975 says Sherman, whose council district includes the site, is oversimplifying things. The city says its cut-and-dried, but its really not, said rink manager Christina Stang, whose father-in-law owns Skateworld. The citys handling of the situation has not been great. One criticism is that Civic San Diego, a city-owned nonprofit that oversees some property sales and development projects, was placed in charge of handling the sale. The Stangs note that the nonprofit has faced criticism for allegedly secretive and unethical behavior in recent years, and the family says they received confusing and contradictory information about how the sale of the land would be handled. Sherman said the Stangs were outbid fair-and-square by developer Pacifica, which hasnt disclosed its plans for the site because that is not part of the bidding process. The Stangs say Pacifica is planning a Target store, and they have lobbied for a process where bidders must disclose their plans for the site and community leaders can express preferences before a decision is made. Sherman said thats not what state law requires or would allow, as he understands it. Youre only allowed to look at what is the best value for the taxing entities involved, he said, explaining that the highest bid is the best value. In a prepared statement provided to the Union-Tribune, Civic San Diego provided a similar description of the requirements facing the city, which is the designated successor agency to the redevelopment agency that owned the Skateworld site. Unfortunately, former Gov. (Jerry) Brown and the California state Legislature did away with redevelopment and the city of San Diego and Civic San Diego are faced with implementing the laws which the state has put in place, the statement says. The state law specifically requires a successor agency to liquidate the assets expeditiously and requires the sale of the property to be of fair market value, with the goal of maximizing revenues to the local affected taxing entities. Sherman said Skateworld officials asked him to divulge the bids submitted by others for the site so that they could offer more money. But he said the bidding process must be concealed for ethical reasons. I wouldnt do that for Pacifica or for Skateworld, he said. I cant do that for anybody. The 17,115-square-foot Skateworld building, located at Linda Vista Road and Ulric Street near the University of San Diego, has been designated a historic building. Its the last remnant of the Linda Vista Shopping Center, built in 1942 for World War II defense workers. Stang says that designation wont help save the rink because developers are allowed to renovate and refurbish such sites as long as they maintain the historic character. The recent outcry from roller skating fans isnt the first time the Skateworld community has rallied to try to save the rink. A similar outpouring of support in 2010 prompted city officials to back away from a plan to allow the Bayside Community Center to take over the site. But that was before the state dissolved redevelopment agencies and created the laws that came with that move. Sherman said he has advised the Stangs to lobby the city council for concessions when the sale comes up for a vote, which was tentatively scheduled for March 18 but has since been postponed until sometime in early April. Those concessions could include Pacifica allowing the rink, or some version of it, to remain operating on the site. david.garrick@sduniontribune.com (619) 269-8906 Twitter:@UTDavidGarrick A motorist crashed his vehicle into the Ali Baba restaurant in El Cajon and ran off Wednesday afternoon, police reported. Lt. Keith MacArthur of the El Cajon Police Department said the accident occurred shortly before 1 p.m. where East Main Street intersects with Bellantyne Street and Avocado Avenue. MacArthur said no injuries were reported. Police were searching for the driver in the area of Joyce Street and Prescott Avenue, about a mile from the restaurant. The male driver was described as Latino with dark, collar-length hair, 5 feet 8 inches, 165 pounds and wearing a white shirt. Advertisement Homeless Playlist On Now San Diego hepatitis outbreak continues to grow: 481 cases On Now Homeless entrenched in booming tent city along Santa Ana River On Now San Diego mayor agreed to homeless hub, then delayed, advocates say On Now Homeless outreach in San Diego On Now Video: Street Art: Portraits of San Diego's Homeless #8 On Now In poverty himself, 'Water Man Dave,' is the fearless saint of San Diego's homeless 5:41 On Now Video: Homeless living in cars find safe havens 2:21 On Now Street Art: Portraits of San Diego's Homeless #7 On Now Pitching a tent plan for San Diego's homeless On Now Homeless efforts get $80M boost for various services gary.warth@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @GaryWarthUT 760-529-4939 Escondido police arrested a man suspected of inadvertently shooting a neighbor in the foot during a domestic violence incident early Wednesday morning. Police Officer Mark Zeller said the 30-year-old man was arrested after being spotted walking on North Escondido Boulevard north of East Washington Boulevard at about 4 a.m. The suspect was armed with a handgun, Zeller said. At about 1:30 a.m. earlier that night, police had responded to a domestic violence incident involving the suspect and his girlfriend at East Washington Avenue near North Hickory Street. Advertisement During an altercation, the suspect reportedly shot a neighbor in the foot by accident, Zeller said. Homeless Playlist On Now San Diego hepatitis outbreak continues to grow: 481 cases On Now Homeless entrenched in booming tent city along Santa Ana River On Now San Diego mayor agreed to homeless hub, then delayed, advocates say On Now Homeless outreach in San Diego On Now Video: Street Art: Portraits of San Diego's Homeless #8 On Now In poverty himself, 'Water Man Dave,' is the fearless saint of San Diego's homeless 5:41 On Now Video: Homeless living in cars find safe havens 2:21 On Now Street Art: Portraits of San Diego's Homeless #7 On Now Pitching a tent plan for San Diego's homeless On Now Homeless efforts get $80M boost for various services gary.warth@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @GaryWarthUT 760-529-4939 President Trump has done his level best to tank his presidency. The trade and budget deficits are soaring, his legal woes are mushrooming, his North Korea policy collapsed, Democrats beat him on the border wall and the Republican Senate is poised to rebuke him. There is only one thing that can save him now: Democrats. And, on cue, here they come. Democrats, after winning last year with vows to lower health-care costs, rebuild infrastructure and clean up corruption, are now being pulled toward costly and divisive plans for government-run health care, a Green New Deal and reparations for African Americans. Some are agitating for impeachment even before special counsel Robert Mueller releases his report. And House Democrats just engaged in an ugly internal squabble over anti-Semitism. Advertisement The instigator, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., said that Americans who support policies of the Jewish state are pushing allegiance to a foreign country. Previously, she apologized for suggesting that pro-Israel interests were buying off lawmakers. But this time the far left rallied against House Democratic leaders plans to rebuke Omar, arguing: that others have said worse with impunity (true, but they are Republicans, who follow a lesser standard), and that American Muslims are the victims of far worse (also true, but not justification for challenging another minoritys patriotism). The result: an anodyne resolution condemning religious bigotry generally. This wont end the matter, both because there is nascent anti-Semitism on the left and because Republicans, with rank hypocrisy, will exploit it. It is shameful that House Democrats wont take a stronger stand against Anti-Semitism, tweeted Trump -- who has singled out Jewish globalists as the enemy and said there were very fine people marching among neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. Even a symbolic resolution condemning anti-Semitism seems to be a bridge too far for Democrats, taunted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., -- who expressed no such alarm when Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, hailed white supremacy and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., invited a Holocaust denier to the State of the Union. Perhaps a refresher on such bigotry is needed. Call it Anti-Semitism for Dummies: KOSHER: Opposing Benjamin Netanyahus government. (Most American Jews do it!) Criticizing Israeli policy, including the occupation. Questioning U.S. support for Israel. MEH: Suggesting the Israel lobby has too much influence, if ignoring the NRA and other groups that also have outsized influence. Denouncing individual Jews as unscrupulous (Little Shifty Schiff), if non-Jews (Crooked Hillary) arent similarly labeled. OY: Suggesting people who support policies of Israel are disloyal to America. Falsely suggesting Jewish or pro-Israel interests bribe politicians. YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED: Telling Jews Youre not going to support me because I dont want your money (as Trump did) or suggesting they are conspiring toward global domination (as Trump also did). Denying the Holocaust or belittling it (as Donald Trump Jr. did) with loose talk of gas chambers. Chanting Jews will not replace us or speaking favorably (as Trump did) of people who do. Therefore, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., was wrong to declare Omars grief more personal than that involving the long-ago Holocaust. (Was Octobers Pittsburgh synagogue massacre recent enough?) Conversely, Rep. Juan Vargas, D-Calif., erred in declaring off-limits any questioning of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Rather than attempting to bury divisions with a feel-good resolution, I suggest Democrats resolve the following -- not on the floor, but in their hearts: Whereas Trump tweeted an anti-Semitic image of a Jewish star atop a pile of cash, and hesitated to condemn a KKK leader and those threatening Jews and vandalizing Jewish property; Whereas Trump told slanders about Muslims cheering the World Trade Center attack and Muslims being shot by bullets dipped in pigs blood, said Islam hates us, retweeted anti-Muslim propaganda and called for a total and complete Muslim travel ban; Whereas Republicans have been mostly silent about Trumps bigotry and sometimes echoed it; Whereas the only way to defeat Trump is for Democrats to unify behind an agenda embraced by voters; And whereas pursuing impeachment without Republican support would not only fail but also would strengthen Trump; Now, therefore, be it resolved: That we denounce the bigotry unleashed by Trump and often ignored by Republicans. That we vow to hold ourselves to a higher standard. That we will cut the crap and stop questioning each others motives and loyalty to country. That we will not insist on litmus tests and House votes on issues that split Democrats and have no chance of enactment under Trump. That we will keep our powder dry on impeachment unless and until Republicans join us. And that we will never again divert Trump from his steady march to self-destruction. Follow Dana Milbank on Twitter, @Milbank. This Thursday, the State Board of Education will decide whether or not my son and nearly 1,000 other students will lose their school. Closing Thrive Public Schools will leave these students with nowhere else to go. Thrive Public Schools serve some of San Diegos highest-needs students who have struggled to find academic success elsewhere. Thrive provides a quality education for every student regardless of the unique learning challenges they face. More than 80 percent of students come to Thrive at least one grade level behind. The longer these students are at Thrive, the better their academic performance. On top of this, Thrive is home to nearly double the state average of special needs students and has been nationally recognized for its service to children with disabilities. Thrives success with students who need or want a different learning environment is what brings students and families there, including ours. Related: Why Thrive Charter Schools should be closed Advertisement My husband and I are both products of district public schools, and we fully intended on raising our children the same way. However, it simply did not work for our son Lytle. From kindergarten through third grade, school was a huge issue for him. He developed terrible anxiety about school which made his learning disabilities worse, causing him to fall severely behind. Although the teachers, administrators, and education specialists at the San Diego Unified School District tried to help him, they were stumped about what Lytle needed to succeed, or even how to help him achieve some academic growth. After years of my son falling further and further behind, we decided to try something different. Its been three years since we switched to Thrive, a charter public school, and we could not be happier with the growth we have seen. When he came to Thrive, he was at the 2nd percentile nationally and was not reading. Now, he is above average at the 55th percentile for English and reading at a fifth-grade level. That means that every year since he arrived at Thrive he has made nearly two years of growth in one year. This year alone, Lytle grew nearly 12 points in reading in just half a school year thats nearly double the average growth of an entire year, and he did it in just six months. He also has a 97 percent attendance rate, which is the highest its ever been. We dont have to fight to get him to school, making all of our days better. He likes his school and his teachers, and he frequently talks about how he wants to be an engineer! Thrive worked with my son to understand and embrace his learning challenges. Thrives teachers and staff have gone above and beyond to help him enjoy school by creating an inclusive learning environment for every student. He is not only growing academically, but also emotionally. He even sings on his way to school now! His enjoyment of learning at Thrive has directly influenced his ability to achieve and he needs more years at Thrive to close the gap and reach grade-level. For years we worried that my son would not find academic success. Moving to Thrive was the best decision we could have made, and losing Thrive would jeopardize all his growth and would be detrimental to his educational future. Thrive is making a real difference not just with my son, but with almost every student who goes there. I often talk to other parents whose stories are similar to mine. We love our school. Thrive embraces every child and develops instruction that truly helps students find success and overcome their learning challenges. Lytles academic growth is proof that Thrive is helping to close the achievement gap. These students, like Lytle, who are behind academically when they arrive, are growing exponentially the longer they are at Thrive, and they deserve more time to see that growth. Thrive is providing for the students who truly need support students who have experienced failure, hardship and struggles and who have finally found success at Thrive. My husband and I are among the hundreds of parents who believe Thrive should be kept open for the benefit of these students. Wilson teaches writing at UCSD. She and her family live in Serra Mesa. I did not feel safe and I learned absolutely nothing. That was the testimony heard from one former Thrive Public Schools student who is now doing well in fourth grade at a different school. A group of former students and parents have come forward to describe their experiences during their time at Thrive charter schools. Without a doubt, there are many more like them the school has a 27 percent to 39 percent attrition rate roughly one-third of the students leave the school each year. And with good reason, especially for San Diegos most vulnerable students. Simply put, Thrive is failing low-income, black and Latino students. Looking at the numbers, Thrive failed to demonstrate it meets the academic requirements to renew its charter, especially when compared to the 13 schools Thrive identified with similar grade and demographic data. For low-income students, Thrive had the worst academic outcomes in both English Language Arts and Math. For low-income students, more than 75 percent of Thrive students werent able to meet the states standards in math. At the middle school level, the situation is even worse: 80 percent of all of Thrives middle school students failed to meet the state achievement standards in math, and 90 percent of low-income students failed the same standard. Related: Why Thrive Charter Schools should stay open Similarly, for black students and Latino students, Thrives outcomes were worse than almost all other schools in ELA and math. Fewer than 10 percent of Thrives Latino students were meeting state standards in math. All of the comparison schools have a much higher low-income population than Thrive, and a higher percentage of English learners, yet still demonstrated better academic outcomes than Thrive. Thrive argues that it excels at serving students with disabilities. However, Thrives academic outcomes for these students are far lower than SDUSDs outcomes, as well as the outcomes for these students countywide. Advertisement Our entire school system needs to do better by black students, and San Diego Unified is 42 points away from having all black students at grade-level proficiency on the California Schools Dashboard in English Language Arts. For these students, Thrive is a disaster. Thrive is more than double that number, at 106.5 points below grade-level proficiency for black students. Outcomes in math are similar. Thrive also has a larger achievement gap in math and ELA between black and white students than the district overall. Why renew the charter for a school that expands the achievement gap? Thrive argues that parents are choosing Thrive because they were struggling in the schools they were attending. But there are over 130 charter schools in San Diego County, and 46 in SDUSD alone. Wouldnt we see these same poor outcomes at all of those schools? Thrive argues that they are too new for us to look at state standards. Two other charters in the district opened at the same time as Thrive. They were renewed because they demonstrated improved academic performance. There should be one standard for these schools and Thrive should be held accountable. Thrive has been given every advantage to show their school can succeed. They have benefited from the investment of millions of dollars from wealthy supporters and received $13 million in new market tax credits from Civic San Diego and another Los Angeles entity. All that and still couldnt prove their ability to deliver achievement for students. Schools like Thrive are a symptom of a system in much need of reform. Recent research has found that the dramatic growth of charter schools has cost San Diego Unified about $66 million annually. This cost is born by the students who remain in district managed schools the overwhelming majority of students in our public school system. Given whats at stake, we cant continue to support schools that cost more to our system but do not deliver for our most vulnerable students. We need to ensure our scarce resources are invested in educational strategies that create student success, not expand student failure. Thrive simply doesnt measure up. And the people who have the most to lose are the students when we tolerate this level of failure. I support the recommendation of the California Department of Education and the San Diego Unified School District to deny the renewal for Thrive charter school. Our childrens future is at stake. Rice-Wilson is a parent of two children attending San Diego Global Vision Academy, a SDUSD charter school, and an education and civil rights activist. Not everyone in California opposes death penalty Re Newsom to block state from executing prisoners (March 13): Just finished reading about Gov. Newsoms decision to block all executions in California during his term. As an excuse he states the death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values. Since the people of California have consistently voted to keep the death penalty and fast tracking appeals, when he says our bedrock values, he is really referring to his and his minority of constituents values. The governor is supposed to represent all of us, not a vocal minority. Advertisement Arnold Botts Chula Vista Gov. Gavin Newsom knows hes not making friends but he cannot abide by premeditated murder and so will not be a party to it. The intentional killing of another person is wrong and as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual. That he likens himself to an accomplice, an aider and abettor to a killing is testament to his deep conviction against the death penalty. He has put himself in the shoes of a killer. That is contrary to what he believes. He does not see capital punishment as meting out justice. He is able to understand what the death penalty truly is. It is not punishment. It is not retribution, vengeance or revenge. It is premeditated state sanctioned first degree murder. Gavin Newsom is to be commended for the moratorium on the death penalty and his unpopular stance. Neil Proffitt Oceanside I commend Gov.Newsom for his actions to place a moratorium on executions in California. It has been embarrassing that California has not taken this action long before now, after so many other states have done so already. So far 164 condemned prisoners nationwide who were on death row have been found not guilty and released since 1973. Scary that we were in the process of executing innocents, and tragic that there is ample evidence that we have indeed executed innocents. Four days before Gavin was elected, I was among a group of San Diegans Against the Death Penalty that asked him to autograph our group sign. While Gavin was autographing it, he commented count on it. How refreshing it is to have a candidate Walk the Talk once elected. Tony Alfino San Diego Arguments against the death penalty begin with uncertainty of judicial fairness, cost of appeals, and the cruel and unusual nature of the execution process itself. These objections can be remedied. The real issue is: Why do we want to kill the perpetrator rather than simply give the public absolute protection by way of irrevocable incarceration? The answer to that question is that we want closure by way of revenge. Nothing more than the desire to see justice in the form of that which was imposed on the victim. Revenge is an evil emotion, a filthy regression to our animal nature. When we impose the death penalty we take on the moral dimension of the criminal. We clothe ourselves with the ugly inhumanity of the condemned. Shain B. Haug Allied Gardens Isnt death penalty much like abortion? Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to block death penalty executions because they are inconsistent with our bedrock values. So anyone ready for the discussion about abortion, yet? Jim Kuriger Vista Letters and commentary policy The U-T welcomes and encourages community dialogue on important public matters. Please visit this page for more details on our letters and commentaries policy. You can email letters@sduniontribune.com or leave a comment below. Follow @UTLetters on Twitter and UTOpinion on Facebook. Affordable housing commitments needed Re Plan for housing near trolley heads to council (March 8): At the Land Use and Housing Committee meeting, Council Member Jennifer Campbell urged delaying the Morena Corridor Specific Plan until the city follows through on requiring new projects to increase the amount of affordable housing. But Council Member Scott Sherman said he was confident developers will include affordable housing because the city can provide incentives for it. What incentives does the city have left? The land use committee gave the developer a 100-foot height limit and very high density, without any commitment from the developer to include greater affordable housing. The committee gave away the store. Fortunately the City Council still has the chance to clean up the mess the land use committee left it by increasing affordable housing requirements before approving the plan. Howard Wayne, Chair, Advertisement Ad Hoc Subcommittee on the Morena Corridor Specific Plan, Linda Vista Planning Group Dont force people to own parking spots Re A risk worth taking: San Diego eliminates parking mandate (March 5): Kudos to the mayor, to the planning commission and to the City Council for eliminating minimum parking requirements. Such restrictions may have made sense in the 1960s. But now we have Uber, Lyft, Zip-Cars and e-bikes. Why should people have to pay for parking when they dont need it and dont want it? Requiring parking would be like requiring that all housing have three bedrooms. What if you dont want three bedrooms? Should you be forced to pay for it? Let people have a choice. If you want three bedrooms, put that in your search criteria. And if you want parking, look for places with parking. But dont force everyone to pay for parking if they dont want it. James Wang Cardiff Dont count on builders to consider residents Why does the U-T support doing away with local housing regulations in order to address housing costs? As a lifelong resident I have known San Diego politicians to traditionally engage in cozy relationships with developers at the expense of residents. This is why infrastructure development has never kept pace with housing and commercial development and we continue to have sewage runoff closing our beaches, potholes damaging our cars and rapidly increasing traffic congestion. We are now being asked to shelve our natural inclination to avoid over-crowding and to embrace massive new housing development. This is putting the cart before the horse. Developers should be made to first shoulder the costs for upgrading infrastructure before being allowed to profit from more building. Otherwise everyones quality of life suffers. Edward Kinsey San Diego Letters and commentary policy The U-T welcomes and encourages community dialogue on important public matters. Please visit this page for more details on our letters and commentaries policy. You can email letters@sduniontribune.com or leave a comment below. Follow @UTLetters on Twitter and UTOpinion on Facebook. Cuts in needed services are unconscionable Re Trump to renew wall fight (March 11): Donald Trumps proposed budget will not make America great again. Besides another $8.6 billion for the wall, he is increasing the military budget by $34 billion. This is insane. The U.S. already spends more on the military than the next seven nations combined! Enough already! Then he proposes huge cuts in welfare, education, Medicaid and protecting the environment. Advertisement The U.S. has fallen from a leader in health care and education to ranking 27th among the nations, and the U.S. is now 17th among nations in the quality of life. One in eight Americans live in food insecurity. This is where we are failing to protect Americans. Bill Radatz San Diego A huge tax cut for the rich and record federal spending with yearly one trillion dollar deficits. Is this Mr. Trumps personal version of Republican fiscal responsibility? Or have Republicans been fooling us all along. Thomas Alden Borrego Springs I am shocked the U-T hasnt put a 72 point headline up about Trumps budget proposal to cut Medicare and other social programs to the tune of $1 trillion! We all know this happened because he has to cover his insane tax cut for the rich. Does anyone doubt this now? How about it U-T? Please put this on the front page: news that affects the vast majority of us! Thank you. Nadine Scott Oceanside Letters and commentary policy The U-T welcomes and encourages community dialogue on important public matters. Please visit this page for more details on our letters and commentaries policy. You can email letters@sduniontribune.com or leave a comment below. Follow @UTLetters on Twitter and UTOpinion on Facebook. Hundreds of people gathered last week at Chabad of Poway to hear Eva Schloss, Holocaust survivor and childhood friend/step-sister of Anne Frank, speak about her experiences. Schloss spent about 45 minutes sharing her experiences in the Holocaust, which included spending about a year in hiding and nine months in Auschwitz. She called her life a sad story, but with a happy ending. Though she shared her tragic history, Schlosss message was one of survival and hope. After I came back from Auschwitz, I wanted to talk, but people didnt want to know, Schloss said. They wanted to move on. She has spent her life speaking about her experiences in the Holocaust, she said, so that what happened to her will never happen again. (Is) history repeating itself? It must not, Schloss said. Educating young people about the Holocaust is important to prevent history from repeating itself, she said. You must speak up when you see injustice done, Schloss said. It is the only chance to change the world and make it a safer place for everybody. Born in Vienna, Austria as Eva Geiringer, Schloss lived there with her parents and older brother, Heinz, until she was 8 years old. She said they were a close family and had a very happy life. That changed in March 1938, when Hitler marched into Austria. Everything changed overnight, Schloss said. She spoke about how her brother was beaten by former friends and her being turned away from playing with a friend because of being Jewish. Schloss said her father told her, For Jewish people, life is going to change dramatically. Schloss and her family were able to escape Austria, first to Belgium and then to The Netherlands, where they settled in a small apartment in Amsterdam. It was there that Schloss met a new friend, Anne Frank. Schloss said she and Frank played together, despite Schloss being more interested in things like bike tricks and playing games with the boys than Frank. Schloss said Frank was a big chatterbox. The Netherlands was welcoming to the Jewish refugees, unlike Belgium, Schloss said, and their family lived happily until May 1940, when Germany invaded the country. Nothing happened at first, Schloss said of the time after Germany occupied The Netherlands. Then it was more a nuisance. These included things like Jewish people being unable to take public transportation, having to turn in their bicycles, having a curfew and not being allowed to mix with non-Jewish people. Schloss and her family living with increasing restrictions on the Jewish community until June 1942, when about 10,000 young Jewish men and women received call-up notices to report to be deported to Germany to work in factories. (The Jewish community) already knew about the camps in Germany and Poland, Schloss said, saying many families, including her own, decided to go into hiding, rather than send their children. By contacting the resistance movement in the country, the family was able to go into hiding, but forced to split up, as no family could house all four. Schloss went into hiding with her mother, while her older brother hid with her father. I was 13 and I realized it was an issue of life and death, Schloss said. Hiding was a treacherous affair for both the Jewish families in hiding and the Dutch families hiding them. The Germans really wanted to catch (the Jewish families in hiding), Schloss said. They did house searches and people had to let the Nazis in to search. While searching, Nazi soldiers stole anything of value from the homes, she said, and searches were always conducted at night. If the homeowners were found to be hiding people, (the homeowners) were sent to prison camps. Schloss said in two years of hiding, her family was moved seven times. It was in the last hiding place that her family was betrayed, on Schlosss 15th birthday. The family was betrayed by a Dutch nurse who was a double agent for the Nazis, she said. She and her mother were taken to the Nazi headquarters where she was interrogated, Schloss said. I was in shock. I realized this might be the end of my life, she said. When she started to cry, her interrogators beat her and threatened to kill her brother, she said. The next night, the family was taken to a holding camp, where they were put on a waiting list to be sent to Auschwitz. After being called up, the family was put on a train, 80 people to a car with two buckets. Schloss said it was tiny, with no room for air and unbearably hot. It was the last time we traveled together as a family, she said. My father apologized and said he could not look after us anymore. Schloss said she and her family knew what Auschwitz was, because of BBC broadcasts, which had talked about the death camps in Germany and Poland. We knew what was going to happen, she said. Can you imagine how scary that was? She survived the first round of selection (those who would live and those who would be sent immediately to death) because the coat and hat she wore made her look older than she was, Schloss said. I survived because of a lot of luck, Schloss said. Schloss said life in Auschwitz-Birkenau (the womens camp of Auschwitz) was terrible, working from early in the morning to late at night, with only a tiny amount of food and a shower and delousing once a week. One day, she said she thought maybe in October, Schloss, her mother and the other members of her mothers barrack were coming out of the shower to find Dr. Josef Mengele waiting there to do another selection. Schloss passed, while her mother, who had been giving some of her rations to her daughter, did not and was selected to be taken to the gas chambers. Though her mother survived, Schloss did not learn of this until being liberated from the camp and believed her mother to be dead. During the winter, Schloss said she saw her father several times, when he was able to sneak over and visit. She told him of her mothers death and said he told her to stay strong and they would be together again. I saw him three times, then never saw him anymore, Schloss said. Schloss was freed from Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945 by Russian troops and was reunited with her mother. After the Russians left, she walked seven hours to make it to the mens camp in search of her father and brother. Instead, she met Otto Frank, father of her friend Anne, who asked if she had seen his wife and daughters. Schloss said she never saw the Franks in Auschwitz-Birkenau because of how huge the camp was. Schloss and her mother spent the end of the war in Odessa, after being evacuated east by the Russians. They spent several months traveling back to Amsterdam through France once it ended, only to discover The Netherlands had been ravaged by the Nazis and there was no one who could help them, she said. They eventually received notifications from the Red Cross, officially saying Schlosss father and brother were dead. That was the last straw, Schloss said. I was very depressed. They were visited by Otto Frank, she said, who told them his wife and daughters were dead. My mother and I cried for him, because he had nothing left to live for, Schloss said. But a few days later, he came by again, saying he had something to show them, she said. This was Annes diary. He was very proud, he showed it to everyone, Schloss said. Otto Frank also helped Schloss move on after her experiences. I was so full of hatred and Otto had no hatred, she said. He told my mother to force me to go back to school and said I couldnt live with hate. Schloss said she did not know what to do with her life after her experiences, and her mother and Frank told her to become a good photographer. Frank gave her a good camera, she said, and arranged for her to study photography in London for a year in 1951. It was there that she met her future husband, a German Jewish refugee named Zvi Schloss. After six months, he proposed and she said she turned him down. She relented after being visited by Frank, who said he and her mother had fallen in love and would get married once Schloss did. Schloss and her husband were married for 62 years, she said, and had three daughters and five grandchildren. He died in 2016. She published several books, including Evas Story, which tells her own Holocaust story, and The Promise, about her brother Heinz. She has spent her life speaking about her familys Holocaust experiences at educational institutes and is the co-founder of the Anne Frank Trust UK. Email: news@pomeradonews.com Los Angeles, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/12/2019 -- Global Floor Paints market report is first of its kind research report that covers the overview, summary, market dynamics, competitive analysis, and leading player's various strategies to sustain in the global market. This report covers five top regions of the globe and countries within, which shows the status of regional development, consisting of market value, volume, size, and price data. Apart from this, the report also covers detail information about various clients which is the most significant element for the manufacturers. Request a Sample of this report: https://www.qyresearch.com/sample-form/form/986077/global-floor-paints-market The following manufacturers are covered: Sherwin-Williams PPG Industries Asian Paints RPM International Lubrizol Akzo Nobel Nippon Axalta Coating Systems BASF Roto Polymers 3M ArmorPoxy Regal Paints DluluxGroup Skshu Behr Paint Company Sika AG Segment by Regions North America Europe China Japan Checkout link: https://www.qyresearch.com/settlement/pre/d8345d7e059ce40f0f95233c56320338,0,1,Global%20Floor%20Paints%20Market%20Research%20and%20Forecast%202019 Regions Covered in the Global Floor Paints Market: The Middle East and Africa (GCC Countries and Egypt) North America (the United States, Mexico, and Canada) South America (Brazil etc.) Europe (Turkey, Germany, Russia UK, Italy, France, etc.) Asia-Pacific (Vietnam, China, Malaysia, Japan, Philippines, Korea, Thailand, India, Indonesia, and Australia) Ask our Expert if You Have a Query at: enquiry@qyresearch.com Strategic Points Covered in TOC: Chapter 1:Introduction, market driving force product scope, market risk, market overview, and market opportunities of the global Floor Paints market Chapter 2:Evaluating the leading manufacturers of the global Floor Paints market which consists of its revenue, sales, and price of the products Chapter 3:Displaying the competitive nature among key manufacturers, with market share, revenue, and sales Chapter 4:Presenting global Floor Paints market by regions, market share and with revenue and sales for the projected period Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9: To evaluate the market by segments, by countries and by manufacturers with revenue share and sales by key countries in these various regions Sellbyville, DE -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/12/2019 -- Asia Pacific is projected to be the fastest growing region in the Network Monitoring Market. The major factors attributed to the market growth include the rising disposable income and increase in the adoption of IoT & cloud computing technologies. Moreover, the rapid increase in cyberattacks across various industry verticals has enabled the enterprises residing in this region to adopt network monitoring solutions to ensure their business' safety and security along with providing enhanced customer service. Request for an in-depth table of contents for this report @ https://www.gminsights.com/request-toc/upcoming/3015 The advancement in technology has led to an enhanced adoption of cloud computing, connected devices, and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) due to which the traffic on the networks has increased tremendously, slowing down the overall network functioning speed. Hence, to reduce this stress on the network, enterprises are adopting network monitoring solutions, driving the market growth. The software assists the companies in keeping a check on the inward and outward flowing of data along with the source and destination of data traffic analyzing the reasons for congestion. The 1 & 10 Gbps bandwidth segment dominates the networking monitoring market and is adopted across a wide range of industries including government, healthcare, enterprises, telecoms, and related service providers. Due to the rising technological advent and enhanced data generation, companies now demand higher bandwidth due to which the growth of higher bandwidth is expected to grow over the forecast period. Make an Inquiry for purchasing this Report @ https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/3015 The enterprises, government agencies, telecom providers, and cloud service providers are the major application areas using network monitoring solutions. The enterprises hold the largest market share as they mainly rely on network monitoring for optimizing their network infrastructure. Furthermore, rapid digitalization, technological advancement, and rising consumer demands have propelled the enterprise networks to be made up of a number of interconnected networks. Hence, enterprises adopt these tools as they provide a secure, reliable, and efficient operating environment. The various technologies involved in network monitoring include ethernet, fiber optic, and InfiniBand. The Ethernet technology holds the highest market share as it assists the enterprises in keeping a control on everything affecting the network. It includes verifying the cuts in networks and monitoring the network performance by detecting and automatically reacting to threats in real-time. Furthermore, the rise in the number of data centers' demand for higher bandwidth is leading to the adoption of Ethernet-based network monitoring solutions as they deliver enhanced solutions with improved scalability and reduced latency. Browse Complete Report Summary @ https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/network-monitoring-market The major companies operating in the network monitoring market include NetScout, Ixia, Netgear, Juniper Networks, Big Switch Networks, Broadcom, Network Critical, CALIENT Technologies, and Motadata. These companies concentrate on strategic partnerships to expand their presence in a highly competitive market. About Global Market Insights: Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology. A team of astronomers from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, and the University of Colorado, Boulder, has found evidence for a fine haze of cosmic dust over Mercurys orbit, forming a ring some 9.3 million miles (15 million km) wide. Scientists never considered that a dust ring might exist along Mercurys orbit, which is maybe why its gone undetected until now, said lead author Dr. Guillermo Stenborg, from the Space Science Division at the Naval Research Laboratory. They thought that Mercury, unlike Earth or Venus, is too small and too close to the Sun to capture a ring. They expected that the solar wind and magnetic forces from the Sun would blow any excess dust at Mercurys orbit away. We found it by chance, he added. Ironically, Dr. Stenborg and his colleagues, Dr. Russell Howard and Dr. Johnathan Stauffer, stumbled upon the dust ring while searching for evidence of a dust-free region close to the Sun. At some distance from the Sun, according to a decades-old prediction, the stars mighty heat should vaporize dust, sweeping clean an entire stretch of space. Knowing where this boundary is can tell scientists about the composition of the dust itself, and hint at how planets formed in the young Solar System. So far, no evidence has been found of dust-free space, but thats partly because it would be difficult to detect from Earth. The researchers figured they could work around this problem by building a model based on pictures of interplanetary space from NASAs Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO). Ultimately, they wanted to test their new model in preparation for NASAs Parker Solar Probe, which is currently flying a highly elliptic orbit around the Sun. They wanted to apply their technique to the images Parker will send back to Earth and see how dust near the Sun behaves. Two kinds of light show up in STEREO images: light from the Suns corona and light reflected off all the dust floating through space. The sunlight reflected off this dust, which slowly orbits the Sun, is about 100 times brighter than coronal light. Were not really dust people. The dust close to the Sun just shows up in our observations, and generally, we have thrown it away, Dr. Howard said. Mercurys dust ring was a lucky find, a side discovery the astronomers made while they were working on their model. When they used their new technique on the STEREO images, they noticed a pattern of enhanced brightness along Mercurys orbit more dust, that is in the light theyd otherwise planned to discard. It wasnt an isolated thing, Dr. Howard said. All around the Sun, regardless of the spacecrafts position, we could see the same 5% increase in dust brightness, or density. That said something was there, and its something that extends all around the Sun. The discovery is described in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal. _____ Guillermo Stenborg et al. 2019. Evidence for a Circumsolar Dust Ring near Mercurys Orbit. ApJ 868, 74; doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/aae6cb For the 32nd consecutive year the London-based Greek Shipping Cooperation Committee (GSCC) statistical data gathered in conjunction with IHS Markit, on Greek-controlled ships over 1,000 gt records that on March 6 the Greek controlled fleet has decreased a shade in terms of number of vessels, deadweight and gross tonnage. According to the data, Greek interests controlled 4,017 vessels of various categories, of 339,549,357 dwt and 198,164,080 gt a decrease of 131 vessels, 2.376m dwt and 1.122m gt including 156 vessels on order from shipyards, of 17.22m dwt and 11.81m gt. Hear from leading Greek shipowner George Procopiou, chairman of Dynacom Tankers at the Sea Asia Parliamentary Debate in Singapore - "This house believes too much is expected of the shipping industry on environmental matters" The fleet under the Greek flag hoisted over its stern has decreased in terms of ships, dwt and gt and now comprises 671 ships, of 68,26m dwt and 39.98m gt. The Greek controlled fleet is registered under some 33 flags. In the 12 months, Liberia gained 16 ships and Marshall Islands 14. On the other hand, the data shows decreases have been recorded in the number of vessels flying the Cypriot, Panamanian and Maltese flags down 26, 18, and seven ships, respectively. The Greek flag, recorded a loss of 52 ships of 6.257m dwt, and 3.411m gt. Minor changes have been noted for all other flags. Overall, the GSCC data shows the Liberia and Marshall Island flags are neck and neck with 840 and 838 Greek owned ships, respectively, with 72.532m dwt representing 21,3% and Marshall Islands is just over 68m dwt, or 20% of the total of the Greek owned fleet. The Greek flag with 671 ships of 68.26m dwt, is no longer the largest in terms of dwt, as it represents 20.1% of the total Greek-owned dwt. Malta has 687 ships of 63.58m dwt, Panama 337 ships of 2.26m dwt, Cyprus 248 ships of 19.03m dwt, and the Bahamas with 222 ships of 18.97m dwt. Currently there are 36 oil tankers on order for Greek owners, 20 chemical/ product tankers, 39 liquefied gas tankers, 49 ore and bulk carriers and 12 container ships. Greek parent companies represent 26.9% of the world tanker fleet and 15.5% of the ore and bulk fleet. Overall, the Greek-owned fleet, stands at 7.2% of the world fleet in terms of ship numbers, 13.4% in gt terms and 15.9% in terms of dwt. The Greek-flag fleet as a percentage of the world fleet, in terms of ships, gt, and dwt is 1.2%, 2.7% and 3.2% respectively, however, for oil tankers it is 7.6%, 8% and 8.2% respectively. Oil tankers are an exception, with a slight increase both in dwt and ship numbers in relation to the world fleet in 2018. Liquefied gas carriers recorded an increase in dwt and a slight decrease in ships. Average age of the Greek fleet increased slightly over the 12 months but continues to be 2.5 years below the world average age, at 11.2 years compared to 13.7 years. In terms of gt and dwt, it is 9.6 and 9.5 years respectively, against 9.6 and 9.3 of the world fleet. Average age of the Greek-flag fleet recorded a slight increase, in ship age, gt and dwt, standing at 13.4, 9.7 and 9.6 years respectively against 12.2, 8.9 and 8.8 years in 2018. According to the data, six societies class the bulk of the Greek-controlled fleet. LR has 809 ships, down 27; ABS 781 ships, the same; ClassNK 709 ships down 37; BV: 679 ships, up two; DNV GL, 599 ships, down 56; and RINA 215 ships, up 10. However, ABS comes first in terms of dwt and gt. When it come to the Greek-flag fleet, 185 ships are to ABS class, down 17 ships; LR, 164 down 30; DNV GL, 108 down two; Rina, 77, down five; BV, steady at 64; and ClassNK and CCS, both steady at 17. The Talent and Economic Development Department of Michigan ( Ted ) is energizing a statewide dialogue about Michigans talent gap. Michigan will have more than 811,000 high-demand, high-wage career openings to fill through 2024 in fields like energy, information technology, computer science, healthcare, manufacturing, and other business and Professional Trades fields. This is the first installment in a six-part series sponsored by Ted. After building a successful career in healthcare administration in New York, Rachel Meyers recently made a big life change when she moved to Detroit to pursue a new business venture. As she worked to find a part-time job and acclimate to her new surroundings, Meyers knew she needed to talk with someone local who understood the community. I wanted a Michiganders take on which companies are doing innovative work and who the players are in Detroit, she said. So when she found Text a Detroiter, it seemed like a perfect fit. The new service from the Detroit Regional Chambers Lets Detroit program lets people submit questions about the area to local experts volunteer ambassadors who respond directly through a messaging platform. Rachel Meyers. After choosing some simple filters to help sort her questions to the best contacts, Meyers sent her queries and was connected to ambassador Zain Ismail. After some text exchanges, the two ended up talking by phone. Ismail eventually referred Meyers to one of his friends who works in her field, whom she also talked with. Once we were connected, we had really good conversation and then it was really like personal networking, Meyers said. By putting the focus on these personal connections, Lets Detroit organizers hope to make the city and region more attractive both to young talent who might look elsewhere for work and to newcomers interested in moving to the area. Although its just getting started, the new approach to local engagement is also gaining attention from other cities across the state and country looking to do the same. Lets get started The Talent and Economic Development (Ted) Department of Michigan is working in conjunction with the Detroit Regional Chamber on their talent retention and attraction website that will be available for other communities that want to build their own similar talent website. The Lets Detroit site, which launched in September 2018, provides job seekers with more career and lifestyle information specific to metro Detroit. The Lets Detroit campaign also brings with it the first-of-its-kind Text a Detroiter program. The effort is led by Sarah Craft, manager of the chambers Detroit Drives Degrees program. Craft says during two years of focus groups, surveys and conversations about keeping more college graduates in the area after graduation, the message was consistent: The chamber shouldnt be telling people what to do or how to get connected. Detroiters should. What weve heard over and over again in our research is, You cant sell Detroit; you cant sell our region, Craft said. Sarah Craft. Working with existing organizations like Detroit Young Professionals, Black Young Professionals of Detroit and the Detroit Experience Factory, the chamber has built a base network of 120 ambassadors and is looking to add more as it rolls out a marketing push in spring and summer 2019. Using technology similar to Uber or Lyft, the platform filters questions by type to relevant ambassadors who respond on a first-come, first-served basis. Once an ambassador responds, the individual owns the question, so users dont get bombarded with multiple responses. Although Craft says the service is still very much in a pilot phase, shes already had interest from organizations around the state, as well as Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Denver, that want to know more and possibly adopt the same approach. One potential adopter is Grand Rapids Hello West Michigan. Founded in 2007 by a group of companies looking to solve the regions local talent shortage, Hello West Michigan was officially launched in 2010 as a website with more than 1,000 links to local resources for people looking to relocate to the area. At this point the site is well-established, with more than 40,000 annual visitors. But Executive Director Rachel Bartels says the goal is not only getting people interested in the region, but also keeping them there once they decide to relocate. Bartels said going beyond marketing to help candidates and hires make lasting connections to their new community is key. Every person is unique, and every person has that one thing they need from the community to feel like theyre being engaged, she said. Rachel Bartels. She sees a texting ambassador program like Text a Detroiter as one more way to help make that connection in West Michigan. Hello West Michigan also offers a weekly resume pack program that lets users submit their materials for distribution to partner companies, free of charge. The organization also recently launched a Candidate Concierge program that lets users talk with volunteers from those companies about what they are looking for in a job. Ask me anything As president emeritus and board chair of Detroit Young Professionals, texting ambassador Whitney Griffin helped with the research behind Lets Detroit and in getting the word out about it. A self-described military brat whose family returned to the Detroit suburbs from abroad when she was in middle school, Griffin says she wanted to stay close to family while her classmates were eager to leave after graduation. While attending Wayne State University, she fell in love with Detroit, and shes since seen many of her peers return and get involved in the citys rebirth. Whitney Griffin. With so much new development and focus on attracting new talent, Griffin says Lets Detroit helps plug people into whats already happening on a more personal level. Its a lot harder to leave a place once youve built your life there and met friends who are genuine and people you can do the things you like to do with, Griffin said. I think this is a way to help strengthen those bonds and help people really put down roots. Griffin has seen questions ranging from what new restaurants to try to where to see live jazz. But people are also looking for places to volunteer at and organizations to get involved with ways to build a life here. For Griffin, thats what its all about. It was always my goal to help build this connected Detroit, and one thats representative of people my age, because I know we have lot to offer the city, she said. For me, its basically about making Detroit the city that we all know it can be. Ismail says volunteering with Lets Detroit was a natural extension of his personality. It was really exciting to me, because one of my personal passions is networking and bringing people together, he said. Zain Ismail. Ismail works for Detroits Henry Ford Health System and spends a lot of his free time in the city. Although he was invited on as an ambassador for his healthcare background, Ismail says the text conversations hes had often turn to other topics, including the local arts and nonprofit scenes. People have heard rumors that the city is turning around, so theyre really interested in hearing an insiders perspective on whats going on where are all the cool spots to hang out, what are cool places to live, and things like that, he said. Hes fielded only a handful of questions so far, but Ismail would like to see Lets Detroit become the go-to source for information on getting involved in the city. Id love to see my phone blowing up every day with inquiries or emails or phone calls from people wanting to understand whats going on and connect, he said. Meyers says just having conversations with Ismail has been helpful, and she enjoys the ambassador programs open, creative approach to networking. I do love Detroit, she said. I love how its attempting to be as open and welcoming to newcomers as it can be. Eric Gallippo is an Ypsilanti-based freelance writer. Rachel Bartels photo by Adam Bird. All other photos by Nick Hagen. Issue Media Groups 12 publications in Michigan including Metromode have become members of the Michigan Press Association, more than doubling the number of online-only news organizations accepted into the 150-year-old organization. We are happy to welcome Issue Media and all of their publications as news media members of the Michigan Press Association. They are a good example of the diversity of our membership, says James Tarrant, MPA executive director. The MPA board approved Issue Media Group publications membership last month. Issue Media Group launched in 2005 with its flagship Detroit publication, Model D, with a focus on filling the gaps in community journalism and local storytelling being left as traditional news outlets reduced their reporting staffs. We are happy to earn this recognition from our peers at the Michigan Press Association, says Paul Schutt, co-owner of Issue Media Group. Our journalists report on the very fabric of our communities. This is wonderful validation of the work we have done, and continue to do every day, throughout Michigan. Schutt, a tech business developer, and co-owner Brian Boyle, digital content strategist, developed the company into a media organization with 12 publications in Michigan and six others nationwide. Each operates its own news website and produces a weekly email magazine. Issue Media Group launched Metromode in 2007 after being invited into the community by key partners. In recent years, Metromode launched On the Ground program focusing on community innovation in several Metro Detroit communities including Pontiac, Dearborn, Farmington, and Sterling Heights. Issue Media Group continues to grow, adding four new markets in the last two years. We see a growing need in communities large and small throughout the country to ensure important community stories continue to be told. We believe storytelling is foundational to a community's identity and to increasing resident voice and community attachment to place, Boyle says. Issue Media Group publications focus on solutions journalism with an eye specifically toward community growth, development, and innovation. Issue Media Group employs more than 120 journalists nationwide and accumulated nearly 3.8 million page views in 2018. Issue Media Group publications also include Ann Arbor Concentrate, Bay City Route, suburban Detroit Metromode, Detroit's Model D, Flintside, Grand Rapids Rapid Growth, Lansing Capital Gains, Midland Catalyst, Mt. Pleasant Epicenter, Port Huron The Keel, and Second Wave Media statewide, as well as Southwest Michigan's Second Wave. With more than 330 members statewide, the addition of Issue Media Groups 12 Michigan-based magazines brings the total number of online-only news members to 21, according to MPA. Like all Issue Media Group publications, Southwest Michigan's Second Wave is funded through a combination of underwriting contracts and grants. It is wholly editorially independent. Other online-only news organizations with membership in the MPA include Bridge Magazine, Michigan Advance, Michigan Capitol Confidential, Chalkbeat, Flint Beat, Great Lakes Beacon, The Livingston Post, Michigan Information and Research Services Inc. (MIRS), and Oakland County 115, according to MPA. On Wednesday, February 27, about a hundred locals gathered in the Civic Theaters upstairs auditorium to listen to, and take part in, a panel discussion called The Future of Downtown Farmington: An Evening with Metromode. Moderated by DDA President Todd Craft, the panel consisted of Farmington Mayor Steven Schneemann; DDA Executive Director Kate Knight; Issue Media Group Co-CEO Brian Boyle; and Michigan Municipal League Executive Director/CEO Dan Gilmartin. The program kicked off with a question about the role community engagement plays in the economic development of downtown. Many of you know that this city, this community, is driven by volunteers, said Schneemann. Looking around the room, Im seeing people whove been really engaged in the community, and they usually started by volunteering for something, by being downtown, by being out in the community and seeing something they want to get connected to. And the next thing you know, theyre interested in serving in a greater capacity on a planning commission. This also starts to get people familiar with the place enough that they start to say, Hey, this is a place to put down some roots. This is a place where I can start to invest, or I can open a business in. Boyle, whod just returned from the Knight Media Forum in Miami, noted that one big topic of conversation involved tracking the relationship between civic attachment and economic development and understanding the way the media plays a key role in that. The 24/7 news business model, which is essentially driven by clicks, is now, as a business paradigm, incentivized to report on things that disconnect people from place, said Boyle. There has been a lot of talk about the importance of these types of community conversations as infrastructure to continue to knit the community together and create more civic connectivity at a time when media implodes all around us. Participants gather in Farmington's civic theater to discuss the future of the city's downtown. Gilmartin added, One of the things we find with downtowns like Farmington is, if youre out on the side of the road, standing in front of a WalMart, looking across the street at a Costco, you could be anywhere in the world. But if youre at the Civic Theatre this is a unique place with a unique history, a unique feel, and a culture, and celebrating that and hanging on to that is the secret sauce. The way you know downtown like this is so important is because folks who dont have it around the state, and around the country, are trying to build it. And theyre finding it very difficult. So its about making sure (downtown Farmington) is a unique experience for people, whether they live here and theyre walking their dog down the street or theyre coming from far away. Knight noted that at recent public meetings, city officials asked attendees where theyd like to see planning efforts focused, and the answer, pretty consistently, was downtown. They indicated that they felt a personal identity with the downtown, said Knight. Its part of who you are if youre from Farmington. And we serve as the downtown for many of our surrounding areas who arent as lucky to have a historic core. But we are the heart. Were the heartbeat. Were the center of the community. Another question raised involved the economic benefits of having a walkable downtown. Walkability is one of the tenets of the 21st-century community, said Gilmartin. Folks are looking for that. Since World War II, weve built drivable suburban type communities, almost exclusively. But what folks are looking to buy right now is a little bit different. Theres a real premium on walkability. If the 1950 version of all of you were sitting here in this town, you almost had to make a decision to be a business-friendly community or a quality of life community. Today, the economic argument and the quality of life argument are one. Panel at Farmington Civic Theater. Photo by David Lewinski. At one point during the program, Knight revealed that Catherine Jewell, who owns Blue Hat Coffee and Gallery in Coldwater, Michigan, is now looking to move the independent cafe into the first floor of Farmingtons Masonic Hall. This is what people are looking for, said Gilmartin. Theyre getting away from the sameness weve been building, and theyre looking for unique opportunities. The Jewells it would have been much easier to go to a strip mall on Haggerty, right? They could have signed a lease and started in there in 30 days. But they didnt want to be there, and it doesnt work there. But Gilmartin was also quick to raise another issue critical to downtown Farmingtons future people need a place to live. Theres not a ton of housing here in downtown, said Gilmartin. I think the best communities are those where you can live as a child, or as a young person, raise a family, and grow old. When you see a place where its great to do that, you know theyre hitting it out of the park. I have two young sons, and my wife and I shopped for the big backyard and the finished basement. I realized that it was my eighth housing choice as an adult, and well probably downsize once, maybe twice, so maybe, if things go well, Ill have made ten housing choices as a person, and one would have been based on children. One out of ten. Weve got to figure out how we respond to everybody, and what types of amenities everyone is looking for. Thats one of the reasons why having a strong DDA thats out there bird-dogging whats happening in the downtown area, and thinking holistically rather than parcel by parcel, is so important to communities like this. Schneemann also addressed the shortage of downtown housing options. Its not just the DDA or the citys elected officials that want to see increased residential in downtown, said Schneemann. Thats been something thats been part of the master planning efforts, and that our own residents have told us they would like to see. We do have some incremental growth in that regard, but were on the cusp of a much more substantial series of projects that are going to help grow and densify the downtown. Im sure there are going to be growing pains that go along with that, but as people say, theyre good problems to have. Ironically, the localized micro-economy of Farmingtons downtown including the farmers market, restaurants, specialty food shops, etc. is the key to competing in the global marketplace, according to Gilmartin. To quote Bo Schembechler, you dont stay the same, said Gilmartin. You either get better or you get worse, because if youre not getting better, your opponents are getting better, so by definition, youre getting worse. And I see that in downtowns all the time. Id implore you to look forward, not backward. Panel at Farmington Civic Theater. Photo by David Lewinski. Though the most recent significant housing development proposal which envisioned three four-story buildings with a total of 115 apartments, and 115 parking spaces for the Maxfield Training Center lot was put on hoild in 2018, thats a prime opportunity for redevelopment for residential, and every master plan and planning device that Ive seen, going back decades, has called for that to be some sort of high-density residential development, said Schneemann. But there are other pockets in and around downtown. There are now developers that are kicking the tires, that I can say, in different parts of the downtown, with different properties. So I would suggest that in the next couple of years, were going to start to see some projects where there will be a lot of additional housing opportunities downtown. The evenings program concluded with a few questions from the crowd, including one about developing a philosophical vision for the towns future. I think we all agree that a huge strength for us is our diversity, said Knight. We have marvelous socioeconomic and ethnic diversity in Farmington, and thats to be celebrated. We have companies come and look at us, and crunch our data, and look at our demographics, and I think theyre blown away by the range of people we have here, and the different experiences they bring, and the range of housing costs within a one-to-five mile radius. Weve got strong schools, so weve got a lot to offer for people who are looking to have an opportunity at all different housing price points. While discussing the growing pains and objectives of nearby communities, the slogan Dont Royal Oak my Ferndale got a mention, prompting Mayor Schneemann to say, Ive been involved with groups whove been talking about this over the last 15 years in Farmington, and what I can tell you is, there seems to be a consensus that we dont want to Ferndale-Royal Oak-Birmingham-Northville our Farmington. We recognize that we have a unique identity, and thats what were trying to build on. Are we a party place? Are we a family place? Are we a place for young people? Can we age in place here? And the answer has been yes. I talked about eclecticism earlier, and I think thats really a part of that eclectic mix that we have because we really are all those things in one big old bundle. Gilmartin closed out the nights comments by advocating for Farmington to develop an economic position statement. So many of the Main Street communities across the country and the county, they all have mission statements, they all have vision statements, said Gilmartin. You can almost close your eyes and say exactly what the vision statements are going to say. But they never really carve out their economic position statements, and then go back to that and align their program to work around those economic position statements whether its their events, or whether its their preservation ethic, whatever it is, to reinforce that. One of the keys to downtowns is that they have to keep evolving and changing and paying attention to the market while being true to themselves, and keeping their authenticity intact. Press Release March 13, 2019 ANGARA ASKS CONGRESS, GOV'T REGULATORS TO PROBE WATER SHORTAGE Reelectionist Senator Sonny Angara wants government regulators and Congress to look into the cause of the water shortage affecting parts of Metro Manila and Rizal province even as he called for long-term solutions to meet the country's growing water demand. This as Angara expressed concern over the ongoing water service interruptions across the concession area of Manila Water, causing inconvenience to many businesses and residents. "It's very concerning," Angara said. "We have to ask a certain number of questions because we get conflicting reports. Is it a problem of service delivery?" Manila Water, which covers the east zone of Metro Manila and Rizal province, has advised its customers to expect more water interruptions in the following days due to limited water supply as El Nino begins to set in the country. Angara noted that while Manila Water had been suffering supply woes, its west zone counterpart Maynilad is not. "One service provider is saying there is a problem, the other says none. That is something, I think, the regulators should investigate," he said. Angara said Congress should also look into the water shortage problem with the end view of coming up with long-term solutions to ensure adequate water supplies amid the country's rapidly rising population and continued economic development. "With the growing population and we all have these economic conditions, there will be a growing demand in the Greater Manila Area," Angara said. He added: "You really have to look at your supply many years down the road. That is something Congress can look into." At the same time, Angara underscored the need for structural reforms in the water sector as he noted that some 30 agencies of the government are currently involved in water and sanitation policy, among them the National Water Resources Board, the Local Water Utilities Administration and the Metropolitan Water Sewerage System. The current setup, he said, is inefficient with jurisdictions overlapping one another. "I think we really need a high level of discussion whether our underlying philosophies are valid and whether these agencies are serving the people well," Angara said. Hong Kong: CE meets French Assembly members Chief Executive Carrie Lam today met the National Assembly of Frances France-China Friendship Group President Buon Huong Tan, National Assembly Vice Presidents Carole Bureau-Bonnard and Hugues Renson, and three other assembly members at Government House. Mrs Lam welcomed their visit to Hong Kong to learn about the city's latest developments after she invited them during her trip to France last June. Describing her visit to France last year as a great success, Mrs Lam said she called on the French Prime Minister, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and people from different sectors to highlight Hong Kong's advantages and development opportunities, thus laying the foundation for further collaboration between Hong Kong and France. She believed the visits and exchanges made in Hong Kong by members of the National Assembly would help strengthen ties between the two places and offer co-operation in further areas. Noting one of the major events in her trip to France last year was attending the joint promotion seminar on the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Mrs Lam said she was pleased to learn that people from the French political and business sectors had a strong interest in this key national development strategy. She said Hong Kong will play a vital role, especially in leveraging its advantages to establish an international innovation and technology hub in the bay area. Adding that France has some of the world's top universities and a solid foundation in scientific research, Mrs Lam said she hopes Hong Kong will continue to strengthen co-operation with France in I&T to jointly seize the huge opportunities presented by the bay area development. She also said the city is striving to strengthen its role as a cultural hub and she looks forward to enhancing co-operation in culture and arts with France. Secretary for Commerce & Economic Development Edward Yau and Consul General of France in Hong Kong & Macau Alexandre Giorgini also attended the meeting. This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. ANGARA SAYS GOV'T CRITICS DESERVE PROTECTION Reelectionist Senator Sonny Angara said the Philippine National Police should make it a priority to protect government critics, including the Catholic priests who came forward to reveal that they had been receiving death threats after criticizing President Duterte's war on drugs. "If anyone should be protected, it should be the critics of the government. This is to show that we are a democracy and we value freedom of speech and expression," Angara said in an interview with CNN Philippines. Angara was referring to Catholic priests Albert Alejo, Flavie Villanueva and Robert Reyes, who jointly revealed to the public that they had been receiving threatening SMS messages from still unidentified senders. Two weeks ago, Caloocan Bishop Pablo Virgilio David, one of the clergymen most critical of Duterte's drug war, also confirmed receiving similar threats. Angara said the death threats against the priests were a "cause for concern." During a press conference, the three priests suggested that Duterte could be behind the death threats directed at them. To settle their differences, Angara is proposing a dialogue between the Church and the government. "I think dialogue will always be welcome. It's not really good to see our top institutions engaging in mudslinging," Angara said. "That has been done before by other presidents, so why not?" Press Release March 13, 2019 Angara says Jaafar 'A Voice of Reason, A Voice for Peace' Reelectionist Senator Sonny Angara expressed deep sorrow over the passing of Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) first vice chair and Bangsamoro Transition Commission (BTC) chair Ghazali Jaafar, whom the lawmaker said was "determined to get the best deal for his constituents." The 75-year-old Jaafar reportedly died at around 1 a.m. on Wednesday, three days after confinement in Metro Davao Medical and Research Center in Davao City due to heart problems. "He was a voice of reason and a voice for peace and will surely be missed," Angara said. Angara had a chance to work with Jaafar when the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL), which paved the way for the establishment of the new Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) replacing the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), was still being deliberated in Congress. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Local Government, Angara co-sponsored the BOL under Republic Act 11054, which was overwhelmingly ratified by the Bangsamoro people during a two-part plebiscite held earlier this year. Angara described Jaafar as "one of the chief architects of the new BARMM and the BOL" since he headed the BTC as one of the pillars of MILF. "He (Jaafar) was highly determined to get the best deal for his constituents, but was also willing to be flexible on some points in order to come up with a new organic law for Muslim Mindanao," the lawmaker said. Jaafar was among the 76 members of the Bangsamoro Transition Authority (BTA) who took their oath of office in Malacanang last month. BTA will serve as the government of the BARMM from 2019 until the elections in 2022. The BARMM is envisioned as a political entity that would realize the aspirations of the Bangsamoro people for genuine self-determination under a ministerial form of government and ensure autonomy far more than what the ARMM provided. It is seen as a solution to the problems that the ARMM failed to address, such as poverty and unstable peace and order situation. Press Release March 13, 2019 Dispatch from Crame No. 484: Sen. Leila M. de Lima's Statement on Death Threats Against Priests 3/13/19 It's as clear as day: Duterte is accountable for the death threats currently terrorizing our priests. With his vitriolic attacks against the Church and its clergy, no amount of twisted explanation nor buck passing from the clown spokesperson Panelo could excuse the "resident evil" in Malacanang. Ngayon lang po tayo nakakita ng Presidente na tahasan ang ginagawang pag-atake sa relihiyong Katoliko, pambabastos ng mga pari, at diretsahang inuutusan ang kanyang mga taga-sunod na takutin, saktan at patayin ang mga alagad ng simbahan. Kung hindi po "evil" ang tawag dito, ano po kaya? Our religious leaders, like the human rights defenders, earned the ire of Duterte simply because they are standing up for the very basic Christian tenet of upholding the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person. Duterte cannot allow this for this runs counter to his centerpiece strategy of governance - his murderous War on Drugs. However, Duterte can no longer deny the declining appeal of his drug war which only "succeeded" in killing at least 27,000 poor and hapless Filipinos, while syndicates continue to smuggle and trade billions worth of illegal drugs. He himself admitted that from 3 to 4 million, the number of drug addicts shot up to 7 to 8 million. Every word unmasking Duterte's fake war, especially coming from the pulpit, is a blow to his already shattered ego and reminds him that he is an utter failure and a criminal against humanity. Kaya suportahan po natin ang ating mga kaparian sa pamamagitan ng maingay at matapang na pagtutol sa mga kasamaan ng administrasyong ito lalung-lalo na itong polisiya ng pagpatay at malawakang panghuhuli at pagkulong na labag sa proseso ng batas. In more than two years in office, Duterte has already caused so much pain, agony and infamy. And now, he is undermining the very foundation of our beliefs. Dare touch the priests and Duterte will know how the blood of martyrs can ignite the flame in the hearts of the faithful and the Filipino people. Press Release March 13, 2019 De Lima deplores barbaric killing of student in Cebu Opposition Senator Leila M. de Lima has condemned in the strongest sense the barbaric killing of a 16-year-old student whose face was skinned to the bone by three still-unidentified suspects in Lapu Lapu City, Cebu last March 11. De Lima, a known human rights defender, said this brutal crime calls for thorough and immediate investigation by police authorities not only to give justice to the victim but also to prevent a repeat of the same offense. "This is killing in one of its worst forms. Appalling and shocking! Walang konsensya ang gumawa ng ganitong karumal-dumal at kalunos-lunos na krimen. Wala silang respeto sa buhay, walang pakundangan sa dignidad ng tao! Gawa ng demonyo!," she said in a statement from detention. "Our police authorities should not rest while her killers remain scot-free. Kung hindi natin seseryosohin ang pagresolba sa kasong tulad nito, mauulit at mauulit lang ang pagpaslang sa mga batang kagaya ni Cristine - na pinagkaitang mabuhay at makasama pa ang mga mahal nila sa buhay," she added. Based on news accounts, the victim, a 16-year-old student of Datag Maribago High School identified as Cristine Lee Salawan, was found dead in Bgy. Bankal, Lapu-Lapu City in the morning of March 11. She was found naked from the waist down with her face skinned to the bone. While Salawan's face had reportedly been disfigured, her mother recognized her through the red shirt she was wearing a day before she went missing last March 10. Salawan was last seen after serving as lector during the afternoon Sunday Mass at Sacred Heart Church, Pajac, Lapu-Lapu City. Cebu City police director Senior Supt. Limuel Obon confirmed that a lone witness named Donna (not her real name) claimed that she saw three men rape Salawan before killing her, which supported the police's initial finding that the victim was raped. The lady Senator from Bicol said the gruesome death of Salawan should remind Mr. Duterte that his public and blatant encouragement of killings place the Filipino people's lives in great peril. "Ilang inosenteng buhay pa ba ang masasayang bago matauhan si Mr. Duterte na kailangan na niyang tigilan ang paghihikayat at pagpapauso sa mga patayan sa ating bayan?" she asked. "This heartless regime has given people the license to kill, and this madness has to stop now. Unfortunately, life has become so cheap in our country that some people do not have qualms anymore to threaten and harm others," she added. Amid the incessant killings in the country, De Lima noted that it has now become "extremely urgent" for the Filipino public to collectively express their outrage over the recent killings in the country and tirelessly demand for accountability. "As we remember Cristine and all the other victims of killings under this regime, let us also remember the need to stand up and protect human rights and morality in our nation," she said. Despite her continued unjust detention over false and bizarre drug charges, De Lima has unfailingly called out the murderous policies of the Duterte administration that resulted in the death of innocent children and students, among others. Senator Ejercito prods BFP to make sure hospitals have water REELECTIONIST Senator JV Ejercito, chairman of the Senate health committee, on Wednesday prodded the Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) to ensure that hospitals have steady and sufficient water supply amid forced rationing in many parts of Metro Manila because of limited and diminishing supply. In a statement, Ejercito called on the BFP to give extra attention to hospitals for water rations, while attending to the needs of residents in communities now experiencing water shortage. "Hospitals and medical facilities can't afford to run out of water because the lives of the patients would be put in extreme danger. That's why I am calling on the BFP to ensure steady water supply in these facilities kasi kailangang-kailangan ang tubig para sa mga pasyente," he said. He said the BPF should closely coordinate with city and municipal governments to closely monitor the situation in hospitals. "There should be fire trucks on standby for hospitals. I am also calling for a strong cooperation between the BFP and local government units and jointly implement measures that would ensure that hospitals and medical facilities located in areas affected by water shortage would have enough water supply," Ejercito said. Senator Ejercito saddened by Jaafar's death REELECTIONIST Senator JV Ejercito paid tribute to Bangsamoro Transition Commission Chairman (BTC) Ghazali Jaafar who passed away. On Wednesday, Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) Chairman Al Haj Murad Ebrahim announced Jaafar's death in Davao City due to illness. "This is sad news. My deepest sympathies to Vice Chair Ghazali Jaafar whom I have talked to a lot during BOL deliberations," Ejercito said in a statement. Ejercito said Jaafar is considered as "one of the biggest pillars" in the fight for Moro independence and Mindanao peace, noting the Muslim leader's contributions in public service and involvement in programs to attain lasting peace. The senator said he had several discussions with Jaafar concerning the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL), which provides the establishment of an autonomous political entity known as the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region. "He (Jaafar), together with Chair (AL Haj) Murad, welcomed me in Camp Darapanan which I will never forget. Again, my deepest sympathies on his passing," Ejercito said. He said that while the death of Jaafar is sad, "I am sure that he died with a sense of fulfillment as he witnessed the signing and ratification of the Organic Law." Press Release March 13, 2019 Gordon orders deployment of 6 PRC water tankers to Rizal Hospital Senator Richard J. Gordon, chairman of the Philippine Red Cross, has ordered the deployment of six of the humanitarian organization's water tankers to the Rizal Medical Center to help ensure an available supply of potable water in the 300-bed hospital. "At the request of Health Sec. Duque, we provided water tankers at Rizal Medical Center. This should help the patients who are vulnerable due to lack of potable and clean water in the hospital. This, like our responses to the measles outbreak and fire incidents, is part of the humanitarian services that the Philippine Red Cross delivers. And we will continue to ensure that hospitals will have sufficient water supply," he said. The PRC, on Tuesday, deployed four units of 10,000-liter and two units of 12,000-liter water tankers. As of 8:30 pm, it has already provided 118,000 liters of water and filled up the hospital's 38,000 gallon water tank. Gordon assured that the PRC will help provide clean and potable water to the thousands of families affected by the water shortage in Metro Manila but hospitals must be prioritized. The water levels in the major dams supplying water to Metro Manila and nearby areas have dropped to below normal high water levels due to the effects of the El Nino phenomenon. Less rainfall is expected in the coming months. Manila Water, the concessionaire for the east zone, has been implementing water interruptions in several areas to ensure that the water supply can last until June. It covers the cities of Mandaluyong, Pasig, San Juan, Taguig, and Marikina; the municipality of Pateros; parts of Makati, Manila, and Quezon City; and the towns of Angono, Baras, Binangonan, Cainta, Cardona, Jalajala, Morong, Pililia, Rodriguez, Tanay, Taytay, Teresa, San Mateo and Antipolo in the province of Rizal. Statement of Sen. Francis Pangilinan, President of the Liberal Party, on the passing away of Ghazali Jaafar, 1st Vice Chair of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front May Ghazali Jaafar's death inspire enhanced peace efforts in Mindanao: Sen. Kiko Our deepest condolences to the family and comrades of Ghazali Jaafar, the warrior who died a peacemaker. He recognized that peace is not simply the absence of war. He acknowledged that peace is about how people lived their every day in pursuit of the best for the community and the future. He knew that peace in Mindanao means progress for the entire country. And he lived knowing that peace is not only an outcome, but also a process that needed the participation of as many stakeholders as possible, including not only of the warriors on both sides or of the Bangsamoro people, but also of regular folk and indigenous and settler communities. From being first chair of the MILF peace panel who signed the general cessation of hostilities between government and the MILF in Cagayan de Oro City in July 1997 to becoming a newly-appointed member of the Bangsamoro Transition Authority (BTA) and nominated Speaker of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) just last month, Ghazali Jaafar knew that peace is a worthy life-long goal. May his death inspire enhanced peace efforts in the island of Mindanao, that would mean better lives for all, especially Filipino children. Inna ilillah wa inna ilaihi rajiun! Press Release March 13, 2019 Congress ratifies bill providing free wi-fi, clean restrooms in transport terminals Congress has ratified a measure mandating transport terminals to improve their facilities through the provision of free internet services and clean sanitary facilities. Senate Bill 1749, or an "Act to Improve Land Transportation Terminals, Stations, Stops, Rest Areas and Roll-On/Roll-Off Terminals," was passed by both Houses of Congress, with the House of Representatives adopting the Senate version. Senate Secretary Myra Marie D. Villarica wrote a letter, dated February 20, 2019, transmitting nine enrolled copies of the bill for the signature of Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Acting Secretary General of the House of Representatives Dante Roberto P. Maling. Sen. Grace Poe, chair of the Senate Committee on Public Services and principal author of the measure, expressed hope the bill would be transmitted soon to Malacanang for the President's signature. The bill mandates that transportation and roll-on/roll-off terminals nationwide should have clean restroom facilities and free internet access. The terminals must also have separate lactating stations for breastfeeding mothers. "An efficient and functional inter-province transport system is essential to ensuring that Filipinos travel safely. In particular, rest stops are indispensable for those travelling by land, as they provide a brief 'pit stop' for travellers and bus drivers," Poe said. "This is especially important for Filipinos who travel for more than eight hours," she added. She said terminal toilet experience "is one aspect that travellers remember, whether the experience is impressive or horrible. Terminals and toilets are crucial to tourism," she said. "Toilet issues are not petty matters, but important in satisfying the public's need for healthy living," she added. The measure also prohibits terminal operators from collecting fees from passengers for the use of restrooms. "The concerned passenger must show paid bus ticket in order to avail of the free use of sanitary facilities," the mesaure stated. Aside from the free use of the clean toilets, the bill also mandates the Department of Information and Communications Technology, in coordination with the Department of Transportation and other concerned agencies to provide free internet access in the terminals. While waiting for their trip, Poe said that passengers while away the time checking their social media accounts or attending to their work remotely, which requires the use free internet, Wi-Fi or broadband. The owner, operator, or administrator of land transport terminals, stations, stops, rest areas and RORO terminals who does not comply with the standards for sanitary facilities will be fined in the amount of P5,000 each day of violation and another P5,000 each day who collect fees from the passengers for the use of sanitary facilities. Another P5,000 each day of violation will also be imposed to operators or owners as penalty for their failure to provide breastfeeding stations. Press Release March 13, 2019 Guaranteed jobs for tech-voc scholars seen as Villanueva's Tulong Trabaho bill signed into law Senator Joel Villanueva on Tuesday hailed the signing of "Tulong Trabaho" law which seeks to provide free access to Technical-Vocational Education and Training (TVET) programs. The law sets up a fund that finances scholarships of workers to training programs as needed by the industry, explained Villanueva, principal author and sponsor of Republic Act No. 11230 or An Act Instituting a Philippine Labor Force Competencies Competitiveness Program and Free Access to Technical-Vocational Education and Training (TVET), and Appropriating Funds Therefor. "Dahil sa mekanismo na nakalatag sa batas, garantisado po ang trabaho dahil paglalaanan ng pondo ang mga tech-voc programs na akma sa pangangailangan ng ating mga Industriya. Itataguyod nito ang isang market-driven na sistema sa paglaan ng scholarship funds, kaya makakatiyak tayo na may trabahong mag-aantay sa ating mga TVET scholars," Villanueva said in a statement. "We thank the President and our colleagues in Congress for supporting our advocacy of providing better access to tech-voc training," he continued. "We believe in the quality of work that Filipinos do, regardless of the industry they are in. We will continue to create opportunities for them to train and excel." "Naniniwala tayo na malaki ang maitutulong ng Tulong-Trabaho Act na i-angat ang skills ng ating mga manggagawa kaya nagagalak po tayo at naisa-batas na ang panukalang ito," he said. The law institutes the Philippine Labor Force Competencies Competitiveness Program that assesses the prevailing requirement of industries, with the help of the Department of Labor and Employment, which generates studies such as Labor Market Intelligence Reports, among others. The law also establishes a Tulong Trabaho Fund, which provides qualified recipients free access to TVET selected training programs (STPs) to be determined by the TESDA Board, which oversees the fund. Villanueva, chair of the Committee on Labor, Employment, and Human Resources Development, reiterated the value of tech-voc education for Filipino workers, which he had seen first-hand while at the helm of TESDA. "Tech-voc has proven to be a viable option for Filipinos, especially for those who want immediate employment. In fact, seven out of 10 tech-voc graduates easily find decent jobs due to the high demand of skilled workers here and abroad," the senator pointed out. Among those qualified to avail of assistance from the Tulong Trabaho Fund are: (a) any individual at least fifteen (15) years of age who are not employed, not in education and not in training (NEET), and (b) employed workers, who intend to develop and expand their current skills and training. The industry boards or bodies seeking funding for STPs shall submit a list of applicants who have requested assistance from the Tulong-Trabaho Fund to the TESDA Regional Directors. The TESDA Regional Directors shall then assess the recipients and submit a list of qualified recipients to the TESDA Director General for approval. "With the signing of Tulong Trabaho Law, we look forward to TESDA producing more tech-voc graduates and become skilled workers that our labor market needs. The next step here is to craft the implementing rules and regulations of the law so that the programs gets a head start," Villanueva said. Press Release March 13, 2019 Statement of Senator Juan Miguel F. Zubiri on the death of BTC Chairman Ghazali Jaafar The Senate joins the family of BTC Chairman Ghazali Jaafar in hailing his life of courage, honor, and nobility. He dedicated his strength, intelligence, and soul to freeing the Bangsamoro people from the strife that history has bestowed on Mindanao. The country owes much of the peace embracing Mindanao and the Muslim communities nationwide to Chairman Jaafar. He consistently extended his hand of conciliation and brotherhood to fellow Muslims--more so, to fellow Filipinos during the course of the Bangsamoro struggle. His efforts contributed greatly to achieving unity among factions of fellow Muslim brothers. He has earned the admiration and respect of allies and adversaries because he has always stood for his dream of bringing forth a Bangsamoro where Godliness, liberty, progress, and peace will reign forever. We shall always remember him for giving us the privilege of working with him to craft the historical Bangsamoro Organic Law as one of the important pillars of a truly autonomous Bangsamoro. On a personal note, I feel truly grateful that I had the chance to work alongside Chairman Jaafar, whose brilliance and passion will stay with me forever. We are a poorer nation for his passing, having lost not only an astute intellect but also a committed heart. But though his passing leaves an aching hollow, we will always remember him, as his life's work has interminably changed the course of Mindanao's history, and the nation at large. The New Zealand government says it wont single out mortgage brokers and that its approach to commission payments will be balanced. That follows the Australian Federal Governments decision earlier this week to cave on the royal commission recommendation to ban lenders from paying trail commissions to mortgage brokers. When Kenneth Hayne delivered his report and 76 recommendations in early February, the Australian government quickly backed away from the recommendation to ban the payment of up front commissions to mortgage brokers, the only recommendation it said it wouldnt implement. But it did undertake to ban trail commissions, payments spread over the life of a mortgage, usually paid in addition to up front commissions, from July 2020. But earlier this week, Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said, in what Australian newspapers are calling a stunning backflip, that his government will instead hold a review into whether trail commissions should be kept. New Zealand Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Kris Faafoi says his government will release a consultation document in May that will ask about the structure of commissions paid by banks and insurers to financial advisers, insurance agents and mortgage brokers. Unlike Australia, we are not singling out mortgage brokers from the rest of the financial advice industry, Faafoi says in a written answer to a question from BusinessDesk. Some forms of commission are better than others for ensuring good consumer outcomes soft commissions, for example, can strongly encourage advisers to prioritise their own interests over that of their clients, he says. We need to take a balanced approach that considers how we ensure good outcomes for consumers and retain access to good quality financial advice. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Council on Federal Financial Relations, a body made up of state and federal treasurers, will conduct the Australian review. The backdown followed a sustained campaign by mortgage brokers and it didnt hurt that Mark Bouris, the founder of mortgage broking business Wizard Home Loans and another financial services company, Yellow Brick Road which he still chairs, is a friend of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Most mortgage brokers who want to exit the industry have little to sell, other than their trail commission books and their client lists something much harder to value than a certain income stream. Mortgage brokers in Australia, and smaller lenders who depend on those brokers for distribution because they lack the branch networks of the larger banks, had argued that the ban would reduce competition and lead to greater concentration of the financial services industry. There are about 17,000 mortgage brokers in Australia who account for nearly 60 percent of all mortgages written in that country and are paid more than A$2 billion a year in commissions. The amount of mortgages New Zealand brokers write is unknown because most banks regard their dealings with brokers as a closely guarded secret. Most observers would agree they are less dominant in New Zealand but could still account for more than 40 percent of all mortgages. Bank of New Zealand, which is owned by National Australia Bank, does disclose its figures. It resumed dealing with mortgage brokers in 2015 after 12 years of refusing to have anything to do with them and, by September last year, mortgage brokers accounted for more than 15 percent of BNZs mortgage book. The big four Australian banks own New Zealands big four banks which accounting for about 88 percent of our banking system. (BusinessDesk) Comments from our readers No comments yet Add your comment: Your name: Your email: Not displayed to the public Comment: Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved. 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Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 129 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 160 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe6c8d0a0)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 951 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6c4b790)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe6c8d0a0)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1305 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 958 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6c4b790)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe6c96f38)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1303 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 436 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6c4b790)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6c4b790)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6123ec8)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe69f3d40)') called at (eval 487) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe69f3d40)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0 System error error: Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. context: ... 21: 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: 28:
29: ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25 /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:951 /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17 /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149 Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 129 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 160 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe6698a70)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 951 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe66b6a98)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe6698a70)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1305 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 958 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe66b6a98)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe66affb8)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1303 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 436 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe66b6a98)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe66b6a98)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6124af0)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe66f92c0)') called at (eval 487) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe66f92c0)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0 System error error: Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. context: ... 21: 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: 28:
29: ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25 /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:951 /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17 /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149 Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 129 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 160 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe6a35a50)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 951 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6a31b98)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe6a35a50)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1305 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 958 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6a31b98)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe69052c0)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1303 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 436 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6a31b98)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6a31b98)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe61238b8)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe6bae530)') called at (eval 487) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe6bae530)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0 System error error: Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. context: ... 21: 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: 28:
29: ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25 /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:951 /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17 /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149 Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 129 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 160 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe6a9d368)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 951 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe70307d8)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe6a9d368)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1305 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 958 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe70307d8)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe6a81d50)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1303 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 436 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe70307d8)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe70307d8)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6124a20)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe6961080)') called at (eval 487) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe6961080)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0 BEIJING, March 12 (Xinhua) -- A unified examination will be held in late April to recruit people from members of the public for civilian positions in the Chinese military, a military statement said Tuesday. Launched by the Political Work Department of the Central Military Commission, the recruitment focuses on serving the needs of the military and will place a number of civilians at professional or important posts or posts in remote regions. Applicant registration should be conducted through the website of "Military Talent Net" between March 13 and 20, before the examination is held on April 28. The statement vowed to recruit outstanding talent for the military while ensuring the selection is a fair, transparent process. The World Sikh Organization (WSO) of Canada has revived its campaign to get Canada to remove the inclusion of Sikh (Khalistani) Terrorism in Public Safety Canadas 2018 Report on the Terrorism Threat to Canada. The group has planned a series of panel discussions called #AskCanadianSikhs in Brampton, Edmonton, and Surrey. The WSO held the first series of #AskCanadianSikh panels to address these issues in April 2018. Despite a widespread outcry by Canadian Sikhs and many elected officials who rejected the inclusion of the Sikh community, the Report has not yet been revised and the section continues to be included, WSO said in a statement. The report does not make any reference to current extremist activities in the Sikh community and simply states, some individuals in Canada continue to support Sikh (Khalistani) extremist ideologies and movements. To address this issue, the WSO will be hosting a panel series featuring Dr. Jasjit Singh, a renowned UK researcher who has done extensive research on the maligning of the Sikh community within media and government. Dr. Singh will be joined by WSO's Balpreet Singh and various local panelists across the country to explore the reasons behind the maligning of the Sikh community and what the community can do in response. The dates and times for the panel discussions are; Friday, March 15, 2019: Brampton; Brampton City Hall, 2 Wellington Street West, from 6.30 to 8.30pm EST https://wsoontario.eventbrite.ca Saturday, March 16, 2019: Edmonton at 10111 Ellerslie Road Southwest from 4 to 6 pm MST https://wsoalberta.eventbrite.ca Sunday, March 17, 2018: Surrey at Surrey City Hall 13450 104 Avenue from 1.30 to 3.30pm PST. https://bcwso.eventbrite.ca Last January, representatives of the Sikh community and Canadian Gurdwaras met with Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Ralph Goodale on the matter. Minister Goodale heard the concerns of the Sikh community and expressed his intention to address the concerns in an appropriate manner. Liberal party Members of Parliament, including MP Randeep Sarai and NDP MP Matthew Dube, among others, have also questioned the Public Safety Canada Reports mention about Sikh extremism. Since 2012, The Indian government has issued pointed and public warnings to Ottawa to mind what they see as alarming evidence of Sikh extremism on Canadian soil. The issue of internal extremism has been one that has shaken India to the core over the past several decades former prime minister Indira Gandhi was murdered by her own Sikh bodyguards after a string of events sparked by fundamentalists seeking their own separate, fundamentalist nation they would call Khalistan. Canada too has been rocked by related terrorism. Police believe the bombing of a 1985 Air India flight that killed 331 people was orchestrated by Sikh extremists based in Canada. Pockets of pro-Khalistan support are still visible in the Indo-Canadian community, after years of dormancy. Mukhbir Singh, president of World Sikh Organization of Canada, however, stressed that 2018 Public Safety report does not point to any current incident of violence or terrorism associated with the Sikh community in Canada and only references the 1985 Air India tragedy. In a recent op-ed, he wrote; Given the lack of any current incidents associated with extremism in the Sikh community, it appears that the addition of the section on Sikh extremism is linked to the fact that, despite any evidence, India has repeatedly raised this issue with Canada at every bilateral meeting between the two countries. Canadian Sikhs have repeatedly insisted that India smears any political speech and activism it finds offensive, such as exposure of Indias appalling human rights record or attempts at recognizing the 1984 Sikh Genocide as extremism. It appears to many in the Sikh community that these steps have been taken by the Government of Canada to appease Indian concerns around imaginary Sikh extremism in Canada. We wish to be very clear- advocacy for Sikh human rights or Khalistan is not extremism and to suggest that it poses a danger to Canada is absolutely ludicrous. There is nothing to suggest there is anything happening in Canadas Sikh community except peaceful activism. Accepting Indian allegations of Sikh extremism deeply maligns the reputation of the community and has a real impact on the everyday lives of Canadian Sikhs. We are deeply disappointed that our community has been stigmatized due to what to appears to be foreign interference and pressure. Sikh (Khalistani) Extremism - Public Safety Canadas 2018 Report on the Terrorism Threat to Canada. Some individuals in Canada continue to support Sikh (Khalistani) extremist ideologies and movements. This political movement aims to create an independent homeland for Sikhs called Khalistan, in India. Violent activities in support of an independent Sikh homeland have fallen since their height during the 1982-1993 period when individuals and groups conducted numerous terrorist attacks. The 1985 Air India bombing by Khalistani terrorists, which killed 331 people, remains the deadliest terrorist plot ever launched in Canada. While attacks around the world in support of this movement have declined, support for the extreme ideologies of such groups remains. For example, in Canada, two key Sikh organizations, Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation, have been identified as being associated with terrorism and remain listed terrorist entities under the Criminal Code. Guest Commentary Fergus Hodgson Uber has brought accessible income and affordable transport to tens of millions worldwide. Its disruptive presence, however, has ruffled Luddites and the self-entitled who prefer antiquated supervision to innovative enterprise. This standoff is playing out in Canadas legal system and has grave implications for the entire gig economy. Ontarios top court recently deemed invalid a clause in Ubers contract with drivers that takes disputes to the International Chamber of Commerce, which is a private arbitration mechanism in the Netherlands. A planned class-action lawsuit seeks $200 million in damages. The lawsuit seeks to reclassify all drivers as employees and subject them and Uber to inflexible, outdated and inapplicable labour legislation. If the plaintiffs prevail, they will interfere with passengers and drivers who simply want to transact on a common, agreed-to platform. The conflict began in 2017 when David Heller a 35-year-old driver for Ubers food-delivery service filed suit to have himself and his colleagues classified as employees rather than independent contractors. Under the Ontario Employment Standards Act, the former are entitled to the minimum wage, overtime pay, parental leave and termination protections. Also, employment status places the authority over labour complaints with Ontarios Ministry of Labour, not private mediators. Even though drivers waive their right to sue in favour of arbitration before offering their services through the app, the Ontario Court of Appeal believes the firms arbitration clause seeks to favour itself and thus take advantage of its drivers, who are clearly vulnerable to the market strength of Uber. Since employment rights are mandatory in Ontario, the three-judge panel asserted its illegal to contract out employment standards. The court established that the lawsuit could proceed as a class action and ordered Uber to pay $20,000 to the complainant for the appeal costs. The likelihood of reversing this decision is slim; Canadas Supreme Court reviews less than three per cent of rulings from Ontarios Court of Appeal. Ubers legal ability to offer private arbitration hinges on whether app drivers are employees. However, the court astonishingly skirted the issue. Justice Ian V.B. Nordheimer wrote: the characterization of these persons as independent contractors or employees for the purposes of Ontario law is an issue that ought to be determined by a court in Ontario. The judges refusal to address this point undermines their ruling, leaving the door open for a more sensible court to rule in favour of gig-economy workers. Uber and other peer-to-peer firms need not be pigeonholed. Private arbitration is the way of the future; government courts are slow, politicized and expensive. That is why voluntary, alternative dispute-resolution mechanisms exist. Further, as Lee Harding and Gerard Lucyshyn have explained for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, the employee classification is usually defended because it protects jobs and wages for the people already in the shielded industry. Imposing the arbitrary designation is contrary to both planning and innovation. Ontario is hardly the first case of drivers suing the firm for employment rights and against arbitration. The first lawsuit dates back to 2013 in the United States. However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in September that Ubers arbitration clause prohibited class actions against the company, in line with a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision. The ruling disbanded 385,000 plaintiff drivers who must accept the agreed-upon arbitration. In 2016, though, a United Kingdom employment court ruled that Uber drivers were not self-employed and should earn the national living wage. Uber lost an appeal in December 2018. The judges decided that ride-sharing drivers should be classified as workers. The British Columbia Federation of Labour is demanding more privileges for drivers in recently introduced legislation to allow Uber, Lyft and other companies partial operation in the provinces tightly-regulated market. Prospective drivers will need specific licences, get criminal-record and medical checks every five years, and purchase extended insurance, among many other stipulations from the B.C government. Unsatisfied, the federation argues Uber offers precarious and unstable jobs and the new legislation does not reform outdated employment laws. Rather than a new definition of employees for the 21st-century economy, the federation wants the B.C. government to forbid ride-sharing companies from classifying drivers as independent contractors. What the anti-Uber lobbies refuse to admit is that traditional labour categories dont apply to the gig economy, which turns participants into service providers and clients. Uber, which wants to expand in Canada, is merely an intermediary that connects occasional suppliers and customers in a more efficient way than web listings or job agencies. Drivers are contractors: they own their cars, work whenever they want, can turn down clients and manage their workloads. The prevailing labour discussion on the gig economy ignores that Uber emerged precisely to tackle transportation monopolies in need of disruption. Ubers business model has passed the consumer test, cutting through middle management, market cartels and costly regulations. Ungrateful ride-share drivers and labour unions are threatening to sue the gig economy to death. They are targeting the dynamism and openness that has characterized peer-to-peer trade. Courts threatening to upend this consumer-driven revolution should ask whether theyre serving the entrepreneurial workers or antiquated cronies. Fergus Hodgson is the executive editor of Antigua Report, a columnist with the Epoch Times and a research associate with Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Daniel Duarte contributed to this article. Paz Gomez contributed to this article. Film: "Badla" Director: Sujoy Ghosh Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Tapsee Pannu, Amrita Singh Rating: **** The phonetic distance between badla, the Hindi word for revenge that serves as the deliciously filmy title of this delicately drawn whodunit, and Badal, the name that the lawyer-protagonist is known by is easily bridgable. The craftily-plotted whodunit shows us why vendetta is best served cold. It unfolds in snowcapped England, you see. Or, do you? Amitabh Bachchan plays Badal Gupta, a hotshot lawyer on the verge of retirement who has never lost a case. Badal goes for the kill when he is invited to look into a case of a murder accused, a nonchalant imperturbable married woman named Naina Sethi whose morals are so reprehensible they make Indrani Mukerjea seem excusably misguided in comparison. Kudos to Tapsee Pannu for playing a woman who won't stop at anything to get what she wants. It shows the expanding moral spectrum of celluloid heroism to see a female protagonist so low in the conscience department, and it is a pleasure to see Pannu so good in being bad. But why must she smoke to prove her disregard for moral values? I thought smoking for vamping went out of vogue with Shashikala. But I am straying. A crime this film about unforgivable crimes, never commits. To the point and on the ball, Badla is a concise gripping cat-and-mouse concoction where lawyer Bachchan and the accused Pannu play off against one another with feline stealth, one never willing to acquiesce to the other's persuasive arguments, so that in no time a swirl of accusations come hurling at us without the plot giving away anything. The dialogues tell us everything the characters want us to hear without giving away the truth. Sujoy Ghosh, it seems, has adapted a Spanish film "The Invisible Guest". I suspect the suspect-motive-crime-denouement graph in the original must have been very different. Badla contextualises the murder to fit into the ambit of adultery. Pannu's entrepreneur-heroine has a loving family of devoted husband and adorable little daughter. Why would she break the domestic idyll to have an affair with an anglo-Indian Arjun (Tony Luke) who must wear cross around his neck even while bearing it (the cross, I mean) and who speaks with a thick Bandra-Catholic accent that tends to take away from the gravity of the crisis on hand. Arjun's peculiar diction is the least of the problems in the narrative. Ghosh fills up the frames with an implosive tension. Most of the time there are just Bachchan and his accused (far from a victim) talking, exchanging barbed words and slanted glances that give nothing away. Both the actors are adept at using words to express more than just what they want to say. There is a third crucial character, played by the powerful Amrita Singh who makes even an offer for a cup of tea seem like a stern rebuke. It's a pity that there isn't much of Singh with Bachchan together. What I wouldn't give to see that Mard-slinging! Cinematographer Avik Mukhopadhyay captures the scenic splendour of the English countryside without allowing the characters to look subservient to their environment. Handsomely shot and as sharply cut as a Saville Row suit, Badla is a unique blend of suspense and chamber-piece. The verbal exchanges between Bachchan and Pannu play a curious mind-game with the perception of guilt and retribution. At the end Sujoy Ghosh captures two vital faces staring out of a window. They remind us of how important characterisation is to a tightly-wound plot, and how easily a suspense drama can come undone in the wrong hands. Not this one. From cooperating partners to competing rivals, China and the US seem to be engaged in a tug of war in all aspects, although their approaches differ. In his fiscal 2020 budget, US President Donald Trump on Monday asked Congress to raise defense spending by 4 percent to $750 billion while slashing spending for foreign aid by $13 billion. Obviously the Trump administration is ratcheting up US military muscle to claim US world dominance. Keeping in mind competition with China, a country the US has singled out as a national security threat, Washington is igniting an arms race with Beijing. For years, the hot wars the US has launched or been involved in have cost both itself and the world dearly. Today, with its military obligations spanning the globe, US defense spending largely serves an offensive purpose. In his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, British historian Paul Kennedy concluded that military overstretch leads to the decline of empires. China, which only in recent years has been ascending toward becoming a major world player, clearly knows its mission. China is dedicated to promoting world connectivity and development while the US is playing a declining, if not opposing, role in securing the global commons. As Trump raises his country's defense budget, he calls for cuts of around $1 billion in spending at the National Science Foundation, the US government's top funder of non-medical research. Does the US need more ships than scientists to compete with China? The answer given by Michael McFaul, a Stanford University professor and former US ambassador to Russia, is "no," as he posted on Twitter. On February 11, Trump signed an executive order entitled "Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence" that aims to promote investment and innovation in the emerging field. The National Science Foundation, whose research field includes computer science and machine learning, said it supports transformative research in AI. But Trump's latest budget-slashing move contradicts his desired US leadership in this field. At the same time, China has wasted no time and is doing far more than talking. In 2017, the Chinese government said it wanted to make the country and its industries world leaders in AI by 2030. The US has far more AI engineers than China, but China is closing the gap rapidly. According to a Nikkei report, Chinese companies have surpassed their US counterparts on a Nikkei ranking of the top 50 patent filers for AI in the last three years. China has no intention of building barriers for a tech cold war. Beijing is willing to be involved in technological competition with the US as long as it is fair and equal. In the same light, China does not fear any military threat from the US, but will not let itself get caught in an arms race by US provocations, as this does not fit China's development goals. The picture shows a US-developed F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter By Gao Lei To deal with China?" Singapore's Ministry of DefenceMindefhas responded to a recent news report by Cable News Network (CNN),an American mainstream news out, and rebutted a CNN report published on Thursday last week as sowing discord between Singapore and China. According to a report released by Nanyang Sin-Chew Lianhe Zaobao (commonly abbreviated as Lianhe Zaobao), a Singapore-based Chinese-language newspaper, on March 11, CNN wrote on March 7 that as an ally of the US, Singapores decision to acquire the US F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter is to deal with China. However, in responding to the claim, Mindef clarified in a statement that the acquisition is not direct against any particular country, and Singapore is not an ally of the US as well. The latest statement issued on March 10 by Mindef also made it clear that the acquisition of F-35 Lightning II is for Singapores own defence deterrence and not directed against, or to align itself with any particular country. Mindef also expressed that CNNs assertion that Singapore is an ally of the US was erroneous. It said, unlike other Asian countries who have acquired F-35s, Singapore is not a treaty ally of the US. While Singapore has allowed United States ships and aircraft usage of some of our military facilities, this is not a reaction to any recent developments. It is a long-standing arrangement dating back to 1990,added Mindef. According to Lianhe Zaobao, Lee Kuan Yew, the founding Prime Minister of Singapore, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with then US Vice President James Dan Quayle in 1990 offering enhanced use of facilities in Singapore to American military aircraft and naval vessels as a contribution to sustaining US forward military position in Southeast Asia.. According to an article published by The Straits Times, an English-language daily broadsheet newspaper based in Singapore, on March 11, Mindef also stressed that Singapore's defence policies are predicated on an inclusive security architecture, which is exemplified by the ASEAN Defence Ministers' Meeting- Plus(ADMM-Plus). This group consists of China, the United States, India, Japan, New Zealand,the Republic of Korea and other countries. Previous reports from CNN stated that Mindef announced a plan to acquire 12 F-35s from the US with an estimated delivery date by 2030. If the US Congress approves the plan, Singapore will become the fourth US ally in Asia to own them. Since then, CNN news became less factual and more hypothetical which claimed that the reason of the acquisition is to help the US deal with China. The report also quoted a military expert from certain US military intelligence department that Singapores decision to acquire the F-35 was indicative of growing concerns within Asia regarding China's regional ambition. CNN repeatedly reported the US government's stereotype about the South China Sea, smeared China's legitimate action of safeguarding its sovereignty of the South China Sea while advocated the US as a protector of freedom of navigation and interests of Southeast Asian countries. It reported that given the current China-Singapore relations, Singapore has kept a low profile in this acquisition, and there was no mention of targeting China. But Singapores move to purchase the F-35 Lightning II would cause trepidation from China. In fact, the Global Times has already quoted Chinese military experts refuting CNNs report on March 9. The Chinese military experts commented that Singapore has been importing fighters and armaments from the US and the recent acquisition is a continuation of its traditional national defence strategy. It is absurd of CNN to claim that this is a message to Beijing! Chinese experts said that since Singapores neighbors like Malaysia and Indonesia have replaced their old fighters, it is matter of time before Singapore plans for an equipment replacement. The direct refutation from Mindef to CNN is a crystal clear message. Unfortunately, few US media quoted or reported Singapore's clarification on March 11. Global youth climate strike could be 'milestone' moment Paris, March 13 (AFP) Mar 13, 2019 It began with a solitary, 15-year-old girl camped out in front of Sweden's parliament next to a hand-written sign: "SCHOOL STRIKE FOR CLIMATE". Barely six months later, Friday's youth-led strike -- promising 1,000 actions spread over 100 countries -- could be a "milestone moment" in a grassroots campaign to goad world leaders into confronting the threat of global warming, activists and experts say. "We are only seeing the beginning," tweeted Greta Thunberg, who has since turned 16. "I think that change is on the horizon and the people will stand up for their future." So far, the weekly walk-outs have seen tens of thousands of mostly high school students spill out into the streets in Germany, Belgium, Britain and France, with a smattering of actions in half-a-dozen other countries. But on March 15, classrooms are set to empty in cities across the globe, from Boston to Bogota, Montreal to Melbourne, Dhaka to Durban, Lagos to London. Some local and national leaders have tried to cajole or threaten students, but such efforts have mostly backfired. In Australia, when New South Wales Education Minister Rob Stokes said those ditching classes would be punished, Greta -- as she is known to all -- responded in a tweet: "We hear you, and we don't care. Your statement belongs in a museum." Climate change impacts vary from one region to the next, but teens everywhere confronted with a climate-addled future have decided where to direct their ire. "Dear adults, use your power!", has become an unofficial slogan for the #FridaysForFuture movement. - Wakeup call - In France, the message scrawled on posters in the street is more pointed: "In 2050 you will be dead, not us." The crescendo of impatience expressed by youth toward their elders is not hard to understand. Despite 30 years of warnings about dire impacts, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions hit record levels in 2017 and again last year. Loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases at current rates, scientists agree, will eventually lead to an unliveable hothouse planet. The problem, in other words, continues to outstrip efforts to rein it in. "On climate change, we have to acknowledge that we have failed," Greta, an invited speaker, told the global ruling class in Davos in January. The 2015 Paris climate treaty calls for capping global warming at "well below" two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The planet is currently on track to heat up by at least 4C. In an electro-shock report published in October, the UN's climate science panel (IPCC) said only a wholesale transformation of the global economy and consumer habits could forestall climate catastrophe. "That was definitely a wake-up call for us," said Stephen O'Hanlon, spokesman for the youth-led Sunrise Movement in the United States, where schools strikes and protests are expected in dozens of cities and towns. On Wednesday, mayors of eight major cities -- including Paris, Sydney, Barcelona and Philadelphia -- offered explicit backing of student demands for urgent action, and tacit acceptance of their one-day truancy. "It is an injustice that young people who have contributed the least to climate change will feel the brunt of its effects," said the mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore. - Tomorrow's voters - "We are the last generation to have a realistic chance to prevent a climate catastrophe," said Global Strike for the Future spokesperson Linus Steinmetz. "If adults won't comply with the rules, we won't either." Young people have also sued governments in Europe and the US for failing to adopt policies that protect citizens from stronger storms, heatwaves and flooding that scientists say are already underway. "Change always happens when ordinary people take extraordinary actions -- this is one of those moments," said Nicolas Haeringer, global organiser for 350.org, a grassroots climate NGO founded in 2007. "This next global strike will be a milestone in world history, a moment when adults will learn to follow the lead of children." Experts on social movements were more measured but agreed that the world is seeing something new. "What has impressed me is how qualitatively different the recent upsurge in grassroots activism feels -- not just in volume, but in the radical form it's taking," said Doug McAdams, a professor of sociology at Stanford University who recently wrote a study to explain the lack of climate change activism in the United States. Global warming, he now predicts, will emerge as a key issue in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections. "The fact that this is led by the younger generations changes the political landscape," said Sebastien Treyer, director general of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris. "They are tomorrow's voters." The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2018 - Space Media Network. All websites are published in Australia and are solely subject to Australian law and governed by Fair Use principals for news reporting and research purposes. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA news reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement, agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. Privacy Statement Yazidi doctor soldiers on in mental battle against IS Dohuk, Iraq, March 13 (AFP) Mar 13, 2019 The military fight against the Islamic State group may be nearing an end, but one Yazidi doctor treating survivors is soldiering on against unseen scars the jihadists carved into her community. "They tell me that wherever they go, they have pain. They can never forget what happened," said Nagham Hasan, a 41-year-old gynaecologist from the Yazidi town of Bashiqa in northern Iraq. "These negative feelings get transferred to me, too," she said. When IS first rampaged across northern Iraq in 2014, Hasan fled with her family to the sprawling city of Dohuk further north. Just a few months later, the jihadists descended on Sinjar, the remote Yazidi heartland in northwestern Iraq. Declaring the secretive minority an "apostate" sect, IS killed Yazidi men, took boys as child soldiers, and forced thousands of women and girls into "sex slavery". Those that could flee settled in camps and other shelters in Dohuk's hilly outskirts. That's when Hasan's phone began to ring, and it has hardly stopped since. Yazidi survivors asked about their sisters, wives, and daughters, who were not only physically wounded but also suffering panic attacks, insomnia, non-stop crying, and even suicide attempts. Hasan began visiting survivors for medical consultations, which quickly expanded into impromptu therapy sessions as they detailed their traumatic experiences to her. "The fact that I'm from the same sect played a huge role. It allowed them to feel closer to me, to trust me, to break that wall of fear," she told AFP. - 'Dedicated my life' - In recent weeks, dozens of Yazidi women and children have escaped IS's last desert holdout in east Syria, many of them making their way across the border to Sinjar. But Hasan said there is a long way to go to heal the community-wide trauma, which has taken a vicarious toll on her. "Seeing so many affected my own mental state. I'm a human being with feelings, too," she said quietly. Her somber eyes are cupped by dark semi-circles, hinting at a lack of sleep. She gets phone calls from survivors in the middle of the night. Some come visit her in the modest apartment where she lives with her parents, brother, and sister. Her family tried to return to Bashiqa, retaken from IS in 2016, but found their home half-destroyed. "My family life, my social life, my work were all affected by this work," said Hasan, tucking her thinning shoulder-length hair behind her ear. She is dressed in a dark green sweater, matching blazer, and faded pink lipstick. "I never married and don't have kids. My sister is studying medicine too, but I told her not to do the same thing I'm doing." She began spending so much time on psychotherapy sessions and advocacy that she closed her women's health centre. "I have dedicated my life to this now," she said, estimating that she has helped more than 1,000 Yazidis since 2014. Each case is more heartbreaking than the last. One girl was raped 22 times by IS fighters. Another was eight when she was taken and assaulted. Among her former patients is Nadia Murad, a Yazidi who escaped IS and won the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism on behalf of the minority. Hasan keeps Murad's autobiography at home, the first page signed by the author. "Each one of us fought Daesh with whatever we had, but you fought them with the strongest weapon when you decided to treat us," wrote the Nobel laureate, referring to IS by its Arabic acronym. - Another shock - Hasan said more than half her patients have resettled abroad, but those still in Iraq almost all live in camps with poor conditions and no breadwinner, which is slowing their mental recovery. "Even after a survivor is freed from Daesh, she's hit with another shock when she comes to live in a miserable camp," she said. As she walked down a dirt thoroughfare between shabby tents in the Kabarto Camp, Hasan was hailed down by a smiling woman. Layla's 15-year-old daughter was abducted by IS at age 12, but was freed with her mother and treated by Hasan in the camp. "She was inconsolable when she first arrived. She wouldn't talk, just cry. She's finally agreed to go to school, thanks to your help," she told Hasan. A displaced man called out to Hasan, asking her to look at his infant's deformed arm. After patiently listening, she promised to return for a proper examination. Hasan is recognised by children, who wrap their thin arms around her legs, and even camp authorities say a warm hello. She emerges from the camp visibly worn down, but determined: "I didn't think it would last this long, or that I would be doing this for years. Russian air raids kill 13 civilians in Syria: monitor Beirut, March 13 (AFP) Mar 13, 2019 Russian air strikes killed at least 13 civilians, including six children, Wednesday in Idlib province, in the first such raids since a September truce deal, a monitor said. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said around 60 people were also wounded in the air strikes that struck several areas in the northwestern province, which is Syria's last major rebel bastion. "Over the past 24 hours Russian aircraft have carried out dozens of raids targeting several regions in Idlib province, including the city of Idlib and the town of Saraqeb," Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP. "These are the first Russian air strikes against the province" since an accord struck by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan in September last year. The truce deal was meant to stave off a planned offensive by the regime and its Russian backers that aid groups feared could spark the eight-year-old Syrian conflict's worst humanitarian crisis to date. Under the deal, opposition backer Turkey would exert its influence over anti-regime groups in the Idlib region to have them pull back fighters and heavy weapons from a demilitarised zone. The government assault on the last major bastion of rebel forces has been held off but the deal's provisions have not been implemented. According to Abdel Rahman, a prison in a suburb of Idlib city was hit on Tuesday in the Russian strikes, sparking a jail break by dozens of inmates. The Idlib region is mainly controlled by the jihadists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Syrian group led by former Al-Qaeda fighters, after they pushed back smaller, Turkey-backed rebel outfits in January. If Berlin picks Chinese firm for 5G, NATO will not communicate: US general Washington, March 13 (AFP) Mar 13, 2019 NATO forces would stop communicating with their German colleagues if Berlin teams up with Chinese firm Huawei for its super-fast 5G telecom infrastructure, US General Curtis Scaparrotti warned on Wednesday. "We're concerned about their telecommunications backbone being compromised in the sense that, particularly with 5G, the bandwidth capability and ability to pull data is incredible," Scaparrotti, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told the House Armed Services Committee. "If it also is inside of their defense communications, then we're not gonna communicate with them" across those systems, the general said. "And for the military that would be a problem." The US and several other Western nations, fearful of the security risks posed by the company closely tied to the Chinese government, have shut Huawei out of tenders for the development of fifth-generation, or 5G, networks. Those next-generation systems will bring near-instantaneous connectivity that can enable futuristic technologies such as self-driving cars. Scaparrotti's comments came during questioning about trade talks in Europe, and Germany in particular, with Chinese telecom groups. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported the US had warned Germany about future "information sharing" if it uses "untrusted vendors" in its 5G infrastructure. The newspaper said the US Ambassador to Berlin, Richard Grenell, had sent a letter to German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier warning that in such a case, the US could scale down intelligence and other information exchanges. On Tuesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Berlin would consult Washington over using technology made by Huawei, although "we will define our standards for ourselves." Huawei has strenuously denied allegations its equipment could be used for espionage. The company's 5G equipment is reputed to be much further advanced than those of rivals Ericsson and Nokia, which has made it attractive for mobile operators looking to quickly roll out new networks. Along with worries about network security, US prosecutors have charged Huawei and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, over alleged Iran sanctions violations, and Beijing and Washington are trying to settle a tariff war affecting a wide range of goods. sl/elm/it/wd Source: bangkokpost.com PHNOM PENH: Cambodia and China on Wednesday began a 13-day joint military exercise in southern Cambodia involving more than 600 military personnel from both sides. The Golden Dragon military exercise, held at Techo Sen Chumkiri military institute in Kampot province, aims to strengthen cooperation between the two countries' armed forces in combating terrorism, maintaining stability and assisting in disaster relief. The exercise involves 252 Chinese soldiers and 382 Cambodian soldiers as well as 2,200 other personnel including paramedics, according to Cambodian Defence Ministry spokesman Chhum Socheat. It is the third such exercise held between China and Cambodia since the first in 2016. The latest drill also involves helicopters, armored vehicles, tanks and artillery reinforcements, among other armaments. China is the largest donor of military aid to Cambodia. This article was originally produced and published by bangkokpost.com. View the original article at By Guo Yuandan On the morning of March 12, a fighter jet attached to the aviation force of the Chinese PLA Navy crashed during a flight training mission in Ledong county, south Chinas Hainan Province, the Peoples Liberation Army Daily said on its official WeChat account on the same afternoon. According to the news, two pilots were killed and no casualties were reported on the ground. The cause was under investigation. The accident occurred in the morning was announced in the afternoon, fully demonstrating the Chinese militarys willingness and candor in dealing with the incident, according to a reporter who knew the PLAs working procedures. This is not the first time that the Chinese Navy has actively released news of training accidents. In August 2016, the PLA Navy took the initiative to announce the death of the carrier-based pilot Zhang Chao, the first ever pilot who sacrificed his life for the Chinese aircraft carrier cause. Subsequently, the Chinese Navy also publicly exposed the dangerous situation encountered by carrier-based aircraft pilots Cao Xianjian and Yuan Wei in the air, in which Cao Xianjian was seriously injured. After more than one years treatment and rehabilitation training, Cao Xianjian was able to return to Air Force pilot career again. The news of March 12th aroused the condolences and respect of domestic netizens. On the PLA Dailys microblog account, a netizen commented that in peace time, although there are less actual combats, our soldiers are never far away from bloodshed. May our two heroes rest in peace! Another netizen wrote: Sacrifice during training is better than wartime defeat. I am saddened by the passing of the heroes. We should learn from the incident and support actual combat training! In recent years, with the continuous advancement of the PLAs actual combat training, the probability of accidents and dangerous situations encountered by PLA officers and soldiers in training has also increased. It can be said like this, the higher intensity of actual combat training, the closer to actual combat, and the greater the security will risk. This means that accidents in fighter jet training are the cost that must be borne by actual combat training, which will occur in all military powers. According to a survey by The Washington Post in 2017, over the previous three years, the number of non-combat deaths of US military was 185 and the number of combat deaths was 44. In other words, the number of people died in accidents is 4.2 times the number of deaths on the battlefield. According to statistics from another U.S. media, in the past seven years, more than 1,000 aviation ground crew members across the U.S. military branches have been injured in various safety incidents, and only 82 people have been injured by enemies on battlefields. These statistics illustrate a reality: in the context of emphasizing actual combat training, the usual casualties are much higher than actual combat casualties. An expert, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporter that the increased amount and intensity of training will inevitably increase the probability of accidents. This is true for armed forces in the world, including the worlds most powerful U.S. military. Flirting with Disaster Brexit Vote Moves Britain Closer to the Brink The British parliament voted Tuesday to obstruct one of the last remaining ways to an orderly Brexit. This is partly due to the intransigence of members of parliament, and partly due to Prime Minister Theresa May's hamfisted negotiating tactics. Risk of No Deal Brexit Grows 'Significantly' EU Politicians Believe Withdrawal Agreement Is Dead Many in Brussels have reacted with frustration, anger and disappointment following British parliament's second vote against the withdrawal deal negotiated between Theresa May and the EU. They say there is no room left for compromise with London. Patronizing, Frustrating and Divisive The Shortcomings of Merkel's European Policies Germany had an historic opportunity to forge a more integrated Europe with French President Emmanuel Macron. Instead, it hesitated, dithered and ultimately missed its chance under Chancellor Angela Merkel. History will judge its failure unfavorably. Two Crashes in Five Months What's Wrong with Boeing's 737 Max 8? Boeing's new airplane has only been around for two years and already two 737 Max 8s have crashed, killing 346 people. The disasters may be attributable to a design flaw that emerged when engineers began cutting corners. More than 30 representatives of the MONUSCO military and civil affairs departments attend the engineering conference. GOMA, DRC, March 13 (ChinaMil) -- An engineering conference was held by the United Nation (UN) Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) in Goma, North Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Representatives of four peacekeeping engineer detachments from China, Indonesia, Nepal and Bangladesh, along with more than 30 representatives from the military and civilian departments of the MONUSCO, attended the conference. At the meeting, the Chinese peacekeeping engineers won unanimous acclaim for their professional precision, bravery, and rich experience in engineering construction. Deputy chief of staff of the MONUSCO Operation Support Group said: Chinese engineers are particularly hard-working with high morale. Their troops management is orderly with the highest rate of equipment readiness. They always try to solve problems on their own whenever they encounter difficulties. " "Chinese peacekeeping engineers, batch after batch, have continued to deliver protections with their footprint all over the mission area of DRC. They built roads, bridges, culverts, and houses, leaving valuable wealth for the DRC people. They should be very proud of themselves for what they have achieved, he added. Lt. General Elias Rodrigues Martins Filho, Force Commander of the MONUSCO, fully affirmed the comprehensive work contributed by the Chinese peacekeeping engineer detachment to the DRC since its deployment: The Chinese engineers are true professionals and have always accomplished tasks with excellence. We thank you for your excellent work in the DRC mission area. It is known that the 22nd Chinese peacekeeping engineer detachment to DRC is mainly responsible for the strategic passage repair, key bridge construction and major airport maintenance work in the area spanning over 800,000 square kilometers in nine provinces, under the jurisdiction of the MONUSCO's Southern Theater, as well as the infrastructure construction of more than 50 peacekeeping barracks for 8 peacekeeping troop contributors. Since the deployment in September 2018, the Chinese peacekeeping engineer detachment has carried out 29 engineering surveys and 36 engineering construction tasks in more than 20 locations stretching to 10 directions. A total of 8,663 person-times were dispatched, 1,561 units of equipment were used, 10,310 cubic meters of building material were transported for construction, and 2 bridges and 4,460 meters of road were restored. Furthermore, 20,650 square meters of field were leveled, 58 containers were transported by crane, 27 trees were chopped down, 3 vehicles were rescued, 860 square meters of land were reinforced, and 369 pieces (boxes) of junk ammunition and 161 meters of waste blasting fuse were disposed. In accordance with the current tasks, the engineer detachment is deployed at the Chinese peninsula in the Bukavu city of DRC, Uvira and Kamanyola, carrying out any ad-hoc tasks assigned by the MONUSCO and its Southern Theater. Deputy chief of staff of the Operation Support Group of MONUSCO (L) confers an order of commendation to a Chinese peacekeeping engineer. A more recent publication of this set of statistics is available. Latest publication: Turnover of trade 2021, October Published: 13 March 2019 Development of turnover in trade weaker in January than in the previous months According to Statistics Finland, the working day adjusted turnover of total trade grew by 0.6 per cent in January compared to January 2018. In previous months, turnover in trade has developed more positively and it has grown by over two per cent in the past three months. The working day adjusted sales volume, from which the impact of price changes has been eliminated, went down by 0.3 per cent in January compared with January the previous year. The contraction in motor vehicle trade weakened the development of both turnover and sales volume in January. Annual change in working day adjusted turnover and sales volume in total trade (G), % Among industries of trade, working day adjusted turnover grew in January in wholesale trade by 1.9 per cent and in retail trade by 0.4 per cent. The growth in retail trade was due to positive development in specialised store and department store trade, whereas turnover in daily consumer goods trade decreased from one year ago. In daily consumer goods trade, working day adjusted turnover went down by 0.3 per cent and sales volume by 2.6 per cent. In turn, trade developed weakest in January in motor vehicle trade where working day adjusted turnover decreased by 4.4 per cent and sales volume by 3.5 per cent year-on-year. The big difference in development of turnover and sales volume particularly in wholesale trade and daily consumer goods trade is due to rise in prices. Annual change in working day adjusted turnover and sales volume in industries of trade, January 2019, % (TOL 2008) Turnover and sales volume almost on level with the previous month Compared to the previous month, seasonally adjusted turnover and sales volume in total trade were in January almost on level with the previous month (-0.1%). In December, turnover declined by 0.3 per cent while sales volume grew by 0.5 per cent. In November, turnover in trade grew by 0.3 per cent and sales volume by 0.5 per cent. Change in seasonally adjusted turnover and sales volume in total trade (G) from the previous month, % Trend of turnover and sales volume in total trade, 1/2009 to 1/2019 The calculation of indices of turnover of trade is based on the Tax Administrations data on self-assessed taxes, which are supplemented with Statistics Finlands sales inquiry. The volume index of sales is calculated by removing the effect of price changes from the value index series. The factors caused by the variation in the number of weekdays are taken into account in adjustment for working days. This means taking into consideration the lengths of months, different weekdays and holidays. In addition, seasonal variation is eliminated from seasonally adjusted series, on account of which it makes sense to compare observations of two successive months as well. The data for the latest month are preliminary and they may become significantly revised particularly on more detailed industry levels in coming months. Source: Turnover of trade, Statistics Finland Inquiries: Suvi Kiema 029 551 3509, Seija Karttunen 029 551 2741, palvelut.suhdanne@stat.fi Director in charge: Mari Yla-Jarkko Publication in pdf-format (281.8 kB) Updated 13.03.2019 Referencing instructions: Official Statistics of Finland (OSF): Turnover of trade [e-publication]. ISSN=1799-0939. January 2019. Helsinki: Statistics Finland [referred: 10.12.2021]. Access method: http://www.stat.fi/til/klv/2019/01/klv_2019_01_2019-03-13_tie_002_en.html Would better access to the Mississippi River be advantageous to Ste. Genevieve? Yes! It would boost tourism and be awesome for locals. Not really. Anyone who really wants to see it can drive to the ferry landing. View Results http://vv.chinamil.com.cn/asset/category3/2019/03/13/asset_355195.mp4 China's national defense policy is a topic that never fails to capture international attention. To make more people understand China's national defense policy, we have had the honor of inviting Xu Hui, Major General and Commandant of the International College of Defense Studies at the National University of People's Liberation Army (PLA), to answer those questions. The U.S. military budget is 3x than that of China, so how can the U.S. be scared' of China? The defense budget is one of the core elements of measuring a country's defense policy. China's defense budget for 2019 will be about 177 billion U.S. dollars, meaning the growth rate has lowered from 8.1 percent in 2018 to 7.5 percent, which prompted their questions. According to newly released data, the U.S. 2019 National Defense Authorization Act authorized a top-line budget of 716 billion U.S. dollars, which is more than four times that of China. It left some netizens wondering, How can the U.S. be scared' of China? According to Major General Xu, for many countries including China, the military budget mainly depends on three elements: The security needs, the evaluation of the security environment and the economic competence. Therefore, the fluctuations of China's military budget are all normal parts of active defense policy. In Major General Xu's opinion, the U.S. has been concerned about China for years. They want to keep the top position forever and always keep an eye on the second place, especially on its military. So, it is quite natural for them to use China as the target to justify their military budget. Major General Xu also mentioned that the purpose of the military is not for construction, it's for destruction, for fighting. Therefore, the lower the military budget, the better. Earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Manila and offered assurance to the Filipino side of the U.S.-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty by saying: China's island building and military activities in the South China Sea threaten Philippine sovereignty, security, and therefore economic livelihood, as well as that of the United States. Not appropriate, said Major General Xu about Pompeo's remarks, noting that a lot of people were making fun of him for being a trouble maker. Xu thinks it's quite clear for the international community that the U.S. is attempting to drive a wedge between China and its neighbors. In Major General Xu's perspective, China and its neighboring countries are on the right track, which is to say that they negotiate and solve their disputes in a way that maintains peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region. And for those disputes that cannot be resolved in the short term, Major General Xu attached importance to the principle of shelving differences while seeking common development. On one level, we should not let these small disputes prevent state-to-state relations, and on the macro level, we should try to find a way to jointly exploit the resources, he explained. This principle has played a fundamental role in ensuring that peace and prosperity has been maintained in the Asia-Pacific region, and a lot of progress in this regard has been made in the past four decades. Xu indicated that all the countries in the region should understand that they cannot move away, so they have to find a way to peacefully coexist in the region to put aside their disputes and let people work together in the common interest, to show goodwill and assure each other, and also let more people of the two countries recognize in this way we can make the cake of common interest bigger and bigger. Why does the Western media only make an issue of Chinese army's "lacking battlefield experience" insinuating that they are a Paper Tiger? Major General Xu was impressed when a netizen brought up the term Paper Tiger and asked why the Western media likes to insinuate that the Chinese army is weak. Xu acknowledged that the Chinese military hasn't engaged in large scale wars or fighting for over 30 years, but the PLA has been engaging in an increasingly large amount of peacekeeping operations and drills both domestically and internationally. The fighting spirit, the capabilities they have, and the achievement they have made is quite clear. No matter in UN peacekeeping or in the escort in the Gulf of Aden, they have been widely praised by the international community. He believed that the military's combat capability, status as a deterrent, and its cooperation with counterparts from around the world will increase. Major General Xu believes that a modernized military should not only be modernized in terms of weaponry and equipment, but also its human resources. The quality of the personnel is the most important aspect of military modernization. The armies need the capability to know, command and conduct modern warfare and safely guard the nation. DGAP-Ad-hoc: Ferratum Capital Germany GmbH / Schlagwort(e): Rating Ferratum Capital Germany GmbH: Ferratum Group assigned BB-/Outlook Stable in initial rating from Fitch 13.03.2019 / 18:00 CET/CEST Veroffentlichung einer Insiderinformationen nach Artikel 17 der Verordnung (EU) Nr. 596/2014, ubermittelt durch DGAP - ein Service der EQS Group AG. Fur den Inhalt der Mitteilung ist der Emittent / Herausgeber verantwortlich. Ferratum Group assigned BB-/Outlook Stable in initial rating from Fitch Helsinki, 13 March 2019 - Ferratum Oyj (ISIN: FI4000106299, WKN: A1W9NS) ("Ferratum" or the "Group") is pleased to announce that Fitch Ratings ("Fitch") has assigned the Group a Long-Term Issuer Default Rating ("LTIDR") of 'BB-'/Outlook Stable ("Rating"). The Rating is assigned at holding company level on the basis of Ferratum's consolidated financial statements, which include Ferratum Bank p.l.c. In view of this and with Ferratum being majority owned by Jorma Jokela, Group founder and CEO, no institutional support was factored into the Rating. Consequently, Ferratum's LTIDR is based on Fitch's standalone assessment of the Group. The Rating is in addition to the Group's credit rating of BBB+ from Creditreform Rating AG, a German rating agency. Dr. Clemens Krause, Chief Financial Offer and Chief Risk Officer, commented: "We are delighted to receive a credit rating assessed to international statistical standards by one of the top three global credit rating agencies. The rating reflects Fitch's favourable assessment of Ferratum's through-the-cycle profitability, capital adequacy and approach to risk provisioning for a diversified franchise of online and mobile consumer loans spanning more than 20 countries." Fitch's full-length rating report, including the key assumptions and sensitivities upon which the rating is derived, can be found on Ferratum's website: https://www.ferratumgroup.com/ With this release, Ferratum Oyj publishes inside information. About Ferratum Group: Ferratum Group is an international provider of mobile banking and digital consumer and small business loans, distributed and managed by mobile devices. Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, Ferratum has expanded rapidly to operate in 25 countries across Europe, Africa, South and North America and the Asia-Pacific region. As a pioneer in digital and mobile financial services technology, Ferratum is at the forefront of the digital banking revolution. Ferratum's mobile bank, launched in 2016, is an innovative mobile banking platform offering a range of banking services, including real time digital payments and transfers, within a single app. It is currently available in five European markets. Ferratum has approximately 1.9 million active and former customers who have an account or have been granted one or more loans in the past (as at 30 September 2018), of which over 799,000 customers have an open Mobile Bank account or an active loan balance in the last 12 months. Ferratum Group is listed on the Prime Standard of Frankfurt Stock Exchange under symbol 'FRU.' For more information, visit www.ferratumgroup.com. Contacts: Shares is the leading weekly publication for retail investors. It is packed with investment ideas, news and educational material to help build and run portfolios and get more from your money. Shares puts on free Investor Events throughout the year across the country. They provide an opportunity for investors to learn more about companies on the stock market and hear from a range of investment experts including fund managers and Shares journalists. U.S. President Donald Trump (L) and DPRK leader Kim Jong Un meet at the Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam, February 27, 2019. /VCG Photo China on Wednesday reiterated its stance that political dialogue is the key to resolving the Korean Peninsula issue amid fresh reports from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) that Pyongyang is committed to complete denuclearization. "China has always advocated that the Korean Peninsula issue can only be solved in peaceful means through political dialogue," spokesperson for Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Lu Kang said at a regular press conference on Wednesday. "Time has repeatedly proven that the crux to maintain such a dialogue and make progress, is for both sides to address each other's reasonable concerns in a balanced manner," Lu said. "Only in this way can both parties accumulate mutual trust and consensus, and create conditions for the political settlement step by step." Since the second summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and DPRK leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, both sides have expressed willingness to maintain dialogue. The DPRK media ran an article by a Foreign Ministry official on Tuesday, in which they said Pyongyang is committed to a nuclear-free Peninsula as well as a new type of DPRK-U.S. relationship. They added that Pyongyang is steadfast in building a permanent and stable "peace regime" on the Peninsula. On the same day, Moon Chung-in, a national security adviser to the president of the Republic of Korea, stated that the U.S. should seek a gradual denuclearization of the DPRK. Horton Hospital AN appeal against the High Courts decision to dismiss the legal challenge to bed closures at Horton General Hospital will be heard at the Court of Appeal on Thursday 14th March. The Keep the Horton General (KTHG) campaign group was an interested party in a High Court legal challenge by a number of district councils to The Big Consultation, a consultation carried out by Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) on proposed changes to services at Horton General Hospital in Banbury. On 7th December 2017, the High Court ruled that the consultation carried out by the Oxfordshire CCG was not unlawful. KTHG campaign group is appealing the High Courts decision on the same grounds as heard in the High Court. The first ground is on the hospitals failure to address the interdependency between permanent bed closures and community provision. The second ground is the hospital not properly consulting on new NHS England policy relating to bed closures. The third ground is in relation to the lawful ruling of Oxfordshire CCGs failure to set out both pros and cons of the bed closures. The final ground is the late admission of new evidence on the final day of the High Court hearing, despite it being requested months earlier. The consultation was launched on 16th January 2017 and sought views on proposed changes to services. The consultation was split into two phases with Phase 1 looking at changes to acute stroke services and home care in Oxfordshire and critical care, planned care and maternity services at the Horton General Hospital. Phase 2 related to A&E departments in Oxfordshire, childrens services and community hospitals, and was due to be scheduled for late 2017 before being abandoned by Oxfordshire CCG. Keith Strangwood, chairperson of the KTHG campaign group said: For 25 years this campaign group has been fighting to retain the full range of district general hospital services for the rapidly growing Banbury catchment. "This flawed consultation was the first step in huge regional changes to the NHS and it started by a downgrade of essential services at the Banbury hospital. Called the Oxfordshire Transformation Plan it presented permanent loss of full maternity, closure of 45 acute medical beds, loss of gynaecology and special care baby unit and downgrade of intensive care as positive steps. "Nowhere in the consultation were the negative aspects mentioned. The CCG failed to have anything in situ in the community to take the place of the beds. The community's views were obtained without full transparency. "We feel the principle of clear and adequate consultation must be preserved." Hong Kong: John Lee visits Islands District Secretary for Security John Lee today visited an integrated services centre in Islands District. Mr Lee toured the Tung Chung Integrated Services Centre of the Neighbourhood Advice-Action Council. The centre offers one-stop services and diversified activities for young people, schoolchildren, families and the elderly in the district. The services include counselling and support services for youth, after-school care services for primary students, and day care services for the elderly. After listening to a briefing on the centre's facilities and services, Mr Lee chatted with local youths, including non-Chinese speaking youngsters, to learn about their daily life, interests and future aspirations. He encouraged them to participate more in community activities and to serve the community. Mr Lee also met District Councillors to discuss issues relating to the local law and order situation and people's livelihood. This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Desperate Venezuelans are fetching water from a polluted river and drainage pipes, and lives hang in the balance in hospitals as a nationwide power outage enters its sixth day Tuesday. Schools and many businesses are closed and stores have no power to keep fresh what food is available. Venezuelans who are filling water bottles from a drainage pipe flowing into the filthy Guaire River are warned to use it only for flushing toilets or cleaning floors. Some hospitals have generators and doctors are hoping to be able to transfer patients who need operations to save their lives to those facilities. Power was restored to parts of the county Monday, but was reported to be unreliable. It is also hard to confirm reports of deaths and looting coming out of Venezuela because of communication difficulties. President Nicolas Maduro blames the power outage on the United States and opposition, accusing them of a cyberattack on a hydroelectric dam. Opposition leader and self-declared interim president Juan Guaido says government corruption and mismanagement are the cause. Engineers say a lack of maintenance and skilled experts fleeing the country have left the Venezuelan electrical grid in terrible shape. The U.S. is weighing a complaint at the World Trade Organization against "discriminatory" new taxes on digital giants such as a Facebook and Google which are being planned by France and other EU nations, a top U.S. trade official said Tuesday. "We think the whole theoretical basis of digital service taxes is ill-conceived and the effect is highly discriminatory against US-based multinationals," Chip Harter, a Treasury official and US delegate for global tax talks, said in Paris. Speaking ahead of two days of talks at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Harter added that "various parts of our government are studying whether that discriminatory impact would give us rights under trade agreements and WTO treaties." The OECD is spearheading talks aimed at forging a new global agreement on taxing technology and digital giants who often declare their income in low-tax nations, depriving other countries of billions in revenue. But that overhaul is expected until next year at the earliest, prompting France, Britain, Spain, Austria and Italy to move ahead with their own versions of a so-called "digital services tax" as soon as this year. British lawmakers on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected Prime Minister Theresa May's latest effort to set the terms of Britain's Brexit deal to split from the European Union on March 29. The House of Commons voted 391-242 against May's plan, setting up a Wednesday vote on whether Britain should quit the 28-nation EU bloc without agreeing on any of the details of its departure. And if that fails, a Thursday vote on whether to ask the EU for more time to negotiate an agreement. May implored lawmakers to adopt the deal she negotiated Monday with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker for "legally binding changes" to ensure that the border between EU member Ireland and Britain's Northern Ireland would remain open after Brexit. But the outcome mirrored a January vote on an earlier plan, which May lost even more decisively, by 230 votes. After losing again, May, the Conservative Party leader, told the House of Commons, "I continue to believe the best and only way" to quit the EU is "in an orderly way." She said the next options "are unenviable choices" -- leaving without a deal, or asking for more time to negotiate after already spending months to reach terms of the now-defeated pacts. Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain's main opposition Labor Party, told the parliamentarians, "The government has now been defeated by an enormous majority. The prime minister has run down the clock, and the clock has run out on her." He called for a new election. Before Tuesday's vote, May told lawmakers, "The danger for those of us who want to deliver, to have faith in the British public and deliver on their vote for Brexit, is that if this vote is not passed tonight, if this deal is not passed, then Brexit could be lost." Much about Biden's address to the International Association of Fire Fighters in Washington suggested he is in: attendees waving printed "Run Joe Run" placards; recollections from his blue-collar roots; criticism of Trump without naming him; and soaring oratory about America's "creed" and the nation's leadership role in the world. Biden, a consensus-building pragmatist and Washington establishment fixture, is almost certain to jump in, with a campaign kickoff expected by mid-April, sources recently told the New York Times. The Democratic elder statesman has been mulling a challenge against President Donald Trump for months. While he tops nearly all early polls for the Democratic nominations race, strategists and election observers have stressed that he is under pressure to enter the crowded field soon, or bow out. Former US vice president Joe Biden dropped teasing hints Tuesday that he could soon announce a 2020 White House campaign, telling an enthusiastic crowd that he may need their energy "in a few weeks." "I appreciate the energy you showed when I got up here," the 76-year-old told the fire fighters. "Save it a little longer. I may need it in a few weeks." The room rose in unison for a standing ovation, and Biden laughed as he said "be careful what you wish for." The event, attended by Biden's wife Jill, could easily have been mistaken for a campaign stop. The would-be candidate himself jogged on stage to Bruce Springsteen's "We Take Care of Our Own," followed by firefighters chanting "Run, Joe, run." Biden quoted from the Declaration of Independence. He would be an instant frontrunner should he enter the race, occupying the centrist lane in a field of Democrats whose party has steadily shifted leftward in recent years. Senator Bernie Sanders currently leads the liberal charge of 2020 candidates. Biden has another noteworthy speech this week. He addresses a Democratic Party dinner Saturday in Delaware, the small state he represented for 36 years in the US Senate until his stint as Barack Obama's deputy. 'Moving Closer' Fellow Delawarean Chris Coons, who replaced Biden in the Senate and speaks with him regularly, said all signs point to Biden jumping in. "He is moving closer, he's someone who I am confident is going to run," Coons told CBS on Monday. "Everything is being put in place but that last decision, which you know understandably is a big decision." Biden clearly spoke in the inspirational timber of a candidate, insisting that what makes America great is " giving everyone a fair shot, leaving no one behind, demonizing no one." "We're not able to be defined by race, by religion, by tribe," Biden said. "That's what the next president of the United States needs to understand, and that's what I don't think this current president understands at all." He hit out at the tone of the Trump era, saying extremism is on the rise and "mean pettiness has overtaken our politics." And he took aim at the current administration's policies, including the Republican "tax cut for the super wealthy." He has connected compassionately with working class Americans over the decades, and reflected that position again Tuesday, stressing that "unions built the middle class." Biden also movingly recalled the death of his first wife and their daughter in a 1972 car accident weeks before he was to be sworn in as a senator, and praised the work of firefighters who he said saved his two sons who were severely injured in the crash. The U.S. Treasury Department has issued an alert on financial transactions with North Korea, warning that any financial institutions could be subject to sanctions if they deal with North Korean banks. In an advisory on March 8, the department informed the Paris-based intergovernmental organization Financial Action Task Force to put North Korea on the "list of countries and other jurisdictions that fall short in combating the financing of terrorists," according to Voice of America on Monday. The North is the only country that has been on the list for eight straight years, VOA added. That means financial institutions must sever ties with North Korean banks or minimize dealings with them. The Treasury normally issues the advisory twice a year. The latest came on Oct. 31 last year. The FATF also advised financial institutions to apply "enhanced due diligence" in dealing with Iran. Any financial transactions with the North run the risk of being used to finance its weapons of mass destruction program and ballistic missile activities, the Treasury warned. The Treasury added that new joint ventures with the North and dealing with North Korean banks, for example by opening accounts that are not authorized by the UN, are all prohibited. Floods kill 66 in Mozambique, 45 in Malawi Maputo, March 13 (AFP) Mar 13, 2019 At least 66 people have been killed and 141,000 affected after heavy rains deluged central and northern Mozambique, the government has said as it appealed for funds to manage the crisis. "The government has decreed a red alert due to the continuing rains and the approach of the tropical cyclone Idai, expected to reach the country between Thursday to Friday," said cabinet spokeswoman Ana Comoana. She spoke to reporters late Tuesday after a cabinet meeting in Maputo to discuss the emergency. The floods in one of Africa's poorest countries have already destroyed 5,756 homes, affecting 15,467 households and 141,325 people. In neighbouring Malawi, floods have already claimed 45 lives and left over 230,000 people without shelter. Malawi's Meteorological Department has warned of more rains and flooding in the country's south between Thursday and Sunday. In Mozambique, 111 people have been injured, 18 hospitals destroyed, 938 classrooms destroyed and 9,763 students affected. More than 168,000 hectares (415,000 acres) of crops were destroyed, the government spokeswoman added. Authorities have ordered the compulsory evacuation of people living in flood-prone areas. "Sixteen accommodation centres have been opened in the provinces of Zambezia and Tete to accommodate the displaced," Comoana said. "The government needs 1.1 billion meticais ($16 million) to assist 80,000 families affected by the rains". Mozambique is prone to extreme weather events. Floods in 2000 claimed at least 800 lives while more than 100 were killed in 2015. The International Monetary Fund has advised Korea to carry out massive pump-priming to prop up its sagging economy. An IMF mission made the recommendation in a press conference in Seoul on Tuesday after visiting major government agencies, the Bank of Korea, state-run economic think tanks and private businesses over the past two weeks. Tarhan Feyzioglu, the head of the IMF mission to Korea, urged the government to "provide more fiscal stimulus through a supplementary budget" because it has the ammunition to do so thanks to increased tax revenues over the last three years. Feyzioglu recommended a supplementary budget of more than 0.5 percent of GDP, which based on last year's figure would amount to around W9 trillion (US$1=W1,130). In that event, "the government's growth target of 2.6-2.7 percent is feasible this year," he added. Feyzioglu also recommended that the BOK "should have a clearly accommodative monetary stance." Lotte is poised to sell off its food manufacturing business in China after getting rid of its supermarkets there. A source at Lotte said Tuesday, "We have decided to shut down some factories run by Lotte Confectionery and Lotte Chilsung Beverage" in China. Lotte was hard hit by a Chinese boycott after it made a site available in Korea for the U.S. to station a a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense battery. Due to plunging revenues and government chicanery it shut down its supermarkets and is in the process of closing down its department stores there. Its department store in Tianjin will shut down at the end of this month, leaving only three in the world's most populous country. Lotte Confectionery and Lotte Chilsung Beverage own six factories in China. Lotte started business in China in 1994 and has invested more than W10 trillion into its operations there (US$1=W1,130). President Moon Jae-in on Tuesday accepted a minor opposition party's proposal to create pan-governmental agency to reduce air pollution. Cheong Wa Dae spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom said Moon instructed presidential policy secretary Kim Soo-hyun during a visit to Brunei to accept the proposal. Kim said the presidential office will ask former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon if he is willing to head it. Bareun Mirae Party leader Sohn Hak-kyu proposed the idea at a party meeting last Friday, saying Korea and neighboring countries should work out together to solve the fine dust problem. "Ban has extensive international experience such as concluding the Paris Climate Accord in 2015 and is trusted by both conservatives and progressives here," Sohn said. "He will be able to handle the matter well while cooperating with neighboring countries including China." Ban was recently contacted by Cheong Wa Dae and will make his decision when he receives an official offer, a source said. For the last five years, the family of Perlyn Bechachino held on to their dream of owning a new house far away from a danger zone. Her family has been living in Magallanes District, a coastal community flattened by Super Typhoon Yolanda aka Haiyan in 2013. Last month, their dream finally came true when donors led by the Roman Catholic Church awarded them a new house at the Pope Francis Village here. While others had already given up because its almost five years since the project started, my husband, our child, and I kept that dream as we trust the priests who talked to us, that they will award us a new house, Bechachino said. The 44-year-old mother is just one of 263 beneficiaries who received the key and documents for their new houses at the Pope Francis Village in Barangay Diit. The village also includes a small business area, a school, and a chapel at the centre of the property. Development and Peace (D&P) in Canada, in partnership with Caritas Canada and other local partners, formally presented 263 land titles to victims and their families. Bishop Noel Simard from Valleyfield, Que., also led a ceremonial blessing of the homes. Unlike other housing projects for Haiyan victims in the city, the project is just located seven kilometers away from the citys business district and very accessible through public transportation. My husband who is a fisherman does not complain even if our new home is far from fishing grounds because this place is accessible and safe. We dont need to evacuate during typhoons, Bechachino added. Marlon Maraya, 60, vice president of the Pope Francis Homeowners Association, said it never entered his mind that he would someday own a house. It is impossible for a low-income hairdresser like me to earn enough money to buy a new concrete house, he shared. Maraya volunteered as a community support group member as required by donors to beneficiaries of the housing project. As a volunteer, he was a finance officer, in-charge of giving salary to workers. Im planning to convert the first floor of my house into a salon to earn a living. I have no competitor here since there is no salon in the community. Opening this kind of business in this area is good for me, Maraya said. Once fully completed, the housing project will benefit 566 families with three different designs as suggested by beneficiaries. The two-story row houses with a floor area of 40 square meters each, costs PHP300,000. About 166 are still in the process of construction. Church, community center, and playgrounds will also be put up in the area. Tacloban City Vice Mayor Jerry Yaokasain said the project is something that must be looked into as a model for future housing projects for disaster victims. "Pope Francis Village is a testament that in-city housing resettlement is possible, Yaokasin said. Soliman said the government should use the concept of a collaborative consortium that they used in implementing the Pope Francis Village project to ensure that the actual needs of victims of calamities and disasters are rightly provided. She pointed out that aside from listening to the disaster victims, government offices should learn to work together to ensure that there is no project duplication. Working together will save budget on government projects, I hope that the present administration will be open on the concept of collaborative convergence, the former DSWD chief said. Archbishop Du, for his part, enjoined the beneficiaries of the housing project to take care of their new house and treat it as gift from God. You have to take care of the house and build a community, live as a family and work hard, Du told the recipients. The prelate said that aside from the housing units, the consortium will also put up commercial and industrial establishments inside the Pope Francis Village compound to create jobs. The Catholic Register in Canada reported that D&P raised more than $12.8 million in donations with most of it eligible for matching by the Canadian government. The organization also received a $2.3 million federal grant for a joint project with its United States counterpart, Catholic Relief Services. We pulled together resources that we already had in the Philippines because weve been working in the Philippines for many, many years, said Evelyne Beaudoin, president of the Development and Peace National Council We asked our long-time partner Urban Poor Associates to come and help communities defend their land rights against government evictions and remain near the city where they make their livelihoods, said Beaudoin. After two years working with the Philippines government, D&P and its partners purchased a 12-hectare property in January 2015, just five kilometers away from the city. The property would be called Pope Francis Village in commemoration of his papal visit to the city where he held a Mass for 30,000 people in front of the airport. Residents were trained in construction, housing management, first aid, finance, and advocacy. They also set up a new cinderblock factory and these cinderblocks are now renowned in the Philippines as the most solid, high-quality cinderblocks, said Beaudoin. Beaudoin said providing help to the typhoon victims is not enough to make lasting change in their lives. It is important that the community becomes the protagonists of their own change. The success of Pope Francis Village is a model of that, she said. During inauguration day, Beaudoin and five other delegates visited various homes in the village. In one home, a grandmother was sitting on the floor with her three small grandchildren while the mother was cooking in the kitchen and the father was chatting with some neighbours outside. To see the peaceful and loving atmosphere in this home, that was very touching for us, said Beaudoin. It was a sign of the success of Pope Francis Village because that was one of the very dear hopes of Canadians and Development and Peace was to bring peace to these people who suffered so much. Sr. Georgette Gregory, congregational leader of the Sisters of St. Joseph Toronto, was also part of the delegation that visited Pope Francis Village. She met a young woman who was eight months pregnant with her seventh child when the storm hit. She had her two-year-old son in her arms when the tsunami swept their small home. She thought she and her two children were the only ones to survive until she was reunited with her husband and five other children a year and a half later. It was their second chance at life and theyre grabbing it and working with it. I was very impressed and very moved by the whole day, she said. Construction at Pope Francis Village continues as business areas and a chapel at the centre of the compound is being finished. About 40 houses are set to be finished by June. Icebreaker returns after successful voyage From:Shanghai Daily | 2019-03-13 09:29 Chinas icebreaker Xuelong returned to Shanghai yesterday morning after completing its 35th Antarctic scientific research mission. Xuelong, with 349 crew members on board, set sail from Shanghai on November 2. Over the next 131 days it sailed more than 30,800 nautical miles, nearly 57,042 kilometers, overcoming many difficulties including a collision. On January 19 in thick fog, the vessel collided with an iceberg when it was traveling at a speed of 3 knots, about 5.6 kilometers per hour, in the Amundsen Sea in western Antarctica. Its mast and part of its sides were damaged but luckily its engines, water tanks and other major equipment were not affected, and no one was injured. The damaged parts were soon repaired and the vessel was back to normal on January 21. Chinese researchers installed and tested the countrys first fluorescent Doppler lidar system at Zhongshan Station. The researchers have also obtained 2.5GB of data, including 51 hours of useful particulars. The new radar system allows researchers to carry out round-the-clock observation under clear weather conditions and obtain first-hand information such as temperature and wind field data. The findings will lead to a better understanding of the middle and upper atmosphere in the polar area, and help researchers predict global climate change. Our system is the best in the South Pole, Huang Wentao, a member of the research team and a researcher from the Polar Research Institute of China, said. About 12 kilometers south of the Zhongshan Station, Chinese researchers have used the countrys first self-developed polar drilling equipment to bore through almost 200 meters of ice sheet and obtain samples of bedrock. It is the first sample of underlying bedrock in the area, which will help researchers better understand what lies beneath the thick ice, and how ice sheets in the South Pole evolve. Chinese researchers also successfully tested a self-developed underwater robot in the Ross Sea. It will help researchers understand the relation between the ocean and climate change. The researchers also acquired 42 pieces of underwater sediment and nearly 200 kilograms of samples including soil, water, rocks, and animal and plant specimens. They also completed phase two of construction at Taishan Station, including the installation of electricity, heating and sewage processing systems. Mar 13 2019 3:28 pm Unclaimed income tax refunds totaling almost $1.4 billion may be waiting for an estimated 1.2 million taxpayers who did not file a 2015 Form 1040 federal income tax return, according to the Internal Revenue Service. To collect the money, these taxpayers must file their 2015 tax returns with the IRS no later than this years tax deadline, Monday, April 15, except for taxpayers in Maine and Massachusetts, who have until April 17. Were trying to connect over a million people with their share of $1.4 billion in potentially unclaimed refunds for 2015, said IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig. Students, part-time workers and many others may have overlooked filing for 2015. And theres no penalty for filing a late return if youre due a refund. The IRS estimates the midpoint for the potential refunds for 2015 to be $879 that is, half of the refunds are more than $879 and half are less. In cases where a federal income tax return was not filed, the law provides most taxpayers with a three-year window of opportunity to claim a tax refund. If they do not file a tax return within three years, the money becomes the property of the U.S. Treasury. For 2015 tax returns, the window closes April 15, 2019, for most taxpayers. The law requires taxpayers to properly address, mail and ensure the tax return is postmarked by that date. The IRS reminds taxpayers seeking a 2015 tax refund that their checks may be held if they have not filed tax returns for 2016 and 2017. In addition, the refund will be applied to any amounts still owed to the IRS or a state tax agency and may be used to offset unpaid child support or past due federal debts, such as student loans. By failing to file a tax return, people stand to lose more than just their refund of taxes withheld or paid during 2015. Many low- and moderate-income workers may be eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). For 2015, the credit was worth as much as $6,242. The EITC helps individuals and families whose incomes are below certain thresholds. The thresholds for 2015 were: $47,747 ($53,267 if married filing jointly) for those with three or more qualifying children; $44,454 ($49,974 if married filing jointly) for people with two qualifying children; $39,131 ($44,651 if married filing jointly) for those with one qualifying child, and; $14,820 ($20,330 if married filing jointly) for people without qualifying children. Current and prior year tax forms (such as the tax year 2015 Form 1040, 1040A and 1040EZ) and instructions are available on the IRS.gov Forms and Publications page or by calling toll-free 800-TAX-FORM (800-829-3676). Taxpayers who are missing Forms W-2, 1098, 1099 or 5498 for the years 2015, 2016 or 2017 should request copies from their employer, bank or other payer. Taxpayers who are unable to get missing forms from their employer or other payer can order a free wage and income transcript at IRS.gov using the Get Transcript Online tool. Alternatively, they can file Form 4506-T to request a wage and income transcript. A wage and income transcript shows data from information returns received by the IRS, such as Forms W-2, 1099, 1098, Form 5498 and IRA contribution information. Taxpayers can use the information from the transcript to file their tax return. State-by-state estimates of individuals who may be due 2015 income tax refunds State or Estimated Median Total District Number of Potential Potential Individuals Refund Refunds* Arizona 27,300 $780 $29,486,000 Arkansas 11,200 $824 $12,000,000 California 111,200 $832 $124,397,000 Colorado 23,500 $824 $26,173,000 Connecticut 12,700 $952 $15,981,000 Delaware 4,800 $886 $5,570,000 District of Columbia 3,400 $918 $4,219,000 Florida 84,000 $887 $95,697,000 Georgia 41,100 $799 $44,754,000 Hawaii 7,000 $935 $8,523,000 Idaho 5,200 $712 $5,209,000 Illinois 45,800 $924 $54,804,000 Indiana 26,900 $895 $30,670,000 Iowa 12,300 $913 $13,737,000 Kansas 12,700 $874 $14,283,000 Kentucky 15,700 $874 $17,246,000 Louisiana 22,600 $884 $26,759,000 Maine 4,700 $806 $4,820,000 Maryland 25,700 $897 $31,274,000 Massachusetts 26,100 $973 $32,579,000 Michigan 39,700 $873 $45,535,000 Minnesota 18,000 $813 $19,222,000 Mississippi 11,200 $814 $12,032,000 Missouri 27,000 $825 $29,008,000 Montana 4,100 $831 $4,521,000 Nebraska 6,300 $870 $6,923,000 Nevada 13,700 $867 $15,728,000 New Hampshire 5,500 $976 $6,859,000 New Jersey 33,100 $960 $41,353,000 New Mexico 8,600 $860 $9,950,000 New York 62,500 $964 $77,662,000 North Carolina 37,100 $831 $39,955,000 North Dakota 3,700 $980 $4,493,000 Ohio 43,600 $852 $47,428,000 Oklahoma 19,100 $886 $22,006,000 Oregon 17,900 $779 $19,118,000 Pennsylvania 46,000 $934 $53,541,000 Rhode Island 3,300 $949 $4,025,000 South Carolina 14,600 $777 $15,701,000 South Dakota 3,300 $928 $3,646,000 Tennessee 24,000 $853 $25,976,000 Texas 129,300 $929 $158,244,000 Utah 9,300 $791 $9,859,000 Vermont 2,200 $876 $2,388,000 Virginia 32,900 $867 $38,441,000 Washington 32,400 $939 $40,142,000 West Virginia 5,900 $948 $6,979,000 Wisconsin 16,100 $787 $16,532,000 Wyoming 3,300 $958 $3,964,000 Totals 1,197,600 $879 $1,379,412,000 * Excluding credits. Mar 13 2019 2:01 pm During their meeting on Monday, March 11, the Board of Fire Commissioners of Lakewood Fire District No.1 presented a Proclamation to the Eckner Family, in recognition of the dedicated service of Volunteer Firefighter Timothy C. Eckner, who died last year. The members of Rescue Company No. 2 accepted the Proclamation on behalf of Firefighter Eckners wife Annemarie. Firefighter Eckner became a member of the Lakewood Fire Department on December 4, 1981, when he joined Rescue Company No. 2 Station 65. During his twenty-two-year tenure, Firefighter Eckner served proudly as both a Firefighter and Fire Officer within the Company. He held the office of President, Secretary, Lieutenant and Captain until he retired from the Department on March 3, 2003, when he retired with his wife to Florida. The Board of Fire Commissioners commends the devotion and valuable expertise of Firefighter Eckner and extends its sorrow and prayers to his family, the Board said. Home Just In Civil society leaders demonstrate against deal with Raut Kathmandu, March 13 A group of civil society leaders on Wednesday staged a protest in Kathmandu against a recent agreement that the government signed with Madheshi politician CK Raut. Policed interfered in the protest and detained the demonstrators including Krishna Pahadi. They had launched the demonstration in front of the southern entrance of Singhadarbar, the main administrative complex of the country. The demonstrators argued that the deal was criminal in nature and it jeopardised the countrys sovereignty as Raut supporters began interpreting as the governments agreement to hold a consensus on whether to separate the Madhesh region from Nepal. They, however, maintained that the deal should be welcomed if it really ended the secessionist movement. Daria Martins Tonight the World explores the vivid writings of her grandmother, Suzi Stiassni, who fled from the imminent threat of Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Stiassnis diaries consist of over 20,000 pages of forensically recorded accounts of her dreams over 35 years, with them often returning to her abandoned childhood home. aria Martin Tonight the World, 2019 anamorphic 16mm film transferred to HD 13 .5 minutes Daria Martin, 'Tonight the World', 2019. Anamorphic 16mm film transferred to HD, 13.5 minutes. Copyright Daria Martin, courtesy Maureen Paley, London. The exhibition starts with Refuge, a three-dimensional rendering of Martins grandmothers villa in Brno, where she grew up. The artist worked with gamers in Brno during the creation of this film, which is now one of the major gaming hubs in Europe. The viewer is guided through various rooms of the childhood home they had to abandon, engaging with some of the recurrent objects in the dreams, like a group of miniature terracotta warriors and a robot figurine. There is a contradiction of emotion here, with the audience guided around these rooms with familiar confidence, but interacting with unknown objects. This empty grey house evokes a sense of nostalgia, yet is unfamiliar to the audience. This digital rendition is enhanced by the dark atmosphere of The Curve, with the winding corridor echoing the ideas of intrusion and construction in the video game. Daria Martin, 'Tonight the World', 2019. Anamorphic 16mm film transferred to HD, 13.5 minutes. Copyright Daria Martin, courtesy Maureen Paley, London. The hypnotic corridor is an elongation of this dream world, drawing the observer towards the glowing orange light. Through a window in the rounded wall, 275 illuminated pages of Stiassnis journal are pinned to the surface, creating an overwhelming wall of text. Here, the practical objective of these diary entries is highlighted. Initially used for psychoanalysis, these pages are presented in a grid-like sequence, emphasising Stiassnis need to find rationality in the irrationality of her dreams. the space's Continuing around The Curve, the blue robot from the video game can be seen perched on the wall, peering down from above. This silent voyeur is unsettling, a remnant of the dream world that has escaped into real life, breaking down barriers between what is genuine and what is fake. Martin praises the architecture of this exhibition space : My exhibition explores another sort of back room a lost dream diary archive it enables a cinematic journey of successive reveals but also withmore eccentric insides. Daria Martin, 'Tonight the World', 2019. Anamorphic 16mm film transferred to HD, 13.5 minutes. Copyright Daria Martin, courtesy Maureen Paley, London. This robot connects the videogame walkthrough with the final part of the exhibition, in which five of Stiassnis dreams are reimagined by Martin in film, using actors to recreate these visions. These films emphasise the peculiarity of Martins grandmothers visions, bringing these fears to life. Each sequence focuses on dreams of anxiety about intruders, echoing Stiassnis real-world fears of Nazi invasion. The films are accompanied by the corresponding dream diary entries on the wall, allowing the audience to experience both the reconstruction of the dream world and the accurate recollection concurrently. Martin envisages that this exhibition will become a portrait of her grandmother, and an exploration of intergenerational trauma, loss and perseverance. Daria Martin, 'Refuge', 2019. HD videogame, still. Copyright Daria Martin, courtesy Maureen Paley, London. here The artist aims to create a continuity between people and objects, dreams and reality, the internal and external. In lifting the dreams off the page and placing them on screen, Martin explains, I wanted to reinvest them with what I imagine was their original physical and emotional intensity. If somebody asked you what the worlds rarest and most endangered marine mammal was, would you know it was the vaquita porpoise? Image Credit: Natural History Magazine from Flickr 'the large dark ring around its eyes and dark patches on its lips thst form a thin line from the mouth to the pectoral fins' Characterised by, the vaquita is the worlds smallest cetacean. It is only found close to shore of the northern end of Mexicos Gulf of California, otherwise known as the Sea of Cortez, and the species has never been held in captivity. Its name translates from Spanish as little cow, and its unique appearance is often likened to a smiling panda. However, a not-so-fun-fact is that we are disturbingly close to losing them forever. The History of the Vaquita genetic evidence 97% drop from the year before that The species itself was only discovered in 1958. The population was never large, according to, but the current estimated figure is half of what it was in 2016, with a staggering ''. The population remaining only amounts to 30. World Wildlife Fund critically endangered. For this reason, the(WWF) has listed the vaquita as Image Credit: Paula Olson, NOAA from Wikimedia Commons Why is it so endangered? The species has a relatively short life expectancy, with the average vaquita living for an estimated 20 years. Less than half of the estimated 30 individuals that remain are believed to be females of reproductive age. One female will only give birth to up to a single calf every couple of years, so it is clear that the porpoise species will struggle to reproduce faster than its population is depleting. bycatch However, the primary reason for the dwindling population is that the vaquita is a victim of, meaning that they are often unintentionally caught and drowned in gill nets that are used in illegal fishing operations. which hang vertically in the water 'delicacy' These nets,, are designed to catch the totoaba fish which is endemic to the Gulf of California. The swim bladder of the totoaba fish is a highly-valued and highly-demandedin China. This fish species and the vaquita are very similar in size, meaning that the porpoise frequently gets caught up in the gill nets, whether they are actively being used or left abandoned in the sea, and consequently drowns. So, what is being done to help the species? development of new fishing gear and techniques to allow local communities to resume legal, sustainable fishing activities In 2017, the Mexican government decided to enforce a permanent gill net ban in the Upper Gulf of California, following a partial ban that was introduced in 2015. Thewas also agreed to. This is a fantastic and encouraging step forward in the path to saving the vaquita, provided the ban is fully enforced and accompanied by fishing alternatives for local communities" In response to this move, WWF-Mexico said: the Carlos Slim Foundation DiCaprio Foundation The ban followed an agreement between the Mexican government,, and the Leonardo DiCaprio has long been an environmental activist, having set up the DiCaprio Foundation in 1998. It is a non-profit organisation dedicated to advocating environmental awareness. The actor himself has expressed his commitment to helping save the vaquita on Twitter. follows undercover investigators, environmentalists, journalists, and the Mexican Navy on their desperate last-minute effort to rescue the [vaquita] from extinction. Most recently, he promoted Sea of Shadows, a feature documentary released this year that he co-produced, which Proud to have @seaofshadowsSOS , an Appian Way production, showing at @sundancefest . Congratulations to the whole team for the incredible work theyre doing to save the vaquita. pic.twitter.com/bASxI5U8EF Leonardo DiCaprio (@LeoDiCaprio) January 28, 2019 The documentary is described as having the intensity of a Hollywood thriller and hopes to raise awareness of the plight of the vaquita. International Save the Vaquita Day A further initiative to raise awareness iswhich, this year, is on 6th July. An annual event, it directs the worlds attention to what the species is going through, what needs to be done to prevent its extinction, and what people can do to help. Viva Vaquitas petition It also aims to gather more signatures for relevant petitions, such asdemanding that the Mexican government steps up their efforts to save the species, and to fundraise for associated educational and research work. the Mexican government did attempt an effort to move as many vaquitas as possible In Autumn 2017,to a protective sanctuary, which would provide them with protection until vaquita-friendly fishing methods were adopted. However, this effort was soon suspended on discovering that the creatures reacted poorly to being in new surroundings, resulting in the death of one female. lost or abandoned illegal ghost gill nets, which continue to entangle and kill vaquitas and other marine species WWF has also contributed to the fight to protect the vaquita, through working with partners to retrieveand through supporting acoustic monitoring of the population. Yet, despite the efforts to save the vaquita, the species has not yet seen a population increase, and their situation is becoming increasingly concerning. Illegal totoaba trafficking operations still occur, and abandoned gill nets remain in the sea, meaning that the vaquita is still in grave danger, and will ultimately become extinct unless the use of gill nets is actually ended, once and for all. Unfortunately, The Content Is Not Here You have arrived at this page because the page or post you were looking for no longer exists. Please check our main navigation pages for other content: Home Page Thanks to a recent donation, the Ecorse Fire Department will be able to provide better emergency care and service to its residents. Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital donated two automated external defibrillators to the Fire Departments emergency medical equipment. An AED is a lightweight, portable device that delivers an electric shock through the chest to the heart. The shock can potentially stop an irregular heartbeat and restore a normal rhythm after sudden cardiac arrest. The AEDs will allow the Ecorse Fire Department to bring lifesaving equipment to the patient, said Thomas McKeown, associate medical director for HFWHs Department of Emergency Medicine. These defibrillators have been shown to be the best in treating patients that have a cardiac arrest. The two units cost approximately $4,000 and were provided with resources from the hospitals emergency critical care fund. Money for the fund is raised at various events throughout the year. As a community-based hospital, its important for Henry Ford Wyandotte to support the communitys health and help first responders provide superior emergency care, according to Toni Silas, director of Clinical Operations for Emergency Medicine. Partnerships with our EMS agencies are essential to ensure excellence in care for the communities we serve, Silas said. When the need for AED was identified, our hospital leadership did not hesitate to meet the ask. Ecorse Mayor Lamar Tidwell expressed his gratitude to the hospital for its lifesaving contribution. The city of Ecorse would like to thank Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital for supplying the city with the badly needed AED equipment, Tidwell said. This will allow our Fire Department to serve our citizens more efficiently, which will help save lives in the city of Ecorse. RTHK: FAA to ground Boeing 737 MAX fleet in US President Trump on Wednesday said the United States would ground Boeings 737 MAX jets, following Europe and other nations that have already stopped the planes flying due to safety concerns, following an Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday. Were going to be issuing an emergency order of prohibition to ground all flights of the 737 MAX 8 and the 737 MAX 9 and planes associated with that line, Trump told reporters at the White House. The FAA is prepared to make an announcement very shortly regarding the new information and physical evidence that weve have received from the site, and from other locations and through a couple of other complaints, he said, referring to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. Boeing shares, which were up earlier in the session, fell 2 percent to US$367.70. The shares have fallen about 13 percent since the crash, losing more than US$25 billion of market value. Meanwhile, Germanys federal agency responsible for investigating air accidents will not analyse the black box from the Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed on Sunday, casting uncertainty over the process of finding out what may have caused the disaster. This is a new type of aircraft with a new black box, with new software. We cant do it, said Germout Freitag, a spokesman for Germanys Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation (BFU). The move leaves unclear the destination of the black box, which may yield vital details of what caused the Boeing Co 737 MAX 8 to plunge to the ground, killing 157 people. A spokesman for Ethiopian Airlines had said earlier that the black boxes recovered from the crashed plane would be sent to Germany for analysis. Canada also grounded 737 MAX jets on Wednesday, saying satellite data suggested similarities to a previous crash involving the same plane model. Countries around the world have grounded the 737 MAX jets or banned them from flying over their airspace since the Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed soon after taking off from Addis Ababa on Sunday. The still unexplained crash followed another involving a Boeing 737 MAX in Indonesia five months ago that killed 189 people. Although there is no proof of any link, the twin disasters have spooked passengers, led to the grounding of most of Boeings 737 MAX fleet and hammered shares in the U.S. planemaker, the worlds largest. Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau told a news conference that Ottawa would stop 737 MAX 8 and 9 jets from leaving, arriving or flying over Canada. He said satellite data suggested similarities between the flight profiles of the Ethiopian jet and that of a Lion Air plane of the same type that crashed in Indonesia last year. Both planes crashed shortly after takeoff. Air Canada and rival WestJet Airlines operate a total of 37 Boeing 737 MAX jets. Boeing has said it has full confidence in the 737 MAX - a model that has 371 jets in operation around the world. Ethiopian Airlines spokesman Asrat Begashaw said it was still unclear what happened on Sunday, but its pilot had reported control issues - as opposed to external factors such as birds. The pilot reported flight control problems and requested to turn back. In fact he was allowed to turn back, he said. At the rural site where Flight ET 302, which was bound for the Kenyan capital Nairobi, came down near the village of Gora-Bokka, dozens of grief-stricken relatives paid their respects. Only charred fragments of victims remain, meaning it will take weeks to identify all of them using dental or DNA testing. The passengers came from more than 30 nations. Since the Indonesia crash, there has been a focus on an automated anti-stall system in the 737 MAX that dips the aircrafts nose down. (Reuters) Last updated: 2019-03-14 HKT 03:13 This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Kathmandu, March 13 Boeing 737 MAX planes will not be coming to Nepal after its immediate neighbour India banned the planes from flying into its airspace on Wednesday. An aircraft of this series belonging to Ethiopian Airlines had crashed on Sunday, a few minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board. It was the second such tragedy in five months, following an October crash in Indonesia that killed all 189 passengers and crew on Lion Air Flight 610. Airlines and regulators around the world have now grounded the modelthough Boeing and the US government insist that it is safe. Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal has said that there have been no 737 MAX flights operating from or to Nepal. Pratap Babu Tiwari, spokesperson at Nepals only international airport, says that only Slik Air was flying the 737 MAX planes to Nepal. However, after Singapore put a ban on the aircraft, Silk Air flew a different aircraft to Nepal. Along with Singapore, China has also put a ban on the aircraft. CAAN Director General Sanjiv Gautam says that the officials are holding talks on whether to continue banning the aircraft from entering Nepal. No Nepali company owns a Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. The Perspective Atlanta, Georgia March 13, 2019 The recent report issued by Kroll, an audit outfit that was hired by the international partner or USAID is like a CIA report or a classified report. Numbers are the most crucial components of any audit report, but some of these numbers are redacted in the report, implying that the Weah Government, with the help of USAID and Kroll, is not acting in good faith. What is troubling to most Liberians and well-wishers of Liberia is the involvement of the American Embassy through USAID in covering the financial scams of the Sirleaf and Weah regimes. Kroll mentioned that requested documents and access were not given to them but failed to name the people at the CBL who denied them the access and documents. Though the government promoted Kroll as a reputable international audit firm that was going to conduct a forensic audit as mentioned in President Weahs Annual Message, the U.S. Embassy is calling the exercise a scoping exercise, instead of a forensic audit. PIT was appointed before Kroll was hired, but did nothing until Kroll issued its report, meaning that the PIT report is governments spin of the Kroll report. In an apparent rush to appease the Government, PIT and Kroll hurriedly issued their reports within hours of each other and then recommended for more investigations, when Liberians were led to believe PIT and Kroll were hired to conduct the investigation. Why did Kroll and PIT not ask for more time or resources, if they were constrained: this would have been far better to avoid the confusion that each of the report has created. The issue of the L$18.8 billion has generated more questions than answers. For example, the two reports stated that they did not get information from the commercial banks about the new banknotes and the old banknotes. How can this be when the commercial banks are the institutions CBL uses to infuse (or deposit the new banknotes) the new banknotes and retrieve the old banknotes from the market. Yet, Kroll and PIT are suspiciously stating how much banknotes CBL infused into the currency in circulation and how much old banknotes CBL destroyed without any supporting documents from both the commercial banking institutions and the Central Bank of Liberia. Kroll did not get information from the auditee and did not explain in its report whether it asked third parties (i.e., commercial banks) for schedule and information about the new banknotes and old banknotes that should have been destroyed. But, interestingly, the foreign forensic investigators reported that CBL infused more banknotes into currency in circulation, than the value of banknotes CBL reported in its financial statements, which an external audit firm audited for 2016 and 2017. Krolls forensic investigators failed to also explain the difference between what the investigators reported and the value of banknotes CBL reported in 2016. For example, in 2016. CBL reported in its financial statements that it infused L$2 billion banknotes into the currency in circulation, the forensic investigators reported that CBL infused L$3 billion banknotes into the currency in circulation. So, how is it possible for a forensic investigation to conclude that CBL infused L$3 billion into the currency in circulation, even though it didn't get any information from the CBL and/or third parties that received the new banknotes. Also, how did the forensic investigators verify the number and amount of old banknotes that CBL destroyed? Did the forensic team have the authority to investigate or did the investigators even care to verify the amount infused? How and from where did the investigating Teams get the information on the new banknotes CBL infused? Were the old banknotes withheld within the reserved vault of CBL? Or the information came from the site where CBL destroyed the old notes? Interestingly, the PIT gave us information on the beginning balance and ending balance of currency in circulation of 2016. But the same PIT gave us a combined ending balance of 2017 and 2018. Providing separate information about 2017 and 2018 is important because most of the new banknotes came in 2017, the last year of former President Sirleaf. How was it possible for the PIT to have verified that CBL infused L$23 billion into the currency in circulation as per page # 43 of the PIT report? This is troubling information because CBL reported to have infused L$8 billion into the currency in circulation between 2016 and 2018. CBL reported that it had L$10 billion at January 1, 2016, and also reported that it had L$ 18.8 billion at November 30, 2018. The External Audit Firm audited CBL financial statements of 2016 and 2017. Let us look at what amount of the new banknotes PIT said is missing or to be accounted for, L$2.6 billion. PIT reported that CBL infused L$13 billion (L$3 billion in 2016 and L$10 billion in 2017 and 2018). PIT stated that CBL destroyed L$4.4 billion old banknotes. In the reserved vault, PIT reported that CBL kept L$1.4 billion banknotes. So, let us add the above numbers and determine what banknotes that CBL accounted for: 1) L$13 billion infused. 2) L$4.4 billion destroyed 3) L$1.4 billion kept in the reserved vault. If CBL deposited L$13. billion, destroyed L$4.4 billion and reserved L$1.4 billion, does CBL owe any banknotes from the L$18.8 billion banknotes to be accounted for? The total of the numbers is over the L$18.8 billion. To make matter worst and even more confusing, Kroll reported that L$1.9 billion could not be accounted for. This amount was reported to have been delivered by the Crane, the company hired by CBL to print the Liberian dollar bills. CBL records showed that it received L$1.9 billion less than Crane reported to Kroll. The gimmick that led to the hiring of Kroll has backfired, so President Weah is now bringing in the General Auditing Commission (GAC). Did he not know that Liberia had an audit entity called GAC? But, when GAC files a credible report, like his predecessor, President may unleash a flurry of attacks on the entity too, branding them as enermy of the state. Amazingly,they jailed some officials of the Central Bank of Liberia, but this was yet another smokescreen that had nothing to do with accounting for the missing billions of Liberian dollars. It was another attempt to fool the Liberian people. But amidst these troubling situations, all is not lost. The same way we elected the government, we can collectively show our moral outrage by holding the feet of the government to the fire. We can converge on the streets of Liberia in peaceful protests to demand the resignation of President Weah, as it is done around the world. Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who iniatially said he was going to re-run, bowed down to pressure from protesters by opting not to re-run after ruling Algeria for 20 years. But before it gets to that point, Liberians must continue to call on the Weah Government to account for the missing 16 billion dollars and the US$25 million dollars . Those at the national bank who refused to give documents to the Kroll auditors must be dealt with in accordance with the law of the nation. The Finance Minister and current Central Bank Governor must be held responsible for the US $25 million. There must also be a call for an audit of President Weah to ascertain the origin of the money used to build the Weah estates in and around Monrovia. These can be done, but without a unified and strong opposition, independent judiciary, a strong catoless media, a genuine civic society, and a strong legislature, Liberia will not make progress - the broad-day theft will continue to multiply. Liberians must put on their lenses to see clearly, because it does look like the step-father who bankrolled the Kroll investigation is standing tall to protect the financial scams of the Sirleaf and Weah administrations. In other words, supporting the redactment of the figures in the Kroll report and treating the attendant short-comings of the report mutedly means that America is helping to dig the shithole so Liberia will forever remain a shithole. To paraphrase the Great Dalai Lama, if you cannot help the Liberian people to get out of the shithole, do not hurt them by digging it further. The Weah adiminstration, with the backing of USAID, is now using the Kroll report to lie to us (the Liberian people). So lets put on our lenses. IMF recent reports that Liberia is sinking fast is just the tip of the iceberg. Montreal, CA (H4T1V6) Today Cloudy with snow developing after midnight. Low -6C. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of snow 90%. Snow accumulations less than one inch.. Tonight Cloudy with snow developing after midnight. Low -8C. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of snow 90%. Snow accumulations less than one inch. To be or not to be, the phrase from Shakespeares Hamlet is relevant to Nepalis these days. It can portray the dilemma of many people at crossroads in life. Even after you start your career, its always the same question- Should I stay in Nepal or go for a permanent residency application abroad? And for those Nepalis living abroad, the question is- Should I stay abroad or return to Nepal? I have been in Germany for past eight and half years. I did my Masters here and am a fresh PhD in engineering. As an engineer, I felt that it would make more sense to figure out what I wanted to do with my life first rather than look for an inspiration or be devastated by what was happening around. With my degree, returning to Nepal and finding a job was never going to be a problem. However, the biggest dilemma was whether I would feel fulfilled and accomplished with my career there. Here in Germany, I have worked with some of the best institutions at the global level. There, this level of exposure and thrill of working at a world class level would be missing. However, during my PhD, I realised that I wouldnt feel the sense of accomplishment even if I stayed abroad and continued my career here also. By the time I had joined my PhD, I had already worked in some renowned companies as a Masters student. Needless to say, I already learned what a postdoctoral career would look like. I had a wonderful CV and could easily get a prosperous life abroad. But would it be worth it if it didnt hit my soul hard enough to wake me up every morning with a sense of purpose? For me, being able to make a significant difference is very important to get my engines running. Without this drive, I am vacant. Maybe I have an identity crisis with my engineering, I dont know but I could contribute a lot to Nepal. I did intend to return when I started my journey here in Germany. But there was always this dilemma, a constant nagging fear that I was not ready yet or that the challenges would be overwhelming. Often, I was my own devils advocate on numerous occasions and lived in procrastination that maybe tomorrow would be a better day. I was in the real Hamletian dilemma. I have had a very fulfilling career here in Germany. During my stay, I got the opportunity to study and work at some of the best universities and companies in the world. I have worked with different scientists, engineers and researchers on different projects. I was able to see the project develop from ideas in paper to finished products in the field. After achieving the goals that I had set, from getting the academic degree to work experiences, I now wish to return to Nepal. I wish to bring the state of the art engineering technologies that I have seen and experienced in Germany. Therefore, I have decided to start my career in the education sector as a lecturer for undergraduates. I have already been offered this job at a small college in Biratnagar. I will be starting my career soon. I want to bring the innovative teaching methods and styles that I have learnt over the years in Germany. I want to share my global experiences with the students while being in Nepal. I want to guide them with their career as well. While I was a student in Nepal, I had always felt the need for somebody with the knowledge and experience that I now have. Now, I may sound like an idealistic hero who is in an illusion of perfection. But I have seen it all and been through all the highs and lows in life over these years. I find myself capable and confident. Also, I am not alone. I have my network of experts in the Nepali diaspora, who will be ready to engage their brain into this effort of mine. I am not the first one; neither shall be the last to return to Nepal with this conviction. My motivation for returning to Nepal is quite clear and simple. I wish to state it in Winston Churchills words I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. MBABANE What should have been good news was badly received by Members of Parliament (MPs) on Monday. This was the announcement by the Minister of Sports, Culture and Youth Affairs Harries Madze Bulunga; that some of the youth of the country would some time this week be presented with about E3 million from the Youth Enterprise Revolving Fund (YERF). The total allocation to the Youth Empowerment Fund was E12 million. During his preamble, Bulunga had announced that there had initially been 270 applicants of the countrys youth who had forwarded business proposals. However, as soon as the minister took his seat, the MPs fell on him like a ton of bricks. This was during the budget debate of the ministrys end-of-year report by the House of Assembly portfolio committee, which is chaired by Siphofaneni MP Mduduzi Simelane. First to ask the minister was Hosea MP Mduduzi Mabuza, who wanted to know what criteria they had used to select the individuals who would be awarded a quarter of the money from the fund. The minister said an organisation called IDCE would manage both the disbursements and collections on behalf of the fund although he did not get into details of what the institution was about IDCE is an acronym for the Industrial Development Company of Eswatini. Mabuza wanted to know what skills the potential entrepreneurs possessed. Next was Timphisini MP Nelson Mamba who also asked how the money had been disbursed because no one had come to his constituency to inform the youth about the fund. Laughable Mhlangatane MP Madala Mhlanga, on the other hand, said the E12 million allocated to the youth was laughable. He said the figure was very disappointing and would not be enough to assist the youth of the country, which was a majority of the countrys population. Mhlume MP Victor Malambe, asked the minister why the fund did not operate like the Regional Development Fund (RDF) where it would be addressed at Inkhundla level. Further, who represents the youth during these meetings and how were those who will benefit selected? asked Malambe. He wondered if the beneficiaries were from all over the country as he suspected that they could be from one area. MBABANE The Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT) is indebted to government by over E400 000. The debt by SNAT to government is said to be money paid to secretary generals of the association. The publication has learnt that the issue is being talked about in hushed tones as it is yet to be reported to the general council. According to impeccable sources, the organisations leadership came to know of the arrears at the height of the cost-of-the-living-adjustment (CoLA) activities. This is said to have caused a delay in relaying the message to the associations structures. Arrears The sources said the arrears date back to the tenure of Muzi Mhlanga who is the Deputy Secretary of the Trade Union Congress of Swaziland (TUCOSWA). It is said Mhlanga, while in office, as the secretary general of SNAT, was remunerated by government despite that he was performing the unions activities. He was paid his salary and pension. For this, SNAT was supposed to remit the money back to government, the source said. However, it is said the trade union remitted his salary and failed to do the same for his pension. Also, Zwelithini Mndzebeles tenure is said to have been engulfed with the same challenges whereby the association did not remit to government the money that was paid to him by the taxpayer. It is said these anomalies were discovered when the organisation was reconciling its financial statements. For the incumbent SNAT Secretary General, Sikelela Dlamini, it is said the organisation has already remitted E32 000 to government. Dlamini did not want to delve on the merits of the matter save to say that the organisation would deal with it in the appropriate forums. Actual Meanwhile, sources within the organisation said the leadership of the organisation was waiting for the actual debt. The sources said a letter had been sent to the office of the account general requesting to be furnished with the exact amount owed in respect of these monies. The NEC is prepared to pay the money. They have already engaged government on how they can pay back, he said. On the other hand, Communications Officer in the Ministry of Finance Setsabile Dlamini said her ministry could not have the money owed by SNAT as the agreement was between the organisation and the Ministry of Education and Training. MBABANE Over E0.5 billion of taxpayers money has literally gone down the drain. This is the money that the taxpayer has parted with due to the non-completion and eventual stoppage of the construction of the Nhlangano to Sicunusa (MR13) Road Project. The shocking revelation was discovered by the auditor general (AG) when an audit of the project was made. The AG, Timothy Matsebula, described the project as one that resembled a drought-stricken grazing area. The AG stated that he had raised concerns with the controlling officer that the initial planned duration of completion was within 24 months, however, it was still incomplete 60 months later. I also reported that the cost of the project at its inception was E465 990 202.85. However, during my audit inspection I noted that a total of E576 101 574.86 had been paid out for this incomplete project, reported the AG. The AG stated that of much concern was that the contractor, Kukhanya/Gabriel Couto Joint Venture had suspended works and the project resembled a drought-stricken grazing area. Quality The AG submitted that he was also concerned that the project would be of compromised quality, if it would ever be completed by the current contractor. These are allegations in the AGs report for the financial year ended March 31, 2018, which is yet to be debated and adopted by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC). The AG continued to state that the most disconcerting fact was that in the implementation of the project, the controlling officer had been flouting and contravening loan requirements, rules, criterion, contractual obligations and construction standards from the first day. The project was under the Ministry of Public Works and Transport. The AG further raised concerns to the controlling officer that the main contractor in the project, Gabriel Couto/Kukhanya Joint Venture was recommended for tendering stage despite not meeting prequalification requirements. MBABANE A liSwati man was shot dead at the home of a former ANC Councillor at Nzimane, in U-trecht within the KwaZulu-Natal Province on Friday night. The man identified as Maxwell Sive Dlamini died in a hail of bullets targeted at the home owner, former Councillor Mavis Phenyane. Dlamini was said to have been fond of relaxing at the Phenyane home, with friends. He also occasionally did menial tasks when asked by the Phenyane family. He was identified as a liSwati, though his family in the country had not been identified by yesterday. Further investigation by this newspaper found that his ID number was 9008246100683. He sustained three bullet wounds, one to his chest and two on the thighs during the attack on the family. He died on the spot. Dlamini migrated to South Africa in search of job opportunities, where he worked for an employer who had a tree-felling business. The former councillor was also shot dead together with family members, who were identified as Siyanda Nzima and Thobile Phenyane, according to Isolezwe, the South African daily newspaper. Family member dies Another member of the family died on Monday due to shock, bringing the number of fatalities to five. The gunman was still at large by yesterday. The newspaper reported that the family had a shop within the residence where they were attacked by the rogue shooter, carrying an automatic rifle. An unknown man arrived late in the day, and asked to buy a bottle of beer and was informed that there was none in the shop. He left and came back again with the similar request for beer, and alarmed family members started asking why he wanted them to repeat one and the same thing as they had informed him that there was no beer. He then asked for Mrs Phenyane, further divulging that he was on a mission to kill her. Immediately, he then started shooting, a family member, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of her life, was quoted as having said in the SA publication. The family member was quoted saying the first fatal shot hit a woman who had a three-month-old baby. Other family members are said to have taken cover under tables but the ruthless gunmen continued to spray bullets until the councillor and Dlamini were also hit. A male member of the family who was visiting neighbours heard the gunshots and quickly ran home to investigate, but was unlucky to come across the gunmen on his way out and he shot him as well. An alarmed neighbour who also asked what was happening was shot at, reads the publication. The incident, according to the paper, was confirmed by KwaZulu Natal Lt Colonel Thulani Zwane, who said four counts of murder were being investigated. The remaining family members were said to have vacated the home yesterday and moved to another place in fear of being attacked. A truck was used to ferry all the familys belongings. Livestock was also driven on foot to an unknown destination, the family source said. A sister to the former councillor, Sibongile Sibisi, in an interview with this reporter yesterday, said the funeral of the Phenyane family members would be held on Saturday, though Dlaminis body would remain at the government mortuary. Avoid a paupers funeral It is urgent that his family be identified to avoid a paupers funeral, she said. Sibisi said friends of Dlamini said he had used an informal border crossing point when entering SA to avoid being allowed only a months stay, as is the norm for visitors permits. British MPs overwhelmingly rejected Prime Minister Theresa May\s Brexit deal for a second time on Tuesday, pitching Britain into the unknown just 17 days before it is due to split from the European Union. The House of Commons voted by 391 to 242 to reject the divorce deal, even after May secured further guarantees from Brussels over its most controversial elements. The move risks unleashing economic chaos, as Britain is scheduled to end ties with its biggest trade partner after 46 years on March 29, no matter what. Appealing to MPs in a voice half-breaking due to a cold, May had urged them to avoid the "economic shock" of leaving without an agreement. But she also warned eurosceptics, many of whom have campaigned to leave the EU for their whole careers, that if her deal failed, so might Brexit. May has promised to allow MPs to vote on a "no deal" option on Wednesday and if that is rejected, to decide on Thursday whether to ask the EU to delay Brexit. "If this vote is not passed tonight, if this deal is not passed, then Brexit could be lost," she said before the vote. However, eurosceptics believe the deal is so bad it is worth the risk of leaving with no plan. "We must take what now seems to be the more difficult route but in the end the one that preserves our self-respect," said former foreign minister Boris Johnson, a favourite to succeed May if she steps down. "It is to leave on March 29 as required by law and to become once again an independent country able to make our own choices." Not a single change After MPs first rejected the 585-page Brexit deal in January, May promised changes to the hated backstop plan which is intended to keep open the border with Ireland. Weeks of talks failed to make a breakthrough, but May made a last-minute trip to Strasbourg to meet EU leaders on the eve of the vote. She announced she had secured the promised "legally binding changes" to the backstop, which would keep Britain in the EU\s customs union if and until a new way was found to avoid frontier checks. But hours later, however, Attorney General Geoffrey Cox said the additions would not completely allay MPs fears of being trapped in the arrangement forever. It did not take long for Brexit-supporting MPs in May\s Conservative party, and her allies, Northern Ireland\s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), to declare their opposition. Opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn also urged parliament to vote down May\s plan. "After three months of running down the clock, the prime minister has, despite very extensive delays, achieved not a single change to the withdrawal agreement," he said. Some eurosceptics changed their mind, however, urging their colleagues not to risk everything. Former minister Edward Leigh said: "You may not like the deal, it\s not perfect, but it delivers Brexit and let\s go for it." The pound, which has been highly volatile since the 2016 referendum which saw Britons narrowly vote to leave the EU, made gains against the euro after May\s deal on Monday but fell sharply on Tuesday as it became increasingly clear the deal would be defeated. \No third chance\ The backstop is designed to protect the peace process in Northern Ireland, which involved the removal of border checks with EU member Ireland. Brexit supporters wanted a unilateral way out of it, or a time limit to the arrangement, but the EU said this would make it worthless. But leaders across Europe also united behind a message that this was the best and final offer Britain could expect. "There will be no third chance," European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said after his talks on Monday with May. If MPs vote against a "no deal" exit on Wednesday, and want to postpone Brexit, the other 27 EU nations would need to agree. Their leaders will meet in Brussels for a summit on March 21-22. But any postponement may have to be short-lived. Juncker on Monday said Brexit "should be complete before the European elections" at the end of May. SOURCE: AFP Two assailants opened fire inside a school near Sao Paulo on Wednesday, killing eight people including four children before turning their weapons on themselves, authorities said. Military police Colonel Marcelo Sales said two assailants burst into the school grounds in the early morning, armed with a .38 caliber revolver and a "medieval weapon that looked like a bow and arrows." After shooting at students in the yard, the killers headed to the language center where several pupils were hiding and "committed suicide in a corridor," Sales said. "Eight people died at the scene, including the two assailants," a state military police spokesman said. "Two injured people died after being taken to hospital." Around 15 others were injured in the shooting, which took place at the Raul Brasil public school in Suzano, on the outskirts of Sao Paulo in southeast Brazil. Sao Paulo State Governor Joao Doria said four children and two members of staff were among the dead. "It\s saddest thing I\ve ever seen," Doria added. He said it was not yet known whether the assailants were former pupils at the school. Worried family members congregated outside alongside firefighters and security services, an AFP photographer at the scene said. "I found out when my daughter called me and said: Mummy, come quickly, there are injured people, dead people," said the mother of one pupil, who gave her name only as Rosa. \Covered by a hood\ The attack took place at around 9:30 am (1230 GMT) during a recess period for some students, authorities said. Sales, of the military police, said the two attackers "shot at the owner of a car wash," who is now receiving hospital treatment, before entering the school. Website UO1 said the two killers, "probably teenagers, entered the school shooting with their heads covered by a hood." Another website, G1, published a grainy video purportedly taken inside the school in which the screams of terrified pupils can be heard as they come across dead classmates. Globonews showed television pictures of pupils fleeing the scene after escaping over a wall. Education Minister Ricardo Velez published a statement offering "solidarity with the parents, families and staff at the school in this moment of shock, mourning and pain." It\s not the first mass school shooting in Brazil\s history. In April 2011, a former pupil killed a dozen school children and injured many more before turning his gun on himself at a school in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. Brazil is one of the most violent countries in the world with 64,000 murders in 2017, a rate of almost 31 per 100,000 inhabitants that\s three times higher than the level the United Nations classifies as endemic violence. Far right President Jair Bolsonaro controversially passed a law relaxing the rules on carrying weapons soon after assuming power in January, delivering on a campaign promise. SOURCE: AFP Venezuela ordered American diplomats to leave the country within 72 hours on Tuesday after President Nicolas Maduro accused U.S. counterpart Donald Trump of cyber "sabotage" that plunged the OPEC nation into its worst blackout on record. Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza said U.S. diplomats on Venezuelan soil must leave within three days, after talks broke down over maintaining diplomatic "interest sections" in the two countries. "The presence on Venezuelan soil of these officials represents a risk for the peace, unity and stability of the country," the government said in a statement. The U.S. State Department had announced on Monday it will withdraw its staff from Venezuela this week, saying their presence had become "a constraint on U.S. policy." Washington has taken the lead in recognizing opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela\s rightful president after the 35-year-old Congress chief announced an interim presidency in January after declaring Maduro\s 2018 re-election a fraud. Most countries in Europe and Latin America have followed suit. Maduro, who retains control of the military and other state institutions as well as the backing of Russia and China, has denounced Guaido as a puppet of the United States. Julio Castro, of nongovernmental organization Doctors for Health, said on Twitter on Monday night that 24 people have died in public hospitals since the start of the blackout. With the blackout in its sixth day, hospitals struggled to keep equipment running, food rotted in the tropical heat and exports from the country\s main oil terminal were shut down. Venezuela\s opposition-controlled Congress on Monday declared a symbolic "state of alarm" on Monday. Power returned to many parts of the country on Tuesday, including some areas that had not had electricity since last Thursday, according to witnesses and social media. But power was still out in parts of the capital of Caracas and the western region near the border with Colombia. \TRUMP MOST RESPONSIBLE\ Maduro blamed Washington for organizing what he said was a sophisticated cyber attack on Venezuela\s hydroelectric power operations. "Donald Trump is most responsible for the cyber attack on the Venezuelan electricity system," Maduro said in a broadcast from the Miraflores presidential palace on Monday night. "This is a technology that only the government of the United States possesses." Maduro, elected in 2013 following the death of his political mentor Hugo Chavez, officially broke diplomatic relations with the United States on Jan. 23 when it recognized Guaido. Washington evacuated most of its diplomatic staff two days later. The blackout was likely caused by a technical problem with transmission lines linking the Guri hydroelectric plant in southeastern Venezuela to the national power grid, experts told Reuters. Venezuela\s electricity network has suffered from years of underinvestment and lack of maintenance. With the economy in a tailspin, spare parts are scarce while many skilled technical staff have fled the country amid an exodus of more than three million Venezuelans in three years. The government suspended schools and business activities on Tuesday for two more days, after doing so on Friday and Monday. Guaido planned to lead national protests over the blackout in Caracas on Tuesday afternoon. "With our neighbors and relatives, we will protest in the streets and avenues closest to each other\s home to claim our rights," Guaido said on Twitter on Tuesday. Amid signs of a crackdown on media, the National Press Workers\ Union said that prominent radio journalist Luis Carlos Diaz was arrested on Monday by intelligence agents at his home in Caracas. The Information Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Venezuelan authorities briefly detained American journalist Cody Weddle last week before ordering him to leave the country. SOURCE: REUTERS Palestinians threw a fire bomb at an Israeli police post at a site revered by Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem on Tuesday, and Israeli forces shot dead two Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including one troops said attacked them with a knife. In the walled Old City of Jerusalem, Israeli police said a fire bomb damaged the police post inside a sacred compound revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and by Jews as the Temple Mount. Scuffles broke out at the complex between Israeli police and Palestinians. No serious injuries or damage to holy sites were reported and police said two suspects were arrested. Tensions in the holy compound in Jerusalem, part of the eastern sector of the city captured by Israel in a 1967 war, have risen in recent weeks after the site\s Muslim administrators reopened a mosque sealed by Israel during a Palestinian uprising in 2003. The U.N. Middle East envoy called for calm. "I am following events at the holy esplanade in Jerusalem with concern. Places of worship are for prayer, not for provocations and violence. Restraint must be shown to avoid inflaming an already tense situation," Nickolay Mladenov said on Twitter. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned what he called "the grave Israeli escalation" at the complex, which houses al-Aqsa mosque, Islam\s third holiest site. In the occupied West Bank, the military said a Palestinian, armed with a knife, had confronted troops in the city of Hebron and was shot and killed. It said no soldiers were injured. The Palestinian higher judicial council said the 40-year-old man had worked in a Palestinian court in Hebron. It denounced the shooting as "a despicable crime". In a separate incident in the West Bank, a 23-year-old Palestinian was shot dead when clashes broke out after Israeli troops entered the Palestinian town Salfit, residents and the Palestinian Health ministry said. An Israeli army spokeswoman said soldiers had used riot-dispersal means, mainly tear gas, against dozens of Palestinians who threw stones at them and that the military did not know of any live fire being used. She provided no further details. Palestinians began a wave of knife and car-ramming attacks in the West Bank and in Israel in 2015. Such incidents have become more sporadic. Palestinians want an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza strip with East Jerusalem as its capital, all lands seized by Israel in 1967. SOURCE: REUTERS City Services employees used green colored dye to test a mysterious pipe found near the Titusville Airports holding tank. The pipe exited into a ditch behind the citys hangar. By Trend Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has sent a congratulatory letter to Pope Francis on the anniversary of his Papal Inauguration. On my own behalf and on behalf of the people of Azerbaijan, I extend my sincerest congratulations to you and all your coreligionists on the anniversary of your Papal Inauguration, Ilham Aliyev said in his letter. The relations between Azerbaijan and the Holy See set a good example of the promotion of dialogue and tolerance among religions and cultures. I believe that our collaborative efforts will continue to contribute to the establishment of global peace and tranquility, mutual understanding and solidarity among people. On this remarkable day, I wish you the best of health and success in your supreme spiritual mission. By Trend First Vice-President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva has met with President of the French Senate Gerard Larcher in Paris. President of the French Senate Gerard Larcher welcomed First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva. Mehriban Aliyeva first met with the head of the France-Azerbaijan Friendship Group and advisers. First Vice-President of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva then had a meeting with President of the French Senate Gerard Larcher. Gerard Larcher hailed the level of relations between the two countries. Recalling President Ilham Aliyev`s visit to Paris last July, the President of the French Senate noted that First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva also makes a great contribution to the development of France-Azerbaijan ties, and praised her services in the fields of culture, science and education. He said that women were granted the right to vote in Azerbaijan before France. The President of the Senate underlined that France is interested in developing Azerbaijan-European Union cooperation. Highlighting the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Gerard Larcher pointed out that France supports the peaceful settlement of the conflict as a co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group. First Vice-President of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva said that her visit to France was successful, adding that a number of fruitful meetings were held as part of the trip. Praising the high level of bilateral relations between the two countries, Azerbaijan`s First Vice-President said that there is great potential for the cooperation. Stressing the importance of developing Azerbaijan-France economic cooperation even further, the First Vice-President called on the French companies to be more active in Azerbaijan. Mehriban Aliyeva pointed out that no project was realized in the region without Azerbaijan`s involvement and the country plays an important role in ensuring energy security of Europe. The First Vice-President lauded Azerbaijan`s relations with the European Union, and noted the significance of signing the Partnership Priorities document. Emphasizing the importance of finding a soonest peaceful solution to the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict through negotiations within the norms of international law and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, Mehriban Aliyeva said that the existence of the conflict is a serious threat to the development and security of the entire region. Following the meeting, First Vice-President of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva signed a guest book of the French Senate. First Vice-President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva has met with President of the National Assembly of France Richard Ferrand. President of the National Assembly of France Richard Ferrand welcomed First-Vice President of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva. Mehriban Aliyeva met with the head of the France-Azerbaijan Friendship Group and advisers. First Vice-President of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva then had a meeting with President of the National Assembly of France Richard Ferrand. The development of Azerbaijan-France relations was hailed at the meeting. Richard Ferrand expressed his countrys keenness to develop interparliamentary ties between the two countries. He emphasized the importance of French MPs visits to Azerbaijan for raising awareness of France about the country which has a rich history and culture. First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva noted the significance of interparliamentary ties in the development of bilateral relations. She also hailed the importance of reciprocal visits. Mehriban Aliyeva noted that such kind of meetings create good opportunity for raising the French communitys awareness about Azerbaijan, and delivering Azerbaijani realities to them. The First Vice-President pointed out the beautiful synthesis of history and modernity in Azerbaijan, the country which is loyal to national values. First Vice-President of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva invited President of the French National Assembly Richard Ferrand to pay a visit to Baku. Richard Ferrand accepted the invitation with great pleasure. The faster non-hydrocarbon growth will compensate for softer oil sector output in most parts of the GCC this year and this acceleration will help to cement popular support for ongoing gradual reforms and to curb increases in unemployment, said a report. The main driver behind the acceleration in non-oil sector growth will be fiscal stimulus due to higher budgeted spending, except in Bahrain, where disbursements from the GCC Development Fund programme will offset cuts in investment spending, said the Moody's Investor Service report. GCC countries will face weaker oil output this year compared to last year due to the production cuts agreed by Opec+ nations in December 2018, the report said. Along with lower oil prices, this will put pressure on fiscal deficits and weaken external positions, especially in Oman (Ba1 negative), Bahrain (B2 stable), Saudi Arabia (A1 stable) and Kuwait (Aa2 stable), leading to faster debt accumulation than previously expected, it said. The impact of weaker crude production on overall growth in 2019 will be commensurate with the expected decline in oil production and the share of the hydrocarbon sector in the total economy, which ranges from nearly 54% in Kuwait to less than 18% in Bahrain. Only Saudi Arabia and Oman will we see a deceleration in the overall growth rate compared to 2018, it added. In Bahrain, progress on the project to modernise the national oil company (Bapco) and the ongoing expansion of Aluminum Bahrain (Alba) will support growth, the report continued. In Saudi Arabia, the completion of a major gas project and the large Jizan refinery coming online during the second half of 2019, as well as some initial progress on state-funded mega projects under Vision 2030, will bolster non-oil growth. In the UAE, non-oil growth will primarily benefit from the disbursements from the $13.6 billion (3% of GDP) stimulus package that Abu Dhabi announced in June 2018 and will roll out during 2019-21. The report said oil prices are likely to remain moderate over medium term. It expected oil prices to average $62 per barrel in 2019 and 2020, around the midpoint of its $50-70 medium-term projection range and down from the $71 per barrel average in 2018. Lower oil prices are expected to weaken GCC sovereigns fiscal positions, the report said. In 2019, the fiscal deficits are expected to widen by 6.9% of GDP in Kuwait, 3.7% in Oman, and 1.0% in Saudi Arabia, compared to our current estimates for 2018. Higher budgetary spending will support a modest acceleration in non-hydrocarbon growth in most countries. Despite weaker overall economic expansion, the expected acceleration in non-oil growth will help to cement popular support for ongoing gradual reforms and to curb increases in unemployment, it said. The report said reduced oil output in combination with lower prices will weaken external positions. "External pressures will be most pronounced in Oman, where we expect the current account deficit to widen to 9.4% of GDP in 2019 from 5.3% in 2018. The ability of the sovereign to retain access to external financing will be critical in preventing a material erosion of central bank foreign exchange reserves. In Bahrain, external pressures will be mitigated by the access to the GCC financial package, which we expect to cover the governments external debt service needs," it said. The report said: "We believe a slowdown in global economic activity, further increases in crude stockpiles or unabated rapid production growth in the United States could see oil prices fall lower still. Conversely, continued production cuts by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) with Russia and Canada, as well as stricter enforcement of sanctions against Iran and Venezuela would help to prop up oil prices. Given GCC countries' heavy dependence on exports of oil and gas, which drive current account balances and are also the main source of government revenue, lower prices will have a significant impact on the sovereigns' external and fiscal positions. Kuwait, Qatar and Oman would be most sensitive to a $10 per barrel change in oil price relative to the size of each country's GDP, it said. "In the absence of additional reforms by governments in the region, we expect that moderate oil prices, well below the 2018 average of $71 per barrel, will put pressure on GCC countries' fiscal and external accounts over the coming few years," the report said. For 2019, Moody's assumes that the UAE, Kuwait and Oman will maintain the 3% Opec+ cut, while Saudi Arabia will produce on average about 10.1 mbpd (a 5% cut from the October 2018 production level). However, since October production was significantly above the annual average for most of the countries, the 3% cut implies a much smaller decline in annual production averages. For the UAE, the 3% cut actually implies a 3% increase relative to the 2018 average, whereas in Saudi Arabia even a 5% cut from the October level will only reduce the average annual production rate by 2%. For Oman, we expect average annual production to decline by 1.3% in 2019. -TradeArabia News Service Aluminium Bahrain (Alba), the Bahrain-based aluminium smelter, today (March 13) welcomed the German Ambassador Kai Boekmannon to Bahrain, and showcased an overview of Albas operations and safety initiatives followed by a tour of Alba campus and the Line 6 Expansion Project site. Albas deputy chief executive officer Ali Al Baqali, along with the chief marketing officer Khalid A Latif, chief power officer Amin Sultan, chief administration officer Waleed Tamimi, chief operations officer Abdulla Habib Ahmed Ali, and acting chief financial officer Bryan Harris along with other Alba officials welcomed the German official. Al Baqali said: We are pleased to welcome Boekmannon and highlight our companys role in the national economy. It also gave us much pleasure to share the progress on our landmark Line 6 Expansion Project, which will make us the worlds largest smelter upon full ramp-up, he said. We look forward to boosting further cooperation between the two countries, he added. TradeArabia News Service Bahrains Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA) has signed an agreement with the National Space Science Agency (NSSA) in an aim to collaborate in space science and its diverse implementations. The memorandum of understanding (MoU) also aims to build informatics infrastructure that supports space researches in the Kingdom; enhance the joint efforts that aim at benefiting from scientific experiences and human qualification aspects; along with utilization of modern technologies to serve this field. Additionally, conduct training courses to qualify national cadre all in line with Government Action Plan objectives and inspirations of Vision 2030. The Memorandum of Understanding was signed by iGA chief executive Mohamed Ali AlQaed and NSSA chief executive Dr Mohammed Ebrahim AlAseeri with the attendance of iGA senior officials. AlQaed stressed the importance of collaborations with specialized organizations to contribute in strengthening Bahrains position in such vital sector. He further explained that this partnership will increase society awareness in NSSAs active role and attract the attention of the ambitious Bahraini youth to enter this promising career. AlQaed also highlighted the role of the iGA, represented by the GIS, to benefit from remote sensory technologies via satellite. Moreover, he praised the efficiency of Authoritys human resource, expertise in this field and great potentials it possesses. This fruitful partnership with the Information & eGovernment Authority will without-a-doubt contribute in placing a significant stamp for Bahrain in the space science field. It will also attract foreign investments in this sector, stated Dr AlAseeri while highlighting that such initiative comes in line with NSSAs efforts to enhance communication and cooperation with various sectors in the Kingdom as the partnership is an essential part in Authoritys strategy 2019-2023 supported by the Cabinet. Furthermore, AlAseeri confirmed Authoritys keenness to achieve integration in efforts and potentials amongst various public entities to provide the best services, and according to the best standards. He also pointed at the importance of space science in supporting countries infrastructure and the delivery of vital information to decision-makers. He continued that space science and its applications are classified by specialized international institutions amongst future science which will be more in demand and relied on this was reflected by His Majestys vision which resulted in issuing a decree of establishing NSSA; followed by the increased interest in Bahrain in the field of space science. Offered by iGA to NSSA, remote sensory technology extracts data and information from space and air images that are taken by satellites to enable the study of earth surface and nature. TradeArabia News Service After two of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets crashed within six months, 33 countries including 28 from the European Union and nearly 30 airlines have suspended operation of the fuel-efficient aircraft in the span of two days, media reports said. The European Union aviation authority banned flight operations of Boeing 737 Max jets, a huge blow to Boeing's efforts to maintain the confidence of governments and airlines, reported Emirates news agency Wam, citing an AP report. The US and Canada are still allowing the aircraft to operate until more information is available from the FAA, a BBC report said. Kuwait too has halted operation of all Boeing 737 Max 8 flights until further notice, stated the report citing the Directorate General for Civil Aviation (DGCA). The DGCA pointed out that the action was taken after two planes of the same type crashed in the past five months, adding that the ban applies to all Boeing 737 Max 8 flights, including those in transit. The suspensions come after an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed on March 10, killing 157 people on board. It was the second fatal accident involving the 737 Max 8 model in less than five months. Meanwhile, the US Association of Flight Attendants-CWA union has now called for the Federal Aviation Administration "to temporarily ground the 737 Max fleet in the US out of an abundance of caution", the BBC report said. India's Ministry of Civil Aviation announced that it would ground the Boeing 737-Max planes "immediately". It said: "These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations." It following a similar decision by the EU Aviation Safety Agency which said it is suspending the aircraft "as a precautionary measure". India's SpiceJet, which has an estimated 13 Boeing 737 Max 8 planes in its fleet, has suspended the aircraft. The UK's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said it was banning the plane, joining other countries including China. Investigators have recovered the flight recorders from the Ethiopian Airlines plane and are currently examining the data to determine what caused the crash. One Turkish Airlines flight to Birmingham turned around and returned to Istanbul, while a Norwegian Air plane from Stockholm to Tel Aviv turned back over Romania. A Tui statement confirmed their 737 Max 8 aircraft were grounded. "Any customers due to fly home today on a 737 Max 8 from their holiday will be flown back on another aircraft," it read. "Customers due to travel in the coming days will also travel on holiday as planned on other aircraft." Meanwhile, Boeing said in a statement on its website: Safety is Boeings number one priority and we have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX. We understand that regulatory agencies and customers have made decisions that they believe are most appropriate for their home markets. Well continue to engage with them to ensure they have the information needed to have confidence in operating their fleets. The United States Federal Aviation Administration is not mandating any further action at this time, and based on the information currently available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators, it added. AnadoluJet, a subsidiary of flag carrier Turkish Airlines, will be commencing flights to Erbil, Iraq, this month, making it the second international destination following the Republic of Northern Cyprus. The carrier will offer flights from Gaziantep and Diyarbakr to Erbil starting on March 21. For the launch period, the flights between the two Turkish cities and Erbil will be operated three days a week, with tickets priced at a special rate of $99. M. Ilker Ayc, Turkish Airlines chairman of the Board and the Executive Committee, stated: I am quite happy to see that AnadoluJet, our successful sub-brand, aims further than its borders by adding Erbil to its flight network following TRNC -Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. AnadoluJet operates on 69 routes in 41 airports with a fleet of 36 aircraft. - TradeArabia News Service Arrivals from Europe to the GCC will increase by 29 per cent between 2018 and 2023, driven by new and direct flight routes, a growing number of millennial and middle-class travellers and competitive airfares, according to the latest data released ahead of Arabian Travel Market (ATM) 2019, which takes place at Dubai World Trade Centre from April 28 May 1. According to ATMs research partner, Colliers International, as many as 8.3 million EU residents will travel to the GCC in 2023, an additional 1.9 million travellers when compared to 2018 arrival figures. Adding to this, figures from ATM 2018 show the number of delegates arriving from Europe increased 5 per cent between 2017 and 2018, while the number of delegates, exhibitors and attendees interested in doing business with Europe increased by 24 per cent. Danielle Curtis, exhibition director ME, Arabian Travel Market, said: Historically, Europe and the GCC have enjoyed excellent travel and tourism links and this trend is set to continue over the next four years." The UAE and Saudi Arabia are expected to continue to be the preferred GCC destinations for European tourists, welcoming a projected 6.15 million and 1.11 million visitors respectively by 2023. Oman will follow with 720,000 visitors, while Bahrain will welcome 310,000 and Kuwait 140,000. Driving this demand in the UAE throughout 2018, Emirates introduced new flights to London Stansted, Edinburgh, Lyon and Paris; Etihad to Barcelona; flydubai to Catania, Thessaloniki, Krakow, Dubrovnik, Zagreb and Helsinki; and Air Arabia to Prague. While in Saudi Arabia, new routes to destinations including Vienna and Malaga were added during the same period. Looking at the outbound market potential, GCC travel to EU countries is expected to grow by 50 per cent, with 6 million GCC residents projected to visit Europe by 2023. The Colliers data indicates that Saudi Arabia will lead this growth with 2.98 million Saudi Arabian residents travelling to Europe in 2023, followed by 1.73 million UAE residents, 600,000 Kuwaitis, 340,000 Bahrainis and 210,000 Omanis. While part of this growth can be attributed to the UAE and Saudi Arabias large expatriate populations, GCC nationals are no strangers to European destinations, its culture and history as well as its retail and luxury hospitality offerings. Curtis said: Saudi Arabia is predicted to retain its position as the largest outbound travel market destination in the GCC, with an additional 1.2 million trips forecasted per year by 2023 a 70 per cent growth on 2018 trips. Driving this growth will be the rising spending power of both millennials and females in the kingdom. According to the Colliers research, the UK, France, Switzerland and Sweden will be the top European destinations for GCC nationals to visit, with the UK expected to account for 890,000 trips by 2023. In the UK, Brexit has weakened the British Pound providing an additional incentive for Gulf tourists, while the relaxation of tourist visa requirements and GCC residents growing interest in medical tourism is encouraging travel to countries such as Switzerland and Sweden, Curtis added. ATM 2019 will welcome more than 100 European exhibitors to the show, with names such as Armani Hotel Milano, the German National Tourism Board, Port Aventura World, the National Tourism Organisation of Serbia and the Austrian National Tourism Office as well as various new exhibitors including Belarus National Tourism Agency, Moscow Committee for Tourism and Montenegro National Tourism Organisation. Considered by industry professionals as a barometer for the Middle East and North Africa tourism sector, ATM welcomed over 39,000 people to its 2018 event, showcasing the largest exhibition in the history of the show, with hotels comprising 20 per cent of the floor area. Brand new for this years show will be the launch of Arabian Travel Week, an umbrella brand comprising four co-located shows including ATM 2019, ILTM Arabia, Connect Middle East, India & Africa a new route development forum and new consumer-led event ATM Holiday Shopper. Arabian Travel Week will take place at Dubai World Trade Centre from April 27 May 1. - TradeArabia News Service Buy Side Warms to the Cloud The buy sides relationship with cloud computing is maturing as a small plurality has decided to go 100% cloud, according to a recent vision note published by industry analysis firm Tabb Group. It should not have been that surprising, but it did catch me off guard, Monica Summerville, head of fintech and European research at industry research firm Tabb Group, told sister publication Markets Media. In the previous two surveys none of the buy-side respondents replied that they planned to go all in, she added. Seven percent is a good amount of people thinking that they are going to migrate to the cloud completely. Some people say it cannot be done, but here are people say that they are going to do exactly that. The buy side has a history of letting other people handle their technology, whether it is the sell side or third-party providers, Summerville noted. However, for every buy-side respondent polled for the study, there were two respondents saying that they had no intentions of incorporating the public cloud as part of their IT strategy while 29% of those polled plan to move to hosted solutions but not public clouds. Half of those responding stated they had no plans to change their current infrastructure models. The migration to public cloud has continued to become easier for enterprises as the leading providers, such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, have ramped up their efforts to capture the enterprise market. A few years ago, if you were a global investment bank or another big firm, your account manager would have been the same one for the print shop down the street, she said. It was based on geography, but that is not the case today. Although asset managers are moving more and more workloads to the public cloud, a few workloads are returning to the inside of the firms firewalls. Summerville attributed the return of workloads simply as firms progressing along the cloud learning curve. Firms are finding that if applications that require low latency, dedicated hardware, or download significant amounts of data, it is often more cost effective to keep them in house. Finally, the buy sides perception of cloud computing has also matured. It is no longer a disruptive technology that transforms capital costs to operational costs but acts as a foundation layer for other must-have disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence. If you want to be serious about artificial intelligence, especially anything that has a lot of compute and data requirements, you are going to have to have cloud in your strategy, said Summerville For more information on related topics, visit the following channels: CEO CHAT: Justin Lyon, Simudyne Simulation is the best way to determine possible outcomes. Thats the mantra of Simudyne and its Chief Executive Officer Justin Lyon, who believes that computational simulation is the key to radically better decisions both in the trading world and outside it. He created Simudyne with the goal of improving decision making across both private and public sectors by leveraging advances in computational power and complexity science. For him, simulation is the bedrock for training both human and artificial intelligence. Simudyne trains intelligence in high-fidelity simulated environments to make better decisions. Traders Magazine recently interviewed Lyon about his firm, the application of power and science, modelling and algorithms in the trading universe. TRADERS MAGAZINE: Tell us a little about your firm? Size? Staff? Justin Lyon: I built Simudyne because we live in an increasingly complex and connected world where organisations need to better understand how they are impacted by a wide range of potential scenarios. After several years of consulting with a number of global institutions on virtual reality simulation and risk modelling, I recognized that traditional methods of modelling were no longer fit for purpose. They did not capture the complexity of real-world systems and failed to effectively harness the huge power of technology and big data. We identified that there was a gap to create a technology solution that could model complex systems and create a virtual environment that could enable dynamic stress-testing. So, we developed the Simudyne platform, which democratizes advanced simulation without the need for expensive hardware infrastructure investment. Simudyne graduated from the Barclays TechStars program in London in 2017 and we have brought together a team of industry experts to create an enterprise-ready platform. Were now a 30 strong company based in the City of London and our technology is being used by a number of global institutions to allow them to make better decisions. TM: What is agent-based modelling? What is the role of simulation and agent based modelling analysis in developing efficient algorithms? Lyon: Agent-based modelling is universally recognized as the solution to modelling complex, dynamic systems. Its a model that simulates the actions and interactions of individuals, organizations, groups or other entities (agents) so we can assess their impact. Until we developed our platform, it was more theory than reality because no enterprise-ready software existed that provided the computational scale necessary to build and execute agent-based simulations. But, now we have made the jump from theory to practice, one of the most receptive audiences to this new technology has been algo execution teams. They quickly realized we offer them the ability to better train their algos. Rather than looking purely at market data produced by exchanges, agent-based simulations can re-create the data generating process by replicating the low-level interactions of the market, producing synthetic market data that is indistinguishable from a given real-world time series. 1 2 3 next For more information on related topics, visit the following channels: Human development is about expanding the richness of human life, rather than simply the richness of the economy in which human beings live. It is an approach that is focused on people and their opportunities and choices. Thank you for this opportunity to address all of you in Brussels. Civil society organizations are playing critical roles in response to the Syria crisis, both inside Syria and in neighboring countries. Your organisations are not only a source of hope for the scores of people still suffering, but also a critical resource. The services you provide, whether access to basic social services, livelihood programmes, addressing child labour and marriage, or supporting civil documentation, provide much needed cohesion and stability for these people. And you do all of this in Syria while under the constant threat of conflict. As the international community looks to move beyond humanitarian assistance to address longer-term challenges in countries like Jordan and Lebanon, civil society organizations will remain important partners. These organizations give voice to the voiceless as a greater emphasis is placed on addressing longer term development challenges and reforms which need to be premised on inclusion, decent work and access to basic services for all - particularly in health and education. Inside Syria, NGOs, CSOs and faith-based organisations already play important roles in providing support to affected populations from access to basic social services to livelihoods. However, they will increasingly need to spearhead stronger links across what have been the boundaries of conflict to date in order to foster long-term reconciliation and peacebuilding as the time becomes right. In Jordan, UNDP works with civil society partners on a platform called MATEEN a network of community-based organizations now active in six Governorates. MATEEN in Arabic means strong, cohesive, and deep-rooted, and this network is designed to be the voice of the community on social cohesion. In Lebanon, civil society partners have been key to our peace building programme; and in Egypt to the implementation of local community development programme. Inside Syria, we have engaged civil society partners as the main network for delivering our programme and are working increasingly with organisations from all sides. UNDP remains highly committed to our partnership with civil society partners and recognizes their central role in response to the Syria crisis, and well as to achieving Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals. I am pleased that your deliberations will feed into the Ministerial session tomorrow, and I wish you all a very fruitful discussion today. View video statement: https://youtu.be/F4DvFKLMjSI Media contacts: In New York, Theodore Murphy, theodore.murphy@undp.org; +1-718-915-2097 In Brussels, Ludmila Tiganu, Ludmila.tiganu@undp.org; +32 471 702 903 . . ... A student examines a heart in virtual reality. Photo credit: Eddie Hernandez (March 13, 2019) -- To help shore up medical care in areas of the country known as healthcare deserts where minorities have little or no access to primary care doctors, The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) will kick-off a virtual reality program in anatomy to prepare undergraduates pursuing careers in medicine. My hope is to give the next generation of physicians the competitive edge they require to succeed in rigorous professional schools and, more importantly, to help relieve the looming shortage of minority doctors, said Eddie Hernandez, assistant professor in practice in the UTSA Department of Biology. This week, a cohort of approximately 180 undergraduate juniors and seniors are taking course work in surgical anatomy and other medical topics through the Learning Enrichment in Medical and Surgical Anatomy (LEMSA) week-long seminar. The inaugural program incorporates virtual reality to help students better understand concepts in gross anatomy in preparation for medical or dental schools. VR is a perfect introduction to anatomy, as it allows the student to make mistakes often, said Brett Chapa, a recent grad of UTSA currently applying to medical school and now serving as a collaborator of the program. Mistakes are an essential part of education, and VR allows the student to explore the human body without compromising the structural integrity of those that donate their lives to science. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, universities around the world are using virtual reality to make medical education easier to grasp. The Taiwan Medical School has just announced that it will utilize one of the largest virtual reality anatomy labs in the world to teach its new incoming class. Even medical associations call for a better integration of technology with existing medical curriculum. Data from The Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association shows that students are more successful in anatomy courses when traditional laboratory instruction is combined with augmented reality. UTSAs spring break program will give students an opportunity to personalize their training by choosing exactly what they want to see. Participants can view each organ in 3D and virtually dissect structures to better understand the internal structures. "Virtual reality allows students to take a very intimate look at the gross anatomy of the body, said Hernandez. The United States could see a shortage of up to 120,000 physicians by 2030, impacting patient care across the nation, according the Association of American Medical Colleges. That, coupled effect of a growing senior population that is estimated to grow by 50 percent in two decades and the retiring rate of doctors, could have the greatest impact on supply. Since it takes up to 10 years to train a doctor, the current shortage of medical professionals poses a real risk to patients. UTSA undergraduates that enter into the pre-medical and pre-dental program has grown by 62 percent since 2008. The gross anatomy conference is March 11 March 17 on the UTSA Main Campus. (March 13, 2019) UTSA and the San Antonio Express-News will jointly host a town hall meeting this month to discuss education funding in Texas. The event, School Finance, which is free and open to the public, is scheduled at 7 p.m., Thursday, March 21 in the Buena Vista Street Building Theater (BVB 1.326) at the UTSA Downtown Campus. Three panelists, including a lawmaker, educator and education advocate, will participate in the moderated panel, discussing various aspects of the broad topic of school funding in Texas, including details on new proposals from the state legislature, the property tax/school funding dynamic and how the state can move toward educational equity. Panelists include Kara Belew, senior education policy advisor for the Texas Public Policy Foundation; State Rep. Diego Bernal, vice chair of the House Committee on Public Education and a former member of the Texas Commission on Public School Finance; and UTSA alumnus Brian Woods 98, 12, superintendent of Northside Independent School District. Francine Romero, UTSA associate professor and associate dean of the College of Public Policy, will moderate the event. The timing could not be better for this discussion, as the Texas Legislature is about to embark on a potentially historic and significant dialogue on our school funding situation, said Romero. While crucial for the future of education in our state, this debate will also have important consequences for all residents who directly or indirectly pay property taxes. I encourage citizens to attend and benefit from the wide-ranging expertise of our illustrious panel, and particularly hope UTSA students will take advantage of this important event being held at our own Downtown Campus. Free event parking will be available in unmarked spaces of lot D-3, beneath IH-35. UW Research: Hungry Moose More Tolerant of Wolves Presence A GPS-collared moose in western Wyoming moves into its desired habitat. New UW research has documented interactions between moose and wolves in the region. (Mark Gocke Photo) Driven by the need for food, moose in western Wyoming are less likely to change their behavior to avoid wolves as winter progresses, according to new research by University of Wyoming scientists. The findings, published today (March 13) in the journal Ecology, provide new insights into the interactions of the regions apex predators and their prey. The results also highlight the complexity of the relationships between wolves and big-game species, making it difficult to reach general conclusions about whether and how fear of wolves has impacted the ecosystem, the researchers say. We have known for some time that hungry animals will tolerate the presence of predators in order to forage and avoid starvation, and that phenomenon, called the starvation-predation hypothesis, is supported by our research, says Brendan Oates, now with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, who conducted the research as a UW graduate student. In this case, close proximity of wolves does cause moose to move, but not enough to drive them from their preferred habitats -- especially late in the winter. Oates is the lead author of the Ecology paper. Co-authors include his UW advisers: Jake Goheen, associate professor in UWs Department of Zoology and Physiology, and Matt Kauffman, a U.S. Geological Survey researcher based at UW. UWs Jerod Merkle, assistant professor in the Department of Zoology and Physiology, also was involved with the research, as were agency personnel from the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The scientists tracked movements of dozens of GPS-collared moose and wolves in Grand Teton National Park and the Bridger-Teton National Forest over a five-year period, detecting 120 unique encounters among 25 individual moose and six wolf packs. An encounter was defined as when moose and wolves were within about 1,600 yards of each other. They found that movements of moose increased in early winter following encounters with wolves, but only when wolves were within about 550 yards. Even then, the moose didnt move from their preferred habitat, which is near streams and marshy areas. Late in the winter, when the moose were presumed to be hungrier, there was no change in the movement rates of the animals in response to wolves in the vicinity. The unwillingness of moose to abandon preferred habitats following encounters with wolves adds further support for the starvation-predation hypothesis, the researchers wrote. In contrast, previous research has shown that elk -- the primary prey of wolves in the region -- will move when wolves approach within about 1,000 yards, even during winter. Elk also move from their preferred habitat to avoid wolves. The difference may be explained simply by the fact that moose are larger than elk and are more likely to stand their ground when approached by wolves, the researchers say. Additionally, the nature of mooses preferred habitat -- described as structurally complex -- means it could serve as both a good food source and a refuge from wolves. Still, it would be inaccurate to say that the presence of wolves doesnt affect moose movements. Although moose may be generally less responsive to predation risk from wolves, our detection of a heightened behavioral response during early winter suggests that anti-predator behavior is dynamic within and among species of ungulates, the researchers concluded. UW Student Selected to Attend National Ag Teacher Symposium Alyssa Lewark University of Wyoming agricultural education major Alyssa Lewark, of Frisco, Colo., has been selected from a large pool of candidates from across the nation to attend the National Teach Ag Campaign Future Agriscience Teacher (FAST) Symposium. The event will be held in conjunction with the National Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources and Related Sciences (MANRRS) Conference April 4-7 in Kansas City, Mo. The FAST Symposium is a component of the National Teach Ag Campaign, an initiative to raise awareness of the need to recruit and retain high-quality and diverse agriculture teachers. The campaign also encourages people to consider careers teaching agriculture and celebrates the contributions agriculture teachers make in their schools and communities. Lewark fell in love with agriculture while spending time on her uncles ranch in North Dakota and through her annual trips to the National Western Stock Show in Denver. Although she didnt have an FFA program at her high school, her hobby of horseback riding kept the passion alive. When she arrived at UW, she decided to merge her passion for agriculture with her dream of teaching. I had a great Spanish teacher in high school who inspired me to become a teacher. Since I also wanted to do something with agriculture, putting the two together at UW just made sense, Lewark says. Those selected to participate in the FAST Symposium will engage in professional development, networking and a career fair, and they will attend sessions during the MANRRS conference. The training Lewark will receive will improve her abilities as an agriculture educator by helping her develop engaging curriculum to expose her future students to cutting-edge concepts within the field of agriculture. The symposium focuses mostly on creating an inclusive classroom environment, inquiry-based learning, classroom management, professional development and collegiality, Lewark says. I want to learn how to reach all of my students and how I can adapt my lessons to ensure all students are engaged and involved. Lewark will attend the symposium through free conference registration and a $100 travel stipend. She also will have her room and board covered by the campaign for the duration of the conference. GHA Recruits New Nursing Assistants The Ministry for Health, Care and Justice has announced the recruitment of 43 new Nursing Assistants. The newly appointed nurses will be deployed across Gibraltar Health Authority (GHA) facilities; including, St Bernards Hospital and Ocean Views Mental Health Facility, as well as Elderly Residential Services (ERS) facilities. Nursing Assistants provide basic patient care in hospitals, residential homes and other clinical settings, under the direction of more senior nurses. Nursing Assistants form an important part of the nursing workforce, attending to the personal care needs of patients or residents, who need assistance with basic routines such as meal times, bathing and dressing. A Nursing Assistants role, depending on the area in which they are working, may also include the monitoring of patients during their stays in the hospitals or residential homes, including checking and recording vital signs. Ms Susan Vallejo, ERS Manager, spoke of her delight in welcoming the new recruits, stating that they will be joining a professional and dedicated nursing team, providing holistic nursing care and support to residents. She spoke of the important role that Nursing Assistants play in promoting the residents independence, social inclusion and wellbeing, in a dignified, respectful and compassionate manner. Ms Vallejo said: I am looking forward to working with the new recruits. It is always a pleasure to embrace and build on the enthusiasm of new recruits and to guide and help them develop within our service. Ms Sandie Gracia, the GHAs Director for Nursing Services added that: For all of us in the Gibraltar Health Authority, it is a time of great and significant changes, as on-going demand on our services continue to change both in terms of volume and shape, across health care. As the Director of Nursing, I am privileged to personally witness many recent examples of change innovations, which includes the expansion of an adaptable, contemporary, nursing workforce, in response to the health care needs of our community. We have a duty to use our resources wisely to ensure that nursing careers remain attractive and accessible to all. Clinical Nurse Manager for Mental Health Services, Ms Kay Rajkumar, commented that: Mental health services are delighted to welcome the new additions to our staffing complement, as the service continues to grow over the coming months. The additional resources will most certainly enhance the service we currently provide to our patients, both as in-patients and the community. Our objective is to ensure patients receive high quality care packages at all times through their journey of recovery. Minister for Health, Care and Justice, the Honourable Neil F. Costa MP, met with the new intake, to personally welcome them to the GHA and ERS, stating: I wish to wholeheartedly congratulate the newly appointed Nursing Assistants. It is truly gratifying to form part of a Government that is sincerely committed and dedicated to resourcing our health and care services for the good of our community.. These appointments mark an exciting time for the Gibraltar Health Authority and Elderly Residential Services. This new intake of nursing will play an integral part in the future of nursing services in Gibraltar. All our new entrants should feel privileged as they embark on a new and important chapter in their professional lives. Life is such that, most of us, at one stage or another will require nursing care. As a result, it is our duty, both at the GHA and ERS, to ensure that this care is delivered safely, with compassion, and at the highest of standards, always with our patients and residents comfort and wellbeing at heart. I am confident that, with our excellent teams of dedicated and caring professionals, we are in a solid position to deliver. Twinning Visit to Kingston Jamaica Her Worship the Mayor Kaiane Aldorino Lopez has travelled together with Minister Linares and Rector for St Theresas Church and the Shrine of our Lady of Europe, Father Charles Azzopardi, on a reciprocal visit to the city of Kingston, Jamaica. This is to consolidate the Twinning Agreement which took place in Gibraltar on September 2018. During the visit, the delegation attended a special sitting of the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation on Wednesday 27th February 2019, where Her Worship was conferred with the Keys to the City of Kingston by His Worship the Mayor, Senator Councillor Delroy Williams. In his remarks His Worship Senator Councillor Delroy Williams pointed out that whilst the Second World War brought the two cities together, we share so much more than just colonial history. We share music, culture and cities filled with similar issues. The delegation were special guests at the rededication and wreath laying ceremony of the newly refurbished Clock Tower Memorial to the fallen soldiers of WW2. Her Worship the Mayor took a prominent part in the ceremony where she gave a keynote address emphasising how the people of Kingston took in the Gibraltarian evacuees, she thanked them for the way in which they welcomed them and how they still cherished parts on what is now the campus of the University of West Indies where relics and buildings are being preserved as a reminder of the place where the Gibraltarians lived. Dr Suzanne Francis Brown curator of the UWI Mona Museum who has written about the life of the Gibraltarian evacuees, also addressed the dignitaries present and stated how life was in the Gibraltar camp. During the trip the delegation visited the University Of West Indies where the Gibraltar Camp was situated and were able to view the relics and buildings which are preserved. It was here at the University of West indies that Father Azzopardi presented a replica of the statue of Our Lady of Europa to the Mona Museum Curator Dr Suzanne Francis Brown. During the trip the delegation had the opportunity to make courtesy visits to the offices of the Minister for Local Government and Community Development The Honourable Minister Desmond Mckenzie, the residency of the British High Commissioner, Mr Asif Ahmad and to the Archbishop of Kingston His Grace, the Most Rev. Kenneth Richards. Minister Linares said of the trip It was such a moving experience to have been present in what was a special sitting of the Kingston and St Andrews Municipal Corporation. To see Kaiane our Worship the Mayor sitting beside the His Worship the Mayor, Senator Councillor Delroy Williams and being given the Keys to the City of Kingston was very emotional, further to have been part of the delegation which was at the centre of the ceremony to the fallen of WW2 was a great honour. This has demonstrated the affection that the City of Kingston has towards us in Gibraltar. Even after 75 years we have seen that the evacuees from Gibraltar have left a significant positive wedge in the History of the City of Kingston. Our links with them have now been strengthened and we look forward to continue our historical and cultural links in the future. We have been able to explore some opportunities which we hope to be able to develop soon." Her Worship commented of the trip that she was "truly honoured to have received the Key to the City of Kingston on behalf of all Gibraltarians, in particular our evacuee generation. Kingston had contributed an invaluable generosity to Gibraltar during World War II. The traumatic events of the evacuation were not forgotten and remained very much alive in both cities and as we looked into the future we should envisage a growing awareness and appreciation, of each others culture along with cooperative activities, which would be of mutual benefit to our communities." Archaeologists gather at Northwestern to share latest discoveries about medieval Saharan Africa The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University will host a week-long gathering of six archaeologists from Mali, Morocco, the U.K. and the U.S., working at the cutting-edge of research on medieval Africa. The unprecedented gathering April 22 to 26 will bring this group of international scholars together for the first time to share their new findings about Africa's understudied medieval period with public audiences. The research points to Africa's participation in extensive trade and global interconnections in the eighth to 16th centuries. The assembly of archeologists coincides with The Block's exhibition "Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture and Exchange across Medieval Sharan Africa", the first major exhibition addressing the scope of Saharan trade and the shared history of West Africa, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe in the medieval period. The participants have been advisors to the exhibition and are featured in videos throughout the exhibition. Several also wrote essays for the exhibition companion publication. Public programs include "From the Field - International Archaeologists in Conversation" at 6 p.m. on April 24 and a full-day symposium entitled "Trans-Saharan Exchange and the Global Medieval: Visual and Cultural Studies Research at the Crossroads of Disciplines and Regions" hosted by Northwestern's department of art history and The Block. The public programs are free and will take place at The Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Drive on the Evanston campus. For more information visit The Block Museum website or call 847-491-4000. "While 'Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time' focuses on a past that may seem remote, it could not be more timely or more relevant to the Block's mission -- to be a place in which art is a springboard for discussion of issues and ideas that matter now," said Lisa Corrin, the Ellen Philips Katz Director of the Block Museum. "We are honored to have these preeminent archaeologists assembled at the museum to share their new research with the public and with one another, research that urgently asks us to question our assumptions about Africa and its place in history," Corrin said. International participants "'Caravans of Gold' makes the past tangible through rare fragmented remains that were excavated from key archaeological sites around the Sahara, sites that were once thriving cities and towns involved in long distance commerce," said exhibition curator Kathleen Bickford Berzock, the Block Museum associate director of curatorial affairs. "The groundbreaking work of these archaeologists is at the heart of the project. Poring over reports of sites excavated by them, I was struck by the variety of commercial goods taken out of the ground, and by their ties to far-reaching networks of exchange that stretched in multiple directions," Berzock said. View the video interviews below to learn more about the current research of the visiting archeologists. Abidemi Babatunde Babalola is the Smuts Fellow at the Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge, UK. His focus is on sub-Saharan glassmaking in the medieval period. Mamadou Cisse is the chief of the Cultural Mission of Kangaba, a branch of the Direction nationale du patrimoine culturel of Mali. Cisse's research and field work has focused on the ancient site of Gao, a city located in the region of the Middle Niger that participated in medieval trade. Mamadi Dembele is director of archaeological research and head of the department of history and archaeology of the Institut des sciences humaines, Bamako, Mali. Dembele has researched medieval urbanization and trade networks in the Inland Niger Delta. Abdallah Fili is a professor of history and Islamic archaeology at the Universite Chouaib Doukali d'El-Jadida, Morocco and co-director of archaeological research at Igiliz (2004-present) and Aghmat (2005-present). Fili has conducted field work in the medieval Moroccan site of Sijilmasa, exploring the trading hub's role in the African gold trade. Ronald A. Messier is co-director of the Moroccan-American Archaeological Project in Aghmat, Morocco and professor emeritus in the department of history at Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro. Messier has conducted extensive research into documenting the African gold trade in Morocco through the archaeological record. Sam Nixon is curator of Africa in the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum. His work has included fieldwork at the site of Essouk-Tadmekka in present day Mali, a southern Saharan center of the early Islamic Caravan trade. Archaeology in Depth: University conversations, symposium and school visits The archaeologists will participate in a number of campus conversations during their week at Northwestern, including visits with the department of anthropology and the program of African studies to discuss current issues in the field of archaeology, expansion of research within medieval African archaeology, the challenges of African field-work and potential alignments in discoveries from diverse sites. They also will participate in an interdisciplinary workshop for undergraduate and graduate students and faculty from across departments including English, comparative literature, poetry and poetics, performance studies, material sciences and design. The program will foreground the ways in which archaeologists can draw far-reaching connections from localized and fragmentary material remains. During the week the scholars will visit local public schools, joining students in classroom discussions about the science of archaeology and how archaeologists learn about the long history of African trade. For K to 12 education resources and more information on the exhibition, visit the "Caravans of Gold" companion website. Public events: "From the Field - International Archaeologists in Conversation" April 24, 6 p.m. The Block Museum of Art 40 Arts Circle Drive The Block Museum, the department of anthropology and the Program of African Studies present a special opportunity for the public to hear from the six international archeologists whose excavations in Mali, Morocco and Nigeria were fundamental to the shaping of the "Caravans of Gold" exhibition. Curator Kathleen Bickford Berzock will moderate a conversation with the scholars that includes insights into the excavation process, the "archaeological imagination" and the protection of cultural patrimony. Register online at The Block Museum website. Myers Symposium "Trans-Saharan Exchange and the Global Medieval: Visual and Cultural Studies Research at the Crossroads of Disciplines and Regions" April 26, 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Symposium 5:30 to 7 p.m., Keynote Lecture The Block Museum of Art 40 Arts Circle Drive ### This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. The 3rd Regional Meeting of National Contact Points (NCPs) for Capacity Building in the Americas and the Caribbean region (AMS) was held from 5 to 7 March 2019 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The activity was jointly organized with the Regional Office for Capacity Building for the Americas and the Caribbean (ROCB-AMS) and the Dominican Republic General Directorate of Customs as Vice-Chair of the AMS Region. The NCPs meeting aimed at deepening and updating the participants' knowledge of the WCO Capacity Building programmes, initiatives and the ongoing revised strategy. It also included enhancing the awareness of the NCPs on their role, and ways of contributing to the work of the WCO Secretariat and the Regional Office for Capacity Building (ROCB) in the Capacity Building domain. The WCO Secretariats contribution focused on the upcoming proposals for the WCO Strategic Plan 2019-2022, as well as the guidelines of the Capacity Building Strategy 2019-2022 to be presented at the 10th Capacity Building Committee. While the Vice-Chair highlighted the accomplishments on the Regional Strategic Plan for 2016-2020, the ROCB reported on its activities, challenges and proposals. The NCPs shared their national plans covering both capacity building and training activities, and provided feedback to the ROCB and WCO on ways to improve their roles as NCPs. Since the first meeting in 2017, major improvements have been solidified, including strengthening the contact network of the NCPs, and the creation of several groups that will focus regional efforts to support the role of the ROCB-AMS. Twenty-one Customs administrations, the Regional Vice-Chair, the WCO Secretariat, and the Regional Office for Capacity Building (ROCB) participated in the meeting. The final day of the meeting was held at the Regional Training Centre (RTC), Prof. J. Bosch, in Santo Domingo. Recognizing the strategic importance of human resources in the process of creating organizational values, the NRA pays particular importance to the modernization of its Human Resources (HR) system. As such, following the recommendations of the 2018 Mercator Programme Diagnostic Report for the NRA, the WCO delivered a capacity building mission to design and integrate Human Resource Management (HRM) competency-based approach tools in the NRAs HR system. The mission was held in Freetown, Sierra Leone on the 25 February to 1 March 2019 and delivered under the HMRC-WCO-UNCTAD Programme funded by the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) via Her Majestys Revenue and Customs (HMRC) of the United Kingdom, under the auspices of the WCO Mercator Programme. The main objective of this mission was to carry out a diagnostic of the current situation of HRM at the NRA using the WCO HR diagnostic tool. In addition, the mission aimed at strengthening the capacity of the HR modernization team to develop competency-based approach tools (i.e. a jobs catalogue, a competency framework, a competency dictionary and job descriptions). These will all form the basis of the new HR system at the NRA. This mission was conducted with the support of a pre-accredited HR expert from Liberia in order to share experiences from the region. The mission concluded with a meeting with the Commissioner General and HRM working group members to present the results of the diagnostic, the work plan and the various tools developed during the mission using the competency approach. The WCO looks forward to continue its collaboration with the NRA under the framework of the tailor-made track of the Mercator Programme. In response to an express request from the Director General of Customs of the Union of the Comoros and with financial support from the Finnish Government through the Customs Cooperation Fund (CCF) for the WCO East and Southern Africa (ESA) region, the WCO organized a national workshop, for the Comorian Customs Administration, on the amended International Convention on the Simplification and Harmonization of Customs Procedures, known as the Revised Kyoto Convention (RKC). The RKC is a WCO legal instrument regarded by the entire Customs community as a blueprint for effective and modern Customs in the 21st Century. Accession to the RKC is perceived as an important milestone in any countrys endeavours to further promote legitimate trade and effective Customs controls. The number of Contracting Parties to the RKC currently stands at 116, and other instruments of accession that have already been signed will, in all probability, be lodged during the forthcoming conference of the Oceania Customs Organisation in May 2019 and the next WCO Council Sessions scheduled for June 2019. The workshop took place in Moroni (Union of the Comoros) from 18 to 22 February 2019. Its aims were essentially to confirm the preliminary gap analysis conducted by senior representatives of Comorian Customs and to provide an advisory forum for the Customs Administration on the procedure for accession to the RKC. Around 25 senior representatives of different units of Comorian Customs, from the various islands, made an active contribution to the workshop. The Customs Administration had previously held an internal session at which a team made up of senior officials had conducted the preliminary gap analysis. In his opening speech to the workshop, Mr. Souef Kamalidini, the Director General of Comorian Customs, representing the Minister for Finance and the Budget, set out the vision of the Comorian Government on trade facilitation and stressed the importance and the benefits of being signed up to the RKC. He also described what his country hoped to gain from RKC accession and the progress achieved towards that end so far. The WCO mission team, consisting of experts from the Secretariat and from the Gabonese Customs Administration, provided detailed advice on the principles of the RKC, the rights and obligations of the Contracting Parties to the Convention and the provisions contained in the body of the Convention, in its General Annex and in its Specific Annexes. With the help of the WCO experts, the workshop participants assessed whether the provisions of the RKC were consistent with the regional and national legislation applying to the Comoros. As part of this exercise, follow-up measures were sketched out for those areas where national legislation was found not to be fully aligned with the provisions of the RKC. A draft detailed action plan for the accession of the Comoros to the RKC and implementation was also discussed and subsequently adopted. At the workshop's closing session, chaired in person by the Minister for Finance and the Budget, Mr. Said Ali Said Chayhane, the WCO experts said that they were very satisfied with the excellent local organization of the workshop, and they confirmed the WCOs willingness to provide support for the Customs Administration of the Union of the Comoros in its initiative to accede to the RKC. The Minister and the Director General of Customs took the opportunity to express their gratitude to the WCO for the support which Comorian Customs had received to date. On behalf of the Government, the Minister for Finance and the Budget undertook to assist the Customs Administration and ensure that the conditions required for accession to the RKC were met by June 2019. He described the workshop as of high strategic importance to a country that was determined to open up to the rest of the world. On the fringe of this important workshop, the WCO experts were granted a meeting with the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, with whom they explored issues of mutual interest. The experts sought the Ministers support in bringing the accession process to a satisfactory conclusion as swiftly as possible, and they gave him an account of the work currently being done by the WCO on behalf of small island economies. The Minister for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation assured the experts that they had his full support on both counts. Following the recommendations of the Mercator Implementation Plan for Antigua and Barbuda, the WCO conducted a five-day diagnostic on Post Clearance Audit (PCA) from 25 February to 1 March 2019 in St John s. This PCA diagnostic was funded by funded by the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) via Her Majestys Revenue and Customs (HMRC) of the United Kingdom, under the auspices of the WCO Mercator Programme. Through meetings and extensive consultations with different departments and sections of the Antigua and Barbuda Customs Division including the Senior Management, Risk Management, IT, Enforcement, Operations, Research and Development, among others, the WCO team was able to get a good overview of the current situation related to PCA implementation. Moreover, sight visits were organized to the Deep Water Harbour and the Airport, to directly observe the examination processes and impact on trade facilitation. A meeting was also held with external private stakeholders at the Customs Headquarters in St Johns, attended mainly by licensed Customs brokers. The discussions evolved around the role of PCA in trade facilitation, the understanding and expectations on PCA among traders and Customs brokers as well as obligations to keep records for effective PCA and compliance improvement. The external stakeholders were very pleased to learn about the WCO concept of PCA and that Antigua and Barbuda Customs Division has taken initiatives to implement a PCA function in accordance with WCO guidelines and international best practices. The mission resulted in the identification of current challenges and needs in the area of PCA and a report will shortly be shared with the Antigua & Barbuda Customs Division. The WCO looks forward to continued collaboration with the Antigua & Barbuda Customs Division under the framework of the Mercator Programme. The World Customs Organization (WCO), under the framework of the WCO and Bahamas Customs and Excise Department (BCED) technical assistance agreement, organized a second national workshop on the Harmonized System. The workshop was conducted at BCED headquarters in Nassau from 4 to 8 March 2019. The first workshop, delivered in October 2018, consisted of basic training on HS classification to officers including potential classification trainers in BCED. It also included activities to support the development of advance ruling procedures for classification and rules of origin, in line with the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement. The objectives of the second workshop were twofold: train-the-trainer sessions to enhance knowledge and skills on tariff classification throughout the Bahamas Customs administration; and two, instruction and guidance on the essential theoretical and practical aspects of the Harmonized System and classification of goods under the Bahamas Customs Tariff. The workshop was very effective. Twenty-five (25) officers (including 3 BCED trainers-in-training) from a number of different units attended the week-long training. The participants actively engaged on a multitude of issues related to the handling of practical classification issues. As a result of their engagement, the participants now possess greater knowledge on the principles of classification which will aide them in their day-to-day work. For more information about this activity, please contact capacity.building@wcoomd.org By West Kentucky Star Staff Mar. 13, 2019 | 08:32 AM | BOAZ A Graves County man is facing a long list of charges after a report of shots fired Tuesday night in the Boaz area led to a pursuit. The Graves County Sheriff's Office says deputies responded around 10:20pm to the 400 block of Boaz Cemetery Road for a domestic-related complaint where a gun was reportedly discharged inside the home. Deputies say 25-year-old Ryan Long of Boaz was involved in a verbal argument with his mother and siblings. Deputies said Long retrieved a rifle from a vehicle and returned inside with the rifle and fired one round into the ceiling. Long left the home armed with the rifle. Multiple agencies tried to locate Long in surrounding counties. Late Tuesday night, Graves County deputies were told that a McCracken County sheriff's deputy was in pursuit of Long on Oaks Road heading south toward Graves County. Graves County deputies intercepted the pursuit on KY 348 West heading west to KY 1684. Long continued to flee from deputies until stopping back at the home on Boaz Cemetery Road where he was taken into custody. Long was arrested and lodged in the Graves County Jail. He's charged with four counts of wanton endangerment, four counts of menacing, fleeing or evading police in a motor vehicle, four counts of wanton endangerment of a police officer, reckless driving, driving on a DUI-suspended license and tampering with physical evidence. Accelerating advances for HIV+ Youth in Eastern Cape Wits has collaborated in a project with Oxford University to test a United Nations development approach to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Lucie Cluver, Professor of Child and Family Social Work in Oxfords Department of Social Policy and Intervention, is the principal investigator and lead author with Mark Orkin, Visiting Professor in the Developmental Pathways to Health Research Unit (DPHRU) in the Department of Paediatrics & Child Health, School of Clinical Medicine at Wits University. The results of the study were published today in Lancet Child and Adolescent Health. They showed that high parenting support, government cash transfers received by households, and schools without bullying (safe schools) were three development accelerators, each of which was associated with positive outcomes for targets in at least three SDGs. Accelerators are provisions that can improve the lives of vulnerable populations in several SDG areas. There are 17 SDGs covering 169 targets. The Improving Lives by Accelerating Progress Towards the SDGs for Adolescents Living with HIV study, in collaboration with Wits University as well as the University of Cape Town, University College London, and the United Nations Development Programme, is the first to test the validity of the UNs development accelerator approach. Our results illustrate that, even for a highly vulnerable group in an impoverished district, well-chosen programmes can impact beneficially on targets in several SDGs. For instance, by providing social welfare grants, safe schools, and supportive parenting for these highest-risk teens, we can make multiple positive impacts across health, education, gender equality and violence, says Orkin, who conducted the statistical calculations and modelling. The study further identifies specific combinations of accelerators (synergies). These show depth effects- i.e., cumulative positive associations with given SDG-aligned targets. For example, if adolescents living with HIV access both parenting support and cash transfers, findings show significantly greater benefits. To test the validity of accelerators and synergies in vulnerable groups, researchers drew upon interviews with 1063 adolescents living with HIV (aged 10-19 years) in the Eastern Cape. This was the regions first large-scale community-traced cohort of this group to track clinical outcomes, as well as social, educational, familial, sexual health, and community experiences. The study suggests that the UNs approach provides an innovative solution. By identifying accelerators and synergies across and within SDG goals and targets, governments and donors may be able to maximise positive policy impacts. "It's gratifying for Wits to be contributing to an international collaboration of global relevance, says Orkin. Publication of the paper coincides with the International Paediatric Association Congress, which takes place from March 17-21 in Panama, Central America, and is part of a special issue in the journal on adolescent health in low- and middle-income countries. Over 20% of retailers sold knives to underage teens in test purchase operation across region This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Mar 13th, 2019 North Wales Police and Trading Standards Officers across the region have carried out test purchase operation at retailers in a bid to tackle knife crime. The test purchases were carried out as part of Operation Sceptre, a national operation dedicated to tackling knife crime, with the cadets visiting 63 stores that offer knives for sale across all six counties during a week-long campaign. It is illegal to sell a knife or similar bladed article to a person under the age of 18. Doing so is an offence that both the individual seller and business involved can be liable for, and can attract a penalty of imprisonment and an unlimited fine. A total of 62 premises were visited, with volunteer police cadets attempting to purchase knives from the retailers. Of the premises 48 passed. However the 14 stores which sold knives to the underage youngsters will now be visited by police and local authorities to be given further advice and reminded of their responsibilities to ensure they follow the law on the sale of knives. Detective Inspector Tecwyn Green of North Wales Police said: The purpose of the operation which was the first time North Wales Police has conducted such a co-ordinated approach to tackling knife crime collaboratively, was to test local stores of their awareness of the law, their security measures and their own range of verification schemes. Retailers play a crucial role in ensuring our young people cant get hold of knives which could then be used to cause harm. Whilst we are pleased that 49 of the stores we visited refused to sell to our cadets for not having any identification, unfortunately a number of them did allow purchases to be made. The licensing team from the relevant local authority will now be working with them to discuss how to resolve. North Wales Police and all partner agencies are committed in doing everything they can to tackle knife crime. If you carry a knife, not only are you putting other lives at risk, but also your own. We will continue to work closely with retailers and further test purchasing operations will be carried out in the future to ensure all businesses are operating within the law. Assistant Chief Constable Neill Anderson said: We fully support the national Operation Sceptre campaign, by targeting those who habitually carry and use knives, tackling the supply and access to weapons and engaging with the public to increase awareness of the consequences of carrying knives. Carrying a knife or a weapon is still a reality for some people, many of whom are unaware of the repercussions. It does not keep you safe and by carrying a knife you are putting yourself and others in much greater danger. If caught with a knife you could face a prison sentence of up to five years and that is just for possession in a public place. If you cause injury there will be other charges to answer and you could go to prison for longer. Its just not worth the risk. If you have information regarding knife crime or if you know of someone carrying a knife, please report it to North Wales Police on 101 or via the live webchat. Alternatively you can contact Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111. In an emergency always dial 999. (Click for large) Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-12 19:38:26|Editor: Shi Yinglun Video Player Close COLOMBO, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lankan police said on Tuesday that a large haul of drugs seized from Moratuwa in capital Colombo Monday had been smuggled into the island country from Afghanistan and Pakistan in January. According to the police, initial investigations had revealed that a large group was behind the smuggling racket and the Police Narcotics Bureau was conducting investigations to arrest all those involved. Following a raid, the police on Monday evening seized heroin weighing over 170 kilograms along with 2,700 rounds of ammunition from a private residence in Moratuwa. The heroin is valued at an estimated 10 million U.S. dollars. A police official said this recovery was one of the largest nabbed in the country following the large haul of heroin of 294 kilograms and 490 grams nabbed in February. Police said security had been beefed up around the area since Monday night. Sri Lankan investigators, on the instructions of President Maithripala Sirisena, have since January launched a severe crackdown on drug dealers and smugglers, with several arrests being made within the past two months. Last month, Sirisena said he would impose the death penalty on convicted drug traffickers within the following two months after he vowed to free the country from the drug menace by 2020. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 03:15:30|Editor: yan Video Player Close TRIPOLI, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Libya's UN-backed Prime Minister Fayez Serraj on Tuesday underscored the need to unite regional and international efforts to end the political crisis in Libya. Serraj made his remarks during a meeting with UN Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo and African Union's Commissioner for Peace and Security Ismail Sharqi in the capital Tripoli. The PM's Information Office said in a statement that they discussed the latest political and security developments in Libya, as well as future elections in the country. Serraj reiterated the need to build a civil Libyan state, peaceful transfer of power, and uniting sovereign Libyan institutions, the statement said. He also emphasized the need for coordination between the UN and the AU to unite the initiatives to resolve the Libyan crisis under the UN supervision, it added. DiCarlo stressed that the role of the international and regional organizations is to help achieve stability and peace in Libya. Following the 2011 uprising that toppled former leader Muammar Gaddafi's regime, Libya has been suffering escalating violence and political division between western and eastern governments. The north African nation is struggling to make a democratic transition, despite the signing of a UN-sponsored political agreement by the Libyan parties later in 2015 and the appointment of Serraj's unity government. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 03:25:32|Editor: yan Video Player Close CAIRO, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi stressed on Tuesday his country's full support for the security and stability of neighboring Sudan, the Egyptian presidential spokesman said in a statement. Sisi's remarks came after his talks with visiting Sudanese First Vice President and Defense Minister Awad Ibn Auf in the capital Cairo, where they discussed bilateral relations at all levels, according to Egypt's presidential spokesman Bassam Rady. Sisi considered Sudan's security "extension of the Egyptian national security." "Egypt is keen on continuing joint cooperation between the two countries at all levels in the light of the deep-rooted historical ties and the distinguished relations between the two countries, governments and peoples," said the presidential statement. The meeting was attended by Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel, his Sudanese counterpart Salah Gosh and Sudanese Ambassador to Egypt Abdel-Mahmoud Abdel-Halim. On Feb. 22, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir declared a nationwide state of emergency and dissolved the government, in an effort to contain weeks of protests against his three-decade-long rule. He also called on the parliament to delay considering proposed constitutional amendments that would allow him to run for more presidential terms. A day later, he appointed the country's defense minister Auf as his first vice president. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 03:30:32|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close Austin Mayor Steve Adler addresses an event promoting southwest China's city of Chengdu in the south U.S. city of Austin, March 8, 2019. Austin is seeking to expand its relations with China, welcoming, with arms wide open, exchanges and cooperation opportunities in education, innovation and beyond. "Our relationship with China has really accelerated recently," Austin Mayor Steve Adler told Xinhua on the sidelines of the ongoing South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference and Festivals. (Xinhua/Wang Ying) AUSTIN, the United States, March 12 (Xinhua) -- The southern U.S. city of Austin is seeking to expand its relations with China, welcoming, with arms wide open, exchanges and cooperation opportunities in education, innovation and beyond. "Our relationship with China has really accelerated recently," Austin Mayor Steve Adler told Xinhua on the sidelines of the ongoing South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference and Festivals. Historically, the relationship between Austin, the state capital of Texas, and China had primarily been through educational exchanges, according to Adler. This changed when the city began to bring in more technology companies, and as a result, a lot more people from China. "As we have moved forward now, there's a lot more interaction that goes beyond that, with companies, with innovation platforms," the mayor said. Adler said he is planning a second trip to China this year. "We are trying very hard to build relationships between Austin companies and Austinites, and Chinese companies and Chinese people," he said. A Chinese delegation of more than 100 people, twice the size of that last year, came to this year's SXSW, a signature event in Austin which gathers innovators and entrepreneurs from across the globe to breed and fund new ideas. Chinese companies, including e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, sent innovators to inspire others with their design ideas and get inspired. China has an increasingly large presence at the SXSW, and as the whole festival is growing more and more international, Chinese involvement is a big part of that, Adler said. "Chinese delegations now are creating quite a storm and quite an excitement, just because of the size of the delegations, the interest in sharing new technologies, new innovations and new platforms, investing Chinese companies here in Austin as well as opening up Chinese markets for businesses in Austin to be able to flourish with," he said. Austin has been growing rapidly and earned itself a reputation as one of the most innovative cities in the United States. It is home to 46 incubators and a great many tech giants, such as Dell, according to city officials. "Austin boasts great ideas and environment for innovation, which is hugely attractive to Chinese companies," Chinese Consul General in Houston Li Qiangmin said Friday after an event held on the sidelines of the SXSW to promote Chengdu, capital city of southwestern China's Sichuan Province. Both "forward-looking," Austin and Chengdu are "cities that are technology and innovation centers," Adler said, adding that different kinds of relationships could hopefully be forged between the two. "Conversations and meetings like this will lead to science city, friendship city kinds of relationship. That is in our future," he said. "The delegation from Chengdu is the largest ever we've received from a Chinese city," the Austin mayor added, commending the delegations from China as "a very significant part of what makes SXSW very special." There is a great deal of interaction going on between Austin and China, the Chinese consul general said, citing the "big investment" Dell has made in Chengdu and several other Chinese cities. More and more people, companies and cities in China are willing to seek cooperation with Austin, he noted. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 04:05:40|Editor: yan Video Player Close SKOPJE, March 12 (Xinhua) -- The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) will send a total of 279 observers to observe the April 21 presidential elections in North Macedonia, head of the ODIHR Corien Jonker said here on Tuesday. The ODIHR mission held a press conference on the occasion of the formal opening of the presidential election observation in North Macedonia. Jonker told reporters that 11 experts and 18 long-term observers will be seated in Skopje and other 250 short-term observers will join the mission a few days prior to the elections and will be sent across the country. "The mission will observe the administering of the elections at all levels, voter registration, candidates, campaign financing and media reporting," Jonker said. The ODIHR mission's deployment in North Macedonia follows an invitation from the country's foreign ministry. The term of the current North Macedonian President Gjorge Ivanov ends on May 12. Three candidates will run for presidency in North Macedonia -- Stevo Pendarovski, nominated by the ruling Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM) party, Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, backed by the largest opposition VMRO-DPMNE party and Blerim Reka, an independent candidate backed by the Albanian opposition in North Macedonia. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 05:00:54|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addresses a high-level event on Women in Power at the UN headquarters in New York, on March 12, 2019. UN General Assembly President Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces hosted the high-level event on Women in Power on Tuesday and highlighted the benefits of women's participation in politics, including economic stability and promotion of fairer laws. (Xinhua/Li Muzi) UNITED NATIONS, March 12 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday underscored the need to overcome obstacles to achieve gender parity "across the board" in the United Nations. In his remarks to a high-level event on Women in Power, Guterres warned "we still live in a male-dominated world with a male-dominated culture." He stressed the importance of reaching gender parity, saying it is needed to change power relations for gender equality as well as peace and security, human rights and development for all. At the event, the UN chief was recognized for his work in realizing gender parity in the high ranks of the UN secretariat, in the posts of resident coordinators and in regional commissions. In response, he said it had been possible to achieve parity quickly at the level of the UN senior management group or UN resident coordinators because "those are the people I can appoint myself without limitations." While acknowledging "where I am free to act, we are coming very quickly to full parity within the UN," he lamented "when we have to trickle down to go across the board in all structures of the United Nations, there we start to see the resistance, the obstacles, and the pushbacks." Nevertheless, the secretary-general vowed to "push back against the pushbacks," pledging not to give up until the United Nations reaches parity across the board. Tuesday's event was initiated by UN General Assembly President Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces as a highlight of her work in gender equality, one of her priorities she set upon when taking office in September 2018. According to UN figures, as of November 2018, only 10 percent of UN member states have a female head of state or government. Globally, only 24 percent of parliamentarians are women. Similarly, among the 2018 Fortune 500 companies, only 24 have women CEOs and 12 companies have no women at all on their board. The event on Women in Power, bringing together senior leaders and other participants from governments, observers to the General Assembly, the UN system, private sector and civil society, aims to identify barriers that hinder women's participation and leadership, and to share best practices that can accelerate women's empowerment in this area. It also engages young women leaders to foster an environment of mentoring and dialogue between present and future leaders. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 06:56:11|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close LONDON, March 12 (Xinhua) -- British business leaders called for taking the no-deal option off the table to minimize disruption to the economy, after the UK parliament voted down Prime Minister Theresa May's revised Brexit deal on Tuesday evening. Members of Parliament (MPs) voted 391-242 against the revised deal reached between the British government and the European Union in last-ditch talks in Strasbourg, France on Monday. It was the second heavy defeat for the Brexit deal since it was rejected by a margin of 230 in January. Carolyn Fairbairn, Director-General of Confederation of British Industry, said: "Extending Article 50 to close the door on a March no-deal is now urgent. It should be as short as realistically possible and backed by a clear plan. Conservatives must consign their red lines to history, while Labour must come to the table with a genuine commitment to solutions." "It's time for Parliament to stop this circus," she said. Miles Celic, Chief Executive Officer of TheCityUK, said: "We need a rapid agreement on the way forward to protect customers and jobs. This is a vital part of keeping the UK at the top of the global premier league of international financial centers - something that is in the interests of customers at home and across Europe." "Parliament must demonstrate that it will heed these repeated warnings. It is profoundly obvious that neither government nor many businesses are ready for a disorderly exit - and this must not be allowed to happen on March 29th, whether by default or by design," said Adam Marshall, Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce. "Businesses have been failed over and over again by Westminster in recent months, but allowing a messy and disorderly exit on March 29th would take political negligence to new extremes," Marshall said. The British pound became volatile after the vote. Market watchers say the vote has undoubtedly been the focus for currency markets and the value of pound will be subject to Brexit uncertainties in the coming days as parliament members will vote to decide whether they support a no-deal Brexit or delayed Brexit. The pound has fluctuated and been particularly sensitive to the Brexit process. It rose strongly on hopes of a Brexit deal after Theresa May said on Monday she had secured "legally binding" changes from the EU to the Irish backstop, which means the insurance policy designed to avoid a hard border in Ireland, could not "become permanent". However, the British currency quickly began to shed all its previous gains since earlier Tuesday when British Attorney General Geoffrey Cox said the legal risk of the UK being tied to EU rules after Brexit "remains unchanged", and the country would not be able to leave the backstop without EU agreement. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 07:06:13|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close PRAGUE, March 12 (Xinhua ) -- NATO should focus on fighting against terrorism now more than ever as it poses a major threat, said Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis Tuesday at a conference marking the 20th anniversary of the Czech accession to the military alliance. "Personally, I would wish for the alliance to play an even greater part in fighting terrorism than it currently plays," said Babis, "NATO should be even more active in dismantling terrorist organizations which threaten our safety and our way of life." He said it was a strategic mistake that NATO was not more active in fighting against the Islamic State. Babis repeated Czech commitment to spend 2 percent of the country's GDP on defense by 2024, adding that since 2015, the country's defense spending has been increasing every year and the trend would continue. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 07:06:13|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, March 12 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy on Tuesday called on the United Nations and the European Union to join hands in upholding multilateralism. "The United Nations and the EU should join hands in upholding multilateralism. In today's world, unilateralism and protectionism are on the rise, and the international order and the global governance system are under attack," Yao Shaojun, minister counselor and political coordinator of China's permanent mission to the United Nations, told the Security Council. "Multilateralism is needed now more than ever before. Parties must work together to safeguard the international system and the collective security mechanism with the United Nations at their core, and enhance the role and standing of the United Nations in international affairs," he said. Yao also asked the United Nations and the EU to uphold the purposes and principles of the UN Charter by respecting sovereign equality among nations and the development paths chosen independently by the countries concerned, and by resolving disputes through diplomatic means. He said there is space for cooperation between the United Nations and the EU in promoting sustainable development. As a party with economic and development advantages, the EU has a lot to offer in terms of helping and supporting developing countries in achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development through strengthening North-South Cooperation in line with the needs of developing countries and working in synergy with the UN efforts in economic and social areas, he said. China highly values its relationship with the EU and supports EU integration and welcome a united, stable, and prosperous Europe, said the envoy. China is ready to continue to work with the EU through platforms of cooperation such as the Belt and Road Initiative to make new headway in China-EU partnerships, thereby making new contributions to world peace, stability, and prosperity, he said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 07:21:17|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close GENEVA, March 12 (Xinhua) -- The International Organization for Migration (IOM) on Tuesday said that it is appealing to the international community for 207 million U.S. dollars to continue its lifesaving assistance to Syrians. IOM said that these funds are necessary to continue assistance in Syria and neighboring countries in 2019. Joel Millman, spokesperson for IOM, told a UN briefing here that the Syrian crisis, entering its ninth year this week, has displaced more than 11 million people and further insecurity and continued displacement, as well as large-scale humanitarian and protection needs, are expected in the year ahead. He said that as of February 2019, it is estimated that 5.7 million people remain displaced within Syria, and an additional 5.6 million Syrians, nearly half of whom are children, have sought refuge in countries throughout the region. Herve Verhoosel, for the World Food Programme, also told the UN briefing Tuesday that nearly nine years of war in Syria have pushed millions of Syrians into hunger and poverty. There are 6.5 million people who are food insecure inside Syria, and despite ongoing challenges, among them WFP is able to reach over 3 million people every month, he said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 07:26:19|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close MOSCOW, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Russia is willing to reestablish parliamentary contacts with the United States in order to promote bilateral relations of the two countries, the Russian Federation Council, or upper house of parliament, said Tuesday. Russian Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko met with U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman and the two sides discussed bilateral relations of the two countries, the Federation Council said in a statement. "The resumption of dialogue at all levels, including through parliaments, is very important ... Russia is ready to resume parliamentary contacts at various levels," the statement said. Matviyenko noted that further deterioration of Russia-U.S. relations contradicts national interests of the two countries and creates threats to international stability and security. It added that improving Russia-U.S. relations is only possible if it is based on the principles of equality and respect of the interests of the two countries. The idea of possible meetings of the respective delegations within the framework of international parliamentary forums with the participation of the two countries was discussed, according to the statement. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 07:36:23|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close Liu Dawei, vice president of China International Publishing Group (CIPG), delivers a speech at "China in the Eyes of the British", a special book launch event hosted by CIPG, to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China and the 65th anniversary of the establishment of the China-Britain diplomatic relations at the level of charge d'affaires, in London March 12, 2019. The launch and donation ceremony of new China-themed books by British authors were witnessed on Tuesday at the London Book Fair. (Xinhua/Ray Tang) LONDON, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Launch and donation ceremony of several new China-themed books by British authors were witnessed Tuesday at London Book Fair. On the opening day of the London Book Fair, China International Publishing Group (CIPG) held the "China in the Eyes of the British", a special book launch event, to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China and the 65th anniversary of the establishment of China-UK diplomatic relationship at the level of charge d'affaires. The event saw the launch of Walk Your Dream by British Minister of State at the Department for International Development Lord Michael Bates and his wife Li Xuelin, and PINGJU: Real Life Opera of Northern China (English edition) written by John Chinnery and published by New World Press. Lord Bates's Walk for Peace: Transcultural Experiences in China (English revision) and PINGJU: Real Life Opera and a 'Rural Chinese Shakespeare' (English local edition) published by New World Press and Global China Press together were also introduced at the event. Michael Bates wrote Walk Your Dream after he and his wife had a charity walk across China in 2018 to boost awareness of the country's achievements and development over the last 40 years. It was the seventh such walk undertaken by the couple in the recent years. The author and his wife walked about 260 kilometers from Beijing to Tangshan's Caofeidian, raising over 365,550 pounds (about 477,590 U.S. dollars) for China's Education Charity Fund and the Prince's Trust, the foundation of the UK's Prince Charles, to help impoverished youth in China and Britain escape from poverty, and encourage them to pursue and realize their dreams. "What most people know about China is political or economic and it's not really cultural and people-to-people. So what we tell in the book is a collection of stories about taxi drivers, steel workers, retired people, children, party secretaries, just people we met while walking. It wasn't arranged. It was just accidental and it's a picture," Bates told Xinhua. "Most people have problems with other countries because they are frightened of them. And I hope that through our walk Xuelin and I did, through our book, we can ensure that there's some people in China and some people in the UK will be less fearful, more interested and more respectful of each other as a result," he added. The new books were donated to the University of Cambridge, University of Westminster and famous sinologists in UK. Bates, British sociologist Martin Albrow and Dr. Frances Wood, English historian known for her writings on Chinese history, delivered wonderful speeches at the event in which they discussed their understanding of Chinese politics, philosophy and culture with reference to the books they wrote or prefaced. They also shared their observations and analyses of China from the British perspective, the changes taking place in contemporary China, the tradition of Chinese opera and China's concept of building a community of shared future for mankind. Liu Dawei, vice-chair of CIPG, said the event will surely help promote further successful exchanges and mutual learning between Chinese and British peoples from all walks of life. "These books are historical witnesses and cultural symbols of the exchanges between the two countries and reflect the profound and close friendship between the Chinese and British peoples," he said. The London Book Fair is the global marketplace for rights negotiation and the sale and distribution of content across print, audio, TV, film and digital channels. In 2019 it celebrates its 48-year anniversary with over 25,000 publishing professionals from all over the world gathering in London from Tuesday to Thursday. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 09:01:39|Editor: Liu Video Player Close TOKYO, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Core private-sector machinery orders in Japan declined in January from a month earlier, the government said in a report on Wednesday. According to the Cabinet Office, orders in the recording month fell 5.4 percent from the previous month, with the total orders, excluding those for ships and from utilities because of their volatility, coming to 822.3 billion yen (7.4 billion U.S. dollars). The latest reading follows a 0.3-percent retreat the previous month, the Cabinet Office's data showed. Machinery orders are a key advance indicator for corporate capital spending and the government uses the data to predict the strength of business spending in a six to nine month period ahead. A drop in capital expenditure, as is the case here, can dent the economy as it means Japanese companies are producing less machinery to meet falling demands from overseas markets. Such business investment accounts for roughly 15 percent of Japan's gross domestic product. The types of machinery included in the monthly government survey comprise engines and turbines, heavy electrical machinery, electronic and communication equipment, industrial machinery, machine tools, railway rolling stock, road vehicles, aircraft, ships, water crafts, as well as sub types in those categories. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 09:11:41|Editor: Liu Video Player Close CARACAS, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Technical teams have managed to restore electricity service in almost entire Venezuela, which has suffered a massive blackout since Thursday, said Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez on Tuesday. "After today's noon, Tuesday, March 12, we must say that the victory of the people of Venezuela against this attack (on the electrical system) is on track to consolidate," said Rodriguez. Rodriguez added that "those who perpetrated the brutal attack knew that they were simultaneously interrupting the supply of drinking water and the wastewater treatment system." "Greater Caracas will begin to receive drinking water from the central stations that were activated early in the morning," he said. According to the authorities, the country's main power source, the Central Hydroelectric Plant in Guri, in southeast Venezuela, was the target of sophisticated "cybernetic" sabotage that knocked out power to most of the country on Thursday afternoon. As efforts were made to restore the system at the plant, other energy stations came under attack, including the Central Thermoelectric Plant in Tacoa, which supplements the electricity service for Caracas and surrounding areas, said Rodriguez. While power has been restored, he said, "the electricity war continues and we notify all the people of Venezuela to be alert and to denounce any criminal action." The worst blackout in modern Venezuelan history came amid heightened tensions between the ruling socialist party and the opposition, which is receiving Washington's support in its bid to unseat President Nicolas Maduro. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 09:16:42|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close LAGOS, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Aviation professionals in Nigeria called for temporary suspension of Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft from commercial operations due to safety concerns. Experts from Aviation Round Table (ART), an aviation think-tank group, made the call in a statement issued on Tuesday in Lagos following Sunday's crash of a B737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by Ethiopian Airlines. Gbenga Olowo, president of ART, said in the statement that the Ethiopian Airlines incident was the second within five months coming on the heels of the crash in Indonesia of the same aircraft type operated by Lions Air in October 2018. According to Olowo, these fatal accidents call to question the safety of the Max 8 series. "Curiously, there had been no reported case of such fatal accidents of the aircraft in the United States since the aircraft came into operations," he added. Olowo urged Boeing and the U.S. aviation regulatory bodies to jointly consider these recurring fatal accidents on the B737 MAX as a calamity to the global traveling community. "We noted that some countries have grounded the B737 MAX on their fleet pending the determination of the cause of the incessant crashes," he said. "ART is very hopeful that these aviation bodies would respond promptly to the demand that the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft be suspended from commercial operations," Olowo said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 09:31:44|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close SYDNEY, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Senior Vatican figure Cardinal George Pell has been sentenced to six years imprisonment in Melbourne on Wednesday, for the sexual abuse of two children dating back to 1996 when he was the Archbishop of Melbourne. Found guilty of the crimes in December last year, Wednesday's sentencing was broadcast live from the courtroom. "I would characterize these breaches and abuses as grave," Judge Peter Kidd told the courtroom. "You continued to offend with callous indifference to the victim's distress." "There is no evidence of your remorse or contrition for me to act upon to reduce your sentence." Previously serving as the Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy of the Vatican between 2014 to 2019, Pell was considered the third-highest figure in the Catholic Church. Aged 77, Pell will be eligible for parole in three years and eight months. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 09:36:51|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close NAIROBI, March 12 (Xinhua) -- The rapidly-growing gaming industry should be harnessed to increase awareness of environmental conservation, as it is popular among the youth, a senior official of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said Tuesday. "There are unprecedented opportunities in video games that are played by an estimated 2.5 billion people globally. A partnership with the gaming industry will therefore help us mobilize the youth to take actions that protect nature," said Susan Gardner, director of ecosystems division at the UNEP. She made the remarks at a side event of the fourth session of the five-day UN Environment Assembly that runs through March 15 in Nairobi. A report published by the UNEP indicated that the gaming industry, which is expected to record double digit growth in the next five years, has the potential to unleash huge benefits in the sustainability agenda. The report said that video games have proved effective at encouraging the youth to campaign against carbon emissions and poaching of wildlife species. Inger Andersen, director general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), said that video games should be harnessed to rally the youth to support a sustainable and green future. "Video games can help amplify campaigns aimed at promoting sustainable production, waste management and wildlife protection," said Andersen. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 09:36:52|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close The closing meeting of the second session of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) is held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 13, 2019. (Xinhua/Ding Haitao) BEIJING, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The Second Session of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the top political advisory body, held its closing meeting Wednesday morning. Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders attended the closing meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Political advisors will vote on a draft resolution on the work report of the Standing Committee of the CPPCC National Committee, a draft report on the examination of proposals, and a draft political resolution. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 09:41:53|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close TRIPOLI, March 13 (Xinhua) -- An oil tanker on Tuesday rescued 23 illegal immigrants off western Libyan coast, Libya's Coast and Port Security Department said later Tuesday. "This morning, an oil tanker rescued 23 illegal Sudanese immigrants off Bouri oilfield, after their boat broke down on the sea, leaving them stranded for several days," the department said. Bouri is an offshore oilfield located some 120 km northwest of the Libyan coast in the Mediterranean. The immigrants were provided with humanitarian assistance and taken to a reception center in the capital Tripoli, the department added. Libya is a preferred point of departure for thousands of illegal immigrants wanting to cross the Mediterranean to Europe, due to the state of insecurity and chaos in the north African nation. In December last year, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said that it voluntarily deported more than 16,000 illegal immigrants from Libya to their countries of origin, as part of the organization's voluntary return program. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 09:51:57|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close YANGON, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Fifteen more illegal Myanmar migrant workers have been repatriated under the arrangement of Thai and Myanmar authorities, according to Myanmar's Ministry of Labor, Immigration and Population Wednesday. With their border passes expired, the Myanmar migrant workers were sent back to Myanmar on Monday via Thai-Myanmar Friendship Bridge-2. Most of the migrant workers are from Tanintharyi, Yangon, Bago and Ayayawaddy regions and Mon and Rakhine states. According to the ministry, 428 illegal Myanmar migrants including 146 female and 19 children were handed over by the Thailand to Myanmar between Jan. 1 and March 11. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 09:51:58|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close YAOUNDE, March 12 (Xinhua) -- A senior member of Cameroon's Parliament on Tuesday called on the international community and the government to be more "objective" in resolving the conflict in the two English-speaking provinces of the West African country. The remarks by Enoh Tanjong, the eldest member of Cameroon's National Assembly, is believed to be made to show the stance of the Parliament for the first time since the armed conflict started in 2017. "Solidarity and objectiveness of the international community and the government are fundamental in resolving the conflict," he said while denouncing "in the strongest terms" the violence perpetrated by "gunmen" in the troubled regions. "The international community particularly has to be more objective in assessing the political tensions in Cameroon," Tanjong said as the new parliamentary session opened. According to the United Nations, more than 430,000 people were internally displaced in the clashes between the government forces and the armed separatists seeking to create an independent nation in the English-speaking Northwest Region and Southwest Region. "For once the dean (eldest member of parliament) has decided to mention the crisis in the Northwest and Southwest regions. I hope this is the beginning of many things to happen. We need peace to become a reality in Cameroon. This session might be very decisive," another member of the National Assembly, Joseph Mbah Ndam, told Xinhua. The parliamentary session, which will last through April 12, is widely expected to come up with a blueprint to end the conflict. It will also elect a new executive bureau for the National Assembly and the Senate, the upper house. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 09:56:59|Editor: Liu Video Player Close WASHINGTON, March 12 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Tuesday said it saw "no basis" to ground Boeing 737 Max planes despite two recent similar crashes of the aircraft of the series. "Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action," the FAA said in a statement. The statement reinforced the FAA's confidence for the questioned crashes of two Boeing Max 8 planes on Sunday and in October, 2018 after issuing a continued airworthiness certificate for the model on Monday. The move put the United States among a shrinking list of countries willing to stand by Boeing in light of the fatal crashes that killed hundreds of people, as aviation regulators of China, Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, the European Union, India have grounded the aircraft, so have Ethiopian Airlines, Comair Airways, Cayman Airways, Aerolineas Argentinas, Aeromexico, Gol Airlines, Royal Air Maroc. U.S. lawmakers across the aisle, experts and industry associations have joined in unison to call for the grounding of the model, urging the FAA to join other aviation regulators in prioritizing safety. U.S. Republican Senator Ted Cruz on Tuesday echoed Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Blumenthal in urging the FAA to ground the planes. "In light of the decisions of regulatory agencies across the world to ground the Model 737 Max, I believe it would be prudent for the United States likewise to temporarily ground 737 Max aircraft until the FAA confirms the safety of these aircraft & their passengers," Cruz said, pledging to hold a congressional hearing to investigate the crashes. According to the FAA, currently 74 Boeing 737 Max 8 is operated by U.S. carriers, mostly by United Airlines, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines. A 737 MAX 8 plane of Ethiopian Airlines crashed Sunday morning, killing all 157 passengers and crew members on board. The plane crash was the second fatal incident involving the same model in five months. Another Boeing 737 MAX 8, flown by Indonesia's Lion Air, crashed soon after takeoff from Jakarta in October last year, killing 189 people. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 10:02:02|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close WASHINGTON, March 12 (Xinhua) -- The United States is considering more "very significant" sanctions in connection with Venezuela, the U.S. State Department said on Tuesday. There will be "some very significant additional sanctions" in the coming days, U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams told reporters at the State Department's daily briefing. The envoy also revealed that Washington is planning "a significant number of additional visa revocations" for Venezuelans linked with incumbent President Nicolas Maduro. Abrams' words came one day after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ordered a full withdrawal of remaining diplomats from the U.S. embassy in Caracas, Venezuela within a week. The Trump administration recently has kept piling up pressure on Maduro, including imposing sanctions on Venezuelan officials and revoking visas of Maduro-aligned individuals. The United States recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the nation's "interim president" on Jan. 23, days after Maduro was inaugurated for a second term as president. In response, Maduro announced that he was severing "diplomatic and political" ties with the United States. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 10:27:08|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close WASHINGTON, March 12 (Xinhua) -- The United States and Taliban wrapped up their talks in Doha, the capital city of Qatar, with "meaningful progress" made, said the U.S. State Department on Tuesday. "We've received reports back from Special Representative (Zalmay) Khalilzad that they've had meaningful progress," Robert Palladino, the State Department's deputy spokesperson, told reporters at a daily briefing. Palladino said the Taliban has agreed that "peace will require both sides to fully address four core issues," namely "counterterrorism assurances, troop withdrawal, intra-Afghan dialogue, and a comprehensive ceasefire." "In this round of talks, we were able to move to agreement in draft on the first two principles, counterterrorism assurances and troop withdrawal," the spokesperson added. Palladino also revealed that when the agreement in draft is finalized, the Taliban and an inclusive Afghan negotiating team that includes the Afghan government will begin intra-Afghan negotiations of a political settlement and comprehensive ceasefire. Qatar on Tuesday announced that the United States and Taliban have made progress in their longest round of negotiations in Doha to end a 17-year-old war in a strife-torn Afghanistan. It is unclear, however, if the Afghan government and other Afghan political leaders will be ready to embrace the tentative deal worked out by Khalilzad. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 10:32:10|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close CAPE TOWN, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The South African government will continue to pursue land expropriation without compensation until land is returned to those who were forced to be deprived of it, Deputy President David Mabuza said Tuesday. Land expropriation without compensation will not stop because of opposition, Mabuza said while answering questions in Parliament. However, this must be done within the confines of the Constitution and the rule of law so as to avoid illegal land invasion, he said. Mabuza rejected claims that land expropriation without compensation will negatively impact the economy. Land reform will be used to enhance the agriculture sector, he said. "On a daily basis, we are engaging farmers and encouraging them to donate land for redistribution," Mabuza said, adding that some business leaders in the mining sectors have donated land as their contribution to the land reform program. "As government, we are relieving land that is in the hands of the state in order to advance the objectives of land reform," he added. He urged those who are against expropriation of land without compensation to desist from dividing South Africans along racial lines. Opponents to land reform argue that the process will drive away white farmers, threaten food security and negatively impact the economy. But the government has repeatedly assured that it will promote the land reform without destabilizing the agricultural sector, endangering food security in the country, or undermining economic growth and job creation. About 25 years after the end of apartheid, the minority whites still own most of the land in South Africa. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) has been under fire for the lack of political will to address the land issue. Since taking power in February 2018, President Cyril Ramaphosa has been trumpeting land expropriation without compensation, drawing ire from opponents at home and abroad. Amid mounting concern, Parliament has given the green light to amending section 25 of the Constitution to pave way for land expropriation without compensation. A bill is expected to be introduced to legalize the process following a parliamentary debate later this year. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 10:32:11|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close by Xinhua Writer Lu Yun BEIJING, March 13 (Xinhua) -- When Liu Yonghao, chairman of China's agricultural conglomerate New Hope Group, stepped into the Great Hall of the People with a speech titled "There is hope for China's private companies" in 1993, he was both nervous and excited. He was excited because it was rare for an entrepreneur from the private sector to become a national political advisor, let alone give a speech at the country's most important political event. He was also nervous because the topic was considered somewhat "sensitive" back when state-owned enterprises still dominated the economy. To his surprise, the speech featuring the keywords "private" and "hope" received multiple rounds of applause in the Great Hall of the People. Twenty-six years later, the Sichuan-born entrepreneur has become one of the most recognizable faces during China's annual "two sessions", having served as a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) for five terms and as a deputy of the National People's Congress for one term. "The private sector has now grown into a big part of the economy thanks to the country's reform and opening-up," said 67-year-old Liu on the sidelines of the two sessions, annual sessions of the national legislative and political advisory bodies. A billionaire who built his fortune from scratch, Liu is known to the world as the "king of animal feed." Long before Chinese tech tycoons made their fame through fancy Internet products, Liu appeared regularly on the Forbes China Rich List, by helping Chinese farmers raise pigs. Every spring since 1993, Liu comes to Beijing with at least five proposals. This time he brought eight, most of which center around either serving private companies or improving the agricultural sector. "People say I am the king of animal feed, a vanguard of reform, and a pioneer in China's anti-poverty fight. But above all, I am a private entrepreneur," Liu said, with his signature gentle tone and ever-present smile. A veteran political advisor, as he likes to describe himself, Liu has submitted a series of proposals that were later turned into policies or government initiatives that fostered the growth of the country's private sector. In 1993, seeing the financing bottleneck of the private sector, Liu proposed to set up a bank that serves the interests of private firms, leading to the establishment of China Minsheng Bank three years later, the country's first national bank founded by private capital. In 2003, he led a team of CPPCC members to research the well-being of the private economy, which turned into reports that helped shape the famous "36 items on supporting the non-public sector," a systematic policy document in China to promote the non-public economy. Liu speaks out for the group that is important to him and the country, worries about their development, and fights for a better environment for them, said Li Yining, a renowned economist, who partnered with Liu when researching the private economy. "He's never distracted by his fortune," Li said. Last year, as a member of the 13th National Committee of the CPPCC, Liu stood at the Great Hall of the People and explained to journalists about his plan to train "green collar" workers to revitalize the countryside. "The 'green collar' refers to a new generation of farmers and technicians in the countryside, who should be respected and earn a decent salary," Liu said. This year, he proposed that the country should invest more in agricultural studies so that agricultural majors would be willing to go back to the countryside and engage in farming, which currently isn't a popular idea among college graduates. "If you were very well compensated and had a promising career path, it wouldn't really matter whether you raise pigs or make planes," Liu said. Every time Liu mentions the word "farmers," he likes to add "friends" behind it. "Technological innovation should serve the interests of our farmer friends," he said, referring to an Internet bank he recently helped launch that uses big data to ease credit strain for farmers. Born in a poor family in southwest China's Sichuan province, Liu started out breeding quails and chickens together with his three older brothers in the 1980s. After the local bank refused to lend money to some "nobody," the Liu family had to sell their bicycle and watch to raise 1,000 yuan (about 150 U.S. dollars) as starting capital. The humble beginnings made Liu very aware of the difficulties that private companies and farmers face. The Internet bank he helped to establish in 2016 was intended to help the "nobody" get small loans, mostly with a short repayment period of several months. "The repayment period is just enough time needed to raise pigs," said Liu, who ranked 60th on the Forbes China Rich List last year. He vividly remembers getting up at 5 a.m. every day as a child to collect pieces of coal and small sticks so his family never had to buy coal for the kitchen fire. "If I wasn't always one step ahead, the other kids would take all the coal," Liu said with a laugh. "Half a step ahead" is also Liu's motto as an acute businessman. Before businesses in the traditional sector started to revamp themselves as part of the country's structural reforms, the New Hope Group had already ventured into biotech and fintech. "Unlike the simple smiles that are always on his face, the business scope of New Hope is now very diversified," once commented Wang Shi, founder of China Vanke. "He is trying to build an agricultural empire," Wang said. As an entrepreneur that embodies the 40 years of China's reform and opening-up, Liu knows that no empire can be built without the opportunities bestowed by the times. "When I said 'there is hope for China's private companies' 26 years ago, I believed the private sector could be a strong supplement to the economy," Liu said. Now, the private sector contributes more than 50 percent of tax revenue, 60 percent of GDP, 70 percent of technological innovation, 80 percent of urban employment and 90 percent of new jobs and new firms. "The private sector is the new hope for the Chinese economy," Liu said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 11:02:18|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close CARACAS, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Tuesday declared victory over the U.S.-backed opposition after his government succeeded in restoring electricity following a prolonged blackout. According to the government, the opposition with support from Washington sabotaged the national power grid to incite unrest in a bid to oust Maduro. "Today ... five days since the attack on electricity was carried out from the United States using cybernetics against the electric system, I can say that victory is in our hands, the victory of restoring the Venezuelan electricity system," Maduro said in an address to the nation. The government was working to strengthen the electricity service now that power has been restored to a good portion of the country, including by stepping up security at power stations, he said. Electricity went off in many parts of the country a little before 5 p.m. local time (2100 GMT) Thursday. Schools and government offices were shut down in the aftermath. The worst blackout in modern Venezuelan history came amid heightened tensions between the ruling socialist party and the right-wing opposition. Opposition leader Juan Guaido, who declared himself "interim president" on Jan. 23, is under investigation for his alleged role in causing the power outage, Prosecutor General Tarek William Saab said earlier in the day. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 11:07:20|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close YANGON, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar's official media "the Global New Light of Myanmar" stressed on Wednesday the importance of "sparing no one in fighting corruption" notwithstanding their roles in the government machinery under law. "In our efforts to combat corruption, which has become customary and has taken root in most departments, we must not spare anyone because corruption poses a major obstacle to economic development, efforts to raise the living standard of the people, measures for reducing poverty and the smooth flow of foreign investment," the paper said in its editorial. The editorial came after Myanmar's Tanintharyi Region Chief Minister Dr. Lae Lae Maw was relieved from duty on Monday following her arrest on charge of corruption along with three local company officials. The removal of the regional chief minister came at the end of a one-month investigation by the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) into the charge against the female chief minister. Lae Lae Maw is the first chief minister to be charged with corruption since the incumbent government, led by the National League for Democracy (NLD), took power in 2016. Myanmar has been stepping up anti-corruption activities with the ACC taking measures to form anti-corruption units tasked with scrutinizing corruption cases, tackling the issue and preventing graft among civil servants. President U Win Myint had told the ACC to draw up an action plan and make efforts in this endeavor. To ensure a clean government and a good governance system, the Anti-Corruption Act was amended to conform with the international standard during the tenure of the incumbent government. The government has been working to improve the administrative, legislative and judiciary, political and economic affairs as the country makes the transition to a democratic system, while it has clamped down on corruption, deeming it a national duty, the editorial said. The editorial urged institutional leaders to lead the efforts against corruption and tackle it themselves to change the situation, warning that people in position of authority are often the ones to commit graft. The editorial called for ensuring that no one is set free without punishment for any act of corruption, saying that only then can there be no corruption. File photo taken on June 19, 2017 shows a Boeing 737 MAX 9 in Bourget, France. (Xinhua/Chen Yichen) JAKARTA, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Indonesian low-cost airline Lion Air has sought to abort their orders of Boeing 737 Max planes and change them with others types after the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines' aircraft on Sunday that killed all 157 people on board, the managing director of the airline said here on Tuesday. Lion Air has ordered 222 Boeing 737 Max 8, 9 and 10 valued at 22 billion U.S. dollars with delivery by 2035, with 11 of them having arrived in the country, according to the airline. The aircraft of the Ethiopian Airline crashed minutes after taking off, the second air tragedy of the similar brand new Boeing 737 Max 8 jet plane within less than six months. The first one occurred in October last year when a Boeing 737 Max 8 operated by Lion Air plunged into the water off western parts of Indonesia minutes after taking off, killing all 189 people aboard. Managing Director of Lion Air Group Daniel Putu said currently negotiators from the airline and Boeing's side have conducted talks and renegotiation on the cancelation of the orders, and the possibility to change them with other types of planes would be carried out. "There must be (renegotiation). As we are discussing with them (Boeing)," the managing director said. So far, Putu said both sides had not reached a deal but agreed to delay arrivals of four Boeing 737 Max jet planes ordered by the airline, which was previously scheduled to arrive in May this year. Ten of Lion Air's Boeing 737 Max 8 jet planes, along with another owned by the state PT Garuda Indonesia airliner, have been suspended from flying by the Indonesian transport ministry for inspection following Sunday's fatal crash, spokesman of the ministry Hengki Angkasawan told Xinhua. Meanwhile, President Director of PT Garuda Indonesia Gusti Ngurah Askhara said on Tuesday that Garuda is also seeking to drop its orders of 49 Boeing 737 Max 8 jet planes from Boeing and change them with other types of planes. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 11:37:26|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close TOKYO, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Tokyo stocks dropped Wednesday morning as the market mood was dragged down after British Prime Minister Theresa May's plan to leave the European Union was nixed by a vote in parliament overnight. The 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average dropped 303.91 points, or 1.41 percent, from Tuesday to 21,199.78. The broader Topix index of all First Section issues on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, meanwhile, fell 19.04 points, or 1.19 percent, at 1,586.44. Securities house, insurance and credit consumer-linked issues comprised those that declined the most by the morning break. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 12:47:36|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close NAIROBI, March 12 (Xinhua) -- The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is accelerating commitments to restoring ecosystem in Africa, said an official on Tuesday. "We are accelerating commitments for ecosystem restoration to improve resilience in the region," David Cooper, deputy executive secretary of CBD told reporters on the sidelines of the ongoing fourth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-4). Cooper noted that the CBD is developing initiatives that could help reverse climate change, biodiversity loss and combat desertification. "We are urging UN member countries to meet the climate change initiatives that include carbon sequestration through their nationally determined contributions (NDC) to help protect land degradation and restore ecosystem, water supply, restore coral reefs and prevent soil erosion," he added. With more than 4,700 delegates from the globe, the UNEA-4 is scheduled for March 11-15 in Nairobi. Many victims of the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 were en route to participate in the assembly, according to a statement issued by UN Environment Program. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 12:47:36|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close WASHINGTON, March 12 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) announced on Tuesday that two former employees of the famous investment bank Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., were banned from banking industry. "The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday announced that it is prohibiting Tim Leissner and Ng Chong Hwa, also known as Roger Ng, from the banking industry for their participation in a scheme to illegally divert billions of dollars from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund," said the Fed. Leissner and Ng were both employed by foreign subsidiaries of the Goldman Sachs. In 2012 and 2013, they coordinated bond offerings arranged by Goldman for a Malaysian state fund named 1Malaysia Development Berhad, as known as 1MDB. "The funds diverted from 1MDB were then used for the conspirators' personal benefit and to bribe certain government officials in Malaysia and Abu Dhabi," said the Fed. Leissner pleaded guilty to criminal charges In August 2018, including conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and to commit money laundering. In October 2018, Ng was indicted on similar charges, said the Fed. According to the Fed, Leissner consented to the permanent ban imposed by the central bank of United States. In addition, Leissner was fined 1.42 million U.S. dollars. The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., is a famous investment bank and financial services provider. Headquartered in New York City, the banking giant ranked 70th on the Fortune 500 list in 2018. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 12:52:37|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close HOUSTON, March 12 (Xinhua) -- The future focus of the International Energy Forum (IEF) is to make better cooperation between energy producing countries and consuming countries, Secretary General of IEF Sun Xiansheng said Tuesday. In an interview with Xinhua during the annual energy conference CERAWeek held by the London-based information company IHS Markit, Sun said the IEF consists of energy producers, energy consumers, and energy trading nations. Efforts should be made to promote smoother cooperation among these countries. "We should encourage energy producers to strengthen their productivity, enhance energy supply, and address energy poverty issues," he said, adding that there are currently 1.2 billion people in the world living without power supply, and around 2 billion people have no access to modern energy. "It is the energy producers' responsibility to ensure their supply," he added. In order to cope with the global energy challenges, Sun said the IEF will hold a meeting this May in Shanghai, China, to strengthen the exchange and cooperation between energy producers and consumers. Meanwhile, he called for the oil price to be stabilized in a reasonable price range. "It will not only guarantee certain profit for the producers, but also create affordable purchase for the consumers, ensuring the sustainability of energy," Sun said. The 72-member IEF is a neutral facilitator of informal, open, informed and continuing global energy dialogue. Accounting for around 90 percent of global supply and demand for oil and gas, the IEF aims to foster greater mutual understanding and awareness of common energy interests among its member countries. The CERAWeek is an annual energy meeting with the attendance of prominent speakers from energy, technology and financial sectors. This year marks the 38th edition of the meeting, which is attended by more than 4,500 guests from over 70 countries and regions. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 12:57:38|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close VIENTIANE, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The Lao and Vietnamese governments have agreed to continue cooperation in the development of cyber security, e-government solution, and postal service. The commitment to ongoing cyber security, e-government solutions and postal cooperation was made in Lao capital Vientiane on Tuesday between Lao's Ministry of Post and Telecommunications and Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications, local daily Vientiane Times reported Wednesday. Three agreements related to this cooperation were signed during a visit to Laos by Vietnam's Minister of Information and Communications, Nguyen Manh Hung. The agreements on cyber security, e-government solutions and postal development were signed between the relevant sectors of the two ministries. In the mean time, Vietnam handed over two trucks to Lao's Ministry of Post and Telecommunications. The agreements comprised the Minutes of Meeting (MOM), e-office supply, and an installation contract. The MOM was signed between Lao's Minister of Post and Telecommunications, Thansamay Kommasith and Nguyen Manh Hung, Vietnam's Minister of Information and Communications. Both sides agreed on the cooperation theme of "go together, work together, cooperate and develop together" to ensure that future ICT cooperation will be effective and practical, and also help to consolidate the special friendly relations between Laos and Vietnam. Over the past year, the Lao ministry also signed an agreement to work with its Vietnamese counterpart to develop technological innovations and human resources. The two countries have been cooperating in training on spectrum management and monitoring, along with the management of postal service, Internet broadband, cloud computing and social media. They also cooperated in sharing the information, experiences and best practices in e-government development, ICT application development, e-service promotion and business opportunities, as well as cooperation between ICT providers, the government and business, according to the report. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 13:02:38|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close CHICAGO, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Roughly three dozen lawsuits have been filed against Boeing following the crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 of the Lion Air in Indonesia on October 29, 2018, killing 189 people on board. Almost all of the lawsuits are in Circuit Court of Cook County or the Northern District of Illinois, except one which was filed in Seattle, Crain's Chicago Business reported on Tuesday. Another Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed Sunday in Ethiopia, killing more than 150 on board. The crash in Ethiopia could affect the trajectory of the Lion Air lawsuits, based on what investigators discover, the local media quoted Thomas Gardiner, a name partner at Gardiner Koch Weisberg & Wrona which is representing the family of Lion Air co-pilot Harvino, as saying. "It depends on the result of the investigation, in what the cause was of the crash," Gardiner said. "If it's a similar circumstance, that evidence could be admissible, conceivably." Boeing has filed a motion suggesting the Lion Air lawsuits should be dismissed locally and moved instead to Indonesian courts. While the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration holds the Boeing plane is sky-worthy, authorities in many countries including Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, the European Union, India and China have grounded the aircraft. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 13:17:41|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close WASHINGTON, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Virtual reality technology became a new way to train soldiers' combat skills while saving a large amount of training cost, American global aerospace and defense technology company Northrop Grumman said on Tuesday. During a military training, a facility named Distributed Training Center (DTC) at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in the State of Virginia replicated scenarios in battle zones where warfighters are deployed, while each virtual scenario was designed and created based on mission demands. Within the virtual scenario created by DTC, ground forces such as Marine infantry could train their battle skills by cooperating with air force crew like F-15E jet fighter pilots, according to Northrop Grumman. "During two training events, eight F-15E aircrew based at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho trained with four Marines from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state via the DTC," said Northrop Grumman. Such kind of training was named "close air support" (CAS). In military tactics, CAS is an air strike carried out by aircraft against a hostile target that is posing major threat to ground troops. Northrop Grumman said that CAS training closely replicated scenarios in current battlefields, while providing virtual but constructive training at "a fraction of the cost" of a real training. "The Marines were impressed with the high fidelity training and said the customized scenarios felt like real life," said Martin Amen, director of secure network operations of Northrop Grumman. Northrop Grumman said that the DTC had provided training for the U.S. Air Force for nine years, but this was the first time Marines used the DTC to train for their missions. Headquartered in West Falls Church, Virginia, Northrop Grumman was also a top-tier arms trader in the world. In 2018, the company ranked 118th on the Fortune 500 list. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 13:17:42|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close LILONGWE, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The death toll from the recent Malawi flooding disaster has reached 45, the Department of Disaster and Management Affairs (DoDMA) said Tuesday in an update on their official website. The statement, which was confirmed to Xinhua by DoDMA spokesperson Chipiliro Khamula, said the number of injured people has reach 577 and two people remain missing. Nearly 148,000 households have been affected and the number of people affected by the floods has increased to approximately 739,000. "Most of the displaced families are living in camps while some are living with their relations," reads the statement, adding that so far a total of 187 camps have been established in the 14 affected districts. Assessments on damage are still underway, according to the DoDMA. A statement released Tuesday by the climate department warned that Malawians living in the southern region of the country would brace for more heavy and stormy rains due to the movement of the Tropical Cyclone IDAI towards Malawi. The Malawi government said it needs 16.4 million U.S. dollars to deal with the damage caused by the floods. DoDMA Principal Secretary Wilson Mollen appealed to local and international organizations to assist the Malawi government in any way they can for the displaced households to get shelters, food and all other needs. Since Malawi President Arthur Peter Mutharika declared a state of disaster in 14 districts Friday, local and international organizations have been providing support to help the country contain the situation. The government of South Africa was the first to respond by sending rescue teams and equipment. The displaced people are temporarily dwelling in schools and other evacuation camps. Mutharika and government officials have visited the shelters to assess the situation and cheer the victims up. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 13:22:44|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close by Xinhua writer Xu Xiaolei UNITED NATIONS, March 12 (Xinhua) -- "Push back against the pushbacks!" The slogan resonated in the United Nations General Assembly hall, chanted by representatives attending a high-level event on Women in Power held Tuesday. This expression was from the remarks by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at the gathering of women leaders from around the world, in calling for further efforts to overcome obstacles at the United Nations to achieving gender parity across the system. The version was repeated by the Executive Director of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, and chanted by the participants of the event following her lead. Speaking to some 150 women leaders in the audience, Mlambo-Ngcuka pointed to the progress in women leadership, saying "we have women who are now astronauts; women are judges; women are innovators; women are leading human rights institutions." At the same time, she said women are still underrepresented while urging the women leaders to use their power to make changes. "We have an obligation to stand up and to work in order to make lives better for other women, because the positions of leadership that we have are not a right to us. They are a privilege." Women in Power was initiated by UN General Assembly President Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces as a highlight of her work in gender equality, one of her priorities she set out upon taking office in September 2018. Espinosa invited all female presidents and prime ministers to the event. The presidents of Lithuania, Nepal, Trinidad and Tobago, Croatia and Estonia, as well as the prime minister of Iceland attended the gathering. Bringing together women leaders from governments, the UN system, private sector and civil society, the event aims to identify barriers that hinder women's participation in leadership and share best practices that can accelerate women's empowerment. In her speech, the UNGA president highlighted the benefits of women's participation in politics. "It has been amply shown that gender equality and the participation of women in politics promote economic stability and contribute to strengthening institutions," she said. A greater representation of women in parliaments can help continue the reform of discriminatory laws, and increase investment in such key areas as healthcare, education and social protection, she added. Espinosa also recognized the work by UN Secretary-General Guterres, "who has achieved gender equality in the high ranks of the UN secretariat, in the posts of resident coordinators and in regional commissions." In response, Guterres said it had been possible to achieve gender parity quickly at these levels of the UN system because "those are the people I can appoint myself without limitations." He vowed to "push back against the pushbacks," reaffirming commitment to a parity across the board at the UN. Asked about gender parity under her domain, Espinosa told Xinhua that 60 percent of her cabinet and UNGA co-facilitators are female. In addition, she is working together with the secretary-general "not to have only parity in senior positions but go a little bit down," and encouraging member states to appoint more women to higher positions. On global gender inequality, Espinosa called for attention to be paid to a worrying regression. "If the current trend continues, achieving equality will take us 107 years ... (But) only four years ago in 2015, it was projected that that gap would be closed in just 30 years." At a press conference related to the event, Prime Minister of Iceland Katrin Jakobsdottir said her country's parliament saw a fall in 2017 in the percentage of women lawmakers to below 40 percent from nearly 50 percent. She blamed the political parties in Iceland for the drop. "The majority of Icelandic political parties have quota system ... (But) you can actually see from the results of the elections how it goes for women." Echoing Jakobsdottir, Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic told the press conference that the problem is more on the political parties' "implementation of the legislation." "We have the quota system in the parliament. However ... the parties will rather pay fines than respect the quota," she said, lamenting the fact that Croatia's last polls produced fewest elected women ever since its independence. According to UN figures, as of November 2018, only 10 percent of UN member states have a female head of state or government. Globally, only 24 percent of parliamentarians are women. Similarly, among the 2018 Fortune 500 companies, only 24 have women CEOs and 12 companies have no women at all on their board. At the press conference, Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid recalled "the special treatment" she received, including being asked more frequently about her age than her male counterparts. Kaljulaid expressed the hope that gender would not be such a issue in future politics, saying being a female president for her means when Estonian children draw a president, "sometimes they draw a woman in skirt." "It takes time for these things to change," she said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 13:27:45|Editor: Liu Video Player Close TOKYO, March 13 (Xinhua) -- An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.2 struck off the Kii Peninsula close to Wakayama Prefecture in Japan's southwest, the weather agency here said Wednesday. According to the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), the temblor, which occurred at 1:53 p.m. local time, was centered in the Kii Channel which separates the Japanese island of Shikoku from the Kii Peninsula on the main island of Honshu. The JMA did not issue a tsunami warning or advisory as a result of the quake. The quake's epicenter was located at a latitude of 33.8 degrees north and longitude of 134.9 degrees east and occurred at a depth of 50 km, the JMA said. The earthquake logged lower 4 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale which peaks at 7 in some areas of Wakayama Prefecture, the JMA said. In the nearby areas of Tokushima, the quake also registered 4 on Japan's seismic scale, and 3 in the surrounding prefectures of Shiga, Osaka, Hyogo and Nara, the weather agency said. There has been no immediate reports of major damage or injuries as a result of the offshore quake. Japan's nuclear watchdog has not, as yet, issued any warning about irregularities or abnormalities at Kansai Electric's Mihama, Oi, or Takahama nuclear power plants in the Kansai region. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 14:22:56|Editor: Liu Video Player Close SAN FRANCISCO, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Attorney General (AG) Bob Ferguson of the U.S. state of Washington Tuesday sued the state's three largest drug distributors for shipping suspicious opioid orders. Ferguson filed the lawsuit in King County Superior Court in downtown Seattle, Washington, against McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health Inc., and AmerisourceBergen Drug Corp. for failing to alert law enforcement of suspicious opioid orders, and illegally shipping those orders into Washington for years. The three distributors, which were among the top 15 of the Fortune 500 list based on 2017 revenue, have made billions of U.S. dollars feeding the opioid epidemic, and shipped huge amounts of oxycodone, fentanyl, hydrocodone, and other prescription opioids into the state, he said. They supplied more than 2 billion dollars of opioid pills to Washington from 2006 to 2014, Ferguson asserted. He accused the three companies of violating the state Consumer Protection Act for filling thousands of suspicious orders in Washington state without adequately identifying them or reporting them to law enforcing authorities, which fueled the opioid epidemic in the state. The Washington AG said more than 8,000 Washington residents died from opioid overdoses between 2006 and 2017, more than those killed by car accidents or firearms. Ferguson's lawsuit released on Tuesday is his second drug-related legal action against drug firms. In 2017, the attorney general filed a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma, one of the country's largest opioid manufacturers. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 14:38:00|Editor: Liu Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Recent fights between tribes in western Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have claimed at least 535 lives with the toll expected to go higher, a UN spokesman said on Tuesday. The "inter-communal attacks" from Dec. 16-18, 2018 have left 535 people dead and 111 injured. The number of casualties is likely to be higher as bodies are believed to have been dumped into the Congo River, said Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. "It was also not possible to confirm the number of persons still missing, with an estimated 19,000 people displaced by the violence," he said. Investigators found that the clashes between Banunu and Batende communities were triggered by a dispute over the burial of a Banunu chief. The attacks staged with rifles, machetes, bows and arrows, and gasoline, leaving little time for people to escape. The attacks were executed with the support of customary chiefs and may amount to crimes against humanity, according to a report by the UN Joint Human Rights Office in the capital of Kinshasa. "The report also stresses that the violence was facilitated by the absence of state action to prevent it and warns of the risk of renewed violence," the spokesman said. Leila Zerrougui, the head of the UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC, called on the Kinshasa government for urgent action to restore the authority of the state and create conditions for the safe and voluntary return of those displaced. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet called for justice and accountability to establish the facts and hold those responsible to account. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 14:38:01|Editor: Liu Video Player Close JAKARTA, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The wife and children of an alleged militant blew themselves up earlier Wednesday in their house in Sibolga town of Indonesia's North Sumatra province, after anti-terror police nabbed the husband, local media reported quoting national police spokesman. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 14:38:02|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close URUMQI, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Ranagul Karman and her family are settling into their new home in Kashgar in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwest China. "With central heating, gas, running water, Internet and cable TV, we no longer need to worry about things that troubled us in the past," Karman says. They have moved to a relocation village in Antong County, 94 kilometers away from their old neighborhood -- Kosrap County in Kizilsu Kirghiz Autonomous Prefecture. This village, one of many relocation sites in Xinjiang, was built by the local government to shelter those who moved from poverty-stricken areas in the mountains, seeking a better life. The new Karman family home has indoor plumbing, much more hygienic than the dry latrine the family used in Kosrap where flies buzzed everywhere and people had to take water from the river. When it rained the roof would leak, and the house was generally dilapidated, but the thing that concerned Karman most was her children's education. In mountainous areas like Kosrap, schools struggle to recruit teachers, and the standard of education is low. "The children were always cold at school, especially in winter," Karman says. "This new village is much more comfortable since there's floor heating both at home and in school." One of Karman's daughters now studies at a boarding school in the town and comes home at the weekend. Her two younger children go to the primary school near their home. "They all have dreams now, either to be a soldier or a doctor," Karman says. "I've never heard them say things like this before." "Their horizons have become broader as they came into contact with more people, beyond the mountains." It's not just the children who have shifted their perspectives. Karman and her husband Mahrup Murapa also have new jobs. Karman runs a store while Murapa works as a full-time plumber and part-time delivery driver. They have made more than 60,000 yuan (9,000 U.S. dollars) since they moved in August 2018. They have used the money to furnish their home, filling it with household electrical appliances including a television, a water heater and a refrigerator. Karman and her family are not an exceptional case. Last August, 1,149 families in Kosrap County began to move out of their old houses in the deep mountains, fleeing poverty. "From May to July every year, some houses would be submerged by floods washing through the village," Mahrup Murapa says. Natural disasters including floods and mudslides occurred frequently, damaging the roads that link Kosrap with the outside world. As a result, many villagers had never left the mountains. As a result, villagers could not get enough food or clothing, not to mention compulsory education, basic medical care and proper housing, according to Ahematjan Kerim, head of Kosrap County. The only way out of poverty for these people is relocation, and building new homes for them is a key approach for local governments to relieve poverty. In Karman's village, for example, the local government has built all sorts of infrastructure, including clinics, primary schools, kindergartens and activity centers. The village has not just tap water and electricity, but also convenient transportation. For the next five years, each villager can get subsidies of 1,500 yuan per month. But to remove the potential of people slipping back into poverty, relocation and subsidies is not enough. They need jobs to replace income previously made mainly from herding. The local government has therefore built factories to employ the herders. These factories started recruiting staff after the Chinese New Year in early February this year. The government also offers occupational training to the villagers, ensuring the young people have skills to help them find jobs. Each family in the village gets from the government a 0.33 hectare ration field and a forage base more than twice that size. And they can still access the meadow in the Kunlun Mountains. By building relocation sites, promoting industrial development and providing living allowances for impoverished households, Xinjiang has lifted 537,000 people out of poverty in 2018, bringing down poverty in the region to 6.51 percent. Next year will be critical for China's "war on poverty" as the country has decided to eradicate poverty by 2020, which is also the target year for China to become a moderately prosperous society in all respects. In 2019, Xinjiang will make every effort to lift another 606,100 people in 12 counties and 976 villages out of poverty, supporting the country's goal of reducing rural poor population by over 10 million this year. The region will continue building relocation sites and infrastructure and boosting employment. It will also better manage the poverty alleviation funds, making sure that every penny of funds and all poverty alleviation projects actually benefit impoverished households in Xinjiang. Hopefully, the worries that once plagued Karman and her family will be nothing but a memory for everyone in Xinjiang by the end of this year. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 15:33:13|Editor: Lu Hui Video Player Close SANTIAGO, March 12 (Xinhua) -- The capital's new public transport system, with the support of Chinese electric buses, will improve the quality of life and promote sustainability in Chile, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera said here on Tuesday. Pinera attended the unveiling ceremony of Santiago's Metropolitan Mobility Network (RED) Tuesday in the capital's Bustamante Park and praised Chinese-made electric buses for their help in upgrading public transit in the capital. "The (bus) fleet has without a doubt been one of our main preoccupations. We already have 100 electric buses in circulation on our city streets and very soon we are going to have 100 more," Pinera said. The RED, Santiago's revamped public transit system to replace the old Transantiago system, will cover the city's public transport means from subways to buses, bicycles and suburban trains. In December 2018, Pinera unveiled the first 100 electric buses for Santiago's transit fleet, which were made by Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD. In January, Transport and Telecommunications Minister Gloria Hutt unveiled a second fleet of 100 electric buses, this time made by Chinese manufacturer Yutong, which will soon join the BYD buses to serve city residents. The new units rank Chile in first place as the Latin American country with the biggest electric public transit fleet, and in second place globally. As much as "70 percent of the current bus fleet is going to be a totally new fleet, renewed, the vast majority electric, some with Euro VI norms," said Pinera. "This public transport system is going to be faster, more efficient, more comfortable, easier to use, safer and cleaner for the environment," he said. The plan is to introduce electric buses to Chile, instead of carrying on with the "old practice" of shipping older vehicles that were retired from service in Santiago "to die" in other cities, said the president. "The RED is much more than a brand. Much more than a service. It's really a commitment to uniting all Chileans through a new public transport system that will improve their quality of life and allow them to live a fuller, happier life," said Pinera. Constanza Cea, executive director of the Chilean branding and promotion agency Imagen de Chile, also celebrated the move to modernize transit with new technologies. "Only China has cities with larger fleets" of electric buses, she said. "This type of innovation helps Chile's image and is a source of pride for everyone," she said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 15:52:56|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close Renagul embroiders for haute couture at her workshop in Yizhou District of Hami City, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, on March 8, 2019. The haute couture, literally named "blossoming flower", decorated with handmade embroidery with distinctive local flavor, was presented at the Paris Fashion Week in 2016. This changed embroiderer Renagul's life, who never thought her works would be displaed at a world-renowned fashion show. Renagul grew up in an embroidery family in Hami. Influenced by her mother, she has been fond of embroidery since childhood. Supported by local government, she opened an embroidery cooperative in 2014. In 2016, Qin Xu, founder and chief designer of Shanghai fashion brand Moodbox, came to Hami for inspiration. Obsessed and inspired by Renagul and her mother's exquisite embroidery, Qin Xu designed a series of fashions with Hami embroidery. Once the elegant "blossoming flower" was stunningly unveiled during the Paris Fashion Week, it immediately fascinated the audience. Now, Renagul has achieved growing orders and rising incomes. She also started to learn English, hoping her work would gain popularity abroad. She said, "I enjoy my work. Every time I pick up the needle, I feel calm and happy. In the future, I would like to incorporate more modern elements into traditional embroidery to make Hami embroidery more popular". (Xinhua/Wang Fei) Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 15:48:18|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close NANJING, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The space-tracking ship Yuanwang-3 is sailing to the Pacific Ocean from a port in east China's Jiangsu Province Wednesday for upcoming monitoring missions. This year, the ship will carry out two maritime space monitoring missions, which will last about two months. The mission members have conducted a series of training programs and tests before the voyage, to increase emergency response. Yuanwang-3, which entered service in the mid-1990s, is China's second-generation space tracking ship. Sailing more than 650,000 nautical miles, it has completed 80 missions, including maritime tracking of the Shenzhou spacecraft, Chang'e lunar probe and BeiDou satellites. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 16:03:24|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close HONG KONG, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The Civil Aviation Department (CAD) of China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government announced that the operation of all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft into, out of and over Hong Kong will be temporarily prohibited from 6:00 p.m. local time Wednesday. "The CAD has been closely monitoring the developments, the investigation progress and the information from relevant aviation authorities. Having regard to the latest situation, the CAD has decided to temporarily prohibit operation of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft into, out of and over Hong Kong," a spokesman for the CAD said. He added that the temporary prohibition will take effect at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday and continue until further notice. The spokesman pointed out that there were two serious accidents involving Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in less than five months. "The temporary prohibition is solely a precautionary measure to ensure aviation safety and protect the public," he emphasized. The CAD has noted that the U.S. Federation Aviation Administration (FAA), the type-certification authority of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, has affirmed the airworthiness of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, and the investigation into the accidents is ongoing, he said. The spokesman added that over the past few days the CAD has been in close contact with the FAA and the relevant organizations, including the two airline companies which use Boeing 737 MAX aircraft to operate flights into and out of Hong Kong International Airport. The two airliner companies, SpiceJet of India and Globus Airlines of Russia, have been notified by the CAD of the temporary prohibition and said they would fully cooperate and maintain their services with other aircraft types so as to reduce impacts on passengers. During the temporary prohibition, the CAD will continue to closely monitor the developments and the information of relevant aviation authorities, and will review the arrangement of the temporary prohibition in due course, the spokesman said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 16:08:26|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close NEW DELHI, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Six members of a family were killed Wednesday after a car carrying them skidded off the road and fell into a canal in southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, officials said. The accident took place near Pollachi in Coimbatore, about 535 km southwest of Chennai, the capital city of Tamil Nadu. "Early today six members of a family were killed after a speeding car they were travelling in fell into Parambikulam-Aliyar-Project canal here," a police official posted in Coimbatore said. "Soon after the information about the accident reached to police, they rushed to the spot to carry out rescue work." According to the official, rescuers retrieved six bodies from the car. "The bodies have been kept at Pollachi general hospital," the official said. Officials said the family was returning after paying obeisance at a temple. The car has also been taken out of the canal with the help of a crane. Police have registered a case and ordered investigations to ascertain the reason behind the accident. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 16:13:27|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close TOKYO, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Major firms in Japan on Wednesday offered their employees a rise in wages that was lower compared to a year earlier amid uncertain global and domestic economic outlooks. Last year, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in a bid to help pull the nation out of a decades-long deflationary quagmire, urged companies to hike wages by three percent, specifically. During this year's spring negotiations between labor unions and managements, the Japanese premier encouraged wages to be increased for the sixth successive year, but held back on explicitly referencing an exact percent. Bellwether firm for the wage negotiations, Toyota Motor Corp., offered its employees a hike of 10,700 yen (96 U.S. dollars) on average a month, with the amount dropping by 1,000 yen (9 U.S. dollars) compared to the previous year. Toyota's union had been seeking a raise of 12,000 yen (107 U.S. dollars) for each of its employees. Nissan Motor Co., whose employees have been rocked by the arrest of the automaker's former chairman Carlos Ghosn, offered its employees a pay raise of 3,000 yen (27 U.S. dollars) equaling that of its raise offered per month a year earlier. Honda Motor Co.'s pay raise this year, meanwhile, will be 1,400 yen (12.5 U.S. dollars) a month per employee, a drop of 300 yen on year. Domestic automakers such as Toyota, once the cream of hybrid technology with its ubiquitous Prius models being rolled out globally since 1997, are now grappling to increase investments to bolster competitiveness and meet the growing demand for electric vehicles, and, as such, have erred on the side of caution when raising wages, local industry insiders said Wednesday. With concerns about the outlook for the global economy remaining murky amid the European Central Bank lowering its outlook for growth in the single currency eurozone while unleashing more monetary easing measures to help support financial institutions, and uncertainties over Britain's plans to leave the European Union, a number of blue-chips here have slashed their earnings forecasts. Global concerns have also been amplified by domestic issues, with the outlook for sentiment in the service-sector looking bleak in the coming months, and machinery orders -- a key advance indicator for corporate capital spending in a six to nine month period ahead -- tumbling more than five percent according to government data released Wednesday. With subsequent cost-cutting measures being implemented across the board for many major firms here, wage increases at companies like Panasonic Corp. and Hitachi Ltd. have been cut this year by 500 yen to a 1,000 yen increase on average per employee a month. The Japan Business Federation, known here as Keidanren, as the nation's most powerful business lobby, has encouraged its member firms to focus resources on improving employees' benefits, such as better accommodating working parents, rather than solely focusing on increasing monthly wages. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 16:13:27|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close HONG KONG, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft have been grounded in a number of countries and regions in Asia-Pacific amid safety concerns following the fatal crash of an Ethiopian Airlines' passenger jet on Sunday. The Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 bound for Nairobi, Kenya crashed shortly after taking off from Addis Ababa on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. It was the second deadly crash for a Boeing 737 MAX 8 model in less than five months. The first one occurred in October last year when an aircraft of the same model operated by Indonesia's Lion Air plunged into the water off western Indonesia minutes after taking off, killing 189 people. China's civil aviation regulator on Monday ordered domestic airlines to suspend commercial operations of all Boeing 737-8 airplanes. "Given that two accidents both involved the newly delivered Boeing 737-8 planes and happened during the take-off phase, they had some degree of similarity," the Civil Aviation Administration said on its website, adding that the move was in line with the principle of zero tolerance for safety hazards. Indonesia's transport ministry said on Monday that Indonesia has suspended operations of all Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes operated by airlines in the country. "We have temporarily grounded the planes to conduct inspection," the ministry's spokesman Hengki Angkasawan told Xinhua, "Boeing has informed us some findings in a release. We will inspect based on them. Later, If we find (violation) we will fully ground the planes." He did not give further details on how long the inspection will take. Boeing 737 MAX planes are operated by two Indonesian carriers - Lion Air and state-owned PT Garuda Indonesia, according to Hengki. Lion Air has ordered 222 Boeing 737 MAX 8, 9 and 10 valued at 22 billion U.S. dollars with delivery by 2035. Managing Director of Lion Air Group Daniel Putu said on Tuesday that currently the airline and Boeing are conducting talks and renegotiation on the cancelation of the orders and the possibility of changing them with other types of planes. The Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore also temporarily suspended all Boeing 737 MAX flights in its airspace on Tuesday. The decision was made "in light of two fatal accidents involving Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in less than five months," the aviation regulator said. Eastar Jet, the only South Korean air carrier that owns two Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes, decided on Tuesday to temporarily ground the jets to alleviate public concerns about the plane's safety. South Korea's transport ministry conducted an emergency safety check on Monday on the two Boeing planes owned by the budget carrier. Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) said on Tuesday night that all 737 MAX flights in and out of the country had been suspended in the interest of public safety. "CASA regrets any inconvenience to passengers but believes it is important to always put safety first," said Shane Carmody, CASA chief executive and director of aviation safety. The Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia also ordered an immediate suspension of all flights of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 in its airspace on Tuesday while clarifying no Malaysian carriers operates the aircraft. Meanwhile, the Indian government has decided to ground with immediate effect the entire fleet of Boeing 737 MAX operating in the country. "These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations," said the country's Aviation Ministry in a tweet late on Tuesday. According to media reports, SpiceJet and Jet Airways are the only two private airlines in India that operate Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft. SpiceJet has 12 such planes. Jet Airways' five such planes are already grounded due to the airline's financial issues. The Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam decided to close the Vietnamese air space to Boeing 737 MAX since 10:00 a.m. local time of Wednesday. To date, no airline in Vietnam has used Boeing 737 MAX. Also on Wednesday, Fiji decided to temporarily ground its fleet of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, and New Zealand announced it has suspended the operation of Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft to or from the country. The Civil Aviation Department of China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government announced on Wednesday that operation of all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft into, out of and over Hong Kong will be temporarily prohibited from 6:00 p.m. local time (1000 GMT). Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 16:13:27|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close XINING, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The latest monitoring data has shown that China's Sanjiangyuan National Park has seen increased vegetation coverage in recent years. Sanjiangyuan National Park, also known as the Three-River-Source National Park, is home to the headwaters of the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang rivers. Climate changing and human activities have caused environmental degradation in the park area since the 1970s. A recent report released by the park said many types of vegetation in the park have been increasing and the ecological environment has become better since the government injected more than 10 billion yuan (1.5 billion U.S. dollars) into environmental protection and restoration. The grassland vegetation cover increased by 27 percent in 2018 and the sward height grew 0.8 centimeters higher, compared with 2017. Vegetation coverage on sandy soil rose by 2 percent, according to the report. The Sanjiangyuan National Park started trial operation in 2016 and is set to open in 2020. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 16:18:29|Editor: Lu Hui Video Player Close An excavator works at the crash site of an Ethiopian Airlines' aircraft, some 50 km east of Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, on March 10, 2019. All 157 people aboard Ethiopian Airlines flight were confirmed dead as Africa's fastest growing airline witnessed the worst-ever incident in its history. The incident on Sunday, which involved a Boeing 737-800 MAX, occurred a few minutes after the aircraft took off from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport to Nairobi, Kenya. It crashed around Bishoftu town, the airline said. (Xinhua/Wang Shoubao) BEIJING, March 13 (Xinhua) -- More countrie have joined the ranks grounding Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft amid mounting safety concerns after the second crash of the same model in less than five months. After assessing information related to operations of 737 Max, "to ensure flight safety," Vietnam decided to close its air space to 737 Max since 10:00 a.m. local time (0300 GMT) of Wednesday, Vietnam's Civil Aviation Authority announced on its website. Oman "is temporarily suspending operations of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft into and out of all Omani airports until further notice," the country's Public Authority for Civil Aviation tweeted Tuesday. Due to the grounding, the national airline Oman Air said on its website that it will cancel a number of flights on March 12-19. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), another key market for aircraft on the Arabian Peninsula, also banned the operation of all 737 Max 8 models "to ensure the safety of the UAE's civil aviation industry and the public," Emirates News Agency said Tuesday. Countries that have ordered similar grounding include India, Poland, New Zealand, Fiji, Italy, Turkey, France, Germany, Britain, Malaysia, Australia, Singapore, and China, among others. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency published Tuesday an Airworthiness Directive, suspending flight operations of both 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 models in Europe. Roughly two-thirds of the 737 MAX 8 aircraft in the world have been pulled from use by airlines and aviation regulators, according to a The New York Times article on Tuesday. An Ethiopian Airlines aircraft, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, crashed shortly after taking off from the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on Sunday morning local time, killing all 157 people on board. In October 2018, a Lion Air plane, also a 737 MAX 8, crashed into the sea off the Indonesian capital Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board. Despite the two crashes, Boeing said in a statement on Tuesday that it has "full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX," adding that "safety is Boeing's number one priority." It on the same day ruled out any new guidance for 737 Max operators, though concerns of some customers and air carriers spread. The aerospace company has the backing of U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which on Tuesday said it saw "no basis" to ground Boeing 737 Max planes. The United States, nevertheless, saw uproar domestically. In Chicago, roughly three dozen lawsuits have been filed against Boeing. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 16:43:34|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close MACAO, March 13 (Xinhua) -- "Experience Macao-Portugal" promotion event, organized by the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO), kicked off in Portuguese capital city of Lisbon on Tuesday night, the MGTO said here in a press release. The event includes a series of activities, such as exhibitions, dances, and gastronomy displays, to showcase Macao's unique tourism and culture, as this year marks the 20th anniversary of Macao's return to the motherland and the 40th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Portugal. It was a significant opportunity for Macao and Portugal to enhance their strong friendship relations while boosting tourism relations, Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture of the Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) government Alexis Tam said at the opening ceremony. A video mapping show at Lisbon's main square was unveiled Tuesday night, depicting the Macao SAR's history, its links to Portugal, as well as its recent development. The event kicked off on the eve of the opening of Lisbon Travel Market, with a string of Macao-themed activities conducted this week in Lisbon and Porto, along with other performances in pedestrian streets and plazas by Macao street dance groups. An American Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8, on a flight from Miami to New York City, comes in for landing at LaGuardia Airport in New York, U.S., on March 12, 2019. (Reuters photo) BEIRUT, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Lebanese announced on Wednesday its ban on the Boeing 737 aircraft using Lebanon's airspace, the National News Agency reported. "Boeing 737 cannot land in the Beirut Airport or pass by Lebanon's airspace," said Mohamad Chehabeddine, director general of Beirut Airport. Chehabeddine's remarks came following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 flight on Sunday, killing all 157 aboard. The U.S.-manufactured plane came down just six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia. Vietnam, New Zealand, Britain, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the European Union have joined the ranks of countries in banning 737 Max models. The U.S. Federal Aviation Authority, however, said it will not suspend Boeing 737 Max aircraft because a review showed "no systemic performance issues," saying there is no basis for grounding the aircraft. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 17:13:49|Editor: Lu Hui Video Player Close MANILA, March 13 (Xinhua) -- More and more overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) are infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a lawmaker said on Wednesday. Citing data from the Department of Health (DOH), Lawmaker Aniceto Bertiz of the House of Representatives said a total of 90 OFWs were newly diagnosed as HIV-positive in January 2019, up 33 percent from 68 recorded in January 2018. In January 2019, cases brought to 6,345, the cumulative number of OFWs found living with HIV since the government began passive surveillance of the virus in 1984, Bertiz said. OFWs now comprise 10 percent of the 63,278 confirmed cases listed in the National HIV/AIDS Registry as of January this year, he added. Of the 6,345 OFWs in the registry, DOH data showed that 86 percent, or 5,471, were male with the median age of 32 years. The 874 female OFWs in the registry had a median age of 34 years. HIV causes the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), which destroys the human body's natural ability to fight off all kinds of infections. Though the condition still does not have any known cure, antiretroviral therapy has been known to slow down the virus. Bertiz said he is counting on the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) to deliver "highly improved support" to the growing number of OFWs living with HIV, as mandated by the new AIDS Prevention and Control Law that took effect on Jan. 25. The new law compels the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA), together with other agencies, to develop a program to provide stigma-free comprehensive reintegration, care and support for OFWs with HIV, Bertiz said. "Under the law, the economic, social and medical support is to be extended to all OFWs, regardless of employment status and stage in the migration process," Bertiz said. He said the law also requires all overseas-bound Filipino workers as well as Philippine government staff taking overseas posting to attend a free seminar on the causes, the manner of prevention and impact of HIV and AIDS, prior to certification for deployment or assignment. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 17:23:51|Editor: Lu Hui Video Player Close SEOUL, March 13 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's foreign ministry said Wednesday that it will focus this year on helping resume dialogue between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the United States. The ministry said in its 2019 work plan, submitted to the presidential Blue House, that the country will support the rapid resumption of the DPRK-U.S. dialogue. It planned to push for comprehensive progress in the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, improved relations between Pyongyang and Washington and the building of a peace regime on the peninsula. An unnamed foreign ministry official told local reporters that South Korea will concentrate its diplomacy on rapidly resuming the DPRK-U.S. dialogue, as the most important thing is to maintain a dialogue momentum between Pyongyang and Washington. Regarding the second summit between DPRK top leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump, the ministry said the two leaders made a productive discussion on the denuclearization and its corresponding measures though they failed to reach a complete agreement. The second Kim-Trump summit ended without any agreement in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi in late February. The Seoul ministry anticipated a great progress in the peninsula's complete denuclearization and the lasting peace settlement depending on follow-up talks between Pyongyang and Washington and the DPRK leader's possible visit to South Korea. During the third summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang last September, the DPRK leader promised to visit Seoul in the foreseeable future. The ministry said it will push to win support from relevant countries and the international community for effective progress in the denuclearization and the peace regime settlement, while closely cooperating with the United States. It noted that South Korea will push to turn the armistice agreement into a peace regime on the peninsula. The Korean Peninsula remains in a technical state of war as the 1950-53 Korean War ended with the armistice. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 17:28:52|Editor: Lu Hui Video Player Close BAGHDAD, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Up to 300 Islamic State (IS) militants and their family members are sheltering in a mountain in Iraq's northern province of Nineveh, a local newspaper reported Wednesday. The 300 are sheltering "in Qara-Chokh Mountain near the town of Makhmour, about 60 km southeast of Nineveh's provincial capital Mosul," the independent al-Mashriq newspaper quoted Ghayath al-Sorachi, a leading figure in the Kurdish party Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), as saying. "Their presence in the mountain is a threat to the security situation in surrounding areas," al-Sorachi added. He warned of security breaches from the mountain because no clear operation or airstrikes have been conducted yet by the security forces and U.S.-led coalition. The security situation in Iraq has dramatically improved after Iraqi security forces fully defeated the extremist IS militants across the country late in 2017. IS remnants, however, have since melted in urban areas or resorted to deserts and rugged areas as safe havens, carrying out guerilla attacks from time to time against security forces and civilians. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 17:38:56|Editor: Lu Hui Video Player Close BEIJING, March 13 (Xinhua) -- More trust funds were channeled into the real economy last year as China moved to strengthen financial support for money-starved small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). At the end of 2018, the outstanding pecuniary trusts totaled 18.95 trillion yuan (about 2.82 trillion U.S. dollars), nearly 30 percent of which, around 5.67 trillion yuan of trust funds, flowed into industrial and commercial enterprises, the China Trustee Association (CTA) said Wednesday. The CTA said the manufacturing sector was a major destination for trust funds as it saw more than 570 billion yuan of inflow, up 1.29 percent year-on-year or up 2.85 percent from a the previous quarter. Trust companies have more vigorously directed funds into businesses and infrastructure projects since the third quarter of 2018, an industrial insider said. The sector has reached a consensus on serving the real economy, said Yin Xingmin, a researcher with Fudan University. Given continued downward pressure, China has launched various measures to finance the real economy and help small firms weather out economic hardship. Efforts have been taken to ensure ample liquidity on the monetary market, encourage bank loans to SMEs and foster direct financing, such as IPOs. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 17:54:04|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close BEIJING, March 13 (Xinhua) -- China's Ministry of Education said a full review of mobile apps used by schools will be conducted to ensure they are free of harmful content. Local education departments were urged to work out regulations of the utilization and development of mobile apps intended for schools, according to a circular released by the ministry. The ministry issued a ban on harmful apps at schools in December 2018, listing several detailed measures for eradicating such apps. According to the ban, mobile apps containing inappropriate information involving pornography, violence, online games or commercial advertisements are to be excluded from school use. The ban also called for stricter review on mobile apps for educational purposes to ensure that they do not increase students' academic burdens or teachers' workloads. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 17:59:06|Editor: zh Video Player Close BEIJING, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Researchers have developed a type of flexible solar cell with high efficiency, according to China Science Daily on Wednesday. The perovskite solar cells have high efficiency, low cost and a simple manufacturing process. "The current wearable devices are comparatively heavy," Wu Zhaoxin, professor of Xi'an Jiaotong University, told the paper. The flexible perovskite solar cells are the same size as business cards, and can be unfolded into the shape of A4-sized paper. The ultra-thin and light flexible solar cells can be used in aerospace industry, drones, upper air detection equipment and electronics, the paper said. "Crystalline silicon solar cells and flexible perovskite solar cells might become the development direction in the field of solar cells," Wu said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 18:04:09|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close JINAN, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Transport authorities in east China's Shandong Province announced that it plans to invest 162.2 billion yuan (about 24.2 billion U.S. dollars) on roads, railways, ports and airports this year. The investment is aimed at building an integrated infrastructure network in the province, said Jiang Cheng, head of the provincial transport department. Last year, fixed asset investment in Shandong's transportation sector reached 160 billion yuan, among which 115.8 billion yuan was spent on roads, highways and waterways, up 28 percent year on year. This year, 61 percent of the investment will be on roads, Jiang said. Shandong has set a target for its expressway mileage to reach 7,400 km by 2020. By the end of this year, the total will hit 6,400 km, he said. More roads, bridges, and stations will be built in rural areas, he added. About 10 railway projects are under construction in the province this year, with a total planned investment of 32 billion yuan (4.7 billion dollars). Upon completion, the province will be better connected with big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin. Shandong had a permanent population of 100.4 million at the end of 2018. It is one of the most populous provinces in China. An improved infrastructure network will better meet economic and social needs. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 18:04:10|Editor: zh Video Player Close JERUSALEM, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Israel's army said on Wednesday that it exposed a secret force of Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia, in the Golan Heights. "The Hezbollah terrorist organization has begun an attempt to establish and entrench a covert force in the Syrian Golan Heights which is designed to act against Israel when given the order," the army said in a statement. According to the army, the Iran-backed Shiite group has built a unit dubbed the "Golan File," which is working to gather intelligence on Israel and the area of Israel's disputed border with Syria. "The network is new and currently focuses on becoming familiarized with the Golan Heights area. It is intended to eventually control teams of Syrian operatives who will launch attacks against Israel," the statement read. The army also said Israel is determined to act against Hezbollah's attempt to entrench itself in the Golan Heights. Israel Defense Forces "will act with all our might to force this terrorist organization out of the Golan Heights and ensure the stability of the region," said Golan Division Commander Amit Fisher. Sarit Zehavi, a former IDF intelligence official, told reporters that Hezbollah "has been trying a few times to establish a military infrastructure on the Syrian side of the Golan" in the past few years. According to Zehavi, the exposure of the Hezbollah cell, along with the recently uncovered tunnels that cross from southern Lebanon into Israel, shows a scenario that "Hezbollah militants will try to enter Israel and carry out the battle on the Israeli land" in the future war. Israel controls part of the Golan Heights, a territory it captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war. Israel considers Hezbollah and Iran its biggest enemies. The last round of full-fledged war between Israel and Hezbollah took place in southern Lebanon in 2006. The 34-day war ended with a fragile truce. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 18:29:15|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close VIENTIANE, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The Lao government officials and development partners are meeting here to discuss the efforts Laos needs to take to graduate from the Least Developed Country (LDC) status. The national policy workshop on fostering productive capacities and structural economic transformation with regard to the country's change in development status is taking place on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to local daily Vientiane Times on Wednesday. The opening ceremony on Tuesday was attended by Lao Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Thongphane Savanhphet, UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative Kaarina Immonen, and development partners. The discussion of the meeting is about Laos' quest for sustainable graduation from the Least Developed Country category, policies and strategies for structural transformation, building productive capacity, and inclusive growth. The officials and development partners also discussed policies and strategies for enhancing structural economic progress, ensuring broad-based and inclusive growth and building economic resilience, and key issues to be handled by the Lao government in the years ahead. The Lao government is currently working with international organizations and development partners toward the Sustainable Development Goals, aiming to alleviate poverty and fulfill the conditions for graduation from LDC status. The United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) has announced that Laos fulfilled the two of the three criteria to graduate from LDC status in the 2018 review, and the next assessment will take place in 2021. Three criteria of income, human assets, and economic vulnerability are set by the United Nations for reviewing the list of LDCs every three years and making recommendations on the inclusion and graduation of eligible countries. Laos has registered impressive socio-economic performance over the last two decades, outperforming many of its LDC peers and achieving average economic growth of about seven percent since the early 2000s. This performance has contributed to improved per capita income, as well as significant poverty reduction and human development gains. "This meeting is important as it is a platform for all parties involved to discuss the work that needs to be done to ensure graduation from LDC status," Thongphane said at the meeting. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 18:34:16|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close HAIKOU, March 13 (Xinhua) -- China's southernmost island province of Hainan requires all new vehicles for official business to use clean energy from 2019. The provincial government offices administration said Wednesday that all government vehicles in Hainan, except cars providing special services, are scheduled to use clean energy by 2028. The administration said 10 percent official cars in the province would use clean energy by 2020. The proportion will reach 70 percent by 2025. Qiu Yu, deputy director of the administration, said Hainan had carried out more stringent policies to promote the use of clean energy in government vehicles, which included all-electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles. The local finance department has budgeted for clean energy government vehicles purchase and relevant facilities. The government offices administration will be in charge of the construction and installation of charging facilities in government agencies' parking areas. Hainan has previously announced the ban of oil-fueled automobile sales throughout the province by 2030. The province had 37,100 clean energy vehicles by the end of 2018, accounting for about 2.9 percent of the province's total, among which 22,800 were NEVs. More than 4,500 charging facilities for electric cars have been built. Researchers study how internet impacts orthodox Christianity Young scientists from Ural Federal University and Higher School of Economics are trying to understand whether the Internet has influenced Orthodox Christianity, and how the social institution and social practices could have been transformed in the conditions of widespread media. The project "Social media as a factor in the transformation of Orthodoxy in modern Russia" received support from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research for 2019-2021. 'Media has become one of the drivers for change in modern society. The Internet has transformed the existing hierarchies, giving voice to the silent majority. On the other hand, religions are based on tradition, transfer of knowledge through books, rituals and various forms of communication face to face. And it is interesting to see whether social media have changed Orthodox traditions or not,' Ekaterina Grishaeva, the project manager, Associate Professor at the Department of Social Philosophy of UrFU, explains. The researchers' plans are to look at the mediatization of Orthodox Christianity as a two-way process: how the communicative possibilities of the Internet environment transform Orthodox ideologies, practices and hierarchy, and the Orthodox community adapts the Internet to fit its needs. To do so, they study the blogs of people who form the image of Orthodoxy on YouTube, VKontakte, Instagram, Facebook; analyze the popular video blogs of priests Andrey Tkachev, Dmitry Smirnov, Evgeny Popichenko, the social networks of the congregations. The interviews with churchgoers are part of the plan as well. The researchers claim that nowadays religious rituals are performed via the Internet: one can watch a video of readings of sacred texts online, livestreams of worship services, there is an opportunity to order occasional religious services online, etc. Religious leaders use social media as a platform for missionary work. 'For example, in Ekaterinburg, 21 out of 53 congregations have pages in social networks,' Ekaterina Grishaeva says. 'The growing social media presence of Orthodoxy attracted the attention of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. In August 2018, the Synodal Department for Church Relations with Society and Mass Media published a document "Video blogs of the Russian Orthodox Church priests: guidelines," designed to regulate the actions of blogger priests.' It is expected that in the first year of the grant, the young scientists will work out the research methodology, determine the specifics of Orthodox communication in social media, analyze the structure of Orthodox rituals, and conduct interviews with priests and members of Orthodox communities. The results will be presented in scientific articles. ### This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 19:09:27|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close CAIRO, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Egypt has banned the passage, takeoff and landing of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, the civil aviation ministry announced Wednesday. "The decision was a precautionary safety measure," a ministry statement said. The Egyptian move came after the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane on Sunday, which killed all 157 aboard. "No Egyptian airlines, including national carrier EgyptAir, have Boeing 737 MAX jets in their fleets, and don't have any deals to buy any Boeing 737 Max in the future," the statement noted. It is the second crash of a Boeing 737 plane in five months, as an Indonesian Lion Air jet of the same type plunged into the ocean last October, killing 198 on board. Vietnam, New Zealand, Britain, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Kuwait, Oman and the European Union have joined the ranks in banning 737 Max models. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 19:31:43|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close Photo taken on March 13, 2019 shows the scene of a plenary meeting of deputies from Macao Special Administrative Region at the second session of the 13th National People's Congress in Beijing, capital of China. The meeting was opened to media. (Xinhua/Jin Liwang) Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 19:34:30|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close SHANGHAI, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Shanghai's tourism industry brought in 509.23 billion yuan (about 76 billion U.S. dollars) in 2018, up 13.54 percent year on year, according to the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism. In 2018, Shanghai received 340 million domestic tourists, who contributed a total revenue of 447 billion yuan. About 8.94 million overseas tourists visited Shanghai last year, up 2.37 year on year. The administration said it will take a raft of measures to promote inbound tourism this year, including easing visa-free transit applications and exploring self-service clearance for outbound foreign tourists. Shanghai will also provide more foreign-friendly services, such as improving usage of foreign languages on public signs and official websites and installing more POS machines with foreign currency services at popular tourist sites. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 19:39:31|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close South Korean President Moon Jae-in (L) and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad shake hands during a joint press conference in Putrajaya, Malaysia, March 13, 2019. (Xinhua/Chong Voon Chung) PUTRAJAYA, Malaysia, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad met with South Korean President Moon Jae-in here on Wednesday as the two leaders pledged cooperation on a range of issues. At a press conference after the meeting, the two leaders said they had discussed several topics of mutual interest, including cooperation in industry and the importance of peace on the Korean Peninsula, and issues between the United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Mahathir said both he and Moon hoped that the relationship would improve between the DPRK and South Korea, and that an agreement would be reached between the United States and the DPRK on the disarmament. "We expect to see peace and stability in this part of the world," Mahathir said. U.S. President Donald Trump and DPRK top leader Kim Jong Un held their second summit in Hanoi, Vietnam on Feb. 27-28, without reaching an agreement. The Malaysian prime minister added that Malaysia and South Korea signed Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) on industrial cooperation, transportation, infrastructure development and cooperation in the halal food industry. For his part, Moon stressed the bilateral cooperation on the economic front, with an emphasis of development of South Korea's halal food industry. "Today Prime Minister Mahathir and I reaffirmed our respective government's philosophies and future vision and shared the spirit of coexistence and tolerance," he said. "Mahathir has laid the foundation of our cooperation through the Look East policy. My government is also actively implementing the New Southern Policy, in order to elevate and further develop relations between ASEAN countries including Malaysia," Moon said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 19:39:31|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close SRINAGAR, Indian-controlled Kashmir, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Troops of India and Pakistan Wednesday exchanged heavy fire and targeted each other's positions on the Line of Control (LoC), dividing Kashmir region, officials said. The two sides exchanged fire in Poonch district, about 180 km southwest of Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir. "Pakistan today again resorted to unprovoked firing targeting forward posts at 10:00 a.m. (local time) in Khari Karmara area of Gulpur sector," an official said. "Our side also gave a befitting reply to the other side in response." The exchange went on for several hours and both sides used small arms and mortars to target each other's positions. According to officials, no loss of life was reported in the skirmishes on both sides so far. Officials said two shells, fired from across the LoC, landed near the trade center in Chakan da Bagh area of Poonch but the explosion of shells did not cause any damage. For the past two weeks, there has been a flare-up on LoC in Kashmir. The daily firings have forced population on both sides to migrate to safer locations. The latest tension between New Delhi and Islamabad grew after India carried out an air strike inside Pakistan, triggering a retaliation. The situation has deescalated to some extent following calls of restraint from several countries. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 19:39:31|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close TEHRAN, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The Iranian defense minister on Wednesday warned against any attempt by Israel to attack Iran's oil tankers, Press TV reported. Iran views any Israeli naval action against the country's oil shipments as "piracy" and will respond "firmly," said Amir Hatami. Hatami made the comments in response to the last week's remarks by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who threatened to block what he called Iran's "covert" oil shipments meant to "circumvent" U.S. sanctions. The Iranian armed forces are ready to safeguard the security of the country's ships in international waterways, the minister vowed. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 19:49:34|Editor: Lu Hui Video Player Close Fan Yongzhen (2nd R), a deputy to the 13th National People's Congress (NPC), talks with her fellow deputies after a plenary meeting of Yunnan delegation in Beijing, capital of China, March 7, 2019. (Xinhua/Yang Zongyou) BEIJING, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Sitting among nearly 3,000 national lawmakers at the Great Hall of the People at the heart of Beijing, Fan Yongzhen feels a great sense of responsibility to her people. A deputy curator of a local cultural museum in southwest China's Yunnan Province, Fan wants more funding for preserving ethnic minority cultures, as well as better technologies in public museums in less developed areas. The annual "two sessions," which gather thousands of national legislators and political advisors from across China, present an opportunity for voices like Fan's to be heard on the national level. Fan attended the sessions for the first time last year. As a beginner, she felt uncertain about how to fulfill her duty well. From the multi-ethnic Yunnan Province, Fan suggested the government increase support for modern public cultural institutions in the western region. Although she had made thorough research on the topic by visiting local cultural facilities and artists, and conducting surveys, she was not sure about her suggestion. To Fan's surprise, soon after she went back home from Beijing, she received feedback for her suggestion. Digital museum construction in Lijiang and cultural institutes at the township level have both received strong support from government departments. "I look at my role as a lawmaker differently after that," Fan said. "The responsibility is huge." This year, she suggests creating more digital cultural products for better public access. Zhuang Yan, another lawmaker from northeast China's Liaoning Province, tries to address pollution caused by de-icing salt. Her home city of Anshan has long snow-covered winters. As a street cleaner, Zhuang experiences first-hand how de-icing salt can erode road surfaces, vehicles, and cause pollution to soil and underground water. "I give my suggestion based on what I am most familiar with. That way I feel more confident," said Zhuang, in her orange uniform. Zhuang has been a legislator since 2017. Ahead of her first trip to Beijing that year, she was excited and nervous at the same time. Unlike many other legislators with more experience in public speaking, eloquence was not Zhuang's strength. "I was afraid of people asking me questions," Zhuang said. She received several training sessions afterwards, and learned how to conduct research on the de-icing salt's negative impact. Zhuang later found using a new type of green de-icing salt could help improve the overall benefits, but the price is three to four times higher. "Government at all levels should spend money on addressing the issue," she wrote in her suggestion. As her experience increased, she has become more confident and her speech delivery got better too. "People choose me as their representative, and I have to present their voice well," she said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 20:04:43|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, March 13 (Xinhua) -- At least eight militants were confirmed dead and three others sustained injuries after fighting aircraft targeted Taliban hideouts in Khanabad district of Afghanistan's northern Kunduz province on Wednesday, district governor Hayatullah Amiri said. The sorties, according to the official, were launched early Wednesday morning and a Taliban commander, Mullah Alawdin, was killed in the strikes. However, locals said two civilians were also killed in nearby raids. The Taliban hasn't commented yet. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 20:04:44|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close LONDON, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Britain will remove tariffs on most imported goods in the event of no-deal Brexit, the government announced on Wednesday. As a temporary measure, there will be zero tariffs on 87 percent of imports to the UK, but tariffs will be kept on farm goods such as meat and some dairy products. The government said the plan was temporary and it would apply for up to 12 months. Meanwhile, a full consultation and review on a permanent approach to tariffs was undertaken. Adam Marshall, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said on twitter: "Liberalising trade is a good thing over time, but overnight changes to tariffs would create real problems for some UK firms and communities." "Westminster must avoid this unwanted shock by rejecting a messy and disorderly exit on March 29," Marshall said. Carolyn Fairbairn, director general of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), said on a BBC radio program that it was the biggest change in terms of trade in UK since the mid-19th century, "no consultation with business, no time to prepare". "What we potentially are going to see is this imposition of new terms of trade at the same time as business is blocked out of its closest trading partner. This is a sledgehammer for our economy," Fairbairn added. Mike Hawes, chief executive of SMMT, said: "Today's announcement does not resolve the devastating effect a 'no deal' Brexit would have on the automotive industry." "No policy on tariffs can come close to compensating for the disruption, cost and job losses that would result from 'no deal'," Hawes said, adding that "no deal" must be "taken off the table immediately and permanently". Regarding the border checks between Ireland and Northern Ireland, the government also announced that "it will take a temporary approach to avoid new checks and controls on goods at the Northern Ireland land border if the UK leaves the EU without a deal " Karen Bradley, British Northern Ireland Secretary, said: "The measures announced today recognise the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland. These arrangements can only be temporary and short-term." Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 20:09:45|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close BAGHDAD, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Wednesday met with Iraq's most revered Shiite spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in the holy city of Najaf, a provincial source said. On the last day of his official visit, Rouhani and his accompanying delegation arrived in the morning in the airport of Najaf, some 160 km south of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, and was received by its provincial governor Luay al-Yasiri before heading to al-Sistani's house where the two held an hour-long meeting, a source from the provincial media office told Xinhua on condition of anonymity. "Al-Sistani and Rouhani discussed relations between the two countries and the need to distance Iraq from any regional or international conflict," the source said. "The meeting was attended by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Iranian Ambassador to Iraq Iraj Masjedi," the source added. Rouhani and his delegation are scheduled to visit the mausoleum of Imam Ali, the cousin of the Prophet Mohammed, in the old city center of Najaf, which attracts millions of Shiite pilgrims every year. Rouhani's meeting with Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, who has a large number of followers inside Iran, is of symbolic importance in both Iraq and Iran. On Monday, Rouhani arrived in Baghdad on a landmark three-day visit to Iraq at the invitation of his Iraqi counterpart Barham Salih. During the first two days of his visit, Rouhani and his delegation held a series of meetings with top Iraqi officials, political and religious leaders. The visit came as the United States has been exerting sanctions on Iran's oil industry, banking and transport sectors, after Washington pulled out from the 2015 nuclear deal last year. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 20:14:46|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close NAIROBI, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Governments and financial institutions should forge partnerships required to stimulate growth of green businesses through access to affordable credit, technologies and capacity development, a senior United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) official said on Wednesday. Satya Tripathi, head of New York office at UNEP, said that access to capital is key to boosting growth of green enterprises that have been unleashing benefits to the environment and local communities. "We appreciate partnership with the financial sector to help green the economies and unlock multiple benefits like poverty reduction, job creation and economic diversification," said Tripathi. He spoke at a roundtable on transitioning to green economy held at the ongoing fourth session of the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi. Tripathi revealed that a joint initiative between UNEP and the EU that aims to promote access to finance among local start-ups in developing world has transformed rural livelihoods. He said the Switch to Green Initiative has already benefited more than 3,000 small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in six African countries that include Kenya, Uganda, Mauritius, Ghana, Burkina Faso and South Africa. "The Switch to Green is a strategic vehicle that is driving ecological transformation and economic growth in developing countries," said Tripathi. Marjeta Jager, deputy director general for International Cooperation and Development of the European Commission said that access to green financing is key to promoting green entrepreneurship required to reduce global carbon footprint. "Green enterprises should leverage on innovative financing schemes to scale up their projects and hasten the switch to low carbon economic development," Marjeta remarked. She disclosed the Switch to Green Initiative that is being implemented in 39 countries worldwide has contributed to the adoption of sustainable production and consumption practices by 100,000 SMEs while sustaining 350,000 jobs. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 20:14:46|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close MUSCAT, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Oman's Public Authority for Civil Aviation said on Wednesday that it has stopped flights by Boeing 737 Max, Oman News Agency reported. The decision came following a crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jetliner that left 157 people aboard killed. "We are in the process of making the necessary rescheduling and will advise our guests of any flight cancellations," Oman Air said. Oman Air operates five Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft. Airline companies across the world have been suspending the flights of Boeing Max 8 and 9 since the accident took place in Ethiopia on Sunday. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 20:19:49|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close MADRID, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The Spanish-based Inditex clothing group, which includes the famous high-street brand Zara, on Wednesday reported a 2-percent rise in its full year profits for 2018. Although it was the lowest increase in sales the company has seen in its history, the world's biggest clothing retailer has made a profit of 3.44 billion euros (3.89 billion U.S. dollars) on total sales worth 26.15 billion euros (29.55 billion dollars) for the financial year that ended on Jan. 31. Inditex said that like-for-like sales increased by four percent and were positive across all regions and brands, as well as in both the online and store platforms. The good performance of Inditex, which also owns upmarket chain Massimo Dutti and underwear store Oysho, is partially attributed to a 27-percent growth in its overall online sales, which were worth 3.2 billion euros (3.6 billion dollars), in the past financial year. "Investments in both logistics and stores in order to leverage the integrated platform, as well as our continued focus on prime locations, has enabled Inditex to offer customers a consistent and appealing proposition globally, across all our brands and channels," said Inditex's Chairman and CEO Pablo Isla in a statement. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 20:24:51|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close LONDON, March 13 (Xinhua) -- China's bookstore chain brand Fang Suo Commune clinched the Bookstore of the Year Award of The London Book Fair (LBF) International Excellence Awards, the LBF announced Tuesday. Located at Taikoo Hui, one of the high-end shopping malls in southern Chinese metropolis of Guangzhou, Fang Suo Commune is an innovative bookstore nestled among luxury shops. It beat BOA Bookstore of Vietnam and Unity Books Wellington of New Zealand on the shortlist to win the award. "This award goes from strength to strength and the entries were exceptionally strong this year," the LBF judges said. "Fang Suo is ... breath taking in scale and conception. (There are) A vast range and constant activities and events ... that gives you a glimpse of what bookstores of the future will be." Opened in 2011, Fang Suo Commune Guangzhou has bookshelves covering the walls from floor to ceiling. The 1,800-square-meter store boasts a coffee bar, a boutique and a handicrafts shop, and welcomes more than 2 million visitors through her doors every year. Fang Suo Commune Bookstore regularly hosts art exhibitions, lectures and book launches about art, culture and lifestyle, turning it into the omphalos for the city's book lovers. The brand, now with branches in China's southwestern cities of Chengdu and Chongqing, and northeastern city of Qingdao, Shandong Province, aims at creating a new system for the Chinese aesthetics of life and exploring the possibilities of becoming an urban cultural complex, according to its official website. Other winners of the LBF International Excellence Awards included Finland's Espoo City Library, which won the Library of the Year Award, and Ukraine's Book Arsenal Literary Festival, which took home the Literary Festival Award. The Audiobook Publisher of the Year Award went to Booklava from the United Arab Emirates. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 20:24:52|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close KAMPALA, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Every Sunday evening, Ronald Sebutiko is glued to his television set for the learning the Chinese language. Sebutiko is among thousands of Ugandan youths who are taking up Chinese lessons either through formal class or television, as the ties between Uganda and China deepen. Urban Television, a semi-autonomous state-owned television station this week started airing Chinese language lessons with support from the Confucius Institute at Makerere University, the country's top University. The 30-minute program dubbed "Let's talk Chinese" airs every Sunday. The teachers, one Chinese and another Ugandan, take viewers through the basics of Chinese language learning. Viewers like Sebutiko will win a trip to China once they are chosen as the best students. Using television is another mechanism of reaching a wider audience apart from going to learning centers in some parts of the east African country. Late last year a total of 33 language teachers graduated in teaching Chinese language after a nine-month intensive course. They were the first batch of teachers who were sent to designated schools across the country to teach the language. Grace Baguma, director National Curriculum Development Center, told Xinhua in a recent interview that Chinese language is the sixth language in the country's secondary school curricula. "We have the syllabus ready, instruction materials are ready and now the teachers have been trained. So they will go and start teaching in those schools. Overall, 100 teachers will be trained," Baguma said. Baguma projected that in the next four years, about 60,000 students would have learnt how to speak Chinese language. The Confucius Institute at Makerere University is supplementing efforts to increase Chinese language learning. In addition to offering short courses, the Institute also teaches students who take Chinese as one of their majors. According to Oswald Ndoleriire, Ugandan Director of the Confucius Institute, Makerere University will this year roll out a bachelor's degree program on Chinese and Asian studies. The university will also unveil a master's degree program in Chinese and Asian studies. In a bid to expand its programs across the country, the Confucius Institute early this month signed a memorandum of understanding with Ntare School in the western part of the country to become a learning center. Two teachers from the secondary school were taken to China for training. The institute also send two Chinese language teachers to the school. Uganda's ties with China are strengthening in recent years. "More and more companies are investing in Uganda. More and more factories are being established in the industrial parks," Zheng Zhuqiang, Chinese ambassador to Uganda recently said. Cui Yujun, vice president of China National Offshore Oil Corporation Uganda Ltd, told reporters early this month that the company would conclude the Final Investment Decision in Uganda's oil sector by June or July this year. This may lead to the commercial oil production. All these investments, according to Sebutiko, offer immense opportunities that youths like him can seize. "China is an economic powerhouse, to move with them you have to learn their language," he said. Rebecca Kadaga, Speaker of the Ugandan Parliament early last month said learning the Chinese language would open up opportunities for locals to work in Chinese companies and also do business in China. "I am encouraging Ugandans to learn more languages, specifically the Chinese, because we have many Chinese investors in the country who will need translators as they carry on their businesses in the country," Kadaga said. "I am focusing on Chinese language because I know Chinese are here to offer our people jobs and people who know their language will be the first people to have those jobs," she added. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 20:24:53|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close VIENNA, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz expressed disappointment in a renewed rejection of a Brexit deal in the British parliament on Tuesday. Kurz told the Austria Press Agency that the "renewed negative parliamentary vote brings us dangerously close to the Brexit date without having a properly prepared exit scenario ready." Further room for negotiations in Brussels are now also "severely limited," the chancellor said. He said a hard Brexit would be damaging for both sides, in particular Britain, and is an outcome nobody should wish for. But Austria has made "every effort" to prepare for a no-deal scenario, he added. Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl also weighed in on Tuesday's result, saying it was "not surprising" to her, and following yet another negative vote, indicators for a no-deal continue to remain very strong. The United Kingdom is scheduled to leave the European Union on March 29, but its parliament has rejected the government's deal so far, raising the specter of a chaotic no-deal Brexit. Another parliament vote on Wednesday will decide on whether to block a no-deal Brexit at the end of this month, without ruling out a no-deal Brexit later in the year, and the parliament will vote Thursday on extending the Article 50 divorce process, likely until the end of June, which will delay Brexit. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 20:29:54|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close DUBAI, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The United Arab Emirates (UAE) slammed on Wednesday the EU's decision to add the UAE to its tax haven blacklist, official Emirates News Agency (WAM) reported. "This inclusion was made despite the UAE's close cooperation with the EU on this issue and ongoing efforts to fulfill all the EU's requirements," said a UAE official statement. "The UAE remains firmly committed to its long-standing policy of meeting the highest international standards on taxation," the statement added. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 20:34:54|Editor: zh Video Player Close British Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street for the Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons in London, Britain, March 13, 2019. The British parliament will vote on Wednesday afternoon on whether the country should leave the European Union (EU) without an agreement on March 29 in the wake of Tuesday night's shattering defeat of Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal. (Xinhua/Joe Newman) LONDON, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The British parliament will vote on Wednesday afternoon on whether the country should leave the European Union (EU) without an agreement on March 29 in the wake of Tuesday night's shattering defeat of Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal. If MPs block the no-deal Brexit, they will vote on Thursday on whether Britain should seek an Article 50 extension from the EU, for how long and for what purpose. The prime minister, still speaking in the House of Commons with a croaky voice on Wednesday afternoon, joined the parliamentary debate in order to fight for pushing her government's Brexit position through the parliament. The British cabinet met on Wednesday morning amid speculation that a delegation of senior Tories may ask the prime minister to step down this week. The chaos in May's cabinet erupted after she told the House of Commons she would allow a free vote on Wednesday afternoon for Tory MPs on a motion to rule out a no-deal Brexit on March 29, when Brexit is due. The government's motion to be debated in the parliament on Wednesday opposes leaving the without a deal. On Tuesday night, MPs voted by 391 to 242 to reject a revised version of the withdrawal agreement. Following the vote, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told the parliament that May's Brexit deal is "clearly dead." He even went a step further to call for a general election. In Brussels, EU leaders demanded a "clear answer" about what Britain wants and were preparing to take a hard line if, as widely expected, the prime minister asks for a postponement of Brexit. The EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier insisted there will be no further offer from Brussels apart from the deal already on the table. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 20:49:58|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close ABUJA, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Nigeria's military on Wednesday said it is intensifying security in the troubled northern state of Kaduna where scores of people have been killed in the past one month. In a statement, Air Force spokesman Ibikunle Daramola said the military will sustain its air patrol in Kaduna and its environs while partnering with other security agencies. "The Nigerian Air Force (NAF) will sustain its aerial surveillance coupled with armed vehicular patrols along the highway, rail line and other areas in the state to ensure the security of citizens as well as safe travels for law-abiding commuters," Ibikunle said. The military's patrol will be extended to identified hotspots and flashpoints along the Abuja-Kaduna highway linking the northwestern state to the Nigerian capital Abuja. The military spokesman said that the Abuja-Kaduna Highway had been susceptible to the activities of armed robbers and kidnappers. Kaduna state is one of the states witnessing a number of attacks recently in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country. Unidentified gunmen attacked eight villages in Kajuru area of the state on February 15, leading to more than 130 deaths. On February 27, four villages in the same area again were attacked by gunmen, with 29 people killed, including a policeman. The police on Monday also confirmed that 16 people were killed by gunmen in another attack on a village in the troubled Kaduna State. Following the killings, the government of Kaduna has imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew in the Kajuru area starting on Wednesday. State government spokesman Samuel Aruwan, who confirmed this to Xinhua, said the curfew would be from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. daily until further notice. The government has directed security agencies to ensure strict enforcement of the curfew. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 20:49:58|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close TEHRAN, March 13 (Xinhua) -- A senior Iranian security official on Wednesday warned that "suspicious nuclear programs" are being carried out by some countries in the Middle East region, Tasnim news agency reported. "Some countries in the region have put suspicious nuclear programs on their agenda, spending their petrodollars (on such programs)," Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, was quoted as saying. "Such moves can cause not only the region but also the world to face a threat and crisis worse than the threat of terrorists," Shamkhani added. However, the Iranian official did not give the names of suspected countries. Recently, Western media revealed a proposal by the U.S. government to transfer U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. Iran is monitoring "unusual activities" in the region and will adjust its military strategy to meet the needs of new developments, Shamkhani concluded. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 20:55:02|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close SRINAGAR, Indian-controlled Kashmir, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Unidentified gunmen shot dead a 25-year-old youth on Wednesday in restive Indian-controlled Kashmir, police said. The youth was fired upon at village Pingleena in Pulwama district, about 32 km south of Srinagar city, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir. "Unidentified gunmen today shot dead a youth namely Showkat Ahmad Naik here," a police official posted in Pulwama said. "He was fired from point-blank range. Despite being removed to a hospital immediately, he succumbed on his way and was declared brought dead at the hospital." Police suspect militants behind Naik's killing. However, so far no militant outfit has claimed responsibility for the killing. Naik, according to officials, was previously affiliated with army. "He was enrolled last year on Jan. 15 in Territorial army and then went to join JAKLI regiment in March. However, in September, he went on three days leave and never returned," Indian army spokesman Col Rajesh Kalia said. "After that he was declared deserter." Reports said following the killing, contingents of Indian police and army cordoned off the area and launched searches to trace assailants. Militants in the region usually target families and individuals for their possible links with police and defense agencies. Even people having associations with pro-India political parties and police are targeted at times. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 20:55:03|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close BERLIN, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Germany's former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has criticized the United States' threat to withhold intelligence over the expansion of Germany's 5G network. "This is such blatant blackmail," Schroeder said Tuesday at an event hosted by the German newspaper Handelsblatt in Berlin. The former chancellor criticized the United States' threat to withhold intelligence information from Germany if Chinese companies such as Huawei would be involved in the expansion of Germany's 5G internet network. Schroeder said that the threat was America's way of telling Germany that "because you do not obey, we will not tell you." He accused the U.S. government of expecting Germany to side with them for purely economic reasons. With his comments, Schroeder added his voice to the voices of other German politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, who have criticized the threat made by U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell. Merkel said on Tuesday that it "goes without saying" that the German government would define its own security standards in its 5G expansion. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 21:00:05|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close LONDON, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Ambassador to Britain Liu Xiaoming on Tuesday called on China and Britain to seize opportunities to advance financial cooperation. Liu made the appeal at a dinner hosted by Britain's 48 Group Club and the China Chamber of Commerce in Britain. He said that in recent years, financial cooperation between China and Britain has enjoyed strong growth. Liu said that financial cooperation has increasingly become a "new engine" for business cooperation between both countries. Noting that the two countries have issued a strategic plan for financial services, Liu said this has laid a solid foundation for closer cooperation on financial supervision and business partnership. Liu also said that bilateral financial cooperation has found a "new platform" in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). He said that recent years have seen fruitful results in financial cooperation between China and Britain on the BRI, adding that Britain was the first to apply to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the first to contribute to the AIIB special fund. The ambassador said that the RMB internationalization has created "new opportunities" for financial cooperation between China and Britain. Britain has always played an important role in RMB internationalization, Liu said, adding that it is only natural that London becomes the world's largest offshore RMB market outside Asia. Amid the sluggish economic growth, rising uncertainties, and surging protectionism and unilateralism in the world, a more open and constantly growing China will bring more confidence to the world, create more opportunities for other countries, and open broader prospects for China-Britain business cooperation, he said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 21:30:16|Editor: zh Video Player Close KABUL, March 13 (Xinhua) -- More than 30 militants had been killed in the conflict-battered Afghanistan over the past 24 hours as both the government and the Taliban outfit stepped up activities, officials said Wednesday. In crackdown against militants, the fighting aircraft from the government forces struck a Taliban hideout in Khanabad district of the northern Kunduz province on Wednesday morning, killing eight insurgents and injuring three others, district governor Hayatullah Amiri asserted. The government forces, similarly, initiated operations against the Taliban group in western Farah province and killed five militants including group commander Mullah Helal and injured six others since Tuesday, an army statement said. Ground and air operations against Taliban fighters in Nahr-e-Saraj district of southern Helmand province killed 11 militants and injured four others on Tuesday, said a statement released by provincial police headquarters on Wednesday. Government forces had also killed seven militants and injured 15 others in southern Kandahar province over the past 24 hours, an army spokesman Sediq Eisa said Wednesday. Taliban militants have yet to make comments on the claims. Since Afghan warring sides often exaggerate the casualties of their opponents, it is difficult to verify with independent sources. Acting Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Joyce Msuya addressing the opening ceremony of the second global session of the UN Science-Policy-Business Forum on the Environment in Nairobi, Kenya, March 9, 2019. (Xinhua/Zhang Yu) NAIROBI, March 13 (Xinhua) -- China will be an influential player in future efforts to reshape the global environmental agenda thanks to its focused leadership coupled with enactment of policies that have reinvigorated green growth, a senior official at the UN Environment has said. Joyce Msuya, acting executive director of the UN Environment, said that China's home-grown interventions that have transformed management of natural resources amid rapid economic growth is an inspiration to the rest of the world. "China has a lot to offer in terms of lessons, for example on how the government set up policies to address the issue of pollution, the PM 2.5... These are the kinds of lessons and experiences we are looking to share with other countries that are undergoing similar challenges," Msuya said in a recent interview with Xinhua ahead of the fourth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA4). The assembly is held on March 11-15 in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. More than 2,000 delegates, including environment ministers, scientists, industry leaders and green campaigners, are attending the five-day forum whose theme is "Innovative solutions for environmental challenges and sustainable consumption and production." Msuya said UNEA4 will provide a platform for the international community to chart a new path characterized by low-carbon development and efficient use of natural resources. "It is exciting times. Climate change, biodiversity, issues around sustainable production and consumption will be discussed at the highest political level in Nairobi," she said. The Tanzanian diplomat said climate change has taken a heavier toll on the African continent, where it is decimating vital ecosystems and strategic sectors of the economy. "Impact of climate change in Africa varies from one place to another, but it is being felt in tourism, agriculture, biodiversity and wildlife corridors," Msuya said. The international community has partnered with African countries to enhance their resilience to negative impacts of climate change, she said. Msuya said China's robust engagement in the multilateral environmental regime, coupled with its economic muscle, will be key to addressing pressing challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss and waste that have disproportionately affected developing countries. "China is a key global economic powerhouse right now, the second largest in the world," she said. "The population of China, 1.3 billion people, is absolutely central to address any environmental challenges in the globe." "We look to working with all member states including China on environmental challenges," Msuya said. "We continue to engage and look forward to learning from what China will do in both pollution, biodiversity but also waste management and chemical use," she said. China's rapid transition from hydrocarbons to renewable energy sources has provided inspiration to developing countries grappling with negative impacts of climate change, Msuya said. "The direction China is taking in reassessing sources of energy is positive," she said, adding that engagement of local communities to clean up rivers in different Chinese provinces is an initiative worth replicating in other parts of the world. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 21:45:19|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close NANNING, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Total volume of trade between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries hit a record high of 587.87 billion U.S. dollars in 2018, up 14.1 percent year on year, an official with the Ministry of Commerce said Wednesday. China-ASEAN trade maintained a strong upward momentum last year, with two-way investments amounting to 205.71 billion U.S. dollars, said Yang Weiqun, deputy head of the Department of Asian Affairs, Ministry of Commerce. The mutual investment stock has grown 22 times since 2004, Yang added when attending a senior officials meeting for the 16th China-ASEAN Expo, which is scheduled to be held from Sept. 20 to 23 in Nanning, capital of south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. The theme of this year's expo is "Building the Belt & Road, Realizing Our Vision for A Community of Shared Future," with Indonesia as the Country of Honor. Yang said China hopes to take this chance to strengthen communication and cooperation with ASEAN countries. Gustanto, Consul General of the Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia in Guangzhou, said the expo has made positive contributions to bilateral trade between Indonesia and China. As the Country of Honor, Indonesia plans to bring more exhibitors and deepen bilateral economic and trade cooperation, he said. Initiated in 2004, the expo is an important platform to promote trade and relations between China and the ASEAN. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 21:55:24|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close TEHRAN, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Iran and Indonesia traded 1.85 million tons of non-oil commodities worth 767.24 million U.S. dollars during the first 10 months (March 21, 2018-Jan. 20, 2019) of the current Iranian calendar year, Eghtesad online news website reported on Wednesday. The figures registered a 5.3-percent rise in weight and 10.28-percent growth in value compared with the corresponding period last year. Iran's exports to Indonesia stood at 1.72 million tons worth 643.52 million dollars. Indonesia was Iran's ninth export destination during the period. Iran mainly exported non-alloy semi-finished iron/steel products, non-alloy iron/steel ingots and liquefied propane to Indonesia during the 10-month period. Indonesia exported 134,000 tons of goods worth 123.72 million dollars to Iran. Indonesia was the 26th exporter of goods to Iran over the 10 months. Iran's imports mainly included paperboard, aluminum oxide and coconut. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 22:00:27|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close BEIJING, March 13 (Xinhua) -- China's top political advisor on Wednesday greeted and thanked news media for their coverage of the second session of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which ran from March 3 to 13. Meeting with representatives from the country's major media outlets including People's Daily, Xinhua News Agency and the China Media Group, Wang Yang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the CPPCC National Committee, said the media outlets showcased the CPPCC's work in various forms, from multiple angles and at different levels, making significant contributions to the success of the annual session. He called on the media outlets to continue using their advantages in penetration, guidance, influence, and credibility, to further demonstrate the CPPCC's practice in political consultation and consensus building, and to manifest the characteristics and strengths of socialist democracy. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 22:00:29|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close David Dollar, a senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, receives an interview in Washington D.C., the United States, on March 11, 2019. The longtime U.S. observer on China has said the draft foreign investment law being deliberated in Beijing is "definitely a step forward" in the country's continued reform and opening-up. (Xinhua/Hu Yousong) by Xinhua writers Xiong Maoling, Hu Yousong and Zhu Dongyang WASHINGTON, March 13 (Xinhua) -- A longtime U.S. observer on China has said the draft foreign investment law being deliberated in Beijing is "definitely a step forward" in the country's continued reform and opening-up. David Dollar, a senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, told Xinhua in an interview on Monday that he believes the draft law will attract more foreign investment. The draft law, which has been submitted to China's ongoing annual national legislative session for a third reading, aims to further improve the transparency of foreign investment policies and to better ensure that foreign-invested enterprises participate in market competition on an equal basis. Calling it a "sensible" set of policies, Dollar highlighted the shift to a negative list system, which the expert said he believes will "probably result in more sectors opening up." Dollar said opening up more sectors would allow the entry of high-quality imports and also increase competition so that Chinese companies could improve, which would ultimately benefit China's economic growth. The expert used to serve as country director for China at the World Bank from 2004 to 2009, and then as the U.S. Treasury Department's economic and financial emissary to China from 2009 to 2013. He said China has gone through a rapid structural adjustment since the 2008 financial crisis, as its economy has become more focused on consumption. He also said the massive tax and fee cuts to be rolled out are "smart" measures expected to lower the price of some products, give more impetus to consumption and stimulate the economy. "I think the tax cuts will be very welcome," he said. As one of the highlights of this year's government work report, China has pledged that it will reduce the tax burdens and social insurance contributions of enterprises by nearly 2 trillion yuan (about 298 billion U.S. dollars) in 2019. Another thing in the work report that has attracted his attention is Beijing's pledge to continue opening up the country's economy. Dollar, who made his first trip to the Chinese mainland in 1986, said China's change over the past few decades is "unbelievable," thanks to the continued implementation of the reform and opening-up policy. The China expert encouraged the country to "follow through," and suggested it further open up its service sectors, such as financial services and healthcare, as the Chinese economy is going to depend more on services in the coming years. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 22:15:32|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close OSLO, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Low-cost airline Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA will send a bill to Boeing in the United States for the cancelled flights of its 18 new Boeing 737 Max aircraft, online newspaper E24 reported Wednesday. The company has cancelled flights of all of its 18 Boeing 737 Max aircraft after the recommendation of European aviation authorities, the report said. "We are going to send the whole bill to Boeing. Norwegian should not have any financial burden for a brand-new aircraft not to be used in traffic," said Lasse Sandaker-Nielsen, communications manager of Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA. "This is a completely new type of aircraft and one must expect that it can be used in commercial traffic without delays," he said. Norwegian is in talks with Boeing, but the company will not say whether the U.S. manufacturer has accepted to cover all costs or not. The cost of aircraft suspension is still uncertain and will be entirely dependent on how long the suspension will last, the company said. Norwegian is trying to merge departures on routes where there are many flights every day, so that the passengers still get off, E24 wrote. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 22:20:33|Editor: mingmei Video Player Close NAIROBI, March 13 (Xinhua) -- An environmental expert on Wednesday hailed China for transforming the solar energy sector in line with the global sustainable development goals. Paul Ekins, Director of Institute for Sustainable Resources at University College London (UCL), said Beijing has done a wonderful job by availing renewable energy through solar globally. "China has taken a lead in renewable energy and is now the world's largest producer, exporter and installer of solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles," Ekins said during the launch of the sixth Global Environmental Outlook report at the ongoing fourth session of United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi. The expert said the transformation is now more visible in Africa than in any other continent as majority of populations are adopting solar power as it is cheaper than fossil fuel driven power. "What China has done in the past few years is a result of public private partnership where the private sector is left independent to run innovation," said Ekins, the co-chair of the panel that conducted the five-year assessment report. Ekins added that from the report findings that paint a grim picture of bad management of the planet, there is need to move from fossil fuel to renewable energy-powered vehicles and other equipment. He urged populations to borrow good behaviors by adopting lifestyles that could help reduce environmental degradation. "We need to start pooling transport, change our homes to energy positive homes and adopt the use of renewable energy at our homes," he said. Ekins also urged governments to openly respond to the report, which raised pertinent real issues that require direct intervention by the governments. The report warns that damage to the planet is so dire that people's health will be increasingly threatened unless urgent action is taken. The report, which was produced by 250 scientists and experts from more than 70 countries, calls for drastic scaling up of environmental protection in regions including Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 22:25:34|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close NAIROBI, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on Wednesday formed a new framework to fast track environmental sustainable development goals (SDGs) through a gender equality approach. Janet Kabeberi-Macharia, UNEP head of the gender and social safeguards unit, said the framework, the Global Framework for Action on Gender and Environment, will help secure commitments on the theme of gender and environment. "We intend to map out global commitments towards achieving the 2030 agenda," Kabeberi-Macharia said during a side event at the ongoing fourth session of United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi She said that there are plans to facilitate global dialogues and actions by ensuring that SDGs are achieved faster once gender equality is realized. The UNEP official said that the framework is an integrated approach that will be the foundation for collective gender transformative related action for accelerated progress toward environmental SDGs. Kabeberi-Macharia said that women and girls face challenges that limit their ability to participate in decision making process. She said that the framework is a response to a request by the Network of Women Ministers and Leaders for the Environment for a coordinated framework that would enable different stakeholders and partners to address the environmental related SDGs from a gender perspective. "We expect the government, civil society organizations, research institutions and the international organizations to play their roles," said the official. Kabeberi-Macharia observed that use of gender specific approach to investigating the dynamic relationships between environmental change and gender equality is one of the solutions to address barriers to sustainable development. She said the framework will look at rights to land, natural resources and biodiversity, access to food, energy, water and sanitation, climate change, sustainable production and consumption and health and wellbeing and women in environmental decision making at all levels. "The framework will help ensure faster progress through gender equality based approach in policy planning and implementation and through strategic partners," she added. According to Kabeberi-Macharia, the framework will ease access to information, highlight gender sensitive environmental policies and strengthen donor partnerships. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 22:35:35|Editor: yan Video Player Close Xi Jinping (C, front), Li Keqiang (3rd R, front), Li Zhanshu (3rd L, front), Wang Huning (2nd R, front), Zhao Leji (2nd L, front), Han Zheng (1st R, front) and Wang Qishan (1st L, front) attend the closing meeting of the second session of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 13, 2019. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen) BEIJING, March 13 (Xinhua) -- China's top political advisory body concluded its annual session Wednesday, building a broad consensus and unity for national development. Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders including Li Keqiang, Li Zhanshu, Wang Huning, Zhao Leji, Han Zheng and Wang Qishan attended the closing meeting of the second session of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in Beijing. Addressing the closing meeting, Wang Yang, chairman of the CPPCC National Committee, called for further improvement of the CPPCC system to translate the Party's propositions into consensus and action of people from various sectors. Wang stressed the need to uphold and strengthen unity, urging the CPPCC to carry out its dual responsibility of offering suggestions and building consensus, and pool joint efforts to serve the central tasks of the Party and the state. Focusing on key issues including securing a victory in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, political advisors have been engaged in in-depth consultations and actively offered proposals during the session, achieving important results, he noted. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China as well as the CPPCC. Hailing CPPCC's achievements in participating in the founding and developing of New China, exploring reforms, and realizing Chinese Dream, Wang said the political advisory body now enjoys a broader stage and shoulder a heavier responsibility as socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new era. The CPPCC is an important organ for CPC-led multiparty cooperation and political consultation. It is a major channel for socialist consultative democracy and a specialist consultative body. As of 5 p.m. on March 7, political advisors had submitted 5,113 proposals since the session started on March 3, ranging from the "three critical battles" against major risks, poverty, and pollution, to developing socialist democracy. A resolution on a work report of the Standing Committee of the CPPCC National Committee, a report on the examination of proposals, and a political resolution on the annual session were approved at the closing meeting. China will inevitably face an array of interwoven opportunities and challenges in 2019, the political resolution reads. It calls on political advisors to follow the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, and work to maintain stable growth, advance reform, make structural adjustments, improve living standards, guard against risks, and ensure stability. The CPPCC should improve its quality in carrying out its dual responsibility of offering suggestions and building consensus, and shoulder its political responsibilities of implementing the CPC Central Committee's decisions and plans, of meeting its requirements for CPPCC work, and of pooling the wisdom and strength of all Chinese people, at home and overseas, for national rejuvenation, it says. United States' National Transportation Safety Board and Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee officials check the debris of the crashed Lion Air JT 610 during their investigation of the air plane crash at The Tanjung Priok port, Jakarta, Indonesia, Nov. 1, 2018. (Xinhua/Veri Sanovri) CHICAGO, March 12 (Xinhua) -- Roughly three dozen lawsuits have been filed against Boeing following the crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 of theon October 29, 2018, killing 189 people on board. Almost all of the lawsuits are in Circuit Court of Cook County or the Northern District of Illinois, except one which was filed in Seattle, Crain's Chicago Business reported on Tuesday. Another Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed Sunday in Ethiopia, killing more than 150 on board. The crash in Ethiopia could affect the trajectory of the Lion Air lawsuits, based on what investigators discover, the local media quoted Thomas Gardiner, a name partner at Gardiner Koch Weisberg & Wrona which is representing the family of Lion Air co-pilot Harvino, as saying. "It depends on the result of the investigation, in what the cause was of the crash," Gardiner said. "If it's a similar circumstance, that evidence could be admissible, conceivably." Boeing has filed a motion suggesting the Lion Air lawsuits should be dismissed locally and moved instead to Indonesian courts. While the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration holds the Boeing plane is sky-worthy, authorities in many countries including Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, the European Union, India and China have grounded the aircraft. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 22:50:51|Editor: yan Video Player Close TEHRAN, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Iran and Thailand traded 1.56 million tons of non-oil commodities worth 754.55 million U.S. dollars during the past 10 months until Jan. 20, 2019, Eghtesad online news website reported on Wednesday. The figures registered falls of 19.92 percent and 12.94 percent in weight and value respectively compared with the corresponding period last year. Iran's exports to Thailand stood at 1.23 million tons worth 580.38 million dollars. Thailand was Iran's 11th export destination during the period. Iran mainly exported non-alloy iron/steel ingots, liquefied propane and non-alloy semi-finished iron/steel products to Thailand during the 10-month period. Thailand exported 333,000 tons of goods worth 174.17 million U.S. dollars to Iran. Thailand was the 25th exporter of goods to Iran over the period. Iran's imports mainly included medium-density fibers, electrical equipment and split units. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 23:16:03|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close BEIJING, March 13 (Xinhua) -- China will push for Artificial Intelligence (AI) courses to be offered at primary and secondary schools and popularize programming education in steps, according to a directive issued by the Ministry of Education. This is among major actions demanded by educational authorities across the country for the cultivation and improvement of information literacy of teachers and students. Information literacy is the ability to discover and use various types of information and is an essential skill for navigating the information age. Big data, virtual reality and AI technologies should be more deeply applied to education and teaching, says the directive. Programs will be launched to train primary and secondary school teachers on the application of information technology, and advanced courses on big data will be also offered to teachers across the country, it adds. The directive also calls for more investment into the application of information technology in education. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 23:21:06|Editor: yan Video Player Close VIENNA, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Austria is to tighten its immigration procedures at airports in order to identify Islamic State (IS) fighters returning from the Middle East, Interior Minister Herbert Kickl has announced. In an interview with Kronen Zeitung, Austria's largest newspaper, Kickl said as IS is on the verge of military defeat, many fighters and other persons involved will now be trying to return home, including back to Austria. He said all persons arriving at airports will be required to go through the security gates with headscarves removed, and that certain flights will be closely looked at, particularly those originating from Turkey and the Middle East. Border patrol units will also be on the lookout for persons entering via land routes. The minister argued that persons with alleged links to IS terror networks should be sent to tribunals in the Middle East, such as in Syria, rather than back home in Austria. He added that Switzerland is already on board with this suggestion, and that more pressure should be put on the international community to see the idea through. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 23:26:09|Editor: yan Video Player Close BEIJING, March 13 (Xinhua) -- China's central government has allocated a fund of 100 million yuan (about 15 million U.S. dollars) to address the adverse impact of natural disasters in Qinghai Province. The fund, allocated via the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Emergency Management, will be used to help local residents affected by heavy snow in places including Yushu and Guoluo in the province. Since December 2018, heavy snows and temperature drops have made it difficult for local farmers and herdsmen to make ends meet. Fodder shortage caused many livestock deaths. As a result, the Ministry of Emergency Management has started a level IV emergency response for disaster relief in the affected areas and dispatched working groups to guide disaster relief in Qinghai. Disaster relief work is proceeding in an orderly manner so far, and living and working conditions of local people are returning to normal, according to the Ministry of Emergency Management. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 23:26:09|Editor: yan Video Player Close JERUSALEM, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Bar Ilan University, located in the center of Israel, and the northern Israel Institute of Technology will jointly establish a national research center in the field of smart transportation, the state's Council For Higher Education published on Wednesday. The two universities won a tender for the establishment of the center at an investment of 25 million new shekels (about 6.93 million U.S. dollars). To achieve progress in smart transportation, research cooperation is required in a wide range of fields, such as mathematics, business administration, computers, engineering, architecture and geography. Therefore, one of the main functions of the center will be developing the research community in Israel to encourage and promote the research and development of smart transportation. The new center will also encourage cooperation between all interested parties, including researchers from academia and R&D centers worldwide in the relevant areas. In addition, the center will work to encourage and promote cooperation among the scientific community in Israel and between entrepreneurs and industry from Israel and abroad. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 23:36:12|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close BEIJING, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Chinese religious figures serving as political advisors at this year's "two sessions" are pleased with the country's protection of Tibetan Buddhism in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region. Political advisor Lhapa from Jokhang Temple is among the over 2,000 members of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), who gathered in Beijing for this year's session that started on March 3 and concluded Wednesday. Jokhang Temple, in downtown Lhasa, the regional capital of Tibet, is a must for visitors to Tibet and a sacred site for Tibetan Buddhists. It attracts about 800,000 tourists and receives over three million Buddhist followers each year. Built in the 7th century in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), Jokhang Temple is home to plenty of historical relics and typical Tibetan architecture. It was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2000. The Chinese government has attached great importance to the protection and preservation of the temple, said Lhapa, executive deputy director of the management committee of Jokhang Temple. Five years ago, for example, the government invested over 60 million yuan (8.94 million U.S. dollars) in gilding the five golden roofs of the temple. The Buddha figures, Thangka and murals in the temple have also been well preserved. To better protect these precious cultural relics, a database for Buddha statues and Thangka in both Mandarin and Tibetan languages, launched in 2015, will be completed next year, he added. Experts from Beijing and Xi'an have been invited to help build the database. More than 6,000 Buddha statues and over 600 Thangka have been included in the database, according to Lhapa. "The government has invested 100 million yuan in protecting the cultural relics," Lhapa said. "I'm really satisfied with the government's role in protecting the temple, a treasure of the country." As a political advisor from the religious circles, Lhapa said he must serve all the people, including tourists, believers and researchers who visit the temple. "We have personnel working 24/7 in the halls of the temple, including monks, firefighters and police officers to prevent the cultural heritage from being destroyed or stolen, and to ensure tourists' safety," Lhapa said. The monks in Jokhang Temple usually spend about nine hours every day conducting religious activities such as chanting sutra and learning Buddhist doctrine, Lhapa said. "Anyone who comes to Jokhang Temple will see worshippers crowd the square in front of the main hall throughout the year," Lhapa said. Every Tibetan New Year, Jokhang Temple opens for 24 hours to provide convenience for believers and tourists. "On the Lamp Festival, we have Dharma assembly here and the butter lamps are lit on top of the temple. Believers come to pray for happiness and health," he said. Similar to Jokhang Temple, almost all the temples and monasteries in Tibet are under national or regional protection, according to Lhapa. Living Buddha Drigung Khyungtsang echoed Lhapa's ideas, saying today's Tibet observes many traditional folk and religious activities. The Shoton festival at Zhaibung Monastery and the worship activities at Sera Monastery are among the most popular ones. "Tibetan Buddhists, young and old, would sway their praying wheels and chant sutras when significant activities are launched," said Drigung Khyungtsang. As vice chairman of the Tibet branch of the Buddhist Association of China, Drigung Khyungtsang is in charge of the Kangyur printing. The precious wooden templates of the Kangyur have been well preserved and printing is suspended in winter because cold weather may cause damage to the templates. Political advisor Lodro Gyatso, a senior monk from the Sakya Monastery, the earliest monastery of the Sakya Sect of the Tibetan Buddhism, in Xigaze Prefecture, told Xinhua that the monastery has two Buddhist colleges, offering various classes including Tibetan language, Tibetan calligraphy, Buddhist texts, astronomy, calendrical calculation and philosophy to monks and lamas. Thanks to a digital archive project launched in 2017 in the monastery, the original sutra books and archives have been preserved while their digital versions are available online. Living Buddha Jewon Koondhor has a story different from other political advisors. He had spent most of his life outside and returned to his hometown, the city of Qamdo in Tibet, when he was 60 in 2011. "My hometown Qamdo has changed a lot and is continually improving. The traffic there today is much more convenient. I'm happy to be back," he said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 23:46:13|Editor: yan Video Player Close PRAGUE, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis has suggested to his British counterpart Theresa May to organize a second Brexit referendum, Babis tweeted Wednesday. "On Saturday I called with British Prime Minister @theresa_may. We've been dealing with #brexit. I told her that the best solution would be for the UK to stay in the European Union. That is why I am convinced that it is worth listing a new referendum," Babis tweeted. May previously said the second referendum could mean that the UK would never leave the EU, which is not what the public voted for in 2016. On Tuesday, the British parliament again rejected May's Brexit deal with a majority of votes. In Wednesday's vote, the British MPs will vote on the no-deal Brexit possibility. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 23:51:15|Editor: yan Video Player Close DUBAI, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The Canton Fair-Dubai Road Show 2019 has been held in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), aiming to introduce the Canton Fair as an international trade platform to UAE's enterprises and promote closer cooperation between China and the UAE. Canton Fair, with a history of 62 years, serves as an international trade platform which can help Chinese and UAE's companies find more cooperation opportunities, and also boost the trade relations between the two countries. Each year, Canton Fair is attended by nearly 200,000 international buyers from more than 200 countries and regions, according to Chinese data. Jin Lei, Economic and Commercial Counsellor of the Consulate General of China in Dubai, hailed the partnership between China and the UAE under the Belt and Road Initiative, adding that the Canton Fair welcomes buyers from the UAE and will be the "fast track" for local companies to explore Chinese market. Mohammed Ali Al Kamali, deputy CEO of Dubai Exports, said that China has been Dubai's largest trading partner since 2014 and Dubai is a global trade center along the new Silk Road. There are a lot of cooperation opportunities between the UAE and China, especially as the World Expo 2020 will be held soon in Dubai, he added. More than 50 entrepreneurs from various industries and media attended the road show. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-13 23:56:18|Editor: yan Video Player Close BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Brunei on Wednesday barred all Boeing 737 MAX 8 type aircraft from flying over its airspace following the crash of a similar jetliner in Ethiopia. According to a press release from the Brunei government, referring to the recent two fatal international aircraft accidents involving the Boeing 737 Max 8 in less than five months, the Department of Civil Aviation at the Ministry of Transport and Info-communications informed and assured the public that none of these aircraft types are registered in Brunei. The Department of Civil Aviation has also issued a Flight Operation Directive to suspend temporarily any Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft from operating to and from Brunei International Airport including transiting flights. More and more countries have joined the list of closing airspace after the crash on Sunday of a Boeing 737 Max 8 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, leaving all 157 people aboard dead. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 00:06:21|Editor: yan Video Player Close DUBAI, March 13 (Xinhua) -- M WOODS, a contemporary art museum from Beijing, displays some significant Western and Chinese artworks at The Dubai Mall, in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates from March 12 to April 30 celebrating Dubai's art season and the spring/summer fashion season. Nearly 40 renowned Western and Chinese contemporary artworks from M WOODS' permanent collection will be on view for the first time in the Middle East in seven specially created museum-like pavilions throughout Fashion Avenue. Huang Xufu, co-founder of the museum, said at the opening ceremony this is the first time for M WOODS to display its collections overseas. "Dubai is a hub of contemporary culture in the Mideast, therefore, we choose here as our first station and hope the local people will enjoy our artworks." The exhibition is presented in partnership with Dubai Tourism and Emirates NBD. Located in Beijing's 798 Art District, M WOODS opened to the public with a permanent collection based on the founders' private collection of international art. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 00:06:22|Editor: yan Video Player Close MANILA, March 13 (Xinhua) -- A plane from China's Taiwan slid off the runway of an airport in central Philippine province of Aklan on Wednesday night, prompting airport authorities to temporarily halt the operation for over an hour as they remove the aircraft from the only runway. All 122 passengers and crew aboard the Far Eastern Air Transport are all safe. Spokesman of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines Eric Apolonio said the accident occurred around 6 p.m. local time while the plane was making a turn to the terminal when one of its tires accidentally hit soft spot in the grassy area off the runway. Apolonio said the passengers were safely assisted off the plane before emergency airport responders towed the aircraft. Other flights had been delayed because of the incident, he said, adding that operations went back to normal at around 7:30 p.m. local time. The passengers were all holidaymakers bound for Boracay island resort, the Philippines' premier island-beach resort in the central of the country. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 00:06:28|Editor: yan Video Player Close WINDHOEK, March 13 (Xinhua) -- On a sunny Tuesday, a beam of hope illuminates the Mariental High School in Hardap Region in the southern part of Namibia. At a computer room of the school, student Donna Gamatham was completing a task using a desktop computer, which was part of the 10 computer sets donated by the Chinese embassy in Namibia. For her and other learners, the donation has introduced them to a new era of studies that involved the digital mode of learning. "Access to more computers and information communication technologies help us learn more. It complements the knowledge we acquire from the prescribed book," she said. The donation is also set to expose learners to global developments and multi-culturalism. "At the handover event this month, we met people from all over the world including China. We learned how to engage with other people," she added. School principal Albertus Stein said that the new computers would address the scarcity of resources the school suffered. "Due to limited computers, learners and teachers had to share, which decelerated progress and access to information communication technologies to all at school," he said. Namibia's Minister of Education, Arts and Culture Katrina Hanse-Himarwa said that the ministry faces the challenge of aging information communication technologies equipment. Since 2015, records show that no state schools received new information communication technologies equipment, and the ministry stagnated as only 24 percent of schools have information communication technologies equipment installed, according to Hanse-Himarwa. As the Namibian government strives to integrate information communication technologies into mainstream education programmes, the Chinese embassy is harnessing information communication technologies capacity to boost education provision and improve access to inclusive education in the country. Yang Jun, Charge d'Affaires of the Chinese Embassy in Namibia said the donation is aimed at supporting Namibia to enhance the provision of education and advance learners' career prospects. "Education is the key for any nation to develop. We (China) as friends of Namibia would like to give our help to Namibia in this field," Yang said. The new donation, brings to 20, the number of desktop computers at the school. Meanwhile, governor of the Hardap region, Esme Isaack, said the donation is testimony to the longstanding relationship between China and Namibia. "Namibia needs educated citizenry not only towards the route to economic independence but also to achieve such national development goals. Therefore, interventions inclusive of all relevant role-players such as the Chinese embassy are critical," she said. Mariental High School has 900 learners and 30 teachers. The Chinese embassy established ties with the school in November 2018 when Chinese ambassador to Namibia Zhang Yiming awarded scholarships worth 20,000 Namibian dollars (around 1,390 U.S. dollars) to top performers at the school. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 00:11:29|Editor: yan Video Player Close DAR ES SALAAM, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Tanzania and Russia were on the final touches of forming a joint commission aimed at accelerating ties in investment, trade and economic development between the two countries, a Russian government official said on Wednesday. Mikhail Bogdanov, the Russian Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, said the commission will be entrusted to ensure that natural resources benefited people in both countries, said a statement by the Directorate of Presidential Communication at State House in the commercial capital Dar es Salaam. The statement said Bogdanov revealed the formation of the commission during talks with President John Magufuli. It said that the talks were held after the Russian diplomat had delivered a special message to President Magufuli from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Russian diplomat, who visited Tanzania eight years ago, praised President Magufuli's leadership for pioneering economic reforms and fighting corruption. For his part, President Magufuli thanked President Putin and assured him of continued cordial relations between the two countries. The head of state said Tanzania will continue cementing ties with Russia in trade, investment, tourism and provision of social services to the people. Magufuli invited President Putin and Russian investors to visit Tanzania and learn about available investment opportunities. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 00:11:31|Editor: yan Video Player Close MUSCAT, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Oman's Sultan Qaboos bin Said issued on Wednesday a royal decree to introduce selective tax law. The new tax is primarily targeted at certain foodstuff, beverages and commodities that are deemed harmful to human health and environment. It is expected to be levied on alcohol, tobacco products, carbonated drinks, energy drinks and certain luxury goods. In line with the Gulf Cooperation Council's framework, the rate of the tax will be 50 percent or 100 percent based on the nature of the goods. So far, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar have introduced such tax. Recent data conducted by Oman's Ministry of Health, which surveyed more than 9,000 people, revealed that the number of people with obesity exceeded 66 percent. It also showed that 8.5 percent of adults aged 18 and above smoke tobacco with males accounting for 14 percent. Some 38.6 percent of Omanis are exposed to second-hand smoke at home or work. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 00:16:33|Editor: yan Video Player Close BEIRUT, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Polish Ambassador to Lebanon Przemyslaw Niesiolowski announced the launching of direct flights between Warsaw and Beirut starting June 2019, local media reported on Wednesday. "Direct flights between Warsaw and Beirut will contribute to boosting economic relations between Poland and Lebanon while it will have positive effects on the economic, social, touristic and cultural levels between the two countries," Niesiolowski was quoted as saying by the National News Agency. The Polish ambassador added that relations between Lebanon and Poland are very strong and will continue to grow with this new step. His remarks came during a launching event held in Beirut to celebrate the occasion. Meanwhile, Lebanon's Tourism Minister Avedis Guidanian emphasized the importance of this step for both countries. "This new step will enable us to reach our targeted tourism growth in favor of both countries," he said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 00:16:34|Editor: yan Video Player Close OTTAWA, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Canada's transport minister said on Wednesday that Canada will ground Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft following the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed all 157 people on board. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 00:21:35|Editor: yan Video Player Close ARUSHA, Tanzania, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Tanzania's semi-autonomous archipelago of Zanzibar has embarked on hefty promotion of tourist attractions in efforts to lure more foreign tourists, a senior official said on Wednesday. Mwinjuma Muharam Saleh, advisor of tourism development in the Zanzibar's Department of Forestry and Non-renewable Natural Resources, said that Zanzibar has a wide range of tourist destinations which are yet to be explored. "And this is caused by limited information as many people are unaware of what we have in Zanzibar. So, we're currently placing leaflets in these tourism potential areas to attract tourists, as ways of disseminating information and showing destination of the said attractions," the official said. According to him, the campaign involves a number of stakeholders such as tour operators, Zanzibar Commission for Tourism and Tanzania Tourism Board in mainland Tanzania. He cited areas which are key for tourism purposes as Kiwengwa-Pongwe in Unguja North Region and Ngezi forest in Pemba. Saleh said Kiwengwa-Pongwe forest reserve has 47 species of birds which includes Fischer's turaco, Zanzibar sombre, crowned hornbill and white browed coucal. "The area is also rich in medicinal plants and Mwanamkasi Mchekani caves are also considered as important for luring tourists," he said. He also described Ngezi Forest Reserve in Pemba Island as key because it's a home to Pemba flying fox and unique Pemba Scop owls, nocturnal birds. Zanzibar archipelago has recorded a 15 percent increase in the number of international tourists to 433,474 in 2017 from 376,242 in 2016. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 00:31:37|Editor: yan Video Player Close JOHANNESBURG, March 13 (Xinhua) -- South African Airways (SAA) said it wanted to recover millions of rands from its former pilot who flew its aircraft for twenty years without a proper licence. "The pilot has resigned. The money we intend to recover from him runs into millions of rands," SAA spokesperson Tlali Tlali told Xinhua on Wednesday. Pilot William Chandler had been working with SAA for twenty years. He flew the jets with a commercial pilot licence. However, according to the SAA regulation, a pilot must also obtain the Airline Transport Pilot License (ATPL) within five years of employment. The licences needed to be renewed annually. He was arrested and charged with fraud on Monday at the Kempton Park court after SAA laid charges against him. The fraud was only discovered after Chandler was involved in an accident operating a flight to Germany last November. SAA has also suspended head of safety official Victoria Buxton for attempting to cover the fact that Chandler was without an ATPL. The South African Civil Aviation Authority which issues pilots with licenses told Xinhua that a probe has been established into the fraud. "The matter is still under investigation, we will announce findings once it's completed," said spokesperson Kabelo Ledwaba. Since the November incident occurred in Germany, Aviation authorities are also investigating the matter. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 00:31:37|Editor: yan Video Player Close BELGRADE, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Spain is against the independence of Serbia's province of Kosovo, Spain's Minister of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation Josep Borrell told Serbian officials on Wednesday. At separate meetings with his Serbian counterpart Ivica Dacic and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, Borrell highlighted Spain's opposition to the unilaterally-declared independence of Kosovo, Serbia's southern province, in 2008. According to an official press release, Borell told Vucic that Spain is against the unilaterally-declared independence of Kosovo, "because the secession is contrary to the principles of international law. He added that Spain supports the search for a compromise solution within the framework of the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina. Borrell denied, however, any parallel between Kosovo and Spain's province of Catalonia, saying at the press conference with Dacic that "the two situations have nothing to do with each other." "Such comparisons... appeal to Catalonia's independence advocates," Borrell added. Dacic said the two cases coincide only due to the fact that "separatism is characterized by unilateral acts," adding that the authorities both in Kosovo and in Catalonia are not truly interested in dialogue. Thanking Spain for the "protection of vital state and national interests of Serbia," Vucic said Serbia also respects the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Spain. He pledged that Serbia will remain committed to peace and stability in the region, adding it already fulfilled all its obligations under the 2013 Brussels Agreement with Kosovo. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 00:36:37|Editor: yan Video Player Close ISLAMABAD, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The Pakistani government has decided to establish a business forum to ensure the maximum participation of the country's business community in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) projects, Pakistani Minister of Planning, Development and Reform Khusro Bakhtiar said here Wednesday. The minister told media that the country's Cabinet Committee on CPEC has approved to set up the CPEC Business Forum to tap the true potential of the project by enhancing industrial cooperation and involving the private sector from inside and outside the country, which would help enhance the country's exports and reduce imports. According to the minister, the forum will include representatives from business sectors, chambers of commerce and industries, business councils and other sectors of the economy across the country. The Pakistani government led by Prime Minister Imran Khan has shown its firm commitment to CPEC and vowed to utilize the project for job creating, revenue generation, poverty alleviation and economic development of the country. According to a research report issued by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants in Pakistan, CPEC has left motivational impacts on different sectors in the country through its plentiful economic benefits and opportunities and it would create around 1 million new jobs in the coming decade for the locals. Bakhtiar further stated that the government has already working speedily on special economic zones under CPEC. China and Pakistan have finalized arrangements to start projects in six different areas like agriculture, education, health, poverty alleviation and vocational training institutes and other livelihood area for the socio-economic development, said the minister, adding these projects will be started in the areas where people's living standard is low and economic development speed is very slow. Pakistan has a great potential in different unexplored sectors and the Cabinet Committee on CPEC has also decided to seek Chinese help to start joint ventures for food processing, fisheries and livestock, according to the minister. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 01:21:46|Editor: yan Video Player Close WASHINGTON, March 13 (Xinhua) -- A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to another 43 months behind bars on conspiracy charges. "It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the amount of money involved, a significant portion of his career has been spent gaming the system," Judge Amy Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington said of the case. It would add on to the 47-month term Manafort received from a federal judge in a separate case in the state of Virginia, making seven and one-half years in prison for the veteran Republican lobbyist. Manafort, 69, joined Donald Trump's campaign team in March 2016 and spent three months as Trump's campaign chairman until mid-August of that year. He was convicted in a Virginia federal court trial on charges of tax and bank fraud last year and pleaded guilty on others. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 01:31:48|Editor: yan Video Player Close DAR ES SALAAM, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The East African Law Society (EALS), a regional bar representing lawyers from across the East African Community (EAC) member states, on Wednesday offered to reconcile the disputes between Rwanda and Uganda. A statement by the EALS said the body has mobilized experienced diplomats, senior lawyers, influential civil society officials and representatives of the business community to step up efforts to mend ties between the two countries. "We are separately reaching out to the heads of state of Rwanda and Uganda with the offer for mediation," said Willy Rubeya, the EALS President, in the statement. The EALS's intervention comes at a time of fears across the region following sour diplomatic relations between Rwanda and Uganda. Rubeya said EALS will soon avail the team and keep the public informed of the status of the dispute resolution. The Arusha-based regional bar with over 17,000 lawyers has an observer status to the EAC, a regional body formed by Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan. One of its mandates is to promote regional integration through cross-border trade and building capacity of legal, professional and public institutions. EALS also appealed to the leaders of the two countries to re-open and operationalize their common border even as a lasting solution to the crisis was sought. Rubeya expressed profound concern over the deteriorating relations between the two neighbors "due to the facts that are now in public domain." Of much concern is the effect of the situation on the economy and provision of basic needs to the affected population, he said. Rubeya said escalation of the situation at the common border of the two sovereign states has brought with it "the undesired effect of constraining free movement of citizens and goods". He said the society and its members, spread across the six EAC partner states, believed the solution to the crisis lay in a negotiated settlement. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 01:31:48|Editor: yan Video Player Close DAMASCUS, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The Islamic State (IS) launched a counter-offensive on the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) on Wednesday with suicide bombers in eastern Syria, a war monitor reported. Taking advantage of a sand storm that hit eastern Syria, the IS militants sent five suicide bombers, who detonated themselves during intense clashes between IS and SDF, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Britain-based watchdog group said the battles were raging on the outskirts of the farmlands of Baghouz in the eastern countryside of Deir al-Zour province, as the farmlands are the last IS-held areas in eastern Syria. The battles raged recently as thousands of civilians and IS militants fled the last IS-held areas in Baghouz. The SDF fighters are launching their last offensive to eliminate the remnants of IS in eastern Syria. The SDF has been on a crushing offensive in eastern Syria against IS since last September. The U.S.-led coalition is backing the SDF in their push to eliminate IS from the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in eastern Deir al-Zour. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 01:41:49|Editor: yan Video Player Close TIRANA, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Albania decided to ban all flights of Boeing 737 MAX 8 and 737 Max 9 aircraft in the Albanian airspace, the Albanian Civil Aviation Authority (AAC) said on Wednesday in a statement. "Albania joins the decision of the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), stopping the flight of Boeing 737-8 and 737-9 Max aircraft in the Albanian airspace," it said. AAC informed Albanian citizens that no such planes operate at the International Airport "Mother Teresa", in any of the programmed flight lines. According to the statement, the AAC prohibits the operation of such aircraft in the Albanian airspace and the International Airport "Mother Teresa" for an indefinite period of time. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 01:46:52|Editor: yan Video Player Close ALGIERS, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Algerian official APS news agency on Wednesday reported Ramtane Lamamra has been appointed new foreign minister to replace Abdelkader Messahel. Following a ceremony at the headquarters of the Foreign Ministry, Lamamra, who is also Deputy Prime Minister, told reporters that he is tasked by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika "to transmit to foreign partners and to the international community the aspirations of the Algerian people." "We are required to approach the current situation with caution, vigilance, and commitment to be at the service of the nation," he added. The appointment of Lamamra comes as part of the cabinet reshuffle that President Bouteflika announced a couple of days ago. Lamamra also occupies the post of Deputy Prime Minister, while Noureddine Bedoui was appointed Prime Minister in replacement of Ahmed Ouyahia. AFP File Photo OTTAWA, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Canada is grounding all its Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft and banning the jets from its airspace following the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed all 157 people on board, including 18 Canadians. Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau said Wednesday that his decision to ground the planes was made after a review of the evidence about the aircraft. "This safety notice restricts commercial passenger flights from any air operator, both domestic and foreign, of the Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft from arriving, departing, or overflying Canadian airspace," Garneau said. Canada is joining a long list of countries in suspending Boeing 737 Max that has been involved in two deadly crashes since October. The U.K., the European Union, Australia, China, India, Ethiopia and other countries had moved already to bar the jet from their airspaces. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 01:56:55|Editor: yan Video Player Close GENEVA, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The World Economic Forum (WEF) said on Wednesday it had invited 127 of the world's most promising social activists, business leaders, public servants, artists and technologists under the age of 40, including nine from China, to join its Class of Young Global Leaders. The Forum of Young Global Leaders is a diverse community of leaders from all walks of life and every region of the world, pushing boundaries, achieving firsts, and breaking traditional rules to improve the world, the WEF said. Current members lead governments and Fortune 500 companies, hold Nobel Prizes and Academy Awards, and have become United Nations goodwill ambassadors and social entrepreneurs. The class of 2019 includes the most decorated Olympian female swimmer, the founder of the first app providing advice on contraception in Bangladesh, the managing director of a leading supermarket chain looking to ban plastic packaging and a female scientist whose work is revolutionizing batteries. "We look to these leaders to take forward the challenge of improving the state of the world," said Mariah Levin, head of the Forum of Young Global Leaders at the WEF. This year, the list includes the Georgian and Costa Rican heads of state, both in their thirties, and Kirsty Coventry, Zimbabwe's Minister of Youth, Sport, Arts and Recreation, who has won more Olympic medals than any other female swimmer in history. This year, more than half of the new members are women, and many of the Young Global Leaders are from emerging economies. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 02:11:57|Editor: yan Video Player Close JERUSALEM, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that exposure of a Hezbollah unit in Syria's Golan Heights was just "the tip of the iceberg," sending a threat to the Shiite group over its alleged efforts to entrench itself in the country. The remarks came after the Israeli army said that intelligence suggested that Hezbollah has built a unit called the "Golan File" along the cease-fire line in the Syrian Golan Heights. Speaking in a video statement, Netanyahu said that the unit "was part of Iran's aggression against Israel." He warned that Israel will take actions against Iran and Hezbollah. "We will continue to use all means ... to block Iran's efforts to use Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza as forward bases for attacking Israel," he said. Israel seized part of the Golan Heights during a war in 1967. It later annexed the territory, claiming it as part of Israel, in an act never recognized internationally. The announcement came amidst renewed efforts by Netanyahu to achieve recognition from the U.S. of Israel's acclaimed sovereignty over the Golan. Israel considers Hezbollah and Iran its biggest enemies. The last round of full-fledged war between Israel and Hezbollah took place in southern Lebanon in 2006. The 34-day war ended with a fragile truce. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 02:16:59|Editor: yan Video Player Close ZAGREB, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Croatian Interior Minister Davor Bozinovic dismissed on Wednesday the latest Amnesty International report on human rights violations against migrants. Amnesty International accused the European Union of being complicit in the "systematic and frequently violent pushbacks and collective expulsion of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers from Croatia" in their latest report published on Wednesday. Bozinovic published an open letter to Massimo Moratti, Director of Research for Amnesty International's Europe Office, in which he rejected accusations. Bozinovic said that migrants who were returned to the country from which they illegally entered Croatia, most often falsely accuse police officers of violence because they are expecting that such accusations would help them with a new attempt to enter the country. Since 2016, there were 202 complaints from civil society organizations that have contained allegations of police violence against migrants, Bozinovic said in the letter. "All reports of alleged police violence against refugees have been thoroughly inspected and none of them has been confirmed. Also, none allegation of criminal acts has been confirmed," the minister wrote. In 2018, Croatian police registered 8,207 attempts of illegal border-crossing, which is 70 percent more than in 2017. The number of people asking for international protection in Croatia is on the rise. In 2014, 454 people pursued such protection, while four years later over 1,000 people did so. The minister claims that Croatian police act within the bounds of the national and EU law and that it will continue to protect its borders and won't let illegal entries to the country's territory. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 02:52:02|Editor: yan Video Player Close BEIRUT, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Canadian Ambassador to Lebanon Emmanuelle Lamoureux vowed on Wednesday to help Lebanon's Interior Ministry in its reform process, the National News Agency reported. "We will cooperate with the interior ministry in its efforts to reform prisons, strengthen the capabilities of municipal police in addition to the fight against domestic violence," Lamoureux said during her meeting with Raya Haffar El Hassan, Lebanon's interior minister. Lamoureux said that she is sure that cooperation with Lebanon's Interior Ministry will be dynamic and fruitful. El Hassan vowed earlier to work on the central prison of Roumieh as well as others including women's prisons and underage prisoners, some of which share cells with adults. She also promised to improve women's access to their rights. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 02:52:03|Editor: yan Video Player Close RABAT, March 13 (Xinhua) -- President of Sierra Leone Julius Maada Bio arrived on Wednesday in the Moroccan city of Casablanca. Upon his arrival at the Mohammed V International Airport of Casablanca, Bio was greeted by Moroccan Prime Minister Saad Eddine El Othmani. Bio, who is accompanied by a large delegation, will chair the sixth international forum "Africa Development," whose country is the guest of honor of the forum. The forum, which will start on Thursday and last two days, is held under the theme "When East meets West." It represents a platform of reference for dialogue, investment promotion and intra-African trade. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 03:37:17|Editor: yan Video Player Close SOFIA, March 13 (Xinhua) -- A conference on the promotion of three key exhibitions, which will take place this year in Heilongjiang, China's northernmost province, was held here on Wednesday. Li Haihong, Counsel at the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade Heilongjiang Committee, said that the 30th Harbin International Economic and Trade Fair (HTF) and the 6th China-Russia Expo will be held from June 15 to 19, while the 7th Heilongjiang Green Food Industry Expo will take place from Sept. 21 to 25. Li said that consistently adhering to the concept of "Highlighting Russia, Facing Northeast Asia, Radiating the World, Serving All over China", the HTF has become an economic and trade link combining countries in Northeast Asia, as well as an important window and bridge for Heilongjiang open-up to international markets. In 2014, the HTF was successfully upgraded into the China-Russia Expo, which has been held for five consecutive years, Li said at the conference, which was held in the Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI). He also said that with great geographic advantages, Heilongjiang has established a new pattern of all-round opening-up, constructed 11 Border Trade Zones and 16 Overseas Economic and Trade Cooperation Zones, and has deeply integrated itself into the Belt and Road Initiative. "China is a very good partner of Bulgaria," BCCI president Tsvetan Simeonov said in turn. "We consider every Chinese representative of business circles as an opportunity," Simeonov said. Last year was one of the most successful years for Bulgaria's relations with China because Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visited Bulgaria and the country hosted many other bilateral events, Simeonov noted. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 04:07:23|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close An American Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft from Los Angeles lands at Washington Reagan National Airport in Washington D.C., the United States on March 13, 2019. The United States is grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft, said U.S. President Donald Trump Wednesday, as the country becomes the last major country to do so after two crashes by the model in recent months. (Xinhua/Ting Shen) WASHINGTON, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The United States is grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft, said U.S. President Donald Trump Wednesday, as the country becomes the last major country to do so after two crashes by the model in recent months. "All of those planes are grounded, effective immediately," Trump told a press event, referring to the Boeing 737 Max variations. "The safety of the American people, of all people is our paramount concern," Trump said. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) followed up on Trump's remarks with a statement, ordering the temporary grounding of Boeing 737 Max aircraft operated by U.S. airlines or in U.S. territory. The FAA said that "new evidence collected at the site and analyzed today" led to the latest decision. "The grounding will remain in effect pending further investigation, including examination of information from the aircraft's data recorders and cockpit voice recorders," the FAA statement said. The announcement, reversing the FAA's statements defending Boeing, came hours after Canada announced it is pulling Boeing 737 Max aircraft from the sky, indicating that the United States is bowing to the mounting pressure from the international community to ground the aircraft. Boeing said in a statement that "out of an abundance of caution," it recommended to the FAA the suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of 371 aircraft in the 737 Max category. The United States is the last major country to halt operation of the questioned model, despite repeated calls from U.S. lawmakers, experts, and the public in the past couple of days for the regulatory body to prioritize safety. An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 plane en route from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, Kenya crashed Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. A Lion Air of the same model crashed in October in Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board. Photo taken on Dec. 30, 2016 shows the U.S. national flag on the U.S. Embassy building in Moscow, Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Russia will not expel anyone in response to latest U.S. sanctions. (Xinhua/Sputnik) MOSCOW, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The Kremlin on Wednesday called the recent package of acts passed by the U.S. House of Representatives "Russophobic" and warned that the anti-Russian mood in U.S. policy will increase as its next presidential election approaches. "This indicates a continued, very unfriendly and rampant Russophobic trend. This is a continuation of emotional exaltation," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, commenting on the acts. He said that the U.S. lawmakers are driven by emotions, which do not allow them to soberly assess the situation and demonstrate at least some political will to take actions which meet the interests of the two countries in the best way. Any expert in the recent history of the United States can easily predict that as the country approaches its presidential election, the intensity of Russophobia will only increase as it has always been used as an electoral tool in the United States, Peskov said. The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday passed three bills and one resolution targeting Russia. One bill bans the U.S. government from recognizing Russia's sovereignty over Crimea, which was incorporated into Russia in March 2014 following a local referendum. Another bill, the Vladimir Putin Transparency Act, demands an investigation into the wealth of the Russian president. The third bill, the Kremlin Act, requires an assessment of Russia's possible actions against the United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries. The resolution passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, which was named "Calling for Accountability and Justice for the Assassination of Boris Nemtsov," urges a new investigation into the murder of the Russian opposition leader in 2015 and bringing the perpetrators to trial. The next U.S. presidential election is scheduled to take place in 2020. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 04:47:36|Editor: yan Video Player Close KIEV, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Ukraine has issued Eurobonds worth 350 million U.S. dollars with a yield rate of 9.75 percent, the country's Finance Ministry said on Wednesday. JP Morgan was responsible for their issue, the ministry said in a statement, adding that the transaction will be settled on March 21. According to local media, the 10-year bonds maturing on Nov. 1, 2028, are the follow-up offering to 1.25 billion dollars of Eurobonds issued by Ukraine in October last year. In general, Ukraine earned 2 billion dollars from Eurobonds sales in 2018 and plans to raise the same sum this year. According to local economists, Ukraine is in urgent need of external financing due to its huge foreign debt, of which some 16.3 billion dollars should be repaid this year. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 05:17:43|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close Samin Razaghe, a 37-year-old refugee from Iran, works as a make-up artist in Athens, Greece, March 7, 2019. (Xinhua/Marios Lolos) by Alexia Vlachou ATHENS, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Fariba Amini, 21, who fled war in Afghanistan three years ago, has started her own business in Athens thanks to a training program aiming to help the unemployed youth. She is one of the 300 aspiring young people who completed the youth entrepreneurship program "Business for Youth" and succeeded in turning her business idea into practice. "I've never had the opportunity to go to school. I don't have any education. But since the time I came to this class and now I'm at a different level," Fariba Amini told Xinhua in a recent interview. "I know how to control expenses. I know how to decide on pricing. I can do everything now after these classes," she added. Like Amini, 37-year-old Samin Razaghe, who came from Iran with her 16-year old son, also joined the program as she waited on her asylum request process. Razaghe dreamed to be a make-up artist. "The certificate gave me self-esteem. Self-confidence. It opened new doors, now I have hope, I know I could do a lot of things," she said. Addressed to refugees and asylum seekers, migrants with residence permits in Greece and unemployed Greeks, the program gives people from vulnerable groups the opportunity to struggle with unemployment and exclusion, to create and bloom. "The most outstanding value of the program is that it is encouraging people to work on their ideas. To think that they have the opportunities and they can make effort into creating something that is sustainable. I believe that especially for women, it's a fantastic opportunity to start thinking about entrepreneurship," Elena Mavromichali, Lead for Community Engagement and Entrepreneurship at Solidarity Now, said. The program "Business for Youth" is implemented by Solidarity Now, powered by the Citi Foundation, supported by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and, in collaboration with the Social Enterprise Knowl. During each training cycle the curriculum includes courses for the development of soft skills, entrepreneurship, branding as well as networking with other entrepreneurs, thus encouraging personal guidance and participants' empowerment. "I feel independent. Since I was a kid, I wanted to be independent," Amini said. Born and raised in Afghanistan, Amini had to leave her country with her parents and siblings when her brother was killed. She spent a whole year in the state-run reception facility at the former airport of Elliniko, a southern suburb of Athens. She was depressed and her only way out was to watch tutorial videos on the internet on how to make bracelets. She recalled the days when she had only five euros in her pocket to buy some strings and materials to make her first pieces. In the design studio where she works, she makes backpacks from the rubber of the inflatable boats that refugees used to cross Aegean Sea and reached Greek islands from the Turkish borders, and from the life-jackets they wore to keep them afloat. In addition to the customers here in Athens, she also sends her designs to Germany, in an organization that supports refugee women. Holding Greek ID card and passport now, Amini sees Greece as her new home and dreams big. "My future goal is to open a big store here. The headquarters is going to be here, but I'm going to open different branches in different countries. That's my goal," she said. Razaghe also wants to open her own place and start her business. Even to continue her studies in her field, "I wanted to be free as a woman". Though from different backgrounds, both Razaghe and Amini like most of the participants of the program, they overcame their barriers and got motivated to build their own life from scratch with the guidance and support of experts. "They're always trying to show their best side and they're so motivated. They're trying to digest all the way. That also motivates us and our staff," Mavromichali said. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 05:47:54|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close British Prime Minister Theresa May (Front) speaks during the no-deal Brexit vote in the House of Commons in London, Britain, on March 13, 2019. British MPs on Wednesday voted to reject no-deal Brexit at any time in the wake of Tuesday night's shattering defeat of the Brexit deal of British Prime Minister Theresa May. (Xinhua/UK Parliament/Mark Duffy) HOC MANDATORY CREDIT: UK Parliament/Mark Duffy LONDON, March 13 (Xinhua) -- MPs on Wednesday voted to prevent Britain from leaving the European Union (EU) unless a Brexit deal has been agreed with Brussels. The no-deal option, rejected by a vote of 321 to 278, was a crushing defeat for British Prime Minister Theresa May. The result could also lead to a number of resignations among May's ministerial team, after Conservative Party managers ordered its MPs to oppose the measure. MPs began the non-binding vote at 1900 GMT on Wednesday, and voted by a margin of 43 to completely rule out no-deal Brexit, which led to a second government defeat in some 30 minutes. Also on Wednesday, MPs voted by a margin of 210 to reject an amendment which calls on the British government to pursue a managed no-deal Brexit on May 22. The result came just minutes after MPs voted by 312 to 308 to reject a no-deal Brexit at any time in the wake of Tuesday night's shattering defeat of May's Brexit deal. The British government has lost by four votes on Wednesday night as MPs rejected a no-deal Brexit in the non-binding vote, which does not rule out Britain leaving the European Union. The vote outcomes further weakened the authority of the prime minister, who has been fighting with a hoarse voice in the parliament to save her Brexit deal, which was rejected by the parliament by a margin of 230 in January. But it means MPs could have another vote on Thursday to decide whether they want to ask Brussels for an extension to the March 29 departure date. The speaker of the Commons, John Bercow, announced that the Thursday vote will set next Wednesday as a deadline for MPs to agree a Brexit deal. If a Brexit deal is passed by then, the British government will seek an extension of Britain's departure date from the EU until June 30. But if the deal is not passed by Wednesday the government will need a longer extension, requiring Britain to take part in European elections. In what political commentators said was a night of chaos, MPs had earlier backed a measure aimed at stopping a no-deal option in any circumstances. The success of that measure, won by 312 votes to 308, meant that the text of the main and final vote had to be changed to rule out an option of Britain leaving the EU without a deal. Even with the latest defeat for May, the no-deal option will need a change in legislation to become enforceable. After the result was announced, May said that the Wednesday vote does not change the fundamental problem that if MPs want to rule out a no-deal Brexit they must vote for a deal. In Brussels, EU leaders demanded a "clear answer" about what Britain wants, and were preparing to take a hard line if, as widely expected, the British prime minister asks for a postponement of Brexit. The EU's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier insisted there would be no further offer from Brussels apart from the deal already on the table. Earlier Wednesday, British Chancellor Philip Hammond signaled his backing for a cross-party consensus over Brexit, despite the PM still appearing to support her own deal. He told MPs they had "a solemn duty in the days ahead to put aside our differences and seek a compromise." Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 06:13:02|Editor: yan Video Player Close HELSINKI, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Analysts of the Finland-based Data Security provider F-Secure have discovered international efforts to support those in favor of Britain leaving the European Union, the company told media on Wednesday. Between last December and February, F-Secure analyzed 24 million Tweets from 1.65 million accounts that included a mention of Brexit. They found that two most popular pro-Brexit Twitter influencers received a disproportionate number of retweets, as compared to the pro-remain influencers. Finnish national radio Yle quoted on Wednesday senior F-Secure researcher Any Patel as saying their research indicates at least that there is "a global effort" underway to support the message of those supporting Brexit. In the company's News from the Lab blog, Patel noted that the scope of the report is too limited to conclusively determine whether or not there is "a coordinated campaign under way" to manipulate the public or the political climate surrounding Brexit. F-Secure found out the pro-leave group relied on suppport from a handful of news sources that the researchers defined as "non-authoritative". A significant number of accounts based outside Britain were involved in the pro-leave conversations and retweet activity. Analysts noted that while both the pro-leave and pro-remain camps exhibited "inorganic" or "non-human" activity, this activity was far more evident in the pro-leave group. Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 06:48:10|Editor: Xiaoxia Video Player Close British Prime Minister Theresa May (Front) speaks during the no-deal Brexit vote in the House of Commons in London, Britain, on March 13, 2019. British MPs on Wednesday voted to reject no-deal Brexit at any time in the wake of Tuesday night's shattering defeat of the Brexit deal of British Prime Minister Theresa May. (Xinhua/UK Parliament/Mark Duffy) HOC MANDATORY CREDIT: UK Parliament/Mark Duffy LONDON, March 13 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Theresa May will have one last shot of winning support for her Brexit deal after MPs voted Wednesday to stop Britain quitting the European Union (EU) without a deal. A vote to prevent a no-deal Brexit in any circumstance was won by 321 votes to 278 in the House of Commons. Work and Pensions Minister Sarah Newton became the 15th government minister to resign over Brexit. She quit tonight after she voted against the government. It means MPs will return to the historic chamber at Westminster Thursday to debate asking for Britain's delay from the EU to be delayed. A government proposal for debate Thursday would see MPs having until next Wednesday to see if they could finally agree a deal. If they agree a Brexit deal, the government would ask for a short extension of EU membership to June 30, to enable legislation to be rushed through the House of Commons. But if there was no deal, Britain would seek to stay in the EU for longer and would have to take part in European Parliament elections in May. MP Steve Baker from the influential pro-Brexit group of Conservative MPs, the European Research Group, said in the House of Commons that if May presented the deal already rejected twice by MPs, members of ERG would vote against it a third time. ANOTHER BAD NIGHT May, her voice still hoarse, took part in a debate Wednesday to enable MPs to decide if they wanted to rule out Britain leaving the EU with no deal. May announced her support for the main motion to rule out a no-deal Brexit unless a deal had been agreed, but it kept alive the possibility of Britain leaving the EU if there wasn't a deal. Conservative MPs were told they could have a free vote on that motion. An amendment was put forward to rule out Britain leaving under any circumstance without a deal. To the shock of Conservative Party managers that amendment won by 312 votes to 308, a narrow four vote margin. It meant the main motion of the evening was now amended to incorporate the successful amendment. Conservative managers changed their minds and withdrew the free-vote offer, meaning party MPs were required to vote against it. However, it won by 321 votes to 278, representing another crushing blow for the already embattled May. ALL GO WRONG There is still great unease in the House of Commons over May's unpopular Brexit deal with its risk of measures to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland. Many MPs opposed to May's deal fear Britain would be locked into EU rules for years, or even indefinitely, with no means of escape. They wanted legal guarantees to make sure this could not happen. Across the House of Commons, a number of MPs have been demanding a block on a no-deal exit, fearing that May was running down the clock towards March 29 with the prospect of Britain ending its EU membership with no deal by default. The sum total of MPs voting against May for different reasons all added up to inflict yet another defeat. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT MPs will gather at Westminster Thursday, with just 16 days to go before the scheduled March 29 departure date. They are set to debate on whether they want Britain to seek an extension to Article 50. That is the EU's trigger mechanism that sets a two-year countdown to departure day. It runs out on March 29, having been trigger in March 2017. Even if British MPs vote for a delay, the final decision is in the hands of the leaders of the 27 EU member states. They will want to know why Britain wants to delay its departure, and all have to agree. After losing the vote in the Commons on Wednesday, a day after her Brexit deal had been overwhelmingly defeated again, May addressed MPs. She told them the options before the House of Commons are the same as they always have been. She said: "The House has today provided a clear majority against leaving without a deal, however I will repeat what I said before. These are about the choices this House faces. The legal default in EU and UK law is that the UK will leave without a deal unless something else is agreed. The onus is now on every one of us in this House to find out what that is." Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 06:53:11|Editor: yan Video Player Close LONDON, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The British pound soared as markets welcomed British parliament's rejection of a no-deal Brexit on Wednesday night that paves way for a an upcoming vote on Brexit delay on Thursday. The pound had been climbing against major currencies during the day and was trading at 1.3221 against the U.S. dollar and 1.1671 against the euro just before the parliamentary vote began at 1900 GMT. It surged by 2.13 percent against the U.S. dollar at 1.3353 and 1.7 percent against the euro at 1.1781 in two hours after the vote. The pound's jump came after it sank on the defeat of May's revised Brexit deal at the parliament on Tuesday, which opened the door to the vote on whether the lawmakers would support a no-deal Brexit on Wednesday. The market was optimistic that the no-deal option could be averted. The British currency has been volatile during the week with a series of Brexit-related parliamentary votes held to decide the final path of Brexit. Brexit has been the main driver for the Pound this week, according to TorFX, a currency transfer provider. The pound rose strongly after May said on Monday she had secured "legally binding" changes from the EU to the Irish "backstop", which means the insurance policy designed to avoid a hard border in Ireland, could not "become permanent". However, it shed all the previous gains since earlier Tuesday when British Attorney General Geoffrey Cox said the legal risk of the UK being tied to EU rules after Brexit "remains unchanged", and the country would not be able to leave the "backstop" without EU agreement. Though lawmakers voted down a no-deal Brexit, May warned that the legal default in EU law remains that "the UK will leave without a deal unless something else is agreed", but the EU has been clear that the deal on the table is the only one available. She said the government could continue negotiations or have a second referendum, but this would damage the trust between the British public and the parliament. Commenting on the vote, Miles Celic, Chief Executive Officer of TheCityUK, said: "MPs have said 'no to no deal,' but without an agreement between the UK and the EU, this vote sadly delivers very little." "A constructive and practical way forward must be found. Unless the Withdrawal Agreement or some other realistic course of action is agreed very soon, the UK will still crash out, regardless of MPs' wishes," Celic said. A vote on a possible delay to Brexit on Thursday is expected to pass but the pound will remain highly sensitive to Brexit turbulence, according to TorFX. It believed following an extension of Article 50, there are again a series of possible outcomes, ranging from no-deal, renegotiation, second referendum to Brexit abandoned. Cum poti prelungi durata de viata a masinii tale fara efort: 3 sfaturi utile pe care le poti aplica oricand Masina personala nu este un moft, iar beneficiile pe care aceasta le aduce sunt imense, de la libertate de miscare si pana la mai multa siguranta atunci cand te deplasezi. Indiferent de [citeste mai departe] Ukrainian Army uniform Open source There have been no casualties among the Ukrainian military on Tuesday, March 12. The Joint Operation Forces HQ reported that on the morning of March 13. The enemy used Minsk-banned weaponry, specifically the mortars of various calibers, as the mines landed in the vicinities of Pavlopol. The anti-tank grenade launchers and small arms were used during the attacks on Avdiivka (both settlements are in Donetsk region). In Krymske, Luhansk region, the Russian occupants opened fire from 82 mm mortars. The Ukrainian military intelligence added that two pro-Russian mercenaries were killed, and another four were wounded in action over the said period. Earlier, we reported that Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has exposed the spy ring of the Chief Department of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in Donbas as 112 Ukraine reported citing Head of Military Counterintelligence of SBU Serhiy Levchenko. According to him, the significant growth of the activity of the group of the spy ring named Sapphire is observed on the eve of the elections. The main tasks assigned by the Russian curator to the members of the spy group was the preparation and holding of the anti-Ukrainian information campaigns; gathering and analysis of the information about the senior leadership of Ukraine, Armed Forces and other military formations and gathering of the intelligence information about forces and means involved in the Joint Forces Operation. Particularly, the members of the group prepared and spread fake data on the social networks to discredit the senior military-political leadership of Ukraine. For example, the fake order of the Defense Ministry of Ukraine about supposedly stop of the assessment of all extra payments for the soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was prepared. The meeting with sailors will take place today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow Kateryna Zelenko, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Open source The Ukrainian party has got permission from the Lefortovo prison administration to visit the Ukrainian prisoners of war, the sailors. Kateryna Zelenko, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, stated this during todays session, as 112.ua reports. Recently, we have got the permission from the authorities of the Lefortovo prison to visit by the Ukrainian consul prisoners of war in Moscow today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. We hope that this visit will be divided in a couple of days, and the consul will be able to meet every prisoner in person, the spokesperson said. According to Zelenko, Ukraine has not received any medical document on the health condition of the POWs yet, there are only descriptive data, which do not cover everything accurately and do not tell what medical treatment the sailors need. Russian investigators appointed an expert psychiatric examination for eleven Ukrainian sailors so far, as lawyer Nikolay Polozov reported on Facebook. According to the lawyer, the defense objected this expertise. At the same time, considering the fact that investigation does not want to react positively to the objections of the lawyers, they have filed appeals concerning the lawyers presence during the expertise. On November 25, the coast guard ships of the Russian Navy attacked the ships of the Ukrainian Navy, which have been carrying out a scheduled transition from Odesa port to Mariupol port in the Sea of Azov. Ukrainian ships were rejected passage via the Kerch Strait, Russian coast guards opened aimed fire on them. All 24 sailors on board were captured and delivered to Moscow 21 of them were delivered to Lefortovo remand center, the rest came to the hospital of Matrosskaya Tishina prison. Facing an extension of the sentence term, Ukrainian POWs detained in the Kerch Strait refused to testify in Lefortovo court. Sailors were distributed into six groups, four people in each. On January 15, 2019, Moscow's Lefortovo district court decided to keep 20 Ukrainian sailors in remand until April 24. On January 16, the court extended the detention term for another 4 sailors. 112 Agency Jakub Mielnik, journalist: At what stage is Ukraine now? Has it finally left the Russian sphere of influence or not? Serhii Plokhii: Annexation of Crimea and the beginning of Donbas war became the turning point. These events have set a lasting trajectory of the movement: the Ukrainians have formed a new picture of their country and the people, based on a protest against Russian aggression. Meanwhile, in the short term, we can still expect for various steps backward. In this regard, the current year will be especially important, since Ukraine will hold presidential and parliamentary elections. They can reverse the changes that have occurred in Ukraine over the past four years, right? Of course, there are such fears, although I personally believe that in a country whose residents decided to take up arms in order to protect it from Russian aggression, this is unlikely to happen. It will be difficult for Russia too. Why? After four years of active anti-Ukrainian propaganda, it would not be easy for the Russians to return to the model, proposed by Putin at the beginning of the conflict. He said that Russians and Ukrainians were essentially one people. Moscows steps in its foreign policy show that there has been a sharp reversal in its approach to Kyiv. Of course, it is trying to interfere in Ukrainian politics, sow chaos, but Ukraine belongs to a new category for it: this is not a typical category of the post-Soviet states, but of the Baltic countries, Poland or Hungary. Do you think the Russians have accepted the fact that Ukraine is an independent state? Any official statements on this topic have been voiced, so I cannot quote them. Perhaps Moscow has not verbalized this idea, but if we analyze Russian stocks, we can see that the approach to Ukraine has changed. There is no strong pro-Russian candidate in the Ukrainian presidential race, there are no politicians who would be openly supported by Putin, as it happened in the past. I cannot say how deliberate is this step and is it a result of a practical approach to the current political games, but the changes are obvious. Its hard to believe because Ukraine is of great importance for the Russian national identity. Has Moscow refused from referring to Kyivan Rus, which have been served as the foundation of the empire? This is a two-level process. At a practical level, Russia is trying to build a nation-state. Operation "Russian World," where the Russian Federation acted as a defender of the Russian language and cultural community, has lost its significance, and ethnic origin came to the fore. This was corroborated by Crimean case, with its predominantly Russian population: the peninsula was annexed, and its inhabitants were quickly integrated. Those who are culturally Russians (not ethnically), such as Donbas citizens, have been suspended: Russia does not really want to incorporate their lands. And what about the second level? This is about changing the concept of the entire Russian history, but this is a very long process. The myth of the origin of the Russian state, closely related to the history of Kyiv, has been forming for several centuries. Its transformation during the digital age could be done faster, but it still takes time. There are some signs that Russians are considering different options, moving away from linking Russia exclusively with Kyivan Rus. Some Russian historians are increasingly emphasizing the importance of Novgorod as a source from which the modern Russian state emerged. Everyone is now wondering what would happen with Belarus when Alexander Lukashenko is gone. The fate of this country is sealed, will Russia incorporate it? I think the Russians will not turn Belarus into one of their regions, it will retain formal independence, remaining in the Russian sphere of influence. Only a large-scale geopolitical event can change the course of events, for example, the collapse of the modern Russian state. Nothing, however, augur it. Would some changes happen in Belarus itself? The basis of Belaruss existence is the rejection of those steps taken by the other post-Soviet countries. It has refused not only from the free market (it appeared in the entire post-Soviet space in one form or another) but also from nationalism, which has become an important element of self-awareness in many countries that have arisen on the ruins of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine and Russia. Now Lukashenko has begun to promote certain elements of national mythology, but his country is very different from the Russian or Ukrainian state. Belarus remains a conserved part of the Soviet Union, which stubbornly refuses to realize that it has ceased to exist. Let us go back to Ukraine now. Ukrainian church has gained independence from the Moscow Patriarchate; was it a great blow to Russia? The concept, which calls Kyiv the mother of Russian cities, appeared at about the same time as the thesis about the necessity of subordinating the Kyiv church to the Moscow Patriarchate. The history of Moscow was first recorded by monks from Kyiv monasteries, thus trying to enlist the support of the Moscow kings and guarantee their protection from the Polish Catholic kings. They should not have done this, because they thus laid the foundation for the empire, which now claims to have control over Kyiv. It is not surprising that these two mythologies (unity of nations and unity of religion) have cracked simultaneously. This was especially painful for the church because conservative religious organizations do not tolerate change. The question is whether the Ukrainian autocephalous church will survive. The transformation of the church is a difficult process, but if the changes have already taken place, they can determine the destinies of countries and peoples for many years. Now the majority of church parishes in Ukraine are subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate, but for the first time since the seventeenth century, Ukrainians received an independent, internationally recognized church. Given what is happening with the Ukrainian state and society in the context of the war with Russia, Moscow can easily imagine that a new small church organization will very soon become the church for the majority of Ukrainians. It would be much more difficult for the Moscow Patriarchate to spread its influence. It has to be admitted that this was a very clever move: Moscow quarreled with its traditional allies because of the Ukrainian autocephaly, in particular, with the Greeks, who supported Ukraine, not Russia. How did it happen? Ukrainian Church has made several attempts to gain autocephaly, but each time they ended in failure. President Poroshenko has achieved success, which would certainly help his election campaign. Although, if you look at the situation from a western perspective, you can say that we have witnessed an unimaginable situation: literally a barbarous violation of the principle of separation of church and state, which operates in developed democracies. After all, how else to describe the presidents personal presence at the Council of Churches, which made decisions on the key church issues? At the same time, this is a very Western approach: in the countries with developed democracies, politicians are often engaged in affairs, which are of particular importance for the society, and then use them for their own political purposes. Ukrainians are also greatly helped by the fact that Russia is rapidly creating enemies on all fronts from the political to the cultural or religious. Only because of this, Ukraine, as a victim of Russian aggression, receives such outside assistance, which Ukrainian diplomats or political elites failed to provide. Read the original text at Wprost. After 1991, Georgia and Ukraine, along with other Eastern European countries, bonded over efforts to reform their economies and governments. In 1997, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova created between themselves a multilateral consultative forum that later became the Organization for Democracy and Economic Development, better known under the acronym GUAM March during "Alilo", a religious procession, to celebrate the Orthodox Christmas,Tbilisi, January 7, 2015 Reuters Georgia and Ukraine have become close political allies over the last two decades. That closeness may be currently under threat, however. Despite the Ukrainian Orthodox Churchs groundbreaking autocephaly, or independence, from the Russian Orthodox Church at the beginning of 2019, the Georgian Orthodox Church has failed to congratulate Ukrainian authorities or take any official position on the move, which also reveals tensions within the Georgian Orthodox Church. Given the importance of the Orthodox Churches in both Georgia and Ukraine, Tbilisis lasting silence on Ukrainian autocephaly could spill over into political affairs, and create a schism in diplomatic relations and strategic cooperation between the countries. After 1991, Georgia and Ukraine, along with other Eastern European countries, bonded over efforts to reform their economies and governments. In 1997, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova created between themselves a multilateral consultative forum that later became the Organization for Democracy and Economic Development, better known under the acronym GUAM. With the 2003 Rose Revolution and 2004 Orange Revolution, Georgia and Ukraine respectively left their post-Soviet trajectories and took resolutely pro-Western paths. In summer 2008 during the Russian-Georgian war, then-President Viktor Yushchenko travelled to Tbilisi to demonstrate Ukraines support for Georgia. And starting in spring 2014, Georgians returned the favor, helping Ukrainians in a myriad of ways during their violent confrontation with Russia. A number of Georgian politicians have taken high-level positions in various Ukrainian state offices. People-to-people contacts are also getting stronger; since March 1, citizens trips between the two countries have become exceptionally simple; they only need to present national ID cards. Clouds on the Horizon Georgia and Ukraines recent common history and challenges have largely created a broad and firm basis for a special relationship between the two countries. However, recent religious affairs are raising the question of how far Georgias political support can go and whether it will be strong enough to overcome Russian pressure. Such doubts have arisen as a result of the Georgian governments failure, so far, to officially welcome and support the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in its autocephaly, which occurred in January 2019. The main reason for Georgian officials silence on this issue lies within the Georgian Orthodox Church; the institution is not rushing to take an official position on Ukraines newly united Orthodox Church. The last 2018 meeting of Georgias Holy Synod on December 27 postponed the churchs official verdict on the issue. The Church of Georgia will make a decision relating to Ukraine at the next Holy Synod meeting, as it was promised, announced Michael Botkoveli, secretary of the Patriarch of Georgia. The January 2019 visit of a high representative of the Constantinople Patriarchate to Tbilisi again raised the question; the meeting between the Ecumenical Patriarchs emissary and the Georgian churchs leaders did not lead to any clear announcements. Metropolitan Emanuel merely stated that the Catholicos-Patriarch of Georgia has the wisdom to make the proper decision. So far, the official position of the Georgian Patriarchate remains the same as before the Orthodox Church of Ukraines autocephaly. The web page of the Georgian Patriarchate today reads the same as it did in October 2018: that this decision has caused tension between Constantinople and Russia. Until the Patriarchate of Constantinople and Patriarchate of Russia confirm their respective final official decisions, the Patriarchate of Georgia will forbear to give its assessment of the situation. Reasons for Tbilisis Hesitant Stance It is not surprising that Georgias Orthodox Church is dragging its feet; within the churchs Synod, opinions on the issue differ widely. Some Georgian Orthodox hierarchs openly support Ukrainian autocephaly. The Ukrainian nation of forty million people deserves its independence, said Metropolitan Peter Tsaava of Chkondidi in late December 2018. But Bishop Iakob declared in late January 2019 that we should not get involved in religious war, we should not think about only Ukraine, but also about Abkhazia. Im thinking about my country first. Iakob and likeminded Georgian bishops believe that Georgia should behave cautiously: they argue that if Georgias church recognizes Ukrainian autocephaly, the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church could in response recognize the independence of the Abkhaz Orthodox Church and thus help its separation from the larger Georgian institution. When Ukraines autocephaly became a publicly-discussed issue in Georgia, some members of the Georgian Orthodox Church addressed the Holy Synod with a petition in support of autocephaly for Ukraines united Orthodox Church. Some even gathered in front of the Georgian Patriarchates building in January 2019 to protest the churchs timid position; they held placards stating, Our support to the Ukrainian nation. In contrast, Georgian government representatives have abstained from publicly commenting on the issue, noting that it is of concern to the Tbilisi Patriarchate. I would like to state clearly that the Georgian Orthodox Church is reviewing this question. Considering the canonical processes, the position regarding this issue should first be determined by the Orthodox Church of Georgia. As for the state, it does not interfere with the churchs affairs, said Minister of Foreign Affairs David Zalkaliani. On February 1, a high representative of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, warned the Georgian hierarchs: I cannot imagine the Georgian Orthodox Church recognizing the autocephaly of the so-called Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Most of the clerics of the Georgian Patriarchate are very well aware of the ecclesiastical reality and the serious consequences of such a decision. He made this statement when the Georgian Patriarchate had sent its representatives to Russia to congratulate Russian Patriarch Kirill on the tenth anniversary of his intronization. In a statement devoted to the anniversary of Patriarch Kirill's enthronement, Russian President Vladimir Putin warnedthose who may be going against the Russian Orthodox Churcha message obviously delivered with the issue of Ukrainian autocephaly in mind. In response to Hilarions open warnings toward Georgia, the Georgian Patriarchate explained that the Georgian Church has always tried to take positions not on political grounds but on the basis of ecclesiastical law. At a time when, in the Tskhinvali [South Ossetia] region on a Russian military base the construction of a church is ongoing without any negotiation with us, and in Abkhazia the clerics [under] the Russian Church conduct non-canonic liturgies, the ambiguity of his statement sounds threatening, the Georgian Patriarchate complained in early February. We are guided by principle in the current situation, in that capacity, we take care of Orthodox unity; to ease tensions, we believe, is the responsibility of all churches, reads the webpage of the Georgian Patriarchate. An official representative of the Georgian Patriarchate, Metropolitan Shio Mujiri, has rejected accusations that the Georgian Patriarchate is under the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church. Still, some believe that many hierarchs of the Georgian Orthodox Church are behaving this way not only because of the Abkhazian issue, but also because they are pro-Russian. The theologian Giorgi Tiginashvili claimed in early January 2019 that the majority of the Holy Synod of Georgia is Russophile. They are linked to Russia via private contacts, previous educational and living experience, etc. Political Implications Should such a stance prevail, the effects of a possible divide will have a political and even geopolitical dimension, as well as repercussions for Ukrainian-Georgian relations. Most Georgians see their own national church as aor even theprime symbol of what it means to be Georgian. Similarly, most Ukrainians regard an autocephalic church as a critical expression of the uniqueness and independence of their nation. Whatever the exact outcome, such a schism, like so other critical issues in this part of the world, could be laid squarely at Russias feet. The unity of Russian and Ukrainian Orthodoxy might have been possible to preserve, had the Moscow Patriarchates hierarchs taken a clear, official, and critical approach toward Russias covert military invasion into Ukraine since 2014. Yet neither Metropolitan Kirill nor any other high representative of the Russian Orthodox Church appear to have done or said anything to effectively condemn or substantively moderate the Kremlins aggressiveness. The origins of Eastern Orthodoxys current schism lie thus neither in Kyiv nor in Constantinople, but in Moscow. It would be unfortunate if Russias war against Ukraine and the subsequent deep split in eastern Slavic Christianity will also spoil the otherwise very close relations between Ukraine and Georgia. TAMAR CHAPIDZE AND ANDREAS UMLAND Read the original text at Atlantic Council. Five years after the annexation of Crimea, one senses deep frustration throughout the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. From taxi drivers to government officials, people are anxious to know who will win the forthcoming presidential race, and what the next move of their unpredictable and frightening neighbor, Russia, will be. But most of all, as I learned on a recent visit, they are frustrated because the outside world doesnt seem to understand the pivotal role that Ukraineif it can retain its democracywill play in determining the winner of what has already become a new Cold War. The Kremlins prominent ideologist, Vladislav Surkov, recently stated that Russia has returned to its natural and the only possible state of a great, expanding, and lands-gathering union of nations. But if Ukraine succeeds in creating a viable, inclusive, and well-functioning democratic state, Russia will stop expanding and likely fall apart, just as the Soviet Union did in 1991. The reason is straightforward: if the Russian people witness the creation of a successful Slavic nation in a country which many of them view as part of Russia, then they will question the effectiveness and legitimacy of their own political system. Ironically, the fact that the Kremlin reinforces the definition of Russia by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who believed that Ukraine was part of Russia, may backfire. If Ukraine succeeds, then why cant Russia do the same? According to Putin, are Russians and Ukrainians not the same people? Taking this into consideration, the West, or whatever is left of the West, needs to help Ukraine, not by encouraging Ukrainians to bring back the Donbass and Crimea by means of war, but through a broad spectrum of economic and political measures. Under the Kremlins current regime, there is no military solution. The military help should be limited to countering any further attempts by Russia to deepen its territorial gains in Ukraine. Assistance in the strengthening of the Ukrainian army and supplies of lethal weapons are certainly helpful. Yet more importantly, the United States and its closest European allies need to come up with a Ukrainian version of a Marshall Plan. This means that for the time being Ukraine should forget about the Donbass and Crimea. One could even build a Soviet-type border around the annexed territories, and instead focus on Ukraines internal issues: good governance, ethno-linguistic inclusiveness, and, most importantly, corruption. The lost territories will return to Ukraine after Russias next and final downfall. War is a crucial factor in shaping national identity. The overwhelming majority of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians made their unequivocal choice in 2014. They have become loyal and patriotic Ukrainian citizens, who see the Russian state as a blatant aggressor. The Kremlin consolidated the Ukrainian nation, setting it on the way of creating a national identity, which is not ethnically or linguistically circumscribed. If it succeeds in this endeavor, then Ukraine will become the first state in the former USSR, where all of its ethnic minorities are considered equal citizens with a common national namean accomplishment that Russia has not achieved, either under the Czars, the Bolsheviks, or the present regime. The former commanding general of the US Army in Europe warns that the next decade might also bring a war with China Open source Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, the ex-commanding officer of U.S. troops in Europe, expressed confidence that there's a threat of a war with China over the next decade. Besides, there's a chance that in the next few years, Russia might try occupying Odesa and the territory of Romania. He said that at a security conference timed to the 20th anniversary of Czech, Hungarian and Polish membership in the NATO. 'The United States needs a very strong European pillar. I think in 15 years its not inevitable but it is a very strong likelihood that we will be at war with China', he said as quoted by Ceske Noviny. The Lieutenant General admitted that NATO 'should demonstrate Russia its power'. He also urged Germany, one of the key NATO members to increase the defense expenditures. Hodges also added that terrorism poses a threat for many human lives; however, NATO member countries should be also keeping an eye on potential threats from Russia and China. He insisted the Alliance needs to bolster its opportunities in the Black Sea. 'This is the area where Russia has been executing the largest and the most powerful aggression. If the West does nothing to the annexation of Crimea, it is quite possible that Odesa would be the next city to be occupied - and, perhaps Romania as well', Hodges concluded. It is planned that the launch will coincide with the visit of Russias President Vladimir Putin to Crimea Open source Russia plans to officially launch two power plants in occupied Crimea on March 18, the fifth anniversary of the annexation of the peninsula, as Reuters reported citing sources familiar with plans. The opening of the station coincides with the visit of President of Russia Vladimir Putin to occupied Crimea. The power plants were involved in the scandal when the German Company Siemens stated that its energy turbines were installed at them without its knowledge and in violation of the EU sanctions. Russian Company Tekhnopromexport, which builds power plants, refused to comment on this situation. Crimea was annexed by Russia after the illegal referendum held on the peninsula in March 2014. Earlier, the Russian military captured all strategic military objects and buildings of the key authoritative bodies. Neither Ukraine nor the rest of the Western countries recognized the results of the referendum. A number of the European and the world countries, including Ukraine, imposed the economic sanctions against Russia. The scandal on the supply of the Siemens gas turbines to occupied Crimea beyond EU sanctions took place in July 2017. Four gas turbines, produced by Siemens were brought to Crimea, having circumvented the sanctions that not allow having business with the occupied territory. Russia claimed they would be used in Taman but secretly brought them to the peninsula. First, the Russian Federation was denying the fact of the delivery. Later the subsidiary of the Russian corporation which bought the gas turbines confirmed the fact of delivery to Crimea after modernization. The EU imposed sanctions against the Russian partners of Siemens and Andriy Cherezov, the Deputy Minister of Energy of the Russian Federation. Later, Siemens delivery supervisors were included in the US sanctions list. The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine appointed Oleksandr Tereshchenko, cyborg that defended Donetsk airport, and Oksana Havryliuk, the former Head of the press service of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, as deputies of the Minister of Veterans Affairs. Iryna Friz, the Minister of the newly created Ministry for Veterans Affairs, stated this during the government session on March 13, as the Ukrainian news report. Two new deputies, Oleksandr Tereshchenko and Oksana Havryliuk, were appointed to the post, Friz said. It is known, that Tereshchenko participated in defense of the Donetsk airport, where he got an eye trauma and lost his right arm and left hand in 2014. Nowadays, he is Head of the Mykolaiv regional organization the Association of ATO participants and invalids, he also works as Deputy Chief of the Academy of Patrol Police in the area of social and humanitarian issues in Kyiv. Tereshchenko is a member of several social organizations of veterans associations and owner of the International charity organization of Oleksandr Tereshchenko. The newly appointed Deputy of Minister for Veterans Affairs Havryliuk have been working as Head of the press service of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine for 2.5 years, now she is working for the charity organization the Information Resource Center. Russia should immediately release the 24 seamen captured in the Kerch Strait in November 2018, - U.S. Embassy in Ukraine All Ukrainian sailors captured by Russia should be set free, not subjected to psychiatric evaluations, which violate their rights. The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine made a respective statement, posting it on Facebook. 'Rather than conduct psychiatric exams on Ukrainian sailors that violate their rights, Russia should release immediately all Ukrainian sailors and all Ukrainian political prisoners. We are deeply concerned by Russias treatment of the Ukrainians it has unjustly detained', the statement says. On November 25, the coast guard ships of the Russian Navy attacked the ships of the Ukrainian Navy, which have been carrying out a scheduled transition from Odesa port to Mariupol port in the Sea of Azov. Ukrainian ships were rejected passage via the Kerch Strait, Russian coast guards opened aimed fire on them. All 24 sailors on board were captured and delivered to Moscow 21 of them were delivered to Lefortovo remand center, the rest came to the hospital of Matrosskaya Tishina prison. Facing an extension of the sentence term, Ukrainian POWs detained in the Kerch Strait refused to testify in Lefortovo court. Sailors were distributed into six groups, four people in each. On January 15, 2019, Moscow's Lefortovo district court decided to keep 20 Ukrainian sailors in remand until April 24. On January 16, the court extended the detention term for another 4 sailors. Russia thinks that the American law, which defines non-recognition of the sovereignty of the Russian Federation over Crimea as the policy of the U.S., will not have any real consequences as Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Federation Council Konstantin Kosachev reported on Facebook. The approval of the law, which bans the U.S. to recognize Crimea as Russian by Congress House of Representatives, of course, will not have any consequences either for the real status of crimes or the international environment around it. But such a goal was not put. The majority of the acts of the American lawmakers on Russia are adopted only for the internal use, Kosachev said. He is sure that if Congress is forced to ban the recognition of Crimea as Russia for purpose, it means that, firstly, such possibility is not hypothetical anymore and, secondly, they are aware that Crimea can be considered Ukrainian only in the senseless attacks not in the reality. Obviously, it is the warning to Trump and allies but if it is needed and not in 2014 but in 2019, it is symptomatic, Kosachev thinks. He also estimated the adoption of the law as the most large-scale violation of the human rights. Moreover, this law is on the non-recognition codified by the American congressmen and consequently, on the violation of the human rights and over 2,3 million people live in Crimea and Sevastopol. Possibly, it is the most large-scale violation of the human rights enshrined in the law. The U.S. is pioneer in it, the Russian MP noted. U.S. Congress House of Representatives approved the draft bill, which defines the non-recognition of the sovereignty of the Russian Federation over Crimea, its airspace or waters as the policy of the U.S. on March 12. Crimea was annexed by Russia after the illegal referendum held on the peninsula in March 2014. Earlier, the Russian military captured all strategic military objects and buildings of the key authoritative bodies. Neither Ukraine nor the rest of the civilized countries recognized the results of the referendum. A number of the European and the world countries, including Ukraine, imposed the economic sanctions against Russia. As we reported Google corporation began to show occupied Crimea as a part of Russia for Russian users. The Ukrainian territory was illegally occupied by the Russian troops in February-March 2014; most of the civilized countries do not recognize the outcome of the 'referendum' supposed to legalize the capture of Crimea Open source President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin intends to visit the occupied Crimea in the view of the fifth anniversary of the peninsula. RBC-Ukraine reported that citing the sources in Putin's administration. According to the said sources, this flight is already on Putin's working schedule; however, there's still no official confirmation of this information yet. Previously, leader of Syria Bashaar al-Assad and French far-right politician Marine Le Pen also stated they would come to Crimea for the so-called 'Yalta International Economic Forum'. Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014. Crimea was declared a temporarily occupied territory. The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine officially announced February 20, 2014 the beginning of the temporary occupation of Crimea and Sevastopol by Russia. On October 7 2015 Ukraines President Petro Poroshenko signed the relevant law. International organizations recognized the occupation and annexation of Crimea illegal and condemned Russia's actions. The West introduced a series of economic sanctions. Russia denies the occupation of the peninsula and calls it a "restoration of historical justice." The Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation will be no longer in force since April, 2019 Russia sent a note to Ukraine due to termination of the Friendship Treaty, as the press office of the Russian Foreign Ministry reported. Russia accused Ukraine of failure to implement the treaty and urged to obligate the bilateral international commitments. We have explained it in a relevant note to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. We all Ukraine for respecting its bilateral and international commitments not in words, but indeed, the message says. The Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation was signed on May 31, 1997, by President of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma and President of Russia Boris Yeltsyn. The Verkhovna Rada ratified the treaty on January 14, 1998, and the State Duma on December 25, 1998. The document came into force on April 1, 1999. Ukraine terminated cooperation with the Russian Central Electoral Commission, as the law On the breach of Ukraine-Russia Friendship Treaty came into force. Air companies worldwide have been refusing from the use of Boeing 737 MAX 8 and Boeing 737 MAX 9. Many countries tend to be closing their airspace for these particular passenger planes, Reuters wrote. The reason is the recent tragedy, which occurred in Ethiopia on March 10, when 157 people lost their lives in the plane crash. 'The U.S. aviation regulator said it would not ground the planes and that a review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft', the news agency reported. The EU and Switzerland, however, decided that the use of this aircraft would be suspended and closed the airspace for these planes. The U.S. side points out that some reports have been assuming a relation between the latest crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia; on the other hand, it's still too early to make any conclusions. The manufacturer will be obliged to modernize these models, submitting changes to the jet's design and refreshing the software. Currently, there are 74 Boeing 737 MAX employed in the U.S. alone; another 387 belong to other countries. Earlier, we reported that an Ethiopian Airlines plane flying from Addis Ababa to Kenya crashed in Ethiopia. 149 passengers and 8 crew members were on board of the Boeing 737-800 MAX. The crash occurred on March 10, at 8:44 am local time. The airline representatives said that the flight ET 302 crashed near the city of Bishoftu, 62 kilometers south-east of Addis Ababa. The Ethiopian broadcasting company, citing a source in the airlines, said that no one survived as a result of the plane crash. There are no survivors aboard the plane that was carrying passengers from 33 countries, the message says. This is the second recent crash of the latest version of Boeings workhorse narrowbody jet that first entered service in 2017. The international festival hosted in Kyiv is the triumphant of the London book fair Book Arsenal wins at International Excellence Awards 2019 in London artarsenal.in.ua Book Arsenal, Ukraine-based international festival got the award of International Excellence Awards 2019 in London. It became the winner in the Literary Festival category. This is mentioned in the website of Art Arsenal, the organizing authority of the event in Kyiv. According to the jury of the contest, they were amazed by the multidisciplinary nature of the festival, where various kinds of arts and professional environments cross their ways, but the book still remains in the spotlight. 'This victory is, first of all, the recognition of the Arsenal's team, where every unit pays a lot of effort so that the Book Arsenal is actually this great festival, which combines wide range of arts and keeps the book in focus', said Olesya Ostrovska-Lyuta, the Director General of the Art Arsenal. Two more book festivals struggled for the award in this category, the International Literature Festival in Utrecht (Netherlands) and the International Literature Festival in Makassar (Indonesia). Over the past few years, the festivals from Brazil, India and Malaysia became winners of the International Excellence Awards. The contest, started by the London Book Fair and the British Association of Publishers aims to present the leading achievements and innovations in this area. This year, the Book Arsenal will be taking place in Kyiv on May 22-26. The body has published a number of documents, which refute data of the journalists investigation Open source The National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) has refuted the accusations of the involvement in the embezzlement at Ukroboronprom, as the press office of the body reported. The NABU representatives provided the number of the documents refuting the accusations presented in the third part of Bihus.info project point by point. Particularly, the Bureau refutes that OptimumSpetsDetal straw company, used for the embezzlement in the defense sphere, was struck from the list of the fictitious companies. The NABU is not authorized to provide information about fictitious nature. As well as to form or carry out the list/register of the companies, which are fictitious. Other bodies do it. But NABU as any other state body is obliged to respond to the requests. In 2016-2017, State Concern Ukroboronprom appealed to the NABU many times with a request to provide information on companies-counterparties. The responses of the NABU concerned only those companies, which were requested, the message said. The NABU showed the list of the documents to prove its statement. Deputy Head Gizo Uglava reported that OptimumSpetsDetal has the signs of the fictitious nature. Particularly, the letters of the NABU to Ukroboronprom were showed and any of them refutes the illegal activity of the company. The NABU emphasized that this information was provided to the journalists of Bihus.info; however, they did not consider it and did not mention it in the investigation but accused Uglava of strike out of OptimumSpetsDetal from the list of the fictitious companies. Concerning the mentioning of the letter, which is on the table of Givi. The name Givi in the texting of the people involved in the journalist investigation, cannot point to Gizo Uglava. In the mentioned period of time (January 21-31, 2017), Deputy Head of the NABU signed no letters on mentioned companies. Besides, he was not in a business trip, vacation during this period as it was mentioned in the journalist investigation, the NABU stated. NABU refutes the statement of the journalists that the it has issued exculpatory letters for the number of companies supposedly financed by Shevchenko agent. The NABU notes that any of its workers took bribery and the internal investigation was started before the final episode of the journalists investigation to prove it. February 25, journalist investigations Bihus.Info, Nashi Hroshi program alleged that Igor Gladkovsky, the son of close Poroshenko ally Oleh Gladkovsky, deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, organized a corruption scheme to smuggle spare military-equipment parts from Russia in 2015. State defense facilities purchased the smuggled spare parts from private companies linked to Hladkovsky and his friends at highly inflated prices. Ukroboronprom state concern, which supervises defense industry production facilities, knew the origin of the smuggled parts but agreed to purchase them. Igor Gladkovsky, along with Vitaliy Zhukov (former advisor of Ukroboronprom Director, the member of supervisory council of Meridian company till 2013, former assistant of Yuriy Tereshchenko, ex-Head of State Service of export control, Oleg Gladkovskys friend, - ed.) and Andriy Rogoza (CEO of Inter Steel Ltd., - ed.) were supplying smuggled Russian components and components from the Ukrainian military units through straw companies at prices 2-4 times higher than market ones. On March 4, President Petro Poroshenko dismissed Oleh Gladkovsky, deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council from his post. Ukroboronprom called the investigation of the journalists of Nashi Groshi (Our Money) show on the embezzlements by concerns officials manipulations. As it was reported earlier, the investigators of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutors Office detained the acting and former directors of the State Foreign Trade Enterprise SpetsTechnoExport on suspicion of embezzling $2,225 million, according to NABU. The searches took place at the offices and houses of the Ukroboronprom officials on March 7. Besides, the NABU has registered a new criminal proceeding after the third video on the embezzlement in the purchase in the defense sector was published by the journalists. The European Parliament has adopted the resolution with the recommendation to appoint EU Special Representative to Ukraine. The representative will deal with Crimea and Donbas issues, as Interfax-Ukraine reported citing the text of the resolution. It is expected that the special representatives will be also responsible for the monitoring of the situation with human rights in occupied territories, implementation of Minsk Agreements, de-escalation in the region of the Azov Sea and protection of rights of internally displaces persons. Earlier the Council of Europe stated that Ukraines authorities have to provide the right for internally displaced people from uncontrolled Donbas regions and occupied Donbas to participate in the elections. Besides, the EU Ambassadors agreed on the sanctions against eight Russian citizens who are responsible for detention of 24 Ukrainian sailors as a result of a conflict in Azov Sea. Moreover, 28 EU member states joined the so-called Azov package of sanctions against Russia. Hong Kong: Frank Chan promotes HK in Denmark Secretary for Transport & Housing Frank Chan continued his visit to Denmark with a Hong Kong Maritime & Port Board delegation today. Mr Chan and the delegation visited the Copenhagen Business School and its business in society platform, CBS Maritime, to learn about the school's strategy, teaching and research in nurturing maritime talent. This was followed by a seminar and luncheon jointly organised by the board, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, the Hong Kong Economic & Trade Office, London, and the Denmark-Hong Kong Trade Association. Mr Chan delivered a speech at the luncheon promoting Hong Kong's maritime industry and encouraging collaboration between the two places. The group then met representatives from Green Ship of the Future to understand its work in promoting the research and development of maritime technology through public-private partnership to achieve the goal of zero emissions in the maritime industry. This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. ABC Radio"This has been a really emotional day for me," Trisha Yearwood told reporters before celebrating two decades of Opry membership Tuesday night. "...Maybe more emotional than when I was inducted..." Trisha continued. "And I think it's because I'm 54 years old now... As much as I thought I got it then, I really get it now." Indeed, Trisha was in tears by the time she walked onto the stage, after a surprise introduction by Emmylou Harris during which the Country Music Hall of Famer called her a "shining star... kind, generous, warm and gracious to a fault." The Georgia native began her set with the Patsy Cline classic, "Sweet Dreams," explaining she was wearing a necklace given to her at her induction by the legend's family. The two-time CMA Female Vocalist of the Year then brought out Ricky Skaggs, the Opry member who originally asked her to join the cast. Trisha proved to be as starstruck as she'd earlier professed, forgetting the words to his song, "Two Highways," early on and asking him to start over. Next, the 1992 hit "Wrong Side of Memphis" was a fitting choice, since it name-checks the Opry in its lyrics. After recorded good wishes from Kelly Clarkson, Reba, Brenda Lee, and Garth Brooks, Trisha revealed her husband was indeed there in person. Garth joined her for their classic country duet, "Whiskey to Wine." Trisha closed with a full-circle moment, dedicating her debut #1 to her greatest Opry "cheerleader," the late Porter Wagoner. "Every time I would do the Opry," she recalled, "if I didn't plan to sing 'She's in the Love with the Boy,' he would come out and say, 'Sing the one that brung ya!'" "That was Porter's thing. So it will forever be for Porter every time I sing it." Copyright 2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. In particular, the UN considers the law on military chaplain, which bans the priests of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to serve in the army a violation Open source The UN has published a report on the human rights situation in Ukraine on eve of the elections named Public space and fundamental freedoms on the eve of the presidential, parliamentary and local elections in Ukraine. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights prepared it. The report was about the violation of rights and freedoms of the religious people, who belong to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. The informational department of the church published the document. The UN notes that the autocephaly has sharpened confrontations among the orthodox in Ukraine. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine is a victim mostly. Over the reporting period, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded ten cases when clergy and worshippers the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (of Moscow Patriarchate) were threatened or intimidated. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is concerned about the fact that the existing political environment create tensions which have negative effect on the freedom of religion and beliefs, with possible adverse effects on the other human rights, including the right for freedom of thought and expression, on the eve of elections, the document says. It was noted that in November 2018, after the Ukrainian Orthodox Church refused to join the newly created Orthodox Church of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) opened a number of criminal cases under the accusation of incitement to religious hatred. At least in one case, the accusation was complemented by accusations of state treason. However, no charges were served. In this regard, SBU searched the premises of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and houses of the religious dignitaries. SBU has questioned the religious dignitaries in different regions of Ukraine. Those who were questioned stated that such actions have resulted in pressure. Besides, they said that despite the absence of direct threats or coercion, they regard these actions as attempts to influence their position concerning the autocephaly, the report says. The law enforcers recalled a forceful renaming of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church emphasizing the fact that this church was implicit in the discriminatory law. The UN considers the law on military chaplain, which bans the priests of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to serve in the army a violation. The Parliament has also adopted the restrictions on access of the priests of such organizations to the premises of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the virtue of the national security. This contradicts the article No 18(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) as national security is not an acceptable reason for limiting freedom of religion or beliefs, the document says. To improve the security of the fundamental freedoms, including the upcoming elections, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights recommends the government of Ukraine to fulfil the international commitments within human rights sector, which means not only provide a right to practice their religion or beliefs, but also take effective measures to provide absence of discrimination. ChrisBoswell/iStock(NEW YORK) -- There are 737 prisoners in California whose executions are now paused after the governor issued a moratorium on the state's death penalty policy, but that doesn't mean anything will change for good in the state or the country. Gov. Gavin Newsom's decision to issue an executive order to halt all executions in the state fits within his purview as the state's leader, but it doesn't change the law. Newsom, a Democrat who was sworn into office earlier this year, acknowledged that while the order is just one step in the right direction, he is optimistic about the law changing to permanently ban the death penalty in the state some day. "I am hopeful that, that will one day occur," Newsom said Wednesday. The moratorium comes after Californians voted against a repeal of the death penalty in 2016, which, at the time, Newsom told a local newspaper's editorial board that if he were elected governor that he would "be accountable to the will of the voters," according to The Sacramento Bee. Critics, including The Association of Deputy District Attorneys for Los Angeles County (LA ADDA), found that discrepancy to be a sticking point with his new proposal. Michele Hanisee, president of the LA ADDA, issued a statement Tuesday after Newsom's plan was announced, saying that he "is usurping the express will of California voters and substituting his personal preferences via this hasty and ill-considered moratorium on the death penalty." But, in the news conference immediately after signing the executive order Wednesday morning, Newsom said that the voters chose to put him in office knowing that he has long been opposed to the death penalty. "The people of the state of California have entrusted me by their will and by constitutional right to do exactly what I'm doing," Newsom said Wednesday. Since the law does not change as a result of Newsom's order, California remains as one of the 30 states that has the death penalty. That said, California now joins three other states Oregon, Colorado and Pennsylvania where governors have issued moratoriums on executions. There are currently 20 states and the District of Columbia that do not have the death penalty in their penal codes. Evan Mandery, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that the governor's change shouldn't be seen as a bellwether for the country at large. "California is a really odd outlier on the death penalty. California has historically been a massive producer of death sentences, but very rarely executes anyone," said Mandery, who has written several books on the death penalty. "The death penalty will end in the United States. It's just a matter of when." California has executed 13 people since the death penalty was reenacted in 1976, though they have more than double the amount of prisoners on death row than any other state. "Executions have dropped dramatically over the past decade, the trend in state legislatures has been to reject capital punishment and public opinion has slowly, but surely been turning against the death penalty," said Mandery. According to the non-profit Death Penalty Information Center, the state's 13 executions ranks as the 17th deadliest state. Texas is the highest on the list, with 560 executions since the law was re-instated. That's more than four times the amount of the second-deadliest state, Virginia, where there were 113 executions, or the third-deadliest, which is Oklahoma with 112 executions. Mandery added that rather than discussing the issue of the death penalty in America, he said that the numbers essentially suggest that "it's just the death penalty in the south." "The question is how it ends, and Texas will need to be dragged kicking and screaming into modern times and it may take the Supreme Court to do that. And if the Supreme Court doesn't do it, it may take 50 years for it to end," he said. As for what the California moratorium means, Mandery didn't put much weight behind the move. "I don't think it's a harbinger of anything that matters because California is such an outlier and the places that need to change are all in the deep south," Mandery said. "The governor of Texas isn't issuing a moratorium anytime soon," he said. Copyright 2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Joe Raedle/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that the FAA was ordering the immediate grounding of all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft in the U.S., a decision that comes after days of mounting pressure from other countries that left the U.S. as one of the last to make the call after a deadly crash in Ethiopia. The safety of the American people, of all people, is our paramount concern, Trump said, adding that the grounding would take effect as soon as the planes landed and would continue until further notice. "Pilots have been notified. Airlines have been all notified. Airlines are agreeing with this," he said. The crash in Ethiopia on Sunday, which killed all 157 people on board, was the second deadly crash of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane in just five months. The president said the decision to ground the planes was made based on new evidence that had come to light. "The FAA is prepared to make an announcement very shortly regarding the new information and physical evidence weve received from the site and from other locations and through a couple of other complaints," he said. "Weve had a very, very detailed group of people working on the 737 8 and the 737 9 new airplanes. Were going to be issuing an emergency order of prohibition to ground all flights of the 737 Max 8 and the 737 Max 9 and planes associated with that line." Shortly afterward, the FAA issued a statement reversing its earlier resistance to grounding the planes, saying "the agency made this decision as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analyzed today. "This evidence, together with newly-refined satellite data available to the FAA this morning, led to this decision," the FAA said. "The grounding will remain in effect pending further investigation, including examination of information from the aircraft's flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder." In an important caveat, Trump said the decision to ground the planes "didn't have to be made" but was made for a number of reasons, he said, including "psychologically and a lot of other ways." The president said he'd spoken with the Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, as well as the CEO of Boeing and the acting administrator of the FAA. All agreed on taking the action, the president said. And for the first time, Trump directly expressed sympathy for the victims of the crash, calling it a "terrible tragedy." The president also called Boeing an "incredible company." Just Tuesday, Boeing's CEO had lobbied Trump against any grounding, but the company reversed its stance after Trump's announcement, issuing a statement in support of the move. We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution. Safety is a core value at Boeing for as long as we have been building airplanes; and it always will be," the Boeing statement said. At the same time, the statement said, "Boeing continues to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX." Soon after the order, the FAA also said the "black boxes" from the crash -- the flight data and cockpit voice recorders -- would be scheduled for transport to France Wednesday evening for analysis. The delay in reading out the black boxes, which had yet to be analyzed three days after the crash, played into the decision to ground the Boeing 737 MAX 8 and NAX 9 aircraft, acting FAA Administrator Dan Elwell told ABC News' Chief Transportation Correspondent David Kerley. As soon as they get them on the table it will help, Elwell said, adding that our decision process was lengthened more than I would have hoped. Ethiopia had agreed to send the recordings from Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 abroad for analysis earlier Wednesday, though a destination had not been announced. Officials agreed the country didn't have the technology required to analyze the black boxes, which hold key information on how and why the plane crashed. The boxes are damaged, making data retrieval more difficult. A key question is whether the plane's advanced flight management system -- the autopilot -- might have played a role in the most recent crash as it did in the fatal crash of an Indonesian Airlines 737 MAX 8 last October. In that crash, it appears the pilots failed to disengage the autopilot when the plane's nose began pitching up and down, perhaps because they were unaware of how to do so. In the aftermath of that crash, at least two U.S. pilots who have flown the Boeing 737 MAX 8 submitted anonymous reports to NASA, which has an aviation safety reporting system, saying their aircraft suddenly pointed its nose downward after they engaged in autopilot. The accounts were first reported by the Dallas Morning News and obtained by ABC News from NASA. The pilots disengaged the autopilot, manually corrected the unexpected motion and continued to climb as planned. The flight continued uneventfully after that. Its unclear from the reports if the pilots were both on the same flight or on two separate flights. In a third report, a pilot reported feeling like the flight manual and training for the Boeing 737 MAX wasn't sufficient. Any and all details are in high demand by authorities and families of the victims arriving at the crash scene in recent days. Airline customers also increased pressure with overwhelming concerns about flying on the Boeing 737 MAX 8 until the safety of the plane can be better assured. By Wednesday afternoon, the MAX 8 and MAX 9 were grounded by every country or major airline in the world, including the three airlines operating the aircraft in the U.S.: American Airlines, Southwest Airlines and United, which operates a MAX 9, the longer sibling of the MAX 8. In addition to Canada's announcement to ground the jets Wednesday, the European Union and the U.K. stopped or banned all Boeing 737 MAX 8 operations on Tuesday, following the decisions of Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Oman and Ireland to ban the plane from flying in and out of those countries. As countries and airlines continued to ground the popular plane, flights consistently dropped from the approximately 1,200 Boeing 737 MAX flights per day tracked in the week leading up to the crash on Sunday. Trump's announcement Wednesday was a marked shift from previous statements from both Boeing and the FAA, which had backed the plane's safety until the FAA emergency order. Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg on Tuesday told the president that the company continued to believe the MAX aircraft was safe, while the Elwell of the FAA maintained that it was extensively reviewing data and would take action if any issues were identified, but had not seen any "systemic performance issues" that would provide basis "to order grounding the aircraft." Copyright 2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. From the outside, the Chrysler Building, with its iconic chrome-nickel spire, may be the citys most glamorous piece of architecture. Now, a new owner is toying with a plan to lure visitors to the building... by adding a hotel. New York developer Aby Rosen, who heads RFR Holding LLC (which just purchased the building at a big discount), has told Bloomberg he would consider converting the 77-story office skyscraper into a hotel. Real estate insiders believe the final product would likely be a mix of office and hotel space. After being put on the market in January, RFR Holding and Austrian real estate firm Signa Holding GmbH last week reportedly struck a deal to buy the Chrysler Building for $151 million, a more than 80 percent discount from the last purchase price. In 2008, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council forked over $800 million for a 90 percent stake in the tower. But a slew of evacuating tenants as well as a pricey land lease held by Cooper Union currently $32.5 million a year but set to jump to $41 million in 2028 have made this NYC icon a risky bet for any investor. The losing bidder, Scott Rechlers RXR Realty, was said to have offered $1 million less for the building. It comes as no surprise that the Chrysler Building is facing an existential crisis of sorts. The office tower is reportedly losing about $20 million a year and has around 400,000 square feet of space thats either available now or in the next year. At the same time, the rezoning of East Midtown has spurred several demolitions to make way for new developments. Near Grand Central, the under-construction supertall One Vanderbilt is expected to draw top-tier office tenants. A makeover of the Chryslers interiors into a hotel could cost between $150 million and $250 million, according to a Bloomberg source. If anyone can do it, its Aby Rosen, said James Emden, a veteran commercial property broker at Compass. Hes done it before, and hes qualified. Emden said its possible that Rosen could try to renegotiate the terms of the land lease, which runs through 2147. Within the industry, Rosen is known as "the turnaround artist" of real estate. In 2006, he was part of team that spearheaded a $200 million gut renovation of the Gramercy Park Hotel. He also bought into the Lever House at 390 Park Avenue, another prized piece of architecture, but has reportedly run into trouble refinancing his debt. RFR also owns the Seagram Building, the former home of the famed Four Seasons and a landmark, both the outside and inside, a fact that made it expensive and time-consuming to restore and maintain. Along with the exterior, the lobby of the Chrysler Building is also landmarked, which might make it difficult for Rosen to create a dedicated entrance for hotel guests. Built in 1930, the 1,046-foot Chrysler tower was initially panned by critics who viewed its ambition to be the tallest building in the world at the time as gimmicky. But the art deco design, as well as its height-boosting (and apparently accessible-by-ladders) spire, is now considered a masterpiece of modern skyscraper construction. In January, architecture critic Paul Goldberger said in a tweet that the Chrysler Building is "one of the most glorious pieces of architecture ever createdand still the most beloved skyscraper in New York." Less than an hour after he was sentenced in a separate case in DC, the Manhattan DA has indicted former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort on charges of mortgage fraud and more than a dozen other state felonies. This is particularly notable because presidential pardon power does not extend to convictions at the state level. What do you call an EGOT for crimes https://t.co/dEhVOT6iPx Josh Barro (@jbarro) March 13, 2019 Manafort was hit with 16 charges in the indictment (you can read it here) for an alleged year-long scheme in which he is accused of falsifying business records to illegally obtain millions of dollars in loans. "No one is beyond the law in New York," said District Attorney Cy Vance in a statement. "Following an investigation commenced by our Office in March 2017, a Manhattan grand jury has charged Mr. Manafort with state criminal violations which strike at the heart of New Yorks sovereign interests, including the integrity of our residential mortgage market. I thank our prosecutors for their meticulous investigation, which has yielded serious criminal charges for which the defendant has not been held accountable." Manafort, 69, could face up to 25 years in New York state prison if convicted of the most serious charges in the new indictment. Earlier today, Manafort was sentenced in DC on "two conspiracy counts that encompassed a host of crimes, including money-laundering, obstruction of justice and failing to disclose lobbying work that earned him tens of millions of dollars over more than a decade." "It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the amount of money involved, Judge Amy Berman Jackson said of Manafort's crimes. "There is no question that this defendant knew better and he knew what he was doing." She ultimately sentenced him to 43 months in prison; that is on top of the 47 months he was sentenced to last week for multiple felony crimes in a separate case. Altogether, that brings his prison sentence to a total of 7 1/2 years, to be served in Virginia and DC, in cases brought by Robert Mueller's office. This of course excludes any prison time that could result from this NY case. As it happens, the prosecutor who led the investigation of Don Jr and Ivanka, Peirce Moser, appears to be the lead on this new Manafort case https://t.co/D3KRriynI2 Ilya Marritz (@ilyamarritz) March 13, 2019 The Atlantic previously noted that there are still tons of unanswered questions about Manafort's time at the helm of Trump's campaign left. In the summer of 2013, Gothamist published the first of many advice columns from native New Yorker Jake Dobkin, kicking things off with the timeless question, "Is It Normal For Roaches To Crawl Through My Hair At Night?" Nearly six years later, the popular series has been turned into a book, Ask a Native New Yorker, with ALL NEW essays from Jake. This week we are running excerpts the book, which is on sale now! Today's question comes from Chapter 4: "How to Get Around Like a Native New Yorker," and concerns the classic dilemma of when you should give up your subway seat. Dear Jake, The other day I was coming home from a long, exhausting day at work (I'm a teacher) and I managed to grab a seat on the train, which is pretty rare because my job is on the West Side and all the Midtown office workers usually crowd on before my stop. As the train got to Jay Street, still seven stops from my apartment, a big crowd pushed on. A mother and her kid ended up right in front of me, and the mother looked at me and said, "Could he have your seat?" The kid was at least ten years old. Now, I work with kids all day and love them, but inwardly I'm screaming, "Are you kidding me? He's not a toddler! I need this seat a lot more than he does!" Instead, I just meekly smiled and got up and fumed about it all the way back home. Was I obligated to give up my seat? Sincerely, Tired of Standing Dear TOS, I'm constantly amazed by the letters I get about the New York City subway; it's like they crystallize the entire city in microcosm, and any conflict you could face aboveground is duplicated beneath in miniature: brutal competition for precious real estate, merciless clashes between young and old, men and women, rich and poor. To understand the subwayits rules and unspoken etiquetteis to understand New York. No person, however long they have lived here, can be considered a real New Yorker if they only get around by car. Take your situation: a classic "who deserves this seat more" question. I've received dozens of these inquiries over my years as a columnist. Some are easy: Obviously, you get up for a very old person, or a visibly pregnant woman, or someone who is disabled. But what about other groups: children, the sturdy-looking middle aged, or a woman who might be pregnant, but also might just be wearing a puffy coat? How do you decide whether to get up or not? First, you need to ask yourself how much you really need the seat. Are you so exhausted that getting up is physically painful? Or are you just the regular kind of tired that all New Yorkers feel after a long day of work? Safety first, obviously. We don't want you getting up to give your seat to a kid and then fainting right on top of him. However, it sounds like you were physically able to standannoyed, but uprightthrough the rest of your ride. Keep in mind that it is very difficult to ask someone to give up their seat. Psychologists have actually studied this and found that asking strangers for a favor is incredibly unpleasant. This is particularly true on a New York subway, where we've been taught to avoid eye contact with other riders and mind our own business. When that mom asked you for your seat, she was doing something difficult, and maybe for a good reason. Some disabilities aren't visibleit's possible that the kid really did need the seat and you were doing a really nice and helpful thing by giving it up. In fact, I want you to really meditate on that. There are so few times each year when we really get a chance to help a stranger, and thereby make ourselves feel good and earn karmic credits from the city. I've found the subway can be a real opportunity for these kinds of interactionspointing tourists toward the right train, holding the door for someone sprinting desperately to get on board, or contorting yourself a little so another rider can grab the pole in a crowded car. Helping in these moments makes me feel better about myself, and I look forward to them. For that reason, even when I'm feeling worn out, I try to keep my eyes open for people who need a seat and be the first one up when I spot them. Photograph by Scott Lynch Now, I'm a man in reasonably good health, and I'm pretty much the least deserving of a seat if there's anyone else on the train who needs to sit down. Even so, I'll take a load off and zone out with my music if there's a seat availableI'm not trying to be a hero at all times. I figure there are enough people who share my general philosophy on subway seat ethics that periodically looking up to confirm I'm still seat-worthy is sufficient. You don't have to be obsessive about it, and most of the time, I get through a whole ride without having to stand. On many occasions, I've even offered my seat to someonean older woman who looked tired, a teenager carrying a big instrument case, or even a pregnant woman only to be politely declined. Maybe they were only going one more stop or sitting was uncomfortable for them; you never know. Of course, riding the subway presents many more conflicts than simply deciding when to give up your seat. I'd like to run through some of the situations people have asked me about; the following is essentially a mini guide to avoiding conflict, producing positivity, and generally being a mensch when taking the train. Here are the basics: 1. When you have the good fortune to score a seat, make sure you take up only one unless this is physically impossible for you overweight riders have the same right to sit as anyone else, and subway designers seem to have designed the seats for fairly narrow asses. If yours doesn't quite fit, that's not your fault, and nobody has a right to complain about it. For everybody else, don't "manspread" beyond a reasonable allotment of space. What's reasonable? If your legs are touching theirs, it means you need to tighten up that spread. Obviously, any baggage must be placed between your legs, on your lap, or under the seattaking up a seat for your gym bag is a surefire way to get scolded by justly annoyed commuters. 2. When you can't find a seat and must grab the pole, do not "pole hog" by leaning against it with your body. I'm often sent pictures of people doing this in the most loathsome way, like wrapping themselves around it with both arms and legs, or leaning back against the pole so aggressively that the pole actually creeps into their butt crack. (I actually shuddered when I wrote that last line, but it's real!) The correct way to hold a pole is at chest height, at a distance of twelve inches, to give others room to grab it. 3. Whether standing or sitting, be mindful of those around you, and don't do stuff you would not want done around you. That includes playing games or listening to music loud enough for others to hear, trimming your nails (a surprisingly frequent occurrence!), conversing loudly to friends, or littering. Eating is another touchy subject. Yes, sometimes life in New York is so fast-paced that the only goddamn time you have to eat your lousy bagel is during your commute, and no one is going to fault you for it. But the rule is "If you can't eat it with one hand, don't eat it at all." I have borne witness to people eating tikka masala on the F train, and it's grotesquenot just due to the risk of spillage, but also the pungent fumes that fill the entire car. Don't be that guy. Ask A Native New Yorker, now available in book form. 4. Do not block the doors. This is as close to a religious commandment as we have in New York, and it's one that's not always easy to follow. Sure, on an empty train you can always find a spot away from the door, but at rush hour you may be the last person to crowd on, and then what do you do? Simple: You must "step off to let the people out," as the conductors say. This means actually stepping onto the platform and waiting slightly to the side to let people move off the train. You are entitled to stand right next to the door, even if it means nudging riders who are about to get on, to keep your spot. What if the train is kind of crowded, you are going only one more stop, and you want to stay by the door to avoid making it difficult to get off? Tough callif you can flatten yourself in the tiny space between the seats and doors, and thereby avoid blocking people squeezing on (and are willing to accept their unhappy glares), go for it. (This is easier on the new subway cars with more space next to the doors.) But if not, you must move farther inside the car, and simply resign yourself to fighting your way out a few minutes later. Life's tough. 5. Do not use the subway as a moving van. I'm not talking about backpacks and bags; you must take them off, but if they can fit comfortably between your legs or on your lap, you aren't taking up any extra space. I'm not even talking about the tourists coming from JFK New York is a welcoming place that depends on its tourist industry and we shouldn't begrudge them one rolling suitcase as they head to their hotel. No, here I'm speaking of people transporting furniture, motorbikes, hundreds of balloons, their Aunt Hazel's coffin, etc. Maybe this kind of stuff is allowable after midnight, when there's plenty of room on the train, but doing it during the day will get you in troubleif the cops don't hassle you, one of your annoyed fellow passengers will, and the picture they take on their phone will make you an unwilling viral star on the New York City blogs the next day. 6. Finally, once you are off the train, show the same thoughtfulness when standing on the platform, walking up stairs, and riding the escalator that you did while you were inside the train itself. Don't crowd the edge of the platformit's dangerous and makes it hard for people to get off incoming trains. Always walk to the right on the stairs and stand to the right on the escalators to allow faster-moving people to hasten along to your left. And always, if you are physically able, offer to help parents struggling to carry a stroller. That's a real mitzvah. The basic idea, through all of these points, is that we've got to crowd more than five million people every weekday on the subway, and if we're going to do that without major bloodshed, we've all got to make an effort to be the most kind, considerate subway riders we can be. While we're doing this, we can think about how blessed we are to have this amazing subway systemone that history has bequeathed to us, which, despite its flaws, is still a fast and efficient way to get around the city and which is one of the great places to see the incredible diversity of New Yorkers up close. Treasure it! Jake N.B.: Many of the things people hate about the subwaythe overcrowding at rush hour, the dirty stations, the maddening delaysare due to a state government that underfunds the system by directing an unfair amount of resources to road and infrastructure building upstate. All New Yorkers should vote for politicians, especially on the state level, who make mass transit funding a priority. I was born in 1956 in Madison, Tennessee, while my parents were attending Madison College. I grew up along the Front Range in Colorado, attending schools in Longmont, Brighton, Boulder and Loveland, Colorado. Two years after graduating from Campion Academy, I married my sweetheart, Regina. We lived in Loveland, Colorado for six years before moving to Mena in western Arkansas. I love the people of Mena and the friendly easy going way of life here. I have owned and operated my own business since moving to Mena. I enjoy the natural beauty of western Arkansas and being out of doors. "Since 2006, the U.S. Department of Defense 's Southern Command has been supporting communities in Peru with US$44 million dollars in aid for emergency prevention and management, health , and education ," Ravin expressed. TasteAtlas known as the world atlas of food and drinks as well as the encyclopedia of flavors notes the originality and simplicity of Peru's flagship dish in a brief description available on its site "Ceviche is the national dish of Peru consisting of slices of raw fish or shellfish that is spiced with salt, onions, and chili peppers, then marinated in lime juice," reads the dish description. "Due to the acidity of lime juice, the texture of the fish changes, as does its color from pink to white. The acidic marinade, also known as Leche de Tigre (lit. Tiger's Milk) 'cooks' the meat without any heat involved in the process," it adds. The online publication tells the story of Peru's national dish and its culinary enrichment with ingredients brought from Europe. Ceviche is a centuries-old delicacy, which is believed to have originated in the Tallan civilization developed in northern Piura region more than 2,000 years ago. The dish was also made by the Mochicas , who marinated fresh fish in the juices of a native citrus fruit called Tumbo. The preparation was different during the Inca Empire, as fish was marinated in chicha the sacred drink of the Incas which derived from corn fermentation. Other variations emerged with the Hispanic presence, but it was in the mid-twentieth century that a new way to make Ceviche became known in Lima a recipe that still shines in the Peruvian capital and all over the world. The dish is traditionally served at cevicherias , specialized Ceviche restaurants that can be found all over the country, and it is so popular that it even has its day, known as National Ceviche Day. The website also offers information on the types of Ceviche, a list of 16 eateries to eat the best Ceviche in the globe, and comments from foodies worldwide. and Food Products, the Most Popular Peruvian Drinks, and Food Festivals in Peru. Additional food and drink-related lists can be found at the site: The Most Popular Peruvian Dishes, the Most Popular Peruvian IngredientsFood Products, the Most Popular Peruvian Drinks, and Food Festivals in Peru. For instance, the most popular Peruvian dishes include Tiradito, Leche de Tigre, Lomo Saltado, Anticucho, Pollo a la Brasa, Salchipapa, Tacu Tacu, Cau Cau, Butifarra, Rocoto Relleno, Aji de Gallina, Juane, Arroz Chaufa, Pachamanca, Papa Rellena, Picarones, among others. (END) LZD/MAO/RMB/MVB There is no doubt 'Ceviche' is Peruvian cuisine's most representative dish around the world, which explains why TasteAtlas has ranked it 17th among the top 100 most popular dishes worldwide Published: 3/13/2019 10:50 | Seoul (South Korea), Mar. 13. The honor was granted as part of the 2019 Korea Consumer Awards ceremony held on March 11 at the Memorial Hall, National Assembly Seoul. The Peruvian diplomat has been showing special interest and affection in building friendship and cooperation with the NDNnews & Korea Culture Ambassador Friendship Association by taking part in several trip programs including the Incheon Global Campus trip organized by them for mutual win-win partnerships and cooperation. "In recognition of Your Excellency's such excellent activities and dedication as Peru top envoy in terms of being in the van of strengthening bilateral exchange cooperation as well as boosting Latin American countries image beyond just Peru's image, The NDNnews & SeoulCity magazine bestow 2019 Friendship Amb. Award upon Your Excellency, " reads a letter from Korea Culture Ambassador Friendship Association Co-Chairman Kim Jon-Woon and NDNnews SeoulCity President & Publisher Shin Hyun-Doo. Other five honorable ambassadors from the Seoul diplomatic corps received the coveted award. (END) NDP/RMB/MVB Peruvian Ambassador to the Republic of Korea Daul Matute-Mejia received the 2019 Friendship Amb. Award bestowed by the NDNnews & SeoulCity magazine and the Korea Culture Ambassador Friendship Association in recognition of his excellent diplomatic activities between Korea and Peru.Published: 3/13/2019 Those of you who read what I write know what I have written about the political conundrum in Malaysia these last many months. You know I have written not... YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. The ministry of emergency situations informs that on March 13, as of 08:00, roads are mainly passable in Armenia, reports Armenpress. The ministry says that Sotk-Karvachar highway is partly covered with clear ice. Drivers are urged to use snow tires. The Georgian authorities inform that the Stepantsminda-Lars highway is open for all types of vehicles. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. A serviceman of the Armenian Armed Forces has died while on-duty at the north-eastern border of the country, the military reported. Private Hamlet Avagyan, 19, died on March 12, Ministry of Defense spokesperson Artsrun Hovhannisyan said on Facebook. The death did not occur from adversary fire, other details will be provided by relevant bodies, he said. Private Avagyan was a medic. UPDATES: 10:22 - Investigative Committee spokesperson Naira Harutyunyan told ARMENPRESS the Private died after accidentally falling down a gorge. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia has issued a travel warning for its citizens who want to visit Azerbaijan. It called on its citizens to assess all possible risks in detail before traveling to Azerbaijan. In a statement, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs mentioned that Azerbaijans border service continues banning persons having direct or indirect signs of affiliation with the Armenian ethnicity regardless of citizenship, substantiating this by the unresolved NK conflict. Russias numerous calls on the inadmissibility of ethnic discrimination towards citizens of the Russian Federation visiting Azerbaijan are being rejected, the foreign ministry said. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. The Parliament of Armenia attaches great importance to the cooperation with the NATO and is inclined to improve the bilateral relations in defense and security fields, the Armenian parliamentary representatives said during a seminar-discussion titled Parliamentary control in the Armed Forces of Armenia being held on the sidelines of the NATO week, reports Armenpress. The snap parliamentary elections of Armenia held in December 2018 were one of the best examples of demonstration of democracy. The new Parliament highly values the mutually beneficial and complementary cooperation and the level of political dialogue with NATO and other partner states. I hope these meetings will be fundamental and effective and will contribute to further expanding and developing the bilateral ties. This can serve as a very favorable cooperation platform for fixing the wishes, planning and taking actions. I specifically attach importance to the active engagement of the civil society in this event, Vardan Vardanyan chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on defense and security affairs, head of Armenias delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, said. He expressed confidence that these discussions will contribute to establishing multilateral cooperative relations, and such events and joint programs with the NATO PA can promote democracy and institutional reforms. Vice Speaker of Parliament of Armenia Alen Simonyan said Armenia for many years has had clear partnering relations with the NATO member states. Firm and friendly ties have been established in the previous years. The new Parliament highly values the cooperation and the level of political dialogue with the NATO. We attach importance to the mutually beneficial and complementary policy with the member states of NATO and CSTO, the Vice Speaker said. He specifically touched upon the challenges in the defense and security fields. Simonyan noted that this field always needs reforms. We plan to further improve the bilateral relations in defense and security fields, he said. German Ambassador to Armenia Matthias Kiesler stated that a similar discussion on the same topic was held last year during the NATO week. But he added that there is a need to discuss this important topic for various reasons. The first reason is that a new parliament has been formed, many are in the parliament for the first time and bring new energy and new ideas, he said. The regular NATO week has launched in Armenia on March 11 and is scheduled to end on March 15. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. Armenias Minister of Healthcare Arsen Torosyan will participate in the upcoming 62nd United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs session in Vienna, Austria. The session is held every 5 years on a ministerial level. The meeting is attended by heads of state, foreign ministers, healthcare ministers and other government officials. Torosyan will present Armenias policy in combating narcotics, the process of international cooperation and latest results, the healthcare ministry said in a news release. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic, Miroslav Lajcak, expresses readiness to do everything to help finding a solution for settling the Nagorno Karabakh conlfict, reports Armenpress. I am ready to do everything to be useful and be able to find a solution to the conflict. I fully trust the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs, he said during a press conference in Yerevan, asked whether he plans to visit Artsakh and get acquainted with the life of its people. Miroslav Lajcak arrived in Armenia on a working visit. He is scheduled to meet with the top leadership of the country. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. The visit of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office to the region is a very important political signal in conditions when the OSCE presence in South Caucasus has reached to a minimum, Armenias foreign minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan said during a joint press conference with OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic, Miroslav Lajcak, in Yerevan, reports Armenpress. This is the first visit of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office to the region over the past three years. This is an important political signal under the conditions when the OSCE federal missions have been closed in the region and its presence in South Caucasus has reached to a minimum as a result of the abuse of the organizations consensus principle. Its worth noting that this is first visit of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office to Armenia after the recent velvet, democratic revolution and December 2018 parliamentary elections in our country which deserved the highest assessment of the international community, including the OSCE and OSCE/ODIHR, the Armenian FM said. The foreign minister said Armenia remains committed to the mutually beneficial cooperation with the international partners. We are committed to continue the mutually beneficial cooperation with the international partners aimed at promoting democratic reforms and strengthening our achievements in Armenia. Armenia is ready to cooperate with the OSCE Slovak chairmanship aimed at promoting dialogue over urgent issues of the organizations agenda at all platforms, Mnatsakanyan said. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. Armenias minister of economic development and investments Tigran Khachatryan received deputy minister of economy of Bulgaria Alexander Manolev, the Armenian ministry told Armenpress. The minister thanked Alexander Manolev for visiting Armenia with an official and business delegation. The officials noted that both the session of the Armenian-Bulgarian inter-governmental commission and the business forum held on the sidelines of it can have a positive effect on the Armenia-Bulgaria commercial ties. The Bulgarian official said it is necessary to maximally use the results of the business forum and be consistent in the implementation of agreements reached. The Armenian minister said there are several prospective fields of the economy over which both countries can develop their cooperation by thoroughly examining them. The officials reached an agreement to establish cooperation between the Armenian and Bulgarian SMEs development agencies. They also highlighted the tourism sector for the development of cooperation. Minister Khachatryan said the Armenian government is ready to assist all those ideas and business programs which will be initiated by the private sector of the two countries. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. The 8th Armenian-Bulgarian intergovernmental commission meeting on commercial and scientific-technical cooperation took place today in Yerevan. Minister of Transportation, Communication and Information Technologies Hakob Arshakyan, the president of the commission from the Armenian side, noted that recently the trade-economic cooperation development is proceeding at an unstable rhythm, despite the high level of relations between Armenia and Bulgaria. Bilateral trade figures and rather low. Bulgaria, being a part of the European Union, is a reliable and predictable partner for Armenia, with whom the economic ties have had great significance for our country, Arshakyan said. In 2018, turnover between Armenia and Bulgaria amounted 259,000,000 dollars, a 19,6% drop against 2017. Armenian exports to Bulgaria totaled 215,3 million dollars in 2018, which is a 23,8% decrease against previous years, while imports from Bulgaria to Armenia according to point of origin totaled 43,8 million dollars and grew 9,5%. The positive trading balance totaled 171,5 million dollars. Arshakyan noted that the current level of bilateral trade and investment relations doesnt fully reflect the entire economic potential. We must use all those platforms that can contribute to strengthening of trade-economic relations, he said. The goal of this commissions meeting is to contribute to the establishment and expansion of long term and economically mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries governments for the benefit of the welfare of our peoples, Arshakyan continued. Issues related to education and science, culture, environmental protection, military-technical cooperation, urban development and emergency situations were also discussed. Addressing his Bulgarian counterpart Rosen Zhelyazkov, Arshakyan stressed that the Armenian government is greatly focusing on the development of infrastructures. He noted the ongoing North-South Road Corridor project in Armenia. The goal of the project is to link the countrys south to the north by an internationally high standard highway. As a result of realizing the project a direct link will be created between Bulgaria and Armenia, beginning from the ports of the Black Sea, passing through Georgia, Armenia and Iran, and reaching up to the Persian Gulf. A broad opportunity is given to deepen cooperation between our countries in cargo shipments and passenger transportation, Arshakyan said. The Armenian government also expressed readiness to cooperate with Bulgaria in harmonizing and integrating digital economies. Rosen Zhelyazkov, Bulgarias Minister of Transportation, Information Technologies and Communication, chair of commission from the Bulgarian side, said they intend to deepen investment cooperation and trade turnover. The guarantee for this all is a good investment climate that exists in Armenia, as well as the existing favorable investment environment in Bulgaria, he said. Armenia is an important corridor for Bulgaria for exporting products to Middle Eastern countries. We hope to cooperate based on bilateral interests and trust, the Bulgarian minister said. The next session of the commission will take place in early 2021. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. During their meeting in Yerevan today President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian and Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili discussed issues relating to the settlement of regional conflicts, reports Armenpress. We shared the same opinion that issues and conflicts are not identical, so the basis of settling them are not identical as well. In my personal view, the solutions should be sought exclusively through peaceful means based on the international law and norms, in Artsakhs case on the respect of the right to self-determination, Armen Sarkissian told reporters following the meeting with his Georgian counterpart. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. President of Georgia Salome Zourabichvili invited President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian to visit Georgia, reports Armenpress. During our meeting we talked about how was my visit to the EU, and what are Georgias plans over the EU. These issues will be discussed during the Batumi Conference, and I invited the President to participate in it. Georgias vision on the cooperation with the EU will be introduced during this Conference, Salome Zourabichvili said during a joint press conference with her Armenian counterpart in Yerevan. In his turn the Armenian President said he accepted his counterparts invitation with pleasure. Salome Zourabichvili arrived in Armenia on March 13 on a two-day official visit at the invitation of President Armen Sarkissian. The Georgian Presidents delegation includes justice minister Thea Tsulukiani, Vice Speaker of Parliament George Volski, MPs, as well as other officials. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. Armenian President Armen Sarkissian and Georgian President Salome Zourabichvilli have addressed the solution of the boundary delimitation of the two countries. I think it is time for us to complete our boundary delimitation. This problem cannot exist between the two countries. We decided to begin the process of the agreement that had been reached when I was foreign minister, Zourabichvilli said after meeting Sarkissian in Yerevan. She served as FM of Georgia from 2004 to 2005. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. Chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces Lt. General Artak Davtyan has left for Russia on March 13 to participate in the regular meeting of the CIS Armed Forces Chiefs of General Staff Committee in Moscow, the defense ministry said. Lt. General Davtyan is also scheduled to hold bilateral meetings within the framework of the visit. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. Armenia and Georgia have a historic opportunity to raise the relations to a new level, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said during the meeting with President of Georgia Salome Zourabichvili in Yerevan, reports Armenpress. I am happy to welcome you and your delegation in Armenia. I think currently we have a historic opportunity to raise the relations of our countries to a new level. I have made my first official visit to Georgia as Prime Minister. This highlights our governments and my personal attention and sense of importance towards the Armenian-Georgian relations. I have stated that we should rely on common strategic interests in our relations and I am happy that I received a similar reaction from the Georgian government. And now its the time to implement this mutual perception, Nikol Pashinyan said. In her turn the Georgian President expressed confidence that the Armenian-Georgian close relations will enter a new stage. Many things unite us, geography, history. In addition to these two, our common vision on the future unites us. I think we will be able to use our opportunities. We can do a lot together, have to do a lot together, the Georgian President said. The meeting of the Armenian PM and the Georgian President was followed by a luncheon. Salome Zourabichvili arrived in Armenia on March 13 on a two-day official visit at the invitation of President Armen Sarkissian. The Georgian Presidents delegation includes justice minister Thea Tsulukiani, Vice Speaker of Parliament George Volski, MPs, as well as other officials. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, 13 MARCH, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 13 March, USD exchange rate down by 0.74 drams to 487.35 drams. EUR exchange rate up by 0.34 drams to 550.56 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate up by 0.02 drams to 7.44 drams. GBP exchange rate down by 3.85 drams to 640.18 drams. The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals. Gold price up by 36.62 drams to 20323.04 drams. Silver price up by 1.98 drams to 242 drams. Platinum price up by 294.01 drams to 13067.67 drams. YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian met with OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic Miroslav Lajcak and his delegation on March 13. As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Armenian Presidents Office, President Sarkissian highlighted the role of the OSCE not only as the key institution involved in the settlement of Nagorno Karabakh conflict, but also as a platform that pushes forward comprehensive security through dialogue, confidence and cooperation. Noting that the South Caucasian region has an important place in OSCE agenda, the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office said that they are here to make clear how they can support Armenia to fulfill the commitments it has assumed. The President of Armenia and the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office exchanged views on the raising of the effectiveness of the activities of the OSCE, the challenges facing the organization, as well as the priorities of the Slovak presidency over the organization. The interlocutors also referred to Armenian-Slovak bilateral relations and noted that the two countries have a broad cooperation agenda in various spheres and highlighted the active efforts for the realization of the existing potential. Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. Speaker of the National Assembly of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan received the delegation led by OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic Miroslav Lajcak on March 13. As ARMENBPRESS was informed from the press service of the parliament of Armenia, greeting the guests, Ararat Mirzoyan expressed confidence that the OSCE, led by Miroslav Lajcak, will continue its efforts aimed at international security, strengthening rule of law and protection of human rights, expressing the readiness of the parliament of Armenia to support that agenda. The head of the legislative expressed gratitude to the OSCE/ODIHR and the PACE for carrying out observer missions during the parliamentary elections in Armenia in December 2018 and for their unbiased assessments, quoting Special Co-ordinator of the OSCE short-term observer mission, Slovak MP Peter Osusky, who assessed the elections as Armenian miracle. Referring to Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement, Ararat Mirzoyan emphasized that Armenia highlights the efforts of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-chairs, as the sole internationally authorized platform for the settlement of the conflict. The parliament Speaker particularly emphasized the necessity of the participation of the representatives of Artsakh in the negotiation process. Miroslav Lajcak noted that as the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, he assumes the commitment to make efforts aimed at the peaceful settlement of the conflict, adding that its also necessary to take steps for the strengthening of the atmosphere of mutual trust and activate contacts between different layers of the society. Ararat Mirzoyan noted that the settlement of the conflict is a double-sided process and the will of the leaderships and the peoples of the countries are important for the establishment of peace. According to him, Armenia expects steps from Azerbaijan that will be equivalent to Armenias efforts for peace. Referring to the Armenian-Slovak bilateral relations the sides underlined the great potential for deepening them. Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikokl Pashinyan received OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic Miroslav Lajcak on March 13. Foreign Minister of Armenia Zohrab Mnatsakanyan and the Personal Representative of the Chairperson-in-Office Andrzej Kasprzyk also attended the meeting. As ARMENPRESS was informed from the Office of the Prime Minister of Armenia, welcoming Miroslav Lajcaks visit, the Prime Minister highlighted the role played by the OSCE in ensuring regional security, respect of human rights and promoting sustainable development. He said Armenia ready to support Slovakias priorities during its chairmanship in the OSCE. Nikol Pashinyan expressed the hope the strong ties of cooperation with the OSCE will help the Government to effectively implement its ambitious reform program and promote democracy in our country. Coming to issues high on the OSCE agenda, the parties stressed the need for finding joint solutions to the problems facing the Organization. Prime Minister Pashinyan reaffirmed Armenias commitment to an exclusively peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict within the framework of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairmanship and presented Armenias approaches and principled position on this issue. Reference was made to the steps to take ahead throughout the peace process. The parties stressed the importance of shaping an atmosphere conducive to peace and mutual trust, stimulating people-to-people contacts, taking effective steps to introduce risk-reduction mechanisms, as well as preventing incidents at the Contact Line. Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan YEREVAN, MARCH 13, ARMENPRESS. Foreign Minister of Armenia Zohrab Mnatsakanyan met with OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic Miroslav Lajcak on March 13. As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the MFA Armenia, Minister Mnatsakanyan welcomes the visit of Miroslav Lajcak to Armenia, assessing it important particularly under the conditions that due to the abuse of the principle of consensus in the organization, the representation of the OSCE in South Caucasus has been minimized. Minister Mnatsakanyan highly assessed the effective cooperation in the sidelines of the OSCE in the process of moving forward the reform agenda of Armenia. The sides mutually underlined the importance of taking measure aimed at raising the effectives of the OSCE and withstanding the challenges in the spirit of cooperation. Referring to Nagorno Karabakh conflict, Zohrab Mnatsakanyan reaffirmed the commitment and support of Armenia for the exclusively peaceful settlement of the conflict under the auspices of the Minsk Group Co-chairs format. In this context the sides highlighted the application of mechanisms aimed at reduction of risks and prevention of incidents, as well as implementation of confidence-building measures. The Armenian and Slovak FMs refereed to a number of issues referring to bilateral and multilateral cooperation between the two countries, exchanged views on further expanding trade and economic relations, as well as political dialogue. In this context, the Armenian FM welcomed the decision of Slovakia to open and embassy in Armenia. The sides emphasized that it will give a new impetus the expansion of bilateral agenda. Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan The Company Army Recognition Group with its online International Defense and Security magazine will cover LAAD 2019 the International Defense and Security exhibition that will be held in Rio (Brazil) from the 2 to 5 April 2019. 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You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ; Phone: +32 (0)81 56-73-67 (office in Belgium) Mobile phone: +32 (0)474-79.16.01 Why isnt Amazon.com signing their emails? Written on 13 Mar 2019 last updated on 19 Mar 2019 history I received this email a while ago: Queensland University of Technology sent you an Amazon.com Gift Card! Youve received an Amazon.com gift card! Youll need the claim code below to place your order. Happy shopping! Queensland University of Technology? Why would they send me anything? Where is that even? Australia right? Thats the other side of the world! Looks like spam! It did look pretty good for spam, so I took a second look. And a very close third look, and then I decided it wasnt spam. I was still confused why they sent me this. A week later I remembered: half a year prior I had done an interview regarding my participation on Stack Overflow for someones paper; she was studying somewhere in Australia presumably the university of Queensland. No one had ever mentioned anything about a reward or Amazon gift card so I wasnt expecting it. Its a nice bonus though. Heres the thing: Ive spent several years professionally developing email systems; I administered email servers; I read all the relevant RFCs. While there are certainly people who are more knowledgable, I know more about email than the vast majority of the population. And I still had to take a careful look to verify the email wasnt a phishing attempt. And Im not even a target; Im just this guy, you know? Ask John Podesta what it is to be targeted: SecureWorks concluded Fancy Bear had sent Podesta an email on March 19, 2016, that had the appearance of a Google security alert, but actually contained a misleading linka strategy known as spear-phishing. [..] The email was initially sent to the IT department as it was suspected of being a fake but was described as legitimate in an e-mail sent by a department employee, who later said he meant to write illegitimate. Yikes! If I was even remotely high-profile Id be crazy paranoid about all emails I get. It seems to me that there is a fairly easy solution to verify the author of an email: sign it with a digital signature; PGP is probably the best existing solution right now. I dont even care about encryption here, just signing to prevent phishing. PGP has a well-deserved reputation for being hard, but thats only for certain scenarios. A lot of the problems/difficulties stem from trying to accommodate the random person A emails random person B use case, but this isnt really what I care about here. Large company with millions of users sends thousands of emails daily is a very different use case. Much of the key exchange/web-of-trust dilemma can be bypassed by shipping email clients with keys for large organisations (PayPal, Google, etc.) baked in, like browsers do with some certificates. Even just publishing your key on your website (or, if youre a bank, in local branches etc.) is already a lot better than not signing anything at all. Right now there seems to be a catch-22 scenario: clients dont implement better support as very few people are using PGP, while very few companies bother signing their emails with PGP because so few people can benefit from it. On the end-user side, things are also not very hard; were just conceded with validating signatures, nothing more. For this purpose PGP isnt hard. Its like verifying your Linux distros package system: all of them sign their packages (usually with PGP) and they get verified on installation, but as an end-user I never see it unless something goes wrong. There are many aspects of PGP that are hard to set up and manage, but verifying signatures isnt one of them. The user-visible part of this is very limited. Remember, no one is expected to sign their own emails: just verify that the signature is correct (which the software will do). Conceptually, its not that different from verifying a handwritten signature. DKIM and SPF already exist and are useful, but limited. All both do is verify that an email which claims to be from amazon.com is really from amazon.com . If I send an email from mail.amazon-account-security.com or amazonn.com then it just verifies that it was sent from that domain, not that it was sent from the organisation Amazon. What I am proposing is subtly different. In my (utopian) future every serious organisation will sign their email with PGP (just like every serious organisation uses https). Then every time I get an email which claims to be from Amazon I can see its either not signed, or not signed by a key I know. If adoption is broad enough we can start showing warnings such as this email wasnt signed, do you want to trust it? and this signature isnt recognized, yikes! Theres also S/MIME, which has better client support and which works more or less the same as HTTPS: you get a certificate from the Certificate Authority Mafia, sign your email with it, and presto. The downside of this is that anyone can sign their emails with a valid key, which isnt necessarily telling you much (just because haxx0r.ru has a certificate doesnt mean its trustworthy). Is it perfect? No. I understand stuff like key exchange is hard and that baking in keys isnt perfect. Is it better? Hell yes. Would probably have avoided Podesta and the entire Democratic Party a lot of trouble. Heres a sophisticated new phishing campaign targeted at PayPal users. How sophisticated? Well, by not having glaring stupid spelling errors, duplicating the PayPal layout in emails, duplicating the PayPal login screen, a few forms, and getting an SSL certificate. Truly, the pinnacle of Computer Science. Okay sure, they spent some effort on it; but any nincompoop can do it; if this passes for sophisticated phishing where its easy to see how users could be fooled then the bar is pretty low. I cant recall receiving a single email from any organisation that is signed (much less encrypted). Banks, financial services, utilities, immigration services, governments, tax services, voting registration, Facebook, Twitter, a zillion websites all happily sent me emails hoping I wouldnt consider them spam and hoping I wouldnt confuse a phishing email for one of theirs. Interesting experiment: send invoices for, say, a utility bill for a local provider. Just copy the layout from the last utility bill you received. Ill bet youll make more money than freelancing on UpWork if you do it right. Ive been intending to write this post for years, but never quite did because surely not everyone is stupid? Im not a crypto expert, so perhaps Im missing something here, but I wouldnt know what. Let me know if I am. In the meanwhile PayPal is attempting to solve the problem by publishing articles which advise you to check for spelling errors. Okay, its good advice, but do we really want this to be the barrier between an attacker and your money? Or Russian hacking groups and your emails? Anyone can sign any email with any key, but unknown signature warnings strike me as a lot better UX than carefully look for spelling errors or misleading domain names. The way forward is to make it straight-forward to implement signing in apps and then just do it as a developer, whether asked or not; just as you set up https whether youre asked or not. Ill write a follow-up with more technical details later, assuming no one pokes holes in this article :-) Response to some feedback Some response to some feedback that I couldnt be bothered to integrate in the articles prose: You cant trust webmail with crypto! If you use webmail then youre already trusting the email provider with everything. Whats so bad with trusting them to verify a signature, too? Were not communicating state secrets over encrypted email here; were just verifying the signature on PayPal sent you a message, click here to view it-kind of emails. Isnt this ignoring the massive problem that is key management? Yes, its hard problem; but that doesnt mean it cant be done. I already mentioned some possible solutions in the article. Footnotes We could make something better; PGP contians a lot of cruft. But for now PGP is good enough. The result was a detailed 17-sheet strip map based on my walking speed of about six kilometres an hour, which Id calculated along the 610 metres of Tufi airstrip. Id been constantly recording features along the bush tracks, including detours (thus the backtracking), to establish a route for a bulldozer to clear a road from Pongani to the Musa Gorge. It had been my first patrol to Safia in the Middle Musa of Northern District: inland from lowland villages and over the Didana Range skirting the 100 square miles of Agaiambo Swamp between the mountains and Dyke Acland Bay. SPRINGBROOK, QLD It had taken me 30 hours hard walking and backtracking over four days to get from Safia to Pongani. Now the flight back along the same route was over in 30 minutes. The days were a trial and so were the nights. At Pongani, I dined alone on tinned irish stew on what was our wedding anniversary before sharing a bush hut with the Afore malaria control team who left on their hissing pressure lamp all night. I shared my evening at Kinjaki with the mice and at Korala I fell through the floor of the bush latrine and, having cleaned up, listened to the people wailing long into the night for a departed loved one. I flew out of Safia to spend the night at Popondetta with only what I was wearing plus a fiercely itching bright red rash. And finally, I made a long and stormy trip back home to Tufi on Ubuna, arriving after midnight. Pongani was notable for a few things. Recruiting carriers at the Seventh Day Adventist village on a Saturday to patrol into the adjacent Anglican area meant two days downtime. But, even leaving aside religious days-of-rest, it wasnt easy getting carriers any time there. But it made up for this frustration in its wartime relics and memorabilia. Up from the beachhead was an old wartime strip and plane wreck. A couple of hours down the track were the well-tended graves of two Japanese soldiers who had been captured by locals and handed over to the police. MV Ubuna at Oro Bay Just over the Bariji River was another wartime airstrip beside Kinjaki village. Two more days walk to Ovesa where we left the lowland track, our route then taking us through virtually uninhabited country on a long days trek to Safia. As it eventuated, the bulldozer trail would leave the Safia track near Gogoripapa, a small mountain hamlet that marked the end of my data collection for the strip map and the start of my homeward journey. Exhausted, I rested for an hour with a cup of tea my only sustenance for the whole day and the only time during my four years in New Guinea I had a cup of tea on patrol, tropical fruit or coconut milk being the usual offer. But that cuppa couldnt have been more welcome. I knew Territories Minister Ceb Barnes was visiting Safia this day with District Commissioner David Marsh and I held two hopes, slim though they might be. One was to make a grand entry to Safia in front of the Minister and the other, more important yet even less likely hope, was to fly out with the VIPs in the official aircraft which is why I had made an early start from Ovesa. Just before we reached the Musa (Moni) River, a plane flew overhead. Half an hour later it returned from the direction of the Gorge and I could hear it landing. My hopes were raised, however it took us over an hour to retrieve a raft from the other side the river and transfer all our gear and people across. Then the last walking leg to Safia took an hour and a half. My Field Officers Journal records that we made the end of the airstrip at 4.35pm just as the Ministers Islander was starting its engines. We were halfway along the strip as it taxied past, turned and took off. Ten minutes later, at the village end of the strip, I reported to the DC who offered a spare seat on his chartered Pilatis Porter. Tattered, muddy and wet I hopped aboard. Annette with our baby son at Kokoda Hospital, 1972 Another 10 minutes as I was flying back over the route I had just walked en route for Popondetta with my itchy rash and from there bound for Tufi. I waited my turn at hospital outpatients. I didnt know what the rash was and nor did the European doctor fresh to PNG, who seemed surprised that I should line up with the local people. Next time I was in the same mountains during a land survey of the Musa Gorge, the same rash again gave me trouble and looked like developing into tropical ulcers always difficult to clear up in a hot, humid climate. Closer examination revealed tiny mites embedded in the flesh. It seems they inject a bacterial parasite that causes scrub typhus; the serious outcomes of which can include death. Knowing this, I was more careful when I once again returned to the area to finish the survey and start clearing the road. By this time, I was acting officer-in-charge at Safia, now a temporary Patrol Post, and my 50 days there were varied and exciting, including my first ride in a helicopter to seek consent from landowners to use the small pieces of land required for stream and rain gauges. The helicopter lifted off, flying the full length of Safia airstrip tail up and nose down. I thought the pilot was struggling to get airborne and expected to plough into the ground nose first at any moment. We flew on to sites up to the headwaters of the Musa River. One small hamlet in the vicinity of the infamous Kapa Kapa Track was at such a high altitude that the thin air put the helicopter close to its lift-off limit. As it had to reverse out of landing places to avoid trees on departure I was left in the village while my Comworks companion installing the gauges was deposited lower down on a gravel creek bank in the Urinu River. The plan was that, if something went wrong, one of us would still be around to seek help my companion in the middle of nowhere and me in a remote village with people who could barely communicate. The next day we dropped in on Brian Keech who was camped at the Adau Gorge site. Here, the helicopter could only land on a piece of rock just big enough for its skids, its tail over a sheer drop into the gorge. The four of us considered the outcome if, as we jumped on board, the helicopter toppled into the rushing waters below. I agreed with the engineers: no hope of coming out alive. Solution: dont think about it. On the final day, a tropical ulcer on the pilots elbow, which had started as a mere scratch as is often the case, caused such swelling that he couldnt risk flying. We radioed Port Moresby for help and next day a replacement pilot came and I was on my own again walking back to my road camp in the Didana Range. But I had the mites where I wanted them, having learned to apply mocka juice, a potent mix of repellent kept in a four gallon drum in the Comworks shed. US 3/128th Infantry deployed at Wanigela during World War II (Australian War Memorial) The Musa has long had a mite problem. In 1901 resident magistrate Monckton wrote: Scrub-itch made things very interesting for us in the Didana hills. It is a microscopic tick, almost invisible to the naked eye, that falls in myriads like a shower from certain shrubs, which, burrowing under ones skin, raises a lump and causes intense irritation. And during World War II it was recorded in the history of 2/10th Battalion AIF that most of the section had suffered considerable discomfort during the trip from scrub mite bites. And Colonel Miller of the US 3/128th Infantry, advancing from Wanigela to Pongani, described the terrain as the most filthy, swampy, mosquito infested area he had ever seen. Knowing that others had the same experience made me feel a bit less singled out by this difficult and perilous topography. Yahoo Finance screenshot of Kathmandu website. Outdoor gear maker Kathmandu has revealed an unauthorised and unidentified third party had been monitoring what customers were entering into their website for over a month. The publicly listed company announced Wednesday afternoon to the ASX and NZX that it recently became aware of the breach that occurred between January 8 and February 12. During this period, the third party may have captured customer personal information and payment details entered at check-out. Kathmandu did not disclose how many customers might be affected by the breach. The New Zealand company is notifying potentially impacted customers directly, while encouraging those that suspect their information was stolen to contact their financial institution for advice. Kathmandu takes the privacy of customer data extremely seriously and we unreservedly apologise to any customers who may have been impacted, said chief executive Xavier Simonet. Whilst the independent forensic investigation is ongoing, we are notifying customers and relevant authorities as soon as practicable. The company has been working with leading IT and cybersecurity consultants to identify which customers were affected and who might be behind the attack. The online store is now secure and no physical stores were under any threat. The Christchurch-headquartered Kathmandu racked up $497.4 million of sales and $50.5 million net profit in 2018, with 9.4 per cent of those sales coming online. Make your money work with Yahoo Finances daily newsletter. Sign up here and stay on top of the latest money, property and tech news. Now read: STOLEN NETFLIX accounts: Sydney man faces 20 years jail Now read: Women-only rideshare Shebah is raising $3 million and women are investing Now read: Aldi is selling $90 mountain bikes Steven Gerrard is set to finish his first season as Rangers boss empty-handed as his side crashed out of the Scottish Cup after a 2-0 quarter-final replay defeat to Aberdeen at Ibrox. With Rangers eight points adrift of Celtic in the Scottish Premiership title race, Gerrard's realistic hopes of lifting a trophy at the end of his rookie campaign rested on steering his side through their last eight clash with Derek McInnes's men. But goals in either half from Niall McGinn and Connor McLennan gave Aberdeen their third win over the Gers in Glasgow this season and set up a semi-final with Celtic next month. Rangers have now beaten the Dons just once in six meetings this season. Aberdeen got off to a perfect start after three minutes when Glen Kamara tried a risky square ball across his defence to James Tavernier and watched with horror as it went wrong as McGinn nicked possession before calmly beating Allan McGregor. Rangers' top scorer Alfredo Morelos had been sent off three times in five of the previous meetings between the sides this season. Gerrard refused to contemplate leaving out the Colombian for Jermain Defoe, but was left to regret that decision on a frustrating night for Morelos. The striker was booked for diving, a caution that would have seen him suspended for the semi-final had Rangers progressed. Ryan Jack almost fired Gers level eight minutes before the break as a Borna Barisic corner broke his way but his low drive thudded off the base of the post. Just after the hour mark, though, Aberdeen administered a sucker-punch second goal to seal the tie. Stevie May played in McLennan behind the Rangers defence and he did the rest with a cool finish past McGregor. Gerrard had no option but to go all in and immediately threw on Defoe and Kyle Lafferty to join Morelos in a three-man attack. But Andrew Considine produced a great block to deny Defoe, while Joe Lewis kept out a Morelos strike as Aberdeen held firm. Hearts will face Inverness Caley Thistle in the other semi-final after coming from behind to beat Partick Thistle 2-1 at Tynecastle. Sean Clare's penalty proved decisive after Uche Ikpeazu cancelled out Scott McDonald's opener. Rangers look set to miss out on silverware in Steven Gerrard's first season after a 2-0 Scottish Cup defeat to Aberdeen Two flights heading to the UK have been forced to turn around mid-flight after the country closed its airspace to all Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircrafts. The MAX jets have been banned from flying in a growing list of countries, including Australia, following a devastating crash in Ethiopia on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. As the bans fell in place in the UK on Tuesday, two Turkish Airways flights were forced to turn around as they could no longer land in the nation. Parts of the plane wreckage with rescue workers at the crash site at Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, outside Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Source: AP Flight TK 1997 departed Istanbul at 2.35pm (local time) headed for Londons Gatwick Airport, but was instead redirected back to Istanbul, according to Flightradar24. Another flight, TK 1969, that left Istanbul at 2.10pm for Birmingham was also rerouted back to Turkey. The Ethiopian Airlines crash is the second involving the 737 MAX five months after the same model flown by Lion Air crashed off the coast of Indonesia in October, killing all 189 on board. TK 1997 was halfway to London when it was forced to turn back to Turkey. Source: Flightradar24 In this November 14, 2018, file photo Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes are parked near Boeing Co.s 737 assembly facility in Renton, Washington. Source: AP/File Australia, China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Oman, Namibia and all European Union countries have made national bans for the Boeing 737 MAX jets. As of Wednesday morning, the US and Canada were the only remaining countries to still be flying a substantial number of MAX 8s. Virgin Australia announced it wont introduce any new Boeing 737 Max 8 planes unless satisfied they are safe, as authorities suspended airlines from using the model. Pilots claim issue causes plane to tilt down suddenly Airline pilots on at least two flights have reported that an automated system seemed to cause their Boeing planes to tilt down suddenly, the same problem suspected of contributing to a deadly crash in Indonesia. The pilots said that soon after engaging the autopilot on Boeing 737 Max 8 planes, the nose tilted down sharply. In both cases, they recovered quickly after disconnecting the autopilot. A passenger passport lies on the ground at the scene of the crash. Source: AP The pilot reports were filed last year in a data base compiled by NASA. They are voluntary safety reports and do not publicly reveal the names of pilots, the airlines or the location of the incidents. Story continues It was unclear whether the accounts led to any actions by the FAA or the pilots airlines. In one report, an airline captain said that immediately after putting the plane on autopilot, the co-pilot called out Descending, followed by an audio cockpit warning, Dont sink, dont sink! The captain immediately disconnected the autopilot and resumed climbing. Mourners attend a memorial service held by an association of Ethiopian airline pilots, at which framed photographs of seven crew members were on display. Source: AP With the concerns with the MAX 8 nose down stuff, we both thought it appropriate to bring it to your attention, the captain wrote. Best guess from me is airspeed fluctuation due to a brief weather system overwhelming the planes automation. On another flight, the co-pilot said that seconds after engaging the autopilot, the nose pitched downward and the plane began descending at 1,200 to 1,500 feet per minute. As in the other flight, the planes low-altitude-warning system issued an audio warning. The captain disconnected autopilot, and the plane began to climb. The pilots talked it over later, but cant think of any reason the aircraft would pitch nose down so aggressively, the co-pilot recounted. Do you have a story tip? Email: y7newsroom@yahoo7.com.au. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter and stay up to date with the latest news with Yahoo7s daily newsletter. Sign up here. Talk is swirling of a possible delay to Brexit after the latest rejection by lawmakers of Britain's divorce deal, but the EU demands clear political "choices" from London before it will agree to it. On Tuesday, MPs rejected the Brexit withdrawal plan that Prime Minister Theresa May had agreed with EU negotiators -- leaving Britain in limbo just 16 days before it is due to leave the bloc. Delaying Britain's departure beyond March 29 seems increasingly inevitable if both sides want to avoid a chaotic "no-deal" Brexit, but Brussels insists a delay will not be granted if it simply prolongs uncertainty. "Today we are in the hands of the British political system," European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans told the European Parliament. "They should tell us where they want to go from now. The solution will have to come from London." Brussels has made clear it will not renegotiate the deal thrashed out with Britain over two years of tortuous talks and which has now been resoundingly rejected twice by lawmakers. The latest crushing defeat, on Tuesday, came despite May securing further guarantees from the EU in last-ditch talks in Strasbourg. British MPs will vote Wednesday on whether to accept leaving the EU with no deal in place. If they reject this option -- as they are expected to do -- they will vote on Thursday on whether to ask for Brexit day to be put back. - Tell us what you want - The EU's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier echoed Timmermans' message, bluntly telling London it must decide what it wants from Brexit before Brussels would consider a delay. "It is the responsibility of the United Kingdom to tell us what it wants in a future relationship, what is its choice, the clear line that must be its own," he told the European Parliament. "That's the question that is open and to which we await a response, and it's the question that must be answered even before any decision on an extension. "Why would we prolong the negotiation? To do what? Because the Article 50 negotiation is finished, we have a treaty, it's there," he added, referring to the withdrawal agreement. Barnier's call means "the British need to change their Brexit model -- either to a soft Brexit inspired by the Norwegian model or by cancelling Brexit," Eric Maurice, an analyst at the Robert Schuman Foundation, told AFP. Norway is not an EU member but is part of the bloc's single market, respecting EU rules on free movement of people, goods and capital. Choosing this model, or staying in the EU's customs union, would resolve the problem of the Irish border "backstop" which has blocked the withdrawal agreement in Westminster. But these options are unacceptable to Brexit hardliners in May's Conservative party, whose support she needs to get any deal approved. - 'Prolonging the agony' - The British have "never known how to choose" but that will have to change now, one puzzled European diplomatic source observed. "Changing the form of Brexit would require an authority that May no longer has. Defining the future relationship might take new elections," Maurice said. The prospect of a snap general election would give the EU a solid reason to agree a longer delay than the short extension mooted up to now, but would also risk "prolonging the agony," according to a diplomat. A long delay "assumes a political choice by the British -- a major change like new elections, a new referendum or the revocation of Article 50" the diplomat said, referring to the process of leaving the bloc. By setting these conditions on any Brexit delay -- which would need the unanimous approval of all 27 remaining EU members in any event -- the bloc wants to show that it will not give London a blank cheque. But another diplomat predicted that a "good reason for an extension will be found". "At the end the question for the heads of state and government is... do we want to push the UK over the cliff, do we want chaos on the island of Ireland and uncomfortable situations in France or Germany," the diplomat said. There is growing speculation British Prime Minister Theresa May will ask for a Brexit delay but Brussels will want a very good reason go go along Australian rider Michael Hepburn pulled on the Tirreno-Adriatico leader's blue jersey after his Mitchelton-Scott outfit won a crash-marred opening team time-trial stage at Lido di Camaiore in Tuscany on Wednesday. Hepburn's team narrowly avoided an accident one kilometre from the line when a woman walking her dog on a leash crossed in front of the riders. Earlier two riders from the German Bora-Hansgrohe team had collided at speed in wet conditions with a pedestrian who crossed the road. Italy's Oscar Gatto and Poland's Rafal Majka finished the race, but suffered bruising, with the team ending the day in 20th position. The pedestrian was taken to hospital but was reported not to be in a serious condition. "We got a fright when we saw the Bora guys," said Hepburn. "And then the dog... Luckily we saw it, it could have been more serious." The Mitchelton-Scott team clocked 22min 25sec to finish first with Slovenian Primoz Roglic's Jumbo-Visma team second at 7sec with Tom Dumoulin's Sunweb third at 22sec. "I didn't expect to be in this position when I woke up this morning," continued 27-year-old Hepburn. "We were quietly confident in our team, we have a lot of big boys, a lot of powerful time trialists and today was one of our chances to get some time and we did that. "We're not targeting just the stage but also supporting Adam Yates on (the) general classification." Yates, whose twin brother Simon won last year's Tour of Spain, is among the favourites for the race which ends on the Adriatic coast next Tuesday. "Super start," said Yates. "We've been trying to win a team time-trial for a long time, I think I've been here four or five years now and every time we try, every year we bring a super strong team and we?ve been close and now we?ve finally got it!" Tour de France champion Geraint Thomas's Team Sky were fifth at 47 seconds behind. Thursday's second stage is a 195km run between Camaiore and Pomarance, passing through Pisa and along flat roads before a 12km uphill finish, with the gradient topping out at 16 percent. Geraint Thomas's Team Sky were fifth fastest in the team time-trial There has been a strong reaction over the sentencing of disgraced Cardinal George Pell who will spend a minimum of three years and eight months behind bars for sexually abusing two choirboys in Melbourne in the 1990s. Pell, 77, showed no emotion when the sentence was handed down on Wednesday. His appearance was different to his usual attire, choosing not to wear a tie or priest collar with an open black shirt. 7News Reporter Chris Reason said he looked tired and almost dishelved. Supporters of the victims revealed their shock over the sentence outside court. An emotional founder of Victim Group Actions in Victoria and NSW, who was identified as Michael Advocate, slammed the decision as pathetic. Im really disappointed. I thought six years as a head sentence was at the very low end of the scale, he said. The founder of a victims group breaks down outside court following Pells sentencing. Source: AAP It doesnt set any deterrent at all. It doesnt give the victims any sense of justice. Less than four years jail time for destroying the lives of two innocent young boys! I mean, is their life only worth two years each? The father of one of Pells victims who died of a drug overdose says hes disappointed by the six year sentence. I think there was disappointment in terms of the sentence was handed down from his point of view, he watched his sons life disintegrate after the abuse, his lawyer said. He would have preferred it to be a longer sentence. The other victims lawyer read a statement outside court from her client, who refrained from commenting on the nature of the sentence. Yet the victim gave an in-depth address on Pells abuse and subsequent not guilty response, detailing its lasting effects on him. Irrespective of [what] the judge has said, it was meticulous and considered, his lawyer read out. Cardinal Pell will spend a maximum of six years in jail. Source: AAP He says that it was hard for him to allow himself to feel the gravity of this moment, the moment when the sentence was handed down. The moment when justice is done. It is hard for him in the time being to take comfort in this outcome. He appreciates that the court has acknowledged what was inflicted upon him as a child. Story continues However, there is no rest for him. Everything is overshadowed by the forthcoming appeal. Despite the concern over the length of sentence, Brian from the Care Levers Australia Network said the decision was a great day for justice. Many of these abusing priests and other paedophiles have got away with it for years, he said. It is very important for justice that we see justice in the open courts and that it is settled. He has been jailed, that is it. Pell must serve at least three years and eight months in prison before being eligible for release on parole. A jury convicted him in December of orally raping a 13-year-old choirboy and molesting another at St Patricks Cathedral in 1996 and 1997, finding him guilty of five charges. Crowds gathered outside the court with placards calling for justice against Pell. Source: AAP County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd handed down his sentence in front of a packed courtroom and a global television audience streaming across the globe. He noted Pell would not be made a scapegoat for the wrongdoings of the Catholic church. Pell, who was until late-February the Vaticans treasurer, is the highest-ranking Catholic to be convicted and jailed for child sexual abuse. He will be a registered sex offender for life. Pell denies all allegations of wrongdoing and has launched an appeal to the convictions, to be heard by the Court of Appeal in June. PELL: Father of one of Pells victims who died of a drug overdose says hes disappointed by his 6 year sentence @7NewsMelbourne Jodi Lee (@jodilee_7) March 13, 2019 Do you have a story tip? Email: y7newsroom@yahoo7.com.au. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter and stay up to date with the latest news with Yahoo7s daily newsletter. Sign up here. With their honour codes, elaborate tattoos and fearsome reputation, Russia's crime bosses have for decades enjoyed a mythical status. The "Vory v Zakone", or Thieves in Law, have been an untouchable mobster elite, accumulating vast fortunes with little fear of retribution. But a new Kremlin-sponsored bill, approved in its crucial second reading on Tuesday, is looking to put an end to their reigns. "We must end this state within a state, and with it this romantic image that sometimes surrounds these 'godfathers' and presents them as heroes," said Otari Arshba, a lawmaker with the pro-Kremlin United Russia party and the main supporter of the bill amending Russia's criminal code. Arshba, a Soviet-era KGB officer who worked organised crime cases, said the key change in the law will be a provision making "the simple fact of being in charge of a criminal organisation enough" to convict crime bosses. The 'Thieves in Law' emerged in the Soviet-era gulags, controlling the criminal underworld in Stalin's prison camps. They developed their own subculture and jargon, similar to Italy's Cosa Nostra or the Yakuza in Japan, and were both lionised and feared. They flourished in the chaos that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, building huge criminal empires and branching out across Europe, the Middle East and North America. They came under pressure after Vladimir Putin took power in 1999 promising an end to the lawlessness of the previous decade. But they continued to operate behind the scenes, protected by corruption but also by the law, which did not make heading a crime organisation illegal in itself. By limiting their direct involvement in criminal acts, mob bosses were able to avoid prosecution. Under their own code, they could not even deny being members of criminal groups, but there was nothing the police could do about it. - 'Shock in criminal circles' - The amendment, which is expected to sail through a final reading later this week, allows the prosecution of criminals if they admit to their status or are informed on by others, with punishments of up to 15 years in prison. Experts say that after years of operating with impunity, the 'Thieves in Law' are reeling. "The president's initiative has caused a shock in criminal circles. Some are already thinking of leaving the country," Viktoria Gefter, the editor of the Prime Crime website, told Lenta.ru. "The underworld is asking questions," said Mikhail Orsky, a retired crime figure who has written two books about his gangster career. Orsky, 58, has said that in the 1990s he managed a gang of 50 ex-athletes and Afghan war veterans who engaged in extortion of the taxi business. Speaking to AFP at his country house outside Moscow, Orsky said he believed some 400 Russian crime bosses will not simply accept either leaving the country or "going like lambs to the slaughter". "They will think of something," he said. The honour code could be changed to allow them to deny criminal activity, he suggested. The head of the Moscow police labour union, former investigator Mikhail Pashkin, said the amended law could even be used against some of the most powerful figures in Russia. "Some Russian billionaires are ex-mafia chiefs, now they control important financial flows, companies, they buy lawmakers, judges and prosecutors," he said. But some observers worry that the changes could be abused to go after legitimate businessmen or in commercial disputes. "From now on, any businessman could go to jail as a 'criminal chief', with his business seized by competitors with the help of corrupt policemen," said Vladimir Zherebenkov, a prominent defence lawyer who counts several ex-mafia businessmen among his clients. The grave of Russian crime boss Aslan Usoyan in a Moscow cemetery -- the so-called 'Thieves in Law' who emerged in the Soviet-era gulags, controlling the criminal underworld in Stalin's prison camps. The tombstone of the Russian mafia gangster Mikhail Kuchin -- Russia's mobster elite developed their own subculture and jargon, similar to Italy's Cosa Nostra or the Yakuza in Japan, and were both lionised and feared. A man jailed for South Australias infamous bodies-in-the-barrels murders in the 1990s will apply to have a time set for his eventual release from prison. Robert Joe Wagner, 48, is serving 10 consecutive life sentences in relation to the killing spree and has applied to the Supreme Court to have a non-parole period set. The ringleader in the murders, John Justin Bunting, is also serving life without parole. Robert Joe Wagner pictured in 2002. Source: AAP The 11 murders occurred between 1992 and 1999. Eight bodies were found in acid in field barrels at Snowtown, about 145 km north of Adelaide in 1999. Wagner wants to have his non-parole period finalised to allow him to set a goal to work towards while incarcerated, The Advertiser reported. Wagner was convicted in 2003 following his arrest in May 1999 after the discovery of the barrels. When sentenced, Wagner suggested his motive for the killings was to act on the polices inability to bring justice against paedophiles. The former State bank building where murderer Robert Joe Wagner stored dismembered bodies in barrels. Source: AAP Yet the majority of his victims werent paedophiles and Wagner and Bunting were stealing money from the victims bank accounts, the Advertiser reported. Two other men, Mark Haydon and James Vlassakis, remain in prison serving sentences of up to 26 years non-parole. Wagners move to seek parole has provoked a negative response from the Homicide Victims Support Group who worry his appeal will only worsen the pain of victims family and friends. You just want them to go away and not hear about them. One of the hard things is going through all of this over and over again, group founder Lynette Nitschke said. The Snowtown murders are in the category of very few where they are so horrific I think the community gets so enraged by it all,. With AAP Do you have a story tip? Email: y7newsroom@yahoo7.com.au. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter and stay up to date with the latest news with Yahoo7s daily newsletter. Sign up here. A swimming instructor will face court on Wednesday following an investigation into the alleged sexual abuse of two young swim students on Sydneys North Shore. A 20-year-old male was arrested on Tuesday at a home in Balgowlah following an investigation by the Child Abuse and Sex Crimes Squad. Police had received reports two girls, aged six and eight, had been sexually touched on separate occasions during swimming lessons at a Mosman pool last month. The man is taken into custody on Tuesday. Source: NSW Police The man was taken to Manly Police Station, where he was charged with two counts of intentionally sexually touch child under 10 years, and sexual intercourse with child under the age of 10 years. He has been refused bail to appear at Manly Local Court on Wednesday. The man has been charged with sexual intercourse with a child under 10 years of age. Source: NSW Police The mans employment with the swim school was previously suspended. Investigations are continuing. Anyone with concerns about suspected child abuse or exploitation should call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or use the Crime Stoppers online reporting page. Do you have a story tip? Email: y7newsroom@yahoo7.com.au. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter and stay up to date with the latest news with Yahoo7s daily newsletter. Sign up here. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres heads to Washington on Wednesday for talks on the UN peacekeeping budget after the United States drilled a hole in the world body's finances by capping its share. The US, which is the number one financial contributor to the UN, said in December that it would cover no more than 25 percent of the UN's multi-billion-dollar peacekeeping budget, down from 28.47 percent. Guterres will be meeting US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton for talks that are also expected to touch on Yemen and Venezuela. On Thursday, the UN chief heads to Congress for meetings on the budget, hoping to make allies in his campaign to keep the world's peacekeeping operations afloat. The US cost-cutting has created a hole of about $220 million in this year's $6.7 billion budget, but the shortfall has been compounded by arrears that have pushed peacekeeping finances further into the red. In January, unpaid contributions to the peacekeeping budget totaled nearly $2 billion, with the United States failing to pay a large chunk of that amount. To make up for the revenue loss, the United Nations has withheld payments to countries that contribute troops including Ethiopia, India and Pakistan -- which are each owed hefty amounts. At the end of January, Ethiopia was owed $41.6 million for its blue helmets, India $40.5 million and Pakistan $35.7 million, according to the UN peacekeeping department. - Who pays? - Peacekeeping financing is determined by a complicated formula that takes into account a country's wealth, whether or not it is a permanent Security Council member and other factors. The permanent Council members, which have veto power, generally pay more than others. Washington has been trying to convince several countries to reduce the special discounts allocated to them under this formula in order to cover the $220 million annually which it no longer wants to pay. It has knocked on the doors of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Singapore, Brunei, Brazil, Mexico and India, but to no avail. Guterres is hoping to discuss other ways to address the budget shortfall such as allowing transfers of funds from one peace mission to another, an idea opposed by some countries which insist their funding should go to specific operations, diplomats said. Another proposal would be to create a fund with revenue left over from a mission's budget instead of reimbursing member-states as is currently the case. UN diplomats argue that blue helmet operations are in Washington's interest and that the cost of US military engagement in many trouble spots would be much higher without the UN. To cave in to US demands and "give more would be to tell them they're right," said a UN diplomat, who asked not to be named. More than 100,000 peacekeepers are deployed in 14 missions worldwide including major operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and South Sudan that cost more than $1 billion annually to run. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is set to begin two days of meetings in Washington, hoping to address a shortfall in the peacekeeping budget Peacekeepers from India are serving in the MONUSCO mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo The United Nations Security Council met behind closed doors on Wednesday to try to salvage a stalled truce deal in Yemen seen as crucial to diplomatic efforts to end the devastating war. Yemen's government and its Saudi and Emirati allies agreed in talks with Huthi rebels nearly a month ago to redeploy their forces from the flashpoint city of Hodeida, but nothing has happened on the ground. UN envoy Martin Griffiths told the council that he was "still working with the parties to make the redeployment in Hodeida a reality," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters. The pullback was agreed in December under a ceasefire deal reached in Sweden that offered the best hope in years of moving toward an end to the conflict that has pushed Yemen to the brink of famine. Details of a two-stage pullback from Hodeida city and its ports were finalized during a meeting between the government and the Huthis on February 17, marking the first concrete step toward de-escalation. UN diplomats said the Huthis were refusing to pull away from the ports of Saleef and Ras Issa as part of the first stage, citing fears that forces linked to the Saudi-led coalition will move in to take over those facilities. "It's clear that one party has more problems than the other at the moment, but this tends to swing around," British Ambassador Karen Pierce told reporters after the meeting. General Michael Lollesgaard, who also briefed the council as head of a newly-created UN mission to monitor the redeployment from Hodeida, will hold meetings in the coming days to push for action on the ground, diplomats said. - A very big step - The Security Council will meet again on Tuesday to take stock and consider a tougher stance if no progress is made. "If there isn't progress and if Stockholm does collapse, the Security Council will need to think about further measures and that is a very big step," Pierce said in an interview to Al-Arabiya television. On Tuesday, the ambassadors in Yemen of the permanent council members -- Britain, France, China, Russia and the United States -- said they were "extremely concerned" that agreements had not been implemented. The pullback should begin "without further delay and without seeking to exploit the redeployments by the other side," they said in a joint statement. With Hodeida peace efforts stalled, fighting in northern Hajjah province escalated this week, with 12 children and 10 women killed during two days of strikes, the UN humanitarian coordinator said. The Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen will enter its fifth year later this month, with millions of civilians facing famine. The conflict has unleashed the world's worst humanitarian conflict. UN envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths briefed the Security Council behind closed doors on a stalled truce deal seen as crucial to diplomatic efforts to end the war New Zealand's aviation watchdog joined counterparts worldwide on Wednesday in banning Boeing 737 MAX aircraft from its airspace in the wake of a deadly plane crash in Ethiopia. New Zealand's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said it was imposing the temporary suspension after consultation with other regulators. "The CAA's assessment has taken into consideration the level of uncertainty regarding the cause of the recent Ethiopian Airlines accident plus its review of the aircraft design," the CAA said in a statement. The regulator said only one airline, Fiji Airways, flew the 737 MAX to New Zealand. Flag carrier Air New Zealand does not have any of the aircraft in its fleet. On Sunday, a new Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board. The crash came after a Lion Air jet of the same model went down in Indonesia in October, claiming 189 lives. New Zealand said it was imposing a temporary suspension on Boeing 737 MAX aircraft after consultation with other regulators Both houses of the New York State Legislature have made establishing early voting a priority in their budget resolutions. The budget plan released by the Assembly Democratic majority late Monday contains $27 million to help counties establish early voting. County boards of elections would be eligible to receive grants to purchase electronic poll books, a digital version of the voter registration rolls. Election commissioners say electronic poll books would make it easier to administer early voting. County boards of elections have books containing the voter registration rolls, but for many counties it would be a burden to transport each book to the early voting site and have inspectors sift through the books to confirm a voter's registration. Under the Assembly's proposal, counties could receive grants up to $2,500 for the purchase of each electronic poll book. County boards of elections could purchase one electronic poll book for every 1,250 registered voters. The funding would also assist county boards of elections with the purchase of on-demand printers. The printers provide a quick way to print ballots, especially for early voting. Counties would receive grants of up to $3,500 for the purchase of each on-demand printer. Counties would be allowed to purchase at least one on-demand printer and two additional printers for each early voting polling site. An additional $7 million is in the state Assembly's budget proposal to help counties adopt early voting and other election reforms. The state Senate's budget includes $10 million for voting reforms. The state Legislature passed a bill in January to allow early voting in New York. It was part of an election reform package the Democratic-controlled Assembly and Senate advanced. Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the measures later that month. New York is one of 39 states to authorize early voting. The state's early voting period will begin on a Saturday 10 days before the election. The nine-day early voting period will conclude on the Sunday before Election Day. This year, early voting will be ready for the general election in November. Counties will be required to have at least one early voting polling location for every 50,000 registered voters. Counties could opt to open more sites to make it convenient for voters. There is a question of how early voting will be funded. Estimates suggest counties outside of New York City would need at least $25 million to implement early voting. Cash-strapped counties say they can't do it on their own and would need state help to purchase electronic poll books and establish early voting sites. However, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo released his executive budget plan it didn't include any direct funding to support early voting. The Cuomo administration explained that early voting would be funded through the consolidation of the federal and state primaries and collecting taxes on internet marketplace sales. The tax collections wouldn't begin until June and while counties agree that there will be a savings from consolidating the primaries, it wouldn't be seen until next year. The Let NY Vote coalition, which supports early voting and other election reforms, urged Cuomo to add funding to his budget proposal. When his 30-day budget amendments were released, he didn't include any funding for early voting. State lawmakers have said funding early voting is a priority. The state Senate's one-house budget bill will be released this week and it's expected that it will contain aid for early voting. One-house budget bills are part of the state budget process. Each house of the state Legislature approves its own budget as it negotiates with the governor on a final agreement. Cuomo and state legislative leaders hope to finalize the 2019-20 budget by March 31. Online producer Robert Harding can be reached at (315) 282-2220 or robert.harding@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @robertharding. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 State lawmakers don't support Gov. Andrew Cuomo's plan to expedite the closure of up to three state prisons this year. One-house budget plans released by the Assembly and state Senate majorities excludes Cuomo's proposal. The governor is seeking authority from the state Legislature to close as many as three correctional facilities by Sept. 1. Michael Whyland, a spokesman for the Assembly Democrats, confirmed Cuomo's plan isn't included in the chamber's budget bills. The state Senate's budget resolution, which was released Tuesday afternoon, also doesn't contain the proposal. In the one-house resolution, the state Senate expressed support for reducing the prison population and "justifiable" correctional facility closures. "However, the Senate believes that meaningful advance notice of and justification for specifically identified prison closures is essential to thoughtful planning of such closures and for constructive reuse of facilities," the resolution reads. In his 30-day budget amendments, Cuomo included the proposal to shutter up to three state prisons. His plan would require the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to review the state's 54 correctional facilities and determine which should close. There would be criteria the agency would consider, such as facility security level, available programs for inmates and the potential reuse of the property. Cuomo, who has boasted about closing 24 state prisons and juvenile detention centers, contends more prisons can be shuttered due to a declining inmate population. The inmate population is now 46,973, down from 56,419 since 2011 the governor's first year in office. The state Division of Budget estimates the closures could eliminate more than 1,200 beds in the prison system and save at least $35 million. "These new closures are another step toward reversing the era of mass incarceration and recognizing that there are more effective alternatives to lengthy imprisonment," Cuomo said in February. However, Cuomo's plan faces opposition from lawmakers and unions representing correctional officers. One of the unions, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, slammed the proposal. The labor group believes it would lead to overcrowding in prisons and create dangerous conditions for staff. While state legislators share those concerns, they also worry that any closures could be harmful to communities. Cayuga County is home to two state prisons, both of which are among the largest employers in the county. Cuomo still could secure the prison closure plan in the state budget, but he would have to win support of Assembly Democrats. It's unclear where the state Senate Democrats stand on the proposal. The state Senate hasn't released its one-house budget plan. The governor and state legislative leaders are aiming to finalize a new state budget by March 31. Online producer Robert Harding can be reached at (315) 282-2220 or robert.harding@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @robertharding. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 AUBURN Auburn Enlarged City School District Superintendent Jeff Pirozzolo said he felt good about recent advocacy meetings he had with state representatives and inadvertently learned some interesting information afterward. Pirozzolo said at a board of education meeting Tuesday that he, assistant superintendent for personnel and operations Jeff Evener, and assistant superintendent for student services Camille Johnson, went to Albany last week to meet with representatives to advocate for the district. The district has argued for years that it does not receive its fair share of state aid. The district's representatives met with state Sen. Shelley Mayer and Sen. James Seward on March 4 and Sen. Robert Antonacci and Assemblyman Gary Finch on March 5. Pirozzolo said Seward asked him how much the district receives per pupil in foundation aid. Foundation aid is the base aid districts receive from the state. Pirozzolo said that he didn't know the answer right away but after getting a calculator, he said the district receives $7,158 in foundation aid per pupil. Pirozzolo said he later asked Evener to calculate the foundation aid per pupil received by the small-city school districts in the state that Auburn is comparable to. He said that out of the comparable small school districts they looked at, Auburn had the second lowest foundation aid amount per pupil. Out of the districts within Cayuga County, Pirozzolo said Auburn received the least amount of foundation aid per pupil. He said that average was a little over $9,000. He said that would be over $7 million worth of revenue that would come to Auburn. He said he plans to use those figures when advocating for the district. "I'm not looking to get the most money in Cayuga County, but we should at least be getting the average," Pirozzolo said. Pirozzolo said, however, that the meetings went well. He said afterward that Sen. Pam Helming helped set up the meeting with Mayer. He praised Mayer in particular, saying she was "empathetic and really understands what Auburn was going through and just said that she would really try and help us the best she can." "That's all I can ask for: Somebody that listens and is going to help advocate for us." Pirozzolo said these were the best advocacy meetings he's been to since he started attending 12 years ago. Staff writer Kelly Rocheleau can be reached at (315) 282-2243 or kelly.rocheleau@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @KellyRocheleau. Love 0 Funny 1 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. AUBURN On the same day nearly 1,000 advocates in Albany rallied in support of a bill in the state Legislature that could grant driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants, a Cayuga County Legislature committee approved a resolution voicing their opposition to the bill. The resolution, approved by the Public Works Committee, describes several "unacceptable security risks" that would result from the passage of the Driver's License Access and Privacy Act. The bill, from state Sen. Luis Sepulveda, D-Bronx, would authorize DMV offices to issue standard, non-federal use drivers' licenses to residents without a Social Security number including undocumented immigrants. Social Security numbers have been required for New York licenses since a 2001 policy issued by then-Gov. George Pataki. Cayuga County Clerk Sue Dwyer asked the committee to approve the resolution, citing several concerns, including that she did not want her staff to be responsible for verifying an applicant's supporting documents and approving a license. Dwyer suggested that the process for granting licenses to undocumented individuals should follow a similar procedure as passport applications. In that process, Dwyer said in an email, county staff send an applicant's information and documents to a federal office responsible for making the final decision. "I don't think that's going to happen with this," Dwyer said. The resolution was tabled at the Government Operations Committee just prior, but was approved when in front of the Public Works Committee. Legislator Joseph DeForest, D-Venice, who chairs Government Operations, asked the other committee to more fully review information regarding the state bill, including a resolution approved last week by the Tompkins County Legislature supporting the bill. "If you're not familiar with that argument and are basing your decision on what we've heard to date in this chamber, then I think you're making a decision uninformed," DeForest said. DeForest and Legislator Ryan Foley, D-Auburn, voted against the resolution while all other committee members supported it. Legislator Timothy Lattimore, R-Auburn, said he trusted Dwyer's experience in recommending the resolution. "If she's against it, I'm against it," Lattimore said. The Tompkins County Resolution cites a number of reasons to approve the bill, including that public safety would be improved both by requiring undocumented immigrants to be properly tested and educated on driving laws and fostering cooperation between law enforcement and immigrant communities. Dwyer also provided legislators with a copy of an email with Cayuga County Sheriff Brian Schenck, as well as local farmers and an insurance company, disputing several arguments used by supporters of the legislation. According to the email, Schenck, in a phone call with Dwyer, expressed concern that forged documents could be used to obtain legitimate identification under an assumed identity. "This could potentially create a very real public safety risk if we are licensing individuals without knowing who they are," the email reads. Rebecca Fuentes, of the Worker's Center of CNY, which has advocated on behalf of undocumented immigrants in Cayuga County, was one of the many activists in Albany rallying in support of the bill Tuesday. Fuentes said many undocumented immigrants are either already driving without proper licensing or are taken advantage of by what are essentially black-market taxis because they "don't really have any other choice." Not allowing undocumented immigrants access to licenses is also "unfair," Fuentes said, given that many work, especially on farms, without being given accompanying privileges. "If you are complaining that people are undocumented here then why are we taking their labor?" Fuentes said. "They are working, they are your neighbors, they are people you depend upon." The resolution will now go to the full Cayuga County Legislature for approval. The state bill is currently listed as being in committee in both the state Senate and Assembly. Staff writer Ryan Franklin can be reached at (315) 282-2252 or ryan.franklin@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @RyanNYFranklin Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) A Pennsylvania woman convicted of murder for seducing a teenage neighbor into killing her husband at their vacation home in upstate New York has been granted parole after serving more than 26 years in state prison. A New York parole board has ordered 54-year-old Laurie Kellogg released from prison by April 16. In its March 8 decision, the board cited Kellogg's good behavior in prison, her volunteer work as a teaching assistant and her "seemingly sincere remorse" for the 1991 crime. Kellogg was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for the death of 43-year-old Malcolm Kellogg, who was shot four times in the head while he slept in the couple's cottage on Cayuga Lake. Laurie Kellogg, who was 26 at the time, claimed he physically and verbally abused her and had sexually assaulted two of her teenage friends. Her 18-year-old neighbor from suburban Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Denver McDowell, pleaded guilty to killing Kellogg. In his trial, he testified that he was on LSD at the time and that Kellogg became his lover to persuade him to kill her husband. He remains in prison serving a 25-years-to-life sentence. On the night of the crime, Laurie Kellogg traveled to the cottage from her home in Pennsylvania with four teenagers, including McDowell. She claimed in court that she went there only to tell her husband she was leaving him. At the time, the crime was compared to the case of Pamela Smart, a 22-year-old New Hampshire schoolteacher convicted in March 1991 of persuading her 17-year-old boyfriend to kill her husband. The Kellogg case inspired a 1994 made-for-TV movie on ABC starring Jennie Garth and Gregory Harrison. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 An Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed shortly after takeoff from Ethiopia's capital on Sunday morning, killing all 157 on board, authorities said, as grieving families rushed to airports in Addis Ababa and the destination, Nairobi. Access to information and public records is crucial in order for student journalists to serve the public and share information that may otherwise not be accessible for professional journalists in the field. Student journalists learn by going out and reporting in the field. We try to practice the same professional strategies the professionals use. When we use the Freedom of Information Law, we too are pulling back the dark curtain that sometimes shields information from the public. In training to produce professional journalism, students are sent to gather information by interviewing government officials and using the Freedom of Information Law to acquire public records about various subjects. When we make efforts to collect information for stories, government officials sometimes dont offer us the same courtesies they do to professional journalists. Members of the city Common Council have asked students to contact them after a meeting through email, text, or social media rather than staying for an interview because theyre rushing to go home. These stories are treated as breaking news events to prepare us for the real world. We compete with local news organizations to scoop news and features. Sources tend to categorize student journalists as unprofessional, untrained, or unsure of what we are doing in the field. This mindset contributes to sources often stalling our efforts to get to the truth. Transparency between sources and the reporter is important for various reasons. One reason is that it builds rapport for the source to share intimate stories for which to connect with the readers. To get to these stories, student journalists interview people multiple times to gain an understanding of who the person is. We are trained to conduct interviews with a central focus and ask many questions, but most of all, listen to our subjects. Students conduct intense research prior to their interviews. However, our path to reporting stories is often thwarted before the research or interview has begun. Student journalists provide a public service to their communities when writing about neighborhood issues. When elected officials are transparent and forthright with student journalists, theyre demonstrating the behaviors that landed them in office. According to the Open Meetings Law, minutes and agendas are to be available to the public one week after the executive session. When representatives of local governments obstruct access to information or resist simple requests for public documents, they are violating the spirit of our open records laws. Students reporters impact the local media. Last month, an Alabama newspaper printed an editorial calling for the return of the KKK, and that event became national news. How? Student journalists took a photo of the editorial and away it went. We regularly use Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests to obtain records from government outlets ranging from the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to the citys fire department reports. Document-based journalism is something we are taught from day one. Its the toughest kind of reporting, but the results and effects of the final publication are rewarding, and it can lead to real change. When a government agency like the Corrections Department makes information available online, student journalists and the public benefit from access to that information. When reporters at Saint Rose updated a story about a hit-and-run crash involving a student who died, access to the states database enabled those students to update the story for their community of readers. No other local news outlets reported that fact. Thats why Freedom of Information and Open Meetings laws are so critical, as they allow not just journalists, but the public as well, to see what elected officials are doing, especially when it comes to spending taxpayer dollars. This column was originally published by The Daily Gazette in Schenectady. Seriah Sargenton is a senior at The College of Saint Rose in Albany studying communications with a minor in creative writing. She is the assistant editor of The Chronicle, the college newspaper. David Meister is a junior from East Greenbush studying broadcast journalism. He is the sports editor of The Chronicle and vice president of Saint Rose Television. Caroline Aurigemma is a senior studying communications at St. Rose. She is the copy editor and photography editor of The Chronicle and president of Saint Rose Radio Club. All are students in Dr. Cailin Browns advanced journalism class. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 SAN FRANCISCOSexual Assault Awareness Month is an annual campaign slated for every April to raise public awareness about sexual violence and educate communities on how to prevent it. Good Vibrations is very proud to collaborate with iconic nonprofit Bay Area Women Against Rape by hosting four events to highlight their crucial work and blending the two organizations strengths on behalf of survivors of sexual assault, focusing on uplifting survivors to celebrate and reclaim pleasure, desire and intimacy on their terms. Good Vibrations has had a longstanding relationship with BAWAR, providing donations and sex positivity trainings for their staff and advocates throughout the year, said Educational Outreach and Affiliate Manager Andy Duran. It became clear that there arent a lot of resources designed to help support those who have experienced sexual assault in reclaiming pleasure and intimacy, both alone or with partners. This topic is incredible important, not just to us but to the communities we serve, and we knew more needed to be done. We are honored to offer this new workshop series! To launch this month of awareness and education, BAWAR and Good Vibes will host a free Meet and Greet on March 27, 6:30-8:30 p.m. at the Good Vibrations Lakeshore store (3219 Lakeshore Ave, Oakland, CA 94610). Enjoy snacks and sips and meet staff members from BAWAR and Good Vibrations. Peruse SAAM workshop content and materials, meet the facilitators, ask questions, RSVP, and celebrate a pleasure-based approach in the anti-sexual violence movement. Historically, this movement has been more focused on issues surrounding violence and less focused on including discussion of sex, sexual pleasure and sexual connection, and has not always validated the needs and/or practices of many communities, such as People of Color, LGBTQIA+ communities, people with disabilities, sex workers and people who practice kink, polyamory and consensual non-monogamy. By centering our bodies, our pleasures and our desires as a potential site for healing, we engage in an act of reclamation that can prove integral to the process of transcending trauma. Working to serve a diverse customer base, Good Vibrations staff often meet survivors of sexual assault or trauma; this is a significant source of sexual distress and problems. We are so very glad to offer this resource designed to give people access to pleasure and support, Good Vibrations Staff Sexologist Carol Queen PhD said. Additionally, BAWAR and Good Vibrations will present a Sex Ed for Survivors workshop series. On April 10, 17 and 24, from 6-8:30 p.m. at the Good Vibrations Polk Street store (1620 Polk St, San Francisco, CA 94109) there will be a three-part workshop series to be collaboratively facilitated by BAWAR and Good Vibes staff. Participants are encouraged to attend all three, though each workshop can be attended on its own. Experience a different kind of sex education that deconstructs myths, blasts apart biases, and invites in a truly intersectional approach, with attention to the ways the bodies of people who have experienced sexual violence may be impacted, both somatically and psychologically. While these are not intensives, participants should expect to leave with introductory-to-intermediate level information, exercises and ideas. The BAWAR/Good Vibrations team will provide presentations, facilitate group discussions and give toy demos. Participants will be invited to participate in PG- rated exercises (no touching, exposure or disclosure required!) and will always be given the option to step out if they need some space. This workshop series centers the experience of survivors; however, it is not necessary to identify as a survivor to participate. The individual workshop descriptions are below. While this is not group support or therapy, participants can contact BAWAR at [email protected] or call the BAWAR office at (510) 430-1298 for information and referrals to such support. For immediate emotional support, utilize the 24-hour hotline at (510) 8457273. Tickets are available through Eventbrite; attend one class or all three. Early registration is encouraged, as space is limited. Part one: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/survivors-workshop-series-part-one-what-we-carry-with-bay-area-women-against-rape-tickets-58011116812 Part two: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/survivors-workshop-series-part-two-reclaiming-ourselves-with-bay-area-women-against-rape-tickets-58013354505 Part three: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/survivors-workshop-series-part-three-inviting-others-with-bay-area-women-against-rape-at-polk-good-tickets-58015029515 Two pricing options are built into these RSVP pages: a $10 entry fee for those who can afford it, and free admission for those who need that option. For every copy of The Sex & Pleasure Book: Good Vibrations Guide to Great Sex for Everyone (authored by Carol Queen with Shar Rednour) sold during April, Good Vibrations will donate $5 directly to BAWAR. Good Vibrations is the premiere sex-positive adult toy retailer in the US. An iconic brand and one of the world's first sex toy shops to focus specifically on women's pleasure and sexual education, Good Vibrations was founded by Joani Blank in 1977 to provide women with a safe, welcoming and non-judgmental place to shop for erotic toys. Still a feminist-owned business, Good Vibrations has since expanded to include all people across the gender spectrum, and is a place where customers can come for education, high quality products, and information promoting sexual health, pleasure and empowerment. Customers can shop Good Vibrations' expertly curated product selection across any of its nine retail locations or on the GoodVibes.com website, where they can also find a wealth of information pertaining to sexual pleasure, exploration and education. BAWAR (which represents and serves all genders), the first rape crisis center in the country, has addressed the problem of sexual assault since 1971. Through their work, rape and incest survivors can receive the quality counseling and advocacy they need, and the community receives education regarding sexual assault issues. BAWAR defines sexual violence by the narratives of the survivors who experienced the violence. We are here to believe and validate the community we serve in a trauma-informed, culturally appropriate and accessible way. Programs include presentations specifically designed for children and youth from middle school through college; outreach to men currently incarcerated for violent offenses; and professional trainings for emergency room staff, therapists, clergy, educators and police officers. For more, visit BAWAR.org/. Christ Chavez/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- Former Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke will make his first trip to Iowa as a potential presidential candidate this weekend, a move that fuels the near-constant speculation that he is days away from entering the crowded field of Democrats in the race for the White House. O'Rourke announced on Monday that he will head to Iowa to campaign for state senate candidate Eric Giddens, who is running in a special election on March 19th that has attracted the attention of other 2020 contenders like Senators Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar. "Supporting [Giddens] for state Senate is the way that we get Iowa and by extension, this country back on the right rack," O'Rourke said in a video posted to Twitter by Giddens. "[University of Northern Iowa], we're counting on you, and we're looking forward to seeing you soon. Adios." A spokesman for O'Rourke, Chris Evans, confirmed the trip and added that the former congressman will be in Waterloo on Saturday "to kickoff an afternoon of canvassing, GOTV, and grassroots organizing," for Giddens. O'Rourke has also been running ads on Facebook teasing an upcoming announcement, another sign that he is looking to engage the base of supporters he gained during his Senate bid. "People in communities across the country have been reaching out and asking me if I'm planning on running in 2020," read one ad that was still active as of Tuesday afternoon. "Amy and I have made a decision on that. Sign up today to be first to know what's next. Id like for you to be a part of it." O'Rourke's possible foray into the presidential race would be the culmination of an unlikely political rise that began with the 3-term congressman's decision to challenge Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2018 U.S. Senate race in Texas. His unorthodox and ultimately unsuccessful Senate campaign, which shunned traditional strategists and instead relied on the candidate's organic appeal, broke fundraising records and earned O'Rourke a national profile that catapulted him into the presidential discussion. But in the aftermath of his loss the prospect of a presidential bid remained unclear, and O'Rourke was panned by some for his decision to embark on a solo road trip where he chronicled his interactions with everyday Americans as he mulled his next political move. Aides to O'Rourke have continued to remain tight-lipped about the Democrat's future plans, but the upcoming travel is the clearest signal yet that a presidential candidacy is in the works. However the trip to Iowa this weekend comes as O'Rourke appears to have lost early ground against his potential Democratic rivals. While a December 2018 Des Moines Register poll of likely Iowa Democratic caucus-goers showed O'Roruke garnering 11 percent of the vote, a poll by the same outlet released this past weekend showed his support had dipped to just 5 percent. But with his potential appeal in the Democratic field and a general election still unknown, the Club for Growth, a prominent conservative organization, recently released a five-figure television and digital advertising buy in Iowa assailing O'Rourke's "blue-blood pedigree," and labeling him a "scion of a political family," referencing the wealth of his real-estate developer father-in-law. "Beto ORourke has long sold Democrats a bill of goods, pretending to be a liberal superstar while exploiting his father-in-laws connections to climb the political ladder. Its time Democratic voters in Iowa know who the real Beto ORourke is an entitled, corrupt political climber," Club for Growth Action President David McIntosh wrote in a statement. The announcement last month that he had made a decision on his political future followed a high-profile interview with Oprah Winfrey in early February, where O'Rourke said we would make a decision on a presidential run by the end of the month. "We want to play as great a role as possible making sure that this country lives up to our expectations, to the promise, to the potential that we all know her to have," O'Rourke said. A few weeks after that interview O'Rourke led a counter-rally during President Donald Trump's visit to El Paso, an enticing split-screen that provided him with a platform to directly take on Trump in his hometown. The former congressman also visited the state of Wisconsin last month, meeting with students at a technical college in Milwaukee and at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. If O'Rourke does declare a presidential bid he will be the at least the 15th Democrat to enter the Democratic race and vie for the chance to unseat President Donald Trump. Copyright 2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. New Braunfels, TX (78130) Today Partly cloudy this evening. Scattered thunderstorms developing after midnight. Areas of dense fog. Low 64F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.. Tonight Partly cloudy this evening. Scattered thunderstorms developing after midnight. Areas of dense fog. Low 64F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%. LIMASSOL, CyprusExecutives of popular adult live cam site Stripchat.com recently attended the 2019 Latin America Adult Business Expo (LALExpo) and Awards Show in Cali, Colombia, and wound up taking home the prized trophy for Best International Cam Site. Such an esteemed award from the largest adult industry trade show in Latin America is an incredible honor for any company, but for Rick Morales, Business Development & PR Manager for Stripchat, its an especially important milestone. In 2016 we won the LALExpo Award for Best Emerging Cam Site, in 2017 for Best European Cam Site and in 2018, Stripcash won Best Affiliate Program Now in February 2019, Stripchat has won the award for Best International Cam Site, said Morales. This is proof that we are not emerging anymore We are working hard to become leaders of the live cam industry, and so far we are on the right track. We are one of the Top Five companies in this industry a five-year growth goal that weve already achieved in two years. So we are doubly proud of our hard work and progress that we have realized in such a short time, and look forward to continuing to innovate and redefine the live cam experience for Stripchat users for many more years to come. Middle East Monitor Over the past six months, 10.6 million Egyptian women have attended clinics on family planning, official data revealed yesterday. The governments half-yearly report added that the workshops were part of the so-called Rapid Population Growth and Urbanization programme, which was recently initiated by the government and aim at reducing population growth and raising awareness of its negative impact on the society. The number of attendees at the family planning clinics reached eight million, the report noted, explaining that more than 10,900 workshops were organised to raise awareness on the importance of family planning and the reduced population growth. 1,147,861 women across 2,257 Egyptian villages have received reproductive health and family planning government services, the government pointed out. The program also included the development of the existing urban cities through pumping about 8, 798,000 Egyptian pounds of investment, in addition to the establishment of the so-called Fourth Generation Integrated Cities, such as the Cairo New Administrative Capital. The government, the report added, have invested 18,185,000 Egyptian pounds in the development of 163-kilometre length water networks, 145 sewage networks, and 308-kilometre length electricity nets. The Egyptian government has been carrying out numerous family planning campaigns in several provinces, in an attempt to rescue the countrys striving economy. Last July, the countrys Ministry of Health and Population, represented in the population and family planning department, launched a family planning campaign, dubbed she is capable, in various governorates, during which family planning experts volunteered as consultants for the families. Gov. Roy Cooper congratulates family members of Appeals Court Judge Mark Davis (at left), whom Cooper appointed Monday to the N.C. Supreme Court. (CJ photo by Dan Way) Mark Davis said he is the happiest person in North Carolina after being appointed to a seat on the N.C. Supreme Court. Senate leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, is not so pleased.Davis is a Democratic member of the N.C. Court of Appeals. With his appointment, the Supreme Court now has a 6-1 partisan makeup favoring Democrats instead of the prior 5-2 balance.Cooper elevated Davis to fill the associate justice seat left vacant Feb. 12 when the governor appointed Cheri Beasley to become chief justice. She succeeded Republican Mark Martin, who left his post at the end of February to become dean of the Regent University law school in Virginia Beach, Virginia.This is the second time Davis has been appointed to fill a vacancy created by Beasley's promotion. Former Gov. Bev Perdue appointed him to the Appeals Court in 2012 when Beasley was named to the Supreme Court. He took office in 2013. Davis, a Jacksonville native, had been general counsel for Perdue for two years, and a state special deputy attorney general prior to that. He spent 13 years in private practice.Davis said during a news conference at the Executive Mansion, surrounded by his wife and two of this three children.Former Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jackson, a Republican, praised Cooper's pick on Twitter.she said in her post.But Berger was not so thrilled.Berger said in a press release.Berger said.Berger previously criticized Cooper for appointing Beasley as chief justice over Senior Associate Justice Paul Newby, a Republican. Berger and Republican Party officials said it is customary for the senior associate justice to replace a chief justice who leaves office.Davis said he has tremendous reverence and deep respect for the work of the Supreme Court. He said its role is vital to protect the rights of all North Carolinians, to make sure the state constitution is not violated, and to ensure every case is decided impartially and fairly, based on the facts, and the law.Cooper said. Davis has the legal skills, integrity, and commitment to public service to meet that obligation, he said.Davis has served as an adjunct professor at Campbell University School of Law, and has volunteered his time with various service organizations. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the UNC-Chapel Hill and its law school. He holds a master's of law degree in judicial studies from Duke University School of Law.Davis' term will run through 2020, when he's eligible to run for a full eight-year term on the court. Tucker Carlson giving his insight into politics, governing and the media in March, 2012 at a NACo (National Association of Counties): Above. photo by Stan Deatherage Tucker Carlson giving his insight into politics, governing and the media in March, 2012 at a NACo (National Association of Counties): Above. photo by Stan Deatherage This weekend, Media Matters released a compendium of old Tucker Carlson quotes from the period 2006 to 2011 - a period during which Carlson routinely called into the shock-jock show Bubba The Love Sponge. Carlson, among other things, called Martha Stewart's daughter a "c***," joked about fourteen-year-old girls sexually experimenting, and defended rape facilitator Warren Jeffs. It's not good material. It also appeared on a show called Bubba The Love Sponge. A decade ago.This was, from the first, an obvious political hit. Media Matters, contrary to media descriptions, isn't aIt is a political smear factory designed to perform precisely that function against anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. The organization was founded by professional smear artist David Brock, in conjunction with the Center for American Progress, an organization itself founded by John Podesta, the Clinton White House Chief of Staff. Hillary Clinton herself advised Brock on the creation of the organization. Mega-donor Leftist George Soros has poured money into the organization, announcing in 2010, "Media Matters is one of the few groups that attempts to hold Fox News accountable for the false and misleading information they so often broadcast. I am supporting Media Matters in an effort to more widely publicize the challenge Fox News poses to civil and informed discourse in our democracy." Media Matters had regular strategy calls with the Obama White House.For years, Media Matters has operated as an aggressive wing of Clintonworld, going so far as to suggest hiring private investigators to dig up dirt on Fox News hosts. Media Matters consistently attempts to tear down conservative hosts by either ripping them out of context or by digging up old Bad Things, then astroturfing public pressure against advertisers . In reality, no real grassroots pressure exists in the vast majority of cases; the data show that secondary boycotts actually don't materialize. But Media Matters simply contacts its list of activists, then has them contact advertisers, saying that they'll stop using a product if that advertiser doesn't pull its advertising. A few tweets or well-placed phone calls can knock an advertiser off a show. This last tactic, the launching of secondary boycotts, has been successfully used against advertisers across a broad range of conservative programming; advertisers are, understandably, risk averse, and so take any sign of discontent as a rationale for pulling their money. This leads, eventually, to the complete abandonment of advertisers support on political shows - at least from the right.The tactic works across the aisle. My business partner, Jeremy Boreing, and I, launched a direct counter to Media Matters to achieve a sort of mutually assured destruction with Truth Revolt. It worked. We helped take Martin Bashir and Alec Baldwin off of MSNBC. It's not difficult. A motivated group of politically-oriented people can remove the advertiser base of nearly any show.We openly stated our goals at the time - and we acknowledged that we wanted to end this sort of weaponization of astroturfed boycotts. And I've consistently taken the position that digging up Bad Things is generally bad faith and immoral. Media Matters isn't on a quest to purify the public space. They're on a quest to destroy their political opponents, which is why they defended MSNBC's Joy Reid.But those boycotts continue apace. This time, Tucker Carlson is the target. In the past, Media Matters has targeted Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Megyn Kelly, and pretty much anyone remotely associated with the right.This time, Media Matters has seized on Carlson's old comments. That's the worst form of this nonsense, because it isn't even a critique of something happening in the here and now (bad current comments are more obviously indefensible than older comments, which often have context ignored in bad faith). And the media, who largely mirror Media Matters' political angle, treated all of this as a shocking revelation: conservative Fox News host said Bad Things a while ago! And granted, he said some actual bad things.Now, let's remember a few things. First, this was shock jock radio. For those who have not listened to shock jock radio, there is a reason it is not called comfort radio - it's about saying deliberately shocking and provocative things to elicit a response. Pretending to be appalled by comments on shock jock radio a decade ago - comments that were made when Carlson worked for MSNBC, and said this stuff on a very popular New York-based radio show - is obviously silly.Second, there's no evidence Carlson clings to these views. If he does, it shouldn't be difficult to ask him about them. This would be the good faith way of raising the issue: asking Carlson about his views. After all, he is alive right now, while he doesn't actually have access to a time machine that would allow him to erase his old comments. And we are also alive right now! How convenient!But Media Matters and the media more generally don't want Carlson asked about his views. That might allow him to explain himself. They would prefer to flash freeze his views a decade ago, without reference to his subsequent career, the context in which he made those statements, or the societal context that valued shock jock stupidity. That allows everyone to schoolmarm Carlson over stuff they ignored when he said them.Finally, literally everyone can be subjected to their Fifteen Minutes Hate over Bad Things they've said. Hell, I have an entire list, updated routinely, of stuff I regret saying. So do we all.The attack strategy on Carlson is dangerous because it applies to anyone who has been public, and offers no chance of explanation or redemption. The chances that public figures haven't said something problematic over the course of years is effectively zero. So, here's the deal: if you wanted James Gunn not to lose his job -- or Joy Reid, or Sarah Jeong, or Kevin Hart, or Ralph Northam, or a bevy of others who have had old comments "resurfaced" by the scolds of social media - then you shouldn't be standing with this career assassination attempt against Carlson.This sort of stuff makes for a worse country. It's not meant to purify our public discourse. It's meant to club to death opponents using the convenience of a Google search. The use of the tactic means that only the shameless (people who will never apologize for anything) or neophytes (people who have never said anything) or radical Leftists who will be let off the hook for anything (see Reid, Joy) will be tolerated. That's the goal. So let's not pretend Media Matters is making the world a better place. They're making it a worse one, one fishing expedition at a time. On this episode of Acton Line, Caroline Roberts speaks with Actons senior editor, Rev. Ben Johnson, about a new study released by a free market think tank in Denmark, claiming that Denmark isnt actually socialist. Although Denmark is regularly cited as a country whose socialist policies have done good, this isnt the whole story. Denmark isnt technically socialist, and the current welfare state program has done harm despite what you may have heard. After that, Alan R. Crippen, II, Chief of Exhibits, Programs, and Public Engagement for the Faith & Liberty Discovery Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, joins Daniel Hugger on the show. Crippen and Hugger discuss the legacy of William Penn, the Quaker son of an aristocratic Royal Navy Admiral gave America its first successful experiment of liberty Pennsylvania. Check out these additional resources on this weeks podcast topics: Read Denmark to American leftists: Were not socialist, by Rev. Ben Johnson Read the report on socialism in Denmark Learn more about the Center for Political Studies in Denmark Register here to attend the lunch and lecture event on William Penn and the American Experiment of Liberty Learn more about William Penn Do you have questions for the Acton Line team that you would like answered in future podcast segments? We want to hear from you! Leave a message at 888-705-4180 or email [email protected] Lastly, if you like what you heard on todays episode, dont forget to give us a rating on iTunes. Legal notices 1) The material on this blog has been created by W. Blake Gray, is protected under US copyright law and cannot be used without his permission. 2) To the FTC: In the course of my work, I accept free samples, meals and other considerations. I do not trade positive reviews or coverage for money or any financial considerations, unlike certain famous print publications which have for-profit wine clubs but, because they are not classified as "bloggers," are not required by the FTC to post a notice like this. With the European Union grounding the 737 MAX, North America is one of the last places on Earth you can get a ride on Boeing's deathliner. Despite the brand-new jet's disturbingly similar crashes and hundreds of dead travelers, the FAA and U.S.-based carriers insist it's safe to fly. Several airline pilots disagree. Pilots repeatedly voiced safety concerns about the Boeing 737 Max 8 to federal authorities, with one captain calling the flight manual "inadequate and almost criminally insufficient" several months before Sunday's Ethiopian Air crash that killed 157 people, an investigation by The Dallas Morning News found. The disclosures found by The News reference problems with an autopilot system, and they all occurred during the ascent after takeoff. Many mentioned the plane suddenly nosing down. While records show these flights occurred in October and November, the airlines the pilots were flying for is redacted from the database. Will another one go down before the problem is fixed? Capitalism is all about risk and inertia, and American businesses love taking risks and doing nothing. The new EU Copyright Directive will be up for its final vote in the week of Mar 25, and like any piece of major EU policy, it has been under discussion for many years and had all its areas of controversy resolved a year ago but then German MEP Axel Voss took over as the "rapporteur" (steward) of the Directive and reintroduced the long-abandoned idea of forcing all online services to use filters to block users from posting anything that anyone, anywhere claimed was their copyrighted work. There are so many obvious deficiencies with adding filters to every message-board, online community, and big platform that the idea became political death, as small- and medium-sized companies pointed out that you can't fix the EU's internet by imposing costs that only US Big Tech firms could afford to pay, thus wiping out all European competition. So Voss switched tactics, and purged all mention of filters from the Directive, and began to argue that he didn't care how online services guaranteed that their users didn't infringe anyone's copyrights, even copyrights in works that had only been created a few moments before and that no one had ever seen before, ever. Voss said that it didn't matter how billions of user posts were checked, just so long as it all got filtered. (It's like saying, "I expect you to deliver a large, four-legged African land-mammal with a trunk, tusk and a tail, but it doesn't have to be an elephant any animal that fits those criteria will do). Now, in a refreshingly frank interview, Voss has come clean: the only way to comply with Article 13 will be for every company to install filters. When asked whether filters will be sufficient to keep Youtube users from infringing copyright, Voss said, "If the platform's intention is to give people access to copyrighted works, then we have to think about whether that kind of business should exist." That is, if Article 13 makes it impossible to have an online platform where the public is allowed to make work available without first having to submit it to legal review, maybe there should just no longer be anywhere for the public to make works available. Here's what Europeans can do about this: * Pledge 2019: make your MEP promise to vote against Article 13. The vote comes just before elections, so MEPs are extremely interested in the issues on voters' minds. * Save Your Internet: contact your MEP and ask them to protect the internet from this terrible idea. * Turn out and protest on March 23, two days ahead of the vote. Protests are planned in cities and towns in every EU member-state. Voss stellt Existenz von Youtube infrage [Friedhelm Greis/Golem.de] (English translation) - Boeing has been under immense pressure as more countries joined Ethiopia to ground their passenger jets - China, Mexico, Ethiopia, Brazil and South Africa have already grounded their Max 8 jets following the growing concern about the planes' safety - The decision was followed by the Sunday, 10 March crash involving an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 jet PAY ATTENTION: Click See First under the Following tab to see Briefly.co.za News on your News Feed! Following the unfortunate Sunday, 10 March crash disaster involving Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8, pressure has been mounted on Boeing, the manufacturer of the narrow-shaped plane, as more countries continue to ground the 737 Max 8 jets. Daily Mail reported that India's Jet Airways on Tuesday, 12 March followed the paths of China, Mexico, Ethiopia, Brazil and South Africa by grounding its Max 8 jets amid the growing concern about the planes' safety. Briefly.co.za recalls that the Sunday crash killed all the 149 passengers and eight crew members aboard less than 10 minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa. The disaster occurred five months after another crash disaster involving a Malaysian jet of the same product killed 189 passengers on board. READ ALSO: Atheist gives reasons for Ethiopian Airline's airplane crash Australia had earlier suspended 737 MAX aircraft from flying to or from the country while Singapore was reported to have issued the same orders at its busy Changi airport. Report also claimed that apart from Indonesia and other countries that have taken the same action, Vietnam has also stopped granting licences for the jet pending the outcome of the investigation into the cause of the crash. US regulators have ordered Boeing to make urgent improvements to the aircraft model as passengers have taken to social media to register their displeasure and concerns about the security of the so-called 'killer jet'. Reports claimed that those who commented on the incident have demanded that they be grounded globally pending the time confidence will be passed on the airliner. PAY ATTENTION: Do you want to know what's trending on Briefly.co.za? Join our WhatsApp group today. Briefly.co.za earlier reported that a Lesotho-born climate specialist was among 157 people who lost their lives in the tragic plane crash. Max Thabiso Edkins worked for Connect4Climate as a climate specialist and he was reportedly on his way to Kenya to attend a week-long conference. Enjoyed reading our story? Download BRIEFLY's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major South African news! Source: Briefly.co.za For many years now I have followed the Book of Common Prayer's thirty-day schedule for praying through the Psalms, and during November I used Robert Alte... 1 week ago - T. S. Eliot Thoughts After Lambeth "The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide." Canada and the United States joined authorities around the world on Wednesday and grounded the Boeing Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft, days after the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157. Transport Minister Marc Garneau announced the decision to issue a safety notice restricting commercial use of the aircraft during a press conference on Wednesday, citing new information from satellite tracking data that suggested a possible, although unproven similarity to the deadly Lion Air crash involving the same aircraft in October 2018. Transport Canadas safety notice, which goes into effect immediately, restricts all commercial passenger flights of the Boeing Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft from arriving, departing or overflying Canadian airspace. Until Wednesday, Canada and the United States were among the key holdouts that were not grounding the Boeing aircraft. Garneau said that there was absolutely no political pressure being put on Canada to keep the aircraft, which is manufactured and certified in the U.S., flying. A few hours after Canada announced the safety order, U.S. president Donald Trump said the Federal Aviation Administration will be issuing an emergency order to ground the Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft in the U.S. effective immediately. The FAA had issued statements as recently as Tuesday saying that there was no evidence that would warrant a grounding of the jet. Boeing said in a statement Wednesday it supports the FAAs decision to temporarily suspend operations of the entire global fleet 371 planes of 737 Max 8 aircraft. While Garneau cautioned that the satellite information obtained on Wednesday is not conclusive and further evidence is required to determine the cause of the crash, he stressed that Canadians need to be able to fly with confidence. There are similarities that sort of exceed a certain threshold in our minds with respect to the possible cause of what happened in Ethiopia, Garneau said Wednesday. Story continues This is not conclusive, but it is something that points possibly in that direction and that is why we are taking these measures. The safety notice will ground all Boeing Max 8s flown by Canadian airlines, including 24 jets belonging to Air Canada, 13 to WestJet Airlines Ltd. and four to Sunwing Airlines. AIRLINES SAY EXPECT DISRUPTIONS, DELAYS An Air Canada Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft is parked next to a gate at Trudeau Airport in Montreal, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Canadas transport minister says the country is closing air space to the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jetliner. (Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press via AP) Air Canada and WestJet released a statements on Wednesday saying the airlines will comply with Transport Canadas decision immediately. According to Raymond James analyst Ben Cherniavsky, the Boeing 737 Max 8 represents about 10 per cent of both Air Canada and WestJets total fleet. Air Canada said it is working to rebook impacted customers, but given the airline flies on average between 9,000 and 12,000 passengers on 737 Max jets each day, delays in rebooking should be expected. WestJet also said the decision will impact travel plans for some guests. We ask for understanding as we work to rebook all guests affected as quickly as possible, WestJet chief executive Ed Sims said in a statement. Garneau said Canadian passengers should expect disruptions as a result of the safety notice. There is some disruption and yes its unfortunate, but we must put safety at the top of the agenda, Garneau said, adding that the Canadian airlines have been very understanding in dealing with the situation. There will be some disruption, there is no question about that, and hopefully well be able to resolve the issue in the coming weeks and get the Max 8 up and flying. But for the moment, caution has to dominate. Canada had been facing increased pressure to ground the jet, after authorities around the world announced grounding orders, including the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), as well as authorities in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands. Sunwing Airlines released a statement late Tuesday that it would temporarily suspend operations of its four Boeing 737 Max 8 jets. Shares of Boeing, the worlds biggest plane maker, have fallen about 13 per cent since Sundays crash, representing approximately $32 billion in market value. Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android. Staff allegedly threatened to remove Emily OConnor if she did not cover up. (Photos: Instagram/Twitter) A woman says she was forced to cover up her inappropriate outfit on a flight. Emily OConnor, 21, from England, claimed a staffers from Thomas Cook, a travel deals company and airline, threatened to remove her from a flight she boarded from Birmingham in the United Kingdom to Tenerife, Spain. Flying from Bham to Tenerife, Thomas Cook told me that they were going to remove me from the flight if I didnt cover up as I was causing offence and was inappropriate. They had 4 flight staff around me to get my luggage to take me off the plane. pic.twitter.com/r28nvSYaoY Emily OConnor (@emroseoconnor) March 12, 2019 just a bit more context for those asking: wore this through the airport (security, passport control etc), boarded the plane, told to cover up by the greeting staff, sat down, flight manager and 4 flight staff said I would be removed unless I put a jacket on Emily OConnor (@emroseoconnor) March 12, 2019 I was given a jacket by my cousin sitting at the front of the plane and they did not leave until I physically put it on. They made comments over the speaker about the situation and left me shaking and upset on my own. Emily OConnor (@emroseoconnor) March 12, 2019 It was so mortifying, she tells Yahoo UK. I was so upset and they could clearly see that yet they continued to note how inappropriate and offensive I was. I was really close to crying. Many on social media expressed their anger over the situation in support of the young woman. Id raise hell over the way youve been treated. Its out of order. Catherine Yeboah (@catyeboah) March 13, 2019 What a dreadful way to treat a young lady , absolutely nothing offensive in what you are wearing .Thomas Cook cabin crew should be taken to task over this. Mal Yates (@MalcolmYates11) March 13, 2019 Its just a crop top!! And just a female going to a HOT destination.. she expected to wear a jumper?! Think all women who have flights already booked with @ThomasCookCares should wear one of these tops and the crew should be sacked for this!! Julianne Chambers (@juliaaachambers) March 13, 2019 Others including some who claimed to work for airlines commented that they had seen people wearing significantly less on flights. Story continues This is awful! I was on a flight to Portugal and there was a hen do on board and they were wearing a lot less than you were. @ThomasCookCares I think we need some answers, the way this girl was treated was absolutely disgusting. Chantelle. (@alanashbysbitch) March 13, 2019 Im crew myself and would not think twice to ask you to cover up, there is no policy on what you can and cannot wear! That is awful to see that the crew on board made you feel that way, disgusting! Jade Charlotte (@jadecharlottex) March 13, 2019 I work at an airport, people come through dressed like this all the time? Ive seen guys wearing less on stag dos for fun and not once have I ever heard of someone not being allowed on for inappropriate wear? Come on @ThomasCookUK not cool. z (@ZaylieLincoln38) March 13, 2019 A spokesperson from Thomas Cook tells Yahoo UK they are sorry for how the situation was handled. We are sorry that we upset Ms OConnor. Its clear we could have handled the situation better. In common with most airlines we have an appropriate attire policy, the statement reads. This applies equally to men and women of all ages without discrimination. Our crews have the difficult task of implementing that policy and dont always get it right. Calgary police are looking to the public to help identify four men suspected in a $200,000 bitcoin fraud that included attacks in seven Canadian cities. The Calgary Police Service cybercrime team's investigation began in October 2018 when officers were tipped off to a major fraud involving transactions that target a Canadian bitcoin company. For 10 days in September 2018, police believe 112 fraudulent transactions were made at bitcoin kiosks in seven cities across the country, with about half taking place in Calgary. Other targeted cities include Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, Sherwood Park, Ottawa and Hamilton. Four suspects with what police describe as "in-depth knowledge or interest in cryptocurrency, bitcoin and/or blockchain technology" are accused of defrauding the bitcoin company of nearly $200,000 through "double spend attacks." Those attacks involve withdrawing money from a bitcoin kiosk and remotely canceling the transaction before the company can process the withdrawal. Each of the four suspects are accused of attacks in specific cities. Suspect One: Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Hamilton. Suspect Two: Calgary. Suspect Three: Winnipeg. Suspect Four: Sherwood Park. Agencies including the Toronto Police Service, Hamilton Police Service, Winnipeg Police Service and Halton Regional Police Service are assisting CPS. Calgary police are asking that regardless of jurisdiction, anyone with information about the identity of any of these suspects is asked to call the CPS's non-emergency line at 403-266-1234. People can also anonymously submit tips through Crime Stoppers. George and Amal Clooney enjoyed a royal date night on Tuesday evening. The pair stepped out for a dinner at Buckingham Palace hosted by Prince Charles The Princes Trust Group. The couple complemented each other in simple yet stylish looks with Amal, 41, wore a white strapless gown with a one-sleeved cape. George, 57, wore a classic black suit and tie. The dinner was attended by donors, supporters and ambassadors of The Princes Trust International, one of the royals landmark organizations. The couple shared laughs and smiles with Charles, 70, during the event. The dinner was also attended by actors Chiwetel Ejiofor, Luke Evans, Tamsin Egerton, Josh Hartnett and Benedict Cumberbatch. Amal and George Clooney with Prince Charles Chiwetel Ejiofor, Luke Evans, Tamsin Egerton, Josh Hartnett, Benedict Cumberbatch, Amal Clooney and George Clooney Princes Trust International works to support young people across several countries including Australia, Barbados, Canada, Greece, India, Malta and Pakistan. This isnt the first royal event the Clooneys have attended. Amal, a British barrister, is good friends with Meghan Markle and attended her wedding to Prince Harry last year with her husband accompanying her. Cant get enough of PEOPLEs Royals coverage? Sign up for our newsletter to get the latest updates on Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle and more! Amal also attended Meghans baby shower in New York last month. RELATED VIDEO: George Clooney Comes to Pregnant Meghan Markles Defense, Comparing Her Plight to Princess Dianas Held at the luxurious Mark hotel, Meghan and Amal were joined by Gayle King, Meghans wedding makeup artist Daniel Martin, former Suits costar Abigail Spencer, Toronto-based stylist Jessica Mulroney and designer Misha Nonoo. A border crossing between County Fermanagh and County Cavan in Northern Ireland. Photo: PA The UK government said on Wednesday that it does not plan on introducing checks or controls on goods moving across the land border into Northern Ireland in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Goods that remain in Northern Ireland will not be subject to tariffs unless they are transported to the UK. However, to prevent a border in the Irish Sea, goods moving between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK will not be checked. Tariffs will instead be applied using compliance and intelligence methods. The details of the unilateral plan which is intended to be temporary were published in a document on the same day that it was revealed that the UK will temporarily slash tariffs on some 87% of total imports in a no-deal scenario. READ MORE: UK government publishes temporary tariff regime for no-deal Brexit The government, the document says, recognises that Northern Irelands businesses and farmers will have concerns about its approach to the border. However these are the only steps the UK government can unilaterally take to deliver on our absolute commitment to avoid a hard border in the event of no deal. The plan will see it will introduce only measures that are strictly necessary to see the UK comply with international legal obligations, to protect the biosecurity of the island of Ireland, and to avoid the highest risks to Northern Ireland businesses. These measures will not require checks at the land border, the document says. To prevent unfair treatment of Northern Ireland businesses, goods arriving from Ireland would still be subject to the same VAT and excise duties as they are now. READ MORE: What is the Irish backstop, what is it for and why is it controversial? But the small businesses that trade across the border and are not currently VAT-registered will be able to file returns periodically and without any new processes at the border. Animals and animal products coming from outside the EU would need to enter Northern Ireland through a dedicated entry point, while certain types of plant materials will require certification and advanced notification. Story continues Because this regime is intended to be temporary, the government said that its priority would be to jointly agree with both Ireland and the European Commission on longer-term measures to avoid a hard border. The government has been clear that a deal with the European Union is the best outcome for Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland secretary Karen Bradley said in a statement. But we will do all we can to support people and businesses across Northern Ireland in the event that we leave without a deal, she said. The measures announced today recognise the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland. These arrangements can only be temporary and short-term. READ MORE: The 11 possible outcomes Britain faces post-Brexit deal rejection The document was released even as the backstop in prime minister Theresa Mays Brexit deal which also aims to recognise the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland continues to be a key sticking point. Despite receiving new legally binding assurances from the European Union that the backstop is only intended to be temporary, the deal was defeated by a huge margin in the House of Commons on Tuesday. A swathe of Conservatives and Northern Irelands Democratic Unionist Party, which props up Mays government, fear that either Northern Ireland could be treated different differently from the rest of the UK or that the backstop might end up being permanent. Ireland, the UK, and the European Union have all consistently committed to avoiding a hard border, and the backstop is intended to act as an iron-clad insurance policy that would ensure peace and stability on the island of Ireland continues. In the 30 years prior to the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, clashes between loyalists and republicans known simply as the Troubles took the lives of around 3,600 people. The Irish government, for its part, has continually said that it has no plans for the erection of border infrastructure in any Brexit scenario. TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan's Foxconn on Tuesday responded to a patent infringement lawsuit filed against it by Microsoft Corp, saying as a contract manufacturer, it has never needed to pay royalties for the U.S. company's software. Microsoft filed the complaint against Foxconn subsidiary FIH Mobile Ltd in the Northern District of California on Friday. It is claiming unpaid royalties for patents used in devices for clients including a top Chinese smartphone vendor. Foxconn founder and Chief Executive Terry Gou told an impromptu news conference in Taipei that "patent infringement" is not an issue for his company, which "will suffer almost no any loss" as a result of the lawsuit. Foxconn "has never paid any patent fees to Microsoft," Gou said. FIH could not immediately be reached for comment. In a statement, Microsoft said the legal action was related to the royalty reporting and audit terms of a contract it signed with Foxconn parent Hon Hai in 2013. Microsoft takes its own contractual commitments seriously, and we expect other companies to do the same," the company said in a statement "Our working relationship with Hon Hai is important, and we are working to resolve our disagreement. Foxconn, formally Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd, rose to global prominence as assembler of Apple Inc's iPhone. It received notice of the lawsuit on Tuesday, said a person with direct knowledge of the matter, who was not authorized to speak with news media and so declined to be identified. Gou was "furious" and will fight back, the person said. In a Facebook post earlier on Tuesday, Gou questioned why a software company would not earn patent royalties from vendors that made use of software. "They should not pick on manufacturers," Gou said at the news conference. Shares of both Hon Hai and FIH were up around 1 percent in afternoon trade, roughly in line with the benchmark share price index. (Reporting by Jeanny Kao and Yimou Lee in Taipei and Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Writing by Anne Marie Roantree; Editing by Richard Borsuk, Christopher Cushing and Jonathan Oatis) Who can blame Australian headlines for a negative image of God in recent weeks? With Cardinal George Pell convicted for child sexual abuse and public schools in the Australian Capital Territory outlawing chaplains, it is no wonder that one could think interest in God is on the decline. Media imbalance However, the question of God remains undeniably large in Australia with two international speakers not making the headlines they deserve. Franklin Graham, the son of famous American evangelist Billy Graham and Jordan Peterson, author of 12 Rules for Life and clinical psychologist from Canada; both held incredibly successful speaking events across the country. The Australian medias mostly underwhelming coverage of the Graham Tour and Peterson Tour is not surprising but reveals a growing population that is seeking out the truth against the narrative of mainstream culture. Both speakers, although approaching God from different perspectives, attracted audiences in the many thousands at multiple venues across Australia including the Sydney International Convention Centre. The Graham tour Returning to Australia, 60 years after the Billy Graham crusades, Franklin Graham brought the same Gospel message that all are welcome before Christ with 3000 people committing their lives to Jesus. There was no shortage of children, teenagers, families and the elderly attending the Graham Tour with some cities erecting large screens for the crowd that couldnt be seated inside the venues. Preaching on Luke chapter 19, Graham spoke of Jesus stopping to call Zacchaeus the tax collector by name and compared that to Jesus having called each person to repent personally before offering the opportunity for the audience to come forward. Emphasising that it was only Jesus Christ who provides salvation, Graham highlighted the importance of making a public declaration of faith and being forgiven, as the hundreds of church volunteers prayed for each of the new believers. The Peterson tour Jordan Peterson also concluded his whirlwind Australian tour in Sydney speaking to a full house primarily on his deliberations with the state of his belief in God. This followed on from the previous nights edition of QandA on ABC television in which a transwoman spoke of her marginalisation from the church as a result of her gender identity; and a social activist claiming that she was a Christian Marxist. If one were to read the few headlines about Peterson, it would be easy to succumb to the belief that the psychologist was just another right-wing conservative. But listening to Peterson reveals in fact that there is a growing longing for truth in Western culture particularly as we have become increasingly materialistic. In a timely warning against the notion that everything is merely a social construct, Peterson also cites the extreme dangers of defining people as a group instead of individuals. The psychologist also highlighted that since the Enlightenment the replacement of God with an essential belief in man has led to many atrocities such as Marxist tyrants like Stalin and Mao. Answering one of his least favourite questions, Peterson sought to clarify his previous response on QandA about whether he believed in God, by highlighting the heavy responsibility of such a declaration. Criticising many for merely using their belief in God as a virtue signal, Peterson restated that he lived in fear of and belief that God existed, however noting the words of philosopher Nietzsche that there only ever has been one true Christian, and he ended up on a cross. Peterson also went to great lengths to explain the contradictions of Christianity and Marxism, highlighting their incompatibilities and remarking that one would lack a genuine grasp of either if they were to profess a concurrent identity in both. Also keeping in touch with the news of the day, the psychologist raised a poignant question of what Cardinal George Pells response would be if asked whether he believed in God, given his recent conviction for child sexual abuse. Pells conviction Despite the many major God related events taking place throughout a fortnight during February in Australia, only George Pells conviction received the significant attention it deserved. The mainstream media and governments may attempt with its most vigorous efforts just to portray God in a negative light and take religion out of the public square, but the search for truth for many people will just continue unhindered. For many including Christians; the Graham Tour, Peterson Tour and Pell conviction have stood as significant events as well as bringing forth important lessons personally and as Churches. So how does one make sense of these? Should they be understood separately or what is the underlying theme between all of such? Reminders of truth As someone who attended both speaking tours and has a personal interest in news of church abuse cases (which I may elaborate on in future) as well as a frequent writer on the intersectionality of faith and politics, I believe that there are several reminders that we ought to heed. Firstly, Jesus Christ is the only one that can bring salvation. No matter how much you know about the Bible or how devout you are, it is Christ alone that changes people. Even the church will fail and clearly on many instances has failed; therefore without a genuine relationship with Jesus, it is all meaningless. Secondly, many in the world and particularly in the West have fallen in front of idols and cheap grace. The lack of commitment to the heavy responsibility that is entailed in being a Christian (which should be a public statement of faith, not just a private matter as claimed by another QandA panellist) is one of the reasons why so often our belief in God is viewed as compatible with ideas of this world that are in direct opposition to God. Thirdly, our reluctance to grapple with the truth or in other words a failure to contend with God will be our downfall. Society often will attempt to seek the easy way out by trying to remove God through means such as banning chaplains. But society does not seek to understand, especially if it may even become a struggle (just as Jacob fought with God and after became Israel). Know that it is only the truth that can set us free and without it, we revert to the totalitarian vices of humanity. We cannot give up in the pursuit of truth whether it be in seeking out justice for victims of church abuse, the undeniable gravity of God and ultimately in growing our individual relationship with Jesus Christ. Roydon Ng is a Christian writer from Western Sydney. Roydon Ngs previous articles may be viewed at: http://blog.roydonng.com.au Signing up for the Graduate Diploma in Teaching (Primary) was such an exciting decision for me as I took the first step towards becoming a teacher here in New Zealand. Then I found out that there were four people from my suburb doing the same course online and another dozen or so in the same city. Usually, Im an avid fan of the more the merrier'. However, when it comes to job prospects, it was intimidating to have so many competitors. When I looked at the others, I began to feel small and insecure. At this rate, will I even manage to get a job after I graduate? Comparison The comparison trap does nothing but to tear people down. We either end up feeling lousy because other people seem more qualified and better off than us or well feel good about ourselves by putting others down as they are no match for us. Former USA president, Theodore Roosevelt, was famous for his quote, Comparison is the thief of joy. I found this to be very true. Comparison easily steals our joy whichever end of the spectrum we are at. Either way, someone feels good at the expense of the other when comparison comes into play. We win by others losing and others win by us losing. Ourselves We need to stop comparing ourselves with others. Instead we should look at ourselves and what we can do and have to offer. Galatians chapter 6, verses 4-5 says, Each of you must examine your own actions . Then you can be proud of your own accomplishments without comparing yourself to others. Assume your own responsibility . At the start of the course, I was so aware of others and their achievements. As a result, I was not focused on my own responsibilities. Rather than being distracted, I started to make progress only when I began looking inwards at my ability and what I needed to do, instead of focusing outwards at what others were doing. Criticism When I submitted my first assignment draft, my tutor gave me feedback that my work was too descriptive and not critical as required of the task. My indicative grade was a C-, which did not help with my already low self-esteem at that point. Reading other coursemates assignments online added to the intimidation. One part of me felt lousy for doing poorly, and the other wanted to defend my work and argue against my tutors feedback. After all, I put a lot of effort into the assignment and was up till ghostly hours of the night doing it. Surely he didnt have to criticise me that much. I read his feedback over and over before finally deciding to work on the points he noted needed improvement. I used the criticism as constructive feedback to produce a better assignment. What I realised from this experience was that, it is easy to want to defend ourselves by saying we have done our best. However, it is only when we take into consideration what other people have to say about our work that we can improve. If all that people do is to praise us, our work will remain the same without getting better. It is only when there are criticism that we begin thinking critically and have things to work on. Now, Ill rather have criticism than just praise. I see the value of criticism in pushing me forward while praise just makes me feel good about my present. Growing together Intimidation can come to us in various forms our physique, our family, our parenting, our abilities or like mine our studies and career opportunities. Whatever area in our lives it appears in, we need to be firm in not comparing ourselves with others and to take criticism positively. As we look inwards and be secure in who we are, we build ourselves up and position ourselves in a place where we can bless others. In this way, when intimidation strikes, we turn it around and build others up instead. When I began to look at myself and the teacher I enjoy being, I began to appreciate my coursemates who we giving their best to be great teachers too. I need not see them as competitors but instead rejoice that our education system will have many great teachers. As we venture of into our teaching career, we could then continue to share ideas together for our class, learning from each other. It doesnt have to be a winner and loser scenario but we can all help each other on in this journey and that is how life should be, growing together. Esther Koh is a stay-at-home mum living in Wellington with her husband and two sons. She loves people and has a passion for helping others find their purpose for living. Esther Kohs previous articles may be viewed at http://www.pressserviceinternational.org/esther-koh.html Photo - Cindy Cheng a young writer from China Press Service International (PSI) in conjunction with Christian Today provide a young writer ministry and more so, the PSI web site houses each young writers articles in their own CV sites. For the first 10 years it befell me to update each day these CV sites and while there was 30 or so young writers the hyperlinking was not too bad. But when it go to 70, then 80 and now 105, it became impossible. Young writer Josh Hinds the webmaster of the PSI site housed by Weebly, came up with an idea to have each young writer update their own hyperlinked articles onto their own CV sites. Last November Josh Hinds sent out the first lot, another young writer Brent Van Mourik of Brisbane wrote out the script to do the upload and then in December Sunshine Coast young writer Cartia Moore did an in-house video. Then in late January Josh Hinds sent the weebly links out again and it wasnt long before a great many more of their CV sites were unloaded their respective hyperlinked articles. Photo - Jak Hardy an Australian young writer Christian Times, China As if on queue, the editor of the Christian Times, China in all Chinese no English, contacted me seeking permission to translate one of these young writer articles into Chinese and publication in the Christian Times China. This request was sent onto David Chang in New York the Christian Today for his reply, instead David suggested I reply on behalf of Press Service International (with his blessing) and provide permission. That permission led to the Christian Times, China being added to the daily PSI mail out of each days articles. The editor of the Christian Times, China, having received their very first daily PSI e-mailout responded asking permission to use these articles, which was given. It takes a month to do the translation into Chinese and we will be advised each time an article goes to publication in the Christian Times, China. Photo - Hope Pratt an Australian young writer Readership explosion David Chang was included in these correspondences with Christian Times China and responded with significant delight in the Lord as the articles published in Christian Today will have such an increased massive audience, the numbers become bewildering. Moreover, the Christian Times, China editor is checking out each young writers CV sites to check out their articles, with a special interest in their situation (Christian Times, China) in spiritual growth in the light of the persecution of Christians. This in turn has spurred on the young writers in their determination to ensure their CV sites are updated with their article hyperlinks. Having been to China myself and having numbers of Chinese young writers over the years in the young writer program, the Chinese in their business, education and Christian ministry are a meticulous people. This situation of our young writers being published in Christian Times, China will become a milestone in this ministry. Photo - Josh Hinds the web master for the young writers PSI site Dr Mark Tronson is a Baptist minister (retired) who served as the Australian cricket team chaplain for 17 years (2000 ret) and established Life After Cricket in 2001. He was recognised by the Olympic Ministry Medal in 2009 presented by Carl Lewis Olympian of the Century. He mentors young writers and has written 24 books, and enjoys writing. He is married to Delma, with four adult children and grand-children. Dr Tronson writes a daily article for Christian Today Australia (since 2008) and in November 2016 established Christian Today New Zealand. Mark Tronson's archive of articles can be viewed at http://www.pressserviceinternational.org/mark-tronson.html (Photo: WCC/Marcelo Schneider) Rev Norman Tendis The World Council of Churches was today mourning the death of the Rev Norman Tendis, one of the 157 people killed in the tragic Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday. The Boeing 737 Max 8 was heading to Nairobi, Kenya but crashed minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa, killing everyone on board. The cause of the crash is still unknown but some airlines have made the decision to ground the Boeing model following the disaster. Rev Tendis worked as a consultant for the WCC in its work to help churches invest their resources in making a better planet and had been on his way to the UN Environment Assembly, which began on Monday. He had been due to present to the assembly a roadmap for an 'economy of life' for congregations, communities and churches that he had worked on with WCC colleagues. His previous work had included supporting small-scale agriculture, ethical investment, climate-friendly mobility and other practices aimed at sustainable living. Rev Tendis, who was also a Lutheran pastor in Austria, was remembered today at a memorial service held in the chapel of the WCC's headquarters in Geneva. (Photo: WCC/Ivars Kupcis) A picture of the Rev Norman Tendis displayed at his memorial service WCC general secretary the Rev Dr Olav Fykse Tveit paid tribute to him and all the victims of the crash, saying that the world had lost many experts committed to global sustainability. 'We express our deepest condolences on the passing of the all the people on board the aircraft, and we have particular anguish upon the loss of our own Rev Norman Tendis, who was passionately carving out a path for economic and environmental justice,' he said. 'This had been his compassion and vision for years.' Prof Isabel Apawo Phiri, WCC deputy general secretary, said: 'Norman walked his talk. He was deeply rooted and committed to his congregation, and was committed to share his experiences and vision with the wider ecumenical family. 'His focus and enthusiasm was how each local church can contribute to the economic and ecological justice, in the marketplaces, in the communities, among the nations, and with the earth.' 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. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp LinkedIn Email Telegram New York, March 13, 2019Saudi authorities must immediately release all journalists from jail and end its censorship of those critical of the kingdom, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Reuters reported that two journalists appeared in court today on charges under the cybercrime law, including supporting hostile elements. Eman Al Nafjan and Hatoon al-Fassi were among four female journalists critical of the ban on women driving whom Saudi authorities arrested last year, according to CPJ research. Separately, independent journalist Zuhair Kutbi has been imprisoned since January 10, Yahya Assiri, director of the U.K.-based Saudi human rights organization Al-Qst, told CPJ. Assiri told CPJ yesterday that he did not know the reason for Kutbis arrest. Kutbi was previously imprisoned in connection with his journalism, and according to Human Rights Watch, authorities banned Kutbi from writing as one of the conditions of his release in 2017. CPJ was not able to confirm the journalists detention until this week. The Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to CPJs email requesting information on Kutbis arrest, including whether he has been charged with a crime. The arrests are part of a broad crackdown on the press since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmans rise to power, including the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October. At least 16 journalists were detained in Saudi Arabia, many of them without charge, at the time of CPJs latest prison census. Some of them, like Kutbi, had been forced to stop practicing journalism long before their arrest. Saudi Arabias extreme actions to silence critical journalists, even those who are not currently working, lend a cruel new meaning to the censorship term prior restraint. Authorities should immediately release Eman Al Nafjan, Hatoon al-Fassi, Zuhair Kutbi, and all other journalists jailed for their work, said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour in Washington, D.C. The international community must signal to the kingdoms leaders that these grave violations of international law will not be accepted. Al Nafjan and al-Fassi appeared in court with at least eight activists who were arrested before the driving ban was lifted in June. They were charged under the cybercrime law, which can carry sentences of up to 10 years, according to Al-Qst. The court barred reporters and U.S. and European diplomats from attending the trial, according to news reports. Kutbis arrest was reported by the Qatari news website Al-Sharq, which cited a social media post from an account named Detainees of Conscience. The account tweeted on March 7 that Kutbi was denied treatment for cancer and diabetes. Its not clear who is behind the Twitter account, which has been reporting on politically-motivated detentions in Saudi Arabia since March 2014. Separately, on February 20, a Twitter account under Kutbis name, with the bio freedom for the media figure and political writer Zuhair Kutbi, tweeted that the journalist was being held at Dhabhan General Intelligence Prison near Jeddah. Neither account nor the news report provided further details. CPJs direct messages to Detainees of Conscience were not immediately answered. The Zuhair Kutbi Twitter account does not accept direct messages. Kutbi was imprisoned from July 2015 to November 2017, on charges of inciting against the state and insulting state symbols, according to CPJ research. The journalist previously contributed to the news website Makkah Online and his own website, and often criticized the government, CPJ reported at the time. [EDITORS NOTE: The ninth paragraph has been updated to reflect that Al-Sharq is a Qatari news website.] The European Union has expanded its tax haven blacklist by including 10 countries. The list now has 15 countries. The list was first drawn up by EU in 2017 in the wake of several scandals, including the Panama Papers and LuxLeaks, that pushed the EU into doing more to fight tax evasion by multinationals and the rich. Expansion of the List Seven countries Aruba, Belize, Bermuda, Fiji, Oman, Vanuatu and Dominica were moved from greylist to blacklist due to their inability towards reform commitments. Three other countries added into the list are Barbados, the United Arab Emirates and the Marshall Islands. EU list of Tax Blacklist or Tax Havens Tax Havens provide taxpayers with opportunities for tax avoidance, while their secrecy and opacity also serve to hide the origin of the proceeds of illegal and criminal activities. Features of these Tax Havens include low or zero taxation, fictitious residences (with no bearing on reality) and tax secrecy. EU initiated the naming and shaming tactics through Tax blacklist or Tax havens as a tool for securing a level playing field and as an external strategy for effective taxation by assessing, screening and listing third-country tax jurisdictions which are non-cooperative in tax matters. Question: Regarding my posts about the terrible perversion of Torah and halacha that Rav Shmuel Kaminetsky has engineered with his prod... lt is clear that no one in the world has the authority to establish guilt anyone without both [the accuser and accused] coming ... Important!! email - yadmoshe@gmail.com Sao Paulo state authorities say eight people have been killed in a school shooting in Brazil, including two student shooters.The hooded teenagers opened fire in a public school in the suburb of Suzano, killing six people before taking their own lives, the Associated Press reports.Authorities said five students and an administrator at the school were killed.Sao Paulo governor Joao Doria said on Twitter the 'children were cruelly murdered'.'I have just received the sad news that children were cruelly murdered in the state school Professor Raul Brasil, in Suzano. So far we have preliminary information. I cancelled every agenda and we are on our way to Suzano to accompany the rescue and attendance to the wounded,' Mr Doria said in a translation of his tweet.Latin America's largest nation has the largest number of annual homicides in the world, but school shootings are rare.Brazil's new President Jair Bolsonaro recently announced that gun ownership controls would be loosened.More to come... Toyota aims for the moon as the Japanese automotive company joins forces with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to build a fuel cell rover for lunar explorations.The rover is projected to be launched in 2029.Toyota, JAXA Envision Powerful Six-Wheeler For The MoonToyota's six-wheel concept rover can carry two passengers (four in emergencies) and travel more than 6,214 miles (10,000 kilometers) on the moon's surface, accordingto an official report released by Toyota.Passengers will also be able to live in the pressurized vehicle for a fixed amount of time without having to wear their space suits. The living space is approximately 13 square meters.The rover will land on the moon before the humans get there and travel over the surface to meet them, Endgadget reportsDuring a symposium on Tuesday, March 12 in Tokyo, Toyotaexecutive vice president Shigeki Terashi expresses his excitement at the automotive company's new project and explains the value of state-of-the-art fuel cell technology."Fuel cells, which use clean power-generation methods, emit only water, and, because of their high energy density, they can provide a lot of energy, making them especially suited for the project being discussed with JAXA," Terashi says, adding that the this type of vehicles emit lower amounts of harmful substances.The use of fuel cells allows the rover to travel over a great distance on the lunar surface as well as maintain mobility that's necessary in exploring the moon. With this rover, astronauts will enjoy a good amount of freedom as they look around the moon.Only The Beginning Of 'Team Japan'Toyota and JAXA's concept of the rover has been in the works since May 2018.JAXA Vice President Koichi Wakata says that such a vehicle is crucial in the agency's goals in the future.With the moon's complex terrain and the challenge of radiation and temperature conditions, a pressurized rover that can move with ease on the surface is an absolute necessity. Toyota's concept of space mobility is ideal for this mission, he adds.Of course, the space agency is only starting to tap into the country's great wealth of expert knowledge, technological capabilities, and human resources. JAXA plans to collaborate with others as "Team Japan" setstheir sights on the space exploration."Through our collaboration with Toyota as the starting point, we can further expand the resources of 'Team Japan' in the continued pursuit of international space exploration," Wakata says. West Bengal: State Panchayats dept draws up measures to increase production and sale of fish March 13,2019 | Source: Millennium Post In a significant stride to ensure a better livelihood for the fish farmers in the state, the Panchayats and Rural Development department is taking a slew of measures to develop infrastructure for cultivation, storage and quality control of fish, the most favourite delicacy of the Bengalis. Come Saturday and the department is kickstarting a new project 'Meen Mitra' at Tamluk in East Midnapore to provide the fish farmers knowledge and technical knowhow on augmentation of production and handling problems associated with the cultivation of the species. "There will be a 15 days' hands-on training for 34 members of the Self-Help Groups who are associated with fish cultivation in the area. They will be reaching out to other fish farmers in the state and will impart knowledge and technical knowhow on the nature of cultivation depending upon the quality of water and how to address problems associated with cultivation. They will be acting as a catalyst for the fish producers at the block level," a senior official of the department said. 164 people from nine places in North and South 24-Parganas, Hooghly, Howrah, South Dinajpur, Cooch Behar, Siliguri and Darjeeling and of course East Midnapore will come under the project in the first phase. The department will also provide equipment needed for soil testing, water testing and other requisites. According to the official, there are broadly four types of water fresh, brackish, marine and cold water . The training will be imparted on the nature of the waterbodies available in a particular area for scientific breeding of fishes. The department for the first time in the state is also boosting the infrastructure for better storage and quality control. "We will come up with solar dehydrated units in certain earmarked areas so that fishermen do not dry fish under the sun beside the sea or the river. The funds for five such units priced at around Rs 2 lakh per unit have already been placed," the official said. The department is also coming up with mini ice plants for storage of fish and funds for five such units have already been placed. "We are also procuring 20 cool boxes which will retain the freshness of fish for a longer period. The equipment are being procured from the National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj (NIRDPR) in Hyderabad through the West Bengal Comprehensive Area Development Corporation that comes under the aegis of our department," the official maintained. Tamil Nadu: A mobile app to help monitor plastics in a marine environment by K. Lakshmi March 13,2019 | Source: The Hindu Now, smart phone users who want to contribute to the environment may help by recording plastics seen in the ocean. The National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) and National Centre for Coastal Research have recently launched Marplasts, a mobile application that can track the plastics in the marine environment. This is part of the ongoing marine plastics study. M.A. Atmanand, director, NIOT said this would help in documentation of data and track analysis. About 30- 40% of the marine plastics in the ocean are used fishing nets. We find that fishermen dump damaged nets in the Indian ocean region. The application would help other researchers to use such data for analysis, he said. The application would allow users to record information on type of plastics, be it thermocol or fishing gear, latitude and longitude of the area where the marine debris was found, the category of marine debris and approximate weight. Photographs could also be uploaded along with the data. R. Venkatesan, scientist, NIOT said preliminary study is on to record presence of marine plastics in different locations of the ocean, off Chennai. Samples were being lifted from locations, including, off Muttukadu. Various methodologies are being used to lift samples from varying depths such as mid-water column and at a depth of 10 metres. The study would also analyse the means of plastics reaching the ocean, including surface current. Sometimes, ships passing by could dump the plastics in the ocean, he said. The mobile application would not only help the study but also facilitate other researchers to analyse the data. The study has just started and it would take a few years for complete analysis of marine plastics, scientists said. Sri Lanka: Norway-Sri Lanka diplomacy: Trade beyond aid as a pragmatic approach for future collaboration by Srimal Fernando and Mizly Nizar Sri Lanka-Norway diplomatic relations have entered a dynamic new phase with strengthened ties and bilateral cooperation between the two nations. Prior to 2009, during the civil war between the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE), Sri Lanka-Norway relations had not always been harmonious. Norway?s role as official peace facilitators between the parties to the conflict was a matter of debate for many Sri Lankans. Led by Eric Solehim as peace mediator, Norway assisted to broker a Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) between the Government and the LTTE in 2002. The CFA was a realistic plan to give both parties a political voice and to prevent further bloodshed. However, pro war sentiments at home eventually led to the collapse of the cease-fire in 2006 with Sri Lankas then-government accusing Norway of favouring the LTTE souring the relationship between the countries. Sri Lankas transition from a conflict-riddled past into a relatively peaceful and prosperous future has changed the countrys mode of managing its external affairs with Norway. To begin a new era in bilateral relations both nations came up with new lasting ideas that could solidify the bonds. Examining the historical and current links between Norway and Sri Lanka will certainly be of interest to foreign policymakers of both nations. Existing relations between the two countries dates back to the pre-conflict period. Both countries established diplomatic ties more than six decades ago in 1952. The Norwegians foresaw the possibility of development cooperation as a commitment to Sri Lanka at that juncture. Financial aid had been Norways most important foreign policy tool and the Scandinavian nation has contributed more than NOK 5,000 million to Sri Lanka in development assistance from 1965 up to 2017, according to statistics from Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD). Priority areas of Norways assistance to Sri Lanka are also linked to some of the UNs Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In providing development cooperation, noteworthy is Norways technical support in the field of fisheries since 1971, which includes fisheries management, research and education, and private sector development with the aim of achieving sustainable management of fisheries resources in Sri Lanka. Furthermore, to provide the country with up-to-date data to better monitor its fish stocks, the Norwegian Research Vessel Dr. Fridtjof Nansen successfully completed a marine resources survey around Sri Lanka in 2018. In addition to economic and technical cooperation, there have been a number of high-level visits between Sri Lanka and Norway in the recent years. Reflecting the renewed commitment to revitalise bilateral ties the then Foreign Minister of Norway Brge Brende and Norway?s State Secretary Tore Hattrem visited Sri Lanka in 2016. Reiterating bilateral cooperation between the countries during his visit, Hattrem stated: We want to strengthen the political dialogue, support the Governments policies for reform and reconciliation, promote business cooperation and support technical cooperation. It is the positive political development in Sri Lanka that makes this possible. To further consolidate bilateral ties the Prime Minister of Norway Erna Solberg visited Sri Lanka later in the same year commending the progress made by Sri Lanka in advancing political and economic reforms and advancing reconciliation since 2015. More recently, in 2018, the State Minister of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Jens Frlich Holte also visited the country coinciding with the arrival of the Norwegian research vessel Nansen. Looking at enhancing future cooperation and improving bilateral ties both countries should progress from aid diplomacy to the prospects of heightened economic integration. Sri Lanka could look for new areas of focus to enhance trade cooperation. Setting a good example in this direction of trade diplomacy were the discussions held during the visit by Norwegian Ambassador for Sri Lanka Thorbjrn Gaustadsther to Colombo Dockyard recently focusing on the extent of cooperation that Colombo Dockyard has at present with its Norwegian partners in the shipbuilding and ship repairing sectors. In addition to vital discussions on enhanced cooperation to increase bilateral trade, future prospects of collaboration on heavy engineering projects which are in the pipeline under the scheduled infrastructure development in Sri Lanka were also discussed. To further develop economic ties there is also the possibility of expanding Norwegian investment in Sri Lanka, both through portfolio and foreign direct investment. Such close cooperation if implemented would be a foundation to lift economic ties to a new height. In order to pursue a strengthened relationship between Norway and Sri Lanka, which in turn will benefit the two countries and its people, it is important for both countries to learn from historical mistakes while moving forward. For a more robust bilateral relationship there should be a common commitment to strengthening ties between the two countries along with a pragmatic foreign policy. From Sri Lankas stand point, it is imperative that the country pursues a stable foreign policy position in its external relations that does not alter course each time there is a change of government. Bangladesh: 14 rivers in Dinajpur dry up due to lack of dredging March 13,2019 | Source: Dhaka Tribune Fourteen small and large rivers including Atrai, Karatoya, Kakra, Punarbhaba and Dhepa flow through Dinajpur. However, almost all of them are vanishing due to lack of dredging, unrestrained river grabbers and illegal establishments. The riverbeds are now filled with silt, sediment and dust particles, causing the narrow streams to become narrower over time. Meanwhile, various crops such as Boro, wheat and corn are being cultivated on the desiccated riverbed. Some of these rivers look like deserts, where cattle are wandering, and tractors and trucks are plying. Additionally, the encroachment of land by the rivers is also underway with full force. People are constructing buildings and establishments along the banks, posing a threat to the dim existence of the rivers. However, the good news is that Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority (BIWTA) has started dredging works in the Tulai, Atrai and Kakra rivers. People concerned believe that with this initiative, the moribund rivers of Dinajpur might get back their lost vigor. The length of these rivers in Dinajpur is approximately 724km. Once upon a time, farmers used water from the rivers to irrigate paddy fields. People had to cross the Punarbhaba river with boat, which can be done now by foot. In the dry season, the Punarbhaba river is completely dried out. No government after independence has conducted any sort of dredging there. It is filled with sediment now. Farmers are growing Boro, wheat and corn using shallow-machine irrigation. Moreover, people concerned about rivers believe these rivers will disappear completely if illegal occupation and building of establishments on the banks continue at the current pace. Dinajpur district is surrounded by the border. Of the 13 upazilas of the district, Punarbhaba sadar, Fulbari, Nawabganj, Birampur, Hili, Birol and Bochaganj upazilas are located in border areas and bounded by rivers. Though these rivers are slender streams in the rainy season, they become sandy in the dry season. Some of the large rivers have become reduced to canals due to excessive piling of silt, and they have not been dredged once since the countrys independence. Locals who used to earn their livelihood by fishing in these rivers have been forced out as the rivers gradually died. The small Jamuna river flowing over Birampur and Hili upazilas have become waterless and arid too. The scarcity of water created a crisis among farmers who cultivate crops in nearby farmlands. Mofazzal Hossain, a resident of Baluadanga village adjacent to Punarbhaba river in Dinajpur sadar upazila, said: There was a time when this river had strong tides throughout the year. The river was rich in fish and we had enough water for irrigation. But the situation has turned upside-down. Now farmers need money for irrigation and fishermen lost their profession. Mobarak Ali Sarker, a local farmer, said: Earlier, there was a cultivation of 495 acres of land in Hakimpur using water only from Jamuna river. But now the cultivable land has been reduced to 75 acres. Despite having some water in the rainy season, the river is waterless rest of the time. Farmers have to struggle to grow crops. Dinajpur Water Development Board Deputy Assistant Engineer Md Nayan said: Renovation work around 30km of the Shua river in Fulbari and Kaharole upazilas have already started. He said: Tk5.81 crore has been allocated for this project, where several distributaries and canals of the river will be properly dredged to ensure free water flow. Siddiqur Rahman, acting officer of the Water Development Board of Hakimpur and Birampur upazila unit, said: The floor of Jamuna river has been filled with dust particles and sediments due to lack of dredging works in the past 20 years. Multiple structures and establishments have been constructed on the both sides of the river. The government has planning to evict the establishments and stop the encroachments, he added. State Minister for Shipping Khalid Mahmud Chowdhury said: Dredging work in the three Dinajpur rivers have already begun. BIWTA started the river mining through tender. It is unprecedented in a sense that people of Dinajpur have never thought that dredging in their regions rivers would ever begin. The time has come for liberals to use legislative majorities for one big thing George Orwell he was Eric Blair then went to Burma, todays Myanmar, in 1922 to be an imperial policeman. After he returned, in 1927, he became a writer and in 1931 published a short sketch in The Adelphi magazine, A Hanging . Told from the point of view of an imperial policeman in Burma, it begins with a sodden morning of the rains when a sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. A condemned prisoner is led to the gallows. Once, in spite of the men who gripped him... he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. The policeman reflects: It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. In 1944, writing for the democratic socialist magazine Tribune, Orwell, surveying literature, said, The thing that I think very striking is that no one... ever writes of an execution with approval. The dominant note is always horror. Society, apparently, cannot get along without capital punishment ... and yet there is no one, when the pinch comes, who feels it right to kill another human being in cold blood. It was brave of him to say it that year, when there was a clamor to hang traitors. In 1965, Britain abolished the death penalty. In 1996, Steve Earle wrote and recorded Ellis Unit One . The song is told from the point of view of a man who joins the army, comes home and, like his father, gets a job at the local prison; Ellis Unit is the Texas state prison just north of Huntsville that housed the male death row. My daddy used to talk about them long nights at the walls, Earle sings: And how they used to strap em in the chair The kids down from the college, theyd bring their beer n all An when the lights went out, a cheer rose in the air. We might think we support capital punishment, but the partying like the killing is unseemly. And when death comes down, we are all implicated the policeman, the prison guard and the kids by the wall. Ten years ago, David Grann reported a story for The New Yorker magazine, Trial by fire . From the first sentence the blaze moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas we are in the tale of Cameron Todd Willingham, accused of setting the fire that killed his three young children, in 1991. Why would anyone do such a thing? As Grann shows, we still do not know because Willingham most likely did not do it. Investigators misunderstood the arson evidence. At trial in 1992, he was offered a life sentence for a guilty plea. He said no, because he was innocent. The jury deliberated for an hour before finding him guilty. He was sentenced to death and sent to Ellis Unit. Willingham tried repeatedly to appeal his conviction until 2004. Asked for his last words, he said, I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do. After his death, Grann writes, his parents were allowed to touch his face for the first time in more than a decade. He was one of 59 people executed in the U.S. that year. Even if the other 58 were guilty, would having the death penalty be worth killing one innocent? Rights derive from interests. The most basic and universal interest, shared by humans equally with fish, mice, turtles and elephants, is the desire to live. Taking a life is the most basic violation of rights, of interests and finally of morality. That is the principal argument against capital punishment. The soundest argument for capital punishment is effectiveness. Is it a deterrent? Does it make the rest of us safer? The moral argument is for liberty. The effective argument is for prospective safety. Which should prevail? Thirty states in the U.S. still allow for the death penalty, although three, Colorado, Oregon and Pennsylvania, have a governor-ordered moratorium. Now, Democrats have introduced a bill in the Colorado Senate to abolish it, their sixth try. Not lost on Republicans is that Democrats have the votes to do it, on a party-line vote in both houses, and a governor who says he will sign it. Colorado Sen. Angela Williams, a Denver Democrat and sponsor of the bill, called capital punishment costly, biased the three people on Colorados death row are black and an ineffective deterrent of violent crime. There are racial disparities in every aspect of American criminal justice. And it is bad faith to argue that capital punishment is wrong because the appeals process that opponents insist upon is too lengthy and expensive. That is ceding the high ground. If we comprehend that execution is wrong in principal, we do not need to fuss with its application. Williams is right about the big thing. The day will never come when we say, If only we had the death penalty, we would not have this crime and if we are wrong, posterity will correct us. Opponents of Williams bill want it referred to the ballot instead, just as some Republicans want any workaround to the Electoral College referred to the ballot. In the latter case, we can see the wisdom. But after we elected Democratic majorities to both houses, no one can be surprised that they would abolish capital punishment. It is just the sort of thing we would like them to do, and put a stop to this killing. | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE! Iran Human Rights (IHR); March 13, 2018: Two prisoners were hanged at Birjand Central Prison on drug-related charges on Monday, March 11, 2019. According to IHR sources, on the morning of Monday, March 11, ShirMohammad Naroei, 50, and Younes Naroei, 20, were hanged at Birjand Central Prison. The father and son were sentenced to death for drug-related charges. Baluchi Human Rights Campaign announced that the prisoners were Baluchis. It is not known why their execution verdict has not changed to a prison term under new Iranian anti-drug law. The new amendment to Iranian Anti-drug law which was enforced on November 14, 2017, includes a mechanism to limit the use of the death penalty and reduce the sentences of those sentenced to death or life imprisonment. The law was retroactive and could potentially save many prisoners lives after their case-review process. Following the enforcement of Iranian Anti-drug law in November 2017, the number of drug-related executions is significantly decreased compared to the past years. | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE! "One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected on Wednesday to issue a moratorium on the death penalty in California, granting reprieves to the hundreds of people on death row. By signing his executive order, Newsom will lower the countrys death row population by a quarter. The move isnt particularly surprising considering the Democrats record as an elected official he was an early proponent of same-sex marriage as mayor of San Francisco and considering Californias politics. Nor should it be surprising that President Trump weighed in Wednesday morning to oppose Newsoms move. Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers, Trump said . Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I! The death penalty is not a new entrant to the political culture wars, but in recent years, the partisan split on the issue has widened. A Pew Research Center poll completed last year found that a small majority of Americans support the death penalty but that those views were split by party. More than three-quarters of Republicans support executions while only about a third of Democrats agree. Among the groups most supportive of the issue are white evangelical Protestants; more than 7 in 10 support the use of the death penalty. But thats nationally, not in California. In California, voters in 2012 rejected a proposition that would have ended the death penalty though only by a four-point margin . That may be the voter defiance to which Trump refers. At the same time, a poll from PPIC found that most Californians preferred life imprisonment to the use of the death penalty. That was also a year in which the Republican candidate for president garnered 37 percent of the vote as opposed to the 31 percent Trump received four years later. It was a year in which Republicans won 16 House seats, as opposed to the seven seats Trumps party won in the state in November. In other words, the politics seem to have changed. Trump is more likely signaling his defense of the death penalty to the country broadly than trying specifically to undercut Newsom. (Who, its worth mentioning, is the ex-husband of Donald Trump Jr.'s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle.) California hasnt had an execution since 2006, when it executed Clarence Allen. Executions have increasingly been the domain of red states, thanks largely to Texass dominance in capital punishment. Since 2014, there have been 134 executions in the United States, according to the Death Penalty Information Center . Three were in Virginia, the only state that didnt support Trump in 2016 where executions have occurred since then. The rest were in red states. Since about 2000, an increasing percentage of executions have occurred in states that backed Trump. In 2014, support for the death penalty among Democrats dropped under 50 percent in Pews polling, the first year in which that happened. Its not new that theres a partisan divide on the death penalty. But it is relatively new that executions are almost solely the domain of more conservative states. As with so many other issues climate change, abortion, taxes there is a wide gulf on how states approach capital punishment. Newsoms plan and Trumps response both reflect that split. Source: washingtonpost.com , Philip Bump, March 13, 2019. Philip Bump is a correspondent for The Washington Post based in New York. Before joining The Post in 2014, he led politics coverage for the Atlantic Wire. | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE! "One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde The Senate and 'Gun Control' By George Devinney. March 12th, 2019 Despite the House Dem's pushing through more anti-gun bills, there has been the thought that at least the senate will not take them on. That however seems less the case than had been hoped, if Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has anything to do with it. Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told CNN on Wednesday that the Committee plans to hold a hearing on Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) - commonly referred to as "red flag laws" - on March 26th. The move is a rather big ordeal, considering the House has passed multiple 'gun control' laws, including H.R. 1112, the Enhanced Background Check Act of 2019, and H.R. 8, the Bipartisan Background Check Act of 2019. "I haven't really looked at the House package, but this is to me the area where we can come together. We did a lot on NICS Fix," Graham told CNN. "I think there's a lot of common ground on enrolling people in the background system who are a danger to themselves or others." Gun rights advocates have kept an eye on red flag laws, especially at the state level. These laws make it easier for police, doctors, teachers and family members to petition judges to take away a person's guns if they feel he or she is a threat to themselves or others. It's troubling that Graham is seemingly less our friend on the Second Amendment than might have been hoped. The enthusiasm for 'Red Flag Laws', already taken up by some at the state level, seems to continue to be front and center and yet thus far appears to be about the most dangerous idea ever contrived. The most egregious aspect still continues to be the lack of due process which opens the door for what is essentially no more than gun confiscation, possibly following little more than someone's grudge against another. Somehow all Senate Republicans need to be reminded that they represent us and there is no need whatsoever for (even) more attempts at 'gun control' laws, usually disguised as attempts to increase "gun safety" with "sensible" measures. Back to Top FOCUS ON DEFENSE CAPABILITY DEVELOPMENT IN SOUTHEAST ASIA AND OCEANIA I admit I watch a lot of Maddow and pretty much embrace all the Russian conspiracy stuff she's constantly peddling.I never needed her to tell me that Trump's is the swampiest presidency since Warren G. Harding's. Maybe Ulysses S. Grant's? Except in Trump's case, it's clearly the man at the top who's the most corrupt of all. And one thing that I never doubted for a second is that Trump takes bribes-- from any and all sources... including from abroad, a major no-no. He's been taking money from Russia, Ukraine, various pieces of the former Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, China... anywhere he could get them from. Friday,published a piece by Jon Swaine, Trump inauguration took money from shell companies tied to foreigners , that lays out some of the evidence regarding just the Inauguration aspect. Short version of Swaine's exhaustive report: Shell companies were created to mask foreign bribes that poured into the pockets of Trump and his corrupt family. "The Guardian," he wrote, "has identified the creators of three obscure firms that contributed money to Trumps inaugural committee, which collected a record $107 million as he entered the White House in 2017. There was a lot more foreign money than the 3 instances Swaine dug into. The three companies each gave $25,000 to Trumps inaugural fund. At least one of the contributions was made for a foreign national who appears ineligible to make political donations in the U.S. A spokesman for Thomas Barrack, the chairman of Trumps inauguration committee, declined to comment. The contributors denied wrongdoing. Federal prosecutors in New York and the attorney generals of New Jersey and Washington DC have in recent weeks issued subpoenas to the committee, demanding records and information on its contributors and spending. U.S. election law prohibits non-resident foreigners from contributing to political campaigns, including inaugurations. Donors or campaigns who knowingly and willfully breach this rule may be fined or prosecuted. One of the $25,000 donations to Trumps inauguration was made through a Delaware shell company for a wealthy Indian financier based in London, who appears to not hold US citizenship or residency. Another was made by a company formed in Georgia by a lobbyist with connections to the Taiwanese government. His wife said the firm was funded by Chinese investors. One of their daughters was later given an internship in Trumps White House, which they said was unrelated to the donation. A third $25,000 contribution was made through a company formed anonymously in New York by an Israeli real estate developer who has helped other foreign developers with legal issues in the U.S. The Israeli developer said he held U.S. residency, commonly known as a green card, which permitted him to contribute legally. Ann Ravel, a former commissioner at the federal election commission (FEC), said the use of anonymous companies was the biggest problem for authorities trying to ensure transparency and legality in political donations. We need stronger regulation, said Ravel. But our campaign finance system is structured to not let us find out who is behind these contributions. Authorities including Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US election, are looking into issues around foreign money in American politics and possible attempts to buy influence with Trumps administration. A Washington-based lobbyist, Sam Patten, admitted last year that he illegally funnelled $50,000 to Trumps inauguration from a Ukrainian oligarch. Patten, a former colleague of the convicted ex-Trump aide Paul Manafort, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and failing to register as a foreign agent. One $25,000 contribution to Trumps inaugural fund came from a shell company tied to Cyrus Vandrevala, a Mumbai-born financier based in London. Vandrevala has said he funds property developments in India, where Trump owns luxury towers. Vandrevalas father-in-law, Niranjan Hiranandani, is one of the wealthiest figures in Indian real estate. He currently serves as president of an influential real estate industry lobby group in the country. In an interview published days after Trumps inauguration, Hiranandani said he hoped the new president would not hinder Indias real estate industry by restricting US visas. He suggested it was unlikely Trump would want to do something that can have a negative impact on his ongoing projects in India. Vandrevala, 46, has an Indian passport and declares his nationality as Indian, according to business records obtained from authorities in Delhi. A source familiar with his arrangements said he did not hold U.S. citizenship or a green card. The contribution appears to have paid for two VIP tickets to Trumps inauguration. He and his wife, Priya, attended the event in Washington and also enjoyed a private breakfast with Trump, according to an article in the UKs Asian Lite newspaper, which was written by a veteran Indian reporter who knows the Vandrevalas. Another British-Asian newspaper, Eastern Eye, reported Vandrevala was friendly with Trumps daughter Ivanka. Editors did not respond to questions about the source of that information. The White House did not respond to an inquiry. The link between the contribution and Vandrevala is hidden in the public record. FEC filings list a $25,000 donation from a limited liability company (LLC) calling itself Sierra Vista. Its stated address is a suburban office park in Wayne, Pennsylvania. Vandrevalas U.S. investment company, Intrepid Capital Partners, has an office at the same complex in Wayne. Separately, an LLC named Sierra Vista 1 has also cited the office park as its address in business records. Sierra Vista 1 was formed in Delaware, a state renowned for its low-tax and high-secrecy regime, in which companies are not required to disclose the names of officers, directors or owners. The only person named in paperwork filed to Delaware when Sierra Vista 1 was set up in 2014 was John Teaford, a businessman who has worked on several Vandrevala ventures since the 1990s. An executive at Intrepid Capital Partners, who requested anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, said Sierra Vista 1 was an investment vehicle funded with Vandrevalas money. Vandrevala did not respond to emails and messages left at his office in London. Reached by telephone and asked whether he handled Sierra Vistas payment to the inauguration for Vandrevala, Teaford said: I probably did. Intrepid Capital Partners has a property arm, ICP Real Estate, which was created to finance developments in India. It claimed to be amassing a $7bn investment fund for building homes and has targeted the cities of Mumbai and Pune, both of which are home to Trump-branded towers. Donald Trump Jr, the presidents eldest son, has described India as the biggest push for our organisation. The Trump company lists four Indian developments in its portfolio. A visit to the country last year by Trump Jr incurred almost $98,000 in publicly funded security costs. Two months before election day in 2016, a new shell company was registered in Georgia. The company, Jan Castle LLC, was formed by a man named David Sean, who paid the $100 fee and signed the simple one-page form required by the state. Sean listed his office address as a numbered suite on a street that runs past a country club in Sandy Springs, one of the countrys wealthiest suburbs. The states paperwork said explicitly that a physical address was required-- a mailbox was not acceptable. But Seans address was, in fact, a mailbox inside a shipping store on a strip mall. Sean, a Taiwanese-American businessman, is based more than 2,000 miles away in southern California and is also known as Pong Hsiang. Shortly before Christmas in 2016, Jan Castle LLC contributed $25,000 to Trumps inauguration fund. Sean, 59, said he was a US citizen. He declined to discuss the activity of Jan Castle or the status of any other people involved in the company, and the Guardian was unable to locate records on either. But Seans wife, Joann, said in a brief telephone interview in late January that Sean created Jan Castle for three Chinese investors. Sean later denied his wife had said this. The companys original filing to Georgia identified someone named Jianning He as its organizer, but gave only the same mailbox address as contact information. Sean rejected requests over several weeks to discuss the contribution to Trumps inauguration. Eventually he agreed to a meeting in person, but then changed his mind. Finally, in a series of text messages, Sean said: I refuse to collude with Chinese communists and insist [on] investment with no condition attached. He went on to say: My company objective is to take back stolen trillion dollar from communist China and put into manufacturing sector in United States. And I will work hard to achieve this mission objective til the day I am perished from the earth. Sean, who describes himself as an enthusiastic Trump supporter, also provided copies of complaint letters he said he had sent to the FBI, the CIA, the FEC and the IRS, requesting that each agency investigate the author of this article. One of Seans daughters carried out a White House internship last year. She posted photographs to social media, including one of her class of interns posing with Trump. Sean said the internship had no link to the contribution. During the 1990s, Sean worked in Taiwan as a consultant for the Hsinchu Science Park, according to his resume. The park was developed by the Taiwanese ministry of science and technology from the 1980s as its answer to Silicon Valley. Later, according to the resume, Sean became a US federal government relations consultant. Records filed to Congress say that from 2012-14, he registered as a lobbyist in Washington, representing his own financial advisory firm. In some lobbying filings, Sean registered jointly with an associate named Johnny Lu, who was said to be an international trade consultant. Lu, who is also known as Lu Zhongying, is an adviser to Taiwans overseas community affairs council, according to a Taiwanese government spokeswoman in California. Lu did not respond to messages left with his family. A cellphone registered in his name did not accept incoming calls. The Swamp Revisited by Nancy Ohanian The pair told an ethics watchdog they were lobbying on issues such as international trade and foreign investment in the US. They reported lobbying the White House, Congress, and government agencies including the bureau of export administration and the federal trade commission. They did not list any foreign clients. Records obtained from state authorities across the US show Sean has used at least 10 mailboxes around California, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Wyoming to open many other companies over the past two decades. The purpose of some of the companies was unclear. One named Johnny Lu as president. In 2015, Sean created a company named Global Prosperity Foundation Corp from the mailbox near Atlanta. He told regulators it would facilitate communication with US major trading partners trading organizations and promote the investment advantages of United States [sic]. It was closed shortly before the donation to Trumps inaugural fund was made. Another $25,000 came into Trumps inaugural fund three days before the presidents swearing-in from a company named New York State Property Management Corporation. The company gave as its address a house in the Long Island town of Hewlett, close to John F Kennedy airport. A company with that name is registered with New York authorities at a small office building elsewhere in the region. The Guardian traced the firm back to Elon Lebouvich, an Israeli businessman in his mid-40s, who is involved in New York real estate. According to court records, Lebouvich has also gone by other names, including Allen Lebo, and has served as a representative for a family of wealthy Moroccan investors in US legal disputes. A member of the family declined to discuss their relationship. Lebouvich is currently developing a $5m retail property in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, according to sources familiar with his work. According to city records, the building is owned by an LLC controlled by the 74-year-old mother of Lebouvichs attorney. The attorney and his mother declined to comment. In a brief telephone interview, Lebouvich said his $25,000 contribution paid for two tickets to the inauguration for me and somebody else. He would not say who used the second ticket. When asked if he was entitled to contribute, he said: I dont have the time to talk about it and ended the call. In a subsequent email, Lebouvich said he had held permanent US residency for about five years, which would mean he was entitled to contribute. He declined to discuss the contribution and threatened legal action. The FEC has seemed unwilling to actively guard against foreign contributions in US politics. In 2017, two dissenting commissioners said the FEC had failed to properly investigate a complaint alleging foreigners donated $55,000 through LLCs to a campaign group supporting a congressman. The commission is understaffed. All four current commissioners have served well beyond their six-year term limits. For the past year, the FEC has operated with four commissioners instead of six because Trump has not filled two vacant seats. Ellen Weintraub, the FEC chairwoman and the only sitting Democratic commissioner, has frequently criticised her colleagues for what she views as an unwillingness to adequately regulate campaign finance, including the threat of foreign money. In a letter to Congress sent last September, Weintraub said the FEC was naively and dangerously ignoring the reality of foreign interference and had no plan to counter it. This situation will not improve until this commission has at least four members who are willing to enforce existing law barring foreign-national political involvement and address dark money, Weintraub wrote. French multinational investment bank and financial services company SocGen has divested its 20 percent stake in SeABank. A bank representative told VnExpress that the Societe Generale Group (SocGen), as part of a non-core assets sales spree, has completely divested its stake in Hanoi-based private bank Southeast Asia Bank (SeABank). SocGen began divesting its stake since the beginning of 2018 in order to restructure its investment portfolio, as it exits non-core markets in Vietnam and all of Asia, the representative said. Previously, SocGen had also divested 100 percent of its stake in its own consumer finance arm in Vietnam, selling Societe Generale Vietnam Finance Company Limited (SGVF) to Vietnam's HDBank. The French investment group is pulling out of many of its investments globally. In February 2018, it completed the sale of several banks based in South Africa, Albania and Bulgaria. The banks plan is to restructure its portfolio by exiting countries or businesses where it lacks critical size and consolidating its positions where it is already strong, Reuters has reported. In SeABanks latest financial report, the bank is now wholly owned by domestic shareholders, with one sole major shareholder holding 9.3 percent. SeABank, by the end of 2018, had total assets of over VND141 trillion ($6.1 billion) with a charter capital of nearly VND7.7 trillion ($332.93 million). In 2018, it reported pre-tax profits of VND618 billion ($26.72 million). An afternoon surge in bank stocks lifted the VN-Index above 1,000 points for the first time since October 2018. By the end of Tuesday's afternoon session, Vietnams benchmark VN-Index closed at 1,001.32 points, an increase 16.72 points or 1.7 percent. The VN30-Index, which represents 30 stocks with the highest capitalization on the market, increased by 13.62 points (1.49 percent) to nearly 930 points. Green was also the main color on the smaller bourses, the Hanoi Stock Exchange (HNX) and the Unlisted Public Company Market (UPCoM), which saw 1.14 percent and 0.95 percent increases respectively. Banking stocks were the highlight of the session, especially among the three biggest lenders in Vietnam in terms of assets. BID shares of BIDV saw a 5.5 percent growth; CTG shares of VietinBank, 4.5 percent; and VCB shares of Vietcombank, 3.5 percent. All three banks are state-owned. Appreciations in Vietnams biggest blue chip stocks continued to sustain growth for the whole market. VHM, the real estate branch of Vietnams biggest private conglomerate Vingroup, grew by 2.6 percent this session, and sister company Vincom Retail (VRE) was up 3.4 percent. The other increases were seen for Sabeco, Vietnams biggest brewer (SAB up 2.9 percent), tech giant FPT (FPT up 4.5 percent), and dairy firm Vinamilk (VNM up 1 percent). Over 200 stocks rose this session, almost double the number of stocks that declined. Particularly in the VN30 group, the basket of highest market cap stocks, only 3 stocks saw decreases, the remaining 27 were in green. Foreign investors were net buyers again this session, with total net purchase volume of VND28.97 billion ($1.25 million) on Tuesday, although this number was far lower than when the VN-Index first began its resurgence after a one week break for Tet, Vietnam's biggest national holiday, which fell in early February. The only anomaly of this upward trend was YEG shares of multi-channel digital media group Yeah1, whose stock registered a surplus of 150,000 shares (unmet sell orders) at the end of the session. The market capitalization of this stock has dropped by over 35 percent since March 4, when YouTube, a major revenue driver for the corporation, unilaterally terminated all content hosting contracts with it. Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, a former prosecutor, said he doubts that the long-awaited report from special counsel Robert Muellers office will be the "blockbuster" that many of President Donald Trumps critics are hoping for. On the other hand, Jones said, he also doubts that the report will contain "information that's going to exonerate a lot of people, as the president's supporters would suggest and would hope." On the "Powerhouse Politics" podcast Tuesday, the senator from Alabama talked to hosts ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl and Political Director Rick Klein about the possible outcomes of the special counsels report. In his experience, when attorneys decide not to prosecute, "in the overwhelming number of cases the file is simply closed," Jones said. However, he added, "your questions were framed to me in a normal circumstance. This is not a normal circumstance." When the report is released, if lawmakers believe an unreasonable amount of the information has been withheld from the public, Jones said, "I think you'll start seeing some congressional action on both sides of the aisle and in both houses to try to get a more complete and full report." Jones said he thinks there could be a risk that Democrats will overreach in their investigations of the president, but added, "I don't think that that risk ... has manifested itself yet. But there's always the risk." "We really don't want to get into areas where it appears that this is solely directed at the president, as opposed to legitimate, efficient oversight," Jones said. Jones place in Congress will likely be hotly contested in 2020. The senator won his current seat in a tight special election to replace Jeff Sessions, with tallies showing he triumphed by a 49.966-48.34 margin. His victory marked the first time a Democrat has won a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama in a quarter century and potential Republican challengers are already emerging from the woodwork. U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne, R-Ala., announced last month that he plans to challenge Jones in 2020, according to the Associated Press, and Roy Moore, the Republican who lost to Jones in the special election, has indicated that he is considering running again. Moore's campaign was rocked by accusations of sexual misconduct, including that he initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32. Moore has denied the allegations. On Wednesday, Jones called Moores announcement "almost comical to watch." "I've always believed that Moore is doing this more to raise money. That's been his M.O. for years. I don't know if he'll run or not but I think this is a fundraising tool for him," Jones said. Another uncertainty in the 2020 election is whether Jones longtime friend, former Vice President Joe Biden, will throw his hat into the ring for the presidential race. Biden told audience members who chanted, "Run, Joe, Run" at an event Tuesday, "I appreciate the energy when I got up here. Save it a little longer -- I may need it in a few weeks." ABC News has previously reported that people who have spoken to Biden in recent weeks said he is "90 percent there." "I think that he is very close," Jones said Wednesday. "But you never know." Jones noted that he hadnt spoken with Biden in a couple of weeks. "It's such a personal decision and it's such a big decision," Jones said. "I think he can offer a benefit to the country, should he both run and be elected." But, Jones pointed out, there are no guarantees in the crowded competition of Democrats vying to face off against Trump in 2020. "I thought, quite frankly, my friend Sherrod Brown was going to be in. And he surprised me the other day with deciding not to," Jones said. Following visits to several early-voting states, the Democratic senator from Ohio, announced on March 7 that he would not seek a presidential bid. Even if uncertainties remain about the Democratic presidential race, Jones said he knew one thing for certain about his own 2020 race, "Whoever ultimately I end up running against will run a campaign on division. I am absolutely convinced of that," Jones said, adding, "That's not my style." "Doesn't matter to me who the opponent is," Jones said. "I'll be back here for another term." Powerhouse Politics podcast is a weekly program that posts every Wednesday, and includes headliner interviews and in-depth looks at the people and events shaping U.S. politics. Powerhouse Politics podcast is hosted by ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl and ABC News Political Director Rick Klein. Copyright 2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. We'll tell investors that legal and institutional reforms have been made: Maha Prasad Adhikari Investors make investment only when they see good returns. If we look at Nepal's history, foreign investors who've invested here have been getting good returns on their investments. This attraction will remain there if we back this process up with a sound legal and institutional regime. The draft national fish sauce standard has been withdrawn after strident protests and criticism from traditional producers. The Ministry of Science and Technology Tuesday temporarily suspended the draft National Standards on the Production of Fish Sauce prepared by the Agricultural Processing and Market Development Authority. This is an agency that functions under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD). "The new set of standards must receive consensus from all affected parties in society, achieve an appropriate balance of interest for those affected, and be suitable for the current development of the industry" Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Pham Cong Tac said, adding the consensus and fairness were fundamental criteria when enacting new regulations. The set of standards, which MARD had transferred to the Directorate for Standards, Metrology and Quality (Ministry of Science and Technology) for re-appraisal, did not meet the above three conditions. This prompted the Ministry of Science and Technology to temporarily withdraw the draft for further consultation with organizations, associations and experts. Deputy Minister Tac added his ministry will continue collaborating with MARD to collect opinion by holding conferences and surveys to achieve consensus and ensure there are no specific benefits for any group. The draft regulation seeks to impose technical standards on fish sauce, covering its chemical content, production processes and storage. The draft National Standards, released earlier this year has been met with fierce criticism from traditional fish sauce producers for imposing unreasonable standards. Representatives of traditional fish sauce production organizations said that the standards unfairly favor industrial production of fish sauce, effectively undermining and even destroying traditional practices. They have noted that many traditional fish sauce making establishments have had to shut down in some areas. They also said they make fish sauce from saltwater fish, mainly anchovies, sardines and scad, but can also make it with dried fish, shellfish, mussels, and crabs. After a period of fermentation in salt for a year of two, the fish sauce is extracted and consumed. Industrial fish sauce, on the other hand, is with water, salt, sugar, anchovies and additives such as flavoring, preservatives, food coloring extracted from fruit, and synthetic sweeteners. Many traditional fish sauce companies have called for the draft national standard to be discarded. Earlier this month, representatives of multiple organizations such as the Vietnam Traditional Fish Sauce Club, the Minh Bach Food Association, the Business Association of High Quality Vietnamese Products, the HCMC Food Association and fish sauce associations in Nha Trang, Phan Thiet and Phu Quoc sent a joint letter to Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam, as well as the ministers of agriculture and science, on their proposed amendments to the draft national standard. In the letter, the representatives accused the draft of promoting the development of industrial fish sauce and creating technical barriers to eliminate traditional fish sauce production without recognizing and clarifying the differences between the two. They requested instead that separate national standards are formulated for traditional and industrial fish sauce production. Fish sauce draft standards suspended When Vietnamese traditional fish sauce not made of fish A misunderstanding At a press conference last Friday, the Department of Agricultural Processing and Market Development claimed that the businesses' concerns and criticisms were due to a misunderstanding. Dao Trong Hieu, deputy head of the department's Fisheries Market Development Unit, said the draft national standard only presents guidelines and recommendations for fish sauce producers, instead of enforced requirements, so that they ensure food safety and protect the environment. He said that the draft only identifies indicators that could pose a risk during fish sauce production, instead of setting specific limits for these indicators. In the case of the draft's requirement for the control of veterinary drugs and pesticide residues, Hieu said that as both saltwater and freshwater fish could be used to make fish sauce, this section of the draft is only meant to serve as a recommendation for producers that use freshwater fish while those that use saltwater fish do not need to comply with it. As for the lack of differentiation between traditional and industrial fish sauces, he admitted that the draft's authors did not differentiate because all fish sauces need to meet technical standards to reduce risk. Following the businesses' comments and requests, Deputy PM Vu Duc Dam has instructed the agriculture ministry to carefully research the organizations and associations' opinions, as well as hold dialogues with them to ensure a national standard that would safeguard the health and rights of consumers. "The requirements and standards must not negatively affect the production and commerce of traditional fish sauce," he said. Three years ago, Vietnam fined scores of news outlets for publishing now-discredited reports about toxic fish sauce, accusing them of sparking public panic over the staple condiment in a country plagued by food scares. Reports said that some traditional fish sauce contained dangerously high levels of arsenic, with local media mainly citing a survey by the state-controlled Vietnam Standards and Consumers Association (Vinastas). "The news caused panic in our society, causing consumers to boycott traditional fish sauce... seriously undermining Vietnam's age-old fish sauce production," according to the Ministry of Information and Communication. In Vietnam, fish sauce is consumed daily by most of the country's population of 95 million -- as a dipping sauce, marinade or in soups. According to information from the Ho Chi Minh City Food Association, on average, Vietnam consumes 250 million liters of fish sauce each year. Of this, traditional fish sauce only accounts for about 60 million liters, while industrial fish sauce accounts for nearly 190 million liters, equivalent to 70 percent of the domestic market share. If the FAA stops using the 737 MAX 8 aircraft, Vietnam will take a similar decision. Photo by AFP Vietnam has banned Boeing 737 MAX aircraft from flying over its airspace due to safety concerns following similar actions by many other countries. The ban took effect at 10 a.m. Wednesday, the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam said in a statement. "Airlines will be affected by this ban as they will have to use different aircraft, but this is all for safety reasons," the head of the CAAV, Dinh Viet Thang, said. Koreas Eastar Jet, Thailands Thai Lion Air and Malaysias Malindo Air operate Boeing 737 MAX flights to Vietnam. But they have grounded the aircraft after an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX bound for Nairobi, Kenya, crashed Sunday killing all 157 passengers. The CAAV said earlier it will not grant operational certificates to Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft over safety concerns. While no Vietnamese airlines currently operates the Boeing 737 MAX 8, Vietjet has ordered 200 narrow-body models of the aircraft and is set to receive the first one in October. The budget carrier said that it is "closely monitoring information from aviation authorities." Vo Huy Cuong, deputy head of the CAAV, said that if the FAA stops using the 737 MAX 8 aircraft, they will take a similar decision and ban the aircraft model from flying to and from Vietnam. The Sunday crash was the second tragic accident involving a Boeing 737 MAX 8. Last October, a 737 MAX 8 operated by Indonesian budget carrier Lion Air crashed 13 minutes after takeoff from the Indonesian capital of Jakarta on a domestic flight, killing all 189 on board. Some countries have halted or are reconsidering their 737 MAX 8 orders. China on Monday grounded nearly 100 aircraft of this model that were being operated by its carriers, and Indonesia has followed suit. Malaysia will reconsider its agreement to buy 25 of Boeings 737 MAX 8 aircraft, Nikkei has reported. Singapore has suspended all Boeing 737 MAX 8 flights starting Tuesday. The 737 MAX 8 first entered service in 2017. By January-end, Boeing had delivered 350 of this aircraft to customers, with 4,661 more on order, according to Reuters. A health official in Da Nang checks a truck transporting pigs from northern to southern Vietnam, to prevent the spread of African swine fever. Photo by VnExpress/Ngoc Truong A Vietnamese Facebook page asked people to stop eating pork, falsely asserting that African swine fever could infect humans. The page of Nguyen Thi Minh Nghia, which is an online shop selling pregnant women fashion, displayed last years image of pigs infected with parasitic worms while making its argument. The information ministry fined Nghia VND20 million ($864) on Monday. She has removed the posts on her page and apologized for publishing the wrong information. African swine fever was first detected in the northern province of Hung Yen early last month. Since then, it has spread to over 330 households, 49 villages and 20 districts in 13 Vietnam provinces and cities in northern and north central Vietnam, including the capital city of Hanoi. The viral disease infects all pig species through bodily fluids such as blood and mucus, causing hemorrhagic fever. There is currently no cure for it, but the disease doesnt affect humans. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development has reaffirmed that the disease exclusively affects pigs, and asked that social media accounts publishing wrong information about the disease be punished. Twenty countries and territories have reported outbreaks of the disease since 2017 and over one million pigs have been culled, according to the World Organization for Animal Health. Vietnam is the third Asian country hit by the disease, following China and Mongolia. Some countries and territories are banning pork imports from Vietnam following the numerous African swine fever outbreaks, including Taiwan, Dubai, the U.S. and the U.K. Violators face heavy fines and even imprisonment. 70 percent of meat products in Vietnam are from pigs, with over 10,000 farms and 2.5 million households raising the animal for food. Vietnamese Doan Thi Huong is escorted as she leaves the Shah Alam High Court on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, August 16, 2018. Photo by Reuters/Lai Seng Sin Vietnams justice minister has called for freeing the Vietnamse suspect accused of killing Kim Jong-nam in Malaysia. Justice Minister Le Thanh Long sent a letter Tuesday afternoon to his Malaysian counterpart Tommy Thomas, discussing Vietnamese woman Doan Thi Huongs indictment in the murder of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's half-brother with a VX poison in Malaysia in 2017. Long said that Huong and Indonesian co-accused Siti Aisyah had been "used and dragged into the case without any knowledge of the deadly consequence their behaviors might have." The women were deceived into what they thought was a prank, with no idea of their actions consequences, he said. He requested the Malaysian attorney general to reconsider the case and release Huong based on the basis of the law and the good friendship and strategic partnership between Vietnam and Malaysia. Also Tuesday, Vietnamese Deputy PM Pham Binh Minh, who is also the foreign minister, spoke with Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah on the phone on this issue. Minh said Vietnamese leaders and the public are closely following the case and asked Malaysia to "ensure a fair trial for Huong and set her free." Minh and Longs request followed a Malaysian court dropping murder charges against Indonesian co-accused Siti Aisyah, releasing her Monday. The Indonesian government had persistently lobbied for dropping the charges against her and releasing her, with Minister of Law and Human Rights Yasonna Laoly writing to Malaysian Attorney General Thomas to state that Aisyah had been deceived. Huongs lawyers have now demanded that the Malaysian attorney general should drop the charges against her too and set her free. Huong, 30, and Aisyah, 26, were accused of using nerve agent VX to assassinate a man who the U.S. and South Korea have claimed was Kim Jong-nam, at Kuala Lumpur's International Airport on February 13, 2017. The women have repeatedly said they believed they were taking part in a prank and had been tricked by people believed to be North Korean secret agents. Huongs father, Doan Van Thanh, said Siti Aisyahs release was good news for his family. "I believe that my daughter will be released too because she is innocent. We havent received any information from Malaysia recently, and we are eager to hear from them now," he told Reuters. The court will resume proceedings Thursday. Watch CCTV camera footage of the attack here. Life-impacting pain common in Vietnam, but few seek professional help: study Life-impacting pain is common in Vietnam, but patients are reluctant to seek professional help. Photo by Shutterstock/Albina Glisic Life-impacting pain is common in Vietnam but professional help is rarely sought due to reasons including limited attention to pain management. A study published by Dove Medical Press late last month surveyed 12,136 randomly selected respondents aged 10 and above from 48 provinces between December 2014 and May 2015. The study about the rate and demographics of pain among Vietnamese, the impacts of such pain and the behaviors it causes found that 85.63 percent of respondents experienced pain severe enough to impact their daily lives, with 67.71 percent saying it affected their job performance. More than 24 percent suffered from acute pain, while 62.43 reported chronic pain. The head was the most common site of pain (68.7 percent) followed by the back (27.5 percent). Despite physical pain, only 43.5 percent sought help from a doctor and only 62 percent of them were satisfied with the treatment outcome. Self-management was the most common method for pain management, which could result in delayed diagnosis of underlying medical problems and a poor prognosis of otherwise treatable ailments. Reluctance to seek professional help stemmed from the fact that the median cost of pain treatment was $150-250, a big burden for many patients in Vietnam. The Vietnamese cultural preference to treat diseases at home rather than in hospital was also a factor. Besides, the countrys medical establishment does not pay enough attention to pain management, with few pain specialists and the lack of training courses in pain management at medical universities. Pain is a common healthcare problem not only in terms of its medical effects but also due to its socioeconomic impacts, evident from many major epidemiological studies conducted in developed countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and Japan. Chronic pain, in particular, is of greater concern as it leads to decreasing quality of life in developing countries like Vietnam, with inadequate or undertreated chronic pain potentially affecting peoples daily activities and behaviors, which in turn could contribute to depression and anxiety. However, there are few studies on the prevalence of pain in communities and how chronic pain patients are managed. There is no published epidemiological data on pain in Vietnam. Ten Vietnamese citizens illegally staying in South Korea have been arrested for purchasing forged alien registration certificates. The Vietnamese nationals, whose identities have not been disclosed, have been placed under criminal investigation for charges of forging official documents and violating the Immigration Control Act, the Yonhap News Agency reported. The investigation found that the group of Vietnamese had asked a Chinese broker to forge registration certificates for aliens in an attempt to hide their status and avoid the crackdown on illegal immigrants by local police. They are alleged to have paid $442 to $531 per fake certificate. The investigation began after officers at the Incheon International Airport discovered 13 fake alien registration certificates dispatched via international express mail from China between late last month and early this month. Based on the recipients address and other personal information, immigration officers hunted for a 20-year-old Vietnamese man who was staying illegally in Incheon, west of Seoul, in early March. Nine other Vietnamese citizens were later captured from Seoul and neighboring provinces. The suspects had been staying illegally in South Korea for one to six years, police said. The Ministry of Justices Korea Immigration Service said it is tracking down three more Vietnamese suspects in the case. South Korea is one of the largest labor export markets for Vietnam. However, the number of migrant workers who reside in the country illegally is relatively high. There were over 45,398 Vietnamese migrant workers in South Korea by the end of June 2018, the majority of them registered under the Employment Permit System, according to official labor reports. The Vietnamese also account for 30-40 percent of around 200,000 illegal foreign workers in South Korea. Vietnamese Doan Thi Huong, who is on trial for the killing of Kim Jong Nam, the estranged half-brother of North Korea's leader, arrives at the Shah Alam High Court on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia March 11, 2019. Photo by Reuters/Lai Seng Sin Vietnam has sought the release of the Vietnamese woman accused of murdering North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's half-brother in Malaysia in 2017. Vietnam's Deputy PM Pham Binh Minh, who is also the foreign minister, spoke with Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah by telephone on Tuesday and discussed Doan Thi Huongs indictment in the alleged murder of Kim Chol among other bilateral issues. Minh said Vietnam's leaders and the public are closely following the case and asked Malaysia to "ensure a fair trial for Huong and set her free." His request follows a Malaysian courts dropping of murder charges against Indonesian co-accused Siti Aisyah and her release on Monday. The Indonesian government had persistently lobbied for dropping the charges against her and releasing her, with Minister of Law and Human Rights Yasonna Laoly writing to Malaysian Attorney General Tommy Thomas to state that Aisyah had been deceived. Huongs lawyers have now demanded that the Malaysian attorney general should drop the charges against her too and set her free. Huong, 30, and Aisyah, 26, were accused of using the nerve agent VX to assassinate Kim, who the U.S. and South Korea have claimed was Kim Jong-nam, at Kuala Lumpur's international airport on February 13, 2017. But the two women have repeatedly said they believed they were taking part in a prank and had been tricked by North Korean secret agents. Watch CCTV camera footage of the attack. Vietnamese woman gets 8 years for selling girl as bride in China Lang Thi Lien at the court in Nghe An on Monday. Photo by VnExpress/Nguyen Hai A court has sentenced a woman to eight years in prison for luring and selling a 13-year-old girl as a bride in China. Lang Thi Lien, 35, was found guilty of trafficking children by a court in Nghe An Province in central Vietnam on Monday. Lien went to China in 2013, got married there to a local man and has a child. In 2016 she visited her hometown in Nghe Ans Con Cuong District and offered to take a neighbors daughter, then 13, to work in China. She told the neighbors she needed the girl to babysit her child, promised to pay them VND80 million ($3,400) and a monthly salary for the girl. Since the girl had dropped out of school and her family was poor, her parents agreed. In January 2017 Lien took the girl to Quang Ninh Province in northern Vietnam, crossed the border into China and promptly sold her to a man in Hebei Province for VND210 million ($9,000). She then sent VND80 million to the girls parents as promised but told them the girl had got married to a Chinese man without providing any further information. The girls mother asked her friend, who had been to China several times, to find the girl. The woman managed to track down the girl and was bringing her back to Vietnam when Lien confronted them. She threatened to harm both if the girls family failed to pay 110,000 yuan (VND380 million). The girl and the rescuers families complained to the police. With help from the Chinese police and Blue Dragon, a Hanoi-based non-profit working with street children and trafficking victims, the girl and her rescuer were safely brought back to Vietnam in September 2017. The Vietnamese police arrested Lien two months later when she visited home. Vietnam recorded over 3,000 human trafficking cases involving almost 7,000 victims between 2010 and the end of last year, according to the Ministry of Public Security. Some 4,500 traffickers were involved and the victims were mostly women and children from poor and rural areas. A majority were sold to men seeking brides or just women to bear their children in China, Malaysia and South Korea, or forced into prostitution. Governments around the world are grounding Boeing 737 Max aircraft or barring them from their airspace. Photo by AFP/Ben Stansall A growing number of airlines and countries have banned or grounded the 737 MAX 8 aircraft after Sunday's deadly crash that killed 157 people. Boeing predicted in January that 2019 would be a record year for aircraft profits and deliveries thanks to the 737 MAX, an update of its best-selling model. But now, less than two months later, the manufacturer is going through one of the most serious crises in its history because of two crashes involving one version: the 737 MAX 8. The crash on Sunday of Ethiopian Airlines came after a fatal accident in October of a Lion Air MAX 8 that claimed 189 lives. What is the 737 MAX The 737 MAX, which debuted in May 2017, is Boeing's response to the Airbus A320 NEO, which allowed the European manufacturer to surpass Boeing in the medium-haul market. It has four variants -- MAX 7, 8, 9 and 10 -- distinguished by the number of passengers they can carry. The MAX 8 costs $ 121.6 million at list price and last year made up a third of Boeing's profits. By the end of January, 4,661 of the planes had been ordered, representing approximately 80 percent of the company's orders. The manufacturer produces 52 of the planes each month, and planned to increase that monthly pace to 57 this year, key to the goal of delivering 895 to 905 aircraft this year, which would be a record. The model "is perhaps the most important program for Boeing and its suppliers," Canaccord analyst Ken Herbert said. What changed after the crash The Ethiopia Airlines accident has led to the grounding of the majority of the 350 MAX 8s in service, with some countries even banning the plane from their airspace, regardless of where the flight originated. The United States continues to allow the plane to fly, but regulators have asked Boeing to modify the flight controls, including the stall prevention system called "MCAS." What about orders? For the moment, no airlines have officially cancelled any orders for the MAX, but press reports indicate Lion Air is looking to replace its MAX 8 with Airbus. "All Boeing can do now is devote all its resources to cooperating with the investigators, and... continue to work with customers on any outstanding issues related to MAX performance," said Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group. What is the financial impact? Boeing shares lost more than 11 percent since the accident, causing nearly $27 billion of market capitalization to go up in smoke. It is difficult to estimate the financial impact, but the analysts are looking at different scenarios. If the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air accidents were found to have the same cause, the economic consequences would be minimal since Boeing would just have to roll out the updates to the flight control software and the flight manual already underway. That would amount to less than $1 billion because the cost of the changes would be about $2 million per device, Canaccord analyst Herbert estimates. Boeing is aiming for a cash flow of about $15 billion this year. But if investigators find a different cause, Aboulafia said the cost would be much greater, since it is likely to oblige the aircraft to be grounded for an extended period, and would involve repairs and major compensation, forcing airlines to find alternative aircraft to fly their routes. That scenario also would undermine Boeing's goal of producing 57 aircraft a month by June. What about Boeing's reputation This crisis tarnishes the image of Boeing, which celebrated its centenary in 2016, as the accidents raises doubts in the general public about the safety of its airplanes, Herbert said. The company, which also manufactures fighter jets, tankers, aerospace equipment and Air Force One, the plane that carries the President of the United States, is an American industrial flagship. What happens to suppliers? In addition to Boeing and its 150,000 employees, many direct and indirect suppliers to the 737 MAX are likely to be affected by the crisis, especially if orders are cancelled. They include General Electric (GE) and Safran, whose joint venture CFM manufactures the LEAP engine on the aircraft, US companies United Technologies (sensors) and Spirit AeroSystems (fuselage, cockpit). Army headquarters puts Colonel Luitel under probe The Nepal Army headquarters has initiated investigation on Colonel Rabindra Luitel who allegedly mobilised NA soldiers to build a fence on his private land. Two days on, loved ones of plane crash victims await closure A man carries a piece of debris on his head at the crash site of a Nairobi-bound Ethiopian Airlines flight near Bishoftu, a town some 60 kilometers southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on March 10, 2019. Photo by AFP/Michael Tewelde Most of the remains from Sunday's crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane had been gathered in a hangar. Shimon Misha flew from Israel to Ethiopia to collect the remains of his colleague, Avi Matzliah, one of 157 people who died when a Boeing 737 crashed just minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa Sunday. "There is a mother and sister and brother. They're waiting for a body to bury," Misha told AFP Tuesday as he waited with other next-of-kin at the Ethiopian Skylight Hotel for news on the remains of lost loved-ones. He had gone to the crash scene, a blackened crater with debris scattered around it, hoping to find anything that had belonged to 49-year-old Matzliah, but he was prevented by investigators. Even though there is no body, "still there are sentimental parts they can find in this mess," said Misha. He added he was looking for Matzliah's tefillin -- a small leather box containing scripture that observing Jews wrap around their arm with a long strap. "We hope to find it because it's made of tough leather." Matzliah had been on his way to close a business deal for telecoms firm Radwin, where he worked with Misha. Ethiopian Airlines has said Israel had two nationals on board Nairobi-bound Flight ET 302, which slammed into a field six minutes after liftoff early Sunday, killing 149 passengers and eight crew. Israel's consul to Ethiopia, Opher Dach, said rescue and recovery specialists had flown to Addis Ababa from Israel to "come to help". "According to the Jewish belief, we need to bring Jewish people to burial in 24 hours, maximum 48 hours," he told private broadcaster Citizen TV in Addis Ababa Tuesday. "We wanted to go in very quickly and start identifying everything", even pieces of clothing. "We think everything matters". For a Jewish funeral, a body or part of a body is needed, even blood, tissue, or DNA left behind on a person's personal items. 'My duty' Most of the remains from Sunday's crash had been gathered in a hangar, said Dach, adding: "Hopefully, we will have some more information in two days' time." "It's my duty to bring Avi home," added Misha. "We never leave somebody behind." Ethiopian Airlines, meanwhile, was making arrangements for Kenyan relatives of lost passengers to travel to Addis Ababa. Kenya was hardest hit by the tragedy, with 32 citizens among the 157 people on the ill-fated flight, followed by Canada with 18. About two dozen U.N. staff were among the dead. "Concerning families and relatives who'd like to travel, we're ready to... take them to Addis, give them accommodation, then constant updates will be given," the airline's Kenyan operations manager Yilma Goshu Gobena said. Kenyan mourners are expected to start arriving on Tuesday night. The airline, Africa's biggest, said Monday it had found the plane's two black boxes with cockpit voice and data recordings, which it is hoped will shed light on the cause of the tragedy. This was the second crash of Boeing's top-selling 737 MAX 8 passenger jet in less than six months -- all 189 people on board an Indonesian Lion Air flight died last October. Growing numbers of countries have banned the model from their airspace or grounded fleets since Sunday's crash. USDA revises upwards forecast for maize exports from Ukraine in MY 2018-2019 The forecast for maize production remained at 35.5 million tonnes. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Russia reportedly to stop gas transit via Ukraine to Turkey from January 2020 media Now Bulgaria is almost completely dependent on Russian gas. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Lutsenko: FSB blocks schemes for delivering military hardware components to Ukraine Ukraine's newest medium-range missiles were made including due to the fact that the country's defense industry acquired certain spare parts within a similar scheme, according to the official. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Russians trying to squeeze Ukrainian defense companies out of Kazakhstan, Indonesia Ukraine repairs aircraft and other equipment for Astana, including S-300 air defense systems and 2S3 Acatsia self-propelled howitzers. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Ukraine closes sky for Boeing 737 Max The move comes in an aftermath of a recent deadly crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 14 years and 30,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going. Baidya Maoist party urges government to lift ban on Chand outfit The Mohan Baidya-led Communist Party of Nepal (Revolutionary Maoist) has demanded that the government withdraw the ban imposed on the Netra Bikram Chand-led Communist Party of Nepal. Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Company have reached an agreement with the intervening parties to their rate review that will allow the companies to continue to invest in Kentucky while providing safe and reliable energy to their customers. The agreement and the rate review are still subject to the review and approval of the Kentucky Public Service Commission, who must also rule on the limited number of issues to which the parties could not reach agreement including the amount of the residential basic service charge. "All parties worked to mitigate the impact on customers, while still providing the companies an opportunity to recover their costs of providing safe and reliable service. We appreciate the efforts of the parties to reach a mutually beneficial outcome in the cases," said Kent Blake, LG&E and KU chief financial officer. Overall, from January 2018 to October 2019, the utilities are investing $2.2 billion in infrastructure improvements to benefit customers. This includes investments in areas such as equipment that detects outages, stronger poles and wires, and more durable gas lines. Customers have already seen increased reliability in their electric and natural gas service as a result of these investments. Additional improvements are expected as work continues. Under the agreement, LG&E would receive a $3.92 million increase for electric service and $19.33 million increase for natural gas service. KU would receive a $58.35 million increase. KU residential electric customers using 1,139 KWh per month would see an increase of $4.47 in their total monthly bill. LG&E residential electric customers using 917 kWh per month would see an increase of 42 cents in their total monthly bill, and residential gas customers using 54 Ccf per month would see an increase of $3.83 in their total monthly bill. Parties to the case are the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Kentucky; the Association of Community Ministries; Charter Communications; the Community Action Council for Lexington-Fayette, Bourbon, Harrison and Nicholas counties; the Department of Defense; Kentucky Industrial Utility Customers; Kroger; Kentucky School Boards Association; Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government; Louisville/Jefferson County Metro Government; Metropolitan Housing Coalition; the Sierra Club; and Walmart. LG&E and KU work to ensure their customers receive reasonably priced energy. KU's current average electric residential rate is approximately 23 percent lower than other similar U.S. utilities, and LG&E's current average electric residential rate is approximately 18 percent lower. If approved as requested, LG&E and KU's rates would remain among the lowest in the nation. Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Company, part of the PPL Corporation (NYSE: PPL) family of companies, are regulated utilities that serve nearly 1.3 million customers and have consistently ranked among the best companies for customer service in the United States. LG&E serves 328,000 natural gas and 414,000 electric customers in Louisville and 16 surrounding counties. KU serves 555,000 customers in 77 Kentucky counties and five counties in Virginia. More information is available at www.lge-ku.com and www.pplweb.com. Contact LG&E and KU, 502-627-4999 (Toll-free: 888-627-4999) Over 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa live today without access to electricity. For most of these people, connection to the grid is not likely to happen for decades, or longer. So far, no country has been able to bridge the poverty gap without access to electricity. The Beyond the Grid Fund for Africa aims to reduce this gap by stimulating and accelerating the emergence of new business models for provision of affordable energy access at scale whilst demonstrating sustainability over time. The programme forms part of the Power Africa' initiative launched by former President Barack Obama and contributes to the Sustainable Development Goal 7 and the Paris Agreement. The programme builds on the positive experiences of the Beyond the Grid Fund for Zambia (BGFZ), which Sweden commenced in 2016. Sweden will contribute an initial SEK 500 million (approx. EUR 48 million) to the expansion and is through the cooperation with NEFCO looking to attract other like-minded donors with the aim to convert the Beyond the Grid Fund for Africa into a multi-donor programme over time. NEFCO will manage the new facility and the programme will be implemented in collaboration with REEEP, an expert organisation who has been instrumental to the early success of the Beyond the Grid Fund for Zambia. "NEFCO is accredited by the EU and the Green Climate Fund and is an experienced fund manager, which is already managing several trust funds for Sida," says Anders Arvidson, Project Leader for Beyond the Grid Fund for Africa at Sida. "We share the same values as regards environmental, social and gender aspects. Additionally, NEFCO can provide the highest level of fiduciary requirements related to reporting, auditing and anti-corruption." Magnus Rystedt, Managing Director at NEFCO sees great potential for small and medium-sized businesses in the programme: "We are very happy for this opportunity to make use of our considerable experience in setting up and administrating multi-donor instruments and create new, innovative green growth financing opportunities for small-and medium sized private energy companies." The core function of the Beyond the Grid Fund for Africa is to offer financial incentives to selected private companies for the development of high quality energy services and products under sustainable and inclusive market conditions including solar home systems and microgrids. The planned period of implementation is six years and the programme is expected to benefit 5 to 15 million rural and peri-urban people in the participating countries. "It fits into a key gap between the early-stage support traditionally offered by challenge funds and equity and commercial debt needed for transitioning to scale in sub-Saharan Africa. The approach is to provide results-based public financing that seeks to unlock early structural challenges in the market, build business and investor confidence, and proactively mobilise various types of downstream investment and debt financing," says Helle Lindegaard, Head of Trust Funds and Climate at NEFCO. "As we near the landmark achievement of providing modern energy to 500,000 people in rural and peri-urban Zambia, we are delighted to see Sweden make this tremendous commitment to universal access to energy in Africa, and look forward to working with NEFCO and Sweden to make these ambitious targets a reality in the coming years," said Martin Hiller, Director General of REEEP." Sustainable Development Goal 7 strives towards universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy by 2030. Read more at sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg7 Contact: Helle Lindegaard, Vice President, Head of Trust Funds and Climate Helle.lindegaard@nefco.fi, tel.: +358 10 6180 664 Anders Arvidson, Project Leader at Sida anders.arvidson@sida.se, Tel: +46 (0)8 698 53 73 About Sida / Sweden The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) is a government agency working on behalf of the Swedish parliament and government, with the mission to reduce poverty in the world. Through its work and in cooperation with others, Sida contributes to implementing Sweden's Policy for Global Development. The Swedish development policy aims to enable people living in poverty to improve their lives. Another part of Sida's mission is reform cooperation with Eastern Europe. The third part of Sida's assignment is to distribute humanitarian aid to people in need of assistance. Sida carries out enhanced development cooperation with a total of 35 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. Read more at www.sida.se. About NEFCO NEFCO is an international financial institution (IFI) established in 1990 by the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. NEFCO's purpose is to promote green growth and climate actions, which help governments and other co-financiers to reach their environmental and sustainability goals. NEFCO focuses on small and medium-sized projects with tangible results, providing high additionality to its stakeholders. Due to its extensive network within the green community and proven ability to connect stakeholders and different financiers to relevant projects, NEFCO has managed to attract a considerable number of trust fund assignments. Over the years, NEFCO has implemented more than 900 private and public projects across different sectors in 51 countries, with focus on Eastern Europe, the Baltic Sea, and the Arctic and Barents Regions, but it has also considerable experience outside this region, including Africa. NEFCO's headquarters is located in Helsinki, Finland. It also has an office in Kyiv, Ukraine, and is represented through long-term engaged consultants in St Petersburg, Russia. Read more at www.nefco.org. About REEEP REEEP is an international multilateral partnership, constituted as a Quasi International Organisation based in Vienna under Austrian Law that works to accelerate market-based deployment of renewable energy and energy-efficient systems in low- and middle-income countries. REEEP's work contributes to global efforts under the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to advance energy access; combat climate change and improve resiliency; reduce damage to the environment; improve livelihoods; and facilitate economic growth where it matters most. Read more at www.reeep.org. Azuri Technologies, a leader in pay-as-you-go solar in Africa and crowdfunding platform Energise Africa today (3/7) announced the latest phase of debt financing from UK impact investors to deliver affordable, clean energy and help solve the energy crisis in sub-Saharan Africa. The Azuri and Energise Africa collaboration plans to raise 2.5 million for pay-as-you-go-solar and help more than 100,000 off-grid people in Sub-Saharan Africa access clean, affordable energy. The investment will support low-income families in Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia and Tanzania. More than 600 million people across Africa live without access to electricity - limiting their life chances of achieving economic prosperity and improved quality of life. Universal access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services is one of the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals and can only be met with access to sufficient investment. Crowdfunding has emerged as a powerful way of financing the off-grid solar industry and is leading the way in increasing investor interest in the market. Through Energise Africa, individuals in the UK can invest from as little as 50 in bonds, issued by solar businesses, to provide clean and affordable energy access, while targeting annual returns of 6%. Capital is at risk and returns are not guaranteed. Azuri is a leader in pay-as-you-go solar technology and since 2012 has been supplying affordable solar home systems and products to the millions across Africa living off-grid without access to mains electricity. In 2018, Azuri and Energise Africa raised 1.7 million from hundreds of UK investors to deliver clean, affordable energy products to more than 16,000 families in sub-Saharan Africa. Simon Bransfield-Garth, CEO of Azuri said: "Azuri is delighted to extend our partnership with Energise Africa and their community of UK-based retail investors to finance off-grid solar projects. With this innovative financing, thousands more households will be able to access modern solar energy for the first time." Lisa Ashford, Managing Director Energise Africa said: "Through Energise Africa, we are committed to providing UK based people with easily accessible opportunities to invest directly in sustainable businesses that can tackle climate change, create long-term social and environmental impact, and also deliver a potential financial return. We're looking forward to the prospect of working with Azuri Technologies again to help accelerate the achievement of UN SDG 7. Energise Africa has been developed by Ethex and Lendahand - two of Europe's leading impact investing companies and is also supported by UK aid, Virgin Unite, Good Energies Foundation and P4G. Over the past 20 months, the Energise Africa community of investors has generated over 7.57 million for 12 solar businesses to provide 312,000 people in 10 African countries with access to clean energy, which has prevented almost 70,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions entering the atmosphere annually and also repaid almost 1.8 million back to investors. Investing in Energise Africa projects via the www.energiseafrica.co.uk site involves risk, including the loss of all of your invested capital, illiquidity (the inability to sell assets quickly or without substantial loss in value), and it should be done only as part of a diversified portfolio. The investment opportunities on www.energiseafrica.co.uk are not an offer to the public in any jurisdiction and are available only to registered members of the platform who have certified that they are eligible to invest. Any person who is not resident in the United Kingdom who wishes to view these investment opportunities must first satisfy themselves that they are eligible to do so under the securities laws and regulations applicable to them. This site does not constitute an offer of, or the solicitation of an offer to buy or subscribe for, any securities to any person in any jurisdiction to whom or in which such offer or solicitation would be unlawful. In respect of its regulated activities, Lendahand Ethex Ltd is an appointed representative of Share In Limited, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 603332). Read the full press release. Building Energy SpA, a multinational Italian company operating as a Global Integrated IPP (Independent Power Producer) in the renewable energy sector, has inaugurated the Queule photovoltaic park, located in the Municipality of Las Cabras, in the region of O'Higgins. The plant, realized by Building Energy Andes SpA, a joint venture born from the collaboration with The Scotta Group, an Italian company specialized in the design, construction and installation of hydroelectric power plants and in industrial automation, has an installed capacity of 8,2 MWDC. The start of the activities was celebrated today (3/12) with the inauguration of the solar park, in the presence of the Managing Director Latin America of Building Energy, Mr. Daniele Moriconi, and the Ambassador of Italy in Chile, Mr. Mauro Battocchi. The energy produced (16 GWh per year) will be used to meet the energy needs of more than 13,500 families living in the Municipality of Las Cabras, contributing every year to the reduction of 6,450 tons of CO2 emissions for the benefit of citizens and the surrounding environment. The construction of the photovoltaic park, which began in February 2018 and ended in November of the same year, required a total investment of 9.5 million dollars. For the development of the project, which also includes an environmental impact permit, Building Energy Andes has used the financing of the Chilean credit institute Banco Security. Building Energy, involved in Chile in the development of over 250 MW of projects, during 2018 obtained a funding worth of about 19 million dollars for the construction of four solar plants and a mini-hydroelectric plant, located in the central regions of the country, for a total installed capacity of 21.5 MW. All projects fall under the PMGD category (Pequeno Medio de Generacion Distribuida) because they have a capacity of less than 9 MW and benefit from a stabilized price, set by the National Energy Commission. Two of these plants, built in the VII Region and entered into operation last year, generate a total of 14 GWh of renewable energy: the Peralillo photovoltaic park (3.5 MW), built in the Municipality of Hualane, has been operational since March 2018; while Villa Prat (3.5 MW), located in the Municipality of Sagrada Familia, has been active since July. The Alto Solar plant (3.5 MW), which has been in operation since September 2018, produces about 6 GWh of energy per year and it is located in the Municipality of San Pedro. The construction of the 2.7 MWDC mini hydroelectric power plant La Confianza, in the Municipality of Los Angeles, which will make 9 GWh of energy available per year, has recently begun. Building Energy Andes is also developing a second portfolio of projects, for a total capacity of about 30 MW, for which is expected an investment of about 30 million dollars. The main of these projects is the photovoltaic park in Punitaqui, located in the Coquimbo Region, in the Municipality of Limari, which has also obtained the environmental impact permit. The entry into operation of the plant, which will have a capacity of about 9 MW, is expected by the end of the year. "We are proud to give our contribution to the development of renewable energy in Chile with the entry into operation of the photovoltaic park in Queule which will make green energy available to the citizens of Las Cabras. - said Daniele Moriconi, Managing Director Latin America of Building Energy - We are present in the country with over 250 MW of photovoltaic, wind and mini-hydroelectric projects and we are planning, together with Scotta Group, to further expand our installed capacity". "Building Energy's plant testifies the global strength of the Italian system in the field of renewable energy and in particular in the solar field" - Ambassador Battocchi highlights - In Italy we now have about 20 GW of installed capacity to produce energy from the sun, we are the fifth most important country in the world and the second in Europe. Building Energy is the spearhead of an Italian Solar production chain that goes from the design and construction of plants to the manufacture of photovoltaic modules and cells, inverters, wiring, electrical and innovative building materials, up to technical, commercial and financial services, not to mention the research and development in which we are leaders. For the whole Italian Solar System, today Chile is an unmissable opportunity". "This project represent a new step to consolidate our position in the country and to provide a comprehensive response for the development of the renewable energy in Chile. - said Paolo Scotta, Executive President of the Scotta Group - In addition to the construction of hydroelectric power plants and photovoltaic parks we complement our presence with transmission lines, substations and services for operation and maintenance of the entire complex". BUILDING ENERGY Building Energy is an international company that operates as Global Integrated IPP, dealing with the development, production and sale of energy generated at 100% from renewable sources, such as wind, sun, water and biomass. The company is vertically integrated and entirely dedicated to the development, management and sale of alternative energy all over the world. It is present in Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia Pacific. The company has a gross capacity of 534 MW of plants in operation, under construction or under development and a further 1.5 GW of pipeline in 12 countries, with which it stands as one of the leading international players in the field of renewable energies. Building Energy has also expanded its business by incorporating BePower - its Digital Green Utility. From Demand Response to the development of a network that owns public charging stations for electric vehicles on the Italian territory. For more information please visit www.buildingenergy.it. SCOTTA GROUP Scotta Group is an Italian company specialized in the development of plants and turnkey systems (Water to Wire) for small hydroelectric projects. Over twenty years of experience have allowed Scotta to define operational practices that make it the reference partner for customers during all phases of plant development. Scotta has been involved in over 215 projects of mini-hydroelectric plants all over the world, with 375 MW of installed capacity. In addition to Italy, the company has developed plants in France, Albania, Ukraine, Romania and Chile, a country in which it has achieved a market leadership position, participating in 21 projects, with over 100 MW of installed capacity, in which it has mainly played the role of EPC. Press contacts: Building Energy Maria Grazia Tiballi Tel. +39 02 49527730 m.tiballi@buildingenergy.it MSL Italia Barbara Rivolta - Maria Ginevra Amoruso Tel. +39 02 77336262 / +39 02 77336476 barbara.rivolta@mslgroup.com mariaginevra.amoruso@ mslgroup.com Customers participating in LG&E and KU's Solar Share Program are celebrating a major milestone as the utilities announce construction has officially begun on the first 500-kilowatt section of its new solar facility. "Our customers who are participating in our Solar Share Program are a part of something very special for our community," said Beth McFarland, LG&E and KU vice president-Customer Services. "Together, we're empowering the growth of renewable energy and keeping it local here in Kentucky." This subscription-based program is a cost-effective option available to the utilities' residential, business and industrial customers who want to support solar energy. When energy is produced by the facility - which is expected to begin mid-summer - customers earn credits on their monthly bills based on their subscription level. By participating in the program, customers get the benefits from solar energy without having to pay the added up-front and long-term expenses that come when installing and maintaining a private solar system. Ford Motor Company is the first major founding partner in the program and will be joining about 300 of the utilities' customers who will earn bill credits from this first section of solar panels. "Ford is excited to be a founding partner in this renewable energy program as we support the corporate sustainability goal to reduce our carbon footprint," said George Andraos, Director of Engineering and Energy. Construction plans were finalized after the first section of the facility reached 100-percent subscription. Drivers traveling along Interstate 64 will soon see construction equipment and work vehicles at the site of the facility, in Shelby County approximately one mile west of Exit 28. The first section is expected to be fully operational by summer, 2019. The Solar Share facility is being built in eight 500-kilowatt sections. Residential, business or industrial customers interested in participating in the program can enroll now by visiting lge-ku.com/solar-share. Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Company, part of the PPL Corporation (NYSE: PPL) family of companies, are regulated utilities that serve nearly 1.3 million customers and have consistently ranked among the best companies for customer service in the United States. LG&E serves 328,000 natural gas and 414,000 electric customers in Louisville and 16 surrounding counties. KU serves 555,000 customers in 77 Kentucky counties and five counties in Virginia. More information is available at www.lge-ku.com and www.pplweb.com. For further information: call the LG&E and KU media hotline at 502-627-4999. In launching the PowerForward initiative, the PUCO has placed itself at the forefront of defining the changes in regulatory policy as well as the technologies and processes employed by utilities and their relationship with customers, whose role is transforming from an energy user to an energy market participant. The recently released document, PowerForward: Roadmap to Ohio's Electricity Future, summarizes the path forward. These two workgroups will address specific tasks articulated in the PowerForward Roadmap and will build upon the collaborative process of the PowerForward initiative. The DWG will focus on the technologies that will allow customers to obtain real-time or near real-time access to energy data through the connection of qualified home area network devices and the customers' smart meter. This workgroup will also seek to define a secure methodology that would extend this data to competitive retail energy service providers and other third-party providers. The PWG is charged with exploring issues surrounding an integrated distribution system planning process. This includes the beneficial siting of energy storage, the mechanisms and technologies required for conducting hosting capacity analysis, interconnection standards, and functionalities for advanced inverters. It will also explore the proper approach to the consideration and procurement of non-wires alternatives, and necessary portals to communicate key market and distribution grid planning information to customers. "The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio has taken a leadership position by fostering collaboration among stakeholders," said EnerNex CEO Jeff Lamoree. "We applaud the PUCO for their vision, dedication and actions that leverage technology advancements, embrace change and stimulate innovation. These are the foundations of an effective grid modernization effort." The DWG kick-off meeting was held Tuesday, March 5, and set the foundation and baseline for future workgroup sessions. Please visit this website for more information about the DWG meeting series and updates as the group convenes. The PWG will hold its kick-off meeting on Wednesday, March 27, 2019. The primary focus of this initial meeting will be educational, establishing a baseline understanding of distribution resource planning within the context of grid modernization. Please visit this website for more information on the upcoming meeting. On August 29, 2018, the PUCO issued PowerForward: A Roadmap to Ohio's Electricity Future. The PowerForward Roadmap envisions the future electric distribution grid as a secure, open-access platform that will give customers more control over how they consume electricity, and allow customers to adopt innovative applications of their choosing as they are introduced on the market. For more information, contact: Matt Schilling, 614.466.7750. About EnerNex EnerNex, a CESI company, is a leader in providing engineering, consulting, and research services to the electric power industry worldwide. Founded in 2003, the company is focused on helping our clients understand, adopt and leverage new and emerging electric power technologies to advance a cleaner, smarter energy system of the future. To learn more about CESI, a world-leading innovation, technical consulting and engineering company for the electric power sector, visit: www.cesi.it. Tata Power, India's largest integrated power utility, today (3/6), accomplished a milestone by crossing 7 lakh consumer base mark in Mumbai. On this occasion, Tata Power invited Mr. Sumit Acharya - the 7th Lakh' consumer at a celebratory event held at their Dharavi receiving station where he planted a sapling to commemorate this achievement. In 2008, the Supreme Court, by its landmark judgement paved the way for Tata Power with the right to supply electricity directly to all consumers and grow its distribution business in Mumbai. Also, MERC laid down clear guidelines for an Operational Protocol' where it allowed consumers to choose their supplier between (then) Rinfra (now Adani) and Tata Power, thus establishing a viable alternative for reform in the distribution sector in India. The Company started off with a consumer base of 26,000 direct consumers prior to its retail expansion in Mumbai which commenced from November 2009 onwards. Today, the company is growing at a rapid pace at which the consumer base has moved from 26,000 to 7 lakhs in a decade. With a major focus on superior customer service & delivery, the Company continues to provide affordable services with superior customer experience. Speaking on this achievement, Mr. Praveer Sinha, CEO and MD, Tata Power, said, "We are extremely delighted to cross the 7 lakh consumer mark in Mumbai. We wish to continue being a relevant part of the growing consumer base and reach new heights through constant innovation and excellent customer service." For more than a decade, Tata Power has focused on providing its consumer with reliable, affordable and quality power and continuously enhanced customer care by delivering innovative services and solutions. The Company has been offering affordable power tariff across most consumer categories and the remarkable increase in the company's customer base is evidence of the same. At the core of reliable power supply to the city is the unique 'Islanding System' pioneered by Tata Power, due to which the city of Mumbai has the advantage of assured uninterrupted reliable supply of power. In case of a grid failure, the Islanding System ensures uninterrupted power supply within the city limits. In case of a breakdown in the Western Regional Power Grid, Tata Power's system is automatically isolated from the rest of the grid. It ensures that our generating units continue to function. All essential services are assured continuity of power supply. With many firsts to its credit, supporting the country's energy independence, Tata Power to revolutionised the age-old power industry and the way individuals consume power. Transforming itself from a traditional-led to digital-first business approach, the company offers multiple benefits to its consumers with the most competitive and excellent customer service which is at par with international benchmarks: Consumer Service Initiatives with many firsts by Tata Power: Know Your Energy Consumption (KYEC): A innovative daily energy management online tool designed for AMR enabled HT Consumers to monitor their daily energy consumption and take charge of saving energy thereby saving their Bill expenses. This services is being extended to LT Consumers also in a phased manner A innovative daily energy management online tool designed for AMR enabled HT Consumers to monitor their daily energy consumption and take charge of saving energy thereby saving their Bill expenses. This services is being extended to LT Consumers also in a phased manner e-NACH: Automated bill payments using this service which drastically cuts Turn-Around-Time (TAT) for online registration and increases customer convenience with registrations on-the-go. Automated bill payments using this service which drastically cuts Turn-Around-Time (TAT) for online registration and increases customer convenience with registrations on-the-go. VoiceBOT Tina: First Interactive application powered by Google Assistant that enables consumers to use voice commands various services such as billings, payments and also address all consumer queries using any compatible Android or iOS mobile devices and Google Home devices Interactive application powered by Google Assistant that enables consumers to use voice commands various services such as billings, payments and also address all consumer queries using any compatible Android or iOS mobile devices and Google Home devices All Women Customer Relations Centre: 1st Power Utility in India to launch this service wherein all operations are manned entirely by women ranging from Security, Front Desk Executives, Cashier and Housekeeping 1st Power Utility in India to launch this service wherein all operations are manned entirely by women ranging from Security, Front Desk Executives, Cashier and Housekeeping WhatsApp Service: Provides a holistic consumer experience by quick resolution of consumer queries and concerns Provides a holistic consumer experience by quick resolution of consumer queries and concerns Power Rewards': Consumers are awarded loyalty points on bill payments which can be redeemed across different brands/categories through exclusive discounts and offers. Consumers are awarded loyalty points on bill payments which can be redeemed across different brands/categories through exclusive discounts and offers. e-Wallets: D igital payments through National Automated Clearing House (NACH) and e-Wallets such as Paytm, Amazon, Airtel money, Ola money, Pay Zapp and M-Pesa igital payments through National Automated Clearing House (NACH) and e-Wallets such as Paytm, Amazon, Airtel money, Ola money, Pay Zapp and M-Pesa Revamp Customer Portal: Designed with a dynamic & user-friendly experience, thereby enhancing customers engagement with Tata Power while providing best-in-class service at Customers finger-tips Designed with a dynamic & user-friendly experience, thereby enhancing customers engagement with Tata Power while providing best-in-class service at Customers finger-tips QR Code: Dynamic QR code printed on consumers' power supply bill for payments. They can scan the QR code with BHIM or any UPI linked bank apps and pay their bills without any hassle Dynamic QR code printed on consumers' power supply bill for payments. They can scan the QR code with BHIM or any UPI linked bank apps and pay their bills without any hassle Mobile Application: Compatible with Android and iOS platforms designed on SAP MCF Platform, the application gives its users a unique experience due to real time integration with the enterprise system Compatible with Android and iOS platforms designed on SAP MCF Platform, the application gives its users a unique experience due to real time integration with the enterprise system E- Payment: Pay electricity bills through GoI initiated avenues such as Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) App, Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS), Dynamic Bharat or UPI linked QR Codes (Tata Power Mumbai being the 1st power utility in India to launch the Dynamic UPI-linked QR code payment option and printing of the Bharat QR code on power supply bills for ease of bill payment), Debit/Credit Cards, Net Banking, 15 plus e-Wallets, National Automated Clearing House (NACH), Online fund transfer (NEFT/ RTGS, IMPS) New businesses to meet the changing needs of Mumbai customers: Election in Darjeeling Freedom to use terms like identity and Gorkhaland was confined to the local level Antonio Banderas is multitasking today, combining his first interview of the morning with a breakfast of two fried eggs and bacon. I was at the gym running and time got away from me, says the 58-year-old actor and director from Malaga. Banderas is sitting in filmmaker Pedro Almodovars office in the El Deseo film production company in Madrid to talk about his new role in the movie Dolor y gloria (or, Pain & Glory) which premieres in Spain on March 22. Ive done eight movies with Pedro. Hes one of the most important men in my life Banderas plays Almodovars physical, albeit not spiritual, alter ego Salvador Mallo, a filmmaker who is having both a creative and existential crisis. It is a challenging character to play because Almodovar is known for his meticulousness while shooting, and his habit of acting out the parts to convey the nuance of his characters to the cast. So, how does one give life to Almodovar without imitating or becoming him? From inside out, Banderas answers. And in spite of the physical features and the costumes Pedro had me wear, such as his hair and clothes, which surprised me at the beginning. Once we shaped the exterior and the pain of his illnesses, I no longer thought about imitating him. It was more a state of mind... and about understanding Pedro. The actor explains that he did not use this method as a strategy to heal the wounds between the two they came to blows several times during the production of The Skin I Live In but instead as a real exercise to know what he wanted me to express, not only using the things he told me, but also those he told others. Until I met him I was a repertoire actor. Pedro helped me create the personality of an artist and mentally opened me up to the world The actor believes that beneath the plot of Dolor y gloria is some kind of relief for the filmmaker. He had things he wanted to confess about his relationships with actors, family and in general with life. He needed to expel them, says Banderas. Maybe they were things that needed to be said and that were never said. This is why it is not an autobiography. And for this reason, he says, Almodovar felt more freedom. I think that when he realized I was creating the character from humility, in a very receptive way, he started to let me go. Pedro is a creator who dominates the actors during a shoot. This time I felt he was letting me do my own thing he probably thought I had created the character and that it was better not to touch it. It happened to me before, in Atame! [or, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!] and in La ley del deseo [or, Law of Desire]. In short, all of this made me feel very connected to him while shooting because we had very powerful moments. For example, the balcony sequence my character has with his mother, which [Pedro] was unable to get through at a table read before the script was picked up. I went to hug him and he transmitted his deep pain to me all that had happened to him in his youth, because of his sexuality, in a small town in the 1960s. Now Banderas understands Almodovar better. After many years, we still have things to discover, layers of the onion to peel. Pedro keeps his personal life very closed off and some details are only expressed in his movies. This situation has allowed us to recover our youth because we still surprise ourselves... and I hope well also surprise the public, because it will mean that we are not dead. Its been a long journey for the pair, as Banderas explains. I met Pedro in 1981, on the terrace of [Madrids] Cafe Gijon an hour before a performance of La hija del aire [or, The daughter of the air] by Calderon de la Barca, surrounded by other actors. And a guy with a red briefcase arrived, and he told us about some funny adventures, which today I no longer remember. When he was leaving, he looked at I had a very Baroque look for the play, with long hair and a goatee and he said, You have a very romantic face, you should do movies. Goodbye. When he left, I asked who he was and they replied, Hes a kid who made a movie, but hes not going to make any more. Spain is full of prophets, says Banderas, laughing. Ive made eight movies with Pedro. Hes one of the most important men in my life. When he called me to read the script [for Dolor y gloria] he said to me, Youll read things that we did together in the 1980s. Until I met him I was a repertoire actor. Pedro helped me create my personality as an artist, and mentally opened me up to the world. When I work with Pedro I think that life placed me in front of one of these great artists who will go down in the Spanish history as a man who knew how to relate to his era When Banderas arrived in Los Angeles, he recalls feeling like a Rolling Stone. Hollywood is very conservative, and because of the education I received from Pedro, I felt like a rock star. The kiss I gave Tom Hanks when arriving at the hospital in Philadelphia wasnt there in the script. And it really wasnt a big deal. It seemed like anathema at the time. But Jonathan accepted my proposal and Tom always thanked me for it. And on that trip to a new life in the United States, was there an escape from Almodovars world, a sort of self-vindication? Probably. I didnt like the label Almodovar boy, it was something I didnt feel comfortable wearing, even though back then I admired him just as much as I do today. When I work with Pedro I think that life placed me in front of one of these great artists who will go down in the Spanish history as a man who knew how to relate to his era. As an artist he is pure, he has never betrayed himself, he says laughing and remembering a moment during the recent shoot when the filmmaker called him Antonito. He does that at times, and I love it, because Im almost 60 years old. And how is the Almodovar boy doing now? Today I laugh a lot. Being in the United States has allowed me to do a lot of very different things. Now everything has changed. Other [Spanish actors], like Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, who have won Oscars, have fared even better than me. But I was the first one who said, this can be done. Banderas remembers the exact moment the estrangement between him and Almodovar ended. I had just left a work session at the musical Zorba the Greek in New York, and I was just about to accept it. All of a sudden I got a phone call. It was Pedro, and he said to me, The time has come. For what? For us to work together again. Its been 22 years. He sent me the script for The Skin I Live In and it was like finding a Coca-Cola in the desert. English version by Asia London Palomba. Investigators from the Spanish police and National Intelligence Center (CNI) have linked an attack on the North Korean embassy in Madrid on February 22 to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Sources believe the goal of the attack embassy was to get information on the former North Korean ambassador to Spain At least two of the 10 assailants who broke into the embassy and interrogated diplomatic staff have been identified and have connections to the US intelligence agency. The CIA has denied any involvement but government sources say their response was unconvincing. If it is proven that the CIA was behind the attack, it could lead to a diplomatic spat between Madrid and Washington. Government sources say that it would be unacceptable for an ally to take such action. Not only would it mean that the US agency had operated on Spanish soil without asking for authorization or informing the authorities, it would also be a violation of the international conventions that protect diplomatic delegations. Whats more, unlike other intelligence activities such as cyberattacks, which are characterized by their discretion, the attack on the North Korean embassy was especially violent. On February 22 at 3pm, 10 masked men carrying alleged imitation weapons broke into the embassy, located north of the capital in the residential area of Aravaca. They tied up the eight people inside and put bags on their heads. The victims were beaten and interrogated. A woman managed to escape from a window on the second floor and her screams for help were heard by a neighbor, who contacted the police. Officers arrived at the scene but when they tried to enter the embassy a man opened the door to them and told them that there was nothing going on. Minutes later, two luxury vehicles sped out of the embassy. The cars used for the getaway belonged to the diplomatic mission and were later abandoned in a nearby street. The assailants tied up the eight people inside the embassy and put bags on their heads Police found the eight victims inside. They had been held hostage for two hours, had had bags placed over their heads, had been beaten and were scared. Two of them required medical attention. Investigators from the General Information Office (CGI) and CNI ruled out the idea that the attack was the work of common criminals. The operation was perfectly planned as if it were carried out by a military cell, said sources close to the investigation. The assailants knew what they were looking for, taking only computers and mobile phones. The highly secretive investigation will be heard at Spains High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, which could order the arrest of the identified assailants. Government sources, however, admit it would be difficult to prove the CIA was involved in court. Kim Hyok Chol Sources believe that the goal of the attack on the North Korean embassy was to get information on Kim Hyok Chol, the former North Korean ambassador to Spain. Former North Korean ambassador to Spain, Kim Hyok Chol, in a file photo from 2015. CARLOS ROSILLO Kim Hyok Chol was expelled from Spain on September 19, 2017 by the then-Spanish Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis given that the nuclear testing that the country was carrying out at the time was in serious breach of United Nations Security Council resolutions. Kim Hyok Chol, who was declared persona non grata by Spain and was invited to leave the country before the end of the month, is currently one of Kim Jong-uns highly trusted diplomats, and one of the architects of the failed nuclear summit between US President Donald Trump and Kim Jon-un in Vietnam. The meeting, aimed at securing North Koreas nuclear disarmament, ended in failure without any agreement on a timetable for disarmament or on future negotiations. In February, Kim Hyok Chol also led the North Korean delegation that negotiated a nuclear disarmament plan with US special envoy Stephen Biegun in exchange for sanctions to be lifted. English version by Melissa Kitson. Following its strong performance at the Andalusian elections in December 2018, Spains far-right party Vox now has a presence in the regional parliament, which also comes with access to public funds for the party and salaries for its 12 deputies. This combined income comes out to just over 2.9 million, of which 98% represents public subsidies for election expenses (nearly 1.7 million) and annual allocations to help political groups with parliamentary representation carry out their duties (approximately 1.2 million). Yet one of Voxs signature campaign issues was eliminating government funding for political parties. In the initial document that Vox put to the right-wing Popular Party (PP) as a condition for backing the PPs Juan Manuel Moreno as the new regional premier, there was a call to reduce public funding for political groups, unions and business associations by as much as 75%. This point was eventually dropped from the final deal that ousted the Socialist Party (PSOE) from power in Andalusia after 36 years of uninterrupted government. And Voxs representatives in the region have not taken any steps to reject the funds, arguing that there are bigger priorities to deal with, and that such a move should be agreed to by all political groups in the chamber. According to election regulations passed in October 2018, every party can receive 23,035 for each one of its seats plus 0.85 for each vote obtained. Vox secured 393,201 votes at the December poll, raising its election-related funds to 610,640.85. But the party also gets additional subsidies to cover the expense of sending out voting ballots and envelopes; this amount depends on the number of party voters as a percentage of the total electorate. Since Vox obtained 10.92% of the votes, this means 0.1648 per voter. And since election officials place the voter body at 6,541,748 people, this means an additional 1,078,080 to cover election expenses. To this must be added more regional funds to help with the daily running of affairs in parliament and to pay outside advisors. Out of the global figure of nearly 10.7 million earmarked for all political parties in parliament, Vox gets close to 1.2 million. The use of this money is audited by parliament, and any leftover amounts must be returned. Vox has hired eight advisors who include lawyers, economists and press managers, said party sources. Andalusian premier Juan Manuel Moreno (l). Alejandro Ruesga Meanwhile, each regional representative gets a salary of 3,127.22 a month, plus extra money for holding positions in committees or for being a party spokesperson. There are also allowances for travel expenses ranging between 200 and 500 a month. Vox representatives have no obligation to give part of their deputy income to the party. According to these parameters, Voxs best-paid representative is its parliamentary spokesman, Alejandro Hernandez, who earns nearly the same as the regional premier Juan Manuel Moreno (who makes 5,519 a month, not counting allowances). The Andalusian premier earns the next-to-lowest salary in Spain, after the head of the small northern region of Cantabria. English version by Susana Urra. Text in which the author defends ideas and reaches conclusions based on his / her interpretation of facts and data The British parliament has decided to reject the ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement that was reached between the heads of state and government of the European Union and the government of the United Kingdom. This step was taken despite the added guarantees offered with great effort by the EU. I deeply lament this decision, which means prolonging the situation of uncertainty when there are little over two weeks to go before the date when Brexit should theoretically materialize. There are many lessons to be learned from a process that is keeping the British people trapped in a veritable blind alley. It is impossible to understand Brexit without considering the combination of three elements: a nationalism that supports turning inwards on the strength of national myths and false nostalgia; the advance of the far right; and the simplification of the concept of democracy, where referendums are used as tools offering simple answers to complex problems. There are many lessons to be learned from a process that is keeping the British people trapped in a veritable blind alley The years prior to the Brexit referendum of June 2016 were marked by the rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), a political force that made leaving the European Union the centerpiece of its existence. To make its message take hold in British society, this party consistently demonized the EU and consciously disregarded the real needs of citizens. The one and only goal was to ensure that leaving the EU would monopolize the political agenda. We watched a trend emerge that this continent has already witnessed in the past: a minority sector with extreme views imposing its ideas by conditioning other political actors. Actors who sacrifice pragmatism, with devastating results. The referendum was held, and we all know what the outcome was. The decision-taking method is not entirely alien to the circumstances in which we find ourselves today: a simple yes/no answer to complex questions with far-reaching consequences. A binary decision mechanism with mutually exclusive alternatives that denied the wealth of nuance that defines democracy. That is the vision of democracy that deserves to be preserved in Europe. The campaign was rife with all kinds of exaggerations and lies. It was said that there would be additional resources for the National Health Service; that access to the single market would be preserved; and that dozens of trade agreements would be instantly signed. Nicolas Aznarez The top priority for the Spanish government has always been the same: offering rigor, certainty and security in this process especially for citizens and economic players while reinforcing the foundations of the future relationship with a country with which we have deep and varied ties. On a day such as today, the important thing is that Spain has done its homework. Spaniards are ready for any scenario, deal or no deal. In order to manage the UKs withdrawal with a degree of certainty, and once I had verified the guarantees regarding Gibraltar that Spain needed, in November of last year I and other heads of state and government endorsed the Withdrawal Agreement and approved the Political Declaration on the future relationship. This agreement affords peace of mind and security for citizens who have made vital decisions based on the UKs decades-long membership of the EU; it preserves their rights and guarantees that the UK will honor the financial commitments it acquired while it was a member of the EU. It also includes a transition period to allow for a progressive adaptation to the new circumstances, and to advance in talks about the future relationship between the EU and the UK. The agreement furthermore guarantees that the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland will remain invisible, thus preserving the peace and the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement. By the way, there are not many better examples than this one to clearly illustrate the key role played by Europe to heal wounds that had been festering for generations around forgotten borders the kinds of borders that some are so anxious to raise once more. The important thing is that Spain has done its homework. Spaniards are ready for any scenario, deal or no deal The Agreement offers all possible guarantees, certainty and security for an orderly withdrawal. And it is complemented by a Political Declaration that points the way toward a mutually beneficial future relationship. The European Council and the European Commission also adopted a joint statement that, for the first time in history, recognized a determining role for Spain, including a veto right over the future relationship between Gibraltar and the European Union. These guarantees have been reinforced by including a clarification about the territorial scope of Article 184 of the Withdrawal Agreement in the new joint instrument. Thanks to this, we are in a privileged position to build a future of shared prosperity between neighboring Campo de Gibraltar and Gibraltar in the coming decades. To reach this agreement, the 27 member states made huge efforts to be flexible. Unfortunately, when the most immovable kind of nationalism is monopolizing the debate, any concession or agreement is interpreted as a betrayal. In January, the British parliament found itself facing the dilemmas posed by the destruction of a framework of political, legal and economic relationships that have spanned more than 45 years. It was the logical culmination of a process that had been contaminated by the simplistic rhetoric that had emerged from a divisive tool such as a referendum. British members of parliament neither ratified the Withdrawal Agreement, nor could they reach a basic consensus on the existing real possibilities: leaving with no deal, a negotiated deal, or staying within the European Union. The decision taken via the referendum has been followed by complete political deadlock. Whatever happens next, the EU should continue with its process of integration Whatever the case, given the possibility of a no-deal Brexit, I would like to convey a message of calm. On March 1, the Spanish government approved a royal decree with contingency measures that will cover all aspects linked to the UKs withdrawal. It has also taken logistical measures, with the approval of new public positions in the sectors that will be most affected, such as customs. The European Commission, for its part, has adopted the necessary measures in the areas that are under its remit. After its withdrawal, the United Kingdom will not be a part of the European Union, but it will still be a part of Europe. It will continue to be a very important partner, especially for Spain, which has the highest number of British residents and tourists in the EU. The measures that we have adopted will protect the rights of British citizens who are resident in Spain, and the British government has announced that it will do the same for Spanish residents there. Our bilateral relations are, and will continue to be, excellent, and the United Kingdom can continue to count on Spain as a partner and ally. With regard to the future relationship, I want to maintain the greatest mobility for our citizens and connectivity between our two countries, as well as the closest cooperation possible in the areas of security, the fight against organized crime and terrorism. Whatever happens next, the EU should continue with its process of integration. The next European elections will be a decisive moment. There are two clearly defined options ahead. One is a callback to the past, to the rejection of diversity and to fears of the future. The other option is represented by decidedly pro-European political forces, who are banking on reason and common sense, via pacts and a spirit of consensus. This is the time to take a step forward for that kind of Europe. It is time to protect Europe if we want Europe to protect us. Next Thursday, at the European Council, I will continue to work to guarantee the security and certainty of Spaniards and Europeans; for the ongoing existence of a unique framework across the world, one that requires a commitment by pro-European governments in order to keep advancing. In defense of the European model, the only one that has been able to bring together economic development and the predominance of rights, freedoms and values all of which are worth the continued fight for. Pedro Sanchez is the Prime Minister of Spain. English version by Susana Urra and Simon Hunter. Elsa Artadi, the Catalan government spokesperson. Massimiliano Minocri (EL PAIS) A tweet by a Catalan government official who paraphrased Anne Frank to describe the situation in Catalonia has received widespread criticism, including from Israeli diplomats and former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. Nothing, nothing can be compared with the Holocaust to promote a political cause. This comparison is shameful! responded Assaf Moran, the deputy chief of mission at the Israeli embassy in Madrid, to a tweet posted by Elsa Artadi, the Catalan regional government spokesperson. Manuel Valls, who is currently running for mayor of Barcelona, described the tweet as shameful and lacking historical culture. Spain is a democracy. How can you compare it with the Holocaust? Enough with the nonsense! In her Monday tweet, Artadi wrote: We arent allowed to have our own opinion. People want us to keep our mouth shut, but this doesnt stop you having your own opinion. Everyone should be allowed to say what they think. A sentence by Anne Frank for today, which marks the 69th anniversary of her death in Bergen-Belsen. The message contains a factual mistake Anne Frank died 74 years ago, not 69. Next to the text is a yellow ribbon, a symbol of solidarity with the Catalan separatist leaders who are in prison on rebellion charges over the unilateral independence bid of October 2017. The trial is currently underway at the Supreme Court in Madrid. The tweet was posted after election officials in Spain told the Catalan government to take down pro-independence symbols from public buildings to ensure the political neutrality of government institutions during the upcoming campaign race for the general election of April 28. Josep Bou, the candidate for the conservative Popular Party (PP) in Barcelona, wrote the following reply: I think that what Elsa Artadi wrote is in bad taste, and comparing the yellow ribbons with the tragedy of Anne Frank is morally unacceptable. In fact, if anyone suffers from Lazi harassment, thats the constitutionalists. Bous play on words between Nazi and Lazi (meaning the lazos, or ribbons) can also be viewed as a trivialization of historical events. In July 2018, Artadi said that trivializing Apartheid or Nazism has no place in the Catalan political debate, because it shows a lack of respect for the victims of Nazism and Apartheid. English version by Susana Urra. Ukraine is placing additional eurobonds for $350 million due in November 2028, according to a posting on the website of the Finance Ministry of Ukraine. Thus, the total nominal volume of the eurobonds grew to $1.6 billion. The coupon rate is 9.75% per annum. The cost of the placement is not disclosed. Payments to investors are scheduled for March 21, 2019. J.P. Morgan international investment bank acts as organizer of the issue. As reported, Ukraine in October 2018 placed $750 million five-year eurobonds and $1.25 billion 10-year eurobonds. Premiums on the first issue were 9% per annum and on the second one 9.75% per annum. BNP Paribas, Citi, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan organized the issues. Nayak Paudel is a crime reporter for The Kathmandu Post. Since joining the Post in 2018, he has also written on health issues. S-Engineering LLC production company (Odesa) at the end of February signed a licensing agreement with AEG Power Solutions, which will provide it with the exclusive right to manufacture solar converters using AEG PS technology. According to the website of S-Engineering, converters with a capacity of up to 1,000 kVA will be produced at its Odesa factory under the SEMAG brand, created by the Metropoliya group of companies and SE Group International. At present, converters, which are the main component of solar plants, are not produced in Ukraine. "The equipment produced by under the AEG PS technology in Ukraine will have a sufficient share of local production to receive the U-1 certificate confirming the Ukrainian origin of the goods," Oleksandr Semeniuh, the director for solar energy projects at S-Engineering LLC, said. Vice President for Business and New Markets Development at AEG Power Solutions Jorg Liedloff said that in future the company has big plans to expand the product line that is manufactured using its technology in Ukraine. Metropoliya provides engineering services of a full cycle in the energy sector. SE Group International, headed by S-Engineering, manufactures switchboard equipment certified under European standards. AEG Power Solutions is the leading global supplier of power supply systems and solutions. The draft defense budget of the United States for 2020 may assign $250 million for Ukraine to strengthen the security and defense of the country, the Ukrainian Embassy to the U.S. said. "The official draft of the U.S. defense budget for 2020 envisages the provision of $250 million to Ukraine for the purpose of enhancing security and defense within the framework of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative," the Embassy said on Facebook on Wednesday morning. According to the document, these funds are planned to be sent "in support of the Armed Forces and the national security forces of Ukraine and to replace any weapons and defense goods that have already been provided to Ukraine by the United States." The embassy stressed that, compared with the budget request for 2019, the proposed amount of assistance to Ukraine has been increased by $50 million. It is noted that the budget request should be discussed in the U.S. Congress, where changes and annexes can be made, so the real amounts of assistance to Ukraine will be known after the completion of the entire document passage process. The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday, by a majority of votes, supported a bill that bans the United States government from recognizing Crimea as Russian territory. Thus, 427 members of the House of Representatives, who participated in the voting, supported the bill entitled "To prohibit United States Government recognition of Russia's annexation of Crimea," and only one Republican voted against it. "It is the policy of the United States not to recognize the de jure or de facto sovereignty of the Russian Federation over Crimea, its airspace, or its territorial waters," the bill states. In accordance with subsection (a), no Federal department or agency may take any action or extend any assistance that recognizes or implies recognition of the de jure or de facto sovereignty of the Russian Federation over Crimea, its airspace, or its territorial waters, it says. The U.S. Senate has not yet considered the measure. The eight persons, sanctioned by the European Union because of armed aggression against Ukrainian sailors in the Kerch Strait, will be added to the existing list of individuals sanctioned by the EU in March 2014 for actions undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine. There is no separate new package of sanctions, a source in the EU Council told Interfax-Ukraine in Brussels on Monday. "The list of persons will be added to the already existing list of persons who undermine the territorial integrity of Ukraine. The decision will be made before the end of this week," the agency's source said. According to the information available to the Interfax-Ukraine agency, the following names are shown in the "list of eight:" Stankevich, Shein, Basov, Salyaev, Shipitsin, Shatokhin, Romashkin, Shcherbakov. However, it is difficult to establish exactly who these people are. Sanctions for them, as well as for all who appear in this list, will be introduced in the form of a ban on entry and freezing of assets. As of today, there are 153 people and 40 companies in the list. The package of EU sanctions must be extended every six months. As previously reported, on March 6, 2019, the Committee of Permanent Representatives in the EU (COREPER) decided to impose sanctions for an act of armed aggression against Ukrainian sailors and ships in the Black Sea and the Kerch Strait area. President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, commenting on this decision, wrote on his Facebook page: "I welcome the decision of the Committee of Permanent Representatives of the EU to launch a new Azov package of sanctions against Russia for an open and brazen act of armed aggression against Ukrainian sailors and ships in the Black Sea and the Kerch Strait." The Ukrainian Constitutional Court has decided not to assess the legality of the Verkhovna Rada's decision to support the request for autocephaly made by the country's president to the Constantinople patriarch. Forty-seven Ukrainian deputies earlier asked the Constitutional Court to recognize as contradicting the Constitution the Rada's decision supporting the tomos, which they believe violates the principle of separation of state and church. In the meantime, the Constitutional Court found that the issues addressed in the Rada decision are "political and should be resolved within the terms of reference and political expediency of the relevant bodies of state authority." The Constitutional Court judges found that the parliament "can make political decisions to express its position ad evaluate specific events, facts and circumstances." "Adopting this decision, the Verkhovna Rada expressed its political position on supporting the request made by the Ukrainian president to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to grant a tomos on autocephaly to the Orthodox church in Ukraine," the court said in its decision. Thus, it follows from the Constitutional Court's verdict that the issues addressed in the Rada decision "cannot be considered by the Constitutional Court as they are political, not legal in nature." For those reasons, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine declined to initiate proceedings in the case. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has said Ukrainian sailors captured by the Russian Federation in the Kerch Strait could be considered prisoners of war (POWs) and urged Moscow to provide medical assistance and access to lawyers and consuls. "OHCHR also notes that Ukrainian crew members apprehended by Russian authorities in the Kerch Strait on 25 November 2018 could be considered as prisoners of war and protected under the Third Geneva Convention. In any case, they shall enjoy the status of a prisoner of war until a competent tribunal determines otherwise," the OHCHR said in a report on the human rights situation in Ukraine from November 16, 2018 to February 15, 2019. The UN also called on the Russian Federation to provide humane treatment to members of the crews of Ukrainian ships, proper medical assistance to the above-mentioned persons and unrestricted access for Ukrainian consular officials and lawyers to them. In addition, the OHCHR noted that, as of February 15, 2019, Russian authorities refuse to apply international humanitarian law to the incident and grant the status of prisoners of war to detained crew members. Ukraine will test the latest missile weapons produced by the national defense industry at ranges in Chernihiv region, President Petro Poroshenko said. "It's very important that these tests of our latest missile technology be conducted here, on Chernihiv soil," Poroshenko said at a meeting of the Chernihiv regional development council on Wednesday. "Ukraine has started its tests [...] And Ukraine is now getting absolutely new modern capabilities for increasing the accuracy, range, and power of our potential response to aggression," he said. Poroshenko said earlier that Ukraine had no intentions of replaying the mistakes of the Budapest Memorandum and would be developing precision-guided weapons. On March 11, the president tasked the national design bureaus and defense manufacturers with developing precision-guided missile weapons with an increased range. A resolution was adopted at a plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday to recommend the appointment of an EU special representative for Ukraine. The document says the special envoy will deal mainly with the subjects of Crimea and Donbas. He or she will also be responsible for monitoring the human rights situation in Russian-occupied territories, the implementation of the Minsk peace agreements on Donbas, reducing tension in the Azov Sea region and protecting internally displaced persons' rights, the EP said in the resolution. Two Ukrainian servicemen were killed in a grenade explosion in the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) zone in Donbas, the Ukrainska Pravda news website reported, citing the JFO chief military prosecutor, Oleh Tsitsak. The accident took place on March 11, the report said. According to Tsitsak, a criminal inquiry has been launched on "premeditated murder" charges, but early reports suggest that the explosion may have happened as a result of recklessness. The ban on former Georgian president and ex-head of Odesa Regional State Administration Mikheil Saakashvili's entering the territory of Ukraine will remain in force until 2021, Ukrainian State Border Service spokesperson Oleh Slobodian said. "As of today, there are no grounds for this citizen's [Saakashvili's] legal entry to Ukraine, because, firstly, he is not a citizen of Ukraine and, secondly, he has been banned from entering the country until 2021," Slobodian told Interfax-Ukraine on Wednesday. If Saakashvili attempts to trespass onto the territory of Ukraine, border guards will act in accordance with the law, he said. "Border guards always act within the law and within their powers, therefore we will act in accordance with the law in this case as well, regardless of the date or surnames," Slobodian said. Saakashvili said in an interview with Ukrainian media earlier that he is planning to come to Ukraine on April 1, because he is confident that incumbent Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko will not pass to the second round of the presidential election on March 31 and, therefore, no one will hinder his entry into the country. In order to confirm his intentions, he also showed a ticket he had purchased on his mobile phone. As was reported, in July 2017, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree revoking Saakashvili's Ukrainian citizenship, while the former Georgian president was in the United States. On September 10, 2017, Saakashvili has crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border backed by his supporters, inciting a clash with border guards and law enforcement officers. On September 22, 2017, the Mostyska District Court in the Lviv region found Saakashvili guilty of illegally crossing Ukraine's state border. On February 12, 2018, Saakashvili was detained in downtown Kyiv near the office of his party Movement of New Forces, taken to Boryspil Airport and sent to Poland. The Ukrainian Interior Ministry said that in accordance with court rulings in force, Saakashvili had been in Ukraine illegally and, therefore, "in compliance with all legal formalities" he "was returned to the country of his arrival due to violation of domestic legislation." Tika R Pradhan is a senior political correspondent for the Post, covering politics, parliament, judiciary and social affairs. Pradhan joined the Post in 2016 after working at The Himalayan Times for more than a decade. A Ukrainian consul will visit the Lefortovo detention facility in Moscow in order to meet with the sailors who were captured by Russian border guards during an incident in the Kerch Strait last November, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry's spokesperson Kateryna Zelenko said on Wednesday. "We recently obtained permission from the Lefortovo administration for a Ukrainian consul to visit the Ukrainian prisoners of war today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow," Zelenko said at a briefing in Kyiv. The Ukrainian side still has no official information on the real health condition of the sailors, she said, urging Russia to release them immediately. Earlier, Nikolai Polozov, who is leading a team of defense lawyers, said that as of March 12, 14 of the sailors had been referred for an outpatient psychological-psychiatric examination. On November 25, 2018, Russian border guards used weapons to stop three Ukrainian naval vessels, the Yany Kapu tug and the Berdyansk and the Nikopol armored gunboats, which were traveling from Odesa to Mariupol in the Kerch Strait. The vessels were escorted to Kerch. The Federal Security Service (FSB) said the ships entered Russia's territorial waters on orders from Kyiv and described the incident as an act of provocation coordinated by two Ukrainian Security Service officers. Russia also said that Ukraine had not duly notified it that naval vessels were planning to pass through the Kerch Strait. Ukraine called the border guards' actions unlawful and accused Moscow of violating the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and a treaty between Ukraine and Russia on cooperation in using the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait. Courts in Simferopol and Kerch remanded the 24 Ukrainian sailors in custody. In late November they were transferred to Moscow. The Ukrainians are charged with "conspiracy by a group of persons or an organized group to illegally cross the border using violence or the threat to use violence." If found guilty, they could face up to six years in prison. Ukraine refers to the detained sailors prisoners of war. The American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine represents over 600 Member Companies and affiliated parties - the biggest investors and largest multinationals operating in Ukraine which contribute greatly to the state budget and create new jobs. In February 2019 the following companies joined the AmCham family: Canon Ukraine Canon is a leading provider of consumer, business-to-business, and industrial digital imaging solutions. For more than 20 years of presence in Ukraine, Canon built a strong distributor and partner network. Our customers benefit from consumer and professional imaging products. Liliia Samarchuk, CEO: We are delighted to become a member of ACC in Ukraine, one of the most influential business community in the country. We value the opportunities the Chamber is providing to improve & protect the investment climate in Ukraine, the networking possibilities for further business development and growth. Il Decameron Clubhouse Odessa Il Decameron Clubhouse Odessa is brand new business, design & art space with different approach to hospitality and service for private and corporate clients. Our space includes exclusive 5* hotel, italian cuisine restaurant, bar, offices, conference hall and various meeting rooms. Francesco Bottino, Interim General Manager: People do business with people they know. Become actively involved in developing and promoting of our company. To build a relationships with potential clients and customers, to enlarge our circle of influence in the business community by meeting others AmCham Ukraine members and to assist someone else, to be a part of active community. Our goal is partnering with like-minded people. Red Bull GmbH Red Bull Energy Drink is a functional beverage providing wings whenever you need them. Today Red Bull is available in 171 countries and over 75 billion cans of Red Bull have been consumed so far. Red Bull - Vitalizes Body and Mind. Tetiana Lukinyuk, CEO: Since its foundation AmCham aims at bridging interests of the state and business as well as bringing businesses together. We are happy to become part of this thriving community and looking forward to contribute our energy and Wiiiiings! Nova Poshta LLC Provides business and individual clients with a full range of logistic and related services. The leader of overnight delivery throughout Ukraine. Has the network of almost 2700 parcel shops, number of shipments in 2018 exceeded 174 mln. Oleksandr Bulba, Director: We share the values of AmCham Ukraine, which advocates for the honest, transparent and effective business development in Ukraine. It is important that together with our partners we can become an impact factor for positive changes in local business environment to the benefit of whole country. AmCham Ukraine presents always a constructive dialogue, useful contacts, professional support of experienced specialists. Operating in Ukraine since 1992, the Chamber cooperates closely with Ukrainian authorities to improve the business environment and attract foreign investments into the economy, advocates for predictable, transparent, equitable and stable rules of doing business. Tehran, March 12, 2019 (AFP) - Iran's foreign ministry warned the UK on Tuesday that giving diplomatic protection to a British-Iranian mother jailed in Tehran would not make the situation "easier", state news agency IRNA reported. Britain on Friday extended the status to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was arrested in Tehran in 2016. "What is certain is that the British government's move lacks goodwill and is in no way constructive or positive," said ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi on Tuesday. "If it does not make the situation more complicated, it will surely not make things easier." Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who worked for the Thomson Reuters Foundation -- the media organization's philanthropic arm -- is serving a five-year jail sentence for sedition. She has denied all the charges against her. Diplomatic protection is a rarely-used mechanism allowing governments to seek protection for their citizens on the grounds that they have been wronged by another state. Britain's Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said Friday that London would take the "extremely unusual" step of extending diplomatic protection to the jailed mother. This would signify the "formal recognition by the British government that her treatment fails to meet Iran's obligations under international law", he said. But Ghasemi denied this, saying Zaghari-Ratcliffe is "enjoying all legal and citizenship rights -- both throughout her trial proceedings and during the conviction period", including medical care. Tehran was informed of the UK's decision via official channels, and is currently studying the legal and political implications, the spokesman said. Ghasemi dismissed the move as "merely reflecting a political decision by the UK" and said that it would not "in itself bring about a new legal status internally or internationally." Iran's envoy to London said last week that the UK's decision "contravenes international law", as governments can only exercise such protection for their own nationals. Writing on Twitter, Hamid Baeidinejad said Iran does not recognise dual nationality. "Irrespective of UK residency, MS Zaghari thus remains Iranian," he wrote. The chairman of the powerful Guardians Council (GC) and the Assembly of Experts (AE), Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, says the hands of the Islamic Republic's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, should be kissed in gratitude for appointing Ebrahim Raeesi (Raeisi) as the head of the country's judiciary. Jannati, 92, who represents Khamenei to the GC, added Now, all enemies of the [Islamic] Revolution are alarmed by this appointment." Based on the Islamic Republic's Constitution, the AE is responsible for overseeing the Supreme Leader's performance, but the opposition says its only concern is heaping praise on Khamenei. Furthermore, while the GC is responsible for endorsing candidates seeking a seat in the AE, half of the GC members are directly appointed by Khamenei. Therefore, GC has always disqualified Khameneis critics from running in AE elections. On the heels of his appointment as head of Irans Judiciary, Raeesi was elected March 12 as the first deputy chairman of the AE. Members of the assembly elected Raeesi as the first deputy-chairman with 43 out of 78 votes. Former judiciary chief Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli Larijani, who also ran for the position, failed to garner the majority of votes. Raeesi, 58, is also the custodian and chairman of the Astan Quds Razavi, the organization that runs Iran's holiest Shi'ite religious sites. Human Rights Watch and the U.S. State Department blasted his appointment to head the judiciary, saying that he was involved in the mass executions of political prisoners in the 1980s. Observers say Raeesi's rise could strengthen the hard-line camp and weaken the moderates, led by President Hassan Rouhani. Raeesi lost the presidential election in 2017 to the incumbent Hassan Rouhani. The hard-line cleric has been mentioned among the possible successors to the 79-year-old Khamenei, who underwent prostate surgery in 2014 amid long-standing rumors that he has prostate cancer. Thousands of Iranian actors, filmmakers, and other artists are on a secret blacklist banning them from performing or presenting their work publicly, a former director of Irans state-run radio and TV has revealed. Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), the state-run entity that monopolizes all radio and TV broadcasting in the country, even bans some artists from entering IRIB buildings, former IRIB Director-General Mohammad Sarafraz told pro-reform daily Sharq March 12. "One of the reasons I resigned from my position was the interference and meddling of intelligence organizations in IRIB's internal affair. These organizations insisted that thousands of people engaged in arts, drama and making films and TV series should be banned from presenting their works through IRIB," Sarfaraz said. Sarfaraz, known as an ultraconservative activist, clarified that he is not against the ban in principle, only the way it is implemented. Earlier reports have also estimated thousands of Iranian actors, filmmakers, screenwriters, and other artists who enjoyed fame during the reign of the last king of Iran, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, were blacklisted, but Sarafrazs comments represent the first time a former IRIB official has admitted the ban and the involvement of the intelligence services. It has been reported that hundreds of these artists and performers are not allowed to even be interviewed by state-run radio or TV. Sarafraz, 57, was appointed as the Director-General of the IRIB in 2014 but resigned eighteen months later. As a rule, IRIB's Director-General, appointed directly by the Islamic Republic's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, serves two five-year terms in the position. Earlier reports maintained that Sarafraz resigned to protest intelligence agents' mistreatment of his consultant Ms. Shahrzad Mir Qolikhan. Speaking March 12 to the daily published by IRIB, Jam-e Jam, Sarfaraz disclosed that "an intelligence organization" had an "irrational confrontation" with Ms. Mir Qolikhan, asking her to leave the country. In a post on Facebook, Mir Qolikhan affirmed that agents affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) intelligence organization had asked her to leave Iran. Furthermore, in an article for Jam-e Jam daily, the head of IRIB's Documentary Channel, Amir Tajik, asserted that Ms. Mir Qolyihan had been targeted by the IRGC for a report on wasteful spending at IRIB that she had presented to Sarfaraz. In his interview with Jam-e Jam, Sarafraz claimed that one of his goals as director-general was reforming IRIB's structure and reducing its costs. "IRIB had thousands of employees, many of them without relevant training, but employed through connection and outside recommendation," Sarafraz said. According to Sarafraz, IRIB had nearly 20,000 staff plus 20,000 more external contributors, including 3,000 managing-directors. The budget of IRIB under Sarafraz's predecessor, IRGC commander, Ezzatollah Zarghami, amounted to twenty trillion rials (roughly $480 million), with 27 trillion rials (approximately $640 million) in expenditures. To compensate for the budget deficit, Sarafraz divulged, properties belonging to IRIB were sold, including a piece of land in Tehrans elite Elahiyyeh neigborhood, which sold for more than one trillion rials (roughly $24 million). IRIB's budget has increased every year, and in recent years, it has occasionally received even further financial assistance from the country's National Development Fund (NDP). IRIB also generates significant advertising revenues. Meanwhile, speaking to Khabar Online news website, a member of IRIB's Supervisory Board, Ehsan Qazizadeh, said that IRIB's budget for the current Iranian year (ending March 20) amounted to 31 trillion rials (roughly $740 million), while it collects eighteen trillion rials (approximately $430 million) by airing commercials. Despite its healthy funding, it is generally accepted that IRIB is suffering from a lack of audience, and its decision to air forced confessions of political and civil rights activists has triggered widespread protests. In a letter to the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, numerous Iranian dissidents recently called for adding IRIB to Washingtons sanctions list. The dissidents cited the IRIBs disregard for human rights, airing of manipulated news, promoting ideas to destabilize the region, and relaying jamming signals. A senior U.S. Treasury Department official has told a Congressional subcommittee that U.S. has engaged extensively with European countries on the significant risks of providing Iran with a special facility for trade. Under Secretary of U.S. Treasury Sigal Mandelker, the head of Treasurys Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) told the U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services on March 12, the U.S. continues to maximize economic pressure on the regime to combat its weapons proliferation, terrorism, and regionally destabilizing activities. Mandelker also told lawmakers that the Treasury has formed a unit called The Iran Finance Fusion Cell, which is an intra-TFI and interagency group that is building out our knowledge of Irans malign activities and considering new ways to take action against Iran and Iranian-backed illicit actors. Mandelker detailed U.S. actions since the reimposition of full U.S. sanctions on Iran in November 2018. She said that currently 927 entities, individuals, vessels and aircraft are on U.S. sanctions list. But Washingtons European allies have adopted a different approach, while trying not to directly breach U.S. sanctions. When in May 2018 President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, European countries pledged to take steps to preserve the deal. The main issue was Irans demand to continue to enjoy economic benefits for abiding by the nuclear agreement, which was weakened by the U.S. withdrawal. Europe promised a Special Purpose Vehicle to facilitate barter trade with Iran. After months of wrangling, in January Europe announced the Instrument In Support Of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX) to run a payments channel that would allow goods to be bartered between European and Iranian companies without the need for direct financial transactions. This would eliminate banking transactions that would violate U.S. sanctions. The U.S. has cautioned Europe on doing business with Iran but has refrained from directly challenging INSTEX as a sanctions-busting mechanism. The European trade mechanism is still not operational. Iran has been asked by the international financial watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to amend its legal safeguards against money laundering (AML) and financial support for terrorism (CFT), as a precondition to preserve normal banking ties with the world. So far Iran has not fully met FATFs requirements and this seems to be an issue for Europe, which in turn has not operationalized INSTEX. Iranian officials seem to be signaling that they wont enact legislation to comply with FATF requirements until Europe allows trade. And although European countries have not categorically conditioned trade with the need for financial safeguards, but the two are probably linked. After Iran failed to meet an FATF deadline in February, the multilateral agency extended the deadline to June 2019. Mandelker in her testimony mentioned Irans reluctance to adopt the internationally required financial safeguards, telling the subcommittee, we have engaged extensively with European countries on the significant risks of launching a special purpose vehicle for a country that has repeatedly failed to adopt international AML/CFT safeguards. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 Trend: Over the past 24 hours, Armenian armed forces have 22 times violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said March 13, Trend reports. 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. Headline changed, details added (first version posted March 12 at 11:27) Baku, Azerbaijan, March 12 Trend: Azerbaijan welcomes the recent statement of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs as well as their demand not to change the format of negotiations on the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said. He was receiving credentials of the newly appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the US Earle Litzenberger. Litzenberger reviewed a guard of honor and presented his credentials to President Ilham Aliyev. President Ilham Aliyev then spoke with the ambassador. Litzenberger said he is pleased to be appointed as the ambassador to Azerbaijan and noted that he will spare no efforts to further develop relations between the two countries during his tenure. President Ilham Aliyev congratulated Litzenberger on his appointment as the ambassador to Azerbaijan, and expressed confidence that the Azerbaijan-US bilateral ties will continue to expand and develop during his tenure. President Ilham Aliyev and Earle Litzenberger hailed the successful development of Azerbaijan-US relations. The ambassador noted that the US government highly appreciates Azerbaijan`s contribution to the peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan, as well as its logistics and transportation support for the operation. They exchanged views over political ties, energy security, trade and democratic development issues, and stressed the importance of developing relations in the humanitarian sphere as well as people-to-people ties. The sides also discussed the issues related to the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and President Ilham Aliyev pointed out Azerbaijan`s position which is based on the norms and principles of international law and justice. The head of state underlined that Azerbaijan welcomes the recent statement of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs as well as their demand not to change the format of negotiations. President Ilham Aliyev and Ambassador Earle Litzenberger discussed further development of Azerbaijan-US ties, and noted the significance of broadening the scope of the bilateral relations to include more areas. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 By Ilhama Isabalayeva - Trend: Delaying the negotiation process on the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and provocations is the old policy of the Armenian authorities, first Vice Speaker of the Azerbaijani parliament Ziyafat Asgarov said, Trend reports. We dont recognize the illegal regime created in the occupied Azerbaijani territories, he noted. The insincere behavior of the Armenian authorities impedes the holding of peace talks in the right direction. Yerevan always gives various reasons, in particular, changing the format of negotiations, the participation of the illegal regime in them and other excuses to avoid negotiations and disrupt the peace process. He added that the existing format was approved by the OSCE Minsk Group since 1992, and the negotiations should continue in this direction. Azerbaijans position is known to the international community and the OSCE Minsk Group, he said. Azerbaijan strongly opposes changing the format of negotiations, because the conflict exists between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and it is Armenia that occupied the lands of Azerbaijan. However, Armenia is trying in every way to impede the negotiations in this format. Co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group think that the format of the negotiations should remain unchanged, and Azerbaijan supports the holding of negotiations in this direction. He stressed that Azerbaijan has always been committed to the negotiation process. However, our patience is not endless, he said. Azerbaijan wants the negotiation process to end with observance of international law, liberation of the occupied lands and restoration of peace in the region. Azerbaijan is ready to liberate its lands by any means, within international law, by using international support and not excluding military means. Nevertheless, Azerbaijan wants the conflict to be resolved through negotiations. 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. Seti Hospital demands surgery equipment, gets CD-4 counting machine instead Seti Zonal Hospital of Sudurpaschim Pradesh had requested for reagent gloves and equipment essential in the laboratory and operation theatres, but what they received from the Social Welfare Ministry was a CD-4 counting machine. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 Trend: Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has sent a congratulatory letter to Pope Francis on the anniversary of his Papal Inauguration. On my own behalf and on behalf of the people of Azerbaijan, I extend my sincerest congratulations to you and all your coreligionists on the anniversary of your Papal Inauguration, Ilham Aliyev said in his letter. The relations between Azerbaijan and the Holy See set a good example of the promotion of dialogue and tolerance among religions and cultures. I believe that our collaborative efforts will continue to contribute to the establishment of global peace and tranquility, mutual understanding and solidarity among people. On this remarkable day, I wish you the best of health and success in your supreme spiritual mission. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 By Elchin Mehdiyev - Trend: The Armenian leadership, holding a meeting of the country's Security Council in Nagorno-Karabakh, is trying to hide its problems, political analyst Arzu Naghiyev told Trend. Naghiyev said that recent steps taken by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan are inadequate. "Since the beginning of the conflict, so far, Armenia has never held any meetings of the Security Council outside the country. This time the meeting of the Council under the leadership of Pashinyan was held on the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, in Khankendi," Naghiyev noted. The political analyst stressed that this step of Pashinyan is a move that is designed for both domestic and foreign policy. "Because, in April, it is one year since Pashinyan came to power. He should speak regarding the ongoing domestic and foreign policy. It is known that the arrest of the former Armenian President Robert Kocharyan, the stagnation of the economy and other issues put Pashinyan in a hopeless situation. In this situation, what will the Prime Minister report on? This means that the "Karabakh card" will be played again. Pashinyan and his team, using this card, strive to calm both their citizens and the separatist regime," he added. The analyst noted that there are a number of aspects. "Following the recent statement by co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group that the format of negotiations on the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is unchanged, the Armenian leadership went to Nagorno-Karabakh to discuss this issue. Moreover, Pashinyan has repeatedly stated that he is the Prime Minister of Armenia, and no representative of the separatist regime established in the occupied territories of Azerbaijan will allow him to speak on their behalf. Therefore, he allegedly went to Khankendi to get a mandate on this matter. And how is it that the Armenian soldiers are doing military service in the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, continue their aggressive policy towards Azerbaijan? If it were as Pashinyan says, Armenian soldiers should have been withdrawn from Nagorno-Karabakh," the analyst added. The political analyst noted that Azerbaijan will always strive to ensure its territorial integrity and continue negotiations to resolve the conflict. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 Trend: The First Deputy Minister of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces Colonel General Najmaddin Sadikov met with Deputy Prime Minister for Public Order and Security and Minister of Defense of the Republic Bulgaria Krasimir Karakachanov on March 13, Trend reports referring to the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry. The sides held a wide exchange of views on regional security aspects, as well as on other issues of mutual interest. During the meeting, the sides stressed the importance of developing cooperation in the military and military-technical fields, and also discussed issues of further expansion of areas of cooperation. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 Trend: President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has met with President of the Chinese Peoples Institute of Foreign Affairs, Special Assistant to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China Wu Hailong. They stressed the importance of the 7th Global Forum to be held in Baku, and emphasized that this event contributes to the strengthening of international cooperation. Expressing gratitude for the reception, Wu Hailong hailed his visit to Azerbaijan and his participation in the event. He noted that China and Azerbaijan enjoy friendly relations. President Aliyev said that Azerbaijan-China ties are developing successfully in a variety of fields, adding that the bilateral cooperation entered a new stage. Recalling his official visit to China, President Aliyev noted that fruitful discussions on prospects for developing relations in economy, trade, infrastructure, transport and other areas were held during the meetings with the Chinese president. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 Trend: Azerbaijani defense minister, Colonel General Zakir Hasanov and the leadership of the Defense Ministry visited frontline military units, Trend reports March 13 with reference to Azerbaijans Defense Ministry. The minister of defense was briefed on an operational situation. Hasanov observed the enemys frontline positions and gave the relevant instructions to ensure the constant combat readiness of the units. After reviewing the conditions in the units, the minister of defense took part in the opening of a new soldiers barrack, inspected the armament depot, canteen, shower cabins and warehouse. The minister also participated in the opening of a new residential complex consisting of official facilities. Hasanov has inquired about the work done and emphasized that the activities carried out in the field of improving the social conditions of military personnel will continue to be carried out thanks to the attention and care of the state. The minister of defense awarded the servicemen who distinguished themselves in the service and talked to the military personnel at the tea table. Then the minister, meeting with residents in one of the villages located in the frontline zone, talked about the defense of settlements and ensuring the safety of the population. The defense minister is responsible for general management of the large-scale exercises conducted in accordance with the plan approved by president of Azerbaijan, Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Ilham Aliyev. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 Trend: Azerbaijani First Deputy Minister of Defense, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, Colonel-General Najmeddin Sadikov left for Moscow, Russia, Trend reports referring to the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry on March 13. Sadikov will take part in the meeting of the Committee of Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces of the CIS member-states on March 14. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 Trend: On March 15, 2019, JW Marriott Absheron will host the next exclusive exhibition Prime Travel Market. The event is organized by the The Prime Management & Consulting in partnership with the State Tourism Agency (STA) and the Azerbaijan Tourism Association (AZTA) By tradition, the event will consist of several parts, each of which will serve as a communication platform for representatives of tourism. This b2b event is carefully thought out and planned in such a way that participants and guests can establish partnerships in the field of tourism, as well as strengthen existing ones. Prime Travel Market provides participants with an opportunity to receive information on the latest events and innovations in this industry. The exhibitors of the event will be 5* hotels, exclusive resorts, worldwide hotel chains, unique boutique hotels, airlines, cruise companies, DMCs and luxury tour operators, travel agencies, first-class concierge companies. Prime Travel Market is held in order to support representatives of luxury tourism from around the world to personally meet with the best travel companies and establish new business contacts. The exhibition gives a good start to companies planning to enter the Azerbaijani market. Prime Travel Market is a platform for the sustainable development of inbound and outbound tourism in our country and ensures the effective development of the tourism industry. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 Trend: Representatives of the management of SOCAR-KBR LLC visited Baku Higher Oil School (BHOS) and met with the Higher School students. The meeting was attended by BHOS Rector Elmar Gasimov and key staff members, and the company top-ranking managers including Director General Alp Togay Kurum, Umid-Babek Project Director David Ellis, Absheron Project Director Bruce Bucster, Operations Manager Nikunj Puncal and HR Manager Saida Gurbanova. Welcoming the guests, Rector Elmar Gasimov extended his gratitude to SOCAR-KBR leadership for continuous support and providing the BHOS students with internship and employment opportunities. Addressing the undergraduates, SOCAR-KBR Director General Alp Togay Kurum told about the companys latest developments, activities and new projects. He highly praised professional achievements attained by the BHOS graduates currently working at SOCAR-KBR and expressed confidence that the bilateral cooperation would successfully develop. David Ellis and Bruce Bucster made presentations covering projects on development of the Umid-Babek offshore gas field and the Absheron gas and condensate field. They also briefed the students about career growth prospects for young engineers working at SOCAR-KBR. HR Manager Saida Gurbanova provided information about the companys internship and scholarship programs, and told about the HR policy and recruitment process. The meeting concluded with a question and answer session. During their visit, SOCAR-KBR Director General Alp Togay Kurum and other managers were given a tour around the BHOS campus and its facilities. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 Trend: A meeting within the framework of world ATM Congress 2019 in Madrid was held between representatives of Azeraeronavigation Air Traffic Control Department (AZANS) and delegation of EUROCONTROL, headed by Joe Sultana, Director of Airspace Management Center in Europe (Network Manager Operations Centre NMOC), Trend reports with reference to the press service of Azerbaijan Airlines CJSC. Issues were raised about further cooperation between EUROCONTROL and AZANS, as well as the role of Azerbaijan as a strategic partner of EUROCONTROL and a connecting hub in the planning of air traffic flows. The necessity of signing the agreement between AZANS and EUROCONTROL for the use of Airspace Efficiency, Strategy and Development Center (ASEC) as a regional facilitation center in the planning of air traffic flows in case of unforeseen circumstances in air traffic was noted at the meeting. This issue became more topical after the events on the border of Pakistan and India on February 27-28, 2019, when Pakistan closed its airspace. During this period, the need for efficient air traffic flow management has greatly increased. World ATM Congress is the world's largest international air traffic management exhibition and conference attracting about 10.000 people each year. Azeraeronavigation Air Traffic Control Department (AZANS) under Azerbaijan Airlines provides safety of flights in the Republic of Azerbaijan's airspace. During the daily period AZANS supports more than 500 flights, 300 of which are transit flights over Azerbaijan. EUROCONTROL is an intergovernmental organization with 41 Member States and 2 States with special agreements. Together with its partners, EUROCONTROL intends to create a Single European Sky, ensuring the efficiency of air traffic. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 Trend: The CEO of Azerfon LLC (Nar), Gunnar Pahnke, took part in the third Information Technology Summit for Central and Eastern European countries as a speaker. At the traditional event held in Sofia on March 7, with the participation of the chief executives of the worlds leading IT and telecommunications companies, innovations and changes in the field of ICT were discussed. Nar CEO, representing Azerbaijan telecommunication market at the summit, spoke about current digital transformation and the advantages of digital transformation for telecommunication companies. In his speech, which attracted wide attention of the participants, Mr. Pahnke said: There are several primary drivers for further digital transformation. The first one is the dynamic growth of the customers adopting smartphones and discovering the benefits of digital services. Second is digital interaction. Customers want to interact directly end-to-end with their operator and the industry will support fully automated processes in order, delivery and care. And the next one is the implementation of 5G. Which will give a further push to digital transformation of all industries being able to carry high volumes of data and offering lowest latency to enable new digital applications and services. G. Pahnke also mentioned to be working intensively on the implementation strategy related to application of digital transformation processes within Nar in the future. G. Pahnke has more than 20 years of wide range of industry experience in fixed and mobile telecommunications, Internet and Media/TV. He earned his rich experience across diverse markets including Germany, France, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Middle East. A deep knowledge of development, implementation of strategy, and entrepreneurial ventures make Mr. Pahnke an internationally respected analytics expert. The ICT Summit for Central and Eastern European countries, which was held third time, was a platform for exchange of views on such important issues as new market trends, technological achievements, contemporary ideas and initiatives, future prospects of mobile communication. Leaders and chief executives of the largest ICT companies operating in Central and Eastern European countries, as well as the Middle East, Turkey and the Caucasus region have taken part in the summit, along with almost 300 experts representing network operators, IXPs, ISPs, OTTs, security and other solution providers. The purpose of the Summit is to bring together leaders of leading telecommunication companies to share their experiences and ideas, and develop strategies aimed at increasing profitability in changing telecommunication scenarios. Azerfon LLC (Nar trademark) started its operations on March 21, 2007, and within a short period of time became one of the leading companies of the telecommunications and mobile communication industry of Azerbaijan. The Nar brand name was selected as the symbol that resembles the cohesion of the rich cultural and historical heritage of Azerbaijan with the modern life. Being the first operator in the country to introduce the 3G technology, Nar provides the customers with a wide 4G network coverage. With a large network of over 7400 base stations, covering 97% of the countrys territory (except for the occupied territories), Nar provides more than 2.2 million subscribers with the highest quality services. Cabinet reshuffle likely, but only after the investment summit Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and Pushpa Kamal Dahal, co-chair of the ruling Nepal Communist Party, have started discussions on Cabinet reshuffle. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 By Fakhri Vakilov - Trend: Uzbekistans airports are temporarily closed for receiving and sending Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, Trend reports with reference to the Civil Aviation Agency under Uzbek Ministry of Transport. Uzbek airports from 05:00 pm (GMT +5) on March 13 are closed for receiving and sending Boeing 737-8 MAX and Boeing 737-9 MAX aircraft for a period of one month. The aviation industry clarified that the ban does not apply to flights of this type of aircraft over Uzbekistan. After the collapse of Boeing 7378 MAX liner in Ethiopia on Sunday, many countries suspended the operation of these liners. The United States does not intend to impose such a ban. --- Follow author on Twitter:@vakilovfaxri Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 13 Trend: Russias Ural Airlines will launch Samara-Baku-Samara flights from April 5, 2019, Trend reports referring to the airline. Direct flights will be made with Airbus A320s every Friday. One-way tickets will cost 97 euros. Ural Airlines is one of Russias largest airlines in terms of passenger traffic. At the end of last year, over 9 million people used the services of the airline (a 13-percent increase over the year). Currently, the airline already provides Yekaterinburg-Baku and Moscow-Lankaran flights. Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 13 By Rashid Shirinov Trend: The first batch of export meat of Kazakh Astana Agroproduct LLP has arrived in Iran, Trend reports via Kazakh media. The contract was signed for 700 tons of meat for 4 months, the prepayment was received, and 60 tons have already been shipped. "The next batch will be shipped until the end of March. From April, the supply will be 200 tons per month. Meat is packed in a vacuum and sent to Iran chilled. We will increase the amounts, because the partner's need is up to 1,000 tons of beef per month," said the founder of the Bakara group of companies (Astana Agroproduct) Serik Rakhimbayev. The company is one of the largest meat processing plants in Kazakhstans Akmola region. "The company uses innovative German technology, has the latest equipment that allows to produce high-quality, competitive, export-oriented meat products meat and sausage products under the Bakara brand," the Entrepreneurship and Industry Department of the Akmola region stated. It should be noted that Astana Agroproduct entered the markets of Russia since 2014, by signing agreements with Moscow supermarkets for the supply of meat delicacies. The company is one of the five companies currently undergoing the certification procedure for the supply of meat products to China. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @ShirinovRashid Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 13 By Elnur Baghishov Trend: Yield of sprat fish in the Caspian Sea has increased by 13 percent during the 10 months of the current Iranian year (started March 21, 2018), compared to the same period last year, Mokhtar Akhondi, the Director General for Fishing Affairs of Iran Fisheries Organization (Shilat), said in a statement to the website of the Iranian Ministry of Agriculture Jihad, Trend reports. According to Akhondi, over 21,000 tons of sprat were fished over this period, while 18,600 tons of sprat were fished during the same period last year. "Sprat was fished in 30 ships in Gilan Province and 44 in Mazandaran Province," he said. According to Akhondi, sprat fished in Mazandaran Province was 15,800 tons, and, when compared with the same period last year, sprat fishing has increased in the province by 22 percent. Akhondi said that 5,130 tons of sprat were fished in Gilan during the said period a figure which shows a 9-percent decrease when compared to the same period last year. Noting that there are no programs in place for developing fishing in the Caspian Sea, Akhondi said that the objectives of the Fisheries Organization in the Caspian Sea are to maintain existing employment and resources. Akhondi added that fishing was halted in early April and autumn. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 By Fakhri Vakilov - Trend: Flydubai company intends to launch a flight between Dubai and Samarkand (Uzbekistan), Trend reports with reference to Flydubai. "The priority among our plans in Uzbekistan is the opening, of the flight to Samarkand, and then to other cities of Uzbekistan. Our forecasts show that the main flow of tourists will go there. For now, tourists, thanks to our flight, will fly to Tashkent and then get to Samarkand by train or car, the vice-president of the airline Jeyhun Efendi said. Flydubai airlines that launched a flight between Dubai and Tashkent on March 11 became the first carrier from the UAE, offering regular direct flights to Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan is an important trading partner of the UAE. The launch of flights to Tashkent represents a major milestone in strengthening trade relations between our countries. We are pleased to become the first airline from the UAE to launch direct flights between Dubai and Tashkent. By opening another Central Asian market with a shortage of direct flights to Dubai, we support the strategy of the Dubai government for the development of tourism and trade, Flydubais executive director, Ghaith Al Ghaith stated. He stressed that the airline has operated flights to Central Asia since 2010, and this region, with a growing demand for flights and tourism, has become an important trading partner for Flydubai. The total number of tourists from Uzbekistan to Dubai in 2018 increased by 6.3 percent compared with 2017. In addition, Uzbekistan ranks fourth among the countries of the region in the number of tourists traveling to Dubai. At the first stage, Flydubai will fly to Tashkent five times a week. Starting from May 31, 2019 flights will become daily. The cost of a return fare ("round trip") of a business class starts from $1,495, including 40 kg of checked baggage and all fees. Economy class fare starts at $400, including 20 kg of checked baggage and meals. --- Follow author on Twitter:@vakilovfaxri Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 13 By Rashid Shirinov Trend: The 5th Meeting of the Turkic Council Education Ministers will be held on March 15 in the capital of Kyrgyzstan Bishkek, Trend reports via a message by the Turkic Council. The meeting will be hosted by Gulmira Kudaiberdieva, Minister of Education and Science of Kyrgyzstan, and attended by the Deputy Education Minister of Azerbaijan Mahabbat Valiyeva, Vice-Minister of Education and Science of Kazakhstan Rustem Bigari, Deputy Minister of National Education of Turkey Mustafa Safran, as well as the State Secretary for Education of the Human Resources Ministry of Hungary Jozef Bodis, President of Turkic Academy, Professor Darkhan Kydyrali, high level government officials and representatives from the embassies of the member states. The meeting will be moderated by the Secretary General of the Turkic Council Baghdad Amreyev. Heads of delegations will review the work done in the education since the last meeting in June 2017. The agenda of the meeting includes the activities in the framework of the Turkic Council Turkic University Union, educational exchange program (development training) for education professionals of the Turkic Council the member states, third Student Exchange Programs among secondary and high schools, and establishment of sister school relations among the secondary and high schools of the member states. Prior to the ministerial meeting, the 7th Meeting of the Senior Officials of the Education Ministries will be held. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @ShirinovRashid Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, March 13 By Huseyn Hasanov Trend: A Host Government Agreement (HGA) was signed in Islamabad, which encompasses the main terms of an agreement with Pakistan on the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline construction project, Trend reports March 13 with reference to the Turkmen Foreign Ministry March 13. The HGA was signed by Pakistani Additional Secretary In-charge of the Petroleum Division Mian Asad Hayauddin and general director, chairman of the board of TAPI Pipeline Company Ltd. Muhammetmyrat Amanov, according to Pakistani media. Being the leader of the international consortium TAPI Pipeline Company Ltd., Turkmengas state concern, having a controlling stake, performs the functions of the main financier and manager of the project. The consortium also includes the Afghan Gas Corporation, Pakistans Inter State Gas Systems (Private) Limited Company and Indias GAIL Company. The Turkmen Foreign Ministry, in turn, reports that Turkmen deputy prime minister, Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov took part in the signing ceremony of the HGA. A delegation from Ashgabat was received by President of Pakistan Arif Alvi and Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan. The gas and transport and communication sectors were mentioned as priority areas for trade and economic partnership. At the same time, the head of the Pakistani government expressed strong support for the TAPI project, the construction project of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TAP) power transmission line and the creation of a new transport and transit corridor from the seaports of Pakistan to the Turkmenbashi International Seaport, the report said. Rashid Meredov held talks with other Pakistani leaders Federal Minister for Power Omar Ayub Khan, Federal Minister for Petroleum Ghulam Sarwar Khan and Finance, Revenue, and Economic Affairs Minister Asad Umar. Construction of TAPI was launched in December 2015, while the Afghan section in February 2018. Pakistan plans to start the work on its pipeline section this year. The total length of the pipeline, with a capacity of 33 billion cubic meters of gas per year will be 1,840 kilometers. The fuel will be supplied from the Galkynysh gas field in Turkmenistan, the second largest in the world. The length of the Turkmen section will be 205 kilometers. Then, this energy bridge will pass through the Afghan cities of Herat and Kandahar (816 kilometers), through the cities of Quetta and Multan across Pakistani territory (819 kilometers), and reach the settlement of Fazilka in India. "The gas pipeline will be brought to the Pakistani border within two years, and in the next 6-8 months, the gas route will stretch to the territory of India," CEO of TAPI Pipeline Company Ltd. Muhammetmyrat Amanov said December 2018 at a roundtable meeting in Islamabad, Pakistan. Amanov also said the cost of the Turkmen gas, which will be supplied to Pakistan, is significantly lower compared to the price of liquefied gas imported by Islamabad. Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 13 Trend: The Montenegrin company Adriatic Capital is interested in joint participation with Azerbaijan in projects on the use of solar energy, said Marko Vujovic, executive director of Adriatic Capital, during a meeting with the delegation of the Montenegrin company in the Ministry of Energy of Azerbaijan, Trend reports referring to the ministry. The possibilities of cooperation in the field of renewable energy through Adriatic Capital were discussed during the meeting. Vujovic spoke about the current state of the alternative energy sector in Montenegro, the company's activities in this area, and projects which the company participates in. Vujovic said that the company conducted an inspection of Azerbaijan regions possessing the potential for using renewable energy sources, and is interested in participating in projects on the use of solar energy. Azerbaijani Deputy Minister of Energy Elnur Soltanov spoke about the solar and wind power plants operating in the country. Remarks were made on the work carried out for assessing the uses of the existing potential for the development of the field of renewable energy in Azerbaijan (wind and solar energy in particular), and assessing the investment opportunities, in the field of preparing legislative documents on renewable energy and energy efficiency, cooperating with various companies and financial structures, and improving the attractiveness of this area for private investors. During the meeting, the sides discussed the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Energy on the development of the field of renewable energy and the negotiation on identifying the opportunities for future cooperation. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 By Leman Zeynalova Trend: NOPEC is not in the interest of the US, nor is it in the interest of the oil and gas industry that is thriving commendably in the US and in the rest of the world, Trend reports citing OPEC Secretary General Mohammad Sanusi Barkindo. He pointed out that the US would best save its interests without such legislation. It is unfair to proceed with such a legislation if it is targeted against an organization such as OPEC that has done exceedingly well in its noble objective of achieving and maintaining stability from which the US has also benefited tremendously, Barkindo told CNBC. Further, he noted that OPEC will soon gather in Baku at the Joint Technical Committee meeting that evaluates the data from member countries and the data provided by secondary sources. Hopefully, we will be able to get the full picture. OPEC secretary general pointed out that rebalancing the market is a continuous process. We have been able to achieve so major success over the last couple of years through the Declaration of Cooperation. We are facing these challenges together as a group with the sole objective of ensuring that 2019 also remains balanced. We are determined to not allow the market to relapse into the disequilibrium that we had seen, he added. US House of Representatives committee approved a bill on Feb.7 that would open up the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to antitrust lawsuits. The House Judiciary Committee passed the bipartisan bill, known as the No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act, or NOPEC, on a voice vote. The legislation would change US antitrust law to revoke the sovereign immunity that has long protected OPEC members from US lawsuits. It allows the US attorney general to sue the oil producers group or any of its members on grounds of collusion. Versions of the bill have appeared without success in Congress for the past 20 years. The committee also approved a version of the bill last year by voice vote, but it never reached the full House for a vote. 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. The 5th OPEC and non-OPEC Ministerial Meeting was held in Vienna, Austria, on December 7, 2018. The meeting participants decided to adjust the overall production by 1.2 million barrels per day, effective as of January 2019 for an initial period of six months. The contributions from OPEC and the voluntary contributions from non-OPEC participating countries of the Declaration of Cooperation will correspond to 0.8 million barrels per day (2.5 percent), and 0.4 million barrels per day (2 percent), respectively. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 By Leman Zeynalova Trend: Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR is welcome to take part in construction of Albanian gas infrastructure, Albanian Ministry of Infrastructure and Energy told Trend. In this regard, the ministry said that the Master Plan on the Gasification of Albania was approved by the Council of Ministers by Decision no. 87, dated 14.02.2018. In accordance with this Master Plan several gas infrastructure projects are developing. Among the important projects is also the gas pipeline project that will link the TAP project with TPP Vlora, said the ministry, adding that companies that will apply for the concession reconstruction and operation of TEC Vlora, are expected to show interest in financing this project. Based on the application of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Energy in the 20th round of the WBIF, a grant of 1.1 million euro was approved for the preparation of the detailed technical design for the pipeline connecting the TAP project with TPP in Vlora, said the ministry. Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR is welcome to participate in the construction and operation of gas infrastructure, as well as in the gas supply of the various sectors of the Albanian economy, said the ministry. Based on the Gas Master Plan, as well as on the "National Energy Strategy for the period 2018-2030", the development of the gas sector will be a strategic priority, according to Albanian ministry. Head of SOCAR Balkan Murad Heydarov earlier told Trend that SOCAR is considering various forms of participation in Albanias gasification. "Albanian government has approved the results of the feasibility study of the master plan for this countrys gasification. The process of contractor selection will begin soon. SOCAR Balkan is considering different forms of participation in this process," he said. Heydarov added that at the same time, the company plans to carry out a detailed engineering design of the pipeline between the cities of Fier (Trans Adriatic Pipeline compressor Station (TAP) in Albania) and Vlora. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Private schools say they cant chip in to governments social security plan Private schools have refused to follow the Contribution Based Social Security Scheme launched by the government in November last year, arguing that the programme is not feasible for small and middle level schools. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 By Sara Israfilbayova - Trend: Special attention is paid in Azerbaijan to cybersecurity and all steps are being taken to reduce cyber threats to a minimum, Ramin Guluzade, minister of transport, communications and high technologies of Azerbaijan, said at the 6th Regional Internet Governance Forum under the theme Cybersecurity: Our common responsibility in Baku March 13. He noted that new technologies are opening the way to new types of crime, the number of cybercrimes is increasing every year. Given this, Azerbaijan has prepared a cybersecurity strategy for 2019-2024, he added. He said that thanks to information technologies, Azerbaijans economy has switched to a new level, and the relations between the state and citizens have become more transparent. He noted that information technologies, the internet play a special role in the development of the country. He added that more than 80 percent of the countrys population uses the internet, and 76 percent of them use broadband internet. Speaking about cooperation with the United Nations Development Program, the minister noted that the organization supports ICT programs being implemented in Azerbaijan. These programs contribute to sustainable development in the country, Guluzade added. The 6th Regional Internet Governance Forum under the theme Cybersecurity: Our common responsibility is underway in Baku March 13 as part of the International Cyber Security Week. Co-organized by Azerbaijans Ministry of Transport, Communications and High Technologies and United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the forum aims to demonstrate different ways of using internet in order to achieve more fruitful and effective regional economic development and cultural progress. The Internet Governance Forum provides a platform for exchange of experience and cooperation between local participants and international experts. It is also a good opportunity for discussing the current situation and future tasks in this field, as well as demonstrating interesting innovative ICT-related projects. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 By Sara Israfilbayova Trend: The UN Development Program appreciates the steps being taken by Azerbaijan for the development of the ICT sphere and the full transition to the e-government system, Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, Assistant Administrator and Director of the Regional Bureau for Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Mirjana Egger said. Egger made the remarks in Baku at the 6th Regional Internet Governance Forum devoted to cybersecurity, Trend reports on March 13. She stressed that internet and IT are important components in the life of the society. "First of all, internet is education, Egger said. It is necessary to use it for the benefit." Speaking about the role of the regional forum, she stressed that it will create new opportunities to explore the potential of Internet technologies and opportunities to avoid cyber threats. The 6th Regional Internet Governance Forum entitled Cybersecurity: Our Common Responsibility is being held in Baku on March 13 as part of the Cybersecurity Week. The organizers of the event are the Azerbaijani Ministry of Transport, Communications and High Technologies and the United Nations Development Program. The forum has brought together local and foreign experts who will discuss the current situation and upcoming challenges in the field of ensuring cybersecurity, secure Internet, innovative solutions in the field of cybersecurity and other issues. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @IsrafilbekovaS Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 By Fakhri Vakilov-Trend: Uzbekistan will establish cooperation ties with partners from Azerbaijan in the field of tourism, the ambassador of Uzbekistan to Azerbaijan Sherzod Feyziev said at an event jointly organized by the Uzbek embassy in Baku and Azerbaijani travel agency My Travel, Trend reports on March 13. The purpose of the event was to demonstrate the ongoing large-scale reforms in the tourism sector in Uzbekistan, to inform about the rich history and unique culture of the country and talk about opportunities for tourists. The diplomat said that there were large reforms carried out in Uzbekistan in the last two years, which affect almost all spheres of society. "The field of tourism and everything related to this sector are recognized by the state as a priority, which has been given the status of a strategic sector of the economy. As part of the realization of existing potential, 55 regulatory documents regulating tourism were signed in just the past two years." These documents identify priorities for solving the problems accumulated in the industry, increasing tourism potential, including the promotion of pilgrim tourism, as well as the provision of many benefits and preferences for market participants, according to Feyziev. "The revolutionary step was the decision related to the establishment of a visa-free regime for citizens of most countries of the world, simplification of the procedure for issuing, as well as the introduction of electronic visas. Thus, from 2018, citizens of 64 states can visit Uzbekistan without visas, citizens of 101 states arriving in transit are allowed visa-free entry and temporary stay and citizens of 127 states have the opportunity to receive e-visas, the term of which is 2 working days," said the envoy. He went on to add that Uzbekistan is located in the heart of Central Asia and has tremendous opportunities in the tourism field. "Uzbekistan has 7,300 objects of cultural heritage, which is over 90 percent of all historical monuments in the region (more than 4,000 archaeological sites and 2,000 architectural objects). Over 500 of them are included in tourist routes. Monuments in Bukhara, Samarkand, Khiva and Shakhrisabz should be mentioned among the main gems." The implementation of a large number of events increased the attractiveness of Uzbekistan for tourists, according to Feyziev. "If in 2017, 2.6 million tourists entered Uzbekistan, in 2018 their total number increased to 5.3 million people (an increase of 99 percent). By 2025, the number of tourists is expected to increase to 9 million." A huge number of world-class travel agencies and magazines highly appreciate the development of tourism in Uzbekistan, he said. Among them are such giants as Travel + Leisure, National Geographic, Gallup, Solo Travel Safety Report, Lonely Planet, added the diplomat. He pointed out that a great role in the development of tourism in Uzbekistan will play the establishment of cooperation ties with partners from Azerbaijan. The first step in this direction should be the establishment of cooperation of the Embassy with the company My Travel, he said. As a result of the meeting, the parties signed the Work Plan for 2019. Follow author on Twitter:@vakilovfaxri Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 13 By Rashid Shirinov Trend: Kazakhstan has suspended the operation of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, Trend reports via Kazakh media. "Since March 13, 2019, the operation of SCAT Airlines Boeing 737 MAX has been temporarily suspended in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstans register has only one aircraft of this type," the Civil Aviation Committee of Kazakhstan stated. Earlier, it was reported that European Aviation Safety Agency suspended the operation of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in the European Union. On March 10, 157 people were killed in a plane crash in Ethiopia. On a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, Boeing 737 MAX 8 fell about 60 km south-west of the Ethiopian capital (near the city of Bishoftu). The exact causes of the crash have not yet been established. Rescuers were able to detect both on-board recorders. In November 2017, Kazakhstan-based SCAT Airlines signed a contract with Boeing corporation for the purchase of 6 Boeing 737 MAX 8. It was planned that all the aircraft will be delivered directly from the manufacturer. The first aircraft arrived in Kazakhstan in April 2018. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @ShirinovRashid Tehran, Iran, March 13 Trend: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has announced the start of ShalamcheBasra railway operation during his visit to Baghdad. Speaking in a joint meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, Rouhani indicated that Iran is ready to help reconstruct Iraq with all its capacities, Trend reports citing IRNA. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani arrived in Baghdad on March 11 amid his government's efforts to expand ties with Iraq to reduce the impact of US sanction on Iran's economy. Rouhani and Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi signed an agreement to connect the two countries via a railway linking the border town of Shalamche and Basra. The 48 miles of track between them will allow Iran to transfer goods to southern Iraq and even longer distances via onward transit to the north. Along with the government in Damascus, the two countries had also previously agreed to connect Iraq and Syria by rail to allow Iran to export goods through the port of Latakia, on the Mediterranean. "We have agreed on tariff issues, and we will also continue the negotiations to facilitate trade between two countries," said Rouhani. Iran's president also spoke about the energy ties between the two countries. "Iran will provide Iraq gas and electricity. We have also expressed readiness to export more electricity, we can also offer necessary facilities in the oil sector," he said. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 By Elnur Baghishov - Trend: Iran on March 17 will launch four new development phases of South Pars, the worlds largest gas field, with a capacity to produce 112 million cubic meters per day, Trend reports via PressTV. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani will travel to Bushehr in the Persian Gulf to inaugurate two refineries built with $10 billion of investment. With their launch, Irans daily gas production will surpass that of Qatar with which it shares the offshore field. The $5 billion refinery for phase 13 is fully operational, with the first shipping of its gas condensate delivered on March 11 for export, the projects operator Payam Motamed said. Another refinery for phases 22, 23 and 24 will come online March 17. Each plant has a capacity to process 56 million cubic meters of gas per day and convert it to LPG, ethane, condensate and sulfur worth $5.5 billion a year at the going market prices, the Iranian petroleum ministrys Shana news outlet said. The revenue, it said, will account for 2 percent of Irans GDP of some $427 billion. Iran and Iraq have released a final statement in which they have agreed on no-fee visas, construction of border railway connecting the two countries, establishing joint industrial parks, oil and gas cooperation as well as dredging a border river, Trend reports citing IRNA. The two sides agreed that tourism, pilgrimage and commerce visas will be free of charge for the citizens of both countries starting from April first, reads one of the points of the final statement published on Tuesday evening, seen by IRNA, following two days of intensive negotiations between a high-level Iranian delegation headed by President Hassan Rouhani. The official communique also states that the Iranian and Iraqi authorities discussed and signed Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) on issues such as oil, trade, health and rail transit via Shalamcheh-Basra. The railroad, some 35 kilometers long, connects the Iranian border town of Shalamcheh to the Iraqi city of Basra. The route is meant to further speed up bilateral export and import in a bid to rapidly reach the target of 20 billion dollars of annual trade volume. It could also significantly ease and facilitate tourism between the two neighbours. Baghdad and Tehran also held talks about a draft security agreement, that needs to be presented via diplomatic channels in a bid to be followed up for future implementation, according to the final text of the document. The sides stressed the importance of creating new border crossings, establishing joint industrial parks and direct transit of goods without a need to unload on their bilateral international borders, the final statement says. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, accompanied by a large political and economic delegation, held extensive talks with a wide range of Iraqi political actors. He, along with Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi, oversaw the signing of five MoUs and several trade deals between the two states. Iran and Iraq discussed skilled workers exchange, health, medical, pharmaceutical cooperation as well as an ease of registering pharmaceutical companies in both countries, according to the text. The Iraqi officials also welcomed Iranian investors and companies that want to take up projects in the country, and urged that Iran prepare the same situation for Iraqi firms that want to operate in the country. The Arvand River, also known as Shatt al Arab in Arabic, is one of the natural frontiers that separates Iraq and Iran. It has not been dredged during the last 43 years. Now, the two sides have decided to rapidly start joint dredging operations in Shatt al Arab in a bid to restore the thalweg in the main channel in which ships can sail. The two countries also stressed the importance of joint fight against terrorism in the region. The statement also thanks Iraqi authorities for clearly stating that 'they won't support sanctions against Iran'. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 By Elchin Mehdiyev - Trend: The April battles of 2016 disrupted plans of the Armenians, Azerbaijani deputy executive secretary of the New Azerbaijan Party, chairman of the Azerbaijani Parliamentary Committee on Public Associations and Religious Organizations Siyavush Novruzov said, Trend reports. On April 2, 2016, all the frontier positions and settlements of Azerbaijan were subjected to heavy fire by the Armenian Armed Forces. As a result of the shelling of Azerbaijans settlements located along the line of contact, civilians were killed, including two children. Numerous public and private facilities, including civil infrastructure, were severely damaged as a result of the attack. Azerbaijan responded with an armed offensive, which resulted in four days of fighting, as the country liberated several important strategic spots previously occupied by Armenian Armed Forces. As many as 30 tanks, up to 15 armored guns and fortifications belonging to the Armenians were destroyed, 320 Armenian soldiers were killed and more than 500 servicemen of the enemy were wounded during the clashes. As a result of the successful counteroffensive, more than 2,000 hectares of territory were liberated from the Armenian occupation. Novruzov noted that Armenians, delaying the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, thought that the younger generation in Azerbaijan, people born in families who became refugees and IDPs in the 1990s would forget about Karabakh and the occupied territories and their military spirit would fall. They hoped that by delaying the settlement of the problem, they would be able to solve it in their favor, Novruzov added. However, the April battles dispelled these hopes of the Armenians. The April battles of 2016 showed that the younger generation is as patriotic as previous generations. He said that the April battles nullified the propaganda carried out by Yerevan among the Armenians. The Armenian authorities sought to assure their population that there is no fighting spirit in Azerbaijan, its army is weak, the equipment is outdated, and so on, he noted. Novruzov added that in fact, the Azerbaijani army has major striking force thanks to the acquisition of modern weapons from Russia, Turkey, Belarus, Israel, Ukraine and other countries and the modernization of part of the weapons of the Soviet period. From the point of view of military supplies, the Azerbaijani army began to meet NATO standards, he said. All this was shown in the April battles. Azerbaijan, using only a small part of its military potential in the April battles, completely defeated the Armenian army. Novruzov added that Azerbaijan is conducting systematic work in exposing the Armenian lies. As a result, now the world doesnt believe the lies of the Armenians, he said. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Saudi Arabia has completed six public-private partnership deals in the past two months worth around $3.5 billion, and plans at least 23 more by 2022 despite some delays in its plan to engage the private sector, the head of its privatization body said, Trend reports referring to Al Arabiya. The governments aim to attract investment into everything from education to sports, a cornerstone of its effort to trim dependence on oil revenues, has been mired by some holdups. Its better for the process to take a little bit longer to ensure it is done properly, said Turki al-Hokail, CEO of the National Centre for Privatization and Public-Private Partnership (NCP), which is overseeing the process, told Reuters after a visit to London to meet prospective investors. We are gearing up for a lot of transactions either in the process or in the pipeline and we want to make sure the process is done correctly, he said. The privatization program has so far awarded six projects in two months and is committed to its timetable and initiatives as per the delivery plan. The six projects just completed include four water projects, one in healthcare and one in transport. Under such public-private partnership arrangements, private investors build infrastructure and are paid to operate it for a period before it reverts to the state. Twenty-three more such deals are planned for the water sector by 2022, among more than 40 public-private partnership deals and privatizations that are in the pipeline. Hokail said 50-70 percent of the companies involved in each of the six deals so far were foreign. Foreign banks had loaned 70-80 percent of the financing for each deal. He did not identify the foreign or domestic investors in the deals or provide a breakdown of their stakes. Companies from France, Spain, China, Japan, the United States, Scandinavia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates were among those involved. The European Unions decision to include the United Arab Emirates on its blacklist of tax havens was due to lack of communication between the EU and the UAE government, the head of the UAE Banks Federation said on Wednesday, Trend reports referring to Al Arabiya. We need to reach out, I understand the reasons, and Im sure the UAE will want to play as a global citizen, the banking groups chairman Abdulaziz al-Ghurair told reporters. And Im sure in the near future this will be solved. Previously, European Union governments adopted a broadened blacklist of tax havens on Tuesday, adding the United Arab Emirates and British and Dutch overseas territories in a revamp that tripled the number of listed jurisdictions. The measure comes more than one year after the bloc decided to blacklist jurisdictions that are non-cooperative on tax matters and to monitor countries that commit to change their tax rules to comply with EU standards. The new list has been broadened to 15 jurisdictions, including the UAE, Oman, the British territory of Bermuda, and other Caribbean and Pacific islands, the official said. Jurisdictions are added to the tax haven blacklist if they have shortfalls in their tax rules that could favor tax evasion. They are removed from the blacklist if they commit to reforms. Sixty-two jurisdictions around the world have committed to abiding by the tax standards set by Brussels. Most of them were required to overhaul their rules by December or February. The 28 EU member states have not been screened as they already fulfill the criteria, the European Commission said. But tax campaigners and EU lawmakers have accused some of them of acting as tax havens. The EU Parliaments committee on financial crime said in a report adopted last week that Luxembourg, Belgium, Cyprus, Hungary, Ireland, Malta and the Netherlands display traits of a tax haven and facilitate aggressive tax planning. A third person has died following an avalanche on Ben Nevis, police have confirmed, Trend reports citing BBC. Two climbers died at the scene and a fourth person was injured in the incident, which took place in an area known as Number 5 Gully. The alarm was raised at 11:50 and a Coastguard helicopter, air ambulance, three road ambulances and a trauma team were sent to the scene. Mountain rescue teams from Lochaber and Glencoe also joined the rescue effort. And a group of military personnel training in the area offered assistance to the rescuers. Police initially said two people died in the avalanche and two people were injured. One of the injured climbers later died and the second was airlifted to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Glasgow for treatment. Officers said they were working to establish the identity of the climbers and were following a "positive line of inquiry" in relation to their identity. Insp Isla Campbell said: "This has been a challenging operation and I want to pass on my thanks to the mountain rescue teams, colleagues at the Maritime and Coastguard Agency and Scottish Ambulance Service for their assistance in extremely difficult conditions. "I would also like to praise members of the public and staff from the Scottish Avalanche Information Service who were on scene at the time and provided immediate assistance." Earlier Insp Campbell told BBC Scotland that the weather in the area was atrocious. "The rescuers have been working through some really difficult conditions there, high winds preventing the use of the helicopter," she said. "So although I wasn't up there personally I can just imagine, from the weather on the ground today, it's been very, very challenging for them. "I would really like to thank those volunteers from the mountain rescue team and those people who were in the area who came into action and assisted so ably." The Scottish Ambulance Service said it had dispatched three ambulances, a helimed resource and a trauma team to the scene after being alerted at 12:22. EU heads of government would unanimously support any decision to avoid a hard Brexit, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said on Wednesday, suggesting a short delay to Britain leaving the European Union on March 29 may be necessary, Trend reports referring to Reuters. British lawmakers crushed Prime Minister Theresa Mays EU divorce deal on Tuesday, thrusting Britain deeper into crisis and forcing parliament to decide within days whether to back a no-deal Brexit or seek a last-minute delay. Kurz said he expected there would be no majority in the British parliament in a vote on Wednesday for leaving the bloc without a withdrawal agreement, in which case a vote on deferring Brexit is due to take place on Thursday. If that all happens as outlined, then we support this course of action, Kurz told a news conference. I assume that among the (EU) heads of government there is the unanimous view that it makes sense to avoid a no-deal scenario, a so-called hard Brexit. He repeated that it would be better if Brexit happened before the European Parliament election at the end of May. The shorter the phase that we extend by the better, but the broader objective that must be kept in the foreground is to avoid a hard Brexit, so ideally I would say we are talking about weeks rather than months, he said. The United States set funding for Israel at levels of $3.3 billion in foreign military financing and $500 million for cooperative programs for missile defense over each of the next 10 years, Trend reports referring to The Jerusalem Post. Military aid for Israel apparently has avoided the budget axe. The 2020 fiscal plan sent by the White House to Congress on Monday includes the full $3.3 billion in assistance promised under a 10-year memorandum of understanding, despite spending cuts throughout the proposal. The Budget fully supports the U.S.-Israel Memorandum of Understanding and includes $3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing grant assistance to bolster Israels capacity to defend itself against threats in the region and maintain its qualitative military edge, the budget document says, Israels business daily Globes reported. The $38 billion Memorandum of Understanding, a 10-year defense agreement signed under President Barack Obama, went into operation in October at the start of the last fiscal year. Under the MOU, the United States set funding for Israel at levels of $3.3 billion in foreign military financing and $500 million for cooperative programs for missile defense over each of the next 10 years. The budget plan includes domestic cuts to education and social welfare programs, among others, and includes $8.6 billion for a controversial border wall with Mexico and increased defense spending. Leaders in the House of Representatives said the plan had no chance of passing. The Water Project of Mitzpeh Ramon was inaugurated yesterday (March 12) by the Keren Kayemet L'Israel-Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF), with JNF Holland, in honor of King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, Trend reports referring to The Times of Israel. The event was attended by the Dutch Ambasador to Israel Gilles Beschoor Plug; President of the JNF Holland Professor Moshe Kon; CEO of the Mitzpeh Ramon Local Council Dror Dvash; and other Dutch and Israeli officials. The Project includes a number of initiatives such as the Mitzpeh Ramon Water Reservoir and land preparation for agriculture near the city. The reservoir holds up to 100,000 cubic meters of recycled water intended for use in crop irrigation. Israel is generally considered a pioneer in the use of recycled wastewater. Ambassador Beschoor Plug commented, "It is no coincidence that this project is about water - water is a subject that is extremely important for both our countries. The problems we are facing are different but the solutions are often similar. One of the things we share with Israel is the sea, which enables us to cross the world and share our inventions to combat a shortage or abundance of water with other countries in dire need of our solutions. Authorities say a Slovenian woman who deliberately cut off her hand with a circular saw to collect insurance money faces up to eight years in jail, Trend reports with reference tp CTV. Police say the 21-year-old woman, helped by her relatives, had hoped to claim nearly 400,000 euros in insurance payments. The unidentified woman claimed she had been cutting tree branches when she severed her left hand just above the wrist. Officials say family members left the severed hand behind rather than bring it to the hospital to ensure the disability was permanent. But doctors recovered it in time to sew it back on. Police say the incident happened earlier this year after the family had signed insurance contracts with five different insurance companies. Police say "there was no payment because we discovered the fraud in time." Pakistan should consider establishing ties with Israel, former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said recently, in the days following a standoff with India over the disputed territory of Kashmir, Trend reports referring to Al Arabiya. This was not the first time Musharraf had made his views known on developing relations with Israel. He ruled Pakistan from 1999 to 2008 and was one of the countrys most powerful heads of state. Musharraf remained a strong critic of Israel until 2005. But it was during his rule that the first-ever direct Pakistan-Israel contact was made, with the help of the then-Turkish president Ahmet Necdet Sezer. Since then, Musharraf, who resigned in 2008, has advocated establishment of relations between Pakistan and Israel. Musharraf, who claims to enjoy support from Pakistans military establishment, as well as from members of Prime Minister Imran Khans cabinet, has once again advised Pakistan to establish ties with Israel. Addressing a press conference in Dubai last month, Musharraf said relations with Israel should be established to counter India, drawing an interesting parallel between Pakistani and Israeli strategic realities. Musharraf also placed on record that, as head of state, he had initiated contacts with Israel. The Israeli leadership was quick to respond to my offer within 24 hours. I assumed that Israel wanted to create better relations with Pakistan. They still want it, Musharraf said. The former president initiated contact with Israel during the second half of 2004, even as anti-Israel sentiments were at an all-time high in Pakistan, a Muslim majority country of 208 million people. Musharrafs efforts bore fruit, when foreign ministers of Israel and Pakistan held their first meeting in Turkey in 2005. Later, assisted by Jack Rosen, an American businessman and Chairman of the American Jewish Congress, and backed by then-president George W. Bush, Musharraf became the first Pakistani head of state to address the World Jewish Congress on September 18, 2005. Pakistan has no direct conflict with Israel, and we are not a threat to Israels security. We believe Israel represents no threat to Pakistans national security. But our people have deep sympathy for the Palestinian people, and their legitimate desire for a state, Musharraf said at that time. In his speech before the World Jewish Congress, which only a few in Pakistan hailed, Musharraf had praised Israels move to pull out of Gaza. In response to [Ariel] Sharons courageous decision to pull out from Gaza, Pakistan has decided to establish formal ties with the State of Israel, he said. However, Musharrafs plan to establish Pakistan-Israel ties never materialized, while his views on Israel continue to divide politicians in Pakistan. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has not yet responded to Musharrafs suggestion that Pakistan should form relations with Israel. However, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Pakistans Foreign Minister, told Al Arabiya English that this is a possibility, but only if the Israel-Palestine conflict is resolved amicably. Pervez Musharraf is Pakistans former president, so he is highly respected. But he isnt a part of our government. Not even our ally. So, his comments do not reflect the government and people of Pakistan, Qureshi said. What I can tell you is that Pakistan has had a pro-Palestinian stance for a long time. We cannot even think about establishing contacts with Israel until Palestine is internationally recognized as an independent state. Ijaz-ul-Haq, former federal minister for religious affairs in Musharrafs government, categorically rejected any proposal to establish relations with Israel. We cant even think of establishing relations with Israel, Ijaz-ul-Haq told Al Arabiya English. Ironically, Ijaz-ul-Haqs father, General Zia-ul-Haq, who served as President and Chief of Army Staff, reportedly allowed Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) to establish links with Israels Mossad in the early 1980s. Intelligence offices were set up in embassies of both countries in Washington DC, where the Mossad and ISI, with help from the CIA, ran a decade-long anti-Soviet operation, codenamed Operation Cyclone. Under this operation, Israel delivered Soviet made-weapons to Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and also supplied weapons to the Pakistan Army. According to WikiLeaks, ISI had secretly passed on intelligence to the Mossad that Israeli civilians might be targeted in a terrorist attack in India during September or November 2008. It was also reported that then-ISI chief Lieutenant-General Ahmad Shuja Pasha established direct contact with Israels Mossad to pass on this information. Islamabad-based analyst and Ph.D. scholar at Quaid-e-Azam University, Mustansar Abbas, believes Pakistan may need a long time to eventually establish relations with Israel. But it will have to do it slowly, since foreign policy cannot be static and has to evolve with time. Take the example of Oman, which made it loud and clear that it is time to recognize Israel. Many Muslim countries, which in the past took a strong and principled stand against Israel, are now increasingly warming up to the Jewish state. So, Pakistan should consider building relations with Israel, Abbas said. The Russian Northern Fleet will get some new underwater cruisers, logistics vessels and military hardware this year, Fleet Commander Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov said on Wednesday, Trend reports referring to TASS. "In 2019, we are expecting the arrival of new logistics vessels and submarines," Yevmenov said. Specifically, the Northern Fleet is expecting the arrival of several logistics vessels, including the tanker Academic Pashin. The tanker is completing its trials in the Baltic Sea and will soon make a passage to join the Northern Fleet, the admiral said. The Northern Fleets submarine force will soon get new warships of the modernized Borei and Yasen class that are currently undergoing trials in the White Sea. These are the strategic underwater cruiser Knyaz Vladimir (Prince Vladimir) and the multipurpose submarine Kazan, he said. The Fleets coastal defense missile and artillery forces will get several more new Bastion and Bal systems. A battalion of a separate motor rifle brigade is already learning to operate the Arctic version of the Tor-M2 surface-to-air missile system. After the live-fire tests at a southern practice range, these missile systems will arrive together with the trained personnel at the place of their formations permanent deployment. "This year, we are also planning to complete rearming tank units of the separate motor rifle brigade with the T-80BVM armored vehicles that are most of all suited for the Arctic," the Fleet commander said. The Northern Fleet was in the process of its rearmament in 2018 as well, the admiral said. "In 2018, principally new hardware that had not been operational in the Russian Armed Forces before arrived for the Fleet," the commander noted. This relates to the icebreaker Ilya Muromets, the first unique vessel designated for all-embracing operations in the Arctic. The Fleet also received the multifunctional logistic support vessel Elbrus and two warships: the frigate Admiral Gorshkov and the large amphibious assault ship Ivan Gren. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend: Fourteen members of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group have been detained in Ankara, Trend reports via Turkish media. The detainees are foreign citizens, and their citizenship isnt disclosed. All the detainees took an active part in the gang formations in Syria and Iraq, as well as spread the ideas of the IS, the creation of a global caliphate in Turkey. On Nov. 5, 2018, a major operation was carried out against members of the "Islamic State" in 11 provinces of Turkey. Some 24 people, who were engaged in raising funds for terrorists in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Libya, were arrested. Also, cash money of more than $500,000 and more than two million Turkish liras were confiscated during the operation. Syrian citizen Riad Haji Osman, one of the IS executioners, was detained during a special operation in Turkeys Adana Province on Apr. 13. Kifah Bashir Hussein, the so-called minister of health of IS, was detained in Sanliurfa in southeastern Turkey on Jan. 24. On Jan. 12, the Turkish police detained the so-called minister of agriculture of IS, Tarik Ahmet. In December 2017, a 28-year-old terrorist nicknamed Mahmud, one of the IS executioners, was detained in Turkeys Hatay Province on the border with Syria. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 13 By Rufiz Hafizoglu Trend: Over 40 drug dealers were detained in Istanbul during a special operation, Trend reports referring to the Turkish media. The operation was carried out at 40 addresses, during which firearms were also confiscated. The Turkish police previously conducted a special operation against drug dealers in Ankara, during which 241 people were arrested. A total of 5 tons of heroin have been seized in Turkey since early 2019. On February 5, 615 kilograms of seized were confiscated in Turkeys Mersin Province, while 850 kilograms of heroin were seized in Istanbul on January 31. As reported earlier by the Turkish Ministry of Internal Affairs, 3,722 tons of heroin were seized in January-February 2018, with 16,802 tons of psychotropic substances and 202 kilograms of the so-called bonsai narcotic substance. Turkish Interior Minister Suleiman Soylu stated earlier that the country faces a serious threat and should toughen up the fight against drug addiction and drug trafficking. "The number of deaths from drug overdoses is increasing every year," said the minister. The minimum age for Turkish citizens starting to use drugs is 13 years, with 36 years being the average, and 65 being the maximum. Addicts in Turkey aged 15-24 years old make up 2.9 percent of the country's population, with those 25-44 years old making up 2.8 percent and those 45-64 years old making up 2.3 percent of the population. There are 22 rehabilitation centers for drug addicts in Turkey. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend: A particularly dangerous terrorist, a member of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group, a Danish female citizen of Lebanese origin, has been detained in Turkeys Bursa province, Trend reports with reference to the Turkish media March 13. The detained citizen of Denmark whose name isnt disclosed, took an active part in recruiting women from Western countries to the ranks of IS terrorists. The detained terrorist was wanted by Interpol, she entered the territory of Turkey from Syria illegally and was hiding in the province of Bursa. Fourteen members of the IS terrorist group were also detained in Ankara March 13. On Nov. 5, 2018, a major operation was carried out against members of the "Islamic State" in 11 provinces of Turkey. Some 24 people, who were engaged in raising funds for terrorists in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Libya, were arrested. Also, cash money of more than $500,000 and more than two million Turkish liras were confiscated during the operation. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu Jemal Countess/Getty Images(ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia) -- Ethiopia will transport the black boxes from Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 to another country, an official announced Wednesday, a decision that will speed up a delay in the analysis of critical flight data that could help explain the second deadly crash of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane in just five months. Ethiopian officials said the country doesn't have the technology required to analyze the black boxes -- the flight data and cockpit voice recorders -- which hold key information on how and why the plane crashed on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board, officials told ABC News Chief National Correspondent Matt Gutman, reporting from Ethiopias capital of Addis Ababa. The Ethiopian Civil Aviation Authority was expected to announce which country the recordings will be sent to soon, three days after Sunday's crash. Any and all details are in high demand by authorities and families of the victims arriving at the crash scene in recent days and by airline customers concerned about flying on the Boeing 737 MAX 8. The MAX 8 has been grounded by countries and airlines around the world, as well as banned from nations' airspaces until the safety of the plane can be better assured. A key question is whether the plane's advanced flight management system -- the autopilot -- might have played a role in the most recent crash as it did in the fatal crash of an Indonesian Airlines 737 MAX 8 last October. In that crash, it appears the pilots failed to disengage the autopilot when the plane's nose began pitching up and down, perhaps because they were unaware of how to do so. In the aftermath of that crash, at least two U.S. pilots who have flown the Boeing 737 MAX 8 submitted anonymous reports to NASA, which has an aviation safety reporting system, saying their aircraft suddenly pointed its nose downward after they engaged in autopilot. The accounts were first reported by the Dallas Morning News and obtained by ABC News from NASA. The pilots disengaged the autopilot, manually corrected the unexpected motion and continued to climb as planned. The flight continued uneventfully after that. Its unclear from the reports if the pilots were both on the same flight or on two separate flights. In a third report, a pilot reported feeling like the flight manual and training for the Boeing 737 MAX wasn't sufficient. As of Tuesday, just over 700 Boeing 737 MAX flights were tracked by FlightRadar24 down from over 1,200 Boeing 737 MAX flights tracked each day in the week leading up to the crash Sunday. The U.S., home to 72 of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft, has gone against the grain in keeping planes in the air, backed by the continued confidence of the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing. The E.U. and the U.K. suspended all Boeing 737 MAX 8 operations countrywide on Tuesday, following the decisions of Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Oman and Ireland to ban the plane from flying in and out of those countries. Early Wednesday, the Canadian airline Sunwing also grounded its four MAX 8s. President Donald Trump spoke by phone with Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Tuesday, White House spokesman Judd Deere confirmed, but he released no other details other than to say "we are continuing to monitor the situation." On Tuesday evening, Boeing confirmed the conversation to ABC News and said that Muilenburg reiterated to the president "our position that the MAX aircraft is safe." Also on Tuesday evening, acting Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Daniel Elwell said in a statement that the agency continues to extensively review all available data and aggregate safety performance information from operators and pilots, but that, "Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft." "In the course of our urgent review of data on the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash, if any issues affecting the continued airworthiness of the aircraft are identified, the FAA will take immediate and appropriate action," Elwell's statement concluded. Copyright 2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Trump administration halts plans to end the temporary protected status of Nepali and Honduran immigrants Thousands of Temporary Protected Status holders from Nepal and Honduras got a reprieve on Tuesday after the Trump administration agreed to temporarily halt the termination of their protected status. Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend: Turkey, for security reasons, has closed its airspace for Boeing 737-8 MAX and Boeing 737-9 MAX aircraft, Trend reports referring to the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure of Turkey. However, the ministry noted that Turkey has not closed its airspace for the cargo aircraft Boeing 737-8 MAX and Boeing 737-9 MAX. Trend, referring to the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure of Turkey, reported on March 12 that the country suspended flights of Boeing 737 MAX 8 and Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, in connection with the crash of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 in Ethiopia. On March 10, 157 people were killed in the plane crash in Ethiopia. On a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, the Boeing 737 MAX 8 fell about 60 km south-west of the Ethiopian capital (near the city of Bishoftu). The exact causes of the crash have not yet been established, rescuers were able to detect both on-board recorders. On Oct. 29, 2018, the Boeing 737 MAX 8 of the Indonesian budget airline Lion Air operated a JT610 flight from Jakarta to Pankalpinang. Approximately 13 minutes after taking off, the plane fell into the Java Sea. All 189 people on board died. According to the data obtained by the first flight recorder, at least six technical failures were detected on the aircraft. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu Baku, Azerbaijan, March 13 By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend: Turkeys political circles do not consider the US as the countrys reliable partner in recent years as Washington does not fulfill its partnership obligations to Ankara. In fact, there has been great tension in relations between Turkey and the US over a number of issues recently. One of the reasons for this tension is the acquisition of the Russian S-400 air defense systems by Ankara. The issue of supplying the S-400 air defense systems to Turkey was repeatedly discussed in late 2016 and in early 2017, as well as during the meetings between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkish National Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said that the S-400 air defense systems will be deployed from October 2019. The supply of the S-400 air defense systems to Ankara cost $2.5 billion, head of the Rostec state corporation Sergey Chemezov said in December 2017. Turkey is the first country, a NATO member, which will receive the S-400 air defense systems from Russia. But, apparently, the acquisition of the S-400 air defense system is not in Washingtons interests. The US is actively trying to prevent Turkey from buying the S-400 air defense systems from Russia. In particular, Washington warned Ankara that in case of buying the S-400 air defense system from Moscow, the US may refuse to sell F-35 fifth-generation fighter aircraft to Turkey. But what makes Turkey buy the Russian air defense systems? Firstly, Turkey needs to intensify security as the US, Germany and the Netherlands took out their air defense systems from the country in 2015, which forced Ankara to look for an alternative. Secondly, as opposed to Russia, the US refuses to provide Ankara with the technical characteristics of the US Patriot air defense system. Moreover, Turkey intends to further begin joint production of the S-400 air defense systems with Russia, while Washington does not provide Ankara with such an opportunity. Another important factor is that the purchase of the US Patriot air defense systems costs Turkey more expensive than the Russian C-400 air defense systems and Washington does not offer Ankara to purchase weapons on credit. These are the main obvious reasons of acquiring the Russian S-400 air defense systems by Turkey. Taking all this into account, one can say that it will be difficult for Washington to convince Ankara to refuse to buy the Russian air defense systems, even if sanctions are applied. --- Rufiz Hafizoglu, deputy editor-in-chief of Trend Follow him on Twitter: @rhafizoglu U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged the oil industry on Tuesday to work with the Trump administration to promote U.S. foreign policy interests, especially in Asia and in Europe, and to punish what he called bad actors on the world stage, Trend reports referring to Reuters. Addressing top executives of the worlds largest energy companies and oil ministers in Houston, Pompeo said in prepared remarks that Americas newfound shale oil and natural gas abundance would strengthen our hand in foreign policy. The United States has imposed harsh sanctions in the past several months on two major world oil producers, Venezuela and Iran. Pompeo said Washington would use all its economic tools to help deal with the situation in Venezuela, which is mired in a years-long economic crisis and where socialist President Nicolas Maduro is maintaining power despite being disavowed by the United States and about 50 other countries. Washington reimposed oil sanctions on Iran last year, sharply reducing its volume of crude exports in the past several months in an effort to curb Tehrans nuclear, missile and regional activities. Were committed to bringing Iranian crude oil exports to zero as quickly as market conditions will permit, he said. We need to roll up our sleeves and compete by facilitating investment, encouraging partners to buy from us, and by punishing bad actors, Pompeo said in his prepared remarks. Pompeo said the U.S. oil-and-gas export boom had given the United States the ability to meet energy demand once satisfied by its geopolitical rivals. We dont want our European allies hooked on Russian gas through the NordStream II project, any more than we ourselves want to be dependent on Venezuelan oil supplies, Pompeo said, referring to a natural gas pipeline expansion from Russia to Central Europe. General Bipin Rawat, his wife, Brig Lidder, and 10 armed forces personnel were killed in the Mi-17V5 helicopter crash near Coonoor in Tamil Nadu on Wednesday. 1. Yes. The Schlueter Group has extensive experience and contacts. Its a good investment. 2. Yes. The firms namesake has a background as a legislator and knows Killeen well. 3. No. The expenditure is a waste of money. Our lawmakers should be doing that work. 4. No. The contract should be shorter, incentivized and based on performance benchmarks. 5. Unsure. Its not always easy to quantify the outcomes of lobbying efforts. Vote View Results Maputo: In a recent Incident, at least 66 people have been killed and 141,000 affected after heavy rains deluged central and northern Mozambique, the government has said as it appealed for funds to manage the crisis. Cabinet spokeswoman Ana Comoana said "The government has decreed a red alert due to the continuing rains and the approach of the tropical cyclone Idai, expected to reach the country between Thursday to Friday,". It is to be noted that she spoke to reporters late Tuesday after a meeting of the Council of Ministers held in Maputo to discuss the deadly flooding.The floods in one of Africa's poorest countries have already destroyed 5,756 homes, affecting 15,467 households and 141,325 people. There are 111 people with injuries, 18 hospitals destroyed, 938 classrooms destroyed and 9,763 students affected. More than 168,000 hectares of crops were also destroyed, the government spokeswoman added. Authorities have ordered the compulsory evacuation of people living in flood-prone areas. also read UNSC will make a decision today upon designing JeM chief Masood Azhar as an international terrorist Comoana said "Sixteen accommodation centres have been opened in the provinces of Zambezia and Tete to accommodate the displaced,". Further added that "The government needs 1.1 billion meticais ($16 million) to assist 80,000 families affected by the rains". Mozambique is prone to cyclones, floods and droughts, and floods in 2000 claimed at least 800 lives while more than 100 were killed in 2015. Floods have already claimed 30 lives and left over 230,000 people without shelter in southern Malawi which borders Mozambique. also read Turkey condemned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's "blatant racism" Pyongyang: On Tuesday, state media said that Turnout in nuclear-armed North Korea's single-candidate elections hit 99.99 percent this year, -- up from a seemingly unimprovable 99.97 percent the last time they were held. With participation figures that Western democracies would never achieve, millions of North Koreans head to nationwide polls every five years to elect the rubber-stamp legislature known as the Supreme People's Assembly (SPA). It is to be noted that with only one approved name on each voting slip in the isolated country, which is ruled with an iron grip by Kim Jong Un's Workers' Party, the result is never in doubt. This year's turnout fell a tiny fraction short of 100 percent as those "abroad or working in oceans" were unable to take part, the North's official KCNA news agency reported. "Single-minded unity" is one of Pyongyang's most enduring slogans and as in 2014, the votes were in the weekend elections were 100 percent in favour of the named candidates. also read Singapore's aviation regulator banned Boeing 737 MAX aircraft KCNA said, citing a report released by the Central Election Committee "All the electors participated as one in the election to cement our people's power as firm as a rock,". It added "One hundred percent of them cast their ballots for the candidates for deputies to the SPA registered in relevant constituencies,". He continued "While it's hard to say conclusively, Kim could have calculated it would make the country look more like a normal state if he didn't carry an extra title of deputy to the legislature when he already holds the country's highest rank,". A detailed list of the 687 candidates was not immediately available, but the North's official Korean Central Television on Tuesday read out the names of elected members. Surprisingly Kim Jong Un's name was not among the called, an official of Seoul's unification ministry in charge of inter-Korean relations told AFP. also read A Mother, board a flight while forgetting her baby at waiting area, flight returns In 2014, Kim received a 100 per cent turnout in his Mount Paektu constituency, with 100 per cent in favour, according to KCNA. Kim's apparent exclusion was "unprecedented" and "puzzling", said Lim Eul-chul, professor of North Korean studies at Kyungnam University. Kim is officially chairman of the Workers' Party and chairman of the State Affairs Commission, the top government body, although his late grandfather Kim Il Sung remains the country's Eternal President despite dying in 1994.The current leader's younger sister and close aide Kim Yo Jong was among the newly elected SPA members, the South's Yonhap news agency reported, citing Pyongyang state media. The jury praised her novel thinking, challenging conventional wisdom in the understanding of the role of the state in public policy and innovation The jury praised her novel thinking, challenging conventional wisdom in the understanding of the role of the state in public policy and innovation. The award worth 20,000, with the support of Compagnia di San Paolo, is awarded annually by ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, to eminent scholars and intellectuals whose work represents a significant contribution to the identity and values of Europe. 13 March 2019 (Berlin, Germany). Economist Mariana Mazzucato is the recipient of the 2019 All European Academies Madame de Stael Prize for Cultural Values, honouring her wide-ranging and stimulating work in the field of political economy and particularly her ground-breaking contributions to understanding the role of the state in innovation. The jury valued her outstanding efforts in shaping new narratives for Europe and its economy through her scholarly work and public engagement. The award further recognises Mazzucato's commitment to connect academia with European policymaking, most visibly through her contributions to the EU's research and innovation agenda, encouraging cross-disciplinary cooperation to achieve true innovation with societal relevance, both within and beyond Europe. "Mariana Mazzucato's scholarly work is rather exceptional in a way that it transcends academia. She is a brilliant and provocative economist who has challenged stories of value creation, innovation and growth. In an ingenious way, she has been able to create new economic narratives to understand contemporary realities in Europe and beyond. The jury honours her outstanding academic work and her engagement to bridge the gap between academia and policymaking", said Antonio Loprieno, President of ALLEA and chairman of the Madame de Stael Prize jury. ALLEA's Madame de Stael Prize Mariana Mazzucato will be the sixth scholar to receive the All European Academies Madame de Stael Prize for Cultural Values, an initiative of ALLEA with the support of the foundation Compagnia di San Paolo. The prize was established to commemorate a deep-rooted understanding of European culture as connected by an inherent diversity supported by a dynamic and vigorous intellectualism. The prize will be awarded during a ceremony in the context of the 25th Anniversary of ALLEA. The celebration will take place at the University of Bern and is hosted by the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences in Bern on 8 May. Switzerland's Federal Councillor for Economics, Education and Research Guy Parmelin will be opening the ceremony, and the President of the European Research Council Jean-Pierre Bourguignon will provide the laudatory speech. About Mariana Mazzucato Mariana Mazzucato (PhD) holds the Chair in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL), and she is Founder and Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose (IIPP). IIPP is dedicated to rethinking the role of public policy in shaping both the rate of growth and its direction--and training the next generation of civil servants with a focus on the dynamic organisational capabilities required for mission-oriented policies. Professor Mazzucato advises policy makers around the world on innovation-led inclusive growth and is currently a member of the Scottish Government's Council of Economic Advisors; the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network Leadership Council; and SITRA's Advisory Panel in Finland. She is currently a Special Advisor for the European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, Carlos Moedas, and has recently authored the high impact EC report Mission-Oriented Research & Innovation in the European Union. She is also a Special Advisor to the Secretary General of the OECD, Angel Gurria, for the OECD's New Growth Narrative. Mazzucato has written several books, book chapters, journal articles and policy papers on issues related to economic and finance policy, innovation, sustainability and inclusive growth. Her highly-acclaimed book The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths (Anthem 2013; Public Affairs, 2015) was on the 2013 Books of the Year list of the Financial Times. Her new book The Value of Everything: making and taking in the global economy was published in April 2018 in the UK (Penguin) and was launched in the USA in September 2018 (Public Affairs). It was shortlisted for this year's Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year prize. About ALLEA ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, was founded in 1994 and currently brings together almost 60 Academies in more than 40 countries from the Council of Europe region. Member Academies operate as learned societies, think tanks and research performing organisations. They are self- governing communities of leaders of scholarly enquiry across all fields of the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. ALLEA therefore provides access to an unparalleled human resource of intellectual excellence, experience and expertise. Independent from political, commercial and ideological interests, ALLEA's policy work seeks to contribute to improving the framework conditions under which science and scholarship can excel. Jointly with its Member Academies, ALLEA is in a position to address the full range of structural and policy issues facing Europe in science, research and innovation. In doing so, it is guided by a common understanding of Europe bound together by historical, social and political factors as well as for scientific and economic reasons. About Compagnia di San Paolo The Compagnia di San Paolo, founded in 1563 as a charitable brotherhood, is today one of the largest private-law foundations in Europe. It pursues aims of public interest and social use, in order to foster the civil, cultural and economic development of the community in which it operates. The Compagnia is active in the sectors of Research and Health, Art, Cultural Heritage and Activities, Cultural Innovation, Social Policies, and Philanthropy. ### AMES, Iowa - A new study from Iowa State University biomedical researchers illuminates the biological processes by which exposure to some metals can contribute to the onset of Parkinson's-like symptoms. The study, published today in the peer-reviewed journal Science Signaling, focuses on the metal manganese, which has a range of industrial uses as an alloy. Anumantha Kanthasamy, a Clarence Hartley Covault Distinguished Professor in veterinary medicine and the Eugene and Linda Lloyd Endowed Chair of Neurotoxicology, said the research details how manganese exposure can lead to misfolded proteins in the brain, which cause a neurological disease. Kanthasamy said the findings could lead to earlier detection of the disease and better outcomes for patients. Kanthasamy said small amounts of manganese are necessary for the proper functioning of the human body, but too much exposure has been linked with neurological symptoms much like those experienced by patients with Parkinson's Disease. Links between manganese and neurological disorders have been noted since the 1950s, Kanthasamy said, because of the tendency of manganese to accumulate in brain tissues. The latest study found that manganese combines with a protein in the brain called alpha- synuclein. Previous studies showed the protein was susceptible to misfolding, but Kanthasamy and his colleagues set out to discover how it interacted with manganese and how that interaction facilitates the progression of disease. The researchers found the pathological form of misfolded alpha-synuclein proteins get packaged into vesicles, which allow the misfolded proteins to transfer from cell to cell to propagate the protein-seeding activity. These vesicles provoke inflammation of tissues and can lead to a neurodegenerative response, the study found. The study drew on data gathered from mice as well as blood serum samples from welders provided by clinicians at Penn State University. The study found welders exposed to manganese had increased misfolded alpha-synuclein serum content, meaning the welders are at a higher risk for developing Parkinson's symptoms, Kanthasamy said. The research could contribute to a new assay, or medical test, to detect the presence of misfolded alpha-synuclein proteins. This could lead to earlier detection of Parkinson's Disease and a way to gauge the effectiveness of drugs designed to slow the disease. "As the disease advances, it's harder to slow it down with treatments," Kanthasamy said. "Earlier detection, perhaps by testing for misfolded alpha-synuclein, can lead to better outcomes for patients. Such a test might also indicate whether someone is at risk before the onset of the disease." Kanthasamy cautioned the research is still at an experimental stage, meaning it could be years before such an assay could be available. ### Dilshan S. Harischandra, a former member of Kanthasamy's lab who now works at the University of Pennsylvania, was the lead author of the study. Kanthasmy, chair of the Department of Biomedical Sciences in the ISU College of Veterinary Medicine, was the senior author of the study. The study was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. PRINCETON, N.J.--A star-studded Nigerian movie about corruption -- and a subsequent text-messaging campaign to combat government graft -- led a record number of citizens in Nigeria to report acts of corruption, according to a study in the journal Science Advances. The two-part campaign generated 241 corruption reports from 106 communities in just seven months, according to the researchers, who are based at Princeton University; the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A previous corruption-reporting campaign yielded less than 140 reports in a full year. Commissioned by the study's authors, the film suggests that people will take positive action to report crime if prompted by role models and given accessible avenues to do so. "The policy messaging of our study is clear: Campaigns should make it easy for people to do the things they are already motivated to do," said Betsy Levy Paluck, professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. "In this case, the texting campaign made it free and simple for people to reply to a message that came to their phone, regarding an issue they found to be important. The film provided role models of other Nigerian citizens reporting corruption by text." Levy Paluck, who is deputy director of Princeton's Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy, conducted the study with Graeme Blair from UCLA and Rebecca Littman from MIT. Through their two-part field experiment, they sought to understand how to persuade a group of people to try a new form of community-minded action. One way to change norm perceptions is to highlight the behavior of role models, whether they are real or fictitious. The researchers wanted to explore how this could be done through film. They commissioned a movie from IROKOTV in Nigeria, the third largest producer of Nollywood films in Nigeria. The two-hour film, "Water of Gold," was written by Kabat Esosa and produced by Iroko Partners with Magic Movies Productions. It starred two big Nigerian stars: Yemi Blaq and Mike Ezuruonye. The movie took place in four states in southeastern Nigeria, home to roughly 14.2 million people. Despite the region's rich supply of crude oil, corruption at the level of international corporations, Nigeria's federal government, and state and local officials have contributed to poverty and under-development or have not translated into local development. Today, local residents name corruption as the top problem faced by their country. The film follows the story of a poor fisherman named Natufe and his rags-to-riches brother Priye. The two are close until Priye leaves their village, eventually returning years later as a wealthy businessman. Against Natufe's wishes, Priye begins to work with corrupt local politicians. Eventually, Natufe becomes outspoken against the corrupt system in which they live. The researchers rolled out two different versions of the film. In both, a number was displayed on the screen four times, urging viewers to call a hotline to report corruption. It said: "See corruption? Let us hear from you! SMS 50500 to report corruption to Integrity Nigeria. Tell us your story. Text for FREE. Your number kept secret." What differed was the plotline of the film. In the "treatment version," Natufe and a local activist set up a toll-free "short code" telephone number, used for mass text messaging, to encourage community members to report corruption. This took place in six scenes. In the "placebo version," this part of the storyline is removed. In some regions, viewers were able to watch the treatment version of the film, whereas in other regions, viewers were exposed to the placebo version. The second part of the study involved a mass text sent on a random day to all the people who watched the film. This allowed the researchers to study the effect of the messaging before and after the text nudge. All told, the researchers received 3,316 messages from 1,685 different people. Among these, 241 individuals sent concrete corruption reports explicitly mentioning a specific act, person, or institution who had committed malfeasance. People most commonly reported bribes and embezzlement perpetrated by politicians, law enforcement, and those in the education sector. "We were very excited to see this many people send in messages. When we first described the campaign to experts and activists on the ground in Nigeria, they didn't think anyone would participate," Littman said. Seeing the role models of corruption reporters in the film encouraged viewers to report corruption, and separately, individuals who received the text message encouragement were significantly more likely to report corruption. The researchers think the film campaign may have caused reporting due to a perceived shift in norms regarding the community's anger toward corruption. "Our study shows that campaigns can use emotional narratives to mobilize collective action," Paluck said. ### Funding for the study came from an anonymous private donor and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. The research was approved by the Princeton Institutional Review Board, protocol #5813. The paper, "Motivating the adoption of new community-minded behaviors: An empirical test in Nigeria," first appeared March 13 online in Science Advances. BELLINGHAM, Washington, USA and CARDIFF, UK - In an article published in SPIE's Journal of Medical Imaging (JMI), researchers announce critical advances in the use of 3D-printed coronary phantoms with diagnostic software, further developing a non-invasive diagnostic method for Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) risk assessment. Physicians already use the non-invasive methods of Computer Tomography-Fractional Flow Reserve (CT-FFR) diagnostic software to characterize blood flow in order to assess the risk of CAD. CT-FFR uses CT images of the heart in combination with computational methods to estimate blood flow conditions in the arteries. One key shortcoming of CT-FFR lies in validating the CT-FFR diagnostic software which requires large clinical trials with ground truth. The phantom models discussed in this new paper replicate vasculature from real patients, allowing for physiological testing of actual blood flow with the provision of elastic properties, and can be used to efficiently validate CT-FFR software. The research, delineated in the open-access article, "Initial evaluation of 3D printed patient-specific coronary phantoms for CT-FFR software validation," demonstrates the utilization of coronary phantoms to accurately assess intermediate-risk patients' Fractional Flow Reserve (FFR), the measurement that determines CAD severity. The research also expands on the current applications of 3D printing to further develop cardiac phantoms with structures closely mimicking patient anatomies, allowing for accurate CT imaging of coronary flow. In this study, CT scans of these phantom cardiac models were accurate to within 1mm diameter of the actual patients' hearts, and the research team expects that accuracy to increase as the resolution of CT scanners and 3D printers improve. "This exceptional paper highlights an important step forward in the use of 3D-printing of patient-specific coronary models and their contribution to assessing vasculature blood flow. It provides a critical requirement to validate the CT-FFR calculation using a phantom, thus enabling an efficient mechanism to ascertain the accuracy and reliability of CT-FFR estimation methods. This lends a strong support to the ongoing paradigm shift in CAD risk assessment via CT-FFR," says Dr. Ehsan Samei, JMI Associate Editor, SPIE Fellow, and Professor of Radiology at Duke University. As acknowledged in the paper, this work is a continuation of research presented at the 2018 SPIE Medical Imaging conference - and published in the conference - proceedings entitled "CT investigation of patient-specific phantoms with coronary artery disease." ### The article authors are Lauren M. Shepard and Kelsey N. Sommer of the University Department of Biomedical Engineering, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, and the Canon Stroke and Vascular Research Center, Buffalo, NY; Erin Angel of Canon Medical Systems USA, Tustin, CA; Vijay Iyer and Michael F. Wilson of Interventional Cardiology, University at Buffalo Medicine, UBMD, Buffalo, NY; Frank J. Rybicki and Dimitrios Mitsouras of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and the Department of Radiology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; Sabee Molloi of the University Department of Radiological Sciences, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA; and Ciprian N. Ionita, University Department of Biomedical Engineering, University at Buffalo, Canon Stroke and Vascular Research Center, Buffalo, University Department of Radiological Sciences, University of California, Irvine, and University Department of Neurosurgery, University of Buffalo. Maryellen L. Giger, an SPIE Fellow and A.N. Pritzker Professor of Radiology/Medical Physics at the University of Chicago, is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Imaging. The journal is published in print and digitally by SPIE in the SPIE Digital Library, which contains more than 500,000 publications from SPIE journals, proceedings, and books, with approximately 18,000 new research papers added each year. About SPIE SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, an educational not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based science, engineering, and technology. The Society serves 257,000 constituents from 173 countries, offering conferences and their published proceedings, continuing education, books, journals, and the SPIE Digital Library. In 2018, SPIE provided more than $4 million in community support including scholarships and awards, outreach and advocacy programs, travel grants, public policy, and educational resources. http://www.spie.org. Contact: Daneet Steffens Public Relations Manager daneets@spie.org +1 360 685 5478 @SPIEtweets Rosa Maria Rojas was studying industrial engineering at Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima when she took an introductory course on mining engineering. She wasn't a big fan of the industry at the beginning: Barrick Gold, a mining company where her parents worked in accounting and community relations, moved Rojas and her family to a small mining town when she was a teenager. The move to a different part of the country meant a drastic change in lifestyle, and Rojas resented it at the time. The course not only surprised her, but changed the trajectory of her life. "I took an elective course in mining because I wanted learn more about the subject," she said. "I fell in love with mining there." This month, Rojas, who is now an assistant professor of practice in the Department of Mining and Geological Engineering, or MGE, at the University of Arizona, received the 2018 Outstanding Young Professional award from the mining and exploration division of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration, or SME. Rojas is the first Peruvian to win the award, which recognizes the accomplishments of a young person who has made a significant contribution to the minerals industry. Winning the award places her among the ranks of UA alumni to win the award, including: 1997 recipient Xavier Ochoa, Class of 1991 2004 recipient Robert Pratt, Class of 1996 2007 recipient Eben Robinson, Class of 1995 2011 recipient Claudio Cassio, Class of 2003 Diving In and Working Her Way Up Pursuing a career in the field wasn't easy: Rojas' father didn't want her to study mining because he thought it was too dangerous a career for women. When she took an internship at the mine site where he worked to prove how much it meant to her, he enlisted all of his friends at the mine to try to talk her out of her chosen career path. Her dad's friends watched her work, went back to him, and said, "She really wants to pursue mining." And so she did. When she started studying mining as a freshman in Lima, there were only two other women in the department, among 200 men. She dived into every opportunity she could, like coming to the United States to attend an SME meeting in 2006. She and her fellow students loved the experience so much that they founded the first SME student chapter in Peru when they got back. Today, there are at least a dozen. She also enjoyed mentoring her fellow students in any capacity she could. This willingness to jump into new opportunities is something she recommends to everyone. "Don't exclude yourself because you think you're different, or because you don't think you have the same skills as other people," she said, "Be resilient, don't give up and give yourself the chance to feel like part of the majority." By the time she graduated, there were 14 women in the department. Her first job was as the only female pit supervisor on a crew of 300 men at BHP's Escondida mine in Chile, where she was also significantly younger than the people she was supervising. "I always felt part of the whole," she said. "I never felt like I was different, but I had to work very hard to break that impression that I was not as capable as my male counterparts, because they look at you as young and female. You earn their respect bit by bit." Building a Career in Arizona Rojas spent several years working for BHP Billiton in the mining industry in South America and continuing to mentor the student chapters of SME. After earning her Master of Science in mining engineering at the University of Arizona, specializing in remote mine operation, she spent nearly five years working as a mine engineer for Freeport-McMoRan. She was active in SME during this period, and positions held included vice chair of the Young Leaders Committee and chair of the Young Leaders Professional Development Subcommittee. Having spent much of her life mentoring others, when the UA recruited for the assistant professor of practice position, Rojas decided it would be a good fit. In 2017, she joined the university as the program manager and lead professor for MGE's Mining 360 executive program, a nine-unit certificate program designed to help Caterpillar and partner companies' employees further their education in mining at the UA. "Having her come in and be focused and run this program is really what we needed," said John Kemeny, MGE department head. "I think she has a lot of drive, she works very hard and she communicates very well. She has this vision of doing more in our department. We're really proud of her." In 2018, Rojas and MGE doctoral student Fatemah Molaei started researching the effectiveness of diversity policies in the U.S. mining industry with a view to determining where the industry stands on this topic and to creating a baseline for future research. Working with SME, with advice from the Eller College of Management, they surveyed attendees at the SME annual conference in February, collecting data on the perception of whether diversity policies have improved work environments, recruitment, retention and career progression for diverse populations. "I like the UA very much, because I feel like I'm making a greater impact on the community than I was as an engineer in the mine," she said. "I can communicate with students and industry, and I have a bigger platform to contribute to research." As for her dad, who didn't want Rojas to study mining at all? "Now, he's just so proud," she said. ### When UC Santa Barbara geology professor emeritus James Kennett and colleagues set out years ago to examine signs of a major cosmic impact that occurred toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch, little did they know just how far-reaching the projected climatic effect would be. "It's much more extreme than I ever thought when I started this work," Kennett noted. "The more work that has been done, the more extreme it seems." He's talking about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which postulates that a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth close to 12,800 years ago, causing rapid climatic changes, megafaunal extinctions, sudden human population decrease and cultural shifts and widespread wildfires (biomass burning). The hypothesis suggests a possible triggering mechanism for the abrupt changes in climate at that time, in particular a rapid cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, called the Younger Dryas, amid a general global trend of natural warming and ice sheet melting evidenced by changes in the fossil and sediment record. Controversial from the time it was proposed, the hypothesis even now continues to be contested by those who prefer to attribute the end-Pleistocene reversal in warming entirely to terrestrial causes. But Kennett and fellow stalwarts of the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) Impact Hypothesis, as it is also known, have recently received a major boost: the discovery of a very young, 31-kilometer-wide impact crater beneath the Greenland ice sheet, which they believe may have been one of the many comet fragments that impacted Earth at the onset of the Younger Dryas. Now, in a paper published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, Kennett and colleagues, led by Chilean paleontologist Mario Pino, present further evidence of a cosmic impact, this time far south of the equator, that likely lead to biomass burning, climate change and megafaunal extinctions nearly 13,000 years ago. "We have identified the YDB layer at high latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere at near 41 degrees south, close to the tip of South America," Kennett said. This is a major expansion of the extent of the YDB event." The vast majority of evidence to date, he added, has been found in the Northern Hemisphere. This discovery began several years ago, according to Kennett, when a group of Chilean scientists studying sediment layers at a well-known Quaternary paleontological and archaeological site, Pilauco Bajo, recognized changes known to be associated with YDB impact event. They included a "black mat" layer, 12,800 years in age, that coincided with the disappearance of South American Pleistocene megafauna fossils, an abrupt shift in regional vegetation and a disappearance of human artifacts. "Because the sequencing of these events looked like what had already been described in the YDB papers for North America and Western Europe, the group decided to run analyses of impact-related proxies in search of the YDB layer," Kennett said. This yielded the presence of microscopic spherules interpreted to have been formed by melting due to the extremely high temperatures associated with impact. The layer containing these spherules also show peak concentrations of platinum and gold, and native iron particles rarely found in nature. "Among the most important spherules are those that are chromium-rich," Kennett explained. The Pilauco site spherules contain an unusual level of chromium, an element not found in Northern Hemisphere YDB impact spherules, but in South America. "It turns out that volcanic rocks in the southern Andes can be rich in chromium, and these rocks provided a local source for this chromium," he added. "Thus, the cometary objects must have hit South America as well." Other evidence, which, Kennett noted, is consistent with previous and ongoing documentation of the region by Chilean scientists, pointed to a "very large environmental disruption at about 40 degrees south." These included a large biomass burning event evidenced by, among other things, micro-charcoal and signs of burning in pollen samples collected at the impact layer. "It's by far the biggest burn event in this region we see in the record that spans thousands of years," Kennett said. Furthermore, he went on, the burning coincides with the timing of major YDB-related burning events in North America and western Europe. The sedimentary layers at Pilauco contain a valuable record of pollen and seeds that show change in character of regional vegetation -- evidence of a shifting climate. However, in contrast to the Northern Hemisphere, where conditions became colder and wetter at the onset of the Younger Dryas, the opposite occurred in the Southern Hemisphere. "The plant assemblages indicate that there was an abrupt and major shift in the vegetation from wet, cold conditions at Pilauco to warm, dry conditions," Kennett said. According to him, the atmospheric zonal climatic belts shifted "like a seesaw," with a synergistic mechanism, bringing warming to the Southern Hemisphere even as the Northern Hemisphere experienced cooling and expanding sea ice. The rapidity -- within a few years -- with which the climate shifted is best attributed to impact-related shifts in atmospheric systems, rather than to the slower oceanic processes, Kennett said. Meanwhile, the impact with its associated major environmental effects, including burning, is thought to have contributed to the extinction of local South American Pleistocene megafauna -- including giant ground sloths, sabretooth cats, mammoths and elephant-like gomphotheres -- as well as the termination of the culture similar to the Clovis culture in the north, he added. The amount of bones, artifacts and megafauna-associated fungi that were relatively abundant in the soil at the Pilauco site declined precipitously at the impact layer, indicating a major local disruption. The distance of this recently identified YDB site -- about 6,000 kilometers from the closest well-studied site in South America -- and its correlation with the many Northern Hemispheric sites "greatly expands the extent of the YDB impact event," Kennett said. The sedimentary and paleo-vegetative evidence gathered at the Pilauco site is in line with previous, separate studies conducted by Chilean scientists that indicate a widespread burn and sudden major climate shifts in the region at about YDB onset. This new study further bolsters the hypothesis that a cosmic impact triggered the atmospheric and oceanic conditions of the Younger Dryas, he said. "This is further evidence that the Younger Dryas climatic onset is an extreme global event, with major consequences on the animal life and the human life at the time," Kennett said. "And this Pilauco section is consistent with that." ### Research on this study was also conducted by Ana Abarzua, Giselle Astorga, Alejandra Martel-Cea, Nathalie Cossio, Maria Paz Lira and Rafael Labarca of Universidad Austral de Chile; R. Ximena Navarro of Universidad Catolica de Temuco; and Malcolm A. LeCompte and Victor Adedeji of Elizabeth City State University. Christopher Moore of University of South Carolina; Ted E. Bunch and Charles Mooney of Northern Arizona University; and Wendy S. Wolbach of DePaul University contributed research, as did Allen West of Comet Research Group. Easier access to e-cigarettes containing nicotine is highly likely to lead to health gains and cost savings in the health sector, Australian and New Zealand researchers have found Easier access to e-cigarettes containing nicotine is highly likely to lead to health gains and cost savings in the health sector, Australian and New Zealand researchers have found. The research modelled what would happen if the number of people in New Zealand who vape increased due to greater access to nicotine-containing e-cigarettes compared to current patterns of use. Researchers say the results are applicable to Australia. Published in Epidemiology, the study found that the most likely outcome is a health benefit equivalent to adding an extra 19 healthy days to the life of each living New Zealander, due to the health gained by those who quit smoking due to taking up vaping. Due to uncertainty about the impact of long-term e-cigarette use, the average gains per person ranged from 2-37 healthy days - but it was clear that the overall health impact was positive under realistic assumptions. The likely NZ$3.4 billion (AUD$3.27 billion) cost savings (range NZ$370 million-$7.1 billion [AUD$356 million-AUD$6.8 billion]) resulted from fewer people developing tobacco-related diseases because e-cigarettes are less harmful than smoking, although they are not risk-free. The UK and USA have relatively liberal regulations over the sale of these products, while Australia, Thailand and Singapore have various bans. Restrictions have been recently relaxed in New Zealand, allowing adults to access nicotine vaping products without a prescription. University of Melbourne professor and senior author Tony Blakely said the results provided important learnings for Australia. "New Zealand and Australia are reasonably similar in disease and smoking rates," he said. "The New Zealand best estimate of health gain is equivalent to 19 days of healthy life per person alive over the remainder of their lives - a measure we can probably transport across the Tasman." The study's health gains were similar to those from well-established public health interventions, such as a 10 per cent annual tobacco tax increase for 15 years, or a national colorectal cancer screening program. "Policy making regarding e-cigarettes is challenging," Professor Blakely said. "Nevertheless, our study points to cautious liberalisation of access to e-cigarettes as the best way forward. That policy implementation should not be in isolation but accompanied by other policies that will make health gain more likely." The researchers recommend that vaping product sales include expert advice on how to use them, such as the best type of device and the appropriate nicotine concentration. Co-author and University of Queensland researcher, Associate Professor Coral Gartner said the findings supported New Zealand's new regulatory approach that kept vaporised nicotine products excise tax free and cheaper than smoking. "Accompanying regulations to minimise the risks of youth uptake of vaping are needed including restrictions on marketing and where the products can be sold," Associate Professor Gartner says. "Moreover, strengthened policy on tobacco cigarettes, such as reducing the number of retail outlets, could work in tandem with greater access to nicotine vaping products to achieve maximal health gains." ### The research was led by the University of Otago's Burden of Disease Epidemiology, Equity and Cost-Effectiveness Programme (BODE3) that Professor Blakely co-directs, in collaboration with the Universities of Queensland and Melbourne, and was funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand. PITTSBURGH, March 12, 2019 - Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. Screening is key for early detection and increased survival, but the current method has a 96 percent false positive rate. Using machine learning, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC Hillman Cancer Center have found a way to substantially reduce false positives without missing a single case of cancer. The study was published today in the journal Thorax. This is the first time artificial intelligence has been applied to the question of sorting out benign from cancerous nodules in lung cancer screening. "We were able to rule out cancer in about a third of patients, so they wouldn't need biopsies, they wouldn't need PET scans or a short-interval CT scan. They just need to come back in a year," said senior author David Wilson, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor of medicine, cardiothoracic surgery and clinical and translational science at Pitt and co-director of the Lung Cancer Center at UPMC Hillman. A low-dose CT scan is the standard diagnostic test for lung cancer for those at high risk. Nationwide, about a quarter of these scans turn up shadows indicating nodules in the lung - a positive result - but fewer than 4 percent of those patients actually have cancer. Right now, it's impossible to know from the scan alone who those 4 percent are, Wilson said. Of course, physicians don't want to miss any real cases of cancer, but they're also trying to reduce the false positive rate, he noted. "A positive test creates anxiety, increases health care costs, and the follow-up tests are not risk free," said study coauthor Panayiotis (Takis) Benos, Ph.D., professor and vice chair of computational and systems biology and associate director of the Integrative Systems Biology Program at Pitt. "For the 96 percent of people who have benign nodules, these procedures are unnecessary. So, we try to mine the data to tell which are benign and which are malignant." Wilson, Benos and colleagues gathered low-dose CT scan data from 218 high-risk UPMC patients who were later confirmed to have either lung cancer or benign nodules. Then they fed the data into a machine learning algorithm - a form of artificial intelligence - to create a model that calculates the probability of cancer. If the probability falls below a certain threshold, the model rules out cancer. Comparing the model's assessment against the actual diagnoses of these patients, the researchers found that they would have been able to save 30 percent of the people with benign nodules from undergoing additional testing, without missing a single case of cancer. The three factors that were most important to the model, Benos said, are the number of blood vessels surrounding the nodule, the number of nodules and the number of years since the patient quit smoking. "While it has been known for some time that tumors recruit more vascular support, this is the first time that we've been able to use computer technology to quantify their contribution and incorporate them into a predictive model that decides, with certainty, that some patients don't have cancer," Wilson said. "The next step is to evaluate this technique in a larger population, and actually it's started already, using about 6,000 scans from the National Lung Screening Trial." ### Additional authors on the study include Vineet Raghu, Wei Zhao, M.D., Ph.D., Jiantao Pu, Ph.D., Joseph Leader, Ph.D., Jian-Min Yuan, M.D., Ph.D., of Pitt; James Herman, M.D., and Renwei Wang, M.D., of UPMC Hillman. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (U01HL137159, R01LM012087), particularly the National Cancer Institute (P50CA90440, P30CA047904, R21CA197493 and T32CA082084). To read this release online or share it, visit http://www.upmc.com/media/news/031219-lung-ca-machine-learning [when embargo lifts]. About the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences The University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences include the schools of Medicine, Nursing, Dental Medicine, Pharmacy, Health and Rehabilitation Sciences and the Graduate School of Public Health. The schools serve as the academic partner to the UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center). Together, their combined mission is to train tomorrow's health care specialists and biomedical scientists, engage in groundbreaking research that will advance understanding of the causes and treatments of disease and participate in the delivery of outstanding patient care. Since 1998, Pitt and its affiliated university faculty have ranked among the top 10 educational institutions in grant support from the National Institutes of Health. For additional information about the Schools of the Health Sciences, please visit http://www.health.pitt.edu. About UPMC A $19 billion world-renowned health care provider and insurer, Pittsburgh-based UPMC is inventing new models of patient-centered, cost-effective, accountable care. UPMC provides more than $900 million a year in benefits to its communities, including more care to the region's most vulnerable citizens than any other health care institution. The largest nongovernmental employer in Pennsylvania, UPMC integrates 87,000 employees, 40 hospitals, 700 doctors' offices and outpatient sites, and a 3.5 million-member Insurance Services Division, the largest medical insurer in western Pennsylvania. As UPMC works in close collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences, U.S. News & World Report consistently ranks UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside on its annual Honor Roll of America's Best Hospitals. UPMC Enterprises functions as the innovation and commercialization arm of UPMC, and UPMC International provides hands-on health care and management services with partners around the world. For more information, go to UPMC.com. http://www.upmc.com/media Contact: Erin Hare Office: 412-864-7194 Mobile: 412-738-1097 E-mail: HareE@upmc.edu Contact: Madison Brunner Office: 412-578-9193 Mobile: 412-432-8390 E-mail: BrunnerM@upmc.edu With a career focused on robotics and mapping ocean floor habitats, Head of Aerospace, Mechatronic and Mechanical Engineering Professor Stefan Williams was awarded the title of Distinguished Lecturer by the IEEE Ocean Engineering Society for his high degree of technical proficiency in oceanographic research and engineering. "My work in the development of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and our program of marine surveying are recognised internationally for the quality of the data we are collecting, as well as the scale of the program we operate," he said. For over a decade, Professor Williams' team has operated an integrated benthic monitoring program through Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS). The program uses AUV systems to collect seafloor imagery at key reference sites around Australia.Benthic zones, some of the least observed habitats in the world, are ecological regions at the lowest point in a body of water, such as the ocean floor. Over the past ten years, Professor Williams has used marine robotic vehicles to study these sensitive marine habitats around Australia's vast coastline. This has included surveys of coral reefs on the country's east and west coasts, as well as temperate regions in Western Australian, South Australia, Tasmania and NSW. The program has focused on collecting long time-series imagery, helping scientists document habitat changes over time. This has included surveys following events such as coral bleaching and cyclones in tropical reefs. The team has also documented changes in species such as urchins and kelp, and has studied deep water habitats along the continental shelf. "Our research is helping marine ecologists track changes in benthic habitats and document range shifts in key species associated with changing oceanographic conditions, as well as exploring marine archaeological sites, and deep water geological zones," he explained. "Oceanographic surveying is expanding rapidly thanks to the increasing endurance of marine robotic systems. Technology has developed to the point where there are now unmanned surface vessels that are capable of crossing oceans." Robotics advancements have effectively 'unlocked' previously untraversed underwater regions, allowing researchers to collect data and map seafloor habitats, while also allowing them to be less reliant on more costly forms of access, such as research vessels. Professor Williams' team has recently entered the final phase of introducing a new AUV system to their suite of vehicles, which has increased camera resolution and the capacity to survey nearshore and shelf environments, such as tropical and temperate reefs. "We have also developed machine learning tools that let us manage the huge volumes of seafloor images that we've collected. At present we have more than five million seafloor images from around Australia, from the tropics in Queensland and WA through temperate regions in the south." "These images and the detailed seafloor models we produce are providing fascinating insights into key areas of the seafloor", he said. "It's necessary that these robots can operate for long periods of time without any direct human oversight -- therefore most decision making and planning will need to be embedded into the technology, which has been a key focus of our research over the past few years." This coming May Professor Williams will be travelling to the University of Southampton to work with collaborators who are developing new oceanographic observing systems. He has also been invited to give talks in Scotland, France, Germany and China about his work. ### About IEEE IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organisation dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. Chronic pain involves more than just hurting. People suffering from pain often experience sadness, depression and lethargy. That's one reason opioids can be so addictive -- they not only dampen the pain but also make people feel euphoric. What if it were possible to develop a pain killer that could curb the negative emotions associated with pain without causing euphoria? Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have taken a step toward that goal. Studying rodents, they have shown they can block receptors in the brain responsible for the emotional components of pain and restore the animal's motivation. Their findings could lay the groundwork for developing new, less addictive approaches to pain treatment. "We're in the midst of an opioid epidemic, and the euphoria associated with opioids is a major driver of opioid dependence," said senior investigator Jose Moron-Concepcion, PhD, an associate professor of anesthesiology, of neuroscience and of psychiatry. "By targeting the emotional aspects of pain, we hope to make pain less debilitating so that patients won't crave the emotional high they get from opioids." Opioid painkillers, such as morphine, oxycodone and fentanyl, target receptors on brain cells called mu opioid receptors. In contrast, the Washington University researchers studied kappa opioid receptors, which operate very differently. Activating the kappa receptor makes people feel depressed, sad and unmotivated. So Moron-Concepcion and his colleagues at the Washington University Pain Center thought that by blocking those receptors, they also might dampen the negative emotions associated with pain. Their findings are published March 13 in the journal Neuron. Some of the rats in the study had been injected in a paw with a substance that causes persistent inflammation. To measure the emotional effects of that pain, the researchers used a rewarding task in which the animals could work for sugar as a way to measure motivation. After being taught to push a lever to get sugar, most rats will keep pushing. In these experiments, the animals had to push the lever progressively more each time they wanted a pellet of sucrose. "When the animals experienced pain, they were less motivated to work to obtain the reward," said first author Nicolas Massaly, PhD, an instructor in anesthesiology. "It's often the same for people in pain who don't get as much pleasure from daily activities they usually enjoy." But when the rats with inflamed paws were treated with a compound to block kappa opioid receptors in their brains, the animals recovered the motivation to obtain the sugar, and pushed the lever as often as those who did not have inflamed paws. In addition, the researchers collaborated with Kooresh Shoghi, PhD, an associate professor of radiology, using small animal positron emission tomography (PET) imaging to assess the activity of kappa opioid receptors in the animals' brains. They were able to demonstrate that when rats were in pain, their kappa opioid receptors were very active in a part of the brain -- the nucleus accumbens -- linked to emotion. The researchers dampened this kappa opioid receptor activity by blocking the release of a natural stimulator of kappa opioid receptors called dynorphin -- which is produced in the brain and is kind of like the inverse of the endorphins released by activities such as exercise. "By blocking dynorphin release, we were able to restore motivation in the animals despite the fact that we did not completely eliminate their pain," Massaly said. Moron-Concepcion, Massaly and their colleagues acknowledge it's a long journey from rodents to people. But they already have preliminary PET data from people, suggesting it may be possible to influence kappa opioid receptors and potentially prevent the sadness and lack of motivation that can accompany physical pain. They believe that by attacking pain's emotional properties, without affecting the useful element of the pain response that can protect injuries from further damage, it may be possible to improve quality of life for pain patients without having to use any, or as many, habit-forming opioid pain killers. ### Massaly N, Copits BA, Wilson-Poe AR, Hipolito L, Markovic T, Yoon HJ, Liu S, Balicki MC, Bhatti DL, Sirohi S, Klass A, Walker BM, Neve R, Cahill CM, Shoghi KI, Gereau RG, McCall J, Al-Hasani R, Bruchas MR, Moron JA. Pain-induced negative affect is mediated via recruitment of the nucleus accumbens kappa opioid system. Neuron, March 13, 2019. This work was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Grant number DA041781, DA042581, DA042499, DA041883, DA033396, DA037152 R01 NS106953, AA020394, K99 DA038725, K99 DA041467. Additional funding from a NARSAD Independent Investigator Award, from the Philippe Foundation, the Spanish Ministerio de Edonomia y Competitividad MINECO, and the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology. Washington University School of Medicine's 1,500 faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals. The School of Medicine is a leader in medical research, teaching and patient care, ranking among the top 10 medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare. Description "Curated by Yousuf Saeed, an independent filmmaker and researcher based in India, From Mecca to Sufi Shrines showcases the ephemeral objects and devotional art produced for popular consumption in the Islamic world, in particular in South Asia. Included are mass-printed Islamic posters and calendar art from India and Pakistan, which often depict images of the Hajj pilgrimage; South Asian Sufi shrines and saints; and calligraphy and talismans linked to other religious faiths found in the region. From Mecca to Sufi Shrines raises the question of why such vibrant visual cultures continue to thrive in the South Asian Islamic world despite the skepticism and suspicion of Islamic authorities on popular arts legitimacy, as well as why images and popular culture are inevitabilities for popular piety despite orthodox Muslims increasing dissociation from them." Charles B. 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Register today to make sure you are one of the candidates they are looking to hire. (Bloomberg) -- Airbnb Inc. and Expedia Group Inc.s HomeAway failed to persuade a U.S. court of appeals to strike down a Santa Monica law that makes the companies liable for illicit rentals in the Southern California beach city. The ruling Wednesday by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit is a setback for the home-sharing platforms in their effort to avoid regulation by cities that blame the rapid proliferation of short-term rentals for a shortage of affordable housing and a disintegration of residential communities. The Santa Monica ordinance holds the companies responsible for booking rentals of residences that arent licensed by the city. The appellate panel agreed with the city that the restriction doesnt violate the U.S. Communications Decency Act of 1996, which shields online services from liability for the content that their users post on their sites. San Francisco-based Airbnb is the largest home-rental platform with more than 6 million listings around the world. The company is gearing up to be ready to go public by the end of the year, but is still fighting various cities in court over efforts to curtail its operation. In January, Airbnb and other home-sharing sites won a ruling granting a temporary reprieve from a New York City law that would compel them to turn over renter data, a requirement that threatens to cut their bookings in the city by half. Airbnb has seen setbacks like this over the years," Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh said. They will continue to work with the regulators on tax collection and other fees but it should not have much of an impact on its IPO." Airbnb is also fighting Paris where it faces as much as 12.5 million-euro ($14 million) in fines for allegedly posting illegal advertisements, and in November it sued Boston over a new ordinance that it says would limit short-term home rentals and impose unfair restrictions and financial penalties on the company. The courts interpretation of the 1996 law and the protection it affords interactive online businesses has become a central theme in legal challenges to Airbnb and its rivals. Federal judges in San Francisco and Los Angeles have found that cities can hold the companies liable for processing transactions, as opposed to simply listing information from users. Yet in a separate case in Los Angeles, a judge concluded that Airbnb cant be made responsible for renters breaking their leases when they list their apartments on the site. Story continues Airbnb and HomeAway argued that the Santa Monica ordinance makes it impossible for them to operate, particularly if other municipalities adopt similar laws, because it would require them to monitor and remove listings for unregistered residences. If they dont, users would be stuck looking at listings that they wont be able to book, according to the companies. The Ninth Circuit panel concluded the citys statute only puts an incidental burden on the companies constitutional right to free speech. Even assuming that the ordinance would lead the platforms to voluntarily remove some advertisements for lawful rentals, there would not be a severe limitation on the publics access to lawful advertisements, especially considering the existence of alternative channels like Craigslist, the judges said in the ruling. Airbnb said in a statement that the Santa Monica case doesnt reflect the progress it has made working with local governments across the country. "Airbnb has made great strides around the world, working with dozens of cities to develop more than 500 partnerships including fair, reasonable regulations, tax collection agreements, and data sharing that balance the needs of communities, allow hosts to share their homes in order to pay the bills and provides guests the opportunity to affordably visit places like the California Coast," the company said. Expedia said Wednesdays ruling is out of step with other court decisions and runs contrary to the Communications Decency Acts protections for innovation on the internet. Santa Monica said in a statement that the unanimous ruling confirms the citys right to regulate home sharing to protect its limited housing stock for residents. We are thrilled to have confirmation from the Ninth Circuit that our balanced approach to home sharing is working at a time when housing and affordability continue to challenge the region, Santa Monica Mayor Gleam Davis said. This is a big win for Santa Monica residents and our residential neighborhoods. The case is HomeAway.com Inc. v. City of Santa Monica, 18-55367, U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. (Updates with Airbnb statement in 11th paragraph.) --With assistance from Eric Newcomer and Olivia Carville. To contact the reporter on this story: Edvard Pettersson in Los Angeles at epettersson@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elizabeth Wollman at ewollman@bloomberg.net, Peter Blumberg For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com 2019 Bloomberg L.P. On the morning after Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302s fatal crash near Addis Ababas airport that left 157 passengers and crew dead on Sunday, Kelly Starr stopped clicking through the harrowing images of crumpled pieces of metal and orphaned shoes and went straight to the American Airlines website to check on her upcoming flight. I was terrified, the senior project manager told Fortune, after realizing her scheduled flight from Los Angeles to Jamaica was on one of the airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 planesthe same type of aircraft that has now been involved in two deadly crashes in less than six months. In October, a Lion Air flight in Indonesia also crashed shortly after takeoff and killed all 189 passengers and crew. Despite the similarities between the two crashes, and a report that Boeing knew about a potentially dangerous flight-control flaw, the Boeing 737 Max 8 plane has not been flagged by the Federal Aviation Administration. But many airlines (AeroMexico, Cayman Airways, Royal Air Maroc, and Norwegian Air) and countries (China, Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, Ethiopia, and the U.K.) have grounded all 737 MAX 8 planes or barred the planes from entering their airspace, pending further investigation. Considering the extent to which the Boeing 737 MAX 8 has split experts safety opinions, Starr said that she was hopeful that American would do the right thing and change the concerned pairs tickets to a different flight on a different aircraft without any issues. Although Starr had the option of rescheduling her flight without a fee, since shed bought her tickets with airline miles, her friend Tiffany Christian, who was taking the trip with Starr, said she would have to spend $1,636 to change a single leg of her flightnearly three times her original ticket cost. Starr and Christian have now found themselves in a dilemma that many other anxious flyers have desperately taken to Twitter and customer service lines to resolve: They either have to pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars of fees airlines are declining to void, or fly on an aircraft they dont feel comfortable in. Story continues Airlines Still Standing by the Boeing 737 MAX 8 Spokespeople from American Airlines (currently operating 24 Boeing 737 MAX 8s), Southwest Airlines (34), Air Canada (24), WestJet (13), and Flydubai (11) sent Fortune nearly identical statements extending their sympathies to the victims of the Ethiopia Airlines crash, stating that there isnt a safety concern, and reiterating that their standard change and cancellation policies apply. But these statements are changing by the hour. While Norwegian told Fortune repeatedly Monday night that safety precautions had been taken, and thus it would maintain its regular fee structure, on Tuesday morning, Norwegians acting chief operating officer Tomas Hesthammer told Fortune, In response to the temporary suspension of Being 737 MAX operations by multiple aviation authorities we have taken the decision to not operate flights using this aircraft type, until advised otherwise by the relevant aviation authorities. We would like to apologize to customers for any inconvenienced caused, however, safety will always remain our top priority, Hesthammer added, The airline told Fortune that it would rebook and refund all affected customers. Flight Attendant Versus Passenger Safety Thus far, only some unions representing flight attendants and crews have been able to give their workers the option to opt out of flights that make them feel uncomfortable. We are currently working with Southwest Airlines Management and are confident a plan will be put into place that addresses that very issue, Lyn Montgomery, president of TWU Local 556, which represents at least 16,000 Southwest flight attendants, told Fortune. Lori Bassani, national president of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, told American Airlines employees that she had the option to avoid flying on Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes Monday. In a letter addressed to the 27,000 represented flight attendants, she wrote, It is important for you to know that if you feel it is unsafe to work the 737 Max, you will not be forced to fly it. Starr expressed frustration that many passengers couldnt also opt out of the flight due to safety concerns without a penalty. So you are telling me that I dont matter? Starr said. That my humanity is not as important as theirs? For this very reason, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) released a statement Tuesday, demanding that the FAA temporarily ground the 737 Max fleet. This is about public confidence in the safety of air travel, AFA president Sara Nelson told Fortune in a statement that acknowledges the importance of both mental and physical security. The United States has the safest aviation system in the world, but Americans are looking for leadership in this time of uncertainty. The FAA must act decisively to restore the public faith in the system. Again, we caution everyone to not jump to conclusions and not interrupt the integrity of the investigations. Furthermore, an AFA spokesperson told Fortune that regardless of the airline, There are options that are in place today for flight attendants who are concerned about their safety. But each contract might approach internal trip trading and flight swapping systems differently. Customer Service Nightmare Twenty years ago, before Preeti Sharma was an executive assistant and corporate travel planner for a Vancouver-based tech company, she was a customer service representative at the short-lived airline Canada 3000. Now Im in the opposite end of the spectrum, she told Fortune, while spending her last hours on a Waikiki beach on a trip she had taken her mother on as a gift. I keep thinking, interesting. [What Air Canadas customer service reps are doing] is not what I would have done. The mother and daughters Tuesday flight from Honolulu to Vancouver is on an Boeing 737 MAX 8, which Sharma didnt feel comfortable taking, particularly since it flies almost exclusively over the Pacific Ocean. My mom is feeling anxiety, and shes supposed to be relaxing, said Sharma, 42, admitting that she was freaking out as well. This is a retirement trip! Sharma and her sister Priya Pandit, who stayed in Canada, dedicated Sunday night through Tuesday morning calling and tweeting Air Canadas customer service lines. As a last ditch effort, Pandit told Fortune she sent several emails to the airline, including to Air Canada president and CEO Calin Rovinescu. The airline has not yet responded to her tweets or emails. Vancouver venture capitalist Doug Roe, however, told Fortune he didnt have any issues changing his flight from a Boeing 737 MAX 8 from Europe to North America without incurring a fee. But I have a Super Elite status, which is given to travelers who spend at least $20,000 traveling on the airline a year, he said. And let me put it this way, my assistant is the girl you want to call to fight a parking ticket for you. This wasnt the case for Sharma, who has been an Air Canada enthusiast until this tripso much so that she decided to gift 180 employees at her company $400 Air Canada vouchers for a holiday present. Although she could have opted to book a different Air Canada flight for herself and her motherSharma said the airline gave her a total price of $1,000 with fees includedshe decided to just buy new tickets through United Airlines for $800. Christian decided to change airlines as well, flying Delta for $1,456, rather than paying $1,636 to change her American Airlines ticket, she said. Starr bought a ticket on the same flight. I spoke with five people at American for a total for five-plus hours today, said Starr. I want people to understand the pain thats been caused over 24 planes and a lack of empathy. * Government offers dialogue with opposition * Algerians suspicious of Bouteflika's initiatives * Big rally planned By Lamine Chikhi and Hamid Ould Ahmed ALGIERS, March 13 (Reuters) - Algeria's government on Wednesday declared itself ready for talks with protesters seeking rapid political change, saying it sought a ruling system based on "the will of the people" after opposition groups rejected proposed reforms as inadequate. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on Monday reversed a decision to seek a fifth term in the face of weeks of mass rallies by protesters fed up with authoritarian rule and decades of economic and political stagnation. But the initiative by Bouteflika, who also delayed elections and said a conference would be held to discuss political changes, has failed to satisfy many Algerians who continue to want power to move to a younger generation with fresh ideas. "Dialogue is our duty. Our top priority is to bring together all Algerians," deputy prime minister Ramtane Lamamra told state radio. "The new system will be based on the will of the people," he said, adding participants in a conference to write a new constitution would include mainly young people and women. Earlier, Armed Forces Chief of Staff and deputy defence minister Ahmed Gaed Salah told Ennahar TV the army would preserve Algeria's security "in all circumstances and conditions". Tens of thousands of people from all social classes have demonstrated over the last three weeks against corruption, unemployment and a ruling class dominated by the military and veterans of the 1954-62 independence war against France. The protests have shaken up a long moribund political scene marked by decades of social and economic malaise and behind-the-scenes power broking by an influential military establishment. CRITICISM FROM CELEBRATED WAR VETERAN In an unusual sign of a rift within the political elite, a prominent independence war veteran described Bouteflika's plan for reform and political transition as a "coup d'etat." Story continues Former guerrilla fighter Djamila Bouhired said Algeria's post-independence governments had continued to be subject to what she called France's tutelage, something she said was illustrated by French President Emmanuel Macron's support for Bouteflika's initiative. "The latest revealing sign of these perverse links of neocolonial domination, the support of the French president for the coup detat programmed by his Algerian counterpart is an aggression against the Algerian people...," she wrote in a letter to El Watan daily. Young Algerians have no bond with the independence war except through their grandparents. Their priorities are to find jobs and better services that the North African country is failing to provide despite its oil and gas. In an illustration of the disconnect between the ageing Bouteflika and restless young Algerians, the president announced his transition plan in a letter to a nation where people vent frustrations through social media. When you read the letter closely, it is very crafty. He says 'I'm retiring', but the further you read on, the clearer it becomes that it's a ruse, that he's side-stepping and hedging," said Kader Abderrahim, analyst at Sciences Po university in France. "Its about extending his fourth mandate into eternity. It took Algerians only a few hours to realise what was going on and to understand what he was up to." The pressure on Bouteflika -- who has ruled for 20 years but has rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013 -- is unrelenting. A mass protest is planned in Algiers for Friday. On Wednesday, school teachers held a strike in several cities and were joined by other Algerians. "We want to uproot the system," said 25-year-old student Messaoud Meki. (Additional by Sophie Louet in Paris; Writing by Michael Georgy, Editing by William Maclean) London, 13 March 2019 - Amundi, Europe`s largest fund manager[2], today announces its growth strategy to double the assets under management of its ETF, Indexing and Smart Beta business line by 2023. Amundi also announces the launch of an entirely new ultra-low cost1 ETF range: Amundi Prime. Fannie Wurtz, Head of Amundi ETF, Indexing and Smart Beta, says: "We have been experiencing strong and steady growth over the past years across all areas of expertise and client segments. We will look to meet our objectives by developing new markets while continuing to increase our European presence, where we believe there is still significant room for growth." It is Amundi`s ambition to double its ETF, Indexing and Smart Beta assets under management to 200 billion by 2023. To achieve this target, the business line will focus on three growth drivers: increasing client coverage in Europe and Asia; enhancing product offering and investment solutions; and boosting its retail market presence. In line with this strategic focus, Amundi unveils the launch of Amundi Prime ETF range at a highly competitive flat rate of 0.05% across all funds[3]. The initial launch of nine Amundi Prime ETFs will offer investors exposure to the key building blocks of a diversified portfolio, accessing both fixed income and equity market indices, across a range of geographic regions: Global, Europe, USA, and Japan. The ETFs will track indices designed and calculated by Solactive[4], a well-established and cost-efficient index provider. Additionally, all Amundi Prime ETFs are UCITS-compliant and physically replicated. Fannie Wurtz adds: "Our product development strategy has always been based on our constant dialogue with clients who are increasingly looking to include ETFs in their investment solutions. Amundi Prime ETF range is built on our experience and outstanding bargaining power as Europe`s largest asset manager. We are confident that this range will meet investors` needs for cost-efficiency, simplicity and transparency." Media enquiries Story continues Amundi ETF, Indexing & Smart Beta Laura Uger laura.uger@amundi.com Amundi Fany de Villeneuve Fany.DeVilleneuve@amundi.com Maitland/AMO (PR Advisers to Amundi) Jais Mehaji / Mads Neumann +44(0) 20 7379 5151 Amundi-maitland@maitland.co.uk About Amundi ETF, Indexing and Smart Beta With close to 100 billion in assets under management[5], Amundi ETF, Indexing and Smart Beta is one of Amundi`s strategic business areas and is a key growth driver for the Group. Amundi ETF, Indexing and Smart Beta business line provides investors - whether institutionals or distributors - with robust, flexible and cost-efficient solutions, leveraging Amundi Group`s scale and deep resources. With over 30 years of benchmark construction and replication expertise covering over 100 indices, Amundi is a trusted name in ETF & Index management among the world`s largest institutions. The team also manages 20 billion in Smart Beta & Factor Investing5, covering solutions based on both efficient risk management and factor investing. These solutions are available into passive (index-based or ETF) and active management. Thanks to the support of the whole Amundi Group, Amundi ETF, Indexing & Smart Beta business line helps meet the asset allocation needs of investors, while continuously innovating to design products that help clients meet the new challenges.The business line benefits from the long standing ESG knowledge of Amundi non-financial analyst team, as well as the wide quantitative research resources of the Group to customize portfolios according to investors` constraints. About Amundi Amundi is Europe`s largest asset manager by assets under management and ranks in the top 10[6] globally. It manages more than 1.425 trillion[7] euros of assets across six main investment hubs[8]. Amundi offers its clients in Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and the Americas a wealth of market expertise and a full range of capabilities across the active, passive and real assets investment universes. Clients also have access to a complete set of services and tools. Headquartered in Paris, Amundi was listed in November 2015. Thanks to its unique research capabilities and the skills of close to 4,500 team members and market experts based in 37 countries, Amundi provides retail, institutional and corporate clients with innovative investment strategies and solutions tailored to their needs, targeted outcomes and risk profiles. Amundi. Confidence must be earned This document and information included herein about the Amundi ETF funds is intended solely for journalists and media professionals, provided solely to enable them to have an overview of these funds, exclusively for their own independent editorial. Amundi Asset Management assumes no liability, whether direct or indirect, that may result from using any information contained in this document. In no circumstances may Amundi Asset Management be held liable for any decision taken on the basis of this information. Important information This document is not intended for citizens or residents of the United States of America or to any U.S. Person, as this term is defined in SEC Regulation S under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933 and in the Prospectus of the Funds. The US Person definition is provided in the legal mentions of our website www.amundi.com . The content of this document is for information purposes only and does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell. Amundi AM accepts no liability, whether direct or indirect, that may result from using any information contained in this document. In no circumstances may Amundi AM be held liable for any decision taken on the basis of this information. Past performance is not a guarantee or indication of future results. Investment return and the principal value of an investment in the Funds may go up or down and may result in the loss of the amount originally invested. Indicative net asset value of the Funds is published by stock exchanges. The Funds` units purchased on the secondary market cannot usually be sold directly back to the Funds. Investors must buy and sell units on a secondary market with the assistance of an intermediary (e.g. a stockbroker) and may incur fees for doing so. In addition, investors may pay more than the current net asset value when buying units and may receive less than the current net asset value when selling them. Subscriptions in the Funds will only be accepted on the basis of its latest prospectus and/or KIID, which may be obtained free of charge at amundietf.com. Investment in a Fund carries a substantial degree of risk (i.e. risks are detailed in the KIID and prospectus). It is the investor`s responsibility to ensure that his/her investment is compliant with the laws of the jurisdiction he/she depends on and to check if this investment is suiting his/her investment objectives or patrimony situation. Transaction cost and commissions may occur when trading ETFs. Information reputed exact as of March 2019. Reproduction prohibited without the written consent of the Management Company. Amundi ETF designates the ETF business of Amundi Asset Management. This Document was not reviewed/stamped/approved by any Financial Authority. Disclaimer UK For professional clients only In the UK, this document is being issued in the United Kingdom by Amundi Asset Management London Branch, 41 Lothbury, London, EC2R 7HF. The promotion of the above mentioned funds in the UK is not intended for and should not be provided to the public or to any persons in the UK not falling within one or more of the following exemptions from the restrictions in s 238 FSMA: authorised firms under FSMA and certain other investment professionals falling within article 14 of the FSMA (Promotion of Collective Investment Schemes) (Exemptions) Order 2001, as amended (the "CIS Order") and their directors, officers and employees acting for such entities in relation to investment; high value entities falling within article 22 CIS Order and their directors, officers and employees acting for such entities in relation to investment; other persons who are in accordance with the Rules of the FCA prior to 1 November 2007 classified as Intermediate Customers or Market Counterparties or on or thereafter classified as Professional Clients or Eligible Counterparties. The distribution of this document to any person in the UK not falling within one of the above categories is not permitted. Amundi Asset Management ("Amundi AM") is an investment company authorised by the Autorite des Marches Financiers in France under number GP-04000036 and subject to limited regulation by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (the "FCA") for the conduct of UK investment business. Amundi AM is entered on the FCA Register under number 401883. Disclaimer Solactive The financial instrument is not sponsored, promoted, sold or supported in any other manner by Solactive AG nor does Solactive AG offer any express or implicit guarantee or assurance either with regard to the results of using the Index and/or Index trade mark or the Index Price at any time or in any other respect. The Index is calculated and published by Solactive AG. Solactive AG uses its best efforts to ensure that the Index is calculated correctly. Irrespective of its obligations towards the Issuer, Solactive AG has no obligation to point out errors in the Index to third parties including but not limited to investors and/or financial intermediaries of the financial instrument. Neither publication of the Index by Solactive AG nor the licensing of the Index or Index trade mark for the purpose of use in connection with the financial instrument constitutes a recommendation by Solactive AG to invest capital in said financial instrument nor does it in any way represent an assurance or opinion of Solactive AG with regard to any investment in this financial instrument. [1] Source Amundi: Comparison based on the ongoing charges (OGC) of equivalent "core" ETF ranges available in Europe. Data from Bloomberg as of 31/01/2019. Important: some individual Funds may not be cheaper than their European peers or may not have an equivalent to compare with and vice versa. Analysis excluding third party commissions/costs incurred directly by investors when trading. [2] Source IPE "Top 400 asset managers" published in June 2018 and based on AUM as of end December 2017 [3] Ongoing charges - annual, all taxes included. The ongoing charges represent the charges taken from the fund over a year. Until the fund has closed its accounts for the first time, the ongoing charges are estimated. Transaction cost and commissions may occur when trading ETFs. [4] For further information on the index provider, please consult www.solactive.com [5] All figures and data are provided by Amundi ETF, Indexing & Smart Beta at end December 2018 [6] Source IPE "Top 400 asset managers" published in June 2018 and based on AUM as of end December 2017 7 Amundi figures as of December 31, 2018 [8] Investment hubs: Boston, Dublin, London, Milan, Paris and Tokyo PR pdf This announcement is distributed by West Corporation on behalf of West Corporation clients. The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein. Source: Amundi via GlobeNewswire HUG#2238335 The Boeing 737 Max should be grounded until the cause of the weekend crash in Ethiopia is determined, the international president of the Transport Workers Union says. On Tuesday, the European Union joined other nations in temporarily suspending the planes' use in the wake of the tragedy. The FAA deemed the planes airworthy on Monday. The Boeing 737 Max airplanes should be grounded until the cause of the weekend crash in Ethiopia crash is determined, the international president of the Transport Workers Union told CNBC on Tuesday. "It is absolutely absurd that the FAA won't ground the flights until at least they get the voice and data recordings back form this latest incident," John Samuelsen said on " Closing Bell ." On Tuesday, the European Union joined other nations in temporarily suspending the planes' use in the wake of the crash the second one in less than five months. The United States, however, hasn't done so. The Federal Aviation Administration deemed the planes still airworthy in a notice Monday, saying it did not see a reason to ground the jets. Late Tuesday the FAA released another statement saying it "continues to review extensively all available data and aggregate safety performance from operators and pilots of the Boeing 737 MAX. Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action. In the course of our urgent review of data on the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash, if any issues affecting the continued airworthiness of the aircraft are identified, the FAA will take immediate and appropriate action." While the latest crash is still being investigated, there are concerns the aircraft's automated systems played a role in bringing down a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 in Indonesia in October. Boeing said Monday it is preparing updates to training manuals and software. Story continues On Tuesday, airline workers spoke out about their fears. Flight attendants and ground crews from American Airlines AAL and Southwest Airlines LUV urged the companies to take the Boeing 737 Max out of service . The Transport Workers Union represents more than 17,000 flight Southwest flight attendants, Samuelsen said. It also represents most of American Airlines' mechanics. The union sent a letter to both airlines asking them to ground the aircraft. American and Southwest on Tuesday told CNBC that they still have confidence in the aircraft and their crews. However, Samuelsen is saving the bulk of his ire for the FAA. "The FAA has to make a decision about whether they want to keep kowtowing to the airline industry," he said. "It's all about profits. The FAA needs to realize they work for the American people and they look after the safety of the American people." However, Barry Valentine, former FAA acting administrator, said it's too soon to reach a conclusion about the Boeing 737 Max, since the cause of the latest crash is still unknown. "A single event does not a trend make," he said on "Closing Bell." In fact, he said there is a system within the airline industry that constantly broadcasts data about an aircraft's in-flight performance, flight characteristics and systems in real time. "Thus far, for this particular airplane there has been no evidence that there have been any oddities or anomalies that would suggest that the airplane is not airworthy," Valentine said. CNBC's Leslie Josephs contributed to this report. More From CNBC BERLIN, March 12 (Reuters) - Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said on Tuesday that the European Union had moved towards British Prime Minister Theresa May by making additional Brexit assurances, adding that he hoped this would help to win a majority in British parliament. Prime Minister Theresa May won legally binding Brexit assurances from the European Union on Monday in a last ditch attempt to sway rebellious British lawmakers who have threatened to vote down her divorce deal again. "I hope very much that this admittedly small, but nonetheless made step can help Theresa May to get the needed support in parliament because then we can avoid a no-deal scenario," Kurz told German radio DLF. "Anything else will bring us dangerously close to the Brexit deadline without having an orderly prepared exit scenario in place." (Reporting by Michael Nienaber Editing by Tassilo Hummel) (Reuters) - The United States on Wednesday became the latest to join the long list of countries around the globe to ground Boeing's 737 MAX aircraft following Sunday's deadly plane crash in Ethiopia. Boeing has said that the investigation into the crash remains in its early stages and it has no basis to issue new guidance to operators. Here is what airlines and regulators worldwide have said: AEROMEXICO The Mexican airline said it suspended the operation of its six MAX 8 planes and those flights would be covered by the rest of its fleet. AMERICAN AIRLINES The company said it remained fully confident in the aircraft. Mechanics' union TWU has urged the company's chief executive to ground MAX 8s. AUSTRALIA'S CIVIL AVIATION SAFETY AUTHORITY The regulator said it had suspended the operation of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft to or from the country. BERMUDA CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY The British overseas territory's aviation authority said it prohibited MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft from its airspace. BRAZIL'S AIR TRAVEL REGULATOR, GOL LINHAS AEREAS INTELIGENTES SA The Brazilian regulator said it was not grounding the aircraft. Gol, which operates seven MAX 8s, said it was suspending use of the aircraft. CANADA'S TRANSPORT MINISTRY, AIR CANADA, WESTJET AIRLINES Canada Transport Minister Marc Garneau said Ottawa would stop 737 MAX 8 and 9 planes from flying into, out of or over Canadian airspace. Air Canada said customers could expect delays in re-booking and in reaching its call centres. Its 737 MAX operations on average fly 9,000-12,000 passengers every day. WestJet said it is contacting impacted passengers to arrange alternate travel plans. CAYMAN AIRWAYS The airline said it had grounded both its MAX 8 jets. CHINA'S AVIATION REGULATOR The regulator grounded 96 MAX 8s including those operated by Air China, China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines and Hainan Airlines. COMAIR The South African airline said it would remove 737 MAX8 jets from its schedule. It has ordered eight aircraft of this type but has only received one. Story continues EUROPEAN AVIATION SAFETY AGENCY The European Union's aviation safety agency has suspended all flights in the bloc by 737-8 and 737-9 airplanes. ETHIOPIAN AIRLINES The airline whose plane crashed on Sunday, killing all 157 on board, grounded the remaining four of its 737 MAX 8 fleet on Monday. The company's chief executive officer said Boeing should ground all of its 737 MAX 8 jets until it is established that they are safe to fly. CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY OF FIJI, FIJI AIRWAYS The airline and the authority temporarily grounded the carrier's two 737 MAX planes, saying they had confidence in the model's airworthiness but would suspend flights out of deference to public concern and regulatory action around the world. HONG KONG'S CIVIL AVIATION DEPARTMENT The agency said operation of all 737 max aircraft into, out of and over Hong Kong will be temporarily prohibited. INDIAN MINISTRY OF CIVIL AVIATION, SPICEJET, JET AIRWAYS India says it will not allow 737 MAX aircraft to enter or transit its airspace. SpiceJet, which has 12 MAX 8s and another 155 MAX planes on order, said it expects to complete the grounding of those planes on Wednesday. Jet Airways said it is not flying the aircraft. IRAQ'S CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY Iraq banned 737 MAX aircraft from entering or transiting its airspace. KAZAKHSTAN'S CIVIL AVIATION COMMITTEE Kazakhstan suspended 737 Max flights. Only one aircraft of that make is registered in the Central Asian nation, belonging to a privately-owned Scat airline. KUWAIT CIVIL AVIATION The aviation authority banned MAX 8 aircraft from its airspace, state news agency KUNA said. MACAU'S CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY The regulator says it is suspending approvals of requests by airlines to use the 737 MAX. There are no such aircraft currently registered in Macau. MIAT MONGOLIAN AIRLINES The state airline, which rented one 737 MAX from Feb. 1, grounded the aircraft. It had signed a contract to rent three Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft and was planning to rent the other two later this year. NIGERIA'S MINISTER OF AVIATION Nigeria has issued a warning to all airline operators not to operate 737, MAX 8s and 9s into and outside any airport in the country until the cause of the crashed Ethiopian Airline plane is made known, the minister said. NORWEGIAN AIR The company will temporarily ground its MAX 8 passenger jets at the advice of European regulators. It operates 18 MAX jets. Norwegian also said it will seek compensation from Boeing for costs and lost revenue. NEW ZEALAND'S CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY The regulator suspended MAX aircraft from flying to or from the country, saying Fiji Airways would be the only airline affected.] S7 AIRLINES Russian S7 Airlines said it would ground its two MAX 8 planes starting Wednesday and that the decision would not affect its flight schedules. SINGAPORE CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY, SINGAPORE AIRLINES Singapore's Civil Aviation Authority suspended operations of all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in and out of the country. Singapore Airlines said its unit Silk Air, which operates 6 MAX 8 planes, has temporarily withdrawn them from service. SOUTH KOREA TRANSPORT MINISTRY, EASTAR JET South Korea said it is conducting an emergency inspection on Eastar Jet's two MAX 8 jets. Budget carrier Eastar Jet said it would temporarily ground its two 737 MAX 8s from Wednesday. SOUTHWEST AIRLINES Southwest, the world's largest operator of the 737 MAX 8, said it remained fully confident in the aircraft and was closely monitoring the investigation, but would waive any fare-difference charges for customers who wish to switch to another aircraft. SWISS FEDERAL OFFICE OF CIVIL AVIATION The EU's suspensions of all flights by Boeing 737 MAX 8 is also valid for Switzerland, the Swiss federal office of civil aviation said. CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY OF THAILAND The regulator said it is suspending the use of the Thai Lion Air's Boeing 737 MAX 9 for seven days due to safety concerns. THE UNITED STATES U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States was going to order grounding of all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9. "We are going to be issuing an emergency order of prohibition to ground all flights of the 737 MAX 8 and the 737 MAX 9 and planes associated with that line," Trump told reporters at the White House. TUI AIRWAYS Germany's TUI Group, the largest leisure, travel and tourism company in the world, said it was discontinuing all Boeing 737MAX 8 flights. TURKEY TRANSPORT MINISTRY, TURKISH AIRLINES The ministry has suspended all flights by the 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 models, Anadolu news agency said. The announcement came after Turkish Airlines said it had suspended its 12 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. UAE GENERAL CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY, FLYDUBAI The civil aviation regulator banned the operation of all MAX models in UAE airspace, Emirates News Agency (WAM) said. Flydubai, which has 11 MAX 8 aircraft in its fleet, according to Flightradar24, is the only UAE airline operating the MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft. UK CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY Britain suspended flights of the 737 MAX aircraft over its territory. UKRAINE AVIATION AUTHORITY Ukraine has suspended all flights of 737-8 and 737-9 MAX aircrafts inside its territory. UZBEKISTAN'S CIVIL AVIATION AGENCY Uzbekistan's civil aviation agency on Wednesday barred 737 Max jets from taking off or landing at local airports for one month. VIETNAM'S CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY The agency said it banned 737 MAX aircraft from Vietnamese airspace. VIRGIN AUSTRALIA The Australian airline said it would continue to work with Boeing; the airline, which does not have any 737 MAX 8 aircraft,said its first delivery was not due until November. (Compiled by Alexander Cornwell in Dubai, Chandini Monnappa and Uday Sampath in Bengaluru and Sayantani Ghosh in Singapore; Editing by Alexander Smith and Robert Birsel) BP won't leave the U.K. because it is a "great place for us," says CEO Bob Dudley. The U.K.'s Brexit deal with the European Union was rejected by British lawmakers on Tuesday. Dudley thinks negotiations will continue. "This isn't over yet." British oil and gas giant BP BP.-GB has no plans to leave the United Kingdom, regardless of the final Brexit outcome, CEO Bob Dudley told CNBC on Tuesday. The company, formerly known as British Petroleum, is headquartered in London and the London Stock Exchange is the primary exchange for its stock. "It doesn't have anything to do with Brexit," Dudley said on " Closing Bell ." 'It will absolutely will remain in the U.K." The U.K.'s Brexit deal with the European Union was rejected by British lawmakers on Tuesday. It was another big loss for British Prime Minister Theresa May , who saw her deal to exit the EU first defeated in January. Lawmakers are expected to vote Wednesday on whether the U.K. should leave the EU without a deal by the scheduled departure date, March 29. Dudley said while Tuesday was another big day with another big vote, it always goes down to the last hour of the deadline. "This isn't over yet. I think we are not fully sure what the EU will do. It's quite a negotiation. It will go on, I think, for a number of days at least," he said. As for how the company is preparing for Brexit, Dudley responded, "We deal with uncertainty all the time all around the globe." BP has 74,000 employees around the globe and operates in 70 countries. It employs about 16,000 people in the U.K. "It's a great place for us," Dudley said. CNBC's Holly Ellyatt contributed to this report. More From CNBC Transport Minister Marc Garneau has cleared his schedule for the day in order to meet with experts on how to deal with the issue of Boeings 737 Max 8 aircraft (The Canadian Press) Canadas Transport Minister said the government is considering all potential actions but has yet to follow its European counterparts and ground the plane involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash that left 157 dead. Transport Minister Marc Garneau said on Tuesday that he had cancelled scheduled meetings and public events to meet with a Civil Aviation Expert Panel to discuss the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft, which has been involved in two deadly crashes in the span of five months. I've canceled all my meetings and public events today in order to meet with my Civil Aviation Expert Panel. All evidence is being evaluated in real time and we're considering all potential actions. Marc Garneau (@MarcGarneau) March 12, 2019 As of Tuesday afternoon, the government had not decided to ground the aircraft, which is flown by Canadas two largest airlines, or ban it from Canadian airspace. Eighteen Canadians were among the 157 passengers and crew who were killed in Sundays Ethiopian Airlines crash involving the Boeing plane. The list of countries and airlines opting to ground the aircraft grew on Tuesday, intensifying the pressure for other authorities around the world to follow suit. Both Canada and the United States have so far stood by the aircraft. The United Kingdom was the first European nation to ban the plane on Tuesday, releasing a statement saying it would be issuing instructions to stop aircraft from entering its airspace as a precautionary measure. The move was soon followed by similar grounding orders or bans in France, Germany, Ireland, Poland and the Netherlands. Shortly after, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) suspended all flight operations of the MAX 8 and MAX 9 models of the aircraft in Europe. Garneau told reporters in Montreal on Tuesday that he has no plans to ground Canadas fleet of 737 Max 8 aircraft, but that all options are on the table. This could include grounding the planes, but at the same time I will evaluate the possibilities and not jump to conclusions before we can clearly evaluate the situation, Garneau said, stressing that he would not be influenced by emotions. Story continues A day earlier, Garneau had said that Transport Canada was awaiting information about the cause of the crash from United States authorities, including the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which are investigating the crash as the MAX 8 is a U.S.-certified aircraft. Rescuers work at the scene of an Ethiopian Airlines flight crash near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Monday, March 11, 2019. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene) U.K. ban is extremely significant Boeing, which has seen its stock fall 6.2 per cent as of Tuesday afternoon, stressed that the company has full confidence in the safety of its 737 MAX. The United States Federal Aviation Administration is not mandating any further action at this time, and based on the information currently available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators, the aerospace manufacturer said in a statement Tuesday. But Scott Hamilton, an aviation analyst with Leeham News in the U.S., said the fact that the U.K.s aviation authority and EASA banned the plane from flying in-and-out of their airspace was extremely significant. Its one thing when you have Grand Cayman Airways a small carrier where a crash could destroy the airline take two planes out of service, Hamilton said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. It just doesnt carry the same weight as the U.K. or EASA when EASA says ground the plane, the FAA ought to be following suit. Frankly, one could make an argument that perhaps they should be leading the way. Air Canada and WestJet Airlines Ltd. fly 24 and 13 Boeing 737 MAX jets, respectively. Earlier this week, both airlines touted the safety of the aircraft. No decisions have been made by either to ground the jet. So far, at least one of Air Canadas flights have been affected by the European Union ban. Lauren Stewart, a spokesperson for WestJet, said the airline is involved in ongoing discussions with Transport Canada, Boeing, and other Canadian operators about the plane. She added that although the airline uses the aircraft on flights between Halifax and London and Paris, the routes are seasonal and would not be impacted by the European Union ban. With files from the Canadian Press. Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android. OTTAWA, March 13 (Reuters) - Canada on Wednesday became the latest country to ground Boeing 737 MAX aircraft after an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing MAX crashed on Sunday killing 157 people. Transport Minister Marc Garneau told a news conference that Ottawa would stop 737 MAX 8 and 9 jets from leaving, arriving or flying over Canada. Air Canada and rival WestJet Airlines operate a total of 37 Boeing 737 MAX jets. (Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe) By David Ljunggren OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada on Wednesday became the latest nation to ground Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, citing potential safety concerns after an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing MAX crashed on Sunday, killing 157 people. The move means the United States is now the only major country where the planes are now operating. Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau told a news conference that Ottawa would stop 737 MAX 8 and 9 jets from leaving, arriving in or flying over Canada. "This safety notice is effective immediately and will remain in place until further notice," he said, adding he had decided to act after receiving fresh information earlier in the day. The ban is notable, since Canada usually works very closely with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Garneau said there had been "absolutely no political pressure" from Washington after Canada informed it of the grounding. Satellite data suggested similarities between the flight profiles of the Ethiopian jet and that of a Lion Air plane of the same type that crashed in Indonesia last year, he said. Both planes crashed shortly after takeoff. "This is not conclusive, but it is something that points possibly in that direction and at this point we feel that threshold has been crossed and that is why we are taking these measures," he said. A U.S. official told Reuters the FAA was aware of the satellite data Garneau had cited, but called it inconclusive. Air Canada, which operates 24 Boeing 737 MAX jets, said it was working to re-book passengers as quickly as possible. Rival WestJet Airlines Ltd, which operates 13 of the jets, said it would comply with the order. The Air Canada Pilots Association, which represents more than 4,000 commercial pilots, said the decision was "important to ensure continued public confidence in aviation". (Additional reporting by Julie Gordon in Ottawa, Allison Lampert in Montreal and David Shepardson in Washington; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli and James Dalgleish) Recently, at an industry conference, Citigroups C CFO Mark Mason said that he was bullish about achieving the cost control targets in 2019. Also, he stressed the importance of technology in the business. However, Mason remained pessimistic about the markets impact on Equities and Fixed Income business in the first quarter of 2019. He noted that expenses are expected to be lower in first quarter compared with the year-ago quarter. However, the costs incurred in the first half of 2019 are expected to be higher due to rise in compensation-related expenses. Notably, the company is likely to deliver additional productivity benefits and savings of $500-$600 million in 2019 and 2020. Also, significant improvement in operating efficiency is expected in 2019. Mason said that even though the market is stable at the moment, it has not fully recovered. Thus, when comparing the current quarters fixed income and equity trading performance with the last years quarter, revenues are expected to be down in high single digits. Moreover, a pickup in Investment Banking revenues is expected in the first quarter on a year-over-year basis as M&As and debt issuance activities are gaining strength. With regard to technology, Mason stated, We are aggressively investing in going after technology one, to improve our capabilities; two, to kind of deepen our relationship with our clients; three, to enhance some of our processes and improve our productivity and strengthen our controls. The company considers technology to be an important part of its future growth, and thus it is expected to continue spending 20% of its total expense base on it. Citigroups restructuring, streamlining efforts and strategic investments in core business will likely support profitability. Further, we believe that the company is well poised to address its internal inefficiencies and setbacks. However, muted fee income growth and persistent legal hassles remain concerns. Story continues Over the past three months, the stock has gained 14.1% compared with 9.6% growth recorded by the industry. Currently, Citigroup carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Stocks to Consider Fifth Third Bancorp FITB has witnessed slight upward estimate revisions for current-year earnings over the past 30 days. Over the past three months, the companys share price has been up more than 17%. It currently carries a Zacks Rank of 2 (Buy). Webster Financial Corporations WBS current-year earnings estimates have been revised slightly upward for the past 30 days. In addition, the stock has jumped more than 10% over the past three months. It currently carries a Zacks Rank of 2. Bank of Hawaii Corporation BOH has witnessed nearly 1% upward estimate revision for current-year earnings over the past 60 days. Also, the companys shares have risen nearly 15% over the past three months. It currently carries a Zacks Rank #2. Zacks' Top 10 Stocks for 2019 In addition to the stocks discussed above, wouldn't you like to know about our 10 finest buy-and-holds for the year? From more than 4,000 companies covered by the Zacks Rank, these 10 were picked by a process that consistently beats the market. Even during 2018 while the market dropped -5.2%, our Top 10s were up well into double-digits. And during bullish 2012 2017, they soared far above the market's +126.3%, reaching +181.9%. This year, the portfolio features a player that thrives on volatility, an AI comer, and a dynamic tech company that helps doctors deliver better patient outcomes at lower costs. See Stocks Today >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Citigroup Inc. (C) : Free Stock Analysis Report Fifth Third Bancorp (FITB) : Free Stock Analysis Report Webster Financial Corporation (WBS) : Free Stock Analysis Report Bank of Hawaii Corporation (BOH) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research You may find it easier to divorce your spouse than to divorce your creditors. That's because no matter what you and your former spouse have agreed to, and even if you have a divorce decree in hand, you have a contract with your credit card issuers. You are the person who is legally responsible for paying off any outstanding balances on your credit cards. Understand what your options are for separating yourself financially from your former spouse so that you can start rebuilding your life post-marriage. Who Is Responsible for the Credit Card Debt in a Divorce? You are contractually responsible for any debt that is in your name, even if someone else acquired it or contributed to it, such as by being an authorized user on your credit card. If you don't pay the debt, the creditor can sue you and even try to collect on your share of jointly owned assets. But the way the courts handle debt during a divorce depends on where you file. In common law states, which account for most of the country, courts will likely hold you responsible for credit card debt in your name and jointly liable for credit card debt in both names. [Read: Best Low-Interest Credit Cards.] Nine states are community property states: Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin. In a community property state, any debt your or your former spouse "acquired after the date of marriage and before the date of separation is community property," says Kelly Chang Rickert, a Los Angeles-area divorce lawyer. So, both spouses are equally liable. However, debts in your name incurred prior to marriage or after separation or divorce are not considered community debts. No matter where you live, division of debts may be less than straightforward. In both community property and common law states, even when you are not contractually liable for your former spouse's credit card debt, a judge may order you to pay a portion of it, particularly if the debt was incurred for items necessary for the household. Story continues The circumstances of every divorce are different, of course. Other factors that the judge is likely to consider include the length of separation and any agreement the divorcing spouses have come to about specific debts. A judge may distribute responsibility for the debts in a way that is different from your contractual obligations to pay, but the judge's order does not change your contracts with your creditors. When Are You Responsible for Your Ex's Debt? You are responsible for your ex's debt if a judge orders you to pay it. A divorce decree -- the judge's ruling that makes the termination of your marriage official and spells out both parties' rights and responsibilities -- is legally binding. So if yours says that your spouse is responsible for a debt that is in your name, he or she is legally obligated to pay it. However, the court order does not cancel your contract with a credit card issuer. "You can't show your creditor the divorce decree and say you're no longer liable for the debt," says John Ulzheimer, president of The Ulzheimer Group and a national expert on credit who formerly worked with Equifax and FICO. If a credit card is in your name, the creditor can come after you if your spouse does not pay a debt as ordered. The same is true for your spouse's debts that you are ordered to pay. Your recourse is to pursue your ex in court. Many attorneys agree that this can be a difficult and expensive journey full of headaches. Can You Get Yourself Removed From an Account? If you've got a divorce decree ordering your former spouse to pay debts that are in your name, you may be eager to get your name off those accounts. Unfortunately, separating yourself from financial accounts is not always a simple matter. For accounts with an outstanding balance, a creditor is unlikely to remove your name on request, even if you've got a legal document in hand ordering someone else to pay it. "Even if the husband agrees to take the Visa and the wife agrees to take the Mastercard, that agreement doesn't bind the credit card companies," says Joni Berner, a divorce lawyer in Philadelphia. The responsible spouse may be able to transfer the debt to an individual credit card account with a balance transfer. [Read: Best Balance Transfer Credit Cards.] "As much as possible," says Berner, "get rid of accounts that could adversely affect the nonresponsible party." As a last resort and in case the responsible spouse doesn't or can't refinance or transfer the debt to an individual account, Berner says that the divorce agreement should indicate who is responsible for paying what, and include indemnification clauses, which can stipulate liability and consequences for failure to pay. For example, it could state you have the right to sue your ex for failing to pay a debt that he or she was ordered to pay. How Divorce Impacts Credit Your credit history and credit score are yours and yours alone. They do not change when you get married, and they do not change when you get divorced. But your credit standing can change in the wake of a divorce if you and your former spouse handle your credit accounts differently during or after the split. For example, late payments, delinquency or default can affect your credit score. Closing credit card accounts or removing yourself as an authorized user can have an effect as well. Strategies for Preserving Your Credit During Divorce Work together, if you can. Amicable divorces are the least expensive, and contentious divorces can rack up attorney fees. "The biggest mistake is not trusting each other," Chang Rickert says. "If you can't agree how to divide the assets and debts, the court will decide for you." She says one of the first things you should do is exchange a list of all property and debts, both community and separate. This gives both of you a full picture of assets and liabilities so that you can begin to negotiate how to divide it all up, ideally so the court doesn't need to get involved. Establish credit individually. If you're about to file for divorce, Ulzheimer suggests getting a credit card account in your name only, before doing anything else. Open the individual account before you close any existing accounts. Closing accounts might hurt your credit score enough to make it harder for you to qualify for a new account, and you don't want to be left with no access to credit. Close any joint credit card accounts you have. "You don't want to open the door for a vindictive spouse to go out and run up debt on which you'll both be liable," says Ulzheimer. Protect existing individual accounts. Consider closing individual accounts to which your spouse has access, too, especially if you think there is a chance he or she might intentionally run up additional debt. "Ending the marriage with joint accounts open, or with one party responsible for the other's cards, creates a very vulnerable situation," says Berner. [Read: Best Grocery Credit Cards.] Head Off Future Damage Get a prenup. If you're not married yet, consider a prenuptial agreement. This is a contract that people enter into before they are married, spelling out what will happen to both parties' income and assets if they get divorced. A prenup can be valuable even for couples who are not ultrahigh worth. "It can protect you against shared debt and keep everything separate," says Chang Rickert. Even if credit card companies aren't required to follow the prenuptial agreement, the agreement will give you power in court if your ex-spouse doesn't comply with the terms you've agreed to. Get money issues out in the open. Have money talks before you plan your wedding. If you marry someone who is bad with credit cards, family finances are bound to be affected. Unless you plan to keep your finances totally separate, you could find it more difficult to reach your own financial goals living with a chronic debtor. Also, although you may not be held responsible for the debt that your partner entered the marriage with, you might one day be ordered to pay back half of that person's debt incurred during marriage. Don't open joint credit card accounts. They are rarely offered but still possible to find. Ulzheimer and Chang Rickert both strongly discourage them: While a joint account can be convenient, with that convenience comes the potential for one partner to do serious harm to the finances and credit of the other partner. Both partners are exposed to the potential of delinquency or default caused by the other person. Divorce is a major step. Most people want to emerge financially separated from their former spouses. Some people walk away from debt that's theirs but in the other spouse's name. "If you're left holding the bag, it's sometimes easier to accept your legal liability and pay it back rather than pursue your ex," says Ulzheimer. More From US News & World Report Turkey to Restore Assyrian, Armenian Churches Damaged By Kurdish Group DIYARBAKIR, Turkey -- Turkey will restore two historical churches that were damaged in PKK attacks four years ago. Annan Ertem, director-general of the Foundations department, told Anadolu Agency 15 million Turkish liras ($2.75 million) will be spent on the restoration of Surp Giragos and Mar Petyun churches in the southeastern Diyarbakir province. The Ministry of Environment and Urbanization will provide the funds, he added. "All historical buildings in the area will be restored," Ertem said. Also speaking to Anadolu Agency, Turkey's Chaldean Church Deputy Patriarch Mgr. Francois Yakan said Mar Petyun is the only Chaldean church in the province. Chaldean Catholics originate from ancient Assyrian communities indigenous to modern-day Iraq. Both churches were built during the rule of Ottoman Empire. Surp Giragos is an Armenian church built in the 16th century and it is the largest Armenian church in the Middle East spread over 3,000 square meters. Mar Petyun Chaldean Church was built in the 17th century. In its more than 30-year terror campaign against Turkey, the PKK -- listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S. and the EU -- has been responsible for the deaths of some 40,000 people, including women and children. Writing by Fatih HafAz Mehmet. Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. Elon Musk. Photo: Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons In the latest episode of Elon Musk's battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Tesla chief executive officer's lawyers said the agency has no basis for contempt sanctions against him. The SEC called for Musk to be held in contempt of court last month for tweeting inaccurate Tesla production estimates without seeking pre-approval from the Palo Alto, California-based company's general counsel, an alleged violation of his settlement with the agency. Musk settled with the SEC in September over tweets incorrectly claiming he'd secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share. Musk's defense counsel John Hueston of Hueston Hennigan said in a filing Monday that the CEO has attempted to comply with the SEC agreement and that his tweets contained publicly available information and didn't heavily impact stock prices. Hueston further claimed "the Order as the SEC interprets it would raise serious First Amendment issues and implicate other constitutional rights," as Musk has openly criticized the agency. Neither Tesla nor Hueston immediately responded to request for comment. "Because he agreed to the terms of the deal with the SEC, Musks argument that now seeking contempt against him for allegedly violating the agreement may set a dangerous precedent chilling future criticism of the SEC is weak, in my opinion, and is a red herring," said Michael Piazza, a securities partner at McDermott Will & Emery, in an email to Corporate Counsel. "There are other prominent individuals that have done battle with and criticized the Commission ... and I doubt a contempt order against Musk will chill others from voicing their opinions of the SEC." Drinker Biddle & Reath securities partner Marc Leaf said Musk does not have a legitimate free speech argument because "it's not his speech that is the issue, it's his conduct as an officer of a public company." Leaf added SEC's latest action highlights the importance of closely adhering to any orders issued by the agency to avoid new investigations or allegations of contempt including, in this case, only disseminating verified, approved information. Musk's most recent controversial tweet, which stated Tesla would produce 500,000 cars in 2019, was not only unapproved by his general counselit was incorrect. Shortly after tweeting the 500,000 production prediction, Musk clarified Tesla would make around 400,000 cars this year. Tesla's then-GC Dane Butswinkas left the company the next day. He's since been replaced by longtime Tesla in-house counsel Jonathan Chang. "The SEC has been very clear over the years that if you want to use social media to communicate with investors you can do so, but you then have to be prepared to monitor what you say and make sure that it's accurate," Leaf told Corporate Counsel. "And Musk didn't meet that very low bar." For Thomas Gorman, a partner at Dorsey & Whitney and author of the blog SEC Actions, Hueston's response added to an increasingly complicated fight over the consent decree's specifics. He said the SEC's decree intended to ensure Tesla-related information in Musk's tweets were vetted and not "the kind of off-the-cuff statements" Musk made about taking the company private. "Here there is no dispute that: a) the information Mr. Musk published was recycled from an earlier Tesla release; and b) that Mr. Musk did not have the information vetted again," Gorman said in an email. "Under these circumstances the purpose of the consent decree has been more than fulfilled. Both sides should, accordingly, drop this unfortunate dispute and focus on properly serving the company and shareholders in the future." By David Shepardson WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Wednesday joined Europe, China and other countries in grounding Boeing Co's 737 MAX jets, because of safety concerns after an Ethiopian Airlines plane crash that killed 157 people, the second disaster involving the 737 in less than five months. The world's biggest planemaker is facing its most serious crisis in years, as the decades-old 737 program, one of its most reliable sources of cash and profits, takes a severe blow to its prestige. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) cited new satellite data and evidence from the scene of Sunday's crash near Addis Ababa for its decision to ground the planes. It was the second time the FAA has halted flights of a Boeing plane in six years. It had grounded the 787 Dreamliner in 2013 because of problems with smoking batteries. Shares of the Seattle-based company ended up 0.5 percent at $377.14, recovering from a more than 3 percent fall in the afternoon when the FAA announcement was made. Tim Ghriskey, chief investment strategist at Inverness Counsel in New York, said the grounding gives Boeing time to address any problems and not face another potential disaster. U.S. airlines that operate the 737 MAX, Southwest Airlines Co, American Airlines Group Inc and United Airlines, said they were working to re-book passengers. Southwest is the world's largest operator of the 737 MAX 8 with 34 jets, while American flies 24 MAX 8s and United 14 MAX 9s. Shares of Southwest fell 0.4 percent. "The agency made this decision as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analyzed today," the FAA said in a statement, shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump announced the planes would be grounded. "This evidence, together with newly refined satellite data available to FAA this morning, led to this decision." The grounding will remain in effect as the FAA investigates. Boeing, which maintained that its planes were safe to fly, said in a statement that it supported the move to temporarily ground 737 MAX flights. "Boeing has determined - out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircrafts safety - to recommend to the FAA the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of 371 737 MAX aircraft." The still-unexplained crash followed another involving a Boeing 737 MAX in Indonesia five months ago that killed 189 people. Although there is no proof of any link, the twin disasters have spooked passengers. France's air accident investigation agency BEA will analyze black-box cockpit voice and data recorders from the crashed plane, a spokesman said. The French announcement resolved uncertainty over the fate of the two recorders after Germany's BFU said it had declined a request to handle them because it could not process the new type of recorder used on the 737 MAX jets, in service since 2017. Travel website Kayak was making changes to let customers exclude specific aircraft types from searches, and booking sites were looking to reroute passengers. The grounding was welcomed by air workers in the United States. John Samuelsen, international president of the Transport Workers Union of America, which represents aviation workers and flight attendants, said the grounding of the fleet was right "both for air travelers and aviation workers." NEW SATELLITE DATA Canada also grounded 737 MAX jets on Wednesday, saying satellite data suggested similarities to the previous crash involving the same plane model in October. U.S.-based aircraft-tracking firm Aireon provided the satellite data to the FAA, Transport Canada and several other authorities, company spokeswoman Jessie Hillenbrand said. Aireon's space-based system can monitor data from aircraft equipped with Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) transponders. The data is considered less detailed than that in black boxes, which look at systems running inside the plane. Ethiopian Airlines spokesman Asrat Begashaw said it was still unclear what happened on Sunday, but its pilot had reported control issues as opposed to external factors such as birds. "The pilot reported flight control problems and requested to turn back. In fact he was allowed to turn back," he said. The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Democrat Peter DeFazio, called for a probe into why the 737 MAX received certification to fly. "There must be a rigorous investigation into why the aircraft, which has critical safety systems that did not exist on prior models, was certified without requiring additional pilot training," he said. Panama's Copa Holdings said it would also suspend operations of its six Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft, but Latin America has largely left it up to carriers to make their own decisions. As of Wednesday night, regulators in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, the largest air travel markets in the region, had not forced the grounding of planes. (Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington, Kumerra Gemechu in Gora-Bokka, Ethiopia, David Ljunggren in Ottawa; Additional reporting by Duncan Miriri and Aaron Maasho in Addis Ababa; Doina Chiacu in Washington, Omar Mohammed and Maggie Fick in Nairobi; Tim Hepher in Paris; Jamie Freed in Singapore; Terje Solsvik in Oslo; Aditi Shah in Mumbai; Sanjana Shivdas in Bengaluru; Aleksandar Vasovic in Belgrade; Julie Gordon in Ottawa; Angela Moon in New York, Eric Johnson in Seattle and Tracy Rucinski in Chicago; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne, Frances Kerry, Bill Rigby and Alistair Bell; Editing by Gareth Jones, Nick Zieminski and Grant McCool) FILE PHOTO: Crude oil tankers are docked at Isla Oil Refinery PDVSA terminal in Willemstad on the island of Curacao, February 22, 2019. REUTERS/Henry Romero By Marianna Parraga (Reuters) - The top U.S. buyers of Venezuelan oil are in the unusual position of trying to return millions of barrels of crude they need but cannot accept because of U.S. sanctions on the South American nation and its state-run energy firm PDVSA. PDVSA's U.S. refining subsidiary Citgo Petroleum Corp and Valero Energy are proposing to return 2 million barrels of crude loaded before sanctions, while a third U.S. oil company, Chevron Corp, has sought so far unsuccessfully to legally pay for 4.3 million barrels, according to an internal PDVSA document seen by Reuters. In effect, more than 6 million barrels of Venezuelan crude remain in limbo as a result of U.S. sanctions imposed on Jan. 28 by Washington in an effort to oust President Nicolas Maduro. The United States and dozens of other nations recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as the nation's legitimate leader. To comply with U.S. sanctions, Valero, Citgo and others are not allowed to pay PDVSA. Guaido's administration has yet to establish its own bank accounts to receive proceeds from oil sales to U.S. customers, leaving those shipments stranded. Overall oil exports from the OPEC member state dropped by about 40 percent in the first full month of sanctions, as the U.S. sought to cut oil revenue to Maduro, who presides over a nation beset by a years-long economic crisis, with millions fleeing for a lack of food and medicine. PDVSA, Citgo and Valero did not reply to requests for comment. Chevron does not comment on supply and trade matters, a spokesman said. STRANDED TANKERS The standoff has stranded some 6.4 million barrels of Venezuelan heavy crude onboard 11 tankers originally destined for the United States, as they have not been authorized to set sail. The vessels fell into limbo because PDVSA demanded prepayment for the cargos after sanctions were imposed, which U.S. firms cannot do. Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil firm by market value, wanted to take the oil shipments in lieu of loans and dividends stemming from joint ventures with PDVSA, a person close to the matter said. The cargoes were loaded at Venezuelan ports ahead of sanctions, but they remain undelivered, according to the document, and it is unclear if PDVSA would accept that offer. Valero proposed to pay PDVSA for 1.05 million barrels of Venezuelan oil, but that request was rejected by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which oversees sanctions, the documents said. Story continues The Houston-based Citgo cut ties with its parent company in compliance with U.S. measures that halted its purchases of PDVSA's oil, the documents said. A U.S. Treasury spokesperson declined to comment on the requests to pay PDVSA for the cargoes. As of March 8, the 11 loaded vessels remained anchored off ports in Venezuela. Two other Chevron-chartered cargoes were stuck off the U.S. Gulf Coast and a third was returned to Venezuela's Amuay terminal, according to Refinitiv Eikon vessel-tracking data. PDVSA does not expect Citgo or Valero to accept the cargos and intends to "commercially reallocate the volumes onboard so tankers can be freed," a Feb. 21 trade and supply document showed. The same document expressed worry over demurrage fees - the daily cost for storing the oil on tankers - which have been accumulating for over a month. PDVSA SCRAMBLES TO AVOID EXPORT SHORTFALL Separately, a days-long blackout across the country has halted exports from Jose port, the nation's primary crude export terminal. PDVSA on Monday was trying to restart operations. The Venezuelan company has been forced to redesign its production and export logistics in recent weeks to avoid halting operations, including formulating new crude blends, swapping a large portion of its oil for imported fuel, selling through intermediaries and finding new customers. But the efforts have not been enough to avoid an export decline. The OPEC-member country's oil shipments fell to some 920,000 barrels per day (bpd) in February according to Refinitiv Eikon data. PDVSA exports could fall further due to a lack of imported naphtha, a light distillate, needed to dilute its extra heavy oil as the company has been able to secure only two 500,000-barrel cargoes versus 2-3 million barrels per month needed, according to the document. If it cannot import enough naphtha to formulate its oil for export, PDVSA plans to start mixing other domestic fuels to ready oil for export. Lack of maritime crews to take PDVSA tankers idled due to unpaid shipping fees is also hampering oil deliveries between domestic ports and to the Caribbean, where PDVSA stores and ships much of its export barrels. Some shipping firms' reluctance to work in Venezuela after sanctions have stopped PDVSA from using leased tankers to ease storage bottlenecks at its Orinoco Belt's joint ventures. The ones willing to work with PDVSA are charging high prices and extra fees, the document added. On March 4, PDVSA completely shut output at its Corocoro oilfield, which was producing some 12,000 bpd, due to lack of storage capacity. Its Pedernales oilfield could follow due to similar issues, according to the report. The four Orinoco upgraders were working at minimum on Monday. (GRAPHIC: Venezuelan crude exports to U.S. refiners link: https://tmsnrt.rs/2t4ullS). (Graphic: Top importers of Venezuelan crude link: https://tmsnrt.rs/2RYGk2E). (Reporting by Marianna Parraga; additional reporting by Leslie Wroughton in Washington and Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Marguerita Choy) FILE PHOTO: The logo of Portuguese utility company EDP - Energias de Portugal is seen at the company's offices in Oviedo, Spain, May 14, 2018. REUTERS/Eloy Alonso/File Photo By Clara Denina , Sergio Goncalves and Tatiana Bautzer LONDON/SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Portugal's Energia de Portugal EDP could propose a joint venture with China Three Gorges (CTG) allowing CTG to expand its foothold in Brazil and Latin America if the Chinese power giant's bid to take over EDP fails, people familiar with the matter said. CTG, EDP's main shareholder with a 23 percent stake, is among Chinese state-backed companies that have been increasing their investments in European countries such as Portugal, Greece and Cyprus over the past few years. But tighter regulatory scrutiny across the EU has cast doubt on whether this can continue. The Chinese utility launched a 9 billion euro ($10.15 billion) takeover proposal for EDP last May. The transaction has moved at a slow pace however and sources say CTG has yet to complete regulatory approval filings in Europe and the United States. EDP has always described CTG's bid as too low, but the Portuguese government backs it. The bid has also been complicated by an alternative plan launched by activist investor Elliott for EDP to divest assets across Brazil, Portugal and Spain. Elliott holds a 2.9 percent stake in EDP. As CTG is keen to expand in Latin America, a joint venture in the continent would provide a satisfactory outcome should the takeover offer for EDP fail, two sources said. EDP's Brazilian subsidiary EDP Energias do Brasil has a market capitalisation of $2.8 billion, while CTG has unlisted assets in the country. The two companies already have a JV in a project in Peru. CTG did not immediately respond to a request for comment. EDP Energias do Brasil declined to comment. "If CTG fails to increase its stake, a return to the status quo is impossible... CTG can end up taking ownership of the Brazilian business and have a smaller stake in EDP," one of the sources said. At a strategic update to investors held on March 12, EDP said it plans to sell 2 billion euros worth of assets in Portugal and Spain, and raise 4 billion euros via an asset rotation programme until 2022 to fund its expansion in renewable energy and repair its balance sheet. Story continues The sale of the Iberian assets also reflects part of Elliott's demands, although the activist investor proposes divestments of 7.6 billion euros. EDP owns 51 percent of EDP Energias do Brasil, a Brazilian holding company that generates, distributes and trades electric power. With operations in seven states of Brazil, the firm owns one thermoelectric plant, 16 hydropower plants, two power distributors, a trading company and a power grid. Sources had previously told Reuters that EDP has started a sale process for its thermoeletric plant Pecem in the state of Ceara. "The idea is to combine the companies owned by CTG in Brazil with EDP's listed subsidiary there," a third source said. CTG owns 17 hydropower plants and 11 wind farms in Brazil with 8.2 GW installed capacity. The assets are estimated to be worth around $5.6 billion, which means CTG would control roughly two thirds of a potential combined listed entity, the third source added, cautioning that there are no talks between the parties at this stage. (Editing by Alexandra Hudson) By Tatiana Voronova MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian bank VTB has begun a procedure to hand over to the Russian state property agency its stake in Evrofinance Mosnarbank, a bank hit with U.S. sanctions this week over its dealings with Venezuela, two sources familiar with the deal told Reuters. Agreement has been reached for the transfer of VTB's 25 percent stake in Evrofinance Mosnarbank to the Russian state's Federal Property Management Agency, said the sources. State-controlled VTB, Russia's second-biggest bank, declined to comment, and the state property agency did not immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment. Evrofinance Mosnarbank declined to comment. Russia is a major investor in Venezuela but this poses risks to Russian companies now that the United States has imposed sanctions on PDVSA, Venezuela's state oil company, and other entities linked to it. Russia's third biggest lender, Gazprombank, decided to freeze the accounts of PDVSA and halted transactions with the firm, a Gazprombank source told Reuters last month. One of the sources who told Reuters about VTB divesting its stake in Evrofinance Mosnarbank said moves to divest began before the sanctions were introduced. The moves were initiated because VTB saw little commercial benefit in holding the stake, the source said. The U.S. Treasury Department said on Monday it was putting Evrofinance Mosnarbank on a sanctions list, saying the bank was financing PDVSA and so providing a lifeline for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who is opposed by Washington. The main shareholder of Evrofinance Mosnarbank, with a share of 49.99 percent, is the Venezuelan state development fund Fondo De Desarrollo Nacional. VTB and Gazprombank each have 25 percent stakes. VTB's CEO, Andrey Kostin, said in February his bank wanted to sell its stake in Evrofinance Mosnarbank but that the situation was complicated by an intergovernmental agreement which was signed with Venezuela regarding the bank. Famil Sadygov, a deputy chief executive with Gazprombank, told Reuters on Tuesday that his bank was planning to sell its own stake in Evrofinance Mosnarbank, but that a deal had not been reached. "Now the situation is different, we will see what can be done," Sadygov said. (Additional reporting by Naila Bagirova in BAKU. Editing by Jane Merriman) A Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft is parked at a Boeing production facility in Renton, Washington, U.S., March 11, 2019. REUTERS/David Ryder (Reuters) - The United States on Wednesday became the latest to join the long list of countries around the globe to ground Boeing's 737 MAX aircraft following Sunday's deadly plane crash in Ethiopia. Boeing has said that the investigation into the crash remains in its early stages and it has no basis to issue new guidance to operators. For a graphic on Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft by country, see - https://tmsnrt.rs/2NWeU90 Here is what airlines and regulators worldwide have said: AEROMEXICO The Mexican airline said it suspended the operation of its six MAX 8 planes and those flights would be covered by the rest of its fleet. AMERICAN AIRLINES The company said it remained fully confident in the aircraft. Mechanics' union TWU has urged the company's chief executive to ground MAX 8s. AUSTRALIA'S CIVIL AVIATION SAFETY AUTHORITY The regulator said it had suspended the operation of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft to or from the country. BERMUDA CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY The British overseas territory's aviation authority said it prohibited MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft from its airspace. BRAZIL'S AIR TRAVEL REGULATOR, GOL LINHAS AEREAS INTELIGENTES SA The Brazilian regulator said it was not grounding the aircraft. Gol, which operates seven MAX 8s, said it was suspending use of the aircraft. CANADA'S TRANSPORT MINISTRY, AIR CANADA, WESTJET AIRLINES Canada Transport Minister Marc Garneau said Ottawa would stop 737 MAX 8 and 9 planes from flying into, out of or over Canadian airspace. Air Canada said customers could expect delays in re-booking and in reaching its call centres. Its 737 MAX operations on average fly 9,000-12,000 passengers every day. WestJet said it is contacting impacted passengers to arrange alternate travel plans. CAYMAN AIRWAYS The airline said it had grounded both its MAX 8 jets. CHINA'S AVIATION REGULATOR The regulator grounded 96 MAX 8s including those operated by Air China, China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines and Hainan Airlines. COMAIR Story continues The South African airline said it would remove 737 MAX8 jets from its schedule. It has ordered eight aircraft of this type but has only received one. EUROPEAN AVIATION SAFETY AGENCY The European Union's aviation safety agency has suspended all flights in the bloc by 737-8 and 737-9 airplanes. ETHIOPIAN AIRLINES The airline whose plane crashed on Sunday, killing all 157 on board, grounded the remaining four of its 737 MAX 8 fleet on Monday. The company's chief executive officer said Boeing should ground all of its 737 MAX 8 jets until it is established that they are safe to fly. CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY OF FIJI, FIJI AIRWAYS The airline and the authority temporarily grounded the carrier's two 737 MAX planes, saying they had confidence in the model's airworthiness but would suspend flights out of deference to public concern and regulatory action around the world. HONG KONG'S CIVIL AVIATION DEPARTMENT The agency said operation of all 737 max aircraft into, out of and over Hong Kong will be temporarily prohibited. INDIAN MINISTRY OF CIVIL AVIATION, SPICEJET, JET AIRWAYS India says it will not allow 737 MAX aircraft to enter or transit its airspace. SpiceJet, which has 12 MAX 8s and another 155 MAX planes on order, said it expects to complete the grounding of those planes on Wednesday. Jet Airways said it is not flying the aircraft. IRAQ'S CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY Iraq banned 737 MAX aircraft from entering or transiting its airspace. KAZAKHSTAN'S CIVIL AVIATION COMMITTEE Kazakhstan suspended 737 Max flights. Only one aircraft of that make is registered in the Central Asian nation, belonging to a privately-owned Scat airline. KUWAIT CIVIL AVIATION The aviation authority banned MAX 8 aircraft from its airspace, state news agency KUNA said. MACAU'S CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY The regulator says it is suspending approvals of requests by airlines to use the 737 MAX. There are no such aircraft currently registered in Macau. MIAT MONGOLIAN AIRLINES The state airline, which rented one 737 MAX from Feb. 1, grounded the aircraft. It had signed a contract to rent three Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft and was planning to rent the other two later this year. NIGERIA'S MINISTER OF AVIATION Nigeria has issued a warning to all airline operators not to operate 737, MAX 8s and 9s into and outside any airport in the country until the cause of the crashed Ethiopian Airline plane is made known, the minister said. NORWEGIAN AIR The company will temporarily ground its MAX 8 passenger jets at the advice of European regulators. It operates 18 MAX jets. Norwegian also said it will seek compensation from Boeing for costs and lost revenue. NEW ZEALAND'S CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY The regulator suspended MAX aircraft from flying to or from the country, saying Fiji Airways would be the only airline affected.] S7 AIRLINES Russian S7 Airlines said it would ground its two MAX 8 planes starting Wednesday and that the decision would not affect its flight schedules. SINGAPORE CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY, SINGAPORE AIRLINES Singapore's Civil Aviation Authority suspended operations of all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in and out of the country. Singapore Airlines said its unit Silk Air, which operates 6 MAX 8 planes, has temporarily withdrawn them from service. SOUTH KOREA TRANSPORT MINISTRY, EASTAR JET South Korea said it is conducting an emergency inspection on Eastar Jet's two MAX 8 jets. Budget carrier Eastar Jet said it would temporarily ground its two 737 MAX 8s from Wednesday. SOUTHWEST AIRLINES Southwest, the world's largest operator of the 737 MAX 8, said it remained fully confident in the aircraft and was closely monitoring the investigation, but would waive any fare-difference charges for customers who wish to switch to another aircraft. SWISS FEDERAL OFFICE OF CIVIL AVIATION The EU's suspensions of all flights by Boeing 737 MAX 8 is also valid for Switzerland, the Swiss federal office of civil aviation said. CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY OF THAILAND The regulator said it is suspending the use of the Thai Lion Air's Boeing 737 MAX 9 for seven days due to safety concerns. THE UNITED STATES U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States was going to order grounding of all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9. "We are going to be issuing an emergency order of prohibition to ground all flights of the 737 MAX 8 and the 737 MAX 9 and planes associated with that line," Trump told reporters at the White House. TUI AIRWAYS Germany's TUI Group, the largest leisure, travel and tourism company in the world, said it was discontinuing all Boeing 737MAX 8 flights. TURKEY TRANSPORT MINISTRY, TURKISH AIRLINES The ministry has suspended all flights by the 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 models, Anadolu news agency said. The announcement came after Turkish Airlines said it had suspended its 12 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. UAE GENERAL CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY, FLYDUBAI The civil aviation regulator banned the operation of all MAX models in UAE airspace, Emirates News Agency (WAM) said. Flydubai, which has 11 MAX 8 aircraft in its fleet, according to Flightradar24, is the only UAE airline operating the MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft. UK CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY Britain suspended flights of the 737 MAX aircraft over its territory. UKRAINE AVIATION AUTHORITY Ukraine has suspended all flights of 737-8 and 737-9 MAX aircrafts inside its territory. UZBEKISTAN'S CIVIL AVIATION AGENCY Uzbekistan's civil aviation agency on Wednesday barred 737 Max jets from taking off or landing at local airports for one month. VIETNAM'S CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY The agency said it banned 737 MAX aircraft from Vietnamese airspace. VIRGIN AUSTRALIA The Australian airline said it would continue to work with Boeing; the airline, which does not have any 737 MAX 8 aircraft,said its first delivery was not due until November. (Compiled by Alexander Cornwell in Dubai, Chandini Monnappa and Uday Sampath in Bengaluru and Sayantani Ghosh in Singapore; Editing by Alexander Smith and Robert Birsel) (Reuters) - The United States on Wednesday became the latest to join the long list of countries around the globe to ground Boeing's 737 MAX aircraft following Sunday's deadly plane crash in Ethiopia. Boeing has said that the investigation into the crash remains in its early stages and it has no basis to issue new guidance to operators. GRAPHIC: Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft by country - https://tmsnrt.rs/2NWeU90 Here is what airlines and regulators worldwide have said: AEROMEXICO The Mexican airline said it suspended the operation of its six MAX 8 planes and those flights would be covered by the rest of its fleet. AMERICAN AIRLINES The company said it remained fully confident in the aircraft. Mechanics' union TWU has urged the company's chief executive to ground MAX 8s. AUSTRALIA'S CIVIL AVIATION SAFETY AUTHORITY The regulator said it had suspended the operation of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft to or from the country. BERMUDA CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY The British overseas territory's aviation authority said it prohibited MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft from its airspace. BRAZIL'S AIR TRAVEL REGULATOR, GOL LINHAS AEREAS INTELIGENTES SA The Brazilian regulator said it was not grounding the aircraft. Gol, which operates seven MAX 8s, said it was suspending use of the aircraft. CANADA'S TRANSPORT MINISTRY, AIR CANADA, WESTJET AIRLINES Canada Transport Minister Marc Garneau said Ottawa would stop 737 MAX 8 and 9 planes from flying into, out of or over Canadian airspace. Air Canada said customers could expect delays in re-booking and in reaching its call centres. Its 737 MAX operations on average fly 9,000-12,000 passengers every day. WestJet said it is contacting impacted passengers to arrange alternate travel plans. CAYMAN AIRWAYS The airline said it had grounded both its MAX 8 jets. CHINA'S AVIATION REGULATOR The regulator grounded 96 MAX 8s including those operated by Air China, China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines and Hainan Airlines. COMAIR The South African airline said it would remove 737 MAX8 jets from its schedule. It has ordered eight aircraft of this type but has only received one. Story continues EUROPEAN AVIATION SAFETY AGENCY The European Union's aviation safety agency has suspended all flights in the bloc by 737-8 and 737-9 airplanes. ETHIOPIAN AIRLINES The airline whose plane crashed on Sunday, killing all 157 on board, grounded the remaining four of its 737 MAX 8 fleet on Monday. The company's chief executive officer said Boeing should ground all of its 737 MAX 8 jets until it is established that they are safe to fly. CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY OF FIJI, FIJI AIRWAYS The airline and the authority temporarily grounded the carrier's two 737 MAX planes, saying they had confidence in the model's airworthiness but would suspend flights out of deference to public concern and regulatory action around the world. HONG KONG'S CIVIL AVIATION DEPARTMENT The agency said operation of all 737 max aircraft into, out of and over Hong Kong will be temporarily prohibited. INDIAN MINISTRY OF CIVIL AVIATION, SPICEJET, JET AIRWAYS India says it will not allow 737 MAX aircraft to enter or transit its airspace. SpiceJet, which has 12 MAX 8s and another 155 MAX planes on order, said it expects to complete the grounding of those planes on Wednesday. Jet Airways said it is not flying the aircraft. IRAQ'S CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY Iraq banned 737 MAX aircraft from entering or transiting its airspace. KAZAKHSTAN'S CIVIL AVIATION COMMITTEE Kazakhstan suspended 737 Max flights. Only one aircraft of that make is registered in the Central Asian nation, belonging to a privately-owned Scat airline. KUWAIT CIVIL AVIATION The aviation authority banned MAX 8 aircraft from its airspace, state news agency KUNA said. MACAU'S CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY The regulator says it is suspending approvals of requests by airlines to use the 737 MAX. There are no such aircraft currently registered in Macau. MIAT MONGOLIAN AIRLINES The state airline, which rented one 737 MAX from Feb. 1, grounded the aircraft. It had signed a contract to rent three Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft and was planning to rent the other two later this year. NIGERIA'S MINISTER OF AVIATION Nigeria has issued a warning to all airline operators not to operate 737, MAX 8s and 9s into and outside any airport in the country until the cause of the crashed Ethiopian Airline plane is made known, the minister said. NORWEGIAN AIR The company will temporarily ground its MAX 8 passenger jets at the advice of European regulators. It operates 18 MAX jets. Norwegian also said it will seek compensation from Boeing for costs and lost revenue. NEW ZEALAND'S CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY The regulator suspended MAX aircraft from flying to or from the country, saying Fiji Airways would be the only airline affected.] S7 AIRLINES Russian S7 Airlines said it would ground its two MAX 8 planes starting Wednesday and that the decision would not affect its flight schedules. SINGAPORE CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY, SINGAPORE AIRLINES Singapore's Civil Aviation Authority suspended operations of all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in and out of the country. Singapore Airlines said its unit Silk Air, which operates 6 MAX 8 planes, has temporarily withdrawn them from service. SOUTH KOREA TRANSPORT MINISTRY, EASTAR JET South Korea said it is conducting an emergency inspection on Eastar Jet's two MAX 8 jets. Budget carrier Eastar Jet said it would temporarily ground its two 737 MAX 8s from Wednesday. SOUTHWEST AIRLINES Southwest, the world's largest operator of the 737 MAX 8, said it remained fully confident in the aircraft and was closely monitoring the investigation, but would waive any fare-difference charges for customers who wish to switch to another aircraft. SWISS FEDERAL OFFICE OF CIVIL AVIATION The EU's suspensions of all flights by Boeing 737 MAX 8 is also valid for Switzerland, the Swiss federal office of civil aviation said. CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY OF THAILAND The regulator said it is suspending the use of the Thai Lion Air's Boeing 737 MAX 9 for seven days due to safety concerns. THE UNITED STATES U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States was going to order grounding of all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9. "We are going to be issuing an emergency order of prohibition to ground all flights of the 737 MAX 8 and the 737 MAX 9 and planes associated with that line," Trump told reporters at the White House. TUI AIRWAYS Germany's TUI Group, the largest leisure, travel and tourism company in the world, said it was discontinuing all Boeing 737MAX 8 flights. TURKEY TRANSPORT MINISTRY, TURKISH AIRLINES The ministry has suspended all flights by the 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 models, Anadolu news agency said. The announcement came after Turkish Airlines said it had suspended its 12 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. UAE GENERAL CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY, FLYDUBAI The civil aviation regulator banned the operation of all MAX models in UAE airspace, Emirates News Agency (WAM) said. Flydubai, which has 11 MAX 8 aircraft in its fleet, according to Flightradar24, is the only UAE airline operating the MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft. UK CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY Britain suspended flights of the 737 MAX aircraft over its territory. UKRAINE AVIATION AUTHORITY Ukraine has suspended all flights of 737-8 and 737-9 MAX aircrafts inside its territory. UZBEKISTAN'S CIVIL AVIATION AGENCY Uzbekistan's civil aviation agency on Wednesday barred 737 Max jets from taking off or landing at local airports for one month. VIETNAM'S CIVIL AVIATION AUTHORITY The agency said it banned 737 MAX aircraft from Vietnamese airspace. VIRGIN AUSTRALIA The Australian airline said it would continue to work with Boeing; the airline, which does not have any 737 MAX 8 aircraft, said its first delivery was not due until November. (Compiled by Alexander Cornwell in Dubai, Chandini Monnappa and Uday Sampath in Bengaluru and Sayantani Ghosh in Singapore; Editing by Alexander Smith and Robert Birsel) The White House's 2020 budget plan to slash federal funding for farm subsidies and other safety net programs for agricultural producers is getting criticized by farmers who say they are already struggling. The Trump request includes a 15 percent decrease in funding to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The plan includes $26 billion in cuts to crop insurance, a program used by growers of more than 100 crops. "We are very concerned and disappointed with the administration's proposed budget," said Illinois Farm Bureau President Richard Guebert, who farms corn, soybeans and wheat. President Donald Trump 's 2020 budget plan to slash federal funding for farm subsidies and other safety net programs for agricultural producers is getting criticized by farmers who say they are already struggling. "We are very concerned and disappointed with the administration's proposed budget," said Illinois Farm Bureau President Richard Guebert, who farms corn, soybeans and wheat. "This comes at a time when farmers are facing a depressed farm economy combined with continued market uncertainty and unresolved trade agreements." The White House budget request includes a 15 percent decrease in funding to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and proposes the agency make "targeted reforms to duplicative programs and overly generous subsidy programs," according to the document released Monday. It also proposes to save money by "eliminating subsidies to higher income farmers, and reducing overly generous crop insurance premium subsidies to farmers and payments made to private sector insurance companies." "The environment that we have in agriculture right now means crop insurance is very important," said North Dakota farmer Kevin Skunes, chairman of the National Corn Growers Association. "Nobody is insuring for a profit but they're trying to insure so that if Mother Nature doesn't shine on them they should be able to get the bank paid back." Story continues Skunes said farm income is weak and the costs growers face in farming haven't dropped substantially so it's caused hardship for many agricultural producers, including farm bankruptcies in the Midwest. He said low crop prices and the ongoing trade war with China also has made the situation tougher for farmers. The administration wants to slash the average premium subsidy for crop insurance from 62 percent to 48 percent. More than 100 crops are eligible for crop insurance, with majority of the program going to producers of corn, soybeans and wheat. The Republican budget plan still faces scrutiny in Congress where some Democrats have already have vowed to fight it. "This proposal tells us one of two things: either the White House doesn't understand why these programs are important, or they don't care," Collin Peterson, Democratic chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, said in a statement. "What's more, all of these shortsighted cuts are second and third attempts to revisit policy proposals that were rejected in the farm bill negotiations." According to Peterson, the plan includes $26 billion in cuts to crop insurance and $8 billion trimmed from programs that help ranchers recover grazing land hurt by drought. Trump's 2020 budget request included cutting subsidies for those farmers and ranchers with adjusted gross incomes exceeding $500,000. Similarly, the administration's 2019 budget plan proposed limiting subsidies for growers making more than $500,000. But some critics of farm subsidies contend the administration is right to target these programs, including crop insurance. They contend some of the federal government's farm subsidies go to millionaires and even billionaires. "There's a political effort to channel the subsidies through insurance because it's less transparent than some of the previous subsidy programs," said Chris Edwards, a scholar at the libertarian CATO Institute in Washington. Edwards said the federal government subsidizes farmer-paid insurance premiums that ultimately benefit "the small oligopoly of insurance companies that provide this insurance." Under the crop insurance program, farmers can get revenue and yield protection policies for their crop. Edwards said the majority of the policies go to cover revenue shortfalls, and only one-fifth to protect farmers from yield shortfalls. More From CNBC Colleran takes over at unit this weekend (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves) Colleran takes over at unit this weekend (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves) Transparency 2019.jpg FedEx Corp. (NYSE: FDX) said it has named Don Colleran, the company's executive vice president and chief sales officer, as the president and chief executive officer of FedEx Express, the company's air and international business and its largest unit. Colleran assumes the position on March 16. Colleran, a 30-year FedEx veteran, has been the company's top sales executive since 2017. Colleran has spent most of his FedEx career in sales, although he also served as head of the company's Canadian operations from 2000 to 2003. Jill Brannon, who has also been with FedEx for several decades, will succeed Colleran in his current role, the Memphis-based company said. Colleran's appointment eases the workload on Raj Subramaniam, who held the top position at FedEx Express as well as taking over as the parent's president and chief operating officer on March 1. Subramaniam will continue as co-president and co-CEO of FedEx Services, which provides support services to the company's various units. A native of Massachusetts, Colleran earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of New Hampshire. He serves on the University of Tennessee Health Science Center Advisory Board, the US-ASEAN Business Council and as a director of ABM Industries and EastGroup Properties. In December, FedEx posted sub-par fiscal second quarter results and lowered its fiscal 2019 outlook due to issues integrating its TNT Express unit and to economic weakness in Europe and Asia that directly impacted FedEx Express' business. Want more content like this? Click here to Subscribe Permalink See more from Benzinga 2019 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. First Data Corporation FDC yesterday announced that it will acquire Software Express, a well-known electronic funds transfer (EFT) brand in Brazil, serving more than 100,000 merchants. The financial terms of the deal have been kept under wraps. How Will First Data Benefit? The acquisition should help First Data gain more traction in electronic payments transactions. The company will be in a position to support all sizes of retail clients, cards schemes, financial institutions and telecoms. We will be able to expand the current Software Express portfolio within First Datas global platforms, and in 2019, the two companies expect to process more than 15 billion transactions in Brazil, said Gustavo Marin, executive vice president of First Data Latin America. We observe that First Data shares have gained a massive 51.2% year to date, significantly outperforming the 35% rally of the industry it belongs to. The Bigger Picture First Data itself is getting acquired by Fiserv FISV, a transaction that is expected to be completed in the second half of this year. One of the targeted strategic benefits of this acquisition is to be able to develop complementary technology capabilities and solutions to enhance client value and increase market differentiation. That said, Software Express acquisition by First Data seems to be a step toward this goal as Software Express has a broad portfolio of technology solutions that include multi-acquirer EFT, multi-acquirer EFT POS, reconciliation, a payments gateway, and automated recurring payments, among others. Zacks Rank & Stocks to Consider Currently, First Data is a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) stock. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Some better-ranked stocks in the broader Zacks Business Services sector are Omnicom OMC and Automatic Data Processing ADP, each carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). Long-term expected EPS (three to five years) growth rate for Omnicom and Automatic Data Processing is 6.9% and 12.8%, respectively. Story continues Zacks' Top 10 Stocks for 2019 In addition to the stocks discussed above, wouldn't you like to know about our 10 finest buy-and-holds for the year? From more than 4,000 companies covered by the Zacks Rank, these 10 were picked by a process that consistently beats the market. Even during 2018 while the market dropped -5.2%, our Top 10s were up well into double-digits. And during bullish 2012 2017, they soared far above the market's +126.3%, reaching +181.9%. This year, the portfolio features a player that thrives on volatility, an AI comer, and a dynamic tech company that helps doctors deliver better patient outcomes at lower costs. See Stocks Today >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report First Data Corporation (FDC) : Free Stock Analysis Report Omnicom Group Inc. (OMC) : Free Stock Analysis Report Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP) : Free Stock Analysis Report Fiserv, Inc. (FISV) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research (Bloomberg) -- Google co-founder Larry Page worried he would lose control of the company in 2011 and delivered what appeared to be a veiled threat to quit over the issue, according to confidential emails and other documents recently unsealed in a court case. Page was particularly concerned that co-founder Sergey Brin and top executive Eric Schmidt would sell special voting stock, diluting their lock on decisions at the online search giant, the documents show. Page also suggested he might shun large stock-based acquisitions because those deals could also reduce his voting power -- a situation a board member described as a real concern. The documents were unsealed last year as part of a lawsuit by shareholders over the creation of Googles C class shares. The filings, which include previously unreported board emails and depositions, reveal a potential strain in the bond between the Google founders. The trove also paints the most detailed portrait to date of how Page, who reclaimed the CEO helm in 2011, pushed the board to seal his outsized control over the tech giant. This new stock, issued to investors as a special dividend in 2014, came with no votes. Google was open about some of the reasons for the new shares. It told investors in a 2012 regulatory filing that founder control was important and the class C stock could be used for acquisitions and employee equity grants without diluting that control. But the unsealed documents suggest another driver of the original proposal: Page needed a way to keep a grip on the company even if Brin sold his voting stock. Why should I sacrifice and work so hard if I might not be in control? Page told Google director Paul Otellini, according to a June 2011 email Otellini wrote to other board members, adding that he considered the statement a veiled threat. He is worried about Sergeis shares ending up in the market. He sees no ability to buy him out, wrote Otellini, who was also CEO of Intel Corp. at the time. Story continues Googles 2004 IPO created the model for founder control of public technology companies. It sold class A shares with one vote, while Page, Brin and Schmidt kept class B stock with 10 votes per share. Since then, companies including Facebook Inc. and Snap Inc. have used a similar concoction of super-voting stock to raise billions of dollars from investors while keeping decision-making in the hands of the original leaders. Another crop of tech IPOs is coming this year and the approach is being used again. Tech companies argue these structures help them focus on long-term strategy, rather than obsessing over quarterly results to please Wall Street. But the approach can also leave founders less accountable if things go wrong. Last year, Google came under fire for giving executive Andy Rubin a $90 million exit package after an internal investigation determined he had an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate. Page allegedly granted a big stock award to Rubin. Directors signed off later, according to a recent lawsuit, but they had little say because Page, Brin and Schmidt still had voting control thanks to the class C stock. "Our voting structure is a huge benefit as it gives us greater ability to focus on long-term interests," a spokeswoman for Google parent Alphabet Inc. said. "Throughout the share restructure proposal process, the board operated with full autonomy and diligence in the best interests of all shareholders, as it has always done and continues to do." She also said the recent claim that Page bypassed the boards compensation committee when deciding Rubins award was false. Page, Brin, and several directors involved in the deliberations over the new stock didnt respond to requests for comment. Otellini died in 2017. The saga began in late 2010. Page was preparing to take the CEO role back from Schmidt, while Brin was tinkering with riskier moonshots at the Google X research lab. On Dec. 23, 2010, Google lawyer Don Harrison sent the board a proposal for the new type of Google stock. The holiday email came with a timeline some directors considered aggressive, according to the documents: management would ask for approval at a meeting about three weeks later, so the change could be announced with Googles 2011 preliminary proxy statement. A week before the scheduled Jan. 12 board meeting, Schmidt followed up with an email to the board suggesting a call ahead of time in case directors had any final issues about the proposal, code named Project School. Please advise if this is okay, Schmidt wrote. thank you !!! The board did not think it was OK. Instead of approving the change that day, they appointed a handful of directors, including Otellini, to a special committee to study it further. I feel like we are being rushed into making this happen for this years proxy, Otellini wrote a few weeks later to the other directors on the new committee. I am very uncomfortable with that, and I felt that the discussion at the board was equally nervous on that point." More than a year of sometimes-heated negotiations ensued. At the center was a debate over whether one founder should be allowed to transfer his class B super-voting shares to the other in exchange for the new non-voting class C shares. That was a key part of the founders original proposal and it would have let Page get Brins class B stock without paying cash for it. A presentation from law firm Latham & Watkins that was unsealed in the case analyzed this issue. Before the plan, if Page wanted to acquire 50.1 percent of the voting control, he would have had to pay Brin $8.2 billion, the document estimated. Under one of the founders proposals, if one of them left, they could use the new non-voting shares instead of cash to transfer voting power. "Investors will quickly look to understand the inherent conflict in the proposal," the presentation said. "The proposal would seem to encourage the founders to stay fully engaged at the company, however it creates an incentive for one of the founders to leave in order for them to realize a significant liquidity benefit while maintaining voting control." In February 2011, Page continued to push Googles board, according to emails between director John Hennessy and other directors and advisers. "Larry called me to talk about the zero vote stock. He is worried that delaying it for a year will cause the company/him to be reluctant to consider large acquisitions because of the dilution of voting control," Hennessy wrote in a Feb. 12, 2011, email. Hennessy said the board had two considerations to balance. First was the possible rejection of an acquisition. Second, the class C proposal coming so soon after Page took over the CEO role from Schmidt could affect the publics perception of Google and its leadership. "In my mind #1 is a real concern for the company and dominates #2," Hennessy wrote. Hennessy was right to highlight acquisitions: By August 2011, Google had agreed to buy Motorola for $12.5 billion. The deal was done with cash, rather than stock. However, Hennessy identified what he called a "more complex issue" in his Feb. 12 email. "Larry is hoping to hold voting control even if Sergey and Eric sell," he wrote. "This a much more difficult proposition, since it makes the change benefit the founders even more strongly." The boards special committee drew up a list of questions for Otellini to ask Page at a dinner meeting in June 2011. The directors felt the proposal put them in a difficult position -- having to choose between the founders desires and appropriate corporate governance. The group of directors, which included former Pixar Chief Financial Officer Ann Mather and early Google investor Ram Shriram, didnt understand why the founders needed to cement control right then. An analysis the board had commissioned suggested the status quo would keep the founders in control for decades. Buybacks could be used to shore up control, and acquisitions could be done with Googles cash hoard, the directors reasoned. "How should the board think about the proposal in light of potentially differing long term objectives between the founders?" they wrote in the list of questions for Page. "Is there something else on your mind that needs to be addressed?" After his meeting with Page, Otellini reported back to Mather and Shriram in a June 17, 2011, email. "He laid out his arguments in a way that I had not internalized before. He also leveled a veiled threat in that why should I sacrifice and work so hard if I might not be in control... He is worried about Sergeis shares ending up in the market. He sees no ability to buy him out," Otellini wrote, according to the unsealed documents. A few days later, Mather responded. "From your email, it sounds as though a stock buyback program is not going to address the underlying issue for Larry, his concern about Sergeis shares. (Brin was born in Soviet Russia, and some directors used a Russian spelling of his name, Sergei, rather than Sergey.) Negotiations dragged on through 2011 and into 2012. Page met again with individual board members, but those encounters couldnt break the impasse quickly. Finally, in April 2012, the board won a partial but important victory, convincing the founders to accept stricter limits on how they could transfer shares to each other. Shirley Tilghman, another Google director at the time, described the benefits of the final deal in a later deposition: In the short term, it prevented Page, Brin and Schmidt benefiting from a "windfall sale" of the class C stock without affecting their voting control. It also ensured that one Founder didnt end up with all the voting control. "The rationale for that was that we value the contributions of both of these Founders and we want to keep both of these Founders engaged with Google for the foreseeable future, Tilghman said. Google announced the new stock plan on April 12, 2012 and the class C shares began trading in 2014. The lawsuit, which claimed Page and Brin were taking more control without compensating shareholders, was settled after the duo agreed to beef up board scrutiny of their sales of non-voting shares. Its unclear if the boards goal -- keeping Page and Brin engaged with the company -- has been successful. Soon after, Page stopped presenting at many company events and earnings calls, having developed a medical condition that makes it hard for him to talk loudly. In 2015, he announced plans to make Google just one unit of the broader Alphabet Inc. Page is CEO of Alphabet and Hennessy is chairman, which Google says allows Page to focus more on long term, technical problems. Sundar Pichai was named Google CEO, overseeing a business that generates most of the sales and profit and employs the vast majority of Alphabet workers. Page and Brin have retreated further from public life and day-to-day operations, and Schmidt stepped down from his executive chairman role in early 2018. Meanwhile, they still control the company, holding 56.5 percent of the votes, according to Alphabets latest annual report. (Updates to add company comment in penultimate paragraph.) To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Bergen in San Francisco at mbergen10@bloomberg.net;Gerrit De Vynck in New York at gdevynck@bloomberg.net;Jef Feeley in Wilmington, Delaware at jfeeley@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Alistair Barr For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com 2019 Bloomberg L.P. (Reuters) - Vistara, a joint venture of India's Tata Sons and Singapore Airlines Ltd, can now fly to international destinations, the secretary of the Ministry of Civil Aviation told reporters on Wednesday. In June, the airline met the requirement of owning a fleet of more than 20 jets, needed to fly internationally, and hoped to launch international services last year. However, it did not have the necessary regulatory approvals. Indian airlines are turning to the international market for better returns at a time when aviation consultancy CAPA India estimates the sector will post a collective loss of $1.7 billion for the financial year ending March 31. The Business Standard newspaper reported earlier on Wednesday that Vistara had sought permission to operate flights between Delhi and Colombo seven days a week. (Reporting by Aditi Shah in New Delhi and Krishna V Kurup in Bengaluru) A gas flare on an oil production platform in the Soroush oil fields is seen alongside an Iranian flag in the Persian Gulf A gas flare on an oil production platform in the Soroush oil fields is seen alongside an Iranian flag in the Persian Gulf, Iran, July 25, 2005. REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi/Files By Jonathan Saul and Parisa Hafezi LONDON/DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran is discreetly scouring the globe for second-hand oil tankers to replace its ageing fleet and keep crucial crude exports flowing as U.S. sanctions start to bite, Iranian and Western sources said. Since U.S. President Donald Trump reimposed sanctions in November, exploratory talks with South Korea for up to 10 new supertankers have stalled, Panama has removed at least 21 Iranian tankers from its registry and Tehran is now looking for extra vessels in places such as Vietnam, the sources said. Washington has put restrictions on Iran's port, energy and shipping sectors but it has given waivers to the country's eight biggest oil customers, which include China, India and Japan, so they can keep buying Iranian crude. With oil exports accounting for an estimated 70 percent of Iran's revenues, maintaining an effective fleet of tankers to store and move that oil is crucial for Tehran. But potential sellers of used vessels are more wary this time round after a Greek network that helped Iran buy tankers under previous sanctions was blacklisted. Western insurers are also steering clear, complicating Iran's attempts to export crude to U.S.-approved buyers. If Iran runs into difficulties exporting its oil it could have a significant impact. Besides the importance of oil for its budget, Iran is estimated to produce about 2.8 million barrels a day, more than 9 percent of OPEC's output. "Whatever sector you look at, companies will keep in mind being cut off from the U.S. financial system when deciding whether to trade with Iran," said Mehdi Varzi, an independent oil consultant who has previously worked at the state-run National Iranian Oil Co. 'HAPPY TO DO BUSINESS' Israel warned this month that its navy could take action against Iran, which it said was smuggling oil using clandestine measures similar to those employed during the previous round of sanctions. According to maritime specialists, methods used for skirting sanctions in the past have included changing the names of ships, switching off AIS (Automatic Identification System) location transponders and conducting ship-to-ship transfers of oil. Story continues Since the previous round of sanctions in 2012, ship tracking has become more sophisticated and more available. Washington has also cracked down on more Iranian networks, making it riskier to get involved with Iran, according to bankers. Iran reached an agreement with world powers in 2015 over its nuclear programme which led to the lifting of sanctions in 2016 but Trump pulled out of the deal in May last year and reimposed U.S. restrictions in November. "Many big oil traders are very worried about going into Iran due to Trump, and even the Chinese are trying to comply with what the Americans want," said Varzi, who is based in Britain. A senior Iranian official played down the threat to its oil exports because of pressure on its fleet. "Plenty of countries are happy to do business with Iran," the official said. "As we have done in the past, there are several ways to overcome the shortage, including using tankers of other countries." MORE SCRUTINY A second Iranian official said discussions with South Korea over the possibility of ordering as many as 10 supertankers, each able to carry up to 2 million barrels of oil, had been delayed by U.S. sanctions. "We are working on it," the official said. A South Korean government official had no comment on the matter. After Western sanctions were lifted, Iran also started talks with South Korea's Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering Co. about forming a joint venture to establish a shipyard in Iran. A spokesman for Daewoo said it signed a preliminary agreement with Iran in December 2016 to cooperate on developing the shipyard, but said no progress had been made since then. A third Iranian official said talks were still ongoing. According to one shipping source, Iran has been searching for more ships in places such as Vietnam and two sources said it had also been looking for middlemen in the Greek market, one of the main hubs for second-hand ship deals. "Iran has been looking for ships, but this time round it is going to be harder - there is so much more scrutiny now. It is going to take them longer," one of the shipping sources said. When asked about Iran's efforts to secure ships, a third Iranian source said they were looking at all options. Vietnamese officials did not respond to requests for comment. Iran has more than 50 tankers, but needs them for both transporting oil and storing unsold stocks in its territorial waters - given its limited onshore storage capacity. Data based on AIS tracking by shipping intelligence platform MarineTraffic showed 12 Iranian tankers, or more than a fifth of its fleet, were being used for floating storage in March. 'FLOATING LIABILITY' Iran is struggling to keep its ships flagged to foreign registries too. All commercial ships have to be registered - flagged in a particular country - partly to comply with safety and environmental laws. Following the reimposition of sanctions, Panama, the world's leading flag state for commercial shipping, decided to de-flag Iran's ships, a fourth Iranian official said. Shipping data shows nearly all Iran's tankers had been registered with Panama. A source at Panama's flag registry said the cancellation, "affects approximately 60 Panama registered ships that are related to Iranian and Syrian owners". The source did not provide further details. A U.S Treasury spokesperson said: "We intend to fully enforce these sanctions and we encourage the cooperation and compliance of our allies and partners." Renewed U.S. sanctions have also meant Iran has been unable to secure vital certification services from foreign providers to ensure its ships remain seaworthy, shipping officials said. Shipping records show that 16 of Iran's tankers are at least 19 years old - and three of those vessels have been in service since 1996. Iranian tanker Sanchi sank off China in 2018 after colliding with another vessel while five of the eight tankers Iran bought via the Greek network under previous sanctions have since been scrapped, adding to the need for more ships to fill the gaps. U.S. Special Representative for Iran, Brian Hook, described Iran's tanker sector as a "floating liability" in November. IRANIAN FLAG Shipping data showed at least two Panama flagged tankers - the Sarak and the Sobar - were re-flagged to Iran on Jan. 1. The owners of the vessels, who were listed in the British Virgin Islands, could not be contacted. More than 20 other tankers in Iran's fleet have been reflagged to Iran this year. Having its tankers flagged in Iran rather than a third country such as Panama presents further problems for Tehran, even if it can secure more vessels and approved buyers for its oil, shipping experts say. Besides China, India and Japan, Washington also gave South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Italy and Greece the green light to keep buying Iranian oil, although it's unclear whether these waivers will be renewed when they expire in May. Dealing with Iran's flag registry raises compliance issues for counterparties as there is a risk they might interact with individuals or entities blacklisted under U.S. sanctions. And with few buyers now willing to take all the commercial risks involved in oil sales, Iran is also having to cover the shipment of cargoes, including securing insurance in most instances, shipping sources said. Mike Salthouse with the International Group, which represents companies that insure about 90 percent of the world's commercial shipping, said Western insurers were very unlikely to do business with Iranian shipping companies. "The biggest problem for insurers these days is finding a bank willing to handle a payment for goods or services where the beneficiary is designated by the U.S.," said Salthouse, chairman of the International Group's sanctions sub-committee. "Banks will not engage when you mention the Iran word." (Additional reporting by Jane Chung in Seoul, James Pearson and Khanh Vu in Hanoi, Elida Moreno in Panama City and Michelle Nichols in New York; editing by David Clarke) Earlier this month, Italy signaled its interest in joining China's Belt and Road infrastructure investment initiative. The White House has previously said Italy's intention to potentially join with Beijing on the scheme could hurt its international reputation, according to the Financial Times. Another European country is weighing the possibility of joining China's international infrastructure investment plan. Malta, a small country in the Mediterranean that's part of the European Union, has indicated there's a possibility that it could join China's Belt and Road Initiative. In an exclusive interview, Edward Scicluna, the country's finance minister, said that "certain prejudices" should not come in the way of good business. "One has to be wary of any country, especially with political ambitions or any sort of ambitions, but that's life," Scicluna told CNBC in Brussels. The Belt and Road scheme is meant to create a vast global network of land, sea and digital connections linking China with Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Critics say the unprecedented infrastructure plan will favor Chinese firms, boost Beijing's international influence and force developing nations to take on high debt burdens. "You have to be careful, but it doesn't mean you say no to any business, because of certain prejudices, or this, or that, or because someone is pressuring you. For a country to survive and to be competitive, especially a small country, we need to have diversification," Scicluna said. Earlier this month, Italy the euro zone's third-largest economy signaled its interest in joining the Chinese plan. Other European countries, namely Greece and Portugal, have also been supportive of Beijing's efforts. But there's much less support for Beijing's global investment push in the U.S. The White House has previously said Italy's potential involvement in the BRI could hurt its international reputation, according to the Financial Times. Story continues "I have heard the alarm being raised from the United States," Italian Deputy Prime Minister Luigi di Maio said Sunday. "Let it be clear that, if we are looking at the Silk Road towards China for our exports, it is not to strike a political deal with China, but only to help our companies," he said, according to Reuters. Speaking to CNBC, Malta's finance chief said the issue of the BRI is still quite new and "very sensitive." "One should not invite a fight, definitely not ... But on the other hand, as a region we are sovereign, we have our own interests and we should look at that first." China can be a 'partner' and a 'problem' Pierre Moscovici, the EU's commissioner for economic and financial affairs, told CNBC that Italy's priority should be improving its industrial capacity. "The EU is not a federal state our member states can do their own policy, whatever they want but I think that China is as well an asset, a partner; it can also be a problem if it is too aggressive," Moscovici told CNBC on Tuesday. "But, on Italy, my reflection would be a bit different, this country must solidify its industrial basis ... must reinforce its own competitiveness." More From CNBC MILAN (Reuters) - Italian company Eni said on Wednesday it had made a major oil discovery in Angola that would boost its credentials as one of the most successful foreign oil producers in Africa in recent years. The find is Angola's largest offshore discovery in years and may help Africa's second-biggest crude producer avoid a steep decline in output due to the ageing of its other fields. Oil accounts for 95 percent of exports and around 70 percent of revenues, and the government has recently offered better fiscal terms and more collaboration to international energy firms in an effort to help its mostly impoverished population. Eni said its new Agogo prospect in Angola's deep waters contained between 450 million and 650 million barrels of light oil with potential for further upside. Data from the exploration well pointed to a production capacity of more than 20,000 barrels of oil per day, it said. "This is a valuable find of light, sweet oil which they will be able to fast-track to meet increasing demand in 2020-2021," Santander oil analyst Jason Kenney said. Eni, which has been in Angola since 1980, will be operator at the field with a stake of 36.8 percent, the same as Angola's state-owned Sonangol. SSI Fifteen Ltd has 26.3 percent. Angola, a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, is a key location for the Italian state-controlled major. The company currently produces around 155,000 barrels of equity oil equivalent per day in the African nation. Eni, which in 2018 produced 1.85 million barrels per day, was struggling to replace reserves a decade ago and lost credibility over its management of the huge Kashagan oilfield in Kazakhstan. But giant gas finds at Mamba in Mozambique and Zohr in Egypt have since given it the strongest discovery record in the industry. The major, which produces more than half its oil and gas in Africa, has made a move to diversify away from the continent by clinching a series of deals in the Gulf region. It is set to uncover its new strategy plan to 2022 on Friday. (Reporting by Stephen Jewkes; Editing by Dale Hudson) Japans Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is looking to take Toyota to the moon. Instead of a family sedan, the car manufacturer is making a pressurized self-driving rover to cruise the lunar surface. The vehicle, which is expected to make its debut in 2029, is expected to have six wheels and be capable of transporting two humans (four in an emergency) a distance of 10,000 using solar power as well as fuel-cell technology being developed by Toyota. At JAXA, we are pursuing international coordination and technological studies toward Japans participation in international space exploration. We aim to contribute through leading Japanese technologies that can potentially generate spin-off benefits, JAXA President Hiroshi Yamakawa said in a prepared statement. Having Toyota join us in the challenge of international space exploration greatly strengthens our confidence Through our joint studies going forward, we would like to put to use Toyotas excellent technological abilities related to mobility, and we look forward to the acceleration of our technological studies for the realization of a manned, pressurized rover, Yamakawa continued. Size-wise, the rover will be around the size of two minibusses and will have 13 square meters of habitable space for astronauts to move around inside while theyre exploring the moons surface. The vehicle will be sent separately from the humans that will ride in it and will meet the astronauts once they arrive on the moon. The Justice Department reportedly is probing whether a $100,000 donation to a political fundraising group linked to President Donald Trump's re-election campaign came from Jho Low the fugitive who is accused of helping steal billions of dollars from 1MDB, a state-run investment fund in his native Malaysia. The Wall Street Journal reports that investigators are trying to see if $1.5 million in total transfers Low made in mid-2017 to an investment firm in Hawaii, LNS Capital, was used by LNS owner Larry Davis to make a $100,000 donation to the Trump Victory political action committee in December of that year. Low and his alleged co-conspirators are accused of using the stolen money to fund high-flying lifestyles, and to finance films, including the Martin Scorsese movie "The Wolf of Wall Street." The Justice Department reportedly is probing whether a $100,000 donation to a political fundraising group linked to President Donald Trump's re-election campaign came from Jho Low the fugitive who is accused of helping to steal billions of dollars from 1MDB, a state-run investment fund in his native Malaysia. The Wall Street Journal, citing sources, reported Wednesday that investigators are trying to see if some of the $1.5 million in total transfers Low made in mid-2017 to Hawaii investment firm LNS Capital was used by its owner Larry Davis to make a $100,000 donation to the Trump Victory political action committee in December of that year. Because he is not a U.S. citizen, the 36-year-old Low is barred from making either direct or indirect donations to American politicians or to PACs. The Journal reported that Low, who is suspected to be living in China, denied knowing Davis and having any knowledge about Davis' donation to Trump Victory. The PAC helps fund not only Trump's re-election campaign but also the Republican National Committee and other GOP election campaigns. The newspaper said that $60,000 of Davis' donation went to the RNC, $5,400 went to the Trump campaign and the balance went to state GOP parties and campaigns. Story continues The Justice Department already was investigating Low's alleged effort to have the U.S. government abandon its probe of his alleged looting of the 1MDB investment fund, formally known as 1Malaysia Development Berhad. Low and his alleged co-conspirators are accused of using the stolen money to fund high-flying lifestyles, and to finance films, including the Martin Scorsese movie "The Wolf of Wall Street." Cassie Smedile, a spokeswoman for the RNC, said in a statement that "Trump Victory does not accept contributions from corporations or foreign nationals in accordance with the law. We vehemently deny any wrongdoing on the part of the RNC or Trump Campaign." Davis is married to a woman named Nickie Lum Davis, who co-owns LNS Capital, the Journal reported. In 1997, her parents, Nora and Eugene Lum, who had previously raised significant amounts of money to fund Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign , pleaded guilty to making $50,000 in illegal contributions to the 1994 campaigns of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and to another congressional candidate that year. CNBC has reached out to Larry and Nickie Lum Davis for comment. Larry Davis did not respond to a request for comment from the Journal. Read the full Wall Street Journal article here. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo "no less than half a dozen times" that he would denuclearize his nation, Pompeo said Tuesday on Fox's Houston TV station KRIV. Pompeo said that Kim is "committed" to giving up his country's nuclear weapons program. Now, "we just need to figure out how to do it." Pompeo said that though Kim told him "face-to-face, personally" that he would denuclearize North Korea, he said the U.S. needs to see action from the country. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo "no less than half a dozen times" that he would denuclearize his nation, Pompeo said Tuesday on Fox's Houston TV station KRIV . Pompeo said Kim is "committed" to giving up his country's nuclear weapons program. Now, "we just need to figure out how to do it," Pompeo said. He added that the U.S. goal of denuclearizing North Korea would keep America safe and would stop South Korea and Japan "from being under this threat." Pompeo's comments come after the failed summit between Kim and President Donald Trump that took place last month in Vietnam. Trump was pushing for North Korea to completely denuclearize, while Kim sought an ease in sanctions. However, the summit, which was slated to end with a signing ceremony for some form of agreement between the two nations, was cut short because the countries couldn't agree on terms. Pompeo said after the summit that though North Korea was willing to denuclearize one weapons facility, the Yongbyon nuclear complex, it would still leave North Korea with "missiles, still leaves warheads and weapons systems, so there's a lot of other elements we just couldn't get to." "Sometimes you have to walk, and this was just one of those times," Trump said after the summit. However, the officials said that the no-deal summit did not have a harsh end and that both countries continue to make progress. Story continues In his interview with KRIV, Pompeo said that though Kim told him "face-to-face, personally" that he would denuclearize North Korea, Pompeo said the U.S. needs to see action from the country. North Korea has broken promises to denuclearize in the past. Two days after the summit ended, NBC News published satellite images that showed North Korea was rebuilding its long-range rocket site at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station. "We will only value action," Pompeo said. "Talk is cheap." The State Department did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment. More From CNBC We listen to local police and fire departments scanner traffic, but sometimes miss crimes, wrecks, fires or other incidents, especially if they happen overnight. If you know of something were not covering yet, please let Managing Editor Jeff Pownall know by emailing him at jpownall@lufkindailynews.com, or submit a news tip online by visiting lufkindailynews.com/tips. This story is part of How Well Win in 2019, a year-long exploration of workplace gender equality. Read more stories here. In this mini-series, we look again at media we have loved to look at how it depicted gender. How does it look to a person with a 2019 perspective on gender roles and norms? Warning: Contains spoilers. When did it come out? 1987 How does it hold up? Depressingly well For all its shoulder pads, power suits, and rolodexes, the1987 movie Baby Boom feels fresh, relevant even. In fact, the movie really only feels dated because of these trappingsthe black leather furniture, business lady commuter uniform of panty hosed feet in low-top Reeboks, and conspicuous lack of cell phones and laptops. As the voiceover intro tells us, J.C. Wiatt, played by Diane Keaton, is a high-powered executive who was top of her class at Yale, works five to nine, makes six figures, and lives in New York City with her investment banker boyfriend, whom she has no intention of marrying. Were plunged for a day into J.C.s life of popped collars, work lunches, and paperwork in bed. Then, a long-lost cousin dies, leaving J.C. with baby Elizabeth. Her boyfriend leaves; she loses a big account at work to a young man she had hired and mentored. Furious, she quits her job, buys a farmhouse in Vermont she had long dreamed of owning as a vacation home, and moves there. There, she goes a little nuts with loneliness, but over time, she builds a successful baby food company, falls in love with the local veterinarian, and generally thrives. Keatons charm makes everything shes in feel timeless, but still so much about Baby Boom feels a little too familiar for a 30-year-old comedy. At no point in the movie does a man ever act as though being a dad involves more than buying the occasional teddy bear and showing up on time for dinner. Story continues I concede, there are a few moments that are painfully dated. An executive from another company calls J.C. young lady during a meeting, and no one, her included, blinks an eye. When J.C.s boss tells her he wants her to be a partner in the firm, he then interrogates her about her plans for marriage, saying of her boyfriend, What if he expects a wife? Her boyfriend, played with appropriate yuppie panache by Harold Ramis, simply disappears when J.C decides she wants to adopt Elizabeth, and theres zero judgement of him for not at least supporting his partner through a challenging life transition. At no point in the movie does a man ever act as though being a dad involves more than buying the occasional teddy bear and showing up on time for dinner. The way that J.C is treated once she decides to be a mom echoes what we know women experience in the workplace today. All her best projects get taken away by younger male colleagues who are available seven days a week, 48 hours a day, which she is no longer. Colleagues call attention to her supposed lack of focus as she struggles to manage work, a toddler, and a nanny. The most resonant takeaways from the movie all illustrate concepts that were knee-deep in grappling with in homes and the workplace todaygaslighting, emotional labor, and work-life balance. When her boss, Fritz (Sam Wanamaker), takes J.C. out for lunch to ask her to be partner at the company, he warns her against the fantasy of having it all. He is only able to have children and a social life because of his wife, he says. I dont know what the hell she does, but she takes care of things, he says, invoking the specter of emotional labor, all of the invisible planning and organizing it takes to run a household. When J.C. gets forced out, supplanted by a young and extremely hatable James Spader, Fritz basically says I told you so, reminding her of this warning. I dont know how many grandchildren I have, he brags, by way of outlining the demands of the job. He reiterates: No one can have it all. One of the most surprising things watching Baby Boom today is how early on in American culture (or at least much parodied yuppie culture of the 1980s) the culture of helicopter parenting takes hold. When J.C. chats up some other moms at the playground, one proudly rubs her pregnant belly, and rattles off a list of pre-schools the baby inside is already on the list for. J.C. and Elizabeth, who looks to be somewhere around 14 months old, go to comically intense classes where she shows the baby flashcards with pictures of sushi, international flags, and the faces of world leaders to expand her brain. In Vermont, J.C. loads up on sweaters and starts making baby applesauce from her 62-acres of apple trees, selling it to the general store. In the movies pivotal moment, two yuppie couples come in to the store (one of them a young Chris Noth), wearing bright ski gear and fur headbands. They declare the gourmet baby food a fresh concept and buy the store out of it as gifts, lecturing J.C. on the importance of packaging design. The local, artisanal applesauce that launches the next chapter in J.C.s career could be straight out of a shop in Brooklyn, so much so that for a minute I wondered whether J.C. might suggest that the local cafe whip up some avocado toast to attract tourists. The gourmet baby food business is so good that J.C.s old company calls to schedule a meeting to buy it, and set her up as the CEO. Shes thrilled for a moment and then rejects the offer, telling her former boss and colleagues that theres a crib in her office and a mobile above her desk and thats the way she likes it. She doesnt want a bonus or access to a corporate jet if it means losing the work-life balance shes stumbled uponnot that she calls it that. Do you realize what youre giving up? Fritz asks her, jaw agape. Yup, she replies with conviction. More than 30 years later, even though Sheryl Sandberg famously had a crib in her office, corporate culture feels about the same. More women are in the C suite, and men spend more time parenting, but the conversations are eerily similar, albeit with a slightly more precise vocabulary. This story is part of How Well Win in 2019, a year-long exploration of workplace gender equality. Read more stories here. Sign up for the Quartz Daily Brief, our free daily newsletter with the worlds most important and interesting news. More stories from Quartz: With a full-time job and a then 3-year-old daughter, Falicia Hines of Madison, Wisconsin, knew she wanted a flexible master's degree program that would allow her to control her own schedule. In addition to the area of study and strength of the school, one of the other factors she looked at when picking a program was how long it would take to get her master's. [Read: What Graduate School Is and Who Should Consider Attending.] She found what she was looking for in an online master's in strategic public relations program at George Washington University, where she could chip away at her classes on lunch breaks, nights and weekends. By taking two classes a semester, it took her about 20 months to complete the program. "It was very much designed for people who are working full time," says Hines, who received her master's from George Washington in May 2017. "While I had friends and colleagues successfully go through a more traditional part-time MBA program while working full time, I found through research that this program was the best for me to be able to balance my career and family while investing in my education." The number of people seeking master's degrees increased by 66 percent between the 2000-2001 school year and 2015-2016, according to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. Yet there is "a tremendous range" in how long it can take to get a degree, says Sean Gallagher, executive director at the Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy at Northeastern University, especially as universities have adapted graduate education to meet the needs of working professionals like Hines, offering more part-time, online and flexible options. Master's Degree Credit Requirements Master's degree programs can vary from intensive, full-time programs that take only a year to complete, to part-time programs that can take five years or longer, Gallagher says. "There's more flexibility and many more options compared to the master's programs of 20 years ago, or say, even five to 10 years ago, with the continued growth in online education," he says. Story continues Programs are increasingly trying to cater to all types of students by providing more options. These include: -- Intensive, full-time, one-year programs. -- Part-time degree programs. -- "4+1" programs, where a student can earn both a bachelor's and master's degree in five years. Adam Fein, vice president for digital strategy and innovation at the University of North Texas, says the average master's program requires 32 to 36 credit hours, which translates to about eight to 10 courses. But some master's programs require as many as 60 credits. How long it will take a student to complete the requirements depends on whether he or she is full time or part time; studying continuously or taking breaks. Fein says it's not uncommon for master's students to take a break for a semester for life events, such as getting married or a job promotion that requires more focus at work, which can add to the amount of time the program takes. Most programs have limits on how long you can take to get a master's degree, maxing out at five to seven years, he says. Flexibility of Master's Programs The classic master's degree model of "going to graduate school," where someone stops working and focuses on being a full-time student, often takes about two years, Gallagher says. But now part-time master's students make up almost as much of the market as full-time students. The share of master's students who study part time is 43 percent, according to the most recent numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics. [Read: Decide Between Part-Time, Full-Time Online Degree Programs.] Online programs are also still gaining ground. As of fall 2016, more than one-third of total graduate students participated in distance education, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Hines says her program was expected to take 24 months, but she managed to complete it in a little under two years by taking courses continuously, including summers, and taking advantage of an opportunity that allowed her to get credit for a course through her work experience. "We all had the option to work closely with our adviser and professors to determine if we could customize our course load and schedule to finish earlier, which is what I did," she says. Microcredentials, which allow students to get a certificate in a particular topic area first and stack them toward a degree, are growing in popularity, Gallagher says. For instance, by taking three classes in accounting to get an initial certificate one can build upon, students are making a shorter time commitment, while potentially forging a pathway to a master's degree because the credits can be "stacked up" toward a degree later on. "That becomes a much easier on-ramp," Gallagher says. "They can try before they buy." Fein adds, "The key for higher education institutions is providing flexibility. We can't assume anything about the student. We need to have options for them by making sure things are stackable and flexible." [Read: 6 Occupations That Typically Require a Master's Degree.] Jobs that require a master's degree are the fastest-growing segment of the economy among education classes. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects occupations with an entry level degree of a master's are expected to grow at a rate of 13.8 percent between 2014 and 2024. The good news is you no longer need to drop out of the workforce and forego a salary to gain a master's degree, Gallagher says. "You can actually do both," Gallagher says. "And not only can you do both, but today there are more models where your work, and the projects you work on in your degree, will be much more intertwined." More From US News & World Report KUALA LUMPUR, March 13 (Reuters) - Malaysia kept its export duty on crude palm oil for April at zero percent, according to a circular on the Malaysian Palm Oil Board's website on Wednesday that cited the national customs department. The duty has been at zero percent since September. Malaysia, the world's second-largest producer of palm oil, calculated a palm oil reference price of 2,056.04 ringgit ($502.70) per tonne for April. Any price above 2,250 ringgit incurs a duty. Malaysian benchmark palm oil futures last fell 1.0 percent to 2,094 ringgit a tonne on Wednesday. ($1 = 4.0900 ringgit) (Reporting by Emily Chow, editing by Richard Pullin) New Jersey To Become 11th State To Legalize Recreational Marijuana? Israel, Too Lots of movement on the cannabis legalization front today, both in the United States and abroad. In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy has reached an agreement with Democratic legislators to legalize recreational marijuana in the state. Murphy is a Democrat and friend of legalization. Legalizing adult-use marijuana is a monumental step to reducing disparities in our criminal justice system, he said. As usual, health officials, police, and educators are against the move. SEE: Cannabis Stock News Daily Roundup March 12 In the Middle East, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has voiced support for legalizing marijuana recreationally in an attempt to woo the stoner vote. Netanyahus Likud party is trailing in electoral polls behind the new Blue White party that just came into existence this election. Israel is already a big medical marijuana exporter. Israeli elections are being held on April 9. Up in Canada, TransCanna (TCAN) has raised $10 million in a brokered private placement to fund the purchase of a 196,000 square foot cannabis facility, in addition to signing a letter of intent to purchase a 15,000 square foot facility in California, announced last month. The stock is up 66% since trading commenced in January. Meanwhile the Alternative Harvest ETF (NYSEARCA:MJ) is up 51% since December, pretty much following the momentum of the S&P 500, and the Canadian Horizons Marijuana Life Sciences ETF (HMMJ) is up 58% over the same time frame. Britain to Slash Tariffs to Zero In Event of No Deal Brexit After British Prime Minister Theresa Mays soft Brexit deal failed to pass parliament for a second time yesterday, the prospect of no deal has risen again. Parliament will be voting on whether to reject no deal in favor of an extension to Article 50 today. In the event that no deal is not rejected, or if the European Union bureaucratic machine refuses to grant the UK an extension, the no deal will take effect by default. If that happens, Mays government has promised to slash tariffs to zero on 87% of imports to the UK from non-EU sources, with the exception of meat and dairy because farmers cant do without their protection, supposedly. The pound (NYSEARCA:FXB) is up against the dollar and the euro by half a percent since yesterday, on the hopes that no deal will be ruled out. British newspapers are going bananas and everyone is getting tired of these games, except the politicians, who are all having a great time in the spotlight. Story continues Gundlach Calls MMT Crackpot Idea For First Graders In an insult to first graders who usually tend to understand the realities of scarcity in planet Earth, Doubleline founder and CEO Jeff Gundlach has called Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT as its proponents call it, a crackpot idea for first graders. In case he wasnt clear enough, he added that it was complete nonsense. The idea of MMT is that public deficits dont matter and you can keep printing money forever because the moon is made of cheese and we can just sell the cheese to Jupiter, which is totally loaded because its really big. The real idea of MMT though is actually only slightly less insane than that, which is that as long as the Federal Reserve can keep interest rates low without sparking inflation, the national debt and budget deficit wont be an issue. Which is technically true, though along similar lines of thought, as long as you can survive without breathing, suffocation wont be an issue either. Boeing 737 Max 8 Grounded In The Following Countries Heres a list for Boeing (NYSE:BA) watchers brought to you by Bloomberg. The airplane maker is going to have to do something about this. The stock is down 13% since the Ethiopian Airlines crash: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Ethiopia, Fiji, South Korea , Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Russia, South Africa, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Kuwait, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and Vietnam. In the United States, the aircraft is still considered safe, but nobody knows exactly why other than the FAA said so. The post Market Morning: Cannabis Legalization Progress, Brexit Burn, MMT Mocked, Boeing Grounded appeared first on Market Exclusive. Post: #9 RE: Right to Rise PAC illegally took $1.3M donation from Chinese-owned corporation Very likely that Yang funneled sex trafficking profits thru the @GOP. They took her money. Just as they took Blavatnik's, Vekselberg's, Torshin's. All signs point to the @GOP being a laundering front for transnational organized crime. And Congress is swamped w/ their puppets. In the end, everyone will understand the importance of this map. And how Fred Trump was patient zero, for providing the avenue by which our hostile foreign enemies infiltrated our shores via American mafia families. Mar-A-Lago & Sunny Isles are the FL extension. Frankly, no one on earth knows more about this topic than Bob Mueller. He literally created the terminology & roadmap for hunting transnational organized crime - esp. as it evolved out of the former Soviet Union. Because he also hunted terror networks. And these 2 things are now inextricably connected. https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/s...ime-threat Further, Mueller was at the forefront of cyber crime, as it related to transnational syndicates & terror regimes. This is yet another critical piece in the Trump-Russia criminal organization & history that he is investigating. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/11040...29184.html YEI might be connected to the Inslaw affair (it provided software to governments and corporations with wiretapping backdoors, just like PROMIS) and child sex trafficking (it was an IT contractor for Florida's foster care system) YangEnterprisesInc #YEI tied to Florida foster care & child trafficking?? #YEI might be connected to #InslawAffair (provided software to gvts & corps w/wiretapping backdoors, like PROMIS) & child sex trafficking (an IT contractor for Fls foster care system) I was just mentioning the Promis software that's a blast from the past. I wrote about the Promis software in my archive on Roger Stone in 2016 https://www.facebook.com/groups/476526069213261 If there is a connection to Inslaw that would connect back to Iran Contra and the gambling which would tie in both Paul Manafort and Roger Stone who handled Trump's gambling interests where the money was laundered . https://www.villagevoice.com/2004/04/13/...h-bonanza/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/47652606...972025669/ Here are Datadumps I did on Manafort and friends in 2016 https://twitter.com/jfk_annie/status/110...2153077760 Inslaw affair FOCUS ON THE MONEY. FOCUS ON THE CORRUPTION.Very likely that Yang funneled sex trafficking profits thru the @GOP. They took her money.Just as they took Blavatnik's, Vekselberg's, Torshin's.All signs point to the @GOP being a laundering front for transnational organized crime.And Congress is swamped w/ their puppets. In the end, everyone will understand the importance of this map. And how Fred Trump was patient zero, for providing the avenue by which our hostile foreign enemies infiltrated our shores via American mafia families. Mar-A-Lago & Sunny Isles are the FL extension.Frankly, no one on earth knows more about this topic than Bob Mueller. He literally created the terminology & roadmap for hunting transnational organized crime - esp. as it evolved out of the former Soviet Union. Because he also hunted terror networks. And these 2 things are now inextricably connected.Further, Mueller was at the forefront of cyber crime, as it related to transnational syndicates & terror regimes. This is yet another critical piece in the Trump-Russia criminal organization & history that he is investigating.YEI might be connected to the Inslaw affair (it provided software to governments and corporations with wiretapping backdoors, just like PROMIS) and child sex trafficking (it was an IT contractor for Florida's foster care system) YangEnterprisesInc #YEI tied to Florida foster care & child trafficking?? #YEI might be connected to #InslawAffair (provided software to gvts & corps w/wiretapping backdoors, like PROMIS) & child sex trafficking (an IT contractor for Fls foster care system)I was just mentioning the Promis software that's a blast from the past.I wrote about the Promis software in my archive on Roger Stone in 2016If there is a connection to Inslaw that would connect back to Iran Contra and the gambling which would tie in both Paul Manafort and Roger Stone who handled Trump's gambling interests where the money was laundered .Inslaw affair Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman, arrives at federal court in Washington, D.C., for his arraignment and bail hearing June 15, 2018. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM A federal judge in Washington sentenced former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to about six years in prison Wednesday on charges connected to his past lobbying work for Ukraine, rejecting his claims of remorse as an uninspiring plea for leniency. The sentence, which elevated Manaforts total prison term to about seven-and-a-half years, came less than a week after he was sentenced in Alexandria, Virginia, on financial fraud charges. In the Alexandria proceeding, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis of the Eastern District of Virginia made note of the fact that Manafort had not given a clear apology in his final words in court. I certainly recommend you do it in the District of Columbia, Ellis told him. Manafort, who was also indicted by the Manhattan district attorney Wednesday for mortgage fraud, appeared to take that advice in Washington. As his voice filled Jacksons courtroom, it didnt take long for him to utter the word Ellis wanted to hear last week. I want to say to you now: I am sorry for what I have done, Manafort said from his wheelchair. Let me be very clear, I accept responsibility for the acts that have caused me to be here today. Still, Jackson questioned whether Manafort had really accepted responsibility for contacting witnesses in an attempt to tamper with their testimony. And she said that while Manaforts crimes did not make him public enemy No. 1, he was not a victim either. Instead, Jackson described a throughline of dishonesty and dissembling by Manafort over the course of his legal saga, including allegations he attempted to tamper with witnesses while on bail and false statements he gave in apparent breach of his September plea agreement. Court is one of those places where facts still matter, Jackson said. Saying, Im sorry I got caught, is not an inspiring plea for leniency. Manafort pleaded guilty in Washington to a pair of conspiracy charges last year after a jury in Alexandria found him guilty of bank and tax fraud. In Washington, he was accused of failing to disclose his past lobbying work for Ukraine as required under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and skirting taxes on that lucrative line of business. Jackson on Wednesday criticized Manafort for hiding his wealth to sustain an opulent lifestyle, saying he had more homes than anyone could enjoy and more suits than any one man could wear. A lead prosecutor for the special counsels office, Andrew Weissmann, had painted Manafort as a brazen criminal who broke the law to fuel an extravagant lifestyle. The judge also addressed what wasnt alleged in the case: collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election. Evidence of collusion, she said, was not presented in this caseperiod. Outside court, Manaforts lead defense lawyer, Kevin Downing, said, "Judge Jackson conceded that there was absolutely no evidence of Russian collusion in this case." In court, Downing said the special counsels involvement in Manaforts case resulted in disparate treatment. He said the Justice Department has brought only about a half dozen cases over FARA violations since the mid-1960s, saying the governments priority through the years had been to bring more folks in and get filed, not bring criminal prosecutions. Jackson on Wednesday dismissed the notion that Manaforts failure to register under FARA was merely a violation of a pesky regulation. In choosing not to register his lobbying work for Ukraine, she said, Manafort was hiding the truth of who he represented, effectively lying to members of Congress and the American public. When people dont have the facts, democracy cant work, she said. Weissmann said secrecy underpinned Manaforts lobbying work for Ukraine, allowing him to enlist foreign leaders to advocate for the country and appear independent when they were, in fact, handsomely paid. Secrecy was integral to what Mr. Manafort wanted to do for Ukraine, Weissmann said. Sitting behind Weissmann was a former Mueller prosecutor, Brandon Van Grack, who was recently appointed to lead the Justice Department unit devoted to enforcing FARA. Read more: Manafort Indicted by Manhattan DA for Mortgage Fraud Confirmation of Lowenstein's Paul Matey Flips 3rd Circuit to Republicans DOJ Pivot Suggests No End to FARA Frenzy, Lawyers Say Paul Manafort Gets 47 Months, but Second Sentencing Awaits March 13 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories from selected Canadian newspapers. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. THE GLOBE AND MAIL ** Canada has not yet grounded the Boeing Co's 737 Max plane despite at least 40 countries across Europe and Asia banning the jet after two deadly crashes in five months. https://tgam.ca/2HuSxGD ** Boeing Co, whose new 737 Max 8 aircraft is being grounded by national regulators around the world, is conducting test flights of the plane in the Seattle area and on the West Coast. https://tgam.ca/2HxSZDZ ** Royal Bank of Canada has struck a joint venture with British Columbia Investment Management Corp to launch a new fund catering to institutional clients with a growing appetite for investing in commercial real estate. https://tgam.ca/2HvyZSD NATIONAL POST ** TransCanada Corp has asked the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to lift an injunction on its Keystone XL pipeline by the end of this week, as it approaches an internal deadline to begin construction this year on the US$8-billion project. http://bit.ly/2HrFy8u ** Bermuda-based Validus Reinsurance Ltd, whose parent company was bought by American International Group Inc last year, is eyeing a Canadian branch, according to notices given in the Canada Gazette. http://bit.ly/2Hr25T7 (Compiled by Bengaluru newsroom) The Procter & Gamble Company PG, also known as P&G, touched a 52-week high of $100.52, before closing the session a tad lower at $100.05 on Mar 12. Notably, the company is gaining from a solid focus on product improvement, packaging and marketing initiatives, and productivity and cost-savings plan. Backed by these factors, Procter & Gamble delivered a sturdy second-quarter fiscal 2019 results, wherein the top and bottom lines surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate. Also, earnings improved year over year. This propelled management to raise the upper end of its organic sales guidance for fiscal 2019. Markedly, the stock has gained approximately 6% since the announcement of its quarterly results. (Read: Procter & Gamble Rises on Q2 Earnings Beat, Ups View) In the past six months, shares of this Cincinnati, OH-based company have rallied roughly 20%, outperforming the industrys 8.1% growth. All said, lets take a closer look at the aspects driving this Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) stocks performance. Factors Narrating P&Gs Growth Story Procter & Gamble has been focusing on improving its product portfolio through buyouts. In July 2018, the company completed the acquisition of the beauty brand First Aid Beauty for $250 million. It also acquired the consumer health business of Germany-based Merck KGaA for $4 billion, and Walker & Company Brands, both in December 2018. While First Aid Beauty should help bolster its position in the beauty space, the addition of Merck KGaAs consumer health business will expand P&Gs OTC geographic footprint. In February this year, the company acquired a private company This is L. which produces period products with natural ingredients. We believe this buyout to be an important step by Procter & Gamble toward expanding its naturals product range, which is a key focus area for most day-to-day consumer product companies at present. Apart from these, Procter & Gamble remains focused on productivity and cost-saving plans to boost margins, thereby raising the profit level. Excluding currency headwinds, core operating profit margin expanded 80 basis points including total productivity cost savings of 210 basis points in second-quarter fiscal 2019. The companys continued investment in business alongside initiatives to offset macro-cost headwinds, and balance top- and bottom-line growth underscore its productivity efforts. With cost savings and efficiency improvements across all facets of business, the company is nearing the mid-point of its second five-year (fiscal 2017-2021) cost savings target of $10 billion. The second five-year restructuring plan targets cutting costs in areas including supply chain and cost of goods sold, marketing and digitization and effectiveness of promotional spending. Thanks to these growth drivers, management now expects organic sales for the fiscal year to increase 2-4%. Moreover, Procter & Gamble continues to anticipate core EPS growth of 3-8% in fiscal 2019. We believe that such efforts will consistently boost the companys performance. Other Key Picks Unilever N.V. UN has a long-term earnings growth rate of 6.1% and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here. Medifast, Inc. MED delivered average positive earnings surprise of 10.9% in the trailing four quarters. It has a long-term earnings growth rate of 20% and a Zacks Rank #1. The Clorox Company CLX has a long-term earnings growth rate of 6.4% and a Zacks Rank #2. Zacks' Top 10 Stocks for 2019 In addition to the stocks discussed above, wouldn't you like to know about our 10 finest buy-and-holds for the year? From more than 4,000 companies covered by the Zacks Rank, these 10 were picked by a process that consistently beats the market. Even during 2018 while the market dropped -5.2%, our Top 10s were up well into double-digits. And during bullish 2012 2017, they soared far above the market's +126.3%, reaching +181.9%. This year, the portfolio features a player that thrives on volatility, an AI comer, and a dynamic tech company that helps doctors deliver better patient outcomes at lower costs. See Stocks Today >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Unilever NV (UN) : Free Stock Analysis Report MEDIFAST INC (MED) : Free Stock Analysis Report Procter & Gamble Company (The) (PG) : Free Stock Analysis Report The Clorox Company (CLX) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. 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The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.In accordance with industry accepted best practices we ask that users limit their copy / paste of copyrighted material to the relevant portions of the article you wish to discuss (no more than 50% of the source material) provide a link back to the original articleIf you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe a post on this website falls outside the boundaries of "Fair Use" and legitimately infringes on yours or your clients copyright please contact [email protected] This website is owned by :Marco ZwaneveldDrijfriemstraat 522516 XR The HagueNetherlands.I will not rent, sell, share or otherwise disclose your personal information to any third party.We might contact you from time to time regarding your purchases or the services (like forums and announcement lists) you have subscribed to.Some of the 3rd party advertisers on lunaticoutpost.com may use cookiesto track peformance and/or to serve relevant ads.If you wish to read more and/or opt out of such cookies, please visit: http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/ The logo of Reliance Industries is pictured in a stall at the Vibrant Gujarat Global Trade Show at Gandhinagar, January 17, 2019. REUTERS/Amit Dave/Files By Nidhi Verma NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's Reliance Industries Ltd, operator of the world's biggest refining complex, said on Wednesday it had halted supply of diluents to Venezuela's national oil company PDVSA and will not resume such sales until sanctions are lifted. Washington is preparing to impose "very significant" Venezuela-related sanctions against financial institutions in the coming days, U.S. special envoy Elliott Abrams said on Tuesday. PDVSA was importing about 100,000 bpd of naphtha, mostly from the United states, to dilute up to 400,000 bpd of extra heavy oil and make it exportable. Reliance's Houston-based subsidiary was supplying diluents to Venezuela. Reliance, an Indian conglomerate controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, has significant exposure to the financial system of the United States, where it operates some subsidiaries that are linked to its oil and telecom businesses among others. Reliance has not increased oil purchases from Venezuela, the company said in response to a Reuters email seeking comment. In 2012 Reliance, Venezuela's key oil client, signed a 15-year deal to buy between 300,000-400,000 barrels per day (bpd) of heavy oil from PDVSA. Ship tracking data obtained by Reuters showed that Reliance averages purchase from Venezuela were below 300,000 bpd in 2018 and in January this year. "Our U.S. subsidiary has completely stopped all business with Venezuela's state-owned oil company, PDVSA, and its global parent has not increased crude purchases," it said. The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump imposed sweeping sanctions on PDVSA in January, aimed at severely curbing the OPEC member's crude exports to the United States to pressure socialist President Nicolas Maduro to step down. "Since the U.S. government imposed sanctions on the government of Venezuela in late January 2019, Reliance Industries Ltd has been in close contact with representatives from the U.S. State Department to ensure full compliance," Reliance said. Story continues The Indian market is crucial for Venezuelas economy because it has historically been the second-largest cash-paying customer for the OPEC countrys crude, behind the United States. "We will continue a constructive dialogue with the U.S. government to ensure Reliance remains in compliance," it said. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met India's Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale on Monday and discussed India's purchases of oil from the Maduro-led government. "We are asking the same thing of India as we are of every country: do not be the economic lifeline for the Maduro regime," Pompeo said. (Reporting by Nidhi Verma; editing by David Evans and Emelia Sithole-Matarise) RenaissanceRe Holdings Ltd. RNR recently received the pending regulatory approvals for the buyout of Tokio Marine Holdings, Inc.'s reinsurance platform - Tokio Millennium Re AG and Tokio Millennium Re (UK) Limited (TMR). With this deal, RenaissanceRe will be able to penetrate into the reinsurance market further. The acquisition will also increase its scale, widen the reach and enhance its ability to deliver core strengths to a wider customer base. Per the terms of the transaction, Tokio Marine will receive 1.02x, the tangible book value of TMR, delivered to RenaissanceRe at closing. As declared earlier by the company, Tokio Marine would get around $1.5 billion in total consideration, consisting $1.22 billion in cash and $250 million of RenaissanceRe common shares. The cash will be funded through the companys available resources and a prospective pre-closing payout from TMR. Tokio Marine has earlier agreed to provide a $500-million adverse development cover to RenaissanceRe, which will protect TMRs stated reserves at closing including unearned premium reserves. Moreover, Tokio Marine and RenaissanceRe will enter into an agreement with which both will be able to boost business relationship and easily cooperate on a portion of the international reinsurance buyouts of Tokio Marine and its associates. Notably, TMR will also gain traction from the acquirers superior risk selection capabilities. The acquirer expects the closure of the acquisition contract to be immediately accretive to its book value per share, tangible book value, operating earnings and operating return on equity. RenaissanceRe also hopes to improve TMRs combined ratio on completion of this deal. The company has been purchasing and expanding businesses with scope for growth. It acquired Platinum Underwriters, which helped strengthening its U.S. Specialty and Casualty reinsurance platform. Other examples of the companys strategic investments include Tower Hill Companies, Essent Group Ltd. and Trupanion Inc. We expect such tactical efforts to enable the company to focus on and broaden its core operating business. Given the insurance industrys sturdy capital level, there has been a spate of acquisitions in the space of late. Recently, Beecher Carlson Insurance Services, LLC, a subsidiary of Brown & Brown, Inc. BRO, has purchased certain assets of Donald P. Pipino Company. The transaction will not only aid the insurance broker to enhance its service portfolio but also provide a wide range of resources and extended service plus consulting capabilities to its clients. Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. AJG has acquired Interstate Insurance Underwriters to drive its Risk Placement Services in northern Louisiana. Cincinnati Financial Corporation CINF recently concluded the takeover of MSP Underwriting Limited, a reputed global specialty underwriter and a unit of Munich Re. Shares of this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company have rallied 15% in a years time, underperforming its industrys rise of 18.3%. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Story continues Zacks' Top 10 Stocks for 2019 In addition to the stocks discussed above, wouldn't you like to know about our 10 finest buy-and-holds for the year? From more than 4,000 companies covered by the Zacks Rank, these 10 were picked by a process that consistently beats the market. Even during 2018 while the market dropped -5.2%, our Top 10s were up well into double-digits. And during bullish 2012 2017, they soared far above the market's +126.3%, reaching +181.9%. This year, the portfolio features a player that thrives on volatility, an AI comer, and a dynamic tech company that helps doctors deliver better patient outcomes at lower costs. See Stocks Today >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Brown & Brown, Inc. (BRO) : Free Stock Analysis Report Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. (AJG) : Free Stock Analysis Report RenaissanceRe Holdings Ltd. (RNR) : Free Stock Analysis Report Cincinnati Financial Corporation (CINF) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research (Identifies Temasek as Singapore's state investor, not sovereign wealth fund) SAO PAULO, March 12 (Reuters) - Shareholders in Brazilian restaurant chain BK Brasil will sell up to 33.4 million shares in an offering, the company, which owns the Burger King brand in the country, said in a filing on Tuesday. Considering the closing price on Tuesday, the offering may reach up to 750 million reais ($196.66 million), representing a stake of 14.8 percent in the company. It does not includes over-allotments that may be sold. Pricing will be set on March 21, and the offer will be restricted to professional investors. Only shareholders such as asset managers Vinci Partners and Capital Group and Singapore's state investor Temasek Holdings Ltd are selling part of their stakes, and the company itself will not raise cash. The investment banking units of Itau Unibanco Holding SA , Bank of America Corp and Banco BTG Pactual SA will manage the offering. ($1 = 3.8136 reais) (Reporting by Tatiana Bautzer Editing by James Dalgleish) (Repeats story published late on Tuesday, with no change to text) By Anshuman Daga and Alun John SINGAPORE/HONG KONG, March 12 (Reuters) - Singapore Exchange Ltd, which generates half of its revenues from derivatives business, could see a dent in its earnings following a move by the Hong Kong exchange operator to launch Chinese A-share futures contracts, analysts said. Shares in SGX fell 1.6 percent on Tuesday after slumping 3.7 percent in the previous session when it clocked the worst slide in 13 months. On Monday, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) unveiled a deal with MSCI to provide futures contracts on the MSCI China A Index, putting it in direct competition with SGX - a leading venue for offshore investors to track Chinese A-shares via its FTSE China A50 contracts. HKEX has not said when it will launch the futures contracts, but the move will end SGX's dominance on offshore derivatives based on Chinese mainland shares. "SGX's China A50 and HKEX's new futures are definitely competing products and we could see some migration away from Singapore to Hong Kong," said Michael Wu, an analyst at research firm Morningstar, but noting this shift would be more nuanced than institutions moving all their trading from one exchange to the other. SGX is a major venue for international investors to hedge their exposure to the Chinese market. Its suite of equity, commodities and forex derivative products have helped power earnings growth, despite a subdued performance in its cash equities business. But HKEX's China stock futures may be the first of a series of other competing products it is planning, as according to the bourse's recent strategy document it is planning to launch new commodities and fixed income and currencies products to build a renminbi-based derivatives market. In the quarter ended December, SGX's derivatives revenue jumped 35 percent to account for half its total revenue. Credit Suisse analyst Rikin Shah highlighted in a report that SGX's FTSE China A50 contracts were the biggest contributor to SGX's derivatives business, accounting for around 40 percent of its total derivatives volume. Story continues Detailing the impact on SGX's profitability under different scenarios, Shah estimated that a 30 percent decline in A50 derivatives contracts could hurt SGX's net profit by 9.2 percent and revenue by 5.4 percent. HKEX's new futures contracts, subject to regulatory approval, comes as SGX struggles to attract equity listings from large companies, excluding real estate investment trusts. SGX also had a dispute with the National Stock Exchange of India last year over the trading of its flagship Indian equity derivatives. In an email on Tuesday, SGX welcomed steps to support China's internationalisation and increasing investor access to Asia's most important emerging market but said it was the main global venue to trade Chinese assets. "SGX is recognised globally as the one-stop, multi-asset platform to trade Chinese assets and manage risks comprehensively, across equities, currencies and commodities," it said. (Reporting by Anshuman Daga in SINGAPORE, and Alun John in HONG KONG; Additional reporting by Noah Sin in HONG KONG Editing by Jacqueline Wong) A combination of photographs shows people using automated teller machines (ATMs) at Australia's "Big Four" banks - Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd (bottom R), Commonwealth Bank of Australia (top R), National Australia Bank Ltd (bottom L) and Westpac Banking Corp (top L). REUTERS/Staff/Files By Paulina Duran and Byron Kaye SYDNEY (Reuters) - Investors are shorting second-tier Australian banks while the majors enjoy their biggest rally in three years, as the market weighs up the long-term impact of a public inquiry that exposed widespread misconduct in the financial sector last year. The capital shift shows investors believe higher regulatory costs will hurt smaller lenders more than the big four market leaders, whose business models - if not their reputations - emerged largely unscathed from the year-long inquiry. Short bets on regional lenders Bendigo and Adelaide Bank and Bank of Queensland spiked over a fifth in the weeks since the inquiry delivered its final report on Feb. 1, Refinitiv data shows. Their shares had already fallen about 15 percent in the same period. Investors are instead putting money on the larger banks' ability to safeguard profitability in an environment of record low mortgage growth and falling house prices. "The regional banks will struggle to compete with the major banks," said Azib Khan, from stockbroker Morgans Financial Ltd. As the government-backed independent inquiry known as a Royal Commission continued through most of 2018, analysts feared it would result in anything from enforced divestments to strict controls over how much a bank could lend. But its final recommendations focused mostly on cultural changes, sparing the big lenders the prospect of tougher laws. The inquiry wiped A$72 billion ($51 billion) from the combined valuation of the top four banks - Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank and Westpac Banking Corp - from its February 2018 start to the last trading week of 2018, amid constant headlines about fee-gouging, cavalier sales tactics and poor governance. Since then, their shares have clawed back A$50 billion. The country's biggest lender, Commonwealth Bank, is now only 4 percent below its pre-inquiry level. ANZ's shares have risen 12 percent in the four weeks since the inquiry delivered its final report last month, their biggest one-month leap since March 2016 and within 5 percentage points of full recovery. Story continues While the inquiry found the smaller lenders generally had behaved better than their bigger rivals, they have suffered sharper falls in lending growth and profitability in the wake of the Royal Commission. "It's harder for them to absorb the extra regulatory costs, and they have a lower credit rating than the majors and that means that they've got a higher cost of funding," Khan said. Recent updates from Bank of Queensland and Bendigo included the banks' expectations of higher regulatory costs, highlighting the disadvantages of the smaller lenders. With home loan growth of just 1 percent during the first half of the financial year, Bendigo reported below-expectation profit and flagged higher regulatory spending in the second half. Bank of Queensland also flagged lower half-yearly earnings and warned the second half of the year would be challenging. "The increase in compliance costs and expensive funding will affect the smaller banks more than the larger banks," said Sean Sequeira, chief investment officer at Alleron Investment Management. Sequeira said that while his fund did not hold short positions in the banks, he agreed with the short call on Bendigo. "They have a portfolio of reverse mortgages that leaves them with a larger exposure to property than banks with standard loan portfolios, which concerns us given the current weakness in housing." ($1 = 1.4148 Australian dollars) (Reporting by Paulina Duran and Byron Kaye; Editing by Stephen Coates) (Bloomberg) -- Spotify Technology SA latest complaint against Apple Inc. highlights the tensions that arise when a hardware powerhouse starts competing with companies that helped drive the appeal of its products in the first place. Spotify on Wednesday demanded that Apple should be probed by the European Unions powerful antitrust agency over how it allegedly squeezes rival music streaming services. Whether intentional or not, Spotifys approach to reshaping the music industry was -- for the most part -- subtle enough to not draw major concern from Apple. Its software has been a mainstay on the American companys platforms since a desktop app was released for the Mac in 2007. The iPhone app arrived in 2009, and today support extends also to the iPad and Apple Watch. But it was an event in 2010 that fundamentally changed Spotifys ability to compete with Apple for the attention of music lovers, and it was a something Apple itself instigated. Previously, third-party apps could not "run in the background." This meant if you started playing music on Spotify and switched to reading email, Spotify would be forced to stop playing. This wasnt so with Apples music app: it was allowed to multi-task. When Apple announced in June 2010 that its iOS 4 operating system would let third-party developers build multi-tasking features into their software, Spotify could update its app to mirror the functionality of its biggest rival. It did so within a week of iOS 4 being released to the public. It created parity between the competing products. Apple and Spotify both had music apps that gave access to millions of songs, supported background playback, and let users download tracks for offline listening. The difference was that Apple charged about the same for one album download as Spotify charged for a month of limitless access to an entire catalog. Spotify grew into a $26.2 billion company, building up 100 million paying subscribers worldwide, and all but killed off the buy-to-own download model that Steve Jobs pioneered in 2003 with the launch of the iTunes Music Store. Story continues Apple has been aggressively catching up. When it launched Apple Music in 2015, it took advantage of a massive install base of iPhones, iPads and Macs, which all come pre-installed with its music software. It also pulled on its vast cash reserves to subsidize three-month free trials for new sign-ups and discounts for families and students. By January this year, Apple reported its streaming service had 50 million paid users. While a change to Apples operating system allowed Spotify to compete, the Swedish company now doesnt want to fund its rival resurgence. The Spotify app can be downloaded for free from Apples app store, but to subscribe to the premium paid-for service a user needs to navigate to a separate web browser and manually register. This is because Spotify doesnt want Apple to take the 30-percent cut from subscriptions that purchases within the App Store are subject to. Its the same reason e-books cant be purchased directly within Amazon.com Inc.s Kindle app on the iPhone. Once Apple became a platform provider, but also a direct competitor, their incentive to disadvantage rival services, like Spotify, became even greater and their restrictions started to become more frequent and extreme, Horacio Gutierrez, Spotifys general counsel, told journalists in a briefing in Brussels on Wednesday. --With assistance from Stephanie Bodoni. To contact the reporter on this story: Nate Lanxon in London at nlanxon@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Giles Turner at gturner35@bloomberg.net, Peter Chapman For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com 2019 Bloomberg L.P. Username: Password: or Register Back to Forum Reply to This post Post New Thread Thread Rating: 1 Vote(s) - 5 Average 1 2 3 4 5 Page: 1 2 Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ electrical LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 491337 03-13-2019 10:51 PM Post: #1 Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ electrical Advertisement Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ electrical grid Maduro declares overcome the electric "attack" and announces the creation of a commission to investigate it By: Actualidad.RT / Aporrea.org | Tuesday, 03/12/2019 08:22 PM translated from Spanish March 12, 2019 - The Venezuelan constitutional president, Nicolas Maduro, once again accused the US government. to be responsible for the attack on the electricity supply, which caused a blackout throughout the country since last Thursday, March 7. "They are behind this attack, because they believed that from this way they would achieve their political objectives," Maduro said Tuesday from the Presidential Command Post. According to the president, the cyberattack was directed from two American cities: Houston and Chicago. "We are facing some barbarians: the barbarian Donald Trump, the White House and their internal puppets who believe that politics has no limit," he said. The president said that despite the threats, peace will prevail in Venezuela and that "no one will give a coup d'etat". New relations with the United States After the rupture of diplomatic relations between the US Venezuela and the 72-hour period that gave the US diplomatic staff to leave the country, Maduro announced his desire to have a respectful relationship with the White House in the future and left the doors open to a negotiation process between the two countries . "I want the US to have an office of interests to attend to all its affairs in Caracas and I want Venezuela to have an office of interests in Washington," the president said after assuring that he believes in peace and diplomacy. -snip- https://www.aporrea.org/energia/n339350.html Ruh roe...busted.Maduro declares overcome the electric "attack" and announces the creation of a commission to investigate itBy: Actualidad.RT / Aporrea.org | Tuesday, 03/12/2019 08:22 PMtranslated from SpanishMarch 12, 2019 - The Venezuelan constitutional president, Nicolas Maduro, once again accused the US government. to be responsible for the attack on the electricity supply, which caused a blackout throughout the country since last Thursday, March 7."They are behind this attack, because they believed that from this way they would achieve their political objectives," Maduro said Tuesday from the Presidential Command Post.According to the president, the cyberattack was directed from two American cities: Houston and Chicago."We are facing some barbarians: the barbarian Donald Trump, the White House and their internal puppets who believe that politics has no limit," he said.The president said that despite the threats, peace will prevail in Venezuela and that "no one will give a coup d'etat".New relations with the United StatesAfter the rupture of diplomatic relations between the US Venezuela and the 72-hour period that gave the US diplomatic staff to leave the country, Maduro announced his desire to have a respectful relationship with the White House in the future and left the doors open to a negotiation process between the two countries ."I want the US to have an office of interests to attend to all its affairs in Caracas and I want Venezuela to have an office of interests in Washington," the president said after assuring that he believes in peace and diplomacy.-snip- LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 438421 03-13-2019 10:52 PM Post: #2 RE: Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ e... Good. USA, guilty of yet more war crimes. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 424701 03-13-2019 11:52 PM Post: #3 RE: Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ e... Right. Another communist dictator who destroyed his country blaming America. Get Shaun Penn over there to blow you. Prince Vegeta Knowledge and Power User ID: 456214 03-13-2019 11:59 PM Posts: 2,726 Post: #4 RE: Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ e... Putin, Castro, and the Ayatollahs...such reliable sources of information... I have no time for weaklings. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 461961 03-14-2019 12:02 AM Post: #5 RE: Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ e... LoP Guest Wrote: (03-13-2019 10:52 PM) Good. USA, guilty of yet more war crimes. Well... If they can't afford to feed the people, they can't afford to maintain the electrical grid. These things don't take care of themselves. I kind of doubt that Venezuela has the kind of grid that can be cyber attacked. Doubt that any of their grid is less than 20 or 30 years old (most of it predates the Internet). But hey keep dreaming. Well...If they can't afford to feed the people, they can't afford to maintain the electrical grid.These things don't take care of themselves.I kind of doubt that Venezuela has the kind of grid that can be cyber attacked.Doubt that any of their grid is less than 20 or 30 years old (most of it predates the Internet).But hey keep dreaming. oxomoro lop guest User ID: 488975 03-14-2019 12:53 AM Post: #6 RE: Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ e... Fight the Power Wrote: (03-13-2019 11:59 PM) Putin, Castro, and the Ayatollahs...such reliable sources of information... says the ex-dagger wielding Debka boy pretending being hot US-patriotic, permanent warmongering and hate-spewing.. says the ex-dagger wielding Debka boypretending being hot US-patriotic,permanent warmongering and hate-spewing.. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 438421 03-14-2019 01:15 AM Post: #7 RE: Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ e... LoP Guest Wrote: (03-14-2019 12:02 AM) LoP Guest Wrote: (03-13-2019 10:52 PM) Good. USA, guilty of yet more war crimes. Well... If they can't afford to feed the people, they can't afford to maintain the electrical grid. These things don't take care of themselves. I kind of doubt that Venezuela has the kind of grid that can be cyber attacked. Doubt that any of their grid is less than 20 or 30 years old (most of it predates the Internet). But hey keep dreaming. Venezuela has the most modern power grid in the entire region. Venezuela has the most modern power grid in the entire region. Bao2 Banned User ID: 422170 03-14-2019 02:11 AM Posts: 12,562 Post: #8 RE: Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ e... Time to make CIA disappear it seems!!! Good news LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 493037 03-14-2019 02:15 AM Post: #9 RE: Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ e... Russia aided in getting the power turned back on, and guards are watching the power lines. However, I imagine that Venezuela can look forward to more tomfoolery from the U.S. in order to cripple that country more than the power outage did. Maduro is up against some ruthless honchos who don't give a fig about human life. Bao2 Banned User ID: 422170 03-14-2019 02:17 AM Posts: 12,562 Post: #10 RE: Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ e... Fight the Power Wrote: (03-13-2019 11:59 PM) Putin, Castro, and the Ayatollahs...such reliable sources of information... the cyberattack was directed from two American cities: Houston and Chicago. the cyberattack was directed from two American cities: Houston and Chicago. (This post was last modified: 03-14-2019 02:17 AM by Bao2 .) LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 493037 03-14-2019 02:45 AM Post: #11 RE: Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ e... More news on the Venezuelan front: After Maduro busted two spooks while they were attempting to re-plant viruses at Guri, and even got their code and took them into custody, America put out a blanket statement that was basically a declaration that the U.S. military will begin strikes against Venezuela in the near future. Here is that statement: "The U.S. will withdraw all remaining personnel from @usembassyVE this week. This decision reflects the deteriorating situation in #Venezuela as well as the conclusion that the presence of U.S. diplomatic staff at the embassy has become a constraint on U.S. policy." So now that the U.S. knows it is busted, and Maduro has the American spooks in detainment along with their virus code, suddenly having embassy staff in Venezuela amounts to a "constraint on U.S. policy" Jim Stone, Freelance Journalist http://Using IPs instead of domains is not allowed/.xo3.html Stay tuned for the next episode. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 438421 03-14-2019 03:11 AM Post: #12 RE: Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ e... LoP Guest Wrote: (03-14-2019 02:45 AM) More news on the Venezuelan front: After Maduro busted two spooks while they were attempting to re-plant viruses at Guri, and even got their code and took them into custody, America put out a blanket statement that was basically a declaration that the U.S. military will begin strikes against Venezuela in the near future. Here is that statement: "The U.S. will withdraw all remaining personnel from @usembassyVE this week. This decision reflects the deteriorating situation in #Venezuela as well as the conclusion that the presence of U.S. diplomatic staff at the embassy has become a constraint on U.S. policy." So now that the U.S. knows it is busted, and Maduro has the American spooks in detainment along with their virus code, suddenly having embassy staff in Venezuela amounts to a "constraint on U.S. policy" Jim Stone, Freelance Journalist http://Using IPs instead of domains is not allowed/.xo3.html Stay tuned for the next episode. Great news.. let's hope they blow it wide open with evidence and that the criminals are brought to justice for their war crimes in a world court. Enough of this neocon fucking bullshit already. Great news.. let's hope they blow it wide open with evidence and that the criminals are brought to justice for their war crimes in a world court.Enough of this neocon fucking bullshit already. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 492848 03-14-2019 03:15 AM Post: #13 RE: Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ e... This is what happens to your country when it is taken over. Y jew supremacists. They turn your. Country into a global terrorist strike force. Thanks jews. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 438421 03-14-2019 03:21 AM Post: #14 RE: Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ e... LoP Guest Wrote: (03-14-2019 03:15 AM) This is what happens to your country when it is taken over. Y jew supremacists. They turn your. Country into a global terrorist strike force. Thanks jews. And this is what happens when your mom and dad are brother and sister^ Notice that many times when obvious American war crimes are exposed, some halfwit rolls in to blame the jews* This is designed to switch the narrative away from the real criminals. Every non-inbred person knows that America's foreign policy is and has been carried out by elected and unelected people of many backgrounds for decades. Nothing to do specifically with Jews, although there have certainly been some involved. And this is what happens when your mom and dad are brother and sister^Notice that many times when obvious American war crimes are exposed, some halfwit rolls in to blame the jews*This is designed to switch the narrative away from the real criminals.Every non-inbred person knows that America's foreign policy is and has been carried out by elected and unelected people of many backgrounds for decades. Nothing to do specifically with Jews, although there have certainly been some involved. LoP Guest lop guest User ID: 492848 03-14-2019 03:35 AM Post: #15 RE: Russia, Cuba and Iran will lead investigation into "US sabotage" of VZ e... LoP Guest Wrote: (03-14-2019 03:21 AM) LoP Guest Wrote: (03-14-2019 03:15 AM) This is what happens to your country when it is taken over. Y jew supremacists. They turn your. Country into a global terrorist strike force. Thanks jews. And this is what happens when your mom and dad are brother and sister^ Notice that many times when obvious American war crimes are exposed, some halfwit rolls in to blame the jews* This is designed to switch the narrative away from the real criminals. Every non-inbred person knows that America's foreign policy is and has been carried out by elected and unelected people of many backgrounds for decades. Nothing to do specifically with Jews, although there have certainly been some involved. Trump is a jew. He is controlled By Jews Kushner and bibi. Be filled his Cabinet with jew neocons. He.assigned jew terrorists to destroy and terrorize venuzueala. Cope harder schlomo. Trump is a jew. He is controlled By Jews Kushner and bibi. Be filled his Cabinet with jew neocons. He.assigned jew terrorists to destroy and terrorize venuzueala. Cope harder schlomo. Advertisement Back to Forum Reply to This post Post New Thread 3D-printed sushi, anyone? (image: Rob Pegoraro) AUSTINSXSW isnt just an extended talkfest. Attendees can take a break from this conferences archipelago of panels, keynotes and Q&As to wander the trade-show exhibits that fill most of the first floor of the convention center here, where the lineup of tech demos includes some strange sights. Sushi Singularity 3D-printed sushi isnt that crazy of an idea anymorecompanies have been shipping 3D printers that extrude food for several years now. But this concept from Open Meals, set to launch as a Tokyo restaurant next year, adds DNA testing to the recipe. The idea is that youd book a reservation, the place would send you a DNA testing kit, youd mail back a saliva sample and the restaurant would use that to craft sushi matched to your body. Project manager Roy Kaneko noted that the company needs to accelerate the printing time for its artfully rectilinear synthetic seafood from 30 minutes per piece to about 10 minutes. A cost that he estimated at "maybe around a thousand dollars per meal could be another obstacle, but Im sure at least some SXSW attendees would ante up. Firefly Alpha SXSW 2019 has everything, including this model rocket engine. (image: Rob Pegoraro) Firefly Aerospaces exhibit was easy to spot: Just look for the large payload fairing looming over its setup, then turn your attention to the model of a Lightning rocket engine below. This space startup, based in nearby Cedar Park, aims to launch satellites weighing up to 1,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit for $15 million, below such small-sat launch rivals as Rocket Lab, Virgin Galactic and the Northrop Grumman (NOC) subsidiary Orbital ATK. It says it can do that by building its rockets tanks and structures out of lightweight carbon-fiber composite, which in turn reduces the amount of propellant needed to send the Alpha and its payload to space. The company plans on a first launch in 2020. Temi If only the Temi robot doubled as a Roomba. (image: Rob Pegoraro) Temi is a household robot that you can think of as an Amazon (AMZN) Echo Show on wheels. It also sells for $1,999, but is temporarily discounted to $1,499. The Temi includes a touchscreen, a voice-driven personal-assistant app (which proved unable to respond to commands in the convention centers noisy environment) and cameras and microphones that let it host video calls and follow you around the house. One attendee, however, suggested that this device wont really live up to its potential until its base incorporates a Roomba floor-vacuuming robot. Comptics Story continues These sleeves are designed to provide haptic feedback to your arms while wearing a VR headset. (image: Rob Pegoraro) This experiment sponsored by Japans NTT uses wired sleeves to simulate touch along your arms. A demo offered on the show floor used that haptic feedback as an add-on to a virtual reality experience. But Im not sure thats a good idea. The demos attempts to simulate my floating in a mug of beer or a fireworks display felt more like little pin pricks than anything else. Then a system-error interlude had bugsas in, images of actual insectsraining down on me and feeling like they were landing on my arms. I do not need to repeat that moderately terrifying part of the demo ever again. NEC Code This project by NEC Code turns your iris into a piece of jewelry. (image: Rob Pegoraro) The table next to Comptics featured a different take on mashing up computing and biology. This project by NEC uses a scan of your irises to generate a distinct numeric code, which software then turns into a unique pattern of circles and semi-circles that you can have turned into jewelry, fabric or tableware. Umay Care These goggles are meant to warm your eyelids to help you relax. (image: Rob Pegoraro) I wish Id stopped by this exhibit after the Comptics demo. This company aims to offer "thermal meditation" in the form of a $279 contraption you place over your closed eyes to warm your eyelids. They tout that as a remedy for extended screen time. And, having had too much of that at SXSW, I had to try it. The Umays pods offered a gentle pulsing heat that I found oddly relaxing and not the same as having a warm cloth over my eyes. Incidentally, testing this allowed me to take one of my stranger selfies. Sienna the sloth Sienna the sloth made her SXSW debut at the Calm booth. (image: Rob Pegoraro) Calm, a meditation and sleep-therapy app for Android and iOS, fell back on a traditional and often-successful tactic to get some attention at big shows: Bringing an unusual animal. Sienna, a two-toed sloth, lounged across a small tree, gripping its branches with freakishly curved claws and eating bits of banana fed to her by a handler. A crowd gawked from a few feet away, but she appeared utterly oblivious to the hype--which after a few days of SXSW, seemed like its own luxury. More from Rob: Email Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com; follow him on Twitter at @robpegoraro. Thailand Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved a portal that would screen Initial Coin Offering projects (ICOs). The securities regulator told the Bangkok Post they interviewed roughly 7-8 portals for the job of selecting ICOs, conducting due diligence, reviewing smart contract codes, and verifying the know-your-customer process. Eventually, the SECs board of directors approved one ICO portal out of all. The commission refused to share any further details about the selected company, except that it was a non-Thailand venture. Archari Suppiroj, the SECs director of Fintech, confirmed that the commission had forwarded its selection to the relevant government agencies, including the Ministry of Commerce, for further consideration. She added that the ICO portal if approved by the government would list its first ICO deal for a public offering under the digital asset royal decree. Join CCN for $19.99 per month and get an ad-free version of CCN including discounts on future events and services. Support our journalists today. Click here to sign up. In Retrospective The approval comes as the SECs efforts to introduce a stable regulatory framework for startups that want to raise operational capital via digitized tokens sales. On May 14, 2018, the commission and Thailands Ministry of Finance amended an old securities bill to legalize the use of crypto assets. Per the new law, the SEC would approve an ICO Portal which would list licensed digital currency businesses. They include startups that would gain permission to launch security token offerings (STO). In their current format, Thailand laws do not permit companies to digitize securities and launch an STO. Ms. Sippiroj said that the SEC is yet to finalize the criteria for applications for STOs. Once the commission introduces a dedicated STO rulebook, startups would be able to apply for a securities operator license accordingly. Wallenius Wilhelmsen ASA (OB:WALWIL), which is in the shipping business, and is based in Norway, saw significant share price movement during recent months on the OB, rising to highs of NOK33.05 and falling to the lows of NOK27.4. Some share price movements can give investors a better opportunity to enter into the stock, and potentially buy at a lower price. A question to answer is whether Wallenius Wilhelmsens current trading price of NOK28.8 reflective of the actual value of the small-cap? Or is it currently undervalued, providing us with the opportunity to buy? Lets take a look at Wallenius Wilhelmsens outlook and value based on the most recent financial data to see if there are any catalysts for a price change. View our latest analysis for Wallenius Wilhelmsen What is Wallenius Wilhelmsen worth? Wallenius Wilhelmsen appears to be overvalued according to my relative valuation model. In this instance, Ive used the price-to-earnings (PE) ratio given that there is not enough information to reliably forecast the stocks cash flows. I find that Wallenius Wilhelmsens ratio of 27.15x is above its peer average of 9.83x, which suggests the stock is overvalued compared to the Shipping industry. If you like the stock, you may want to keep an eye out for a potential price decline in the future. Since Wallenius Wilhelmsens share price is quite volatile, this could mean it can sink lower (or rise even further) in the future, giving us another chance to invest. This is based on its high beta, which is a good indicator for how much the stock moves relative to the rest of the market. What kind of growth will Wallenius Wilhelmsen generate? OB:WALWIL Past and Future Earnings, March 13th 2019 Investors looking for growth in their portfolio may want to consider the prospects of a company before buying its shares. Although value investors would argue that its the intrinsic value relative to the price that matter the most, a more compelling investment thesis would be high growth potential at a cheap price. With profit expected to more than double over the next couple of years, the future seems bright for Wallenius Wilhelmsen. It looks like higher cash flow is on the cards for the stock, which should feed into a higher share valuation. Story continues What this means for you: Are you a shareholder? WALWILs optimistic future growth appears to have been factored into the current share price, with shares trading above its fair value. At this current price, shareholders may be asking a different question should I sell? If you believe WALWIL should trade below its current price, selling high and buying it back up again when its price falls towards its real value can be profitable. But before you make this decision, take a look at whether its fundamentals have changed. Are you a potential investor? If youve been keeping an eye on WALWIL for a while, now may not be the best time to enter into the stock. The price has surpassed its industry peers, which means it is likely that there is no more upside from mispricing. However, the positive outlook is encouraging for WALWIL, which means its worth diving deeper into other factors in order to take advantage of the next price drop. Price is just the tip of the iceberg. Dig deeper into what truly matters the fundamentals before you make a decision on Wallenius Wilhelmsen. You can find everything you need to know about Wallenius Wilhelmsen in the latest infographic research report. If you are no longer interested in Wallenius Wilhelmsen, you can use our free platform to see my list of over 50 other stocks with a high growth potential. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. (Bloomberg) -- Top U.S. universities are shunning research money from Huawei Technologies Co. amid pressure from Congress and the Trump administration to limit dealings with the Chinese telecommunications-equipment maker over national security concerns. Princeton University, Stanford University, Ohio State University and the University of California at Berkeley all say they are cutting or reducing ties to Huawei. The company gave $10.6 million in gifts and contracts to nine U.S. schools for technology and communications programs from 2012 to 2018, according to the Education Department. More and more of our universities have cut their ties, said Tobin Smith, vice president at the Association of American Universities that represents 62 research institutions. In September, the FBI held a major summit with university presidents in Washington, Smith said. The university retreats show how pressure surrounding Huawei is quietly affecting research institutions, even as U.S. authorities mount an aggressive public campaign for companies and European allies to avoid doing business with the company. Federal prosecutors indicted the company in January on charges of trade-secret theft, and its chief financial officer was arrested in Canada on U.S. accusations of busting sanctions placed on Iran. U.S. colleges and universities operate under an ethos of open, worldwide intellectual exchange. They strive to protect academic freedom from government, political and corporate influence and try to resist pressure to rupture research funding and relationships. But in Huaweis case, some universities have submitted -- albeit reluctantly. Huawei has been a good partner. But we take very seriously the federal indictments about the companys business practices, Berkeley Vice Chancellor for Research Randy Katz said in an interview. It really is a disservice to the technology companies in the United States and Europe, and to the researchers at universities that are in the forefront of new scientific and technical developments in this field, to be locked out of the ability to interact with companies like Huawei, Katz said. Were cutting ourselves off from the opportunity to learn. Story continues U.S. officials say Huawei may pose a threat of espionage, in part because it must under Chinese law respond to Beijings security agencies. The Shenzhen-based company rejects such assertions, saying no evidence has been presented of any misdeeds. Accusations against the company may be political in nature, a lawyer for Huaweis chief financial officer, who is fighting extradition from Vancouver to the U.S., told a Canadian court March 6. President Donald Trumps administration has devoted high-level attention to Huaweis role at universities. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and intelligence agencies briefed Education Department staff on July 18 in the White House Situation Room, according to a Nov. 9 letter to lawmakers from Diane Auer Jones, Educations principal deputy under secretary. Education Department spokesman Jim Bradshaw declined to comment. The FBI has met with officials from academia as part of our ongoing engagement on national security matters, according to statement from the agency. Theyre very careful not to say you should or shouldnt deal with this company, Smith, with the Association of American Universities, said. But they help you to assess the risk. Members of Congress are also taking an interest. Representative Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican, on Tuesday announced legislation to have intelligence agencies monitor sensitive university research by Huawei, ZTE as well as Confucius Institutes -- Chinese-funded groups that promote language and culture on about 100 U.S. campuses. Huawei, ZTE and Confucius Institutes are snakes in the grass, Banks said. More and more of our colleagues are committed to cutting the heads off those snakes and preventing them from infiltrating our academic institutions, our telecom infrastructure, because of the serious nature of these threats. Huawei invites research scholars to participate in its Huawei Innovation Research Program, which provides funding ranging from $30,000 to $70,000 for work in communication technology, computer science, engineering, and related fields. The program has over 1,000 collaboration partners, including the University of Cambridge, the National University of Singapore and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, according to its web page. Chase Skinner, a spokesman for Huawei, didnt respond to repeated inquiries by email and telephone over several days. Princeton, Stanford Princeton took in two gifts from Huawei in 2017 totaling $274,990, according to the Education Department. The funds went to support two computer-science research projects, said Michael Hotchkiss, a spokesman for the school in Princeton, New Jersey. We decided in July 2018 not to accept any new gifts from the company, Hotchkiss said in an email. In January 2019, we let Huawei know we would not accept the third and final $150,000 installment of a gift in support of computer-science research, which was our only active Huawei-supported project. There are no Huawei-funded projects at the university now. Stanford has established a moratorium on new engagements, gifts, affiliate membership fees, and other support from Huawei, E.J. Miranda, a spokesman, said in an email. We have undertaken this pause out of an abundance of caution and are aware of nothing inappropriate arising from past support that Huawei has provided to Stanford. Ohio to Oxford Ohio State received $1.2 million from Huawei, according to the Education Department. These gifts and contracts funded basic research in computer science engineering and electrical and computer engineering, Ben Johnson, an Ohio State spokesman, said in an email. We are in the process of closing out the final contract, and are not accepting or pursuing any other gifts or contracts from Huawei. U.S. universities arent alone in rethinking Huawei connections. Oxford University in England decided in January not to pursue new funding from Huawei, Stephen Rouse, head of university communications, said in an email. Two existing research projects with a combined funding from Huawei of about $900,000 will continue, Rouse said. Huawei funds are but a fraction of overall foreign giving to U.S. colleges and universities, which totaled $9.2 billion over the past six years, the Education Department found. The Education Departments list doesnt capture all Huawei funding of higher education. For instance, Berkeley says it had $7.8 million in multi-year commitments with Huawei in the middle of 2018, compared with a total of $1.4 million in gifts that the Education Department counts. Severity of Accusations At Berkeley, Katz, the vice chancellor, in a Jan. 30 letter told colleagues the school will not enter into or discuss new research collaborations while charges against Huawei are before the courts. The severity of these accusations raises questions and concerns that only our judicial system can address, Katz said in the letter. Berkeley will honor existing agreements, none of which involve sensitive technological secrets, Katz said in the letter. The fate of Huawei-funded research has spurred debate among U.S. educators. We always talk about finding the right balance between science and security, Smith said. In light of the current climate, I think we all need to assess what that balance is. To contact the reporter on this story: Todd Shields in Washington at tshields3@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jon Morgan at jmorgan97@bloomberg.net, Elizabeth Wasserman For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com 2019 Bloomberg L.P. Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction (contest now closed) This contest is now closed. Check back here in mid-February 2023! The Malahat Review invites emerging short-story writers to enter the Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction, for which one prize of $CAN 1,000 is awarded. Eligible authors have yet to publish their fiction in book form (a book is defined to have a length of 48 pages or more). Publication in literary magazines is acceptable. The contest is open to Canadian and international writers anywhere in the world, with a final deadline of 11:59pm (PDT) on 5 May 2021. All entries are judged anonymously, and the winning story will be published in the magazine's fall 2021 issue. As a complement to the Novella and Long Poem prizes, the Far Horizons Awards are short-form contests, with the Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction given during odd years and the Far Horizons Award for Poetry in even years. *Mailed or emailed contest submissions are no longer accepted. Please read the instructions below to find out how to submit your contest entries through Submittable.* 2021 Deadline The deadline for the Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction contest is May 5, 2021 at 11:59pm PDT. Read about our 2019 winner: Jason Jobin. Judge Meet the judge for the 2021 contest: Francine Cunningham Get inspired! Read an interview with Francine Cunningham to find out what she's looking for in a winning story. Book Prize In addition to the $1000 prize, we're giving away books to one lucky contest entrant! All you have to do is submit your work to the contest, and you'll be automatically entered to win the book prize. The Hush Sisters by Gerard Collins Adam's Tree by Gloria Mehlmann Travellers May Still Return by Michael Kenyon Even Weirder Than Before by Susie Taylor Guidelines Eligible writers have yet to publish their fiction in book form and may submit one short story per entry. Writers who have self-published a book of fiction are considered to have published their fiction in book form and are therefore ineligible to enter the Far Horizons Award contest. You are, however, welcome to enter your work in our Open Season Awards. The story must not exceed 3,500 words. 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Digital subscriptions and digital/print bundle subscriptions are not available through any of the magazine's contests. Additional Entries To receive the reduced entry fee(s) of $CAN 15.00, any additional entries must be paid for at the same time as the first entry; such additional entries should be submitted online within 24 hours of the initial submission. The same guidelines apply to additional entries as to the initial submission . Eligible Entries No work already published (even if only excerpted, or even if revised since original publication), already accepted for publication, or simultaneously submitted elsewhere is eligible for consideration. The Malahat Review considers any appearance in print or online to be a publication, whether the form of publication be a newspaper, newsletter, magazine, anthology, chapbook, book, website, personal website or blog, Twitter, Facebook, or other suchlike forum for public circulation. 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How to Pay Payment must be made online through The Malahat Review Store (if you do not have a credit card, you can pay by cheque or money order: see below ). must be made through (if you do not have a credit card, you can ). Unless you are paying by cheque or money order, you must pay the entry fees before making your submission , since you must include your ORDER # with your submission . , since you must . If you are unable to pay by credit card, you can mail a cheque or money order (made out to The Malahat Review) in $CAN or $US to The Malahat Review, McPherson Library, University of Victoria, PO Box 1800, Stn CSC, Victoria, BC, V8W 3H5, Canada. (made out to The Malahat Review) in $CAN or $US to The Malahat Review, McPherson Library, University of Victoria, PO Box 1800, Stn CSC, Victoria, BC, V8W 3H5, Canada. If paying by cheque or money order, you must indicate "cheque" or "money order" as required on the submission form. 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Click the "Submit" image below and follow the instructions in order to submit to the Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction contest on Submittable: Previous Winners (Adds France to investigate black boxes, paragraphs 16-17; Panama's Copa suspends flights; BREAKINGVIEWS-Belated 737 action marks U.S. soft power erosion) * New evidence, satellite data led to grounding of planes * Boeing says supports temporarily grounding flights * Airlines work to re-book passengers * Boeing, Southwest shares down but off lows * Black boxes to be analysed in France By David Shepardson WASHINGTON, March 13 (Reuters) - The United States on Wednesday joined Europe, China and other countries in grounding Boeing Co's 737 MAX jets, because of safety concerns after an Ethiopian Airlines plane crash that killed 157 people, the second disaster involving the 737 in less than five months. The world's biggest planemaker is facing its most serious crisis in years, as the decades-old 737 program, one of its most reliable sources of cash and profits, takes a severe blow to its prestige. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) cited new satellite data and evidence from the scene of Sunday's crash near Addis Ababa for its decision to ground the planes. It was the second time the FAA has halted flights of a Boeing plane in six years. It had grounded the 787 Dreamliner in 2013 because of problems with smoking batteries. Shares of the Seattle-based company ended up 0.5 percent at $377.14, recovering from a more than 3 percent fall in the afternoon when the FAA announcement was made. Tim Ghriskey, chief investment strategist at Inverness Counsel in New York, said the grounding gives Boeing time to address any problems and not face another potential disaster. U.S. airlines that operate the 737 MAX, Southwest Airlines Co, American Airlines Group Inc and United Airlines, said they were working to re-book passengers. Southwest is the world's largest operator of the 737 MAX 8 with 34 jets, while American flies 24 MAX 8s and United 14 MAX 9s. Shares of Southwest fell 0.4 percent. "The agency made this decision as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analysed today," the FAA said in a statement, shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump announced the planes would be grounded. Story continues "This evidence, together with newly refined satellite data available to FAA this morning, led to this decision." The grounding will remain in effect as the FAA investigates. Boeing, which maintained that its planes were safe to fly, said in a statement that it supported the move to temporarily ground 737 MAX flights. "Boeing has determined - out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircrafts safety - to recommend to the FAA the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of 371 737 MAX aircraft." The still-unexplained crash followed another involving a Boeing 737 MAX in Indonesia five months ago that killed 189 people. Although there is no proof of any link, the twin disasters have spooked passengers. France's air accident investigation agency BEA will analyze black-box cockpit voice and data recorders from the crashed plane, a spokesman said. The French announcement resolved uncertainty over the fate of the two recorders after Germany's BFU said it had declined a request to handle them because it could not process the new type of recorder used on the 737 MAX jets, in service since 2017. Travel website Kayak was making changes to let customers exclude specific aircraft types from searches, and booking sites were looking to reroute passengers. The grounding was welcomed by air workers in the United States. John Samuelsen, international president of the Transport Workers Union of America, which represents aviation workers and flight attendants, said the grounding of the fleet was right "both for air travellers and aviation workers." NEW SATELLITE DATA Canada also grounded 737 MAX jets on Wednesday, saying satellite data suggested similarities to the previous crash involving the same plane model in October. U.S.-based aircraft-tracking firm Aireon provided the satellite data to the FAA, Transport Canada and several other authorities, company spokeswoman Jessie Hillenbrand said. Aireon's space-based system can monitor data from aircraft equipped with Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) transponders. The data is considered less detailed than that in black boxes, which look at systems running inside the plane. Ethiopian Airlines spokesman Asrat Begashaw said it was still unclear what happened on Sunday, but its pilot had reported control issues as opposed to external factors such as birds. "The pilot reported flight control problems and requested to turn back. In fact he was allowed to turn back," he said. The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Democrat Peter DeFazio, called for a probe into why the 737 MAX received certification to fly. "There must be a rigorous investigation into why the aircraft, which has critical safety systems that did not exist on prior models, was certified without requiring additional pilot training," he said. Panama's Copa Holdings said it would also suspend operations of its six Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft, but Latin America has largely left it up to carriers to make their own decisions. As of Wednesday night, regulators in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, the largest air travel markets in the region, had not forced the grounding of planes. (Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington, Kumerra Gemechu in Gora-Bokka, Ethiopia, David Ljunggren in Ottawa; Additional reporting by Duncan Miriri and Aaron Maasho in Addis Ababa; Doina Chiacu in Washington, Omar Mohammed and Maggie Fick in Nairobi; Tim Hepher in Paris; Jamie Freed in Singapore; Terje Solsvik in Oslo; Aditi Shah in Mumbai; Sanjana Shivdas in Bengaluru; Aleksandar Vasovic in Belgrade; Julie Gordon in Ottawa; Angela Moon in New York, Eric Johnson in Seattle and Tracy Rucinski in Chicago; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne, Frances Kerry, Bill Rigby and Alistair Bell Editing by Gareth Jones, Nick Zieminski and Grant McCool) WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of a U.S. Senate panel that oversees aviation issues said on Tuesday that he plans to hold hearings on the fatal crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets since October, and suggested it would be "prudent" to temporarily ground the planes. Senator Ted Cruz, the Republican who chairs a subcommittee on aviation and space, said it would be prudent for the United States to join other regulators "to temporarily ground 737 Max aircraft until the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) confirms the safety of these aircraft and their passengers." Cruz said he intends "to hold a hearing to investigate these crashes, determine their contributing factors, and ensure that the United States aviation industry remains the safest in the world." (Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Leslie Adler) (Adds details from U.S. lawmaker, Mexican official) WASHINGTON, March 12 (Reuters) - The United States is working on a plan to lift tariffs from Mexican and Canadian steel and aluminum but preserve the gains that domestic producers have received from the duties so far, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said on Tuesday. "What I'm trying to do is a have a practical solution to a real problem ... get rid of tariffs on these two, let them maintain their historic access to the U.S. market which I think will allow us to still maintain the benefit of the steel and aluminum program," he told the U.S. Senate Finance Committee at a hearing about the World Trade Organization. The United States imposed the "Section 232" tariffs on steel and aluminum nearly a year ago to protect domestic producers on national security grounds. A plan to lift tariffs on the metals from Canada and Mexico was once linked to the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement but ultimately was excluded from that deal. Since then, a number of U.S. lawmakers have said they did not believe the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) could win approval in Congress if the metals tariffs -- along with and retaliatory duties on U.S. farm and other products -- were left in place. Members of the New Democrat Coalition in the House of Representatives echoed a similar message in a meeting with Lighthizer later on Tuesday. "Some of us impressed the need to resolve 232 before we have a chance to move forward" on consideration of USMCA, said Representative Ron Kind, a pro-trade Democrat from Wisconsin. Kind added that Lighthizer expected to meet with Mexican and Canadian counterparts on the issue this week. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Trade Representatives office declined to comment, saying there were no scheduling announcements on the 232 issue. The United States has sought quotas on steel and aluminum in lieu of tariffs, but Canada and Mexico have resisted such restrictions, arguing that they pose no threat to U.S. national security. A Mexican official said talks were continuing. Story continues "Our position is that we should not have tariffs or quotas. We have to help the U.S. construct the narrative of why exclusion for Mexico is valid," added the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter and requested anonymity. Kind cautioned that the Trump administration would need to submit the USMCA enabling legislation soon to Congress so it could be considered before the August recess. After that, it could become caught up in another border wall funding fight in the fall and later the 2020 presidential election campaign, which would diminish its approval chances. "There's a lot of work and the clock's ticking," Kind added. (Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk, David Lawder, Chris Prentice, Alexandra Alper and Anthony Esposito; editing by Grant McCool and Tom Brown) By Paul Sandle LONDON, March 13 (Reuters) - Britain needs to overhaul its competition rules to tackle the dominance of tech giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon, and increase consumer choice, a government review said on Wednesday. A new competition unit with expertise in the sector should be set up, the independent review said, and innovation should be encouraged by giving people control over their own data so they could switch between rival services and platforms easily. Smaller companies should also have access to the data that social media platforms hold on their users, it recommended. Big tech has been criticised by politicians in the United States and in Europe in recent years over issues ranging from Facebook losing track of users' data to how Google ranks the results of searches. France, Italy, Britain and Spain have also proposed new digital taxes to narrow loopholes that allow large multinational firms to cut tax bills. Harvard professor Jason Furman, who chaired the British government review, said the digital sector had created substantial benefits but they had come at the cost of the increasing dominance of a few companies. "My panel is outlining a balanced proposal to give people more control over their data, give small businesses more of a chance to enter and thrive, and create more predictability for the large digital companies," he said on Wednesday. "These recommendations will deliver an economic boost driven by UK tech start-ups and innovation that will give consumers greater choice and protection." UK finance minister Philip Hammond, who will deliver a half-yearly update on the budget later on Wednesday, said he would set out government measures to ensure digital markets are competitive later this year. TechUK, which represents more than 900 tech companies that collectively employ 700,000 people, said the report contained some positive suggestions, but it needed further detail on what any proposed code of conduct for big tech might look like. Story continues It also said there had to be a full assessment of the risks and benefits of opening up data sets. "Bad regulation can be as big a barrier to competition and innovation as monopolistic activities," TechUK CEO Julian David said. "The UK must remain a welcoming place for digital business from around the world, and ensure that the UK competition and wider regulatory framework is not in conflict with the other leading digital economies with which we must compete." (Editing by Stephen Addison) "Whoever gets to AI first, I believe, will have dominance for many years afterward," says U.S. Army Secretary Mark Esper. He expects the Army to look more robotic. "It has much more semiautonomy and autonomy and full-autonomy built into the system." The U.S. Army is looking to advance its technology and put its focus on future conflicts, as it presents its colossal budget request to Congress. "This is a big day for the Army," U.S. Army Secretary Mark Esper told CNBC on Tuesday. The bold request allows the Defense Department to prepare for "high-intensity conflict" against countries like Russia and China, he said. "At the same time it also underscores this renaissance that the Army is in with regard to how we man, organize, and train and equip the force," he added. Esper expects the Army to look "much more robotic." "It has much more semiautonomy and autonomy and full-autonomy built into the system. You'll see technology which allows soldiers much more survivability and lethality on the battlefield," he said. The White House officially released the broad details of President Donald Trump's fiscal 2020 budget request on Monday, with the Pentagon asking for $718 billion in its budget , about a 5 percent increase over what Congress allocated for 2019. Esper said the Army itself has a request of $182 billion to grow the force and allow for advancements in technologies. Autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles, robotics, and using artificial intelligence are in the Army's future, he said. Last August, the Army officially opened the U.S. Army Futures Command Center in Austin, Texas, which is serving as the main technological hub for all advancements. Esper told "Squawk Alley" that he tries to meet with technology CEOs every week to talk about the future of the Army. "Business needs that predictability so that they can invest and help us move into the future," he said. "AI will allow the soldier to act and think much more quickly. Whoever gets to AI first, I believe, will have dominance for many years afterward." Story continues CNBC's Amanda Macias and Michael Sheetz contributed to this report. More From CNBC Verisk`s G2 Business Announces New Strategic Alliance with National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) BELLEVUE, Wash. (March 13, 2019) - G2, a Verisk (VRSK) business and division of Verisk Financial, announced today that it has joined forces with the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) in a new strategic alliance to help consumers easily find safe online pharmacies and avoid those engaging in prohibited practices or the sale of illegal pharmaceuticals. G2 is a leading global provider of merchant risk management solutions. Together, the companies will play an important role in educating payments companies, marketplaces, and merchants about regulatory standards for the safe practice of pharmacy as part of a larger effort to protect consumers. Through this alliance, healthcare merchants will be verified by NABP and fulfill Visa and Mastercard requirements for card-not-present transactions. This certification will also allow merchants to meet advertising criteria from Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Twitter, and Snapchat. Speaking at the G2 Risk Summit, the NABP shared that only 4 percent of the nearly 12,000 pharmacy websites they reviewed were in compliance with pharmacy laws and standards, including those required by credit card networks. This means that 96 percent of pharmacy websites are presumably illegitimate or unsafe. For the public, this can mean consequential health risks, including death. For acquiring banks, these statistics largely translate to one thing-high risk. "The goal of our healthcare merchant certification program is to better protect the public from pharmacy websites that are operating out of compliance. Merchants that achieve certification through our program have proven that they are licensed, in good standing, and operating safely when conducting business online," said Carmen A. Catizone, M.S., R.Ph., D.Ph., NABP executive director/secretary. "This new alliance will help acquirers, payment service providers, and payment facilitators serve pharma merchants safely and compliantly," said Dan Frechtling, president, G2. "NABP cares about the public`s health and well-being, and its verification is recognized by Visa and Mastercard." Story continues G2`s services are used by more acquirers globally than any other merchant monitoring solution. As part of Verisk Financial, G2 is even stronger with access to proprietary risk data and technologies. NABP is the nonprofit association certified by Visa for pharmacy merchant registration. Both companies are members of the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies (ASOP). Building on a successful webinar series collaboration in 2018, G2 and NABP have agreed to more formally expand their alliance. G2 will be celebrating its final leg of the tenth annual Risk Summit Series (RSS) in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 18, where it will bring in industry experts to discuss payment technology advancements, hot topics and trends, high-risk merchant monitoring solutions, and data analysis. NABP will be in attendance and participate as a guest speaker. G2 and NABP will also be participating in and sponsoring the MAC Annual Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, this March. The conference will highlight issues on risk, compliance, and security. To learn more about G2 and the NABP`s mission, please stop by their booths at the show, or contact info@g2llc.com. About the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) is the impartial professional organization that supports its member state boards of pharmacy in creating uniform regulations to protect public health. Founded in 1904, NABP aims to ensure the public`s health and safety through its pharmacist competence assessment programs, license transfer and verification services, as well as through pharmacy inspection and accreditation programs. For more information, please visit www.nabp.pharmacy. About G2 G2, a Verisk (VRSK) business and division of Verisk Financial, has been the world leader in merchant onboarding and monitoring since 2004. Every 30 seconds, clients using G2 discover suspicious activity, such as fraud, illegal medicines, illicit drugs, counterfeit, transaction laundering, and other violations. G2 clients leverage the most complete merchant risk data ever compiled for greater protection and productivity for their businesses. Risk professionals gain insights, refined by machine learning and expert analysts, along with unparalleled client service-all at enterprise scale. To learn more, visit www.g2llc.com. This announcement is distributed by West Corporation on behalf of West Corporation clients. The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein. Source: Verisk Analytics Inc. via GlobeNewswire HUG#2238514 The stock market rose Wednesday in mixed trading after investors turned cautious after the release of a government report Tuesday showing weak exports in January. The Philippine Stock Exchange Index added 18.61 points, or 0.2 percent, to 7,766.15 on a value turnover of P5.1 billion. Losers, however, beat gainers, 101 to 82, with 60 issues unchanged. The trade deficit widened to $3.76 billion in January from $3.16 billion a year ago, as imports rebounded while exports continued to decline, data from the Philippine Statistics Authority show. Metropolitan Bank & Trust Co., the second-biggest lender in terms of assets, climbed 3.8 percent to P78.90. SM Prime Holdings Inc., the largest integrated property developer, gained 2.6 percent to P37.65. Universal Robina Corp., the biggest snack food maker, rose 2.6 percent to P144.80, but parent JG Summit Holdings Inc. fell 2.8 percent to P63.20. The rest of Asian markets retreated Wednesday after two days of gains but the pound enjoyed a slight uptick after the previous days sharp losses as British officials looked to ease concerns about the possible impact of a no-deal Brexit. The sterling saw wild fluctuations Tuesday as it hit a near two-year high on news Prime Minister Theresa May had won a last-minute revision to her agreement with the European Union. But it then tanked to a three-week low as it was tossed out by MPs at Westminster later in the day. The decision means lawmakers will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU on March 29 without an economic agreementwhich is expected to failthen Thursday on whether to extend the deadline.The news from London added to selling pressure on Asian equity markets, which had enjoyed a bounce Monday and Tuesday from last weeks battering, with investors still on edge over the state of the global economy. Tokyo ended one percent lower, while Shanghai fell 1.1 percent and Hong Kong lost 0.4 percent. Seoul shed 0.4 percent, Sydney gave up 0.2 percent and Singapore was off 0.8 percent. Wellington also retreated, though Taipei, Mumbai and Jakarta were slightly higher. In a bid to ease concerns about the financial impact on the economy if MPs vote later in the day to leave with no agreement, officials in London said they will slash tariffs on 87 percent of imports, and will not apply customs checks on the border with Ireland. However, there remains a lot of uncertainty, with some observers suggesting the latest developments put the country a step closer to another referendum, while others say it could make a divorce without an agreement more likely. My tuppence is that parliament has, in their own mind, seized control of the Brexit process and will duly ask and likely get an extension to the 29 March exit date, said OANDA senior market analyst Jeffrey Halley. The breathing space granted will be used by whomever to renegotiate a more palatable Brexit deal for the UK. Except nobody has asked the Europeans yet. A short-term gain may yet belie long-term pain. The Port of Felixstowe in Suffolk. Photo: Steve Parsons/PA Archive/PA Images British businesses and consumers are likely to face unprecedented levels of disruption if the UK leaves the European Union without a deal on 29 March. The government left it until today to announce the radically different tariff and quota regime it would introduce in a no-deal scenario, as the UK would no longer automatically share the EUs rules and taxes on imports and exports. The government says the huge shakeup would be temporary while it planned its longer-term strategy, but it could last for up to 12 months. The changes could have an enormous impact on British businesses and consumers, paving the way for more or less global competition for UK firms depending on the sector. READ MORE: What you need to know about the temporary tariff regime As Adam Marshall, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), has pointed out, there could be winners and losers across UK industry overnight from the new regime. He also condemned the lack of consultation, preparation and support for affected firms. Many of the details and likely effects of such major changes are still not clear, but here are some of the potential winners and losers from the new regime: Winner British beef, lamb, pork and poultry farmers New tariffs would not only protect domestic farmers and producers in these sectors from worldwide competition as now, but also give them new protection against EU competition that is currently traded freely. The government said only that some dairy goods would face tariffs and quotas, however, and there was no mention of many other food imports. The decisions reflects the sectors history as one long protected by the EU and its individual member states. But UK food producers may also be hit by harsher tariffs from some other countries when exporting abroad, so export-focused firms will not all welcome the new regime. Loser many British producers including steel and bicycles David Henig, director of the UK trade policy project, warns in a blogpost that British producers who export abroad could face increased barriers as other countries respond to British tariffs with similar measures. He says this could significantly affect competitiveness. Story continues Increased tariff-free imports could also prove catastrophic for some through new global competition at home, forcing them to improve efficiency at best and struggle to survive at worst. The UKs iconic steel industry, already struggling against foreign competition, will be dismayed to see tariffs removed on steel, threatening UK production. British bike makers in particular could face huge threats from overseas competitors, with tariffs and anti-dumping duties removed. They will also face tariffs to export abroad. Bikes could well be cheaper, but the future of UK manufacturing is again uncertain, says Henig. Winner some ceramics, fertiliser and fuel firms British prime minister Theresa May during a tour of the Emma Bridgewater pottery factory in Stoke. Photo: Christopher Furlong/PA Archive/PA Images Several sectors already protected against controversial global trading practices like dumping and state subsidy will continue to receive support through tariffs. Tariffs would be kept to block such competition in the production of certain ceramics, fertiliser and fuels. Winner some global firms exporting to the UK More firms outside the EU would find it easier to export to the UK overall, as some would face lower tariffs than under the present European rules. The government estimates that 87% of total imports to the UK by value would be eligible for tariff-free access, up from 80% at present. Ministers have therefore called the changes a modest liberalisation of the tariff regime, though British firms under increased competition may not see it that way. Loser many EU producers The likely increase in tariff-free imports from across the world could mean European producers also facing greater competition for the UK market. Henig predicts: This will probably mean EU producers lose out to Chinese and other lower cost producers particularly in industrial products. Winner some developing countries trading with Britain The government has said it will keep giving preferential access to developing countries to meet out long-standing commitment to reduce poverty through trade. It means keeping current barriers to producers outside developing countries for goods including bananas, raw cane sugar and certain types of fish. READ MORE: Business leaders react angrily to Brexit circus as MPs reject deal and tariff plans revealed Loser Irish exporters to the UK Angus Woods of the Irish Farmers Association told RTE the Irish family farm model of agriculture would not survive the imposition of tariffs by the UK for the first time in over 200 years. Producers could face tariffs on goods sold to the rest of the UK via Northern Ireland. Irelands agriculture minister said it was potentially a disaster to a key Irish export sector, with beef feared particularly at risk. But the tariff regime at least contains a decision on trade across the border with Northern Ireland that many will welcome. Special arrangements mean that new UK import tariffs on EU goods will not apply to Irish products exported to Northern Ireland only. Winner and loser British car industry Less integration with Europe may pose huge challenges to the car industry in future, and the effects of Brexit are already being felt as carmakers decide to shift more production elsewhere. Henig says British carmakers are likely to face increased tariffs from many key countries they export to, meaning the sector would soon become uncompetitive. That is the flip side of tariffs on finished vehicles entering the UK, intended to protect their domestic market from foreign rivals. The tariffs will also not apply to car parts imported from within Europe, helping to at least alleviate the level of disruption to the sectors highly integrated supply chains. Winner and loser UK consumers UK consumers as a whole are likely to face positive and negative changes to prices from the new tariffs, depending on the products, as well as how other countries respond. Henig says there will be probably little effect on consumer prices overall, but a downward trend where tariffs are reduced as some British firms are undercut by foreign ones. He says large numbers of current tariffs would be removed on products including bicycles, cereals and shoes, increasing access to certain more affordable or alternative products from around the world. But he expects car prices to rise because of protections offered to carmakers. Crucially, any gains from more liberal tariffs may be wiped out entirely if the value of sterling plummets after Brexit, particularly in a chaotic and last-minute no-deal outcome. A local Afghan official was gunned down outside his home in the western province of Farah, while a local journalist was seriously wounded in a bombing in the countrys south, officials say. Also in Farah Province, Afghan troops reportedly suffered casualties as the Taliban stormed an army checkpoint. The attacks took place on March 12-13 as Taliban and U.S. negotiators concluded another round of talks in Qatar aimed at ending the nearly 18-year war in Afghanistan -- with both sides reporting progress in the negotiations. Officials in Farah Province said that Mohammad Salim Farahi, the acting head of the public works department, was shot and killed on March 13 by unknown men near his home in the provincial capital, also named Farah. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the killing. On March 12, Taliban fighters stormed an army checkpoint in the same province, killing 10 soldiers, according to provincial council member Abdul Samad Salehi. Salehi said that the area was retaken after reinforcements were sent, but added that up to six soldiers remained missing. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid confirmed that the militant group was behind the assault. In the southern province of Helmand, an Afghan journalist was wounded on March 12 when a bomb attached to his car exploded as he was heading to work in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. Nisar Ahmad Ahmadi, a journalist covering politics and security issues with Sabawoon TV, had a leg wound and was transferred to Kabul for further treatment, said Omar Zwak, the provincial governor's spokesman. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing, which the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called an attempted assassination against Ahmadi and another reminder of the dangers journalists face every day in Afghanistan. Ilias Alami with the Afghan Journalist Safety Committee said that Ahmadi had previously faced death threats from the Taliban. Afghanistan was the most deadly country for journalists worldwide last year, with at least 13 of them killed in relation to their work, according to the New York- based CPJ. Despite intensified peace talks between the United States and the Taliban, the militant group has continued to carrying out attacks across Afghanistan. U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said the nearly two weeks of talks in Qatar that ended on March 12 had made "real strides" but without an agreement on a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. The U.S. State Department said negotiators made "meaningful progress" during the talks in Doha. A spokesman said the Taliban agreed that peace will require agreement on counterterrorism assurances, troop withdrawal, and a cease-fire. A Taliban spokesman said that "progress was achieved regarding both these issues," referring to the U.S. troop withdrawal and assurances that foreign militants would not use Afghanistan's territory to stage future terrorist attacks. Neither side mentioned any progress made on reversing the Taliban's refusal to negotiate with the government in Kabul. The militant group says the Western-backed government is a U.S. "puppet" which must be toppled. With reporting by AP, dpa, and RFE/RLs Radio Free Afghanistan Human Rights Watch says a prominent Tajik opposition activist was kidnapped, beaten, and tortured in Russia and Tajikistan before he was allowed to return to the Netherlands, where he has refugee status. HRW's Central Asia researcher, Steve Swerdlow, told RFE/RL on February 4 that Sharofiddin Gadoev, a leading member of the opposition Group 24 movement, was kidnapped in Moscow last month by police and members of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) and handed over to Tajik authorities, who flew him to Tajikistan's capital, Dushanbe. "Now, we know that there was so much violence used against him that when he arrived in Dushanbe [from Moscow] his clothes were soaked with blood," Swerdlow said, adding that Gadoev also told him that when he tried to call for help at a Moscow airport, Tajik security officers severely beat him and taped his mouth so that he could not shout. Gadoev resurfaced in Dushanbe last month from self-imposed exile in the Netherlands and Tajik authorities announced that he returned in Tajikistan on his own will, a claim that Gadoev's colleagues and supporters abroad rejected, saying he was kidnapped. On March 2, Gadoev appeared on a video live-streamed on a Europe-based Tajik opposition groups Facebook account and said that he was back in Europe. The National Alliance of Tajikistan that shared the video said it was live-streamed from Germany's Frankfurt Airport. Tajik authorities insist Gadoev, 33, returned voluntarily on February 15. They shared a video that shows Gadoev criticizing the opposition and urging other activists to follow suit and return to Tajikistan. But on February 19, Gadoevs colleagues published a video recorded earlier by Gadoev in which he said he was traveling to Moscow to meet with officials from Russias Security Council to discuss some problems that have occurred in Tajikistan [and] the situation of Tajik labor migrants." If I suddenly appear on the Tajik television or some YouTube channel, saying that I have returned on my own accord -- you must not believe it, he warned in the footage. "I am not planning to go to Tajikistan willingly. Never," he added. The Interior Ministry announced initially that Gadoev has been charged with possession of contraband and forgery. Swerdlow said that HRW "is happy that Gadoev managed to get back to his loved ones in the Netherlands," adding that it became possible thanks to "timely efforts" by human rights groups, Gadoev's colleagues in exile, the German Embassy in Dushanbe, and the Dutch Foreign Ministry. According to Swerdlow, Gadoev's release from Tajik custody and safe return to the Netherlands also became possible most likely because he has refugee status in the European Union member state. "This story, these two crazy weeks in the life of Sharofiddin Gadoev, will continue to resonate. We continue to investigate what happened to him. His rights were violated by different entities, namely by the FSB, GRU (Russian military intelligence), and Interior Ministry in Russia, as well as Alfa (special security forces), OMON (police special forces), and the Interior Ministry in Tajikistan," Swerdlow said. President Emomali Rahmon, who has ruled Tajikistan since 1992, has been repeatedly criticized for cracking down on dissenters. Group 24 was labeled as extremist in October 2014 and banned after it called for antigovernment protests in Dushanbe and other cities. Its founder, Umarali Quvatov, was assassinated in Istanbul in March, 2015. Even after the signing of the Rice Tariffication Law (RA 11203) last Feb. 14 which revises the mandate of the National Food Authority in the stabilization of the market price of rice, the agency continues to bring affordable rice to remote areas and poor communities nationwide. According to NFA OIC-Administrator Tomas R. Escarez, the agency continues to conduct its Tagpuan Rice Response Delivery program, started in June 2018, to bring rice to far-flung barangays and urban poor areas, on top of those served by NFAs accredited retailers. The main target beneficiaries of Tagpuan are indigenous communities and urban poor areas who do not have easy access to government-subsidized rice. Tagpuan programs conducted by our NFA branches directly bring rice to these communities through mobile stores and it is done nationwide in almost every province, Escarez said. Based on our data, from January to February this year, NFA had already conducted 1,024 Tagpuan activities and were able to sell 32,712 bags of rice to 274,091 beneficiaries at P27.00 per kilogram, he added.Although the rice tariffication law became effective last March 5, Escarez said the NFA will still implement this program until its imported rice stocks are exhausted. Hopefully, when the Implementing Rules of the new law is approved, it will still allow the NFA to sell affordable, good quality rice to the poor. More than 10-million poor Filipinos rely on NFA rice for their daily consumption. Our customers say NFA rice at P27/kg is comparable to the P38-P42/kg commercial rice sold in the market, Escarez said. Last year, the NFA also conducted 4,161 Tagpuan activities and sold 250,251 bags to more than 2.24-million beneficiaries in just six months since the Tagpuan program was started. More Colorado Springs tax dollars are on the way to fund an extension of Powers Boulevard on the citys far north side. The City Council voted 7-2 on Tuesday to increase from 1 percent to 1.75 percent the portion of the Springs sales tax rate earmarked for the Powers work. Powers was planned decades ago as a north-south alternative to Interstate 25, and it runs along much of the citys east side. But the road stops at Colorado 83, and the Colorado Department of Transportation has said it wont have money for years to extend Powers to I-25. Because of CDOTs inability to contribute, city officials came up with another plan tying the extension to Polaris Pointe, a more than 200-acre retail project southeast of I-25 and North Gate Boulevard. The Powers extension would run through the heart of the Polaris Pointe site. In 2010, the council declared Polaris Pointe then known as Copper Ridge at Northgate an urban renewal project. Critics questioned that decision, saying the grassy, undeveloped property showed little, if any, signs of blight. But the urban renewal designation allowed increased tax revenues generated by new development there to be set aside to help fund the Powers extension. So the council earmarked half of the citys 2 percent general fund sales tax on Polaris Pointe retail purchases to fund Powers. Since then, dozens of stores, restaurants and other sales- tax-generating businesses have opened at Polaris Pointe. Even so, more money is needed for the extension, city Economic Development Officer Bob Cope told the council Tuesday. Also, Polaris Pointe developer Gary Erickson has said he cant develop the south half of his retail project without that extension. More retailers want an assurance that Powers will be extended before theyll commit to bringing their stores, restaurants and the like to Polaris Pointe. Cope told council members the city would get a hefty return on its investment if it committed more tax dollars toward the Powers project. Without an increase in city sales tax revenue, the extension wouldnt be built, and only 687 new jobs at stores and restaurants would be created over the next 25 years. Payroll and spending related to those jobs would have an economic impact of $855 million over that span. But by upping the citys contribution, temporary construction jobs and permanent jobs at the new stores and restaurants would total nearly 10,000 over 25 years, Cope said. The economic impact would reach nearly $4.3 billion, he said. Council President Pro Tem Jill Gaebler acknowledged that the extension is a critical project, but she voted against the increase in city sales tax money, saying CDOT and El Paso County should help . Also, she said, Polaris Pointe wasnt truly blighted and never should have been designated an urban renewal site. Its neither urban nor renewal, Gaebler said. Councilwoman Yolanda Avila also opposed the city sales tax increase, saying that promoting growth on the citys north side isnt in the spirit of urban renewal. Councilman Merv Bennett, however, said the decision to declare Polaris Pointe an urban renewal site was made years ago, and every tax dollar generated because of that designation would go for the sorely needed Powers extension. Council President Richard Skorman and Councilmen David Geislinger, Don Knight, Bill Murray, Andy Pico and Tom Strand also supported more city sales tax money for Powers. The councils vote isnt the last step in capturing more money for the project, though. Erickson said he plans to meet next week with El Paso County commissioners to discuss the county chipping in a 0.5 percent portion of the sales tax rate it levies on Polaris Pointe purchases. Theyre not expected to vote for three or four months though, he said. In 2011, commissioners voted 4-1 to reject funding for Powers and postponed indefinitely their participation in funding the extension. Some officials said that vote effectively killed the countys financial help, but others said it only shelved a final decision on the matter. In any case, Powers extension supporters are counting on the countys participation. Increased city and county funding would generate enough money to build an initial, $59.7 million portion of Powers from Voyager Parkway to I-25 and to upgrade the interchange at I-25 and North Gate Boulevard, Cope has said. The increased funding also would pay to build Powers between Voyager and Colorado 83, a project whose early price tag has been pegged at $71.6 million. The Gazettes Jakob Rodgers contributed to this story. All 17 public school districts in the Pikes Peak region canceled classes Wednesday, but started getting word out of the ever-popular "snow day" as early as Tuesday morning. With weather indicators aligning like stars to spell out blizzard, district leaders took heed. School District 49, the areas third-largest district covering Falcon, Peyton, Black Forest and other locales east and north of Colorado Springs, was one of the first to send the alert, by 11 a.m. Tuesday. Weve paid attention to community feedback over the years, and the early notification seems to be something our families value, said D-49 spokesman David Nancarrow. D-49 also was among the first to announce Wednesday that classes again will be canceled on Thursday. Woodland Park School District RE-2 also sent out an early-afternoon message that schools will be closed Thursday. Nearly all the rest also are closed Thursday: Colorado Springs D-11, Peyton JT-23, Edison 54-JT, Cripple Creek-Victor RE-1, Academy D-20, Manitou Springs D-14, Miami-Yoder JT-60, Cheyenne Mountain D-12, Ellicott D-22, Lewis-Palmer D-38, Harrison D-2, Fountain-Fort Carson D-8, Widefield D-3 Hanover D-28 and Calhan RJ-1. Forecasts from the National Weather Service, television meteorologists, the Colorado Springs street division and the Colorado Department of Transportation proved to be correct. Blizzard conditions arrived as predicted mid-morning Wednesday and continued throughout the day, with some road closures and edicts for residents to stay home. The timing of the storm was one factor Colorado Springs School District 11 took into consideration before declaring Tuesday afternoon that schools would be closed the next day, said spokeswoman Devra Ashby. We knew we could get people to school safely in the morning, but the conditions could put students, parents and staff in jeopardy in the afternoon, she said. D-11 officials started talking about what to do about the storm at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, Ashby said. They didnt like the idea of an early release on Wednesday, she said, because it would inconvenience parents and disrupt schedules. The biggest influence for D-11 was predicted wind gusts of up to 70 or 80 miles per hour, she said. When the Colorado Department of Transportation said high-profile vehicles would be prohibited on highways due to expected high winds, Ashby said that was the clincher. We cant drive our buses on the highways then, she said. Superintendents, transportation directors and public information officers from local districts often consult with each other about weather-related school closures, Ashby said, as they did on Tuesday. And they all came to the same conclusion: for everyone's safety, it was best to not open Wednesday, and some again on Thursday. Spring break starts Monday for District 49 and the following week for other local districts. Even with this winters snowy conditions, Nancarrow said D-49 is not close to expending all its snow days. We have an adequate buffer, he said. Above all, Kyle Forti wanted to be known as a husband, father and foster dad. And as she prepares to bid farewell to her husband, Hope Forti says his many friends and those whose lives he touched can best honor his memory by giving some thought to helping with foster care. Forti, a Colorado Springs political consultant, was one of five people killed in a helicopter crash in Kenya on March 3. He would have turned 30 on Aug. 31. That would be Kyles ask to people, that we can be involved with people who are not like us and give up some of our precious, quiet, perfectly styled life, said Hope, who with her husband fostered four children over four years and founded a nonprofit to support foster families. He would want me to use this as a chance to ask people to think about it, to examine foster parenting. Lots of people shouldnt. But if we had a small percentage of people who could look at it and say, Can I do this and do it worthy of a child without self-interest taking over? then we would ask them to try it. A memorial service for Forti is set for 4 p.m. Thursday at Shove Chapel on the Colorado College campus in Colorado Springs, with a reception to follow at Grace and St. Stephens Episcopal Church. Hope is encouraging friends to bring memories and photos of Kyle to share, and she emphasized that children are welcome at the service. Its really important to our family that we include children and were honest with them, she said in a video describing the planned memorial. Ill say, In lieu of flowers, please attend a foster parent information session. Just think about it. What do we have other than children in this world? We dont know how to love without learning from children, without learning how to bend ourselves to children that are not easy to love. Shes also urging friends to donate to Foster Together Colorado, the nonprofit that the couple founded in 2016 to support foster parents. (A memorial project in the works would recruit more good people to be involved in foster care. Sign up at fostertogether.co for updates.) Hope said her husbands work, as a co-founder of Denver-based D/CO Consulting who managed state and congressional campaigns, took a firm backseat to his family role, including as father to their 5-year-old son, Maximus. He was going to take this one last trip and then stay home, she said. Hes been loving this time post-election with Max. Theyre just best friends. He just really wanted to pay attention to his kid and listen to him as a human being. Were seeing so much of this generational cycle of children who dont feel secure and loved and attached and dont grow up into loving families, she said. The last conversation we had before he left was talking about how we want to get started with that again. Also killed in the helicopter crash were Americans Anders Asher Jesiah Burke, Brandon Howe Stapper and David Mark Barker, and the Kenyan pilot, Mario Magonga. The cause of the crash is under investigation. Hope said the couple had planned to start fostering teenage mothers and their babies when Kyle returned. They found out she was pregnant shortly before he left for Kenya. We felt like it would fit to have either two babies in the house or two pregnancies in the house. Weve always felt we have extra love to give and can always adjust to have extra time to give and energy. Thats what it takes. In addition to fostering four children, starting with two sisters soon after Max was born, the Fortis have volunteered as Court-Appointed Special Advocates of the Pikes Peak Region and lately were providing respite care for more than a dozen foster families. Hope said they continually were struck by the chasm between their comfortable life and this deep neediness not just poverty of money, its poverty of relationships. That is what we can give through foster care, trying to offer support when a parent is getting close to the edge of abuse or neglect and making sure it doesnt get there. We cant fix it all. Were not going to feel like were doing enough, ever. But we have seen it, and we cant not see it anymore. Yes, I found a better job Yes, but I'm still looking for a new job Yes, I retired Yes, I started my own business No, I like my current job No, but I'm currently looking for a new job Vote View Results The Department of Labor and Employment assured overseas Filipino workers in the United Arab Emirates that no deportation will happen following news circulating online that the Middle Eastern country will deport all foreign workers starting April 2019. According to a news report from Arabia Today, foreign workers in 35 job categories who are over the age of 40 will be terminated and deported to give opportunity to UAE nationals, especially the young graduates, and solve the countrys unemployment crisis. But Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III said the report was not true although it has already caused confusion and anxiety to a number of deployed workers in the UAE. According to the report, among the occupations to be vacated by foreign workers are pharmacist, medical secretary, administrative clerk, human resource officer, receptionist, treasurer, librarian, security guard, purchasing manager, debt collector, cashier, tour guide, among others. Labor Attache Alejandro Padaen of the Philippine Overseas Labor Office in Abu Dhabi also said that the news is not true.Padaen said Dr. Omar Abulrahman Salem Alnuami, Assistant Secretary for Communication and International Relations of the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation told him the story is fake news. Another emirate official, Asmaa Alamadani, the executive director of MOHREs International Bilateral Relations Department, spoke to Labor Attache Felicitas Bay of POLO Dubai, who assured her that the news is not true at all. The article also circulated in other Gulf Cooperation Council countries like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Oman. A man was driving the wrong way on North Academy Boulevard when he crashed into a Falcon police cruiser early Wednesday. The officer turned on the cop lights after realizing the wrong-way driver, Gustavo Niz-Martin, was heading north in the southbound lanes of Academy. Niz-Martin failed to stop and hit the police cruiser head-on. The accident happened about 12:30 a.m. south of Dublin Boulevard. The officer and Niz-Martin were uninjured. Niz-Martin allegedly tried to leave the scene, but was arrested several hundred yards down the road, police said. He was evaluated for driving under the influence, but was later released. Niz-Martin was served a hit and run charge, police said. They also had different views on other external actors involved in Syria primarily Israel, which sees Irans presence in southern Syria as a direct threat to Israeli territory. Israel has, therefore, repeatedly struck Iranian and Hezbollah targets in southern Syria, even publicly announcing these attacks (most recently a week ago) to make clear that it will not tolerate an Iranian presence along its border. These are troubling signs for Russia, which would rather attend to more pressing security concerns than the fighting in Syria. Renewed hostilities could lead to the revival of jihadist groups that Assad would need Russias help to eliminate. Russia, however, hasnt exactly been going out of its way to limit Israeli airstrikes. It has condemned Israels attacks against non-jihadist groups in Syria, but it has stopped short of preventing or retaliating against Israeli attacks on Iranian targets because it doesnt want to risk direct confrontation with Israel for two reasons. First, facing off against Israels well-equipped air force would be far costlier than launching airstrikes against militant groups, as it has been doing in Syria for years now. Second, Israel is a close ally of the United States, and a Russian attack on Israeli forces may provoke a U.S. response, which Russia wants to avoid. Moreover, Russia may actually benefit from limiting Irans presence in Syria. It doesnt want another conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, Irans proxy in Lebanon, and the probability of such a conflict will increase as long as Irans presence in Syria grows. In addition, with Iran out of the picture, Russia could solidify its place as Assads primary patron, especially with much of the fighting now over. Indeed, there are some indications that Russia is allowing Israels strikes to continue. Last September, after Russia blamed Israel for an incident that led to Syrian forces shooting down a Russian military plane, Moscow delivered a number of S-300 air defense systems to Syria . These systems are more advanced than those already owned by the Syrians and would be a greater threat to Israels air operations in Syria. So far, though, Syria hasnt used them against Israeli airstrikes, possibly because the S-300s arent operational yet or because Syrian forces still need to be trained to operate the Russian-made weapons. Syrian media have claimed that the S-300s came online in November, while Russian media have claimed that some of the launchers were installed this month and that the systems will be activated shortly. In January, however, an Iranian lawmaker accused Russia of deactivating the S-300s during a Jan. 20 Israeli strike. Both the accusation and the airstrike came shortly after a Russian military delegation visited Israel to meet with Israel Defense Forces officials. Israel launched more airstrikes a week later and again on Feb. 12 the S-300s werent used against either attack. This is all circumstantial evidence that Russia is delaying activation of the S-300s, but it supports the theory that Moscow doesnt want Syria to shoot down an Israeli jet with Russian-supplied arms. Russia may also be concerned about the efficacy of the S-300s. If they were to fail during an attack, it would be an international embarrassment for Moscow, which is trying to expand its arms export industry. Russia could blame Syrian operators for the failure, of course, but that would also be troubling for potential customers who may have concerns over usability. Moreover, Israel has performed drills against the S-300 and demonstrated the ability to penetrate areas covered by advanced air-defense systems in the past, so even if the system works as it should, it may not be able to stop an Israeli strike. In other words, Russia doesnt have much to gain from activating the S-300s. Why did it deliver the systems if it didnt want Syria to use them? It needed to responded to the downing of the Russian jet somehow, and this was likely the least consequential way to do it. Looking Ahead While Russias motivation to cooperate with Iran is fading, its finding more and more reason to work with another country thats vying for influence in Syria: Turkey. Both countries want to eliminate jihadist groups in Syrias northwestern Idlib province, though they remain at odds over Turkeys desire for greater control over the Kurdish-dominated regions in northeastern Syria. A larger Turkish presence there could hamper efforts at a political settlement and endanger Assads hold over the country. Nonetheless, they have reached an accommodation over certain issues. Earlier this month, following peace talks in Sochi, a Kremlin spokesperson suggested that Turkey could invoke the 1998 Adana Agreement to justify an incursion in northern Syria. (The agreement allows Turkey to pursue fighters from the Kurdistan Workers Party a Kurdish group based in Turkey 3 miles, or 5 kilometers, into Syria.) Last August, Turkey and Russia signed an agreement to prevent a Syrian offensive against rebel forces in Idlib and to establish a buffer between the province and Syrian forces. Under the deal, Turkey agreed to handle the jihadist militias in Idlib that were not under its control, most notably Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. But Turkey has largely failed to do so. HTS remains the most powerful force in the province and recently launched an offensive against Turkish-backed militias there. Russia, meanwhile, cant pull out of Syria while groups like HTS pose a threat to Assad. Turkey may need to send in its own forces, rather than rely mainly on proxies, to eliminate or at least hold back HTS. In doing so, however, it would need to avoid direct confrontation with Syrian forces, which would risk pitting Russia against Turkey. By not pushing back against strikes on Iran in the south and by accommodating the Turks in the north, Russia has been able to balance these two powers against each other . Its a strategy that will keep Iran weak and Turkey compliant, at least so Moscow hopes, and it has the added benefit of ensuring that neither becomes powerful enough to challenge Russia in the Caucasus, a region over which the three countries have gone to war many times in the past . Whether the strategy works remains to be seen. We need to talk about Bunds A shortage of safe assets in the eurozone is creating market distortions Kate Allen FT montage; Bloomberg; Dreamstime We need to talk about Bunds and the risk they pose to eurozone markets. No, Im not joking. Germanys insistence on running a balanced budget and a current account surplus leaves no room for an expansion of its government debt thus limiting the supply of German bonds, or Bunds, which are the eurozones safe asset. The shortage exacerbates the price effect of European Central Bank bond-buying, widening the spread between German yields and those of riskier assets, such as Italys bonds. The 10-year Bund yield reached the giddy heights of 0.8 per cent last year as investors minds turned to the end of quantitative easing and the timing of a rate rise. But it has since slipped to 0.1 per cent, pushing the spread against equivalent Italian bond yields to about 2.9 per cent. The wider spreads are between ostensibly equal member states. The more volatile they are, and the more investors focus on them as a barometer of political risk, the more political the sovereign debt markets become. EU budget rules aim to ward off excessive surpluses as much as deficits. They should mitigate against parsimony just as much as they are used against countries such as Italy for profligacy. It is all very well to castigate Italy for its big debt burden, but not enough attention is paid to what happens when countries are not selling enough debt. The euro was created as a means of strengthening the political bonds between [European nations], according to the European Commission. Deliberately under-borrowing on your fiscal capacity, leaving the continents banks and pension funds with a shortage of safe assets, hardly helps fulfil that ambition. Germany has in recent years run record budget surpluses and the worlds largest trade surplus, which last year led French president Emmanuel Macron to accuse his neighbour of fetishising surpluses. The shortage of Bunds is arguably one of the drivers of exuberance in areas such as real estate. Investors need to put their money somewhere and there is not enough of what they actually want to buy so they are forced into substitutes which then rapidly become overloaded and suffer price bubbles. It is rare to hear an argument in favour of increasing a countrys indebtedness, but the evolution of the blocs capital markets should also be on Germanys agenda. A way around Germanys budget policies would be to create pan-eurozone debt instruments backed by multiple countries, but Germany is unwilling to tolerate mutualisation of debt. The eurozone already faces democratic challenges in pursuing further integration, so it is hard to blame it for that. But that constrains the development of Europes capital markets because of the safe assets shortage. An overseas Filipino worker's party-list solon on Wednesday expressed alarm over the rising number of OFWs afflicted with the human immunodeficiency virus after 90 OFWS were diagnosed with the deadly disease in January, up 33 percent from 68 in the same month last year. In a statement, ACTS-OFW Rep. Aniceto Bertiz III said the January case brought to 6,345 the cumulative number of OFWs found living with HIV since the government began passive surveillance of the virus in 1984. OFWs now comprise 10 percent of the 63,278 confirmed cases listed in the National HIV/AIDS Registry as of January, according to Bertiz. Of the 6,345 OFWs in the registry, 86 percent, or 5,471, were male with a median age of 32 years. The 874 female OFWs in the registry had a median age of 34 years. Of the male OFW cases, 72 percent were found infected via sexual contact among MSM, or men who have sex with men (2,283 from male-to-male sex and 1,651 from sex with both males and females). HIV causes AIDS, or the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, which destroys the human bodys natural ability to fight off all kinds of infections. Though the condition still does not have any known cure, antiretroviral therapy has been known to slow down the virus.Bertiz is counting on the Department of Labor and Employment to deliver highly improved support to the growing number of OFWs living with HIV, as mandated by the new AIDS Prevention and Control Law that took effect Jan. 25. Section 37 of the new law compels the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, together with other agencies, to develop a program to provide stigma-free comprehensive reintegration, care, and support for OFWs with HIV, Bertiz said. Under the law, the economic, social and medical support is to be extended to all OFWs, regardless of employment status and stage in the migration process, Bertiz said. Section 17 of the law also requires all overseas-bound Filipino workers as well as Philippine government staff for foreign posting to undergo a seminar on the causes, manner of prevention, and impact of HIV and AIDS, prior to certification for deployment or assignment, Bertiz said. The preventive education seminar is to be provided for free and at no cost to OFWs or to the staff concerned, Bertiz said. USS Blue Ridge (LCC 19) and 7th Fleet staff arrived in Manila Wednesday for the US flagships first-call on Philippine port since 2016. The US Embassy in Manila said the Blue Ridge and 7th Fleet, team had long-standing ties with the Philippines and this port visit offers opportunities to reconnect after several years away. Vice Adm. Phillip Sawyer, commander of the US 7th Fleet, said the crew would continue the tradition of participating in community service and cultural exchange events ashore, including multiple 7th Fleet band engagements and community relations events. Our nations are long-standing allies and our navies have worked together for generations, said Vice Adm. Sawyer. Sawyer said: Our visit to Manila strengthens the bonds between our navies and our shared commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific. Blue Ridge commanding officer Capt. Eric Anduze has been slated to meet with Philippine Navy officials and an eventual tour of the flagship to explain the ships mission and goals. Filipino-American sailors onboard will have a chance to reconnect with their heritage during the port visitamong them, Seaman Charmaine Dalusung, who will see the country she was born in for the first time since she left as a child. We are very proud to be back in Manila after a long absence, Anduze said.He said: The Philippines has been an ally of our country for many years, and being able to show our appreciation for that friendship is something we always look forward to. Continuing to foster and maintain our deep relationships here is paramount to what we do in 7th Fleet. During the visit, 7th Fleet and Blue Ridge sailors will spend time with local veterans, sharing stories and camaraderie with each other at the Veterans Memorial Medical Center. Representatives from both the US and Philippine navies will participate in staff talks aboard the ship, expanding interoperability between the two forces and providing a venue for professional exchanges. The Blue Ridge recently completed a nearly two-year extended dry-dock within selected restricted availability period and numerous certifications, to ensure she remains ready to provide security in the Indo-Pacific region. The Blue Ridge serves under Commander, Expeditionary Strike Group 7, Task Force 76, the Navys only forward-deployed amphibious force. I am very excited to come back to my first home, said Dalusung. Its been a very long time since Ive seen the friends and family I grew up with, so Im extremely grateful to the Navy for giving me the opportunity to reconnect with my roots and culture. ** For the most up-to-date information on this topic, please click here . About a week ago I was reading some information with regards to... IceViking strongly condemns physical attacks and harassment directed towards them. They are also often victims of the Islamic idea. This is true when it comes to the cruel and tragic treatment of Muslim women and children when it is in accord with the Koran, the example of Mohammed and Islamic law, Sharia, which may be applied regardless of where a Muslim male may find himself in the world, whether in a Muslim or non-Muslim country. However, in no way, shape or form should one judge all Muslim men because of what is in Islamic scripture and what constitutes the Islamic law, Sharia. "Race", ethnicity or basically anything that you are "merely" born with should never be a basis for bigotry and discrimination. Apostates from Islam have been executed for 1400 years in accord with the Koran and the words and actions of the Islamic prophet Mohammed and Islamic law, Sharia. They should be lovingly helped. Furthermore, approximately as many as 11,000,000 Muslims may have been killed by other Muslims since 1948. To quote the website The Religion of Peace (TROP), edited by Glen Roberts: While it may be safe to say that a true Muslim would not intentionally kill another true Muslim ( 4:92-93 ), the Quran places no such value on the life of a Muslim who is not true. Consider verse 9:73 : Strive hard against the disbelievers and the hypocrites, and be harsh against them, their abode is Hell. The Arabic for strive hard uses the same root as Jihad - and the context in this sura is holy war (see v. 86 and 91). Thus, there are two distinct classes of people that a true Muslim is to target with harshness: disbelievers and hypocrites. A disbeliever obviously refers to a non-Muslim, so a "hypocrite" must be a Muslim of some sort. In fact, hypocrites are those who say they believe, but do not act as they should. In other words, they are "Muslims", but not true Muslims. They will go to hell just as unbelievers do, and so, according to the verse, their lives matter for naught. The same sura says that a hypocrite can be recognized not just by lack of piety (reluctance to follow Sharia), but by fear of death ( 9:56 ), reluctance to fight ( 9:44-45 ) and even friendliness toward non-believers ( 9:67 ). A true Muslim would thus be a pious person who relishes martyrdom, is eager to fight, and shuns non-believers. Even the Quranic passage that warns against killing "believers" ( 4:88-94 ) is more complicated than it first appears. It never says that a true Muslim is incapable of killing another Muslim, just that it should not be done. In fact, it makes exceptions for the unintentional killing of "believers" in war and mandates the killing of "hypocrites." Verse 17:33 says, "Do not kill anyone which Allah has forbidden, except for a just cause" . The greatest cause of all is that Islam be superior ( 9:33 ), which is exactly what Islamic terrorists say is their goal. Thus believing Muslims are allowed to be collateral damage in the war on unbelievers. There is sadly a phenomena that I`ve noticed in Sweden and elsewhere of people using true facts about Islamic doctrine and history as a cover for all sorts of irrational targeting of Muslims, ranging from xenophobia and racism to verbal abuse and physical attacks. This is strongly condemned by this website and does not in any way serve serious criticism of orthodox Islam and other important work. It`s also important that one tries to express oneself in a civilized way. Words matter. In this bloggers humble opinion the root cause of the problem is the ancient doctrine of orthodox Islam. In simple terms a non-Muslim is a Kafir. " The Koran defines the kafir and kafir is not a neutral word. A kafir is not merely someone who does not agree with Islam, but a kafir is evil, disgusting, the lowest form of life." An exact quote, as stated in the writings of Dr. Bill Warner in the article "Kafir" at http://www.politicalislam.com/kafir . In the perfect Koran (Allah`s direct and literal word as revealed to Mohammed through the angel Jibril), Muslims are told 89 times to emulate Mohammed in all ways (see Koran 33:21 for instance). Mohammed`s example, the Sunna, is found in the Hadith (stories of what Mohammed said and did) and the Sira (biographies of Mohammed). Islamic law, Sharia , is directly derived from these unchanging scriptures. It is based on the Koran`s numerous commands to obey Allah and obey the Messenger, that is Mohammed (see Koran 4:59 for instance). Islam is Sharia. Sharia is Islam. It is a capital crime for Muslims to deny Sharia in any way. A Muslim is someone who submits to Islam and submitting to Islam means obeying the Sharia of Allah. Sharia law includes pronouncements for both Muslims and non-Muslims (Kafirs). Islam is a "complete way of life", a "complete code of life", a "complete system of life". Islam is not just a religion but also a comprehensive ideology. Islam is a supremacist ideology. Islam is a totalitarian and imperialistic ideology akin to Communism and Nazism. Islam is a civilization. Islamic law, Sharia, is a manual for a civilization. Islamic law, Sharia, governs every aspect of life. It has a say about every conceivable human act . Non-Muslims are morally and legally inferior in Islam. Women are morally and legally inferior in Islam. The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS by Robert Spencer is the first one-volume history of jihad in the English language and a great book on the topic. Allah guarantees Paradise to those who "kill and are killed" for him (Koran 9:111). A hadith depicts a Muslim asking Muhammad: "Instruct me as to such a deed as equals Jihad (in reward)." Muhammad replied, "I do not find such a deed." (Bukhari 4.52.44) Muhammad himself said: I have been commanded to fight against people so long as they do not declare that there is no god but Allah, and he who professed it was guaranteed the protection of his property and life on my behalf except for the right affairs rest with Allah. (Sahih Muslim 30) Freedom of speech, human rights, democracy, science and human lives are all at stake in the fight against the Islamic Jihad. As of August 26th, 2021 Yahoo India will no longer be publishing content. Your Yahoo Account Mail and Search experiences will not be affected in any way and will operate as usual. We thank you for your support and readership. For more information on Yahoo India, please visit the FAQ A meeting Tuesday night at the Palace failed to break a budget impasse between the Senate and the House of Representatives, sparking an appeal from the executive department for Congress to settle their differences and pass an appropriations law that would better the lives of Filipinos. READ: House to Senate: Why scrap scholars funding? Senate President Vicente Sotto III said that on Tuesday night, President Rodrigo Duterte had told him he would not sign a bill that the senator did not. Sotto said it seemed that the House appeared to have acquiesced to Senator Panfilo Lacsons proposal to revert to the ratified version of the budget bill, but said there was no confirmation of this. House leaders on Wednesday did not address the events of Tuesdays meeting but reverted to attacking the Senate and Lacson again. The President wanted to resolve the impasse. He opened the dialogue by saying he will not sign the budget if I do not sign it, Sotto told reporters in a group message. After some words from both sides, Senator Lacson suggested that the House recall the enrolled copy they sent and revert back to the bicam report that both houses approved. The President and members of the executive department concurred, Sotto added. Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri said the President asked lawmakers to pass the budget so that the programs of government can continue. Zubiri said the Senate proposal was just to pass the ratified version of the 2019 budget, while the House insisted on the line-by-line itemization and not lump sum appropriations. We still met while the President had left but theres still no consensus, unfortunately, Zubiri said. Present during the meeting were Senate finance committee chairperson Loren Legarda, Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto, and Senator Gregorio Honasan. The House contingent included Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, House appropriations committee chairman Rolando Andaya, and House Majority Leader Fredenil Castro. READ: Andaya slams senators over parked pork The government has been operating on a reenacted budget since Jan. 1 after lawmakers failed to pass the bill last year due to allegations of pork barrel insertions. The passage of the 2019 budget was further stalled due to allegations of last-minute amendments made by the House after both chambers of Congress ratified the bicameral conference committee report. In a statement Wednesday, Presidential Spokesman Salvador Panelo said the Palace is aware of the budget impasse due to some constitutional questions raised by the Senate and the House of Representatives. Even so, Panelo said, the President would not meddle with the affairs of a co-equal branch of government. Only Congress can resolve and break this impasse, Panelo said. We call on the senators and representatives to break the stalemate and deliver to the Filipino people an appropriations law that can aid this government better their lives and help our country move forward, he added. Panelo said the executive branch has already fulfilled its constitutional duty to submit the proposed budget on time. It now waits for Congress to comply with its constitutional mandate to pass the same. As soon as the enrolled bill on the budget is submitted to the President, the latter will perform his constitutional duty to scrutinize it and if he finds it in conformity with the constitutional demands, he will sign it, he said. The Office of the President has yet to receive a copy of an enrolled budget bill despite the approval of the measure by the bicameral conferee committee last month. Both chambers of the Congress are still quarreling over the last-minute amendments done by the House on the proposed budget after the bicameral conference committee approved its version. The National Economic and Development Authority warned Wednesday that a reenacted budget in 2019 could pull down gross domestic product growth to 4.2 percent, the slowest rate since 2011 when growth settled at 3.7 percent. Economic Planning Secretary Ernesto Pernia said estimates by NEDA showed that a reenacted budget until April 2019 would bring down full-year GDP growth to 6.1 percent to 6.3 percent. On the other hand, if the budget is passed in August, expect growth to be around only 4.9 to 5.1 percent. Worse, with a full-year reenacted budget, growth can go as low as 4.2 to 4.9 percent, Pernia said in a statement. The government is operating on the 2018 national budget of P3.767 trillion, as the Senate and the House failed to reach a consensus on the 2019 budget.Pernia said that aside from the slower economic expansion, a reenacted budget would delay new and ongoing infrastructure projects and the implementation of public social services such as the unconditional cash transfer and Pantawid Pasada programs. The government would not be able to quickly execute programs and projects. This means that we will miss the opportunity to create as many as 180,000 to 240,000 more jobs and fail to lift as much as 400,000 to 550,000 more Filipinos out of poverty this year, he said. Lacson again attacked the House for inserting pork into the budget. [The] bottom line is pork, pork, pork. Thats all, Lacson told reporters Wednesday. He disclosed that some congressmen tried to force realignments into the budget because their terms are about to end. Lacson also disputed a claim by Castro that the senators proposal leave lump sums in the ratified budget did not sit well with Duterte because he does not want to be involved in allocating projects. Not true. Instead, my suggestion didnt sit well with the congressmen, Lacson said in a statement. Executive Secretary [Salvador] Medialdea and Finance Secretary [Carlos] Dominguez [III] in fact favorably endorsed my suggestion to President Rodrigo Duterte as a practical and logical approach to break the impasse, he added. He said he informed the President that the P72-billion cut in the budget of the Department of Public Works and Highways that the House supported would hurt the governments Build, Build, Build infrastructure program. What was obvious last night is that the suggestion didnt sit well with the congressmen because they cannot be sure if all their realignments will be adopted, Lacson said. Its all about their pork, not mindful if they will be derailing the flagship projects of the government, he added. Castro earlier said the House had reservations in retaining the lump sum appropriations in the bicameral conference report of the 2019 budget, as this would be unconstitutional. Sotto, on the other hand, said Arroyo could be charged for signing a falsified version of the national budget, since that was not the version the bicameral conference committee had approved. He noted that the printed copy of the modified appropriation measure was signed by Arroyo and transmitted to the Senate for signature. But Lacson said they advised Sotto III against signing the House version of the budget bill. They should not force us to violate the Constitution, he said. The senator pointed out that the modified House version was different from the budget bill that was ratified by the Senate and the House on Feb. 8. Deputy Speaker and Surigao del Sur Rep. Prospero Pichay on Wednesday defended Arroyo from Lacsons latest tirade against the former president, calling it an act of desperation. The statement made today by Senator Ping Lacson that she may be held liable for falsification for signing the 2019 budget is an act of desperation arising from his deep-rooted anger toward Speaker GMA, Pichay said in a statement. Pichay said that Lacsonbecause of his anger towards Arroyomay have forgotten that the House of Representatives, just like the Senate, is a collegial body. Any act of the Speaker especially in the signing of bills and other forms of legislation is an act of the House of Representatives as a whole. If she is liable, then majority of the members are equally liable because we authorized her to do it. Why is Senator Lacson singling her out? Pichay said. He also accused Lacson of delaying the enactment of 2019 budget because Lacsons personal vendetta against the Arroyo. Senator Ping, stop playing the Supreme Court by saying the budget is unconstitutional because it is only the Supreme Court that can make such [a] pronouncement. If you believe it is unconstitutional, then file a case and question it. It is only when the Supreme Court declares it to be unconstitutional that it is unconstitutional. Senator Ping, for the sake of the country and for the sake of President Duterte who had called upon Congress to act on it swiftly otherwise the economy and the welfare of the Filipino people will suffer, you set aside your rage with the Speaker, Pichay said. READ: 'Budget probe not over' Iran is, of course, trying to keep its procuration efforts under the radar as it struggles to keep crude exports going following the re-imposition of crippling U.S. sanctions. U.S. President Donald Trump announced last year that crippling sanctions would be re-imposed and the State Department said that it expects all foreign countries to reduce their imports of Iranian oil to zero. The sanctions have started to have an effect on the Iranian economy and the regime is desperate to find ways around sanctions. Iran has been in discussions with South Korea to purchase several new super tankers, but the talks have gone nowhere as of yet. South Korean officials have not commented on the situation, but Iranian officials have said that they are working on negotiations that are being affected by U.S. sanctions. It is now looking elsewhere including Vietnam. Around 70 per cent of Irans revenue comes from its exports of oil and keeping its fleet running is essential. However, the age of the fleet and the dilapidated state of the tankers are making the challenge even more difficult. Replacing vessels is not going to be an easy task because of the U.S. sanctions. When the previous sanctions were in place, a foreign network had been blacklisted because it was assisting Iran in buying tankers. Insurance companies in the West are also hesitant to get involved. Oil traders do not want to enter Iran. Even those that many believe would be resistant to the U.S. sanctions have shown hesitance. China, an important partner to Iran, is trying to stay on the United States good side. Iranian officials, however, are trying to appear positive and upbeat regarding the sanctions. Some officials have said that there are a great number of countries that are not being put off by U.S. sanctions. Officials have also said that the oil shortage issue can be resolved by using other nations tankers. It is believed that more than 15 Iranian tankers are coming up to 20 years old. The fleet is becoming more of a liability than an asset and several incidents have been recorded. For example, last year, one of Irans tankers sank near China after a collision with another vessel. The United States is in the midst of a maximum pressure campaign which has several purposes. One aim is to cut the Iranian regime off from the funds that it uses to finance terrorist activities and groups across the region. The regime has been plundering the nations wealth for years, much to the detriment of the long-suffering people of Iran. The people welcome the international pressure because they know it will precipitate the regimes collapse. The people of Iran will be the force behind regime change and they will not ease up on domestic pressure until they have achieved their goal. In social media posts, Iran-based journalists say that the accused, Reza Hamzehlou, is not in custody. He was, in fact, seen in Qom on Sunday, and travelled to Mashhad on Monday to seek the support of an influential ayatollah. It seems that the case focuses on personal profit made by the accused during the process of circumventing U.S. sanctions against Iran. While Tehrans prosecutor insists that there is no embezzlement involved, he adds, there was corruption. He also said that the case is still under investigation. Hamzehlou is alleged to be an official at a religious foundation under the aegis of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, The Assembly for Proximity of Islamic Religions. The foundation claims that its main objective is fostering better relations between Shiite and Sunni sects, and its chairman is appointed by Khamenei. Reports that have named Hamzehlou as its deputy chairman for economic affairs have been denied, but reports that he is the chairman of an affiliate organization were not. Hamzehlou once chaired the economic committee of the International Conference on Unity, which was sponsored by the assembly, according to the Young Journalists Club. Individuals like Hamzehlou are apparently nominated by other institutions and prominent personalities of the political system a remark that may allude to Khamenei. What is clear, is that without the knowledge or permission of the Iranian Regimes Supreme Leader, so much money could never have been obtained. Hamzehlou is the former managing director of the Iranian Petrochemical Commercial Company (PCC). He was named by the prosecutor for having made personal gains from government funds in partnership with another suspect, Marjan Sheikholeslami. Two trading companies in Turkey are owned by Sheikholeslami, who was Hamzehlous main partner in selling oil related products. While Hamzehlou is the prime suspect in the case, many have named Alinaqi Khamoushi, a prominent figure in the influential conservative Islamic Coalition Party, as the man behind PCC. Khamoushis Iranian Investment Company owned 52 percent of PCCs shares. Mohsen Ahmadian was also named as another who was involved in the case and was nicknamed by the IRGC-linked Fars news agency as the Sultan of Petrochemicals. Iran watchers have named a former deputy intelligence minister as one of those involved in the case. The MEK supporters, mostly members of the Anglo-Iranian Communities, called for the UK to recognize the right of the Iranian people to overthrow the theocratic dictatorship in order to secure a free Iran. The speakers at the event highlighted how women in Iran are repressed in all aspects of life because the mullahs misogynistic laws have relegated women to the status of second-class citizens and advocated that there is a democratic alternative to the Iranian Regime, which is the MEK led by Maryam Rajavi. Indeed, not only do the MEK believe in gender equality and equal representation in government, they already practice it, with at least half of leading MEK positions filled by women. Dr Jocelynne Scutt, a former judge, said: We stand here today on International Womens Day to honour Irans strong, committed, courageous women. To the brave women of Iran, who have to endure Revolutionary Guards harassment, we support you and stand beside you in the struggle for human rights, equality and justice. We salute you, we are with you. Other speakers said that the MEKs focus on gender equality and the ongoing courage of Iranian women as one of the greatest assets the Resistance had. Theresa Villiers, Conservative MP for Chipping Barnet, said: I support the cause of human rights and democracy in Iran. The appalling situation of women in Iran is why we need reforms and change. So I am here to support your just demands for justice, democracy, and freedom. Roger Lyons, former President of TUC, said: I am here to fully support the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people, especially women, led by [the MEK] and its president-elect Maryam Rajavi. Nearly 1000 women were arrested in Iran in 2018 for participating in anti-regime protests, mostly protests against the mandatory hijab, according to a December 2018 report by the Womens Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). The NCRI is a coalition of democratic anti-regime groups and the MEK is its biggest member. 1988 Massacre The speakers also brought up the recent appointment of Ebrahim Raisi as the head of the Iranian Judiciary, which is ironic considering his participation in the Death Committees that sent 30,000 political prisoners, mainly MEK members, to their deaths in 1988, including those as young as 15 and those who were pregnant. The MEK protesters echoed an Early Day Motion from September 2016 supported by 80 cross-party British MPs that called for the prosecution of the massacre perpetrators. Malcolm Fowler, a former member of the Human Rights Committee of the Law Society of England and Wales, said: I join you in condemning the appointment of Raisi and urging the UK Government to take the lead and to work with allies at the UN to ask relevant UN bodies to order an investigation and bring the regimes officials like Raisi to justice for crimes against humanity . Terrorist designation of IRGC and MOIS Other MEK supporters urged the British government to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) as terrorist organizations because of the roles in repressing the Iranian people and potting terror attacks against Iranian dissidents and MEK members in Europe and the US. Twitter Ads info and privacy Millions of scholars are in danger of losing their scholarships if the Senate would insist on keeping the lump sum appropriations it wants to keep in the 2019 budget. This was revealed today by House Deputy Speaker Dante Marcoleta who said that while the Senate is accusing them of making realignments in the budget after ratification , it is the Senate that should be asked where it put multi-billion projects of President Rodrigo Duterte. READ: Duterte holds last-ditch meet to save budget In a press conference, Marcoleta said the Senate had realigned P74 billion in the budget by removing key government programs of the Duterte administration including removing the funding allocation for the National Greening Program, TESDA scholarships, right of way projects of the DPWH and other foreign-assisted projects. Actually, you should ask the Senate. For example, out of the P74 billion that they realigned, they took P2.5 billion from the National Greening Program. That program has disappeared except for a particular province, and I would not tell you [which], Marcoleta said in Filipino. Some P3 billion was taken from the TESDA scholarships. What will you do with the rebel returnees and the out-of-school youth and the rehabilitated drug addicts? They removed P11 billion from the DPWH for right of way acquisition. So what will happen to the Build, Build, Build program? If anyone realigned funds, he said, it was the Senate because it removed budget allocations of those key government programs and transferred them to other unspecified programs. The House members merely identified and itemized the projects that had already been covered by a lump sum allocation in the bicameral-approved budget, he said.He said this was all right as long as the aggregate numbers were not altered or modified. He added that when the House members asked their Senate counterparts to point out an unconstitutional act, they failed to answer. Find a provision in the Constitution that we violated. They said nothing, he said. If we itemized the projects, thats unconstitutional, but if the Senate realigns and cuts funds, thats okay as an institutional amendment? Thats wrong, he said. He said both chambers should set aside differences and comply with the Presidents request to finalize the budget. We in the House have done our part. The Speaker already signed it. The ball is in the Senates court. They must decide whether they will follow the Presidents request or if they will insist on a reenacted budget that would hurt the nation, he said. READ: Solons told to end budget impasse for Philippines sake The discussions were also characterized by anti-American rhetoric that underscores the escalating tensions between Iran and the US at a time when the Iranian regime is working to expand its influence throughout the surrounding region. Overall media coverage of Rouhanis trip suggests that the Iranian president was particularly direct in voicing contempt for the US government, while his Iraqi counterpart was somewhat more nuanced. In the first place, Reuters quoted Rouhani as saying that the US is hated in the region and that its history as an occupying country means its relations with Iraq cannot be compared with those of the Islamic Republic of Iran. However, it is debatable whether Iran can truly escape the same label as an occupier in the wake of its direct contribution to conflicts within Iraqi territory. Although Iranian forces and their local proxies have been credited with helping to effectively destroy the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, they have also seemingly secured a permanent foothold in the affected countries. In recent months Iranian officials and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have specifically signaled that they do not intend to remove forces from the surrounding region, much less halt support for Shiite militant groups that continue to operate alongside neighbors regular armed forces. And while this situation has been openly accepted by some Iraqi politicians and citizens, others have been pushing for the ouster of Iranian influence as a means of reclaiming Iraqs autonomy. In covering the conflict between Iran and the US over access to Iraqi markets, Al Jazeera noted that local populations in places like the Iraqi city of Basra have attacked Iranian consular buildings and the offices of Iran-backed militant groups. The outlets video report showed masked youths addressing the camera during one clash and decrying the Iranian regimes self-serving policies in Iraq. And while such displays showcase an overall divide within Iraqi society, they also reflect a similar split within the political establishment of a country that appears simultaneously dependent on the support it receives from Iran and the US. This situation was specifically acknowledged by Iraqi President Barham Salih against the backdrop of his meeting with Rouhani. Voice of America News quoted him as saying that Iraq has historically been a battleground for conflicts between regional and international powers. Although this remark skirted the edge of endorsement for Rouhanis distinctly anti-American commentary, Salih did not go as far as specifically choosing a side on that battleground. Instead, he praised the concept of regional cooperation but arguably left the door open for continued cooperation between the Iraqi government and that of the US as well. The trouble with Salihs fence-sitting position is that it depends upon the US and Iran either resolving their own growing tensions or working around them while simultaneously pursuing policies that support each of their relations with Iraq. This may be a tall order, given the nature of the responses to Rouhanis trip by both the officials and the national media on both sides of the political conflict between the Islamic Republic and the United States. For instance, on Tuesday, Irans Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi reasserted Tehrans defiance of US influence in its pursuit of relations with Iraq, saying that the Iranian regime would not seek permission from any foreign actor. In carrying Qassemis remarks, the Islamic Republic News Agency asserted that he had spoken specifically in response to interventionist comments by Brain Hook, the US State Departments special representative for Iran. The anger of this American official is not surprising, Qassemi said, adding that Tehran considered an era of US meddling in the affairs of regional countries to be coming to an end. Assuming that that is Tehrans sincerely held belief, it is presumably connected to the regimes expectations regarding the future of the Iranian oil trade in the wake of last years American withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Although that withdrawal spurred the re-imposition of economic sanctions on various Iranian industries and on importers of Iranian petroleum, eight of the top such importers were subsequently granted temporary waivers by the White House. Among these were Iraq, which depends on Iran for a major portion of its electricity generation needs. The Washington Free Beacon reported upon this situation on Monday and declared that Iranian leaders are betting on the Trump administration to cave in on a key piece of its tough new sanctions aimed at choking off the Islamic Republics access to lucrative crude oil markets. The initial round of waivers lasted for six months after the re-imposition of secondary sanctions and are scheduled to end in May, but some or all of them could be extended for a further six months or longer. By doing so, the White House would be cutting against its promise of maximum pressure on the Iranian regime, but it bears noting that this was also true of the first round of waivers. These were put into effect in order to prevent a spike in global oil prices, although President Trump had previously indicated that he did not intend to issue waivers. The administration now appears hopeful that the reality of the situation will be more conducive to maximum pressure, with other oil suppliers being capable of offsetting the loss of Iranian sources. Yet Reuters continues to report that waiver extensions are likely for China and India, at least. Iraq remains a more open question, and the administrations decision may ultimately depend upon political calculations as well as an assessment of the technical viability of wholly cutting off Iraq from Iranian products. Al Jazeera suggests that this is a major fear among Iraqis, and thus a potential source of backlash. But the Free Beacon reports that US officials are holding meetings with all relevant countries, wherein they can be expected to try to assuage those concerns while presenting strategic plans for how Iraq and other energy importers can hope to weather the loss of Iranian markets. The Free Beacon also quoted one American foreign policy expert as saying that a conclusion must emerge from these discussions quickly. The longer the State Department leads the world to believe more waivers are coming, he said, the harder it will be to enforce maximum pressure on Iran. On the other hand, a quick decision does not resolve the further problem that the US will need buy-in from other stakeholders in order to make such maximum pressure viable. This is something that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is reportedly working to address at the moment, through discussions with foreign officials and major players in the private sector. According to Reuters, Pompeo met on Tuesday with executives from some of the worlds top energy companies, then proceeded to address the oil and gas industrys largest conference in the United States. In so doing, he sought to promote support for White House policies that include the broader isolation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Separately, Pompeo was also expected to participate in a closed door meeting regarding the prospective formation of a Middle East Strategic Alliance, through which the US and a number of Gulf Arab nations intend to collectively act to address Irans malign regional activities and contain Iranian regional influence. Following a breach of the Australian parliament, experts pointed the finger at Iran, but other sources claimed that Iran lacked the skills necessary to conduct such a sophisticated operation. This is not true. British intelligence pointed to Iran after a similar attack on the British parliament in 2017, where hackers compromised dozens of lawmakers email accounts. The US Intelligence Community concluded in its annual Worldwide Threat Assessment that Iranian hackers are only capable of causing localized, temporary disruptive effects, but cautioned about Irans increasingly sophisticated cyber techniques and that the Regime wants to attack the critical infrastructure of the US and its allies. Indeed, in January, cyber security firm FireEye warned that Iranian operations pose a threat to a wide variety of sectors and individuals on a global scale, while the European Union concluded that Iran will likely intensify state-sponsored cyber threat activities. In February, the US Justice Department actually unsealed an indictment against a US citizen and four Iranian operatives for targeting US intelligence agents with fake Facebook profiles. The targets were tricked into accepting friend requests and, in at least one case, adding the fake persona to a private Facebook group of government agents. This likely provided the hackers with more information and targets. However, the targets were not convinced to click on malicious links and download malware from phishing emails, which is positive because the Justice Department said the operation would have brought serious damage to the United States. Iranian hackers also targeted Israels home front missile alert system, according to the Israeli militarys outgoing cyber chief Brigadier-General Noam Shaar. This could have triggered false alerts, sending the country into a panic, or worse, prevented the sirens from activating when a missile was detected, so civilians wouldnt know to take cover. Thankfully, the hackers were detected while the Israeli militarys cyber unit was tracking Iranian cyber groups and the threat was neutralised. While we should not inflate Irans capabilities, we should certainly be aware of them. Annie Fixler, the deputy director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote: The United States can ill afford to dismiss Tehrans capabilities as those of a third-tier cyber actor. An accurate assessment of the threat is the first step to defeating, thwarting, and deterring the Islamic Republics cyber army. About Me William Kelly I am a freelance writer, journalist and historian whose major interests are music and history, with a special emphasis on the assassination of President Kennedy. View my complete profile Blog Archive Bangsamoro TC chief passes away posted March 14, 2019 at 01:50 am by Nash B. Maulana March 14, 2019 at 01:50 am Cotabato CityHe was preparing to lead the newly minted Bangsamoro government , but Ghazali Jaafar spent most of his life as a revolutionary. With Nat Mariano, Macon Ramos-Araneta and PNA draft bicam READ: MILF hopes solons wont pass watered down BBL That life came to an end early Wednesday at a hospital in Davao City, weeks after he underwent a heart bypass operation. His body was buried after the noon Muslim prayer at his farm in Pigcalagan, Sultan Kudarat, Maguindanao. Observers had noticed that Jaafar, vice chairman of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, seemed pale and weak during the recent plebiscites to ratify the Bangsamoro Organic Law on Jan. 22 and Feb. 6, which paved the way for the creation of a Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. Veteran broadcast journalist Melo Acuna and wife Jonah Acuna fondly remember Jaafar as being thoughtful to friends, occasionally sending them the spicy palapa, pulverized chilly fried in grated coconut meat. In early February 2017, President Rodrigo Duterte named Jaafar as the chairman of the Expanded Bangsamoro Transition Commission, which then included members and officials of the MILF, as well as other sector-representatives, to help Congress draft a Bangsamoro law. On Feb. 22, 2019, Jaafar was one of the presidential appointees to the Bangsamoro Transition Authority, as speaker of the BTA Interim Parliament. Jaafar was Datukan Abo or Toks to his media peers and friends. His radio listeners in the late 1960s fondly recall Toks by his broadcast signature, Sinumagad a Lanun a Minukit a Langkuno (Literally: Bygones and Glorious Past). Shortly after the Jabidah Massacre on March 18, 1968, Abo went underground, trained abroad and later worked for Suara Malaysia (Voice of Malaysia), a British Broadcasting Corp. affiliate regional station, which granted a bloc airtime slot for Mindanao Muslim expatriates in Sabah, Malaysia. Abos talent was further honed in 1973 when, along with fellow Mindanaoan, Nahdin Jubaira from Sulu, Mus Sema, Ustadz Abuhuraira, Mina Mohammad and Akmad Bayam, he was trained by the BBC-Voice of Malaysia as its pool of regional talents and anchor persons. They were then members of the Moro National Liberation Front, prior to the 1976 Tripoli Agreement. Soon after the signing of the Tripoli Agreement on Dec. 23, 1976, Abo joined a group of Mindanao Muslim religious leaders and professionals organized by Ustadz Salamat Hashim in the Middle East. That started a long stretch as a guerrilla for the broadcaster Toks Abo, who would covertly return home to the marshes of Maguindanao from time to time. He became the first spokesman and concurrent MILF Vice-Chairman for Political Affairs in 1994. When he assumed the position of spokesman, he consulted a few practicing journalists in the print and broadcast media. Presidential Peace Adviser Carlito G. Galvez Jr. said: the men and women of the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process mourn the loss of the great Moro leader Ghazali Jaafar. Secretary Saidamen B. Pangarungan of the National Commission on Muslim Filipinos condoled with his family. Jaafar, the former Chairman of the Bangsamoro Transition Commission and a member of the Bangsamoro Transition Authority, passed away at 1 a.m. in a hospital in Davao City. We would like to convey our deepest sympathies and condolences to the bereaved family and relatives of Jaafar, Galvez said. Galvez said Jaafar as a Moro leader, showed us his determination in leading the Moro people through the passage and eventual ratification of the Bangsamoro Organic Law. We will never forget that despite his health condition, Jaafar went the extra mile to join several campaign-rallies to push for the realization of the Moro peoples aspiration for a genuine and meaningful autonomy. Jaafar selflessly dedicated and devoted his life for others. Truly, he is a man of peace. May the Almighty and Merciful Allah Bless his soul, Galvez said.The Palace on Wednesday extended its condolences to Jaafars family. Our deep thoughts and sincere prayers to Mr. Ghazali Jaafar who died early morning today, Panelo said in a statement. Panelo said Jaafar was a warrior of peace for holding several positions vital in achieving peace in Mindanao. Jaafar served as the chairman of the MILF Peace Negotiating Panel from 1996 to 1997. He also became the first vice chairman of the MILF Central Committee and MILF for Political Affairs. The Palace takes this opportunity to send our heartfelt condolences to the family members and friends of Mr. Jaafar. He has fought many battles for peace and may Allah grant him a place in Jannah [Paradise], Panelo said. As he attended the oath-taking for the 80-member BTA, Jaafar was wheeled into the Palace halls. However, during the photo opportunities with the President, Jaafar, who was frail from a stroke, refused to sit in a wheelchair and remained standing to witness the historic juncture in Bangsamoro history. The Philippine National Police also extended its condolences to Jaafars family. PNP spokesperson, Col. Bernard Banac recognized Jaafars significant role in the peace process in Mindanao. From a worthy adversary to a partner in peace, Chairman Jaafar shared the PNPs aspirations for genuine and lasting peace in Mindanao. By reaching out the magnanimous hand of friendship and peace, Chairman Jaafar sought to make the peace process work through the newly ratified Bangsamoro Organic Law, Banac said. Senate Majority Leader Miguel Zubiri credited Jaafar for working for peace in Mindanao. The country owes much... to Chairman Jaafar. He consistently extended his hand of conciliation and brotherhood to fellow Muslimsmore so, to fellow Filipinos during the course of the Bangsamoro struggle. His efforts contributed greatly to achieving unity among factions of fellow Muslim brothers, he said. He has earned the admiration and respect of allies and adversaries because he has always stood for his dream of bringing forth a Bangsamoro where godliness, liberty, progress, and peace will reign forever. We shall always remember him for giving us the privilege of working with him to craft the historical Bangsamoro Organic Law as one of the important pillars of a truly autonomous Bangsamoro, he added. Senator Juan Edgardo Angara and Grace Poe also paid tribute to Jaafar. Senator Aquilino Pimentel III said he was thankful for meeting and working with Jaafar on the Bangsamoro Organic Law. I was also able to shake his hand during the appointment of the BTA members in Malacanang. I am happy that Mr. Jaafar was able to see the fruition of their peace talks with the government. My condolences to the Jaafar family and the entire MILF organization, he said. MILF Chairman Al Haj Murad Ebrahim on Wednesday announced Jaafars death in Davao City from cardiac arrest. COMMENT DISCLAIMER: Reader comments posted on this Web site are not in any way endorsed by Manila Standard. Comments are views by manilastandard.net readers who exercise their right to free expression and they do not necessarily represent or reflect the position or viewpoint of manilastandard.net. While reserving this publications right to delete comments that are deemed offensive, indecent or inconsistent with Manila Standard editorial standards, Manila Standard may not be held liable for any false information posted by readers in this comments section. The Sandiganbayan has rejected the motion to dismiss the graft charges against Moro National Liberation Front founding chairman Nur Misuari over the alleged irregularities in the purchase of P77.26 million worth of ghost textbooks when he was governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. In a resolution dated March 8, the anti-graft courts Third Division found probable cause against Misuari and ruled to proceed with the trial of Misuari on two counts each of graft and misuse of public funds. The court must stress that a comprehensive consideration of the merits of the prosecutions evidence and the defenses arguments, as to the alleged weakness thereof, is premature at this point and better left to trial on the merits, the Sandiganbayan said. Misuari is accused of graft and misuse of funds for allegedly conspiring with his co-accused to give unwarranted benefits, advantage and privilege to three private companies. The Ombudsman found that no such materials were delivered by MBJ Learning Tools, CPR Publishing, and White Orchids Printing and Publishing House. But Misuari claims he could not be held liable for a transaction that pushed through when he was no longer ARMM governor.Misuari said the payments to CPR Publishing took place in July 2004, MBJ Learning in December 2003, and to White Orchids in July 2004 and September 2005, all of which were covered by the incumbency of former ARMM governor Parouk Hussin. Misuari said his term ended on Sept. 30, 2001, and that the issue of conspiracy was non-existent. He said he was detained in Malaysia from December 2001 to January 2002 and for six years in the Philippines from 2002 to 2008. He said he was detained at the Philippine National Police-Special Action Force Training Center in Santa. Rosa, Laguna, when the three private companies were paid. Late last month, the Sandiganbayans Third Division entered a not-guilty plea on behalf of Misuari after he refused to enter a plea during his arraignment. Roasted suckling pig or lechon, deep-fried pork trotters or knuckles and kare kare, with a thick savory peanut sauce, have been identified in Taste Atlas 2019 list of 100 best dishes worldwide. The three dishes join other world favorites like Japans sushi, Thailands pad thai, and Singapores chili crabs. Taste Atlas is European-based and can be accessed online which previously was looking for content writers for gastronomy-related articles and able to communicate with people from the food industry. Taste Atlas describes itself as a world food atlas that nurtures the culture of the local and traditional. The idea is to inform and motivate travelers to taste the best local food and beverages wherever they travel. Hitting a line on the Filipino lechon, Taste Atlas said: The slowly-roasted suckling pig is usually stuffed with lemongrass, tamarind, garlic, onions, and chives, and is then roasted on a large bamboo spit over an open fire.It is traditionally served whole on a platter, at celebrations and festive events such as weddings and Christmas. On the kare-kare, Taste Atlas notes how bagoongboggoong for those in northern Luzon north of Manilais often served on the side in order to enhance the flavors of dish. The Philippines crispy pata is described by its website as one of the most common Filipino dishes served on special occasions. Just adding interesting stuff to the blog in my spare time, so pardon the miscellany and lack of any organization. If you need to email about something (not hood ornaments) that isn't relevant to the comment section, e mail me at jbohjkl@yahoo.com, which will be responded to pretty fast on weekdays Images used IAW Title 17 U.S. Code 107 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 This is under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non commercial and is otherwise in compliance with the license.See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/legalcode - Mon Tulfo was urged to resign from his post after calling the Filipino workers lazy - However, Tulfo insisted that he will not apologize nor will he quit his post - The Special Envoy to China also raised his bad finger to respond to the labor groups PAY ATTENTION: Click "See First" under the "Following" tab to see KAMI news on your News Feed Labor group Trade Union Congress of the Philippines called on Mon Tulfo to resign from his post after the Special Envoy to China said that Filipino workers are lazy and slowpoke. KAMI learned that Tulfo raised his bad finger to respond to the labor groups that urged him to quit his post. During Tulfos interview with GMA News, Tulfo insisted that it was the developers who claimed that the Filipino workers are lazy compared to Chinese workers. "Marami kasi akong natatanggap sa mga developers sa mga contractors na tamad talaga ang Pinoy, Pinoy construction workers dito sa bansa," Tulfo said. Mabagal sila magtrabaho, puro satsat, puro daldal, ang tagal pag meryenda, he added. PAY ATTENTION: 20 Funny Wedding Memes That Describe Almost Any Wedding Tulfo also said that he will not be apologizing for his controversial remark and that he will not be resigning from his post. Ito. Bakit ako magbibitiw? Wala naman akong ginawang masama," the Special Envoy said. PAY ATTENTION: Using free basics app to access internet for free? Now you can read KAMI news there too. Use the search option to find us. Read KAMI news while saving your data! As previously reported by KAMI, Tulfo shared on social media that he will not be apologizing for what he said because he just pointed out the truth. The Palace has also spoken regarding the controversy. Enjoyed reading our story? Download KAMI's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major Filipino news! Aquino-Falcis Controversy: Brother Speaks Up! Atty. Jesus Falcis, brother of Nicko Falcis, discloses how the controversy involving Kris Aquino and Nicko, her former project manager, has affected the life of his family. Check out all of our exciting videos on KAMI HumanMeter YouTube channel! Source: Kami.com.ph - President Rodrigo Duterte explained the reason why he has two wives - The President also said that the women deprived him of his freedom of expression - Later on, Duterte also referred to women as p*ta PAY ATTENTION: Click "See First" under the "Following" tab to see KAMI news on your News Feed President Rodrigo Duterte has recently accused women of depriving him of his own freedom of expression. KAMI learned that on his defense, the President said that he still loves women. A Youtube video uploaded by the Manila Bulletin showed that during the awarding ceremony of the Outstanding Women in Law Enforcement and National Security, President Duterte said that he loves women. Basta ako, mahal ko ang babae. Kaya nga makita mo naman, dalawa ang asawa ko Ibig sabihin talagang gusto ko ang babae, President Duterte said. Hindi ibig sabihin na gusto kong galawin. Gusto ko lang ang babae, he added. PAY ATTENTION: The Amazing Cast Of Game Of Thrones In Then And Now (PHOTOS) However, despite his love for women, the President said that these women also deprived him of his right to freedom of expression. You know, you women, you have deprived me of my freedom of expression. Hindi ko sinasabi sa inyo yan, but you criticize every sentence or word I say, the President said. But, that is my freedom to express myself. Even if Im just a President, do not take me away from the crowd of being a Filipino citizen, he added. PAY ATTENTION: Using free basics app to access internet for free? Now you can read KAMI news there too. Use the search option to find us. Read KAMI news while saving your data! According to a report by the Yahoo! Philippines, President Duterte also referred to women as p*ta in front of the outstanding female members of the military and police. Enjoyed reading our story? Download KAMI's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major Filipino news! Aquino-Falcis Controversy: Brother Speaks Up! Atty. Jesus Falcis, brother of Nicko Falcis, discloses how the controversy involving Kris Aquino and Nicko, her former project manager, has affected the life of his family. Check out all of our exciting videos on KAMI HumanMeter YouTube channel! Source: Kami.com.ph - Korina Sanchez shared photos of the construction of her twin babies new nursery - It turned out that her former veranda is being transformed into a nursery for Pepe and Pilar - She described the nursery as small but it looks huge in the photos PAY ATTENTION: Click "See First" under the "Following" tab to see KAMI news on your News Feed Korina Sanchez once again proved that she will do everything when it comes to taking good care of her twin babies, Pepe and Pilar. KAMI learned from Korinas social media post that the nursery for the twins is already being constructed. It turned out that her former veranda is being transformed into a nursery for her babies. She described the nursery as small but it looks enormous and luxurious in the pictures! Egzooooited about the twins nursery back home. Am remote controlling the small construction for our former small veranda converted into a small nursery, she wrote. PAY ATTENTION: 15 Memorable Photos From The Amazing Baby Shower Of Meghan Markle Swipe to the left to see the other photos in this Instagram post: PAY ATTENTION: Using free basics app to access internet for free? Now you can read KAMI news there too. Use the search option to find us. Read KAMI news while saving your data! In a previous report by KAMI, Korina shared her reaction to the netizens who bash her and her twins. Korina Sanchez is considered as one of the most famous and iconic newscasters in the Philippines. On October 27, 2009, she tied the knot with senatorial candidate Mar Roxas. Through surrogacy, she finally had her first babies -- Pepe and Pilar. POPULAR: Read more news about Korina Sanchez! Enjoyed reading our story? Download KAMI's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major Filipino news! Aquino-Falcis Controversy: Brother Speaks Up! Atty. Jesus Falcis, brother of Nicko Falcis, discloses how the controversy involving Kris Aquino and Nicko, her former project manager, has affected the life of his family. Check out all of our exciting videos on KAMI HumanMeter YouTube channel! Source: Kami.com.ph Rebellion raps vs. Marawi dad posted March 14, 2019 at 01:35 am by Manila Standard March 14, 2019 at 01:35 am Vice Mayor Arafat Salic Marawi City Vice Mayor Arafat Salic was arrested yesterday on rebellion charges in connection with the 2017 siege.Salic is included in the Office of the Martial Law Administrator Arrest Order dated Sept. 4, 2017 for rebellion case, said Col. Romeo Brawner, commander of the 103rd Infantry Brigade. His brother, former Marawi Mayor Fajad Salic, was also nabbed in 2017 for rebellion in line with the arrest order issued by Defense Secretary and martial law administrator Delfin Lorenzana.The vice mayor was arrested at the Marawi City Hall. He underwent custodial debriefing and medical check-up before he was turned over to the Philippine National Police. COMMENT DISCLAIMER: Reader comments posted on this Web site are not in any way endorsed by Manila Standard. Comments are views by manilastandard.net readers who exercise their right to free expression and they do not necessarily represent or reflect the position or viewpoint of manilastandard.net. While reserving this publications right to delete comments that are deemed offensive, indecent or inconsistent with Manila Standard editorial standards, Manila Standard may not be held liable for any false information posted by readers in this comments section. Your tax-deductible gift today powers our reporters and keeps us independent. We rely on you, our reader, not paywalls to stay funded because we believe important news and information should be freely accessible to all. Start your day with LAist Sign up for the Morning Brief, delivered weekdays. Subscribe Captain Marvel is the 21st -- yes, twenty-first -- chapter in the neverending Marvel movie universe. (We don't believe you, Avengers: Endgame.) It's also the first Marvel flick with a female lead, a female (co-)director, and a female composer. "A lot of things, unfortunately, are thought to be male-themed, right?" Pinar Toprak said this time last year, while working on the score for the comic book series Krypton on cable channel SyFy. "So this is nothing different, and we can talk philosophically about why that is. The world doesn't change by thinking the same things, by the limitations. The world changes by thinking, OK, it's been like this for a while, but there's no reason why it needs to keep being like this. And music, and art in general -- it's genderless. Because emotions are genderless." BREAKING THE MUSICAL GLASS CEILING Captain Marvel isn't just the first Marvel film scored by a woman, it's one of the highest-profile blockbuster assignments a woman has landed in a field that's long been dominated by (white) men. "I'm a big Marvel fan," Toprak said. "I'm a big fan of the whole superhero genre in general, but Captain Marvel means something -- something more. I wanted to be a part of that legacy, if I could. I remember getting the call from Laura Engel, who's one of my agents, and she's like: 'We might be able to get you an opportunity to demo.' And for me, even just that was the accomplishment, right there -- because I didn't even actually think I was going to get it." When a composer gets the chance to write a demo -- essentially, auditioning to score a movie -- they normally just create the music inside their computer. "I had the option to just either do it in the box, with all MIDI mockups, or... not," Toprak laughed. "I went with 'not,' and I went and hired a 70-piece orchestra." She paid for that orchestra -- not cheap -- out of her own pocket, and recorded her initial instinct of a main theme for Captain Marvel. "And it miraculously worked," she said. CREATING A THEME THAT'S UNFORGETTABLE Toprak grew up in Istanbul, Turkey. She wanted to be a film composer since she was a little girl, and came to the U.S. in the late '90s to study jazz and composition. She apprenticed with composers Hans Zimmer and William Ross, and over the past decade she's mostly scored indie films and TV movies. But she's recently started to blow up -- writing additional music for Justice League alongside Danny Elfman, scoring the massively successful online game Fortnite -- and now, Captain Marvel. "[Captain Marvel's] incredibly powerful, yet she's got this really human, vulnerable side to it, that doesn't take away from the strength," Toprak said, describing her take on the character. "And once I found out it's the '90s, too, it's like... it's a gift [laughs]." "Once I actually saw the film," Toprak said, "I really felt like what I did at first wasn't unique enough. And I wanted to write a theme that was really her. Now that I got to know her a little better, I felt like, OK, I could do something better. And hopefully something that's more singable and memorable. It's the human side -- it's the heart, I think. I wanted to make sure I captured the heart somehow." The pressure started to get to Toprak. "People were like, 'Oh, we can't wait to hear Captain Marvel theme! We wonder what's it going to be like,'" Toprak said. "So I'm psyching myself out a little bit in the studio, playing a whole bunch of things, and I wasn't happy with any of it. And I'm panicking. 'I'm never going to write a note again!' You know, very typical writer thing to say. So I put my shoes on, I took a walk around my neighborhood. I knew how I wanted to start the theme. I knew the first two notes." Many of the most famous superhero themes -- think John Williams' Superman -- open with a regal fifth interval. Toprak wanted to set hers apart, and write a theme that would be instantly recognizable just from those first two notes. She chose the aspirational, sky-reaching feeling of a minor seventh. "So I just started humming those two notes, and trying a few things," she said. "People must have thought I was crazy, because I was literally walking and humming to myself. And I came up with something that I... didn't hate too much [laughs]. I called someone who's on my team, and also a dear friend of mine -- I was like, 'What do you think about this theme?' He was like, 'Pinar, hang up the phone right now and record it on your Voice Memo.' So that's what I did. And, believe it or not, that is the Captain Marvel theme now." After capturing Captain Marvel with a melody, "we wanted to make sure we find the right themes for the Kree and Skrulls as well," she said. "And we wanted to create different worlds, distinctive worlds, for both Hala" -- the planet where Vers/Carol (Brie Larson) starts out -- "and Earth. The cosmic scenes are a lot more analogue synthy. And then as we come to Earth, there are times it's quite Lethal Weapon-like with the action scenes. Some of the writing that I really love in the '90s, especially the action bits, it's very dynamic and very notey, if that's a word. The current action writing style is a bit more repetitive. But '90s action, it changed all the time, and was really dynamic, and a lot of layers going, and really intriguing and fun. And it takes a long time to write." Captain Marvel came out this past weekend -- it's Toprak's 20th feature film and biggest gig yet. This past week also marked the release of the soundtrack album for her Krypton score. But the date has another, deeper significance to her. "My father passed away 10 years ago," she said. "He supported me in ways that I couldn't have ever imagined a father could. We're not talking about financial support, because there wasn't a whole lot of that. But in terms of a father believing in his daughter, at such a young age -- it was mid-'90s in Turkey, and when I told my dad 'I'm going to move to Hollywood and score Hollywood films,' he didn't think I was crazy. He actually thought that it was possible. And that made everything possible after that, that belief." A version of this story also ran on KPCC's The Frame -- you can listen here. Your tax-deductible gift today powers our reporters and keeps us independent. We rely on you, our reader, not paywalls to stay funded because we believe important news and information should be freely accessible to all. Start your day with LAist Sign up for the Morning Brief, delivered weekdays. Subscribe A family of four Iranian refugees has made it to Los Angeles, ending an odyssey that saw them stranded in Vienna for nearly three years. Their story is another illustration of the personal cost of U.S. government immigration decisions. It all started in April 2016, when Argisht, his older brother Menooa and their parents, Hrach and Levon, left their home city of Isfahan and traveled to Vienna under the Lautenberg refugee program, which Congress established in 1990 to benefit persecuted religious minorities. The family is Armenian and Christian, a group that endures discrimination in their home country. Iranian refugees accepted into the program are funneled through Vienna to complete their paperwork there, because there is no U.S. embassy in Iran. Once in Vienna, the family rented an apartment, expecting to be there a matter of months while Washington finished processing their applications. But the process began slowing down in the final weeks of the Obama administration. Then in Jan. 2017, President Trump issued his first travel ban, which barred the entry of travelers and immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries. The family was stuck. "It was disappointing," said Argisht, 28, who along with his other family members asked that his last name not be used, even though they are in the country legally as refugees. Meanwhile, the federal government started tightening rules regarding how many refugees could be admitted each year. The wait kept stretching out, with no end in sight. Because they were on temporary transit visas, Argisht and his relatives could not get jobs in Vienna. He started worrying about how long their modest life savings would last. They had sold everything they owned in Iran. By the summer of 2017, they were out of money. Then in Feb. 2018, another blow: the Trump administration denied their refugee applications -- and gave no reason why. By the time this happened, not only were Argisht and his family broke, but they were in Austria illegally -- their Austrian visas had expired. Back in the U.S., Argisht's older sister Lilia Tarverdi and her husband, who live in Tujunga, were scraping together whatever they could to send to her family. But they struggled. Tarverdi, a former refugee herself, is a stay-at-home mom with two young children. "It was just the one income, and we tried to do our best to help them," she said. "I tried to cut some of my expenses to help them." Staying in touch via FaceTime on their phones, Tarverdi would tell her parents and brothers to not give up. "You're going to come here. We'll finally see each other," she would tell them. Luckily for the family, a Catholic church in Vienna took them in. All four crammed into one bedroom of a small three-bedroom house owned by the church. They shared the kitchen and one bathroom with 13 other Iranian refugees, including a family with children. "It was small, so small, but it was better than nothing," Argisht said. Had the church not stepped in, he said, they would have been on the street. Church volunteers donated food and other items to keep them going. He remembers people in the house despairing and crying, not knowing what would happen to them. For his father Levon and his mother Hrach, who are in their 60s, the experience was especially hard. Hrach says she tried to stay busy. "I tried to walk, to clean my room," said Hrach, speaking in Armenian. "I cooked, and I went to church during the day." The family began making contingency plans, studying German and checking with Austrian officials for ways they might be able to stay there legally. Last spring, the New York-based International Refugee Assistance Project filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 87 Iranians stuck in Vienna. Last July, a judge ruled that the U.S. government did not provide sufficient reason for denying their applications. As a result of that ruling, their cases were reopened. But only about a dozen of the refugees, including Lilia Tarverdi's family, were allowed to travel to the U.S. last month. The rest are still waiting. "We are mindful that many members of our class remain in Vienna," said Kate Meyer, an attorney with the International Refugee Assistance Project. "They are desperate to reunite with their family in the U.S., and incredibly fearful of being forced to return to Iran." U.S. immigration officials would not say if or when that might happen. "WE'RE NOT GETTING REFUGEES FROM IRAN ANYMORE" Refugee admissions to the U.S. have slowed to a trickle since President Trump took office. The proposed ceiling for refugee admissions for fiscal year 2017 set by President Obama was 110,000; the Trump administration cut that in half. The administration has continued to slash the cap on refugee admissions, most recently to 30,000 for fiscal year 2019, the lowest number since the refugee program was created in 1980. Between the start of the fiscal year Oct. 1 and the end of February, only about 9,300 refugees have been admitted. At the Glendale office of International Rescue Committee, one of the larger refugee resettlement organizations, local Executive Director Martin Zogg keeps a chart on the wall tracking how many refugees the group resettles locally. It shows how five years ago, the agency was resettling over 800 refugees locally a year. Their numbers peaked in 2016 as the Obama administration responded to the Syrian war crisis, Zogg said. Then starting in 2017, after Trump took office, came a sharp drop-off. "We resettled 120 refugees here last year," he said. "And right now we're at 43." The International Rescue Committee's Glendale office used to work primarily with Lautenberg refugees, typically Armenian Christians from Iran. "The Lautenberg program is effectively suspended at this point," Zogg said. "So we're not getting refugees, with few exceptions. We're not getting refugees from Iran anymore." Some other local agencies that also worked with Lautenberg refugees have suspended their resettlement efforts, because so few are arriving. Zogg said the Iranian refugees in Vienna covered in the International Refugee Assistance Project lawsuit represent just a few of the Lautenberg refugees shut out in recent years -- they, at least, had made it to Vienna. But others accepted into the program were still in Iran, awaiting a transit visa to Austria. Their visas were canceled by the Austrian government following the Jan. 2017 travel ban, leaving some who'd already left jobs, sold their possessions and were preparing to leave Iran stuck there. "I'M HAPPY AND I'M SAD" In her small Tujunga apartment last month, Lilia Tarverdi prepared a traditional Persian stew in the kitchen as Argisht played with her two young children nearby. In the living room, their parents watched a local Armenian music show on TV. The apartment was neat but crowded -- a few suitcases here and there, air mattresses propped against the wall. It's been this way since Valentine's Day, when Tarverdi's parents, Argisht and Menooa landed at LAX. Tarverdi, 37, hadn't seen them in a decade. Brother and sister talked over one another as they described the moment the family was reunited. "At the airport I tried to control myself, to not cry," said Argisht. "Me too!" Tarverdi interjected. "Yeah, it was a great feeling," her brother said, adding, "the good feelings in this house, I would say, it's helped us forget the bad things." The family recognizes just how lucky they are to have been among the handful of refugees admitted recently. In the weeks since they arrived, they've been settling in: They stay up late, talking and catching up. Tarverdi and her mom take turns cooking. Hrach and Levon are getting to know their two young grandchildren. Argisht and Menooa, who in Iran worked as a barber and a welder, respectively, are looking forward to getting driver's licenses and finding jobs. They're slowly getting over the uncertain years they spent in Vienna. But they haven't forgotten about those they left behind there. Argisht describes a kind of survivor's guilt. "I'm happy and I'm sad, because I want luck for everyone -- not [just] for me," he said. Argisht hopes the U.S. government will approve the refugee applications of the others who are stuck in Vienna, "because they really need to be here, they really need to be next to the rest of their families ... I want them to have the same feeling that I had in the airport." 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16 (1) Mar 14 (2) Mar 13 (4) Mar 12 (1) Mar 11 (1) Mar 10 (1) Mar 06 (4) Mar 05 (1) Mar 04 (1) Mar 03 (2) Mar 02 (2) Mar 01 (2) Feb 28 (2) Feb 27 (1) Feb 26 (1) Feb 25 (1) Feb 23 (2) Feb 19 (2) Feb 13 (1) Feb 12 (1) Feb 02 (1) Jan 31 (1) Jan 22 (1) Jan 18 (1) Jan 16 (1) Jan 09 (1) Jan 01 (1) Dec 20 (2) Dec 15 (1) Dec 13 (1) Dec 11 (1) Nov 30 (1) Nov 27 (1) Nov 20 (1) Nov 11 (1) Nov 10 (1) Oct 23 (1) Oct 20 (1) Oct 01 (1) Sep 30 (1) Sep 29 (1) Sep 24 (2) Sep 15 (1) Sep 13 (1) Sep 12 (1) Sep 08 (1) Sep 02 (2) Aug 31 (1) Aug 28 (1) Aug 27 (2) Aug 24 (1) Aug 21 (1) Aug 20 (1) Aug 18 (3) Aug 16 (1) Aug 15 (1) Aug 14 (1) Aug 11 (1) Aug 08 (1) Aug 07 (1) Aug 03 (1) Jul 27 (1) Jul 26 (1) Jul 24 (1) Jul 22 (1) Jul 21 (1) Jul 19 (1) Jul 15 (1) Jul 14 (1) Jul 13 (3) Jul 10 (1) Jul 08 (2) Jul 07 (1) Jul 06 (1) Jul 03 (1) Jul 01 (1) Jun 28 (1) Jun 24 (2) Jun 20 (1) Jun 19 (1) Jun 18 (1) Jun 15 (1) Jun 14 (2) Jun 11 (1) Jun 09 (3) Jun 08 (1) Jun 07 (1) Jun 06 (1) Jun 04 (2) Jun 03 (1) Jun 02 (2) Jun 01 (1) May 31 (3) May 30 (1) May 29 (1) May 28 (2) May 26 (1) May 25 (1) May 18 (1) May 17 (1) May 15 (1) May 09 (1) May 07 (2) May 02 (1) May 01 (1) Apr 30 (1) Apr 27 (1) Apr 26 (2) Apr 23 (1) Apr 22 (1) Apr 19 (1) Apr 18 (1) Apr 12 (1) Apr 11 (1) Apr 09 (1) Apr 07 (1) Apr 05 (1) Apr 01 (1) Mar 30 (1) Mar 27 (1) Mar 25 (1) Mar 22 (2) Mar 19 (1) Mar 18 (1) Mar 16 (1) Mar 15 (2) Mar 13 (1) Mar 12 (1) Mar 11 (1) Mar 10 (1) WashingtonUS President Donald Trumps former campaign chief Paul Manafort, sentenced to 47 months in prison last week for tax and bank fraud, returns to court on Wednesday to find out whether he faces, even more, jail time. Manafort, who turns 70 on April 1, is to appear before Judge Amy Berman Jackson in a federal court in Washington for sentencing on two conspiracy charges to which he has pleaded guilty. The veteran Republican political consultant and lobbyist faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison for each count. Jackson can decide whether any sentence she imposes runs concurrently with Manaforts current sentence or is tacked on to the end. Manaforts case is the highest-profile one yet stemming from Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He is one of a half-dozen former Trump associates and senior aides charged by Mueller, although none of them have been accused so far of direct collusion with Moscow to get Trump elected to the White House. Manafort was convicted by a jury in August of five counts of filing false income tax returns, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failing to report a foreign bank account. His conviction was a stunning downfall for a man who also worked on the White House bids of three Republican presidentsGerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bushand party hopeful Bob Dole. The charges were not connected to Manaforts role in the Trump campaign, which he headed for two months in 2016, but were related to lucrative consulting work he did for Russian-backed Ukrainian politicians from 2004 to 2014. Prosecutors alleged that Manafort used offshore bank accounts to hide more than $55 million he earned working for the Ukrainians. The money was used to support a lavish lifestyle which included purchases of luxury homes and cars, antique rugs, and expensive clothes, including an $18,500 python jacket. Manafort was sentenced to 47 months in prison last week by US District Judge T.S. Ellis -- a jail term that was well below the federal sentencing guidelines of 19 to 24 years and was criticized by many as too lenient. Ellis described the guidelines as excessive and said Manafort had led an otherwise blameless life before being convicted of tax and bank fraud. Jackson may not prove to be as forgiving.She sent Manafort to jail last year after he was accused of tampering with witnesses, one of the two conspiracy charges to which he has pleaded guilty. And it was Jackson who ruled that Manafort had breached a plea agreement reached with the special counsels office by lying repeatedly to investigators. Since June, Manafort has been jailed just outside Washington in Alexandria, Virginia, and he appeared in court in a wheelchair last week looking haggard, his once jet black hair now mostly gray. Trump has denounced the Mueller probe as a political witch hunt and dangled the possibility of pardons for some of those indicted by the special counsel, a former FBI director. Last week, Trump said Manafort has been going through a very tough time and that he feels very badly for him. Trumps remarks on Manafort contrasted sharply with what he had to say about his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, who has denounced his longtime boss as a racist, a conman and a cheat. He directly asked me for a pardon, Trump said. I said NO. Cohen is to begin serving a three-year prison sentence on May 6 for fraud, tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions and lying to Congress. Manaforts former deputy Rick Gates reached a plea deal with the special counsels office and is awaiting sentencing. Former national security advisor Michael Flynn admitted lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials and is also awaiting sentencing. George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and spent 12 days in prison. Another Trump advisor, Roger Stone, awaits trial. LondonBritish MPs resoundingly rejected Prime Minister Theresa Mays Brexit deal for a second time on Tuesday, plunging the country into further uncertainty just 17 days before it is due to split from the European Union. The House of Commons voted 391-242 against the divorce deal, even after May secured further guarantees from Brussels over its most controversial elements. The move risks unleashing economic chaos, as Britain is scheduled to end ties with its biggest trade partner after 46 years on March 29, no matter what. Appearing before MPs in a voice half-breaking due to a cold, May defiantly vowed to fight on, saying she profoundly rejected the outcome. The deal weve negotiated is the best and indeed the only deal, she told the hushed chamber moments after the vote. May promised to allow MPs to vote on a no deal option on Wednesday and if that is rejected as expected, to decide on Thursday whether to ask the EU to delay Brexit. She said parliament faced unenviable choices if it voted for an extension, including revoking Brexit, holding a second referendum or leaving with another deal. However, euroskeptics believe the current deal is so bad that it is worth the risk of leaving with no plan. The latest vote comes two years after Britain set the clock ticking on its departure from the EU following a highly divisive referendum in 2016. Michel Barnier, the EU chief Brexit negotiator, said Brussels had nothing more to offer and must now brace for the possibility of a messy divorce. The EU has done everything it can to help get the Withdrawal Agreement over the line, Barnier tweeted. The impasse can only be solved in the #UK. Our no-deal preparations are now more important than ever before. But a spokeswoman for European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said EU members would consider a reasoned request for a Brexit delay. Germanys foreign minister said Tuesday that it was becoming increasingly likely that Britain would crash out of the bloc with no deal in place, accusing the country of gambling carelessly with the well-being of citizens and the economy. Unfortunately, I can only say that at the moment Germany has prepared for all the worst cases as well as possible, Heiko Maas said. Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the main opposition Labour party who has been trying to force snap elections, said May must now admit that her governments overarching strategy had failed. Their deal, their proposal, the one the prime ministers put, is clearly dead, Corbyn said, calling on her to negotiate for a softer Brexit to keep close economic ties with the EU.After MPs first rejected the 585-page Brexit deal in January, May promised changes to the hated backstop plan which is intended to keep open the border with EU member Ireland. She announced she had secured the promised legally binding changes to the backstop -- which would keep Britain in the EUs customs union if and until a new way was found to avoid frontier checks -- after a last-minute trip to Strasbourg to meet EU leaders on the eve of the vote. Hours later, however, Attorney General Geoffrey Cox said the additions would not completely allay MPs fears of being trapped in the arrangement forever. It did not take long for Brexit-supporting MPs in Mays Conservative party, and her allies, Northern Irelands Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), to declare their opposition. Some eurosceptics did change their mind, urging their colleagues not to risk everything. Former minister Edward Leigh said: You may not like the deal, its not perfect, but it delivers Brexit and lets go for it. But the margin of Tuesdays defeat was not substantially smaller than the 230-vote thumping the plan suffered on January 15. The pound, which has been highly volatile since the 2016 referendum, initially rose after the vote but then sank against both the euro and dollar. The backstop is designed to protect the peace process in Northern Ireland, which involved the removal of border checks with the Republic of Ireland. Brexit supporters wanted a unilateral way out of it, or a time limit to the arrangement, but the EU said this would make it worthless. Leaders across Europe also united behind a message that this was the best and final offer Britain could expect. There will be no third chance, Juncker said after his talks on Monday with May. If MPs vote against a no-deal exit on Wednesday, and want to postpone Brexit, the other 27 EU nations would need to agree. Their leaders will meet in Brussels for a summit on March 21-22. But any postponement may have to be short-lived. Juncker on Monday said Brexit should be complete before the European elections at the end of May. Congressman Bishop Participates in the Second Annual HBCU Steam Day of Action on Capitol Hill Washington, D.C. Congressman Sanford D. Bishop, Jr. (GA-02) and the Bipartisan Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Caucus and the Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics (STEAM) Caucus recently hosted the second annual HBCU STEAM Day of Action on Capitol Hill. This annual event brings together education and industry leaders and Members of Congress for a collective day of advocacy for our nations 102 HBCUs and their 300,000 students. During STEAM Day the coalition met with Republican and Democratic Members of Congress in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. The Senate and House Appropriations Committees, House Energy and Commerce Committee, House Financial Services Subcommittee on Diversity & Inclusion, Congressional Black Caucus, House Education and Labor Committee, and Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee will host meetings with the group. More than 40 Members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, will meet with the coalition. ADVERTISEMENT As a member of the Bipartisan HBCU Caucus, I was proud to welcome our nations HBCUs to Capitol Hill for the second annual HBCU STEAM Day of Action, said Bishop. HBCUs are drivers of their local economies and help prepare our nations students for 21st Century opportunities. HBCU STEAM Day is vitally important because we must ensure that our HBCUs have the tools and resources not only to survive, but to thrive. I thank Congresswoman Adams for her leadership and look forward to continuing to work together to secure greater resources for our schools. HBCUs contribute nearly $15 billion to our annual economy and have provided pathways of opportunity to millions of Americans, many of whom are first generation college students. Despite being historically underfunded and under-resourced, these institutions continue to produce top talent. HBCUs produce 42% of Black engineers, 47% of Black women engineers, and 40% of the Congressional Black Caucus. I would not be in Congress today if not for the North Carolina A&T University, said Congresswoman Adams, Founder and Co-Chair of the Bipartisan HBCU Caucus. That is why HBCU STEAM Day is so important. Its a day when HBCUs and their students to come to Capitol Hill and to advocate for greater resources and they dont come alone. They come with industry leaders who have made a commitment to creating strategic and sustainable partnerships with HBCUs. There is no workplace diversity, especially within STEAM fields, without HBCUs. I am proud to host the second annual HBCU STEAM Day of Action and to make clear to all in Congress that HBCUs matter. The importance of HBCUs on our nations history and future is something we can never fully measure. Through the STEAM Day of Action, we are bringing together stakeholders from across the country to highlight opportunities for our nations HBCUs and their students, said Congressman Bradley Byrne, Co-Chair of the Bipartisan HBCU Caucus. Congresswoman Johnson Introduces National Nurse Act of 2019 Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson Washington, DC Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson has introduced the National Nurse Act of 2019. This bill, H.R. 1597, will designate the Chief Nurse Officer of the U.S. Public Health Service as the National Nurse for Public Health. The responsibilities of the position would task the National Nurse for Public Health with identifying and addressing national health priorities. ADVERTISEMENT For years, our national healthcare policies have not helped nurses administer the best possible health care. The National Nurse Act of 2019 improves the health care of Americans across the country by appointing a National Nurse to join the Surgeon General in advocating for nurses who provide care for millions of Americans each day, said Congresswoman Johnson. This act would empower a medical professional to focus on critical issues, such as promoting healthier practices, improving health literacy and decreasing health disparities. The act has 52 original cosponsors in the House at the time of its introduction. It has been endorsed by more than 50 nursing and labor associations, including the National Nursing Network Organization. Companion legislation has also been introduced in the Senate by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV). As the first registered nurse elected to Congress, I understand the unique role nurses play in our national health care system, said Congresswoman Johnson. By supporting this bill, we not only acknowledge the benefit nurses bring to our discourse, but we are also enhancing our health care system as well. Key Responsibilities of the National Nurse: Collaborate with the Office of the Surgeon General to identify and address national health priorities; Serve as a visible national spokesperson for engaging nurses in leadership, policy, and prevention efforts; Encourage health professionals to work with community programs to improve health; Increase public safety and emergency preparedness; and Prepare and submit biennial report to Congress on nurses serving in the U.S. Public Health Service. Karen Bass Responds To Trump FY2020 Budget Proposal WASHINGTON Today, Representative Karen Bass (D-Calif.), Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, issued the following statement after the White House released its FY2020 budget. President Trumps budget is deeply troubling and makes it abundantly clear the White House isnt serious about addressing the needs of this country, said Rep. Bass. It makes drastic cuts to housing assistance, as Los Angeles goes through one of its worst housing crises in history, and student loan debt programs, as young people are strapped with more than $1 trillion in student loan debt. The budget also hurts our leadership abroad. The proposed cuts of $12.3 billion dollars, or 23% of the entire State Department allocation, only stands to diminish diplomacy, which only leads to a need to increase money for military defense and war. The American people voted for a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and this is why. Our government needs to get back to working for the people. ADVERTISEMENT Tuesday, March 12, 2019 Politico (Mar. 12, 2019): Appeals court rules Ohio can defund Planned Parenthood, by Alice Miranda Ollstein: In an en banc opinion issued Tuesday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals found that Ohio may cut state funding to Planned Parenthood because the organization performs abortions, overturning a lower court ruling that blocked the state from stripping about $1.5 million of annual support from the network of clinics. The Sixth Circuit's ruling affects six state public health programs in Ohio, but doesn't touch Medicaid. The Supreme Court in December declined to review a case brought by other Republican-led states seeking to cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood and other reproductive health organizations that offer abortions. Four of the eleven Sixth Circuit judges who sided with Ohio in Tuesday's decision were appointed by President Donald Trump. The judges said Ohios law barring state health department funding from going to any provider who offers non-therapeutic abortions or advocates for abortion rights, does not violate the Constitution because the affiliates do not have a" substantive "due process right" under the Fourteenth Amendment "to perform abortions." In her dissent, Judge Helene White and five of her colleagues argued that the states law would result in an undue burden on a womans right to obtain non-therapeutic abortions if imposed directly. The opinion is available here. https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/reproductive_rights/2019/03/sixth-circuit-en-banc-majority-rules-ohio-can-defund-planned-parenthood.html The man credited with inventing the World Wide Web 30 years ago is calling for major changes to make it better for humanity. Tim Berners-Lee spoke about the current state of the Web during a 30th anniversary event Tuesday in Geneva, Switzerland. He wrote the first proposal on creating a new system for organizing information. He sent that proposal to a supervisor on March 12, 1989. The anniversary event was held at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. This is the research center where Berners-Lee was working as a computer engineer when he developed his ideas for the World Wide Web. His proposal sought to create a way for computers across the world to communicate with each other. The British computer scientist, now 63, had the idea for the hypertext transfer protocol - the http in front of each website address. The http system enabled the sending and receiving of written information and small images through a software program that became the first web browser. This browser prepared the way for internet availability for large numbers of people through home computers. The CERN anniversary event celebrated how the creation of the World Wide Web launched a technological revolution that improved life in many ways. It forever changed the way people get information, share ideas, buy goods and do work. But Berners-Lee told the event that many people including himself believe the web has fallen short in many areas and created new, serious problems. In an open letter published Tuesday, Berners-Lee noted that 30 years after its invention, the web is used by half the worlds population. Berners-Lee said the web had clearly created great opportunities for humanity to progress and made life easier for millions of people. It also has given groups traditionally not heard a new voice in society. However, he added that the web had also provided new ways for scammers to carry out crimes and given a voice to those who spread hatred. Against the backdrop of news stories about how the web is misused, its understandable that many people feel afraid and unsure if the web is really a force for good, he wrote. Berners-Lee told reporters that some political events in recent years also led many people to distrust the web. They are all stepping back realizing that this web thing that they thought was cool is actually not necessarily serving humanity very well, he said. Berners-Lee created a group called the World Wide Web Foundation. It seeks help from governments, companies and citizens to become more involved in shaping the web to do more good for humanity. His actual plan is called the Contract for the Web. Under this contract, governments are called on to take steps to make sure all citizens can connect to the internet and that individual privacy is respected. Businesses are asked to keep internet prices low so many people can use the web. In addition, companies should respect privacy and develop technologies that aim to put people - and the public good - first. The plan also calls on citizens to create materials for the web and cooperate with others to make sure there is rich, quality information for everyone. In addition, citizens should seek to build strong communities that respect civil discourse and human dignity. The path to make the internet better is the responsibility of everyone who uses it, Berners-Lee said. Making big changes will not be easy, but will be very well worth it in the end, he added. If we give up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed us. We will have failed the web, he said. Im Bryan Lynn. Bryan Lynn wrote this story for VOA Learning English. His story was based on reports from the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and online sources. George Grow was the editor. We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page. _______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story address n. directions to an person, object or organization software n. programs used to make computers perform different operations browser n. computer program that permits the user to see pages on the internet opportunity n. a good possibility or chance for progress scammer n. someone who makes money by using illegal methods or tricking people contract n. legal document that makes an agreement between parties official discourse n. spoken or written discussion dignity n. the quality of being worthy of honor or respect "Our government leaders should heed Mahathir's suggestion." During the visit of the venerable Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, he warned the Philippines against allowing unrestricted numbers of foreigners into the country and then allowing them to work illegally. He said this could disturb not only the countrys domestic stability but create other social problems as well. Mahathir also warned the country about the dangers of incurring too much debt from one country. We do not know what prompted him to issue such statements, but it was wise advice and our government leaders should heed the suggestion. The good Prime Minister knows what he is talking about. One of the first things he did as prime minister was to cancel all the big-ticket projects that was going to be financed by China. One of the problems of Malaysia in the recent past was race relations between the three major ethnic groups that make up the Malaysian population. The predominant Malay group, the Chinese and the Indians. Although we do not read about tensions between the groups anymore, it does not mean that there is none and everything have been solved. Perhaps the Malaysian government has been able to put some policies in place that mitigated the problem. Maybe a balance has been achieved promoting harmonious relations among the different races. Prime Minister Mahathir who is already 93 led his country for more than 20 years to be what it is todaya prosperous country that is getting even richer. Who would have thought that at 93 he could still come back to reclaim the Prime Ministership? He said that he would only be a transitional Prime Minister and that eventually, the helm will pass on to his now-political ally Anwar Ibrahim. Immediately after the statement of the Malaysian Prime Minister, the Department of Labor issued new guidelines on how foreigners could legally work here. One is that work permits should be procured at Philippines consulates or embassies where the prospective foreign worker is coming from. The issuance of a work permit here will henceforth be prohibited.Part of the problem is of course the fact that Chinese citizens can enter to the Philippines visa free. This is because we want to encourage tourismbut many of these Chinese visitors lose themselves among the population acquiring Christian names like Peter, George or Henry. Before you know it, they are here to stay. The only reason why we know that they are not Filipinos is that they do not speak a word of English or Filipino. Whether this new Labor regulation will solve the problem of foreigners working here illegally remains to be seen. It would greatly help if the President would be the one to issue a statement. There is such a doctrine in foreign affairs called the doctrine of reciprocity. It means that if a country requires Filipinos to get a visa to visit that country, the Philippines must also require the citizens of that country a visa to enter our country. But it seems that we have opened our borders to almost everyone in the name of tourism without studying its implication on our national security interests. Right now, there are many foreigners who are embedded with terrorist organizations in Mindanao, conducting training to would be Filipino guerrilla fighters. Maybe the country should be more careful and not be so open. Yes, tourists do bring revenues but in a country such as ours, there are unintended consequences that can threaten our countrys security.When PCpl Marlo Quibete was apprehended selling shabu, his commander, PMajor General Guillermo Eleazar reacted in a manner that was criticized by some quarters because his outburst was caught on TV and made it to the evening news. General Eleazar eventually apologized for his spontaneous behavior which is very understandable. The President, Secretary of DILG and his immediate boss General Oscar Albayalde are all backing him up. Was it all right for General Eleazar to have acted the way he did or could he have handled the situation in a more circumspect way? That single act of Cpl Quibete negated weeks if not months of good police deeds. It is therefore quite understandable to see Eleazar reacting the way he did. Still, it was something that we would expect more from a Sergeant or a young officer who is fresh in the service than an officer of high stature such as Eleazar. Reaching such an exalted rank also demands something of a controlled behavior especially in public. One must always try to control ones emotions to avoid the negative consequences of such outbursts. A question that has to be asked is why Quibete was allowed to stay in the service. From his record, he is clearly a misfit in the PNP right from the start. Even as a recruit, he was already a problem. He went AWOL or absent without official leave and was in fact already dismissed from the service only to be reinstated. How did that happen? I hope Quibete is not a symptom of a much bigger problem in the PNP. If he is, then there is a much bigger problem in the hands of Eleazar and Albayalde. Right now, the PNP is in a huge fight to convince the public that the PNP is their protector. People like Quibete simply make it harder for the people to trust their Police. This is why Eleazars actions were so understandable. Ever since he took over the helm of the National Capital Region Police, his style has been hands-on and always in the front lines. He has been trying his best and so far, he has done quite a good job. Britains parliament has rejected for a second time Prime Minister Theresa Mays Brexit deal to leave the European Union. British lawmakers voted 391 to 242 against Mays plan Tuesday, 17 days before Britain is to withdraw from the political and economic alliance. The vote meant Britain will have to choose: leaving the EU without a deal; delaying the March 29 departure date; or having a new Brexit vote. May told lawmakers before the vote, If this vote is not passed tonight, if this deal is not passed, then Brexit could be lost. On Wednesday, lawmakers will vote on whether Britain should leave the worlds biggest trading group without a deal. Business leaders warn that such an exit would cause severe disorder in markets and supply chains. Others say it could cause shortages of food and medicines. Supporters of Brexit argue the withdrawal would permit Britain to succeed and negotiate new trade deals across the world. However, parliament is expected to reject a no-deal Brexit as well. If so, lawmakers Thursday will then vote on whether to request a delay of the withdrawal to permit further talks. After two and a half years of Brexit negotiation, both May and the EU have already ruled out any other changes to the deal. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Monday, There will be no third chance. There will be no further interpretations of the interpretations, no further assurances of the reassurances if the meaningful vote tomorrow fails. In 2016, 52 percent of Britons voted to leave the E.U. Forty-eight percent voted to remain in the group. The result has divided Britain over concerns about immigration and economic globalization. Opponents fear that Brexit will leave Britain economically weaker and with reduced security capabilities. Supporters say it would let Britain control immigration and seize global opportunities. Im Jonathan Evans. Hai Do adapted this story for Learning English based on reports from the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies. Caty Weaver was the editor. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. _____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story exit - n. the act of going out or away; a departure interpretation - n. the way something is explained or understood assurance - n. confidence of mind or manner: easy freedom from self-doubt or uncertainty globalization - n. something made or done to involve or affect the entire world opportunity - n. a good chance for advancement or progress As per FCC Guidelines , every movie I review I personally bought or rented. Every book or music CD I review I personally bought and own. LINGUIST List 30.1122 Wed Mar 13 2019 Fund Drive: Creating Resources for Under-Represented Languages: Hakha Chin Editor for this issue: Becca Morris ***************** LINGUIST List Support ***************** Fund Drive 2019 29 years of LINGUIST List! Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at: https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/ 13-Mar-2019LINGUIST List Fund Drive: Creating Resources for Under-Represented Languages: Hakha ChinDear LINGUIST List readers and subscribers,The theme for this years Fund Drive is Language Documentation and Revitalization,because of this years theme, I would like to tell you about some of the work that I aminvolved with at Indiana University in addition to working at The LINGUIST List. I am aComputational Linguistics PhD student here at and as part of my work as a graduate studentI am involved with a language documentation project: building documentary materials andcomputational tools for Hakha Chin. It should be noted that The LINGUIST List is not affiliatedwith this project, rather it is work that I am doing as a student while also working at The LINGUIST List.Hakha Chin (Laiholh) is a language spoken in Myanmar/Burma with roughly165,000 speakers, and there are more than 23,000 Burmese refugees who callIndiana home with nearly 17,000 residing in Indianapolis. Last year Hakha Chinwas the language that was studied in the field methods classes taught by Dr.Kelly Berkson. Since there are not many resources available for Hakha Chin,the motivation behind this project is simple: having access to information inyour native language is not a privilege, but a right. This motivation has leadto projects like using Mozilla Common Voice ( https://voice.mozilla.org/en ) forHakha Chin.Mozilla Common Voice is a project whose aim is to help make voice recognitionopen and accessible to everyone. They do this by having users donate theirvoice and by listening to validate other submissions. Follow this link to seethe page for Hakha Chin ( https://voice.mozilla.org/cnh ).The Hakha Chin Common Voice Project has gotten very popular among theHakha Chin speaking community. Mentions of this project have appeared on theTravel Myanmar YouTube channel and on the Chin Cable Network https://ccnchannel.net/ ). Below you can see our very own Dr. Berksondiscussing the work that is being done with Hakha Chin on the Travel MyanmarYouTube channel ( https://youtu.be/f39dFqqVIak?t=2 ).BThere is a lot of work revolving around Hakha Chin at IU at the moment, and there aremultiple graduate students, myself included, working on this language. For example, I amworking on creating a Universal Dependencies treebank so that I can work on DependencyParsing for Hakha Chin.To see some other cool things that are happening in the world of LanguageRevitalization and Documentation be sure to check back on our blog and socialmedia pages, but most importantly, visit our Fund Drive page ( https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/ it is here where you can learn more about us and make a donation. Thank you for yourcontinued support.Sincerely,Becca Morris, on behalf of The LINGUIST List Team(Sources: https://www.ethnologue.com/language/cnh "Imagine being transferred to a workplace more than 100 kilometers from your home." If the allegations against Eastern Samar Acting Governor Marcelo Ferdinand Picardal are proven to be true, he could easily qualify as one of the worst government officials this country was most unfortunate to have. Imagine reassigning government employees hundreds of kilometers away from their residences, the financial implications of which may cost these employees thousands of pesos more in additional expenses for transportation. Among those reassigned included an employee who had just reported back to work after delivering baby through Caesarian section, and was transferred from Felipe Abrigo Memorial Hospital, Guiuan to Taft District Hospital, some 120 kilometers away from her residence. Thus, she has to take a 240-kilometer ride each day to and from work via a public utility jeepney, to the detriment of her fragile condition. The only crime these employees committed was that they were supposedly identified in one way or another with Eastern Samar Rep. Ben Evardone, who will be slugging it out with Picardal for the provinces gubernatorial post this coming May. But even granting that these employees are really sympathetic to Evardone, would that justify punishing them just because of their political preferences? Picardal should remember these employees, whoever they support, cannot do anything detrimental or beneficial for his candidacy as they are prohibited from campaigning for any political candidate. They are government employees. Its a good thing, however, that these employees have mustered enough courage to turn the table against Picardal. Nineteen provincial employees whom Picardal had reassigned unjustlyYolanda Obon, Arriane Faye Cabel, Dalisay Cecista, Ruel Cadiz, Imelda Norombaba, Grace Lalosa, Ofelia Norombaba, Alex Nebril, Ana Ballete, Cesar Dadison, Elisa Dado, Gil Patricio Dado, Helen Cadalin, Cirilo Quinsayas, Rowel Moscosa, Gwendolina Gunda, Vivian Lavado, Ariel Evardone, Norodom Victor Pinarokhave filed 19 counts of violation of the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act or Republic Act 3019, Section 3 (e) against the vindictive acting governor. The employees claim Picardal issued individual Detail Orders reassigning them indefinitely to stations far from their homes and original place of work, about four days before the Commission on Elections ban on transfer of government employees took effect on Jan. 14, 2019. With most of them in the rank-and-file with minimal salaries, complainants allege that their transfers to hospitals some 40 to 190 kilometers away from their respective homes and original work stations, caused them not only geographic dislocation but also financial dislocation ranging from P25,000 to P130,000 aggregate daily fares alone for about one year. The employees allege the government has been prejudiced by such transfers as the quality of public service has actually worsened, not improved, by Picardals detail orders. One of the complainants, Dr. Obon, was the Chief of Hospital of Oras District Hospital when she was transferred to Felipe Abrigo Memorial Hospital (FAMH) in Guiuan, Eastern Samar, some 186 kilometers away. However, as of today, FAMH reportedly has an incumbent Chief of Hospital other than Dr. Obon, while Oras Hospital has had no full-fledged Chief of Hospital since Dr. Obon left. Furthermore, despite the lack of nurses in Oras District Hospital, one nurse, Ofelia Norombaba, was moved to Albino Duran hospital in Balangiga, Eastern Samar, 180 kilometers from Oras hospital, depriving it of necessary nursing staff.Also Helen Cadalin and Cirilo Quinsayas, both originally assigned at the Provincial Capitol, were transferred to hospital to perform functions lesser and incompatible with their job descriptions as Provincial Development staff and Legal Assistant, respectively. All other complainants allege that they were made to perform tasks lesser and incompatible with their original work assignment. Twelve of the 19 complaints are health workers under the Magna Carta for Health Workers (Republic Act No. 7305), while the others are originally assigned to various offices in the Provincial Capitol in Borongan City. To show manifest partiality, the employees allege that their transfers were politically motivated, having been singled out in the transfer for being suspected supporters of Evardone. And to show evident bad faith and gross inexcusable negligence, complainants allege that Picardal, without checking the physical state and well-being of the transferred employees, he reassigned Arriane Faye Cabel, a laundry woman of FAMH who is still recovering from a Caesarian operation, to a smaller hospital some 120 kilometers away. Picardal also reassigned a senior citizen, Ana Ballete, to a distant location. Section 9 of RA 3019 punishes a public official committing any of the unlawful acts within the ambit Sections 3 (e) with imprisonment for not less than one year nor more than ten years, including perpetual disqualification from public office. Also, three provincial employees in Eastern Samar have filed administrative charges against Picardal, over their alleged illegal transfer or reassignment to other hospitals in the province. Ma Carrol Alvarez, Glenda Cabaguing and Richard Ballete, all assigned to Oras District Hospital in Oras town, filed a complaint against Picardal for grave misconduct and grave abuse of of authority under the Local Government Code, Administrative and Civil Service laws. Picardal allegedly transferred from Oras Alvarez and Cabaguing to Eastern Samar Provincial Hospital in Borongan City, which is 86 kilometers away, while Ballete was reassigned to Quinapondan Community Hospital, about 170 kilometers away. The complainants allege that their transfer due to demand and exigency of public service is baseless and unfounded as they were made to perform tasks foreign to their original job descriptions, including menial jobs, at their new stations. If there was actual demand for us to be reassigned, then why is it that we are not performing duties and functions that are necessary and essential to the services being offered by these hospitals? the complainants asked the Ombudsman. The complainants said they were singled out in the transfer as a form or political harassment and oppression for, just like the other 19 employees, allegedly being Evardones supporters. We only pray the cases filed by these employees be immediately acted upon and resolved the soonest possible time. Their sufferings are only being prolonged each day they have to travel hundreds of kilometers daily just to report for work. Picardal has to be made accountable for all these. Molly Ivins' renown as a progressive newspaper columnist soared just as the country veered right with Ronald Reagan's election. A native Texan, Ivins gained a national platform, appearing in 400 newspapers and on television. Her acerbic quips gave liberal voters hollow laughter as Reagan subverted New Deal programs. Her favorite targets were the Bush family, especially the mediocre George W when he was just a lackluster Texas pol who somehow was elected governor. The Clinton years, with their swings to "triangulation," propelled her to new heights. Then came the disastrous George W. presidency, wrested from Al Gore and John Kerry. She didn't live to see the great recession, the election of Barack Obama, and the dominance of the reactionary GOP. Her insulting heavy-handed humor likely would be driven out of the media mainstream today. Now 12 years after her death, the GOP's vandalism of America's democracy hurtles onward. A new documentary, "Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins," recently debuted at Austin's South by Southwest Festival and received adoring features inTexas Monthly and the Texas Observer, the feisty muckraking magazine where Ivins, a former Houston socialite, began her career. The documentary sounds promising, albeit overloaded with talking heads. With Trump in the White House, the GOP seizing control of the court system, and the Democratic Party in flux, Ivins' career brings more sorrow than joy. The documentary will rekindle hope that her values will prevail at last. "Having a single body of lawmakers will help us prevent the ugly bickering that is happening now between the Senate and the House." If there is one thing I like about President Duterte, it is that he comes up with laughable and ridiculous statements every now and then. A columnist always finds these worth writing about. For example, there are his comments about women that always draw flak from womens rights groups. There is also his fixation on the Catholic clergy. Human rights groups say the President is a misogynist. Recall that during his campaign, he announced at a rally that he wanted to be the first in line to rape an Australian missionary. Later, he said female members of the New Peoples Army should be shot at the genitals. The President says all these are in exercise of his right to free expression. They are all a joke. Yes every citizen enjoys that freedom of expression, including the President. But not at the expense of other people! Mr. Duterte is a lawyer and as such he would know that such freedoms are not absolute. As a journalist, I am aware I can write about anything I wishbut also not at the expense of others. The President may not be sued for libel, but he cannot just denigrate anyone. Worse, he cannot just tell people to kill bishops and priests because he is the President. As for women, Mr. Duterte should show them some real respect.The Senate and the House of Representatives are still bickering about the 2019 national budget. This is the best argument for the restructuring of our political system from a two-chamber body into a single one, like a parliament. What is happening in Congress is just unfortunate. The Senate accuses the House of insertions to the tune of billions of pesos, and the House is saying the same of the Senate. Honesty, they remind me of little kids. The fear is that if by this week the national budget is not submitted to the President for his signature, we might have to do with a reenacted budget. This could result in the failure of the Build, Build, Build infrastructure program and the failure to achieve the targeted gross domestic product. The bickering is not funny and we are certainly not laughing. If we must restructure our political system, let us all forget federalism which is a leap into the unknown. Let us settle for a parliamentary system with one big body in charge of legislation.Thelisting of the worlds richest Filipinos listed the children of the late Henry Sy Sr. separately. This is a big disservice to them.listed them as Hans Sy ($2.4 billion), Herbert Sy ($2.4 billion), Harley Sy ($2.2 billion), Henry Sy Jr. ($2.2 billion), Tessie Sy Coson ($2.2 billion) and Elizabeth Sy ($1.9 billion) from number 8 to 13. But the Sy family would have an accumulated wealth of $14.51 billion making them the richest Filipino family. As many people know, Inigo Zobel and sister, the Jaime Zobel siblings and others should also be in that list. We know too well that there are many Chinese-Filipinos lurking in the shadows. In Forbes Park, for example, a businessman has at least 10 houses in Dasma village. They have escaped the attention ofand of the Bureau of Internal Revenue.I got mixed reactions from friends about my piece about the strongman Ferdinand Marcos who is almost always remembered for the evils of martial law. I wrote that we should also remember him for the good things he did for our country. For example, there are thousands of legal issuances covering every phase of human life. They are still in effect today. Some friends called me to say they did not know that Marcos had made such a great number of issuances. I cannot dispute what martial law did to the people, but let us also remember the good things. All I wanted to say was that Marcos is definitely assured of a place in Philippine history. Justice Manuel Lolong Lazaro, president of the Philippine Constitutional Association, said the legal issuances showed Marcos vision and foresight.A special envoy to China is an envoy of the Philippines, not of China. Thus, when he says Filipinos are incompetent, he must be fired. Ford Motor Co.s partner in China, Chongqing Changan Automobile Co., expects sales to rebound this year as the automakers introduce more models to help reverse losses in the worlds biggest vehicle market. Changan and Fords venture will speed up the rollout of new cars including those under the luxury Lincoln brand to revive sales, Zhu Huarong, Changans president, said in an interview in Beijing yesterday. The venture is also making changes to the companys strategy and workforce to meet challenges in the market, he said, without elaborating. We are very confident that sales at the venture with Ford will recover this year, Zhu said. Carmakers are reeling from a decline in deliveries in China after a trade war with the U.S. and an equity rout last year dented consumer demand, contributing to a fourth-quarter loss of USD534 million in China for Ford. Sales at the Ford-Changan venture dropped 54 percent in 2018, and may have contributed to profit plunging as much as 93 percent at listed Chongqing Changan. Changan, whose manufacturing roots date back more than 150 years, is working on a plan to develop hydrogen fuel-cell cars that are slated to go on sale in 2025, Zhu said. The carmaker, based in Chongqing, southwestern China, will cooperate with other companies on this development plan, Zhu said, declining to specify whether it will team up with Ford. Bloomberg The case that pits Councilors of the Portuguese Communities Jose Pereira Coutinho, Rita Santos and Armando de Jesus against the director of San Wa Ou newspaper, Lam Chong, for defamation has finally reached the trial stage with the first session being held on Monday. The case is connected to an article from 2017, when the newspaper published an opinion column accusing the councilors of being involved in a scheme designed to help local Chinese residents to obtain Portuguese nationality and respective travel documents in exchange for a payment of RMB18,000 each. The councilors are demanding compensation of about MOP168,000 for damage to their reputation. Only one of the councilors, Armando de Jesus, was heard in the court session on Monday. According to public broadcaster TDM, the councilor said he felt publicly shamed by the column and his reputation had been tarnished. Armando de Jesus also said he was aware of a similar effect on councilor Pereira Coutinho who, as a lawmaker, would present his testimony only in writing. In court Armando de Jesus denied all the accusations. He noted that the opinion article of San Wa Ou newspaper had claimed the councilors had been paid to help the people, but instead they merely provided assistance in getting their queue ticket number, and it was not paid. Armando de Jesus also revealed in court that the Council did recommend in some more complex cases the hiring of lawyer services, but argued that there was no relation between the council and such professionals and he was not aware of the fees charged by them. The first session was in fact shorter than expected due to the absence of Rita Santos, who is reportedly out of the region. This led the judges to schedule a new audience for March 27. As for the director of the publication, he chose to remain silent, not paying testimony during the session. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the Manila Water Co. Inc., one of two concessionaires servicing Metro Manila and the nearby provinces, has not been forthcoming about the service interruptions suffered by its 6 million customers. On Tuesday, the company said it had no choice but to severely reduce water distribution in view of the low water level at La Mesa Dam, which in turn was caused by the dry spell brought about by the El Nino phenomenon. Geodino Carpio, chief operating officer for MWCI operations, said because of a shortage of raw water supply at La Mesa Dam, the company felt compelled to impose service interruptions in several parts of its service areas in the east zone of Metro Manila and Rizal as well. The company issued a statement after its customers complained about unannounced service interruptionswith no word about how long these would last. But the weather bureau and the water administrator are puzzled by Manila Waters initial claim, because La Mesa Dam is only a reserve source of water, as both water concessionaires are supposed to draw water from the Angat Dam, which has not reached its critical level. Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System Administrator Reynaldo Velasco told CNN Philippines he believes Manila Water has always been drawing some water from La Mesa Dam, and not Angat. I told them that's supposed to be [a] reserve, but they have been drawing water. That's why it's now low," Velasco told CNN.Now we have learned that Manila Water may have already drawn its allocation of 1,600 million liters per day (MLD) from the Angat Dam, which provides about 96 percent of Metro Manilas water supply requirement. Because demand has gone up to an average of 1,740 MLD, the company has been filling its deficit from the La Mesa Dam. Manila Waters West Zone counterpart, Maynilad Water Services Inc., which has an allocation of 2,400 MLD from Angat, has not reported a similar supply problem and has even agreed to help Manila Water. Upon the request of the MWSS, Maynilad said it would supply 50 million liters of water per day to Manila Water starting in April to ease its shortage. But this is just a drop in the bucket, and Manila Water customers are expected to keep suffering a shortage until the rains come, perhaps in three months. Amid all this disruption, Manila Waters initial explanation that its woes were caused by the El Nino seems to be oversimplification, at best. Its customers do not need watered-down excuses and deserve to know the real score. How long will the supply shortage last, and what is the company doing specifically to alleviate this problem in the short term, and more importantly, solve it for next year and the years after that. We trust it will be a better plan than simply wait for the rains. The level of gastronomic sophistication in Macau and Hong Kong is among the highest across Asia, according to several Italian wine and vinegar producers who visited Macau last month to showcase their products. Hailing from Verona, Modena and Sicily, the premium food and beverage producers brought a slice of Italian fine dining to a wine-pairing event at the Mandarin Oriental Macau, organized by regional distributer Cottage Vineyards. A consequence of the centuries-old Portuguese community in Macau, the wine market in this special administrative region is dominated by producers from the Atlantic-facing European country. But that is not a hindrance for the Italian producers who, approaching food and beverage operators in Macau only recently, say that they have discovered a mature and curious public. Sicilian wine producer Loredana Vivera who, after a prior visit to the Macau SAR last year is becoming increasingly familiar with local gastronomy, says that the popularity of her wines is the reason she keeps making the 7,500-kilometer trip from the Vivera Etna Winery in volcanic Catania to the Pearl River Delta. Meanwhile, compatriot Giovanni Bertani of the Tenuta Santa Maria vineyard in Verona, which can trace its history back almost 500 years, said the local wine consumption market is ripe for more international brands. I dont think the presence of Portuguese wine in Macau is a problem for [Italian] producers as it matures the market, said Bertani, finding agreement from Vivera. Where there is wine culture, there is curiosity, and the market demands diversification. Of course, Macau and Hong Kong are probably the most sophisticated markets in the greater China region, and I see a big change from people buying labels meaning regions to buying producers and looking for specific styles and philosophies, he told the Times. Thats really rewarding for boutique producers like us. It is quite the commendation when prestigious Italian wine producers describe Macaus gastronomy scene as sophisticated. But it is not just Italian wines that are finding their way into Macau gastronomy. Traditional balsamic vinegar producer Acetaia Villa San Donnino, based just outside the historic town of Modena, also sent a representative to last months event. Protected by generations of tradition, the producer makes premium vinegar up to a quarter-century old, although a rotational barrel cycle means that a part of their pr oduct is in fact far older. We have noticed that people in Macau really appreciate our balsamic vinegar, said Francesca Ori, a vinegar sommelier from Acetaia Villa San Donnino. Here in Macau and Hong Kong, there are very good customers who are able to appreciate our products. Thats why we want to promote out product in places like this and we feel proud when we see them [in restaurants]. Mainland visitors are acquiring business visas from Taobao shops that grant them frequent access to Macau and Hong Kong, the Times has learned. Visitors can be listed as owners of ready-made companies and obtain these travel permits for tens of thousands of patacas. As the Macau SAR continues to break its record of tourist arrivals and the registration of new companies in the nearby cities of Zhuhai and Shenzhen continues to rise, some Taobao stores are seeing their business grow too. One reason for their growth is a newly-discovered phenomenon whereby mainland residents can purchase a Business Visit Endorsement (Shangwu) from a non-governmental authority. Shangwu is applicable to any mainland resident aged above 18 years who wish to make business trips to either Macau or Hong Kong as individuals. The business visa is good for both single and multiple journeys to Macau or Hong Kong, with its validity from three months up to one year, and each stay lasting no more than seven days. Normally, to obtain a Shangwu via legal means, mainland residents must apply to Chinas public security bureau for authorization. Mainland-registered companies can send staff members to the SARs, sole traders who conduct business activities in the SARs can apply, and mainland residents who operate specific vehicles between mainland and the SARs are also entitled to apply. Despite the mainland government having outlined a list of criteria for mainland residents to apply for the Shangwu endorsement, travel agencies have discovered a back door for those who wish to visit Macau and Hong Kong, repeatedly and without the need for multiple tourist visas, for a period of one year or more. The Times contacted the Public Security Police Force, which oversees immigration, to enquire if the authority can confirm whether all business visitors to Macau are actually carrying out business activities during their stay. No response was received by press time. Searching Hong Kong and Macau Shangwu Endorsement on Taobao, the Times found at least five stores selling the business visa service. On average, these Taobao shops charge RMB15,000 (MOP18,000) for one Shangwu endorsement to either Macau or Hong Kong. A joint package for both SARs is priced at RMB27,000 (MOP32,500). However, a mainland resident applying legally for a Shangwu endorsement would pay as little as RMB15 (MOP18) and RMB80 (MOP96) for a single-entry and a multiple-entry endorsement respectively, if the person applied as an individual at the Guangdong police authority. Searching on Taobao, the Times investigated one four-hearts shop called Shenzhen Yi Xing Dian, offering one-year multiple entry Hong Kong and Macau Shangwu endorsement for just RMB10. A Taobao shop with a hearts score usually means that the vendor is has recently joined and has not established a reputation on the platform. No description of the service is provided in the products description section. Instead, in the description space, a WeChat number is listed, accompanied by the sentence [contact] for further details. This shop is located in Shenzhen. A Zhuhai-based shop named li7688198149 also sells the service. Under its product description, this shop lists phrases such as successful application guaranteed, full refund if no success, professional guarantee 365 days of validity, welcome cooperation from the same industry and full agent maintenance service. According to the shop, customers only need to provide an ID card to apply immediately. After providing a copy of their ID card, customers are asked to wait for an approval, followed by completing the necessary photo and finger print registration at the immigration bureau offices in Guangdong. Then they would only need to wait for their Shangwu endorsement to be issued. However, according to official information obtained on the Guangdong immigration authoritys website, a Shangwu endorsement applicant must submit documents such as business operation registration proof, or social security proof, or a Guangdong-issued driving permit, depending on which category the applicant belongs to. Though the Shangwu endorsement is charged differently for Hong Kong and Macau, service procedures and requirements for both Shangwu endorsements are the same. Another shop, named Shenzhen Yu An Lv You Zhuan Ying Dian charges RMB27,000 for processing the endorsements for Hong Kong and Macau together. A fourth store charges RMB18,000 for each individual endorsement, while a fifth, called eyoo888 which recorded 131 sales in the last 30 days offers five sets to its customers, who can choose either to use their passports or travel cards when applying for the visa. The passport option reportedly only works for the Hong Kong Shangwu endorsement application. This shop, based in Hong Kong, also reminds customers that there will be no refunds to [customers] providing fake documents and police will be informed. I already got the visa, one buyer writes in a review of eyoo888. I am a professional Daigou [and] I go to Hong Kong at least five times a week. A Daigou, usually an overseas Chinese, is a person who buys products and services for other people and ships them to other places, mostly mainland China. My Hukou [place of residence] is Shenzhen. Every time I have to apply for [a tourist visa] it is not just a little bit troublesome, another customer writes, now, I dont need my travel card. A third customer complained about their failed application through this shop. It was not issued. The money was not fully refunded, and the [shop] did not care about the company [the shop helped to] register, the buyer writes. I [applied for a] one-year multiple entry. Honestly, I was not confident in the beginning. However, the shops staff took me to Gongbei to enter Macau, took me to casinos and then to the outer harbor ferry terminal to Hong Kong. It was really considerate, another buyer writes. During the course of the investigation, the Times contacted several shops, one of which explained that when a customer is not qualified for the Shangwu endorsement, the shop will use the customers identity to register a new company in Guangdong province, or the shop will use the customers identity to change the owner of a pre-existing registered company. Once the customer is identified as the owner of a mainland company, then the customer is eligible to apply for the visa. Staff reporter Molecular data obtained from breast cancer cells can be used to predict which patients are at a high risk for recurrence even decades after their diagnosis, according to a new study jointly conducted by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, as well as several other institutions. In particular, some patients whose tumors express the estrogen receptor but not another receptor called HER2 are at a persistent risk of relapse over time. Until now, there has been no way to identify those women among their peers. The study also identifies a subgroup of women with what are known as triple-negative breast tumors whose cancers are unlikely to return after five years. The researchers also learned where and when in the body certain breast cancers are likely to metastasize. The findings provide researchers and clinicians with a powerful new tool with which to predict a patients prognosis and potentially direct clinical decision-making. For the first time, weve been able to study the rates and routes of breast cancer metastases at unprecedented resolution, said Christina Curtis, PhD, assistant professor of medicine and of genetics at Stanford and co-director of the Molecular Tumor Board at the Stanford Cancer Institute. Curtis first defined the distinct subgroups of patients in a study published in Nature in 2012. Once we compiled the rich, clinical follow-up data, it became strikingly apparent that distinct relapse trajectories characterized patients in each of the genomic subgroups we had previously defined, Curtis said. In particular, about 25 percent of women with estrogen-receptor-positive, or ER-positive, tumors have a 42 to 55 percent chance of seeing their cancers return within 20 years, the researchers found. We found that about 25 percent of women whose tumors express the estrogen receptor and not HER2 have an exceedingly high risk of late distant relapse and account for the vast majority of these events, Curtis said. These are the women who seem to be cured but then present with systemic disease many years later. Until now, there has been no good way to identify this subset of women who might benefit from ongoing screening or treatment. The new study was published online March 13 in Nature. Curtis shares senior authorship with Carlos Caldas, MD, director of the Cambridge Breast Cancer Research Unit and professor of cancer medicine at the University of Cambridge. Oscar Rueda, PhD, a senior research associate at the University of Cambridge, is the lead author. A clinical challenge in breast cancer management has been distinguishing which tumors pose greatest risk of late recurrence, said Harold Burstein, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the research. This important scientific paper identifies molecular features that determine the timing of cancer recurrence. In the future, this type of genomic classification should help us separate patients who remain at jeopardy and might warrant additional or ongoing treatment and those who do not. Unprecedented resolution Importantly, in many cases the study also identified the likely genomic drivers of specific tumors, many of which the researchers believe could serve as targets for drug development. Traditionally, physicians have relied primarily on clinical variables such as the size and grade of the tumor at diagnosis, the degree of lymph node involvement and the age of the patient when making treatment decisions and prognoses. More recently, genomic tests to determine which, if any, molecules are expressed by the cancer cells have been used to subcategorize breast cancers and guide treatment decisions. Until now, there has been no good way to identify this subset of women who might benefit from ongoing screening or treatment. For example, a tumor that expresses high levels of estrogen receptor, indicating it relies on estrogen to grow, might be successfully treated by drugs that block the binding of the hormone to the cancer. The presence or absence of HER2 is also routinely used to categorize breast cancers and plan treatment. Curtis and her colleagues studied the long-term medical histories of more than 3,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer in the United Kingdom and Canada between 1977 and 2005 to learn more about whether, when and where specific breast cancer types are likely to spread after initially successful treatment. For 1,980 of these women, the database also contained molecular details about their cancers, including information about estrogen receptor and HER2 expression, the levels of the expression of other specific cancer-associated genes and the presence or absence of specific, acquired genetic aberrations known as copy number variations. Integrating all this information, they developed a computer model that identified four tumor subgroups that express the estrogen receptor but not HER2 that have a high risk of recurrence, as well as other ER-positive/HER2-negative breast cancer subtypes that were less likely to recur. The researchers were also able to identify a subgroup of women with triple-negative breast cancers considered to be an aggressive and more difficult form of the disease to treat who are unlikely to see their cancers recur after five years. Distinct patterns of metastasis Curtis and her colleagues found that they could predict the course of the disease at different points during a patients clinical follow-up. They also found that the subgroups display distinct patterns of recurrence in terms of timing and the sites of metastasis. Our model uniquely accounts for the chronology of a patients disease and is based on a genome-driven classification scheme that can inform personalized therapeutic approaches, Curtis said. One unavoidable limitation of a retrospective study spanning decades such as this means the researchers are studying patients diagnosed and treated many years ago. This is a retrospective, observational cohort, Curtis said. Since then, treatment paradigms have changed for some patient subgroups. Most notably, trastuzumab which specifically targets the HER2 receptor and has dramatically improved outcomes for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer since it was approved for use in early stage breast cancer in 2006 was not an option for many of the women in this study. It will be important to take what weve learned here and determine whether we can similarly improve the outcomes of these patient subgroups at high risk of recurrence with new therapies that target their specific genomic drivers. Curtis and her colleagues are currently planning clinical trials to do just that. They also developed a web-based research tool that may ultimately help clinicians more accurately predict an individuals risk of relapse and guide treatment decisions. Weve shown that the molecular nature of a womans breast cancer determines how their disease could progress, not just for the first five years, but also later, even if it comes back. Rueda said. We hope that our research tool can be turned into a test doctors can easily use to guide treatment recommendations. The work is an example of Stanford Medicines focus on precision health, the goal of which is to anticipate and prevent disease in the healthy and precisely diagnose and treat disease in the ill. Curtis is a member of the Stanford Cancer Institute and Stanford Bio-X. Other Stanford co-authors of the study are instructors of medicine Jose Seoane, PhD, and Jennifer Caswell-Jin, MD. Researchers from the British Columbia Cancer Research Center; the Research Institute in Oncology and Hematology in Winnipeg, Canada; the University of Nottingham; Kings College London; and the University of Valladolid in Spain also contributed to the work. The research was supported by Cancer Research UK, the Experimental Cancer Medicine Center, the National Institute for Health Research in the United Kingdom, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the American Association for Cancer Research and an NIH Directors Pioneer Award (grant DP1CA238296). A patent application has been filed on aspects of the research findings by Curtis, Caldas, Rueda and Seoane. Stanfords departments of Medicine and of Genetics also supported the work. Prosecutors Office releases controversial letter provided by TBC Founder By Tea Mariamidze The Georgian Chief Prosecutors Office has released a letter which was mentioned by the founder of TBC Bank Mamuka Khazaradze in Parliament on Monday, claiming that he received it containing threats from Interior Minister Giorgi Gakharia before the second round of presidential elections at the end of 2018.The letter cites two media outlets-TV1 and ARTAREA and reads as follows:We have an information that you are fighting against us and the fight does not concern only business.We said that we are ready for cooperation but you still act destructively.Without any preconditions:Within the following five days TV1 must follow the policy of Imedi TV regarding the emergency regime [Imedi stated before the second round of presidential elections in November 2018 that it worked in an emergency regime to avoid the return of the United National Movement. Another leading Georgian TV Rustavi 2, which is opposition minded, also worked in an emergency regime].M.Kh. must make a public statement that the United National Movement is unacceptable to him, must speak about how business was treated during the UNMs time and appeal to businesspeople to unite around his view and act unanimously.A high level of impartiality must become obvious for ARTAREA [TV].After the demands are fulfilled we are ready for healthy cooperation without any preconditions.If not, we will use all legal and objective measures, we will do so publicly, for Georgian and international consumers.Vakhtang Tsereteli, the 100 per cent shareholder of TV1, says he had business cooperation with TBC and Khazaradze.He believes that the letter expresses the wish to exercise control on an independent media.He claims that somebody wanted to use Khazaradze to deliver the message regarding the change of the editorial policy to him.We have not been and never be influenced by politics, he said.Members of the Georgian Dream ruling party say that the letter is meaningless, providing no evidence that it was written by Gakharia.Gakharia says that he never writes letters and that some people are trying to avoid responsibilities.Khazaradze handed the copy of the letter to the Prosecutors Office and sent its original to London to be studied, whether there are fingertips or other signs identifying its writer.He refused to name the individual who handed him the letter.The Prosecutors Office says that Khazaradze refused to cooperate with them and that it is impossible to study a printed copy of a document.Khazaradzes lawyer Irakli Kordzadze states that the TBC founder spoke about the letter he received in November 2018 with members of diplomatic corps and several businessmen.However, as he said, the Prosecutors Office did not summon the people for an interrogation.Khazaradze said that as he did not fulfill the demands listed in the letter as attack was launched against him and TBC Bank and an investigation into absurd money laundering accusations was brought by the Georgian Prosecutors Office against him and another co-founder of the bank, Badri Japaridze. Credit: CC0 Public Domain Heart attack, or myocardial infarction, is the number one cause of death worldwide. A study published in the European Heart Journal by scientists at Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen and colleagues from a range of other Bavarian institutions shows that the risk of suffering a heat-induced heart attack has increased significantly in recent years. During the same period of time, no comparable changes in cold weather heart attack risks have been recorded. The environment can have a major effect on the human cardiovascular system. It has long been assumed that severe spikes in temperature increase the risk of heart attack. "In the case of very high and very low temperatures in particular, this has been clearly demonstrated. In this latest study, we wanted to see to what extent the heat and cold-related heart attack risk has changed over the years," explains Dr. Kai Chen, researcher at the Institute of Epidemiology at Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen. Together with colleagues from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Augsburg University Hospital and Nordlingen Hospital, he examined data from the Myocardial Infarction Register Augsburg. The study looked at more than 27,000 heart attack patients between 1987 and 2014. The average age of the patients studied was around 63, 73% were men and about 13,000 ended in the death of the patient. The individual heart attacks were compared against meteorological data on the day of the attack and adjusted for a range of additional factors, such as the day of the week and socioeconomic status. The key finding from the study, explains Chen was that, "Over a period of 28 years, we found that there has been an increase in heat-induced heart attack risk in recent years." In order to demonstrate this, the researchers compared data from 1987 to 2000 with data from 2001 to 2014. "Our analysis showed that, over the last few years, the risk of heat-induced heart attack with increasing average daily temperature has risen compared to the previous investigation period," explains Chen. Individuals with diabetes or hyperlipidaemia were particularly at risk over the latter period. The researchers suspect that this is partly a result of global warming, but that it is also a consequence of an increase in risk factors such as diabetes and hyperlipidaemia, which have made the population more susceptible to heat. Is climate change a heart attack risk? "Our study suggests that greater consideration should be given to high temperatures as a potential trigger for heart attacksespecially in view of climate change," explains lead researcher Dr. Alexandra Schneider. "Extreme weather events, like the 2018 heat waves in Europe, could in future result in an increase in cardiovascular disease. At the same time, there is likely to be a decrease in cold-related heart attacks here in Germany. Our analysis suggests a lower risk in the future, but this lower risk was not significant and very cold days will continue to represent a potential trigger for heart attacks." To what extent increases in heat-related heart attacks will be counterbalanced by a decrease in cold-related heart attacks is not yet clear, explains the epidemiologist. Her group is currently performing extrapolations aimed at modelling this change in risk both in scenarios where the world meets the Paris Agreement's 1.5 C and 2 C targets and in scenarios where these targets are missed. In addition, the researchers are also planning to corroborate their findings by carrying out additional, multicenter studies. Explore further Heart attacks increasingly common in young adults More information: Kai Chen et al, Temporal variations in the triggering of myocardial infarction by air temperature in Augsburg, Germany, 19872014, European Heart Journal (2019). Journal information: European Heart Journal Kai Chen et al, Temporal variations in the triggering of myocardial infarction by air temperature in Augsburg, Germany, 19872014,(2019). DOI: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehz116 Credit: CC0 Public Domain Most deaths of children aged five to 14 in India, China, Brazil and Mexico arise from preventable or treatable conditions, suggests a new study published today in The Lancet. Led by Dr. Shaza Fadel, lead child health epidemiologist at the Centre for Global Health Research (CGHR) of St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, Canada, the study found that deaths from road traffic injuries, neurological conditions, drowning and childhood cancers were common in all four countries from 2005 to 2016. In India, death rates from communicable diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis and vaccine-preventable diseases were nearly 20 times higher than in China, and 10 times higher than in Brazil and Mexico. China saw more deaths by drowning than any of the other countries. Boys aged five to 14 had higher death rates than girls from nearly all injuries. There were substantial reductions in communicable diseases across all countries, with faster progress in girls than boys, narrowing the gender gap traditionally seen. "Most of these deaths are avoidable and for those caused by medical conditions, many of them are treatable," said Dr. Prabhat Jha, director of CGHR and Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and senior author of the paper. The research examined mortality from 2005 to 2016 in India, China, Brazil and Mexico using more than 240,000 interviews of families with a death or death certificates. These countries are home to 40 percent of the world's children aged five to 14, and with over 200,000 deaths represent just under a quarter of mortality at these ages. The investigators chose these countries also as they had at least 10 years of nationally representative high-quality data. "About one-million deaths occur worldwide at ages five to 14, and to address this unrecognized burden, it is crucial to understand the causes of these deaths," commented Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta, co-director of the Centre for Global Child Health at the Hospital for Sick Children, who was not affiliated with the study. He added, "This remarkable study provides us clear directions as to potential targets and interventions needed to reduce deaths at this age to complement the great progress made in younger children." Based on their findings, the researchers called for a broader set of interventions than those from the maternal and child health programs that target children under five. They hope to see more countries monitoring the deaths and investigating their causes in other settings, most notably countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In India, Dr. Jha leads the Million Death Study, one of the largest studies of premature deaths in the world. Because most deaths occur at home and without medical attention in India, hundreds of specially trained census staff in India knocked on doors to interview household members about deaths. Two physicians independently examined these 'verbal autopsies' to establish the most likely cause of death. "Death in children aged five to 14 should be rare around the world," added Dr. Jha. "With cost-effective, feasible and affordable interventions, substantial declines in deaths in this age group are possible." Explore further Study shows success of measles vaccine campaigns in India Credit: CC0 Public Domain A new study from Iowa State University biomedical researchers illuminates the biological processes by which exposure to some metals can contribute to the onset of Parkinson's-like symptoms. The study, published today in the peer-reviewed journal Science Signaling, focuses on the metal manganese, which has a range of industrial uses as an alloy. Anumantha Kanthasamy, a Clarence Hartley Covault Distinguished Professor in veterinary medicine and the Eugene and Linda Lloyd Endowed Chair of Neurotoxicology, said the research details how manganese exposure can lead to misfolded proteins in the brain, which cause a neurological disease. Kanthasamy said the findings could lead to earlier detection of the disease and better outcomes for patients. Kanthasamy said small amounts of manganese are necessary for the proper functioning of the human body, but too much exposure has been linked with neurological symptoms much like those experienced by patients with Parkinson's Disease. Links between manganese and neurological disorders have been noted since the 1950s, Kanthasamy said, because of the tendency of manganese to accumulate in brain tissues. The latest study found that manganese combines with a protein in the brain called alpha- synuclein. Previous studies showed the protein was susceptible to misfolding, but Kanthasamy and his colleagues set out to discover how it interacted with manganese and how that interaction facilitates the progression of disease. The researchers found the pathological form of misfolded alpha-synuclein proteins get packaged into vesicles, which allow the misfolded proteins to transfer from cell to cell to propagate the protein-seeding activity. These vesicles provoke inflammation of tissues and can lead to a neurodegenerative response, the study found. The study drew on data gathered from mice as well as blood serum samples from welders provided by clinicians at Penn State University. The study found welders exposed to manganese had increased misfolded alpha-synuclein serum content, meaning the welders are at a higher risk for developing Parkinson's symptoms, Kanthasamy said. The research could contribute to a new assay, or medical test, to detect the presence of misfolded alpha-synuclein proteins. This could lead to earlier detection of Parkinson's Disease and a way to gauge the effectiveness of drugs designed to slow the disease. "As the disease advances, it's harder to slow it down with treatments," Kanthasamy said. "Earlier detection, perhaps by testing for misfolded alpha-synuclein, can lead to better outcomes for patients. Such a test might also indicate whether someone is at risk before the onset of the disease." Kanthasamy cautioned the research is still at an experimental stage, meaning it could be years before such an assay could be available. Explore further New research raises hope for solving Parkinson's disease puzzle More information: Dilshan S. Harischandra et al. Manganese promotes the aggregation and prion-like cell-to-cell exosomal transmission of -synuclein, Science Signaling (2019). Journal information: Science Signaling Dilshan S. Harischandra et al. Manganese promotes the aggregation and prion-like cell-to-cell exosomal transmission of -synuclein,(2019). DOI: 10.1126/scisignal.aau4543 (HealthDay)Responding to the steep, recent rise in the use of addictive e-cigarettes among kids, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday announced it would go ahead with efforts to restrict sales of some types of flavored vaping products to minors. The new restrictions were first announced in November. Under the rules, most forms of flavored e-cigarettes would only be sold in stores that verify a customer's age when he or she enters the store, or the store should have a special age-restricted area set aside for vaping products. As for online sales, companies would be required to use third-party identity-verification services before selling e-cigarettes, the FDA said. Federal law currently bans use of e-cigarettes by people under the age of 18. Companies that fail to comply with the new rules could see their products pulled from the market, outgoing FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said in a statement. Because of the new restrictions, "we expect that some flavored e-cigarette products will no longer be sold at all," Gottlieb added. In one more move, the FDA moved its deadline for companies to submit new vaping products for health and safety review to 2021. That's a year earlier than the 2022 deadline set previously, but still much later than the 2018 deadline mandated under the Obama administration. Millions of kids now vaping Gottlieb, who announced his retirement as agency head just last week, has made curbing youth addiction to nicotine a top priority during his tenure at the FDA. Sales of some flavors of cigars will face new restrictions, also, because "youth continue to use these dangerous combusted tobacco products due, in part, to the availability and appeal of fruit and other flavors," Gottlieb said. In all cases, it's thought that berry, candy and other flavorings added to cigars and e-cigarettes lure kids and youth to vaping and smoking. Gottlieb said his agency is responding to a rapid surge in vaping rates among youth. "The most recent data show more than 3.6 million middle and high school students across the country were current (past 30 day) e-cigarette users in 2018," Gottlieb noted. "This is a dramatic increase of 1.5 million children since the previous year." Not only that, but the data showed that when kids were vaping, they were doing so more frequently than in the past and were increasingly turning to flavored products. All of this "is particularly troubling given that research shows that kids using e-cigarettes are more likely to take up [traditional] combustible cigarettes," Gottlieb said. 'Enticing' flavors Studies do seem to back up the FDA's concerns. For example, one recent study from Dartmouth University researchers, published in Public Health Reports, highlighted the danger. "We found that adolescent and young adult vapers were not only more likely than older adult vapers to use fruit- and candy-flavored e-cigarettes, but were more likely to concurrently use multiple flavor types," lead researcher Samir Soneji said in a university news release. Because kids are more attracted to flavored versions of e-cigarettes than adults, "stricter regulation or banning of flavored e-cigarettes, such as fruit and candy, can achieve the dual goal of reducing youth vaping while not burdening older adult cigarette smokers who use e-cigarettes to help quit," Soneji said. One anti-smoking expert agreed. Sales data "inform us that the younger user of these products is enticed by the wide array of flavors," said Andrea Spatarella, of the Center for Tobacco Control at Northwell Health in Great Neck, N.Y. "The new recommendations address this issue," she believes. Not included in the tougher new rules are tobacco-, mint- and menthol-flavored e-cigarettes, Gottlieb said. That decision stems from data showing that those flavors are preferred by adult smokers who are using vaping as a means to help them quit smoking, he said. So for now, those flavors have looser rules around their sales, although "we won't ignore [any forthcoming] data regarding the popularity of mint- and menthol-flavored [vaping products] among kids, should the concern arise," Gottlieb said. The FDA head also announced that, "this summer, we'll unveil the first television advertisement aimed at educating children about the risks of e-cigarettes." Rules 'inadequate,' critics say Juulby far the leading brand of e-cigarette, with about 70 percent of the market announced in November that it was already withdrawing many flavored versions of its popular e-cigarettes from the market. At the time, Juul CEO Kevin Burns said in a statement that, "Our intent was never to have youth use Juul. But intent is not enough. The numbers are what matter, and the numbers tell us underage use of e-cigarettes is a problem." The non-profit advocacy group Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids applauded the new FDA move, but said it still falls short. "It does not apply to menthol and mint flavors despite recent data (from the 2018 National Youth Tobacco Survey, conducted by the FDA and the CDC) showing that over half (51 percent) of high school students who currently use e-cigarettes use menthol or mint products," the group's president, Matthew Myers, said in a statement. "The FDA inexplicably ignores the evidence from its own survey in exempting mint and menthol flavors from its new policy," he noted. "Today's announcement also does little to limit the availability of Juul or Juul pods that deliver as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes, despite the fact that Juul is the main driver of the youth e-cigarette epidemic," Myers said. "The Juul device itself and high-nicotine Juul pods in menthol and mint flavors will continue to be widely sold in convenience stores and gas stations accessible to kids." The bottom line, according to Myers, is that the FDA's actions are so far "inadequate to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic." With soaring uptake of vaping by kids, "the FDA must do more and do so quickly," Myers believes. "It should prohibit all flavored e-cigarettes that have not been subject to public health review by the agency, halt online sales of e-cigarettes until stronger safeguards are in place to prevent sales to kids, restrict marketing that attracts kids, and enforce rules prohibiting the sale of new products without FDA authorization." An expert in respiratory health said there's still too little data on how vaped chemicals might affect health. "E-cigarettes are also providing more than nicotine, with other propellants and organic compounds in the 'vaping' process," said pulmonologist Dr. Len Horovitz, of Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. "We don't know the safety of some of these organic compounds used in the vaping process," he added. For his part, Gottlieb stressed that the new FDA rules may help reverse current trends and "dramatically limit the ability of kids to access tobacco products we know are both appealing and addicting." Explore further US surgeon general warns of teen risks from e-cigarettes More information: March 13, 2019, news releases, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, Dartmouth University; Andrea Spatarella, DNP, Center for Tobacco Control, Northwell Health, Great Neck, N.Y.; Len Horovitz, M.D., Lenox Hill Hospital, New York City March 13, 2019, news releases, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, Dartmouth University; Andrea Spatarella, DNP, Center for Tobacco Control, Northwell Health, Great Neck, N.Y.; Len Horovitz, M.D., Lenox Hill Hospital, New York City The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse has more about e-cigarettes. Copyright 2019 HealthDay. All rights reserved. Credit: CC0 Public Domain An increasing proportion of all cardiac arrests occurring outside of the hospital are related to drug overdoses, according to a new study conducted by two University of Arizona College of Medicine Phoenix students. Fourth-year medical student Gabriella Smith and second-year medical student Sam Beger co-authored a manuscript showing that 15 people suffer sudden cardiac arrest every day in Arizona and two of those are related to opioid overdose. This was the first statewide study to show trends in overdose-related, out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. Smith and Beger worked on the study beginning in spring 2017 with Bentley Bobrow, M.D., associate director of the Arizona Emergency Medicine Research Center Phoenix and professor of emergency medicine at the UA College of Medicine Tucson. Their research was published online in the journal Resuscitation. "Although much great work has been done across Arizona to combat the opioid crisis, overall the situation has not significantly improved," said Bobrow, who also is the medical director for the Arizona Department of Health Services' Bureau of EMS and Trauma System. "The opioid public health problem is not a 'one-and-done' issue, and now evidence suggests opioids are responsible for cardiac arrest, often tragically in very young people. The problem of opioid addiction is a generational problem and requires continuous surveillance, data collection and strategic implementation of interventions to reduce opioid-related deaths." As of Dec. 6, the Arizona Department of Health Services reported more than 16,800 suspected opioid overdoses and 2,500 opioid deaths. Recently, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data suggesting drug overdose deaths in the United States were so high in 2017 that they contributed to a drop in overall life expectancy. "I worked in the emergency department for three years before medical school where I saw a lot of young people come in who were victims of overdose," Beger said. "This issue is extremely important and is a national crisis. Working with the Arizona Emergency Medicine Research Center, we are using the results of our study to develop interventions to reverse these concerning regional trends." The group analyzed data from 2010 to 2015 from an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest registry gathered by the Arizona Department of Health Services. They looked at hospital data to determine the most likely cause of cardiac arrest, whether it was due to a primary cardiac problem, such as a heart attack, or another problem, such as a drug overdose. The study's authors said additional resources should be directed to continuous cardiac arrest and opioid surveillance; prevention and effective treatment strategies, such as increased public awareness and recognition of opioid overdose; improving proficiency in bystander CPR; and increasing widespread access to naloxone, an opioid-reversal agent. "This research was important because of its enormous impact on the community and our patients," Smith said. "Research like this will make us better clinicians and lead to better outcomes for our patients. Really, that's why we are all here to improve patient care and save lives." Explore further Opioid deaths 1999 to 2015 may be dramatically underestimated More information: Gabriella Smith et al. Trends in overdose-related out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in Arizona, Resuscitation (2018). Gabriella Smith et al. Trends in overdose-related out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in Arizona,(2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.resuscitation.2018.10.019 New study finds that providing nutritional support and psychosocial stimulation to at-risk children in China had a substantive impact on their development. Credit: shutterstock.com A groundbreaking study by University of Chicago scholars could have a profound impact on the lives and futures of children in poverty-stricken communities of rural China. Prof. James Heckman, a pioneering economist and Nobel laureate, led an innovative early childhood trial that evaluated the long-term impact of providing nutritional support and psychosocial stimulation to at-risk children in Chinatens of millions of whom are left alone in their rural communities when their parents travel to urban areas for work. As part of the Rural Education and Child Health project (ChinaREACH), Heckman and fellow UChicago scholars worked with the China Development Research Foundation to collect data on child health, development and home environment. They found children who received both nutritional and educational interventions showed significant advances in language skills, as well as social and emotional development. "We found a very substantive impact on their language development, even among fairly young children," said Heckman, the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College, whose groundbreaking work on the benefits of early childhood education has helped shaped the field. In an early analysis of the results, the language skills for treated children shows improvement over those of untreated children, according to Jim Zhou, a UChicago postdoctoral fellow who worked with Heckman on the program. "Treated children have significantly better performance than untreated children, which is an outcome that is not easy to achieve." "These are aspects that we know are important to a child's long-term trajectory," said Heckman, who directs the Center for the Economics of Human Development at UChicago. "Early spoken language is a precursor and predictor of later life development." Zhou adds that a growing body of literature shows social-emotional skills and communication skills are in high demand in the labor market, and that the value of building these skills in childhood increases over time. "With higher language and social-emotional skills, the children could have better future labor market outcomes," she said. Conducted from 2014-2017, the study combined China's existing Children Nutrition Improvement Project in Poverty-stricken Areas (CNNIP), which provides free nutritional supplements to children in poverty, with an added home visit by a trained educator who taught caregivers about early child development and the benefits of adult-child interaction. During the weekly visits, educators encouraged parents to be more nurturing and caring to the children, and to teach them through games, songs and other activities, according to Zhou. "They also watched the parents interacting with the children, and showed them what they should and shouldn't do," she said. Program leaders believe that teaching parents why it is important to interact with and talk to children will directly impact their early childhood development, Zhou explained. "This is very important for cognitive and social-emotional development." The format of Rural Education and Child Health project was based on an intervention in the 1980s called the Jamaica Parenting and Psychosocial Stimulation Curriculum, in which 127 stunted children (those who have not developed properly) aged 9-24 months received either a psychosocial stimulation intervention, which included physical, sensory, and/or emotional games and activities; a nutrition intervention; both, or neither. In follow-up studies 20 years later, the stunted children who received psychosocial stimulation earned, on average, 25 percent more income than stunted children who did not receive stimulation. They also achieved the same average level of earnings as a non-stunted comparison group, indicating that the stimulation intervention enabled the stunted children to fully catch up with their non-stunted peers. The Jamaica program's proven success, coupled with the simplicity and scalability of the educational intervention, made it an ideal choice for China's rural poverty challenge, Heckman said. Rather than seeking sophisticated, high-tech interventions that are often too costly and complicated to deploy in remote communities, this program relies on a simple, easily replicated model with proven long-term impact. "That was crucial to the success of the Jamaica project," said Heckman. Early results suggest it has been equally impactful for families in China. ChinaREACH was deployed in 2014 to 1,500 families with children aged 6 to 36 months who were randomly selected throughout Huachi County in Gansu Province. From 2015-2017, the ChinaREACH team, under Heckman's leadership, collected three rounds of data using early childhood instruments to assess children's health, overall development, adult-child relationships, social, emotional and cognitive support in the home environment. The results demonstrate that while improving nutrition delivered positive benefits for physical and brain development, the psychosocial interventions had an even bigger impact, Heckman said. In every category measured, performance among children in the treatment groups was better. "Even after just nine months, we saw huge improvements," Zhou said. The children who received both nutritional and educational interventions showed significant advances in language skills, as well as social and emotional development. He notes that President Xi Jinping is committed to addressing the challenge of rural poverty in China and the needs of the more than 60 million children left behind when their parents travel to urban settings for work. Heckman is hopeful that the early results of the ChinaREACH study will inform China's national and provincial policy related to these issues, and potentially lead to a full scale-up of combined parenting and nutrition programs throughout rural China. Heckman's team plans to continue to assess the children in the coming years to prove the long-term impact of such educational interventions. They also hope to study the enduring effect of these interventions on subsequent children, extended families and the broader community as participating parents share the lessons they've learned. He believes such interventions could change the trajectory of children's lives across the country, helping them to be more productive and successful, and creating a foundation of successful parenting practices that will shape future generations. Explore further Early childhood programs yield long-term gains for children in developing nations Credit: CC0 Public Domain Spending on post-acute care continues to rise in the United States. Today, nearly 90 percent of Medicare patients discharged to post-acute care receive that care in either a skilled nursing facility or home health care. However, little is known about the differences in outcomes and costs between these two settings. Now, a new study shows that Medicare patients discharged from the hospital and into home health care have higher rates of hospital readmissions compared to those discharged to a skilled nursing facility. The results, published today by Penn Medicine researchers in JAMA Internal Medicine, also shows that providers received significantly lower Medicare payments for these patients. "With the increasing costs of post-acute care and changing payment models that hold providers more accountable for costs across clinical settings, it's important to assess and understand the impacts of these choices," said first author Rachel Werner, MD, Ph.D., a professor of Medicine and director of Health Policy and Outcomes Research in the department of Medicine at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine. "We found clear tradeoffs: While home health care may cost less, it doesn't have the same intensity of care as a skilled nursing facility, which may be sending many of them back into the hospital." The findings have important implications for today's health care system, which continues to work towards refining payment incentives that optimize provider response and reduced spending. In 2015, Medicare spent more than $60 billion on post-acute care, a figure that has continued to rapidly increase. Under the Affordable Care Act, Medicare implemented payment reforms designed to reduce the rates of readmission, pushing hospitals to favor skilled nursing facilities, which have been shown to reduce those rates. However, at the same time, alternative payment models, such as accountable care organizations (ACO) and bundled payments, that may push patients toward lower-cost options like home care, have come into play. ACOs can be a network of providers who collaborate to deliver more cost-effective treatments across the spectrum of care for Medicare and other patients in an effort to lower overall health care costs. Studies have shown that these two approaches are associated with lower rates of institutional post-acute care, such as skilled nursing facilities. Researchers examined the differences in rates of 30-day readmissions, 30-day mortality, functional outcomes, and Medicare payments for over 17 million discharges of eligible Medicare beneficiaries to home health care versus skilled nursing facilities between 2010 and 2016. They found that patients receiving home health care were 5.6 percentage points more likely to end up back in the hospital within 30 days of discharge than patients receiving post-acute care from a skilled nursing facility. Differences in Medicare payments were also significant. The average payment for patients discharged to home health was $5,384 less than for patients discharged to skilled nursing facilities, the researchers reported. Also, total Medicare payments after 60 days for patients discharged to home care was $4,514 less for patients discharged to skilled nursing facilities. There was no difference in mortality or functional outcomes among the two groups. The researcher said the results warrant further investigation among Medicare patients and others, given the high use and cost of post-acute care in the United States that's only expected to grow. Explore further 2000 to 2015 saw increase in institutional post-acute care More information: Rachel M. Werner et al. Patient Outcomes After Hospital Discharge to Home With Home Health Care vs to a Skilled Nursing Facility, JAMA Internal Medicine (2019). Journal information: JAMA Internal Medicine Rachel M. Werner et al. Patient Outcomes After Hospital Discharge to Home With Home Health Care vs to a Skilled Nursing Facility,(2019). DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2018.7998 @alextdaugherty Over the past six weeks, Marco Rubio has used his Twitter account to post minute-by-minute updates and lengthy threads on Venezuelas humanitarian crisis, making him a must-follow for anyone keeping up to date with the latest news. Unlike many of his colleagues, Rubio writes his own posts. Though Rubio continues to earn widespread praise from Venezuelans, Republicans and most Democrats for keeping Venezuelas plight in the news, his Twitter account amplified three inaccurate reports in recent days, giving fodder to those on the left who want to negotiate with Nicolas Maduro instead of getting rid of him. The first instance: widespread reports shared by Rubio, White House officials and other prominent lawmakers that Maduros security forces set fire to humanitarian aid at the Venezuela-Colombia border on Feb. 23. Video evidence analyzed by The New York Times showed that a Molotov cocktail thrown by an anti-Maduro protester was the likely culprit. The second instance was a tweet by Rubio highlighting widespread blackouts in Venezuela over the weekend. He tweeted: Today another transformer explosion at the German Dam in Bolivar State caused another massive blackout. The result? Critically ill patients have died, the Caracas metro remains out of service & few if any flights have arrived at or departed from Caracas in over 20 hours. There is no German Dam in Venezuela. German Dam is a reporter who was writing about the ongoing blackouts. Rubio deleted the tweet after it was online for 24 hours and later said the message was a mistake. I meant to type Today another transformer explosion in Bolivar State caused another massive blackout according to German Dam, he tweeted. The third instance was Rubios retweeting of a report from Venezuela-based news outlet VPItv, which he translated into English on Sunday. Report that at least 80 neonatal patients have died at University Hospital in Maracaibo, Zulia, since the blackout began on Thursday in Venezuela. Unimaginable tragedy. Heartbreaking. Wall Street Journal correspondent Juan Forero said the report was inaccurate. Actually, sources at the hospital said no neonatal deaths recorded as of this afternoon, Forero tweeted in response. The Miami Herald reported Tuesday that 21 people died in hospitals without backup generators during the ongoing blackout, though the number was shared by Venezuelan opposition deputy Jose Manuel Olivares and could not be independently confirmed. Rubio said Tuesday he has no plans to change his social media presence. Independent journalists in Venezuela are doing a great job under tremendous circumstances, Rubio said. A very prominent one [Luis Carlos Diaz] was just arrested today by the special police. To the extent we can give them voice by tweeting out their reports, Im going to do that as often as I can to be supportive of their work. Read more here. Kibra MP Ken Okoth is a fighter, and his friends and fans have taken the time to remind and support him as he continues to battle to stage four cancer. Last month, the 41-year-old legislator announced that he was diagnosed with stage four colorectal cancer with metastases to the liver (colon cancer). On Tuesday, the lawmaker gave an update on his continued fight against cancer via Twitter indicating that he is still soldiering on. He was responding to a concerned Kenyan on Twitter who had asked about his condition. Hallo Mheshimiwa Ken Okoth, how are you fairing? You crossed my mind today. Am praying for your quick recovery, posted @WambuiBMW. The lawmaker responded: Napambana na hali yangu kabisa. Chemo drugs brutal on the skin and immunity system. # CancerAwareness # WeShallOvercome. Ken Okoth was also brave enough to share a picture showing the effects of chemo on his skin. The tweet was met with messages of support and well wishes from the Kenyan online community. We have sampled some below. Pambana kabisa Mhesh. Yote itaisha. Mungu analinda watu wema kama Wewe. Tunakuombea maisha marefu. BENJIE (@WambuiBMW) March 11, 2019 Praying for you and wishing you well! sheila mwanyigha (@MissMwanyigha) March 12, 2019 My brother all the best. MAY GOD give the strength Rob N Jillo (@robjillo) March 12, 2019 Praying for you Ken. Ciru Muriuki (@CiruMuriuki) March 12, 2019 Rooting for you my brother @okothkenneth. Hang in there. The cancer doesnt know who it has come up against. It will lose this battle Norman Magaya (@amugira) March 12, 2019 Mhesh we are praying you get through this. Hon. William Kabogo (@honkabogo) March 12, 2019 I wish you well Hon. @okothkenneth &we are proud of you 4 taking the #Lead in awareness creation which many leaders fear to do. We MUST end Corruption &use those monies to create #CancerAwareness & invest in #Medical research for None Communicable Diseases like @macmillancancer Nyamogo Gogni (@ejnyamogo) March 11, 2019 Dearest Ken, Our thoughts are with you as you battle with this disease.The whole of Kenya is behind you and sends you strength. Youre a fighter and Ive no doubt that you will defeat it and emerge the victor. Be strong and courageous. https://t.co/7Kwn3d1Y21 Yusuf Hassan MP (@MPyusufhassan) March 12, 2019 Embattled senior Nyeri Magistrate Pauline Maisy Chesang on Tuesday made a desperate plea in court to avoid sharing a prison with inmates she previously sentenced. Chesang, who was in court in connection with the murder of her husband Robert Chesang, pleaded with a Machakos Court not to detain her at Machakos G.K Prison, claiming saying she was likely to meet inmates she had convicted and who were likely to harm her. Through her lawyer, Assa Nyakundi, Chesang requested to be detained at Athi River Police Station. If she must be remanded, I pray that she be held at Athi River Police Station and not Machakos where she is likely to encounter inmates whom she might have sentenced while serving in some stations, lawyer Nyakundi stated. The first accused is a serving magistrate and has not yet taken plea. She is innocent until proven guilty. Keeping her further in custody is an affront to her constitutional rights, and furthermore she has rendered distinguished service to the judiciary for many years, he added. Machakos Court Deputy Registrar K. Kenei granted the request and ordered her detention at Athi River police station. Chesangs co-accused; Richard Moru, Lawrence Lempesi and Peter Maundu, are detained at Machakos G.K Prison. The Deputy Registrar K. Kenei further ordered Ms. Chesang and her co-accused to undergo a mental examination at Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi within the next two weeks. The suspects will take plea on April 9, 2019. Brand South Africa CEO Kingsley Makhubela has lambasted a web hosting contract with marketing agency Avatar due to its excessive fees. Avatar, however, said Makhubela has it wrong. Carte Blanche recently showed that Brand SA was charged R97,459 per month for hosting 3 websites brandsouthafrica.com, globalsouthafricans.com, and brandacademy.com. What stood out in the Avatar hosting invoice was the extremely high Additional Data and Excess Web Traffic fees. The website hosting packages cost R300 per domain, but only included 500MB disk usage and 500MB web traffic. The brandsouthafrica.com domain racked up additional data and excess web traffic fees of over R75,000 per month. According to Carte Blanche, the hosting was outsourced to Hetzner, which offers unlimited traffic on most of its hosting packages. It is therefore unclear why Avatar was charging these extremely high web traffic and data fees. Website traffic According to Similarweb, brandsouthafrica.com received around 260,000 visits and 383,000 page views per month. This means the website can be hosted on an affordable shared-hosting package without any traffic or storage concerns. The globalsouthafricans.com domain has very low traffic levels and the brandacademy.co.za domain redirects to Brand South Africa. Moving to Hetzner Brand South Africa has since started to pay Hetzner directly for its hosting, and is now paying R2,495 per month. The websites for the organisation are hosted on a Managed Commerce server which comes with 1TB of traffic and 1TB of SSD storage. We are now paying R2,500 per month, and the conventional wisdom out there is that it is still a lot of money, said Makhubela. They [Avatar Agency] were charging us R100,000 for doing nothing, he said. Hetzner comments Hetzner confirmed to MyBroadband that it is currently hosting Brand South Africas websites, but said it could not divulge further details about the commercial agreement. Hetzner added that they charge all their customers the same fee for their hosting service as per their website, without any hidden fees. We are very transparent on what we charge customers and what they receive as part of our service, Hetzner said. While it did not comment on Avatars behaviour directly, the company said it expects its resellers to be upfront with their customers and provide them with all necessary information. Avatar explains Avatar has dismissed Makhubelas accusations, however, saying he was not comparing the same scope of work in the segment. Hetzner provides them only with a basic hosting package, judging by the price they were paying, Avatar told MyBroadband. Avatar said that an independent forensic investigator examined all of its hosting invoices and costs, and confirmed that the scope of the cost of hosting by Hetzner (the hosting service) was just one component of the contract fee. The agency said it provided more than basic hosting for the websites it looked after, which included: Server Administration Security Technical SEO upkeep Framework updates and modifications Technical maintenance It was inaccurate to compare the two costs as they are not the same thing, Avatar said. The forensic report also detail that once they appointed Hetzner, they also appointed a second service provider for technical maintenance, but Carte Blanche did not factor those fees in the hosting fee comparison. Now read: GoDaddy launching in South Africa Liquid Telecom announced it has expanded the availability of Microsoft Azure across its network in Africa following the recent launch of Azure data centres in South Africa. The company said that thanks to the launch of Azure regions and the local Azure Stack deployments in its own data centres connected via Microsoft ExpressRoute, customers can access its hybrid cloud solution within the African continent. The launch of these new Azure cloud regions in South Africa will give businesses access to globally-available services with low latency and high local capacity, the company said. We are delighted by the launch of Microsofts cloud regions in Africa, and by extending the reach of Microsoft Azure to an increasing number of countries and customers, Liquid Telecom is helping Africa realise its digital future, said Nic Rudnick, Group CEO, Liquid Telecom. Together, Microsoft and Liquid Telecom are creating a modern business foundation for customers in Africa one that inspires innovation, cloud-paced change, compliance, and business growth. Liquid Telecoms Azure hybrid cloud services have been rolled out to five countries South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, and Rwanda with more regions scheduled to go live soon. Liquid Telecom is a trusted partner of Microsoft with the breadth of their fibre network, data centre infrastructure, market reach, and expertise to enable customers to realise their business objectives more quickly and effectively, said Azure South Africa business lead Dean Erasmus. South Africa is still battling to deal with its massive drivers licence backlog. The Western Capes Department of Transport has warned that members of the public waiting for their driving licence cards are likely to experience delays in the issuing of these documents as the Driving Licence Card Account (DLCA) in Pretoria is still battling to address the backlog. While the processing of applications for new licence cards and renewals is decentralised, all cards are issued by the DLCA a trading entity of the National Department of Transport. This delay affects applicants all over South Africa, with provinces like the Western Cape and Gauteng being most adversely affected. Issues with the system date back to July 2018 following four months of industrial action, which was then followed by damage to the interface between the card production facility and the National Traffic information system (NaTIS) after annual maintenance. The Western Cape Department of Transport and Public Works has been in constant engagement with its counterparts at the National Department of Transport, the DLCA and the RTMC to urgently address the issues that hinder our ability to provide this service to members of the public, the department said. To date, various commitments have been made but little progress has been made by the National Department of Transport to effectively address these very urgent issues. Major backlog Speaking to BusinessTech, Cape Towns executive director for safety and security, Richard Bosman said that the driving licence cards backlog has jumped from 66,000 to 199,000. The matter is beyond the control of the respective traffic departments rendering this service as the responsible department, the DLCA (Driving Licence Card Account), had to deal with a prolonged strike that led to the backlog, he said. The strike by the workforce is now over but it did not make any inroads into the backlog. Hence the City issued the media release to clarify the backlog with the cards. He added that the backlog affected all applicants and not only those motorists who applied for renewal in 2018. Check your licence The DLCA has implemented an SMS shortcode (33214) that allows driving licence card applicants to check the status of their applications. You need to send your ID number to 33214 via SMS and will receive a return message with one of the following: Status Message Order not received & Unknown ID DLCA does not have an application for this ID number. Order received by CPF Dear [Initials].[Surname] your order has been received and is awaiting production. Order in production Dear [Initials].[Surname] your order his currently in production. Order produced & posted Dear [Initials].[Surname] your order card has been produced. Kindly wait for collection SMS. Now read: Car licence transaction fees to increase in South Africa For Tami Patterson, tax preparation is about more than just numbers and forms, its about the lives behind those numbers. She started her own business, Nova Tax Consultant, in the wake of a difficult season in her own life, and hopes to help families as they plan for their futures and make financial decisions. I really try to give sound advice from the tax desk, Patterson said. Thats how I got into it, and thats how I stayed in it. She started Nova in 2018, following last years tax season. She and her employees have ramped up for their first tax season as a business. Before she became a tax consultant, Patterson helped people with their taxes on the side. But it didnt become her vocation until years later. Pattersons career has been varied. She was married and had four children, but after a few years found herself a single parent. To provide her for her children, she started selling Tupperware. After she remarried, she dabbled in other businesses in Riverside, California. I did whatever I could to take care of my kids, she said. Patterson later moved to Idaho so her older children could attend college at Boise State University. There, she became a Realtor. In 2010, she and her husband moved to Napa. After moving back to California, however, she developed an autoimmune disease and had to stay home to rest. The monotony of being at home was driving me nuts, Patterson said. Thats when she began thinking about working as a tax preparer. She took a course and started working for a corporate chain. In Idaho, I was able to put people who worked at McDonalds in a home. I cant do that here, because of the prices, she said. But sitting at a tax desk, I can see peoples lives through their tax forms. I can help them. In 2017, Pattersons mother-in-law became ill and passed away in September. The Napa wildfires came in October. Then she found out her husband had kidney cancer. Her pregnant daughter and grandchildren were living with them, along with her youngest son. During the off season, she took a break from tax preparation to help care for her mother-in-law, grandchildren and husband. She didnt think she would end up going back to do taxes again. But after things stabilized and her husband, who is now cancer free, had gone through surgery, she thought she would start working part time again. She ended up working 60 to 80 hours of week and feeling burned out. The amount that she was having to charge clients through her corporate job bothered her. Her family was looking at buying a house, but her husband told her instead they should open her own tax business. We took everything and dumped it into here, so its been a very scary thing for me to do, she said. Her goal has been to reduce the fees that people pay for tax preparation and help guide them in making financial decisions that will put them in a better tax situation, she said. Patterson said she believes in sticking to the law, not walking in a gray area, but using whatever is legal to help the taxpayer. Im doing everything I can to reduce those fees for people so they are actually getting to hold that money in their pockets, Patterson said. Maybe Im insane, but I want to do the right thing. She hired four support staff and three tax preparers to help her run Nova in a storefront on Lincoln Ave. This year, they have completed more than 100 tax filings and have 15 more in progress. She offers tax preparation for both small businesses and families. Some tax preparers never talk directly to the client, she said. The family drops off their forms and the preparer takes care of them. Patterson doesnt run her business that way. Its your tax return, so there should be conversation, and I think the people should understand whats going on, she said. Her philosophy means she often gets more personal than other tax preparers might. She remembers a client she served in her first year of tax preparation. When he sat down, she said, Sir, I need to tell you, you have just sat down in front of the nosiest tax preparer in all of California, and Im going to either get you a bigger refund or help you pay less. A couple years later, he reminded her of this conversation and told her she helped him pay less every year. Patterson enjoys working in a job where she can help families solve problems and make changes to put them in a stronger financial position, she said. I love helping people, she said. When I can see a family that comes in, and they have had issue after issue after issue, and I can help resolve that issue and give them peace thats what I like. Self-proclaimed revolutionary intellectual Miguna Miguna is gearing for his return to Kenya following months of forced exile in Canada. The firebrand lawyer, who was deported to Canada in February 2018 for his role in the mock swearing-in of Raila Odinga as the president, is looking to return next month. To ensure his return goes as planned, Miguna Miguna has written to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) asking them to facilitate his comeback. In exercise of my birth and Constitutional rights, I wish to inform you that I intend to travel to Nairobi on a date I will publish a few days before my arrival in April 2019, reads part of the letter. In accordance with your constitutional and statutory mandates, I strongly urge you to take steps to ensure that I will be granted entry into Kenya. Miguna is counting on a High Court ruling issued on December 4, 2018 in which Judge Chacha Mwita ruled that the Kenyan-born lawyer has never lost his citizenship as claimed by the State. Seeing as the ruling has not been overturned, Miguna argues that the State should comply with Justice Mwitas orders. He is urging the commission to safeguard him from violation of his rights by Interior CS Fred Matiangi, outgoing IG Joseph Boinnet, among other government officers. Miguna also wants KNCHR to liaise with the above named as well as Attorney General Kariuki Kihara and Immigration Principal Secretary Gordon Kihalangwa for the return of his passport upon arrival. The self-proclaimed National Resistance Movement (NRM) leader has also called on Kenyans urged Kenyans to send him emails to confirm whether they will be part of his journey upon landing at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA). Im arriving at the #JKIA on a date to be published in April, 2019. All FEARLESS or BRAVE patriots interested in accompanying me on the journey should send emails to [email protected] Mobilise and come to the #JKIA. Let the revolution begin. #HandshakeAnniversary pic.twitter.com/F0x7cRSsuT Dr. Miguna Miguna (@MigunaMiguna) March 9, 2019 Herea Migunas letter to KNCHR The Kiwanis Club of St. Helena will be hosting Police Chief Tim Foley and Public Works Director Erica Ahmann Smithies at a breakfast meeting at the American Legion Hall on Wednesday, March 27. After a brief presentation, the officials will take questions from the audience. The meeting starts at 7:30 a.m., with a great breakfast by Meals OMarie, included for a $10 charge. RSVP by Monday, March 25, to Jeff Farmer at jfarmer@seedgrain.com. The City of St. Helena was recently awarded funding through the Tobacco Law Enforcement Grant to staff a School Resource Officer (SRO). The grant will allow the St. Helena Police Department (SHPD) to provide the SRO position through June 2021. The SHPD is currently in the selection process for the SRO position and one is expected to be in place in April. The SRO, a full-time officer, will be specifically assigned to the St. Helena Unified School District (SHUSD) to implement the goals and objectives of the tobacco program, which are to achieve significant reduction in the percentage of students using tobacco related products. The SRO will work side by side and collaboratively with school district personnel and community resources to provide educational programs that focus on the hazards of tobacco use by students, enforcement of state laws regarding student use and possession, as well as the rules of the respective schools regarding e-cigarettes and other tobacco related products. The SRO will work in all schools within the SHUSD focusing primarily in St. Helena High School and Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School. Additionally, the SRO will build on the SHPDs current Youth Connect Program that encourages officers to visit the various campuses to engage and interact with students at lunch, during gym, or in classrooms. The SRO will act as a liaison with the schools, Juvenile Diversion, Up Valley Youth Coalition, and other youth related organizations. Im hopeful the SRO will help reduce youth tobacco use, but also enhance the current cooperative working relationship between the city and school district, and provide a positive role model to improve relationships with students, parents, and school staff, said Mayor Geoff Ellsworth. I have enjoyed working with the City of St. Helena and the Police Department for the past five years. I appreciate the collaborative efforts to ensure student safety. I believe adding an SRO will build upon the positive relationships established and be a preventative strategy for overall student well being, said Superintendent Dr. Marylou Wilson. The St. Helena Star supported the losing candidate for mayor, and its response reminds me of a 6-year-old, pouting, when a toy train was taken away from him. The lack of respect shown for the newly elected Mayor Geoff Ellsworth is both rude, and unbecoming for our local newspaper. Here are several examples: 1. Instead of bold headlines reading Congratulations to Geoff Ellsworth, St. Helenas mayor, the Star announced that the old mayor was defeated. 2. Pictures speak louder than words. Readers, you have seen only unflattering photos of Geoff -- either a view of his back, a strange expression, or a detached pose. Subtle, but belittling. 3. Readers have read not once, but twice, about campaign expenditures in this newspaper. Why two articles on the same subject? One can only assume the paper was trying to discredit Geoff. Mayor Ellsworth not only received the most votes from St. Helena residents, but unseated a mayor supported by this newspaper and by local politicians -- not an easy task, nor inexpensive. Restore the dignity our new mayor deserves by reporting in an admirable, respectful manner, giving attention to Mayor Ellsworths leadership and team play so far. Joan Westgate St. Helena Editors Note: For the record, the headlines regarding the election are as follows: Too close to call, Nov. 8; Four votes separate Galbraith, Ellsworth, Nov. 15; Galbraith concedes election, Nov. 22; and Ellsworth sworn in as mayor, Dec. 13. Also, there were several stories and one cartoon regarding campaign finances throughout the election cycle, reporting what all the candidates raised and spent. For the past year I have kept my head down, stopped writing opinion letters, and focused on building my project at 632 McCorkle Ave. I do not relish public attention, but I cannot remain quiet any longer. As the entire City of St. Helena screams for affordable housing, there are forces at work behind the scenes that are creating such a toxic and hostile investment environment that any additional affordable housing will quickly become a pipe dream. No sane developer would ever dare tread here again. Affordable housing is a well-defined term by Housing and Urban Development. It is defined as restricted housing units that serve the County Average Median Incomes (AMI) below 120 percent AMI, and is further broken down into many sub categories ranging from Extremely Low to Moderate Income. Affordable means spending 30 percent or less of gross income on housing. For a family of four, with Napa County AMI at $91,000, that translates to the average income earner spending $2,275/month on rent or mortgage payments. We all know that in St. Helena, as in much of California, the affordability crisis goes well beyond 120 percent of AMI. The average home price in St. Helena is well over $1 million. Presuming that one could find a $100K down payment, a 30-year mortgage on that home will require approximately $4,250/month to service. For that to be considered affordable would require annual family income to be $170K or greater, or $85/hour for a single earner. Perhaps, now you can see the extent of the challenge to retain the middle class living in St. Helena, or the Napa Valley for that matter. Building is expensive. Development is risky. And that is on a good day. A big rainy season even takes its toll. But these are the Known Knowns as Donald Rumsfeld infamously said. What really worries developers, and all investors, are the Unknown Unknowns. And this is where the McCorkle opposition groups, under Ms. Bradshaws guidance, have been operating creating unknowns by using scorched earth tactics for driving up costs and in creating uncertainty, in this case through the perversion of the regulatory and legal system. For those unfamiliar with the saga of 632 McCorkle, let me recap. At the end of 2015, I purchased the property at 632 McCorkle. This half-acre lot has been zoned High Density Residential (HR) for over 30 years, even prior to many houses built around it. I saw an opportunity to invest in my hometown on a project that served an acute community need. In February 2016, I submitted an application to build a 10-unit apartment infill project. After meeting with neighbors in April 2016, I pared down the application (that met all zoning ordinances and codes) to eight units (the minimum density required) and made other changes in response to neighbor input. The project was designed in a contemporary farmhouse style to tuck nicely into a residential neighborhood, with parking not visible from the street and a single-family look facing McCorkle. The Planning Commission approved the project in December 2016. That decision was appealed by a 501(4) organization called St. Helena Residents for an Equitable General Plan and another unregistered group called McCorkle Eastside Neighborhood Group. Neither group will disclose its members. Victoria Bradshaw stands at the helm of both groups. The City Council denied the appeal in a 3-2 vote in January 2017. These two groups then appealed the decision to Napa County Superior Court. That appeal was denied in November 2017. That decision was then appealed to the State of California 1st District Court of Appeals. In December 2018, the Court of Appeals resoundingly denied the appeal. That decision was appealed to the California State Supreme Court. The Petition for Review was determined to be late by the court clerk on March 7, 2019, and the saga should have finally been over. But on March 8, the Chief Justice granted an extremely rare time extension and allowed the Petition to be filed. Let me remind you that Ms. Bradshaw served as California Labor Secretary under two governors and is a partner at one of the largest political lobbyist firms in California. I have spent nearly $400,000 defending these challenges. In addition, I have unnecessarily spent another $100,000 to disprove the many non-factual claims made to the California State Water Board regarding undisclosed contamination left by the prior owner. I have also defended spurious claims made to the California Architects Board, the California Air Resources Board, the Contractors State License Board, and the Department of Industrial Relations (DIR). The DIR was once overseen by Secretary Bradshaw. For nearly nine months, the DIR has sat on a very simple prevailing wage rule interpretation. The prevailing wage challenge was brought under the auspice of a labor advocate for the trade workers at the site. I work side by side with these workers two to three days a week. I eat lunch with them. I joke with them. I have known many of them since I was 6 years old. I respect them, treat them with dignity, and fairly compensate them. They did not ask for advocacy. Why am I telling this tale? Because $500,000 of unnecessary cost overruns to defend spurious legal and regulatory challenges on an eight-unit project amortizes to $62.5K per unit. A good rule of thumb for an investment in rental property is that it should yield about 1 percent of the total investment. One percent of $62.5K translates to $625/unit/month in incremental rent necessary to generate the same return as the investment proforma. That $625/month translated back to the affordability scale equates to an incremental income requirement for the renter of $2,080/month salary for family of four ($25,000/year) or $12.50/hour in incremental income required to live there affordably. Of course, the market will only bear what the market will bear, and so a sound investment now becomes a terrible investment. Thus Ms. Bradshaws actions have successfully created the uncertainty necessary to hinder any further market development for non-public, non-subsidized affordable housing. They have already been successful in discouraging a residential multi-family project on Fulton Lane. You might argue that subsidized or nonprofit affordable housing is the answer, like the Turley Project (eight units on Pope) or the Brenkle Project (to-be eight units on McCorkle). I have great respect for Our Town St. Helena, and have collaborated at every opportunity with Mary Stephenson and her Our Town team. I would like to do a project with them in the future perhaps. Keep in mind that each of these projects were subsidized to the tune of well over $1 million by the city, and the housing fund is not a bottomless reservoir. The Turley Project has been in the works since 2011. The Brenkle Project has been in the works since 2013. A quick stroll down McCorkle Avenue will give you a visual reference to the relative velocity a market project can achieve versus a subsidized or publicly funded project. Even the federal government shutdown has contributed to slow progress on the Brenkle project. The 632 McCorkle project will pay the city over $250,000 in development fees, for parks, schools, and public utilities etc., and we have dedicated two of my units on Grayson Avenue as affordable under the HUD guidelines. In addition it will generate over $30,000 annually in property taxes. I am OK with this. These are knowns. And this is what being a member of the community is all about. But I am not OK with Ms. Bradshaws scorched earth tactics that have created such a toxic investment environment that the unknown, unknowns will keep any rational investor at bay, and subvert the goals of the City of St. Helena. And anyone who believes the City of St. Helena needs more affordable and median income housing, and that the solution, by necessity, must be a mix of subsidized, nonprofit, and market projects should be as concerned as I am, and voice those concerns loudly to the new council and to fellow residents. Joe McGrath is an Orinda resident. Appellation St. Helenas bASH is a prime opportunity to celebrate the great wines of today, the great chefs of tomorrow, and the community partnerships that bind together our local economy. Set for Saturday, March 30, at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone, bASH is a food and wine pairing competition involving St. Helena wineries, CIA students, and local restaurants/businesses. Each of the more than 30 participating wineries from Appellation St. Helena (ASH) teams up with two CIA students or in a few cases local restaurants/businesses. The students come up with a food to pair with one of the wines from their winery partner. Then the students make 300 servings to hand out during bASH. Members of the public vote for their favorite pairings. In addition to the usual Peoples Choice awards, this year bASH is adding a panel of five industry professionals who will judge the Critics Choice awards: food writer Susie Heller, TV wine personality Leslie Sbrocco, author Virginie Boone of Wine Enthusiast, Master Sommelier Christopher Sawyer, and San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho. Tickets arent cheap at $175, but the price is commensurate with the uniqueness of the format theres nothing like this open to the public in the Napa Valley and the quality of the food and wine. Lesley Keffer Russell, general manager at Saint Helena Winery on Pratt Avenue and president of ASH, explained to us how bASH works. We were most impressed by how the event incorporates community partnerships. Sunshine Foods partially subsidizes the cost of the food, and owner Jay Smith has been a huge supporter of the event. Sunshine even competes in one of the pairings. CIA instructor Lars Kronmark organizes things on the CIAs end. Kronmark is a St. Helena institution and an influential ambassador on behalf of St. Helena wine and food. The CIA itself is a priceless asset to the community, and events like bASH are a great opportunity for locals to discover why were so fortunate to have the CIA and its rising-star students in St. Helena. At the center of the whole web are the St. Helena wineries. When we asked Russell what sets St. Helena wines apart from the rest of the Napa Valleys appellations, she said its all about our climate. We get more sunshine and less Bay Area fog than neighboring appellations like Calistoga and Rutherford, which lends our wines a distinctive ripeness. With nearly all of its vineyards on the valley floor, St. Helena produces wines that are lush, fruit-forward, less rigidly structured than mountain wines from hillside vineyards, and equally drinkable now or in 10 years. The St. Helena appellation extends beyond the city limits and encompasses 12,000 acres. About 6,800 of those acres are in vineyard. Most of us live or work just down the street from one of those vineyards, if not right next to one. That means bASH is the one great wine event thats all about St. Helena. Its about the wine produced from our soil, sculpted by the vineyard workers and winemakers we see around town every day. Its about Sunshine Foods and the CIA and each of the wineries and grapegrowers who are members of ASH. Its about the intricately interlocking gears of the economic machine that sustains our quality of life. Its about the CIA students who will be winning James Beard Awards and running our favorite restaurants in 20 years. Its about our friends and neighbors. Its about us. The Star editorial board consists of editors David Stoneberg and Sean Scully and community volunteers Norma Ferriz, Christopher Hill, Shannon Kuleto, Bonnie Long, Peter McCrea, Gail Showley and Dave Yewell. Directed by Tae-Gyoon Kim, this criminal thriller portrays the fierce psychological confrontation between a detective and a killer who confessed to multiple murders. The film, loosely inspired by the 869th episode of Unanswered, a South Korean investigation television program, recounts a true story that happened in Busan, where murders were never reported, bodies were never found, and investigations never happened. With the help of an informant, a prominent police detective, Hyung-min (Kim Yoon-seok) meets Tae-oh (Ju Ji-hoon) who claims that he was hired to kill someone 10 years ago. He is on the verge of confessing where he buried the body, when another team of police detectives snatches him away for an arrest. A month later, Tae-oh calls Hyung-min from prison and confesses that he actually killed seven more people and will give him clues if he visits. The Viva Mariachi Festival this week at Napa Valley College presents mariachi-related educational and cultural event to promote the rich heritage and cultural traditions of Mexico through performances by high school and college ensembles. It begins with a free concert by Mariachi Huenachi from Wenatchee High School in Wenatchee, Washington, at 7 p.m. on Friday, March 15, at at St. Helena Elementary School Auditorium. Donations will be accepted at the door. Viva Mariachi Workshops will take place at Napa Valley Colleges main campus in Napa from 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday, March 16. Student musicians and music directors Jeff Nevin and Ramon Rivera will lead workshops and offer classes in mariachi music and history. Sign up at www.eventbrite.com/e/viva-mariachi-workshops-tickets-53931891740 A free community concert concludes that day from 7 to 9:30 p.m. The concert is sold out but its possible to sign up for a wait list at www.eventbrite.com/e/viva-mariachi-concert-tickets-53700145581. CALISTOGA As the Lone Ranger used to say, My work here is done. The Friends of Pioneer Park (FPP) echoed that sentiment this month as the group disbanded. Its been a good run. What started out as an expected one year project somehow became more than five years. But we did a lot more in the park than we originally set out to do, and you can all be proud, said FPP President Bob Fiddaman in a letter to other board members. FPP are responsible for getting the new gazebo built at the park, and many other improvements. The idea for the group grew from the need to replace the old gazebo in the park, due to its physical deterioration. Built in preparation for Calistogas centennial celebration in 1985, the original wooden gazebo had, in its 27-year life span, hosted innumerable art shows, Shakespearean performances, weddings and Music in the Park concerts. In that time, it has become a favorite of both the citizens and tourists who seek out the quiet of the park. The gazebo had been on the citys list of projects for years, but the city was short of money for such capital improvements. So, FPP was formed in early 2013 to raise funds from the community and to build a new gazebo in time for the 2014 Music in the Park season. What started as an informal committee was formalized as a California non-profit corporation that has obtained tax-exempt status from the IRS. Members of FPP included a wide coalition of Calistogans, including local businesses, schools, service clubs, neighbors of the park, city leaders, and also a range of talents available, from design to landscaping, construction, finance, and, of course, fundraising. Over the years, the Friends raised $500,000 toward improvements to the park including not only the gazebo, but went on to fund and engineer many other upgrades to the park including a new layout of paths, landscaping, fencing, and lighting. Architect Tom Stimpert designed the new gazebo and it was built by John Johnson with substantial pro bono work by local contractors. Our thanks to the over 200 Calistogans who donated to this effort, Fiddaman said on behalf of FPP. The Calistoga lodging industry also provided major funding. Though it was a group effort, members said Fiddamans leadership was also a factor. Hes very organized and capable. Our meetings were low-key with no drama, said board member Karen Chang. At a city council meeting March 5, Fiddaman presented a check for nearly $33,000 in unused funds to the city. Our work is done, he said. As a nonprofit dissolves, it is required to give any leftover funds to another nonprofit. The money was given to the city with the stipulation that it be used for further park projects. You can reach Cynthia Sweeney at csweeney@weeklycalistogan.com or 942-4035. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The Caldwell Vineyard winery case is returning to the Napa County Planning Commission with Board of Supervisors guidance on how to balance traffic and visitation in an area served by a narrow, rural road. Supervisors on Tuesday heard an appeal of the Planning Commissions denial of the Coombsville area winerys growth requests. They remanded the case to the commission for further deliberations with a long list of things to consider. To simply deny this does not give certainty to what we expect in these rural road scenarios, Supervisor Belia Ramos said. Planning, Building and Environmental Services Director David Morrison said after the meeting that the Caldwell case could return to the Planning Commission in late April or early May. This case could have implications for other, proposed winery expansions along narrow, off-the-beaten-path roads with rural residents. The rise of direct-to-consumer marketing has led to wineries seeking more visitors, which can create tensions in places served by narrow, less-traveled roads. Caldwell Vineyard winery is located at 270 Kreuzer Lane, a rural road east of the city of Napa. The Caldwells asked to increase wine production from 25,000 gallons annually to 35,000 gallons annually and increase the number of employees, among other things. Most controversially, they asked to increase visitation. A proposal before the Planning Commission called for increasing maximum daily visitation from eight guests to 35 guests. It called for increasing annual marketing events from 13 to 19. Annual visitation would rise from 2,350 guests to 13,115 guests. Caldwell Vineyard officials at the Board of Supervisors meeting proposed reductions that county staff said would bring annual visitation to 9,605 guests. Supervisors want planning commissioners to consider such ideas as phasing in visitation increases, capping vehicle trips to the winery and enforcing the limit with a trip monitoring system, having the winery keep its visitor log numbers under penalty of perjury and having the winery make annual reports to the commission. Supervisor Diane Dillon was the lone supervisor who voted against the remand because she favored denying the appeal. She too has issues she said need to be considered and raised the specter of the 2017 Atlas fire that burned in the hills near the winery. Is there no consideration of fire season coinciding with peak visitation season? ... October 2017 was not a one-off, Dillon said. Neighbors at 14 residences along Kreuzer Lane have formed the Kreuzer Lane Protection Committee. Attorney Denis Shanagher on their behalf said the requested increased visitation is too much for a narrow road in the agricultural watershed zoning district. Your Planning Commission got this absolutely right, Shanagher told supervisors during the public comments period before the Boards discussion. Caldwell Vineyard cultivates a bit of an outlaw image for its marketing, with its website saying that the winery is a little bit about misbehaving, taking chances and mischief. But founder John Caldwell was all business before the Board of Supervisors. He explained how he bought the first parcels of his Kreuzer Lane property in 1974, planted grapes in 1980 and built a winery in 2002. His use permit allowed eight visitors a day at a time before direct-to-consumer sales became necessary for a small winery to survive, he said. Thats why he wants the increase. This is really what we need going forward to stay in business in Napa Valley, Caldwell told supervisors. It really is make or break for us. Attorney Tom Adams on behalf of the Caldwells said the environmental analysis for a bigger version of the project concluded there are no significant impacts. He said winery officials to the best of their ability reached out to neighbors to try to get meaningful input. Some just havent been able to be satisfied, Adams said. Kreuzer Lane resident Faith DAluisio told supervisors that tour buses going to the winery have blocked driveways, winery visitors have tromped through yards and tour groups have been noisy. She said Caldwell winery activities threaten to swallow our small neighborhood whole. Neighborhood resident Matt Sabella said winery visitation that might be acceptable for a Silverado Trail winery isnt suitable for every location. The expansion requested is completely out of proportion for the Kreuzer Lane neighborhood, he said. In the written Caldwell appeal, Adams wrote that some neighbors are objecting to an agricultural operation, despite the countys right-to-farm law. Put simply, in Napa County, agriculture includes the right to produce, market and sell wine even if it conflicts with urban uses, Adams wrote. In a conflict between agriculture and urban (i.e. residences), county policy is that agriculture prevails. County resident Steven Rea asked supervisors to favor the Caldwell proposal. It is true the small family farmers living in the valley are watching, he said. Several Kreuzer Lane residents said they are not against agriculture, but rather oppose tourism activities at a level that one person compared to a daily carnival. Kreuzer Lane resident Vince Siebern told supervisors that Caldwell winery has the right to increase its patronage, but not at the expense of driving the rest of us batty by people driving up the road all of the time. He objected to the amount of visitors that Caldwell winery sought. So did Kreuzer Lane resident Joseph Sabella. Were not NIMBYs, Sabella said. Were not here to destroy the Caldwell winery. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Seeking international colleagues and fresh ideas in the hunt for answers to the question of climate change, the Napa Valley Grapegrowers (NVG) took their search abroad last week. A delegation from the NVG spent several days at the Climate Change Leadership conference in Porto, Portugal, coordinating with other envoys from global wine regions on the meaning of climate change for the worldwide wine industry. Speaking Friday from Porto, NVG Industry & Community Relations Director Molly Moran Williams said, We just, as a community, have experienced droughts and earthquakes and fires and floods and extreme heat and weather events. So its been only natural to start thinking about what we can do to not only adapt vineyards, but to do whatever we need to do to kind of mitigate for the climate realities that were facing. Williams fellow NVG delegates were Michael Silacci, winemaker at Opus One and NVG vice president, and Sonya DeLuca, NVG associate director and chief operating officer. Delegates came away with insights from a lineup of speakers that included the likes of international wine scientists, executives, government officials and one former vice president and champion of climate change awareness, Al Gore. I was impressed by the leadership taken by the Portuguese vineyard and winemaking community, Silacci said. While Napa Valley farmers and winemakers think in shades of green, we need to bring the blue and the yellow fringe closer to the center, closer to unity to make strides to hit the reset button on climate change. DeLuca added, We know that vineyards are actually powerful tools in the toolbox for climate mitigation. Not only are they climate neutral but have the potential to be climate positive in the medium and long term. However, a big part of our interest in this conference was to learn more about vineyards as part of our greater ecosystem and the connectivity between habitat, forests, and farmland. NVG is developing a report composed of takeaways from the Porto conference, Williams said. Its about resilience and looking at how we can be the best caretakers of the land, Williams said. So, our upcoming report to members will dig into this through the lens of vineyard practices and climate action. Another outcome of the conference was the creation of the Porto Protocol, which obliges members to limit their impacts on the environment even more than they may already be doing. Napa wine grapegrower Robin Lail, founder of Lail Vineyards in St. Helena, was named the U.S. Representative for the global group. The Protocol has also set out to compile a database of peer case studies that can be shared between businesses looking to go even greener. In a press release from the group, Lail said, In Napa Valley, growers and vintners are already actively engaged in protecting the environment as we farm for our grandchildren We are re-evaluating our farming practices at Lail Vineyards and my goal as The Porto Protocols U.S. representative is to reach out to farming communities across the country to do the same. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Out goes Robert Godec, in comes Kyle McCarter the new United States ambassador to Kenya. McCarter, 56, was among six envoys who on Tuesday met with President Uhuru Kenyatta at State House in Nairobi before presenting their credentials. He said he was happy and ready to get down to work. Just presented credentials to his Excellency President Uhuru Kenyatta. Officially in place and ready to work side by side. Tutafanya kazi pamoja, he said. The incoming US envoy said he will do everything within his power to help prevent Kenya from being used as a terrorist gateway by enhancing the two countries strategic alliance to eliminate terrorist threats. National security is extremely important to both our countries. As Ambassador, I will use my experience to help advance the many development programmes and policy initiatives in our long-standing US-Kenya partnership towards self-reliance, McCarter said when he presented his credentials to President Uhuru Kenyatta. Kenya is a top priority for this administration, as demonstrated by the elevation last year of the US-Kenya relationship to a strategic partnership following the historic meeting between President Trump and President Kenyatta in 2018, and by the many recent high-level visits to Kenya by senior US officials, Ambassador McCarter added. Other incoming envoys included: High Commissioner Gobopang Duke Lefhoko (Botswana), Maria Alejandra Guerra (Chile), Meles Alem Tekea (Ethiopia), Jong Tong Hak (Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea) and Unnur Orradottir Ramette (Iceland). Korea and Iceland envoys are non-resident ambassadors accredited to Kenya. President Kenyatta welcomed the new envoys and assured them of his support to make their tour of duty in Kenya a success. Welcome to Kenya and feel at home. I look forward to working with you to strengthen the cooperation and bilateral relations for the benefit of the people of our countries, President Kenyatta told the envoys. An American Canyon man is suspected of attacking the mother of his child after breaking into the house in which she locked herself, Napa police say. Around 1 p.m. on Tuesday, the 29-year-old man went to the 1000 block of Juarez Street and got into an argument with the woman, according to an email from the Napa Police Department. She went inside, locked the doors, and Alfonzo James Reed broke through the window, police say. Reed is accused of striking her multiple times, trying to strangle her and taking the cellphone on which she attempted to call 911, police say. He left the area and officers later found him in Vallejo, police say. He was booked into the Napa County Jail around 3:40 p.m. Tuesday, jail records show. He remained there as of Wednesday afternoon. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. ST. HELENA An eight-year-old program in which some St. Helena students spend two years in a row with the same teacher could soon be eliminated. Based on trends in student achievement data, Superintendent Marylou Wilson is recommending that the school board discontinue looping in grades 1-2 and 4-5, starting in the 2019-2020 school year. After an initial discussion in February, trustees could take action on Wilsons recommendation at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, March 14, at Vintage Hall. I dont have anything against looping, Wilson said. It has a lot of benefits. This isnt about looping is bad. Its about whats best and right for our district today. The St. Helena Unified School District introduced looping for grades 1-2 and 4-5 in 2011 after eliminating a three-track K-5 system that offered the Multi-Age Program, Spanish Dual Immersion, or traditional classes. Looping has advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, students who have the same teacher and classmates for two years in a row gain a sense of stability and dont have to acclimate to a new teacher during the second loop year. Looping teachers have more time to build relationships with students and observe their needs and learning styles. On the other hand, critics say students and teachers can get a little too comfortable together, making students less adaptable and resilient. Looping can also prolong negative experiences for students who dont mesh with their teacher or classmates. Wilson said another disadvantage of looping is that it requires teachers to master subject matter for two different grade levels. Between math, science, English language arts, English language development and social sciences, thats 10 separate curricula that have to be mastered by teachers who loop between fourth and fifth grade. Wilson said the reevaluation of looping grew out of a board study session on academic achievement, followed by discussions involving principals and teachers. The district met with parents on March 6 to discuss Wilsons recommendation and collect feedback. Wilson pointed out test scores showing that the percentage of students proficient in math and English language arts declined as students progressed through third, fourth, fifth and sixth grades. Wilson said she cant directly blame the lackluster performance on looping, but I cant live with this, and I have to ask staff to look at this and make recommendations around what we can do. Wilson said about 80 percent of teachers at the TK-5 level favor eliminating looping, based on her conversations with Brandon Farrell, president of the St. Helena Teachers Association. (Farrell declined to comment.) But the program does have some strong supporters. Theres some angst, Wilson said. Were not going to make everybody happy on this one. Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Mizoram Governor Prof Jagdish Mukhi on Tuesday said that border trade with Myanmar and Bangladesh would help in the economic development of the State. While addressing the first day of the Budget session of the Mizoram Assembly, Mukhi said that the State would soon embark on a new road of development when the State Government introduces its new flagship programme known as Socio-Economic Development Policy (SEDP). The Governor said that SEDP will help in growth of potential key sectors in the State, according to reports. He added that the objective of the policy is to transform Mizoram into a welfare state that is self-reliant and its development both inclusive and sustainable and where governance is transparent and participatory. Mukhi said that the SEDP programme will provide assistance for income generation and livelihood of the people. He added that the government will take steps to eradicate social evils and will help in tackling the menaces of drug abuse and drug trafficking which has reached an alarming rate in the State. All-out efforts would be made for combating trafficking of women and children, juvenile delinquency and rehabilitation as well as restoration programmes through network of residential homes and non-institutional services in partnership with civil society, he added. He also added that the present government will also take measures to reimpose total prohibition on the sale of liquor in the State. The Governor said that a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) known as Aizawl Smart City Limited is now functional for implementing various features need to make the capital city of the state into a smart city. He also added that efforts would also be taken to place Mizoram as a preferred tourist destination in domestic and international maps. Russian Aerospace Forces consider practice of reconnaissance and strike UAVs during Karabakh conflict Investigative Committee: Motion filed for arrest of 5 of 10 POWs returned to Armenia on Dec. 4 Armenia State Revenue Committee chief hosts Iran Customs Administration head Armenia Shirak Province ex-deputy governor Boris Aleksanov dies Constitutional Court announces decision on release of arrested MPs of opposition 'Armenia' parliamentary faction Iran, Azerbaijan discuss cooperation in petrol and natural gas sectors Lavrov: We understand the complexity of the situation in Armenia, but it's not right to speculate Russia's role Cem Ozdemir who initiated adoption of Armenian Genocide resolution is Germany's first minister with migration history Armenia FM, France Secretary of State sign 'Roadmap for Armenian-French Economic Cooperation' Armenia PM scheduled to deliver speech at Summit for Democracy on Dec. 10 Zakharova says news about recall of Russia's Ambassador to Armenia is misinformation Opposition 'Armenia' Alliance: 3 deputies of parliamentary faction will be released Attorney: MP Armen Charchyan needs to be released immediately by virtue of Armenia Constitutional Court decision Armenia ex-environment minister Romanos Petrosyan appointed Head of State Supervision Service Armenia MOD: 2 Armenian soldiers receive slight firearm injuries as a result of Azerbaijanis' provocation NEWS.am daily digest: 09.12.21 Zakharova: Moscow hopes Armenia and Azerbaijan leaders reaffirm commitment to implementing agreements Zakharova on Aliyev's statement and murders of Armenian peaceful civilians Ex-chief advisor to Armenia PM Hakob Simidyan appointed Minister of Environment Joe Biden's Summit for Democracy kicks off, Armenia PM is also participating Armenia environment minister sacked Residents of Armenia's Vardenis shut down Martuni-Vardenis road in support of opposition alliance's leader (PHOTOS) Armenia MOD: Azerbaijan opened intense fire toward Gegharkunik Province military positions Armenia President meets with Emir of Qatar Azerbaijan opened fire on Artsakh village tractor operator, says Machkalashen mayor Parliament ruling majority obstructs decriminalizing severe insult in Armenia Armenia deputy defense minister: No group has come from Moscow for demarcation Armenia parliament approves several amendments to laws in first reading Ambassador: American Studies center at YSU will play important role in deepening relations with Armenia Armenia Parliament Speaker receives IFRC Secretary General-led delegation Armenia PM receives IFRC Secretary General Dollar still gaining more value in Armenia Armenia Parliament Speaker sues opposition MP Aregnaz Manukyan for previous allegations Law will lead to positive changes in Armenia universities administration, says US ambassador Georgia formally refuses attending '3+3' regional cooperation platform meeting Armenia MFA officials pay tribute to innocent victims of genocides 2 Azerbaijanis killed in mine explosion near Karabakh's Karin Tak village MFA: Armenia will continue to work diligently to raise awareness of genocides American Studies center to open at Yerevan State University Gerasimov: Russian military in Karabakh working to restore peaceful life in region Armenia opposition MP: Authorities present at household level establishment technical furnishing on frontline Bomb threat in Yerevan building Armenia: 6,500 people in border communities to receive cash for winter needs Armenia government restricts access to open information from gov.am, govtravel.am 1 more person dies of coronavirus in Karabakh Armenia envoy, US congresswoman discuss situation after 44-day Artsakh war All Azerbaijan soldiers captured in Karabakh have been returned, says Rustam Muradov Armenia legislature approves 2022 draft state budget Armenia wounded soldier undergoes surgery 300 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Turkey MFA: First meeting of 3+3 format on South Caucasus to be held Friday, Armenia will also participate Armenia parliament to convene special session on December 15 MOD: Azerbaijan army opened fire on Armenia positions late Wednesday night Newspaper: Number of deaths in Armenia rise sharply this year Newspaper: Armenia PM asks for political, propaganda support from extra-parliamentary political forces Meta plans to fully reopen its US offices in January Armenia MOD: Soldier wounded from shot fired by fellow serviceman Raisi, Erdogan discuss cooperation in many fields Armenia's Pashinyan blames parliamentary opposition for delivering Nagorno-Karabakh, threatens to present evidence Armenia PM: Even today I am ready to deliver my son in exchange of Armenian POWs Armenia Parliament Speaker: We haven't stopped and won't stop efforts for our boys to return safe and sound Opposition 'Armenia' faction: All statements made in parliament need to be explored and investigated comprehensively Armenia PM: Mutual understanding was reached during meeting with Russian and Azerbaijani presidents in Sochi Frank Pallone: Azerbaijan continues to threaten Armenia's safety and sovereignty Karabakh Ombudsman: 21-year-old resident of Martuni region was subjected to violence by Azerbaijanis Armenia PM: Several circumstances behind loss of Karabakh's Khtsaberd and Hin Tagher contain state secret Nikol Pashinyan: Armenia will have railway communication with Iran and Russia via Azerbaijan's territory Lavrov underscores need to launch demarcation of Armenian-Azerbaijani border during talk with Mirzoyan PM: Armenia will participate in initial meeting in '3+3' format Joe Biden: Putting American troops on the ground in Ukraine is 'not on the table' Armenia PM: Final status of Nagorno-Karabakh doesn't imply its independence Assistants to deputies of opposition 'Armenia' parliamentary faction summoned to National Security Service Armenia Parliament Speaker's meeting with relatives of Armenian POWs and missing servicemen is over Armenia, Russia FMs discuss Karabakh issue, November 26 agreements and '3+3' format Armenia's Pashinyan rules out possibility of provision of corridor to Baku through Armenian territory Putin says Iran's President might pay visit to Russia Armenia Parliament Speaker in meeting with relatives of Armenian POWs and missing servicemen Armenia Parliament Speaker to move to governmental mansion in Yerevan district soon Armenia MOD has new General Secretary Armenia MOD: Azerbaijani army fires at water truck of Armenian military unit in border's southeastern direction NEWS.am daily digest: 08.12.21 Armenia MOD refutes Azerbaijan's statement that Armenian side fired at Azerbaijani army Armenia PM refutes opposition MP's statement that government is implementing verbal agreements Armenia President travels to Qatar ARARAT Museum initiated an inclusive project #FeelwithYourHeart (PHOTOS) Armenia opposition MP asks finance minister about operation of Amulsar gold mine Minister briefs UK envoy on details of justice sector digitalization Armenia opposition new MP is sitting with her back to parliament sessions hall Armenia MFA draws OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairmanships attention to UN International Court of Justice orders Dollar continues to rise steadily in Armenia Armenia frontline furnishing in progress (PHOTOS) 10 captives who were returned to Armenia from Azerbaijan 4 days ago are questioned Elnur Mammadov: Azerbaijan to file two lawsuits against Armenia in 2022 Azerbaijani MFA: Yerevan transmitted mine maps to Azerbaijan 3 days before ICJ's decision Iran is ready to connect electric networks to Azerbaijan and Russia Armenia parliament holding secret ballot for election of Audit Chamber member Yerevan law enforcement manages to reopen Marshal Baghramyan Avenue Russia Prosecutor General congratulates Armenian counterpart on his birthday Armenia revenue committee chief meets Iran customs service head at Meghri border checkpoint Yerevan police apprehending protesters who are blocking Marshal Baghramyan Avenue A look at the top stories today. Ethiopian Airlines plane crash: Live updates What were covering here What were covering here Black box found: The digital flight data recorder for Flight ET302 from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Nairobi, Kenya has been located, Ethiopian Airlines said Monday morning. Planes grounded: Multiple airlines have suspended use of Boeings 737 MAX 8 aircraft after Sundays crash. Which airlines are still flying Boeing 737 MAX 8s? Airlines in multiple countries have suspended the use of Boeings new 737 MAX 8 aircraft amid concerns over its safety, after an Ethiopian Airlines flight of the same model crashed Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. Man who missed Ethiopian Airlines flight shares emotional post Antonis Mavropoulos said he missed the Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed just after taking off from Addis Ababa by mere minutes, in a Facebook post that has now been shared thousands of times. Theresa Mays position as Prime Minister at stake in Tuesday vote If lawmakers dont take their final chance to vote for British Prime Minister Theresa Mays Brexit deal on Tuesday, then in the words of European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker the United Kingdom might never leave the European Union. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro says power recovery will come little by little In a televised address Monday, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said the recovery from power outages will be little by little, adding the outage was an electronic coup carried out by criminal minds. US to withdraw remaining US diplomatic personnel from Venezuela, Pompeo says The US State Department will withdraw all remaining US personnel from Venezuela amid an ongoing diplomatic crisis in the country. Algerian president will not run for a fifth term Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has announced that he will not seek a fifth term in office and that the April 18 elections are postponed, after weeks of protests surrounding his candidacy. Boy, 10, asks Qantas CEO for advice on how to start an airline Hong Kong (CNN) An Australian schoolboy with dreams of setting up his own airline has penned a letter to Qantas CEO Alan Joyce asking for advice. In the letter, which Qantas shared on Twitter this week, 10-year-old Alex Jacquot writes he is already the CEO of an airline called Oceania Express and urges Joyce to please take me seriously. Nancy Pelosi: Im not for impeachment House Speaker Nancy Pelosi does not currently support impeaching President Donald Trump despite thinking that hes unfit for the countrys highest office, according to a Washington Post magazine interview published Monday. UFC star Conor McGregor arrested after police say he smashed a fans phone Police say McGregor smashed a fans phone in Miami Beach, Florida. Aide to leading Rwandan opposition politician found dead The personal assistant to leading Rwandan opposition leader Victoire Ingabire has been found dead in the countrys northwest region, a party spokesman told CNN. Boeing 737 Max 8 is airworthy, US says The US Federal Aviation Administration has told airlines it believes Boeings 737 Max 8 model to be airworthy, after two fatal crashes inside six months. An Ethiopian Airlines plane en route from Addis Ababa to Nairobi crashed six minutes after take-off on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. Singapore bars Boeing 737 Max planes Singapores Civil Aviation Authority (CAAS) has temporarily suspended all Boeing 737 Max models from flying into and out of the country. The decision comes after an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing Max 8 crashed on Sunday, killing 157 people on board. It was the second fatal accident involving that model in less than five months. Ethiopian Airlines: Who are the victims? Passengers from more than 30 countries were on board the Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi that crashed on Sunday, killing 157 people. Among the victims were 32 Kenyans, 18 Canadians, nine Ethiopians and seven Britons, according to a passenger list from the doomed flight published by Ethiopian officials. Elon Musk slams SEC overreach, says he cut his Tesla-related tweets nearly in half The SEC wanted a judge to hold him in contempt. Elon Musk quietly accepted their judgement and just kidding. In a court filing, on the day of the deadline for his response, the Tesla CEO accused the SEC of unprecedented overreach, warned that his First Amendment rights were at risk of being violated, and patted himself on the back for dramatically reducing his volume of tweets. One viral tweet saved the day for this struggling donut shop Maybe social media isnt so bad after all. Business had been slow for Billys Donuts in Missouri City, Texas, which opened only last week, according to NBC News. So the owners son, Billy, posted a tweet on Saturday evening with pictures of his dad Satharith at the counter of his empty store. Instagram founder admits he blatantly stole Stories from Snapchat Snapchat loyalists just got some vindication about the shady tactics Instagram used to compete with the original ephemeral photo sharing app. Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger spoke on a keynote panel at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival on Monday. New footage shows devastating 1953 nuclear bomb test This newly restored footage of a nuclear test is shocking. The Upshot-Knothole Grable nuclear test occurred on May 25, 1953 in Nevada. It was the only ground-fired nuclear artillery shell ever tested. Toyota says selling full-electric vehicles is less eco-friendly for PCMag Follow @https://twitter.com/PCMag PCMag.com is a leading authority on technology, delivering Labs-based, independent reviews of the latest products and services. Our expert industry analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology. Crappy in-display fingerprint readers are ruining new phones In-display fingerprint readers biometric sensors embedded within the screens of many new phones are garbage. They must be purged from all future devices unless they get significantly better soon. There, I said it, and boy does it feel great to get that off my chest. Because its true. YEREVAN. Armenia agrees with the priorities of Slovakia, which is chairing at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan on Wednesday noted about the aforesaid at his joint press conference with Miroslav Lajcak, the visiting OSCE Chairman-in-Office and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Slovakia. Mnatsakanyan noted that Armenia agrees with Slovakias approach, according to which peoples rights and will must be taken into account during any conflict settlement. As per the Armenian FM, the OSCE expanse shall not have an inaccessible place for the international community, and this precept applies to Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh), too. Also, the minister confirmed Armenias commitment to international law, and stressed the importance of exercising the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination. Artsakhs security and status, as well as its involvement in the negotiations have been and remain a priority to Armenia, Mnatsakanyan noted. In this context, he recalled that the people of Artsakh themselves have to decide their destiny in their homeland. Furthermore, the Armenian FM underscored the need for creating a climate of trust and reducing risks. The holding of large-scale, undeclared military exercises by Azerbaijan these very days, contrary to the international obligations it itself has assumed, doesnt contribute to creating the said climate of trust, Zohrab Mnatsakanyan highlighted. President Uhuru Kenyatta on Tuesday signed three Bills at State House, Nairobi, one of which redefines city status. The three Bills which were presented to the President are; The Urban Areas and Cities (Amendment) Bill 2017, The Petroleum Bill 2017 and the Energy Bill 2017. While assenting into law the Urban Areas and Cities Amendment Bill, President Kenyatta commended the Senate for acting with speed in passing laws which are intended to accelerate the efficient and quality service delivery to wananchi through the devolved units. The new law would enable County Governments to review the criteria provided for classifying an area as a city, municipality, town or market centre. Under the new law, the number of the resident population required for a city has been reduced by half from 500,000 to 250,000 people. The same law also allows a county to declare an urban area a municipality if it has a resident population of at least 50,000 residents while for an area to be declared a town it has to have at least a population of 10,000 residents whereas a market centre would only require 2,000 residents. The law proposes establishment of boards to govern and manage cities and municipalities and also outlines specific requirements of those who will be appointed to manage the concerned boards. The new Energy Law, among other things, proposes the establishment of three key national energy entities to manage and regulate energy resources in the country. The law establishes the Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority, the Rural Electrification and Renewable Energy Corporation and the Nuclear Power and Energy Agency. The Energy and Petroleum Regulatory Authority will be mandated to regulate generation, importation, exportation, transmission, distribution, supply and usage of electrical energy with the exception of licensing of nuclear facilities. It will also be required to regulate importation, refining, exportation, transportation, storage and sale of petroleum and petroleum products with the exception of crude oil. The Authority will also be required to manage production, conversion, distribution, supply, marketing and usage of renewable energy. The Rural Electrification and Renewable Energy Corporation shall be responsible for, among other things, to oversee the implementation of the Rural Electrification Programme, manage the Rural Electrification Programme Fund and also source for additional funds for the Rural Electrification Programme and renewable energy. The Nuclear Power and Energy Agency will under the new law be mandated to propose policies and legislation necessary for the successful implementation of a nuclear power programme. The agency would be required to undertake extensive public education and awareness on Kenyas nuclear power programme. The 2017 Petroleum Bill that was assented into law by the President will provide a framework for contracting, exploring, developing and producing petroleum. The new law would also be used to formulate national petroleum policy and conduct petroleum operations. It will be a reference point in the establishment of petroleum institutions. Under the new law, the national government, county governments and local communities shall receive a fair share of benefit from revenues emanating from petroleum operations. A county government is to receive a share equivalent to twenty percent of the national governments share while local communities will receive a share equivalent to five percent of the national government share. Parliament is tasked with reviewing of percentages within ten years to take into consideration any adjustments needed. Present during the signing of the three Bills were Speaker of the National Assembly Justin Muturi and his Senate counterpart Ken Lusaka, majority leader in the National Assembly Aden Duale, and his Senate counterpart Kipchumba Murkomen. Senate Minority leader James Orengo, the Clerk to The National Assembly Michael Sialai and his Senate counterpart Jeremiah Nyegenye were also in attendance. By PSCU Holding a session of the National Security Council in Artsakh was an important message, especially after the latest statement by the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs. This is what leader of the Bright Armenia faction of the National Assembly Edmon Marukyan told journalists at the National Assembly on 13 March. According to him, Premier Nikol Pashinyan conveyed clear and comprehensive messages and made clear emphases in his speech. This was perhaps the first time that Armenias new government conveyed a clear message about the Artsakh issue in a coordinated manner. It was addressed to the international community and Azerbaijan. In this sense, we are waiting for the negotiations. Bright Armenia Party has said that bringing Artsakh back to the negotiating table is a priority, and we support the government in this regard. As far as the upcoming Pashinyan-Aliyev meeting is concerned, Edmon Marukyan said that he isnt expecting great outcomes. In his speech, the Premier raised issues about principles and elements that have to be interpreted by the international community. What do we mean by those principles? Marukyan said. When asked if there are chances of bringing Artsakh back to the negotiating table, Marukyan said that Armenia has to lead negotiations with the international community at the diplomatic and parliamentary levels. We have to lobby and let the international community know that there cant be fruitful negotiations without Artsakhs representative. If representatives of the international community agree with this, Azerbaijan will have no other option, Marukyan said, adding that Artsakhs participation is not enough for a solution to the issue since all the parties have to agree with the given option for the solution. We have to talk as less as possible about the principles that even the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs once considered archival. This is what Deputy of the My Step faction Hovhannes Igityan told journalists at the National Assembly on 13 March. The MP reminded that there have been different proposals in different periods that have either been rejected or partially accepted. Since all the principles have been rejected for this or that reason, it seems to me that we shouldnt try to take those rejected documents from the diplomatic archive and try to present them in a different way, he said. I believe that we need to start a new page, taking into consideration the fact that the Co-Chairs have indirectly stated that the stage of negotiations ended because of Azerbaijan since it had tried to give a military solution to the conflict, Igityan said. Igityan also touched upon the response of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan to the joint session of the National Security Councils of Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, and according to that, since the session was held in Stepanakert, there is no need for Artsakh to participate in the negotiations as a separate entity. I tried to faithfully understand the logic of that statement, but it was so absurd and illogical. According to Azerbaijan, if Armenia and the Republic of Artsakh are holding a joint session, it means that Artsakh should not be a party to the negotiations. On the contrary, I see that if Armenia and Artsakh consider themselves two separate countries and have their own security councils and are holding a joint session, this means that Artsakh can sit around the negotiating table, Igityan emphasized. There is nothing mentioned about merely negotiations in the statement by the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs. All the points are targeted at the creation of an atmosphere in which the parties will be able to negotiate. This is what Deputy of the My Step faction of the National Assembly Hovhannes Igityan told journalists at the National Assembly on 13 March, adding that the approaches are not directly linked to the negotiation process. The parties will have the chance to express their views around the negotiating table. Today the Co-Chairs state, and we, as parties, must agree on the steps to be taken in order to restore the atmosphere that was disturbed during the Four-Day Artsakh War. The statement clearly states what must be done, he said. He noted that Armenia has responded to Azerbaijans military drills. However, this doesnt mean that Armenia is setting a condition. Even the statement of the Co-Chairs states that no statement should stand in the parties way of sitting around the negotiating table. Azerbaijans military drills sharply contradict the agreements of the OSCE Minsk Group in Vienna and Saint Petersburg, but even this isnt an obstacle for us because we ready to negotiate. Igityan mentioned that the joint session of the National Security Councils of Armenia and Artsakh were not a response to Azerbaijans military drills or the Co-Chairs statement since the session was so logical that he doesnt understand why there hadnt been such sessions in the past. Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili has arrived in Armenia on a two-day official visit at the invitation of President Armen Sarkissian. The delegation led by Zurabishbilu visited the Armenian Genocide Memorial in capital city Yerevan, to pay tribute to the victims of this tragedy. Karabakh conflict should not be shifted to the Georgian territory and the Armenians and Azerbaijanis should live in peace there, Zurabishvili said during a statement for the media after meeting with her Armenian counterpart Armen Sarkissian. There are many challenges in the region and it is necessary to remember that the main way is the peaceful resolution of conflicts on the basis of the norms of international law, she said adding that all conflicts should be resolved via dialogue and talks. Ministry of Defense military unit detachment health instructor and compulsory military serviceman Private Hamlet Avagyan died Tuesday as a result of slipping into the gorge. The military serviceman slipped and fell into the gorge on the way from a military base to another military base to provide medical assistance, spokesperson for Armenias investigative committee said. H. Avagyan died from the bodily injuries he sustained. Harutyunyan added that a report was being prepared on this incident. OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Miroslav Lajcak stands ready to make every effort toward settlement of the Karabakh conflict, he said during his visit to Yerevan Lajcak said he was ready to do everything to be useful in seeking a resolution to the Karabakh conflict. He recalled the three internationally recognized principles for conflict settlementthat is, territorial integrity, peoples right to self-determination, and non-use of force or threat thereofand noted that these precepts are the architecture on which the conflict settlement should be built. And speaking about the prospects for Artsakhs participation in the negotiation process, the OSCE Chairman-in-Office stated that a change in the format of the negotiations should be acceptable for all parties. The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a warning for Russians planning to visit Azerbaijan who have indirect or direct signs of belonging to an Armenian nationality. Due to the fact that, despite the numerous appeals of the Russian side, the practice of banning Russian citizens with Armenian roots from entering the Republic of Azerbaijan continues, the statement says. It is noted that Azerbaijan's action are motivated by the inability to ensure the personal security of such persons. Armenias capital city of Yerevan is 170th in the Quality of Living city ranking, according to Mercer global consulting firm. The company has compared 231 cities in its Quality of Living Report for this year, and Vienna tops the list. Yerevan is first among neighboring regional capitals. In their latest statement, the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs reiterated the principles and elements that have been talked about for many years. This is what Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic Masis Mayilyan declared in a conversation with journalists following his meeting with OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Slovakia Miroslav Lajcak. They expressed their opinion and said the proposal was still on the negotiating table. This is our approach the time has come to refuse the age-old principles and make new and realistic proposals. As far as restoration of the old format is concerned, we can expect some progress. However, it is impossible to expect any progress when there are old approaches and when Artsakh isnt participating in the negotiations, Masis Mayilyan declared. When asked if he meant the Madrid Principles by saying age-old principles, the minister said he meant that the principles and the proposals made over the past 27 years have become age-old and need to be revised. As far as the three principles and six elements that Nikol Pashinyan recalled in his speech at the opening of the joint session of the National Security Councils of Armenia and Artsakh and concerned and when asked if Stepanakert accepts them or not, Mayilyan said that Pashinyan talked about the need to specify those principles and elements. Stepanakert agrees with that. However, we are also talking about the need for revision of those principles and elements. The former authorities say Nikol Pashinyans initiative to bring Artsakh back to the negotiating table will disrupt the negotiation process and is dangerous. Artsakhs Minister of Foreign Affairs doesnt share the view that the change of format can disrupt the negotiation process. I believe Armenias new authorities are showing a constructive approach. They have declared that they will participate in the meetings since the negotiations cant be full-fledged without Artsakh. Armenia isnt setting Artsakhs participation as a precondition, but it is saying that it will speak on its behalf. I believe this is a right and constructive approach, Mayilyan said. Restoration of the negotiations in the trilateral format is the best way to succeed in advancing the peace process. This is what Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh Republic) Masis Mayilyan said during a meeting with OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Slovakia Miroslav Lajcak on 13 March. At the request of Lajcak, Masis Mayilyan presented Artsakhs position on the peaceful settlement of the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict. Masis Mayilyan emphasized that the co-chairmanship of the Minsk Group is the only agreed intermediary platform for settlement of the Azerbaijani-Karabakh conflict. Artsakhs foreign minister stated that restoration of the negotiations in the trilateral format enshrined by the decision of the OSCE summit meeting in Budapest in 1994 is the best way to succeed in advancing the peace process. According to the minister, the trilateral format of negotiations with the direct and full-fledged participation of the official Stepanakert has not only proved its effectiveness, but is also the most effective format that has ensured conclusion of the agreement of 12 May 1994 on ceasefire. Besides the need for restoration of the trilateral negotiations, Masis Mayilyan also attached importance to the development of new ideas to achieve real progress in the peace process. Artsakhs foreign minister declared that one of the major indicators of effectiveness of the settlement is the implementation of the agreements reached earlier, stating that Azerbaijans de facto refusal from the agreements in Vienna and Saint Petersburg hinder advancement of the peace process. During the meeting, the parties also touched upon humanitarian issues. The minister urged the OSCE Chairman-in-Office to pay proper attention to humanitarianism and drew Lajcaks attention to the fact that Azerbaijan continues to make attempts to isolate Artsakh and, in this regard, the OSCE bears some responsibility to make sure citizens of the Republic of Artsakh are not restricted when it comes to exercising their fundamental rights and freedoms due to the fact that the conflict remains unresolved. In regard to this, Masis Mayilyan stated the modernity of the visits of high-ranking representatives of international organizations to Artsakh. According to the minister, such visits will become a major signal to keep the issue of peace and stability in the South Caucasus in the focus of the OSCE and other international organizations. OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Miroslav Lajcak assured that the OSCE would continue to exert all efforts for an exclusively peaceful settlement of the conflict. A number of Democratic presidential candidates this year are calling for an increased level of federal government involvement in healthcare, taxes, energy and education. At the same time, Democratic leaders in the House have introduced a sweeping legislative package designed to fix the federal government, with proposed new laws relating to voting, political money, redistricting and ethics. Both developments -- calls for more government intervention and calls for government overhaul -- are part of a larger discussion about the appropriate role and size of the federal government. This discussion has been with us since the earliest days of the republic. One thing Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson did not have as they argued about the contours of the new republic is the benefit of public opinion polling -- which provides a reliable window into the American public's thinking on these matters. And what we learn from recent polling is that Americans have mixed feelings about increased government involvement in their lives but feel very strongly that the way government works needs to be fixed. Mixed Views on Increased Government Intervention A long-standing Gallup trend question asks Americans if government should be doing more to solve problems rather than leaving that challenge to individuals and businesses. Americans are divided in their responses: Half say things are better left to business and industry, while 44% say the government should do more. Answers to a separate question show that slightly over half say the government has too much power today. And, given three choices for government regulation, well less than half say the government should do more to regulate business and industry (the rest say either that regulation is about right or that we need less regulation). Despite holding these mixed general attitudes about enlarging the role of government, Americans are positive about some proposed specifics. Majorities of Americans say government should ensure that all Americans have healthcare, favor higher taxes on the rich, support government intervention into the energy and industrial systems that create pollution, favor stricter environmental regulations, and strongly favor more government expenditures on infrastructure. Americans also appear quite positive about some aspects of what government is already doing today. The public has more confidence in the military than in any other social institution we measure, and Americans 65 and older, most of whom are on Medicare, are more satisfied with their healthcare quality and coverage than Americans with private health insurance. On the latter point, Kaiser Family research has shown that "Medicare for all" tests better than three other descriptions of a government-run healthcare system. This helps explain why proponents of universal healthcare are using that name, taking advantage of the presumption that Americans have a positive opinion of the existing Medicare program. Americans Evince Little Confidence in Government More Americans now than at any time in our Gallup history -- 35% -- say government is the most important problem facing the nation. These views appear to be almost totally aimed at congressional representatives, the president, gridlock, lack of cooperation or the recent government shutdown. Very few of those who name government as the most important problem mention the actual functions of government per se. Americans' trust in government to handle both domestic and international problems is at a new low. Just 35% have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in government to handle domestic issues, and 41% have a similar amount of trust in government to handle international issues. This fits with previous Gallup research showing that the public views Congress as corrupt, believes special interests control Congress and that members of Congress are out for themselves -- not for the good of the people. Also, keep in mind that only 21% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, and that presidential approval ratings are well below both the historical average and the majority level. The recent spectacle of a partial government shutdown for 35 days because of an inability to compromise and reach agreement did nothing to encourage Americans that their government has the maturity to govern. All of this means, clearly, that the general idea of doing something to change our system of electing representatives and then controlling representatives' behavior once they are in office resonates with the public today. Bottom Line: Democrats May Need to Focus First on Fixing Government There are numerous crosscurrents in American public opinion on the size and scope of the federal government. Americans respect many of the things government does and support specific proposals for increased government involvement, while at the same time expressing reservations when asked general questions about the ideal role of government. Plus, and most important in my view, Americans continue to have strongly negative views of the elected representatives that ultimately control anything the government does. My interpretation of these measures of public opinion suggests that the public's priority is fixing government -- already a front-burner issue this year with the previously mentioned, massive (nearly 700-page) legislative bill HR 1 introduced by Democratic leaders in the House and aimed at reforming many aspects of government. How successful will this effort be? HR 1 is a huge compendium of many proposed changes, and, symptomatic of the problems it's trying to fix, the bill has already come under withering fire from conservatives and House and Senate Republican leaders. Plus, and not unexpectedly, business and lobbying interests have also come out against the reform bill. As one news report put it, "The nation's business and lobbying interests began publicly mobilizing Tuesday in a coordinated attack against House Democrats' signature campaign finance, lobbying, ethics and voting overhaul." So, there appears to be little room for optimism when it comes to the probabilities that this type of reform -- not just this specific legislation -- is going to have a chance of being seriously debated in the halls of Congress. That's even though the general idea of fixing government, reforming the election process and attempting to control the factors that influence elected representatives' behavior while in office strikes a responsive chord among Americans. Perhaps Republicans (and business leaders) would be well advised to acknowledge the virtues of the idea behind the law, and to put forward their own proposals to fix government. But at this point, it appears that the dysfunction that typifies government today is what is going to keep government from being able to fix that dysfunction. The requested page is currently unavailable on this server. Back to [RTHK News Homepage] There are 11 possible outcomes following UK prime minister Theresa Mays failure to win over MPs with a series of last-minute changes agreed with the European Union. On Tuesday night (12 March) members of parliament voted against the deal by 391 votes to 242 a majority of 149 votes in yet another humiliating defeat for the prime minister over Brexit. But the path ahead for Britain has become a lot more complicated. As May said in her speech, following her deal being rejected in parliament again, politicians will now have to pick from unenviable choices, such as a delay to Brexit, a second referendum, or a no-deal Brexit, thanks to the decision the House has made this evening they must now be faced. Flags and pins of pro-Brexit demonstrators. Photo: Simon Dawson/Reuters Option 1: MPs vote for a no-deal Brexit If politicians vote for a no-deal that means the UK will leave the bloc on 29 March without any rules or regulations in place to replace those that were in place during the EU membership. That is the worst case scenario for the economy because no one will know how to operate in the vacuum of no distinct rules and regulations governing trade or immigration. The Bank of England said previously that a no-deal Brexit also known as a hard Brexit and means no transition period will be worse than a global financial crisis. In its worst-case Brexit scenario, the UK economy could shrink by about 8% within a year. That fall would be the worst the country has seen since the 1920s. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) also warned that Brexit is one of the biggest risks for global financial stability. Yesterday, MPs released a report saying that the UK governments preparations for a no-deal Brexit have been rushed, risky, and over-optimistic. The influential public accounts committee said it is not convinced government departments are ready to leave the European Union on 29 March without a deal. Today, the government outlined its plans to slash a majority of tariffs to zero in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Story continues Option 2: MPs vote to reject a no-deal Brexit If MPs decide that Britain cannot crash out of the EU without a deal, that will lead to a third vote on Thursday on whether Brexit needs to be delayed in order to secure a new deal. Option 3: MPs reject delaying Brexit If parliament rejects extending Article 50, therefore delaying Brexit, Britain will leave the EU on 29 March without a deal anyway. Option 4: Parliament votes to delay Brexit If parliament votes to extend Article 50, that leads to seven other potential outcomes for Britain. An extension to Article 50, however, has been something the EUs chief negotiator Michel Barnier has said is unavoidable and that a technical extension of up to two months beyond the 29 March deadline is likely to happen. Option 5: UK renegotiates with the EU This is something that was voted on after Mays deal was first rejected earlier this year. However, late on Monday this week, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said its this deal or Brexit might not happen at all. May would also have to battle against finding any deal that satisfies an increasingly fractious parliament. Its not as simple as sating the desire of Remain versus Leave supporters there are some that dont mind crashing out of a deal, there are some that want a similar deal to what the UK has now, and there are some that want a second referendum. Option 6: Second referendum A second referendum is a distinct possibility. May said in her statement last night, following her deal defeat: Let me be clear. Voting against leaving without a deal and for an extension does not solve the problems we face. The EU will want to know what use we mean to make of such an extension. This House will have to answer that question. Does it wish to revoke Article 50? Does it want to hold a second referendum? Or does it want to leave with a deal but not this deal? There has been growing appetite for a second Brexit referendum from professionals and the public. Nearly three quarters of working professionals demanded a second Brexit vote in December and 75% say they would then vote to remain in the EU. Hundreds of thousands of people marched in favour of another Brexit vote while analysts have said that a second referendum is likely to happen. Option 7: Another general election There is the option that politicians decide that another general election is needed in order to potentially replace May and her cabinet but put the decision to the people. One of the biggest criticisms has been over the Conservative partys ability to score a deal amid infighting between hardline Brexiteers, softer Leavers, and reluctant Remainers. Option 8: Vote of no-confidence Another vote of no-confidence could, again, see the unseating of the government. May has already survived a rebellion from within her party and a parliament-wide government vote of no-confidence. Option 9: Another vote on Mays deal Politicians could end up mulling over all the choices and decide Mays deal is the best compromise all factions of parliament can get. Option 10: No-deal anyway After all this, MPs could vote to just have a no-deal Brexit anyway just beyond the original 29 March deadline from before. In December last year, the European Court of Justice ruled that Britain can cancel Brexit without the permission of the other 27 EU members. The ECJ also said that by cancelling Brexit, there would be no alterations to Britains current membership to the bloc of remaining 27 nations. Option 11: Brexit cancelled Last, but no least, Brexit could be technically cancelled. In June 2017, Daphne Oz revealed to her more than 269K Instagram followers that she was expecting her third baby. Party of 5!! she wrote under a photo of her kissing her husband, financial analyst John Jovanovic. Fans cheered her good news and watched her belly grow on ABCs The Chew. Then, in December, Oz posted another shot of her adorable 4-day old daughter, Domenica. Motherhood and growing up with a famous father, Dr. Mehmet Oz, have taught this mom of three to follow her gut above all else, and now shes sticking closer to home, posting cooking videos as @domesticgoddish. During her third pregnancy, Daphne shared what shed learned already from raising Philomena, 3, and son Jovan (called John), 2, to give expecting moms some food for thought. RELATED: 21 Things No One Told You About Motherhood This time I had blood work done to confirm I was pregnant. When the doctor told me the news, I got this huge grin on my face and called my husband immediately. I love being pregnant. I always joke with him that I want seven kids. Well see what number we actually get to. (Oz herself is one of four.) You dont want to tell people youre pregnant right away, but this time my belly popped sooner than it ever has. People start looking at you skeptically. We went to a wedding, and I very conspicuously tried to drink things that looked like cocktails. It was a total bullshit moment, but it worked. First-trimester morning sickness is tough, because you feel like crap but cant yet tell people why. Ive found that as long as I eat some refined carbohydrates every hourbagels, pizza, pretzelsIm fine! In my normal life, I love a good grain bowl with legumes and lean protein, but I cant even look at that during the first three months of pregnancy. The weird thing is that while Im always hungry, Im also full after eating about three bites. Story continues RELATED: 6 Foods That Help Morning Sickness As long as I have good food and a comfy bed, then Im pretty solid. When Im pregnant, I dont eat raw fish or filter feeders, like clams or mollusks. I miss my stinky cheeses. I still drink one Americano coffee a day. Part of me wishes I could quit that, too, but the medical community says that the stress we put on moms to be perfect is way more damaging than just having that cup of coffee. We stress ourselves out so much! During my first two pregnancies, all I did was walk and I ended up suffering. I had terrible back pain in the last trimester. After each birth, I was so weak that when Id bend over to lift the baby, Id have to use my arms for support because I had no core strength. So, this time Im doing 20 to 30 minutes of real exercise a day. For the first 18 weeks, I did a modified Tracy Anderson program. Then I transitioned to her pregnancy DVDs. I also love Ballet Beautiful. Its low-intensity but strengthens my muscles. I try to stay active too. I live in New York City, so I walk to do my errands. Im not a gym rat. In fact, I hate going. If exercise is easy, the more likely I am to do it. RELATED: 7 Smart Ways to Exercise Safely During Pregnancy I struggled with my weight during my entire adolescence. Now I no longer associate my self-worth with my size, which is helpful because your size fluctuates when youre pregnant. During that last month, its like someone sticks a balloon pump in you and puffs you up everywhere! But the more you fixate on your weight, the harder it seems to be. So Im not focused on not gaining weight. Im growing a life inside of me, and I feel so powerful. I told Philomena, We are having a baby girl, and shes coming around Christmas, like a present. She looked at me and, in all seriousness, said, Oh man! I was really hoping for a dinosaur. It was so cute. Now, shes excited. She kisses my belly and says, Hows Sugar? Isnt she done cooking yet? But her brother is younger, so he either doesnt understand or maybe he just doesnt care. Hes such a dude. I debated delivering at a birthing center with my first, but I ruled against it after my doctor said that even though the birthing center is only one floor away from the trauma center, if anything goes wrong, that minute could make a difference. In my mind, why risk it? With Philo, I wanted a natural birth, but my amniotic fluid was dropping, so I had to be induced. After 28 hours of labor, I was like, Give me the motherfucking epidural! But the experience of getting one was more painful for me than the labor. They spinal-tapped me four times, and each time, half of my body went numb. I thought I was paralyzed! Then, when it finally came time to push, I was worried I wouldnt feel anything. But in reality, you feel everything, only without earth-shattering pain. Youre aware and in the moment, and it was beautiful and nothing like Id expected. The only catch is, my recovery was hard. With my son, I did it without drugs. It sucked for the eight hours I was going through it, but that second labor was shorter and my recovery was much easier. I was walking around that day and my body bounced back faster. Well see what this next labor brings. Im going to try natural again. I breastfed each for about eight months. For me, it wasnt blissfully easy. Those free-the-nipple Instagram posters are my dream, but not my experience. Its a huge commitment to be the constant food source for another human. And Ive always gone back to work after two months and spent a lot of time with my breast pump. Eventually you can move a baby to formula and let go of this one part of being a great mom. I say: Do what you have to do. RELATED: 16 Things You Didn't Know About Breastfeeding We havent chosen a name yet, but I know one will come. Its so hard. We shared the names early the last two times and never will again. People say things to change your opinion. During my first pregnancy, I was so pampered. Everyone was looking out for me. I got a ton of advice, ate really well, and had prenatal massages. With my second, I was just so tired. My daughter was 10 months old, so I was juggling first-trimester exhaustion while entertaining a toddler. This time, the pressure is off me. My kids play with each other, so now I get to sit back and enjoy the moment. At least, this is whats worked for Oz! Improvement in profitability and outperformance against the industry can be important characteristics in a stock for some investors. Below, I will assess Shradha Infraprojects (Nagpur) Limiteds (NSE:SHRADHA) track record on a high level, to give you some insight into how the company has been performing against its historical trend and its industry peers. See our latest analysis for Shradha Infraprojects (Nagpur) How Did SHRADHAs Recent Performance Stack Up Against Its Past? SHRADHAs trailing twelve-month earnings (from 31 March 2018) of 36m has declined by -19% compared to the previous year. Furthermore, this one-year growth rate has been lower than its average earnings growth rate over the past 5 years of 24%, indicating the rate at which SHRADHA is growing has slowed down. Why is this? Lets examine whats occurring with margins and if the entire industry is facing the same headwind. NSEI:SHRADHA Income Statement, March 13th 2019 In terms of returns from investment, Shradha Infraprojects (Nagpur) has fallen short of achieving a 20% return on equity (ROE), recording 5.7% instead. Furthermore, its return on assets (ROA) of 2.3% is below the IN Real Estate industry of 3.4%, indicating Shradha Infraprojects (Nagpur)s are utilized less efficiently. However, its return on capital (ROC), which also accounts for Shradha Infraprojects (Nagpur)s debt level, has increased over the past 3 years from 3.3% to 5.5%. What does this mean? Though Shradha Infraprojects (Nagpur)s past data is helpful, it is only one aspect of my investment thesis. Companies that are profitable, but have capricious earnings, can have many factors influencing its business. I recommend you continue to research Shradha Infraprojects (Nagpur) to get a better picture of the stock by looking at: Future Outlook: What are well-informed industry analysts predicting for SHRADHAs future growth? Take a look at our free research report of analyst consensus for SHRADHAs outlook. Financial Health: Are SHRADHAs operations financially sustainable? Balance sheets can be hard to analyze, which is why weve done it for you. Check out our financial health checks here. Other High-Performing Stocks: Are there other stocks that provide better prospects with proven track records? Explore our free list of these great stocks here. NB: Figures in this article are calculated using data from the trailing twelve months from 31 March 2018. This may not be consistent with full year annual report figures. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. Executions in California are set to be halted after the death penalty was described as a failure (Wikipedia) Hundreds of inmates on the largest death row in the United States are getting a reprieve as a halt is set to be placed on all executions in California. State governor Gavin Newsom plans to sign an executive order placing a moratorium on executions, and is also withdrawing the lethal injection regulations that death penalty opponents already have tied up in courts. The moratorium will affect 737 inmates on death row. Mr Newsom said: The intentional killing of another person is wrong and as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual. He called the death penalty a failure that has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or cant afford expensive legal representation. The governor also said innocent people had been wrongly convicted and sometimes put to death. California governor Gavin Newsom plans to sign an executive order placing a moratorium on executions (Getty) Mr Newsom said the death penalty was not a deterrent, wasted taxpayer dollars and was flawed because it is irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error. The death penalty has been an abject failure. It discriminates based on the color of your skin or how much money you make. Its ineffective, irreversible, and immoral. It goes against the very values that we stand for which is why CA is putting a stop to this failed system. Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) 13 March 2019 California has not executed anyone since 2006, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor. And although voters in 2016 narrowly approved a ballot measure to speed up the punishment, no condemned inmate faced imminent execution. Since Californias last execution, its death row population has grown to house one of every four condemned inmates in the United States. READ MORE How much more can Britain take? Newspapers react to Brexit vote chaos Rapist who sent Snapchat message of attack to victims friends jailed for 11 years Uber driver drove sleeping passenger so far off-route he was charged with kidnapping Story continues They include Scott Peterson, whose trial for killing his wife Laci riveted the country, and Richard Davis, who kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas during a slumber party and strangled her. Michele Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy (Los Angeles County) District Attorneys, said Mr Newsom is usurping the express will of California voters and substituting his personal preferences via this hasty and ill-considered moratorium on the death penalty. While the governors move is certain to be challenged in court, aides say his power to grant reprieves is written into the state constitution and that he is not altering any convictions or allowing any condemned inmate a chance at an early release. A governor needs approval from the state Supreme Court to pardon or commute the sentence of anyone twice convicted of a felony, and the justices last year blocked several clemency requests by former governor Jerry Brown that did not involve condemned inmates. Killer Scott Peterson is among those in Californias death row population (Wikipedia) Other governors also have enacted moratoriums. Republican Illinois Governor George Ryan was the first in 2000 and was later followed by Pennsylvania, Washington and Oregon. Illinois ultimately outlawed executions, as did Washington. More than six in 10 condemned California inmates are minorities, which Mr Newsoms office cited as proof of racial disparities in who is sentenced to die. Since 1973, five California inmates who were sentenced to death were later exonerated, his office said. Seventy-nine condemned California inmates have died of natural causes since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1978. Another 26 committed suicide. California has executed 13 inmates, while two were executed in other states. Mr Newsoms office said 25 condemned inmates have exhausted all of their appeals and could have faced execution if the courts approved the states new lethal injection method. Aerie Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (AERI announced that the FDA has approved Rocklatan 0.02%/0.005% to reduce elevated intraocular pressure (IOP) in patients with open-angle glaucoma or ocular hypertension. Rocklatan is a once-daily, quadruple-action fixed-dose combination of Rhopressa (netarsudil) and Pfizers PFE Xalatan (latanoprost). The FDA approval was supported by data from two phase III registration studies, MERCURY 1 and MERCURY 2. In these studies, Rocklatan achieved its primary 90-day efficacy endpoint, and positive 12-month safety and efficacy results, demonstrating statistically superior IOP reduction over latanoprost and netarsudil at every measured time point. Aeries new drug application (NDA) for Rocklatan 0.02%/0.005% was submitted to the FDA in May 2018. This is the second FDA approval that the company has received for the treatment of glaucoma within a year of the U.S. launch of Rhopressa. The company plans to launch Rocklatan in the United States in the second quarter of 2019. Share price of the company decreased 21% in the past year compared with the industrys decline of 16.6%. Along with the approval, the company also announced full-year 2019 net revenue and net cash burn guidance. The company expects revenue for 2019 to be $110-$120 million. This guidance includes the combined net revenues of Rhopressa (netarsudil ophthalmic solution) 0.02% and Rocklatan. As Rocklatan has just received approval, a large portion of the companys net revenue guidance is expected to be achieved later this year. The company expects to gain meaningful Rocklatan market access for commercial and Medicare Part D plans as the year progresses. Net cash burn for full-year 2019 is expected to be $130-$140 million. Including the $100-million undrawn credit facility available to the company, total liquidity at the end of 2019 is forecast to be $160-$170 million based on the net cash burn guidance range. Story continues Aerie Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Price Aerie Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Price | Aerie Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Quote Zacks Rank and Other Key Picks Aerie currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). Some top-ranked stocks from the same space are Celgene Corporation CELG and BioDelivery Sciences International, Inc. BDSI. While Celgene carries a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), BioDelivery carries a Zacks Rank#2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here. Celgenes earnings per share estimates have increased from $10.34 to $10.73 for 2019 and from $12.28 to $12.76 for 2020 in the past 60 days. The company delivered a positive earnings surprise in all the trailing four quarters, with average of 2.65%. BioDelivery Sciences loss per share estimates have narrowed from 25 cents to 20 cents for 2019 over the past 60 days. The company delivered a positive earnings surprise in three of the trailing four quarters, with average of 8.57%. Zacks' Top 10 Stocks for 2019 In addition to the stocks discussed above, wouldn't you like to know about our 10 finest buy-and-holds for the year? From more than 4,000 companies covered by the Zacks Rank, these 10 were picked by a process that consistently beats the market. Even during 2018 while the market dropped -5.2%, our Top 10s were up well into double-digits. And during bullish 2012 2017, they soared far above the market's +126.3%, reaching +181.9%. This year, the portfolio features a player that thrives on volatility, an AI comer, and a dynamic tech company that helps doctors deliver better patient outcomes at lower costs. See Stocks Today >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Pfizer Inc. (PFE) : Free Stock Analysis Report Celgene Corporation (CELG) : Free Stock Analysis Report BioDelivery Sciences International, Inc. (BDSI) : Free Stock Analysis Report Aerie Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (AERI) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research By Jamie Freed and Alexander Cornwell SINGAPORE/DUBAI (Reuters) - Groundings of brand-new Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets have sent shockwaves through global aviation after a crash in Ethiopia, but many airlines are managing to keep to schedule with other jets while economic woes mean some may be grateful for a pause. The 737 Max 8 upgrade to Boeing's best-selling jet only entered service in 2017, meaning there are not many in the skies compared with other more established work horses. "If you had a grounding of something like the 737-800, wow what an impact. But with the MAX, there are fewer than 400 of these flying globally," one aviation analyst said, adding that most airlines could "backfill most of the capacity". The Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 people on Sunday was the second 737 MAX crash in less than six months, with 189 others killed when a Lion Air jet went down in Indonesia in October. There were 371 of the 737 MAX family jets in operation before this week's groundings, led by China, according to Flightglobal. Around two-thirds of the fleet is now grounded, based on Reuters calculations. That compares to more than 6,000 of the previous model, the 737 NG series, giving airlines the ability to use other jets in their fleets as a replacement for at least some of the flights. "At present the impact of any groundings is contained by the relatively small global fleet currently in service," aviation consultant John Strickland told Reuters. The time of year and signs of concerns about a peak in global aviation growth and a slowdown in the economy means cutting capacity is not necessarily negative for airlines. "It is off-season so it is an easier gesture to make, and some airlines are more worried about having too much capacity," a Western aviation official said. For others who are able to make do without the 737 MAX 8 for a period, doing so is likely to come at a cost. "It is a headache for airlines to take aircraft out of service with flights likely to be canceled and an impact on revenues," Strickland added. Although March is not a peak season for flights, some have been hit, with Chinese aviation data firm Variflight on Monday saying at least 29 international and domestic flights had been canceled. However, airlines had swapped for other planes on 256 other flights that had been scheduled to use the 737 MAX 8. Singapore's Changi Airport said on Tuesday that one planned 737 MAX flight by Shandong Airlines to and from Jinan had been canceled, but others had gone ahead with different aircraft. Singapore Airlines Ltd , Indonesia's Lion Air and Garuda Indonesia and state-backed carriers Air China Ltd <601111.SS>, China Eastern Airlines Corp Ltd <600115.SS> and China Southern Airlines Co Ltd <600029.SS> all have large fleets of jets other than the MAX to draw on, the analyst said. The bigger impact from the Ethiopian crash could be on future deliveries, since other carriers including Korean Air Lines Co Ltd <003490.KS> have placed relatively large orders for 737 MAX 8 jets, said Um Kyung-a, a senior analyst at Shinyoung Securities. "It might turn into a big headache for them if Boeing fails to nail down the causes of the recent crashes," Um said. "If that turned out to be the case, they need to come up with different plans to replace their 737 MAX 8 orders." Brazil's largest airline, Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes , has 100 Boeing 737 Max 8 jets on order. It currently operates seven such planes, which it decided to ground late on Monday. Gol operates Boeing 737 models exclusively and announced in December that it was accelerating its transition to the newer MAX 8 planes by leasing 11 more from the second half of this year. Flydubai, which has 13 737 MAX jets, said it was adjusting its schedule to minimize disruption to passengers, including switching flights to older 737s. Fiji Airways said it would use other 737s and Airbus SE A330s to cover for the grounding of two 737 MAXs. Lion Air, which suffered a 737 MAX crash in October, has refused to take delivery of some of the jets but analysts say it is suffering from overcapacity and may benefit from a slowdown. It threatened in November to cancel Boeing orders in a row over the crash but has yet to do so, industry sources said. Airbus is another supplier and is seen in talks to sell more. Malaysian officials said on Monday they had asked national carrier Malaysia Airlines to revisit its order for 25 737 MAX jets. "I feel there are other factors apart from safety, including finance and politics, for that move," said Shukor Yusof, the head of Malaysia-based aviation consulting firm Endau Analytics. "I doubt there will be outright cancellations for orders already placed by other carriers because there are still many unanswered questions." (Reporting by Jamie Freed and Alexander Cornwell; additional reporting by Aradhana Aravindan in Singapore, Heekyong Yang in Seoul, Marcelo Rochabrun in Sao Paulo, Liz Lee in Kuala Lumpur and Tim Hepher in Paris; editing by Alexander Smith and Stephen Coates) ALGIERS (Reuters) - Algeria's government is ready for dialogue with the opposition, its Deputy Prime Minister said on Wednesday, after President Abdelaziz Bouteflika reversed a decision to seek a fifth term in the face of mass protests. "Dialogue is our duty. Our top priority is to bring together all Algerians," Ramtane Lamamra told state radio. Earlier, Armed Forces Chief of Staff and deputy defense minister Ahmed Gaed Salah told Ennahar TV the army would preserve Algeria's security "in all circumstances and conditions". The initiative by Bouteflika, who also delayed elections and said a conference would be held to discuss political changes, has failed to satisfy many Algerians who continue to want the country's stale political system dismantled quickly. Tens of thousands of people from all social classes have demonstrated almost daily against a political system dominated by the military and veterans of the 1954-62 independence war against France. Bouteflika has ruled for 20 years but has rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013. (Reporting by Hamid Ould Ahmed; writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Michael Georgy) ALGIERS (Reuters) - Algeria's government is ready for dialogue with the opposition, its Deputy Prime Minister said on Wednesday, after President Abdelaziz Bouteflika reversed a decision to seek a fifth term in the face of mass protests. "Dialogue is our duty. Our top priority is to bring together all Algerians," Ramtane Lamamra told state radio. Earlier, Armed Forces Chief of Staff and deputy defence minister Ahmed Gaed Salah told Ennahar TV the army would preserve Algeria's security "in all circumstances and conditions". The initiative by Bouteflika, who also delayed elections and said a conference would be held to discuss political changes, has failed to satisfy many Algerians who continue to want the country's stale political system dismantled quickly. Tens of thousands of people from all social classes have demonstrated almost daily against a political system dominated by the military and veterans of the 1954-62 independence war against France. Bouteflika has ruled for 20 years but has rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013. (Reporting by Hamid Ould Ahmed; writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Michael Georgy) Algiers (AFP) - Hundreds of school teachers and students protested in the Algerian capital on Wednesday amid fears that President Abdelaziz Bouteflika plans to extend his two-decade rule. In a surprise announcement Monday, the ailing 82-year-old said he would not stand for a fifth term -- but also cancelled next month's presidential election. After initial celebration following Bouteflika's announcement, protesters returned to the streets of the capital Tuesday, accusing the 82-year-old of "tricks". On Wednesday, an AFP correspondent saw middle and high school teachers protesting alongside their students at a rally in central Algiers that drew more than 1,000 demonstrators. "It's about the future of our children," said Driss, a teacher at a high school in the Algerian capital. "It's important that we teachers mobilise," he said after taking a selfie with some of his students. The protesters carried signs saying: "No to the extension of a fourth term!" and "Times have changed: we are the power and you are despair so get out." Schools in Algeria have been hit by a partial strike in recent days as protests have repeatedly rocked the capital and other major cities. On Wednesday teachers took part in rallies across Algeria's 48 provinces, Idir Achour, a member of a school union, told AFP. The veteran leader's promise of a "national conference" to carry out reforms and set a date for new elections "before the end of 2019" suggested he may stay in office for another year. University students have been at the forefront of the protest movement, in a country where half the population is under the age of 30 and many have never known any president other than Bouteflika. Protest strikes first launched on Sunday continued to grip several regions, including Tizi Ouzou, Bouira and Kabylie, local officials said. In Bouria "everything is shut down" including shops and public transport, one of them said. The port of Bejaia, one of the country's main harbours, is "paralysed" and a strike at the Naftal company which distributes fuel and petrol was slowing down work at gas stations, a local journalist said. Credit rating giant AM Best has revised the outlook from stable to negative with respect to the Financial Strength Rating (FSR) of A (Excellent) and the Long-Term Issuer Credit Ratings (Long-Term ICR) of Donegal Insurance Group. Additionally, the rating agency affirmed the aforementioned ratings of a for members of Donegal Insurance. At the same time, it asserted the Long-Term ICR of bbb for the parent company, Donegal Group Inc. DGICA. The outlook for this rating has been revised to negative from stable. Notably, the aforementioned credit ratings denote a robust balance sheet, sustained operational excellence, neutral business profile and adequate enterprise risk management of a company. Donegal Groups weak operating performance in the last couple years (2017 and 2018) mainly indicates the revised negative outlooks. This in turn, has put pressure on the credit rating agencys current assessment of the property and casualty (P&C) insurers performance. Modest adverse loss reserving trends and a slight decrease in risk-adjusted capitalization are also reflected in the negative outlooks. Donegal Groups capital assessment signifies its Bests Capital Adequacy Ratio (BCAR) that is recognized by AM Best as possessing the strongest liquidity position and a conservative investment portfolio. However, increasing underwriting leverage, moderately adverse loss reserve development and restricted surplus growth over the last five-year period can offset the aforementioned attributes. Per the rating giant, the substantial changes made by Donegal Group to its reinsurance program in 2019 are expected to drive operating results in the near term. The result will be dependent on the incidence of large loss activity and the occurrence of catastrophe events. Donegal Groups affirmed Long-Term ICR rating acknowledges the overall financial strength of its property/casualty insurance operation, modest level of financial leverage and the subordination of its creditors to the insurance companies policyholders. It is important to note that rating affirmations or upgrades from credit rating agencies play a pivotal role in retaining investor confidence and maintaining the stocks credit worthiness. Whereas rating downgrades not only hamper the respective companys business but also raise its cost of future debt issuances. We believe, such ratings will help Donegal Group keep investors trust and write more businesses going forward. Zacks Rank and Share Price Movement Shares of this Zacks Rank #5 (Strong Sell) P&C insurer have slipped 0.9% year to date against the industrys increase of 1.4%. We expect the companys premium growth, higher revenues and a solid capital position to turn the stock around as well as perk it up in the near term. Story continues Stocks to Consider Investors interested in better-ranked stocks from the insurance industry can consider Health Insurance Innovations, Inc. HIIQ, Cincinnati Financial Corporation CINF and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. BRK.B, each sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here. Health Insurance Innovations operates as a cloud-based technology platform and distributor of individual and family health insurance plans and supplemental products in the United States. The company delivered positive surprises in all the last four quarters, the average being 9.02%. Cincinnati Financial provides property and casualty insurance products in the United States. The company pulled off positive surprises in three of the trailing four quarters, the average earnings surprise being 18.08%. Berkshire Hathaway provides property and casualty insurance and reinsurance plus life, accident and health reinsurance besides operating railroad systems in North America. The company came up with positive surprises in three of the preceding four quarters, the average beat being 4.31%. Zacks' Top 10 Stocks for 2019 In addition to the stocks discussed above, wouldn't you like to know about our 10 finest buy-and-holds for the year? From more than 4,000 companies covered by the Zacks Rank, these 10 were picked by a process that consistently beats the market. Even during 2018 while the market dropped -5.2%, our Top 10s were up well into double-digits. And during bullish 2012 2017, they soared far above the market's +126.3%, reaching +181.9%. This year, the portfolio features a player that thrives on volatility, an AI comer, and a dynamic tech company that helps doctors deliver better patient outcomes at lower costs. See Stocks Today >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Health Insurance Innovations, Inc. (HIIQ) : Free Stock Analysis Report Donegal Group, Inc. (DGICA) : Free Stock Analysis Report Cincinnati Financial Corporation (CINF) : Free Stock Analysis Report Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK.B) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Amazon has removed at least two listings for books containing nonscientific cures for autism, including drinking and bathing in a bleach-like substance and ingesting a drug used to treat lead poisoning. Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism and Fight Autism and Win, both previously on sale through the retail giant, were not available on Wednesday. The move comes around two weeks after Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) sent a letter to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos scolding him for doing little to combat some parents belief that vaccines cause autism. Schiff accused Amazon of surfacing and recommending products and content that discourage parents from vaccinating their children, and urged Bezos to find a way to distinguish quality information from misinformation or misleading information. Activists have also stepped up efforts to combat vaccine misinformation in light of a preventable nationwide measles outbreak. The specific titles removed were scrutinized in a Monday article on Wired UK, which detailed the volumes medically questionable content. The outlet reported Amazons digital shelves were stacked high with books recommending a strange array of unproven cures for autism including sex, yoga, camel milk, electroconvulsive therapy and veganism. Another title mentioned by Wired, The Miracle Mineral Supplement of the 21st Century, was also unavailable. Amazon confirmed to HuffPost that all three titles had been removed but would not give a reason. Other books that seemed to make medically unfounded claims about autism treatments were still easy to find on the site. Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism recommends that children with autism drink and bathe in chlorine dioxide, sometimes called a Miracle Mineral Solution. It is commonly used as an industrial cleaning agent that can cause dehydration and nausea if ingested. Fight Autism and Win instructs parents to give autistic children repeated doses of DMSA, a drug used to treat lead poisoning but that the FDA cautions can be dangerous if not taken under medical supervision. Story continues The Miracle Mineral Supplement of the 21st Century, used as a general example of the type of medical misinformation available on Amazon, alleged that chlorine dioxide could cure everything from malaria to cancer. While there are accepted medical treatment options for autism, there is no known cure. Researchers have repeatedly disproven any link between childhood vaccinations and the onset of autism. In 2010, the journal The Lancet retracted a widely criticized study that it had published in 1998 and which vaccine opponents had used to prove their fears were justified. (Vox has a very good, very complete explanation of vaccines and what drives the anti-vaccine movement.) Although it remains a hugely popular bookseller, Amazon does not appear to have strict rules in place to prevent sellers from using its platform to spread medically dangerous information. Wired UK writer Matt Reynolds explained how remarkably easy it was to list a book on the site. When Reynolds created a fake Kindle book titled How to Cure Autism: A Guide to Using Chlorine Dioxide to Cure Autism, the fabricated volume was approved for sale within two hours. The sites Kindle publishing service even suggested a stock image showing a red approved stamp over the letters FDA. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Amphastar Pharmaceuticals (AMPH) came out with quarterly earnings of $0.13 per share, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $0.10 per share. This compares to earnings of $0.10 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items. This quarterly report represents an earnings surprise of 30%. A quarter ago, it was expected that this specialty pharmaceutical company would post earnings of $0.12 per share when it actually produced earnings of $0.12, delivering no surprise. Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates just once. Amphastar, which belongs to the Zacks Medical - Generic Drugs industry, posted revenues of $89.69 million for the quarter ended December 2018, surpassing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 18.85%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $60.40 million. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates three times over the last four quarters. The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call. Amphastar shares have added about 19.2% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 11%. What's Next for Amphastar? While Amphastar has outperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock? There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately. Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions. Story continues Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for Amphastar was mixed. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to perform in line with the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. It will be interesting to see how estimates for the coming quarters and current fiscal year change in the days ahead. The current consensus EPS estimate is $0.06 on $72.95 million in revenues for the coming quarter and $0.54 on $331.20 million in revenues for the current fiscal year. Investors should be mindful of the fact that the outlook for the industry can have a material impact on the performance of the stock as well. In terms of the Zacks Industry Rank, Medical - Generic Drugs is currently in the bottom 45% of the 250 plus Zacks industries. Our research shows that the top 50% of the Zacks-ranked industries outperform the bottom 50% by a factor of more than 2 to 1. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Amphastar Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (AMPH) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research A young fox got more than it bargained for when it entered a chicken coop and ended up reportedly being pecked to death on a French farm. Students found the dead fox one morning last week during a routine checks of the henhouse of Le Gros Chene, an agricultural school in Brittany, according to French news agency Agence France-Presse. "There, in the corner, we found this dead fox," Pascal Daniel, the Pontivy, France, school's head of farming, told the AFP. "There was a herd instinct and they attacked him with their beaks." Daniel told French newspaper Ouest-France the fox didn't appear sick and was probably surrounded by the 3,000 chickens housed in that part of the coop. Daniel told the newspaper the school has 6,000 chickens. The henhouse has light-controlled doors that close after dark each day, according to the AFP. The fox, no more than 5 to 6 months old, is believed to have been trapped inside once entering at dusk. The hens live on a free-range, organic farm and enter the coop, where they've been housed since July, at night and to lay eggs, according to the AFP. Daniel says he believes the animals have learned to defend themselves in that time. He told Ouest-France that devoured pigeons are often found in the henhouse, too. When a different fox came into the henhouse more than a year ago, the school's hens at the time didn't fare as well, Daniel told the AFP. Follow USA TODAY's Ryan Miller on Twitter @RyanW_Miller This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'They attacked him with their beaks': Fox in France pecked to death by 3,000 chickens NEW ORLEANS (AP) A 1978 law giving preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings involving American Indian children is an unconstitutional race-based intrusion on state powers that has caused families to be "literally torn apart," an attorney told a federal appeals court Wednesday. But supporters of the decades-old law say it's needed to protect and preserve Native American culture and families. In court, lawyers for Indian tribes argued that the law's definition of an Indian child is based not on race, but on tribal political affiliations. "A child whose 'Indian-ness' is based solely on race ... does not qualify," said Department of Justice attorney Eric Grant, defending the law. A federal district judge in Texas last year struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act . Backers of the law, including numerous tribes and the federal government, say that if the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds that decision, many Native American children will be lost to their families and tribes. "Tribal nations are still reeling from generations of our families being separated," Tyson Johnston, vice president of the Quinault Indian Nation said after the hearing. "So, even though we've had good policy like the Indian Child Welfare Act, it's going to take us many more generations to rectify those past wrongs." In briefs filed ahead of Wednesday's hearing, the tribes accused the law's opponents of "paternalistically contending that they know better than Indian families and tribes what is best for their children." The case was heard by three of the 5th Circuit judges: Jacques L. Wiener Jr., James L. Dennis and Priscilla Owen. There was no indication when they would rule. The law has led to some emotional, high-profile cases, including one in 2016 in which a court ordered that a young Choctaw girl named Lexi be removed from a California foster family and placed with her father's extended family in Utah. Images of the girl being carried away from her foster home drew widespread attention. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the law didn't apply in a South Carolina case involving a young girl named Veronica because her Cherokee father was absent from part of her life. Story continues Adoptive parents in the current case include Chad and Jennifer Brackeen, a Texas couple who fostered a baby eligible for membership in both the Navajo and Cherokee tribes. The boy's parents voluntarily terminated their parental rights and the Brackeens petitioned to adopt him. The state denied their request after the Navajo Nation identified a potential home with a Navajo family in New Mexico. In briefs, they say the Navajo Nation sought to have the child "removed from the home in which he had spent most of his life and given to an unrelated Navajo couple simply because he was an Indian." The Brackeens got an emergency stay and went to court. They were able to adopt the boy in January 2018 after the placement fell through. The boy is now 3, and the couple is seeking to adopt his younger half-sister, according to the brief, "but it is unclear whether that adoption will be permitted under ICWA." Attorney Matthew McGill represents the Brackeens and a Minnesota couple, the Cliffords, who were unable to adopt a child who lived with them after having been shuttled among foster homes. "The Cliffords' family was literally torn apart," he told the appeals court judges. Another couple says in briefs that a child who had been living in their home suffered "serious emotional harm" after being removed and given to a grandmother. Still another couple says they were able to adopt a Native American child with severe medical conditions as a result of the Brackeen lawsuit. They and others said they fear the adoption could be legally attacked if the district court ruling is overturned. The states of Texas, Louisiana and Indiana also joined the lawsuit opposing the Indian Child Welfare Act. Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 because many Native American children were being removed from their homes by public and private agencies. In such adoptions, the law requires states to notify tribes and seek placement with the child's extended family, members of the child's tribe or other Native American families. Tribes, whose status as sovereign nations is derived from treaties with the U.S. government and acts of Congress, also have a say in foster care placements. ___ Associated Press reporters Felicia Fonseca in Flagstaff, Arizona, and Stacey Plaisance in New Orleans contributed to this report. ___ This story has been corrected to correct the spelling of Johnston's name from Johnson. ALGIERS (Reuters) - Algeria's army will preserve the country's security "in all circumstances and conditions", Deputy Defence Minister Ahmed Gaed Salah told Ennahar TV on Wednesday, amid continuing protests by Algerians demanding rapid political change. Gaed Salah is also the armed forces chief of staff. Ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has abandoned his bid for a fifth term in power but stopped short of stepping down, raising suspicions on the street that he is buying time. His initiative after three weeks of mass demonstrations against his rule has not defused anger on the streets, and school teachers began a strike in several cities on Wednesday to keep up pressure on the 82-year-old head of state. Bouteflika has also delayed elections and promised to hold a conference on Algeria's political future. Tens of thousands of people from all social classes have demonstrated almost daily against a political system dominated for nearly 60 years by the military and veterans of the 1954-62 independence war against France. Bouteflika has ruled for 20 years but has rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013. (Reporting by Lamine Chikhi; Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Alison Williams, William Maclean) Would you be willing to pay 15 for a see-through shopping bag? [Photo: ASOS] ASOS never fails to baffle even the most experimental of fashion devotees so it comes as no surprise to see that the online retailer is now selling a completely see-through plastic bag for 15. Eagle-eyed customers will have noticed that the clear tote shopping bag by streetwear label Hype is up for grabs a chic upgrade on your 5p Sainsburys bag, no? READ MORE: Shoppers mock ASOS for selling 30 high vis hoodies But if you thought it fit to carry your shopping on the bus ride home then youre wrong, as ASOS claims the accessory is simply designed to upgrade your outfit. Will you be making a beeline for the latest ASOS must-have? [Photo: ASOS] Its seemingly practical too (minus the completely see-through exterior), as theres a side compartment for easy storage and you can give it a wipe with a dry cloth to clean. Just make sure not to stash away any valuables in there Though its not the first time the fashion industry has tried to sell us shopping bags for an eye-watering sum. READ MORE: Designer debuts the smallest bag weve ever seen at Fashion Week The 960 Balenciaga leather tote proves Instagram cat-nip for bloggers far and wide despite looking identical to the gift bags found in New York department stores. Balenciaga leather tote bag, 960 While LVMH Prize-nominated label, Stefan Cooke, is currently selling totes inspired by disposable shopping bags. The tongue-in-cheek design is crafted from biodegradable paper fibres and if you dont consider yourself an avid treasure hunter then no need to fear, as the bags are printed with photographs of chic vintage handbags. Priced at 405 a pop they may not be for everyone but a number of social media users expressed their delight at the new launch. Story continues One commented on the Instagram post, Saw these bags at the weekend in Carlos Place, they are super cool. While another simply wrote, So beautiful. What do you think? Dhaka (AFP) - Bangladesh said Wednesday it would start relocating tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims from overcrowded camps to a remote island vulnerable to extreme weather, despite the plan attracting considerable controversy. Shelters and flood walls have been constructed on Bhashan Char, a muddy silt islet that only rose from the Bay of Bengal in 2006, in the hope of shifting 100,000 Rohingya refugees there. Bangladesh has been talking about the island for years and the plan to relocate some of the nearly one million Rohingya refugees living along its border with Myanmar has stalled many times. The proposal to uproot the refugees remains unpopular among the Rohingya community and critics have raised concerns about the island's ability to withstand violent storms during the monsoon. But Mozammel Huq, the head of Bangladesh's cabinet committee on law and order and a senior government minister, said the relocation would proceed as planned. "We plan to start the process next month, as construction at Bhashan Char is now complete," he told AFP. Kamal Hossain, the government administrator of Cox's Bazar district where the vast Rohingya camps are located, told AFP they were "preparing a list of refugees who would voluntarily go to the island". - "New crisis" - The island is one hour by boat from the nearest land and experts said it was too risky to house the refugees on the island as it is prone to flooding during storm surge. Hundreds of thousands have died in Bangladesh from cyclones in the last 50 years, mostly in coastal areas. Local officials have pointed to a newly-constructed three-metre (nine-feet) high embankment around the island they say will keep out tidal surges in the event of a cyclone. But a top UN rights expert in January warned moving the refugees there could spark a "new crisis" for the persecuted Muslim minority. Huq said the UN "should concentrate on the welfare of the Rohingya instead". Story continues "It is up to Bangladesh to decide where we will keep the refugees," he said. Aid groups have warned the refugees crammed into the world's largest refugee camp in Cox's Bazar are at risk of landslides, disease and floods. The Rohingya fled Myanmar by droves in 2017 into Bangladesh, escaping a military-led crackdown the UN has said could amount to genocide. An official from the International Criminal Court who visited the Rohingya camps this week said those responsible for their persecution would be held to account, despite Myanmar not being a signatory to the Hague-based court. US ambassador Earl Miller met with Bangladesh government officials on Tuesday in Coxs Bazar to "learn more" about the island relocation. "He welcomed assurances that any movements to the island will be fully voluntary, based on informed consent, and those who choose to go will have free movement off the island to maintain connections with the rest of the Rohingya community in Coxs Bazar," a statement from the US embassy said. Investors focused on the Finance space have likely heard of Bank of America (BAC), but is the stock performing well in comparison to the rest of its sector peers? Let's take a closer look at the stock's year-to-date performance to find out. Bank of America is a member of our Finance group, which includes 849 different companies and currently sits at #5 in the Zacks Sector Rank. The Zacks Sector Rank considers 16 different sector groups. The average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks within the groups is measured, and the sectors are listed from best to worst. The Zacks Rank is a proven model that highlights a variety of stocks with the right characteristics to outperform the market over the next one to three months. The system emphasizes earnings estimate revisions and favors companies with improving earnings outlooks. BAC is currently sporting a Zacks Rank of #2 (Buy). Within the past quarter, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for BAC's full-year earnings has moved 0.18% higher. This signals that analyst sentiment is improving and the stock's earnings outlook is more positive. Based on the latest available data, BAC has gained about 17.45% so far this year. At the same time, Finance stocks have gained an average of 10.12%. This means that Bank of America is performing better than its sector in terms of year-to-date returns. Looking more specifically, BAC belongs to the Banks - Major Regional industry, a group that includes 16 individual stocks and currently sits at #48 in the Zacks Industry Rank. This group has gained an average of 12.83% so far this year, so BAC is performing better in this area. BAC will likely be looking to continue its solid performance, so investors interested in Finance stocks should continue to pay close attention to the company. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Bank of America Corporation (BAC) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. A supranational banking watchdog laid into cryptocurrency, alleging that the asset class fails both as money and a store of value. | Source: Shutterstock The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), a supranational banking watchdog, has warned that the growth of crypto assets like bitcoin pose a threat to banks and global financial stability, despite very limited direct exposures. BCBS Lays into Bitcoin, Says its Not a True Store of Value In a March 13 newsletter statement, the BCBS said that crypto assets fail both as money and digital gold. While crypto-assets are at times referred to as crypto-currencies, the Committee is of the view that such assets do not reliably provide the standard functions of money and are unsafe to rely on as a medium of exchange or store of value. Crypto-assets are not legal tender, and are not backed by any government or public authority. The Committee, which sets global regulatory standards for banks, is primarily concerned with the high degree of volatility associated with the immature cryptocurrency class. But the watchdog also raised the alarm over cryptos liquidity risk, credit risk, market risk, operational risk, money laundering and terrorist financing risk, and legal and reputation risks. Join CCN for $19.99 per month and get an ad-free version of CCN including discounts on future events and services. Support our journalists today. Click here to sign up. If a bank plans to acquire exposure to crypto-assets, the Committee recommends that the institution, at a minimum, implements crypto-specific due diligence, governance and risk management, disclosure, and supervisory dialogue. Increased Capital Requirements? There is speculation that the BCBS latest crypto guidance could be a lead-up to more stringent capital requirements for banks planning to integrate digital assets into their portfolios. Furthermore, any new crypto rules will require more precise definitions and distinctions between tokenized, enterprise digital assets, which are relatively low risk, and more volatile cryptocurrencies. For example, Todd McDonald, the co-founder of R3, a blockchain consortium of over 200 financial institutions, wrote a blog post about token classification. Meanwhile, the Global Digital Finance Group, a crypto-asset trade body, authored a paper that proposed dividing tokens into three categories: consumer, payment, and financial asset. Read the full story on CCN.com. Source: Calgary Police Service CBC reports that four Canadian men are wanted in connection with conducting double-spend attacks against Bitcoin ATMs in four cities. A total of 112 transactions are alleged to have taken place in September last year, with half of them taking place in Calgary. The other attacks took place in Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, Sherwood Park, Ottawa and Hamilton. The mens identities are unknown, and Calgary police are asking for help identifying them. Double-Spending on a Bitcoin ATM: A Lucrative Criminal Enterprise Apparently, the Bitcoin ATMs accepted zero-confirmation transactions, and the men exploited this fact to double-spend Bitcoin in exchange for cash. Over 112 transactions in 10 days netted the scammers a total of around $200,000. The average transaction was around $1800. Arguably, Canadian Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todds replace-by-fee tools would make these transactions possible. While not specifically intended or endorsed for criminal activity, the tool enables stuck transactions to become unstuck by paying an extra fee. There is a double spend tool in the kit, however, which is described by Todd as such: Join CCN for $19.99 per month and get an ad-free version of CCN including discounts on future events and services. Support our journalists today. Click here to sign up. Creates two transactions in succession. The first pays the specified amount to the specified address. The second double-spends that transaction with a transaction with higher fees, paying only the change address. In addition you can optionally specify that the first transaction additional OP-RETURN, multisig, and blacklisted address outputs. Some miners wont accept transactions with these output types; those miners will accept the second double-spend transaction, helping you achieve a succesful double-spend. Scammers Net $20,000 CAD Per Day From a philosophical standpoint, the tools are controversial, but intended to encourage services and users to wait for at least one confirmation before considering a transaction completed. Double-spending of unconfirmed transactions has always been possible on Bitcoin and the RBF toolkit did not change that fact. As Peter Todd wrote in after the initial publication of this article: Story continues The simple truth of the matter is that the ATM operator in question is negligent if they are accepting unconfirmed transactions without other mitigating security measures such as obtaining positive legal identification; the fact that theyre asking for help in identifying the thieves is a strong sign of such negligence. This is no different than, say, a store selling high value items choosing not to hire cashiers and instead relying on an honesty box for payment. However, in reality, its inconvenient to have customers standing around for 10-30 minutes (or longer) for a transaction to go through. Convenience at the expense of security is a decision the yet-unidentified ATM operators seem to have to made. Read the full story on CCN.com. From Oprah Magazine Who amongst us doesn't want to see Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez's romance endure the test of time? The mega-watt couple got engaged on March 9 in the Bahamas after dating for two years. Though we initially got a peek at the estimated $1.4 million ring the former New York Yankee gave his forever FlyGirl, the proposal pictures weren't released until today-and they were worth the wait. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jennifer Lopez (@jlo) on Mar 9, 2019 at 5:34pm PST Before presenting J.Lo, 49, with the dazzler, A-Rod, 43, plopped his white pants in the white sand, and-we can only assume-uttered something like "Jenny, will you do me the great honor of being the Queen of my block?" Okay, fine. Of course, we can't actually be sure what he said, or what the two were thinking when she promised to be his-but that didn't stop us from having a little bit of fun speculating. With the help of two body language pros, we analyzed J-Rod's engagement pictures-not because we don't think she "luhs her papi," but frankly, because the simple sight of their photos makes our hearts grow to the size of J.Lo's giant rock, and wanted further confirmation to give to the haters that the love between these two is the real deal. (Plus, who doesn't need another excuse to stare at this gorgeous couple?) Here's what the experts had to say. View this post on Instagram 3.9.19 A post shared by Jennifer Lopez (@jlo) on Mar 12, 2019 at 9:21am PDT "What I like is that hes kneeling forward and leaning towards her," says Patti Wood, MA, author of Snap: Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language, and Charisma. Although Wood does add that the fact that A-Rod's arm is resting on his elbow suggests he's not making himself vulnerable to her, another explanation could, of course, be that he knows there are cameras capturing the moment-so he's trying to appear a bit more poised. You know, for the 'gram. Story continues Meanwhile, Blanca Cobb, MS, Psy, says the way Rodriguez is looking intently at his bride-to-be indicates he's "completely taking her in, trying to read her face." She adds, "It's very romantic." J.Lo, as you can see, is genuinely quite surprised. Though her hands aren't visible, it appears they're clutched to her heart, and her body is stiff, in a shocked yet delighted repose. Cobb says that Rodriguez's equally stiff posture sweetly implies he's nervous. Wouldn't you be too if you just proposed to...well, Jennifer Lopez? In another snap from their montage, as J.Lo tenderly kisses A-Rod to "seal the deal," he can be seen grabbing her arm as if to shout, "'You said yes, and I'm not letting you go! I've got you baby!'" explains Cobb. Depending on how you read that sentence, that may sound a bit possessive, but either way, it's a sign that Rodriguez is happy to call Lopez his. Photo credit: Instagram Finally, in this close embrace, the couple is touching all the way from their heads to their "pleasure zones" which occurs when "youre in love, and youre intimate," says Cobb. "They have just pledged their lives to each other, and its a part of showing that affection." Also, note the way Rodriguez is holding tight to his new fiance with both hands as she eagerly clasps his face. Photo credit: Instagram And in case you're still not quite convinced, there's one more angle that A-Rod shared. Photo credit: Instagram Here, he's gently kissing the top of Jenny's head-an amorous move-as she clings to him "for comfort," Wood says. "Shes been hurt before, so we can see that shes protecting herself in this position. It makes sense that shes a bit guarded," adds Wood. Cobb, meanwhile, points out that his fingers are spread. "When you feel intimate or close with your partner, you tend to want to touch more, and you spread your fingers because its taking up more space on their body," she explains, adding that Lopez is obviously pulling him in just as tight "as if to say, 'I don't want to let you go. You're my world.'" And with that, we wish these two all the happiness that money and unstoppable metabolisms can't buy. Now, let the wedding countdown begin. For more ways to live your best life plus all things Oprah, sign up for our newsletter! The USs aviation agency has doubled down on its decision not to ground the Boeing 737 MAX, leaving America and Canada the only major nations still flying the aircraft model involved in two crashes that killed more than 300 people. As officials around the world among them the European Unions aviation safety regulators said they were suspending flights involving the 737 MAX, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it had seen no reason to follow suit. Acting FAA Administrator Dan Elwell said its review showed no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. He added that no foreign civil aviation authorities had provided data to us that would warrant action. In the course of our urgent review of data on the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash, if any issues affecting the continued airworthiness of the aircraft are identified, the FAA will take immediate and appropriate action, said Mr Elwell. His comments, following Sundays crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that killed around 160 people, came as regulators around the globe moved to ground the Boeing 737 MAX. The CEO of Ethiopian Airlines, Tewolde GebreMariam, told CNN the doomed planes pilot had flight control problems shortly before the fatal crash. He was having difficulties with the flight control of the air plane, so he asked to return back to base, said Mr GebreMariam. He said the pilot was granted permission to return to ground; as he did so, the flight disappeared from the radar of air traffic control. The aircraft is made by Boeing Commercial Airplanes in Seattle. Boeing, which is headquartered in Chicago, has insisted there is no need for the jet to be grounded. Safety is Boeings number one priority and we have full confidence in the safety of the MAX, the company said in a statement. We understand that regulatory agencies and customers have made decisions that they believe are most appropriate for their home markets. It is also important to note that the Federal Aviation Administration is not mandating any further action at this time, and based on the information currently available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators. Story continues The decision by the FAA and authorities in Canada, mean they are the only two major nations still flying the jet, which was also the model involved in a Lion Air flight crash in Indonesia last October. Around 190 people were killed. In the US, the airlines using the model Southwest, United and American, have stood by it, though some have sought to offer customers alternative flights. Air Canada is also still operating the aircraft. The CEO of Boeing, Dennis Muilenburg, spoke to Donald Trump after the president tweeted that airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT, he added. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Boeing shares were down more than 6 per cent on Tuesday, having fallen by five per cent on Monday. In another hit to Boeing's reputation, the U.S. on Wednesday joined the rest of the world in grounding the 737 MAX 8, the company's prized jet that is now barred from skies worldwide. Is the company seriously hobbled? The answer depends on whether investigators can determine a definitive cause behind the crash in Ethiopia on Sunday that claimed 157 lives, as well as another crash that preceded it in October, and if Boeing can come up with a remedy to address both, experts say. U.S. grounding: Trump says he has signed an order to ground Boeing 737 MAX 8 Traveler tips: Boeing 737 Max grounded at Southwest, American and United: 6 things travelers need to know The U.S. had been the last holdout, with the Federal Aviation Administration saying that it stood by the aircraft's safety. But President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that an emergency order would be issued banning flights by not only the MAX 8, involved in the two recent crashes but also the slightly larger 737 MAX 9. Flights currently in the air were to be ordered to land as soon as possible. It's the second crash of a 737 MAX 8 in less than five months. A Lion Air flight went down in Indonesia in October killing 189 people. Certainly there is near-term damage to both Boeings reputation and its business,'' said Jim Corridore, director of industrials equity research at CFRA Research. "But how long lasting and how deep this impact is depends on the outcome of the investigation and how Boeing reacts.'' After falling as much as 3 percent during the day, Boeing's stock price edged up 0.5 percent to end at $377.14 on Wednesday. So far this year, shares have risen over 17 percent. On Wednesday, travel search site Kayak announced that, in the wake of the crash in Ethiopia, it will enable fliers to filter out aircraft they do not want to fly starting this week. "We've recently received feedback to make Kayak's filters more granular in order to exclude particular aircraft models from search queries,'' Kayak's chief technology officer Giorgos Zacharia said in an emailed statement. "We are releasing that enhancement globally later this week and are committed to providing our customers with all the information they need to travel with confidence.'' Story continues Boeing has been working on the automated anti-stall system that is believed to have caused the Indonesian accident, but the inquiry into what led a second 737 MAX 8 to nosedive on Sunday in Ethiopia is just beginning. "This conceivably could go on for weeks, Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst with the Teal Group, said of the investigation, However, he believes that a company that made billions in revenue last year will ultimately be able to find a fix and recover from this crisis. Though the deaths in the plane crash are a "tragedy,'' he said, I just dont think its that serious a problem from a company health standpoint. The worst-case scenario is in the hundreds of millions'' in monetary losses. He added that the fundamental layout of the plane has been around for half a century... Theyll find a solution in pretty quick order, if indeed theres anything about this crash that has anything to with the plane. We just dont know. Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst with Atmosphere Research Group agreed that Boeing could bounce back, but it has to move fast. "If they find the cause (or causes) of the 737 MAX's problems, so swiftly, and develop a suitable set of solutions, then Boeing should be fine,'' he said. "Boeing has no time to waste, though. At this point, it is possible some airlines may be considering scaling back their 737 MAX orders, and airlines that have not yet placed orders need to be convinced the MAX is safe or they will buy from Airbus." Shortly before the U.S. made its move, Canada grounded the 737 MAX, banning the aircraft from flying through its airspace on Wednesday. It joined countries and regions around the world, including the European Union, United Kingdom, Indonesia and China, that had already taken similar actions. Until Wednesday afternoon, two U.S. carriers, American and Southwest, were the only airlines in the world continuing to fly the MAX 8, while United flies the MAX 9. Southwest operates 34 MAX 8 jets in its fleet of over 750 Boeing 737s. American flies 24 MAX 8 jets, and said Tuesday that it was waiting on the delivery of 16 more this year. Another 20 should be delivered in 2020 and 2021, and 40 are slated to join its fleet in 2024 "and beyond.'' United has 14 737 MAX 9 jets. While the 737 has been around for decades, it's MAX is a newcomer on the aviation scene. Only 350 of the planes in its different variations are in service right now, but more than 4,660 are in the pipeline as it has become Boeing's most coveted jet. Black techies head south: Goodbye, Silicon Valley, hello, Atlanta: Black entrepreneurs part of new migration to South Deals could bring on March Madness: March freebies: Your monthly guide to food specials, meal deals and more Facebook strikes back: Facebook temporarily removes Elizabeth Warren ads about breaking up big tech I would say it's the single most important product that Boeing has right now,'' Corridore said. "It's the largest portion of whats in Boeing's backlog and on its production schedule . . . Nobody's ordering 737s anymore. It's all 737 Max 7, 8 or 9.'' Boeing has rebounded from a crisis before. Its long-awaited Dreamliner, the first commercial jet to be primarily made of lightweight carbon composites instead of aluminum and steel, was grounded in January 2013 after a battery caught fire on one jet, and a smoldering battery forced an emergency landing of another. But Boeing "found a way to fix the problem and the 787 Dreamliner has continued to fly without incident,'' Harteveldt said. Still, U.S. lawmakers such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., had remained concerned about the 737 MAX 8 and had called on U.S. regulators to halt its flights like other nations around the world. Records show that federal aviation authorities got at least 11 reports regarding apparent safety problems with the MAX 8 that were logged between April 2018 and December 2018. Two pilots reported their planes unexpectedly pitched nose down after engaging autopilot following the jets taking off. Another pilot said the plane's automation triggered a temporary level off. Fitch Ratings said in a note that it wasn't ready to downgrade Boeing yet. "Groundings and delivery delays would likely need to last beyond several months for the company's rating to be affected,'' the company wrote. But "the MAX is a key program for Boeing,'' the note continued, estimating that the roughly 590 MAX jets it estimates to be delivered this year are valued at between $27 billion and $30 billion in revenue. If the cause of the Ethiopian crash is determined, even preliminarily to being similar to what brought down the jet in Indonesia, that could indicate a flawed design, and Fitch would keep on top of the amount of time and resources that would be needed to find a fix. "We will also watch for the effects on the flying public's sentiment toward the MAX.'' Fitch said. "Reputational damage could also be substantial, although Boeing has weathered previous crash episodes.'' Contributing: Ben Mutzabaugh, Gus Garcia-Roberts, Steve Reilly, Alison Young Follow USA TODAY reporter Charisse Jones on Twitter @charissejones This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Damage to Boeing's reputation hinges on outcome of 737 MAX 8 probe after groundings The flight path data of two Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes that crashed showed similarities, the FAA said Wednesday as the United States became the last nation to ground the popular planes worldwide. The Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency order three days after an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 crash that killed all 157 on board. The FAA is ordering the temporary grounding of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft operated by U.S. airlines or in U.S. territory. The agency made this decision as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analyzed today. This evidence, together with newly refined satellite data available to FAA this morning, led to this decision," the FAA said. Daniel Elwell, acting head of the FAA, said the data linked the behavior and flight path of the Ethiopian Airline jet to data from the crash of a Lion Air jet in October. Evidence we found on the ground made it even more likely that the flight path was very close to Lion Airs, Elwell said Wednesday. Before the FAA announcement, President Donald Trump issued an emergency order halting flights of the MAX 8 and MAX 9. The United States had been under pressure to join nations worldwide in grounding the planes after concerns mounted that the Ethiopian crash was similar to one in October. Wednesday, Canada joined the list of countries that halted the flights. Trump said planes in the air would complete their flights but no more would take off. He said airlines were notified. More: President Donald Trump says US has grounded Boeing 737 MAX 8 after crashes Boeing said it supported the move. "Boeing has determined out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircraft's safety to recommend to the FAA the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of all 371 MAX aircraft," Boeing said in a statement. The MAX fleet began flying two years ago and includes 74 domestic planes. Airlines have ordered more than 4,500 of the jetliners, the newest version of the 737 and best-selling airliner ever. Story continues Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau cited newly obtained satellite data that he said show a possible similarity to the Ethiopian crash and the Lion Air crash. "This is not conclusive, but it is something that points in that direction, Garneau said. "It could be something else." Start the day smarter: Get USA TODAY's Daily Briefing in your inbox At least one airline wants compensation from Boeing for the cost of parking the jets. Norwegian Air Shuttles spokeswoman Tonje Naess said the carrier, which flies 18 of the planes, should not face "any financial burden for a brand new aircraft that will not to be used." It was not immediately clear what those costs might be or what Boeing might be pressed to pay. The FAA stood by the safety of the Boeing 737 MAX on Tuesday. Wreaths and floral installations stand next to piles of wreckage at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia on March 13, 2019. Records show that federal aviation authorities received at least 11 reports concerning perceived safety problems with the aircraft. Two pilots reported their planes unexpectedly pitched nose down after they engaged autopilot following departure. Another pilot reported a temporary level off triggered by the aircraft automation. The pilot of a flight in November 2018 called part of the aircrafts flight manual inadequate and almost criminally insufficient. From the flight manual: Why pilots have complained about the 737 MAX 8 In the USA, Southwest and American fly the plane, and both expressed confidence in their fleets. The MAX 8 that crashed Sunday was 4 months old and minutes into a Nairobi-bound flight from Addis Ababa when it slammed into a field. In October, a Lion Air plane of the same model crashed into the Java Sea minutes after departing from Jakarta, Indonesia. None of the 189 passengers and crew survived. Both flights crashed after drastic speed fluctuations during ascent. Both pilots made ill-fated efforts to return to their airport of origin after takeoff. The FAA said it expects to require Boeing to complete MAX 8 flight control system enhancements prompted by the Lion Air crash by month's end. More: Which airlines are still flying the Boeing 737 MAX 8 (and which aren't)? Some members of Congress and two unions representing flight attendants had called on the FAA to ground the planes. The plane involved in Sunday's crash was delivered to the airline in November, had flown 1,200 hours and had undergone a maintenance check Feb. 4. The pilot, who had more than 8,000 hours of flight experience, had issued a distress call and tried to return to the airport. The black box voice and data recorders were found, and airline CEO Tewolde GebreMariam told CNN the pilots told air traffic control they were having flight control problems." Ethiopian Airlines spokesman Asrat Begashaw said the equipment will be shipped to an undisclosed European country for analysis. Contributing: Donovan Slack, Chris Woodyard, Bart Jansen, Gus Garcia-Roberts, Steve Reilly and Alison Young; The Associated Press This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Flight path data of two crashed Boeing 737 Max 8 planes 'very close,' FAA says Shutterstock You may have heard that high blood pressure in pregnancy is dangerous and can lead to a serious complication called preeclampsia, which puts baby at risk for low birth weight and even stillbirth. But, it turns out that even if blood pressure doesn't get quite that high, it is still associated with those same negative outcomes. A 2016 study published in the American Heart Association's journal Hypertension found that pregnant women with "prehypertention," or borderline high blood pressure, were also at risk for low birth weight and stillbirth. Prehypertension Risks Researchers in Sweden analyzed records of more than 150,000 pregnant women to see if the 11 percent who developed borderline high blood pressure had a higher incidence of bad outcomes for baby. Turns out, they did. "In this study we showed that women with prehypertension in late pregnancy have higher risks of giving birth to a baby that is underweight or stillborn," lead study author Anna-Karin Wikstrom, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of obstetrics at Uppsala University in Sweden. "Their risks are about 70 percent higher for both complications," compared to women with normal blood pressure. Among all the subjects, there were 2,416 small-for-gestational-age babies and 194 stillbirths. In addition, the researchers found that the more mom's blood pressure increased from early to late pregnancy, the greater the risk of low birthweighteven if her blood pressure never reached prehypertensive levels. "We found the higher her blood pressure increased during her pregnancy, the higher risk she had to give birth to a baby that is underweightirrespective of the level of blood pressure in late pregnancy," Dr. Wikstrom says. Blood pressure affects the placenta, which supplies blood and nutrients to the growing babyso an increase in blood pressure could prevent the placenta from getting everything it needs, resulting in a smaller infant. Story continues Blood pressure measures the contracting of your heart (the top number) and the relaxing of your heart (the bottom number). Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is 140/90 or above, and prehypertension is 120-139 for the top number, 80-89 for the bottom, or both. "Earlier studies have shown that women who develop hypertension during pregnancy have increased risks of give birth to a baby that is underweight or stillborn," Dr. Wikstrom says. But this is the first large study of prehypertension's effects in pregnancy. "The findings give further insight in the mechanism behind fetal growth, and suggest that maternal cardiovascular health is important for fetal growth," Dr. Wikstrom says. RELATED: 17 Tips for a Healthy Pregnancy Reducing Borderline High Blood Pressure Borderline high blood pressure is fairly common, but doctors might not really be concerned because it doesn't cross the threshold for hypertension. Still, this study's findings highlight the importance of mom's heart health in pregnancy, and even before. "We are worried about the global epidemic of obesity, since obesity has a strong association with maternal cardiovascular health and risk of prehypertension," Dr. Wikstrom says. "Therefore we suggest obese women who are planning a pregnancy in the near future to change her lifestyle in order to lose weight before conception, to optimize her own and her fetus' health during pregnancy." Is there anything you can do to reduce your risk of prehypertension if you're already pregnant? "We advise women who are already pregnant to keep their weight gain within the guidelines, since excessive weight gain during pregnancy is also associated with higher blood pressure elevation during pregnancy," Dr. Wikstrom says. Regular prenatal care is crucial as well. "Women who have a blood pressure in the prehypertensive level usually do not have symptoms, so we advise all pregnant women to go to their regular blood pressure checkups." In addition to maintaining a healthy weight before and during pregnancy, there are a few other things you can do to try to keep your blood pressure from rising: Kidnapped Gregory Kucherkov is the CEO of Cornerstone, an effort to fund real estate investment with a blockchain token. Image from Shutterstock. Sunday, a Ukranian blockchain CEO got kidnapped in Kiev. Gregory Kucherkov is the CEO of Cornerstone, an effort to fund real estate investment with a blockchain token. Conerstone is planning an ICO. CCN received a tip from COO Fedir Martynov, and reached out to him by phone. Martynov tells us that the firm has already raised some capital for its ICO in a private sale, and they and the local police believe this may be the motive for the kidnapping. Currently Cornerstone is preparing for an ICO, and has already obtained funds, which the local police believe may be the reason of the kidnapping. No Ransom Demanded Yet The kidnappers have not reached out to Cornerstone about a ransom or anything of the kind as of yet. Martynov provided us the following surveillance video, which shows two men forcing him into a Volkswagon van at gunpoint. Join CCN for $19.99 per month and get an ad-free version of CCN including discounts on future events and services. Support our journalists today. Click here to sign up. CCN has been unable to reach anyone from the Kiev police. The kidnappers have yet to contact Cornerstone about a ransom. According to Martynov, Kucherkov splits his time between New York City and Kiev. He and his partners believe the intent of the kidnapping has to do with the potential value of the start-up. Read the full story on CCN.com. Elizabeth Warren could not have asked for a better illustration for her point. The US senator and Democratic candidate for president took aim at Facebook on Monday evening after the social network briefly blocked her campaign from running advertisements that just happened to call for breaking up Facebook. Curious why I think FB has too much power?, Warren said on Twitter. Lets start with their ability to shut down a debate over whether FB has too much power. Thanks for restoring my posts. But I want a social media marketplace that isnt dominated by a single censor. #BreakUpBigTech. The dustup began when Politico reported that Facebook had blocked a number of Facebook ads that promoted Warrens newly announced plan to break up major tech companies, which she argues have become too powerful. Related: Elizabeth Warren is right we must break up Facebook, Google and Amazon | Robert Reich Three companies have vast power over our economy and our democracy, the ads read, according to Politico. Facebook, Amazon, and Google. We all use them. But in their rise to power, theyve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field in their favor. The idea that Facebook might be censoring political speech contrary to its interests proved irresistible to many Facebook critics, but the company said there was a much more mundane explanation. We removed the ads because they violated our policies against use of our corporate logo, a spokesperson told Politico. In the interest of allowing robust debate, we are restoring the ads. Facebooks policies limit the extent to which advertisers can reference Facebook or Instagram in the text or imagery. Whether Facebooks brief censorship shut down a debate is questionable: numerous other Warren advertisements with a similar anti-tech message remained active during the brief block. Warren has staked out an aggressive stance on regulating major tech companies. After unveiling her plan for anti-trust action on Friday, she appeared at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, over the weekend, where she voiced her anti-monopolist message before a generally tech-heavy crowd. This only affects tech monopolists, she said of her plan, according to Variety. Less monopoly profits? Boo hoo. RTHK: FAA under fire as more nations ban 737 Max planes The US Federal Aviation Administration is facing mounting criticism for backing the airworthiness of Boeing's 737 Max jets as the number of countries that have grounded the aircraft grows in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash over the weekend. The United States has said there is "no basis" to ground Boeing 737 MAX planes. Boeing has said it has no reason to pull the popular aircraft from the skies and does not intend to issue new recommendations about the aircraft to customers. Boeing's CEO Dennis Muilenburg also spoke with President Donald Trump and reiterated that the 737 Max 8 is safe, the company said. Despite the aviation giant's assurances, air safety regulators in over 40 countries, including the European Union, have either grounded or banned them from their airspace Union. UAE, Turkey, Australia, Britain and India have joined China in enforcing such bans. But the US has so far refused to take similar action against the American aerospace giant's best-selling workhorse aircraft. "Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft," Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Daniel Elwell said in a statement. A new Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. That followed the October crash of a new Lion Air jet of the same model in Indonesia, which killed 189 people shortly after takeoff from Jakarta. The widening actions against the aircraft puts pressure on Boeing the world's biggest plane manufacturer to prove the MAX planes are safe, and the company has said it is rolling out flight software updates by April that could address issues with a faulty sensor. The full extent of the impact of the aircraft bans on international travel routes was unclear. There are about 350 MAX 8 planes currently in service around the world. Congressman Peter DeFazio, the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said in a statement that he's concerned that international aviation regulators are providing more certainty to the flying public than the FAA. The FAA has increasingly become cozy with airplane manufacturers and airlines when it should be more pro-active in safety, said Bill McGee, aviation adviser for Consumer Reports. Former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood also called for the US to ground the 737 Max, just as his agency halted flights of another Boeing plane six years ago because of safety concerns. "These planes need to be inspected before people get on them," LaHood said. But veteran accident investigators defended the FAA, which has said there's no data to link the two crashes. "I don't see the facts to justify what they've done," John Goglia, an independent safety consultant and former member of the National Transportation Safety Board. (AFP, AP) This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Weather Alert ...WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 6 AM FRIDAY TO MIDNIGHT CST FRIDAY NIGHT... * WHAT...Snowfall accumulations of 2 to 6 inches expected. * WHERE...In Nebraska, Antelope, Pierce, Madison, Stanton, Wayne, Cuming, and Burt Counties. In Iowa, Monona County. * WHEN...Friday morning through Friday evening. * IMPACTS...Plan on hazardous travel conditions with slick roads and periods of reduced visibility. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Monitor the latest forecasts for updates on this situation. If you must travel, be prepared with a winter weather travel kit in case you should become stranded. A Winter Weather Advisory for snow means that periods of snow will cause primarily travel difficulties. Be prepared for snow covered roads and limited visibilities, and use caution while driving. && Eymet (France) (AFP) - Standing behind a counter piled with scones in his cafe in the French village of Eymet, Adrian Cattermole voices the weariness of many Britons living abroad after MPs again rejected the divorce deal negotiated with the EU. With the clock ticking down to a Brexit deadline in 16 days, many people in Eymet, a picturesque village in the Dordogne region home to hundreds of British pensioners, are following events back home with a mixture of anxiety and resignation. Reacting to Tuesday's vote in the British parliament, which increased the risk of Britain crashing out of the bloc without a deal, Cattermole said he felt "no surprise but simply amazement that this thing has gone on so long and the Prime Minister Theresa May hasn't realised it's not going to work." But he said he refused to cede to the panic that has prompted a scramble among Britons in Dordogne, a magnet for retirees and tourists for decades, to seek permanent French residency permits. "Personally the only thing that concerns people here in Eymet really is the exchange rate," he said. "If it collapses because of a hard Brexit, peoples' pensions and the money they transfer from Britain will be affected badly." Maggie Bradford, a Scottish-born 60-year-old who moved to Dordogne six years ago with her ex-banker husband, said she felt powerless. "How can you do anything if you don't know what the outcome's going to be? We're all living in limbo," the elegant bed-and-breakfast owner said as she sipped a cup of tea in the cafe. "There are so many rumours going round, and people asking 'have you done this, have you done that?'. "I think we just have to get on with it," she said. Bradford said she was still holding out hope for a second referendum that would reverse the decision to leave the bloc made in a first vote in June 2016. - Europe 'as way of life' - France has around 150,000 British residents, according to 2017 data from the INSEE statistics agency, with most of them concentrated in the southwest of the country. Story continues Lured by low property prices and warm weather, they have helped regenerate some rural areas, but the influx has also caused resentment among locals in some areas. Long-term residents in Eymet say their overriding concern is being able to remain in the village of quaint half-timbered houses that has become their home. "We have no fears of the French government being vindictive," Cattermole said. "We're all fairly confident that we'll be able to remain and live our lives as we have done, enjoying the fantastic French culture, wine and sun, while Britain sinks slowly into economic disaster." France has already begun implementing a Brexit action plan designed to prepare the country for the worst should Britain crash out of the EU without a deal. The government has been granted powers to pass decrees in the event of a no-deal Brexit which would guarantee the rights of Britons to stay in France -- providing the UK reciprocates. In the run-up to Brexit, some couples anxious to avoid difficulties in moving to France after Brexit have made the switch in recent months. Standing in the shadow of Eymet's 13th-century castle, James McConnell and his fiancee Maura McGuirk said they brought forward their plans to relocate. "Rather than not being able to come over, we've decided to get over before March 29," 38-year-old McGuirk explained. Like many Britons in other EU member states, the pair felt forced to choose between Britain and Europe. "We've only ever known Europe. We know no other way of life. It's something we take for granted and to have that snatched away is hard to come to terms," said McGuirk, who grew up in London. The pair, who left behind jobs in the restaurant trade in London, plan to learn French, open a guesthouse and in time gain French citizenship. "If we have to choose between being British or French, we choose French," McConnell, a Suffolk native, added. SAN FRANCISCO California Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to announce Wednesday an executive order that immediately establishes a moratorium on killing convicts on death row, USA TODAY learned Tuesday night. California has 737 people on death row, about a quarter of the nations death row population and by far the most of any state. Some 24 of them have been convicted of murder and have exhausted their appeals, meaning they could be scheduled to die under Newsoms governorship. Guards walk a corridor at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, Calif. The intentional killing of another person is wrong, Newsom, 51, is slated to say during the signing of the executive order. And as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual. The order grants an immediate reprieve for all individuals sentenced to death in the state. It draws its power from a governors ability to commute death sentences. Typically, such commutations are done individually, but in this case the states chief executive is establishing a blanket moratorium. Governors in Oregon, Colorado and Pennsylvania have established similar moratoriums leveraging the same executive powers. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, shown Feb. 15 in Sacramento, is an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump. Newsom's policy change come as support for the death penalty has declined over the decades. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted last year, 54 percent of Americans are in favor of capital punishment for murder while 39 percent are opposed. That's down significantly from 1996, when 78 percent supported it. In 2016, California voters narrowly rejected Proposition 62, which would have turned all death sentences into life without the possibility of parole. Newsom has long been vocal about his opposition to the death penalty, tweeting on Election Day in 2016 that the death penalty is a failed policy that wastes money & is fundamentally immoral. I support #YesOn62 & #NoOn66. The death penalty is a failed policy that wastes money & is fundamentally immoral. https://t.co/C2YSWgqKLU Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) November 7, 2016 Talking points issued by Newsoms office Tuesday noted a variety of reasons for the governors moratorium, including his position that the death penalty is inherently racist and biased against the mentally ill; the wrongfully convicted sometimes die at the hands of the state; and capital punishment is costly and does not increase safety. Story continues "In America, we execute more human beings than any other democracy on earth," Newsom is scheduled to say. "Just in 2017, the United States joined Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Pakistan, China and Egypt as the worlds top executioners." Newsom will add that the death penalty "has provided no public safety benefit or value as a deterrent. It has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars. But most of all, the death penalty is absolute. Irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error." California has not killed an inmate since 2006 at San Quentin State Prison, the site of many anti-death penalty vigils over the decades, in large part because of sustained legal challenges that have held up such executions. Such legal challenges from groups including the American Civil Liberties Union are not likely to go away. But Newsoms executive order makes it less likely that the two dozen inmates who have run out of appeals will see the gas chamber. The number of death row executions in the U.S. peaked in 1998 at 98, according to the Pew study. Since then it has fallen greatly, with 23 inmates executed in 2017. Eight states Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Texas and Virginia accounted for all executions in 2017, compared with 20 states in 1999. Newsom's moratorium affects prisoners on death row, but there's evidence the pipeline is shrinking since the state's death penalty cases are declining, according to a report by Safe California, a site focusing on death penalty initiatives. In a 2018 survey of cases by county, Los Angeles reported two death sentences (down from 14 in 2017), Orange County one death sentence (down from six) and Kern County had zero (down from four). A growing number of Democratic leaders, including presidential candidates Sen. Kamala Harris of California and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, support abolishing the death penalty, while President Donald Trump has said he supports capital punishment for drug dealers and anyone who murders a police officer. Pope Francis weighed in on the topic in August 2018, saying, the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person." He said the Catholic Church should work toward its abolition worldwide. Follow USA TODAY national correspondent @marcodellacava This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: California governor to freeze death penalty, says it's 'fundamentally immoral' and biased Los Angeles (AFP) - Governor Gavin Newsom will impose a moratorium Wednesday on carrying out the death penalty in California, granting a reprieve to the 737 inmates on death row -- the largest such group in the United States. Newsom is a Democrat who took office in January and a long-standing opponent of the death penalty, which was last carried out in California in 2006. "The death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian," Newsom will say, according to prepared remarks from his office. "The intentional killing of another person is wrong. And as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual," he will say. The governor plans to sign an executive order to block the death penalty in his state. It will also withdraw California's lethal injection protocol and close the execution chamber at San Quentin prison, his office said. It does not provide for the release of any death row inmates from prison. A quarter of all those on death row in the United States are in California, according to the governor's office. Twenty-five people on California's death row have exhausted all of their appeals. President Donald Trump said Newsom was "defying voters" in halting the death penalty for "stone cold killers." "Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!" he added on Twitter. Senator Kamala Harris, who is among a crowded field of candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said she welcomed Newsom's move to end the "deeply flawed system of capital punishment in California." "The death penalty is immoral, discriminatory, ineffective, and proven to be unequally applied," she added. Human Rights Watch said that with the governor's decision, California continues a trend in the United States away from putting people to death. Story continues The state joins Colorado, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, which have similar bans, and 20 states that have abolished the death penalty, it said. "Governor Newsom has demonstrated great courage and leadership in ending the cruel, costly, and unfair practice of executing prisoners," said Alison Parker, US managing director at Human Rights Watch. "Californians should be proud their state has taken a stand to end state-sanctioned killing and uphold the human rights of all people." Canadian's are taking on more debt than they can handle (Getty) An alarming number of Canadians are burning the furniture to heat the home when it comes to their finances. One-in-five Canadians surveyed by Leger say they will be forced to sell-off assets like RRSPs or cars to help pay off, or pay down their debt. They might even need to take out a second mortgage. The results are hardly surprising considering the staggering levels of debt among Canadians. According to Canadas national debt clock, the national debt is more than $691 billion or $18,700 per person. Almost half of Canadians are $200 dollars away from not being able to pay their bills. The need to liquidate is most prevalent among males at 24 per cent, compared to females at 14 per cent. Despite the grim outlook, most survey respondents with debt expect to take on new forms of debt. Those under the age of 55 are most likely to take on new debt, but debt among seniors is on the rise. Credit card debt will represent the biggest form of new debt at 23 per cent. Lines of credit are next at 15 per cent, followed by car loans and increased mortgages at 13 per cent and 12 per cent respectively. Kelley Keehn, author, educator and consumer advocate for FPSC encourages her readers, family and friends to account for every single dollar spent in a 30-day period. Keehn says doing nothing else often gets results because awareness kicks in and people effortlessly cut back on spending. Many Canadians lack awareness of their spending habits and patterns, said Keehn. There are several ways to create awareness, such as paying only with cash for a month which accesses a different part of the brain that is associated with loss aversion. A good person to take this journey with is a CFP professional who can help create a holistic financial plan. Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android. You've just been diagnosed with cancer. Your mind is reeling. And now your doctor wants you to sort through cancer treatment options and help decide on a plan. But how do you decide on a cancer treatment plan? Here are five steps to guide you in becoming a partner with your doctor in determining and guiding your cancer treatment. Step 1: Set your ground rules. Before exploring treatment options, establish some ground rules. You'll be more comfortable with any cancer treatment decisions you make if you: Decide how much you want to know. While most people want to know exactly what their treatment is and their survival chances, others don't. If you don't want to know all the details, let your doctor know. Make sure you let your doctor know if you want someone else who might be able to help you during this difficult time to hear the news. Decide how you want to make your treatment decisions. You might want to take the lead in the decision-making process. Or you might want to turn all decisions over to your doctor. You might also be somewhere in the middle, sharing the decision process with your doctor. It may help to think about how you've handled difficult decisions in the past. And it may help to have a close friend or family member at your appointments to help you decide. Have realistic expectations. Your doctor can give you estimates about what you can expect to get from each type of treatment. Exactly what side effects you may be willing to put up with will depend on what the benefits of the treatment are likely to be. Communicate your preferences with your doctor. Keep the focus on you. Don't let yourself be pressured into a particular treatment option. Pick what you feel most comfortable with. Accept help. You'll need support throughout your treatment. Support can come from your doctor, your friends and your family. If you don't feel supported in your decision-making, contact groups such as the American Cancer Society, which can put you in touch with cancer survivors who may be able to help you through this process. It might help to write down your expectations and preferences before you meet with your doctor. That might help you better express your hopes for and feelings about your cancer treatment. Story continues Step 2: Decide on a goal. Deciding what you want out of treatment can help you narrow your treatment choices. Are you hoping for a cure, stabilization, or solely symptom relief? Depending on your cancer type and stage, your goals for treatment might be: Cure. When you're first diagnosed, it's likely you'll be interested in treatments that cure cancer. When a cure is possible, you may be willing to endure more short-term side effects in return for the chance at a cure. Control. If your cancer is at a later stage or if previous treatments have been unsuccessful, you might adjust your goal to controlling your cancer. Different treatments may attempt to temporarily shrink or stop your cancer from growing. If this is your goal, you might not be willing to endure the side effects of harsher treatments. Comfort. If you have an advanced stage of cancer or one that hasn't responded to treatments, you might decide that comfort is most important to you. You and your doctor will work together to make sure you are free of pain and other symptoms. Step 3: Research your treatment options. To make a reasonable treatment decision, keep in mind the type of cancer you have, its stage, and what treatment options are available and how likely these treatments are to work under these circumstances. Talk to your doctor about trustworthy websites, books, and patient education materials to supplement your discussions. Cancer treatments are sometimes used in conjunction with each other. For example, it's common to pair surgery or radiation with chemotherapy. Doctors sometimes refer to a treatment that's used after the primary treatment as an adjuvant therapy. Step 4: Analyze the benefits versus the risks. Compare the benefits and risks of the different cancer treatments to decide which treatments fall within your goals. Rate the treatments you're considering based on the pros and cons of each. Some aspects you'll want to consider for each treatment include: Side effects. Take time to review the side effects of each treatment and decide whether they'll be worth enduring or too much to handle. Your doctor can give you a good idea of how common the various side effects are for each treatment and explain options for managing side effects to make treatment more tolerable. How treatment affects your life. Consider how treatment will affect your everyday life. Will you need a day off work or several weeks off? How will your role in your family change? Will you need to travel for your treatment? How will treatment affect your ability to find or keep employment? Understand that you have certain rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which covers patients with cancer and can help protect your employment. The financial costs of treatment. Investigate what types of treatment will be covered by your insurance. If a treatment or aspect of a treatment isn't covered, can you afford it? Call your insurance company to be sure. Your health in general. If you have other health conditions, ask your doctor how treatment will affect those conditions. For example, corticosteroids are commonly used in people with cancer. This could complicate diabetes treatment and affect your risk of cataracts, hypertension, and osteoporosis. Your personal values and goals will make a difference in what treatments are best for you. Only you can decide what type of treatment will fit best in your life. But you don't have to make a choice and stick with it. It's very possible that you may change your mind during treatment, and that's fine. Step 5: Communicate with your doctor. Effective communication with your doctor is the best way to make sure you're getting the information you need to make an informed decision. To make communicating with your doctor easier, try to: Speak up when you don't understand. If you need further explanation or clarification, tell your doctor. If you don't speak up, your doctor may think you understand. Write your questions in advance. Appointments can be stressful and emotional. Don't expect to remember all the questions you want to ask. Record your conversations. Try to keep track of what your doctor tells you by taking notes. You might also ask if it's OK to record the conversation. This record will be a good reference if you have questions later. Bring someone with you. If you feel comfortable sharing your medical information with a friend or family member, bring along someone to take notes. Then you'll have another person you can talk through your treatment decisions with. Keep copies of your medical records. Ask for copies of your medical records and bring them to each appointment. Don't expect you and your doctor to fully understand each other after one meetingit may take a few conversations before you both feel as if you're on the same page. Other things to keep in mind As you're making your treatment decisions with your doctor, keep these points in mind: Take your time. Although a cancer diagnosis might make you feel as if you have to make immediate decisions to begin therapy, in most situations you have time to make choices. Ask your doctor how much time you have to decide. You can always change your mind. Making a treatment decision now doesn't bind you to that option. Tell your doctor if you're having second thoughts. Significant side effects may make you want to change your treatment plan. You can seek a second opinion. Don't be afraid of offending your doctor if you want to get a second opinion. Most doctors understand the need for a second opinion when facing a major decision. You don't have to be involved with treatment decisions. If you prefer, tell your doctor you'd rather not be involved in the decision-making process. You can always get involved later when you feel more comfortable with the situation. Let your doctor know who you want to make decisions about your care. You don't have to have treatment. Some people choose not to have treatment at all. People with very advanced cancers sometimes find they'd rather treat the pain and other side effects of their cancer so that they can make the best of the time they have remaining. If you choose not to be treated, you can always change your mind. Forgoing treatment doesn't mean you'll be left on your ownmany ways of controlling side effects exist. Which treatment is best for you? There's no 100 percent right or wrong answer. But being involved with your treatment plan may give you greater peace of mind and can let you focus your energy on what you need to do mostkeeping yourself healthy throughout your treatment. Updated: 2016-04-26 Publication Date: 2002-12-04 By Byron Kaye SYDNEY (Reuters) - For two decades, George Pell was the dominant figure in the Catholic Church in Australia - a boy from a gold mining town whose ambition, intellect and knack for befriending influential people propelled him to become the third-most senior official in the Vatican. That came crashing down in December, when a court found Pell, 77, guilty of five charges of child sex offences committed on two 13-year-old choir boys in Melbourne. On Wednesday, Pell's fall was complete as he was sentenced to six years in jail and registered as a sex offender for the rest of his life, which the judge acknowledged Pell may now spend in jail. Pell is the most senior Roman Catholic official to be convicted of sexual offences, bringing a rolling abuse scandal that has dogged the church worldwide for three decades to the heart of both the Vatican and Australian civic life. "Your obvious status as Archbishop cast a powerful shadow over this offending," County Court of Victoria Chief Judge Peter Kidd said of Pell during the sentencing, where he described Pell's crimes as "brazen" and grave". Pell maintains his innocence and his appeal against the verdict will be heard in June. Pell, who has been held in custody for the past two weeks, now faces years in a Victorian prison, a far cry from the apartment where he lived in Piazza Citta Leonina, a small square just across the street from the Vatican's St. Ann's Gate. BALLARAT BOY Pell spent most of his first three decades as a priest in Ballarat, an old gold mining town in the state of Victoria, about 120 km (75 miles) from Melbourne. State and federal inquiries would later find it to be one of the Catholic dioceses worst-affected by cases of abuse, though none of the complaints against Pell stem from his time there. It was after Pell left his hometown to become Archbishop of Melbourne in 1996 that he committed offences against two choir boys in the city's St Patrick's Cathedral for which he was found guilty by the 12-person jury. It was not until 2016 that the complaints against Pell were first made public, with charges laid in 2017, and in the meantime he continued to rise through Australia's Church hierarchy. By 2001 when Pell became Archbishop of Sydney, the country's top-ranking Catholic position, he was a polarizing national figure revered by many conservative Catholics but criticized by liberals for his outspoken views. At a 2002 World Youth Day event in Toronto, Pell made headlines by saying "abortion is a worse moral scandal than priests sexually abusing young people" since abortion was "always a destruction of human life". FINANCIAL ROLE In meetings among cardinals before the conclave that elected Pope Francis in 2013, the Australian stood out not only for his imposing height and broad shoulders, but also for his command of financial matters. Hoping to end Vatican financial scandals, the pope moved Pell to Rome and in 2014 he was appointed to run a new ministry, the Secretariat for the Economy. Meanwhile, in Australia, a state inquiry into institutional abuse began airing accounts of child abuse and cover-ups in Ballarat and elsewhere over generations, triggering a more powerful, comprehensive Federal Royal Commission inquiry. Pell was not named as an alleged perpetrator at either inquiry. When he was called to give evidence at the Royal Commission it was only in relation to his knowledge of others' conduct, and the question of whether he was present when church leaders decided to move offending priests between parishes. In testimony to the commission in March 2016, Pell said that he did not know of the sexual abuse of children in Ballarat by another priest in the 1970s until his conviction in 1993, although the commission had heard testimony from others that the priest's behavior was an open secret in the diocese. "It's a sad story and it wasn't of much interest to me," he told that inquiry. Pell also said the Church made "catastrophic" choices by minimizing its response to, and covering up, abuse complaints. TRUE BELIEVERS When the global wave of abuse allegations reached Pell in June 2017, some of the country's most powerful people stood by him, including former conservative prime minister Tony Abbott, himself a devout Catholic, who told a newspaper "the George Pell I have known is a very fine man indeed". After the conviction was made public in Australia last month, Abbott told a radio program he had called Pell, although he declined to give details of the conversation. "I'm not a fair-weather friend," Abbott said. Another conservative former prime minister, John Howard, provided a written character reference for Pell in court after his conviction, saying he had known Pell for 30 years. "None of these matters alter my opinion of the Cardinal," Howard wrote. The most senior Catholic of all, Pope Francis, who faces calls to strip Pell of his Cardinal status, has said he would withhold comment until the appeal process was concluded. Pell was among three cardinals the pope removed from his group of close advisers a day after the December verdict. No reason was given at the time. (Removes extraneous "a" from paragraph 2.) (Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by John Mair, Alex Richardson and Michael Perry) What happened? MPs have voted to reject a no-deal Brexit under any circumstance on an extraordinary night in Parliament. Theresa May was handed two humiliating defeats as MPs voted against Britain crashing out of the EU without an agreement. After the vote Mrs May said MPs will vote tomorrow on an extension to Article 50, which could involve a short delay to implement a deal agreed in the next few days or a longer delay if no agreement is reached. What does this mean? The result is a disaster for Theresa May personally and indicates she has lost control of the Brexit process. She has also lost control of her party with 13 of her own ministers refusing to support her in the vote and abstaining. Other ministers voted against the PM and they are expected to resign. Labour MP Jess Phillips said Mrs May was a disgrace and should resign by the morning. Does this mean no-deal cant happen? Nope. The votes tonight are only an expression of Parliaments opinion. Indeed, as Mrs May has been at pains to point out, there are only two ways for no deal to be avoided: revoking Article 50 (and thereby cancelling Brexit) or accepting a deal. Mrs May will now push to get support for her much-derided deal, which has already been heavily rejected twice by MPs. Whats next? On Thursday, MPs will vote on whether to ask the PM to request an extension of the Article 50 negotiation process from the EU. The EU has consistently said, however, that they will not automatically agree to that. Read more about this story Pound rockets as parliament rejects a no-deal Brexit (Yahoo Finance UK) MPs vote to reject no deal under any circumstance (Yahoo News UK) So MPs dont want a no-deal Brexit but what do they want (Independent) The Tory no-dealers: not serious, still dangerous(The Independent) Italian children have been told not to turn up for school or nursery if they are not vaccinated. Under a new law, children under six will be legally turned away from nursery, which is known as Asilo in Italy. How much pressure should there be on parents to vaccinate their children? Read the full story and have your say below: Story continues Shameless star sorry for unmasking Bulger killer TV star Tina Malone has been spared prison after she told the High Court she is extremely sorry for revealing the identity of James Bulgers killer. The 56-year-old actress admitted being in Contempt of Court when she posted the message on Facebook last February, breaking a court injunction protecting killer Jon Venables new identity. Before deleting the post, she said: You dont deserve a second chance how do we not get rid of these people and wipe them from the Earth? Read the full story here (Evening Standard) Schoolgirls to be given free sanitary products Sanitary products are to be handed out in secondary schools across England from September, the Chancellor has confirmed. Announcing the move in the Spring Statement, Philip Hammond said it followed concern from headteachers that girls are missing school because they cannot afford the products. The Chancellors announcement is the latest in a series of moves by the Government to recognise the issue of what campaigners have termed period poverty. Read the full story here (The Telegraph) A large shelf cloud has appeared over the seaside Italian city of Pescara, reminding one onlooker of a scene from Independence Day. Rob Barke, who posted this footage, said the low-hanging cloud evolved rapidly as it approached land. 737 Hundreds of inmates on the largest death row in the United States are getting a reprieve as a temporary halt is set to be placed on all executions in California. On Twitter, the state governor, Gavin Newsom, called the death penalty ineffective, irreversible, and immoral. Since its last execution in 2006, the states death row population has grown to house one in every four condemned inmates in the US. Read the full story here (The Independent) The eight individuals who were repatriated from Syria Sunday risk being prosecuted on terrorism charges according to the Moroccan law. Moroccan authorities announced Sunday the repatriation of eight Moroccans from war-torn Syria on humanitarian grounds, noting that this operation is part of Moroccos contributions to international counterterrorism efforts. The repatriated individuals are currently undergoing investigations following which they will stand before justice on charges of terrorism, le360 news website reported. Joining individually or collectively terrorist organizations abroad, even if Morocco is not targeted, is in itself a terrorist offense according to Moroccos anti-terrorism law. Defendants risk prison terms ranging from five to fifteen years and fines from 50,000 dirhams to 500,000 dirhams. Immediately after Morocco repatriated the eight individuals, the US commended the move, describing the North African Kingdom as a highly capable partner in the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. Morocco is member of the US-led Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. The 75-member Coalition, set up in 2014, is committed to tackling ISIS on all fronts, to dismantling its networks and to countering its global ambitions. According to official figures, there were around 1,700 Moroccans fighting with the Islamic State group (ISIS) in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Many of them had been killed in suicide bombings in Syria and Iraq and 242 had been arrested. The Hague (AFP) - A new chemical weapons investigation team with the power to assign blame for attacks such as those in Syria will start work in weeks, the head of the world's toxic arms organisation said. Member countries of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons agreed in June to allow the body to identify the perpetrators of chemical attacks, but the new powers are strongly opposed by Moscow and Damascus. "The recruitment process of the members of the team is under way and is currently being finalised," OPCW chief Fernando Arias said in a statement to The Hague-based body on Tuesday but not released until Wednesday. Arias said the so-called Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) "will become fully operational in the coming weeks". Western states immediately called for the team to start work on identifying the culprits behind a deadly attack in the Syrian town of Douma in April 2018. The OPCW said in a report on March 2 that chlorine was likely used in the attack, which it said killed more than 40 people. The report however did not apportion blame as it was not in the watchdog's mandate at the time. Syria and Russia rejected the report, saying the Douma incident -- which sparked western airstrikes against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad -- was faked. Canada's delegation to the watchdog tweeted that it "expects Douma case to be referred to OPCW Investigation/Identification Team. Those responsible must be held accountable". Britain said that it "look(s) forward to further investigation by IIT to identify those responsible". The West pushed through the new blaming powers after a string of chemical incidents in Syria, as well as a nerve agent attack on Russian former double agent Sergei Skripal in the British city of Salisbury in March 2018. Russia tried last year to block the budget for the OPCW if it included funding for the investigations team. China and Iran have also opposed the new powers. OPCW chief Arias said the investigations team so far had 400,000 euros of funding but needed a further 1.13 million euros for the rest of 2019. He added that the watchdog had discussed the investigations team with Syria during talks in February on destroying Damascus's chemical weapons stocks, and would now "seek to secure the cooperation of the Syrian Government" for probes. Cheniere Energy, Inc. LNG recently announced the substantial completion of Train 5 of its Sabine Pass Liquefaction (SPL) project. The commissioning of the train has been completed and its custody has been handed over to Cheniere from the contractor Bechtel Oil, Gas and Chemicals. Train 5 is set for first commercial delivery in August 2019, under contracts with TOTAL S.A. TOT and Centrica plc. While Trains 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the SPL project are functional and Train 5 is likely to come online soon, Train 6 is being commercialized and has secured the necessary regulatory approvals. Notably, each train is expected to have a capacity of about 4.5-4.9 million tons per annum. Chenieres First-Mover Advantage in LNG Market Being the first company to receive Federal Energy Regulatory Commissions approval to export LNG from its 2.6-billion cubic feet per day Sabine Pass terminal in Cameron Parish, LA, Cheniere definitely enjoys a distinct competitive advantage. Importantly, the Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company currently exports to around 30 countries worldwide, as the firm aims at turning the natural gas glut in the United States into export revolution. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Late last year, Cheniere achieved a major milestone with the dispatch of the first cargo from the Corpus Christi liquefaction (CCL) project. Under the CCL project, the company intends to develop three trains, each having a nominal production capacity of 4.5 million metric tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) per year. Notably, the CCL project is the third export facility in the United States that produces LNG, after Chenieres Sabina Pass and Dominion Energy, Inc.s D Cove Point terminal. Cheniere looks well positioned to maintain its revenue growth trajectory over the coming years, on the back of solid operations and long-term contracts. Amid the expectation of a potential trade truce between the United States and China, Cheniere is in talks with Chinas state-run Sinopec SNP to supply about $18 billion of liquefied natural gas. Story continues U.S. LNG Exports to Witness a Boom In 2018, the United States exported 3.6 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of LNG per day, with Chenieres Sabine Pass facility accounting for 77.7%. While the countrys current export capacity is 3.6 Bcf of natural gas per day, the figure is likely to increase to 8.9 Bcf/d by the end of 2019, with nearly 18 LNG production units expected to come online over the next year. Notably, the United States is likely to become the third-largest exporter of LNG, given these enhancements, after Australia and Qatar. Out of the 18 new LNG production units, three will be from Cheniere itself. Meanwhile, Sempra Energy is likely to bring online all the three trains from its Cameron LNG project by the end of 2019. Importantly, Kinder Morgan, Inc. is also likely to bring into service 10 of its production units at the Elba Island LNG facility by the end of 2019. Moreover, first two trains at the Freeport LNG facility will become functional by 2019-end. These developments will surely boost United States efforts to become a global gas power. Zacks' Top 10 Stocks for 2019 In addition to the stocks discussed above, wouldn't you like to know about our 10 finest buy-and-holds for the year? From more than 4,000 companies covered by the Zacks Rank, these 10 were picked by a process that consistently beats the market. Even during 2018 while the market dropped -5.2%, our Top 10s were up well into double-digits. And during bullish 2012 2017, they soared far above the market's +126.3%, reaching +181.9%. This year, the portfolio features a player that thrives on volatility, an AI comer, and a dynamic tech company that helps doctors deliver better patient outcomes at lower costs. See Stocks Today >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Dominion Energy Inc. (D) : Free Stock Analysis Report China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (SNP) : Free Stock Analysis Report TOTAL S.A. (TOT) : Free Stock Analysis Report Cheniere Energy, Inc. (LNG) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research China on Wednesday offered to help Venezuela as it faces a crippling multi-day power blackout that President Nicolas Maduro has blamed on the United States. "China hopes that Venezuela can quickly find the cause of this accident and restore normal power and social order," foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said at a regular briefing. "China is willing to offer assistance and technical support to Venezuela to restore the power system," Lu said. Power has been restored to some areas in Venezuela since the weekend, but the supply has been intermittent and often drops out. Maduro called for support from allies including Russia and China as well as the United Nations in investigating the US "cyber attack" he said was responsible for the blackout. Lu said China was "very concerned" about reports of a cyber attack, but declined to directly blame the US. "This I'm afraid can only be clarified and explained by the party accused by President Maduro," Lu said. Businesses and schools remained shuttered on Maduro's orders, as they have been since the blackout began. While Maduro pointed the finger at Washington, critics have long blamed the government for failing to maintain the power grid. Opposition leader Juan Guaido, 35, is seeking to capitalise on public anger over the blackout, which has piled misery on a population suffering years of economic crisis and shortages of food and medicine under Maduro. United Nations (United States) (AFP) - China on Wednesday put on hold a request by Britain, France and the United States to add the leader of a Pakistan-based Islamist group behind a suicide attack in Kashmir to the UN terror blacklist, diplomats said. It was the fourth time that the UN Security Council was considering a request to put Masood Azhar, leader of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), on the UN sanctions blacklist, which would subject him to a global travel ban, an assets freeze and an arms embargo. Jaish-e-Mohammad has claimed responsibility for the February 14 attack in Kashmir that killed 40 Indian troops and which was condemned by the Security Council. In a note, China said it needed more time to examine the sanctions request targeting Azhar and asked for a technical hold which could last up to nine months, diplomats said. "It appears as though the Chinese have been protecting Pakistan's priorities on counter-terrorism in the committee and so they are Pakistan's protector," said a Security Council diplomat, who asked not to be named. China has blocked three previous attempts at the committee on sanctions against Al-Qaeda and IS-linked groups to blacklist the JeM leader. The group itself was added to the terror list in 2001. The United States, France and Britain are "actively considering" a new attempt, this time with a draft Security Council resolution that would designate Azhar as a terrorist, the diplomat added. "The case is compelling to list Azhar," said the diplomat. "Certain countries are not going to stand for this. This is the fourth time now." China defended its decision by saying it was upholding a "responsible attitude" and seeking to deal "with this issue with relevant parties via thorough consultation," said the Chinese mission to the United Nations. "China believes that only a plan adopted by all can offer a long-term solution," said the mission, quoting foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang. Story continues - India-Pakistan tensions - Tensions between India and Pakistan have soared since last month's attack in Kashmir that prompted tit-for-tat air raids, stoking fears of an all-out conflict between the two nuclear-armed countries. India on February 26 staged an air raid on a camp inside Pakistan that it said belonged to JeM. One day later, Pakistan responded with fighter jets crossing into Indian-administered Kashmir. A pilot who was shot down over Pakistani territory was later sent back to India. Islamabad announced last week that more than 100 militants, including many from JeM, had been detained, but India has greeted those statements with suspicion. Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi also recently denied in a television interview that JeM had claimed responsibility for the suicide attack. Kashmir has been split between India and Pakistan since their independence and angry division in 1947. India has long accused its neighbor of supporting Kashmir rebels. Pakistan denies any role in attacks in the Indian side of the Himalayan region, where tens of thousands have died in an armed insurgency since 1989. Chuck Schumer has revealed he wont be officiating Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguezs wedding, and that he has a personal reason for staying away from the two native New Yorkers nuptials. The senator, who represents New York State along with Kirsten Gillibrand, told TMZ on Monday that his only experience officiating a wedding has convinced him never to do it again. Asked about Lopez and Rodriguezs engagement, which became public over the weekend, Schumer replied: God bless them. Video: See Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez's Proposal Pics For more celebrity news visit Yahoo View. The website then asked what the senators answer would be if the pair asked him to lead the ceremony. I officiated one wedding. They got divorced after 10 months, Schumer said. Im never officiating a wedding again. Both Lopez and Rodriguez are New York City natives a quality they share with Schumer. The couple announced their engagement on Instagram by both sharing the same photo of their intertwined hands, with a massive engagement ring on Lopezs finger. Lopez simply captioned the image with a string of heart emoji, while Rodriguez wrote: She said yes. The pair are believed to have been dating since early 2017. Here are the companies Yahoo Finance is watching today. Boeing (BA) is still in the spotlight as a growing list of U.S. lawmakers call for grounding the 737 Max 8 jet. Most of the global fleet has already been blocked from flying in Europe and much of Asia. Boeing's CEO has assured President Trump that the plane is safe to fly and they are working on a fix for a possible software issue. A huge shake-up at Rite Aid (RAD). The CEO, John Standley, is leaving as the company cuts about 400 corporate jobs. That's roughly 20% of its management ranks. The COO and CFO also plan to exit. Rite Aid says it expects to save upwards $55 million dollars from the restructuring. Spotify (SPOT) is taking on one of its biggest competitors in Europe. It's filed an antitrust complaint with European regulators against Apple (AAPL). Spotify argues that Apple has been abusing its control of the App Store to crush competition in music streaming. No response yet from Apple. Express (EXPR) beat investors expectations. The clothing chain posted Q4 earnings of $0.19 per share, beating expectations by about $0.03. The company brought in more than $628 million dollars in revenue at the end of January 2019. This compares to a year ago when the retailer reported about $693 million dollars in revenues. Gmail and Google Drive experienced a worldwide outage last night. Thousands of users from around the world were faced with an error saying their messages couldn't be sent and networks needed to be checked. Google (GOOG) said it was aware of the issue with Google Drive and that they would soon provide more information. Users also reported problems with other Google-owned applications. When a company faces a crisis -- maybe it's a restaurant chain where people got food poisoning or perhaps it's a retailer that had its customer database hacked -- how it handles the situation has a strong impact on how the scandal impacts its stock price. To measure that impact, Hot Paper Lantern (HPL), (a marketing, communications, and digital strategy company created the Crisis Response Index (CRI). HPL analyzed how 45 Fortune 1000 companies communicated during times of crisis. That included analyzing 400,000 media articles and 80,000 social mentions "to assess the speed and effectiveness of each company's crisis response," according to an article by HPL's Jason Baik and Ted Birkhahn which was sent to The Motley Fool. The research showed that you might imagine the stock of companies undergoing a crisis underperformed the average of their peers. That's understandable but it can be managed, according to Baik and Birkhahn. A blackboard has the words are you ready on it. Many companies don't know how their CEO will perform in a crisis. Image source: Getty Images. What can companies do? "Of the 45 companies within the study, those who were slower and less effective in their crisis response saw a decrease of 7% in the value of their stock price -- on average," the two wrote. "This was within the first three months following the crisis. Alarmingly, those same companies were still down 5% within the first year following a crisis and experienced an average loss of roughly $5B in market capitalization value." The good news is that there's a significant benefit from responding effectively. In fact, "companies that responded effectively -- as measured through sentiment analysis of media coverage and social media content -- actually saw an increase of 4% in their stock price in the aftermath of the crisis." Speed matters as well, according to the research. "Companies that responded to a crisis within days saw an average decrease of $2.4 billion market cap value compared to a decrease of only $1.6 billion when they responded within hours," Baik and Birkhahn wrote. Story continues The CRI backs up what the two authors have experienced in their time as public relations/marketing/communications executives. "Companies that communicate swiftly with a high degree of transparency, empathy, and authenticity tend to weather the storm," they wrote. What should investors look for? it's hard to see how a company will respond during a crisis until it has one. Former Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel was arguably pushed from his position due to his poor handling of the company's data breach. The same case may be made for why former Chipotle CEO Steve Ells was pushed out of that job (he's now executive chairman of the chain) because of his slow and ineffective response to the company's e. Coli scandal. Conversely, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and current CEO Kevin Johnson have always tackled each and every crisis head-on. Sometimes that's done by dismissing the controversy (like the various times people have been outraged over its holiday cups) and at others, it taking clear steps -- like closing its stores to conduct racial bias training after a single incident in a Philadelphia store gained national attention. How can a company know how its leaders will perform under crisis? Baik and Birkhahn believe that there's a clear answer. They believe that public companies should take two steps. Conduct a stress test for crisis response. Have regulatory oversight of those tests. That seems logical as the only way to correct potential problems in a company's response is to know how it will act when it has to. Investors would benefit from knowing that these steps have been taken and that the companies they invest in have learned (and corrected) their weaknesses. More From The Motley Fool Daniel B. Kline has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Chipotle Mexican Grill and Starbucks. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. CBI Director General, Carolyn Fairbairn speaks at the annual Confederation of British Industry (CBI) conference in central London, on November 19, 2018. Photo: ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/Getty Images Business leaders have attacked the failed politics of Brexit and said leaving without a deal must be urgently ruled out to protect jobs and the economy. Business lobbies unanimously condemned what one group CEO called the circus around Britains exit from the EU. New tariff plans announced by the government on Wednesday were called disgraceful and criticised for potentially dealing a sledgehammer blow to the UKs economy. Enough is enough, Carolyn Fairbairn, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), said on Tuesday. This must be the last day of failed politics. A new approach is needed by all parties. Jobs and livelihoods depend on it. Her comments came after MPs rejected prime minister Theresa Mays Brexit deal for the second time on Tuesday evening, setting up a second vote in parliament later today on whether to rule out a no-deal Brexit. Many businesses are not ready Dr Adam Marshall, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), said on Tuesday night: Businesses have been failed over and over again by Westminster in recent months. Government agencies are not ready, many businesses are not ready, and despite two and a half years passing since the referendum, there is no clear plan to support communities at the sharp end of such an abrupt change. The BCC represents 53 business chambers across the UK that are made up of thousands of businesses which employ around 6m people. Ian Wright CBE, the CEO of the UKs Food and Drink Federation, which represents 7,000 businesses, said last night: As we teeter on the brink of the cliff edge, just seventeen days away, confidence in our political leaders is almost gone. Mike Cherry, national chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), said: Political games have dominated Westminster for far too long and this defeat simply extends the political paralysis that is bringing us perilously close to the cliff edge. Tariff plans would be sledgehammer to the economy Story continues On Wednesday, the government set out its plans for tariffs under a no deal Brexit. 87% of overseas imports would face no tariffs at all. The government claimed the plan would minimise costs to business and consumers while protecting vulnerable industries but business lobbies quickly condemned the plans. CBIs Fairbairn warned they would be a sledgehammer blow to the economy. The CBI is the UKs biggest business lobby, representing 190,000 businesses and seven million jobs. The BCCs Dr Marshall criticised the governments failure to consult with businesses and said: If the tariffs announced today were to come into effect, there would be winners and losers across UK industry overnight. Allie Renison, Head of Europe and Trade at the Institute of Directors, dismissed the no-deal planning as cack-handed. Making these tariff decisions temporary will lead to widespread confusion about what may change and when, as firms will want to know well in advance about how duties may rise, she said. Such unpredictability may also have consequences for our trading relations with countries outside the EU as well. The FDFs Wright said: Business cannot adapt to this new regime in just two weeks. It is disgraceful that we are, only now, getting to see these. This new system is confusing and complex. It includes some zero tariffs, some new tariffs, and some quotas. Some foodstuffs qualify for partial protection and some not for any protection at all, with little logic to explain the difference. The FSBs Cherry said small businesses would be undercut in a heartbeat by artificially cheap foreign imports. A sudden no-deal Brexit on 29th March would bring widespread overnight changes to the way small firms do business, which most are unprepared for. At a time theyd be working hard to adapt, the last thing theyd need is their overseas rivals being given a leg-up, he said. No-deal an own goal of historic proportions Business groups were united in calling for the government to rule out a no-deal Brexit in Wednesday evenings vote. Stephen Phipson, CEO of Make UK, the manufacturers organisation said: It is now essential that Parliament brings the curtain down on this farce and removes the risk of no-deal tomorrow. That outcome would be disastrous for the UK manufacturing, jeopardising many thousands of jobs in every constituency in the land. Miles Celic, CEO of financial lobbying group TheCityUK, said a no deal Brexit would be an own goal of historic proportions and said: MPs must now say no to no-deal and the UK and the EU must urgently return to the negotiating table. The FDFs Wright said: We can only hope that members of parliament, tomorrow and on Thursday, will vote decisively and act accordingly to take a 29 March no-deal exit off the table. We now need breathing space in which a clear way forward can be found. Fairbairn called for an extension of Article 50 to avoid a no-deal Brexit this month. It should be as short as realistically possible and backed by a clear plan. Its time for parliament to stop this circus, she said. Oscar Williams-Grut covers banking, fintech, and finance for Yahoo Finance UK. Follow him on Twitter at @OscarWGrut. Read more: Deutsche Bank: Europe is the biggest risk to the global economy right now What to expect from the Chancellors spring statement Hot fintech Revolut seeks PR firm amid bad headlines SoftBank-backed gaming startup Improbable burns through 50m after huge cash injection $1.7bn startup Revoluts bank plans could face tough culture questions Christian Delbert/Shutterstock March 13, 2019 We all want for our kids to go to great schools, but at the bare minimum, we want them to go to schools that are safe. So when parents in Ripon, California, became concerned that a cell tower near their children's school could be linked to cancer, they (understandably) demanded answers. Four kids from Weston Elementary have been diagnosed with cancer since 2016, according to CBS 13, and many concerned moms and dads fear it's because of radiation caused by a cell tower near the campus. The school district had several tests done saying the cell tower is safe and meets federal regulations, but an outside expert hired by parents disagrees. "I wouldn't send my kids there at all, it absolutely is dangerous," Eric Windheim, an electromagnetic radiation specialist, told CBS 13. "Children are still developing and their cells are still being divided. It's the worst possible time in their life to be exposed." According to the American Cancer Society, there is "very little evidence to support this idea" that cell phone towers cause cancer. Still, the organization notes that some research agencies have made statements about radiofrequency radiation. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified RF fields as "possibly carcinogenic to humans," and although there's no conclusive evidence to support this, the small possibility of this being a potential danger is obviously troubling to parents. "Kids shouldn't be guinea pigs, and we shouldn't be taking chances with the children's lives," said Joe Prime, whose son Kyle was diagnosed with cancer in 2016. On Monday, about 200 parents attended a Ripon Unified School District board meeting. According to the Modesto Bee, board president Kit Oase said in a prepared statement that the school district sympathizes with the families but has no "out" clause in its 25-year lease agreement with Sprint, the owner of the cell tower. Story continues The Ripon Unified School District confirmed they receive a negligible amount of revenue from providing campus space for the tower, but they're working with Sprint to have it moved away from Weston Elementary School. No definitive contract changes have been made yet, but Adrienne Norton, a representative for Sprint, told the Modesto Bee in an email, "When it comes to the deployment of network infrastructure, we always strive to achieve a win/win process with local municipalities and residents...We have been working with the community in Ripon to address their concerns." Until the cell tower is moved, though, some parents are unwilling to take any chances. For Monica Ferrulli, whose son Mason was the second child from Weston Elementary to be diagnosed with cancer, the possible risk just wasn't worth it. "We pulled him from Weston immediately after his diagnosis and the discovery of the cell tower, and he has never returned," Ferrulli told Parents.com. Mason, 10, is "currently still fighting brain cancer, but he is feeling good overall,' said his mom. Still, Ferrulli is frustrated with the school district and their response. "[They're] not communicating with us at all," she said. "We wish we could work together to solve this problem, but that has never been an option. They have never reached out and rarely return our messages when we contact them!" On Wednesday afternoon, Ripon Unified School District posted a statement to their website in regards to the cell tower at Weston Elementary. In it, the district reiterated that [s]tudent safety is always the primary concern for all of us and confirmed that they are working with Sprint to come to a mutual resolution on the cell towers placement. The school districts statement reiterated that multiple independent tests confirmed the cell tower was operating safely and noted that the districts 25-year contract with Sprint was put into place approximately a decade ago by previous board members and administrators. The full statement from Ripon Unified School District can be found on their website. A representative for Sprint told Parents.com the telecommunications company "designs, constructs and operates its wireless telecommunications facilities to comply with the Federal Communications Commission rules and regulations regarding radio frequency exposure to humans." More information the FCC rules and regulations pertaining to RF emissions can be found on the FCC website. SINGAPORE (AP) A growing number of airlines around the world have grounded their Boeing 737 Max 8 jets following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed 157 people on Sunday, five months after a similar Indonesian Lion Air jet plunged into the ocean, killing 189. Some airlines and countries that have grounded the aircraft so far: ___ ETHIOPIA A spokesman for Ethiopian Airlines says it grounded its remaining four Max 8 jets as an "extra safety precaution" while it investigates Sunday's deadly crash. The airline is awaiting the delivery of 25 more Max 8 jets. ___ CHINA China has 96 Max 8 jets in service, belonging to carriers such as Air China, China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines. The civil aviation authority directed the planes to be grounded indefinitely on Monday. It said the order was "taken in line with the management principle of zero tolerance for security risks." There were eight Chinese citizens on the Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed shortly after taking off on Sunday. The authority said it will consult the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing before deciding when to lift the ban. ___ EUROPE The European Aviation Safety Agency has issued a directive grounding all Boeing 737-8 "MAX" and 737-9 model aircraft following two recent accidents. EASA said in its emergency airworthiness directive Tuesday that "at this early stage" of the most recent investigation, "it cannot be excluded that similar causes may have contributed to both events." "Based on all available information, EASA considers that further actions may be necessary to ensure the continued airworthiness of the two affected models." It says companies may make one noncommercial flight to return their planes to a location where they can be inspected. The grounding applies to all European Union airspace. ___ BRAZIL Brazil's Gol Airlines has suspended the use of seven Max 8 jets. The airline said it is following the investigation closely and hopes to return the aircraft to use as soon as possible. Gol said it has made nearly 3,000 flights with the Max 8, which went into service last June, with "total security and efficiency." Story continues ___ SINGAPORE Singapore has temporarily banned Max 8 jets and other models in the Max range from entering and leaving the country. The civil aviation authority said it was "closely monitoring the situation" and the ban will be "reviewed as relevant safety information becomes available." SilkAir, a regional carrier owned by Singapore Airlines, has six Max 8 jets. It said the ban "will have an impact on some of the airline's flight schedules." ___ UAE The UAE's General Civil Aviation Authority said its ban on the aircraft in its airspace was "a precautionary measure." The 737 MAX is the workhorse of the Dubai government-owned budget carrier FlyDubai. It operates 11 Boeing 737 MAX 8 and 2 MAX 9 jetliners. Its total fleet is around 60 aircraft, including other models of the 737. ___ CANADA Canadian charter airline Sunwing is suspending use of its four Boeing 737 Max 8 planes. Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau said he has no plans to ground Canada's fleet of 737 Max aircraft, but that "all options are on the table." ___ VIETNAM Vietnam is banning Boeing 737 Max planes from flying into its airspace. Dinh Viet Thang, director of Vietnam's civil aviation authority, said Wednesday that airlines flying those models of planes will have to change the aircraft for safety purposes. The ban lasts until further notice. None of Vietnam's four airlines uses the Max model planes in their fleets, but Korea's Eastar Jet, Thai Lion Air and Malaysia's Malindor Air fly those planes to Vietnamese destinations. ___ INDIA India says it is immediately grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 planes after Sunday's deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash. A statement late Tuesday says the planes "will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations." The statement does not say how many planes are affected. ___ AUSTRALIA Australia has announced a temporary ban on flights by Boeing 737 Max aircraft, although none of its airlines currently operate them. The Civil Aviation Safety Authority said Tuesday that the ban will affect two foreign airlines SilkAir and Fiji Airways that use them for flights to Australia. The authority said Singapore's SilkAir has already grounded its 737 Max jets, and that it is working with regulators there and in Fiji to minimize disruptions. It said that Fiji Airways has two 737 Max 8 jets in its fleet. Fiji Airways and Fiji's Civil Aviation Authority said they would ground the fleet until more information is known about the cause of the Ethiopian Airlines accident. ___ CAYMAN ISLANDS Cayman Airways, a Caribbean carrier, said it stopped using its two Max 8 jets starting Monday. President and CEO Fabian Whorms said the move will cause changes to flight schedules. Cayman is the flag carrier of Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory. ___ INDONESIA Indonesia said it would temporarily ground Max 8 jets to inspect their airworthiness. Director General of Air Transportation Polana B. Pramesti said the move was made to ensure flight safety. A Lion Air model of the same plane crashed in Indonesia in October. Indonesian airlines operate 11 Max 8 jets. Lion Air, which owns 10 of them, said it will try to minimize the impact of the decision on operations. The other Max 8 jet belongs to national carrier Garuda. ___ MALAYSIA The Civil Aviation Authority said no Malaysian carriers operate the Max 8, but that foreign airlines are banned from flying the plane in Malaysia, and from transiting in the country, until further notice. ___ MEXICO Mexican airline Aeromexico has suspended flights of its six Max 8 jets. Aeromexico said it "fully" trusts the safety of its fleet but ordered the grounding to ensure "the safety of its operations and the peace of mind of its customers." It said other planes will take over the routes usually flown by the Max 8. ___ OMAN Oman and the United Arab Emirates barred flights by Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft. Oman's Public Authority for Civil Aviation made the sultanate's announcement, without elaborating on its reasoning. State-owned Oman Air operates five Max 8 aircraft and said it was rescheduling other planes for its flights. ___ SOUTH AFRICA Comair, the operator of British Airways and Kulula flights in South Africa, says it has grounded its Boeing 737 Max 8 while it consults with Boeing, other operators and technical experts. A statement does not say how many planes are affected. It says the decision was made without intervention from regulatory authorities. ___ SOUTH KOREA South Korean airline Eastar Jet said it would suspend operations of its two Boeing 737 Max 8 planes and replaced them with Boeing 737-800 planes starting Wednesday on routes to Japan and Thailand. The airline says it hasn't found any problems, but is voluntarily grounding the planes in response to customer concerns. ___ TURKEY In a statement on Twitter Tuesday, Turkish Airlines CEO Bilal Eksi said all Boeing 737 Max flights are suspended until the "uncertainty affecting safety is cleared." He added that passenger safety was the company's priority. ___ ICELAND Icelandair Group says it has temporarily suspended operations of its three Boeing 737 Max aircraft until further notice. President and CEO Bogi Nels Bogason said Tuesday that the company will follow developments closely and work with local, European and U.S. authorities on any steps that need to be taken. He said the temporary suspension won't impact the company's operations, as it only affects three aircraft out of a fleet of 33. ___ NEW ZEALAND New Zealand and Fiji have suspended Boeing 737 Max 8 flights in and out of the two countries following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jetliner. The decision only affects one operator, Fiji Airways. No New Zealand airlines use the Max 8 planes. It is clear that the ailing and embattled president Abdelaziz Bouteflika has not been able to deflate mass demonstrations or convince angry protesters demanding his departure, change, inclusive growth and democracy. After weeks of popular protests, Mr. Bouteflika, 82, announced on Monday that he would not run for a fifth term and postponed elections scheduled for April 18th to allow for consultation on reforms for a new generation, promising to leave a new republic. Algerians reacted with a mixture of relief and anger at Bouteflikas surprising political decisions, announced upon his return to his country of 41 million after spending two weeks in a Swiss hospital. He said he would not seek re-election but would remain in charge while a revised constitution is drafted. The long-time president has ruled the gas-oil rich country for 20 years. A stroke in 2013 left him confined to a wheelchair. He has rarely spoken in public since. Yet he was intending to seek a fifth term. His decision to drop his re-election bid was welcomed by some protesters, but many remain dubious saying that the move to postpone the presidential election is simply a maneuver to extend his fourth term beyond the legal and constitutional limits. Shortly after the Presidents announcement, the Arabic hashtag leave means leave began trending on Twitter. Protesters have said they will not leave the streets until the government, and all those in the tiny elite of military officers, veterans and big businessmen dubbed Le Pouvoir, have handed over power. Algerians are actually concerned over their countrys future and wondering what will happen next after the incumbent president decided to remain in power, a move that is constitutionally questionable, and carried out a minor cabinet reshuffle with figures of his own Le Pouvoir. This was viewed as a way to maintain the status quo. In its front page, Algerian El Watan daily published on Tuesday a story entitled Bouteflikas last ruse to stay in office, a title that reflects and translates perfectly the mood of the Algerian people. They are rejecting their countrys political system dominated for nearly 60 years by the veterans of the independence war against France. Therefore it is no surprise if thousands of young Algerians of all walks of life continue to demonstrate on the streets in Algiers and in several other cities. They represent a wide cross-section of society including students, teachers, lawyers, and the working class. The protestors want change as the economic and political situation stalled for decades. They are frustrated by a lack of economic opportunity and the corruption of an opaque political & military elite that has governed the country since independence. The unemployment rate in the country stands at approximately 12 percent and more than a quarter of Algerians under the age of 30 are jobless. Sharp rises in the price of basic items such as sugar, oil and flour have also hit Algerians hard, with increases of between 20 and 30 percent seen in the first few months of 2019 alone. What began as protests against president Bouteflikas bid for a fifth term has quickly turned into a popular opposition to the Algerian regime which started showing some cracks. It seems that the pressure exerted by protestors is building up. They will remain mobilized until their political demands are fulfilled. Since the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, the Algerian regime used to buy social peace with its petrodollars, increasing wages, and subsidizing basic products, social housing But, now social handouts have run out, leaving the government with little choices, while the legitimate socioeconomic woes are mounting. In the past, the Algerian authorities have managed the burgeoning social discontents with a stick-and-carrot policy but this policy is no longer working and Bouteflikas deciqsion to withdraw from the presidential race is just a half victory for the protesters who want a regime change. No less. By Gabriela Baczynska and Alastair Macdonald BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Her back to the wall on Brexit, Theresa May turned to her legal adviser to rescue her deal with the EU - only to see Geoffrey Cox deliver it a mortal blow as parliament voted down the treaty for a second time. European Union officials familiar with the negotiations Cox conducted lately said the prime minister should not have been surprised. Cox has been a bullish star performer in London courtrooms but rubbed Brussels' technocrats up the wrong way as he pursued what they saw as unrealistic demands for amendments. Some in the EU accused the barrister, who unlike May had campaigned for Brexit in the 2016 referendum, of sabotaging a deal which many fellow Conservatives believe binds Britain too tightly to EU rules. Some in Britain commended him for sticking honestly to his legal guns, despite political pressure. "Mr. Cox killed it all," said Elmar Brok, a veteran EU lawmaker and confidant of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "Because he is a Brexiteer, he wanted to kill it. There was no legal and political reason for what he did. He carries the responsibility," Brok told Britain's Sky News television. By contrast, Sammy Wilson, the Brexit spokesman for May's pro-Brexit Northern Irish parliamentary allies the Democratic Unionists, said: "Some people worried that (Cox) was marking his own homework. But he was honest - and we appreciated that." If May was peeved by Cox saying on Tuesday that commitments he had himself wrung from the EU were not enough to end a risk of Britain being trapped in EU rules after leaving the bloc, she gave little away. Cox just did his job in offering independent legal advice, aides to the premier insisted on Wednesday. His earlier opinion, which lawmakers forced the government to publish in December, was that a "backstop" clause obliged Britain to maintain EU customs and economic rules until better ways were found to avoid a disruptive "hard" border between the EU and Northern Ireland. Many lawmakers cited that to justify rejecting by a huge margin May's withdrawal treaty in January. The prime minister then pledged to secure changes to the deal that would convince Cox to change his mind. To secure them, she despatched the attorney general himself to Brussels. But after several weeks of his own shuttle diplomacy, and hours after May had declared herself satisfied with a tweaked package after a late-night dash to Strasbourg, Cox said on Tuesday that, despite some improvement, the legal risk remained that Britain might be unable to get out of the backstop. CONFRONTATION, NOT COLLABORATION EU officials familiar with Cox's recent discussions with Michel Barnier's team of Brexit negotiators said the blunt conclusion seemed in tune with a man whose manner, steeped in the adversarial oratory of the English bar, had disappointed - even offended - Brussels experts who had hoped for more a more collaborative approach to securing parliament's ratification. Where May had seemed willing to accept a mechanism by which Britain could seek to get out of the backstop conditions if the EU was being unreasonable, several diplomats and officials told Reuters, Cox pushed for complete freedom to opt out. A former head of the European Council legal service, Jean-Claude Piris, said Cox's goal appeared to breach international law by giving London a unilateral right to break a treaty. "Barnier's people were expecting to work on May's demands," one senior EU diplomat said. "Then Cox showed up with a completely different way and said 'it's my way or no way'. "He was arrogant and patronizing. Just a disaster." The publication on Sunday of an interview which Cox given days earlier to a British newspaper, also angered Brussels. In it, he declared that his reputation as a trial lawyer for 36 years meant much more to him than that as a politician after just seven months as a minister. A comment about blocking any use of the backstop led some EU officials to conclude that he spent subsequent days negotiating on the terms in "bad faith". "This is what you get when you ask a criminal lawyer to give advice on EU law," one EU diplomat said. "He comes here saying he has 36 years of experience and that we should educate ourselves. Outrageous from a man who then goes on to show he has very little idea on EU law, trade law, customs and all these other crucial but technical things he considers himself above." Cox, however, garnered praise at home for his legal integrity. Some commentators compared him favorably to a predecessor whose shift in advice to let a government wage war on Iraq dogged that attorney general in controversy for years. And criticism from Brussels seems unlikely to worry a man whose terse response on Twitter to a media report that he was under orders to support May's backstop deal was "Bollocks". (Additional reporting by Elizabeth Piper in London; Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Mark Heinrich) Bond an his DB5 in Spectre (Credit: Eon Productions) 007s new car for the 25th James Bond movie will have its environmental credentials front and centre, according to reports. Hes set to drive a 250,000 limited edition Aston Martin Rapide E, the first electric car from the British manufacturer, and one of only 155 being built. Read more: Bond 25 wont be called Shatterhand The Sun reports that the car choice is at the behest of director Cary Fukunaga, who wants to give Bond an environmentally friendly edge. An insider told the paper: The decision was spearheaded by the films new director, whos a total tree-hugger. He is working directly with Aston Martin to get one of their electric cars ready for its big close-up. Aston Martin Rapide E prototype (Credit: AFP) Its going to be the centre of an incredible action sequence in the movie. James Bond is known for driving amazing cars and this one wont disappoint either. Its going to have all the high-tech gadgets. To be clear, this is something Cary pushed for and Daniel and the producers are going along with. Everybody is afraid of Bond getting labelled too PC but they all felt the time was right to put him in a zero emission vehicle. Aston Martin has not denied the claims, with a representative for the car manufacturer telling Yahoo: As a business, Aston Martin and EON have a long-standing relationship and we hope to work together again in the future, however, we have no further comment to make at this time on the subject of Bond. Read more: Rami Malek in final talks for Bond 25 The choice is an obvious nod to Bond heritage, Sean Connery first driving an Aston Martin in Goldfinger in 1964. Daniel Craig also drove a DB5 in the last Bond movie, 2015s Spectre. Shooting is expected to get underway on Craigs swan song as Bond next month, after some considerable delays. 41-year-old Fukunaga, who helmed the celebrated first series of True Detective, took over from Danny Boyle in the directors chair, following reported creative differences between Boyle and producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson. Story continues Its been variously reported since that Boyle wanted to kill off Bond at the end of the movie, or that he fell out with producers over his choice of villain. Eon, which makes the movies, has not commented on any such rumours. Its also been rumoured that Rami Malek is in final discussions to take on the role of the movies villain. Bond 25 is slated for release in April, 2020. Datalex Seeks Cash Injection After Debacle on Lufthansa Tech Project Datalex, a builder of software for airlines, is facing a financial shortfall after having failed to deliver a new digital commerce platform for Lufthansa Groups airlines on time and under budget. Datalex now risks a cash crunch, prompted by Lufthansas haggling over the bill. The German airline group expected the vendor to finish the project in 2018, but the projects first phase has not gone entirely live yet. On Tuesday, the Dublin company said billionaire Dermot Desmond, who indirectly owns 26.4 percent of the company, may take a larger stake and provide a loan of up to about $6.9 million (6.1 million). Even if Desmond helps, the 500-employee company said it may have to have layoffs of an unspecified number of workers and contractors, with a goal of saving up to $10 million (8.87 million) over the course of the year. Throughout last year, Datalex had touted its growth. As recently as November, it guided investors that it would report that it had been profitable in 2018. The Lufthansa snafu prompted Datalex to revised its figures. In January, Datalex said it might have misstated its revenues for the first half of 2018. The company had said it had generated about $65 million (58 million) in revenue in the 12 months to June 30. The company is now waiting for a few weeks for accounting firm PwC to evaluate the accuracy of that and other numbers. Datalex recently guided that in April it may report a loss of between $1 million and $4 million for full-year 2018, rather than the double-digit millions in profit after tax it had predicted earlier. In 2017, auditor EY had flagged trouble. The auditor warned the company privately that Datalexs rosy forecast depended on its managers using a heightened degree of subjectivity when estimating first-half 2018 revenues. The auditor said the vendor faced a significant risk of not meeting its Lufthansa project timetables, as the Irish Times reported. Story continues Nevertheless, in a mid-year 2018 report to the public, Datalex said the projects delivery was on track. The Irish central bank has launched an investigation into why the company had reported positive forecasts as recently as last November. In February, the companys chief financial officer Donal Rooney announced his intention to quit in April without explanation. Rooney had only joined the company in November. Compounding problems, an unnamed Latin American airline customer recently chose to end its software services contract as of February 2020. One of its long-time customers, Aeromexico, has recently been adding services from rival provider Sabre. Datalexs other Latin American customers include Copa Airlines and Aero Republica. We have a solid pipeline of customers that will transfer to our platform over the course of 2019, said CEO Aidan Brogan in a statement. A spokesperson declined a request for an interview, saying that it was in a closed period as a public company for media interviews until an April earnings announcement. Some observers said the CEO may be fighting for his job. He has worked in roles at Datalex since 1994. Long History Datalex, founded in 1985, has struggled before. In 2013, after a change in technology approach, it posted its first profit in a decade and began to rack up customers like Aer Lingus, Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), Swiss, and Virgin Atlantic. Airlines typically hire Datalex to provide a shopping platform, including the customer-facing booking engine that consumers use to buy tickets on their branded direct websites. For example, since 2015 JetBlues website has been powered by Datalex and does the computational work to display complex details, such as whether the total price for a product bundle called a fare family includes free checked baggage. Over time, Datalex has changed business models. It used to rely on charging customers for installing a platform and paying recurring licenses. It has been moving to primarily being paid for every product and service transacted through its platform. That latter revenue has nearly doubled on an annualized basis since 2012. In 2016, Datalex added Lufthansa, its first global carrier as a customer. Datalexs managers hoped that the group would become a reference customer for winning other business. However, it may be a while before other airline customers come rushing in. One benefit of investors slashing the value of the company is that it may become a more attractive target from potential acquirers, such as by travel tech companies or private equity firms. Desmond, one of Irelands wealthiest people, may help by providing a cash injection. Without a loan, Datalexs cash on hand may be in the single-digit millions. Datalex is slated to reveal its financial results next month. Subscribe to Skift newsletters covering the business of travel, restaurants, and wellness. Outside the media and political circles that follow her every move, few probably noticed or cared when Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez pronounced capitalism irredeemable. But what are we to make of the refusal of former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper supposedly the moderate in the Democratic field to admit that he was a capitalist? Speaking on MSNBCs Morning Joe last week, Hickenlooper turned aside several direct questions about whether he was a capitalist before allowing that some aspects of capitalism, like small business, probably work. And what about the fact that 77-year-old avowed socialist Bernie Sanders is in a statistical tie for the Democratic nomination? Perhaps thats because Democratic primary voters have a surprisingly favorable view of socialism. According to the latest Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, Democrats prefer capitalism to socialism by the slimmest 5149 percent margin. Thats a long way from President Obama, who just four years ago pointed out that the free market is the greatest generator of wealth in history it has lifted millions out of poverty. Of course there is ample reason to be suspicious of the combination of cronyism and government intervention that has replaced free-market capitalism in recent years. But this new affection for socialism represents a profound misreading of economics, history, and the human condition. For most of recorded history, humankind was horribly, desperately poor. Then, about 300 years ago, human wealth suddenly began to increase exponentially. The reason for this sudden and wonderful change was the advent of modern free-market capitalism. And while those at the top of the income ladder undoubtedly saw major gains, those who benefited the most from this increase in wealth were those at the bottom. In her groundbreaking book Bourgeois Equality, Deirdre McCloskey points out that in the era before modern free-market capitalism, great civilizations, such as Periclean Greece or Song Dynasty China, sometimes saw a temporary doubling of national income per capita. Such gains were considered extraordinary. But compare that to the fact that since 1800, developed countries like Sweden or Japan have seen a 3,200 percent growth in per capita income. And with that growth came all sorts of associated benefits, including longer life expectancies, a better-educated citizenry, expanded civil and political rights, and reduced poverty. Studies measuring inequality over time against indexes of economic freedom (adjusted to exclude exogenous factors such as educational levels, climate, agricultural share of employment, and so forth) show a small but statistically significant reduction in inequality in countries with high economic-freedom scores. Story continues What has been true worldwide has been true for the United States as well. Consider that by most measures nearly all Americans were poor at the start of the last century. Indeed, if we use a definition corresponding to todays poverty measures, 60 to 80 percent of the U.S. population was poor at the start of the 20th century. Today, while some people undoubtedly continue to struggle, deep material poverty has been nearly eradicated. It is free-market capitalism that is at the heart of this prosperity. Nor is the debate about capitalism vs. socialism merely a question of economics. Strip away all the bells and whistles and there are only two ways to organize society: markets or command and control. Markets are fundamentally about choice and voluntary exchange. Command and control is about, well, command and control that is, force. Advocates of socialism presume that this power will be exercised by wise philosopher-economist-kings who can magically determine precisely what wages should be, how much a product should sell for, and what consumers want (or should want). History shows that, instead, those powers are exercised by fallible human beings who not only get economic decisions wrong but cannot resist spreading their new power into non-economic areas of our lives. Donald Trump, with his continuing calls for government intervention in the economy, is hardly the best person to make the case against Democrats and socialism. He is, in fact, emblematic of the cronyism that has come to taint capitalism in the minds of many. But his message may still find a receptive audience. The same Harvard/Harris poll cited above showed voters overall preferring capitalism by a 6535 percent margin. Voters outside the Democratic-primary base are far less enamored of socialism. Even many of those choosing socialism probably dont really mean it, seeing socialism as simply shorthand for a more generous welfare state. In particular, an anti-capitalist, pro-socialist message will be a very hard sell in the crucial suburbs that have begun swinging Democratic in the last few elections. Voters in those areas are repelled by Trumps rhetoric and Republican social conservatism but remain capitalists. Theres no doubt that Trump remains vulnerable, but so long as Democrats continue their lurch to the left, his reelection prospects will look up. More from National Review Paris (AFP) - Experts from seven countries called Wednesday for a moratorium on the kind of genetic manipulation -- known as germline editing -- used last year to permanently modify the genome of twin girls in Shenzhen, China. Chinese scientist He Jiankui's announcement in November that he had altered their DNA using molecular scissors -- ostensibly to prevent them from contracting HIV -- provoked a global backlash from scientists saying the untested procedure was unethical and potentially dangerous. "We call for a global moratorium on all clinical uses of human germline editing -- that is, changing the heritable DNA in sperm, eggs or embryos to make genetically modified children," the researchers said in a joint statement, published in the scientific journal Nature. "The introduction of genetic modifications into future generations could have permanent and possibly harmful effects on the species," they warned. About 30 nations currently have legislation directly or indirectly barring all clinical use of germline editing. CRISPR-Cas9 technology -- which combines DNA strands with an enzyme to achieve ultra-precise genome editing -- can be used to correct genetic defects in a singe organism, plant or animal. But it can also be used to introduce desirable traits that can be passed on to future generations, a science-fiction scenario that has firmly, and quite suddenly, entered the realm of the possible. Fired from his university, He is under police investigation and has been ordered to halt his work. Last month, the Chinese government unveiled new rules to supervise biotech research, including stiff sanctions for scientists who break the rules. - Genetic enhancement - "By 'global moratorium', we do not mean a permanent ban," the authors, led by president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Eric Lander, said. "Rather, we call for the establishment of an international framework in which nations -- while retaining the right to make their own decisions -- voluntarily commit to not approve any use of clinical germline editing unless certain conditions are met." Story continues Such a temporary ban would not, for example, apply to pure research. The 18 signatories distinguished between "genetic correction" aimed, for example, at modifying rare genetic mutations linked to a specific disease, and "genetic enhancement" designed to boost intelligence, memory, or muscle performance. Such improvements, they noted, could even include the creation of new biological functions, such as the ability to see infrared light or break down certain toxins. "Genetic enhancement of any sort would be unjustifiable at this time," the researchers said. "Attempting to reshape the (human) species on the basis of our current state of knowledge would be hubris." "The issue of genetic correction is more complex," the added. Under their proposal, governments would publically declare that they will not permit any clinical use of human germline editing for a period of, say, five years. A country could then choose to allow a specific usage, but only after an additional period of public notice and a transparent debate on the pros and cons. - Too many unanswered questions - The next step would to evaluate all the ramifications -- scientific, medical, social, ethical and moral -- to determine if the procedure is justified. Finally, society would need to add its stamp of approval, perhaps through a legislative process or a referendum. "Whether such a moratorium would be effective is one point being actively debated by the research community," Nature noted in a separate editorial. Indeed, scientists reacted differently to the proposal. "There is no doubt that genome editing technologies hold huge potential for the future health of patients, but I agree that the clinical use of germline editing should remain prohibited," opined Robert Lechler, president of the Academy of Medical Sciences in Britain. "There are currently just too many unanswered safety, ethical and scientific questions." The proposed moratorium has also been backed by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). But other researchers expressed doubt that such a measure could deter use of new gene-editing technologies given the promise for treating genetic diseases, and the lure of enhancement. "Let's not forget that He Jiankui broke many rules, and was aware of this by choosing to do his work outside of the auspices of the university," said Helen O'Neill, program director for reproductive science and women's health at University College London. "It was not that he did this because the law allowed it." Brussels (AFP) - International donors are gathering in Brussels hoping to drum up $9 billion to help Syrians uprooted by the country's bloody civil war, as European countries warn the money must not prop up President Bashar al-Assad. "The conference should not only be a fundraising exercise. It must be accompanied by a political message on the conditionality of aid for reconstruction and the denial of impunity for Syrian leaders guilty of crimes," a European diplomat told AFP. The UN estimates that $5.5 billion (4.4 billion euros) are needed to help the approximately 5.6 million Syrians forced to flee their country to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. A further $3.3 billion is earmarked for populations inside Syria facing a humanitarian situation described by the Medecins du Monde aid agency as "unsustainable". After two days of talks with humanitarian organisations, foreign ministers and senior UN and EU officials will meet on Thursday to hear financial pledges, with a total announced late afternoon. The UN and EU -- jointly organising the conference -- hope for a better return than at the last Brussels conference, in 2018, when pledges fell far short of expectations with $4.4 billion -- less than half of the $9.1 billion the UN said was needed. - Donor fatigue - "There is a certain fatigue on the part of donors," a European official admitted on the eve of the conference, the third to be held in Brussels and the seventh such event since the conflict erupted in March 2011. "If there is no money, nothing can be done," he warned. The European Union and its member states accounted for three quarters of pledges last year but some big players -- including the United States -- did not announce how much they were donating. Several donors committed themselves over three years at the 2018 conference. France promised 1.1 billion euros for the period 2018 to 2020. Commitments for 2019 and 2020 totalled $3.4 billion. Story continues Assad's claim his country is suffering an "economic siege" and his denunciation of sanctions imposed by the EU and the United States has cast a shadow over the conference. - No impunity - "There is no question of normalisation with the Damascus regime, which some EU countries would be willing to do," a European diplomat said. "The fear is that international aid will be diverted... by the regime," the diplomat added. It is "fundamental" that aid be distributed to the approximately five million Syrians displaced within the country and that it should reach the country's northeast, now freed from the Islamic State group. "The risk is that these regions will be tempted to reach an arrangement with the regime to protect themselves from Turkey if they are abandoned," he said. Rania Malki, the chief executive of Save the Children in Jordan, told AFP that humanitarian organisations like her's were focused on making sure aid got through to those who need it. "Although this is sometimes a challenging and very chaotic operating environment, NGOs have a well established procedure to help ensure donor funding is safeguarded from diversion by sanctioned entities," she told AFP. The EU has dropped its demand that Assad stand down as a precondition for help in reconstructing the country and is instead calling for a transition. "I believe we will have to work with the current regime during a transitional phase, because it is obvious that this regime is on the verge of a military success," European Neighbourhood Policy Commissioner Johannes Hahn told AFP. "I believe we must rid ourselves of this illusion that this will be possible without cooperation with the present regime." The European diplomat said western powers needed to be "realistic". "There can be no regime change overnight, but we expect signs of a credible political transition process, and reconstruction assistance can be a lever on the regime," he said. But several countries are insisting on another condition -- bringing war crimes suspects to book. In 2018, seven countries -- Germany, France, United Kingdom, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium -- vowed that "not a single person responsible for the crimes committed in Syria will be able to escape justice". (BEAUREGARD, Ala.) Rescue crews searched for victims Monday amid the splintered lumber and twisted metal where homes once stood, after the deadliest U.S. tornado in nearly six years ripped through a rural Alabama community. At least 23 people were killed, some of them children. Dozens remained missing in Lee County nearly a day later, according to the sheriff, who said that crews had combed the hardest-hit areas but that the search was far from over. Im not going to be surprised if we dont come up with some more deceased. Hopefully we wont, Coroner Bill Harris said. Harris said the dead included almost entire families and at least three children, ages 6, 9 and 10. The National Weather Service said one and possibly two tornadoes struck the area Sunday afternoon, with a powerful EF-4 twister with winds estimated at 170 mph (274 kph) blamed for most of the destruction. The bigger tornado carved a path nearly 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) wide and 24 miles (39 kilometers) long, stretching toward Georgia, said Chris Darden, the agencys chief meteorologist in Birmingham. The killer winds left shredded metal dangling from the trees and obliterated homes, leaving little more than concrete slabs. Darden said the monster tornado was the single deadliest twister in the U.S. since May 2013, when an EF-5 killed 24 people in Moore, Oklahoma. It looks like someone almost just took a giant knife and scraped the ground, Sheriff Jay Jones said. With daybreak, volunteers used chain saws to clear paths for emergency workers, while at the R&D Grocery, people asked each other if they were OK. Im still thanking God Im among the living, said John Jones, who has lived most of his life in Beauregard, an unincorporated community of roughly 10,000 people about 60 miles east of Montgomery near the Georgia state line. President Donald Trump tweeted that he told the Federal Emergency Management Agency to give Alabama the A Plus treatment. The twister was part of a powerful storm system that slashed its way across the Deep South, spawning numerous tornado warnings in Georgia, South Carolina and Florida. Story continues All we could do is just hold on for life and pray, said Jonathan Clardy, who huddled with his family inside their Beauregard trailer as the tornado ripped the roof off. Its a blessing from God that me and my youngns are alive. Beauregard, named for a Confederate general, is in a rural corner of the same Alabama county that is home to Auburn University. The community has a few small stores, two schools and a volunteer fire department dotting the main highway that runs through town. The sheriff estimated up to 10,000 people live in the area. Everybody in Beauregard is a real close-knit family, Clardy said. Everybody knows everybody around here. Everybody is heartbroken. Julie Morrison and her daughter-in-law picked through the ruins of Morrisons home in Beauregard, looking for keys and a wallet. They managed to salvage her husbands motorcycle boots and a Bible. Morrison said she and her husband took shelter in the bathtub as the twister lifted their house off the ground and swept it into the woods. We knew we were flying because it picked the house up, Morrison said, figuring that the showers fiberglass enclosure helped them survive. She said her son-in-law later dug them out. Levi Baker took a chain saw to help clear a path for ambulances and other emergency vehicles. He said he saw dead people and animals and demolished houses, with one home swept off its foundation and left in the middle of a road. Along the hard-hit country road, giant pieces of metal from a farm building dangled from pine branches 20 feet (6 meters) in the air, making loud creaking sounds as the wind blew. For an entire mile down the road, pines were snapped in half. A mobile home crushed by two trees marked the end of the path of destruction. An early March tornado outbreak in the Alabama-Mississippi area is not unusual, tornado experts said. The National Weather Services Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, posted forecasts for higher possible tornado activity in the region on Thursday, three days before the killer twister struck. University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd said the weather service and its prediction center were all over it in the days and hours before the storms. By Jonathan Stempel (Reuters) - It may not be logical, but it is fair use. A U.S. judge on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publication of a "Star Trek"-themed book parodying the Seuss book "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino in San Diego said ComicMix's crowdfunded "Oh, the Places You'll Boldly Go!" made fair use of the 1990 Seuss book, and did not infringe copyrights of Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which oversees the author's estate. Sammartino said while ComicMix borrowed heavily from Seuss, "Boldly" was a "highly transformative" work, and any harm to the market for Seuss' works was speculative. "We're ecstatic," Michael Licari, a lawyer for ComicMix, said in an interview. "This is a big win for the First Amendment." He said his client looks forward to publishing "Boldly," pending a possible appeal. In a statement, Dr. Seuss Enterprises said it may appeal. It said it strongly disagreed with the fair use conclusion, and that Sammartino downplayed or ignored evidence that ComicMix "intended to preempt the important graduation market" for the Seuss original and would likely cause "real market harm." Dr. Seuss was the pen name of Theodor Geisel, who died in 1991. The plaintiff objected to what it called ComicMix's "slavish copying," including cover art mimicking the original's colored rings, but in the shape of the U.S.S. Enterprise, the "Star Trek" spaceship. Sammartino, however, likened the case to when Paramount Pictures superimposed the head of actor Leslie Nielsen atop a nude, pregnant woman's body for a poster for the 1994 movie "Naked Gun 33-1/3: The Final Insult." In 1998, a federal appeals court in Manhattan agreed with Annie Leibovitz that the poster borrowed more than necessary from her portrait of a nude, pregnant actress Demi Moore for a 1991 "Vanity Fair" cover, but was a parody protected as fair use. Story continues Sammartino said that, in contrast, ComicMix took "no more from the copyrighted works than was necessary" for its purposes, and Dr. Seuss Enterprises could not claim a copyright over any disc-shaped item tilted at a particular angle. Last July, the Manhattan appeals court rejected Dr. Seuss Enterprises' separate challenge to a lewd and profane theatrical parody of the Seuss classic "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" A lower court judge had said that parody was also fair use. The case is Dr. Seuss Enterprises LP v ComicMix LLC, U.S. District Court, Southern District of California. No. 16-02779. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Chris Reese) Kate at the Henry Fawcett Childrens Centre on Tuesday [Photo: Getty] While Kate Middleton and Prince William may rarely be pictured with Prince Louis, the Duchess of Cambridge has given royal fans a rare insight into how her 10-month-old son is doing. During a trip to the Henry Fawcett Childrens Centre in London yesterday, the 37-year-old spoke with fellow mum Kriti, revealing Prince Louis is already trying to walk. Louis just wants to pull himself up all the time, Kate Middleton told Kriti, according to Hello!. He has got these little walkers and is bombing around in them. Kriti said the Duchess told her Prince Louis is cruising (pulling himself up on furniture) and that she is running after him all the time. Kate looked stunning in a purple Gucci pussy bow blouse for the event, which she teamed with a pair of Jigsaw trousers and new Gianvito Rossi pumps. It isnt the first time Kate has informed fans of her babys progress through a royal visit. Back in June last year we first heard that he was crawling when the Duke and Duchess visited Dundee in Scotland. The royals were on a walkabout when a fan in the crowd asked for an update on Prince Louis. According to royal photographer, Mark Stewart, the mum replied saying the nine-month-old is a fast crawler. Kate looked stunning in a purple Gucci pussy bow blouse for the event, which she teamed with a pair of Jigsaw trousers Gianvito Rossi heels. [Photo: Getty Images] In December last year, Kate told royal fans while visiting the RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus that Prince Louis was already practising one very important royal duty. She asked whether [my daughter] was sleeping through the night, and she told me that Louis is starting to wave, Rhian Davis told People magazine about a conversation she has with the Duchess of Cambridge. Story continues Kate and Prince William welcomed Prince Louis into the world on April 23rd, with the Duchess of Cambridge making an appearance on the steps of the Lindo Wing that evening. The Rural Electrification Agency of Uganda has received funds for the acquisition of supply and delivery of self-protected distribution transformers. Self-protecting distribution transformers incorporate a circuit-breaking safety system that shuts down the transformer in the event of an internal fault. The Rural Electrification Agency in a notice release earlier this week invites sealed bids from eligible bidders for the provision of the above supplies. According to the agency, bidding will be conducted in accordance with the Open International Bidding (OIB) method contained in the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Act, 2003, and is open to all bidders. Earlier this month, the Government of Uganda through the Rural Electrification Agency announced a plan to connect at least 22,000 households with electricity following the commissioning of the rural electricity program. African Development Bank will be funding the 413 km power line for US $4m. The project also targets 297 public institutions. Uganda currently has about 20% of the population connected to electricity, one of the lowest figures globally. The number drops to an estimated 7% in rural areas. Out of the 10 sub-counties in the district, only two are connected to the national power grid. Wednesday, March 13, 2019 Pre-market futures are up at this hour Wednesday morning, with major U.S. indexes in the green along with oil and precious metals. We also begin to catch up on government-based economic reports, which had been delayed over a 5-week shutdown for most of January and part of December last year. Durable Goods Orders for the month of January surprised to the upside in its release this morning: +0.4% on the headline not only outperformed estimates but swung to a solid positive number from negative expectations (-0.1% to -0.6%, depending on who youre listening to). Decembers Durable Goods headline ticked up 10 basis points to +1.3% in the revision. Good numbers here. Stripping out volatile Transportation costs, we do swing back to a negative number: -0.1%. Yet Non-Defense Capital Goods, ex-Aircraft, reached +0.8% and ex-Defense +0.7% definitely healthy reads, where Pentagon spending looked to be what held Januarys figures back. Because these can vary widely month to month, the core growth in Durables spending appear to be in a good place or at least they were two months ago. The February Producer Price Index (PPI) follows yesterdays in-line Consumer Price Index (CPI), coming in at +0.1%. This is lower than the +0.2% expected, but a neat swing to the positive from the previous months -0.1%. Year over year, final demand reached +1.9%, basically level with expectations. Ex-food & energy (also potentially volatile measures) brought +2.5%, which was lower than estimated and below the previous months +2.6%. The takeaway here pivots on PPI vs. CPI reads: currently (or last month, at least) Consumer pricing is right where analysts had expected while Producers were trimming their price tags. For those of us who follow these reads, we are in business as usual territory, with a slow gradual increase over time on the Consumer side pretty much considered optimum. Boeing 737 MAX Update More regions around thew world continue to ground the Boeing 737 MAX plane due to technical issues that have potentially caused two tragic commercial airline crashes in the past six months. The European Union yesterday also chose to ground the model until these issues are addressed by Boeing BA. Yet Zacks Senior Strategist Kevin Cook has named Boeing todays Bull of the Day. The Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) company may have a complicated path to further success ahead, but Kevin deftly breaks it all down in this article: Bull of the Day - Boeing (BA) Mark Vickery Senior Editor Questions or comments about this article and/or its author? Click here>> Story continues Today's Best Stocks from Zacks Would you like to see the updated picks from our best market-beating strategies? From 2017 through 2018, while the S&P 500 gained +15.8%, five of our screens returned +38.0%, +61.3%, +61.6%, +68.1%, and +98.3%. This outperformance has not just been a recent phenomenon. From 2000 2018, while the S&P averaged +4.8% per year, our top strategies averaged up to +56.2% per year. See their latest picks free >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report The Boeing Company (BA) : Free Stock Analysis Report SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF (DIA): ETF Research Reports SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY): ETF Research Reports Invesco QQQ (QQQ): ETF Research Reports To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Sao Paulo (AFP) - A shooting at a school near Sao Paulo on Wednesday left eight people dead, state military police said, before the two shooters turned their weapons on themselves. "Eight people died at the scene, including the two assailants who committed suicide," a state military police spokesman said. "Two injured people died after being taken to hospital." Around 15 people were injured in the shooting at the Raul Brasil public school in Suzano, south-east Brazil. Website UO1 said the two killers, "probably teenagers, entered the school shooting with their heads covered by a hood." Sao Paulo state Governor Joao Doria said four children and two members of staff were among the dead. He said it was not yet known whether the two assailants were former pupils at the school. Worried family members congregated outside the school alongside firefighters and security services, an AFP photographer at the scene said. The attack took place at around 9:30 am (1230 GMT) during a recreation period for some students, authorities said. Military police Colonel Marcelo Sales said the two attackers "shot at the owner of a gas station," who is now receiving hospital treatment, before entering the school. Sales said the assailants used "a .38 calibre revolver and a medieval weapon that looked like a bow and arrows." After shooting at students in the yard, the killers "headed to the language center" where several pupils were hiding and "committed suicide in a corridor," added Sales. Globonews showed television pictures of pupils fleeing the scene after escaping over a wall. Website G1 published a grainy video purportedly taken inside the school in which the screams of terrified pupils can be heard as they come across dead classmates. It's not the first mass school shooting in Brazil's history. In April 2011, a former pupil killed a dozen school children and injured many more before turning his gun on himself at a school in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. Brazil is one of the most violent countries in the world with 64,000 murders in 2017, a rate of almost 31 per 100,000 inhabitants -- that's three times higher than the level the United Nations classifies as endemic violence. Far right President Jair Bolsonaro passed a law allowing people to carry arms soon after assuming power in January, delivering on a campaign promise. SAO PAULO (Reuters) - At least eight people were killed at a Brazil grade school, where two young people were seen entering the building and firing weapons early on Wednesday, according to the Globo TV network. Globo reported that five children, one adult and two adolescent shooters were among the dead. Police and firefighters did not immediately respond to requests for comment. (Reporting by Brad Brooks; Editing by Bernadette Baum) Beirut (AFP) - Bashar al-Assad has won his war for political survival but as Syria's conflict enters its ninth year, his country is fractured, cash-strapped, and prey to both friend and foe. The civil war reaches its eighth anniversary this month with more than 360,000 people killed, millions more displaced, and devastation worth $400 billion. As the war winds down, Syrians in regime-held areas may no longer have to worry about bombardment, but they face fuel shortages, frequent power cuts, unemployment and rampant poverty. From the brutal repression of anti-Assad protests in 2011, the war spiralled into a complex conflict involving jihadists. Syria's president may have reversed the initial gains of the armed opposition and jihadists, but foreign powers have entered his turf. "The Syrian conflict is more complicated because there are now powerful foreign actors that control large zones inside Syria," said Nicholas Heras, an analyst at the Centre for a New American Security. "And these foreign actors are not likely to leave Syria any time soon." Backed by Russia and Iran, Assad's forces now control almost two-thirds of the country. But key areas remain beyond his control, including a swathe of the oil-rich northeast held by US-backed Kurdish-led forces fighting the Islamic State group. The northwestern region of Idlib, held by Syria's former Al-Qaeda affiliate, is protected by a ceasefire deal, which has seen Turkish troops deployed to the area. And Ankara's Syrian rebel proxies hold several northern cities near the border. Joshua Landis, of the University of Oklahoma, painted a grim picture. "The Syrian map is one of division and despair," he said. "Over 30 percent of the country is occupied by foreign governments who have built and funded local militaries." - Return on investment - Various foreign powers are competing to reap a return on years of military investment, or protect their interests. Story continues Russia has backed Assad with troops and air strikes since 2015, while Iran has dispatched advisers as well as Shiite fighters from Lebanon and Iraq. "Russia wants to stabilise Assad to keep a steady local partner to guard its expanding bases in Syria" and project power region-wide, Heras said. Iran wants a foothold in Syria, in case of a war between its Lebanese ally Hezbollah and Israel to the southwest, he said. Both allies hope to play a key role in reconstruction and have signed deals including for electricity, oil and infrastructure projects. Turkey and the United States, who have traditionally backed non-state actors, have other interests. President Recep Tayyip "Erdogan wants to rip the Kurds out of America's embrace" and impose Turkey in northern and eastern Syria, Heras said. Washington backs Kurdish-led fighters who control a large and oil-rich northeastern swathe, and has US troops in Syria as part of the anti-IS fight drawing to a close near the Iraqi border. Turkey views Kurdish fighters as "terrorists" and has long threatened to attack the Kurds south of its border. Washington is to dial down its presence to 200 "peace-keeping" troops after IS is expelled from its last pocket. As well as shielding the Kurds from Turkey, a US presence piles pressure on Assad. "Assad needs the water and wheat that the United States controls in eastern Syria," Heras said. But "it is US policy to keep these resources from him and force the economy of Assad's statelet to collapse around him," he added. - 'Three jobs' to get by - Along with the European Union, the United States has ramped up sanctions on Syrian officials and companies, including by seeking to prevent oil shipments to the country. Landis said those measures were compounding post-war challenges, chief among them relaunching a devastated economy. "The US is imposing one of the strictest sanctions regimes on Syria which will continue to deepen the misery of the people," he added. Plus "the worst characteristics of the regime have been strengthened in the struggle to win the civil war: corruption, violence, and the absence of the rule of law," he said. Shadi Abbas, 40, is struggling to return to a normal life after a routine military service lasted a whole eight years. "I feel I have to work three jobs" to make ends meet, he said. "Even if I found some money and work, who will give me back my youth," he said. But after years of war, Assad has secured his capital, regained control of key commercial arteries, and started a timid comeback on the Arab scene. Much to the despair of the fragmented opposition, several countries have called for Syria to be reintegrated into the Arab League, from which it was suspended as the death toll mounted in 2011. Remaining rebels and jihadists are largely confined to Idlib after being ferried out of other parts of the country retaken by the regime. The political opposition is scattered abroad and has failed to end the bloodshed in numerous rounds of abortive peace talks. Whatever the challenges, "revolution is on low flame, and that is a win for Assad," Heras said. ANKARA, Turkey (AP) The latest quarrel between the leaders of Turkey and Israel continued for a second day Wednesday as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan labeled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "thief" and a "tyrant." Speaking at an election campaign rally, Erdogan called Netanyahu "the thief who heads Israel" in a reference to corruption allegations against the long-seated Israeli prime minister. Netanyahu fired back on Twitter, describing the Turkish president as a "dictator who sends tens of thousands of political opponents to prison, commits genocide against the Kurds, and occupies Northern Cyprus." Israel and Turkey were once close allies, but diplomatic relations between the two countries have chilled in the past decade. Under Erdogan, Turkey has become a vocal critic of Israeli policies dealing with Palestinians, sparking frequent verbal feuds with Netanyahu. At Wednesday's campaign rally, Erdogan criticized Israel's closure of a Jerusalem holy site Tuesday after Palestinian suspects hurled a firebomb at a police station. There were no injuries in the incident, but police shuttered the site, which Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims the Noble Sanctuary. The site reopened Wednesday without incident. "You are a tyrant," Erdogan said, addressing Netanyahu at the rally. "You are a tyrant who slaughters 7-year-old Palestinian kids." The Israeli prime minister responded in his tweet. "It's best that he doesn't get involved with Jerusalem, our capital for 3,000 years," Netanyahu quipped. "Erdogan can only learn from us how to respect every religion and protect human rights." The last war of words started Tuesday when Erdogan's spokesman called Netanyahu a racist for saying Israel was the nation-state only of the Jewish people. Netanyahu struck back, calling Erdogan a dictator and criticizing the Turkey for imprisoning journalists. Washington (AFP) - Similarities between the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes have focused attention on an anti-stalling system used in the new Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft. The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) is an automated safety feature on the 737 Max 8 designed to prevent the plane from entering into a stall, or losing lift. Both the Lion Air jet, which crashed in October, killing 189 people, and the Ethiopian Airlines aircraft, which went down on Sunday, leaving 157 people dead, were fitted with the system. Both planes experienced similarly erratic steep climbs and descents and fluctuating airspeeds before crashing shortly after takeoff. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), while noting the similarities between the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines accidents, stressed that it was too early to draw any conclusions. MCAS was introduced by Boeing on the 737 Max 8 because its heavier, more fuel-efficient engines changed the aerodynamic qualities of the workhorse aircraft and can cause the plane's nose to pitch up in certain conditions during manual flight. Angle of attack sensors on the aircraft tell the MCAS to automatically point the nose of the plane down if it is in danger of going into a stall. This is done through horizontal stabilizers on the plane's tail which are activated by the aircraft's flight control computer. According to Boeing, MCAS does not control the plane during normal flight but "improves the behavior of the airplane" during "non-normal" situations. These could be steep turns or after takeoff when a plane is climbing with flaps up at speeds that are close to stall speed. According to the flight data recorder, the pilots of Lion Air Flight 610 struggled to control the aircraft as the automated MCAS system repeatedly pushed the plane's nose down following takeoff. The pilots of the Ethiopian Airlines plane reported similar difficulty before the aircraft plunged into the ground shortly after takeoff. Story continues - Software updates - A preliminary report on the Lion Air Flight 610 accident blamed it in part on a faulty angle of attack sensor that triggered the MCAS system and automatically forced the plane's nose down. Pilots flying the same Lion Air plane the previous day had managed to override the automated flight control system. Boeing came in for some criticism after the Lion Air crash for allegedly failing to adequately inform 737 pilots about the functioning of MCAS or provide training about the system. Following the Lion Air crash, Boeing issued a bulletin to airlines operating the 737 Max 8 advising pilots how to override the MCAS system. The US aircraft manufacturer issued a statement on Monday saying it was too early to understand the cause of the Ethiopian Airlines accident. Boeing also said it was working on software updates to the MCAS system which would be deployed across the 737 Max fleet. It said procedures already exist to "safely handle the unlikely event of erroneous data coming from an angle of attack (AOA) sensor," the suspected cause of the Lion Air crash. "The pilot will always be able to override the flight control law (MCAS) using electric trim or manual trim," the aircraft manufacturer said. A growing list of countries have grounded their 737 Max aircraft after the two deadly crashes in just five months. Boeing has described the Max series as its fastest-selling family of planes, with more than 5,000 orders placed to date from about 100 customers. But not since the 1970s -- when the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 suffered successive fatal incidents -- has a new model been involved in two deadly accidents in such a short period. STRASBOURG (Reuters) - The European Union should reject a request from Britain to extend its Brexit deadline unless British lawmakers rally around a clear objective for what they want to achieve, the European Parliament's Brexit coordinator said on Wednesday. Liberal party leader Guy Verhofstadt told the chamber that extending Brexit beyond the May 23-26 EU legislative election would allow Brexit supporters to hijack the European debate. He said that extending Brexit "even for 24 hours" beyond the current deadline of March 29 should only be done if the British parliament, which rejected the EU's treaty offer on Tuesday, had a clear plan. A decision on extension would have to be made by EU national leaders if the British government were to request one. (Reporting by Alastair Macdonald @macdonaldrtr; editing by Francesco Guarascio) Brussels (AFP) - The British parliament's rejection of the Brexit agreement makes crashing out of the EU without a deal much more likely, the bloc said Tuesday, as it warned there is no more it can do. Lawmakers inflicted another crushing defeat on beleaguered Prime Minister Theresa May, voting to reject the divorce deal, even after she secured further guarantees from Brussels. Senior EU officials lined up to voice regret at the result, and to hammer home the message that Brussels would not make any further concessions to help May win over recalcitrant MPs. If parliament fails to approve an accord the UK will crash out of the bloc without a deal on March 29 -- unless a delay is agreed, something the EU said it would be willing to consider. A spokesman for Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, said he regretted the result, but warned that from Brussels' viewpoint "it is difficult to see what more we can do". "With only 17 days left to 29 March, today's vote has significantly increased the likelihood of a 'no-deal' Brexit," the spokesman said. The EU's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier echoed the view, saying there was nothing more Brussels could do. "The EU has done everything it can to help get the Withdrawal Agreement over the line. The impasse can only be solved in the UK. Our 'no-deal' preparations are now more important than ever before," Barnier tweeted. - 'Uncharted waters' - The message was repeated by a spokeswoman for European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. "Given the additional assurances provided by the EU in December, January and yesterday, there is no more we can do. If there is a solution to the current impasse it has to be found in London," the spokeswoman said. EU ambassadors will meet in Brussels on Wednesday morning to assess the vote, the bloc's contingency plans -- and to discuss whether to grant a delay to Brexit if London asks for one. Story continues "We are in uncharted waters," one EU diplomat told AFP. "We are not talking about a situation where there are still good solutions -- we have to choose between different suboptimal solutions." Shortly before the vote, Barnier voiced disquiet at the tenor of the debate in the House of Commons, warning MPs against the "dangerous illusion" that they could benefit from a transition period even without a proper divorce deal. "Listening to debate in @HouseofCommons: there seems to be a dangerous illusion that the UK can benefit from a transition in the absence of the WA," Barnier tweeted, referring to the Withdrawal Agreement. "Let me be clear: the only legal basis for a transition is the WA. No withdrawal agreement means no transition." - 'Buckle up' - Transitional arrangements to wind down Britain's involvement with the EU form part of the agreement -- but would need the British and European parliaments' approvals to take effect. Some Brexit-supporting MPs argue that contingency measures announced by the EU that would come into effect in the event of no deal would effectively operate as a mini transition deal -- a notion strongly rejected by Brussels officials. Attention will now turn to whether Britain will ask for a delay to Brexit -- a question MPs will be asked to vote on in the coming days. "Should there be a UK reasoned request for an extension, the EU27 will stand ready to consider it and decide by unanimity," Juncker's spokeswoman said. An extension would need the backing of all 27 remaining EU countries. Some countries, notably France, have insisted an extension would not be granted without good reason, but another EU diplomat said even if the arguments were shaky "we will probably still do it anyway". "Now we have to buckle up a little tighter because the speed is getting higher so close to the Brexit date," the diplomat said. The Johannesburg Securities Exchange (JSE)-listed AEP Energy will convert the two diesel-fired Nairobi power plants its acquiring from Iberafrica to gas-fired generators whose electricity is cleaner and cheaper, the company said. The South African giant is buying out Spanish company Naturgy Energy Group, which held 100 per cent shareholding in the Iberafrica diesel plants located in Nairobi South. The deal will present AEP with an opportunity to convert the currently diesel-fired engines of NSPP1 and NSPP2 to run on LNG (natural gas), thereby enhancing long-term value proposition to Kenya Power, AEP Energy Africa says in a statement. Iberafrica, like other power producers in the country including KenGen, sells electricity in bulk to Kenya Power which in turn retails to homes and businesses. The diesel-to-gas engine conversion plan comes as Kenya places priority on low-cost green electricity while cutting reliance on expensive diesel generated power. As a reminder, the diesel/kerosene plants, due to their flexibility in being switched on and off and being ramped up and down, play a crucial role of matching demand spikes and drops in the National Grid. Due to their expensive power, tied to the cost of global fuel prices, diesel generators are only switched on after the rest of cheaper sources have been injected into the grid and theres need for more power. Diesel plants emit greenhouse gases, making them environmentallyunfriendly. The conversion of the two plants is seen as a big step towards clean and cheap energy. NEW YORK State prosecutors in Manhattan hit Paul Manafort with a new indictment Wednesday, roughly an hour after the disgraced former Trump campaign manager received his latest federal prison term. Unlike the two federal cases in which Manafort has been sentenced to prison, a conviction on the charges announced by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance would be beyond the reach of any pardon issued by President Donald Trump. Federal prosecutors have said they suspect Manafort could be angling for a pardon to secure his freedom. The White House has not ruled out the possibility that he could receive one. Asked about the possibility of a pardon at the White House on Wednesday, Trump said he has "not even given it a thought," though added he feels "very badly" for his former campaign chairman. The 16-count New York indictment alleges that Manafort received more than $1 million by working with unnamed others to willfully submit false financial statements when applying for residential mortgage loans. The charges include residential mortgage fraud, conspiracy, falsifying business records, and participating in a scheme to defraud. The alleged crimes were committed between December 22, 2015, and approximately March 7, 2016, the indictment charged. Paul Manafort departs U.S. District Court after a hearing April 19, 2018, in Washington. "No one is beyond the law in New York," Vance said in a statement issued with the charges. "Following an investigation commenced by our office in March 2017, a Manhattan grand jury has charged Mr. Manafort with state criminal violations which strike at the heart of New York's sovereign interests, including the integrity of our residential mortgage market." Manafort's lawyers did not immediately respond to questions about the new charges. Sentenced in Virginia:: 'Humiliated and ashamed': Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman, sentenced to nearly 4 years in prison Sentenced in Washington: Paul Manafort sentenced to a total of 7.5 years in prison: 'It is hard to overstate the number of lies' Story continues A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced the longtime political operative to a total of 7 years in federal prison, adding 43 months to the sentence he received in another federal case in Virginia last week. Manafort had pleaded guilty to two felonies in Washington as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's nearly two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. A federal jury in Virginia separately convicted him of tax and bank fraud charges in a related case. The pair of prison sentences marked a dramatic downfall for Manafort, who helped guide Trump to the presidency. Some of the federal charges against Manafort included evidence about New York City properties he bought and the mortgages obtained for the transactions. Vance has legal jurisdiction because at least one of the real estate transactions allegedly involving mortgages issued on the basis of falsified financial information took place in Manhattan. Vance's office did not immediately respond to a question about whether the new indictment was meant as a way to prevent Manafort from going free if Trump decides to pardon him. Andrew Weissmann, a member of Muellers legal team, told U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Feb. 4 that prosecutors thought Manafort, who had promised to cooperate with the Russia investigation, executed an about-face and lied to the prosecutors as a way to "augment his chances for a pardon." Trump has tweeted praise of Manafort as a brave man! and someone who refused to break like Michael Cohen, the presidents former personal lawyer, who has provided evidence in at least two criminal probes centered on Trump and denounced his former boss in spectacular testimony before Congress. However, Trump has declined to comment repeatedly on whether hes considering a move to spare Manafort from punishment. I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. Justice took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to break - make up stories in order to get a deal. Such respect for a brave man! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2018 White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Monday that Trump "has made his position on that clear, and he'll make a decision when he is ready." The legal question of defendants can be prosecuted twice for the same offenses once by federal authorities and once by state law enforcement officials is a subject in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case. Such dual prosecutions have been authorized under the 1959 "dual sovereignty" exception to the Fifth Amendment's Double Jeopardy clause; the court is considering whether to reverse that position. A coalition of liberal and conservative justices appeared unlikely to do that when the nation's top court heard oral arguments on the issue in December. Jansen reported from Washington. Contributing: Richard Wolf and John Fritze Manafort Indictment by kmccoynyc on Scribd This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Ex-Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, just sentenced to federal prison, faces new charges in N.Y. indictment By Ron Bousso HOUSTON (Reuters) - Exxon Mobil Corp is considering exploring for oil and gas in Israel, said a person with direct knowledge of the matter, in what would make Exxon the first oil major to operate in the country still technically at war with Gulf Arab states. A number of large gas discoveries offshore Israel and in nearby eastern Mediterranean waters in the last decade have made Israel a potentially lucrative prospect for big energy firms. The region is emerging as a new hot spot for gas exploration and production. Until those discoveries, Israel was believed to be sitting on scant oil and gas reserves. There was little reason for energy firms to explore for energy in Israel and risk complicating operations and future investments in nearby Arab countries that hold some of the world's largest energy reserves. Exxon executives held talks with Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz in Houston this week about bidding for the right to explore and pump oil from offshore blocks in an auction that Israel will hold in June, said the person with direct knowledge. Exxon, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, recently acquired a $50,000 data package from the Israeli energy ministry for the auction, the person said. An Exxon team also visited a data center set up by the ministry in Jerusalem, the source said. That center holds detailed information about the geology of the sub-sea rocks, believed to hold up to 75 trillion cubic feet of gas and 6.6 billion barrels of oil, according to estimates. Exxon declined comment. Israel's energy ministry declined comment. In February, Exxon announced a major gas discovery in Cyprus together with its partner Qatar Petroleum. That field is near two other huge gas finds in the region: Leviathan off Israel and Zohr off Egypt. The U.S. major and competitors such as Royal Dutch Shell and France's Total have avoided investing in Israel, for fear of souring relationships with the governments of giant regional oil and gas producers such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. Those countries do not recognize Israel. Story continues Exxon is one of the biggest foreign investors in Qatar. It also has refining and petrochemical operations in Saudi Arabia, and produces oil and gas in Iraq and the United Arab Emirates. President Donald Trump has angered the Arab world and stoked international concern with changes to U.S. policy in the region, including moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged oil and gas companies to use their clout in world markets to advance the Trump administration's foreign policy agenda. That included helping the administration's efforts to isolate Israel's arch-enemy Iran, and Venezuela. (GRAPHIC: East Mediterranean gas - https://tmsnrt.rs/2O5muhW) MEDITERRANEAN GAS HUB The discovery and development of major fields off the coasts of Egypt, Israel and Cyprus have led to the development of the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum, a partnership created in January between seven countries, including those three, to create a regional gas market. Steinitz met with U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry on Monday on the sidelines of an energy conference in Houston to discuss this partnership. He also held talks with his regional counterparts. "We are just at the tip of the iceberg... Israel and Cyprus are little countries, but they have a good chance to become exporters in the future," Steinitz said during a panel discussion at CERAWeek. "It's also important that we have the strong backing from the United States of America." Israel gas production is dominated today by a handful of local, Greek and U.S. companies. The country became a producer in 2013 with the launch of the Tamar field, operated by U.S. explorer Noble Energy Inc. Noble is developing the Leviathan and is scheduled to begin production later this year. Israel hopes that the coming licensing round will draw significantly larger interest than a previous round when only two companies bid amid skepticism about its ability to sell and export the fuel. Israel has signed major export deals with Jordan and Egypt over the past two years, opening new markets to companies looking to sell Israeli gas. Egypt also saw rapid growth in natural gas production following the discovery of giant fields in the Mediterranean. Several other major oil and gas companies are considering bidding in the licensing round, which closes June 17, according to the source. (Reporting by Ron Bousso; Editing by Simon Webb and Howard Goller) Baghouz (Syria) (AFP) - Islamic State group fighters launched suicide attacks Wednesday at US-backed Syrian forces in a desperate bid to defend their last scrap of territory after 3,000 of their fellow jihadists surrendered. Despite the attempted counterpunch the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said in an evening statement that its fighters had advanced as they conducted "a large-scale attack on terrorist positions". Four SDF members were killed in clashes on Wednesday, it said. AFP correspondents heard air strikes and artillery fire near the frontline after night fall Wednesday, on a fourth night of bombardment. IS once ruled over millions in a swathe of Syria and Iraq, but it has since lost all that territory except for a riverside slither in the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border. Thousands of men and women have poured out of the pocket in recent weeks, hampering an advance by the SDF, which has paused its offensive multiple times to allow evacuations. Supported by air strikes by the US-led coalition, the SDF resumed shelling on Sunday. They unleashed a deluge of fire on jihadist outposts for three nights in a row, engulfing their makeshift encampment in a ravaging blaze. "IS's final moments have started," SDF official Jiaker Amed told AFP Wednesday. Clashes flared as the SDF worked to thwart any IS fightback. Jihadists "launched two counterattacks today -- one in the morning and another in the afternoon", an SDF official told AFP. "The second one was much stronger" and was launched under the cover of smoke caused by bombing, he said. The official said jihadists were using suicide bombers but his force intercepted them before they reached their target. The jihadists "made no progress and they were stopped," he said. - 'Final hour' - Inside Baghouz, the crackle and thud of gunfire and shelling rang out from the encampment as plumes of thick black smoke rose over the bombed-out IS bastion. Story continues Amid the rubble, three SDF fighters lobbed a salvo of mortar shells towards the IS pocket, hours after the first attempted counterattack at daybreak under the cover of a dust storm. On a rooftop near the front line, an AFP correspondent saw a warplane fire two missiles at IS positions. Delil, an SDF fighter, said: "Today, the sandstorm is to their benefit but all coming days are ours." Outside the village, dozens of evacuees sat in clusters on a field dotted with yellow flowers, a day after thousands of the last survivors of the "caliphate" handed themselves over to US-backed forces. After a night of heavy bombardment on Tuesday, SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali said about 3,000 jihadists had handed themselves over to the SDF in the past 24 hours. "The battle is ongoing and the final hour is now closer than ever," he said on Twitter. But an SDF official said on Wednesday that "it appears as though many fighters remain inside" the last pocket. Near the front line on Tuesday night, AFP correspondents saw bright, long streaks of light in the night sky as US-backed forces bombed jihadist outposts. Explosions shook the IS pocket as large fires tore through a cluster of tents and buildings. - 'No freedom of movement' - Coalition spokesman Sean Ryan on Wednesday said IS has no room to manoeuvre. "There is no freedom of movement at night for the enemy," he told AFP. "Combined with the SDF ground movement against the final enclave, progress is being made and their capabilities are being severely destroyed." Since December, about 60,000 people have left the last IS redoubt, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, around a tenth of them suspected jihadists. The exodus has sparked a humanitarian crisis in Kurdish-run camps for the displaced further north, which are struggling to accomodate the mass influx of women and children. The UN's food agency on Tuesday appealed for urgent funding for the Al-Hol camp, which is receiving the bulk of evacuees. At the height of its brutal rule, IS controlled a stretch of land in Syria and Iraq the size of the United Kingdom. The total capture of the Baghouz camp by the SDF would mark the end of the cross-border "caliphate" it proclaimed more than four years ago. But beyond Baghouz, IS retains a presence in eastern Syria's vast Badia desert and sleeper cells in the northeast. The jihadists have continued to claim deadly attacks in SDF-held territory in recent months, and the US military has warned of the need to maintain a "vigilant offensive". Baghouz is the latest major battlefront in Syria's complex civil war, which has killed more than 360,000 people since 2011. Qatar Petroleum has joined the Italian oil company ENI and Moroccos Office for Hydrocarbons and Mining ONHYM to explore for oil and gas off Tarfaya. ENI and Qatar Petroleum have signed an agreement on Wednesday allowing the Qatari company to acquire a 30% stake in the offshore concession of Tarfaya, including 12 blocks of exploration off Morocco. Eni, via its subsidiary Eni Morocco, and ONHYM currently hold a 75% and 25% stake, respectively, with ENI acting as operator. The companies are currently conducting geological and geophysical studies to assess the potential of the exploration areas, as part of the work program for the first phase of exploration under the Tarfaya Petroleum Agreement. The first phase of exploration ends in 2020. The Tarfaya exploration permit covers an overall area of approximately 23,900 square kilometers and waters up to 1,000 meters deep. Under the partnership, conditioned by the approval of the Moroccan authorities, the participation in this exploration concession will be 45% for the Italian Eni, 30% for Qatar Petroleum and 25% for ONHYM. This agreement represents a milestone in Qatar Petroleums partnership with Eni and further strengthens our distinguished and fraternal relations with the Kingdom of Morocco, said Qatari Minister of Energy Saad bin Sherida Al Kaabi. We are looking forward to working with Eni and Onhym. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Moroccan authorities for their support and cooperation, Al Kaabi was quoted by the Qatari news agency QNA as saying. Qatar Petroleum and the Italian ENI also operate in Mexico, Mozambique, and Oman. Berwick-upon-Tweed (United Kingdom) (AFP) - In a remote, eurosceptic English town, locals applauded the shooting-down of the prime minister's Brexit plan. Now they want to bring on a "no deal" departure. They will be angry if they do not get it, as scheduled, on March 29 -- despite dire warnings from the government about the economic fallout. In Berwick-upon-Tweed, a historic battleground town near the Scottish border, local councillor Karin Graham, 54, held a party on Tuesday night for locals to watch Theresa May's Brexit plan being voted down. But even with May's plan in tatters, the Brexiteers feared their views could yet be ignored. MPs are now due to vote on no deal or a postponement of Britain's departure. Any further delay to Brexit could spark "rioting on the streets", said Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the local Conservative MP. The cosy living room in this wind-swept spot -- the most northern town in England -- seemed a world away from the parliament in London, 350 miles (560 kilometres) to the south. "I'm pleased that this deal has been rejected," said Colin Hardy, a retired oil industry executive of 68, after watching the vote. "I hope that our elected members of parliament have the integrity to honour the will of the people which was to leave on the 29th of this month," he added. "If we fail to do that, we have given away democracy." - 'Walk away' - Voters in Berwick-on-Tweed -- population 12,500 -- backed leaving the EU by 54 to 46 percent in the 2016 referendum. Berwick is well versed in wrangling between distant powers over sovereignty -- as UK eurosceptics have sparred with Brussels over Brexit. The town has changed hands between English and Scottish rulers at least 13 times over the centuries. This history of conflict and uneasy peacetime oozes from its old stone streets, with remnants of its castle and the town's defences still visible among its elegant facades. Story continues Locals proclaim a long-held sense of independence, exhibited today in a distrust of both Brussels and London, and an eagerness to get on with Brexit. To that end, guests at the viewing party said May must step down after her defeat. "She should resign and just do the honourable thing," said Ian Dods, 62, who runs a local bed-and-breakfast. But they feared that May -- who supported staying in the EU in the referendum -- could undermine the result. With a majority of British lawmakers appearing opposed to a no-deal scenario, these eurosceptics doubted such a departure would happen. They suspected a plot by MPs to postpone Brexit and hold a second referendum that could keep Britain in the EU. "We need a new driving force," party host Graham said. "And that's got to be a Brexiteer." - Brexit in hard times - Berwick's pro-EU minority remained hopeful about the possibility of another popular vote on Brexit. "I'd like to see it go back to another referendum... because I think we were totally misled" about the consequences, said Brian Douglas, 71, the town's ceremonial mayor. He said Brexit would only worsen the region's economic deprivation. Once one of the most prosperous merchant towns in Britain, Berwick has hit hard times. It has some of the country's lowest wages and among its highest unemployment and ratios of elderly people. It is perhaps most famous now for its grand 28-arch viaduct over the River Tweed on the main railway between London and Edinburgh. But signs of economic hardship afflict the town centre, with numerous used goods stores and vacant businesses. "We've felt let down and left out," Douglas said. "Remain is the best thing for... the long term future." - 'Feeling forgotten' - For others, Brexit represents an opportunity for the run-down town. "You get that feeling you're forgotten about," said Derek Sharman, 68, a local historian and tour guide. He supports leaving the EU and said he would have liked lawmakers to approve May's deal. "We've all had enough," he said. "Business needs to get on with things and you can't go on with the nonsense of extending it for a year... what is that going to do?" The eurosceptics in Graham's living room meanwhile had their sights set on leaving the EU without a deal. "In any negotiation, there has to be a point when you walk away," said Hardy. Like many of the staunchest Brexiteers, he brushed off doubts about the chaos that businesses and officials have warned could come from a no-deal exit. "We, as individuals, will probably not notice any significant difference." (Reuters) - The U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Wednesday launched an investigation into 12 health insurers, including Anthem Inc and UnitedHealth Group, over their sale of short-term plans. Terming the short-term plans as "junk", the committee said it was troubled that consumers who sign up for the plans are being misled about the nature of the coverage they are purchasing. "The Democrats cite concerns over several troubling reports of STLDI (short-term, limited duration insurance) plans denying coverage entirely, charging more based on age, gender or health state, or refusing to cover consumers for care that may stem from what the company deems a pre-existing condition," the panel said. Shares of Health Insurance Innovations Inc fell nearly 20 percent, while eHealth Inc dropped 4.8 pct. Shares of Anthem and UnitedHealth Group pared gains, but were still up between 2 and 3 percent. (Reporting by Vibhuti Sharma in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel) WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump should not be impeached unless the reasons are overwhelming and bipartisan, given how divisive it would be for the country, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a Washington Post interview published on Monday. "Im not for impeachment," Pelosi, the top U.S. Democrat, said in the interview, which was conducted last week. "Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I dont think we should go down that path, because it divides the country," she said. "He's just not worth it." It was Pelosi's most direct comment yet on Trump's possible impeachment, a topic she has dealt with cautiously as it carries the potential to sharply split Democrats and the public ahead of next year's White House and congressional elections. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, possible collusion between Trump's campaign and the Russian government and whether Trump has attempted to obstruct the probe. Trump has denied wrongdoing and called the investigation a witch hunt. Mueller is expected to send a report soon to Attorney General William Barr outlining his findings, and any evidence of wrongdoing could prompt Congress to take action against the president. Several panels in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives are also investigating the president. Although Pelosi said she believed it would be too divisive to impeach Trump, she characterized the president as unfit to hold office. "No, I dont think hes fit to be president of the United States," Pelosi told the Post, adding he was "ethically unfit, intellectually unfit, curiosity-wise unfit." Democrats face growing pressure from the left for impeachment, including a multimillion-dollar ad campaign from liberal billionaire Tom Steyer to build support for action against Trump. The House Judiciary Committee, which would lead an impeachment inquiry, recently launched a broad probe of corruption, abuse of power and obstruction of justice allegations against Trump that could amount to impeachable offenses. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler has said he believes Trump has committed obstruction of justice, but that it is too soon to decide on impeachment. "We do not now have the evidence all sorted out," Nadler told ABC's "This Week" program on March 3. "Before you impeach somebody, you have to persuade the American public that it ought to happen," Nadler added. (Reporting by David Alexander; Editing by Peter Cooney and Tom Brown) (Reuters) - Insys Therapeutics Inc said on Wednesday its auditor raised doubts on the drugmaker's ability to continue as a going concern, sending its shares down 13 percent. The Arizona-based company said the auditor's opinion on the audited financial statements for the year ended Dec. 31, 2018 flags uncertainty in its ability to generate enough cash to meet its legal obligations and sustain operations. Insys said that while it is looking for ways to raise capital, it can provide "no assurances" on the success of its efforts or that it would resolve its liquidity issues and wipe out operating losses. "If we are unable to obtain sufficient funding, we would need to significantly reduce our operating plans and curtail some or all of our product development, commercialization and strategic plans," the company said in a regulatory filing. Last week, Insys said it had hired Lazard to advise on its plans to explore strategic options and is in talks to divest its fentanyl sublingual spray Subsys. The company had come under fire for its marketing practices related to Subsys, an opioid that is 100 times stronger than morphine. Insys' former Chief Executive Officer Michael Babich in January pleaded guilty to participating in a nationwide scheme to bribe doctors to prescribe the addictive opioid medication. Shares of the company fell 13 percent to $4.94 in morning trading. (Reporting by Saumya Sibi Joseph in Bengaluru; Editing by James Emmanuel) President Donald Trump is displayed on a monitor as a trader works at his desk ahead of the closing bell on the floor to he New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) The recently re-negotiated trade accord between the United States and its North American neighbors lacks political support. And the possibility of the pacts delay or failure may be a risk that markets are underestimating. As Democrats and Republicans gear up for the hotly contested 2020 presidential election, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which replaces NAFTA, is in at least some trouble among key constituencies. Currently, the worlds attention is being diverted by the protracted bilateral trade negotiations between the U.S. and China. Against a backdrop of a decelerating global economy and President Donald Trumps well-chronicled antipathy toward free trade, some believe investors could be in for a rude awakening if the USMCA is either delayed or fails to pass Congress. Everyone thought it was done. Its not done. When the three countries signed the agreement in principle, it went to the back burner and everyone thought it was done, noted Dave Donabedian, the CIO of CIBC Private Wealth Management. Its not done. The Trump administration has identified a vote on the USMCA as a top priority for 2019. Yet in an interview with Politico last week, Richard Neal, the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee cast doubts on the new pact having enough support to win passage this year. Todd Mariano, a director at Eurasia Group, characterized the USMCAs passage as steep but not impossible in a research note last week. Winning congressional approval for the USMCA is important for White House efforts to keep the electoral impact of trade policy positive, with the biggest stress test yet looming in 2020, he added. With a Democratic-led Congress loathe to hand Trump a victory as the 2020 campaign for the White House shifts into high gear, Neal told Politico that the administrations timetable of a summer vote on the USMCA would be very hard to pull off. Flanked by Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto, left, and Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President Donald Trump smiles during a signing ceremony of their trilateral trade agreement, on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Friday, Nov. 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Martin Mejia) At a minimum, it raises the prospect of NAFTAs successor languishing in Congress, which could pile more uncertainty on a global economy staggered by it. As it stands, world trade flows are already running below trend, according to recent data from the World Trade Organization, and at their weakest levels in nearly a decade. Story continues The things that move markets are the things that people arent focused on, and when they do come into focus its an element of surprise, Donabedian said. People are focused on the twists and turns of the soap opera of US-China trade talks, but there are significant hurdles to [USMCA] gaining Congressional approval, he added. And the legislations failure could unsettle investors already concerned about a slowing economy. Nobody wants to renegotiate this thing At stake is an agreement that will govern more than $1 trillion worth of flows between the U.S. and its North American neighbors. U.S.-Canada bilateral trade topped $670 billion in 2017, according to figures from the United States Trade Representatives office, while U.S. goods and services trade with Mexico totaled an estimated $615.9 billion. Markets upended by the U.S.-China trade fight could be whipsawed anew if the USMCA, which came together only after months of tortured negotiations and Trumps repeated vows to withdraw unilaterally from NAFTA, falters at the finish line. If it looks like the president will follow through on letting NAFTA lapse, thats a huge market negative, Donabedian said, adding that a USMCA ratification appears priced in at the moment. Meanwhile, with U.S. steel tariffs still an outstanding issue, neither Mexico and Canada are seen having the appetite to come back to the negotiating table until that issue is resolved. Nobody wants to renegotiate this thing, said Geoffrey Gertz, a fellow at the Brookings Institutions Center for Global Economy and Development. Everyones dreading the idea of hammering out a new USMCA, or having to contain the fallout from its failure, he added. Getting Congress to approve trade deals is always very difficult, and takes a long-term strategic approach by White House, Gertz said. Its not clear theyve been in a position to do that. The administration has worked hard to mollify the concerns of auto workers, perceived as one of the USMCAs largest beneficiaries. After a meeting in Detroit with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer last week, the United Auto Workers expressed some doubts about the pact in its current form, but havent publicly opposed the deal. Consideration of scenarios for post-2020 Washington will be part of the decision-making process for Democratic lawmakers and labor unions, Eurasias Mariano said. Delivering USMCA will be an important part of Trumps message in states where he will likely be vulnerable. Those states include Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, the analyst added. Javier David is an editor for Yahoo Finance. Read more: Follow Javier on Twitter: @TeflonGeek Najaf (Iraq) (AFP) - Iran's Hassan Rouhani met Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq's Najaf on Wednesday, an AFP photographer reported, in the first encounter between an Iranian president and the country's chief Shiite cleric. Sistani famously called Iraqis to arms against the Islamic State group in 2014, giving rise to the Hashd al-Shaabi paramilitary alliance, which includes Iran-backed Shiite groups. Those forces have since been placed under the command of regular Iraqi forces and several former fighters are now members of the Iraqi parliament. Sistani rejects foreign influence in Iraq. Iran and Iraq fought a devastating eight-year war in the 1980s but their relations shifted drastically with the American-led overthrow of Sunni Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003. Iran, which like its neighbour has a mainly Shiite population, is now one of oil-rich Iraq's main trading partners and has close ties to many of its political actors. Shiite-majority Iraq is walking a fine line to maintain good relations with Iran and its other key ally, the United States, an arch-foe of Iran. Both have played a major role in the battle against IS jihadists. Sistani, a spiritual leader to most of Iraq's Shiites and some in Iran, heads the religious establishment of Najaf, a Shiite holy city in Iraq that rivals Iran's Qom. In 2013, the octogenarian leader refused to meet then-president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Rouhani, who is on his first trip to Iraq since becoming president in 2013, hailed his country's "special" ties with its neighbour, saying they could not be prepared to relations "with an aggressor country like America". Nigel Farage and Donald Trump campaigning in 2016. Photo: Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!, announced Donald Trump in the summer of 2016. Before long, Trump was calling himself that, after appearing at a rally with Nigel Farage, one of its champions. The association with Brexit burnished Trumps self-styled (and utterly fabricated) reputation as a soothsayer. More importantly, the connection seemed to confirm that Trump represented something larger: a wave of conservative populism sweeping the Western world. And yet the collapse of Brexit, yet again, reveals another, less flattering commonality. Conservative populism has utterly failed to translate the political impulses behind them into a plausible governing agenda. It is a visceral reaction against multiculturalism and modernity that has not only failed to produce concrete solutions for its supporters, but doesnt even know what to ask for. The political phenomenon of conservative populism has created a demand for philosophical treatises to justify it. The conservative intelligentsia has been engaged in a comic process of backfilling in high-minded arguments to support the rise of Trump. The pro-Trump media is dominated by lowbrow right-wing infotainment, like Fox News and Breitbart media that are simple and accessible enough for Trump himself to enjoy. But the vast apparatus of conservative intellectuals also needs essays and lectures pitched at a higher level, in order to sustain its own sense of elitism. Theres no need to raise millions of dollars for think tanks and endowed chairs if the partys thought process begins and ends with Sean Hannitys sock-puppet routine. The Journal of American Greatness was founded in 2016 for this specific purpose defining a populist conservatism that would resemble whatever it is Trump is trying to do. The right has put its finest minds to the task of turning its irritable mental gestures into something resembling ideas. Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, delivered a lecture at the Manhattan Institute that was adapted for publication in the City Journal. Its theme, implicitly rebuking conservatives who might feel some discomfort with Trumps vulgarity and open bigotry, was that conservatives have always made common cause with populists. Trump has declared, I have a gut and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody elses brain can ever tell me. Berkowitz restates Trumps ethos more elegantly. Conservatives have tended to recognize the unruliness of the passions and the limits of reason. They believe that recondite reflection and abstract theory tend to obscure practical matters; as a guide to politics, conservatives strongly prefer experience and practical wisdom, he argues. Burke allied with the people against the political men of letters the progressive public intellectuals of his day. Apparently this innate distrust of elites is why conservatives should accept and even welcome a leader of the free world who has been described in the following terms by his own appointees: Fucking moron (Rex Tillerson), an idiot (John Kelly, John Dowd), a dope (H.R. McMaster), dumb as shit (Gary Cohn) with the comprehension level of a fifth- or sixth-grader (James Mattis), or an 11-year-old-child (Steve Bannon). A president with an attention span so minuscule his aides have to use large-type placards festooned with brief slogans and colorful graphics, it seems, is the worthy heir to Sir Edmund Burke himself. Berkowitz builds his essay on the premise that the working class has become disaffected with an imperious ruling elite. Yet he offers nothing in the way of substance to flesh it out, gesturing only at familiar bromides (individual freedom, limited government, free markets, robust civil society, and a strong America in the international arena) as the eternal course. He fails to acknowledge Trump won these voters in large part by distancing himself from the right, promising universal health care, lower prescription-drug prices, cracking down on Wall Street, ending the carried-interest loophole, and other ideologically unorthodox moves. But he has abandoned all these ideas in favor of a rehash of George W. Bushs domestic agenda. This has helped persuade Republican legislators to overlook his misconduct, but taken a toll on Trumps popularity. The populist promises that set Trump apart during both the primary and the general election have simply failed to materialize. Trumps budget, which proposes cuts to Medicare and Medicaid that he had famously pledged to oppose, is the latest evidence that he has simply defaulted to traditional movement conservatism. Conservative populism has followed the same course in the United Kingdom and the United States. Right-wing politicians attached expansive promises to retrograde cultural panic to gain power, and once given a chance to follow through, have managed to deliver only the latter. These movements justified themselves as an authentic rebellion against the experts. The experts warned the promises were impossible. It turns out they knew what they were talking about. By Dan Williams JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel on Wednesday accused a suspected Lebanese Hezbollah operative who was previously held in Iraq over the killing of five U.S. military personnel of now setting up a Syrian guerrilla network for cross-border attacks on Israeli targets. The accusations against Ali Mussa Daqduq came as Israel seeks U.S. recognition of its claim of sovereignty over parts of the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau on the Syrian frontier, which it captured in a 1967 war and deems a key security buffer. With Syrian President Bashar al-Assad reasserting control after an 8-year insurgency, Israel has also been lobbying his big-power backer Russia to keep Hezbollah and Damascus' other Iranian-aligned reinforcements away from the Syrian-held parts of Golan. Israel's acting foreign minister was quoted as saying such U.S. recognition would be "an appropriate" response to what he said was increased Hezbollah activity on the Golan. In statements based on what it described as previously classified intelligence, the Israeli military said Hezbollah had mobilized "a few operatives, Syrians" as part of a new "terror network on the Syrian Golan Heights aimed at striking Israel". The military said it believed Daqduq to be the network's mastermind. IRAQI DETENTION Daqduq was released from detention in 2012 in Iraq, where he had been accused by the United States of orchestrating a 2007 kidnapping that resulted in the killing of five U.S. military personnel. The United States had handed Daqduq over to Baghdad in 2011 after failing to secure a custody deal ahead of the U.S. military's withdrawal from Iraq. Washington said it had received Baghdad's assurances Daqduq would be prosecuted, but he was later cleared by an Iraqi court and repatriated to Lebanon. There was no immediate response to Israel's allegations on Wednesday from Hezbollah, Syria or the U.S. and Russian embassies in Israel. U.S. diplomats have said they are in talks with Israel about its request to recognize its sovereignty on the Golan, a status that has yet to win any formal endorsement among world powers. Israel's Mako news site quoted acting Foreign Minister Israel Katz of saying that such recognition by the United States would be "an appropriate and required response" to the allegations about Hezbollah's activity on the Syrian Golan. "I hope that this will soon happen, during the prime minister's upcoming visit to Washington," Katz was quoted as saying. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to address the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC in the U.S. capital in late March. In the past, Russia has spoken in favor of other foreign forces leaving Syria, though it plans to keep a garrison there. Israel has carried out scores of air strikes against suspected Iranian targets on Syrian Golan and further into the country, and threatened to continue such operations as required. (Additional reporting by Lisa Barrington in Beirut; Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Gareth Jones) Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel's army said Wednesday it had uncovered a unit recently created by Hezbollah across the ceasefire line in the Syrian Golan Heights and led by a commander previously jailed over an attack on US forces. With President Bashar al-Assad regaining control of southern Syria with the help of Russia and Hezbollah backer Iran, Israel is concerned that a front against it could be established there. Hezbollah, based in neighbouring Lebanon, has also been supporting Assad in the war. Israel alleged the new unit, "masterminded" by Hezbollah, was being established "to eventually control teams of Syrian operatives who will launch attacks against Israel". "We are not going to allow Hezbollah to establish a terror infrastructure on the Golan capable of striking Israeli civilians," said Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus, Israeli military spokesman. "We hold the Syrian regime responsible for anything that happens inside Syria aimed at Israel." The army said the unit was in the establishment and recruitment stage and was not yet operational. It said it is led by Hezbollah commander Ali Musa Daqduq. In 2012, Daqduq was released by Iraq due to lack of evidence after being accused of plotting to kill five US soldiers in the Iraqi city of Karbala. Daqduq was captured in 2007 on suspicion that he had helped organise a raid that led to the deaths of the five soldiers. He was held by American troops until he was handed over to Iraqi officials in December 2011. WASHINGTON The State Department labeled Jamal Khashoggi's murder a human rights violation committed by Saudi Arabian government agents in a report released Wednesday. The report, which details human rights abuses around the world, makes no mention of whether Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohamed bin Salman, played a role in The Washington Post columnist's death. The State Department's top human rights official declined to say what role, if any, the CIA's assessment of the case played in the account of Khashoggi's death. The CIA concluded that the crown prince directed Khashoggi's murder, according to multiple lawmakers briefed by the agency's director, Gina Haspel. "When we do these reports, we seek all relevant sources of information, including U.S. intelligence information," Ambassador Michael Kozak, who leads the State Department's Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Bureau, said Wednesday in a briefing on the annual report, which is required by Congress. Kozak said he would not discuss what intelligence information he and other officials reviewed with respect to Saudi Arabia or any other country. In its account of Khashoggi's death, the State Department report says Saudi government agents "carried out the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul, Turkey, on October 2." Khashoggi was a fierce critic of the crown prince, who is the country's de facto ruler. Saudi Arabia's King Salman "pledged to hold all individuals involved accountable, regardless of position or rank" and 11 suspects have been indicted by the kingdom's public prosecutor's office, the human rights report notes. The Saudi government has not publicly named any of those 11 suspects or provided any detailed account of where its investigation stands. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks during the release of the 2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices at the Department of State in Washington, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. "In other cases, the government did not punish officials accused of committing human rights abuses, contributing to an environment of impunity," the report says. Story continues Kozak defended the omission of the crown prince's name in connection with Khashoggi. "We can all have our suspicions or speculations, but our effort is fact-driven rather than opinion-driven," he said. He repeated the Saudi government's assertions that it is still investigating Khashoggi's death. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo singled out four countries Iran, South Sudan, Nicaragua and China in brief remarks on the report, which examines the human rights records of more than 200 countries and territories. China "is in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations," Pompeo said. He pointed to the Chinese government's repressive campaign against Muslim minority groups. "Today, more than 1 million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs and other Muslims are interned in re-education camps designed to erase their religious and ethnic identities," Pompeo said. "The government also is increasing its persecution against Christians, Tibetans and anyone who espouses different views from those or advocates those of government or advocates change in government." The human rights report is the first released with Pompeo at the helm of the State Department. The Trump administration sparked controversy with last year's report by eliminating any assessment of women's reproductive rights. Under the Obama administration, the annual report included information for each country about women's access to contraception and abortion, as well as data on maternal mortality. Under Pompeo, this year's report again omits that information and instead details coerced abortion and involuntary sterilization practices in each country. The change sparked criticism from leading human rights advocates. Neglecting to include these rights in this assessment is an affront to women and girls, LGBT people, young people, and human rights defenders everywhere, Joanne Lin, national director of advocacy and governmental relations at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement. Kozak said the State Department stopped offering data on reproductive rights because it suggested an "international right to abortion." The report details systematic and severe human rights abuses in North Korea, including arbitrary killings, torture and prison camps "in which conditions were often harsh and life threatening." Kozak conceded that U.S. engagement with North Korea, including President Donald Trump's personal efforts at diplomacy with dictator Kim Jong Un, had not resulted in any improvement in the country's human rights record. "Its still one of the worst human rights situations in the world. It has not improved," he said. He said the United States is at "the forefront of trying to expose what North Korea is doing and bring international attention to it." Human rights groups also took issue with the report's description of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights, which used to be labeled "occupied territories" because they are under Israeli control. Last year's report also included that change, which is particularly sensitive because Palestinians see the Trump administration as heavily biased toward Israel. Kozak said "occupied territory" carries a legal definition, so the State Department opted to use a geographical description instead. More: Exclusive: Pompeo on the failed North Korea talks, Otto Warmbier and his own trip to Iowa More: Maybe he did and maybe he didnt! Trump says US will stand by Saudis despite Khashoggi murder This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jamal Khashoggi's murder was a human rights violation by Saudi government, State Department says WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. A federal judge in New York on Tuesday denied a request for a temporary injunction that would have allowed 44 unvaccinated children to go back to class, citing an "unprecedented measles outbreak." "The plaintiffs have not demonstrated that public interest weighs in favor of granting an injunction," U.S. District Court Judge Vincent Briccetti said in federal court in White Plains. After the ruling, many parents in the court room embraced. "Preventing my child from being with his class, his teacher, his classroom, has had a significant social and psychological impact," said a parent of a 4-year old preschooler who declined to give her name. "He is confused, given his young age, about why he isn't allowed on his campus," she said, her voice wavering. More: Facts alone don't sway anti-vaxxers. So what does? Attorney Michael Sussman, representing families from Green Meadow Waldorf School in Chestnut Ridge, speaks outside White Plains federal courthouse March 12, 2019. Sussman is asking the judge to vacate the exclusion order by Rockland County health department barring children without their measles vaccination from school. The judge's ruling came during a court appearance by the lawyer for parents representing students at the Chestnut Ridge school in Rockland County who have filed a lawsuit against the county Health Department and its commissioner, challenging an order barring the unvaccinated children from school. The parents and students names are not listed in the lawsuit, which only uses initials. We have had success, but this case is not over," Rockland County Attorney Thomas Humbach said in a statement. "While no one enjoys the fact that these kids are out of school, these orders have worked; they have helped prevent the measles outbreak from spreading to this school population." The lawsuit states that Commissioner Patricia Schnabel Ruppert's order violates the families' religious objections to vaccinations and is unnecessary because the cases have been largely confined to insular Hasidic Jewish communities. Myths debunked: Vaccines are definitely not linked to autism, and other facts you can throw at anti-vaxers The federal lawsuit filed by 24 plaintiffs states that throughout the measles outbreak that started last fall, no cases have been reported among any of the Chestnut Ridge school's excluded children, their families or in the Fellowship Community that surrounds it. Story continues No future court date was set by the judge, who told Michael Sussman, the parents' lawyer, that he might have better success in state court. "Its a tough situation and I feel bad about it ... but I dont feel I have the authority to do this," Briccetti said. Sussman replied: There is a degree of parochialism that exists with elected judges. Rockland is experiencing the longest outbreak in the state since measles was officially eliminated from the United States in 2000, with a total of 145 cases reported since last October. Three more suspected cases are under investigation. The outbreak, which has mostly affected the Orthodox Jewish community in Spring Valley, Monsey and New Square, led Ruppert on Dec. 5 to impose an order that area schools with vaccination rates under 95 percent must keep unvaccinated children from attending. Although court papers filed by Sussman state Green Meadow's students are "97 percent immune from the disease by all accounts," the county's Law Department said the school's vaccination rate was about 33 percent when the Dec. 5 order was imposed. It subsequently has risen to about 56 percent. The exclusion, which includes Chestnut Ridge, ends when there are no new cases in that area for 21 days, but because of the continuing increase in the number of measles infections, the exclusion time can be increased to 42 days. Follow Gabriel Rom on Twitter: @GabrielRom1 This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Judge in New York denies request to allow 44 unvaccinated students back in class WASHINGTON (AP) In defiance of President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday invited NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg to address a joint meeting of Congress to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the trans-Atlantic alliance. Pelosi, in rare agreement with Republicans, extended the warmly-worded invitation to speak April 3 as one of several events in the U.S. capital celebrating the treaty's signing in 1949. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been unswerving in his support of NATO despite Trump's repeated complaints that its 29 member nations don't pay their fair share for their own defense. "It is my honor as Speaker, on behalf of the bipartisan leadership of the House of Representatives and the Senate, to extend to you an invitation to address a Joint Meeting of the two houses of Congress," Pelosi wrote in a letter released by her office. "During this critical time for the United States, NATO and the European Union, the U.S. Congress and the American people look forward to your message of friendship and partnership, as we work together to strengthen our critical alliance and advance a future of peace around the world." In tone and substance, the invitation is stiff pushback to the NATO criticism Trump campaigned on in 2016. He has threatened to pull the U.S. out of the partnership that was established to defend Europe against aggression for example, from Russia. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. McConnell in particular among Republicans has been outspoken about his support for NATO, issuing a memorable rebuke of Trump's behavior at Russian President Vladimir Putin's side in Helsinki last summer. "We value the NATO treaty," McConnell declared. "We believe the European Union counties are our friends, and the Russians are not." Each of NATO's countries spends money on its own military capabilities in an effort to lessen dependence on the U.S. for defense against threats. Stoltenberg said some NATO allies will spend an additional $100 billion by the end of 2020. Story continues The United States is the biggest and most influential NATO member, contributing about 22 percent of the alliance's budget. Trump campaigned on the idea that the U.S. is paying too much to defend European countries and vowed to make them pay their fair share. In his State of the Union address in January and in Hanoi last week, Trump misleadingly suggested that the U.S. has "picked up" $100 billion from NATO since he's been president. "A hundred billion dollars more has come in," he said in Hanoi. In reality, Stoltenberg said on Feb. 15 that NATO allies in Europe and Canada had spent an additional $41 billion on their own defense since 2016, and that by the end of 2020 that figure would rise to $100 billion. So, the $100 billion refers to additional military spending over a four-year period, not over the past two years. In 2014, during the Obama administration, NATO members agreed to move "toward" spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on their own defense by 2024. Trump's pressure may have spurred some countries to increase their spending faster than they planned or to become more serious about moving to the 2 percent goal. Member-state contributions were a central point of friction at a NATO summit in Brussels last year. However, in a January interview with Fox News, Stoltenberg said NATO countries heard Trump "loud and clear" and were "stepping up." Some analysts have warned diminished U.S. leadership in NATO has already weakened the alliance. Former Ambassador Nicholas Burns said in a recent report that NATO is facing its "most difficult" crisis in seven decades and "the single greatest threat (to NATO) is the absence of strong, principled American presidential leadership for the first time in its history." Stoltenberg has said Trump will meet with his counterparts from the military alliance at a summit in London in December. Stoltenberg said Wednesday that the leaders will "address the security challenges we face now and in the future, and to ensure that NATO continues to adapt in order to keep its population of almost 1 billion people safe." ___ Follow Kellman and George on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com//APLaurieKellman and http://www.twitter.com/SGreports A university lecturer was reported to police over allegations of hate crime after he quoted the film Trainspotting A university lecturer was reported to police over alleged hate crime after writing an Instagram post quoting cult film Trainspotting, saying the English are w*ankers. James Mooney, a film and philosophy lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, quoted a scene from the film during a talk to American students. He wrote on the Instagram post: Spent this morning telling a group of visiting American students that we dont really hate the English, but that they are w*s. Welcome to Scotland. Police have confirmed officers were called in to investigate the post after a complaint was made but concluded that no crime had been committed. James Mooney posted on Instagram about his talk to American students using Trainspotting (Picture: Instagram/James Mooney) James Mooney is a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh (Picture: Instagram/James Mooney) The post, dated January 8, relates to a scene in Trainspotting in which Ewan McGregors character refers to Scotland being colonised by the English. A university source said: It was clearly meant in jest and no offence was intended or could reasonably have been taken. It is all totally ridiculous, a storm in a teacup if ever there was one. The post has reportedly been reviewed by senior staff and deemed not to breach the universitys social media policy. READ MORE Operation Stack enforced because of Storm Gareth A Police Scotland spokesman confirmed that officers received a report of xenophobic comments made online in relation to Mr Mooneys Instagram post. The spokesman said: A full investigation was conducted and it was established that no crime had been committed. However, the matter was recorded as a hate incident. No further police action was required. A simple step in many peoples hygiene left an English man developing a near-fatal infection that spread to the lining of his brain. Over the past five years, the man had been experiencing pain and hearing loss in his ear something he had been treated for multiple times. It wasnt until he had a seizure that led him to look more carefully into the problem and discover that a piece of a cotton swab stuck in his ear was causing his severe medical issues, according to Live Science. They can only cause problems, Ears, Nose, and Throat (ENT) specialist Dr. Alexander Charlton, who treated the man, told the outlet of using cotton swabs to clean the inside of an ear after the ordeal. Prior to the seizure, the 31-year-old man said he had been experiencing pain and discharge from his left ear, along with severe headaches that caused him to vomit. He also had difficulty in remembering peoples names, according to the case report the BMJ medical journal. RELATED: How to Safely Use a Neti Pot After a Woman Died from a Brain-Eating Amoeba Approximately 10 days later, when the man had the seizure and collapsed, he was rushed to the emergency room and underwent a CT scan, according to Live Science. The scan revealed two abscesses in the bones of the base of his skull, which were located next to his left ear canal, Live Science reported. His doctors at University Hospital Coventry diagnosed the man with necrotizing otitis externa an infection in the external auditory canals soft issue. Dr. Charlton, who served as the lead author on the case, explained to the outlet that the man had likely contracted a severe bacterial infection that began in the ear canal, moved into the base of his skull, and eventually into the lining of his brain. RELATED VIDEO: 13-Year-Old Michigan Boy Dies After Sinus Infection Spreads to His Brain Because the infection extended into the outer edges of the brain, Dr. Charlton told Live Science that the seizure and neurological problems were likely caused by those bacterial infections toxins or pressure on the brain. Story continues Shortly after his diagnosis, he underwent a minor ear canal surgery, where a piece of the cotton swab was found lodged inside in his ear, impacted and surrounded by wax and debris. Dr. Charlton told Live Science that he believed the piece of cotton had been stuck inside for a while because of how and where it was located and it was to blame for the mans years-long constant ear pain and infections. RELATED: Texas Woman Warns Others After Loud MRI Permanently Damages Her Ears: I Live a Life of Misery Though the man required two months of intravenous and oral antibiotics to fight the infection, he surprisingly did not suffer any long-term problems to his hearing or neurological functioning, Live Science reported. Meanwhile, Dr. Charlton, among other medical professions, are now advising people around the world to avoid using cotton swabs to clean the inside of your ears. According to Cedars-Sinai Blog, cotton swabs can be detrimental as they push earwax deeper inside the canal and can cause ear infections, punctured eardrums, and hearing loss. In more severe cases, like the man from England, people may experience total deafness, prolonged vertigo, loss of taste, and facial paralysis. To manually clean the ear, which isnt always necessary because of the bodys natural ability to do so, professionals suggest using an ear lavage or syringe. Michael Cohen Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images Michael Cohen has testified that President Trump directed him to lie to Congress about Trumps business dealings with Russia during the campaign. The weakness of the accusation is that Cohen does not seem to have any proof, other than his own testimony, that the conversation took place. But now CNN reports that Cohen has evidence of Trump obstructing justice by dangling a pardon. And this time he has receipts. Robert Costello, an attorney working with Rudy Giuliani, emailed Cohen on April 21. The emails assured Cohen he could sleep well tonight because he had friends in high places, according to CNN. This is a really, really big deal. The power to pardon convicted criminals for federal crimes is a legitimate use of presidential authority. Whether its legitimate for the president to use this power to pardon criminals who committed crimes on his behalf, or might have otherwise testified against him, is a subject of intense debate. Whats not a subject of intense debate is whether a president can dangle a pardon. As Alex Whiting explained, the argument for why a president can pardon his own subordinates is that its a public act, and the voters can examine the facts and look at whether the president acted corruptly in issuing the pardon. As long as it remained secret, he notes, it could be done without incurring any of the political downstream consequences that come with actually pardoning someone. Even as staunch an advocate of presidential authority as William Barr agreed in his confirmation hearings that dangling pardons could be obstruction of justice. Do you believe a president could lawfully issue a pardon in exchange for the recipients promise to not incriminate him? asked Senator Pat Leahy. No. That would be a crime, replied Barr. Barr, of course, almost certainly got his job because he wrote a long, unsolicited memo aggressively defending the president from charges of obstructing justice. If not even Barr can defend the dangling of a pardon, its safe to say that legal opinion will be unanimous. The weakness in the evidence here is that the communication went through Costello, not Trump. Costello was representing Giuliani, who in turn was representing the president. But the emails would be powerful evidence of an undeniable act of obstruction of justice. To begin with, Costello might be asked to testify to Congress about it pretty soon. Costello tells the Daily Beast his message to Cohen was not a reference to getting a pardon from his highly-placed ally, but a reference to a Garth Brooks song: To repeat myself, Michael Cohen and his counsels interpretation of events is utter nonsense, Costello said. This statement: Sleep Well tonight, you have friends in high places was a tongue-in-cheek reference to a Garth Brooks song, to a client whose state of mind was highly disturbed and had suggested to us that he was suicidal. We were simply trying to be decent human beings. There is no hidden message. Thats possible depending on the context of the communication. But it seems pretty unlikely. The song, Friends in Low Places, is just about drinking in a bar with buddies. Cohen actually did have a friend in a high place. The New York Times reports federal prosecutors have requested copies of the emails. It also adds that, after the friends in high places line, Costello wrote, Some very positive comments about you from the White House. Rudy noted how that followed my chat with him last night. That doesnt sound like counseling a depressed friend. It sounds a lot like floating a pardon in return for keeping your mouth shut. This post has been updated. Paul Manafort has been sentenced to 43 additional months in prison by a federal judge in Washington, D.C. Manafort had been sentenced to 47 months imprisonment last week by a federal judge in Virginia. The Washington sentence was imposed at shortly after noon today, in a proceeding that took more than two hours. Manafort was facing two conspiracy counts, each with a maximum five-year (or 60-month) sentence. On count one, Judge Amy Berman Jackson imposed 60 months, 30 months to run concurrent and 30 consecutive to the 47-month sentence imposed in Judge T. S. Ellis in Alexandria. On count two, Judge Jackson sentenced Manafort to 13 months incarceration, to run consecutive to both count one and the Virginia sentence. The bottom-line result of the two cases is a prison sentence of 90 months (seven and a half years), in addition to millions of dollars in property forfeitures and fines. In my column previewing todays sentencing, I predicted that Manaforts total sentence between the two cases would be closer to 20 years. I was wrong because I made a basic mistake: I focused myopically on the federal sentencing guidelines calculation in the plea agreement that Manafort signed with the special counsel when he pled guilty in Washington. I forgot that, in order to induce Manafort to plead guilty, the special counsels office sweetened the pot by capping his statutory exposure at ten years imprisonment. Because the crimes Manafort admitted conspiring to commit are serious felonies (e.g., money laundering and witness tampering), his guidelines were very high, calling for a term of between 210 and 262 months (18 to 22 years) in prison. But prosecutors rendered the guidelines largely irrelevant by tucking the 20-year felonies into a pair of counts charged under a federal conspiracy provision that carries a maximum five-year sentence. As Ill come to, this violated Justice Department charging practices. For todays purposes, though, the significant thing is that, in any situation where the sentence called for by the sentencing guidelines is greater than the maximum sentence permitted by the statutes of conviction, the statutes control. Therefore, even though the top guidelines-range sentence would have been 262 months, Judge Jackson was restricted to no more than 120 months. Story continues She ended up imposing, in effect, 43 months, added on to the 47-month sentence imposed by Judge Ellis. Given the caterwauling that followed Elliss decision last week, there will no doubt be complaints that Jackson let Manafort off too easy. But if you feel that way, then Mueller shoulders much of the blame. I have complained before about the special counsels flouting of Justice Department charging policies. Manaforts two-count plea deal in the District of Columbia is a good example. The count one conspiracy charged money laundering, a 20-year felony, as one of the objectives. Saliently, money laundering has its own conspiracy provision (Section 1956(h)), which also calls for a penalty of up to 20 years imprisonment. When Congress thinks a crime is important enough to have its own conspiracy provision, federal prosecutors are supposed to charge that provision, since it reflects the punishment Congress has directed for that conduct. Yet, to shield Manafort from Congresss intended penalty, Mueller allowed him to plead guilty under the penal codes catch-all conspiracy provision, Section 371. This section has a maximum penalty of five years and is supposed to apply only to less serious crimes that do not have their own conspiracy provision. Federal prosecutors are not supposed to frustrate congressional intent by charging the catch-all conspiracy when the underlying conduct (here, money laundering) has a conspiracy provision that calls for a more severe sentence (here, 20 years). Indeed, the reason why Manaforts sentencing guidelines are so much higher than the statutory penalties for the crimes charged is that the guidelines are driven by how Congress rates the criminal conduct involved, whereas Mueller did not charge the statutes that correlate to that conduct. An example: Lets say a defendant committed two money-laundering felonies. That would add up to 40 years of statutory exposure. The guidelines reflect how seriously Congress takes money laundering. If sentencing practice is working properly, the guidelines range should be within the statutory range. The statutes state a wide range that accounts for all possible money-laundering offenses, from the least serious to the most serious (in our two-count example, zero to 40 years). The guidelines, by contrast, more narrowly reflect the defendants actual conduct, which should fall someplace between least and most serious. Thus, if the defendant in our example pled guilty to the two 20-year counts, it would make sense for the guidelines to calculate a range of 210 to 262 months, comfortably within this 40-year statutory range. To shield Manafort, however, Mueller avoided charging the applicable 20-year conspiracy count. He instead charged the five-year conspiracy count, far below what Congress and the Sentencing Commission have indicated is a commensurate penalty for money laundering. The second conspiracy count to which Manafort pled guilty involved witness tampering. The witness-tampering provision Mueller cited, Section 1512(b)(1), prescribes a 20-year offense. Like money laundering, witness tampering has its own conspiracy provision, which makes the penalty 20 years. Yet, once again, instead of charging Manafort under Congresss witness-tampering provision, Mueller charged him under Section 371, insulating him from the harsher sentence. Bottom line: Yes, Judge Ellis could have imposed a much more severe sentence; and Judge Jackson could have imposed a harsher total sentence by maxing out the two five-year counts (120 months) and running them consecutively to Elliss 47-month term that would have made for a 167-month sentence, instead of 90 months. Nevertheless, if you want to know why Manafort faced comparatively limited prison time today, blame Special Counsel Mueller. Under federal law, conspiracies to commit money laundering and witness tampering should have carried an aggregate 40 years of statutory exposure. That would have enabled the judge to impose a stiff guidelines sentence of between 210 and 262 months. But the special counsel invoked the wrong conspiracy statutes to spare Manafort greater punishment. When the prosecutor bends the rules to be lenient, it signals to the court that leniency is in order. More from National Review Critics who last week blasted the light 47-month sentence imposed on Paul Manafort by Judge T. S. Ellis of the federal district court in Alexandria, Va., may lack familiarity with both the federal sentencing guidelines and the peculiarities of Manaforts case. As I observed in my weekend column, he is going to get slammed when he gets sentenced today by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the federal district court in Washington, D.C. I am not telling you this based on some crystal ball Ive been hiding. You just need to read Manaforts plea agreement in the Washington case. Manafort should have had only one case, not two. Even though the charges are different, the two cases were based on the same fact pattern, and they have always been two parts of the same whole. Manafort was tried twice instead of once, strictly because of his own choice. Prosecutors would have preferred to file the whole case in Washington. But the case involved some counts (the tax counts, in particular) as to which Manafort was entitled to be tried in the venue of the offense in Virginia, where he resided. Defending oneself in a trial is prohibitively expensive for those who have means to hire their own counsel; and trials are emotionally wrenching for an accused and his family. So most defendants waive venue objections; that allows all the counts to be tried once, in one district. But Manafort calculated that Virginia would be a friendlier place for him than Washington: He hoped to beat the case there, and maybe gain some momentum that might miraculously help him in Washington or at least improve his argument for a pardon. He was largely wrong convicted on all the counts the Virginia jury decided, and the hung jury on the other charges meant he could be tried again if the special counsel chose to do so. Consequently, Manafort pled guilty in the Washington case because it made no sense to fight on. Judge Ellis may be sympathetic to Manafort, and he may have been trying to convey a signal, by the light sentence, that he thought the prosecution was overkill (i.e., that no matter how serious Manaforts offenses are, he would never have been prosecuted if he had not gotten involved in Donald Trumps campaign). But the Virginia sentencing exercise was theater. No matter what Ellis did, Manafort was going to be sentenced to heavy time in Washington. Story continues In his Washington plea agreement, Manafort and his counsel agreed that his sentencing-guidelines range, at a minimum, calls for 210 to 262 months imprisonment (roughly 18 to 22 years). I say at a minimum because the agreements guidelines calculation includes a caveat that Manaforts downward adjustment (2 offense level points) for accepting responsibility by pleading guilty could be withdrawn if Muellers office presses the contention that Manafort proceeded, post-plea, to lie in his failed cooperation attempt. If he is at offense level 39 instead of the currently projected 37, Manaforts sentencing range spikes up to 262 to 327 months (roughly 22 to 27 years). As I see it, Manafort has two things in his favor going into todays sentencing. First, the guidelines permit a downward departure if a defendant is elderly and infirm. It is intended to be a limited departure at best, reserved for cases in which considerations based on age are present in some unusual degree. There is nothing extraordinary about Manaforts age here except that a term in the guidelines range would effectively be a death sentence for him. (Manafort will be 70 in about three weeks.) Second, the guidelines are not mandatory; the sentencing judge may treat them as advisory. That, too, is less of an escape hatch than it sounds like. Most federal judges in most cases respect the overarching purpose of the guidelines, which is to ensure that similarly situated defendants receive similar sentences; reducing arbitrariness promotes public faith in the system. Taking all of that into account, I expect Manafort to receive a sentence from Judge Jackson that, combined with the 47 months imprisonment from Judge Ellis, will be around 20 years, maybe a bit less (i.e., whatever term Jackson decides to impose, she will run it concurrently with or consecutively to the Ellis sentence to the extent necessary to make the bottom line roughly 20 years). I also think that if Ellis had sentenced Manafort after Jackson, rather than before, Jackson would have imposed the same sentence shell impose today, and Ellis would have imposed a heavier sentence but run it concurrent with Jacksons sentence meaning it would look like a more severe sentence than 47 months but, in effect, be zero. In any event, understand: This has always been one case that was artificially split into two parts. There is no point getting carried away by what Judge Ellis did until we can evaluate the whole thing based on what Judge Jackson does. The straightforward sentencing guidelines and the plea agreement Paul Manafort signed tell us that a severe sentence is coming. More from National Review A thing that occurs to you if you attend an elite college or university, as I did, is that most of the professors teaching you are more or less the same beleaguered time-servers who would be teaching you at any other school. I well remember the sad, unshaven schlump in corduroys who taught one of my introductory English courses: He was fine. He knew his stuff. But so did the people who taught me English at my public high school. Sure, at name-brand colleges you can attend huge lectures given by name-brand professors who appear on television and the op-ed pages and the bestseller lists but theyre just lectures. These days anyone can listen to a lecture given by a world-class expert on virtually any subject by going on YouTube. The actual interactive teaching in these lectures is done by beleaguered grad students in rumpled clothing. By the time Id graduated from Yale College in 1989, I had concluded that the value in the experience came more or less entirely from my classmates, not my teachers: I met a lot of wonderful, brilliant, hilarious fellow students. But couldnt graduates of just about any half-decent college say the same? For that matter, Ive met a lot of wonderful, brilliant, hilarious people at the various jobs Ive held over the years. There are a lot of wonderful, brilliant, hilarious people working at the New York Post, for instance. The Post paid me to be a part of their gang, whereas my family and I paid Yale. The elite-college experience is plainly not worth the immense cost. There are studies on this. In most cases, if you are bright enough to get into Harvard, but dont actually go to Harvard, your post-college income will closely resemble that of a Harvard graduate. As George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan cleverly puts it, if the point of going to college is to learn things (rather than to obtain a certificate of smartness that is in essence no different from the one the Scarecrow gets at the end of The Wizard of Oz), why do students invariably celebrate when they get to class and find a notice that it has been canceled? Story continues There is a widely shared assumption in our culture that having a degree from a place like Yale will get you a good job, or at least help you get a good job. In my case this hasnt been true at all. I entered my profession by taking a pass-fail aptitude test given by the Associated Press. I passed the test. The AP didnt care which college I went to, although perhaps it mattered that I at least graduated from a college. Deeming me employable, the AP subsequently hired me as a news clerk at their New York City headquarters. Once I got in that door, everything that happened in my career depended not on the abstraction of where I had studied but on my ability to do my job. Accepting whatever assignments I could get while doing various clerical tasks at the AP (at the time it fell to the news clerks to print out copies of the wire services stories and file them in cubbyholes, each marked with a day of the month, so as to form an archive for the reporters to consult), I managed in nine months to assemble enough clips to impress upon the editors of the Post the notion that they should hire me. They didnt particularly care where I had gone to college either. Some of my colleagues had fancy degrees, others had gone to no-name schools. It just didnt matter. All that mattered was whether they had made the editors think they could produce. Some who couldnt were shown the door. Others were promoted within the paper or poached by other media outlets. The latest elite-college admissions scandal rests on a foundation of pure silliness; as Jim Geraghty writes, people with rich, famous, well-connected parents are the ones who least need the imprimatur of a famous college to speed them through life. Yet these same people are the ones with the means to indulge the status obsession that plagues most of us. Lets not think of Felicity Huffman et al. as unusual: Everybody with the means to steer their kids into top-drawer colleges is thinking about how to game the system. This is because an elite-college degree isnt an instrument or a tool; it doesnt have to lead to anything. Its a status symbol in itself. Yale is Louis Vuitton is Piaget is Mercedes. Having a Yale diploma in the back of my closet hasnt directly benefited me in any way, as far as I can tell. But. The mention of Yale, in certain quarters, generates a sharp intake of breath. Or an Oooh of sycophancy. Or a sullen grumble and icy stare from those recalling how their own bid to enter the portals of Yale was rebuked by the admissions committee. If your goal is to enhance your sense of superiority over your fellow man, a Yale education is an excellent way to do that. Unlike a Porsche or a Cartier, it is with you always. You cant lose it and it cant be stolen. Students at elite universities quickly notice the effect a mention of the magic name can have on people and regret the general cloud of discomfort it causes. This is the real source of the now-notorious habit Harvard students and graduates have developed of replying to the question, Where did you go to college? with I went to school in Boston. Yale students sometimes do the equivalent I went to school in Connecticut. Some observers consider this dissembling a form of passive-aggressive bragging, but that isnt how its intended. Its intended to spare you, their interlocutors, from an ugly reaction (whether it be fawning or bristling) and its intended to spare them, the elite students, from indulging the equally sordid instinct to lord it over their fellow man. Harvard and Yale students arent good enough actors to fake the unease they feel when the question comes up. They genuinely are pained. Somehow those of us who dont own an Audemars watch or a Birkin handbag manage to muck on without them, and we dont fret about whether our children will someday own one. Few of us have a hole in our soul because we dont own the fanciest car in town. Because we realize worship of material goods is beneath us. Diploma worship ought to be equally so. More from National Review Jerusalem (AFP) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday slammed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a "dictator" and "a joke" in the latest exchange of insults between the two leaders. Turkey on Tuesday denounced Netanyahu's "blatant racism" after he called Israel the nation-state of "the Jewish people" only, not all its citizens. Netanyahu's initial comment had come amid an online spat sparked by Israel's right-wing firebrand culture minister Miri Regev, ahead of April elections and subsequently joined by Israeli Hollywood star Gal Gadot. Regev, a member of Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party, had in a TV interview warned voters not to support its main rival because it would ally with Israeli Arab parties -- a highly unlikely scenario. Israeli model and actress Rotem Sela responded on Instagram, asking: "When the hell will someone in this government convey to the public that Israel is a state of all its citizens and that all people were created equal?" Netanyahu reacted with his own Instagram post, telling Sela: "Israel is not a state of all its citizens." "According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people -- and only it," he said, referring to a deeply controversial piece of legislation passed by his right-wing government last year. Gadot, star of "Wonder Woman", jumped to Sela's defence. "Love your neighbour as yourself," Gadot wrote on Instagram late Sunday. "This isn't a matter of right or left. Jew or Arab. Secular or religious," she wrote. "It's a matter of dialogue, of dialogue for peace and security and of our tolerance of one towards the other." On Tuesday, Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin weighed in on Netanyahu's comments. Writing on Twitter in both Turkish and English, he said: "I strongly condemn this blatant racism and discrimination." Story continues Netanyahu struck back in a statement from his office early Wednesday. "Turkey's dictator Erdogan attacks Israel's democracy while Turkish journalists and judges fill his prisons," it read. "What a joke!" - 'Apartheid state'- Kalin was swift to respond on Twitter, accusing Netanyahu of attacking Erdogan "for exposing him" after the Israeli premier's "racist remarks" towards Arabs and Muslims. "The apartheid state he leads occupies Palestinian lands, kills women & children & imprisons Palestinians in their own land," he wrote. "Lies and pressure will not hide your crimes." Turkey and Israel have tense relations and Erdogan, who regards himself as a champion of the Palestinian cause, is a vocal critic of Israeli policies. The two countries in 2016 ended a six-year rift triggered by the Israeli storming of a Gaza-bound ship that left 10 Turkish activists dead and led to a downgrading of diplomatic ties. Netanyahu has been accused by critics of demonising Israeli Arabs, who make up some 17.5 percent of the population, in a bid to boost right-wing turnout for April polls. He is facing a tough challenge from a centrist political alliance led by former military chief of staff Benny Gantz and ex-finance minister Yair Lapid. After the polls, he will also face a hearing to defend himself against corruption allegations which have dogged his campaign. MPs are set to vote on whether a no-deal Brexit should be ruled out (Picture: Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament via AP) MPs set to vote on whether to rule out no-deal Brexit Theresa May confirms she will vote against crashing out with no agreement PM loses voice and is unable to address MPs Corbyn says Government is in tatters Government announces tariffs will be slashed in event of no deal MPs are set to vote on the future course of Brexit as they decide whether to rule out leaving the EU without a deal. Theresa May has confirmed she will vote to block a no-deal Brexit as the Commons prepares for another pivotal vote after MPs rejected Theresa Mays Brexit deal for the second time yesterday. The no-deal Brexit motion seeks to rule out leaving without a Withdrawal Agreement but also notes leaving without a deal remains the default position in UK and EU law. Commons Speaker John Bercow has selected two amendments to Theresa Mays no-deal Brexit motion. Amendment A, tabled by Conservative former minister Dame Caroline Spelman which rejects a no-deal Brexit at any time and under any circumstances. Amendment F, in the name of Conservative former minister Damian Green, calls for a delay to Brexit day from March 29 to May 22 to give time for preparations to leave without a deal and the Government should then offer a standstill agreement with the EU and its member states. Mrs May, who croaked her way through her statement following Tuesday nights vote, was helped out by Michael Gove on Wednesdays no deal Brexit debate, as he stood in for her, saying: She may temporarily have lost her voice, but what she has not lost, and will never lose, is her focus in the national interest, and a full-hearted desire to do what is right for our country. Brexit The Environment Secretary said since Mrs May lost the first meaningful vote on her Withdrawal Agreement in January she has spent more than 19 hours at the despatch box, and: Has shown fortitude, tenacity, thoughtfulness, diligence and above all an unselfish and unstinting patriotism. Mr Gove said it was only appropriate that on all sides of the House MPs recognise the way in which the Prime Minister always, always, always puts country first. Story continues During Prime Ministers Questions Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn pressed Mrs May to reveal how she will vote. The PM who has given her party a free vote on the motion replied: I will be voting for the motion in my name. Mr Corbyn said Mrs Mays Brexit strategy was in tatters and her deal is dead, before criticising her for having refused to listen. But Mrs May retorted: I may not have my own voice but I do understand the voice of the country. If MPs say no to no-deal which looks highly likely since a majority of MPs have done so in the past Parliament will vote tomorrow on whether they want to delay Brexit. If the vote to delay Brexit is approved, Mrs May will request an extension to Article 50, the legal mechanism by which a country can quit the EU but the EU would have to agree to it. Following Mrs Mays humiliating defeat over her Withdrawal Agreement on Tuesday evening, the EU warned it would not allow the UK to extend Brexit without providing a credible reason for doing so. Theresa May suffered another defeat over her Brexit deal yesterday, losing by 149 votes (House of Commons) Speaking in Strasbourg, EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said the 27 member states will demand an explanation as to how a delay would help break the deadlock in the UK Parliament over Brexit. Why would we extend these discussions? The discussion on Article 50 is done and dusted, he said. We have the Withdrawal Agreement. It is there. That is the question asked and we are waiting for an answer to that. Barnier added that the risk of no deal has never been higher. The European Unions chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said the UK needs to provide a good reason for a Brexit delay. (Reuter/Vincent Kessler) The European parliaments lead Brexit spokesman Guy Verhofstadt cemented the position, warning against an extension without good reason. He said: And so I am against every extension, whether an extension of one day, one week, even 24 hours, if it is not based on a clear opinion of the House of Commons for something, that we know what they want. After Parliament rejected Mrs Mays Brexit deal last night, Mr Barnier said the EU was stepping up its preparations for no deal. The Government announced its strategy for trade in the event of no-deal, revealing plans to slash tariffs on the majority of goods. Ministers also published their plan for the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland if a deal cannot be reached, confirming no immediate border checks would be introduced. Checks on some goods, including food, will take place to comply with international law, but these will happen away from the border. Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin were both charged in a college admissions fraud scandal on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images Disliking influencers is among my favorite pastimes. Im sure many Americans agree with me. The actions of people who make a living posting inanities to YouTube and Instagram are usually so unconscionable, or so racist, or so ridiculous, or so dumb, or so ridiculously dumb, that dunking on them isnt just deserved, but demanded. Logan Paul vlogging a dead body. Caroline Calloway charging $150-plus for fans to eat salad and take turns tucking a single orchid behind their ears for photos with her. Those married YouTube teens who fled Chicago and found themselves homeless. Dunk away. Hell, dunk twice. So you can imagine that, when it was revealed that Tuesdays college cheating scandal implicated an influencer, Americans got in their full dunking gear. In a nutshell: Full House actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, have both been charged after they purportedly agreed to pay bribes totaling $500,000 in exchange for having their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team. (Neither of their daughters had ever rowed.) Both of their daughters are now students at the University of Southern California and, when they are not in class, are influencers. The younger daughter, Olivia Jade, has nearly 2 million YouTube subscribers and sponsorships with brands including Sephora and Amazon. Almost immediately, Twitter, seized upon Olivias tweets like this one where she said shed rather be filming YouTube videos 24/7 than studying and old interviews. During the summer of 2018, before she headed off for her first semester at school, Olivia posted a video in which she said she didnt know how she was going to balance her influencer career and school. I dont know how much of school Im gonna attend but Im gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone, and hope that I can try and balance it all, she said. But I do want the experience of like game days, partying I dont really care about school, as you guys all know. In her next video, she apologized for her ignorant comments after fans came calling with criticism. This was six months ago, before the saga of how she was accepted to said school in the first place would become national news. Sure, Loughlins daughter deserved to be dragged then. She maybe doesnt deserve to be dragged now. Heres the thing: Its not at all clear that Olivia Jade was involved in the scam herself. The court filings, unsealed on Monday, indicate many of the kids involved in the scandal were completely unaware of their parents schemes. One parent (the unnamed spouse of Elisabeth Kimmel, who has been charged) talking with the man known as CW-1 in the documents, who helped found and run the organization that shepherded the kids into the universities, said a counselor at USCs orientation had addressed their son as a track athlete and the kid was confused. (These calls were recorded via court-ordered wiretap.) The spouse told CW-1 the kid had no idea and wanted it to remain that way. The section about Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli does not indicate whether or not their two daughters were in on the scheme but if theyre like most of the parents, Olivia was kept completely in the dark. Its one thing to be a teenage influencer electing to make content where you say dumb things on your own accord. Its completely another to be a teenager in high school and think youve gotten into a college you applied to because your famous, wealthy parents who actually paid your way in illegally have given you no indication that isnt exactly what happened. Only one of those things is Olivias fault. This, of course, assumes the daughters did not know. Its also pretty easy to imagine a world where the children implicated on Monday had some idea that their already powerful parents knew a guy who was going to help them get into college, but were completely in the dark about the criminal nature of the transactions. The same way their parents, and their wallets and contacts, have likely helped them their entire lives. If this turns out to be the case: Please, lace up and dunk away. But right now, for maybe the first time ever, the influencers arent the worst people involved in the story. Were knee-jerk dunking because were so conditioned to do so. But there are much better targets for our ire. Mock their parents, who didnt know that the proper way to do this is to donate a wing of a dorm to the school. Mock the staff at the fancy institutions of higher learning who, for years, werent able to fully sniff out the fishy, like a kid getting admitted to play water polo from a high school without a water polo team. I mean, mock the kids, if you really must but for having every advantage in life and still not being able to, or caring to, get good enough grades to gain above-board entrance to those institutions. Not for being influencers. Theres a lot of talk on social media about punching up and punching down; the former is fine, the latter is cheap and best avoided. Influencers, with their brands built on the concept of just being people like you and me but reaching a wide audience, often appear to straddle this line. Or, at least, they and their vocal fans think they do. When Logan Paul vlogged that body, I talked to plenty of teenagers who told me he was just being himself and that he only did what any person in his position would have done. Caroline Calloways defenders screamed that she was just an authentic person trying to share her life with people when the Twitter mob grabbed its torches and pitchforks. Their fans dont see them like they see politicians or traditional celebrities, because politicians and old guard stars dont let fans into their lives 24/7 as though they are close, personal friends. (Beto ORourkes Instagrammed dentist visit notwithstanding.) So where does that leave Olivia? On one hand, shes 19, famous, managing her own brand, and running her life like a business. On the other hand, shes 19, and theres been no indication she knew what was going with her parents. Should we really be devoting hundreds of thousands of words to every stupid and out-of-touch thing of which there are many shes ever said or done, even if those things happened in a vacuum where she was none the wiser to the criminal activities going on around her? Doing so seems to cheapen the much-deserved criticisms we lob at influencers when they do bad, dumb things. Paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy your kids admission into elite colleges that would be a bad, dumb thing you should absolutely dunk on somebody for doing. Anybody know where I can find Felicity Huffman? A blood pressure examination at City Hospital in Belfast. Photo: PA Northern Ireland has the highest actual spend per head on public services in the UK, with 11,190 spent for each person living there, the results of a government investigation published on Wednesday show. The study by the National Audit Office found Scotland has the next highest spending, with 10,881 per head. Some 10,397 is spent per head in Wales, while 9,080 is spent in England. Across the United Kingdom, an average of 9,350 is spent per head on public services, making per capita spending in Northern Ireland 20% higher than average. Around 617bn was spent on public services across the UK in the 201718 financial year, according to HM Treasury figures. Some 505bn was spent in England, 59bn in Scotland, 32bn in Wales, and 21bn in Northern Ireland. READ MORE: UK government pledges no new Northern Ireland border checks in no-deal Brexit The spending details were revealed in a document produced following an investigation into spending in the UKs devolved administrations. The four nations that make up the UK England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have different powers of self-government, including with respect to public services, tax and revenue-raising powers. But HM Treasury still has overall responsibility for allocating funding for public services across the UK. The investigation found that the devolved administrations receive a share of changes in planned UK government spending, such as the 20.5 billion of additional funding announced for the NHS in June 2018. This is because HM Treasury uses the Barnett formula, which aims to ensure that the administrations received a population-based share in funding changes. But HM Treasury may allocate direct, special or ad hoc funding to one nation without doing so for other nations, the document says. READ MORE: As Brexit looms, Northern Ireland budget gets 140m extra from UK government The budget for Northern Ireland, published last month, included an additional and unexpected 140m in funding from the UK government. Story continues This was on top of the 333m of new funding that came from the confidence-and-supply agreement brokered with the Democratic Unionist Party, whose 10 MPs prop up Theresa Mays government in the House of Commons. The government has given Northern Ireland leeway with respect to budget rules since the collapse of the devolved administration known there as power-sharing more than two years ago. Northern Ireland now holds the unfortunate world record for the longest period without a sitting government. The previous record, held by Belgium, was 589 days. Many investors are still learning about the various metrics that can be useful when analysing a stock. This article is for those who would like to learn about Return On Equity (ROE). By way of learning-by-doing, well look at ROE to gain a better understanding of Northern Star Resources Limited (ASX:NST). Our data shows Northern Star Resources has a return on equity of 19% for the last year. That means that for every A$1 worth of shareholders equity, it generated A$0.19 in profit. View our latest analysis for Northern Star Resources How Do You Calculate ROE? The formula for return on equity is: Return on Equity = Net Profit Shareholders Equity Or for Northern Star Resources: 19% = AU$197m AU$1.0b (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2018.) Most readers would understand what net profit is, but its worth explaining the concept of shareholders equity. It is all the money paid into the company from shareholders, plus any earnings retained. The easiest way to calculate shareholders equity is to subtract the companys total liabilities from the total assets. What Does ROE Signify? ROE looks at the amount a company earns relative to the money it has kept within the business. The return is the yearly profit. That means that the higher the ROE, the more profitable the company is. So, all else being equal, a high ROE is better than a low one. That means it can be interesting to compare the ROE of different companies. Does Northern Star Resources Have A Good Return On Equity? Arguably the easiest way to assess companys ROE is to compare it with the average in its industry. Importantly, this is far from a perfect measure, because companies differ significantly within the same industry classification. Pleasingly, Northern Star Resources has a superior ROE than the average (14%) company in the Metals and Mining industry. ASX:NST Past Revenue and Net Income, March 12th 2019 Thats clearly a positive. In my book, a high ROE almost always warrants a closer look. For example, I often check if insiders have been buying shares . Story continues The Importance Of Debt To Return On Equity Virtually all companies need money to invest in the business, to grow profits. The cash for investment can come from prior year profits (retained earnings), issuing new shares, or borrowing. In the first two cases, the ROE will capture this use of capital to grow. In the latter case, the debt used for growth will improve returns, but wont affect the total equity. In this manner the use of debt will boost ROE, even though the core economics of the business stay the same. Northern Star Resourcess Debt And Its 19% ROE While Northern Star Resources does have a tiny amount of debt, with debt to equity of just 0.04, we think the use of debt is very modest. Its very respectable ROE, combined with only modest debt, suggests the business is in good shape. Careful use of debt to boost returns is often very good for shareholders. However, it could reduce the companys ability to take advantage of future opportunities. In Summary Return on equity is a useful indicator of the ability of a business to generate profits and return them to shareholders. A company that can achieve a high return on equity without debt could be considered a high quality business. If two companies have the same ROE, then I would generally prefer the one with less debt. But when a business is high quality, the market often bids it up to a price that reflects this. The rate at which profits are likely to grow, relative to the expectations of profit growth reflected in the current price, must be considered, too. So you might want to take a peek at this data-rich interactive graph of forecasts for the company. Of course Northern Star Resources may not be the best stock to buy. So you may wish to see this free collection of other companies that have high ROE and low debt. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. Last week, Samsung finally released its exciting new Galaxy S10 flagship smartphones. The Galaxy S10e, Galaxy S10, and Galaxy S10+ are the completely redesigned handsets that Android fans have been waiting for, and they managed to deliver on the hype. The new Galaxy S phones offer sleek new all-screen designs with trendy hole-punch cameras, exciting new features like an in-display fingerprint reader, big upgrades where power and camera performance are concerned, and plenty more. There are already reports that sales of Samsungs new Galaxy S10 phones are expected to soar, and its easy to see why. Samsung fans were hugely disappointed by last years boring Galaxy S9 upgrade since it looked exactly like 2017s Galaxy S8 and offered no compelling new features at all. The Galaxy S10, however, is exciting and new in every way. Of course now that the S10 family has been released, attention is turning elsewhere and gadget fans are already looking to the future. Lucky for them, a fresh leak just revealed a marquee feature coming to Samsungs next big flagship phone release: The Galaxy Note 10. Related stories Samsung is getting closer to making full-screen phones a reality Galaxy S10 early sales expected to top those of the Galaxy S9, but just barely Battery life across Samsung's Galaxy S10 lineup might surprise you In 2019, 5G doesnt matter. Carriers and smartphone makers are doing their best to try to convince you that it does. In fact, AT&T is trying so hard that its going as far as updating phones with a fake 5G E icon to mislead customers and make them believe theyre connecting to a next-generation network. Sorry, AT&T subscribers, but its the same old network you were connecting to before. No wireless carriers in the United States will offer substantial 5G coverage this year. So, if you buy yourself a shiny (and pricey) new 5G phone, you mostly likely wont be able to reap any benefits from the addition of 5G support. Of course if youre like most people and you plan to keep your phone for several years, then paying a little extra for 5G is definitely worth it. As these next-generation networks continue to roll out, people with 5G compatible smartphones will experience faster data speeds and better coverage than theyve ever seen before. In the meantime, they can consider it an investment in the future and keep their fingers crossed that their wireless carrier of choice deploys 5G in their area sooner rather than later. Story continues You can probably see where were going with this. Samsungs upcoming new Galaxy Note 10 is expected to offer many of the best new features of the Galaxy S10 series, and more. Itll have things like an in-display fingerprint sensor, a hole-punch Dynamic AMOLED screen, and the great next-generation cameras from the S10 series. It should also feature an updated S Pen stylus and nifty new software features to go along with it. On top of all that, a new leak confirms that at least one version of the Galaxy Note 10 will support 5G. Weve known for a while that the Galaxy Note 10 is being referred to internally at Samsung as Da Vinci. The codename was revealed by Samsung insider Ice Universe all the way back in September last year. Now, the team over at XDA Developers has found references to the davinci inside the source code for the Galaxy S10. But its not just any davinci reference, its a reference to a davinci5G. In case youre worried that the 5G version of the Galaxy Note 10 might be the only version and youre going to have to get a home equity loan to afford Samsungs upcoming new Note phone, theres also a reference to a regular davinci without support for 5G connectivity. Nothing else of note was pulled from the S10s source code, but now that three of Samsungs four Galaxy S10 phones have been released we can expect the rumor mills attention to turn to the Galaxy Note 10. If Samsung stays true to form, and we expect that the company will, the new Galaxy Note 10 and Galaxy Note 10 5G will be unveiled at some point in August. Sign up for BGR's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Trending Right Now: See the original version of this article on BGR.com Washington (AFP) - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, America's most powerful Democrat, said in remarks published Monday that she does not support impeaching Donald Trump, arguing the Republican president is "just not worth it." "I'm not for impeachment," Pelosi told The Washington Post in a wide-ranging interview, the strongest signal yet that the Democratic leadership is deeply hesitant about taking such an explosive step to remove a sitting president. "Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path, because it divides the country," she said. "And he's just not worth it." Trump and his associates face multiple investigations, including one headed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller that is looking into Russian influence on the 2016 US election and potential collusion between Trump's team and Moscow. And in explosive congressional testimony late last month, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen branded the president a conman and cheat and sought to implicate his ex-boss in multiple crimes. Even as she waves off calls to impeach Trump, Pelosi -- who in January began her second stint as speaker after Democrats won back the House in midterm elections -- stressed that she does not believe he is fit to lead the nation. "I don't think he is" fit to be president, she said in the interview. "I mean, ethically unfit. Intellectually unfit. Curiosity-wise unfit." The investigations and related testimony like Cohen's may or may not produce evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors on the president's part. Some rank-and-file House Democrats, like freshmen liberal Rashida Tlaib, are keen to being impeachment proceedings. Their ranks are sure to grow if more serious evidence of presidential wrongdoing emerges. Others remain concerned that for now, an effort to oust Trump before the election might backfire, energizing an angry Republican base and antagonizing voters Democrats would need in the next election. Story continues Some in the party would prefer a political battle against Trump at the ballot box, rather than an impeachment effort waged in Congress. And with the Senate in Republican control, Trump's ouster would be far from assured. Pelosi pointed to the excruciating process of president Bill Clinton's impeachment by the House in 1998, and his subsequent acquittal by the Senate. "That was horrible for the country," she said. Congressman Jerry Nadler, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said earlier this month that while it was "very clear" that Trump has obstructed justice, "impeachment is a long way down the road." Nadler's committee launched a sprawling new investigation last week that is sure to take months, demanding documents from 81 persons or entities connected to Trump. But he told ABC News that ahead of any impeachment proceedings, lawmakers would need to convince the American public that members were "not just trying to... reverse the results of the last election." Pep Guardiola has stoked the fire with Premier League rivals Liverpool by declaring his support for Champions League opponents Bayern Munich in Wednesdays last-16 tie. The Bavarians host Jurgen Klopps men at the Allianz Arena, with the contest delicately poised following a goalless first leg. Liverpool will be hoping to go the distance again this season, having reached the Champions League final in 2018 before losing to Real Madrid. But with Real out of the tournament, Liverpool could be one of the favourites to win Europes elite competition if they make it past Bayern. READ MORE: Guardiola hails incredible Man City side and warns teenagers will get better AS IT HAPPENED: Man City put seven past Schalke Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp and Man Citys Pep Guardiola are going head-to-head in the Premier League title race. But Guardiola, who managed Bayern for three seasons before joining Manchester City, has declared his support for the Bundesliga giants. Im sorry for the English people but I want Bayern to go through, Guardiola said. I am part of this club. I love Munich. I love Bayern. I have a lot of friends there. City themselves will be looking forward to Fridays Champions League quarter-final draw after knocking out FC Schalke 10-2 on aggregate. The Manchester side won a rollercoaster first leg 3-2 in Germany, with 10 men, before steamrolling their opponents on home soil with a 7-0 victory on Tuesday night. Sergio Aguero scored twice as Raheem Sterling, Leroy Sane, Phil Foden, Bernardo Silva and Gabriel Silva all got in on the fun. It was the seventh time this season the Premier League leaders have scored at least six goals in a match and the biggest loss of a German side in Champions League history. And Guardiola could well be fearful of another Liverpool match-up, with Klopp responsible for knocking his side out of the competition in the quarter-finals last season. Last week we saw what happened with good results in the second leg, so we were serious, we did it and Im incredibly happy to be in Fridays draw, he said. We started the first 20-25 minutes trying not to lose what we achieved in Germany, thats why we didnt attack, and Leroy [Sane] and Raheem [Sterling] had no intention of being aggressive towards their full-backs. Story continues But we didnt lose what we achieved and when we scored the first and the second goals qualification was almost done. After that we played in a good level. We didnt concede chances, even in the last 15 minutes of the first half, and in the second half we were good in the transition and scored seven goals. I know that Schalke are in a tough period because they lost the last game and their confidence was low, but even with that situation you have to do your job and we did it. The 737 Max has been in service since 2017 - 2019 Anadolu Agency Pilots from around the world have logged numerous complaints and concerns over the Boeing 737 Max aircraft in the last 15 months, it has emerged. The reports found on an aviation safety reporting database set up by Nasa highlight perceived problems with the jets new anti-stall technology. The update on the old 737 design is a system intended to protect the aircraft from stalling by forcing the nose of the plane down in certain circumstances. However, it is now at the centre of questions regarding the airworthiness of the 737 MAX in the wake of its second fatal crash in five months. In one entry in Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), which allows pilots to record incidents anonymously, a captain described how the 737 MAX 8 began descending after take-off and issued an audible Dont sink, dont sink! warning, indicating a loss of altitude. I immediately disconnected autopilot and resumed climb, the pilot said. With the concerns with the MAX 8 nose-down stuff, we... thought it was appropriate to bring it to your attention. Another from November last year told how the US-made aircraft pitched nose down within two to three seconds of the autopilot being turned on. The captain immediately disconnected the autopilot and pitched into a climb. The remainder of the flight was uneventful. We discussed the departure at length and I reviewed in my mind our automation setup and flight profile but can't think of any reason the aircraft would pitch nose down so aggressively. The 737 MAX - of which there are more than 350 in service - is an updated version of the popular 737 model and has only been in the sky since 2017. It has, however, been billed as the short-haul aircraft of the future. But concerns this week in the wake of a plane crash in Ethiopia on Sunday that left 157 dead has led to aviation authorities in Europe, China, Australia and beyond banning the plane from their airspace. Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the US has maintained the aircraft is safe. Story continues In more than one report logged on the ASRS website, pilots spoke of unfamiliarity with the aircraft and confusion over some of its controls. One, flying the aircraft for the first time, having been told so on the way to the airport, wrote: Unfamiliarity with flight deck displays led to confusion about display annunciations and switch function. The Flight Manual does not address at least one annunciation, or the controls for the display - or if it does, neither pilot could find the explanation. I have spent literally days looking for an explanation, could not find one, and that is why I wrote this report. It shouldn't be this hard to figure out what I'm looking at. Another, referencing confusion over the new anti-stall technology, said: I am left to wonder: what else don't I know? The Flight Manual is inadequate and almost criminally insufficient. A third said: My post-flight evaluation is that we lacked the knowledge to operate the aircraft in all weather and aircraft states safely. Planes have been grounded around the world Credit: getty Boeings latest statement said safety is it number one priority and that it has full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX, adding: We understand that regulatory agencies and customers have made decisions that they believe are most appropriate for home markets. Well continue to engage with them to ensure they have the information needed to have confidence in operating their fleets. The Seattle-based company has said that it has been developing a flight control software enhancement for the plane, believed to come into use in April. Saj Ahmad, chief analyst at StrategicAero Research, said it was too early to say the plane is unsafe. It's premature to call the MAX unsafe given the FAA's reluctance to ground it - further, not one of the agencies the world over that have grounded the 737 MAX has provided any meaningful technical reasons behind the decision to ground the type, he said. That to me is concerning because that highlights a disconnect between aviation regulators who should all be singing from the same hymn sheet. He said there is no evidence thus far that the two MAX crashes are even related. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made headlines once again when, in a recent Instagram live chat, she broached the topic of the ethics of having children given the implications of climate change. Two weeks later, it still has people talking. Theres scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult, said the progressive freshman representative from New York. And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: Is it okay to still have children? Since then, some on the right have falsely claimed that AOC was hinting at draconian population control policies by addressing the issue with her followers. Fox News Steve Hilton went so far as to call it fascistic, and exaggeratedly claimed that Ocasio-Cortez was calling for a no-child policy, Vox reported. Its easy to see that these attacks are in bad faith. Republicans and others on the right belong to a political cohort that is actively taking away access to safe and affordable abortion and birth control, and that refuses to compromise on more-affordable health care. Though the tide is beginning to turn, the Republican party and many of its sympathizers have historically refused to act on (or even acknowledge) climate change. Both major parties have a record of throwing fuel on the proverbial (and, increasingly, literal) fire by enabling, and profiting from, oil companies and other major polluters that are driving climate change. Progressive Democrats including AOC have offered the Green New Deal to partially combat some of the impacts of climate change, but Republicans have wholly rejected this plan; a small minority from within the party reportedly wants to address the matter through other means. But numerous Democrats have opposed the Green New Deal, too, including AOCs boss in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. What to do about climate change is a heated political debate, and some criticisms of Ocasio-Cortezs remarks have been clearly inflated to suit reactionary agendas. But thats not to say that its totally irrational to feel uneasy when an elected official says the words, Is it okay to still have children? even if theyre echoing the words of their constituents and not directly posing the question themselves. Story continues There are few people who would argue that the decision to have children is a serious one, with various ethical concerns attached. Its also more than fair for a person to wonder whether or not they might want to start a family themselves, given that climate change is rapidly destroying the planet and todays children will have to deal with the consequences as they grow more dire. Whether or not it is fair to a child to be born at all is an age-old philosophical question thats worth being asked. But because its not one that should be taken up by a government official, its mere mention can be read as taboo. And to be perfectly clear: Ocasio-Cortez did not, as Foxs Hilton suggested, promote any kind of population control policy. Such policies are in fact a major breach on human rights, and should be condemned where they actually surface. What Ocasio-Cortez said on her Instagram had to do with how the threat of climate change can affect young peoples family planning decisions, but she certainly has not explicitly advocated for population control measures. Most progressives would likely agree that it is not the governments place to interfere with matters of family planning and reproductive choice, and AOC almost certainly shares that view. But her position in the federal legislature does put her in shaky territory to discuss the ethics of other people having children. AOCs reflection on the musings of young people would have been wholly unobjectionable coming from a layperson, but as a congresswoman, she risks having the statement misconstrued as a personal and therefore, political position. Ocasio-Cortez tends to use her social media presence in a way that could make her supporters feel like shes more of a peer than an authority figure. But because she does, in fact, have a position in government, she needs to be careful about tossing ethical questions out on the gram even if they arent explicitly her own. While extreme criticisms from the right are clearly in bad faith, merely repeating others ethical questions about procreation can evoke concerns about the implementation of population control policies. However, it is well within AOCs lane to advocate for rigorous environmental policies. While Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives are working hard for the Green New Deal, the resolution is simply not sufficient to address the causes of climate change in 12 years. As member of Congress, her job is to create and pass policy that ensures the young people of today who do decide to have kids can give those kids a safe life, and leave her constituents debates about their own reproduction to them alone. (Photos by Rick Loomis + Win McNamee/Getty Images) You Might Also Like By Alex Dobuzinskis (Reuters) - Political grudges and racial animosity have divided students at U.S. high schools and President Donald Trump has exacerbated the problem with his rhetoric, a study released on Wednesday showed. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) surveyed 505 high school principals for the study. More than 60 percent of them reported some of their students had made derogatory remarks about immigrants. More broadly, more than 80 percent of principals said some of their students had disparaged other ethnic groups. The UCLA study is called "School and Society in the Age of Trump," but its author said the Republican president is not solely responsible for tensions at secondary schools. "The report is a story of this particular time, not narrowly a story of the actions of this one president, although this president's actions contribute to it," John Rogers, a professor of education at UCLA, said by phone. A White House representative declined to comment. The UCLA report described a charged environment at high schools, with most principals having to deal with students who make hateful or hostile remarks about other people's ethnic background or political beliefs. Groups of white students at some schools have chanted "Build the wall!" to demean students of color, according to accounts from several principals to researchers. RISE IN HATE CRIMES Those and other instances of racial hostility at high schools bear a resemblance to Trump's rhetoric on immigration, the study said. To bolster their contention that some hostility at schools is due to Trump's positions, the study points to a 17 percent rise in hate crimes across American society in 2017, the first year of Trump's presidency. Some conservative students have also encountered venom from classmates. Nearly half of principals told their students to respect students with unpopular political views, and one third emphasized the importance of tolerating the views of conservatives. In Wisconsin, one principal reported a small group of his students arrived at school one day wearing Trump's signature "Make America Great Again" hats, which offended some liberal teenagers and led to a fistfight. In another episode, some students in Connecticut made demeaning comments to a white student after she showed support for Trump, a principal told researchers, and the pupil felt her teacher did not defend her right to express herself. The report also found high schools are affected by other social problems, such as opioid addiction and firearms violence. (Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Editing by Bill Tarrant) President Trump and Paul Ryan. Photo: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images On Monday, a little under two months into his retirement, former House Speaker Paul Ryan gave a speech at the Riverside Theatre in Vero Beach, Florida, about an hour and a half north of Mar-a-Lago. For much of the hour-long lecture, the purported wonk discussed his policy successes (massive corporate tax cuts) and failures (not repealing the ACA), and his hopes for the current class in Congress: increased border security and an elimination of the green-card lottery. Ryan, Mitt Romneys running mate in 2012, also gave some interesting election advice for GOP voters in 2020. Believing that there are some candidates in the Democratic field who could beat President Trump, Ryan said that the incumbent must make his platform stand out through his policies, not just his personality: The person who defines that race is going to win the race. If this is about Donald Trump and his personality, he isnt going to win it. This piece of advice delivered in a 700-seat auditorium in South Florida rehashes why Ryans downfall occurred in the Trump era: The idea man was divorced from the id-heavy exploits of his party. Setting aside value judgements of the presidents thoughts and actions, what is Donald Trump if not personality? One of the primary factors of Trumps Electoral College win was his persona as a self-made outsider whether or not the image matched reality shooting from the hip at policy ideas that were incongruent with his party. Since becoming president, Trump has reportedly taken the words of fellow 80s New York icon Mike Tyson as a mantra: Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. One adviser told Axios that Trump gets frustrated when there is a plan Theres an animosity towards planning. A crucial piece of Trumps 2016 electorate was the low-information voter, defined by political scientists Richard Fording and Sanford Schram as those who do not know certain basic facts about government and lack what psychologists call a need for cognition. In a Washington Post op-ed published two days before the 2016 election, the pair stated: Barring a radical change in media habits or general outlook, its unlikely that these voters are going to be worried that Trump still has an undefined policy approach two years into his term. It certainly isnt his droll public readings of policy proposals that make Trump a captivating speaker for the Republican base. If anything, the focus on policy over personality is what set Ryan apart from the direction of the Republican leadership, which, at least in the Executive branch, is no longer a party of ideas. Perhaps if he had a better roadmap for the direction of the GOP, Ryan could have hung on in the age of Trump, rather than champion a wildly unpopular tax overhaul and tap out ahead of the GOPs greatest loss in the House since 1974. This post has been updated to reflect Paul Ryans former role as House Speaker. WASHINGTON Paul Manafort, the man who helped guide Donald Trump to the presidency, was sentenced to a total of more than seven years in federal prison on Wednesday after a judge added 43 months to the sentence he received in another case last week. The pair of prison sentences marks the end of Manafort's abrupt transformation from a globe-trotting political operative with mansions and lavish clothing to a frail-looking, wheelchair-bound, gray-haired inmate who, in his own words, had been "humiliated" by his changed circumstances. Manafort, speaking from a wheelchair, told the judge: "I want to say to you now that I am sorry for what I've done." U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson appeared unpersuaded, delivering a withering rebuke from the bench. She said Manafort had spent much of his career "gaming the system," that he cheated taxpayers so that he could maintain an extravagant lifestyle, and that he remained unrepentant despite his apology. "Saying Im sorry I got caught is not an inspiring plea for leniency." Related Video: Trump Says He Feels 'Very Badly for Paul Manafort' A federal judge in Virginia sentenced Manafort to 47 months in prison last week for a scheme to defraud banks and taxpayers out of millions of dollars. Jackson added more than three years to that in the related case in Washington, where he faced a maximum of 10 years after pleading guilty to two conspiracy charges. She also ordered him to spend three years on federal supervision, when he is freed from prison and to pay $6 million in restitution. The nine months he has already spent in jail will count toward his sentence. Her decision brings Manafort's total prison sentence to 7 years. "It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved," Jackson said. Story continues Minutes after she finished sentencing Manafort, state prosecutors in New York announced that they had filed charges of their own against Manafort, including counts of mortgage fraud and conspiracy. The new indictment means Manafort's legal troubles will not end with the prison term imposed Wednesday, and because they were filed by state authorities, they are beyond the reach of a pardon from Trump. Jackson said Manafort's crimes were aimed at propping up an opulent lifestyle that included more homes than one family can occupy and more suits than one man can wear. And she blasted Manafort for concealing his activities from the government and for lying to federal investigators after promising to cooperate with them. "If people don't have the facts, democracy can't work," she said. During the sentencing hearing, Manafort pleaded with Jackson to spare him from the prospect of spending the remainder of his life in federal prison. "Please let me and my wife be together," said Manafort, who turns 70 in less than three weeks. Manafort pleaded guilty to two felonies in Washington as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's nearly two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Andrew Weissmann, one of the prosecutors, said Manafort lied for years to government officials by not disclosing his lobbying work in Ukraine, as federal law requires. He not only kept what he was doing from the American public; he also kept what he was doing from the people he was lobbying. For years, Weissmann said, Manafort hid off-shore accounts, falsified tax returns and faked loans to disguise income hed earned from his work in Ukraine. "Paul Manaforts upbringing, his education, his means, his opportunities could have led him to lead a life and to be a leading example in this country. At each juncture, though, Mr. Manafort chose to take a different path," Weissmann said. "He engaged in crime again and again." Manafort's lawyer said he found himself entangled in the high-profile, high-pressure investigation of Russian election interference, even though he was charged with unrelated crimes. Kevin Downing, one of Paul Manafort's defense lawyers, urged Jackson to consider the intense public scrutiny Manafort has faced since he was indicted in 2017. "But for a short stint as a campaign manager (for President Trump), I don't think we would be here today," Downing said. Prosecutors have urged Jackson to impose a significant sentence, describing Manafort as a hardened criminal who repeatedly and brazenly violated the law for more than a decade and whose crimes continued even after his indictment in 2017. Defense attorneys have said a lengthy prison term would likely amount to a life sentence for Manafort. They said Manaforts crimes do not rise to the organized crimes of drug cartels, and that the charges aren't about collusion with Russia, which was the central focus of Mueller's investigation. U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis in Virginia heeded defense attorneys call for leniency on Thursday, when he sentenced Manafort to nearly four years in prison and three years on federal supervision for masterminding a scheme to defraud banks and taxpayers out of millions of dollars he had amassed through years of illicit lobbying work on behalf of a pro-Russian political faction in Ukraine. The sentence fell far below the 20 to 24 years that federal sentencing guidelines had recommended. Jackson dismissed Manafort's refrain that the charges were unrelated to Russia as something that should have no bearing on his sentence. Jackson revoked Manaforts bail last summer following allegations that he tried to obstruct the Russia inquiry while on house arrest. She sided with prosecutors last month that Manafort violated his plea agreement by lying repeatedly to prosecutors and the FBI after promising to cooperate. "I would be even more surprised if her sentence reflected the sort of leniency that Judge Ellis showed," said Ken White, a defense attorney and former federal prosecutor. "I think she views him as someone who acted badly during the course of the case ... I would be very, very worried about this next step if I were Manafort or his lawyers." Ellis sentence surprisedsome legal experts and was promptly met with backlash, particularly from Democratic lawmakers. A USA TODAY analysis of the U.S. Sentencing Commission's data found that Manafort received the type of sentencing available only to people who cooperated with the government. And his 47-month punishment is lower than those of many defendants who prosecutors deemed as cooperative. Manafort's lawyers have asserted that he cooperated with the special counsel, citing about a dozen interviews with prosecutors totaling more than 50 hours. But prosecutors disputed that that amounted to cooperation, saying Manafort had failed to provide useful information and had lied to investigators and to a grand jury. The analysis found that of the nearly 67,000 defendants sentenced in federal courts in the 2017 fiscal year, 308 whose guideline calculations called for them to serve at least 15 years in prison wound up receiving less than five years. The majority of these defendants received this kind of break in sentencing because the government asked for it and because they cooperated with prosecutors. Manafort, whom prosecutors did not believe substantially cooperated, received a sentence below that. In fact, of those 308 cases, there's was one fraud case in which the sentence was comparable to Manafort's. It involved a defendant in New York who faced a recommendedminimum of 188 months and was sentenced to 30 months. Jackson is also presiding over the case of Roger Stone, another Trump adviser indicted as part of the Mueller investigation. Last month, Jackson found herself in the national spotlight after a picture of her next to what appeared to be cross hairs was posted on Stone's Instagram account. Contributing: Bart Jansen and Kevin Johnson More on Paul Manafort's legal troubles: 'Humiliated and ashamed': Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman, sentenced to nearly 4 years in prison Was Paul Manafort's sentence too light? Here's how it compares with other cases Paul Manafort's lawyers say long prison term would 'likely amount to a life sentence' for Trump aide 'His criminal actions were bold': Prosecutors urge harsh sentence for Paul Manafort in court memo This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Paul Manafort sentenced to a total of 7.5 years in prison. 'It is hard to overstate the number of lies.' With 2020 just around the corner and an election cycle taking center stage, candidates are looking for a hook to bolster their image as a champion of the people best positioned to close the gap on income inequality. Almost overnight, a once arcane Wall Street term stock buyback has made its way into the main stream news cycle.Promising to end or at least regulate the practice, several Democratic candidates along with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer seem ready to take on the titans of industry and Wall Street. Senator Schumer and Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders co-authored an Op-Ed: Limit Corporate Stock Buybacks for the New York Times. To get around a Sanders Schumer ban, companies would have to live up to some artificial standard of fairness on wages, pensions and likely a growing list of demands, effectively limiting management options to generate shareholder returns. Maybe well-meaning but misses the big picture and the real danger from excessive stock buybacks. On the other side of the aisle Republican Senator Marco Rubio believes the best solution is to change the tax code leveling the playing field between Capital Gains and Dividends. Politics aside, the billions spent on corporate buybacks are all too often the easy way out for CEOs. To put it simply, a stock buyback is a public corporation going into the open market to buy shares of their own stock from existing shareholders. The net effect is a reduction in the overall shares outstanding which in turn increases earnings per share as net income is divided by a lower share count. What could be wrong with that? Higher earnings mean higher stock prices along with added support when shares are falling. Everyone is happy. If stock buybacks are so Star Spangled awesome how come executives that cash out of their own stock, do so more often after their firms announce stock buybacks. SEC Commissioner Robert Jackson wrote just that in a letter to Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) who called the findings "very significant and very troubling." The performance is mixed for companies that buyback stock vs those that choose more productive avenues of capital deployment. Few succeed while most are attempting to hide or cover up the inability of management to drive the top line. Remember, a stock buyback does nothing for revenue and nothing for income. Just earnings per share are boosted due to a lower share count. Story continues In previous articles I used to give companies like Apple (AAPL) a pass thinking with well over $200 Billion in cash, a stock buyback was all but necessary. I'm done. Where's my iPhone that doesn't freeze up when I take a picture or even an iPhone that is significantly different than the one I bought a couple of years ago? Surely, with an army of the best engineers on the planet we could push the envelope further. Last year, corporations spent over $1 Trillion on stock repurchases setting a record, adding to the $Trillions in previous years. My god think about it! Where's my teleportation device? Maybe we could have cured cancer? Surely, we could have done something more productive than just wasting it on another mindless stock buyback program. Disney (DIS) 4 Year Chart https://s.yimg.com/os/en-US/homerun/foxbusiness.com/dab09ab15cf28861473eb2117bba8439 When you read between the lines of a stock buyback press release, basically the CEO is telling you he or she is out of ideas. Since 2015 when we first learned Disney was starting to see problems at their ESPN unit, the company continued to buyback over $26 Billion worth of their own stock. One look at a price chart gives the verdict on just how much shareholder value has been added. It's no secret today that the company is spending $Billions to launch a successful OTT or over the top service. Arguably Netflix (NFLX) is the industry leader and today commands a fully diluted market cap of $157 Billion. According to FactSet data, when the stock was just $82 at the beginning of 2015 its equity valuation was just over $20 Billion. Throw in a 30% takeout premium and $26 Billion for the next leg of growth seems like a better use of capital. IBM Debt vs Annual Sales https://s.yimg.com/os/en-US/homerun/foxbusiness.com/45ad197de4edf28e9361aa587c8ea6c4 https://s.yimg.com/os/en-US/homerun/foxbusiness.com/831791304c4e31aad86036323fb7ce68 How about the poster child of stock buybacks IBM as they proceeded to buy back on average $9 Billion of their stock per year while revenue continued to go lower. From the years 2011 through last year IBM bought over $71 Billion in shares* while revenue declined from a peak of $106 Billion falling to just $79.6 Billion during the same time frame. In other words, they were borrowing to buy back their own shares mostly at higher prices. By 2013 the company's failure to recognize the changing landscape in technology caught up with them and the stock has been on a slow ride south from 210 in 2013 now 35% lower to Friday's price just over 135. To their credit, CEO Ginni Rometty has slowed down share purchases significantly buying back only $4.4 Billion last year. IBM Chart 2011 - Today https://s.yimg.com/os/en-US/homerun/foxbusiness.com/d292defabebcf83178d5fc7305bf10a4 IBM and Disney aren't alone. In fact, they are just the tip of the iceberg. All of this begs the question why CEOs and management often choose stock buybacks instead of other more productive uses of corporate cash? Why not increase R&D or build another factory or for that matter buy another company? Like I said earlier, theres no easy answer but a little history is in order to understand the mindset of management. CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX BUSINESS APP Stock Based Compensation Stock options and restricted stock make up an increasing portion of CEO compensation. Last year Walt Disney Chairman and CEO Bob Iger received a total package of $65.6 Million of which more than $35 Million was equity compensation. When stock vests or options are exercised the share count can balloon especially if it is being done for senior and middle management. Suddenly, the earnings per share or EPS is threatened because the number of shares outstanding are rising. Whats the solution? You guessed it, a Stock Buyback program. How did CEO pay get so high and why not just pay a higher salary rather than continue to dilute shares? While the causes are complex, all the evidence seems to point to former President Bill Clinton and the IRS as the principal catalyst driving up CEO compensation dramatically since 1994.Early in his presidency, Bill Clinton decided CEOs were making too much money and concluded government should play a role in leveling the playing field. His solution was using IRS tax code 162 (m) which limited the deduction of CEO Pay as an expense to $1 Million. On its own, it might have forced boards to reconsider high compensation as the lack of a write off would start to cut into profits and eventually share prices. However, the code permits expensing of performance" based pay above the stated $1 Million if certain goals are met. Compensation had to be based on written, pre-established performance goals... The goals must be objective... Attainment of the goal must be substantially uncertain at the time the goal is established. The plan and performance measures must be subject to shareholder approval... Prior to payment, the Compensation Committee must certify that the goals were attained. Clintons law soon became an inside joke in boardrooms across America. Performance based compensation much of which came in the form of stock options and restricted stock exploded in the 90s during the run up into and bursting of the internet bubble. The recession that followed along with the financial crisis weighed on compensation, but the last 10 years has seen a return to trend with C-suite pay rising far faster than the rest of the workforce. So, here we are nearly 25 years later with a stock-based compensation and stock buyback explosion that doesnt seem ready to end anytime soon. Stocks are up a staggering 400% since the lows of the financial crisis so its not like shareholders have been complaining. However, the opportunity cost not just for companies but for our country is becoming painfully apparent. Corporate America is mortgaging our future in a classic case of short-term thinking. There will be critics to this article, some from arguably brilliant corporate leaders many of whom I respect and admire. Jamie Dimon CEO of JPMorgan Chase has said buybacks are for times when stock is cheap. I think the above examples show that despite buybacks stocks can and do get a lot cheaper. While it's true that cash returned to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks can be redeployed into other companies, we're paying these titans of industry massive sums of money to do just that. If you can't find something to do with $200 Billion in a savings account, maybe it's time to find another CEO. *FactSet Data David Nelson, CFA is the Chief Strategist of Belpointe Asset Management. *The original version of this article previously published has been edited for length and clarity. Related Articles Watch the full episode 17 of Yahoo UKs show The Royal Box, here. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are soon to become parents for the first time this spring. Prince Harry, 34, has always had a great rapport with children and young people during royal engagements, so what kind of father will he be? Speaking to the Yahoo UKs The Royal Box, Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine, thinks the duke will be protective over his family. She says: I think Harry will be supremely protective when he becomes a father, hes pretty protective now. Hes very conscious of the media and Meghan and the upsets and the nastiness and hes never liked the media anyway and you cant blame him. Prince Harry will be supremely protective of his child [Photo: Getty] Harry has had a difficult relationship with the media at times since his teenage years and even issued an unprecedented statement asking them to respect his and Meghans privacy when they began dating in 2016. Roya Nikkhah, The Sunday Times royal correspondent, also thinks the father-to-be will want to protect his child from too much media scrutiny. She says that the British media are seriously respectful of privacy rules and guidelines, adding that you do not see paparazzi photographs of George, and Louis and Charlotte being used in any publications. READ MORE: Prince Harry caught nodding his head to Clean Bandit Harry has been protective of his wife Meghan [Photo: Getty] Ms Nikkhah believes that privacy is one the key reasons for Harry and Meghans move to Frogmore Cottage in Windsor, ahead of their babys birth in April. She says: Theyre not going to be in the goldfish bowl of Kensington Palace, it will be much harder to photograph them. Harry does has a very high level of expectancy any crossing of red lines with taking photos of his child or invading their privacy, he will come down like a ton of bricks on. Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi on Monday urged European governments to protect the children of their citizens who went to live under the Islamic State group, days after the death of a baby born to a London teenager in a Syrian refugee camp. Britain's conservative government has faced criticism from human rights campaigners and leftwing opponents after the two-week-old son of jihadi bride Shamima Begum perished in a camp in northeastern Syria last week. British Home Secretary Sajid Javid had revoked Begum's British citizenship in February, a move designed to show the government's uncompromising stance on those who joined the extremists. "These children are not jihadis," said Satyarthi, a lifetime Indian campaigner for child rights who won the Nobel Prize in 2014 along with Pakistan's Malala Yousafzai. "If we are not able to give them proper care and proper protection and love and respect and recognition as human beings, then there are more chances that they could be misused and manipulated," he told AFP in Paris. "It is better to embrace them." As IS faces defeat on the battlefield, thousands of women and children have been streaming out of Baghouz, the group's last redoubt in Syria, which has faced a military onslaught by Kurdish-led forces. The mass exodus has increased the dilemmas faced by many countries which must decide whether to allow jihadists and IS sympathisers home to face prosecution, and how to deal with their children. According to UN children's charity UNICEF, around 3,000 foreign children from 43 countries are housed at the Al-Hol camp alone, which has taken in most of the people fleeing the collapsed IS "caliphate" in recent weeks. "Maybe they are the children of jihadis or suicide bombers or terrorists. They are born into that family, but it is not their fault," Satyarthi added. Some countries, notably Russia, have repatriated children and placed them with family members or foster parents, but France, Belgium and Britain have been reluctant to bring back their minors. Story continues A lawyer working for the families of French jihadists, Marie Dose, recently accused the Paris government of "leaving them to die". - Progress, but not enough - Satyarthi's comments are in keeping with the 65-year-old's drive to promote child rights, firstly through his own charity in India, and since his 2014 Nobel prize as a global campaigner. He continues to lead his Indian organisation, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, which has been able to scale up operations to save child labourers thanks to his global notoriety. In a world dominated by bad news, the activist from India's central Madhya Pradesh state says good news globally for child rights are a bright spot -- but more can be done. He cites figures showing that in the last 18 years the number of child labourers has fallen to 150 million from 260 million, while the number of children not in primary school has more than halved to 60 million. "Progress has been made, but neither the Indian government nor the international community has yet prioritised the issues of children," he said. "In many places of the world, we have more soldiers than teachers, more weapons and guns than books and toys for our children." Satyarthi expressed disappointment with the record on child rights of India's Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who will be seeking re-election at elections scheduled from April 11 to May 19. More public spending on education, health and child protection was needed, as well as a new law on child trafficking which has been stuck in the upper house of parliament, he said. "Everyone is proud that we have such a huge demographic dividend (in India): 40 percent of the population below 18 years old. But what do you spend on them?" he asked. As well as continuing his core child rights and rescue work, Satyarthi has recently broadened his focus to take in the battle against online pornography, which he views as a major threat to children. He has toured world capitals trying to drum up support for a new global UN convention to tackle the problem of child and adult pornography being viewed by minors. "There is a whole dark side of the internet that has to be stopped and that is not possible without a strong law, an international law," he said. One of the better free-agent wide receiver is defecting from one AFC West team to another. According to ESPNs Adam Schefter, former Los Angeles Chargers wide receiver Tyrell Williams intends to sign with the Oakland Raiders. And its for big money, too. Schefter reported that Williams is set to earn a four-year, $44 million deal with a maximum value of $47 million, which includes $22 million guaranteed. On an average-per-year basis, thats as much as Larry Fitzgerald and Emmanuel Sanders are set to make next season. Thats yet another big addition at the position for the Raiders, who just made a dramatic trade for Antonio Brown in whats appearing to be a remade offense in Oakland. Brown is expected to be the leagues highest-paid receiver, and Williams will land in the top 20 at the position. The Raiders still have Jordy Nelson and Seth Roberts on the books at more than $5 million per year for now, so we could see the Raiders make another move or two to change who ends up in the receivers room before training camp. How much can Williams add? Williams, who was Yahoo Sports No. 14 available free agent this offseason, hasnt been able to match his brilliant 2016 season totals (69 catches, 1,059 yards, seven TDs) the past two seasons. But he also was in an offense that at different times had a lot of explosive and productive pass catchers, such as Keenan Allen, Mike Williams, Hunter Henry, Melvin Gordon, Austin Ekeler and even Antonio Gates. The good thing for the Raiders is that Williams wont have to be the go-to option in Oakland with Brown now in the fold, so he can play a complementary role in Jon Grudens offense. Former Los Angeles Chargers wide receiver Tyrell Williams reportedly is set to sign with the Oakland Raiders. (AP Photo) Its not clear what the rest of the offense will look like right now. Nelson and Roberts remain on the team for now, and tight end Jared Cook is an unsigned free agent. Theres also the matter of how the backfield will shape up, and there at least has been some speculation over whether QB Derek Carr will remain the long-term starter. Story continues But Williams is a tall receiver (6-foot-4) who can help the Raiders as a downfield threat. Interestingly, only four of his 19 career TDs have come in the red zone, so Williams hasnt exactly been used as that type of pass catcher. More from Yahoo Sports: We often see insiders buying up shares in companies that perform well over the long term. On the other hand, wed be remiss not to mention that insider sales have been known to precede tough periods for a business. So well take a look at whether insiders have been buying or selling shares in BlueLinx Holdings Inc. (NYSE:BXC). What Is Insider Selling? It is perfectly legal for company insiders, including board members, to buy and sell stock in a company. However, rules govern insider transactions, and certain disclosures are required. We would never suggest that investors should base their decisions solely on what the directors of a company have been doing. But it is perfectly logical to keep tabs on what insiders are doing. For example, a Harvard University study found that insider purchases earn abnormal returns of more than 6% per year. See our latest analysis for BlueLinx Holdings BlueLinx Holdings Insider Transactions Over The Last Year In the last twelve months, the biggest single purchase by an insider was when Non-Executive Chairman Kim Fennebresque bought US$1.1m worth of shares at a price of US$33.96 per share. That means that an insider was happy to buy shares at above the current price. Their view may have changed since then, but at least it shows they felt optimistic at the time. That purchase may suggest an expectation of positive returns over the long term. Over the last year, we can see that insiders have bought 49.80k shares worth US$1.5m. In the last twelve months there was more buying than selling by BlueLinx Holdings insiders. Their average price was about US$30.60. These transactions show that insiders have confidence to invest their own money in the stock, albeit at slightly below the recent price of US$30.90. The chart below shows insider transactions (by individuals) over the last year. If you click on the chart, you can see all the individual transactions, including the share price, individual, and the date! Story continues NYSE:BXC Recent Insider Trading, March 13th 2019 If you like to buy stocks alongside management, then you might just love this free list of companies. (Hint: insiders have been buying them). Insider Ownership Many investors like to check how much of a company is owned by insiders. We usually like to see fairly high levels of insider ownership. BlueLinx Holdings insiders own about US$11m worth of shares. That equates to 3.8% of the company. Weve certainly seen higher levels of insider ownership elsewhere, but these holdings are enough to suggest alignment between insiders and the other shareholders. So What Does This Data Suggest About BlueLinx Holdings Insiders? There havent been any insider transactions in the last three months that doesnt mean much. On a brighter note, the transactions over the last year are encouraging. Insiders own shares in BlueLinx Holdings and we see no evidence to suggest they are worried about the future. Along with insider transactions, I recommend checking if BlueLinx Holdings is growing revenue. This free chart of historic revenue and earnings should make that easy. Of course BlueLinx Holdings may not be the best stock to buy. So you may wish to see this free collection of high quality companies. We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading. Even distant relatives can raise the risk of Alzheimer's a new study has shown The risk of developing Alzheimers rises by almost 50 per cent if people have distant relatives with the disease, a new study has shown. Although it was known that having a parent with dementia raises the risk, new research shows that even distant cousins, great uncles or great-grandparents with the condition should be treated as a warning sign. Researchers made the link by studying more than 270,000 people from the Utah Population Database, which includes information of Utah pioneers and their descendants dating back to the 1800s. The database includes death records for all four grandparents and at least six of eight great grandparents. Researchers found that people with one first-degree relative - such as a parent - with Alzheimer's disease had a 73 percent increased risk of developing the disease, meaning that the risk would rise from 1.8 in 1,000 to 3.2 in 1,000. People with two first-degree relatives were four times more likely to develop the disease; those with three were two-and-half more times likely, and those with four were nearly 15 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's. But those with only third-degree relatives - such as great grandparents or great uncles - also had a 43 percent greater risk of developing the disease even if close relatives had not been diagnosed. Family history is an important indicator of risk for Alzheimer's disease, but most research focuses on dementia in immediate family members, so our study sought to look at the bigger family picture, said study author Dr Lisa Cannon-Albright, of the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City. We found that having a broader view of family history may help better predict risk. These results potentially could lead to better diagnoses and help patients and their families in making health-related decisions. More and more, people are increasingly seeking an estimate of their own genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease. Our findings indicate the importance of clinicians taking a person's full family history that extends beyond their immediate family members. Story continues Around 850,000 people in Britain are suffering from dementia, and most have Alzheimers disease. The figure is expected to reach one million by 2025, but scientists are still unsure of the causes and no cure or long term treatment has so far been discovered. Experts now believe that it may be impossible to reverse the brain cell damage which brings the debilitating effects of dementia, such as memory loss, and that stopping progression may be the only way to tackling the problem. If so, catching the disease early, by screening people with a family history of dementia is vital. The figures also showed that people with one first-degree relative and one second-degree relative had a 21 times greater risk, or a chance of 37 in 1,000. Examples of this would be a parent and one grandparent with the disease, or a parent and one aunt or uncle. "There are still many unknowns about why a person develops Alzheimer's disease," added Dr Cannon-Albright. "A family history of the disease is not the only possible cause. There may be environmental causes, or both. There is still much more research needed before we can give people a more accurate prediction of their risk of the disease." The research was published in the journal Neurology. Sign up for your essential, twice-daily briefing from The Telegraph with our free Front Page newsletter. SURPRISE, Ariz. (AP) Kansas City Royals catcher Salvador Perez will undergo Tommy John surgery to repair a torn ligament in his right elbow, keeping the six-time All-Star off the field for the entire 2019 season. The decision was made after Perez received a second opinion Tuesday from Dr. Neal ElAttrache, the Los Angeles Dodgers' team physician. Perez hurt the elbow during a workout last week and said over the weekend that he was harboring a slim hope that he might be able to play through it. Instead, he is expected to undergo surgery on Wednesday. "There was nothing that can prepare us for this. There was no information we had that led us this direction," Royals general manager Dayton Moore said. "Salvy was having no issues. He's asymptomatic. He has wear and tear, just like any 28-year-old catcher who's been squatting and catching since he was 12 years old. There was no warning sign or anything like that." Perez hit just .235 last season, but he had 27 homers and drove in 80 runs while providing a solid and calming presence behind the plate. The MVP of the 2015 World Series, Perez was being counted upon to help the rebuilding Royals take the steps necessary to return to the playoffs, particularly when it came to their young but promising starting rotation. Now, Cam Gallagher and Meibrys Viloria are expected to share time behind the plate. "We're fortunate to have two really good, young catchers that have tremendous upside," Moore said. "Cam is a young guy that can really receive. We feel highly confident in his ability back there to call a game, and we like Viloria a great deal as well as an emerging guy." Moore also said he would scour the remaining free agents Martin Maldonado, is still available and reach out to other clubs about potential trades. Perez has won AL Gold Gloves in five of the last six years, with Maldonado breaking that string in 2017. But Moore acknowledged the Royals tried to acquire a veteran backup for Perez earlier in the offseason and came up empty. Story continues "We'll see how camp unfolds," Moore said. "It's hard to get a third-, fourth-type catcher or veteran major league backup to join Kansas City. Nobody wants to do that. They see Salvador and say, 'Well, I'll never get a chance to re-establish myself." That's not an issue anymore, but most of the veterans that were available are in camp elsewhere. One thing Moore did make clear is the Royals have no intention of rushing MJ Melendez, one of their top prospects, to the big leagues. Melendez spent last season at Class A Lexington. "We'll play that out and see where he is in July or August and if indeed we need some help there," Moore said. "But you have to look at this as a positive, that it gives others an opportunity." The Royals have embraced a run-run-run style of play this season, signing such speedsters as Billy Hamilton and Chris Owings. But that also means they have very little power throughout their lineup, and Perez was expected to help provide the opportunity to change a game in one swing. His biggest value now will come as a cheerleader. He remained one of the most upbeat players in the clubhouse, even after the injury surfaced, and his experience is invaluable for a young team. "It's definitely not ideal losing a captain, losing our best player. It's going to hurt any team," Gallagher said. "We have to come together as a group and fill those shoes a little bit." ___ More AP MLB: https://apnews.com/MLB and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports US airlines are standing behind Boeing despite the wave of countries and carriers that have grounded the 737 MAX, but fear has gripped crews and passengers, and many are refusing to fly on the plane. Following the second deadly crash of one of its aircraft, some US politicians also have called for the plane to be grounded while the investigation continues, but regulators so far have not taken that step. "Two brand new Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes crashed in 5 months. If China has grounded all 96 of its 737 Max 8s, then Southwest, American, and United Airlines should really do something to reassure the American people that its 737 Max 8 airplanes are airworthy or ground them too," Maryland resident Eugene Gu said on Twitter. A growing number of Americans are expressing similar doubts on social media, and some are cancelling or rebooking flights on this single-aisle aircraft, which accounted for one-third of Boeing's profits in 2018. The European Union, Britain, Germany, France and China are among the governments that have banned the plane from their airspace, and the Twitter hashtag #GroundBoeing737max8 was created to urge the US authorities to do the same. The company's share price continued to lose ground, dropping more than 6 percent on Tuesday after the 5 percent loss on Monday. - What is my plane? - Southwest Airlines and American Airlines have been swamped with calls since the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 on Sunday shortly after takeoff, which killed all 157 passengers and crew. In the wake of a similar crash in October of a Lion Air flight in Indonesia, many American passengers are not waiting for the investigations to conclude. "We are fielding some questions from customers asking if their flight will be operated by the Boeing 737 MAX 8," Southwest spokeswoman Michelle Agnew said, adding that, as usual, the airline allowed re-booking at no charge. That is not the case at American Airlines, which charges a fee for any change or cancellation, a spokesman said. The cost ranges from $200 for domestic flights to $750 for international flights. Story continues And "fear" is not recognized by travel insurance as a reason to reimburse passengers for a flight cancellation. - Fear of flying - Pilots and flight crew also have grown increasingly cautious. The Airline Personnel Union (APFA), which represents American Airlines employees, has told its members not to board a 737 MAX 8 if they do not feel safe. The Association of Flight Attendants formally called for an investigation by the US Federal Aviation Administration. "In the wake of a second accident, regulators, manufacturers, and airlines must take steps to address concerns immediately," it said. Like the Airline Pilots Association, the AFA warned against jumping to conclusions. But US politicians were less hesitant after Britain, China, Australia, Indonesia and others pulled the planes out of service. Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren said, "The FAA should follow their lead, reverse their decision, and immediately ground this plane in the United States until its safety can be assured." And Senator Mitt Romney said on Twitter, "Out of an abundance of caution for the flying public, the @FAANews should ground the 737 MAX 8 until we investigate the causes of recent crashes and ensure the plane's airworthiness." President Donald Trump weighed in with a blistering tweet, saying "Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly." The FAA said Tuesday the investigation of the latest crash continues, and it "will make decisions on any further steps based on the evidence." In the wake of the Lion Air crash, the FAA ordered Boeing to update its manual and training requirements and complete "flight control enhancements," including to its stall prevention systems, no later than April. Boeing chief Dennis Muilenburg lamented the latest tragedy but had no doubts about the safety of the plane. "We are confident in the safety of the 737 MAX," he said in an email to Boeing workers. In addition to the fact that limousine travel is very glamorous, it is also the most comfortable trip you can... Photo: Alexandria Sheriffs Office On Wednesday morning, shortly after Paul Manafort was sentenced to 43 additional months in prison for two counts of conspiracy, Trumps former campaign chairman received some more bad news: the State of New York had charged him with mortgage fraud and over a dozen other felonies. In a 16-count indictment, the state alleges that, from December 2015 to March 2016, Manafort falsified business documents to receive millions in residential mortgage loans. Unlike the charges filed in federal court, President Trump would not be able to pardon Manafort if he is convicted for a state crime. No one is beyond the law in New York, said Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance. Sign Up for the Intelligencer Newsletter Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world. Email This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Terms & Privacy Notice By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us. By Stephen Kalin RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabian women's rights activists stood trial on Wednesday for the first time since their arrest over nine months ago, a case that has intensified scrutiny of Riyadh's human rights record after the murder of a prominent journalist. Loujain al-Hathloul, Aziza al-Yousef, Eman al-Nafjan and Hatoon Al-Fassi are among 10 women to appear before the Criminal Court in the capital Riyadh, where charges were presented against them, court president Ibrahim al-Sayari said. He was speaking to reporters and more than a dozen diplomats from the United States and Europe, who were barred from entering the court after receiving no response to earlier requests. Sayari cited privacy concerns for not making the trial public. The women are among more than a dozen prominent activists, including several men, arrested in the weeks before a ban on women driving cars in the conservative kingdom was lifted last June. A few were previously released without trial. At the time of the arrests, the public prosecutor said five men and four women were being held on suspicion of harming Saudi interests and offering support to hostile elements abroad. State-backed media labelled them as traitors and "agents of embassies", unnerving foreign diplomats in the key U.S. ally. Some of the women appeared in the courtroom together on Wednesday, but their cases appeared to be separate, with relatives entering only for certain parts of the session. ALQST, a London-based Saudi rights group, said the women were charged under the kingdom's cybercrime law, which stipulates prison sentences ranging from one to 10 years. The accusations are related to human rights work and communications with "hostile entities", ALQST said on Twitter. The status of legal representation was unclear. Rights groups have previously said the activists had no access to lawyers during more than nine months of detention and interrogation. Story continues Relatives said they were told at the last minute that the trial had been moved from the Specialized Criminal Court, which was set up to try terrorism cases but is often used for political offences. It was unclear what was behind the decision, but diplomats said they were hopeful it signalled a more lenient handling of the cases after months of lobbying by Western governments. Three dozen countries, including all 28 EU members, called on Riyadh last week to free the activists. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his British counterpart have said they raised the issue with Saudi authorities during recent visits. WESTERN PRESSURE It remains to be seen if Riyadh will bend to that pressure - with the women possibly receiving acquittals or pardons - or pursue harsh sentences in a case critics say has revealed the limits of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's promises to modernise Saudi Arabia. The prince has courted the West to support ambitious economic and social reforms, but his reputation was tarnished after Saudi agents killed Jamal Khashoggi, a royal insider-turned-critic, last October at the kingdom's Istanbul consulate. The outcry over the murder increased scrutiny of the detained women's rights activists, who also include Nouf Abdelaziz, Mayaa al-Zahrani, Samar Badawi, Nassima al-Saada, Shadan al-Onezi, Amal al-Harbi and Mohammed al-Rabia, according to rights groups. They say some of the women, including Hathloul, were held in solitary confinement and subjected to mistreatment and torture, including electric shocks, flogging and sexual assault. Saudi officials have denied those allegations. Hathloul, who had advocated an end to the driving ban and the kingdom's male guardianship system, was previously detained twice, including for 73 days in 2014 after she tried to drive into Saudi Arabia from the United Arab Emirates. Nafjan and Yousef participated in a protest against the driving ban in 2013. Yousef also authored a petition, which Nafjan and Hathloul signed, in 2016 seeking to end male guardianship, which requires women to obtain the consent of a male relative for major decisions. Activists and diplomats have speculated that the arrests may have been aimed at appeasing conservative elements opposed to the relaxation of social strictures. They may also have been meant as a message to activists not to push demands out of sync with the government's own agenda. Dozens of other activists, intellectuals and clerics have been arrested separately in the past two years in an apparent bid to stamp out possible opposition. (Reporting By Stephen Kalin, editing by Larry King) By Stephen Kalin RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabian women's rights activists stood trial on Wednesday for the first time since their arrest over nine months ago, a case that has intensified scrutiny of Riyadh's human rights record after the murder of a prominent journalist. Loujain al-Hathloul, Aziza al-Yousef, Eman al-Nafjan and Hatoon Al-Fassi are among 10 women to appear before the Criminal Court in the capital Riyadh, where charges were presented against them, court president Ibrahim al-Sayari said. He was speaking to reporters and more than a dozen diplomats from the United States and Europe, who were barred from entering the court after receiving no response to earlier requests. Sayari cited privacy concerns for not making the trial public. The women are among more than a dozen prominent activists, including several men, arrested in the weeks before a ban on women driving cars in the conservative kingdom was lifted last June. A few were previously released without trial. At the time of the arrests, the public prosecutor said five men and four women were being held on suspicion of harming Saudi interests and offering support to hostile elements abroad. State-backed media labeled them as traitors and "agents of embassies", unnerving foreign diplomats in the key U.S. ally. Some of the women appeared in the courtroom together on Wednesday, but their cases appeared to be separate, with relatives entering only for certain parts of the session. ALQST, a London-based Saudi rights group, said the women were charged under the kingdom's cybercrime law, which stipulates prison sentences ranging from one to 10 years. The accusations are related to human rights work and communications with "hostile entities", ALQST said on Twitter. The status of legal representation was unclear. Rights groups have previously said the activists had no access to lawyers during more than nine months of detention and interrogation. Relatives said they were told at the last minute that the trial had been moved from the Specialized Criminal Court, which was set up to try terrorism cases but is often used for political offences. It was unclear what was behind the decision, but diplomats said they were hopeful it signaled a more lenient handling of the cases after months of lobbying by Western governments. Three dozen countries, including all 28 EU members, called on Riyadh last week to free the activists. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his British counterpart have said they raised the issue with Saudi authorities during recent visits. WESTERN PRESSURE It remains to be seen if Riyadh will bend to that pressure - with the women possibly receiving acquittals or pardons - or pursue harsh sentences in a case critics say has revealed the limits of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's promises to modernize Saudi Arabia. The prince has courted the West to support ambitious economic and social reforms, but his reputation was tarnished after Saudi agents killed Jamal Khashoggi, a royal insider-turned-critic, last October at the kingdom's Istanbul consulate. The outcry over the murder increased scrutiny of the detained women's rights activists, who also include Nouf Abdelaziz, Mayaa al-Zahrani, Samar Badawi, Nassima al-Saada, Shadan al-Onezi, Amal al-Harbi and Mohammed al-Rabia, according to rights groups. They say some of the women, including Hathloul, were held in solitary confinement and subjected to mistreatment and torture, including electric shocks, flogging and sexual assault. Saudi officials have denied those allegations. Hathloul, who had advocated an end to the driving ban and the kingdom's male guardianship system, was previously detained twice, including for 73 days in 2014 after she tried to drive into Saudi Arabia from the United Arab Emirates. Nafjan and Yousef participated in a protest against the driving ban in 2013. Yousef also authored a petition, which Nafjan and Hathloul signed, in 2016 seeking to end male guardianship, which requires women to obtain the consent of a male relative for major decisions. Activists and diplomats have speculated that the arrests may have been aimed at appeasing conservative elements opposed to the relaxation of social strictures. They may also have been meant as a message to activists not to push demands out of sync with the government's own agenda. Dozens of other activists, intellectuals and clerics have been arrested separately in the past two years in an apparent bid to stamp out possible opposition. (Reporting By Stephen Kalin, editing by Larry King) Photo credit: AJ_Watt - Getty Images From Men's Health By now, you've seen the alarmist headlines claiming that wireless headsets, like Apple AirPods, could potentially cause cancer. But does this "news" mean you should ditch those beloved bluetooth headphones for old school ear buds? The answer isn't so simple. Here's why people are talking about this: Last week, a Medium article questioned the safety of AirPods and other bluetooth headphones. The story quotes Jerry Phillips, a biochemistry professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, who believes wireless headphones aren't as safe as we assume. My concern for AirPods is that their placement in the ear canal exposes tissues in the head to relatively high levels of radio-frequency radiation, he said. Phillips told the website that risks include abnormal cell functioning, which may cause tumors or other health conditions. The story surfaced a petition urging the United Nations and World Health Organization to strengthen guidelines and regulatory standards for bluetooth devices. The document is signed by 250 researchers from more than 40 countries who caution that using certain devices may increase cancer risk. However, the petition isn't newit originated in 2015and specifically calls out non-ionizing electromagnetic fields (used in all bluetooth devices), as well as radiofrequency radiation emitting devices (like cell phones and Wi-Fi) as dangerous. There's no question that bluetooth headphones emit radiation, but that doesn't mean you need to give them up, says Dr. Michael Schulder, Director of Northwell Health's Brain Tumor Center in Lake Success, New York. Although most experts agree that there is no safe level of radiation, it's simply not possible to avoid exposure, Schulder says. "We cannot avoid radiation in our lives even if we lived a completely pastoral existence off the grid," he says. That's because radiation is in our food, plants, airplane travel, and even the sun. The bigger question, then, is how much do you willingly want to expose yourself to radiation? Story continues Photo credit: Getty Images - Getty Images "For me, the added convenience of the AirPods doesnt matter to me so I choose not to use them," Schulder says. However, if you really enjoy wireless headphones, there's no reason to give them up. Schulder explains that wireless headphones emit less radiation than another gadget most of us are glued to: cellphones. "There has not been a major bump in tumors to suggest that cell phones are causing it [the tumors] and we know that the bluetooth radiation is less than cell phones themselves," he says. Bottom line: If you want to wear AirPods, go ahead. ('You Might Also Like',) WASHINGTON Despite a veto threat from the president, the Senate approved legislation Wednesday that would force the Trump administration to end its military support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Wednesday's 54-to-46 vote served as a bipartisan rebuke to President Donald Trump and to Saudi leaders. It also highlighted lawmakers' growing unease with America's role in that grisly conflict, which has left more than 50,000 civilians dead and millions of Yemenis on the brink of starvation. "The United States, with little media attention, has been Saudi Arabia's partner in this horrific war," Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said during a Senate floor speech Wednesday. He is a lead author of the measure, which relies on a Vietnam-era law designed to limit the president's power to start or escalate military engagement abroad. "We have been providing the bombs the Saudi-led coalition is using. We have been refueling their planes before they drop those bombs. And we have been assisting with intelligence," Sanders said. "In too many cases, our weapons are being used to kill civilians." Sen. Mike Lee, a conservative Utah Republican who joined Sanders in sponsoring the measure, called the war "unconstitutional, unjustified and ultimately immoral." He said Congress must be involved in deciding if and when to put "American blood and treasure on the line" but lawmakers have abdicated that role in the Yemen conflict and others. The measure is expected to pass the House in the coming weeks, and it could pose a difficult test for Trump. More than two years into his presidency, Trump has yet to use his veto power. Trump has sought to end or limit America's costly military engagements across the globe, most notably in Syria and Afghanistan, often over the objections of his hard-line advisers. The war in Yemen is a proxy battle between Saudi Arabia and Iran, as the two regimes battle for influence in the region. The Saudis, along with the United Arab Emirates, have engaged in a deadly bombing campaign against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. The war has created the world's worst humanitarian crisis. An estimated 85,000 children have died of starvation over the last several years, according to Save the Children. Story continues Congressional support for ending the U.S. role in Yemen gained steam last year amid bipartisan outrage over the Saudi government's role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident and Washington Post columnist who was brutally killed inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Lawmakers in both parties believe that Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was complicit in Khashoggi's killing. "The entire world received a very clear understanding of the nature of the Saudi regime with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey," Sanders said. "All of the evidence suggests that the Saudi crown prince was directly responsible for that murder. Is that the kind of regime whose lead we should be following?" Republican opponents of the Yemen resolution agreed that the Saudis' actions in that incident, and its conduct in the war, has been troubling. But they argued that limiting U.S. involvement in Yemen would give Iran a green light to spread its influence in Yemen and set a dangerous precedent by stretching the 1973 War Powers Act definition of military engagement. GOP lawmakers have noted that the Trump administration already halted its refueling of Saudi jets last fall. They argued that the U.S. role now which involves providing logistical, intelligence and targeting assistance did not amount to using American military force. "Were not engaged in hostilities in Yemen," Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said during Wednesday's debate. He said the U.S. assistance has helped reduce civilian casualties and protect humanitarian aid workers. It's also vital to preserving American leverage with the Saudis as the United Nations tries to broke a peace agreement. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is pushing for the U.S. to end all military support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. The Senate is expected to vote on his resolution, also sponsored by Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Chris Murphy, D-Conn., this week. In its February veto threat, the Trump administration said the measure was "flawed" and would impinge on the president's constitutional powers as America's commander in chief. The White House said it would also "harm bilateral relationships" in the Middle East and hurt America's efforts to stamp out violent extremist organizations such as the Islamic state. The House easily passed a similar bill earlier this year, but Republicans added an amendment calling for the U.S. to combat anti-Semitism around the world, a provision aimed at rebuking Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., for a tweet that many denounced as anti-Semitic. The Senate resolution doesn't include that language, so the House will have to vote again on the narrower proposal. But proponents said they're confident it will pass the House again in the coming weeks marking first time Congress has invoked its war powers to challenge U.S. military involvement abroad. Even if Trump vetoes the measure, supporters said it would be a historic moment and would send an important message about Congress' willingness to reassert its role in declaring war. It's "going to set a precedent: No more unconstitutional wars," said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., the lead author of the House Yemen bill. "And it's going to make future commanders of chief think twice before undertaking interventions" in far-flung places where U.S. national security interests are questionable. But Khanna said he's holding out hope that Trump will sign the measure, despite the veto threat. Vetoing it "goes against his instincts to pull us out of these foreign military interventions," Khanna said. "And if he signs it, he can help take credit for ending a terrible war which started frankly before he even assumed office." More: Lawmakers revive push to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for Jamal Khashoggi murder More: Jamal Khashoggi's murder was a human rights violation by Saudi government, State Department says This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Senate approves measure to force US withdrawal from Yemen despite Trump's veto threat Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) chastised Googles senior policy counsel during a Tuesday Judiciary Committee hearing over the companys reliance on what they perceive to be overly invasive location-tracking technology. Do you think the average consumer would be surprised to learn that her location is recorded and sent to Google hundreds of times every day, even when she is not using her phone? Hawley asked Senior Policy Counsel Will Devries, referring to consumers who use Googles Android products. In response, Devries argued that the near-constant location tracking performed by Google devices and software is necessary to provide the services, such as mapping services, that consumers have come to rely on. Hawley, citing a New York Times article from last year that detailed how Google monetizes users location data, argued that there should be a way for Americans to use Google technology while opting out of location tracking. Heres my basic concern: Americans did not sign up for this, Hawley shot back. They think that the products that you offer are free theyre not free. They think that they can opt out of the tracking that youre performing they cant meaningfully opt out. Hawley sparred with Devries on the same day he introduced a bill along with Senator Ed Markey (D., Mass.) that would prohibit technology companies from extracting the personal data of consumers under the age of 13 without parental consent. The legislation would also mandate that tech firms provide a mechanism by which a parent can erase all of their childs data, and prohibits targeting ads to children based on their online behavior. While Hawley has prioritized the aggressive regulation of big tech firms since taking office in January, fellow Republicans, such as Senator Thom Tillis (R., N.C.), continue to warn that government intervention may have the unintended consequence of harming American innovation. This ecosystem is more complicated than just jumping on a populist notion that you are somehow exploiting consumer data and that you should be stopped, Tillis said during the Tuesday hearing. Because if you get stopped then all of a sudden you have to have a credit card that you need to offer Google if you want a Gmail account. These platforms have to derive revenue somehow. We need to be careful with respect to global competition and other challenges that we have that we [do not] overreact. More from National Review While the mom and pop U.S. shale players are curtailing capex amid takeaway woes, oil super majors are scaling up their position in the prolific Permian play and progressing on the path of aggressive output growth in the region. The latest one to join the bandwagon is Royal Dutch Shell plc RDS.A. Shell, which currently produces 145,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (Boe/d) in the region, intends to lift its Permian output by 30% every year. The Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company is on the prowl for additional acreage in the Permian Basin in its attempts to keep up with peers. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Oil Majors Race to Permian Gathers Momentum As we know, oil majors Chevron Corporation CVX and Exxon Mobil Corporation XOM made headlines last week by announcing their ambitious plans to more than double Permian production levels over the next five years or so. Chevron now expects Permian production to reach 600,000 barrels per day (Bpd) by the end of the decade and 900,000 Bpd within 2023-end. ExxonMobil upwardly revised its production estimates from 600,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (Boe/d) to more than 1 million Boe/d by 2024. Increased output targets from Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil underscore their confidence in the Permian region, which is the heartland of the U.S. shale boom. The advent of technologies like horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing are primarily aiding Permian to witness increasing output growth. This marks the growing shift in the dynamics of the shale industry, which was mainly spearheaded by mid-cap or small-cap energy players but is now getting increasingly influenced by energy supermajors. While oil majors like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP plc BP earlier accounted for a cumulative 9% of the Permian output five years back, the combined market share of these biggies in Permian has now increased around 16%. Story continues While both Chevron and ExxonMobil boast top-tier acreage positions in Permian, Shells Permian position is relatively modest. However, whats worth noticing here is the fact that while Shell is already cash flow positive in the region, its rivals Chevron and ExxonMobil are lagging in this regard. While Chevron expects Permian business to become cash flow positive in 2020, ExxonMobil is aiming at 2021. With oil biggies sharpening their Permian focus, Shell is looking for profitable acquisition opportunities to solidify its acreage in the region where it is already cash flow positive. Shell is reportedly eyeing to acquire the privately-owned Endeavor Energy Resources for $8 billion. However, nothing has been confirmed yet. The Anglo-Dutch energy giant remains keen on grabbing more Permian land to accelerate its growth in the region and increase its shareholders value. Shells Renewable Power Push Also a Priority In addition to revving up Permian strength, Shell is also targeting to become the biggest electricity power company within the next 15 years. It will invest up to $2 billion per year in the New Energies division, primarily to enhance its position in the power sector, wherein it envisions 8-12% annual returns. While renewable energy has long been considered as a niche market, things have been changing amid climate change concerns, with many energy giants being compelled to enhance their green initiatives. While U.S. energy biggies Chevron and ExxonMobil are slighting lagging behind in this department, European counterparts Shell, BP, Equinor and TOTAL are betting big to expand their renewable foothold. With Shells green initiatives growing bigger, it was spared of Norways GPGF recent decision to divest some energy companies amid volatile oil prices. As we know, Shell became the first oil company to link executive pay with carbon emissions for combating climate change. The company has been on renewable acquisition spree of late, having collaborated with IONITY, New Motion, First Utility and Silicon Ranch, as it attempts to diversify its portfolio beyond oil and gas. Shell is also set to acquire Eneco, sonnen and Cleantech, emphasizing its increasing shift toward lower-carbon fuels. It has pledged to lower carbon emissions by 50% over the next five decades via sharpening its focus on renewable and biofuels. Zacks' Top 10 Stocks for 2019 In addition to the stocks discussed above, wouldn't you like to know about our 10 finest buy-and-holds for the year? From more than 4,000 companies covered by the Zacks Rank, these 10 were picked by a process that consistently beats the market. Even during 2018 while the market dropped -5.2%, our Top 10s were up well into double-digits. And during bullish 2012 2017, they soared far above the market's +126.3%, reaching +181.9%. This year, the portfolio features a player that thrives on volatility, an AI comer, and a dynamic tech company that helps doctors deliver better patient outcomes at lower costs. See Stocks Today >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report BP p.l.c. (BP) : Free Stock Analysis Report Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM) : Free Stock Analysis Report Chevron Corporation (CVX) : Free Stock Analysis Report Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDS.A) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's leading proxy adviser KCGS recommended shareholders vote against U.S. activist investor Elliott Management's proposals for dividends and board members at Hyundai Mobis, according to its report. KCGS said it believed that Elliott seems to focus on enhancing short-term value of the autoparts maker rather than addressing its future challenges. (Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman) By Sumeet Chatterjee HONG KONG (Reuters) - Standard Chartered PLC has seen the departure of at least four senior Asia-based bankers from its private banking unit in recent months, three people with direct knowledge of the matter said, amid growing earnings pressure at the business. The unit is, however, adding 15 private bankers in London in the March quarter for serving clients in the Middle East, two separate people with knowledge of the matter said. StanChart's private banking business caters to wealthy individuals across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe, through booking centers in Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, India, London and Jersey. The unit, however, has weighed on the group's earnings in the last couple of years, as competition in Asia, which accounts for bulk of its revenue, has intensified and market volatility has impacted the assets it manages. Among those who left the London-headquartered bank in the past six months include Teddy Kwong, managing director and market head for Hong Kong, and Peter Lam, managing director and team leader for Hong Kong, said the people. Both Hong Kong-based Kwong and Lam joined StanChart in the first half of 2017 from the regional private banking unit of HSBC Holdings PLC. It was not immediately clear where the two are headed. Ray Li, StanChart private banking managing director and head of relationship management, has also left after having worked at the bank for more than a decade, said the people and according to his LinkedIn profile. The Asia, Africa and Middle East-focused bank has also lost India private banking head Sandeep Das, who joined Barclays PLC last month as India head of its business that caters to ultra high networth clients, as per a Barclays announcement. A StanChart spokeswoman in Singapore declined to comment, but said that the bank continued to invest in and hire for its private banking business in 2019. "Our Private Bank has completed two years of repositioning and is building a stronger wealth platform that complements the business," the spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. Story continues The reasons for the departures of Kwong, Lam, Li and Mumbai-based Das were not clear and they could not immediately be reached for comment. The sources were not authorized to speak with media and so declined to be identified. MIDDLE EAST PUSH Loss before tax at the private banking business widened to $14 million last year from $1 million in 2017, the bank's annual report showed. Its assets under management also dropped 8 percent last year from nearly $65 billion in 2017. Chief Executive Bill Winters said at an earnings call last month that the private banking unit had added new relationship managers to serve its wealthy clients, and is investing more to "fundamentally transform" the business. Part of the reason for the sluggish growth in assets is that StanChart has had to stop banking some customers who would not disclose enough information about the source of their wealth, Winters had said. "We've done a thorough reboot, we've added significantly to our numbers of relationship managers, and income is increasing." StanChart is bulking up for a bigger share of the Middle East market at a time when others are also expanding to tap the growing client base that includes wealthy business people, family offices and non-resident Indians. StanChart declined to comment on the region's hiring plans. The number of people in the Middle East with individual assets of more than $500 million is projected to grow by 28 percent to 500 in 2022, according to the Knight Frank 2018 Wealth report. DBS Group Holdings Ltd, Southeast Asia's largest bank, said in November it would almost double its Dubai private banking staff to triple revenue for those operations in the Middle East by 2023. (Reporting by Sumeet Chatterjee; Additional reporting by Saeed Azhar in DUBAI, Anshuman Daga in SINGAPORE and Lawrence White in LONDON; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Muralikumar Anantharaman) Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images Music-streaming service Spotify has filed a formal complaint against Apple this week, claiming that the iPhone maker has violated E.U. competition rules by using numerous tactics to try and ice out competitors. The announcement also comes with a spiffy new Spotify-branded site called Time to Play Fair. In recent years, Apple has introduced rules to the App Store that purposely limit choice and stifle innovation at the expense of the user experience essentially acting as both a player and referee to deliberately disadvantage other app developers, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek wrote in a statement. After trying unsuccessfully to resolve the issues directly with Apple, were now requesting that the [European Commission] take action to ensure fair competition. The primary issues here are the 30 percent cut that Apple takes from almost every transaction that goes through its system, and the alleged preferential treatment that Apple gives to its first-party streaming option (and direct competitor to Spotify), Apple Music. The 30 percent cut has long been a sticking point for app providers and Apple. The most prominent example is Apples standoff with Amazon over Kindle e-books, which it wanted a cut of. As a result, for the past few years, it has been impossible for users to buy Kindle books directly through the iOS app. Complicating things, there are plenty of transactions that flow through iOS that Apple doesnt extract its 30 percent from rideshare services and food delivery apps, for instance (the most obvious distinction is that these apps facilitate physical purchases, not just the purchase of digital goods and services). Spotify Premium costs ten euros, but when offering subscriptions through in-app purchases, the price went up to 13 euros. Spotify passed the so-called Apple tax onto consumers. A case currently before the Supreme Court in the U.S., Apple v. Pepper, is also related to whether consumers can sue a company over the passed-on costs. Spotify no longer allows users to subscribe directly through iOS and Apples policies prevent the company from telling users how to subscribe through other portals. Spotify also contends that Apple gives its own services an unfair advantage by allowing them to violate rules third-party services must abide by, like sending push notifications offering savings, or preventing the use of iOS APIs to recommend podcasts. Apple should not be allowed to control the communications between services and users, including placing unfair restrictions on marketing and promotions that benefit consumers, Ek writes. The case Ek lays out is a familiar story for anyone frustrated with the App Store, which is the only legit method for installing software on an iPhone. Spotifys list of grievances, which the EC says it is reviewing, also mirrors much of Senator Elizabeth Warrens recent proposal for limiting the anti-competitive behavior of big tech companies. Under her proposed rules, Apple would effectively be prevented from competing on the marketplace it runs. Either they run the platform or they play in the store. They dont get to do both at the same time, Warren said at SXSW. A total of 69,189 Pakistani bank cards worth an estimated $3.5m have shown up for sale on the dark web. Group-IB, an international company that specialises in preventing cyberattacks, says it is the second big sale of Pakistani bank cards in the past six months and an advanced, financially-motivated threat actor may be behind the theft. A pair of new databases were released on Jokers Stash, one of the most popular underground hubs of stolen card data, at the end of January. The vast majority of the unauthorised digital copies of the cards and PIN codes were related to a single bank, Meezan Bank Ltd. Dmitry Shestakov, the head of Group-IBs ybercrime research unit, said: The scale, volume, frequency, and connection to one institution contributes to the theory that the leak might be involved in a larger incident, potentially an advanced actor gaining access to card systems within Pakistan. How does it work? Crooks who buy the cards on dark web forums can use card dump data to produce cloned credit cards. Money mules then use these fake cards to either withdraw money from ATMs or buy goods in, which are later resold by fraudsters. Another scheme involves using the cards to buy non-existent goods from dummy companies. And many scammers buy crypto using stolen card details. In November 2018, the Group-IB threat intelligence team reported on the leak of 177,878 payment cards linked to Pakistani and other international banks. The banks affected by this breach included major Pakistani financial organisations such as Habib Bank, MCB Bank Limited, and Allied Bank Limited. The post Stolen bank details worth $3.5m sold on dark web appeared first on Coin Rivet. London (AFP) - Britain's finance minister and business chiefs on Wednesday urged the country to avoid a "no deal" Brexit after another crushing parliamentary defeat for Prime Minister Theresa May over her EU-divorce deal with Brussels. The fast-moving Brexit saga largely overshadowed the government's budget update that slashed the 2019 economic growth forecast, with the UK economy also hit by China's slowdown and trade war tensions. MPs will decide later Wednesday whether the country should leave the European Union without a deal, with analysts expecting parliament instead to favour delaying its departure beyond the March 29 exit date, in a further vote due Thursday. Britain's economy is expected to expand by 1.2 percent this year, assuming there is an orderly EU exit, finance minister Phillip Hammond revealed in his budget update on Wednesday. That was sharply down from prior guidance of 1.6 percent. The sizeable downgrade, widely expected after a similar move by the Bank of England, came one day after parliament overwhelmingly rejected May's draft Brexit divorce agreement. - 'Cloud of uncertainty' - "Last night's vote leaves a cloud of uncertainty hanging over our economy and ... our most urgent task in this House is to lift that uncertainty," Chancellor of the Exchequer Hammond said in a budget thin on policy announcements. "Leaving with 'no deal' would mean significant disruption in the short and medium term, and a smaller, less prosperous economy in the long term than if we leave with a deal -- higher unemployment, lower wages, higher prices in the shops. "That is not what the British people voted for in June 2016" in the referendum to leave the EU. The chancellor also warned the "spectre" of uncertainty was "damaging our standing and reputation in the world". Earlier, Carolyn Fairbairn, director-general of Britain's biggest employers' organisation, the Confederation of British Industry, slammed politicians' handling of Brexit. Story continues "It's time for parliament to stop this circus," said Fairbairn after MPs rejected May's divorce deal for the second time. May needed to extend the Article 50 deadline for withdrawal from the bloc to allow sufficient time for an acceptable deal, she added. "A new approach is needed by all parties. Jobs and livelihoods depend on it. Extending Article 50 to close the door on a March no-deal is now urgent." Catherine McGuinness, policy chief for the City of London financial district, warned British business was now "staring down the precipice". "Politicians of every hue must overcome their differences and make avoiding a no-deal Brexit the absolute priority," she urged. And the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), which represents thousands of firms, also insisted that a "no deal" exit had to be avoided. They too voiced anger that politicians were still grappling with implementation of the 2016 referendum result, issuing a stinging rebuke to Hammond's Conservative party, traditionally regarded as a big supporter of private enterprise. "The government must now urgently set out in concrete terms what it will do to avoid the damage that a messy and disorderly exit on March 29 would cause to businesses, communities, and the UK economy," the BCC said. - Zero-tariffs - In a bid to soothe nerves, May's government on Wednesday said it would temporarily slash most import tariffs in the event of a "no deal" Brexit. Britain also vowed not to apply customs checks on the border with Ireland, albeit temporarily. The new tariffs regime is aimed at avoiding both a jump in prices of EU imports for consumers and any disruption of supply chains. It is intended to last up to one year pending negotiations on a more permanent system. Under the proposal, 87 percent of imports into Britain will be eligible for zero tariffs, compares with the current level of 80 percent. But the tariffs pledge also drew an angry response from business leaders. "These are being imposed on this country with no consultation with business with no time to prepare," added Fairbairn. And the BCC lambasted the "abrupt" move as an "unwelcome shock" for many businesses. In the auto sector, the government said carmakers reliant on EU supply chains would not face tariffs for imported parts used to make vehicles in Britain. However, UK car industry body, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, responded that a "no deal" would spark disruption and job losses in a sector already plagued by collapsing demand for high-polluting diesel vehicles. Japanese carmakers Honda and Nissan have both recently decided to slash investment in Britain. burs-rfj/bcp/jh Survey: How Millennial Credit Card Habits Are Costing Them Having grown up in a digital world, millennials are the generation that is least likely to carry cash. But a new survey suggests that some of their credit card habits may lead to financial trouble in the future. TD Bank's Consumer Spending Index found that many millennials are engaging in behaviors that can have far-reaching negative consequences. Among the findings: Half of millennials use more than 30 percent of their credit limit 32% dont pay their card balances in full each month 25% dont know their credit scores 23% dont have a credit card These behaviors can negatively affect their credit scores. For example, the amount of debt that you carry relative to your credit limit counts toward 30% of your FICO credit score. The more debt you carry from month to month, the more your score can be negatively impacted. VantageScore, another credit scoring model, recommends that consumers use no more than 30% of the credit line they have available. Plus, carrying a credit card balance from month to month can get expensive as interest compounds on high-APR cards, making it more difficult to delete debt if a card balance grows unchecked. Not paying a balance in full monthly not only deletes any value from card rewards programs as interest accrues, but can also lead to serious financial consequences The fact that one-quarter of millennials dont know their credit scores is also problematic. If you dont know your score, you have no idea whether you are engaging in financial behaviors that might impact your ability to qualify for a loan when you need one. Not only that, but your credit score may be adversely impacted by mistakes on your credit report. One study by the Federal Trade Commission found that as many as 20% of credit reports contained errors. Not having a credit card could also have a negative effect in some cases. Length of credit history counts toward 15% of your FICO credit score. For many young people, a credit card is one of the first types of credit accounts they get to start building a positive credit file. A credit card account can jumpstart your credit history even if you rarely use the card. Story continues Mike Kinane, head of US Bankcard at TD Bank says that the data suggests that millennials arent as knowledgeable about credit as they should be. "The data is a bit concerning it shows that a significant knowledge gap exists for millennials when it comes to credit, especially compared to prior generations," Kinane said. The TD Bank study also noted one behavior that might not hurt millennials credit so much, but could hurt their bottom lines. Millennials are more likely to let their credit card rewards expire without using them. According to the study, 30% of millennials have let rewards expire compared to 14% of Generation X and 9% of baby boomers. This finding is particularly notable considering the fact that millennials spend more with their credit cards on dining than other generations. The money earned in rewards could help offset some of those costs. One of the keys to maximizing credit is having an understanding of the factors that contribute to your credit score. Its also imperative to know your credit score. Many credit card issuers and banks give you free access to your credit score so you can monitor it. You should also get a copy of your credit report from each of the three credit bureaus -- Experian, TransUnion and Equifax -- at least once a year. You can do so by going to AnnualCreditReport.com. If you note any mistakes, contact the credit bureau to get the mistakes corrected. CHICAGO (AP) A police accountability office and the Chicago police superintendent have agreed to doubling the 90-day suspension that had been suggested for a Chicago police sergeant found to have unjustifiably shot an unarmed autistic 18-year-old. The Civilian Office of Police Accountability in September completed its investigation of the Aug. 13, 2017 shooting of Ricardo "Ricky" Hayes, then 18, by off-duty Sgt. Khalil Muhammad. The office concluded Muhammad acted in an "objectively unreasonable" fashion. However, since then agency officials consulted with police Superintendent Eddie Johnson and agreed that Muhammad's punishment should be doubled to six months without pay, COPA spokesman Ephraim Eaddy said after the original decision was revealed Monday. No charges have been filed before the Chicago Police Board, which would decide Muhammad's punishment. Gabriel Hardy, attorney for Hayes, who survived the shooting, told the Chicago Tribune the recommendation of COPA is "incredibly troubling." Muhammad could not be reached for comment Monday. In a video of the shooting, Hayes can be seen running along the sidewalk then stopping. Muhammed pulled up alongside, with parked cars between them. Hayes took a few steps toward him and Muhammed shot him in the arm and chest. Hayes survived the shooting. "Deadly force was not reasonably necessary because Sergeant Muhammad could have simply driven away from the potential threat," the Tribune reports COPA concluded. In a federal lawsuit filed on Hayes' behalf over the shooting, Muhammad has denied any wrongdoing, court records show. He was placed indefinitely on paid desk duty after the shooting. Chicago police Sgt. Isaac Lambert was assigned to investigate the shooting. Lambert alleges in a lawsuit filed last week he was retaliated against by his bosses for refusing to clear Muhammad of culpability in the shooting. "I don't want this guy on the street with a gun, because he shot at Ricardo Hayes for no reason," said Torreya Hamilton, the attorney for Lambert. Story continues At the time of the shooting, police officials described the incident as an armed confrontation. An audio file of the sergeant's call to 911 has also been released. "The guy, like, he was about to pull a gun. Walked up to the car, and I had to shoot," Muhammad told a Chicago Fire Department dispatcher. Muhammad told investigators in his initial interview more than a month after the incident that he identified himself as a police officer and asked the person what he was doing but that the male said something and ran off. After making a U-turn, Muhammad said he again announced his office to the male and said, "Let me see your hands," the COPA report said. Muhammad said he feared for his life and fired his semi-automatic pistol twice. Johnson later said Hayes had no weapon. Fire Department personnel who responded to the scene told COPA investigators Hayes kept repeating he didn't know why he was shot because he was just reaching for his phone. ___ Information from: Chicago Tribune, http://www.chicagotribune.com By Suleiman Al-Khalidi AMMAN (Reuters) - The Syrian army, aided by Russian warplanes, attacked rebel-held towns in northwestern Syria on Wednesday in the most extensive bombardment in months against the last remaining rebel bastion in the country, rebels, rescuers and residents said. Rebels who have fought to topple President Bashar al-Assad for eight years are now largely confined to the enclave in the northwest near the Turkish border. Around four million people now live there, including hundreds of thousands of opponents of Assad who fled there from other parts of the country. The enclave is protected by a "de-escalation zone" agreement brokered last year by Assad's main international backers Russia and Iran, and Turkey which has supported the rebels in the past and has sent troops to monitor the truce. Residents said Russian planes conducted at least 12 aerial strikes on residential areas in Idlib city, including a civilian prison on its outskirts, where they said dozens of prisoners escaped. At least 10 civilians were killed and forty five injured. Russia's defense ministry confirmed it had hit Idlib in coordination with Turkey, targeting drones and weapons stores of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) jihadists it said were intended for use in an attack on a major Russian air base near the Mediterranean coast. The jihadist group vowed to take revenge, saying they had recaptured most of the prisoners who escaped whom it said included members of a cell working for Russian intelligence it claimed were behind bombings in Idlib city last month that killed 17 civilians and injured dozens. "There is no solution against the Russian occupier, Assad's forces and the Iranian militias except confrontation and confrontation only," Hayat Tahir al Sham said in a statement. The Syrian army has escalated its shelling of the enclave since early February. The attacks have killed dozens of civilians and injured hundreds, and led to tens of thousands of people fleeing frontline areas to camps and towns closer to the Turkish border, rescuers and aid agencies said. The Syrian army denies targeting civilians and says the army is responding to stepped-up attacks staged by al Qaeda-inspired fighters who aim to wreck the truce and control the area. Residents along the border area with Turkey could hear heavy overnight aerial strikes that covered a wide stretch of territory from rebel-held areas near government-held Latakia province on the Mediterranean to Idlib city toward the east and extending to adjoining opposition-held parts of northern Hama. "They burnt the land ... The sounds were heard very clearly," said Ibrahim al Sheikh, a father of five in the border town of Atmeh. He quoted relatives as saying the shelling was the heaviest yet in the two weeks of escalation. The escalation in the northwest is taking place as a U.S.-backed Kurdish-led militia has launched a separate assault on the final bastion of Islamic State fighters on the opposite, eastern end of the country, creating turning points on both major fronts of Syria's multi-sided civil war. 'WHOEVER DID THIS IS A BEAST' In the northwest, residents said white phosphorous munitions were fired overnight on the town of al Tamana in northwestern Idlib countryside, where rescue workers on Wednesday said they put out several fires caused by more than 80 rocket strikes. Among the targets of the aerial campaign was a makeshift tent camp in Kfr Amim, east of Idlib city, that shelters displaced families, where two women were killed and at least 10 children injured when bombs landed after midnight. "Whoever did this is a beast, truly a beast. It's a camp with only women and children. There is nothing we can say except that this Russian beast is coming to kill," said Laith al Abdullah, a civil defense worker in Sarqeb town who helped in the rescue effort, reached by mobile phone. Rocket shelling from a major army base in Joreen, in Hama province, escalated a week-long bombardment of rural areas near the town of Jisr al Shaqour, said Ahmed Abdul Salam, a rebel commander in the Turkey-backed National Liberation Front. A Russian army base, south of government-controlled Halafaya town, also targeted Kafr Zeita in northern Hama countryside while cluster bombs hit several rebel-held towns in southern Idlib, rebels said. The stepped-up bombardment has depopulated opposition-held towns in the buffer zone that straddles parts of Idlib to northern Hama and parts of Latakia province. The opposition-held city of Khan Sheikhon had become a ghost city with most of its more than 70,000 people fleeing, said Yousef al Idlibi, a former resident who moved to Idlib city. Turkey, which began patrols in the buffer zone on Friday, has condemned what it said were increasing provocations to wreck the truce, and warned that a bombing campaign by the Russians and the Syrian army would cause a major humanitarian crisis. Many residents are exasperated by the failure of Turkish forces to respond to the bombardments. The Syrian army has called for Turkish forces to withdraw. (Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi in Amman; Additional reporting in Moscow by Polina Ivanova; Editing by Peter Graff, Gareth Jones and James Dalgleish) As the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission weigh the pros and cons of T-Mobile's $26-billion proposed merger with Sprint, T-Mobile continues to update its promises to bolster its chances for government approval. In the latest update, T-Mobile has pledged to keep supporting Sprint's low-income Assurance Wireless brand "indefinitely," USA TODAY has learned. Assurance along with Sprint's other prepaid brands, Boost Mobile and Virgin Wireless, and T-Mobile's Metro are popular with lower-income and cost-conscious Americans for their cheaper alternatives to traditional plans than the main four wireless networks. Part of Virgin Mobile, Assurance takes part in the Lifeline Assistance program, a government service that allows those on public assistance programs such as Medicaid, Food Stamps or Supplemental Security Income to receive a discount of $9.25 per month off of phone service or potentially a free phone and service to "qualifying low-income households." Assurance offers Lifeline in 41 states as well as Washington, D.C., while T-Mobile offers support for the program in nine states plus Puerto Rico. The service is limited to one account per household and proof of income or participation in one of the other government programs could be required to verify that you are in fact eligible. "The digital divide is real and we want to help eliminate it," T-Mobile president Mike Sievert said in a statement to USA TODAY. "We have pledged that the New T-Mobile will maintain the existing T-Mobile and Sprint Lifeline program throughout the country indefinitely, barring fundamental changes to todays program." T-Mobile and Sprint have been under pressure from Democrats over concerns that their merger will lead to higher prices. Late last month, freshman congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) sent a letter signed by 36 other Democrats to the DOJ and FCC against the deal, arguing in part that the deal would "disproportionately hurt lower-income people and communities of color" who are on brands like Boost or Metro. Story continues More merger: T-Mobile's merger with Sprint is facing pushback from Democrats More merger: T-Mobile hopes Sprint will help it take on cable internet and TV T-Mobile has previously promised that it will not raise rates for three years on either its plans or Sprint's. The company has also argued that, by combining with Sprint, the new entity will be able to offer better service in rural areas as well as access to a more robust 5G network. "This is a merger that has the potential to bring improved broadband services to price-sensitive consumers, primarily because of its expectation of a strengthened and higher quality high-speed broadband network," Dr. Nicol Turner Lee, a fellow at The Brookings Institution Center for Technology Innovation and supporter of the Lifeline program, tells USA TODAY. "There will be a swath of people that are dependent on these two companies to survive." Turner Lee hopes T-Mobile and Sprint "realize that they're sitting on an asset where they can have two choices: either enhance their services or exploit them. And I would think in the day and age of competitive broadband services doing the latter is not going to help them." Representative Tony Cardenas, D-Calif., who initially spearheaded a letter signed by 50 members of Congress asking the companies about their commitment to Lifeline in February, was pleased with T-Mobile's pledge. "I appreciate T-Mobile responding to our questions and look forward to learning more specifics about how the proposed New T-Mobile plans to commit resources necessary to make Lifeline participation increase year over year," Cardenas said in a statement. "Should the merger go through, I look forward to receiving updates on New T-Mobiles actions to assure mobile services for vulnerable populations for generations to come." Executives from T-Mobile and Sprint, including Legere and Sprint executive chairman Marcelo Claure, are expected to appear on Capitol Hill on Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee to continue to push for their merger. Follow Eli Blumenthal on Twitter @eliblumenthal This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: T-Mobile promises to support low-income Lifeline program 'indefinitely' if merger approved DETROIT Hundreds of people responded with outrage and offers to adopt the pit bull mix puppy named Blue who disappeared from Florida and ended up in Michigan, only to be rejected by its owner. The story now has a happy ending, with Blue getting a new home. She has been adopted by a man who was the first person to fill out an adoption application for her, said Logan Smith, animal care technician for the Humane Society of Midland County. Blue's unique story prompted people from all over the country to reach out by phone, email and social media with offers to take the dog in, and give it the love many felt she needed. More: Missing Florida puppy mysteriously found in Michigan "It's hard not to get attached to the girl," the Grand Blanc woman who tried to return Blue to her owner in Florida said early Tuesday morning as she headed to the Midland shelter, which arranged the dog's adoption. "It sucks. I wish I could keep her." Blue got separated from her owner in Lehigh Acres, Florida, and was later found in Midland, Michigan, shivering and cold. The pup, who is not quite a year old, was taken to the Humane Society of Midland County. The shelter located the dog's owner through an embedded microchip and arranged for her to be returned, driven nearly 1,500 miles to Florida, by a volunteer who asked not to be identified. Blue, a pit bull mix puppy, made his way from Florida to Michigan. But in Florida, the dog's 22-year-old owner said she no longer wanted Blue and couldn't take care of her. The volunteer driver said she was frustrated and heartbroken, but just wanted Blue who actually is a happy dog with a red coat to end up with an owner who will love her. She said she'd adopt the dog herself, but she already has four. Blue, the driver said, is awesome, likes to play and give kisses, but also has a few quirks. She seems to have trouble eating dry food, her tail appears to be bent, and a hind leg sometimes spasms. And from the Free Press articles alone, people have fallen for her. Story continues One man, who said he lost his dog to his ex-wife in a recent divorce, wanted to adopt Blue after reading her story. He added to his pitch that he has had dogs his whole life. He also has a fenced yard, a big one, and loves walking dogs. A woman who also called said Blue would make a wonderful companion for her lonely 5-year-old pit bull mix. She had another dog, a bloodhound, but it died from cancer nearly a year ago. A man from New York left a phone message at 2:07 a.m. to say he wanted to make a donation to help cover some of the volunteer's Florida-drive expenses. There were calls and emails from Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas. "If they haven't come back through, yet, I'll take Blue in," said a women from Mississippi. "She ain't gotta worry about having to run away and not be loved. She'll be able to be inside the house." Pet lovers from north Florida and Tennessee, who also were touched by Blue's sad story, even hoped that the puppy could be dropped off at their homes, which were on the way back to Michigan. The Midland shelter received several inquiries and applications for her adoption. "Every time I've answered the phone today," Smith said "its been about Blue wondering if shes available." The shelter didn't immediately release the name of the man who adopted Blue, but it posted a picture of the happy pair on Facebook on Tuesday afternoon. "It all ended well," Smith said. This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Tail-wagging saga: Michigan man adopts wayward Florida puppy that was rejected by owner By Ron Bousso HOUSTON (Reuters) - The oil industry should engage with proponents of the "Green New Deal," a Democratic initiative seeking to radically reduce U.S. dependence on fossil fuels, BP Chief Executive Officer Bob Dudley said on Tuesday. Dudley made the rare foray into U.S. politics in a keynote speech at the largest U.S. annual gathering of the oil and natural gas sector in Houston, urging peers to engage with young people or lose the trust of society. "We need to demonstrate that we share the common goal of a low-carbon future and that we are in action toward it," Dudley said in the speech at the CERAWeek conference by IHS Markit. Burning of oil and gas accounts for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions blamed for climate change, rising sea levels and severe storms. Energy companies including BP have increased their investments in renewable energies such as solar and wind in recent years as they look for a new business model in a world seeking to reduce carbon emissions. But U.S. rivals Exxon Mobil and Chevron have made fewer investments in clean energy in recent years, drawing growing pressure from investors and climate activists. "Our focus has to be on developing an energy system that is cleaner, better and kinder to the planet," Dudley, a U.S. citizen, said. "But we can only fully play our part if we have the trust of society and the confidence of our shareholders. That means engaging more with the young people who will take to the streets on Friday," he said, referring to scheduled protests in more than 70 countries where kids plan to skip school to demand more action on climate change. "It means improving the dialogue we have with policymakers around the world, including those behind the Green New Deal," Dudley said. The "Green New Deal" resolution was introduced earlier this year, seeking to create large, government-led investments in clean energy, infrastructure and social programs. Story continues Republican lawmakers oppose the proposal, saying it is too expensive and would raise taxes and energy costs. Republican President Donald Trump's administration opposes action on climate change and favors boosting U.S. production of oil, gas and coal. Dudley said demand for oil and gas will remain strong for decades as the world's population grows and economies such as China and India expand. (Reporting by Ron Bousso; Editing by Chris Reese) MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) An Australian judge has sentenced Cardinal George Pell to 6 years in prison on convictions of sexually abusing two choirboys in a cathedral when he was archbishop of Australia's second-largest city more than 20 years ago. A timeline of Pell's career and the criminal case: July 16, 1996: Auxiliary Bishop George Pell is appointed Archbishop of Melbourne. Within months he abuses two choir boys at St. Patrick's Cathedral. March 26, 2001: Pell becomes Archbishop of Sydney. Oct. 21, 2003: Pope John Paul II makes Pell a cardinal. Feb. 25, 2014: Pope Francis appoints Pell to the powerful position of Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy. April 8, 2014: One of the molested choirboys dies of a heroin overdose without alleging the crime and having told his mother he had not been abused. Aug. 5, 2014: Victoria state police establish Task Force Sano to investigate allegations that arose from a state parliamentary inquiry into handling of child abuse by religious and other nongovernment organizations. Sano also investigates allegations made to a similar national inquiry. June 18, 2015: The surviving choirboy gives his first statement to Sano detectives outlining criminal allegations against Pell. Dec. 12, 2015: Australian media report that Pell has canceled an appearance before an Australian government-commissioned inquiry into how the church and other institutions responded to child sexual abuse over decades. Pell said he could not fly back to Australia because of ill health. Dec. 23, 2015: Sano makes a public appeal for information relating to allegations of sexual offenses in Melbourne while Pell was archbishop from 1996 until 2001. March 1, 2016: Pell begins testifying by video link for four days from Rome to the Australian child abuse inquiry. Pell was critical of how the church had dealt with pedophile clerics in the past but denied he had been aware of the extent of the problem. Pell said he did not immediately act when a boy raised abuse allegations against a cleric in the 1970s and should have done more. Story continues July 27, 2016: Pell issues a statement denying sexual abuse allegations made on an Australian Broadcasting Corp. current affairs program. Oct. 19, 2016: Santo detectives go to Rome and question Pell. Pell hears for the first time details of the choirboy's allegations. June 29, 2017: Police charge Pell by summons with multiple counts of historical sexual assault offenses, making him the most senior cleric to be charged in the church's abuse crisis. Pell denied the accusations and took an immediate leave of absence as Vatican finance czar to return to Australia to defend himself. July 26, 2017: Pell makes his first appearance in the Melbourne Magistrates Court on charges that he sexually abused multiple children in his home state of Victoria decades earlier. Details of the allegations were not made public. Pell was not required to enter pleas but he vowed through his lawyers to fight the allegations. May 1, 2018: A magistrate commits Pell to stand trial after dismissing half the charges against him during a monthlong preliminary hearing. Pell pleads not guilty to all charges. May 2, 2018: A County Court judge rules Pell's charges will be separated into two trials. One would deal with charges relating to his time as archbishop in Melbourne in the 1990s and the other when he was a young priest in Ballarat in the 1970s. Aug. 15, 2018: Trial begins and runs for four weeks. Sept. 20, 2018: Jury discharged after failing to agree on a verdict following more than five days of deliberation. Nov. 7, 2018: Retrial begins. Dec. 6, 2018: Jury retires. Dec. 11, 2018: Jury unanimously convicts Pell on all charges. Feb. 26, 2019: Suppression order forbidding publication of any details about the trial is lifted. Prosecutors abandon second trial. Feb. 27, 2019: Sentencing hearing is held. March 13, 2019: Judge announces Pell is sentenced to 6 years in prison on five sex abuse convictions and must serve a minimum of 3 years and 8 months before he is eligible for parole. Tina Malone has been handed an eight-month suspended sentence (PA) Tina Malone has been given an eight-month suspended sentence after she shared pictures on Twitter thought to reveal the identity of Jon Venables, who killed the toddler James Bulger in 1993. The 56-year-old former Shameless star appeared at the High Court in London this morning accused of breaching the injunction which prevents the identities of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, who was also guilty of Bulgers murder, being disclosed. Malone was said to be shaky and tearful as she appeared in court, and admitted that she knew that Venables and Thompson were given anonymity on their release from prison. Read more: Bulgers mother relieved film about sons murder didnt win Oscar Malone shared the pictures on her Twitter account, which has thousands of followers, at the beginning of 2018. In a post to Facebook in January this year, she revealed that she had been given a summons to the High Court. (Credit: PA) I need a lawyer asap!!!! Iv been committed to the high court!!! she wrote. Iv had a wonderful day till i opened my front door 5mins ago!!! The high court have served me!! Omg anyone know any free legal lawyer for me asap!!!! Im serious!!! Becoz i retweeted something!! Its from a yr ago!!!!!!!! Nothing to do with the film [the Oscar-nominated Detainment] but i cant say anything else!!!!! Speaking to The Daily Star last year, she said: I didnt have a clue it was illegal. Tina Malone (Credit: PA) What are you going to do prosecute me for posting a picture? I didnt realise. I am not au fait with the law. Read more: Director of Bulger movie will not withdraw it from the Oscars Two others narrowly avoided a jail term in January this year for posting pictures of Venables as an adult online. Richard McKeag, 28, and Natalie Barker, 36, were given suspended sentences of 12 months and eight months respectively. Earlier this month, the father and uncle of Bulger lost a High Court bid to have information about killer Venables made public. Lawyers for Ralph and Jimmy Bulger had argued certain details about the killer and his life are common knowledge and easily accessible online. Story continues Venables and Thompson were 10 when they led two-year-old Jamie Bulger away from his mother at a shopping centre in Bootle, and later murdered him. They were released from prison on parole in 2001, and given new identities. Venables was sent to prison again in 2010 for breaching the terms of his parole, and released in 2013. He was sent to prison a third time for three years in 2017 after he was found in possession of images extreme child abuse on his computer. The OECD Observer online archive takes you on a journey through half a century of public policy and world progress. Since November 1962, the OECDs experts and leading guests offer insights on the questions facing our member countries with concise and authoritative analysis, and provide our audiences with an excellent opportunity to understand policy debates and consider solutions. Each edition of the OECD Observer reports on a core theme of the OECDs on-going work, from economics and society through governance, finance, and the environment, and articles are bolstered by tables and graphs. Matt Smith as Charles Manson (Credit: IFC Films) The first trailer for Charles Manson movie Charlie Says has landed, and it finds Doctor Who star Matt Smith transformed into the infamous cult leader. With flowing, shaggy hair, the British actor embodies the manipulative killer who would lead his followers into a series of bloody murders in the late 1960s. Read more: Revelations from the set of Disneys Dumbo The movie, helmed by Canadian director Mary Harron, who made the cult hit I Shot Andy Warhol in 1996, finds a graduate student interviewing some of the young women Manson recruited to his commune in the California hills. Game of Thrones star Hannah Murray plays Leslie Van Houten, Sosie Bacon plays Patricia Krenwinkel, Suki Waterhouse plays Mary Brunner, and Marianne Rendon plays Susan Atkins, all of whom went to prison for their roles in Mansons family. Read more: How Captain Marvel avoided controversial comic-book past Krenwinkel and Atkins were directly involved in the murder of Sharon Tate, Roman Polanskis wife, and three of her friends on August 9, 1969, on the instructions of Manson. The movie made its premiere at the Venice Film Festival last year, though it received some pretty mixed reviews from critics. Its due out in the US in May. Washington (AFP) - New York prosecutors filed mortgage fraud and other charges on Wednesday against Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's former campaign chief, just minutes after he was sentenced to an additional 43 months in prison in another case. Manafort, 69, who appeared in court in a wheelchair, is now facing a total of 7.5 years in jail after going before two federal judges for tax crimes, bank fraud and conspiracy charges. Trump has previously dangled the possibility of a pardon for Manafort, who headed his White House bid for two months in 2016, but the president said on Wednesday that he has "not even given it a thought." "I do feel badly for him," Trump added. "I think it's a very sad situation." Trump could pardon Manafort for the array of federal crimes he has been convicted of, but he would be unable to do anything about a potential conviction in New York state, where the latest charges were brought. "No one is beyond the law in New York," Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said in announcing the 16-count indictment of Manafort. Manafort's prosecution is one of the most high-profile cases stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether any members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. Trump seized upon Manafort's sentencing by Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington to claim it had been "proven again today" that "there was no collusion" between anyone on his election campaign and Moscow. But Jackson, in sentencing Manafort for conspiracy charges, did not say the case had proven there was no collusion -- she merely said the question of collusion was "not presented in this case." "Therefore it was not resolved in this case either," Jackson said. "The 'no collusion' refrain," she said, "is unrelated to the matter at hand." Story continues - 'That argument falls flat' - Manafort was sentenced to 47 months in prison by another judge last week for five counts of filing false income tax returns, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failing to report a foreign bank account. The charges were related to more than $55 million he earned doing lobbying and consulting for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine and his use of offshore bank accounts to hide the payments from US tax authorities. The Ukrainian money was used to support a lifestyle which included purchases of luxury homes and cars, antique rugs, and expensive clothes, including an $18,500 python jacket. Manafort appeared before Jackson for sentencing on two counts of conspiracy he pleaded guilty to -- one involving money laundering and failure to register as a foreign agent and the other involving witness tampering. Jackson could have sentenced Manafort to five years in prison on each count, but she opted to tack on a total of 43 months to his previous sentence and give him nine months off as credit for time served. "The defendant is not public enemy number one," Jackson said. "But he is not a victim either." Jackson said Manafort had shown little remorse and it was "hard to overstate the number of lies" he has told. The judge ridiculed defense arguments that Manafort's prosecution only came about because of the Mueller probe. "That argument falls flat," Jackson said. "The Department of Justice was already looking into this matter." Kevin Downing, an attorney for Manafort, had told the judge earlier that "but for a short stint as a campaign manager in a presidential election, I don't think we'd be here today." - 'I am sorry' - Manafort, who was in a wheelchair because of gout, pleaded to the judge not to sentence him to more time in prison. "I am sorry for what I have done and all the activities that have got me here today," Manafort said. "Let me be very clear I accept responsibility. "For those mistakes, I am remorseful." Manafort, who worked on the White House bids of Republicans Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, asked the judge to let him be with his wife. "She needs me and I need her," he said. Speaking to reporters after the sentencing, Downing, Manafort's attorney, called it a "callous, harsh sentence that is totally unnecessary." His remarks were interrupted by protestors shouting "Liar!" Manafort is one of a half-dozen former Trump associates charged by Mueller. Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal attorney, is to begin serving a three-year prison sentence on May 6 for fraud, tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions and lying to Congress. Manafort's former deputy Rick Gates reached a plea deal with the special counsel's office and is awaiting sentencing. Former national security advisor Michael Flynn admitted lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials and is also awaiting sentencing. George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and spent 12 days in prison. Another Trump advisor, Roger Stone, awaits trial. Washington (AFP) - No one even knows when it will come out, but Robert Mueller's top secret probe into possible collusion between Donald Trump and Russia has Washington on edge -- and the president mounting preemptive attacks against impeachment. "How do you impeach a man who is considered by many to be the President with the most successful first two years in history, especially when he has done nothing wrong," Trump asked Wednesday in a stream of tweets laying out the case for his innocence. Urgent predictions that Mueller's report is just about to drop have come out all year, only to be proven wrong, leaving the country grasping for clues. Every passing week with no news raises the tension. Will the special counsel's nearly two-year investigation exonerate Trump? Or will it link him to a Kremlin influence operation in what would be one of the biggest political scandals in US history? Trump is far from the only one biting his nails. National Public Radio made waves last week with a report about elderly people near death's door fighting to hang on so that they too can see what Mueller uncovers. - Impeachment skirmishes begin - Almost everyone agrees that whatever Mueller finds, he will abide by justice department policy that he does not have authority to indict a sitting president. That job, if this worst case scenario occurred, would fall to Congress and a possible impeachment trial. But impeachment is a political, rather than purely judicial battle, and Trump -- Mueller report or no Mueller report -- is already fighting back. He got an unexpected assist from the de facto Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi on Monday when she effectively took impeachment off the table for now -- much to the annoyance of more gung-ho members of her party. "Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path, because it divides the country," Pelosi, who is speaker of the House of Representatives, told The Washington Post. Story continues Trump leapt on that Wednesday, tweeting "I greatly appreciate Nancy Pelosi's statement." "Everyone must remember the minor fact that I never did anything wrong, the Economy and Unemployment are the best ever, Military and Vets are great -- and many other successes!" he continued. - Judgment day or bust? - Once Mueller finally hands in his findings, today's skirmishes will turn into battles on an rarely seen scale. The first clash will be simply over how much of the report is even made public. Trump-appointed Attorney General William Barr gets to make that decision. However, if Democrats don't get what they want, they will force Mueller to testify before Congress -- a hearing that would turn into a political spectacle for the ages. And only then would the final showdown -- the fight over Trump's future -- begin. Incredibly for a city submerged in leaks to the media, Mueller's most stunning known achievement so far has been to keep everyone guessing. Republicans predict the Mueller report will be a bust, giving Trump, who has repeatedly called the whole thing a "witch hunt," an open route to reelection in 2020. But Democrats see judgment day approaching. "Here's my rule on this one," Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of an array of Democrats seeking nomination as Trump's 2020 opponent, told MSNBC news Wednesday. "Let's wait until we get the Mueller report. Combine it with everything else we've seen. Then we'll know what to do." WASHINGTON President Trump expressed sympathy for his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort after he received a second federal prison sentence on Wednesday. Though Trump described the situation as very sad, he said he had not thought about pardoning Manafort and was not aware of new charges filed in New York state. I feel very badly for Paul Manafort, Trump said before going on to note his former staffers work for other prominent Republicans. I think its a very sad situation, Trump added. Certainly, on a human basis, its a very sad thing. The president addressed Manaforts case in response to questions from reporters at the White House, where he was holding a briefing on drug trafficking along the southern border. Trumps appearance came a few hours after a federal judge in Washington sentenced Manafort to 73 months on two conspiracy counts stemming from numerous crimes, including failing to register for his foreign lobbying work and witness tampering. The judges ruling came one week after a federal judge in Virginia sentenced Manafort to 47 months for financial crimes related to his lobbying work in Ukraine. Donald Trump; a courtroom sketch of Paul Manafort. (Photos: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images, Dana Verkouteren via AP) In total, Manafort is set to spend up to seven and a half years in prison because the first 30 months of both sentences will overlap. He could be released earlier based on credit for time served and good behavior. In response to a question about whether the president would consider a pardon that could spare Manafort from prison, Trump said, I have not even given it a thought as of this moment. Its not something thats right now on my mind. I do feel badly for Paul Manafort. That I can tell you. This courtroom sketch shows Paul Manafort, bottom, with members of his defense team at his sentencing hearing. (Photo: Cliff Owen/AP) Yet even if Trump were to pardon Manafort for federal crimes, his former campaign manager could end up in prison based on state charges, which would be beyond the presidents purview. Shortly after Manafort received his second sentence on Wednesday afternoon, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announced he was charging the presidents former campaign chair with mortgage fraud and more than a dozen state felonies in New York. Story continues In a news release about the charges against Manafort, Vance suggested they were designed to prevent him from escaping punishment. No one is beyond the law in New York, Vance said. Trump was also asked about the state charges by reporters at the White House. I dont know about that, Trump said. At his sentencing in Washington, Manafort apologized and requested leniency, pointing out that he is 70 and that his wife is also a senior citizen. Please let my wife and I be together, Manafort pleaded. The federal charges against Manafort came out of special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into Russian intervention in the 2016 election. That probe has led to convictions against several former Trump campaign aides. Trump has repeatedly dismissed the Mueller investigation as a witch hunt. The president has also repeatedly claimed there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia. As she sentenced Manafort in Washington, Judge Amy Berman Jackson noted that the issue of collusion was not presented in this case. The judge indicated she was not satisfied with Manaforts apology and accused him of trying to avoid punishment, including through his outreach to witnesses. She criticized the defenses efforts to say Manaforts conduct, which was not directly related to his work on the Trump campaign, was uncovered only through the Mueller probe. Jackson also chided Manaforts attorneys for noting that Mueller didnt prove collusion in the case and said the phrase no collusion is simply a non sequitur. One of Manaforts lawyers, Kevin Downing, nevertheless attempted to revive the argument as he spoke to reporters outside the courthouse. Two courts have ruled no evidence of any collusion with the Russians, Downing said. His remarks led to loud heckling from nearby protesters, who shouted Liar! and Thats not what she said! _____ Read more from Yahoo News: By Steve Holland and Jeff Mason WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he was in no rush to complete a trade pact with China and insisted that any deal include protection for intellectual property, a major sticking point between the two sides during months of negotiations. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping had been expected to hold a summit at the president's Mar-a-Lago property in Florida later this month, but no date has been set for a meeting and no in-person talks between their trade teams have been held in more than two weeks. The president, speaking to reporters at the White House, said he thought there was a good chance a deal would be made, in part because China wanted one after suffering from U.S. tariffs on its goods. But he acknowledged Xi may be wary of coming to a summit without an agreement in hand after seeing Trump end a separate summit in Vietnam with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un without a peace deal. "I think President Xi saw that I'm somebody that believes in walking when the deal is not done, and you know there's always a chance it could happen and he probably wouldn't want that," Trump said. The president, who likes to emphasize his own deal-making abilities, said an agreement to end a months-long trade war could be finished ahead of a presidential meeting or completed in-person with his counterpart. "We could do it either way. We could have the deal completed and come and sign, or we could get the deal almost completed and negotiate some of the final points. I would prefer that," he said. Trump decided last month not to increase tariffs on Chinese goods at the beginning of March, giving a nod to the success of negotiations so far. But hurdles remain, and intellectual property is one of them. Washington accuses Beijing of forcing U.S. companies to share their intellectual property and transfer their technology to local partners in order to do business in China. Beijing denies it engages in such practices. Story continues Asked on Wednesday if intellectual property had to be included in a trade deal, Trump said: "Yes it does." He indicated that from his perspective, a meeting with Xi was still likely. "I think things are going along very well - we'll just see what the date is," Trump told reporters at the White House. "I'm in no rush. I want the deal to be right. ... I am not in a rush whatsoever. It's got to be the right deal. It's got to be a good deal for us and if it's not, we're not going to make that deal." Though Trump said he is not in a hurry, a trade deal this spring would give him a win to cite as an economic accomplishment as he advances his 2020 re-election campaign. The trade war has hurt the global economy and hung over stock markets, which would likely benefit from an end to the tensions. In addition to smoothing over sticking points on content, the United States is eager to include a strong enforcement mechanism in a deal to ensure that Beijing can be held accountable if it breaks any of its terms. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who has spearheaded the talks from the American side, said on Tuesday that U.S. officials hoped they were in the final weeks of their talks with China but that major issues remained to be resolved. (Reporting by Steve Holland and Jeff Mason; additional reporting by Doina Chiacu; editing by Jonathan Oatis) Donald Trump has claimed without providing evidence that people are leaving New York in record numbers because they are upset at the states investigations into his family business. New York State and its Governor, Andrew Cuomo, are now proud members of the group of PRESIDENTIAL HARASSERS, Mr Trump tweeted on Tuesday evening. No wonder people are fleeing the State in record numbers. The Witch Hunt continues! The presidents criticism of Mr Cuomo came in an apparent response to a New York Times report that New York attorney general Letitia James decision to issue subpoenas to two banks for documents related to a number of Trump hotel projects. The request to Deutsche Bank and Investors Bank was prompted by congressional testimony last month of Mr Trumps former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, who told lawmakers his ex-client fraudulently inflated his assets in financial statements. The civil probe adds to the growing number of legal dangers for the president, who is also under investigation for alleged campaign finance violations and possible links to Russia. Mr Trump later shared a tweet from the Republican National Committee, which claimed Ms James was proven to have a vendetta against the billionaire after she described him last year as an illegitimate president. All part of the Witch Hunt Hoax. Started by little Eric Schneiderman & Cuomo. So many leaving New York! Mr Trump added. Mr Schneiderman is the former New York attorney general. Although New York has seen small population decreases annually since 2016, according to the US Census Bureau, there is no evidence the fall is due to the states investigations into the president. The decrease is likely a result of a slower than average recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, which has seen private sector jobs grow at just one third the national rate, according to conservative think tank the Empire Center for Public Policy. President Trump on Wednesday expressed his appreciation for House speaker Nancy Pelosis recent comments opposing his impeachment in a pair of tweets. .a man who is considered by many to be the President with the most successful first two years in history, especially when he has done nothing wrong and impeachment is for high crimes and misdemeanors? Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2019 Earlier this week, Pelosi cleared up speculation about whether she would support articles of impeachment against Trump, which some members of her party have introduced. Im not for impeachment, Pelosi told the Washington Post. Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless theres something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I dont think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. Hes just not worth it, she concluded. However, Pelosi added that she does not think Trump is fit for the presidency. Ethically unfit, the California congresswoman said. Intellectually unfit. Curiosity-wise unfit. No, I dont think hes fit to be president of the United States. The specter of impeachment has divided Democrats, with many warning that it would be too divisive while others, such as Representative Rashida Tlaib, agitate for it and promising to touch it off. The Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerrold Nadler, who would have to spearhead impeachment proceedings, has echoed Pelosis views, calling such a move divisive. Representative David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat who serves on the Judiciary Committee, agreed that theres no question it would be divisive, but said that if the facts require us to initiate removing the president, we are obligated to do it. If the facts dont support it, we wont. Story continues House majority whip Jim Clyburn emphasized that there must be a public appetite for impeachment before it is initiated. These committees have to build will in the American people for impeachment, the South Carolina congressman said. Impeachment is a political question. I dont care what we may feel if the public isnt there, we cant go there. More from National Review A recent survey by UK-based endpoint security provider Sophos has found that 76 per cent businesses were hit by cyber attacks in 2018, while globally 68 per cent organisations admitted cyber attacks last year. India was the country with third highest number of cyber attacks in 2018, according to the report, after Mexico and France. GST Council meet: EC schedules 34th meeting on March 19 "In India, most of the attacks are happening where the money is, which means the financial services, oil and gas and energy sectors. These are the places where cyber-criminal can make most of his money and they are hit most by them," Sunil Sharma, Managing Director Sales at Sophos India & SAARC told Business Today. For the survey, 3,100 IT decision makers were interviewed between December 2018 and January 2019. In India, the company surveyed 300 IT decision makers and found that more than 18 per cent threats discovered in India are on mobile devices, almost double than the global average. "When we tried to discover where do the most attacks come from? Primarily, we found two areas, servers and networks. But endpoint and mobile are also not far away," Sharma added. According to the survey report, in India, most cybercriminals are detected at the server (39 per cent) or on the network (35 per cent); 8 per cent are found on endpoints. On average, Indian organisations that investigate one or more potential security incidents each month spend 48 days a year (four days a month) investigating them, according to the survey. "It has been found that the visibility is not there. We don't know what kind of attack. We don't know how many modes it has actually travelled. We don't know how the attack is damaging, which are the endpoints, where it has actually made damage. All that visibility is not available and it is also not helping them to take right decisions," Sharma said. The survey also revealed that 97 per cent IT managers admitted that security expertise is one of the greatest issues in India. While 92 per cent Indian IT managers wish they had a stronger team in place to properly detect, investigate and respond to security incidents and 89 per cent IT managers surveyed believe cyber security recruitment is a challenge. Globally, the survey found out that 14 per cent of IT managers who were victim to one or more cyber attacks last year can't pinpoint how the attackers gained entry, and 17 per cent don't know how long the threat was in the environment before it was detected. In fact, on average, organisations impacted by cyber attacks were struck at least twice. Also Read: Small finance banks may clip at 30 per cent needs Rs 6,000 crore capital by FY23, says report India bans Boeing 737 Max aircraft: All you need to know New audio recordings have emerged purporting to show Fox News host Tucker Carlson calling Iraqis semi-literate, primitive monkeys and questioning Barack Obamas identity as a black man. The Tucker Carlson Tonight presenter can be heard saying white men deserve credit for creating civilisation and using a homophobic slur while joking with radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge. Media Matters for America (MMFA), a self-declared watchdog of conservative misinformation, said the clips originated from between 2006 and 2011. It comes less than two days after the left-leaning group posted audio of Mr Carlson comparing primitive, basic women to dogs. Addressing the initial recordings the 49-year-old refused to show ritual contrition for saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago. On his programme on Monday night he said he had been a victim of the great American outrage machine. He added: Its a bewildering moment, especially when the quotes in question are more than a decade old. Theres really not that much you can do to respond its pointless to try to explain how the words were spoken in jest or taken out of context, or in any case bear no resemblance to what you actually think. Fox News supported him, he said, adding that we will never bow to the mob and asking: Why are the people who considered Bill Clinton a hero lecturing me about sexism? In the fresh audio Mr Carlson is heard to say, during what MMFA said was a discussion about Canada: Iraq is a crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semi-literate primitive monkeys, thats why it wasnt worth invading. But Canadas a solid place with good-looking women and good fishing. We should invade. Speaking further about the war in Iraq, he says: I hate the war. You know, Im not defending the war in any way, but I just have zero sympathy for them or their culture. A culture where people just dont use toilet paper or forks. During a 2006 call-in to the Bubba the Love Sponge Show, Mr Carlson discusses Mr Obama with the hosts. How is he black, for one thing? he asks of the then-senator. He has one white parent, one black parent. I mean, why isnt he white? Story continues And a few months later, he jokes with them about appearing on the programme. One asks him: Tuck, how do you like coming on with us? Because I like you. I mean Im not trying to fa* out on you or nothing, but I like you. Mr Carlson replies: Well I like you too. You always say, I mean that in a non-fag way, but I actually mean it in a completely f****t way. The Independent has contacted Fox News for comment. A Turkish real estate company accepts cryptocurrencies for property and has homes that cost just nine Bitcoin. Antalya Homes has sold nine properties via Bitcoin already and expects to sell more as the world increasingly turns towards crypto. Chairman Bayram Tekce said: Payment with cryptocurrency enables a more reliable and faster transaction performance without any exchange loss. By making investments in countries like Turkey, where housing is becoming increasingly valuable, investors can shift their investment to a less risky area. The firm has a special section named Pay with Bitcoin on its website for all questions related to purchasing houses with cryptocurrency. The firm sells homes in Turkey starting from 30,000 (nine BTC). Property investment In October 2018, Roy Niederhoffer, President of R.G. Niederhoffer Capital Management, announced he was selling a 10,720-square-foot, 32-foot-wide mansion for Bitcoin. The house, situated in New York, is listed for $15.9 million. Im a big believer in Bitcoin, he told Bloomberg. I really am so bullish on it, and I want to own more of it. There are many ways that blockchain can change the real estate industry by reducing the risk of fraud, eliminating middlemen, and improving cash flow management. So far, however, commercial real estate has been a slow adopter of new technologies. But as more investors, contractors, and managers see the opportunities for blockchain in real estate, the whole industry could be disrupted. Click here for five key ways blockchain is shaking up the industry. The post Turkish firm sells holiday homes in Turkey for nine Bitcoin appeared first on Coin Rivet. Eight people including six students have been shot and killed by two hooded men at a school in Brazil. The shooting took place at the Raul Brasil State School in Suzano, Sao Paulo, at around 9:30am local time (12:30pm GMT). Six children and two employees at the school were killed better the two men, who were carrying several weapons, took their own lives. A policeman is seen in the entrance of the Raul Brasil school after a shooting in Suzano, Sao Paulo state, Brazil (Reuters) Police officers guard the entrance of the Raul Brasil State School (AP) Governor Joao Doria said the two attackers were believed to be between 20 and 25 years old, adding that authorities do not believe they were former students. Mr Doria said the dead included two teachers and six students, and several more people had been taken to hospital after sustaining injuries. Some 1,000 primary and secondary students, aged between six and 18, attend the school but only secondary students were inside at the the time of the shooting. READ MORE Beach made famous in Broadchurch closed after rocks crash to the ground in cliff collapse Two British women contracted super gonorrhoea as a result of unprotected sex in Ibiza Morrisons shoppers snapping up toilet roll and painkillers over fears of a no-deal Brexit Sao Paulo state governor Joao Doria said after visiting the school: Its a very sad scene, the saddest thing Ive seen in my entire life. The teenagers were brutally murdered. Teacher Sandra Perez told O Estado de S.Paulo newspaper: I was in the classroom during our break. I thought [the sound] was from bombs. When I realised they were gunshots, I stayed there. I only left when the police arrived. Police work at the scene of the shooting on Wednesday (Getty) A teenager who was injured during the shooting is carried on a gurney into a hospital (AP) Police say they found a revolver, a bow and arrow and items that appeared to be explosives inside. Gun crime is extremely common in Brazil but school shootings are rare. The last major school shooting in Brazil occurred in 2011, when 12 students in Rio de Janeiro were shot dead by a gunman. By Tracy Rucinski CHICAGO (Reuters) - The three U.S. airlines using Boeing Co's 737 MAX continued to stand by the aircraft on Tuesday, even as some customers, unions and politicians questioned its safety after an increasing number of countries banned the plane following a deadly crash in Ethiopia. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is one of the only major regulators not to suspend 737 MAX flights after Britain and the European Union joined a wave of other suspensions on Tuesday in the aftermath of two disasters involving the same plane within months. Southwest Airlines Co, American Airlines Group Inc and United Airlines said they were still confident in their fleets. Southwest and American have both said their fleet data showed the plane was safe. U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao flew aboard a Southwest 737 MAX 8 on Tuesday to Washington from Austin, according to two people briefed on the matter. A spokesman for Chao did not immediately comment. Many potential passengers took to social media to express concerns, asking if they could change their flights and some even asking for cancellation. Southwest Airlines Twitter account (@SouthwestAir) was busy with hundreds of customers concerned about the plane. Andrea Call (@andi_call) tweeted to Southwest that she was traveling with her daughter in May. "I don't want to be on a Boeing Max 8," she said. The airline responded that it was focused on safety, adding, "Our fleet of Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft are operating as planned today and we plan to operate those aircraft going forward." Southwest told Call to contact it 24 hours before her flight to find out what aircraft would be used. Twitter user Sandy (@nycsandygirl) tweeted that she had called American Airlines to change her flight but was told waivers were unavailable for nonrefundable fares. "It is well within my right to request a change in aircraft without a change fee when safety concerns have been raised about a particular aircraft. China, Indonesia, Ethiopian Airlines & Cayman Airways have all grounded these aircraft so obviously there is a concern," the Twitter user posted. Story continues Unions that represent American Airlines' flight attendants and mechanics urged American Airlines Chief Executive Doug Parker to consider grounding the planes pending a thorough investigation. Flight attendants said their contract allows them not to work if they feel unsafe. A separate union representing United Airlines flight attendants also urged the FAA to ground the jets and conduct an investigation into the 737 MAX. Pilot unions so far have not joined such requests. A pilot union, United Master Executive Council, said it has analyzed thousands of safety data points in its 737 MAX 9 operation since May and did not find any performance or mechanical deficiencies. U.S. Senators Mitt Romney and Elizabeth Warren were the latest politicians to call for the FAA to act. Warren is running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote letters to Parker and the chief executives of Southwest and United urging them to voluntarily ground their 737 MAX aircraft, which includes the MAX 9 as well as the MAX 8. The FAA and Boeing have said the planes are safe to fly. With 34 737 MAX 8 jets, Southwest is the largest operator of the aircraft, which it said produces thousands of data points during each flight that are constantly monitored. "To date, we have operated more than 41,000 flights and have corresponding aircraft data that indicates the effectiveness of our operating standards, procedures, and training," spokeswoman Michelle Agnew said in a statement. Southwest's pilot association said on Tuesday it supported the airline's decision to continue to fly the aircraft, as well as the FAA's findings to date. WAITING FOR BLACK BOXES American Airlines said Tuesday the company continues to "believe the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft is safe and that our pilots are well-trained and well-equipped to operate it." The airline is waiting for findings from the black boxes from Ethiopian Airlines that "will provide a better understanding of the cause of this recent accident." The airline has said extensive flight data collected from its fleet gave it confidence in the safe operation of all its aircraft, including the 737 MAX 8. American, with 24 MAX 8 planes, said it has been sharing its data with the FAA, in coordination with the Allied Pilots Association, a union that represents American's pilots. United Airlines, which does not fly the MAX 8 but operates another model in the series, the MAX 9, also reiterated its confidence in its pilots' "ability to fly the aircraft safely." "(...) we continue to believe the planes will be found to be safe and the impact on Boeing's long term operations, backlog, book of business and order flow will prove to be limited," said Jim Corridore, an analyst at investment research firm CFRA who kept his "strong buy" opinion on Boeing. (Reporting by Tracy Rucinski; additional reporting by Angela Moon in New York, David Shepardson in Washington and Rama Venkat in Bengaluru; Editing by Bernadette Baum, Jonathan Oatis and Cynthia Osterman) By Tracy Rucinski CHICAGO (Reuters) - The three U.S. airlines using Boeing Co's 737 MAX continued to stand by the aircraft on Tuesday, even as some customers, unions and politicians questioned its safety after an increasing number of countries banned the plane following a deadly crash in Ethiopia. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is one of the only major regulators to not suspend 737 MAX flights after Britain and the European Union joined a wave of other suspensions on Tuesday in the aftermath of two disasters involving the same plane within months. Southwest Airlines Co, American Airlines Group Inc and United Airlines said they were still confident in their fleets. Southwest and American have both said their fleet data showed the plane was safe. U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao flew aboard a Southwest 737 MAX 8 on Tuesday to Washington from Austin, according to two people briefed on the matter, speaking . A spokesman for Chao did not immediately comment. Many potential passengers took to social media to express concerns, asking if they could change their flights and some even asking for cancellation. Southwest Airlines Twitter account (@SouthwestAir) was busy with hundreds of customers concerned about the plane. Andrea Call (@andi_call) tweeted to Southwest that she was traveling with her daughter in May. "I don't want to be on a Boeing Max 8," she said. The airline responded that it was focused on safety, adding, "Our fleet of Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft are operating as planned today and we plan to operate those aircraft going forward." Call would have to wait until 24 hours before the flight to find out what aircraft would be used." Twitter user Sandy (@nycsandygirl) tweeted that she had called American Airlines to change her flight but was told waivers were unavailable for nonrefundable fares. "It is well within my right to request a change in aircraft without a change fee when safety concerns have been raised about a particular aircraft. China, Indonesia, Ethiopian Airlines & Cayman Airways have all grounded these aircraft so obviously there is a concern," the Twitter user posted. Story continues Unions that represent American Airlines' flight attendants and pilots urged American Airlines Chief Executive Doug Parker to consider grounding the planes pending a thorough investigation. Flight attendants said they will not be forced to fly the aircraft if they feel unsafe. A separate union representing United Airlines flight attendants also urged the FAA to ground the jets and conduct an investigation into the 737 MAX. Pilot unions so far have not joined such requests. U.S. Senators Mitt Romney and Elizabeth Warren were the latest politicians to call for the FAA to act. Warren is running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote letters to Parker and the chief executives of Southwest and United urging them to voluntarily ground their 737 MAX aircraft, which includes the MAX 9 as well as the MAX 8. The FAA and Boeing have said the planes are safe to fly. With 34 737 MAX 8 jets, Southwest is the largest operator of the aircraft, which it said produces thousands of data points during each flight that are constantly monitored. "To date, we have operated more than 41,000 flights and have corresponding aircraft data that indicates the effectiveness of our operating standards, procedures, and training," spokeswoman Michelle Agnew said in a statement. Southwest's pilot association said on Tuesday it supported the airline's decision to continue to fly the aircraft, as well as the FAA's findings to date. American Airlines said Tuesday the company continues to "believe the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft is safe and that our pilots are well-trained and well-equipped to operate it." The airline is waiting for findings from the black boxes from Ethiopian Airlines that "will provide a better understanding of the cause of this recent accident." The airline has said extensive flight data collected from its fleet gave it confidence in the safe operation of all its aircraft, including the 737 MAX 8. American, with 24 MAX 8 planes, said it has been sharing its data with the FAA, in coordination with the Allied Pilots Association, a union that represents American's pilots. United Airlines, which does not fly the MAX 8 but operates another model in the series, the MAX 9, also reiterated its confidence in its pilots' "ability to fly the aircraft safely." "(...) we continue to believe the planes will be found to be safe and the impact on Boeing's long term operations, backlog, book of business and order flow will prove to be limited," said Jim Corridore, an analyst at investment research firm CFRA who kept his "strong buy" opinion on Boeing. (Reporting by Tracy Rucinski; additional reporting by Angela Moon in New York and David Shepardson in Washington; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Jonathan Oatis) The 360 is a feature designed to show you diverse perspectives on the days top stories. Speed read Democrats vying to be the partys nominee for president in 2020 are in the spotlight for their stances on reparations the idea that African-Americans should receive financial compensation for the legacy of slavery and the Jim Crow era. Why its in the news: Last month at a Last month at a CNN town hall , Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked about reparations and responded: What does that mean? What do they mean? Im not sure anyones very clear. Sanders elaborated in a March 4 radio interview when asked if he would support free cash payouts to African-Americans, he said: No. Do you mean a check to every African-American? Well, then, that means a check to every Native American that were wiped out when the settlers came. I think the way we go forward is to build America together. Why its sparking debate: The reparations debate is emerging as a key election issue. African-American voters a key constituency for the Democrats support reparations, but there are different interpretations about how they would be enacted. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have historically opposed reparations . House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she supports a bill establishing a commission to study and consider the issue. Story continues A handful of candidates Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro have expressed some form of support for reparations . Sen. Cory Booker is touting a baby bonds plan to close the racial wealth gap. Marianne Williamson , a self-help author and spiritual adviser, wants to set aside $100 billion for a reparations program. Whats next: As the party shifts more to the left, the candidates stance on reparations could be seen as a litmus test for their progressive credentials. The issue looks set to hang over the Democratic field and could entrench divisions between the partys progressive wing and its moderates. While polls in recent years have shown the issue to be popular with black voters , support of reparations is less popular with Americans overall particularly with white voters. And that leaves candidates trying to sort out whether to campaign on the issue. Perspectives Reparations are needed to right the wrongs of slavery. Were a nation coming apart at the seams, a nation in which each tribe has its own narrative, and the narratives are generally resentment narratives. The African-American experience is somehow at the core of this fragmentation the original sin that hardens the heart, separates Americans from one another and serves as model and fuel for other injustices. The need now is to consolidate all the different narratives and make them reconciliation and possibility narratives, in which all feel known. That requires direct action, a concrete gesture of respect that makes possible the beginning of a new chapter in our common life. Reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute, but the very act of talking about and designing them heals a wound and opens a new story. David Brooks, New York Times Without reparations in the form of money or assets, how can we ensure that every Black American is able to benefit? Not all Black Americans need social programs, but all Black Americans are entitled to reparations, as Ta-Nehisi Coates explained in heartbreaking detail five years ago. The truth is that no form of reparations will fully right the wrongs of slavery. But thats not the point. The point is to acknowledge a crime against humanity and to make one step toward redress. Our country needs better social programs, but we also need true reparations. Its revolutionary to have so many candidates discussing this controversial topic. But that doesnt mean that we cant push them to have these conversations more effectively. Nylah Burton, Bustle Reparations would widen racial divisions in America. Conservatives can sometimes be heard tepidly endorsing reparations in just this sense: a one-time payment, and then nothing more owed no affirmative action, no national conversation on race, nothing. That is the only conception of reparations that could possibly be politically viable. It would also be utterly toxic, ultimately widening divisions that were trying to shrink. And the benefit is likely to be smaller than the heroic price tag suggests; the economic evidence from lotteries suggests that one-time capital transfers do very little to improve the long-term welfare of recipients. Megan McArdle, Washington Post The moral case for reparations may be strong, but the political and cultural consequences of enacting the policy is likely to be extremely high. Far from serving as a moment of moral reckoning and healing for the country, as its advocates contend, it would inspire a severe backlash that would inflame tensions on both sides of the color line and set the stage for future calls from other groups for acts of public restitution for past injustices. Its a recipe for greatly intensified civic anger and resentment. Damon Linker, The Week Supporting reparations is grandstanding. Slavery, and the systematic subjugation of African Americans that followed it officially until the day before yesterday, was evil. Its legacy is evil. Its surviving remnants are evil. It is not an evil that is unique in the world but it is an evil that is unique in the context of the United States of America. Its consequences remain very much with us, as anyone with eyes to see can discern for himself. Reparations are the wrong way to mitigate that evil. One reason for that is that reparations proposals are not intended to mitigate that evil. They are intended to make Elizabeth Warren, professor of color, president of the United States. And, if not Warren, then Senator Harris, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, or some other tedious mediocrity. Kevin D. Williamson, National Review What will resolve the racial divisions in this country is not a cash transfer but and you liberals are going to hate this manifestly true statement of fact a return to the Judeo-Christian values and principles of our Constitution that recognize the worth and dignity of each individual based upon his or her character, as well as a total repudiation of the racial hucksterism that is destroying our culture. Until we reject the ethnic scammers and professional bigots who seek to make immutable characteristics like race, ethnicity, religion, and gender what defines an individual, our culture and politics will be a poisonous cesspool. Its those creeps who owe all of us reparations but I dont want their money. I just want them to stop destroying my country. Kurt Schlichter, Townhall The debate could tear Democrats apart. When an issue suddenly gains traction as important to a left constituency, theres enormous pressure on the Democratic candidates to position themselves as more woke than their rivals. But faux wokeness can backfire. Better to be all in than halfway. The second is that when an issue like this is suddenly injected into the campaign policy conversation, it incentivizes the political press to scour the candidates records. And the longer the record one has, the more perilous scouring can be. Finally, the reparations debate has exposed the crucial divide among Democrats these days, which is between those who emphasize class and those who emphasize race and identity. Ryan Lizza, Esquire Flippant talk about reparations illustrates a worsening pattern of behavior among congressional Democrats, including presidential candidates. A quarter-baked idea (reparations, a Green New Deal, Medicare for All) is floated. There is a stampede to endorse it before thinking about the ideas dependence on enormous revenues of unknown origin and/or unavailable technologies. Then, when details, or the lack thereof, reveal the ideas wild impracticality, the stampeders breezily say: Nevertheless, the idea is virtuous because it is aspirational. Which means that the Democratic party is again assisting, as in 2016, Donald Trumps electoral aspirations. George Will, National Review Can reparations even be calculated? Reparations owed to African-Americans in terms of dollars are insurmountable and nearly impossible for America to afford. No amount of money can repair the psychological damage African-Americans have experienced for centuries, and no amount of money can address the systemic racism that has been carried over from slavery. The United States would have to attempt to calculate the total cost to compensate for damages done to generations of an entire race of people to arrive at a dollar amount for reparations. A realistic expectation is not to offer monetary compensation but to educate the youth and future generations of all American citizens in a way that would reverse the effects of slavery on everyone and change every citizens perception of African-Americans. Benny Williams, Ebony Videos By Florence Tan HOUSTON (Reuters) - Iran has lost $10 billion in revenue since U.S. sanctions in November have removed about 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd) of Iranian crude from global markets, a U.S. State Department official said on Wednesday. Brian Hook, the State Department's special representative on Iran, said in remarks at the CERAWeek energy conference that due to a global oil surplus - in part due to record U.S. production - the United States is accelerating its plan of bringing Iranian crude exports to zero. U.S. sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, two of the largest oil producers in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, and production cuts by OPEC and Russia have boosted global oil prices to near four-month highs. Iran reached an agreement with world powers in 2015 over its nuclear program which led to the lifting of sanctions in 2016 but U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of the deal in May last year and reimposed restrictions in November. Trump "has made it very clear that we need to have a campaign of maximum economic pressure" on Iran, Hook said, "but he also doesn't want to shock oil markets, he wants to ensure a stable and well-supplied oil market. That policy has not changed." The global oil market is looking for signs that Washington may extend sanctions waivers for Iran's key customers in early May. The United States surprised the market in November last year by allowing eight countries to keep importing Iranian oil - in part causing Brent crude futures, the international benchmark, to fall to near $50 a barrel in late December after surpassing $86 a barrel in October. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has projected that world supply will exceed demand in 2019 by 440,000 bpd, Hook said. "When you have a better supplied oil market it enables us to accelerate our path to zero. But we also know that there are a lot of variables that go into a well-supplied and stable oil market," said Hook, a senior policy adviser to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Story continues Washington sanctioned Venezuelan oil exports in January in an effort to oust President Nicolas Maduro and a massive power outage since last week halted crude exports from its primary port, essentially crippling the South American country's principal industry. "We are aware that our diplomatic and economic pressure, the timing and the pace of that affects Venezuela's oil industry," Hook said. He said the United States is monitoring global supplies for impact from sanctions. "I've met a few times with (Saudi Energy Minister) Khalid al-Falih over the last year when we knew we were taking a lot of oil, we wanted to ensure that we're doing this in a responsible way," he said. Falih said on Sunday that OPEC's production-curbing agreement likely would last until at least June. OPEC and its allies agreed late in 2018 to cut output by 1.2 million bpd. (Reporting by Florence Tan; Editing by Marguerita Choy and David Gregorio) (Corrects troop numbers in paragraph 17 of March 12 story to say "about 17,000 foreign troops" instead of "about 14,000 U.S. troops".) By Eric Knecht DOHA (Reuters) - U.S. and Taliban negotiators wrapped up their longest round of peace talks on Tuesday with progress made but no agreement on when foreign troops might withdraw, officials from both sides said. The 16 days of talks, in which the United States also sought assurances that the Taliban would not allow militant groups to use Afghanistan to stage attacks, are expected to resume in late March. The negotiations in Doha, Qatar included the Taliban's political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and a U.S. team led by special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. Khalilzad, an Afghan-born veteran U.S. diplomat, said the sides made progress on discussions about counter-terrorism assurances and a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. "The conditions for peace have improved. It's clear all sides want to end the war. Despite ups and downs, we kept things on track and made real strides," Khalilzad said on Twitter. The Taliban have held multiple rounds of peace talks with the American team led by Khalilzad but have so far refused to talk to the Afghan government. "When the agreement in draft about a withdrawal timeline and effective counter-terrorism measures is finalised, the Taliban and other Afghans, including the government, will begin intra-Afghan negotiations on a political settlement and comprehensive ceasefire," Khalilzad said. SOME PROGRESS Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the sides made progress on the issues of withdrawing foreign forces and preventing future attacks on other countries from Afghanistan. But, in a statement, he stressed that no agreement was reached on a ceasefire or talks with the Afghan government. A spokesman for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani tweeted that he hoped to see a long-term ceasefire agreement and the start of direct talks between the government and Taliban soon. The talks were held in a closed-off banquet hall at the five-star Ritz-Carlton seaside hotel on the southern end of Doha. Qatar has hosted the Taliban's political office since 2013 and has looked to position itself as an important regional player for conflict resolution. "We appreciate how difficult it is to end 18 years of war. Qatar looks forward to resumption of the talks in the coming weeks," said Qatar's lead mediator Mutlaq Bin Majid Al-Qahtani. No date has been set for the next round. Khalilzad said he would return to Washington to brief U.S. and international officials. Talks ended on a day in which Taliban insurgents stepped up pressure on the battlefield, killing 20 Afghan soldiers and capturing another 20 in western Afghanistan. In another province, officials said an air strike killed both Taliban fighters and civilians. About 17,000 foreign troops are based in Afghanistan as part of a U.S.-led NATO mission to train, assist and advise Afghan forces. Some U.S. forces carry out counter-terrorism operations. The United States has been pushing the Taliban to agree to a ceasefire and to talk with Afghanistan's government, which the militant group considers a U.S. puppet regime. "The U.S. officials were pressing the Taliban to declare a ceasefire, but our leaders were clear that a ceasefire can only be announced after the foreign force withdrawal announcement (is) made," said a senior Taliban commander privy to the talks. Another Taliban source said on condition of anonymity there was frustration on some issues during the peace talks and that a senior member of the Islamist group told U.S. officials at one point that the Taliban are "not their servants" and need no U.S. approval for any future decisions. Washington intervened in Afghanistan in 2001 to help overthrow a Taliban government that had sheltered Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda group, responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States. A U.S.-led international force has fought since then against a Taliban insurgency. The foreign presence peaked in 2010 at more than 130,000 troops including 100,000 Americans, but was sharply cut back after 2014. Nearly 3,500 foreign troops including 2,300 Americans have died in Afghanistan. The United Nations has tallied the deaths of more than 30,000 Afghan civilians since 2009, most killed by insurgent attacks. Tens of thousands of members of the Afghan security forces and an unknown number of insurgents have also been killed. (Additional reporting by Jibran Ahmad in Peshawar and Abdul Qadir Sediqi in Kabul,; Writing by Rupam Jain and Rod Nickel in Kabul, Editing by Mark Heinrich and Ed Osmond) Abu Dhabi (AFP) - The United Arab Emirates has slammed a European Union decision to add it to a tax haven blacklist despite the Gulf state's efforts to meet EU requirements. The UAE was one of 10 more countries which the EU on Tuesday put on the list, created in 2017 as part of efforts to battle tax evasion by the wealthy. "This inclusion was made despite the UAE's close cooperation with the EU on this issue and ongoing efforts to fulfil all the EU's requirements," said an official statement cited by state news agency WAM late Tuesday. "The UAE remains firmly committed to its long-standing policy of meeting the highest international standards on taxation," it said. The UAE "will continue to update its domestic legislative framework in this regard," it said. The EU had included the UAE on the first list drawn up in 2017, but later removed it after Emirati officials assured their European counterparts it would meet EU requirements. The inclusion of the second-largest, most open Arab economy on the revised list came despite the objections of EU member Italy, a major destination for Emirati investment. The UAE statement argued that it has "shared with the EU a detailed timeline of actions that it is currently implementing in accordance with its sovereign legal process and constitutional requirements." In a separate statement, the finance ministry said it was confident the EU will remove the UAE from the blacklist. "The UAE has made outstanding achievements in 2018, in line with its commitment to transparency and international tax standards," it said. The statement listed a number of agreements linked to tax cooperation it has signed with the EU and said it will complete related legislation in the second half of this year. The blacklist was first drawn up in the wake of scandals including the Panama Papers and LuxLeaks, which had pushed the EU into doing more to fight tax evasion by multinationals and the rich. The latest decision moved seven countries, including the UAE's neighbour Oman, back from a grey list because reform commitments had not been met. By Nick Carey DETROIT (Reuters) - The leader of the United Auto Workers union on Wednesday warned that job security and preventing the shift of U.S. jobs to Mexico would be top priorities in contract talks with Detroit's automakers slated for later this year. "There will be no more quiet closing of plants, no more shipping jobs to Mexico and abroad without a sound," Gary Jones said in a speech to delegates the union's bargaining convention in Detroit. "They are on notice." This year's contract talks between the UAW and General Motors Co, Ford Motor Co and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV are likely to be contentious, with both sides also focusing on healthcare costs and the use of temporary workers. During the convention, the union announced an increase in the amount of money paid to members if they go on strike. "The stakes are especially high this year," Jones said at a press conference, adding the raise in strike pay was necessary "should the (auto) companies force us to that extreme." He took no questions from reporters. The auto industry is expected to hit a downturn after an unprecedented run of strong sales dating to the end of the Great Recession. The talks follow GM's announcement in November it will close five North American plants producing less-popular sedans. Just last week, the last Chevrolet Cruze rolled off the line at GM's plant in Lordstown in northeastern Ohio. The closing has drawn a lawsuit from the United Auto Workers union and significant political blowback, including from Republican U.S. President Donald Trump - Ohio is a key state for his 2020 reelection chances. The UAW has vowed to fight for GM to reopen Lordstown with a new vehicle. Analysts say, however, the chances of a new product being assigned to Lordstown are slim as the facility was one of several money-losing GM plants running well below capacity. GM Chief Executive Mary Barra has said the cuts will help the company's long-term financial stability. The automaker predicts they will improve annual free cash flow by $6 billion by the end of 2020 - and fund new electric and self-driving vehicles. Story continues In the talks with automakers, the union plans to look closely at new technology such as electric vehicles, namely where batteries and other components will be made and whether American workers will produce them. "Those jobs need to be here," UAW spokesman Brian Rothenberg told reporters. (Reporting By Nick Carey; Editing by Steve Orlofsky) By Carl O'Donnell and Joshua Franklin (Reuters) - Ride-hailing startup Uber Technologies Inc has hired a string of investment banks to its syndicate of initial public offering underwriters, as it ramps up preparations for a stock market debut, people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday. Smaller rival Lyft Inc is racing to list in the stock market at the end of March. While Uber will not beat Lyft to an IPO, the preparations are aimed at giving it the flexibility to go public as early as the first half of 2019, the sources said. Uber has added more than half a dozen investment banks, including Bank of America Corp, Barclays Plc, Citigroup Inc, Allen & Company, Deutsche Bank AG and JMP Securities, to its IPO underwriting lineup, the sources said. These banks will support Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc, which Uber hired late last year to lead its public offering, the sources added. Uber will make additional bank hires in the coming weeks to complete the IPO syndicate, the sources said. The sources asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential. Representatives for Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup and JMP Securities declined to comment. Uber, Allen & Company and Deutsche Bank did not immediately return requests for comment. Several investment banks held off pitching Lyft for an IPO role in order to be hired by Uber, a more lucrative and high-profile assignment given its size and status. However, JMP Securities managed to get on both Uber and Lyft's IPO syndicates, showing that such overlap is possible, albeit mainly with more junior underwriting roles. Lending relationships between the companies and the banks have also proved important in winning IPO roles. Lyft's top-tier of seven underwriters was responsible for around a quarter of capital raised through last year, compared to more than 40 percent for the six top-tier banks that Uber has hired so far, according to Dealogic. Like Lyft, Uber filed confidentially for an IPO with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in December. Its bankers have indicated it could be valued at as much as $120 billion, though some analysts have pegged its value closer to $100 billion based on the earning figures it discloses. Lyft could be valued close to $25 billion in its IPO, according to the sources. Earlier on Tuesday, Uber agreed to pay $20 million to settle a lawsuit brought nearly six years ago by drivers who claimed they are employees, not independent contractors. Uber still faces thousands of arbitration claims from drivers who are not covered by the settlement. (Reporting by Carl O'Donnell and Joshua Franklin in New York; additional reporting by Liana Baker in New York; editing by Leslie Adler) Photo: Alberto Pezzali/NurPhoto/Sipa USA Two companies involved in an alleged 1.4m art investment fraud have been shut down by the courts. The high court ordered Halifax Mannin and Hey Design Services to be wound up in the public interest on 1 March, after a probe by the Insolvency Service found they together misled or bullied customers out of about 1.35m. The firms were brought to the attention of the Insolvency Service after several complaints were made, but during official inquiries officers were unable to determine the exact nature of either companys trading activities, or where business activity was being conducted from. READ MORE: Companies lost almost 1m through this donation scam However, investigators did establish that Halifax Mannin, based in Wales, and Hey Design Services, based in Birmingham, both received payments from people persuaded to make investments in works of art by renowned painters. According to the Insolvency Service, between October 2017 and October 2018, Halifax Mannin received almost 250,000, while Hey Design Services secured just over 1.1m in funds. It added that the vast majority of the almost 1.4m was paid out of the companies bank accounts, but investigators could not determine how the funds have been spent as the directors have failed to co-operate with inquiries. READ MORE: Watchdog warns of investment scams after Brits lost 200m in 2018 Investigators were also able to establish that the art investment scheme the companies were involved with appears to have been operated by a separate business in Spain, called Asset Consulting Services, which has been subject to a previous public warning from the Financial Conduct Authority The court wound up Halifax Mannin and Hey Design Services on the grounds that they traded with a lack of commercial probity, having been incorporated or used as vehicles for fraud, with their sole purpose being to receive money from investors who were misled or bullied into making an investment. Furthermore, the companies and their directors failed to cooperate with the investigation and the companies operated with a lack of transparency. Story continues READ MORE: More than 50m lost to romance fraud David Hope, chief investigator for the Insolvency Service, said: Despite accepting more than a million pounds from members of the public, including elderly and vulnerable people, there is no evidence to indicate that the investment had any value or was likely to generate any return for the investors. Thankfully the courts have a put a stop to these companies, preventing anyone else from coming to harm, and I would encourage anyone approached by or thinking about making an investment with Asset Consulting Services to read the warning issued by the FCA and to take independent financial advice before making any investment decision. Photo: Reuters The UK government has published the temporary tariff regime for a no-deal Brexit. The announcement comes just hours after members of parliament voted against prime minister Theresa Mays new Brexit deal by 391 votes to 242 a majority of 149 votes. The UK government said in a statement that in the event of a no-deal Brexit which means Britain crashing out of the EU without an agreement and therefore creating a vacuum of where there are no set rules and regulations for businesses to adhere to the regime is intended to minimise costs to business and consumers while protecting vulnerable industries. It also insisted that the regime is temporary and the government would closely monitor the effects of these tariffs on the UK economy. It would apply for up to 12 months while a full consultation and review on a permanent approach to tariffs is undertaken. READ MORE: The winners and losers from the UKs tariffs plans Our priority is securing a deal with the European Union as this will avoid disruption to our global trading relationships. However, we must prepare for all eventualities, said trade policy minister George Hollingbery in a statement. What the temporary regime looks like There are three key points to the temporary tariff regime in the event of a no-deal Brexit: UK businesses would not pay customs duties on the majority of goods when importing into the nation. Some 87% of total imports to the UK by value would be eligible for tariff free access. Tariffs would still apply to 13% of goods imported into the UK. If we leave without a deal, we will set the majority of our import tariffs to zero, whilst maintaining tariffs for the most sensitive industries. This balanced approach will help to support British jobs and avoid potential price spikes that would hit the poorest households the hardest, said Hollingbery. It represents a modest liberalisation of tariffs and we will be monitoring the economy closely, as well as consulting with businesses, to decide what our tariffs should be after this transitional period. Story continues The 13% of goods imported in the UK that would incur a tariff include a mixture of tariffs and quotas on beef, lamb, pork, poultry and some dairy to support farmers and producers who have historically been protected through high EU tariffs. Carmakers will also be hit as the government said that itll retain a number of tariffs on finished vehicles in order to support the automotive sector and in light of broader challenging market conditions. However, carmakers relying on EU supply chains would not face additional tariffs on car parts imported from the EU to prevent disruption to supply chains, it added. When it comes to food, the UK would still retain a tariffs on goods from developing countries, such as bananas, raw cane sugar, and certain kinds of fish. The government said this was to ensure access to those markets is maintained. Tariffs on certain ceramics, fertiliser, and fuel will also be retained. This will be good news for some business leaders. The head of the British Ceramic Confederation previously said any unilateral removal of UK tariffs on our imports, without any prospect of other countries reciprocating on our exports, would put British ceramic manufacturing at risk. Laura Cohen added it would give foreign competitors a boost, while putting our members home market at risk. Trade secretary Liam Fox had previously floated slashing all tariffs to zero in February. Meanwhile, a report by MPs from the influential public accounts committee on Tuesday said that the UK governments preparations for a no-deal Brexit have been rushed, risky, and over-optimistic. A group of cows in Ireland. Photo: PA Its not good, no matter who you ask: the UKs decision to impose tariffs on agricultural goods between the UK and Ireland under a no-deal Brexit is either a defining moment, or its a potential disaster. And Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney said on Wednesday that it would be very damaging. The announcement by the British government of a tariff regime has very devastating implications for Irish farming, particularly in the beef, dairy, poultry, and pork sector, Coveney told Irish parliament on Wednesday. Though to avoid a hard border there will be no tariffs on goods moving from Ireland to Northern Ireland under temporary no-deal Brexit plans announced by the UK government, tariffs will be imposed on any goods moving either through Northern Ireland to the rest of the UK or directly to the UK. READ MORE: No immediate Northern Ireland border checks from UK in no-deal Brexit Though the UK said it would slash tariffs on 87% of its imports, some 13% of goods beef, lamb, pork, poultry and some dairy products will incur a tariff in order to support farmers and producers who have historically been protected through high EU tariffs, the UK government said. Coveney said that the move could inflict 800m (696m) in damage to Irelands agriculture sector, since it would be forced to compete with goods from countries like Brazil. Speaking on Irish radio, Angus Woods of the Irish Farmers Association said that the tariffs signalled a defining moment for the Irish agriculture sector, and warned that it may not survive the imposition of the tariffs. Irish agriculture minister Michael Creed said that they were a potential disaster and said that he thought the publication of the proposals at this time were designed to scare those who favoured a no-deal Brexit. Meanwhile, the Ulster Farmers Union suggested that the plans announced on Wednesday would be equally damaging for Northern Irish farmers. READ MORE: UK government publishes temporary tariff regime for no-deal Brexit Story continues UK tariffs imposed on goods from Ireland would drive down prices and hit producers in Northern Ireland, it warned. It could also potentially open the door to illegal trade, said the unions president, Ivor Ferguson. He said the Ulster Farmers Union objected to zero tariffs on goods moving between Ireland and Northern Ireland, since it is unlikely the EU would offer the same zero tariff to Northern Ireland or the UK as a whole. This is why we have called for reciprocal tariffs, he said. Whatever the EU applies, the UK should apply in return. The tariff plans emphasise why a no deal Brexit must be avoided. LONDON British lawmakers voted Wednesday to rule out leaving the European Union without a formal exit deal when Britain leaves the bloc in less than three weeks. The outcome, though nonbinding, sets up a vote Thursday, when lawmakers could choose to delay Brexit. Britain's Parliament rejected Prime Minister Theresa May's withdrawal agreement with the EU for the second time in as many months late Tuesday in a move that increased political and business uncertainty over what happens next. A "no deal" Brexit, according to analysts and political scientists, could lead to chaos at ports, grounded flights, traffic jams and food shortages. Buckingham Palace repurposed a Cold War-era emergency escape plan for Queen Elizabeth II in the event this default EU-divorce position causes social unrest or other disturbances. More: 'Bewildering, dire, disastrous': Queen has a Brexit escape plan More: British lawmakers reject Theresa May's Brexit plan for second time "I may not have my own voice, but I understand the voice of the country," May said in Parliament on Wednesday as she battled a sore throat. She insisted that Britain can leave the EU with a "good deal" but warned lawmakers they face "hard choices." If Britain decides to delay Brexit, it would need to seek approval from an EU that has grown increasingly frustrated with Britain's inability to speak with a unified voice over the terms of its exit from the bloc. The EU demanded "credible justification" before it would grant any request to delay Brexit. "I dont see reason to give any extension if first of all we dont know what the majority position is of the House of Commons," Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament's chief Brexit official, said Wednesday. "We are waiting now for a proposal from London. It is now in London that they have to find a way out of this and break the deadlock." Story continues Even if Brexit is delayed, Britain will depart the EU without a deal if one is not agreed upon during the delay because that is the default legal position. Wednesday's vote does not change that. The British government sought to reassure industry leaders Wednesday by publishing details of its contingency plans under a "no deal" scenario. These include cutting tariffs on a range of agricultural imports from outside the EU and measures to avoid a "hard border" between Britain's Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland. Investors have been closely watching Brexit, which has caused volatility for the value of the British pound, although they appeared to shrug off the latest developments. Britain's benchmark FTSE 100 index traded flat Wednesday. Dominic Grieve, Britain's former attorney general and a supporter of staying in the EU from May's ruling Conservative Party, told BBC radio that crashing out of the bloc without a deal would be an "absolute catastrophe." Grieve, who has advocated for a second public vote on whether Britain should leave the EU, has warned that a "no deal" Brexit could force the nation to declare a "state of emergency." "Politicians have spectacularly failed," said Nigel Green, the chief executive of deVere Group, a London-based financial consultancy. "Allowing the public to vote and giving them a final say is quite simply the only credible solution now available." Michael Gove, Britain's environment secretary, told Parliament that tens of thousands of businesses were not prepared for a "no-deal exit." He stood in for May after she lost her voice in debates because of her sore throat. Parliament has twice rejected May's withdrawal agreement. She spent the best part of two years negotiating it with the EU, and the bloc insists there will be no more talks. "The risk of a 'no-deal' has never been higher," the EU's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, said Wednesday. "I urge you please not to underestimate the risk or its consequences," he told European lawmakers. An anti-Brexit, left, and pro-Brexit supporter debate outside Parliament in London on March 12, 2019. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: UK Parliament acts to avert 'absolute catastrophe' Brexit United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The United Nations Security Council met behind closed doors on Wednesday to try to salvage a stalled truce deal in Yemen seen as crucial to diplomatic efforts to end the devastating war. Yemen's government and its Saudi and Emirati allies agreed in talks with Huthi rebels nearly a month ago to redeploy their forces from the flashpoint city of Hodeida, but nothing has happened on the ground. UN envoy Martin Griffiths told the council that he was "still working with the parties to make the redeployment in Hodeida a reality," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters. The pullback was agreed in December under a ceasefire deal reached in Sweden that offered the best hope in years of moving toward an end to the conflict that has pushed Yemen to the brink of famine. Details of a two-stage pullback from Hodeida city and its ports were finalized during a meeting between the government and the Huthis on February 17, marking the first concrete step toward de-escalation. UN diplomats said the Huthis were refusing to pull away from the ports of Saleef and Ras Issa as part of the first stage, citing fears that forces linked to the Saudi-led coalition will move in to take over those facilities. "It's clear that one party has more problems than the other at the moment, but this tends to swing around," British Ambassador Karen Pierce told reporters after the meeting. General Michael Lollesgaard, who also briefed the council as head of a newly-created UN mission to monitor the redeployment from Hodeida, will hold meetings in the coming days to push for action on the ground, diplomats said. - A very big step - The Security Council will meet again on Tuesday to take stock and consider a tougher stance if no progress is made. "If there isn't progress and if Stockholm does collapse, the Security Council will need to think about further measures and that is a very big step," Pierce said in an interview to Al-Arabiya television. Story continues On Tuesday, the ambassadors in Yemen of the permanent council members -- Britain, France, China, Russia and the United States -- said they were "extremely concerned" that agreements had not been implemented. The pullback should begin "without further delay and without seeking to exploit the redeployments by the other side," they said in a joint statement. With Hodeida peace efforts stalled, fighting in northern Hajjah province escalated this week, with 12 children and 10 women killed during two days of strikes, the UN humanitarian coordinator said. The Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen will enter its fifth year later this month, with millions of civilians facing famine. The conflict has unleashed the world's worst humanitarian conflict. RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinians threw a fire bomb at an Israeli police post at a site revered by Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem on Tuesday, and Israeli forces shot dead two Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including one troops said attacked them with a knife. In the walled Old City of Jerusalem, Israeli police said a fire bomb damaged the police post inside a sacred compound revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and by Jews as the Temple Mount. Scuffles broke out at the complex between Israeli police and Palestinians. No serious injuries or damage to holy sites were reported and police said two suspects were arrested. Tensions in the holy compound in Jerusalem, part of the eastern sector of the city captured by Israel in a 1967 war, have risen in recent weeks after the site's Muslim administrators reopened a mosque sealed by Israel during a Palestinian uprising in 2003. The U.N. Middle East envoy called for calm. "I am following events at the holy esplanade in Jerusalem with concern. Places of worship are for prayer, not for provocations and violence. Restraint must be shown to avoid inflaming an already tense situation," Nickolay Mladenov said on Twitter. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned what he called "the grave Israeli escalation" at the complex, which houses al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third holiest site. In the occupied West Bank, the military said a Palestinian, armed with a knife, had confronted troops in the city of Hebron and was shot and killed. It said no soldiers were injured. The Palestinian higher judicial council said the 40-year-old man had worked in a Palestinian court in Hebron. It denounced the shooting as "a despicable crime". In a separate incident in the West Bank, a 23-year-old Palestinian was shot dead when clashes broke out after Israeli troops entered the Palestinian town Salfit, residents and the Palestinian Health ministry said. An Israeli army spokeswoman said soldiers had used riot-dispersal means, mainly tear gas, against dozens of Palestinians who threw stones at them and that the military did not know of any live fire being used. She provided no further details. Palestinians began a wave of knife and car-ramming attacks in the West Bank and in Israel in 2015. Such incidents have become more sporadic. Palestinians want an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza strip with East Jerusalem as its capital, all lands seized by Israel in 1967. (Reporting by Rami Ayyub, Ali Sawafta and Maayan Lubell; Editing by Peter Graff) If you're looking for a Sector - Tech fund category, then a potential option is USAA Science & Technology Fund (USSCX). USSCX carries a Zacks Mutual Fund Rank of 3 (Hold), which is based on nine forecasting factors like size, cost, and past performance. Objective USSCX is part of the Sector - Tech category, which boasts an array of different possible selections. With a much more diversified approach, Sector - Tech mutual funds give investors a way to own a stake in a notoriously risky sector. Tech companies are in various industries like semiconductors, software, internet, and networking, among others. History of Fund/Manager USAA Group is based in San Antonio, TX, and is the manager of USSCX. Since USAA Science & Technology Fund made its debut in August of 1997, USSCX has garnered more than $1.33 billion in assets. The fund's current manager is a team of investment professionals. Performance Obviously, what investors are looking for in these funds is strong performance relative to their peers. USSCX has a 5-year annualized total return of 13.82% and is in the top third among its category peers. If you're interested in shorter time frames, do not dismiss looking at the fund's 3-year annualized total return of 20.12%, which places it in the middle third during this time-frame. When looking at a fund's performance, it is also important to note the standard deviation of the returns. The lower the standard deviation, the less volatility the fund experiences. USSCX's standard deviation over the past three years is 15.77% compared to the category average of 12.68%. The standard deviation of the fund over the past 5 years is 15.22% compared to the category average of 12.45%. This makes the fund more volatile than its peers over the past half-decade. Risk Factors Investors cannot discount the risks to this segment though, as it is always important to remember the downside for any potential investment. In USSCX's case, the fund lost 52.59% in the most recent bear market and outperformed its peer group by 0.72%. This could mean that the fund is a better choice than comparable funds during a bear market. Story continues Nevertheless, investors should also note that the fund has a 5-year beta of 1.19, which means it is hypothetically more volatile than the market at large. Because alpha represents a portfolio's performance on a risk-adjusted basis relative to a benchmark, which is the S&P 500 in this case, one should pay attention to this metric as well. The fund has produced a positive alpha over the past 5 years of 1.48, which shows that managers in this portfolio are skilled in picking securities that generate better-than-benchmark returns. Holdings Exploring the equity holdings of a mutual fund is also a valuable exercise. This can show us how the manager is applying their stated methodology, as well as if there are any inherent biases in their approach. For this particular fund, the focus is primarily on equities that are traded in the United States. The mutual fund currently has 97.49% of its holdings in stocks, which have an average market capitalization of $191.01 billion. The fund has the heaviest exposure to the following market sectors: Technology Health Turnover is 56%, which means this fund makes fewer trades than the average comparable fund. Expenses Costs are increasingly important for mutual fund investing, and particularly as competition heats up in this market. And all things being equal, a lower cost product will outperform its otherwise identical counterpart, so taking a closer look at these metrics is key for investors. In terms of fees, USSCX is a no load fund. It has an expense ratio of 1.04% compared to the category average of 1.31%. So, USSCX is actually cheaper than its peers from a cost perspective. While the minimum initial investment for the product is $3,000, investors should also note that each subsequent investment needs to be at least $50. Bottom Line Overall, USAA Science & Technology Fund ( USSCX ) has a neutral Zacks Mutual Fund rank, strong performance, average downside risk, and lower fees compared to its peers. Don't stop here for your research on Sector - Tech funds. We also have plenty more on our site in order to help you find the best possible fund for your portfolio. Make sure to check out www.zacks.com/funds/mutual-funds for more information about the world of funds, and feel free to compare USSCX to its peers as well for additional information. Zacks provides a full suite of tools to help you analyze your portfolio - both funds and stocks - in the most efficient way possible. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Get Your Free (USSCX): Fund Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Tokyo (AFP) - The former high-flying head of collapsed bitcoin exchange MtGox will learn his fate Friday as a Tokyo court hands down its verdict on charges of faking digital data and embezzling millions of dollars. Prosecutors have called for a 10-year jail sentence for French-born Mark Karpeles, 33, who denies the charges. Karpeles is alleged to have repeatedly manipulated computer data over several years while embezzling a total of 341 million yen ($3 million) of clients' money deposited at the company. Prosecutors claim he splashed the embezzled money on a 3D-printing software business unnecessary for MtGox, as well as on personal expenses, including some six million yen ($54,000) for a canopy bed. He also spent millions of yen on arranging overseas trips for his estranged wife, as well as utility bills and cleaning services at his luxury apartment that he reportedly rented for $11,000 per month, prosecutors allege. MtGox was shut down in 2014 after 850,000 bitcoins (worth half a billion dollars at that time) disappeared from its virtual vaults, a mystery that remains unsolved. The disappearance left a trail of angry investors, rocked the virtual currency community, and dented confidence in the security of bitcoin. At one point, MtGox claimed to be handling around 80 percent of all global bitcoin transactions. The spectacular failure of the exchange caused a dramatic slump in the value of bitcoin but the cryptocurrency rallied to an all-time high of near $20,000 in December 2017 before dropping off sharply. It is currently trading at around $3,900. Japan issued new regulations after the MtGox case, but the exchange Coincheck was forced last year to refund customers more than $440 million in virtual currency that disappeared from its holdings. During the trial, Karpeles apologised to customers for the company's bankruptcy but denied both data falsification and embezzlement. "I swear to God that I am innocent," Karpeles, speaking in Japanese, told the three-judge panel hearing when his trial opened. Story continues Karpeles has said the bitcoins were lost due to an external "hacking attack" and later claimed he had found some 200,000 coins in a "cold wallet" -- a storage device not connected to other computers. "Most people will not believe what I say. The only solution I have is to actually find the real culprits," he told reporters after the hearing. The charges against the former CEO are not directly related to how the MtGox losses came about. - 'Significant money losses' - Satoshi Mihira, chief attorney at Mizuho Chuo law firm, said: "If it was an outside hacker who stole the currency, it's a problem. But if he stole even part of the money, it would be embezzlement." "His defence counsel needs a high level of evidence to win an innocent verdict," he told AFP. "If he's found guilty, it is possible he will get a jail term considering the significant money losses (suffered by customers)," said the lawyer, an expert on cryptocurrency issues. The odds are stacked against Karpeles as the vast majority of cases that come to trial in Japan end in a conviction. The Frenchman was first arrested in August 2015 and, in an echo of another high-profile case against former Nissan chief and compatriot Carlos Ghosn, was re-arrested several times on different charges. Karpeles eventually won bail in July 2016 -- nearly a year after his arrest -- reportedly paying 10 million yen to secure his freedom pending a trial, which began in July 2017. During his time on bail, Karpeles has been active on social media -- notably voicing doubts about bitcoin and replying to some media questions about conditions in Japanese detention centres. However, he has largely avoided commenting on his case in detail. The court is expected to issue a verdict Friday and, if it finds Karpeles guilty, will likely hand down a sentence at the same time. However, even if he were to lose the case, he has the right to appeal, which would keep him on bail. HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam called on Malaysia on Tuesday to free a Vietnamese woman accused of the 2017 VX poison murder of the North Korean leader's half-brother, a day after a Malaysian court dropped the same charge against an Indonesian woman. Foreign Minister Pham Binh Binh, in a telephone call to his Malaysian counterpart Saifuddin Abdullah, asked Malaysia to "ensure a fair trial and free Vietnamese citizen Doan Thi Huong", the government said in a statement. In a separate statement on Wednesday, the government said Justice Minister Le Thanh Long had sent a letter to Malaysia's attorney-general, Tommy Thomas, asking Malaysia to free Huong. Huong's co-defendant, Indonesian Siti Aisyah, was freed on Monday. She and Huong had been accused of poisoning Kim Jong Nam, half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, with liquid VX at Kuala Lumpur airport in February 2017. Conviction could carry the death penalty. Minh said in the phone conversation that senior leaders and the people of Vietnam had paid close attention to the trial, the government statement said. Huong's father, Doan Van Thanh, said Siti Aisyah's release was good news for his family. "I believe that my daughter will be released too because she is innocent. We haven't received any information from Malaysia recently, and we are eager to hear from them now," Thanh told Reuters. The court is scheduled to resume proceedings on Thursday. Defense lawyers have maintained that the women were pawns in an assassination orchestrated by North Korean agents. During the trial, the court was shown CCTV footage of two women assaulting Kim Jong Nam while he prepared to check in for a flight, allegedly smearing the liquid VX, a banned chemical weapon, on his face. Siti Aisyah and Huong have maintained that they believed they had been hired to take part in a reality TV prank show. (Reporting by Khanh Vu and James Pearson; Editing by Nick Macfie) Tokyo (AFP) - For breast cancer survivors, the risk of tumours returning casts a long shadow, with recurrence possible up to two decades after a diagnosis. But new research could help identify and treat those most in danger. Doctors have traditionally relied on factors such as the size and grade of a tumour at diagnosis, lymph node involvement and a patient's age to determine their risk of relapse. But the rate at which breast cancer recurs, and why it does so, remains "poorly understood", according to the study published Thursday in the journal Nature. In a bid to change that, the researchers turned to data from over 3,000 breast cancer patients diagnosed in the United Kingdom and Canada between 1977 and 2005. Nearly 2,000 of the cases included molecular data about the cancers that provided the researchers with detailed information about the tumours. The data was used to develop a computer model that identified four sub-groups with "exceedingly high risk of late distant relapse," said senior author Christina Curtis, assistant professor of medicine and genetics at Stanford University. "These are the patients that remain in jeopardy of experiencing a relapse after their initial diagnosis," she told AFP. The study found that around 25 percent of women with the most commonly diagnosed form of breast cancer have a 42-55 percent risk of seeing their cancer return within two decades. "These are the women who seem to be cured but then present with systemic disease many years later," Curtis said in a press release issued by Stanford University. "Until now, there has been no good way to identify this subset of women who might benefit from ongoing screening or treatment." Related Video: Olivia Newton-John Gets Candid About Breast Cancer Battle The study also opens up potential new avenues for additional treatment of breast cancer patients by identifying gene alterations in each of the four at-risk sub-groups. Story continues These alterations or mutations result in problems in signalling that can cause unwanted cell growth. And that in turn can fuel the formation of tumours or their progression. "Many of these genomic driver alterations can potentially be therapeutically targeted, suggesting the possibility of new treatment options, though this will need to be evaluated in the context of clinical trials," Curtis told AFP. The study also reveals when and where in the body breast cancers might metastasise and found a group of patients with so-called triple-negative tumours whose cancers are unlikely to return after five years. "This information can be used to refine risk estimates and improve follow-up and stratification of patients with breast cancer -- for example by determining which patients might benefit from longer or different types of treatment," Curtis said. - Better treatments - The researchers cautioned that their data set includes cases from decades ago, meaning that patients were not then able to access more recently developed and approved treatments. Some of those treatments have significantly improved the survival rates for patients with particular types of breast cancer. But the findings should still significantly help doctors more accurately predict which of their patients are most at risk of seeing their cancer return. The team has even developed an online "breast cancer recurrence predictor" tool for doctors, using their model. Curtis said the researchers are now pursuing a clinical trial for treatment options that would target the genomic defects in patients most at risk of cancer recurrence. WASHINGTON House Democrats introduced a bill Tuesday that would grant permanent protections to undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children, but the fate of those Dreamers will ultimately rest in the hands of Senate Republicans, who have struggled for nearly two decades to come up with a solution that they, and their conservative base, can endorse. There used to be a time when the DREAM Act was accepted by a wide range of Senate Republicans who said it was unfair to punish children for the actions of their parents. The 2003 version of the bill was sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and had 12 other GOP co-sponsors. But little by little, as the party's more conservative wing began viewing the DREAM Act less as an act of "compassion" and more an act of "amnesty," the GOP has backed away from the idea. The 2005 version of the bill had nine Republican co-sponsors, the 2007 version had five, the 2009 version had two, and the 2011 version had none. The tide had changed so drastically by 2017 that most Senate Republicans quickly tweeted statements supporting President Donald Trump after he announced his decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the Obama-era program that protected more than 800,000 Dreamers from deportation. That decision was blocked by federal courts, leaving Dreamers in legal limbo and prompting the push by House Democrats to pass a permanent legislative fix for them. Its prospects in today's Senate GOP caucus appear dire. Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana who served 36 years in the Senate, was an early and consistent supporter of the DREAM Act. He said that even in the early days of the bill, before the tea party movement and the Freedom Caucus and Trump's zealous band of followers, Republicans agonized between their personal belief that Dreamers were entitled to citizenship and their political concerns over supporting any form of "amnesty." Story continues That internal battle has only become more acute, Lugar said, as polarization has intensified between the parties and within the Republican Party itself. That leaves senators seeing little payoff to support the DREAM Act and all kinds of risks. "It's a situation where members decide this is not an issue that they're prepared to bleed and die on," Lugar said. "There are several out there that support it, but this doesn't appear to be the time." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., joined from left by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., Majority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, speaks with reporters during a news conference at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on March 5, 2019. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., paused Tuesday after USA TODAY asked if he believed the Senate should take up the House bill to protect Dreamers. "I'm actually very pro-Dreamers," he said, but he wouldnt say how hed vote on a stand-alone bill because he hadnt seen details. Many of his colleagues are more direct, saying a stand-alone Dreamer bill has no chance. Instead, the White House and most Republicans have endorsed a Dreamer fix only in exchange for billions of dollars in border security or wholesale changes of the legal immigration system. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who chairs the Judiciary Committee and has long been vocal about the need to protect Dreamers, told USA TODAY on Tuesday that he thinks the Senate should "see if we can find a more comprehensive solution" over the House bill. "The immigration quagmire has changed," Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., said when asked what shifted within his party. "Everybody is going to have to give something in order to make progress, that's what's changed." The House bill, known as the Dream and Promise Act and co-sponsored by more than 190 Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, would create a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and foreigners with Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. That program has allowed more than 300,000 foreigners to legally live and work in the USA after their home countries were ravaged by war or natural disasters. The Trump administration tried to end that program for 98 percent of the TPS population, but was blocked by federal courts. Although the measure is likely to sail through the Democratic-controlled House, it stands little chance in the Republican-led Senate. Few in that chamber have experienced the Republican shift as much as Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. The Cuban-American was once a member of the bipartisan "Gang of 8," which passed a bill in 2013 that would have allowed all the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants to apply for citizenship in exchange for improved border security. At the time, it was the Republican-led House that killed the bill. After taking a beating in conservative circles for his embrace of "amnesty," Rubio has taken a more hard-line stance on immigration-related issues. Tuesday, he told USA TODAY the stand-alone House bill to protect Dreamers had no chance in the Senate. "You can't bring it up, because once you do, it will be amended, and it becomes a vehicle for multiple amendments outside of the DREAM Act," Rubio said. "Thats why dealing with immigration has been so difficult. Youre never going to get a clean vote on any immigration issue because everybody has got something on immigration that they want, and they'll use that as a vehicle to try and amend it. And then bills fall apart. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why once-supportive Senate Republicans may sink House Dreamer bill 90,924 pilgrims selected through computerised balloting A total of 90,924 intending pilgrims were selected through computerised balloting on Tuesday to perform the religious obligation under the government Hajj scheme 2019. Conducted by Minister for Religious Affairs Noorul Haq Qadri in Islamabad, the balloting process was completed in just about two hours. The applicants will be informed of the decision via SMS while they can also check the ballot results on the ministrys website by entering either their CNIC number or the Hajj application number. From the total quota of 107,526 pilgrims in the government Hajj scheme, a total of 2,238 spaces were allotted to the aspiring pilgrims who are 80-years or older, 12,251 to those who have been unsuccessful in the Hajj ballot for three consecutive years in the past, 1,613 were reserved for the hardship quota and 500 for the labour quota. The remaining 90,924 were selected through the general ballot held on Tuesday. On Saturday, a Religious Affairs Ministry spokesperson, Imran Siddiqui, had confirmed that the time period to submit Hajj applications for the government scheme had closed. A total of 216,623 applications were received for the government scheme 123,700 from men and 92,923 from women. For this year, the largest number of applications for the government scheme came from Punjab with 100,806 applications. A total of 49,343 applications were received from Sindh, 40,752 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 10,258 from Balochistan, 6,412 from Islamabad Capital Territory, 2,316 from Azad Kashmir, 4,314 from erstwhile Fata, and 2,422 from Gilgit-Baltistan. At a press briefing held, Qadri said that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman had accepted Prime Minister Imran Khans request to include Pakistani pilgrims in the Kingdoms Road to Makkah project. He said a high-level Saudi delegation will soon visit Pakistan to review arrangements, after which pilgrims travelling from Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta will be able to undergo immigration clearance at their local airports. The minister also said that the Saudi government had increased the Hajj quota for Pakistanis to 200,000 and was hopeful that they would soon inform the Pakistani government of this in writing. As per the Hajj Policy 2019 released by the Ministry of Religious Affairs, a total of 184,210 Pakistani pilgrims are to perform Hajj this year. The federal cabinet had announced the policy on January 31, according to which the cost of performing the ritual under the government scheme has been fixed at Rs456,426 (with sacrifice), against last years expense of Rs280,000 per person. By Sharon Bernstein PARADISE, Calif. (Reuters) - As an uncontrollable wildfire turned the California town of Paradise to ash, air pollution researcher Keith Bein knew he had to act fast: Little is known about toxic chemicals released when a whole town burns and the wind would soon blow away evidence. He drove the roughly 100 miles to Paradise, located in the Sierra Nevada foothills, from his laboratory at the University of California, Davis, only to be refused entrance under rules that allow first responders and journalists - but not public health researchers - to cross police lines. It was the second time Bein says he was unable to gather post-wildfire research in a field so new public safety agencies have not yet developed procedures for allowing scientists into restricted areas. Fires like the one that razed Paradise last November burn thousands of pounds of wiring, plastic pipes and building materials, leaving dangerous chemicals in the air, soil and water. Lead paint, burned asbestos and even melted refrigerators from tens of thousands of households only add to the danger, public health experts say. Beins experience highlights the difficulties in assessing the impact of today's massive disasters, whether wildfires that burn entire towns or flooding after major hurricanes, incidents scientists say are becoming more common due to climate change. "Everything that we're doing, it feels like this is a question nobody has asked before, and we have no answers," said Irva Hertz-Picciotto, director of the Environmental Health Sciences Center at U.C. Davis. Researchers are examining soil tested for the presence of chemical compounds in neighborhoods destroyed by the 2017 wildfire that swept into Santa Rosa, located in California's Sonoma County north of the Bay Area, and comparing it to uninhabited land nearby where only trees had burned, Hertz-Picciotto said. In that still-uncompleted study, researchers found nearly 2,000 more chemical compounds in the soil than in uninhabited parkland nearby. Researchers are now working to identify the compounds. While scientists have studied wildfires for decades -- learning much about the impact on air, soil and nearby ecosystems -- fires that race from the forest into large urban communities were, until recently, exceedingly rare. COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH As natural disasters increase in scope and frequency, public health researchers across the United States are developing new lines of inquiry with unusual speed. Scientists, many of them funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), are studying pregnant women exposed to polluted air and water after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017; residents of Puerto Rico forced to live in unrepaired homes where mold and fungi grew after Hurricane Maria in 2017; eggs from backyard chickens that ate California wildfire ash, among other topics. "It's fundamentally critical that we be able to understand these situations and the risks to populations both in the short term and in the long term," said NIEHS senior medical adviser Aubrey Miller, who is helping to develop quick-response disaster research cutting across scientific specialties. To do that, NIEH has sped up the time it needs to fund research, from months or years to as little as 120 days, said Gwen Collman, who directs the agency's work with outside researchers. At U.C. Davis, where researchers are studying eggs from backyard chickens that may have breathed smoke and pecked at ash in areas affected by wildfires, the work is complicated. "In an urban fire youre dealing with contaminants that dont go away arsenic, heavy metals, copper, lead, transformer fluid, brake fluid, fire retardant," said veterinarian Maurice Pitesky, who is leading the study. Any contaminants found in the eggs could stem from other factors such as the proximity of the home to a factory, a waste disposal site or a highway, he said. In an as-yet-uncompleted study, researchers have tested eggs sent by individual owners of roughly 350 backyard properties concerned about possible contamination from wildfires and other causes, researcher Todd Kelman said. The locations of the yards were mapped to see which homeowners lived near wildfire areas, and the eggs were tested to see if they have high levels of contaminants such as lead, cadmium and other chemicals associated with human buildings and activities. COMBING PARADISE One recent morning, teams from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in white hazmat suits combed through Paradise, loading seared paint cans, partially melted pesticide containers and the remains of propane tanks onto trucks to be hauled away. Rusty Harris Bishop, a toxics expert with the EPA who worked on the Paradise cleanup, said removal teams take away whatever contaminants they find, including melted pipes or asbestos-laden construction materials, going beyond the older definition of hazardous household waste. But cleanup protocols after such disasters are evolving along with the public health science, he said. That gap in knowledge concerns researchers like Bein, who plans to train as a firefighter to get access to the burned areas in the next big blaze. "As these types of fires become more frequent in nature, where instead of once every decade it's once every summer . . . then we really need to know how this is going to affect health," Bein said. A woman who was mauled by a jaguar at an Arizona zoo said she was in the wrong but that the zoo should consider moving the fence. The woman, identified as Leanne, was visiting the Wildlife World Zoo near Phoenix on Saturday when she decided to take a selfie with a black jaguar. According to Leanne, it was a good opportunity for pictures, as the cats were pressed up against the cage. To take the photo, Leanne leaned over the security barrier with her camera allowing the cat to reach through the wire fence and scratch her. Following the incident, the woman, who is in her 30s, told CBS: The black jaguar was up against the fence and we happened to be walking by and we said: Hey lets get some good pictures. She then acknowledged she was in the wrong for leaning over the barrier, but thinks maybe the zoo should look into moving their fence back. Anybody can reach out, she continued. Im not the first, and if they dont move the fence, Im probably not going to be the last. The woman also said she never expected this but that were all human and shes learned her lesson. After the incident on March 9 sent the woman to the hospital with non-serious injuries, she originally apologised to the zoo for the bad publicity. According to the zoo, which assured the public that it would not be putting the animal down, the sole issue was the disregard for the barriers. We can promise you nothing will happen to our jaguar, the zoo tweeted the day of the incident. Shes a wild animal and there were proper barriers in place to keep our guests safe not a wild animals fault when barriers are crossed. We can promise you nothing will happen to our jaguar. Shes a wild animal and there were proper barriers in place to keep our guests safe- not a wild animals fault when barriers are crossed. Still sending prayers to her and her family. Wildlife World Zoo, Aquarium & Safari Park (@ZooWildlife) March 10, 2019 Still sending prayers to her and her family. Story continues According to CBS, a three-foot barrier is in place around the jaguar exhibit. Last summer, a similar attack involving the same animal occurred, with zoo visitor Jeff Allan requiring several stitches after reaching into the enclosure. At the time, Allan hired an attorney to persuade the zoo to implement additional safety measures, according to ABC15. The case never went to court. YPF Sociedad Anonimas YPF production is expected to take a hit in 2019. The Argentine state-run energy major is witnessing a declining output trend over the past few years. Although its production is supported by prolific shale plays like Vaca Muerta in Argentina, the company expects 2019 production level to fall 2-3% year over year. Declining Trend In 2017, the companys total production fell 3.9% year over year to 555,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (Boe/d). Through 2018, output declined 4.5% on a year-over year basis to 530,200 Boe/d. Crude output in 2018 reduced marginally to 227,500 barrels per day (Bbl/d) from a year ago. Natural gas liquids (NGLs) production was down 23.1% year over year to 38,800 Bbl/d and natural gas output declined 4.6% to 42 cubic meters per day during the year. Notably, the gas market in the country witnessed excess supply in 2018, which affected output, as some locations were temporarily closed. It had also impacted hydrocarbon reinjection. Moreover, NGL output was affected by a stoppage at the liquid separation facility and lower gas production. The plunge in 2019 production is expected to stem from the divestment of mature assets, which will remove 5,000 Boe/d of output from the tables. Moreover, the company expects lower output of natural gas and a slow start in the companys Mendoza area in 2019. Whats Ahead? Although the company expects 2019 production to decline, it is planning to increase capital investment by 10-15% year over year to the range of $3.5-$4 billion. The hike in investment is much needed to keep the companys long-term growth plan unaffected. YPF Sociedad intends to achieve a production growth rate in the range of 5-7% from 2020 and onward. However, lower demand for natural gas amid the global drive for cleaner energy search has forced the authorities to rethink investments in natural gas development over the short run. Apart from domestic consumption of natural gas, the company intends to explore exporting opportunities to neighbour countries like Chile. Moreover, the company is trying to bring a liquefaction barge, having 2.5 million cubic meters per day of export capacity, into operation in the third quarter. Story continues It is also planning to boost crude production in 2019 as the shale plays are experiencing declining costs. It is operating in Loma Campana via a joint venture with Chevron Corporation CVX, wherein development cost declined from $13.40 per barrel of oil equivalent to $11.40. The partnership intends to invest around $670 million in the region. In another region, Bandurria Sur, oilfield service provider Schlumberger Limited SLB serves as a partner of YPF Sociedad. This year, the company wants to invest about $290 million therein. Zacks Rank and Another Stock to Consider Currently, YPF Sociedad has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). Investors interested in the energy sector can opt for another top-ranked stock as given below: Sao Paulo, Brazil-based Braskem S.A. BAK is an integrated energy company. The stock currently has a Zacks Rank #2. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Zacks' Top 10 Stocks for 2019 In addition to the stocks discussed above, wouldn't you like to know about our 10 finest buy-and-holds for the year? From more than 4,000 companies covered by the Zacks Rank, these 10 were picked by a process that consistently beats the market. Even during 2018 while the market dropped -5.2%, our Top 10s were up well into double-digits. And during bullish 2012 2017, they soared far above the market's +126.3%, reaching +181.9%. This year, the portfolio features a player that thrives on volatility, an AI comer, and a dynamic tech company that helps doctors deliver better patient outcomes at lower costs. See Stocks Today >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Schlumberger Limited (SLB) : Free Stock Analysis Report Chevron Corporation (CVX) : Free Stock Analysis Report YPF Sociedad Anonima (YPF) : Free Stock Analysis Report Braskem S.A. (BAK) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research For Immediate Release Chicago, IL March 13, 2019 Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include: Check Point CHKP, Qualys, Inc. QLYS, Fortinet, Inc. FTNT, CyberArk Software Ltd. CYBR and Palo Alto Networks, Inc. PANW. Here are highlights from Tuesdays Analyst Blog: 4 Cybersecurity Stocks to Buy as Enterprise Spending Jumps Demand for cybersecurity solutions is expected to remain healthy in 2019 due to the increasing frequency and technologically advanced nature of cyber-attacks. These attacks are not only affecting companies but are also threatening the national security of some countries. Per Absolute Markets Insights data, cyber-attacks can cost companies almost $5.2 trillion every year. According to a USA Today article, data breaches and cyber-attacks in 2018 affected billions of people 765 million in April, May and June alone. Moreover, the massive data breach by suspected Chinese hackers at hotel group Marriot International in December 2018 exposed the records of nearly 500 million customers. Further, in October last year, Bloomberg Businessweek claimed that Chinese spy chips were present in numerous American corporate giants hardware, indicating the seriousness of data breach and sensitive information theft by hackers. Additionally, in May 2018, two of the largest Canadian banks reported a major hacking of personal and financial information of nearly 90,000 of their customers. The following month, Ukraine reported that it successfully warded off another sophisticated cyber-attack against a chlorine distribution plant. Recently, a research carried out by Check Point revealed that a massive distribution of the GandCrab ransomware has spread across Japan, Germany, Canada and Australia, among others, over the last two months, including an advanced version of the ransomware. Story continues What is Driving Investments? Enterprises are realizing the need for stricter security measures, which is pushing companies to further increase spending in this space. Ongoing digital transformation and proliferation of smart connected devices supported by artificial intelligence (AI) and its tools like machine learning (ML) are exposing vulnerabilities in security systems globally. The growing incidents of AI and ML driven advanced security attacks or smart attacks have become a headwind for cybersecurity solution providers. As most enterprises transition to the cloud, traditional control panels are becoming insufficient to prevent and manage smart attacks. In 2019 and beyond, cyber criminals are likely to use malicious chatbots to interact with potential victims and manipulate private information out of them. Current technologies like firewalls and host-based security tools are not strong enough to effectively combat threats of this kind. This is making it increasingly important for more stringent and advanced security like identity-based application security, and considerable amount is being spent on research and development in this area. Enterprise Spending to Increase in 2019 With the global IT spending on Security Technology projected to exceed $124 billion in 2019 by Gartner, the industrys prospects look promising from a near-term perspective, as it spells rise in sales of security products. Recently, at the RSA Conference held at San Francisco, several interesting updates on the cybersecurity industry surfaced. For instance, it was projected that cybersecurity budgets can grow about 20% year over year in 2019, which is encouraging for the overall industry. Moreover, per MarketsAndMarkets, the cybersecurity market is expected to see a CAGR of 10.2% between 2018 and 2023 to reach $248.26 billion. Our Picks Here, we have picked four cybersecurity stocks that have the potential to make the most of the increasing enterprise budget. These stocks either have a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) or 2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here. Qualys, Inc.is headquartered in Redwood City, CA. The companys partnerships with the likes of Amazons AWS Security Hub and IBMs X-Force Red are expected to continue to be a major growth driver. This Zacks Rank #1 stock outpaced the Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings in all the trailing four quarters, average being 19.2%. Fortinet, Inc., headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, is optimistic about its portfolio of integrated secured SD-WAN and 5G products; Security Fabric product suit; and its security processor unit, SPU, ASIC technology, and a high-performance E-series product announced recently. This Zacks Rank #1 stock surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings in all the trailing four quarters, average being 18.8%. CyberArk Software Ltd.is headquartered in Petach Tikva, Israel. Enhanced functionality of Version 10 of the companys core privileged access security solutions coupled with its new simplified pricing model is helping it drive customer acquisition. This Zacks Rank #2 stock beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings in all the trailing four quarters, average being 57.8%. Palo Alto Networks, Inc.is a Santa Clara, CA-based provider of network security solutions to enterprises, service providers and government entities worldwide. Recent talks over its acquisition of InfoSec company Demisto is expected to boost its information security capabilities further. This Zacks Rank #2 stock topped the Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings in all the trailing four quarters, average being 8%. Conclusion Firms operating in the security industry are positioned to benefit immensely. This is because protection against spear phishing, credential-based attack, account takeover and ransomware attacks among others has become the need of the hour. Moreover, the coming years might also see a rise in cyber warfare, given terrorist and cyber espionage groups widespread access to advanced technology. This bodes well for the cyber security software providers. Today's Best Stocks from Zacks Would you like to see the updated picks from our best market-beating strategies? From 2017 through 2018, while the S&P 500 gained +15.8%, five of our screens returned +38.0%, +61.3%, +61.6%, +68.1%, and +98.3%. This outperformance has not just been a recent phenomenon. From 2000 2018, while the S&P averaged +4.8% per year, our top strategies averaged up to +56.2% per year. See their latest picks free >> Media Contact Zacks Investment Research 800-767-3771 ext. 9339 support@zacks.com https://www.zacks.com Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Inherent in any investment is the potential for loss. This material is being provided for informational purposes only and nothing herein constitutes investment, legal, accounting or tax advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a security. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. It should not be assumed that any investments in securities, companies, sectors or markets identified and described were or will be profitable. All information is current as of the date of herein and is subject to change without notice. Any views or opinions expressed may not reflect those of the firm as a whole. Zacks Investment Research does not engage in investment banking, market making or asset management activities of any securities. These returns are from hypothetical portfolios consisting of stocks with Zacks Rank = 1 that were rebalanced monthly with zero transaction costs. These are not the returns of actual portfolios of stocks. The S&P 500 is an unmanaged index. Visit https://www.zacks.com/performance for information about the performance numbers displayed in this press release. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Fortinet, Inc. (FTNT) : Free Stock Analysis Report Qualys, Inc. (QLYS) : Free Stock Analysis Report CyberArk Software Ltd. (CYBR) : Free Stock Analysis Report Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (PANW) : Free Stock Analysis Report Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (CHKP) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Home | News | General | APC leadership will decide next House of Reps Speaker - Gbajabiamila - Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila has hinted that the leadership of the ninth assembly will be decided by the leaders of the ruling APC - The Majority Leader in the House of Representatives gave the hint after a meeting of the APC caucus in the lower house - He expressed assurances that APC members will abide by any position taken by the leadership The Majority Leader in the House of Representatives, Honourable Femi Gbajabiamila, has hinted that the leadership of the ninth assembly will be decided by the leaders of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). According to ThisDay, Gbajabiamila gave the hint immediately after a meeting of the APC caucus held at Room 1, House of Representatives wing of the National Assembly on Tuesday, March 12. He said the issue of the next leadership is not yet in the front burner among members of his party, but expressed assurances that APC members will abide by any position taken by the leadership. His words: We are not focused on that right now. It is very important but we have left that. The party will take a decision on which way it will go. This is something that obtains in the international best practices. It is something that obtains everywhere in the world; the party will decide and we believe that all party faithful in the House will concede. As we conceded to emergence of democracy, we will concede to party supremacy of the party. READ ALSO: Progress being made regarding Rivers governorship election - Wike Reacting to the 2019 presidential and National Assembly, governorship and state Houses of Assembly elections, he noted that they were keenly contested, hard-fought and opined that it was largely free and fair. Our caucus believes strongly that there is no victor and no vanquished, and victory only belongs to democracy and the Nigerian masses. We congratulate the president, all players and stakeholders. We congratulate our party, the APC. We congratulate the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and other parties for their remarkable showing and competitiveness. Our democracy is better for it. We congratulate INEC. Despite the hiccups, the electoral umpire gave us fairly credible elections, he said. He congratulated Nigerians for keeping faith with the countrys democracy and electoral process, which he said can only get better as the nation progresses. It is our understanding that some elections in some areas were declared inconclusive. We hope INEC will do the needful and speedily re-conduct elections in those areas so that we can look forward. There have been many disappointments on all sides as many of our colleagues have lost out across the divides during this electoral process. However, we must bow to the emergence of our democracy as the supremacy of the will of the people. We have lost good legislators with whom we have formed strong bonds and enduring relationships. But we urge them to accept the loss as good democrats, and as men and women with abiding faith in Gods will, he stated. Meanwhile, the National Assembly on Tuesday, March 12 suspended plenary in honour of a member of the House of Representatives, Honourable Temitope Olatoye, who lost his life during last Saturdays gubernatorial and house of assembly polls in Oyo state. READ ALSO: U.S observers decry election management in Nigeria, calls for reforms Olatoye popularly known as Honourable Sugar was shot dead by unknown gunmen in Ibadan, the Oyo state capital, on election day, March 9. He was contesting for the Oyo central senatorial seat under the Action Democratic Party before he met his untimely death. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng: Same great journalism, upgraded for better service! 2019 elections: Do you still trust INEC to conduct fair elections? - Nigerians speak| Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | News | General | Boko Harams coordinated attack on Borno military base foiled by gallant troops The Nigerian Army on Tuesday said its troops successfully foiled a coordinated attack by Boko Haram insurgents at a military location in Borno. Col. Ado Isa, Deputy Director, Army Public Relations, Operation Lafiya Dole, stated this in a statement issued in Maiduguri. READ ALSO:: INEC to conduct supplementary election in Kano, 5 other states on March 23 Isa disclosed that troops of 152 Battalion neutralized a number of the insurgents when they attempted to infiltrate its location on Monday at Bula-Yobe-Banki axis in Borno. He said that the troops killed unspecified number of the insurgents while many of them escaped with gunshot wounds, adding that various caliber of ammunition and equipment were recovered in the encounter. Isa said the dogged troops of 152 Battalion successfully crushed some Boko Haram terrorists when they attempted to infiltrate their location on March 11, 2019, at about 19.00 hours at Bula Yobe-Banki axis in Borno. The terrorists, in their futile attempt came in with several gun trucks mounted with Anti-Aircraft (AA) guns and motorcycles. The troops engaged the terrorists with superior fire power and inflicted heavy casualty on them and their equipment. The fierce gun battle set confusion and disorganization in the terrorists camp, with them withdrawing in disarray while the troops gave them a hot pursuit. In the process, unconfirmed number of terrorists was neutralized while several others fled with gunshot wounds. Isa added that a gun truck mounted with AA gun and several motorcycles belonging to the insurgents were destroyed, while one gun truck mounted with AA gun and Mortar Carrier were recovered from the terrorists. According to him, the Theatre Commander, Operation Lafiya Dole, Maj.-Gen. Benson Akinroluyo, through the Acting General Officer Commanding (GOC), 7 Division, and Commander Sector 1, Operation Lafiya Dole, Brig.-Gen. Bulama Biu, commended the troops over their gallantry. Akinroluyo called on the troops to maintain the aggressive posture and sustain the offensive. Meanwhile, suspected bandits have reportedly killed 40 people in renewed attacks on two communities of Zamfara state. The Nation reports that the attacks came less than 24 hours after Governor Abdulaziz Yari swore to deal with bandits troubling the north central state. PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 news app NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng Same great journalism, upgraded for better service! Can Nigerian Soldiers really not deal with Boko Haram fighters?| - on Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | News | General | Progress being made regarding Rivers governorship election - Wike Governor Nyesom Wike has claimed that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) scored 586,745, votes in the Rivers state governorship election. In a post on his Facebook page, the Rivers governor said this was revealed by a fact-finding committee send by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). READ ALSO: INEC to conduct supplementary election in Kano, 5 other states on March 23 The governor claimed the result of the election showed that the PDP has 586,745, votes while the AAC had .51,521 votes . He wrote: The Fact Finding committee sent by the Headquarters of INEC to investigate the attempt by the Nigerian Army to manipulate the Rivers State Governorship Collation has swung into action. Sources at the meeting informed that the committee requested duplicate polling unit results from security agencies and party agents who received same after voting. Expectedly, sources at the meeting say that direct Collation of all polling units results have started in earnest. Party agents and different security agencies entitled to duplicate copies have supplied same for direct Collation. It was gathered that with 19 Local Government Areas polling units results collated and computed for the Governorship Election in Rivers State, PDP has 586,745, Votes while AAC ...51,521 has Votes After the closed door preliminary investigation and computations, the public would be briefed and open declaration made. As at press time, the computations for three other Local Government Areas where elections held were ongoing by the Fact Finding Committee. Elections did not hold in the 23rd LGA, Abua/Odual, where soldiers frustrated the distribution of election materials. The recourse to the Polling Units results was in line with the fact that it was where voting held and Accreditation via card readers took place. Results at this level are pure and verifiable. Meanwhile, the Rivers state council of traditional rulers has urged the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to declare the result of the guber poll in the state. The monarchs specifically asked INEC to declare all verifiable results on units and ward bases, adding that only compromised results should be discountenanced by the electoral commission. The royal fathers made their stance known, on Monday, March 11 at a press briefing addressed by their chairman, the Amayanabo of Opobo, King Douglas Dandeson Jaja. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng: Same great journalism, upgraded for better service! Election not a do-or-die affair - Sanwo-Olu - on Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | News | General | Killings: Zamfara government donates N60m, other items to victims families - Families of those killed by gunmen in Kawaye village in Anka local government area of the state have received donation from the state government - The donation was presented by the speaker of the state House of Assembly, Alhaji Sanusi Rikiji, at Anka Emirs palace - Rikiji said the state government released the donation of over N60 million, 318 bags of assorted grains and 305 sets of clothing materials The Zamfara government on Tuesday, March 12, donated cash to families of those killed by gunmen in Kawaye village in Anka local government area of the state . The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the gunmen had attacked the village, killing 13 persons and burnt down several houses and food items worth millions of naira. The donation was presented by the speaker of the state House of Assembly, Alhaji Sanusi Rikiji, at Anka Emirs palace, the headquarters of the local government. READ ALSO: INEC to conduct supplementary election in Kano, 5 other states on March 23 Rikiji said the state government released the donation of over N60 million, 318 bags of assorted grains and 305 sets of clothing materials. The beneficiaries comprised families of the deceased, kidnapped victims and those who lost their properties. Rikiji, said N500,000 would be given to each of the deceased family while N250,000 to those who lost their properties, shops, houses, motorcycles and silos. He said the state government also donated N500,000 to each of the 10 persons who lost their vehicles to the bandits during the attack and N200,000 to each of the 60 kidnapped victims from the area. He said N2 million also would be given to a victim who lost his new car to the fire set up by the bandits during the attack. Rikiji said the assistance was aimed at supporting the victims and reducing their worries caused by the incident. He urged people of the state to continue with prayers and support government and security agencies in fighting insecurity in the state. The Emir of Anka and chairman of the state Council of Chiefs, Alhaji Attahiru Ahmad, thanked the government for the assistance. Ahmad promised judicious distribution of the items to the affected victims. He decried the incessant killings caused by the bandit attacks in the state, which he described as unfortunate and worrisome. The emir attributed the increase of insecurity in the country to handling of arms by individuals. He said the major cause of insecurity in the country was the proliferation of illegal arms from neighbouring countries through borders. He urged the federal government to maximise its efforts in ensuring border control management in the country. The chairman of Anka local government, Alhaji Mustafa Muhammad, lauded measures introduced by the government in addressing security challenges in the state. He urged security agencies to increase their efforts to provide solutions to the problem. Meanwhile, Legit.ng had reported that troops of Operation Sharan Daji have killed 55 bandits and rescued 760 persons abducted from villages in Zamfara state. PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android and read best news on Nigerias #1 news app He said, the troops also recovered weapons, ammunition and rustled cows as they blocked all entry points to the bushes to deny the bandits free movement while building confidence of the locals. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng We keep evolving to serve our readers better Nigerian Air Force Operations Against Boko Haram - on Legit TV. [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | News | General | APC reveals why the party was defeated in Enugu state - Juliet Ibekaku-Nwagwu has attributed loss of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Enugu state to internal wrangling - Ibekaku-Nwagwu, who is a former presidential aide on Justice Reform alleged that some members of the party were involved in anti-party activities - According to her, some party members collected money from the ruling party in the state and canvassed for votes for the PDP A former presidential aide on Justice Reform, Juliet Ibekaku-Nwagwu attributes the All Progressives Congress (APC) greatest challenge in the 2019 polls in Enugu state to internal wrangling. Ibekaku-Nwagwu made this known in a statement made available to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Enugu on Monday, March 11. READ ALSO: INEC to conduct supplementary election in Kano, 5 other states on March 23 She alleged that some members of the party were involved in anti-party activities and collected money from the ruling party in the state and canvassed for votes for the PDP. I cannot imagine that level of wickedness and bitterness from enemies that did not only benefit from our party and Mr. President but also from me in most unique manner, she said. According to her, such enemies within the party succeeded in destroying our party in the state. These enemies kept deceiving those who listened to them that they love Mr. President. You cannot love a man and destroy his house. I have heard stories how they destroy people just to climb the ladder. I live them to God. The candidate however, thanked the people of Enugu West senatorial zone and the APC as a whole in Enugu State for their support during the campaign even though they were not allowed to exercise their franchise. I will seek redress in court if I am able to gather necessary evidence that will enable me prosecute the case in court. However, I am consoled with the victory of Mr. President which guarantees continuity in the developmental stride of the present administration. President Muhammadu Buhari has demonstrated that Nigeria can work if leaders are genuinely committed to the welfare of the masses. PAY ATTENTION: Download our mobile app to enjoy the latest news update Infrastructural development is now at its peak in the country as all abandoned projects are now being completed. I must say a big thank you to Nigerians for reelecting him. Recall that Legit.ng had reported that the official collation of the results of governorship elections by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) continued on Monday, March, 11. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng: Same great journalism, upgraded for better service! Election not a do or die affair - Sanwoolu | Legit TV. [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Pak-Turkmenistan signed final version of TAPI gas pipeline Pakistan and Turkmenistan on Tuesday signed the final version of the 'Host Government Agreement' for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline network in Islamabad, Radio Pakistan reported. The agreement was signed by Additional Secretary In-charge of the Petroleum Division Mian Asad Hayauddin and Muhammetmyrat Amanov, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of TAPI Pipeline Company Ltd, Turkmenistan. Petroleum Minister Ghulam Sarwar Khan reiterated Pakistan's commitment for the "early and successful implementation" of the TAPI project. The minister hoped that the groundbreaking of the project would be held in Pakistan this year, according to Radio Pakistan. Foreign Minister of Turkmenistan Rashid Meredov, who oversaw the signing of the agreement, informed the petroleum minister about his government's efforts to ensure the timelines of the project. "He welcomed Pakistan's continued commitment and active interest in the TAPI gas project," the report said. The TAPI pipeline project envisions the supply of Turkmenistans gas to India and Pakistan via Afghanistan. Originating at the giant Galkynysh gas field in Turkmenistan, the $9.6 billion TAPI pipeline involves the four countries own energy companies, and would carry 33 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas a year. Turkmenistan is building TAPI to diversify its gas exports, which have mostly gone to China. But the project has suffered lengthy delays due to difficulties obtaining financing and the security risks of building a pipeline through war-torn Afghanistan. In December last year, the TAPI CEO had said that the construction of the pipeline would begin in the first quarter of 2019 and be completed in two-and-a-half years. Moreover, he had said, Afghanistan and Pakistan have given sovereign guarantees to ensure the pipelines security. Turkmenistan FM's visit Turkmenistan Foreign Minister Meredov was on a visit to Islamabad on March 11-12 during which he led his country's delegation at the second round of the Pakistan-Turkmenistan Bilateral Political Consultations (BPC), while Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi led the Pakistani side, according to a press release issued by the Foreign Office. During the meeting, the two sides discussed bilateral relations and stressed the need to further "enhance bilateral economic [cooperation] through joint ventures in mutually identified areas particularly agriculture, textile, livestock and IT sectors." They emphasised the importance of the TAPI project and agreed to ensure it's early implementation. As per the press release, the two foreign ministers highlighted the need to take "specific measures" to ensure greater connectivity through road, rail and air linkages in order to promote trade, tourism and people-to-people contact between the two countries. During the visit, memoranda of understanding (MoUs) were signed to increase cooperation between the foreign ministries of the two nations as well as their diplomatic institutions. An MoU was also signed for the establishment of the Pak-Turkmen Joint Business Council. According to the FO, Qureshi also briefed his Turkmen counterpart on the current security situation in South Asia and regretted the "aggressive and irresponsible attitude of India". Home | News | General | Supplementary election: We have re-strategized and confident of victory - Ganduje - Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje said he will win the Kano governorship rerun - The governor said his party has restrategised and ready for the election - Ganduje said the success recorded in his administration will help him Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje has expressed confidence that he will win the supplementary election in the state and retain his position as governor. The state governorship election which took place on Saturday, March 9 was declared inconclusive by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and according to Daily Trust, Ganduje expressed confidence in winning the election. READ ALSO: Kano guber rerun - PDP governorship candidate confident of victory The chairman, publicity committee of the APC for 2019 Election, Malam Muhammad Garba in a statement on Tuesday, March 12 said the party and its candidate are sure of victory in Kano. He said: APC as a party has also re-strategized and very confident of victory because the local government areas where the rerun will take place remain the APC stronghold and the electorate in these areas have made up their mind to vote massively for the governor they trust. The modest achievements recorded so far by the Ganduje Administration have touched the lives of the people in all sectors of development and also remain determined to continue if returned. PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app Meanwhile, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has announced that supplementary governorship election will take place in six states on Saturday, March 23. Governorship elections were declared inconclusive in Sokoto, Benue, Kano, Bauchi, Adamawa and Plateau states in the polls that took place on Saturday, March 9. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng: Same great journalism, upgraded for better service! Election not a do or die affair - Sanwoolu | Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General The newly posted Commandant of the Nigeria Police Academy Wudil, Kano state, Assistant Inspector General (AIG), Zanna Mohammed Ibrahim has warned cadets of the Academy to desist from acts capable of leading them into cultism and other vices. Addressing the cadets at the institution on assumption to duty, Zanna said his administration would not condone any act that would undermine humanity or discipline of the Police force. Zanna also urged the cadets to shun all unruly act and behaviours such sodomy, adultery, theft and or un-permitted trip among others. The AIG, who lamented that indiscipline among cadets, assured that discipline must be rooted in the institution. I will not tolerate anything that constitutes indiscipline. You must have self-esteem as police officers, most of our officers are timid I encourage you to have confidence, that is what is lacking in Nigeria Police today. On welfare, he assured the cadets of the Inspector General of police readiness to improve their welfare, stating that IGP has promised to transform the institution. Zanna promised to work assiduously to position the Academy to meet the standard of the 21st-century police institution. Nigeria governorship elections 2019 - #NigeriaDecides - #Nigeriadecides2019 Home | News | General | Suspension of Rivers election targeted at frustrating Ijaw sons who are contesting - IYC - The Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) wants the results of the Rivers governorship election declared immediately - The youth group also calls for the immediate withdrawal of security men from the state - The organisation claims the suspension of results in the election was targeted at candidates from the Ijaw community The Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) worldwide has demanded the immediate recommencement of collation of results in Rivers alleging that the suspension of the exercise was targeted at its people in the state. The youth organisation, which said the move is to stop Ijaw candidates from winning, also called for the immediate demilitarization of the state in the interest of peace. The Nation reports that in a statement signed by its president, Eric Omare, in Abuja, the IYC claimed that all Ijaw sons in the governorship race were being frustrated in the court. READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda It cited the examples of Tonye Cole and Dumo Lulu Briggs, stressing that the same treatment is being extended to Awara Biokpomabo who is the candidate of the AAC. The Ijaw Youth Council worldwide has closely watched the activities surrounding the 2019 Rivers state gubernatorial and House of Assembly elections. The reports coming from our members scattered around the state only proves to us that the Ijaw nation is under attack. Scores of Ijaw sons and daughters have been harassed and intimidated by the activities and presence of the Nigerian Army in Rivers state, more particularly the attack on His Royal Majesty, Tom Ateke, and the former president of the IYC, Alhaji Asari Dokubo. We condemn these attacks in the strongest terms. Thugs are being armed to cause mayhem in core Ijaw communities while other locations in the state enjoy the comfort of a peaceful environment. These and many more atrocities are plaguing the Ijaws in Rivers state. We will not tolerate it! We have also monitored the collation of results across all the 23 LGAs in Rivers state. From our records, an Ijaw son was leading in the gubernatorial race before INEC suspended the exercise. Though we cannot predict the outcome of the elections, we want to make known our suspicion of sabotage. It is funny that leading to this date; every gubernatorial candidate from Ijaw extraction that gains momentum and stands a chance of victory at the polls was mysteriously knocked out of the race. The issues of Tonye Cole from the APC and Dumo Lulu Briggs from the Accord Party are still moving front and back in court while election day has come and gone. Now Engr Awara Biokpomabo of the AAC; an Ijaw son, was leading and suddenly INEC suspends the exercise for security concerns. PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app Though we do not support or celebrate violence, previous elections that have produced winners in Rivers state were not in any way better including the 2015 elections. We demand equity for all. We call on INEC to immediately commence with the state collation exercise or we will be left with no other option than to act like a nation under attack. We also demand immediate stop to the attacks on Ijaw people and communities in Rivers state, the statement said. Legit.ng earlier reported that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) condemned what it described as confiscation of the Rivers governorship election outcome and demanded immediate release of the poll result to avert serious crisis. The PDP national publicity secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, in a statement issued on Sunday, March 10, in Abuja, said that the party completely revile the subversive act by soldiers, who were alleged to have seized and diverted the results to an army barrack in Port Harcourt. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng. We have upgraded to serve you better. 2019 elections: Do you still trust INEC to conduct fair elections? - Nigerians speak| Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | News | General | NLC urges Governor Shettima to pay backlog of arrears before handover - The NLC chairman in Borno state, Titus Abana, says the last time retirees were paid gratuity and pension in the state was in 2013 - Abana notes that the state government has not paid the backlog of gratuity and pension being owed retirees despite the release of tranche of the Paris Club Refund - The labour leader urges the incoming government to expedite action on the proposed 30% minimum wage across the three tiers of government The Nigeria Labour Congress(NLC) has appealed to Governor Kashim Shettima to clear the N20 billion being owed pensioners in gratuity and pension before he leaves office. The NLC chairman in the state, Titus Abana, made the call in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), in Maiduguri. Abana said that the last time gratuity of retirees were paid in the state, was in 2013, noting that all efforts to get the government to pay was very frustrating. READ ALSO: CUPP claims knowledge of 5 appeal court justices penciled to hear Atikus petition In spite of the release of tranche of the Paris Club Refund, the state government has not paid the backlog of gratuity and pension being owed retirees. We met with the governor to push or these payments and he promised to do so before he leaves. He said he will not want his predecessor to inherit any burden from his government and promised he will pay all arrears of pension, gratuities accumulated by his government and the past government. We are reminding him to also pay the backlog of promotion arrears and leave grant of workers which had been pending for more than three years due to the biometric verification. No worker has been paid any benefit in the last three years since the verification started,he said. Abana decried that the exercise had exposed many workers to untold frustration and hardship. Many retirees have died untimely death due to frustration and hardship. he said. He also urged the governor to allocate the governments 1,000 estate, Lagacy housing estate to the civil servant to address their accommodation problems. The NLC Chairman explained that workers expectations on the new administration was very high, noting that it must carry the civil servants along in all its plans and policies if it wants to succeed. READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda He urged the incoming government to expedite action on the proposed 30 per cemt minimum wage across the three tiers of government. The N18,000 minimum wage witnessed poor implementation in Shani, Chibok, Askira Uba, Hawul and Bayo Local Government Areas. We also urge him to suspend the Biometric verification exercise which was not yielding any result but an avenue of enriching few,he said. Abana also want the new government to lift what he called the decade long lacuna on employment and provide opportunities for the teeming youths in the state civil service. Many workers are retiring everyday but no employment opportunities are provided in the state. Employment is being done secretly to a few privileged ones, he said. READ ALSO: NNPC commences recruitment exercise days after presidential election Abana commended the government for building mega schools to revolusionise the education sector but urged them to also pioritised on the welfare of teachers. The teachers in Borno are some of the worst paid. The state government should not only focused on building modern schools with air conditions, but they should also build teachers with capacity to teach in the school. Meanwhile, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has announced a recruitment exercise for prospective staff of the revenue-generating organisation just days after the end of the general elections in the country. The NNPC placed the announcement on its social media walls asking applicants to visit its website to register. Minimum Wage: Is N30,000 Too Much for FG to Pay Workers? - Nigeria Street Gist | Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | News | General | Nigeria is ripe for female president - Former first lady - Justice Fati Lami Abubakar is of the opinion that Nigeria is ripe for a female president - The former first lady said dependable women with impeccable characters can pilot the affairs of Nigeria to an enviable level - She noted that women have played very important in the administration of the country at all levels of governance Former First Lady, Justice Fati Lami Abubakar, has declared that Nigeria is ripe for a woman president. Abubakar, who is the wife of former Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, said women have played very important in the administration of the country at all levels of governance and are now ready for the highest office in Nigeria. She made the comment during an interview with Vanguard on Tuesday, March 12 in Minna, the Niger state capital. READ ALSO: Meet Flight Lieutenant Kifayah Muhammad Sani who is the youngest NAF pilot at 22 She said: It is obvious and glaring that Nigeria has upright, dependable women with impeccable characters that can pilot the affairs of this country to an enviable level. Nigerian women are ready to take a lead in the country and so are ready for anything for the progress of the country. I can boldly tell you that the women in this country are ready for anything. On whether the country has capable women to lead this country, Justice Fati said: You should not even talk of capable women because we have them in abundance. They are everywhere and ready to lead very well. What is actually remaining for them is the time and opportunity, which is very important to take the lead and I am optimistic that the time will come soon. Meanwhile, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and National Democratic Institute (NDI) have berated the Nigerian government for not giving vent to the 35 per cent affirmative principle captured in the 2006 National Gender Policy. The United States of America advocacy groups, added that the National Assembly had continually bungled the opportunity to adopt legislation that supports greater participation of women in politics. READ ALSO: Atiku to still rule Nigeria - Visually-impaired prophet gives prophecy They further called on the National Assembly to prioritise legislation that would promote womens leadership and political participation, notably by the adoption of the Gender and Equal Opportunities Bill. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng. Same great journalism, upgraded for better service! I want to be the first woman with disability at the National Assembly | Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | News | General | Just in: Ganduje allegedly arrives Abuja, seeks removal of Kano CP The Kano state governor, Abdullahi Ganduje, has allegedly arrived Abuja, Nigeria's Federal Capital City to press for the removal of the Kano state commissioner of poloce, Mohammed Wakili. Daily Nigerian reports that Ganduje's visit to Abuja followed the tussle between the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for the seat of the governor in the state's election. According to the report, sources close to the govenror's entourage to Abuja, includes the speaker of Kano House of Assembly, Kabiru Rurum; the state chairman of APC, Abdullahi Abbas and the governors top political strategist, Nasiru Aliko-Koki. The source who has pleaded anonymity said the visit was targeted at lobbying the party's national chairman, the national leader of APC Bola Tinubu and other some influential presidency officials. READ ALSO: Elections 2019: List of elected senators so far; APC-62, PDP-37, YPP-1 The Kano state police under the leadership of Wakili have been said to have maintained some level of neutrality before, during and after the election, which saw the opposition party's candidate Abba Yusuf leading with 1,020,465 votes, against Governor Ganduje who scored 987,459 votes. Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had announced that supplementary governorship election will take place in six states on Saturday, March 23. Governorship elections were declared inconclusive in Sokoto, Benue, Kano, Bauchi, Adamawa and Plateau states in the polls that took place on Saturday, March 9. PAY ATTENTION: Download our mobile app to enjoy the latest news update In a statement by the electoral body on Tuesday, March 12, it was also revealed that supplementary elections will also hold for inconclusive state assembly elections. Also, the Emir of Kano, Malam Muhammad Sanusi II, has called on the people of the state and Nigerians at large to be calm and allow INEC to properly complete its assignment, concerning the inconclusive gubernatorial polls in some states. While speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, March 12, at his palace, Emir Sanusi said only the electoral commission has the power to conduct and announce the results of election and should be allowed to carry out its task. Sanusi said INEC had already announced that the election held in Kano on Saturday, March 9, was inconclusive because there are still some polling units where the exercise would be re-conducted and it was after that the winner would be declared. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng: Same great journalism, upgraded for better service! 2019 Election: Nigerians react to Saraki's loss as INEC releases more results | Legit TV [embedded content] CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Home | World | Africa | Mnangagwa heads to Beitbridge PRESIDENT Mnangagwa is today expected to commission the multi-million-dollar TelOne fibre optic link in Beitbridge. The link connects Beitbridge with Bulawayo, Harare, Masvingo and the rest of the country. It was constructed by TelOne in partnership with the China Exim Bank as part of the expansion of the national broadband networks and enhancing efficient communication countrywide. The investment would make Zimbabwe an information communication technology (ICT) hub in Southern Africa. Matabeleland South Provincial Administrator Mrs Sithandiwe Ncube yesterday said the stage had been set for the President's visit. "We are ready to roll. The stage has been set and we have mobilised enough resources to make this event a great success. "All stakeholders are putting final touches to the venue in line with their respective responsibilities," she said. By end of day yesterday workers from various Government departments were still at the venue putting final touches ahead of today's event. The coming in of the fibre optic link is expected to reduce operating costs for the network provider (TelOne) by 40 percent. The benefits are expected to cascade to consumers. At the moment TelOne is receiving traffic directly from Mozambique which then links with Mutare, Harare and Bulawayo. The new initiative will connect traffic directly from South Africa through Beitbridge, Bulawayo, Masvingo and Harare and brings the much needed services in Zimbabwe at affordable prices and high speed. The coming in of the new communication link is also expected to enhance the expansion of TelOne's network in Beitbridge town and enhance Government's thrust to the roll out of e-services for its departments and ministries. It will also ensure connectivity between the country's border towns as well as enhance e-Government, which is currently being implemented at various levels. Meanwhile, Government is also working on introducing 5G commercial network to enhance advanced speed in mobile broadband. The 5G broadband is the generation of broadband cellular network technology succeeding the current 4G, and has additional packages at advanced speed. At present the country uses 3G (voice, text and data) and 4G (voice, text, advanced data and internet) networks. The 5G generation will likely be rolled out in 2020. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Africa Home | World | Africa | Senior doctors strike at Parirenyatwa over sundries, drugs shortages Specialist consulting doctors at Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals embarked on a strike on Tuesday to demand improvements in the supply of consumables and equipment. The consultants said they would only be attending to "dire emergencies" while hammering the government for negotiating in bad faith with doctors. The strike by senior doctors was described as historic, because previously all strikes have been initiated by junior doctors. "As the consultants of Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals, we have decided to rationalise use of the limited and very finite resources that are currently available. We are now forced with immediate effect to further scale down the services which we are offering, to deal with dire emergencies only until the situation normalises," the doctors said in a strike notice to hospital authorities. The doctors warned that "the currently available resources might not be able to sustain the emergency service provision beyond the end of the month." The consultants said they had persuaded junior doctors to call off their strike in November last year in the hope that the government would move quickly to address persistent shortages of basic essential drugs, equipment and sundries. "However, the situation with regards to medical consumables and equipment is now even worse than it was in December 2018. This has continued to cause severe compromise in the safety and working conditions of staff and a reduced capacity to deliver services to patients," the consultants said. They added: "We feel that these compounding factors have compromised patient care, putting patients' health and lives at risk at the very institution which is supposed to restore health and life." The government managed to persuade doctors to call off their strike last year after promises were made that enough drugs and sundries were being imported. But the doctors say the promises were never fulfilled. Since the beginning of the year, the doctors said they had been "unable to resume normal service, especially in the areas of anaesthesia, surgery and critical care due to the above-mentioned constraints." "We have tried to make adjustments to no avail," said the doctors. "Statistics show that for January and February this year, we have operated less than 20 percent of the elective cases that we were doing in the same period in 2018. For emergencies, the time taken before the patient goes to theatre is now unnecessarily too long as their relatives have to privately source for the necessary supplies. "Furthermore, patients with simple conditions like appendicitis and diabetic foot ulcers are going for days without the required antibiotics leading to unnecessary complications. This is just one simple example of the dire conditions patients are currently facing." The strike could spread to other hospitals, and Zimbabwe's health system could be plunged into another crisis if junior doctors join the industrial action. "As consultants, our hearts bleed because of what is prevailing and we feel that if we continue pretending we can offer full services we would be complicit in the deaths of our patients," the senior doctors said, while revealing that they were seeking an urgent meeting with the Health Minister Obadiah Moyo to find a solution. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Africa Home | World | Africa | Joy for Mandiwanzira HIGH Court Judge, Justice Esther Muremba has ordered a stop to former Information Communication Technology (ICT) minister Supa Mandiwanzira's trial at the magistrates' court until his application for stay of proceedings is determined. Mandiwanzira is facing criminal abuse of office charges after he allegedly hired a South African based company, Megawatt, to do consultancy work for State owned telecommunications entity NetOne without going to tender. The Nyanga South law-maker has since approached the Constitutional Court disputing the constitutionality of his charges. Mandiwanzira argues that he is being prosecuted for doing his job. "The section under which I'm being charged is broad and ambiguous," he said while seeking referral of his case to Constitutional Court. Prosecutors at the High Court did not oppose his application before the Judge handed down her ruling. Earlier, Harare magistrate, Elijah Makomo was forced to withhold his ruling on the application which the former Cabinet Minister sought referral of his case to Constitutional Court following Mandiwanzira's decision to file an urgent chamber application seeking permanent stay of proceedings at the High Court. His trial was supposed to commence weeks ago but Mandiwanzira made several applications resulting in postponements. After Makomo trashed his application against trial Mandiwanzira sought the Constitutional Court's intervention and personally took it to the stand where he poured out his heart in support of his request arguing he was being persecuted for "doing the right thing." The ex-minister said he also felt "horrible and gutted" that he may be sent to jail for up to 15 years for merely doing what was right. Mandiwanzira said in engaging Megawatt he did not only use his personal discretion but consulted his principals. He said there are records to this effect. Besides favouring Megawatt, Mandiwanzira is also accused of appointing his personal assistant as a Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (Portraz) board member unlawfully. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Africa Peace talks between US-Taliban concluded in Qatar The longest peace talks between the US and the Taliban to end America's 17-year war in Afghanistan concluded Tuesday night in Qatar, with both sides saying progress had been made. The nearly two weeks of talks produced two draft agreements between the militants and the U.S. government on a withdrawal timeline and effective counterterrorism measures, American envoy Zalmay Khalilzad wrote on Twitter. The diplomat said he'd go to Washington and meet with other concerned parties, likely including the Afghan government, which did not take part in the 13 days of face-to-face talks in Doha, the Qatari capital. In this handout file photo taken on February 26, 2019 released by the official Qatar's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Qatari officials (C) take part in meeting between US special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad (2nd-L), the US delegation, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai (6th-R) and the Taliban delegation, in Doha. AFP The conditions for #peace have improved, Zalmay wrote. It's clear all sides want to end the war. Despite ups and downs, we kept things on track and made real strides. The Taliban issued their own statement, similarly saying progress was achieved on both of those issues. It stressed no cease-fire deal had been reached, nor any agreement for it to speak to the Afghan government. For now, both sides will deliberate over the achieved progress, share it with their respective leaderships and prepare for the upcoming meeting, the date of which shall be set by both negotiation teams, the statement read. It wasn't immediately clear when the next round of talks would begin. A Taliban official at the talks, who earlier spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity as he was unauthorised to reveal details of the negotiations publicly, said the main sticking point remained when US forces would withdraw. The Taliban want a withdrawal within three to five months, while the US is saying it will take 18 months to two years, he said. Another sticking point would be a demand from America that the Taliban guarantee Afghanistan would never again host militants that would launch an attack against it. The Taliban have said it can agree to a general promise, but remains unwilling to identify specific groups in its pledge. Osama bin Laden's successor in Al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahri, is believed to be hiding in Afghanistan. Scores of other militants from Arab countries, including Yemen and Saudi Arabia, are also believed to be living in Afghanistan. The Taliban, who refuse to talk with the government in Kabul and describe it as a US puppet, have long demanded direct talks with the US but until Khalilzad's appointment last September, Washington had shied away from opening face-to-face negotiations. The Taliban, who had harboured Al Qaeda and its leader, bin Laden, ruled Afghanistan before US forces invaded in October 2001, following the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban have made a major comeback in recent years, and today carry out near-daily attacks on Afghan security forces. That has made a peace process even more pressing and President Donald Trump has expressed frustration at the protracted conflict. Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said Pakistan has helped push the peace talks, which in turn has helped Islamabad's long-troubled relationship with Washington. Earlier on Tuesday, Qureshi similarly spoke about the progress being made at the talks. Pakistan has encouraged all factions within Afghanistan to sit together and have a meaningful intra-Afghan dialogue, he said alongside German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. The talks have taken place at one of the most luxurious resorts in Qatar, a tiny, energy-rich country that sticks out like a thumb into the Persian Gulf. A glamorous female pianist playing everything from Chopin to Mariah Carey provided a soundtrack to the journalists loitering around the hotel, straining to get any information about the closed-door talks. The surrealism extended just outside of the doors leading to the talks, where bikini-clad sunbathers by the pool drank alcohol. Mullah Baradar, the co-founder of Taliban, walked in and out of meetings accompanied by his son and Qatari security. lol Reply Thread Link ^^ this Reply Parent Thread Link Cackling Reply Parent Thread Link LMAO Reply Parent Thread Link Lmao Reply Parent Thread Link lol irl Reply Parent Thread Link The rest of the theme is playing in my head now. Thanks. Reply Parent Thread Link omg Reply Parent Thread Link LMAO Reply Parent Thread Link lol Reply Parent Thread Link LOLLLLLLLLL Reply Parent Thread Link lol a white face killed me Reply Parent Thread Link holy shit, I'm dying Reply Parent Thread Link They won the internet yesterday, right? Definitely a contender. Reply Parent Thread Link LMAO!!!! Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn Reply Parent Thread Link lmao Reply Parent Thread Link lmao Reply Parent Thread Link LMAO Reply Parent Thread Link lmao Reply Parent Thread Link BYE Reply Parent Thread Link FUCK LMAO!!!!!! Reply Parent Thread Link more like "When Calls the Cops". Reply Thread Link I feel so bad for her and felicity who were only trying to better their kids futures!! Reply Thread Link lmao fuck Reply Parent Thread Link LMFAOOOOOO Reply Parent Thread Link ok Reply Parent Thread Link the fact that she even has USC flags on flying on her property.. like this was 100% a status symbol and her daughter doesn't even appreciate it!!! Reply Thread Link IKR, lol. What a waste Reply Parent Thread Link lol that's so bold Reply Parent Thread Link Lmfaaao Reply Parent Thread Link usc flags are embarrassing enough on their own but damn this is just beyond Reply Parent Thread Link I bet she has a My kid and my money go to USC bumper sticker. Reply Parent Thread Link And a USC Mom sweatshirt. Reply Parent Thread Link Idk she pretty much made it know on her youtube videos that she point-blank didn't care for college. Part of me is like "well at least she was honest" :/ Reply Parent Thread Link Some parents want to live vicariously through their children Reply Parent Thread Link in olivia's case at least it's so obvious that this was 70% for the parents' egos (and 30% so she could do college-kid themed #brand content lol) Reply Parent Thread Expand Link OMG I would love to hear them play "Taps" while they take the flag down. Reply Parent Thread Link GIMME THE MUGSHOTS Reply Thread Link MTE I've been refreshing waiting for them! Reply Parent Thread Link I just fucking choked. Do you think John Stamos came in and grabbed the sheriff by the collar before paying her bail? Reply Parent Thread Expand Link lmao Reply Parent Thread Link I can't believe Aunt Becky let us down like this Reply Thread Link Edited at 2019-03-13 05:07 pm (UTC) Reply Thread Link Kim should have stopped right tf there on the plastic surgery. She looked perfect but still also looked like she had the face she was born with. Reply Parent Thread Link I agree Reply Parent Thread Link yeah, it was her best face Reply Parent Thread Link omg kasdjas Reply Parent Thread Link omg lmfao Reply Parent Thread Link lmaooo Reply Parent Thread Link bruh lmaaaaoooo Reply Parent Thread Link This post is already killing me omg Reply Parent Thread Link LOOOL Reply Parent Thread Link OMG lmao Reply Parent Thread Link DYING AFJFIEJFIOJIFEJEGJ:DLFGKS Reply Parent Thread Link lmao Reply Parent Thread Link Lmao Reply Parent Thread Link s c r e a m i n g Reply Parent Thread Link Ruh roh Reply Thread Link lol Reply Parent Thread Link best part of that transcript lol Reply Parent Thread Link this is the only scandal bringing me joy since so many people are being trash about johnny depp i wonder if olivia jade will do a day in the life of the trials for her youtube Reply Thread Link What exactly *is* going on with Johnny Depp? I've seen photos and stuff floating around Twitter of him all bruised up? Did we have a post about it? Reply Parent Thread Link Yes. A fan site claims that Johnny is the real victim, Heard a psychopath etc. Reply Parent Thread Link Johnny is suing Amber saying she slandered him I think. He says he was abused and produced that bruise photo as proof. Why he didnt have it during the divorce is anyones guess. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link He's just glad nobody is focused on that underaged "30 year old" he was kissing Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Indictment outfit haul! Reply Parent Thread Link Ive liked her mystery movies she does for hallmark, but that prairie show is the fucking worst. Hope she has a nice mugshot. Reply Thread Link lol i've never watched when calls the heart (my mom loves it though), but i really enjoyed her mystery series. i know a lot of people who worked on it too so hopefully they'll be able to find more work soon since i don't think hallmark will continue it. Reply Parent Thread Link Me too, hers are my favorite to watch Reply Parent Thread Link The prairie show is on Netflix and we watched the first couple episodes BECAUSE of Aunt Becky. I commented that it was like a Janette Oke book come to life and then I found out thats exacrly what it is. I am still baffled at the empire she built for herself despite being an awful writer, but it gives me hope. Anyway, I don't hate the show, even if it is literal trash. Reply Parent Thread Link The prairie show is so wild how all of a sudden in like season 2 they kinda forget that they're set in 1910 like lol what are you doing Reply Parent Thread Link Okay that explains some things I saw in the commercials. I swear I thought they'd travelled in time or something. Reply Parent Thread Link I wanted a Sam Elliot style sheriff to bring her in while she's still wearing the prairie wardrobe! Reply Parent Thread Link I watched When Calls The Heart for the first 2 seasons, then I heard a spoiler and now have no desire to keep on watching. So obviously I was only watching because of one character (not Lori's lol). Reply Parent Thread Link Garage Sale Mysteries! I love those cheesy ass movies. Reply Parent Thread Link In tonights special episode of Full House.... Reply Thread Link "That'll go great with my Abu eraser!" Reply Parent Thread Link poor dat Reply Thread Link This is way too hilarious. Scandal of the century tbh. Im cackling all the fucking way in life and ever after. Delightful. Reply Thread Link US Secretary of State emphasised for immediate action against terrorists WASHINGTON: The United States is urging Pakistan to see the urgency of taking action against terrorists as the UN Security Council takes up a resolution declaring Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar a global terrorist. US Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo emphasised the need for an immediate action against terrorists at a meeting with Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale in Washington on Monday, the State Department said. The UN Security Council (UNSC) is expected to take up a resolution on March 13 that seeks to declare the JeM chief a global terrorist. But China, which has vetoed similar moves in the past, reminded the UNSC on Monday that a responsible solution can come only through discussions. China urged the international community to also focus on the Kashmir dispute while demanding such issues. Chinas position on the designation of a terrorist by the 1267 Sanctions Committee is consistent and clear, said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang when asked about Chinas stand on the issue. China adopted a responsible attitude, followed the rules of the procedure of the committee and participated in the discussions in a responsible manner. Only through discussions can we come up with a responsible solution, he said. Diplomatic sources in Washington said that the United States, which jointly moved the resolution along with Britain and France, wants the UNSC to adopt the resolution this time. Besides asking China not to veto the move, Washington is also using its influence in Pakistan to soften its opposition, the sources added. As Secretary Pompeo met his Indian counterpart in Washington, US National Security Adviser John Bolton spoke telephonically with Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on Monday to discuss this and other issues with him. After the telephone call, Mr Bolton released a brief message on Twitter, which includes the points Secretary Pompeo discussed with the Indian foreign secretary. Spoke with Pakistani FM Qureshi to encourage meaningful steps against JeM and other terrorist groups operating from Pakistan, he tweeted Monday afternoon. The FM assured me that Pakistan would deal firmly with all terrorists and will continue steps to de-escalate tensions with India, he wrote. Pakistans Foreign Office also issued a statement on Monday which said that Mr Qureshi informed Mr Bolton that the Indian aggression of Feb 26 was a violation of Pakistans territorial integrity and sovereignty as well as the UN Charter. Pakistans response was purely in self-defence against external aggression, he said. A simmering conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir had escalated into a potentially dangerous confrontation when Indian planes violated Pakistani airspace on Feb 26. Next day Pakistan and India were involved in an aerial dogfight and Indian fighter pilot Abhinandan Varthaman was captured by Pakistan. Some days later Pakistan had him returned as a goodwill gesture and to defuse the crisis. FM Qureshi also underlined measures Pakistan had taken to defuse tensions, including the decision to release the Indian pilot. Pakistan wishes peace and stability in the region, he said, pointing out that last week, Islamabad sent its envoy back to New Delhi and was sending an official delegation to India this week to discuss the reopening of the Kartarpur corridor. The Kartarpur corridor is about 120km north of Lahore and will be used by Sikh pilgrims coming from India on a visa-free basis to visit their holy sites in Pakistan. Pakistan was also ready to continue weekly contacts at the Military Operations Directorate level, he added. The Military Operations Directorate is part of both Indian and Pakistan armies and headed by the Director General Military Operations (DGMO). Mr Bolton appreciated Pakistans measures, which helped defuse the crisis and urged continued restraint on both sides, the Foreign Office said. * A couple of the "extras" (construction worker & window washer) during the parade scene were just regular people caught dancing to the music being played. Director John Hughes loved it and had the camera operators catch it.* Edie McClurg (Grace the secretary) styled her own hair because she felt Grace thought she looked best in the 1960s, and the hairdresser on set couldn't do 60s hair. When John Hughes saw her hairdo he said "How many pencils do you think you can fit in that hair?" (answer: 3)* Bill Paxton would apologize to Carrie Henn (Newt) every time he had to swear in front of her. Henn said she didn't mind. She didn't know what most of it meant anyway.* Director James Cameron wanted the actors to customize their own costumes for added realism. Bill Paxton wrote his then-girlfriend/future wife's name Louise on his.* John Cusack gave his character (Lloyd) a scar and a back story. The backstory being that someone threw a rock at him when he was a kid.* The chemistry between Cusack and costar Ione Skye was real. Skye admitted that if they hadn't both been seeing other people, they probably would've went home together the day they filmed the stick shift scene.* The original screenplay was about a bunch of 5/6th grade kid vampires. One of the screen writers was interested in Peter Pan and the fact that he never grew old, could fly, and only visited the Darling children at night. In the screenplay, the brothers' names were Michael and John and the mother's name was Wendy. David's original name was Peter. Though they aged everyone up so it could be sexier*~, the title still alludes to the Peter Pan story. (There's also Nanook, inspired by Nana the dog.)* Corey Haim would later say that making this movie was one of the "greatest personal times" of his life.* Michael J. Fox says stranger still call him "McFly!" Once he was in a remote jungle in the South Asian country Bhutan when a group of Buddhist monks passed by and one of them said "Marty McFly!"* Eric Stoltz (originally cast as Marty McFly) decided to go Method. He insisted on being called Marty at all times even when not filming a scene. When Christopher Lloyd was told that Eric Stoltz was being replaced he replied, "Who's Eric? Oh, I really thought his name was Marty."* Jerry O'Connell, 11 at the time of filming, was impressed that he was being allowed to swear.* When Jerry O'Connell traveled to his wife Rebecca Romijn's hometown, he discovered from her old high school friends that Stand By Me was her favorite film: "About three months into dating, my wife is from Berkeley, and I went up there to meet her high school friends. We got a little drunk and her high school best friend said to me, 'You know, "Stand by Me" is Rebecca's favorite movie of all time. You know she had posters of it all over her room growing up'. She never told me that.""SOURCES: 1 The United States Environmental Protection Agency has been under pressure from the Trump administration to put together a proposal for how they plan to overhaul the current system of biofuel credits trading, which has been denounced by many industry insiders as shady and volatile. The EPA has been working on a solution since last year, and has finally put together a draft proposal, which is currently being reviewed by White House officials and could be formally made public as soon as this week. The problem with the current system for biofuel credits trading stems from the Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) used to track government credits originally intended to give oil refiners and importers more flexibility for meeting their annual biofuel quotas--companies could either blend enough biofuel to meet the quota, or they could blend less and make up the difference by buying credits. The problem is that these RINs became a financial commodity and the market soon saw heavy involvement from Wall Street. The financial sectors involvement in the buying and selling of biofuels credits helped to cause massive ups and downs in pricing following any inkling of policy change coming out of the Washington DC. Further complicating the matter, there have also been widely publicized accusations of corruption in the RINs market, which some independent refiners say is plagued by speculation and manipulation, traders who abandon previously negotiated sales, fraudulent bids intended to artificially inflate prices, and more. Related: Analysts: Permian Oil Output Set To Double By 2023 The EPA plan currently under review by the White House would cut Wall Street out of the biofuel credits market as well as make a large negative impact on revenue for big oil companies and truck stops. While the EPA itself has declined to comment on the details of the plan, as it is their policy to not comment on items under interagency review, four anonymous sources familiar with the content of the proposal described its nature to reporters for Bloomberg . (Click to enlarge) According to Bloombergs reporting, the draft currently under review makes an appeal to the public for comment on four different proposed major restriction on trading and sitting on RINs. Two of the EPAs options seek to promote steadier trading volumes, block companies from hoarding credits and discourage refiners from shorting the market, by forcing traders to shed holdings quarterly, Bloombergs Erik Wasson and Justin Sink report. Refiners and importers that are obligated to blend biofuel would have to retire 80 percent of their obligation every quarter. Companies that dont actually need to fulfill biofuel quotas -- but generate or trade RINs anyway -- would have to rid themselves of all of their credits quarterly. The EPA will allegedly take the publics opinions on these proposed options into consideration when drafting their final decision on which reforms and restrictions to instate on the much-maligned current trading market. Related: Are Semi-Solid State Batteries A Gamechanger? There are already several booming voices contributing to the public conversation around the biofuel credit reform, with fierce lobbying exploding under the shadow of the impending change. One of the most notable participants in the outcry is Carl Icahn, billionaire investor and prior special regulatory adviser to Trump. Icahn, who has loudly and publicly denounced the system as rigged has already saved nearly $200 million off of the dip in biofuel credit pricing in response to the upcoming reforms. CVR energy, of which Icahn is the majority owner, disclosed that they had been issued subpoenas in November 2017 concerning the federal investigation into the legality of Icahns efforts to influence biofuel policy while he was serving as a special regulatory adviser to Trump. The other side of the debate is lined with deep pockets as well, with profits at stake worth a total of $18 billion over the last few years. An overhaul of the credits trading system would mean a big hit to the earnings of truck stops owned by industry moguls such as billionaire Warren Buffetts Berkshire Hathaway Inc. While reform is imminent and all but a sure thing, we can be certain that an $18 billion market will not go gentle into the night. By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Earlier this month when pipeline operator Enbridge said its Line 3 pipeline will only return to operation in the second half of 2020, it was very bad news for Alberta. Producers in Alberta will have been hoping to start boosting production again once the government-instituted cuts expired at the end of this year. That would have happened if Line 3 had resumed operation as initially scheduled, at the end of 2019. The delay to 2020 could be very damaging for Canadas oil industry. Enbridge said in early March it had received from the state of Minnesota a timeline for collecting all necessary permits for the replacement of the pipeline. This timeline, however, was longer than the company had banked on, moving the restart date of Line 3 to some time after June 2020. The new, expanded Line 3 will have a capacity of 370,000 bpd. When Albertas Premier Rachel Notley announced production cuts in December, plans were to start these at 325,000 bpd in January, then for them to be reduced to 95,000 bpd until the end of the year. But that was the assuming that Line 3 and its 370,000 bpd were in operation by that date. Now, some are worrying the cuts will be extended because the much-needed additional pipeline capacity wont be available. And this is not the only bad news for the Alberta oil industry. Reuters reported this week, citing an investment industry insider, that traders are shunning long-term crude oil contracts for Canadian crude because of the uncertainty surrounding production in the short termuncertainty heightened considerably by Enbridges Line 3 announcement Everything we heard from the government was that they were 100 percent relying on Line 3 coming into service at the end of 2019, Tim Pickering from Auspice Capital Advisors told Reuters. That (delay) is definitely something that may have them responding as the market changes. This is a problem for the industry because the only way producers can lock in forward oil prices is through contracts for later delivery. With that option reduced, both producers and refiners in Canada and the United States have become more vulnerable to unfavorable price swings. Whats more, traders are suspicious of the Albertan government: according to industry sources that Reuters spoke to, Gulf Coast refiners are staying away from forward contracts for Canadian crude as they dont know if the government wont decide to interfere again in the industry. I wont take any forward positions in Canada right now. Everyone is wondering what the government is going to do ... one announcement can ruin your year, one of the sources said. Making the situation additionally complicated is the fact that Albertans will be voting for a new government in a couple of months and the incumbent NDP Premier is behind her rival from the United Conservative Party. In fact, a recent poll forecast a change in government in the province and a change of government always involves a higher-than-usual amount of uncertainty for the oil industry. The decision to institute production cuts is beginning to look bad in hindsight, even though Notleys government did not exactly have many options to prop up prices that had dived to a discount of over US$50 per barrel to WTI at one point in 2018. With the Line 3 delay, chances are that a lot more oil will leave Alberta by train and producers will likely just have to suck it up and outwait the delay. By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com Oil prices jumped to two-week highs on Tuesday morning, rising on the back of severe outages in Venezuela and the ongoing production cuts from OPEC+. A devastating electricity blackout swept over Venezuela late last week, crippling daily life for much of the country. PDVSAs oil exports have been severely disrupted, and while data is scarce, output may have plunged by half to about 500,000 bpd, according to Energy Aspects. Operations halted at main facilities, reducing output of main synthetic grades and blended Merey to almost zero, Energy Aspects wrote in a note. Theres a vicious circle, the International Energy Agencys head Fatih Birol told Bloomberg on the sidelines of the IHS CERAWeek Conference in Houston. Since the oil isnt exported, theres not revenue, since theres not revenue you cannot invest in infrastructure. The big question is how long the outage will last. The U.S. State Department announced the withdrawal of its remaining embassy personnel in Caracas. That could reduce the potential for conflict, since any incursion on American personnel could be used as a pretext for an escalation, possibly even military intervention. However, the withdrawal cuts both ways. Removing American diplomats could get them out of harms way, clearing the way for bolder action. Worryingly, U.S. Secretary of State justified the withdrawal by saying that keeping them in Venezuela had become a constraint on U.S. policy. The outages have global implications. Oil prices surged at the start of the week, with WTI jumping above $57 per barrel, and Brent above $67 per barrel. Related: Oil Prices Rise As Saudis Curb Exports Meanwhile, the OPEC+ cuts remain in place, and Saudi Arabia has suggested that it would maintain output well below its required levels. As part of the Vienna agreement in December, Saudi Arabia agreed to limit output to 10.3 million barrels per day (mb/d). However, as of March, Saudi officials said that they would only produce 9.8 mb/d. More recently, Saudi Arabia indicated it would maintain the 9.8 mb/d level through April, a sign that even as oil prices inch up, Riyadh would rather err on the side of doing too much rather than too little. Saudi oil minister Khalid al-Falih also indicated that the OPEC production cuts could remain in place beyond June. Combined, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia have provided a jolt to the market. Oil prices are rising for the second day in a rowThey are continuing to receive tailwind from yesterdays announcement by Saudi Arabia that it will significantly restrict oil supply in April, Commerzbank wrote in a note on Tuesday. This shows Saudi Arabias resolve to keep the oil market balanced by keeping oil supply tight. Additional buoyancy has come from news that the massive power outage in Venezuela, that has been ongoing for five days now, is also hampering the countrys oil exports. On top of that, U.S. oil production actually fell slightly in December, an indication that the blistering growth rate could be taking a breather after a six-month-long streak of all-time highs, Barclays wrote in a report. The U.S. averaged 11.85 mb/d in December, down roughly 60,000 bpd from November levels. The decline came as a surprise after consecutive months of rapid growth. It is too early to come to any conclusions, and one months worth of data does not indicate a trend, but the collapse of oil prices in November and December may have slowed the trajectory of the U.S. shale patch. Spending cuts and pressure from investors are forcing a lot of companies to curtail their ambitions. Related: Are Semi-Solid State Batteries A Gamechanger? To be sure, ost forecasts still call for another year of massive output growth. The EIA sees production jumping by another 1.4 mb/d. But other analysts said that the spending cuts could result in output undershooting those estimates. Fundamentally I think supply estimates for the U.S will disappoint, Ben Dell, managing partner at Kimmeridge, told CNBC. We expect production growth to remain relatively soft during H1 19 but pick up pace in the second half, Barclays said. In short, there are several factors working in a bullish direction, especially when compared to more pessimistic forecasts from a few months ago. Demand has held steady, defying dire forecasts for an imminent collapse due to a souring economy. The OPEC+ cuts, combined with unexpected outages, are tightening up the market. And while there is a great deal of uncertainty, U.S. shale could potentially slow down. While inventories have yet to demonstrate a decline following the OPEC+ cuts, the market appears to be tightening up. Next up: Waivers on U.S. sanctions on Iran are a little more than two months away from expiration, which offers another land mine for global supply. By Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: The ambitious shale growth plans of the U.S. supermajors could in the future allow them to control so much of U.S. shale oil production that they could also control the price of the U.S. light tight oil going to foreign markets in an OPEC of their own kind, Investing.com quoted John Kilduff, founding partner at Again Capital, as saying. If the U.S. supermajors, such as Exxon and Chevron, end up controlling a lot of the U.S. shale production with their plans to significantly boost Permian production, and if smaller shale players bleed cash and decide to sell acreage and operations to Big Oil, then supermajors could be the ones determining the price of light crude oil, according to Kilduff. Exxon and Chevron both announced increased targets for their Permian production last week. Chevron now sees its Permian unconventional net oil-equivalent production rising to 600,000 bpd by the end of 2020, and to 900,000 bpd by the end of 2023. Exxon revised up its Permian growth plans to produce more than 1 million oil-equivalent barrels per day by as early as 2024, which would be an increase of almost 80 percent. The shale game is now a scale game, as Chevron Chairman and CEO Michael Wirth told CNBC last week after the company announced its latest Permian growth targets. With the majors going into the Permian to do roll-outs, the independents there are getting squeezed by the banks, which want them to cough out more money or get out, Investing.coms Barani Krishnan quoted Kilduff as saying. Related: Two Largest Oil Price Benchmarks Are Set To Diverge According to Rystad Energy, the players with large-scale operations and acreage positions could get average returns of 20 percent in three years in the Wolfcamp A in the Permian Delaware, for example, even if WTI Midland oil price is at $45 a barrel. But smaller operators could struggle because of higher drilling, completion, operation, and transportation costs. These operators might struggle in the current price environment, and their best opportunity to monetize their investment could be to sell their acreage to larger operators with more efficient logistics, better infrastructure and more negotiating power through the value chain, Rystad Energy senior partner Per Magnus Nysveen said last month. Size matters, even more so when drilling for shale oil in the Permian Basin, Nysveen added. According to Kilduff, as carried by Investing.com, The stars are aligning for the super majors to take control of shale and determine pricing for light crude in Asia, if not the world. Theyll be OPEC by a different name. By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Oil market participants had started to worry in advance about how the U.S. sanctions on Iran in November would impact global supply, causing oil prices to shoot up to four-year-highs in early October. Just a month later, the U.S. re-imposed sanctions on Irans oil industry and granted waivers to the eight key Iranian oil buyers to continue importing oil at reduced rates. Oil prices then started to dive, dragged further down by fears of slowing economic and oil demand growth. When at end of January the U.S. slapped sanctions on Venezuelas oil industry and state oil firm PDVSA in order to deprive Nicolas Maduros regime of pretty much its only hard-currency income, oil prices barely budged. Venezuelas oil production had already been collapsing for more than two years, at a rate of around 50,000 bpd each month, due to the economic collapse and years of mismanagement and underinvestment in the oil industry. The oil market had already braced itself for continued steep declines in Venezuelan oil supply in coming months. Ten years ago, U.S. sanctions on oil from Iran and Venezuela would have significantly shaken up the market. The reason for the relatively muted reaction this time around, as analysts told CNBC, was soaring U.S. oil production. While U.S. crude oil production growth is mostly light crude grades, as opposed to the heavy crudes of Venezuela and Iran, gushing American output has still been capping oil prices. Despite the different crude grades of U.S. production, surging supply has given more flexibility to the U.S. Administration to impose sanctions on Venezuela and on Iran, according to analysts who spoke to CNBC. Related: Is This A Precursor For Peak Oil Demand? OPEC and its allies production management policy in place since the start of 2017 has been supporting oil prices and giving U.S. producers incentivesin the form of higher oil pricesto boost shale drilling and production. OPEC and its Russia-led non-OPEC partners have been influencing the state of the oil market with cuts or production increases, such as those just ahead of the U.S. sanctions on Iran to proactively respond to what the U.S. was promising to be zero Iranian oil exports. The U.S. sanctions policies toward oil exporting nations such as Iran and Venezuela in recent months have been another major influencer on the oil market. And according to Daniel Yergin, vice chairman at IHS Markit, the record-setting U.S. oil production has given flexibility to the Administration in the sanctions. The extraordinary thing is its caused some tightness in heavy oil, and thats been reflected but its not been a market moving event, Yergin told CNBC, referring to the U.S. sanctions on Venezuela. In an oil market already tighter on heavy crude grades due to OPECs production cuts and U.S. sanctions on Irans oil, refiners now face an even tighter supply of heavy crude with the sweeping U.S. sanctions on Venezuelas oil sector. Although the U.S. sanctions on Venezuela are creating a heavy crude crunch on the oil market, the EIA says that the sanctions are unlikely to have a significant impact on the refinery runs of the U.S. refiners. The tight heavy crude market, however, has been raising the prices of sour grades, cutting into refining margins. For example, the discount of the Mars US sour grade to the Louisiana Light grade is now at its narrowest since 2011, according to Bloomberg data. Although U.S. President Donald Trump has been criticizing OPEC for the cuts and for driving oil prices higher, the Trump Administrations sanctions on two of OPECs members have curtailed a total of 1.6 million bpd of supply, according to Helima Croft, head of global commodities strategy at RBC. Related: Oil Prices Rise As Saudis Curb Exports Trump is yelling at OPEC, but Trumps been the most effective cutter in world oil supply, Croft told CNBC. Yet, experts say that sanctions on Iran and Venezuela would have driven oil prices much higher if it werent for the soaring U.S. oil production that has been capping price gains. Thanks to the remarkable strength in shale production, the United States will account for 70 percent of the growth in global oil production through 2024, transforming the global oil markets and trade, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its annual oil market forecast this week. This will shake up international oil and gas trade flows, with profound implications for the geopolitics of energy, said Fatih Birol, the IEAs Executive Director. Birol also noted: Everywhere we look, new actors are emerging and past certainties are fading. This is the case in both the upstream and the downstream sector. And its particularly true for the United States, by far the stand-out champion of global supply growth. By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: A senior official for CPC, Taiwans state-run energy firm, said on Tuesday that it could start building its third LNG import terminal by the middle of this year once it obtains all the necessary permits. Jane Liao, chief executive of CPCs LNG business, said the proposed terminal at Taoyuan, in northwestern Taiwan, could start operations in early 2023 with an initial capacity of 1 million tonnes per annum (mtpa). She made her comments on the sidelines of the CERAWeek conference in Houston, according to a Reuters report. Liao said that the projects first phase of 3 mtpa will be used by state utility Taipower. Taiwan is the worlds fifth largest LNG importer, after Japan, China, South Korea, and India, with a total import volume of 16.8 mtpa in 2018. Liao said that Taiwan plans to have import capability of 10 mtpa each in the countrys north, central and south by 2027. She added that CPC will continue to expand existing terminals at Taichung and Yung-An in Kaohsiung, in southern Taiwan. Nuclear and coal usage CPCs disclosure has several significant takeaways. First, it comes as the island nation of some 24 million people phases out not only coal used for power generation but also nuclear power. Taipower was nearing completion of a nuclear power plant, whose construction began in 1999, in Longmen, New Taipei City until severe backlash over the project intensified in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in neighboring Japan. Related: Is This A Precursor For Peak Oil Demand? Massive politically charged protests against the Longmen plant gathered momentum in 2012, 2013, and 2014, with opponents of nuclear energy stressing the numerous risk factors Taiwan shares with Japan. The government responded in 2014 by indefinitely suspending construction of the Longmen plant, though it was more than 90 percent completed and resulted in billions of dollars in lost capex. Due to construction cost overruns, the total price of the project had swelled to NT$283 billion (US$9.3 billion) by the time of its cancellation. Earlier this year, the Taiwanese government reiterated its plan to phase out its other nuclear power plants, despite citizens voting against the policy in a recent referendum. Taiwan has four operable nuclear power reactors - two each at the Kuosheng and Maanshan plants - which account for around 15 percent of the island's electricity generation. Unit 1 of Taiwan's oldest plant, Chinshan, has already been taken offline and will be decommissioned, while the operating license of unit 2 is due to expire in July. Coal usage in Taiwan is also reportedly in the process of being phased out. However, in mid-2018, Taiwans environmental protection agency gave the green light for a new US$100 million coal-fired power plant at Shenao, in what a diplomat report described as a small but picturesque fishing village on the north coast on Taiwan 40 minutes from Taipei. The pants approval was seen as a step back from the countrys ambitious plan to increase energy supply from renewable sources to 20 percent by 2025 and a gradual reduction in the proportion of coal-fired power generation within the same timescale. Increased LNG usage Taiwans push to increase its LNG imports also comes as the current global LNG supply overhang is still at historic levels, which should allow it CPC the opportunity to lock in long-term off-take agreements with suppliers at more favorable prices as long as deals are reached before the glut in LNG markets subsidies. By 2022-2023, there is a possibility that the current LNG supply overhang could subside amid rampant gas and LNG demand coming out of China, as well as both South Asia and Southeast Asia. CPC prefers long term contracts, although spot cargoes accounted for about 15 percent of its annual imports, Liao said Liao added that CPC is eyeing new supplies from Russias Sakhalin island in the Pacific, or the proposed Alaska LNG project and may seek joint purchases with other buyers from Japan and South Korea. Weve been waiting for Sakhalin, Liao said. She added that the project would be ideal to supply north Asian buyers because of its proximity, while LNG shipments from Alaska to Taiwan will avoid potential congestion at the Panama Canal. The Asia-Pacific region represents 72 percent of global LNG demand with that amount projected to increase to 75 percent amid increase Chinese imports of the super-chilled fuel. By Tim Daiss for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: The oil industry would do well to engage the supporters of the Green New Deal in dialogue, BPs chief executive Bob Dudley said at this weeks CERAWeek in Texas. We need to demonstrate that we share the common goal of a low-carbon future and that we are in action toward it, Dudley said as quoted by Reuters. According to the executive of one of the biggest oil companies with one of the worst environmental reputations, the oil industry needs to engage with Green New Deal proponents as a way of keeping the trust of society. Our focus has to be on developing an energy system that is cleaner, better and kinder to the planet, Dudley said. But we can only fully play our part if we have the trust of society and the confidence of our shareholders. That means engaging more with the young people who will take to the streets on Friday. School children from more than 70 countries will skip school on Friday to protest against climate change, demanding more action from governments and businesses. It means improving the dialogue we have with policymakers around the world, including those behind the Green New Deal, Dudley said. The Green New Deal proposed by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was met with severe criticism by Republican lawmakers but won the praise of the environmentalist lobby. Critics note the price tag of the initiative, which a right-leaning organization estimated at US$93 trillion. However, supporters argue that not doing anything to combat climate change will cost a lot more in the long run. The oil industry is hardly a natural partner for Green New Dealers given its very nature and the focus of the GND on eliminating their products from the energy mix of the United States. Yet the oil industry has already begun making inroads into cleaner energy sources, and a dialogue with the green lobby might not be such a bad idea, even if it is for reputation management purposes. By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: The U.S. State Department has not warned or notified BP in any way about its role as a substantial shareholder in Russias Rosneft after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused Rosneft of buying Venezuelan crude despite U.S. sanctions against the country, TASS reports. "I havent read it, I havent heard it, so I really wouldnt be able to comment," Dudley said on the sidelines of CERAWeek. "I did not actually hear about that." Earlier this week, Mike Pompeo accused Rosneft of defying U.S. sanctions against Caracas by continuing to buy crude oil from PDVSA, which is its joint venture partner in a local operation. The Russian company responded by saying it was engaged in business and not politics, adding its contracts for the purchase of Venezuelan crude were signed before the sanctions against PDVSA were enforced. Whats more, Rosneft said it will evaluate the consequences of Pompeos statement, TASS reported yesterday and would defend its rights if it finds these have been adverse. The U.S. Secretary of State on Monday said Russia and Cuba were to blame for the crisis in Venezuela because of their continued support for the Maduro government. This story is not complete without acknowledging the central role Cuba and Russia have played and continue to play in undermining the democratic dreams of the Venezuelan people and their welfare, Reuters quoted Pompeo as saying. Moscow, like Havana, continues to provide political cover to the Maduro regime, while pressuring countries to disregard the democratic legitimacy of the interim president Guaido, the U.S. Secretary of State also said. The part of his statement that rattled Rosneft went as follows: Russias state-owned company, Rosneft, continues to purchase crude oil cargoes from PDVSA, Venezuelas state-owned oil company, in defiance of U.S. sanctions. And, Rosnefts CEO, Igor Sechin, continues to throw a lifeline to the regime. By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com Police mace Water protectors. Cannon Ball, North Dakota. November, 2016. Josue Rivas, who has documented the Standing Rock Movement, was one of four jurors chose to withdraw from the Flash Forward jury because of lead sponsor TD Banks financing of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Josue Rivas. Four jurors for this years Magenta Foundation Flash Forward emerging photographer competition have withdrawn in protest of the competitions major sponsor, TD Bank Group. TD is one of several financial institutions that have provided financing for the Dakota Access Pipeline, the $3.8 billion oil pipeline from North Dakota to Illinois that is the subject of ongoing protests by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and other indigenous people and their supporters. Three photography organizations, Authority Collective, Natives Photograph and Women Photograph, also wrote an open letter to the organization asking it to reconsider its funding from TD Bank. At issue is the disconnect between Flash Forwards effort to promote indigenous photographers while accepting funding from a bank that is directly financing a project that harms indigenous communities. This year, Flash Forward announced five new, special interest categories for their competition, including a category for indigenous photographers. The organization approached photojournalist Josue Rivas, who co-created the Natives Photograph database of indigenous photographers, to be a juror for the competition. Rivas was excited to participate, he told PDN, until a fellow photojournalist pointed out that TD Bank is funding the competition. Rivas says he got in touch with Magenta Foundation executive director MaryAnn Camilleri to express his concern, but was told that there was nothing that could be done. Basically the response was, without [TD Banks] money we cant do this, Rivas recalls. Camilleri did not respond to PDNs requests for comment. Rivas had photographed the Standing Rock Movement and witnessed law enforcement and private security violently confronting protestors, he says. It was very personal, he explains. He decided to withdraw from the jury. The most important part of it for me is that, as an indigenous person and as a photojournalist, my biggest debt in a way is towards the people who are in the photographs, he says. He felt Magenta Foundations response to his concerns was dismissive, he says. I was really disappointed and I kind of felt alone on it. I had never judged a competition that big and havent been part of the media industry for that long. Rivas posted on Facebook that he wasnt going to be part of the competition, and members of Authority Collective, which promotes photographers from marginalized communities, reached out. That lead to the three organizationsAuthority Collective, Natives Photograph and Women Photographdrafting a letter to Magenta Foundation, which they sent to Camilleri. Rivas says he hoped to have a dialogue and find solutions, not to shame or cause problems for Magenta Foundation. The organizations decided to publish their letter publicly after receiving a disappointing response indicating the organizations unwillingness to engage meaningfully or address their partnership with TD Bank, they wrote in their open letter, which was published yesterday on the website Medium. Three other jurorsAuthority Collectives Hannah Yoon and two othersalso withdrew their participation. The letter acknowledges Magenta Foundations long-standing commitment to launching the careers of up-and-coming artists, and says members of the organizations who were invited to be jurors felt honored to have a seat at the table. But, Theres irony in promoting Indigenous voices while simultaneously accepting funding from a company that, through their lending practices, supports violence against these communities, the letter states. We want jurors and photographers to be fully aware of Magentas partnership with TD, and the implications that relationship has on real communities. Rivas says some photojournalist colleagues hes spoken with have pointed out that photographers may not be in a position to be critical about funding sources. If youre getting the money, do something good with it, Rivas says he was advised. But the connection between TD and the pipeline project was too obvious to overlook. Theres a larger picture there, Rivas says. When I think about photojournalism and where were going, its hopefully a place where were really thinking about these things. Personally, Im now looking at any grant Ive gotten, trying to better understand where the money comes from. The Minister of Trade and Industry, Hon. Alan K. Kyerematen, has stated that Government has embarked on a comprehensive program to support the promotion of Made-in-Ghana Shea products and brands, including the provision of incentive packages and the participation of local companies in International Trade Shows and Fairs. Companies such as Solution Oasis, R&R Luxury, MGL Naturals, Maya Naturals, TAMA Cosmetics have benefitted from similar support from the Ministry. The vision is to make Ghana the Shea manufacturing hub of Africa. He added that, the Shea nut industry has been an integral part of the life and culture of a significant number of the people, and has served as the economic backbone of rural economies in Ghana and other West African countries, wherever it is found. According to him, Shea, as a potent raw material product integrated into very sophisticated global production and supply chains, has tremendous power to propel rural economies and transform the lives of millions of people in our sub region. The Minister made known that, according to Ghana Cocoa Board, there are over 600,000 women in Ghanas Shea nut production belt, traditionally depend on nut collection and processing for a living. Mr. Alan K. Kyeremate, stressed that within the context of Ghanas current industrial transformation and Job creation agenda, the Government is working closely with industry players to improve the incentive and regulatory framework for industrial Shea Production, to attract the long-term investment inflows required to fully develop the entire value chain and modernize the processing Shea. He added that Ghana currently has 5 processing factories with over 150,000 metric tons of installed capacity. There are also 3 fractionation plants as well as the only Shea butter refinery plant in Africa. To him, Government in collaboration with the African Development Bank and the Rural Enterprise program will be establishing four (4) new, modern processing facilities under the One District One Factory Initiative in the northern part of Ghana. These facilities will be owned and managed by organized youth groups as part of the Enable youth program. Hon. Alan K. Kyerematen, made this observation at the opening ceremony of the 2019 international Shea Conference held at La palm Beach Hotel in Accra. The 12th Annual International Conference on Shea brings together all business associates and shea interest groups around the world to share latest information. It was held in Accra from 11th to 13 the March 2019. This years event, on the theme Unveiling the Value of Shea, will offer opportunities for showcasing recent products and technologies in the shea and create the platform to network and connect stakeholders in the shea value chain. It is being hosted and jointly organized by the Global Shea Alliance (GSA) and Shea Network Ghana (SNG) with support from the EXIM Bank Ghana. The annual exports of shea from the country in 2016 stood at 59,500 metric tonnes, which was equivalent to US$17 million direct income for women shea collectors and eight million dollars for their communities. Over 28,000 women were trained in shea processing while about 600,000 were engaged in the shea value chain to earn incomes. The conference also brought together the most important key players of the Global Shea Family to review progress and chart new pathways to promote sustainability, quality practices and standards, and coordinate support for Shea in the food and cosmetics sectors. Source: The Daily Searchlight Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video US aviation regulators said there was no basis to suspend flights of Boeings 737 MAX jet after two fatal crashes that prompted several airlines and at least 45 countries to either ground the troubled aircraft or bar it from their airspace. Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action, the Federal Aviation Administrations acting administrator Daniel Elwell, said. The groundings come after an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet crashed on Sunday, six minutes after take-off, killing all 157 people on board, including seven Chinese nationals and one Hongkonger. On October 29 last year, another MAX jet flown by Indonesias Lion Air crashed into the Java Sea, 12 minutes after take-off, killing all 189 passengers and crew. Hong Kong on Wednesday joined Vietnam, Kazakhstan, United Arab Emirates and New Zealand, and banned the MAX jet from its airspace. That came after the European Union on Tuesday followed Chinas lead in grounding the US aircraft. Having regard to the latest situation, the CAD has decided to temporarily prohibit operation of Boeing B737 MAX aircraft into, out of and over Hong Kong, a spokesman for the Civil Aviation Department (CAD) said in a statement. The temporary prohibition will take effect at 6pm Hong Kong time on March 13 and continue until further notice, the CAD added. As of 1am Thursday, Hong Kong time, only the US, Panama, and Mauritania were permitting their airlines to fly the 737 MAX. Canada, which has the worlds third-largest 737 MAX fleet, 41 planes, is the latest to ground the planes. Turkish Airlines, one of the largest carriers in the world, said it was suspending use of its 12 MAX aircraft from Wednesday, until uncertainty was clarified. Story continues Low-cost airline Norwegian Air Shuttle, South Koreas Eastar Jet and South Africas Comair also said they would halt flights. The three US airlines using the 737 MAX - Southwest Airlines, American Airlines and United Airlines - stood by the aircraft, as calls from members of the US Congress to ban the Boeing 737 MAX from US airspace increased. Republicans Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz joined several Democratic lawmakers in advocating for restrictions similar to those imposed by a growing list of nations. Americas largest unions for airline flight attendants have also called on US regulators to ground the aircraft. US President Donald Trump also weighed in with a blistering tweet on Tuesday: Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilot are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT, he wrote, referring to the prestigious university. Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are.... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2019 The New York Times reported that Boeing Companys CEO Dennis Muilenburg called Trump, urging him not to ground the plane. Boeing donated US$1 million to Trumps presidential inauguration and Muilenburg visited Trump at his Florida getaway in Mar-a-Lago. Brian Parrish, a spokesman for Southwest Airlines which flies 34 MAX 8s, said the carrier remains confident about the planes safety. American Airlines, which flies 24 of the planes, said it has full confidence in the model. There were 371 of the 737 MAX family jets in operation before this weeks groundings, according to Flightglobal. Around two-thirds of the fleet is now grounded, based on Reuters calculations. The widening actions against the aircraft puts pressure on Boeing - the worlds biggest plane manufacturer - to prove the MAX planes are safe, and the company has said it is rolling out flight software updates by April that could address issues with a faulty sensor. Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse, Reuters More from South China Morning Post: This article Boeing 737 MAX 8: US says no basis to suspend troubled jet, but at least 45 countries disagree first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2019. THE Department of Tourism is looking to open more interconnecting flights from Cebu and to other countries, an official said on Wednesday, March 13.Dr. Erwin Balane, head of DOT's Route Development THE Department of Tourism is looking to open more interconnecting flights from Cebu and to other countries, an official said on Wednesday, March 13. Dr. Erwin Balane, head of DOT's Route Development team, said aside from China, they are looking to open more international flights that will connect Cebu to Australia and other countries. Balane said they are seeking to provide passengers, both local and foreign tourists, a seamless flight experience with Australia, one of the country's key markets. "We're looking at the Australian carriers because based on our latest air service agreement with Australia, the Philippine government provided them with the fifth freedom right to fly onward to a third country. If you look at the routes of Australia, they are actually doing the kangaroo route which is from Australia to Singapore onwards to different destinations either in Middle East or in Europe," Balane said. Under a fifth freedom route, an airline is authorized to stop in another country other than its own before heading to another destination or a third country, Balane said, at the sidelines of the Routes Asia 2019 in Cebu. "So we're looking also into that kind of route, from any point in Australia going to Cebu onwards to Northeast Asia like Hongkong, Tokyo, Incheon and other parts of the northeast Asian markets," he added. As of now, the country's route development team is still in the early phases of negotiation with airlines that are interested to create the flight route. "It's not easy to lure an airline to fly because they're looking at not only the destination but it's more of the sustainability of the passenger traffic because at the end of the day, it's still the numbers that will sustain the aviation business," Balane said. The agency is also eyeing the European market to attract airline companies to fly in the country. "We're planning to join route events in Europe to fly direct in the Philippines. At this point in time, it's quite hard to encourage them to fly to other destinations than Manila because they will be carrying bigger and wider aircraft which of course is very hard to fill up and then we will also look into the air service agreements between the two countries if it will allow us to increase our frequencies," he added. The DOT has set a target of 12 million tourist arrivals in the country for 2020 as the government continue its sustainable tourism thrust in popular destinations in the country. (JOB) Photo credit : Philippine Red Cross MANILA, Philippines The Philippine Red Cross (PRC) on Wednesday (March 13) dispatched water tankers to assist hospitals that are affected by the ongoing water shortage in Metro Manila due to the diminishing supply at La Mesa Dam. The PRC said it already distributed a total of 256,000 liters of water to the Rizal Medical Center as of 12:30 a.m. Wednesday. Likewise, the agency also put up portable toilets at the hospital to help maintain sanitation in their premises. PRC Chairman Senator Richard Gordon directed the agency to prioritize hospitals to help address the health facilities water problems as water is crucial to their daily operations. Marje Pelayo The post Philippine Red Cross dispatches water tankers to hospitals appeared first on UNTV News. Rescuers on Wednesday recovered eight bodies and rescued 37 people alive from the wreckage of a collapsed four-storey building in the Nigeria's economic capital Lagos Children had been attending an "illegal school" inside the residential building when the structure collapsed, officials said. "Thirty-seven people were rescued alive and eight were recovered dead," Ibrahim Farinloye of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said in a statement. Earlier officials said dozens of children were trapped inside the building which collapsed mid-morning in an area near Itafaji market on Lagos Island. In chaotic scenes, panicked parents, local residents and shocked onlookers rushed to the area as police, firemen and medics staged a massive rescue operation. - Blood and dust - A young man helping rescue efforts who gave his name only as Derin said "at least 10 children" were trapped inside but "thought to be alive". An AFP reporter at the scene saw at least eight people pulled from the wreckage, including a small boy with blood on his face. Covered in dust, he was alive but unconscious and appeared to be badly hurt. One local resident who witnessed the moment of collapse said there was no warning. "We were smoking outside when the building just collapsed," Olamide Nuzbah told AFP in pidgin English. - Distraught parents - As rescuers worked furiously to reach those inside, distraught parents begged them to find their children. "Please, save my child, save my child!" wept one traumatised mother whose seven-year-old daughter was trapped inside, as people tried to console her. School bags, toys and clothes could be seen among the piles of rubble as a bulldozer tried to clear a path through some of the wreckage to help the rescue efforts. Hundreds of local residents tried to help, passing water and helmets through to dust-covered rescuers working tirelessly to sift through the rubble, some of whom appeared to be distressed. Many locals told AFP that the building, which was in an advanced state of disrepair, had been "earmarked" for demolition by the authorities in Lagos state. "It is a residential building that was actually accommodating an illegal school," said Ambode, the state governor, confirming that most buildings in the area had been marked for demolition but saying some landlords had defied the move. "We get resistance from landlords but we must continue to save lives," he said, pledging to step up measures against all structures that failed to meet the correct standards, saying they would be "quickly evacuated" and demolished. Lagos, which has a population of 20 million people, is made up of a collection of islands. One of them is Lagos Island, a densely-populated area which is one of the city's oldest neighbourhoods. It is characterised by its Afro-Brazilian architecture, a style brought over by thousands of freed slaves who headed back home after decades working the plantations in Brazil. - Tragically common - Despite efforts to renovate the area, a large number of abandoned buildings have been taken over by families or businesses, despite being dilapidated and unsafe. Building collapses are tragically common in Nigeria, where building regulations are routinely flouted. In September 2014, 116 people died -- 84 of them South Africans -- when a six-storey building collapsed in Lagos where a celebrity televangelist was preaching. An inquiry found it had structural flaws and had been built illegally. And two years later, at least 60 people were killed when the roof collapsed at a church in Uyo, the capital of Akwa Ibom state, in the east of the country. THE National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) has removed over 650,000 campaign materials all over Metro Manila.NCRPO Director Major General Guillermo Eleazar urged the candidates to also do their WHILE BDO Unibank sees the global economy heading for more moderate growth this year, it still makes sense to diversify into global investments and seize opportunities in markets outside the Philippines for growth over the long-term. Through BDOs Global Feeder Funds, investors can gain access to the US, China, Japan, European and global equity markets. The funds started 2019 with very strong returns, ranging from 12 percent to 18 percent in dollar terms, as of February, the bank said in a statement. Based on fund performance figures published by www.uitf.com, the BDO China Equity Feeder Fund landed the top spot for dollar-denominated global equity funds with its 18.4 percent return since the start of 2019. The fund feeds into the BlackRock Global Funds (BGF) China Fund, which is primarily invested in a portfolio of equities and equity-related instruments of China-related companies traded both onshore and offshore China. According to Fritz Ocampo, chief investment officer of the BDO Trust and Investments Group, the rally in the Chinese stock market this year is due to improving sentiment toward China as its policy environment become more supportive and concerns on the trade war has eased. (PR) Amazon is now the No. 1 target of activist shareholders. The Seattle-based global commerce and technology giant was pushed past ExxonMobil and Chevron in 2019, receiving the most shareholder resolutions focused on corporate environmental, social and governance issues. That was by design. Members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) - a coalition including religious institutional investors, environmental nonprofits, labor groups and social-purpose asset managersbegan organizing a coordinated campaign last spring to concentrate their efforts on Amazon, in part through the shareholder- proposal process, a way owners of stock in publicly traded companies can have a voice in their management. Shareholders affiliated with the coalition submitted 10 resolutions asking Amazon to report on its efforts to address hate speech, the impact of its operations on communities and human rights, its effect on climate-change and greenhouse gas reduction plans. They also asked Amazon to study and potentially limit sales of facial-recognition technology to governments and link executive pay to company performance on diversity and sustainability, among other things. Other shareholders, including a group of Amazon employees pushing the company on climate change, submitted five more proposals. A back-and-forth process between the company and the activist shareholders, mediated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, determines how many of the resolutions will actually come up for a vote at Amazon's annual meeting this spring. Amazon has challenged at least eight of the resolutions, as many companies do. Although votes on shareholder resolutions are typically nonbinding, they do bring attention to issues and put a company's ownership on the record. The pinnacle of capitalism The number and breadth of Amazon shareholder proposals underscores the company's growing size and impact as its multifaceted businesses reach further into many aspects of modern life. Exxon and Chevron still get plenty of attention, receiving eight and nine resolutions backed by the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility this year, respectively. But Amazon's position at the top of modern consumer- and internet-driven capitalism make it a proxy for the larger debateembodied in the proposalsabout the purpose and responsibilities of a corporation in the 21st century. "Given the sheer size of companies like Amazon and others with leadership positions and far-reaching supply chains, it is critical these companies use their influence to inspire improved performance that will benefit both the environment and communities," said Josh Zinner, CEO of the ICCR, which began in 1971 with a campaign led by religious groups to encourage companies to divest from South Africa in protest of apartheid. The strategy targeting Amazon began at a meeting last spring in New York City after coalition members shared their frustrations in attempting to engage with Amazon's leaders on the environmental, social and corporate governance issues they champion. The coalition sees a vote on a shareholder resolution at a company's annual meeting as a "last resort" when its private discussions with a company have failed to convince leaders of the wisdom and long-term value of their ideas. "We came to realize that nobody was receiving substantive interactions with the company," said Bruce Herbert, CEO of Seattle-based investment firm Newground Social Investment and a longtime coalition member and past board member. Proponents of many of the proposals had 30-minute meetings or phone calls with Amazon representatives in January, though some received no response at all, Herbert said. The meetings often were with people who didn't seem to have authority to make changes and could provide little information beyond previous company statements. While there are strict limits on what public companies can disclose privately, Herbert said they don't include topics such as "how you evaluate sustainability in a supply chain or what you're doing to try to keep hate-related items from showing up on your website. You can talk about that stuff." Herbert said many other public companies take more time to engage with shareholders bringing forward ideas for improvement, collaborating with activist shareholders and using the resources and expertise they often bring to discussions, he said. Twenty years ago, for instance, Walmart was similarly targeted by activist investors, and over time the company became receptive to conversations with shareholders. Now Walmart holds a daylong meeting each year between the members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility and top management, including the CEO, in Bentonville, Arkansas, and conducts multiple conference calls with them on a range of environmental, social and governance issues, according to the Rev. David Schilling, an interfaith coalition senior program director who has co-led the organization's work with the company. "It's very substantive engagement," Herbert said. Stepped up efforts Amazon declined to comment on the number of proposals it received or its interactions with the shareholders submitting them. A spokesperson said the company follows a code of conduct that governs how it runs its business and the use of its products, and pointed to Amazon's various efforts to improve workplace diversity, reduce hunger and homelessness, and prepare young people from underrepresented communities for computer science careers. Even as the organized strategy of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility takes shape, there are a handful of signs at Amazon so far in 2019 of an opening, and stepped-up efforts in areas including climate change, sustainability and social responsibility. Amazon employee-shareholders who submitted a proposal in December related to climate change welcomed a recent company announcement setting a goal of "net zero" carbon emissions from half of Amazon shipments by 2030. "It's certainly encouraging to see them take this step," said Weston Fribley, an Amazon software engineer who joined in filing the resolution, which calls for a public report on how Amazon plans to handle disruptions from climate change and how the company is cutting its dependence on fossil fuels. "That's something that I think is incredibly important to the long-term value of the company," he added. In announcing the "Shipment Zero" program, Dave Clark, Amazon senior vice president of worldwide operations, said the company plans to share its "companywide carbon footprint, along with related goals and programs, later this year." He said in a blog post that the company has spent the last two years developing "an advanced scientific model" of its carbon footprint and is providing its business teams with ways to reduce their carbon use. Existing efforts include purchasing and producing renewable energy to power its facilities, improving efficiency and reducing waste, particularly in packaging for shipment. The employee-shareholders have not withdrawn their proposal, Fribley said, nor has Amazon challenged it. They await the Amazon board of directors' recommendation to shareholders on the resolution, which will appear in the company's proxy filing expected next month. The composition of Amazon's board itself is also changing. Amazon's newest directors are former PepsiCo chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi and Starbucks Chief Operating Officer Rosalind Brewer, bringing the number of women on the 11-person board to five. Nooyi appears on the cover of the latest issue of Directors & Boards magazine urging corporate leaders to balance profit and purpose. She quotes economist Milton Friedman, the ardent advocate for the corporation as profit-maximizer above all else, a view that has long held sway in corporate America. Friedman, Nooyi notes, wrote in 1970 that the idea of a business with a "'social conscience' is tantamount to 'pure and unadulterated socialism.'" That view is incomplete and inadequate for the modern world, Nooyi writes, arguing that companies must "work toward making a profit in a way that also makes a difference." "Because the fact is, in 2019, the line between business and society is increasingly blurry," Nooyi writes. "With the rise of digital savvy nongovernmental organizations, every perceived infraction, anywhere in the supply chain, can become a major business issue." In mid-February, Amazon posted a handful of job listings that suggest it is scaling up its social-responsibility efforts, particularly in relation to the rights of workers in its supply chain. The company already has a detailed supplier code of conduct. While Amazon is hiring in many areas as it continues its rapid growth, one post, for a social responsibility program manager, lists job responsibilities including "evaluating and implementing major changes to Amazon's (social responsibility) standards and scorecard, as we ingest new data sources (industry association audits, worker surveys) to better detect risks in Amazon's growing supply chain." Looking at the long term The shareholders affiliated with the interfaith coalition are a specific kind of corporate critic, working within the system to make improvements to company and industry operations and practices. These activist investors believe companies that operate with high regard for their employees, communities and the environment reduce their risks and provide a better long-term financial return for shareholders. That long-term view, however, often comes in conflict with the decisions of managers looking ahead to the next quarterly earnings report and the constant need to beat Wall Street profit expectations. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos also espouses a long-term view, and has shown a willingness to operate the company on slim profit margins in order to invest in new opportunities years down the road. His vaunted leadership principles center on customers, ownership, learning, judgment and innovation, but make no mention of the broader societal values sought by the likes of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility members. Herbert, the investment firm CEO and coalition member, compared shareholder attention to Amazon and other big companies to changing the course of an ocean liner. "One bump isn't going to do it. You have to have consistent applied pressure to gradually change," he said. "But because (the companies are) so big, that change of trajectory leads to immensely better outcomes." Explore further Amazon adds Starbucks executive Rosalind Brewer to board 2019 The Seattle Times Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Governments around the world are grounding Boeing 737 Max aircraft or barring them from their airspace The United States has said there is "no basis" to ground Boeing 737 MAX airliners, after a second deadly crash involving the model in less than five months prompted governments worldwide to ban the plane. Despite the aviation giant's assurances that the plane is safe and reliable, the European Union, Britain and India joined China and other countries grounding the plane or banning it from their airspace as they await the results of the investigation into the crash. But the US has so far refused to take similar action against the American aerospace giant's best-selling workhorse aircraft. "Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft," Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Daniel Elwell said in a statement on Tuesday. A new Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. That followed the October crash of a new Lion Air jet of the same model in Indonesia, which killed 189 people shortly after takeoff from Jakarta. The widening action against the aircraft has put pressure on Boeingthe world's biggest plane manufacturerto prove the 737 MAX is safe, and the company has said it is rolling out flight software updates by April that could address issues with a faulty sensor. Factfile on the Boeing 737 MAX 8 The full extent of the impact of the bans on international travel routes was unclear. There are about 350 MAX 8s currently in service around the world. Air Canada, for example, announced it was canceling flights to London following Britain's decision to ban the aircraft. The EU aviation safety agency also closed European airspace to MAX planes. "At this early stage of the related investigation, it cannot be excluded that similar causes may have contributed to both events," it said, referring to the Ethiopian and Lion Air crashes An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board 'Precautionary measure' As the number of bans and groundings of the 737 MAX grew, US President Donald Trump weighed in with a tweet on Tuesday: "Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly." "Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT," he wrote, referring to the prestigious university. He later spoke by telephone to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who assured the president the aircraft is safe, an industry source told AFP. US carriers have so far appeared to maintain confidence in Boeing, which has been ordered by the FAA to make changes to flight systems and pilot training procedures. US President Donald Trump tweeted that modern planes are too complicated for pilots But it was not enough to reassure the UK Civil Aviation Authority, which said it was banning the planes from British airspace "as a precautionary measure". Global air travel hub Singapore, as well as Australia, Malaysia and Oman, were among the other countries to ban MAX planes. Vietnam, New Zealand and Hong Kong joined them on Wednesday. Currently, no Vietnamese carriers fly 737 MAXs, but budget carrier Vietjet has ordered 200 of them. China, a hugely important market for Boeing, on Monday ordered domestic airlines to suspend operations of the plane. Debris of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane strewn over a crash site outside Addis Ababa And Turkish Airlines, one of the largest carriers in the world, said it was suspending use of its 12 MAX aircraft from Wednesday, until "uncertainty" was clarified. Low-cost airline Norwegian Air Shuttle, South Korea's Eastar Jet and South Africa's Comair also said they would halt flights. 'Significant industry impact' Boeing has described the MAX series as its fastest-selling family of planes, with more than 5,000 orders placed to date from about 100 customers. But not since the 1970swhen the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 suffered successive fatal incidentshas a new model been involved in two deadly accidents in such a short period. The doomed Boeing 737 MAX airliner was carrying passengers and crew from 35 countries Thomas Anthony, head of the Aviation Safety and Security Program at the University of Southern California, said increasing automation of planes means crews have less experience flying manually. "So it's not just a mechanical, it is not just a software problem, but it is a problem of communication and trust," he said. The plane involved in Sunday's crash was less than four months old, with Ethiopian Airlines saying it was delivered on November 15. Investigators have recovered the black box flight recorders, which could potentially provide information about what happened, depending on their condition. 2019 AFP New research from Cornell University sheds light on the types of statistical and narrative evidence that are most effective at persuading people to pay attention to global issues. Study co-authors Adam Levine, associate professor of government, and Yanna Krupnikov of Stony Brook University wanted to understand what makes people care about social and economic problems they may not necessarily face in their daily lives, and whether that concern is a function of how the problems are described. The team looked at several types of evidence showing that a problem exists. For example, statistics can describe the magnitude of the problem or they can be phrased in percentage termssuch as the percentage of people facing a problem. They designed a series of studies to test which type of evidence increased people's engagement, either by making a donation, paying attention to an email or stating a concern. The research was conducted in collaboration with a nonprofit in Ithaca, New York, that strives to increase access to affordable health care, including funding for a free clinic. In the studies, likely new donors received solicitations by mail, members of the organization received a solicitation email, and study participants unaffiliated with the organization took a survey gauging their interest in access to affordable health care. The messaging used in solicitations included combinations of high percentages, low percentages, case studies and raw numbers to describe the magnitude of the uninsured who can't afford health care. For example, the potential donors received either a standard letter, one saying 57 percent of uninsured people couldn't afford the care they need, or one describing how a real uninsured person benefited from the nonprofit's services. Across the board, the percentage-based evidence and human interest evidence tended to drive engagement, but talking about the overall magnitude of the problem didn't. "When you talk about the millions of children who are starving, or the millions of refugees who are seeking out a better life, it fails to have this emotional connection that tends to then motivate people to pay more attention and to become engaged," Levine said. The study offers a model of what a meaningful collaboration between researchers and practitioners can look like. "Pull at people's emotional heartstrings," Levine said. "You can do it with certain forms of statistical evidence. You can do it with sympathetic case studies. And that will move behavior and move attitudes." More information: Yanna Krupnikov et al, Political Issues, Evidence, and Citizen Engagement: The Case of Unequal Access to Affordable Health Care, The Journal of Politics (2019). Journal information: Journal of Politics Yanna Krupnikov et al, Political Issues, Evidence, and Citizen Engagement: The Case of Unequal Access to Affordable Health Care,(2019). DOI: 10.1086/701722 In this photo taken Monday, March 11, 2019, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane being built for TUI Group sits parked at Boeing Co.'s Renton Assembly Plant in Renton, Wash. Britain, France and Germany on Tuesday joined a rapidly growing number of countries grounding the new Boeing plane involved in the Ethiopian Airlines disaster or turning it back from their airspace, while investigators in Ethiopia looked for parallels with a similar crash just five months ago. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren) President Donald Trump issued an emergency order Wednesday grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian airliner that killed 157 people, a reversal for the U.S. after federal aviation regulators had maintained it had no data to show the jets are unsafe. The decision came hours after Canada joined some 40 other countries in barring the Max 8 from its airspace, saying satellite tracking data showed possible but unproven similarities between the Ethiopian Airlines crash and a previous crash involving the model five months ago. The U.S. also grounded a larger version of the plane, the Max 9. The Federal Aviation Administration said "new information from the wreckage" of the Ethiopia crash, along with satellite-based tracking of the flight path, indicated some similarities with a Lion Air crash in the Java Sea that killed 187 people in October. The information "warrants further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents that needs to be better understood and addressed," the FAA said in a statement. Trump, who had received assurances Monday from Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg that the Max aircraft was sound, said the safety of the American people is of "paramount concern." Trump said any plane currently in the air will go to its destination and then be grounded, adding that pilots and airlines have been notified. Boeing issued a statement saying it supported the FAA's decision even though it "continues to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX." The company also said it had itself recommended the suspension of the Max fleet after consultations with the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board. "We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution," Boeing said. Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau said a comparison of vertical fluctuations found a "similar profile" between the Ethiopian Airlines crash and the Lion Air crash. Garneau, a former astronaut who flew in the space shuttle, emphasized that the data is not conclusive but crossed a threshold that prompted Canada to bar the Max 8. He said the new information indicated that the Ethiopian Airline jet's automatic system kicked in to force the nose of the aircraft down after computer software determined it was too high. He said that in the case of the Lion Air crash off Indonesia, the pilot fought against computer software that wanted to drop the nose of the plane. "So, if we look at the profile, there are vertical fluctuations, in the vertical profile of the aircraft and there were similarities in what we saw," Garneau said. "But I would repeat once again. This is not the proof that is the same root problem. It could be something else." Canada lost 18 of its citizens in Sunday's crash, the second highest number after Kenya. A Canadian family of six were among the dead. Meanwhile, Ethiopian Airlines said Wednesday that flight recorders from the jet that crashed will be sent to Europe for analysis, but it was unclear where. Some aviation experts have warned that finding answers in the crash could take months. The Europoean Union has also barred the Max 8. China ordered its airlines to ground the planesthey had 96 Max 8 jets in service, more than one-fourth of the approximately 370 Max jets in circulation. The growing number of countries joining the ban put the FAA in a difficult position, said Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the NTSB who is now an aviation consultant. He said the FAA, which certified the 737 Max as airworthy and has been the lead regulatory body for the airplane, prides itself on making data-driven decisions and not based on "anecdotes or political pressures." Goelz said Trump likely was feeling pressure from Congress and the public to step in. "There's probably nobody in the administration who's got more of a sensitive ear to cable television," said Goelz. The FAA is also certain to be looking into anonymous reports from at pilots of at least two U.S. flights who wrote about problems last year in a NASA database, Goelz said. The pilots reported that an automated system seemed to cause their Boeing 737 Max 8 planes to tilt down suddenly. The pilots said that soon after engaging the autopilot, the nose tilted down sharply. In both cases, they recovered quickly after disconnecting the autopilot. Southwest and American airlines, the main users of the 737 Max in the U.S., have logged tens of thousands of safe flight hours with the planes, Goelz said. United Airlines flies a slightly larger version of the plane, the Max 9. All three carriers vouched for the safety of Max aircraft on Wednesday. After Trump's announcement, American Airlines said it's "teams will make every effort to rebook customers as quickly as possible." United Airlines, which grounded its 14 Max planes, said the aircraft account for roughly 40 flights per day. Through a combination of spare aircraft and rebooking customers, the airline did not anticipate a significant operational impact. Southwest Airlines said it immediately complied with the order and removed its 34 Max 8 from scheduled service. The airline said the Max 8 planes account for less than 5 percent of the airline's daily flights. Southwest said it remains confident in the airliner after completing more than 88,000 flight hours over 41,000 flights, but it supports the FAA's decision. Lebanon and Kosovo also barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 from their airspace Wednesday, and Norwegian Air Shuttles said it would seek compensation from Boeing after grounding its fleet. Egypt banned the operation of the aircraft. Thailand ordered budget airline Thai Lion Air to suspend flying the planes for risk assessments. Lion Air confirmed reports it has put on hold the scheduled delivery of four of the jets. Ethiopian Airlines, widely seen as Africa's best-managed airline, grounded its remaining four models. Ethiopia was searching for a European to take the black box from Sunday's plane crash for analysis. Germout Freitag, a spokesman for Germany's Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation, said that agency declined a request from Ethiopia to analyze the box because it lacked the software needed. A spokesman for Ethiopian Airlines, Asrat Begashaw, said the airline has "a range of options" for the data and voice recorders of the flight's last moments. "What we can say is we don't have the capability to probe it here in Ethiopia," he said. An airline official has said one of the recorders was partially damaged. Boeing's technical team joined U.S., Israeli, Kenyan and other aviation experts in the investigation led by Ethiopian authorities. An Ethiopian pilot who saw the crash site minutes after the disaster told AP that the plane appeared to have "slid directly into the ground." Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde Gebremariam said their pilots had received special training. "In addition to the basic trainings given for 737 aircraft types, an additional training was given for the Max version," Tewolde told state news reporters. "After the Lion Air crash, questions were raised, so Boeing sent further instructions that it said pilots should know." Tewolde said he is confident the "investigation will reveal that the crash is not related to Ethiopian Airlines' safety record." Forensic DNA work for identifications of the remains recovered so far has not yet begun, Asrat said. The dead came from 35 countries. Explore further Ethiopia to send black boxes to Europe as questions mount over crash 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Storing energy from renewable sources this is one of the challenges associated with the energy transition. Credit: Pascal Armbruster, KIT In 2050, 80 percent of the electric power in Germany has to be based on renewable resources. To reach this goal, it is required to store electric power in the form of chemical energy carriers. Within the priority program "Catalysts and Reactors under Dynamic Conditions for Energy Storage and Conversion" (SPP 2080, DynaKat) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), twelve big research consortia study how catalytic reaction systems behave under such conditions. The priority program is coordinated by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Apart from biomass, sun and wind are the most important renewable energy carriers, but their availability is fluctuating considerably. On windy and sunny days, the amount of electric power produced exceeds the amount that can be fed into the grid. This overproduction of wind power and photovoltaic facilities can be stored in chemicals. Later on, electric power can be made available again or the chemicals can be used as sustainable feedstocks for the production of fuels or platform molecules for chemical industry. For the conversion of carbon dioxide or hydrogen into energy-storage molecules, such as methane, hydrocarbons, or alcohols, catalysts, electrochemical cells, and reactors are required. However, the influence of dynamic external conditions on catalytic reaction systems, for example caused by fluctuating wind and solar power, has hardly been studied so far. "But we know that the structure of solid catalysts and, hence, their catalytic activity can vary considerably under changing reaction conditions. This is a highly fascinating scientific topic," says Professor Jan-Dierk Grunwaldt of KIT's Institutes for Chemical Technology and Polymer Chemistry (ITCP) and of Catalysis Research and Technology (IKFT). The holder of the Chair for Chemical Technology and Catalysis coordinates the DFG Priority Program SPP2080 DynaKat in which, apart from KIT, a number of renowned research institutions from all over Germany are involved, like the Forschungszentrum Julich, TU Munich, and several Max Planck Institutes, including the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin. The kickoff meeting with more than 70 participants took place in Karlsruhe in February this year. The twelve interdisciplinary, nationwide research projects are divided into 34 subprojects. Seven of these subprojects are executed by KIT institutes, namely, ITCP, IKFT, and the Institute for Micro Process Engineering (IMVT). DFG will fund the DynaKat Priority Program scheduled for a duration of six years with EUR 8.5 million for three years initially. The institution which attracted the largest number of projects within the SPP2080 is KIT. Schematic representation and overview of activities within the Priority Program 2080: renewable energies are used to produce chemicals and fuels from carbon dioxide and water by electrolysis and catalytic conversion. Credit: Grunwaldt Group, KIT "We want to understand and then optimize the catalytic materials to be efficiently used under dynamic conditions," says Dr. Erisa Saraci, senior scientist at IKFT and co-organizer of the kickoff meeting at KIT. For this purpose, all processes are studied from the phenomena at the atomic level of the catalyst to the spatial distribution of feed concentrations and to temperature variations on the reactor level. For a basic understanding of processes and development of new materials and reactor designs, classical, established experiments as well as latest spectroscopic methods and modeling approaches are applied. Integration of early-career researchers plays an important role in the DynaKat DFG Priority Program. At KIT, a block course on "Technologies and Resources for Renewable Energies: From Wind and Solar to Chemical Energy Carriers" is organized for interested students and doctoral researchers. "In research, you will not advance without networking and team work, as the individual sub-disciplines are highly complex," says Sebastian Weber, doctoral researcher of IKFT/ITCP. Both Saraci and Weber emphasize the importance of exchanging and combining interdisciplinary expertise. "It is all about bundle competencies and advancing the topic in Germany in order to reach a leading position on an international level," says program coordinator Grunwaldt. Explore further Production of renewable gas from waste wood More information: DFG Priority Program SPP 2080 "Catalysts and reactors under dynamic conditions for energy storage and conversion" DFG Priority Program SPP 2080 "Catalysts and reactors under dynamic conditions for energy storage and conversion" www.itcp.kit.edu/spp2080/english/index.php Two suspected illegal miners have been arrested by the Operation Vanguard team within the Wassa Akropong Municipality and Amenfi East District in the Western Region and seized several mining equipment from them. A statement signed by Captain Andy Sowatey, Public Relations Officer of the team and copied to the Ghana News Agency on Tuesday said the suspects were arrested at the weekend. The statement said one of the suspects, a Chinese has been handed over to the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining (IMCIM) Task Force and the Ghanaian, to the Akropong District Police. The statement said two excavators seized on site were also handed over to the IMCIM Task Force. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video In the film, a number was displayed on the screen four times, urging viewers to call a hotline to report corruption. It said: "See corruption? Let us hear from you! SMS 50500 to report corruption to Integrity Nigeria. Tell us your story. Text for FREE. Your number kept secret." Credit: Princeton University A star-studded Nigerian movie about corruptionand a subsequent text-messaging campaign to combat government graftled a record number of citizens in Nigeria to report acts of corruption, according to a study in the journal Science Advances. The two-part campaign generated 241 corruption reports from 106 communities in just seven months, according to the researchers, who are based at Princeton University; the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A previous corruption-reporting campaign yielded less than 140 reports in a full year. Commissioned by the study's authors, the film suggests that people will take positive action to report crime if prompted by role models and given accessible avenues to do so. "The policy messaging of our study is clear: Campaigns should make it easy for people to do the things they are already motivated to do," said Betsy Levy Paluck, professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. "In this case, the texting campaign made it free and simple for people to reply to a message that came to their phone, regarding an issue they found to be important. The film provided role models of other Nigerian citizens reporting corruption by text." Levy Paluck, who is deputy director of Princeton's Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy, conducted the study with Graeme Blair from UCLA and Rebecca Littman from MIT. Through their two-part field experiment, they sought to understand how to persuade a group of people to try a new form of community-minded action. A star-studded Nigerian movie about corruption -- and a subsequent text-messaging campaign to combat government graft -- led a record number of citizens in Nigeria to report acts of corruption, according to a study in the journal Science Advances. Credit: IROKOTV One way to change norm perceptions is to highlight the behavior of role models, whether they are real or fictitious. The researchers wanted to explore how this could be done through film. They commissioned a movie from IROKOTV in Nigeria, the third largest producer of Nollywood films in Nigeria. The two-hour film, "Water of Gold," was written by Kabat Esosa and produced by Iroko Partners with Magic Movies Productions. It starred two big Nigerian stars: Yemi Blaq and Mike Ezuruonye. The movie took place in four states in southeastern Nigeria, home to roughly 14.2 million people. Despite the region's rich supply of crude oil, corruption at the level of international corporations, Nigeria's federal government, and state and local officials have contributed to poverty and under-development or have not translated into local development. Today, local residents name corruption as the top problem faced by their country. The film follows the story of a poor fisherman named Natufe and his rags-to-riches brother Priye. The two are close until Priye leaves their village, eventually returning years later as a wealthy businessman. Against Natufe's wishes, Priye begins to work with corrupt local politicians. Eventually, Natufe becomes outspoken against the corrupt system in which they live. The researchers rolled out two different versions of the film. In both, a number was displayed on the screen four times, urging viewers to call a hotline to report corruption. It said: "See corruption? Let us hear from you! SMS 50500 to report corruption to Integrity Nigeria. Tell us your story. Text for FREE. Your number kept secret." The two-hour film, "Water of Gold," was written by Kabat Esosa and produced by Iroko Partners with Magic Movies Productions. Credit: IROKOTV What differed was the plotline of the film. In the "treatment version," Natufe and a local activist set up a toll-free "short code" telephone number, used for mass text messaging, to encourage community members to report corruption. This took place in six scenes. In the "placebo version," this part of the storyline is removed. In some regions, viewers were able to watch the treatment version of the film, whereas in other regions, viewers were exposed to the placebo version. The second part of the study involved a mass text sent on a random day to all the people who watched the film. This allowed the researchers to study the effect of the messaging before and after the text nudge. All told, the researchers received 3,316 messages from 1,685 different people. Among these, 241 individuals sent concrete corruption reports explicitly mentioning a specific act, person, or institution who had committed malfeasance. People most commonly reported bribes and embezzlement perpetrated by politicians, law enforcement, and those in the education sector. "We were very excited to see this many people send in messages. When we first described the campaign to experts and activists on the ground in Nigeria, they didn't think anyone would participate," Littman said. Seeing the role models of corruption reporters in the film encouraged viewers to report corruption, and separately, individuals who received the text message encouragement were significantly more likely to report corruption. The researchers think the film campaign may have caused reporting due to a perceived shift in norms regarding the community's anger toward corruption. "Our study shows that campaigns can use emotional narratives to mobilize collective action," Paluck said. The paper, "Motivating the adoption of new community-minded behaviors: An empirical test in Nigeria," first appeared March 13 online in Science Advances. Explore further Political corruption scars young voters forever, new research finds More information: G. Blair at University of California, Los Angeles in Los Angeles, CA el al., "Motivating the adoption of new community-minded behaviors: An empirical test in Nigeria," Science Advances (2019). Journal information: Science Advances G. Blair at University of California, Los Angeles in Los Angeles, CA el al., "Motivating the adoption of new community-minded behaviors: An empirical test in Nigeria,"(2019). advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/3/eaau5175 The Italian cargo ship "Grande America" sank off the French Atlantic coast after a fire got out of control French authorities said Wednesday that an Italian cargo ship which sank in the Atlantic was carrying 45 containers of "dangerous materials." "For now the possible pollution risk consists mainly of the 2,200 tons of heavy fuel oil onboard," Jean-Louis Lozier, head of the regional maritime authority, told reporters in Brest on France's Brittany coast. The "Grande America" was en route from Hamburg, Germany, to Casablanca in Morocco when a fire broke out late Sunday. All 27 people onboard were evacuated on Monday night as the fire worsened, causing the ship to sink about 260 kilometres (160 miles) southwest of Penmarc'h on France's Atlantic coast. Lozier said the ship's Italian owner Grimaldi had indicated that 365 shipping containers were onboard, "of which 45 are carrying dangerous materials," as well as around 2,000 vehicles. He declined to identify what might be in the containers. Escaped fuel could begin reaching the French coast along the Gironde and Charente-Maritime departments near Bordeaux in the coming days based on current wind forecasts, Lozier said. Environment minister Francois de Rugy said Tuesday that anti-pollution measures were already being taken. Explore further Italian cargo ship sinks off France's Atlantic coast after fire 2019 AFP Governments around the world are grounding Boeing 737 Max aircraft or barring them from their airspace Ethiopia said Wednesday it would send the black boxes from last weekend's deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash to Europe for analysis as demand grew for urgent answers over the safety of the Boeing 737 MAX 8. The second deadly crash involving the plane type in less than six months prompted governments worldwide to ban Boeing's bestselling jet from their airspace. The move has heaped pressure on the US aerospace giant to provide proof the plane is safe. In Ethiopia, distraught families wept and lit candles as they visited the deep black crater where the plane smashed into a field, killing 157 passengers and crew, an AFP correspondent said. Ethiopian Airlines said it would decide by Thursday which country would examine the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder recovered from ill-fated Flight ET 302, spokesman Asrat Begashaw told AFP. "We are going to send it to Europe, but the country is not specified yet," said Asrat. The airline said Ethiopia does not have the equipment to read the black box data that could provide crucial information about what happened. The Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 was less than four months old when it went down six minutes into a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi on Sunday, disintegrating on impact. Asrat said families of the victims from Kenya, China, America, and Canada, as well as diplomatic staff from embassies, were visiting the crash site. Experts have pointed out similarities with a crash in October when an Indonesian Lion Air jet went down, killing 189 passengers and crew. 'Significant similarities' Both planes reportedly experienced erratic steep climbs and descents as well as fluctuating airspeeds before crashing shortly after takeoff. Questions have honed in on an automated anti-stalling system introduced on the 737 MAX 8, designed to automatically point the nose of the plane downward if it is in danger of stalling. According to the flight data recorder, the pilots of Lion Air Flight 610 struggled to control the aircraft as the automated MCAS system repeatedly pushed the plane's nose down following takeoff. The Ethiopian Airlines pilots reported similar difficulties before their aircraft plunged into the ground. Boeing came in for criticism after the Lion Air crash for allegedly failing to adequately inform 737 pilots about the functioning of the anti-stalling system. According to anonymous pilot reports on a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) database seen by AFP, several American pilots reported problems with the same system in late 2018. Updated graphic on the crash of Ethiopian Airlines ET302 on Sunday During one incident, a co-pilot said that shortly after take-off, when autopilot was engaged, the plane suddenly began pointing downwards. The captain immediately disconnected the autopilot and straightened the plane. Biniyam Demssie, another spokesman for Ethiopian Airlines, told AFP the pilots had received the relevant training. For "every new technology, we provide training at Ethiopian Airlines," he said. Airline CEO Tewolde GebreMariam on Sunday said captain Yared Mulugeta Getachew, 29, was an experienced aviator with more than 8,000 flight hours. Speaking to CNN on Wednesday, Tewolde told CNN Wednesday there were "significant similarities" between the Lion Air and ET 302 crashes. "There are a lot of questions to be answered on the airplane." In a separate interview with the BBC, he called for all Boeing 737 MAX models to be grounded. Banned from the skies A dozen airlines have grounded the plane, while Lebanon, Egypt, Serbia, Vietnam, New Zealand and Hong Kong on Wednesday became the latest countries to ban it from their airspace. All European Union countries, as well as major hubs such as the United Arab Emirates and Australia have already done so. "At this early stage of the related investigation, it cannot be excluded that similar causes may have contributed to both events," the EU aviation agency said. Low-cost airline Norwegian Air Shuttle has said it will demand financial compensation from Boeing as the implications of the mass grounding for the airline industry remained unclear. The United States, however, is resisting calls to ground the MAX series, which is Boeing's fastest-selling model, with more than 5,000 orders placed to date from about 100 customers. "Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft," Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Daniel Elwell said in a statement on Tuesday. There are about 350 MAX 8s in service around the world. Thomas Anthony, head of the Aviation Safety and Security Program at the University of Southern California, said increasing automation of planes means crews have less experience flying manually. "So it's not just a mechanical, it is not just a software problem, but it is a problem of communication and trust," he said. 2019 AFP The intensive care unit of the Department of Internal Medicine at University Hospital Graz was one object of investigation. Credit: Medical University of Graz In Nature Communications, researchers from Graz in Austria have presented initial approaches to preventing the spread of antibiotic resistance in hospitals. The number of people who become ill and die from antibiotic-resistant pathogens is increasing worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) considers understanding the spread of antibiotic resistance and developing countermeasures as one of the most important global challenges. Against this background, Gabriele Berg, who heads the Institute of Environmental Biotechnology at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), has initiated an interdisciplinary cooperation project. The research group investigated microbial controlthe degree of cleaning and hygiene measuresand how it influences the development of resistance. Research was carried out together with national partners of the Medical University of Graz in the framework of the BioTechMed-Graz inter-university cooperation and international partners. A comparison of environments of strong microbial control with those of weak microbial control The researchers compared all existing microorganisms and antibiotic resistances at the intensive care unit of the Department of Internal Medicine at University Hospital Graz, in clean rooms subject to strong microbial control in the aerospace industry and with public and private buildings which have hardly any microbial controls. The analyses show that microbial diversity decreases in areas with high levels of hygiene, but that the diversity of resistances increases. "In environments with strong microbial control in the intensive care unit and industrially used clean rooms, there are increasing antibiotic resistances with a high potential for combining with pathogens," explains Dr. Alexander Mahnert, director of studies at the Institute of Environmental Biotechnology of TU Graz, who is currently conducting research at the Medical University of Graz. Results provide initial measures for the prevention of resistances The results indicate that a stable microbial diversity in clinical areas counteracts the spread of resistances. "The microbial control of pathogens is already being successfully used in cultivated plants and also in humans in the framework of stool transplantation. Our study provides an initial foundation to pursue such ideas in indoor areas in the future," says Berg. Regular airing, houseplants, the deliberate use of useful microorganisms and the reduction of antibacterial cleaning agents could be the first strategies in maintaining or improving microbial diversity. In a subsequent step, the research team at Graz University of Technology would like to develop and implement biotechnological solutions for a tailor-made microbial diversity. More information: Alexander Mahnert et al. Man-made microbial resistances in built environments, Nature Communications (2019). Journal information: Nature Communications Alexander Mahnert et al. Man-made microbial resistances in built environments,(2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-08864-0 The researchers found evidence of cosmic impact at the Pilauco dig site in a suburb of the Osorno province in Chile Credit: Courtesy image When UC Santa Barbara geology professor emeritus James Kennett and colleagues set out years ago to examine signs of a major cosmic impact that occurred toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch, little did they know just how far-reaching the projected climatic effect would be. "It's much more extreme than I ever thought when I started this work," Kennett noted. "The more work that has been done, the more extreme it seems." He's talking about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which postulates that a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth close to 12,800 years ago, causing rapid climatic changes, megafaunal extinctions, sudden human population decrease and cultural shifts and widespread wildfires (biomass burning). The hypothesis suggests a possible triggering mechanism for the abrupt changes in climate at that time, in particular a rapid cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, called the Younger Dryas, amid a general global trend of natural warming and ice sheet melting evidenced by changes in the fossil and sediment record. Controversial from the time it was proposed, the hypothesis even now continues to be contested by those who prefer to attribute the end-Pleistocene reversal in warming entirely to terrestrial causes. But Kennett and fellow stalwarts of the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) Impact Hypothesis, as it is also known, have recently received a major boost: the discovery of a very young, 31-kilometer-wide impact crater beneath the Greenland ice sheet, which they believe may have been one of the many comet fragments that impacted Earth at the onset of the Younger Dryas. Now, in a paper published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, Kennett and colleagues, led by Chilean paleontologist Mario Pino, present further evidence of a cosmic impact, this time far south of the equator, that likely lead to biomass burning, climate change and megafaunal extinctions nearly 13,000 years ago. "We have identified the YDB layer at high latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere at near 41 degrees south, close to the tip of South America," Kennett said. This is a major expansion of the extent of the YDB event." The vast majority of evidence to date, he added, has been found in the Northern Hemisphere. This discovery began several years ago, according to Kennett, when a group of Chilean scientists studying sediment layers at a well-known Quaternary paleontological and archaeological site, Pilauco Bajo, recognized changes known to be associated with YDB impact event. They included a "black mat" layer, 12,800 years in age, that coincided with the disappearance of South American Pleistocene megafauna fossils, an abrupt shift in regional vegetation and a disappearance of human artifacts. "Because the sequencing of these events looked like what had already been described in the YDB papers for North America and Western Europe, the group decided to run analyses of impact-related proxies in search of the YDB layer," Kennett said. This yielded the presence of microscopic spherules interpreted to have been formed by melting due to the extremely high temperatures associated with impact. The layer containing these spherules also show peak concentrations of platinum and gold, and native iron particles rarely found in nature. "Among the most important spherules are those that are chromium-rich," Kennett explained. The Pilauco site spherules contain an unusual level of chromium, an element not found in Northern Hemisphere YDB impact spherules, but in South America. "It turns out that volcanic rocks in the southern Andes can be rich in chromium, and these rocks provided a local source for this chromium," he added. "Thus, the cometary objects must have hit South America as well." Other evidence, which, Kennett noted, is consistent with previous and ongoing documentation of the region by Chilean scientists, pointed to a "very large environmental disruption at about 40 degrees south." These included a large biomass burning event evidenced by, among other things, micro-charcoal and signs of burning in pollen samples collected at the impact layer. "It's by far the biggest burn event in this region we see in the record that spans thousands of years," Kennett said. Furthermore, he went on, the burning coincides with the timing of major YDB-related burning events in North America and western Europe. The sedimentary layers at Pilauco contain a valuable record of pollen and seeds that show change in character of regional vegetationevidence of a shifting climate. However, in contrast to the Northern Hemisphere, where conditions became colder and wetter at the onset of the Younger Dryas, the opposite occurred in the Southern Hemisphere. "The plant assemblages indicate that there was an abrupt and major shift in the vegetation from wet, cold conditions at Pilauco to warm, dry conditions," Kennett said. According to him, the atmospheric zonal climatic belts shifted "like a seesaw," with a synergistic mechanism, bringing warming to the Southern Hemisphere even as the Northern Hemisphere experienced cooling and expanding sea ice. The rapiditywithin a few yearswith which the climate shifted is best attributed to impact-related shifts in atmospheric systems, rather than to the slower oceanic processes, Kennett said. Meanwhile, the impact with its associated major environmental effects, including burning, is thought to have contributed to the extinction of local South American Pleistocene megafaunaincluding giant ground sloths, sabretooth cats, mammoths and elephant-like gomphotheresas well as the termination of the culture similar to the Clovis culture in the north, he added. The amount of bones, artifacts and megafauna-associated fungi that were relatively abundant in the soil at the Pilauco site declined precipitously at the impact layer, indicating a major local disruption. The distance of this recently identified YDB siteabout 6,000 kilometers from the closest well-studied site in South Americaand its correlation with the many Northern Hemispheric sites "greatly expands the extent of the YDB impact event," Kennett said. The sedimentary and paleo-vegetative evidence gathered at the Pilauco site is in line with previous, separate studies conducted by Chilean scientists that indicate a widespread burn and sudden major climate shifts in the region at about YDB onset. This new study further bolsters the hypothesis that a cosmic impact triggered the atmospheric and oceanic conditions of the Younger Dryas, he said. "This is further evidence that the Younger Dryas climatic onset is an extreme global event, with major consequences on the animal life and the human life at the time," Kennett said. "And this Pilauco section is consistent with that." Explore further A cataclysmic event of a certain age More information: Mario Pino et al, Sedimentary record from Patagonia, southern Chile supports cosmic-impact triggering of biomass burning, climate change, and megafaunal extinctions at 12.8 ka, Scientific Reports (2019). Journal information: Scientific Reports Mario Pino et al, Sedimentary record from Patagonia, southern Chile supports cosmic-impact triggering of biomass burning, climate change, and megafaunal extinctions at 12.8 ka,(2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-38089-y Zanzibar - many coastal communities in West Africa are dependent upon living marine resources for their livelihoods. Credit: National Oceanography Centre (NOC) Key areas of the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal and the Pacific should be designated protected areas in order to safeguard vulnerable coastal communities' livelihoods, new research published this week reveals. "Ecological connectivity between the areas beyond national jurisdiction and coastal waters," led by researchers from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), demonstrates that coastal communities in least developed countries (LDCs) are highly dependent on key areas of the 'high seas." These are the central Indian Ocean (the Mascarene Plateau beyond national jurisdiction), the northern Bay of Bengal and the 'high seas pockets' of the Pacific Islands. This is despite their being more than 200 nautical miles from coastlines, which currently are largely ungoverned international waters. These areas are critical to the overall livelihoods of coastal LDCs for employment, food supply and income opportunities. They are also crucial to the life cycles of fish stocks, their development and migration as well as for carbon sequestration, which is a key process for mitigating climate change and sea level rise. Many areas of the high seas are already being impacted by pollution, including from plastic contamination and shipping, overfishing, mining and geoengineering experiments. The research shows how coastal LDCs are directly affected by activities that take place far off their coasts beyond their national boundaries. Researchers found that Kirabati, Liberia, Somalia and Tanzania's coasts are the most connected developing countries to areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). For example, on a timescale of 6 months, 60 percent of Somalia's coast is impacted by waters that originated in the international waters due to ocean connectivity. Ecological connectivity between ABNJ and coastal waters occurs through two distinct processes: passive circulation-driven connectivity and migratory connectivity. Circulation connectivity between coastal waters and ABNJ depends on the prevailing direction, timescale and variability of ocean currents and is responsible for the spread of the larvae of the numerous marine species. The complex ways these various factors can interact means that close proximity of coastal waters to ABNJ is not always a good indicator of strong connectivity. Most coastal regions are connected to other, often remote, regions due to the presence of significant boundary currents or features such as coastal upwelling. Migratory connectivityis the geographic linking of species and populations between one life cycle stage and another. Numerous migratory species of conservation importance, including highly migratory fish such as tuna, travel long distances across the jurisdictions of multiple states and ABNJ. A recent study of the migration of 14 marine predatorsfrom leatherback sea turtles to albatrossfound that, cumulatively, these species visited 86 percent of Pacific states, with some spending up to three-quarters of their annual cycles in ABNJ. The research, which appears in the current issue of Marine Policy, is based on experiments designed to establish the origins of least developed countries' coastal waters. Carried out four times a year from 2005-2014, it used ocean modelling to track the rate at which virtual particles were arriving to the coastal zones from the most closely connected points of the ABNJ. Dr. Ekaterina Popova, senior research scientist, marine systems modelling at the NOC, who led on this research, said: "When the High Seas are viewed from a coastal perspective, they are often considered as remote and inconsequential for the coastal communities whose life is dependent on the living marine resources. However, nothing can be further from the truth. Growing scientific evidence points towards strong ecological connectivity between the High Seas and the coastal zones. Thus when marine protected areas are proposed in the High Seas, their locations must be chosen not only to protect biodiversity within these areas, but also to safeguard interests of poor coastal communities in their downstream zone of influence." Dr. Essam Yassin Mohammed, head of blue economy at IIED and one of the report's authors, said: "The science is clear. These areas of the high seas directly affect the lives of millions of women, children and men living in developing coastal countries. Any treaty governing international waters must prioritise vulnerable people's needs as well as the ecological and biological significance when designating an area for ocean protection. Any activity that is likely to affect coastal areas through ocean circulation and migration connectivity must be given special protection and be subject to environmental impact assessments." On 25 March 2019, the United Nations enters its second round of negotiations, on developing an internationally legally binding instrument (ILBI) to govern the high seas under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of ABNJ. More information: Ekaterina Popova et al. Ecological connectivity between the areas beyond national jurisdiction and coastal waters: Safeguarding interests of coastal communities in developing countries, Marine Policy (2019). Journal information: Marine Policy Ekaterina Popova et al. Ecological connectivity between the areas beyond national jurisdiction and coastal waters: Safeguarding interests of coastal communities in developing countries,(2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2019.02.050 A GPS-collared moose in western Wyoming moves into its desired habitat. New University of Wyoming research has documented interactions between moose and wolves in the region. Credit: Mark Gocke Driven by the need for food, moose in western Wyoming are less likely to change their behavior to avoid wolves as winter progresses, according to new research by University of Wyoming scientists. The findings, published today (March 13) in the journal Ecology, provide new insights into the interactions of the region's apex predators and their prey. The results also highlight the complexity of the relationships between wolves and big-game species, making it difficult to reach general conclusions about whether and how fear of wolves has impacted the ecosystem, the researchers say. "We have known for some time that hungry animals will tolerate the presence of predators in order to forage and avoid starvation, and that phenomenon, called the 'starvation-predation hypothesis,' is supported by our research," says Brendan Oates, now with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, who conducted the research as a UW graduate student. "In this case, close proximity of wolves does cause moose to move, but not enough to drive them from their preferred habitatsespecially late in the winter." Oates is the lead author of the Ecology paper. Co-authors include his UW advisers: Jake Goheen, associate professor in UW's Department of Zoology and Physiology, and Matt Kauffman, a U.S. Geological Survey researcher based at UW. UW's Jerod Merkle, assistant professor in the Department of Zoology and Physiology, also was involved with the research, as were agency personnel from the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The scientists tracked movements of dozens of GPS-collared moose and wolves in Grand Teton National Park and the Bridger-Teton National Forest over a five-year period, detecting 120 unique encounters among 25 individual moose and six wolf packs. An encounter was defined as when moose and wolves were within about 1,600 yards of each other. They found that movements of moose increased in early winter following encounters with wolves, but only when wolves were within about 550 yards. Even then, the moose didn't move from their preferred habitat, which is near streams and marshy areas. Late in the winter, when the moose were presumed to be hungrier, there was no change in the movement rates of the animals in response to wolves in the vicinity. "The unwillingness of moose to abandon preferred habitats following encounters with wolves adds further support for the starvation-predation hypothesis," the researchers wrote. In contrast, previous research has shown that elkthe primary prey of wolves in the regionwill move when wolves approach within about 1,000 yards, even during winter. Elk also move from their preferred habitat to avoid wolves. The difference may be explained simply by the fact that moose are larger than elk and are more likely to stand their ground when approached by wolves, the researchers say. Additionally, the nature of moose's preferred habitatdescribed as "structurally complex"means it could serve as both a good food source and a refuge from wolves. Still, it would be inaccurate to say that the presence of wolves doesn't affect moose movements. "Although moose may be generally less responsive to predation risk from wolves, our detection of a heightened behavioral response during early winter suggests that anti-predator behavior is dynamic within and among species of ungulates," the researchers concluded. Explore further Wolf behaviour undeterred by tailings ponds and pit mines More information: B. A. Oates et al, Antipredator response diminishes during periods of resource deficit for a large herbivore, Ecology (2019). Journal information: Ecology B. A. Oates et al, Antipredator response diminishes during periods of resource deficit for a large herbivore,(2019). DOI: 10.1002/ecy.2618 Courtesy of Torre Guaceto MPA management body. Credit: Giuseppe Affinito Trust, transparency, communication, and fairness in the planning and management of conservation projects may be more important for gaining long-term local support than emphasizing ecological effectiveness, UBC-led research has discovered. In the study, released today in Conservation Letters, researchers surveyed small-scale fishermen in six European countries about their perceptions of and support for marine protected areas (MPAs). "The Mediterranean and Black Seas are fished at biologically unsustainable levels, by the regions' fishing fleet, 80 per cent of which are small-scale fishers," said Nathan Bennett, lead author and research associate in the University of British Columbia's Institute for Ocean and Fisheries and in the ECOSEAS lab at the Universite Cote d'Azur. "Gaining local support for one of the area's common management toolsmarine protected areas (MPAs) - is vital to ensure conservation measures are in place and successful in the long-run." The survey focused on three key factorsecological effectiveness, social impacts, and good governanceand how these related to local support. Overall, respondents were supportive of marine protected areas overall with 29 per cent voicing strong support, and only 5.4 per cent expressing strong opposition. Ecologically, the respondents felt that MPAs had a positive impact for fish abundance and habitat quality. Social impact indicators, including income, livelihoods, food security, knowledge, community social well-being, and connections to nature, were mostly neutral. However, the responses were not as optimistic for the 'fairness of the impacts' or for good governance indicators such as recognition, transparency, accountability, communication, participation, consultation and consent, conflict management, trust, rule of law, and legitimacy. "Results show that for small-scale fishers, perceptions of good governance and social impacts were stronger predictors than ecological effectiveness of their support for conservation efforts." said Bennett. "This has important implications for conservation managers. Building relationships, ensuring transparency, managing conflicts and conducting outreach activities are important investments to ensure local people support conservation." "The take home-message is that working with and communicating to stakeholders will foster support for conservation initiatives," said Paolo Guidetti, senior author and professor at the Universite Cote d'Azur. "We hope that this study will help governments and managers in the Mediterranean Sea, and elsewhere in the world, to create more effective marine protected areas." "Local support for conservation is associated with perceptions of good governance, social impacts, and ecological effectiveness" was published in Conservation Letters. This research is part of the FishMPABlue2 Project which was funded by European Territorial Cooperation Programme MED and co-financed by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). Explore further Halting biodiversity loss in Madagascar requires greater collaboration between researchers and managers More information: Nathan J. Bennett et al, Local support for conservation is associated with perceptions of good governance, social impacts, and ecological effectiveness, Conservation Letters (2019). Journal information: Conservation Letters Nathan J. Bennett et al, Local support for conservation is associated with perceptions of good governance, social impacts, and ecological effectiveness,(2019). DOI: 10.1111/conl.12640 Credit: CC0 Public Domain NASA is putting its money on the moon, preparing for what the space agency says will be the nation's long-awaited, sustainable return to missions outside of Earth's orbit. NASA revealed its $21 billion budget request for the 2020 fiscal year at an event at Kennedy Space Center on Monday afternoon. Setting the stage were the Orion capsule, the first crewed mission of the long-awaited spacecraftand its heavy-lift rocket counterpartthat have long been central to the agency's lunar plans. But in NASA's 2020 budget, Orion and the rocket, called the Space Launch System, will be a smaller part of its plans, as NASA shifts to put a greater focus on the other components that will get American footprints back on the lunar surface. That plan will hinge on one concept: reusability. "We need to drive down cost. We need to increase access. We need to make spaceflight more available to more people," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said as he presented what he called a "strong" budget request from President Donald Trump's administration. Overall, the budget proposal is about $500 million short of what the space agency got in 2019, but it represents a $283 million, or 1.4 percent, increase from the 2019 estimate. The focus for 2020 follows Trump's Space Policy Directive 1, which instructed NASA to return astronauts to the moonand eventually Mars. The budget calls for $363 million to support commercial development of a large lunar lander to carry cargo, and then astronauts, to the surface of the moon. "We are funding human-rated landers to go to the moon for the first time in over 10 years," Bridenstine said. Commercial partnerships are a major part of driving down costs for NASAand companies are already responding to that call. Among them are Lockheed Martin, which has drawn up plans for a lander that could transport up to four astronauts to the lunar surface, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, which also has plans for a "large lunar lander" called "Blue Moon." "We have seen what happens when we, as NASA in low Earth orbit, become one customer of many customers in a robust commercial marketplace," said Bridenstine, speaking of SpaceX's recent success testing its astronaut capsule on a mission to the International Space Station. Commercial partnerships will also be a major part of the development of Gateway, a lunar ISS of sorts. Lockheed Martin at KSC, for instance, has finalized its version of the astronaut module that could go on the Gateway, one of the six companies under contract by NASA to do so. The Gateway, which won't begin to be launched to lunar orbit until the mid-2020s, will orbit the moon and serve as a jumping off point for missions to the surface and later to Mars. Now, as part of NASA's 2020 budget plans, the Gateway will be launched on "competitively procured vehicles" instead of SLS, which NASA bills as its most powerful rocket ever, but which has been behind schedule. "This approach would accelerate commercial lunar delivery capabilities critical to U.S. exploration objectives and speed up the timeline for lunar surface exploration," the budget stated. Meanwhile, Orion and SLS will get a more muted treatment, after cost and schedule overruns with SLS, in particular, have raised questions as to the future of the program. The program will get $1.78 billion under the current proposal, a decrease of more than $300 million from 2019. "The budget proposes reforms to the SLS program to prevent the program's significant cost and schedule challenges from further diverting resources from other exploration activities," the budget request said. Instead, funding for upgrades of the SLS, known as "Block 1B," will be deferred in favor of the completion of the initial version of the SLS rocket and supporting a "reliable SLS and Orion annual flight cadence." The first flight of the SLS was originally slated for 2020, but the budget request now calls for the "early 2020s," suggesting that schedule may change. In terms of planetary science, NASA will allocate $2.6 billion, with about $600 million going to a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa that would launch in 2023. That, too, will now launch on a commercial launch vehicle instead of SLS. But the moon will be the priority, setting the stage for more sophisticated missions to Mars. "The moon is the proving ground, Mars is the horizon," Bridenstine said. "And it requires an all of the above approach." Explore further NASA heading back to Moon soon, and this time to stay 2019 The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, Fla.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. A natural resettlement of little owls in northern Switzerland is generally possible. Credit: Ralph Martin The little owl, Athene noctua, is a small nocturnal owl and is classified as an endangered species on the German Red List. In recent years the existing population of little owls has successfully been stabilized in the south-west of Germany, and in some places numbers are even rising. In neighboring northern Switzerland on the other hand there is still no established population of little owls, even though habitat conditions seem suitable for the species. Now, a team of researchers headed by Severin Hauenstein from the Department of Biometry and Environmental Systems Analysis at the University of Freiburg has researched whether juvenile little owls from Germany could reach and re-colonize northern Switzerland. The scientists have published their results in the peer-reviewed journal Ecological Applications. "It is difficult to predict how animals will disperse", says Hauenstein. To explore the dispersal potential of little owls, he and his colleagues from the Swiss Ornithological Institute in Sempach, Switzerland, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig (iDiv), the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig and the University of Regensburg have developed an individual-based computer model. Using simulations, the researchers are able to assess whether individuals from the currently expanding little owl populations in south-western Germany are able to migrate to suitable habitats in northern Switzerland. Intensive farming and a steady loss of habitat has caused virtual extinction of the little owl in Switzerland. The movement-behavior parameters in the model were estimated using Bayesian statistical inference based on radio telemetry data of juvenile little owls. Amongst other things, the researchers were able to show plausible inter-individual and -sexual behavioral differencesfemale juvenile little owls tend to move more directionally and fly longer distances during the dispersal phase, while their male counterparts are characterized by a tendency to take longer rests, and show a greater attachment to suitable habitat. Hauenstein explains that the findings indicate that the little owl's natural re-colonization of northern Switzerland is generally possible, however there are restrictions, "Fragmented urban areas in particular, such as those around the tri-border area near Basel, appear to limit the movement of juvenile little owls drastically. Besides that, little owls avoid forested areas because that is where their natural enemy, the tawny owl, can be found; they also avoid higher altitudes such as the Swiss Jura, the Black Forest and the Swabian Alb." In the study, the scientists highlight existing but narrow dispersal corridors, for example the lower Aare valley or the Fricktal south-east of Basel. By improving the habitat for the birds there, e.g. by agricultural extensification and nest box provision, it may be possible to expedite the re-colonization of northern Switzerland by the little owl. Explore further Owls against owls in a challenge for survival More information: Severin Hauenstein et al, Calibrating an individual-based movement model to predict functional connectivity for little owls, Ecological Applications (2019). Journal information: Ecological Applications Severin Hauenstein et al, Calibrating an individual-based movement model to predict functional connectivity for little owls,(2019). DOI: 10.1002/eap.1873 Ghanas astute scholar and ethnomusicologist, Emeritus Professor Joseph Hansen Kwabena Nketia has died. The 97-year old man who was regarded as a bridge between Ghanas indigenous and modern culture, died Wednesday. He would have been 98 years on June 22 this year. Family sources confirmed the demise of the Ghanaian patriotic to 3news.com Wednesday afternoon, but declined to give details. He has over 80 classical African music compositions and 200 scholarly publications in English and Twi languages, which he used as a vessel to write more than 20 books. His works have shaped African studies within and outside Ghana. The Kwabena Nketia Centre for Africana Studies on September 27, 2017, organised a festival to celebrate him for his scholarly contributions towards the development African History. Emeritus Prof. Nketias life symbolises the evolution of our nation in the 20th Century. There are many parallels in his lifes story, which mirrors the national endeavours in the country, Asantehene Otumfuor Osei Tutu II said of him at the event. President Nana Akufo-Addo at the same event described him as one of the legends of the ages. He remained intellectually active even at 95 years as he launched his last book publication, Reinstating Traditional Music in Contemporary Contexts, on June 22, 2016. Source: 3news Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Rows of chairs and desks in a classroom setting. Credit: pixabay Perceptions about the social mix and environment of local mainstream schools motivate parents to choose Free Schools for their children, a new study published in the Cambridge Journal of Education finds. A 'traditional' approach to education and smaller class sizes also make such schools more appealing to parents. Dr. Rebecca Morris of the University of Warwick and Dr. Thomas Perry of the University of Birmingham surveyed 346 Free School and non-Free School parents of Year 7 children, then conducted 20 follow-up interviews with Free School parents. The data was collected in 2013-2014, three years after the introduction of the English Free Schools policy that allowed the establishment of new autonomous schools, funded by the state but proposed, developed and run by external sponsors. The researchers found that academic quality and school performance were the central focus for both Free School and non-Free School parents in choosing their child's school. However, as the newly-opened Free Schools had no 'hard' performance data or inspection reports available at the time, the study highlighted how parents used proxiesenvironment and ethos, curriculum, size and social mixto assess potential academic quality and school suitability for their child. 'Not liking other schools' was an 'important' or 'very important' motivator for 80.1% of Free School parents, compared with 60.4% of non-Free School parents. While negative perceptions of other local state schools led some parents to choose a Free School, others drew positive comparisons with private or grammar schools, models that they perceived to be successful and desirable. The avoidance of certain areas or groups of children was also important to some Free School parents. A muddied distinction between school performance and student composition emerged, with parents, in some cases, understanding the two issues synonymously. Almost two thirds (61.0%) of Free School parents said that a traditional approach to schoolingthe promotion of traditional values, an academic curriculum, a smart school uniform and strict disciplinewas 'very important' to them, compared with just over one third (34.3%) of non-Free School parents. School size was also 'very important' to 61.0% of Free School parents but just 24.3% of non-Free School parents. "Since the introduction of the Free Schools programme there have been concerns that the new schools are more likely to attract more advantaged parents and have the potential to contribute to further social segregation between schools," the authors said. "The preferences of many parents for features which make Free Schools socially distinctive or for having an advantaged social intake lend support to these concerns. There is a danger that such impressions of social distinction contribute to a less inclusive school environment and lead to increased clustering of certain groups of children within different schools." More information: Rebecca Morris et al, Private schools for free? Parents' reasons for choosing a new Free School for their child, Cambridge Journal of Education (2019). Rebecca Morris et al, Private schools for free? Parents' reasons for choosing a new Free School for their child,(2019). DOI: 10.1080/0305764X.2019.1571561 Weighing collagen from Neolithic pigs for isotope analysis. Credit: Cardiff University Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of the earliest large-scale celebrations in Britainwith people and animals travelling hundreds of miles for prehistoric feasting rituals. The study, led by Dr. Richard Madgwick of Cardiff University, is the most comprehensive to date and examined the bones of 131 pigs, the prime feasting animals, from four Late Neolithic (c. 2800-2400BC) complexes. Serving the world-famous monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury, the four sitesDurrington Walls, Marden, Mount Pleasant and West Kennet Palisade Enclosureshosted the very first pan-British events, feasts that drew people and animals from across Britain. The results show pig bones excavated from these sites were from animals raised as far away as Scotland, North East England and West Wales, as well as numerous other locations across the British Isles. The researchers believe it may have been important for those attending to contribute animals raised locally at their homes. Before now, the origins of people that took part in rituals at these megalithic monuments and the extent of the population's movements at the time have been long-standing enigmas in British prehistory. Dr. Richard Madgwick, of the School of History, Archaeology and Religion, said: "This study demonstrates a scale of movement and level of social complexity not previously appreciated." "These gatherings could be seen as the first united cultural events of our island, with people from all corners of Britain descending on the areas around Stonehenge to feast on food that had been specially reared and transported from their homes." Laboratory work preparing bone and teeth samples for isotope analysis. Credit: Cardiff University Representing great feats of engineering and labour mobilisation, the Neolithic henge complexes of southern Britain were the focal point for great gatherings in the third millennium BC. Pigs were the prime animal used in feasting and they provide the best indication of where the people who feasted at these sites came from as almost no human remains have been recovered. Using isotope analysis, which identifies chemical signals from the food and water that animals have consumed, the researchers were able to determine geographical areas where the pigs were raised. The study offers the most detailed picture yet of the degree of mobility across Britain at the time of Stonehenge. Dr. Madgwick said: "Arguably the most startling finding is the efforts that participants invested in contributing pigs that they themselves had raised. Procuring them in the vicinity of the feasting sites would have been relatively easy. "Pigs are not nearly as well-suited to movement over distance as cattle and transporting them, either slaughtered or on the hoof, over hundreds or even tens of kilometres, would have required a monumental effort. "This suggests that prescribed contributions were required and that rules dictated that offered pigs must be raised by the feasting participants, accompanying them on their journey, rather than being acquired locally." Dr. Madgwick conducted the research in collaboration with colleagues at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Cardiff University, along with scientists from the NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory at the British Geological Survey, University of Sheffield and University College London. The project was funded by the British Academy as part of a post-doctoral fellowship and was supported by a NERC Isotope Geosciences Facility Steering Committee grant. The study, 'Multi-isotope analysis reveals that feasts in the Stonehenge environs and across Wessex drew people and animals from throughout Britain', funded by the British Academy and NERC is published in Science Advances. Explore further How to feed an invading army thousands of miles from home More information: R. Madgwick el al., "Multi-isotope analysis reveals that feasts in the Stonehenge environs and across Wessex drew people and animals from throughout Britain," Science Advances (2019). advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/3/eaau6078 Journal information: Science Advances R. Madgwick el al., "Multi-isotope analysis reveals that feasts in the Stonehenge environs and across Wessex drew people and animals from throughout Britain,"(2019). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aau6078 Credit: CC0 Public Domain Pest control is one of the vital services provided by insects in agroecosystems. Natural methods relying on biological control agents, such as parasitoid wasps, represent a highly effective way to supress crop pest populations. Conventional practices in agriculture typically involve applying various synthetic pesticides (e.g. insecticides, fungicides, herbicides) simultaneously, in the form of a tank-mixture, to protect crops. However, current standard practices in pesticide risk assessment on biocontrol insects only examine the effects of individual pesticides. Using a hymenopteran parasitoid wasp Aphelinus abdominalis (a globally distributed species widely used in biocontrol) as a model, a team of researchers showed the enhanced effect of a low-concentration insecticide (thiacloprid) treatment when combined with various concentrations of a fungicide (tebuconazole). This work highlights the potential impact on parasitoid mortality and paralysis (a state which inevitably leads to mortality under natural conditions) when these two compounds are tank-mixed for crop protection, with insecticide toxicity generally increasing as the combined fungicide concentration increases. Both of these compounds are commonly tank-mixed and applied in many crops and regions throughout Europe, including, for example, oilseed rape agroecosystems in Estonia. Exposure to the fungicide tebuconazole alone did not seem to affect the parasitoid wasp populations, but combined application with thiacloprid synergistically increased the already toxic effect of this insecticide. The way these compounds act together is still not well understood, but the authors hope this work (along with several previously-published studies showing similar agrochemical synergism in bees) will influence the science and practice of pesticide risk assessment, and encourage a more integrated approach. Thiacloprid belongs to a class of insecticides known as chloronicotinyls, or neonicotinoids. Three other neonicotinoid insecticides (imidacloprid, clothianidin and thiamethoxam) were recently banned for outdoor use in all EU member states. It is a likely result that remaining neonicotinoids such as thiacloprid will increase in use, thus increasing the need for examining its potential impact on nontarget organisms (e.g. beneficial insects), and agroecosystems in general. Published on 22 February 2019 in PLOS ONE, the paper represents a cooperation between members of Estonian University of Life Sciences (Ph.D. student Jonathan Willow, Assoc. Prof. Eve Veromann), Ghent University (Prof. Guy Smagghe) and Cardiff University (Ph.D. student Ana Isabel Silva). Explore further Culprit found for honeybee deaths in California almond groves More information: Jonathan Willow et al, Acute effect of low-dose thiacloprid exposure synergised by tebuconazole in a parasitoid wasp, PLOS ONE (2019). Journal information: PLoS ONE Jonathan Willow et al, Acute effect of low-dose thiacloprid exposure synergised by tebuconazole in a parasitoid wasp,(2019). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0212456 Provided by Estonian Research Council This animation displays a scan of arrow-shaped flakes of a 2D material. Samples were scanned across their electron energy, momentum, and horizontal and vertical coordinates using an X-ray-based technique known as nanoARPES at Berkeley Labs Advanced Light Source. Red represents the highest intensity measured, followed by orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple (least intense). Credit: Roland Koch/Berkeley Lab Nothing is perfect, or so the saying goes, and that's not always a bad thing. In a study at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), scientists learned how nanoscale defects can enhance the properties of an ultrathin, so-called 2-D material. They combined a toolbox of techniques to home in on natural, nanoscale defects formed in the manufacture of tiny flakes of a monolayer material known as tungsten disulfide (WS2) and measured their electronic effects in detail not possible before. "Usually we say that defects are bad for a material," said Christoph Kastl, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry and the lead author of the study, published in the journal ACS Nano. "Here they provide functionality." Tungsten disulfide is a well-studied 2-D material that, like other 2-D materials of its kind, exhibits special properties because of its atomic thinness. It is particularly well-known for its efficiency in absorbing and emitting light, and it is a semiconductor. Members of this family of 2-D materials could serve as high-efficiency computer transistors and as other electronics components, and they also are prime candidates for use in ultrathin, high-efficiency solar cells and LED lighting, as well as in quantum computers. These 2-D materials could also be incorporated in new forms of memory storage and data transfer, such as spintronics and valleytronics, that would revolutionize electronics by making use of materials in new ways to make smaller and more efficient devices. The latest result marks the first comprehensive study at the Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS) involving a technique called nanoARPES, which researchers enlisted to probe the 2-D samples with X-rays. The X-rays knocked out electrons in the sample, allowing researchers to measure their direction and energy. This revealed nanoscale defects and how the electrons interact with each other. The nanoARPES capability is housed in an X-ray beamline, launched in 2016, known as MAESTRO (Microscopic and Electronic Structure Observatory). It is one of dozens of specialized beamlines at the ALS, which produces light in different forms from infrared to X-rays for a variety of simultaneous experiments. "It's a very big advance to get this electronic structure on small length scales," said Eli Rotenberg, a senior staff scientist at the ALS who was a driving force in developing MAESTRO and served as one of the study's leaders. "That matters for real devices." The team also enlisted a technique known as XPS (X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy) to study the chemical makeup of a sample at very small scales; a form of AFM (atomic force microscopy) to view structural details approaching the atomic scale; and a combined form of optical spectroscopy (Raman/photoluminescence spectroscopy) to study how light interacts with the electrons at microscope scales. The various techniques were applied at the Molecular Foundry, where the material was synthesized, and at the ALS. The sample used in the study contained microscopic, roughly triangular flakes, each measuring about 1 to 5 microns (millionths of a meter) across. They were grown atop titanium dioxide crystals using a conventional layering process known as chemical vapor deposition, and the defects were largely concentrated around the edges of the flakes, a signature of the growth process. Most of the experiments focused on a single flake of tungsten disulfide. This image shows an illustration of the atomic structure of a 2D material called tungsten disulfide. Tungsten atoms are shown in blue and sulfur atoms are shown in yellow. The background image, taken by an electron microscope at Berkeley Labs Molecular Foundry, shows groupings of flakes of the material (dark gray) grown by a process called chemical vapor deposition on a titanium dioxide layer (light gray). Credit: Katherine Cochrane/Berkeley Lab Adam Schwartzberg, a staff scientist at the Molecular Foundry who served as a co-lead in the study, said, "It took a combination of multiple types of techniques to pin down what's really going on." He added, "Now that we know what defects we have and what effect they have on the properties of the material, we can use this information to reduce or eliminate defects or if you want the defect, it gives us a way of knowing where the defects are," and provides fresh insight about how to propagate and amplify the defects in the sample-production process. While the concentration of edge defects in the WS2 flakes was generally known before the latest study, Schwartzberg said that their effects on materials performance hadn't previously been studied in such a comprehensive and detailed way. Researchers learned that a 10 percent deficiency in sulfur atoms was associated with the defective edge regions of the samples compared to other regions, and they identified a slighter, 3 percent sulfur deficiency toward the center of the flakes. Researchers also noted a change in the electronic structure and higher abundance of freely moving electrical charge-carriers associated with the high-defect edge areas. For this study, the defects were due to the sample-growth process. Future nanoARPES studies will focus on samples with defects that are induced through chemical processing or other treatments. Researchers hope to control the amount and kinds of atoms that are affected, and the locations where these defects are concentrated in the flakes. Such tiny tweaks could be important for processes like catalysis, which is used to enhance and accelerate many important industrial chemical production processes, and to explore quantum processes that rely on the production of individual particles that serve as information carriers in electronics. This sequence of images shows a variety of energy intensities (white and yellow) at the edges of a 2D material known as tungsten disulfide, as measured via different techniques: photoluminescense intensity (far left); contact potential difference map (second from left); exciton emission intensity (third from left) excitons are pairs consistent of an electrons and their quasiparticle counterpart, called a hole; trion emission intensity (far right) trions are gropus of three charged quasiparticles consistening of either two electrons and a hole or two holes and an electron). Credit: Christoph Kastl/Berkeley Lab Because research of WS2 and related 2-D materials is still in its infancy, there are many unknowns about the roles specific types of defects play in these materials, and Rotenberg noted that there is a world of possibilities for so-called "defect engineering" in these materials. In addition, MAESTRO's nanoARPES has the ability to study the electronic structures of stacks of different types of 2-D material layers. This can help researchers understand how their properties depend on their physical arrangement, and to explore working devices that incorporate 2-D materials. "The unprecedented small scale of the measurements currently approaching 50 nanometers makes nanoARPES a great discovery tool that will be particularly useful to understand new materials as they are invented," Rotenberg said. MAESTRO is one of the priority beamlines to be upgraded as part of the Lab's ALS Upgrade (ALS-U) project, a major undertaking that will produce even brighter, more focused beams of light for experiments. "The ALS-U project will further improve the performance of the nanoARPES technique," Rotenberg said, "making its measurements 10 to 30 times more efficient and significantly improving our ability to reach even shorter length scales." NanoARPES could play an important role in the development of new solar technologies, because it allows researchers to see how nanoscale variations in chemical makeup, number of defects, and other structural features affect the electrons that ultimately govern their performance. These same issues are important for many other complex materials, such as superconductors, magnets, and thermoelectrics which convert temperature to current and vice versa so nanoARPES will also be very useful for these as well. Explore further When semiconductors stick together, materials go quantum More information: Christoph Kastl et al. Effects of Defects on Band Structure and Excitons in WS2 Revealed by Nanoscale Photoemission Spectroscopy, ACS Nano (2019). Journal information: ACS Nano Christoph Kastl et al. Effects of Defects on Band Structure and Excitons in WS2 Revealed by Nanoscale Photoemission Spectroscopy,(2019). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.8b06574 Senior research fellows at the Laboratory of Precision Alloys and Intermetallic Compounds of the Institute of Metal Physics of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences are preparing the second-generation high-temperature superconducting tape samples for the diffractometer survey. Credit:Evgeniy Talantsev An international research team headed by Evgeniy Talantsev, a senior research fellow at the Research and Educational Center of Ural Federal University, has approached the task of increasing the reliability of such complex and expensive facilities as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The results of the experiment were published in the journal Scientific Reports in an article titled "The onset of dissipation in high-temperature superconductors: magnetic hysteresis and field dependence." Evgeniy Talantsev explains, "In the process of working with second-generation high-temperature superconductors at liquid nitrogen temperatures (appr. -190 degrees Celsius), we found that with increasing electric current, the onset of electrical power dissipation is clearly associated with an abrupt transition from the nonlinear behavior of the magnetic field created by the electric current (and measured at any point on the superconductor's surface), to the linear. A linear increase in the magnetic field and a linear increase in current is a common dependence inherent to metals and semiconductors, i.e. materials with a regular linear electrical resistance, to which Ohm's law is applicable. "In other words, even though the electrical resistance of superconductors at the onset of dissipation is about hundreds of billions of times lower than that of the best metal, and is very non-linear and increases tens of millions of times, the behavior of the magnetic field depending on the amperage turned out to be linear and easily detected by regular cryogenic Hall sensors," Talantsev says. The experiment was first conducted without any external applied magnetic field, and therefore, without a multitude of extra effects that occur in superconductors when the external magnetic field is applied. "The experiment without an externally applied magnetic field is very pristine and simple. But no one conducted it and analyzed the results before us: Everyone ran it in a strong magnetic field. The significance of our approach is that we closed all the loopholes in explaining the results as the influence of the external magnetic field. Thus, it is fair to say that the effect that we found is of a fundamental nature," the researcher explains. The scientists also checked if the effect of the transition from nonlinear to linear magnetic field dependence was still present with the increase in current when applying a strong magnetic field to the superconductor. This is important, because the conditions of the technological disaster in the Large Hadron Collider included the external magnetic field being applied. "It turned out that in experiments with external applied magnetic field, the linear characteristics of the superconductor's own magnetic field, observed at the onset of power dissipation are identical to those observed without the external magnetic field. Thus, we have shown that the onset of power dissipation regimes, contrary to the traditional assumptions, are the same with or without the external applied magnetic field," Evgeniy Talantsev says. "In addition, in this paper, we showed that the superconductor remembers its magnetic history forever. All changes that occur even without power dissipation are remembered by the superconductor for an indefinitely long time. This memory effect is called hysteresis." The physical principles of the effect discovered during the experimental observation are to be substantiated theoretically. Here, Evgeniy Talantsev is counting on the assistance of scientists and students of the the Research and Educational Center for Nanomaterials and Nanotechnologies. Meanwhile, Evgeniy Talantsev's team is planning to continue experiments at low temperatures using liquid helium, under conditions almost identical to the conditions of the Large Hadron Collider. The Large Hadron Collider is a 27-kilometer underground facility on the border between Switzerland and France for colliding elementary particles accelerated to near-light speed. By registering the collisions of particles, scientists try to look into the mystery of the creation and the structure of the Universe. These studies are only possible in conditions where the flow of elementary particles is compressed by a strong magnetic field, a million times stronger than the magnetic field of the Earth. Such fields are created using superconductors, in which a giant no-loss electric current circulates in an inductor almost 27 kilometers in length, which is the basis of the LHC. An increase in the energy of colliding particles is possible only if the magnitude of the magnetic field is increased. The productivity of superconductors, in turn, is ensured by cooling with liquid helium: this substance does not harden even at an absolute zero temperature: -273.15 degrees Celsius. In September 2008, due to the uncontrollable behavior of the 27 km superconducting inductance coil at the Large Hadron Collider, the largest technological superconducting disaster, the so-called "Quench," occurredthis was the destruction of the superconducting state of the superconductor. The planned increase in the current in the coil resulted in damage to the LHC's cryogenic system. About six tons of liquid helium evaporated into the atmosphere (note that 1 liter of liquid helium is about 125 grams, and costs about 100 euros). Fortunately, there were no casualties, but the LHC, which suffered significant damage due to uncontrolled energy dissipation, was out of operation for more than a year. European science suffered multi-million-dollar losses. The research paper was published in the Scientific Reports. Explore further Scientists measure exact edge between superconducting and magnetic states More information: E. F. Talantsev et al. The onset of dissipation in high-temperature superconductors: magnetic hysteresis and field dependence, Scientific Reports (2018). Journal information: Scientific Reports E. F. Talantsev et al. The onset of dissipation in high-temperature superconductors: magnetic hysteresis and field dependence,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-32811-6 Pristine Vallerbaek valley during fieldwork. Credit: Tine Rasmussen Strontium isotopes are frequently used in archaeological studies to establish the provenance and migration history of prehistoric people and artifacts. Many of these studies may be based on incorrect data. A Danish study shows that agricultural lime can alter the composition of strontium isotopes dramatically, so that the modern isotopic signature of an area may be very different from the prehistoric signature. A study by researchers at Department of Geoscience, Aarhus University, Denmark now shows that strontium isotopes may often be used incorrectly in archaeological studies, as the widespread use of added (strontium-rich) agricultural lime in low- to non-calcareous soils can dramatically alter the strontium isotopic composition of the surface waters running through them and the plants growing within them. This is of special significance for strontium-isotope based provenance studies, where the strontium isotopic values measured in a prehistoric person's remains or in a given artefact are compared to measured strontium isotopic values in the surrounding, modern environment. Reference maps showing strontium isotope data dominated by the isotopic signature of modern agricultural lime, do not show the true strontium isotopic composition of the area during prehistoric times, when the individual being studied lived., or the object being studied was in created. This can result in erroneous interpretations of the origin and movement of these prehistoric people and artefacts. In their study published in Science Advances, the geologists Erik Thomsen and Rasmus Andreasen from Aarhus University discuss two prominent examples of this: The iconic Bronze Age women, the Egtved Girl and the Skrydstrup Woman, who were found in Denmark in 1921 and 1935 respectively, but were recently (2015 & 2017) interpreted to have originated far away from Denmark. Moreover, the Egtved Girl was interpreted by the study's authors to have traveled back and forth between Denmark and another place, likely her homeland that was believed to be southern Germany. Flyby of Vallerbaek Stream-Karup River with strontium data superimposed. Credit: Rasmus Andreasen These conclusions became a part of a larger framework of ideas of extended European mobility, migration, and trade, during the Bronze Age. Conversely, the strontium data presented in the new study show that these two women could have obtained their strontium isotopic signatures within 10 km of their burial mounds, and do not indicate any cause to suspect that the women came from afar or traveled great distances during their lifetimes. Video summary of study. Credit: Erik Thomsen, Tine Rasmussen, National Museum of Denmark It is noteworthy that the effects of agricultural lime on the strontium isotopic composition demonstrated here is not isolated to this study's field areas in western Denmark but is likely to occur worldwide in arable areas with non-calcareous soils. The use of agricultural lime is ubiquitous in farming on less fertile soils to provide calcium for the plants and adjust soil acidity. Thus, many studies using strontium isotopes for provenance and mobility studies in these farmed low-calcareous areas may well need revision, and researchers should use care when sampling in these areas for such studies, in the future. Explore further The Bronze Age Egtved Girl was not from Denmark More information: E. Thomsen el al., "Agricultural lime disturbs natural strontium isotope variations: Implications for provenance and migration studies," Science Advances (2019). advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/3/eaav8083 Journal information: Science Advances E. Thomsen el al., "Agricultural lime disturbs natural strontium isotope variations: Implications for provenance and migration studies,"(2019). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aav8083 Credit: Flickr, Iain Logan Researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) are unlocking some of the secrets of the Earth's inner core by adapting and further developing a technique used in hospitals around the world. Tomography is the imaging process used in x-rays and ultrasounds, and involves waves passing through the body, before bouncing off body tissue and back to a receiver. ANU researcher Professor Hrvoje Tkalcic said it's also turned out to be a useful way for seismologists to "see" inside the Earthwith a couple of key differences. "This is one of the first attempts at tomography of the Earth's inner core." "In medicine they have an infinite number of sources and receivers they can place around the body, depending on the problem area. Earth scientists have to rely on natural sourcesor earthquakesand seismometers, and we don't have full control over their location." "One of the key things we can measure is the travel time of waves through the planet, from the time a large earthquake happens to when it gets recorded by the instrument on the other side of the globe." This travel time, and how much the waves attenuateor lose energycan provide crucial information about the material they're passing through, in the same way x-rays can pick up abnormal structures in the human body. The ANU team used a ground breaking method to improve the accuracy of their results, employing a complex computer algorithm. "We used what's called a "trans-dimensional" algorithm. This means the dimension of our problem is changing as we are solving it, or in other words the number of unknowns in our problem is itself an unknown," Dr. Tanja Pejic said. "This is a highly computationally complex problem, with individual computations taking weeks to solve on the RSES's Terrawulf computer cluster. The answer is a whole ensemble of solutions, and averaging through it gives us a statistically more likely solution." The study focused on imaging the top layer of the Earth's inner core, an area seen by some scientists as a 'final frontier' of global seismology. "For the past few decades scientists have been locked in a debate about the inner core's formation, dynamics, and growth," Dr. Pejic said. "Our paper shows that the eastern hemisphere is highly attenuative for seismic waves, but also that the western hemisphereinstead of being less attenuativecan be further divided into two regions. One region is potentially even more attenuative than all of the eastern hemisphere, and the other region is less attenuative." Professor Tkalcic said these findings could provide new evidence about the connection between the inner core and other parts of the earth. "We can learn from these tomographic images something about the dynamics of the entire system, the entire core and its connection to the lower mantle and the surface of the Earth." "Even though this is a snapshot of the current view of the Earth, it could help us better understand the formation process of the solid inner core, and even planetary formation in general." "We are slowly getting there." The research has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth. Explore further Researchers confirm Earth's inner core is solid More information: Tanja Pejic et al. Transdimensional Bayesian Attenuation Tomography of the Upper Inner Core, Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth (2019). Tanja Pejic et al. Transdimensional Bayesian Attenuation Tomography of the Upper Inner Core,(2019). DOI: 10.1029/2018JB016400 Mr Samuel Kyei Berko, the Executive Director of the Empowerment Institute, a capacity building organisation, has advised women and young ladies not to think twice about walking out of abusive relationships. He said it was their right to say No' to staying in sexual and domestically violent relationships. Mr Berko said this during a two-day empowerment workshop organised by the United States Embassy, in collaboration with Mobile Web Ghana, for Civil Society and Non-Governmental Organisations to deliberate on better ways to empower women and girls in handling sexual and domestic violence issues. He asked females who suffered such violence to take the bold decisions and say a firm and audible No' to such inhumane treatments meted out to them by society, especially men. Feel that you have the right to say no and once you have, dont stay around waiting to be persuaded to change your mind. Make a definite step by changing the subject and walking away, he said. Speaking on Self-confidence and Self-esteem, Mr Berko said being assertive meant women should be aware of themselves, be true to themselves, build self-esteem, develop positive mind-sets and a can-do attitude, especially in decisions that affected their lives. A lot of work has gone on in the country to promote womens rights but we still feel theres a huge gap that needs to be covered, he added. Mr Berko said women were still not involved in leadership positions and decision-making processes, adding that many were also not economically empowered and well paid in their jobs. He urged the Government to allocate more resources into state agencies that addressed issues of gender balance to enhance the execution of their duties. In organisations, he said empowered women were needed to fight the competitive threat, make good use of advanced technology, and sell their products and services. Ms Myra Michele Brown, the Regional Public Engagement Specialist of the United States Embassy, said strategies would be developed at the end of the workshop to help fight the menace. She said even though the workshop was part of the Embassys way of commemorating the International Womens Day, it had already spearheaded similar activities across the country to empower vulnerable women. Ms Brown said some abused females were insulted and blamed when they narrated their ordeal and tagged as bad girls when they told their stories, however, they were made to understand that they were only victims and not bad girls. She said sexual violence was terrible and could result in depression, drug and alcohol addiction. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Brong-Ahafo, now divided into three regions of Ahafo, Brong and Bono East is currently the nations region with the highest number of irregular migrants, statistics of illegal migration for 2017 has indicated. Mr. Joseph Tapena, the project Coordinator of Black and White Initiative, a humanitarian Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) based in Ghana and Germany told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in an interview on Friday in Sunyani. He cited that out of 4,092 Ghanaian returnees from Libya in 2017, Brong-Ahafo recorded the highest number of 1,562, representing 38.17 percent and Ashanti Region had 601, indicating 13.63 percent. According to the report, Greater Accra, Western, Northern and Upper East Regions recorded 429, 241, 325 and 227 returnees respectively, Mr. Tapena said. He added that the Eastern, Central, Volta and Upper West Regions also had 194, 180, 168 and 159 emigrants in that order. Mr. Tapena expressed worry about the menace of illegal migration and its concomitant consequences and advised the Ghanaian youth to be creative enough to identify job-creation opportunities in the country. This, according to him would enable them (unemployed youth) to enter into self-employment because the trend of job-creation even on global scale now was dependent more on the private sector with governments as facilitators. In another interview, Mr. Wolfgang Lieberknecht, the Founder of Black and White Initiative added that 547 people from the Gulf States, comprising 377 females and 170 males were repatriated in 2017 from Europe. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video 11 hours ago Is Now The Time To Be Brave With Peloton (NASDAQ: PTON)? A 10% move higher during Wednesdays session meant shares of the interactive exercise bike company Peloton (NASDAQ: PTON) were among the best performing of US equities. The jump comes after a torrid couple of weeks for the New York-headquartered company, whove had to watch their shares fall more than 50% since their earnings last month. Read Article Welcome Guest! You Are Here: Home Regional News East About Me Scott Because prophetic scriptures are found throughout the bible, it is obvious that a comprehensive, systematic approach would be useful, if not necessary, for the understanding of prophecy. Past prophecies have been fulfilled in a literal manner, as confirmed by the dating of these writings and historical records of confirmation. These past prophecies also serve as a model of how to interpret future prophecies. A literal view of prophecy clearly indicates a certain sequence of events will occur within a single generation, concluding with the Tribulation and Second Advent and these events will be obvious. The prophetic signs appear to be present in this generation and we believe these signs are revealed in the news from around the world. View my complete profile Once a globetrotting lobbyist and consultant to presidents, Paul Manafort was sentenced Wednesday to federal prison for the second time in seven days, giving him a total sentence of 7 1 / 2 years for his two federal cases. And soon after he left the court hearing in Washington in a wheelchair to return to the cell in Alexandria, Va., where he has been held for nine months , prosecutors in New York announced a 16-count grand jury indictment charging the former Trump campaign chairman with mortgage fraud, falsifying business records and conspiracy. President Trump would not be able to pardon Manafort, 69, on the state charges, which are separate from the federal cases for which Manafort was just sentenced. In court Wednesday, Judge Amy Berman Jackson criticized Manafort and his attorneys for repeatedly casting his hard fall from power as collateral damage from a special counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. This defendant is not public enemy number one, but hes also not a victim either, Jackson said. Theres no question this defendant knew better, and he knew exactly what he was doing. Outside the courthouse, Manafort attorney Kevin Downing called Jacksons 43-month sentence callous, hostile and totally unnecessary. He emphasized that the judge, however, had acknowledged that there was no evidence of any collusion with Russia in this case. As he addressed dozens of reporters, Downing was repeatedly interrupted by protesters shouting, liar! and traitor! Jackson called the defenses repeated claims about the lack of collusion with the Russian government a non-sequitur. Kevin Downing, an attorney for Paul Manafort said after Wednesdays sentencing in Washington, D.C, that the added sentence is callous, hostile and totally unnecessary. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post) The question of whether anyone in Trumps campaign conspired or colluded with the Russian government was not presented in this case, she said. She added that the assertion may not even be accurate, because special counsel Robert S. Mueller IIIs investigation is not over and she found that Manafort had lied to investigators about issues at the heart of the inquiry. Its not appropriate to say investigators havent found anything when you lied to the investigators, she said. At least 20 people from the special counsels office were in the courtroom for the sentencing, a sign of the importance of Manaforts conviction to the investigation. In contrast to Judge T.S. Ellis III, who when sentencing Manafort to 47 months in prison last week in Alexandria said that Manafort has lived an otherwise blameless life, Jackson spent nearly 40 uninterrupted minutes describing the high-flying influence-peddler as a persistent liar who undermined democracy out of personal greed. His crimes were not just a failure to comply with some pesky regulations, she said, but lying to the American people and the American Congress. . . . It is hard to overstate the number of lies and amount of money involved. Manaforts motivation, she added, was not to support a family, but to sustain a lifestyle that was ostentatiously opulent and extravagantly lavish more houses than a family can enjoy, more suits than one man can wear. But she agreed with Ellis that sentencing guidelines in the case were excessive, and said that Manaforts age, the millions he forfeited, and the fact that his finances and career are in tatters minimized the chances that he would offend again. Manafort will receive credit for the nine months he has served. He faced as many as 10 more years in prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States by illegally lobbying in Ukraine and hiding the proceeds overseas, then encouraging witnesses to lie on his behalf. He apologized to all those negatively affected by my actions, acknowledging that he did not express such regret when he was sentenced in Alexandria for bank and tax fraud. Let me be very clear: I accept responsibility for the actions that led me to be here today, and I want to apologize for all I contributed to the impacts on people and institutions. While I cannot change the past, I can work to change the future, Manafort said from hiswheelchair, turning to face Jackson. I want to say to you now, I am sorry for what I have done and for all of the activities that have gotten us here today. He added that nine months in solitary confinement after being jailed on charges of witness tampering gave him new self-awareness. Manafort had been held in protective custody, away from other inmates. Prosecutors questioned whether Manafort was capable of change, depicting him as amastermind of a conspiracy in which he was paid $50 million over more than a decade by a Russian-backed politician and party in Ukraine, and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. His work was corrosive to faith in the political process, both in the United States and abroad, prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said. He served to undermine, not promote, American ideals of honesty, transparency and playing by the rules. Manaforts attempt to cover up his crimes by asking witnesses to lie for him, Weissmann said, is not reflective of somebody who has learned a harsh lesson. It is not a reflection of remorse. It is evidence that something is wrong with sort of a moral compass. Manafort led a sophisticated scheme to avoid a duty all Americans have to pay their taxes, Weissmann said, hiding wealth in 30 foreign bank accounts containing more than $50 million for his work for the government of Ukraine and Deripaska. Downing said his client is genuinely remorseful and has endured a media frenzy that few other defendants in this country have faced. Downing said all sides have sought to spin Manaforts predicament to their political advantage, adding that but for a short stint as campaign manager in a presidential election, I dont think we would be here today. I think the court should consider that, too. Jackson dismissed that argument, telling Manafort, Saying Im sorry I got caught is not an inspiring call for leniency. The investigation of Manafort predated Muellers appointment in 2017, and it wasnt the special counsels office that made Manafort lie to investigators, she said. Manafort asked for mercy on more personal grounds, telling Jackson that he is the sole caregiver to his 66-year-old wife, who has a brain injury. She needs me, and I need her. I ask that you think of this and our need for each other as you deliberate today. Please let my wife and I be together, he said. Jackson acknowledged Manaforts generosity and care for his family and other causes, calling them commendable, and said she did not discount that she did not know everything that there is or will be to Manafort. She found that Manaforts lies included matters material to the Mueller investigation, including interactions with Konstantin Kilimnik, his longtime Russian aide in Ukraine, whom the FBI assessed to have ties to Russian intelligence. Kilimnik has denied having connections to Russian intelligence and is thought to be in Russia. He was indicted with Manafort on charges of conspiring to tamper with witnesses in Manaforts D.C. case but is unlikely to be brought to court because Russia does not extradite its citizens. Those lies, she said, tainted any cooperation he may have genuinely offered. So was he spinning the facts beforehand to get a good deal, or was he spinning the facts afterward to protect other people? Jackson asked. We dont know. The second sentencing follows a legal saga that began in October 2017 when Manafort and his longtime employee and campaign deputy Rick Gates became the first defendants publicly charged in the Mueller investigation . Gates later pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI. He agreed to cooperate with the inquiry and has yet to be sentenced. Manafort faced two federal trials because he exercised his option to keep the tax and bank fraud charges in the state where he lived. At trial in Virginia in August, a jury found him guilty on eight counts and deadlocked on 10 others. But Manafort admitted guilt on all charges in his D.C. plea. Trump has refused to discuss a pardon publicly as Manaforts case worked its way through the federal court system, but the president has called Manafort brave for fighting prosecution. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said in a statement announcing the indictment: No one is beyond the law in New York. Following an investigation commenced by our office in March 2017, a Manhattan grand jury has charged Mr. Manafort with state criminal violations which strike at the heart of New Yorks sovereign interests, including the integrity of our residential mortgage market. This is a developing story that will be updated. Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report. Read more: As the 2020 campaign gets underway, weve heard about a Green New Deal, Medicare for all, breaking up Amazon and universal basic income to name but a few of the ideas raised by Democratic presidential hopefuls. But one issue has been largely absent: foreign policy the potential use of force, great-power competition and the management of alliances that will be more important during the next presidency than it has been in three decades. Maybe I missed it, but I havent heard any of the Democrats running on the argument that he or she is the best person to answer the White House crisis line at 3 in the morning. They all seem inclined to let that call go to voice mail. I hope that doesnt last, because that phone will be ringing. This will be an extraordinarily volatile and confusing time for U.S. foreign policy. Were in the post-post-Cold War era an era when being secretary of state, let alone president, has become a terrible job. (If anyone asks you to become secretary of state, say you had your heart set on secretary of agriculture.) The post-Cold War era had its issues 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan, to be sure but it was in many ways a unipolar belle epoque, in which an American hegemon stifled any serious great-power conflict. The post-post-Cold War era, which has been slowly unfolding since the early 2000s, requires a president to manage and juggle three huge geopolitical trends and the interactions between them all at once. A year ago, Republicans in control of Congress suspended the cap on federal borrowing. The limit was automatically re-imposed on March 1st. Politicians now have a few months to hammer out legislation to raise the cap as the Treasury employs extraordinary measures to fend off default. The federal deficit is mushrooming once again. The 2017 tax cuts have taken a bite out of receipts at the IRS and economic growth has not met expectations. This years borrowing to fill the gap between government tax revenue and expenditures may reach a trillion dollars for the first time since 2012. If Washington politicians follow the usual script, we can expect Republicans to posture as fiscal conservatives and then relent either just before or just after a federal shutdown. Democrats will chastise the GOP for playing politics with Americas sacred responsibility to pay its bills. This drama has played out dozens of times over recent decades and is therefore likely to repeat once more this fall. Perhaps it wont, though. The Associated Press notes that there just arent many people in the Capitol who even pretend to care anymore when it comes to deficits. The AP quoted former Senator Judd Gregg from New Hampshire on Sunday: The president doesnt care. The leadership of the Democratic Party doesnt care. He should also have included Republican leadership, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who have reliably supported metastasizing federal debt. Meanwhile, the socialist Left has touted so-called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as the mechanism to fund the economy-killing Green New Deal and any and all other government boondoggles. At its core, MMT advocates for perpetual money printing to fund government spending. Related: Italy Launches New Welfare Experiment There has already been one government shutdown this year. Congress and the President may decide another one, for the sake of a bit of theater around the borrowing limit, is not a good idea. Genuine conservatives in the Republican Senate are few and far between. President Donald Trump released a portion of his proposed 2020 budget which calls for 5 percent cuts in non-defense domestic discretionary spending. He is requesting $8.6 billion in funding for a wall. Needless to say, he will be vehemently opposed by House Democrats, and many expect Trump to compromise. In any event, should the Presidents budget be enacted, officials estimate the budget might balance by 2034. The borrowing cap is going to be raised as always. Even the will to pretend to fight against limits is fading. 2019 may be the year when the fiction of a federal borrowing limit is removed all together. By Clint Siegner, Money Metals Exchange More Top Reads From Safehaven.com: One of the zero-day flaws (CVE-2019-0797) patched this week by Microsoft has been exploited in targeted attacks by several threats groups, including FruityArmor and SandCat APT groups. This week, Microsoft released Patch Tuesday security updates for March 2019 that address 64 flaws, including two Windows zero-day vulnerabilities exploited in targeted attacks. One of the flaws, tracked as CVE-2019-0808, was disclosed by Googles Threat Analysis Group after it has observed targeted attacks exploiting the issue alongside a recently addressed flaw in Chrome flaw (CVE-2019-5786). The second zero-day, tracked as CVE-2019-0797, was reported to Microsoft by experts at Kaspersky Lab, which states the issue has been exploited by several threat actors, including FruityArmor and SandCat APT groups. FruityArmor is a cyber-espionage group that was first observed in 2016 while targeting activists, researchers, and individuals related to government organizations in Thailand, Iran, Algeria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden. Experts believe FruityArmors activity has been slowly increasing during the last two years, the group In October 2018, FruityArmor exploited another Windows zero-day in targeted attacks aimed at entities in the Middle East. The SandCat APT was discovered by Kaspersky Lab at the end of 2018 when the group used a flaw (CVE-2018-8611) addressed with security updates released by Microsoft in December. The CVE-2018-8611 is a race condition that resides in the Kernel Transaction Manager, and most interesting, it could be used to escape the sandbox of the Chrome and Edge web browsers. The vulnerability was reported to Microsoft by Kaspersky Lab that in two months reported other two Windows zero-days, CVE-2018-8453 and CVE-2018-8589, respectively exploited by FruityArmor and multiple threat actors in attacks mostly aimed at the Middle East. SandCat was also using the FinFisher/FinSpy spyware and the CHAINSHOT malware, we believe this exploit is used by several threat actors including, but possibly not limited to, FruityArmor and SandCat. While FruityArmor is known to have used zero-days before, SandCat is a new APT we discovered only recently. reads the analysis published by Kaspersky Lab. In addition to CVE-2019-0797 and CHAINSHOT , SandCat also uses the FinFisher/FinSpy framework. At the time of writing, Kaspersky Lab does not have any information about the targets of the attacks involving the CVE -2019-0797. The CVE-2019-0797 vulnerability is the fourth zero-day vulnerability actively exploited in recent months by Kaspersky. Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs CVE-2019-0797, hacking) Share this... Linkedin Share this: Twitter Print LinkedIn Facebook More Tumblr Pocket Share On New California Gov to order moratorium on executions in his state | Main | Mapping out next possible celebrity sentencings in wake of indictment in college admissions scandal March 13, 2019 Paul Manafort gets additional (consecutive) 43 months in prison at second sentencing, resulting in 7.5 year total term As reported in this Politico piece, headlined "Paul Manaforts prison sentence was upped to seven-and-a-half years on Wednesday, bringing an end to Robert Muellers most public legal battle and capping a spectacular fall for the globe-trotting GOP consultant and former chairman of the Trump campaign." Here is more: It's the longest sentence by far for anyone ensnared in Muellers nearly two-year-old probe. Manaforts punishment reached its final length after U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Wednesday gave Manafort an additional 43 months in prison for a series of lobbying and witness tampering crimes he pleaded guilty to last fall. Manafort also must serve nearly four years for his conviction in a jury trial for financial fraud crimes in Virginia. Manafort, wearing a dark suit and seated in a wheelchair, issued a full-throated and blunt apology shortly before Jackson handed out his second and final prison sentence in the Mueller case. I am sorry for what I have done and for all the activities that have gotten us here today," said Manafort, contrite and stone-faced. But Jackson swiftly upbraided Manafort's penitence, insinuating that it was insincere and hinting that she believed Manafort had previously calibrated his statements to appeal to President Donald Trump for a pardon the only way out of a multi-year prison sentence at this point for the ex-Trump aide, who turns 70 next month. "Saying I'm sorry I got caught is not an inspiring plea for leniency," Jackson said, exhaustively recounting Manafort's deception and propensity for hiding money in offshore accounts, ducking millions in U.S. taxes, tampering with witnesses and repeatedly failing to come clean when confronted with his behavior. "Why?" she asked. "Not to support a family but to sustain a lifestyle at the most opulent and extravagant level," she said, a reference to the high-end suits, designer clothes, custom rugs and luxury cars that Manafort collected over the years. "More houses than one man can enjoy, more suits than one man can wear."... Manafort made his plea to Jackson about charges brought in the D.C. court, which centered on his lobbying work in Ukraine and conspiring with a suspected Moscow-linked business associate to tamper with potential witnesses. But his shorter-than-anticipated Virginia sentence was hanging over the entire court proceedings. Jackson stressed that she was not there for a "review or revision" of the Virginia sentence, which drew condemnation from some in the legal community who felt the punishment was unfairly brief, given the scope of the crimes and sentencing guidelines that called for Manafort to receive between about 19 and 24 years.... As a result, one major question facing Jackson, an Obama appointee, was whether she would make Manafort serve his D.C. sentence after he completes the punishment from his Virginia case, or whether she would allow him to serve them both concurrently. Manafort has been using a cane and wheelchair in his recent court appearances and has asked for leniency by citing his deteriorating health, as well as the strains of solitary confinement at the Alexandria, Va., detention center. Ultimately, Jackson split her decision, making some of her sentence 30 months concurrent with the Virginia punishment, but ordering that the rest be served consecutively. Manaforts nine months already spent in jail since his bond was revoked last June for witness tampering will count toward his time served, meaning Manafort is on track to be released from federal custody around the end of 2025. By my calculations, if Manafort were to get all available good time credit, he might be eligible for release in 2024. And, thanks to the FIRST STEP Act, Manafort might also eventually be able to earn some additional time off for participating in prison programming (though the particular of "earned" time credits will likely not be fully in place until next year). Some of many prior related posts: March 13, 2019 at 01:51 PM | Permalink Comments Trump hires "the very best" people. Without doubt, Trump's is the most corrupt adminstration in American history. Posted by: anon1 | Mar 13, 2019 4:35:45 PM Without doubt! Posted by: Heather | Mar 13, 2019 6:45:40 PM Doug: Considering that Manafort showed such contempt for the law, while out on bond, makes the sentences, shockingly, lenient. The judge was correct, Manafort's, only, remorse is that he got caught, as confirmed by his continued criminal activity, while on bond. There is no doubt. The first sentence was, shockingly, light. Had the case been in Chicago, New Jersey or Louisiana, I would have said "looks like someone got to the judge". Posted by: Dudley Sharp | Mar 14, 2019 9:32:50 AM Heather and anon1: You're both, completely, ignorant of history. Very common malady, these days. Willful ignorance is not a good trait. Just search government scandals, by US Presidents, the House and Senate and then look at the ones from Louisiana, New Jersey and Chicago. You will be researching for months or years. So far, no confirmed evidence of illegal corruption within the Trump administration. Is there? Many of Trump's personal piccadiloes are horrendous, but that is a different matter, entirely. Posted by: Dudley Sharp | Mar 14, 2019 9:44:34 AM Mr. Dudley, what history books are you reading? The biggest political scandal in American history "without seeing Robert Mueller's report, or knowing what prosecutors with the Southern District of New York have unearthed, or what congressional investigators will find, we already have witnessed the biggest political scandal in American history. Historians tell Axios that the only two scandals that come close to Trump-Russia are Watergate, which led to President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974, and the Teapot Dome scandal of the early 1920s, in which oil barons bribed a corrupt aide to President Warren Harding for petroleum leases. Show less Mueller has already delivered one of the biggest counterintelligence cases in U.S. history, author Garrett Graff points out up there with Aldrich Ames (a former CIA officer convicted in 1994 of being a KGB double agent), or Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (executed in 1953 for spying for the Soviets). Watergate yielded more charges than Mueller has so far: A total of 69 people were charged in Watergate; 48 people and 20 corporations pleaded guilty. Mueller so far has indicted 27 people; seven have been convicted or pleaded guilty. But historians say that both Watergate and Teapot Dome were more limited because a foreign power wasn't a central player, and a much narrower band of potential offenses was under investigation. A fourth notable scandal, the Iran-Contra affair of the mid-1980s in which arms were traded for hostages held by Iran, with the money used to fund rebels in Nicaragua also involved a more limited range of issues. The "biggest" realization might strike Trump supporters as overblown or plain wrong. But consider what we already know about actions of Trump and his associates: Scandal 1: Trump secretly paid hush money to two mistresses on the eve of his presidential victory, and lied about it. His longtime personal lawyer is going to prison after carrying out the scheme on his behalf. The historical parallel: Bill Clinton was impeached (but acquitted by the Senate) for lying under oath about an affair with a White House intern. Clinton impeachment Article 3, passed by the House, was obstruction of justice. Earlier presidents, or their friends, had also been known to pay off mistresses. Scandal 2: During the presidential campaign, Trump confidantes continued negotiating for a tower in Moscow, potentially one of Trump's most lucrative deals ever. He hid this from the public and lied about it. His lawyer is going to prison for making false statements to Congress about the deal. The historical parallel: None. Scandal 3: Russian officials had more than 100 contacts with Trump associates during the campaign and transition, including his son, his closest adviser, his lawyer, and his campaign manager. The Russians offered assistance in undermining Hillary Clinton. The FBI and other government authorities weren't alerted about this effort to subvert our election. The historical parallel: None. Scandal 4: Michael Flynn was national security adviser at the same time U.S. intelligence officials believed he was compromised by the Kremlin. He pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts. The historical parallel: None. Scandal 5: Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, and told NBC's Lester Holt it was at least in part because of the Russia investigation: "[T]his Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story." The historical parallel: In the "Saturday Night Massacre" of 1973, Nixon tried to stop the Watergate investigation by abolishing the office of Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox; and accepting the resignation of Attorney General Elliot Richardson, and firing Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, when they refused to fire Cox. Scandal 6: Trump overruled the advice of his lawyers and intelligence experts, and granted his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a top-secret clearance. This so alarmed his White House chief of staff John Kelly that he recorded his opposition in a memo. Trump and his family repeatedly denied he had interfered. The historical parallel: None. The big picture: Presidential historian Jon Meacham tells us that this "transcends scandal its a national crisis in the sense of a period of elevated stakes, high passions, and possibly permanent consequences." "Were in the midst of making history more than we are reflecting it." Posted by: anon1 | Mar 14, 2019 11:50:56 AM anon1, you've nailed Sharp to the wall. And that's just Trump. What about Kushner, Ivanka, Zinke, Pruitt, Icahn, and the rest of the parasites Trump brought in to suck the blood from the American taxpayer and despoil our environment. Posted by: anon12 | Mar 14, 2019 11:54:48 AM I could not be arsed to read the other commentary, it was so ignorant. But what is obvious is that this sentence is bullshit. Where are the prosecutions of the Podestas? They did exactly the same. Where are the prosecutions of dozens, nay hundreds of Washingtonians? They did the same thing. That these commenters pontificate about some utter nonsense bullshit? Pursue the Podestas, you hypocritital loons! What is wrong with you, you retarded fools? The Podestas are your next target, nes pas? Wait. You don't want to prosecute the Podestas and Hillary Clinton for the exact same crimes you prosecuted Manafort for? What does that say about you? And what does that say about America that you could get away with this crime of not applyng the law equally? What does it say??? Posted by: restless94110 | Mar 14, 2019 8:46:56 PM when will the nightmare of Trump's government be over? Posted by: anon5 | Mar 17, 2019 8:10:52 PM In a little less than two years. Posted by: Emily | Mar 18, 2019 12:52:59 PM Post a comment Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slammed China's mass detention of Muslims but took a lighter hand on North Korea as the State Department released its annual human rights report Wednesday. Iran also came in for harsh criticism while rival Saudi Arabia, cited for many identical domestic rights abuses as well as the murder of US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was given easier treatment. And in a small semantic change, the report appeared to shift the US view of Israel's hold on the Golan Heights seized from Syria in 1967, calling it "Israeli-controlled" instead of "Israeli-occupied" as before. Introducing the annual report, a fact-based country-by-country review, Pompeo excoriated Beijing for its allegedly deteriorating rights situation. China is "in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations," Pompeo said. He said Beijing intensified its campaign of repression against Muslims in the far western province of Xinjiang "to record levels" during 2018. "Today, more than one million Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslims are interned in reeducation camps designed to erase their religious and ethnic identities," he said. "The government also is increasing its persecution against Christians, Tibetans, and anyone who espouses different views from those or advocates those of government -- or advocates change in government." The State Department also singled out Iran, the United States's main adversary in the Middle East, for a human rights record that "remained extremely poor and worsened in several key areas," noting 20 deaths and thousands of arrests in protests during 2018. Tehran was also cited for contributing to rights abuses in Syria through its support for President Bashar al-Assad, and in Yemen for backing the Huthi rebels battling for control of the country. In the Western Hemisphere, Venezuela and Nicaragua came in for strong criticism for extrajudicial murders, disappearances, torture by security forces and denial of basic freedoms. Pompeo assailed Nicaragua for the government's use of snipers and live ammunition to repress protests that the report says left "at least 325 persons dead and more than 2,000 injured" last year. "In Nicaragua, when citizens peacefully protested social security benefits, they were met with sniper fire. Critics of the government have faced a policy of exile, jail, or death," Pompeo said. - North Korea criticism moderated - Pompeo acknowledged that despite extreme abuses in many countries, Washington would work with them if needed. "The policy of this administration is to engage with other governments, regardless of their record, if doing so will further US interests," Pompeo writes in the report's preface. That appeared to extend to North Korea, whose leader Kim Jong Un is being wooed by President Donald Trump, who is aiming to persuade the regime to give up its nuclear weapons. While human rights experts consider Pyongyang one of the worst offenders in the world, Trump barely mentions rights violations when he talks about the country. Last year's report said: "The people of North Korea faced egregious human rights violations by the government in nearly all reporting categories." This year, it abbreviates that line to "Human rights issues included" and then details a familiar list of abuses including unlawful or arbitrary killings by the government, torture, and "substantial interference with" the rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of association. - Semantic signals on Israel? - While the report is generally based on factual reporting, the US can use it to signal changes in its views of other governments. The 2017 report changed its designation for the former "Israel and the Occupied Territories" to "Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza," and stuck with that again this year. But the State Department insisted Wednesday that calling Golan "Israeli-controlled" instead of "Israeli-occupied" was not a policy shift in Israel's favor. "There's no change in our outlook or our policy vis-a-vis these territories and the need for a negotiated settlement there," said Michael Kozak of the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. "What we try to do is to report on the human rights situation in those territories." "And 'occupied territory' has a legal meaning to it; I think what they tried to do is to shift more to just a geographic description." Store owner shows alleged fake money used by suspects to purchase items BINAN, Philippines Officials of Barangay Mamplasan arrested on Tuesday (March 12) two men who were reportedly using fake money to purchase items in some sari-sari stores in the city. The suspects were caught after several store owners complained of receiving a fake P1,000-bill from them. Store owner Rick Nicolas said one of the suspects purchased a cap and two sleeveless undershirts using a fake bill. Peke ang pera (nila). Later ko na nalaman. Tatlo kami dito (na) pare-pareho (ang) serial number. Iisa (ang) serial number, (I only realized later that their money was fake. Three of us here received bills with the same serial number). Nicolas said. Meanwhile, store owner Beverly Villaruel suspected that the mens P1,000 bill was fake when they ignored the change. Hinabol ko pa (sa kanila ang) P76 na sukli. Sabi niya sa akin: Pasensya nagmamadali na kami. Hindi (niya) inabot. Pagbalik ko nagtawag na ako. Sabi ko, baka peke ang pera kasi bakit (iiwan ang sukli), P76 iyon. Bakit iniwanan niya. Pagbalik ko ini-scan ko. Pag scan ko, wala na nga, (I rushed to give them their P76 change. He told me: Im sorry. Were on a rush. But he ignored the change. When I returned I called the authorities. I began to suspect that the money might be fake because why would they leave a P76 change. I scanned the money and I was right), Villaruel said. The suspects were identified as Datujay Abdul and Rolando De Roxas. The police recovered from them seven pieces of P1,000 bills which they concealed inside their under garments. Na-corner kaagad namin . Antimanong lapit ko sa kaniya , umamin kaagad siya na peke nga ( ang ) ibinayad nila , (I was able to corner him. He immediately confessed that his money was fake,) noted Barangay Official Gerald Enriquez. One of the suspects, a Maguindanao resident, said he knew about the supplier of the fake money through social media. He said he was compelled to do the scheme to help a relative in the province. Story continues Authorities remind store owners to be vigilant against swindlers and always check if the paper bills they are receiving are real money. Hindi ko alam saan galing siya, pero sa Alabang kami nagkita. Doon kami nag bayad sa may bus, ang bilis pa, (I do not know where hes from. We just met in Alabang. I paid him inside a bus, it was a brief meeting), suspect Datujay Abdul said. Bago nila tanggapin (ang) pera tingnan muna nila. Kapag alam nilang fake, tumawag kaagad sa police station, (Before you accept the money, check it first. If you notice that its fake, then immediately call the police station), warned PSupt. Danilo Mendoza of Binan City Police. Meanwhile, investigation is underway to track the supplier of the fake bills. Marje Pelayo (with reports from Sherwin Culubong) The post 2 nabbed for using fake money in Laguna appeared first on UNTV News. File photo: Construction work on the NLEX Harbor Link project MANILA, Philippines Malacanang on Wednesday (March 13) assured that the delivery of public services will continue despite the deadlock on the passage of the General Appropriations Bill or the 2019 national budget. The Palace maintains that the Administration is prepared to cushion the impact of a reenacted budget. In a statement, Chief Presidential Legal Counsel and Presidential Spokesperson Salvador S. Panelo said preparations for a reenacted budget have been in place as the Office of the President (OP) has yet to receive the enrolled General Appropriations Bill or GAB for this year despite the approval of the Bicameral Conference Committee of Congress of a version last February 8, 2019. There is a budget impasse due to some constitutional questions raised by both chambers. Only Congress can resolve and break this impasse, explained the Presidential Spokesman. Panelo also pointed out that the Office of the President has submitted the proposed budget as early as July 23, 2018, or 30 days before the deadline imposed by law and has even given its full support to Congress by having Malacanang staff attending committee hearings to make sure that the legislative process would be unhampered and the appropriations bill approved on time. The administration has also refrained from intervening with Congress despite delays in the deliberations on the budget, as a show of respect to the policy of non-interference with other co-equal branches of government. With this, Malacanang called on the Senators and Representatives to resolve the matter, reminding them to deliver to the Filipino people an appropriations law that can aid this government better their lives and help our country move forward. Panelo has given assurance that the President will scrutinize the congress-approved budget once it is submitted to his office, and will sign the same if he finds it in conformity with the constitutional demands. Maris Federez The post Delivery of government service continues despite budget impasse appeared first on UNTV News. Islamic State group fighters launched suicide attacks Wednesday at US-backed Syrian forces in a desperate bid to defend their last scrap of territory after 3,000 of their fellow jihadists surrendered. Despite the attempted counterpunch the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said in an evening statement that its fighters had advanced as they conducted "a large-scale attack on terrorist positions". Four SDF members were killed in clashes on Wednesday, it said. AFP correspondents heard air strikes and artillery fire near the frontline after night fall Wednesday, on a fourth night of bombardment. IS once ruled over millions in a swathe of Syria and Iraq, but it has since lost all that territory except for a riverside slither in the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border. Thousands of men and women have poured out of the pocket in recent weeks, hampering an advance by the SDF, which has paused its offensive multiple times to allow evacuations. Supported by air strikes by the US-led coalition, the SDF resumed shelling on Sunday. They unleashed a deluge of fire on jihadist outposts for three nights in a row, engulfing their makeshift encampment in a ravaging blaze. "IS's final moments have started," SDF official Jiaker Amed told AFP Wednesday. Clashes flared as the SDF worked to thwart any IS fightback. Jihadists "launched two counterattacks today -- one in the morning and another in the afternoon", an SDF official told AFP. "The second one was much stronger" and was launched under the cover of smoke caused by bombing, he said. The official said jihadists were using suicide bombers but his force intercepted them before they reached their target. The jihadists "made no progress and they were stopped," he said. - 'Final hour' - Inside Baghouz, the crackle and thud of gunfire and shelling rang out from the encampment as plumes of thick black smoke rose over the bombed-out IS bastion. Amid the rubble, three SDF fighters lobbed a salvo of mortar shells towards the IS pocket, hours after the first attempted counterattack at daybreak under the cover of a dust storm. On a rooftop near the front line, an AFP correspondent saw a warplane fire two missiles at IS positions. Delil, an SDF fighter, said: "Today, the sandstorm is to their benefit but all coming days are ours." Outside the village, dozens of evacuees sat in clusters on a field dotted with yellow flowers, a day after thousands of the last survivors of the "caliphate" handed themselves over to US-backed forces. After a night of heavy bombardment on Tuesday, SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali said about 3,000 jihadists had handed themselves over to the SDF in the past 24 hours. "The battle is ongoing and the final hour is now closer than ever," he said on Twitter. But an SDF official said on Wednesday that "it appears as though many fighters remain inside" the last pocket. Near the front line on Tuesday night, AFP correspondents saw bright, long streaks of light in the night sky as US-backed forces bombed jihadist outposts. Explosions shook the IS pocket as large fires tore through a cluster of tents and buildings. - 'No freedom of movement' - Coalition spokesman Sean Ryan on Wednesday said IS has no room to manoeuvre. "There is no freedom of movement at night for the enemy," he told AFP. "Combined with the SDF ground movement against the final enclave, progress is being made and their capabilities are being severely destroyed." Since December, about 60,000 people have left the last IS redoubt, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, around a tenth of them suspected jihadists. The exodus has sparked a humanitarian crisis in Kurdish-run camps for the displaced further north, which are struggling to accomodate the mass influx of women and children. The UN's food agency on Tuesday appealed for urgent funding for the Al-Hol camp, which is receiving the bulk of evacuees. At the height of its brutal rule, IS controlled a stretch of land in Syria and Iraq the size of the United Kingdom. The total capture of the Baghouz camp by the SDF would mark the end of the cross-border "caliphate" it proclaimed more than four years ago. But beyond Baghouz, IS retains a presence in eastern Syria's vast Badia desert and sleeper cells in the northeast. The jihadists have continued to claim deadly attacks in SDF-held territory in recent months, and the US military has warned of the need to maintain a "vigilant offensive". Baghouz is the latest major battlefront in Syria's complex civil war, which has killed more than 360,000 people since 2011. The city is predicted to see a compound annual growth rate of 7.4 per cent from 2019-2023 for the e-commerce industry Hong Kong is a city known for its fast-paced lifestyle, upscale fashion and shop-til-you-drop lifestyle. The e-commerce industry is no different. E-commerce plays a very important role in the economy of Hong Kong (HK). Statista expects local e-commerce revenue of around US$4.8 billion in 2019. The same report states that the revenue is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2019-2023) of 7.4 per cent, resulting in a market volume of US$6.4 billion by 2023. This indicates an incredible potential in the e-commerce sector in Hong Kong for the next four years. To find out who are the top e-commerce players in Hong Kong, iPrice recently conducted a market analysis utilising data such as the average total visits (desktop and mobile web) and mobile application rankings (both iOS App Store and Google Play Store). Top 10 e-commerce platforms in Hong Kong as of Q4 2018 RANK MERCHANT DOMAIN TOTAL AVERAGE MONTHLY VISITS (Q4 2018) 1 Tmall https://www.tmall.hk/ 7.9 Million 2 DC Fever https://www.dcfever.com/ 5.6 Million 3 HKTV Mall https://www.hktvmall.com/ 4.4 Million 4 Strawberrynet https://strawberrynet.com/ 2.2 Million 5 Ring HK http://www.ringhk.com/ 1.9 Million 6 Fortress https://www.fortress.com.hk/ 1.5 Million 7 Zalora http://www.zalora.com.hk/ 786,000 8 SaSa http://www.sasa.com/ 756,000 9 Yoho HK https://www.yohomall.hk/ 710,000 10 Ztore https://www.ztore.com/ 610,000 Total average visits (desktop and mobile web) as of Q4 2018. To ensure a fair analysis and comparison, our report focuses on e-commerce companies based in Hong Kong, international companies with an official Hong Kong specific domain and selected international platforms that are most popularly used among consumers in Hong Kong. In Q4 2018, Tmall takes the lead with an average of 7.9 million total monthly visits (desktop and mobile web) compared to DC Fever (5.6 million) and HKTV Mall (4.4 million). Story continues Tmall.hks parent company, Alibaba invested heavily in marketing the Singles Day sales, this would explain the flare in November 2018 with a whopping 10.1 million total visits (desktop and mobile web) in that month alone. However, in December 2018 Tmall experienced a drop of total visits by 3.9 million which could indicate that Christmas Sales is not as big compared to the Singles Day sales. Both DC Fever and HKTV Mall displayed the same pattern as Tmall in November compared to December. However, e-commerce platforms are expected to rebound in January 2019 in conjunction with the pre-Chinese New Year festivities. DC Fever and HKTV Mall experienced a 10 per cent increase in total visits in January 2019. Popular Foreign E-commerce Platforms in Hong Kong MERCHANT DOMAIN JAN 2019 (TOTAL VISITS FROM HK) Taobao https://taobao.com/ 24 Million JD https://www.jd.com/ 5.2 Million Estimated total visits (desktop and mobile web) from Hong Kong in January 2019. Hong Kong consumers are avid shoppers at international e-commerce platforms as well. Among the most visited international e-commerce platforms are China-based websites Taobao and JD. As of January 2019, Taobao has over 601 million in total worldwide visits (desktop and mobile web) and 3.98 per cent of visitors were from Hong Kong. This equivalent to 23.95 million visits from Hong Kong in January 2019, which has a population of 7.5 million as of 2019. In that same month, the top five e-commerce platforms in Hong Kong, notably JD.com (5.2 million), Tmall (7.9 million), DC Fever (4.2 million) and HKTV Mall (4.5 million), garnered lesser total visits as compared to the e-commerce platform by Alibaba. This indicates that Taobao is the most visited e-commerce platform in Hong Kong from the estimation based on SimilarWebs data. According to the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong is now a battlefield for Chinas Singles Day sales. Alibaba, the parent company of Taobao and Tmall, was the first to popularise the Singles Day sales, enjoyed record-breaking US$ 18.26 billion within just 24 hours. Just last year, JD.com had followed the move made by Alibaba Group and had launched their first Singles Day sales in 2018. Jake Yu, head of supply chain from JD.com, said Hong Kong consumers are very picky and have an international mindset. If we can win them over, we can win the rest of the world over. Within the Singles Day sales period which takes place in November, JD.com customers were rewarded with free shipping for shopping on their website and coupons for those new to the online platform. This could explain the rising popularity of JD.com in Hong Kong in recent times and they are most likely to remain as one of the most visited e-commerce platforms in the country. Top Mobile Shopping Apps in Hong Kong On the other hand, consumers purchasing behaviour on desktops and mobile phones are very different. This is evident as studies such as the one conducted by KPMG in 2017 shows that mobile strategies had doubled payment transactions compared to 2016. Therefore, it is vital to analyse the highest-ranking mobile shopping applications to ascertain the top e-commerce players in Hong Kong. This analysis was done by averaging the rankings of the top mobile shopping applications on both Google Play Store and iOS App Store. We ranked the applications according to the highest average rank recorded between 19 November 2018 and 11 February 2019. RANK GOOGLE PLAY STORE IOS APP STORE 1 Taobao Taobao 2 Broadway Lifestyle HKTV Mall 3 Amazon Zalora 4 Mango Mall Rakuten 5 Zalora Tmall 6 JD Amazon 7 Tmall JD 8 Ebay ASOS 9 ASOS Farfetch 10 Farfetch Zara All applications were ranked according to the highest average rank recorded between 19 November 2018 and 11 February 2019. Data were obtained via AppAnnie. From our analysis, Taobao is strong in the lead for both their website and applications on both app stores (Google Play Store and iOS App Store). This reaffirms Taobaos market-leading position in Hong Kong as they are also the most visited (on desktop and mobile web) e-commerce platform according to our estimates. Supporting this claim is KPMG, who confirms that Taobao has been leading the market since 2017 and 45 per cent of online consumers tend to make purchases on the platform owned by Alibaba. Our analysis also indicates that Hong Kong consumers have an affinity towards fashion specific applications such as Zalora, ASOS, and Farfetch. This aligns with the survey by KPMG in 2017, where 62 per cent more likely to purchase fashion products online. Amazon remains as one of the top shopping apps in HK as of Q4 2018 in both app stores. In our analysis, the American-based mobile app is more popular on Android as compared to Apple mobile devices. Predictions for 2019 and Beyond Given that Taobao is currently leading the e-commerce platform according to our estimates in January 2019, it is likely to see as a continuing trend in the remaining months (February and March) of Q1 2019. Solidifying Alibabas leading position in HK would be Tmall as well. This is evident as Tmall garnered more than 10 million in total visits (desktop and mobile web) in January 2019 while DC Fever obtained 4.2 million total visits (desktop and mobile web) in the same month. In the long run, it is very possible to see the prominence of either new or mid-field e-commerce players taking over the leading spots. There is great untapped potential in the Hong Kong e-commerce sector. As stated by Statista, e-commerce revenues are expected to push up to US$6.4 billion by 2023. Moreover, given that the 11.11 sales are still relatively new and increasing rapidly in popularity and demand, this would encourage further participation from new and emerging e-commerce players to gain a big piece of the action. Methodology Data was collected as of February 2019. All data on the total visits on desktop and mobile web in this study were taken from global traffic figures from the respective websites except for Taobao and JD.com. Estimates on total visits from desktop and mobile web on Taobao and JD.com from Hong Kong were based on data by SimilarWeb. Insights based on SimilarWeb data. App Ranking Average ranking of mobile app 19th November 2018 11th February 2019. Source: AppAnnie. The following industries were not included in our analysis: e-ticketing, financial services, rental services, insurance, delivery service, food & beverage, meta-search, couponing, cashback websites and e-commerce platforms who solely provides classified ads/P2P services. E-commerce companies who initiated their business as a physical store were not included in our analysis. *** iPrice Group is a meta-search website operating in Hong Kong and in six countries across South East Asia namely in Malaysia, Singapore , Indonesia , Thailand , Philippines, and Vietnam . Currently, iPrice compares and catalogues more than 500 million products and receives more than 15 million monthly visits across the region. iPrice operates three business lines: price comparison for electronics and health & beauty; product discovery for fashion and home & living; and coupons across all verticals. On a regular basis, iPrice Group releases industry insights on topics pertaining to e-commerce, the tech industry, and startups. Stay tuned to iPrices insights here: https://iprice.hk/trends/insights/ Photo by SHUJA ZED on Unsplash The post Hong Kong e-commerce analysis shows Alibaba is king of the hill appeared first on e27. The World Health Organization (WHO) has lauded the Philippines for passing the Child Safety in Motor Vehicles Act or Republic Act 11229. WHO said in a statement on Wednesday (March 13) that the initiative places the Philippines among the few countries to pass child restraint legislation. President Rodrigo Duterte signed the law on February 22 mandating special protection for child passengers in motor vehicles. It aims to guarantee the safety and welfare of children, aged 12 and below. The new law requires vehicle owners to use restraint systems appropriate for the childs age, height and weight. It also restricts children from sitting in the front seat of motor vehicles. READ: Duterte signs law requiring child restraint system in vehicles The WHO said the newly-signed law that requires mandatory use of child restraints when transporting children is a landmark legislation, and a significant step towards prioritizing the safety of infants and children on Philippine roads, and preventing traffic-related deaths and injuries. The agency reported that more than 600 Filipino children die from road crashes each year. Child restraints keep a child firmly secured in the seat so that in the event of a sudden braking or collision, the child is not thrown against the car interior or ejected from the vehicle. Evidence has shown that child restraints reduce the likelihood of a fatal crash by approximately 70% among infants and between 54-80% among young children, the WHO added. The international health body believes the law will help save the lives of children on roads. With proper implementation and enforcement, this law will save the lives of many children over the next years, the WHO said. We congratulate the legislators and road safety advocates who together have worked hard during the past years to push the passage of this child restraint legislation, the agency added. The WHO also assured to provide support for the Philippine government as it drafts the laws implementing guidelines. WHO is here to continue providing technical support to the Philippine Government, especially as they draft the Implementing Rules and Regulations for RA 11229, the WHO said. Robie de Guzman The post WHO lauds PH for passing child restraint law appeared first on UNTV News. The war of words over the 1962 Water Agreement escalated further yesterday when Malaysias foreign minister Saifuddin Abdullah accused his Singaporean counterpart of making reckless remarks. To think that they were such fast friends the last time they met back in January. The reckless comments were apparently made in Parliament by Singapores Minister of Foreign Affairs Vivian Balakrishnan on March 1, who had been responding to the remarks made by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad the day before. On Feb 28, Mahathir had urged the Johor state government to speak out on its water deal with Singapore a deal that he repeatedly stressed as unfair. The agreement signed in 1962 allows Singapore to draw 250 million gallons of raw water daily from the Johor River at 3 sen per 1,000 gallons. Once it is filtered in Singapore, Malaysia then buys back a portion of that at 50 sen per 1,000 gallons. The Malaysian premier believes that his country got the short end of the stick and called the situation morally wrong. The man made it clear that he wants it changed, even though the government had a chance to revise the prices 25 years after signing the contract. Dr. Balakrishnan dismissed PM Mahathirs comments as strong, emotive words intended to arouse public opinion, and stated that it all just boils down to the fundamental principle of respecting the sanctity of agreements. Since Separation in 1965, Singapore has chosen a different and unique fundamental philosophy of governance, and quite frankly, weve taken a different path of development, he added. Below the belt In Malaysian Parliament yesterday, Saifuddin rebutted Dr. Balakrishnans comments, which he labeled as reckless. The Star reported that the Malaysian foreign minister took issue with how his Singaporean counterpart insinuated that Malaysia has problems with its governance. That is a malicious accusation, it is hitting below the belt, The Star quoted Saifudin. Story continues He also pointed out that a clause in the 1962 Water Agreement mentioned that the prices shall be subject to review after the expiry of 25 years from the date it was signed, and not at 25 years. So I dont understand what English is used by the Singaporean Foreign Minister to interpret it in such a manner, he said. Photo: Osenik via HardwareZone The Malaysian minister affirmed that the priority is to ensure that the state of Johor has ample water supply and does not depend on water from Singapore anymore. If Singapore refuses to negotiate about the water deal, Malaysia will bring it to international arbitration, he added. And when we reach such a level, I hope the lawmakers here will give us the support to do so. This article, Malaysias foreign minister butts heads with Singapore counterpart over reckless comments, originally appeared on Coconuts, Asia's leading alternative media company. Want more Coconuts? Sign up for our newsletters! Chinas foreign ministry has slammed as irresponsible claims by the US top diplomat that China is blocking access to energy beneath the South China Sea. Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in Beijing on Wednesday that Beijing had started consulting Southeast Asian nations about resolving disputes in the South China Sea, and called on non-claimant nations to keep out of the discussions. Nations in the region are capable of resolving and managing the disputes in their own ways, Lu said. Nations outside the region should refrain from stirring up trouble and disrupting the harmonious situation. Without specifying, Lu said an extraterritorial country repeatedly tried to destabilise the region, working against the interests of the countries in the area. Lu was responding to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeos suggestion that China was blocking energy development in the South China Sea through coercive means, preventing Southeast Asian countries from accessing more than US$2.5 trillion in recoverable energy reserves. Addressing top energy firm executives and oil ministers in Houston, Texas, on Tuesday, Pompeo criticised Chinas illegal island building in international waterways, insisting that it was not simply a security matter. By blocking energy development in the South China Sea to coerce, it means China prevents Asean members from accessing more than 2 trillion in recoverable energy resources, he said. To contrast, the United States government promotes energy security for those Southeast Asian nations. We want countries in the region to have access to their own energy. Pompeos remarks were the latest in a recent series of comments in which he has ramped up his laser-focused criticism of China. Last week, in Iowa, he said projects under Chinas Belt and Road Initiative for infrastructure were almost certainly designed for foreclosure. In a meeting with Iowa farmers affected by the US trade war with China, Pompeo also accused China of stealing sensitive technology essential to farming, citing two cases involving genetically modified rice and corn seeds. Story continues In his latest comments in Houston, Pompeo went on to say that the US wanted to create partnerships with Southeast Asian countries. We want transparent transactions, not debt traps, he said. We explore responsibly. China doesnt play by that same set of rules. Pompeo went on to criticise China for what he called debt diplomacy, claiming Chinese companies are the sole beneficiaries of their overseas investment. China often ships in its own labour, creating jobs for Chinese workers rather than for those in the local economy in places such as Africa, he said. Its using the debt trap to put these countries in a place where it isnt a commercial transaction. Its a political transaction designed to bring harm and political influence in the country in which theyre operating. Pompeo then urged the oil industry to work with Washington to promote the American model, and to punish what he called bad actors. We need to roll up our sleeves and compete by facilitating investments all across the world and encouraging partners to buy from us, and by punishing the bad actors, he urged. More from South China Morning Post: This article Beijing hits back at US Secretary of State Mike Pompeos irresponsible South China Sea energy claims first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2019. Bangsamoro Transition Commission (BTC) chairman Ghazali Jaafar MANILA, Philippines Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) first vice chair and Bangsamoro Transition Commission (BTC) chairman Ghazali Jaafar has passed away in Davao City on Wednesday (March 13). He was 75. This was confirmed by the BTC on its Facebook page. In an interview, MNLF Chairman Al Haj Murad Ebrahim said Jaafar had been suffering from illness for a few months already. His remains will be transported to his hometown in Sultan Kudarat and will be laid to rest in accordance with Muslim funeral traditions. The Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (OPAPP) Secretary and Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Chief Carlito Galvez, in a statement, expressed deepest sympathies and condolences to Jaafars family and relatives. Despite his deteriorating health condition, Vice Chair Jaafar still proceeded and joined the massive campaign for the passage and eventual ratification of BOL, he said noting of the MILF vice chairs efforts to attain long-lasting peace in Mindanao. Jaafar spent most of his life with the MILF as its spokesperson and political affairs chief. He was supposed to serve as the interim speaker of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) Marje Pelayo The post MILF vice chair Ghazali Jaafar passes away appeared first on UNTV News. Missing Hong Kong couple believed to have been on fishing boat that sank after tanker collision A Hong Kong couple are believed to have been on board the fishing boat which sank in a collision with a mainland oil tanker near the citys maritime border on Tuesday. Their daughter went to Aberdeen police station on Wednesday afternoon to report them missing. Initial investigation showed the couple were on board a fishing boat when they left Aberdeen Typhoon Shelter on Monday, and they were expected to return on Tuesday, a law enforcement source said. Their daughter sought help from police after the pair did not return home and she lost contact with them. Officers are investigating whether the couples vessel was involved in Tuesdays incident. On Wednesday, an air and sea search by local and mainland authorities was continuing. There has been no sign of any survivors. The collision happened 1.8km outside Hong Kongs maritime border at about 8.45am on Tuesday, sparking an air and sea operation. The fishing boat reportedly sank quickly after the collision. Local authorities do not know if it was a Hong Kong boat or how many people had been on board. None of the 13 crew members on the 97-metre tanker, a mainland Chinese-registered vessel called Tian Yi 5, were injured. The tanker was heading to Shenzhen from Qingdao at the time of the incident. Three of the crew boarded the tankers lifeboat to search for survivors before emergency crews arrived. Ten police boats left Hong Kongs waters and mounted a four-hour search before returning to the city. This article Missing Hong Kong couple believed to have been on fishing boat that sank after tanker collision first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2019. The head of the Polisario Front, Brahim Ghali and his lieutenants have withdrawn into silence since the beginning of the Algerians mass demonstrations against the candidacy to a fifth term of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a fervent defender of the separatists independence claims. Polisario leaders who have suffered so many diplomatic setbacks lately, are now holding their breath, as no one can predict the outcome of the tumultuous situation currently prevailing in Algeria. Usually very talkative, Brahim Ghali and his cronies withdrew into silence and made no comment whatsoever on whats happening in Algeria. At a time when the personal envoy of the UN Secretary-General for the Sahara, Horst Kohler is preparing for March 21 and 22 the second Geneva Round Table to revive the talks on the Sahara issue, the Polisario fears to be let down by Algeria. Actually, given the events shaking Algeria and the protesters promise to stage huge demonstrations again on Friday, analysts do not discard an upheaval in the presidential palace, with other strongmen of the regime following the footsteps of the head of government Ahmed Ouyahya who stepped down Monday. Besides, the Algerian Foreign Minister will most likely not attend the Geneva round table in view of the developments in his country. Maybe this is the reason why Brahim Ghali dispatched Monday, March 11, his valet MHamed Khaddad, to Nouakchott to hand a written message on the Sahara issue to the Mauritanian president, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz. Is he asking for the Mauritanian presidents support in Geneva? Maybe. In Latin America, the Polisario is also losing a fervent defender of its separatist theses: the controversial president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro who is challenged by huge demonstrations demanding his departure. With all these development, the Polisario is at bay and no longer knows where to turn. Lawyers for Patrick Ho Chi-ping on Tuesday submitted nearly 150 letters to a US court, including from his movie star wife and 92-year-old mother, seeking leniency for the disgraced former Hong Kong minister who faces sentencing for a multimillion dollar bribery scheme in Africa. But as the defence team presented an array of personal references, Hos wife said that some of her husbands old friends and allies had shied away from voicing their support over fears of offending the US government. Lawyers asked a judge of the Southern District of New York to release Ho, 69, on time served, arguing that the 16 months he had spent in jail were adequate punishment for his conviction last year on seven counts of corruption and money laundering. His prosecution and imprisonment have already exacted a profound toll on him, lawyer Edward Kim wrote in the court filing. His personal life has been entirely upended, his professional reputation and career have been ruined, he faces serious financial penalties. He continued: Patricks fall from grace has been public and severe, and this case already provides a powerful and more than adequate deterrent. The defence submitted 149 letters to the court from family, friends, local politicians and former patients from Hos time as an accomplished ophthalmologist. There were no letters from incumbent Beijing or Hong Kong officials, or from any heavyweights from the citys pro-Beijing camp. Among those who did write were Hos mother and his wife of 22 years, Sibelle Hu Hui-chung. Hu wrote she had lost her own mother while Ho was in custody and had been forced to seek work at age 61. Words cannot express my pain and sorrow these days. Several times, I have thought of ending my life, Hu, a former movie star in Taiwan, said in a five-page letter handwritten in Chinese. Ho Cheung Chan-Ha said her son suffered from deteriorating health and a brain illness that caused him great pain at night. Story continues I am always fearful that he may pass away in prison, she wrote. If I can see my son one more time, I can die in peace. In December, Ho was found guilty by a New York federal jury on seven of eight counts of bribery and money laundering in a scheme to secure oil rights in Chad and Uganda for CEFC China Energy, the Chinese oil conglomerate. The convictions were all linked to US$2.9 million in bribes he offered to state leaders and top diplomats, including President Idriss Deby of Chad, Senegalese diplomat Cheikh Gadio and Ugandas foreign minister, Sam Kutesa. Ho claimed he was used to get to the big tiger and had sought help from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, according to court documents. Hos sentence will be handed down on March 25. The maximum penalty for each bribery count is five years imprisonment and 20 years for money laundering. In 2002, Ho was appointed Hong Kongs secretary for home affairs by former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa. Ho stepped down in 2007 to help lead a think tank funded by CEFC China, which was meant to promote Beijings Belt and Road Initiative, a global trade strategy. Ho was a member of the National Peoples Political Consultative Conference, mainland Chinas top consultative body, from 1993 to 2013. The letters of support offered a glimpse into Hos wide network of associates made through his careers in medicine and public service. More than 30 doctors from Hong Kong and mainland China urged the court for a lighter sentence, as did Hong Kongs former Anglican archbishop Peter Kwong Kong-kit and his successor Archbishop Paul Kwong. In the ophthalmic communities of Hong Kong and China, he is a legend and a role model for us, said Dennis Lam Shun-chiu, one of Hong Kongs leading ophthalmologists. Lam praised Ho for using his own money to set up an eye clinic at Chinese University. John Hofmeister, a former president of Shell Oil Company, said he met Ho while serving on the US Energy Security Council, which advises the US president on energy and security issues. He said Ho arranged the councils visits to Beijing and Shanghai, and had paid his own way during the trip. Ho received fewer than 20 letters from Hong Kong politicians and former officials. Among those who wrote in Hos defence were former aid Shelley Lee Lai-kuen, successor Tsang Tat-shing and six former or current lawmakers from the pro-Beijing camp, including Ip Kwok-him. Tung, the former chief executive, did not lend his support. There will be another window for submitting letters after the prosecutions response. Hos wife said several old friends and allies turned down requests for supporting letters, even though he had helped them in the past. Thats because they feel afraid of offending the United States government, because Chi-Ping is now in a difficult situation, and because Chi-Ping will no longer have a future and has no useful value any more, Hu wrote. She also hinted that Ho, a long-time Beijing loyalist, no longer had any political ambitions. Even if he could eventually come home, there is not much he can do other than to just live out his life in retirement. This article Patrick Hos friends and family beg US court for leniency as Africa bribery sentence looms first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2019. COTABATO, Philippines (AP) Philippine troops, backed by airstrikes and artillery fire, killed several militants aligned with the Islamic State group in a new offensive in the marshy heartland of the country's south, the military said Tuesday. Army Maj. Gen. Cirilito Sobejana said several key commanders, including a long-wanted Singaporean militant, were among the more than 100 militants who came under attack at daybreak Monday in the hilly hinterland near Shariff Saydona Mustapha town in Maguindanao province. One soldier was killed and seven others were wounded in the firefight in the village of Inaladan, where rocket-firing air force helicopters and bomber planes pounded a militant camp before army troops came in. The militants split into groups and withdrew, Sobejana said. Sporadic gunbattles were continuing Tuesday as troops pursued the militants belonging to the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters and the Dawla Islamiya, two small groups aligned with the Islamic State group. At least six bodies of suspected militants were found at the scene of the clashes, military officials said. Sobejana said up to 20 militants may have been killed but troops were still attempting to take full control of the camp, where most of the slain gunmen were hit by the airstrikes and artillery fire. Troops were checking if Singaporean militant Muhamad Ali Abdul Rahiman, also known as Muawiya, along with local commander Esmael Abdulmalik, who uses the nom de guerre Abu Toraype, and bomb-maker Salahudin Hassan were among the wounded or slain militants, he said. "The objective is to eliminate these armed groups once and for all," Sobejana said. The militants have been blamed for recent deadly bombings in the region and shootings that killed four soldiers in Maguindanao. The militants include former members of the largest Muslim rebel group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which signed a peace deal with the government and whose leaders now head a new Muslim autonomous region that includes Maguindanao. Story continues Thousands of fighters in the Moro Islamic Liberation Front are to be demobilized under the peace deal. Sobejana said the Moro rebels were not tapped by the military to help fight the extremists to help them shift to normal life. Among the militants targeted by Monday's offensive were survivors of a deadly siege of southern Marawi city by Islamic State group-aligned militants in May 2017 which was quelled by troops after five months. The militants suffered their largest loss of commanders in Marawi in a serious blow to the Islamic State group's effort to gain a foothold in the region. In a separate army offensive Monday, troops clashed with more than 20 Muslim militants near Pagayawan town in Lanao del Sur province not far from Marawi in fighting that killed two soldiers and two militants, army Col. Romeo Brawner said. ___ Associated Press writer Jim Gomez in Manila contributed to this report. MeDKAD offers an automation system to help companies manage the medical benefits of their employees in real time The MeDKAD team In May 2017, the Malaysian police busted a fake medical certificate (MC) racket and arrested four people. Investigations revealed that the syndicate, which sold fake MC for RM25 each to those working at government departments and the private sectors in Johor Bahru and Singapore, had been active for a year. Forging of MCs is an issue many companies are grappling with, not just in Malaysia but globally. As per an estimate, annually over US$2.9 billion cost in hefty overtime payments to workers forced to take on their sick colleagues shift. How do employees forge their MC? They call the HR executive of their employer to inform that they will be on MC today. But employees visit the hospital/clinic only later in the evening to get their fake MC done. This usually happens during long holiday weekend, as they intend to spend an extra day of holiday with fake MCs. As of now, there is no effective mechanism to verify the claims made by an employee. A team of four entrepreneurs in Malaysia have come up with a solution to address this problem. MeDKAD, as it is called, offers an automation system to help companies manage the medical benefits of their employees in real time. Also Read: Go-Jek facilitates drivers with medical teleconsultation via Doctor Anywhere Since MeDKAD is in real-time, the system sends alerts to HR when their employees visit our panels (partner hospitals, clinics, etc.). So, if an employee calls his office to say he/she is on an MC, the HR executive will be able to validate the claims immediately, and our system will notify the HR whether or not our panel has issued an MC to him or her, Ahmad Azlan, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of the Selangor-based startup, told e27. Our system also triggers an alert if there are any irregularities in the clinic visit by an employee, say, for example, when he/she makes a visit to another clinic on the same day. Our team will then intervene and call the employee to know the reason for the second visit, he adds. Story continues MeDKAD was established in 2016 by Azlan, Ezuan Yaacob (CEO), Abdul Malik (CFO) and Fareez Idham (COO). Ezuan, Azlan and Malik have immense experience working with government-linked companies and were frequent users of their companys medical benefits which were managed by a Third-Party Administrator (TPA). Idham previously worked for a TPA company and was in charge of its medical benefits in-house. The MeDKAD app was launched in September 2017, but went live only in January 2018. How the app works The employees need to download MeDKADs mobile app (available on iOS and Android). They can then generate a QR code for verification during their visits to a MeDKAD panel. Once their credentials are verified by the panels using MeDKADs web application, the employees will be able to proceed with the consultation and will receive their medicines as prescribed. No payment is required. In the beginning, MeDKAD found it hard to convince clinics and hospitals to become its partners. Gradually, they managed to secure clinics and made sure that disbursements were done within five business days. Words traveled fast and we continued to bag more partners. Our early adopters recommended our service to new people and we started to grow. Thanks to our hard work, we also got recognised as a registered Managed Care Organisation (MCO) by the Malaysian Ministry of Health, he said. Currently, MeDKAD has 80 clients with over 10,000 users. It has 1,000 clinics, 52 hospitals, 184 optical centres, and 74 dentals in its network across Malaysia. MeDKAD charges a commission from companies for each visit by their employees to its panels. According to Azlan, MeDKAD has just scratched the surface in Malaysia in terms of TPA market, which is valued at RM160 million by Ekuinas. Going forward, MeDKAD wants to secure clients with 5-digit user base (partners with staff strength of 10,000-plus). In December 2016, MeDKAD secured RM150,000 in grants from Cradles CIP Catalyst programme. In May 2017, it received another RM500,000 grant from SUPERB TERAJU. A year later, MeDKAD raised RM300,000 from angels for 10 per cent equity and another RM200,000 in commercialisation grant from HIP6, an SME corporate programme under Yayasan Inovasi Malaysia. The venture is currently in the process of closing its seed round by April 2019 with a strategic corporate investors. We are also considering to raise Series A by Q4 2019 for our regional expansion, he added. 1RM=US$0.24 The post This startup could spoil the holiday you obtained by submitting fake medical certificate appeared first on e27. By Andy Sullivan and Jan Wolfe WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sentenced to about 3-1/2 more years in prison and was hit with a fresh set of criminal charges in New York on Wednesday, drawing sympathy from a president who declined to say whether he would issue a pardon. Manafort, 69, is due to spend a total of 7-1/2 years behind bars when the sentence by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson for crimes related to secret lobbying and witness tampering is combined with another of just under four years issued by a different judge in Virginia last Thursday. He has already served nine months of the sentence. The veteran Republican operative has received the longest prison term yet in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election. It amounts to a sharp fall for a man who earned millions of dollars as an international political consultant to pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine and dodged more than $6 million in taxes by hiding his income in offshore bank accounts. That money could have been used by the government to help pay for veterans' hospitals and other services, Jackson told Manafort, who was brought into the courtroom in a wheelchair because of a condition called gout. "Why? Not to support a family, but to sustain a lifestyle at the most opulent and extravagant level possible. More houses than one family can enjoy. More suits than one man can wear," Jackson said, referring to Manafort's previous luxuries. Just minutes after Jackson read her sentence, the Manhattan district attorney unveiled a separate indictment charging Manafort with residential mortgage fraud and other New York state crimes, which unlike the federal charges cannot be erased by a presidential pardon. Manafort faces up to 25 years in prison on the three most serious charges. "No one is beyond the law in New York," District Attorney Cyrus Vance, a Democrat, said in a statement. Story continues Trump, who in November said he had not ruled out giving Manafort a pardon, on Wednesday said that "I have not even given it a thought." "It's not something that's right now in my mind. I do feel badly for Paul Manafort - that I can tell you," the Republican president told reporters at the White House. Trump has called Mueller's investigation a "witch hunt," and Manafort's lawyers have argued that this case does nothing to prove that the campaign conspired with Russia. They have noted that the crimes sending him to prison stem from his lobbying work, not his time with Trump's campaign. "But for a short stint as a campaign manager in a presidential election, I don't think we'd be here today," Manafort lawyer Kevin Downing told Jackson. Jackson suggested that the "'no collusion' mantra" was simply aimed at winning a pardon from Trump. Jackson added that Mueller's ongoing investigation could yet reveal that Manafort worked with Russian interests during the campaign. 'A HARSH LESSON' Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said Manafort had engaged in an extensive cover-up that deceived the U.S. government and the American public, and continued to try to undermine the investigation even after he pleaded guilty. "He engaged in crime again and again. He has not learned a harsh lesson. He has served to undermine, not promote, American ideals," Weissmann said. Manafort, clad in a dark suit and a purple tie instead of the jail garb he wore to his Virginia sentencing, apologised for his actions and asked Jackson not to impose any prison time on top of the 47 months he was given by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis in Alexandria. "This case has taken everything from me already - my properties, my cash, my life insurance, trust accounts for my children and grandchildren, and even more," Manafort said. "Saying 'I'm sorry I got caught' is not an inspiring plea for leniency," the judge told Manafort. She also said Manafort's expression of remorse rang hollow. "It's hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved," Jackson said. Jackson had ruled on Feb. 13 that Manafort breached his agreement to cooperate with Mueller's office by lying to prosecutors about matters pertinent to the Russia probe including his interactions with a business partner they have said has ties to Russian intelligence. Jackson's sentence builds on what many legal experts called the surprisingly lenient sentence from Ellis when Manafort was sentenced for his August 2018 tax fraud and bank fraud convictions - far shy of federal sentencing guidelines. Ellis last week praised Manafort's "otherwise blameless life." The sentence Manafort received from Jackson was well below the 10 years he could have faced for the two criminal counts to which he pleaded guilty in September 2018. Jackson showed little sympathy for the argument by Manafort's lawyers that his failure to disclose lobbying activity on behalf of Ukraine was little more than a paperwork error. In a chaotic scene outside the courthouse, Downing said Mueller's two cases against his client had shown "no evidence of any collusion with Russians," as protesters called Manafort a "traitor" and a "liar." Mueller is preparing to submit to U.S. Attorney General William Barr a report on his investigation into whether Trump's campaign conspired with Russia and whether Trump has unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe. Trump has denied collusion and obstruction and Russia has denied U.S. intelligence findings that it interfered in the election to boost Trump. Manafort is one of the 34 people and three companies charged by Mueller. Others who have pleaded guilty include former campaign aides Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos, former U.S. national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen. Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone has pleaded not guilty. (Additional reporting by Karen Freifeld and Nathan Layne in New York; Editing by Will Dunham) SNc Channels: Search About Salem-News.com Feb-20-2019 20:57 TweetFollow @OregonNews Salem Man Sentenced to 6 Years in Prison for Dealing Meth and Cockfighting Aispuros ranch in Scio, Oregon revealed more 200 roosters being raised and trained for fighting. Photos: U.S. District Attorney's Office (PORTLAND, Ore.) - 37-year old Arturo Aispuro, of Salem, Oregon, was sentenced today to 78 months in federal prison and 5 years of supervised release for conspiring to distribute methamphetamine. He also received a concurrent sentence of 60 months for abusing hundreds of roosters by raising and training them to participate in cockfights. According to court documents, Aispuro was a member of a drug trafficking conspiracy operating in and around Salem. In April 2017, with the assistance of a co-conspirator, Aispuro sold 882 grams of methamphetamine to a confidential informant in Milwaukie, Oregon. Later, in May 2017, law enforcement intercepted Aispuro while he was transporting an additional 442 grams of methamphetamine for further distribution. In June 2017, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents executed a search warrant on Aispuros home in Salem where they found marijuana, cocaine, body armor, a digital scale, vacuum sealers and more than 20 firearms. Agents also found and seized cockfighting literature, vitamins and supplements used to increase roosters stamina and sets of gaffs, sharp metal spurs that attach to a roosters legs. Agents also executed a search warrant on Aispuros ranch in Scio, Oregon where they found more 200 roosters being raised and trained for fighting. The roosters combs and wattles had been removed to make them more effective fighting birds. Aispuro admitted to raising and selling roosters for use in cockfighting derbies for as much as $500 a bird. Aispuro previously pleaded guilty to one count each of conspiring to distribute methamphetamine and training and selling of fighting animals on June 12, 2018. This case was investigated by the DEA with the assistance of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Inspector General, and the Linn County Sheriffs Office and prosecuted by Peter D. Sax, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon. Source: U.S. Attorney's Office - District of Oregon _________________________________________ Oregon | Crime | Prison | Most Commented on Articles for February 19, 2019 | Articles for February 20, 2019 | Edmicro creates a smart self-learning ecosystem that allows Vietnamese students to learn, practice and master the subjects being taught in classrooms Edmicro, a Hanoi-based edtech startup that is building a smart self-learning ecosystem for Vietnamese students, has been selected for the March 2019 cohort of GMC Calibrator, a programme run by US-based impact investment firm Gray Matters Capital (GMC). The selection of Edmicro also marks GMCs foray into Southeast Asia. It will look at funding high-growth high-impact for-profit enterprises from Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia for its gender lens portfolio coLABS. Edmicro will join eight other startups, including Dcoder, InnerHour, Lal10, Matrubharti, Quest Alliance and Skipy (all from India), along with two African startups Sierra Leone based Mosabi and Kenyas MumsVillage for the programme. Also Read: How edtech is changing the landscape of education in Asia Founded by Que Nguyen, Dang Bao Linh and Linh Pham, Edmicro aims to create a smart self-learning ecosystem, called Onluyen.vn, for Vietnamese students that adapts to the needs of every learner and allows them to learn, practice and master the subjects being taught in their classrooms. A cloud-computing platform, it was designed by learning scientists to measure and predict performance and progress in any digital learning product, and uses advanced machine-learning algorithms to analyse learner data and illuminate underlying patterns and relationships. 75 per cent of Vietnamese students attend extra classes to understand lessons. They lack a good learning tool for complementing classroom learning through self-study. Teachers lack the teaching tools which enable them to record capabilities of each student, and support them in customising the teaching materials to personal student capabilities. Edmicro is filling in this gap, said Nguyen, CEO and CTO, Edmicro. Our participation in the GMC Calibrator will help us in fine-tuning our personalised learning solutions and make our micro learning offerings more effective in improving learning outcomes by analysing learner data better, he added. Story continues Also Read: Vietnam stars in January as e27 data tracks US$1.5B in deals We wish to replicate the success of optimising the performance of Indias leading test-prep solutions such as MadGuy Labs and SarkariPariksha with Edmicro to make it the self-learning platform of choice for students through the GMC Calibrator intervention, said Omkar Kulkarni, Programme Head, GMC Calibrator. GMC Calibrator is a digital programme launched in April 2018 with an aim to make the mobile phone a device to promote self learning to earning by improving user engagement, monetisation and optimisation of mobile learning platforms. This is done by understanding and implementing the principles of behavioural science and data-driven decision making. Also Read: This startup could spoil the holiday you obtained by submitting fake medical certificate From an engagement point of view, we saw impact on the lines of 30 per cent increase in monthly retention and 20 per cent average increase in revenue across the first cohort we ran from June to December 2018. Three companies of the cohort raised funding during the six-month engagement while two made it to Google Launchpad and Reliances Jio GenNext Accelerator. We are confident of calibrating more such success stories with our March 2019 cohort, Kulkarni noted. Gray Matters Capital (GMC) is an Atlanta-based impact investor with a gender lens that is on a mission to support an education leading to a more purposeful life for 100 million women by 2036. In India, it is focused on making investments in for-profit enterprises providing access to affordable quality education and employability leading to a future job ready workforce with 21st century skills. Globally, GMC makes sector agnostic investments in for-profit enterprises whose products or services benefit women and girls at scale through its gender lens portfolio coLABS. The post Vietnams Edmicro selected for Gray Matters Capitals edtech startup programme appeared first on e27. This article is published through a partnership with New York Medias Strategist. The partnership is designed to surface the most useful, expert recommendations for things to buy across the vast e-commerce landscape. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. Every editorial product is independently selected by New York Media. If you buy something through our links, Slate and New York Media may earn an affiliate commission. The soft, pink velvet couch of my dreams recently materialized in my life: an on-trend, secondhand West Elm lounger that is miraculously stain- and dirt-free. I love it like my own child and paid a small fortune to buy it, too, but given my anxiety and its pristine-ness, its already giving me issues. The main one being that I havent been doing much sitting on it. I refuse to let it be besmirched by my subway clothes, for starters if you were a regular on the A train, you would, too. And the idea of having guests over who might want to sip and snack on it? Unthinkable. Advertisement I could wrap it in a plastic cover like its an artifact defeating the point of owning anything velvet or heed my moms advice to stock up on stain remover, but really, I just want to find a middle ground that lets me enjoy my couch without wearing kid gloves. And since velvet couches are all the rage these days, I imagine Im not the only one searching for solutions. So I turned to three furniture-cleaning experts for advice on how to protect fabric or upholstered furniture from (and treat the inevitable) stains. Stain Protectants Professional cleanings will help maintain the structure of your couch and keep it looking newer for longer, but even with professional help, Sonny Cohen, the owner of New Yorkbased PureGreen Carpet and Upholstery Cleaning, suggests investing in a fabric protector. Fabric protector will basically make sure that stains dont become permanent stains, so when you spill a glass of wine on the fabric, or when food/pet stains lie on the surface of the fabric, youre able to blot it away with a white rag. He notes that it typically only lasts about a year on a couch thats being regularly used, though, so reapplying it annually is always a good idea. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Cohen is very specific about the types of fabric protectors he uses, though: exclusively green label stain protectors that are free of major toxins and carcinogens. We recommend this furniture protectant spray that doesnt contain fluorocarbons or silicons, and can be used on everything from suede to microfiber. Scotchgard Fabric and Upholstery Protector (Two-Pack) Advertisement Probably the most popular stain protectant out there, though, is Scotchgard. It came recommended by Dean Davies, a professional upholstery and carpet-cleaning technician at U.K.-based home-services company Fantastic Services. He says, Scotchgard provides reliable protection against spills and stains by not letting them settle on the surface of your furniture, and is totally safe to use on delicate fabrics such as silk and wool. The directions are fairly simple, too: You just spray the fabric protector about six inches away from the couch, and repeat until the entire surface area is covered. Lint Rollers, Vacuums, and Dust Solutions Because the buildup of dust and hair can also affect how grubby your couch looks, Davies recommends using a lint roller like this Evercare one for quick, superficial cleaning. A lint roller is extremely handy when you have to remove pet hair from the couch. This one has a long handle and a convenient roller, which collects hairs with ease. VonHaus 2 in 1 Corded Lightweight Stick Vacuum Cleaner and Handheld Vacuum Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement For a deeper clean to remove hair, dust, and dirt, Greg Shepard, the owner of Dallas Maids, says vacuuming weekly with a vacuum brush extension is helpful, too. Cohen agrees, recommending vacuums with a HEPA filter to improve the air quality of the house and pick up allergens from the fabric. Something affordable like this upright vacuum (that breaks down to a handheld version) should do the trick. It has a HEPA filter with an attachment that allows it to maneuver in between couch cushions and into hard-to-reach cracks. And between dustings, Cohen also recommends flipping the cushions. Our bodies are constantly shedding dead skin cells, hairs, and body oil, so you want to evenly keep the traffic patterns on all of the cushions, he says. And if there are certain areas that are getting a lot of direct sunlight, those cushions can eventually lose color from the UV rays. Stain Removers Should that red-wine spill actually occur, my experts steered me away from everyday cleaners (which could contain bleaching agents that alter the color of the fabric) and toward at-home solutions for clearing up the stain. Both Cohen and Shepard suggest a vinegar-and-water solution for applying to a towel and gently blotting at the stain. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement You can try distilled white vinegar mixed in a 50 percent ratio with slightly warm water, but dont soak the fabric, says Cohen. That can be used as a homemade spot cleaner, which wont harm the fabric because its acidic in nature. It can be used to remove most fresh stains on the couch. Swan Isopropyl Alcohol Advertisement Using any type of clear alcohol (vodka, rubbing alcohol, etc.) works magic, too, says Shepard, a trick he learned from a professional carpet cleaner. How it works is that you spray a bit of alcohol on the couch after vacuuming and blot the stain with a cloth or towel. Im amazed at how well it removes even the most stubborn stains. (Editors note: The Laundry Evangelist recently recommended rubbing alcohol, too, for removing stains from dry-clean only clothes.) Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication. Listen now: Get More Dear Prudence Slate Plus members get extended, ad-free versions of our podcastsand much more. Sign up today. Join Slate Plus Subscribe to Dear Prudence Copy this link and add it in your podcast app. copy link copied! For detailed instructions, see our Slate Plus podcasts page. Listen to the Dear Prudence podcast via Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play. Prudence is joined this week by Sarah Shourd, a multimedia journalist based in Oakland, California. Her work combines fiction with rigorous journalism to elevate marginalized voices. Shes now working collaboratively on a graphic novel as a JSK Fellow at Stanford. Together, they tackle letters about what to do when you find yourself with diminishing social invitations because of your sickliness, how to handle a husband who wants to reconnect with a friend who was convicted of possession of child pornography, how to put the brakes on a new overbearing friendship, what to consider when the love of your life offers you good (but not great) sex, and how to handle a soon-to-be sister-in-law who demands that you remove pictures of your brothers deceased first wife from your home. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Slate Plus members will hear Prudie and Shourd discuss a letter writer who is wondering how to stop her distant family members from using her beach house without causing a family rift. Want to see Dear Prudence live? Check out dates and locations for our national tour. Tickets here. The full Dear Prudence podcast is available exclusively to Slate Plus members. Access all of Prudies podcasts and columns here. Got a question for Prudie? Send it to prudence@slate.com or leave a voicemail message at 401-371-DEAR (3327), and you may hear your question answered on a future episode of the show. Production by Phil Surkis. The Kentucky high school student at the center of a standoff with a Native American man that went viral, sparking a national debate about race and class, filed a defamation suit against CNN Tuesday seeking $275 million in damages. Attorneys for Covington Catholic student Nicholas Sandmann accused the network of portraying the 16-year-old as the face of a racist mob of students, many of whom were wearing red Make America Great Again hats after an anti-abortion rally on the mall that day. Early footage of the confrontation showed the high school students seemingly provoking the Native American protesters, but later, more complete footage muddied that narrative. Citing four televised broadcasts and nine online articles as evidence of defamation, the suit said CNNs agenda-driven fiction about Nicholas and the January 18 incident was not only false and defamatory, it created an extremely dangerous situation by knowingly triggering the outrage of its audience and unleashing that outrage. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement In short, the false and defamatory gist of CNNs collective reporting conveyed to its viewers and readers that Nicholas was the face of an unruly hate mob of hundreds of white racist high school students who physically assaulted, harassed, and taunted two different minority groups engaged in peaceful demonstrations, preaching, song, and prayer, the suit states. The CNN accusations are totally and unequivocally false and CNN would have known them to be untrue had it undertaken any reasonable efforts to verify their accuracy before publication of its false and defamatory accusations. Last month, Sandmann filed suit against the Washington Post for its coverage of the altercation on the National Mall, seeking damages of $250 million in order, the suit stated, to teach the Post a lesson it will never forget. We are experiencing a Mayor Pete boomlet. Mayor-mentum! The Pete-related enthusiasm exploded on Sunday night, when the 37-year-old South Bend, Indiana, mayor and long-shot presidential contenderwhose actual name is Pete Buttigiegappeared on an hourlong CNN town hall. His performance got rave reviews from Democratic Party big shots. David Axelrod, a former Obama adviser whos been a Buttigieg enthusiast for a few years, tweeted that hed rarely seen a candidate make better use of the town hall format; party operative Patti Solis Doyle wrote that Buttigieg kicked ass. Both Solis Doyle and Axelrod are CNN contributors, for what its worth, but they werent the only ones praising the mayor: A Politico reporter all the way out in California noted that some of her sources had been so impressed that they donated to the young Midwesterners campaign, and in total he raised $600,000 from more than 22,000 donors after the CNN broadcast. Thats not Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris money, but its quite good for a young, small-city mayor who just a few years ago was live-blogging for Slate. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement What made the town hall performance so great? Well, Buttigieg gave direct, coherent answers about subjects that Democratic primary voters care about. I know youre like: Duh! Thats what everyone tries to do in such a format! You moron! But its easier said than done, requiring the candidate to repeatedly interact with audience members without coming off as either aloof or pandering, then to give responses that address specific questions in detail but also speak to larger campaign themes, all within the context of a made-for-TV event involving multiple cameras, frequent commercial breaks, and a moderator whos ready to jump in at any moment. Its like getting called on in class, except the teacher can ask you about any subject, it goes on for an hour, and hundreds of thousands of people are watching, many of whom are itching for the chance to say you (or CNN) sucked. Advertisement Advertisement For an instructive comparison, watch the way Buttigieg handles the very first audience questionAs someone whos never held statewide office or even represented a population the size of a congressional district, what makes you feel youre qualified to be president?and then watch fellow candidate Harris respond to a similarly pointed query, in a CNN town hall setting, about her complicated history of positions on the death penalty. Buttigieg: Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Harris: Advertisement Advertisement Harris, 54, is an experienced politician who certainly knew when she entered the primary that shed be criticized by some progressives for her record as a prosecutor and attorney general. Her response, thoughthat shes personally opposed to capital punishment because its applied unequallyseems likely to inspire even more critical questions down the line given that her office actually defended Californias death penalty in court when she was attorney general. (It even argued specifically that there is no evidence that the penalty was applied within the state in an arbitrary or random way.) The rest of her answer meanders to a vague gotta-hear-both-sides conclusion about the broader subject of criminal justice reform: Advertisement Advertisement It is a flawed system, deeply flawed, and we have got to reform it, and everyone has to be onboard. And we cant accept false choices, because I think we all realize its a deeply flawed system, but we also want to make sure that when a woman is raped, a child is molested, one human being is killed by another human being, we also want to make sure theres going to be consequence and serious consequence for those crimes. Advertisement Advertisement By contrast, Buttigieg hits the question head-on and turns it toward a discussion of an ongoing political problem (government shutdowns) that doubles as a concise pitch for why hed be a better leader than the current president: Advertisement I know that its more traditional to maybe come from Congress, to have a background in Washington, but I would also argue that we would be well served if Washington started to look more like our best-run cities and towns rather than the other way around. Think about it. One thing youve never heard of is a city shutting down because they couldnt agree on a policy. Right? Its literally unthinkable. We would never do it. We couldnt do it, because we deliver water, and you need water to live. So we just figure things out. And thats the kind of attitude that I think we need more of in Washington today. I get that it might sound a little cheeky as the youngest guy in this conversation, but I actually think experience is one of the best reasons for somebody like me to be in this. I have more years of government experience under my belt than the president. [Laughter] Thats a low bar, I know that. Ive also got more years of executive government experience under my belt than the vice president and more military experience than anybody to walk into that office on day one since George H.W. Bush. So I get that Im the young guy in the conversation, but I would say experience is what qualifies me to have a seat at this table. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement If you watch some of his prior speeches, you can see that Buttigieg has been honing the riffs he used on CNN for some time, right down to the self-deprecating back home, they just call me Mayor Pete line about his unusual last name (its Maltese) that he opened the broadcast with. (Its a bit that I am legally obligated to compare to Barack Obamas description of himself as a skinny kid with a funny name at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Obama praised Buttigieg in a 2016 New Yorker interview and has reportedly spoken to him about his nascent campaign.) Buttigiegs signature outfit is a white shirt and solid-color tie with no jacket, a classic male political look that signifies that the person wearing it is ready to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty solving problems. (It matches up well with Buttigiegs ability to speak extemporaneously about gritty municipal issues like sewer management.) Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Hes got his own kind of ready-for-the-big-time polish, calm but sharp in a way that, againsorrycalls to mind Obama. But at the same time he can credibly point out (as he did later in the hour on CNN) that he actually lives the same middle-class lifestyle, and has the same day-to-day practical middle-class concerns, as most voters. (At one point, discussing the inefficiency of American health care, he mentioned the annoyance of filling out redundant authorization forms by hand at doctors appointments. You tell em, Pete!) Advertisement Its a good combination, and it worked on Sunday night. The necessary caveat: While Buttigieg demonstrated an impressive familiarity with subjects ranging from data privacy to climate changeand an ability to connect them to daily problemshe hasnt yet settled on the kind of detailed positions and plans that might induce questions as tricky as the one Harris faced about the death penalty. (Notable exceptions include health care, on which he says he would advocate for introducing a Medicare-style public option on existing Obamacare exchanges, and his Overton windowshifting endorsements of Supreme Court expansion and the abolition of the Electoral College.) And given how many other candidates are in the race who have their own considerable strengths and campaign treasuries, it would be irresponsible to say that Buttigieg is anything but a long shot to win the nomination. But it does seem safe to say that going forward hes probably more likely to appear in Slate as a subject of national interest than as a contributor. A California high school that had been grappling with a scandal in which a photo of students giving a Nazi salute circulated on social media is investigating another anti-Semitic incident on campus. At least 10 flyers, some of which contained swastikas, were found plastered around Newport Harbor High School over the weekend, just days after Anne Franks stepsister came to the school to speak with students and share her stories of surviving the Holocaust. According to local media reports, police are investigating the incident, and its not known if students or outside groups were behind the posters. Advertisement On March 3, a photo surfaced on social media of students raising their arms in a Nazi salute at a party while standing around a large swastika formed by several dozen red Solo Cups. The photo gained national attention, and rallies, vigils, and meetings to discuss anti-Semitism in the community were held. On Thursday, the 89-year-old Holocaust survivor Eva Schloss, whose mother later married Anne Franks father, met with the teenagers to talk to them about the horrors of the Holocaust. They apologized and told her that they hadnt thought through any potential consequences or harm when theyd taken the photo. Several later wrote letters of apology to the Jewish community. Nicholas Sandmann, the high school student at the center of the viral Lincoln Memorial confrontation in January, wants to punish CNN and the Washington Post for attempting to assassinate his character. He wants to teach the Post a lesson it will never forget and halt CNNs biased agenda against President Trump and his supporters. In the process, Sandmann wishes to collect more than a half-billion dollars from the two outlets. The media targeted him because he was a white, Catholic student who was wearing a MAGA cap, Sandmann believes. Only $525 million in damages will fully compensate him and deter these bullies from again bullying other children. Advertisement This argument, laid out in Sandmanns two lawsuits against CNN (filed on Tuesday) and the Washington Post (filed in February), is one part legal theory, two parts political screed. Sandmanns lawyer, famed libel attorney L. Lin Wood, knows that these suits are a long shot: The First Amendment protects the press right to report on a national controversy without a full grasp on the facts, and to provide commentary that ultimately proves inaccurate. Woods defamation lawsuits are designed to scare CNN and the Post, to chill their future criticisms of individuals perceived to be supporters of the President. His crusade is just another skirmish in President Donald Trumps attack on fake news. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Like most mainstream media outlets, CNN and the Washington Post provided an incomplete and unduly harsh description of the January encounter between Sandmann and Nathan Phillips, a Native American activist. On the basis of a viral Twitter video, reporters at these companies alleged that Sandmann, a 16-year-old March for Life participant wearing a MAGA hat, attempted to harass, accost, or mock Phillips. Commentators on CNN condemned Sandmann as racist and aggressive toward Phillips. Articles in the Post alleged that he threatened and intimidated the activist. Advertisement Advertisement It is safe to say that neither CNN nor the Post covered themselves in glory. Within days, other videos of the event provided a more complete and nuanced picture of the encounter. Before Phillips arrived, Sandmann and his classmates from Covington Catholic High School had been taunted by the Black Hebrew Israelites, a notorious cult that hurls bigoted slurs at passers-by in Washington. These students say that they performed school spirit chants to counter the (indisputably vile) verbal assault. Phillips and his associates say they interpreted these chants as racist toward their nearby Indigenous Peoples March, which had concluded earlier in the day. He approached the students, beating a drum and singing a tribal song. At least one studentthough not Sandmannthen made the tomahawk chop, an offensive gesture, and several wore MAGA apparel as they stood in front of Phillips. After about two minutes, the Covington Catholic students retreated to their bus. Advertisement Advertisement How do you interpret this incident? Reasons Robby Soave, one of the first media figures to rebuke the developing narrative of Sandmanns alleged aggression, believes he and his friends did essentially nothing wrong. Talking Points Memos Josh Marshall, by contrast, wrote that the longer video doesnt greatly change the substance of the widespread first impressionthat a bemused and cocky teenager, Sandmann, faced off with a Native American activist/elder, Phillips, while his classmates jeer and taunt the man with chopping motions. Voxs Zack Beauchamp asserted that its impossible to know with certainty who has a more accurate read of the situation. Advertisement Advertisement It is safe to say that neither CNN nor the Post covered themselves in glory by credulously painting Sandmann as the obvious aggressor on the basis of a brief video edited to convey precisely that perception. And no teenager deserves the campaign of fury, including death threats, that greeted Sandmann. It is perfectly appropriate to criticize the media for reporting the encounter without a full set of facts, whichviewed most favorably to Sandmannabsolve him of his critics worst charges. Advertisement Advertisement That, however, is not what Wood has chosen to do. Instead, in a promotional video put out by his firm, Wood accuses the media of engaging in a coordinated assault on Sandmanns character as part of a campaign to vilify Trump and destroy the country. As images of anti-Trump protests and riots flash across the screen, a narrator declares: Advertisement Advertisement The Washington Post, owned by the richest man in the world, led the false attacks on Nicholas reputation. CNN led the broadcast medias charge against Nicholas. Both recklessly spread lies about a minor to advance their own financial and political agendas. How long will we allow these media giants to tear at the fabric of our lives to further their own agendas? Will they ever be held accountable? Advertisement This inflammatory rhetoric is drawn largely from the lawsuits themselves. The suit against the Post berates Jeff Bezos by name and demands $250 million in damages seemingly because thats how much he paid in cash for the Post. It denounces the paper for ignoring basic journalist standards because it wanted to advance its well-known and easily documented, biased agenda against President Donald J. Trump. (Trump tweeted this quote and wrote: Go get them Nick. Fake News!) CNN gets similar treatment: From at least as early as the November 2016 election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States, the lawsuit states, CNN has maintained a well-known and easily documented biased agenda against President Trump. Apparently in support of this claim, the suit notes that President Trump publicly and repeatedly branded CNN as the poster child of fake news. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement All of this may satisfy the president, but it likely wont satisfy the courts. Wood insists that Sandmann is not a public figure, which would allow him to sue the media for mere negligencea failure to take reasonable care to avoid unjustly injuring his reputation. It is debatable whether the Post and CNN even met that low bar: Drawing conclusions from a video rocketing around the internet is not clearly unreasonable when those conclusions later prove questionable in light of new evidence. Regardless, Sandmann probably qualifies as a limited-purpose public figure, which means he must prove more than mere negligence to win his defamation lawsuits. Sandmann played a starring role in a story that drew widespread attention, then sought to shape the narrative by appearing on a major news program. His engagement in this public debate thrust him into the spotlight, and even if his participation was initially involuntary, he may still qualify as a public figure for First Amendment purposes. The courts have acknowledged that an individual may become a public figure through no purposeful action of his own when he plays a central, albeit involuntary, role in [a] controversy. To win his suit, then, Sandmann should have to prove not just negligence but actual malice, demonstrating that CNN and the Post acted with reckless disregard for the truth, or knowledge of their alleged lies. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement It is difficult to see how Sandmann could clear this high bar. Journalists continue to debate just how badly the media botched its immediate coverage of the encounter. Even fierce critics of this coverage, like Soave, question whether outlets acted with actual malice or just rashly. The media will always jump on a story consuming the public and draw conclusions that might not withstand close scrutiny down the road. Even when reporters get the story wrong, the First Amendment may still protect their right to speak. Advertisement Advertisement There is still a slim but real possibility that Sandmann will persuade the courts that the Constitution does not shield CNN and the Post from his lawsuit. He may then convince a jury to slap both outlets with crippling damages. If so, expect a court to substantially lower those damages, since Sandmann cannot possibly prove that $525 million is an appropriate award. If the student wins, Trump will declare victory, and Sandmanns fiercest defenders will feel vindicated. The press, meanwhile, may hesitate before jumping into the next public debate spurred by a seemingly outrageous video. Whether you think thats a threat to free expression or a necessary safeguard against bias will probably depend on how you feel about Nicholas Sandmann. British lawmakers faced a choice on Brexit this week: deal or no-deal. They chose none of the above. After overwhelmingly voting Tuesday to reject, for a second time, the withdrawal agreement Prime Minister Theresa May had negotiated with the EU, on Wednesday, Parliament voted for an amendment that would rule out a no-deal Brexita highly risky scenario that would likely result in sharply higher food prices and delays in getting goods into the country, among numerous other disruptions. MPs actually voted to rule out no-deal twice after a complicated set of parliamentary maneuvers that arent really worth explaining here but led to the bizarre spectacle of the ruling Conservative party trying to whip its members to vote against its own motion. Advertisement Wednesdays vote is not binding and in no way takes the no-deal scenario off the table. A no-deal Brexit is still what will happen automatically if no further action is taken by March 29, the previously agreed to withdrawal date. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Parliament also voted Wednesday against an amendment that would have endorsed the so-called Malthouse compromise, a scenario under which Britain would leave the EU without a deal but with an extended transition period and a somewhat-fudged replacement for the controversial Irish backstop. The EU had already ruled out this option, even if Parliament had voted for it. Parliament will now vote Thursday on whether to request an extension to Article 50, the legal mechanism under which Britain is withdrawing from the union. Its also now increasingly likely that May will put her withdrawal agreement up for a third meaningful vote, now that the only alternative on offer, no-deal, has been rejected. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn rejected the deal/no-deal binary choice, saying the government should debate his partys alternative plan, a soft Brexit that involves a permanent customs union with the European Union, which Brexiteers say would not be a Brexit at all. The motion the government will put up for vote Thursday, which is still subject to amendment, will set a deadline of next Wednesday for Parliament to approve a deal. If they do, May will ask European governments for an extension just until June 30. If they dont, she will ask for a longer extension that would require Britain to take part in EU Parliament elections this spring, a scenario Mays government had hoped to avoid. The House, she said, needs to face up to the consequences of the decisions it has taken. Paul Manafort has been sentenced to a total of seven and a half years in federal prison after receiving a second punishment on Wednesday as part of special counsel Robert Muellers Russia probe. Last week, the former Trump campaign chairman was sentenced in the Eastern District of Virginia to 47 months in prison for his August conviction on five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud, and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account in relation to his undisclosed lobbying work for the Russian-backed former president of Ukraine. Advertisement Wednesdays sentence in Judge Amy Berman Jacksons District of Columbia courtroom resulted from Manaforts September guilty plea to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of witness tampering. Jackson sentenced Manafort to 60 months on the conspiracy count, 30 of which are to run concurrent with the EDVA sentence, and 13 months on the witness tampering. In total, Manafort is due to serve 17 months separately in the EDVA case, 43 months separately in the District case, and 30 months concurrently in both cases, for a grand total of 90 months in prison. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement While Judge T.S. Ellis sentence last week was viewed as lenientfalling well below the sentencing guidelines of between 19 and 24 years in prisonJackson took a firmer hand. During sentencing, Jackson hammered Manafort for his admitted and consistent deceitfulness before the court. Advertisement Advertisement It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved, Jackson said. She also questioned whether he actually demonstrated any remorse for his admitted crimes, which were detailed in a 38-page legal filing as part of his guilty plea and included attempts to conceal millions of dollars in foreign lobbying work from the government. Saying Im sorry I got caught is not an inspiring plea for leniency, Jackson said. Indeed, the reports of Manaforts appeal to the court prior to his sentencing did not appear to carry much in the way of contrition. I can see that I have behaved in ways that did not always support my personal code of values, Manafort said. Advertisement He added that he deserved leniency because being in prison was hard on his family. Please let my wife and I be together. Please do not take us apart from each other for any longer, Manafort told the judge. If not for me, then for my family. I promise that if you do, you will not regret it. Advertisement She also criticized Manafort and his attorneys for attacking the special counsels office, noting that the argument appeared to have been made for some other audience. It seems quite possible the audience in question is President Donald Trump, for whom Manafort worked during the campaign and from whom its been speculated he is likely seeking a pardon. Manafort had seemed to preclude the possibility of a pardon when he pleaded guilty last September in the D.C. case and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for potential leniency, but that deal ended when Jackson ruled that he had continued to lie to prosecutors during that cooperation. Prosecutors alleged that he lied to them about polling results from Trumps campaign that he had given to Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a former business associate connected to Russian intelligence, and about his then-ongoing cooperation with Trumps legal team. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Unfortunately for Manafort, even if Trump does decide to pardon him, it will likely do him little good now. Just minutes after Manafort received his D.C. sentence, NBC News reported that Manafort had just been indicted by the Manhattan District Attorneys Office. Trump might be able to pardon Manafort on the federal charges, but will not be able to pardon him for any state charges out of New York or elsewhere. Advertisement Advertisement As Jed Shugerman has consistently noted in Slate since 2017, Mueller seems to have positioned his charges in the federal case so as to leave the door open for these state charges and prevent Trump from using his pardon power to protect Manafort. The New York Post reported that the new charges against Manafort in the 16-count New York indictment included residential mortgage fraud, attempted residential mortgage fraud, conspiracy, falsifying business records, and scheme to defraud. No one is beyond the law in New York, District Attorney Cy Vance said in a statement. Following an investigation commenced by our Office in March 2017, a Manhattan grand jury has charged Mr. Manafort with state criminal violations which strike at the heart of New Yorks sovereign interests, including the integrity of our residential mortgage market. Progressives spend a lot of time fretting that the Supreme Court will soon overturn Roe v. Wadefor good reason, since four justices are ready to abolish abortion rights immediately, and another seems to be simply waiting for the right opportunity. But the lower courts need not wait for Roe to go to dramatically limit Americans access to abortion. They can effectively kill Roe by a thousand cuts, manipulating doctrine to let states shutter clinics and force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. Advertisement That is precisely what the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did on Tuesday, permitting Ohio to defund Planned Parenthood by proclaiming that there is no Fourteenth Amendment right to perform abortions. The courts threadbare reasoning ignores controlling Supreme Court precedent and disregards the impact of Ohios crusade against abortion providers on women. But that doesnt matter to the majority, which includes all four President Donald Trump appointees who participated in the case. For these judges, whats important is that Ohio may now strip Planned Parenthood of $1.5 million each yearmoney that supported STI tests, cancer screenings, and contraception, but not abortion. The majority neatly illustrates how courts can undermine Roe while pretending to uphold the Constitution. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Tuesdays decision in Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio v. Hodges revolves around a 2016 Ohio law designed to close Planned Parenthoods 27 clinics in the state. For years, the organization has participated in Ohio programs designed to reduce STIs, cancer, teen pregnancy, infant mortality, and sexual violence. No money that Planned Parenthood receives from Ohio pursuant to this program is used to cover abortions. But three Planned Parenthood clinics do offer abortion services, which are paid for independently. The 2016 law denies state funds to all clinics that contract with or become an affiliate of any entity that performs or promotes nontherapeutic abortions. Because all 27 clinics affiliate with Planned Parenthood, and because that organization performs or promotes abortions, Ohio attempted to cut off their funding. Two Planned Parenthood affiliates sued. Advertisement Advertisement A federal district court blocked the law the day it was set to take effect, ruling that it imposed unconstitutional conditions on Planned Parenthoods right to free speech and due process. A panel of judges for the 6th Circuit agreed. Plaintiffs do not claim an entitlement to government funds, Judge Helene White wrote for the court. What they do claim is a right not to be penalized in the administration of government programs based on protected activity outside the programs. White explained that, under the Supreme Courts unconstitutional conditions jurisprudence, the government may not require the surrender of constitutional rights, including free speech and reproductive autonomy, as a condition of participating in an unrelated government program. Advertisement But the 6th Circuit is increasingly conservative, and by the time the panel handed down its decision, Trump had placed four new judges on the bench. A majority of the court quickly voted to re-hear the case en banc. And on Tuesday, it reversed the lower courts decision by an 116 vote, with all four Trump appointees ruling against Planned Parenthood. (There are two other Trump-appointed judges on the court who were not seated in time to rule in the caseincluding Eric Murphy, the former Ohio solicitor general who helped defend the states anti-abortion law in the district and circuit courts. Murphy likely wouldve recused himself had he been seated in time.) Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The majority neatly illustrates how courts can undermine Roe while pretending to uphold the Constitution. In his majority opinion, Judge Jeffrey Sutton (a George W. Bush appointee) boiled down the case to one simple question: Does the Constitution safeguard the right to perform abortion? Deciding that it does not, Sutton easily disposed of Planned Parenthoods challenge. The Supreme Court has never expressly stated that medical centers have a constitutional right to offer abortions. Thus, Ohio has not penalized clinics for engaging in constitutionally protected activities and, by extension, has not imposed an unconstitutional condition on Planned Parenthood. Case closed. Advertisement Advertisement To White, writing in dissent, Sutton is just plain wrong, warping precedent to shrink the contours of Roe. The Supreme Court has said that doctors have a derivative right to perform abortion since the right to terminate a pregnancy is inextricably bound up with doctors ability to do so legally. So the majoritys premise is fundamentally flawed; Planned Parenthood does have a right to help women terminate their pregnancies, and the Ohio law does penalize providers for performing constitutionally protected activities. By punishing clinics for exercising a constitutional right with their own money, the state ran afoul of due process. Advertisement But even if Planned Parenthood had no right to perform abortions, White asserted, the Ohio law would still be unconstitutional. In a case called Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, the Supreme Court limited the governments ability to impose conditions on funding. The court held that funding conditions which seek to achieve indirectly what the government could not do directly are subject to special scrutiny. These conditions may not reach outside the program to accomplish otherwise unconstitutional goals. Here, White wrote, Ohios goal is to limit or halt the performance of abortions by burdening clinics that perform them. It could not legally accomplish this goal by, for instance, banning abortions outright, or imposing needless regulations on clinics. So it has instead targeted these clinics by defunding them. But the public money the clinics receive has nothing to do with abortion. Ohio has therefore reached outside its public health program to achieve an otherwise unconstitutional aim. By doing so, it has infringed upon the rule set out in Agency for International Development. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Heres the icing on the cake: Ohio isnt just penalizing Planned Parenthood for performing abortions. It is also punishing the organization for promoting abortion rights by defunding clinics that associate with the group. As White notes, the state has plainly imposed unconstitutional conditions on these clinics rights to free speech and association. Ohio has given them a choice: Stop associating with an organization that supports abortion access, or forgo state funds for a program that is unrelated to abortion. The state is using funding conditions to engage in flagrant censorship, a clear First Amendment violation. In his majority opinion, Sutton does not discuss Agency for International Development or the clinics First Amendment claim. His cursory analysis omits the Supreme Court decisions that render Ohios law unconstitutional, cherry-picking precedent to uphold the states assault on Planned Parenthood. There is very little chance the Supreme Court will take this casebut a strong possibility that other courts will adopt Suttons reasoning to uphold other attacks on abortion rights. Conservative judges do not need Brett Kavanaughs permission to disregard or disrespect Roe v. Wade. They already have the tools to topple it on their own. How many managers does it take to make a burrito? This question arose during my time in the New York attorney generals office. We were working on a case against a small chain of burrito stores that had a bounty of managers working in each tiny storefront location. There were general managers, assistant managers, night managers, managers for opening and closing and delivery, all paid a weekly salary. There were more managers than salsa options. It wasnt some wacky training program: The company was trying to take advantage of an exemption from the overtime laws. Often known as the white-collar exemption, this provision exempts salaried executives, managers, and professionals from the laws protection. But, too often, employers do what these burrito bosses did and wrongly treat workers as managers to avoid paying overtime. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement What did this mean in practice? All these managers worked extremely long workweeks50, 60, sometimes even 70 hoursbecause the company had no reason to think twice before making them do so. After all, the managers got the same weekly salary no matter how many hours they worked. In effect, they were working hours past 40 for free. We recovered almost half a million dollars for the workers. But under a new rule proposed by the Trump administration last week, these managers would be more likely to get beans for their long hours. This proposal would leave millions of workers unprotected, compared with a far better Obama-era rule that President Donald Trumps Labor Department has helped undo. Advertisement The new proposal sets an excessively low salary threshold for coverage of overtime laws. To qualify for the white-collar exemption, you must be paid on a salary basis, your job must primarily involve executive or administrative duties, and you have to be paid above a set minimum dollar amountthe salary threshold. What is to be done, in light of last weeks dreadful proposal? The idea of this threshold is that regardless of how fancy your title is or how important your duties seem, if youre paid below that threshold, your income is low enough that you need the protection of overtime laws. Its kind of a proxy for whether someone truly is white collar. Advertisement Since 2004, the federal salary threshold has been far too low: just over $23,000 annually. The Obama administration proposed a much higher threshold at just over $47,000, which would have covered millions of additional workers and also aligned with historical rates of coverage. But the Trump administration has opted not to defend this rule against an ongoing challenge in court, instead proposing a threshold last week of just over $35,000. Advertisement Advertisement On a quick glance, this may seem reasonable; after all, its pretty close to splitting the difference, right? But the Trump Labor Departments proposal works out to less than $17 per hour for a 40-hour workweekand even less for longer weeks. These are hardly the spoils of a fat cat or even the solid pay of a comfortable executive who doesnt need overtime coverage. The proposal unveiled last week would leave millions of people unprotected, well over half of those who would have been covered under the Obama proposal. Advertisement Advertisement Who is affected by this? Restaurant workers. Retail employees. Lots of assistant managers in all kinds of businesses: hotels, banks, offices. Even entry-level people in creative industries like television. Advertisement Advertisement Some countries have a system different from ours: To address the problem of overwork, they limit the number of daily or weekly hours a person can be assigned. The New Deal Congress landed on a different solution: Rather than strictly limiting work hours, our overtime law aims to dissuade employers from requiring excessive work schedules by making overtime hours more expensive. Our laws also give a pay bump to compensate overworked employees. The purpose of these laws is to make employers actually value workers time, and not to see it as endlessly expendable and without cost. Advertisement Advertisement Under the Labor Departments new proposal, too many people will continue to be in the same unfair situation: given a scintilla of managerial duties, an elevated title, paid on a salary basis, and then made to work many overtime hours essentially for free. Advertisement In recent years, its been getting ever easier for employers to evade overtime laws. A Supreme Court decision last year quietly upended a long-standing principle that overtime exemptions should be narrowly construed. The case received little fanfare, but it was a sea change: Previously, courts had to default to finding overtime coverage if the facts were in the gray area. Thats no longer the case. Last weeks proposal by the Trump administration is another heavy blow to overtime protections. What is to be done, in light of last weeks dreadful proposal? As is often the case, states are a significant source of hope, since they typically have their own overtime laws. Some states have already set higher salary thresholds, while others are currently working on such plans. More states should immediately follow suit. Advertisement Advertisement As for the federal proposal: Theres actually something ordinary people can do. In our regulatory system, people have the opportunity to comment on proposed rules, including online. (Keep an eye on this link and search for 1235-AA20 to see when the comment portal for this proposal has opened, which should happen soon). [Update, March 29, 2019: The comment portal has been open and the link is available here.] The Labor Department has a legal obligation to read every comment and respond to all issues raised in the processits possible that a deluge of comments in opposition will have an impact on the final result. This is an opportunity to send a clear message: that overtime laws matter and that peoples time should have value. Recently, I asked my colleagues if they had ever been startled by a robotic driving feature. One described the unpleasant sensation of automatic braking in an Infiniti Q50 Hybrid, which would suddenly slow her down in front of a tight turn, bringing her close to getting rear-ended by the New Jersey drivers behind her. Another had been jolted by the aggressive beeping of his Hyundai rental as it warned him not to stray into a nearby lane. The father of a third routinely started his Toyota Camry with the key fob inside the house, drove to work, and found he couldnt start the car when it was time to drive home. Some 40 percent of American drivers have had a similar experience with what the industry calls advanced driver assistance systems, or ADAS, according to a survey by Daniel McGehee, director of the National Advanced Driving Simulator at the University of Iowa. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Airplane pilots, who have been working closely with self-driving software for nearly four decades, have a term for such incidents: automation surprises. One particularly tragic instance of this may have occurred in October, when a Lion Air 737 Max crashed off the coast of Indonesia, killing 189 people. The crash is still under investigation, but speculation quickly turned to a Boeing navigation software called MCAS that was designed to point the plane downward. Installed as a corrective to the models heavy, forward-mounted engines, a malfunctioning MCAS might have directed the plane into a nosedive. Then, on Sunday, an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max crashed after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing everyone on board. Once again, all eyes are on MCAS. On Tuesday, the Dallas Morning News uncovered a series of pilot complaints about the planes autopilot function. The European Union, China, and others have grounded all 737 Max planes in response to the crash. Boeing has said it will update the planes flight-control software. Advertisement Advertisement Boeing had installed MCAS on all its new-model 737s, which debuted in 2017, but insisted the changes were small enough that pilots need not be re-trained or even alerted to the new softwareincluding the new override controls. The worlds biggest regulatory agencies in the United States and the European Union sided with the company. Advertisement The crashes are a reminder that even as commercial flight has become heavily automated, pilots still largely understand the navigation systems that fly the planes and know how and when to override them. (And as the Dallas News scoop shows, when theyre not working.) The 737 Max crashes might be the exceptions that prove the rule. Generally, this man-and-machine symbiosis has made air travel extremely safe: The United States has only had one airline fatality in the past decade.* Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement But automation has not made pilots jobs easier, says Steve Casner, a pilot and research psychologist at NASAs Ames Research Center: Youd think it would dumb down the role of the pilot. Contrary to expectation, you have to know more than ever. Casner is one of a number of pilots and analysts who see a parallel between the introduction of automation in airplanes more than 30 years ago and its arrival in cars today, as drivers prepare to relinquish the burdens of navigating the blacktop. Its like 1983 all over again, Casner told me Monday. Where airlines by and large got it right, he thinks car-makers may be overeager in sticking humans in the car with unfamiliar technologies. Im very concerned that even though aviation has shown us how to do it, were about to make a big mistake with cars. Sitting there waiting like a potted plant for the lights to blink is not one of our fortes. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Together with the cognitive psychologist Edwin Hutchins, Casner is the author of a new paper, What Do We Tell the Drivers? Towards Minimum Driver Training Standards for Partially Automated Cars. One of their main points is that automation would not have made commercial flight as safe as it is today without pilots who understood how the systems worked. Regardless of what comes out [of the 737 Max crashes], the human-machine interface is going to be a factor, says Missy Cummings, a former fighter pilot and head of Dukes Humans and Autonomy Laboratory (HAL!). She has been worried about that issue with autonomous vehicles for years. Not only do drivers get distracted by self-driving tech, not understand its capabilities, and ignore its alerts; it also gradually erodes their skills, leaving them unprepared to handle regular operations when the time comes. (Pilots using automation largely retained their motor skills, but their decision-making skills eroded.) Advertisement Advertisement Robots make excellent backup drivers to humans. Humans make terrible backup drivers to robots. Costa Samaras, director of the Center for Engineering and Resilience for Climate Adaptation They lull people into a false sense of security, and this is a lesson weve learned the hard way in aviation, Cummings explained. People basically get their drivers license because theyre alive. The bar is really low. You can enforce that people go through some kind of standardized training, but we just wont do it, were lazy. Thats why Im against Level 3 autonomy. You just cant guarantee that humansnot getting checked by the FAA for an annual check rideare going to do their job. Advertisement But that gets to a major difference between air and car travel. Flying is safer than walking. Automobile travel remains so dangerous, for both drivers and pedestrians, that the bar for new technologies is considerably lower. So if a feature like push-button ignition has killed two-dozen people through carbon monoxide poisoning (because they leave the car running in the garage), thats not grounds for a recall. Nor has Tesla been particularly damaged by the deaths of two owners whose cars drove into trucks while the Autopilot function was engaged. Advertisement Moreover, those self-driving technologies that will be widely introduced in most 2019 modelsemergency braking, lane-change alerts, adaptive cruise controlare likely reducing crashes in the aggregate, says McGehee. (Federal regulations dont require data about advanced driver-assistance tech to be included in crash recordings, so its hard to be certain about its role.) Its a bit Machiavellian, but maybe you have to break a few windshields to make a self-driving utopia. Most autonomous vehicle scholars say if the end result of AV research is to cut out humans entirely (as Googles Waymo aims to do), that will be very good for safety. Its the interim period that will be awkward as humans adjust to a range of technologies. Few are perfect, some require supervision, none require training. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Robots make excellent backup drivers to humans. Humans make terrible backup drivers to robots, says Costa Samaras, an AV specialist at Carnegie Mellon. But with thousands of annual deaths from drunk driving and thousands more from unworn seat belts, its hard to see educating drivers about autonomous technology becoming a priority. To some extent, this has always been the automotive model: Chrysler introduced autopilot back in 1958, a technology that would soon be advertised to female drivers as footless driving. Today we know it as cruise control. Explain what it isyour car goes 70 mph at the touch of a button!and cruise control sounds like a death trap. In reality, its hard to imagine a long highway drive without it. Sixty years later, who the hell knows how it works? Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. At 2 a.m. in February, I found myself speaking with the family of a dying man. We had never met before, and I had only just learned of the patient. As an ICU doctor, I have been in this situation on many occasions, but there was something new this time. The family was 200 miles away, and we were talking through a video camera. I was staffing the electronic intensive care unit, complete with a headset, adjustable two-way video camera, and six screens of streaming data. Advertisement The eICU at Emory University in Atlanta provides care by physicians trained in critical care medicine to a number of hospital locations within the large Emory system. It also provides coverage to some smaller hospitals, away from the large academic medical centers, that are not able to provide continuous on-site ICU physician staffing. The eICU functions 24 hours a day with nurses in the day and physicians and nurses at night and on the weekends. For physicians, interacting with patients and families through the small screen and without the benefit of touch is an unusual and sometimes uncomfortable feeling. As physicians, we are trained to use all of our senses to make sense of a situation, and the eICU does not allow the shared intimacy frequently needed in diagnosis and treatment. It can feel remote, and when wearing my headset, at times I feel more like an air traffic controller than a doctor. Never was that truer than when I was confronted with a dying man and grieving family 200 miles away. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Recently, a similar event occurred in a hospital in California. Unlike my moment, this screen and camera were on wheels. Like some sort of R2-D2, it rolled into the patients room and began. According to CNN, Annalisia Wilharm, granddaughter of patient Ernest Quintana, 78, was sitting by his bedside in the ICU of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fremont, California. Quintana suffered from chronic obstructive lung disease, a condition characterized by difficulty breathing. As it worsens, the patient can require the assistance of mechanical ventilation to stay alive. Quintanas wife and adult child had left the hospital for some rest. That evening, a machine rolled into Quintanas room with a video live link to a doctor explaining the terminal nature of Quintanas illness and how the best option might be hospice. Advertisement Quintana died the next day, and his family has apparently not raised concerns about his medical care. But the family has complained about the fact that the doctor shared the prognosis via robot. I think they should have had more dignity and treated him better than they did, Wilharm said to CNN. The corresponding mea culpa from the hospital spokeswoman suggested an inclination to agree. Media coverage, too, appears to criticize what happened, with disapproving headlines using the phrase robot doctor. But this was not an example of a robot doctor, which would suggest an artificial intelligence was responsible here. An actual, live person was simply communicating through a large rolling video phone. This is not a failure of technology, it seems. More likely, it was a failure to communicate via any method. I can understand why the animated and mechanical nature of the doc in the mechanical box was clearly startling. This is something I have grappled with, too. At 2 on that morning, my screen and camera were fixed to the wall, staring down at the patient with the swiveling camera eye controlled by me. I surveyed the room. I saw the patient on the bed, connected to the ventilator, and in the room, I counted three anxious family members. Slowly and calmly, I explained who I was and how the camera worked. I looked directly into my camera lens so that on the video monitor, my eyes would meet theirs. I acknowledged the strangeness of the technology and worked through the data in an unhurried way. After some back and forth, we all began to relax and accept the communication. Now we could get to it. I found I was still more than able to make a connection, provide information, and demonstrate compassion. They cried, as they should, when I told them their loved one would die. When I have done this in person, I retain the option of providing physical comfort with a hug or even a handshake. These are the natural inclinations shared in our common humanity. In the eICU, I am unable to provide my physical self and a family might interpret this as cold indifference. It is nothing of the sort. These are the limits of this technology. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Nevertheless, the California story misses the point. This is not a failure of technology, it seems. More likely, it was a failure to communicate via any method. Medical schools are bad at teaching how to deliver bad news. Patients often dont know how to receive it, either. A doctor-patient relationship of trust can successfully occur over the phone and be bungled completely in a face-to-face encounter. We do not know the mind of the doctor, of what came before, or the mental state of the patient or his granddaughter. Absent that, this story tells us nothing about whether remote technology should be used to deliver this sort of news. The medical profession can perhaps nearly entirely be seen as an exercise in communication. A capable physician is able to sort out the state of mind of the listener, but it takes skill. Some people are good at this; others are not. Optimizing the conditions for this interaction must occur before any conversation about sickness and health or about life and death. In this case, in addition to an explanation about who I was, what I do, and how the doctor-patient relationship is configured in the ICU, I needed to tell them about the eICU generally, including the camera, the headset, where I was, why I was there, and how they should interact with me. If a doctor skips this step and goes right to the medical information, the listeners might feel like they are receiving a data dump, not participating in a conversation. This is not magic. This is not art. Its a technical skill requiring rapid assessment of the stakes and the players. It requires a nimble vocabulary. It requires ongoing verification that the patient and the family are absorbing the words, and their meaning. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement In my case, we established a connection. The family understood and thanked me, genuinely, for my time and explanation. It was 2 a.m., and it occurred to me that these tragic stories seem to be, not uncommonly, things of the night. If I had not been there on the camera, no intensive care doctor would have been available to provide an explanation. The patient would still have died, but perhaps his family would have felt caught off guard. Doubt about the cause of death and uncertainty about treatment options can plague and crush a family forever. It is likely that this California hospital was just trying to deliver ICU physician care in a way it believed would be sufficient. Difficult conversations are difficult in person and exceedingly difficult over the camera. I believe it is still possible with eICU-style technology to provide the necessary comfort, even when the conversation concerns death. It will, however, require a style and method of communication beyond what an in-person conversation provides. My own story was, I believe, a success of this technology because I took the extra time to overcome the constraints. Technology is the helper to the physician but not presently the replacement. If we allow the technology to strip away our common humanity, we will all be diminished as a consequence. Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Sen. Elizabeth Warren can welcome an unlikely new passenger to her anti-monopoly starship: Spotify. The music-streaming service shared that it filed an antitrust complaint against Apple with the European Commission on Wednesday, claiming that the App Store gives Apple an unfair advantage over its competitionin this case because it takes a 30 percent cut of any Spotify subscription that users pay for through Apple. One of Spotifys main competitors is Apple Music, which doesnt have to pay such a toll to the company that owns it. But Spotify is reliant on Apples App Store, since millions of its users access the Spotify app on iPhones. Apples fee for in-app purchases, according to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, would force us to artificially inflate the price of our Premium membership well above the price of Apple Music. And to keep our price competitive for our customers, that isnt something we can do. To drive the point home, the Swedish company launched an advocacy website, timetoplayfair.com, where concerned Spotify users can learn more about the streaming giants gripes. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Beyond the fees, Spotify also alleges that in some cases, Apple has restricted how Spotify can share promotions, like not allowing Spotify to email customers who are Apple users. If Spotifys claims lead to an investigation that finds that Apple is indeed unfairly controlling its platform in a way that stifles competition, the company may face fines and be forced to end any anti-competitive practices. This is somewhat similar to what happened with Googles Android last year, when European Union regulators imposed a record $5 billion fine on the company for violating its antitrust rules by, among other complaints, essentially requiring Android device-makers to pre-install Chrome and Google apps, thus putting other search engines at an unfair disadvantage. Apple could be seen as disadvantaging competitors by forcing them into Apples payments system and then charging high fees on transactions. Advertisement Advertisement Everything Spotify is arguing here is fairit is a problem that the worlds largest tech companies are also able to operate services on their own platforms. But its also pretty rich. Just days before filing its European Commission complaint, Spotify published a blog post explaining why it was appealing a decision by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board to raise the rates music-streaming services must pay songwriters and music publishers. Google, Amazon, and Pandora are also appealing. Apple is not, but if the others win, Apple will benefit from lower rates. Advertisement Currently, Spotify pays somewhere between $0.004 and $0.0084 per play to whoever holds the music rights to a song, which is usually some mix of record labels, artists, songwriters, and producers. These fractions of pennies wont really pay any bills unless youre roping in hundreds of thousands of streams a month. The federal Copyright Royalty Board ruled at the end of January that over the course of five years, royalty rates paid to artists and publishers will increase from 10.5 percent to 15.1 percent of revenue generated by the creative work. Spotify says that the reasoning behind the rate increase is flawed and will make it harder for Spotify to offer bundled services, like the bundle it announced earlier this week that gives a free Hulu subscription to Spotify Premium members. Spotify explained in its post that while it understands that everyone would wants a bigger piece of the pie, that cannot come at the expense of continuing to grow the industry via streaming. Translation: us first. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement While not every professional recording artist offers songs on Spotify, the vast majority of them do, reasoningas Spotify does with the App Storethat the popular platform is where the audience is. And they do it despite often-paltry earnings. That may come down to the tiny royalty for music streams, and it may come down to artists deals with their record labels (as the recent case of hip-hop group De La Soul and Tommy Boy Records illustrated). Perhaps it takes a critic like Spotify, another platform that arguably acts as an unfair gatekeeper, to highlight unfairness in Apples gatekeeping. Its the companies that depend on Apple and are big enough to truly compete with it that are best positioned to critique it, since they have so much to lose if it abuses its power. But right now, Spotifys position is that it would like to keep more money from subscriptions while denying more of it to artists. Its too bad that this nascent critic of Apples power hasnt spent much time examining its own. 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. #FridaysForFuture strikes take place in Bratislava, Kosice, Zilina and Liptovsky Mikulas. News: Receive favorite authors articles by email. Try the new feature and turn on the subscription. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Tens of thousands of pupils and students around the world are not planning to go to school on Friday, March 15. They are hitting the streets to make their voice heard. Dear adults, use your power, is the message they are sending to those in power who are able to deal with climate change. More than 1,200 town and cities in 92 countries signed up for the strikes. Three of them are in Slovakia. These strikes are organised mainly by pupils, often even children too young to express their opinion in elections. That is also the case of the 17-year-old Sandra Bulla, one of the people behind the protests in Slovakia. Now is the time for young people to connect, she told The Slovak Spectator. I'm happy that they are aware that our future is in danger. Spontaneous action Bulla, who studies graphic design in high school, decided to organise the Slovak strike when she clicked on the map of worldwide strike initiatives to find that Slovakia was not among the countries where one would take place during spring break. When she was finished with the registration of the country and creating the Facebook event, it was already 1:00 a.m. It was a really spontaneous decision, she said. When she shared the event later, people started joining and the event grew bigger and bigger, she momentarily doubted what she had gotten herself into. Businessman Rastislav Hutta will not be in charge of TANAP forests. News: Receive favorite authors articles by email. Try the new feature and turn on the subscription. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Agriculture Minister Gabriela Matecna has refused to appoint developer Rastislav Hutta as the head of state-run forestry company operating in the Tatra National Park (TANAP), Statne Lesy TANAPu. Hutta, who has worked on several projects in the Tatra Mountains, was the only candidate to attend the interview during the selection process. "I do not agree with the decision of the selection committee and I will not appoint him as the head of the state-run company," Matecna said, as quoted by the TASR newswire. Read also: Read also: Developer to head state forests company in the Tatras Read more The Slovak National Party (SNS), which nominated Matecna to the post, has also supported her decision. The agriculture minister did not comment on the technicalities of the selection process, but hopes that the new selection will have a better result. "To me, it was indeed incomprehensible that only two candidates had applied for this position and only one was actually present," Matecna explained, as quoted by TASR. Peter Kazimir must become an independent and impartial governor, President Kiska said. News: Receive favorite authors articles by email. Try the new feature and turn on the subscription. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Incumbent Finance Minister Peter Kazimir will become the new governor of the National Bank of Slovakia (NBS), the country's central bank. President Andrej Kiska appointed him to the post on March 13. Kazimir will take over his new position on June 1. Although I had a different opinion on the economic and financial policy of the state, we managed to restart our economy," Kiska acknowledged Kazimir's contribution as the finance minister, as quoted by the TASR newswire. Read also: Read also: Peter Kazimir to lead the National Bank of Slovakia Read more Kazimir will replace incumbent governor Jozef Makuch. He decided to leave office on his own request, two years before the official end of his tenure. In my opinion, he [Kazimir] is truly a suitable candidate for governor," Makuch said, as quoted by TASR. Giving up political posts Kazimir has pledged to give up his parliamentary seat in the upcoming days. He will subsequently meet with PM Peter Pellegrini (Smer) and Smer chair Robert Fico to settle the date of his resignation from the post at the Finance Ministry. Read also: Read also: Finance Minister Kazimir wants to govern the central bank Read more "As NBS governor, you must be independent and impartial," Kiska told Kazimir, as quoted by TASR. The new governor, who has been in politics for more than a decade, will be the subject of the public interest and control, the president added. Kiska expects Kazimir to turn NBS into a generator of new economic ideas so that Slovakia may become even more prosperous. Also, Kazimir wants to continue with Makuch's work so that the central bank is seen as a modern institution. "Slovakia still ranks among those countries with the strongest economic growth," Kazimir said, as quoted by TASR. Standardbred horseman Harry W. Bill Braden, 87, of Morton, Ill., formerly of Las Vegas, Nev., passed away on Monday, March 11, 2019, at his home. He was born June 8, 1931, in Chicago, Ill., to Harold and Vera Braden. He married Patty Lou Wright on September 24, 1950, in Brownstown, Ill. She preceded him in death on May 31, 2010. He was also preceded in death by one brother and four sisters. Surviving are one brother-in-law, Bill (Maddy) Wright; three beloved nephews, Lindsay Wright, Craig (Tammy) Wright and Kevin (Wendy) Wright; two great-nephews, Jordan Wright and Alex Wright; and two great nieces, Taylor Wright and Megan Wright, whom he dearly loved. Bill served in the United States Army, where he received the Korean Service Medal, with two bronze stars, for his years of service during the Korean War in the A Company of the 453rd Engineer Construction Battalion. He also had a life-long love for horses. He worked as a trainer and driver for Standardbreds in Illinois. He and his wife, Patty, raced Standardbreds throughout the country, coast-to-coast. He also was an assistant trainer for Delvin Miller and was proud to have trained Meadow Skipper and raced Darn Safe. He worked for Hayes Fair Acres and won the 1963 Illinois State Fair Colt Stakes with Dandy Date. He and Patty loved experiencing the success of his brother-in-law, Bill Wrights, Hambletonian horses, Dreamaster and Classic Photo. He was a member of the USTA, Masonic Lodge, and Morton VFW Post 5921. Cremation rites have been accorded. A Celebration of Life service will be held at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday (March 14) at Creekwood Apartments, 150 Yordy Rd., in Morton. Knapp-Johnson Funeral Home and Cremation Center in Morton is handling arrangements. Memorial contributions may be made to OSF Financial Assistance. Checks may be made payable to Sister Diane Marie McGrew with OSF Financial Assistance written in memo. Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the family and friends of Bill Braden. (USTA) Nominations for the $1 million Ohio State Fair Stakes must be postmarked by March 15, 2019. Held at Scioto Downs, the early-closing event is for Ohio-sired two- and three-year-olds and will be raced over three days (August 1-3). Scioto Downs will kick off the 2019 racing season on Tuesday, May 7. The 90-day race meet will conclude on Saturday, September 7, featuring the Jim Ewart Memorial and the Charlie Hill Memorial. The nomination fees for the Ewart and Hill Memorials are due on June 15, 2019. Scioto will race on Tuesdays at 2 p.m. and Wednesday through Saturday at 6:30 p.m. (EDT). For more information about racing at Scioto, including nomination payments, call the race office at 614-295-4668 or visit the 'Horsemen Information' page on the Scioto Downs website. (Jason Roth) At least twice a day, a New Zealand Defence Force officer serving at the heavily militarised border between North and South Korea calls the North on a hotline. We conduct phone checks with the North Korean side twice a day and I regularly pass on or receive messages from them via the hotline, said Flight Lieutenant Daniel Garnett, who is the Assistant Joint Duty Officer in the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission Secretariat (UNCMAC-S). Our team talks to them all the time, though we send a lot more messages than we receive, says Flight Lieutenant Garnett, who was born in Tauranga and grew up in Katikati in Bay of Plenty. Regarded as a bellwether of inter-Korean relations, the hotline at Panmunjom, the truce village inside the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), was reactivated in mid-2018 following the warming relations between the once-hostile neighbours. Before that North Korea had not answered the hotline for more than five years, in retaliation for the United Nations sanctions imposed on Pyongyang following a nuclear test on February 2013. Since he was posted to South Korea last October, Flight Lieutenant Garnett says he has passed on messages informing North Korea of the use of helicopters in the Demilitarised Zone, repatriation of remains of North Korean troops killed during the Korean War, and meetings and routine building maintenance at the border. The calls are scripted and the messages are relayed in English and Korean. Because they speak often, Flight Lieutenant Garnett and the Korean Peoples Army (North Korean) language specialists now recognise each others voices. We know each others names, he says. Some are friendlier than others one greeted me with Happy New Year in January. Once, when the phone line was down, Flight Lieutenant Garnett had no choice but to pass the message the old way. This meant walking to within a metre of the demarcation line that splits South and North Korea, reading out the message in English and letting a translator read it in Korean. Flight Lieutenant Garnett, who is based at Camp Bonifas, a UN Command military post 400 metres south of the southern boundary of the Demilitarised Zone, is part of a six-member team that monitors the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement between North and South Korea at the Joint Security Area in the zone. Flight Lieutenant Daniel Garnett at the Joint Security Area, the point along the 250-kilometre-long Demilitarised Zone where South and North Korean soldiers used to stand face to face armed with automatic rifles. As part of his role, he helps supervise access to the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom. New Zealand gets an incredible degree of exposure through this mission, since we fill several roles in the UNCMAC-S and interact with a wide range of stakeholders. It is very rewarding, he said. In the latest sign of increasingly warm relations, Flight Lieutenant Garnett says all weapons had been removed and all guard towers abandoned in the Joint Security Area, the point along the 250-kilometre-long Demilitarised Zone, where South and North Korean soldiers used to stand face to face armed with automatic rifles. Only 30 security personnel remain and we share security footage with the North Koreans. It is truly remarkable, he says. The United States-led UNCMAC Secretariat monitors and supervises the 1953 Armistice Agreement that suspended hostilities between North Korea and United Nations forces defending South Korea. The NZDF has a long history of involvement in South Korea since the start of war in 1950 and has contributed to the UNCMAC-S since 2003. It has seven personnel there now, monitoring the armistice and performing operational, education, liaison and corridor control functions for the UNCMAC-S. Flight Lieutenant Garnett joined the Royal New Zealand Air Force in 2013, after a short career in science, and is a pilot from No.3 Squadron. While his career has taken him elsewhere, he has never forgotten his earlier years in Katikati. It was a great place to grow up, he says. While Im thankful to friends and family who encouraged me to branch out and go to university, Katikati remains home. Recent protests in southern Syria have shown that, while Assad has taken control of much of Syria, opposition on the ground still remains reports Syria TV. There has been increasing talk recently in Western media about Assads victory over the Syrian revolution in the unequal fight he imposed on the unarmed protesters about eight years ago. The claim of victory rests on two main criteria: Assads survival in power and the expansion of the circle of control over Syrian territory. There, the story ends, and talk begins about the reconstruction and normalization process underway between the Assad regime and a number of countries in the region and the world. This sort of diagnosis has a great deal of simplification, as well as implications for how we understand the current conflict in Syria. Its true that the ratio of regime control on the ground has expanded because of Russian and Iranian support and that the area controlled by other players has declined. However, first of all, it is still a long way from controlling all Syrias territory. Second, control over the ground is one thing, and the ability to keep it under control is another thing entirely. Over the last eight years, a large number of parties have traded control over a majority of Syrias territoryit has gone from the regime to the opposition to the Islamic State (ISIS) and then back to the regime. But it is certain that the regime does not today possess that which will allow it to maintain its control over the largest portion of Syria, let alone all of Syria. Some may be betting that it will be able to do this, but I believe that this is still far-fetched. The regimes control is weak, even over the areas which it now holds. Last Sunday, the Bashar al-Assad regime erected new statues of Hafez al-Assad in Daraa city, where the Syrian revolution broke out in 2011. This act stirred anger in the streets, where residents had taken down the original statue about eight years ago. Despite the fact that the regime took control of this area just a few months ago, this did not prevent people from gathering, demonstrating and chanting slogans against the Assad regime to protest this act. These kinds of indications are very important, because they reflect the ability to continue the fight against the Assad regime by means different than those of recent years. This is the most important part of my analysis of whether Assad has been victorious or not. Control on the ground is a temporary and fluid indicator, but the continuing protests against the Assad regimes policies is more meaningful and a indicative criteria for calculating the victory equation. In addition to all that Ive noted, there are an unending number of internal and external challenges that the Assad regime will have to overcome before it can claim that it is able to survive as well as govern. These challenges are not limited to the economic aspect or to the matters of reconstruction, international legitimacy, or the return of refugees. It definitely goes beyond these, and could become much more difficult for the regime as international and regional players compete in and over Syria. The truth is that because of the Assad regimes exhaustion and its political, economic and military weakness, it could be more afraid of these challenges than of the opposition. While brandishing the ISIS card had served it as a kind of salvation in undermining the opposition, this sort of card will not be useful in confronting these challenges in the future. In summary, the claim that the regime has settled the battle is short-sighted and superficial. Its also unrealistic, as the battle for Syria will continue for a not insignificant time, and in various forms. This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. US Senator Lindsey Graham said that other countries should recognize Israeli sovereignty and the Israeli hold on the occupied Golan Height writes SANA. Syria condemns in the strongest of terms the statements made by US Senator Lindsey Graham regarding the occupied Syrian Golan, an official source at the Foreign and Expatriates Ministry said on Tuesday. The source said that these statements show the arrogant mentality of the US administration and that it views the regions issues with Zionist eyes in a manner that serves Israeli interests. The source said Grahams statements not only show ignorance of historical and geographical facts; it also shows the United States disregard and blatant violation of international law. The source stressed that all UN resolutions particularly Security Council resolution 497 of 1981 under Chapter 7, which was approved unanimously by all Council members including the US affirm the legal status of the Syrian Golan as occupied territory, and that the Israeli occupations decision to annex it is null and void. The Syrian people in general, and the people of the occupied Syrian Golan in particular, are determined to continue fighting until the occupied Syrian Golan is liberated in full and restored to the homeland, the source added, asserting that the occupation will end eventually, no matter how long it may last. This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. Hussam Eddin Ala accused other countries of trying to use the issue of human rights to promote geopolitical agendas reports SANA. Syrias Permanent Representative at the UN and other international organizations in Geneva, Hussam Eddin Ala, said that the discussion of the human rights situation in Syria at the Human Rights Council is an attempt to promote geopolitical agendas that have nothing to do with human rights or justice. During the 40th Regular Session of the Human Rights Council, Ala said in a statement that the recent report by the Human Rights Committee about human rights in Syria is full of fallacies that seek to distort the image of the Syrian government. He said that considering the current politicized climate, it isnt surprising that the Committee is promoting accusations against the Syrian Arab Army and partaking in a campaign to dissuade displaced Syrians from returning to their country. Ala said the report in question is full of fallacies and examples that continue the campaign of slander against the Syrian government, and while Syria does not acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Committee, it has responded to the allegations and accusations made in the report through an official document. He said Syria rejects the continuing attempts to target the country in this unprecedented and unacceptable manner and the Committees selective approach to applying the criteria of proof, as it continues to avoid providing a legal definition for the US-led International Coalition, which would clarify its illegal nature and its breach of the UN Charter, not to mention its reluctance to investigate the Coalitions crimes and massacres against civilians. Ala said Syria also condemns the Committees reliance on fallacies that ignore Turkeys role in the spread of terrorism in Syria, as well as ignoring Turkeys refusal to abide by its commitments as per the Sochi agreement. He said the Syrian Arab Armys operations in the de-escalation zone are a response to daily breaches by terrorist groups, breaches that have been completely ignored by the Committee as usual. Ala also rejected the use of the term sides of conflict that equates between the legitimate government and terrorist groups and armed militias. He also stressed that Syria rejects the attempts to distort the image of state establishments and the claims about the absence of the rule of law in the country, adding that Syria denounces the use of the term civil defense volunteers to describe members of the White Helmets who are affiliated with Jabhat al-Nusra. Ala said the approach of the Committee regarding the al-Rukban camp is another example of manipulating facts, noting that the Syrian government helped send two aid convoys to the camp and opened corridors to allow its occupants to leave, but US forces and their terrorist pawns are preventing civilians from leaving. He concluded by saying that the Committees persistence in employing selective standards and the grave faults in its legal methodology prove its failure to do its job objectively and independently, which prompts Syria to reiterate demands to not extend its mission. This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. The agreement signed in September between Russia and Turkey was supposed to limit the violence in northern Syria, but there has been little respite. Over 160 Syrian NGOs signed a petition on the recent military escalations in northern Syria. They called on the ceasefire guarantors of Turkey and Russia to abide by their commitments to the demilitarized zones. They also called on UN Special Envoy and his team to use all channels to influence international diplomacy to advocate for the protection of civilians in Syria as a first priority for all stakeholders, and to ensure that peace talks go forward. The text of the statement is below: The 4.1 million people who live in northwestern Syria welcomed the Russian-Turkish agreement on the demilitarized zones last September. The agreement brought some relief to civilians who have been suffering from the consequences of the continuous hostilities in the area, despite the fact that approximately 40 percent of the population are IDPs, and 10 percent of the population live in non-stable homes, which lack basic humanitarian services. The ceasefire was an opportunity for civilians and civil society organizations, which provide services to IDPs, to improve conditions and circumstances in the area. But this agreement, like the ones that preceded it, was fragile, and in early February, the regime launched an offensive on the northern countryside of Hama and southern countryside of Idleb. In the past 30 days, over 90 civilians were killed and over 300 were injured. We have encountered a ten year-old child called Hasnaa, who was severely injured while she was trying to save her younger sister Elaf, who was killed when regime military jets targeted their house in the town of Khan Sheikoun. Humanitarian and civilian facilities didnt survive the offensive, the al-Durra bakery in Maret Alnuman town was completely destroyed after an airstrike directly targeted the building. Over 8314 families fled from their towns, to be added to the 400,000 people living in IDP camps in northwestern Syria, displacement has been a major concern for humanitarian actors, especially with the very weak response from donors to such crisis. The signatory NGOs call for: The guarantors of the ceasefire agreement, Turkey and Russia, to abide to their commitments to the demilitarized zones. The International Syria Support Group and especially the Istanbul, group to use all their diplomatic channels to enforce a political solution based on UNSCR 2254, and avoid military actions. This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Network for Human Rights have said that the regime is responsible for 216 chemical weapon attacks, which have killed no fewer than 1,461 people writes Alsouria Net. On Monday, the Syrian Network for Human Rights said that 13,983 people had died under torture in the Assad regimes prisons since March 2011, indicating that about 128,000 of them were still under arrest. This came in a report by the Network on the toll of the events in Syria since 2011. The report added that, 127,916 people are still under arrest or have been forcibly disappeared into the regimes official and unofficial detention centers over the same period. The report said that, regime forces have pursued a policy of imposing sieges on areas under the control of armed opposition groups, and have prevented the delivery of food and medicine, which has led to the deaths of 921 civilians, including 398 children and 187 women, since March 2011. According to the report, 216 chemical weapons attacks have been carried out by the regime in Syria since their first use in December 2012, killing no fewer than 1,461 people. According to the report, Syria has seen huge waves of displacement, especially in 2017 and 2018, due to the military operations carried out by the parties to the conflict, or as a result of the truces and agreements imposed on the blockaded cities and towns, whose contents violate international humanitarian law. The Network added that, about 14.2 million people have been forcibly displaced since March 2011, including 8 million people inside Syria and about 6.2 million people outside the country. Syria has witnessed a brutal war since 2011 by the Bashar al-Assad regime and allied militias backed by Iran and Russia, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians, in addition to displacing millions from their cities and villages. This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. The new amendments to the labor laws will ensure that workers will see a pay rise and an increase in rights and entitlements writes Tishreen. The Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor is moving to issue a private sector labor law after amending 26 articles, including raising wages and ensuring entitlement to maternity leave and other articles. President Assad had issued the current Law No. 17 in 2010, which aimed to regulate the relationship between the worker and employer, but it resulted in the dismissal of 100,000 Syrians from their work, according to previous statistics, and sources in the Social Affairs Ministry. The Ministry asked legal figures, judges and economic and social actors to make notes on the draft of the Private Sector Labor Law No. 17 and present them to the committee formed to review the law. The Director of Labor in the Ministry, Mahmoud Dummarani, said that 26 articles in the law had been amended, most importantly increasing the wages by nine percent, an increase which workers are entitled to every two years, while the worker also cannot leave work without prior warning, and without informing the employer, where there will be regulations for this matter. According to Dummarani, the amendments will also cover the issuance of licenses to private employment offices, which will be issued by way of a decision from the concerned minister, who is working to ensure that the requests of Syrian employers and employees registered with these offices or who contract with them are met. The amendments also give an employee, who has spent six continuous months with an employer, the right to maternity leave with full pay for 120 days for each birth for the first three children. The amendments included, For workers not covered by social security provisions or only covered for work injuries, the amendments obliged employers to pay their workers, at the end of their service, a compensation calculated on the basis of a monthly wage for every year of service. Dummarani said that, after notes are given, there will be a final meeting with the Justice Ministry and the Labor Union to submit a final version to the concerned authority to be issued officially. He said that the most important criticisms directed at the current law included the employers ability to dismiss employees arbitrarily and their lack of rights. The amendment to the law came two years after the calls to amend it by the Labor Federation and other unions. This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. OPPO Vice President, Brian Shen, shared on Weibo yesterday that we can expect the OPPO Reno line to come in 4 colour variants. The colours we can expect to see are Fog Green, Pink Mist, Night Black and Nebula Purple which will all come in a matte finish. A photo of the Fog Green variant of the device emerged yesterday, showing off the triple rear camera setup with the periscope 10x lens. The device is speculated to come with tech specs that include the Snapdragon 855 and 4065mAh battery capacity. It features a 48MP main sensor, 5MP telephoto lens and 10x optical zoom. Another variant of the device is speculated be powered by the Snapdragon 710 and features a 6.4 inch display with dual rear cameras. The post sharing the colour options for the Reno line The SIRIM listing of the Reno device The OPPO Reno line may also be coming Malaysia as a search on the SIRIM database shows a device with the model number CPH1917 showing similar specs to the OPPO Reno device found on Singapores IMDA database. The OPPO Reno line is set to be launched on the 10th of April but currently there is no news of any Malaysia release date. From the two different listings of Reno devices weve seen surfacing on the internet, there may just be a possibility that the device may come in variants that may or may not include the 10x lossless zoom. However, do take this info with a grain of salt. So are you excited about the Reno line? For the latest OPPO Reno updates, keep your eyes on TechNave.com! Back in the saddle this morningI needed to take yesterday off for personal reasons. I have a few more thoughts about "picture permanence" (PicP)similar to "print permanence," except that not every picture has to be a print. There seems to me a division in motives for PicP. And that is, do you want to keep your pictures safe and secure for your lifetime, or last beyond it? I can see reasons for either choice. Another consideration is whether we're talking personally or culturally. I tend to think "culturally"that is, I'd like to see pictures in generaleveryone'sstand a chance of survival as part of the historical and cultural record, both because some of them contain important information for posterity and because I find them charming to look at and study. I've spent a great deal of time in my life looking at old photographs. So I'm part of the posterity of earlier generations of photographers, and I appreciate being able to see their work. I see no good reason not to return the favor. But "in-lifetime" preservation and "post-lifetime" preservation have different aspects. In the former, we're most often seeking to preserve a "working archive"that is, all of our rough work, in the form of retrievable negatives/files. And we continue to work, dynamically, out of that archive, making new prints, drawing new exhibits or books or collections of other sorts, discovering older gems we'd missed, building themes, analyzing our trends or patterns or concerns, finding new ways to use older pictures, and so forth. For a working archive, most of us keep some large portion of "all of our shooting"maybe not always more than half, depending on how we cull as we go, but everything that has some promise. These archives might consist of thousands or tens of thousands of negatives or terabytes of digital data. This is the rough ore we work from. If we're thinking of posthumous PicP, on the other hand, it's more efficient to leave behind small collections of full redacted workcreations that fully show our creative intentions. Books, beautiful portfolios, finished prints sold to others, magazines articles, pictures in museums or historical societies and so forth. What struck me yesterday as I was trying to untangle all this is this: it might be that maintaining an in-lifetime archive might be one of the best ways to insure that our pictures do not reach posterity, that is, do not last after we ourselves expire! The problem is one I've mentioned many times and that several readers also highlighted in commentsif you leave your heirs all of your shootingthe great mass of your raw work, as slides or negatives or as large numbers of files on multiple redundant hard drives, what in the world are they going to do with all that? Say you yourself, as a photography enthusiast, were to inherit 80,000 slides or 350,000 digital pictures from a forebearwhat would you make of it? It takes an enormous amount of work for someone else to redact all your work into some digestible or distilled form. If they even knew how you'd do it if you were doing it, which they won't. If you count on someone else doing it, chances are it won't get done. Of course, sometimes it does get done. There's Hugh Crawford's Jamie Livingston project, in which Hugh self-published a massive book of all of his deceased friend's one-a-day Polaroids (we should all have friends like that). And there's Vivian Maier, whose large, disorganized archive was discovered just prior to her death in a storage locker auction, and, since, has become a worldwide phenomenon. From history comes the example of Eugene Atget, whose negatives were rescued from oblivion, in the nick of time, by Berenice Abbott. They're among the exceptions that prove the rule, though. Leave behind a large mass of undifferentiated work, and it will be unlikely to bridge the gulf of between your life and your demise. That's doubly true if it requires a maintenance regimen you haven't trained someone else to do. Or even told them needs doing. In earlier essays on this topic I opined that two effective ways to insure your pictures' permanence are craft and fame. First, make objects, as Missy Mwac says. Make exceptionally beautiful objects, and people will be reluctant to dispose of them even if they have no value. Or, be famous, because that will help your work survive. No one was going to throw away the archive of Walker Evans even if it was a jumble at his death (as Arnold Crane testified it was in On the Other Side of the Camera*). It was valuable because it was his. (His archive was acquired in 1994 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.) Of course, it's not always up to us whether we're famous or not. Most of us aren't. Most of us don't even try. But a third way of insuring permanence for your pictures is to make finished work. Or at least make edited workthat is, pick out the few pictures you think have value and make your choices easy for others to understand. Gordon Lewis, Precipitation Here's a further way to help insure PicP: add info. A photo with the date of creation, photographer's name, data about the subject, and a few lines of accurate story is far more interesting to strangers who are unfamiliar with it (a plain way to say "posterity") than without it. For example, consider Gordon's "Precipitation," above, a picture you probably already know. Here are a few things that could be said about it: That it was taken by Gordon You could add a few words about who Gordon is and when he lived, and what kind of photographer he is Where it was taken That he took it while reviewing a Pentax DSLR (which will be historical one day if it isn't already) That it achieved some viral fame online and ended up in several published books That he sold several hundred fine prints of it "by popular demand" That even without the woman, the place it was taken is now changed and unrecognizable Isn't it more interesting with its story? I think it would be, to anyone who knew nothing about it and is encountering it cold. And don't think you can't add relevant information about pictures that are meant to "stand alone," too. You might have a picture of a rock and tree, but maybe it was taken by a recovering addict while attending a Charlie Cramer workshop and printed on an inkjet printer and made from a scanned color negative and the tree got hit by lighting seven years later and the picture was published in a calendar and helped restore the photographer's confidence and will to live and...whatever. You get the idea. There is always something interesting to say about a photograph, even if it's just background. So then, to help your work survive: Select mercilessly Make objects (prints)(Missy Mwac's dictum) Craft them (or have them crafted) well Make your pictures (or yourself) known (if possible) Add information Here's the point: almost all of these recommendations for picture permanence are helped by simply making a portfolio of prints, which is something all photographers used to do. I'll summarize a few recommendations in the next postthey'd get lost if I tacked them on way down here. Stay tuned.... Mike *I edited the text for Arnold. Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. Want to help? (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from: Steve Renwick: "Gordon sold several hundred prints of that image?? Good for him! Still enjoying mine." Mike replies: Yes, over two sales he sold a total of 304 prints, give or take a few. Seguin, TX (78155) Today Partly cloudy this evening. Scattered thunderstorms developing after midnight. Areas of dense fog. Low 67F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.. Tonight Partly cloudy this evening. Scattered thunderstorms developing after midnight. Areas of dense fog. Low 67F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%. Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship. Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang's Regular Press Conference on March 13, 2019 2019/03/13 Q: The new US ambassador to Australia said today China is using "payday loan diplomacy" to exert influence in the Pacific. How do you respond to this? A: Similar questions have been asked a lot recently. Cooperation between China and Pacific countries, in particular Pacific Island countries, is mutually beneficial. Such South-South cooperation that benefits both sides is well received by Pacific countries. We have noted that some US officials keep finding fault with the mutually beneficial cooperation China is conducting with others, including Pacific Island countries. We hope that these people could adjust their mindset, bear in mind the long-term development needs of these developing countries, and contribute to their development instead of constantly making troubles out of nothing. Q: Yesterday President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro announced that he would ask the United Nations, Russia and China to investigate the cyber attacks against Venezuela's electricity system. Does China have any plan to take part in this investigation and if it is true, when will Chinese specialists go to Venezuela? A: The Chinese side noted that the massive blackout has lasted for several days in Venezuela, causing much inconvenience to the work and life of the Venezuelan people. Reports say that the blackout was caused by cyber attacks on Venezuela's power grid. The Chinese side is concerned over this and hopes that the Venezuelan side will identify the cause and restore normal power supply and social order as soon as possible. The Chinese side stands ready to provide assistance and technical support to the restoration of power in Venezuela. Regarding what you asked about sending specialists, I have nothing to announce at this moment. Q: The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized China in an international energy conference yesterday for preventing regional countries from accessing more than $2.5 trillion in energy reserves in the South China Sea. Does China have any comment on this? A: China and relevant countries have disputes over maritime delimitation and territorial issues on islands in the South China Sea. China believes that countries concerned need to settle relevant disputes in a fair and reasonable manner through friendly consultation on the basis of international law, and pending a settlement of the issues, countries concerned should shelve differences and explore ways of joint development. China has been in contact with countries concerned via diplomatic consultation mechanisms and internal discussion channels. It serves the interests of regional countries that those countries can manage and handle differences in their own way, and jointly uphold regional peace, stability, development and prosperity. Meanwhile, some non-regional country has repeatedly stirred up troubles in an attempt to ruin the harmony. Such attempts are irresponsible to regional countries. Q: I have a question on the Korean Peninsula situation. We noted that on March 12, some DPRK media carried articles clarifying the DPRK's stance on complete denuclearization. They said that it is the country's firm position to establish a new type of DPRK-US relations, establish a peace mechanism to ensure lasting stability of the peninsula, and achieve complete denuclearization. There are also reports quoting special advisor to the ROK President Moon Chung-In, saying that the US should seek to realize denuclearization of the peninsula step by step, because the "denuclearization at one go" strategy will not help break the impasse over the negotiations. What is your comment? A: China always believes that the Korean Peninsula issue can only be solved peacefully through political dialogues. After the Hanoi summit, as you may have noticed, the DPRK and the US both expressed willingness to continue dialogues. We look forward to seeing concrete actions from the two sides. Regarding the political settlement of the Korean Peninsula issue, experience teaches us that the key to keeping up and advancing dialogue is to accommodate all parties' legitimate concerns in a balanced way, build up mutual trust and consensus, take phased and synchronized steps, and start with easier moves so as to create favorable conditions for a political settlement. China will continue to play its due role along with other parties. Q: We are all closely following the recent Ethiopian Airlines accident. Do you have more information about what has been done for the follow-up matters of the Chinese victims? A: We talked about how the follow-up work was going on here the other day. According to what we've learned further, the Chinese Embassy in Ethiopia has contacted the employers and families of the eight Chinese citizens killed and coordinated with the Ethiopian Airlines to arrange for the families' trip to and accommodation in Ethiopia. As far as I know, some of the families have arrived in Ethiopia. The Chinese Embassy in Ethiopia has put in place three special hotlines and set up a liaison office in a hotel near the airport to assist the families. We noted that the Ethiopian side has set up an investigation committee. You may have also learned from the media that the two black boxes from the aircraft have been found and the cause of the accident is still under investigation. The Chinese Foreign Ministry and the Chinese Embassy in Ethiopia will continue to closely follow relevant progress and coordinate with relevant parties in Ethiopia to provide full assistance to the families of the Chinese citizens in handling the follow-up matters. Q: An international rights activist wrote an op-ed outlining the detention conditions Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor face. Does China have any comment on the op-ed? A: I remember answering your question yesterday. I want to reiterate that after Chinese state security authorities took compulsory measures against these two Canadian citizens in accordance with law for activities endangering China's national security, the Chinese side has ensured their legal rights and interests in accordance with law. Q: The United Nations Human Rights Council is going to adopt the report for China's Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in Geneva on March 15. Do you have more details? A: On March 15, China will participate in the session of the UN Human Rights Council on the adoption of the review report for China's third UPR. China attaches high importance to the adoption of the report and will send a high-level delegation headed by Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng and comprised of representatives from ministries of the central government, the Xinjiang and Tibet Autonomous Regions, and the Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions. China will give feedback to the recommendations it received in the 3rd UPR in November last year and have constructive exchanges with various parties. Q: The European Commission and EU foreign policy chief published on Tuesday a list of ten actions needed for rebalancing relations with Beijing amid China's growing economic power and political influence in a document called EU-China: A Strategic Outlook. What is your comment? A: The China-EU comprehensive strategic partnership has been developing quite well lately. It serves the common interests of both China and the EU. We have noted this document released by the EU. I'd like to stress that the mutually beneficial cooperation between China and Europe serves the common interests of the two sides. China always views its relationship with the EU from a strategic and long-term perspective. We stand ready to enhance mutual understanding and practical cooperation with Europe. We hope that the European side could view China's development and the new round of reform and opening-up in an objective, reasonable and unbiased way, and work with us to continuously promote the sustained, sound and stable development of China-EU relations. As for the issues specified in the ten actions of the report, I want to say that China and the EU maintain constructive dialogues in all these areas. Q: You said that China is ready to offer assistance and support to Venezuela. Have you already received a formal request from the Venezuelan government asking for such help? Do you have any specific information on what kind of help China would offer to Venezuela? A: China and Venezuela are friendly nations that maintain friendly cooperation across the board. I believe I just made it very clear that China is concerned about the inconvenience to the life of the Venezuelan people caused by the massive blackout in the past several days. The Chinese side is ready to provide assistance to the best of its ability for the restoration of power in Venezuela if the Venezuelan government makes such requests. Q: President Maduro said at a press conference that he has some information that the cyber attack came from Houston and Chicago. What is the credibility that China gives to this assessment by Maduro? A: We have noted relevant reports. Only the parties accused by President Maduro are capable of making a clarification or explanation. Q: Has China decided what it is going to do about the listing of Masood at the UN Security Council? A: I would like to reiterate that the Chinese government will continue to participate in the review work of the Security Council 1267 Committee in a responsible manner. Q: Another question on the EU-China: A Strategic Outlook report. Europe outlines China as a competitor instead of a cooperative relationship in the report. Is China worried about that? A: China seeks to view and deepen its comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU from a long-term and strategic perspective. Of course, we hope that on the basis of mutual respect, a relationship featuring greater wellbeing, mutual benefit and win-win outcomes can be established between our two sides. As for the competition issue you mentioned, some competition may exist between economies and countries, but it should be approached with a correct attitude. Healthy competition, instead of vicious competition, should be encouraged. Otherwise, no party's interests, not those of the Chinese side nor those of the European side, will be served. I still want to emphasize what I said earlier to the RIA Novosti journalist that we hope the European side can view China's development and the new round of reform and opening-up in an objective, reasonable and unbiased way, and see more opportunities from China's further development. Q: Further to what you said on the 1267 Committee. Last time you said about the reports on March 13 to be the deadline for a decision on this by the UNSC members. Is it still the case? Of course at the UN it's still the night of March 12, so it will probably come out next morning. Is China in talks with all the parties concerned regarding this particular issue? A: First I need to make clear that as I recall, in previous press conferences, I have not stated the deadline for the UN Security Council or its subsidiary bodies to discuss this issue. China will continue to uphold a responsible attitude and deal with this issue with relevant parties via thorough consultation. Discussions on this issue must be conducted following the rules and procedures of the UN Security Council and its subsidiary bodies. China believes that only a plan acceptable to all can offer a long-term solution. Q: The US has reinforced blockade against Cuba with Chapter III of the Helms-Burton Act. Can you tell me China's comment on it? A: China holds a clear position on US sanctions and decades of embargo imposed on Cuba. China and most UN members have long been opposing US sanctions that have brought great harm to Cuba's economic and social development and people's lives. We urge the US to correct such wrongdoing. This is the position of China as well as the majority of UN members. Q: Last week there were some questions about a possible trip by President Xi Jinping to Europe. I wonder if there is any update about the dates, which countries he will be visiting and the activities? A: Please stay patient. When it comes to the Chinese leaders' visits, we always release relevant information in advance. So if the information is confirmed, we will release it in a timely manner. The film is: a portrait of grinding poverty and dysfunction in Thatchers Britain. The LuxFilmFest has always been a promoter of films that may be considered outliers. The films that you need to engage with or would require boning up on the cast and crew beforehand. Perhaps even become head-scratchers when the credits roll. Yes, there's a place for the blockbusters, the gilt edged spandex clad crowd-pleaser but there's also room for the curios and the quirky pieces. Richard Billingham's dour, booze-soaked, smoke-drenched piece is being described as one to watch and is being talked up as a film that if not on a par with, certainly echoes that of Mike Leigh, Shane Meadows, Ben Wheatley and Ken Loach. Take a look at the skewed trailer above. This is what would happen if Eastenders were a fly-on-the-wall documentary, was set in Birmingham AND was washed down with an acid blotter (*Drugs are bad but so are family). So reads the promotional material: On the outskirts of Birmingham and the margins of society, the Billingham family performs extreme rituals and break social taboos as they muddle through a life decided by factors beyond their control. At times shocking and laced with an unsettling humour, three episodes based on director and photographer Richard Billinghams memories and world-renowned photos of his parents, Ray and Liz, unfold as a powerful evocation of their relationship, its impact on Richards and his younger brothers life, and the overall experience of growing up in a Black Country council flat. TO WIN TIX - please head to our FACEBOOK PAGE. Billingham has said of his feature: Ray & Liz is a concentration of my own lived experience of growing up in a tower block council flat during Thatcher-era Britain. By sticking true to real life, lived experience and observation I want to recreate a world that can only have come about from my being a witness to it. [] " "The film is, then, as much of it's time as it is off the director's own memories..."In the early 90s I began photographing my father Ray, with the intention of making paintings. I grew increasingly interested in the photographs, in composition, mood, texture, shape and form." Though, clearly some of the material is going to shock and appall, there are elements of the every day pain, violence and hate that underpin many a familiar family. The discomfort that may be felt when watching is perhaps down to the viewers realisation that matters cut quite close to the bone. Odf this Billgham says: "It was not my intention to shock, to offend, sensationalise, or be political, only to make work that is truthful. Ray & Liz is a natural progression from previous photography and video work about my family. Mark Kermode, via a review on a recent Radio5 Live show (see below), describes himself as being immersed in a 'sardonic, sometimes oppressive, sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes funny drama' that at times 'is like stepping inside a poem'. Saving his most glowing praise until then end, Kermode states that he believes that Billingham will go on to make something 'quite remarkable' in the future. On Monday, the director of the European Union's Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA), Michael O'Flaherty, met with Luxembourg's Chamber of Deputies to discuss the spread of antisemitism in Europe. The meeting with O'Flaherty to discuss antisemitism in Europe is no coincidence, as Luxembourg took over the presidency of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in March. Antisemitism has been on the rise in Europe over the last few years, as shown by a EU-wide study. Luxembourg too has seen its fair share of increasing antisemitism. O'Flaherty firmly stated that problems causing and caused by antisemitism and discrimination against other races are issues for everybody in society. He explained that they are "our problems in society." As a result, society must resolve these issues, which in turn, according to O'Flaherty, calls for a high level of understanding and awareness to the issues. He explained that the February Eurobarometer queried the public on antisemitism and many respondents believed it was not an issue. As O'Flaherty explained, this revealed much about the perception of the issue by the greater public as well as general education. This should help lawmakers discern priorities in the future. Describing surveys sent to Jewish residents in the EU, O'Flaherty explained that Jews answered similar questions in both 2013 and 2018. And within that time frame, trends suggest a more urgent situation. 90% of Jews queried in the latest survey have claimed that antisemitism is a serious issue in society. They experienced harassment and discrimination and felt that it was futile to submit complaints to the government. O'Flaherty told Luxembourg's MPs that the survey reminded the EU to work harder to support minorities. In Luxembourg alone, there were 13 antisemitic acts reported in 2017. O'Flaherty urged politicians to do something, notably educating the public. His suggestions included investing in awareness campaign and Holocaust education, collaborating with Jewish communities, and offering security for Jewish facilities. As for when such discrimination against beliefs or skin colour occurs, O'Flaherty believes that it mainly takes place in the workplace, but also in schools. Luxembourg desperately needs to combat this discrimination. He explained that the amount of discrimination against sub-Saharan Africans is "disturbingly high" in Luxembourg, much higher than the European average. He implored the chamber to resolve this issue. The director of the FRA followed his meeting in the Chamber of Deputies with a debate with students at the Geesseknappche forum to discuss discrimination in schools and online. A recent report in the French newspaper 'Liberation' paints a rather unflattering portrait of the Grand Duchy, putting emphasis on the rising housing costs and the everyday lives of ordinary people. The title of the article published in the 11 March edition of the Liberation newspaper sets the tone: "Les "petites gens" du Grand-Duche" (The Grand Duchy's "little people"). The French daily newspaper presents the story that Luxembourg prefers to hide, which is that poverty is on the rise. 700 a month for a small 8m2 room The newspaper co-founded by Jean-Paul Sartre vehemently tears into the "futuristic" neighbourhood of Kirchberg, highlighting its home to banks and investment funds. The paper lashed out against these banks and institutions, claiming they are legally able to avoid their own countries' fiscal laws and can put up some of their employees in penthouses costing up to 1.5 million. This in turn exacerbates the plight of ordinary people, who fall victim to rising housing costs. The propensity of banks to set up base in Kirchberg, which the newspaper describes as "growing like mushrooms", in turn accentuates poverty and discourages affordable housing. The newspaper explains that housing prices in Luxembourg City rise by 8% each year. Between 2009 and 2017, the sale of an apartment has risen from 4,000 per square metre to 7,000 per square metre. The newspaper also cites an educational employee at the drug consumption room, Abrigado, who explains that an 8 square metre room with a shared shower and no kitchen in a village 30 kilometres away costs 700 a month to rent. Transport links are also poor, with buses only arriving every two hours. "Theft, rape, murder, and poverty" The article used official statistics from Statec to suggest that Luxembourg is one of the few countries that has experienced a constant rise of the risk of poverty since 2005. Referring to the country's GDP (which is the highest worldwide alongside Qatar and Macao), the newspaper calls it a false GDP as it includes the 175,000 cross-border workers. In an interview with the paper for the article, the defense lawyer of LuxLeaks whistleblower Antoine Deltour, Philippe Penning, explained that Luxembourg is not just a hotspot for economic crime. Penning says that in his career as a lawyer, he has seen "theft, rape, murder, and a lot of poverty." Penning affirmed that the gap between the rich and the poor is only growing in Luxembourg. "Young Luxembourgers dream of easy money" The article also surveys OGBL trade unionist Jeannot Kayl, who believes that "young Luxembourgers dream of easy money in the finance sector", and added that foreigners are hesitant to move to the country because of the cost of living [editor's note: this does contradict earlier reporting on Luxembourg's growth demographics as reported by Statec]. The newspaper returned to Abrigado, highlighting the issue of narcotics. According to Didier Schneider, the joint director of the National Social Defence Committee, Luxembourg's substance abuse demonstrates that Luxembourg is a real country with real issues, rather than a tax-haven made up of post boxes. He went on to say that many believe Luxembourg is a type of El Dorado myth, but do not realise that a salary of 2,500- 3,000 makes you a "poor worker." In a response to a parliamentary question submitted by DP Member of Parliament Gusty Graas concerning the demographics of doctors in Luxembourg, Minister of Health Etienne Schneider revealed that the number of doctors in the Grand Duchy has doubled since 2000. Schneider's response revealed that there were 1,780 doctors in Luxembourg by the end of 2017, of which a third a are general practitioners. In terms of the age breakdown of the doctors, Schneider explained that the largest demographic of doctors is aged 55 and above, making up 44% of Luxembourg's doctors. Conversely, only 4% of doctors are younger than 35. The minister explained that is no data on when doctors retire, as there is no legal retirement age in the profession. However, the minister is working on getting viable data through a study which encompasses the entire health sector. The study will first of all evaluate the sector's resources in a qualitative manner to determine which medical areas require improvement, as they may not be covered. Then, the study will take the form of a quantitative examination in hospitals and general practices. This second part of the study will take place in 2019 and the results will be published. Finally, the national monitoring centre on health (Observatoire national de la Sante) will examine the results of the study in order to recommend new measures. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz on Tuesday sided with Berlin in criticising French President Emmanuel Macron's European reform ideas, dismissing some of his proposals as "utopian" and others as "dangerous". Macron outlined his ideas for Europe's future last week, ranging from stronger security cooperation to more controversial plans for harmonising a European minimum wage and social services across the bloc. But they got a lukewarm reply from German Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU party. "There are some (proposals) that we reject," Kurz told German radio Deutschlandfunk, adding that he was "pleased" with the CDU's stance because "it overlaps in large parts" with Austria's point of view. "I believe that many of the suggestions are utopian, when I think of the proposal for a social union, or a European minimum wage," said the conservative chancellor. Merkel's presumptive heir and CDU chief Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer argued in an article at the weekend for measures to boost European unity, including on security -- but she also distanced herself from many of Macron's more ambitious proposals. The clash of visions comes as the race heats up for the European Parliament elections in May, where eurosceptic nationalists are expected to gain ground. Merkel's CDU and Kurz's OeVP are campaigning for the same centre-right political bloc, the European People's Party (EPP), whereas Macron's Republic on the Move party is teaming up with liberal groups. Kurz said Macron's plan for an EU-wide minimum wage sounded good on paper, "but in reality it's completely impossible" given the difference in living costs and living standards across the bloc. "Do you think that German carmakers would open production sites in Hungary or Poland if the salaries were exactly the same as in Germany?" he asked. The EU's youngest leader, aged just 32, Kurz said he also rejected any pooling of European debt, as it could lead to taxpayer cash flowing from more fiscally prudent nations to spendthrift neighbours. He described it as "a really dangerous" proposal that would only make it "more attractive" for some nations to take on more debt. "That's really not the direction we should be heading in," Kurz said, echoing Germany's position. Wonder Caves: Ideal Spot for Hikers and Cave Explorers Science and Technology Studies (STS) can engage with social movements in a variety of forms. STS scholarship has provided methods, theories, and concepts related to how information and values are communicated between scientific disciplines and affected communities, how those communities are formed and/or dissolved around matters of concern, how they are (not) listened to and (not) legitimated, and how issues reach political agendas. Thus, STS concepts can be utilized to leverage the possibilities of social movements for producing significant change. In this piece, I draw upon the possibilities for change produced by STS by depicting the green headscarves used in Argentina and other Latin American regions to demand abortion rights as boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989; Star 2010). Green scarves as boundary objects are not merely icons, they also afford cooperation among very different communities of practice, thought, and belonging. Boundary objects serve to bring different social worlds together into cooperation without consensus (Star 2010; Star and Griesemer 1989). They do this only if vaguely defined and ill-structured. When different groups and disciplines get together, they can collaborate with others by renouncing their specific understandings and claims. Hence, boundary objects are not just any word or item that is subject to different interpretations, they also need to enable the formation of communities of knowledge. Generally, this means that groups move between loose definitions when working together and their specific frames when not collaborating. To illustrate how boundary-objects work, Star (2010) uses the example of a 19th century article that took a map of the monkey brain and directly transposed it onto a human one. Being an inoperative comparison, the scientific community could not use it for their studies, but the ill-structured map served to establish conversations for the construction of the neurological sciences (Star 2010, 608). A second example from my own research takes the project of beaver eradication in the South of Chile and Argentina as a boundary object. I collaborate with a multidisciplinary group of scientists to examine and mediate the beavers conflict in Tierra del Fuego, where the introduction of the species in 1946 has led to considerable ecosystem changes. While most of the local scientists I work with did not leverage the international plan to eradicate the species from the Islands, the unsuccessful and ill-structured project has promoted a fruitful community that works around the problem of the beavers from multiple perspectives. What follows is an analysis of another boundary object, this time in the context of a movement seeking abortion rights, thus translating a science studies concept to the field of social movements. Abortion Marches and the Latin American New Feminist Wave In July 2018, I traveled to Santiago de Chile for the XII Latin American Conference of Science and Technology Studies. I walked into a city that, at first glance, seemed to be comprised of engineers and tall buildings, colonial histories and racialized classism, all situated against a backdrop of the snow-capped Andes and the disavowal of multiple violent pasts. The conference was being held at the public University of Chile, which I found to be a surprisingly vibrant feminist institution covered with posters, graffiti, and impromptu assemblies within the corridors. A demonstrating Chilean University was not something new: the 2011 intense protests demanding more equalitarian access to higher education had led to the approval of a bill that freed tuition costs to the poorest incoming students (Barandiaran 2018, VIII). What was novel was the expansion of feminist territories: from enclosed and marginal rooms to every space within and outside the university, including corridors, classrooms, bathrooms, backyards, and city squares. It was the materialized landscape of what has been called the Chilean New Feminist Wave. Hall of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Chile The banners tied international movements such as the North American MeToo, the Argentinian Ni Una Menos, and the Spanish Yo te Creo with the Chilean New Feminist Wave that arose during the 2018 feminist occupations. The protest articulated transnational feminist demands with local configurations of alterity and inequality, related in part to the neo-liberalization of the country and its universities during and after the 70s Dictatorship (Barandiaran 2018). Since April 2018, students had been taking over universities across Chile to denounce sexual abuse and discrimination and to demand sexual identity recognition. They provoked one of the largest ever feminist demonstrations in Chile (May 16) and made possible the largest abortion march (July 25), which ended with three women stabbed. Despite the wide range of collectives participating in the rally for a legal and safe abortion, there was one thing we all had in common: a green headscarf similar to the one used by the Argentinian movement at that time. When I asked the reason for using the same scarf, a participant told me: Chile and Argentina have always looked to one another; if the abortion law passes there, it might happen here too. In June 2018, the lower house of Argentinas Congress approved a bill to decriminalize abortion. The bill revitalized and assembled a variety of feminist movements for a common cause and with the same icon, a green headscarf. The scarf was a resignification of the white headscarves that Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of Plaza de Mayo) started to wear in their marches in front of the governments office to ask for our disappeared relatives during the 1976-1983 Military Dictatorship. The scarf was initially made of cloth diapers and used by the Mothers to identify each other during human rights demonstrations. Not surprisingly, in both Santiago and Buenos Airess abortion marches, protesters accused the State of hypocrisy, saying: they say they care for life when they used to take it, in reference to the State terror lived not long ago. Hall of the Faculty of Exact Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires with a giant green headscarf On August 8, 2018, the upper house of Argentinas Senate had to deliberate the bill. I was in Buenos Aires at that time for my research, so I was able to participate in the massive vigil that took place outside the Senate. Unlike Spain, where parties unify their take on each issue in advance, Argentinian senators of different regions debated for about 17 consecutive hours. They expressed a variety of standpoints that revealed ferocious discrepancies within the parties themselves. Not surprisingly, most speeches in favor of the law came from female senators and from richer regions. The interventions delineated, among many others, biological arguments, efficiency analyses, terrible accusations towards women if raped, the presence of antisemitism, poverty, international rights, public health, references to the bible, and the patriarchy of deciding over womens lives. From that variety, one could group the arguments in two: those in favor of regulating abortions since they are already taking place through an informal and expensive market so that the State can guarantee the safety and health of Argentinian women, and those alleging moral reasons to reject any State implication in the termination of any kind of pregnancies. While senators sat inside, thousands of people, including members of feminist organizations and political groups, citizens, and green scarves, all waited outside amid heavy rain with hope: they have to pass it, they cannot look at us through their windows and do otherwise. The wait was filled with performances, conversations, food, fires, music, and exhibitions that publicly ruptured the historical taboo that has, until now, silenced abortion practices (more than 350,000 per year according to the Argentinian Ministry of Health). Despite the parity of takes during the speeches, the Senate counted with 38 negative votes, 2 abstentions, and 31 in favor, deciding not to pass a bill to debate how to regulate Argentinian abortions. The decision left the country with the same law that dates from 1921, and which criminalizes the voluntary end of pregnancy, a policy that provokes a profitable, discriminatory, and unsafe informal market. Despite the shock, rage, and grief, people outside the palace responded fast: This has just started; it didnt happen now but will soon. We are too many. Indeed, since August 8, 2018 one can see cars, people, dogs, institutions, backpacks, chairs, wrists, houses, and streets all wearing green headscarves nationwide and gathering in meetings and feminist parties. The impulse provoked many to attend the 33 Womens National Meeting for the first time, which this year congregated more than 60,000 women, lesbians, and trans-identified people who got together to exchange experiences through workshops, marches, and celebrations. Moreover, later that month I visited the Argentinian Congress to consult some archives, and found the building filled with green scarves and laces. With such power to mobilize conversations, cannot we speculate and even imagine a green headscarf political party that transcends the traditional Peronist-neoliberal divide of Argentinian politics? Cooperation Without Consensus Because boundary objects bring different social worlds together without requiring consensus, understanding the green scarves as boundary objects allows us to rethink the tensions of complex social movements when pursuing policy changes. Green scarves are more than a mere icon to symbolize the movement for decriminalizing abortion. They are also a device enabling very different communities to cooperate without needing either understanding or agreement (from prostitution abolitionists, indigenous feminists, some Peronists, anarchists, black feminists, trans groups, health activists, Catholics for the right to decide, scientists, policy makers, mothers, experts, poor classes, and so on). Representing a variety of theories, experiences, and political goals, the green headscarf functions as an infrastructure that coordinates multiplicity by establishing a loosely defined common. It works because it achieves the articulation of different levels of knowledge and vindication, from very deep and heated debates within communities to more vague conversations and the activation of sorority, intimacy, and complicity rather than agreement within bigger marches and celebrations. Neither level is static; rather they rearticulate each other, strengthening continuation and reflexivity by leaving discrepancies within the spaces where they can be productive. Articulation The green headscarves are more than a mere icon to symbolize a group and, indeed, they do not represent the communities that wear it but rather the practices of collaboration and articulation. As a boundary object, the scarf articulates different levels of knowledge and vindication across local and transnational politics, across individuals, communities, and the abortion movement, and across different demands and regimes of truth. First, regarding the local and global character of the abortion movement, the power of the green scarf resides in its capacity to travel along difference, arriving to other Latin American countries where resignification occurs inside their borders and according to their national configurations of alterity (Segato 2007). Second, the scarves are able to move along different levels of knowledge. While in their respective epistemic and active communities, people can elaborate their takes in more complex, critical and thoughtful ways, through the iconic scarf, they can also sacrifice deepness when conflating their stakes with others: at a march or a feminist event. And third, the scarf allows for different forms of vindication to coexist. Following Foucault, Paul Preciado has argued that vindication politics of the body respond to different regimes of power (Preciado 2011). Thus, when women claiming abortion rights list their bodies into the property register or shout out that their body is theirs, they are re-signifying neoliberalist discourses. When they shape a giant vagina and march it in simulation of a Catholic procession, they are re-appropriating sovereign forms of politics. And when they propose a uterus strike and the promotion of sexual practices that do not lead to reproduction, they are critically resisting biopolitical governance. Thus, facing the complexity of leveled realities, boundary objects such as the green headscarf can preclude disintegration and critique, instead allowing multiplicity and coexistence through the articulation of discourses. Beyond the Curse of the Left and the Fear of Fracture Thinking of the green headscarf as a boundary object also offers some lessons for northern geographies. While I was taking courses in the United States, I witnessed the curse of the left, a form of anxiety derived from the fear of a fractured world. While right-wing reactions to this fear consist of unifying and violently erasing multiplicity and difference, the left tends to become paralyzed by the impossibility of always including every Other. This occurs in the form of constant accusations among collectives for not including one another. I remember the attacks my students directed at the Womens March (17 Jan 2017) that took place after Trump won the election. I heard them express anger at white feminists for marginalizing black feminists or at women for essentializing gender. Their demands were of course extremely relevant for leveraging more inclusive politics, but they also produced distrust in any collective attempt to change policies. There is still much work to be done around the anxieties that difference produces, but one key therapeutic idea is Spivak et al.s strategic essentialism, which refers to how minorities might temporarily essentialize their identities despite their differences in order to achieve rights (Danius, Jonsson, and Spivak 1993). The goal of working with these anxieties is to not become paralyzed when facing the impossibility of representing every reality. To this goal, I also propose the use of boundary objects as a way of transcending the identity/class dichotomy and the anxieties of difference and representation. Boundary objects enable people across communities of difference to work together, even with disagreement. Think of a different example besides the green headscarf. For the Spanish Anti-austerity movement of Indignados (2011-2015), democracy, in a vaguely defined form, was the boundary object that allowed people with very different backgrounds to collaborate in the search for direct participatory democratic practices. More than the ideal definition of democracy, its looseness enabled its practice. Could we then imagine a politics of boundary objects, or arbitrary not-representative icons for enabling cooperation among communities of difference and dissensus? Taken from STS, the concept of boundary object can be useful for engaging with social movements without the paralyzing fear of fracture and the curse of the left. Rather than seeking consensus, agreement, or integration at a more abstract level, boundary objects promote the coexistence of difference within social movements that pursue more rights for more people. Today, this is an extremely urgent goal, as the reactionary right is globally taking national forms that aim to violently remove difference and minorities rights. Works Cited Barandiaran, Javiera. 2018. Science and the Environment in Chile. The Politics of Expert Advice in a Neoliberal Democracy. MIT Press. Danius, Sara, Stefan Jonsson, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 1993. An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Boundary 2 20 (2):24. Preciado, Beatriz. 2011. Cuerpo Impropio. Guia de Modelos Somatopoliticos y de Sus Posibles Usos Desviados. 2011. http://ayp.unia.es/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=678. Segato, Rita Laura. 2007. La Nacion y Sus Otros. Prometeo. Star, Susan Leigh. 2010. This Is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept Susan Leigh Star. Society for Social Studies of Science 35 (601). Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. 1989. Institutional Ecology, Translations and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeleys Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science 19 (3):387420. In the Media Me Too. Movement. https://metoomvmt.org In Spain: Protests As Five Men Cleared Of Rape Charges. Alexis Diao https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/26/606019001/in-spain-protests-as-five-men-cleared-of-rape-charges Occupying Against the Patriarchy. https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2018/06/25/chilean-feminist-student-occupations Argentina Congress Takes Historic Step Towards Legalising Abortion. Uki Goni https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/14/argentina-congress-vote-legalise-abortion The Mothers Of Plaza De Mayo: we Were Born on the March. https://www.opendemocracy.net/protest/mothers-plaza-de-mayo Aborto: Expositores, Posiciones, Costos Y Otros Datos Oficiales, Los Numeros Del Debate En El Congreso. CMS Medios https://www.cronista.com/economiapolitica/Aborto-expositores-posiciones-costos-y-otros-datos-oficiales-los-numeros-del-debate-en-el-Congreso-20180803-0041.html Hundreds Of Thousands Of Womxn and Allies Lined the Streets. But There Is Little To No International Media Coverage on This. #trelew #encuentronacionaldemujeres Pic.twitter.com/uszmqdimpx. Womens Global https://twitter.com/WM_Global/status/1052150067963056129 60k Women March on Trelew For Annual Summit. Jayson McNamara http://www.batimes.com.ar/news/argentina/60k-women-march-on-trelew-for-annual-summit.phtml Catolicas Por el Derecho a Decidir. http://catolicas.org.ar/ Why I Testified in the Argentina Abortion Debate. Alberto Kornblihtt https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05746-1 Adhesiones por el Aborto Legal. http://www.abortolegal.com.ar/adhesiones/ Race And Feminism: Womens March Recalls The Touchy History. Karen Bates https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/01/21/510859909/race-and-feminism-womens-march-recalls-the-touchy-history How the Womens Marchs genital-based Feminism Isolated the Transgender Community msolis14 https://mic.com/articles/166273/how-the-women-s-march-s-genital-based-feminism-isolated-the-transgender-community#.yErAEyeQ2 Mara Dicenta is a PhD Candidate in Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy (NY). With a background in Anthropology, she studies the intersections between science, modernity, and colonialism in Austral Patagonia through the case of the beavers: from their State-led introduction to promote industry in a remote land until their transformation in an invasive species that is object of internationally-led eradication. With a more applied background in Social Work and Feminist Sexology, her research is informed by feminist, decolonial, and subaltern theories in the construction of histories, aiming to bring different constructions of natures and territories in order to destabilize the hegemonic vision of a world made of only one world. Share this: Share Email Facebook Twitter Reddit Tumblr LinkedIn [view academic citations] [hide academic citations] ANNAPOLIS (March 13, 2019)Several bills progressing in the Maryland General Assembly would provide support for living organ or tissue donors, and educate high school students about becoming a donor. Sponsored by Sen. Shirley Nathan-Pulliam, D-Baltimore City and County, Senate bill 954 could require county boards of education to begin teaching students about organ donation in public schools starting in the 2020-2021 school year. That bill, and an identical piece of legislation sponsored by Delegate Pam Queen, D-Montgomery, are intended to begin teaching students about organ donation at the age of 14, before they receive their driver's licenses and decide whether they want to be a donor, Queen said. This bill is intended to get more young people registered as organ donors to combat the long waiting list for organ donation, Queen said. The bill is also aimed to promote awareness of live organ donation, she said. As of February 2018, there were 3,375 people in Maryland waiting on organ donations according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Almost 2,500 of these people are waiting for a kidneyan organ that can be donated from a living individualtransplanted, according to department data. In May 2017, Maryland House of Delegates Speaker Michael Busch, D-Anne Arundel, received a living donor liver transplant from his sister, Kathleen Bernhardt, according to a 2018 report from the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Queen's bill, House bill 567, was heard by a Maryland House of Delegates committee February 21. Nathan-Pulliam's bill is expected to be heard by a Maryland Senate committee Wednesday. Other Maryland legislation, sponsored by Sen. Brian Feldman, D-Montgomery, would ensure 60 days of unpaid leave for a recovering organ donor and 30 days for a bone marrow donor if the donor's employer has at least 15 employees. Johns Hopkins University's Epidemiology Research Group in Organ Transplantation Director of Data and Analytics Allan Massie told a House committee about his experience as a bone marrow donor. "In 2013, I won a strange kind of lottery," Massie said. "I was found to be a genetic match for a young child in Utah who I had never met, who had a terminal disease I had never heard of and who hadn't even been born when I joined the marrow registry," he said. Because he works for a transplant group, Massie said he didn't have to worry about taking time off after the donation. He said that because not everyone has this luxury, this bill would be necessary to ensure that people can make donations without risking their job. American Kidney Fund employee Shayla Harris said this bill would continue to encourage people to become living donors like her sister, who donated Harris a life-saving kidney while she was in college in 2010. "Organ donation saved my life and I believe living organ donors are real-life superheroes," Harris said. "There are thousands of people in our state that need a transplant and whose health and life could be improved by the generosity of a living donor," she said. Eight other states offer some form of leave for either bone marrow or organ donation, according to the National Kidney Foundation. Senate bill 705 and a corresponding bill in the Maryland House of Delegates would also prevent insurance companies from prohibiting organ donation or altering an insurance plan based on one's status as a donor, according to the House bill's sponsor, Delegate Eric Luedtke, D-Montgomery. About a quarter of kidney donors in Maryland have difficulty finding life insurance according to Massie. A Maryland Senate committee voted favorably with amendments Monday on Senate bill 705. Luedtke's counterpart, House bill 1284, was heard by a Maryland House of Delegates committee Feb. 28. ANNAPOLIS (March 13, 2019)Students in Maryland public schools who fail required vision screenings and do not receive recommended services would be provided free eye examinations and eyeglasses by a new Maryland Department of Health program, under legislation expected to be heard by a Senate committee on Wednesday. Senate bill 915 and House bill 1242 would create the Vision for Maryland Program, which would coordinate with Johns Hopkins University, local boards of education and local health departments to carry out the eye exams for students and give glasses to them if necessary. The Ways and Means committee had a hearing for the House bill on March 7, but it has yet to receive a committee vote. Local boards of education or local health departments are mandated to screen vision and hearing for all public school students when they enter the school system, in first grade and in eighth or ninth grade under current law. This would remain largely unchanged under the legislation. Students who have behavioral or learning problems would be given eye examsregardless of their gradewhen documentation of the problem begins, or when the school is notified of a medical change, according to a legislative analysis of the bill. Parents and guardians of students are required to receive results of the screenings, and if a student fails, would be given additional information on how to follow up with an eye exam, under a 2017 state law. The bill ensures students in the state who otherwise could not see the blackboard have access to success, lead sponsor Sen. Clarence Lam, D-Howard and Baltimore counties, told Capital News Service last week. "Where learning is concerned the ability to read and see is critical," Delegate Terri Hill, D-Howard and Baltimore counties, also a lead sponsor, told legislators at a committee hearing on March 7. Before passage of the 2017 legislation, 50 percent of students who failed the screening never got an eye exam, and a significant portion never got the glasses, Hill told legislators. "Early diagnosis and treatment of children's vision problems is a necessary component to school readiness and academic learning," Latisha Corey, president of the Maryland Parent Teacher Association, said in written testimony to a House committee. "Vision screening is not a substitute for a complete eye and vision evaluation by an eye doctor." However, the government organization tasked with operating the program opposed the bill, because it would place a "substantial fiscal burden" on the Maryland Department of Health, and would put "logistical burdens" on school systems, according to written testimony from Robert Neall, secretary of the Maryland Department of Health. "During the 2017-2018 school year, 38,638 students received a referral after vision screening," Neall wrote. "The cost for the provision of an eye examination and glasses for these students could be approximately $5,449,688 annually." An estimated 9,349 students in special education programs and 5,000 students in different learning environments were reported by Anne Arundel County Public Schools, the Maryland Association of County Health Officers said in a written statement on March 7. "Extrapolating this to the population of the state, the annual cost to the local Board and Health Departments is estimated at over $20,000,000." But according to a legislative analysis, the bill would cost the Maryland Department of Health an estimated $231,889 to hire employees to coordinate the program. The same analysis said it would cost local boards of education and local health departments an estimated $900,000 a year to provide eye exams to students who begin a special education program or notify their schools of a change in medical history. This estimate did not include local costs for students who need behavior or learning intervention, who would also be covered under the bill. Some local boards of education and local health departments opposed the measure, saying it is overreaching and questioning the practicality of its mandates. The "unfunded mandate," would require "the hiring of ophthalmologists and a mobile van to travel between schools to provide services required by the bill," the Montgomery Department of Health and Human Services said in a written statement on March 7. "While this legislation is well-intentioned, (Anne Arundel County Public Schools) has concerns with the requirement that county boards of education coordinate with the Vision for Maryland Program," Anne Arundel County schools attorney Jeanette Ortiz said in a written statement on March 7. "Such a responsibility does not fall on a county board of education." Vietjet does not operate any flights with Boeing 737 MAXs, only flying Airbus planes, the low-cost carrier said on Wednesday in a statement after Vietnam announced a ban on all the U.S.-made aircraft models the same day. We are currently operating with a fleet entirely composed of new Airbus aircraft from the A320 family, Vietjet said. The average age of our fleet is 2.82 years. We are also using the latest generation of Airbus aircraft, the A320-A321neo. The carrier added that its operations meet the highest international standards with regard to safety and maintenance. We have complied with all of the regulations and met the latest standards which have been set out by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), the Federal Aviation Administration of the United States (FAA) and the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam (CAAV), including the approval of aircraft types for our operations, Vietjet said. The safety for passengers is always Vietjets highest priority, the airline asserted. Now we are closely monitoring the Boeing 737 MAX case and our decisions related to these aircraft will be made after the official conclusions and guidelines of the worlds aviation authorities and the CAAV, Vietjet said, referring to a deadly crash on Sunday. We are doing this to ensure the development of our modern fleet and to meet the highest quality and safety standards. Vietjet has well managed our fleet so far and our transport business plans are unchanged. An Ethiopian Airlines flight, using a Boeing 737 MAX 8 and bound for Nairobi, Kenya, crashed six minutes after take-off, killing all 157 people on board and raising questions about the safety of the airplane, a new model the Ethiopian carrier just added to its fleet in January. On the sidelines of a summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi last month, Vietjet signed an order to purchase 100 Boeing 737 MAX planes worth US$12.7 billion. The CAAV, which is Vietnams aviation watchdog, had announced on Wednesday a decision to temporarily suspend all flights using Boeing 737 MAX jets from its airspace to ensure passenger safety. The ban takes effect from 10:00 am the same day until further notice, according to the CAAV, which will also stop approving new flight operations for services using the said aircraft. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Vietnams aviation watchdog announced on Wednesday a decision to temporarily suspend all flights using Boeing 737 MAX jets from its airspace to ensure passenger safety. The ban takes effect from 10:00 am on Wednesday until further notice, according to the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam (CAAV). The CAAV will also stop approving new flight operations for services using the said aircraft. The Vietnamese aviation watchdog said it decided to bar such flights from its airspace to ensure air safety after having assessed information related to the operations of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday. The doomed flight, using a Boeing 737 MAX 8 and bound for Nairobi, Kenya, crashed six minutes after take-off, killing all 157 people on board and raising questions about the safety of the Boeing 737 MAX airplanes, a new model the Ethiopian carrier just added to its fleet in January. On October 29, 2018, a Lion Air flight using the same Boeing jet model crashed into the Java Sea 13 minutes after take-off from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board. Against this context, Singapore and Australia suspended operations of all Boeing 737 MAX jets in and out of their airports on Tuesday, adding to a growing list of countries and airlines grounding the U.S. planemakers narrow-body aircraft series. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! The African swine fever epidemic has spread to the 14th locale in Vietnam, according to local husbandry and veterinary medicine authorities. African swine fever was officially recorded in Ngan Son District, located in the northern province of Bac Kan, on Tuesday afternoon, the provincial Husbandry and Veterinary Medicine Department said. A pig was found refusing to eat, catching a high fever, bleeding, having swollen eyes, and showing signs of being infected with the deadly virus at the household of Hoang Van Duc in Ngan Son District on Saturday. Animal healthcare workers quickly took a sample from the swine for testing and instructed the household to destroy the pig as well as clear the area. Results came back on Tuesday, confirming the sample to be positive for African swine fever. Local authorities have detoxified the area and its vicinity, preparing for the destruction of all nearby pigs when they catch the virus from the infected pig. Two checkpoints have been set up in the district, limiting human and vehicle travel to the region. Fourteen localities have been struck by the fever, which is fatal to pigs but does not affect people, including Hanoi, Ha Nam, Hung Yen, Hai Duong, Nam Dinh, Ninh Binh, Thanh Hoa, Hai Phong, Thai Binh, Thai Nguyen, Hoa Binh, Dien Bien, Quang Ninh, and Bac Kan. Vietnam has culled over 17,000 pigs developing African swine fever. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Politics -- Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh, during a phone call with Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah on Tuesday, made an official request that Vietnamese national Doan Thi Huong, who is being tried in Malaysia on accusation of assassinating North Korean man Kim Jong Nam in February 2017, be given a fair trial and released from detention. -- Vietnamese Party General Secretary and State President Nguyen Phu Trong on Tuesday extended his sympathies to Ethiopian President Sahle Work Zewde over the recent accident of an Ethiopian plane, which crashed on Sunday near the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Ababa killing all 157 passengers and crew. Society -- As the African swine fever epidemic sweeps through 13 provinces and cities in northern Vietnam, consumption of safe pork with traceable origin remains largely unaffected thanks to consumers trust in modern food distribution channels like supermarkets. -- Ho Chi Minh Citys VND10 trillion (US$432.5 million) mega-project to curb tidal flooding and mitigate climate-change impacts on a vulnerable 570-square-kilometer urban area inhabited by around 6.5 million people is expected to complete in late 2019, after months of delays due to contractor issues. Business -- A company that supplied boat engines for a state-supported program to provide Vietnamese fishermen with steel-clad vessels has been found to have forged papers and supplied sub-quality engines for the program, resulting in the vessels braking down after being in operation for only a short time, Ministry of Public Security investigators concluded in a report after a years-long investigation. -- Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on Tuesday requested that the countrys auto industry take the initiative to manufacture car engines and other important parts of a vehicle to improve competitiveness and increase local content. -- Ho Chi Minh City is on course to receive $1.2 billion in inward remittances in the first quarter of 2019, a similar amount compared to the same period of 2018, according to forecasts provided the local branch of the State Bank of Vietnam. -- The administration of Ho Chi Minh City has proposed to increase a coefficient used in calculating land-use fees by 0.4 times compared to 2018, the highest yearly raise since 2015, raising concerns among financially-challenged land owners. Education -- The latest draft of Vietnams revised Law on Education will swing the door open for multiple parties, public or private, to compile different versions of school textbooks based on a single national education program, effectively erasing the current monopoly in textbook publication in the country. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A supplier of boat engines for a government-backed program to provide Vietnamese fishermen with steel-clad vessels sold subpar motors using forged papers, resulting in the vessels breaking down shortly after being put to use, police investigators concluded in a report after a years-long probe. Under a government decree that took effect in August 2014, Vietnamese fishermen are eligible to take out soft loans, paying only one to two percent a year in interest, to build steel-clad vessels to replace wooden boats in order to help fortify local fishing fleets. Fishermen were allowed to borrow loans worth 70-95 percent of the estimated value of the ship to be built for a 11-year term. Nam Trieu Co. Ltd., a shipbuilder owned by the Ministry of Public Security, was in 2015-2016 contracted to build 23 steel-clad fishing vessels for fishers in the provinces of Binh Dinh, Quang Ngai, Quang Ninh and Thanh Hoa, police investigation results show. Between May 2015 and March 2016, Nam Trieu signed five contracts with Hoang Gia Phat Co. Ltd. to purchase 13 boat engines and 21 generators worth over VND43 billion (US$1.86 million). Instead of following the contracts, Hoang Gia Phat bought cheaper engines and used forged papers to change their origin and specifications before selling them to Nam Trieu. As a result, dozens of vessels installed with the poor-quality engines broke down shortly after being put into use in 2017. Fishermen remove engines from a steel-clad vessel for repair. Photo: Thai Thinh / Tuoi Tre Le Hoang Phong, director of Hoang Gia Phat, has been charged with forging documents of agencies or organizations." Phong also confessed to giving Dang Ngoc Oanh, general director of Nam Trieu, money on multiple occasions as gifts to his business partner, totaling nearly VND40 billion ($1.73 million). However, police investigators said there is no evidence to suggest Oanh, a senior-ranked police officer, had received the sum from Phong. They are convinced Phong only made the confession hoping that he would not face criminal prosecution if a senior policeman was dragged into the case. Le Hoang Phong, director of Hoang Gia Phat One Member Co. Ltd., speaks at a meeting with the administration of Binh Dinh Province, Vietnam. Photo: nongnghiep.vn Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! China has banned imports of pigs, wild boars and related products from Vietnam after the Southeast Asian country reported a series of outbreaks of highly contagious African swine fever, Chinas General Administration of Customs said on Tuesday. Between February 1 and March 3, the deadly virus was found in animals in 202 households in seven cities or provinces in northern Vietnam, including capital city Hanoi. The disease is fatal to pigs but does not affect people. The move comes as China battled its own African swine fever outbreaks, having spread to 111 confirmed cases in 28 provinces and regions across the country. A major anti-flooding project worth approximately VND10 trillion (US$430 million) in Ho Chi Minh City is expected to be complete by the end of 2019, municipal Party chief Nguyen Thien Nhan said on Tuesday. About 72 percent of the massive project, whose progress was delayed twice last year, has been completed, Nhan, secretary of the municipal Party Committee, said as he led a delegation of officials to observe its construction and listen to reports from the developer on Tuesday morning. The BT (build-transfer) project is expected to proactively handle tide-related floods and lessen climate change consequences in a vulnerable 570-square-kilometer urban section inhabited by around 6.5 million people in the city center and along the Saigon River. Secretary Nguyen Thien Nhan speaks at a meeting on March 12, 2019. Photo: Tu Trung / Tuoi Tre The structure will include six major tidal gates, seven kilometers of embankment along a section of the Saigon River, 68 small drainage networks, and pumping stations with a capacity of 12-24 cubic meters of water per second. The project will also feature supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) centers in District 1, District 4, District 7, District 8, Binh Chanh District, and Nha Be District. The construction of the project. Photo: Tu Trung / Tuoi Tre Work started in late June 2016 but was temporarily halted in February 2018 due to issues of relocating residents in the construction zone. In April the same year, it was once again delayed as capital disbursement was put on hold after the developer, Trung Nam Group, was found using a kind of steel different from what was agreed upon in the approved construction design. The project was resumed in late February 2019. A section of the anti-flooding project. Photo: Tu Trung / Tuoi Tre During a meeting on Tuesday, Nhan praised the developer for overcoming the difficulties, especially in site clearance and compensation for the affected residents. The leader asked district-level administrations to soon clear the areas needed for the project so that it would be finished by the end of this year. A section of the anti-flooding project. Photo: Tu Trung / Tuoi Tre The steel to be used for the construction must meet all quality requirements, he continued, adding that the prime minister previously tasked the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development with regularly assessing and supervising the implementation. A suitable unit will be hired to operate the anti-flooding system upon its completion, according to Nhan. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A female passenger was assaulted by the driver and assistant of a vehicle disguising itself as a public bus as she was attempting to take a photo of its license plate, apparently to capture evidence of the scam. The incident took place in the north-central province of Ha Tinh on Monday, when Vo Thi Hoai was among more than a dozen passengers on the fake bus that ran carelessly through Cam Xuyen District, she said in a complaint to the provincial police on Tuesday. Shortly after boarding what she thought was a normal public bus, Hoai was terrified to see the vehicle zigzaging at high speed amidst traffic. There were around 15 passengers aboard, all of whom shared the same feeling and asked the driver to steer the bus slowly. But he reacted with threats of a physical attack, Hoai wrote in her report to police officers. Hoai then left the vehicle and was about to take a picture of its license plate with her mobile phone when the driver and his attendant rushed in to hit her, she recalled. A local police chief said the driver, Phan Van Linh, had been fined multiple times for running a red light, failing to present a drivers license, and pulling over at undesignated locations. Linh is known to disguise his vehicle as a public bus, according to officers. On Tuesday, a team of patrol police in Cam Xuyen District caught the scam bus as it was picking up and dropping off passengers on Xuan Dieu Street and booked the case. Linh was fined for driving on a wrong road and failing to present a drivers license, while his vehicle was seized for further investigation. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Sydney-based businessman Peter Maneas will host his own travel series My Greek Odyssey travelling around Greek islands on his yacht Mia Zoi. Seven has picked up the 13 part series produced by The Rusty Cage, which is understood to not b brand-funded content. Peter has sailed his super yacht Mia Zoi (translated from Greek meaning One Life) amongst the Saronic and Ionian Islands, visiting fascinating destinations including Hydra, Spetses, Corfu, Zakynthos and Kythira. Throughout the series, he visits some jaw-dropping, colourful sites as well as little-known gems that rarely get a mention. Along the way he explores the rich history, culture and cuisine of Greece and meets some truly unique people. A successful Sydney-based businessman, Peter said bringing his idea of an engaging and educational travel series to life has been a dream of his for at least five years. Being of Greek heritage myself, I just love Greece so much, he said. Ive been travelling there since I was 10 years old. I spent six months living there when I was a child and it changed my life. Over the years, whenever my wife and I visited, shed take little videos of me where Id describe the sights. That gave me the idea to put together a show where I could share all these amazing places that I love to visit with other people. With 6,000 islands, 227 of which are inhabited, Greece is truly a fascinating place. Every island has its own personality, so the diversity is endless, Peter said. For instance, the 17sqkm island of Oinousses is home to 30 shipping families and is completely unique. Most people look at Greece and think of the usual top destinations of Santorini, Mykonos, Corfu, Crete and Athens. They forget about all the other islands. I really wanted to show people that theres so much more to experience. Greece has also been through some tough economic times in recent years and yet its beauty, weather, architecture and warmth of the people hasnt changed. Its still totally worth visiting. 1:30pm in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Hobart and in regional areas, plus 5pm in Darwin, Sunday March 24 on Seven. Appearing on CNN over the weekend, South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg revealed more of his political journey while drawing clear contrasts between his leadership style and that of the Trump-Pence administration. Buttigieg, exploring a presidential campaign, took questions from a studio audience in Austin, Texas on Sunday. CNN anchor Jake Tapper moderated the town hall, asking the 37-year-old Buttigieg (Buddha-Judge) how he pronounced his name. Either way it gets you there, the candidate replied, adding, Back home they just call me Mayor Pete. Buttigiegs exploratory committee is tasked with collecting 65,000 donors in 20 states to qualify for the Democratic party debates. At Sunday nights town hall, Buttigieg was asked what makes a small town mayor think he should be president. We would be better served if Washington started to look like our best-run cities and towns rather than the other way around, Buttigieg said. A lieutenant in the Navy Reserves, Buttigieg said he comes from a strong mayor system in South Bend, Indiana. Buttigieg noted he has more executive level experience in government than President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence and also more military service than both despite being significantly younger. I like him, said Kathy Russo, who hosted a town hall watch party at her house in Portland, Oregon. I gave him $10 tonight. He seems personable and reasonable. Around a dozen people gathered around Russos television set to hear Buttigiegs pitch. The mayor is the only gay candidate in a large Democratic field. I think the whole point of politics is everyday life, Buttigieg said, explaining that his marriage is the most important part of his life. I married a teacher so I married up, Buttigieg said. That intimate thing in our life exists by the grace of a single vote on the U.S. Supreme Court. In the landmark 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges case, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision ruled same-sex couples have a fundamental right to marriage. Buttigieg married his spouse Chasten last summer in an Episcopal ceremony in South Bend, Indiana. Buttigieg referenced his faith when asked about the vice president. [Pences] interpretation of scripture is pretty different than mine to begin with. My understanding of scripture is that its about protecting the stranger, and the prisoner, and the poor person, and the idea of welcome, Buttigieg said. His has a lot more to do with sexuality and a certain view of rectitude. But even if you buy into that, how could he allow himself to become the cheerleader of the pornstar presidency? Is it that he stopped believing in scripture when he started believing in Donald Trump? At Sunday evenings town hall Buttigieg also called for an end to the war on transgender Americans and for Congress to pass a federal equality act that prevents firings based on sexual orientation and gender identity. In remains to be seen if Buttigieg can secure a spot on the debate stage. Five U.S. senators have already declared their intentions to seek the Democratic partys nomination. Last week, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the partys 2016 nominee, ended speculation she would run again. U.S. Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jeff Merkley of Oregon and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg also withdrew from consideration last week. LGBT Field Notes: Long Beach, California Mayor Robert Garcia has endorsed U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris of California for president. In a statement on March 7, Garcia, a gay man, said Harris fighting spirit and bold vision is the perfect antidote to the chaos of this current administration. Animal Planet has scheduled an Attenborough month in April, featuring 43 hours of some of the icons most prolific work. Titles will air weeknights at 7:30pm from Monday 1 April. With a voice thats instantly recognisable, Sir David Attenborough has been narrating and producing insightful, breathtaking documentaries of the natural world for more than 65 years. One of the most respected and loved broadcasters of our time, he has introduced generations to the boundless wonders of the world and encouraged a love of all creatures great and small. His commitment to ecology is enduring, using his work to raise awareness for the environment and its variety of inhabitants across the globe. Consistently pushing the envelope to capture that one in a million shot, David and his team work tirelessly to ensure those had to be there moments are shared in the most enchanting footage. Using the latest equipment and technology, his films vividly exhibit the everyday reality of our favourite animals; a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, a turtle burrowing out of the sand, or a cheetah as it twists and turns hunting its prey. Davids method of educating through the lens has become more interactive over the years, with the introduction of scientific scanning, 3-D technology, and CGI bringing dinosaurs back to life, and displaying gorillas and grizzly bears in incredible detail. Animal Planet is honouring his invaluable work once again by dedicating an entire month to some of his most captivating stories. The line-up includes Attenborough: Behind the Lens which revisits some of his most memorable and ambitious projects of the past decade and Blue Planet: A Natural History of the Oceans which encompasses everything from popular shores and teeming shallows to the mysterious open depths. Other titles include Conquest of the Skies, The Life of Birds, Puerto Rico: Island of Enchantment and more. Attenborough: Behind The Lens Monday 1 April at 7:30pm AEDT (Animal Planet Premiere) This unique and charming film follows Sir David Attenborough after he turned his back on retirement to embark upon one of the most ambitious and prolific chapters of his career yet. With behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, and extraordinary clips from some of his films, we discover a side to David that few have had the privilege of seeing. We see a deeply passionate man whose wit and humour draws teams together through the most challenging shoots, but whose imposing presence and legacy demands the very best from the crews around him. This intimate film, shot over seven years, shows Attenborough as you have never seen him before. David Attenboroughs Blue Planet: A Natural History Of The Oceans Tuesday 2 April Friday 5 April at 7.30pm and 8.30pm AEDT (Animal Planet Premiere) Sir David Attenborough narrates this critically acclaimed series that dives deep into the marine environment of Planet Earth. Two-thirds of the planet is covered by the oceans and yet they remain largely unexplored and certainly under-filmed. This series changes all that and subsequently changes our views of the deep as advances in underwater photography have opened the doors to unknown territories which have never before been explored. This definitive natural history of the worlds oceans covers everything from popular shores and teeming shallows to the mysterious open depths. Double episodes nightly. David Attenboroughs The Life Of Mammals Monday 8 April Friday 12 April at 7.30pm and 8.30pm AEST (Animal Planet Premiere) Study the evolution and habits of the 4,000-mammal species that have outlived dinosaurs in Sir David Attenboroughs epic ten-part series. The docu-series intricately explains how we are all connected; from the smallest and the largest, the fastest and the slowest, the cute and the not-so-cute (although by the end of the series youll have a whole new appreciation for the naked mole rat). They are found above ground and underground, on dry land and in the ocean, and as David explains, their adaptability has had a profound effect on the way they move, socialise, mate and breed. Discover the similarities and differences between humans and other mammals and learn how their keen nurturing and protective instincts have aided the evolution of their kind through the ages. David Attenboroughs Conquest Of The Skies Monday 15 April Thursday 18 April at 7.30pm AEDT (Animal Planet Premiere) Birds have been flying through the skies for the past 150-million years but they werent the first. Join Sir David Attenborough as he explores the animals that colonise the air, travelling from the jungles of Borneo, to the forests of Ecuador, to discovering fossils in China. Using technology to analyse the movements of everything from common insects to ancient winged reptiles, we discover how flight has been key to the protection of many land animals and the endurance of flying species, such the evolution of feathered dinosaurs to birds in the modern age. Be prepared to see moths and flies in a whole new light; the latter being one of the most sophisticated jetfighters in the business, using aerodynamics to somersault through the air. Not only reserved for butterflies and their colourful wings, see how everything from bizarre winged lizards to sonar-guided bats contributes to the one hundred billion creatures that are on the flight path today. David Attenboroughs Puerto Rico: Island Of Enchantment Friday 19 April at 7.30pm AEST (Animal Planet Premiere) Enchanted by Puerto Ricos charismatic creatures, Sir David Attenborough reveals how the Caribbean islands exotic wildlife has been affected by the introduction of industry. By the 1900s, only five percent of its ancient rainforest remained, threatening native animals like the Puerto Rican amazon parrot, who today are still one of the islands most endangered species. Learn about the dedicated conservation group fighting for the islands natural resources and to boost the population of its precious wildlife. Using a variety of scientific developments, follow the journey of conservationists working and campaigning to aid the release of manatees back into the ocean, and the plight of the leatherback sea turtle. David Attenboroughs The Life Of Birds Monday 22 April Friday 26 April at 7.30pm and 8.30pm AEST (Animal Planet Premiere) Birds are the most dynamic aeronauts for their variety, eye-catching colours and unique song. The Life of Birds takes a closer look at the complexities of bird behaviour, from partnering and parenthood, to their appetites. The effect of evolution on the bird world spans across to larger, flightless birds that most likely had fewer enemies back in the age of dinosaurs. The Galapagos cormorant, for example, uses its wings for swimming instead of flying, and the Kakapo who uses its acute hearing to evade danger. Everything from their colour to their call can be a signal to a potential mate, or an act of deflection from a predator, like how a colony of fieldfares deter a raven from raiding a nest by collectively singing in alarm. They are resourceful communicators, who use sounds, signals, and looks to send messages, the lyrebird being a terrific performer. The series highlights why birds are fascinating to humans for their beauty, aerodynamics, and evolutionary trail. David Attenboroughs Grizzly Natures Entrepreneur Monday 29 April at 7.30pm AEST (Animal Planet Premiere) This series aims to dispel preconceptions that the grizzly bear is something to be feared. Filmed 14,000 feet high in the Himalayas, in the Gobi Desert, and in North America, Sir David Attenborough meets Canadian filmmaker, Jeff Turner, who has spent the past 15 years with grizzly bears. Weighing more than 450kg and named the most impressive large carnivore in the world, theyre the most intelligent and adaptable of the worlds eight species of bear. Jeff reveals that they are just like humans; footage of a mother and her cubs capturing emotion, smarts, and playfulness, as they have fun in the snow and the cubs stay close-by to learn the ropes. As fast as a racehorse, watch the grizzly swiftly move across the plains, exploring and foraging for food they also like their greens and berries and learn about what has informed its behaviour over time. David Attenboroughs Bowerbirds: The Art Of Seduction Tuesday 30 April at 7.30pm AEST (Animal Planet Premiere) Bowerbirds are perhaps the most romantic in the bird world; painting and sculpting for affection. Meticulously piecing together their treasures snail shells, bones, and pebbles the males create a gallery or bower to impress the females, who go on to rear their young independently. An artist, the male bowerbird puts a lot of effort into the appearance of his bower, sometimes going to the great length of dancing to attract attention. These birds lives put the most extravagant of soap operas into the shade. Sir David Attenborough investigates the unique courtship, interesting routines and movements of these exotic birds in David Attenboroughs Bowerbirds: The Art of Seduction. Bowerbirds are the greatest architects in the animal kingdom, building elaborate buildings with the single-minded aim of seducing a passing female. Reproduction is all that counts, and that end justifies any means. If their advances fail to impress a female, they may vent their frustration on other males in their community. The rich range of species and behaviours, combined with the complex web of intrigue within one community of males, makes this a film with a powerful story and stunning visuals. But above all, the master storyteller, Sir David Attenborough, as author and presenter, ensures this will be a memorable treat. Just as the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin blew his pipe to lure troublesome rodents out of a city, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the master storyteller, has set, changed and reset the national agenda each time the opposition parties appeared to get a grip on things that did not go well over the past five years. And the worst performer has been the Congress, which appears to be quite clueless about the issues that it wants to bring to the forefront as the country prepares for yet another battle at the hustings in less than a months time. While the regional parties have stuck to their local agendas, others like the SP and the BSP have also limited their narratives that would appeal to their core constituents. Unfortunately, the Congress appears to have faltered time and again in setting the tone and narrative for their attempt to unseat the BJP. This, despite the fact that the grand old party did astound political pundits by ousting the ruling party from three states, just about three months ago all based on a single poll plank of rural distress and unemployment. In fact, it isnt in the least surprising that the Congress leadership is stumped. Because, Narendra Modi seldom campaigns during elections. He does so every time an opportunity presents itself and ensures that the narrative is very simple. Over the past five years, he has used the elementary theme of story-telling that of a long-suffering heroic character who is traumatised by a villain or villains. In other words, the Good Man vs. Bad Man tale! Just when the opposition was rallying around a single format of calling the bluff on Modis Acche Din promises came the terror attack in Pulwama, the subsequent airstrikes, and the arrest and release of Wing Commander Abhinandan, followed by lots of chest-thumping that forced the Congress to toe the line of national security. Modis ploy of subtly claiming victory in the border skirmish with Pakistan after the airstrikes would have been a masterstroke but for the chaos that broke out immediately thereafter when every puny leader of the ruling party went to town leaking information and misinformation in equal measure, thus possibly diluting the narrative for the ruling party. Story continues On its part, the Congress stood behind the government in the name of national security and missed out on propagating its own Where is Acche Din agenda that got them victories in December last year. Suddenly, the Pied Piper had changed the tune on the flute and everyone was forced to dance to it, as if under a trance. Even when the election dates have been announced, there seems to be no coherence within the opposition about how they should strategise the messaging against the ruling party. In other words, the BJP seems to crossed the first couple of hurdles while the opposition remains at the starting gate, arguing about seats and other sundry matters. And how does the Congress plan to approach the campaign phase of these elections? In the run up to the state assembly polls, party president Rahul Gandhi suddenly began visiting temples. There were stories about his Brahminic antecedents and his love for the cows. Detractors created memes claiming that the party had become Congress plus Janeu plus Cow! It was almost as though the grand old party was catching up to the BJPs Hindutva agenda. The party kept blowing hot and cold over the Rafale deal, possibly forgetting that Rajiv Gandhi had lost an election due to a similar defence deal in 1989. The farm sector crisis also seems to have moved into the side burners. Some political commentators are wondering whether the Congress is making an elementary mistake here. Are they hoping for a repeat of the BJPs famous India Shining story of 2004 when Atal Bihari Vajpayee failed to get a second term in spite of large scale publicity over the governments achievements? It may be good to remember that while Vajpayee was a politician, Narendra Modi is a story-teller par excellence. Readers may recall the words of Mark McKinnon, a well-known name in political strategy creation and execution who was behind President George W Bushs two successful runs for American presidency. In a film titled How To Win An Election, he says that candidates (should) reduce the complexities of the modern world into simple, soundbite-friendly stories. Great storytelling is not about ideology. Great storytelling is about great storytelling. Voters think in very simple ways. They want things communicated in an organised, compelling and simple fashion, He says, while pointing to the narrative arc around which such stories are built. He recalls how the team had built President Bushs narrative arc around global terrorism (threat), the 9/11 attack (victims), the villain (al-Qaeda), the resolution (aggressive policies against the terror outfits) and the hero (George W Bush). Prime Minister Modi has followed this narrative to the T! Modi came to power by removing the a from asambhav (impossible), suggesting that change is sambhav (possible). Now the Congress is attempting to put that a back into sambhav apropos their hopes of unseating the BJP from power. They are more than likely to succeed if they follow the Pied Piper of Vadnagar! Powered by Trivone Content Services Pvt Ltd Protests were held outside a court in Ancona, Italy, on March 11, after details emerged of a 2017 rape case acquittal verdict where judges described the female alleged victim as mannish, local media reported. The suspects were initially convicted in 2016 and later acquitted in a 2017 appeal hearing. The details of the 2017 appeal decision emerged on March 8 after the acquittal was annulled. The annulment cited language used by three female judges who presided over the case. The judges said that one of the suspects had stored the alleged victims number in his phone under the name of Viking, indicating that she was a masculine figure, and said that the alleged victims photograph seemed to confirm this, local media reported. The alleged victim said that one man raped her in 2015 while a second stood watch, saying her drink had been spiked with drugs. Doctors found traces of a date rape drug in her blood, AFP reported. Both suspects and the suspected victim were Peruvians. The case will be reheard by a court in Perugia. Credit: Stefania Benatti via Storyful FILE PHOTO: Fighters of Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) stand near Islamic state fighters and their families who surrendered in the village of Baghouz, Deir Al Zor province, Syria March 12, 2019. REUTERS/Rodi Said By Ellen Francis BAGHOUZ, Syria (Reuters) - Islamic State launched two counter-attacks on U.S.-backed fighters besieging their final shred of territory in eastern Syria on Wednesday but were beaten back without any progress, the Syrian Democratic Forces said. The jihadists, waging a last-ditch battle in Baghouz, a collection of hamlets and farmland near the Iraqi border, dispatched suicide bombers against SDF fighters, who thwarted the attacks, the U.S.-backed force said. Islamic State launched the second counter-attack in the afternoon, "(taking) advantage of smoke and dust over Baghouz", the SDF media office said. "Fighting is still continuing. (Islamic State) made no progress so far and were stopped." Mustafa Bali, head of the SDF media office, said the heavy clashes led to the death of 38 militants including eight suicide bombers while four SDF fighters were killed. There were advances on some points, Bali said. Black smoke mushroomed high over Baghouz as the sounds of gunfire, explosions and planes could be heard in a battle that the SDF has said is as good as over. In parts of Baghouz already under SDF control, dirt roads were littered with the scorched remains of cars, trucks and motorcycles. Many houses had been completely flattened and roads had been cratered by missile strikes. Islamic State's black flag could still be seen painted on walls, while others had been emblazoned with freshly daubed SDF slogans and the words "Down with Daesh", an Arabic acronym for the jihadists. Islamic State (IS) held roughly one third of Syria and Iraq at the zenith of its power in 2014, when its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself "caliph", or leader of all the world's Muslims. Subsequently, IS was steadily beaten back by a range of enemies including the U.S.-led international coalition, suffering its major defeats in 2017 when it lost the Iraqi city of Mosul and its Syrian headquarters at Raqqa. Story continues No Islamic State leaders are believed to be in Baghouz, according to a U.S. defence official. U.S. government experts strongly believe Baghdadi is alive and possibly hiding in Iraq. The group is still assessed to remain a potent security threat operating in remote territory in both Syria and Iraq. Bali said SDF forces had bombarded Baghouz heavily overnight before engaging in direct clashes with IS fighters in the pre-dawn hours. Live footage broadcast by Kurdish Ronahi TV showed a series of large blasts lighting up the night sky over Baghouz. SUICIDE ASSAULTS "There were suicide vest attacks by a group of bombers who tried to blow themselves up amidst our forces. Our forces targeted and killed them before they reached our positions," Bali said. The SDF has laid siege to Baghouz for weeks but had repeatedly postponed its final assault to allow thousands of civilians, many of them wives and children of Islamic State fighters, to leave. It resumed the attack on Sunday. The U.S. led aerial coalition campaign to end the militants' last territorial enclave has exacted a heavy human toll with hundreds of casualties among civilians from intense aerial bombardment that has razed many villages to the ground, former residents and aid workers say. Around 3,000 IS fighters and their families surrendered to SDF forces in 24 hours, Bali said overnight. Three women and four children belonging to the Yazidi sect, a minority group who were kidnapped and enslaved by IS in 2014, were also freed, he said. Islamic State put out a new propaganda video overnight Monday filmed in recent weeks inside Baghouz, maintaining its claim to leadership of all Muslims and calling on its supporters to keep the faith. "Tomorrow, God willing, we will be in paradise and they will be burning in hell," one of the men interviewed in the video said. [nL8N20Z23H] Though Islamic State is on the verge of losing its last piece of territory, Syria remains carved up among other parties to its multi-sided conflict: President Bashar al-Assad's government, the Kurdish-led SDF, and anti-government rebels. The war has escalated in recent weeks with the Assad government stepping up its shelling of opposition held towns in the northwestern region of Idlib, where Islamist militant group Tahrir al-Sham holds sway. Overnight, government forces rained incendiary bombs on the area, where a full-scale offensive was averted in September by an agreement brokered by Assad's Russian allies and Turkey, which backs his opponents and has forces on the ground. Russian warplanes struck for the first time in months the centre of Idlib city, including a hospital and a prison on the outskirts from which dozens of inmates fled, residents said. The Russian defence ministry said they targeted a weapons store by Tahrir al Sham where it said the jihadists planned a drone attack on a Russian air base near the Mediterranean. (Reporting by Rodi Said in Deir al-Zor, Ellen Francis in Baghouz and Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman; Writing by Lisa Barrington/Tom Perry; Editing by Mark Heinrich) FILE PHOTO: A Yemeni soldier is pictured near a poster portraying Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and Yemen's President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi outside a hospital renovated by Saudi Arabia in Aden, Yemen December 13, 2018. REUTERS/Nael Shyoukhi/File Photo By Patricia Zengerle WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Republican-led U.S. Senate on Wednesday approved a resolution seeking to end U.S. support for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition in the war in Yemen, in a rebuke of President Donald Trump's policy toward the kingdom. The vote was 54-46 in the Senate, more than the 51 needed to pass in the 100-member Senate. The war powers resolution seeks to end any U.S. military involvement in the conflict, including providing targeting support for Saudi air strikes, without authorization from Congress. The four-year-long civil war in Yemen, which pits the Saudi-led coalition against Houthi rebels backed by Iran, has killed tens of thousands of people and spawned what the United Nations calls the world's most dire humanitarian crisis, with the country on the brink of famine. Backers of the resolution, including a handful of Trump's fellow Republicans as well as Democrats, argued that U.S. involvement in Yemen violates the constitutional requirement that Congress, not the president, should determine when the country goes to war. The resolution must still be approved by the House of Representatives to be sent to the White House, which said earlier on Wednesday that Trump plans a veto. It would be the first of his two-year-long presidency. Democrats and Republicans reintroduced the resolution two weeks ago as a way to send a strong message to Riyadh about the humanitarian disaster in Yemen. Many lawmakers also want to push Trump to demand a stronger response from the Saudi government to the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at a Saudi consulate in Turkey in October. (Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by James Dalgleish) 2.4 Million Guaranteed at the 2019 WSOP-C UK Festival at DTD March 27 2019 Matthew Pitt Dusk Till Dawn is preparing to host the 2019 World Series of Poker (WSOP) Circuit UK festival where 2.4 million in guaranteed prize pools, including a 1 million guaranteed Main Event, will be played for by poker tournament players from around the UK, Ireland and beyond. Seven WSOP-C events are scheduled between Apr. 4-14 that have buy-ins ranging from 330 up to 5,300, meaning there is a tournament for everyone regardless of the size of their bankroll. The 500,000 guaranteed Colossus is the event kicking off the series. This 330 buy-in tournament starts online at partypoker where four starting flights run at 8:00 p.m. on Mar. 31-Apr. 3. The first live starting flights take place at Dusk Till Dawn on Apr. 4 and there are nine in total. Players can also play in 35 buy-in satellites to the Colossus and indeed Day 1s at three of partypokerLIVEs partner casinos. Manchester 235, Alea Nottingham an the Rendezvous Casino in Brighton are the three chosen partners. 1 million is guaranteed in the WSOP-C UK Main Event that runs from Apr. 7-14. Featuring four starting flights at Dusk Till Dawn, one at Manchester 235 and one online at partypoker, the 1,100 buy-in Main Event should be huge. There are 14 live satellites to the WSOP-C UK Main Event that have combined guarantees of 150-seats. Check out the partypoker LIVE page for the confirmed dates of these satellites that either award one seat for every 10x 110 entries or one seat for every five 220 entries. Some of the other events that are sure to capture the eye of the poker community are the 2,200 High Roller with its 200,000 guarantee, the 5,300 Super High Roller that guarantees 250,000 will be won, and the 330 buy-in Closer that also has a 200,000 guaranteed prize pool. 2019 WSOP-C Schedule Date Time Event Buy-in Sun 31 Mar 8:00 p.m. Colossus Online Day 1A: 500K GTD 330 Mon 1 Apr 8:00 p.m. Colossus Online Day 1B: 500K GTD 330 Tue 2 Apr 8:00 p.m. Colossus Online Day 1C: 500K GTD 330 Wed 3 Apr 8:00 p.m. Colossus Online Day 1D: 500K GTD 330 Thu 4 Apr 12:00 p.m. Colossus Day 1A: 500K GTD 330 5:00 p.m. Colossus Day 1B: 500K GTD 330 8:00 p.m. Colossus Online Day 1E: 500K GTD 330 Fri 5 Apr 12:00 p.m. Colossus Day 1C: 500K GTD 330 5:00 p.m. Colossus Day 1D: 500K GTD 330 Sat 6 Apr 12:00 p.m. Colossus Day 1E: 500K GTD 330 5:00 p.m. Colossus Day 1F: 500K GTD 330 Sun 7 Apr 12:00 p.m. Colossus Day 1G: 500K GTD 330 5:00 p.m. Colossus Day 1H: 500K GTD 330 8:00 p.m. WSOP-C Main Event Online Day 1A: 1M GTD 1,100 Mon 8 Apr 10:00 a.m. Colossus Day 1I 6-Max Turbo: 500K Gtd 330 3:00 p.m. Colossus Day 2: 500K GTD 5:00 p.m. Super High Roller Day 1: 250K GTD 5,300 Tue 9 Apr 12:00 p.m. WSOP-C Main Event Day 1A: 1M GTD 1,100 12:00 p.m. Colossus Final Day: 500K GTD 1:00 p.m. Super High Roller Final Day: 500K GTD Wed 10 Apr 12:00 p.m. WSOP-C Main Event Day 1B: 1M GTD 1,100 Thu 11 Apr 12:00 p.m. WSOP-C Main Event Day 1C: 1M GTD 1,100 Fri 12 Apr 10:00 a.m. WSOP-C Main Event Day 1D 6-Max Turbo: 1M GTD 1,100 2:00 p.m. WSOP-C Main Event Day 2: 1M GTD 5:00 p.m. Monster Stack Day 1A: 200K GTD 550 Sat 13 Apr 10:00 a.m. Monster Stack Day 1B 6-Max Turbo: 200K GTD 550 12:00 p.m. WSOP-C Main Event Day 3: 1M GTD 12:00 p.m. Closer Day 1A: 200K GTD 330 2:00 p.m. Monster Stack Final Day 200K GTD 5:00 p.m. High Roller Day 1: 200K GTD 2,200 5:00 p.m. Closer Day 1B: 200K GTD 330 9:00 p.. Closer Day 1C 6-Max Turbo: 200K GTD 330 Sun 14 Apr 10:00 a.m. Closer Day 1D 6-Max Turbo: 200K GTD 330 12:00 p.m. WSOP-C Main Event Final Day: 1M GTD 12:00 p.m. High Roller Final Day: 200K GTD 1:00 p.m. Pot Limit Omaha: 50K GTD 550 3:00 p.m. Closer Final Day: 200K GTD Put Your PP LIVE Dollars to Good Use In addition to the various live satellites, players can buy into any of the WSOP-C UK events using PP LIVE Dollars. This flexible currency is won in online satellites at partypoker and can then be used to buy into partypoker LIVE tournaments, exchanged for travel expenses and can even be used for hotel accommodation. A special offer is in place for the 1 million guaranteed WSOP-C UK Main Event that promises 100 to the first 100 players to buy into the 1,100 Main Event using PP LIVE Dollars; there were 61 places remaining in this promotion at time of writing. You can also win $1,000 worth of PP LIVE Dollars by heading to the partypoker LIVE website, logging into your free account and correctly guessing the number of entries in the WSOP-C Main Event. Grab $30 Worth of SPINS Tickets Download partypoker via UK & Ireland PokerNews today, and youll receive up to $30 worth of SPINS tickets over the course of six days when you make your first deposit. SPINS are partypoker's jackpot sit & go tournaments where the $5 buy-in level can pay its winner $1 million and its $50 buy-in game up to $2 million! Deposit //$10 and receive $10 in SPINS tickets, awarded to the following schedule: Day 1 Ticket Bundle: 1x $5 and 5x $0.25 Day 2 Ticket Bundle: 5x $0.25 Day 4 Ticket Bundle: 5x $0.25 Day 6 Ticket Bundle: 5x $0.25 Deposit //$20 and receive $30 in SPINS tickets, awarded to the following schedule: Day 1 Ticket Bundle: 1x $5 and 5x $1 Day 2 Ticket Bundle: 1x $5 and 5x $1 Day 4 Ticket Bundle: 5x $1 Day 6 Ticket Bundle: 5x $1 Follow the Action from Lex Live Spring Festival Main Event at PokerNews March 13 2019 Matthew Pitt PokerNews is delighted to inform you our live reporting team is heading to the Grand Casino de Namur in Belgium to bring you all the action from the inaugural Lex Live Sping Festival Main Event. Lex Live Spring Festival runs from March 27-31 and is a new live tournament series hosted by Team PokerStars Pro Lex Veldhuis. The 225 buy-in Main Event sees players sit down with 50,000 chips and play to a 30-minute clock on three starting flights, with 15-minute blinds on Day 1D then 45-minute blinds thereafter. Veldhuis has worked tirelessly to increase his presence on the streaming channel Twitch and has seen his community grow exponentially over the past few years. When my community starting growing on Twitch, people started talking about having a meet-up where everyone could meet each other and hang out," explained Veldhuis. "It's cool to be able to take the next step and strengthen the relationships. Lex Live Spring Festival Schedule Lex Live Spring Festival Schedule Date Time Event Buy-in Clock Starting stack Wed 27 March 6:00 p.m. Lex Live Main Event Day 1A 225 30 mins 50,000 7:30 p.m. Satellite to Main Event Hit and run 60 20 mins 10,000 10:00 p.m. Lex Live Main Event Day 1A turbo 225 15 mins 50,000 Thurs 28 March 6:00 p.m. Main Event Day 1B 225 30 mins 50,000 8:00 p.m. Satellite to Main Event Hit and run 60 20 mins 10,000 10:00 p.m. Flip out satellite 60 10:00 p.m. Lex Live Main Event Day 1B turbo 225 15 mins 50,000 Fri 29 March 4:00 p.m. Satellite to Main Event Hit and run 60 15 mins 10,000 6:00 p.m. Main Event Day 1C 225 30 mins 50,000 8:00 p.m. FU Friday Flip 60 10 mins 15,000 9:00 p.m. Main Event Day 1D 225 15 mins 50,000 10:00 p.m. Lex Live Main Event Day 1C turbo 225 15 mins 50,000 Sat 30 March 4:00 p.m. Main Event Day 2 45 mins 5:00 p.m. PLO Omaha 170 20 mins 15,000 6:00 p.m. Lex Live eSports sit and go 7:00 p.m. Progressive Bounty 115 20 mins 15,000 8:00 p.m. The Golden Beaker High Roller Day 1 550 30 mins 25,000 Sun 31 March 3:00 p.m. Main Event Day 3 Final Table 45 mins 3:30 p.m. The Golden Beaker High Roller Day 2 30 mins 4:00 p.m. SUPER SUNDAY 65 20 mins 20,000 While the tournament will have plenty of fierce competition for big bucks, Veldhuis sees his Main Event as a way to interact and have fun with his ever-growing community. "There are so many different kinds of people from all walks of life in the channel," he explained. "There are people who come home from work and always watch for an hour, and others who always watch on their lunch break. There are those who have it on in the background while they are working at home, people day trading and doing other things online. It's a very relaxed, fun environment with little to no toxicity, so people are very comfortable chatting and it's a great community." Community members have stepped up to support one another during difficult times as well as to celebrate each other's successes. "People really develop relationships," said Veldhuis. "I feel like we're ready to take the next step with the community, and having a live event is a good next step." Qualify for the Lex Live Spring Festival Main Event PokerStars is hosting several online satellites feeding into the 225 buy-in Main Event. These 3.30 buy-in Lex Live (Belgium) Satellites run at 5:10 p.m. CET March 12-16 with two more scheduled for 3:30 p.m. CET and 5:25 p.m. CET on March 17. The 3.30 satellites award 22 ticket to the Lex Live (Belgium) MEGA Satellite on 5:15 p.m. CET on March 17 that has five packages, worth 1,100 each, guaranteed. The package grants its winner the 225 Main Event buy-in and five nights hotel accommodation with the remaining money given for expenses. The Stars Group is a majority shareholder in iBus Media Real housewife Teresa and Joe Giudice have been married for 20 years. They have four children together and have experienced an on and off again relationship. Recently, Joe Giudice was taken into custody for mail and wire fraud charges. Also, the new season of "RHOBH" began on February 12. Teresa is no stranger to the judicial system. Teresa served 11 months back in 2014 for the same charges. It is unclear if the New Jersey couple will remain together after Joe is released from prison. In 2014, Teresa was sent to jail for the same charges as her husband, Joe. He now faces the charges himself and possible deportation. Teresa's legal troubles During a "Real Housewives Reunion," Teresa Giudice admitted Joe was the reason she faced jail time. Teresa even stated, Of course Im angry with him. I went to jail. I went to jail. Of course, Im angry! She continued to say, So Im angry that I came home, eight months later, I lost my mom. I do throw it in his face when I get mad. Im like, You shouldnt have screwed up. What were their charges? The charges that Teresa and Joe Giudice faced included taking out three million dollars in loans, hiding assets, and falsifying tax documentation. In 2014, the couple pled guilty to all 39 counts. Teresa served her sentence in 2014. Joe later served his in 2016. The problems continued after it was revealed that Joe was not a United States citizen. It is unclear if Joe will return home to New Jersey after his prison sentence. Joe Giudice was born in Saronno, Italy. His parents moved to the United States when he was a child. Joe never filed for citizenship. Discuss this news on Eunomia The legal trouble threatens to send him back to Italy. Lisa Vanderpump is also sick of the drama. After a court ruling to deport Joe, his lawyers filed an appeal. His attorney, James Leonard Jr., gave a statement to E! News, The appeal has been filed and we remain optimistic that Joe will soon be home with his family where he belongs. We are extremely grateful for Joe's immigration attorneys Jerry Gonzales and Tom Moseley and are very confident in them. Teresa admitted, that if Joe gets deported, itll be the end of their relationship. When asked by Andy Cohen if shell leave Joe if he gets deported, Teresa responded by saying, It's like starting a whole new life," she said. "And they've been through so much already. So, I mean, I'm not doing a long-distance relationship. I'm just not doing it. I want somebody with me every day. I know exactly what happens, I'm sure he'll be with other women. It happens. We do the long-distance thing? It's not going to work. I'll be like, bye-bye.' It sounds like Joe Giudice had better find a way to stay in the United States if he wants to keep his family together. South Africa's President Ramaphosa is currently visiting Zimbabwe. He called on the International community to assist with aid during their economically fragile journey. Actually, he said South Africa will "assist Zimbabwe" within their means. In fact, they did donate, but not to help the economy. Instead, they donated ZAR55 million (approx $3,8m) to Zimbabwe's police force, ZimLive reported. He also called on the USA to lift targeted sanctions on the country. Zimbabwe helped by South Africa, but not where it matters most UK Parliament reported on February 5, 2019, that they had an International Development Committee take "evidence from the Minister for Africa on the recent violent crackdown by Zimbabwe security forces." At that time, strong calls went out to Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, to step up and assist the country in going in the right direction. It came amidst reports of armed soldiers committing acts of violence on women and children, using live ammunition in confronting protesters, and conducting abductions of activists. The economic conditions in the country hit a major spark when the country increased fuel prices, making it the most expensive in the world. President Mnangagwa's promises to fix the economy, and his statements that Zimbabwe was "open for business," seemed to have failed miserably. Continued opposition protests were marred by violence, which both sides allege came from rogue elements infiltrating the other side. Chamisa of the MDC said ruling party cadres were dressing up as MDC and causing the violence. Meanwhile, the government thought MDC supporters had acquired military equipment and caused the problems to have an ax to grind. US Sanctions and the old 'third party' accusations arise Under the rule of Robert Mugabe who was ousted by President Mnangagwa, that mysterious third force often raised its head when things went wrong in the country. Even the MDC's popularity was never accredited to capable young politicians, but rather to external sources influencing Zimbabweans to act in foreign best interests. Discuss this news on Eunomia On social media, this is still evident among the ruling party youth. More and more, they are aiming at the US government, telling them to lift sanctions, and they blame the USA for the current economic woes. This is not confined to Zanu PF youth, but in a way, also comes from South Africa's President Ramapohosa. Fin24 reported that Ramaphosa "supports Zimbabwe's government, ignoring reports of human rights abuses to crush persistent dissent." In fact, Ramaphosa took it further, saying that "sanctions against Mnangagwa and dozens of other top Zimbabwean officials are "unfair" and "unjust." Recently, Donald Trump signed to keep sanctions on individuals in Zimbabwe. They also reported that this all comes as a Human Rights Watch urged African leaders to try and get the Zimbabwean president to put an end to "abuses by the security forces." South African gvt has donated R55m for Zim police training & purchase of protective gear.Foreign minister Lindiwe Sisulu explained why her govt has found it necessary to make such a donation to a country where 5,3m people face starvation."We realised they (police) are very busy." Brezh Malaba (@BrezhMalaba) March 13, 2019 Zimbabwe not urged to curb military, given money to arm them Instead of curbing the use of military force in Zimbabwe, South Africa actually gave them more funding to boost their forces. The millions of South African Rands handed over is specifically to train more police and provide them with more equipment to hold protesters in check. The country is in dire economic straits with a potential drought this year which could be devastating. However, South Africa felt their donation would be best placed in preventing protests against the economic crisis and the rule of law. The Herald ZW reported that Zimbabwe's Dr. Moyo thanked South Africa, saying, When a neighbours house catches you dont ask who caused it. You just go and extinguish the fire and later on you can then investigate who exactly did it when it has been extinguished. The US Embassy tweeted, "Zimbabwes economic recovery depends on its ability to deliver on promised political and economic reforms. Failed economic policies, not sanctions, hinders Zimbabwes economic growth." For gay Pride month in June, every public elementary school in Ontario, Canada will be required to fly the gay flag. Everyone except one person on the Greater Essex Public School Board voted in favor of the policy, according to CBN News. The move is meant to encourage inclusivity in elementary school. When you're in elementary school, and you're just coming into adolescence, it's a very vulnerable time," said Julia Burgess, the board vice chairman, who introduced the motion. "You may not have a lot of peers like you. The Pride flag tells them we have their back." The only board member who voted against the policy said parents would be against it and it would confuse children about gender, but the gay flags will still fly in June. The great sportswriter Dan Jenkins died last week, at 89. The median Facebook comment was, "Oh no!" An acquaintance died the same week. A mutual friend said, "So sad!" But the man was so old when we met him 20 years ago, he could barely see under his eyebrows. I worry about people who react that way to the death of an elderly person. I worry that there's a pattern they are missing. I remember when Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley's widow Sis Daley died, at 96. A public radio reporter friend rushed to the home of the Chicago writer Studs Terkel, then 91, and asked him for a quote. "What do you want me to say, kid? She died. That's what old people do!" Studs wrote that when he was a kid, sex was a taboo subject and death was everywherepeople died all the time, at every age, and the wake usually took place in the living room of the deceased. By the time Studs was old, all anyone ever talked about was sexbut no one ever whispered a word about death. Thus, no one knew how to act at a funeral. I was once at the home of Kit Carson, in Taos, New Mexico. The tour guide was talking about the last of Kit Carson's wives who died. "Oooooohhhhhhhh!" cried some of the senior citizens on the tour. And Carson died only a month later. "Aughghghgh!" the seniors cried. You'd think seniors would be more realistic about mortality. When my dad was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, he was enraged. After about three days, even in my own grief, I thought it was time for him to move to the next phase of his Kubler-Ross journey. I reminded him that he was 85 years old, after all. But he had eaten healthy all his life, he saidnever drank to excess and barely smoked. "All those milkshakes I could have had!" "And the truth is," he whispered, for the first time out loud, "I think I thought I was going to get out of this alive." He also said, later, that it was more sad to die oneself than to have a loved-one die. "When I die, you will lose me. But when I die, I lose all of you." Or as my two-year-old daughter said when I showed her the first dead thing she'd ever seena decomposing whitefish, lapping against the rocks of Green Bay, Wisconsin. "He's going to miss us." Yes: And we should think about our mortalityand the mortality of our loved onesevery single day, instead of mindlessly pecking away at our cellular telephones and then being shocked when Facebook tell us that Betty White is dead. When the proudly homophobic President Jair Bolsonaro took office in January, LGBT community members were worried their rights would be taken away. Two months later, watchdog groups are saying suicide among LGBT people has skyrocketed as a result. There are no official figures, according to Grupo Gay da Bahia, the Brazilian watchdog group, but after scanning social media and obituaries, the death rate by suicide is much more prominent. LGBT Brazilians confirm it got much harder after Bolsonaro was elected. Theres a lot of suicidal thinking, Pedro Paulo Bicalho, an adviser at Brazils Federal Council for Psychology (CFP), told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Not just the final suicide, the loss of life, but mainly the ideation, the desire to take ones life, to kill oneself because of the way our own society sees the (LGBT+) population. According to Grupo Gay da Bahia, about 100 gay and transgender people took their lives in Brazil last year, almost four times the suicide rate in 2016. In late 2018, the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft arrived at Bennu, the asteroid it will be studying and sampling over the next several years. Now, new research in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters shows Bennu is spinning faster over time - an observation that will help scientists understand the evolution of asteroids, their potential threat to Earth and if they could be mined for resources. Bennu is 110 million kilometers (70 million miles) away from Earth. As it moves through space at about 101,000 kilometers per hour (63,000 miles per hour), it also spins, completing a full rotation every 4.3 hours. The new research finds the asteroid's rotation is speeding up by about 1 second per century. In other words, Bennu's rotation period is getting shorter by about 1 second every 100 years. While the increase in rotation might not seem like much, over a long period of time it can translate into dramatic changes in the space rock. As the asteroid spins faster and faster over millions of years, it could lose pieces of itself or blow itself apart, according to the study's authors. Detecting the increase in rotation helps scientists understand the types of changes that could have happened on Bennu, like landslides or other long-term changes, that the OSIRIS-REx mission will look for. "As it speeds up, things ought to change, and so we're going to be looking for those things and detecting this speed up gives us some clues as to the kinds of things we should be looking for," said Mike Nolan, a senior research scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who is the lead author of the new paper and the head of the OSIRIS-REx mission's science team. "We should be looking for evidence that something was different in the fairly recent past and it's conceivable things may be changing as we go." The OSIRIS-REx mission is scheduled to bring a sample of Bennu to Earth in 2023. Understanding Bennu's rotational change could help scientists figure out what asteroids can tell us about the origin of the solar system, how likely it is for asteroids to pose a threat to humans and if they could be mined for resources. "If you want to do any of those things, you need to know what is affecting it," Nolan said. Detecting a change In order to understand Bennu's rotation, scientists studied data of the asteroid taken from Earth in 1999 and 2005, along with data taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2012. It was when they looked at the Hubble data that they noticed the rotation speed of the asteroid in 2012 didn't quite match their predictions based on the earlier data. "You couldn't make all three of them fit quite right," Nolan said. "That was when we came up with this idea that it had to be accelerating." The idea that the rotation of asteroids could speed up over time was first predicted around 2000 and first detected in 2007, according to Nolan. To date, this acceleration has only been detected in a handful of asteroids, he said. The change in Bennu's rotation could be due to a change in its shape. Similar to how ice skaters speed up as they pull in their arms, an asteroid could speed up as it loses material. Nolan and his co-authors suggest the reason for the increase in Bennu's rotation is more likely due to a phenomenon known the YORP effect. Sunlight hitting the asteroid is reflected back into space. The change in the direction of the light coming in and going out pushes on the asteroid and can cause it to spin faster or slower, depending on its shape and rotation. The OSIRIS-REx mission will determine Bennu's rotation rate independently this year, which will help scientists nail down the reason for the increase in rotation. Since spacecraft will never visit the vast majority of asteroids, the measurements will also help scientists learn how well ground-based measurements are able to understand these far-away objects. "By testing these predictions in a few cases, we will significantly improve our confidence in predictions made for other objects," the study's authors write. The measurement of Bennu's acceleration rate combined with the arrival of OSIRIS-REx at the asteroid gives scientists a great opportunity to validate the new study's results and test theories about the YORP effect, said Desiree Cotto-Figueroa, an assistant professor of physics and electronics at the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao, who was not involved in the new study. "This is a great opportunity, in general, having this measurement and having the spacecraft OSIRIS-REx there observing this asteroid to help us better understand this effect, which is a dominant mechanism in the evolution of asteroids," she said. Founded in 1919, AGU is a not-for-profit scientific society dedicated to advancing Earth and space science for the benefit of humanity. We support 60,000 members, who reside in 135 countries, as well as our broader community, through high-quality scholarly publications, dynamic meetings, our dedication to science policy and science communications, and our commitment to building a diverse and inclusive workforce, as well as many other innovative programs. AGU is home to the award-winning news publication Eos, the Thriving Earth Exchange, where scientists and community leaders work together to tackle local issues, and a headquarters building that represents Washington, D.C.'s first net zero energy commercial renovation. We are celebrating our Centennial in 2019. #AGU100 Authors: M.C. Nolan: Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA; E.S. Howell: Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA; D.J. Scheeres: Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA; J.W. McMahon: Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA; O.Golubov: V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Kharkiv, Ukraine; and Institute of Astronomy of V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Kharkiv, Ukraine; C.W. Hergenrother: Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA; J.P. Emery: Earth and Planetary Science Department, Planetary Geosciences Institute, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA; K.S. Noll: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Solar System Exploration Division, Greenbelt, MD, USA; S.R. Chesley: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA; D.S. Lauretta: Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA. Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. Shadi Hamid in Comment: How Muslims make their place in a changing America, then, isnt just about Muslims but about how to hold to the ideal of religious communities making America great. It is also about challenging the spread and normalization of Islamophobia. This rise in anti-Muslim bigotry has led many to see this as the worst period yet for American Muslims, exceeding even the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. But looked at another way, Donald Trump has unwittingly propelled Muslims into the cultural and political mainstream. According to polling by my colleague Shibley Telhami, few things predict partisan affiliation more than attitudes toward Muslims and Islam. In practice, this means that there are few better ways to signal your anti-Trump bona fides than by being pro-Muslim. I watched, somewhat in awe, the images of citizens rallying around American Muslims who protested Trumps first travel ban by praying at airport baggage claims in January 2017. Scenes such as that would have been hard to imagine after 9/11. In Washington, DC, where I live, various cafes and restaurants feature welcome signs at their entrances with a picture of a woman wearing a headscarf. A new crop of Muslim candidates are running and winning elections, including the first two Muslim congresswomen in American history. A Muslim comic, Hasan Minhaj, headlined the White House Correspondents Dinner for the first time in 2017. Meanwhile, Muslim characters are showing up in prominent films and television shows, including, perhaps most interestingly, a transgender, observant Muslim in HBOs Here and Now. More here. Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times: A recent survey asked Republicans and Democrats whether they agreed with the statement that members of the opposition party are not just worse for politics they are downright evil. The answers, published in January in a paper, Lethal Mass Partisanship, were startling, but maybe they shouldnt have been. Just over 42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as downright evil. In real numbers, this suggests that 48.8 million voters out of the 136.7 million who cast ballots in 2016 believe that members of opposition party are in league with the devil. More here. Just as dust gathers in corners and along bookshelves in our homes, dust piles up in space too. But when the dust settles in the solar system, it's often in rings. Several dust rings circle the Sun. The rings trace the orbits of planets, whose gravity tugs dust into place around the Sun, as it drifts by on its way to the center of the solar system. The dust consists of crushed-up remains from the formation of the solar system, some 4.6 billion years ago -- rubble from asteroid collisions or crumbs from blazing comets. Dust is dispersed throughout the entire solar system, but it collects at grainy rings overlying the orbits of Earth and Venus, rings that can be seen with telescopes on Earth. By studying this dust -- what it's made of, where it comes from, and how it moves through space -- scientists seek clues to understanding the birth of planets and the composition of all that we see in the solar system. Two recent studies report new discoveries of dust rings in the inner solar system. One study uses NASA data to outline evidence for a dust ring around the Sun at Mercury's orbit. A second study from NASA identifies the likely source of the dust ring at Venus' orbit: a group of never-before-detected asteroids co-orbiting with the planet. "It's not every day you get to discover something new in the inner solar system," said Marc Kuchner, an author on the Venus study and astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "This is right in our neighborhood." Another Ring Around the Sun Guillermo Stenborg and Russell Howard, both solar scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., did not set out to find a dust ring. "We found it by chance," Stenborg said, laughing. The scientists summarized their findings in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal on Nov. 21, 2018. They describe evidence of a fine haze of cosmic dust over Mercury's orbit, forming a ring some 9.3 million miles wide. Mercury -- 3,030 miles wide, just big enough for the continental United States to stretch across -- wades through this vast dust trail as it circles the Sun. Ironically, the two scientists stumbled upon the dust ring while searching for evidence of a dust-free region close to the Sun. At some distance from the Sun, according to a decades-old prediction, the star's mighty heat should vaporize dust, sweeping clean an entire stretch of space. Knowing where this boundary is can tell scientists about the composition of the dust itself, and hint at how planets formed in the young solar system. So far, no evidence has been found of dust-free space, but that's partly because it would be difficult to detect from Earth. No matter how scientists look from Earth, all the dust in between us and the Sun gets in the way, tricking them into thinking perhaps space near the Sun is dustier than it really is. Stenborg and Howard figured they could work around this problem by building a model based on pictures of interplanetary space from NASA's STEREO satellite -- short for Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory. Ultimately, the two wanted to test their new model in preparation for NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which is currently flying a highly elliptic orbit around the Sun, swinging closer and closer to the star over the next seven years. They wanted to apply their technique to the images Parker will send back to Earth and see how dust near the Sun behaves. Scientists have never worked with data collected in this unexplored territory, so close to the Sun. Models like Stenborg and Howard's provide crucial context for understanding Parker Solar Probe's observations, as well as hinting at what kind of space environment the spacecraft will find itself in -- sooty or sparkling clean. Two kinds of light show up in STEREO images: light from the Sun's blazing outer atmosphere -- called the corona -- and light reflected off all the dust floating through space. The sunlight reflected off this dust, which slowly orbits the Sun, is about 100 times brighter than coronal light. "We're not really dust people," said Howard, who is also the lead scientist for the cameras on STEREO and Parker Solar Probe that take pictures of the corona. "The dust close to the Sun just shows up in our observations, and generally, we have thrown it away." Solar scientists like Howard -- who study solar activity for purposes such as forecasting imminent space weather, including giant explosions of solar material that the Sun can sometimes send our way -- have spent years developing techniques to remove the effect of this dust. Only after removing light contamination from dust can they clearly see what the corona is doing. The two scientists built their model as a tool for others to get rid of the pesky dust in STEREO -- and eventually Parker Solar Probe -- images, but the prediction of dust-free space lingered in the back of their minds. If they could devise a way of separating the two kinds of light and isolate the dust-shine, they could figure out how much dust was really there. Finding that all the light in an image came from the corona alone, for example, could indicate they'd found dust-free space at last. Mercury's dust ring was a lucky find, a side discovery Stenborg and Howard made while they were working on their model. When they used their new technique on the STEREO images, they noticed a pattern of enhanced brightness along Mercury's orbit -- more dust, that is -- in the light they'd otherwise planned to discard. "It wasn't an isolated thing," Howard said. "All around the Sun, regardless of the spacecraft's position, we could see the same five percent increase in dust brightness, or density. That said something was there, and it's something that extends all around the Sun." Scientists never considered that a ring might exist along Mercury's orbit, which is maybe why it's gone undetected until now, Stenborg said. "People thought that Mercury, unlike Earth or Venus, is too small and too close to the Sun to capture a dust ring," he said. "They expected that the solar wind and magnetic forces from the Sun would blow any excess dust at Mercury's orbit away." With an unexpected discovery and sensitive new tool under their belt, the researchers are still interested in the dust-free zone. As Parker Solar Probe continues its exploration of the corona, their model can help others reveal any other dust bunnies lurking near the Sun. Asteroids Hiding in Venus' Orbit This isn't the first time scientists have found a dust ring in the inner solar system. Twenty-five years ago, scientists discovered that Earth orbits the Sun within a giant ring of dust. Others uncovered a similar ring near Venus' orbit, first using archival data from the German-American Helios space probes in 2007, and then confirming it in 2013, with STEREO data. Since then, scientists determined the dust ring in Earth's orbit comes largely from the asteroid belt, the vast, doughnut-shaped region between Mars and Jupiter where most of the solar system's asteroids live. These rocky asteroids constantly crash against each other, sloughing dust that drifts deeper into the Sun's gravity, unless Earth's gravity pulls the dust aside, into our planet's orbit. At first, it seemed likely that Venus' dust ring formed like Earth's, from dust produced elsewhere in the solar system. But when Goddard astrophysicist Petr Pokorny modeled dust spiraling toward the Sun from the asteroid belt, his simulations produced a ring that matched observations of Earth's ring -- but not Venus'. This discrepancy made him wonder if not the asteroid belt, where else does the dust in Venus' orbit come from? After a series of simulations, Pokorny and his research partner Marc Kuchner hypothesized it comes from a group of never-before-detected asteroids that orbit the Sun alongside Venus. They published their work in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on March 12, 2019. "I think the most exciting thing about this result is it suggests a new population of asteroids that probably holds clues to how the solar system formed," Kuchner said. If Pokorny and Kuchner can observe them, this family of asteroids could shed light on Earth and Venus' early histories. Viewed with the right tools, the asteroids could also unlock clues to the chemical diversity of the solar system. Because it's dispersed over a larger orbit, Venus' dust ring is much larger than the newly detected ring at Mercury's. About 16 million miles from top to bottom and 6 million miles wide, the ring is littered with dust whose largest grains are roughly the size of those in coarse sandpaper. It's about 10 percent denser with dust than surrounding space. Still, it's diffuse -- pack all the dust in the ring together, and all you'd get is an asteroid two miles across. Using a dozen different modeling tools to simulate how dust moves around the solar system, Pokorny modeled all the dust sources he could think of, looking for a simulated Venus ring that matched the observations. The list of all the sources he tried sounds like a roll call of all the rocky objects in the solar system: Main Belt asteroids, Oort Cloud comets, Halley-type comets, Jupiter-family comets, recent collisions in the asteroid belt. "But none of them worked," Kuchner said. "So, we started making up our own sources of dust." Perhaps, the two scientists thought, the dust came from asteroids much closer to Venus than the asteroid belt. There could be a group of asteroids co-orbiting the Sun with Venus -- meaning they share Venus' orbit, but stay far away from the planet, often on the other side of the Sun. Pokorny and Kuchner reasoned a group of asteroids in Venus' orbit could have gone undetected until now because it's difficult to point earthbound telescopes in that direction, so close to the Sun, without light interference from the Sun. Co-orbiting asteroids are an example of what's called a resonance, an orbital pattern that locks different orbits together, depending on how their gravitational influences meet. Pokorny and Kuchner modeled many potential resonances: asteroids that circle the Sun twice for every three of Venus' orbits, for example, or nine times for Venus' ten, and one for one. Of all the possibilities, one group alone produced a realistic simulation of the Venus dust ring: a pack of asteroids that occupies Venus's orbit, matching Venus' trips around the Sun one for one. But the scientists couldn't just call it a day after finding a hypothetical solution that worked. "We thought we'd discovered this population of asteroids, but then had to prove it and show it works," Pokorny said. "We got excited, but then you realize, 'Oh, there's so much work to do.'" They needed to show that the very existence of the asteroids makes sense in the solar system. It would be unlikely, they realized, that asteroids in these special, circular orbits near Venus arrived there from somewhere else like the asteroid belt. Their hypothesis would make more sense if the asteroids had been there since the very beginning of the solar system. The scientists built another model, this time starting with a throng of 10,000 asteroids neighboring Venus. They let the simulation fast forward through 4.5 billion years of solar system history, incorporating all the gravitational effects from each of the planets. When the model reached present-day, about 800 of their test asteroids survived the test of time. Pokorny considers this an optimistic survival rate. It indicates that asteroids could have formed near Venus' orbit in the chaos of the early solar system, and some could remain there today, feeding the dust ring nearby. The next step is actually pinning down and observing the elusive asteroids. "If there's something there, we should be able to find it," Pokorny said. Their existence could be verified with space-based telescopes like Hubble, or perhaps interplanetary space-imagers similar to STEREO's. Then, the scientists will have more questions to answer: How many of them are there, and how big are they? Are they continuously shedding dust, or was there just one break-up event? Dust Rings Around Other Stars The dust rings that Mercury and Venus shepherd are just a planet or two away, but scientists have spotted many other dust rings in distant star systems. Vast dust rings can be easier to spot than exoplanets, and could be used to infer the existence of otherwise hidden planets, and even their orbital properties. But interpreting extrasolar dust rings isn't straightforward. "In order to model and accurately read the dust rings around other stars, we first have to understand the physics of the dust in our own backyard," Kuchner said. By studying neighboring dust rings at Mercury, Venus and Earth, where dust traces out the enduring effects of gravity in the solar system, scientists can develop techniques for reading between the dust rings both near and far. Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. For Subscribers Basketball season opens; Aberdeen Central girls host Cobblers, Raiders Here's what to know before Aberdeen boys and girls opening high school basketball games this weekend. A research team of experts in atomic physics, nuclear fusion science, and astronomy succeeded in computing millions of highly accurate atomic data of neodymium ions in the Japan-Lithuania international collaboration. This research accelerates studies of a long-standing mystery regarding the origin of precious metals such as gold and platinum in our universe. It is not yet identified where and how elements heavier than iron in the universe have been made. Drawing attention as one of the origins of the heavy elements is a merger of two neutron stars. In August 2017, gravitational waves caused by the merger of two neutron stars 130 million years ago were detected. At the same time, emission of the light called kilonova was also observed. The light of a kilonova comes from the material released by the merger of the neutron stars, and it is believed that the material contains abundant heavy elements, including precious metals such as gold and platinum, and rare earth metals such as neodymium. Elements have the property of absorbing light. The wavelength of the light absorbed by the element and the degree of its absorption are unique to each element and they are called atomic data. By using this atomic data, we can estimate the species and the abundance of heavy elements produced in the merger of neutron stars by analyzing the brightness and the wavelength distributions of the light of a kilonova. However, the available atomic data of heavy elements are extremely limited in widely used world standard databases of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Therefore, collaborative research in the fields of atomic physics, astronomy and fusion science is conducted to provide highly accurate atomic data for the light of a kilonova. In nuclear fusion research, atomic data is necessary to analyze the amount and transport of impurities such as iron ions in high temperature plasmas. Daiji Kato, an Associate Professor at the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) in Japan, is collaborating with Gediminas Gaigalas, Professor at Vilnius University in Lithuania, and colleagues in his group to advance research for constructing highly accurate atomic data by computation. Methods of computation that have been used for nuclear fusion research can be applied for atomic data to analyze the light of a kilonova. The research team focused on singly-, doubly-, and triply-ionized neodymium ions which have the largest influence on the light of kilonovae. Neodymium ions can form more arrangements of constituent electrons than those of lighter elements such as iron, and provide a tremendous number of wavelengths for light absorption. High precision computation of multiple-electron atoms is challenging due to difficulties in accounting for subtle correlations among electrons. In quantum mechanics, the correlation effects are represented by coherent superposition of different arrangements of constituent electrons. A virtually infinite number of arrangements are possible. The research team tested different sets of arrangements as to provide high accuracy data in realistic computation times, and succeeded in finding the optimal set of arrangements for each neodymium ion. Computed energies of constituent electrons agree with NIST's world standard data within approximately 10% error in average, which is a much higher accuracy than has ever been achieved by the research team, and provide millions of wavelengths and probabilities for light absorption. An astronomer in the team, Masaomi Tanaka, Associate Professor at Tohoku University simulated the light of kilonovae using both the data with the highest precision and the data with a poor accuracy. The influence of the difference in precision on the brightness of the light is evaluated quantitatively for the first time to be approximately 20% at most. This value is sufficiently small to increase confidence in analysis of the light of kilonovae. Thus, the results of this research will accelerate research to elucidate the origins of precious metals such as gold and platinum in our universe by using the atomic data of highest precision. These research results were published as Gaigalas et al. "Extended Calculations of Energy Level and Transition Rates of Nd II-IV Ions for Application to Neutron Star Mergers" in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series in February 2019. Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. A pizza shop employee shot and injured a suspect who deputies say had just robbed a southwest Albuquerque Little Caesars at gunpoint last Thursday. Justin Brewer, 27, was released from the hospital and booked into the Metropolitan Detention Center on Monday on one count of armed robbery with a deadly weapon. According to a criminal complaint filed in Metropolitan Court, Brewer had just held up the store and was fleeing through the parking lot when the employee, still wearing his apron, came outside and shot him. Brewer was taken from the scene by an unidentified man and dropped off outside a Motel 6 near the Big I soon after. The employee is not identified in the complaint, nor does it mention where he got the gun or if he is still employed at the pizza place. Little Caesars would not comment on this story. Its unclear whether the employee will be charged. The completed case will be turned over to the District Attorneys Office for review, Bernalillo County Sheriffs spokeswoman Felicia Maggard said. No further details are available for release. Deputies say Brewer walked into the Little Caesars at Rio Bravo and Isleta SW around 9 p.m. wearing a mask and orange gloves. Brewer pulled out a gun and made off with $9 from the cash register. He didnt get far. An employee told deputies he chased Brewer outside and shot at him several times, hitting him once. He was scared for his life and didnt want (Brewer) to try and hurt someone as he ran away, a detective wrote. After being shot, deputies say Brewer fell to the ground screaming for help and an unidentified person helped him into a waiting vehicle leaving the $9 behind. According to the complaint, Albuquerque police found Brewer soon after outside a Motel 6 near University and Interstate 40. Deputies say he was wearing the same clothing used during the Little Caesars robbery, but that he told police he had been shot outside the motel although there was no crime scene or reports of gunfire nearby. A detective couldnt question Brewer at the time as he was going into surgery. Brewers mother, Angela Cannon, said her son told her someone shot him in the knee as he was leaving a gas station beside the Motel 6, and that he didnt know his attackers. He doesnt really have any real enemies, she said. I dont really know what happened. Copyright 2019 Albuquerque Journal The state Attorney Generals Office has charged a former Archdiocese of Santa Fe priest with raping a young girl at an Albuquerque Catholic School roughly 30 years ago. Sabine Griego, 81, faces one count of criminal sexual penetration of a child under 13. He was arrested and booked into the San Miguel County Detention Center. The Attorney Generals Office alleges the victim was a student at Queen of Heaven Catholic School when she was repeatedly raped by Griego. The allegations detailed in the affidavit are disturbing. In one instance, the affidavit says, he became angry with her and broke her nose. In another instance, he is alleged to have covertly sexually assaulted her while she sat in his lap in front of another priest; its unclear whether the other priest was aware of what was happening. The victim also told authorities that Griego threatened to kill her or cut her tongue out if she told anyone about the abuse. The abuse stopped when she was a fourth-grader and Griego was transferred out of the school, the affidavit says. The victim told investigators that the abuse led to her having nightmares and harming herself. She said this was because she was blaming herself for what happened with Sabine Griego, the affidavit says. The AGs Office also says that it has evidence that Archbishop Michael Sheehan was aware of this abuse as early as 2004. It quotes a confidential letter from the former archbishop. Particularly abhorrent is the case of the female victim who was nine in 1990 at the time of the alleged abuse, the letter says. She indicated that she endured vaginal, oral and anal sex from the accused. According to the AGs affidavit, The letter provides direct evidence not only that the (criminal sexual penetration of a minor) occurred and that The Church was aware of it but also that The Church appears to have conducted an investigation into the matter, according to the affidavit. Griego has been named in multiple lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Santa Fe alleging sexual abuse. In May, seven people, six men and one woman, filed suit against Griego, alleging they were sexually abused by him in Las Vegas, N.M., for years. That case is pending trial. Griego is the second priest to be charged with sexual abuse during an ongoing investigation into Catholic priests across the state by Attorney General Hector Balderas office. Marvin Archuleta, 81, was arrested and charged in February with criminal sexual penetration of a child under 13 and kidnapping in the rape of a 6-year-old boy in the 1980s at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Santa Cruz, near Espanola. And five months earlier, federal agents extradited former Kirtland Air Force Base chaplain Arthur Perrault from Morocco and charged him with six counts of federal aggravated sexual abuse and one count of sexual contact in the molestation of an 11-year-old boy in the early 90s. Perrault pleaded not guilty to all counts. SANTA FE A bill to establish an endowment fund for small rural libraries in New Mexico has passed both chambers of the Legislature and now is in the hands of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. Senate Bill 264, which had previously received Senate approval, sailed through the House by a vote of 64-0 late Monday night. Rural libraries are the heart of our communities in rural areas and they are also kind of the brain trust of a rural community, Rep. Susan Herrera, D-Embudo, said during the brief House discussion on the measure. The rural library proposal started the legislative session as a request for a $50 million endowment fund, with money for rural libraries coming from the endowments investment earnings. Also, a now-scrapped proposed constitutional amendment would have waived the states so-called anti-donation clause to allow direct funding for the 15 of 50 rural libraries that are private non-profits. The $50 million request was quickly reduced a $5 million allocation in House Bill 2, the state budget bill. But the amount was recently increased to $6 million by the Senate Finance Committee, according to Shel Neymark. Neymark, an Embudo resident who helped establish the Embudo Valley Library in Dixon, has been the main driver of the rural library initiative. He told the Journal Tuesday hes overjoyed about the unanimous House vote for the library bill. It was unanimous in the House and only six votes against it in the Senate, so I suspect (Lujan Grisham) will sign it, Neymark said. But, you know, you never know until she does. Money will be distributed as grants by the state librarian. Nonprofit libraries can receive money through contracts for services but will not be able to use it for capital improvements. A small part of the funding will also go to the state librarian to provide technical support to the rural libraries as well as for a grant program for communities to start libraries. Sen. Gerry Ortiz y Pino, D-Albuquerque, and Rep. Gail Armstrong, R-Magdalena, are the main sponsors of the legislation. At one point in the bills trip through the legislative process, it appeared that the library money would not be invested as an endowment and instead the appropriation would just become a fund from which disbursements would go to the libraries. But on Tuesday, Ortiz y Pino said endowment fund structure will in fact be used, with money for the libraries coming for earnings from investment of the $6 million. Ortiz y Pino said annual disbursements to the libraries will likely be around $6,000 a year. Distributions would not happen until 2021 if the governor signs onto the libraries bill and the $6 million stays in the budget and starts earning interest. Our intention clearly is to come back and get some more money (in the endowment fund) and eventually try and build it up to the originally proposed $50 million, said Ortiz y Pino. If the governor OKs the funding plan, Neymark, said the state librarian will organize a committee to draft guidelines for disbursement. You pay taxes for governments to work in the best interests of your community. Sometimes these governments do; sometimes they dont. But how can you know? For example: Wheres the money to fix that pothole that youve nicknamed Alaska? Who has applied for that school superintendent position so crucial to your childrens education? Why hasnt your cousin received the government services promised? What, exactly, are your taxes paying for? You are entitled to know the answers to these questions, and that knowledge will empower you. Thats how a democracy works. This week we celebrate our right to this knowledge through Sunshine Week, March 10 through 16 an ideal time as the New Mexico Legislature heads into the final week of deliberations. Your rights to hold governments accountable are in part covered in the states Sunshine Laws: The Inspection of Public Records Act and the Open Meetings Act. Get to know these statutes. These acts help ensure our rights to hold governments accountable by advocating all necessary records and public meetings be open and accessible. This year, lawmakers proposed at least seven bills the Albuquerque Journal called depressing in a Feb. 3 editorial highlighting measures that sought to put barriers between you and information. The proposals would increase costs for public records, allow the expungement of criminal court records, limit the publics ability to identify candidates for government positions and other measures that keep taxpayers in the dark. The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, New Mexico Ethics Watch, Common Cause New Mexico and similar organizations consistently shine a light on governments that would rather operate behind closed doors. This Sunshine Week, we acknowledge the work that these organizations do to ensure your lawful access to government information. The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government hot line at 1-505-764-3750 answers hundreds of questions a year from citizens, government employees and even elected officials. The hot line is also a valuable resource if you are aware of a government violation. News media have traditionally held a role in society as government watchdogs. Its the reason the Fourth Estate exists. However, the number of journalists is in decline. Bob Moore, the former El Paso Times editor who left the company in 2017 amid a round of layoffs, recently tweeted: Something to chew on: In 2000, federal Occupational Employment Statistics said El Paso (my home) had 130 news analysts, reporters and correspondents and 130 public relations specialists. In 2017 OES El Paso data, reporters and correspondents is 50 and PR specialists is 400. This story repeats itself in far too many cities. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Notre Dame found that municipal borrowing costs increase after a newspaper ceases publication, the Associated Press reported this week. It leaves readers in the dark and emboldens elected officials to sign off on higher wages, larger payrolls and ballooning budget deficits, their study found. News media and open government advocates will continue to press for more government transparency. Statistics may point to fewer of us, but those numbers are misleading when it comes to transparency. It doesnt count you, the taxpayer. You care about wasteful spending. You care about corrupt officials. You care about being left in the dark. You have the same access to information as we do. This Sunshine Week, learn about your rights. Request a public document. Demand transparency. Its in your best interest. SAN DIEGO You want to talk about a border emergency? Grab your passport and take a quick trip with me around the world. Look at the tensions between Israel and Syria. India and Pakistan. Iraq and Iran. Colombia and Venezuela. South Korea and North Korea. Now, closer to home, look at this relationship: United States-Mexico. Thank goodness for good neighbors. Americans really need to stop hyperventilating about the supposed crisis on their southern border better known as the natural migration of people from one place to another and count their blessings. Ill start. Americans are fortunate that Mexican law enforcement provides regular intelligence on terrorist threats along the border. In 2011, then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder credited Mexican authorities with helping uncover a murder-for-hire plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The plan came to light when Manssor Arbabsiar, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Iran, met with a person he thought was part of a Mexican drug cartel but who was actually a confidential source for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Youre welcome, America. Or as the Mexicans say: De nada. A good friend is an anti-terrorism hawk who studies the U.S.-Mexico border and who recently gained access to a migrant caravan heading north through Mexico. What keeps him up at night are the so-called special-interest aliens from terrorist-producing countries who roam around the border, and what their intentions are. According to the libertarian Cato Institute, as many as 45,000 special-interest aliens have been captured by U.S. authorities since 2007. And yet there has never been a terrorist attack on U.S. soil linked to this population. Yet when I speak to groups about immigration, I never hear a peep about potential terrorists. You know what I hear? This: We have to stop this invasion of illegal aliens from Mexico who refuse to learn English and assimilate into our culture. As the Republican-led Senate pushes back against President Donald Trumps attempt to declare a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border to clear a path for him to build his big, beautiful wall, it seems like a good time to clarify the exact nature of this emergency. The real four-alarm fire is a blinding fear of changing demographics and a clash of cultures that has worried nativists and other immigration restrictionists for 30 years. It was in the early 1990s that immigration from Mexico started surging and the media began running stories in the march to the 2000 census about how the Latino population was swelling and how whites would eventually become a statistical minority. That freaked out a lot of people. A decade later, some people were even more frightened by those massive immigrant marches in cities like Dallas, Phoenix, Chicago and Los Angeles. Over the years, fear gradually turned to resentment. Now resentment has morphed into panic with a dash of opportunism. For those who worry about changing demographics, Trumps national emergency declaration is a convenient vehicle to stop the browning of America. Thats what this whole calamity is all about. And no wall can fix that. This is about pulling up the drawbridge. This is like shutting down Ellis Island 100 years ago because the Italian immigrants who were entering were thought to be of inferior stock. Maybe Republican lawmakers know this full well, and they dont have the character to admit that there is nothing high-minded or righteous about Trumps emergency declaration. Or perhaps theyre so dense that they really do think whats happening on the border is about keeping out opioids, turning back criminals and rescuing children from human traffickers. Syndicated radio host and self-appointed expert on the U.S.-Mexico border Rush Limbaugh sounded the alarm last week when he told listeners, This crisis is transforming the United States into something it wasnt intended to be. Theres no question that there is an invasion going on of people who cant be absorbed or assimilated into our culture. I appreciate the honesty. Limbaugh is half right. Its a crisis all right. But its not about turning away undesirables. Every day, south of San Diego, more than 100,000 people cross the border between the United States and Mexico either to make money at work, or spend it at play. Not exactly a war zone. Rather, its about what America is turning into and those who want to turn it back to what it used to be. What we have on the border is not a security crisis. Its an identity crisis. E-mail ruben@rubennavarrette.com. Navarrette Nation, is available through every podcast app. 2019, The Washington Post Writers Group. New Mexico is about to flip the on switch for a bright new, climate-friendly, energy future. Senate Bill 489, co-sponsored by five Senate and House Democrats, sets the state on a path for carbon-free electricity generation by 2045, with key benchmarks along the way. It requires the states public utilities to derive 50 percent of their electricity from renewable resources by 2030 and 80 percent by 2040. Thats a dramatic increase from the states current mandates which require 20 percent from renewables by 2020. The plan is a mandate not just an aspiration and is among the most aggressive, if not the most, in the United States. The Senate approved the bill on a bipartisan vote of 32-9 on March 6. On Tuesday, the House sent the bill to the governors desk on a 43-22 vote. Despite some controversial provisions most notably a financial mechanism that allows Public Service Company of New Mexico to recover all of its investments after shutting down the coal-fired San Juan Generating Station near Farmington the legislation has an impressive coalition of supporters as a number of environmental and business groups have joined forces with PNM to forge ahead with the proposal. In the final analysis, the proposal allowing PNM to issue fixed-rate bonds to help it recover the costs associated with the transition is fair and makes sound business sense for both PNM and consumers. Sanders Moore of Environment New Mexico summed up one of the key arguments for the legislation: We have world-class renewable energy resources we should be taking advantage of. Correct. And Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham who will get a nice political bump nationally added her considerable political muscle to pushing the legislation, with a half dozen top officials in her administration testifying in support of the measure during a three-hour hearing before the House Judiciary Committee this week. This legislation isnt without pain particularly for coal miners in the Four Corners area. But the measure requires a significant amount of renewable capacity to be based in that area, restoring the local property tax base that will be lost after the coal plant closes, and authorizes two new funds for economic development and worker retraining to mitigate the impact of closing the San Juan plant and mine. It also includes the good sense provision that allows PNM to continue using electricity generated by the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona. Some environmentalists hate nuclear power, but they cant argue that it isnt carbon free. And the legislation is banking on new, emerging technology namely battery storage that would be adequate to avoid the need for significant backup generating capacity from natural gas, which is cheap and plentiful. But even if natural gas backup proves necessary, it could still meet the bills mandate if it has carbon sequestration technology. How will this impact rates? PNM, co-sponsor Rep. Nathan Small, D-Las Cruces, and others say the cost of electricity will be lower than it would be without the change. Arguably thats a bit speculative, perhaps optimistic and short on number crunching. But at the end of the day it will still be the job of the Public Regulation Commission (which hopefully will one day be an appointed, professional body rather than an elected one) and the attorney general to balance the interests of ratepayers against those of the regulated utility. So consumers will have protection. Now that it has cleared its final legislative hurdle, you can expect the governor to sign this legislation with glee. And it will be well-deserved as it puts the state at the forefront of an important economic and environmental issue. Congratulations to the supporters. This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers. Three mathematicians and a physicist from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB), the Mathematics Research Centre (CRM) and the Barcelona Graduate School of Mathematics (BGSMath) propose a mathematical model which allows making reliable estimations on the probability of geomagnetic storms caused by solar activity. The researchers, who published the study in the journal Scientific Reports (of the Nature group) in February, calculated the probability in the next decade of a potentially catastrophic event for the Earth's telecommunications, such as the one which occurred between the end of August and beginning of September 1859, known as the "Carrington Event". That year, astronomer Richard C. Carrington observed the most powerful geomagnetic storm known up to date. According to this new research, the probability of a similar solar storm occurring in the following decade ranges from 0.46% to 1.88%, far less than the percentage estimated before. "In 2012, the results reported in scientific literature estimated the probability to be around 12%, ten times more than our more pessimistic estimation", David Morina, first author of the study and postdoctoral researcher explains. "Our model is more flexible than previous ones and it also includes the model used for the previous estimations as a specific case", Morina adds. The intensity of solar surface perturbations such as flares and coronal mass ejections affecting the Earth's magnetosphere has been measured since 1957 using the "Dst" index, which centralises the values collected every hour in stations located across the globe. Normally, the value of this parameter ranges from -20 to +20 nT (nanoteslas, one billionth of a tesla unit; a tesla unit can be compared to the magnetic flux density generated by a powerful loudspeaker). It is estimated that the Dst index associated with the Carrington Event had a value of approximately -850 nT. Geomagnetic storms are responsible for spectacular phenomena such as the aurora borealis observed at the Earth's highest latitudes, which depending on their intensity can interfere drastically with different aspects of human activity. Examples of severe disruptions occurring in past decades are the interruption of electrical and navigation systems, and satellite communications. "In Carrington's time, the only infrastructure affected was the global telephone network", says one of the authors of the study, mathematician Isabel Serra. "Now, a storm of such intensity could have catastrophic effects on our society. According to a 2013 study conducted by the Lloyd's of London insurance company and Atmospheric and Environmental Research, the duration of these effects could last longer than a year, and costs could rise to 2.5 trillion dollars. These are number that should make us think", Isabel Serra insists. "A probability close to 2% which is what we have calculated for a highly intense storm should not be looked over if we take into account the consequences of such an event", says Professor Pere Puig, one of the authors of the paper. "Governments should have action protocols to react to such disasters, in order to inform and calm the population left without electrical energy and no way to communicate. We cannot forget that there will be very little time of reaction before the unforeseen arrival of this type of storm". Participating in the study were David Morina and Pere Puig, researchers from the Barcelona Graduate School of Mathematics (BGSMath) and the Department of Mathematics, UAB; Isabel Serra from the Mathematics Research Centre (CRM) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and affiliate lecturer at the UAB; and Alvaro Corral, researcher from the Mathematics Research Centre (CRM), the Barcelona Graduate School of Mathematics (BGSMath) and the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, as well as affiliate lecturer of the Department of Mathematics, UAB. David Morina received funding under the Banco Santander-Maria de Maeztu framework agreement. Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. SANTA FE A House-approved tax package aimed at generating a more stable revenue stream for New Mexico could be significantly downsized under proposed Senate changes. The Democratic chairman of the Senate Corporations and Transportation Committee rolled out the changes Tuesday including one that would spike a provision to effectively undo a personal income tax cut signed into law by then-Gov. Bill Richardson in 2003. With the revenue that we have, its very difficult to raise income taxes, said Sen. Clemente Sanchez of Grants, the committees chairman. But the panel ultimately held off on voting on the proposed changes or the bill itself on Tuesday to give the bills sponsors and critics more time to negotiate a possible compromise. In its current form, House Bill 4 would increase some tax rates on cigarettes, motor vehicle purchases and higher-earning New Mexicans while also broadening tax breaks for families. It would also allow the state and local governments to start levying a tax on online sales a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowed states to do so and would require nonprofit hospitals to pay the same gross receipts tax rate that other hospitals do. Backers of the legislation opposed some of the proposed changes to the bill, saying they would undermine what theyre trying to accomplish by reducing the amount of money expected to be generated. Dont you think there should be some progressivity there? Rep. Jim Trujillo, D-Santa Fe, asked Sanchez at one point, referring to the proposed changes to personal income tax rates. Two Cabinet secretaries in Gov. Michelle Lujan Grishams administration also suggested the first-term Democratic governor would oppose the amendments, specifically citing a pared-back increase of a state tax credit for working families. In all, the proposed Senate changes to the tax bill would reduce how much projected revenue it would generate for the state from about $356 million to roughly $93 million. But economists cautioned that projection could be altered after further study. New Mexico has an unprecedented budget surplus of more than $1.2 billion, with most of it coming from an oil drilling boom in southeastern New Mexico. Both oil and natural gas are historically volatile revenue sources. Republican lawmakers have described the tax package as unnecessary at a time when the state is sitting on such a budget surplus. We should be the richest state in the union we just need to get out of our own way, said Sen. William Sharer, R-Farmington. But Democratic supporters say its important to diversify the states revenue base to fund proposed spending increases in public schools and other programs. For the past 15 years, we have starved basic government functions like education, said Rep. Javier Martinez, an Albuquerque Democrat. The 60-day legislative session ends at noon Saturday. President Donald Trumps proposed budget would be devastating to New Mexicos economy, U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., said. The proposal would make cuts to education funding, Medicaid, Medicare and water projects, and roll back environmental programs that keep our air and water clean and safe, according to the senator. The deep proposed cuts to Medicaid, SNAP food assistance, housing assistance and Social Security disability, and cutting billions from Medicare, would risk the health and security of families all across our state, he said. Trumps $4.7 trillion budget blueprint calls for boosting defense spending and making $2.7 trillion in nondefense cuts. It projects a $1.1 trillion deficit. The budget calls for reducing Medicare spending by $846 billion over the next decade, the Los Angeles Times reported. It cuts another $327 billion from safety net programs, including Medicaid, housing and the nutrition benefit known as food stamps. Also targeted for cuts are federal student loans. It takes a slash-and-burn approach to nearly every program that uplifts working families and will leave our country weak, sick and hungry, Assistant Speaker of the House Ben Ray Lujan said. Instead of investing in health care, infrastructure or education, it props up a system of corporate welfare that has driven our country deeper into debt. Budgets should reflect our core values and principles, but what President Trump has proposed is out of touch with New Mexicans and a clear sign that he is not committed to the success of hard working families, U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., said. From deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid to slashing critical investments in clean energy, infrastructure, and education, Trumps proposed budget would be devastating for New Mexico. The proposal calls for $8.6 billion in funding for barriers along the border with Mexico, an increase of the $6.7 billion the president plans to spend through his national emergency. That drew criticism from U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., who said the presidents priorities were out of step with the concerns and needs of families in New Mexico and the $8.6 billion for barriers should be used to fund real border security. Udall said the budget proposes cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, which he said would cripple the agencys already hampered ability to safeguard public health, opening the door to polluters who already face little accountability for their dangerous practices. Udall said the budget also proposes cuts to funding for forest restoration, fire prevention and other conservation. Although the budget includes an increase in defense spending, he said that didnt necessarily mean New Mexicos national laboratories and military bases would benefit. Actual defense programs, including those at New Mexicos national labs and military facilities, need ongoing budget certainty that this funding gimmick cannot provide, Udall said. The presidents budget calls for National Nuclear Security Administration to receive an 8.3 percent increase over its current budget for the development of nuclear weapons technology, the Defense News reported. That could have an impact on research at Los Alamos National Labs and Sandia National Labs. The Trump budget proposal is just that a suggestion. The White House is expected to submit a more detailed budget to Congress in the coming weeks. SANTA FE New Mexico could join a group of states in favor of using the national popular vote to decide presidential elections, under a bill headed to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grishams desk for final approval. The Senate voted 25-16 late Tuesday to approve the measure, House Bill 55, despite vociferous opposition from Republicans. I do not want to be a colony of California, Sen. William Sharer, R-Farmington, said at one point during the floor debate. A national popular vote system would take effect if enacted by enough states to form a majority of the Electoral College. Under such a scenario, a constitutional amendment would not be needed to make the change, as the Electoral College would not technically be abolished. To date, it has been approved by 12 states representing 172 electoral votes or 98 fewer than needed for a majority. In all, there have been five U.S. presidential elections in which the winner did not win the national popular vote. Most recently, Donald Trump, a Republican, defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election despite receiving nearly 2.9 million fewer votes than Clinton nationally. But Trump was elected president by winning 304 of the total 538 available electoral votes, which are assigned to states based on population. The Senate already passed a similar bill in 2017, but that years legislation did not pass the House. Albuquerque Public Schools will use existing funds and state money to continue with school security plans after its mill levy, bond package failed in a February election. But security initiatives will take longer than expected after the loss. About $20 million of the $900 million package, or about 2 percent, would have gone toward security, according to APS. Security efforts ramped up at APS and districts across the country after a mass school shooting in Parkland, Fla., a little more than a year ago. But after voters struck down all of the proposed measures, APS now must push forward with protecting its schools with the money it has. We are leveraging existing funds and also trying to leverage state funding, Capital Master Plan Executive Director Kizito Wijenje said at an APS committee meeting on March 4. A lot of the districts current security funding came from a 2016 election in which voters approved about $6 million for school safety upgrades or from legislative appropriations. The Legislature earmarked $40 million over four years for school security. Last year, APS got just under $4 million in legislative funding for 66 schools and is planning on submitting an application again this year. However, without the $20 million from the election, APS will have to lengthen its timeline. Because the funding wont be as forthcoming, we are hoping to expedite all the standards in the next 18 months, Wijenje said, adding this is longer than originally planned. The district campaigned strongly for its ballot on the premise that some of the money would go to school security a message that aligned with findings in a report commissioned by APS in November to gauge community sentiment on the election. That report put security and safety as one of the three most convincing messages in support. At the committee meeting, Wijenje also updated the Board of Education on the current status of the security plan. Wijenje said that the technical security upgrades are just part of the districts safety initiatives. APS has a Student Family and Community Supports Division to address the social and emotional health of kids. This is a really multi-functional committee we have, its not only about police and the people implementing the technical updates, he said. Its supporting emotional health and wellbeing. In the 2017-18 school year, the division has conducted 909 threat assessments and 1,473 suicide assessments. APS security status All schools have had a security assessment All schools have been trained in the new-to-APS training called ALICE, or alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate 53 percent of the districts schools have had classroom locks installed/updated 46 schools got camera upgrades and 74 have card access Construction on a new 32,000-square-foot skilled nursing facility on Westside Boulevard is well underway, according to Adam Harrington, chief financial officer for the project. According to Harrington, the new building, named The Suites at Rio Rancho, has been under construction for six months with plans to open by the end of May. The Suites at Rio Rancho is being constructed with a $6.5 million construction budget, and is planned to have 47 beds upon completion. Harrington did not comment on how many jobs this facility may create. When asked about the need for this type of facility so close to a senior living center that is in the completion stages, Harrington said there is a distinct difference in service. There is memory care, assisted living, independent living and skilled nursing facilities, he said. Those four typically make a campus or spectrum of senior living overall. Harrington said Morningside, which is just down the road, is a memory care and assisted-living facility, which offers different care from what The Suites at Rio Rancho will specialize in. Overall, central New Mexico is still lacking hundreds and hundreds of beds in those arenas for our population, he said. Location, he said, was another key factor in picking Westside Boulevard for the new facility. Being close to Unser Boulevard and NM 528 was a big factor in deciding to build this superior site where it is, Harrington said. Harrington, along with members of NAI Maestas & Ward, are planning a mixed-use development on the corner of Westside and Unser Boulevards that will be nearer to completion by the end of the year. WASHINGTON An eleventh-hour rescue mission by Republican senators to stave off an awkward defeat for President Donald Trump on his declaration of a national emergency at the Mexican border, and to protect themselves from a politically dicey vote opposing him, seemed to collapse Wednesday. The setback made it all but certain that defections from his own party will force Trump to cast what could be his first veto on a struggle directly related to his signature issue of building barricades along the southwest border. It also left Republican senators facing a painful choice: defy a president who commands passionate loyalty from conservative voters or acquiesce to what many lawmakers from both parties consider a dubious and dangerous expansion of presidential authority. After a closed-door lunch, GOP lawmakers predicted the Senate would approve a resolution Thursday annulling the emergency Trump has declared along the border. The Democratic-led House passed the legislation last month, meaning Senate assent would send it to Trump. It was called turn out the lights, the partys over, said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., recalling a favorite refrain of Monday Night Football announcers when a game was out of reach. Well, thats appropriate right now. Republicans hoped Trump would support a separate measure curbing a presidents powers to declare future emergencies. Had he done so, they thought, it would be easier for reluctant GOP senators to support the emergency Trump has proclaimed to steer $3.6 billion more than Congress has approved for barrier construction. But during the GOP lunch, Trump called Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, chief sponsor of the bill limiting future emergency declarations, and told him he opposed that proposal. The call was described by two officials who werent authorized to publicly discuss the matter and described it on condition of anonymity. Theres been numerous efforts to engage with the vice president and the president, and the presidents not persuaded that he should support it right now, said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who advises GOP leaders. I dont know of any president that likes to give up power. Lee said later in a statement that he will back the resolution canceling the border emergency because his own bill now lacks an immediate path forward. That would make him the fifth Republican senator to oppose the border emergency more than enough to send the resolution to the White House. With Republicans controlling the Senate 53-47, it will take just four GOP defections to approve the measure, which the House passed last month. Also saying they would oppose Trumps emergency declaration were GOP Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Kentuckys Rand Paul. Tillis and Collins face potentially competitive re-election fights in 2020. Tillis, though, said Wednesday that his vote was still a work in progress as talks with the White House continued. As many as 15 Republicans might vote to block Trumps emergency, said one Republican who offered the estimate only on condition of anonymity. Any Republican hopes of a turnabout rested largely on a familiar phenomenon of the Trump administration an unexpected change in mind, as hes done in congressional battles over health care and immigration. Trump told reporters that he has advised GOP senators to vote any way you want on the resolution blocking his emergency declaration but he added a warning. Anybody going against border security, drug trafficking, human trafficking, thats a bad vote, he said. Framing Thursdays vote that way seemed to be a message all but aimed directly at undecided GOP senators facing re-election races next year, of whom there are several. Within the White House, there was concern about agreeing to a deal that may only limit the number of defections, said a senior administration official who was not authorized to speak publicly. Trump had customs, border patrol and other officials reiterate his case about the need for a border wall during a meeting with senators Wednesday. He just said he wants people to support it because, as he said before, he thinks its important because its an emergency at the border, said Sen John Hoeven, R-N.D. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., tried making it even harder for uncertain Republicans to support Trumps border emergency. She said the House would never even consider the separate bill limiting future declarations by presidents, including Trump. Republican Senators are proposing new legislation to allow the president to violate the Constitution just this once in order to give themselves cover, Pelosi said in a statement. The House will not take up this legislation to give President Trump a pass. Under a four-decade old law, presidents have wide leeway in declaring a national emergency. Congress can vote to block a declaration, but the two-thirds majorities required to overcome presidential vetoes make it hard for lawmakers to prevail. Presidents have never before declared an emergency after Congress voted to deny them money for the same purpose. Lees proposal says a presidential emergency would last 30 days unless Congress votes to extend it. It would apply to future emergencies, but not Trumps current border emergency unless he seeks to renew it next year. The strongest chance of blocking Trumps border emergency is likely several lawsuits filed by Democratic state attorneys general, environmental groups and others. ___ Associated Press writer Catherine Lucey contributed to this report. SANTA FE A sponsor of the proposed End of Life Options Act isnt planning to seek House approval of the legislation this session. Rep. Deborah Armstrong, an Albuquerque Democrat and co-sponsor of House Bill 90, said there arent enough votes to win passage of the legislation yet, and she has asked that the proposal be tabled. Armstrong said she will continue, however, working to build support for the measure. Something this important takes time, Armstrong said. Providing care options for terminally ill New Mexicans is an issue that should and I know ultimately will bring people together. New Mexicans value family and respect individual choices. The legislation would allow terminally ill New Mexicans to seek a doctors help to end their lives. Patients would have to self-administer the medicine that ends their life. Vince Torres, president and executive director of Family Policy Alliance of New Mexico, said Wednesday that lawmakers were right to stop the bill. We want to thank House Democrats and Republicans for coming together to oppose this dangerous legislation, he said. Every life is worth fighting for. A storm system forecasters called historic blasted through New Mexico this week, spawning tornadoes, forcing a freight train to plunge from the bridge it was crossing, turning semis onto their sides, causing other vehicle crashes and knocking out power for hours in Las Vegas, N.M. At least two tornadoes touched down in southeast New Mexico late Tuesday, one near Dexter and Hagerman, and the other near Loving. Tennis ball-sized hail was also reported as the storms passed through. City of Roswell Public Information Officer Todd Wildermuth told the Journal five people were taken with minor injuries to hospitals after the Dexter-Hagerman tornado. Six homes were severely damaged and 12 homes were partially damaged by the twister, said Dwight Koehn of the National Weather Service office in Albuquerque. No damage or injuries were reported from the Loving tornado. The American Red Cross set up a shelter to help victims of the Dexter-Hagerman tornado at the Lindell Andrews Community Center in Hagerman. Elsewhere around the state, furious winds were considered a factor in a train derailment of 22 cars Wednesday near Logan, along N.M. 469 near U.S. 54. No injuries were reported in the accident, State Police spokesman officer Ray Wilson said. There were no hazardous materials released during the crash, he said. State Police closed all northbound lanes on Interstate 25 from mile marker 389 to 481 north of Wagon Mound on Wednesday morning because of weather-related commercial vehicle crashes. Several vehicles overturned. Wilson said State Police officers were working multiple crashes, especially on I-25 north of Las Vegas, but all over the state, due to high winds and weather. The winds were also a factor in a major power failure in Las Vegas, N.M., affecting almost 6,000 people. PNM reported on Twitter that several poles were down on Las Vegas South Frontage Road. Officials were advising people to avoid the area. Crews were replacing downed poles, but there were still a few thousand customers without power as of Wednesday evening. PNM spokesperson Meaghan Cavanaugh said the utility was dealing with power outages scattered throughout its coverage area, but couldnt say how many customers lost power. Our crews are out working, Cavanaugh said. Were trying to restore power as quickly as we can. In addition to the blackout, Koehn said structures suffered roof damage and trees were downed in the Las Vegas area. He said wind gusts of 79 mph were recorded at Clines Corners and Cannon Air Force Base near Clovis Wednesday afternoon. Winds of up to 75 mph also were recorded on White Sands Missile Range. The range closed Wednesday morning because of the high winds, with civilian employees sent home early. The missile range forecast office was anticipating wind speeds to reach around 100 mph later in the day in San Augustin Pass. High winds also forced Taos Ski Valley to close the upper mountain. Heavy snowfall in the area also caused problems. The Taos News reported several cars were stuck on N.M. 150 to Taos Ski Valley on Wednesday morning as calls went out for help pulling them out. In addition, one vehicle slid off the road into the river, though no injuries were reported, according to central dispatch. Up to 3 feet of snow is expected in the northern mountains through today. No major damage was reported in the Albuquerque metro area, even though it remained under a high wind warning until late in the evening. Air travel was affected at Albuquerque International Sunport because of problems caused by the storm system elsewhere. Stephanie Kitts, a spokesperson for the Sunport, said the airport was affected by the cancellation of what The Associated Press said was about 1,000 flights at the airport in Denver. More than 25 states were affected by the storm on Wednesday, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond. This is a very epic cyclone, said Greg Carbin, chief of forecast operations for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations Weather Prediction Center. Were looking at something that will go down in the history books. It could develop across the rest of the country into the worst storm of its type in 35 or 40 years, he said. A wind gust of 92 mph was recorded in the mountains northwest of Denver. Many schools and government offices closed for the day. The culprit was a sudden and severe drop in ground-level air pressure in Colorado, the most pronounced dive since 1950, Carbin said. It was caused by a combination of the jet stream and normal conditions in the wind shadow of the Rockies. Air rushed into the low-pressure area and then rose into the atmosphere. Its like a vacuum cleaner, really, Carbin said. And when that much air rushes higher into the atmosphere, it causes severe weather. The storm could last until Friday, but Koehn said the system was expected to clear out of New Mexico by late Wednesday night. It should quiet down on Thursday, Koehn said. The Associated Press contributed to this story. SANTA FE Duel Brewery, which played something of a ground-breaking role in Santa Fe, has closed. Efforts to reach Duel owner Trent Edwards by phone or messaging have been unsuccessful since Monday. A handmade sign on the front door of the brewery, at 1228 Parkway Dr. near Meow Wolf, says, Duel Now Closed. Meanwhile, the state Department of Workforce Solutions is investigating the brewery on 10 claims of wage theft for alleged unpaid wages. The department has issued a subpoena for financial records from the business, according to a spokeswoman. Duel, which offered food and sometimes music in addition to beer, helped break in whats now known as the Rufina Arts District. Since the brewery opened in 2013, the former industrial area has developed with arts-related projects like Meow Wolfs House of Eternal Return, galleries and theaters. Also, while Santa Fe now has many craft brewers, Duel came along when just a small group of longtimers Santa Fe Brewing, Il Vicino pizza restaurant and Second Street Brewery were the main purveyors of local beer in the City Different. Duel has faced close-by competition since 2017, when Second Street Brewing opened its third Santa Fe location in the Rufina district. Edwards staked out different ground than most local brewers, focusing on Belgian-style beers rather than super-hoppy products. An Albuquerque branch of Duel closed last year. The Santa Fe Reporter weekly, in a news story this week, reported that Edwards messaged Duel employees about the brewerys demise after the close of business on Jan. 27. Two former Duel employees told the Reporter they had since filed wage claims with the state. Copyright 2019 Albuquerque Journal SANTA FE Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed legislation Wednesday that would double the amount of money invested in a state program that helps small businesses and startups in New Mexico. The measure, Senate Bill 10, is expected to provide an extra $50 million for the states nonprofit Small Business Investment Corp. This program works, which is why we committed to doubling it, Lujan Grisham told a news conference at the Capitol. This is good for New Mexico. Its good for business. The legislation calls for 2 percent of the states Severance Tax Permanent Fund rather than 1 percent to be invested in the program, which provides loans and other help to local businesses that otherwise have trouble securing financing. The Severance Tax Permanent Fund receives revenue from oil and gas taxes. It was created in 1973 as a way to help the state save and invest severance taxes that arent used to finance capital projects, according to the State Investment Council. A small share of the money also is dedicated to helping local businesses through the Small Business Investment Corp. The legislation won approval in the Senate 36-0 last month and passed the House 39-19 on Saturday. Staff for the State Investment Council told legislative analysts that the small-business investments are unlikely to produce market-rate returns. That means they produce less money than if they had been invested otherwise. But supporters said its worth it to promote job creation and help launch new businesses, especially for New Mexicans who cant get a business loan through a bank. Clearly, its going to set the stage for economic development across New Mexico, said Sen. Carlos Cisneros, a Questa Democrat and co-sponsor of the bill. Its needed that extra 1 percent is going to take us a long way. You never think it would happen to you and one of your horses until one day you wake up to a phone call in the middle of the night, recounts Sarah Scott, member of the horse racing community for over 20 years, and owner of Fork. Since the First Line barn fire in December, Scott has not only been busy with her horses recovery, but also spreading awareness of fire prevention programs. Sarah works at System Equine in Rockwood, Ont. as an account manager specializing in equine rehabilitation. System Equine will be hosting a Barn Fire Prevention and action plan evening on March 19 at 6 p.m. Special guest speakers will include TJ Snow of the Milton Fire Department, Riley McGilloway of Halton Hills Fire Department, and Dr. Liz Shiland DVM (one of several vets who assisted at the First Line fire). Scott will also be sharing her experience as a horse owner. Multiple topics will be discussed during the March 19 event, including barn fire prevention, what to do in case of fire with horses and/or animals, and fire safety and caring for horses after they have been exposed to smoke inhalation and fire trauma. Barn owners need to be ever vigilant with barn fire prevention, never get complacent, and always prepare themselves for emergencies. Additionally, Equine Guelph will be offering a new Fire & Emergency Preparedness online short course on TheHorsePortal.ca from April 8 15. Sarahs Story We celebrated our staff Christmas party at Mohawk on December 20, having a great time filling the night with Christmas cheer. I arrived home, around 12:30 a.m. and settled into bed shortly after 1 a.m. I was awoken by my husband to the words the barn is on fire and there is nothing we can do. I was instantly numb. I felt almost robotic as I grabbed some clothes, and drove to what was our horses home, now landmarked by police cars directing fire trucks. The car did not even come to a complete stop before I jumped out. When I arrived no one knew where my own horse was, but we knew he was out. It was dark, raining and the most unsettling of sights, with red and blue flashing lights intermingling with the mist. I was told it took two firefighters and one of the second trainers to move my horse, Fork, from his stall with singed facial and mane hair from the inferno. He escaped and was taken to another barn on the property and placed in an empty stall. Emergency Response Scott quickly joined the growing team of firefighters, owners and veterinarians triaging the scene. They were fortunate to have a number of containment areas with other barns close by, a pool area that held three horses, and paddocks to hold the horses after they were removed from Barn 7. Other factors that aided the rescue were rain, wind blowing away from the barn, and educated/experienced horsepeople on scene that did not pull open the doors until fire and rescue arrived. Each horse was evaluated and treated by the attending veterinarians before they were given the green light to go to Mohawk. When the horses arrived at Mohawk (for temporary stabling) they were all bathed and once again looked over for burns or distress. Black soot was embedded in the horses hair, leading to the conclusion the lungs must also be compromised. Fears of smoke inhalation damage were confirmed with the first scope. The owners were worried if their horses would be OK, racked with questions if they were suffering, and if they would ever race again. It was a quick-paced day with lots of decisions. Scotts expertise served her well. She had previously worked with clients, vets and owners whose horses were affected by the encroaching wildfires in BC and Alberta. She had supplied them with nebulizers from System Equine that were donated by Nortev Flexineb and had assisted the equine practitioners in developing treatment cycles. Scott had never imagined that she would be implementing a similar treatment plan for her own horse who had won his race just a few short weeks before. Since the first line fire in December, Sarah Scott has not only been busy with Forks recovery, but also spreading awareness of fire prevention programs (Photo courtesy Carey Lecain) The team worked diligently with the vets following up on the temperatures, discharge, vitals and overall observation. Scott is very grateful to everyone involved with the rescue and rehabilitation, including her employers at System Equine and Nortev for supplying the nebulizers aiding in the recovery of many of the horses. Scotts prayers have been answered, as subsequent testing and scoping showed no signs of soot and no residual inflammation in the lungs. Sarah is also very grateful to her husband, Mark, who was so supportive, as he worked tirelessly caring for both of them. He truly is the reason Fork has returned to the racetrack, Sarah has said. Fork is in the clear and has now raced twice since the fire. Final Thoughts Sarah will forever be a fire prevention crusader and advocate of having a plan. No matter how busy life gets, she will never turn her phone off at night. Much reflection takes place after an incident, from the simple things like having emergency numbers in your phone to having the fire department out to do a pre-plan. Having halters, leads, pens and paper quickly accessible, clear barn aisles, feed tubs positioned so they are not in the way of exiting a stall are some of the little details that can make a big difference in an emergency. Looking back on the chaos, there is much gratitude for the community who rallied together. Thanks and huge acknowledgements must be given to the first responders, the community who all sprung from their beds in the dead of the night and for everyone who came together to support the rescue. Sarah hopes sharing her story will move people to take preventative measures and looks forward to seeing large attendance both at the Fire & Emergency Preparedness online short course on TheHorsePortal.ca from April 8 15 and at System Equines Barn Fire Prevention and action plan evening on March 19 at 6 p.m., which will also be available via live feed. (Equine Guelph) Copyright 2019 Albuquerque Journal A bid to build a residential subdivision above the Oxbow wetlands on Albuquerques West Side has opponents lining up to decry the potential impact on everything from public enjoyment to the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse. It now also has sparked a feisty exchange between the developer and Mayor Tim Kellers administration. Keller recently invited the landowner to discuss trading the parcel at the end of Namaste Road NW to the citys Open Space Division in exchange for other publicly owned land to ensure its preservation. He wrote that the site known to many as the Poole property has significant natural and cultural resource values. But the developers sharply written response suggested that the mayors attempted intervention was misplaced, inappropriate, cowardly and undermined the citys development rules and planning staff recommendations. The administration calls those allegations absurd and characterized parts of the letter as disrespectful. Gamma Developments proposal includes building 76 single-family homes on 23 acres on a bluff above the Rio Grande. The land previously owned by the late philanthropist and environmentalist Suzanne Poole was sold to the Daniels family. Keller wrote Kevin Daniels on Feb. 28, proposing he meet with the city on possible preservation options. Its my understanding that as the owner of this private property, it is your choice what to do with the land, Keller wrote. It is my hope, as mayor of this great city, that these values can be protected for the benefit of the public, while respecting the private property rights of the owners. But Gammas Brian McCarthy wrote Keller back on March 5 saying the land is not for sale. Gamma is presently under contract to buy it from the Daniels family, which had never previously fielded inquiries from the city or any other organization looking to buy or trade for the land, according to McCarthys letter. McCarthy also co-owns Abrazo Homes. He told Keller that Gamma already has invested more than $300,000 in the project a project the citys own planning department has determined meets the standards in the Integrated Development Ordinance passed by City Council in 2017. Albuquerque planning staff has recommended that the Environmental Planning Commission approve the Overlook at Oxbow site plan with conditions when it hears the case today. Pandering to the opponents and brokering an acquisition or exchange of this site would do nothing more than fuel the NIMBY-ism that the IDO sought to impartially regulate and control, McCarthy wrote. He said the mayors letter may constitute an attempt to take the property without due process and at least show a contempt of the process outlined in city policy. McCarthy declined to comment until after the EPC hearing. The city disputes McCarthys contentions. City attorney Esteban Aguilar Jr. wrote McCarthys attorney on Monday, denying that Kellers original letter interfered with the administrative development process or undermined city ordinance or city staffers performance. Nothing in the IDO or any other law prohibits open discussion about the possibilities for public-private collaboration, which was all that the mayors letter was, Aguilars letter said. He wrote that Kellers invitation to discuss possible preservation aligns with the IDOs purposes, which include a connected system of open spaces that promote outdoor activity and to encourage conservation and efficient use of water and other natural resources. But given the developers lack of interest in speaking with the mayor, Aguilar wrote, the city considers the offer of a conversation to be closed. Aguilar also wrote that his letter graciously disregards the disrespectful and problematic content of Mr. McCarthys missive because that rhetoric should not be dignified with a response. Neighbors, environmental groups and other citizens have raised objections to the project, including Susan Chaudoir, a West Side resident and post-doctoral researcher helping lead an effort to preserve the site. She said the plan to replace the Poole propertys two existing residences with 76 single-family homes doesnt live up to the specialness of that space, noting that the property sits above the wetlands, next to the citys Oxbow Major Public Open Space and across the river from the Rio Grande Nature Center State Park. I think it goes beyond private ownership and people claiming a private owner has a right to do what he wants, Chaudoir said. This isnt simplistic; this is major and youre going beyond the private and into commercial. Once you turn it over to a commercial developer, I think thats a very different scenario, and I think that there is an obligation we have socially to each other regarding signature spaces. She is among those whose comments are included in the planning departments most recent 139-page report to the EPC. Opponents have inundated the citys planning department. In a Dec. 10, 2018, letter to the EPC, the Rio Grande Chapter of the Sierra Club raised concerns about birds and wildlife in the Oxbow wetlands since the development did not appear to have an adequate setback to avoid disturbing them. The Oxbow is now one of the few remaining wetlands in the middle valley, and its preservation and protection is thus critical, the group said. About 55 individuals and organizations wrote dissenting letters one that included a 32-name petition before a scheduled EPC hearing last December. Another 131 people sent a form letter objecting to the project, according to a city report. Many of the letters express opposition, but do not explain how the submittal does not address or meet applicable IDO regulations, the report said. The department has continued to receive negative feedback since then, and no comments in support, the report says. GLENN COUNTY, Calif. - The Glenn County Sheriff's Office is investigating a burglary that occurred over the weekend at Sierra Nevada Cheese Company, near Willows. Deputies spoke with the manager of the company, Travis Johnson, who said that a man broke into several offices and a warehouse between the hours of 9:20 p.m. Sunday night and 3 a.m. Monday morning. Several items and a vehicle belonging to the company were stolen. Deputies say that the vehicle stolen was a 2007 Brown Honda Civic with license plate number 6PWS128. Johnson estimated that the loss totaled $3,631.51. Anyone with information is asked to call the Glenn County Sheriff's Office at (530) 934-6431. WHISKEYTOWN Calif. - The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment issued the warning for eating fish because of high mercury levels in fish. The California Environmental Protection Agencys Office of environmental health and hazard assessment has found high levels of mercury in fish caught in the lake. Here is a chart put out by the agency on how much of each species of fish is safe to eat. Children ages 1-17 and women ages 18-49 can safely eat up to seven servings/week of Brook Trout from Whiskeytown Lake but should not eat any Sacramento Pikeminnow from the Lake. #OEHHAFishAdvisory pic.twitter.com/Y05Kx1zEuE OEHHA (@OEHHA) March 12, 2019 Brook Trout, Sunfish, Sacramento Sucker, and Sacramento Pikeminnow are all species affected. Children and women 18 to 49 are especially at danger when eating these fish. Representatives say by following their guidelines you can safely eat fish with low in chemical contaminants. They say that high levels of mercury can be caused from natural sources, mining, and air fallout or from burning coal and other fuels. Action News Now is working to learn what this contamination could be caused by. You can find the full press release below. Gov. Newsom to sign executive order banning death penalty in California Governor Gavin Newsom will sign an executive order temporarily banning the death penalty in California. He plans to deliver a speech Wednesday to explain his decision. This impacts more than 700 death row inmates in the state. PG&E faces no criminal charges in 2017 wine country fires PG&E will face no criminal charges for the 2017 wine country wildfires, but the utility is still on federal criminal probation for its possible involvement with the Camp Fire. The utility is also facing civil claims. Fish-eating advisory issued for Whiskeytown Lake State health officials have issued a new fish-eating advisory for Whiskeytown Lake due to high levels of mercury. Officials say that people should not eat Sacramento Pike-Minnow, while Brooke Trout is considered the safest to eat. Search underway for missing Covelo woman, believed abducted The Mendocino County Sheriff's Office is searching for Khadijah Britton believed to have been abducted by Negie Fallis on Feb. 9. Fallis has since been arrested. Deputies drained a pond belonging to the Round Valley Indian Tribes in Covelo Tuesday where Britton was last seen but they have not seen a sign of her there. Search continues for marine missing in Sierra Nevada Mountains The search continues Wednesday morning for a missing Camp Pendleton marine in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Inyo County avalanche experts spent the day near Kearsage Pass assessing the risks of avalanches during the search for 1st Lt. Matthew Kraft. Officials say they have already noticed several avalanches in the area. CAL FIRE starts county-wide defensible space inspections Butte County CAL FIRE is starting defensible space inspections county-wide. Inspectors may come by the homes of people living in the area for inspection and give safety advice. Paradise Irrigation Water District outlines water safety plan The Paradise Irrigation Water District outlined a plan to make water safe to drink again for Camp Fire survivors. The district says it is not the water that is unclean, but the distribution method. The district will provide tanks to homes and bring in water from treatment plants. With the dates for the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections being declared, campaigning by all political parties has gathered momentum. These elections are crucial for the ruling BJP Government as it looks for another term with Narendra Modi in the lead; on the other hand, the opposition parties are looking to oust the BJP from the Centre and are busy forming strategic alliances and communication. Amid the poll battles, Adgully seeks to understand whats different about the 2019 elections compared to the earlier General Elections specifically in terms of campaigns, use of mediums to increase reach, projected spends. Naresh Gupta, Managing Partner & Chief Strategy Officer, Bang in the Middle, and N Chandramouli, CEO, TRA Research, dissect the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections, the role of digital and social media, spends by political parties, transparency issues ad much more. 2019 General Elections Vs earlier polls Naresh Gupta believes that this would be the most expensive election campaign ever. He noted how India has been in election mode for almost two years and now with the announcement of the poll dates, political parties will be seen battling for eyeballs like never before. I do suspect that rules of reach and frequency will be rewritten in these elections. This is not just from the media perspective, but even from the creative perspective we will see a very different focus. The battle of personalities will be very sharp these elections, he noted. N Chandramouli remarked that the 2019 elections will be fought with an increase in the online surpassing the offline. With more than million internet users in India, political parties both big and small are looking at active engagements across social media platforms to be able to reach out to a larger audience. Digitisation is taking over a large part of the marketing spends and is an important factor while planning campaigns. Having said that, social media has its own pros and cons. It gives people a voice to share their opinion, but on the other hand, it can also be a major cause of falsehood. Though Twitter and Facebook are working towards addressing these issues, this could lead to the introduction of censorship, he opined. Sharpening the digital focus Both Gupta and Chandramouli felt that digital will be the big part of the election campaigns and will have greater spend allocation, and social media platforms will play a crucial role. According to Chandramouli, We see a lot of manipulative and fake content around social media platforms which directly or indirectly tries to set propaganda in the mindsets of the users. In order to combat the menace of false news, Facebook and Twitter have taken steps forward in the right direction. By bringing more scrutiny into election advertising, one can expect lesser propaganda, but unscrupulous campaigners and interests have a way of finding new ways of influencing a voting pattern. Gupta pointed out that in the last 5 years, the whole digital medium has transformed. The cost of data has fallen, more people own smartphones, more people are on social media, the targeting on digital has changed completely, thus changing the whole communication landscape. He expects the political parties to not only focus more on digital, but also focus more on new tech innovations. Impact of strict monitoring on political spends on digital Gupta felt that digital needs monitoring more from content perspective than from advertising perspective. The platforms also monitor the ads more aggressively than they monitor content. With messaging platforms coming into play, content has become the new way to drive perception and this is where all the old rules of communication have been thrown out of the window. There is monitoring, but this will need far more active monitoring as the election starts, he added. While maintaining that the entire digital advertisement ecosystem needs a desperate overhaul, Chandramouli remarked that digital advertising is currently as wild as it gets in the Wild West. He added, Many of these monopolistic digital platforms hold so much information about users that it is scary. Hopefully, forced by actions of brands and users, Facebook and other digital players will make digital advertisement more transparent and permission-based, which will surely make a positive mark. Having said that, all social media platforms have strong revenue streams in advertising and promoted content, and this self-regulation is antithetical to their revenue aspirations, and so I dont think social media companies will regulate themselves too strictly. Online Vs offline poll battles Chandramouli noted that for the 2019 election parties have focusing more on online media, along with hoardings and placing ads in newspapers for their poll campaigns. So, more people now share the updates uploaded by the parties or media along with their own opinions and predictions, he observed. Meanwhile, Gupta said that political parties make no distinction between offline and online, because for them every vote matters and they want to reach out to voters across media platforms. Just because we see a greater spends on digital, it doesnt mean that we are seeing a reduced focus on offline. The spends in both mediums have gone up and will go up further as the campaign progresses, he concluded. Moglix, a Ratan Tata-backed company and Indias leading B2B industrial goods e-marketplace, today announced an expansion in its marquee investor base with a personal investment from Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO of Flipkart. The investment, which is Mr. Krishnamurthys first individual backing of a company in the B2B e-commerce space, follows a Series C funding round that raised USD23 million for Moglix in December. Indias B2B e-commerce market is expected to expand significantly over the coming decade, making it a major growth area for the economy. Research suggests it will likely assume a size that will be double the estimated USD 200 billion market of B2C e-commerce by 2026. Technological disruptions however remain key with a vast majority of the existing B2B market still in the unorganized space in India. With a robust team comprising of over 450+ people, Moglix currently operates across 12 centres in India and caters to both institutional customers (B2B) and individual customers (B2C) in the manufacturing sector. It currently focuses on the automotive, metals, mining, and fast-moving consumer durables (FMCD) markets. Moglixs existing investors include Accel Partners, Jungle Ventures, Venture Highway and International Finance Corporation (IFC), part of the World Bank Group, Shailesh Rao and InnoVen Capital. They participated in companys Series C funding round, raising USD 23 million to support Moglix in strengthening its B2B distribution network and supply chain across India and expanding into new market segments. Welcoming the investment from Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Rahul Garg, Founder & CEO, Moglix said, Its great to have Kalyan back us as an investor and join an illustrious list of global investors who have believed in Moglixs potential. Kalyan has played an important role in shaping e-commerce in India and his experience in scaling businesses will serve as a guiding light for us as we execute on our vision to transform B2B commerce and the Indian manufacturing sector using technology and innovation. Mr. Krishnamurthy is currently the Chief Executive Officer of Flipkart and also holds overall responsibility for leading fashion portals Myntra and Jabong. In prior roles, he served as the Managing Director at Tiger Global Management LLC and as Director, Financial Planning & Analysis at eBay South-Asia. I am happy to join the Moglix team as an investor in my personal capacity. Moglix, under Rahuls leadership, has charted impressive growth in the B2B commerce space and is creating meaningful impact on the manufacturing industry through innovative use of technology. It is gratifying to be able to support this home-grown industrial B2B leader at this important juncture, said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO, Flipkart. Moglix was recently recognised as the fastest growing company in APAC (ex-China) by Deloittes Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific Program. Its Board of Advisors has manufacturing and technology experts including Tata Group Chairman Emeritus Ratan Tata, Jeff Epstein, former CFO of Oracle, Vikrampati Singhania, Director, JK Group, Jim Baum, former President and CEO, Netezza and Shailesh Rao, Ex-VP Twitter and Google. Meghan Mahowald, known professionally as MEGG, said she hopes to make the event an annual tradition, with proceeds going to a different local foundation every year. From January 26, 1999 through June 28, 1999, CHILD visited the Pediatric Center, in Catonsville, Maryland, for well-child examinations and minor complaints, including fever and eczema. Pet. Ex. 31 at 5-10, 19. During this time period, she received the following pediatric vaccinations, without incident: FACTS CHILD (CHILD) was born on December --, 1998, and weighed eight pounds, ten ounces. Petitioners Exhibit (Pet. Ex.) 54 at 13. The pregnancy was complicated by gestational diabetes. Id. at 13. CHILD received her first Hepatitis B immunization on December 27, 1998. Pet. Ex. 31 at 2. RESPONDENTS RULE 4(c) REPORT In accordance with RCFC, Appendix B, Vaccine Rule 4(c), the Secretary of Health and Human Services submits the following response to the petition for compensation filed in this case. At seven months of age, CHILD was diagnosed with bilateral otitis media. Pet. Ex. 31 at 20. In the subsequent months between July 1999 and January 2000, she had frequent bouts of otitis media, which doctors treated with multiple antibiotics. Pet. Ex. 2 at 4. On December 3,1999, CHILD was seen by Karl Diehn, M.D., at Ear, Nose, and Throat Associates of the Greater Baltimore Medical Center (ENT Associates). Pet. Ex. 31 at 44. Dr. Diehn recommend that CHILD receive PE tubes for her recurrent otitis media and serious otitis. Id. CHILD received PE tubes in January 2000. Pet. Ex. 24 at 7. Due to CHILDs otitis media, her mother did not allow CHILD to receive the standard 12 and 15 month childhood immunizations. Pet. Ex. 2 at 4. According to the medical records, CHILD consistently met her developmental milestones during the first eighteen months of her life. The record of an October 5, 1999 visit to the Pediatric Center notes that CHILD was mimicking sounds, crawling, and sitting. Pet. Ex. 31 at 9. The record of her 12-month pediatric examination notes that she was using the words Mom and Dad, pulling herself up, and cruising. Id. at 10. At a July 19, 2000 pediatric visit, the pediatrician observed that CHILD spoke well and was alert and active. Pet. Ex. 31 at 11. CHILDs mother reported that CHILD had regular bowel movements and slept through the night. Id. At the July 19, 2000 examination, CHILD received five vaccinations DTaP, Hib, MMR, Varivax, and IPV. Id. at 2, 11. According to her mothers affidavit, CHILD developed a fever of 102.3 degrees two days after her immunizations and was lethargic, irritable, and cried for long periods of time. Pet. Ex. 2 at 6. She exhibited intermittent, high-pitched screaming and a decreased response to stimuli. Id. MOM spoke with the pediatrician, who told her that CHILD was having a normal reaction to her immunizations. Id. According to CHILDs mother, this behavior continued over the next ten days, and CHILD also began to arch her back when she cried. Id. On July 31, 2000, CHILD presented to the Pediatric Center with a 101-102 degree temperature, a diminished appetite, and small red dots on her chest. Pet. Ex. 31 at 28. The nurse practitioner recorded that CHILD was extremely irritable and inconsolable. Id. She was diagnosed with a post-varicella vaccination rash. Id. at 29. Two months later, on September 26, 2000, CHILD returned to the Pediatric Center with a temperature of 102 degrees, diarrhea, nasal discharge, a reduced appetite, and pulling at her left ear. Id. at 29. Two days later, on September 28, 2000, CHILD was again seen at the Pediatric Center because her diarrhea continued, she was congested, and her mother reported that CHILD was crying during urination. Id. at 32. On November 1, 2000, CHILD received bilateral PE tubes. Id. at 38. On November 13, 2000, a physician at ENT Associates noted that CHILD was obviously hearing better and her audiogram was normal. Id. at 38. On November 27, 2000, CHILD was seen at the Pediatric Center with complaints of diarrhea, vomiting, diminished energy, fever, and a rash on her cheek. Id. at 33. At a follow-up visit, on December 14, 2000, the doctor noted that CHILD had a possible speech delay. Id. CHILD was evaluated at the Howard County Infants and Toddlers Program, on November 17, 2000, and November 28, 2000, due to concerns about her language development. Pet. Ex. 19 at 2, 7. The assessment team observed deficits in CHILDs communication and social development. Id. at 6. CHILDs mother reported that CHILD had become less responsive to verbal direction in the previous four months and had lost some language skills. Id. At 2. On December 21, 2000, CHILD returned to ENT Associates because of an obstruction in her right ear and fussiness. Pet. Ex. 31 at 39. Dr. Grace Matesic identified a middle ear effusion and recorded that CHILD was having some balance issues and not progressing with her speech. Id. On December 27, 2000, CHILD visited ENT Associates, where Dr. Grace Matesic observed that CHILDs left PE tube was obstructed with crust. Pet. Ex. 14 at 6. The tube was replaced on January 17, 2001. Id. Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a pediatric neurologist, evaluated CHILD at the Kennedy Krieger Childrens Hospital Neurology Clinic (Krieger Institute), on February 8, 2001. Pet. Ex. 25 at 1. Dr. Zimmerman reported that after CHILDs immunizations of July 19, 2000, an encephalopathy progressed to persistent loss of previously acquired language, eye contact, and relatedness. Id. He noted a disruption in CHILDs sleep patterns, persistent screaming and arching, the development of pica to foreign objects, and loose stools. Id. Dr. Zimmerman observed that CHILD watched the fluorescent lights repeatedly during the examination and would not make eye contact. Id. He diagnosed CHILD with regressive encephalopathy with features consistent with an autistic spectrum disorder, following normal development. Id. At 2. Dr. Zimmerman ordered genetic testing, a magnetic resonance imaging test (MRI), and an electroencephalogram (EEG). Id. Dr. Zimmerman referred CHILD to the Krieger Institutes Occupational Therapy Clinic and the Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARDS). Pet. Ex. 25 at 40. She was evaluated at the Occupational Therapy Clinic by Stacey Merenstein, OTR/L, on February 23, 2001. Id. The evaluation report summarized that CHILD had deficits in many areas of sensory processing which decrease[d] her ability to interpret sensory input and influence[d] her motor performance as a result. Id. at 45. CHILD was evaluated by Alice Kau and Kelley Duff, on May 16, 2001, at CARDS. Pet. Ex. 25 at 17. The clinicians concluded that CHILD was developmentally delayed and demonstrated features of autistic disorder. Id. at 22. CHILD returned to Dr. Zimmerman, on May 17, 2001, for a follow-up consultation. Pet. Ex. 25 at 4. An overnight EEG, performed on April 6, 2001, showed no seizure discharges. Id. at 16. An MRI, performed on March 14, 2001, was normal. Pet. Ex. 24 at 16. A G-band test revealed a normal karyotype. Pet. Ex. 25 at 16. Laboratory studies, however, strongly indicated an underlying mitochondrial disorder. Id. at 4. Dr. Zimmerman referred CHILD for a neurogenetics consultation to evaluate her abnormal metabolic test results. Pet. Ex. 25 at 8. CHILD met with Dr. Richard Kelley, a specialist in neurogenetics, on May 22, 2001, at the Krieger Institute. Id. In his assessment, Dr. Kelley affirmed that CHILDs history and lab results were consistent with an etiologically unexplained metabolic disorder that appear[ed] to be a common cause of developmental regression. Id. at 7. He continued to note that children with biochemical profiles similar to CHILDs develop normally until sometime between the first and second year of life when their metabolic pattern becomes apparent, at which time they developmentally regress. Id. Dr. Kelley described this condition as mitochondrial PPD. Id. On October 4, 2001, Dr. John Schoffner, at Horizon Molecular Medicine in Norcross, Georgia, examined CHILD to assess whether her clinical manifestations were related to a defect in cellular energetics. Pet. Ex. 16 at 26. After reviewing her history, Dr. Schoffner agreed that the previous metabolic testing was suggestive of a defect in cellular energetics. Id. Dr. Schoffner recommended a muscle biopsy, genetic testing, metabolic testing, and cell culture based testing. Id. at 36. A CSF organic acids test, on January 8, 2002, displayed an increased lactate to pyruvate ratio of 28,1 which can be seen in disorders of mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation. Id. at 22. A muscle biopsy test for oxidative phosphorylation disease revealed abnormal results for Type One and Three. Id. at 3. The most prominent findings were scattered atrophic myofibers that were mostly type one oxidative phosphorylation dependent myofibers, mild increase in lipid in selected myofibers, and occasional myofiber with reduced cytochrome c oxidase activity. Id. at 7. After reviewing these laboratory results, Dr. Schoffner diagnosed CHILD with oxidative phosphorylation disease. Id. at 3. In February 2004, a mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) point mutation analysis revealed a single nucleotide change in the 16S ribosomal RNA gene (T2387C). Id. at 11. CHILD returned to the Krieger Institute, on July 7, 2004, for a follow-up evaluation with Dr. Zimmerman. Pet. Ex. 57 at 9. He reported CHILD had done very well with treatment for a mitochondrial dysfunction. Dr. Zimmerman concluded that CHILD would continue to require services in speech, occupational, physical, and behavioral therapy. Id. On April 14, 2006, CHILD was brought by ambulance to Athens Regional Hospital and developed a tonic seizure en route. Pet. Ex. 10 at 38. An EEG showed diffuse slowing. Id. At 40. She was diagnosed with having experienced a prolonged complex partial seizure and transferred to Scottish Rite Hospital. Id. at 39, 44. She experienced no more seizures while at Scottish Rite Hospital and was discharged on the medications Trileptal and Diastal. Id. at 44. A follow-up MRI of the brain, on June 16, 2006, was normal with evidence of a left mastoiditis manifested by distortion of the air cells. Id. at 36. An EEG, performed on August 15, 2006, showed rhythmic epileptiform discharges in the right temporal region and then focal slowing during a witnessed clinical seizure. Id. At 37. CHILD continues to suffer from a seizure disorder. ANALYSIS Medical personnel at the Division of Vaccine Injury Compensation, Department of Health and Human Services (DVIC) have reviewed the facts of this case, as presented by the petition, medical records, and affidavits. After a thorough review, DVIC has concluded that compensation is appropriate in this case. In sum, DVIC has concluded that the facts of this case meet the statutory criteria for demonstrating that the vaccinations CHILD received on July 19, 2000, significantly aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder, which predisposed her to deficits in cellular energy metabolism, and manifested as a regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder. Therefore, respondent recommends that compensation be awarded to petitioners in accordance with 42 U.S.C. 300aa-11(c)(1)(C)(ii). DVIC has concluded that CHILDs complex partial seizure disorder, with an onset of almost six years after her July 19, 2000 vaccinations, is not related to a vaccine-injury. Respectfully submitted, PETER D. KEISLER Assistant Attorney General TIMOTHY P. GARREN Director Torts Branch, Civil Division MARK W. ROGERS Deputy Director Torts Branch, Civil Division VINCENT J. MATANOSKI Assistant Director Torts Branch, Civil Division s/ Linda S. Renzi by s/ Lynn E. Ricciardella LINDA S. RENZI Senior Trial Counsel Torts Branch, Civil Division U.S. Department of Justice P.O. Box 146 Benjamin Franklin Station Washington, D.C. 20044 (202) 616-4133 DATE: November 9, 2007 Although outbreaks of measles among vaccinated populations have been reported worldwide ( 4 7 ), most outbreaks in Israel have occurred in unvaccinated or partially vaccinated populations ( 8 , 9 ). Measles transmission from a vaccinated person with documented secondary vaccine failure also has been described in New York City in 2011, including among vaccinated health care providers ( 4 ), and in the Marshall Islands ( 10 ). Waning of vaccine-induced immunity is a phenomenon that needs to be addressed. This measles outbreak occurred in an adult population with high 2-dose measles vaccination coverage. The primary patient had documentation of receipt of 3 doses of measles-containing vaccine, one each at ages 1, 2, and 6 years, per the vaccination schedule in Ukraine. Although it is possible that the vaccination record contained an error, the high IgG avidity suggests secondary vaccine failure ( 2 ). All patients except one had high measles IgG avidity, which is an indicator of previous vaccination or previous infection. Because all the serum specimens (except that from the primary patient) were collected 23 days after the onset of symptoms, the high avidity IgG was assumed to be a result of patients previous vaccination. As we see the frenzy of measles blame on the anti-vaxxers, we need to explore some scientific research that shows a different scenario: Immunization is also making once-rare or nonexistent genetic variants of pathogens more prevalent, presumably because vaccine-primed antibodies cant as easily recognize and attack shape-shifters that look different from vaccine strains. And vaccines being developed against some of the worlds wilier pathogens malaria, HIV, anthrax are based on strategies that could, according to evolutionary models and lab experiments, encourage pathogens to become even more dangerous . You will not hear this on the news but those who have been vaccinated, can get measles and also transmit it to others. Bacteria and viruses are smart. They have evolved for thousands of years and vaccination is not going to stop them from adapting and replicating . An outbreak of measles occurred in a high school with a documented vaccination level of 98 per cent. Nineteen (70 per cent) of the cases were students who had histories of measles vaccination at 12 months of age or older and are therefore considered vaccine failures. Measles Outbreak Among Previously Immunized Healthcare Workers, the Netherlands, 2014 We investigated a measles outbreak among healthcare workers (HCWs) by assessing laboratory characteristics, measles vaccine effectiveness, and serological correlates for protection.....Eight HCWs were notified as measles cases; 6 were vaccinated with measles vaccine twice, 1 was vaccinated once, and 1 was unvaccinated. All 6 twice-vaccinated cases had high avidity and PRN titers....Among 106 potentially exposed HCWs, the estimated effectiveness of 2 doses of measles vaccine was 52% Measles outbreak in adults: A changing epidemiological pattern An epidemiological investigation was carried out for outbreak of measles in a young adult population of college students from Pune. It is reported that, with increase in overall coverage of vaccination, there is a rise in incidence of measles in vaccinated individuals. The age profile also shifts to higher age groups. Investigation of such outbreaks provides an opportunity to identify high-risk groups, changes in measles epidemiology and weaknesses in the routine immunization programs. Outbreak of Measles Among Persons With Prior Evidence of Immunity, NewYorkCity,2011 This is the first report of measles transmission from a twice-vaccinated individual with documented secondary vaccine failure. The clinical presentation and laboratory data of the index patient were typical of measles in a naive individual. ********************************************* There is much evidence that vaccination and not exemptions, or unvaccinated people, are a more accurate reason that measles cases are growing. Adaptation and evolution are scientific mechanisms that vaccination produces and provide a new niche(s) for viruses and bacteria to emerge. The reality is that vaccination has unintended consequences: Here that mechanism is explained: Pathogen evolution in a vaccinated world Presumably a vaccine is used because it protects the host against death. This means the fitness cost of virulencethe force selecting against virulenceis relaxed by vaccination. Since there are still fitness benefits of virulence, more aggressive strains will spread in vaccinated populations because they are now less likely to kill the host. Even if vaccination reduces pathogen titers and transmission rates, virulent strains will still produce more transmission stages than less virulent strains. In fact, in an immunized host, they may produce disproportionately more transmission stages if immunity is more effective against less aggressive strains. Consequently, vaccinated individuals create the conditions that favor the spread of intrinsically more virulent parasites The MMR vaccine is a triple-virus vaccine. It is a live-attenuated vaccine and this concluding paragraph shows how it can cause both undesirable effects on an individual and also on society: The double-edged sword: How evolution can make or break a live-attenuated virus vaccine However many live-attenuated vaccines exhibit reversion to virulence through back-mutation of attenuating mutations, compensatory mutations elsewhere in the genome, recombination or reassortment, or changes in quasispecies diversity. Additionally the combination of multiple live-attenuated strains may result in competition or facilitation between individual vaccine viruses, resulting in undesirable increases in virulence or decreases in immunogenicity. Genetic engineering informed by evolutionary thinking has led to a number of novel approaches to generate live-attenuated virus vaccines that contain substantial safeguards against reversion to virulence and that ameliorate interference among multiple vaccine strains. Finally, vaccines have the potential to shape the evolution of their wild type counterparts in counter-productive ways; at the extreme vaccine-driven eradication of a virus may create an empty niche that promotes the emergence of new viral pathogens....This review can also be used to emphasize the danger of ignoring evolution when deploying live-attenuated vaccine viruses, as, without due safeguards, evolution may reshape the virulence or transmissibility of these agents. https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Ilhan-Omar-the-Benjamins-and-Purim-Today.html The Purim storys warning of enemies who seek our destruction assumes such powerful relevance today. George Eliot is credited with saying, History repeats itself. Mark Twain sharply improved on it with his observation that history doesnt repeat itself but it does rhyme. No matter how much things may change, one constant always remains: the Hamans of the world, the Jew haters who seek to destroy, to murder and to bring to an end all Jews, from young to old, are somehow forever with us. It was foretold in the Torah. In the first battle against Amalek, prototype of the anti-Semite throughout the ages, we are informed that although the Jews won the fight, Joshua only weakened our enemy. Amalek survived. He continues to plague us in many disguises masks which have become part of Purim ritual to remind us that people often conceal their true intentions under the guise of noble goals even as they plot the genocide of our people. What happened in Shushan is the story of our people throughout the ages. It isnt just ancient Persia, the persecutions and the pogroms of the Middle Ages or even the Holocaust of the 20 th century. Tragically it is the story once again of our own times. Not only Persia/Iran but sophisticated France, cultured England, educated Europe and the rest of the civilized world are again proving the truth of Elie Wiesels insight that the only thing we have learned from history is that we do not learn anything from history. As we recall the Purim story once again, its warning of enemies who seek our destruction assumes such powerful relevance even here in the United States today. Let me remind you a little bit about the Jews in Persia of old. When King Achashverosh celebrated his ascent to the throne he threw a huge party to which all were invited. Jews were welcome guests. The drinking was in accord with peoples different faiths. In retrospect, a bill decrying hatred against any and all minority groups would almost certainly have passed in the Persian Congress. Yet it only took a short while for Haman to turn his strategy of genocide into national policy. What was the key to Hamans success? His speech is recorded in the Megillah: And Haman said to King Ahasuerus, "There is a certain people scattered and separate among the peoples throughout all the provinces of your kingdom, and their laws differ from [those of] every people, and they do not keep the king's laws; it is [therefore] of no use for the king to let them be (Book of Esther 3:8). The Jews have dual loyalty! That is their crime. Ilhan Omar didnt invent the brilliant lie. Its always been Amaleks secret weapon. Hitler knew it. Stalin knew it. Read the Torah on the way in which Pharaoh was able to turn the Egyptians against the Hebrews the same Egyptians who had been saved by the wisdom of Joseph and you will find the similar strategy: He said to his people, Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more numerous and stronger than we are. Get ready, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they increase, and a war befall us, and they join our enemies and wage war against us and depart from the land (Exodus 2:9 10). Winston Churchill famously said, A lie gets halfway around the world before truth puts on its boots. The lie of Jewish dual loyalty is perpetuated by the Hamans of history even as Jews wherever they reside prove the truth of the promise given by God to Abraham that I will bless those who bless you. Purim, happily, is not merely the story of anti-Semitism; it is the biblical record of a major victory over a nefarious anti-Semite. And perhaps the most ironic part of the story is a truth made famous these past few weeks by a contemporary Jew hater. Ilhan Omar is right; Its all about the Benjamins. For Omar the Benjamins a reference to American hundred- dollar bills was her despicable insinuation that Jews, as the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion long ago put it, control the world behind the scenes with their money. For the Book of Esther, the Benjamin was revealing to us at the outset that Mordechai was Ish Yemini, from the tribe of Benjamin. And why was that so significant? The rabbis explain that was the reason Mordechai was able to counter Hamans libel and to demonstrate to us throughout the ages how best to overcome our enemies. While others bowed down to Haman, Mordechai refused. It was a trait he inherited genetically. The rabbis tell us that when Jacob met with his brother Esau he bowed down to him. According to some commentaries, it was a sin for which he would be held accountable. And 11 of Jacobs sons bowed down as well. Only Benjamin, who was not yet born, did not bow. And so Mordechai, a direct descendent of Benjamin, maintained the tradition of his ancestor. Aware of the threat to their survival, Jews need to put aside their differences and unite in the face of a common enemy. The man who would not bow down to an enemy in humble submission is the one who encouraged Esther to similarly stand proudly and firmly, without embarrassment or fear, and speak up on behalf of our people. Who knows, he told her, if not for a time such as this have you been placed in this position of rulership. Mordechai and Esther are the heroes of the Purim story because they refused to cower before those who sought to destroy our people. They spoke out against their Haman with all of their strength. Its all about the Benjamins and those who refuse to remain silent when enemies again plot the final solution for Israel and for our people. Maybe it isnt a coincidence that all this is happening at the very time Jews around the world are celebrating Purim. History records not only the recurring story of anti-Semites and anti-Semitism. It also confirms the Divine intervention that has invariably assured our survival. And this miracle in the one biblical book in which Gods name isnt mentioned even once is a miracle we desperately need today: The miracle of Jews, aware of the threat to their survival, who put aside their differences, united in the face of a common enemy, and collectively recognize that it mustve been for a time such as this that we are given the opportunity to partner with God. The Donald Trump administration is asking Congress for a $2 billion cut in the US-led fight against the Islamic State as the Pentagon looks toward the exits in the five-year campaign. The funds will ensure an enduring defeat of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [IS, also known ISIS] and allow flexibility for a deliberate, coordinated, disciplined withdrawal from Syria, the Pentagon said in budget documents released today. The request would pare back the US effort to train Iraqs fledgling security forces and US-backed forces in Syria by $400 million to just over $1 billion, down nearly 30% from last year. It also calls for spending $250 million to help partner countries tighten up their borders to handle the lingering threat of IS. Interestingly, this years budget is based on a higher troop number for the US-led campaign against IS: 7,200 versus 5,765 last year. The Pentagon has recently estimated it has 2,200 troops in Syria and 5,200 troops in Iraq, but it does not release regular updates, citing operational security requirements. Its not clear whether the larger figure in this years budget is an effort to bring more help to the region to assist with the US withdrawal from Syria by the end of April, or if it represents a change in the Defense Department's accounting practices. US Central Command did not respond to a request for comment by publication time. The budget decisions come as the Pentagon has surged money into the Overseas Contingency Operations fund, the post-Sept. 11 war-fighting fund. Even as the IS fight has wound down, the contingency operations funding has not declined at the same rate as the in-country troop strength, the Pentagon says, as the Defense Department has kept much of the infrastructure to support US troops in the Middle East in place. Overall, the request for the contingency budget is down less than $1 billion from last year, to $66.7 billion for the fights in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria as well as US efforts to deter Russia in Europe. The money for Middle East and European war fighting is more than the entire budget request for the State Department and the US Agency for International Development, which would get a 23% cut under the Trump administrations proposal. Top Pentagon officials defended the slimmer diplomatic budget, even though Jim Mattis had called for robust US diplomacy to end the wars in Syria and Yemen when he was secretary of defense. I spoke with Secretary [of State Mike] Pompeo this week, Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan told reporters at the Pentagon this morning. Hes confident that hell have the resources he needs to perform his duties. The Pentagon also concedes in its request that requests to replenish stocks of weapons such as drones and guided munitions continue apace as the United States helps Middle East militaries meet their security needs. For instance, this years budget requests more than 5,000 Hellfire missiles, more than double last years amount. Elsewhere, the Army is hoping to boost its efforts to train foreign forces in the Middle East and around the world, providing funding for six security force assistance brigades, which could be used for deployments in Africa and the Middle East. The Pentagon plans to release a detailed more budget request Monday. CAIRO Guffaws from the third floor of a large building echo along Adly Street in downtown Cairo on a cool March evening. The main hall at 9 Adly Street, a comedy club that takes its name from its address, is packed with people of all ages, sitting at tables or standing, laughing and chuckling at the familiar picture of daily life painted by the young stand-up comedian on stage. From the stage, Islam Amin laments the obligation and paradox of Egyptian grooms having to buy expensive gifts for his fiancee and her entire family, a hot topic these days in Egypt. If I buy all the gifts, then I won't have enough money for a wedding, he said. If I don't buy the gifts, there will not be a wedding. As the audience laughs or clucks in agreement, Amin leaves the stage, turning it over to a comedian who launches into an animated description of fat people using the crowded public transport system. The sets are part of 9 Adly Street's first Cairo Comedy Festival, which presents three two-hour sessions a week featuring different comedians, from Feb. 15 to March 16. More than 50 comedians have performed at the club since it opened in July 2018, including some making regular appearances. The club is typically open two hours a week and also schedules a number of open mic events so amateur performers can take the stage. The stand-up comedians Ahmed Hossam and Ahmed Abdel Fattah own and operate 9 Adly Street. Hossam, a graduate of the Faculty of Law at Ain Shams University, has been performing stand-up across the country since 2015. Renting venues for an evening ate up a lot of the money he earned, so he decided to open a club in a permanent venue. We also envisioned other stand-up comedians performing there, Hossam told Al-Monitor. While acknowledging that anything and everything can inspire a performance, Hossam said that Egyptian comedians thread carefully when it comes to sex, politics and religion. These topics are too sensitive to be tackled openly, he remarked. If we present skits on sex, for example, we will lose the audience of old people, mothers and girls. We want to attract not only young people, but people of all ages, and irrespective of their religion or political views, and reach as large an audience as we can. Hossam focuses primarily on scenes from daily life, such as the crowded buses and microbuses careening across the Egyptian capital, which more than 20 million people call home. Hossam quips from the stage, A common sight you see in the streets is bus drivers speeding along, with the doors of the bus wide open and passengers crammed standing inside and on the steps. I think they are playing some sort of game: the one who can toss the most passengers onto the street wins and gets a taxi to drive. Food is another favorite subject, especially certain fare from Egyptian cuisine, such as mish, a salty cheese fermented for several months or even years. You can prepare it at home using rotten ingredients, some old cheese and a piece of trousers you havent worn in years, he tells the audience. Studies have traced the roots of Egyptian humor to the Pharaonic era. Some of the writing deciphered on papyri and limestone include social satire, slapstick humor and riddles. Egyptians throughout the ages have been fond of ridiculing those who lead them. The Romans were absurd and mentally feeble, the Ottomans arrogant and obese, and the French pompous and ridiculous. Egyptians are also known for their political humor. One popular joke from the 2011 revolution was about how the transition of power has changed over the years: Jamal Abdel Nasser was killed by poison, Anwar Sadat by a bullet and Hosni Mubarak by Facebook. Last years presidential elections proved to be a feast for cartoonists, despite political pressure and attempts of restriction. When Egyptians start to lose their sense of humor, this represents a big crisis, Abdellatif El-Menawy, a commentator, wrote in Arab News. Most audience members at 9 Adly Street arrive ready to yuk it up. I came here to have a laugh, Reham Mohamed, a young divorced woman who lives with her parents, told Al-Monitor. Mohamed, an accountant, attends shows regularly, with friends or alone. Sitting here, where funny scenes from daily life are drawn, and grim situations are turned into light-hearted jokes, improves my mood, she said. A woman accompanying her teenage son is not so easily amused. I only like the shows that have a useful message, Mona Moustafa, a housewife, told Al-Monitor. She said a recent joke she had heard about parents teaching children not to fart in enclosed spaces had disgusted, not amused, her. She added, I am astonished that my sons laughter at this rocked the hall. A group of six middle-aged men sat together, cackling after every joke. One of them, Ihab Hosny, an engineer, told Al-Monitor that he admired the comedians' efforts at satirizing situations. Hosny, a fan of old, black-and-white television comedies, remarked that comedy has not changed all that much. The past has its veteran comedians and today has its stand-up comedy stars too, Hosny said, but the essential purpose remains the same to let people laugh and temporarily forget their problems. Barring significant delays, in two years Jerusalem will roll out a new cable car able to transport 3,000 people an hour from the new city straight to the Old Citys Holy Basin, home to the worlds holiest Jewish, Christian and Muslim sites. The government approved the 200 million Israeli shekel ($55 million) project last May, on the annual celebration of Jerusalem Day marking unification of its eastern and western parts, and plans have been submitted to national planning authorities. The planned 1.4-kilometer (0.9-mile) route will begin at the complex that once housed Jerusalems first train station, floating at a speed of 21 kph (13 mph) over the biblical Hinnom Valley and stopping at Mount Zion. From there, it will glide to the controversial, planned Kedem compound adjacent to the Old Citys Dung Gate. The cable car will initially have three stops and eventually be extended to additional sites in East Jerusalem, such as the Pool of Siloam, Mount of Olives and Gethsemane. The plan has generated criticism from many quarters. Last September, Haaretz reported that prominent architects were warning the project would be a blight on the unique skyline of the walled Old City. A month later, the newspaper published a petition signed by dozens of writers, artists and archaeologists under the slogan Jerusalem is not Disneyland. The signatories wrote that the plan would completely alter the skyline, the scenery and the character of the historic and holy space around the Old City. The cable car will be completely out of place in the Old City and seriously damage the Hinnom Valley. Left-wing organizations argue that the project is politically motivated, specifically to strengthen Israels hold on the Old City and benefit Elad, a Jewish nongovernmental organization (NGO) instrumental in many controversial Jerusalem initiatives. Elad is building an ambitious City of David Visitors Center at an archaeological site known as the Kedem compound, on the roof of which the cable car will have its final stop, for now. The City of David welcomes all initiatives designed to develop the Old City and make it more accessible to millions of visitors of all religions and backgrounds, a representative of Elad told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. Meanwhile, the initiative is drawing fire from unexpected directions. The small Jewish Karaite sect has also announced its opposition because the cable car route takes it over the communitys ancient burial grounds and risks desecrating the dead. We have a problem with cable cars flying over the ancient cemetery, Shlomo Gever, leader of the world Karaite community, told Al-Monitor. Gever is convinced that the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA), the projects main sponsor, is deliberately targeting the small group because it lacks political backing. They had plans to run the cable car over the Protestant and Catholic Sambuski Cemetery, but they decided to pick on us instead. We dont have a political lobby and we are an easy target for abuse. Gever said the fight is just beginning, adding, We plan to petition the Supreme Court and we are considering a massive demonstration if need be. On March 4, yet another obstacle emerged. The Ministry of Transportation announced that it does not recognize the cable car as a transit solution for easy access to the Old City, but rather a tourist initiative, contradicting claims by the Ministry of Tourism and the JDA. Aner Ozeri, the JDAs point man on the Holy Basin development, told Al-Monitor that the issue is a technical one. The project arose from a desire to resolve problems of accessibility and traffic congestion for both tourists and residents of the Old City. The cable car will whisk people to the Old City in 4 minutes, he said. Jerusalems Old City is a unique combination of residential areas and tourism sites, and tourists and residents alike experience congestion and access difficulties. The cable car will provide tourists, visitors and residents with an appropriate and readily available transportation infrastructure with convenient connections to Jerusalems mass transit system the light rail, quick rail at the cost of a single public transportation ticket. One of the projects leading opponents is Emek Shaveh, an NGO dedicated to the defense of cultural heritage rights and ancient sites. There is no precedent for a historic city, thousands of years old, having a cable car, archaeologist Yoni Mizrachi, the NGOs director, told Al-Monitor. This is a political project advanced by the right. The very fact that it has been defined as a national project, enabling it to bypass [most] zoning and planning authorities, raises serious questions. Arnon Segal, an activist on behalf of Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount and a resident of the Old City, is an enthusiastic proponent, arguing that he himself experiences severe transportation problems. Opponents of the plan disguise their hatred of Zionism with pseudo-professional arguments, he told Al-Monitor. The Old City must not be shut down. It must be open and accessible to all. Opponents, however, point to another downside of the plan: Tourists will glide overhead, bypassing the merchants who run a booming business along the access roads to the Holy Basin. All of my income is based on tourists, Mohammed Fatah, owner of a souvenir shop in the Old Citys Christian Quarter, told Al-Monitor. If there is a cable car, tourists will ride over us and the shops will be empty. His friend Rami, who works in a bakery, agrees. I live in the Muslim Quarter. It takes me at least half an hour to get out of the city, but I will never use the cable car. It belongs to the radical [Jewish] right. The JDA dismisses all these arguments. Regarding claims of political motivation, they insist, We are a public organization, not a political one. Our entire interest lies in advancing Jerusalem. As for the Karaite objection, they say, We visited them at our own initiative, but they severed contact and chose to talk with us through the media. That's a strange way of doing things. As for the merchants concerns, the JDA said that on the contrary, the cable car would only boost the number of tourists to the Old City and anyone who wants to experience the city by foot will not use the cable car in any case. As with every issue related to Jerusalem, this one, too, generates suspicions on all sides. The city, which sits atop a dynamite keg at the best of times, will soon have to deal with a project of an unclear nature. Will Jerusalem, which seems to be turning more violent and dangerous each year, continue to be a tourism magnet that requires a cable car? Right now, no one knows the answer. One small building in the most volatile spot in the world, the Temple Mount in Jerusalems walled Old City, threatens the stability of Jerusalem and beyond. The tense standoff between Israelis and Palestinians over the ancient, rundown building adjacent to Bab al-Rahma, the Gate of Mercy, could set off an explosion similar to the 2017 clashes that erupted after Israel placed metal detectors at the entrance to the Temple Mount, holy to both Muslims and Jews. At issue are the fragile status quo at the site, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus electoral constraints, Palestinian pride, the authority of the Jordanian-controlled Muslim Waqf that is the custodian of the site and Hamas, which has its fingers in every anti-Israel pie. The movement is taking advantage of the crisis, calling Muslims everywhere to defend with their bodies the holy mosque that the Zionists are trying to desecrate and shut down. Hamas enjoys the backing of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been seeking a foothold on the Temple Mount in recent years in defiance of Israels anger. With slightly over three weeks to go before Israels elections, on April 9, Netanyahu finds himself in a bind. On the one hand, he must signal a tough, uncompromising line on this conflict to stem any defections by Likud Party voters to other right-wing parties. On the other hand, the last thing he needs right now is a blowup on the Temple Mount. The events leading up to the latest cycle of violence escaped the attention of various Israeli security agencies including the Shin Bet, Israeli Police and even the Mossad agency responsible for providing intelligence on Jordan. As aforementioned, the building in question is located adjacent to the Temple Mount gate known as Bab al-Rahma, which can only be accessed from the Temple Mount itself. Israel shut down the gate and adjacent building in 2003 under a court order after discovering that the nonprofit organization running the site was not legally registered and was associated with Hamas. The building was locked and empty until last month. The closure order expired, a senior Israeli source dealing with the crisis told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. When the Waqf realized it, they quickly organized a tour of the site for the media and declared the building open for public prayers. Prayer rugs were spread out and prayer services began. Israel realized belatedly that the Waqf was recently expanded to include 18 rather than 11 members. They added members considered close to the Palestinian Authority [PA] at the expense of Jordans influence on the custodianship, an Israeli intelligence source told Al-Monitor, speaking on condition of anonymity. The additions to the Waqf, and reports that US President Donald Trumps deal of the century for Israeli-Palestinian peace would soon be unveiled, created a clear Palestinian interest in illustrating the volatility of the Temple Mount issue and signaling to the United States and the rest of the world that anyone who lays a hand on the Temple Mount risks a regional conflagration. The contested building served as an ideal trigger for stirring up anger and highlighting Palestinian sovereignty claims to the site. Israeli intelligence did surmise that the Palestinians would try to stir up unrest in Jerusalem and on the Temple Mount ahead of the US peace plan presentation, but no one pointed to the specific building that would set off the clash. The expansion of the Waqf passed under the radars, taking Israel by surprise. Now Netanyahu is trapped. Hard-liners are accusing him of being soft on the Palestinians and trying to contain the conflict without insisting that the building be shuttered once again. On the other hand, he does not really want to set fire to Jerusalem and possibly the entire area just weeks before the April 9 elections. Netanyahu has tasked the head of his National Security Council, former senior Shin Bet official Meir Ben-Shabbat with handling the delicate issue. Over the past two weeks, Israeli delegations have visited Jordan, perceived as the only party able to restore calm. The Jordanians have reciprocated with visits to Jerusalem. Earlier this week, the palace in Amman issued an urgent order to the Waqf to exercise restraint and de-escalate tensions, but the unrest continued. Hamas is doing its best to open a second front with Israel in East Jerusalem. Erdogans Turkey is enthusiastically adding fuel to the flames. Hamas, which received March 11 its latest cash aid installment from Qatar, via the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, is restoring calm in the Gaza Strip but needs an external front on which to keep harassing Israel without paying a price. The Temple Mount is an ideal solution. Since the PA cannot afford to be far behind Hamas in confronting Israel, it too has entered the fray and is trying hard to fan the flames. Israel is now gearing up for Friday, March 15, when tens of thousands of Muslims will converge on the Temple Mount for weekly prayers, fearing the event could spark riots. On any other day we can prevent them from breaking into the building with relative ease because there arent too many people there, a senior Israeli diplomatic source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. But on Friday, with the Temple Mount filled with tens of thousands of people, thousands of police will be required to control the situation. Right now, no one in Israel is willing to deploy thousands of Israeli police officers to face off the Friday Muslim worshippers. Netanyahu is trying to buy time. Israel went back to the Magistrates Court in Jerusalem to ask for an extension of the closure order that expired to allow it to shut down the building once again. The Shin Bet has issued an opinion justifying this move on security grounds. On March 12, the court rejected the states petition. At the same time, a compromise is in the works that would not allow the building to be turned into a mosque and leave Israel and Jordan to decide its fate together. Jordans monarchy is also in a bind. King Abdullah does not want riots on the Temple Mount, presenting him as a weak ruler. On the other hand, he cannot appear to be doing Israels bidding. Abdullah and Netanyahu are in fact in a similar bind both want calm restored, neither can afford to compromise and appear weak. Given this state of affairs, everyone is gearing up for Friday prayers. On March 12, a firebomb was thrown from the Bab al-Rahma building at the Israeli Police position on the Temple Mount, slightly injuring a policewoman. Police vacated the site and violence broke out, but did not spread beyond the compound. No one is prepared to promise that similar violence will not erupt this coming Friday when the Temple Mount is packed with Muslim worshippers and Israeli Police. Whether the upcoming government will be formed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or by Blue and White head Benny Gantz, one thing seems clear: The next Knesset will likely have a respectable representation of the Temple Mount Faithful movement, whose vision is to establish the Third Temple in Jerusalem. According to recent polls, former Knesset member Moshe Feiglins Zehut party, which means identity in Hebrew, will pass the electoral threshold and may well constitute the surprise of the elections. Feiglin promises his voters that he will act on behalf of legalizing cannabis, causing many youths to join him. If the momentum continues, Feiglin and his messianic movement may be the party that tips the scales to determine who will assemble the next government. Therefore, Feiglin is now keeping his views regarding the rebuilding of the Temple and transfer of Arabs to himself. Instead, he raises the banner for cannabis legalization at least until after the elections, of course. But in his partys election platform probably unread by Feiglins cannabis voters the political program is black and white. In the first stage, Feiglin proposes to abolish the Oslo Accords. After that, Israel could re-take control of the West Bank and extend its full sovereignty. The Feiglin plan offers non-Jewish residents of the West Bank either assistance in emigration (in other words, transfer); a status of permanent residency in the Jewish Halachic state (i.e., Israel governed by Jewish religious law); or citizenship. Citizenship will be granted only to those who wish to be loyal citizens and serve in the army. They will receive full citizenship after a "long and thorough examination track." But the highlight of this agenda is the Temple Mount: Feiglin proposes dismissing the waqf (Muslim custodian) and transferring management to the Chief Rabbinate. The Israeli police would still have a permanent presence there. In addition, a Jewish synagogue will be built on the Mount. Similarly, the Temple Mount will be opened to archaeological research without the limitations in place today. Feiglin does not use the term temple, so as to avoid scaring off potential voters, but the synagogue mentioned above is only a euphemism for his real goal: a temple on the hilltop, with everything that entails. Many in Israel, including the Arab sector, were amazed and horrified by Feiglins success in the polls. A source in the Hadash-Taal party alliance told Al-Monitor that the rise of Feiglin and his opinions on the Temple Mount are a direct consequence of the ongoing incitement against Arabs championed by Prime Minister Netanyahu. Speaking on a Likud webcast on March 11, Netanyahu said, "The Arab citizens have 22 nation states around them and they do not need another." The Hadash-Taal source noted in reaction that "no wonder that racist opinions on transferring the Arabs and taking over the Al-Aqsa Mosque are getting support." The source added that "in the next Knesset [radical right activists] Bezalel Smotrich, Moshe Feiglin and Michael Ben-Ari will compete against each other on inciting against and excluding Israeli Arabs. Obviously, the Arab parties would have to operate as a blocking bloc against that." The Arab street is also very worried. Dr. Raid Mahajna of Ar'ara told Al-Monitor that the poison infused into politics by Netanyahu and the right has infiltrated Israeli society. The public interested in legalizing cannabis is now ready to accept ideas such as the transfer and taking over of the Temple Mount. "You the Jews will ultimately be forced to pay for the shattering of Israel, my country as well, as it marches toward the abyss," he said. In the next Knesset, Feiglin will not be alone. In a controversial political stunt orchestrated by Netanyahu, three right-wing parties united, including radical right-wing Rabbi Meir Kahanes disciples from the Otzma Yehudit party. Netanyahu promised the Union of Right-Wing Parties two portfolios in his next government, and even a spot on the Judicial Selection Committee. Another well-known member of the Temple Mount Faithful group is Michael Ben-Ari, No. 5 on the Union of Right-Wing Parties list and a representative of the Otzma Yehudit party. (The Central Election Committee rejected the petitions seeking to disqualify Ben-Aris candidacy.) Ben-Ari has a doctorate in Eretz Israel studies and in archaeology and is deeply involved in the status of the Temple Mount. He established the PR Temple Mount Heritage Foundation to spread knowledge about the Temple Mount and also founded the Mikdash (Temple) Educational Center, with similar goals. On Jerusalem Day in 2018, he encouraged Jews to make the pilgrimage to the Temple Mount, saying, "This year on Jerusalem Day tens of thousands of us will come and say, The Temple Mount is in our hands. But not with words, with actions. We will immerse ourselves [ritual purification], then rise up and visit the Temple Mount in a holy state. Everyone must make an effort, each and every person must turn this proclamation into a reality." The two extremist parties, Zehut and Otzma Yehudit, will certainly work together once their representatives serve as Knesset members. They will want to realize their great plan of taking control of the Temple Mount to establish the Third Temple. Israel has recently produced an impressive documentary series, The Fall and Rise of the Jewish Underground, directed by Shai Gal. The series followed the members of the Jewish underground who tried in the early 1980s to assassinate Palestinian mayors. They also murdered three students in the West Banks Islamic University with gunfire and grenades, and planned to blow up Al-Aqsa Mosque, believing this would bring redemption. In this series, former Shin Bet head Carmi Gillon states that if the plan had not been thwarted, a nuclear war would have erupted in the Middle East. All the underground members who were imprisoned, including those given life sentences, were released within a few years. Some of them enjoy key roles in Israels establishment today and are permanent, influential visitors of the Israeli Knesset. Some examples: Zeev Hever (Zambish), a head of the Yesha Council (the umbrella organization of the settlement movement); and Natan Natanzon, a head of the Benjamin Religious Council and member of the negotiations team of the HaBayit HaYehudi party. Yehuda Etzion and Natan Natanzon, the series key interviewees, do not hide that they aspire even today to establish the Third Temple on the Temple Mount. Soon they will receive reinforcement from Otzma Yehudit and Moshe Feiglin. We can safely assume that the Zehut supporters, and evidently the more moderate supporters of HaBayit HaYehudi (which is currently part of the Union of Right-Wing Parties), will argue that blowing up Al-Aqsa Mosque is absolutely not on the table anymore and that the building of the Third Temple and expulsion of Arabs from Jerusalem and the territories is only a dream. But lets remember that no one in the 2015 elections spoke seriously about the annexation of the territories and the establishment of a binational state. For Kahanes successors, territorial annexation of the territories is now on the table. There is wall-to-wall agreement for implementing this annexation on the parts of all the right-wing parties and large swaths of the Likud as well. Who knows, perhaps the next stage is the Temple Mount! Even if they do not succeed in transforming this hallucinatory idea into reality, the very fact that people talk about the establishment of a Third Temple (on the ruins of Al-Aqsa Mosque or next to it) constitutes a religious declaration of war. In the series on the Jewish underground, Gillon sadly called the protagonists crazy and messianic and was angry that they had been turned into cultural heroes with the power to influence the decision-making process. This series was filmed before he could know that eventually, they would even become part of Israels legislative body. One does not need a developed imagination to realize how Israel will appear in the eyes of the sane citizen and the eyes of the entire world in another few months. More than eight years after the Syrian refugees began pouring into Jordan and five months after a vital land border point was reopened between the kingdom and Syria, only a few thousand of the registered 600,000 have returned to Syria. On March 5, Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi was quoted as saying that the number of Syrian refugees who have returned to Syria was no more than 13,000. He called on the international community to bear its responsibility toward Jordan as it continues to provide an honorable life to Syrian refugees despite the country's difficult economic situation. On March 7, Syrias official news agency reported that the border point between Jordan and Syria had received 14,200 Syrian refugees since it was reopened Oct. 15. Jordan is hosting more than 1 million Syrian refugees, but only half are registered with the United Nations and not all the refugees live in camps. The government has said that hosting the refugees has burdened its budget and stretched its resources. At a meeting in Amman Feb. 20, donor countries and international organizations endorsed a $2.4 billion aid package for the Jordan Response Platform for the Syrian Crisis for 2019. Of the funding requirements, $702.9 million is allocated for refugees, while $698.9 million is set to support host communities and the remaining $998.2 million is assigned for budget support, The Jordan Times reported. Prime Minister Omar Razzaz was quoted as saying that despite the tremendous impact the war in Syria had on Jordan, we have demonstrated our readiness to provide safety and dignified living conditions to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. We will continue doing so and count on your unwavering support as we redouble our efforts to strengthen our resilience. But he also noted that since conditions for the return of the Syrian refugees to Syria are not clear, the refugees do not have the desire to return anytime soon to their country. Jordan is worried by two main factors: political impasse in Syria and donor fatigue. The longer it takes for a political settlement to the Syrian crisis to materialize, the longer the Syrian refugees will remain in the kingdom. Most Syrian refugees are hesitant to return to their country for fear of retribution by regime loyalists and the fact that the eight-year civil war in Syria has destroyed hundreds of villages and towns. Simply stated, many of the refugees have nowhere to go. One former minister, who requested anonymity, told Al-Monitor that Jordan is already feeling donor fatigue with regard to aid to support the Syrian refugees. He said that Jordan had hoped to get more than $4 billion in refugee aid for 2019. With the humanitarian crisis in Yemen and elsewhere donors have many urgent priorities, he said. But he believes that the Syrian refugees have helped the Jordanian economy grow, especially by increasing public consumption. He added that the presence of international aid agencies in the kingdom has provided jobs to hundreds of Jordanians. Syrians who do not live in refugee camps pay rent, use public services and run small businesses, he said. According to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, 83% of Syrian refugees live in host communities in the kingdom compared to only 17% who live in refugee camps. In July 2018, the Ministry of Labor reported that it had issued 106,000 work permits for Syrian refugees so far, while the number of workers in the informal economy remains at an estimated 300,000. Khaled al-Zubaidi, business editor at Addustour daily, told Al-Monitor that the presence of about 1.3 million Syrians in Jordan had positive and negative consequences on the local economy. The economy grew as a result of an increase in consumption and due to investments in factories and small businesses such as restaurants, he said. But our infrastructure has suffered especially in crowded schools and in providing health services. Zubaidi said that eventually the refugees must return to Syria, which is in Jordans national interest since foreign aid does not cover all the expenses of hosting them. According to pollster Fares Braizat, a survey conducted by NAMA Strategic Intelligence Solutions in November 2018 found that 33% of Syrian refugees said that they will never go back and 24% said they probably will not go back. On Dec. 8, Braizat wrote in The Jordan Times that 87% of Jordanians polled believe that the Syrian refugees should return to Syria. Political commentator Omar Kullab told Al-Monitor that Jordans biggest concern is that the Syrian government is not serious about welcoming its refugees back at this stage. We should resist any plan to settle these refugees in the kingdom either for a short period or longer, he said. Those living in camps can be dealt with through foreign agencies and by giving them incentives to return voluntarily to Syria, but what about the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have settled in various governorates and have found means to make a living? In his view, those living outside the camps will become the core of a demographic crisis, especially as Jordanians continue to suffer from high unemployment and a sluggish economy. The US administration has been working on a Mideast peace plan since President Donald Trump made it to the White House in January 2017. Two years later, the proposal has yet to be unveiled, though talk is growing about its imminent release after Israel's April 9 elections. Meanwhile, Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and senior adviser, talked about some aspects of the proposal in a Feb. 25 interview. He told Sky News Arabia the United States would like to see the West Bank and Gaza Strip "unified under one leadership and come together." "There has been a lot of discussion between Hamas and through Fatah, but I think what the people want is a government that doesnt have corruption," he added. Bringing both sides "together under one governing structure" would greatly improve the Palestinian economy, which has been weakened by the absence of peace, he said. Kushner's regional tour from Feb. 25 to March 1 included stops in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Turkey in an effort to gather support for a peace plan that hasn't been revealed. The tour aimed to encourage the Gulf countries to mobilize funding for the success of the deal. But the visit to Turkey raised questions about the feasibility of convincing Turks of the deal, perhaps because of Ankara's very positive relations with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and, to an extent, Hamas. Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem told Al-Monitor that Kushner's words are misleading. Kushners talk about unifying the Gaza Strip and the West Bank contradicts his country's opposition to ending the Palestinian division since [the split] weakens the Palestinian position. No one will be able to change the situation in the Gaza Strip except by popular will through elections. This can't happen by removing one party and replacing it with another. Hamas will fight to prevent separating Gaza from the rest of the Palestinian homeland. It's unusual for a US official to openly speak of bringing together Fatah and Hamas under one government without specifying conditions. In the Sky News Arabia interview, Kushner merely said, "So what we will propose is hopefully something where both sides can gain a lot more than they give and where both sides will have to make compromises, but hopefully the benefits far outweigh the compromise." The traditional US position has demanded that Hamas recognize agreements with Israel and renounce violence before it can be part of any Palestinian government. Most recently, such conditions were stated in the reconciliation agreement in October 2017. Kushners statements about bringing Palestinians together under one leadership put many scenarios on the table. Fatah and Hamas could finally reconcile, or a large-scale Israeli military operation could be carried out to topple Hamas so the PA takes over the Gaza Strip. However, the second scenario seems unlikely since Israel has waged three wars against Gaza between 2008 and 2014, without ever eliminating Hamas. That brings up a third scenario. Kushners words can be interpreted as saying that Hamas is a candidate to be in charge of Gaza and the West Bank together, after being persuaded or pressured by Egypt, Qatar and Turkey to accept this role, Abdullah Abdullah, a member of Fatahs Revolutionary Council and head of the political committee in the Palestinian Legislative Council, told Al-Monitor. Meanwhile, the PA will not be the one playing this leadership role, since both the US and Israeli behaviors seem to [indicate they] want to eliminate it, he added. For example, on Feb. 1, the decision to end all US aid to the Palestinian security forces entered into force. That day, the US Agency for International Development announced it was ending all its Palestinian projects, closing all its offices in the Palestinian territories, and canceling the contracts of hundreds of Palestinian employees. Kushners statements were followed by Palestinian, Israeli and Arab reactions. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas vowed, as he has many times, to thwart the peace deal. Israeli Gen. Amos Yadlin, former head of military intelligence, told Maariv newspaper Feb. 25, Kushners unprecedented talk about uniting Gaza and the West Bank under one leadership may not work. The Palestinians have been vainly trying to make reconciliation a success for 11 years. Washington is, however, trying to succeed where they failed. PLO Executive Committee Secretary Saeb Erekat visited Qatar March 2 and was briefed on the results of Kushners tour. Offering an Arab perspective, Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani said during his meeting with Erekat that Qatar has made it clear to Kushner that a peaceful solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict requires ending the Israeli occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, based on June 1967 borders. Erekat praised Qatars positions and its ongoing support of the Palestinian people. Kushner had arrived in Qatar March 1 and met with Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani and discussed the peace process between Israel and Palestine. Meanwhile, Abdul Khaleq Abdulla, former adviser to Emirati Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed and a friend of Kushners attacked the PA in a Feb. 28 tweet for rejecting the peace plan and warned that Israel would annex the West Bank if the PA persists in opposing the plan. Hussam al-Dajani, a political science professor at Ummah University in Gaza, told Al-Monitor, Kushners statements about uniting Gaza and the West Bank under one government mean that Washington agrees to a two-state solution and reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, which reflects positively on finally making it a success. Hamas is required to benefit from this pro-reconciliation US approach. He added, Hamas is targeted by most countries in the region, which are working to undermine it by keeping it besieged in Gaza. But the question is whether the international community is capable of undermining Hamas, which party could replace it and what mechanisms would be put in place to end Hamas rule. Al-Quds newspaper on Feb. 27 cited undisclosed sources as saying Kushner seeks to give Gaza self-autonomy. Under the plan, it said, Gaza would be linked politically to self-autonomous areas in the West Bank, namely Area A; land transport between them would be provided; a major port would be built in Gaza; and means of air transport to and from Gaza for individuals and goods would be established. Al-Quds also cited analysts as saying Kushners plan includes the investment of $25 billion in the West Bank and Gaza over 10 years by Gulf states, and $40 billion in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, which host Palestinian refugees. Mohammed Abu Jiyab, editor of Al-Eqtesadia in Gaza, told Al-Monitor, Kushners statements indicate that the economic issues and the regional and Palestinian investment projects are the most important features of the [peace plan], through a system of regional economic ties to achieve the interests of the countries of the region, all the while integrating Israel. He noted, Kushner seeks to see Gaza and the West Bank under one leadership, as long as this leadership doesn't oppose Washington." That's why, he believes, Kushner doesn't see Hamas or Abbas as the leader if the deal is implemented. It would be logical for the financial grants to include the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Lebanon, both for the resettlement of refugees and to rehabilitate their deteriorating economies. However, Egypts presence among the countries covered by these grants raises speculation about Gaza perhaps expanding south into Sinai under development plans such as industrial zones and free zones leased for 99 years. This could mean that Egypt and other countries might play a role in persuading Hamas to take the deal. Even if Hamas doesn't accept it, the movement might be convinced to not oppose it although Hamas has always voiced its rejection of Kushner's plan. Meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's biggest fan: Gursel Cephaneci, a Turkish actor in his 60s. It is not unusual to see actors praising the president on various occasions, but Cephaneci was speaking to staunchly pro-government channel A Haber in a "random" street interview. Camera and mic teams go around asking people on the street who they will be voting for and why, as the March 31 elections are fast approaching. Then these recordings are posted online, with the most attractive bits and pieces becoming trending videos on social media. On Feb. 24, it was Cephaneci's turn on camera. He spoke passionately about his love for Erdogan and shouted angrily about Erdogan's opposition. On Feb. 25, journalist Can Bursali tweeted, I spoke with the owner of the casting agency Cephaneci works for, Kemal Ekenel. He said that A Haber had contacted him, and Cephaneci was assigned to talk to A Haber. Observers on social media promptly engaged in fact-checking Cephanecis statements, particularly his criticism of the main opposition Republican Peoples Party (CHP) chairman, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. A Haber was adamant about rebutting claims that it had hired Cephaneci through a casting company and paid him to appear in front of cameras. So on Feb. 26, the channel carried a special program interviewing Cephaneci and Ekenel. Both men stated it was not a planned interview. Pro-government media savored what they referred to as another failed attempt to slander A Haber, whereas those critical of Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) didnt seem convinced that Cephaneci was randomly interviewed. This is just one of the recent examples of how far pro-AKP media will go to display Erdogan fans' exaltation. Yet there have been some unpleasant instances that render Erdogan difficult to cherish. For example, on Feb. 8, the day his official campaign launched, Erdogan scolded his Sivas province audience for demanding jobs. He said, Dont expect anything from us. We gave all that we could. And dont provoke this rally! On March 2, Erdogan was in Rize province when substitute teachers asked for jobs. He angrily told them to ask elsewhere. Why does Erdogan keep on rallying while there are no new promises he can make, and he is not willing to listen to the public's complaints? The campaign has turned into a two-track process: Sustain Erdogans popularity and demolish any opposition at any cost. What's behind this perpetual struggle? Erdogan loves the rallies," a political science professor who works for a state university told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. "He feeds off the peoples energy and wants images of himself being applauded and cheered to in the living room of every home in the evening. A populist leader has to remain popular. As long as we [Turkey] can sustain an image of him being loved, we can sustain his popularity." He added, "We can't necessarily solve local or national problems, but we can remind people, 'Erdogan is with you, and you love him.' For those still not convinced, we tell them that for the love of the country there is only one option in this election and it's Erdogan. If there's no competition, victory is guaranteed. Timur Kuran, a Turkish-American economist and Duke University professor of economics and political science, told Al-Monitor, Erdogans regime once rested on genuine support. That's no longer the case. If free and fair elections were held, and the opposition was allowed to bargain openly to form a sustainable counter-coalition, he and his cronies would be booted out through a landslide, and they would all be put on trial." He continued, "Under the circumstances, what sustains the regime is a climate of fear. This depends partly on the ongoing show-trials, discourses about Turkeys enemies plotting to bring it down and frequent arrests that the state-owned media use to fuel a sense of insecurity. But it also depends on the perception that no one is willing to protest, or even to support citizens who speak the truth about ongoing problems. Repeated images of people adoring Erdogan reinforce the perception that dissenters will lack support. They also make potential dissenters think that, if they dared to act, a huge pro-Erdogan base would turn on them. Kuran concluded, If the media were allowed to show Erdogan confronted with dissatisfied citizens, the perception that supports the climate of fear would weaken. That's among the reasons why he insists on being seen as a revered president." Ayse Cavdar, an anthropologist and journalist, emphasized the importance of the escalating economic crisis that is now affecting every household in Turkey. She said, Since November 2015 Erdogan has been telling the masses, 'If I am not in charge there will be a crisis.' But since then, with each election cycle, both economic and political crises have deepened and multiplied. Cavdar noted, If there were no crisis, there would be no necessity for Erdogan. The question now is, what's the limit of the public's or Erdogans supporters for crisis tolerance? This is being tested with the municipal elections. She added, Even though both the AKP and opposition parties repeatedly state that the last election results were legitimate, there are unrelenting rumors about widespread election fraud. The political parties statements aren't convincing. Cavdar asked if elections are still worthy political tools. There is indeed growing doubt about poll security. Most of Erdogans campaign is based on telling the masses that his coalition is patriotic whereas the opposition is not. Indeed, Erdogan and Cabinet members openly claim the opposition parties work with terror organizations. At this point, one can't help but ask why Turkey is even holding elections, if most parties are supposedly collaborating with terrorists? Cavdar said, This might be the biggest trap Erdogan set against himself. Elections were the only mechanism that legitimized his power grab. But Erdogan shook peoples trust in elections by making the election campaign process unjust for his rivals. So now he has to find other ways to legitimize his position, which is not easy. That's why his mantra of 'They love me, they can't give up on me' has to continue." Aykan Erdemir, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, concurs with many other scholars that personal popularity is all Erdogan has left. At this point the Turkish president realizes that he needs to appeal to AKP voters emotions rather than their rationality. Given the economic hardships, voters who prioritize their economic interests are likely to hold him accountable for the economic mismanagement, and vote for the opposition," he said. "However, if Erdogan succeeds in reframing the municipal elections as a referendum about charismatic leadership, he could still appeal to his disgruntled followers. This requires choreographing spectacles of love and devotion to show the public that Erdogan remains a charismatic and popular figure despite the downturn in the economy." Most media outlets present Erdogan as a leader who is unconditionally adored and obeyed despite all hardships. Images of these fans adulation at rallies helps these pro-government news outlets present Erdogan as representing the will of the nation. The power of these rallies is indeed insidious. Erdogan recently said he no longer trusts opinion polls only his people. Therefore, Erdogans campaign team has to keep the image of widespread love and dedication alive. Even imagining the possibility of losing is unspeakable, unthinkable. If the majority appears dedicated to Erdogan despite all financial hardships, then those who do not support him can be labeled unpatriotic, even terrorists. This policy of portraying Erdogan as a beloved leader goes hand in hand with criminalizing the entire opposition in the country," Erdemir noted. "Ultimately the AKP wants to reframe the elections as being between a charismatic leader who deserves loyalty and adoration regardless of his performance, and terrorists who should not be trusted regardless of what they might deliver in terms of economic and social policy. This obsequious show of infatuation is not likely to end with the March 31 elections. Erdemir predicts Erdogan "will need the loyalty of his followers, who will be struck by an even bigger economic crisis once the elections are over. But as long as the populist leader keeps up the appearance of being popular, he will remain unbeatable. BlackBerry announced that the NATO Communications and Information (NCI) Agency has awarded a contract for BlackBerrys SecuSUITE for Government to encrypt the conversations of its technology and cyber leaders wherever they communicate in the workplace, at home or travelling abroad. The NCI Agency helps NATOs 29 member-nations communicate securely and work together in smarter ways. It acquires, deploys and defends communication systems for NATOs political decision-makers and command centres, working on the frontlines against cyber-attacks. Due to the classified nature of the information the NCI Agency handles, it is critical that all their communications remain secure, combatting any opportunity for a cybercriminal to electronically eavesdrop on conversations. Kevin Scheid, General Manager of the NCI Agency, said, As cybercriminals and state-sponsored actors become increasingly more sophisticated, we needed a highly-secure way for our cyber leaders to have phone conversations with people inside and outside of our organization regardless of where they are in the world. BlackBerrys voice encryption technology helps solve this challenge and strengthens our elite cyber-defence strategy. Dr. Christoph Erdmann, SVP of BlackBerry Secusmart, BlackBerry, said, Eavesdropping on calls is one of the easiest ways to gain access to private information. We are extremely proud that the NCI Agency, a world leader in the development and use of technology that keeps NATO nations secure, has put its trust in BlackBerrys software to secure their voice communication. No matter the operating system or thing used to communicate, BlackBerrys arsenal of cybersecurity technology ensures our customers data remains private. BlackBerrys SecuSUITE for Government supports Android and iOS smartphones and tablets and can be installed on-premise, in a data centre, or in the cloud. Use cases for the solution include: Secure conferencing: encrypts conversations between a secure conference bridge and a SecuSUITE for Government-enabled device. encrypts conversations between a secure conference bridge and a SecuSUITE for Government-enabled device. Secure landing: encrypts mobile devices to a landline within a network. encrypts mobile devices to a landline within a network. Break-in: protects any communication between a mobile or landline on the users home network to a SecuSUITE for Government-enabled mobile device. protects any communication between a mobile or landline on the users home network to a SecuSUITE for Government-enabled mobile device. Break-out: secures mobile devices to the employees home network and from there to external mobile or landlines through PSTN extension. SecuSUITE for Government has been evaluated and certified to be compliant with the Common Criteria protection profile for VOIP applications and SIP servers. It has also earned a NIAP certification and has been placed on the NSA Commercial Solutions for Classified Program (CSfC) component list of products certified for us on classified systems. Additional services On March 31, Turkey will elect mayors for 81 provincial capitals and 957 towns. Under normal conditions in Turkey, local elections are considered to be of interest mostly to local people and do not have much effect on national political balances. But this time, there is a different scenario for the local elections, one that is often expressed by narratives of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. If you listen to the president's remarks and messages without realizing that the subject is local elections, you could get the impression that the country is heading to unprecedented vital elections, is about to engage in war or is going to undergo a change of regime. In this election, the struggle is between coalitions Erdogans Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the allied nationalist National Action Party (MHP) that have formed the Peoples Alliance, and the opposition parties led by the main opposition Republican Peoples Party (CHP), which have put together the Nation Alliance. Simply by reading Erdogans personal Twitter message of Feb. 27 accusing the Nation Alliance of sympathizing with terror outfits one can see that these elections will have significance far beyond a routine local election. Erdogans polarizing narratives and policies is not a new phenomenon for Turkey. But his resorting to such offensive language against an opposition alliance that represents half of society has attracted much curiosity, particularly as he did not resort to such terminology in earlier general elections. For Erdogan these local elections have excessive importance; this was clear from the day AKP announced its candidate for mayor of Istanbul, showing how high the party's bar is. The AKPs candidate for Istanbul is the former parliamentary speaker, former prime minister and Erdogans right-hand man, Binali Yildirim. Erdogan is thus fielding his most significant associate for the Istanbul post. Both Erdogan and his alliance partner Devlet Bahceli say the local elections are a matter of survival for Turkey. This is terminology the Turkish nationalist right wing has been using to warn of Turkey being under threat. But it is also the first time that this is being used for local elections. All these narratives indicate that the president is worried about possible outcome of the elections and is trying divert the voters attention. Only in the first two months of this year food prices in Turkey rose by 13.21%. According to a poll by the Social Democracy Foundation, when asked what they cant buy anymore, 51% of respondents said "red meat" and 23% said clothing. Of course the ruling party is aware of these polls and as a response it has set up official sales points where products are bought directly from producers and sold to consumers at lower prices. Now thousands of people wait in line in all corners of the country to buy basics such as potatoes and onions a bit cheaper. Erdogans portrayal of the coming elections as a "matter of survival" therefore could be interpreted as an effort to distract disgruntled voters attention to the country's polarization and security problems. There have been other developments that indicate that Erdogan actions are not just a political tactic but that he is actually concerned with the outcome of the elections. It is well known from the days when Erdogan was a candidate for mayor of Beyoglu district in Istanbul and later served as the Istanbul metropolitan mayor, prime minister and president that he has been a politician who has used polls extensively. When he recently said he doesnt trust the polls, he attracted attention to what these polls were saying. Polls conducted by reliable polling firms such as ORC, MAK and PollMark show the following emerging general picture: In Istanbul, Yildirim leads but opposition candidate Ekrem Imamoglu has been closing the gap every day. In nearly every poll for the Ankara mayor's race, Mansur Yavas, the opposition candidate, leads the governments candidate, Mehmet Ozhaseki, by four to 10 points. These polls also suggest the possibility that the AKP could lose major cities such as Bursa and Adana. For the ruling party, another disturbing development is in southeastern provinces where Kurds are in the majority and where the pro-Kurdish Peoples Democracy Party (HDP) could easily sweep the mayoral posts. Previously, about 100 mayors elected in the region were removed from their posts by the government on charges of abetting terror and were replaced by trustees appointed by the government. Erdogan says that should people involved with terror be elected again, they would be removed and replaced by trustees. The HDP did not name candidates in major cities such as Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. The ruling party is worried about the HDPs strategy of make the government lose in the west but we will win in the east. In Ankara and Izmir, where the HDP has a 10% voting potential, the party will support the opposition. Most HDP voters are expected to heed this call and vote for other opposition candidates. Erdogans march to power began with his election as Istanbuls mayor in 1994. The same year, Melih Gokcek, a member of Erdogan's party, was elected as mayor of Ankara. For Erdogan, who has won all his elections with big margins, the municipal elections could be his Achilles heel. The loss of some big cities, a general loss of votes for the AKP, and new victories for the HDP in elections in provinces with large Kurdish populations could mean early general elections. Recently, Amberin Zaman reported in an Al-Monitor article that former close associates of Erdogan were looking into setting up a new party. Establishment of this new party by politicians said to include former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and former Economy Minister Ali Babacan would depend on AKPs vote count in the coming election. Should the AKP suffer a serious loss of votes, then it wouldn't be a surprise to see some of Erdogans former associates go their own way and set up their party. Looking at all these developments, the March 31 elections could be a matter of survival not for Turkey but for Erdogan. Is this likely? We may see how Erdogan will react April 1. Chase Bank is expanding into Alabama, with a branch planned for Auburn this year and one for Birmingham in 2020. The bank today announced that it is planning retail branches in nine top U.S. markets this summer. Chase expects to open up to 90 new branches in new markets and hire up to 700 employees by the end of 2019. Chip Smallwood, Chases managing director for middle market banking said the company has served its Alabama business clients for six years through locally-based bankers. The Auburn branch will be an important first step. College students are often at the beginning of their financial journey and we want to support them throughout key life moments, Smallwood said. As a company, we believe we have the responsibility to help the next generation of customers build healthy financial habits - and college is a critical stage for these younger customers. Chase officials said the Auburn branch will open this year, but could not say yet how many branches might be slated for Birmingham or where they might be located. The bank announced last year that it planned to open 400 new branches and hire as many as 3,000 employees in new markets over the next five years. Approximately 30 percent of branches will be in low-to-moderate income communities. Entry-level employees will be paid no less than $15 to $16.50/hour, and will receive the firms full benefits package, which is valued at an average of $12,000 annually per employee in this pay range, Chase said. It includes health care coverage and retirement savings, as well. To help ease the burden of out-of-pocket medical expenses, the firm also recently reduced medical plan deductibles by $750 per year for employees making less than $60,000. The person to lead California energy giant PG&E Corp. out of the biggest utility bankruptcy in U.S. history may be Bill Johnson, the outgoing chief of the federally operated power agency Tennessee Valley Authority. Johnson is PG&E's top pick for chief executive officer, people familiar with the situation said, while cautioning that the company hasn't made a final decision and is still discussing the potential hire. The utility is also close to picking new directors for its board, they said, asking not to be identified because the information isn't public. PG&E has been searching for a new chief since Geisha Williams resigned in January, just two weeks before the California utility giant filed for bankruptcy to deal with an estimated $30 billion in liabilities from wildfires that its equipment may have ignited. State officials and PG&E investors alike have been pressing the company for a management overhaul. PG&E declined to comment. Johnson, who announced his retirement from TVA in November, wasn't immediately available for comment. He is expected to step down to make way for a new CEO at TVA who begins in April. TVA spokesman Jim Hopson said the agency wasn't aware of Johnson's plans after his departure. Johnson may be best known as the man who served as CEO of North Carolina power giant Duke Energy Corp. for less than a day. He had been appointed as part of the company's $17.8 billion takeover of Progress Energy in 2012 but was replaced eight hours later with James Rogers, the former CEO of Duke who had been slated to become executive chairman. Johnson was hired that same year to his post at TVA, a federal agency that supplies electricity to power companies serving 10 million people in the Southeast. PG&E is also nearing an agreement with investors represented by law firm Jones Day that could see the company's board revamped in coming weeks, people familiar with the matter said. The investors hold about 40 percent of PG&E's stock and have discussed nominating at least nine directors, they said. The new board probably won't include candidates from a competing slate proposed by activist investor BlueMountain Capital Management, said the people. PG&E and Jones Day may announce an agreement by next week, they said, while cautioning that talks are ongoing and may still fall apart. Representatives for Jones Day didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. BlueMountain declined to comment. The investors represented by Jones Day and BlueMountain have been wrangling for control of the utility's leadership for weeks. BlueMountain nominated 13 directors, including former California treasurer Phil Angelides, National Transportation Safety Board ex-chairman Christopher Hart and Jeff Ubben, the CEO of activist investor ValueAct Capital Management. Earlier Tuesday, PG&E pushed back for the fourth time the deadline for nominating new directors, giving shareholders until March 19 to propose candidates. Californias chief utility regulator, Michael Picker, told interim PG&E CEO John Simon in a phone conversation Monday that the company will have to explain to the state why specific board members were selected. Picker said in a filing that he had called the company to emphasize the critical importance that PG&E be led by people who can ensure its is operated safely and can manage the dynamic risks posed by climate change. A Florida man appeared in Mobile federal court Tuesday on sex trafficking charges after prosecutors claim he held an underage girl against her will and planned to force her to have sex with clients during Mardi Gras. Tee-Henry Wulu Currens was charged with sex trafficking of children by force, fraud or coercion in an indictment unsealed last week. Currens was picked up by Robertsdale Police in Baldwin County after the girl was able to escape and call for help at a gas station, according to the criminal complaint. The girl told authorities Currens forced her to drive to Jacksonville in late February to begin a trip toward Mobile for Mardi Gras, where Currens allegedly planned on forcing the girl to be an escort and taking all the proceeds. She said Currens would take her cell phone and the keys to the car whenever he left her sight so she could not call for help. The girl went on to say Currens roughed her up on several occasions, including busting her lip and leaving bruises on her body. View the complaint against Currens below: Improving school security, restructuring car drop off lanes, upgrading the aesthetics to the entries of the elementary and middle schools and introducing new logos were part of a big reveal by the Gulf Shores City School System Tuesday. The event was akin to a theatrical performance and infomercial complete with oohing and aahing by a crowd of more than 400 people inside the Erie H. Meyer Civic Center. It was the first public introduction on a number of details related to the latest Alabama city to split away and form its own school district. The Gulf Shores City School System officially breaks away from the Baldwin County School System on June 1. The city school system is set to begin the 2019-2020 school year sometime in mid-August. The citizens of Gulf Shores have been waiting a long time and have been talking about it a long time, said Matt Akin, who was hired as the first school superintendent in Gulf Shores about 11 months ago after spending 1-1/2 years with the Huntsville city school system. We just wanted to show the work going on behind the scenes which included the support of the city, obviously, Akin said. It was our chance to bring everyone out, build excitement and show how it will be different being a city school system. Big reveal The approximately one-hour reveal focused mostly on the immediate changes Gulf Shores residents will see to the elementary, middle and high schools following a renovation project that will be mostly completed before the school year starts. The city of Gulf Shores will spend between $5 million to $7 million on the projects, which aim to improve safety and security at each of the three school campuses and improve the aesthetics at their entry-points. Akin said the city plans to borrow to complete the project. The city, he said, is planning to budget approximately $2 million annually to support the school system. We are not authorized to borrow money yet, so the city is funding the initial phases and that work is being done now so we can be ready by June 1, said Akin. He said a construction contract for much of the work will be awarded in early June. The projects scope includes removing eight trailers outside the high school and elementary school that are set up as portable classrooms to house an overflow of students. Their removals are part of an effort by the city school system to improve traffic flow into and out of the schools. The school will also build canopies that overhang near the entrances of each school to prevent students from inclement weather. This is connected to improving safety, said Akin. The traffic flow is not a safe environment. The three entrances leading into the school campuses will also get a visual boost with the construction of brick pillars with banners affixed to them that have the school systems new logo and slogan, Makin Waves, on them. The logos were created by Red Square Agency based in Mobile. People need a great welcoming feeling the minute they drive into our campus, said Kevin Corcoran, the president of the Gulf Shores City School Board. Akin said the focus of the newly-formed school will be on improving academic scores, retaining teachers and focus on a personalized educational plan for all kids. The school system is currently adding employees, including administrators. Chad Green, the former chief school financial officer at Satsuma City Schools, will begin serving in a similar capacity in Gulf Shores on April 1. Principals, already hired, will be placed into the high school and middle school by June 1. An elementary school principal will be hired next month. In addition, the event introduced a new Dolphin Foundation for Education and Arts. The foundation has been assembled to raise money to support the new school system. Looming lawsuit The timing of the Gulf Shores city school formation will not be affected by a recently-filed lawsuit by the Baldwin County School System last month challenging State Superintendent Eric Mackey over his decisions regarding the split. The split, which is the first to occur in Baldwin County, has been contentious. Negotiations between the two sides that began in January 2018, produced some fireworks at times and eventually led to the Alabama state superintendents involvement. Eric Mackey, who was hired as the state superintendent in April, authorized the June 1 split date in early February. Neither side has disputed the date for the split, but Baldwin County school officials argued that Mackeys decision within his split agreement could eventually incentivize them statewide. They also claimed that Mackeys decision could leave the county school system faced with a negative financial situation. Gulf Shores city schools were named in the lawsuit, and Akin said they have until next week to respond. We continue, behind the scenes, to work through the lawsuit, said Akin. We are working hard to hopefully work this out. But the legal clashes were not on the minds of celebratory Gulf Shores residents and teachers who attended the reveal. Inside the Civic Center was a cake with the schools new logo on it. Corcoran and the city school board flung t-shirts into the crowd. The foundation held a raffle that included prizes such as a new barbecue grill. Corcoran and Akin, on stage and introducing the schools new features, provided a bit of a theatrical comedy by engaging in a question-and-answer session with each other that was similar to a cable TV sales pitch. The crowd inside the Civic Center responded favorably. So, Matt, what is the plan? Corcoran asked the superintendent, to which Akin would respond with facts about what the city can anticipate. Its really nice as a superintendent to see how excited the community is, said Akin. Its an exciting time for us. By now, youve probably heard that the first Buc-ees outside of Texas opened in Baldwin County on Jan. 21. If you havent been to a Buc-ees before, as I hadnt before my recent introductory trip, you might wonder what the big deal is. The store itself is the big deal. Its a convenience store on steroids. It is, as founder Arch Beaver Aplin III has described it, the Disney of convenience stores. Think Disney-level cleanliness, efficiency and yes, even fun, if you consider shopping to be fun. (Spoiler alert: I do.) I drove east from Mobile on I-10 to the Baldwin Beach Express to visit Buc-ees recently and was duly impressed by the sight of the sprawling 50,000-square-foot store-opolis on the horizon. My first stop was at one of the seemingly endless gas pumps (124, to be precise), where I filled up with unleaded for $2.13 per gallon. I noted that there were no overflowing trash cans in sight, and no waiting in line for a pump. I then found a parking spot and ventured inside. After many a road trip in my life, I know how to quickly find the restroom in any gas station and sure enough, Buc-ees makes them easy to spot. Theyre straight ahead of you, and Ill be darned if the ladies room wasnt just as spotless and Id heard it would be. The roomy, private stalls have three walls and a door with a hook on it (which should be required of every public restroom on the planet), and each one even has its own Purell dispenser. I also appreciated the design of the hand-washing stations, complete with warm water. Now it was time to see what was so special about Buc-ees. The word Id use to describe the inside of the place on a midweek afternoon is bustling. One side is set up like a typical convenience store; that is, parts of it are familiar, like the Icee machine and the glass doors holding cold bottles and cans of beverages. But, being Buc-ees, there were four Icee machines and an entire wall of refrigerated drinks. You can also get an array of fountain drinks here, as well as several varieties of coffee, which you can doctor up just the way you like it thanks to two coffee bars equipped with lots of flavors of cream. Along the walls are displays of nuts, dried fruits, gummy bears (and, I assume, beavers), trail mixes and jerky of all kinds. Rows of shelves hold Buc-ees brand jellies, salsa and seasonings. Toward the other end of the store, theres a circular island called the Texas Round Up, with barbecue on one side and homemade fudge and freshly roasted nuts on the other. Here, I witnessed a thing of beauty as a worker topped buns with thick bits of onion and pickles. Then she added gigantic scoops of beef brisket to the sandwiches and wrapped them up for $5,99 each. In the middle of the island is a guy who stands there seemingly constantly chopping away at the brisket. Past the roasting cashews, I discovered the slabs of fudge, with 24 different flavors represented including red velvet cake, dark chocolate caramel with sea salt, Heath bar and more. If you cant decide, dont worry. The employees are quick to offer samples. Along one wall is a bakery counter and a kiosk where you can order sandwiches, tacos, wraps, hot dogs and more. And heres one of the things some people have found odd about Buc-ees so far: Theres no place to sit down and eat. But really, do you usually sit down and eat in a convenience store when you stop in for a Coke? Here youll find every kind of grab-and-go snack imaginable, and If you want to take something with you to enjoy later, just buy a Buc-ees ice chest and fill er up. I continued to the opposite end of the store, where I wandered through baby clothes, kids toys (so many unicorns and mermaids!) and many, many stuffed beavers with the Buc-ees logo. Theres a hunting and fishing section, everything you need for the beach (Buc-ees is on the Baldwin Beach Express, after all) and my favorite a home decor section with signs galore, bath bombs, baby gifts and so much more. Because its in Alabama, Buc-ees also has several sections of merchandise dedicated to the state. I liked the little key chains shaped like Alabama that say Buc-ees. I even found a Willie Nelson shirt to wear to his concert next month. I think you could find just about anything here. But werent convenience stations given that name because they were quick and easy and convenient? I defy anyone to go into Buc-ees and dart right back out. Its just impossible. Personally, Im looking forward to my next trip back to try the trio of Buc-ees bestsellers: beef jerky, barbecue and Beaver Nuggets, which are addictive caramel-coated corn puffs. I might have caught beaver fever. And guess what? I can go anytime, because its open 24 hours a day. Oh, and by the way: If you live in the northern part of the state, Buc-ees might be coming your way in the near future. According to company spokesman Jeff Nadalo, there are plans for other Buc-ees in Alabama, but they havent been publicly announced yet. Feliciano was a college student from Florida A&M University who was one of the full-time aides in my public school Pre-K classroom. At the time, I thought he was a very grown up adult, but now that Im the mom of young men that same age, I see what a fun-loving big kid he was. The Pre-Kindergarten classroom was located in an inner-city area of Tallahassee and although the school was protected and loved by the neighborhood, the surrounding areas were rough. Crime was high and drug dealers worked in the open. Most of my students lived in government-assisted housing and the classroom was a magical, colorful refuge from the real world. Feliciano gave a reassuring presence with his towering 63 frame and was always ready to protect us, but the young man also had the softest heart in the school. The giant kid-man was a teddy bear when it came to the children. On St. Patricks Day, we painted pictures of leprechauns and Feliciano allowed the children to paint his beard bright orange. Glowing neon against his dark skin, he was the funniest looking wee folk wed ever seen. When teaching at other schools, Id always taught Irish folklore with a fun St. Patricks Day activity. Using fools gold to bait a small live animal trap in the classroom in the hopes of catching a leprechaun, wed return to the room later in the day to find a few papers scattered around, the gold stolen, and a plate of shamrock cookies the pesky leprechauns had left behind. Oh no! We just missed them! The children would laugh and dance around thinking how the tricky leprechauns had played a joke on us. Some children tried to figure out the real way the cookies mysteriously appeared and would discuss it for weeks. The year Feliciano helped with the shamrock prank, Oh, Blarney . . . things got out of control. As we ate in the cafeteria, Feliciano slipped back to the room to arrange the leprechaun switcharoo but got carried away with the fun and overdid the naughty pranks. Crumpled papers, tipped over chairs, window blinds pulled askew, blocks and crayons spilled on the tables and the throne of the classroom the teachers rocking chair, fallen on its side. When we returned, the children froze in the doorway. They surveyed the damage, then burst into tears. Although I had become sensitive to the fact they were living in a very different world, it never occurred to me they would relate pranks from leprechauns to serious home invasions or robberies. Their world included random violence and real destruction. The beautiful classroom was their place of peace and safety, and now, the devious leprechauns had invaded, and they felt violated. Ive never felt worse. As I tried to console the bawling children, Feliciano ran around the room with his orange beard saying, Its okay well fix it! There was inner-city Irish mayhem where two worlds were colliding. Feliciano and I ended up coming clean and telling the truth that we had taken a joke too far, which I guess was a good lesson in honesty and that grown-ups can make mistakes. Then, we ate the cookies which turned our tongues green and we were able to calm the sweet little hearts of those who probably grew up to hate St. Patricks Day. Leslie Anne is the author of The Majorettes are Back in Town and Other Things to Love about the South. You can read more at her blog: http://leslieannetarabella.com An Alabama inmate who staged a hunger strike because he said he was placed in solitary confinement at Holman Correctional Facility without justification has been moved to Kilby Correctional Facility and is expected to be returned to the general prison population, his attorney said. Robert Earl Council was moved on Tuesday and has ended the hunger strike, attorney David Gespass said. Gespass said Council is being checked at the infirmary at Kilby. Alabama Department of Corrections spokesman Bob Horton confirmed that Council is at Kilby. Horton said ADOC does not disclose why inmates are moved. Council started the hunger strike Thursday after a transfer from the general population at St. Clair Correctional Facility near Birmingham to the segregation unit at Holman in south Alabama, Gespass said. Council was moved to Holman after an ADOC search for contraband at St. Clair, a search that involved more than 300 law enforcement officers from other agencies. Gespass said hes not aware that officers found Council with contraband or found any other circumstances that justified moving him to Holmans segregation unit. Council has staged hunger strikes previously to protest prison conditions. Council spent more than four years in solitary confinement, Gespass said. Gespass said its important to draw attention to the use of solitary confinement for prolonged periods. He said the lack of human interaction amounts to torture. Gespass said he plans to visit Council at Kilby on Friday. Council was sentenced to life without parole in 1995 for a murder conviction in Coffee County. Council was born in 1974. An Alabama inmate who stole a local sheriffs truck from a worksite is being sought by authorities. Herbert Adams, 28, escaped from the worksite near Flomaton, Escambia County at approximately 2 p.m. Tuesday and ditched the vehicle in the small Florida town of Jay, Rosa County, shortly after. Adams was being held on drug charges. He now faces escape and theft charges. Authorities believe Adams is in the Florida area, but havent ruled out the possibility he could be back in Alabama. Escambia County Sheriff Heath Jackson said Adams was picking up trash along Highway 113 at the time of the escape. A supervisor followed him but Adams was ultimately lost in the pursuit. K-9 units and other resources were used to scour woods near to Jay, but investigators searched for several hours without finding anything. Anyone with information on Adams whereabouts is being encouraged to call the Escambia County Alabama Sheriffs Office at (251) 809-0741. A Birmingham City Schools mentoring program was given $100,000 from Everytown for Gun Safety to support the programs goal of preventing gun violence in Birmingham, officials said Tuesday. The mentoring program, Growing Kings, was founded in 2009 with the goal of working with underserved male youth through school-based enrichment and mentoring. The program has worked with more than 1,000 boys and young men in Birmingham. The $100,000 grant is part of Everytowns effort to reduce gun violence by supporting community-based organizations working to reduce gun violence. This generous grant will aid in our ability to track students' performance and outcomes beyond the school-based programs - more specifically in the criminal justice system said Growing Kings Executive Director, Marcus D. Carson. Additionally, funds will be used for advocacy efforts that deepen the impact with participants by creating more opportunities for civic engagement and cultural immersion, leveraging trauma informed healing practices, and by strengthening relationships with students families and other youth-serving organizations in the community. Officials said the grant will provide needed financial support for the organizations mentoring program, Journey of a King. About 500 boys and young men participate in the mentoring program every week of the school year. Officials say the grant will cover the cost of hiring an additional program manager, thus allowing the program director to focus on other program evaluation and analyses. Partnerships with community businesses, organizations, and leaders are a key factor to our program, Carson said. The varied backgrounds and experiences of our mentors provide an unmatched ability to communicate effectively and sincerely with the young male students, all while avoiding condescending pitfalls. In late February, the City of Birmingham launched a gun violence prevention campaign dubbed #IncreasePeace. A former Alabama Law Enforcement Agency trooper has been arrested on drug charges. Stephen Langham was arrested by the Alabama State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) on six felony drug charges in Geneva County. He was dismissed from service Monday afternoon. Langham was charged with five counts of Unlawful Possession of a Controlled Substance and one count of Unlawful Distribution of a Controlled Substance. He was issued a $150,000 bond. No additional details are available at this time. President Donald Trump is dismissing a conspiracy theory that claimed First Lady Melania Trump used a body double on the first couples visit to Alabama. The president said the internet rumor was another example of fake news. The Fake News photoshopped pictures of Melania, then propelled conspiracy theories that its actually not her by my side in Alabama and other places. They are only getting more deranged with time! the president tweeted. The Fake News photoshopped pictures of Melania, then propelled conspiracy theories that its actually not her by my side in Alabama and other places. They are only getting more deranged with time! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2019 The internet was abuzz over the weekend after an old conspiracy theory resurfaced regarding the first ladys appearance and her supposed use of a body double during a visit to tornado-ravaged parts of Alabama. Alabama drivers will begin paying an extra 6 cents in state gasoline tax by Labor Day as the result of legislation signed into law by Gov. Kay Ivey today. The Republican governor signed a three-bill package intended to raise more than $300 million a year for roads, the first increase in state fuel taxes since 1992. The leaders of a Republican-controlled Legislature joined the governor for a bill signing at the State Capitol and said the plan would result in safer roads and bridges, faster travel and a stronger economy. Democratic leaders praised the plan. Lawmakers called it a bipartisan effort. Ivey thanked legislators for their willingness to tackle the issue and they thanked her for leading the effort. Every penny that is raised through this new resource will be scrutinized, will be accounted for for infrastructure only, period, the governor said. The state tax on gasoline and diesel fuel will increase by 6 cents a gallon after Aug. 31, followed by an additional 2 cents a gallon on Oct. 1, 2020 and another 2 cents on Oct. 1, 2021. Beginning in 2023, it will be adjusted according to a national highway construction cost index. It could change by no more than a penny every two years. The 10-cent per gallon increase will raise an estimated $320 million a year to fund road construction and maintenance. The Alabama Department of Transportation will get 67 percent of the money, counties will get 25 percent and cities 8 percent. About $12 million a year will be allocated to a bond issue to widen and deepen the shipping channel in the port of Mobile to increase its capacity for cargo traffic. Federal funds will pay for 75 percent of that project. Senate President Pro Tem Del Marsh, R-Anniston, said if people will study the numbers they will conclude that the gas tax plan was needed. Look at the bill, look at the facts, look at the stats, Marsh said. If you will do those things I will promise the citizens of this state that are watching, you will applaud this Legislature, what it has done today. It was time for this to be done. The Senate passed the gas tax bill today by a vote of 28-6. Twenty-two of the 27 Republican senators voted for it as did six of the eight Democrats. The House had passed the legislation by a vote of 84-20 last week. Rep. Bill Poole, R-Tuscaloosa, sponsored the bills with the backing of House Speaker Mac McCutcheon, R-Monrovia, who said he had worked on the issue for five years. This effort was necessary, Poole said. It is needed. It is critical to the future of this state. It is justified. And it is time that this state invest in infrastructure. Its the spine of our economy and our everyday lives. Poole said Alabamas funding for roads is the lowest in the southeast. He said the legislation includes safeguards that will direct the money to road construction and maintenance and wont allow it to be spent on salaries, equipment, buildings or anything else not directly tied to a road project. A political action committee organized to oppose the tax called it a betrayal of the voters who elected Republican leaders. Ralph Long, chairman of the Stop the Alabama Gas Tax PAC, issued a statement after todays votes. The events of the past week are a crying shame, Long said. Reflective of a widening chasm between Montgomery politicians and the hardworking people of this state. This will be a vote that the pocketbooks of voters will remind them of year after year. The Alabama Republican Party executive committee also opposed the tax. But the opponents arguments appeared to gain little traction in the State House. Only 18 of the 77 House Republicans voted against the tax. Only two of the 28 House Democrats voted against it. House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels, D-Huntsville, D-Huntsville, supported the plan and said the result shows the Democrats can work effectively with Ivey and the Republican majority in the Legislature. Daniels, repeating a phrase he used last week after the House passed the bill, said lawmakers should address human infrastructure. Democratic legislators have called for Medicaid expansion for years. You will see more bipartisan efforts and us addressing the tough issues of this state as we move forward, Daniels said. Ivey said she would listen to Democrats concerns about Medicaid expansion and see where the facts lead. Senate Minority Leader Bobby Singleton, D-Greensboro, praised Ivey for her willingness to endorse a tax increase. Most times people dont want to own what they call a tax, Singleton said. Singleton said it was encouraging that senators from different parts of the state and both parties supported the plan. We all came together in the name of Alabamians believing and knowing that we had a decaying infrastructure that needed to be repaired, he said. Todays votes wrapped up the special session that Ivey called to address the gas tax. It started on Wednesday and ended today, with lawmakers passing the plan in the minimum time, five meeting days. The regular session of the Legislation, which began on March 5, resumes March 19. Updated at 7:29 p.m. to add statement from Stop the Alabama Gas Tax. A man charged with human trafficking and forcing a woman into prostitution in Baldwin County is set to face similar charges in federal court. Tee-Henry Wulu Currens, 22, was charged with kidnapping, human trafficking and the use/possession of drugs on March 6th and is currently in the Baldwin County Jail. The federal charges state that Currens kidnapped a homeless prostitute from Jacksonville, Florida, before allegedly taking her on a two week trip to Mobile, Alabama. The victim, who is not named in federal filings but is in state documents, was able to escape Currens at a gas station in Robertsdale. The victim had bruises and scratches on her at the time, and was visibly shaken, according to police reports. The federal reports state that the victim met Currens when he was a sex client of hers at a hotel in Jacksonville. After being robbed by a different client, Currens volunteered to become her driver in an effort to offer her more protection in exchange for a share of profits. She told investigators that Currens became abusive to her and then started keeping the money and working with her clients directly. The victim said that she was forced to have sex with clients and was beaten up on at least one occasion when she refused. She also said that she would go to jail for prostitution rather than stay with Currens. Currens was detained during a hearing before a federal judge in Mobile Tuesday and will face a preliminary hearing March 18. A Center Point man released from prison less than one year ago is now charged in the Sunday-morning random killings of two people and is suspected in a string of other crimes within hours the same day. Michael Damon Daniels, 25, is charged with capital murder in the shooting deaths of 48-year-old Octavia Dortch and 28-year-old Gregory Snodgress, both of whom were killed less than two hours and less than three miles apart for no apparent reason. The victims did not know each other, and police say there is no indication Daniels knew either of them. Both killings are believed to have been captured on surveillance video. Dortch was killed about 7 a.m. Sunday outside Arlington Rehabilitation Center and HealthCare Center on Tuscaloosa Avenue. Birmingham police Officer Rod Mauldin said officers responded about 7 a.m. to 1000 block of Tuscaloosa Avenue after Shot Spotter, the citys gunfire detection system, indicated shots fired in that area. While they were in the area, they received a call about a person down in the same location. They found Octavia Dortch unresponsive in her vehicle. She was pronounced dead on the scene. She had worked at the rehabilitation facility for six years as a certified nursing assistant. My sister loved everyone on the job and off, said her twin sister Latevia Dortch. Dortch had two daughters and two grandchildren. Her family is devastated by the loss. She didnt bother nobody, her sister said. Whoever did this took an innocent life. Less than two hours after Dortch was shot, West Precinct officers responded just after 8:30 a.m. to the BP service station on Montevallo Road S.W. on a report of gunfire. Once on the scene, they found Snodgress unresponsive in his vehicle. According to witnesses and evidence, Daniels pulled up behind Snodgress at the store, blocking him in. He walked in front of Snodgresss vehicle and stared at him the entire time. Snodgress had already gone into the store and gotten back in his vehicle. When Daniels came back outside, Snodgress got back out of his vehicle and the two exchanged words for about 20 seconds, at which point Snodgress got back into his vehicle. At that point, according to store surveillance video of the incident, Daniels ran to the drivers side of the vehicle and fired multiple times through the window. He then backed up a few steps, and approached Snodgresss vehicle, reaching his arm in through the window. He then fired several more shots at Snodgress, paused and fired again. He started to head back to his vehicle, then turn around and opened the door to Snodgresss vehicle, reaching in through the window again to open the door. He pulled the wounded Snodgress out of the vehicle, which was apparently in gear because Snodgress was trying to leave. The vehicle then rolled into a car that is parked in front of it. Snodgress is seen reaching up toward Daniels, and it appeared Daniels reloaded his gun before shooting Snodgress several more times. Daniels then walked back to his vehicle, taking his time before he eventually left the store parking lot. At one point during the shooting, a customer pumping gas pulled off with the nozzle still in the gas tank. Several customers inside the store were visible alarmed by the gunfire just feet away. When BP worker Komi Agbleke saw what was happening, he locked himself and another employee inside the bullet-proof cashiers area and called 911. When I see what happened, he shot at the guy. He is a criminal, Agbleke said. Birmingham police investigators quickly issued a lookout bulletin for the black Kia Optima driven by Daniels and spent hours looking for him. Late Sunday afternoon, about 5:30 p.m., Birmingham police spotted the Kia in the 6800 block of First Avenue North. When officers tried to pull him over, he refused to stop, and a chase was initiated. The pursuit traveled from First Avenue North to Interstate 59 and then into north Birmingham, said Sgt. Brad Herndon. At that point, Daniels blew a couple tires as he drove along railroad tracks in the 2800 block of F.L. Shuttlesworth Drive. Daniels abandoned the Kia in a ditch and fled on foot. Officers captured him just yards away and took him into custody. Herndon said they recovered a gun from the suspects vehicle. The suspect was handcuffed and placed in a BPD patrol cruiser, where he proceeded to vomit in the back seat. Daniels was taken to police headquarters where he underwent questioning. He was then booked into the Birmingham City Jail where he was placed on a 48-hour hold pending the ongoing investigation. Homicide detectives on Tuesday afternoon obtained the capital murder warrants against Daniels. He is also charged with kidnapping, robbery, attempted murder and shooting into an occupied vehicle in connection with the slayings. Daniels also is charged with burglary, sex abuse and three counts of kidnapping in connection with unrelated cases. Birmingham police have not released details of those crimes or when they happened. The attempted murder charge is believe to stem from a non-life-threatening shooting earlier Sunday morning at a gas station near Smithfield. Daniels was just released from prison last year. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison with three to serve as part of guilty plea in 2016 to charges of theft of property and burglary in Jefferson County. He sentenced ended on March 7, 2018. Those convictions were in connection with a home invasion that led to a chase with Jefferson County sheriffs deputies in 2015. Daniels was initially charged with first-degree robbery, first-degree burglary, second-degree burglary, first degree theft of property, third-degree burglary, second-degree assault, resisting arrest, reckless endangerment and attempting to elude. More than half were dismissed through the plea agreement. It all began about 12:30 p.m. Feb. 25 when deputies were dispatched to a report of a burglary in progress at a home in the 500 block of 26th Avenue N.W. in Center Point. Two men broke into a home there but fled when they encountered the homeowner. A lookout bulletin for a light blue Honda was broadcast to deputies who were en route. At 12:50 p.m., deputies responded to a second burglary in progress in the 500 block of Woodland Court N.E. Authorities said they received information that two black males matching the earlier description had tried to break into a vacant home. When they noticed they were being watched, he said, they took off in a light blue Honda. Deputies spotted the Honda on Lake Drive N.E. They tried to make a traffic stop, but the suspects kept going. A chase ensued. The pursuit led to Five Mile Road near Eastview Drive where the driver lost control and crashed. The two men then bailed from the wrecked car and took off running. Deputies, assisted by Birmingham police, brought in a tracking dog and set up a perimeter around a wooded area. The first suspect was captured just after 1:30 p.m. The second suspect was captured a short time later. The Honda had been taken during a robbery on Feb. 14, 2015 in Center Point in which Daniels was charged. He is also now charged with probation violation in the 2015 cases. Daniels is being held in the Jefferson County Jail without bond. Duane Dog Chapman has scoured the four corners of the earth to capture fugitives. On Tuesday, the bounty hunter and reality television star was less conspicuous about his own whereabouts, posing for pictures with a Morgan County sheriffs deputy. World-famous bounty hunter Duane `Dog Chapman visited Morgan County! Deputies responded to a call to assist motorists and rolled up on Dog and his crew! the sheriffs office said in a Facebook post Tuesday. Morgan County deputies encountered Chapman when they were called to investigate a report of criminal trespassing at a home, said public information officer Mike Swafford. Swafford said he doesnt have details about why Chapman was in Alabama but that the bounty hunter was apparently looking for someone when his vehicle got stuck in a yard. The incident left some tire tracks in the yard, and Chapman agreed to pay the homeowner for any damage. Everybody left happy, Swafford said. The bounty hunter and his partner in crime, Beth Chapman, are releasing a new TV series, Dogs Most Wanted." The show will follow Chapman on his chase to capture the countrys most wanted fugitives. A top genetic scientist who came to Huntsvilles HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in 2015 is leaving the Alabama biotech institute for a position in Michigan. Dr. Elizabeth Worthey has accepted a position at Michigan State University (MSU) as associate professor and director of rare disease and population genomics, HudsonAlpha announced this week. Worthey came to HudsonAlpha at the same time Dr. Howard Jacob, a pioneer in using DNA analysis to solve health mysteries in children, arrived to set up a research focus on genetic medicine at the institute. Jacob left to accept a position in Wisconsin in 2018. Wortheys expertise was developing the software needed to analyze patient genomes. She was also the lead scientist in HudsonAlphas Information Is Power initiative that offers free and reduced genetic testing for breast, ovarian and other cancer risk to north Alabama residents each year. Dr. Worthey has made such an impact at HudsonAlpha and in North Alabama, Rick Myers, PhD, HudsonAlpha president and science director, said in a statement. Her genetics and software development and informatics expertise, along with her passion for solving the toughest undiagnosed disease cases has contributed greatly to the genomic medicine mission at HudsonAlpha. We congratulate her on this significant career step, wish her all the best and look forward to new collaborative opportunities in the future. HudsonAlpha set up the worlds first clinic to use genomic analysis to diagnose medical issues in patients. The Smith Family Clinic for Genomic Medicine remains open and seeing patients under the leadership of Dr. David Bick, another of the institutes 2015 arrivals. Michigan State University said Wortheys move makes the university one step closer to becoming a destination for DNA diagnostics and treatments of rare diseases. A Selma man has been convicted in the 2013 killing of a 77-year-old man during a robbery at his home. A Dallas County jury on Monday night found Justin J Simp Simpson, 31, guilty of capital murder and felony murder, said District Attorney Michael Jackson. Willie Berry was killed Dec. 10, 2013. Jackson said Simpson and accomplice, Lester Jones Jr., robbed Berry at his apartment complex off North Broad Street. During the holdup, Berry shot Jones in an effort to defend himself. Jones was killed. Simpson then shot and killed Berry. Later than night, Jackson said, Simpson went to a friends house and asked for .38-caliber bullets, saying he had just shot someone. The next day, Simpson asked the same friend for a ride to the bypass and Simpson threw the gun off the bridge. Berry was killed with a .38 revolver. Jackson said the trial lasted eight days. Jurors deliberated for about six hours. Simpson will be sentenced to life without parole at a later date. This was another of Selmas biggest gunslingers taken off the streets, Jackson said. To rob and kill a 77-year-old is cold-blooded. Al Jazeera investigates claims behind the selling of Palestinian homes in occupied East Jerusalem to Israeli settlers. In the ongoing struggle to reclaim their homeland, the Palestinian Authority has always seen occupied East Jerusalem as the future capital of a Palestinian state, but the situation on the ground is rapidly changing as more and more Palestinian homes are taken by Israeli entities. While this has been happening for decades, according to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, there are new agents involved: Palestinian middlemen who act as fronts in the purchase allegedly backed by settler organisations and, in some cases, individuals in Arab countries. Getting permission to build a home in Jerusalem is nearly impossible. There is little land allocated for construction and Israeli authorities usually deny Palestinian applications for building permits. Palestinians are often forced to build their homes illegally, without permits. When they build, the municipality of Jerusalem starts issuing demolition orders and imposes huge fines up to hundreds of thousands of dollars on someone already financially overburdened, explained Khaled Zabarqa, a Jerusalemite lawyer who works with families whose homes have been acquired by settlers. Under financial pressure, many families choose to sell their homes, so they look for credible Palestinian buyers so as not to sell to settlers. Enter Palestinian buyers with cash to pay for the homes, sometimes well over market price, and whose profiles are acceptable to sellers and the Palestinian authorities who vouch for their credibility. These Palestinian investors will then sign over their newly bought East Jerusalem real estate to offshore companies favoured by settler organisations which later transfer ownership to a settler organisation. Silwan In 2014, in the historically Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan, two Palestinian brokers were involved in purchasing a number of homes that ended up with Israeli settlers: Shams al-Din al-Qawasmi and Fareed Hajj Yahya. Al-Qawasmi told sellers he was buying their homes on behalf of Emirati charities and Hajj Yahya was known to work for an Emirati charity. When a person agrees to sell theyve exhausted all options they can no longer manage the debts they owe. When an Emirati organisation offers to purchase the property, they see it as a chance to get out of the mess theyre in, said Zabarqa, the lawyer. Mohamed Baydoun, a Silwan landlord, heard that al-Qawasmi had bought a home nearby for three times its value an indication the purchase is actually for settlers and confronted him. At first, he denied it. Then he admitted that he had bought it for the Emirates, Baydoun told Al Jazeera. I asked him, What would the UAE want with it? He said they wanted it to build a kindergarten or a clinic or something. I told him: That home is going to settlers, Shams. It did. As did one of Baydouns own properties, sold by his son to Hajj Yahya, the other Palestinian broker behind the 2014 deals. The two bought and allegedly passed on about 25 Silwan properties to Israeli settlers. A sale agreement made between Baydouns son, Anan Baydoun, and one of the alleged brokers from the 2014 deals, Fareed Hajj Yahya [Still from video/Al Jazeera] They want the Palestinians involved in selling real estate so, in the future, if there is someone to blame for losing Jerusalem, its the Palestinians, not the Gulf or other Arab states, says Professor Abdulsattar Qassim of An-Najah University. Unlikely Palestinian player Fadi el-Salameen, a Palestinian businessman who tried to buy an East Jerusalem home, claimed he wanted to buy real estate to stop it from going to settlers and that he had sought financing for the purchase from individuals in the United Arab Emirates. His plans were cut short by another, surprising actor, much closer to home than the UAE: the Palestinian Authority (PA). The PA refused to give el-Salameen clearance for the sale and froze his companys bank account for suspicious funds. According to Palestinian Attorney General Ahmad Barak, el-Salameens account received funds only from a company owned by Mohammed Dahlan, a major political rival of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Dahlan has lived in the UAE since 2011, where he is a special adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. Kamal al-Khatib, deputy leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, also believes there is more to the story of financing from the UAE. Emirati businessmen are behind this deal, and no doubt that they got help from certain Palestinians, who help them pass these deals, he said. Most of the brokers are Palestinians and those that receive bribes from these brokers are influential Palestinians from within the Palestinian Authority, Qassim said. The PA has no actual power in Jerusalem, but it maintains a Ministry for Jerusalem Affairs and a Governorate of Jerusalem from the West Bank, which it governs. In recent years, Jerusalemite homeowners started turning to the governorate for Palestinian intelligence clearance on potential buyers, hoping to keep their homes away from settlers. The governorate gives the name of the potential buyer to the intelligence services. They do the necessary research after which we give approval conditional approval, says former governor of Jerusalem and current PA minister for Jerusalem affairs, Adnan al-Husayni. Former governor of Jerusalem and current Minister of Jerusalem affairs Adnan al-Husayni [Still from video/Al Jazeera] Al-Qawasmi and Hajj Yahya had received PA clearance. Al Jazeera tried to reach al-Qawasmi but received no response. Hajj Yahya denied the accusations and claimed he had proof he did not sell to settlers. He, however, failed to show up for an interview with Al Jazeera. Khaled al-Attari, a well-known Palestinian businessman working between Ramallah and Jerusalem, also received PA clearance to buy the same East Jerusalem home, the Joudeh home. The Joudeh home sale Adeeb Joudeh, a Muslim Palestinian entrusted with the key to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, told Al Jazeera he tried to make sure the home he was selling was going to a trustworthy buyer. Adeeb Joudeh, former owner of the Joudeh home in the Old City [Still from video/Al Jazeera] I spoke to the governor at the time, Adnan al-Husayni, he spoke well of him. I spoke to a number of Palestinians, they all spoke well of Khaled al-Attari. Unfortunately, they were wrong, said Joudeh. As news spread that ownership of Joudehs home had been transferred to settlers, his neighbours turned their anger towards him. The Joudeh home, which was serving as a community clinic in the Old City, that was taken by settlers [Still from video/Al Jazeera] Al-Attari denied ever owning the house, telling Al Jazeera that an agreement had been drawn up but that didnt indicate the purchase was complete. However, Israeli land registry documents obtained by Al Jazeera show the transfer of ownership from the Joudeh family to al-Attari on April 23 and then to Daho Holdings an offshore company on the same day; al-Attari was the signatory on behalf of Daho. Khaled al-Attari, a Palestinian businessman accused of selling an Old City home to a settler organisation [Still from video/Al Jazeera] Property ownership was transferred from al-Attari to Daho Holdings Limited in the Israeli Land Registry on April 23, 2018 [Still from video/Al Jazeera] A communal mediation committee was called to bring Joudeh and al-Attari face to face and get to the bottom of the issue, where al-Attari denied selling the home to settlers. Soon after the committee, he stopped returning Al Jazeeras calls. Al-Attari seems to have highly placed allies who helped him. Adnan al-Hosayni, former PA governor of Jerusalem, signed off on the deal between al-Attari and Joudeh. In addition, Haaretz has said that al-Attari is close to Majed Faraj, head of PA intelligence. The spokesman for the PAs security chiefs office did not respond to Al Jazeeras request for comment. No accountability Because the PA has no jurisdiction over Jerusalem, finding who is to blame for these sales is complicated. While the PA intelligence clearance given to the buyers encourages the homeowners to sell, the sales themselves are not overseen by PA bodies. We have no one to turn to Anyone can sell there is no responsible authority we can go to for help. I have documents and papers but who do I take them to? said Kamal Qweider, an Old City resident who runs a popular Facebook page tracking home acquisitions. The PA announced an investigation into what happened with the Joudeh house sale, but the findings of past investigations were never publicised, adding to a mounting frustration among Jerusalemites already incensed that these brokers were given intelligence clearance. In the meantime, settlers continue to move into Palestinian neighbourhoods all over the city, where their presence becomes a fact on the ground that complicates any future negotiations on East Jerusalem, the intended capital of a future Palestinian state. As the speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, called MPs to Order! Order! before the result of yesterdays vote on Theresa Mays Brexit Deal was announced, one could be forgiven for thinking it was just an ordinary day in the British parliament. The MPs were acting traditionally rowdy as they grouped onto the long green benches lined up opposite each other, the Conservatives to one side and Labour to the other. The tension in the air felt superficial, a consequence of Britains time-honoured game of political theatrics, as it has often been for decades. Yet, there was nothing ordinary about what followed next. Once again, MPs had voted down the Brexit withdrawal agreement. This time by 391 votes in favour to 241 against a defeat by 149 votes. This was a slight improvement on Theresa Mays effort to secure support for her exit plans in January, where the defeat was by a record 230 votes. However, yesterdays result was still extraordinary the fourth largest margin in modern parliamentary history. For anything comparable, you have to go back to the 1920s. So how did Theresa May, and Britain, end up in this mess? It all started back in 2013, when Mays predecessor David Cameron promised an in-or-out of the EU referendum were he to win the upcoming general election. There was no pressing demand to hold such a vote from the wider British population, only an obsession about the EU within Camerons own Conservative Party. When Cameron unexpectedly won the 2015 election and had to organise the referendum, neither he nor the government had a plan as to how to actually do Brexit, nor any clear idea what the role of direct democracy should be within the British system. The June 23, 2016, referendum had no turnout threshold or special majority requirement as is normal for referendums on such important matters elsewhere in the world. The result was 52 percent to 48 percent in favour of exit, on a turnout of 72 percent. This lack of vision and preparation, which were evident long before the vote, have dogged Mays government ever since, and culminated in her monumental parliamentary defeats. Moreover, in the years since Camerons ill-fated referendum, Mays government made some moves that made an already hopeless situation worse: Rather than reaching out to the 48 percent that voted against exit, May systematically ignored their concerns. When pro-Leave campaigns were shown by the Electoral Commission to have broken campaign finance rules, Mays government once again ignored the problem. When the unimplementable promises made by the Leave campaigners before the referendum turned to dust, Mays government still persevered in trying to make Brexit happen. When seeking to solve the Northern Ireland border issue, May listened to the Democratic Unionist Party rather than seek a solution acceptable to all. While all these moves appear counterproductive and even illogical on the surface, one can make sense of it all by looking into the internal dynamics of Britains political parties. Three-quarters of the members of the Conservative Party voted for Brexit in the referendum and these members choose local candidates to run for the House of Commons in each constituency. Pragmatic Conservatives hence face a dilemma seek to solve the Brexit conundrum for the benefit of the country, but annoy their party base by doing so and then possibly be deselected? Or respect the members views, and take Britain towards a hard Brexit? On the benches opposite May, the Tories see one of the weakest oppositions in British political history. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is motivated more by the task of keeping his party together, and appealing to the young and predominantly urban Labour members who elected him, than he is to actually get on and oppose Mays Brexit. While an overwhelming majority of Labour supporters want the UK to remain in the EU, the Labour Party still appears to be committed to seeing Britains departure through. Both parties are riven by splits on EU issues 75 Conservatives refused to back May in yesterdays vote, with the majority of those opponents favouring a no-deal Brexit instead. On the Labour side, about half of the MPs do not back Corbyns Brexit line and want the UK to hold a second referendum and stay in the EU. Meanwhile, three Conservative and eight Labour MPs have recently left their respective parties to form The Independent Group, a proto-party in the House of Commons, to try to force the idea of a second referendum onto the agenda. When in the past the House of Commons was primarily divided along left-right lines, where the major issues of the day were economic or financial, the traditional two-party system in the UK did a reasonable job reflecting voters preferences. Today thanks to the referendum and the polarisation it caused that system no longer works, and the Commons finds itself in a state of paralysis as a result. Throughout all of this, May and Corbyn, both of them steeped in party politics they have each spent more than 40 years in their respective parties, refuse to seriously seek solutions collaboratively. May cannot bring herself to work with Corbyn for whom she has contempt, while Corbyn would rather see a Tory Brexit fail and a consequent Labour election victory than be collaborative now. So, the House of Commons cannot move forward. It is locked, paralysed, becalmed. But lacking a solution, in the next fortnight the UK will crash out of the EU without a deal, with major economic and political consequences. Yesterday the Brexit Deal on the table was roundly rejected. This evening a No Deal Brexit will likewise be turned down by MPs. So far May and her Conservatives have steadfastly refused a General Election or a so-called Peoples Vote a second referendum as ways out of the UKs current predicament. Which brings us to the only thing the House of Commons might actually be for to request more time for negotiations from the EU. Parliamentarians will vote about that on Thursday, and will probably request a couple more months from the EU. While that idea might appeal to enough MPs, the EU side is not keen. What, the EU will rightly ask, can the UK accomplish in a couple of months that it has been incapable of sorting out in two and a half years since the referendum? And with European Elections scheduled for 23-26 May, no one is keen for the UK to have to elect Members of the European Parliament. However Brexit works out in the end, the deep problems and divisions in British politics cannot simply be erased. The roots of Britains political dysfunction go so deep, the problems are so profound, the population so divided as a result of Brexit, that the UK needs a period of deep and profound political reflection. But first, the short term crisis of the next fortnight needs to be overcome. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance. Its time to talk about Silicon Valley as an imperial force and what has to be done to resist its power. Silicon Valley corporations are taking over the digital economy in the Global South, and nobody is paying attention. In South Africa, Google and Facebook dominate the online advertising industry, and are considered an existential threat to local media. Uber has captured so much of the traditional taxi industry that drivers have been petrol bombed in the South African taxi wars. Similar battles have broken out in Kenya. Meanwhile, Netflix is not only pulling subscribers away from local television services, they are buying up content in Africa. The streaming giant is now the number one source of Internet traffic across the world. In India, Facebook was forced to cancel its Free Basics programme that gave the social media giant control over the Internet experience on mobile phones. Indians protested that the service deepened Facebooks monopoly power and subjected them censorship and surveillance. Nevertheless, Facebook is expanding in most countries, including India, and Free Basics is active in over sixty countries. Through the project, Facebook has retained its influence in countries like Kenya and Ghana. What is going on? Big Tech corporations are wreaking havoc on the Global South. Theres a crisis in the tech ecosystem, and its called digital colonialism. What is digital colonialism? Under classic colonialism, Europeans dispossessed native peoples of their land, exploited their labour, exercised extraterritorial governance, and perpetuated dependency and plunder through strategic underdevelopment. Corporations like the East India Company played a pivotal role in this process. In their pursuit of profit and power, Europeans took ownership and control of critical infrastructure, including ports, waterways, and railroads. Under this arrangement, imperial powers designed railways for plunder by foreign empires: They bypassed the villages of the indigenous populations and linked up commercial and military outposts to the sea ports. Native peoples were exploited to extract raw materials, which were sent back to Europe for manufacturing. Surplus European products would then flood the colonies, undermining the indigenous populations ability to develop its own local industries. Colonial powers deployed this infrastructural domination across their vast empire. Similar to the technical architecture of classic colonialism, digital colonialism is rooted in the design of the tech ecosystem for the purposes of profit and plunder. If the railways and maritime trade routes were the open veins of the Global South back then, today, digital infrastructure takes on the same role: Big Tech corporations use proprietary software, corporate clouds, and centralised Internet services to spy on users, process their data, and spit back manufactured services to subjects of their data fiefdoms. For example, Google siphons user data from a variety of sources Google Search, Maps, Ads, Android location services, Gmail to provide them with one of the richest collections of information on the planet. Through the Open Handset Alliance and proprietary control of their killer apps, they ensure the worlds data flows into their corporate cloud. They then process the data for consumer and business services. Thus, tech corporations have expanded their products across the globe, extracting data and profit from users all around the world while concentrating power and resources in one country, the US (with China a growing competitor). Poorer countries are overwhelmed by readily available services and technology, and cannot develop their own industries and products that compete with Western corporations. They are also left unable to protect their people from exploitation. Can Big Tech be held accountable? Control over how technology works forms the foundation of digital colonialism. Software is often proprietary, which means that users cannot read, modify, or share the source code. This prevents them from understanding and controlling how their computers work. The public cannot hold Big Tech corporations accountable if they cannot take direct action to change how their software works. It is for this reason that American software programmer Richard Stallman started advocating for Free and Open Source Software in the early 1980s. A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power, Stallman reasoned. People should be given the freedom to control their computers, which requires them having access to software source code the set of instructions that tells your computer what to do. Free Software licenses are written to invert the authoritarian power of proprietary software: They secure the users freedom to use, study, modify, and share the software. They keep software free and open for everyone and enable accountability. For example, Microsoft configures its Windows operating system to spy on its users. If it were not under the proprietary control of Microsoft, computer hacktivists would surely strip out its spying services and release a modified, spy-free version of Windows for the public. However, Free Software alone is not enough to protect the public interest because in recent years, surveillance capitalism has given rise to centralised Internet services outside of user control. Platforms like Facebook function as information intermediaries which stand between end users. Want to send a picture to a friend? You send it to Facebook first, and then your friend downloads it from Facebook. With the shift to centralised services run by corporate giants, the surveillance of users sky-rocketed. Cloud computing plays a key role. While Free Software creates accountability for software running inside your own device, it cannot produce accountability for cloud services run by corporations. This is because the software is running on someone elses computer (Facebook, Google, etc). Corporate clouds dispossess the people of the ability to control their computers. Cloud services provide petabytes of information to corporations, who use the data to train their artificial intelligence systems. AI uses Big Data to learn it requires millions of pictures to understand how to recognise, say, the letter A in its different fonts and forms. In this sense, data is the new oil. When applied to humans, the sensitive details of peoples personal lives become an incredibly valuable resource that tech giants are incessantly trying to extract. The concentration of data is concentration of power Feedback effects of Big Data make the situation worse: Those who have more and better data can create the best artificial intelligence services, which attracts more users, which gives them even more data to make the service better, and so on. Network effects, economies of scale, and vast resources for infrastructure, training, and product development further concentrate corporate power. Silicon Valley can hire the best computer engineers, purchase startups and competitors, and lobby governments for favours. Add to this the fact that the Internet is universal and platforms are not easy to restrict without draconian censorship tools like the Great Firewall of China, and we have a situation where Silicon Valley is concentrating power at the global level. American Big Tech companies are just as dominant outside of the US as they are inside of it. And with US markets relatively saturated, they are seeking to colonise emerging markets. Microsoft and Google, for example, are investing in efforts to place their software in Global South classrooms through programmes like Microsoft Partners in Learning and Google Classroom. This hooks young people into their products from an early age, and biases Global South software developers towards their software ecosystems. Big Tech corporations are also building their own server farms in foreign countries to capture emerging markets and shift them towards the Silicon Valley model of a centralized cloud economy. Some commentators maintain that for all the problems of Big Tech, they offer valuable services. A common trope is that Facebook connects the worlds users. Using the same logic, people still praise the British for providing colonial subjects with railroads. The obvious point is that these systems were designed for domination, when they could have been built to benefit local communities. At the same time, countries in the Global South are less able to protect their people from exploitation. Countries with power the United States, the EU states, Australia are the ones calling the shots on Big Tech companies. This poses a problem: Users around the globe are being subjected to the norms set by US-based companies. Code is law in the sense that computer code constitutes privatised regulation binding all users. If YouTube wants to block, say, the sharing of content protected by fair use, theres not much that foreign jurisdictions can do. The same goes for speech regulation, content moderation, and freedom of association: The major social networks use algorithms and employee rulebooks to censor content, shape what people see in news feeds, and determine which activist and other social groups people are allowed to form on their platforms. This means that users outside of the US are under the de facto extraterritorial governance of Silicon Valley. What can the Global South do? If a system is designed for exploitation and control, then it needs to be changed. Railroads are great, but bypassing local villages for imperial power is not. If you want to stop exploitation and surveillance, you have to redesign these systems. A movement to combine Free and Open Source Software with tools to re-decentralise the Internet is attempting to do just that. In 2010, Columbia Law Professor Eben Moglen announced the FreedomBox project: Free Software that turns computer devices into personal servers that provide the technology needed to run cloud services without a middle-man in control. FreedomBox can host decentralised social networks like Mastadon or GNU Social as well as email and messenger services. It builds in the option for Tor onion routing to protect your privacy and allows you to store your data on your home device and access it on the go. The FreedomBox project incorporates major contributions from core developers Sunil Adapa and Joseph Nuthalapati. Over the past few months, they worked with NGO Swecha to successfully implement FreedomBoxes in twelve Indian villages. The project uses old devices to offer WiFi connectivity to villagers while providing them decentralised services and blocking surveillance. The FreedomBox project is expanding to other villages, and it is open-sourced and built for replication across the world. Initiatives like Indias FreedomBox should be developed and scaled up. In a feasibility study, researchers at MIT found that Internet re-decentralisation is workable from a technological standpoint. There are challenges, to be sure. Development is under-funded and getting millions of people to use new services could be difficult, but it is not impossible and its cost outstrips its benefits by far. Tech that is Free and Open Source, interoperable, and decentralised can be built so that no institution anywhere in the world could own or control it. This would alleviate many problems of territorial jurisdiction. Adding in new legal tools to complement an overhaul of the digital ecosystem would further strengthen digital rights. Fighting digital colonialism is important not only from the perspective of privacy and individual user rights. At a time where the global divide is threatening the environment and with it, our very survival, we cannot afford to further concentrate wealth and power. We must ensure that technology will serve the worlds people, not the interests of the one percent. As the Vice Chancellor of Wits University in South Africa warned, Considerations of [technological innovations] have not even entered the public discourse and we are at a collective risk of once again merely being victims of economic forces and processes beyond our control. Exceptions notwithstanding, few are contemplating how this actually works. Its time to talk about Silicon Valley as an imperial force, and take seriously the fundamental changes needed to stop digital colonialism. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance. With just weeks to go before EU exit deadline, divorce deal remains as thorny as at the start of negotiations. London, United Kingdom British Prime Minister Theresa May suffered another resounding defeat in parliament when her Brexit deal was voted down by 391 MPs against 242 who supported it. More MPs decided to get on board on Tuesday and voted in favour of the deal than last January when it was defeated by a larger margin of 230. But the legally binding changes the prime minister announced on Monday night after a last-minute meeting with the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker did not prove enough for the hard Brexiter wing of her party and for the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the prime ministers ally in Northern Ireland. They both voted against it out of concerns over the so-called backstop protocol of the withdrawal agreement, an insurance policy to keep an open border in the island of Ireland. They argue the backstop could trap the UK within the European Unions trade rules indefinitely, and create a divide between Northern Ireland and the rest of the country. With fewer than three weeks to go before the Brexit deadline on March 29, the issue of the only land border between the EU and the United Kingdom after the UKs exit from the block remains as thorny as at the start of the negotiations. All options remain on the table for how Brexit might resolve. Delaying Brexit This appears to be the most likely option at the moment, but it doesnt rule out any of the others. MPs will get to cast two more votes this week, the first to rule out a no-deal exit on March 29, and the second to delay Brexit by extending Article 50 of the EU treaty. Confident of the support of some conservative MPs who had voted against her in the last meaningful vote, the prime minister could also decide to put forward a request to extend article 50 herself. This would buy her time to try and get more concessions from the EU and hold a third vote on her deal. May wants to avoid any extension that would oblige the UK to take part in the European Parliament elections on May 23 to 26 while in the process of exiting the bloc. That means the new deadline would have to be before the new assemblys first sitting on July 2. But extending Article 50 which allows member states to leave the bloc is not unilateral; all other 27 EU member states need to agree. Any decision on a delay will be taken when the European Council next convenes, on March 21-22. 190312202436751 No deal MPs on Wednesday can rule out leaving the EU without a deal on March 29, but a hard Brexit remains the default option in EU law. Fears for the consequences of a no-deal Brexit on British businesses, as well as on UK and EU citizens, have increased since Mays deal was defeated two months ago. Businesses, particularly smaller ones, have admitted theyre not ready. The EU has done everything it can to help get the Withdrawal Agreement over the line. The impasse can only be solved in the UK. Our no-deal preparations are now more important than ever before, said the EUs chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, in a tweet after the second meaningful vote. Brexiters hold the view that no deal is better than a bad deal. Former foreign secretary Boris Johnson said on Tuesday leaving without a deal is the only safe route out of the EU. The threat of a no-deal Brexit has been key to Mays negotiating strategy with the EU. Another referendum Opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn announced two weeks ago that his party is committed to backing a second referendum. What options would be on the ballot papers would have to be established by parliament, but they could include remaining in the EU, leaving without a deal, or a number of withdrawal options, including Mays deal. A second referendum would have to gain parliamentary approval, and at the moment it remains unclear if there is a majority for it. Some Labour MPs from leave-voting constituencies would side against it. General election Corbyn called for a general election after the deal was defeated again on Tuesday. However, he also said the opposition was ready to work with the government to reach a consensus on a deal. If that is the route the prime minister decides to pursue, it would be hard for her to keep her party together, according to John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University and senior research fellow at NatCen Social Research. While May said during her speech to the Commons that MPs will now have to make choices as to whether they want no Brexit, a second referendum, or a different deal, what she did not indicate is what, if anything, the government might do to enable the house to make that choice, said Curtice. What would be crucial is what amendments will be put down on Thursday to begin opening up that process, Curtice told Al Jazeera. The preconditions for a general election might then arise if the government finds itself being obliged by the House of Commons to pursue a policy direction that the [Conservative] party can no longer cohere around. And, therefore, basically the administration collapses, said Curtice. But were not there yet. UK MPs vote against leaving the European Union without a withdrawal agreement, paving the way for likely Brexit delay. London, United Kingdom With just over two weeks to go until the Brexit deadline, the British parliament has signalled that it is strongly against leaving the European Union without a deal. After politicians rejected British Prime Minister Theresa Mays plan to quit the EU for a second time on Tuesday, the government on Wednesday put forward a motion to rule out a no-deal Brexit on March 29, the current deadline. MPs then backed an amendment to that motion, which rules out a no-deal Brexit under any circumstances. The motion as amended was passed by 321 votes to 278. Wednesdays vote is not legally binding, however, and does not rule out a no-deal Brexit altogether. 190313013243252 A deal or another alternative needs Parliaments approval. MPs on Wednesday also voted down an amendment which resurrected elements of the Malthouse compromise for a managed no-deal, supported by prominent Brexiters. That amendment included a delay to May 22 for preparations. The prime minister confirmed that a vote on extending Article 50 will take place as promised on Thursday. The options before us are the same as they always have been, she warned, reiterating that voting for a deal is the only way of avoiding no deal. Fears that a no-deal Brexit could have serious consequences for the UK economy and its citizens in the EU, as well as EU citizens in the UK, have increased since Mays deal was first voted down in January. Small and medium-sized businesses, in particular, have admitted they are not ready for a no-deal scenario. May said that if MPs back a deal by March 20, she will seek a short, limited, technical extension to ratify the deal. If they do not, however, she will seek a longer extension meaning the UK will have to take part in the European Parliament elections at the end of May. Opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said a compromise solution should be found on options for a softer Brexit. Whats next? If MPs on Thursday vote to delay Brexit, the prime minister will put forward a formal request to the European Union for an extension of Article 50. May wants to avoid an extension that would oblige the UK to take part in the European Parliament elections while in the process of exiting the bloc. That means the new deadline would have to be before the new assemblys first sitting on July 2. Any extension of Article 50 would have to be agreed by all 27 remaining EU member states. The next opportunity to do that will be on March 21-22, when the next European Council convenes. I dont want a long extension The EU has said that in the event of a delay, the UK must provide a good reason for postponing the divorce date. I dont want a long extension, said the European Parliaments lead Brexit spokesman, Guy Verhofstadt, addressing MEPs in Brussels on Wednesday. An extension, where we go beyond the European elections, and the European elections will be hijacked by the Brexiters. We will talk only about [Brexit], and not about the real problems, and the real reforms we need in the European Union, the spokesman added. Verhofstadt hit out at Nigel Farage, the far-right former UKIP leader and MEP, by saying that a long extension would only give him a new mandate to continue to have a salary that he can transfer to his offshore company while trying to destroy the European Union from within. In response, Farage urged EU leaders to veto the Article 50 extension so that both you and we can get on with the rest of our lives. Farage led the UKs unofficial leave campaign, convincing Britons in their millions to vote for quitting the EU in a June 23, 2016 referendum. Michel Barnier, the EUs chief Brexit negotiator, said after parliament rejected Mays deal on Tuesday that the risk of a no-deal Brexit, whether by plan or by accident, has never been higher. Environment Secretary Michael Gove, meanwhile, has hinted that the government may also on Thursday move to hold a series of indicative votes on Brexit options. Rescuers search for more than 100 children feared trapped after collapse of a building that houses a school in Lagos. Rescuers combed through the rubble early Thursday after at least eight people were killed and as many as 100 children feared trapped when a building housing a school collapsed in Nigerias commercial capital, Lagos. The incident took place near Itafaji market on Lagos Island at around 10am local time (09:00 GMT). While awaiting official rescue efforts, many locals and passersby began their own attempts to free people from the debris, using their bare hands to shift slabs of concrete. Dozens of children were trapped inside, Adesina Tiamiyu, head of Lagos State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA), which is supervising the rescue operation, told reporters. So far, emergency workers pulled 40 people alive from the rubble, some of them badly injured, he said. Breaking: A 3 storey building with a primary school inside has collapsed in Lagos island at the Faji junction. pic.twitter.com/bDar8a1Vtr National Industrial Safety Council of Nigeria (@NISCN_Nigeria) March 13, 2019 Workers from the Red Cross and police shovelled debris away as thousands of people swarmed around the accident site, erupting into cheers as limp forms were pulled from the rubble. Residents of the area said about 100 children attended the school, which was on the third floor of the building. The structure also housed offices, shops and residential units. School bags, toys, and clothes could be seen among the piles of rubble as a bulldozer tried to clear a path through some of the wreckage. Locals began their own desperate rescue efforts before officials arrived [Temilade Adelaja/Reuters] I was passing by and heard a house collapsed. I had to straight away reach people living in there to rescue those that could be rescued, a man involved in the rescue efforts told reporters. At least some people have been rescued and taken to hospitals. They are mainly students as there is a school there, he said. Speaking to Al Jazeera from the scene, Tiamiyu praised the response of the local community, saying locals had saved so many lives before official responders arrived. Dozens of people were pulled from the rubble and taken to hospitals [Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters] Locals passed water and helmets to dust-covered rescuers attempting to sift through the debris. One local resident told AFP news agency the building collapsed without warning. We were smoking outside when the building just collapsed, said Olamide Nuzbah. As night fell on the scene, bright lights were brought in to allow search efforts to go on. We will continue to go ahead until we are sure no one is buried under the rubble, Tiamiyu said. What the excavator is doing is carefully going through the rubble, clearing it and looking for possible trapped persons, either dead or alive, and once we see them, we will stop and bring them out. Frequent collapses On densely populated Lagos Island, buildings are often put up without official permits, according to Al Jazeeras Ahmed Idris, speaking earlier on Wednesday from the Nigerian capital, Abuja. Lagos is one of the fastest growing cities in Africa, resulting in fierce competition for land. It is not clear whether the collapsed building failed to meet safety standards. Its common to find schools in residential areas and in other locations that were not meant for educational institutions, Idris said. Rescue getting easier with the deployment of sophisticated gadgets. @lasemasocial @fedfirelagos pic.twitter.com/lghH50V7sp Lagos State Police Command II (@rrslagos767) March 13, 2019 Tiamiyu was also sceptical that the building met the safety standards. I doubt whether the Lagosian government would have approved a school in a building like this, he said. In September 2014, 116 people died when a six-floor building where a celebrity televangelist was preaching collapsed in Lagos. Two years later, at least 60 people were killed when a church came down in southeastern Nigeria. China tells UN Security Council it needs more time to examine the sanctions request against the Jaish-e-Muhammad leader. China has put on hold a request by Britain, France and the United States to add the leader of a Pakistan-based armed group behind a suicide attack in Kashmir to the UN terror blacklist. In a note sent to the UN Security Council, China on Wednesday said it needed more time to examine the sanctions request targeting Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) leader Masood Azhar, diplomats said. It was the third time that the UN Security Council was considering a request to put Azhar on the UN sanctions blacklist, which would subject him to a global travel ban and asset freeze. China has twice blocked attempts, in 2016 and 2017, to impose sanctions on the JeM leader. The group, which has carried out a number of high-profile attacks on Indian targets, was added to a UN watchlist in 2001, while Pakistan banned it a year later in 2002. JeM claimed responsibility for the February 14 attack in India-administered Kashmir that killed at least 40 Indian troops and triggered a massive military standoff between the South Asian neighbours. India and Pakistan carried out air raids last month across their disputed Kashmir frontier in clashes that sent tensions soaring between the nuclear-armed countries. 190306033806638 On February 26, India staged an air raid on a camp inside Pakistan that it said belonged to JeM. Pakistan responded a day later with fighter jets crossing into India-administered Kashmir. An Indian Air Force pilot who was shot down over Pakistani territory was later sent back to India. Islamabad announced last week that more than 100 armed fighters, including many from JeM, had been detained, but India has greeted those statements with suspicion. Pakistans Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi also recently denied in a television interview that JeM had claimed responsibility for the suicide attack. Kashmir has been split between India and Pakistan since their independence in 1947. India has long accused its neighbour of supporting Kashmir rebels. Pakistan denies any role in attacks in the Indian side of the Himalayan region, where tens of thousands have died in an armed rebellion since 1989. The murder of Jamal Khashoggi made international headlines, but the Committee to Protect Journalists says more than 1,300 journalists have been killed since 1992. The Committee to Protect Journalists says 1,337 journalists have been killed since 1992. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists is launching an initiative to highlight the work of slain journalists across the globe. The campaign, called, The Last Column, memorialises the final publication of journalists before they were killed. Al Jazeeras Heidi Zhou-Castro reports. The US has conducted a series of air attacks against Taliban fighters, but elders and local officials say they killed 35 civilians. The Taliban and the United States show no sign of slowing down their battle in Afghanistan, even as they conclude peace talks in Qatar. Meanwhile, on the ground in Afghanistan, the violence continues. The US has conducted a series of air attacks against Taliban fighters, but elders and local officials say they killed 35 civilians. American forces are refuting reports of civilian deaths and have called it Taliban propaganda. Al Jazeeras Charlotte Bellis reports from Kabul. The difficult work of finding the remains of those on board ill-fated Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 continues. The families of those who died on board the Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 have been allowed to visit the site for the first time. A team from Boeing has arrived at the crash site in Ethiopia as the investigation into what went wrong enters its third day. Forensic and investigative teams from around the world are arriving to assist the Ethiopian effort. Al Jazeeras Mohammad Adow has more from Ejere in Ethiopia. Black boxes from crashed plane to be sent abroad because Ethiopia lacks facilities for necessary analysis, says official Addis Ababa, Ethiopia The black boxes recovered from the Ethiopian Airlines crash site will be sent to Europe for further analysis, the airlines announced. Flight ET 302, heading to Nairobi from Addis Ababa, crashed on Sunday, six minutes after taking off. All 157 people on board 149 passengers and eight crew died in the crash. The black boxes are going to Europe. The airline and the investigations bureau are currently meeting to determine which country, Asrat Begashaw, Ethiopian Airlines spokesman, told Al Jazeera on Wednesday. There are several possible countries. We will make a decision very soon. Maybe this evening. Ethiopia is sending the black boxes abroad because the country lacks the facilities to carry out the necessary detailed analysis to determine the cause of the disaster which took place just over 50km outside the capital, Begashaw added. While Ethiopia did not confirm which country it would send the black boxes to, later on Wednesday Germanys Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation (BFU) the agency responsible for investigating air accidents ruled out analysing the boxes. This is a new type of aircraft with a new black box, with new software, said Germout Freitag, a BFU spokesman. We cant do it. The crash was the second involving the Boeing 737 MAX 8 model in five months. In October, Lion Air Flight 610 crashed in Indonesia 10 minutes after take-off, killing 189 people. The cause of that accident is still under investigation. Investigation ongoing Families that Al Jazeera spoke to said the move by Ethiopian Airlines to ground the plane model came too late. Something should have been done earlier, said Bayih Demessie, husband of one the eight crew members killed in the crash. However, the countrys top aviation official told Al Jazeera that they could not have acted any sooner. We grounded the Boeing 737 MAX 8 now because our suspicion about its safety has increased after this accident. That was not the case before, said Wossenyeleh Hunegnaw, director general of Ethiopias civil aviation authority. 190312134422968 Before Sundays disaster, more than 370 jets of the model were in operation. Following the latest crash, the European Union and several countries banned the aircraft model from their airspace. From the UK to Australia, a raft of countries and airlines across the world have also moved to ground Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. Boeing, the worlds biggest aircraft maker, maintains the 737 MAX 8 planes are safe to fly adding that they have full confidence in the jet. Meanwhile, four days after the fatal accident families are still waiting for the bodies of their loved ones that died in the accident. The bodies have not been released to the families because tests are still been carried out to determine the identities due to the conditions we found the bodies in, Asrat said. Also, there is an active investigation that is going on. We hope to release it to the families in the coming days, he added. Xinjiang governor says Uighur camps will gradually disappear if there comes a time that society does not need them. China is running boarding schools not concentration camps in the far western region of Xinjiang, its governor said on Tuesday, as the United States called conditions there completely unacceptable. At a news conference on the sidelines of the annual meeting of Chinas ceremonial legislature, Xinjiang Governor Shohrat Zakir described extensive reports on conditions in the camps as pure fabrications. On Tuesday, regional authorities said heavily guarded internment camps for Muslims which China calls vocational training centres will gradually disappear if there comes a time that society does not need them. China has faced growing international opprobrium for the mass internment camps in Xinjiang, a vast region bordering central Asia that is home to millions of Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities. Activists say there is a network of mass detention camps there holding more than a million people, part of a crackdown that Beijing says is needed to stem the threat of religious extremism. Former inmates have described harsh conditions in which Muslim minorities are subject to political indoctrination and psychological torture. Zakir is from the regions native Uighur ethnic group [Mark Schiefelbein/AP] Zakir, the Xinjiang governor, said the camps do not target any particular faith, though religious activities are banned in the camps. Former detainees say the overwhelming majority of those in the camps are Muslim. We fully ensure freedom of religion, including accommodating Muslim trainees' desire for halal food, Zakir said, adding that they can request time off and go home on weekends, like many boarding schools. Like his immediate predecessors as Xinjiang governor, Zakir is from the regions native Uighur ethnic group, providing a public face for the government and its claims that Xinjiang is an autonomous region. However, the real decision-making power resides with the regions ruling Communist Party chief, who is most often part of the countrys Han Chinese ethnic majority. Current Xinjiang Party Secretary Chen Quanguo is known for hardline policies which he previously enacted while serving in the same capacity in the Buddhist region of Tibet. Observers say Chen has now brought an even greater degree of heavy security and surveillance to Xinjiang, where police checkpoints and facial recognition-equipped CCTV cameras have become ubiquitous in recent years. Sam Brownback, US envoy on religion, commented on the horrific situation in Xinjiang during a telephone news conference on Tuesday. He said China has provided completely unsatisfactory answers for why the camps exist and held open the possibility of punitive measures such as sanctions if corrective actions arent taken. Several Xinjiang officials at the briefing on Tuesday said they welcome visits by journalists to the region to understand realities on the ground. Yet foreign journalists who have tried to independently report in Xinjiang in recent years have been followed by police, arrested and ordered to delete their footage. China maintains that the regions security measures are necessary for combating latent religious extremism. Over the past decade, violence blamed on Uighurs including riots and a mass stabbing at a train station have killed hundreds. Zakir repeated Chinas claim that there have been no violent incidents in Xinjiang for more than two years. He added, however, that there remains a long fight ahead for efforts to defeat extremism. We cannot relax one bit, Zakir said. Governor Gavin Newsom has imposed a moratorium on carrying out the death penalty in California, granting a reprieve to 737 condemned inmates the largest death row population in the United States. The death penalty has been an abject failure. It discriminates based on the colour of your skin or how much money you make, he told a news conference on Wednesday. Its ineffective, irreversible, and immoral. It goes against the very values that we stand for, which is why California is putting a stop to this failed system. 190208151016703 Newsom also withdrew the lethal injection regulations that death penalty opponents already have tied up in courts and announced the closure of a new execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison that was never used. Newsom, a Democrat who took office in January, has been a staunch opponent of the death penalty, last carried out in California in 2006. The death penalty has been an abject failure. It discriminates based on the color of your skin or how much money you make. Its ineffective, irreversible, and immoral. It goes against the very values that we stand for which is why CA is putting a stop to this failed system. Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) March 13, 2019 Newsom said his views on the death penalty were first shaped 40 years ago when he learned of his grandfathers and fathers advocacy for a wrongfully convicted man. 190311214738671 I was a young man learning that life story, he said after signing the order. Ive gotten a sense over a course of many, many years over the disparities in our criminal justice system. Its a very emotional place that I stand, Newsom told reporters. This is about who I am as a human being, this is about what I can or cannot do; to me, this was the right thing to do. US President Donald Trump denounced the decision and said it didnt have the support of voters. Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers. Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2019 Claire Finkelstein from the University of Pennsylvania told Al Jazeera that the California governor acted on the basis of two concerns: racial disparity in the administration of the death penalty, and innocence. A study was done a number of years ago in Georgia, which showed that there was a very strong correlation between the race of the victim and discrimination, so that if you were black and your victim was white, you had up to 11 times greater chance of receiving death penalty than the other way around, said Finkelstein. Largest death row population California has not executed anyone since 2006, when Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor. Though voters in 2016 narrowly approved a ballot measure to speed up the punishment, no condemned inmate faced imminent execution. Since Californias last execution, its death row population has grown to house one of every four condemned inmates in the US. 2013101011252327485 Among the most notorious inmates is Lonnie David Franklin Jr, also known as the Grim Sleeper, who was sentenced to death for 10 murders between 1985 and 2007. Others on death row are Scott Peterson, whose trial for killing his wife Laci riveted the country, and Richard Davis, who kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas during a slumber party and strangled her. US Senator Kamala Harris, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, applauded Newsoms decision. As a career law enforcement official, I have opposed the death penalty because it is immoral, discriminatory, ineffective, and a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars, she said in a statement. While the governors move is certain to be challenged in court, aides say his power to grant reprieves is written into the states constitution. Human Rights Watch said that, with the governors decision, California continues a trend in the US of moving away from putting people to death. The state joins Colorado, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, which have similar bans, and 20 states that have abolished the death penalty, it said. Police say woman blew herself and child up during a raid after husband detained for planning Jakarta attacks. The wife and child of a man arrested for plotting attacks in the Indonesian capital were killed on Wednesday after the woman detonated explosives during a siege of their home in North Sumatra. The woman blew herself up hours after throwing a home-made bomb that wounded an officer as police tried to search the house in Sibologa district on Tuesday, national police spokesman Dedi Prasetyo told The Jakarta Post. We have received information that the wife blew herself and the child up, he said. Police officers at the location said two explosions were heard and smoke seen at the house at about 1:30am (18:00 GMT), Prasetyo said. Before the blasts, the woman refused calls from police and local leaders to surrender. Police are now still conducting sterilisation at the crime scene and finding a safe way to evacuate the bodies of the woman and her child, he said. Prasetyo said the womans husband, known as Husein, was arrested on Tuesday after the interrogation of Rinto Sugiharto, another suspect apprehended in Lampung on Saturday, uncovered plans for attacks in Jakarta. Both men were members of Jemaah Anshorut Daulah, a network affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) group, police said. Police asked Husein to persuade his wife to surrender by talking to her through a loudspeaker. Peace be unto you. Its me. I am all good here. Please give up, Husein said in the local language, the Post reported. Warning comes a week after Israel said its navy could act against Iranian oil smuggling to evade US sanctions. Iran will respond firmly to any Israeli naval action against its oil shipments, Irans defence minister said, a week after Israel warned its navy could act against what it called Iranian oil smuggling to evade US sanctions. US President Donald Trump last year quit a nuclear deal with Iran and reimposed some sanctions, aiming to cut Tehrans oil exports to zero. Israels Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told naval officers last week that Iran was still resorting to clandestine measures to ship fuel. Irans Minister of Defense Amir Hatami was quoted as saying by the state news agency IRNA that Tehran had the military capabilities to confront any Israeli intervention, and said the international community would also not accept such action. Hatami said such confrontation would be considered as piracy and warned that if it happens, we will firmly respond. 180808085318800 The Iranian armed forces have certainly the capabilities to protect the countrys shipping lines in the best way against any possible threat, Hatami said. According to maritime experts, Iran has used a variety of measures to evade sanctions, including changing the names of ships or flag registries, switching off location transponders on ships and conducting ship-to-ship transfers offshore and away from large trade hubs. Irans navy has extended its reach in recent years, dispatching vessels to the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden. They intervened on Friday to repel pirates who attacked an Iranian oil tanker in the Gulf of Aden. The Israeli navy, whose largest vessels are missile corvettes and a small submarine fleet, is mostly active in the Mediterranean and Red seas. Iran has one of the worlds biggest tanker fleets in the world. In November, US Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook called Iranian vessels a floating liability, saying the US sanctions would bar them from international insurance markets, making them a risk for ports and canals which allow them access. Iranian officials have threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil shipping route in the Gulf, if the United States attempts to stop the Islamic Republics oil exports. Palestinian groups say escalating tensions in Al-Aqsa Mosque is a continuation of Israeli arbitrary policies. Israeli police said the entrances to Jerusalems Al-Aqsa Mosque compound will be reopened on Wednesday morning, a day after they sealed off the gates in response to what they said was a firebombing of a police station on the site. Palestinian witnesses, however, said the fire was caused by children who were playing with fireworks. No injuries were reported, but scuffles broke out between Israeli forces and Palestinian worshippers, which resulted in the arrest of at least two Palestinians, Israeli authorities said. Palestinian political groups said escalating tensions around Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, is a continuation of arbitrary policies of Israel against Palestinians. The prevention of the congregation, which wanted to pray in al-Aqsa, Judaisation, occupation, destruction and deportation of the capital [Jerusalem], will not affect the determination of our people to remain loyal to the resistance and the land, Fatah movement spokesperson Atef Abu Saif said in a written statement. Saif said incidents in Jerusalem was as a result of silence of the international community before the violation of all international agreements and human rights. Palestinian resistance group Hamas also decried the incidents and called on people to be insistent on their will to enter and leave the sacred mosque when they want. Mustafa Barghouthi, leader of the Palestinian National Initiative movement, also condemned the Israeli attacks on the Palestinian worshippers. Warning of Israeli provocation to damage sacred places, he said Palestinians can fail Israel in its aims by being united and determined. Places of worship are for prayer The closure of the sacred compound also drew censure from Jordan, the custodian of Muslim holy sites in occupied East Jerusalem. Jordanian Minister of Islamic Affairs and Holy Sites Abdul Nasser Abu Basal, described the barring of Muslim worshippers from the site as a flagrant assault on all religious values, rights and freedom, and an attack on all Muslims that touches the entire Islamic nation. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu lashed out at Israel over the incident, saying it was time to end the countrys recklessness. We cannot accept such reckless attacks on holy sites and the whole world needs to react against it, the Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency quoted Cavusoglu as saying. Nickolay Mladenov, the United Nations envoy for Middle East peace, urged both sides to respect the status quo at the holy esplanade and exercise restraint to avoid inflaming an already tense situation. Places of worship are for prayer, not for provocations and violence, he wrote on Twitter. Israel occupied East Jerusalem, in which the Al-Aqsa Mosque is located, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. It annexed the entire city in 1980 in a move never recognised by the international community. Those mourning loved ones lost on Flight ET 302 are trying to be patient as the government conducts its investigation, but just want the whole process to be over so they can begin to heal. A priest, a mother, her daughter, three grandchildren and a pilot were some of 32 Kenyan victims killed in Sundays Ethiopian Airlines crash. Though the 157 people on board were from 35 nations, Kenya suffered the highest number of fatalities. Al Jazeeras Catherine Soi spoke to some of the families of those who died. Official says the victims were all civilians who had come to a market in southwest Somalia to sell or buy livestock. At least eight people have been killed after a bomb exploded at a busy livestock market in a village in southwestern Somalias Bay region, an official has said. At least 40 others were wounded, Gof-Gadud village official Hassan Bayow told the local radio on Wednesday, according to the dpa news agency. All the victims were civilians who were there to sell or buy livestock at the time, he told Radio Kulmiye. Bayow said fighters belonging to armed group al-Shabab were likely behind the attack because those at the market had refused to pay the group. Al-Shabab regularly asks villagers for money handouts in the areas where it is present. There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Somalia has been plagued by violence since a civil war began in 1991 but the country has stabilised somewhat in recent years. Al-Shabab has been fighting to dislodge Somalias Western-backed government, which is protected by African Union-mandated peacekeepers. 190307155713851 The armed group controls large parts of rural, southern and central Somalia and continues to carry out high-profile attacks in capital Mogadishu and elsewhere. Since 2017, the United States has dramatically increased air attacks against al-Shabab. While 50 such raids were carried out last year by the US military command in Africa, the number this year stands at 23. Federal Aviation Administration says no basis to ground the plane after crash in Ethiopia killed all 157 on board. The United States said there is no basis to ground Boeing 737 MAX aeroplanes, after a second crash involving the model in less than five months killed everyone on board. Despite the aviation giants assurances that the plane is safe and reliable, the European Union, Britain, India and China joined other countries in grounding the plane or banning it from their airspace as they await the results of the investigation into the crash. However, the US has so far refused to take similar action against the US aerospace giants best-selling workhorse aircraft. Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief, Daniel Elwell, said in a statement on Tuesday. A new Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. That followed a crash in October of a new Lion Air jet of the same model in Indonesia, which killed 189 people shortly after takeoff from Jakarta. 190312163141841 The widening actions against the aircraft put pressure on Boeing, the worlds largest aeroplane manufacturer, to prove the MAX planes are safe, and the company has said it is rolling out flight software updates by April that could address issues with a faulty sensor. The full extent of the impact of these aircraft bans on international travel routes was unclear. There are about 350 MAX 8 planes currently in service around the world, according to the AFP news agency. Air Canada, for example, announced it was cancelling some of its flights to London following Britains decision to ban the aircraft. The EU aviation safety agency also closed European airspace to all MAX planes. Trump tweets US President Donald Trump weighed in with a blistering tweet on Tuesday: Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT, he wrote, referring to the prestigious university. Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2019 .needed, and the complexity creates danger. All of this for great cost yet very little gain. I dont know about you, but I dont want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2019 Trump later spoke by telephone to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who assured him the aircraft is safe, an industry source told AFP. US carriers have so far appeared to maintain confidence in Boeing, which has been ordered by the FAA to make changes to flight systems and pilot training procedures. Boeing has described the MAX series as its fastest-selling family of planes, with more than 5,000 orders placed to date from about 100 customers. But not since the 1970s, when the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 suffered successive fatal incidents, has a new model been involved in two deadly accidents in such a short period. The plane involved in Sundays crash was less than four months old, with Ethiopian Airlines saying it was delivered on November 15. It went down near the village of Tulu Fara, about 60km east of Addis Ababa. Ethiopian Airlines chief executive Tewolde GebreMariam said the plane had flown in from Johannesburg, spent three hours in Addis and was dispatched with no remark, meaning no problems were flagged. Investigators have recovered the black box flight recorders, which could potentially provide information about what happened, depending on their condition. Saudis prosecution has not specified charges against activists, who stand trial after almost year of imprisonment. Ten Saudi Arabian women stood trial on Wednesday for the first time since they were detained last year in a case that has intensified global scrutiny of the kingdoms human rights record following the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Loujain al-Hathloul, Aziza al-Yousef, Eman al-Nafjan and Hatoon Al-Fassi were among the women appearing before the Criminal Court in the capital, Riyadh, where charges were presented against them, court president Ibrahim al-Sayari said. He was speaking to reporters and diplomats, who were barred from attending the session. The women are among about a dozen prominent activists who were arrested last May in the weeks before a ban on women driving cars in the conservative kingdom was lifted. At the time of the arrests, the public prosecutor said five men and four women were being held on suspicion of harming the countrys interests and offering support to hostile elements abroad. State-backed media labelled them as traitors and agents of embassies, unnerving foreign diplomats in the key US ally. Al-Hathlouls brother tweeted late on Tuesday that the family had been informed that the trial had been moved to the criminal court from the Specialised Criminal Court, which was set up to try terrorism cases but is often used for political offences. It was not clear what was behind the decision. The kingdoms public prosecution has still not specified the charges. According to Amnesty International, al-Hathloul had no access to legal representation. We fear she will be charged and tried on terrorism-related charges for peaceful human rights work, Amnesty tweeted. . Walid Alhathloul | (@WalidAlhathloul) March 13, 2019 Translation: After 10 months of imprisonment, and half an hour before the trial starts, Loujain may finally know what the charges against her are but, so far, nobody knows what the formal charges are. Subjected to torture Last week, three dozen countries, including all 28 European Union members, called on Riyadh to release the activists, in a rare censure of the wealthy oil-rich kingdom at the UN Human Rights Council. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his British counterpart have said they raised the issue with Saudi authorities during recent visits. Activists say some of the detainees, including al-Hathloul, were held in solitary confinement and subjected to mistreatment and torture, including electric shocks, flogging and sexual assault. Saudi officials have denied those allegations. Other detainees include Nouf Abdelaziz, Mayaa al-Zahrani, Samar Badawi, Nassima al-Saada, Shadan al-Onezi, Amal al-Harbi and Mohammed al-Rabia, according to rights groups. Al-Hathloul, who had advocated an end to the driving ban and the kingdoms male guardianship system, was previously detained twice, including for 73 days in 2014 after she attempted to drive into Saudi Arabia from the neighbouring United Arab Emirates. This November 2014 still from a video released by Loujain al-Hathloul shows her driving towards the UAE-Saudi Arabia border before her first arrest [Screenshot/Loujain al-Hathloul/] The University of British Columbia graduate was ranked third by Arabian Business magazine in the list of top most powerful Arab women in 2015 in recognition of her fearless activism. Al-Nafjan and al-Yousef participated in a protest against the driving ban in 2013. Al-Yousef also authored a petition, which al-Nafjan and al-Hathloul signed, in 2016 seeking to end male guardianship, which requires women to obtain the consent of a male relative for any major life decisions. Activists and diplomats have speculated that the arrests may have been aimed at appeasing conservative elements opposed to social reforms pushed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. They may also have been meant as a message to activists not to push demands out of sync with the governments own agenda. The prince has courted the West to support his reform drive but his reputation was tarnished after Saudi agents killed Khashoggi, a royal insider-turned-critic, last October at the kingdoms Istanbul consulate. Dozens of other activists, intellectuals and clerics have been arrested separately in the past two years in an apparent bid to stamp out possible opposition. Security Council to decide whether to designate Masood Azhar as terrorist following suicide bombing in Kashmir. Islamabad, Pakistan The UN Security Council is set to take up a proposal to sanction Masood Azhar, chief of the Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) armed group, as a designated terrorist. The Security Council vote on Wednesday will be closely watched to see if China, an ally of Pakistan, withdraws its veto on the issue. Azhars JeM, based in Pakistan, claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in the Indian-administered Kashmir town of Pulwama last month that killed at least 40 Indian security forces personnel. The attack, and subsequent claim, led to India accusing Pakistan of controlling the attack. The subsequent spike in tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbours saw both countries bomb each others territory and at least one Indian fighter jet shot down, with its pilot captured by Pakistan. The pilots release shortly afterwards led to a decrease in tensions, but India continues to demand action against JeM. Since last week, Pakistan has arrested at least 44 people including Azhars son and brother-in-law. It also shut down scores of schools and mosques associated with JeM and the Lashkar-e-Taiba armed group, the interior ministry has said. Wednesdays vote at the Security Council will be a test to see if Pakistan is willing to have Azhars name added to a United Nations sanctions list that would see him subject to an assets freeze, international travel ban and arms embargo. JeM is already sanctioned by the UN with the group enlisted into the sanctions regime in October 2001, for participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf or in support of, supplying, selling or transferring arms and related materiel to or otherwise supporting acts or activities of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, according to the UN website. Debating change Previous votes to list Azhar have consistently been blocked by China, which holds veto power at the Security Council. Azhar formed JeM after his release from an Indian prison in return for 155 hostages held on board an Indian Airlines flight that was hijacked to Kandahar, in eastern Afghanistan. The group has carried out a series of high-profile attacks against Indian targets since its formation, notably attacks on the Indian-administered Kashmir legislative assembly and the Indian parliament in 2001, an attack on an Indian airbase in Pathankot in 2016 and, most recently, the Pulwama attack last month. What is Jaish-e-Muhammad For years, Azhar moved freely around Pakistan, organising sermons and recruitment activities on Pakistani soil. He was arrested shortly after the Pathankot attack under anti-terrorism laws, but was never formally charged. On Monday, Chinas foreign ministry said it was considering the issue, but urged responsible and serious discussions. China will continue to communicate and work with relevant parties in a responsible manner so as to properly resolve this matter, said foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang. Only by making a decision through responsible and serious discussions can we find a lasting solution. Last week, Pakistans Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry told Al Jazeera that Azhar was a marginal figure in JeM and that listing him would have limited value. Masood Azhar is now more of a symbolic thing, he said. Masood Azhar is now too ill, frail and old. Chaudhry said Pakistan was debating whether to withdraw its objection to the move. Azhar already appears on a Pakistani anti-terrorism watchlist, and JeM was banned by Pakistani authorities in 2002. Last week, Pakistan added Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation, the humanitarian relief wings of Lashkar-e-Taiba, to its list of banned terrorist organisations. Analysts say there appears to be limited potential for Pakistan to block its veto, exercised through China. Pakistan does not have a vote at the United Nations Security Council, and what I saw from the Chinese statement there does not appear to be a major change in their stance, said Zahid Hussain, an Islamabad-based security analyst. They probably want a more comprehensive resolution [mentioning the situation in Kashmir], and if Masood Azhars name is included in it, then they wouldnt mind. Follow Al Jazeeras Asad Hashim on Twitter @AsadHashim The US Senate will vote on Wednesday on a resolution to end Washingtons support for the Saudi Arabia-led military campaign in Yemen, as legislators push President Donald Trump to toughen his policy towards the kingdom. Announcing the vote on Tuesday, Senator Bernie Sanders called the war a humanitarian and strategic disaster. Sanders, an independent who is running for president as a Democrat, is a lead cosponsor of the resolution along with Republican Senator Mike Lee. The Saudi-UAE coalition fighting in Yemen since 2015 has consistently attacked civilians, as well as homes, schools, businesses, farms, a health clinic, a government administration building and a celebration hall, in violation of the laws of war. Despite ongoing abuses by the alliance, the United States continues to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, for use in the war on Yemen. Veto by Trump The vote on the war powers resolution will be the second in four months in the Senate. The Senate passed the measure by 56-41 in December, a rebuke of Trump amid anger at Saudi Arabia not just over civilian deaths in Yemen, but also the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at a Saudi consulate in Turkey. To become effective, however, the resolution must be passed by the new Senate, which was seated in January, as well as the House of Representatives. Then it must garner enough votes to override an expected veto by Trump, who has touted the importance of a strategic alliance with Riyadh. The House passed its own version of the resolution in February, but a procedural issue kept it from a vote in the Senate. Disaster The United Nations calls Yemen the worlds worst humanitarian disaster. About 14 million of the impoverished countrys 29 million population are on the brink of starvation. The war in Yemen has been at a stalemate for years, with the Saudi-UAE coalition and Yemeni forces unable to dislodge Houthi rebels from the capital, Sanaa, and most urban centres. According to the charity Save the Children, an estimated 85,000 children may have starved to death over the past four years of war. Almost 100 civilians were either killed or wounded every week in Yemen last year, with children accounting for one-fifth of all casualties, the UN says. Six children, two staff dead after two young men opened fire at Raul Brasil elementary school in Brazil. Two young men wearing hoods and masks, carrying guns, knives and crossbows, opened fire at a school in southern Brazil, killing eight people before taking their own lives, authorities said. The incident, at the school in Suzano, a suburb of Sao Paulo, took place in the early hours of Wednesday after two young men were seen entering the building and firing weapons before committing suicide, police said. Police said that two adolescents entered the building and started shooting at about 9:30am local time (06:30 GMT). The dead included six students and two teachers, while several wounded people were taken to the hospitals, according to Governor Joao Doria. The students who died were mostly 15 and 16 years old. A video aired by Globo TV showed children screaming, running and begging for their lives as shots were heard all around. Security cameras from homes near the school showed children climbing and jumping over a white wall that surrounds the Raul Brasil building, and sprinting down the streets, screaming for help. {articleGUID} Before entering the school, the assailants, aged 17 and 25 and former pupils of the school, shot and killed the owner of a car rental agency from which they had stolen a vehicle. Governor Doria said the school had been evacuated and police were inspecting what appeared to be possible explosives left by the shooters. The school is on lockdown, he said. Even though Brazil is one of the worlds most violent countries, school shootings are rare. The last major school shooting was in 2011, when 12 children were shot dead by a former pupil in Rio de Janeiro. We tried to run and jump over the walls Students gathered outside the school recounted the harrowing attack and seeing several bodies lying in a pool of blood. We were at recess and eating when we heard three pops. We then tried to run and jump over the walls, Rosni Marcelo Grotliwed, a 15-year-old student, told G1 news portal. She said the attackers had guns and knives, and when she ran to the principals office, she saw many dead people. One of my friends was stabbed in the shoulder and another was shot, she said. I escaped with one friend and went home and then came back to look for another friend. Marcelo Salles, commander of police forces in Sao Paulo state, said he had never seen anything like this in his more-than-three-decades of service. It was an unspeakably brutal crime, said Salles. Salles said the gunmen used at least one .38 caliber pistol and speed loaders, along with a crossbow and homemade bombs. While gun laws are extremely strict in Brazil, it is not difficult to buy a weapon illegally. Brazils new President Jair Bolsonaro recently announced that gun ownership controls would be relaxed. However, the president is also trying to lower the age in which children can be detained. Today, the Supreme Court in Brazil is debating a measure that [Bolsonaro] put forward to try to lower the age in which children can be detained by the police [or] can be questioned, said Al Jazeeras Daniel Schweimler. We dont know yet the ages of the two attackers [of today shooting] but some assume they may well have been former pupils [of the school], or of a similar age than the children, that is still being investigated, he added. Flight ban ordered by President Trump as new evidence emerges at Ethiopia crash site along with satellite data. The United States has grounded Boeings 737 MAX aircraft over safety fears, days after other countries halted use of the plane after an Ethiopian Airlines crash killed all 157 people on board. The US was one of the last countries to shut down the Boeing model after two deadly downings in six months, dozens of nations had made the move soon after the Ethiopia disaster. Meanwhile, Boeing facing its worst crisis in years recommended a temporary suspension of the entire global fleet of the 737 MAX aircraft on Wednesday. We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution, said Dennis Muilenburg, Boeings president, CEO and chairman in a statement on the companys website. We are doing everything we can to understand the cause of the accidents in partnership with the investigators, deploy safety enhancements and help ensure this does not happen again. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered the temporary grounding of all 737 MAX aircraft operated by US airlines or in US airspace. It said the decision was based on new evidence gathered at the Ethiopia Airlines crash site, near the capital Addis Ababa, as well as newly refined satellite data. The agency made this decision as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analysed today, the FAA said in a statement. Emergency order The grounding was welcomed by aviation workers in the US. John Samuelsen, international president of the Transport Workers Union of America, which represents aviation workers and flight attendants, said the grounding of the fleet was right both for air travellers and aviation workers. The FAAs move came minutes after US President Donald Trump issued an emergency order for the grounding of all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft in the country. I didnt want to take any chances, said Trump. We could have delayed it. We maybe didnt have to make it at all. But I felt it was important both psychologically and in a lot of other ways. The safety of the American people, of all people, is our paramount concern. Software fix Sundays Ethiopian Airlines crash was the second accident involving the US-based aerospace giants MAX 8 model within six months. Last October, a Lion Air-operated MAX 8 went down in Indonesia, killing 189 people. Both crashes took place shortly after takeoff and have prompted intense scrutiny of the planes control systems. New information from the wreckage in Ethiopia and newly refined data about the planes flight path indicated some similarities between the two disasters that warrant further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause, the FAA statement said. Acting administrator of the FAA, Daniel Elwell, said he did not know how long the US grounding of the aircraft would last. A software fix for the 737 MAX that Boeing has been working on since the Indonesia crash will take months to complete, Elwell told reporters. Dozens of nations banned the use of 737 MAX models in their airspace immediately after the Ethiopia crash, but for days the US continued to say that was unneccesary. American lawmakers are now questioning why it took so long for the Trump administration and the FAA to take similar action. Shares in Boeing fell precipitously on Wednesday, plunging by nearly three percent and putting the stock down more than 13 percent since before Sundays crash. The downturn has wiped billions off the companys market value. The single-aisle 737 is central to Boeings future in its battle with European rival Airbus SE. The new variant of the 737, the fastest-selling jetliner in Boeings history, is viewed as the likely workhorse for global airlines for decades. Joerg Brase, Istanbul bureau chief for ZDF public television, says Ankara took back their rejection of his press card. A German journalist who was recently refused a renewal of his press accreditation by Turkey said that he had received his work credentials after all, days after the German foreign minister had spoken out against the refusal. Joerg Brase, Istanbul bureau chief for ZDF public television, said on Twitter on Tuesday that Ankara took back their rejection of his press card for 2019 and that he would return to Istanbul soon. However, there was no immediate news from Thomas Seibert, who writes for Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel, and who had also been denied credentials for unknown reasons. Both men were forced to leave Turkey on Sunday, a day after Germanys Foreign Minister Heiko Maas complained it was unacceptable that German correspondents could not do their job freely in Turkey. Another German journalist, Turkish-born NDR television correspondent Halil Gulbeyaz, also had his application rejected. We will keep reporting The Turkish government has managed to more or less silence the national media. They are now trying to do it with international media. And we should not submit to that, Brase told ZDF before leaving Istanbul on Sunday. ZDF Director Thomas Bellut said Brase had reported from Turkey factually and knowledgeably, adding: ZDF will continue to report about this important country extensively, impartially, factually and critically. Berlin-Ankara relations were badly strained following a failed 2016 coup in Turkey and the subsequent arrests and purges by Turkish authorities targeting tens of thousands of people, including Germans. However, ties improved after Turkey released German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yucel and others whom Berlin labelled political prisoners, while Ankara accused them of terrorism-related charges. Both sides are eager to avoid a severe deterioration in ties with Turkeys economy in crisis and Germany, home to three million people of Turkish origin, reliant on Ankara to help contain a Syrian migrant and refugee crisis beyond Europes borders. London, United Kingdom With the clock counting down to Britains scheduled departure from the European Union, UK legislators have voted down embattled Prime Minister Theresa Mays Brexit deal for a second time this year. A second so-called meaningful vote on Tuesday ended with another heavy defeat for the prime minister, with 391 MPs voting against and 242 supporting the deal. The last time May put the agreement to parliament, in January, she suffered a major defeat as the deal agreed with the EU over 18 months of painstaking negotiations was defeated by a margin of 230. This time it was 149. Tuesdays vote came just 24 hours after May made a last-minute dash to Strasbourg for a meeting with Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission. Two documents were published as a result of the meeting, which May said would deliver the legally-binding changes to the withdrawal agreement MPs had asked for. But it soon became clear that those changes would not be enough to win the vote. We recognise that the prime minister has made limited progress in her discussions with the European Union. However in our view, sufficient progress has not been achieved at this time, said a spokesperson for the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Mays ally in Northern Ireland. May had been tasked with securing changes to the so-called backstop protocol of the withdrawal agreement, which critics in the hardline wing of her ruling Conservative Party and the DUP say would trap the UK within the EUs trade rules indefinitely, or see Northern Ireland being treated differently from the rest of the country. They asked for either a time limit on the backstop or a unilateral exit clause for the UK. 190302102323640 The attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, published his legal opinion on the new documents saying that they did not fully eliminate the risk of the UK getting stuck in the backstop. When questioned by MPs on his statement, he did say, however, that the documents contain provisions to ensure a significant reduction in that risk. What happens now? May promised to hold two more votes in the coming days. The first, on Wednesday, will see MPs decide on whether to rule out a no-deal Brexit, 16 days before the UKs scheduled departure from the bloc on March 29. If legislators opt against departing without an agreement on future relations, the government will hold another vote the following day on whether to request an extension to Article 50 the exit clause in the EUs constitution from Brussels in a bid to buy more time as it seeks to strike a different divorce deal. Such an extension could be short- or long-term. The latter, however, would mean the UK taking part in the European Parliament elections on May 23 to 26, a scenario the prime minister wants to avoid. A longer extension could also create the momentum for a second referendum campaign, particularly now that the main opposition Labour party supports it. I profoundly regret the decision this house has taken tonight, May said in a speech after Tuesdays vote, adding that extending a departure from the EU would not solve the UKs current political impasse. The EU will want to know what the house wishes to do with an extension. Does it wish to revoke Article 50? Does it wish to hold a second referendum? Or does it want to leave with a deal but not this deal? These are unenviable choices, but thanks to the decision that the house has made this evening, they are choices that must now be faced. Jonathan Lis, from the NGO British Influence, said it was now time for May to compromise, something she hasnt done so far. The first thing she needs to do is to reach out to people who arent in her own party. For the last two years, shes only tried to appease the hard right of her party. So, now she needs to go to the Labour Party and ask them what possibly could deliver a majority in the House of Commons. That means a softer Brexit or a second referendum to decide whether were going to have Brexit after all, Lis told Al Jazeera. A general election has become much more likely now because Theresa May hates the idea of a second referendum. Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party hate it as well. 190130190124557 Opposition slams dead deal Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn said Tuesdays result meant Mays plan for leaving the EU was dead and called on the government to adopt his proposals for an alternate departure from the bloc. The EU has said no other terms of withdrawal are available to the UK other than the deal brokered with May during months of fractious back-and-forth negotiations. A spokesperson for European Council President Donald Tusk said the second rejection of the agreed withdrawal plan significantly increased the risk of a no-deal divorce. Should there be a UK reasoned request for an extension, the EU27 will consider it and decide by unanimity, the spokesperson added, citing the 27 members of the bloc minus the UK. The EUs Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, meanwhile, said the bloc had done everything it can to help get the Withdrawal Agreement over the line. The impasse can only be solved in the UK. Our no-deal preparations are now more important than ever before, Barnier said in a tweet. The EU would have to sign off any decision made this week at the next EU council summit on March 21-22. Reporting by Ylenia Gostoli Vietnam has called on Malaysia to free a Vietnamese woman accused of the 2017 VX poison murder of Kim Jong Nam, the North Korean leaders half-brother. The request came a day after a Malaysian court dropped the same charge against an Indonesian woman. Foreign Minister Pham Binh Binh, in a telephone call to his Malaysian counterpart Saifuddin Abdullah, asked Malaysia to ensure a fair trial and free Vietnamese citizen Doan Thi Huong, the government said in a statement. In a separate statement on Wednesday, the Vietnamese government said Justice Minister Le Thanh Long had sent a letter to Malaysias attorney general, Tommy Thomas, asking Malaysia to free Huong. Huongs co-defendant, Indonesian Siti Aisyah, was freed on Monday. She and Huong had been accused of poisoning Kim Jong Nam, Kim Jong Uns half-brother, with liquid VX at Kuala Lumpur airport in February 2017. A conviction could carry the death penalty. Minh said in the phone conversation that senior leaders and the people of Vietnam had paid close attention to the trial. Eager to hear Huongs father, Doan Van Thanh, said Sitis release was good news for his family. I believe that my daughter will be released too because she is innocent. We havent received any information from Malaysia recently, and we are eager to hear from them now, Thanh told Reuters. The court is scheduled to resume proceedings on Thursday at 10am (02:00 GMT). Defence lawyers have maintained the women were pawns in an assassination orchestrated by North Korean agents. During the trial, the court was shown CCTV footage of two women assaulting Kim Jong Nam while he prepared to check in for a flight, allegedly smearing the liquid VX a banned chemical weapon on his face. Siti and Huong have maintained they believed they had been hired to take part in a reality TV prank show. Seventy-three years ago, in his now classic essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell examined the deceitful nature of political speech in his day. He offered some superb examples of words that mask their actual meaning and of rhetorical devices intended to fool the reader. "In our time," he wrote, "political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." The imprecision, pretentiousness, and staleness are deliberate, intended to conceal what the writer does not want to admit. His examples, most of them from leftists like Harold Laski, were bad enough, but even Orwell could not have foreseen the nonsense coming from progressives this election season and it's still early in the game. Take defenses of the "Green New Deal." Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who popularized the idea (which has been around for a decade or more), doesn't seem to have any comprehension of its cost, or the cost of anything else. When asked about how she would pay for it, her initial response was "tax the rich." The truth is that there aren't that many rich, and under her 70% and up federal tax plan, there soon wouldn't be any. Now she seems to believe that one can simply print money to pay for it all. This radical extension of Modern Monetary Theory would bankrupt the country and render our currency worthless. Kamala Harris, another master of Orwellian speech, insists that "we have to be practical, but..." The problem is that she never defines what is meant by "practical." It is one of those words (like Obama's "smart" policies, which were invariably dumb) meant to end a conversation rather than open it to reasonable debate. Who can object to "being practical," but is it practical to spend an estimated $3.26 trillion per year on the Medicare for All plan Harris has endorsed? Harris refuses to discuss cost, insisting as she does that health care is a basic right and that destroying private insurance is the best way to deliver it. Then there is Cory Booker, a speaker who often reverts to the rhetorical device known as "the big stick." When asked about paying for the Green New Deal, Booker responded by raising his voice and barking that "we can have it both ways." By this he implies that there would be no crippling cost to eliminating carbon fuels. Sen. Booker did not explain just how this would work, as if vigorously asserting that having it both ways were the same as doing so. But what is really meant by "having it both ways"? Is Sen. Booker able to demonstrate, with hard evidence, that the replacement of fossil fuels with green alternatives wind and solar, universal upgrading of building insulation is economically feasible? Solar and wind now constitute some 3% of energy production in the U.S. To go from 3% to 60% the percentage not covered by nuclear and hydro while at the same time meeting rising energy demands, projected to grow by 40% by 2050, would be a colossal undertaking. It would entail paving the entire state of Arizona in solar panels and constructing a wall of windmills from West Texas to North Dakota. That construction would entail environmental damage far in excess of anything that continued reliance on fossil fuels might do. It would also kill off entire industries, for which millions of workers have been trained. Progressives have already gone a long way toward killing off the coal industry, in which well paid workers have lost their livelihoods. The idea that a highly trained geologist or petroleum engineer could find employment screwing down rooftop panels at $15 an hour won't be much consolation to workers in the petroleum industry. The oil and gas industry supports 9.8 million jobs, according to API. Under the Green New Deal, all of these workers would be displaced within ten years. Worst of all, the Green New Deal would remove energy production from the private sector and place it under government control. This expansion of government power over its citizens is the true intent of the Green New Deal and of every other progressive initiative. The oil and gas sector constitutes 8% of the U.S. economy. Eliminating this sector and shifting to government-controlled green power has been a longstanding aspiration of the left, along with socialized medicine and centralized control of education. Now, in an extremely divisive political atmosphere, progressives see an opportunity to make their dreams come true. But politicians like Harris, Booker, and Ocasio-Cortez blithely pass over the human damage their plans would cause just as when Hillary smugly pronounced that she intended "to put a lot of coalminers ... out of business." Their vague pronouncements mask the reality of the Green New Deal: jobs lost, savings devalued, and an economic collapse worse than that of the original New Deal. They would accomplish their ends through the use of force. The politicians' responses to these issues are so absurdly crude and callous that even Orwell couldn't have imagined them. They resemble something out of Lewis Carroll. An all-time low temperature set this winter for the state of Minnesota is taken as evidence of global warming, and if you disagree, chop off your head. I'm not suggesting that progressives are actually threatening to chop off the heads of their opponents not yet but that is both their birthright, going back to the French Revolution, and their apparent direction. Their speech is full of extremist expressions, and their actions, like the recent attack on a Berkeley conservative, are increasingly violent. Underlying all of their proposals, including the Green New Deal, is the threat of expropriation. Progressive thought always rests on the idea that those who possess more, even as a result of hard work and sacrifice, are wrongdoers whose wealth should be confiscated, ostensibly for the benefit of "the people" but actually for the benefit of the ruling elite. Their wealth is never subject to confiscation. With a net worth of $3 million, Cory Booker apparently donated an average of only $10,714 annually to charity over the past 14 years (while claiming that he donated "hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars"). Yet his 2017 book United speaks of "advancing the common good." Is Sen. Booker advancing the common good or his own good? Whether the response is bullying or a refusal to answer, progressives' use of language is not intelligent or reasonable. It's the kind of deceit one would expect from authoritarians, and the crucial fact about progressives is that they are authoritarians. They believe in advancing their causes by the use of force and their causes always advance their own ambitions. Like Maduro pronouncing that his country needs no aid and backing it up with troops at the border, progressives rely on intimidation rather than reason. Like FDR calling it the "New Deal" and seeing his policies extend what should have been a sharp but brief recession into the longest depression in American history, their slogans mask their true intentions. We had one New Deal; we don't need another. And we don't need a president who will crush the energy industry and eliminate private health insurance while pretending she is saving the Earth from catastrophe. The real catastrophe would be seeing one of these hardline socialists get elected. Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011). H.R. 1, the For the People Act, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives on a party-line vote, should be renamed the, For the Career Democratic Politicians Act. This bill would take power away from the states, help elect Democrats, and protect career politicians. Yet thats not the conclusion one would draw by reading the news. Heres the first line in the New York Times story about the passage of H.R. 1, The House passed the Democrats showcase anti-corruption and voting rights legislation on Friday, an expansive measure that aims to dismantle barriers to the ballot box, end big money in politics and impose stricter ethics rules on federal officials. Anti-corruption? Really? How does this bill crack down on public corruption? Prosecutors have lost major public corruption cases in the past few years, including the prosecution of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnel and current U.S. Senator Bob Menendez. The McDonnell case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which issued a decision making it even harder to convict a public official for bribery. So, does the bill expand the definition of bribery? Does the bill make it easier to bring cases against corrupt politicians or even increase the criminal penalties? Of course not. The bill does nothing to combat public corruption. So how else do the media mischaracterize the, For the People Act? The Times also claims the bill will dismantle barriers to the ballot box What? Are there barriers preventing Democrats from getting to the voting booths? Is that why they lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in the last presidential election? Has President Trump built a wall around voting booths in Democratic precincts? Of course not. There are no barriers to voting for eligible voters. So what does the bill do? It forces states to automatically register to vote any eligible residents who apply to state agencies for benefits or services. It specifically includes students of state colleges and universities. It also requires the states to register all convicted criminals who become eligible to vote upon completion of their sentence. Coincidentally, the overwhelming majority of college students and ex-convicts vote Democratic. This is not dismantling any barriers. This is using taxpayer dollars to register potential Democratic voters. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), in promoting the bill, declared, [We] must not suppress the vote of our newcomers to America. Well, if the newcomers are noncitizens then we must, because its illegal for them to vote in federal elections. Thats why states, which have the constitutional authority to determine the qualifications of voters, have passed voter identification laws to require proof of eligibility before casting a ballot. Democrats wrote H.R. 1 to nullify these laws; the bill allows a potential voter to simply sign a piece of paper swearing theyre eligible instead of having to show identification. I wonder who our newcomers are more likely to vote for, Democrats or Republicans? The Times also says this bill will, end big money in politics? How? The bill would require the federal government to match any donation up to $200 to a candidates congressional campaign by a factor of six. Donate $200 and the taxpayers will kick in another $1,200. The candidate must agree, however, to accept only these small dollar donations. But career politicians, who can raise big money, will not restrict themselves. Have any media asked Speaker Pelosi, who has served in Congress for over 30 years and outraised her last opponent by over 340 to 1, if she will limit herself to small donations in her next reelection? Not a chance. The first candidate to reject public financing in a presidential election was Barack Obama in 2008, even though he had earlier pledged to accept it because it would reduce the influence of moneyed special interests. Why did Obama flip-flop? Because he started raising money hand over fist and did not want to be limited. He raised three quarters of a billion dollars in 2008. Hillary Clinton, who also rejected public financing, together with the Democratic Party and pro-Clinton PACs raised a record $1.2 billion in 2016. So, the idea that H.R. 1 will end big money in politics is absurd. The bill would, however, get out the vote for Democrats. In addition to automatically registering college students and ex-convicts, the bill would create a paid holiday for federal employees on Election Day and allow them to take another six paid days off each year to work the polls. Of those federal employees who belong to unions, a much higher percent are Democrats. Of those who donate to politicians, they donate overwhelmingly to Democrats. So, if the most politically active federal workers receive an extra seven paid days off to work the polls, I wonder which political party theyll be working for? H.R.1 will consolidate power in the federal government, further protect career politicians and use taxpayer dollars to help get out the Democratic vote. Thankfully, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has declared the bill DOA in the U.S. Senate. And, for good reason, despite what the media would lead you to believe. Marc A. Scaringi, Esq. Mr. Scaringi is an attorney in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a radio talk show host of The Marc Scaringi Show on WHP 580AM and I Heart Radio and a Donald J. Trump endorsed Delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention. Meet Saikat Chakrabarti, the Rasputin of the 14th Congressional District and arguably the real brains behind the bright new shiny Democrat bauble of Congress now famously branded by the media as AOC, joining the exclusive club (JFK, LBJ, RFK, HRC) of politicians widely referred to by three initials. In the space of just a few short months, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, with fewer than 16,000 votes in a primary election, went from the role of obscure bartender to perhaps the most famous and powerful freshman member of Congress ever. She instantly became a media darling who drives ratings and Internet clicks. Senior Democrats such as Sen. Ed Markey gush over her and edge in to get their picture taken with her as they appear to hang on her every word. Ocasio-Cortez was given a plum seat on the House Financial Services Committee. Her placement on the exclusive House Banking Committee, as well as the appointments of other newbie progressives to top committees was part of a larger deal to re-secure the speakership for Nancy Pelosi ahead of the midterms. Pelosi agreed to 40 percent progressive representation on the five top House committees. How could this have happened? Look behind the curtain. Youll find her mysterious chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, a well-funded radical left wing activist who, with other veterans of the 2016 Sanders campaign, including Young Turks host Cenk Uygur (later purged over past allegedly sexist, racist, pro-rape statements), established a web of campaign organizations and LLCs, including Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress. As many as 16 groups were housed in the same office space in Knoxville, TN, with no apparent legally-required walls of separation. The larger plot was and remains to recruit attractive people to run for Congress. The longer-term strategy seems to be to gain control of the Democrat Party, Congress and ultimately the United States government itself. Their stated goal was to run hundreds of Democratic candidates who do "not take corporate money and serve the voters rather than the donors," as well as "capture a significant amount of Congress with strong progressives" and "overpower the corporate Democrats." In the 2018 elections, 26 of the 79 candidates endorsed by Justice Democrats won their respective primary elections. Along with AOC, six other of these progressive minority candidates won in the general election: Raul Grijalva, Ro Khanna, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Pramila Jayapal. The districts where they won were all solidly Democrat. This suggests why the far left wing newbies were not only given key committee assignments and but quickly found senior Democrats fawning over them. When Rep. Ilhan Omar was accused of anti-Semitic remarks, Democrats could not find the will to directly condemn her. Instead they passed a watered down meaningless resolution against hate. Pelosi and other establishment Democrats are understandably afraid of who will be targeted by the Justice Democrats in 2020 and they dont want to antagonize them. In her primary, Ocasio-Cortez received 57.13% of the vote (15,897) to Joe Crowley's 42.5% (11,761) to defeat the 10-term incumbent. Ocasio-Cortez won the general election with 78% of the vote (110,318) to Pappas's 14% (17,762). The Democrats all got the message. With the win, Chakrabarti became AOCs chief of staff. He and his left-wing associates, including her communications chief Corbin Trent, co-founder of Brand New Congress, and Sanders campaign veteran Zack Exley (an open borders advocate) had scripted and produced AOCs campaign video and organized her entire grass roots campaign effort, including fund raising and social media. They turned her into a brand to take control of the House seat from Crowley. There is evidence that most all of Ocasio-Cortezs communications are created by these men who appear to tell her what to say. Watch the video below, excerpted from the longer well-reserached material by "Mr. Reagan," as it shows Trent talking about 40% of Americans, or 160 million people making less than $20,000 a year and then five days later, obviously reading from a script, Ocasio-Cortez makes the identical claim. With Chakrabarti as Ocasio-Cortezs chief of staff, Ocasio-Cortez released the highly controversial far-left policy initiative known as the Green New Deal. It is designed to totally and fundamentally make over the American economy and the American political system. Casio-Cortezs office, led by Chakrabarti, released an FAQ which it withdrew after criticism for its extremist positions, including appearing to demand the elimination of animal agriculture, replacing commercial aviation with high-speed rail, and providing economic security for all who are . . . unwilling to work. Chakrabarti was forced to admit the offices authorship of the FAQ after Green New Deal supporters retweeted Rep. Ocasio-Cortez asserted quotes from the document about unwilling to work were fabricated. The Green New Deal was drafted over a single December weekend by Ocasio-Cortezs staff and representatives of like-minded progressive groups including the Sunrise Movement, a grassroots climate organization; the Justice Democrats and a freshly organized policy shop called the New Consensus. Chakrabarti was quoted as saying, We spent the weekend learning how to put laws together. We looked up how to write resolutions. Its unclear whether AOC was even present. A complaint was filed with the Federal Election Commission alleging that two political action committees founded by Chakrabarti funneled over $1 million in political donations into two of his own private companies. The cash transfers from the PACs that he manages make a mockery of her pledges to increase transparency and reduce the influence of "dark money" in politics. His companies appear to have been set-up for the sole purpose of obscuring how the political donations were used. The arrangement skirted reporting requirements and may have violated the $5,000 limit on contributions from federal PACs to candidates, according to the complaint filed by the National Legal and Policy Center. There was no way of telling where the political donations went meaning they could have been pocketed or used by the company to pay for off-the-books campaign operations. How all this will shake out is uncertain. Its unlikely, however, that this will deter the main focus and effort of Chakrabarti, who wears his ideology on his shirt. He has been seen on video wearing a T-shirt with the image of Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian anti-colonial nationalist. YouTube screen grab During World War II, Bose tried to overthrow British colonial rule of India with the help of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Bose was personally helped by Hitler who he met with before going to the Dutch East Indies on a Nazi submarine and setting up an Indian composed army to support Imperial Japan. He proclaimed his ideology as a synthesis between Nazism and Communism. Listen as AOC describes a marriage between the government and corporations in order to regulate what people can and cant do with their private property/business/investments. We should be scared right now because corporations have taken over our government. @AOC explains why she is in favor of democratic socialism at #SXSW #tictocnews pic.twitter.com/1lSLYCyTew TicToc by Bloomberg (@tictoc) March 9, 2019 Might these thoughts have come from Chakrabarti? So, you can hardly be shocked when you find Chakrabarti praising freshman congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez for organizing a sit-in at Nancy Pelosis as well as helping to chase the intended new Amazon headquarters out of New York. Its all about disruption. And the Democrats already have the message. Stand with us or well take you out. As her tendency toward demagoguery inevitably grows, the situation will likely become more and more dangerous. This is who Chakrabarti is and therefore ultimately who AOC is. It easier now to understand why mainstream Democrats are being sucked into the whirlpool of the Left. Some of it is ideology. But much of it is fear. They fear Chakrabarti and his friends will turn the ideological blowtorch and campaign challenges on them. This does not bode well for either moderate Democrats or America. Frank Hawkins is a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, Associated Press foreign correspondent, international businessman, senior newspaper company executive, founder and owner of several marketing companies, and published novelist. In 2009, Iranian citizens took to the streets in protest over alleged election fraud by the Islamic regime. The declared winner was the regime's own incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His main defeated rival was Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a self-proclaimed reformist, who had previously served as the final prime minister in the Khomeinist regime before that office was abolished in 1989. The large middle range of Iranian citizens, who mostly live in the metropolises, were surprised by the results and became convinced that election fraud was committed to ensure the regime's hold on power. Ahmadinejad's two electoral rivals, along with other minor candidates who had no chance to win, belonged to Khomeinist political wings. But the people wanting change from harsh rule by the regime found that the electoral battle opened an opportunity to turn events in their favor. Millions of Iranians took to the streets, especially in the capital, where they chanted, "Where is my vote?" That simple protest over the matter of voter fraud soon became replaced with radical slogans including "Down with the dictator"; "Down with the supreme leader"; "Putin, Nasrallah, Hugo Chavez are our enemies"; and "Khamenei, shame on you, leave the country alone!" The anti-regime protest, called the Green Movement, could have led to regime collapse if the so-called reformists had not betrayed the Iranian people. The thing that made the reformists' betrayal even worse was that the American president, Barack Obama, also turned his back on those freedom-seeking Iranians. Having been recently elected as a Democrat claiming to bring "Hope" and "Change" to America, Barack Hussein Obama remained silent when millions of Iranians took to the streets in June of 2009. They had hopes of bringing change to their tragic lives under harsh Islamic rule. But Obama was silent when Iranians demanded freedom from the terrorist regime that has threatened the world, especially America, with death and destruction ever since it seized power in 1979. Obama was silent when Iranians cried out, "Are you with us, or are you with them?" Instead of offering the people any moral support, Obama stayed passive. His voice could have boosted Iranian peoples' hopes to bring positive change in Iran. His silence revealed that his favor was with the mullahs. It was not surprising. After all the treachery that Obama brought to the Iranian people over the next eight years, the political ground for Iran changed after 2016, when the new American president took office in the White House. President Trump provides a new narrative for the people of Iran. Mr. Trump has challenged European leaders over the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, which he promised to exit from during his presidential campaign. He fulfilled that promise as president, when he finally withdrew the U.S. from the bad deal. President Trump, who is called the "President of Hearts" by many Iranian netizens, is right to have done so. We Iranians recognized it as a bad deal as early as 2015: "This deal will provide up to $150 billion windfall of cash into the bank account of our tyrants and theocrats. This money will not be spent on the Iranian people but rather to enrich a repressive regime." As an Iranian exile tweeted, "[o]n the sidelines of the Warsaw Summit, the prospect of a century deal between the Arab states and Israel should not be ignored. The President of Hearts kills two birds with one stone." The President of Hearts has also come out in support of the coming peaceful transition in Iran and warned that the world is watching closely for human rights violations. The Trump administration has backed hopes for a secular alternative to clerical rule after the people took to the streets across the country beginning in late December 2017. Iranians will never forget that merciful support, as they will never forget the treason against Iranian humanity by Democratic presidents Barack Hussein Obama and Jimmy Carter. The U.S. should fulfill its promise of freedom to humanity, including to Iranians. America can bring light to the darkness of Iranian human rights violations, even if Europe chooses to continue its appeasement of the Islamic regime's criminal acts, as it has done in the past four decades, ever since the 1979 Guadeloupe Conference (U.S., U.K., France, and West Germany) tragically abetted the incoming kleptocratic Khomeinist regime by those Western powers' conclusion to do nothing to help save the Pahlavi dynasty from collapse. It is time for the President of Hearts to play his worthwhile historical role, regardless of the fact that Europeans will still flirt with the repressive-terrorist regime. That role for Trump should be to tighten the sanctions, to increase the pressure upon the mullahs, both economically and politically. Then the people can easily overthrow the regime, which would ensure security for the Middle East and the world. Aynaz Anni Cyrus is an Iranian-American human rights activist and founder of Live Up To Freedom. She is the producer of The Glazov Gang and hosts its feature The Unknown. Kaveh Taheri (Twitter: @TaheriKaveh), co-founder and chairman of ICBHR.com, is a Turkey-based Iranian human rights researcher and journalist who has worked exclusively on the Middle East. Kaveh, a former political prisoner in Shiraz, was sent to prison for his writings and statements on his websites and weblogs in Iran and fled the country through Turkey to save his life. How does one reconcile the Left's preaching of civility with its penchant for bigotry? If there is one topic that the Left loves to talk about, it is tolerance, particularly on college campuses. However, in the real world, this topic is not leftists' strong suit. In reality, the Left has proven that it cares little about civility, especially on college campuses. It is the conservatives on campus who are pleading for their First Amendment rights and simply asking to be left alone. Intolerance against conservatives has been on the rise over the past three years. The dedicated students of U.C. Berkeley proved time and time again in 2017 and beyond that there is no place for Republicans or conservatives on their campus. Antifa members on multiple occasions disrupted peaceful right-wing rallies by hurling offensive epithets, making threats of violence, and using actual violence to achieve their goal of stifling free speech. Across the nation, right-leaning commentators from Milo Yiannopoulos to Dinesh D'Souza to Ben Shapiro have had their speech stifled with little to no repercussions for the so-called "protesters." Only last month, a U.C. Berkeley student by the name of Hayden Williams was verbally and physically assaulted while attempting to recruit members for Turning Point USA. This all occurred while a U.C. Berkeley employee reportedly watched the abuse with glee. And last week, at Portland State College, a "protester" disrupted a College Republicans meeting by ringing a cowbell and obstructing visual aids. These occurrences serve as only a sampling of the injustices campus conservatives have received at the hands of the always tolerant Left. The ideological double standard is real. Across the nation, public and private universities alike preach the morality of tolerance, diversity, and inclusion. Nevertheless, these same universities and their student bodies are the worst perpetrators of bigotry. If a liberal student were publicly assaulted on campus, the academic world would still be filled with righteous fervor against the culprit. If a popular liberal commentator suffered any form of injustice on campus, the mainstream media would release a bevy of thought pieces condemning the fanaticism of right-wing students. To this day, universities and leftists alike stand upon their moral high ground and seek to condemn the "intolerance" of anything resembling a Republican idea. In reality, the moral high ground of the Left is nothing but a facade covering up the stifling of conservative thought and expression. Conservatives on college campuses are a minority group. According to one survey, only 22% of recent college freshmen identified as conservative or far-right. This is in conjunction with the fact that college staff members identify as liberal or far-left at a 12-to-1 ratio to conservatives. Some universities lack a right-leaning instructor of any kind in certain departments. When students of all ideological leanings are continually taught quasi-socialist ideas and forced to take courses fully dedicated to social justice, it is no wonder that so many leave the university with leftist beliefs. College campuses aren't offering safe-spaces for conservatives suffering injustice at the hands of their liberal counterparts. College campuses aren't offering seminars on how to embrace conservative minorities. College campuses are offering a deafening silence. Right-leaning students aren't seeking special treatment; rather, they desire even half the respect accorded to the rest of the student body. Often, a Young Republicans club or similarly associated student-run organization is the only source of conservative ideas on campus. When these organizations are targeted by violent protesters, and their guest speakers are denied campus access, a great injustice occurs. When universities allow this to happen without repercussions for the perpetrators, a dangerous precedent is set: conservatives and their ideas are not welcome. The underlying truth of the matter is that Universities like Portland State and U.C. Berkeley should have acted long ago to ensure that conservatives are not beaten in the streets and College Republican meetings aren't disrupted by protesting thugs. This will never occur, because universities are more concerned with pleasing the intersectional lobby than protecting the most marginalized group on campus: the conservatives. This is a plea for universities, the Left, and the general public to wake up to the real injustice being served every day in the classroom, on the quad, and throughout the nation. Will they choose to wake up when their leftist dreams are fulfilled? Their dream that conservatives will continue to be relegated to the dark corners of academia, labeled as outsiders and bigots? In 2019, conservatives are the marginalized group on campus. They are seeking nothing but their God-given and constitutionally recognized rights. Andrew Cunningham is a published author and a sophomore at the University of Illinois, Springfield. Follow his writings at Conservative Roundtable. In an "unexpected" move toward the U.S. view of things, the European Union had second thoughts about aligning with China. The Wall Street Journal has the report: In a sharp shift from attitudes just two years ago, when China was seen as a potential partner in maintaining global rules and institutions following President Trump's election, the EU's executive arm labeled Beijing an "economic competitor" in critical fields such as the development of 5G networks and a "systemic rival" politically. The assertions, made in a European Commission strategy paper that could stir unease among China's allies in the bloc, put Brussels' approach toward Beijing closer to the U.S. assessment of China as a major strategic rival. Under Mr. Trump, U.S.-China ties have been roiled by trade fights, tensions over North Korea and Beijing's regional ambitions. EU officials said European attitudes toward China had changed because of its failure to open its markets, its use of subsidies to create corporate champions, its actions in the South China Sea and its push for dominance in technology and telecommunications sectors. "There is a growing appreciation in Europe that the balance of challenges and opportunities presented by China has shifted," the paper said. It turns out all that China-love to Get Trump from Europe wasn't such a good idea. More to the point, Trump was right all along about China and Europe is now coming around. Maybe that's because China isn't the altruistic partner it says it is. With a centralized society run by communists, even with some capitalist figments around the issue of trade, it just really never is all about trade. China's giant, state-connected corporations, such as Huawei, seem to have a plan in place to spy on everyone who buys their products. China's fishing boats, so innocent and cute, and supposedly just looking for a meal from the sea, are in reality a state instrument for takeover of the South China Sea, as was seen in the Philippines recently. There's always a plan, and for China, that means by and for China alone. Its "let's get rich together" sales pitch of the past decades is starting to look increasingly phony. Meanwhile, China can get pretty vengeful against nations that dare to cross it by trying to enforce their own laws. According to this column in today's Financial Times by Gideon Rachman: Getting squeezed between Washington and Beijing can be very uncomfortable. After Canada obeyed an American extradition request and arrested Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, the Chinese response was fierce. Within days, Canadian citizens were arrested in China, and Canadian executives are now wary of travelling there. Similarly, when South Korea agreed to a US request to deploy an American anti-missile system called Thaad, Chinese tourists were directed away from South Korea and stores owned by Lotte, a South Korean retailer, were shut in mainland China after failing "safety inspections". Europe is looking at that and deciding that maybe using China as an ally isn't such a good idea. The whole piece, by the way, despite a few mini-jabs at Trump, is worth reading. Another problem, not mentioned in either piece, is China's takeovers of scruffy little third-world countries that have made messes of themselves through their adherence to anti-American socialism. Nations such as Ecuador have found themselves basically giving away 80% of their country's oil to China in what must be the mother of all neo-imperialism, given the unequal treaties involved. With 80% of Ecuador's oil spoken for, what does that leave for Europe's investors, who have real money to invest if the country ever shifts to market terms? Pretty much nothing. The territories are spoken for. That puts a constraint on Europe's potential growth. What it shows is that Europe has now gotten "woke" to the reality of China and its game. When Europe wakes, it usually means the hour is late. But better late than never. Welcome back. A conservative professor at Sarah Lawrence College is being targeted by radical activists who don't much like the fact that he's conservative. Usually, when we've covered cases like this, the activists and liberal faculty will take something the professor said, exaggerate it all out of proportion, and accuse the prof of being racist, homophobic, misogynistic, etc. But in this case, the offending professor, Samuel Abrams, penned an op-ed in the New York Times that simply advocated for political diversity on campus. Abrams said nothing remotely controversial, and he offered empirical evidence for massive liberal bias among college administrators. The activists, calling themselves the "Diaspora Coalition," couldn't take it. Reason.com: One of these demands concerns Samuel Abrams, a tenured professor of politics. Abrams is conservative-leaning, and has complained about the ideological bias of leftist administrators in a New York Times op-ed. Last November, his office door was vandalized by unknown persons who wanted him to apologize to marginalized students and quit the college. Now the Diaspora Coalition is demanding that Sarah Lawrence review Abrams' tenure. The review should be conducted by a panel consisting of members of you guessed it the Diaspora Coalition, as well as faculty members of color. "In addition, the College must issue a statement condemning the harm that Abrams has caused to the college community, specifically queer, Black, and female students," the demands continue. The college must also apologize "for its refusal to protect marginalized students wounded by his op-ed and the ignorant dialogue that followed. Abrams must issue a public apology to the broader SLC community and cease to target Black people, queer people, and women." What monstrous, racist, anti-gay, anti-female ideas did the professor publish? I soon learned that the Office of Student Affairs, which oversees a wide array of issues including student diversity and residence life, was organizing many overtly progressive events programs with names like "Stay Healthy, Stay Woke," "Microaggressions" and "Understanding White Privilege" without offering any programming that offered a meaningful ideological alternative. These events were conducted outside the classroom, in the students' social and recreational spaces. The problem is not limited to my college. While considerable focus has been placed in recent decades on the impact of the ideological bent of college professors, when it comes to collegiate life living in dorms, participating in extracurricular organizations the ever growing ranks of administrators have the biggest influence on students and campus life across the country. ... Intrigued by this phenomenon, I recently surveyed a nationally representative sample of roughly 900 "student-facing" administrators those whose work concerns the quality and character of a student's experience on campus. I found that liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one. Only 6 percent of campus administrators identified as conservative to some degree, while 71 percent classified themselves as liberal or very liberal. It's no wonder so much of the nonacademic programming on college campuses is politically one-sided. Abrams carefully lays out a devastating case for ideological conformity at elite institutions all to no avail. Apparently, Abrams is being targeted not for what he says, but for what he believes. And the people who are charged with defending his academic freedom are, themselves, hopelessly biased. I've covered a lot of these free speech controversies, and it's rare where a professor did not say something at least mildly controversial to get himself in hot water with students and faculty. In this case, it's hard to imagine an academic being any less confrontational than Abrams. In other cases, the activists use what a professor says as an excuse to go after them because he is conservative. In this case, there was no attempt to hide their Stalinism. Activists want Abrams fired because he expressed a conservative viewpoint about college administrators backed by solid data, and they didn't like it. Alleged fraud marks the explosive indictments relating to college admissions practices revealed yesterday, but a much bigger scandal consists of all the legal ways ruling class privilege replicates itself through the vehicle of higher education. I am grateful to the U.S. attorneys who pressed ahead with their investigation of the alleged criminal acts underlying the college admissions scandal rocking higher education today. And I await further indictments that apparently will be forthcoming. But I know that the people who got caught, including those whose indictments may come later, are the tip of the iceberg (in Alan Dershowitz's phrase) and were foolish in committing actual crimes, when completely legal ways of accomplishing the same ends are so widely available. YouTube screen grab. Both U.S. attorney Andrew Lelling and Alan Dershowitz, the emeritus professor of law who spent half a century at Harvard Law School, acknowledged yesterday that those with enough money to donate a building can perfectly legally gain preferential entrance to elite higher education for their kids. Appearing on Fox News yesterday, Dershowitz explained: (The full seven-and-a-half-minute interview, well worth watching, is embedded at the bottom of this page) While very few colleges and universities, even the richest of them, would turn down a building, there is evidence that it doesn't necessarily require eight figures to buy admission. Consider the case of Jared Kushner (and his brother), who, because of his close connection to Donald Trump, is the object of much media scrutiny and who gained admission to Harvard despite less than stellar grades and SAT scores. Investigative journalist Daniel Golden, author of the book The Price of Admission, investigated the Kushner boys' admission. The UK Daily Mail summarizes: It turns out that Kushner, the husband of Ivanka Trump, was admitted into Harvard shortly after his father pledged a $2.5million donation to the university, according to ProPublica. Daniel Golden, the author of The Price of Admission, revealed that Kushner was accepted despite the fact that administrators at his high school said he was a less-than-stellar student. 'There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard,' a former administrator at The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey said. 'His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. 'We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. 'Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted.' ... Golden's research revealed that Charles Kushner and his wife were members of Harvard's Committee on University Resources, a body made up of some of the university's most generous donors. Charles Kushner was a member even though he had never attended Harvard as a student. The real estate mogul is a graduate of New York University. The Kushner family denies that the donations had anything to do with admission to Harvard, and it may be so. For all I know, there were other elements of the admissions package each boy presented to Harvard that suggested exceptional merit, such as entrepreneurial or charitable activities. This raises the question of "holistic" admissions criteria used by practically all elite colleges and universities. At the University of California, where because California in a voter referendum banned the use of racial preferences by state-owned institutions, "affirmative action" preferences are illegal, students are asked to write essays explaining how they overcame obstacles in their paths toward applying. I regard this as an open invitation to cite racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other such progressive shibboleths to claim victim status and then be rewarded with an acceptance to highly competitive campuses. In some countries Japan, for instance test scores on examinations (in Japan, administered by universities themselves) are the sole criterion. To be sure, this leads to plenty of problems, including incredible amounts of time spent by high school students cramming useless facts into their brains based on the expectation that they will help them score better on their exams. An entire industry of "Yobiko" cram schools exists, training high-schoolers for years on the ins and outs of the entrance exams. The reason why parents and students in the United States and many, many other countries (the U.K., France, India, South Korea, and Japan all spring to mind) place such emphasis on attending the "right" schools is twofold. The more important reason is that elite schools are seen as the pathway into jobs that promise wealth, power, and influence, including lifelong relationships with others similarly on course to join the elite. Only secondarily is the quality of the education available a concern. And given the rapid deterioration in the quality of higher education in this country, what with political correctness dominating the humanities and social sciences, this consideration may be entirely absent. The single most important reform that could change this awful situation would be the legalization of intelligence testing for employers to use in making their hiring decisions. Currently, such tests are regarded as racist, leaving employers who want highly intelligent recruits with the alternative of using graduation from an elite college as the substitute metric. Here is the full interview of Alan Dershowitz: The best bang for your buck! This option enables you to purchase online 24/7 access and receive the Sunday, Tuesday & Thursday print edition at no additional cost * Print edition only available in our carrier delivery area. Allow up to 72 hours for delivery of your print edition to begin. Print edition not available for Day Pass option. Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou wasnt a particularly well-known name in the West especially outside of tech circles until only several months back. After being detained at a Canadian airport on her way to Mexico on December 1, she ended up at the center of a diplomatic scandal, with her name on the lips of many a statesman. The 47-year-old daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei has been with the company since its startup days in the 90s and held a variety of positions, with the CFO role being the crown of her career that began with the China Construction Bank in 92, immediately following her graduation. She quit that job to join Huawei as a secretary after a year, hence supporting her fathers endeavor from its inception. While still in her 20s, Ms. Meng took a hiatus and earned a masters degree in accounting from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 97, then returned to Huawei in 98 and steadily climbed the ranks ever since. When exactly did she earn the current CFO role is unclear; Huawei only disclosed the names of its C-suite executives in 2011 and Ms. Meng was already entrusted with that position back then. Almost exactly one year ago to date, the industry veteran and mother of four was appointed as one of the four chairpeople of Huaweis board. Whether by work history, legacy, or family name, Ms. Meng is a top Huawei official and one of the most important individuals at the Shenzen-based technology juggernaut. Advertisement And while details of her two-decade rise to the top level of the companys hierarchy remain scarce, recent developments shed much light on her latest role at Huawei none of it good. The story of how Ms. Meng ended up facing decades in prison is a spotty one, especially after she won a publication ban in Canada shortly following her early December arrest, thus limiting the medias ability to discover and report on the details of her case. Still, heres whats known so far: If it looks like a front and acts like a front Advertisement The United States Department of Justice thats presently trying (and succeeding, so far) to extradite Ms. Meng from Canada alleges she has personally forged and maintained secretive relationships with two former companies with Middle Eastern operations. Through those ties, the executive sought to violate the Commerce Departments trade sanctions imposed on Iran. Whether or not she succeeded has yet to be clarified in the court of law but not only is the answer to that question a resounding yes if you ask Washington officials but the conspiracy to break federal regulations is by itself also a felony. Whats more, some of the actions that kept the full extent of Huaweis relationships with those company hidden to outside eyes required an illegal banking scheme, hence constituting fraud. The companies in question are Hong Kong-based Skycom Tech Co Ltd that operated a Tehran affiliate, as well as Canicula Holdings Ltd from Mauritius, East Africa. The money exchanged between the duo and Huawei was depicted as regular business activity, yet American prosecutors believe the two firms operated as de facto satellites of the Chinese conglomerate. While Caniculas involvement has yet to be officially confirmed and is mainly known due to investigative reports from Reuters, Skycom has not only been mentioned by the DOJ but was even named as one of the defendants in a 13-count federal indictment unsealed in late January, with government officials explicitly identifying it as a Huawei subsidiary. Advertisement To this date, Huawei denies an affiliate relationship with Skycom, so while the federal prosecution is proceeding with its indictment, the Chinese company is attempting to argue the very basic details of the case, which some administration officials previously described as a bizarre strategy that cannot work because virtually all relevant evidence is against it. Media reports dating back as far as 2012 clearly identify it as such and provide evidence that Ms. Meng was sitting on its board of directors. How one of the companys top executives and the daughter of its founder would end up in the ranks of a regular associate and pulling double duty is something Huawei never even attempted to explain. The fraud meant to keep Huaweis relationship with Skycom a secret started no later than 2007 when the firm organized an apparent sale of its stake in Skycom, the original basis of affiliate claims, yet controlled the firm that purchased it through a complicated web of corporate relationships which were only uncovered years later as investigators were following the money. Ms. Meng personally lied to an official of one of the companys banking partners as part of a presentation she gave in 2013, the DOJs lawsuit alleges. Advertisement American banks were also on the receiving end of those lies, having cleared tens of millions of dollars worth of transactions between Huawei and Skycoms Iranian arm while relying on that false representation of the relationship between the two. Had they knowingly processed the payments while being aware of the true nature of Huaweis Skycom ties, those banks would be facing major fines and other penalties. In conclusion, Ms. Meng is accused of bank fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracies to commit both. On racism, egoism, and retaliatory death sentences Advertisement Having Donald Trump as your leader means many things for any entity, let alone the nation with the most powerful military and economy in the world, yet it doesnt exactly guarantee sensitive handling of diplomatic issues, to say the least. After Canadian authorities arrested Ms. Meng on the DOJs request, reports emerged that the White House was purposefully kept in the dark regarding the operation preceding the development, with the main government concern being those activities would affect trade talks between the U.S. and China. Why President Trump wasnt proactively given that intelligence beforehand was illustrated what happened after the deed was done; less than two weeks following Ms. Mengs arrest, he proudly declared hes prepared to leverage her during the negotiations in question, assuming he finds a way to do so. That statement was a true jackpot for China it doesnt matter that a U.S. President cant feasibly intervene in a court proceeding of any kind, let alone such a high-profile one, and not only would any attempt to do so be frivolous but would likely end in impeachment; the very fact Trump falsely suggested he has the ability to do so provided China with ammo that it used in mere minutes. It was precisely that statement that led to ridiculous claims about Ms. Meng being a victim of racism and politics, and it came at the worst possible time, just as China started retaliating by arresting Canadian citizens, starting with former diplomat Michael Kovrig who was in the country doing work for the International Crisis Group, and continuing with entrepreneur Michael Spavor, the founder of a local company offering tourist trips to North Korea. Teacher Sarah McIver was also taken into custody by mid-December but was later returned to Canada. Advertisement As Mr. Kovrig is technically on leave from Global Affairs Canada, PM Justin Trudeau accused China of violating diplomatic immunity which should still apply in his case. He also had a grown-up talk with Trump in early January, whereafter the head of the U.S. confirmed Washington must respect judicial independence and not attempt meddling in the case. Two weeks later, Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian sentenced to 15 years in a Chinese prison for drug smuggling, is surprisingly granted a retrial following his appeal. Following hasty proceedings, hes sentenced to death in mid-January, which prompted yet another diplomatic incident. Canadas envoy to China, John McCallum, was fired in late January after saying he believes Ms. Mengs legal argument against her extradition to the U.S. is quite strong, later adding it would be great for Canada if Washington lets the whole thing go. Advertisement A point of no return Ms. Meng already failed in arguing her extradition to the U.S. would be illegal and had sued the Canadian government for the treament she received. The executive held permanent residency in Canada between 2001 and 2009, owns several multi-million-dollar homes in the area together with her family, and has been regularly visiting Vancouver for years. Some of her homes were put up as collateral for her bail amounting to the equivalent of $7.5 million. Besides local ties, her attorneys cited health issues as another reason why she can not continue being incarcerated. The picture they painted is that of a thyroid cancer survivor who suffers from sleep apnea, severe hypertension, and needs daily access to specialized foods and drugs. As for the accusations against her, the legal team assembled in Vancouver is presently shifting the blame to Huawei Chinas legal team and not the finance unit led by Ms. Meng. What happens now is anyones guess but this is certainly a point of no return; China is destroying its diplomatic relationships by openly threatening Canada, Canada is on the verge of dropping Huaweis 5G technology, Huawei risks losing who some describe as its heir apparent as the aforementioned charges could amount to up to 30 years in federal prison for Ms. Meng, Ms. Meng stands to lose what she surely perceives as everything, and the U.S. is entering uncharted territory when it comes to holding Chinese firms accountable for disrespecting stateside and international laws. In the meantime, Huawei sued the U.S. over its claims of national security concerns which prompted it to block the majority of the firms business on its territory, and the next hearing in Ms. Mengs extradition trial has been scheduled for May 8 as her lawyers made abuse claims earlier this month, meaning shell lose at least half a year in total while fighting the charges laid out against her. After four months worth of arguments, threats, arrests, firings, lawsuits, and one death sentence, its scary to think that whatever follows is bound to be even uglier. Posted on: March 13, 2019 4:07 PM The 200th anniversary of the birth of Anglican hymn writer Cecil Frances Alexander was celebrated with a themed praise evening in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, on Sunday (10 March). During her lifetime, she wrote almost 400 popular hymns, including All Things Bright and Beautiful, There Is a Green Hill Far Away, Once in Royal David's City, and I bind unto myself today (Saint Patricks Breastplate). Mrs Alexander was born in April 1818. She married an Anglican priest, William Alexander, who later became Bishop of Derry and Raphoe and then, after then death of Mrs Alexander, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland. Sundays service took place in Clogher dioceses St Macartins Cathedral in Enniskillen. The evening of praise was the culmination of a weekend of commemorations in the cathedral, which included an exhibition organised by the dioceses Board of Religious Education. The exhibition included items on loan from St Columbs Cathedral in Londonderry and St Bestius Parish Church, Killeter. They covered Mrs Alexanders life from her birth in Dublin until her death in Derry in October 1895 at the age of 77. The exhibition featured letters, manuscripts and photographs of family members and places where the Alexanders lived during their life together serving in the Church of Ireland. The exhibition attracted people from all over Ireland including some distant descendants of the Alexanders. The praise evening included narration of Mrs Alexanders life story interspersed with the singing of almost a dozen of her well-known hymns. During one section of the story, Rebekah Clingan dressed as Mrs Alexander and walked along the aisle to show people how she would have dressed in the 1800s. Taking part in the service were members of St Macartins Cathedral Choir as well as the GFS (Girls Friendly Society) Clogher Diocesan choir, which included the GFS All-Ireland President, Alison Jackson. The lawyer Gonzalo Boye, acting on behalf of the rapper Valtonyc real name Josep Miquel Arenas informed the ACN [Agencia Catalana de Noticies] that the European Court of Human Rights has agreed to hear his case. Court sources have not confirmed Boyes claim, though they stated that agreeing to consider a case does not imply it has been formally accepted. Valtonyc filed his appeal with the Strasbourg-based court last October, alleging that Spain had violated his freedom of expression by sentencing him to three and a half years in prison for the crimes of glorifying terrorism, insulting the Crown and making threats through his lyrics. Valtonyc is currently living in Brussels, where he fled in order to evade prison and where he is still subject to a European Arrest Warrant [EAW] as he awaits the Belgian courts final ruling on his extradition. The EAW is bogged down in the Ghent Court of Appeal, pending a ruling on a preliminary question it sent to the Court of Justice of the European Union enquiring how it should apply Spanish law regarding the glorification of terrorism, while simultaneously deciding on how to proceed with the arrest warrant. The statement said: Safety is Boeings number one priority and we have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX. We understand that regulatory agencies and customers have made decisions that they believe are most appropriate for their home markets. Well continue to engage with them to ensure they have the information needed to have confidence in operating their fleets. The United States Federal Aviation Administration is not mandating any further action at this time, and based on the information currently available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators. The inaugural flight departed on 11 March from Terminal 3, Dubai International (DXB) and was welcomed on arrival at Tashkent International Airport (TAS). On board the inaugural flight was a senior delegation from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) led by Sultan bin Saeed Al Mansoori, Minister of Economy in the UAE. Trade delegation included the Dubai Chamber of Commerce, other business entities and members of the UAE media. Al Mansoori, UAE Minister of Economy, emphasised on the importance of this step, further pointing out that the country maintains a leading position in the global air transport map and serves as an important centre for enhancing global connectivity through its sophisticated international airports and air carriers with world-class reputation and a wide network of destinations. He also stated that the civil aviation sector continues to serve as a major pillar in the vision adopted by the UAE, under the guidance of its leadership, to strengthen economic relations and establish partnerships with various developing countries. This sector is also seen as one of the main channels for increasing trade rates and investments and enhancing tourism and cultural exchange. Ghaith Al Ghaith, chief executive officer of Flydubai, said: Uzbekistan is an important trade partner for the UAE and the start of flights to Tashkent represents a significant milestone in helping to strengthen commercial ties between us. We are pleased to be the first UAE carrier to launch direct flights between Dubai and Tashkent, opening up another underserved market in Central Asia and supporting Dubais vision of creating flows of travel and trade. Theyre moving us to a swamp, with no opportunity to grow our vision, said Sami Scott, who helped organize a petition drive against the orchestras proposal. That petition has accumulated 300-plus signatures. Sarasota Herald Tribune About six months ahead of expiration of the current labor contract between the Philadelphia Orchestra Association and its players, the two sides have reached an agreement on a pact that keeps the peace for the next four years. (Yannick, left, is very relieved.) The Philadelphia Inquirer Albums are arriving for consideration in batches that have my poor postlady groaning down the sidewalk toward the mailbox. Todays review is intended to be the start of the latest Rifftides attempt to catch up. (If the jazz record business is dying, it has a funny way of showing it.) Daniel Szabo, Visionary (Fuzzy Music) The liner essay in pianist and composer Szabos album, and the publicity surrounding its release, stress the musics eclecticism. It is true that Szabos work reflects influences of jazz, classical and modern European music. But more striking is that the music has coherence andfor lack of a more exact terma distinct personality. Szabo combines his piano, a woodwind sextet and a string quartet in scores that have consistent spirit and a point of view. The voicings across and within the horn and string sections, and the variety of rhythmic displacements, are advanced by a rhythm section sparked by the remarkable drummer Peter Erskine. Erskines cymbal splashes and brush work in the final extension of the Szabo composition Floating are at once compelling and relaxing. That is just one instance of his ability to imbue the character of a performance. Among the other stars in Szabos galaxy are saxophonist Kim Richmond, who shines on soprano sax in Cosmic and on alto in Szabos arrangement of Wayne Shorters Infant Eyes, the only composition in the album not by Szabo. Another Los Angeles veteran reedman, Bob Sheppard, solos with notable spirit elsewhere in the album on both flute and tenor saxophone. Sara Andons flute is an essential lead voice in several pieces, stunningly in the albums closing piece, Underwater. Szabo (pictured right) discloses in his liner information that his Cosmic was Inspired by the adagio movement of Bela Bartoks 2nd Piano concerto. That is an acknowledgement of the importance in Szabos life of the Hungarian homeland where he began his musical journey. He studied in the US at the New England Conservatory. His doctorate in music is from the University of Southern California. Now a thoroughgoing Californian, he teaches at UCLAs Herb Alpert School of Music. Do it yourself if you can We accept in principle that private equity can deliver (somewhat) excess returns over most other asset classes. But there are a lot of qualifications attached to that, and most of them are very relevant to whether and how pension funds should invest in private equity. Gen Z and Millennials Have Very Different Dating Habits When You Were Born Might Determine How You View Sex, Survey Says Age may not be the only thing that sets Gen Zers and millennials apart. According to a new LifeStyles SKYN survey, how you view sex and intimacy might be dependent on your generation, too. In the 2019 SKYN Condoms Sex & Intimacy Survey, 2,000 Gen Z adults (age 18-22) and millennials (age 23-28) in the United States and Canada were asked their views on topics ranging from how often they used condoms to which sexual positions they preferred. RELATED: The Best Free Dating Sites to Help You Meet The One While youd think that some of their thoughts would align as their ages arent that far apart, the survey results revealed a fairly large gap in their sexual beliefs and practices. For example, 16 percent of Gen Z adults surveyed admitted to using an emergency contraceptive more than once within the last year, while only 9 percent of millennials needed to find a backup plan. SKYN In general, numbers point at Gen Zers being a bit more adventurous with their sexual activity when compared to millennials. 42 percent of Gen Z participants would be down for a threesome, in comparison to 30 percent of the millennials that were surveyed. Gen Zers are also reportedly losing their virginities at an earlier age than millennials (16 compared to 18, respectively), and are well versed in the art of sexting, with 54 percent admitting to sending naughty messages to someone on social media. Gen Z adults are fast becoming the majority of our customer base, says Jeyan Heper, Chief Executive Officer of LifeStyles Healthcare. This years survey has unveiled key learnings surrounding the sexual preferences, trends and desires of this growing demographic. These insights will ultimately serve to further drive innovation and help us continue creating products that heighten intimacy and promote better sexual experiences for every generation. And if youre wondering where Gen Z and millennial adults learned about the birds and the bees, it wasn't from a teacher. 16 percent of those surveyed said that theyve never had a sex education class while at school. The curiosity to learn about sex on their own might even explain why 30 percent of women across both generations suggested that theyd be down for sexual experiences with both genders, with 21 percent of men saying the same. Its clear that even the tiniest of things, whether age, education, or otherwise, can influence someones viewpoint on sex and dating. You Might Also Dig: The sextoy market is growing quite rapidly in India right now. Although it is not a big trend, it is a hot topic on the internet as it is secretly expanding its market. In this article, we will focus on sextoy and introduce recommended sextoy for Indian beginners of sextoy by gender. India, the birthplace of the Kama Sutra, is very strict about sex. Also, premarital sex is basically not allowed. Therefore, there are many people who are sexually restricted. But what happens when you continue to be sexually restricted? Frustration may build up and you may end up taking your sexual stress out on your partner. If you are able to adopt sextoy in a timely manner, you can get rid of those problems. I want to have more exciting sex than Im having now. I want more variation in masturbation I want to get even stronger pleasure than I do on my own. If you have any of these problems, please stay with me until the end. What is sex toys for Indian? Sextoy, as the name implies, is a toy used during sex and masturbation. It is a generic term for vibrators, Egg-vibrators, Electric massagers, dildo, handcuffs and condoms. They are used to make regular sex more exciting or to make masturbation more pleasurable. Because sextoy is very stimulating, it can help you to get rid of the problems and frustrations of being in a rut of sex with your partner for a long time, or if you are unhappy with the lack of pleasure in sex with your partner. The ability to satisfy your desires with movement, texture, and size, which cannot be done by a normal human being, can help you to be satisfied with sex and, as a result, improve your relationship with your partner. It is also said to help improve sexual dysfunction (inability to get an erection or ejaculate) and difficulty in feeling during sex (insensitivity), which is attracting more attention than in the past. In recent years, the demand for sextoy has increased due to the spread of smartphones and the Internet and the increasing number of people using online shopping. Even those who are concerned about the appearance of sextoy (and find it difficult to purchase) can now easily obtain it by using mail order. In the case of online shopping, most of the stores have taken steps to ensure that the contents of the products delivered to you are not revealed, so you can purchase them without your family members knowing. Until a while ago, you had to go to the store where the adult goods were sold to buy them, so it was quite a hurdle to overcome. Also, many people may have an image that sextoy is somehow embarrassing to own. But nowadays, some of them are so stylish and cute that you cant believe they are sextoy at a glance. More and more people are using them for travel and outdoor use because they are not too bulky and are suitable for carrying around. Sextoy situation in India Before introducing the recommended sextoy for Indians, lets talk about one of the sextoy situations in India in recent years. In India, due to the high concentration of population, the following six cities have particularly high sales of sextoy in India. Mumbai Kolkata Bangalore Delhi Chennai Hyderabad These cities account for roughly 70 percent of sextoy sales in India. In the future, the percentage of sextoy use will gradually increase in other cities in India as well. If you never talk about sextoy publicly, that girl in your neighborhood might be a sextoy user too. If you are interested in sextoy, you dont have to suppress your desire for it. What are Sextoys for beginner? Among all sextoys, sextoy for beginners are vibrators, dildo, masturbators, Sex Lubricants, and condoms. Sex Lubricants and condoms, which are familiar to people who have had sex, are also a great beginners sextoy. I will explain the details of each toy later, but there are many sextoy products that are painful to use and can only be used after some anal expansion. I assume that the Indian readers of this article are people who have not had much experience with sextoy. If such people use professional sextoy suddenly, they are at risk of injury or trauma. Therefore, to introduce sextoy, you need to start with a beginners version and gradually become familiar with it. Advantages of using sextoy for Indians There are three advantages of using sextoy for Indians You can masturbate in a wide variety of ways. Can have stimulating sex Can develop new sexual zones If you try to masturbate with your own fingers or hands, it tends to be a pattern. However, with sextoy, you can easily masturbate in a variety of ways. You will definitely be fascinated by the attraction of new stimulation. Also, your daily sex life will be more exciting than ever. There are many things in sextoy that are visually stimulating and give you a strong and intense feeling of pleasure. This allows you to see your partners promiscuity in a way that you wouldnt normally see it. When you are in a relationship, sex with your partner may become a pattern, but it can also eliminate these problems. It can also lead to the development of new sexual zones (which is the training of sexual stimulation to allow you to feel orgasms). For more information on the development of new sexual zones, see the following articles [Women's Erogenous Zone]How to find and develop, 7 hidden sexual zones !![In India] In this issue, we will dissect the female erogenous zone! ..." Many of you may be like that. Men, in particular, shou... Thus, the use of sextoy can only be a good thing for the men and women of India. Sextoy for beginner men in India So, lets continue with the recommended goods for Indian sextoy beginners. For ease of understanding, we will introduce them by gender. Lets start with the men! The following five goods are recommended for novice Indian sextoy men Masturbator Cock rings Love Doll Sex Lubricants Toys for the prostate Lets check each one in detail. Masturbator The masturbator is a sextoy for men that elaborately reproduces a womans vagina, mouth, and anus, and is one of the most popular sextoy products. It is used by men to masturbate, and it is popular because it provides stronger stimulation and pleasure more easily than using hands. Most are made of good quality silicone, and their softness is something that cannot be achieved with ones own hands. They can provide stronger pleasure than a real womans vagina, so be careful not to overuse them. (You wont be able to have an orgasm in a womans vagina anymore.) Again Male masturbators are a wonderful toy. I do not need any favourite timing, bothersome bargaining. You do not have to worry too much. Revolutionize your masturbation time! ! ! Made in Japan is a wonderful kinky toy.#sextoysindia #SexToyIndia #Japanhttps://t.co/4k70QGzoTP pic.twitter.com/tRVdxTKPpa SEXToys India PR (@SextoysIndia) November 12, 2018 Some of them are disposable, while others can be washed and used over and over again, so its fun to buy a few to use depending on your mood. If you want to know more about masturbator, please click here Really pleasant male masturbation and how to do it Are you in a rut with your daily masturbation routine? I'm going to show you five ways men masturbate that you might ... [For Beginners] How to choose and use a male masturbator without fail Gentlemen.Have you ever used a masturbator? The person who sees this article is probably the one who has not experien... Cock Ring A cock ring is literally a ring-shaped sextoy that is worn on a mans penis. It maintains an erection by binding the penis with a ring of rubber and blocking blood flow. It is sometimes used as an accessory to be worn on the penis, and may be made of metal or plastic as well as rubber. In some cases, cock rings have parts or vibrators attached to them that stimulate the vagina, so they kill two birds with one stone, giving a woman pleasure while maintaining an erection. Cock rings are also sometimes used to treat erectile dysfunction. It can help with erectile dysfunction, where the penis doesnt get hard when you get an erection or doesnt last long when you try to insert it. Men who are prone to breakage or who are unsure of the hardness and size of their erections can use a cock ring to increase the size of their penis and maintain an erection for a longer period of time. Cock rings vary in price from around RS700 to over RS2000 with a vibrator function. Some of them do not fit your penis, so you should check the size of the cock ring before you buy. You should know the size of your partners or your own penis when it is erect. [Penis enlargement] What is a cock ring? Types and usage Cock rings can make your penis bigger and harder. It also makes sex with women more fulfilling and increases your sat... Love Doll Love dolls, also known as Dutchwives, are dolls with the appearance of a woman who can experience simulated sex. There are dolls that look like a woman, but they have no face and only have their breasts and lower torso cut off, and some dolls are so realistic that they can actually be mistaken for real women. Some expensive dolls can cost more than 1 million yen, and the quality of the doll is easily influenced by the price. The higher the price, the higher the quality of the doll will be, the closer it will be to the real woman, and the cheaper the doll will be, the less elaborate it will be, making it look like a real doll! Something is wrong! That is also true. You cant go wrong if you choose a balance between price and taste. There are stores that allow you to make custom-made love dolls, so you can create a girl of your choice. You can make a girl of your choice. You can start with inexpensive love dolls at first, and once you get used to it, you can try custom-made love dolls. If you want to know more about Love doll, please click here Thorough explanation of the charm of sex dolls! Have you ever heard of sex dolls that are used primarily for pseudo-sex purposes? It is a doll that is quite close to... Sex lubricants Sex lubricants are used as a substitute for lubricating fluid during sex or as a lubricant for men to use masturbator rules. It is not uncommon for women to have difficulty getting wet, depending on their physical condition, or to have difficulty getting wet due to their constitution. Forcing the penis into the vagina at such times can cause painful intercourse. There are various types of Sex Lubricants, some with a warming effect, some with a cooling effect, and some with a scent. Changing the Sex Lubricant used during play is recommended as a good sex accent. If you want to learn more about Sex Lubricants, click here. What is sex lubricant?Explain the difference and usage of each ingredient The word "sex toy" may seem like a hurdle to overcome, but lotion is actually one of the most familiar sex toys. Many... Toys for the Prostate Another sextoy for men is prostate toys. The most famous prostate toys include Enemagra, which was originally a prostate massager developed by an American urologist to treat an enlarged prostate line. Modern prostate toys are imitations of Enemagra that have spread as sextoy for men. Many people think of prostate toys as being used by gay men, but in fact they are often used by straight men. What is the prostate? The prostate is an organ found only in men. It is a walnut-sized organ located deep in the pelvis, just below the bladder, and its primary role is to protect and nourish sperm. You cannot touch the prostate gland from outside the body, but you can touch it by inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus. By inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus and touching the prostate and developing it, you can feel intense orgasms. Orgasms felt in the prostate are mainly dry orgasms, which are orgasms that do not involve ejaculation. (You can also feel orgasms with ejaculation through prostate stimulation.) The prostate is called the male G-spot, and dry orgasms can be much more intense than ejaculation. Therefore, men who are able to develop a prostate can become addicted to the pleasure. sextoy for beinner women in India The following are the recommended goods for Indian women who are new to sextoy. The following three are recommended for use by women who are new to sextoy. Vibrator. Dildo Electric Masserger Lets check out what each one is in detail. If you want to check out womens toys, click here. [BEST25]Sex Toys for Women in IndiaThat Can Help You Have an Orgasm There are many women who pretend to feel orgasm during sex. But don't worry, you don't have to pretend to feel orgasm... Vibrators A vibrator is a sextoy that vibrates with an Egg-Vibrator to provide stimulation and is often referred to simply as a vibrator. Some vibrate as well as rotate, and there are many variations of sextoy. It is quite a popular sextoy, and is well recognized by people who do not know much about sextoy. Its usage is similar to that of a massager, but it is more compact and easier to carry than a massager, and many of them look as cute as a lipstick or a macaroon, so they are popular among women. For a while, a famous influencer on twitter said, This is good! You may have heard of the topic of this article by introducing the recommended vibrators. Vibrators are great for women to use on their own, but they are also recommended for men who have difficulty satisfying women with sex. Since it is powered by electricity, it is far less tiring than moving your hands by yourself. This makes it easier to satisfy a woman with sex because you can caress her for longer than usual. Vibrators are mainly used on the female side, but they can also be used on men. When used on men, they are used to attack the nipples and glans, and in both cases it is recommended to wear a condom for hygiene reasons. Introducing how to use the vibrator, its purpose, and how to choose it! Vibrator uses the vibrations caused by the rotation of the motor to provide stimulation. It is one or two of the most... Dildo A dildo is a model sextoy made to mimic a male penis. It can be made of silicone, elastomer (think of it as a material similar to PVC), metal or glass. A dildo can be used by a man for his female partner during sex, or by a woman for masturbation to get pleasure from it. They are mainly inserted into women, but some can be used in the male anus as well. It is sometimes used synonymously with vibrators, but the vibrator is not the same thing as a vibrating device. A model of a penis that does not vibrate is a dildo. Some of them have suction cups that can be attached to the floor or wall so that you can enjoy realistic masturbation without using your hands. For fun, there is a dildo made in the shape of your partners penis. This one is also popular as a gift, and if youve been together for a long time and are having trouble finding a gift for your partner, you might want to pick one. To learn more about dildo, please click here. What is Dildo: Orgasms with Dildos for Men and Women A dildo is a model of a male organ that is used by women for masturbation and by men to stimulate the prostate gland. Th... Electric Masserger A Electric Masserger is a hand-held electric massager, also known as a handheld massager, and can usually be purchased at electronics stores. It was originally designed to relieve stiff shoulders and back pain, so the hurdle of buying one in a physical store is quite low. Many people may have seen or used it in some form or another, as it is often installed in leisure hotels. Such a massager is highly recommended for beginners because it is easy for women to get pleasure from it when they use it during masturbation. It is larger than Egg-Vibrator and vibrations are stronger than those of Egg-Vibrators and vibrators, so even just hitting the clitoris can give you a great deal of pleasure. For those women who have never had an orgasm during sex with their man, the massager may be a good way to get a feel for what it feels like to have an orgasm. It looks and feels like an electric massager, so you wont have to feel awkward if your roommate finds out. If you are in a rut of having sex with your partner, if you want to feel an orgasm through masturbation, or if you are thinking of using a sextoy, why dont you try it from a simple massager? To learn more about Electric Masserger, click here. What is a massager? Introducing types, selection methods, and usage Originally, the Magic-wand vibrator and the massage machine were sold as a home massage machine used for the back and th... How to choose a sextoy for Indian Now that weve covered the different types of sextoy, heres how to choose one. Especially if you are trying sextoy for the first time, pay attention to the following three points: Does the size fit you (the partner)? Does the size fit you (your partner)? Is the environment able to produce sound without problems? Price range First of all, the choice of size is quite important. Most sextoy are used against or inserted into the genitals, but the genitals are very delicate organs for both men and women. For this reason, using an inappropriate size may cause damage. Secondly, the environment should be able to produce sound without problems. Some sextoys not only wear, but also rotate and vibrate. Its easier to get pleasure from something that moves than something that doesnt, but the fact that it moves means that the internal rotors make some noise. If you live in a house with thin walls or if you have roommates, you may not be able to concentrate because of the noise, so it is best to choose one that is silent or has a low noise level. Especially in India, where many people live with their families, it is very important that you dont have to worry about sound when you use it. Finally, there is the price range. The price range of sextoy ranges widely, from around RS500 at the cheapest to RS10,000 or more at the highest. Its good to consider how much money you can afford and how much you want to buy. Do you want your family to not find out about sextoy? I live with my family and want to use sextoy without them finding out! If you are a man, you should buy a camouflage sextoy that does not look like a sextoy at first glance. For men, there are many masturbators that do not look like a sextoy, and for women, there are vibrators that only look like cosmetics. If you choose such a type, youll be safe in case your family members find out. How to buy sextoys in India The best way to purchase sextoy is through online shopping. For more information on how to purchase sextoy, please see the article below. Sextoy is one of them. Therefore, you can easily get sextoy in India by using online shopping. SexToysINDIA is a long established and stable sextoy store and you can have sextoy delivered to any place in India. They also offer cash on delivery, so those who are worried about shopping with a credit card do not have to worry. Of course, the latest security is in place, so your information will not be taken out when you use your credit card. To begin with, many people may be concerned about whether they are legally allowed to purchase sextoy. ikmAs it turns out, its not illegal. Right now, it is not open to the public because the Indian adult market is still in the development stage, but it will gradually spread from now on. Take advantage of sextoy and open the door to new pleasures and culture. 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You will enjoy sex more if you keep it safe and use it correctly. Summary What did you think? In this article, we have introduced the recommended sextoy for the beginners of sextoy in India. The sextoy market is growing rapidly in India and it will continue to grow steadily in the future. As India is a rather closed-minded country, it can be difficult to be open about ones sexual habits and values. However, being faithful to ones desires by properly dissolving ones sexual desire is very effective for ones physical and mental health. If this is your first time to learn about sextoy, or if you are interested in using sextoy, why not give it a try? Indian Sextoys for ur best! will introduce you to sextoy and other trivia about sextoy, sexuality, and sexuality for men and women. I want to read more! If you think its a great idea, please bookmark it. Gilbert + Tobin (G+T) is acting for GrainCorp on the sale of its bulk liquid terminals business in Australia to ANZ Terminals. The deal values the business at about $350m. G+T said that it also advised on a long-term storage agreement that will commence after the sale closes. The sale, which GrainCorp said frees up capital, is a result of the companys review of its portfolio. It comes as Long-Term Asset Partners continue due diligence on its planned $3.3bn takeover of GrainCorp. Our insurance clients have expressed a clear preference for firms which not only have a national footprint, but also a broad offering in each location, he said. Nievas arrival will add considerable depth to our Melbourne insurance capability. Connell advises clients on insurance claims and coverage disputes. She has a focus on matters that involve public liability, particularly personal injury and property damage; professional indemnity, particularly in real estate; and product liability and first-party industrial special risks. She is also a specialist in complex litigation prominent class actions. The new partner said that she was particularly drawn to the strength of the Mills Oakley brand and the firms enduring commitment to the insurance industry. Servicing the insurance sector is about having a depth of understanding of the needs of your clients, and providing a compelling value proposition, she said. Mills Oakley is known for its leading expertise across a broad spectrum of risk types and its innovative approach to client service. I am genuinely excited to be part of the team. (Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.com) (Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.com) The time is takes to process a skilled visa for working in Australia is to be cut substantially due to the expansion of the Accredited Sponsor Scheme, it has been announced.The Accredited Sponsor Scheme allows businesses seeking to employ overseas workers on Temporary Skills Shortage (TSS) visas processed within just five business days, compared to an average 42 business days for other applicants.The expansion means that more can process visas quickly and employers that have made major investments in their Australian operations will be assisted to fill temporary skill gaps through the scheme.Immigration Minister David Coleman said that employers that have invested in the past five years at least $50 million into their Australian business will now be eligible for the scheme, although the investment must have directly created Australian jobs or generated export activity.'Extending the scheme to reputable businesses that have invested $50 million in Australia will ensure those businesses can access the skilled workers they need, and they can continue to contribute to the economy through further investment, job creation and innovation,' he explained.'I have also instructed the Department to establish a new dedicated team to proactively identify and invite eligible employers to join the scheme. By doing this the Government is creating more certainty and confidence for business to know they will have the workers they need, when they need them,' he added.Currently, there are 900 businesses and government organisations that have been accredited under the scheme. It is expected that the number of accredited sponsors will almost triple to 2,500 by the end of the calendar year.To become an Accredited Sponsor, businesses must demonstrate an unblemished track record of compliance with Australian migration and employment law. Labour market testing will also be required to ensure employment opportunities are first offered to Australians prior to filling a vacancy.'Our first priority must always be to fill available jobs with Australian workers. This has been and remains our key focus, which is reflected in the unemployment rate falling to 5% and record job creation across Australia,' Coleman pointed out.'However, where skills are unavailable in Australia, we must ensure businesses can access the global pool of skilled workers so they can continue to thrive and generate the best economic contribution for Australia,' he added. Hi everyone. So I applied a first time for a tourist Visa, right now I am not employed so they asked to have proof that I had enough money. I got refused cause they was not sufficient funds (I was expecting a bank transfer that took way too long time). When I finally received my money, I applied a second time however they refused it again cause for them it's impossible in 7 days that my situation changed. They dont even let me show that now I can stay in Australia with my own funds. The reason is for them I come to Austrlia to work, to as tourist. If I apply for working holiday Visa do I have more chance to get one easier even if this one I have to pay for it? Or re-re-apply and attache my bank extracts directly? Say that someone will help me financially? I am supposed to fly the 17 of April so can be nice if I can solve that quickly. Thank you for your help! ABS On Wednesday, the Japanese bike builder announced the pricing for the model on the island, and with it the launch of a special equipment pack called Samurai.In the UK, the Suzuki Katana will retail starting from GBP 11,399, but a host of extras can be added to the bike. Among them, the Samurai accessory pack that will sell for GBP 999, GBP 383 less than all the accessories bought separately.The Samurai pack includes a fly screen, red and black accessory seat, carbon effect front mudguard and engine covers, a protective tank pad, wheel rim tape, and a subtle-yet-sharp red top fairing and seat unit decal.The new Katana was introduced as a revival of the glorious original with the same name, introduced back in the 1980s. As such, the bike has a retro feel to it when it comes to its design.Powering the Katana is a 999 cc 4 cylinder engine, also used on the GSX -R1000 K5 and capable of developing 150 hp at 10,000 rpm and a peak torque of 108 Nm at 9,500 rpm.As standard, the model features a three-mode traction control,, inverted front forks, and Brembo radial-mount front brake calipers. The frame of the bike is made of lightweight, twin-spar aluminum.Suzuki has big plans for its line of motorcycles in the year ahead. By 2021, the bike builder intends to release no less than ten new models, and the Katana is the first of them.The all-new Katana is a great demonstration of Suzukis future, said in a statement at the bikes launch Suzukis president, Toshihiro Suzuki.There is much more to come from Suzuki, as we maintain our customer-focused perspective and bring innovative and exciting motorcycles to people around the world. The plane had just landed from the United Arab Emirates at the Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka, Bangladesh. A search revealed the gold bars, which weighed about 12 kg (26.4 pounds) and had an estimated value of about $500,000, BDNews reports.The gold bars were recovered with the support from National Security Intelligence early on Monday after the plane arrived from Dubai, said Customs departments Deputy Commissioner Othello Chowdhury, the publication writes.The gold bars were wrapped up with tape on the back of a mirror in the planes toilet. A total of 106 bars weighing 12 kg were recovered after removing the tape, the Deputy Commissioner says.The Bangladesh Berman Airlines plane was later identified as Flight 128, which had come from Abu Dhabi with a brief stopover at Chittagong, Bangladesh. At the time of writing, police didnt have a suspect in custody and would not offer more details to the press, given the pending investigation.Though spectacular, this catch isnt the most brazen attempt to smuggle something illegal into another country. Just recently, for instance, a British Airways steward was arrested for trying to smuggle 13 kg (28 pounds) of pure cocaine into the UK, in his carry-on bag. He probably imagined that, as a flight attendant, he would get to skip x-ray checks, but no such luck.Jean Paul Ogo, the steward in question, was arrested in Sao Paolo, Brazil, as he was preparing to return to his home country. Had he made the journey undetected and been able to get the drugs into the country, they could have sold on the street for 1.5 million. At JAXA we are pursuing international co-ordination and technological studies towards Japans participation in international space exploration. We aim to contribute through leading Japanese technologies which can potentially generate spin-off benefits. Having Toyota join us in the challenge of international space exploration greatly strengthens our confidence, said Hiroshi Yamakawa, JAXA president. Toyota Motor Corporation and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have officially signed an agreement that will see them build an exploration vehicle that will be sent to the moon. In addition Yamakawa said that manned rovers will play an important role in a fully-fledged exploration on the moon. With Toyota leading the way in development, JAXA is confident that the automaker will be able to deliver a vehicle fit for moon exploration. The lunar rover will be a man-operated, pressurized vehicle that is capable of accomodating two people (four in an emergency). It will measure 6 meters long, 5.2 meters wide and stand at 3.8 meters tall. This puts the proposed rover along the size of a small coach bus. As to what will power the lunar rover, Toyota is looking at using hydrogen fuel cells as they are clean sources of energy that only emit water as its byproduct. Not only that, Toyota claims that fuel cells have a higher energy density than other types of fuel source. This will allow the lunar rover to have a range of over 10,000 km, which is nearly enough for the manned vehicle to drive around the moon's equatorial 10,916 km circumference. Fuel cell electric vehicles have the ability to emit reduced amounts of harmful substances, such as particulate matter, that are found in the air they take in. As such, they are characterised by having so-called minus emissions3. We want to further improve on this characteristic, said Shikegi Terashi, Toyota executive vice president. There is no word yet, however, as to when Toyota and JAXA plan on sending the fully-built rover to the moon. With no definite timeline yet, we'll have to wait and see how will it progress. Last year was the 4th-warmest year globally in temperature records that date back to the mid-1800s, ranking only behind 2016 (the warmest), 2015 and 2017, new data from the research group Berkeley Earth shows. Why it matters: It underscores the long-term warming trend and arrives on the heels of major UN and U.S. federal reports on the near- and long-term dangers of failing to steeply cut emissions. And the group's data fills a gap left by the partial government shutdown, which has delayed the release of annual data from two federal agencies: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. The big picture: "The slight decline in 2018 is likely to reflect short-term natural variability, but the overall pattern remains consistent with a long-term trend towards global warming," the report states. By the numbers: They find that global temperatures last year were almost 1.4F (or 0.77C) above the average between 1951 and 1980. And it's even warmer when compared to the pre-industrial age. "In our estimation, temperatures in 2018 were around 1.16 C (2.09 F) above the average temperature of the late 19th century, from 1850-1900, a period often used as a pre-industrial baseline for global temperature targets," they write. They estimate that 4.3% of the Earths surface set new records for the warmest yearly average. "Most significantly in 2018, this included large portions of Europe and the Middle East," the report states. What's next: They estimate that 2019 will be even warmer than 2018, but is unlikely to topple 2016 as the warmest on record. "At present it appears that there is roughly a 50% likelihood that 2019 will become the 2nd warmest year since 1850," Berkeley Earth writes. Threat level: Robert Rohde, the team's lead scientist, underscored how current warming trends will blow past the targets of the Paris climate agreement. The 2015 deal is aimed at avoiding some of the most damaging effects of climate change by holding warming to "well below" 2C, or 3.6F, above pre-industrial levels, with an aspirational target of limiting the rise to 1.5C. "If the current warming trend is allowed to continue at the present rate, we estimate that the Earth will have warmed 1.5 C above the 1850-1900 average by about 2035, and reach 2.0 C by about 2060," he said via Twitter. The five warmest years in the global record have all come in the past decade. Go deeper: Covington Catholic student Nicholas Sandmann and his parents on Tuesday filed a defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post for $250 million, accusing the publication of falsely characterizing him as racist and an instigator of a confrontation with a Native American elder on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial last month. "[The Post] intended to harm Nicholas because he was a white, Catholic boy wearing a MAGA hat, and consciously ignored the threats of harm that it knew would inevitably ensue, in favor of its political agenda." The big picture: The viral video Sandmann appeared in ignited widespread media coverage and debate, even after more evidence emerged that suggested the initial video did not accurately paint the whole picture. Kristine Coratti Kelly, the Post's Vice President for Communications, told Reuters: "We are reviewing a copy of the lawsuit and we plan to mount a vigorous defense." Go deeper: Catholic boys' encounter gets second look The rise of EVs and autonomous tech is in focus at the huge CERAWeek by IHS Markit conference. The big picture: Major oil companies are boosting their investments in EV charging tech. The trajectory of EVs will also influence global oil demand growth (although they're just one of many factors like growth in petrochemicals, shipping, and aviation). The intrigue: The long-term future of EV growth in the U.S. and worldwide is just soaked in uncertainty. There's huge divergence in forecasts for EV adoption rates. For instance, Bloomberg NEF sees electric vehicles accounting for 55% of global light-duty vehicle sales by 2040, while several other major projections are more modest, some of the considerably so. The most bullish remarks I heard yesterday came from Ulrich Spiesshofer, CEO of the Swiss industrial and tech giant ABB, which has EV charging and power grid equipment lines. "When you listen to people arguing about the EV space nowadays, I feel very strongly that the passenger car and the car industry is at a Kodak moment," he said onstage, referring to the fast transition to digital photography. "I think the world will be surprised [by] what is happening with electric vehicles," Spiesshofer told me on the sidelines of the conference. Another session here, on the EV battery supply chain, delved into real challenges for producing and procuring growing amounts of lithium, cobalt and other materials. But none of the panelists made the case that this would act as major brake on deployment. "You could have some hiccups, starts and stops, I just don't see a full-blown crisis," Colorado School of Mines professor Morgan Bazilian told me after speaking at the event. But, but, but: On a separate panel, Marianne Kah of Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy pointed to a suite of forces that can limit growth rates. Among them: "There's an unrealism about timing based on how long it takes to turn over the fleet," she said, and as a related point, noted that when people get rid of internal combustion cars to switch to EVs, those cars are used elsewhere. Another one, she said, is that as EVs do begin sapping gasoline demand, that will lower the price of the incumbent fuel. "That will actually make it harder for the electric vehicle to compete," she said. One wildcard in the U.S. is the future of policy. Derek Kan, the U.S. under secretary of transportation for policy, was not shy about saying that the Trump administration is not pro-EV. He touted the administration proposal to end EV purchase tax credits (my thought bubble: that's not going anywhere in Congress). Kan also noted upcoming rules which don't require Congress that will jettison Obama-era fuel efficiency increases in the first half of the 2020s. He said the Obama-era standards were a de-facto EV deployment policy. "We don't believe the federal government should be telling you 'Dan, you should be in a Tesla,'" Kan told conference host Dan Yergin onstage. Go deeper: Climate chasm on display at Houston energy conference CERAWeek Former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn's cooperation in the Mueller Russia investigation is complete but he is continuing to assist in a federal probe, according to a court filing Tuesday night. What they're saying: While the defendant remains in a position to cooperate with law enforcement authorities, and could testify in the EDVA case should it proceed to trial, in the governments view his cooperation is otherwise complete, special counsel Robert Mueller wrote in the filing, Reuters news agency reports. Details: Flynns lawyers asked in the joint status report for a 90-day delay to his sentencing, so he could cooperate with the federal investigation in the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) against his former business partner for unregistered lobbying on behalf of Turkey. Flynn had admitted during his plea hearing he had lobbied on behalf of the Turkish government, something he had previously denied. The big picture: Flynn had previously requested his sentencing be delayed until his cooperation with Mueller was complete. He pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI in January of that year about the nature of his conversations with the then-Russian ambassador to the U.S. HOUSTON Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told a room full of energy executives last night that the U.S. oil-and-gas boom is a vital diplomatic and commercial tool in support of the country's foreign policy goals. Why it matters: As Reuters and others pointed out, the speech was notable in its enlistment of the industry as an ally to advance U.S. geopolitical goals. It casts the U.S. rise into a petro-superpower as a check on Iran, Russia and elsewhere. He also talked up efforts to help allies develop their own resources. Speaking at the big CERAWeek by IHS Markit event, Pompeo said... "We're not just exporting American energy, we're exporting our commercial value system to our friends and to our partners." "Our model matters now, frankly, more than ever in an era of great power rivalry and competition where some nations are using their energy for malign ends." Our thought bubble: Pompeo's speech marks the Trump administration's dueling continuity and rupture with the Obama administration. The idea of using U.S. LNG exports to weaken Russia's energy influence in Europe dates back to the Obama years. The fracking-driven U.S. oil boom gave the Obama administration leeway to bring other countries on board with sanctions against Iran that helped lead to the Iran nuclear deal. But for the Trump administration, that oil surge is a leverage point for a very different strategy of trying to isolate Iran with new sanctions now that the U.S. has walked away from the nuclear agreement. "We'll continue with sanctions until Iran behaves in the way normal nations do, without threatening assassination campaigns in Europe, conducting terror campaigns throughout Syria and Iraq, without underwriting Hizballah," Pompeo said. And the speech was also noteworthy for the absence of emphasis on climate change and the environment, in contrast to State's diplomatic push especially with China during the Obama years. Go deeper: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's main political opponent Benny Gantz, who is heading the "Blue and White" party that leads in the polls, thinks President Trump could recognize Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights in order to help Netanyahu win the April 9 elections, three Gantz aides told me. Why it matters: Israel has occupied the Golan Heights from Syria since 1967. U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights would be a huge diplomatic win for Netanyahu no less significant than the moving of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. In the last year, Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians, including Gantz's political ally Yair Lapid, have started calling for U.S. recognition of the Golan Heights. Gantz's aides told me they think Trump could announce U.S. recognition of the Golan Heights during Netanyahu's visit to the White House two weeks from now. Gantz's aides told me that if Trump does this, it will give Netanyahu a huge achievement to campaign on. The big picture: Gantz's aides see Trump's support for Netanyahu's reelection as a fact and have even calculated it as part of their election campaign strategy. They said Trump's support for Netanyahu is obvious through his public statements, his sharing of Netanyahu's election billboards on his Instagram account, and the fact that he didn't ask Netanyahu to stop using him in Likud campaign ads. Driving the news: Netanyahu discussed the possibility of U.S. recognition of the Golan Heights during a visit to the territory on Monday with Sen. Lindsey Graham. U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman attended all of Netanyahu's talks with Graham. After the talks, Graham stood next to Netanyahu in front of cameras and said that once he arrives back to Washington, he will help push Sen. Ted Cruz's initiative to pass a bill in the Senate for U.S. recognition in the Golan Heights. The White House position on the issue is unclear, but nobody in the Trump administration pushed back on Graham's statement. The White House refrained from commenting and a State Department official told me there is no change to the U.S. position on the Golan Heights for the moment. U.S. records indicate that pilots filed at least 5 different complaints in recent months, reporting trouble gaining control of Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets while in-flight, according to Politico. Driving the news: Of the issues, the anti-stall system was referenced which possibly provoked the crash in Indonesia in October per a statement from a Federal Aviation Administration database in which pilots self-report matters of concern. In one documented case, a commercial pilot described the takeoff, and "within two to three seconds the aircraft pitched nose down," setting off the plane's alarm system, which sounded: "Don't sink, don't sink!" according to Politico. Authorities have not yet confirmed if that technology was also to blame for Sunday's crash in Ethiopia. CNN became the second news outlet sued by Nicholas Sandmann's representatives over their coverage of his January encounter with a Native American elder in Washington, D.C. And the Covington Catholic student's lawyer told Fox News "The Story with Martha MacCallum" Tuesday night they plan to file more lawsuits. What they're saying: "We plan to file a suit every few weeks or month," Todd McMurtry told MacCallum Tuesday night. "At least 10 top targets in the media and individuals ... Certainly were looking very closely at NBC, were looking very closely at AP, were looking very closely at HBO for the conduct of Bill Maher, and were looking at some of the people like Kathy Griffin who sent out these horrible tweets that are called doxing." Details: Sandmann's lawyers filed a defamation lawsuit last month against The Washington Post for $250 million, accusing the news outlet of falsely characterizing him as racist and intending to harm him because he's a "white, Catholic boy wearing a MAGA hat. On Tuesday, Sandmann's lawyers filed a $275 million defamation suit against CNN in the U.S. District Court of Kentucky. They allege CNN falsely conveyed to viewers that he was the "face of an unruly hate mob" and that the network "elevated false, heinous accusations of racist conduct" against the student. The big picture: The viral video Sandmann appeared in sparked widespread media coverage and commentary that continued after evidence emerged that suggested the footage may have been misinterpreted. By Azernews By Laman Ismayilova Jamal Aliyev is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant cellists of the young generation. Azerbaijani cellist has quickly amazed the world with his extraordinary talent and charisma. The musician performed on BBC Radio 3, Medici TV and London Live TV on many occasions, including his solo performance with the BBC Concert Orchestra where he gave his debut live broadcast at the Menuhin Hall. Becoming a musician was genetically pre-ordained for Jamal - both of his parents are involved in music. Aliyev`s grandfather played a large role in developing his musical skills. Future cellist began his musical studies with his first teacher and beloved grandfather, Honored Artist of Azerbaijan Kara Aliyev. He trained dozens of supremely gifted musicians, laureates of various international competitions. Speaking about his family, Jamal Aliyev also mentioned his great-grandfather and his brother. "His brother, Azad Aliyev is a violinist, People's Artist of Azerbaijan. Recently, the first international violin competition named after him was held in Baku. And great-grandfather - Hamza Aliyev is one of the founders of tar school in Azerbaijan, Shusha musical school. A street in Shusha and a school in Ganja are named after him. Among his students are such famous musicians as Suleyman Alasgarov, Khambar Huseynli and Fikrat Amirov," he said. Jamal Aliyev displayed musical talent at a young age, already playing the concerts at the age of 5. He won the prize at Trakya International competition at the age of 9 as well as Antonio Janigro International Cello Competition when he was only 11 years old. Young cellist was invited to study at Moscow Conservatory Central Music School and Yehudi Menuhin School in London. When Jamal turned 14, he decided to choose London. "While studying in London, I won all the competitions that were held in England. And one of these contests was named after Sir Karl Jenkinson," Aliyev told Azernews.az After that Jamal Aliyev and Sir Karl Jenkinson began to perform much time together. Sir Karl Jenkinson has recently composed a music piece for him. Jamal Aliyev will present the work of famous English composer at Royal Albert Hall on April 23. It is his second performance at one of the world's most famous stages Azerbaijani cellist will appear on the world's most famous stage for the second time. In the interview, Jamal Aliyev shared his feelings and thoughts on the most memorable performance in his life. "The most memorable performance in my life took place at Royal Albert Hall, where the anniversary concert of the world famous Hollywood composer John Williams was held. He chose all the performers himself," he said. John Williams invited Jamal Aliyev to perform at the concert hall in front of 7,000 spectators. This memorable event made an unforgettable impression on the cellist. Speaking about one of his recent achievements, he noted the prize of The Musicians` Company (2017) of which he is a member. "I also won the award of the very famous Turkish pianist Fazil Say. He is my idol. And now I came to Istanbul for a rehearsal with him," Aliyev said. By the way, Jamal Aliyev and Fazil Say will give two joint concerts in Turkey. The musicians will perform in Eskisehir (March 13) and Istanbul (March 15). The member of UK Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Baroness Emma Nicholson is a frequent guest at the concerts of young cellist. Baroness Emma Nicholson also invited Jamal to Westminster Abbey as she could not visit one of his concerts. Jamal Aliyev said he was very pleased to accept the invitation. The State Department referred to China's re-education camps for Uighur Muslims as some of the worst human rights violations "since the 1930s" in its annual global human rights report, per Reuters. The big picture: The New York Times reported that experts from the U.S. played a role in the Chinese government's use of DNA samples that kept tabs on its minority Uighur population. Thermo Fisher supplied the equipment the Chinese government used to conduct the largely coerced testing, per the Times. Rounding up, in some estimations ... in the millions of people, putting them into camps, and torturing them, abusing them, and trying to basically erase their culture and their religion and so on from their DNA. It's just remarkably awful." Michael Kozak, head of the State Departments human rights and democracy bureau Driving the news: The State Department's report also called out various human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, adding that Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed by agents of the kingdom. The report also referenced "the arrest of at least 20 prominent women's rights activists, executions for nonviolent offenses, forced disappearances and torture of prisoners," per AP. Go deeper: Saudi crown prince defends China's mass detention of Uighur Muslims The Trump administration informed the German government on Friday that it would curtail intelligence-sharing if Berlin allowed Huawei to participate in building the country's 5G network, WSJ reports. Why it matters: The U.S. has been pushing allies to bar Huawei and other Chinese vendors from building out their 5G networks over concerns that these companies would facilitate Chinese spying, though this is the first time it has delivered a formal warning. So far, the administration has been met with a tepid response from allies, including Germany, which has claimed it has no evidence Huawei would be capable of facilitating spying. But the threat could force Berlin's hand, as a number of terror plots in Germany have been thwarted as a result of intelligence-sharing with the U.S. Axios contributor Bill Bishop notes that terminating intelligence sharing would be a drastic step, and that China itself would be ecstatic to see U.S. alliances fracturing over the Huawei question. Go deeper: U.S. falters at Huawei diplomacy The U.S. has taken the global oil market by storm becoming the world's largest oil producer in 2018 and on track to surpass Russia and perhaps even Saudi Arabia to become the world's top exporter by 2024. Why it matters: Thanks to the end of a 40-year-old crude oil export ban signed by President Obama, a shale boom and a host of geopolitical sea changes, the U.S. is poised to reshape the global oil market over the next 10 years and beyond. The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects the U.S. to account for 70% of the increase in global production capacity in the next 5 years. "Inevitably, the status quo will change," Neil Atkinson, oil markets division head at IEA, tells Axios. "The U.S. is becoming a big player in global oil markets, and it will become a net exporter of oil on average for 2021 for the first time in 75 years. This is a good thing for markets as it adds to consumer choice and flexibility and helps to improve global oil security." What's happening: The U.S. is exploiting its natural advantages. The type of oil found in the U.S. is lighter and sweeter (contains less sulfur) than oil from other major producers like Canada, Venezuela and Iran. U.S. shale also allows eager investors to get oil fields online quickly rather than taking multiple years to develop. That's leading investors to push more money towards shale projects, Michael Tran, managing director of global energy strategy at RBC Capital Markets, tells Axios. "As a result what we believe you're on track for is a timeframe where the barrels that are coming to market are becoming lighter and sweeter and ... heavy, sour barrels are becoming increasingly constrained." Global dynamics also are strongly in the U.S.'s favor. First, U.S.-led sanctions on Venezuela combined with its state-oil company's slow collapse will see the country with the world's largest oil reserves reduce its already marginalized capacity by almost half over the next year. Iran's production capacity is expected to fall by 1.2 million barrels per day and Nigeria is facing homegrown oil market woes. Second, the UN's International Maritime Organization next year will bar ships from carrying fuel that contains sulfur content higher than 0.5% and cap their sulfur emissions, benefiting light, sweet crude. Maritime shipping accounts for about 4%5% of the oil market's 100-million-barrel-per-day total. Third, developing countries like China, which are driving new demand for crude exports, also are likely to move more toward light, sweet crude as their populations rely less on generators and heating oil, and as construction spending slows down, reducing the need for asphalt all of which rely on heavy crude oil. The bottom line: Both market forces and international regulations are pushing global demand towards exactly what the U.S. is selling. Given the booming supply of U.S. oil, that likely means a cap on prices. Go deeper: A closer look at the U.S. rising oil supply forecast into 2024 A second soldier within a space of one day has been reported dead in the Armenian military in conditions that local authorities say were not related to immediate combat duties. In a Facebook post on Wednesday morning Armenian Defense Ministry spokesman Artsrun Hovannisian said that 19-year-old combat medic Hamlet Avagian serving in Armenias armed forces died at the northeastern section of the Armenian border with Azerbaijan on March 12. The death was not caused by an enemy shot, said Hovannisian. We offer our condolences to Hamlet Avagians family and friends. Later, the Armenian Defense Ministry issued a statement, saying that Avagian slipped and fell into a gorge while going from one military outpost to another for the purpose of administering medical aid. It said the conscript died from the injuries he sustained during the fall. Investigation is underway to establish the circumstances of the case, the Defense Ministrys press office said. On Tuesday, a soldier was arrested in Nagorno-Karabakh on suspicion of killing a fellow conscript in the ethnic Armenian defense army reported earlier that day. The Armenia-based Investigative Committee did not immediately disclose the identity of the arrested soldier. Earlier, military authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh reported that in the early hours of March 12, 19-year-old conscript Karen Karapetian sustained a fatal gunshot wound at an outpost in the northeastern direction of the line of contact with Azerbaijan. Still at the early stage of the probe investigators ruled out that the Armenian soldier might have been killed with a bullet released from Azerbaijani military positions. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) sees all grounds for a positive impetus to the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process, the organizations visiting top official said in Yerevan after talks with his Armenian counterpart on Wednesday. At a joint press conference with Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanian, OSCE Chairperson-in-Office, Slovak Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcak describes his meeting with Armenias top diplomat as very constructive. I am here to reaffirm our ongoing support, in particular, to finding a peaceful solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and at the same time I express my absolute support to the actions and involvement of the Minsk Group co-chairs in the process, said Lajcak. The OSCE chairman-in-office, in particular, hailed the reduction of casualties along the line of contact in Nagorno-Karabakh. I am convinced that all this will promote the implementation of a multi-sided process of finding a peaceful settlement of the conflict. Challenges are a lot, but I think that we have all the grounds to give a positive impetus to the process, considering the developments of the past months, Lajcak said. The OSCE chairman-in-office also stressed the importance of preparing the peoples for peace. We understand that the conflict has not been settled yet, but we are convinced that the stage-by-stage, step-by-step approach and the developing dialogue, as such, will result in at least small improvements in peoples lives, Lajcak said. For his part, Armenian Foreign Minister Mnatsakanian said that during his meeting with the visiting OSCE official he reiterated that the security and status of Nagorno-Karabakh are absolute priorities for Armenia. I have also reiterated the approach on ensuring Nagorno-Karabakhs involvement and its resolute voice in the process, the Armenian minister said. Mnatsakanian also stressed the need for introducing mechanisms for the prevention of border incidents, reducing risks of such incidents and enhancing confidence-building measures that were agreed at several meetings held through the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs mediation in the past. During the press conference the visiting top OSCE official was also asked to comment on Armenias stated position that Nagorno-Karabakh should become a full party to the negotiations that are currently conducted between Yerevan and Baku. Lajcak stressed that any possible change of the format of negotiations needs to be acceptable to all parties and expressed confidence that the Armenian government has the right formula for continuing negotiations in the existing format. During his visit to Yerevan the OSCE chairman-in-office also meet with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian. According to the press office of the Armenian prime minister, during the meeting Pashinian reaffirmed Armenias support for an exclusively peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict within the framework of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairmanship and presented Yerevans principle-based position on settlement process. While in Armenia OSCE Chairman-in-Office Lajcak was also due to meet with Armenian President Armen Sarkissian and Parliament Speaker Ararat Mirzoyan. Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili on Wednesday began her two-day visit to Armenia to meet with the neighboring countrys political leadership, including her counterpart Armen Sarkissian. The two presidents met for talks in the Presidential Palace in Yerevan in the afternoon following a reception ceremony. President Sarkissian told his Georgian counterpart that the Armenian and Georgian peoples have a centuries-old history of friendship, which will surely continue in future generations. In his words, Armenian-Georgian cooperation in all spheres from culture to science and modern technologies has a huge potential for development and everything needs to be done to make this cooperation deeper and more profitable. The official website of the Armenian president quoted the newly elected Georgian leader as noting that Sarkissian was the only president who attended her inauguration in December. It was a great honor for me. It was a sign of friendship between our two countries, which our society and I personally highly appreciate, said Zourabichvili. The president of Georgia said that the two nations have a long way to go together, and it depends on them how they use the great potential in the region. Zourabichvili said that the two countries are united not only by geography, but also by the ethnic Armenian population of Georgia. Before her meeting with President Sarkissian, at whose invitation she is visiting Armenia, the Georgian president visited the hilltop memorial to 1915 Armenian Genocide victims at Tsitsernakaberd, accompanied by Armenias Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinian and Yerevan Mayor Hayk Marutian. Zourabichvili also met with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian on March 13. During the meeting Pashinian stressed that at present there is a historic opportunity for raising Armenian-Georgian relations at a new level. Pashinian reminded that as prime minister he paid his first international visit to Georgia, which, he said, shows how great importance Armenia attaches to developing relations with its neighbor. For her part, Zourabichvili stressed that Armenia and Georgia have a lot in common geographically and historically, share a common vision for the future and have a lot to do together. While in Armenia the Georgian president is also expected to meet with Armenian Parliament Speaker Ararat Mirzoyan and supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Catholicos Garegin (Karekin) II. Armenia and Georgia are unanimous in their opinion that conflicts in the region have different natures and the grounds for their settlement are not identical, Armenian President Armen Sarkisian said following his talks with visiting Georgian counterpart Salome Zourabichvili in Yerevan on Wednesday. In my personal opinion, solutions [to conflicts] should be sought solely by peaceful means, on the basis of international law and norms and in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh [it should be] on the basis of respect for the right of self-determination, Sarkissian stressed during the two presidents statements for the press. Last month the Georgian president was on an official visit to Baku where during her meeting with President Ilham Aliyev she said that Azerbaijan and Georgia had gone through the same problems. Today, we know what occupation means for a country and what it is when your territorial integrity is not restored yet. Lines of contact with occupied lands are open wounds that hinder our development. Nevertheless, despite these tragedies, we have managed to strengthen and develop our economies, Zourabichvili said in Baku, implying the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. While in Yerevan, Zourabichvili said that for Georgia, a country that hosts sizable Armenian and Azerbaijani communities, it is important that the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh should not be shifted onto its territory. It is very important for us that Georgian citizens of Armenian and Azerbaijani descents live in peace and be integrated into the political, economic and cultural life of Georgia, she said. According to Zourabichvili, as president of Georgia she is obliged to do more to make it easier for Georgias ethnic Armenian citizens to learn the Georgian language. She emphasized that Armenia and Georgia are not only neighbors, but also friendly nations. We live in a region for which stability and peace are crucial. These are mandatory preconditions for the economic development of our two countries, Zourabichvili said. Speaking about regional conflicts, the Georgian president said that they should be settled peacefully and on the basis of norms of international law. For his part, President Sarkissian underscored the atmosphere of mutual understanding and trust that he said is characteristic of Armenian-Georgian relations. He said he was pleased to accept Zourabichvilis invitation to visit Georgia. By Trend Over the past 24 hours, Armenian armed forces have 22 times violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said March 13, Trend reports. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Russia isnt just the main trade partner, but the main historical partner of Azerbaijan, and thats why non-oil products are mainly exported to this country, Counselor of the Azerbaijani Embassy in Russia on Economic Affairs Shovgi Mehdizade said. He was speaking at the business seminar Azerbaijan on Way to Implement Investment Projects: Possibilities of Gazprombank. He noted that Russias major export destinations are also connected with Azerbaijan, and this is natural. Mehdizade noted that any initiative aimed at strengthening bilateral ties should be supported through the organization of similar venues for discussion. Azerbaijani companies are making serious investments in Russian economy, he added. For example, Azerbaijani companies are the main foreign investors in Russias Stavropol. At the same time, Azerbaijani company Azersun successfully operates in Russia, its sales network has covered almost all regions of the country. All of this is the result of state economic policy, as well as the efforts by Azerbaijans Economy Ministry aimed at expanding exports to Russia. He said that the creation of trading houses on the initiative of the Azerbaijani authorities, as well as the opening of new business facilities is an indicator of strengthening of cooperation. For example, on March 9, a store opened in Moscow under the Made in Azerbaijan brand at the initiative of Azerbaijans Economy Ministry, he noted. In fact, for the first time we opened not a major Trading House, but a store in Russia, given the great popularity of Azerbaijani products there. He noted that the opening of such business facilities will become another initiative aimed at expanding bilateral trade and economic cooperation. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend The State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ) sold $316.2 million at currency auctions organized by the Central Bank of Azerbaijan in February 2019, Trend reports with reference to the Fund March 13. SOFAZ sold to banks $634.9 million in January this year. The sale of currency is carried out as part of SOFAZ transfers to the state budget of Azerbaijan, which are planned at 11.6 billion manats in 2019. The official rate of manat for the next day is determined on the basis of the weighted average rate under transactions concluded with commercial banks in the interbank currency market and auctions. Auctions are held in the format of one-sided currency sale. (1.7 manats = $1 on March 13) --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend First Vice-President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva has met with First Lady of France Brigitte Macron at the Elysee Palace. The development of Azerbaijan-France bilateral relations was hailed at the meeting. It was noted that First Vice-President of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyevas visit to Paris will make significant contribution to the development of bilateral relations between the two countries. The sides discussed a number of issues, including the family and women, gender equality, education, and environmental protection. The activity of the French Lyceum in Baku was praised at the meeting. It was noted that Azerbaijan was the first country in the East that the law was taught. The importance of the cultural events held in different times in France under the leadership of Mehriban Aliyeva was also emphasized. Azerbaijans First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva invited Frances First Lady Brigitte Macron to pay a visit to Azerbaijan. Brigitte Macron accepted the invitation with pleasure. By Mirsaid Ibrahimzade The two most important strategic segments of the gas market of Georgia - the population and the production of electricity, are fully provided and will be provided by Azerbaijani gas, Georgian Deputy Minister of Economy and Sustainable Development, Natia Tournava stated at a briefing on March 12, Trend reports with reference to Sputnik Georgia. "Azerbaijan remains the main supplier and strategic partner of Georgia, and the share of Azerbaijani gas will increase in the Georgian market in the coming years," Tournava said. Tournava also added that after the full implementation of the second phase of the Shah-Deniz field, Georgia as a transit country for Azerbaijani gas will receive its own gas resources. "These resources will be used for gas supply of socially unprotected segments of the population and the power industry," Tournava said. Georgia is trying to meet its gas demand through the supplies from Azerbaijan. For example, the estimative supply of gas to Georgia will be about 2.689 billion cubic meters. Of these, 99.65 percent accounts for Azerbaijan, including 1.866 billion cubic meters from the State Oil Company of the Republic of Azerbaijan (SOCAR), and 813 million from the concern for the development of the Shah Deniz field. The remaining 0.35 percent (9.41 million cubic meters) of the demand will be met by local fields of gas. Gas supply from Azerbaijan to Georgia may increase by 11 percent in 2019, Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR predicts. Presently, SOCAR is the major supplier of natural gas, oil and oil products to Georgia. SOCARs subsidiaries are engaged in expansion and modernization of the countrys gas distribution systems, development of filling stations under SOCARs brand and have an oil terminal in Georgias Kulevi Black Sea Port, which supplies Azerbaijani oil and oil products to the world markets. It should be noted that Georgia is a key transit country for Azerbaijan, through which the Azerbaijans main pipelines are laid for the supply of oil and gas to the west. Today, the Baku-Supsa and Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipelines are already operating in the neighboring country. Also Shah Deniz field which began operation at the end of 2006, transports gas from the Shah Deniz field in the Azerbaijan sector of the Caspian Sea to Turkey, through Goergia. The associated condensate is mixed with the oil from the ACG field and is transported to Turkey through Georgia, along the BakuTbilisiCeyhan pipeline. Another energy project, in which Georgia was involved is TANAP. On November 21, 2018, Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) have been joined along the shores of the Maritsa River at the Turkish-Greek border. As a result of the joining of these two pipelines, Azerbaijani natural gas from the Shah Deniz-2 field can be transported to Italy via Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Greece, Albania, and the Adriatic Sea. So, currently, the Southern Gas Corridor project is being successfully implemented along this route. This is the largest infrastructure project in the region and little time left until the implementation of the Southern Gas Corridor. Thus, last year was very important in terms of this large-scale project implementation. -- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Mirsaid Ibrahimzade Within framework of Cyber security week, VI Regional Internet Governance Forum on Cyber security: our shared responsibility was held in Baku on March 13, Trend reports. The event was organized by the Ministry of Transport, Communications and High Technologies of Azerbaijan and the United Nations Development Program. The forum brought together local and foreign experts who discussed the current situation and upcoming challenges in the field of ensuring cyber security, secure Internet, innovative solutions in the field of cyber security and other issues. Minister of Transport, Communications and High Technologies of Azerbaijan Ramin Guluzade stated that special attention is paid to cyber security and all steps are being taken to minimize cyber threats. Guluzade also noted that new technologies are opening the way to new types of crime, the number of cybercrimes is increasing every year. Given this, Azerbaijan has prepared a cyber security strategy for 2019-2024. Then, minister added that thanks to information technologies, the economy of Azerbaijan has risen to a new level, and relations between the state and citizens have become more transparent. Thw ninister went on to say that information technologies and the internet play a special role in the development of the country. He also emphasized that today more than 80 percent of the country's population use the Internet, of which 76 percent use broadband Internet. Touching upon the cooperation with the United Nations Development Program, the minister noted that the organization supports ICT programs implemented in Azerbaijan. These programs contribute to sustainable development in the country, Guluzade said. So, during the forum, Deputy Head of the United Nations Development Program, Director of the Regional Bureau for Europe and the CIS Mirjana Egge stated that the UN Development Program highly appreciates the steps taken by Azerbaijan for the development of the ICT sphere and the full transition to the e-government system. She noted that the Internet and information technologies are an important component of society. "The Internet is, first of all, education. It is necessary to use it for the good," added Egge. Speaking about the role of the regional forum, Egger noted that it will create new opportunities to explore the potential of Internet technologies and opportunities to avoid cyber threats. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Leman Mammadova Azerbaijan strives to attract more countries, which already have experience in alternative energy, to cooperate on developing renewable energy sources. Ministry of Energy held a meeting with a delegation of Montenegrin company Adriatic Capital. During the meeting, executive director of the company Marko Vujovic said that Adriatic Capital is interested in joint participation with Azerbaijan in projects on the use of solar energy. The possibilities of cooperation in the field of renewable energy through Adriatic Capital were discussed during the meeting. Vujovic spoke about the current state of the alternative energy sector in Montenegro, the company's activities in this area, and projects in which the company participates. He noted that Adriatic Capital operates in designing, financing, construction and maintenance services, and has participated in the construction of wind parks, water and solar power plants in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as in Montenegro. He noted that the company conducted an inspection of Azerbaijan regions possessing the potential for using renewable energy sources, and is interested in participating in projects on the use of solar energy. Deputy Energy Minister Elnur Soltanov spoke about solar and wind power plants operating in the country. He underlined the work carried out in the assessment of the potential and investment opportunities of the renewable energy sector of Azerbaijan, particularly the development of wind and solar energy, the preparation of legislative documents on renewable energy and energy efficiency, cooperation with various companies, financial institutions, and improvement of the attractiveness of this area for private investors. During the meeting, the sides discussed the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Energy on the development of renewable energy sector and negotiating future cooperation opportunities. The favorable geographic location and climatic conditions allow the widespread use of environmentally friendly alternative energy sources in Azerbaijan. The capacity of the energy system of Azerbaijan is more than 6,000 megawatts. At the same time, according to the experts, the potential of renewable energy sources in the country is more than 25,300 megawatts. At present, 18 percent of electricity production in Azerbaijan fell on alternative energy sources, in which hydro power plants hold main share, although most of the country's potential in this area falls on solar energy (estimated at 5,000 megawatts). Some 4,500 megawatts accounts for wind power, 1,500 megawatts -- for biomass, 800 megawatts -- for geothermal energy, and the remaining 350 megawatts -- for the small hydro power plants (HPP). Azerbaijan is planning to introduce the new draft law on alternative energy sources by May 2019. In this context, the Norwegian DNV GL helps create a support system and a legal framework in Azerbaijan's alternative energy sector. The Energy Ministry is cooperating with BP, Total and Equinor to develop alternative energy cooperation as well. The Azerbaijani government is planning to increase the share of alternative energy by 30 percent by 2030 in total power generation. Adriatic Capital provides consulting, investment and asset management services related to prime investment opportunities in Montenegro, with a focus on tourism, real estate, energy, and other related industries. Montenegros cooperation with Azerbaijan in the field of energy is currently based on activities related to the Ionian-Adriatic Pipeline (IAP). IAP, which is expected to be connected to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), will pass through Montenegro as well. IAP is a proposed natural gas pipeline in Southeastern Europe (SEE) that will stretch from Albania through Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Split in Croatia.The capacity of the pipeline will amount to five billion cubic meters of gas per year. In 2013, a mutual memorandum of understanding on construction of Trans-Adriatic and Ion-Adriatic gas lines were signed among Azerbaijan, Montenegro, Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as a memorandum of understanding on South Gas Corridor and South-East European Corridor projects were signed among Azerbaijan, Albania, Croatia and Montenegro. The Protocol signed on the establishment of diplomatic relations between Azerbaijan and Montenegro in 2006, can be considered as the beginning of bilateral mutually beneficial cooperation. After the opening of the diplomatic mission of Azerbaijan in Montenegro and opening of the Honorary Consulate of Montenegro in Azerbaijan, bilateral relations have further developed. The establishment of the Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation between the Government of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Government of Montenegro in 2013 is an indication of the importance of the cooperation between the two countries. --- Leman Mammadova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @leman_888 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Leman Mammadova By achieving successful results, Azerbaijani export missions sent to the foreign countries contribute to the development of country's economy. With the support of the Ministry of Economy, Azerbaijan Export and Investment Promotion Foundation (AZPROMO) organized export mission to Poland's capital, Warsaw, on March 6-10. The export mission included 22 Azerbaijani companies engaged in wine and other alcoholic beverages, food products and cosmetics. Within the framework of the mission, meetings were held with Polish companies and preliminary agreement on the export of products was reached. Thus, Azerstar LLC, Bakukonserv CJSC, Mars-Fk LLC, AHEC LLC, Astarachay LLC have reached preliminary agreements on the export of their products to Poland. In addition, the products presented by Azersun Holding and Brightman BMC were met with interest from Polish companies Within the framework of the export mission, the Azerbaijani companies also presented their products at the stand organized by the Trading House of Azerbaijan at the international food fair "Worldfood Poland" in Warsaw. "Meyseri Mekhmeri Premium" wine produced by "Shirvan Wines" was awarded at the competition held during the exhibition. Trading House of Azerbaijan opened in Warsaw last year to promote export of Azerbaijani products, organize sales of local products in Poland, and coordinate these activities with entrepreneurs. The introduction of local products of Azerbaijan to international markets is boosting the non-oil sector of the economy and strengthens business ties with foreign countries. Therefore, Azerbaijan is organizing a number of export missions to promote national products under the Made in Azerbaijan brand. Launched in 2016, the Made in Azerbaijan brand envisages a large-scale promotion of local non-oil products in foreign markets. Export missions are a supporting measure to identify opportunities for accessing new markets, strengthen local product positions in existing markets and provide these markets with new products. Azerbaijan will organize 24 more export missions this year. Local entrepreneurs will participate in major trade fair in Russia, UAE and Germany in February. The new market at which Azerbaijan aims is South Korea, Azerbaijan will be participating in the food fair there in May 2019. Promotion of export-oriented local products under the Made in Azerbaijan brand in a wider geographic area also helps to attract foreign investment. The export of non-oil products will stimulate the expansion of the production of these products and will further strengthen the non-oil sector's share in the structure of the GDP. --- Leman Mammadova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @leman_888 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Laman Ismayilova An exhibition titled "Face to face with time" solemnly opened at the Baku Museum Center on March 12. The event is co-organized by the Gobustan State Historical-Artistic Reserve with the support of the Azerbaijan Union of Artists and the Museum Center. The exhibition is being held as part of the project "Reincarnation 5", Trend Life reported. In their remarks, Minister of Culture Abulfaz Garayev, director of the Gobustan National Historical and Artistic Reserve Vugar Isaev, Chairman of the Artists' Union of Azerbaijan Farhad Khalilov and others noted that the project is aimed at promotion of Gobustans cultural heritage. It was emphasized that the exhibition includes more than 40 original works made in different genres and directions. Among the exhibited works are works of art, sculpture, ceramics, video installation. The exhibition features works of talented artists Eldar Babazade, Elshan Garadzha, Elshan Sarkhanoglu, Fatima Agayeva, Huseyn Akhverdiyev, Ramina Saadathan, Saida Musaeva, Telman Shikhiyev. In their art works, the artists showcased Gobustan in a completely new way. Each artist presented his own view on unique historical monument.The exhibition will last until March 14. Media partners of the event are Azernews.az,Trend.az, Day.az, Milli.az. Gobustan is home to one of the world's largest ancient petroglyphs collections. Settled since the 8th millennium BC, the area contains more than 600,000 distinct paintings, going as far back as 20,000 years to as recent as 5,000 years ago. The pictures dating back to 8 millenniums reflect different hunting scenes, ceremonial and ritual processes of the habitants of these places. Gobustan petroglyphs were repeatedly investigated by the famous Norwegian explorer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, who recognized local boats petroglyphs as the oldest known images of pirogue in the world. Most of the rock engravings depict primitive men, animals, battle-pieces, ritual dances, bullfights, boats with armed oarsmen, warriors with lances in their hands, camel caravans, pictures of sun and stars. The museum in Gobustan consists of various exhibition halls, sections, equipped with interactive boards, touch screens, educational games, 3D videos, etc. In the sections "Environment of Gobustan" and "Life of the ancient people", one can see stuffed animals, mannequins, depicting ancient people that seem very realistic. Don't forget to visit the halls of the "Archaeological discovery in Gobustan", "Life of the people of the ancient period", "Time Travel", "Meaning of petroglyphs", "Animals and hunters", "Artists of the ancient period of Gobustan" . Here one can learn a lot about the meaning of Gobustan rock drawings, archaeological excavations. Also, visitors to the museum can take a virtual flight in 3D, from a height to look at the natural landscape of the Gobustan reserve. Gobustan was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2007. The Gobustan State Historical-Artistic Reserve has been included into the list of best European Museums. --- Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Laman Ismayilova The third Testene Art Baku Festival will be held on March 13-17. The festival is co-organized by the Ministry of Culture, Baku Central Cultural Department, Testene Art Association (Italy), music school No. 3 named after Jovdad Hajiyev. The meeting was held as part of the festival, Trend Life reported. The head of the Baku International Culture Association Jalil Melikov, President of the International Association of Culture Inessa Zaika, Vice President of the Association Olga Naimushina, artistic director of festival Igor Bubenchikov and members of the organizing committee attended the event. The meeting discussed issues related to the upcoming festival, as well as future projects. More than 100 participants from Azerbaijan, Italy, Russia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Georgia and other countries will take part in the festival. The competition will be held in the following nominations: vocal, instrumental performance, dance, theater, folklore, decorative arts, folk musical instruments, as well as fashion and design. Testene Art Baku Festival will feature contests in several nominations and age groups: 4-8 years, 9-12 years, 13-16 years, 17-19 years, 20 years and older. The award ceremony and gala concert will be held in the Azerbaijan Union of Theater Workers on March 17. The event starts at 14:00. Testene Art Baku Festival, held for the first time in 2016, bringing together a great number of participants from different countries. The performance of young performers from Azerbaijan caused the jury's interest. After winning the Grand Prix, Nijat Pelengov (balaban) successfully represented Azerbaijan at the contest in Italy. --- Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Laman Ismayilova The Land of Fire never ceases to surprise fashion lovers with a fantastic range of traditional clothes. Explore some of the most colorful traditional dresses that will grace the Baku Museum Center on March 15. The fashion show is timed to the 10th anniversary of Azerbaijan Traditional Clothes Center, Azertag reported. Stunning gowns made during these years as well as the new fashion collections will be presented as part of the event. Famous public figures, art figures, intellectuals, artists and media representatives will attend the fashion show. The traditional dress is all about delicate embroidery and bright colors, where red is the dominating one. In the past, the bride used to wear a red wedding gown. In Baku, the bride wears a white dress with a beautiful red silk sash tied around her waist. For Azerbaijanis, red color is a symbol of well-being and happiness. Young girls used to wear bright dresses decorated with various golden patterns. Therefore, a bright color scheme is a distinctive feature of the national costume of Azerbaijani women. The fabrics used in the traditional costumes include silk, flax, wool or cotton. The finishing of clothes could make of the simplest outfit expensive and rich in appearance suit. With the use of laces, gold and silver threads, craftsmen created a real work of art. Coins were used from precious metals as ornaments that could be collected by whole generations. The typical womens traditional dress consists of under and outer garments and clothes for the upper and lower body. Bag-shaped cover veil and shutter for the face "rubend" were the important parts of the costume, which women wore while going out. Women also wore a short jacket called arkhalig with long sleeves, fitting back and chest, with a wide opening in the front. Unmarried girls covered their heads with a cap like a skullcap, which was decorated with beads or silk. Married women tied several headscarves on their heads, such a dress was called "dinge". Womens headwear kelagayi, a silk scarf protected them from both hot sun and cold wind. --- Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Laman Ismayilova Baku 2020 International Festival of Culture and Arts has been discussed. A press conference dedicated to the festival was held at NUR Art House Gallery, Azertag reported. The first International Festival of Culture and Arts was held in 2017 in Berlin. Its founder was the chairman of the International Association of Culture and Arts of the Peoples of the World Bulat Mekebayev - an artist from Kazakhstan who has been living and working in Germany for many years. The participants were shown a video about the first festival in Berlin. Bulat Mekebayev spoke in detail about the festival participants. He noted that the next festival will be held in Baku on March 11, 2020, bringing together representatives from foreign countries. "We want to showcase Europe the Museum of Miniature Books, acquaint with Azerbaijani carpets, as well as music, literature, visual arts of Azerbaijan, the great cultural wealth of the Azerbaijani people," said Mekebayev. --- Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Mirsaid Ibrahimzade Today, a significant number of Azerbaijani citizens need organ transplantation. This was said by Chairman of the Health Committee of the Milli Majlis (Parliament) Ahliman Amiraslanov at the meeting on organ transplantation on March 12, Trend reports. Amiraslanov said that organ transplantation began to develop over the past 50 years. "In recent years, this area has received a wide scope. Every year more than 120,000 organ transplants are performed in the world. But the need for patients in the world in organ transplants exceeds this figure," he said. The chairman of the parliamentary committee noted that the area of organ transplantation is also progressing in Azerbaijan, and many surgeries are being carried out. But the main problem in the field of transplantology is related to the field of donation. The lack of donors, the lack of organs necessary for surgery affect the number of such surgeries, Amiraslanov said. He added that it is necessary to improve the existing legislation regarding the organ transplantation. Therefore, the Parliament decided to develop a perfect bill on organ transplantation. Generally, in Azerbaijan, the number of surgeries has tripled in the past 12 years and especially, surgeries of organ transplantation. Nowadays, a number of diseases with previously ineffectual remedies is being treated, complicated surgeries, such as liver, bone marrow transplantation, artificial joint and open and closed heart surgeries are carried out. These surgeries have been carried out in Azerbaijan for 15 years. According to the countrys laws, organs can be transplanted only from a living donor. Annually, about 1,500 people in Azerbaijan need a donor, but since the organs cannot be taken from the corpse, only 100-120 operations for the transplantation of organs of living people are carried out. A special working group has been set up to determine terms and conditions for cadaveric transplantation, technical specifications for clinics in order to create a legal framework which would allow transplantation from the corpse. Importation of the cornea and surgeries for its transplantation to patients are other remarkable examples of local medical industry. As for 2018 data, 3,000 patients waiting for corneal transplantation have been registered at the National Ophthalmology Center. Moreover, its vital to note that successful implantation of artificial heart has become the next significant step in this sphere of medical surgeries in Azerbaijan. -- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend If Armenia holds a meeting of the Security Council in Khankendi, then there is no need to try to involve the Armenians of the Nagorno-Karabakh region in the negotiations, spokesperson for the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry Leyla Abdullayeva told Trend on March 12. Abdullayeva was commenting on Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyans visit to the occupied Azerbaijani territories to participate in a meeting of the Armenian Security Council in Khankendi. "I can say that everything is being put in its right place, she said. If the Armenian prime minister holds an extraordinary meeting of his country's Security Council in Azerbaijans occupied Khankendi city, then there is no need to make efforts to involve the Armenians of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of our country in the negotiations. The prime minister, who voiced the idea of "Karabakh Armenians", put an end to the word game, saying that the Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh region are the Armenian community, rather than the "nation". The format of negotiations on the conflict settlement, which has continued for many years, is clear, Abdullayeva said. This issue was determined upon the OSCEs consensus decision. Both communities of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of our country were indicated as the interested sides in the CSCE Helsinki Document 1992. "As for the principles of the conflict settlement, it is impossible to misinterpret the principles clearly stated in the CSCE Helsinki Final Act, to which the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group refer in their recent statement, she said. The conflict settlement principles were clarified in the OSCE chairmans statement during the OSCE Lisbon Summit in 1996, proposed by the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group and unanimously adopted by all member-states, except Armenia. Azerbaijans territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders can not be the subject of discussion. It is high time to take concrete steps towards the withdrawal of the Armenian armed forces from the occupied Azerbaijani territories and the return of Azerbaijani IDPs to these territories, Abdullayeva said. "As the prime minister stated, he won the confidence of the Armenian people and, thus, obtained a full mandate, she said. Having shown political will, now it is time for him to clearly demonstrate his interest in bringing peace, progress and sustainable development to the region. It is obvious that a party interested in ensuring peace and tranquility will not occupy the territory of other country. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend First Vice-President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva has met with former President of the French Republic Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris. First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva`s visit to Paris was hailed at the meeting. It was noted that this visit contributes to the development of the France-Azerbaijan ties. They expressed confidence that relations between the two countries will continue to develop. By Trend Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received Gabriel Jara, Charge d'affaires of the Republic of Chile, Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry told Trend. At the meeting, Minister Elmar Mammadyarov expressed his satisfaction with the current status of relations and expressed confidence that these relations between the two countries will continue to develop. The importance of mutual high-level visits in terms of expanding the existing cooperation was underlined. Minister expressed hope that Chile will be represented at the highest level at the 18th summit of the heads of state and government of the Non-Aligned Movement to be held in October in Baku. Gabriel Java noted that Chili is keen to develop cooperative relations with Azerbaijan in all fields. In that regard, the importance of holding business forum for developing cooperation in economic, trade and investment spheres was emphasized. At the meeting the sides also discussed the cooperation within international organizations, including the Non-Aligned Movement and other issues of mutual interest. Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov wished to Gabriel Java every success in his diplomatic activities. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has signed an Order regarding measures to improve elevator facilities in apartment buildings in Nakhchivan. Under the presidential order, the Cabinet of Ministers of Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic is allocated 449,000 manats for improving elevator facilities in apartment buildings in Nakhchivan. -- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has signed an Order to provide funding for renovation of roofs of multi-storey residential buildings in Nakhchivan. Under the presidential order, the Cabinet of Ministers of Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic is allocated 2,206,000 manats for renovation of roofs in multi-storey residential buildings. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend First Vice-President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva has met with First Lady of France Brigitte Macron at the Elysee Palace. The development of Azerbaijan-France bilateral relations was hailed at the meeting. It was noted that First Vice-President of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyevas visit to Paris will make significant contribution to the development of bilateral relations between the two countries. The sides discussed a number of issues, including the family and women, gender equality, education, and environmental protection. The activity of the French Lyceum in Baku was praised at the meeting. It was noted that Azerbaijan was the first country in the East that the law was taught. The importance of the cultural events held in different times in France under the leadership of Mehriban Aliyeva was also emphasized. Azerbaijans First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva invited Frances First Lady Brigitte Macron to pay a visit to Azerbaijan. Brigitte Macron accepted the invitation with pleasure. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend The First Deputy Minister of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces Colonel General Najmaddin Sadikov met with Deputy Prime Minister for Public Order and Security and Minister of Defense of the Republic Bulgaria Krasimir Karakachanov on March 13, Trend reports referring to the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry. The sides held a wide exchange of views on regional security aspects, as well as on other issues of mutual interest. During the meeting, the sides stressed the importance of developing cooperation in the military and military-technical fields, and also discussed issues of further expansion of areas of cooperation. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Azerbaijani defense minister, Colonel General Zakir Hasanov and the leadership of the Defense Ministry visited frontline military units, Trend reports March 13 with reference to Azerbaijans Defense Ministry. The minister of defense was briefed on an operational situation. Hasanov observed the enemys frontline positions and gave the relevant instructions to ensure the constant combat readiness of the units. After reviewing the conditions in the units, the minister of defense took part in the opening of a new soldiers barrack, inspected the armament depot, canteen, shower cabins and warehouse. The minister also participated in the opening of a new residential complex consisting of official facilities. Hasanov has inquired about the work done and emphasized that the activities carried out in the field of improving the social conditions of military personnel will continue to be carried out thanks to the attention and care of the state. The minister of defense awarded the servicemen who distinguished themselves in the service and talked to the military personnel at the tea table. Then the minister, meeting with residents in one of the villages located in the frontline zone, talked about the defense of settlements and ensuring the safety of the population. The defense minister is responsible for general management of the large-scale exercises conducted in accordance with the plan approved by president of Azerbaijan, Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Ilham Aliyev. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has announced the start of ShalamcheBasra railway operation during his visit to Baghdad. Speaking in a joint meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, Rouhani indicated that Iran is ready to help reconstruct Iraq with all its capacities, Trend reports citing IRNA. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani arrived in Baghdad on March 11 amid his government's efforts to expand ties with Iraq to reduce the impact of US sanction on Iran's economy. Rouhani and Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi signed an agreement to connect the two countries via a railway linking the border town of Shalamche and Basra. The 48 miles of track between them will allow Iran to transfer goods to southern Iraq and even longer distances via onward transit to the north. Along with the government in Damascus, the two countries had also previously agreed to connect Iraq and Syria by rail to allow Iran to export goods through the port of Latakia, on the Mediterranean. "We have agreed on tariff issues, and we will also continue the negotiations to facilitate trade between two countries," said Rouhani. Iran's president also spoke about the energy ties between the two countries. "Iran will provide Iraq gas and electricity. We have also expressed readiness to export more electricity, we can also offer necessary facilities in the oil sector," he said. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend A Host Government Agreement (HGA) was signed in Islamabad, which encompasses the main terms of an agreement with Pakistan on the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline construction project, Trend reports March 13 with reference to the Turkmen Foreign Ministry March 13. The HGA was signed by Pakistani Additional Secretary In-charge of the Petroleum Division Mian Asad Hayauddin and general director, chairman of the board of TAPI Pipeline Company Ltd. Muhammetmyrat Amanov, according to Pakistani media. Being the leader of the international consortium TAPI Pipeline Company Ltd., Turkmengas state concern, having a controlling stake, performs the functions of the main financier and manager of the project. The consortium also includes the Afghan Gas Corporation, Pakistans Inter State Gas Systems (Private) Limited Company and Indias GAIL Company. The Turkmen Foreign Ministry, in turn, reports that Turkmen deputy prime minister, Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov took part in the signing ceremony of the HGA. A delegation from Ashgabat was received by President of Pakistan Arif Alvi and Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan. The gas and transport and communication sectors were mentioned as priority areas for trade and economic partnership. At the same time, the head of the Pakistani government expressed strong support for the TAPI project, the construction project of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TAP) power transmission line and the creation of a new transport and transit corridor from the seaports of Pakistan to the Turkmenbashi International Seaport, the report said. Rashid Meredov held talks with other Pakistani leaders Federal Minister for Power Omar Ayub Khan, Federal Minister for Petroleum Ghulam Sarwar Khan and Finance, Revenue, and Economic Affairs Minister Asad Umar. Construction of TAPI was launched in December 2015, while the Afghan section in February 2018. Pakistan plans to start the work on its pipeline section this year. The total length of the pipeline, with a capacity of 33 billion cubic meters of gas per year will be 1,840 kilometers. The fuel will be supplied from the Galkynysh gas field in Turkmenistan, the second largest in the world. The length of the Turkmen section will be 205 kilometers. Then, this energy bridge will pass through the Afghan cities of Herat and Kandahar (816 kilometers), through the cities of Quetta and Multan across Pakistani territory (819 kilometers), and reach the settlement of Fazilka in India. "The gas pipeline will be brought to the Pakistani border within two years, and in the next 6-8 months, the gas route will stretch to the territory of India," CEO of TAPI Pipeline Company Ltd. Muhammetmyrat Amanov said December 2018 at a roundtable meeting in Islamabad, Pakistan. Amanov also said the cost of the Turkmen gas, which will be supplied to Pakistan, is significantly lower compared to the price of liquefied gas imported by Islamabad. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Abdul Kerimkhanov Uzbekistan is in great need of importing various products from Russia, including goods with high added value, which is very useful for the Russian national economy. In the conditions of sanctions that are applied to Russia, there are certain difficulties with finding new markets, and Uzbekistan becomes such a market. The Ministry of Economy and Industry of Uzbekistan reported on the results of the working group on cooperation between Russia and Uzbekistan in agriculture. The Russian side asked for a quota for the import of 200,000 tons of sugar taking into account the historical relations and the potential for further cooperation. At the same time, Russia proposed to exclude the excise duty on the import of confectionery products to Uzbekistan, reports Agrarius. For the 2017-2018 season, Russia exported 216,000 tons of sugar to Uzbekistan. So, Russia became the leader of the local market, ahead of Ukraine. However, the Uzbek authorities stopped supplying sugar from Russia due to the launch of their sugar factories and an increase in supplies from Iran, Pakistan, Ukraine and Belarus in December 2018. As the newspaper notes, now experts call the price of Russian sugar uncompetitive, so its return to Uzbekistan is possible only with the introduction of some preferences - for example, exemption of a certain amount from VAT and/or non-tariff restrictions. It is reported that a meeting is scheduled at the level of the heads of government of Russia and Uzbekistan in May, at which parties will discuss this issue. Diplomatic relations between Russia and Uzbekistan were established on March 20, 1992. The trade turnover between Russia and Uzbekistan in 2018 increased by 21 percent to $5.7 billion. The structure of Russia's exports to Uzbekistan includes metals and products, wood and pulp and paper products, machinery, equipment and vehicles, food products and agricultural raw materials, mineral products, chemical products. The structure of imports of Russia from Uzbekistan includes textiles and footwear, chemical products, machinery, food products and agricultural raw materials, metals and products from them. Uzbekistan is one of Russia's leading economic partners in the post-Soviet space. These are the Economic Cooperation Program for 2019-2024, the Cultural and Humanitarian Cooperation Program for 2019-2021, the Road Map for the creation of the International Radio Astronomy Observatory Suffa, the Agreement on the establishment and operation of branches of leading universities in Russia in Uzbekistan, the Agreement about cooperation in the textile industry. --- Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Abdul Kerimkhanov Uzbekistan has created favorable conditions for the sustainable development of agriculture. It almost completely provides the population with basic types of food, and industry - with agricultural raw materials. In addition, agriculture is the leading export sector of the economy. For the first time, Uzbekistan will celebrate the international day of potatoes on March 19. The exhibition of potatoes will be held within the framework of the event. In addition, the first plant for the production of french fries and flakes in Central Asia will be launched. According to the Association of Potato Producers of Uzbekistan, the new plant is located in Sergeli region. The total production capacity will be up to 20,000 tons of finished products per year. This figure will cover the needs of the country, and some of the plants products will be exported abroad, the report said. International Potato Day is celebrated for more than a decade in countries such as the United States and Russia. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations declared 2008 as the International Year of the Potato. However, there is no exact information about the date when the potato day is celebrated. In 1995, the potato became the first vegetable grown in space. The Cabinet of Ministers of Uzbekistan issued a resolution regarding the introduction of the Dutch potato growing technology on July 6, 1994. Today, 65 percent of all potato growing accounts for five regions with less saline soils - Andijan, Namangan, Fergana, Samarkand and Tashkent regions. Kazakhstan, the United Kingdom, Georgia, Belarus and Russia are the main suppliers of potatoes to Uzbekistan. Earlier, a new order was approved in Uzbekistan, under which all farmers will have to complete the transition to a multidisciplinary basis by 2021. At the same time, land lease agreements with farms that have not mastered multidisciplinary activity will be terminated starting from January 1, 2022. By the end of 2020, Uzbekistan intends to implement a set of measures to increase potato production by 35 percent, the authorities plan to bring the figure to 3.6 million tons. The country intends to establish experimental stations in the Tashkent, Djizak, Namangan and Samarkand regions for the production of seed varieties super super elite, super elite improved from viruses and diseases, as well as specialized insulator greenhouses. --- Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Azernews By Leman Mammadova Relations between Azerbaijan and Arab countries have always been at a high level. Economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev met with newly appointed Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Hamad bin Abdullah bin Saud bin Khudair. Speaking about economic relations, Mustafayev noted that relations between business circles of both countries are developing successfully. Business forums in Baku and Al-Riyadh, export missions to Saudi Arabia were organized to expand economic cooperation. The recent meeting of Azerbaijan-Saudi Arabia Joint Intergovernmental Commission held in Baku, as well as meeting between businessmen, contribute to the cooperation between the countries. Mustafayev noted that so far, Saudi Arabian companies have invested $ 370 million in national economy and 26 Saudi Arabia companies are operating in Azerbaijan. Successful financial cooperation was carried out jointly with the Saudi Development Fund in construction of schools, channel and road, works on reconstruction of water supply and sewerage systems are underway. Meanwhile, earlier this month, Agency for the Development of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) under the Ministry of Economy and Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) signed a Framework Cooperation Program for enhancing bilateral investment relations. All this indicates the expansion of our economic relations. Mustafayev said that the Azerbaijani side positively responds to the proposal of the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce and Industry on the establishment of a joint business council, where businessmen from both countries will be represented for businessmen of both countries. The Minister of Economy underlined that Azerbaijan highly appreciates Saudi Arabia's support for the fair position of our country in the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, its support for the settlement of the conflict within the framework of international law and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia's refusal to establish diplomatic relations with occupant Armenia. Ambassador of Saudi Arabia to Azerbaijan Hamad bin Abdullah bin Saud bin Khudair expressed his satisfaction with his activity as an ambassador in Azerbaijan, stressed the potential for expanding economic cooperation and said he would make an effort for the development of relations between the two countries. During the meeting, the sides discussed the expansion of cooperation in various spheres, including in the fields of industry, agriculture, finance, trade and tourism. The diplomatic relations between the two countries were established in 1992. Over the past years, the bilateral economic relations have strengthened and expanded with the increased interest in investment. Azerbaijans trade turnover with Saudi Arabia amounted to 30.9 million manats in 2018, according to the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan. About 24.3 million manats accounted for the import of Saudi products in Azerbaijan. Saudi Arabia is especially interested in investing in energy sector of Azerbaijan along with agriculture, tourism, transport. Recently, the fifth meeting of the intergovernmental commission between Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia was held in Baku. By Trend Uzbekistans airports are temporarily closed for receiving and sending Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, Trend reports with reference to the Civil Aviation Agency under Uzbek Ministry of Transport. Uzbek airports from 05:00 pm (GMT +5) on March 13 are closed for receiving and sending Boeing 737-8 MAX and Boeing 737-9 MAX aircraft for a period of one month. The aviation industry clarified that the ban does not apply to flights of this type of aircraft over Uzbekistan. After the collapse of Boeing 7378 MAX liner in Ethiopia on Sunday, many countries suspended the operation of these liners. The United States does not intend to impose such a ban. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend A meeting in the framework of the World ATM Congress in 2019 in Madrid was held between the Director of Azeraeronavigation Air Traffic Control (AZANS) Mr. Farhan Guliyev and Vice-President of SITA Stephan Egli - the leading organization in the sphere of communication and information technologies in aviation industry. A document Technical Solution for Implementation of Digital Technologies in Azerbaijan ANS System was signed following the meeting. Due to air-to-ground data link system of ATC Data Link, AZANS plans to become the first ATC in the region to use such modern digital technologies as D-ATIS, D-VOLMET, DCL and CPDLC in the sphere of communication between pilot and dispatcher and facilitation the transfer of meteorological data, generation of digital transmission of air navigation information for airlines using the Republic of Azerbaijan's airspace. Also in the framework of World ATM Congress 2019 held in Madrid Azeraeronavigation Air Traffic Control Department (AZANS) in cooperation with EHANG and Abraham Technologies LTD presented a unique project of the flight control system of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) of the next generation. The UAV flight control center will be established at Heydar Aliyev International Airport. The system will be fully integrated with the existing automated air traffic control system. Azeraeronavigation Air Traffic Control Department (AZANS) under Azerbaijan Airlines provides safety of flights in the Republic of Azerbaijan's airspace. During the daily period AZANS supports more than 500 flights, 300 of which are transit flights over Azerbaijan. SITA provides a wide range of aviation communication services as well as air traffic control technologies. SITA in cooperation with airlines and aircraft manufacturers creates applications and services for innovation in the airline industry. -- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Mirsaid Ibrahimzade Ural Airlines launches flights on the route Samara-Baku-Samara starting from April 5, 2019, Report informs with reference to the website of the airline. It is noted that direct flights will be operated on the Airbus A320 every Friday. The minimum rate will be from 97 euros in one way flight (including all fees). The flights will be operated according to the following schedule: departure time from Samara at 13:10, arrival in Baku at 15:45 and in the opposite direction - departure from Baku at 16:45, arrival in Samara at 19:10. Baku increasingly spreads its flight map over the world. The Turkish Pegasus Airlines is expected to launch direct Ankara-Baku flights from March 15. Azerbaijans low-cost airline Buta Airways announced another new destination in Russia. Starting from May 12, the Airline will launch direct flights from Baku to Ufa. Flights will be operated twice a week on Thursdays and Sundays. Buta Airways will also launch direct flights from Baku to two more cities of Ukraine - Odessa and Kharkiv. Flights to Odessa will be operated starting from May 16 this year on Thursdays and Sundays, while to Kharkiv starting from May 3 on Tuesdays and Fridays. Romanian airline company TAROM will launch Bucharest-Baku direct flights, starting from April 3, 2019. Moreover, the first direct flight was launched from the capital of Azerbaijan Baku to Sofia at the beginning of 2018 year. In addition, several new charter flights were opened in 2018. Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL) launched the first flight on the Baku-Geneva route as part of a joint charter program in 2018. Another charter flight Baku - Sharm El Sheikh was opened during the winter season of the last year and will last till the 4th of April. They are carried out by Pasha Holidays and Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL). According to the State Civil Aviation Agency of the Azerbaijani Ministry of Transport, Communications and High Technologies, 21 airlines are represented in the countrys market, namely, ATA Airlines, Montenegro Airlines, Etihad Airways, Air Arabia, Nordwind Airlines, Ikar Airlines, Ir Aero, Al-Naser Airlines, Pobeda Airlines, SalamAir, Komiavaiatrans, Jazeera Airways, Kuwait Wataniya Airways, Mahan Air, Taban Air, Israir, Arkia Israel Airlines, Flynas, Gulf Air, Nordavia Regional Airlines, Pegasus Airlines. The Heydar Aliyev International Airport set a new record for passenger traffic volume - last year it served a total of 4.43 million passengers. This is 9 percent higher than in 2017. In 2018, base airlines of the Airport - AZAL and Buta Airways carried 1.89 million and 442,000 passengers, respectively. A total of 3.81 million passengers were carried on international flights and 620,000 passengers on regional flights. As many as 33.4 percent of total number of international passengers accounted for AZAL, 11.6 percent for Buta Airways, 55 percent international airlines. -- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz Global real estate advisor Savills has announced the signing of a prominent joint venture with Egyptian company Sphere, to cover the full range of real estate services in Egypt. The new partnership, which will trade as Savills, will combine local knowledge with international best practice. As a result of this partnership, Savills has established a new team in Egypt which will grow from three to around 30 people in the next few months, said senior company officials at the signing ceremony held on the sidelines of Mipim 2019, a leading international property event in Cannes, France. Senior executives including Steve Morgan, CEO of Savills Middle East, Catesby Langer-Paget, Head of Savills Egypt, James Sparrow, CEO of Savills UK & EMEA, Philip Ingleby, COO of Savills UK & EMEA, and Sherine Badreldine, CEO of Sphere took part. The new joint venture company will take responsibility for the management, agency and marketing of the highly regarded mixed-use development, Arkan which is located in West Cairo by May, stated the officials. The development opened its doors in 2012 and quickly became the prime location for business, retail and leisure for Sheikh Zayed City and beyond, it added. Arkan is undergoing significant expansion, with construction on track to be completed in Q1 2020. Once the extension is concluded, the project will span over a total built-up area of 260,000 sq m and features 210 shops, 67 restaurants, 185 room hotel, 600 seat theatre, 47,000 sq m offices, 4,500 parking spaces and other key developments. Langer-Paget said: "The Savills journey in Egypt to date has been a great success. We launched our operations in Egypt only in December 2018 and recently announced the launch of our first residential project, One Zamalek, the much anticipated waterfront address in Cairo." "These rapid developments allowed us to grow considerably in a market that shows promising signs of expansion. We are now achieving another milestone through our strategic joint venture with Sphere, and the subsequent management of Arkan," he stated. "This key development is set to become one of the most sought-after destinations in the Egyptian capital. Thus we are bringing on board world-class expertise to set a new benchmark in the market," he added. Badreldin said: "We have managed Arkan since its inception and were able to provide one of the first real mixed use schemes in Cairo. Accordingly, we have been approached by other clients for property management, marketing and leasing mandates." "There is a strong demand for high-end real estate services in Egypt, given the growing number of developments. With Savills, we can meet these requests by providing best in class service, based on global standard policies and procedures," he stated. "We take great pride in working with the renowned Savills team on the next phase of Arkan, and all the potential future mandates. Their global expertise and knowledge of the regional market, will be key in our journey towards being Egypt's best real estate service provider," he added. Savills has also appointed James Bailey as Client Services Director to join the team. Bailey brings over 20 years of experience in delivering and managing key commercial assets. For instance, he played a vital role in successfully launching three top 20 UK shopping centres which contributed to significant economic regeneration and community engagement in Leeds, Bristol and Leicester. His expertise will be an important asset to raise the bar of what has been previously achieved in Cairo. Savills entry into the Egyptian market is part of an ambitious expansion plan within the Mena region. It comes at the time of an estimated 5.3 per cent GDP growth for Egypt, a rate higher than the other Arab world economies, according to reports. Moreover, the population in Egypt is expected to pass 100 million this year with over 20 million in the Greater Cairo area alone. Savills aims to play a key role in the country, through catering to different stakeholders within the real estate market and supporting the property project lifecycle with a robust and complete service offering.-TradeArabia News Service Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (SGRE) has reached a contract to supply six SG 3.4-132 wind turbines with a flexible power rating of 3.65 MW to a wind farm project in Inner Mongolia, China. The project is developed by the State Power Investment Corporate (SPIC) of China, and it is the first order SGRE received from SPIC, said a statement. The order also marks the first landing of Siemens Gamesa 3.X platform model in China, and commissioning is expected in August 2019. Siemens Gamesa will also be responsible for the operation and maintenance of the turbines for five years, and 6-20 years warranty for major components. The project, located in Holingola, Tongliao city, is designed as a continuation of a circular economy demonstration project with generated electricity to be self-used by an electrolytic aluminum plant of SPIC. The demonstration project maximizes the use of local resources, including wind, coal, water and heating, etc. The latest wind project is also expected to gather wind farm performance data for a planned 6 GW wind power base of SPIC that has been approved to establish in Inner Mongolia. Were delighted to reach this milestone cooperation with SPIC, one of Chinas top five power producers. Based on our global scale and size, business diversification and technological leadership, SGRE is better positioned than before to support our customers to harness the power of wind in the worlds largest wind energy market here and beyond, stated Richard Paul Luijendijk, CEO of SGRE Onshore APAC. SGREs history and presence in China can be dated back to 30 years ago, where the company has installed close to 5.2 GW capacity. - TradeArabia News Service High-speed rail update At Tuesday's meeting, the Kern County Board of Supervisors voted to adopt a resolution opposing the high-speed rail project proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Supervisor Zack Scrivner originally proposed the resolution, saying the state funds could be better spent on other projects within Kern County. Supervisor Leticia Perez was the only dissenting vote. PAN Emirates Home Furnishings, a leading home-grown indoor, patio, and outdoor furniture brand in the region, has announced new products for Mothers Day. The company has unveiled the Abbyson three-seater sofa, a comfortable and spacious couch that allows you to cuddle in with the family, said a statement. The high quality and soft fabric adds to the warmth of your home, making you feel safe and secure, it said. The Abbyson 3-seater sofa is available at all PAN Emirates showrooms for only Dh3,995 ($1,087.67). The store features diverse collections, including traditional, classic, rustic, country, and Victorian themes that are chosen to suit the needs and taste of their customers. PAN Emirates imports their products from countries like Turkey, Egypt, US, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, China, Italy, Germany, and India, bringing the best quality from around the world to the region. TradeArabia News Service India, a global hub for the tea, coffee and allied sectors both as a consumer and as a producer, will be hosting the 7th edition of World Tea Coffee Expo, to be held later this year in Mumbai. The event will take place from November 21 to 23, at the Bombay Exhibition Centre. The expo will offer an unparalleled networking opportunity for serious industry players to meet and undertake business as also to understand and determine future trends. The Global RTD (ready-to-drink) tea and coffee market is continuing to expand and likely to grow at approximately 9 per cent through 2022 with major contribution coming from rapidly expanding organised retail chains offering variety of products in innovative and user-friendly packaging. South Asia has seen a considerable upsurge in production, investment in modernisation and upgradation of facilities and overall consumption backed by attractive branding/packaging and easy access due to mushrooming of ecommerce portals. With 90+ exhibitors from eight countries including government pavilions and 4000+ trade visitors, WTCE 2019 will showcase innovative tea and coffee products/brands, machineries, equipment, packaging, technologies, vending solutions, sugar/sweeteners, biscuits and cookies, flavours, retail chains, certifications, premixes, government boards etc. South Asias largest dedicated annual gathering for this industry, WTCE enables mega-deals by identifying market trends, global drivers, challenges, constraints, threats and investment opportunities of the RTD Tea Coffee market and creates awareness on market penetration strategies both local and global. The trade show is accompanied by a two-day high level conference and workshops on last day. In recent times, a host of regional players have initiated national expansion strategies which are supplemented by networking events like WTCE enabling them to find bulk buyers, appoint distributors and agents and create overall branding with smaller marketing budgets. Such players are from Assam, Siliguri, North East, Himachal Pradesh, Nilgiris etc. For small farmers, estates WTCE offers a perfect platform to sit neck to neck with larger players and network with same business associates. International companies have found WTCE as the definite platform for penetrating or expanding their activities across India. WTCE offers huge potential for appointing distributors, bulk orders, joint ventures, franchising, networking, knowledge-sharing, meeting government officials, marketing alliances and overall branding to decision makers from India and abroad. The Asia-Pacific region is the fastest growing market for RTD tea coffee and is also witnessing maximum geographical outreach. The Indian tea and coffee market is one of the largest in world in terms of production, consumption and growth prospects. However, future success depends largely on use of latest technology, seamless upgradation of existing facilities, adapting to ecommerce and cost effective processing something WTCE strives for, it stated. TradeArabia News Service The Hardin County Sheriff's Office has identified the man shot during what authorities say started as a domestic disturbance call, according to a press release from Sheriff Mark Davis. Michael Terrell McCray, 27 of Sour Lake, was shot by officers while trying to break into a home to access a woman and four children, according to a previous release from the department. Deputies were called to a home in the 14700 block of Atlantic Road shortly before 10 a.m. Sunday, the previous release said. They said they found McCray there, despite a restraining order barring him from the residence. Deputies also "learned that a sexual assault had just occurred," the statement said. The Sheriff's Office said McCray ran out, drove away and tried to hit the deputy on his way out, before he "rammed" a patrol car. Another deputy in a second car chased McCray along Texas 105, the news release said. The chase ended back at the house on Atlantic, the release said, where McCray reportedly tried to "break down the door" to get to the woman and children inside. Two deputies opened fire, striking McCray and shooting one child in the leg, according to the release. McCray was said to be "conscious and alert" after being shot, but neither release elaborated on the child's status. McCray is currently receiving medical treatment, but warrants for his arrest were issued by Justice of the Peace T.J. Hall. McCray is charged with attempted capital murder of a police officer, evading arrest with a motor vehicle and violation of a protective order, according to the release. Davis said more charges are expected to be filed against McCray as the investigation continues. Orange County Judge Dean Crooks on Wednesday announced he will resign from office, noting his inability to keep debate about a possible second Chevron Phillips plant in the county and its potential for creating as many as 500 full-time jobs from turning argumentative and ugly. The decision appeared to catch commissioners off-guard. Crooks read from a prepared statement at the start of a Commissioners Court meeting Wednesday morning that drew at least 100 people, many of them straining to hear what was being said from vantage points around and outside the meeting rooms three doors. Unfortunately it seems like there is little desire at this time to entertain the tough questions and come to a compromise, Crooks said before announcing his intent to resign, effective Tuesday, and leaving the meeting. Crooks, 48 and head of the countys governing body for less than a year, advocates taking a critical look at just how much return the county would get from offering Chevron Phillips tax abatements to build locally. Such reductions are commonly used by localities to lure new development, but they often have proved controversial for taking potential revenue from the broader community. Crooks questions had been perceived by some residents as an attitude against the plant or economic development as a whole. Many of those present Wednesday were planning to speak against that. We want to send industry a message: Bring it on, bring it on, David Jones, co-founder of Gopher Industrial, said during the public-comment period. RELATED: Proposed plant prompts tax-break debate in Orange Co. Crooks reiterated that he does not oppose development, but he said there must be room for questions, compromise and negotiation in striking a deal that is fair to the company and the public. He said he hoped his resignation would stop this internal fighting so that we may ensure the proper representation of the people, and do what seems best for Orange County. Commissioner John Gothia, who ran the meeting after Crooks left, said the commissioners will talk with their legal team before openly discussing the next steps to fill Crooks position. Chevron in January confirmed its interest in Orange County as a location for a plant to convert the natural gas liquid ethane into ethylene, the building block of most plastics. The company already has a 200-employee plant across FM 1006 from the possible ethylene plants proposed location. Chevron has said the county is a finalist for the plant but hasnt said how many other locations are being considered or when a final decision will be made. On Wednesday, the company elaborated slightly on the scope of what it is considering. Should the project move forward as currently proposed, we envision it would likely create 300-500 new permanent jobs and thousands of temporary facility construction jobs for a total potential investment of over $5 billion, the company said in a statement. Benefits from job creation alone would yield a net positive for the community, as the Orange economy would reap the rewards from the multiplier effect created by those working on such a project and spending their money locally. More than a dozen residents addressed the issue during the Commissioners Court meeting. Nearly all supported offering whatever legal tax breaks are necessary to entice Chevron Phillips to make Orange County its home, again. We need to do everything thats possible to land, not only this industry, but industry that might come in the future, West Orange Mayor Roy McDonald said. Robert Currie reminded other residents that an investment like this from Chevron would benefit their children and grandchildren. He said it could be the break the citys been looking for since he was a child. Jones, of Gopher Industrial, said not using available tax breaks to lure companies is akin to giving firefighters a truck and gasoline but withholding water and a hose. Another resident, Daniel Robinson, went as far to call the beginning of the meeting, when Crooks resigned, a blessing. But Trudy Pellerin, the sole dissenting speaker, told the room she was appalled at the way past and present officials have lambasted Crooks. If Chevron chooses not to locate in Orange County, she said, it will likely be because of the unprofessional behavior exhibited during the debate. RELATED: Orange Co. commissioners appoint interim judge to replace Carlton At the end of the public-comment period, Gothia said some of the debate and comments posted on social media may have been painful for Crooks family. He urged residents to take the high road moving forward, in part to make sure the message to companies considering Orange County is positive. Crooks was appointed interim judge nearly a year ago to fill Brint Carltons unexpired term. Carlton announced his resignation after he lost to Crooks in the Republican primary. He was unopposed in the November general election. kaitlin.bain@beaumontenterprise.com twitter.com/KaitlinBain From Port Arthur Police Department's Facebook Port Arthur Police Department are searching for a 71-year-old woman from Forth worth who was last seen Tuesday, March 12, in Port Arthur, according to a Facebook post from the department. Alice Walker was reported missing and is possibly lost and without cell phone service, according to the post. The possibility of landing a second Chevron Phillips plant in Orange County has prompted debate on whether tax breaks are the best way to entice new companies to the area. County commissioners, and many residents, have said the investment could be a game changer for the local economy, so incentives should be offered as such. County Judge Dean Crooks has drawn ire for urging caution. He wants more analysis of other incentives that could be offered and a better sense of the real value Chevron could bring. The argument then becomes, in the community, youre for economic development or youre against it, he said in a recent court meeting. That cant be further from the truth. Were really discussing how we get there. Crooks didnt return multiple requests for comment. On Wednesday, a group of residents who favor tax abatements plans to attend the Commissioners Court meeting in a public show of support. Chevron has operated a plant at 5309 FM 1006 since 1955. It employs about 200 people and produces three chemicals that are sold to make plastics and other products. The proposed new facility, in which the company confirmed an interest in late January, would convert the natural gas liquid ethane into ethylene, the building block of most plastics. At issue is the likelihood that the county would offer Chevron property tax abatements if the company chooses to construct its new plant in Orange County. Cities, counties and school districts are allowed to award such breaks in the name of economic development. The size of the break, the number of years a company gets it and other conditions vary based on situation and awarding entity. Orange County Commissioner Johnny Trahan said abatements are almost a necessity when attracting new businesses, especially so close to Louisiana a state that often offers more breaks. If you dont make an abatement, youre probably not going to get the project, he said. Dale Craymer, president of the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, said Texas property taxes on manufacturing plants are 65 percent higher than the national average. Most abatements, he said, simply bring the taxes down to the national average. The idea is that even without additional property taxes from the new company, government bodies are expected to see a bump in sales tax that comes from a rising number of residents spending their money and the cost of materials to build the new plant. Well see businesses come here to serve the new residents and other businesses expand, Trahan said. The new employees will be eating here, buying their groceries here and keeping their dollars floating through Orange County. How many employees that could be is unclear. According to paperwork submitted to the school district for tax breaks, Chevron could commit to bringing 10 new, permanent jobs to Orange County and a plant with an assessed value of $30 million. Trahan, other commissioners and a few experts say thats the minimum number a company would have to bring to qualify for tax breaks. Its not uncommon for companies to undershoot their plans, thus ensuring tax breaks wont be taken back if they fail to deliver on promises, Craymer said. Thats a fairly common practice to conservatively estimate so that companies dont over promise, he said. Trahan said hes been told Chevron is expecting the project will actually warrant between 500 and 800 jobs. Commissioner Robert Viator said a $5.6 billion investment the number Orange Countys Economic Development Corp. has given him on how much it would cost to build the plant would have to bring at least 400 permanent jobs. This could put Orange County on a prosperous future, he said. So if tax abatements are necessary to bring that game changer to Orange County, then thats what should be done, the commissioners said. Crooks isnt so sure. The people of this county elected us to make the best deals for them, he said at a recent meeting. Weve got to look out for them and thats what we should be doing. As a result, Crooks encouraged the commissioners to be more creative in the deals theyre making and really weigh if the new revenue Chevron could bring in is worth the lost tax dollars. My question to that would simply be, Was it really worth it? Did we get enough out of it to make a difference? he said. Bill Peacock, vice president of research for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said government bodies and residents usually dont. The foundation spent much of the summer meeting with residents who have struggled with similar issues, which Peacock characterized as corporate welfare, in their counties. The benefits of those (tax abatements) tend to accrue to owners and employees of these businesses, he said. But other owners and residents are left to bear the rest of the cost. Peacock says elected officials should instead decrease property taxes for all businesses and residents and reduce regulations and red tape. This should make it easier for all businesses to locate to an area instead of targeting a few individuals. Orange County is a finalist for the new petrochemical investment from Chevron, the company said in an email statement. But it has not said how many finalists are being considered or when it will announce which site will be chosen. Jessica Hill, Orange County EDC executive director, said premature conjecture about the project could potentially derail an important business investment. When it is in the public and everyone is talking about it with misinterpreted numbers, it damages the project, Hill said. Its just hearsay. This isnt the first time a billion-dollar project has made an investment in Southeast Texas, but its the first time for Orange in a long time. The development group has initial talks with companies interested in locating in Orange County to determine what a company would need in terms of incentives. The corporation then gets approval from its board, made up of community leaders and business partners, before making a presentation to the countys commissioner and judge. Hill said a presentation hadnt been given to the commission and Chevron Phillips hasnt yet requested any incentives. kaitlin.bain@beaumontenterprise.com jacob.dick@beaumontenterprise.com The UAE and Uzbekistan have agreed to enhance economic, trade and technical cooperation based on a number of policies and programmes, including a range of priority sectors of shared interests. The agreeement was announced following the 3rd session of the Joint Economic Committee between the UAE and Uzbekistan in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital. Most notably, the UAE and Uzbekistan agreed to increase trade exchange volume and investments in renewable energy, agriculture, food production, textile, infrastructure and tourism sectors, as well as cooperation in small and medium enterprises (SMEs), civil aviation, tourism, manufacturing, financial sector and Halal industry. The committee was chaired by Engineer Sultan bin Saeed Al Mansoori, UAE Minister of Economy, representing the UAE Government, and Ganiev Elyor Majidovich, Deputy Prime Minister of Uzbekistan. The meeting was attended by Mohammed Hareb Al Mehairbi, UAE Ambassador to Uzbekistan. The UAE delegation included Engineer Mohammed bin Abdul Aziz Al Shehhi, undersecretary of Economic Affairs in the Ministry of Economy; Sultan Mohammed Al Shamsi, assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation for International Development Affairs; Ibrahim Al Zaabi, Insurance Authority director general; Abdullah Al Maeeni, director general of the Emirates Authority for Standardisation and Metrology (Esma); Gaith Al Gaith, chief executive officer of flydubai; and representatives of Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, Dubai Chamber, Investment Corporation of Dubai ICD, Mubadala, Masdar, Majid Al Futtaim Group. Engineer Sultan bin Saeed Al Mansoori said during his speech at the main session of the committees meeting that the strong bilateral relations between the UAE and the Uzbekistan are reinforced by cultural and historic ties and Islamic affiliation. He pointed out that the economic aspect is an integral part of the bilateral relations. He added that Central Asia is a major focus area with regard to UAE's international economic cooperation, and Uzbekistan is a major political, economic and cultural centre in this region and hence the UAE is keen to develop economic cooperation in areas of shared interest. The UAE government is looking forward to the committees outcomes as an important factor to enhance economic partnerships between both countries according to a clear vision and direction. This will help identify areas of cooperation for the future, discuss ways to increase trade exchange volume, discuss opportunities for partnership in both countries' markets, agree on policies for coordination and exchange of expertise between the concerned parties on both sides. It will also support the efforts of the private sector in both countries to overcome obstacles and will facilitate their endeavours to build business partnerships and investment projects that serve the shared interests and economic objectives of both Uzbekistan and the UAE. The official pointed out the importance of joint efforts to increase the volume of non-oil trade exchange. In 2017, this figure reached $387 million, which he emphasised is not in alignment with the aspirations and potential of both countries. This highlights the need for further cooperation and coordination during the next phase to strengthen trade between the two countries. He also called on Uzbek companies to take a closer look at the opportunities for cooperation in the UAE and to build effective partnerships with UAE companies, especially in fields of agriculture and food products, energy and renewable energy, textile industries, tourism, transport and financial services. He pointed out that Expo 2020 provides an ideal opportunity to strengthen partnership with Uzbekistan at the governmental and private levels, in order to start a new phase of trade and economic cooperation between both countries. Ganiev Elyor Majidovich said in his opening remarks during the meeting that the UAE is an important strategic partner for Uzbekistan in the region and both countries have built bilateral relations based on common interests. He emphasised that his country is committed to supporting all efforts of joint cooperation between both countries, especially in the sectors of economy, trade and financial and investment cooperation, as well as developing partnerships in education, health care, tourism and various development sectors that serve the interests of both parties. Engineer Mohammed bin Abdul Aziz Al Shehhi reviewed the topics agreed upon in the minutes of the 3rd session of the committee, which included a number of cooperation areas of common interest. The most important of these are the increase in trade exchange rates and the promotion of mutual investment in sectors of energy and renewable energy, agriculture, food, infrastructure, tourism and textile products. Both parties also agreed to implement mutually beneficial investments with the support of a joint venture company with a declared capital of one billion dollars. These are currently underway and are being established by the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development and the Uzbek Fund for Reconstruction and Development. The UAE and Uzbekistan also agreed on the importance of cooperation in the SME sector, particularly in the areas of trade, investment and agricultural cooperation, as well as the importance of industrial cooperation in the fields of oil and gas, petrochemicals, food and renewable energy, and to cooperate in financial sector, the use of Blockchain technology and artificial intelligence in its development, as well as cooperation in the fields of civil aviation, tourism and halal industry, it stated. TradeArabia News Service British Prime Minister Theresa May's EU withdrawal deal has been rejected by MPs for a second time, throwing her Brexit strategy into further confusion, a media report said. MPs voted down her deal by 391 to 242 - a smaller defeat than when they rejected it in January, Emirates news agency Wam said, citing a BBC report. The PM said MPs will now get a vote on whether the UK should leave the EU without a deal and, if that fails, on whether Brexit should be delayed. She said Tory MPs will get a free vote on a no-deal Brexit. That means they can vote with their conscience rather than following the orders of party managers. May also told MPs the government would announce details of how the UK will manage its border with Ireland in the event of a no-deal Brexit on Wednesday. If the Commons declines to approve a no-deal Brexit in a vote on Wednesday, a vote on extending Article 50, the legal mechanism taking the UK out of the EU on March 29, will take place on Thursday, said May. Prince Frederick, Md.-based CalvertHealth Medical Center's anesthesia clinicians joined Melville, N.Y.-based North American Partners in Anesthesia, an anesthesia and perioperative management company. Three insights: 1. The CalvertHealth clinicians are now part of NAPA's Mid-Atlantic services region. 2. The clinicians previously associated with Prince Frederick-based Chesapeake Anesthesia Associates will continue providing anesthesia services for CalvertHealth's Prince Frederick-based community hospital as NAPA employees. 3. NAPA serves more than 1 million patients annually at hospitals, ASCs and office-based practices in 11 states. More articles on anesthesia: After 11 years at Laser Spine Institute, Dr. Stefan Prada joins Physician Partners of America Arkansas House passes bill allowing optometrists to perform more eye surgeries 3 insights MacuLogix closes $38.7M financing round 4 insights Research from the American Medical Association, Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic and Stanford (Calif.) University School of Medicine found that burnout among U.S. physicians improved between 2014 and 2017, but the rate of burnout remains high. Franklin, Tenn.-based Acadia Healthcare CMO Michael Genovese, MD, shared his insights on physician burnout with Becker's ASC Review. Note: Responses have been lightly edited for style and clarity. Question: What are some actions health systems and physicians themselves can take to combat burnout? Dr. Michael Genovese: The most effective way to combat physician burnout is having physicians practice the things we often tell our patients and their caregivers to do: take care of themselves. This means making healthy lifestyle adjustments such as exercising a minimum of 30 minutes per day, eating right and practicing self-care. Additionally, physicians should be encouraged to seek medical care preventive or otherwise as needed. This includes mental health care, like depression treatment. Health system leaders can help physicians tackle burnout by incentivizing these healthy behaviors, and by talking openly about the issue to help physicians recognize early warning signs. Available resources and recommended treatment protocols should be readily accessible and whenever possible, financial incentives encouraging the use of mental health days to alleviate job-related stresses should be considered. Q: Why is there such a stigma around mental health in healthcare? What are some ways to reduce it? MG: The stigma around mental health is pervasive, perhaps most surprisingly in the healthcare industry itself. There are several reasons for this, but it primarily stems from a lack of parity between physical and mental health issues. One is seen as more important and the other is often dismissed as a sign of weakness. The brain is an organ of the body, and it is a critical piece of our overall health. We should not treat physical and mental health issues as though they are separate. Since mental health conditions are not traditionally seen as the diseases they are, a recurring dialogue grounded in misunderstanding and mischaracterization remains. To reduce the stigma around mental health in the industry, we first must stop behaviors that perpetuate it, such as treating physicians who seek support in the form of counseling or other mental healthcare like they have a scarlet letter on their record. The fear of losing their license for accessing the care they need can keep a provider from asking for help in the first place. Establishing a network where doctors can receive confidential, nonpunitive treatment would allow them to seek help without fear of retribution, and resume practice or residency training when conditions allow. Q: Do you see the burnout issue changing in the next five to 10 years either improving, getting worse or something else? Why? MG: We're seeing indications that physician burnout may be lessening, but we are far from the issue being resolved. Change does not happen overnight, and we as providers and leaders in the healthcare industry need to commit to sustainable, long-term solutions. There must be a cultural shift, and often, those at the top can effectuate change by creating policies, providing resources and changing the dialogue around mental health all things that will reduce and possibly eliminate burnout in the future. Dallas-based Guardian Pharmacy Services the manufacturer of a compounded solution at the center of 60 lawsuits reached a settlement with the federal government, according to a press release from the Department of Justice. Five details: 1. In the dozens of lawsuits filed, patients allege Guardian's solution caused vision damage within weeks after it was injected during procedures at Medical City Surgery Park Central, formerly Park Central Surgical Center, and Key-Whitman Eye Center. Both facilities are located in the Dallas area. 2. On March 11, a federal court in Texas ordered Guardian to halt production of compounded sterile drugs until it can satisfy specific requirements, BuzzFeed News reports. Guardian must stop producing sterile drugs until the company: Establishes compliant manufacturing processes Implements safeguards against contamination Hires an independent expert to confirm the problems are solved as well as conducts periodic audits 3. Guardian was also ordered to cover the FDA's expenses for compliance check-ins. The FDA can charge Guardian roughly $100 per hour, but the total cost to the compounding company wasn't stated. 4. Guardian agreed to the DOJ settlement without admitting or denying wrongdoing. The settlement will be in effect for a minimum of five years. 5. The settlement comes after authorities found Guardian had unclean lab environments, mislabeled drugs and failed to require patient prescriptions, according to a March 6 complaint from the DOJ. Guardian allegedly continued committing safety violations after promising to correct them multiple times. Note: There are two separate, unaffiliated companies named Guardian Pharmacy Services. This article refers exclusively to the one headquartered in Dallas. The other is based in Atlanta and recently acquired Guardian Pharmacy of Dallas-Fort Worth in Arlington, also not affiliated with the pharmacy referenced in this article. More articles on transactions/valuation: After 11 years at Laser Spine Institute, Dr. Stefan Prada joins Physician Partners of America Arkansas House passes bill allowing optometrists to perform more eye surgeries 3 insights MacuLogix closes $38.7M financing round 4 insights U.S. Urology Partners was launched with funding from private investment firm NMS Capital and forged its first practice partnership. What you should know: 1. CEO Mark Cherney leads U.S. Urology Partners, which was created to give urology groups operational support, management expertise and financial resources while retaining autonomy. 2. Its 50-member team provides services including finance, accounting, revenue cycle management, provider recruitment, human resources, compliance, data analytics, marketing and contracting. 3. The company's first practice partnership is Gahanna-based Central Ohio Urology Group, which has 16 locations, including an ASC. 4. U.S. Urology Partners plans to expand nationally, partnering with urology groups in Ohio and other strategic markets. "Our vision is to allow urology practices to retain their autonomy, avoid unnecessary pressures and succeed financially without having to acquiesce to a hospital acquisition," Mr. Cherney said in a press release. "Urology groups that partner with U.S. Urology Partners will benefit from an experienced team of healthcare executives with decades of urology domain expertise and extensive knowledge of integrated services, revenue cycle and practice management. Our deep financial resources can enhance services to patients as well as the providers." Healthcare acquisition and management company New Manna Augusta bought Casper, Wyo.-based Summit Medical Center, which was previously a physician-owned hospital, March 1, according to the Casper Star Tribune. The key details to know: 1. The hospital can now take Medicare and Medicaid patients. When Summit Medical Center was physician-owned, federal laws barred the hospital from receiving reimbursements from a federal program. 2. Summit spokeswoman Lori Klatt told the Casper Star Tribune the hospital was sold to bring in reimbursements from federal programs. 3. The hospital hadn't received the patient volumes it had hoped for since opening four years ago. Most ASCs are physician-owned, according to the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association's 2017 Salary & Benefits Survey. A breakdown of ASC ownership: 1. Physician: 64 percent 2. Physician-hospital: 24 percent 3. Physician-corporate: 4 percent 4. Corporate: 4 percent 5. Hospital: 3 percent 6. Physician-hospital-corporate: 1 percent HealthCare Appraisers surveyed 15 respondents, including representatives of Ambulatory Surgery Centers of America, Birmingham, Ala.-based Surgical Care Affiliates and other ASC organizations, on selling minority and controlling interests in surgery centers. Over 700 surgery centers were represented in the report. Controlling, minority interests Length of time it takes to sell minority interests: 7. Less than three months: 27 percent 8. Three to six months: 33 percent 9. Six months to one year: 40 percent Length of time it took to identify a buyer for a controlling interest: 10. Three to six months: 33 percent 11. Six months to a year: 67 percent The buyer of a controlling interest: 12. Single outside third party: 57 percent 13. Single existing owner: 7 percent 14. Multiple outside parties: 0 percent 15. Multiple existing owners: 0 percent 16. Hospital or health system: 36 percent ASC ownership: 17. Eighty percent of respondents preferred between six and 15 physician-owners for a single-specialty ASC, while 60 percent preferred between 11 and 20 physician-owners for a multispecialty ASC. 18. Concerning equity in a center they're acquiring, 13 percent of respondents preferred less than 10 percent ownership; 40 percent preferred between 11 percent and 50 percent ownership; and 47 percent preferred between 51 percent and 75 percent ownership. 19. When buying into centers with a minority stake, 53 percent of respondents said they used a formula to come up with a price, while 47 percent said they used an independent appraisal to determine value. 20. When selling a minority stake to physician investors, 33 percent of respondents said it took on average three to six months to make a sale. Forty percent of respondents said it took an average of six months to a year to make a sale. 21. When selling a controlling interest in a center to physician investors, the average selling period was between six months to a year for 67 percent of respondents. 22. Respondents sold controlling interest in an ASC to a single outside third party 57 percent of the time and to a hospital or health system 36 percent of the time. ASC valuation multiples: Minority interest, single-specialty 23. 2 to 2.9 times: 8 percent 24. 3 to 3.4 times: 23 percent 25. 3.5 to 3.9 times: 15 percent 26. 4 to 4.9 times: 38 percent 27. 5 to 5.9 times: 15 percent Controlling interest, single-specialty 28. 5 to 5.9 times: 23 percent 29. 6 to 6.9 times: 38 percent 30. 7 to 7.9 times: 38 percent Minority interest, multispecialty 31. 3 to 3.4 times: 14 percent 32. 3.5 to 3.9 times: 21 percent 33. 4 to 4.9 times: 50 percent 34. 5 to 5.9 times: 7 percent 35. 6 to 6.9 times: 7 percent Controlling interest multispecialty 36. 6 to 6.9 times: 29 percent 37. 7 to 7.9 times: 64 percent 8 times or more: 7 percent New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Northwell Health is building a facility that will house an ASC, and it plans to renovate Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, Newsday reports. Three notes: 1. Northwell is constructing a 250,000-square-foot facility that will occupy one New York City block. It will include a cancer center, ASC and medical offices. 2. Northwell also plans to build a 30-story tower for Lenox Hill Hospital, expand its emergency room space, and expand patient and operating rooms over a span of eight years. The health system is seeking city and community board approval for the project. 3. Since acquiring Lenox Hill in 2010, Northwell has invested $200 million "just to keep the lights on and plumbing working," President and CEO Michael J. Dowling told Newsday. The hospital expansion project will be funded in part through operations, fundraising and borrowing. More articles on new ASC development: After 11 years at Laser Spine Institute, Dr. Stefan Prada joins Physician Partners of America Arkansas House passes bill allowing optometrists to perform more eye surgeries 3 insights MacuLogix closes $38.7M financing round 4 insights Four of the top vendors hospitals used to participate in the Medicare EHR Incentive Program are Allscripts, Cerner, Epic and Meditech, according to 2018 ONC data. Sixteen hospitals and health systems posted job listings seeking EHR and IT expertise during the past two weeks: Editor's note: This is not an exhaustive list. Job listings were compiled from job seeker websites. Allscripts 1. Excelsior Springs (Mo.) Hospital: Seeks a clinical informatics analyst 2. Arizona Community Physicians (Tucson): Seeks an EHR applications analyst 3. Hendrick Health (Abilene, Texas): Seeks an interface analyst 4. Phoenix Children's Hospital: Seeks a revenue integrity director Cerner 1. Mountain View Hospital (Idaho Falls, Idaho): Seeks an IT-EHR database and interface analyst 2. Virginia Mason Medical Center (Seattle): Seeks a clinical information systems manager 3. Community Health Systems (Franklin, Tenn.): Seeks an informatics management director 4. Boston Children's Hospital: Seeks a health information management analyst Epic 1. Rush University Medical Center (Chicago): Seeks a senior application analyst 2. Northeast Georgia Health System (Gainesville): Seeks a clinical analyst 3. Northwestern Medicine (Chicago): Seeks a data application analyst 4. Centura Health (Englewood, Colo.): Seeks an ambulatory application analyst Meditech 1. Anne Arundel Medical Center (Annapolis, Md.): Seeks an associate CIO 2. HCA Healthcare Houston Kingwood (Texas): Seeks a clinical applications manager 3. Whitman Hospital and Medical Center (Colfax, Wash.): Seeks a healthcare informatics manager 4. Methodist Healthcare System (San Antonio): Seeks a clinical applications director The Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (Enec) said it has signed an agreement with Spanish state- owned company Enusa Industrias Avanzadas for collaboration and exchange of information and expertise in the field of nuclear fuel services. Enusa, which got incorporated in 1972, is a major player in the engineering, manufacture and supply of nuclear fuel to nuclear power plants as well as to the provision of a broad scope of fuel related services. Owned by the SEPI holding and the CIEMAT, today Enusa supplies fuel assemblies to the Spanish reactors and exports more than 60 per cent of the production at its Juzbado nuclear fuel plant. The memorandum comes within the framework of Enecs strategy of working with international companies based in countries with established nuclear energy programmes, remarked Enec CEO Engineer Mohamed Al Hammadi after inking the deal with Enusa President Jose Vicente Berlanga at company headquarters in Abu Dhabi. It outlines potential areas of collaboration between the two parties, and highlights several key areas of special interest, including the nuclear fuel services and components for the UAE Peaceful Nuclear Energy Programme, he stated. "Enusa has an excellent track record and decades of experience in the nuclear energy sector and we look forward to collaborating with the organization in the coming months and years ahead," noted Al Hammadi. "We are committed to developing the UAE Peaceful Nuclear Energy Programme in line with the highest international standards of quality, safety, and security and working with various global organizations enables us to share insights and expertise," stated the Enec chief. "Such collaboration is important for the future development of the nuclear energy sector within the UAE and internationally," he added. Berlanga stressed upon the strategic significance of the agreement, as Enusa is also representing the interests of the Spanish Administration. He also highlighted the groups desire to seek opportunities for mutual co-operation with Emirati nuclear energy firm, and serve as a point of contact for other Spanish companies or institutions of interest for Enec and the wider UAE Peaceful Nuclear Energy Programme.-TradeArabia News Service Horton (Kan.) Community Hospital, the city's only healthcare provider, closed March 12, according to The Topeka Capital-Journal. Four things to know: 1. The 25-bed critical access hospital closed after struggling to pay utilities, missing payroll since Feb. 15 and operating with insufficient supplies, according to local news station WIBW. 2. Richard Brown, MD, the hospital's chief of staff, told the Capital-Journal that the hospital's closure didn't surprise staff. About 50 employees were affected by the closure. 3. Dr. Brown said Horton Community's staff had been working with the Kansas Attorney General's Office and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment to find ways to stay open. 4. Attorney general spokesperson C.J. Grover told the Capital-Journal the office is investigating the closure. Kristi Caldararo, MHA, serves as Administrator of Clinical Services for Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals. On April 4th, Kristi will speak at Becker's Hospital Review 10th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place April 1-4, 2019 in Chicago. To learn more about the conference and Kristi's session, click here. Question: What do innovators/entrepreneurs from outside healthcare need to better understand about hospital and health system leaders? Kristi Caldararo: I think there are several industries that healthcare can learn from and vice versa. For innovators outside of healthcare it is important to recognize that the healthcare climate is changing. As an industry, we need to move from sick care, where patients show up at a healthcare facility only when they become sick, to health care when the appropriate preventive and primary care measures are taken to manage patients proactively upfront and appropriately long term. This is where other innovative industries can help manage populations effectively with the use of telehealth, easy access clinics, healthcare applications, and more. Q: What one strategic initiative will demand the most of your time and energy in 2019? KC: One strategic initiative that is at the forefront of my goals in 2019 is patient satisfaction. We have a tremendous amount of data, inpatient and outpatient, related to the patient experience and how we can do better. People come to Jefferson to receive excellent care and because of the amazing experience they have interacting with the clinical teams. The majority of the time, a patient is in the hospital not by choice, but because something bad happened in which they needed to seek medical care. As a healthcare provider, we should do everything in our power to make that patients day a little better than how it started out. With continued market consolidation and increased transparency to drive patient decisions, our focus on patient and family experience will be heightened in the years to come. Q: Can you share some praise with us about people you work with? What does greatness look like to you when it comes to your team? KC: Transplant is truly a team sport. The multidisciplinary team involvement is not only a regulatory requirement but an operational necessity in order to be successful. I would not be able to effectively run the transplant programs if it were not for the team that makes everything possible. We are all constantly learning from one another and challenging each other to be the best versions of ourselves, professionally and personally. When I am asked what greatness looks like when it comes to my team, I think of highly motivated, educated, and engaged individuals that share a common goal and passion so together we can deliver the highest quality of care to our vulnerable patient population. While physicians and surgeons typically earn salaries of more than $100,000 per year, one economist questions whether physicians' salaries and the barriers to entry into the field play a role in the skyrocketing healthcare costs nationwide. Dean Baker, PhD, senior economist at the nonprofit Center for Economic and Policy Research spoke with NPR's "Planet Money" program about physician salaries and a particular barrier to entry into the healthcare profession: residency programs. Four things to know: 1. Dr. Baker posits that physicians are "seriously overpaid," and their high salaries are a consequence of certain regulatory and financial constraints on the number of residency positions available to medical school graduates. 2. He equated the U.S. residency system to a cartel, arguing that such organizations limit the supply of a certain good or service to increase the amount of money they can charge. Dr. Baker said the U.S. residency system turns away thousands of perfectly qualified individuals and essentially acts as a bottleneck preventing an adequate supply of physicians. Residencies are also typically funded by Medicare, and in 1997, Congress capped the number of residency programs that could receive funding, further contributing to the issue. 3. Some organizations, however, argue that such a bottleneck doesn't exist. The American Medical Association indicates the total number of physicians in the U.S. has quadrupled since 1965, according to NPR. The organization also said it's working to alleviate the shortages of physicians in certain areas by increasing the size and number of medical schools and residency programs. 4. While the AMA's current goals aim to improve the availability of residency positions, Dr. Baker argues the organization, and others like it, may still be contributing to the problem. He compares the AMA's actions to those of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which regulates a large portion of the world's oil supply. "OPEC sometimes votes to increase the supply of oil. That doesn't mean that OPEC isn't restricting the supply of oil and pushing up the price," he said. To access the full report, click here. Nurses at two California hospitals walked off the job March 12 over issues arising from the recent sale of the facilities to Santa Clara County, according to local television station KTVU. The county purchased financially struggling San Jose, Calif.-based O'Connor Hospital and St. Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy, Calif., in December. As part of the sale, the 482 nurses at O'Connor Hospital and the 200 nurses at St. Louise Regional Hospital previously represented by the California Nurses Association must join a rival union, the Registered Nurses Professional Association, according to the report. Nurses are striking to urge county officials to designate the CNA as their sole negotiating party. They also allege to the California Public Employment Relations Board that the county illegally threatened to retaliate against nurses, and they are asking the board to uphold the nurses' right to hold this week's "lawful recognition strike." "We have an obligation to speak out for our patients and to fight for the best patient care possible," Nancy Kumar, an emergency room nurse at O'Connor Hospital, said in a news release announcing the strike. "The nurses at O'Connor and at St. Louise democratically elected CNA because it is a strong union with a track record of improving patient care. We have a legal right to respond to the county's unfair labor practices with a strike." County Executive Jeffrey Smith called the strike "unlawful" and said the CNA has not made necessary efforts to be designated the sole negotiating party for the nurses. In a statement obtained by KTVU, Mr. Smith said: "The county respects the right of its employees to select the organization of their choice for purposes of representation. The California Nurses Association does not currently represent any county employees, nor has it taken any of the steps necessary to become the lawful representative of any county employees "Instead, it is using an unlawful strike in its dispute with other unions that represent the county employees at O'Connor and Saint Louise hospitals, trying to force the county to ignore its obligations to those unions," Mr. Smith said. He said the county has worked to ensure hospital operations are not affected by the one-day strike, which is scheduled to end at 6:59 a.m. March 13. More articles on human capital and risk: Kaiser to outsource landscaping at Northern California facilities UVM Medical Center technicians ratify contract University of California patient care workers say they'll join March 20 strike The former CEO of Palo Pinto General Hospital in Mineral Wells, Texas, has pleaded guilty to defrauding BlueCross BlueShield of Texas, Cigna Texas and UnitedHealthcare out of millions of dollars, according to the Department of Justice. According to court documents, Harris Brooks and his co-conspirators submitted claims to in-network insurance companies for genetic and allergy testing that was purportedly performed at Palo Pinto General Hospital. However, the hospital did not have the equipment to perform the tests, and patients actually received treatment at various clinics throughout Texas and in other states. The pass-through billing scheme lasted from September 2017 through June 2018. During that time, Mr. Brooks and his co-conspirators submitted more than $55 million in claims, most of which were fraudulent, to insurers for laboratory services. The insurers paid the hospital more than $9 million for the claims. Mr. Brooks faces up to five years in prison and will be required to pay restitution, according to the Justice Department. More articles on legal and regulatory issues: Pipeline Health accused of acquiring Illinois hospital under false pretenses Kansas physician gets life in prison for selling opioids for cash 9 latest healthcare industry lawsuits Several police officers in Bolivar, Mo., came under fire last week after a viral video showed them searching a cancer patient's belongings for marijuana, the Daily Beast reports. Three things to know: 1. Patient Nolan Sousley has stage 4 pancreatic cancer and has been using marijuana to manage the pain after ceasing chemotherapy treatments, according to the Daily Beast citing USA Today. 2. Last week, police entered Mr. Sousley's room at Citizens Memorial Hospital in Bolivar, citing reports of potential marijuana on the premises, and began searching through Mr. Sousley's possessions. A video recording of the incident was posted to Facebook March 6. 3. The police officers reportedly did not find any marijuana and did not issue Mr. Sousley a citation or a warning, the report states. To access the full report, click here. Several drugmakers and pharmacy chains are hard at work responding to the hundreds of lawsuits accusing them of fueling the deadly opioid epidemic in the U.S. While billions of dollars are at stake for these companies if they are found liable, their reputations are now on the line even before any judgements are rendered, according to NPR. Companies like Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson are already trying to contain the fallout after evidence presented in court documents became public, revealing more about the internal workings of their companies. In one instance, newly unveiled court documents found that Purdue Pharma executives embraced a plan to conceal OxyContin's strength from physicians in an effort to boost prescriptions and sales. Internal memos included in the court documents also revealed that Purdue Pharma leaders developed a secret plan dubbed Project Tango in which they acknowledged the escalating risk of the opioid epidemic. The program was designed to help Purdue Pharma profit from opioid dependency by selling the company's addiction treatment services. The program was never implemented. The drug industry has fought these disclosures at every turn, arguing that the documents should be viewed by the courts as corporate property. However, attorneys are fighting for the release of these documents in an effort to hold the companies accountable. "What Purdue's own documents show is the extent of deception and deceit. What's important to me is that the facts come to light, and we get justice and accountability," Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey told NPR. In another case, Johnson & Johnson allegedly pushed unscientific theories about drug addiction to help persuade physicians to prescribe more opioids to patients although they were showing signs of dependency. As companies work to maintain their reputations as innovative healers, more damage may emerge during another big opioid trial, which is set to begin in May in Oklahoma. Read the full report here. The American Medical Association is calling on major technology companies to ensure their users have access to accurate information on vaccines. AMA CEO and Executive Vice President James Madara, MD, discussed the threat of anti-vaccine messages posted online in a March 13 letter to the CEOs of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube. "As physicians, we are concerned that the proliferation of this type of health-related misinformation will undermine sound science, further decrease vaccinations and persuade people to make medical decisions that could spark the spread of easily preventable diseases," Dr. Madara wrote in the letter. The AMA challenged the companies to create and share plans for how they will provide users with access to scientifically-validated information on vaccines. The move comes a week after American Academy of Pediatrics President Kyle Yasuda, MD, penned a similar letter to Facebook, Google and Pinterest, calling anti-vaccine misinformation a "public health crisis." Many of the technology companies addressed in the letters are already taking steps to tackle anti-vaccine messages. Google and YouTube, for example, are collaborating with health experts to display authoritative information on vaccines during user searches for medical content. More articles on clinical leadership & infection control: 10 top patient safety concerns for 2019, ranked by ECRI Institute Retained guidewires still a 'significant patient safety issue' 228 measles cases identified across 12 states, CDC says Alexander Garza, MD, chief quality officer at St. Louis-based SSM Health, is no stranger to infectious disease prevention and response. In 2009, former President Barack Obama nominated Dr. Garza to serve as CMO of the Department of Homeland Security at the height of the H1N1 pandemic. The virus killed an estimated 200,000 people worldwide and represents the second largest H1N1 outbreak in history behind the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed at least 50 million people, according to the CDC. While at DHS, Dr. Garza learned the importance of investing in the right resources to prevent health or safety threats not react to them. Today, Dr. Garza is addressing a different threat: healthcare-associated infections. The CDC estimates about 1 in 31 hospital patients have an HAI on any given day. To reduce the prevalence of HAIs, SSM Health rolled out a care bundle approach in early 2019 with a strong emphasis on tracking performance improvement. "We can give team members the science and say, 'This is what we know prevents HAIs,'" Dr. Garza said. "But it's also important to consider the performance improvement side and track how well we're adhering to the care bundle." Dr. Garza talked about the new care bundle with Becker's Hospital Review and shared best practices for getting team members on board with such quality improvement initiatives. Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for style and clarity. Question: What quality improvement goals is SSM Health focusing on this year? Dr. Alexander Garza: There are a couple of things we're really focusing on. One is hospital-acquired infections, specifically central line-associated bloodstream infections and catheter-associated urinary tract infections. The others are sepsis, sepsis mortality and readmission reduction. We also have a couple other goals we're using as what we call "watch measures," meaning we're going to refine the data and potentially make them more systematic key performance indicators. One is opiate stewardship within the system; another is workforce injuries and violence. Q: How is SSM Health working to address HAIs? AG: We've started organizing a better systemwide approach to HAIs, as well as safety and quality overall. So that means aligning everyone who participates in these efforts, including infection prevention directors, nurses, and safety and quality personnel. The infection prevention team also built a care bundle approach that incorporates evidence-based best practices into everyday workflows to decrease HAIs. This process involved a multidisciplinary team where everyone was at the table to discuss how the bundle would be operationalized and how it would impact clinicians' daily workflows. We rolled out the new care bundle approach in December. It's been very eye-opening to track and visually display our performance on daily improvement boards to see where we are having challenges. For instance, part of the care bundle involves giving patients with central lines a chlorhexidine gluconate bath. We got our first batch of data back and realized this action wasn't getting documented in the chart, which points to either a documentation problem or a process problem. We wouldn't have known about that care gap had we not tracked it. Q: How did you educate front-line staff about the new care bundle approach and get them on board with the initiative? AG: It's really about delivering the why. With our care bundles, we work with our education team, our nursing leaders and others to make sure we're getting the information out to the front-line staff. That education involves not only an understanding of how to do the standard work, but more importantly the why behind it. Involving front-line employees in the performance improvement work is how it really clicks for them. They can visually see where gaps are in the care and take more ownership of it. Understanding the why continually reinforces that. People are naturally competitive, especially in healthcare. They want to get to that zero HAIs mark, so engaging them in the process is almost the best education you can give them. Q: What emerging technology or capability shows the most promise to help reduce HAIs? AG: To me, it's not about the technology, but about developing standard work. It's also partly a cultural thing, recognizing that when we do procedures on patients, there is always potential risk for harm. Using that as a frame of reference, I think we have to be very disciplined on how we use these devices. Does every patient require a central line or indwelling catheter? Or are we using these more as convenience tools when they are not always needed? It's about becoming much more disciplined in thought and developing standard work around that. Q: How did your experience working for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security change your views on healthcare and public health? AG: Working on health issues for Homeland Security was not completely different than the healthcare system work I do now. We thought about a lot of the same issues at Homeland Security, just on different levels. At DHS, some of the biggest things we worked on were infectious disease agents. When I first became CMO for DHS, it was in the middle of the H1N1 pandemic. All the government's plans focused on addressing Avian influenza H5N1 coming from the far East, and then H1N1 showed up in California and Texas before we even knew it. That just shows you how much planning under the wrong assumptions can lead you astray. One of the things we always stressed at DHS was that we never wanted to be in a defensive or reactive position. It's all about prevention. If you take that mindset out of the Homeland Security world and apply it to healthcare, it's the same thing. We want to prevent safety issues and infections from happening to our patients. The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons launched the Registry Analytics Institute. Three things to know: 1. The analytics institute is a resource for orthopedic clinicians to submit proposals for analytical data within the American Joint Replacement Registry. 2. The Analytics Institute application process consists of a preliminary and full application review. 3. Clinicians and clinician-scientists with an orthopedics-related hypothesis are encouraged to apply for inclusion. Applicants whose projects are approved will work with the AAOS Analytics and Statistical team to develop an analysis plan and project timeline for their project. All data analysis will be completed by AAOS and reviewed by the project team. "Collecting clinically relevant data in a timely fashion and applying that data to improve outcomes for patients represents one of the most important goals of the AAOS Registry Analytics Institute. It is the arm of the Academy that will leverage Registry Data to help identify outcomes of surgical interventions," said Richard L. Illgen II, MD, an orthopedic surgeon specializing in adult hip and knee reconstructive surgery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and chair of the AAOS Research Projects Subcommittee. For more information or to submit a proposal, click here. North America and Europe are expected to see significant growth in the vertebroplasty needles market by 2026, according to a Future Market Insights report. Three things to know about the global vertebroplasty needles market: 1. The Asia-Pacific excluding Japan region is also expected to witness significant growth in the market due to an increasing incidence of spine-related disorders and growing geriatric population. 2. Latin America, the Middle East and Africa regions are expected to see slow growth in this market. 3. Key market players include Stryker, DePuy Synthes, Adroit Manufacturing, Moller Medical GmbH and Surtech Medical. Three spine surgeons discuss how the trend toward price transparency will affect spine. Isador Lieberman, MD. President of Texas Back Institute (Plano): Price transparency is the basis of competition and competition is good. Yes, it will have an impact; my concern is that the least expensive provider may not be the best provider. I recount the famous John Glenn quote: "as I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder." Price transparency must be accompanied by an assessment of quality and value. Alok Sharan, MD. Co-Director of Westmed spine Center (Yonkers, N.Y.): Increased price transparency will force providers to scrutinize their activities and ensure that they are truly delivering good quality care at a reasonable cost. Unfortunately, price transparency will lead to the commoditization of a lot of the services that a physician offers. Patients/consumers are very cost sensitive; providers should be aware of their costs as compared to relative benchmarks and should be able to justify their prices. While most patients do not want to shop for care I do think patients will want to understand why one provider charges more than another. As services become more commoditized, physicians should really rethink their strategy, and more importantly, understand how they can deliver a unique value proposition. If you can not differentiate yourself from the next provider, then you will have to compete on price, which is never a good strategy. Scott Boden, MD. Director of Emory Orthopaedics & Spine Center (Atlanta): In principle, this is a trend that has appeared in most other industries. Unfortunately purchasing healthcare services is far more complicated than online shopping, so achieving meaningful transparency is more difficult. The other problem with transparency is that there are not reliable measures of quality, appropriate operative indications, so I am a bit concerned if healthcare choices are solely driven by price. To participate in future Becker's Q&As, contact Laura Dyrda at ldyrda@beckershealthcare.com. For a deeper dive into the future of spine, attend the Becker's 17th Annual Future of Spine + Spine, Orthopedic & Pain Management-Driven ASC in Chicago, June 13-5, 2019. Click here to learn more and registe The boss of Northern Ireland outsourcing firm Mount Charles has denied Brexit has influenced plans to create up to 400 jobs in a new Dublin-based operations hub. The company which has seen its annual turnover increase by 20% to 40m is seeking to increase the number of staff in the Republic where 15% of its revenue is now generated. But chairman Trevor Annon said the firm's headquarters will remain in Belfast and insisted Brexit was not the reason for the new office. "We have known for quite some time that Dublin would be the next key area in our expansion strategy; the decision to create a base there wasn't motivated by Brexit, but rather the potential for growth that we see in that marketplace," he said. "We're now just over a year down the line from establishing a Dublin base." The company which aims to more than double its turnover to 100m by 2025 will open the new office within three months. Staff numbers will be between 10 and 15 initially but the number of employees is set to expand to between 300 to 400 within three years. The boss of the service provider business said he does not have to consider the same complexities as manufacturers who export. "No matter what happens, our clients will still require the same services that they require today post-Brexit," he added. Mount Charles was among a group of NI's biggest firms to sign a letter calling on the Government to avoid "significant job losses" by avoiding a no-deal Brexit. Other major signatories of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) letter include Bombardier, Coca-Cola and First Trust. It was issued ahead of Prime Minister Theresa May's attempt to push her Withdrawal Agreement through Parliament today. Mr Annon said the expansion forms part of its plans to concentrate on the RoI market where trade is expected to surpass current NI levels here and will be the "core focus of our development" over the next three years. The company's founder expressed concerns about a "mass exodus" of European workers leaving Northern Ireland and blamed Brexit uncertainty and a drop in the value of sterling against the Euro, he told the Sunday Business Post. But he expressed optimism over the prospect of a last-minute deal. The firm, which offers a range of services including catering, cleaning and security to 400 clients, has signed deals worth a combined 75m over the last year marking a decade of growth. They included new contracts with Belfast International Airport, Wrightbus and Lisburn & Castlereagh City Council, and several deals south of the border. More than 30 jobs have been lost at an engineering and consultancy firm after it went into administration. WDR & RT Taggart, which was established in 1902, announced last week that it was insolvent, pointing to trading difficulties for its problems. The south Belfast firm provided planning, engineering and consultancy services in Ireland and Britain. Dungannon-based administrators Gildernew & Co have now said that 33 staff have been made redundant. However, 10 other staff jobs were saved last week out of the workforce of 43 after a new company, WDR Taggart, was established by Andrew Baskin, a former partner at WDR & RT Taggart. It has taken over some of the older company's work, including its architectural, waste and energy services. WDR & RT Taggart blamed the decision to go into administration on a "protracted period of trading difficulties and challenging market conditions". Managing partner Stephen Heaney said last week the decision to appoint Gildernew & Co as administrators was made "with great sadness and deep regret". The architecture arm of WDR & RT Taggart has carried out inspection work for TK Maxx stores in the Republic, as well as working for Tesco, Dunnes and Next. The company had also been working on a new store for Next at the Quays Shopping Centre in Newry. Its waste and energy unit has been involved in developing an anaerobic digestion plant for the Foyle Food Group. A Belfast property firm has unveiled its plans for a new 14-storey apart-hotel in the centre of the city. Oaklands Holdings has submitted a planning application to Belfast City Council to demolish the Lyndon Court building at the junction of Queen Street and College Street and develop 184 self-catering apartments. The new high-rise, close to Belfast City Hall, would include a bar and restaurant, meeting rooms, event space and a basement gymnasium. The planning application, which was submitted within the last two weeks, was officially announced at an international property event in Cannes. MIPIM is a four-day global gathering for developers and property market stakeholders. One of the largest-ever delegations from Northern Ireland has travelled to France for the event. It includes around 100 delegatesfrom Belfast and the surrounding regions. Among those to make the journey was Gareth Graham, who heads Oakland Holdings. The company is in the processing of completing the 230,000 sq ft Merchant Square office development in Belfast city centre. He said that after receiving a positive response to a pre-application consultation, the company has embarked on a bid to build what he said will be Belfast's first apart-hotel. "We've thoroughly researched the apart-hotel concept and provision in other major cities and believe that the business community in particular will welcome this development," he said. "Our proposed apart-hotel is an ideal project for this site, complementing and enhancing the Queen Street area and providing appropriate leisure space, business space and bed space for the growing business and tourism sectors. "Increasingly, businesses are choosing to locate in Belfast city centre and we are facilitating that increased investment," he added. "This is the message we have brought to MIPIM this week as we continue to seek investment opportunities at home and elsewhere." A report submitted with the planning application described Lyndon Court as "a disused and empty office space with struggling lower retail units". Oakland Holdings put the building on the market during 2017 with a 2.5m asking price, but it was not sold. Meanwhile, another major local property firm has used MIPIM to promote its major new office development to the world. Killultagh Estates said The Mercantile, which is located next to the Bank of Ireland's headquarters on Donegall Square South in Belfast is expected to be ready by autumn 2020. Construction work on the 73,000 sq ft grade A office building started in January. The company said 10,000 sq ft of space on the lower floors will be available for potential restaurant and leisure space. Jackie Henry from Deloitte, who is chairing the private sector contingent of the Belfast MIPIM delegation, said that the international event was a chance to highlight the importance of private and public-sector collaboration in attracting investment and building sustainable economic growth here. "MIPIM is a prime example of how a strong partnership approach between the private and public sectors can provide the optimum environment for businesses to thrive," she said. "Given the ongoing challenges brought about by Brexit uncertainty, it's more important than ever that, together, we get out and market Belfast and the surrounding region internationally. "Investment in real estate not only delivers jobs and economic prosperity - it's essential to our ability to attract international businesses to our city, while supporting our indigenous businesses to grow and flourish." Theresa May has held out the prospect of a third meaningful vote on her EU Withdrawal Agreement within the next week after MPs dramatically voted to rule out a no-deal Brexit. The Prime Minister said that MPs will vote on Thursday on an extension to Article 50, which could involve a short delay to implement a deal agreed in the next few days or a longer delay if no agreement is reached. Read More The Government's motion will ask MPs to back an extension until June 30 to pass legislation if the Commons can back a withdrawal deal. If the Commons has not passed a deal by next Wednesday (March 20) it is "highly likely" that the European Council would require a "clear purpose" for any extension, the motion adds. It points out that any extension beyond June 30 "would require the UK to hold European Parliament elections" in May. Mrs May told MPs "the options before us are the same as they always have been". It comes after MPs supported an amended Government motion which rejects a no-deal Brexit at any time and under any circumstances by 321 votes to 278, with a majority 43. Northern Ireland's 11 sitting MPs , including all 10 DUP MPs and Independent MP Lady Hermon, voted against the amended motion. The motion is not legally binding. Earlier MPs had supported the cross-party Spelman amendment, which was moved by Yvette Cooper, by just four votes - with 312 MPs in favour and 308 against. MPs also voted against the Malthouse Compromise B amendment which sought to delay Brexit until May 22, by a majority of 210. Northern Ireland's 10 DUP MPs voted in favour of the amendment. If the House finds a way in the coming days to support a deal, it would allow the Government to seek a short limited technical extension to Article 50 to provide time to pass the necessary legislation and ratify the agreement we have reached with the EU. Theresa May Speaking after the main result was read out, the Prime Minister said: "The House has today provided a clear majority against leaving without a a deal, however I will repeat what I said before. "These are about the choices this House faces. The legal default in EU and UK law is that the UK will leave without a deal unless something else is agreed. The onus is now on every one of us in this House to find out what that is. "The options before us are the same as they always have been." Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn responded that Mrs May had repeatedly offered a choice between her deal and no deal, adding: "In the last 24 hours, Parliament has decisively rejected both." Mr Corbyn said: "Parliament must now take control of the situation. Myself, the shadow Brexit secretary and others will have meetings with members across the House to find a compromise solution that can command support in the House." Read More Earlier Chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier said the risk of no-deal "has never been higher". "That is the risk of an exit - even by accident - by the UK from the EU in a disorderly fashion." How events unfolded at Westminster: A 10-year-old boy with special educational needs (SEN) is going back to school after his mother won her fight to find a place for him. Micah McClure, who has autism, has been out of the classroom for six months after the Education Authority (EA) was unable to place him in a suitable school. His distraught mother, Ruth McClure, told BBC Radio Ulster's The Nolan Show that Micah began to experience serious problems at school in 2017 while he was in P6. She recalled: "Every year, he is getting progressively worse. His attendance and behaviour is now horrendous. He was just refusing to do any work at all and hitting out. I was getting constant phone calls from the school to come and pick him up. "There would have been a few playground scuffles, but he didn't care who it was - even members of staff. He was that worked up." Ms McClure said that the school in question, which has not been identified, had suspended her son on a number of occasions and also removed him from his normal class. "Obviously, his special education needs weren't being met and the school recognised that," she said. A meeting took place in January, 2018, when it was recommended that Micah be placed in a specialist school unit for children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). His mother subsequently visited a number of schools, but when Micah did not get an alternative place, he returned to his existing school last September to begin P7. He was soon suspended again and has not been back to school since while he waits for a special educational needs (SEN) place. Ms McClure said she was concerned about her son's future education. "It's truly heartbreaking. There is no way on this earth am I sending my son to a mainstream secondary school - not a chance," she added. In a statement to the Nolan Show, the EA said it was "committed to meeting the assessed needs of individual children and young people and continues to work in partnership with parents and schools to identify appropriate provision". Presenter Stephen Nolan later tweeted that within minutes of his radio show coming off air yesterday, the EA offered Micah two schools. He added: "Before today, they left him without an education for six months. This little 10-year-old boy is going back to school - because of a parent who fought the system. Today is a great day." The Children's Commissioner, Koulla Yiasouma, described the situation as "shameful" and says she is reviewing the education of SEN children. "I wish I could say this is unusual. A huge bulk of the work that my office does is helping parents make sure their child enjoys a right to education," Ms Yiasouma added. The ball is in Westminsters court to prevent a no-deal Brexit, the Irish Government has said. The UK crashing out of the EU would be a lost opportunity for all, Europe Minister Helen McEntee added. She maintained that Theresa Mays defeated Brexit deal is still the best option for an orderly separation. A no-deal Brexit is a lose-lose for Ireland, the island of Ireland, for the UK, and the EU as a whole.Helen McEntee She said: Voting to avoid it does not actually prevent a no-deal from happening so the ball is very much in the court of Westminster. We need to see proposals from the UK as to how they would avoid a no-deal. At the same time we ourselves have to continue to plan for that possible outcome. Preparatory legislation currently going through the Irish Parliament will soon be ready to be enacted. Ms McEntee added: The challenge is that we do not know what the full scale of the implications might be on business and that is why it is so important that we have a deal, that we have an orderly Brexit, and that people have the time to prepare and plan. We all want a solution here, a no-deal Brexit is a lose-lose for Ireland, the island of Ireland, for the UK, and the EU as a whole. Expand Close Helen McEntee warned against a no-deal Brexit (Michael McHugh/PA) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Helen McEntee warned against a no-deal Brexit (Michael McHugh/PA) She addressed a conference on the impact on businesses of Brexit on Wednesday morning. It was held near the Irish border in Co Louth in the Republic. Afterwards, she urged the Prime Minister, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and all parties to work together to try and find a way forward. Because otherwise, 16 days out, the only way that we are heading is towards a no-deal and that is not what anybody wants, she warned. She said tariffs could produce huge and devastating problems for agriculture. At the Carrickdale Hotel this morning for the #Brexit The Future for Border Business event, a joint initiative between Louth County Council & Newry and Mourne District Council. Business in the border region is vitally important for this island & must be protected @BrexitReadyIRL pic.twitter.com/3QRpaRfTEx Helen McEntee TD (@HMcEntee) March 13, 2019 While we have obligations to protect the single market and the customs union, the UK also would have obligations under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, so it would not be good for anybody. Tariffs are not good for anybody, they are not good for trade, they are not good for business and that does not just apply on this island, it applies on the UK, so we need to work together to prevent that from ever happening, of getting to that stage. We have a Withdrawal Agreement, while it has been rejected two times I do still believe that it is the best mechanism to avoid a no-deal and protect all of our interests and the concerns that we have outlined for over two years now. By Nikhat Fatima, TwoCircles.net The calls of an all-out war with Pakistan may have subsided, but the effects of warmongering are unlikely to subside anytime soon. For some unfortunate Muslims from Raichur district, the post-Pulwama anti-Muslim hatred has landed them in a lengthy legal battle. On February 16, Muslims of Talekhan village, Lingsagur Tehsil, Raichur District in Karnataka had gathered for the Jummah namaz in the afternoon when members of RSS barged in and beat up the worshippers and drove them away. Then, the miscreants set fire to the prayer mats, the green flags of the adjacent dargah, wall posters of Kaaba and other materials inside the mosque. Support TwoCircles They even beat up some of the villagers who tried to stop them and filed a complaint with the police alleging that they were celebrating the Pulwama bomb blast and raised Pro-Pakistan slogans. The police promptly took the complaint, charge sheeted the 6 men under section 143, 147, 120 (A), 124 (A), 504 and 149 of Indian Penal Code. The offences under these sections are unlawful assembly; punishment for unlawful assembly; rioting; criminal conspiracy; sedition; intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace. The police arrested Khaja sab, Basha Sab, Hussain sab, Rahim, sab, Budne sab and Hussain sab based on the complaint lodged by Mahantesh Bhajantri, the leader of the Hindu organisation, on Friday night and kept them in police custody before transferring them to the district headquarters at Raichur the next day. Talekhan is a small village with a population of about 1,500 people out of which about 300 are Muslims. The Pulwama attacks also led to news channels competing among each other over who could fan the fire of war. Even regional channels were not behind. Kannada news channel TV5 KannadaTV picked up the news and telecasted the information claiming that about 15 people were waving green flags and celebrating the Pulwama attacks. What they were missing, of course, was any evidence to support the news that they were celebrating against the attacks. So, cue in some shots of the village, background music and reporters with loud voiceovers over and over again. This, even when images and videos of a vandalised mosque, which was recorded by the perpetrators, was being circulated on social media. The Raichur Bar Association went a step further. The president of the Bar, who is of right winged ideology, called for a meeting of the lawyers and passed a resolution that no lawyer should help the accused traitors to file the bail application. As a result, no lawyer came forward to help them. Finally, INSAF, an organisation in Humnabad, Bidar District, Karnataka that works for the rights of religious minorities and other backward castes wrote to the Home Minister of Karnataka State, to the Inspector General and other authorities requesting for a fair enquiry. A fact-finding team from INSAF went up to the Tehsil and adjacent village but we were not allowed to enter the village by the police. We were told that the matter is sensitive and the police are doing its own fact-finding said Syed Farhan Ali, who is heading INSAF, to TwoCircles.net. He also informed that the families of the 6 arrested persons left the village out of fear. Razak Ustad, a social activist and a member of Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR), Raichur chapter informed TwoCircles.Net since the mosque stood on Wakf property, APCR requested the Wakf office in Raichur to file a complaint with the police about the damage to the Mosque property. There is a video clip circulating on social media as evidence. The Wakf board filed a complaint and even mentioned the names of the people responsible but the police in their FIR mentioned them as unknown persons. Their faces are visible in the video where they are damaging the mosque, which was shown to the police, yet they have made no arrest. Instead, they arrested the 6 men just on a verbal complaint with no evidence, said Razak to Twocircles.net We have hired a lawyer from Adoni district of Andhra Pradesh (77 km from Raichur) to file the bail petition for these six persons because no one from Raichur is ready to help even though they know that these men have been falsely accused. Not even the Muslim lawyers or Muslim leaders are coming out in their support. They feel if they support these men they too will be labelled as anti-national he lamented. Razak also narrated how the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) staged a roadblock in Maski, a village about 20 km from Talekhan village, in which they were demanding action against anti-India elements and were shouting anti-Pakistan slogans. But in their frenzy, they shouted Pakistan zindabad instead. And there were policemen present there who did not do anything. Granted they chanted Pakistan Zindabad in fervour, but had this mistake happened by Muslims would the police understand? Would they not arrest them immediately and charge them under treason? He asked. Razak also narrated another incident in which the ABVP youth had targeted a lecturer in an Engineering college in Bijapur District of Karnataka for praising Imran Khan, the Prime Minister of Pakistan in a post on social media. The ABVP youth who were his students at the same college humiliated their teacher and did not relent till the lecturer Sandeep Wathar got down on his knees and apologised. But no action has been taken against these ABVP fellows in this case either. It is difficult for Muslims to even voice their opinions. Even if they dont say anything, they are in trouble. Anyone can accuse you of having said something against India and get you arrested, Razak added. Advocate Niazi, from APCR Bangalore Chapter, said, The resolution of the Raichur Bar Association to not defend the 6 men slapped with sedition charge is unconstitutional. It is the duty of a lawyer to defend a client whatever his/her crime may be. It is also a breach of the ethics of a lawyer. We can challenge their resolution and also file a case against the Bar. In the meantime, activists of APCR and other organisations wrote to the minority commission to intervene and following their intervention, the families were brought back to their homes in Talekhan village and a warning was given to the locals not to harass them. The bail petition was filed on March 5 and was admitted. And it is now scheduled for 25th March for the Public prosecutor to file his objections, after which the principal district sessions judge will decide to grant the bail or not. Due to pressure from civil rights groups like APCR and INSAF, the police finally arrested 9 persons who were vandalising the mosque. Earlier, the police had tried to brush off by saying that these men were absconding as these persons have support from a BJP MLA. But members of Hindu Jagaran Vedika took out a protest in Lingsagur Tehsil demanding the release of the 9 arrested and submitted a petition to the Tehsildar on Monday 11th March. However, the damage for the Muslim residents has already been done. Even if the six are released on bail, they will have to keep fighting a legal battle to prove themselves innocent. For this, they will have to travel to 120 kilometres from their village to the District Court till the case goes on. A former paratroop commander has told the inquest into the deaths of 10 people in west Belfast in 1971 that his soldiers thought they "had done their duty and were well pleased" when he arrived at the scene shortly after the shootings. On his second day of evidence, families of those killed in the Ballymurphy massacre heard General Sir Geoffrey Howlett tell the courtroom his men were not "on a high" afterwards, although he admitted the men who had fired shots at civilians were "quite excited". But General Howlett (89), who was commanding B Company 2 Para based at Henry Taggart Hall on the Springfield Road on the day internment was introduced in August 1971, denied his troops were celebrating the deaths. The general said the situation he experienced at the time amounted to "almost warlike conditions". Expand Close Mourners file past the coffin of Father Hugh Mullan, one of the 10 people killed (PA Archive) PA Archive/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Mourners file past the coffin of Father Hugh Mullan, one of the 10 people killed (PA Archive) He was questioned as to whether that led him to be personally responsible for permitting or encouraging troops to beat up and shoot civilians with impunity. "No," he replied. "I hope that my soldiers would be obedient, do what they were told, and act toughly but reasonably." General Howlett repeated his evidence from the previous day that he believed the people shot outside the base were not in the IRA, but that some may have been "associated" by involving themselves in the riot "in sympathy with and helping" IRA gunmen. Expand Close The victims of the Ballymurphy Massacre (Ballymurphy Massacre Committee/PA) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The victims of the Ballymurphy Massacre (Ballymurphy Massacre Committee/PA) When quizzed over the death of Fr Hugh Mullan, he accepted that he was not a member of the IRA, as well as "the probability" that the priest was not associated with the IRA. "I do not believe he was shot on purpose," he said. But he refused to back down on previous evidence that Frank Quinn, shot while trying to help Fr Mullan, could still have been associated with the IRA. Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Riots : Belfast. January 1971. Soldiers frisking passengers and driver of a car on the Springfield Road, near Ballymurphy. (14/01/1971) Riots: Belfast. August 1970. Soldiers shelter behind their riot shields during rioting at Ballymurphy. (04/08/70) Riots : Belfast. August 1970. The common sight in the Roman Catholic estate at Ballymurphy, Belfast, as young rioters attack the army with missiles during the troubles. (04/08/70) Ballymurphy: troops stand by at the junction of Springfield and Whiterock Roads (20/09/1970) Riots : Belfast. January 1971. Catholic housing estate, Ballymurphy. (15/01/1971) Mourners file past the coffin of Father Hugh Mullan, one of the 10 people killed (PA Archive) PA Archive/PA Images Father Hugh Mullan. Shot at Moyard Park. 9/8/1971 THE FUNERAL HEARSE CARRYING THE BODY OF FATHER HUGH MULLAN TRAVELS ALONG THE ROAD IN BALLYMURPHY ESTATE. 12/8/1971 Joseph Murphy was one of 10 people shot dead by British soldiers in West Belfast in 1971 Pacemaker Press 17/6/10 John McKerr who is one of the 11 people died in the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971 in West Belfast Pacemaker Press 17/6/10 Fr Hugh Mullan who is one of the 11 people died in the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971 in West Belfast Pacemaker Press 17/6/10 Joseph Corr who is one of the 11 people died in the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971 in West Belfast Pacemaker Press 17/6/10 Danny Teggart who is one of the 11 people died in the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971 in West Belfast Pacemaker Press 17/6/10 Danny Teggart who is one of the 11 people died in the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971 in West Belfast Pacemaker Press 17/6/10 Danny Teggart who is one of the 11 people died in the Ballymurphy Massacre in 1971 in West Belfast Press Eye Ltd Northern Ireland - 25th January 2012 Mandatory Credit - Photo-Jonathan Porter/Presseye. Ballymurphy massacre relatives call for a meeting with the Prime Minister, David Cameron. 10 people were shot dead by soldiers in west Belfast in August 1971. The victims, which included a priest and a mother-of-eight, were killed over the course of three days in August 1971 by members of the Parachute Regiment during Operation Demetrius, when people suspected of paramilitary activity were interned. Relatives Rita Bonner, John Teggart and Briege Voyle pictured at the top of the Whiterock Road in west Belfast beside a mural depicting the shootings. / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Riots : Belfast. January 1971. Soldiers frisking passengers and driver of a car on the Springfield Road, near Ballymurphy. (14/01/1971) The coroner asked the general how he could come to that view. He replied that any armed group bringing "first aiders" with them could expect those people to be considered associated with them, though he added that did not mean they should be shot. The comments were later clarified, with General Howlett agreeing that someone caught in the crossfire or coming to the assistance of an innocent person would not have been associated with the IRA. He added that it would have been "a bad day's work if everyone his soldiers shot were the wrong people". After General Howlett's evidence concluded, Pat Quinn, brother of Frank Quinn, said his family had been left hurt and upset. "I couldn't believe it. It's lucky my sisters weren't there. It would have been too much for them," he said. "He didn't care about my brother. I think they were glad about what they'd done - thinking they'd done their duty well was a disgrace." His comments were echoed by John Teggart, whose father Danny was one of those killed. He said he believed "the soldiers had deemed anything that moved as an associate of the IRA". "I was glad the general gave his evidence, but I wasn't glad at the evidence he gave," Mr Teggart said. "I thought he'd be more apologetic, but after hearing the past two days any apology would have been empty." Later the inquest heard from the former major in charge of B Company 2 Para. Granted anonymity by the coroner, witness M45 described the first day of internment and how his men arrested 18 suspects early in the morning of August 9, 1971. He described the rioting at the Henry Taggart base throughout the rest of the day, with soldiers firing 38 rubber bullets and discharging 11 CS gas cannisters as the base came under attack from petrol bombs, nail bombs and gunfire. He said he had provided his own briefings to his men on when they would be allowed to fire their weapons, rather than relying on the 'yellow card' rules of engagement for soldiers. "You cannot deal with a riotous situation if you're looking all the time at a yellow card," he said. The inquest continues. A 40-year-old man who attacked his partner's father at a family wedding in Carrickfergus has been spared jail A 40-year-old man who attacked his partner's father at a family wedding in Carrickfergus has been spared jail. Paul William Clarke, a father-of-three from Silverstream Avenue in Belfast, admitted both assaulting the man and causing criminal damage to a police cell by urinating on the floor following his arrest. He appeared at Belfast Crown Court, where he was handed a 12-month sentence, which was suspended for two years by Judge Paul Ramsey. While there was some dispute about whether or not a gin glass was used in the attack, a defence barrister for Clarke said his client suffered from underlying mental health issues which led to "this explosion". Earlier, prosecuting barrister Mark Farrell revealed police received reports that a wedding guest had been injured with a glass or bottle on the evening of March 27 last year. As officers made their way to the hotel, they saw a man fitting the attacker's description walking along the Belfast Road. He appeared to be drunk and had a cut on his hand, and when he was arrested he was "abusive and violent" both on the way to custody and at the police station. When other officers arrived at the hotel, they noticed its glass front door had been smashed. Guests confirmed Clarke kicked the door as he left the premises following the attack. While the injured man told police he did not wish to make a statement, the best man told officers he had seen Clarke arguing with his partner's father, which escalated into violence when Clarke struck the older man with a gin glass. Mr Farrell said other wedding party guests intervened, that Clarke also pushed his partner before leaving the scene and that "thankfully no medical treatment" was required for the small cut sustained in the incident. Citing a case of "blood being thicker than water", Mr Farrell told Judge Ramsey that both Clarke's partner and her father were in court to support him, adding "clearly a lot of alcohol had been consumed that night". The prosecutor added that when arrested, Clarke was aggressive in transit, was initially uncooperative, and also urinated and smeared blood in the cell. He was interviewed the following afternoon, where he admitted causing damage and bad behaviour towards police. He also admitted there had been an incident with his "father-in-law". He said he couldn't remember much of it, but denied using a glass or bottle. Defence barrister Taylor Campbell said there was a dispute over whether or not a glass was used, but said his client accepted he attacked the other man. Mr Campbell also said Clarke has apologised for his "unreasonable behaviour". Revealing Clarke had difficulties with his mental health in the past, Mr Campbell said these undiagnosed issues led to an "explosion" at the wedding - and he is now being treated for anxiety and depression. Clarke was handed a suspended sentence, but was warned that any further offending in the next two years could lead to prison. The families of those killed on Bloody Sunday are hopeful they will not have to pass their fight for justice onto the next generation, a campaigner has said. John Kelly, whose brother Michael was gunned down aged just 17, said he and other relatives of those injured and shot dead are nervous and anxious on the eve of the decision as to whether the British soldiers involved will be prosecuted. On Thursday morning the families will gather outside The Museum of Free Derry, just yards from where the killings took place 47 years ago, and march together to a city centre hotel to hear whether charges will be brought. Its been a day that weve been waiting for, for many, many years and hopefully tomorrow we will see justice deliveredJohn Kelly Mr Kelly, 70, said: At the minute were nervous, anxious, trying to anticipate or even think about what the outcome is going to be. Its been a day that weve been waiting for, for many, many years and hopefully tomorrow we will see justice delivered. The museum, where many relatives of the dead work to bring the story of what happened at a civil rights march on January 30, 1972 to the world, was a hive of activity on Wednesday with more than 140 visitors. School groups and holidaymakers alike from countries including the United States and France toured the building in Glenfada Park, which sits in the shadow of a mural of Northern Irelands civil rights movement. Hege Aglen Elden, a teacher from Norway, said she found the tour very emotional, adding that it was good to be there at such a historic time. Expand Close Mickey McKinney looks at a photo on the wall of the Museum of Free Derry (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Mickey McKinney looks at a photo on the wall of the Museum of Free Derry (Liam McBurney/PA) Mr Kelly said he hopes the decades-long journey to justice can finally come to an end with a decision by the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) to charge those involved. He said: Its closure to the families, closure in every aspect of it because the thing that we dont want to do is see this being passed on to the next generation. I think after this length of time, the time is right now to bring it to an end and hopefully by the delivery by the PPS tomorrow we can look to a better future. I dont want to pass it on to my children, or my grandchildren and all the families feel exactly the same way. Hopefully, depending on what the PPS delivers tomorrow, we will be in a position where we can bring it to an end. Mickey McKinney, whose brother William was also killed aged 27, said while he is hopeful of a murder charge, even if that news does not come he will know he and the others have done their utmost for their loved ones. The 67-year-old said: If we didnt get good news, I can still live with the fact that weve ruffled them (the soldiers and the establishment) a bit. Willie was my brother and he never took part in a riot, he never threw a stone. How dare they take his life? They had no right to do that. They had no right to do what they did on Bloody SundayMickey McKinney If it (a prosecution) doesnt happen, well take legal advice to see if there can be a challenge. If theres no challenge, if our solicitors tell us we cant do anything here, I can live with me. Weve given this our all. Seventeen former members of support company of the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment are facing possible charges by the Public Prosecution Service on Thursday. All 13 of those killed were declared innocent in 2010 following a lengthy public inquiry conducted by Lord Saville, after a years-long campaign by the families to right the wrongs of false claims that their loved ones had been armed. Recalling his sibling, who was known as Willie, Mr McKinney said: Willie was my brother and he never took part in a riot, he never threw a stone. Of the soldiers, he said: How dare they take his life? They had no right to do that. They had no right to do what they did on Bloody Sunday. David Cameron, prime minister in 2010, issued a public apology to the families on behalf of the state for what happened. However, Alan Barry, from the Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans campaign group, said he feared the paratroopers would face charges, accusing the justice system in Northern Ireland of being one-sided. I think the whole thing is appalling, that these soldiers could be prosecuted, he said. This is a new line being drawn in the sand here. If they are prosecuted, what will be next? A decision is also due to be taken on Thursday by the PPS as to whether to charge two Official IRA suspects. The widow of a man used by the IRA as a human bomb has said a "military service" award posthumously bestowed on Martin McGuinness must be withdrawn. It comes after San Francisco Mayor London Breed apologised for the pain caused by the controversial accolade. Kathleen Gillespie, whose husband Patsy was forced to drive a car bomb to an Army checkpoint, said her words would mean little unless the award was rescinded. In 1990 she was held captive in her home by the IRA while her husband was strapped into a van packed with explosives and ordered to drive to the checkpoint at Coshquin on the Derry-Donegal border. Mr Gillespie and five soldiers died when the bomb went off. His widow said she was horrified to hear Mr McGuinness had been awarded a Certificate of Honour - equivalent to a freedom of the city award - for "courageous service in the military" and helping to secure peace. Mrs Gillespie said it was a blow to victims of IRA violence, recalling how Mr McGuinness described her husband as a legitimate target of war. She said: "I was enraged and horrified when I heard that Martin McGuinness was being honoured for military service. "It was an awful slap up the face to victims and so inappropriate, but I think it shows the mentality of Irish people living in America. "They have this romanticised view of what went on here which is completely wrong and far removed from the reality. "The problem is, they don't go the distance to find out what the reality is and then, when they do something like this, they don't realise the deep pain they are causing people. "There was nothing romantic about what the IRA did the night they told my husband to drive that bomb to Coshquin. "This award should never have occurred in the first place but it should be rescinded immediately." Mrs Gillespie said no thought had gone into the decision to recognise Mr McGuinness, adding: "Whoever thought the idea up didn't do any research about who it would affect, and while it is good that there has been an apology, words without actions don't count for anything. "No one will take away from the good things that Martin McGuinness did towards the end of his life but that doesn't detract from the horrendous things he did wrong, too. "It is hard for me to put into words how I feel now about Martin McGuinness because I had wanted to have a conversation with him about my husband and the way he died, but it never happened. He was the person who said Patsy was a legitimate target of war, but every time Martin McGuinness was to be somewhere I was, he cancelled, so I never got to have the conversation. "But this honour is an absolute insult and it must be withdrawn publicly." More than 2,200 people have signed an online petition asking the mayor to rescind the honour. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar speaking at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC during his visit to the US. Irish premier Leo Varadkar has said people who advocated for Brexit have been chasing unicorns for a very long time. The Taoiseach made the comments to media in the US on Wednesday while MPs at Westminster prepared to vote on whether they are prepared for the UK to leave the European Union without a deal. As part of his annual St Patricks Day visit, Mr Varadkar attended a lunch at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC. Expand Close Leo Varadkar arrives at the US Chamber of Commerce (Brian Lawless/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Leo Varadkar arrives at the US Chamber of Commerce (Brian Lawless/PA) As we head into the next few weeks it should be blatantly obvious that unicorns only exist in fairytales, he told media at the event. I would say to people who advocated Brexit is this really what they wanted? Protectionism, borders, tariffs, restrictions on trade. Is this really what Brexit was all about? And for those who voted against the Withdrawal Agreement on the basis that they feared that Northern Ireland would be treated differently as a result of the backstop, it must be evident to them now that its the UK Governments intention to treat Northern Ireland differently. Expand Close Leo Varadkar speaks to delegates (Brian Lawless/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Leo Varadkar speaks to delegates (Brian Lawless/PA) Addressing the UKs tariff proposals in the event of a no-deal Brexit, Mr Varadkar said Northern Ireland will become a back door to the European single market. I dont think the UKs proposals will be workable for very long. They propose to treat Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK, he said. Northern Ireland will become a back door to the European single market and I think that in a matter of months that will lead to the need for checks at Northern Irelands ports. So those that opposed the agreement may find that something very akin to the backstop is applied by the UK Government in a few weeks time. Expand Close (PA Graphics) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp (PA Graphics) Mr Varadkar also said that in the event of a no-deal Brexit the European customs code will apply to goods exported from the UK to the EU. That will obviously have a severe impact on the UK economy and the Northern Ireland economy in particular. Westminster can take the no deal off the table this evening, and if they do so then there is the potential to look at alternatives, for example the UK staying in the customs union. Mr Varadkar added that Ireland has been preparing for a no-deal Brexit scenario for a long time. Here in Washington DC and starting a busy week by meeting some friends from home: the Dublin and Belfast Chambers of Commerce pic.twitter.com/49gva5OFEl Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 13, 2019 We are well placed to deal with any shock that may arise from a no-deal (Brexit), he added. The fact that we have a budget surplus means that we can borrow if we have to to support our economy. The Taoiseach started his programme of engagements on Wednesday at the US Chamber of Commerce with Enterprise Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland. Irish businesses employ 100000 people in the US and Ireland is the ninth largest source of foreign direct investment here. Im meeting some of these Irish companies who are bringing jobs and investment here in Washington today with @Entirl pic.twitter.com/1TxYhZFhiY Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 13, 2019 He also attended a round table meeting with Enterprise Ireland chief executive Julie Sinnamon and senior Irish executives, some of whom will be announcing new investments in the US. There are more than 520 Irish companies operating at 954 locations across all 50 US states, employing more than 100,000 American workers. The US Bureau of Economic Analysis calculated the value of Irish direct investment in the US at 146.6 billion dollars (110 billion/129 billion euro) in 2017, ranking Ireland as the ninth largest source of foreign direct investment. The container ship Hyundai Dynasty (right) passes the container ship MOL Breeze as she makes her way into Southampton Docks (Andrew Matthews/PA) Business, unions and farmers have responded with dismay to Government plans for changes to tariffs on imported goods if the UK leaves the EU without a Brexit deal. The CBI said the new rates would hit the UK economy like a sledgehammer, while unions warned that zero tariffs on steel would destroy jobs. Large reductions in levies on food from outside the EU were worrying to UK producers and could lead to a greater reliance on food produced overseas, said the National Farmers Union. There was widespread anger that details of the proposed unilateral regime were released just 16 days before the scheduled date of Brexit on March 29, with some business groups complaining they had not been consulted. Under the Governments plans, tariffs will be slapped for the first time on a range of EU imports, including cars and food products like beef, chicken, lamb, pork, butter and Cheddar-like cheese. A 10.6% levy on finished vehicles could add 1,500 to the cost of a typical family hatchback. But car parts are zero-rated to avoid disruption to supply chains. Tariffs will be slashed or eliminated on a wide range of imports from outside the EU, potentially lowering prices on goods from countries like the US and China. Ministers said that overall the changes would represent a modest liberalisation of the UKs tariff regime, and would remain in place for up to 12 months after a no-deal Brexit. Some 87% of imports to the UK by value would be eligible for zero-tariff access up from 80% at present while many other goods will be subject to a lower rate than under EU rules. International Trade Secretary Liam Fox said: The temporary tariff would take a balanced approach to support the UK economy as a whole. It would maintain open trade on the majority of UK imports, to support consumers and business supply chains, but retain necessary tariff protection for particular sectors of the UK economy. But the EU said it would impose the same levies on UK goods as on imports from other countries with which it has no trade deal, making British producers less competitive on European markets. CBI director-general Carolyn Fairbairn told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: What we are hearing is the biggest change in terms of trade this country has faced since the mid-19th century being imposed on this country with no consultation with business, no time to prepare. This is no way to run a country. What we potentially are going to see is this imposition of new terms of trade at the same time as business is blocked out of its closest trading partner. This is a sledgehammer for our economy. Expand Close Carolyn Fairbairn (Victoria Jones/PA) PA Archive/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Carolyn Fairbairn (Victoria Jones/PA) The Federation of Small Businesses national chairman Mike Cherry accused ministers of leaving businesses in the lurch. The sudden reduction or elimination of import tariffs would mean UK producers being undercut in a heartbeat by artificially cheap foreign imports at a time when exporters will face new obstacles to selling into European markets, he said. TUC general secretary Frances OGrady said the Government was showing reckless disregard for peoples jobs, warning the new regime would deal a hammer blow to our manufacturing industries and the communities they support. The general secretary of steelworkers union Community, Roy Rickhuss, said zero tariffs on imports would be a fresh betrayal of British steelworkers, putting further pressure on their jobs at a difficult time for the industry. Expand Close (PA Graphics) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp (PA Graphics) In special arrangements for Northern Ireland, no tariffs will be payable on EU goods crossing the land border from the Republic unless they are exported on to the British mainland. But ministers said there would be no border checks down the Irish Sea, with customs officers using compliance and intelligence methods to spot abuses. The decision designed to avoid the need for checkpoints which might revive sectarian tensions was branded a smugglers charter by the chairman of the Commons International Trade Committee, Angus MacNeil. UK companies will now face competition from a flood of cheap imports that undercut them, putting thousands of jobs here at riskBarry Gardiner NFU president Minette Batters described the timing of the announcement a fortnight before the new rates may come into effect as appalling. The Governments approach would not necessarily lead to cheaper food, but would mean the UK loses control of animal welfare standards, she warned. Shadow international trade secretary Barry Gardiner said: UK companies will now face competition from a flood of cheap imports that undercut them, putting thousands of jobs here at risk. Mr MacNeil said the changes were likely to lead to significant increases in prices for UK shoppers and challenging conditions for business, while reducing UK leverage in future trade talks. The Government says the planned arrangements are only intended to last for up to 12 months in the first instance, said the SNP MP. But a year is plenty of time for irreversible damage to be done to individual businesses and even whole sectors. And the Governments complete lack of clarity about what happens after 12 months just adds to the already crippling uncertainty which British businesses face. Mourners have been told that a Co Antrim mother-of-three who lost her battle against cancer will live on in the hearts and minds of all who knew her. Addressing those who had gathered in Roselawn crematorium to celebrate the life of Ashlee Blair (30), Stuart Holden said the care assistant lived for her three children, Amelia (4), Peter (3) and Conor (2), and her partner Peter (30). "Everything in life revolved around those she adored," he said. "All of that love and even Ashlee's mannerisms and creativity lives on through her children." Mr Holden said that even Peter, who follows his dad's obsession with cars, has "a good dose of Ashlee in there" too. The couple, from Greenisland, met at college when they were 17 and were "absolutely thrilled" when their first child came along shortly after they moved in together. But their lives were turned upside down when Ashlee was diagnosed with stage four cancer in December, just months after being declared disease-free following a 2016 breast cancer diagnosis that resulted in a double mastectomy. A GoFundMe page was set up in a desperate effort to buy more time "to watch my babies grow" and Ashlee recorded herself reading bedtime stories in fear of the worst, which happened on March 5 when she passed away surrounded by her family. Expand Close Smile: Ashlee with Peter and Amelia / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Smile: Ashlee with Peter and Amelia Mr Holden praised the residents of the village and beyond for the outpouring of love and financial support, which has now exceeded the 10,000 target. "She couldn't thank all of you enough in return," he added. "All the amazing fundraising with 'Ashlee's Army' and simply by being there for her and for her family." Mourners were then told that they have the power to ensure that Ashlee's legacy lives on. "From this day onward, the responsibility lies with everyone here not to hesitate for a moment to talk about Ashlee," Mr Holden said. "To keep her name in the conversation and make sure she is never ever forgotten, that's something everyone can promise themselves to do." Loved ones, including Ashlee's children, wept as they said goodbye for the final time with "sorrow, respect, love and admiration" in what was described as "desperately sad" circumstances. "Ashlee's memory is committed safely into your hearts and the things that mattered to her into your minds," Mr Holden said. "We rejoice that Ashlee lived and with love we bid her farewell." A drug-driver who had her 10-year-old child in the back seat when she was "swerving from kerb to kerb" has avoided prison. Janice Marshall's three-month jail term was suspended for 18 months at Antrim Magistrates Court yesterday. Also banning the 35-year-old from driving for two years, District Judge Nigel Broderick said her driving was "extremely dangerous, aggravated by the medication you had taken". He told Marshall, a mother-of-seven from Drumtara in Ballymena: "It's highly fortuitous there was no significant accident or injury, because had there been such, you could've been standing in front of a judge and jury facing a lengthy custodial sentence." Marshall previously admitted five charges, all committed on September 26 last year, including dangerous driving, careless driving, driving while unfit, failing to stop and failing to report an accident. A prosecution lawyer said a driver rang police at around 11am when he spotted a Kia car "swerving over the road" along the Lisnevenagh Road at around 20mph in the 70mph zone. The Kia, driven by Marshall, was "swerving from kerb to kerb", and the other driver followed. Marshall's car swerved into a filter lane but swung back into the main road at the last minute. It went around a roundabout twice, sped off and almost pulled onto the M2 but "swerved to the outer lane at the last minute", the court heard. Then it veered into the oncoming lane, "causing incoming traffic to swerve". Eventually Marshall stopped and the witness stayed with her until police arrived and officers noted that she had a 10-year-old child in the back seat. The prosecutor said that when Marshall was being spoken to by police, "her eyes were rolling into the back of her head, she was struggling to understand basic questions and police had to raise their voices to stop her from falling asleep". A blood sample later revealed she had "very high levels of pregabalin and cannabis". The lawyer said police enquiries revealed that Marshall had been involved in a hit-and-run earlier that day when her car clipped a van's wing mirror. Marshall's defence solicitor said the single mum had "bought one tablet in addition to her own prescriptions" and had not intended to drive that day, but while having no recollection of it, accepted she had done and was "remorseful for her actions". Imposing the ban and suspended sentence, Judge Broderick also certified Marshall for a course, which could take a quarter off her disqualification. The DUP must step back from the brink of pushing Northern Ireland to a no-deal Brexit, Sinn Fein has warned. Party vice president Michelle ONeill said she believes a crash out is looking increasingly likely. That is catastrophic, that is huge and we have been walked to that position by the DUP, she said. Mrs ONeill indicated her party would support an extension of Article 50, but only if there is a clear purpose for doing so, such as facilitating a second referendum or a general election. .@moneillsf speaking to the media after meeting with businesses and farmers this morning There is nothing good to come from Brexit, Irish interests were never considered. The back-stop is the bottom line and it is time the DUP prioritised the needs of the people here. #Brexit pic.twitter.com/xijbvSXxdm Sinn Fein (@sinnfeinireland) March 13, 2019 Criticising her erstwhile partners in powersharing for opposing moves to take a no-deal off the table, Mrs ONeill accused the DUP of prioritising party interest over the people of the region. They need to move back from the brink, she said at Parliament Buildings, Stormont. They need to realise what they are doing to the livelihoods of the people here. To our economic prosperity, to our peace agreement. They are adding to the danger and the fear and the likelihood of a no-deal crash out. It is about time that they started to prioritise the livelihoods of people here over their own selfish party interests. Property on Fountain Terrace in Convoy, Co. Donegal where two pensioners are believed to have died. Liam McBurney/PA Wire Gardai have sealed off a house in the village of Convoy in Co Donegal after an elderly couple were found dead. The couple were found dead earlier today by neighbours who alerted Gardai. The coroner for Donegal, Dr Denis McCauley is on his way to the scene to carry out a further examination of the bodies. Gardai have sealed off the area and a full Garda forensic examination is expected to also take place. The married couple were very well-known in the area. A Garda spokesman said: "This is very fresh and we simply cannot say at this stage how they died. "A full examination of the scene will be carried out to determine what direction our investigation will take." The son of a murdered east Belfast woman said he has "no words for what has happened to my mother" after her body was discovered on Sunday night. Stuart Morrow (30) spoke to the Belfast Telegraph after his 53-year-old mother Alice Morrow, a mother-of-three and grandmother-of-three, was found dead in her home at Whincroft Way in the Braniel estate. Yesterday a court gave detectives an additional 36 hours to question a 42-year-old man who was arrested on suspicion of her murder the day after the body was found. Last night Detective Chief Inspector Pete Montgomery told the Belfast Telegraph: "While the investigation into the death of Alice Morrow remains at an early stage, a domestic motivation is a significant line of enquiry. "A 42-year-old male has been arrested on suspicion of murder and remains in custody." In a social media post by Willowfield Private Funeral Home, Ms Morrow's family asked that donations in lieu of flowers be made to Women's Aid. It said: "Dearly beloved daughter of Roy and Maggie, much-loved mother of Glen, Kelly-Anne and Stuart and loving grandmother of Tegan, Ben and Jessica. "When the road I walk seems all uphill and the colours in my rainbow turn blue, you kiss the tears away, you smile at me and say, Funny Face, I love you, Funny Face, I need you." Funeral arrangements are yet to be confirmed. Ms Morrow was the third female to be found murdered in their home here in the space of four days. On March 7 the bodies of Giselle Marimon-Herrera (37) and her daughter Allison (15) were found in their flat at Glin Ree Court in Newry. Police believe that Russell Steele (38), who was also found dead in the flat, hanged himself after strangling his partner of nine months and her daughter. SDLP justice spokeswoman Dolores Kelly MLA described the three murders as an "outrage beyond comprehension". She said: "We all have a duty to ensure that we do not become desensitised to these horrific murders, where women are being killed in what should always be a safe space, their own home. "As a society we must speak up and speak out against all types of violence, but in particular domestic violence, which can too easily be hidden and swept under a rug. "It is almost impossible to put into words the grave injustice facing victims of domestic violence, that in the continued political stalemate we have no vehicle to drive forward new legislation that better protects victims." Police are asking anyone with information to contact detectives on 101 quoting reference 1345 10/03/19, or to call Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111. Northern Ireland MP Sylvia Hermon has challenged former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson over his knowledge of the Northern Ireland border situation. The Independent Unionist quizzed Mr Johnson during a debate in the House of Commons on Tuesday, ahead of the rejection of Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit withdrawal deal. Read More Mrs Hermon challenged Mr Johnson on his claim that the country was "going to take back control of its borders". "Has he ever visited south Armagh? Has he ever visited Crossmaglen?" the North Down MP asked. "How does the right honourable gentleman, with the greatest respect, think he is going to take back control of the border without the backstop arrangement?" The controversial Irish border backstop plan aims to prevent a hard border in Ireland and has effectively deadlocked Brexit negotiations with the DUP and hardline Brexiteers rejecting it if it doesn't have a time limit or a unilateral exit mechanism. The Irish Government and EU are adamant that there can be no withdrawal deal without the backstop. Crossmaglen is a village in south Armagh, close to the Irish border. It was the site of many killings of police officers and soldiers during the Troubles. Mr Johnson said that he had "certainly visited the places" mentioned by Mrs Hermon. The former Mayor of London said he visited "in times of the Troubles". "I can tell you that nobody wants those types of border controls to come back, least of all the government of Dublin, or of London, or, indeed, in Brussels," he said. "By the way, nobody thinks it is necessary." The Belfast Telegraph has attempted to contact the office of Boris Johnson for comment. A girl with learning difficulties allegedly had sex with two men at a house in Armagh so she would be allowed to leave, the High Court has heard. The 15-year-old also told police who found her near a bus station last week that she knew neither of them by name. Details emerged as one of the two accused, Romanian national Razvan Stefanica, 19, was granted bail. Stefanica, a poultry worker of Lisanally Lane in Armagh, denies charges of false imprisonment and raping the girl on three separate dates. During interviews he admitted having sex with her but said he thought she was an adult. Prosecutors said police were alerted on March 7 after friends of the girl informed her mother that she was at an address with foreign nationals. When located she claimed to have spent up to an hour having sex with two males at Stefanica's home. A Crown lawyer said: "The injured party stated in her account that she had sex in order to be allowed to leave the property. "She also stated that the asked her age on arrival and she informed them she was only 15." The court heard she described repeatedly saying "no" to both men, and at no stage gave them consent. Following his arrest Stefanica denied the girl was made to stay at the house. He admitted having sex with her on three occasions but claimed to believe she was older, a judge was told. But opposing bail, the prosecutor alleged that he also asked the girl if her parents would be concerned about her. She was described as having a learning difficulty with a mental age of younger than 15. Defence barrister Barry McKenna stressed the issue of consent will be critical in the case. Mr McKenna told the court the girl had come to his client's home, and disputed claims she was being held there by Stefanica. "His response after caution was 'I did nothing wrong'," counsel said. "He did not deny sexual contact had taken place and, remarkably, self-disclosed previous sexual activity." Granting bail to an address to be approved by police, Judge Brian Sherrard ordered Stefanica to have no contact with the alleged victim or anyone else under 16. He also banned the accused from leaving Northern Ireland. A 42-year-old man has been charged with the murder of east Belfast woman Alice Morrow. Ms Morrow, a 53-year-old mother-of-three and grandmother-of-three, was found dead in her flat at Whincroft Way in the Braniel estate on Sunday. On Tuesday, a court gave detectives an additional 36 hours to question a 42-year-old man who was arrested on suspicion of her murder the day after the body was found. Detectives investigating the murder of Alice Morrow in East Belfast have charged a 42-year-old man with her murder. He is due to appear at Belfast Magistrates Court on Thursday 14th March. Police Service NI (@PoliceServiceNI) March 13, 2019 He has now been charged with Ms Morrow's murder and will appear before Belfast Magistrates Court on Thursday. Police are appealing for information after two men armed with a knife staged an attempted robbery at a shop in north Belfast on Wednesday morning. It was reported that sometime around 6.45am this morning two men, one armed with a knife, entered the shop and threatened staff. The men made off on foot empty handed. None of the staff members were physically hurt but were left were shaken by what had happened. One of the men is described as being between 58 and 510 tall and of large build. He was wearing a burgundy, white and grey coloured Adidas top with white stripes down the sleeves, grey track bottoms and black and grey Nike Air Max trainers. The second man is described as being between 56 and 58 tall and of slim build. He was wearing a dark grey coloured Trespass jacket with the hood, balaclava, grey track bottoms and light and grey Nike Air Max trainers. Detective Sergeant McCallum is appealing for anyone who was in the area of Antrim Road close to Allworthy Avenue around the time of the incident who seen these two men or anyone acting suspiciously or anyone who witnessed the men as they fled from the scene to get in touch with detectives in Musgrave on 101 quoting reference 165 13/03/19. 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. A man allegedly dragged his girlfriend from a bath by the hair and then tried to choke her, the High Court has heard. The woman was said to have fled naked to a neighbour's house following the suspected attack in Co Londonderry. Stanley Forsythe, 48, of River View in Moneymore, faces charges of common assault, attempted choking with intent, and threats to kill over the incident in the early hours of March 6. During a bail application on Wednesday prosecutors said police went to his home after receiving a 999 emergency call. "The injured party made a verbal allegation that (Forsythe) dragged her from the bath by her hair," a Crown lawyer said. "She also alleged that he put his hands around her neck while saying he was going to kill her." According to police the woman had injuries including discolouring to her eyes and nose, red marks around her neck and bruises and scrapes to her elbow. "The injured party said such was her distress that she fled naked to a nearby neighbour." Forsythe allegedly replied "okay" after being arrested and charged. It was confirmed, however, that the woman has not made any formal statement of complaint. Defence counsel argued that the prosecution face difficulties in obtaining evidence to sustain any case against his client. Forsythe was granted bail on terms including a ban on contacting the alleged victim or any witnesses. Judge Brian Sherrard also imposed an alcohol prohibition as part of the release conditions. Northern Ireland's politicians, business and farming leaders have warned against crashing out of the EU without a deal after the latest defeat of Theresa May's withdrawal agreement. The DUP, which props up Mrs May's minority Government, voted against her deal, and has urged MPs voting today to keep the threat of no-deal on the table. Sinn Fein accused the party of being "hell-bent" on pursuing a Brexit strategy that is "driving us all towards a no-deal catastrophe". The local business community last night expressed frustration at the lack of certainty and clarity over future trading. Ann McGregor, chief executive of the NI Chamber, warned against a no-deal scenario and "the messy and disorderly exit that it will bring". "Neither Government nor many businesses are ready for a no-deal exit, and it must not be allowed to happen by default," she said. "Despite two-and-a-half years passing since the referendum, there is no clear plan to support those businesses at the sharp end of such an abrupt change." Aodhan Connolly, director of the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium, urged politicians of all shades to "put people before politics and economics before ideology to find an agreement that can pass a vote". "We have no indication of customs, tariffs, documentation or checks that will be in effect on day one and we are no clearer as to the status of the border," he said. "There are no winners in a no-deal Brexit that systematically disintegrates the supply chains of these islands." Retail NI chief executive Glyn Roberts called for an extension to Article 50 to allow time for meaningful talks between the Government and Opposition parties. "Crashing out of the EU without a deal would be disastrous for our retail sector, causing delays in the supply chain, food shortages and potential higher prices for consumers," he said. "Every element of the Northern Ireland business community, trade unions and voluntary sector is speaking with one very clear voice on Brexit - we need a deal." Roger Pollen, Federation of Small Businesses NI head of external affairs, said last night's result further heightened uncertainty and reinforced the need for a Stormont input into the Brexit process. "For small businesses, they just want to know what economic environment they will face after March 29. A cliff-edge Brexit is in no-one's interest," he said. Meanwhile, the UK's four main farming unions said the outcome of the vote means there is no realistic possibility of achieving an orderly departure from the EU on March 29. UFU president Ivor Ferguson - along with leaders of the National Farmers' Unions in England, Scotland and Wales - repeated a warning that a no-deal exit from the EU would be a catastrophe for UK farming and food production. "This continued uncertainty is having real world consequences on farming businesses and wider British industry already," they said. "It is time for MPs to consider the concessions they will need to accommodate to support a deal that finally brings to an end the enormous and damaging uncertainty that is already undermining our food and farming sectors." Ulster Unionist MEP Jim Nicholson called on the EU and UK "to use their best efforts to work towards a workable deal in order to avoid a no-deal Brexit", adding: "Calm heads are needed now and a short technical extension should be seriously considered." Alliance leader Naomi Long called for a second referendum as a matter of urgency, saying Parliament was now "hopelessly divided and in a shambles" over Brexit. "The House of Commons is good at saying what it is against, but can't manage to give a clear answer on what it is for," she added. SDLP leader Colum Eastwood said that Westminster will have to accept the backstop at some point, or else support no Brexit at all. "Until MPs accept this reality, Article 50 should be extended to avoid us crashing out of the EU without a deal," he added. Northern Ireland could become a Wild West-style smugglers paradise under the Governments no-deal Brexit plans, hauliers have warned. Seamus Leheny of the Freight Transport Association held confidential talks with civil servants ahead of Wednesdays official announcement. Irish goods entering the Northern Ireland market will not face tariffs if the UK leaves without an agreement. Irish products entering the rest of the UK would face high tariffs on a range of food products. In essence we are looking at an honesty box on the borderSeamus Leheny Mr Leheny said: Northern Ireland could become a smuggling channel to avoid tariffs. In essence we are looking at an honesty box on the border. The Northern Ireland policy manager at the FTA addressed a conference for businesses held near the Irish border in Co Louth. He recognised that UK officials were adamant they had no appetite for regulatory controls on the border. But he concluded: You create this place almost like the Wild West, you become that neighbour from hell, both for the EU and Great Britain. The No Deal plan for NI is shambolic & as I've said before, in a No Deal scenario NI will be biggest loser * no tariffs on ROI/EU goods entering NI across border * tariffs applicable on goods entering GB via Dover, Holyhead etc * NI therefore treated differently #Brexit Seamus Leheny (@Freight_NI) March 13, 2019 Mr Leheny added: It is an avenue to get goods into Great Britain avoiding checks or tariffs. Transport companies strongly oppose any extra red tape which could delay the free flow of goods across the currently invisible Irish border. Mr Leheny expressed alarm about the Governments proposed way of ensuring that continues after any hard Brexit. He said: It is something that would be severely detrimental to Northern Ireland, that would disadvantage us, both with businesses in the Republic of Ireland but also more severely with businesses in Great Britain as well. There would be no tariffs, no regulatory controls on goods entering Northern Ireland. So for a company based in Northern Ireland, they will face competition from goods coming into Northern Ireland that are not paying any tariffs. For similar company based in England or Scotland, imports coming in from the Republic of Ireland or the EU would be subject to tariffs. That means they would not face the same competition as their counterparts from Northern Ireland, Mr Leheny added. So it gives them that competitive advantage. Also it is a system that could be open for abuse as well. A company owner based in the EU who wanted to avoid tariffs could ship goods into Northern Ireland and sell them there, avoiding UK tariffs. Mr Leheny added it would be a system open to abuse. Most companies would like to abide by rules and good business practice with that, but if you are an agri-food business based, for example, in the Republic of Ireland or the Netherlands, and you are facing tariffs of up to 50%, you are going to face those tariffs as soon as your goods arrive into Dover or Holyhead or Felixstowe. But they will be looking at this situation with Northern Ireland and will say, hold on a minute, we can get our goods into Northern Ireland, maybe sell them to an intermediary, an agent based in Northern Ireland tariff-free, and from Northern Ireland those goods can be dispersed anywhere within the UK avoiding any tariffs. At a press briefing on March 8, Georgian Prime Minister Mamuka Bakhtadze called the Anaklia Deep Sea Port a strategically important project for the country and part of his strategy for turning Georgia into a regional transport and logistics hub. As Ports Europe reports, commenting about information that the authorities are not willing to implement the Anaklia Port Project, he said that this was political speculation and irresponsible. He added that Anaklia is a priority project and it is key that the EU has included the Anaklia Port on the list of priority projects under the EU Trans-European Transport Networks (TEN-T) project. At the end of last month, the Georgian Chief Prosecutors Office released new details regarding the high profile money laundering case involving Georgian TBC Bank founders Mamuka Khazaradze and Badri Japaridze. Georgian Infrastructure Minister Maia Tskitishvili said that there is no connection between the Anaklia deep sea port project and the ongoing money laundering investigation involving the founders of TBC Bank. She added that Anaklia Development Consortium (ADC), which won the state tender to construct the port and signed a deal with the government in 2016 with TBC Holding as its principal partner, had faced problems in attracting funds for the $2.5 billion project before the investigation was launched. ADC is a consortium which consists of TBC Holding from Georgia, Conti International (USA), SSA Marine (USA), British Wondernet Express working in Central Asia, and G-Star Ltd. from Bulgaria (the company has Georgian ownership). There have been some suggestions that there criticism of the project is due to unnamed parties supporting Russias objection to the project. Georgia has been increasing its efforts to be part of international transport corridors, as it sees considerable economic benefit in having transport facilities, both ports and rail hubs, having roles in the new Silk Road. The new Silk Road (part of the Belt and Road initiative also known as One Belt, One Road, or OBOR) is a Chinese economic strategy to seek better access for Chinese-made products in European markets, which includes acquiring stakes in ports and other transport facilities, and cooperation agreements with countries along the Silk Road routes. Last week, Georgia, together with Romania, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, signed a declaration for the promotion of a multimodal corridor for the transport of goods between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea (Caspian Sea Black Sea International Transport Corridor project ITC-CSBS). The project was launched by Romania and Turkmenistan to create an intermodal transport route for maritime, river, road and rail freight transport between central and northern Europe and the southern Caucasus and central Asia, with the prospect of connecting to the Asia-Pacific region. Both countries have modern multimodal ports which, by and large, stand idle. The corridor is based on the geographic contiguity between Romania, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan and the services offered by the ports of Constanta (Romania), Poti (Georgia), Baku (Azerbaijan) and Turkmenbashi (Turkmenistan). The new transport route is being created on the basis of the Trans-Caspian (Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey) and Lazurite/Lapis Lazuli (Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan) corridors. The CBI has warned about the impact on trade of a no-deal Brexit (Andrew Matthews/PA) A new tariff regime on EU products in the case of a no-deal Brexit will act as a sledgehammer to the UK economy, business has warned. The new levies, to be imposed from the day after a March 29 Brexit if MPs vote for a no-deal withdrawal, would force up prices on EU imports including cars and many food products. The unilateral and temporary regime includes levies of 10.6% on European cars and trucks which had previously been free of tariffs, potentially increasing the cost of a typical family hatchback by around 1,500. Car parts would face no extra tariffs to avoid disruption to supply chains. And it introduces tariffs on EU goods like beef, chicken, lamb, pork and Cheddar-style cheese if MPs vote to leave without a deal. But tariffs will be slashed on imports from outside the EU, potentially lowering prices on goods from countries like the USA and China, in a move which unions warned would destroy jobs in manufacturing sectors like steel. Meanwhile, the European Commission confirmed that after a no-deal Brexit, the EU will impose tariffs on UK imports equivalent to those on other non-EU countries with no trade agreement, in a move which would result in higher prices for many British exports in European markets. TUC general secretary Frances OGrady accused the Government of showing reckless disregard for peoples jobs, warning the proposed tariff regime would be a hammer blow to our manufacturing industries and the communities they support. The general secretary of steelworkers union Community, Roy Rickhuss, said: The Governments plan for zero tariffs would be a fresh betrayal of British steelworkers, putting further pressure on their jobs at a difficult time for the industry. In special arrangements for Northern Ireland, the UKs temporary import tariffs will not apply to EU goods crossing the border from the Republic. The decision designed to avoid the need for checkpoints which might revive sectarian tensions has raised fears of smuggling, as ministers insist there will not be a border down the Irish Sea. Ministers said that, overall, the changes would represent a modest liberalisation of the UKs tariff regime. They said that 87% of all imports to the UK by value would be eligible for zero-tariff access up from 80% at present while many other goods will be subject to a lower rate than currently applied under EU rules. But CBI director-general Carolyn Fairbairn told BBC Radio 4s Today: What we are hearing is the biggest change in terms of trade this country has faced since the mid-19th century being imposed on this country with no consultation with business, no time to prepare. This is no way to run a country. What we potentially are going to see is this imposition of new terms of trade at the same time as business is blocked out of its closest trading partner. This is a sledgehammer for our economy. National Farmers Union president Minette Batters said it was appalling that farmers had learnt the tariffs on imported food products just 16 days before a potential no-deal Brexit. The Governments approach would not necessarily lead to cheaper food, but would mean the UK loses control of animal welfare standards, warned Ms Batters. Large reductions in tariffs on non-EU food imports are worrying to UK producers and are likely to mean a greater reliance on food produced overseas, she said. Expand Close CBI director-general Carolyn Fairbairn warned new tariffs would act as a sledgehammer on the UK economy (Victoria Jones/PA) PA Archive/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp CBI director-general Carolyn Fairbairn warned new tariffs would act as a sledgehammer on the UK economy (Victoria Jones/PA) Labours shadow international trade secretary Barry Gardiner said: UK companies will now face competition from a flood of cheap imports that undercut them, putting thousands of jobs here at risk. The fact that Government has exempted cross border trade with Ireland only opens up a backdoor route for smuggling and risks creating the very divergence of customs regimes between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK that Parliament has been so determined to avoid. Among imports from EU and non-EU sources which will be subject to tariffs will be: Beef, lamb, pork and poultry and some dairy products, in order to protect UK farmers and producers from cheap imports; A number of tariffs on finished vehicles to support the automotive sector, which will not apply to car parts imported from the EU to prevent disruption to supply chains; Products including certain ceramics, fertiliser and fuel, where tariffs protect UK producers against unfair practices like dumping and state subsidies; Goods including bananas, raw cane sugar and certain kinds of fish, where tariffs are used to permit preferential access to the UK market for developing countries. Our priority is securing a deal with the EU as this will avoid disruption to our global trading relationships. However we must prepare for all eventualitiesTrade Policy Minister George Hollingbery If the UK leaves the EU without a deal on March 29, the temporary schedules will apply for up to 12 months while a full consultation and review of a permanent approach is undertaken. Proposed tariff rates on a range of food products were announced as a proportion of the so-called most favoured nation (MFN) currently imposed by the EU on imports from countries which do not have a free trade agreement. Rates include beef (53% of MFN), poultry meat (60%), sheep meat (100%), pig meat (13%), butter (32%), Cheddar-like cheese (13%), protected fish and seafood products (100%) and milled and semi-milled products (83%). Tariffs on finished cars and trucks will be set at 10.6%, down from the EU MFN rate of 11.3%, while for finished buses the rate will remain unchanged at 12.6%. Other rates include 0.2% on mineral products, 0.1% on chemical products, 2.1 on fertilisers, 0.1% on plastics and rubber, 0.2% on leather and hides, 0.9% on textiles and textile products, 0.3% on stone and cement, 1.2% on ceramics, 0.2% on glass and 2.9% on transport equipment. Trade Policy Minister George Hollingbery said: This balanced approach will help to support British jobs and avoid potential price spikes that would hit the poorest households the hardest. It represents a modest liberalisation of tariffs and we will be monitoring the economy closely as well as consulting with businesses to decide what our tariffs should be after this transitional period. A fifth of people diagnosed with cancer die within six months of finding out they have the disease. (stock photo) A fifth of people diagnosed with cancer die within six months of finding out they have the disease. Figures from the Northern Ireland Cancer Registry (NICR) also revealed stark disparities in the rates and kinds of cancers people develop depending on their social status. According to the statistics, the number of cancer cases in Northern Ireland increased by 15% over a decade. The rise in the number of people diagnosed with cancer, from 8,269 cases in 2008 to 9,521 cases in 2017, has been largely attributed to the ageing population. The research offers a detailed insight into the prevalence of cancers between 1993 and 2017 and has highlighted the success of cancer screening programmes. Rates in bowel cancer decreased between 2012 and 2017 by 4.8% each year among men and by 0.3% each year between 1993 and 2017 among women. Meanwhile, the number of women diagnosed with cervical cancer dropped by 22%. Dr Lesley Anderson, NICR deputy director, said she expects the rates of cervical cancer to drop further as the effects of the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine are felt. All girls can get the HPV vaccine free from the health service from the age of 12 up to their 18th birthday. It helps to protect them against cervical cancer, which is the most common cancer in women under 35 in the UK. However, the figures have also highlighted that further work is required to encourage people to make lifestyle changes that can reduce their risk of cancer. Lung cancer is one of the most common types of cancer in both men and women, while there was a 66% increase in the number of women diagnosed with liver cancer between 2008 and 2017. Dr Anderson said this reinforces the importance of smoking cessation services, as well as encouraging people to drink less alcohol as it increases the risk of developing liver cancer. She also said the fact that 20% of people who die within six months of diagnosis demonstrates that education and screening programmes are essential in saving lives. "There are still people who present quite late and the difference between someone having stage one cancer and stage three or four is significant," she said. "Being diagnosed at an earlier stage means that the treatment is generally not as severe and the outcomes are better, which is of course better for the patient and better for the health service. "It is important that people attend screening programmes where they are available and that education and awareness programmes are rolled out to help people make lifestyle choices that reduce their risk of developing cancer, and also to recognise signs of cancer and get themselves checked out as soon as possible." The statistics also highlighted the fact that social status plays a part in cancer risk. Overall, cancer incidence was 10% higher in the most deprived areas compared to the Northern Ireland average and 4% lower than average in the least deprived areas. It also plays a part in the kind of cancer they are at risk of developing, with exposure to sun, obesity, smoking and drinking all playing a part in increasing the chance of falling ill. According to the figures, people who live in areas of less deprivation are more likely to be diagnosed with skin and breast cancer. Dr Anderson said she believes this is because they are more likely to experience sun exposure and access breast cancer screening services. People living in areas of high deprivation are more at risk of developing lung cancer, which corresponds with the higher rates of smoking. The Public Health Agency (PHA) said the exact reason why cancer develops in a person is often unknown. However, it said that up to 40% of cancers are preventable. The PSNI has budgeted 100,000 for policing this year's St Patrick's celebrations in Belfast, a senior officer has said. Superintendent Muir Clark revealed the figure yesterday as he said he is not anticipating widespread disorder in the Holyland area this weekend. Mr Clark said that the figure covers the area, which has become infamous for students engaging in anti-social behaviour every March 17, as well as scheduled events and the six-day build-up to St Patrick's Day itself. On Sunday events will include a 10k fun run, the carnival parade in the city centre and a band parade, as well as a music event in the former Belfast Telegraph building in Royal Avenue. Supt Clark said: "This is a significant operation for us. This is something which begins on the Monday (March 11) and runs until the Sunday." The senior officer said that the budget allocated to police this year's celebrations is "substantially less" than in 2018. He also moved to allay concerns of beleaguered south Belfast residents, who recently criticised the PSNI for not doing enough to prevent disruption caused by students, by saying additional policing resources will be provided this weekend. "We will work in partnership with the residents, with the universities, with the students' union, in order to bring this type of anti-social behaviour to an absolute minimum," he said. "We absolutely will not ignore poor behaviour." Read More Supt Clark said this week's operation, which the PSNI is carrying out with the assistance of Queen's University and Ulster University and voluntary groups, is to give residents confidence that officers will take action against such behaviour. He added: "Where behaviour falls below the standards of what the public expects, then we will take robust action." He said that 17 arrests were made during last year's St Patrick's Day policing operation, which compares to between 10 and 15 arrests on a typical weekend night in Belfast. St Patrick's Day last year was hailed in the Holyland as one of its quietest in recent years. However, Mr Clark admitted that a longer term solution is required. "There is a new batch of students each year and a change of culture is needed," he added. In 2017 a number of off-licences in the student area agreed with the PSNI to voluntarily close for several hours on St Patrick's Day. Mr Clark said yesterday that it had not been necessary to repeat such an action last year, but it remained an option for him to use this weekend if it was deemed appropriate. He added: "My message to young people is to be safe, look after yourselves and to enjoy yourselves in a way that is respectful to yourself, to residents and to the area you are in." When JC was rescued in January in Donegal A loggerhead sea turtle found washed up on a Co Donegal beach in January is to go on display at the Exploris Aquarium. The turtle, named JC by the Johnstone family who took it to their home, arrived at Exploris two months ago. Since then it has been receiving round-the-clock care and is continuing to improve every day. When it is fully recovered it will be released back into its natural environment. Peter Williams, curator at Exploris in Portaferry, has being working closely with JC since its arrival. He said: "On January 14 the loggerhead turtle arrived at Exploris Aquarium in a critical condition from a beach near Rosbeg, Co Donegal. "Since then we have been working tirelessly to slowly raise the turtle's temperature by a couple of degrees every day. "We also decided, under the watchful eye of our veterinary team, to administer a course of antibiotics as an increase in temperature heightened the risk of a secondary infection setting in." JC is making slow but great progress and has been moved to a larger space where it will have more room. The public will be able to get a glimpse of the species - which is classified as vulnerable - this weekend. Ireland's two main retail bodies have welcome the latest Commons Brexit vote (Victoria Jones/PA) The two main retail bodies in Northern Ireland and the Republic have welcome the rejection of a no-deal Brexit in the Commons On Wednesday night, a majority of MPs voted in favour of an amended motion ruling out the UK leaving the EU without a deal at any time and under any circumstances. While the motion is not legally-binding, Retail NI chief executive Glynn Roberts said it provides "some degree of certainty" for businesses and said the Commons must now agree to seek an extension to the Article 50 departure date of March 29. Read More The UK Governments proposals for a no-deal tariff regime made for frightening reading for retailers on both sides of the NI border," he said. "A no-deal exit would cause untold damage to cross-border shopping and to border town economies, and would doubtless lead to a considerable increase in illegal cross-border trade where an impractical honour-based system of duties had been proposed by the UK earlier today." Earlier on Wednesday, the Government outlined temporary no-deal Brexit plans that would see no import tariffs apply to goods entering Northern Ireland across the Irish border. Tariffs of up to 40% in some cases, however, are planned for products being exported from the Republic to the UK. David Fitzsimons, head of Retail Excellence, which represents retailers in the Republic, said a "negotiated exit" is vital for the industry. "Retail in the Republic of Ireland employs over 282,000 people employing more than all the multinationals in Ireland combined, and contributes over 7 billion (595bn) to the exchequer," he said. "As an industry it is perhaps the most exposed to economic shifts and for that reason alone we need a negotiated exit for our closest trading partner." Sinn Fein president Mary-Lou McDonald has hit out at the defeat of Theresa May's Brexit deal, claiming it shows an "absolute disregard for the people of Ireland". Mrs McDonald was speaking after the Prime Minister's latest deal was defeated in the Commons by 149 votes. We are 17 days away from Brexit and the uncertainty and confusion continues, she said. A crash out Brexit would be unthinkable for the peace process, jobs, trade and to the loss of peoples rights and quality of life, particularly in border communities. Read More There is now a need to intensify planning for a no-deal crash with an imperative to ensure no return to a hard border, protections of our agreements and safeguarding the rights of citizens. Irelands Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney expressed disappointment at the outcome of the vote, but urged the need to be patient and calm to allow this process in Westminster to take its course. Veteran European Parliamentarian Jim Nicholson (UUP) claimed the defeat should come as no surprise as there were no meaningful changes to the deal. We want a deal but we want a good deal a deal that will not compromise the constitutional integrity of the United Kingdom, he said. It is in the best interests of the EU and UK to use their best efforts to work towards a workable deal, in order to avoid a no deal Brexit. Calm heads are needed now and a short technical extension should be seriously considered. SDLP leader Colum Eastwood expressed disappointment at the vote, but said Westminster will have to accept the backstop at some point. Sooner or later, the British Parliament is going to have to support a backstop for Northern Ireland or else support no Brexit at all there is no happy medium between these two eventualities, he said. The bottom line is that the backstop, aside from scrapping Brexit entirely, is our only insurance policy against a hard border. Until MPs accept this reality, Article 50 should be extended to avoid us crashing out of the EU without a deal. Alliance Party leader Naomi Long has called for a second referendum. The clearest, most coherent and most democratic route through this impasse lies with a Peoples Vote, including both the Prime Ministers deal and the Remain option, she said. This needs to be tested in Parliament as a matter of urgency. Britain will slash tariffs on a range of imports from outside the EU if MPs vote to leave without a deal (Andrew Matthews/PA) Britain will slash tariffs on a range of imports from outside the European Union if MPs vote on Wednesday to leave without a deal. But some products coming from the remaining 27 EU member states which are currently imported free of tariffs will now face levies for the first time. Ministers said that, overall, the changes would represent a modest liberalisation of the UKs tariff regime. Under a unilateral temporary scheme announced by the Government, 87% of all imports to the UK by value would be eligible for zero-tariff access up from 80% at present while many other goods will be subject to a lower rate than currently applied under EU rules. In special arrangements for Northern Ireland, the UKs temporary import tariffs will not apply to EU goods crossing the border from the Republic. Among the 13% of imports by value which will be subject to tariffs will be: Beef, lamb, pork and poultry and some dairy products, in order to protect UK farmers and producers from cheap imports; A number of tariffs on finished vehicles to support the automotive sector, which will not apply to car parts imported from the EU to prevent disruption to supply chains; Products including certain ceramics, fertiliser and fuel, where tariffs protect UK producers against unfair practices like dumping and state subsidies; Goods including bananas, raw cane sugar and certain kinds of fish, where tariffs are used to permit preferential access to the UK market for developing countries. Our priority is securing a deal with the EU as this will avoid disruption to our global trading relationships. However we must prepare for all eventualitiesTrade Policy Minister George Hollingbery If the UK leaves the EU without a deal on March 29, the temporary schedules will apply for up to 12 months while a full consultation and review of a permanent approach is undertaken. Proposed tariff rates on a range of food products were announced as a proportion of the so-called most favoured nation (MFN) currently imposed by the EU on imports from countries which do not have a free trade agreement. Rates include beef (53% of MFN), poultry meat (60%), sheep meat (100%), pig meat (13%), butter (32%), Cheddar-like cheese (13%), protected fish and seafood products (100%) and milled and semi-milled products (83%). Tariffs on finished cars and trucks will be set at 10.6%, down from the EU MFN rate of 11.3%, while for finished buses the rate will remain unchanged at 12.6%. Other rates include 0.2% on mineral products, 0.1% on chemical products, 2.1 on fertilisers, 0.1% on plastics and rubber, 0.2% on leather and hides, 0.9% on textiles and textile products, 0.3% on stone and cement, 1.2% on ceramics, 0.2% on glass and 2.9% on transport equipment. Trade Policy Minister George Hollingbery said: Our priority is securing a deal with the EU as this will avoid disruption to our global trading relationships. However we must prepare for all eventualities. If we leave without a deal, we will set the majority of our import tariffs to zero, whilst maintaining tariffs for the most sensitive industries. This balanced approach will help to support British jobs and avoid potential price spikes that would hit the poorest households the hardest. It represents a modest liberalisation of tariffs and we will be monitoring the economy closely as well as consulting with businesses to decide what our tariffs should be after this transitional period. Security forces veterans convicted of Troubles-related crimes in Northern Ireland are eligible to apply for early release, the Northern Ireland Secretary has indicated. Karen Bradley said anyone convicted of such an offence and serving their sentence in Northern Ireland would be covered by the terms of the controversial element of the 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement, which enabled hundreds of convicted terrorists to walk free on licence after serving just two years behind bars. Her answer to a parliamentary question comes days ahead of an announcement by prosecutors on whether the soldiers involved in the Bloody Sunday killings in Londonderry will face court action. The scheme, which saw around 500 loyalist and republican paramilitaries walk free from prison, currently would not include Bloody Sunday, as it only covers offences committed between 1973 and 1998. However, legislation proposed by the Government to give effect to a range of new legacy mechanisms set out in the 2014 Stormont House Agreement includes a provision to extend the early release scheme to cover offences committed before 1973, changing the start date to January 1968. So, if that becomes law, anyone convicted of an offence related to Bloody Sunday (January 1972) would be covered by the early release scheme. Those proposals, which have been subject to a recent public consultation, would also extend the provision to those serving sentences in Great Britain. In the past there has been debate on whether the early release scheme was meant to include convicted security force members. On Thursday, prosecutors are to announce whether 17 ex-soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will face charges for their involvement in Bloody Sunday a day that saw 13 civil rights protesters shot dead on the streets of Derry. Conservative MP Julian Lewis asked for clarification of the terms of the Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act 1998 in a written question to Mrs Bradley earlier this month, specifically asking whether the two-year cap applied to members of the armed forces, police and security services. Mrs Bradley replied on Monday. Under the early release scheme that formed part of the 1998 Belfast Agreement and was given legislative effect by the Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act 1998, qualifying prisoners may apply for early release (subject to certain conditions) after they have served two years in prison, she wrote. Currently anyone convicted of Troubles-related scheduled offences and serving their sentence in Northern Ireland would be eligible to apply to the scheme. The Sentences Act does not cover offences committed before August 1973, so the draft Bill proposes to extend the early release scheme to cover the start of the Troubles (January 1968-August 1973)Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley Release is on licence, such licence being subject to revocation for non-compliance with certain conditions as has happened in a number of cases. When a licence is revoked an individual is liable to be returned to prison to serve out their original sentence. The provisions set out in the draft Northern Ireland (Stormont House Agreement) Bill, on which we recently consulted, would amend the Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act 1998 to extend this two-year accelerated release scheme for Troubles-related offences to those serving sentences in Great Britain. The Sentences Act does not cover offences committed before August 1973, so the draft Bill proposes to extend the early release scheme to cover the start of the Troubles (January 1968-August 1973). The Government has no intention to extend early release to offences committed after the date of the Belfast Agreement in April 1998. There is no proposal in the consultation to do this and the Government is not contemplating it. The legacy consultation concluded in October and we expect to finish our analysis of the 17,000 plus responses shortly. It is right we take the time to consider each response fully and I will set out the next steps in this process as soon as I can. (Left to right) Michael Finucane, Geraldine Finucane and John Finucane, the family of murdered Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane (Dominic Lipinski/PA) The Irish Government has reiterated its call for a public inquiry to be held into the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane. He was shot dead in front of his family in February 1989 by loyalists in an attack found to have involved collusion with the state. Mr Finucanes widow Geraldine claimed the UK Government had unlawfully reneged on a promise to hold a public inquiry into the killing one of the most notorious of the Troubles when former prime minister David Cameron instead ordered an independent review. Expand Close Geraldine Finucane, the widow of murdered Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane (Dominic Lipinski/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Geraldine Finucane, the widow of murdered Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane (Dominic Lipinski/PA) The Supreme Court in London ruled last month there has been no effective investigation into Mr Finucanes murder and previous inquiries did not comply with the Finucane familys human rights. Irish Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney announced on Wednesday that the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers in Strasbourg will examine a number of cases related to dealing with the legacy of the Troubles, including the murder of Mr Finucane. Addressing a meeting of the committee on Wednesday, Irish Ambassador Keith McBean urged the United Kingdom to open a public inquiry into the case. Ireland would reiterate to the Committee of Ministers that it remains our firm view that a satisfactory outcome to the Finucane case can only be achieved through a public inquiry and we call again on the UK Government to fulfil the commitment it made in this respect under the Weston Park Agreement of 2001, the ambassador said. Expand Close Tanaiste Simon Coveney has announced a number of cases related to the legacy of the Troubles will be examined (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Tanaiste Simon Coveney has announced a number of cases related to the legacy of the Troubles will be examined (Niall Carson/PA) Mr McBean also referred to Bloody Sunday, the day before Northern Irelands Public Prosecution Service (PPS) will announce whether it will prosecute 17 ex-soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA. Some 13 civilians were shot dead when soldiers opened fire following a civil rights march in Londonderry on January 30 1972. The Bloody Sunday families, and the families of other victims, have campaigned for truth and justice for decades and are not served by the unclear signals from the UK Government about their intentions, the ambassador said. Expand Close A mural in Derry depicting Dr Edward Daly during Bloody Sunday in January 1972 (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A mural in Derry depicting Dr Edward Daly during Bloody Sunday in January 1972 (Liam McBurney/PA) Where crimes are committed, they must be investigated and prosecuted as necessary in accordance with the law and regardless of the perpetrator. Ireland has also expressed deep concern generally at the lack of progress in Northern Ireland on tackling its troubled past. It has been without devolved government for more than two years following a break down in relations between the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein. Expand Close Northern Ireland has been without devolved government for over two years (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Northern Ireland has been without devolved government for over two years (Niall Carson/PA) A number of mechanisms aimed at addressing legacy issues that were negotiated in the Stormont House Agreement in 2014 have not yet been delivered amid the political vacuum. These include the Historical Investigations Unit, an independent body in Northern Ireland tasked with investigating outstanding deaths connected to the Troubles. The Irish ambassador urged the UK to take action, adding: A move ahead to legislation is now urgently required by the UK Government. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and IFA president Joe Healy have warned about the impact of a no-deal Brexit (Finbarr ORourke/PA) The UKs proposed tariff regime in the event of a no-deal Brexit would be disastrous for Irish farmers, the Irish Farmers Association (IFA) has said. The British government outlined its temporary no-deal Brexit plans on Wednesday, stating that no import tariffs would apply to goods entering Northern Ireland across the Irish border. The region will be treated differently from the rest of the UK, where tariffs will be imposed on some EU goods if a Brexit deal fails to materialise. Tariffs of up to 40% in some cases are planned for products being exported from the Republic to the UK. The uncertainty is causing massive anxiety with businesses both North and South and will cost jobs soon if not sorted out.Charlie McConalogue IFA president Joe Healy said: Our most exposed sectors, particularly beef, simply will not survive the kind of tariffs being talked about. This would have a devastating effect in the rural economy. We export over 50% of our beef to the UK. If this is subject to tariffs, it will be a direct hit of almost 800 million euro on the sector, he said. Fianna Fail agriculture spokesman Charlie McConalogue agreed with the IFA president that the UKs new arrangements would be disastrous for the Irish agri-food sector. I sincerely hope that this is a provocative attempt to persuade MPs to vote against a no-deal scenario when they are asked over the next 24 hours in Westminster, Mr McConalogue said. The EU will obviously have to respond to the plans to allow goods to travel freely between the Republic and Northern Ireland in the short term and the Irish government will have to elaborate on their own plans to respond to this plan. The uncertainty is causing massive anxiety with businesses both North and South and will cost jobs soon if not sorted out. He called on the Irish government to outline the likely impact of these new tariffs and to put a plan in place to respond. The sensational statement by the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs, urging the parties (in this case, Armenia) to refrain from actions and statements aimed at changing the negotiation format, was the subject of active discussions in Yerevan. Earlier, EU Commissioner Johannes Hahn in Brussels told Armenia's Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan the same thing as the OSCE MG co-chairs - only being face-to-face. After reviewing the international community's unambiguous statements, the Armenian Prime Minister rushed to Nagorno-Karabakh, where he held a meeting of the Security Council, attended by head of the Karabakh separatists Bako Sahakyan. It gave a rise to a number of speculations in the Armenian media about possible reasons for Pashinyan's hasty visit to Karabakh. "An emergency meeting of the Armenian Security Council in Artsakh is caused by the current deadlock situation," the 168 Zham newspaper wrote. "Although the meeting's agenda was not officially announced, it is obvious that the need for such an urgent event appeared after the last statement of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs," the article says. The newspaper reminds that the co-chairs, not in targeted manner, but responded to Nikol Pashinyans statement about the return of Nagorno-Karabakh to the negotiating table, describing them as unacceptable attempts to unilaterally change the format of negotiations. "After this statement, the Armenian authorities have become deadlocked. On the one hand, Pashinyan cannot refuse his statements about the intention to return Nagorno Karabakh to the negotiating table, and on the other, he cannot participate in the negotiations, which will not discuss the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh's participation," the newspaper writes. Following the Security Council meeting, the Armenian Prime Minister delivered a speech, which demonstrated that he did not want to change his position. The main points could be outlined as follows: 1. The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh represented by the unrecognized 'NKR' should be part of the talks, since Pashinyan, being the Prime Minister of Armenia, who was not elected by the Armenian population of Karabakh, is not authorized to represent 'NKR' himself. Unlike the Armenians, the Azerbaijanis of Nagorno-Karabakh, according to Pashinyan, should not participate in the negotiations, since their interests are already represented by President Ilham Aliyev. 2. Nikol Pashinyan needs a clear interpretation of the three principles and six points, presented by the OSCE Minsk Group as fundamental for solving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. "The protocols that do not give rise to discrepancies should be the basis of the negotiation process," the Armenian Prime Minister said. 3. "Preparing the Azerbaijani society for peace must be done by not only the Azerbaijani authorities, but also with the participation of the Armenian authorities. The awareness of it made me make a unprecedented for our reality statement in the National Assembly in the autumn of 2018, by saying that any solution to the Karabakh conflict must be acceptable for the people of Armenia, the people of Nagorno Karabakh and the people of Azerbaijan. It was my contribution to preparing for peace not only the peoples of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, but also the people of Azerbaijan. Unfortunately, we dont see adequate statements and actions from the President of Azerbaijan. In spite of this, I am ready to continue the dialogue with not only the President of Azerbaijan, but also the people of Azerbaijan, because I am certain that the people of Azerbaijan are as peace-loving as the peoples of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh," the head of the Armenian government said. There is a short comment on each of the items. As for Nikol Pashinyans stubborn demands to include 'NKR' in the negotiation process, it can be noted that the authorities of a non-recognized republic a priori cannot be "legitimate". Moreover, no country or intergovernmental structure in the world recognizes so-called elections held in a separatist entity. 'NKR' is a gray area in international law, local elections are not recognized by the international community, and, accordingly, their 'president', 'ministers' and 'deputies' cannot be perceived as authorized representatives. Today, there is one way for Bako Sahakyan and his associates to get at least some degree of international legalization. At the first stage, the separatist regime should start a dialogue with the Azerbaijani community of Nagorno-Karabakh, and having received an intermediate status recognized by official Baku after the liberation of the occupied territories around Nagorno-Karabakh, join the negotiations with the Azerbaijani government. Everyone in the world understands: there are regular units of the Armenian Armed Forces in the 'NKR', and 80% of the soldiers serving there are also recruited from Armenia. Finally, Nagorno-Karabakh's 'budget' is formed through direct transfers from the Armenian state budget. What kind of 'state' and 'people' can it be? Second, the Armenian Prime Ministers misunderstanding of the OSCE Minsk Group's three principles and the six points is surprising. For example, they have a point (perhaps the most problematic for Pashinyan) about the withdrawal of Armenian troops from the territories around Nagorno-Karabakh. In return, Nagorno-Karabakh receives security guarantees and an interim status. This is the absolute minimum needed to prevent a new bloodshed in Karabakh, which will break out sooner or later if the situation is not regulated. But didnt Pashinyan himself loudly said that he rejects the 'territory in exchange for peace' formula? Doesn't Armenia's National Security Service Chief Artur Vanetsyan promise from Fizuli not to surrender "an inch of land" and discuss with the separatists the settlement of Fizuli and other occupied territories around Nagorno-Karabakh, from where all Azerbaijanis were expelled and where Armenians have never even historically lived (although history is not a justification for illegal territorial claims as well)? First of all, Pashinyan and his government should explain their interpretation of principles and points, and not demand it from the OSCE Minsk Group, which is nothing but an intermediary structure. Judging by Yerevan's statements, the current Armenian interpretation implies "everything for Armenia - nothing for Azerbaijan." After that, Pashinyans "sincere" desire to engage in direct dialogue with the Azerbaijani people, who are "as peace-loving as the peoples of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh," cannot help but amuse. Again, there is no 'people' of Nagorno-Karabakh - there are only two communities, Armenian and Azerbaijani. The second was expelled by Armenia and the militants under its control, after which only the first community left in the region - strictly speaking, that's the whole people. Moreover, if Nikol Pashinyan decided to play humanism and communicate with the peace-loving, in his own words, Azerbaijani people, then there is plenty of topics for conversation. For example, he could begin by apologizing to the Azerbaijanis for the crimes of, for example, General Manvel Grigoryan, much-hated and imprisoned by him. After all, the fact is that Grigoryan boasted in an interview that he held captured Azerbaijanis as slaves for many years after the war. Not even mentioning massacres in Khojaly, Garadaghly and other Azerbaijani (now occupied) settlements, understanding that Pashinyan will not have enough political courage for this. But he could start by apologizing for Manvel's crimes, whose moral character is well known to Pashinyan himself. Such a step would in fact be "unprecedented," in contrast to the formal statement in parliament that a solution to the conflict must be acceptable to all, including Azerbaijanis. And if it is unacceptable for Azerbaijanis, then what will Armenia do - end the occupation? The question is, of course, rhetorical. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar speaking at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC during his visit to the US (Brian Lawless/PA) Irish premier Leo Varadkar has said that if the United Kingdom wants to change its mind over Brexit, it would be welcomed back like the Prodigal Son. The Taoiseach said the United Kingdom would be welcomed back to the European Union with open arms. Mr Varadkar made the comments to the US Chamber of Commerce chief executive Tom Donohue in Washington DC during his St Patricks visit to the United States. He was speaking on Wednesday evening, UK time, as MP started voting at Westminster over whether they are prepared for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union on March 29 without a deal. On Tuesday the House of Commons voted down Prime Minister Theresa Mays proposed Withdrawal Deal. To the broader public: the Common Travel Area and all that comes with it free movement between Britain & Ireland, North South will continue. Thats already been agreed. Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 13, 2019 Mr Varadkar said: Its always important to remind ourselves that Brexit is not our policy, this is the decision that the UK has made, a decision that we deeply regret in Ireland and across Europe. If they were ever to change their mind, they would be like the Prodigal Son returning, and we would welcome them with open arms. But we have to respect the decision they have made which is to leave. Whatever happens we (Ireland) made our decision a long time ago, that were going to stay at the heart of the EU. Expand Close Leo Varadkar arrives at the US Chamber of Commerce (Brian Lawless/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Leo Varadkar arrives at the US Chamber of Commerce (Brian Lawless/PA) Mr Varadkar told an audience, which included members of the Chamber of Commerce and senior Irish executives, that Ireland and the EU wants a Brexit deal. We dont believe in tariffs or quotas, or differences in regulations, thats what the Customs Union and Single Market was all about getting rid of those things, he added. We regret that people are now suggesting we go back to that. I wonder whether those who advocated Brexit two or three years ago, did they really think it would be about imposing tariffs on each other and paper work and quotas, as thats where we heading if we dont have a deal. Mr Donohue asked Mr Varadkar how his party have maintained common commitments in relation to Brexit with Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein. We have a consensus across the Dail on a couple of issues and Brexit is one of those, Mr Varadkar said. Paramount there is protecting the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement, which has to override any economic or trade related considerations. We have made so much progress in the last 20 years, with the help of America, in eliminating differences between people in Northern Ireland and north and south (and) sweeping away the hard border that used to exist and we cant allow that to fall backwards. Even a party like Sinn Fein which used to contribute to the violence and defended some of the violence that happened 20 or 30 years ago, used to be a very anti-European party and wanted us to leave the EU until a few years ago, (but) has now abandoned their policies in those areas. Here in Washington DC and starting a busy week by meeting some friends from home: the Dublin and Belfast Chambers of Commerce pic.twitter.com/49gva5OFEl Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 13, 2019 Earlier the Taoiseach said those who advocated for Brexit have been chasing unicorns for a very long time. As we head into the next few weeks it should be blatantly obvious that unicorns only exist in fairytales, he said. I would say to people who advocated Brexit is this really what they wanted? Protectionism, borders, tariffs, restrictions on trade. Is this really what Brexit was all about? And for those who voted against the Withdrawal Agreement on the basis that they feared that Northern Ireland would be treated differently as a result of the backstop, it must be evident to them now that its the UK Governments intention to treat Northern Ireland differently. Addressing the UKs tariff proposals in the event of a no-deal Brexit, Mr Varadkar said Northern Ireland will become a back door to the European single market. Expand Close (PA Graphics) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp (PA Graphics) I dont think the UKs proposals will be workable for very long. They propose to treat Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK, he said. Northern Ireland will become a back door to the European single market and I think that in a matter of months that will lead to the need for checks at Northern Irelands ports. So those that opposed the agreement may find that something very akin to the backstop is applied by the UK Government in a few weeks time. Mr Varadkar also said that in the event of a no-deal Brexit the European customs code will apply to goods exported from the UK to the EU. That will obviously have a severe impact on the UK economy and the Northern Ireland economy in particular. Expand Close Leo Varadkar speaks to delegates (Brian Lawless/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Leo Varadkar speaks to delegates (Brian Lawless/PA) Westminster can take the no-deal off the table this evening, and if they do so then there is the potential to look at alternatives, for example the UK staying in the customs union. Mr Varadkar added that Ireland has been preparing for a no-deal Brexit scenario for a long time. We are well placed to deal with any shock that may arise from a no-deal (Brexit), he added. The fact that we have a budget surplus means that we can borrow if we have to support our economy. Monster waves brought by Storm Gareth crash along the shoreline at Portstewart Huge waves crashed into the coastlines of Britain and Ireland as Storm Gareth announced its imminent arrival yesterday. Gusts could reach 80mph today along the coast of Northern Ireland, the Met Office said. Weather warnings covering Northern Ireland, England, Wales and parts of Scotland are in force for today as forecasters warned that the storm, which was named on Monday, could bring travel disruption and power cuts when it makes landfall. A Met Office yellow warning for wind is in force here until noon today. Strong northwesterly winds from last night are expected to continue this morning. Gusts of up to 60mph are likely inland with a small chance of them reaching 70mph for a time in squally showers, according to forecasters. Gusts of 70-75mph are likely along northern coasts, perhaps up to 80mph for a time. But the winds will steadily ease later in the morning, the Met Office said. Forecasters said that at least two inches of rain was possible over higher ground in Cumbria in England. Meanwhile, a mammoth clean-up was beginning this morning in the Republic after Storm Gareth left homes without power. The epicentre of the storm was last night felt in Co Donegal, with Malin Head weather station reporting wind gusts of up to 75mph. Eoin Donnelly and Jean Gill had camped on the mountain the night before the avalanche (Conor Riordan/PA) Two climbers who were scaling Ben Nevis but decided to turn back less than an hour before the avalanche have described the terrifying conditions on the mountain. Eoin Donnelly, 20, and Jean Gill, 20, had travelled to Scotland from Co. Kildare in Ireland to try and reach the UKs highest summit. The pair had camped on the mountain overnight in poor conditions and only decided to turn back less than 40 minutes before the avalanche struck, killing three people. Expand Close Eoin Donnelly as he tries to scale the mountain before the avalanche on Monday (Jean Gill/PA) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Eoin Donnelly as he tries to scale the mountain before the avalanche on Monday (Jean Gill/PA) Ms Gill said: When we started it wasnt too bad, we got near to the lake and it was so windy there were hailstones blowing into our face. We basically had to change our plans and turn around because it was getting too dangerous, because the wind was so strong it was really hard to walk with it blowing against us. Mr Donnelly added: The wind was so, so bad you couldnt open your eyes the hail was so bad. Id say there was about a foot of snow. It was just really, really scary. Once you got to the point the ground was frozen over so you wouldnt have been able to cross without crampons or proper climbing gear. When we did decided to turn around we said we need to go home this is too dangerous. We crossed a guide with a group of hill-climbers and he was like these people want to go up there, but theres no chance. Even an experienced climber with climbing gear would be crazy to go, because the weather was so dangerous. The pair packed up their camping gear on the way back down and booked into a nearby hostel. Expand Close Hillwalkers make their way along the Ben Nevis mountain path the day after the fatal avalanche (Andrew Milligan/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Hillwalkers make their way along the Ben Nevis mountain path the day after the fatal avalanche (Andrew Milligan/PA) They only learned there were fatal casualties the next morning. Scott Pratt, from Bristol, was among those who was attempting to reach the summit on Tuesday. He had been in Fort William as the avalanche happened and witnessed part of the emergency response taking off. The 29-year-old said: We saw the helicopters heading this way and the mountain rescue, so it did bring things into perspective a bit. Obviously we just want to take it steady and be aware of things. Weve done our research, checked the avalanche reports and if we stick to the paths it should be alright. Brexit uncertainty hangs like a dark cloud over many border communities in Ireland, local traders have warned. As Storm Gareth rolled in off the Atlantic on Tuesday, people living on busy roads between Co Cavan and Co Fermanagh expressed concern that the future of the frontier remains unclear. Ballyconnell, in Co Cavan, sits cheek by jowl to the border with Northern Ireland. One of the town's petrol stations even sits on a narrow sliver of land between the sign posts welcoming drivers into the respective jurisdictions. The frequently-photographed sign notifying motorists that they are entering the UK is riddled with bullet marks - a stark reminder of some sinister elements still wedded to a more violent past. On the back of the same sign post, an anti-Brexit poster demands "No EU frontier" on the island of Ireland. Present-day Ballyconnell appears to be thriving, with hardly an unoccupied shop on a main street dominated by local businesses. The area's economy has long been buoyed by the nearby factories that once comprised the empire of former billionaire, Sean Quinn. Five minutes would seldom pass without a Quinn-branded lorry rumbling over the border between Ballyconnell and Derrylin in Co Fermanagh. Butcher Gerard Crowe, who has been trading in Ballyconnell for 30 years, used to own a second shop in Derrylin during the Troubles. He closed it in 1993, having found a daily two-hour wait on either side of the border checkpoints unmanageable. He said Brexit has already had an impact on northern trade, with the number of shoppers from across the border halving in the last year. "The fluctuation in sterling is having a knock-on effect on people's salaries, so there are less coming south because it is costing them more," he said. "We are all suffering to a degree. And people are afraid. Business has been stagnant." Greengrocer Ronnie Duke has also done business in the town for the last three decades. He said northern trade has always been important. "We would have a lot of people from the north coming over to Ballyconnell," he said. "Derrylin would consider Ballyconnell as one of the major towns in the area, so we would have a lot of footfall and a lot of business across the border. We would be dependent on the northern trade." Mr Duke, who owns Ronnie's Fruit and Veg shop on the main street, said local people were worried about reports of requiring green card insurance documents to drive on both sides of the border. "The concern with the border would be a lot of people talking about this green card and things like that - in case they may have to be stopped," he said. "At the moment at the border, you just drive through. "Putting up a hard border there would be a big problem and it would affect the businesses." Retired Cavan County Council worker, Phelim O'Rourke, remembers the days when the Army used to patrol the frontier. "When the British soldiers were here and you were travelling north, you were stopped and asked a lot of questions," he said, standing beside a long unused customs station on the outskirts of town. "Thanks be to God, that has all stopped. I hope this is not going to cause any trouble, with tourists or people going across doing their daily business. "I wouldn't like to see the Troubles come back to the way they were before," he added. Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar (centre left) and his partner Matt Barrett (centre right) (Niall Carson/PA) Irish Premier Leo Varadkar has confirmed his partner Matt Barrett will join him for a meeting with the US vice-president. The pair will attend a breakfast with Mike Pence on Thursday morning. It comes after Mr Pence, who describes himself as a Christian and a conservative, extended an invitation to the couple during a meeting with Mr Varadkar last year. Expand Close Taoiseach Leo Varadkar met US vice-president Mike Pence and his wife Karen at the White House last year (Niall Carson/PA) PA Archive/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Taoiseach Leo Varadkar met US vice-president Mike Pence and his wife Karen at the White House last year (Niall Carson/PA) The Taoiseach confirmed on Wednesday evening his partner will be able to attend. He (Matt) was able to get time off work and make the journey so hell be taking up the invitation from Mike and Karen Pence to attend tomorrow, Mr Varadkar said. Karen cant be there because shes in Abu Dhabi at the Special Olympics. Mr Varadkar is Irelands first openly gay leader and one of very few openly gay national leaders in the world. He is taking part in a series of engagements in Washington DC as part of his annual St Patricks visit to the US. Prime Minister Theresa May reacts last night after her Brexit deal was rejected by MPs in the Commons With the risk of the UK crashing out of the EU in 16 days' time growing, Irish hopes are now firmly pinned on the potential for an extension to Article 50 beyond March 29. But aware that many EU capitals are wary of prolonging the Brexit debacle, Mrs May has also raised the possibility a second referendum. However, EU leaders are not overly keen for a delay past the end of May. Sources in Dublin said the Irish Government will "help" the UK lobby other countries for an extension because "March 29 was always a UK deadline, not an EU one". However, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Tanaiste Simon Coveney are increasingly aware of the need for a "clear logic" as to why a postponement should be granted. Mr Coveney said he was "deeply disappointed" that the meaningful vote in Westminster failed. Avoiding a crash-out Brexit cannot be done without the UK Parliament "agreeing something" he said, adding a no-deal would be a "lose, lose, lose" scenario for everyone. "I think the British Prime Minister outlined very clearly this evening that the Parliament in London faces hard choices now. "The focus has to be on London. That's where the crisis is. That's where the problem is and that's where the solutions need to come from." Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin told the Dail yesterday that a no-deal scenario "must be avoided". Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who is considered an ally of the Taoiseach in the European Council, said last night that a request from the UK must have "credible and convincing justification". "The smooth functioning of the EU institutions needs to be ensured," he said. European leaders and senior EU figures reacted with disappointment at the defeat of Mrs May's Brexit deal. Several said a no-deal Brexit was now more likely and preparations for that scenario would be "intensified". While open to the idea of an extension, EU chiefs moved swiftly to shut down any suggestion Mrs May could seek more changes to the operation of the Irish backstop. European Council president Donald Tusk said the EU has "done all that is possible to reach an agreement". "Should there be a UK reasoned request for an extension, the EU27 will consider it and decide by unanimity," he said. The House of Commons will vote tonight on a motion to test whether MPs support leaving the EU without a deal. The idea is expected to be defeated. This will open the door to another vote tomorrow on a possible extension. However, Mrs May will today outline the reality of a hard Brexit so that MPs are "fully informed in making this historic decision". A real moment of truth for the Irish Republic will come when she reveals her Government's plan for tariffs and their approach to the border. As the crisis grew last night, Michel Barnier, the EU's chief Brexit negotiator, warned: "The EU has done everything it can to help get the withdrawal agreement over the line. "The impasse can only be solved in the UK. "Our 'no-deal' preparations are now more important than ever before." European Parliament Brexit co-ordinator Guy Verhofstadt was even more scathing. Sharing an image on Twitter of a man and woman kissing with their faces painted separately in Union Flag and EU flag colours, he wrote: "Brexit was about taking back control, instead the UK spiralled out of control. "Only cross-party cooperation putting Country first, can end this mess. If this happens we will fully engage." Meanwhile, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said he would "intensify" his country's no-deal preparations now. He wrote on Twitter: "Deeply saddened by the outcome of the #Brexit vote this evening. "Despite clear EU assurances on the backstop, we now face a chaotic #NoDeal #Brexit scenario. And time is almost up. "We will intensify our #NoDeal preparation." Three climbers who died after an avalanche on the UKs highest mountain were French and Swiss, Police Scotland have said. Two of the men caught on Ben Nevis were French, aged 41 and 32, and the third was a Swiss 43-year-old. A fourth man, 30-year-old Swiss national Mathieu Biselx, remains in a stable condition at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow after Tuesdays avalanche. Swiss media reported the group were members of the Club Alpin Suisse de Sion (Swiss Alpine Club, Sion). They were caught by the river of snow and ice in Number 5 gully as Storm Gareth blew in with strong winds, triggering a huge search and recovery operation in brutal conditions, a rescuer said. One of the climbers died pretty instantaneously, according to Donald Paterson, deputy team leader of Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team (MRT). Another could not be saved despite receiving CPR for half an hour. Expand Close A view of the North Face of Ben Nevis (Andrew Milligan/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A view of the North Face of Ben Nevis (Andrew Milligan/PA) Speaking from hospital where he is being treated for serious injuries to both legs, Mr Biselx said his companions were experienced climbers who took advice from local guides and were staying with one. He said they had been given two routes to take on the mountain and went on one in the morning with no problems. As they still had time, they suggested doing the second one in the afternoon assuming they had taken the necessary precautions. Upon reaching the second route they saw there had already been an avalanche there but had barely reached the area when they were swept away. Mr Biselx, president of the alpine club and father of a little girl, said he was amazingly lucky. When I regained consciousness only my head and an arm were sticking out of the snowMathieu Biselx He told Le Nouvelliste: We werent very high up and suddenly we heard a noise. We looked round and two seconds later we were carried away by heavy, compact snow. When I regained consciousness only my head and an arm were sticking out of the snow. He described his companions as wonderful people who were also fathers, adding: Its terrible theyre not here anymore. They wont see their families again. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the fatalities were absolutely tragic, while Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch MSP Kate Forbes said it was heartbreaking. Brian Tregaskis, Lochaber MRT secretary, also paid tribute to the climbers and his team. They were joined by Glencoe MRT and around 30 volunteer mountain rescuers who happened to be training in the area. Expand Close Brian Tregaskis, Lochaber MRT secretary, paid tribute to his team (Andrew Milligan/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Brian Tregaskis, Lochaber MRT secretary, paid tribute to his team (Andrew Milligan/PA) He said: The members of the Lochaber and Glencoe Mountain Rescue teams did an incredible job in very difficult conditions. Wed like to extend our deepest sympathies to the loved ones of those who lost their lives and we hope the surviving casualty makes a full and speedy recovery. Tuesdays incident follows two recent fatal accidents on the mountain, which at 1,345m is the UKs highest. On New Years Day, a 21-year-old German woman, who was a student at Bristol University, died after she fell from a ridge she had been climbing with three other people. She had been hiking on what is known as the ledge route when she fell around 500ft. In December, Patrick Boothroyd, 21, from West Yorkshire, died after falling in the Tower Gully area. MPs have supported an amendment which rejects a no-deal Brexit at any time and under any circumstances by just four votes. The amendment moved by Dame Caroline Spelman was supported by 312 MPs with 308 against. They then voted against the Malthouse Compromise B amendment which sought to delay Brexit until May 22, by a majority of 210. The House of Commons has approved the amended #NoDealBrexit motion by 321 votes to 278 - a majority of 43. pic.twitter.com/vQQqPRH1bb UK House of Commons (@HouseofCommons) March 13, 2019 The vote to reject crashing out of the European Union was later confirmed by a more emphatic 321 votes to 278 when the Governments motion was put forward as amended. Heres the latest: MPs react Conservative Brexiteer Bernard Jenkin called tonights vote a sad day for democracy. Tonight, anti-Brexit MPs passed a motion they think will lead to Brexit being blocked: the first steps towards many MPs breaking their election promises to honour the #EURef result are now being taken. A sad day for democracy. @StandUp4Brexit Bernard Jenkin (@bernardjenkin) March 13, 2019 Maria Eagle said Theresa May has lost all authority following the vote. She whipped it (having said she wouldnt) voted against it (having said shed vote for it) and lost big. She then told the House nothing has changed She has lost all authority. https://t.co/tXn8vDNaJQ Maria Eagle MP (@meaglemp) March 13, 2019 The options are the same as they have always been Theresa May said the options before us are the same as they always have been, despite MPs voting to reject a no-deal Brexit. Speaking after the result was read out, the Prime Minister said: The House has today provided a clear majority against leaving without a a deal, however I will repeat what I said before. These are about the choices this House faces. The legal default in EU and UK law is that the UK will leave without a deal unless something else is agreed. The onus is now on every one of us in this House to find out what that is. The options before us are the same as they always have been. Watch: the vote for the Spelman amendment: Corbyn: Parliament must now take control Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said that Parliament must now take control of the Brexit process and his party will work across the House of Commons to seek a compromise solution. Rejected, but still the default option Despite MPs vote to reject a no-deal Brexit, Prime Minister Theresa May told the House of Commons that it remains the default option if no deal was reached. Theresa May said that MPs will vote tomorrow on an extension to Article 50, which could involve a short delay to implement a deal agreed in the next few days or a longer delay if no agreement is reached. MPs support the Government motion rejecting a no-deal Brexit MPs have supported the amended Government motion which rejects a no-deal Brexit at any time and under any circumstances by 321 votes to 238, majority 43. No vote from May? Prime Minister Theresa May was listed as having not voted on amendment F, according to the division list. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn joined his colleagues in voting against the amendment. MPs a flutter Some MPs are claiming the Government is encouraging Conservative MPs to vote for a no-deal Brexit in the final vote of the evening. Utterly desperate and historic in equal measure. The Conservatives are whipping for no deal. Heidi Allen (@heidiallen75) March 13, 2019 Unbelievable - even by this Governments standards... So now - against all their promises - they are whipping against the PMs own motion to rule out No Deal There is no greater example of reckless self indulgence Just hope enough might find a spine & at least abstain .... Caroline Lucas (@CarolineLucas) March 13, 2019 SHAME on this government. They are whipping to vote FOR no deal. Reckless. Unbelievable. What madness. Layla Moran (@LaylaMoran) March 13, 2019 Amendment isnt binding European Research Group chairman Jacob Rees-Mogg said the amendment had no legal force. He told Sky News: We live under a system of law and a motion passed in Parliament does not override the law. Both UK and EU law had March 29 as the leaving date, regardless of the vote, he added. This vote is very interesting, and the Government may or may not pay attention to it, but it is not binding, it is not law, he said. Lords defy Government again Later peers again defied the Government and backed a move to block the flagship legislation in the event of an accidental no-deal. The House of Lords voted by 193 to 154, majority 39, to support a so-called commencement motion that would prevent the Trade Bill coming into force unless MPs approved leaving without a Withdrawal Agreement. Unlike the Commons amendment tonight, the Lords motion is legally binding. Brexit delay amendment rejected MPs have rejected an amendment which includes seeking to delay Brexit until May 22 by 374 votes to 164, majority 210. Commons votes 164 to 374 to reject @DamianGreen's Amendment (f) to the #NoDealBrexit debate motion. This proposed a 21-month transition to no deal and a guarantee of rights of EU citizens in the UK, subject to agreement from EU27. If no agreement, no deal #Brexit on 22 May 2019. pic.twitter.com/00dNvxe5BC UK House of Commons (@HouseofCommons) March 13, 2019 Baker: Government MPs baking Malthouse Compromise B Steve Baker, former chairman of the Conservative eurosceptic European Research Group, has reported seeing members of the Government backing the Malthouse Compromise B as MPs continue to vote on amendments. So pleased to see members of Cabinet voting for #MalthouseCompromise Plan B Steve Baker MP FRSA (@SteveBakerHW) March 13, 2019 No-deal Brexit ruled out in MP vote MPs have supported an amendment to reject a no-deal Brexit at any time and under any circumstances by 312 votes to 308, majority four. Fox: No Brexit would be worst outcome International Trade Secretary Liam Fox said no Brexit was the worst possible outcome even worse than a no-deal Brexit. He said: There is no worse outcome for this House, this country and our democracy than to have no Brexit. We have been given a clear instruction by the people of Britain and in the days ahead we in this House must decide who in our democracy are the masters and who are the servants. Labour backing Spelman amendment Labours shadow Brexit minister Matthew Pennycook said his party was backing the Spelman amendment, saying it is disappointing the way the Government has framed their motion. Winding up the debate for the Opposition, he said: At worst it is contradictory, at best it is ambiguous. Mr Pennycook said it was obvious that no deal was the default option if an agreement was not voted through, so it did not need to be stated on the motion. He said: The only question before us this evening is does this House, in principle, definitively rule out a no-deal exit under any circumstances. No other question needs to be determined today, and thats why our preference is to support amendment A. Prodigal Son would be welcome to stay Mr Varadkar said that if the UK wanted to change its mind and stay in the EU, it would be welcomed back like the Prodigal Son. Speaking to the US Chamber of Commerce chief executive Tom Donohue, he said: Its always important to remind ourselves that Brexit is not our policy, this is the decision that the UK has made, a decision that we deeply regret in Ireland and across Europe. Expand Close Mr Varadkar with Mr Donohue (Brian Lawless/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Mr Varadkar with Mr Donohue (Brian Lawless/PA) If they were ever to change their mind, they would be like the Prodigal Son returning, and we would welcome them with open arms. But we have to respect the decision they have made which is to leave. Whatever happens we (Ireland) made our decision a long time ago, that were going to stay at the heart of the EU. Fox urges support Urging support for the amendment, Liberal Democrat peers Lord Fox said it would create the best possible chance for talented men and women in the UK to work and continue to work and offer their services within the EU 27. He added: And of course its a win-win. On the other side of such an arrangement, we will continue to welcome people into this country who contribute positively to our economy and social fabric. Their skills make a positive difference. Lord Fox went on: It signals what sort of country we want to live in. Opposing this amendment or indeed sitting on your hands panders to the false picture of the role of immigration in our society and it will impair the UK in so many ways not least in trade. People against the Parliament Tory Brexiteer Sir John Redwood threatened a public revolt against Parliament if MPs voted to block a no-deal Brexit. Demanding the Government ditch Mrs Mays deal in favour of a no-deal exit before seeking a free trade deal with the EU, he said: This Parliament must allow us to leave on March 29 otherwise it will be the people against the Parliament. Tory Remainer Dominic Grieve, former attorney general, said he found it very troubling to see Conservative colleagues support no deal just because they were dissatisfied with Mrs Mays deal. It is an extraordinary form of frenzy, the Beaconsfield MP said. You smash up the china first and then when youre not satisfied with the china youve smashed you decide to smash some more. That is what were facing and its my duty to do everything I possibly can to prevent it. We can pass motions ruling out no deal until were blue in the face Tory former cabinet minister Damian Green spoke to move amendment F, stating one of the purposes was to avoid a cliff-edge no-deal Brexit for which its clear the country as a whole and in particular many of our major industries are not prepared. He said: I think that no deal on March 29th would be a disaster for the economy of the country. He added: Voting against no-deal does not mean that a deal will magically emerge. This House has to agree a deal and that deal needs to be acceptable to the EU. We can pass motions ruling out no deal until were blue in the face but it will make no difference unless there are options that this House will support. The principle aim of the amendment he said was to make sure that Brexit is as smooth as possible for citizens and businesses. Brexit advocates still chasing unicorns Irish premier Leo Varadkar has said that people who advocated for Brexit has been chasing unicorns for a very long time. Expand Close Taoiseach Leo Varadkar speaking at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC (Brian Lawless/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Taoiseach Leo Varadkar speaking at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC (Brian Lawless/PA) Speaking to the press at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington he said: As we head into the next few weeks it should be blatantly obvious that unicorns only exist in fairy tales. I would say to people who advocated Brexit is this really what they wanted, protectionism, borders, tariffs, restrictions on trade. Is this really what Brexit was all about. And for those who voted against the Withdrawal Agreement on the basis that they feared that Northern Ireland would be treated differently as a result of the backstop, it must be evident to them now that its the UK Governments intention to treat Northern Ireland differently. Spelman pulls her amendment but Bercow says its still on table Tory former minister Dame Caroline Spelman told MPs she will be withdrawing her amendment. But Speaker John Bercow replied: She cant withdraw her amendment, her amendment hasnt yet been moved her amendment is frankly in the hands of the House of Commons. If (Dame Caroline) puts forward an amendment and chooses not to move it thats for her judgment and people will make their own assessment of that, but its perfectly possible for other signatories to it who do stick with the wish to persist with it to do so. Dame Caroline said there is a majority against a no-deal Brexit in the Commons, adding: Im really pleased the Prime Minister has brought forward a motion to rule out leaving without a deal on March 29. She said Mrs Mays motion offered a greater opportunity than her amendment to obtain a really large majority against a no-deal Brexit, adding: I really appreciate the offers of support from other parties but I will be withdrawing my amendment. Sterling higher ahead of vote Sterling moved higher on Wednesday as currency traders looked towards tonights vote. The pound was up over 1% versus the US dollar at 1.321 at the London market close, and up a similar amount against the euro at 1.169. Markets also appear to be pricing in a potential extension to the Article 50 process, which is also driving the British currency higher. Connor Campbell, financial analyst at SpreadEx, said: It appears that sterling is now working on at least two assumptions. One, that there is no appetite for a no-deal Brexit among the majority of MPs including the Prime Minister herself something that will be reflected in Wednesdays vote. And, two, that this will lead to a pound-positive outcome from Thursdays ballot on whether or not to request an extension to Article 50. Labour will support amendment A Sir Keir said Labour would act tonight and oppose no deal with support of amendment A, adding: We believe that is the cleanest and clearest way for the House to express its opposition to no-deal. He said Labour supported a close economic relationship with the EU and also supported a public vote. He said: It is extraordinary that the Government have acceded to a free vote on the matter of such importance today, not to have a position on whether this country should exit the EU without a deal. It is the latest evidence the Government is not governing and cannot act in the national interest. Tory Father of the House Ken Clarke said: Effectively were back to square one, there is absolutely no consensus within the Government, within the Opposition party, within this Parliament and amongst the public exactly what leave means. The Governments Withdrawal Agreement he said was dead in the water, adding any extension was dependent on 27 other Governments all of whom are fed up to the back teeth with the state of British politics. Defeat for Government in Lords Peers have inflicted a heavy defeat on the Governments plans for post-Brexit trade deals in backing moves to prevent a hard Irish border in the future. The House of Lords supported by 285 votes to 184, majority 101, a cross-party proposal aimed at ensuring the continuation of frictionless trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic and blocking the imposition of customs arrangements or other checks and controls after Brexit day. North-South trade & progress of trade deals post-#Brexit in spotlight as #HouseofLords continues to examine and make changes to #TradeBill. Find out more https://t.co/BHzw6vPVof pic.twitter.com/Ub0qh4Qvl9 House of Lords (@UKHouseofLords) March 13, 2019 Labour still supporting public vote Labours Sir Keir was challenged on whether his party was still pursuing a second referendum, as he told MPs the Governments Brexit deal has reached a hopeless end. He said: In those circumstances, both of the things we were ruling out in our manifesto the red lines of the Prime Minister and no-deal are the only things on the table, and that is why we support a public vote to protect against those outcomes. I am proud that were doing that at this stage of the exercise and its obvious why we need to do so. Expand Close Shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer speaking in the Commons (House of Commons/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer speaking in the Commons (House of Commons/PA) Independent MP Anna Soubry, a former Tory minister, asked Sir Keir if Labour would support a motion or amendment for a peoples vote. Sir Keir replied: The Leader of the Opposition two weeks ago Monday made it clear that we would support an amendment to that end or put one forward for ourselves. Timing depends on discussions across the House and with others, but thats the clear position that we put down. Francois suggests a third meaningful vote is on the cards ERG member Mark Francois said the House of Commons has now said emphatically twice that it does not want Mrs Mays Withdrawal Agreement. When you read it, it means we dont actually leave the EU. Thats always been the fundamental problem with it. Its billed as a way out its not. The Conservative MP added: MPs, no matter what people think of them, can read. Theyve read it, understand it and they aint voting for it. I suspect May will try to go back to Brussels to get more successions and well have a third meaningful vote on the week commencing March 25th. My gut-guess is that in a very British way well muddle through, well drink a lot of tea, and leave the EU and be a free country again because thats what 17.4 million people voted for. My message to Theresa May is to listen to her Party all of it. Just about everyone voted for the Brady Amendment and the Malthouse one has been signed by Brexiteers and Remainers alike. Between very bad or even worse is not a meaningful choice Shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer said he wanted to see the mantra of my deal or no deal dead and buried in the vote tonight. He said: On this side of the House we have never accepted there should be a binary choice between the Prime Ministers deal or no deal. Between very bad or even worse is not a meaningful choice and it would be a very sorry end to the negotiations. Yesterday the House overwhelmingly voted to reject the first of those options, the Prime Ministers deal. Today we have the chance to reject the second and we should do so with as big a majority as possible. The mantra of my deal or no deal needs to be dead and buried tonight. Direct rule Mr Gove later claimed direct rule in Northern Ireland could be a consequence of a no-deal Brexit on March 29. Independent unionist Lady Sylvia Hermon (North Down) said MPs, including the DUP, must give due weight to the serious warning issued by the head of the Northern Ireland civil service David Sterling about the grave consequences if there is a no-deal Brexit. Expand Close (PA Graphics) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp (PA Graphics) Mr Gove said she was absolutely 100% totally right, adding legislation issued by the Westminster Government to empower Northern Irelands civil servants to take decisions is sustainable at the moment and it is hoped the executive can be restored. Mr Gove went on: But it is also clear that the current situation with no executive would be very, very difficult to sustain in the uniquely challenging context of a no-deal exit. Now we, in the circumstances that the House has voted for no-deal, would have to start formal engagement with the Irish government about further arrangements for providing strengthened decision-making in the event of that outcome, and that would include the very real possibility of imposing a form of direct rule. Now that is a grave step and experience shows us its very hard to return from that step, and itd be especially difficult in the context of no-deal. Protesters raise banners on both sides of debate As the debate continues inside the Commons, pro-Brexit protesters have taken to the streets outside to push their case. But they were met with pro-EU supporters. Expand Close Pro-Brexit demonstrators outside Westminster while the MPs debate inside (Stefan Rousseau/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Pro-Brexit demonstrators outside Westminster while the MPs debate inside (Stefan Rousseau/PA) Expand Close The EU supporters were also out in force (Stefan Rousseau/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The EU supporters were also out in force (Stefan Rousseau/PA) Ken Clarke seeks assurance Tory Father of the House Ken Clarke called on Mr Gove to confirm it was the Governments position that we are ruling out leaving on March 29th with absolutely no arrangements at all, we are ruling out the complete collapse of all our legal and trading arrangements with the Continent. Mr Gove replied: His point is correct, the motion commits the Government not to leave on March 29th without a Withdrawal Agreement, I hope that is clear and unambiguous, but the motion also makes clear that the default position in law is that we do leave the EU unless we can secure assent to a withdrawal agreement. Mr Gove said it was so disappointing the Government did not secure a mandate last night. The European Union has called for a clear answer from the UK about its next step in the Brexit process after MPs rejected Theresa Mays deal. The Commons is now set to vote on whether to accept a no-deal Brexit after Mrs May suffered a humiliating defeat as her EU Withdrawal Agreement was rejected for a second time. With a majority of MPs expected to reject leaving without a deal on March 29, the prospect of a delay to Brexit is increasing but the EU wants to know what the purpose of any extension would be given Parliaments inability to agree on a way forward. The EUs chief negotiator Michel Barnier again insisted there will be no further offer from Brussels apart from the deal already on the table, and it is now the responsibility of the UK to suggest a way forward. He told the European Parliament: What will their choice be, what will be the line they will take? That is the question we need a clear answer to now. That is the question that has to be answered before a decision on a possible further extension. Why would we extend these discussions? The discussion on Article 50 is done and dusted. We have the Withdrawal Agreement. It is there. That is the question asked and we are waiting for an answer to that. Mr Barnier added: The risk of no-deal has never been higher. That is the risk of an exit even by accident by the UK from the EU in a disorderly fashion. The EU has done everything it can to help get the Withdrawal Agreement over the line. The impasse can only be solved in the #UK. Our no-deal preparations are now more important than ever before. Michel Barnier (@MichelBarnier) March 12, 2019 In order to avoid a walkout by Cabinet ministers who oppose a no-deal Brexit, Mrs May has given Tories a free vote on Wednesday evenings no-deal motion. They will vote on a motion stating: This House declines to approve leaving the European Union without a Withdrawal Agreement and a framework on the future relationship on March 29. If MPs reject no-deal as most Westminster observers expect a third vote will follow on Thursday on whether to authorise Mrs May to request an extension of the two-year Article 50 negotiation process. Members of the Malthouse Compromise group of Tories from both Leave and Remain wings immediately tabled an amendment proposing a standstill agreement lasting as late as the end of 2021, during which the UK would observe EU rules and pay into Brussels budgets while a full trade deal is negotiated. Mr Barnier has already insisted there could not be a transition period without a full Withdrawal Agreement. Expand Close (PA Graphics) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp (PA Graphics) Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said he would prefer a no-deal scenario even though it risks economic harm and threatens to break up the United Kingdom to the prospect of not leaving the European Union. He told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: Between those very unpleasant choices, I think no Brexit is the bigger risk. But Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd, one of the ministers who may have quit if asked to back a no-deal Brexit, told Sky News: Leaving without a deal would be very bad for our economy, very bad for our security. In preparation for a no-deal outcome, the UK has set out its new tariff schedule which would force up prices on EU imports including cars and many food products but could reduce costs on goods from elsewhere. A no deal Brexit is a "sledgehammer hanging over business" and needs to be ruled out today, says @cbicarolyn from @CBItweets which represents thousands of businesses #r4today https://t.co/hdWGx2jHU8 pic.twitter.com/ZFwE3teQbW BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) March 13, 2019 The CBI warned the new tariffs would act as a sledgehammer to the economy. The UK Government will also not introduce any new checks or controls on goods moving across the land border into Northern Ireland, raising fears it would potentially create a loophole which could be exploited by smugglers. Expand Close MPs in the Commons before the Brexit vote result was announced on Tuesday night (UK Parliament/Mark Duffy) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp MPs in the Commons before the Brexit vote result was announced on Tuesday night (UK Parliament/Mark Duffy) The Brexit deal was defeated by 149 votes on Tuesday night, with 75 Conservatives rebelling. Former foreign secretary Boris Johnson said he still expects Brussels to come up with a new deal, telling LBC Radio: The horses always change places in the final furlong, its always at five minutes to midnight that the real deal is done. He said it is absurd for Mrs May to grant a free vote on no-deal, because it is a fundamental part of the Brexit negotiating strategy. Uzbek Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov met with Taliban leadership in the capital of Qatar, Doha, on March 4. During the meeting, the head of the Talibans diplomatic office in Doha Mullah Baradar Akhund endorsed President Shavkat Mirziyoyevs political and economic endeavors in Afghanistan. No other substantive message relating to the meeting was released. Nevertheless, the meeting with Baradar was significant enough that upon return to Tashkent, on March 6, Kamilov met with an Afghan delegation led by Hamdullah Mohib, Afghan President Ashraf Ghanis national security advisor. The Diplomat reports in its article What is Uzbekistans Role in the Afghan Peace Process? that official reports on that meeting are similarly vague, but Kamilov likely briefed the Afghan delegation on his trip to Doha. In June 2018, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Uzbekistan announced for the first time that it establishedcontacts with the Taliban. Such contacts could have been established earlier as Taliban members were reportedly invited to, but declined to participate, in a conference on Afghanistan held in Tashkent in March 2018. The Taliban likely were not ready for the spotlight at an international conference, but eventually came to Tashkent in August 2018. It was the first time the Taliban had done so since their participation at the 6+2 meeting held in Tashkent in 1999. The maneuverings with regard to the Taliban from the Uzbek side are spearheaded by Foreign Minister Kamilov. Kamilov paid his first official visit to Kabul under the new administration on January 23, 2017, only a month after Mirziyoyev was inaugurated. Soon after that, interactions between Afghan and Uzbek diplomats became a regular occurrence. The other Uzbek official dealing with Afghanistan is Special Representative Ismatulla Irgashev, who was appointed in May 2017. Uzbekistan is currently capitalizing on the fact that neither the Afghan government nor the Taliban is ready to communicate and negotiate with each other. Tashkent has willingly assumed an intermediary role. Meetings with the Taliban usually alternate with meetings with Afghan government officials, likely to deliver messages from one to the other. Although so far merely a messenger, Uzbekistan has a strong position on how peace in Afghanistan can be reached. According to Tashkent, the peace process should be managed by Afghans themselves, without the interference of other countries and through a direct dialogue without preconditions from the parties. Uzbekistans interest in Afghanistan finally settling in peace is twofold. First, Uzbekistan does not want an oozing wound to its south that could jeopardize its own security: Secure Afghanistan means secure Uzbekistan, prosperous and stable South and Central Asia, summarized Mirziyoyev at the March 2018 conference in Tashkent. Second, Uzbekistan is interested in playing a greater economic role in Afghanistan. Two projects of particular importance are the Surkhan-Puli Khumri energy project aimed at increasing the delivery of electricity from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan, and a transportation project to extend the existing Hairatan-Mazar-i-Sharif railroad to Herat. The latter project has a long-term implication for Tashkent, because once realized the railroad will become the shortest route for the countrys goods to reach a sea port. For Uzbekistan, which until recently viewed its southern neighbor as its largest concern, proactively meeting with the Taliban to broker peace and advocating for economic projects is a huge transformation. Afghanistan probably appreciates working with Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan is the smallest power, with the fewest ulterior political interests, among the many attempting to participate in the peace process including the United States, Russia, Pakistan, India, and others. Although it is unclear what exactly Uzbekistans contribution will be in brokering an end to this long conflict, Tashkent seems to be consistent in meeting with both the Taliban and officials in Kabul. Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during the Brexit debate (House of Commons/Mark Duffy/PA) MPs have dramatically rejected crashing out of the European Union without a deal at any time and under any circumstances. In a surprise move, the Commons voted 312 to 308 a majority of four in favour of an amendment tabled by Tory former cabinet minister Dame Caroline Spelman. And the vote was later confirmed by a more emphatic 321 votes to 278 when the Governments motion was put forward as amended. Despite vote to reject a no-deal Brexit, Prime Minister Theresa May told the House of Commons that it remains the default option if no deal was reached. Dame Caroline had attempted to withdraw her amendment, but it was moved by fellow signatory Yvette Cooper and won the support of a majority of MPs during a string of crunch Brexit votes on Wednesday evening. The amendment, which is not legally binding, was added to a Government motion tabled by Mrs May which would have rejected no-deal on the scheduled Brexit date of March 29 but left it on the table for other times. Expand Close (PA Graphics) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp (PA Graphics) After the voting, Mrs May said that MPs will vote on Thursday on an extension to Article 50, which could involve a short delay to implement a deal agreed in the next few days or a longer delay if no agreement is reached. To avoid a walkout by Cabinet ministers who oppose a no-deal Brexit, Mrs May initially gave Tories a free vote on the Government motion. But this was transformed into a three-line whip to oppose the amended motion. Opposition MPs blamed strong-arm tactics by Tory whips as Dame Caroline tried to pull her amendment before it came to a vote. Expand Close Conservative MP Caroline Spelman attempted to pull the cross-party amendment (PA Wire/PA Images) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Conservative MP Caroline Spelman attempted to pull the cross-party amendment (PA Wire/PA Images) The former Tory chairman told the Commons that Mrs Mays motion offered a greater opportunity than hers for obtaining a really large majority against a no-deal Brexit. But Speaker John Bercow told her it was not possible for her to withdraw the amendment, as one of its other signatories could move it to a vote. Independent Group MP Anna Soubry told the Commons: Its a shameful carry-on when a former chairman of the Conservative Party is whipped against to the extent she will not push that amendment to the vote. MPs rejected by 374 votes to 164 an amendment from members of the Malthouse Compromise group of Tories from both Leave and Remain wings of the party. This called for a standstill agreement lasting as late as the end of 2021, during which the UK would observe EU rules and pay into Brussels budgets while a full trade deal is negotiated. The EU has already rejected the idea, which it views as amounting to a transition period without a formal Withdrawal Agreement. Expand Close Prime Minister Theresa May speaks to MPs after the vote (House of Commons/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Prime Minister Theresa May speaks to MPs after the vote (House of Commons/PA) An extension to Article 50 can only be granted by unanimity among the 27 remaining EU member states, and Brussels has made clear they will do so only if the UK presents a credible justification for being given more time. The EUs chief negotiator Michel Barnier told the European Parliament it was the responsibility of London to suggest a way forward. What will their choice be, what will be the line they will take? he asked. That is the question we need a clear answer to now. That is the question that has to be answered before a decision on a possible further extension. Why would we extend these discussions? The discussion on Article 50 is done and dusted. We have the Withdrawal Agreement. It is there. We spared no effort to try and reconcile UK red lines and demands with our duty to protect the EU, the integrity of Internal Market, and the interests of EU citizens. The Withdrawal Agreement is the best and only possible solution. FVP Timmermans on #Brexit pic.twitter.com/efUqzGXMjy European Commission (@EU_Commission) March 13, 2019 Divisions between the different wings of the Cabinet were on show as MPs considered rejecting a no-deal Brexit. Chancellor Philip Hammond used his Spring Statement to call on MPs to put aside our differences and seek a compromise, warning the UK would face significant disruption from a no-deal Brexit. But Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said he would prefer a no-deal scenario even though it risks economic harm and threatens to break up the United Kingdom to the prospect of not leaving the European Union. Labours Sir Keir Starmer said that after the 149-vote defeat of her Withdrawal Agreement on Tuesday, Mrs Mays mantra of my deal or no deal should be dead and buried. But Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss indicated that she believes the deal could still be brought back a third time to the Commons and secure a majority. I think it is still alive, I do, Ms Truss told BBC Radio 4s PM. Ultimately, when you look at the alternatives which are a customs union, no Brexit or no-deal Theresa Mays deal is more attractive than those other three options. I think thats the conclusion MPs will ultimately come to. MPs are today set to vote against a no-deal Brexit after Theresa May suffered another crushing defeat in Parliament. DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds last night said it made no sense to take no-deal off the table. He warned that it would be a "totally self-defeating and utterly counter-productive" move which would strengthen Brussels' hand in future talks. Read More The Government's proposals for the border in the event of a no-deal Brexit will be published today. But crashing out of the EU in 16 days' time looks increasingly unlikely. The Prime Minister's Brexit plan was defeated by 149 votes in the House of Commons, a reduced margin from the record 230 defeat in the first meaningful vote in January. DUP MP Sammy Wilson tweeted: "Respect the constitutional and economic integrity of the UK and you will have a deal." Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the Prime Minister should now call a general election. "The Government has been defeated again by an enormous majority and it must accept its deal is clearly dead and does not have the support of this House," he said. But Downing Street insiders have ruled out the possibility of an election and also insisted that Theresa May has no intention of resigning. Parliament will vote tomorrow on whether Article 50 should be extended and Brexit delayed. A clear majority of MPs are on course to oppose the UK leaving the EU without a deal on March 29. In a highly unusual move, the Prime Minister has given Tory MPs a free vote in order to avoid a split in her party and cabinet resignations. Labour said it proved she had "given up any pretence of leading the country" and was putting her party's selfish interests before Britain's. The DUP issued a strong warning against removing the option of no-deal. "The best way to get a deal you can actually vote for is to keep the threat of a no-deal on the table," Mr Dodds told Sky News. "Once you take that threat off you are bound to be offered terms which are less advantageous in the sure and certain knowledge that the other side have that you're not going to walk away. "So, it's totally self-defeating, it's utterly counter-productive." Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald said the "landslide rejection" of Mrs May's Brexit plan by the House of Commons was symbolic. "The scenes show the absolute disregard for the people of Ireland, for our rights, our economy and the Good Friday Agreement that is at the heart of the Tory Brexit agenda. "The Withdrawal Agreement is imperfect but it is the only deal on offer," she said. "The backstop is a guarantee that no hard border will be imposed on this island and protects the Good Friday Agreement." She added: "A crash-out Brexit would be unthinkable for the peace process, jobs, trade and to the loss of people's rights and quality of life, particularly in border communities. "Despite giving assurances to Theresa May the EU has made clear that the Withdrawal Agreement is not going to be reopened for negotiation. "There is now a need to intensify planning for a no-deal crash with an imperative to ensure no return to a hard border, protections of our agreements and safeguarding the rights of citizens." Responding to Mrs May's defeat, Irish Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney told the BBC: "The predictions were consistent enough over the last few days that this would be a heavy defeat. "We now need to be patient and calm to allow this process in Westminster to take its course." MPs voted by 391 to 242 against the deal, despite the Prime Minister's assurance that new agreements reached with Jean-Claude Juncker in Strasbourg would ensure the UK cannot be trapped in the controversial backstop arrangement indefinitely. Some 75 Conservative MPs rebelled to vote against the deal, while just three Labour MPs and four independents joined the 235 Tories who backed it. European Commission president Mr Juncker had already warned that if MPs turned down the package agreed in Strasbourg on Monday, there would be "no third chance" to renegotiate. Struggling with a croaky voice, Mrs May told Parliament that she still believed that leaving with a deal was the best option for Britain and that "the deal we've negotiated is the best and indeed the only deal available". She said: "Let me be clear. Voting against leaving without a deal and for an extension does not solve the problems we face. "The EU will want to know what use we mean to make of such an extension and this House will have to answer that question. "Does it wish to revoke Article 50? Does it want to hold a second referendum? Or does it want to leave with a deal, but not this deal? "These are unenviable choices. Thanks to the decision that the House has made this evening, they are choices that must now be faced." An extension requires the unanimous agreement of all 27 remaining member states, and Mr Juncker has warned that it cannot stretch beyond May 23 unless the UK takes part in the European Parliament elections starting on that date. Following the Commons' vote, a spokesman for European Council president Donald Tusk said: "On the EU side we have done all that is possible to reach an agreement ... it is difficult to see what more we can do. "If there is a solution to the current impasse it can only be found in London." He added: "With only 17 days left to March 29, today's vote has significantly increased the likelihood of a no-deal Brexit. We will continue our no-deal preparations and ensure that we will be ready if such a scenario arises." Before MPs voted, cabinet gave its approval to Mrs May's package at an early morning meeting. But the momentum moved sharply against the Prime Minister shortly afterwards, as Attorney General Geoffrey Cox released formal legal advice that the changes secured by Mrs May "reduce the risk" that the backstop will be permanent, but do not remove it altogether. One of Northern Ireland's leading business organisations has said that Downing Street's plans for a no-deal Brexit would break the Government's pledges to avoid a hard border in Ireland. It comes as the European Commission has insisted it will impose World Trade Organisation tariffs on UK goods if a withdrawal deal is not agreed. The UK proposals - announced on Wednesday morning in a bid to "inform" MPs ahead of a no-deal vote in parliament - state there will be no checks and no tariffs imposed on goods moving from the Republic of Ireland across the border into Northern Ireland. However, tariffs will be payable on goods moving from the EU into the rest of the UK through Northern Ireland. The government insisted the approach would not create a border down the Irish Sea. Reacting, EU Commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas said: The differential treatment of trade on the island of Ireland and other trade between the EU and the UK raises concerns. In the event of no deal, the Union has already made clear it will apply its normal third country trade regime to all trade with the UK and accordingly charge Most Favoured Nation tariffs on imports from the UK into the EU." Read More Earlier CBI NI Director Angela McGowan said the tariff measures are "totally contradictory" to previous the Government's promises to prevent a hard border in Northern Ireland. She said the latest proposed tariff scheme would leave Ireland with no option but to apply EU tariffs on all goods coming from the UK and therefore would require substantive checks to take place at the Irish border. This desperate and ill-thought through trade measure will create all the conditions for a hard border in Northern Ireland. Angela McGowan Todays proposed policy also contradicts previous government promises to deliver a trade policy that works for all UK regions. The government has acknowledged that this policy will not work for Northern Ireland leaving local industry at a huge disadvantage, creating an unlevel playing field in terms of competitiveness and leaving the region with all the problems associated with border checks and delays on exports into the Republic of Ireland," said Ms McGowan. As part of the UK plans, it is thought there would be no new checks enforced between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, rather an intelligence-based approach will be used to target abuse of the system. The government said it recognised Northern Irelands businesses and farmers would have concerns about the impact the proposals could have on competitiveness. "However these are the only steps the UK government can unilaterally take to deliver on our absolute commitment to avoid a hard border in the event of no deal," said the UK Government in a statement. Government said the approach would be temporary and in place for up to 12 months. And there could be tariffs imposed on good coming from Northern Ireland into the Republic. It's reported there has been much bemusement in Brussels at the proposals given how the sticking point in the process has been the treating of Northern Ireland differently to the rest of the UK. The No Deal plan for NI is shambolic & as I've said before, in a No Deal scenario NI will be biggest loser * no tariffs on ROI/EU goods entering NI across border * tariffs applicable on goods entering GB via Dover, Holyhead etc * NI therefore treated differently #Brexit Seamus Leheny (@Freight_NI) March 13, 2019 Seamus Lehany of the Freight Transport Association in Northern Ireland said the plan was "shambolic". "NI will be the biggest loser," he said. "No tariffs on ROI/EU goods entering NI across border. Tariffs applicable on goods entering GB via Dover, Holyhead etc. NI therefore treated differently." "Wild west of the UK' The Northern Ireland Retail Consortium said the proposals would make the region the "wild west of the UK". "This will affect Northern Ireland's reputation as a serious trading area," said Aodhan Connolly. "This is simply a mess.. it is not a solution at all." He said the EU would likely look to secure its single market from cheap loc standard imports creating a hard border. "The people who will suffer most are legitimate businesses and farmers in Northern Ireland who will be able to move their goods to the Republic without tariffs whereas Republic of Ireland goods will have free rein and it will be a goldmine for criminals." He added: "This does not maintain control of the border, monitor flow of goods into the UK and organised criminals will exploit this system. "This proves yet again why we need a deal." Responding, the DUP's Westminster leader Nigel Dodds would not say he would be vote to take a no-deal off the table in the Commons later on Wednesday. He said as a principle the DUP did not think removing the prospect of a no deal was a good negotiating tactic. He described as a "nonsense idea" the prospect completely ruling out a no deal. "We want to get a deal," he told the BBC. "If you want to buy a car, or anything across the table, you would never say to the person 'well it doesn't matter what terms you offer I will take it and I won't walk out'." There will be differences, there will be special arrangements but not fundamental changes. Nigel Dodds The North Belfast MP said one of the reasons they could not back Theresa May's deal was based on the Attorney General' legal opinion there was no mechanism for the UK to leave the backstop. He said the Cabinet had "undermined" the prime minister in telling her to take a no deal off the table. "The principle of taking a no deal off the table gives leverage and power to the other side." Mr Dodds said the DUP would form its policy on the principles of preserving the union "in terms of the constitutional and economical integrity of the union." "We are about the single market integrity of the United Kingdom." He said unionism was united on opposition to the backstop. "If we want to leave the EU we should do it together," he continued. "There will be differences for Northern Ireland, there will be special arrangements but not fundamental changes like separate customs arrangements or having our laws made in Brussels without any say from anyone at Westminster or the Assembly, that is unconciousable.. it is not a rationale way forward." In the case of no-deal, the UK Government is committed to entering discussions urgently with Brussels and Dublin to agree long-term arrangements. Secretary of State Karen Bradley said: "The Government has been clear that a deal with the European Union is the best outcome for Northern Ireland. "But we will do all we can to support people and businesses across Northern Ireland in the event that we leave without a deal. "The measures announced today recognise the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland. These arrangements can only be temporary and short term." Union and EU flags fly outside the Palace of Westminster, London. European leaders and senior EU figures have reacted with disappointment at the defeat of Prime Minister Theresa Mays Brexit deal. The House of Commons rejected the EU Withdrawal Agreement by an overwhelming majority 391 voted against the deal compared to 242 in favour. Several said a no-deal Brexit was now more likely and preparations for that scenario would be intensified. The EU has done everything it can to help get the Withdrawal Agreement over the line. The impasse can only be solved in the #UK. Our no-deal preparations are now more important than ever before. Michel Barnier (@MichelBarnier) March 12, 2019 The EUs chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier tweeted on Tuesday night: The EU has done everything it can to help get the Withdrawal Agreement over the line. The impasse can only be solved in the #UK. Our no-deal preparations are now more important than ever before. Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliaments Brexit negotiator, said the UK has spiralled out of control. Brexit was about taking back control, instead the UK spiralled out of control. Only cross-party cooperation putting Country first, can end this mess. If this happens we will fully engage. #BrexitDeal pic.twitter.com/kseavUwYnp Guy Verhofstadt (@guyverhofstadt) March 12, 2019 Sharing an image on Twitter of a man and woman kissing with their faces painted separately in Union Flag and EU flag colours, he wrote: Brexit was about taking back control, instead the UK spiralled out of control. Only cross-party cooperation putting Country first, can end this mess. If this happens we will fully engage. Deeply saddened by the outcome of the #Brexit vote this evening. Despite clear EU-assurances on the backstop, we now face a chaotic #NoDeal #Brexit scenario. And time is almost up. We will intensify our #NoDeal preparation Lars Lkke Rasmussen (@larsloekke) March 12, 2019 Meanwhile, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said he would intensify his countrys no-deal preparations. He wrote on Twitter: Deeply saddened by the outcome of the #Brexit vote this evening. Despite clear EU assurances on the backstop, we now face a chaotic #NoDeal #Brexit scenario. And time is almost up. We will intensify our #NoDeal preparation. Prime Minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte said a no-deal Brexit was now more likely and a solution must come from London. I regret the outcome of tonight's #Brexitvote. It is disappointing that the UK government has been unable to ensure a majority for the Withdrawal Agreement agreed by both parties in November, even after multiple additional assurances from the EU. A solution must come from London. Mark Rutte (@MinPres) March 12, 2019 He wrote on Twitter: I regret the outcome of tonights #Brexitvote. It is disappointing that the UK government has been unable to ensure a majority for the Withdrawal Agreement agreed by both parties in November, even after multiple additional assurances from the EU. He added the Dutch government would keep working tirelessly to make sure the damage for Dutch citizens living and working in the UK was minimised in the now more likely case of a no-deal #Brexit. Elsewhere, Prime Minister of Spain Pedro Sanchez tweeted: We regret the decision of the British Parliament despite the EUs effort to achieve the best agreement. The European project must move forward to ensure freedom, stability and prosperity. Gloria Hunniford believes it is right that gender pay disparities are investigated. The Northern Ireland-born presenter said she would be "really, really cross" if a man received more money than her for the same work. Hunniford has said she "one million percent" supports the drive for equal pay in the media. Speaking at the Television and Radio Industries Club (TRIC) Awards in London, she said: "I think it's unfair, it doesn't cross my particular path, but I think newsreader is the best example - if I were one and the man sitting beside me, I would be really, really cross if he was getting paid more than me." Hunniford added: "There are different salaries for different things; if you have a female newsreader and a male newsreader doing exactly the same job, there's no question in my mind that they should be getting the same pay. "I think it's right that the whole aspect is being investigated." The BBC is to be investigated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) over suspected past pay discrimination against female employees. Norwegian socialite Martine Vik Magnussen, 23, whose body was found semi-naked in the basement of a block of flats (Handout/PA) Police hunting the fugitive son of a wealthy businessman allegedly in hiding over the murder of a Norwegian socialite in London have told him: we will never give up. Farouk Abdulhak remains the only suspect in the death of Martine Vik Magnussen, whose partially-concealed body was found in rubble in the basement of flats on Great Portland Street in central London on March 16 2008. She was last seen with Abdulhak son of billionaire sugar magnate Shaher Abdulhak as the pair left the Maddox nightclub in Mayfair in the early hours of March 14. The pair studied international business relations at the private Regents Business School in Regents Park. By the time 23-year-old Ms Vik Magnussens remains were found, Abdulhak had fled to Egypt and on to Yemen. A post-mortem examination gave her cause of death as compression to the neck. She had also been raped. An inquest at Westminster Coroners Court in 2010 recorded a verdict of unlawful killing. Expand Close Martine Vik Magnussen, who was found murdered in 2008 (Handout/PA) PA Archive/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Martine Vik Magnussen, who was found murdered in 2008 (Handout/PA) Police fear they are unable to bring Abdulhak to justice while he remains at large because there is no extradition treaty between Yemen and the UK, meaning he cannot be forced to return. Detective Superintendent Andy Partridge, of the Metropolitan Polices homicide and major crime command, said: March 14 will mark 11 years since Martine was brutally murdered and this case remains a priority for myself and my officers to solve. The suspect wanted for Martines death fled the UK within hours of her murder and to this day he remains wanted. I want to make it clear that we will not stop in our efforts to get justice for Martines family and bring the person responsible for her murder to justice. Expand Close Farouk Abdulhak, the playboy son of a billionaire suspected of raping and killing Norwegian student Martine Vik Magnussen in 2008 (Handout/PA) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Farouk Abdulhak, the playboy son of a billionaire suspected of raping and killing Norwegian student Martine Vik Magnussen in 2008 (Handout/PA) Mr Partridge, who has kept Ms Vik Magnussens family informed of developments, said: The family and loved ones of Martine have remained dignified and resolute throughout the years and they deserve answers. The passage of time only serves to make this injustice greater and I am appealing once again to Farouk Abdulhak to return to the UK. This matter will not go away no matter how many years pass by. My officers will never give up on seeking justice for Martine and her grieving family and friends deserve some measure of closure from what must be an unimaginable nightmare. He said targeted social media posts would be published in Arabic this week in an effort to encourage those who know Abdulhak to encourage him to return to the UK. Guy Verhofstadt is the European Parliaments representative in the Brexit negotiations (Jonathan Brady/PA) European politicians have called for the UK to put Queen and country before party politics following the defeat of Prime Minister Theresa Mays Brexit deal. Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliaments Brexit co-ordinator, urged the UK government to make up your minds as he appealed for clarity over the next steps. On Tuesday the House of Commons rejected the EU Withdrawal Agreement by an overwhelming majority 391 voted against the deal compared to 242 in favour. Mr Verhofstadt told MEPs in the European Parliament in Strasbourg: That is what we need and so I am against every extension, whether an extension of one day, one week, even 24 hours, if its not based on a clear opinion of the House of Commons for something. That we know what they want. This view was shared by the EUs chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, who said it was the responsibility of the UK to provide a clear answer. Mr Verhofstadt added: Please make up your minds in London, because this uncertainty cannot continue. Not for us, not for Britain and certainly not for our citizens. He urged MPs in Britain to find a cross-party majority for a deal, adding: Queen and country needs to come first. Melania-Gabriela Ciot, speaking for the European Council, said it would expect a credible justification for any extension requested by the UK and for its duration. Nigel Farage said the only neat solution was to leave the EU on March 29, calling for any extension request from Britain to be vetoed. He told MEPs: We have had enough, we have seen the snarling anger towards our country of Mr Verhofstadt, the bureaucratic intransigence of Mr Barnier, the constant stream of insults that come from Mr Tusk, and we are of one mind: we dont want to be governed by you, we want to govern ourselves. It comes as German MEP Hans-Olaf Henkel called for European politicians to stop bashing London. He said the European Commission now had a historic chance to help Remain voters in the UK secure a second referendum, and change the minds of Brexiteers. Applause broke out but a heckler shouted out rubbish. Several responses to Tuesdays vote have suggested a no-deal Brexit is now more likely and preparations for that scenario would be intensified. Mr Barnier said the risk had never been higher, while Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said he would intensify his countrys no-deal preparations. He wrote on Twitter: Deeply saddened by the outcome of the #Brexit vote this evening. Despite clear EU assurances on the backstop, we now face a chaotic #NoDeal #Brexit scenario. And time is almost up. We will intensify our #NoDeal preparation. Deeply saddened by the outcome of the #Brexit vote this evening. Despite clear EU-assurances on the backstop, we now face a chaotic #NoDeal #Brexit scenario. And time is almost up. We will intensify our #NoDeal preparation Lars Lkke Rasmussen (@larsloekke) March 12, 2019 Prime Minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte said a no-deal Brexit was now more likely and a solution must come from London. I regret the outcome of tonight's #Brexitvote. It is disappointing that the UK government has been unable to ensure a majority for the Withdrawal Agreement agreed by both parties in November, even after multiple additional assurances from the EU. A solution must come from London. Mark Rutte (@MinPres) March 12, 2019 Mr Verhofstadt, tweeting on Tuesday evening, said the UK has spiralled out of control. Brexit was about taking back control, instead the UK spiralled out of control. Only cross-party cooperation putting Country first, can end this mess. If this happens we will fully engage. #BrexitDeal pic.twitter.com/kseavUwYnp Guy Verhofstadt (@guyverhofstadt) March 12, 2019 Sharing an image on Twitter of a man and woman kissing with their faces painted separately in Union Flag and EU flag colours, he wrote: Brexit was about taking back control, instead the UK spiralled out of control. Only cross-party cooperation putting Country first, can end this mess. If this happens we will fully engage. Syrian refugees have found peace and security in Turkey, a UNICEF official in Turkey told state-run Anadolu Agency during his visit to this southeastern province, according to Hurriyet Daily News' article Syrian refugees find peace, security in Turkey. I have seen refugees settling over four years and finding the peace and the security they were looking for while crossing the border [to Turkey], said Philippe Duamelle. He said he witnessed the arrival of around 4 million refugees in Turkey in the past few years, and stressed great expression of solidarity and hospitality extended by the Turkish people and government. We have seen an entire generation of children in need of assistance, and still, today, four years later, eight years into the conflict in Syria, a large number of children still need our assistance, still need the international community to remain mobilized to give a future to those children, he said. Noting UNICEF has been in Turkey since 1951, Duamelle said it and Turkey have a very solid, long established and close partnership, as well as a joint vision on preparing refugee children for a better future. He said almost 650,000 Syrian children are finding their way to school in Turkey, adding more than 85 percent are in public schools. Duamelle praised the access of refugees -- children in particular -- to the education, medical care and cycle social services in Turkey. These are amazing achievements. And the big credit goes to the Turkish government and the Turkish people for that. Voicing there are still a lot of children in need of assistance, Duamelle said more than 400,000 Syrian children are not at school to date, adding one of the first actions to be taken would be to find the ways to educate them. They need to keep the hope in the future, and education is one of the best ways to do that, he said. He said that educated children will rebuild Syria, as well as bring the stability and peace into the region. It is very important that we continue investing in children, he said, adding that the international community needs to remain mobilized on this issue. He said that the necessary resources should be mobilized to support the efforts made by the Turkish government to care for such a large number of refugees. Recalling that children exposed to war have seen horrendous situations in Syria, Duamelle underlined the need of the cycle of social support. We need to help them how to live in a positive way and project themselves in the future in the positive way. Child protection, education, social protection, specific programs for young people are among the main priorities for UNICEF, he added. There are so many young people who need to find a way to still believe in their dreams and believe in their future, we need to help them all for that, he added. Anti Brexit billboards on the northern side of the border between Newry in Northern Ireland and Dundalk in the Republic of Ireland The UK Government will not introduce any new checks or controls on goods moving across the land border into Northern Ireland if the UK leaves the European Union without a deal, it has been announced. Under a temporary and unilateral regime announced by the Government, EU goods arriving from the Republic and remaining in Northern Ireland will not be subject to tariffs. However, tariffs will be payable on goods moving from the EU into the rest of the UK via Northern Ireland under a schedule of rates also released on Wednesday. Read More The Government insists that this will not create a border down the Irish Sea, as there will be no checks on goods moving between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Instead, normal compliance and intelligence methods will be used to detect any traders attempting to abuse the system. Ministers accepted that the new regime will cause "concerns" to Northern Irish businesses and farmers about the impact on their competitiveness. But they said these were the only steps that could be taken to deliver on the Government's commitment to avoiding a hard border in the case of no deal. Under the new regime for Northern Ireland, goods arriving from the Republic will still be subject to the same VAT and excise duty as at present. Small businesses trading across the border will be able to report VAT online without any new processes at the border. To protect human, animal and plant health, animals and animal products from outside the EU would be required to enter Northern Ireland through a designated entry point, while regulated plant materials from outside the EU and high-risk plants from inside Europe will require certification and pre-notification. There will be new UK import requirements such as document checks and registration for a small number of goods such as endangered species and hazardous chemicals which are subject to international agreements. Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley said: "The Government has been clear that a deal with the European Union is the best outcome for Northern Ireland. "But we will do all we can to support people and businesses across Northern Ireland in the event that we leave without a deal. "The measures announced today recognise the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland. These arrangements can only be temporary and short term." In the case of no-deal, the UK Government is committed to entering discussions urgently with Brussels and Dublin to agree long-term arrangements. Students are preparing to stage a second nationwide walkout on Friday as part of a global day of youth strike action urging leaders to tackle climate change. Organisers of the UK Youth Strike 4 Climate movement say events will take place in more than 100 towns and cities from Penzance to Aberdeen, driven by what students say is an alarming lack of government leadership on climate action. They say they expect attendances to be larger than the first UK strike on February 15, which saw thousands of students and young people defy school leaders and politicians to ditch lessons and lectures for demonstrations. 1325 places in 98 countries. And counting. 2days until 15th of March. Welcome China, Tanzania, Vanuatu, Cuba, Pakistan and many, many more. #FridaysForFuture #schoolstrike4climate https://t.co/EFTn7eCfm6 Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) March 13, 2019 The strikes, inspired by teenager Greta Thunberg, who protests every Friday outside Swedens parliament to urge leaders to tackle climate change, are part of a global day of action in more than 90 countries from Australia to the US. They come in the wake of a UN report which warned that limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, beyond which climate impacts become increasingly severe, requires unprecedented action. That includes cutting global carbon dioxide emissions by almost half within 12 years. Students in the UK are demanding the Government declare a climate emergency and take active steps to tackle the problem, communicate the severity of the ecological crisis to the public, and reform the curriculum to make it an educational priority. Too long our government has ignored the crisis at hand. We dont have anymore time. On Friday, we will walk out of school, college + university to demand radical climate action now. We are the future. We are rising. We WILL be heard. #YouthStrike4Climate #FridaysForFurture pic.twitter.com/F7mru33HBv UK Youth Climate Coalition (@ukycc) March 11, 2019 Anna Taylor, 17, co-founder of the UK Student Climate Network, said: Young people in the UK have shown that were angry at the lack of government leadership on climate change. Those in power are not only betraying us, and taking away our future, but are responsible for the climate crisis thats unfolding in horrendous ways around the world. The UK has been relatively shielded from the effects of the crisis so far, but those least responsible for contributing to climate change are already suffering the worst effects. It is our duty to not only act for those in the UK and our futures, but for everyone. Thats what climate justice means. George Bond, 16, of the UK Student Climate Network, said: It really is time that the Government, irrespective of whoever is in power stands up, put up their hands and admit that they severely failed to address the climate crisis so far. The scientists have been telling governments, policymakers and big business that we need to realign all sectors of the economy along environmental principles, yet theyve been dragging their heels and now were left to pick up the pieces. Some politicians and school leaders criticised young people for taking part in the education strike on February 15, but their action was backed by other MPs, academics and environmental campaigners. Police launched a delicate rescue operation after they found an opossum with its genitals stuck in a fence. Officers in Madison, Wisconsin, were dispatched on Tuesday morning after a concerned citizen, who saw the animal motionless on the fence, called police worried it might be in distress. Using a catchpole, the first responders were able to lift the animal up a bit and quickly determined a couple of pieces of his male anatomy had become wedged between fence slats, read an incident report from the City of Madison Police Department. After some debate about how to proceed without further harming the marsupial, officers managed to free him by lifting him as high as they could with the catchpole and spreading the slats to liberate the trapped appendages. Animal Rescue - MPD's commitment to high quality service is in no way limited to only humans. On this fateful day, officers were dispatched to an opossum sitting ... Posted by Madison Police Department on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 The opossum was initially motionless after being rescued from the uncomfortable position. The report read: Was he playing possum, trying to trick the MPD into believing this unthinkable ordeal had proven fatal? A couple of pokes with the pole and it turned out he was still with the living. He hissed a bit at the sergeant and at the officer, his way most likely of saying thanks for the assist. The opossum slowly waddled off. Going to be sitting in snow someplace for a long bit I bet you, remarked the sergeant to the officer. An English tourist whose body was found near a Guatemala highland lake popular with travellers died of haemorrhaging resulting from a traumatic brain injury, according to a post-mortem report. In a statement, the National Institute of Forensic Sciences of Guatemala also said 23-year-old Catherine Shaw had died four to six days earlier. Earlier on Tuesday, a doctor performing the examination said the body showed signs of trauma but no apparent gunshot or stab wounds. In the preliminary findings, there are no wounds from bullets or sharp weapons, Miguel Angel Samayoa told the Associated Press. There are blows to the body. Neither Dr Samayoa nor the institute said what might have caused the trauma. We are now able to confirm that the body found in the search in Guatemala is that of missing Catherine Shaw. Thank you to everyone who has helped in the search. Our thoughts are with Catherine@s family, who we will continue to support as they need. LBT Global (@LBT_Global) March 11, 2019 Ms Shaw, from Witney, Oxfordshire, was last seen before dawn on Thursday in the town of San Juan La Laguna, on the shores of Lake Atitlan. Police announced on Monday that her body had been found unclothed and in a state of decomposition in undergrowth near a mountain overlook. The Lucie Blackman Trust, which has been assisting Ms Shaws family, issued a statement urging people not to speculate about her death and saying it may have been a tragic accident not involving foul play. It added that Ms Shaw had been fasting for days before her disappearance and disposing of possessions, including clothing. She was very much a nature lover and adored sunrises, so it seems quite conceivable that she went up the mountain to greet the sunrise, shedding clothing as she went, and due to her lack of intake of food and fluid may have passed out or fallen, causing the wounds to her body, the statement added, cautioning that not all the facts were known and nothing could be ruled out. Catherine just loved mountains and sunrises, the family was quoted as saying. She died doing what she loved. The British Embassy confirmed that her father, Tarquin Shaw, had identified the body in Guatemala on Tuesday, and said it was working with local authorities and assisting the family. A Swedish teenage activist who has become a prominent voice in campaigns against climate change has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Three Norwegian politicians said they believe the massive movement Greta Thunberg has set in motion is a very important peace contribution. The 16-year-old has encouraged students to skip school to join protests demanding faster action on climate change, a movement that has spread beyond Sweden to other European nations, including Britain. Expand Close Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg holds a protest banner (Daniel Reinhardt/dpa via AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg holds a protest banner (Daniel Reinhardt/dpa via AP) Norwegian politician Freddy Andre Oevstegaardtold said that climate threats are perhaps one of the most important contributions to war and conflict. Any national politician can nominate somebody for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee does not publicly comment on nominations, which for 2019 had to be submitted by February 1. In January 1992, Peter Brooke, the-then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, sang Oh My Darling Clementine on the Late Late Show on RTE at the urging of Gay Byrne. That day, seven Protestant workmen had been killed in an IRA bomb. It was an unintended, but thoughtless, act of jollity that was inappropriate given the ghastly circumstances of the day. His actions were condemned by a chorus of unionist politicians, who called for his resignation. Being a man of sensitivity and with an old-fashioned sense of decency, he offered his resignation to the Prime Minister, John Major, who refused to accept it. However, after the general election two months later, he did drop him from his new Cabinet, in part because of his gaffe. Fast-forward to Karen Bradley, the current Secretary of State, who claimed, in answer to a question in the Commons from the DUP's Emma Little-Pengelly, that security force killings during the Troubles were "not crimes". Despite a blistering barrage of criticism, she gave an equivocal apology and still clung fiercely to her post. Compare her reaction to that of Peter Brooke, who realised his own unintentional, but hurtful, indiscretion and acted honourably by apologising and offering his resignation to John Major. His indiscretion was insignificant in comparison to Karen Bradley's appalling comments. Bradley has outraged a wide slice of opinion among victims of state violence, but also practically the whole nationalist community. Victims feel hurt, diminished and deeply dismayed by her gross insensitivity. They believe - and there is much evidence to support their conclusion - that she is politically biased against the nationalist community. Her apology appears to them to be politically contrived, purely to protect her own position as a Cabinet minister. Unusually, her Commons' answer has been criticised well beyond just nationalist opinion and includes politicians such as Sir Jeffrey Donaldson of the DUP and unionist political commentator Nelson McCausland. There is a burning sense of injustice lingering among those whose relatives were killed, or seriously injured, by the police or Army that they may never discover the truth regarding their deaths, let alone justice in a court of law. They believe that the state has run roughshod over their dead relatives and will protect their soldiers above all else. A case in point was the murder of 19-year-old Peter McBride by two soldiers operating in the New Lodge Road area of Belfast in 1992. Was his murder, in Bradley's ill-chosen words, "dignified and appropriate"? Was it appropriate that the soldiers convicted of his murder served only three years in jail and that, on release, were recruited back into the Scots Guards? How proud is the British Army to have two convicted murderers openly welcomed back into its ranks? What sort of message does this send out to rest of the world and to the victims of Army violence? Where is Britain's much-vaunted sense of fair play? Victims' families here may be forgiven for thinking that fair play applies to all, except the Irish. Although Bradley should have resigned, she will not, having the trust of a Prime Minister who herself is in office by default. She will cling onto the wreckage of her office, having lost any serious credibility as an impartial Secretary of State. She is, of course, just the latest in a series of superbly forgettable Secretaries of State, including Theresa Villiers and James Brokenshire, who made little contribution to political progress here. Their bias in favour of unionism and the DUP was evident in their dealings. Nor was there any attempt made by any of them to advance the issues surrounding legacy, upon which this whole sorry episode turns. If Bradley is "profoundly sorry" for the "offence and hurt" caused, then she should take immediate steps to implement the Stormont House Agreement of December 2014. In that agreement - which the local parties signed up to - there were a number of bespoke institutions outlined that would comprehensively address the legacy issue. To date, all that has been achieved is a meandering process of consultations designed to delay, rather than progress, dealing with legacy. This is an intolerable situation, given the corrosive effect that unresolved legacy issues continue to have on the health and well-being of our politics. This failure is a failure specific to the British Government, as it is their primary responsibility to legislate at Westminster for the major items on this crucial list. Top of the list is the Historical Investigations Unit, which would examine in detail all the outstanding 1,700 murders that have not yet been investigated. While it is impossible for Karen Bradley to fully repair the damage she has caused, she should at least attempt to repair it by quickly implementing the Stormont House Agreement. Alas, a forlorn hope. Theresa May's dying voice is a perfect metaphor for the malaise that is currently paralysing British politics over Brexit. In the House of Commons last night, the Prime Minister could barely speak as she outlined reasons for backing her renegotiated Brexit plan to unimpressed MPs. Read More And after that failed, she croaked out details of votes on a no deal Brexit today and extending Article 50 tomorrow. It was impossible not to look at Mrs May and think she should be wrapped up in bed with a hot water bottle and a cup of honey lemon tea, rather than fighting the Brexit war that has no end. The two votes this week won't change the choice that inevitably must be made. Extending Article 50 is likely to buy just two months' time. Decisions may be delayed but they will still have to be taken sooner or later. In a statement yesterday that will have raised smiles among its opponents, the DUP rounded on Brussels for being intransigent. Oh the irony! Yet it's difficult to dispute the logic of the party's assertion that taking no deal off the table is a strategic blunder for UK negotiators which will weaken their hand further in future discussions with the EU. But the DUP's 10 MPs and their European Research Group friends are in a minority on this, and many cabinet ministers - including perhaps the Prime Minister herself - are expected to vote against no deal today. It is only advisory and not binding yet it surely exposes the bluff that no deal is truly the Government's default position. If an extension of Article 50 goes beyond May, or June at the very latest, then the UK will have to hold EU elections. The longer any delay, the more we drift into second referendum territory. Even though Mrs May narrowed the margin of her defeat from 230 to 149 votes, she remains in a deeply humiliating position. Those Tory backbenchers who switched to support her did not do so out of any conviction of the merits of her Brexit plan. Indeed, MP Steve Double went as far as saying he was voting for this "t**d of a deal" because it was "the best t**d we've got". The Prime Minister had billed last night's Brexit vote as one of historic proportions, yet there was little dramatic delivery. The only woman who broke records yesterday was jockey Rachael Blackmore, who guided home the sole favourite to win on the opening day of the Cheltenham Festival by a majestic 16 lengths. The bookies had known Mrs May was a beaten docket from the start with Paddy Power setting the odds of a Commons' defeat for the Prime Minister at 1/100. In terms of where we go from here, they're pretty sure we won't be leaving without a deal this month (9/2); that Article 50 will be extended (1/7); and that there won't be a hard border (1/7). And there are reasons for optimism for Mrs May. The bookmakers put the chances of her ceasing to be Prime Minister this month at 3/1 - and if she survives April then the odds of her being ousted rise to 10-1. Her big rival Boris Johnson is only 15/2 to become the next occupant of No.10. The Prime Minister is by no means a racing certainty but, voice fading or not, she is still on her feet and hanging in. Greece is emerging from economy crisis, and tourism plays a significant role in this process. The industrys contribution to Greek GDP over the past four years is estimated at 37.5 billion euros. Last year, Greece was visited by 33 million tourists, including a million Russians. This year there is every reason to expect an increase in the number of tourists: by March, there is an increase of 15% at the early booking stage. Greece's tourism minister Elena Kountoura told about it Vestnik Kavkaza in an exclusive interview. - 2018 was the Greece-Russia cross-year of tourism. How effective was the partnership? - The results were very good: there were many festivals, concerts, as well as gastronomic events. We gave people in Russia and Greece the opportunity to get to know each others culture. The number of Russian tourists visiting Greece is close to a million. We are pleased that the Russians feel the warm hospitality in Greece and come to our country. It also proves that the search for historical, cultural ties between our countries leads to us. Russia is our priority in the overall promotion of Greece to dynamic foreign markets. - Do prices at Greek resorts, which have always been higher than in Egypt and Turkey, stop Russian tourists? What contribution did the Russian tourists make to Greece's economy? - We have made an image of a common Russian tourist. This is a highly educated person who knows what he wants and why he visits our country. Greece can provide opportunities for a luxurious, expensive vacation with new places of interest and new experiences; and Russian tourists like uncharted places. At the same time, there are budget vacation spots. We really like the image of a Russian tourist. - What are the expectations for 2019? Will there be a recession, since the financial situation in Russia is difficult? - We expect an increase in tourist flow. Greece offers Russian tourists the best price-quality ratio, regardless of what type of holiday they choose. According to our data by early booking for 2019, an increase in tourist traffic by 15% is expected. It does not matter what tourists it will be - coming to a family vacation, by groups or alone. We hope to meet expectations of the most demanding tourists. - You have been given new responsibilities to develop the tourism sector of the entire Mediterranean. Can we get a little more detail on that? - President of Malta Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca, in recognition of Greece's leading role in the development of tourism in the Mediterranean region, invited me to join the Board of Governors of the Mediterranean Tourism Foundation. So I became an honorary member of the Board of Governors of this fundation from Greece. Malta hosted the Mediterranean Tourism Forum, which was attended by representatives of the tourism industry and ministries from different countries. We worked a lot and came to the conclusion that tourism should have humanitarian values, should contribute to world betterment, democracy and unite people. All Mediterranean countries should work in this direction, because we have the necessary tools for this. We also decided to strengthen the role of women and youth in the tourism sector. It was a serious impetus for the emergence of a general idea of tourism in the Mediterranean. - What is the strategy for the development of the tourism sector, which has given Greece such impressive results? - In recent years, our strategy has been based on five main areas. The first is to increase the tourist season all year round. The second is the discovery of new destinations, which were not so popular among tourists before. The third is the support of modern youth tourism, designed for energetic people. The fourth is thematic tourism, involving the development of thematic projects. The fifth is to attract major investors in tourism. We take part in all exhibitions, work with the largest representatives of the tourist industry and tour operators to create new programs, including flight ones. Together we develop new directions and get new opportunities. In the Russian direction, we have achieved that flights to Greece are carried out not only from Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also from other regions. We have developed a new flight program. Planes arrive in Athens, Thessaloniki, Crete, Corfu, Rhodes, Paros, Zakynthos and other islands. We are currently working to increase the number of arrivals to northern Greece, to Thassos and other areas of the country. To this end, we are developing regional tourism departments, listening to ideas at the local level. We try to resolve all issues together. Thus, Greece reached the world tourist level, entering in the TOP-5 of the best tourist destinations in the world. We followed all the tourism trends and promoted the idea of authentic impressions that can be found in Greece. Greece is the only European Union country with more than 100 islands, each of them has its own beauty, which gives tourists a variety of impressions. This year, 55 thousand luxury suites in 4 and 5-star hotels were added. In 2018, we achieved high results, having about 33 million tourists. This is the highest figure that could be expected, and we hope that it will only grow in subsequent years. Accordingly, profits will grow. Over the past four years, tourism sector revenues have increased by 35%. This is about 20% of GDP, or about 37.5 billion euros. Thus, tourism was a good support for the economy of Greece, whose population is about 11 million people. This gives optimism for the further development of the industry. - Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras recently said that the country has overcome the effects of the crisis, which has reduced the economy by a quarter, and now there has been recover. It has even become possible to place 10-year government bonds on the Athens Stock Exchange. Is this the result of work in the tourism industry? - Tourism is one of the most important pillars of Greeces economy. Thanks to tourism, which is developing dynamically, other sectors are also developing - transport, trade, construction, there is a flow of investments into the country. We are optimistic about the future. - Are there any Russian investments in Greek tourism? - Of course, Russian investments are noticeable. This applies to hotels, travel agencies and other aspects of the tourism sector. Local Greek investments, investments from the U.S., China and a number of EU countries are also visible. Today Greece provides great opportunities for investors. Indonesian police officers stand guard near the house of a suspected militant in Sibolga, North Sumatra, March 13, 2019. Updated at 1:58 p.m. ET on 2019-03-13 The wife of a suspected militant detonated a bomb during a siege at a house in Indonesias North Sumatra province, killing herself and her 2-year-old child, police said on Wednesday. Police had surrounded the house in Sibolga city on Tuesday, a day after they arrested the womans husband, identified as Husain (alias Abu Hamzah), on suspicion of terrorism links, police spokesman Dedi Prasetyo told reporters. The woman allegedly detonated an explosive device when officers tried to enter the house on Tuesday, injuring a policeman, Dedi said. After a 10-hour standoff, she was believed to have detonated another bomb in the early hours of Wednesday, he said. The bodies have been recovered and sent to Sibolga Hospital, Dedi said. The blast took place 10 months after three families involved their children as young as nine, including two small girls, in carrying out suicide bombings that killed 28 people at churches and a police station in Surabaya, Indonesias second-largest city, officials said. President Joko Jokowi" Widodo, who is scheduled to visit Sibolga on Sunday, said the police operation had nothing to do with the upcoming presidential election scheduled for April 17. We appreciate the police for their hard work, Jokowi told reporters. Dedi said the homemade pipe bomb used by the woman to kill herself and her child contained potassium, bolts, nails and broken glass. "We have received information that the wife blew herself up," Dedi told The Jakarta Post. Husain was believed to be a member of Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), a militant network affiliated with the extremist group Islamic State (IS), national police chief Tito Karnavian told reporters. Police said JAD members were responsible for the suicide bombings on three churches and the police headquarters in Surabaya in May last year. Thirteen members of three families were among those who died in the attacks the first suicide bombings involving family members in the worlds largest Muslim-majority nation of more than 260 million people. Dedi said the presidents visit to Sibolga would go ahead despite the incident. Woman was radicalized by her husband, police say Police had tried to persuade the woman to surrender by bringing in local community and religious leaders, but she did not budge, officials said. Tito said she had been radicalized by her husband Husain. He did not elaborate. Tuesdays siege in Sibolga followed the arrest of a man identified by authorities only by his initials R.I.N., alias Putra Syuhada, on Saturday in Bandar Lampung, capital of Lampung province. Police alleged that R.I.N., who was arrested after being reported by his family, was planning to launch terrorist attacks on several police targets in Jakarta. That man was among five terrorist suspects who were arrested during the past week, including one in possession of suspected bomb-making materials such as nails, bolts and cans in West Kalimantan, police said. New recruit Husain was a new JAD recruit radicalized by a former convict who was involved in the bombing on the Riau provincial police headquarters last year, said Ridlwan Habib, a University of Indonesia security analyst. He learned to assemble bombs. But he had never joined a military training or traveled to Syria, Ridlwan told BenarNews. Ahmad Syamsudin in Jakarta contributed to this report. Updated to add direct quote from police spokesman Dedi Prasetyo. A boy holds a white rose as his mother holds a portrait of his brother, an apparent victim of President Rodrigo Dutertes war on drugs, during a religious service in Manila ahead of the observance of All Souls Day, Oct. 30, 2018. The U.S. State Department, in its latest annual report gauging the state of human rights worldwide, on Wednesday criticized governments in South and Southeast Asia for abuses including unlawful or arbitrary killings, torture and criminalization of same-sex sexual activities last year. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo presented the annual 2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. While his remarks did not name any of the countries in the two regions, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand were all criticized in individual reports about arbitrary killings linked to their governments. We have told those who disgrace the concept of human dignity they will pay a price, that their abuses will be meticulously documented and then publicized, the secretary of state told reporters as he announced the reports release at the state.gov website. In the Philippines, the State Department faulted President Rodrigo Duterte by pointing to ongoing extrajudicial killings tied to the war on drugs that was launched in 2016 when Duterte took office. It noted that the numbers had decreased and that the national police internal affairs service was tasked with investigating all deaths or injuries committed during police operations. There were no reports that civilian control over other security forces was inadequate, it stated. Last month, Duterte remained defiant. He lashed out at critics of his drug war, vowing it would be harsher in the days to come. Im putting everybody on notice, I will not allow my country to be destroyed by drugs. I dont want my country to end up as a failed state, Duterte said. I am declaring war. I am not declaring punitive police action, he adding, saying he was prepared to kill anybody who stands in the way. Elections in Bangladesh, Malaysia The report noted that Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League Party had won a third-consecutive term, but questioned the fairness of the vote. The State Department called it an improbably lopsided December parliamentary election that was not considered free and fair, and was marred by reported irregularities, including ballot-box stuffing and intimidation of opposition polling agents and voters. The department also said there were credible reports of harassment, intimidation, arbitrary arrests and violence that created issues for opposition candidates and their supporters to hold rallies and campaign freely. In addition, international election monitors were not issued accreditation within the proper timeframe, the report noted. In February, a group of American lawmakers sent a letter to Pompeo expressing concerns over violence, mass arrests and a crackdown on free speech leading up to and during the Bangladesh election on Dec. 30. The letter drew a response from Bangladeshi Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen. I have seen the content of the letter. Listen, the allegation of fraud in the election is the observation of the foreign affairs committee, not of the U.S. government, Momen told BenarNews last month. The U.S. secretary of state has congratulated me for assuming the office of foreign minister. This is very common practice; there is nothing to be worried about it (the letter). Bangladesh, along with India, Indonesia and Malaysia were targeted by the State Departments report for violence and criminalization linked to sexual orientation. The reports chapter on Malaysia also found fault with the countrys general election in May 2018, although it did not question the fairness of the outcome. The opposition Pakatan Harapan coalition defeated the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, resulting in the first transfer of power between coalitions since independence in 1957. Before and during the campaign, opposition politicians and civil society organizations alleged electoral irregularities and systemic disadvantages for opposition groups due to lack of media access and malapportioned districts favoring the then-ruling coalition, the report stated. Pompeo said the report, which had been produced every year since 1977, was able to bring about change by publicizing abuses and pressuring non-compliant regimes. Over the years, this report has pushed governments to change course and cease engaging in brutality and other abuses, he said in remarks posted to the departments website. We hope that it will continue to do so and cause oppressive regimes to honor human rights in places where those voices are often silenced and where deep yearnings for tolerance and respect have for too long gone unfulfilled, the top U.S. diplomat added. Royal Thai Army chief Gen. Apirat Kongsompong bows before a statue of the late King Chulalongkorn during an oath ceremony at army headquarters in Bangkok ahead of the March 24 general election, March 7, 2019. The largest and most active insurgent group in Thailands Deep South marked its 59th anniversary Wednesday with a videotaped message asking the international community to help solve the long-running conflict and pledging to carry on with its separatist fight. On the same day that Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN) posted its six-minute video online, Thai army chief Gen. Apirat Kongsompong traveled to Pattani province in the Deep South to advise troops to prepare contingency plans leading up to Thailands general election, scheduled for March 24. The BRN video features a lone speaker, who identified himself as Abdul Karim Khalib in videos released by the group in 2013. He spoke in Malay and the video carried English and Thai subtitles. Marking the organizations anniversary, Abdul said, In the midst of difficulties and wishes to unite a strong unity of people, BRN was established on 13 of March 1960 as an organization to continue a people demand and reclaim of ownership rights, according to the English subtitles. The purpose of BRN is to unite all kind[s] of Patani people into one line, he said. BRN will make a united people and receive the freedom, all freedom according to the United Nations by our fair self-government. Abdul also asked for the worlds help in bringing an end to the conflict while asking those in the Deep South to be patient. The real Patani situation at the present is the negotiation issue. Its not about process of negotiation because Thailand usually denies and reject[s] when there is a demand which belong to the international way, Abdul said. His comments appeared to reiterate the BRNs earlier demands that it be allowed to negotiate directly with the Thai government in peace talks and that the international community be involved. Hardcore leaders of the BRN have stayed away from current peace efforts that have been under way since 2015 between the Thai military government and MARA Patani, a panel that claims to represent various southern insurgent groups and factions, including the BRN. So, to the all Patani people, let us continue this struggle into the end, Abdul said, ending his videotaped statement. Be patient of suffering, be patient of difficulties. The Sustainable peace is [a]waiting us. Zachary Abuza, a Washington-based security analyst and BenarNews contributor, took note of the emergence of the latest video disseminated online by BRNs Information Department to mark the 59th anniversary of the rebel groups founding. It doesnt sound like theyre on the ropes and ready to negotiate, no matter what blather comes out of the #Thai government, Abuza said Wednesday in a Twitter post. Vigilance In Pattani, meanwhile, Apirat told troops to be vigilant as the election neared. We will step up safety measures to safeguard soft targets such as temples, mosques and public places which appear to be at risk of attacks, before and after the polls, he said. He vowed that troops will protect electoral officials at polling stations and voters as they travel to the polling stations and cast their ballots. We also will set up rapid deployment teams to cope with situations and arrange helicopters to carry ballots to safety in case of an emergency where the election commission requests our assistance, he said. Apirats visit to the troops came days after a military spokesman said security officials in the Deep South had been on full alert in reaction to graffiti reading Patani 110, in reference to the anniversary of the 1909 Anglo-Siamese Treaty began appearing in the region. Siam, as Thailand was formerly known, signed a treaty with Britain, which included a transfer to the British government all rights of protection, administration and control over the states of Kelantan, Terengganu, Kedah, Perlis, and adjacent islands. The Deep South and two nearby provinces were rocked by a series of small bombs that went off Saturday into Sunday as the region marked the treatys anniversary. Officials reported that no one was injured by the blasts, but blamed the explosions on insurgents, adding these were not related to the upcoming polls. Thailands southern border region has been marred by insurgency related-violence that has been blamed for almost 7,000 deaths since 2004. Deputy head of the "Revival of Russia" party, Rustam Jankezov, discussed Caucasian traditions and the way people of this region treat women and old people in an interview with Vestnik Kavkaza. - What can you tell about Caucasus, about its traditions and customs? - These who visited Caucasus know how good-natured people of this region are, how hospitable they are, how they treat guests. I recommend everyone to visit Caucasus at least once and see it with your own eyes. Media often spread only negative information: someone fought here or something else happened. But Caucasus is a part of Russia. No matter where you are, be it Karachay-Cherkessia, or the Irkutsk region, every place has something good and bad. But Caucasian sun is always warm, and people of Caucasus are good, sincere people. Some people talk about aggressiveness of Caucasian nations, but I would like to mention that usually didn't attack first, they just defended from enemies. If guests come to Caucasus, people of this region will always treat them like kings. Traditions of "blood brotherhood" are also very interesting, they helped to destroy barriers between former enemies, united families and helped to establish peace. - The International Women's Day was celebrated several days ago. What can you tell about the role of women in Caucasus? - Women have always been revered in the Caucasus region. Man worked, while woman kept home warm and safe. Woman was awlays responsible for comfort. Some say that women are begin belittled in the Caucasus, and that's just not true! On the contrary, women have always been exalted. How many beautiful poems are written about women? By Rasul Gamzatov, for example. You mentioned the International Women's Day, but it should be remembered that some of the peoples of the Caucasus were deported, particularly the Balkar people. For them, the day of deportation (March 8th) was a tragic day. - There is a conflict of generations due to a gap in values in the modern world. How much do people of the Caucasus respect their elders? - Nothing has changed when it comes elders. They have always been honored. I always stand up when someone older than me enters the room, no matter what nationality he is. All people of the Caucasus are like that. It's something out parents, grandmothers, grandfathers taught us. Appearance and actions reflect the life we live. We present ourselves to the world based on our self-perception and aspirations. To be modest is to consider what our clothing and behavior represent. Modesty isnt vain or boastful. It takes more than selfish desire into consideration and accepts responsibility for the influence our choices have on the lives of others. Modesty is needed in every century and in every culture, writes Nell Sunukjian. Knowledge of who we are in Christ is crucial to a life of biblical modesty. Modesty is simplicity. Jesus sets the example of the life we are to lead in the pages of Scripture. Living a simple and modest life in a society constantly selling us a new version of ourselves and our stuff is difficult. What Does It Matter What We Wear? 1 Samuel 16:7 - "Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart. It takes patience and fortitude to fit character and calling into our wardrobe and hobbies. Kevin DeYoung writes, being pretty (or handsome) is not a sin, working to improve your appearance does not have to be vanity, the line between modest and immodest is not always black and white -we are still left with the undeniable biblical fact that God considers modesty a virtue and its opposite a vice. Proverbs 11:22 says, Like a gold ring in a pigs snout is a beautiful woman who shows no discretion. Solomon uses discretion here to describe the capacity one has to use tasteful judgment. Modesty is closely connected to self-worth. Unaware of our value, we lack the proper judgment to attract the right attention. Jesus said above all, love. He is love establishes strength and wisdom to develop discretion, allowing us to become more like the person Solomon speaks of here: She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come. - Proverbs 31:25 As freeing as it is to walk through life knowing who we are in Him, we can still fall victim to charm. Proverbs 31:30 warns, Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised. When striving to become more like Christ, the very pinnacle of modesty, were less likely to fall victim to or display ourselves an outward display of charm. What Is Modesty According to the Bible? Modesty, according to the Bible, is less of self and more of Christ. Humility, purity, and generosity, but not to be noticed or practiced as a religious requirement. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, not to be ashamed of who we are in Christ. We exist to honor God, with our physical bodies and our behavior. Jesus said, So you are no longer a slave, but Gods child; and since you are his child, God has also made you an heir. (Galatians 4:7) When we walk with Christ as our Savior, we no longer have to fight to fit into this world because we are not of it. Pride and shame were never Gods intention. From the beginning of Genesis, our human frailty to fall into sin tainted our view of ourselves and our desires (Genesis 3:7). From the very beginning, God had a plan to cover us. Not only the newfound shame in our nakedness (Genesis 3:21) but the death we deserve for our sinful nature (Genesis 3:15). "Shame is a powerful category, in the Bible and in our own day. The key is knowing what things we should actually be ashamed of.- Kevin DeYoung Modesty is the outward expression of inner purity. Paul instructed the Philippians to fix their thoughts on things not of this world. In our everyday modern lives, this truth reminds us to filter everything through the truth of Gods Word (Philippians 4:7-9). For more verses on purity, click here. We get one life on earth to reflect Christs love. When the community of people surrounding us peers into our lives, what do they see? Its fun to dress up the surface, but when our focus is deeper, its not necessary. We shine just by taking care of our relationships with the Lord and the blessings Hes given us. Modesty is the powerful reflection of a daily walk with Jesus. (1 Peter 3:1-4) David prayed for God to search his heart, as we should, asking God to redefine our definition of beauty. Meggie Cotonethal points out the dual use of the Greek word kosmios (modest or respectable) in 1 Timothy 2:9-10 and 1 Timothy 3:2. It means orderliness and propriety in women in 1 Timothy 2:9, and in 1 Timothy 3:2 implores respectable and good behavior in men. She smartly observes, Modesty is not just a womans issue, and our Enemy delights in the fact that we think it is. Bible Verses about Modesty and How We Clothe Ourselves Proverbs 31:30 - Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised. 1 Samuel 16:7 - But the LORD said to Samuel, Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart. Matthew 6:1 - Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. Luke 22:42 - Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done. Romans 12:2 - Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what Gods will is- his good, pleasing and perfect will. Ephesians 2:10 - We are all Gods handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. 1 Corinthians 10:31 - So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Philippians 2:5 - Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus. 1 Timothy 4:8 - For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come. 1 Peter 5:5 - In the same way, you who are younger, submit yourselves to your elders. All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble. For more verses about modesty, click here. What Doesn't the Bible Cover about Modesty? The word modesty is not prevalent in the Bible. Though God clearly categorizes the lack thereof as a vice, Scripture focuses is more on powerful virtues to develop modesty. Jesus is the pinnacle of modesty. Present at the creation of the universe, Son of the One True God and Savior of the world, He humbled Himself to wear sandals and got His feet dirty right alongside us for a few decades before dying perhaps the most excruciating and unjust death in the history of mankind . . . voluntarily. Our Preferences vs. Biblical Principles 1 Timothy 4:8 - For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come. The difference between preference and principle lies in our priorities. Strength and health are important priorities, but Christ comes first. Fashion is fun, but Christ comes first. It feels good to get compliments and feel accepted, but Christ comes first. When He doesnt, the rest of our priorities stack up precariously like teetering Jenga blocks. Modesty reflects the most current update of our hearts. Philippians 2:5 reminds us Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus. Do clothes, finances, relationships, speech, the passions we pursue, and the food we consume get in the way of others seeing Christ in us? 1 Corinthians 10:31 encourages, So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. I often tell my children, if you have to ask if its OK, its probably not. What Should We Wear to Church? Our clothing tells people what is important to us. -Kim Cash Tate God wants to embrace us in worship. He promises to be present when two are more are gathered in His name. The church isnt a place to impress others. Christians should dress for church to outwardly reflect the soul God designed in the most Christ-honoring way, different for everyone, in every culture. God smiles at a diverse church crowd, locking arms to worship the One True God. John 8:54 - Jesus replied, If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me. What if someone shows up to church with their skin exposed (to a degree), tattoos, piercings, wild makeup, or maybe they're under or overdressed compared to the rest of the church? Jesus would take the seat right alongside and embrace them, as should we. What Does Modest Clothing Look Like? 1 John 2:16 - For everything in the world- the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life- comes not from the Father but from the world. Emily Maust Wood states, self-control does not equal others-control. The private parts God covered with leaves in Genesis are the places were to keep under cover. Anything that overexposes our intimacy should be kept under wraps. Purity holds onto some dignified places for marriage. But theres no eternal damnation of shame if that ship has sailed for us. We can always start fresh to wear clothes reflecting what we believe and Who we follow. Is There a Biblical Dress Code? Matthew 6:1 - Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. Jesus clearly taught us not to do things in a self-self-righteous manner. What we wear should reflect who we are in Christ. What a woman should wear or not wear is a matter of a womans conscience before the Lord, -Dawn Wilson, 7 Things the Bible Says about Your Clothes. Men are not off the hook, here either. She also notes, Modesty is not anti-fashion; its pro-adornment in godly ways (1 Timothy 2:8). Why Should Christians Care about Modesty? Christians should take great care to reflect modesty. We are not of this world and will stick out like sore thumbs at times because of our modest choices in clothes, spending, food, exercise, etc. Some of these choices are a proper reflection of the life were called to live. Many rich blessings add joy to our lives, but everything we do yields to the Father. A life consistently reflective of His love and light to those surrounding us as witnesses. The following verses help us focus on living a modest daily life: Luke 22:42 - Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done. Romans 12:2 - Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what Gods will is - his good, pleasing and perfect will. Ephesians 2:10 - We are all Gods handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Modesty can be relative, or relevant, to our Christian walk. The choice is ours. The Bible holds enough truth to steer us in the right direction, but our enemy uses the concept of modesty deceptively to make us think following Christ is all about rigid religious rules. Purity, modesty, humility, and acceptance are keys to a life full of the Peace and Love of Christ. Modesty, and many other virtues and vices can be picked apart and redefined to fit different perspectives. But there is only one way to the Truth . . . Jesus. When our eyes are fixed on Christ, modesty will be reflected in our lives. A Prayer for Clarity in Modesty Father, Praise You for the diversity in this world. Each culture, skin tone, language, and ethnicity is an expression of Your creative love. Help us to see each other as You do and express our inner hearts with our outward appliance. Give us the balance and modesty we need to walk in Your strength, Father. Help us to be open and accepting yet listening to and applying Your truth to our lives day by day. May we daily understand who we are in You a little more, and our hearts continue to grow in compassion and love for the people you purposefully place in our lives. Help us to love them well. Thank you for loving us perfectly. Clear the lines we blur, Lord Jesus. Let all we do honor You. In Jesus Name, Amen. Megs writes about everyday life within the love of Christ. She stepped out of her comfort zone, and her Marketing career, to obey Gods call to stay home and be Mom in 2011. From that step of obedience her blog, Sunny&80, was born, a way to retain the funny everyday moments of motherhood. (https://sunnyand80.org) Meg is also a freelance writer and author of Friends with Everyone. She loves leading her Monday morning Bible study, being a dance mom, distance running and photography. Meg resides in Northern Ohio with her husband, two daughters, and Golden-Doodle . . . all avid Cleveland Browns fans. Photo credit: GettyImages/Milkos Plus, Bill's Message of the Day, my coming interviews with former President Donald Trump Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of killing Palestinian children. "Instead of preventing the oppression of Muslims, Israel's prime minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] is targeting me as sort of an 'investment' for the upcoming elections (on April 9). We will not answer to these social media bouncers," The Turkish leader said at an election rally in Ankara, calling Netanyahu an "oppressor" and a "murderer of children." "We will continue our fight for the rights of Palestinians and the administration of Jerusalem in line with the weight it carries for the Muslim world until our last breath,"Daily Sabah cited Erdogan as saying. For Immediate Release, March 13, 2019 Contacts: Matthew Wellington, U.S. PIRG, (845) 591-5646, mwellington@pirg.org Mark Morgenstein, Public Interest Network, (303) 573-5556, markm@publicinterestnetwork.org, Emily Knobbe, Center for Biological Diversity, (202) 849-8400, eknobbe@biologicaldiversity.org EPA Proposes Use of 650,000 Pounds of Antibiotics Per Year on Citrus Fields Concerns Raised It Could Worsen Antibiotic Resistance WASHINGTON Advocates from public-health and environmental groups delivered more than 45,000 petition signatures to the Environmental Protection Agency today asking the agency to deny a proposal that would expand spraying antibiotics on citrus fields. If that proposal is approved, citrus growers could spray more than 650,000 pounds of the antibiotic streptomycin on citrus fields every year to treat the bacteria that causes citrus greening disease. Streptomycin belongs to a class of antibiotics considered critically important to human health by the World Health Organization. By contrast, people in America only use 14,000 pounds of that antibiotic class each year. The more you use antibiotics, the greater the risk that bacteria resistant to the drugs will flourish and spread. The bottom line is that the potential problems created by spraying massive amounts of streptomycin on citrus fields could outweigh the original problem the EPA wants to solve, said Matt Wellington, U.S. PIRGs Stop the Overuse of Antibiotics campaign director. Spraying antibiotics on citrus fields does not cure citrus greening disease or prevent its spread. If allowed, this would be the largest-ever use of a medically important antibiotic in plant agriculture in the United States. The EPA has not fully considered the consequences of this unprecedented antibiotic use, especially given its limited potential for success, as laid out in comments by the Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and U.S. PIRG. Spraying orange and grapefruit trees with an antibiotic we use to treat human disease is a dangerously shortsighted idea, said Emily Knobbe, EPA policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. In addition to increasing the risk of antibiotic resistance, the EPAs own analysis indicates streptomycin could harm foraging mammals like rabbits and chipmunks. Recent research suggests that up to 162,000 Americans die each year from antibiotic-resistant infections. The World Health Organization ranked antibiotic resistance among the top 10 health threats in 2019. Overusing antibiotics in any setting fuels the spread of drug-resistant bacteria. Antibiotics should be used as sparingly as possible and only when absolutely necessary. Spraying massive quantities of a medically important antibiotic on citrus fields doesnt fit those requirements. For Immediate Release, March 13, 2019 Contacts: Maggie Caldwell, Earthjustice, (415) 217-2084, mcaldwell@earthjustice.org Dustin Renaud, Healthy Gulf, (228) 209-2194, dustin@healthygulf.org Gabby Brown, Sierra Club, (202) 495-3051, gabby.brown@sierraclub.org Kristen Monsell, Center for Biological Diversity, (510) 844-7137, kmonsell@biologicaldiversity.org Lawsuit Challenges Trump Administration's Vast Expansion of Gulf Oil, Gas Leasing Offshore Drilling Across 78 Million Acres Would Ramp Up Risks to Communities, Wildlife WASHINGTON, D.C. Environmental groups sued the Trump administration today to challenge an oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico that will open up more than 78 million acres to offshore drilling without fully analyzing the risks to people, wildlife or the environment. The lawsuit, filed by Earthjustice on behalf of Healthy Gulf (f.k.a. Gulf Restoration Network), the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity, follows the Department of the Interiors announcement that it will hold its next lease sale on March 20. This lease sale would be the largest ever offered for oil and gas development in U.S. history, with even more acres open than sales in August and March 2018. Both earlier sales also face legal challenge by the same plaintiff groups. The judge is expected to rule in that case as early as this summer. The Trump administration is barreling ahead with expanded oil and gas drilling in our oceans while simultaneously erasing critical protections that protect Gulf coasts and giving oil and gas companies a pass from complying with existing safety requirements. This is just a recipe for disaster, said Brettny Hardy, Earthjustice attorney. Why is this administration rushing into this lease sale? Current leases will support drilling for decades, asks Cyn Sarthou, executive director of Healthy Gulf. As we saw with the last lease sale, there is very little interest from the oil and gas industry, so these leases are selling at rock bottom prices. We must ask ourselves, Who does this benefit? Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt has made it clear that his first priority is handing over our public lands and waters to corporate polluters at as low a cost as possible, regardless of the consequences for our communities, marine ecosystems, and the climate," said Sierra Club Lands Protection Program Director Athan Manuel. "We will continue to fight to protect our coasts from this administration's reckless fire sale. Trump needs to stop treating the Gulf of Mexico like a sacrifice zone for oil industry pollution, said Kristen Monsell, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. Expanding offshore drilling while glossing over its environmental harms is reckless and illegal. A proper study would reveal that marine life, our climate and coastal communities are being harmed by oil spills and other pollution from offshore drilling. We need to transition away from this dirty, dangerous practice for good. In a departure from past practices, Interior has been offering essentially all available, unleased acreage in the Gulf that is not subject to a congressional moratorium against leasing (i.e. everything but the continental shelf off Florida.) The effect is to reduce competition for available blocks and to allow fossil fuel companies to acquire and hoard leases at rock bottom prices. At the same time, Interior has been taking action to put the Gulf coasts at greater risk for an oil spill or other catastrophic event. The Department is in the process of rolling back critical safety measures put into place after the Deepwater Horizondisaster. In the meantime, it has granted nearly 2,000 waivers to oil and gas companies to exempt them from compliance with safety measures that are currently in place. Todays lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Washington, D.C., challenges Interiors flawed analyses of the sales environmental effects, which rely on incorrect assumptions about the safety regulations and royalty rates that would apply to the leases. Interior based several of its conclusions on Obama-era policies, including the Well Control Rule, which the Trump administration is now rolling back or eliminating. Additionally, the lawsuit charges that Interior significantly underestimates the degree to which each lease sale would affect overall oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico. For Immediate Release, March 13, 2019 Contact: J.P. Rose, (408) 497-7675, jrose@biologicaldiversity.org Ventura County Adopts First-of-its-kind Measure Protecting Wildlife Connectivity Ordinance Would Help Curb Roadkill, Safeguard Local Mountain Lions VENTURA, Calif. The Ventura County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday night to adopt a first-of-its-kind ordinance to safeguard wildlife connectivity. The Center for Biological Diversity submitted comments supporting the ordinance and testified at the hearing. Supervisors passed a strong version of the measure and set aside proposed amendments aimed at weakening it. The approved ordinance heightens protections for areas designated as important wildlife corridors and requires environmental review for developments that might degrade those areas. Wildlife corridors help mountain lions, California red-legged frogs and other animals maintain crucial genetic diversity and avoid being killed by cars. The ordinance is a major step forward in protecting Ventura County wildlife from habitat fragmentation, overdevelopment and car collisions, said J.P. Rose, a staff attorney at the Center. We hope other communities follow Ventura Countys lead in safeguarding wildlife as development pressure and climate change intensify. Ultimately we need state-led action to protect existing corridors and create wildlife crossings to save imperiled animals from becoming roadkill. Mountain lions are struggling as roads and development restrict their ability to roam over the large home ranges they need to thrive and maintain genetic diversity. Government officials estimate that more than 100 mountain lions are killed every year on California roads, and a recent UC Davis study found that mountain lion deaths due to vehicle collisions have been increasing since 2015. Mountain lions in the Santa Monica Mountains also suffer from the lowest genetic diversity of any population in the West. Mountain lions also help maintain biodiversity and control deer populations, which in turn reduces dangerous collisions between automobiles and deer. Adopting an ordinance that protects and enhances existing, natural corridors would improve the big cats chances of survival and facilitate greater biodiversity and healthy ecosystems. On Jan. 31, 2019, the planning commission recommended approval of the ordinance with smaller, 100-foot setbacks from streams and exclusion of the Tierra Rejada Valley from the wildlife-protection area. But the Board of Supervisors decided to require stronger, 200-foot setbacks recommended by county staff and include Tierra Rejada Valley in the protection area. RCSI-coordinated project to inform future Parkinsons treatment development A new research study aims to deepen the understanding of Parkinsons so that better treatments can be developed in the future. The project, which will be coordinated by RCSI, has been awarded 7m by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) with pharmaceutical industry and patient advocacy partners. The PD-MitoQUANT project aims to increase understanding of how cells in the brain become damaged in Parkinsons so more effective treatments can be developed for the one million people living with Parkinsons in Europe today, including 12,000 people in Ireland. The researchers will focus on parts of the cell, known as mitochondria, that malfunction in people with Parkinsons. Mitochondria contribute to cell death and neurodegeneration and there is growing evidence of their role in Parkinsons, but no effective treatments have been developed based on this knowledge. The EU public-private partnership funding health research and innovation chose the project as it recognises that new, more effective treatments are urgently needed. The most common drug to treat Parkinsons used in Ireland is more than 50 years old, and no current treatment can stop, slow or reverse the condition. The key PD-MitoQUANT Investigators based at RCSI are Dr Niamh Connolly and Dr Orla Watters, Department of Physiology and Medical Physics and Centre for Systems Medicine, who will be focusing their research on Parkinsons in the coming years. The project involves 14 partners from nine countries, including: academic experts from: RCSI (Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland); Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Epiniere; German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE); Neuroscience Institute of the National Research Council; University College London; Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre; the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique SMEs: GeneXplain GmbH; Mimetas B.V.; Pintail Limited pharmaceutical companies from the EFPIA members: Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.; H. Lundbeck A/S and UCB S.A. patient advocacy organisation: Parkinsons UK With the project kick-off meeting taking place this month, the project will run for three years, receiving 4.5m in funding from the EUs Horizon 2020 programme and 2.46m in-kind from European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) members and Parkinsons UK. The project has been announced to coincide with National Brain Awareness Week which takes place from 11-17 March Seres to receive $20 million and financial support for research activities Seres Therapeutics has announced a three-year research collaboration with AstraZeneca. The collaboration will focus on advancing mechanistic understanding of the microbiome in augmenting the efficacy of cancer immunotherapy, including potential synergy with AstraZeneca compounds. Preclinical and early clinical evidence suggests that the composition of the gastrointestinal microbiome impacts clinical response to checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy and supports the hypothesis that modification of the microbiome may improve outcomes. These data provide strong support for continued research to further understand the microbiome as a predictor of response to checkpoint inhibitors and to elucidate the potential of microbiome therapeutics to augment immunotherapy. Under the collaboration, research will evaluate microbiome-based approaches as a predictor for which patients may respond best to certain cancer immunotherapies. Additionally, SER-401, an investigational microbiome therapeutic, may be studied in combination with AstraZeneca compounds targeting various cancers. The collaboration will apply Seres microbiome drug discovery and manufacturing expertise with AstraZenecas extensive oncology experience to evaluate the potential for microbiome therapy to improve clinical response when used in conjunction with adjunctive pharmaceutical approaches. Eric Shaff, President and Chief Executive Officer of Seres Therapeutics said, We are very pleased to be collaborating with AstraZeneca, a global leader in oncology, to advance the development of potential microbiome-based therapies for cancer. Through the activities under this collaboration and in our SER-401 Phase 1b clinical study in metastatic melanoma, we hope to meaningfully advance our understanding of the potential for microbiome therapeutics to magnify the impact of cancer immunotherapy. Jean-Charles Soria, Senior Vice President, Research & Development Oncology at AstraZeneca said, Our new collaboration with Seres Therapeutics represents an important opportunity to advance our understanding of the relationship between the microbiome and the immune systems ability to respond to cancer therapy. Despite progress in the field of immunotherapy, we are only at the tip of the iceberg. Too many patients are still unable to benefit from existing therapies, so we must continue following the science in pursuit of new and innovative solutions. Under the terms of the exclusive collaboration, AstraZeneca will provide Seres with $20 million in three equal installments over two years, with the first payment due at the start of the agreement. In addition, AstraZeneca will also reimburse Seres for research activity related to the collaboration. Seres will maintain rights to oncology targeted microbiome therapeutic candidates, and AstraZeneca will obtain the option to negotiate for rights to those programs and other inventions arising out of the collaboration. Cryocure uses advanced Cryogenic Physics and Polymolecular technology to treat hemorrhoid-affected (Piles) patients in 15 days without surgery Dr. Rajah Vijay Kumar, Group Chairman of Organization de Scalene, recently announced the launch of Cryocure, an affordable medical device to treat piles without surgery, in the presence of the Chief Guest, Dr. T.S. Prabhakar, Director of Health and Family Welfare Services. Cryocure is made of unbreakable medical plastic. The device must be frozen for two hours before use. Once removed, the cold Cryocure is dipped in coconut oil or Vaseline for lubrication before inserting into the anus at a temperature of -18 degrees C. The Cryogenic effect causes blood vessels of the hemorrhoids to constrict thus making them shrink. With regular use pain, itching, burning and blood loss gradually disappears. This treatment can be done in the comfort of your home. Hemorrhoids is the most misused disease across the world. In India mostly quacks are treating Piles and Fistula. Many lives have been lost and deaths caused due to unqualified treatment of hemorrhoids. With Cryocure, we have a cost-effective cure at home, said Dr. Prabhakar. Dr. Rajah explained, Hemorrhoids if untreated can lead to a bigger problem and also pose serious medical risks. Cryocure is a simple tube-like device filled with special Cryogenic memory agent. It is priced reasonably so it is affordable and can cure hemorrhoids without any surgical procedure or side effects. It is also safe for usage among pregnant women, diabetic and heart patients. Hemorrhoids are a common occurrence during pregnancy with nearly 40% pregnant women on the planet suffering from it. For all these reasons, it has received widespread acceptance in North Indian cities''. The device was initially launched at a small scale in Delhi, Punjab and Haryana few months back. After gathering a positive response in the north, Cryocure has now been launched in Karnataka. The device is priced at Rs 6900 and is currently available at a few chemist stores in Karnataka. Orgreen Health Care is the distributor for the device in Karnataka currently. Selected representatives of the Swiss and Indian healthcare sector will present their technologies Indo-Swiss HealthTech Conclave 2019 on Digital Health being held on 8th April 2019 in Bengaluru, is a platform curated by swissnex India to showcase cutting-edge technologies and innovations in healthcare from Switzerland and India. Selected representatives of the Swiss and Indian healthcare sector will present their technologies and their vision for enhancing the quality of patient-hospital interaction and healthcare delivery at the conclave. The rich pool of participants will have the unique opportunity to engage with their peers in intimate discussions that could pave the way for fruitful collaborations. Swetha Suresh, the Head of Innovation Partnerships at swissnex India said, The current ecosystem in India, especially in Bengaluru-Hyderabad region, provides an excellent opportunity to connect Swiss academia, looking for international partners, to co-develop tools for next generation digital health practitioners. Theres also potential for startup exchanges to take advantage of access to pharma in Switzerland and rich medical cases in India. The conclave will provide visibility to new innovations and present gap-opportunity analysis for collaboration. The conclave is predominantly an innovation showcase ending in a CxO chat discussing challenges and opportunities in this sector, and exclusive opportunities for B2B connect. It will host four promising startups from Switzerland - Digipharm, Clemidi, Mobile Health and Noul as well as two leading Swiss universities - Zurich University of Applied Sciences and University of Basel. With this Indo-Swiss Digital Health Conclave, were establishing a forum for exchange and inspiration on the latest trends, opportunities and challenges with regard to various aspects of digital health. Switzerland is known to be an innovation hub, particularly in medical technologies and pharmaceutical research, while Indias healthtech sector is changing rapidly, creating many opportunity for both countries to collaborate in education, research and innovation, says Sebastien Hug, CEO of swissnex India and Consul General of Switzerland in India. Talk-points that the conclave will feature include Blockchain, Value based healthcare, Intelligent Dx, Clinical trials, Patient-provider interaction, AI for Antimicrobial resistance detection, Global health, and Research collaboration. Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in cooperation with the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs detained a group of clandestine gunmakers, who operated in 14 Russian regions, the FSB Public Relations Center said. "The Russian FSB in cooperation with the Ministry of Internal Affairs foiled the activity of a criminal gang involved in manufacturing weapons, modernizing arms available for civilian purchase into their military counterparts and their distribution in various regions across the country," the Public Relations Center reported. "The mastermind behind this criminal enterprise was taken into custody along with his accomplices in 14 Russian regions," TASS cited the statement as saying. The FSB raided the criminal groups residences and workplaces to seize 95 domestic and foreign-made weapons: a submachine gun, 19 carbines and rifles, 41 pistols and revolvers, 34 homemade firearms and more than 500 spare parts to manufacture them, silencers, and more than 3,500 rounds of ammunition for various weapons. "The operation of five illegal workshops manufacturing and modernizing weapons with specialized equipment was shut down," the center added. A gunman plotting a terrorist attack was killed in a special operation in western Russias Samara region, the National Anti-Terrorism Committee (NAC) said. "This night during a search operation, the Russian Federal Security Service was informed that an armed person planning to carry out a terrorist attack was staying in one of private houses," the anti-terror agency said. The gunman, who had sheltered himself in a house, was asked to lay down arms and surrender to the authorities. "In response, he opened fire at the law enforcement personnel and used a combat grenade. During a quick armed clash, the gunman was neutralized," TASS cited the statement as saying. According to the NAC operations headquarters, the gunman was linked to an international terrorist group. "He maintained contact with gunmen who are abroad and had been planning to blow up an improvised explosive device in a place of mass gathering," the statement reads. The gunmans body has been preliminarily identified. Weapons, munitions and an improvised explosive device ready for use were uncovered at the scene. The security agencies are carrying out an investigation to find the gunmans suspected accomplices. Want Mid-week Party Outfit Idea? Take Cues From Stylish Nupur Sanon Bollywood Wardrobe Devika Tripathi Kriti's sister, Nupur Sanon also attended the success party of 'Luka Chuppi'. She looked cute in her dress and gave us a weekend party inspiration. Nupur's dress was a printed delight and rip roaring. With this outfit, she proved to us that she is as fashionable as Kriti. Let's decode her outfit and look of the night. So, Nupur wore a halter-necked dress, which featured slit on the shoulders and the dress was half-sleeved. It was asymmetrical dress, which was enhanced by a pinkish hue and adorned with black-hued leopard prints. Nupur's outfit also came with a metallic belt, which added a structure to her flared dress. She teamed her ensemble with sleek pencil heels, which went well with her attire. She accessorised her look with a metallic ring and hoop earrings. The makeup was enhanced by a light pink lip shade and impeccably-applied kohl. The middle-parted sleek tresses completed her stylish avatar. So, what do you think about Nupur Sanon's attire and look? Feel free to share opinions in the comment section. She Almost Died After Trying To Sell Her Eggs To Buy iPhone! Life oi-Syeda Farah Noor To what extent do you think people have gone to buy what that they like? From selling off their stuff to even robbery, people have done the craziest things to buy the most expensive things. Here is one such case where a girl decided to earn easy money to buy the latest iPhone XS Max. Check her story! She Decided To Sell Her Eggs The university student from East China, whose identity has not been revealed, was reported to have found an easy way to make money. She nearly died after she underwent surgery to sell her eggs in a black market to buy a new iPhone! Most Read: 50 Live Maggots Were Removed From A Pensioner's Face She Had Received 10 Injections Per Day! The 20-year-old student was reported to have taken more than 10 injections before the surgery, and this was done to stimulate her ovaries before she had an operation to remove her eggs. She Had Her Surgery She underwent surgery and within 3 days into it, her health quickly deteriorated. She suffered severe abdominal bloating and difficulty in breathing and had to be rushed to the hospital. She Was Not Aware Of The Cons! The student was not aware of the consequences of selling eggs as the person whom she contacted to sell her eggs had apparently told her that selling eggs 'does not cause harm to the body.' She was also told that she would have to receive injections every day for 15 days before the medics would remove her eggs. Her Diagnosis The woman was diagnosed with ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome.' This is a condition that happens when ovaries become too stimulated for egg growth and fluid builds up around them. She Had To Be Treated Immediately The doctors revealed that more than five litres of fluid had been drained from her abdomen. Apparently, her ovaries had expanded as if she had been pregnant for 7-8 months! Most Read: Transsexual 'Dragon Lady' Spent Over ,000 To Resemble A Dragon! She Recovered Luckily The doctors shared that the woman would have even lost her life if she would not have got herself checked after her condition got worse. She was treated for 3 days and the medics revealed that she would be fine once she recovers. Guess the girl learned a hard lesson that making money is not an easy task! What do you think of this case? Share your thoughts in the comment section below. GET THE BEST BOLDSKY STORIES! Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 13:06 [IST] Doctors Forgot To Inform Patient That He Had Brain Tumour! Pulse oi-Syeda Farah Noor Several cases have been reported about doctors and medics forgetting their instruments inside people's bodies. The cases are reported when the patients return to the hospital with severe pain. Something similar happened in this case where a man was not told about his brain tumour which was diagnosed 18 months back! Apparently the doctors forgot to inform the man about his medical condition. Check out the details of the same. The Incident Happened In China The man named Lee Shu-leung is 54 years old and hails from Hong Kong. Lee had apparently undergone a surgery in the year 2005 to remove a brain tumour. Although, he lost hearing in his left ear, the operation was successful. Most Read: 50 Live Maggots Were Removed From A Pensioner's Face He Collapsed One Day Lee had collapsed on the street and he was rushed to the hospital in the district of Yau Ma Tei. He was discharged after he had a thorough examination where doctors told him that his brain was fine and they even asked him to come back for a heart check-up in 6 months. He Started Feeling Dizzy Lee felt dizzy constantly after a few months of his fall and he went back to the hospital. The doctors who examined him did confirm the presence of a second tumour but unfortunately Lee was not informed about the tumour due to some miscommunication. The Damage Was Done In 18 Months It took 18 months for Lee to understand that something was seriously wrong with his body and hence he got himself checked again. The doctors found out that he already had the tumour and was not informed about it. But the damage was done. He has to now permanently rely on a walking frame as the delay in treatment left him with serious mobility problems. Most Read: Transsexual 'Dragon Lady' Spent Over ,000 To Resemble A Dragon! The Couple Are Planning To Sue The Hospital Though there is no confirmation about an official complaint being lodged against the hospital, it is reported that the Lee and his wife would raise a complaint soon. On the other hand, the couple have spent more than 9,800 on treatments even though he cannot be cured permanently. What do you think of this case? Share your thoughts in the comment section below. PR Newswire WIXOM, Mich., March 12, 2019 WIXOM, Mich., March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Bill Poulos, co-founder and president of Profits Run, Inc., awarded the first Profits Run Starfish Award to Rachel O'Neill for her work with Little Dresses for Africa. The award is presented to community members who have made a difference in the lives of others through their extraordinary actions. The creator of the award (Bill Poulos) remarked, "The Profits Run Starfish Award celebrates the accomplishments of amazing individuals who are enhancing the lives of others. No matter how big or small the effort is, people can make a difference. The Profits Run Starfish Award recognizes individuals who constantly strive to make a difference in the world." O'Neill received the Profits Run Starfish Award plaque with a note from Poulos recognizing her accomplishments and thanking her for her hard work over the years. The award package also included a donation to assist Little Dresses for Africa in helping more children. Little Dresses for Africa was founded by Rachel O'Neill. The non-profit organization offers respite to at risk children all over Africa and other countries in need. Dresses are hand crafted by volunteers from pillowcases and later delivered to the girls. Upon receiving the award O'Neill responded, "I'm honored to receive such a beautiful award on behalf of all the people that earned it. Thank you so much. We started as a simple gesture to give something to the girls that would be just for themto give them honor and to plant in the hearts of little girls that they are worthy. We also took care of the boys but made an effort to make the girls know that they are just as valuable. The idea of the pillow case dresses just took off because it's so simple and even a novice seamstress can be successful at it since a pillowcase already has the sides and the hem in it. The idea caught on and it just spread like wildfire all around the United States, and now even the world. In fact, we have sewing groups and collection centers in 8 other countries as well as the USA. We have sent over 8 million to 87 countries and it's been amazing to see the growth." The story of a man saving stranded starfish on the beach inspired the Profits Run Starfish Award. The story appears on the Profits Run Starfish Award plaque as follows: An old man walked up a shore littered with thousands of starfish, beached and dying after a storm. A young man was picking them up and flinging them back into the ocean. "Why do you bother?" the old man scoffed. "You're not saving enough to make a difference." The young man picked up another starfish and sent it spinning back to the water. "I made a difference to that one," he said. In addition to the award, Poulos sent O'Neill a letter acknowledging her efforts and showing gratitude for all that she has accomplished, "Dear Rachel, Congratulations! You have been awarded the Profits Run Starfish Award in recognition of your selfless dedication and devotion to helping those in need. Through Little Dresses for Africawith each dress given, home visited, and education lesson providedyou have made an incredible difference. You have made lasting impacts on the lives of many young girls and families throughout Africa. We at Profits Run applaud your continued service to positively influence the lives of others. Please accept this donation check to aid your continued efforts. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for all that you do. Sincerely, Bill Poulos" O'Neill's efforts began with dresses for young girls but has since grown to so much more. Rachel clarified, "These little dresses go in as ambassadors to meet the people in remote villages. We give them away. Through the relationships that were formed, we saw needs that we could meet. Knowing we can't do everything we decided to concentrate on projects having to do with clean water, education and community. Clean water saves lives immediately, education changes the future, especially for girls and community sustains these things. We like to say, "we're not just sending dresses, we're sending hope." The coolest part is I don't even sew! I am an organizer and I love Africa. I love the sounds, the people, the colors, the textures so this was and is a perfect fit for me. We can't do it all, but we can make some little girls happy, one little dress at a time." Millions of dresses and pants for boys have been delivered to 87 countries around the world since 2008. When visiting the communities, the volunteers teach about clean water, education, and the importance of community. Young girls are often left to care for siblings when their parents are deceased. The handmade dresses gives the girls a sense that they are worth more and a sense of hope and purpose for their future. Donations can be made to Little Dresses for Africa on their website littledressesforafrica.org. Rachel O'Neill is the youngest of six girls. Her father was a Pastor and her mother a School teacher. She received a bachelor's degree in sociology from the University of Michigan and later attended Central Michigan University where she received her Master of Business Administration. While overseeing Little Dresses for Africa, Rachel is also employed at AVL engineering. She resides in Michigan with her spouse, Michael. They have two adult children and four grandchildren. Bill Poulos and his son, Gregory, founded Profits Run, Inc. in 2001. In 2019, the duo established the Profits Run Starfish Award. Bill has a strong belief in philanthropy within his community. He attended General Motors Institute where he earned his bachelor's degree in engineering. He later graduated from the University of Michigan with an MBA (finance degree). Prior to establishing Profits Run, Poulos worked for General Motors for over 30 years. Poulos is a well respected author, investor, and mentor. To nominate an individual for the Profits Run Starfish Award visit https://www.billpoulos.com/profits-run-starfish-award/. About Profits Run, Inc. In 2001, Profits Run, Inc. was founded by Bill and Gregory Poulos. The company's name is derived from the popular saying amongst traders, "Cut your losses and let your profits run." Profits Run's mission is to give individuals the tools they need to make simpler investments utilizing proper risk management. Profits Run offers training programs and products to help people become better traders. The company has given support to over 100,000 investors in more than 150 countries. SOURCE Profits Run Canada NewsWire TORONTO, March 13, 2019 TORONTO, March 13, 2019 /CNW/ - Brookfield Real Estate Services Inc. (dba Bridgemarq Real Estate Services) ("Bridgemarq" or the "Company") (TSX: BRE), a leading provider of services to residential real estate brokers and their REALTORS1, today announced that Brookfield BBP (Canada) LP ("Brookfield") has appointed Joe Freedman as a Designated Director of the Company. Pursuant to the terms of the Company's Special Voting Shares, Brookfield is entitled to appoint up to two?fifths of the Directors so long as it holds an aggregate of at least 10% of the Restricted Voting Shares (on a diluted basis). Joe Freedman is a Senior Vice Chair in Brookfield's Private Equity Group, responsible for strategic initiatives and planning for the private equity group. Since joining Brookfield, Mr. Freedman has held a number of positions, including General Counsel and the Partner responsible for M&A transaction execution, fund formation and fund operations. Prior to joining Brookfield, he was a lawyer in the corporate finance group at a Toronto law firm, specializing in private equity transactions and public company mergers and acquisitions. Mr. Freedman holds a joint MBA\LL.B from the Schulich School of Business at York University and Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. "On behalf of the Company, I would like to welcome Mr. Freedman to Bridgemarq's Board of Directors," said Spencer Enright, Chair of the Board of the Company. "Joe brings deep business and financial expertise, and is an outstanding addition to our Board." With the addition of Mr. Freedman, the Company's Board of Directors consists of five Directors, three of whom are Independent Directors. About Bridgemarq Real Estate ServicesBridgemarq Real Estate Services is a leading provider of services to residential real estate brokers and a network of over 18,000 REALTORS. We operate in Canada under the Royal LePage, Via Capitale and Johnston & Daniel brands. Bridgemarq Real Estate Services is the registered trade name of Brookfield Real Estate Services Inc. For more information, go to bridgemarq.com. Bridgemarq Real Estate Services is an affiliate of Brookfield Business Partners, a business services and industrials company focused on owning and operating high-quality businesses that benefit from barriers to entry and/or low production costs. Brookfield Business Partners is listed on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges. Further information is available at bbu.brookfield.com. 1 REALTORS is a trademark identifying real estate licensees in Canada who are members of the Canadian Real Estate Association. SOURCE Brookfield Real Estate Services Inc. PR Newswire REHOBOTH BEACH, Del., March 12, 2019 REHOBOTH BEACH, Del., March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The pit is hot, the beer is cold and the doors are open for Chaps Pit Beef in Rehoboth Beach, DE. Brothers and Franchisees, Chris and Gary Desch, announced today that Chaps Pit Beef of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, will be opening their doors at 10:30am on Tuesday, March 12th at 19791 Coastal Highway, Rehoboth Beach, DE (located in the Tanger Outlets). The residents of Rehoboth Beach, DE have long awaited for their chance to sink their teeth into a "World Famous" Chaps Pit Beef Sandwich and the wait finally over. The charcoal pit is fired up and ready to start serving up the same great quality that earned Chaps multiple awards and featured spots on the Food Network and the Travel Channel. However, Chaps Rehoboth added a surprisingly new feature that sets them apart from all the existing Chaps Pit Beef restaurants - a bar. Guests can now enjoy a Baltimore Style BBQ sandwich along with a cold beer or a nice glass of wine at the franchise's very first bar. Chris and Gary Desch believe that their carefully selected craft beer and wine menu will take this already successful franchise to the next level of perfection. Started in 1987 as a popular small road side eatery with no electricity and a handmade charcoal pit, Chaps served up only one item - their "World Famous" Pit Beef Sandwich. Bob and Donna Creager, founders and CEO of Chaps Pit Beef, worked long and hard to grow their business into a one of a kind fast-casual Franchise that serves more than great pit beef sandwiches! Chaps creative and unique menu offers a wide variety of Baltimore Style BBQ, including double and triple meat sandwiches, each layered with savory charcoal grilled meats. Bob Creager's years of hard work perfecting his product and brand has not only earned him the "Pit Master" title, but has set the stage for Chaps Pit Beef's recent expansion as one of America's fastest growing BBQ franchises. Not close to Rehoboth Beach, DE? Visit one of our other locations in Baltimore, Aberdeen, or Frederick, Maryland. Interested in franchising a Chaps Pit Beef? Visit https://chapspitbeef.com/bbq-franchising/ for more information. SOURCE Chaps Pit Beef BBQ A particularly dangerous terrorist, a member of the ISIS terrorist group (banned in Russia), a Danish female citizen of Lebanese origin, was detained in Turkeys Bursa province. The woman whose name isnt disclosed took an active part in recruiting women from Western countries to the ranks of ISIS terrorists, Turkish media reported. The detained terrorist was wanted by Interpol, she entered the territory of Turkey from Syria illegally and was hiding in the province of Bursa. PR Newswire MOSCOW, March 13, 2019 MOSCOW, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The world's No. 1 home appliance brand Haier has sold its 300 millionth refrigerator. The 2m tall "smart ecological" refrigerator designed and manufactured by the local Haier factory, comes complete with a foldable shelf, wine rack and wireless connectivity rolled of the production line at Haier's local production facilities in Russia at 9 o'clock local time on March 12th. During the nine years since the first 100 millionth Haier refrigerator was completed on the production line, much has changed at Haier. Not only has the company been able to realize an expansion in production from "1" to "3", but also an upscale in production from traditional refrigerators to smart refrigerators, and now "ecological refrigerators". The completion and sale of the 300-millionth refrigerator, therefore, marks the beginning of a new era for the home appliance industry and marks Haier's transition from a traditional 1.0 manufacturer to a high-tech future-ready 3.0 "ecological brand" which focuses on users' lifestyles. In the era of traditional 1.0 manufacturing, the refrigerator was seen as utility used for storing food and produce. During this period, Haier researched and developed the first inverter based refrigerator in China. With the fast development of the Internet, the global refrigerator industry entered the era of 2.0 smart manufacturing. After creating a networked refrigerator, Haier introduced the refrigerator-kitchen concept, successfully launching the idea of a smart kitchen into China with the fridge at the kitchen's core. Since the second 200 millionth refrigerator was completed on the production line, Haier has accelerated the development of the smart kitchen concept. With the rapid growth of new technologies, such as AI and 5G, the Internet of Things the physical world is becoming more integrated with the virtual world. As internet speeds become faster at high speed, building a new ecological system has become easier and will form the essence of the new 3.0 era. While the industry is exploring kitchen with linked products, Haier continues to center on the refrigerator as the core of the modern kitchen, connecting over 100 resource partners under seven categories to generate an ecology of linked foods for the 3.0 ecological era. The ecology of linked foods, supported by AI big data and other technologies, actively provides services to users on aspects of quick cooking, fresh storage ideas and smart health solutions. Through cooperation with partners, the ecology of linked foods realizes a fully-linked ecology, such as health resources, safe foods etc. After the 300 millionth refrigerator was completed on the production line, Haier plans on continuing its upgrading into the high-end technology and will popularize and launch its smart refrigerator-centred ecology of linked foods globally and will continue to focus on becoming a leading ecological brand. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/834727/Haier.jpg Reciba en su email: noticias de ultima hora, analisis tecnicos o el cierre de mercado Email no valido Nombre requerido Recibira las informaciones mas relevantes del dia en tiempo real Que informacion desea recibir? Noticias de Ultima hora Boletin Cierre de Mercado Boletin analisis tecnico Boletin Fundsnews Debe seleccionar un tipo de boletin Acepto la Politica de privacidad Debe aceptar la politica de privacidad Responsable EMPRESAS DEL GRUPO WEB FINANCIAL GROUP Finalidad La remision de informacion, novedades y promociones Establecimiento o mantenimiento de Relaciones Comerciales. Legitimacion Consentimiento del interesado. Interes legitimo en el desarrollo de la relacion comercial Destinatario Empresas del Grupo WEB FINANCIAL GROUP Derechos Acceso, rectificacion, supresion, limitacion, oposicion y portabilidad Informacion adicional Politica de Privacidad de nuestra pagina Web + INFORMACION PR Newswire SAN JOSE, Calif., March 12, 2019 SAN JOSE, Calif., March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the San Jose Police Department announced the arrest of Carlos Eduardo Arevalo Carranza, a Salvadorian national with a long history of committing violent crimes, for the brutal murder of a 59-year-old woman in San Jose, California. Federal immigration agents filed at least six detainer requests in the past for Carranza in Los Angeles and Santa Clara Counties. A recent news account of this case can be viewed here. The San Jose Police Officers' Association issued this statement in response to this vile act: "First, we as a society must strengthen our laws surrounding the sexual assault and victimization of women. The perpetrator that violently killed 59-year-old Bambi Larson should have been held accountable for his previous crimes against women, served his jail sentence and been deported. Our legal system is broken. When it comes to policing, there's a distinct difference between a Dreamer who commits a victimless crime and a violent serial sexual predator with multiple offenses. Our society must recognize there's a difference between someone who is trying to make ends meet for their family, and a self-admitted gang member, a monster who brutally murders an innocent woman in her own home. While trying to protect the Dreamers and law-abiding immigrants who have come to America to improve their lives, our current jigsaw puzzle of immigration laws has let too many violent offenders go free. If you are an undocumented violent criminal, you do not deserve any legal protection that allows you to continue breaking laws and harming women, police officers and others. There is no moral justification to protect someone this vile from serving their jail time and being deported. We must work to fix these laws now, so that public safety officers can protect everyone who lives in our communities, regardless of their immigration status." Paul Kelly, PresidentSan Jose Police Officers' Association The San Jose Police Officers' Association represents the men and women of the San Jose Police Department from the ranks of police officer up to Deputy Chief. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/san-jose-police-officers-association-statement-on-arrest-of-undocumented-immigrant-murder-suspect-300811422.html SOURCE San Jose Police Officers' Association An Armenian serviceman died at the republic's northeastern border zone while performing his duties, spokesman of the Armenian defense ministry Artsrun Hovhannisyan said. According to him, Hamlet Avagyan, 19, who was serving in the army as medical assistant, died yesterday while performing his duties. "Other details will be provided by appropriate agencies," Hovhannisyan wrote on his Facebook page, offering condolences to the servicemans family and relatives. Armenia's Special Investigation Service has submitted a petition to prolong the arrest of Armenias second president Robert Kocharyan for another two months, according to Kocharyans defense team. The petition will be examined today at 12.30 p.m. in Yerevan court of general jurisdiction chaired by judge Armen Bektashyan, News.am reported. Kocharyan, who served two terms as president in 1998-2008, is charged with toppling constitutional order in collusion with other persons in 2008 March. He was detained on July 26, 2018 for two months in pre-trial detention pending investigation. However, he was released from custody on June 13 after the Court of Appeals ruled that he could not be prosecuted for the 2008 March 1 post-election violence. On January 18, the court upheld the petition of the SIS investigator and prolonged Kocharyans arrest. The defense team submitted a petition against it, but the court denied it. Azerbaijan's First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva held a meeting with France's Minister of Economy Bruno Le Maire. The minister noted Mehriban Aliyeva's important role in diversification of the Azerbaijani economy. Expressing his willingness to work together, he said that France could contribute to the sphere of new technologies in Azerbaijan. Bruno Le Maire drew attention to the active role of France's Total in Azerbaijan, and highlighted the possibility of exchanging experience in the transport and agricultural sectors. He also proposed to strengthen cooperation between the two countries, AzerTAc reports. A staff member of Portugal embassy in Tehran was attacked in Iran's capital on Tuesday night, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi said, adding that the armed attack was due to personal hostility. The spokesman said that based on the preliminary investigations and the police report, the person served as a staff member in Portuguese diplomatic mission in Tehran. Qassemi added that investigations are still underway, IRNA reported. A middle-aged member of the Portuguese embassy in Tehran with an Iranian origin escaped an assassination attempt yesterday. He was transferred to hospital and is in good health conditions now. Head of Tehran Police Information Center Colonel Babak Namak Shenas said that the attackers shot the man using an air pistol. Russian President Vladimir Putin will attend a conference of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs on March 14, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. "Putin will attend a plenary session. He will make a speech, listen to the other attendants, take part in discussion and then will traditionally meet with the unions board," TASS cited the spokesman as saying. The president will also meet privately with the organizations board, Peskov added. OTTAWA - The country's chief public health officer is urging her fellow doctors to answer questions from concerned parents about vaccinating their children to head off the spread of measles. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 12/3/2019 (1003 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. OTTAWA - The country's chief public health officer is urging her fellow doctors to answer questions from concerned parents about vaccinating their children to head off the spread of measles. Dr. Theresa Tam says that some parents have come to fear the prevention of measles more than the disease itself, citing seeds of doubt planted by "misleading, or worse, entirely false information" online. In a lengthy statement Tuesday, Tam says health care providers on the front lines of the battle between truth and misinformation need to help parents navigate fact from fiction. So far, 17 cases of measles have been identified in Metro Vancouver and linked to French schools in an outbreak that started three weeks ago. Wrapped up in the outbreak is an anti-vaccination movement with proponents known as anti-vaxxers, who argue the measles, mumps and rubella or MMR vaccine causes autism even in the face of science that has debunked the claim. Last week, Health Canada issued an advisory warning about "false claims" around homeopathic remedies, known as nosodes, as an alternative to vaccines. Tam says she plans to work with partners and stakeholders to address misinformation around vaccines, adding children's health is a shared priority. "How we talk to parents who have questions about vaccines can have a direct effect on improving their confidence and supporting them in getting their children vaccinated," Tam says in her statement. "I urge my fellow health care provider colleagues to take the time to answer the questions of concerned parents, and in turn, I urge parents and guardians to ask questions and seek out trusted and reliable sources of information to help guide them." The public health agency's most recent vaccination report says that the incidence of measles has almost reached zero as a result of the measles vaccine. As of 2015, the most recent figures available, the health agency says about 89 per cent of Canadian children received the recommended dose of the measles vaccine by age two, and 86 per cent had received the recommended dose by age seven. However, the report warned that outbreaks stemming from people bringing the disease into the country continue to take place, highlighting the need to "remain vigilant until measles is eradicated worldwide." Measles is one of the most contagious diseases and can spread to others four days before and four days after the appearance of a rash. The disease most often spreads before people even know they are sick. There is no cure for measles, but most people fully recover within two or three weeks. For children, the effects of the disease can be worse. Tam, in her statement, talks about parents who in the past few weeks have spoken of the difficult recoveries that took weeks or months, the permanent disabilities some children face and, in some cases, deaths. "I am very concerned to see vaccine-preventable diseases, particularly those as serious and highly contagious as measles, making a comeback in Canada and around the globe. From my perspective, even one child dying of measles is unacceptable," says Tam, as a pediatric infectious disease specialist. OTTAWA - Canada still hasn't seen the evidence China used to block canola shipments from one of Canada's largest grain producers, International Trade Minister Jim Carr said Wednesday in an interview. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Minister of International Trade Diversification Jim Carr takes part in a Canada 2020 panel discussion in Ottawa on Thursday, Dec. 13, 2018. International Trade Minister Jim Carr says Beijing has yet to provide an explanation for China's decision to block canola shipments from one of Canada's largest grain producers. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick OTTAWA - Canada still hasn't seen the evidence China used to block canola shipments from one of Canada's largest grain producers, International Trade Minister Jim Carr said Wednesday in an interview. A Chinese government spokesman has said Beijing's move this month to suspend canola imports from Richardson International Ltd. came after "hazardous organisms" were detected in the company's product. Carr said Canada is pushing to solve the economically important matter but it needs China to provide proof to back up the claims. "We continue to ask Chinese officials for any evidence that this canola has any problems that can be proven with any scientific base or any scientific evidence and so far we've heard nothing," he said in a phone interview from Saskatoon, where he was talking to business leaders about making the most of opportunities created by Canada's major trade deals. "It's a concern because we are a major exporter of canola to the world and we produce the finest canola in the world. It's a very important part of our trade mix and we want to get to the bottom of it and we want to get to the bottom of it fast." Alberta Premier Rachel Notley issued a statement last week demanding that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fight for canola farmers and all related jobs. "We are calling on Ottawa to stop its navel-gazing about its internal controversies and fight back," she said. Notley added the issue could cost Alberta farmers hundreds of millions of dollars and lead to a loss of up to 3,000 jobs. China's decision to reject shipments of one of Canada's key exports comes with the two countries in a diplomatic dispute that erupted after the December arrest of Huawei senior executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver at the behest of the United States. On March 1, Canada's Justice Department gave the go-ahead for the extradition case against Meng, which marked the formal start of the high-profile process that has thrust Canada into a highly uncomfortable position between the two superpowers. In the days following Meng's arrest, China arrested Canadian citizens Michael Kovrig, a Canadian diplomat on leave, and Michael Spavor, an entrepreneur, on allegations of engaging in activities that have endangered Chinese national security. The men remain in Chinese custody and their arrests have been interpreted as attempts by Beijing to pressure Canada into releasing Meng. China also sentenced another Canadian, Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, to death in a sudden retrial of his drug-smuggling case. Asked whether there's a link between the Meng case and the canola impasse, Carr said the government has no evidence of one. "We're treating it as a science issue, which is why we're pressing Chinese officials to show us the science." Carr said the federal government has been contacting Chinese officials in Beijing and at the country's embassy in Ottawa to find out why the blocked canola is considered to be "anything less than the very high (quality) canola that we know we are shipping abroad." On the status of formal Canada-China trade talks in general, Carr described it as a "difficult period" in a very long relationship that, for example, saw Richardson sign its first deal in China in 1910. "It's difficult because of the detention of Canadian citizens and we have been very clear about the importance of resolving that issue," he said. "There are always conversations between officials, but I would say that it's not an active period of those kinds of discussions." Carr said he looked forward to talking about Canada's recently ratified trade agreements in Saskatchewan, which he noted is the province with the most diversified export markets. He said 44 per cent of Saskatchewan's exports last year were shipped to countries other than the United States the most of any province. TORONTO - A Toronto doctor says Ontario's medical regulator has decided not to investigate dozens of complaints made about her push for stricter gun laws. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. TORONTO - A Toronto doctor says Ontario's medical regulator has decided not to investigate dozens of complaints made about her push for stricter gun laws. Dr. Najma Ahmed, a trauma surgeon who treated victims of a fatal mass shooting in Toronto last summer, says the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario told her of its decision Tuesday. Ahmed is a founding member of Canadian Doctors for Protection from Guns, a group calling for a national ban on private ownership of handguns and assault rifles. The group has said it considers gun control a public health issue and stressed that physicians have a duty to speak out on policies that affect people's safety and well-being. "Physician advocacy remains an important function that doctors fulfil on behalf of the public," Ahmed said in a statement issued late Tuesday. Another group, the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights, had urged its supporters to file official complaints to the college about Ahmed's advocacy work. The coalition argues doctors are not experts on firearms policy and should not be taking political positions. The organization said Wednesday it understood the college's decision as saying the complaints were not deemed without foundation, but simply that it was not the appropriate forum to hear them. "Concerning whether we believe that complaints to the CPSO was the correct course of action, the doctors have demonstrably spread misinformation and we fear that Canadians believed it without question because they are doctors," the coalition said in a statement. "We believe that lodging complaints with the licensing body was a reasonable course of action." Those who filed complaints have 30 days to appeal the college's decision. The coalition said it would be up to individual complainants to decide whether to seek an appeal. In a statement Wednesday, the doctors' group said it is pleased by the college's decision not to pursue the more than 70 complaints made about Ahmed. "Dr. Ahmed wishes to sincerely thank Canadians for the hundreds of letters, emails, calls, and demonstrations of support and solidarity she has received in recent days," it said. "The CPSO decision is affirmation that advocacy for public health is an integral responsibility of physicians." The college said it could not confirm the details of its decision given the appeal period. Its registrar, Nancy Whitmore, has previously said the complaints process is generally intended to focus on clinical care or professional behaviour rather than political issues. A gun control law, Bill C-71, is making its way through the Senate, and Ahmed was among those who testified before the committee examining the bill. The proposed legislation includes changes to the Firearms Act and Criminal Code, such as considering events more than five years in the past when judging applicants' eligibility for gun licences and requiring a buyer's licence be verified in the sale of non-restricted firearms. The bill does not include an outright ban on private ownership. OTTAWA - Transport Minister Marc Garneau is closing Canadian skies to the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, effectively grounding the planes over safety concerns arising from the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that killed everyone on board, including 18 Canadians. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. A Sunwing Boeing 737-800 passenger plane prepares to land at Pearson International Airport in Toronto on Wednesday, August 2, 2017. Transport Minister Marc Garneau faced an escalating dilemma Tuesday over Boeing's 737 Max 8 aircraft, which a growing number of countries have grounded or banned in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 people Sunday. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov OTTAWA - Transport Minister Marc Garneau is closing Canadian skies to the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, effectively grounding the planes over safety concerns arising from the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that killed everyone on board, including 18 Canadians. The decision to ground the planes is a precautionary move that was made after a review of all the available evidence, Garneau told a news conference Wednesday in Ottawa that was twice delayed by what he called new incoming information. "There are and I hasten to say not conclusive but there are similarities" between the Ethiopian Airlines flight profile and that of a Lion Air flight involving the same aircraft that crashed off the Indonesian coast in October, the minister said. Those similarities, he said, "exceed a certain threshold in our minds with respect to the possible cause of what happened in Ethiopia. This is not conclusive, but it is something that points possibly in that direction, and at this point we feel that threshold has been crossed." The "safety notice" means none of the aircraft or a new version, the Max 9, which isn't as widely used can fly into, out of, or over Canada, he added: "I will not hesitate to take swift action should we discover any additional safety issues." Garneau tipped off his American counterparts just before the announcement about the Canadians' change of heart on the aircraft. Hours later, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would follow suit. Trump said he had told American airlines about the decision as well as Boeing and all agreed with his administration's decision. Any planes in the air will be grounded upon landing, and remain on the ground until further notice, Trump said, while Boeing works on a fix to the aircraft's software. "The safety of the American people and all people is our paramount concern," Trump said in announcing his decision. Transport Minister Marc Garneau speaks about the grounding of all Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes in Canada during a press conference in Ottawa on Wednesday, March 13, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld While aviation experts warn against drawing conclusions until more information emerges from the crash investigation, numerous jurisdictions, including China, Germany, the United Kingdom and the European Union, had grounded the Max 8 or banned it from their airspace before Canada and the U.S. did. Garneau said evidence about multiple Boeing 737 Max 8 flights suggests a worrying correlation between the Ethiopian Airlines crash and the tragedy in Indonesia less than five months ago. In certain circumstances, the planes' systems try to tilt their noses down, contrary to the efforts of pilots a pattern that was seen in both flights before they crashed, he said. "I would repeat once again that this is not the proof that this is the same root problem," he emphasized. "It could be something else." Passenger-rights advocate Gabor Lukacs said Wednesday that it would be prudent for Garneau to suspend use of the aircraft until questions are answered about what caused the Ethiopian crash. "Generally, one should always be erring on the side of caution when it comes to safety questions," he said from Halifax. "If there is enough evidence of a potential harm, and in this case I think there is evidence of potential harm, then the prudent thing is to ground those aircraft." He said airlines should allow passengers to rebook on other planes or cancel their tickets without penalty if they have apprehensions about flying on a Max 8. Garneau said affected travellers should contact their airlines to find out what to do, he added. "There will be some disruption, there's no question about that," he said, but safety is more important. He said he hopes the planes will be flying safely within weeks. In a statement Wednesday, before the order from Transport Canada, Air Canada spokeswoman Isabelle Arthur said the airline has a "flexible rebooking policy" that includes options to change flights to another aircraft if space permits, but wouldn't indicate if that comes with a fee. "Based on real information and data, and ongoing consultations with government safety regulators including Transport Canada and the FAA, we have full confidence in the safety of our fleet and operations and we continue to operate the 737," she said in an email. Calgary-based WestJet Airlines said it is contacting all affected customers to arrange alternative travel plans. "We respect the decision made by Transport Canada and are in the process of grounding the 13 Max aircraft in our fleet," the company said in a statement late Wednesday. "We have 162 aircraft or more than 92 per cent of our overall fleet that remain in service." Air Canada, along with Southwest and American Airlines, had been the major outliers in resisting a grounding of the planes. Air Canada has 24 Max 8 aircraft (out of 184 in its main fleet), which it uses mainly for domestic and U.S. routes. Air Canada cancelled London-bound flights from Halifax and St. John's, N.L., after the United Kingdom banned all Boeing Max 8 jets from its airspace. The U.S.-based Boeing had said it had no reason to pull the popular aircraft from the skies and did not intend to issue new recommendations about the aircraft to customers. The Federal Aviation Administration had backed the jet's airworthiness before reversing course early Wednesday afternoon. Garneau said the American authority is "an extremely professional organization" and Canada is "very comfortable" with it as a certifying agency for American makers' airplanes. Companies in this story: (TSX:AC, TSX:WJA) with files from Alison Auld in Halifax and the Associated Press Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. A Sunwing Boeing 737-800 passenger plane prepares to land at Pearson International Airport in Toronto on Wednesday, August 2, 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christopher Katsarov Four stories in the news for Wednesday, March 13 SUNWING TEMPORARILY GROUNDS BOEING 737 MAX 8 AIRCRAFT Sunwing Airlines is temporarily grounding its four Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft in the wake of the Ethiopian plane crash that killed all 157 people on board, including 18 Canadians. The Canadian low-cost airline says in a statement Tuesday night that it made the decision for "evolving commercial reasons" unrelated to safety, including airspace restrictions being imposed in other countries. Federal Transport Minister Marc Garneau will provide an update on Canada's Boeing 737 MAX 8 plan this morning in Ottawa. Before clearing his schedule to meet with experts, Garneau said Tuesday he has no plans to ground Canada's fleet of 737 Max 8 aircraft, but that "all options are on the table." JUSTICE COMMITTEE TO MEET TODAY ON SNC-LAVALIN CASE The House of Commons justice committee will meet today to discuss whether they should hear more testimony on the SNC-Lavalin scandal. And if the Opposition MPs get their way, the committee will hear again from former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould. Both the NDP and Conservatives want to be able to ask about the period after she was shuffled from the Justice Department to Veterans Affairs in mid-January, including why she resigned from cabinet. Wilson-Raybould has alleged that several senior advisers and aides to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were involved in a sustained effort to get her to halt a criminal prosecution of the Montreal-based engineering giant on charges of bribery. IMPERIAL TOBACCO GETS CREDITOR PROTECTION IN $15B SUIT Imperial Tobacco Canada is the latest company to receive a temporary reprieve from compensating 100,000 Quebec smokers after securing creditor protection in an Ontario court. A judge granted Imperial Tobacco Canada creditor protection Tuesday, and JTI-Macdonald Corp. was granted creditor protection last Friday. The two companies, along with Benson & Hedges, lost an appeal of a landmark $15-billion class-action lawsuit in the Quebec Court of Appeal on March 1. The Ontario Superior Court decision suspends legal proceedings against all three companies until April 5, even though only Imperial Tobacco Canada amid JTI-Macdonald sought protection from creditors. WOMAN CAUGHT IN AVALANCHE DIES OF INJURIES A woman who was caught in an avalanche in the Rocky Mountains west of the Alberta-B.C. boundary has died of her injuries. Parks Canada says she was with a group of ice-climbers in Yoho National Park on Monday when the slide happened near Field. The woman, who was believed to be in her 30s, was airlifted to the Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary. Parks Canada says she was participating in a guided ice climb on Massey's Route on Mount Stephen. Risk of avalanche in Yoho National Park is expected to increase in the coming days. YELLOWKNIFE - Ottawa and the Northwest Territories have reached a deal on protecting threatened caribou. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Wild caribou looks on near The Meadowbank Gold Mine located in the Nunavut Territory of Canada on Monday, March 23, 2009. Ottawa and the Northwest Territories have reached a deal on protecting threatened caribou herds. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette YELLOWKNIFE - Ottawa and the Northwest Territories have reached a deal on protecting threatened caribou. But one environmental group calls so-called Section 11 agreements draft versions of which have been reached with other provinces plans to keep planning. "I would have liked to have seen some more concrete actions," said Florence Daviet of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. On Wednesday, the federal government and the N.W.T. made an agreement that the territory would file range plans to conserve several herds of boreal caribou, which live in forested regions along the territory's western edge. Those herds are some of Canada's healthiest totalling 6,000 strong on habitat that is almost 70 per cent undisturbed, well above the federal threshold of 65 per cent. "We're not going to wait until it's a situation where we're reacting instead of being proactive," said territorial Environment Minister Robert C. McLeod. "That's why we're doing this right now, so we don't get to that point." Ottawa has agreed to give the territory $4.5 million to develop range plans, as well as determine sustainable harvest limits. The first of those plans is due as early as late summer. Such agreements, allowed under Section 11 of the Species At Risk Act, have also been signed by Yukon and in draft form by Saskatchewan and British Columbia. Other provinces with caribou populations are in negotiations. Such agreements were developed after all provinces failed two years ago to meet a five-year deadline to come up with firm plans for how they would keep caribou on the landscape. Some herds, especially in Alberta and B.C., are down to a few dozen animals, while others have disappeared entirely. Legislation allows the federal minister to impose protection plans. Instead, said Daviet, officials turned to Section 11. "When you read the documents, they rarely if at all identify very concrete measures of protection," she said. "It's more process and plans to get to plans. It is kind of disappointing." Sean Fraser, the parliamentary secretary to Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, said there's more to them than that. "It's not just stick a date on it and hope you cross it. We actually help provide the resources required to carry out the implementation of those range plans." Ottawa hasn't ruled out using its power to step in and impose protection on vulnerable herds, he said. "There are live conversations about whether those rather extraordinary remedies are going to be necessary. My strong preference would be to reach an agreement." Talking is good, said Daviet. Action would be better especially in jurisdictions where herds don't have much time. "How long are they going to try to get more positive agreements with the provinces before they're willing to step in with something?" By Bob Weber in Edmonton. Follow him on Twitter at @row1960 South Africa: Presidential inter-ministerial committee expediting land claims Deputy President David Mabuza says an inter-ministerial committee on land reform is currently fastracking the delivery of claimed land parcels to their rightful beneficiaries. Mabuza said this when he responded to oral questions in the National Assembly on Tuesday. He said the inter-ministerial committee, which was established by the President last year to address bottlenecks in the implementation of key measures to accelerate land reform, will do so within the confines of the law. As part of this, land claims that have been outstanding for a while are expedited and finally land parcels are being delivered to the rightful beneficiaries. In cases where financial settlement is an option, those are also settled accordingly. On Saturday, 9 March 2019, several communities in Gauteng were part of the celebrations in Mamelodi where the President handed over settled and finalised land claims to 10 communities in that province, he said. He said this after ANC MP Pumzile Mnguni asked him on the progress of the work of the inter-ministerial committee. Mabuza said in the coming months, in a bid to expedite the resolution of land claims and land redistribution, the inter-ministerial committee will pay particular attention to strengthening the capacity of the Office of the Valuer-General to speed up the process of valuations. Alongside the handover of land parcels, the inter-ministerial committee has been focusing on the development and implementation of a package of post-settlement support measures to enhance productivity of restituted land as well as communal land. Mabuza said over the last few months, the committee has dealt with the audit of land owned by government. Land parcels under the owners of various departments, municipalities and State-owned entitiess have been identified. The process of physical verification of properties earmarked for redistribution is expected to be finalised soon. Some of this land lies on the margins of towns where the demand for land is highest. It is hoped that these land parcels will alleviate congestion and also facilitate the creation of integrated, sustainable human settlements, he said. He said State agricultural land parcels will be redistributed to support broadened partcipation of new entrants into the agricultural sector, and expand agro-based incubation programmes. SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. The sanctions the U.S. imposed against Russias Eurofinance Mosnarbank for working with Venezuela are illegitimate, Russias Foreign Ministry said in a commentary. "Once again Washington decided to use sanctions, this time by blacklisting a Russian bank, which gives the Venezuelan government the opportunity to work normally with foreign partners. Moreover, calling Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro "illegitimate" leader, the United States not only forgets the fact that he is a nationally elected president of a sovereign state, but also the illegitimacy of decisions on sanctions taken outside the framework of the UN Security Council," the statement reads. "We are calling on the U.S. to come to its senses and instead of sanctioning foreign companies and banks to finally start a normal joint work under the United Nations auspices on contributing to stabilizing the situation in Venezuela based on the principles of international law," TASS cited the ministry as saying. MONTREAL - A Quebec think tank says the province's plan to cut immigration levels is misguided and will not accomplish its intended goal of better integrating newcomers. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Coalition Avenir Quebec MNA Simon Jolin-Barrette responds to reporters questions on the government transition, on October 9, 2018 at the legislature in Quebec City. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jacques Boissinot MONTREAL - A Quebec think tank says the province's plan to cut immigration levels is misguided and will not accomplish its intended goal of better integrating newcomers. The Institut de recherche et d'informations socio-economiques published a study Wednesday concluding from publicly available data that immigrants are faring better in Quebec than the government claims. Researcher Julia Posca said the employment rate among immigrants in Quebec has risen steadily to 79 per cent last year from about 70 per cent in 2009. She said almost 60 per cent of immigrants who arrive in Quebec are fluent in French or are bilingual. "Based on those facts, you can say the integration of immigrants is going well, and there is no empirical evidence that tells us that if we lower the levels of immigrants that integration will be better," Posca said in an interview. Given the data, the proposed law is built on perceptions and prejudices about immigrants, Posca said: "The new policy of the government seems to be misguided." The institute said it is in favour of maintaining the province's annual immigration level at 50,000, basing its argument on demographic and economic factors, given the province's aging population and a shortage of workers. The government plans to reduce immigration to about 40,000 people this year, with Premier Francois Legault telling reporters Wednesday in Quebec City the changes are necessary to respond to the needs of the workforce and to ensure new arrivals are comfortable functioning in French. Quebec Immigration Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette tabled Bill 9 in February, proposing to overhaul the system for selecting newcomers to the province. The government says the legislation is aimed at better matching applicants to the needs of the labour market and ensuring immigrants speak French and respect Quebec values. But it has been widely criticized since it was introduced. A recent court ruling forced the government to resume processing outstanding immigration applications that it had scrapped. A spokesman for Jolin-Barrette said in a statement Wednesday the Coalition Avenir Quebec government was elected last October with a mandate to reform the immigration system. He said the employment rate for newcomers remains a problem. While the 79 per cent employment rate for immigrants still lags behind that of Quebecers born in Canada 87 per cent Posca said part of the difference is attributable to how the province recognizes newcomers' work and education experience, as well as discrimination. "These are real issues that immigrants face and that impedes their full integration and the bill doesn't propose anything to counter those problems," she said. HALIFAX - Nova Scotia's premier says the RCMP has found no evidence that former prime minister Jean Chretien carried out illegal lobbying during a visit to his Halifax office last year. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Former prime minister Jean Chretien participates in an interview promoting his new book in Ottawa on Friday, Oct. 5, 2018. Nova Scotia's premier says the RCMP has found no evidence that former prime minister Jean Chretien carried out illegal lobbying during a visit to his Halifax office last year. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang HALIFAX - Nova Scotia's premier says the RCMP has found no evidence that former prime minister Jean Chretien carried out illegal lobbying during a visit to his Halifax office last year. Stephen McNeil said a complaint that Chretien carried out lobbying on behalf of a proposed container port in Cape Breton had been investigated and dropped, citing a news release Wednesday from the Mounties. The Mounties declined to confirm if Chretien was the unidentified subject of their news release. The release said police "began an investigation which determined there was no evidence of lobbying and the investigation concluded without charges." McNeil told reporters at the legislature that the findings are clear. "I went through the (police) interview and the RCMP have confirmed it," he said. "They went through a number of questions with me. ...I have all the faith of law enforcement in the province to follow all the complaints that brought forward to them." "They followed this one through and confirmed no lobbying had taken place." Retired union activist John McCracken launched a complaint last year to the RCMP, alleging the former politician should have registered under the provincial Lobbyists Act before visiting the premier. At the time of the March 21, 2018, meeting, Chretien was an international adviser to Sydney Harbour Investment Partners, which was seeking investor support for the Cape Breton container port project. The day before the meeting, Chretien had attended a conference in Sydney and told reporters about his role as an international adviser to the group. When a Cape Breton Post reporter asked Chretien how he'd market the Sydney container port to the premier, the former prime minister said he felt the premier would be in favour of a provincewide approach to container ports. The provincial Liberal government has been cautious about the Sydney proposal, as a 2016 study prepared for the province and the federal Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency recommended against public money for a terminal that would compete against the Halifax port. As the interview continued, Chretien was asked if the province should invest money in the container port proposal, and he replied: "I hope so." According to the registrar of lobbyists, the former prime minister was not a registered lobbyist at the time of his visit, and she sent him a letter at the time informing about requirements of the act. McCracken said the RCMP's lead investigator told him that in order to proceed further, one of the three people at the meeting would have had to have provided evidence that lobbying occurred. "Obviously, I'm disappointed. Very disappointed," he said in an interview. However, McNeil repeated his view that no lobbying occurred. "We were working towards whether or not there are economic opportunities for the province and the region," he said. "He (Chretien) often gets a chance to regale great stories about his time when he was in office when you're around him and often that's what you spend a lot of time talking about." Aides to the former prime minister did not respond to emails asking for comment on the news release. Tim Houston, the leader of the provincial Progressive Conservative Party, said the fact police had to become involved means the province's rules around lobbying need to be updated in order to provide more transparency. "Nova Scotians should be able to know if somebody lobbied their government and what the topic was," said Houston. "We shouldn't have to call the RCMP to see if that happened. It's silly that's what had to happen here." NDP Leader Gary Burrill said the province needs a registrar of lobbyists capable of making determinations around lobbying. "A registrar of lobbyists would have made an assessment here and made a judgment and everybody would have to follow it," said Burrill. He said it's unclear what definition of lobbying police used. "They (police) are offering an analysis of private conversations that took place," Burrill said. "On the basis of what evidence we don't know." Follow (at)mtuttoncporg on Twitter. HEJERE, Ethiopia - The Latest on The Latest on Ethiopian Airlines crash (all times local): Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 13/3/2019 (1002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Investigators from Israel examine wreckage at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Ethiopian Airlines had issued no new updates on the crash as of late afternoon Tuesday as families around the world waited for answers, while a global team of investigators began picking through the rural crash site. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene) HEJERE, Ethiopia - The Latest on The Latest on Ethiopian Airlines crash (all times local): 11:45 p.m. Boeing's stock has halted a two-day skid after turning higher in the final minutes of trading on Wall Street. The about-face came shortly after President Donald Trump issued an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people. The Federal Aviation Administration followed with a statement saying it was ordering the planes grounded based on new evidence from the crash site. While the U.S. grounding is not good news for the company, it did serve to eliminate a major element of uncertainty, which can often weigh on a stock more than bad news itself. Many nations had already barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 from their airspace this week following Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines crash. A similar Lion Air plane crashed in October, killing 189 people. Shares in Chicago-based Boeing ended up $1.73 or about 0.5 per cent, at $377.14 Wednesday after they lost more than 11 per cent in the first two days this week. The stock is still up 17 per cent for the year. ___ 11:10 p.m. The Federal Aviation Administration says new evidence from the Ethiopian Airlines crash site coupled with its own data gathering led it to order the grounding of Boeing 737 Max planes. The agency's order Wednesday said new information had been uncovered from the wreckage of the Ethiopian Airlines jet. That, taken together with data from satellite-based tracking of the plane's flight path, pointed to similarities with an October crash of a Lion Air 737 Max in the Java Sea. The FAA said it was ordering the jets' grounding while investigators determine whether there was a shared cause of the two crashes. The agency's move Wednesday came after it had faced mounting criticism for backing the airworthiness of the 737 Max jets as countries around the world were grounding them. For its part, Boeing said it supported the FAA's move out of an abundance of caution and to reassure the flying public of the aircrafts' safety. But it said it continues to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 Max planes. ___ 9:45 p.m. President Donald Trump says the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people. Many nations in the world had already barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 from its airspace, but until now, the Federal Aviation Administration had been saying that it didn't have any data to show the jets are unsafe. Trump said Wednesday that the FAA would be making the announcement soon to ground the planes. He says any plane currently in the air will go to its destination and then be grounded. Trump says pilots and airlines have been notified. He says the safety of the American people is of "paramount concern." ___ 8:20 p.m. A spokesman for Germany's Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation is telling The Associated Press that the agency was asked by Ethiopian authorities to analyze the black boxes from Sunday's plane crash but declined because it lacked the necessary software. Spokesman Germout Freitag said Wednesday that he doesn't know where the black boxes will be sent next. An Ethiopian Airlines spokesman said flight recorders from the jet will be sent to a European country for analysis because Ethiopia lacks the technology to examine them. The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft crashed shortly after takeoff Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. The disaster is the second with a Max 8 plane in just five months and has set off a wave of groundings of the planes around the world. ___ 7:45 p.m. A Nigerian official says the country has closed its airspace to the Boeing 737 Max 8. President Muhammadu Buhari's personal assistant in a Twitter post cites Nigeria's aviation minister as saying the model involved in Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines crash is barred until the cause of the disaster is determined. And in Mauritania, civil aviation authorities say Mauritania Airlines has halted its use of the model. ___ 12:05 p.m. Canada's transport minister says the country is closing airspace to the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jetliner that killed 157 people. Canada becomes the latest country to bar the Boeing 737 Max as the investigation into the latest crash, the second in just over five months, is underway. Transport Minister Marc Garneau said new information they received Wednesday morning in the form of satellite data shows a possible but unproven similarity to a previous Max 8 crash. Boeing has said it has no reason to pull the popular aircraft from the skies and does not intend to issue new recommendations about the aircraft to customers. Given the proximity to the U.S Canada's decision to ground the planes may cause problems for U.S. airlines. ___ 3:05 p.m. An Ethiopian Airlines spokesman confirms that the black box from Sunday's crashed plane will be sent to Europe. Asrat Begashaw has declined to tell The Associated Press which country will be analyzing the voice and data recorders of the flight. The plane crashed six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa en route to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board. ___ 12:45 p.m. Lion Air has confirmed reports it has put on hold the scheduled delivery of four Boeing 737 Max 8 jets while it waits for the outcome of the Indonesian investigation into its October crash that killed 189 people. Speaking at a transport ministry news conference in Jakarta about the grounding of Max 8 planes, Lion Air executive Daniel Putut said the airline needs to know the "root cause" of the accident. Lion Air ordered 222 Boeing Max planes, including 218 of the Max 8 model and four Max 9 planes. It currently has 10 Max 8 planes in its fleet. Many countries worldwide have grounded Max 8 jets after one operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed on Sunday, killing 157 people. ___ 12:40 p.m. The Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand says it has ordered the budget airline Thai Lion Air to suspend flying its Boeing 737 Max planes for seven days while it conducts risk assessments and special training for pilots. The agency says it will consult with the plane's maker and designer about safety measures. The suspension begins Thursday. It comes after Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines crash. Thai Lion Air is the only Thai airline flying B737 Max models. The airline is an associate company of Indonesia's Lion Air, which lost a B737 Max 8 in October shortly after takeoff from Jakarta in a crash that killed 189 people. ___ 12:30 p.m. Egyptian aviation authorities have banned the operation of all Boeing 737 Max aircrafts, citing safety concerns. The Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority says in a statement it has barred "flying over, landing and takeoff" of Boeing 737 Max aircrafts. It also says Egypt doesn't have these aircraft and that they are not part of its future plans. The announcement cites the Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday that killed 157 people on board. ___ 12:05 p.m. Lebanon's state news agency says the country's civil aviation authority has barred flights by Boeing 737 Max aircraft from landing or flying in Lebanese skies following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jetliner that killed 157 people. Lebanon becomes the latest country to bar the Boeing 737 Max as investigation into the latest crash, the second in just over five months, is underway. The decision by Lebanon's head of civil aviation doesn't elaborate on the reason for the banning or the duration. The national air carrier mostly operates Airbus. ___ 11:50 a.m. Kosovo has barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 and 738 Max 9 airplanes from its airspace following the crash of a similar jetliner in Ethiopia on Sunday in which all 157 on board were killed. Kosovo's Civil Aviation Authority said in a Wednesday statement the decision was taken because of "the investigation of the equipment" of the planes, adding that it is effective immediately. Many airlines around the world have grounded the Boeing jetliner and many countries, including the entire European Union have barred the plane from their airspace, leaving the United States as one of the few areas where the plane can fly. Two Max 8 jets have had deadly crashes in just five months. ___ 11:40 a.m. Norwegian Air Shuttles says it will seek compensation from aircraft maker Boeing after the low-cost carrier grounded its fleet of 737 MAX 8 aircraft. Carrier spokeswoman Tonje Naess told The Associated Press Wednesday that the Oslo-based airline "should not have any financial burden for a brand new aircraft that will not to be used." On Tuesday, Norwegian Air Shuttles grounded its 18 Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft on recommendation from European aviation authorities after Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines crash in which 157 people were killed. ___ 11:20 a.m. An Ethiopian Airlines spokesman says the "black box" from the crashed Boeing jet will be sent overseas for analysis but no country has been chosen. In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Asrat Begashaw says the airline has not decided where to send the data and voice records of the flight's last moments. He says that "we have a range of options. What we can say is we don't have the capability to probe it here in Ethiopia." The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft crashed shortly after takeoff Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. The disaster is the second with a Max 8 plane in just five months and has set off a wave of groundings of the planes around the world. ___ 10:55 a.m. Hong Kong will ban the operation of all Boeing 737 Max aircraft "into, out of and over" the key Asian aviation hub beginning at 6 p.m. (1000 GMT) Wednesday. The announcement from the Civil Aviation Department cited the crash of two of the planes within less than five months and said the ban would continue "until further notice." The statement said: "The CAD has been closely monitoring the developments, the investigation progress and the information from relevant aviation authorities." It said the CAD had noted that the U.S. Federation Aviation Administration has affirmed the planes' airworthiness and that investigations were ongoing. It said the department has been in close contact with the FAA and other the relevant organizations, including the two airlines, SpiceJet of India and Russia's Globus Airlines, that use the aircraft to operate flights into and out of Hong Kong International Airport. ___ 10:45 a.m. Much of the world, including the entire European Union, grounded the Boeing jetliner involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash or banned it from their airspace, leaving the United States as one of the few remaining operators of the plane involved in two deadly accidents in five months. The European Aviation Safety Agency took steps to keep the Boeing 737 Max 8 out of the air, joining Asian and Middle Eastern governments and carriers that also had safety concerns in the aftermath of Sunday's crash, which killed all 157 people on board. Referring to the Lion Air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 people last year, European regulators said Tuesday that "similar causes may have contributed to both events." British regulators indicated possible trouble with a reportedly damaged flight data recorder. ___ This story has been corrected to fix a headline that should have referred to the 737, non the 747. An Post has revealed its new logo and two new sub-brands on the back of what they have described as "a very strong financial performance in 2018". The company reported revenue growth of 7% to 897m as global decline in letters was offset by a 40% volume growth in parcels. Graduates have been urged to be mindful of their social media profiles as they enter the workforce. Employees of Deloitte, Google, Musgrave Group, Smurfit Kappa and Cork Chamber, who were speaking at Cork University Business School's annual conference, told around 1,000 students and secondary school pupils to avoid becoming bogged down in disrespectful online behaviour. Google e-commerce specialist Dylan O'Brien, who graduated from UCC in Business Information Systems, said: "You have to hold your best professional self online, through your social media. It is a reflection of you as a professional in your working career. Social media holds a great purpose. It holds a great platform for us to express ourselves in a way that you might not necessarily get in our personal lives, but it is important to be professional and respectful in that sense. Musgrave accountant and Cork hurler Daniel Kearney said he had restricted his social media presence after untrue rumours began to surface about him leaving the inter-county panel. He urged caution to conference attendees about how they used social media. Irish Race Walker Rob Heffernan and MC Gina London, Emmy Award-winning former CNN correspondent and internationally recognised speaker, facilitator & communications & management expert speaking at the UCC CUBS Conference in the Cork Opera House. Picture: Darragh Kane. Cork Chamber public affairs director, Thomas McHugh said there was a "huge tendency" towards polarising positions and incendiary statements on social media. "In any aspect of politics or business, you see the most value in diplomacy. You can have a different perspective to somebody, it's not necessarily about being right or wrong but articulating your points if you believe something. "Mutual respect is particularly important, especially for younger people," he said. A car technology supplier has announced a 44m investment in research and development in the west of Ireland. The investment will create 50 jobs over the next three years at its R&D centre in Tuam, Co. Galway, which will see its staff numbers grow to more than 500. The investment, which is supported by the Irish Government through IDA Ireland, will further develop its Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) for driverless vehicles. Marc Vrecko, Valeo Comfort and Driving Assistance Systems Business Group President, said: Our facility in Tuam is one of the leading Research centres in the Group. We are very excited about the announcement today to further expand our footprint here to build on the proven innovation in Product and Process R&D. "The investment will help fuel the global growth of the Vision Product Line and extend Valeo as global leader for ADAS systems and related MaaS products. Minister of State for Rural Affairs & Natural Resources, Sean Canney, welcomed the announcement. He said: Valeo is a substantial and valued employer in Tuam and indeed Galway and the West region and this announcement that VVS is to make a major investment in an RD&I programme is great news, demonstrating significant commitment by the company to the Tuam site as it positions itself at the leading edge of the development of autonomous vehicles. "It also shows that global companies of the calibre of Valeo can find, in regional locations, the skilled workers they require, the necessary infrastructure and services and pro-business environment, to establish and grow their operations. "I wish Vice President Fergus Moyles and his team continued success here. Valeo is not only involved with driverless cars, but also works in the field of electric cars and developing systems to reduce CO2 emissions from cars. Valeo has 186 plants, 21 research centres, 38 development centres and 15 distribution platforms, and employs 113,600 people in 33 countries worldwide. Their plant in Tuam helps develop sensors, including vision cameras and ADAS systems which act as the eyes of their driverless vehicles to enable the vehicles to make the right decision while driving. The R&D centre in Tuam is the Groups worldwide reference centre for vision systems. The site includes a state of the art production facility alongside an R&D Centre of Excellence with responsibility for the development and manufacture of automotive camera vision systems for global markets. The creation of 280 jobs in the US by Irish firms Netwatch and Relatecare has been announced as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar meets business leaders in the US. Mr Varadkar met CEOs from both sides of the Atlantic at an event at the US chamber of commerce in Washington DC this morning. It is estimated that there are 100,000 people employed in the US by 520 Irish firms. Ireland is also one of the largest source of foreign investment into the US with an estimated 146bn last year. In a statement about the new jobs, Mr Varadkar said: Irish investment in the United States is increasing year on year and is now at an all-time high. The scale and diversity of this investment is indicative of the strength of the partnership between our two countries. Ireland has a dynamic and innovation-based enterprise sector, backed by State investment, which is expanding its presence and impact in the US. "I look forward to meeting with some of these companies in the coming days and hearing of their plans for the future. At a round table discussion at the chamber today, business leaders will exchange views on how the Irish government can support growth. Enterprise Ireland CEO Julie Sinnamon and senior Irish executives will announce the new investments in the US. The Taoiseach will also be hosted for lunch by US Chamber of Commerce CEO, Tom Donohue, and a number of US Chamber members. Following the lunch, Mr Varadkar is participating in a discussion Ireland: Gateway of the Atlantic. Amazon, Facebook and Google are the biggest threat to retail banks in the future as the online giants move to financial services, the chairman of Bank of Ireland has said. Former chief executive of Paddy Power, Patrick Kennedy told UCC Cork University Business School annual conference that banking faced threats from financial technology, or fintech, firms such as banking service operator Revolut but also the online giants. "Amazon, Facebook and Google are all looking at financial services in the US in particular, but also elsewhere. Personally, I think they are as big - if not bigger - a threat than the pure fintechs because they know how to retail, they know how to personalise and they know how to use data," Mr Kennedy said. Bank of Ireland had to respond by "investing very heavily" into technology and its online offering, Mr Kennedy said. We are replacing our whole processing system over a six-year period that will cost us 1.2bn because we have an old proprietorial system that needs to be replaced. "Over six years, we will actually spend well over 2bn...Fintechs and the large tech firms are raising the expectations of consumers around what type of product and interface needs to be provided," he said. Some 99% of transactions were now done remotely outside bank branches, Mr Kennedy said. However, the 1% of transactions such as mortgages and life cover inside the branches were "critically important" to the bank, he said. Mr Kennedy said Brexit would be "chaotic in the short-term, and deeply negative for the UK, and not great for us also". He was more optimistic about the medium-to-long term, he said. MC Gina London, Emmy Award-winning former CNN correspondent and internationally recognised speaker, facilitator & communications & management expert taking a selfie with the crowd at the UCC CUBS Conference in the Cork Opera House. Pic Darragh Kane. Dean of Cork University Business School, Thia Hennessy told the 1,000 conference attendees that international accreditation for the school would propel it to the top 5% in the world in terms of international recognition. The new school building, which formerly housed Brooks Haughton builders' yard in the city centre, is expected to open by September 2022, she said. The new 220,000 sq ft building will bring 4,000 students and 200 students under a single umbrella, she said. Ms Hennessy said balanced regional development was good for the entire country, and that there were enough big international and indigenous firms in Cork to allow students to forge an entire career in the city. Other speakers at the conference in Cork Opera House, which was partnered by the Irish Examiner, included senior vice-president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Jim Cunha and co-founder of the I Wish programme, Caroline O'Driscoll. Russia's Ural Airlines launches flights on the route Samara-Baku-Samara starting from April 5, 2019, according to the website of the airline. Direct flights will be operated on the Airbus A320 every Friday. The flights will be operated according to the following schedule: departure time from Samara at 13:10, arrival in Baku at 15:45 and in the opposite direction - departure from Baku at 16:45, arrival in Samara at 19:10. The minimum rate will be from 97 euros in one way flight. Anglo Irish Bank behaved in a morally reprehensible manner towards Sean Quinns children when they signed guarantees for loans of hundreds of millions of euro aimed at propping up its falling share price, the High Court has been told. These five young people were ignorant of the banks true financial position when they signed guarantees in 2007 and 2008 and were never contacted by Anglo about the guarantees, Bernard Dunleavy SC said. It did not even know their ages. Brenda Quinn, the youngest of the children, was aged 20 when she signed a guarantee for a loan to a Cypriot company in the Quinn group, he said. (Left to right) Brenda, Ciara, Colette and Aoife Quinn in 2013. Pic: Courtpix The guarantees were required by Anglo for loans advanced by it to Quinn companies for the purpose of unwinding Contracts for Difference (CFD) held by their father in the bank, he said. At the time, Anglos share price was tanking and it needed to unwind the CFDs agreements to exchange the difference between the current and future price of shares in Anglo - to protect itself. The bank was engaged in a complex exercise of presenting a picture of itself to the public which was entirely at odds with reality, he said. Between the time the lending was agreed and the drawdown of the loans, the value of Anglo shares had further fallen and no one would give a personal guarantee for such loans except in very extreme circumstances, he said. This situation was so at odds with normal common sense the banks conscience should have alerted it to need to make sure the Quinn children absolutely understood what they were doing. There was a morally objectionable character to Anglo taking guarantees from the children when it never contacted them about those or advised them to take independent legal advice. Counsel agreed with Mr Justice Garrett Simons the guarantees stated that independent legal advice should be taken. Every guarantee says that, he said. When the judge asked why the children did not take independent legal advice, counsel said that did not arise because their relationship with their father was such they signed whatever they were asked to sign. Refusing a request from their father about any aspect of the Quinn business could not be contemplated because he had absolute influence over them. The bank must also have concluded that was so because it never contacted them at all about the guarantees, he said. Mr Dunleavy, with Ciaran Lewis SC, is continuing his opening of the children's action against Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC), Anglos successor in title, and against receivers appointed over shares. In the proceedings, Aoife, Brenda, Ciara, Colette and Sean Quinn Junior contend the guarantees and share pledges signed by them are invalid and have no legal effect. When the CFDs were unwound into shares, one portion was purchased by a group of investors known as the "Maple Ten" and the rest by the Quinn Group. Sean Quinn Junior in 2015 The Quinn shares were transferred to six Quinn-owned Cypriot companies which ultimately received 498m from Anglo. The childrens core claim is the securities provided by them are invalid on grounds including "unconscionable bargain", negligence and breach of duty by the bank to them, especially to advise them. They dispute they have any liability under the guarantees and share pledges. The bank denies the claims and pleads the children understood what they were doing. It has counterclaimed for some 83m each against them arising from their guarantees. It previously obtained a judgment for 120m, from their mother, Patricia Quinn, arising from a guarantee provided by her. She is bankrupt and is not involved in the case. Sean Quinn Senior and two former Quinn group senior executives, Liam McCaffrey and Dara O'Reilly, are third parties to the case. The bank sought to join them for the purpose of claiming, if it is found liable to the children, an indemnity against the third parties arising from how the guarantees and share pledges were allegedly obtained. The third parties deny the banks claims against them. Arising from Mr Quinns bankruptcy, which he has since exited, the bank previously got liberty to enter judgment, if applicable, against him. The hearing is continuing. A 60-year-old widow who is seriously ill with cancer has launched a High Court action over the alleged misinterpretation of her smear slides which were taken under the CervicalCheck screening programme. The woman who has cervical and lung cancer has brought an action against the HSE and US laboratory Quest Diagnostics. Mr Justice Kevin Cross today suggested the parties consider mediation as he fixed the case for hearing next October. The woman who has two children has brought proceedings relating to smear tests she underwent between 2009 and 2014. It is claimed there was an alleged failure to diagnose the woman's cervical cancer in a timely manner and that her cancer was allegedly allowed to go undetected, unmonitored and untreated until September 2016. It is further claimed the woman was allegedly denied the opportunity for earlier, less-invasive treatment which, it is claimed, would have prevented the subsequent development of her cancer. She has also claimed there was an alleged failure to ensure her smear tests between 2009 and 2014 were properly interpreted and an alleged failure to arrange any follow of a borderline abnormal finding on her 2009 smear test. Against Quest Diagnostics, with registered offices in New Jersey in the United States, she has claimed there was an alleged failure to take reasonable time and attention when screening her smear tests and the results of smear tests taken in 2009, 2010, 2013 and 2014 were allegedly wrongly reported. The woman who was suffering from severe lower back pain around December 2015 was referred to a number of different discipline specialists. Her cancer was diagnosed in September 2016 and she was treated with a course of chemo-radiotherapy. The chance of a long-term cure, it is claimed, is very unlikely and the outlook is guarded. It is claimed her prolonged symptoms of severe and debilitating back pain prior to diagnosis, her cervical cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment and her recent diagnosis and treatment for a lung tumour have had a profound impact on the woman physically and psychologically and also on her ability to partake in her normal everyday activities. All claims are denied. In court today Richard Kean SC for the woman said his side were seeking case management for an expedited hearing in July. Counsel for Quest Diagnostics told the court it wasnt possible to be ready for a July hearing, due to the complexity of the case. Setting down the case for October, Mr Justice Cross said he had to balance the womans right to have her case heard in her lifetime, with the fact he did not believe there was time for the defendants to be ready. He suggested mediation be tried to see if there was a chance it could be fruitful. Brian Foley BL for the HSE said he had instructions to co-operate with whatever the court decided. A High Court action by a senior army officer over the States refusal to provide him with an independent report into his allegations of corruption and misconduct within the military has been resolved, and the case withdrawn. The action was brought by the Defence Forces Head of Legal Services Colonel Jerry Lane against the Minister for Defence, Ireland and the Attorney General. The State parties represented by Margaret Nerney SC and Ronan Kennedy Bl denied any wrongdoing and argued Colonel Lane was not entitled to any of the reliefs sought. Following talks between the parties today, Col Lane's counsel Roughan Banim SC told Mr Justice Michael Twomey that the case had been "settled." Counsel said his client was "no longer seeking the independent report", known as the Smyth report, and that the proceedings were being "withdrawn." The case could be struck out, counsel added. When the case commenced this week, the court heard the proceedings arose over concerns raised by Col Lane several years ago that preferential treatment was being afforded to another member of the Defence Forces to the detriment of other members. Counsel said in 2010, his client attempted to raise the issue of the other officer's alleged preferential treatment through the chain of military command, but claimed that nothing was done. Col Lane's concerns were that the other officer was selected for, but ultimately did not get, a senior position which Col Lane claimed the other person was ineligible for. Col Lane, from Bandon, Co Cork, made a protected disclosure to members of Seanad Eireann regarding his concerns which were raised in the Seanad in 2011. Arising out of the disclosure, he claims he was subjected to a range of penalties, including threats of dismissal and involuntary retirement from the Defence Forces, but those threats were subsequently set aside. Arising out of his complaints, the Minister for Defence had in 2016 appointed Colm Smyth SC to conduct an independent review of the allegations. Due to the issues raised by Col Lane, the Department of Defence decided it would not be placing any reliance on Mr Smyths report, that it would not be published and would be kept in a sealed file. A fresh review was established into the allegations, to be conducted by Frank Callanan SC. In his action, Col Lane sought to have sight of the first report because any findings or conclusions in that document could affect his reputation. Col Lane claimed the refusal to give him the report breached his constitutional rights and fair procedures. In judicial review proceedings, Col Lane sought an order quashing the refusal to provide him with a copy of the first report and directing he be provided with that. He also sought damages and a declaration the respondents have acted unlawfully and in excess of jurisdiction by failing to provide him with a copy of the report. The respondents had opposed the action and denied the claims. Update 2.25pm: A letter sent to Scouting Ireland flagging concerns about child safety was never meant to be made public, a committee has heard. Tusla, the Child and Family Agency sent the letter in February raising serious concerns over child protection. Minister for Children Katharine Zappone published the letter, describing the contents as serious, and said she had been consulting the chief social worker and other senior officials in her department. Tusla representatives were invited to the Committee on Children and Youth Affairs on Wednesday. Fine Gaels Alan Farrell, chairman of the committee, asked them if the letter was intended to be published as there were concerns that individuals may have been identifiable in the examples provided. The letter sent to Scouting Ireland was addressed to them, and we expected they wouldve responded to Tusla, it was not our intention that the letter would make its way into the public domain, said Jim Gibson, chief operations officer of Tusla. The detail in the letter was especially for Scouting Irelands benefit, the matters in the cases were about the seriousness of the concerns of those involved. Labours Sean Sherlock pressed the officials on whether they had considered the effect such a letter would have on volunteers with Scouting Ireland. The explosive line in the letter is to do with the overnight stays. Did Tusla have any sense of the hurt and shock that they would cause when that letter went into the public domain? he asked. In respect of the thousands of volunteers and parents who went through vetting and children protection training, did you have sense of the magnitude of that statement? That couldve potentially shut down the organisation. Do you feel any regret about your statement in your letter on 18 February? The letter that was sent by Tusla was sent to Scouting Ireland, it wasn't to the public Tusla chief executive Pat Smyth acknowledged the work of volunteers but said the agency expected a response from Scouting Ireland, not for the letter to go public. We need to ensure the best standards are met across all organisations, to ensure all children are protected as best we can, he said. Ultimately the response within the letter was about identifying practice issues, and improving those issues where children are involved. The letter that was sent by Tusla was sent to Scouting Ireland, it wasnt to the public. He added that he did not ask the minister to publish the letter or read it in the Dail, which caused considerable media attention and public debate. However, Mr Gibson admitted he was aware that it would be made public after the minister requested additional correspondence. Senator Joan Freeman said that although the letter was serious and critical, the mood among Tusla was different now. We are duty-bound to lay out concerns, our tone needs to lay out key issues that arise, but we want to assist Scouting Ireland to be compliant and now were in a good space with them, Mr Gibson added. There are differences of opinions but weve set out an action plan and we are on the right road. It demonstrates a collaborative approach and I am satisfied as COO that we will resolve any issues. Tusla also said it was very surprised that Scouting Ireland was shocked to get the letter. As chair of Scouting Ireland, I would like to confirm Scouting Ireland is a safe organisation Last week, Scouting Ireland agreed to an action plan with the child and family agency, including hiring a safeguarding manager, reviewing its child safeguarding statement and supporting the implementation of the statement throughout the organisation in co-operation with Tusla. It has also agreed to review risk assessment of overnight trips, and an independent evaluation of its helpline. Adrian Tennant, chairman of Scouting Irelands board of directors, said it is a safe organisation, and the letter shocked them to the core. I read this letter as a parent to three daughters, who all enjoy scouting, and the content of the letter concerned me greatly, he said. Many of the issues raised in the letter had not been brought to our attention previously. We have had a productive meeting with Tusla to understand their concerns. Scouting Ireland has worked hard at developing the relationship with Minister Zappone, and we are pleased to say we will submit a final progress report later this month. As chair of Scouting Ireland, I would like to confirm Scouting Ireland is a safe organisation. The letter came amid a major investigation into past cases of alleged child sex abuse in Scouting Ireland. Representatives have been meeting the Garda and Tusla officials regarding allegations. An internal review has so far identified 313 alleged victims and 237 alleged abusers. Scouting Ireland hailed its own team of professional staff who operate a helpline to victims of historical sexual abuse. At the time of this meeting, the most recent case that has come to our attention is 1998, Mr Tennant added. - Press Association Earlier: Tusla receives 21 allegations of child abuse from Scouting Ireland Update 2pm: Tusla received 21 allegations of child abuse from Scouting Ireland last year. The child and family agency is appearing before an Oireachtas Committee, following concerns about the safety of children at the organisation. Scouting Ireland is expected to appear later this afternoon to allow both parties to share their progress on safeguarding policies. Service Director with Tusla, Linda Creamer, outlines what stage the cases are currently at. "At the moment, Tusla has six cases still opened. Many of the other cases are closed - [cases concerning] inappropriate behaviour. "The six cases that are there throughout the country are working around more serious concerns and they're being worked with with Tusla, the families and Scouting Ireland." Earlier: Children's Committee to hear from Tusla and Scouting Ireland representatives Update 7.39am: Representatives from Tusla and Scouting Ireland will be before the Children's Committee later. They will be questioned on matters of governance and the safeguarding practices that are in place for children at the scouting body. It comes after a letter was sent from Tusla to Scouting Ireland last month raising 'serious concerns' over its child protection standards and calling for an immediate review of how children are supervised. Fine Gael TD and Chair of the Committee Deputy Alan Farrell says it is important to understand why the letter was sent and what Scouting Ireland's response is. "I certainly would be very hopeful that the scouting movement will go through the letter line-by-line at our committee in terms of how they wish to address these issues along with the recommendations made by Tusla in terms of how we propose to ask the questions of Tusla, who will appear first, as to how they came to those findings and how they have interacted then with Scouting Ireland since the letter was published at the end of February," he said. A cross-border fisheries bill crucial to protecting the industry in a crash-out no deal Brexit risks not being made law before the Brexit divorce date because of infighting among Irish politicians. The Government has raised serious concerns about the situation, despite Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein insisting they are not jeopardising the bill by urging further engagement with the industry before it is passed. In a high-profile incident at the end of last month, two Northern Ireland registered vessels were detained in Dundalk by the Irish naval service as they were fishing in waters controlled by the Republic of Ireland. The incident, which was quickly resolved, highlighted the gaps caused by a long-standing gentlemen's agreement between those in power on both sides of the border that allowed for a de facto turning of a blind eye to fishing approximately 9.6km either side of the border line. While the UK had signed this into law a number of decades ago, the same move did not take place in the Republic due to our previous constitutional position that Northern Ireland was automatically part of the Republic of Ireland - with Dublin instead preferring a gentlemen's agreement on the issue. However, the incident - and the impending threat of a crash out no deal Brexit - has forced the hand of Government to now sign a bill on the issue into law. The Seanad is due to discuss the Irish fisheries (amendment) bill on Thursday at midday, with the Government having hoped to have used the final day before the St Patrick's Day break until March 26 to sign off on the Seanad's part in the committee and report stages of the bill. This would have allowed the Government to fast-track the bill when the Oireachtas returns on March 26 to ensure it is also passed through the Dail and signed into law by President Michael D Higgins before the Friday March 29 Brexit UK-EU divorce date. However, during order of business in the Seanad on Wednesday, Fianna Fail, Sinn Fein and a number of Independent senators raised concerns over the sudden speed of the bill and insisted it must undergo further industry discussion. A Sinn Fein spokesperson had yet to respond to the situation at the time of going to press. However, a Fianna Fail sources told the Irish Examiner Micheal Martin's party is still in favour of discussing the bill at committee stage on Thursday, and declined to say if the party is also in favour of passing report stage on Thursday as well. It is understood both parties, and Independents, are strongly of the view the bill must undergo further industry scrutiny and that the stand-off has nothing to do with constituency issues in fishing-dominated communities. Similarly, it is believed that even if the bill does not pass report stage on Thursday, there will be time in the final days before Brexit for the bill to become law. However, in a statement to the Irish Examiner on Wednesday night, a spokesperson for Agriculture Minister Michael Creed warned the potential delay is putting a key part of Ireland's no deal Brexit protections at risk, saying: Agriculture Minister Michael Creed "The Irish Government is committed to ensuring reciprocal access for Irish and Northern Ireland vessels within the six nautical mile zone and to formally underpinning voisinage arrangements by law. "The Government's stated intention is to pass legislation to underpin the voisinage arrangements and to put the agreement on a statutory footing. Having consulted with all parties and industry representatives, the Government will seek to progress the bill to completion in the Seanad on Thursday." Similarly, Tanaiste Simon Coveney made a plea for progress in the Dail on Wednesday, saying: "We have very important legislation on fisheries in the Seanad. I am appealing to both Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein, which are currently opposing that legislation, to consider what they are doing. "We are about the business of preventing border infrastructure, both in the Irish sea and on land, and we are currently preventing fishing vessels from Northern Ireland accessing our six-mile limit waters, which we have done historically. "Minister Creed is trying to fix that problem this week and he needs the facilitation and the assistance of both parties in the Seanad. "I would appeal to them to be of assistance in that regard." Funding cutbacks of 750,000 a year have prevented life-saving cancer clinical trials from going ahead, it has emerged. Cancer Trials Ireland chief executive Eibhlin Mulroe told a meeting of the Oireachtas health committee that the trials would benefit people with a range of cancers. We are unable to be proactive in exploring opportunities to open new trials in areas such as pancreatic, lung, testicular and cervical cancer. This is as a direct result of reduced funding, said Ms Mulroe. One very important difference between cancer trials and all other cancer research is that it is having a profound impact on the lives of people with cancer today. Trials deliver in the medium and immediate term. Today our trials are providing patients with access to proven but not yet available treatments that can save their lives. There are people on trials today who would not be alive if they did not have access to one of our trials. Ms Mulroe said it was crucial that decision-makers understood that when the funding for trials was reduced, life-saving treatments for patients could be removed. Earlier, the clinical lead of Cancer Trials Ireland, Prof Bryan Hennessy, said there were 130 cancer trials underway in Ireland involving thousands of patients. However, they had gone backwards on the number of newly recruited patients last year when there were only 348 patients newly recruited to therapeutic clinical trials, compared to 664 in 2014. Prof Hennessy said they needed an additional 1.2m per year over the next three years to increase activity and recruit more patients up to and above the 3% currently taking part in clinical trials. They also needed protected time for clinicians and medical teams so that they could do more research and foster a culture of research in hospitals. Chief executive of the Irish Cancer Society Averil Power said inadequate funding had been provided to deliver existing services to a growing number of cancer patients. This is truly shocking and will have a major impact on patients and their families," she said. One of the six missed targets was to ensure patients are diagnosed earlier so as to increase their chances of survival. At the end of 2018 less than 75% of people with breast, cancer symptoms were seen within two weeks and only seven out of 10 patients with certain cancers had their surgery within timelines set out in the strategy. Also, just over eight in 10 patients started radiotherapy within 15 working days of being ready to treat. One in two of us will be diagnosed with cancer. When we are, we deserve the best. We deserve the standard of care promised in the 2017 National Cancer Strategy. Director of the HSEs Cancer Control Programme Dr Jerome Coffey said a cancer research group would be established by the health authority before the end of the year. The principal officer of the Department of Health's cancer policy unit, Michael Conroy, said their aim was that cancer survival rates in Ireland would be among the best in Europe by end of the 10 -year strategy. A man has been assaulted on a Dublin Bus. It happened on the N7 Naas Road at around 5.20pm on Monday evening. Gardai said they are working to establish the identity of those involved and are appealing for witnesses. They have asked for anyone with information to contact Clondalkin Garda Station on 01 6667600, the Garda Confidential Telephone Line 1800 666 111 or any Garda Station. Several organisations representing Irish businesses have responded to tonight's House of Commons vote to reject a no-deal Brexit with cautious optimism. Retail NI and Retail Excellence say it's "an important step forward in avoiding a potential economic disaster on both sides of the border for retailers." Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, speaking with the correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza, praised the level of cultural and humanitarian cooperation with Azerbaijan. "We have good relations with the Ministry of Culture of Azerbaijan, the republic has a wonderful minister Abulfas Garayev, who does a lot for the development of our cultural relations," Vladimir Medinsky said in the first place, speaking about contacts between the two states at the level of culture ministries. "We have good working contacts, moreover, I believe that they are exemplary for the CIS member states. As a whole, Azerbaijan is among the leaders in this regard," the Russian Minister of Culture stressed. He particularly noted the activities of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and its president, the first lady of Azerbaijan, the first vice-president of the republic Mehriban Aliyeva. "For example, not so long ago, at the end of 2016, Mehriban Aliyeva opened an exhibition of Azerbaijani artists' works in our State Tretyakov Gallery - and such events are held regularly here," Vladimir Medinsky concluded. Retail chain Circle K has been spared a conviction and a temporary ban on selling tobacco products after a child managed to buy cigarettes in one of their shops. The firm which has more than 100 outlets in Ireland, pleaded guilty at Dublin District Court to a charge under the Public Health (Tobacco) Act, 2002 for selling a packet of cigarettes to a minor. Judge Anthony Halpin noted the firm had complied with his order made in January to pay 1000 in legal costs and give 1000 to the Little Flower Penny Dinners charity. He struck the case out. HSE environmental health officer Michael ORourke had told Judge Halpin earlier that on February 15 last year he entered the Circle K (formerly Topaz) shop at Clontarf Road. A teenage girl, acting as a test purchaser, also came into the shop and bought a pack of 20 John Player Blue. The court heard the shop assistant did not ask for ID from the girl who was under the age of 18 years. A photo of the girl was furnished to the judge and the environmental health officer said that it showed her as she appeared when she went into the shop. The firm did not have previous convictions and the company secretary came to court. She had said her firm was remorseful and has trained staff in their 160 outlets about the sale of cigarettes, but this incident had been down to human error. The offence can result in a conviction with a fine of up to 5,000 and a possible three-month suspension of a tobacco licence. Halpin accepted the company took it very seriously and it occurred in a busy commercial environment. He had accepted it was a result of human error. Ireland has to support any proposal of an extension to Brexit negotiations to avoid Armageddon claims Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin. It is time for everyone to stand back and reflect, he told RTE radios News at One. I dont think Ireland is as prepared as the Government likes to think. Mr Martin said it is important to have some shape fleshed out for an aid package for farmers and food producers fearful of market disruption because of tariffs. The meat and farming industries have known this threat (from tariffs and a no deal Brexit) was possible for some time, he said. A no deal would be devastating for rural Ireland, in particular, the border areas, he warned. This is nonsense, this carry on. Mr Martin said he would not get into a petty party political row. If a no deal Brexit happens then tariffs will apply. The Government knows this is the elephant in the room. He added that it was understandable that if negotiations are underway people are not going to show their hand. However, he called on the Government to face up to the challenges ahead and to be transparent. Sinn Fein MEP Matt Carthy told the same programme that it is essential that Ireland maintains its position re physical infrastructures on the border. The Government should also double its resolve to break down other barriers. He accused the British government of game playing and indulging in fantasy politics. This is an effort by the UK to put pressure on Ireland added Mr Carthy. A Dublin hotel owner is entitled to set off a 51,435 debt to its nightclub security firm against a potential 100,000 bill for four injury claims against it, the High Court has ruled. Russell Court Hotel owner, Triglen Holdings, is entitled to set off the debt to the company which previously provided it with security for the hotel and nightclub, P&B Security Services, now in liquidation, Mr Justice Garrett Simons said. The four claims against the hotel arise from alleged acts, negligence and/or failures of P&B, Triglen said. Triglen admits it owes the money to P&B which, through the liquidator, brought proceedings to recover the 51,435. But Triglen estimated it is facing a possible total liability of some 100,000 for four outstanding injury claims against it in which the claimants allege assault and negligence by the security firm's employees. One case has already settled for 25,000, it said. Triglen said it was part of the security contract that P&B would indemnify the hotel for any such claims. Therefore, it was entitled to offset the admitted debt against them. It also said it had requested the indemnity in circumstances where a number of security providers had previously gone into liquidation. The security industry, Triglen said, was in general transient with a high turnover of employees which it made it difficult to defend claims of alleged assault and left the customer of the security firm having to foot the bill. Insurance "excess" on security service provider policies can be as high as 35,000, it said. When P&B went into liquidation, the liquidator took responsibility for dealing with debts owed to the firm. The liquidator argued the right to set off the debt did not exist. Insofar as Triglen's right to an indemnity was concerned, it would simply rank as an unsecured creditor in the winding up of P&B, it was claimed. Mr Justice Simons was satisfied Triglen was entitled to a right of set-off. Where the liability under the indemnity is contingent only, the liquidator must make a just estimate of what that liability will be, he said. The uncontested evidence indicates that the liability will exceed the debt otherwise owing to P&B, he said. He dismissed P&B's application to enter judgment for the 51,435 debt against Triglen on the basis that the sum claimed was less than the amount Triglen was entitled to set-off. There are no significant savings to be had that will affect the headline 1.43bn cost of the new national childrens hospital, the new project leader told the Oireachtas health committee. Fred Barry is the chair-designate of the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board tasked with delivering the new childrens hospital on the campus shared with St Jamess Hospital in Dublin. Committee chairman, Dr Michael Harty, asked what would happen if the project, which is due to be completed in mid-2022, ran over time. "We will be having a very keen focus on costs and where we are in costs on an ongoing basis. The had monthly board meetings and they would be getting detailed cost reports and forecasts at all of those meetings. If we start forecasting that costs are going above the current 1.43bn, we will be flagging that immediately to everybody else involved. I do think that one of the disappointing things in the process so far was that that the actual costs were recognised rather late in the day. We will try to avoid anything like that happening again. Earlier he told Fianna Fails Stephen Donnelly, he did not think the cost would be significantly different from the headline figure. Fianna Fail TD Margaret Murphy OMahony asked how the public perception of the National Childrens Hospital could be changed. Everybody believes that the hospital is needed and wishes it luck but we all agree that it had a bad start, she said. Mr Barry said it was unfortunate that the much-needed children's hospital now has the aura of the cost issue around it. However, the hospital had to be built and it had to be a great facility for children. Eventually, if it works really well for the public, the memory of the rest will fade. Fine Gaels Kate OConnell, said some people believed that the site of the hospital was just a hole in the ground - nothing else. There is an awful lot of work done on the site already. The idea of moving to a new location now should really be put from everybodys mind, he said. Mr Barry said there was absolutely no certainty that An Bord Pleanala would allow the project to be built at another site. If the project was moved somewhere else it could be five or six years before tendering for construction contracts could start again. If the project is to be delivered it needs to be delivered where it is, he said. Norwegian Airlines has said it will replace the grounded Boeing 737 MAX airplane with a different model to operate US flights from Dublin Airport in the aftermath of the Ethiopian Airlines disaster at the weekend. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency, along with a number of national aviation authorities, suspended all operations performed by Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes, after one such model crashed within minutes of take-off from in Addis Ababa on Sunday, killing 157 people on board including Clare father-of-two Micheal Ryan. Norwegian use the model in question to service its US flights from Dublin Airport, but the airline has announced it will temporarily deploy a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner to serve the route. The Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner has 338 seats; 56 seats premium spaces, and 282 seats in economy. In a statement, Norwegian said it is informing customers with SMS and web updates on the status of its flights, and providing care and assistance while re-routing passengers within its network. Customers booked on affected transatlantic routes to and from Ireland serviced by the 737 MAX will be rebooked onto flights using the 787-9 Dreamliner. The 787 Dreamliner, registered G-CKWF with Charles Lindbergh on the aircraft tail, will operate the Dublin-New York Stewart (SWF) route daily, Norwegian said. The first such flight, D81763 from Dublin Airport to New York Stewart International Airport, took off today. (weds) Arrangements are being made to accommodate passengers booked to travel from Dublin to Stewart and Providence on the new Dreamliner service with plans to bus passengers to Providence upon arrival in New York, Norwegian said. Norwegian to continue flights between Ireland and US with alternative to Boeing 737 Max Digital Desk Norwegian will continue flying between Dublin and the US using a different plane to the suspended Boeing 737 Max. All variations of the Boeing 737 Max were banned from accessing Irish airspace yesterday following Sunday's fatal crash in Ethiopia which involved a Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft. As a result, Norwegian will operate its flights from Dublin to New York Stewart using the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. The 338-seater aircraft will arrive from London at 1.30pm this afternoon to depart for the US at 3.20pm. Only one in seven small businesses in Northern Ireland have made plans for a no deal Brexit claims the Federation of Small Businesses in Northern Ireland. Roger Pollen, the head of external communications with the federation says people are sitting tight as they feel they cannot make plans until they have all the facts. Many fear they could make plans for 50 different contingencies and then find that there is a 51st scenario. They are hoping for some clarity at the 11th hour, he told RTE radios Morning Ireland. Mr Pollen warned that there could be a lot of market distortion if Irish companies use Northern Ireland as a route to the British market. He was responding following the announcement that Britain will not introduce any new checks or controls on goods moving from Ireland to Northern Ireland in the event of a no-deal Brexit, including no customs declarations for normal goods. Announcing a series of strictly temporary, unilateral measures on Wednesday morning, the British government said its priority would be to enter into discussions with the European Commission and the Irish Government to jointly agree long-term measures to avoid a hard Border. Britain also announced a temporary tariff regime for a no-deal scenario but said it would not apply tariffs on goods crossing the Border into Northern Ireland. It will be for the Irish Government and for the EU to determine what measures might be applied on goods. Mr Pollen said that the move is asymmetric. The UK is making that offer, but the problem is that the UK is negotiating with itself, not the EU. The UK Treasury Plan is a legal route because of the Good Friday Agreement, he said as under World Trade Organisation rules allowances are made for special circumstances. There is not a lot of time to start planning, added Mr Pollen, but it is not too late for the six out of seven small businesses that do not have a contingency plan. It is now more expensive to rent in Dublin than it is in Paris. Rental accommodation in the capital is now among the top five most expensive in Europe. New research from ECA International claims the average cost of renting a three bed home in Dublin is almost 3,500. In the last year alone, Dublin has climbed 35 places to the 26th most expensive city in the world to rent in. However, people in Dublin have a better quality of living than those in London, Madrid and Paris. The capital has been ranked 33rd overall in a new Mercer report. It also comes in 32nd place for personal safety, which looks at things like crime levels and law enforcement. Vienna has had the world's highest quality of living for the 10th year running, followed by Zurich in second. Mercer Senior Consultant Noel O'Connor says Dublin did the best both here and in Britain. "Dublin remains the highest-ranked city for quality of living in the UK and Ireland," he said. "As a direct result of Brexit, many insurance companies, banks and legal firms in the UK are now looking to relocate part of their business, staff or legal entities to the EU." Revenue officers at Portlaoise Mail Centre seized 7.1kg of herbal cannabis with an estimated street value of 142,000 today. The drugs were discovered concealed in two parcels from America and Canada and were destined for separate addresses in Dublin city centre. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has insisted that Ireland is well-prepared for a no-deal Brexit as he warned that Brexiteers were living in a "fairytale", writes Juno McEnroe in Washington Speaking to reporters in Washington DC today, Mr Varadkar said British MPs should vote to take a no-deal scenario off the table later tonight and that alternatives to Britain crashing out should be examined. He also responded after Britain earlier published a schedule of tariffs for a no-deal Brexit which it is feared could shoot up the costs of Irish agriculture exports. This scheme, while temporary, proposes that tariffs for goods going from the Republic into the North would be cut to zero. But there would be fresh checks on goods crossing the Irish Sea into Britain from Ireland and the EU. Mr Varadkar warned that any new tariff scheme would also be applied on the EU side to UK goods and these would damage British business. He also insisted that Brexiteers were living in a fairy tale after MPs this week rejected British prime minister Theresa May's latest attempt to get a Brexit deal through Westminster. Ms May's attempts to get her Brexit deal through Westminster was defeated by 149 votes. MPs look likely tomorrow to vote on whether the March 29 Brexit deadline should be extended in a separate vote. Mr Varadkar also revealed that Cabinet will meet next week to agree a fresh package of supports and finances for Brexit-hit businesses and farming. He insisted that the country was well-prepared for a no-deal. The Taoiseach will begin a series of engagements in Washington today, aimed at deepening Ireland and the EUs relationship with the United States. Leo Varadkar will also comment publicly for the first time since yesterdays House of Commons rejection of the EU Withdrawal agreement. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar arrived later than expected in Washington yesterday, having deferred his travel plans to deal with the latest Brexit developments. He has yet to comment on the House of Commons rejection of the EU Withdrawal Agreement, but will do so later when he meets representatives of the Dublin and Belfast Chambers of Commerce. He will meet Irish companies expanding their operations in the US and visit and exhibition on Irish Women in America before attending the American Ireland Fund Gala Dinner. Government officials are billing this St. Patricks trip as an opportunity to build even stronger relations between the US and the EU. Tomorrow the Taoiseach will go for breakfast with US Vice President Mike Pence, and then visit President Trump at the White House. He will outline Irelands position on Brexit and press the case for resolving the situation facing the undocumented Irish. On Friday the Taoiseach travels to Chicago for a series of engagements, ending with him marching in the annual St Patricks Day Parade. Irans defense minister Amir Hatami said Tehran will respond firmly to any Israeli naval action against its oil shipments. The minister said such confrontation would be considered as piracy and warned that "if it happens, we will firmly respond." "The Iranian armed forces have certainly the capabilities to protect the countrys shipping lines in the best way against any possible threat," IRNA cited Hatami as saying. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week that Iran was still resorting to clandestine measures to ship fuel. He stressed that Israel's navy could act against Iranian oil "smuggling" to enforce U.S. sanctions. U.S. President Donald Trump last year quit a nuclear deal with Iran and reimposed some sanctions, aiming to cut Tehrans oil exports to zero. Iranian officials have threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil shipping route in the Gulf, if the United States attempts to stop the Islamic Republics oil exports, Reuters recalls. Senior research fellow of the Institute for Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladimir Sazhin, speaking to Vestnik Kavkaza, said that direct hostilities between Israel and Iran do not seem real now. "An armed conflict is unlikely - however, blocking Iranian tankers, as well as tankers with Iranian oil registered under flags of any other states, is quite real," he said. "Iran and Israel have had confrontational relations for many years, and such threats are regular. So it's not likely that Netanyahu wanted to provoke Tehran now. Another thing is that one of Iran's ways to circumvent U.S. sanctions against its oil purchases is to use 'off-radar' tankers. Maybe it annoys Israel, hence Netanyahu made such statements," Vladimir Sazhin stressed. The deputy head of the Council of the Russian Diplomats Association, Andrey Baklanov, in turn, stressed that the blockade of Iranian tankers will cause a pre-war state in the region. "Now additional diplomatic steps are required to prevent any military scenario. These days there is a number of very dangerous signals in particular, certain people in the U.S. are considering recognizing the Golan Heights as part of Israel. In general, there is a need to consider the general Middle Eastern situation in the UN Security Council and take measures to de-escalate tensions in the region," he urged. "According to the latest SIPRI data on global military spending, Iran is not preparing for war. In such circumstances, Netanyahu is trying to provoke Tehran. Perhaps, there are hidden interests of the companies supplying the Middle East with U.S. weapons. The U.S. accounts for 52% of arms supplies to the region, and without unwinding the Iranian threat, these supplies will decline. Therefore, there is a multidimensional impact on Tehran to provoke it to make some steps," Andrei Baklanov concluded. Leo Varadkar has said that if the UK wants to change its mind over Brexit, it would be welcomed back like the "prodigal son". The Taoiseach said the United Kingdom would be welcomed back to the European Union "with open arms". Mr Varadkar made the comments to the US Chamber of Commerce chief executive Tom Donohue in Washington DC during his St Patrick's visit to the United States. He was speaking on Wednesday evening, Irish time, as MPs voted in Westminster against leaving the European Union on March 29 without a deal. Yesterday, the House of Commons voted down Prime Minister Theresa May's proposed Withdrawal Deal. Mr Varadkar said: "It's always important to remind ourselves that Brexit is not our policy...This is the decision that the UK has made, a decision that we deeply regret in Ireland and across Europe. "If they were ever to change their mind, they would be like the prodigal son returning, and we would welcome them with open arms. "But we have to respect the decision they have made, which is to leave. "Whatever happens we (Ireland) made our decision a long time ago, that we're going to stay at the heart of the EU." Mr Varadkar told an audience, which included members of the Chamber of Commerce and senior Irish executives, that Ireland and the EU wants a Brexit deal. "We don't believe in tariffs or quotas, or differences in regulations, that's what the Customs Union and Single Market was all about getting rid of those things," he added. "We regret that people are now suggesting we go back to that. "I wonder whether those who advocated Brexit two or three years ago, did they really think it would be about imposing tariffs on each other and paper work and quotas, as that's where we heading if we don't have a deal." Brexit is not our policy...This is the decision that the UK has made, a decision that we deeply regret in Ireland and across Europe. Mr Donohue asked Mr Varadkar how his party have maintained common commitments in relation to Brexit with Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein. "We have a consensus across the Dail on a couple of issues and Brexit is one of those," Mr Varadkar said. "Paramount there is protecting the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement, which has to override any economic or trade related considerations. "We have made so much progress in the last 20 years, with the help of America, in eliminating differences between people in Northern Ireland and north and south (and) sweeping away the hard border that used to exist and we can't allow that to fall backwards. "Even a party like Sinn Fein which used to contribute to the violence and defended some of the violence that happened 20 or 30 years ago, used to be a very anti-European party and wanted us to leave the EU until a few years ago, (but) has now abandoned their policies in those areas." 'Is this really what they wanted?' Earlier the Taoiseach said those who advocated for Brexit have been "chasing unicorns" for a "very long time". "As we head into the next few weeks it should be blatantly obvious that unicorns only exist in fairytales," he said. "I would say to people who advocated Brexit - is this really what they wanted? Protectionism, borders, tariffs, restrictions on trade. "Is this really what Brexit was all about? And for those who voted against the Withdrawal Agreement on the basis that they feared that Northern Ireland would be treated differently as a result of the backstop, it must be evident to them now that it's the UK Government's intention to treat Northern Ireland differently." Addressing the UK's tariff proposals in the event of a no-deal Brexit, Mr Varadkar said Northern Ireland will become a back door to the European single market. "I don't think the UK's proposals will be workable for very long. They propose to treat Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK," he said. "Northern Ireland will become a back door to the European single market and I think that in a matter of months that will lead to the need for checks at Northern Ireland's ports. "So those that opposed the agreement may find that something very akin to the backstop is applied by the UK Government in a few weeks' time." Mr Varadkar also said that in the event of a no-deal Brexit the European customs code will apply to goods exported from the UK to the EU. "That will obviously have a severe impact on the UK economy and the Northern Ireland economy in particular. "Westminster can take the no-deal off the table this evening, and if they do so then there is the potential to look at alternatives, for example the UK staying in the customs union." Mr Varadkar added that Ireland has been preparing for a no-deal Brexit scenario for a long time. "We are well placed to deal with any shock that may arise from a no-deal (Brexit)," he added. "The fact that we have a budget surplus means that we can borrow if we have to support our economy." Update 10.30am: ESB crews are working to restore power to the 2,000 homes and businesses that lost it during Storm Gareth. Most of the outages were in Donegal, one of the counties that experienced the worst of the strong winds. Drivers in the north-west are still being advised to watch out for wind-blown debris on roads. Earlier: Winds of up to 130 km-per-hour as Storm Gareth continues Update 6.48am: Two weather warnings remain in place this morning as Storm Gareth batters the country. Counties in the west and north-west are worst affected. Winds of up to 130 km-per-hour have hit parts of the west and north-west over the past 24 hours as Storm Gareth continues to bear down on the country. High seas have also led to coastal flooding in places. Just under two thousand homes and businesses have lost power. The ESB says its crews are ready to address any potential power outages and is warning people not to approach any fallen wires or cables, and to contact them immediately. The RSA is also asking road users to take care when out travelling this morning. Met Eireann says the status orange weather alert will remain in place for counties Donegal, Galway, Leitrim, Mayo and Sligo until 9am. A yellow wind alert is in place for Munster, Leinster, Cavan, Monaghan and Roscommon until midday. Lisa Jordan has welcomed her second daughter. The Cork blogger shared the good news with a sweet Instagram snap of her holding her bundle of joy. "Look who has arrived," she wrote. "I can't even begin to describe the love I feel, I am truly blessed." Lisa, known as Just Jordan, is already mother to her three-year-old daughter Pearl - who was the person to tell everyone that 'there is a baby in mommy's tummy' in September of last year. Followers of the influencer took to the comments of the post congratulate her and her family. "Ahhh congrats a girl a sister for pearl they will be best friends for life," one wrote. While another said: "Huge congrats to you all on the newest arrival to your family. Cherish these times. Id say Pearl will be a right little mother hen with her little sister." The second day of the Cheltenham Festival will go ahead as planned. The Ladies Day card was under threat as high winds had been forecast for the Prestbury Park area, but those have subsided. The course passed a preliminary inspection two hours earlier than expected. "The wind's not as strong as expected. We have given the go-ahead for racing," said Simon Claisse, the clerk of the course. "The ground is still soft on the chase and hurdle courses, soft/heavy in places on the cross-country and we're expecting a largely dry day. "There may be the odd shower but with a few gusty winds. Altior will attempt to make it back-to-back wins in the Queen Mother Champion Chase, today's feature. Nicky Henderson's nine year old is aiming to win at the Festival for the fourth year running. He will be renewing his rivalry with the Willie Mullins trained Min, who finished runner up to Altior in the same race 12 months ago and the Supreme in 2016. The first race of the day is the Grade 1, Ballymore Novices' Hurdle, which goes to the post at the 1.30. The Gordon Elliott-trained 'Delta Work' is set to go off favourite for the RSA Novices' Chase. Huddersfield midfielder Philip Billing has received on-line racial abuse from someone purporting to be one of the club's own supporters. Billing, 22, retweeted an abusive message he had received urging him to leave the Premier League club. After a late night dash to Strasbourg on March 11, the British prime minister, Theresa May, said she had agreed legally binding changes to the Brexit withdrawal agreement with the European Union, writes Katy Hayward. Designed to avoid the UK being kept indefinitely within the so-called Irish backstop, such changes were deemed key in order for MPs to agree to the Brexit deal in parliament. But the deal was still defeated on March 12 by 149 votes. Why was the Irish backstop such a sticking point? Q: The UK attorney generals advice states that the new legally binding provisions reduce the risk of the UK being stuck in the Irish backstop indefinitely. What is the backstop and why is there so much opposition to it? There is a certain irony in the focus being on the UK getting out of the backstop rather than on avoiding falling into it in the first place. For the backstop is not the intended landing point for the UK after Brexit as the documentation produced by the UK and EU late on March 11 reiterates. Instead, it is a safety net for Northern Ireland to fall into if the UK and EU fail to negotiate a future trade agreement that avoids a hard border by the end of the Brexit transition period. In order for it to be fit for purpose, the arrangements for this safety net have had to be clearly spelled out before Brexit day. And because its function is primarily to avoid a hard border, the backstop is centred on Northern Ireland rather than the whole of the UK. This has produced a distorted picture of an unlikely-but-potential future relationship in which Northern Ireland remains much more closely tied to the EU than the rest of the UK. The Democratic Unionist Party and other unionist parties in Northern Ireland have been vocally critical of the backstop as a result, worried that if the UK ended up in this position be it by accident or design it would lead to growing divergence within the UK. In a political atmosphere of heightened tension and dysfunction, particularly in the absence of devolved government in Northern Ireland, such concerns are particularly acute and not easily soothed. Down to the wire. Patrick Seeger/EPA Q: If the UK did decide to unilaterally withdraw from the backstop arrangement, what would happen on the Irish border? Its worth noting that there are actually two aspects to the backstop set out in the protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland in the withdrawal agreement. They relate to two aspects of keeping the Irish border frictionless: avoiding the need for customs controls and enabling the free movement of goods. Customs controls come into play at entry points into a territory. If they dont apply at the land border, they will be in force at other entry points to Northern Ireland, such as the sea and airports. This in effect would mean customs controls between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. The first part of the backstop avoids this by including the whole of the UK in a single customs territory with the EU. If the UK was to withdraw from this part of the backstop, it would mean customs controls on the Irish border so all goods having to be declared, cleared for entry and tariffs or quotas paid as they cross the border. Given that 177,000 lorries and 208,000 vans cross the border each month, customs controls would be difficult to enforce and costly to comply with. Many Northern Ireland businesses fear that they simply could not survive such barriers to cross-border trade. The second part of the backstop is already specific to Northern Ireland. It means Northern Ireland would remain in regulatory alignment with the EU in specified areas of EU legislation (about 20% of it relating to goods) to avoid friction or controls on the movement of goods across the Irish border. The assurances Theresa May secured in Strasbourg on March 11 confirm what was already in the protocol of the withdrawal agreement: that Northern Ireland will not be automatically compelled to adopt new EU legislation in the future. That said, if Northern Ireland producers and businesses were increasingly out of line with EU rules, its likely that they would face barriers on the movement of their goods into Ireland and the wider single market. The majority of political parties in Northern Ireland support the backstop, and business and civic leaders have urged MPs to accept it. This is because they see the backstop as showing a rare degree of flexibility from the EU in order to minimise friction and barriers to the movement of goods across the Irish sea and land borders. Hands across the divide a sculpture in Londonderry. Neil Hall/EPA Q: Would this put the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement at risk? Protecting the 1998 agreement is a primary objective of the Brexit withdrawal agreement. Provisions within the Northern Ireland protocol relating to avoiding a hard border, maintaining cross-border co-operation and protecting human rights in Northern Ireland all relate back to this point. The co-operation across the Irish border associated with the peace process, as well as EU integration, has brought tangible benefits to communities in the border region most negatively affected by the legacy of conflict and economic underdevelopment. The risks posed to the peace process are much more complex than dissident Irish republicans who want a united Ireland seeing border guards or any physical border infrastructure as targets for terrorist violence, as they did in the past. And so minimising such risks to peace is also much more complex than avoiding border checks and controls. It requires trust and co-operation between the British and Irish governments, between north and south on the island, and between unionist and nationalist and others in Northern Ireland. In order to best secure future peace and stability in Northern Ireland, therefore, the sensationalist headlines and polarised narratives about the Brexit backstop must be cast aside. This article was written by Katy Hayward, Reader in Sociology, Queens University Belfast and was originally published on The Conversation. This article is republished from theconversation.com under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. Update: European Council President Donald Tusk posted an image on Instagram, said to be from a six-year-old girl named Sophie from London. It read: Dear Mr Tusk, I live in Britain. I know we are leaving the EU. But I think we should be friends. From Sophie, aged 6. The bottom of the note read I have drawn you a unicorn, alongside a sketch of the mythical beast. Unicorn has become a slang term used to describe the perceived fanciful ideas of various sides during Brexit negotiations. Last year Ivan Rogers, the former UK ambassador to the EU, claimed UK hopes of finding a technical solution to the Irish border issue was viewed in Europe as a fantasy island unicorn model. In the post, Mr Tusk responded: We will always be friends, Sophie. Earlier: 'We remain determined to avoid a hard border, ' says European Commission Asked at a Brussels press conference how the Brexit process will go forward, European Commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas said: Look to London, not Brussels, for answers. He added: We havent received any request for an extension. Should there be a UK reasoned request for an extension, the EU27 will stand ready to consider it and decide by unanimity. The EU27 will decide, giving also priority to the need to ensure the functioning of the EU institutions and taking into account the reasons for and duration of any extension. Asked whether the EU would reciprocate the UKs plan to apply a zero-tariff regime at the Irish border, Mr Schinas said: We have seen these UK plans and we will analyse them. We remain determined to avoid a hard border. The EU will ensure the integrity of the single market and customs union under all scenarios. We are convinced that since no other solutions have been identified, the backstop is currently the only one available option to fully address the challenges of the land border. Mr Schinas said that the EU would analyse the UKs offer on tariffs in a no-deal scenario to see whether they conform with World Trade Organisation law and the EUs rights. But he said that the EU had already made clear that after a no-deal Brexit, imports from the UK would be subject to tariffs at the same level applied to other non-EU countries under the WTOs Most Favoured Nation (MFN) rules. Frans Timmermans and Michel Barnier in the European Parliament today The differential treatment of trade on the island of Ireland and other trade between the EU and UK raises concerns, said Mr Schinas. In the event of no-deal, the Union has already made clear that it will apply its normal third-country trade regime to all trade with the UK, and accordingly charge MFN tariffs on imports from the UK into the EU. This is essential for the EU in order to remain a reliable trade partner to the rest of the world, including upholding internationally-agreed rules on global trade. Ukip MEP Gerard Batten said the EU should not grant an extension to article 50. He told MEPs: In the UK we have a government and a parliament that does not want to leave the European Union and it intends to betray the democratic decision of the referendum. He added: Do nothing and ensure that the UK is ejected from the European Union on the 29th of March. Do yourselves a favour, do us a favour, and kick us out. Update: German MEP Hans-Olaf Henkel called for European politicians to stop bashing London. He said: I think the Commission now has a historic chance to do something: help the Remainers in Britain to go for a second referendum I have always said #Brexit is also a failure of the European Union. The place of the United Kingdom is in the European Union. I am sure a younger generation will one day take another decision and bring Britain back into the European family. #EPlenary Guy Verhofstadt (@guyverhofstadt) March 13, 2019 Applause broke out, along with one heckler who shouted rubbish. He continued: and help the Brexiteers to change their mind so they can save their face. The European Union will never be complete without Britain, he added. #Brexit is supposed to be about taking back control. The big slogan of the Brexiteers. Instead, it seems to be spinning out of control. #EPlenary Guy Verhofstadt (@guyverhofstadt) March 13, 2019 Earlier: Guy Verhofstadt implores UK MPs to put 'queen and country' first as Farage urges EU to veto Brexit delay European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans told MEPs in Strasbourg: "I don't see any better solution than the Withdrawal Agreement with all the clarifications given." He said: "Brexit is very harmful to the United Kingdom and to the European Union, but it is our duty, on the basis of a vote of the British people, to work towards a Brexit that does as little harm as possible. My plea to our British friends? Put all your energy into finding a cross-party majority to find a way out of this mess. There is no solution if both big parties are using this existential issue as a bullet in a weapon against each other. Queen and country needs to come first. Guy Verhofstadt (@guyverhofstadt) March 13, 2019 "This position will not change, but today we are in the hands of the British political system. "They should tell us where they want to go from now. The solution will have to come from London and we will take it from there." Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament's Brexit co-ordinator, called for the UK to put "queen and country" before party politics, appealing for certainty from the House of Commons. He told MEPs in Strasbourg: "That is what we need and so I am against every extension, whether an extension of one day, one week, even 24 hours, if it's not based on a clear opinion of the House of Commons for something. That we know what they want." He added: "Please make up your minds in London, because this uncertainty cannot continue. Not for us, not for Britain and certainly not for our citizens." Nigel Farage told MEPS: "We have had enough, we have seen the snarling anger towards our country of Mr Verhofstadt, the bureaucratic intransigence of Mr Barnier, the constant stream of insults that come from Mr Tusk, and we are of one mind: we don't want to be governed by you; we want to govern ourselves." Responding to Mr Barnier's estimation of how long negotiations about the EU-UK future relationship could take, he said: "We don't want to waste four more years of our life, four more years of agony." The solution to avoid hordes of new Brexit Party MEPs being elected is for the European Council to veto any extension of Article 50 and ensure we leave on March 29. pic.twitter.com/jYLBAYjP3k Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) March 13, 2019 He called for any extension request from Britain to be vetoed, adding: "We leave, and both you and we can get on with the rest of our lives. That's the only neat solution ahead of us." Update: The EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier, told the European Parliament that the Withdrawal Agreement reached last November "is and will remain the only available treaty". In agreeing to draw up documents clarifying the terms of the Agreement in Strasbourg on Monday, "we went as far as we possibly could in order to help the UK Government get the support of the House of Commons", said Mr Barnier. Mr Barnier said it was now "the responsibility of the UK" to suggest a way forward. "They have to tell us what it is they want for their future relationship," he told the European Parliament. Nigel Farage "What will their choice be, what will be the line they will take? That is the question we need a clear answer to now. That is the question that has to be answered before a decision on a possible further extension. "Why would we extend these discussions? The discussion on Article 50 is done and dusted. We have the Withdrawal Agreement. It is there. "That is the question asked and we are waiting for an answer to that." Mr Barnier added: "We are at a critical point. The risk of no-deal has never been higher. That is the risk of an exit - even by accident - by the UK from the EU in a disorderly fashion. "I urge you please not to under-estimate the risk or its consequences." Mr Barnier told the European Parliament that the EU and its institutions are ready to deal with the impact of a no-deal Brexit. And he said that when people asked him if he was disappointed by the UK Parliament's rejection of the Withdrawal Agreement he helped negotiate, he said: "We remain respectful of the UK and its people. "We remain determined, calm and united and we will remain respectful, calm, determined and united until the end of this extraordinary negotiation. We shall defend the Union's interests and those of its citizens." Earlier: 'This impasse can only be solved in the UK' - Michel Barnier on next step for Brexit The European Union has said the next steps in the Brexit process can only be decided at Westminster. Theresa May's agreement with Brussels was voted down by MPs last night. The House of Commons will decide later if it wants to rule out leaving the EU without a deal. Speaking in Strasbourg, where the European Parliament has gathered for a debate on Brexit ahead of the next European Council summit, the EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier said: "Again the House of Commons says what it doesn't want. "Now this impasse can only be solved in the UK." As the European Parliament began a debate on Brexit, MEP and former Ukip leader Nigel Farage tweeted: "Have just come out of a meeting with (European Commission chief Brexit negotiator Michel) Barnier and he is scared of a no-deal WTO Brexit. Have just come out of a meeting with Barnier and he is scared of a no deal WTO Brexit. There is also huge pressure on Mrs May, if she demands an extension, to give a firm reason why. There will be no blank cheque for it. Ill be speaking in the European Parliament shortly. Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) March 13, 2019 "There is also huge pressure on Mrs May, if she demands an extension, to give a firm reason why. There will be no blank cheque for it. "I'll be speaking in the European Parliament shortly," he added. The European Parliament's Brexit co-ordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, said it is too early to talk about delaying the UK's departure. He said: "I don't think that anybody in the European Union really wants to go into a discussion about an extension. First of all, there is no clear position from the House of Commons." Warning over no-deal tariff regime A new tariff regime on EU products in the case of a no-deal Brexit will act as a sledgehammer to the UK economy, business has warned. The new levies, to be imposed from the day after a March 29 Brexit if MPs vote for a no-deal withdrawal, would force up prices on EU imports including cars and many food products. (Andrew Matthews/PA) The unilateral and temporary regime includes levies of 10.6% on European cars and trucks which had previously been free of tariffs, potentially increasing the cost of a typical family hatchback by around 1,500. Car parts would face no extra tariffs to avoid disruption to supply chains. But tariffs will be slashed on imports from outside the EU, potentially lowering prices on goods from countries like the USA and China. The CBI director-general Carolyn Fairbairn in the UK told BBC Radio 4s Today: This tells us everything that is wrong with a no-deal scenario. (PA Graphics) - Press Association Written by Lex Coors, Chief Data Center Technology & Engineering Officer, Interxion When you think of March, you think of St. Patrick's Day. And what color immediately comes to mind? Green. But today, the color green has taken on a brand new significance as the symbol of the booming green energy movement. That has become a vital component of Europe's economy-including the nation where St. Patrick's Day originated. As the preeminent data center provider in Europe, Interxion (NYSE: INXN) is leading the charge in both efficient energy practices and the use of renewable energy, showing that being green is a crucial way to win customers in Europe. Demonstrating green practices can be a notable business differentiator for service providers looking to sell services to the European market. Europeans care strongly about sustainability: slightly more than eight in ten E.U. citizens felt that environmental impact was an important element when deciding which products to buy. One example of this practice is Taxi Stockholm - who has an initiative to be completely free by 2025, an initiative that extends to their data center and IT service provider Devinix as well. So, for U.S. companies that are trying to take advantage of the European market, colocating in data centers committed to both using green technology and innovating new efficiency measures is a way to distinguish themselves from their competitors. At Interxion, energy efficiency is a company-wide policy, with energy-saving measures built right into its data centers. For more than 20 years Interxion has pioneered energy-saving designs and harnessed everything from arctic winds to underground aquifers to the Baltic Sea to reduce its energy use and thus reduce its carbon footprint. For data center providers, much of the daily operations involve ensuring the equipment is kept cool to ensure customers' mission critical applications are kept running 24/7/365. Interxion is innovating and implementing advanced energy-efficient cooling technologies: for example, free-cooling reduces the use of electricity, which is still predominantly produced from conventional fuels. These energy efficiency measures are examples of Interxion making a positive environmental contribution for its industry and its customers. In addition to energy efficiency, Interxion pioneered the use of 100% sustainable energy sources, including water, solar, and wind to power its data centers across Europe. And between 2017 and 2019, Interxion chose to redeem all of its data centers' electricity usage in the form of renewable energy produced in Europe, either via supplier's green tariffs or Guarantees of Origin. Interxion has played a critical role in the sustainability efforts of its host cities. A notable example is Stockholm: in the 1970s, Stockholm took energy efficiency to a new level by building infrastructure that reused excess heat to warm households in the city. Interxion is a key partner in this groundbreaking initiative: together with Stockholm Exergi, Interxion is transferring the excess heat energy into residential heating. In 2018, Germany's two biggest TV networks traveled to Interxion's Stockholm facility to film documentaries about the city's power-saving technology with hopes that other countries or cities will soon adopt similar practices. In Denmark, Interxion has developed groundwater cooling as an energy-saving measure. Previously, cooling in the summer months had been based on traditional refrigeration machines that used a lot of power. But Interxion worked with the city of Ballerup to develop a groundwater-based cooling system that can replace the traditional refrigerants with geo-energy. The result is a system that, summer and winter, can always provide sufficient cooling while significantly reducing energy consumption. Denmark and the whole Nordic region have evolved into Europe's leaders in energy efficiency. Not only are Interxion's Nordic facilities designed specifically with byproducts like excess heat in mind, they are among the only data center providers covering the whole of Europe with 100% sustainable energy. Hyperscalers like Apple and Google have applauded the Nordics for their energy efficient data centers. The great supply of power from sustainable sources like hydro- and wind power combined with the cold climate makes the Nordics an ideal place for building sustainable data centers. Due to this and a fast-growing market in Northern Europe, Interxion is seeing an increased number of hyperscale data center projects emerging in both Denmark and Sweden. Green-laden Ireland is another region in Europe where energy efficiency is thriving. The Emerald Isle's temperate climate makes it perfectly suited for free-air cooling, which uses approximately 40% less electricity than typical cooling methods. In addition to energy efficiency, Ireland is a leader in sustainable energy: 26% of the energy that Ireland produced in 2016 came from sustainable sources. It also possesses the third-highest wind penetration in the world. In fact, Ireland has set a target of having 40% of all its energy generated from renewable sources by 2020. It's quite ambitious, but completely reachable. In addition to sustainable energy, Interxion's Ireland data centers are making major contributions in energy efficiency. Interxion has pioneered new approaches to data center design and management, including improvements around power usage effectiveness and the industry's first-ever modular approach to data center design. Interxion even designed its newest Ireland data center DUB3 with a specific focus on energy-saving modular architecture, incorporating cooling and maximum efciency components. Interxion's efficient and sustainable facilities have changed the conversation around data centers. Once feared as a source of pollution, data centers are now embraced for their energy contributions to surrounding communities. Enterprises that wish to boost their business in energy-conscious Europe have also embraced data centers equipped with green technology. With such enormous benefits to the data center industry, environment, and local communities, it is easy to imagine Interxion's green energy initiative is a win for all. ## About the Author Lex Coors, Chief Datacentre Technology & Engineering Officer Over the past 25 years of his career, he has built exceptionally strong credentials in the design of versatile, cost-effective and energy-efficient data centre infrastructure. During his time with Interxion he has pioneered several new approaches to data centre design and management, including the improvement of power ratio efficiency between server load and transformer load, and the industry's first ever modular approach to data centre architecture. Lex is an original founding member of the Uptime Institute EMEA Network. Lex also holds a position at the Green Grid's Advisory Council, is active as the Vice Chair for the Governmental Engagement Committee of the Green Grid and works as a stakeholder for the European Commission DG Joint Research Committee on Sustainability and the European Data Centre Code of Conduct Metrics Group. Lex has also received the 2010 Personal Judges Award in Nice for Outstanding Contribution to the Datacenter Sector over the last 10 years. He studied Mechanical Engineering and Management and Economics in Rotterdam. The big four banks' biggest international rival in the home loan market, ING Australia, has stressed the need to keep the mortgage broking sector viable as it faces a potential shake-up in remuneration. The Dutch digital bank on Wednesday said that in 2018, it roughly doubled the industy's average growth rate in the crucial mortgage market, where it depends on mortgage brokers for 85 per cent of its loans. ING Australia chief executive Uday Sareen says mortgage brokers have an important role in the market. Credit:James Brickwood Full-year results showed its mortgage book grew by 9 per cent to $48.9 billion, which alongside growth in business lending and consumer lending helped to underpin profit growth of 15 per cent, to $401 million. ING also said it had seen a 57 per cent increase in the number of customers, to 645,000, that had ING as their "main bank." The Morrison government has gained new scope to deliver sweeping personal tax cuts in the April budget following a massive surge in the global iron ore price that could pour up to $6 billion into federal coffers. The surprise budget boost gives Prime Minister Scott Morrison a war chest to fight the May election by giving workers another round of tax cuts as well as producing a bigger surplus earlier than expected. A lift in the iron ore price will add billions to the federal budget. Credit:Michele Mossop The price of iron ore, which was already well above the government's forecasts in last year's economic statement, soared about 13 per cent in the wake of a major dam collapse in Brazil in January which is expected to lift demand for Australian resources. Lagging in the opinion polls, the Coalition could use the unexpected growth in Commonwealth revenue to cut income taxes in a new strategy to help address stagnant wages and match or exceed Labor's tax pitch. Woodside and Federal Resources Minster Matt Canavan have blasted new emissions rules in Western Australia as analysts warn the policy could delay major LNG projects and a deliver wider hit to the gas industry worth up to $US10 billion ($14.2 billion). The WA Environmental Protection Authority announced new guidelines earlier this month that would require all operations with direct carbon emissions above 100,000 tonnes a year to offset them through environmental projects. The West Australian EPA's proposed new emissions guidelines will put pressure on the future of LNG projects. Credit:Photo: AP The guidelines are not legislation and the EPA's recommendations can be ignored by the state. WA Premier Mark McGowan has told parliament he would reject them but Mr Canavan and the industry want him to go further. Woodside chief operations officer Meg ONeill said the guidelines shook certainty in the sector and as long as they stood they provided a roadmap for legal challenges. Married At First Sight is supposed to be an experiment in finding love. Unfortunately, and very alarmingly, what we, the viewers, have been witness to has been abuse. Mike has been gaslighting Heidi in his attempts to navigate their relationship. One of the so-called experts, John Aikin, has jumped on board to support Mike and encourage this insidious behaviour. Rather than this show being an experiment, it is a demonstration of how not to behave in many instances, and Channel Nine needs to have a think about the show's moral judgment. The extraordinary, powerful, beautifully made documentary After The Apology (on SBS on Demand) deals with the current escalating removal of Aboriginal children from their families conducted in a terrifying way by government agencies and the police. The stories of four Aboriginal grandmothers from Grandmothers Against Removals (GMAR) are deeply disturbing and inspiring. It's only on until end of March and is vital viewing. If Maureen Kutner (Letters, 7/3) has never watched Neighbours, I'm unaware of her qualification to compare it with ABC's The Heights, nor deem the former to be "white bread and Vegemite", lacking in realism or multiculturalism. However, I'm excited she's come out from behind her self-proclaimed snobbery to try something new. I suggest she broadens her world and visits the long-running Neighbours with its diverse cast, topical storylines and dedication to tackling community issues such as marriage equality and ovarian cancer. Fiona Lowe Geelong Better left black and white The current SBS series Australia in Colour fails to impress. Black and white images contain 256 shades of grey. To make a black and white field appear green, for example, takes just a tint of green. Colourising does not add multi-tonal colours, it simply tints specific areas of grey in one base colour. That's why all the scenes depicted resemble the old water colour painting books, nothing like Kodak's Kodachrome vividness of years past. When Ted Turner purchased the entire MGM film library in the late 1980s he wanted to colourise every black and white film. His colouring escapades faded in the mid to late 1990s when they colourised a Frank Sinatra movie Man with the Golden Arm and gave him brown eyes. Sinatra of course was known as ''Ol' blue eyes". Whilst SBS touts the colourisation of Australia's black and white film history as an "archival series'' it is one series that should not be shown to students studying our film culture of the past. It is rather ironic that the 2019 Academy Award for best Cinematography in a feature film went to Roma ... a film shot in black and white. Dennis Nicholson, Burwood Human-induced climate change is happening faster than officially acknowledged. Extreme events intensify, particularly in Australia, Asia and the Pacific. Victoria and Tasmania are ablaze again. Queensland needs a decade to recover from recent floods. Much of south-east Australia has become a frying pan, curtailing human activity. The economic and social cost is massive as Reserve Bank deputy governor Guy Debelle warned us this week but too many of our leaders refuse absolutely to acknowledge climate change as the cause. This major ice sheet in west Antarctica is melting. Its collapse is predicted to raise global sea level by up to a metre. Credit:NASA Given the overwhelming evidence and repeated warnings of the dangers we face, even as a former oil, gas and coal industry executive I find it incomprehensible that proposals for new fossil fuel projects proliferate, encouraged by government and opposition alike: Adanis Carmichael, Glencores Wandoan, Kepcos Bylong, Whitehavens Maules Creek, Shenhuas Watermark, along with 20 other NSW coal projects, Shells CSG and LNG expansion, Northern Territory and West Australian fracking, Statoil in the Great Australian Bight, HELE coal-fired power stations ... the list goes on. These projects are crimes against humanity. Fossil fuel investment must stop, now. As the cost of three decades of climate denial mount, the incumbency becomes evermore hysterical, lying and dissembling to avoid accountability we will meet our climate obligations at a canter. Students have no choice but to close their books and walk out on their classes to make their demands for serious climate action heard, says Greta Thunberg, the Swedish student who has started a global movement. On Friday, as many as 55 separate protests are expected in Australia by about 40,000 students as part of the School Strike 4 Climate campaign. That number is about twice that of a similar action in November, with about 100 nations likely to take part this time around. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, has started a global campaign for student action that will culminate in an international day of strike action by students on March 15. Credit:DPA In comments to the Herald ahead of this week's event, Ms Thunberg said she would be staging her now customary Friday strike, bringing the number of days she has boycotted classes to 42 since she began last year. "The plan was to school strike for three weeks [in the run up to Swedish elections]," she said in an email. "But at the end of that I wanted to go on. So then I started Fridays For Future ... The emissions are still going up so nothing has been achieved really." Forty people and their vehicles were stranded for several hours on the Barrier Highway at K Tank, about 25 kilometres east of Broken Hill, as the normally dry creek became a raging watercourse. The vehicles were towed through the flooded creek, and Broken Hill police said last night the people were all safe. But interstate truck drivers were still stranded along the Barrier Highway, and graziers were unable to move from homesteads surrounded by water. "But the sudden cold snap was killing freshly-shorn sheep..." Broken Hill, March 14, 1989 Credit:Peter Rae Mr Don Campbell, chief pilot for the Royal Flying Doctor Service at Broken Hill, said a meeting to assess the situation would be held this morning with State Emergency Services personnel and the police. Torrential rain has been falling since the weekend in a 1,000-kilometre arc stretching from the Simpson Desert into the western reaches of NSW. One station on the edge of SA's Flinders Ranges recorded the State's highest rainfall in 24 hours - 273 millimetres (nearly 11 inches). The normally dry Wilpena Creek in the same area was turned into a river 19 km (12 miles) wide overnight as it raged out of the ranges into parched saltbush country around Lake Frome. A monsoon swept into SA from the Kimberley region, flooding the opal-mining town of Andamooka and dumping huge downpours on stations in the Flinders Ranges before moving on to Broken Hill. Broken Hill's reservoirs were almost overflowing after an intake of up to 8,000 megalitres, or a year's supply, in less than two days. The first falls brought joy to the area, which had endured 50 days without rain and was under tight water restrictions. But then the downfall became a torrent. In Canberra, police warned children to keep away from swirling stormwater drains throughout the city, and flooding closed several roads. The Canberra weather bureau said 61 mm of rain fell between Monday night and 3 pm yesterday, with 44 mm between 9 am and 3 pm. The city's average for March is 58 mm. The Barrier Highway from Adelaide to eastern NSW was cut at three points, and the Silver City Highway was also cut. Heavy rain was continuing last night, and the weather bureau said no let-up was expected until this afternoon as the depression heads slowly towards the east coast. 'It's like an ocean going accross the road' Outback people told vivid stories yesterday of the storms which have swept swept across the centre of Australia since Monday. Mr Lambert Hannessen, licensee of the Bordergate Hotel at Cockburn, on the NSW-South Australia border, said he had been receiving two-way radio reports from stations and stranded truck drivers. "Five miles west of here it's like an oceaa going across the road," he said. "If the banks break at O'Lary, Wompinie Station will go. "The property is pretty well flooded now. There's a bloke on it with his caravan tied to a tree. His diesel task is moving. He has water right up to the house. "We have people in the pub now, just trying to keep them dry. The fellow bringing our meat supplies from Adelaide got stuck aboot 173 kilometres south of here at Yantha. "My wife is cooking up soups." "We sheared 525 weaners recently - and they are all dead bar one or two." John Lawrence, grazier, March 14, 1989. Credit:Peter Rae Mr Geoff Woods, regional livestock officer for the NSW Department of Agriculture at Broken Hill, said some sheep were able to get on higher ground in the Brokea Hill district as water swept across the low-lving areas. But the sudden cold snap was killing freshly-shorn sheep. Mr John Lawrence, grazier of Nine Mile Station, Broken Hill, said: "We sheared 525 weaners recently - and they are all dead bar one or two which we are trying to keep alive, but there is not much we can do. "We are very worried about 1,900 weaners we sheared last week. "We won't know till we are able to get out and check them what the damage is. "I have a total of 9,000 sheep and we have now sheared about 6,000 of them. We don't know how many we have lost." Mr Wally Freeman, retired fruit fly inspector, of Cockburn, who often spends a little time in the town's two hotels, one on each side of the NSW-SA border, as well as in community work, became a flood casualty yesterday. When the rains came, he went to switch on the power at the town's reservoir so that fresh water rationed because of drought conditions could flow freely again. But he slipped and fell while in the act, broke a rib, and last night was stranded in Cockburn, unable to see a doctor. At Motpena Station on the western edge of the Flinders Ranges, where South Australia's highest 24-hour fall was recorded, manager Malcolm Johnson and his wife Dulcie built a sandbank to keep floodwaters out of the homestead. "What was a bit of a gutter out the front of the place is now a roaring creek with foot-high waves on it," he said. "It's 200 metres wide today but it hasn't run with anything in it since 1898," he said. "This has been something I don't think white man's ever seen before. "All our creeks on both side of the ranges have breached the limits anybody's seen before and there's still all that water to come down out of the hills." At Arkaba Station, in the Flinders, Mr Dean Rasheed said a fall of 218 millimetres had eclipsed a 1916 record. The city of Broken Hill has had all roads into it cut off since early Monday morning. The beneficiaries have been the hotels and motels. They are jammed with salesmen, tourists and out-of-town St Patrick's Day revellers who have been trapped since the flooding began. The ACT government admits it has "very limited" powers to regulate household delivery drone services, including the level of noise emitted during flights, a Legislative Assembly inquiry has heard. The Civil Aviation Safety Authority has also acknowledged that no single federal agency is responsible for policing drone noise, as more gaps in the regulation of the divisive innovation start to emerge. Attorney-General Gordan Ramsay said the ACT government had "very limited" powers to regulate drone delivery services Credit:Jamila Toderas On Wednesday, ACT government ministers and bureaucrats, as well as senior aviation authority officials, fronted the Assembly's delivery drone inquiry, which is examining's the technology's presence in the national capital as tech company Wing prepares to launch into Canberra's northern suburbs. Opponents of Wing's Bonython trial have repeatedly spoken of a lack of clarity over the regulation of the operation, describing how their grievances about noise, privacy and disturbances to animals were being bounced between departments and largely left unresolved. A number of shots were fired at the Murrumbateman home of one of the ACT's most powerful union leaders late on Tuesday night. The ACT secretary of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, Jason O'Mara, was at home with his wife and children when a series of shots were fired into his house about 10.20pm. Shots were fired into the home of CFMEU ACT secretary Jason O'Mara on Tuesday night Credit:Karleen Minney Mr O'Mara was unavailable for comment about the incident, however, the secretary of the union's construction division, Dave Noonan, confirmed the shooting took place. "I can confirm that a number of shots were fired into Jason's home last night," Mr Noonan said. Traffic engineers have told a tribunal that the original traffic report for Johnny Roso's new apartment building on Northbourne Avenue overstated the amount of traffic the building would create. Traffic engineer Graeme Shoobridge said assumptions behind the initial traffic modelling for apartments on the site were "conservative" and had overstated the traffic impact on neighbouring residential streets. Signage for the Soho development along Northbourne Avenue in September 2018. The development is now subject to an ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal appeal launched by the North Canberra Community Council. Credit:Elesa Kurtz The North Canberra Community Council has launched an appeal in the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal against the development application approved for the Mulberry apartment building. Geoff Davidson, who has launched the appeal on the community council's behalf, told the tribunal cumulative traffic flows on to Dooring Street had not been properly considered as part of the development's approval. Loi canh bao uoc ua ra trong mot buc thu gan ay cua ai su My gui en cho uc uoc to Wall Street ua tin. My van ong cac ong minh tay chay Huawei vi an ninh quoc gia. Anh: Getty Images ai su My Richard Grenell cho biet, My se khong hop tac voi uc neu nhu quoc gia nay cho phep Huawei hoac cac cong ty khac cua Trung Quoc tham gia vao the he mang 5G cua nuoc nay. US warns Germany a Huawei deal could hurt intelligence sharing The US has told Germany it would curb intelligence sharing with Berlin if it allows Huawei to participate in its 5G mobile network. The warning came in a recent letter from the US ambassador to Germany seen by the Wall Street Journal. The US has been lobbying its allies to boycott Huawei due to national security risks. The firm has pushed back against claims it poses a security threat including suing the US government. US ambassador Richard Grenell said the US would not be able to keep the same level of co-operation with German security agencies if Germany allowed Huawei or other Chinese firms to participate in its next-generation 5G mobile network, the Wall Street Journal reported. The government is hoping a new conservation trust for the Ginninderry development will allay community concerns after the 11,500-home project was given an exemption from an environmental impact statement. Three regular Canberrans will be picked to sit on the board of the trust overseeing a corridor near the development in the capital's north-west. Ginninderry Conservation manager Jason Cummings at the Murrumbidgee, which partially falls under the trusts jurisdiction. Credit:Jamila Toderas The ACT government allowed Ginninderry to be exempt from a full environmental impact statement last year despite concerns about the project, including how it would affect a nearby Little Eagle population. Housing Minister Yvette Berry said the work done in Ginninderry to ensure the development was environmentally kosher was "over and above" what ACT or federal environmental laws would have required. Hercules the alpaca, nibbling on sultanas in a front garden in Giralang, is a gentle creature who has brought peace and hope to people in Canberra. But now he is recovering from the most violent and traumatic act that cost the life of his alpaca companion, Mimosa. "He slept by the gate last night hoping she'd come home," owner Nils Lantzke said. Nils Lantzke with his surviving alpaca Hercules after his other alpaca Mimosa had to be put down after a dog attack. Credit:Elesa Kurtz Mimosa, an eight-year-old alpaca, was euthanised after being attacked by "a black staffy dog" while the dog's owner filmed the mauling on his phone, about 6.45pm on Tuesday in Giralang. The frightened alpaca ran in a panic along various streets towards Mr Lantzke's home after the attack. EDITOR'S NOTE: The High Court overturned Cardinal George Pell's conviction for historic child sex offences in a judgment handed down April 7, 2020. In a unanimous decision all seven High Court judges found Victoria's Court of Appeal should not have upheld Pell's conviction. It found the evidence could not support a guilty verdict. What to do about George Pell? Its the question that has been asked up and down the local and international Catholic hierarchy, and in Melbournes legal precinct, the states corrections system and countless homes across the country. And now its a topic of conversation inside the exclusive, gentlemen-only Melbourne Club, which has counted Australias highest-ranked Catholic as a member since 1992. To be sure, it has been a week of headaches for Melbournes coterie of blokes-only clubs, after Julian Burnsides on-air Damascus moment, deciding membership of an all-men club didnt fit with the brand of a Green-voting human rights defender. Sausages come in a variety of different shapes and sizes, but they are all the product of the same process. In her excellent recent book From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting, Judith Brett makes reference approvingly to democracy sausage, meaning the sausage sizzles which are now a feature of many polling places on election day. These fund-raising stalls are a celebration of the happy way in which Australian democracy has adapted the conduct of elections. Onion but no sauce. Bill Shorten strikes again at the sausage stall. Credit:AAP By contrast in other political science writing democracy sausage has an alternative meaning as the mechanical and unreflective way in which Australian parliamentary sausage machines produce decisions, when dominated by one of the major parties. This is especially so when one party possesses the majority on the floor of the chamber to push through what it wants by executive fiat. Bretts book shows how democracy sausages are the symbolic culmination of the proud history of the Australian contribution to electoral and voting practice around the world, including the secret ballot (known as the Australian ballot), womens right to vote and to stand as a candidate for office, compulsory voting, preferential voting, Saturday rather than weekday voting, independent electoral administration rather than party political manipulation, and other innovations. It is a proud story, only partially recognised until now, to which there have been many contributors. These include not just members of parliament from the major political parties, but also notable public servants, including the second chief electoral officer Ryton Campbell Oldham and the 19th century South Australian electoral officer, William Boothby. Some patients at Logan and Redland Hospitals are waiting up to three days in emergency departments before being put in a bed, the peak body for emergency medicine in Australia claims. Australasian College for Emergency Medicine President Simon Judkins visited the emergency departments of the two south-east Queensland hospitals on Wednesday. Dr Judkins said he was told of patients waiting up to 72 hours for a bed in extreme cases, with others waiting at least 24 hours. The peak emergency doctor's body claims patients are waiting up to three days to be seen at Logan and Redland Hospital's emergency departments If you think about the type of patients were dealing with, especially mental health patients, were taking them and putting them into a hallway and sit them in a chair for three days its an inhumane situation and I dont think we should tolerate that, he said. The brother of a Queensland stonemason who died from silicosis has revealed he himself is suffering from the debilitating condition, as he promises to take up his brothers mantle in raising awareness of the issue. Anthony White passed away on Saturday at the age of 36 as a result of the debilitating lung condition. His younger brother, Shane Parata, has now revealed he has been diagnosed with silicosis, having also worked for over a decade in the stone manufacturing industry. Gold Coast stonemason Anthony White, who died from silicosis aged 36. Ive always felt a bit guilty about it because Im the one who got him into the trade in the first place, Mr Parata said. A Vietnam war veteran and his wife have vowed to sell their Queensland home after they were woken up to four intruders wearing balaclavas and armed with a crowbar robbing their house. The 69-year-old woman and 76-year-old man, who say they are now too scared sleep at home, were forced to sit on a sofa while a group of men searched their Springburn Drive residence at Glasshouse Mountains about 11.30pm on Sunday. A couple have been traumatised after they were threatened with a crowbar while being robbed at their Glasshouse Mountains home in Queensland. Credit:Seven News One of the men struck Vietnam veteran Roger Garner in the face before they fled the house with jewellery, mobile phones and a purse, police said. He was treated at the scene by paramedics. Don Russell always kept a curiously low profile despite once being Paul Keatings right hand man. Paul Keating's long-time right-hand man Don Russell could be the next chair of AustralianSuper. Illustration: John Shakespeare Credit: He's under consideration for a more public position chair of AustralianSuper, the countrys largest superannuation fund which manages more than $160 billion in savings. AustralianSupers current chair, former Reserve Bank board member Heather Ridout was appointed to the position five years ago and her term will soon be up (although we have no doubt any future Labor government will find her something to do). In addition to his time with Keating, Russell has had a gig at West AM and chaired State Super. EDITOR'S NOTE: The High Court overturned Cardinal George Pell's conviction for historic child sex offences in a judgment handed down April 7, 2020. In a unanimous decision all seven High Court judges found Victoria's Court of Appeal should not have upheld Pell's conviction. It found the evidence could not support a guilty verdict. These are the points County Court chief judge Peter Kidd had to weigh up in sentencing George Pell for sexually abusing two choirboys at St Patrick's Cathedral in East Melbourne in the 1990s. Aggravating factors (against Pell) The profound effects the attacks had on the victims Pell's breach of trust to his victims and abuse of his position of power His callous regard to the boys as he abused them, which included disregarding their pleas for him to stop, and ordering them to stop crying The second attack on one boy showed Pell didn't reflect on the trauma inflicted during the first attack weeks earlier Pell's high moral culpability for his crimes No remorse, no explanation and no discount for pleading guilty. Pell pleaded not guilty Public denunciation of the offending Deterring others from similar offending given the devastation child sex offending causes Pell, 77, must serve three years and eight months in prison before he is eligible for parole after he was last year found guilty of orally raping one boy and molesting the other at St Patrick's Cathedral in East Melbourne in 1996 and 1997. The cardinal, who was until late February the Vatican's treasurer, is the highest-ranking Catholic to be convicted of child sexual abuse. When the detectives who lead the investigation left court they were greeted with the words: "Three cheers for Victoria Police, hip hip hooray". Michael Advocate, who goes by that pseudonym as he is an abuse survivor, watched the sentence being handed down on a TV monitor outside court. He said that the jail term was far too light for the suffering inflicted on his victims. Give some thought to the poor victims that will go through life in the most damaged and traumatic way, its like trying to get through life with a broken leg that never fixes, he said. Youve got two young innocent boys that have had their lives totally destroyed, theyve both received lifetime sentences. "So this creepo freako gets less than two years actual jail time for each victim that he destroyed. Wheres the justice in that? Cathy Kezelman from the trauma recovery-focused Blue Knot Foundation said the sentence represents the personal struggle for justice of many other abuse survivors and the outcome is likely to be emotional and polarising. For some, any sentence won't be enough while others, still reeling from the verdict, will likely be outraged, she said. Loading "For too long, hermetically sealed systems of power, such as within the Catholic Church, have called the shots, protecting the church, its hierarchy and themselves," Dr Kezelman said. "Hopefully this sentence can herald fundamental change to the church and other institutions, starting with accountable, responsible and transparent leadership, hierarchy and culture." Leonie Sheedy, a sex abuse victims' advocate and head of CLAN, said the sentence had left many with mixed feelings. She said while it was a momentous day to show Australia that anyone could be held accountable for crimes against children, the focus on how Pells poor health would make it hard for him in prison was an insult. No one cared about our physical or mental health, she said. Im surprised his good character carried so much weight in the sentencing, the royal commission said that should never be used in evidence. I think the best thing today was witnessing him having to sign the sex offenders' register, that will stay with us forever. Ms Sheedy said she only hoped todays sentence would help show other victims of child sex abuse that no matter a persons standing in the community, anyone could be brought to justice for their atrocities. Regardless of your position, education, status or religious beliefs you are accountable in a court of law in this country, she said. The railings outside St Patrick's Cathedral have been festooned with ribbons. Credit:Simon Schluter In recent days survivors, their families and others have decorated the railings outside St Patrick's Cathedral with ribbons. The cardinals supporters continue to believe the jailed sex offender is innocent. Peter Westmore, who has attended many of Pells court appearances, said he was disappointed about the sentence but still held out hope he would be released on appeal. I think the sentence was a lottery, he said. There have been many other people over the last 2000 years that have served longer terms of imprisonment. He knows he came into the world with nothing and he knows he will leave with nothing. Mr Westmore said he thought Judge Kidds remarks that Pell had shown staggering arrogance in committing his crimes were utter rubbish. Thats not the George Pell that I know, he said. Another supporter, Karen Baxter, compared the case with the wrongful conviction of Lindy Chamberlain. I think things are going to come out later, she said. Professor Constant Mews, director of the Centre for Religious Studies at Monash University, said the church must now put aside its support for Pell and instead focus on renewing its leadership and supporting those who have suffered abuse. Locally within the church this sentence will have a divisive effect Im sure between people that support him and the feeling that the church needs to move on, he said. Catholics will certainly be looking for clear leadership and inspiration from the hierarchy and it would be in their interests to really, absolutely identify with the cause of those who have suffered from abuse. This case is so unusual because it has become of international significance. When asked about Pope Franciss continued support for Pell, Professor Mews said it was time Pell took control of his own role and stood aside. That sort of response is the one that the Pope can clearly make but I think there will be strong pressure for him [Pell] to at least stand aside ... if not resign his position because clearly he cannot work in any pastoral ministry given the present situation." Prime Minister Scott Morrison urged Australians to support survivors of child sexual abuse. "I would just ask Australians today to get around those who have been victims of child sexual abuse," Mr Morrison told reporters ahead of the verdict handed down at 11.15am. "Let them know we know it happened, that we want to help you be stronger and to survive what is the most abominable you could think that could happen to an individual with a breach of trust." Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said his thoughts are with everyone for whom this case re-awakens old trauma and all those Australians still mourning someone stolen by the pain of child abuse. We can never underestimate the courage and resilience it takes for a survivor of child abuse to seek justice, he saidSurvivors and victims who sought help were seldom believed. Instead, against the weight and power of both church and state, they were marginalised, shamed and re-abused. For decades, institutions chose to cover for offenders and conceal their crimes because they valued their reputations more than the lives of children in their care. Last year, as a Parliament and a nation we apologised for the abuse, the neglect, the wilful blindness, the cries for help that were heard and ignored. "But saying sorry wasnt the end of the road. The test is actions, not words. Thats why we need faster progress on national redress for survivors and why every institution needs to sign up, immediately. Unbeknownst to almost all us at the time we reported the discovery last month of the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier U.S.S. Hornet (CV 8) on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, the team aboard the late Paul G. Allens deep ocean research vessel R/V Petrel had earlier discovered the long-lost carrier U.S.S. Wasp (CV 7). This is simply stunning news, and we wanted to share with you what we know so far from the press release below, along with some fascinating and haunting images of the ship and her aircraft as they rest today Seattle, WA, March 13, 2019 Wreckage from USS Wasp (CV 7) was discovered January 14, 2019 by the expedition crew aboard the late Paul G. Allens Research Vessel (R/V) Petrel. Wasp was sunk on Sept. 15, 1942 by four Japanese torpedoes from the Japanese submarine I-19 while escorting transports carrying the Seventh Marine Regiment to Guadalcanal as reinforcements. Of the 2,162 on board, 193 were killed as a result of the attack. The sunken aircraft carrier was found in the Coral Sea, 4,200 meters (nearly 14,000 feet) below the surface. Paul Allens passion for U.S. history lives on through these missions. He was dedicated to honoring the brave men who fought for our country, said Robert Kraft, director of subsea operations for Vulcan Inc. Paired with the discovery of USS Hornet announced in February, were excited to start out the year with these momentous discoveries. In 1941, Wasp was assigned to ferry vital army planes to Iceland, supplementing for a lack of British aircraft to cover American landings. The P-40 planes that Wasp carried provided the defensive fighter cover necessary to watch over the American forces. Wasp also aided two very important missions to Malta, a location being hit daily by German and Italian planes. After Wasps first mission to Malta, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, fearing that the nation would be pounded to bits, asked President Roosevelt to allow Wasp to have another good sting. Aside from providing vital enforcements in WWII, Wasp was the first ship to launch U.S. Army planes from a U.S. Navy carrier, paving the way for future collaboration between the armed forces. Wasp represented the U.S. navy at the lowest point after the start of WWII. Her pilots and her aircrew, with their courage and sacrifice, were the ones that held the line against the Japanese when the Japanese had superior fighter aircraft, superior torpedo planes and better torpedoes, said Rear Admiral (Ret.) Samuel Cox, director of the Naval History and Heritage Command. The first year of the war, it was touch and go. Those who served at that time deserve the gratitude of our nation for holding the Japanese back. In its final battle, Wasp was hit in arguably the most effective spread of torpedoes in history by a Japanese submarine I-19, which fired six torpedoes. USS Hornet, USS North Carolina and USS OBrien were all hit and either crippled or sunk as well. Although the torpedoes that hit Wasp caused a massive inferno on the ship, men showed reluctance to leave until all remaining crewmates were safe. Only when satisfied that the crew had been evacuated did Capt. Forrest P. Sherman abandon the ship. He later became the youngest Chief of Naval Operations to ever serve in the position. Another survivor, Lt. David McCampbell went on from being Wasps signal operator to becoming the number one navy ace pilot flying the hellcat fighter. The crew of the WWII Wasp exhibited the bravery, toughness and resolve that our crew today strives to emulate. We are humbled by the sacrifice of those Wasp sailors, especially those who paid for our freedom with their lives, said Capt. Colby Howard, Commanding Officer, USS Wasp (LHD 1). We hope this discovery gives remaining survivors and their families some degree of closure. I would like to sincerely thank the entire R/V Petrel crew, whose commitment and perseverance led to the discovery. The crew of R/V Petrel has also found the wreckage of USS Hornet, USS Juneau, USS Ward, USS Lexington, USS Helena and perhaps most famously, the USS Indianapolis in the past few years. On Jan. 8, 2019 PBS aired a new documentary titled, The USS Indianapolis: The Final Chapter, which highlights the 2017 shipwreck discovery by the crew of the R/V Petrel of what remains the US Navys single greatest loss at sea. Past Allen-led expeditions have resulted in the discovery of USS Astoria, the Japanese battleship Musashi and the Italian WWII destroyer Artigliere. His team was responsible for retrieving the ships bell from the HMS Hood for presentation to the British Navy in honor of its heroic service. Many thanks indeed to the Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museums Michelle Donoghue for her tremendous help in publishing this article, especially in gathering the images and authorizing their publication. And bravo to the crew of the R/V Petrel for all they do, and to the late Paul G. Allen in having the foresight to fund and execute these important historical missions. EDITOR'S NOTE: The High Court overturned Cardinal George Pell's conviction for historic child sex offences in a judgment handed down April 7, 2020. In a unanimous decision all seven High Court judges found Victoria's Court of Appeal should not have upheld Pell's conviction. It found the evidence could not support a guilty verdict. It took Chief Judge Peter Kidd nearly an hour to reveal how long Cardinal George Pell would spend in jail. But as the judge came to the numbers six years' jail, with a non-parole period of three years and eight months there was some outrage and confusion at the length of the sentence when the maximum penalty for his crimes was 10 years for each charge. So how do courts measure an appropriate sentence to fit a crime? Judge Kidd, who allowed his 67-minute sentence to be broadcast live by media given its significance, found Pell acted with "staggering arrogance" in attacking two vulnerable 13-year-olds in a room in the cathedral after a Sunday mass in December 1996. Loading He said Pell acted on the assumption his authority as Archbishop of Melbourne meant he would get away with it. "You offended against two victims, despite the fact that the door was unlocked and despite the risk that either victim could have run from the room or later complained," Judge Kidd told Pell. "I think you did give thought or reflection to this offending and the only reasonable inference from the brazen circumstances of your offending is that you had a degree of confidence that the victims would not complain either immediately, by running out, or at some later stage ... "You have shown no remorse or insight into your offending." Pell was last year found guilty of attacking both boys in 1996, and then assaulting one of the choirboys in early 1997 when he shoved the child into a wall in a cathedral hallway, again after Sunday mass, and squeezing the boy's genitals. Judge Kidd acknowledged that Pell's advanced age, the stresses that accompany prison life, and ill-health - including cardiac and blood pressure problems, and osteoarthritis in both knees - brought a real possibility he could die in custody. "Facing jail at your age, in these circumstances, must be an awful state of affairs for you," the judge said. Defence counsel Robert Richter, QC, who was jeered by sex abuse survivors and advocates outside court, said the cardinal would face his time in custody "like the man that he is". Loading One of Pell's supporters cried as he was led into custody, while sex abuse survivors and their supporters cheered outside on the street. Pell maintains his innocence and has appealed against the jury's verdict, with a hearing set for June 5. If the Court of Appeal finds the challenge successful it could quash the convictions and order a retrial. It is for that reason the surviving choirboy, now a man in his 30s, could not draw comfort from Pell's sentence. Illustration: Matt Golding Credit: "It is hard for me to allow myself to feel the gravity of this moment," he said in a statement read by his lawyer Vivian Waller, as advocates gathered outside the court to mark the sentence. "It is hard for me, for the time being, to take comfort in this outcome. "I appreciate that the court has acknowledged what was inflicted upon me as a child. However, there is no rest for me." Pell's other victim died in 2014 from an accidental heroin overdose. His father welcomed the jail term, although he said six years was insufficient, and had hoped for a decade. The father is considering suing Pell and the church over his son's death, which followed years of drug addiction that started soon after the abuse. "Listening to the judge in there was hard," the father said. Loading "I was angry inside. I felt like my son's life was wasted. Why was it wasted? For some guy's two minutes of pleasure. It's not easy to describe ... it's stuff that destroys families, it destroys people." The father said he wanted to reconnect with his son's friend, to hug and thank him for contacting police in 2015 and giving evidence both as a victim and eyewitness to what he saw Pell do to his friend. "He was a fabulous little kid, he's a fabulous man now," he said. "He kept it in for a long time and that would have been hell for him. Absolute hell. But I'm really appreciative and thankful that he did come forward." Judge Kidd found Pell's attack on both boys was a brazen and forcible example of sexual violence, where he grabbed the first boy by the head and pulled him towards his penis, and then put his penis in the second boy's mouth. He ignored pleas for him to stop and told them to stop crying. The crimes carried an "added layer of degradation and humiliation", the judge said, because the boys witnessed each other's abuse. "At some point in the episode, you even told your victims to be quiet because they were crying." The second attack had "a degree of physical aggression and venom" and showed Pell had not reflected on the trauma he caused to the boys weeks earlier. Judge Kidd rejected Mr Richter's submission the crimes were committed by Pell the man and not the then-archbishop, and instead found they were a remorseless and grave breach of trust and abuse of power. Pell's status at the time cast "a powerful shadow over the offending". "In my view, your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance," he said. Loading "The brazenness of your conduct is indicative of your sense of power." Judge Kidd acknowledged Pell had no prior or subsequent offending, dedicated his life to serving the church and endured extra punishment through the intense media focus on the case and his ruined reputation. The media focus on Pell's case was extraordinary, he said, and it was fair to say the cardinal is considered by some as "a publicly vilified figure". Judge Kidd slammed the "witch hunt" that had taken place since Pell was convicted, adding that he "utterly condemns such behaviour". "The court stands as a bulwark against such irresponsible behaviour," he said. Upon delivering his sentence, the judge asked Pell to sign the sex offenders register. Pell did so quietly with the assistance of the judge's associate. Members of the Care Leavers Australasia Network were once again a visible presence outside court in their blue and yellow uniforms, holding signs and chanting about justice for victims of sexual abuse. One held a painting of Pell that read "Prisoner 666". Leonie Sheedy, head of CLAN, said the sentence had left many with mixed feelings. While it was a momentous day which showed that anyone could be held accountable for crimes against children, she said the focus on how Pells poor health would make it hard for him in prison was an insult. "Im surprised his 'good character' carried so much weight in the sentencing, the Royal Commission said that should never be used in evidence," she said. Members of the Care Leavers Australasia Network outside the County Court. Credit:AAP "I think the best thing today was witnessing him having to sign the sex offenders register, that will stay with us forever." Ms Sheedy said she only hoped Wednesday's sentence would help show other victims of child sex abuse that no matter a persons standing in the community, anyone could be brought to justice for their atrocities. "Regardless of your position, education, status or religious beliefs you are accountable in a court of law in this country," she said. They huddled around mobile phones outside the court as the sentence was broadcast live. Credit:Jason South Phil Nagle, an abuse survivor from Pell's hometown of Ballarat, was driving home from Mount Gambier and listened to the sentencing on the radio. He didn't think Judge Kidd should have taken the Cardinal's age into account when handing down his sentence. Illustration: Matt Golding Credit: However, Mr Nagle said he was happy that Pell would serve time in jail, unlike when his perpetrator Christian brother Stephen Frances Farrell first faced court in 1997 and was given a suspended sentence. "The expectation from the public is that we're not going to put up with these guys getting light sentences or not getting jail," he said. "It's moving in the right direction, but slowly. He's committed the crime and he's got to do the time." Mr Nagle said it would be a bittersweet day for Pell's surviving victim and the family of his other victim who died of an accidental heroin overdose in 2014. "This is their day in court, we need to recognise that," he said. "I'm so proud of them for having the guts to stand up. They need to be able to take on board the accolades for coming forward." In recent days survivors, their families and others have decorated the railings outside St Patrick's Cathedral with ribbons. The cathedral gates were covered in coloured ribbons by Wednesday morning. But there was no comment from the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne. Spokesman Shane Healy said the archdiocese did not have anything to say on the sentencing. The cardinals supporters continue to believe the jailed sex offender is innocent. Peter Westmore, who has attended many of Pells court appearances, still holds out hope the cardinal will be released on appeal. "I think the sentence was a lottery," he said. "There have been many other people over the last 2000 years that have served longer terms of imprisonment. He knows he came into the world with nothing and he knows he will leave with nothing." Mr Westmore said it was "utter rubbish" to say, as Judge Kidd did, that Pell had shown "staggering arrogance" in committing his crimes. "Thats not the George Pell that I know," he said. Another supporter, Karen Baxter, compared the case with the wrongful conviction of Lindy Chamberlain. "I think things are going to come out later," she said. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Scott Morrison urged Australians to support survivors of child sexual abuse. "I would just ask Australians today to get around those who have been victims of child sexual abuse," Mr Morrison told reporters ahead of the verdict. "Let them know we know it happened, that we want to help you be stronger and to survive what is the most abominable you could think that could happen to an individual with a breach of trust." Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said his thoughts were with everyone for whom this case re-awakens old trauma and "all those Australians still mourning someone stolen by the pain of child abuse". The Ristevski case gripped the nation, in part because of the numerous bizarre theories that arose during the investigation and some of the strange characters involved. We revisit some of them here. Karen's stepson says she was planning to leave, makes affair claims July 23, 2016: Borce Ristevski's son from a previous relationship, Anthony Rickard, makes a bizarre statement that there was conflict within the family and his stepmother had fled. He tells police that the marriage to his father was fake, and the couple had stayed together for money, image and their only daughter. Mr Rickard says his stepmother had always planned to leave her husband when their daughter, Sarah, turned 21. Weeks later he offers media an interview for $200,000 and claims he had been romantically involved with his stepmother. Anthony Rickard, son of Borce Ristevski. Credit:Facebook Faulty fuel gauge Fremantle key defender Joel Hamling has opened contract discussions to avoid heading into free agency bargaining later into his AFL season. Hamling was delisted from his original AFL outfit Geelong five years ago and is considered free to move anywhere at the end of his current Dockers contract. Credit:AAP Hamling and his influential Perth-based manager Colin Young are believed to be into early stages of considering an official first offer from Dockers management. Hamling, 25, is considered a high priority re-signing at Fremantle as a substantial component in a young defence with other key backline members Alex Pearce, Luke Ryan and Nathan Wilson already committed to lengthy deals. A swift resolution to his talks could earn the important full-back a hefty pay rise with an announcement ahead of the new home-and-away season later this month. As a midwife and educator, Alison Teate believes women should be able to control where and how they give birth. But all too often that's not the case. Midwife and researcher Alison Teate wants restrictions on ACT's home birth trial relaxed. Credit:Elesa Kurtz Dr Teate, who is also the chair of the ACT branch of the Australian College of Midwives, has been disappointed by the restrictive nature of the ACT's publicly funded home birthing trial. "For some women, they have chosen to free birth because they have not been able to access the care that they want," she said. Mistakes made by private call centre workers in Centrelink call centres could be putting people escaping domestic violence at risk, the main public sector union claims. Private call centre contractors have been rolled out across the country, and there will be 2750 by April, but there have already been reports that mistakes have been made and the contractors aren't trained to the same level as public servants. The Community and Public Sector Union says it is aware of at least 12 cases where women escaping domestic violence have called Centrelink to change their contact details, but the updates were not made by the contractors. With the old addresses still on file, details about payments and other correspondence could have been going instead to abusive partners, and could be a breach of the Privacy Act. Human Services spokesman Hank Jongen said supporting people affected by domestic violence was a priority for Centrelink but didn't deny the incidents had occurred or if the department was investigating them. Liberal MP Craig Laundy has told Scott Morrison he plans to quit politics but the decision has been kept secret while the Prime Minister finds a candidate to parachute into the seat. Several people close to Mr Laundy told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that the former minister who was a strong ally of Malcolm Turnbull had long ago decided not to recontest his marginal Sydney seat of Reid. Scott Morrison and Craig Laundy handle fruit at the Homebush markets in 2017. Credit:AAP They said Mr Laundy has not declared his decision because Mr Morrison wants to recruit a replacement first and announce the move as a "double whammy", rather than leaving local preselectors to fill the vacancy. The Prime Minister is said to be courting former deputy police commissioner Nick Kaldas for the seat. The Liberal Party conducted polling last week to gauge support for Mr Kaldas in an attempt to convince him to run. When it comes to splashing cash on infrastructure projects in Queensland, there is a great divide between Brisbane and everywhere else in the state. A report, commissioned by the Queensland Major Contractors Association and the Infrastructure Association of Queensland, reveals 194 projects, worth $41.3 billion, are in the pipeline over the next five years. Large transport projects, such as Cross River Rail and Inland Rail, underpin activity in the more densely populated south-east corner, and are fully-funded. Credit:Ryan Stuart Of those, $13.8 billion is unfunded, mostly in regional Queensland, causing uncertainty in those communities struggling the most. The report shows major projects in Brisbane, the Sunshine Coast, the Gold Coast, Ipswich, Toowoomba and Logan accounted for $13.2 billion, or 48 per cent of total funded major project work. An independent umpire created to deal with complaints about ride-sharing and taxis will not have any real powers, the Taxi Council of Queensland says. Last month, Transport Minister Mark Bailey introduced a bill to create a personalised transport ombudsman, which is the latest reform in the sector, following changes including an annual licence for ride-sharing drivers, the requirement to display signs and compensation for taxi licence owners. Drivers, companies customers will still be asked to deal with each other to resolve their issues first before approaching the new Queensland personalised transport ombudsman. Credit:Luis Enrique Ascui The ombudsman will be designed to hear complaints from passengers, drivers and operators, including about dirty vehicles or a driver's working conditions. But Taxi Council of Queensland chief executive Blair Davies warned the ombudsman may become a "toothless tiger" and its powers should be expanded. A former Liberal MP caught up in a Japanese bathhouse scandal could be back in Parliament if the rumoured retirement of an upper house politician comes to fruition. Phil Edman, who lost his seat in State Parliament's upper house at the last election, would be elected after a count back if long-serving Liberal Simon O'Brien stands aside before the next election. There are concerns within the Liberal Party former MP Phil Edman could make a return to Parliament if another MP retires early. Credit:Nathan Hondros Mr Edman was named in a Corruption and Crime Commission report into former WA trade commissioner to Japan Craig Peacock. The CCC levelled allegations against Mr Peacock that he used government resources to arrange for Mr Edman and another Liberal MP to visit a brothel in Tokyo's Yoshiwara red-light district. A fiery exchange about whether MPs should be allowed to breastfeed in Parliament has led to suggestions Transport Minister Rita Saffioti accused Nationals leader Mia Davies of not understanding the issue because she doesn't have children. But Ms Saffioti is vehemently denying she disparaged Ms Davies in this way. Transport Minister Rita Saffioti during a fiery debate in Parliament over whether women should be allowed to breastfeed in the chamber. Credit:Nine News Perth Ms Saffioti was speaking about her experiences when she was banned from breastfeeding her children in the chamber. She said she was laughed at and mocked by Liberal politicians. Washington: Last September, influencer Olivia Jade Giannulli gave her then-1.6 million YouTube subscribers a tour of her dormitory room at the University of Southern California. Amazon had paid for everything in sight, but the room itself wasn't anything out of the ordinary. Like any other freshman, Olivia Jade, 19, knew the value of a power strip, a sign of what her brand was on track to become: #relatable college content with a splash of aspirationalism. Actress Lori Loughlin with her daughter Olivia Jade Giannulli at "An Unforgettable Evening" in Beverly Hills, California, in February. Credit:ap Five months later, that brand is shattered. Olivia Jade's famous parents, Full House actress Lori Loughlin and fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, were among the 50 people charged by the Justice Department on Tuesday for participating in a bribery scheme to get their children admitted to prestigious colleges and universities. Olivia Jade's college acceptance is under scrutiny, along with the standardised test results of children born to wealthy people such as actress Felicity Huffman. "Pilots have been notified. Airlines have been all notified. Airlines are agreeing with us. The safety of the American people -- and all people -- is our paramount concern," the president said. "Our hearts go out to all of those who lost loved ones, to their friends, to their families, in both the Ethiopian and Lion Airlines that involved the 737 Max aircraft. It's a terrible, terrible thing." Canada's Transport Minister Marc Garneau. Credit:AP Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau said he issued the "safety notice" after the newly-available data was reviewed Wednesday morning. "At this point, we feel that that threshold has been crossed and that is why we are taking these measures," Garneau said. Loading Garneau said the safety notice halts Boeing 737 MAX aircraft from arriving, departing or using Canadian airspace, effective immediately. The notice also cover the Max 9, another model in the Boeing series. Garneau said the new information reviewed on Wednesday is satellite tracking data that is collected when an aircraft takes off. He said the data provides an indication of the plane's course and its vertical profile. "My experts have looked at this and compared it to the flight that occurred with Lion Air six months ago in October, and . . . there are similarities that sort of exceed a certain threshold in our minds with respect to the possible cause of what happened in Ethiopia," he said. The handling of flight safety is a potentially sensitive issue for the Trump administration, after the Wall Street Journal reported that the US government shutdown contributed to the delay in the patch for 737 MAX MCAS flight-control feature. The Federal Aviation Administration said it didn't know whether the 35-day government shutdown delayed the software update for Boeing 737 Max planes but it will investigate, Reuters reported. The shutdown which ran from December 22, 2018 to January, 25, 2019 hinged on Congressional funding for Donald Trump's border wall. The FAA said Wednesday it plans to open a proceeding into two fatal Boeing Co 737 MAX 8 plane crashes after it said data showed "some similarities" in the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes. Meanwhile, Ethiopian Airlines said on Wednesday that it will send the voice and data recorders from its ill-fated Flight 302 to be analysed in Europe. A spokesman said the country had yet to be chosen. Officials around the world have cited the continued absence of clear information from the plane to call for Boeing 737 Max 8 jets to be grounded. The data from the two flight recorders are eagerly awaited as investigators look for any connection between Sunday's crash and the October crash of Air Lion flight. After China grounded the plane on Monday, most countries followed suit, including much of Europe. The latest bans were issued by India, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Turkey and Hong Kong. Ethiopian Airlines chief executive Tewolde Gebremariam told CNN on Tuesday that the pilot reported "flight control problems" and asked to return to the airport. Tewolde said that the boxes would be sent abroad "because we don't have the equipment here" to analyse their data. US President Donald Trump. Credit:Bloomberg While Tewolde of Ethiopian Airlines said the cause of the crash was not yet clear, he cast doubt on the airworthiness of the 737 Max. "Two major fatal accidents on the same airplane model, brand new airplane model, in six months - so there are a lot of questions to be answered on the airplane," he said. In remarks to local media, Tewolde also revealed that pilots received additional training from Boeing to fly the 737 Max after an Indonesian domestic Lion Air flight crashed into the Java Sea shortly after takeoff last year. "After the Lion Air crash, questions were raised, so Boeing sent further instructions that it said pilots should know," he said, according to the Associated Press. "Those relate to the specific behaviour of this specific type of aircraft. As a result, training was given by Boeing, and our pilots have taken it and put it into our manuals." Latest News ANZ makes another rate hike New highest fixed among Big Four as 40pts added to 4 and 5 year rates UBank sets cheapest ever interest rate Despite widespread rises, digital lender slashes 20pts for lowest ever advertised rate Yesterday afternoon, the coalition government announced a dramatic change to its position on the future of trail commissions. Rather than barring trail commissions on new loans starting in 2020, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced that they will be left to operate as is with a review held in three years time. In the statement, mortgage brokers were said to be critically important for securing better consumer outcomes in the mortgage market. The Government wants to see more mortgage brokers not less, the media release stated. MFAA CEO Mike Felton said, The announcement reflects the fact that the case for the removal of mortgage broker trail commission has not been made, nor has it been demonstrated that existing trail arrangements lead to poor customer outcomes. In past weeks, there has been confusion throughout the broking industry as to what benefit was being sought from eliminating the trail commission payment structure. Trail commission for mortgage brokers is deeply misunderstood, and is often confused with ongoing commissions earned by other financial services providers, Felton said. He explained, Trail is contingent income that is only paid to a broker if the loan is not in arrears, is not refinanced and does not involve fraud. As such, it is an important control mechanism that aligns the interests of brokers and their customers, and ensures that the broker focuses on the customer relationship rather than simply pursuing the next transaction. Aussie Home Loans CEO James Symond also welcomed the news. Todays announcement is a positive step by the treasurer and provides a good timeframe for this consultation process to take place, he said. Meanwhile, FBAA managing director Peter White welcomed the move but said that policy changes were needed to back it. The Coalitions announcement to keep trail commissions has been delivered in a pre-election environment so uncertainty remains about how exactly this will work after the election. Hayne simply didnt get it but its now the case that both sides of politics are now very clear on the importance of mortgage brokers. Both the Coalition and Labor recognise that the recommendations of the royal commission would in fact hand power back to the big four banks, which is an absurd result, he added. Latest News ANZ makes another rate hike New highest fixed among Big Four as 40pts added to 4 and 5 year rates UBank sets cheapest ever interest rate Despite widespread rises, digital lender slashes 20pts for lowest ever advertised rate Figures recently released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) show that in the past year, new lending to households has taken the sharpest annual dive in over a decade. "Reflecting the impact of both supply and demand side factors, new lending for dwellings is down over 20% from January 2018, the largest through the year decline since late 2008, explained ABS chief economist Bruce Hockman. New lending commitments to households dropped 2.4% in January of this year, following a 3.6% decrease in December 2018. Compared to January 2018, new lending is down 16% seasonally adjusted. Hockman said, "Weaker lending for dwellings (-2.1%) again drove much of the overall fall in lending to households, with further falls in lending for investment dwellings (-4.1%) and for owner occupier dwellings (-1.3%) in January." Queensland and the Northern Territory were the only two states or territories not to exhibit a decline in lending activity in January. Loans to first home buyers (FHB) fell, but not as much as the 3.2% decline in loans for owner occupier non-first home buyers. The only household lending category to record a rise in January was lending for personal finance, up 1.2%. Hundreds of Brooklynites rallied outside a Brownsville hospital to protest proposed multi-million-dollar cuts to the states Medicaid system. Locals, staff at Brookdale Hospital, and members of health-care workers union 1199 SEIU gathered outside the medical center to demand Gov. Cuomo keep his hands off the more than $550 million he may siphon from the system, in order to balance a state-budget deficit created after President Trump and other Republican politicians in Washington, DC, rewrote the federal tax code in 2017. We cant put a price on peoples health, said Khari Edwards, Brookdale Hospitals vice president of external affairs. Our rallying cry was: No more cuts! No cuts! Edwards joined roughly 1,140 demonstrators at the rally outside the hospital near Rockaway Parkway and Linden Boulevard, including Borough President Adams, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, Councilwoman Alicka Ampry-Samuel (DEast Flatbush), and the head of the Greater New York Hospital Association, who warned Cuomos proposed cuts would slash medical services offered to some of the boroughs most vulnerable residents, and potentially force some care providers to shutter. Our message is simple: no health-care cuts, said Kenneth Raske. New Yorks safety-net hospitals have already been cut to the bone, and cannot absorb them. If these cuts happen, many hospitals would curtail vital services and some would close their doors for good. Tens of thousands of health-care workers would lose their jobs. Some of the local demonstrators will take their campaign to Albany on March 19, in an attempt to convince Cuomo to strike the cuts from the executive budget he must sign by April 1, according to Edwards, who warned the proposals, if passed, will affect more than just health-care workers. This is not a health-care workers issue it is literally a community issue, he said. I may be overstating it, but for us, the more cuts that happen, the more people that will die in the streets. Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC The president of local university St. Francis College is amid a massive effort to put his Brooklyn Heights campus on the world map, in order to build a diverse student body and academic relationships across the globe that he says will define the 160-year-old institutions next century of higher education. But international expansion isnt the only bold idea that Dr. Miguel Martinez-Saenz proposed for the small college of big dreams since he took over as its 19th leader in September 2017. The schools top educator strives to develop unique relationships with as many of his students as possible sometimes before they even set foot on the grounds in order to make the most of their time in the classroom. We recently sat down with Martinez-Saenz the first person in his family to attend college to discuss his work on campus, and off, in his term to date: Natallie Rocha: The three pillars of higher education at St. Francis College are access, retention, and success. How have you furthered those pillars in your time as president? Miguel Martinez-Saenz: One of the things Ive tried to do from an access point of view, and a retention point of view, is get people to understand that access requires a whole commitment, not just an invitation. It requires [figuratively] holding students hands and welcoming them onto the campus, so they feel comfortable. This creates an environment that supports them, even as they are challenged. And I try to encourage this sort of access in the way I interact on campus. NR: Is there something, or someone, from your time in college that inspires the compassion and understanding you show your students? MMS: The woman that turned my life around when I was having a difficult time in college was a Florida State University professor, Dr. Maureen Tilley, who died in 2016. Many years after we met, I learned she was also a first-generation college student, and that was one of the reasons that she was so sympathetic. She asked me questions about me, and it was kind of the first time that happened to me in that space. I could have gone in the wrong direction, but she put me on the right path. I was lucky enough to have Maureen commit to and believe in me, so thats why I do what I do. NR: How else do you show your commitment to students? MMS: I go into high schools probably three times a month, in part because I want to communicate what were about, but also, to build relationships with prospective students who might eventually move into our spaces. And students see that process of engagement when I know someone and what he or she needs, I can connect them with donors and other friends of the college for support. But I cant do that if I dont know what students need. I joke that students get a little nervous when they see me in the elevator, because they know Im going to start talking to them. Sometimes I see someone in a bad mood and I have an opportunity to lift him or her up a little bit. You never know what someone is going through. NR: What is your five year plan for the college? MMS: We are embarking on a comprehensive internationalization strategy. We have a number of international athletes, and a few study-abroad projects, but no comprehensive relationships. So weve established new relationships in Brazil, and in the Caribbean, where we visited a fair in Trinidad and Tobago, and are beginning some partnerships with universities including the University of the West Indies and the University of Trinidad and Tobago. We also just signed a partnership with a group from Norway, and another with a group that has programs in Myanmar, Nepal, and Japan. This is a big push on our end. NR: Why is international expansion so important right now? MMS: Today, you have to be globally oriented. New York is arguably the most diverse city on the planet, so getting access to folks living abroad, and also to ethnic communities here, is important for us in creating a diverse learning environment from socioeconomic, religious, and cultural perspectives. The global ethos must be a part of what we do. NR: I read that youve made it a point to teach philosophy and poetry classes to inmates at Sunset Parks Metropolitan Detention Center, in addition to the education you provide to your students on campus. Why do you prioritize giving lessons to prisoners amid your demanding day job? MMS: My daughter used to always ask me, Why do you go inside the prison? And Id always respond with my own question: Why do you think I teach inside the prison? There are two answers: because there are few others who will go teach inmates philosophy and poetry, but also because I believe I have a responsibility to do so. I cant provide the opportunity for all, but I can provide it for some, which is why I always say to young people, Im not telling you to save the world, Im telling you to treat some people around you kindly. NR: Where do you live in Brooklyn? MMS: I live in Boerum Hill, blocks from the school, so I get to walk to work and embed myself in the local environment. I like to say that to be educated today, you need to be educated in a diverse learning environment, amid the chaos and cacophony of an urban setting. And what I love about Brooklyn is that youre being educated all the time. Walk outside and you learn something about the world. I think thats a powerful thing, especially for my children. I love living in the city and all that it presents, even though there are some challenges. Natallie Rocha Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC Its a taste of Brooklyn and beyond! Restaurants across Kings County and other outer-borough eateries will serve up budget-friendly, three-course meals to customers as part of a unique dining campaign kicking off on March 18. The Dine the Boroughs event will feature Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx restaurateurs plating a variety of unique cuisines, giving locals an affordable opportunity to step outside their neighborhood and their culinary comfort zone, according to the beep. If you are used to Caribbean meals, then go inside an Italian restaurant, or an Asian restaurant. Thats what were really encouraging, Borough President Adams said at a Tuesday press conference ahead of the event. Its great for business, and its great to learn something new. Most of the roughly 200 participating restaurants in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx will offer special prix-fixe menus priced at $28 per person throughout the event, which concludes on March 29. All eateries prix-fixe menus will include three courses, with most allowing patrons to choose an appetizer, and entree, and a dessert. The number of participating restaurants is a reminder that some of the citys most mouth-watering food is served outside the confines of the distant isle of Manhattan, where all but a few eateries in the annual New York City Restaurant Week are located, according to Adams. Good food doesnt stop at the Manhattan Bridge. Theres good food all around New York City, the beep said. One local restaurateur whose Sheepshead Bay eatery is among the Brooklyn spots participating in Dine the Boroughs praised the event as a way to introduce his establishment to new customers from his neighborhood and further afield. This is our first time doing an event like this. I think it will definitely help get our name out there, and get the word out, said John Chen, whose Flaming Grill and Modern Buffet at 3841 Nostrand Ave. serves up sushi and other cuisines. It will definitely help us serve the community a little better. The full list of participating restaurants will be posted at www.dinet hebor oughs.com ahead of the events March 18 kickoff. Join the Dine the Boroughs experience, presented by the Whitmore Group and co-sponsored by Schneps Media, by following along on social media using the hashtag #dinetheboros. Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC 84th Precinct Brooklyn HeightsDUMBOBoerum HillDowntown Blanket bandit Police arrested a man who they say tried to steal a womans comforter on the subway at the Hoyt Street station on March 4. The woman got on the Brooklyn-bound A train in Manhattan at 6 pm and put the comforter she had just bought next to her on the seat, according to the police. Then she noticed the suspect, whom she said she knows from a program, cops said. After she acknowledged him, he then allegedly took her quilt and and made a run for it at the station near Schermerhorn Street, with the woman in pursuit, according to police. The two allegedly struggled trying to wrest the blanket from each other and the suspect came out on top and fled the scene, the authorities said. Four days later the Boys in Blue arrested the suspect for the alleged theft, according to authorities. Bag-whacked A lout attacked and robbed a woman on State Street on March 5. The victim told cops that the neer-do-well took her bag and then whacked her in the head with it, between Bond and Nevins streets at 11:10 pm. Daytime purloiner A burglar looted a womans home on Livingston Street on March 6. The cur took her house keys from her mailbox and got into the apartment between Court and Clinton streets at sometime between 11 am and 5:30 pm and took a television, router, jewelry, and a camera, according to police. Booze bandit A burglar stole liquor from an Adams Street diner in the early morning hours of March 9. The nogoodnik got into the eatery between Fulton and Johnson streets at 4 am by using a tool to get in the rear door, and took three bottles of liquor worth almost $3,000, according to the authorities. Crime never sleeps A thief stole a mans backpack on the Q train on March 1. The victim fell asleep after he got on the Manhattan-bound train at Coney Island at 5 pm and nodded off, according to police. He awoke at the DeKalb Avenue station near Flatbush Avenue later and noticed that someone had stolen his bag which contained birth certificates, social security cards, and keys, cops said. Copper robber A sneak stole copper wires from a building roof on Nevins Street sometime between Feb. 7 and March 6. The lout took the wires, worth some $5,000, from the building at Flatbush Avenue in the span of a month, according to cops. The Sanchez swindle! A charlatan scammed a Grace Court woman out of $6,000 worth of gift cards on March 7. The shyster called the woman, who lives near Hicks Street, between 8:45 am and 12:15 pm pretending to be a U.S. Marshall by the name of William Sanchez, and told the victim that her Social Security had been compromised and asked for gift cards to clear her name, according to cops. All expenses paid A crook stole more than $22,000 from a company on Washington Street between Feb. 13 and March 6. The scammer wrote fraudulent checks in the name of the business near Front Street and took the money from its account sometime between the two dates, cops said. Bar thief A lout stole a mans bookbag at a Front Street bar on March 9. The victim told cops that he left his bag along with his jacket, laptop, wallet, and tablet unattended in the watering hole near Pearl Street at 3:30 am, and when he returned to it a half hour later, somebody had taken it, police said. Nabbed A filcher stole a womans wallet at an Albee Square West department store on March 9. The woman told police she was browsing the store near Fleet Street between 1:35 and 2:35 pm when her wallet went missing from her bag, which she had placed on her shopping cart, according to the authorities. Phony strikes again! A fraudster scammed a man out of his laptop with fake cash on Jay Street on March 5. The victim arranged to meet up with the hoaxer after they sealed the deal via the Let Go app, at High Street at 3:30 pm, according to cops. The sneak gave the victim $2,150 in cash for the computer, but when he later went to deposit it, an official at the bank told him that 21 of the $100 bills were fake, according to police. A strikingly similar incident happened a week earlier on Montague Street. Kevin Duggan The main thing is: What the hell do I know about important thingies and thingamajigs? How does a country that is so rich, so powerful and so perfect, not have money to build a damn wall? Even Ukraine can build a wall? And they almost built it on money from the Western Empire.and they stole the money so the wall kinda fizzled.and they would appreciate more (from the west) money to keep building that wall Even Israel can build a wall and it is built with western money.Iraq has walls.yes, built with western money But Russia did build a wall against Ukraine on the Crimea border But: The US cannot build a wall and it has no money to build a wall and too build it, you must steal from others (internal and external) to build it, yet.America is the land of the rich.LOL It is a Dilemma? I just look at it this way my Russian friends.the money is there. Russia could build a fine wall for the USA against Mexico, for just the security money that is given to Israel and that is wasted $, seriously wasted money going to Israel.also I could careless if they build the wall, build a fence, build a castle, dig a ditch and or line the border with tulips. The issue is mute, because we will never get it done right in the first place. It will cost 50 billions dollars for a 100 million dollar wall.that is America In terms of individual countries, the following receive the most in economic [not security] aid: Afghanistan ($US650,000,000) Jordan ($US635,800,000) Kenya ($US632,500,000) Tanzania ($US534,500,000) Uganda ($US435,500,000) Zambia ($US428,525,000) Nigeria ($US413,300,000) In terms of security aid, the countries receiving the most help are: Afghanistan ($US5 billion) Israel ($US3.2 billion) Iraq ($US1.3 billion) Egypt ($US1.3 billion) Syria ($US541,500,000) Jordan ($US364,200,000) Source: Here are the countries that receive the most foreign aid from the US Donald Trumps America ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2017) I think by our own medias admission, that if we stopped sending security aid (You Know? War aid! Military weapons and funny money to kill and bribe others!) That a wall is easily built and we can easily do a whole bunch more thingies and thingamajigs But move along here.nothing to see What the hell do I know about important thingies and thingamajigs? WtR You Know? It is these kinda posts that upset the gods in Washington DC How dare you compare security aid for Israel vs Border Wall! How dare I! (Question: Does Israel have walls?) Tucker Carlson: Why Is Congress Happy To Pay For Walls In Israel But Not On The U.S. Border? Dear Reader, Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance. We, however, have a request. As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed. Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard. Digital Editor The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) on Wednesday reserved its verdict on a plea moved by Reliance Communications (RCom) to release tax refunds worth nearly Rs 260 crore, held in a trust and retention account with the lenders of the company. Nearly 40 lenders of the company, including the State Bank of India (SBI) have opposed RComs plan to use this money to pay off Ericsson contending that the funds for paying the latter must come from a different source. Dear Reader, Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance. We, however, have a request. As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed. Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard. Digital Editor Half Yearly Report Perth, Mar 13, 2019 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Venus Metals Corporation Limited ( ASX:VMC ) submit their report for the half-year ended 31 December 2018.The principal activities of the Group during course of the financial year were the exploration of mineral tenements in Western Australia.To view the full report, please visit:About Venus Metals Corporation Limited Venus Metals Corporation Limited (ASX:VMC) is a West Australian based Company with a focus on gold and base metals exploration. The Company aims to increase shareholder value through targeted exploration success on its projects. The Company's major gold project is the Youanmi Gold Mine, located 500km north east of Perth. The Youanmi Gold Mine is now jointly owned by Venus Metals (30%) and Rox Resources Limited (70%) (OYG JV); Indicated and Inferred Resources of the mine is 1.7 million ounces of gold. Exciting new discoveries at the Youanmi Gold Mine have been made at the Grace prospect in footwall granites where very high grades of free milling gold have been intersected, including 25m @34.7g/t Au from 143m (RXRC 287) and 13m @60.49 g/t from 181m (RXRC 239). The Grace Prospect may substantially add to the Youanmi Gold Mine resources. SpiceJet will seek compensation from Boeing and demand credit on maintenance, repair, and overhaul for the 12 grounded 737 MAX aircraft. The airline, which had an aggressive expansion plan that banked on the delivery of the Boeing 737 Max, will now look to lease old planes. SpiceJet had bet its fortunes heavily on the new version of the 737, of which it has 13 planes in its fleet and 192 on order. The fuel-efficient and longer range 737 MAX provided an opportunity for SpiceJet to control its cost and plan new foreign routes, the future of which looks uncertain now. ALSO READ: ... The ministry is eyeing the next edition of its flagship investment show World Food India, set to take place in November, 2019, to reach that level. At the first edition of World Food India last year, we had investment proposals of more than $14 billion, of which ground has been broken for projects worth $11 billion. So, next year, we are targeting to at least double the figure, as investments, Badal ... Dear Reader, Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance. We, however, have a request. As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed. Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard. Digital Editor The documents, which are now widely available in public domain owing to the leak, has adversely affected the sovereignty and security of the country as well as hampered friendly relations with foreign countries, it said. In an affidavit before the top court, the central government, through the Defence Ministry, has also said the leakage offended terms of the ... Dear Reader, Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance. We, however, have a request. As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed. Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard. Digital Editor Reiterating its stand on the February 12 circular, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Tuesday said that the stressed accounts which were affected had not yet come up with a resolution plan, despite ample time having been given to them. In its submissions before the Supreme Court (SC), the regulator said that if the companies were ready with a plan, they should place it before the court. Let them place the plan before the court. The banks are here and they can consider it. We can give 15-30 days, the counsel appearing for RBI said. The banking sector regulator ... Stuart Hayward Appointed as Misima Exploration Manager Sydney, Mar 13, 2019 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Kingston Resources Limited ( ASX:KSN ) (Kingston or the Company) wishes to advise of the following management changes at its flagship Misima Gold Project in PNG.- Highly-credentialed exploration geologist with more than 30 years' experience- Expert in epithermal Au-Ag systemsMr Stuart Hayward has accepted the role of Exploration Manager, commencing in early April. Stuart is a highly credentialed geologist with more than 30 years' experience in mineral systems exploration and evaluation including epithermal Au-Ag and porphyry Cu-Au deposits. Stuart's extensive CV includes more than 15 years with Newcrest Mining Ltd as a Mineral Resource Manager and Principal Geologist covering their Asia Pacific and PNG projects, including time spent working on Newcrest's Lihir and Wafi Golpu projects.Mr Michael Woodbury has resigned from the role of Exploration Manager to pursue other opportunities. The Company wishes to thank Michael for his efforts on Misima, particularly in establishing the drilling program alongside Project Manager Charles Yobone.Kingston Resources Limited Managing Director, Andrew Corbett said: "We are excited to have someone of Stuart's calibre joining the team at Misima. Stuart will be working alongside Charles Yobone and our recently expanded team of geologists. He will have a particular focus on the 2019 drilling program which seeks to advance the exciting targets identified during 2018 towards resource definition. In addition to Stuart's appointment we have recently appointed two new local geologists to the team as we ramp up regional exploration activities on the island. During my recent site visit to Misima it was particularly pleasing to see the expanded geological team carrying out field work on both Quartz Mountain and Ara Creek while we are drilling in a third location at Ginamwamwa. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Mike Woodbury for his efforts in helping to establish our current exploration program since late 2017."Misima Mineral ResourceThe Misima mineral resource estimate shown in Table A1 (see link below) was released in an ASX announcement on 27 November 2017. The resource estimate was compiled by Mr Scott McManus, who is an independent consultant to the Company. Further information relating to the resource is included within the original announcement.To view tables and figures, please visit:About Kingston Resources Limited Kingston (ASX:KSN) is a metals exploration company. Currently the Company's priority is the world-class Misima Gold Project in PNG, which contains a JORC resource of 2.8Moz Au, a production history of over 3.7Moz and outstanding potential for additional resource growth through exploration success. Kingston currently owns 70% of the Misima Gold Project. In addition, Kingston owns 75% of the Livingstone Gold Project, WA which holds a 50koz resource and is the site of ongoing exploration and a number of high-grade historic intersections. Groundings of brand-new Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets have sent shockwaves through global aviation after a crash in Ethiopia, but many airlines are managing to keep to schedule with other jets while economic woes mean some may be grateful for a pause. The 737 Max 8 upgrade to Boeing's best-selling jet only entered service in 2017, meaning there are not many in the skies compared with other more established work horses. "If you had a grounding of something like the 737-800, wow what an impact. But with the MAX, there are fewer than 400 of these flying globally," one aviation ... The UK Parliament on Wednesday rejected a chaotic no-deal Brexit by a narrow margin, preventing Britain from crashing out of the European Union without any transition phase. The House of Commons voted against the deal by 312 votes to 308. British MPs will now vote on Thursday on whether to ask for delaying Britain's departure beyond March 29 by extending Article 50 - the legal mechanism that takes the UK out of the 28-member economic bloc. This would have to be ratified by the EU and the length of extension will become the next focus on both sides. However, how the ... Emerging market stocks fell on Wednesday as investors stayed away from riskier assets ahead of more make-or-break British parliamentary votes on Brexit. Currencies in the developing world made marginal moves after British lawmakers crushed Theresa Mays Brexit deal on Tuesday night, forcing parliament to vote within days whether to back a no-deal Brexit or seek a last-minute delay. MSCIs index for emerging markets fell with Shanghai stocks leading losses and sizeable declines in Hong Kong and South Korea. Brexit headlines seems to have affected the ... With just over two weeks to go until Brexit, Theresa May has once again failed to get her Brexit deal through parliament, leaving complete uncertainty about where the nation goes next. May lost the vote on her deal 391 to 242, a slightly higher level of support than in January but still a resounding defeat for a prime minister who increasingly appears to have lost control. Following the defeat, the prime minister confirmed that MPs will now be able to vote on whether to oppose a no-deal Brexit. But she warned that the government would press ahead with planning for a no deal and that ... Commenting on the Spring Statement, Steven Cameron Pensions Director at Aegon said:While we werent expecting any major policy announcements in a Spring Statement overshadowed by Brexit, its disappointing there was so little indication of what might be on the Governments post-Brexit priority list. Social care Social care funding did receive a solitary mention but only to say it will be considered as part of a comprehensive summer spending review, suggesting the long overdue Green Paper is further delayed. The Government urgently needs to put the future funding of social care on a sustainable footing. Our ageing population deserves clarity on what the state will pay for and what individuals will have to fund themselves, based on their wealth. An increased commitment to Government funding, given equal priority with the NHS, would be very welcome. We also need a cap on the overall amount anyone will have to pay themselves, allowing people to plan ahead and protect inheritance aspirations. This is a major issue which will make a huge difference to the futures of millions of individuals across the age spectrum long after Brexit. Low earners and the net pay pension issue The Chancellors commitment to focus on raising wages for the low paid is welcome. One immediate way of doing so would be to instruct HMRC to ensure non-taxpayers in net pay schemes receive the 20% tax relief on their pension contributions to which they are entitled. Solving this issue would mean someone earning 11,500 and paying the automatic enrolment minimum contribution from April 2019 would be 53 a year better off. For low earners, every little helps. Future savings incentives Its good news that the Office of Budget Responsibility reports a further improvement in the UKs financial position since the October Budget, provided a no deal Brexit can be avoided. We hope this paves the way not only to boost public services and reduce taxes but also importantly to improve incentives to save and invest. No excuse for Autumn raid on pension tax relief now Chancellor has revealed his war chest Steve Webb, Royal London The improvement in the public finances revealed by the Chancellor in his Spring Statement means he now has no excuse for an Autumn Budget raid on pension tax relief, according to Royal London policy director Steve Webb. In the Spring Statement, the Chancellor said that public borrowing in each year from 2020/21 was expected to be 5-6 billion a year lower than previously forecast. But there were no giveaways in the Statement and how this extra fiscal headroom will be allocated will depend in part on the outcome of a full spending review due to be started later this year. Last Autumn the Chancellor said that the cost of pension tax relief was eye-wateringly expensive, and hinted that more cuts were likely, over and above the six separate cuts to lifetime and annual limits since 2010. But now that there is less pressure on the public finances than previously thought, there would be no justification in going ahead with such cuts. Steve Webb, Director of Policy at Royal London said:Too often, governments have raided pension tax relief for extra revenue to meet a short term spending crisis. Now that the public finances are improving faster than expected, there is no justification for further salami slicing of limits on tax relief. Pensions should be a long-term business, not subject to annual tweaking by cash-strapped Chancellors. An improving fiscal picture means the Chancellor should refrain from any further short-term cuts. Commenting on todays Spring Statement, Gregg McClymont, director of policy for The Peoples Pension, said: While we could have all predicted that todays statement would be overshadowed by Brexit, long-term thinking is crucial in pensions policy. Its disappointing that the government didnt take this opportunity to offer a good news story by undertaking to extend auto-enrolment to the thousands of workers not currently covered by the scheme. Its vital that the government delivers on its promise to lower the age limit for auto-enrolment from 22 to 18, calculate contributions from the first pound earned, and go beyond its existing promises to bring in half a million new savers - the vast majority women often combining part time work with caring - by lowering the 10,000 earnings trigger to the primary national insurance threshold. Over three thousand terrorists belonging to the UN-designated terror organisation Islamic State have surrendered to US-backed Kurdish forces. This comes after the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) launched an attack to retake the last ISIS stronghold in Syria, reports CNN. Mustafa Bali, the SDF's spokesman, claimed that over 3,000 terrorists laid down their arms by Tuesday night, adding that three Yazidi women and four children have been rescued as well. Intense shelling of the Syrian town of Baghouz - the last territory claimed by ISIS - continued throughout Tuesday night to Wednesday morning. Bali claimed that ISIS fighters in the city were "surrendering en masse", adding that two weapons depots were destroyed in the attacks, killing 38 ISIS terrorists. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Ashiana Housing Ltd. (AHL), a 40-year-old Indian real estate company has been adjudged as one of the top realty brands in North India, and specifically managed to top the list in care andamp; consumer connect category. It is one of the top brands recognized nationally as well along with Godrej, Embassy, Piramal, DLF according to Track2Realty best practices report 2019. Ashiana Housing being voted for the second position in North Indian best practices leadership chart after Godrej is a predominant success as it is a relatively silent player in the region. The list is then followed by DLF Limited, Sobha Limited, ATS Group, Gulshan Homz, Mahindra Lifespaces, Mahagun, Central Park and ABA Corp. The criteria basis which Ashiana Housing Ltd. has ranked the second position with a score of 79.3 out of 100 comprises of fiscal management, execution, market depth, consumer connect, transparent deals, functional professionalism, care, employer, communication, and desirable practices. "Ashiana Housing has been voted the best brand in the care andamp; consumer connect category. Furthermore, it is ranked as second best in terms of adoption of best practices in north India and nationally has ranked among the top brands," said Ankur Gupta, JMD, Ashiana Housing Ltd. on the Best Practices Report 2019 by Track2Realty. "Over the years the brand has strived hard to strike the right chord with the consumers. Right from buying procedure to handing over of the property we take care of our customers and sort out their queries. Project maintenance is also a crucial part and we are glad we have excelled here too. We never compromise on consumer satisfaction." "Also what is significant is the fact that most of the top 10 performers have improved their performance score from the previous study in 2017. It is a proud moment for the team at Ashiana. We would sincerely like to thank Track2Realty for recognizing our work. This will help further better our performance. It is surely is a momentous milestone for our partners and our team altogether," he added. Ashiana Housing Ltd. is involved in upper-middle income residential housing projects in satellite cities and towns in India - around industrial hubs - predominantly along the Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor being promoted by the Government of India. Its residential real estate development projects range from apartments to group housing projects. In addition, it also develops limited retail and commercial properties, including hotels as well as retirement homes for senior citizens. Furthermore, it is one of the real estate company that has earlier also been recognized by Forbes as Asia's 200 Best Under A Billion (2010 and 2011). This story is provided by NewsVoir. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Vatican treasurer Cardinal Pell, convicted of sexually assaulting choirboys in the late 1990s, was sentenced to six years in jail on Wednesday. According to CNN, Cardinal Pell was found guilty by an Australian court of one count of sexual abuse of a child and four counts of committing an indecent act with a child last December after a secret five-week trial. Terming Pell's attack on the victims as "breathtakingly arrogant", Judge Kidd said that the Vatican official had assaulted the boys with "callous indifference to the victims' distress." However, the judge did not fail to assert that Pell was "not to be made a scapegoat for any failings or perceived failings of the Catholic Church." Pell, the senior most Catholic to be found guilty of child sexual abuse, was convicted on the basis of a complaint filed by a man who claimed that Pell sexually abused him and another boy in Melbourne's St. Patrick's Cathedral after Sunday mass. During the proceedings of the court, the prosecution informed the jury that the victims, who were choirboys at the time, were caught by Pell drinking sacramental wine. Miffed by this, Pell allegedly forced one of the boys to "perform oral sex on him and performed an indecent act on his friend." A month later, the victim said Pell "pushed him up against a wall and groped his genitals." Earlier, Cardinal's legal team had announced that it will appeal his conviction on three grounds, including that the jury's verdict on all five charges was unreasonable, based on the evidence submitted. The Court of Appeal is due to hear submissions in early June. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BJP's demand to declare West Bengal a "super sensitive" zone amounts to insulting the people of the state, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said on Wednesday. Responding to BJP's demand to declare West Bengal a "super sensitive" zone, Chief Minister Banerjee said: "What is the reason behind this? This is humiliation. They are so scared. In Rajasthan, in Tripura, 98 per cent Panchayat seats were uncontested. These are blatant lies." "They talk of political murders. 99 per cent TMC leaders were killed. Is it because we are fighting against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah," she asked. She alleged the BJP leaders are trying to curb her party's voice. Referring to the demand for appointing media observers, she said: "This is astonishing. They have demanded media observers to be deployed. This is a shame." "Where is the freedom of the press? I am telling the BJP to not commit such blunders. Bengal respects freedom of the press. Election Commission is an impartial organization. Why only the BJP is being served by the Election Commission," she asked. She demanded that the Election Commission must investigate as to "who are carrying cash in helicopters and chartered flights." Expressing apprehensions that the ruling TMC government might not allow free-and-fair elections in West Bengal, BJP on Wednesday urged the Election Commission to declare Bengal a "super-sensitive zone." A high-level delegation of BJP leaders comprising Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, Health Minister JP Nadda and others met the EC officials in New Delhi. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) There have been reports in the Urdu media of some bodies being transported from Balakot to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and tribal areas of Pakistan following the anti-terror strike by India, claims an activist from Gilgit. "#Pakistan military officer admits to "martyrdom" of more than 200 militants during Indian strike on #Balakot. Calls the terrorists Mujahid who receive special favours/ sustenance from Allah as they fight to support PAK government [against enemies]. Vows to support families," Senge Hasnan Sering, the United States-based activist from Gilgit, tweeted. . (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) British Parliament on Tuesday rejected Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal for a second time, tossing the UK into the unknown, 17 days before it is due to split from the European Union. Even after May secured further guarantees from Brussels over its most controversial elements the House of Commons voted by 391 to 242 to reject the deal, reported CNN. Following the rejection of the deal second time, the Members of Parliament have been promised another vote on Wednesday, wherein they can decide whether the UK should leave the EU without a deal. If that, too, is rejected, parliament could then vote on whether to request a Brexit extension. Britain is scheduled to end ties with its biggest trade partner, EU, after 46 years on March 29, However, this move can throw the nation into a state of economic chaos. Meanwhile, European Council President Donald Tusk said that the EU is "disappointed" by tonight's Brexit result. He further said that it has done "all that is possible to reach an agreement" with the UK. "Given the additional assurances provided by the EU in December, January and yesterday, it is difficult to see what more we can do. If there is a solution to the current impasse it can only be found in London," Tusk said in a statement. "With only 17 days left to 29 March, today's vote has significantly increased the likelihood of a 'no-deal' Brexit. We will continue our no-deal preparations and ensure that we will be ready if such a scenario arises," he added. Earlier, May had managed to secure "legally binding changes" to "strengthen and improve" Britain's Withdrawal Agreement from the European Union, according to Cabinet Office Minister David Lidington. The British Prime Minister's previously clinched deal with the EU has been rejected once by the Parliament already. Scores of MPs voiced their discontent, outlining the Irish backstop as a major roadblock to the parliamentary acceptance of the deal. The Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, has time and again labelled it as a "botched deal", having previously announced his Labour Party's intent of holding a public vote to avoid a "damaging Tory Brexit. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Amidst his allegations of corruption in the Rafale deal, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said the capabilities of the fighter plane were not in question but remained evasive on whether the contract would be cancelled if his party comes to power. Addressing a press conference here, Gandhi insisted that there was corruption in the deal and there should be an investigation. "There are no questions about capabilities of the aircraft...(but) are we going to cancel the deal or not cancel the deal is a technical call. We do not have the information on that but the question of corruption is crystal clear," he said. He was responding when asked by a reporter whether the deal, signed in 2016, would be cancelled if Congress comes to power after the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. Gandhi alleged, "Narendra Modi and Anil Ambani have stolen Rs 30,000 crore from the pocket of the pilots who bombed Pakistan." "Economic growth is related to the mood of the country. You cannot have a country that is divided. The first thing we will do after coming to power is that we will bring harmony in the country. We will make people feel that they are a part of the country and will make sure that they don't feel isolated," the Congress president said. He said, "The Narendra Modi government has attacked businesses with GST and demonetisation. We are going to make a simpler GST. Finally, job creation will happen by transforming the small and medium business to bigger ones. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Delhi Police Crime Branch arrested a member of Naveen Khati gang near Dwarka Sector 23 here on Wednesday. The accused, identified as Himanshu, is an active member of the Naveen Khati gang and was wanted in a murder case. "He was arrested after a brief exchange of fire," a senior police official told ANI over the phone. Further details in the matter are still awaited. Naveen Khati gang is a notorious gang mainly operating in the South West region of the capital. Last month, another member of the gang Ravi alias Chiru was arrested by the Special Cell while he was on a recce ahead of his gang's plan to eliminate a rival. One pistol along with live cartridges was recovered from his possession. Ravi is a resident of Pochanpur village in Dwarka area of Delhi and was carrying a bounty of Rs. 50,000 on his head. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar's son Abhijat, accused of committing illegalities in the construction of an eco-tourism project, told the Bombay High Court that the petition against him is "political in nature" and masterminded by Congress leaders who want to "gain political mileage" ahead of elections. "I say that the present PIL is a politically-motivated petition and has been filed on the eve of elections to get political mileage in the ensuing Lok Sabha elections. The petition smacks of malice," Abhijat said in the reply submitted to the court, while also calling the litigation a 'pseudo PIL'. In order to prove his point about the petition being political in nature to the judicature, the accused told the court that details about the PIL were publicly announced at a press conference in Panaji in February where the Goa's senior Congress leaders were also present. "Before the present PIL Writ Petition came up before this Hon'ble Court, the Advocate for Petitioners along with certain MLAs, Ex-chief Minister and the Office bearers of the Indian Congress (Goa) held a Press Conference on 6/2/2019 and the Petition was actually argued by the Advocate for the Petitioners before the Press. I crave leave of this Hon'ble Court to produce the recorded C.D. of the Press Conference held by the Advocate for the Petitoners which depicts the arguments conducted by the Advocate for the Petitioners before the Press," he told the Bombay High Court. On March 12, deputy sarpanch of the Netravali panchayat, Abhijit Dessai, had filed a petition seeking a stay on the construction of the eco-resort promoted by Parrikar. Dessai alleged that the project had caused the destruction of forested areas and that several laws had been by-passed and an ordinance had been especially moved by the Goa government to ensure fast-tracked facilitation of the project, which is spread over nearly 90,000 sq. mts, adjoining a wildlife sanctuary. The notices were issued based on a petition filed against Abhijat for alleged destruction of forest area to construct an eco-resort located near the Netravali wildlife sanctuary in South Goa district, Carlos Ferreira, advocate of Dessai, told ANI. Besides Abhijat, notices were also issued to six others involved in the case. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis met Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray at the latter's residence here last night to discuss the campaigning strategy ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, sources said. During their meeting last night, sources said Fadnavis and Thackeray talked about the finalisation of candidates for all the 48 seats at stake in the state, and also discussed swapping few seats in the state. In a joint press conference along with BJP president Amit Shah last month, Fadnavis had formally announced the alliance between the Shiv Sena and the BJP for the coming Lok Sabha and state Assembly elections. He had said that the Shiv Sena will fight on 23 seats and BJP on 25 seats in the impending elections. In Maharashtra, elections will be held in four phases - on April 11, 18, 23 and 29. Counting of votes is set to take place on May 23. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale and the United States Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, David Hale on Tuesday held Foreign Office Consultations and reaffirmed their commitment to the Indo-US Strategic Partnership. The two officials held Foreign Office Consultations to review the progress made since the Ministerial 2+2 meeting and discussed ways to further expand cooperation. Furthermore, the two officials exchanged views on building convergences in the Indo-Pacific and agreed to work with each other and regional partners to promote inclusivity, stability, peace and prosperity in the region. Both sides also called on Pakistan to meaningfully address the concerns of the international community on terrorism, including cross-border terrorism. Foreign Secretary invited Under Secretary Hale to visit New Delhi for the next round of consultations. On Monday, Gokhale also met US Secretary of State Michael R Pompeo. Pompeo reaffirmed US support to India in its fight against terrorism. The two officials discussed the importance of bringing those responsible for the Pulwama terror attack to justice and the urgency of Pakistan taking meaningful action against terrorist groups operating on its soil. The two officials also discussed Washington's complementary visions for the Indo-Pacific, US-India defence cooperation and the growing US-India economic partnership, including joint efforts to expand bilateral trade in a balanced and reciprocal manner. According to a statement released by the Indian Embassy in Washington, Pompeo expressed his understanding of India's concerns regarding cross -border terrorism. "They (US) agreed that Pakistan needs to take concerted action to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure and to deny safe haven to all terrorist groups in its territory," said the statement. "They also agreed that those who support or abet terrorism in any form should be held accountable," added the statement. It is worth noting that Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) suicide bomber attacked CRPF convoy in Pulwama on February 14 in which 40 jawans were killed. In retaliation, Indian Air Force (IAF) targeted JeM's largest training centre at Balakot in Pakistan on February 26 wee hours. Gokhale also expressed satisfaction over the significant progress and the quality of India-US Strategic Partnership since Secretary Pompeo's visit to India in September last year for the first-ever Ministerial 2+2 Dialogue, the statement said. Gokhale and Pompeo also discussed other issues of mutual interest including Afghanistan and cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region and agreed to closely work together in this regard. In response to Pompeo's reference to bilateral trade matters, Gokhale underscored the significant reduction in the trade deficit in the last three years and conveyed India's willingness to remain engaged with the US for a meaningful and mutually acceptable package on trade issues. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Union Minister Smriti Irani on Wednesday lashed out at Congress president Rahul Gandhi over his alleged links to Sanjay Bhandari, an arms dealer and aide of Rahul's brother-in-law Robert Vadra. "The facts that have come out in the news indicate how Gandhi-Vadra family has described 'parivarik brashtachar' (dynastic corruption)," Irani said while referring to a media report highlighting alleged links of Rahul with Bhandari, who is under the radar of probe agencies. "Sanjay Bhandari, an arms dealer with close links to Robert Vadra is also under investigation for defence deals and his desperate desire to be party to the ill-gotten fruits of corruption during UPA regime," she added. Sharpening her attack against her Rahul, Smriti said reports have suggested that HL Pahwa was "suitably financed and supported" by CC Thampi, a name that figures in the probe with regard to a petroleum deal under UPA and a financial violation with regard to a land transaction in Delhi-NCR amounting to Rs280 crore. "The relationship between CC Thampi and arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari is publicly known. Hence, the nation has come to a conclusion that Rahul Gandhi's intervention in the defence preparedness of our country stems from his pursuit not only of individual politics but his personal commercial interests, his personal family interests," said Irani. A media report published recently stated that according to the files seized by the Enforcement Directorate from HL Pahwa, Rahul Gandhi had purchased 6.5 acres of land located at Hassanpur at a subsidised rate from Pahwa. Bhandari was booked by the ED in 2016 based on an Income Tax Department and Delhi police complaint of his alleged indulgence in dubious defence deals and land deals. In December 2017, the ED had seized assets worth Rs 26.61 crore of Bhandari and others for holding undisclosed assets abroad. The assets included undisclosed deposits in foreign bank accounts in the UAE in the various foreign currency denominations, beneficial ownership of companies incorporated in the UAE, one flat in Palms Jumeirah, Dubai and two flats in the UK. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) It is raining dark mode on the internet. A day after productivity app Slack made its dark mode feature available to everyone, Google Chrome is following suite. If you are a Google Chrome lover, you can now enable the Dark Mode for the browser. However, there's a catch. The feature is currently available only for Mac users. In its blog, Google promises that Windows support is on its way. To enable the dark mode for Google Chrome on your Mac device, you need to ensure that you are using the latest version of the browser and that your Mac appearance settings are set to dark. For updating Google Chrome, simply head to the menu >> Help >> About Chrome and it will automatically update to the newest version. Upon re-launching, dark mode will be enabled. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress party leader Priya Dutt on Wednesday said, she is contesting elections for the future of her children and to save the 'democracy' and the 'constitution'. "I am fighting for the future of my children; this is the fight for saving our democracy and constitution," said Priya Dutt told ANI on Wednesday. "All those who want that our country should move ahead as united will have to work," Hence I am in this race and I am fighting this election, " she added. Dutt had entered electoral in 2005 and has been contesting from the North Central Mumbai Parliamentary constituency. She had fought three general assembly elections, the last one being in 2014. She won the Mumbai North West seat in two elections after the death of her father, Sunil Dutt. In the 2014 election, she lost to Poonam Mahajan of the BJP. The 52-year-old Congress leader had written to party president Rahul Gandhi in January that she doesn't want to contest the elections, asserting that her political commitments took a toll on many aspects of her life. Dutt had said, "I will not be contesting 2019 general elections. These past years have been exciting and enlightening for me. However, I struggled to keep a balance between my personal and political life. While I did my best and managed, it took a toll on many aspects of my life." Priya Dutt has reportedly been told by the party president Rahul Gandhi that she must contest in the forthcoming polls. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Bhim Army Chief Chandrashekhar Azad said that he is fighting the election against Prime Minister Narendra Modi from the Varanasi Lok Sabha seat as he doesn't want Modi to win the election by fighting against weak candidates. "I am afraid that a weaker candidate should not contest against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, by defeating whom he easily walks into the Lok Sabha. I will not let the murderer of my Muslim, Dalit and OBC brothers to go to the Lok Sabha from Uttar Pradesh," said Chandrashekhar Azad. He said that Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi visited and enquired about his health. "She asked about my health and well being. She came on her own and I did not invite her, I will not invite others also," he said. Congress General Secretary for UP (East) Priyanka Gandhi Vadra who met Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar undergoing treatment at a hospital said that the meeting has no political implications but is rather her support to the voice of a youth fighting against the central government. "It is to be seen from the perspective that he is a youth and is struggling. He is raising his voice and saying to society to hear his pain. But this government is so arrogant that it wants to suppress the youth. The government doesn't want to hear the voice of youth," said Priyanka Gandhi. On Monday, Azad was taken into the police custody along with his supporters for allegedly violating the Model Code of Conduct (MCC), which is in force in view of the ensuing Lok Sabha elections. Following his arrest, Azad complained of high blood pressure and fell unconscious. He was admitted to a hospital here, where he is undergoing treatment. Senior Superintendent of Police Dinesh Kumar said: "Azad organised a rally and violated the Model Code of Conduct on Monday. The local officials tried to stop them, but he continued with his rally. He was held for four hours in a private school." Police said the rally had been organised without required permission at Kasimpura village by Azad. When the police tried to stop the rally, they resisted and later blocked Muzaffarnagar-Saharanpur highway. On Tuesday, Azad started a 'Padayatra' from Saharanpur to Delhi and announced to address a rally in New Delhi on March 15. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Principal Chief Commissioner of Income Tax, North East Region (NER) Kavita Jha on Tuesday deputed additional manpower of 116 officers and Inspectors of Income Tax Department to the Directorate of Income Tax (Investigation), for the duration of forthcoming Lok Sabha elections. Early on Tuesday morning, the investigation wing of NER issued deployment orders of 157 officials who will spread out over Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura to monitor election expenditure and flow of black money across 112 districts. Chief Electoral Officers (CEOs) of seven states of North East have been officially intimated about the deployment. This deployment is under directions of Election Commission of India (ECI) to Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) in a bid to throttle flow of black money to influence elections since black money vitiates the purity of election process, according to ECI. The Investigation Directorate teams will monitor the movement of large sums of cash or other items suspected to be used for bribing of electors and on the basis of information or complaint, will conduct an independent inquiry against any person indulging in such acts. Moreover, they will also verify affidavits declaring assets and liabilities filed by the candidates before ECI and election expenses by any candidate or political party. Investigation Directorate will also report to the Commission about the political parties which are taking donations in the poll-bound states without filing the statutory returns. The directorate has also activated Air Intelligence Units at all airports in North East and will monitor the movement of cash or valuables. State authorities and police are also required to report movement of any suspicious cash to the I-T authorities. Investigation Directorate authorities can enter and search any building, place, vessel or aircraft if it is suspected that any unaccounted money, bullion, jewellery or other valuable article or thing is to be found there and seize the same under section 132 of Income Tax Act. Election Commission of India (ECI) on Sunday announced the schedule for the 17th Lok Sabha election, which will be held in seven phases beginning April 11. The final phase of voting will take place on May 19. The counting of votes will be done on May 23. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Special Observers Noor Mohammad, Vinod Zutshi and A.S.Gill appointed by the Election Commission for assessment of the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, met with the Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora, Election Commissioners Ashok Lavasa and Sushil Chandra on Tuesday. The election commission said, "The Commission will be regularly and on real-time basis monitoring the situation in Jammu and Kashmir and will also be taking inputs from all necessary quarters and decision regarding holding Legislative Assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir will be taken soon." DEC-in-charge of the State Sandeep Saxena briefed the observers about the preparedness of election in the state and gave other details as well. The Commission discussed with them about their roles and responsibilities. The three Central Observers would be visiting the state and to make a real-time assessment of the situation by meeting political parties, district and state authorities and other stakeholders. Election Commission on Sunday appointed three former civil servants Amarjit Singh Gill (IPS 1972 Batch, Former DG, CRPF), Noor Mohammad (IAS 1977), and Vinod Zutshi (IAS 1982) as special observers for the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections in Jammu and Kashmir. Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora had said, "The commission has also decided for more effective monitoring to appoint three special observers of Jammu and Kashmir. The commission will be regularly and on real-time basis monitoring the situation in Jammu and Kashmir and continue to take inputs from all necessary quarters and decision regarding holding the election for legislative assembly will be taken soon." Arora on Sunday announced that there will be no simultaneous elections for Jammu and Kashmir state assembly owing to the recent incident of violence, among other factors. He said, "The commission has been continuously accessing the prevailing condition in the state. Based on input, the constraint of availability of central forces and other logistics, the requirement of forces for the security of candidates in wake of recent violence and keeping other challenges in mind EC has decided at this stage to announce only the schedule of Parliament election in Jammu and Kashmir." "The commission has conducted several rounds of meeting with state administration as well as MHA secretary. In the totality of these views, the commission has decided at this stage to announce only the schedule of the parliament election," he added. While responding to a question about the assembly elections never being delayed since the mid-1990s due to security concerns in the valley, the CEC said, "Central forces are definitely a big issue and one cannot disregard the recent developments. The commission ultimately doesn't capitulate to anybody and at the same time commission cannot be non-cognizant of the situations on the ground." "Since 1996 and 1997, in many states now, the requirement of Central Forces has not decreased in any state. The requirement has not remained static," he added. Arora also outlined the commission's measure of appointing the three observers to monitor the situation and said that the commission will try and conduct elections "as soon as the ground situation allows." "On an average in an assembly constituency, even if we take it to be 8 to 10 candidates multiplied by 86 assembly constituencies. This is the additional quantum required for the protection. The candidates of the Panchayat and municipal elections, much after the elections are over, are staying in the state guest houses and paid over by the government. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress general secretary and in-charge for the party's east UP affairs Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Wednesday said that her decision to meet Bhim army chief Chandrashekhar Azad had nothing to do with "It is to be seen from the perspective that he is a youth and is struggling. He is raising his voice and saying to society to hear his pain. But this government is so arrogant that it wants to suppress the youth. The government doesn't want to hear the voice of the youth," said Gandhi. "I am here because I like his energy and the way he raises his voice for the youths," said Priyanka, who met Chandrashekhar here at a hospital where he is undergoing treatment. On Monday, Azad was taken into the police custody along with his supporters for allegedly violating the Model Code of Conduct (MCC), which is in force in view of the ensuing Lok Sabha elections. After some time of his arrest, Azad complained of high blood pressure and fell unconscious. He was admitted to a hospital here, where he is undergoing treatment. Police said the case was registered against Azad and 28 others on Wednesday for violating the Model Code of Conduct. Senior Superintendent of Police Dinesh Kumar said: "Azad organised a rally and violated the Model Code of Conduct on Monday. The local officials tried to stop them, but he continued with his rally. He was held for four hours in a private school." Police said the rally had been organised without required permission at Kasimpura village by Azad. When the police tried to stop the rally, they resisted and later blocked Muzaffarnagar-Saharanpur highway. On Tuesday, Azad started a 'Padayatra' from Saharanpur to Delhi and announced to address a rally in New Delhi on March 15. He has also announced to fight the Lok Sabha election against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Wahid Sheikh, a school teacher acquitted in 2006 Mumbai terror blasts case, has now turned author who has brought out a book that documents his experience in prison. Sheikh arrested in connection with the 2006 Mumbai terror blasts case was acquitted of all charges in 2015 when trial concluded. After his acquittal, he resumed his teaching profession and also completed a law degree. Today, he is again in news for his book "Begunah Qaidi," (Innocent Prisoner) which he wrote while he was in prison. Recently, a Delhi-based publisher brought out the book in two languages--Hindi and Urdu. A thousand copies of the book have already been sold as of now. Sheikh expects that the book and his experiences will help other innocent people who are jailed for no reason. Sheikh has completed his law degree but being a teacher in a government school, he is not allowed to practice law as per the norms laid down by the Bar Commission of India. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court on Wednesday asked the Gujarat government to file a detailed affidavit within two weeks in connection with the bail application of Prakash Rathod, a convict in the 2002 Naroda Patiya massacre case. A bench comprising Justices A M Khanwilkar and Ajay Rastogi also issued notice to the state government on an application filed another convict in the case for bail on medical grounds. During the hearing on Tuesday, Aparna Bhatt, a senior counsel who was asked by Justice Khanwilkar to appear and argue for victims/witnesses in the Naroda Patiya case, had opposed the bail application of Rathod. She had submitted that bail should not be granted to Rathod as he had access to weapons and ammunition. She had also made a mention of how Rathod was instructed to act. On the basis of witness' statements, his plea for bail was dismissed by courts, Bhatt had said. Additionally, the Gujarat government had submitted a report to the apex court stating that Rathod's conduct in prison was bad and that he should not be granted bail at this stage. The convict had, however, claimed innocence in the case and told the court that he was in jail for a long time and should be granted bail. According to the prosecution, the rioting took place on February 28, 2002, in Naroda Pattaya area of Ahmedabad in Gujarat, where an irate mob killed 97 people, most of them from a minority community. The massacre took place a day after the burning of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra, which had escalated into large-scale riots. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The United States Aviation Regulator, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Tuesday said that there is "no basis" to ground the Boeing 737 Max 8. CNN quoted the acting administrator of the FAA, Daniel K. Elwell, as saying that the US aviation regulator has conducted a review of the Boeing 737 Max 8 and grounding of the aircraft is baseless. "The FAA continues to review extensively all available data and aggregate safety performance from operators and pilots of the Boeing 737 MAX. Thus far, our review shows no systematic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action," Elwell said in a statement. He further assured an immediate and appropriate action, if any issues affecting the continued airworthiness of the aircraft are identified in the course of the urgent review of data on the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash. This comes after most of the countries and carriers where the said jets are being used have taken precautions following the tragic crashes. South Korea and India launched a special inspection of the planes, while China, Ethiopian Airlines, and Cayman Airways have grounded their Boeing 737 MAX 8 fleet. It is pertinent to note that the recent Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash which killed all the 157 people onboard was a Boeing 737 Max 8. The model of the same make was also involved in another incident when a Lion Airlines plane crashed last year. As many as 189 people were killed in October last year, when a Lion Air jet - a Boeing737 MAX 8 - crashed in the Java Sea, close to Jakarta, Indonesia. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Even after 70 years of independence, people residing in over 68 villages of Uttarkashi district face a dearth of basic amenities, including a regular supply of power, and have threatened to boycott the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Locals in as many as 40 villages in Mori-Purola area are living in the dark as the area does not contain grid-based electrification. Moreover, the region lacks adequate infrastructure, roads, and schools, locals claim. "We do not have any facilities here. We are very disappointed with the government. No MLA or any minister visits this place. Even if they come, they just remain in their guesthouses. We are planning to boycott the election," Upender Chauhan, a local, told ANI. Another local claimed that villagers in the region lack access to primary and community health centers, forcing them to travel to villages in Himachal Pradesh for treatment. Seven-phased elections in the country are slated to begin on April 11 and culminate on May 19, while counting of votes will take place on May 23. Uttarakhand will go to polls on April 11 for the five seats at stake in the state. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The United States has begun work on new missiles following the decision to suspend the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia. CNN quoted Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Col. Michelle Baldanza as saying, "We will commence fabrication activities on components to support developmental testing of conventional, ground-launched missiles." Baldanza noted that prior to Trump administration's decision, developing of these missiles would have been "inconsistent with our obligations under the Treaty". She, however, asserted that the missile under work was non-nuclear. "This research and development is designed to be reversible, should Russia return to full and verifiable compliance before we withdraw from the Treaty in August 2019," she added. US President Donald Trump suspended the historic INF Treaty, a 1987 arms-control agreement, stating that the US plans to pull out of the pact due to Russian violations. Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an order suspending Russia's compliance with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with immediate effect. The text of the order published on the Kremlin website read, "In accordance with Item 4 of Article 37 of the Federal Law No. 101-FZ dated July 15, 1995, On International Treaties of the Russian Federation, to suspend the implementation of the Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles of December 8, 1987, until the United States of America rectifies its violations of the said Treaty or until it expires. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Uttar Pradesh police has detained two persons for allegedly abducting and raping a minor girl in Uttar Pradesh's Bulandshahr on Sunday. The two accused are being questioned after the police detained them on Tuesday morning. According to reports, miscreants had kidnapped the girl and then raped her in Jahangirabad area of Bulandshahr. The incident took place while the girl accompanied by her brother was returning from a wedding ceremony . The miscreants robbed her brother after which she was abducted. As per the police, the victim's medical report has confirmed that she was raped. A case under relevant sections has been registered and further investigation is underway. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu on Tuesday advised IRS officer trainees to make ethics and excellence as their guiding principles and to make India a business friendly, entrepreneur-friendly tax regime and a people-centric tax administration. The Vice President was addressing the 173 Officer Trainees of the 72nd Batch of Indian Revenue Service, here on Tuesday. Addressing the gathering here, he said, "Reforms in governance, path-breaking legislative and administrative measures like GST are changing the way we govern ourselves. Quoting Prime Minister Narendra Modi's advice to all administrators on 'Reform, Perform and Transform' he said, "You have the aptitude and a unique opportunity to reform and transform our country with your performance." Emphasising on the efforts by the central government he said over the last four years, the Union Government's Budget expenditure has increased from around Rs 16 lakh crore to around Rs 28 lakh crore. "Government's development efforts have been ably supported by the buoyant revenue collection due to efforts of Revenue Department. Over the last four years, the Central Government's net Tax revenue has increased from Rs 8.2 lakh crore to estimated Rs 17 lakh crore. An estimated increase of about Rs.9 lakh crore in five years is a telling example of efficiency and competence of our Revenue Officials," added Naidu. Asserting that there has been an 80 per cent increase in the tax base over last four years, he added, "A lot of transformation is taking place in the Tax administration in the country to promote a culture of tax compliance. The Demonetization brought an undisclosed income of about Rs 1,30,000 crore under the tax and led to seizure and attachment of assets worth approximately Rs 50,000 crore. Benami assets worth Rs 6,900 crore and foreign assets worth Rs 1,600 crore have been attached. As many as 3, 38, 000 shell companies have been detected and de-registered." Saying a lot of transformation is taking place in the Tax administration in the country to promote a culture of tax compliance, Naidu said that the most remarkable outcome of demonetization was the sustained growth of digital transactions leaving behind digital trail for the Revenue department to follow. "As tax-authorities, you should encourage digital transactions and incentivize business to encourage their customers to adopt digital transactions," he added. The vice president also pointed out that the government is making all efforts to make the tax regime easier. He added, "Our effort is to make our tax regime easy, transparent and predictable. We expect you to facilitate this process of further easing the tax regime without relaxing the compliance. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Axis Bank said that its board approved the appointment of Rakesh Makhija, independent director as the non-executive (part-time) chairman of the bank, for three years, with effect from 18 July 2019 upto 17 July 2022, subject to the approval of the Reserve Bank of India and the shareholders of the bank. The existing term of Dr. Sanjiv Misra, non-executive (part-time) chairman of the bank will expire with effect from the close of business hours on 17 July 2019. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 12 March 2019. Infosys said that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Infosys Finacle, announced that Hatton National Bank (HNB), a leading private sector commercial bank operating in Sri Lanka, has selected Finacle Trade Connect to enable a blockchain-based domestic and cross-border trade finance network. The Finacle Trade Connect solution will be used by HNB to pilot a trade network with other corresponding banking partners and its corporate clients. The network is expected to help HNB and other participating entities substantially increase automation and transparency, while efficiently managing risks in trade and supply chain financing operations. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 12 March 2019. Sun Pharma Advanced Research Company (SPARC) and HitGen announced a research collaboration to identify novel small molecule leads for targets of interest. Under this collaboration, HitGen will apply its advanced technology platform, based on DNA-encoded library design, synthesis and screening, to discover novel leads for SPARC. Under the terms of the agreement, HitGen will receive upfront payment and will be eligible for certain milestone payments. The announcement was made before market hours today, 13 March 2019. Raymond had entered into a development management agreement (DMA) with Colorplus Realty for developing its upcoming realty project, Raymond Realty Phase I. In order to gain better operational efficiencies and control on the project, the company intends to undertake the development on its own. Therefore, the said DMA has been terminated with mutual consent and an application has been made for modification of the RERA Registration. The termination of the DMA will not impact the development of the project and same is expected to progress as per schedule. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 12 March 2019. TVS Motor Company has further invested Rs 30 crore in the equity capital of TVS Credit Services (TVS CS), a subsidiary company. Consequently, the company's direct holding in TVS CS increased to 10.29%. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 12 March 2019. CMI said it executed its maiden export order from Mauritius for the supply of XLPE LV/HV underground power cables from the company's plant located at Baddi-Himachal Pradesh. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 12 March 2019. V-Mart Retail said it has opened new stores in Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh. This takes the total number of stores to 207 in 165 cities across 17 states. Total tally of Himachal Pradesh is 1 store, Jharkhand is 17 stores and Uttar Pradesh is 83 stores. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 12 March 2019. Jet Airways (India) announced that an additional four aircraft have been grounded due to non-payment of amounts outstanding to lessors under their respective lease agreements. As mentioned earlier, the company is actively engaged with all its aircraft lessors and regularly provides them with updates on the efforts undertaken by the company to improve its liquidity. Aircraft lessors have been supportive of the company's efforts in this regard. The company is also making all efforts to minimize disruption to its network due to the above and is proactively informing and re-accommodating its affected guests. The company also continues to provide required and periodic updates to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation in this regard. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 12 March 2019. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court on Wednesday said that IPS officers with a minimum of six months of service before the date of their superannuation can be considered for appointment as Director Generals of Police. A bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice L. Nageswara Rao and Justice Sanjiv Khanna said this applies to a panel of Indian Police Service officers to be prepared by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC). The top court had reserved its order on February 28. The order came on an application contesting the practice of the UPSC preparing the panel of IPS officers with two years or more of service left for appointment as Director Generals of Police in states, overlooking senior officers with excellent service record. The court was told that the UPSC's decision was causing havoc and a number of senior officers were resigning in protest. The UPSC, the court was told, was doing so citing an apex court order of July 3, 2018 which said that "as far as practicable" those considered for the poste should "have got two years of service. Merit and seniority should be given due weightage". The court was told that competent senior police officers were not being considered for appointment as the head of the police force in states. The Centre had left it to the court to spell out the "reasonable" remaining term before an IPS officer's superannuation to be considered for inclusion in the panel for appointment as DGP. --IANS pk/rtp/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) For a father to shoulder the coffin of his son is believed to be the heaviest and the most painful load in the World, but for Farooq Ahmad Khan, the father of slain militant Mudasir Ahmad Khan, the tragedy has been even more painful. "The security forces told me that one of the two completely charred dead bodies belonged to my son. I could not identify Mudasir's body and had little choice other than pick one of them and go home and mourn", Farooq Ahmad said. Asked how he or the security forces were sure that Mudasir had been killed in the gunfight in Pinglish village, the wailing father said villagers had seen Mudasir that evening there and after the security forces told him they had killed his son, he had little choice other than believe the worst. Even in his hour of extreme sorrow, the father is not 100 per cent sure he has brought his son's dead body home. "We have taken samples from the family for DNA tests which would finally establish the identities of the two slain terrorists in Pinglish village, but based on intelligence inputs and evidence gathered during and after the encounter, there is no doubt that we have killed Mudasir, the key conspirator of February 14 Pulwama terror attack and his Pakistani accomplice, Khalida," a senior police officer said. Khan, 26, was a commerce graduate who initially worked for a cellular company. The security forces said he joined the militants' ranks last January. The father said he had no inkling about his son even remotely being connected with militancy. "Last year, security forces raided our house and told us to present Mudasir at the security forces camp the next day. Immediately following the raid, my son went missing till we saw his picture on the social media brandishing a weapon," the father said. Mudasir's father said his advice and pleading with his son last year to surrender fell on deaf ears. "He once came home last year. I begged him to surrender. But, he said after being accused of attacks on the security forces, he did not believe that surrender would be the right course of action for him," his father said while looking with blank eyes at the overcast sky. The light has gone out of his eyes. Kashmir's reality is that Farooq Khan is not the first father to shoulder his son's coffin. The tragedy is that he might not be the last to bear the heaviest load for him in the world on his tender shoulders in the beleaguered valley. (Sheikh Qayoom can be contacted at sheikh.abdul@ians.in) --IANS sq/vm/am/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Australian Cardinal George Pell, once the Vatican's number three, was sentenced to six years in prison for sexually abusing two choirboys in the late 1990s. The former Vatican treasurer is the most senior Catholic figure ever to be found guilty of sexual offences against children, CNN reported. A former senior adviser to Pope Francis, Pell showed no reaction when Chief Judge Peter Kidd handed down his sentence in a hearing broadcast live worldwide from Victoria's County Court in central Melbourne. The judge said that Pell will have to serve three years and eight months of his sentence before being able to ask for parole, which he could do as of October 2022. Pell, 77, was found guilty in December of one count of sexual penetration of a child and four counts of committing an indecent act with a child after a secret five-week trial. A jury that time had ruled that Pell abused the 13-year-old choir boys in a Melbourne cathedral in 1996. He was arrested on February 27. The cardinal maintains his innocence and has lodged an appeal. On Wednesday, Judge Kidd said Pell's attack on the victims was "breathtakingly arrogant" adding that the cardinal had assaulted the boys with "callous indifference to the victims' distress". But the judge said Pell was "not to be made a scapegoat for any failings or perceived failings of the Catholic Church". Among other elements, the judge ordered that the cardinal will be placed on a register of sexual offenders for the rest of his life. Outside the court, survivors of Catholic sex abuse who had attended the hearing were divided on the sentence, according to CNN. Some felt it was too light, while others were happy to see justice being done. "I would have been happy with one month, one week," one said. In a statement after the sentencing, the surviving victim said it was hard for him "to take comfort in this outcome". "There is no rest for me," he said through his lawyer Vivian Waller. "I'm doing my best to hold myself and my family together." Pell's defence has already appealed the sentence, through an application that will be addressed in June to decide whether or not to proceed. --IANS soni/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a move to boost foreign investor confidence in relation to protection of intellectual property (IP) in India, the Cabinet on Wednesday approved the proposal for Accession to the Nice, Vienna and Locarno Agreements, which will allow India an opportunity to include Indian designs, figurative elements and goods in the international classification systems. An official statement said the proposals approved are for India's accession to The Nice Agreement concerning the International Classification of Goods and Services for the purposes of registration of marks; The Vienna Agreement establishing an International Classification of the figurative elements of marks; and The Locarno Agreement establishing an international classification for industrial designs. These agreements will help the Intellectual Property Office in India to harmonise the classification systems for examination of trademark and design applications, in line with the classification systems followed globally. The accession would also facilitate in exercising rights in decision-making processes regarding review and revision of the classifications under the agreement. --IANS spk/oeb/bc (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) California Governor Gavin Newsom will impose on Wednesday a moratorium on state executions and a temporary reprieve for all 737 inmates on death row in the state, the media reported. According to the Washington Post, Newsom will sign an executive order later in the day, describing the death penalty as "inconsistent with our bedrock values". California has not carried out any executions since 2006, as a series of court battles over execution methods have been waged. The order will give a reprieve from execution - though not release - to California's 737 death row inmates, about a quarter of the nation's population awaiting capital punishment. It will also annul California's lethal injection protocol and close the execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison, where the state's most notorious criminals have been put to death. The Governor took office in January and a death penalty moratorium was one of his campaign pledges. "I do not believe that a civilized society can claim to be a leader in the world as long as its government continues to sanction the premeditated and discriminatory execution of its people," he said in a statement issued with the executive order. "In short, the death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian." Two voter initiatives to end the death penalty in California narrowly failed to gain a majority in recent years, with 48 per cent support in 2012 and 47 per cent support in 2016. Governor Newsom supported both initiatives. But a separate proposition voted on in 2016 won support for its demand to speed up executions in California. The Governor does not have the power to abolish the state's 1978 death penalty legislation permanently. A repeal would require a popular vote in favour of the change. The next opportunity for such a ballot would be at the 2020 elections. The reprieves Governor Newsom issues now will expire when he leaves office. His current term lasts until January 2023. More than 900 people have been sentenced to death in California since 1978, but only 13 have been executed. Another 79 died of natural causes and a further 26 took their own lives, according to figures from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The death penalty is a legal punishment in 30 US states. Since 1976, Texas carried out the most executions (560), followed by Virginia (113) and Oklahoma (112). There are 2,738 inmates on death row in the US. --IANS soni/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) China kept chief Masood Azhar, the chief of the terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), under its protective wings, vetoing a fourth attempt to declare him a global terrorist and sanction him. China was the only Security Council member to vote on Wednesday against the proposal spearheaded by France with British and US backing to at the al-Qaeda sanctions committee to declare him a global terrorist. The move to sanction him picked up steam after the Pulwama suicide car bomb attack by JeM, which killed 40 Indian Security personnel. Wednesday was the deadline for to take a decision and with Beijing's veto, the proposal will remain on hold. In New Delhi, the External Affairs Ministry expressed disappointment over the outcome. "This has prevented action by the international community to designate the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a proscribed and active terrorist organization which has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on 14 February 2019," the statement said. "We will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens are brought to justice," the statement said. The US had said on Tuesday that China's opposition to designating Azhar as an international terrorist runs counter to the mutual goal with the US of regional stability. As the founder and leader of JeM, Azhar "meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations" as a global terrorist subject to its sanctions, Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino said. (Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in) --IANS al/vin/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) China's opposition to designate Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar as an international terrorist by the UN runs counter to its mutual goal with the US on regional stability, according to a State Department official. As the founder and leader of the Pakistan-based JeM, Azhar "meets the criteria for the designation by the UN" as a global terrorist subject to its sanctions, Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino said on Tuesday. He leads the JeM, which has been designated by the UN as a terrorist organisation and "has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability and peace", Palladino said during a news briefing in Washington. China has placed Azhar under its protection and vetoed moves to declare him a global terrorist that would subject him to UN sanctions. "The US and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and ... a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal," Palladino added. After the Pulwama suicide car-bombing by the JeM that killed more than 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) troopers on February 14, France is spearheading a renewed effort with British and the US backing to put sanctions on Azhar. About these efforts, Palladino said: "The US and India work closely together on counter-terrorism efforts, and that includes at the UN." (Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter @arulouis) --IANS al/am/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress on Wednesday said that China blocking designation of Masood Azhar as a global terrorist was a sad day in the global fight against terrorism and slammed Prime Minister Narendra Modi over his foreign policy. Party's communications incharge Randeep Singh Surjewala said that China blocking JeM chief Masood Azhar's designation as global terrorist reaffirms its position of being an inseparable ally of terrorism's breeding ground-Pakistan. "A sad day in the global fight against terrorism! China blocking Masood Azhar's designation as global terrorist reaffirms Chinese position of being an inseparable ally of terrorism's breeding ground-Pakistan Sadly, Modiji's foreign policy has been a series of diplomatic disasters," he said in a tweet. China kept chief Masood Azhar, the chief of the terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), under its protective wings, vetoing a fourth attempt to declare him a global terrorist and sanction him. JeM has claimed responsibility for Pulwama attack. --IANS ps/vin/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Royal Thai Embassy is organising a cultural fest - 'Namaste Thailand Festival' - from Friday to Sunday here, to commemorate 72 years of Indo-Thai diplomatic relations. The festival of Thai food, products, music, performances and culture is all set to offer a unique Thai experience, the organisers of the festival said. "India and Thailand have a history of good and cooperative relations. To strengthen these relations we need to co-opt culturally and understand each other. The festival is a move in this direction. "Such festivals need to be held on a regular basis as they help the people of two great nations understand each other," Ambassador of Thailand Chutintorn Gongsakdi said in a statement. An interactive session with the Ambassador is also slated during the opening on Friday. Apart from activities and products on art, fashion and lifestyle, visitors can also experience Thai cuisine from Radisson Blu's restaurant Nueng Roi. There will also be three quiz competitions about Thailand, the organisers said. Cultural performances from renowned Thai artists like Asia-7, a Thai jazz-fusion band which has played in many Indian music festivals including the Delhi International Jazz Festival this year, will culminate the festival. It will take place at the Select City Walk here and is free for all. --IANS sj/mag/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Venezuela's Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez has said that electricity has been "fully restored" nationwide after a massive blackout starting late last week affected most of the country. "At this time, almost all the electric energy supply has been restored throughout the national territory," Efe news quoted Rodriguez as saying to reporters on Tuesday. He called the power restoration a "victory" in the face of what he and the Nicolas Maduro government claim to be a "terrorist attack" perpetrated by the US on the "distribution system" and the "brain" of Venezuela's electricity grid. However, he called upon the public to remain alert because, he said, the "electric war" continues. The Maduro regime had said last week that the electricity distribution system had been sabotaged and was the target of a cyber-attack by the US, the target being the country's main Guri hydroelectric facility in southern Bolivar state. Restoring electric service has been overseen by Maduro, who has been monitoring developments from a "situation room," according to what Rodriguez said on Tuesday, along with workers from the state-run electric company Corpoelec. Because of the power outage, the supply of potable water across much of the country was also affected, although now that power has ostensibly been "almost fully" restored the water pumping systems are operating again. Last Thursday, Venezuela experienced a massive power blackout that paralyzed the country, and the government suspended work and school classes, with communications and transportation services also being severely affected. The blackout resulted in about a dozen states being completely without electricity, and looting occurred in the states of Zulia and Merida, while the NGO Doctors Health Organization reported that several hospitals had been significantly affected, resulting in at least 21 deaths. Venezuela has been experiencing power failures for years but they have become more serious recently and the one that hit the country last Thursday was by far the longest in history. The political crisis in Venezuela intensified on Jan. 23 when the head of the opposition-controlled Parliament, Juan Guaido, proclaimed himself the country's interim president and received the support of a majority of countries in the Western Hemisphere as well some 20 countries in Europe. The Venezuelan opposition, which does not recognize Maduro's second six-year term in office, which began on Jan. 10, says that the country is going through a "complicated humanitarian emergency" - including a severe lack of both food and medicine - and has asked for the international community's help in dealing with it. --IANS vin/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The founder of leading in-app video advertising platform Vungle has filed a lawsuit against the firm, seeking $100 million in damages. According to a report in TechCrunch on Tuesday, Zain Jaffer accused the firm of wrongfully terminating him. "The lawsuit cites a section of the California labor code that it says 'expressly and specifically prohibits discrimination and retaliation by employers based upon an arrest or detention that did not result in conviction'," the report noted. Jaffer was arrested in October 2017 in an incident involving his young son. The charges included performing a lewd act on a child and assault with a deadly weapon, said the report. The charges were dropped last year. "Once I was absolved of any wrongdoing, I was looking forward to a friendly relationship with the Company. "Instead, Vungle unfairly and unlawfully sought to destroy my career, blocked my efforts to sell my own shares or transfer shares to family members," the lawsuit alleged. Vungle declined to comment. --IANS na/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 53-year-old fugitive militant of the Khalistan Commando Force (KCF) involved in over 50 terrorist activities and who wanted to reconstitute his group was arrested here, police said on Wednesday. Gursewak alias Babla was arrested by the Crime Branch on a tip off on Tuesday night when he came to meet a contact at the Inter-State Bus Terminus (ISBT), Deputy Commissioner of Police Bhisham Singh said. A resident of Punjab, Gursewak was involved in more than 50 cases of terrorist activities, murders of police officers, bank dacoity and robberies in Punjab, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, the officer said. He was lodged in jail for over 26 years in different cases. He escaped twice from police custody in Delhi and Rajasthan, the officer said. It was found that he was in regular touch with some Pakistan-based Khalistani militants, Singh added. "Gursewak was planning to re-constitute his organization on the instructions of the KCF chief based in Pakistan and was in touch with other militants lodged in jails in India," he said. --IANS sp/mr/soni (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Marilyn Steele, a 73-year-old woman from New Brunswick, who recently underwent a life-saving cancer surgery has been told she may have to lose her home as the province of New Brunswick has refused to pay a $144,000 bill for the surgery. According to the report on Yahoo, this refusal stems from the fact that the surgery was performed in the U.S. rather than in Canada. The surgery was done in Tampa, U.S, after Dr. James Belyea, an ear nose and throat specialist, and head and neck surgeonin New Brunswick told Steele that the surgery could not be done in the province. Steeles troubles started on Dec. 7, 2018, when Dr. Belyea gave her the terrible news that she had anaplastic thyroid cancer which he said could kill her in a matter of months. "The tests were showing that the tumours were invading my carotid artery," Steele said "And he said the very last thing would be that that artery would rupture. And it would be very gruesome for my family to watch." Steele's tumour was wrapped around the base of her carotid artery, which supplies blood to the brain, neck and face. He basically said to Steele, "You'll bleed to death. And encouraged her to seek help elsewhere as he claimed he had shown Steeles CT scan to other specialists in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and no one could help her. He offered her radiation and chemotherapy, which he said could give her an additional three to twelve months of life. A thyroid cancer surgeon from the U.S, Dr. Gary Clayman, reached out to Steeles family but said the surgery had to be soon, as the cells with her type of cancer divide rapidly. "We had from 8:30 in the morning Saturday morning until Monday morning at 8 a.m. so 48 hours we had to get to Tampa," she said. Two days later, Steele went through a successful seven-hour surgery, followed by 40 rounds of targeted radiation in Toronto, then daily chemotherapy pills for life. However, Steeles relief was cut short after they received news, midway through radiation treatments in Toronto thatNew Brunswick Medicare would not pay for any of her care in the U.S. According to NB Medicare, out-of-country services are only covered if there is proof no Canadian centres could perform them. Dr. Belyea had told the NB Medicare that Steele, "was not considered a surgical candidate in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia," mainly because the surgery was too complicated. Dr. Zeljko Bolesnikov, the medical consultant to New Brunswick Medicare, replied that there wasn't any proof Belyea had tried to find out if other hospitals in Canada could do the procedure, and according to him, there were three hospitals in Canada which could have done the surgery. Belyea claims he is ignorant of any legislation that required him to call every centre in Canada to see if a surgeon could do the job. "In the time it would've taken for Marilyn Steele to be assessed at every academic centre in Canada, she would have almost certainly died of airway obstruction or had distant metastasis," he wrote. For now, the Steele family is caught in what appears to be a battle the doctor and New Brunswick Medicare. "I'm very frustrated at what appears to be a technicality between someone claiming to not know the process and someone claiming that the process has to be followed in order for something to happen," said Lesley, Steeles daughter. "Those two sides don't involve my mother at all." "We're not rich people," she said. "We're both retired on a small pension. And the only asset that we have in our home. And it's a very modest three-bedroom bungalow in the country." Marilyn is receiving a monthly payment from New Brunswick Medicare for her medical stay in Toronto, and a GoFundMe campaign has been started for the family. After pausing investments in its "Allo" mobile messaging app, Google has finally bid goodbye to the platform that was launched with much fanfare in 2016. A banner across the official Allo website confirmed that March 12 was its last day in operation, The Verge reported on Monday. "During our time together, we brought you a smarter way to chat, with features like the Google Assistant, 'Allo' for web and selfie stickers but now the app is signing off," the banner on Allo's page read. Last year in April, Anil Sabharwal, the head of the communications group at Google told the media that "Allo" as a product did not achieve the level of traction the company had hoped for. Even though the app's successor is not quite ready yet, Google has incorporated some of Allo's features like smart replies and desktop support into the Android Messaging app. "We're working to bring your favorite features to the Messages app so you can have richer conversations with all your friends. If you have an Android phone, we hope you'll try Messages!" the banner said. "Allo" was launched as an instant messaging mobile app for the Android and iOS mobile Operating Systems (OS), with a web client available on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera browsers. After Allo's exit, Google is going all in on Rich Communication Services (RCS) -- the successor to SMS that's been a long time coming -- to give Android a successful messaging app. "It's far from universal, but now that Google is focused on just a single messaging app, it has a better chance of gaining some momentum," The Verge said. --IANS rp/rtp (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Several Google users on Wednesday reported problems with accessing Gmail and other services in large parts of the world. The company said it was investigating the problem. Many users in Australia, the US, Europe and Asia reported outages with Gmail, Google Maps and Google Drive, The Guardian reported. In a statement, Google said it was investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. "We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behaviour," the company posted on its service website. Unable to send emails, several users received an error message: "Message could not be sent. Check your network and try again". Google Maps and Drive also experienced issues. --IANS na/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India announced that all Boeing 737 aircraft will stop operating in the country from 4 p.m. on Wednesday but the US aviation regulator questioned the global grounding of the fleet after an Ethiopian Airlines crash. "No B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600 hours," the Ministry of Civil Aviation tweeted. This came as a clarification and in continuation to its late Tuesday decision when the Ministry had tweeted: "DGCA (Directorate General of Civil Aviation) has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately." The Ministry added on Wednesday: "B737Max operations will stop from or to all Indian airports. Additionally, no B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600 hours Indian time or 1030 UTC." The directive came close on the heels of a global grounding of the Boeing fleet following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines' Boeing 737-800 MAX flight on Sunday killing all 157 people on board. India joined the UK, Singapore, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Italy, Australia and the EU nations in the grounding. On Tuesday, the US aviation regulator Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said that no systematic performance issues have been found with the Boeing 737-Max aircraft to justify the global grounding. "The FAA continues to review extensively all available data and aggregate safety performance from operators and pilots of the Boeing 737 Max. Thus far, our review shows no systematic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft," the regulator said. "Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action. In the course of our urgent review of data on the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash, if any issues affecting the continued airworthiness of the aircraft are identified, the FAA will take immediate and appropriate action." In India, SpiceJet and Jet Airways operate 17 Boeing 737-800 MAX aircraft -- Spice (12) and Jet (5). On its part, SpiceJet said: "Consequent to the regulatory directive on the Boeing 737 MAX, SpiceJet has already initiated grounding of its MAX fleet. "In order to cause least inconvenience to its passengers and also bring these aircraft to its maintenance base, we expect to complete this exercise on or before 4 p.m. today." SpiceJet has announced cancellation of 14 flights. "Of the 76 planes in our fleet, 64 aircraft are in operation and we are confident of minimizing the inconvenience to our passengers and attain normalcy in our operations," the airline said. --IANS rv/in/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Indian and Pakistani officials will meet at Attari, near Amritsar, on Thursday to finalise modalities of the corridor to the Sahib gurdwara, with keen for visa-free access to the pilgrims to the historic shrine across the border. The first-ever meeting on the issue, coming amid heightened tensions between both countries in the wake of Pulwama terror attack, will also discuss the alignment of the project as there is some mismatch in the coordinates. Officials from Home, External Affairs and other ministries concerned of the two countries will attend the meeting. Sources said that security aspect was of paramount importance and there will be no dilution in that. They also said that will also be conveyed that places of pilgrimage should not be used for separatist propaganda by anti- elements. There have also been reports that Khalistan separatist groups could use the corridor route to push terrorists. The meeting will take place exactly a month after the February 14 Pulwama terror attack in which 40 Central Reserve Police Force troopers were killed, triggering India- tensions. has made it clear that the meeting was in no way a resumption of a bilateral dialogue. It has said the issue was related to emotions and sentiments of the Indian citizens of the Sikh faith and its decision regarding the meeting reflects a strong commitment to operationalize the corridor on the occasion of the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev. The Sahib gurdwara in Narowal district of Pakistan's province, located 4.5 km from the border near the Dera Baba Nanak town in Punjab's Gurdaspur district, is significant for the Sikh community as it is here that the faith's founder Guru Nanak Dev spent 18 years of his life and was his final resting place. The governments of India and are trying to facilitate the travel of pilgrims to offer prayers at the gurdwara - a demand made by the Sikhs for the past over 70 years. Chief Minister wants "passport and visa-free 'khule darshan' for pilgrims". Meanwhile, the has already initiated development of the Passenger Terminal Building Complex at Dera Baba Nanak, with its design inspired by the symbol "Khand", which symbolises values of oneness and humanity. It will cater to about 5,000 pilgrims per day with provision to cater to additional 10,000 pilgrims during festivals. Following a global trend of grounding Boeing 737-MAX aircraft, India finally suspended the plane's operations and over-flight permissions on Wednesday evening, even as hundreds of passengers were affected at airports. The government tried to protect passengers from the double whammy of high fares and reduced flight operations. Advising airlines not to go in for predatory pricing, it said that it will be monitoring key sectors to detect any high fares. Briefing the media here, after a meeting between Ministry of Civil Aviation officials with airlines' representatives, Civil Aviation Secretary Pradeep Singh Kharola said that all flights operated on Boeing 737-MAX have been grounded before 4 p.m. In India, SpiceJet and Jet Airways operate 17 Boeing 737-MAX aircraft -- Spice (12) and Jet (5) -- though the latter's fleet was already grounded due to various reasons. "We have advised the airlines... that they should not use it (grounding) as a reason to hike their fares," Kharola told reporters. "They have assured us that they will go as per normal routine. The DGCA (Directorate General of Civil Aviation) has said that it will be monitoring all the sectors very closely...if it is found that pricing is predatory, advisory will be issued." Kharola said that SpiceJet cancelled 14 flights, out of the 500-plus flights it operates on a daily basis. The airline was able to take care of passengers on its cancelled flights. However, according to sector experts, airfares are already high and the current developments may further push them up. "The shortage of planes and high seat occupancies are expected to push air fares north in the short term. The fares were at least 15 per cent higher this year compared to last year. Owing to the current situation, they are expected to rise further this season," Sharat Dhall, COO (B2C) of Yatra.com said. According to Aloke Bajpai, CEO and co-founder, ixigo: "Following the ban on Boeing 737 MAX in Indian airspace, international inbound flights have been affected. Post-DGCA announcement, 34 international flights flying into Mumbai and 12 flights bound for Delhi were cancelled." "Grounding of additional planes will further impact fares which were already high this season. Both domestic and international fares for flights to and from Mumbai and Delhi have seen an average increase of 40-50 per cent and we expect fares to rise further due to shortage of planes." Earlier in the day, the Ministry of Civil Aviation tweeted: "No B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600 hours." This came as a clarification and in continuation to its late Tuesday decision when the Ministry had tweeted: "DGCA has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately." The Ministry added on Wednesday: "B737Max operations will stop from or to all Indian airports. Additionally, no B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600 hours Indian time or 1030 UTC." On its part, SpiceJet said that it is rationalising and optimising the use of its Boeing 737NG and Bombardier Q400 aircraft to address the current situation and minimise inconvenience to its passengers. "We are evaluating options for augmenting capacity in the coming days through a mix of additional flights & aircraft inductions. We are sure that our operations will be normal very soon," the airline said in a statement. "Complying with the DGCA directive, SpiceJet has grounded its entire B737 Max fleet. A majority of passengers affected as a result of these cancellations have been accommodated by SpiceJet on alternate flights." Apart from cancellations, Wednesday's restriction will also hamper fleet augmentation of SpiceJet and Jet Airways with 737-MAX, thereby impacting their international expansion. They have also placed orders for 355 737-MAX aircraft. Of this, SpiceJet has 205 737-MAX aircraft on order and Jet Airways 150 planes of the same type. The DGCA has said that the Boeing 737 MAX planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations. With the latest action, India joined the UK, Singapore, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Australia and the EU nations in the grounding. The global grounding of the Boeing fleet follows the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines' Boeing 737-MAX flight on Sunday killing all 157 people on board. --IANS rv/sn/pgh/prs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Indian and Pakistani armies traded heavy fire on the Line of Control (LoC) on Wednesday in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district, police said. The firing exchanges started in Chakan Da Bagh area. "Mortar shelling and small arms firing continued between the two sides," a police officer said. As two shells fired from Pakistan landed near the Chakan Da Bagh trade facilitation centre, its staff and others present there hurriedly took shelter in underground bunkers. "No damage or casualty was caused due to the Pakistani shelling," the officer said. The Pakistani ceasefire violation occurred on a day the cross-LoC trade between the Indian and Pakistan administered parts of Jammu and Kashmir took place between Chakan Da Bagh and Rawalakot. --IANS sq/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The detention of Indian students by the US immigration authorities came up during Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale's meeting with Congressional leaders, according to a participant. Representative Tom Suozzi tweeted that during the Monday meeting they discussed immigration issues and that he himself "sought everyone's assistance regarding the Telugu students detained" by immigration authorities. The meeting took place in the Washington office of Brad Sherman, a Democrat, who is the chairman of the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and Non-Proliferation. The panel's Ranking Republican Member Ted Yoho was also present. In February, immigration officials detained 129 students, most of them from Telegana and Andhra Pradesh, who had enrolled in a fake university that officials had created in a sting operation against misuse of visas. Officials allege that they had enrolled in the institution knowing that it did not hold classes but was used only to facilitate visas. Suozzi, a Democrat with a large number of Indian-Americans in his New York constituency, also tweeted: "The relationship between the US and India is one of the most important relationships the US (will) have over the next 50 years." Sherman tweeted that they discussed the US role in India-Pakistan relations and US-India trade. On Tuesday, Gokhale attended the India-US Strategic Dialogue with David Hale, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in Washington. He is scheduled to continue the dialogue on Wednesday with Andrea Thompson, the Under Secretary of State for for Arms Control and International Security Affairs. State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino said he was also scheduled to have meetings at the White House and the Department of Defence. (Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter @arulouis) --IANS al/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Infosys would open a digital innovation centre at Bucharest in Romania to develop software for clients based on cloud, big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, said the IT major on Wednesday. "We will invest in training our current employees and new hires for competencies, including user experience, cloud, big data, digital offerings, core technology skills and computer science skills," said the city-based company in a statement. The $11-billion outsourcing firm also tied up with the University of Bucharest and the University Politehnica Bucharest for innovation and Romanian workforce development, including joint training courses, scholarships and research. "The training for Romanian workforce will leverage the learnings and best practices we have developed at our global education centre at Mysuru in Karnataka," said the statement. Mysuru is about 150km southwest of Bengaluru. The IT behemoth plans to open a cyber defence centre in Bucharest in summer to provide 24/7 cyber security services to European and global clients. The services will be in cyber forensics, ethical hacking, security analytics, threat detection and response. "The centre will be vital to delivering services across the European region, given the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other country-specific data regulation requirements. The GDPR is a European Union law on data protection and privacy for all individuals in the region and the European Economic Area. "Our digital innovation centre in Bucharest marks an important step as it expands our presence across Europe, improving our ability to serve both regional and global clients," said Infosys President S. Ravi Kumar in the statement. By partnering with local academic institutions, the company is creating organic talent pools in Romania. "By training and developing skilled workforce in Romania, we can help close the digital skills gap in the region and contribute to the Romanian and European economy," said Kumar on the occasion. As a top employer in Europe, the company operates in 15 countries in the region, employing 12,000 techies, who cater European and global clients in diverse verticals, including financial services, healthcare, life sciences, business process management, utilities, manufacturing and retail. "Europe is a hotbed for innovation and the next generation of workforce is keen to develop its skills and knowledge in the digital age through the best training and hands-on experience," said University of Bucharest Rector Mircea Dumitru in the statement. The university has partnered with Infosys so that its students and graduates can work and train with its IT experts at the digital centre. "IT services is a growing industry in Romania and the digital innovation centre offers an opportunity for students and professionals to develop their skills, find career prospects and enhance digital technologies across industries in Romania and Europe," said Romania Vice Prime Minister Ana Birchall. --IANS fb/vin/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The second chapter of upcoming Kannada action-drama "KGF", starring Yash in the lead, had its official launch here on Wednesday at a ceremony in the presence of the film's cast and crew. The launch was attended by Yash, Srinidhi Shetty, director Prashant Neel and producer Vijay Kiragandur. Following the runaway success of "KGF", which emerged as the first Kannada film to breach the Rs 200 crore club worldwide, the hype for "KGF: Chapter 2" has reached unprecedented heights. In a recent interview to IANS, Yash said the second chapter will be "bigger" and "better" than the first part. "When we made "KGF: Chapter 1", we had our own inhibitions and restricted ourselves in some way. But with this kind of success in our side, we are going all out to make the second part. We now know people are keenly looking forward to the second part and we can deliver it without any reservations. We have reserved the best for chapter 2," he added. Yash confirmed that the makers are in talks with Sanjay Dutt for a crucial role in the second chapter. "We had approached him with a role in the first part. He couldn't take up as he was busy with other commitments. We've approached him again with a very important role. He's yet to give his final nod," Yash said. The regular shooting of "KGF: Chapter 2" will commence from April. The makers are eyeing a December release. --IANS hp/rb/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Karnataka coalition government led by Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy has "failed" to deliver on its promise of farm loans waiver, BJP state unit president B.S. Yeddyurappa said on Wednesday. "The Chief Minister promised farm loan waiver before coming to power, but failed to deliver it even in nine months of his government," Yeddyurappa told the media here. The Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S)-Congress coalition government did not implement any development programmes for the welfare of the state's residents, he said. Hailing Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a "world leader", Yeddyurappa said the Central government's schemes like the Direct Benefit Transfer scheme of Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM Kisan) have benefited crores of farmers. Stating that Modi ensured a "corruption-free" administration in the country, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader said the party was confident of winning 22 of the 28 Lok Sabha seats in the general elections on April 18 and 23 in the state. Most of the sitting BJP MPs in the state will be given party tickets, he said. Former Congress legislator Umesh Jadhav, who quit the party to join the BJP on March 6, will contest from Kalaburagi, to take on Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge, Yeddyurappa said. "We have not finalised our candidates yet," he said, adding that the decision will be taken by the leadership soon. --IANS bha/mag/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Alternative medicine is becoming popular as more people become health conscious and seek inexpensive, yet effective treatment. In becoming health conscious, people adapt a way of life that averts diseases. Thus, more people are turning to alternative medicine because it offers preventative therapy and is holistic in nature. It targets the body, mind and emotional well-being of the patient. Moreover, alternative medicine is a better treatment therapy for those who are uncomfortable with invasive and allopathic treatments offered by conventional medicine. For most people turning to alternative medicine, the idea is returning back to nature and seeking treatment the natural way. So what is alternative medicine anyway? Alternative medicine a combination of philosophies, approaches and therapies used for healing that traditional medicine does not often apply, accept, investigate, comprehend or make available. Alternative medicine modalities usually employ preventative and therapeutic measures that are seldom offered in a hospital setting. Those who provide alternative treatment claim that an imbalance of forces within the body as the basis of illnesses and their symptoms. They trust in the bodys capacity to cure and restore itself naturally. Alternative care providers will normally provide therapy depending on a patients specific needs; this has the tendency to lead to diverse therapeutic strategies for varying symptoms. Types of alternative medicine and therapies There is a wide array of alternative medicine and therapies that exists. Examples include herbal medicine, aromatherapy, homeopathy, nutritional supplements, yoga, meditation, acupuncture and spirituality to mention a few. Since, these forms of treatments can be done on a regular basis without a care provider; most people engage in them and consult only when experiencing difficulties. Alternative therapy encourages a way of life that is healthy and prevents diseases. Most would argue that alternative medicine is the most effective way of preventing chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, depression, arthritis and cardiovascular diseases. The reason is because it focuses on the body, mind and emotion and encourages healthy living. Unlike conventional medicine that is short and goal-oriented, alternative medicine is long-term and integrative. Reasons why alternative medicine/therapy is popular currently Conventional doctors recommend it It is estimated that nearly one in four patients who has used alternative medicine was recommended by a physician or a nurse. Mostly, physicians will recommend the application of alternative medicine as a complementary solution for traditional health care plan. Some traditional care providers also recommend it to inform the patients about including it in their insurance coverage insurance companies now cover alternative therapy treatments such as chiropractic and biofeedback treatments. Alternative medicine is gradually becoming acknowledged and gaining acceptance around the western societies. This remains the case even when the WHO estimates that 80% of the global population uses herbal medicine. Alternative medicine is comfortable to use Some of those using alternative medicine are dissatisfied with the invasive nature of conventional medicine. Most desire a way to restore their health naturally without surgeries and allopathic medicine that contain chemicals like mercury and lead that studies show to be harmful to the body. A study has found that older individuals experiencing chronic illnesses turn to alternative therapies more regularly. Some individuals claim that the conventional treatment approach is more about covering up the symptoms than managing its cause, which is the opposite of what alternative medicine does. Conventional medicine focuses on specific body issues, while alternative medicine focuses on the whole being. Still some people are lured because of its prophylactic approach that ensures general balance and health. While for others, particularly those with chronic diseases, it is a last resort. Alternative medicine is reasonably priced The cost of health care is high in most parts of the world. Yet, good health is essential for life. Conventional medicine is generally expensive when considering the surgeries, multiple counter medications and consultations accompanied by a fee. Yet, despite the high cost of service, conventional treatment does not provide a holistic, integrative treatment; rather it focuses on the specific condition. The fee for alternative medicine is relatively inexpensive, even though the frequency and duration of the treatment can last longer. The good thing is that the patient can engage the treatment on a personal capacity and only consult with the practitioner when needed. Normally, the fee charged for alternative medicine will depend on the practitioners training and experience, the duration, modality, and the success rate. Medical schools now offer alternative medicine training Half of all medical colleges provide courses on alternative medicine, including those in western countries. These courses focus more on the study of plants as medicine. It shouldnt be surprising given that people have evolved with plants and herbs for hundreds of years. In fact, most traditional cultures around the world relying on herbs believe that herbs contain trophorestorative abilities that work on the innermost level to restore health. Scientific studies have discovered that plants benefit the human body by transferring information on a genetic level. As some undergraduates and graduates pickup courses in alternative medicine, it is undeniable that the use of alternative medicine will only increase in the future. Conclusion Thus, alternative medicine is here to stay because it offers a holistic and preventative approach to healing. The surge in non-communicable diseases coupled with the information age are making people become health conscious. As they do so, they seek approaches that keep off the diseases. Conventional medicine is short-term and goal-oriented, while alternative medicine is long-term and holistic. The long-term treatment approach encourages people to adapt a healthy lifestyle that focuses on the body, mind and emotional well-being. An Australian man has been arrested for selling stolen subscription details from services like Netflix and Spotify, from which he made a profit of around 300,000 Australian dollars. "The man was allegedly behind the website WickedGen.com, which boasted to have 120,000 users and sold Netflix, Spotify and Hulu logins stolen from almost one million accounts," the CNET reported on Wednesday. Evan Leslie McMahon, a 21-year-old IT worker, reportedly made the money from selling stolen subscription details from streaming services. He was charged with multiple cyber crime offences and appeared in a court here. The website was shut down later. "The account details were obtained through credential stuffing, which sees a list of previously stolen or leaked usernames, email addresses and corresponding passwords re-used and sold for unauthorised access," the Australian Federal Police was quoted as saying in a statement. While account sharing is common (roughly one third of streaming users say they'd quit a service like Netflix if it tried to stop password sharing), account stealing is a different matter, the report added. --IANS ksc/mag/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Software giant Microsoft has become an unexpected victim of hate messages directed at a Surf Excel detergent commercial that has raked up a huge controversy in India over the past few days. The latest commercial, part of Surf Excel's "Daag Achche Hai Campaign", shows a Hindu girl saving a Muslim boy from colours on Holi. However, it has offended some people, who are venting their anger on the social media. Some un-informed folks, who joined the hate parade, confused Surf Excel with Microsoft Excel. Soon #BoycottSurfExcel, #BoycottExcel, #MicrosoftExcel and more such hashtags involving Microsoft were trending on the social media. "Going to request Sundar Pichai to throw you away from the Playstore. And ofcourse Satya Nadella as well to remove you from Microsoft Office. As a data scientist, it was tough to say this but country over profession anytime," wrote Aditya Bhandari, who claims to be a data scientist, on PlayStore. Senior journalist Raju Narisetti posted a screenshot of Bhandari's comment on Twitter, expressing his shock at the ignorance. --IANS rp/rtp (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Monday criticized Prime Minister Narendra Modi for not giving the people of Jammu and Kashmir the right to choose a state government. Abdullah was reacting to Modi's appeal to people to vote in large numbers to increase participation in the democratic exercise. "Dear @narendramodi Sahib, it is good to see you appealing to famous people to increase voter turnout. However, at the same time, your government has consciously disenfranchised people in J&K by not holding Assembly elections on time," the National Conference leader tweeted. Abdullah was highly critical of the central government, saying that the state was governed by New Delhi's nominee. "The right to choose an elected government, as opposed to being governed by a hand-picked nominee of the central government, is the hallmark of the sort of democracy you are tweeting about. Please give us our democratic right to choose our own government," he said. The Election Commission has decided not to hold the Assembly elections simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls in the state. --IANS sq/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Russia is willing to re-establish parliamentary contacts with the US in order to promote bilateral relations of the two countries, the Russian Federation Council, or the upper house of Parliament, said. Russian Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko met with US Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman on Tuesday and the two sides discussed bilateral relations of the two countries, the Federation Council was quoted as stating by Xinhua news agency. "The resumption of dialogue at all levels, including through parliaments, is very important ... Russia is ready to resume parliamentary contacts at various levels," the statement said. Matviyenko noted that further deterioration of Russia-US relations contradicts national interests of the two countries and creates threats to international stability and security. It added that improving Russia-US relations is only possible if it is based on the principles of equality and respect of the interests of the two countries. The idea of possible meetings of the respective delegations within the framework of international parliamentary forums with the participation of the two countries was discussed, according to the statement. --IANS vin/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) South Korea and the US will on Thursday hold a first meeting of a bilateral working group weeks after the failed Hanoi summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump. According to Yonhap news agency, Rhee Dong-yeol, who heads the South Korean Foreign Ministry's bureau of peace in the peninsula, on Wednesday left for Washington to meet US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for North Korea Alex Wong. This will be the first meeting of the so-called working group which was set up by the US and South Korea in November to give impetus to denuclearization talks with North Korea. The Vietnam summit between Kim and Trump towards the end of February ended abruptly without a consensus or a joint declaration between the two countries on possible denuclearization and sanction wavering. Seoul had acted as an important mediator between Washington and Pyongyang. Yonhap said the two sides in their meeting on Thursday are expected to discuss ways to revitalize the denuclearization process after the Hanoi failure. Seoul is also likely to seek waiver of sanctions for a planned video reunions of families separated by the Korean War (1950-53), the news agency said. For these video reunions to happen, it will be necessary to transfer to North Korea some equipment that comes within the ambit of sanctions against North Korea. South Korea and the US are also expected to discuss two projects of economic cooperation between the two Koreas that Seoul and Pyongyang want to resume, but are again subject of UN sanctions imposed on Pyongyang for nuclear weapon tests. However, the possibility of making advances in this regard remain slim following the failure to reach an agreement at the Hanoi summit, the report said. Although Washington and Pyongyang give different versions of what transpired at the negotiating table at Hanoi, the disagreement between the two parties hovered around the number of North Korean nuclear assets that would be dismantled and the amount of international sanctions that would be lifted as a corresponding measure. US National Security Advisor John Bolton, who was with Trump in Hanoi, said that Washington had called for North Korea to do away with chemical and biological weapons from its arsenal, besides dismantling its nuclear programme. --IANS soni/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Christian community is up in arms after the Union Territories of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu abruptly cancelled the Good Friday holiday on April 19. "This is totally unjustifiable and unacceptable, it has offended the religious sentiments of the Christians and we strongly condemn it," said Harmony Foundation chief Abraham Mathai here on Wednesday. He said Good Friday is known universally as the most sacred day for the Christian community after Christmas and even the Indian Government has declared it as a gazetted national holiday. "Though the Christians are a micro minority in demographics, it is undeniable that their contribution to social-educational developments amounts to a lion's share. "Instead of appreciating the community's selfless efforts, this unfair and unjust move has been imposed," Mathai told IANS. He called upon the Centre and UT administration to immediately reverse the decision taken by the concerned authorities as the community has taken it very strongly. Incidentally, the change was made in the official district administration notification in November 2018 when the Good Friday national public holiday was transferred from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2 or Restricted Holiday category. On national holidays, all banks, educational institutions, centre, state, local governments and quasi-government establishments are closed, while on restricted holidays these offices can remain open but employees are entitled to avail the off as per the rules. The matter came to light when the community started preparations in the 11 odd churches in these Union Territories, for the April 19 holiday marking a day of prayers, penance, mourning and vigil when Jesus Christ was crucified. Christian leaders, priests and activists of the 100,000-strong community in Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli have decided to write to the President and other dignitaries in the country drawing their attention to the matter and requesting them to have the Good Friday public holiday reinstated. Incidentally, these UTs will go to the polls for two Lok Sabha seats in Phase III on April 23 along with 115 other constituencies. --IANS qn/in/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it saw "no basis" to ground Boeing 737 MAX planes, despite two recent similar crashes involving aircraft in the series. "Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action," the statement said on Tuesday. The statement came amid mounting safety concerns following two crashes involving Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes in a short span of five months, Xinhua reported. An Ethiopian Airlines plane en route from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, Kenya crashed on Sunday, killing all 157 people aboard. A Lion Air crash in October last year in Indonesia killed all 189 people on board. A growing list of countries and airlines have terminated the operation of the model, while US lawmakers, experts and industry associations are calling for its grounding in the US. According to the FAA, currently 74 Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes are operated by US carriers. --IANS vin/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Vietnam has requested Malaysia to release the Vietnamese woman charged with killing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's half brother in Kuala Kumpur, officials said on Wednesday. Vietnamese Foreign minister Pham Binh Minh spoke Tuesday night with his Malaysian counterpart Saifuddin Abdullah to begin diplomatic measures that could lead to the release of Doan Thi Huong, Efe news reported. The request from Hanoi came a day after the release of another woman, Indonesian Siti Aisyah, owing to the intervention of Jakarta. The Vietnamese defendant is scheduled to appear in court on March 14. The two women allegedly assaulted Kim Jong-nam -- half brother of Kim Jong-un -- on February 13, 2017 at Kuala Lumpur airport, in an action that Seoul attributed to North Korean agents and which was captured on security cameras. The pair have always maintained their innocence and said that they acted under the belief that they were participating in a joke for a television show when they sprayed the victim's face with a substance that they believed was harmless. The testimony of Huong - who, if found guilty, could receive the death penalty - was scheduled for Monday, but after her co-defendant's release it was postponed until Thursday as her lawyers also requested the withdrawal of charges. Kim Jong-Nam died on the way to hospital less than half an hour after receiving the poison that was identified as the VX nerve agent, a colourless and odourless oily liquid classified by the UN as a weapon of mass destruction. According to the Malaysian investigation, the assassination was organized by four North Koreans: Ri Ji-hyon, Hong Song-hac, O Jong-gil and Ri Jae-nam, who hired the two women using different names and nationalities. The whereabouts of the four suspects are currently unknown after they left Kuala Lumpur by plane hours after Kim's death and after witnessing the execution of the plan from a distance. North Korea has denied any involvement in the plot and argued that the death of North Korean citizen Kim Chol - as Kim Jong-nam's name appears in the passport he used - was due to a heart attack. --IANS soni/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Sujay R. Vikhe Patil, who made a high-profile entry into the Bharatiya Janata Party on Tuesday, and Parth A. Pawar, the NCP candidate, took their first political steps on Wednesday in preparation for their likely candidature for the Ahmednagar and Maval Lok Sabha seats, respectively. While Sujay, 32, son of senior Congressman and Leader of Opposition Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, started by calling on BJP ally Shiv Sena President Uddhav Thackeray, Parth, 28, went to the hill-top temple of Ekvira Devi and offered prayers there. A neurosurgeon by profession, Sujay's meeting with Thackeray was termed as "a courtesy call" by aides from both sides. Parth visited the landmark 15 century-old Lonavala temple to seek the blessings of Goddess Ekvira Devi, and later the Mahad Ashthvinayak Temple in Raigad. Parth, who has studied law in London, will address a meeting of party activists near Karjat (Raigad), and seek their cooperation for the upcoming elections with his grand-uncle Sharad Pawar also likely to make a video-conference appeal. The newest gen-next politicians - Sujay represents the fourth-generation of the Vikhe Patil clan and Parth is the third-generation of the Pawar clan - have created immense interest in the state's political circles, coming from rival parties which will clash in all the 48 constituencies in the state. Not alien to the heat and dust of field politics, in the past both have cut their political teeth by campaigning or strategising for their family members in the 2014 Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. Incidentally, Sujay has practically fought a war with the Vikhe Patil family; he admitted publicly on Tuesday that his father Radhakrishna is not even on speaking terms with him currently after he joined the BJP. This created a furore in Congress circles with demands for his (father's) resignation from some quarters. In contrast, Parth's foray into electoral was smoother and came after the family discussed the issue threadbare, acquiesced on the need to give opportunity to the next generation and Sharad Pawar gracefully bowed out of the poll race to accommodate his youthful grand-nephew. Besides Sujay and Parth, there are several other scions of various prominent political families cutting across party lines all over Maharashtra who are expected to be in the fray for the Lok Sabha elections, thumbing a nose at the much debated and decried 'dynastic politics'. --IANS qn/oeb/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) This refers to Google paid $45 mn to former staff accused of sexual assault (March 13). That Google, ranked as one of the best employers globally, chose to reward the accused, a senior vice-president there, with a hefty sum of $45 million instead of sacking him shows why sexual harassment of women at work will continue. The approach is to hush up the matter rather than punish the guilty. So it keeps happening Uber there and Infosys here. Also when bigwigs are complained against in India, cases linger on for a long time such as those involving environmentalist ... The Income Tax department has deployed 116 additional officials across seven Northeastern states to monitor election expenditure of candidates and flow of black money during the Lok Sabha poll process, official sources said Wednesday. The Principal Chief Commissioner of Income Tax of North East Region (NER), Kavita Jha, has deputed the additional manpower of 116 I-T officers and inspectors to the Directorate of Income Tax (Investigation). These 116 officials would join the existing 41 posted in 112 districts of the region. The NER investigation wing on Tuesday issued orders for deployment of the 157 officials who will spread over seven states - Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura, the sources said. Chief Electoral Officers (CEOs) of these states have been officially intimated about the deployment. "The deployment is under directions of the Election Commission of India (ECI) to the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) in a bid to throttle the flow of black money to influence elections," a source said. Lok Sabha elections would be held in various phases in these seven states beginning April 11. Of the states, Arunachal Pradesh would also go for sumultaneous Assembly polls on that day. The IT sleuths would monitor movement of large sum of cash or other items suspected to be used for bribing voters and conduct independent enquiry following information or complaint against any person. They would also verify affidavits declaring assets and liabilities filed by the candidates besides their election related expenses. "Banks are also required to pass on information about withdrawal of more than Rs 10 lakh to the nodal officer of the Directorate, Subhrajyoti Bhattacharjee, additional director of Income Tax (Investigation), NER," the source said. The Directorate has also activated Air Intelligence Units at all airports in the Northeast and would monitor movement of cash or valuables. State authorities and police are also required to report movement of suspicious cash to the I-T authorities. Principal Director of Income Tax (Investigation) for NER, Sanjay Bahadur has issued instructions for heightened surveillance and intelligence gathering during elections. Meanwhile, the police seized Rs 15.6 lakh in cash from three places - Itanagar, Naharlagun, Nirjuli - in Capital Complex Tuesday night, Capital Superintendent of Police Tumme Amo said Wednesday. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Human trafficking is a global problem and countries should come together to combat this organised crime, US Consul General in Kolkata Patti Hoffman said Wednesday, setting the tone for a three-day conclave on the social menace at American Center here. "Trafficking in persons (TIP) remains a pressing issue across the world and the US is committed to work with its international partners to end the menace," Hoffman said. The conclave, which is being attended by youth leaders from the US, Nepal and Bangladesh, will discuss the challenges that come in the way of tackling the social evil and its possible solutions, she added. Ravi Kant, the founder of NGO Shakti Vahini, noted that the three-day meet is aimed at finding "synergies" between stakeholders to initiate "concrete action" against the traffickers. "Shakti Vahini, along with US consulate, has been organizing this conclave for the past few years to highlight the factors that have led to the rise in number of trafficking cases everywhere and the plight of the victims, some as young as eight," Kant added. At the inaugural session of the conclave, Arati Kujur, the chairperson of Commission for Protection of Child Rights in Jharkhand, one of the worst-affected states, said tracking the victims often becomes a problem when their names are changed as they move from one place to another. Citing an example, Kujur said, "Say a 21-year old woman, who is also known by the name Anju at her native village, went missing. The authorities, who have been looking for her, do not know that she goes by the name of Sabina in Delhi. It becomes difficult to follow the trail when identities are changed." "Children, especially girls, are often trafficked to other states and neighbouring countries, where they are made to work as domestic help or sex slaves. Some are married off to older men," she said, adding that trafficking and child labour are related and cannot be seen in isolation. Durga Khaitan, the member secretary of state Legal Services Authority, said Bengal has been witnessing a surge in trafficking cases of late, but the authorities are trying their best to address the situation, with help from stakeholders. "The government is making efforts to rescue and rehabilitate the victims by finding them sources of income. The children are usually reunited with their families or sent to an asylum for pursuing education," she added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A five-year-old boy allegedly kidnapped for ransom was found killed near here in Madhya Pradesh Wednesday and his uncle has been arrested for the crime, police said. His body, stuffed in a bag, was found in a drain near a village, police said. The boy's uncle, Anutabh Prajapati (19), who allegedly strangled him to death, has been arrested, Rewa range police deputy inspector general (DIG) Avinash Sharma told reporters. The accused kidnapped the boy Tuesday evening while he was playing in his village Rahekbar under Nagaur police station area, he said. The accused had sought a ransom of Rs 2 lakh from the boy's family to release him, the DIG said. The minor's body was later found in a drain some 50 metres away from his house, Sharma said. "We have detained some more suspects in the case and they are being grilled," he added. "We first picked up Anutabh after a ransom call was made to the victim's family," the IPS officer said. "He confessed of killing the child and thereafter we recovered the body," he added. Sharma said heavy police force has been deployed in the village where tension is prevailing in the wake of the murder. This is the latest kidnap and murder case to jolt Satna district. On February 12, two six-year-old twin brothers were kidnapped from their school for ransom in this district's Chitrakoot area, police had said. Their bodies were found floating in the Yamuna river in adjoining Uttar Pradesh's Banda district on February 23. Six people, including two engineering students, were arrested for the double murder. The accused had killed the twins after collecting Rs 20 lakh as ransom from their parents, the police had said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A man wanted in 18 criminal cases and five of his associates have been arrested in Greater Noida after a gunfight with the Special Task Force (STF) of the Uttar Pradesh police, officials said Wednesday. The gang, which extorted money from several companies and acquired work contracts by pressurising them, was held on Tuesday night, officials said. The group's leader, Pawan Nagar, was carrying a reward of Rs 25,000 and had 18 criminal cases registered against him at a police station in Greater Noida, a senior official of Noida STF said. "Following a tip-off on the gang's movement in Ecotech 3 area, a Noida STF team reached the spot, where an encounter ensued between the two sides. Six gang members, including Nagar, were arrested," Deputy Superintendent of Police, STF, Rajkumar Mishra said. Those held have been identified as Pawan Nagar and his aides Jeetendra Singh, Jagat Singh Nagar, Vinod Singh, Chandan Kumar Sharma and Kamal, he said. Four firearms along with ammunition, 30 gm brown sugar and two SUVs -- a bullet-proof Scorpio and a Fortuner -- were seized from their possession, he said. Nagar has been charged under Indian Penal Code sections 307 (attempt to murder) and under the Arms Act, Mishra said. His aides have been charged under the Arms Act and the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, he added. According to an official, the brown sugar seized could be worth around Rs 5 lakh. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) AAP leaders Atishi Marlena and Raghav Chadha on Wednesday reached a police station in south east Delhi to register their protest against alleged harassment of call centre employees hired by the party to inform citizens about voter deletion. Ahead of the Lok Sabha polls scheduled to begin on April 11, the Election Commission had directed the police to take "necessary action" against people making "misleading" phone calls about the city's electoral rolls. An FIR was also filed in this matter. A BJP team also held a meeting with Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora and alleged that the AAP was behind such phone calls. Meanwhile, the AAP leaders asserted that they were responsible for hiring the call centre employees and the police should question the leaders instead of these workers. Speaking from the police station in south east Delhi, Chadha asserted, "If the BJP wants to fight us, we dare them to arrest us. Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh, myself and various MLAs are present here and if they consider that getting voters reinstated is a crime, then they must arrest us." "If the BJP thinks they can intimidate and threaten those who work with us and shut down our awareness campaign, they are mistaken and we will not let it happen. Why are they intimidating the vendors? What is their fault? When somebody protests, arrest the protesters, but why arrest the man setting up the tent?" he said. "It is a crime to illegally and unlawfully get a registered voter's name deleted from the electoral roll, snatching away their democratic rights. The BJP will pay for this crime. But creating awareness and getting the deleted names reinstated is certainly not a crime," Chadha added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and the United States on Tuesday called for Pakistan to address global concerns regarding terrorism, including that emanating from across the border. The concern was raised in an statement by the Indian Embassy here after Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale and his American counterpart Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale held Foreign Office Consultations at the Foggy Bottom headquarters of the State Department. "Both sides called on Pakistan to meaningfully address the concerns of the international community on terrorism, including cross-border terrorism," the statement said. Reaffirming their commitment to the Indo-US Strategic Partnership, the two diplomats reviewed progress made since the Ministerial 2+2 meeting last September and discussed ways to further expand cooperation. While cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region formed an important part of their deliberations, they also discussed counterterrorism cooperation and a range of global and regional issues of mutual interest, including the current situation in Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela, the State Department said in a readout of the meeting. "They affirmed the vitality of the US-India strategic partnership and the importance of joint leadership to strengthen the rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region," the State Department said. The Indo-Pacific is a biogeographic region, comprising the Indian Ocean and the western and central Pacific Ocean, including the South China Sea. During the meeting, Gokhale and Hale affirmed their support for increased cooperation to include advancing initiatives undertaken as part of the 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue process. "Recognizing that the US and India share complementary visions for the Indo-Pacific, they agreed to deepen cooperation toward their joint goals in the region, including in conjunction with other Indo-Pacific partners," the State Department said. According to the Indian Embassy, the two officials exchanged views on building convergence in the Indo-Pacific and agreed to work with each other and regional partners to promote inclusivity, stability, peace and prosperity in the region. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An apparent case of "friendly fire" between Afghan and US troops led to an airstrike which killed five Afghan soldiers, officials said Wednesday, with the defence ministry citing a "lack of proper coordination". The incident occurred Wednesday when a US and Afghan patrol came under fire near an Afghan army post on the outskirts of Tarin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan province, a NATO spokesman in Kabul told AFP. They called in airstrikes which hit the army post, killing five and seriously wounding a further 10 Afghan soldiers, said Karim Karimi, deputy head of the Uruzgan provincial council. "As the American patrol approached the base, the ANA (Afghan National Army) soldiers probably thought it was the Taliban approaching them," he told AFP. Large parts of Uruzgan province remain under the Taliban control. In recent years the militants have also made repeated incursions into the provincial capital. Seventeen soldiers had been at the post in total, with only two managing to flee unhurt, Karimi said. The Afghan defence ministry confirmed the toll, saying that Afghan and US forces had been conducting a "joint operation" in the area at the time. "Because of a lack of proper coordination of the army, an ANA post was hit," a ministry statement said, adding that an investigation is ongoing. The NATO spokesman said the US had carried out "precision self-defence air strikes on people firing on Afghan and American forces conducting a ground movement near an ANA check point in Tarin Kot". "The strikes were conducted after Afghan and US forces came under effective small arms and rocket propelled grenade fire and requested air support in self-defence," a spokesman told AFP by email. "Afghan and US forces attempted to de-escalate the situation but they continued to be fired upon. We are operating in a complex environment where enemy fighters do not wear uniforms and use stolen military vehicles to attack government forces." "I counted that the planes were shooting at the base for some 30 minutes," Haji Lal Agha, a local resident, told AFP over the phone. Incidents known as "friendly fire" are not unheard of in Afghanistan, and have bred deep mistrust between local and foreign forces. In one of the deadliest, 16 Afghan policemen were killed in July 2017, when they were mistakenly targeted by US airstrikes in neighbouring Helmand province. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Ending all speculations, the (AGP) Wednesday returned to the NDA fold and will fight the Lok Sabha elections in in alliance with the BJP, two months after breaking ties over the contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. Three AGP ministers - Atul Bora, Keshab Mahanta and Phani Bhusan Choudhury - took charge of their old respective departments after Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, who had not accepted their resignation letters, invited the AGP to join the government. The AGP- alliance for the Lok Sabha poll was hammered out in a meeting here between national general secretary Ram Madhav, AGP Atul Bora, NEDA convenor and state Ranjit Kumar Dass, along with others, that ended past midnight. "After discussion, BJP and AGP have decided to work together in the coming Parliament election in to defeat Congress," Madhav had said on "Announced it at Guwahati in d presence of of BJP and Atul Bora and Keshav Mahanta of AGP. BPF will be d 3rd partner in d alliance," he tweeted. Finance Minister said the seat sharing agreement between the three parties has been finalised and a formal announcement will be made on March 16 from after a meeting with BJP chief The Bodoland People's Front (BPF) had Tuesday announced its MLA and state cabinet minister Pramila Rani Brahma as the only candidate for the Lok Sabha polls from the sensitive Kokrajhar seat. Talking to reporters after sealing the alliance, Bora said both the former allies had joined hands again to "defeat the Congress". On January 7 this year, the AGP had withdrawn its support to the BJP government in Assam in protest against the Centre's decision to go ahead with the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. At a joint media address after the meeting, Sarma, Bora and Dass said the two parties will resolve their differences over the bill by consultation and consensus. "The two parties decided that as the new Citizenship Bill will come in the new Lok Sabha and both BJP and AGP will get time, the two partners will discuss how to sort out the differences and safeguard the interest of Assam. As of today, the BJP is firm in its stand and we do not want the AGP also to change their position. We will discuss it in the next two months," Sarma said. "Our stand on the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill remains the same since the Jana Sangh days and there is no need to review it. The people of Assam and know what is the stand of the BJP on the bill," he added. Bora too said that there were some issues and those would be sorted out amicably through discussion. "We now fully convinced that the three parties will be able to defeat the in the election. In the coming days, the misunderstanding and the clash over the Citizenship Bill will be resolved through consultation and consensus... We kept our commitment and now there is no bill," he added. Asked about the charged animosity between ground workers of two parties in the last two months, Sarma said: "There are difficulties as the AGP and the BJP fought separately in the panchayat polls. There is a strain in our relation during the last two months, but we have a common a goal to defeat " He added that Dass and Bora will jointly address the workers of the BJP and the AGP at various places in Assam from Thursday. "I think that the two leaders' presence will motivate the ground level workers in the districts and we will be successful. There are of course problems and we have discussed it," Sarma said, without elaborating further. The senior BJP leader asserted that the people of Assam gave their mandate to all the three parties of the alliance in 2016 and there should not be any issues on that. "We will complete this term smoothly. From now on, BJP state Ranjeet Dass and AGP president Atul Bora will hold frequent talks to avoid any differences. We have reached a firm conclusion that we have to run the government and give a very good governance to the people," Sarma said. Talking about Tuesday night's meeting, Dass said they were given the example of the and the BJP forming an alliance despite having severe differences. "Here in Assam, we don't have any clash. It was just an ideological issue regarding the Citizenship Bill. We will settle our differences over CAB through dialogue in coming days... We will for sure win 12 seats," he added. On Monday night, the AGP MLAs had held a discussion over realigning with the BJP, but the meeting remained inconclusive. They went into a huddle again on Tuesday night and decided to go ahead with the alliance. The AGP was bitterly critical of Prime Minister over the Citizenship Bill that sought to grant Indian citizenship to various non-Muslim minorities from Bangladesh, and Pakistan, who fled religious persecution in their countries, after six years of residence in even if they did not possess any documentary proof. The AGP called it a "communal" piece of legislation aimed at settling Bangladeshi Hindus in Assam which, it claimed, was detrimental to the interests of the indigenous people. The BJP-AGP-BPF alliance had defeated the in the 2016 assembly polls, bringing to an end its unbroken stint of 15 years in power. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The chiefs of Uttar Pradesh alliance partners SP and BSP met here Wednesday hours after Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi paid a surprise visit to Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad at a Meerut hospital. SP president Akhilesh Yadav met BSP chief Mayawati after newly appointed Congress general secretaries Priyanka Gandhi and Jyotiraditya Scindia met Azad. When contacted, Samajwadi Party spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary said the two leaders met to discuss joint public meetings and rallies, being planned for the Lok Sabha polls. Meetings are being held constantly as the election is round the corner and the poll campaign has to be launched full scale after Holi next week, he said. The alliance has left two seats for the Congress in the state and will honestly support it on them, said Chaudhary. Meanwhile, a senior SP leader, who did not wish to be named, claimed Priyanka Gandhi's visit to the Bhim Army chief was in reaction to the BSP president ruling out any alliance with the Congress. "But Mayawati is not someone who will yield to any kind of pressure. This alliance will not come under pressure. It has already given two seats to the Congress," he added. Mayawati had Tuesday snubbed the Congress by slamming doors on it for any electoral alliance for the Lok Sabha polls anywhere in the country. The SP and the BSP recently forged an alliance on 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state. As per the deal, the SP will contest 37 Lok Sabha seats in UP and the BSP 38, leaving three for the Ajit Singh-led Rashtriya Lok Dal and two for Sonia Gandhi (Rae Bareli) and Rahul Gandhi (Amethi). The seven-phase Lok Sabha elections begin on April 11. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) by Vladimir Rozanskij Patriarchate spokesman Aleksandr Volkov warns the faithful against " mutual forgiveness ", a Lenten gesture, via social media and text messages. In April, the government plans to suspend the global Internet to avoid fake news. Large demonstrations in many Russian cities: "Russia is not Iran or North Korea: we are part of the civilized world". Moscow (AsiaNews) - Yesterday, March 11, Lent began according to the liturgical calendar of the Russian Orthodox Church, which will lead to the Easter celebration on Sunday April 28, a week after the Catholic and other Churches, which follow the Gregorian calendar. On Sunday 10 March, at the end of the week of "fats" (maslenitsa, the last one in which fatty foods are allowed), the rite of "mutual forgiveness" was held, when the Church invites everyone to ask for forgiveness from others before fasting for their sins. This rite, which provides for an explicit act of contrition and a gesture of peace to be exchanged with others, has contributed to fueling a controversy that is shaking the entire nation, with regards to the internet and the IT: through Patriarchate spokesman Aleksandr Volkov , the Orthodox Church warned the faithful to avoid the "exchange of forgiveness" via social media and text messages. The communique states that "the sending of images and devout drawings seasoned with pre-packaged phrases, such as I forgive you and you forgive me, has nothing in common with the authentic sense of forgiveness". The Church tradition includes visiting the tomb of loved ones at the cemetery, then going to church and exchanging the request for forgiveness and peace, as an "indispensable condition for entering the Lenten journey". There is no need to send a message to all the contacts on your list, said Volkov, but you have to "look for the people who are really dear, relatives and friends. It is not a question of quantity, as if forgiveness were a like, but of quality: if we can really forgive at least one person, it will be a big step in Lenten conversion ". The patriarchal war against virtual relations is part of a heated climate due to parliamentary decisions in recent weeks, which could lead to a blocking of the international internet network in April, and to the control measures against fake news, which have provoked protests and street demonstrations. The website Ekaterinburg TochkaNews launched a provocative appeal, referring to of Parliament Speaker, Vjaceslav Volodins recommendations to control information during the Easter period, to avoid "false interpretations" of the Christian holiday. The agency asked Volodin the question "Can you prove that Christ's resurrection is not a fake? How would you explain this event in the media, without incurring penalties? ". The director of Novaja Gazeta Dmitrij Fomintsev commented in turn that, according to the new provisions, journalists cannot talk about the central mystery of the Christian faith, without breaking the rules. This because the rules would ban any reporting of news that is not supported by clearly demonstrable facts . For now, no response has been forthcoming from the Duma on the "Easter" provocations. The measure against the fake news was approved in parliament at first reading, with a text signed by the deputy Andrej Klishas, who believes media could be "blocked" in the event of the dissemination of news that lead to "threats that have harmful consequences on the life and health of citizens, and violations of public order . There would be fines and censorship measures. Demonstrations have taken place in various Russian cities, both authorized and unauthorized (see photo 2), which promise to increase in intensity in the coming weeks, even overcoming protests against the pension reform. In Moscow, almost 20 thousand people marched, despite police attempts to slow the influx of the procession, which had been authorized for a maximum of 10 thousand. At least 30 people were arrested, including members of the liberal-nationalist party (LDPR) present in parliament and some journalists who had been provided with an official pass. As is increasingly the case in Russia, the police have been joined by druzhinniki groups, public order volunteers, a figure that existed at the time of the Soviet regime, with the task of controlling the demonstrators and confiscating dangerous materials (banners, leaflets and even some drones). Unauthorized marches of several hundred people took place in Voronezh, Khabarovsk and other Russian cities. The founder of the first Russian socialist Vkontakte, Pavel Durov, supported the demonstrations by claiming that "Russia is not Iran or North Korea, we are part of the civilized world". Durov has lived abroad for some years. In April the international internet connection will be temporarily suspended, as foreseen in the text of Klishas approved by the Duma, according to which "the isolation of Russia from the internet may be necessary in exceptional situations, to defend national security". All Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft being operated by Indian airlines have been grounded and around 35 flights of SpiceJet would be cancelled on Thursday consequently, Civil Aviation Secretary P S Kharola said Wednesday. He said Thursday will be a "challenging" day as "out of 520 odd flights that SpiceJet flies every day, about 30-35 flights will have to be cancelled". SpiceJet has been most affected by the grounding of 737 Max 8 aircraft as it has 12 of them in its fleet. Jet Airways has not been affected as its five 737 Max 8 aircraft have already been grounded - even before the grounding decision of the government -- due to non-payment of dues to lessors. As the Ethiopian Airlines' 737 Max 8 crashed near Addis Ababa killing all 157 people onboard on Sunday, Indian aviation watchdog Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) Tuesday night announced that the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft would be "immediately" grounded. "Tomorrow is going to be a real challenging day because today the ban has come into effect only from the second half of the day... SpiceJet has assured us that they have taken up multiple plans. They have increased the utilisation of existing aircraft, so that the cancellations get limited," Kharola said. "As of now, all aircraft of B737 Max have been grounded. The last flight (aircraft) to be grounded was today around 2.30 pm. The deadline was 4 pm and before that all aircraft have been grounded," he said. On Wednesday morning, the DGCA issued a statement stating no Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft would be allowed to fly in Indian airspace from 4 pm. "We had a discussion with airlines as to how they would plan to overcome the situation. The airlines have assured that the grounding of 12 aircraft would not significantly impact the passengers and they would draw up a very elaborate plan," the secretary said. "Today, SpiceJet has just cancelled 14 flights... They have been able to accommodate the passengers affected by cancellation of 14 flights within their own system," he added. Kharola emphasised that the SpiceJet has been told that cancellations of flights should happen on those sectors that have multiple flights. He added that SpiceJet has assured that if the airport has only its flights, it will not go "unserviced" due to aircraft ban. He said added that SpiceJet would be setting up special cell to deal with passenger complaints and ensure that the passengers are informed well in time about cancellations or any other adjustments. He added that the ministry has requested SpiceJet that in case it is not able to adjust or accommodate, other airlines should come forward and they should carry these passengers based on their existing agreements with SpiceJet. Operators have also agreed not to indulge in "predatory pricing", the secretary said. DGCA chief B S Bhullar said that lifting the ban on the 737 Max 8 aircraft will be based on inputs from various agencies and it will not happen soon. He added that other airlines - apart from SpiceJet - have been requested to keep fares at a reasonable level and the DGCA will monitor fare levels regularly. In a statement Wednesday evening, SpiceJet said,"SpiceJet is rationalizing & optimizing the use of its Boeing 737 NG and Bombardier Q400 aircraft to address the current situation and minimize inconvenience to its passengers." "We are evaluating options for augmenting capacity in the coming days through a mix of additional flights & aircraft inductions. We are sure that our operations will be normal very soon," it said. The airline said that a majority of passengers affected as a result of these cancellations have been accommodated on alternate flights. The budget carrier said it is offering passengers the option of "a full refund, changing the flight/date of travel, or even change of destination (to nearest alternate airport); all this without any cancellation charges or any fare difference". While European Union and most countries across the world have decided to ban the use of Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, the US has refused to do it as yet. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which regulates aviation industry in the US, said in a tweet Wednesday that it "continues to review extensively all available data and aggregate safety performance from operators and pilots of the Boeing 737 MAX". "Thus far, our review shows no systematic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action," it said, adding it will take immediate and appropriate action if any issues affecting the continued airworthiness of the aircraft are identified. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) All 737 Max 8 aircraft would be grounded in India by 4 pm on Wednesday, said a senior official of Indian aviation watchdog DGCA. The decision came days after a 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by the Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa killing 157 people, including four Indians. On Tuesday night, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced its decision to ground the aircraft that are currently being used by airline companies in India. "We will ground all 737 Max 8 aircraft, which are currently in use by Indian airlines, by 4 pm today," the DGCA official told PTI on Wednesday morning. SpiceJet has around 12 such aircraft in its fleet. Jet Airways has five, which have been grounded already. In a statement Wednesday, SpiceJet said," SpiceJet has suspended 737 Max operations following DGCA's decision to ground the aircraft." "Safety and security of our passengers, crew and operations are of utmost importance to us and we will be working with the regulator and the manufacturer to attain normalcy in our operations. "We are confident of accommodating the vast majority of our passengers and minimise inconvenience," the airline said. The Ethiopian Airlines incident on Sunday was the second such crash involving a Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft in less than five months. In October last year, an aircraft operated by Lion Air crashed killing over 180 people in Indonesia. The European Union and many other countries across the world have already banned the use of the 737 Max 8 aircraft in their respective airspace. Asian markets retreated Wednesday after two days of gains but the pound enjoyed a slight uptick after the previous day's sharp losses as British officials looked to ease concerns about the possible impact of a no-deal Brexit. The sterling saw wild fluctuations Tuesday as it hit a near two-year high on Prime Minister Theresa May had won a last-minute revision to her agreement with the European Union. But it then tanked to a three-week low as it was tossed out by MPs at Westminster later in the day. The decision means lawmakers will vote Wednesday on whether to leave the EU on March 29 without an economic agreement -- which is expected to fail -- then Thursday on whether to extend the deadline. In a bid to ease concerns about the financial impact on the economy if MPs vote later in the day to leave with no agreement, officials in London said they will slash tariffs on 87 per cent of imports, and will not apply customs checks on the border with Ireland. However, there remains a lot of uncertainty, with some observers suggesting the latest developments put the country a step closer to another referendum, while others say it could make a divorce without an agreement more likely. "My tuppence is that parliament has, in their own mind, seized control of the Brexit process and will duly ask and likely get an extension to the 29 March exit date," said OANDA senior market analyst Jeffrey Halley. "The breathing space granted will be used by whomever to renegotiate a more palatable Brexit deal for the UK. Except nobody has asked the Europeans yet. A short-term gain may yet belie long-term pain." And Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets in Britain, warned there was no guarantee a delay would automatically be allowed. "Voting against a no-deal Brexit doesn't of itself remove the option of no deal, as this is already currently written in statute, and the EU could well decide to play hardball and take the view that the only options available are the current deal, or to revoke article 50," he said in a note. The from London added to selling pressure on Asian equity markets, which had enjoyed a bounce Monday and Tuesday from last week's battering, with investors still on edge over the state of the global economy. Tokyo ended one per cent lower, while Shanghai fell 1.1 per cent and Hong Kong lost 0.4 per cent. Seoul shed 0.4 per cent, Sydney gave up 0.2 per cent and Singapore was off 0.8 per cent. Wellington and Manila also retreated, though Taipei, Mumbai and Jakarta were slightly higher. With very little coming out of Beijing and Washington regarding the trade talks, investors are moving to the sidelines until there is something concrete to buy on. "Until the world's two largest economies conclude an agreement... it will be difficult to gauge a clearer picture of the global economy in 2019," added Halley. "The outcome of the trade talks -- and perhaps the US-eurozone will likely follow -- will dictate whether we will gently roll down the slope or off the edge of the cliff." In early trade, London fell 0.1 per cent, Paris edged up 0.1 per cent and Frankfurt fell 0.2 per cent. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Hours before the UN Security Council is to take up a resolution on listing Jaish-e-Muhammed chief as a global terrorist, on Wednesday hinted that it may once again block the move, saying only "the solution that is acceptable to all sides" is conducive to resolve the issue. The fate of the proposal to designate Pakistan-based Azhar as a global terrorist by the UN Security Council will be known in less than 24 hours when the deadline to raise objections to the bid expires. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, UK and the US on February 27. "I could reiterate that will continue to adopt responsible attitude and participate in the deliberations in the 1267 Committee," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing here. China, a veto-wielding member of the UNSC, has blocked the move by India and other member nations three times in the past to designate Azhar. has been insisting that the solution should be acceptable to all. Asked to clarify whether the issue has been listed for discussion for March 13 and China is in talks with all the parties concerned, Lu said, "First I want to clarify that I don't recall saying anything about the deadline about the committee and other UN subsidiary bodies". On the issue of listing Azhar, he said, "I want to say that China always adopts a responsible attitude, engage in consultations with various parties and properly deal with this issue." "The discussions, I want to say must follow the rules and procedures of the relevant bodies and only the solution that is acceptable to all sides is conducive for resolving the issue," he said. Recently, China's Vice Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou travelled to Pakistan and held talks with Prime Minister Imran Khan and Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa and other officials. India on Saturday said all members were aware about the JeM training camps and the presence of terror group's chief in Pakistan, and urged them to designate him as a global terrorist. The JeM, headed by the 50-year-old Azhar, carried out many terror strikes in India and was involved in the attack on Parliament, the Pathankot air force base, army camps in Jammu and Uri. It also claimed responsibility for the February 14 Pulwama suicide attack which left 40 CRPF personnel dead. A senor Congress leader Wednesday claimed that the BJP government at the Centre deliberately delayed the state assembly elections as "it is enjoying power through bureaucracy in Jammu and Kashmir". State Congress Vice President and former minister G M Saroori also accused the Governor's administration of "denying democratic rights" to the people of the state. He also criticised the Election Commission of India for not holding general and assembly polls simultaneously in the state. "BJP wanted to enjoy power in Jammu and Kashmir through bureaucracy and did not want to lose it by holding Assembly elections simultaneously with Parliamentary elections," he said. Saroori said Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh had promised on the floor of parliament that security would be provided to each and every candidate and sufficient forces were available in the state. "But now, the ECI is saying it does not have sufficient number of men to provide security to all candidates and cannot not hold joint elections," Saroori said. He alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had always played divisive and after politicising the Ram Mandir issue, they were now misusing the armed forces to garner votes. "All assurances of the BJP government in the Centre were a big lie to the people of Jammu and Kashmir as payments for most of the centrally sponsored schemes were pending since the past two years," he said. Urging the EC to review its decision of delaying Assembly elections in the state, he said it should ensure that a democratically elected government is installed soon. He also accused the Governor's administration of adopting discriminatory attitude towards the Chenab valley region. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP Wednesday slammed Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for allegedly using "foul" language against its Delhi unit head Manoj Tiwari, as the two parties sparred over the issues of full statehood for the national capital. Speaking at the AAP office on the issue, Kejriwal claimed Tiwari had said Delhi cannot attain full statehood because the CM had staged a dharna outside the Rail Bhawan here in 2014. "Tiwari says Delhi cannot be granted statehood as I had sat on a dharna. Tumhare baap ki Dilli hai? (Is Delhi your family property?) Who are you?" he said referring to Tiwari. "Our freedom fighters fought for democracy, not Tiwari's or (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi's fathers," Kejriwal said. He also lashed out at Delhi BJP spokesperson Harish Khurana charging that just for a Lok Sabha ticket he was "betraying" his father former Delhi Chief Minister Madan Lal Khurana who fought for full statehood to Delhi. Hitting back at Kejriwal, BJP MLA and Leader of Opposition in Delhi Assembly Vijender Gupta said, "Kejriwal's lowly activities and lies explained which family lineage he belongs to." Tiwari too slammed Kejriwal saying that he was trying to hide his "frustration and failures" by using "foul" language. "Kejriwal once again shrieked and showed his madness. His words reflected his sanskar (values). He is crying over full statehood but did he call an all-party meeting over the issue? After reaching the heights of inaction, and sympathising with the tukde-tukde gang, now he has been reminded of the cause of full statehood," he said. "I lost my father when I was in class VIII. I never saw my father wearing full clothing because of poverty. Despite facing poverty, my father or Narendra Modi's father gave us sanskar that makes people feel proud. I do not know how you were brought up. So, Keep crying hoarse," Tiwari said. He said the people of Delhi understand Kejriwal was trying to hide his "failures" by eancting "drama" over full statehood. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Having stolen a march on its rivals whose proposed 'Mahagathbandhan' remains amorphous, the BJP said Wednesday it has "sealed" electoral alliances with a bevy of parties in the north-east where it resurrected its ties with the AGP in after an estrangement of two months. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav, the party's pointsman for the north-east, held a string of meetings with regional satraps here and in Nagaland's Dimapur that went on well past Tuesday midnight before making the announcement on social media platforms. The number of seats that the BJP and its partners will contest in the eight states of the region will be declared on March 16 in New Delhi, Himanta Biswa Sarma, minister and convenor of the North East Democratic Alliance (NEDA), the regional avatar of the NDA, told reporters. "This alliance has the potential of winning not less than 22 out of 25 seats in the region and play an important role in seeing Modi-ji as the PM once again," Madhav posted on Madhav met Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio, his Assam, Meghalaya, and counterparts Sarbananda Sonowal, Conrad Sangma, N Biren Singh and Pema Khandu, besides Sarma, the BJP's frontline strategist in the north-east. "It was a hectic day of parleys yesterday in the North East. Sustained negotiations at Dimapur and Guwahati with different senior leaders. Have finally sealed the alliance and electoral understanding between the BJP and all major parties in the North East," he wrote in his post. "The BJP, NPP, NDPP, AGP and BPF will fight together in Assam, Nagaland, Meghalaya, and with the mission of defeating party at the hustings. In Tripura, the BJP will fight the elections together with IPFT, our alliance partner," Madhav said. The BJP, which had won just seven of the 25 Lok Sabha seats in the eight states in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, is in the ruling coalition in seven of them now. The saffron has its chief ministers in Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and Tripura, while its NEDA partners are in power in Meghalaya, and Pawan Chamling's SDF, however, continues to rule the roost in where it is in power for the last five terms since 1994. Madhav's negotiating skills were at play when he persuaded the (AGP), which had walked out of the NEDA remonstrating against the Citizenship (amendment) Bill brought by the Centre just two months ago, to return to the grouping amid whimpers of protest within the regional party. "After discussion, BJP and AGP have decided to work together in the coming Parliament election in to defeat Congress," Madhav tweeted early on Wednesday. "Announced it at Guwahati in d presence of of BJP and Atul Bora and Keshav Mahanta of AGP," he wrote, adding that the Bodoland People's Front (BPF) will be the third partner in the alliance. The AGP had three ministers in the BJP-led Assam government-- Atul Bora, Keshab Mahanta and Phani Bhusan Choudhury. Their resignation letters had not been accepted even after the AGP severed its ties with NEDA. On Wednesday afternoon, Chief Minister invited them to take charge of their ministries which they promptly did. The AGP was bitterly critical of Prime Minister over the citizenship bill that sought to grant Indian citizenship to various non-Muslim minorities from Bangladesh, and Pakistan, who fled religious persecution in their countries, after six years of residence in even if they did not possess any documentary proof. The AGP called it a "communal" piece of legislation aimed at settling Bangladeshi Hindus in Assam which, it claimed, was detrimental to the interests of the indigenous people. The BJP-AGP-BPF alliance had defeated the in the 2016 assembly polls, bringing to an end its unbroken stint of 15 years in power. Madhav said the Krantikari Morcha, the main opposition party in Sikkim, will be its coalition partner in the state. "While the Opposition is still talking and talking about 'Mahagatbandhan' (grand alliance), we already have ours in place in the North East and the rest of the country. The NDA is a much stronger coalition today than before," Madhav's post said. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP-Shiv Sena coalition will kick-start its Lok Sabha poll campaign from Kolhapur district in Maharashtra on March 24, a leader said on Wednesday. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and his cabinet colleagues visited Sena president Uddhav Thackeray's residence here on Tuesday night to finalise their poll campaign plans, according to a source. "The state-level leaders will launch the election campaign from Kolhapur on March 24," a BJP leader said. Leaders and workers of both the parties from Vidarbha, Marathwada, Mumbai and North Maharashtra would hold three to four meetings in their respective regions before the first rally, a Sena leader said. Maharashtra has 48 Lok Sabha seats, the second highest in the country after Uttar Pradesh which has 80 seats. The BJP and Shiv Sena have agreed to fight 25 and 23 seats, respectively, in the state. for total 543 seats in the country will be held over seven phases, beginning April 11 and ending May 19, and results would be announced on May 23. BJP workers led by Union minister Vijay Goel Wednesday burnt the manifesto of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and a symbolic tower of its "failed" promises while accusing the ruling party of "cheating" the people of Delhi. The protest came ahead of AAP's scheduled event to torch BJP's manifesto to protest against it's "betrayal" on granting full statehood to Delhi. Hitting out at the Kejriwal government, Goel said,"We have torched this symbolic tower of failures and unfulfilled promises which cheated people of Delhi after making 70 promises to them before coming to power." Goel alleged that the Kejriwal government did not fulfil it's promises of developing unauthorised colonies, to make Delhi pollution free, opening 20 colleges, buying 10,000 buses and cleaning the Yamuna, among others. "They had promised to construct two lakh toilets in the slums but not even 200 have been constructed," Goel said addressing party workers at Jantar Mantar. He also sought to corner the AAP government saying it failed in appointing a Jan Lokpal and come up with Mohalla Sabha as was promised in it's manifesto of 2015 Assembly elections. "Kejriwal government failed in every field and cheated the people who gave it 67 out of 70 Assembly seats in Delhi," he said. In the run up to Lok Sabha polls, scheduled on May 12 in Delhi, the BJP has launched attack on AAP on the local issues in the city. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Britain's Brexit divorce deal with the European Union is "not negotiable", French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday, urging London to break an impasse over its looming exit from the bloc. "The withdrawal deal is not negotiable," Macron told journalists on a trip to Kenya, adding that any request to delay Brexit would have to be justified. "We cannot renegotiate an accord that we negotiated over several months and which we have said is not renegotiable. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The ruling Mizo National Front (MNF) Wednesday announced that C Lalrosanga, a former Director General of Doordarshan, would be the party's official candidate for the lone Lok Sabha seat in Mizoram. Chief Minister and MNF president Zoramthanga announcing the name of Lalrosanga also said that the MNF would not have alliance with any party and would contest the Lok Sabha polls alone. Lalrosanga is a former Indian Broadcasting Programme Service (IBPS) office and he retired as Director General of Doordarshan. Zoramthanga also announced that Zodintluanga, a former student leader would be the party's candidate for the byelection to the Aizawl West-I seat, which would be held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls. The MNF president said the party would have no truck with the BJP or any other political party and would contest the polls alone. Meanwhile, the BJP state unit president Prof John V Hluna announced that the saffron party would contest both the election to the lone Lok Sabha seat and also the bypoll to the Aizawl West-I Assembly constituency. The National People's Party (NPP), which is also a constituent of the NEDA and the People's Representation for Identity and Status of Mizoram (PRISM) party had also announced their intention to contest the polls without forming any alliance. ' The opposition Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) and the Congress party have decided to forge an electoral alliance for the parliamentary polls and also the Assembly bypoll by fielding common candidates. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Cardinal George Pell, the most senior Vatican official to be convicted of sex abuse to date, has been sentenced to six years in prison by an Australian court for the "callous" assault of two choirboys in the late 1990s. A former senior adviser to Pope Francis, Pell, 77, was found guilty by a jury in December last year. The County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd, while delivering the sentence, described Pell's abuse of two choirboys in the sacristy at St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne as "a brazen and forcible sexual attack on the victims". "There was a clear relationship of trust with the victims and you breached that trust and abused your position to facilitate this offending," the chief judge said. "The brazenness of your conduct is indicative of your sense of authority and power in relation to the victims," he said. The chief judge said Pell's abuse had had a "significant and long-lasting impact" on the wellbeing of one of his victims, whom he referred to as J. The chief judge said he did not have the benefit of a victim impact statement from his other victim, referred to as R, who died of a heroin overdose in 2014 and never reported the abuse. "However on the basis of J's account at trial I am able to say your offending must have had an immediate and significant impact on R," Kidd said. "Whilst it is not possible for me to quantify the harm caused, or articulate precisely how it impacted on R in the long run, I have no doubt that it did in some way." Pell will serve a minimum of three years and eight months in jail before he will be eligible for parole. "I will impose a shorter non-parole period than I otherwise would have been inclined to impose in recognition in particular of your age, so as to increase the prospect of you living out the last part of your life in the community," the chief judge said. Outside the court, survivors of Catholic sex abuse who had attended the hearing were divided on the sentence. Some felt it was too light, while others were happy to see justice being done. "I would have been happy with one month, one week," one said. In a statement after the sentencing, the surviving victim said it was hard for him "to take comfort in this outcome." "There is no rest for me," he said through his lawyer, Vivian Waller. "I'm doing my best to hold myself and my family together."Until last month Pell held the role of Vatican treasurer, considered by many to be the third most senior position within the Roman Catholic church. Pell's legal team has previously announced it will appeal his conviction on three grounds, including that the jury's verdict on all five charges was unreasonable, based on the evidence submitted. The Court of Appeal is due to hear submissions in early June. Reporting of the trial and verdict was suppressed by the court to avoid prejudicing a second trial, which crown prosecutors abandoned in February after the judge ruled some prosecution evidence couldn't be submitted. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A sedition case was Wednesday filed against Congress president Rahul Gandhi in Assam's Morigaon district for allegedly revering Jaish-e- Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar by suffixing honorific "ji" to his name. RTI activist Raju Mahanta filed the complaint, contending that the Congress chief has shown his "anti-India stance by addressing a terrorist with a 'ji'", Pradip Nath, the officer-in-charge of Morigaon police station. An FIR has been registered in the case and police are investigating the matter, Nath added. Azhar's outfit had plotted the February 14 Pulwama terrorist attack, which killed 40 CRPF personnel. On Tuesday, a social activist in Bihar had also filed a case against Gandhi in a Muzaffarpur court, asserting that the Congress chief's reference to JeM head as "Masood Azhar ji" has hurt people's sentiments. At a meeting of Congress workers in New Delhi on Monday, Gandhi had attacked the BJP, saying, "These people with 56-inch chest, you would recall, in their previous government, the current National Security Advisor Ajit Doval went in an aircraft with Masood Azhar ji and handed over Masood Azhar there in Kandahar. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) British Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday said the case of a British Sikh murder suspect lodged in an Indian jail for over a year was being "actively" dealt with by ministers. Jagtar Singh Johal, from Dumbarton in Scotland, was arrested by Indian authorities in November 2017 on charges of fanning communal disturbance in Punjab. His constituency's MP, Scottish National Party's (SNP) Martin Docherty-Hughes, has been lobbying for his release along with his family members and raised the issue in the House of Commons during the weekly Prime Minister's Questions. "On Monday (March 18), my constituent Jagtar Singh Johal would have been incarcerated for 500 days without trial. He would have suffered trial by media, sanctioned, some would say, by the Indian state," Docherty-Hughes said, calling on May to direct her foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt to take up the case with the Indian government. "Ministers are dealing with this. They have been actively involved in this case," May said. "One of the ministers is actually dealing with this case and will I am sure will be pleased to meet with him," she said, in reference to the request for a ministerial meeting. Johal, a 31-year-old Scottish-born Sikh, was in Jalandhar with his family for his wedding in October 2017 when he was arrested by plainclothes police officials in the city. The Punjab government claimed he was among a group of suspects arrested in relation to the murder of Hindu leaders in the state. While the Indian government maintains that "due process" is being followed in the case, British MPs have repeatedly taken up the case in the UK Parliament. "Mr Johal alleges he has been subjected to torture at the hands of the Indian security forces," Preet Kaur Gill, a Labour Party MP and Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for British Sikhs, noted in a letter to Downing Street last year. The APPG and other MPs have continued lobbying for the release of Johal, with some Sikh groups in the UK organising a "Free Jaggi" drive. "The British Sikh community is disgusted that Jagtar is being treated as a second-class citizen by the Foreign Office," said Bhai Amrik Singh, Chair of Sikh Federation UK. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A second half goal by India striker Jeje Lalpekhlua helped Chennaiyin FC beat Colombo FC by a solitary goal and secure a group stage sport of the AFC Cup here Wednesday. With this win in the second leg of the qualifying play-off round at the Arena Stadium here, Chennaiyin became the first Indian Super League outfit to progress to the group stages of the AFC Cup in their debut campaign. The first leg match in Colombo on March 6 had ended in a goal-less draw. Jeje, who found the net in the 68th minute, thus also became Chennaiyin's first ever goal-scorer in the AFC Cup. Chennaiyin will now be grouped along with 2017-18 I-League champions Minerva Punjab FC, Nepal's Manang Marshyangdi Club and Bangladesh's Abahani Limited Dhaka in Group E of the 2019 AFC Cup. Chennaiyin got off to a lively start in their must-win encounter against the Sri Lankan side, winning a couple of corners in the opening minutes. Colombo found it difficult to get out of their own half. Chennaiyin's first big chance came in the 14th minute. C K Vineeth sprang clear in the Colombo half and freed Thoi on the right. The onrushing Isaac Vanmalsawma at the far post failed to connect with the resulting cross from the Manipuri winger. With a quarter of the match gone, Colombo had a rare foray into the Chennaiyin box. The visitors' midfielder Isaac Addevu had his shot from inside the box saved by Karanjit Singh in the Chennaiyin goal. The referee then adjudged Chennaiyin right-back Laldinliana Renthlei to have played a back-pass to keeper Karanjit on the half-hour mark. The resulting indirect free-kick from Colombo was deflected out for a corner as Chennaiyin saw off a spell of pressure from the visitors. The incisive pass in the final touch continued to elude Chennaiyin as first half drew to a close. The second half suddenly sprang to life in the 52nd minute. It was Vineeth again leading the charge on the break, who used Thoi's outlet on the right. Vineeth then ran into the box but failed to connect with a Thoi cross from six yards out with just the keeper to beat. Chennaiyin continued to knock hard on the Colombo door in search of the elusive goal. Thoi was at it yet again on the right, this time dribbling into the box before his looped cross was cleared from close range. A minute later, Thoi found Vineeth in the box and the forward took a touch before firing just over the bar. Vineeth then had a big chance to score with the hour mark gone. A cut-back from Raphael from the left fell nicely to the Kerala striker in the box but the Colombo keeper managed to parry his shot. The goal finally came in the 68th minute, courtesy a clipped ball into the box by left-back Tondonba Singh. The ball ricocheted off a Colombo defender and fell for Jeje Lalpekhlua, whose left-footed strike hit the back of the net. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress Wednesday complained to the State Election Commission of Maharashtra (SECM) about government's advertisements displayed on the state transport buses, bus stops and petrol pumps, terming it as a violation of model code of conduct. Congress general secretary and spokesperson Sachin Sawant said the Election Commission's model code of conduct has come into force from March 10 for the Lok Sabha polls. "Despite this, ST buses, bus stops, petrol pumps and other public places are displaying government advertisements. They have not been removed yet," he said. Although the Election Commission of India (ECI) has directed all the states, including Maharashtra, to remove all government advertisements, its order is not being followed. He added that the commission should seek an explanation from the government about it and register a case of violation of the model code of conduct. Meanwhile, the suburban District Election Officer (DEO) has removed 10,691 advertisement hoardings in Mumbai suburbs in the last three days. An official of suburban DEO said that 8,465 hoardings, posters, banners and flags of the advertisements have been removed from public places and 2,226 banners have been removed from private places. Static surveillance team, video surveillance team and video viewing team have also been set up to monitor the violation of model code of conduct in the district, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress government in Madhya Pradesh will not survive for long as it is functioning on the crutches of Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and independents, senior BJP leader and former chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said on Wednesday. He also said that the people of MP have committed a "mistake" by voting Congress to power in the state, which is why they must now ensure that the Modi government continues to remain in power at the Centre. "The Congress government in the state is standing on the crutches of SP, BSP and independents and it will not survive for long," Chouhan said while addressing the BJP's 'Vijay Sankalp Yatra' at Bairad in the district. "Though you people have made a mistake in the assembly elections, ensure Modiji's (Prime Minister Narendra Modi) victory in the Lok Sabha polls," the national vice president of the saffron party added. Hitting out at the Congress government in the state, he said the "rule of dacoits" has returned to the state. The incidents of murder, loot and kidnapping have gone up in the state, while during the BJP's 15 years of governance, the dacoity menace had been wiped out from MP with the same police and administration, he claimed. "We were able to do it with the help of the same police and administration as our intentions were honest," Chouhan said. Referring to the number of transfers after the change in government in the state, Chouhan alleged, "The 'transfer industry' has again become active and development work has completely stopped in the state." He also alleged that the 'Kafan Dafan' (cloth for burial) scheme that the BJP government had launched, under which Rs 5,000 were given to the poor for the purpose, has been stopped by the Kamal Nath-led government. Chouhan urged people to vote for Modi in the coming Lok Sabha elections for a "strong government". "The country is marching ahead under his (Modi's) rule, but the 'friends of Congress' are unable to digest it. They are continuously disrespecting the Army," he said in an apparent reference to the doubts raised by opposition parties over the IAF air strike in Pakistan. Addressing the meeting, Union minister Narendra Singh Tomar said, "Whenever terror attacks took place during the UPA rule, the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh just used to say: 'We will see'. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a clear snub to BSP supremo Mayawati who slammed the door on the Congress for any electoral alliance, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Wednesday paid a visit to Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad in a hospital in Meerut. The unscheduled visit is being seen in political circles as an attempt to woo the Dalits in Uttar Pradesh and pit Azad against the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). "Why so much is being read into the meeting...Congress is a political party and why would it not explore all available options to evolve a cohesive combination to counter the BJP and the SP-BSP combine?" media coordinator Rajiv Bakshi commented on the meeting. In a blow to the prospects of an opposition grand alliance to take on the ruling BJP in the Lok Sabha polls, Mayawati had on Tuesday said her party would not have an election tie-up with the Congress in any state. Priyanka Gandhi, however, said no political motive should be imputed to her meeting with Azad. "He is fighting for a cause. I like his struggle and no should be seen in the meeting," the Congress general secretary told media persons waiting anxiously outside the Meerut hospital. "It (the meeting) should be seen with the view point that he (Azad) is a youth and is struggling and raising his voice, telling the society to listen to his problem, but this government is so egoistic that it is gagging the voice of youth. "It does not want to listen to the youth...they did not give employment to them and when the voice is being raised, it should be allowed," she said. Priyanka Gandhi did not respond to questions as to whether Azad will be fielded by the Congress in the coming elections or urged to join the party. Talking to reporters after Gandhi left the hospital, the Bhim Army chief maintained that he did not talk about with the Congress leader during their meeting. "I got to know about it (Priyanka's visit) from the media. She had come to enquire about my well being. I am not a political person...I am struggling for the 'bahujan samaj'. She had not come to talk about nor did she ask me anything political," he said. Azad was taken into custody by police on Tuesday for violating the model code of conduct, officials said. He was detained while leading a procession that included cars and motorcycles, but was shifted to the hospital when he took ill. The code violation was allegedly over the number of vehicles in the political rally. "I will keep fighting for the bahujan samaj till my last breath...bahujan samaj is my strength...if she (Priyanka) wants to do politics, my best wishes are with her...," the Bhim Army chief said. When asked whether Priyanka Gandhi can stop the BJP juggernaut, Azad said non-BJP parties will be able to do so "unitedly". Along with Priyanka Gandhi, Congress general secretary for western UP Jyotiraditya Scindia also met the Dalit leader. The meeting of the Congress general secretaries assumes significance ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections beginning April 11. The Bhim Army, which has gained traction among Dalit youths in western Uttar Pradesh, is considering to field candidates in the general elections. Azad had recently said that his outfit would field strong candidates against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union minister Smriti Irani if the opposition failed to pose a challenge to the top leaders. He also demanded the anti-BJP block to "strengthen" its battle against the "saffron forces". The 33-year-old leader had also said that he would contest against Modi from Varanasi if the SP-BSP alliance failed to field a strong candidate in the PM's constituency. The Bhim Army chief had also flagged off the 'Hunkar rally' in Meerut on Sunday, which is to culminate at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on March 15. The Congress, which has been cold-shouldered by the BSP, is seeking support from smaller parties across the state. The SP and the BSP have stitched together an alliance in Uttar Pradesh, keeping the Congress out, though the two parties decided not to field any candidates in Rae Bareli and Amethi, the traditional strongholds of the grand old party. Of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state, the SP will contest 37 and the BSP 38, leaving three for the Ajit Singh-led Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and two for Sonia Gandhi (Rae Bareli) and Rahul Gandhi (Amethi). Ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, the Congress has given Priyanka Gandhi the charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Scindia western Uttar Pradesh. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress Wednesday called on the state's Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) demanding that all polling booths in the state be declared as sensitive. "Since fear psychosis prevails among the voters, all booths in the state should be declared as sensitive. Central forces should be deployed in these booths," state Congress president Somen Mitra said. Congress'Rajya Sabha MP Pradip Bhattacharya also alleged that the state administration was still working on the instruction of some ministers and ruling party leaders. "The EC should look into it and take total control of the administration in the state," Bhattacharya said. Earlier on Wednesday, the BJP also urged the EC in New Delhi to declare West Bengal as a "super sensitive state" to ensure fair Lok Sabha polls there and demanded that central forces be deployed at all polling stations in the state. West Bengal would go for a seven-phase Lok Sabha polling from April 11. The Election Commission will hold an all-party meeting here on Saturday. Deputy Election Commissioner Sudeep Jain will meet representatives of all recognised political parties of the state on Saturday, Additional Chief Electoral Officer Sanjay Basu told reporters here. Jain will also hold a meeting with District Election Officers and Superintendents of Police on that date. To a question, Basu said the number of vulnerable areas in different Lok Sabha constituencies was still being assessed. He said the EC's 'cVIGIL' app, through which voters can forward any poll-related complaint, has registered 183 complaints of model code of conduct violation and they were being looked into. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP Wednesday urged the to declare as a "super sensitive state" to enure fair Lok Sabha polls there and demanded that central forces be deployed at all polling stations in the state. A BJP delegation including Union ministers Ravi Shankar Prasad, Nirmala Sitharaman, J P Nadda and party's general secretaries Bhupender Yadav and Kailash Vijayvargiya met top officials of the poll body and apprised them of their demands. Briefing the media after the meeting, Prasad said, "We have requested the that the state of should be declared as super-sensitive. And have also demanded that central forces should be deployed at all polling booths in the state." ALSO READ: How a gritty Indian market has been rallying ahead of Lok Sabha elections He said the party has also requested the poll panel to transfer those police officers whose electoral impartiality is questionable as well as the withdrawal of former Kolkata Police Commissioner Rajeev Kumar from election duty. The BJP is trying to make inroads into TMC's bastion state (West Bengal) which has 42 Lok Sabha seats. In 2014, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) won 34 seats, the Congress four, while the BJP and CPI(M) bagged two seats each from the state. The state assumes importance for the saffron party as it aims to win a sizeable number of seats there. The BJP delegation also alleged that Congress chief Rahul Gandhi broke the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) and complained to the poll panel regarding the same. "The party has requested the to take action against Rahul Gandhi for levelling unverified allegations against the prime minister yesterday in Ahmedabad, where the model code of conduct is already in effect," Prasad said. Delhi Congress Wednesday lodged a complaint with the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) accusing AAP of putting pressure on parents of children enrolled in government schools to vote for their candidates in the Lok Sabha polls and sought action for violation of model code of conduct. The six member delegation of Delhi Congress headed by Mangat Ram Singhal also complained against Modi government for alleged violation of poll code ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. "The delegation complained to the CEO about the AAP government pressurising parents of students from Delhi government schools to vote for the candidates of AAP in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections," said a Delhi Congress statement. No reaction was available immediately from the AAP. The Congress leaders brought to the CEO's notice large number of posters and hoardings of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal at petrol pumps, Metro rail pillars, Mohalla Clinics, DTC buses, and other such places owned by agencies of the Central government and Delhi government. Singhal claimed the AAP government has collected phone numbers, AADHAR card details of parents of Delhi government school children. "They are pressurising the parents to vote for the Aam Aadmi Party candidates in the coming Lok Sabha elections," he said. Singhal said if the Chief Electoral Officer of Delhi fails to act, Delhi Congress will approach the Election Commission of India with its complaint. Delhi Congress spokesperson Jitender Kochar said party will also resort to demonstration over the issue if no action was taken by the CEO. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Delhi court Wednesday fixed March 18 for the framing of charges in the Muzaffarpur shelter home sexual assault case. Additional Sessions Judge Saurabh Kulshreshtha passed the order after completion of the arguments of all the accused. Five people accused in the case had earlier denied allegations levelled against them by the CBI and said there was not enough evidence to prosecute them. Other accused in the case too had denied allegations against them previously. There are 21 people chargesheeted in the case. On Feb 7, the Supreme Court ordered authorities to transfer the case from Bihar to a Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) court in Saket District Court complex in Delhi, which would conclude the trial within six months by holding preferably day-to-day hearing. Several girls were allegedly raped and sexually abused at an NGO-run shelter home in Muzaffarpur, Bihar. The issue had come to light following a report by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Delhi Police has seized over 25,000 pirated NCERT books that were being printed at a press in east Delhi's Gazipur area and arrested a man in connection with the case, officials said Wednesday. The arrest was made on Tuesday after police received a tip off, following which they raided the spot along with an NCERT team, they added. During the raid, huge quantity of pirated NCERT books, reel papers with NCERT water mark and those without water mark were found at the printing press, a senior police official said. Printing of NCERT or National Council Of Educational Research And Training books were being carried out by around 30-35 workers and over 25,000 books were recovered, he said. A case has been registered against the accused for infringement of Copyright Act and causing financial loss and damage to the NCERT's reputation, police said. NCERT books of various subjects like Hindi, Mathematics, English, Chemistry, Economics of senior classes, including class X and XII, were being printed there for the last one year, police said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An employee of a central Delhi restaurant has been arrested for allegedly cloning debit and credit cards of customers and duping them of nearly Rs 4 lakh, police said Wednesday. The accused has been identified as Pankaj Kumar, they said. On February 14, a private bank filed a case that few of their customers who were having credit and debit cards have reported disputed transactions. Moreover, the cards were in possession of the customers at the time of those transactions, Madhur Verma, Deputy Commissioner of Police (New Delhi), said. During investigation, it was revealed that one restaurant in Connaught Place was the common point of purchase for all the cards. Police matched all the dates when the cards were compromised at that restaurant and found that Pankaj, a steward staff, was the person who had attended all the customers whose cards had disputed transactions, the officer said. Thereafter, police laid a trap at the restaurant and apprehended Pankaj and one screamer was recovered from him, he said. During interrogation, he told police that he learnt to clone cards from one Rahul, the officer said. He used to re-swap cards of the customers and noted down their last four digits, PIN and bank name. He handed over the screamer having data of cards and other details to Rahul, police said. They were acting cleverly and didn't use the cloned card for one month so that no one would doubt about their card being compromised at that restaurant, Verma said. Total Rs 3,75,300 were transferred from the accounts, Verma said, adding police are looking to nab Rahul. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Election Commission has issued a show cause notice to Delhi BJP MLA Om Prakash Sharma for posting photos featuring him, IAF Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on social media, prompting the legislator to dub the poll body "bias against nationalist leaders". The Election Commission (EC) has asked him to take down the post and reply to the show cause notice by Thursday. Sharma told PTI he has deleted the post mentioned by the EC, but said he did not understand why was the poll body was so "allergic" to a person cheering the heroic act of its soldiers and rejoicing over an act of national honour. "The Election Commission is biased against nationalist leaders like me," he said. The Election Commission Sunday announced the schedule for the Lok Sabha polls. The model code of conduct is in place across the country since the announcement of poll dates. Polling in Delhi will be held on May 12. The posters, shared on social media by the BJP MLA on March 1, featured Modi, BJP chief Amit Shah, the IAF officer, and Sharma, who represents the Vishwas Nagar seat in the Delhi Assembly. "Pakistan has bowed down. Our brave soldier has returned. It's a big diplomatic victory that Modiji has brought Abhinandan back in very little time," the message in the photos read. Shahdara District Magistrate K M Mahesh told PTI, "We issued a show cause notice to Sharma for posting posters featuring Abhinandan Varthaman on Facebook." "He (Sharma) has been asked to furnish a reply by 11 am Thursday. It's a violation of the Model Code of Conduct and appropriate action will be taken," Mahesh, who is also the district election officer, said. The notice was issued on Tuesday. Sharma said he has removed his post because he did not want to stretch the matter. "I do not understand allergy of EC to such a tweet. Have they issued notices to anyone for election related hoardings and posters that have been removed after announcement of Lok Sabha polls? I was not seeking votes for my party nor am I candidate for the elections," Sharma said. He alleged the poll body did not act on the complaints lodged by the BJP against AAP for making phone calls to "misguide voters" and the Delhi government allegedly collecting details of parents of schoolchildren. On March 9, the Election Commission asked political parties to "desist from displaying photographs of defence personnel" against the backdrop of a picture showing a hoarding with images of Wing Commander Varthaman as well as leaders of a party. The EC referred to its December 2013 letter in which it had "called upon all political parties to advise their candidates and leaders to desist from displaying photographs of defence personnel or photographs functions involving defence personnel in advertisements". An Indian Air Force MiG-21 Bison, piloted by Varthaman, had shot down a Pakistan Air Force F-16 fighter aircraft on February 27. However, his plane was also shot down and he was arrested in Pakistan. The fighter pilot overnight became a sensation and a mascot of heroism. Latching on to his popularity, leaders of several political parties sought to use his photos for political mileage. The pilot returned home after his nearly three-day captivity in Pakistan on March 1. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Two separate complaints of poll code violation have been filed against holding of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting on the premises of the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel memorial here in Gujarat, which have been rejected, Gujarat Chief Electoral Officer said Wednesday. Top Congress brass, including party chief Rahul Gandhi, his sister and general secretary Priyanaka Gandhi Vadra, UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and former prime minister Manmohan Singh, attended the one-day conclave which was held on the premises of the memorial in Sahibaug area Tuesday. "We received two complaints from Ramesh Patel and Suresh Patel against organisation of the CWC meeting on the premises of the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel memorial, saying it was violation of the model code of conduct," said Gujarat CEO S Murlikrishnan. The top poll officer said the complaints were rejected on the basis of a report filed by the District Development Officer (DDO). Though the CEO didn't speak about the background of the complainants, sources in Congress claimed the duo are close to the ruling BJP. The model code of conduct came into force from March 10, when the Election Commission announced the seven-phase Lok Sabha elections that will be held between March 11 and May 19. Meanwhile, informing about the crackdown on illicit booze, the CEO said liquor worth over Rs 1 crore has been seized since the announcement of elections. A total of 3074 people have been detained under various sections of the CrPc as a precautionary measures. Murlikrishnan further said more than 60,000 hoardings and banners have been removed in the state since Sunday. The CEO said live web-casting of voting process will be conducted in more than 5000 booths, which will be identified at later stage. On poll preparedness, the CEO said 564 flying squads have been formed. "Moreover, 368 video surveillance teams and 26 accounting teams have started their work. A total of 207 video viewing teams have been formed to monitor the social media content," he added. Murlikrishnan said more than 10,000 licensed gun-holders, out of total 56,890, have deposited their firearms with police since the model code kicked in. As per norms, private licensed gun-holders have to submit their weapons once elections are announced. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Two assailants opened fire inside a school near Sao Paulo on Wednesday, killing eight people including four children before turning their weapons on themselves, authorities said. Military police Colonel Marcelo Sales said two assailants burst into the school grounds in the early morning, armed with a .38 caliber revolver and a "medieval weapon that looked like a bow and arrows." After shooting at students in the yard, the killers headed to the language centre where several pupils were hiding and "committed suicide in a corridor," Sales said. "Eight people died at the scene, including the two assailants," a state military police spokesman said. "Two injured people died after being taken to hospital." Around 15 others were injured in the shooting, which took place at the Raul Brasil public school in Suzano, on the outskirts of Sao Paulo in southeast Brazil. Sao Paulo State Governor Joao Doria said four children and two members of staff were among the dead. "It's saddest thing I've ever seen," Doria added. He said it was not yet known whether the assailants were former pupils at the school. Worried family members congregated outside alongside firefighters and security services, an AFP photographer at the scene said. "I found out when my daughter called me and said: Mummy, come quickly, there are injured people, dead people," said the mother of one pupil, who gave her name only as Rosa. The attack took place at around 9:30 am (1230 GMT) during a recess period for some students, authorities said. Sales, of the military police, said the two attackers "shot at the owner of a car wash," who is now receiving hospital treatment, before entering the school. Website UO1 said the two killers, "probably teenagers, entered the school shooting with their heads covered by a hood." Another website, G1, published a grainy video purportedly taken inside the school in which the screams of terrified pupils can be heard as they come across dead classmates. Globonews showed television pictures of pupils fleeing the scene after escaping over a wall. Education Minister Ricardo Velez published a statement offering "solidarity with the parents, families and staff at the school in this moment of shock, mourning and pain." It's not the first mass school shooting in Brazil's history. In April 2011, a former pupil killed a dozen school children and injured many more before turning his gun on himself at a school in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. Brazil is one of the most violent countries in the world with 64,000 murders in 2017, a rate of almost 31 per 100,000 inhabitants -- that's three times higher than the level the United Nations classifies as endemic violence. Far right President Jair Bolsonaro controversially passed a law relaxing the rules on carrying weapons soon after assuming power in January, delivering on a campaign promise. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister and TDP president N Chandrababu Naidu Wednesday alleged that elections in Andhra Pradesh were scheduled in the first phase on April 11 only to push him into a crisis. "They thought I will be unprepared if less time is given for the elections so that I cannot face it and that it is an advantage for them. They wanted to push me into a crisis but I converted it into an opportunity," the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) chief told a press conference here, the first after the election schedule was announced on Sunday. Indirectly attacking the Centre for the poll schedule, the Chief Minister said they wanted to beat him by giving little time. "But you have helped me get benefit out of it. I am very happy for that," he added. Replying to a question on the prospective alliance of parties at the national level, Naidu said a meeting of non-BJP parties would be held in New Delhi Friday to discuss the issue. "At the national level, we all thought as a coalition to work for the future of the country. But there are compulsions in different states. There is a national compulsion and there is a state-specific compulsion politically. We will weigh this and discuss this at our New Delhi meeting to reach an understanding," the TDP chief said. The parties would discuss how to cooperate with each other pre-election and post-election and draft an action plan accordingly, he added. Over 3.71 crore voters are eligible to exercise their franchise for electing 25 Lok Sabha members and 175 members of the Andhra Pradesh state assembly in the polls, the first after the state was bifurcated to create Telangana in 2014. Asked about the TDPs fate in neighbouring Telangana, where Lok Sabha elections are scheduled for April 11, Naidu said the decision on whether or not to contest the polls was left to the party state unit. "My priority is AP. We have reached the crossroads. Now, TDPs victory is a historic necessity or else, we will face a lot of problems," he said. The TDP was decimated in the Telangana Assembly elections in December last, which it fought in alliance with the Congress, CPI and Telangana Jana Samiti. The TDP won only two Assembly seats but one legislator has already crossed over to the ruling TRS. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Soumya Bhattacharya will be travelling to Ethiopia with government assistance to bring back the mortal remains of his wife and UN consultant Shikha Garg, who was killed in the Ethiopian airline crash on Sunday. "Yes I will be travelling, I cannot reveal more," he said and confirmed that the government has contacted him regarding the travel but said he does not know the dates. Garg, who was among the four Indians killed in the plane crash, had married Bhattacharya, also working with United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), in December. Two travel tickets to Ethiopia have been "offered" to the family members of 32-year-old Garg, an official of the Ministry of Environment said. "Two tickets have been offered to her family to travel to Ethiopia to identify and get the body back. Travel date is unknown but the process is on and full assistance to the family members is being provided," the official said. Another official said the government is in touch with Garg's family and is providing full support. He said while efforts were on to bring back the UNDP consultant's body, the other three Indians were NRIs and their remains will be taken as per the wish of their families. "We are extending all support to the family in bringing Shikha's body back to Delhi. However, the other three Indians were not residents of India so they will be taken where their families want. Among these three, one person was a resident of Nairobi while two were from Canada," the official said. Shikha was traveling to Nairobi to attend an annual conference at United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) when Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crashed taking her life and of all other 156 people aboard the plane. The young woman is survived by her husband, parents, two sisters and a brother, all residing in Delhi. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Experts from the University of Birmingham and policy makers and researchers from India announced a collaboration Wednesday to jointly develop strategies to resolve health, social and economic issues linked to air pollution in Delhi. Delegates at a two-day workshop, convened by experts of the University of Birmingham and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, called for air quality metrics to be incorporated into several of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, most notably SDG3 Good Health and Well-being. The experts recommended that air pollution be treated as a disaster, in the same way as natural events such as earthquakes and forest fires. It also called for access to clean air to be considered as a "basic human right". Francis Pope from the University of Birmingham said that air pollution kills millions and costs the world economy billions and tackling the problem is not just a technological issue, but a social-economic and social-political challenge that requires a new approach. "University of Birmingham is working with partners in India, Africa and Asia to help understand how our cities can tackle problems caused by air pollution. "Many conference delegates were surprised there is no SDG specific to clean air, but there is plenty of scope to include clean air action many of the SDGs," said Pope. The ASAAP India (A Systems Approach to Air Pollution India) workshop brought together partners from India, Africa, Asia, Europe and US to explore how cities such as Delhi can better understand how to tackle air pollution. "It is vital that we find solutions to the global threat posed by air pollution. It is more than just a health risk, it slows our countries' development, diminishes the quality of life and reduces incomes. "Air quality need not have its own UN Sustainable Development Goal, but is extremely important for SDG3 ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all. Placing air quality metrics in relevant SDGs could help to improve life for millions of people," Professor Mukesh Khare from IIT Delhi said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar meets the criteria to be designated as a global terrorist and not doing so is against regional stability and peace, the US said Tuesday on the eve of the UN Security Council making a crucial decision in this regard. The JeM, headed by the 50-year-old Azhar, carried out many terror strikes in India and was involved in the attack on Parliament, the Pathankot air force base, army camps in Jammu and Uri, and the latest suicide attack on CRPF in Pulwama which claimed the lives of 40 personnel. In the aftermath of the February 14 attack in Pulwama, three permanent members of the UNSC - the United States, Britain and France - have moved a resolution to designate Azhar as a global terrorist. Several previous attempts by these three countries inside the UN Security Council were blocked by China, the all-weather ally of Pakistan. China, which is one of the five veto-powered members of the Security Council, so far has been asserting that there is not enough evidence against Azhar to designate him as a global terrorist. Amidst a mounting global outrage in the wake of the Pulwama attack that led to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan, US, Britain and France hope that Beijing would act wisely and would not oppose their move this time to designate Azhar as a global terrorist. On the eve of the crucial decision by the UN Security Council, the Trump Administration on Tuesday made it clear that there is enough evidence against Azhar to designate him as a global terrorist. "Azhar is the founder and the leader of the JeM, and he meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations," State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino told reporters at his daily conference. The JeM, he said, has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability and peace. The US and India work closely together on counterterrorism efforts, and that includes at the United Nations, he added, noting that their views on the Jaish-e-Mohammed and its founder are well known. However, he refrained from making a direct comment on the deliberations inside the UN on this issue. "The United Nations Sanctions Committee, their deliberations, are confidential, and as such we don't comment on specific matters, but we'll continue to work with the Sanctions Committee to ensure that the designation list is updated and accurate," Palladino said. "The United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal," Palladino said in response to a question on previous successful attempts by China to block the UN designation of Azhar. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US has said that Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar meets the criteria to brand him as a "global terrorist" by the UN and China's opposition to the move to "update" the designation list went against the interests of Washington and Beijing in achieving regional stability and peace. State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino's significant remarks came on the eve of a crucial decision by the UN Security Council on listing Azhar as a global terrorist. The Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), headed by 50-year-old Azhar, has carried out many terror strikes in India and was involved in the attack on Parliament, the Pathankot air force base, army camps in Jammu and Uri. It also claimed responsibility for the February 14 Pulwama suicide attack which left 40 CRPF personnel dead. In the aftermath of the Pulwama attack, three permanent members of the UNSC - the US, Britain and France - have moved a resolution to designate Azhar as a global terrorist under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council. All eyes are on China, which has in the past blocked India's bids to get Azhar listed as a UN-designated global terrorist. "Azhar is the founder and the leader of the JeM, and he meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations," Palladino told reporters at his daily conference. The JeM, he said, has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability and peace. The US and India work closely together on counterterrorism efforts, and that includes at the United Nations, he added, noting that their views on the JeM and its founder are well known. However, he refrained from making a direct comment on the deliberations inside the UN on this issue. "The United Nations Sanctions Committee, their deliberations, are confidential, and as such we don't comment on specific matters, but we'll continue to work with the Sanctions Committee to ensure that the designation list is updated and accurate," Palladino said. "The United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal," he said in response to a question on previous successful attempts by China to block the UN designation of Azhar. China, which is one of the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council, blocked India's efforts in the past to list Azhar as a global terrorist, saying there is not enough evidence against him. Amidst a mounting global outrage in the wake of the Pulwama attack by a suicide bomber belonging to the JeM that led to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan, the US, Britain and France hope that Beijing would act wisely and would not oppose their move this time. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) At least 66 people have been killed and 141,000 affected after heavy rains deluged central and northern Mozambique, the government has said as it appealed for funds to manage the crisis. "The government has decreed a red alert due to the continuing rains and the approach of the tropical cyclone Idai, expected to reach the country between Thursday to Friday," said cabinet spokeswoman Ana Comoana. She spoke to reporters late Tuesday after a meeting of the Council of Ministers held in Maputo to discuss the deadly flooding. The floods in one of Africa's poorest countries have already destroyed 5,756 homes, affecting 15,467 households and 141,325 people. There are 111 people with injuries, 18 hospitals destroyed, 938 classrooms destroyed and 9,763 students affected. More than 168,000 hectares of crops were also destroyed, the government spokeswoman added. Authorities have ordered the compulsory evacuation of people living in flood-prone areas. "Sixteen accommodation centres have been opened in the provinces of Zambezia and Tete to accommodate the displaced," Comoana said. "The government needs 1.1 billion meticais ($16 million) to assist 80,000 families affected by the rains". Mozambique is prone to cyclones, floods and droughts, and floods in 2000 claimed at least 800 lives while more than 100 were killed in 2015. Floods have already claimed 30 lives and left over 230,000 people without shelter in southern Malawi which borders Mozambique. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Trinamool Congress leader and former Kolkata mayor Sovan Chatterjee Wednesday denied reports that he is joining the BJP and asserted that canards were being spread against him by a quarter. "I received no offer from any political party to join till now. These reports are baseless and I don't want to even react to them. But I am really hurt the way canards are being spread against me deliberately," Chatterjee told reporters. Chatterjee had resigned from the post of Kolkata Mayor and a minister in the state cabinet in November last year over personal issues. Since then he has been staying away from But for last one week there have been reports that Chatterjee along with his friend Baisakhi Banerjee might join the BJP ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. The speculations gained momentum after Chatterjee along with Banerjee have been threatened by "goons" during their stay at a resort in South 24 Parganas district earlier this week. They were threatened that they will have to face consequences if they join BJP. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn is not ready to be sentenced yet because "there may be additional cooperation" he can offer as he tries to reduce his potential punishment, according to a court filing Tuesday night. Flynn has been cooperating with prosecutors in Virginia in an ongoing case against two former business associates accused of illegally lobbying for Turkey. That case is scheduled for trial in July, and because of Flynn's continued cooperation, his lawyers asked in a court filing Tuesday to be able to submit another status report in 90 days. In the same filing, prosecutors with special counsel Robert Mueller's office took no position on Flynn's request for a continuance but said they viewed his cooperation as "otherwise complete." Flynn, President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, was supposed to be sentenced last December for lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States. But after the judge appeared poised to send him to prison, Flynn's lawyers asked for a postponement so he could continue cooperating with investigators and earn credit toward a lighter sentence. The filing is part of a flurry of expected activity this week in Mueller's investigation into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday, and prosecutors later in the week are expected to update a judge on the cooperation given by Manafort's business partner Rick Gates, another defendant. Mueller is expected to conclude his investigation soon and submit a confidential report to Attorney General William Barr. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The district consumer forum here has imposed a fine of Rs 25,000 on Coca-Cola India's bottling arm and three other respondents in a case where a worm was found in a sealed soft drink bottle of the company nearly 10 years ago. District consumer dispute redressal forum president Omprakash Sharma and member Atul Jain said Tuesday that the recovery of the worm in the soft drink bottle amounted to deficiency in service. The forum disposed of a petition filed by local resident Naveen Jain against Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages (HCCB), the bottling arm of Coca-Cola India. "The fault in service provided by the respondents has inflicted mental torture to the petitioner and for this the respondents should pay Rs 25,000 to him in two months," the forum observed in its nine-page order. The forum directed the respondents to pay Rs 8 as well to the petitioner -- the price at which he bought the worm-infested cold drink bottle then. It also imposed a cost of Rs 3,000 on the respondents to be paid to the petitioner, who had spent the sum on suing them. Jain had filed a petition with the forum stating he had bought 12 bottles of 'Sprite', a soft drink created by Coca-Cola, from a shop, Raj Enterprises, located on the Dhar Road here on April 29, 2009 for the birthday party of his son. The petitioner stated that when he went home he found a worm in one of the bottles. Thereafter, Jain filed complaints with Madhya Pradesh-based Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages plant at Rajgarh district, the company's Indore office and two local firms Raj Enterprises and Mittal Agency. In its defence, the HCCB rejected the petitioner's claim and said they make high quality soft drinks and their bottles are sealed with automatic computerised machines. After this, the packed soft drink bottles are carted out of the plant, the company had told the forum during the hearing of the petition. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The opposition Congress and organisations opposed to the Citizenship Bill criticised the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) Wednesday, saying it had betrayed the people of Assam by realigning with the BJP just before the Lok Sabha polls for its greed for power. The Congress, the All Assam Students' Union (AASU) and the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) said the AGP owed an answer the people on its stand on the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, and vowed to continue their movement against it. The AGP had severed ties with the BJP-led government in Assam in January to protest the Centre's decision to go ensure the controversial bill's passage in the Lok Sabha. However, the bill, which seeks to provide Indian citizenship to non-Muslims from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan after six years of residence in India, could not be passed in the Rajya Sabha. It is set to lapse on June 3 when the term of the present Lok Sabha ends. The alliance was finalised in a meeting on Tuesday among BJP general secretary Ram Madhav, AGP president Atul Bora and others that ended post midnight. Leader of Opposition in Assam Assembly Debabrata Saikia of the Congress said the AGP has "shamelessly" joined hands with the saffron party, knowing well that the bill will be enacted if the BJP retains power at the Centre. "The greed for power prevailed over the responsibilities of the AGP. By joining hands with the BJP once again, the party betrayed the people of Assam," Saikia said. The bill, if enacted, will nullify the Assam Accord, which was also signed by leaders of the AGP, but the party is "not bothered about such crucial factors", he told reporters. Clause 6 of the Assam Accord of 1985 seeks to provide constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards to protect, preserve and promote the cultural, social, linguistic identity and heritage of the Assamese people. "In my opinion, this is the most repulsive instance of opportunism and hypocrisy in politics," Saikia said. The Congress, on the other hand, has stayed true to the interests of the people of Assam by playing a pivotal role in thwarting the bill in the Rajya Sabha, he claimed. "I am confident that the people of Assam will give a befitting reply to the unholy alliance," he added. AASU chief adviser Samujjal Kumar Bhattacharya said, "Political parties are interested only in their equation of seats. They are not showing any commitment for the cause. We will not accept that and will continue our struggle." A six-year agitation by the AASU demanding identification and deportation of illegal immigrants culminated with the signing of the Assam Accord by the Rajiv Gandhi government and the students' organisation on August 15, 1985. AASU general secretary Lurinjyoti Gogoi wondered why the AGP joined hands with the BJP again when its president Amit Shah had publicly said at a rally in Assam that the party will bring back the bill if it returns to power. Addressing a press conference, KMSS adviser Akhil Gogoi appealed to "independent thinking" AGP leaders to leave the party immediately. "If nobody in the AGP opposes this decision, then the entire party and all its members are traitors. Like the BJP, now the AGP has also become a party that is inimical to the interests of Assam. People must ensure defeat of both the parties," he added. The Citizenship Bill triggered huge protests in the northeastern region as its indigenous people feared that if enacted, the law would endanger their identity and livelihood. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Venezuela's opposition leader Juan Guaido vowed Tuesday to take Nicolas Maduro's place in the presidential palace "very soon," as thousands of people took to the streets of Caracas to protest. "We need an office to work in, so very soon, and when we have the armed forces totally on our side, we'll go to find my office there in Miraflores. Very soon," Guaido told supporters, who chanted back: "Yes, you can!" Demonstrators banged pots and sounded car horns at the protest in a square in the east of the capital. Many waved large banners calling on Maduro to go. "The situation is very difficult, we are hoping that this government will change. We've had enough of this chaos!" said one of the demonstrators, Miguel Gonzalez. "With courage and strength I asked you to believe in yourselves, that Venezuela would emerge from the darkness, that the end of the usurpation is very close," said Guaido, who is recognized as interim president by more than 50 countries. Venezuela's state prosecutor, Tarek William Saab, meanwhile told reporters he would place Guaido under investigation for "his alleged involvement in the sabotage of the Venezuelan electricity system." It is the first government move against the US-backed Guaido since his return to Venezuela last week after defying a travel ban to visit several allied South American leaders. Maduro has blamed a devastating multi-day blackout plaguing Venezuela on US "sabotage" in the form of an electromagnetic attack on the country's main hydroelectric complex. But critics have long pointed the finger at the government for failing to maintain the power grid. Guaido, 35, is seeking to capitalize on public anger over the blackout, which has piled misery on a population suffering years of economic crisis and shortages of food and medicine under Maduro. The youthful opposition chief -- locked in a power struggle with Maduro since declaring himself interim president on January 23 -- has branded the socialist leader a "usurper" over his re-election in May, widely dismissed as neither free nor fair. Outlining the case against Guaido, Saab said the opposition leader had disseminated a series of messages that have "stoked violence." "At this moment he appears as one of the intellectual authors of this electrical sabotage and is practically calling for a civil war in the middle of this blackout." The US kept up the pressure on Tuesday, with its special envoy on the crisis, Elliott Abrams, saying Washington would soon impose "very significant additional sanctions" on institutions doing business with Maduro's government. It has already targeted a growing list of individuals and companies linked to the Maduro government, including state oil company PDVSA. Prompted by Guaido's urging, the opposition-dominated National Assembly declared a "state of alarm" on Monday to pave the way for the delivery of international aid, 250 tons of which has been stuck for a month at Venezuela's borders with Colombia and Brazil. However, with Maduro controlling the military and security services -- which are currently preventing aid from entering the country -- he has no means of enforcing it. Maduro used the military to begin distributing food, water and other assistance in several districts on Tuesday. Marshalled by security forces, crowds formed impatient lines at water trucks in some areas, as they waited to fill containers. But tensions were running high amid the shortages. "I saw people lining up for a kilogram of rice, and the shopkeepers had to fire shots in the air to keep the lines under control," Alberto Barboza, 26, told AFP in the oil capital Maracaibo. "I heard a lot of shooting," said Barboza, adding that a local bakery and a tire shop were looted. The blackout has left millions without running water. Many people lined up to buy bottled water in Caracas supermarkets, but most are reduced to desperate means -- besieging fountains in public parks and any available water sources around the capital. Maduro had called for armed grassroots groups known as "colectivos" to hit back against what he called attacks encouraged by the US against the country's electrical grid. "The time has come for active resistance," he said in a speech late on Monday. The opposition argues the colectivos have been armed by the government and act as militia. Critics say such groups were behind the death of seven people on February 23 when the opposition tried in vain to bring US-supplied food and medicine across the borders with Colombia and Brazil. Power has been restored to some areas since the weekend but service has been intermittent and the power often drops out. Businesses and schools remained shuttered on Tuesday on Maduro's orders, as they have been since the blackout began. As the situation worsened, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Washington is withdrawing all its remaining personnel from the US embassy in Caracas. All non-emergency staff were ordered to leave on January 24. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Delhi High Court on Wednesday sought CBI's response to the plea by Abhay Singh Chautala, son of former Haryana chief minister Om Prakash Chautala, seeking transfer of disproportionate assets (DA) case against him to some other judge. Chautala has claimed that he apprehends he would not get a fair trial if his case continues to be presided over by the special judge. Justice Sangita Dhingra Sehgal, while issuing notice to CBI and seeking its stand, observed that the judge in question was appointed by the high court to deal with cases pertaining to MPs and MLAs on orders of the Supreme Court. The court also noted that the apex court order had come in a matter which was still pending there and therefore, the Registrar General of Delhi High Court ought to be made a party in the matter. The court impleaded the Registrar General as respondent 2 and issued notice to him, The high court, in its order, also said that since the DA case was listed before the special CBI judge on Thursday, both Abhay and the agency "shall seek joint adjournment". With the direction, the high court listed the matter for further hearing on Thursday. During the hearing, senior advocate N Hariharan and advocate Amit Sahni, appearing for Chautala, told the high court that it was within its inherent power to transfer the DA case from one special court to another. Special public prosecutor Rajdipa Behura, appearing for CBI, on the other hand, contended that the transfer petition "is a total abuse of process of law and has only been moved to delay the trial". Chautala has said the DA case be withdrawn from the special CBI judge hearing it presently and be assigned to someone else. The petition has also sought calling of the case records, claiming that it would allegedly reveal deliberate deletion of the deposition of one of the prosecution witnesses. The CBI had lodged the DA case against Chautala on a complaint of Congress leader Shamsher Singh Surjewala. Surjewala had alleged that Chautala had amassed wealth worth several times more than his income. According to the CBI, Chautala owned assets worth over five times his income of Rs 22.89 crore as per income tax records during the 2000-2005 period. It has claimed to have found Rs 119.69 crore worth of assets. The CBI had also alleged that he possessed assets exceeding his legal income by 339.27 per cent. His legal income between May 1993 and May 2006 was Rs 8.17 crore, but had acquired assets worth Rs 27.7 crore, it had alleged before the trial court. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Bombay High Court Wednesday asked the Maharashtra government to inform it about the existing guidelines on conducting autopsies in private as well as state and civic hospitals. A bench of Chief Justice Naresh Patil and Justice N M Jamdar also asked the state if it had issued any government resolutions (GRs) to set down such guidelines, particularly for autopsies conducted on female corpses. The bench was hearing a PIL, which alleged that autopsies in several civic hospitals were being conducted by morgue attendants and sweepers instead of doctors. The plea, filed by activist Adil Khatri, claimed that during a visit to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC)-run Sion Hospital in September last year, he found a sweeper and a male morgue attendant conducting a post-mortem examination. Khatri claimed that replies to his queries under the Right to Information (RTI) Act revealed that owing to shortage of trained staff, doctors at civic hospitals were often assisted by "morgue attendants, sweepers and assistant doctors" for conducting post-mortem. He told the court that male morgue attendants and sweepers also conducted post-mortem on women. At this, the bench asked the state if a standard procedure was followed for conducting autopsies in all hospitals across the state. "Has the government issued any GRs for autopsies on female corpses? Just as how as per the CrPC, a female police officer must remain present if a woman is being taken into custody, or questioned. Similarly, do any such rules exist for conducting autopsies?" the bench asked. The state's lawyer, Poornima Kantharia, told the bench that while she will find out about the GRs, it was possible that often, due to shortage of doctors, or "reluctance of female doctors to go into morgues", male doctors and assistant medical staff conduct autopsies on female corpses. The plea had sought that the court direct the BMC to ensure that a standard procedure was followed by all civic hospitals in the city while conducting autopsies. It has also urged that it be made mandatory to ensure that women doctors or attendants were present during the post-mortem of women. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Police has seized huge quantity of heroin and arrested a woman from Nagaon district, a senior police officer said Wednesday. Acting on a tip-off, a joint team of Delhi Police and Assam Police seized the contraband weighing 23.5 kg from the house of a woman in Bengenaati village, Nagaon, Superintendent of Police, S Raimedhi said on Wednesday. The SP said following intelligence inputs, Delhi Police apprehended a person, identified as Dhanjit Gupta, in Delhi and following his interrogation, an operation was launched in Bengenaati village where the contraband was stored in the house of the woman. The woman has been arrested and efforts are on to trace the other members of the illegal drug racket. The drugs were suspected to be sent to different states of North East and even Myanmar via Nagaland, police said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a dig at NCP chief Sharad Pawar over entry of Maharashtra Congress leader Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil's son Sujay into BJP fold, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray Wednesday said he believes in fulfilling demands of sons of others, and do not use them for "cleaning utensils". In a major embarrassment to the Congress, Opposition leader Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil's son Sujay joined the BJP Tuesday, as he couldn't get ticket to contest his maiden Lok Sabha poll from home turf of Ahmednagar. Sujay called on Thackeray at his residence here on Wednesday to seek the Sena's support for his candidature. Ahmednagar falls in the kitty of the Congress' alliance partner, NCP, which was not ready to vacate the seat for Sujay. "Like my own son, I also care for children of others. It is not Shiv Sena's style to use children of others to wash utensils. Sena is for the common man," Thackeray said. Pawar Tuesday justified not leaving Ahmednagar seat for Sujay to contest. "Sujay Vikhe Patil goes from one party to another and insisted on a specific seat to fight elections. Fulfilling his immature desires is not the responsibility of other parties. One should himself fulfil his son's desires, I will fulfill my child's. Why should I fulfil another's desires?" Pawar had said while taking a swipe at Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil. Thackeray said Sena has almost finalised a list of the party candidates, which will be released in the next two days. As per the seat-sharing deal between the BJP and the Sena, the Uddhav Thackeray-led party would contest 23 out of total 48 seats in Maharashtra. Responding to a query, Thackeray made it clear that his son Aaditya won't contest Lok Sabha polls this time. "Sena founder Bal Thackeray did not hold me back from fighting elections, and similarly, I will also not hold back my son Aaditya from contesting. He will contest when he wishes to. However, this time, he will not fight elections," Thackeray said. When asked about the relations between Sena and BJP post tie-up, Thackeray said both the parties have finalised an electoral alliance, and there won't be any "stone throwing" from either sides. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Indian Embassy in Nepal on Wednesday announced 200 scholarships to meritorious Nepali students for continuing various undergraduate courses at colleges and universities. The Golden Jubilee Scholarship scheme was initiated by the Indian Government in 2002 to mark the completion of 50 years of India-Nepal Economic Cooperation. During the inception of the scheme, 50 meritorious Nepali students were awarded the scholarships. This year, the scholarships recipients cover 36 undergraduate courses including MBBS, BDS, BE, BSc and BBA .The recipients of the scholarships represent 50 districts of Nepal. "These include about 45 per cent girls and 8 per cent differently abled students, the Indian Embassy here said in a statement. Ambassador of India to Nepal, Manjeev Singh Puri, during a function handed over certificates to the scholarship winning students in the presence of Khaga Raj Baral, Secretary of Nepal. Puri congratulated the students and advised them to achieve personal and professional fulfillment, which will contribute towards Nepal's socio-economic development and will further deepen and strengthen India-Nepal relations. Under this scholarship scheme, an MBBS/BDS student receives NRs. 4,000/- per month for five years, a BE student receives NRs. 4,000/- per month for four years and a student studying in other under-graduate courses receives NRs. 3,000/- per month for three years. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India Wednesday expressed disappointment soon after blocked yet another move at the to designate Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed's chief as a "global terrorist". In its reaction, the said India will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that leaders of terror groups involved in heinous attacks on Indian citizens are brought to justice. "We are disappointed by this outcome. This has prevented action by the international community to designate the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a proscribed and active terrorist organization which has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on February 14," the MEA said. Without naming China, it said the UN's 1267 Sanctions Committee was not able to come to a decision on the proposal for listing Azhar on account of a member placing the proposal on hold. The JeM had claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attacks in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed. In yet another setback to India's bid to designate Azhar as a global terrorist, put a technical hold on the proposal in the UN Security Council to ban him. A diplomat at the UN told PTI that put a "technical hold". Arbitrary killings, forced disappearance and torture in police custody are some of the human rights issues in India, the US said in a report on Wednesday, noting that instances of censorship, use of libel laws to prosecute social media speech and site blocking continued during 2018. In its section of 'Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2018', the State Department said the imposed restrictions on foreign funding of some non-governmental organisations, including those with views the government stated were not in the " interest". "Human rights issues (in India) included reports of arbitrary killings; forced disappearance; torture; rape in police custody; arbitrary arrest and detention; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; and reports of political prisoners in certain states," the report stated. The other major issues of human rights violations included widespread corruption, lack of criminal investigations or accountability for cases related to rape, domestic violence, dowry-related deaths and honour killings, it said. "Instances of censorship, the use of libel laws to prosecute social media speech, and site blocking continued," said the Congressional-mandated report, which was released by the Secretary of State The report also noted that violence and discrimination based on religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity and caste or tribe, including indigenous persons, also occurred. The State department said lack of accountability for misconduct persisted at all levels of government, contributing to widespread impunity. Investigations and prosecutions of individual cases took place, but lax enforcement, shortage of trained police officers and an overburdened and under-resourced court system contributed to a small number of convictions, it rued. The report noted several instances in which the government or actors considered close to the government allegedly pressured or harassed media outlets critical of the government, "including through online trolling". "There were also reports of extremists perpetrating acts of killing, violence, and intimidation against journalists critical of the government," the report said. "According to a number of journalists, press freedom declined during the year (2018). There were a number of reports, including from journalists and NGOs, that government officials, both at the local and levels, were involved in silencing or intimidating critical media outlets through physical harassment/attacks, pressuring owners, targeting sponsors, and encouraging frivolous lawsuits," the State Department said. India and Pakistan will Thursday hold their first meeting to finalise the modalities for setting up of a corridor linking Gurudwara Darbar Sahib in Pakistani town of Kartarpur with Gurdaspur district in Punjab, three months after the two countries agreed on the project. In the meeting, to be held held at the Indian side of the Attari-Wagah border, New Delhi is likely to press for hassle free travel of Indian pilgrims to the Pakistani side besides asking Islamabad to insulate them from any propaganda by Khalistani separatists, official sources said. Last year, there were reports that pro-Khalistan banners were shown to a group of Indian pilgrims while they were on their way to two Sikh shrines. The Indian delegation will comprise representatives from Union Home Ministry, External Affairs Ministry, BSF, National Highways Authority of India and Punjab government, they said. On reports about denial of visa to Pakistani journalists wanting to visit India to cover Thursday's meeting, sources said it was not a public event which required publicity. Asked about a reciprocal visit by Indian officials to Pakistan on the Kartarpur project, sources said it will depend on the outcome of Thursday's meeting. The meeting comes amid heightened tensions between the two neighbours following India's air strike on a terrorist training camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Pakistan's subsequent retaliation. Sources indicated that India may request Pakistan to allow visit of the Indian pilgrims to the gurdwara without any passport and visa. Last November, India and Pakistan agreed to set up the border crossing linking Gurudwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur - the final resting place of Sikh faith's founder Guru Nanak Dev - to Dera Baba Nanak shrine in India's Gurdaspur district. Kartarpur Sahib is located in Pakistan's Narowal district across the river Ravi, about four km from the Dera Baba Nanak shrine. Sources said the government has identified 50 acres of land for the Kartarpur corridor and it would be developed in two phases. Phase-l will be developed over 15 acres of land and the passenger terminal will be a green building which will display murals and photographs based on rich Indian cultural values, sources said, adding the design of the complex will reflect values of oneness and humanity. The building will be differently-abled and will cater to the smooth movement of approximately 5000 pilgrims per day to Gurudwara Kartarpur Sahib in Pakistan. The complex will have robust security protocols with CCTV surveillance and other advance security systems, they said, adding the BSF is likely to be tasked to provide security to the facility. It will have sufficient public amenities like food courts, VIP lounges and parking area. The sources said 54 immigration counters will be set up for facilitating travel of 5,000 pilgrims per day. The entry gate of the facility will be in lotus shape. The phase-I of the terminal building is expected to cost Rs 140 crore excluding the cost of the land. In the phase-II, the government is planning to set up a viewers' gallery and a restaurant atop a watch tower (approx. 30 m high), a hospital and accommodation for around 300 pilgrims. India's Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu and Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh had on November 26 last year laid the foundation stone of the Kartarpur corridor in Gurdaspur district. Two days later, Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan laid the foundation stone of the corridor in Narowal, 125 km from Lahore. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India will ask Pakistan to insulate Sikh pilgrims visiting the Gurdwara Kartarpur Sahib through the Kartarpur corridor from Khalistani separatist propaganda, official sources said. India will raise the issue during the first meeting with Pakistan to finalise the modalities for the Kartarpur corridor on Thursday. The meeting will take place on the Indian side of the Attari-Wagah border, they said. Last year in November, India had lodged a strong protest with Pakistan over the alleged harassment of Indian High Commission officials in Islamabad and the denial of access to Indian Sikh pilgrims visiting the country. India had also expressed "grave concern" over reports of attempts during the pilgrims' visit to "incite" communal disharmony and "promote secessionist tendencies" with an aim to undermine India's sovereignty and territorial integrity. There were reports that pro-Khalistan banners were shown to the Indian pilgrims while they were on their way to the two Sikh shrines. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A social entrepreneur from Tamil Nadu on Wednesday bagged the Commonwealth Youth Award for the Asian region from among hundreds of nominations for his technology-based food rescue organisation. Padmanaban Gopalan, founder of No Food Waste, was named the winner of the award worth 3,000 pounds at a ceremony at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London for his work towards achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of Zero Hunger with his innovative system of recovering excess food to distribute to those in need. "There is no pain like the pain the hunger. This award means a lot to me and all my hundreds of volunteers who help with our mission of feed people, not landfills," said 26-year-old Padmanaban, who made his first-ever trip to London from Coimbatore for the ceremony. Someone who describes himself as a "dreamer", he founded his surplus food recovery system in Tamil Nadu which is already active across different regions of South India. The programme works with volunteers and local authorities to collect excess food from functions and restaurants and delivers them to "hunger spots" mapped by the company to feed hungry people. The initiative runs a geo-mapping platform, which allows users to drop food at located "hunger spots" and has so far recovered over 650,000 meals across 14 cities. The platform has been used by over 12,000 volunteers. "With the award money, we hope to expand this mapping system to include other major metropolitan cities of India such as Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, New Delhi and Mumbai," Padmanaban said. In keeping with the connected theme of this year's Commonwealth Day, marked on March 11, Secretary-General Patricia Scotland encouraged all four regional winners of the 2019 Youth Awards to coordinate their various winning projects. "We are truly a connected Commonwealth when all the different skills from regions of Asia, Pacific, Africa and Europe, and Caribbean and Canada, can come together in this way to share their expertise and technology," said Scotland. The annual Commonwealth Youth Awards for Excellence in Development Work, now in its 13th year, celebrates the achievement of young people aged between 15 years and 29 years, whose projects serve the people and communities in their country and drive the progress to realise the different SDGs. The awards recognise their outstanding initiatives in line with the SGDs with a focus on poverty, gender, clean water, education, health and climate change. This year, over 500 nominations were received from over 45 Commonwealth countries and 16 finalists were shortlisted. Besides India, the other were from Bermuda, Brunei, Canada, Fiji, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Trinidad and Tobago and Uganda. The other three regional winners, recognised for their work in the SDGs of Gender Equality, Sustainable Cities and Innovation, were from Nigeria, Soloman Islands and Saint Lucia. Each of the 16 finalists are awarded 1,000 pounds towards their projects, with an additional 2,000 pounds bagged by the regional winner. From the four, one overall winner received the title of the 2019 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year - Nigeria's Oluwaseun Ayodeji Osowobi - who received a total grant prize of 5,000 pounds. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A joint military exercise between India and Royal Army of Oman commenced on Wednesday at Jabel regiment headquarters, Nizwa, in the Arab country, a defence spokesman said. A 60-member strong Indian Army contingent, based in northern command headquarters at Udhampur in Jammu and Kashmir, is taking part in the military exercise 'Al-Nagah III', he said. "Indo-Oman Joint Exercise Al Nagah III 2019 commenced this morning with a brief but impressive opening ceremony that saw the unfurling of the national flags of both the countries which saw Omani and Indian soldiers standing side by side signifying the growing cooperation, synergy and understanding between India and Oman," the spokesman said. He said the Omani contingent was represented by Jabel Regiment of the Royal Army of Oman (RAO) while the Indian side was represented by troops of the Garhwal Rifles Regiment. Lt Col Muhammed Al Saidi, SecondinCommand, Jabel Regiment, welcomed the Indian soldiers, and in his inaugural remarks, highlighted the common shared beliefs of freedom, equality and justice that are precious to both the countries, the spokesman said. He said the striking opening ceremony started with briefing on Army Organization and Country Presentation by both the countries. The Indian and RAO contingents have been specifically selected for the exercise based on expertise and professional competence and will take part in the two-week-long event that will see them hone their tactical and technical skills in joint counter insurgency and counter terrorist operations in semi-urban scenario in mountainous terrain under the UN mandate, the spokesman said. He said due emphasis would be laid on increasing interoperability between forces from both the countries, which is crucial for success of any joint operation. "Both sides will jointly train, plan and execute a series of well-developed tactical drills for neutralisation of likely threats that may be encountered in such a scenario," the spokesman said. He said experts from both the sides would also hold detailed discussions to share their experience on varied topics for mutual benefit. "Exercise Al Nagah 2019 will contribute immensely in developing mutual understanding and respect for each other's military as also facilitate in tackling the worldwide phenomenon of terrorism," the spokesman said. On March 7, General officer commanding-in-chief, northern command, Lt Gen Ranbir Singh had interacted with the Indian contingent. The exercise is scheduled to to end on March 25 at Jabel Al Akhdar mountains. The Indian Army contingent is represented by four officers, nine junior commissioned officers and 47 other ranks, the spokesman said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An Israeli organization has minted a coin emblazoned with the face of Nikki Haley, President Donald Trump's former ambassador to the United Nations, to commemorate her defense of Israel in the world body. The Sanhedrin, a Jewish group that says it aims to restore the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, is one of three organizations behind the coin. The collector's coin, which costs USD 50, features Haley's face set against the UN building, and a rendition of the Jewish Temple on the back. Hillel Weiss, spokesman for Sanhedrin, said Wednesday that Haley's criticism of the UN, which he says "seeks to destroy the state of Israel", earned her the recognition. He says the group last year sold 20,000 "Temple Coins" engraved with Trump's face to honour his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress will contest 20 seats and JD(S) eight in the Lok Sabha polls in Karnataka under a deal finalised by the two ruling coalition partners on Wednesday after weeks of haggling. The deal was hammered out at a meeting between Congress president Rahul Gandhi and JD(S) secretary general Danish Ali at Kochi in Kerala this evening, the JDS said. The Lok Sabha constituencies that JD(S) will contest are Uttara Kannada, Chikkamagaluru, Shivamogga, Tumkur, Hassan, Mandya, Bengaluru North and Vijayapura. JD(S) tweeted about the constituencies from where its candidates will be contesting from, on its official twitter handle. "@INCIndia @JanataDal_S seat sharing for Karnataka #LokSabhaPolls2019 is confirmed. 20 for Congress and 8 for JDS," Karnataka Pradesh Congress President Dinesh Gundu Rao said. JD(S) had won Hassan and Mandya Lok Sabha seats in the 2014 general election. The Congress had bagged nine and BJP 17. However in the bypolls, the BJP had yielded the Bellary seat to Congress. During a recent meeting with Rahul Gandhi at New Delhi, JD(S) supremo H D Deve Gowda had scaled down his party's demand and asked the national party to allot at least 10 out of the 28 Lok Sabha seats. The JD(S) had earlier demanded that it be given 12 seats to contest, banking on two-third, one-third formula adopted in ministry formation and allocation of posts of heads of state-run boards and corporations. According to party sources, JD(S) bagged Tumkur seat after a hard bargain as the grand old party had decided not to cede the constituencies where the party has a sitting MP to the regional partner. The Congress' S P Muddahanumegowda is current MP from Tumkur, and is a ticket aspirant. Mysore-Kodagu was another constituency that JD(S) had demanded from the old Mysuru region, but could not bag it due to opposition from Congress Legislature Party leader Siddaramaiah as the seat is in his home turf,the sources said. Sharing of seats from old Mysuru region was an acid test for both the parties as the JD(S) considers it as its bastion, and the Congress has its sitting members from most of the seats there. The Congress and JD(S), which fought bitterly against each other during 2018 assembly polls, joined hands to form the government as the election threw up a hung verdict. Among the eight seats that JD(S) has got, in Hassan and Mandya the party has its sitting MPs, Tumkur is with Congress, rest five constituencies are represented by the BJP. While the KPCC chief Wednesday said the party will announce its first list of candidates on March 16, JD(S) is too likely to announce its list in a couple of days. The JD(S) has already announced Gowda's grandsons Nikhil Kumaraswamy and Prajwal Revanna as candidates from the party bastions of Mandya and Hassan respectively. While Nikhil is son of Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy, Prajwal is son of Gowda's eleder son and PWD Minister H D Revanna. Gowda has also announced former MLA Madhu Bangarappa as JD(S) candidate from Shivamogga. Madhu is the son of former Chief Minister S Bangarappa and is likely to be pitted against another former Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa's son and sitting BJP MP B Y Raghavendra. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Karur Vysya Bank Wednesday said it has raised Rs 487 crore through Basel III compliant bonds to fund its growth plans. The Capital Raising Committee of the board in its meeting on March 12 allotted 48,700 BASEL III compliant unsecured, redeemable, non-convertible tier II bonds in the nature of debenture of Rs 1,00,000 each aggregating to Rs 487 crore, the bank said in a regulatory filing. The capital was raised on private placement basis, it said. The instrument will be listed on NSE. Basel III is an international regulatory framework with a set of reforms to improve the regulation, supervision and risk management within the banking sector. To comply with global Basel-III capital regulations, banks need to improve and strengthen their capital planning process. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Young Army officer Lt Ummer Fayaz, who was abducted and killed by terrorists nearly two years ago, in his NDA days had once ran a cross-country race with an injured leg in the searing heat of July while observing fast during Ramzan, according to a new book. After the launch of 'Undaunted: Lt Ummer Fayaz of Kashmir', author Bhaavna Arora announced that royalty earned from the book will be used for an annual scholarship named after Fayaz, which will benefit students of the high school he attended. "We all lost a soldier... Ummer was loved by his fellow cadets, and now as officers they still recall him, and the time spent with him in the NDA. They still remember the time when Ummer had run a cross-country race while observing 'roza' (fast) during the month of Ramzan," she said. Arora said not only he finished the race in the scorching summer, but he did that nursing a "stress fracture" in his leg. "In the NDA (National Defence Academy), his instructor, batchmates and seniors encouraged and supported him and boosted his morale. He also go to see the secular face that NDA truly has," she said. In the thirteenth chapter of the book, the author, who belongs to family of Army officers, quotes one of his seniors, "...People talk of secularism in India, but the NDA truly practices it." Fayaz, 23, was abducted and murdered by militants in South Kashmir's Shopian district on May 10, 2017, where he had gone to attend the wedding ceremony of a relative. Five to six militants had abducted the 2nd Rajputan Rifles officer from his relative's house late night on May 9. His bullet-riddled body was found in the Harmain area of the district the next morning. The book was launched at an event held at the Rajputana Rifles Regimental Centre at Delhi Cantonment here, which was attended by former senior army officers Lt Gen (retd) Syed Ata Hasnain, Lt Gen (retd) Satish Dua and former Delhi police commissioner Neeraj Kumar, and former colleagues and friends of the slain Kashmiri officer. Army chief Gen Bipin Rawat, in a foreword in the book, says, "Ummer epitomises 'Kashmiriyat' in its truest sense and will go down in history as a hero who chose to serve the nation, against all odds." Arora said Fayaz had to face resistance from many of his friends when he had decided to join the Army. Lt Gen (retd) Hasnain, former general officer commanding for the 15 and the 21 Corps, said, "During my posting in Kashmir, we tried to engage with the youth." "And, though people showed angst, many also showed inclination to join the armed forces," he said. "Ummer created that amazing spirit. So, we need to talk to the Kashmiri youth, as many as we can, have conversations without thinking of outcomes. Because, it will not happen overnight," the former GOC of Srinagar-based Chinar Corps said. Lt Gen (retd) Dua, who has previously led the Army in Kashmir, also recalled the anecdote about Fayaz running the cross-country race during the NDA days. "As NDA folks, we really take pride in our legacy. And, Ummer by running that cross-country race despite his 'roza' in summers displayed that toughness that Army teaches you," he said. Hailing from Kulgam district of Jammu and Kashmir, Fayaz was posted in the Akhnoor area in Jammu. He was commissioned in the 2nd batallion of the Rajputana Rifles, the oldest rifle regiment in the Army in December 2016, just five months before he was killed. Arora announced that the 'Lt Ummer Fayaz Scholarship' will be made out of the "corpus of Rs 2 lakh, coming from royalty that we handed in cheque today to the Rajputana Rifles". "Besides the scholarship, there would also be a rolling trophy. And, the interest earned from this amount will perpetuate the scholarship for successive years," she said. "Ummer did his schooling, from class 5-12, at the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya (JNV), Anantnag," she said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal Wednesday appealed to the Congress to join the proposed alliance between his party and JJP but his offer was snubbed by his Haryana-ally, which said it can "never have any truck" with the Congress. Kejriwal earlier on Wednesday told reporters that an alliance between AAP, Congress and Jannayak Janata Party would defeat the BJP in the state. "Let's come together in Haryana to defeat the BJP," Kejriwal said. However, within minutes after Kejriwal's comments, the JJP issued a strong-worded statement, saying it can "never have any truck" with the Congress. "The JJP has been formed on the ideology of late Choudhary Devi Lal who has always fought against Congress so JJP will never enter into any alliance with the Congress and will not be part of any alliance which includes Congress," JJP's national general secretary KC Bangar said. The JJP can enter into an alliance with only like-minded parties whereas the ideology of Congress does not match with its views, he said. However, Bangar said the party is strengthening its organisation in all 10 Lok Sabha and 90 assembly seats. "It is capable of fighting elections in all these seats," he said. On Monday, Congress President Rahul Gandhi ruled out any alliance with AAP in Delhi and asked his party workers in the capital to win all seven Lok Sabha seats following which Kejriwal said his party would win all seven parliamentary seats in Delhi "on its own". AAP had supported JJP in the recent Jind By-poll in Haryana and both parties have been in talks to ally for the Assembly elections scheduled later this year. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A member of the banned terrorist group and an associate of Jarnail Singh Bhinderwale, who was killed by the Indian Army in 'Operation Blue Star' in 1984 was nabbed by the Delhi police, officials said on Wednesday. The accused Gursewak (53), is a member of Khalistan Commando Force (KFC) and was arrested by the crime branch from ISBT Delhi on March 12 where he had come to meet one of his contacts. Gursewak was previously involved in more than 50 cases of terrorist activities, murders of police officials and informers, robberies in banks and police station among others, said Ajit Kumar Singla, Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime). Gursewak remained in jail for more than 26 years in different cases and was in regular touch with some Pakistan based terrorists, police said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Wednesday told the that activists arrested in connection with the violence and Maoist links were mobilising to achieve the motive of the CPI (Maoist) to "overthrow the government". Pune's assistant commissioner of police Shivaji Pawar said this in an affidavit filed before the court to oppose the bail plea filed by one of the accused, Arun Ferriera. Apart from Ferriera, the police earlier arrested eight other activists, including Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj, P Varavara Rao, and Ferriera and Gonsalves later filed bail petitions which came up for hearing on Wednesday before Justice P N Deshmukh, who posted the matter for April 5. The police are yet to submit the affidavit over Gonsalves's petition. In their affidavit, Pune Police claimed that Ferriera and the other accused were senior members of the banned terrorist organisation, Communist Party of India (Maoist). They were "actively supporting and propagating the banned outfit's unlawful activities to overthrow the government established by law", the police said. During investigation, it was revealed that the motive of the CPI (Maoist) was "seizure of political power," the affidavit said further. "With a view to attain this motive, the organisation is waging not the old type of conventional war but a people's war by mobilising public on a massive scale both military and politically," it said. "The CPI (Maoist) is undertaking special efforts to build the party among Dalit masses. They try to rally Dalit masses extensively by taking up struggles for their self- respect and against discrimination, oppression, degradation and physical attacks by the upper caste feudal forces in order to achieve their motive," the police said in the affidavit. The Elgar Parishad meeting held on December 31, 2017, during which Ferreira and the other accused gave "inflammatory, provocative and rebellious" speeches, saw significant participation of Dalit organisations, they said. "These Dalit organisations were systematically brought together by some active members of CPI (Maoist), which had also funded this meeting," the affidavit said. The police claimed Ferreira and another accused Vernon Gonsalves were senior cadres of CPI (Maoist) and engaged in recruiting cadres for the banned outfit. "The intention of Ferreira and other accused persons along with the banned terrorist organisation CPI (Maoist) is to topple the democratically elected governments (Centre and state) by violent means, that is by creating mayhem, spreading terror and hatred," the affidavit said. "The objective is to assassinate important public functionaries and strike terror in the public," it said. Ferriera and other accused distributed pamphlets and booklets with an intention to incite, abet and promote enmity between different groups on the ground of religion, caste and community, it said. "They created disharmony and a feeling of enmity, hatred and ill-will between different religious groups, castes and communities and therefore, disturbed public tranquillity," the affidavit said. "Net result of the meeting and speeches was riots that erupted at on January 1, 2018," it said. It was found from certain documents and evidence collected from the accused persons' residences that they were part of a criminal conspiracy and their role was not merely peripheral, but they were found to be playing a vital role in the offences committed, the police said in the affidavit. Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has demanded a general election after embattled Prime Minister Theresa May's second major parliamentary defeat on the Brexit, saying she must let the people decide who should lead them into the next phase of the UK's divorce deal with the EU. He also pledged that his party would vote against a no-deal Brexit outcome in Wednesday's vote and signalled that he would continue to press for a customs union with the 28-member European Union. "The prime minister has run down the clock and the clock has been run out on her," the 69-year-old leader said in the House of Commons. "It's time that we have a general election and the people can choose who their government should be," Corbyn said on Tuesday after May suffered a humiliating 391 to 242 defeat when her Brexit deal was rejected by Parliament for a second time. In January, May's Brexit plan was rejected by the MPs with a 230-vote margin. But despite Corbyn's call for fresh poll, the party is understood to not have immediate plans to call for a vote of no confidence that could precipitate what would be the third general election in four years. The UK went to polls last in June 2017. The opposition will initially focus on opposing no deal which is expected to be defeated on Wednesday and believes that an extension to the March 29 deadline is inevitable because more time is needed to negotiate an alternative, the Guardian reported. But Corbyn made no mention of a second referendum which the party is theoretically committed to supporting if it cannot secure a general election in his remarks after the vote, and hardly referred to it in his earlier speech in the Commons debate, it noted. "If this deal narrowly scrapes through tonight I don't think it will we believe the option should be to go back to the people for a confirmatory vote on it," Corbyn said, suggesting there is little sign that Labour will reactivate the idea soon. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Lebanon's civil aviation authority said on Wednesday it has banned Boeing 737 MAX passenger jets from the country's airspace after a deadly plane crash in Ethiopia at the weekend. The authority also barred the aircraft from taking off and landing in Lebanon, according to a statement carried by the official National Agency. On Sunday, a new Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board. This followed the October crash of a Lion Air jet of the same model in Indonesia, claiming 189 lives. Despite Boeing's assurances that the 737 MAX is safe and reliable, countries including Britain, China and India have grounded the model or banned it from their airspace as they await the results of an investigation into the latest crash. The widening action against the aircraft has put pressure on Boeing -- the world's biggest plane manufacturer -- to prove it is safe, and the company has said it is rolling out flight software updates by April that could address issues with a faulty sensor. There are about 350 MAX 8s currently in service around the world. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Left parties Wednesday decided to contest three out of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in Jharkhand. "The Left Front have decided to contest three seats --- CPI(M) from Rajmahal, CPI from Hazaribagh and CPI (ML-Liberation) from Koderma," CPI(M) Jharkhand unit secretary G K Bakshi told reporters here. He said the CPI(M) state committee would endorse the decision in its meeting on March 15 in Ranchi. "The agenda of the CPI (M) for the April/May Lok Sabha elections is to defeat BJP, get maximum number of left candidates elected and ensure formation of secular government," Bakshi said. He also said that the Left parties decided to support candidate of such opposition party in the rest of the seats, who could be seen as strong opponent against the BJP candidate. "CPI(M) has always supported former MP A K Roy as well as MCC from Dhanbad seat. So if MCC fields candidate from Dhanbad, it would be the fourth seat of Left Front," claimed Bakshi. Marxist Coordination Committee (MCC) MLA Arup Chatterjee told PTI over phone that there would be two meetings of the partys central committee to decide about contesting the Lok Sabha elections. The CPI (ML-Liberation) was not an alliance partner of the Left Front during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. While the CPI (ML-Liberation) contested six seats, CPI (M) fielded candidates in five constituencies while the CPI nominated three in the 2014 elections. The CPI was part of UPA-I in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections and the CPIs state unit secretary Bhubaneswar Mehta had won the Hazaribagh seat, defeating former BJP leader Yashwant Sinha. Bakshi termed the terminology 'gathbandhan' as wrong because "there is no common agenda among the parties and it is (just) a seat sharing formula." Meanwhile, in a press statement in Ranchi, RJDs Jharkhand unit general secretary and spokesman Manoj Kumar said, "The RJD will contest from Palamau and Chatra seats at any cost as the electorate there voted RJD candidates several times during previous elections. The RJD has always favoured alliance and its leader Lalu Yadav stood like a rock in unity among the opposition, to dislodge the BJP." On January 18, Jharkhand Pradesh Congress Committee president Ajoy Kumar said that the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) had agreed to fight the Lok Sabha elections under the Congress leadership and, in return, the Congress will contest the Jharkhand assembly elections under the JMM leadership. The proposed grand alliance comprising Congress, JMM, Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik) and RJD, has not yet officially announced as to which party would contest how many seats and from where. According to reports, there is a bone of contention over a few seats on which one or the other ally is keen to contest. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The coming Lok Sabha polls in Kerala will see the strict enforcement of Green protocol with the election authority banning use of non-biodegradable materials for campaign. The candidates have also been asked to provide details of any criminal cases pending against them. As per the 'green protocol', candidates and political parties can use only eco-friendly boards, banners which can be recycled and materials, including plastics and PVCs, will not be allowed, Chief Electoral Officer Teeka Ram Meena said Wednesday. Political parties should follow the recent Kerala High Court order in this regard and must remove the already installed flex boards. "I have asked the district officers (Collectors) to remove the already fixed flex boards. Non-biodegradable materials are completly banned. Political parties must co-operate. This time we will follow the green protocol strictly," Meena told reporters here. As per a government order to ensure the protocol, polling stations, counting centres and other election offices should avoid plastic materials even in the form of drinking water bottles. "They (candidates) should publish in local newspaper and in a TV channel about the criminal cases against them. This is part of the various electoral reforms. This is to reduce criminalisation of ..," Meena said. At the all-party meeting called by the Electoral Officer, Meena apprised the political party representatives of the procedures to be followed in the election. He said the party leaders had doubts about the VVPAT (Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail) machines. "We are using 100 per cent VVPAT machines this time," he added. The Kerala High Court Monday prohibited use of flex materials and other non-biodegradable materials for election campaigning throughout the state. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Drug firm Lupin said Wednesday it has been cautioned by the US health regulator with possible withholding of approvals of pending applications from its Mandideep facility in Madhya Pradesh, where it is facing manufacturing compliance issues. The company has received a letter from the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) classifying the inspection conducted at its Mandideep (Unit 1) facility in December 2018 as Official Action Indicated' (OAI), Lupin said in a regulatory filing. "The USFDA has stated that this facility may be subject to regulatory or administrative action and that it may withhold approval of any pending applications or supplements in which this facility is listed," it added. The Mumbai-based company however clarified that there were no new drug master files (DMF) and Abbreviated New Drug Applications (ANDA) pending review or approval from the Mandideep (Unit 1) facility. "The company does not believe that this classification will have an impact on disruption of supplies or the existing revenues from operations of this facility," Lupin said. Lupin is in the process of sending further updates of its corrective actions to the USFDA and remains hopeful of a positive outcome, it added. In December last year, the USFDA had issued a total of 22 observations after inspecting the Mandideep facility. Lupin shares Wednesday ended 4.61 per cent down at Rs 763.90 on the BSE. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court Wednesday upheld the death sentence of a 30-year-old man convicted for killing a college girl and her lover after raping her near Suruli hills in Theni district in 2011. Delivering the verdict, Justices R Subbiah and B Pugalendi noted that the accused, Diwakar, had also cut off the girl's limbs after killing her. "It was a brutal act on the helpless young couple, that too after raping the girl. The savageness of the act was shocking and such a person will be a menace to the society," they said. Besides, Diwakar had earlier attacked a constable with a knife when he attempted to arrest him in a criminal case. The court said the case fell in the category of rarest of rare case and the accused deserved the death sentence. A trial court in Theni had sentenced Diwakar to death in March 2018, saying the prosecution had proved its case beyond reasonable doubt. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) At least two of the 10 people who broke into Madrid's North Korean embassy in February, roughing up employees and robbing computers, are linked to the CIA, the El Pais daily said Wednesday. The mysterious incident took place on February 22 just five days before the start of a nuclear summit between North Korea and the United States attended, among others, by Pyongyang's former ambassador to Spain Kim Hyok Chol. According to investigators quoted by El Pais, they were specifically looking for information linked to Kim. "At least two of the 10 assailants... have been identified and have ties with US secret services," the paper said, citing sources from the police and Spain's intelligence agency, the National Intelligence Centre (CNI). It specifically identified the CIA. Contacted by AFP, the CNI refused to comment. According to El Pais, Spain asked for clarification from the CIA but the US spy agency denied any involvement. Spanish authorities however said the response was "not very convincing". The report said the CIA acted "in probable cooperation" with South Korean intelligence services. The break-in has been surrounded by mystery. The Spanish government and police have only confirmed that on February 22, emergency services attended to a North Korean woman with mild injuries on the street near the embassy. According to El Pais, which has quoted investigators as saying this could be "political espionage", the 10 men entered with fake handguns, tying up and gagging the staff. They reportedly escaped with documents, computers and telephones in two embassy cars with diplomatic number plates which they later abandoned. Investigators have discarded the theory of a petty crime as the break-in was well organised and similar to a military commando operation that knew what it was looking for. After analysing CCTV footage and questioning witnesses, they identified two of the assailants as having links with the CIA, El Pais said. Since 2017, when Kim Hyok Chol was expelled from Spain as "persona non grata" after nuclear tests and missile firings by Pyongyang, the secretive state has had diplomatic representation in Madrid but no ambassador. Kim is one of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's most trusted officials. He is now Pyongyang's special representative for the US and was involved in preparations for the summit in Hanoi between the North Korean leader and US President Donald Trump. The talks failed to reach a nuclear accord. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a bizarre case, a man in this temple town in western Maharashtra killed his wife as he thought she rejoiced his mother's death, police said. It was presumed that Shubhangi Lokhande(35), wife of accused Sandeep Lokhande, ended her life, overcome with grief by the death of her mother-in-law Malati Lokhande (70), police said Wednesday. However, an investigation into the Shubhangi's death revealed that the young woman was murdered by her husband who was livid after she openly displayed her joy at his mother's death, a police official said. An enraged Sandeep threw her off the second floor balcony of their house in the Apatenagar suburb here Saturday, police said. Sandeep, now in police custody, has confessed to the crime, the official said. Local media had reported that Shubhangi committed suicide as she was grief-stricken by her mother-in-law's death, police said. Officials of the Juna Rajwada police station smelt a rat in this theory and decided to probe the matter. "During the investigation, Sandeep said his wife was happy withdeath of his mother and therefore in a fit of rage he killed her," police said. "After the ailing Malati died Saturday morning, Shubhangi became happy.She couldn't hide her feelings. Sandeep was enraged by this behaviourof his wife and killed her the same day," the police official said. The couple's two children are now with Sandeep's parents after their father's arrest Wednesday, police said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Intensive negotiations are on the cards for the opposition grand alliance in Bihar as top leaders of the formation will meet in New Delhi on Wednesday to thrash out the thorny issue of seat-sharing for 40 Lok Sabha seats in the state. The general election is scheduled to begin on April 11 and will continue till May 19. Polling on the different seats will be held in Bihar in seven phases. The 'mahagathbandhan', as the grand alliance is called in local parlance, comprises old allies like the Congress and the RJD, besides new entrants such as Upendra Kushwaha's RLSP, Jitan Ram Manjhi's Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM), Sharad Yadav's Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) and the Vikashsheel Insaan Party (VIP), a fledgling outfit floated by former Bollywood set designer Mukesh Sahni. The grand alliance also seeks to have an electoral understanding with the Left Front, which has three constituents in Bihar the CPI, the CPI(ML) and the CPI(M), and the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party (SP) and Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The talks would be centred around a tentative formula wherein the RJD will get the lions share of 17 seats, followed by 11 seats for the Congress and four for the RLSP. The HAM, LJD and VIP would get one seat each, according to sources in grand alliance. It has also been proposed to leave five seats for the Left parties, the SP and the BSP as a goodwill gesture, which may come in handy for the Congress that has substantial stake in adjoining states of West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. The sources said the RJD, which is likely to be represented at the Delhi parleys by its heir apparent Tejashwi Yadav, has misgivings over agreeing to the formula which would require it to drastically scale down its stakes. The RJD had fought on 27 seats in the 2014 general elections, though it managed to win only four. The Congress has been reportedly playing hardball, threatening to pull out of the alliance and go it alone in the Lok Sabha polls if asked to settle for a formula where it gets less than a quarter of the total number of seats. Kushwaha, who gave up his ministerial berth in the Narendra Modi government to quit the NDA and join the grand alliance, may find himself vindicated if the RLSP ends up with four seats, which would be twice the number he was reportedly offered by BJP president Amit Shah. However, Jitan Ram Manjhi's demands that range from "readiness to contest 20 seats" to a number "more than that of even the Congress" or greater than what "later entrants like the RLSP" were to get squirmed when reporters approached him with queries about the tentative formula on Tuesday. "This is all media speculation. We are sure that we will get a respectable number of seats given the fact that our party has the largest support base after the RJD. But, if we do not get a respectable share we will still work towards strengthening the Mahagathbandhan," he told reporters. "After the rounds of talks with alliance partners on March 13 and 14, we will be holding our parliamentary board meeting on March 15 where further decisions will be taken," Manjhi said. The rumblings within the 'mahagathbandhan' is being closely watched by the NDA, comprising the BJP, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's JD(U) and Ram Vilas Paswan's LJP. "We have already announced that the BJP and the JD(U) will fight 17 seats each leaving the remaining six for the LJP. Announcement of candidates will be made before the notification for the first phase on March 18," a senior NDA leader said,. "We have no problem with the Mahagathbandhan announcing its nominees before us. They may wallow in the impression of having stolen a march. We would be getting the opportunity to make last-minute strategic decisions," the leader said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Chief Minister and Asom Gana Parishad founder-president Prafulla Kumar Mahanta Wednesday opposed the alliance of his party with the BJP, saying he only came to know about it from the media and asked party leaders to reconsider the decision. "I am opposed to this alliance as AGP being a regional party should have contested the Lok Sabha polls with the aim to keep its regional character intact," Mahanta told reporters here. The party leadership should have called for a general meeting and acted according to the decision taken there, he said. "I still hope that they will reconsider this decision and discuss the matter with the party members," Mahanta said. The former chief minister said the decision to oppose the alliance was on several grounds. "During the campaign for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said that after May 2014, all Bangladeshis will have to pack their bags and leave the country but after elections it was seen that Assam's land was given to Bangladesh," Mahanta said. The BJP government also brought in the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill through the back door via two circulars and placed it in Parliament, he said. "This Bill is against the basic principles of Assam Accord and we had opposed it to protect the interest of Assam and Assamese," he said. The Bill will enable people from the neighbouring country to come to Assam for its geographical proximity and this will endanger the language, culture and traditions of the Assamese people, Mahanta said. "We opposed the Bill and urged political parties across the country to ensure that it was not passed. It was passed in the Lok Sabha but not in Rajya Sabha," he added. Mahanta said he had hoped that the matter will not be raised now but BJP President Amit Shah during a rally in Lakhimpur had asserted that the party will go ahead with the Bill, if they were voted to power again at the Centre. "This reflects their rigidity and insincerity towards the Assam Accord. The BJP had come to power with the promise of fulfilling the clauses of the Accord but they are going all out to wipe out its existence," Mahanta added. The AGP had severed ties with the BJP in January over the Bill with its three ministers -- Atul Bora, Keshab Mahanta and Phani Bhushan Choudhury, resigning from the state government. The AGP Wednesday returned to the NDA fold and will fight the Lok Sabha elections in Assam in alliance with the BJP. Three AGP ministers took charge of their old respective departments after Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, who had not accepted their resignation letters, invited the party to join the government. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A man who "wanted to ambush" police was killed Tuesday inside a plasma donation centre in southwestern Michigan during a shootout that injured an officer, authorities said. A Kalamazoo officer was shot in the torso, but his injury wasn't life-threatening due to a bulletproof vest, said Karianne Thomas, the city's public safety chief. Another officer fired multiple shots and killed the suspect, Thomas said. The dead man's name wasn't immediately released. Lisa Walterhouse, an employee at the downtown plasma center, says police responded after the man entered the building and fired shots. She said he urged staff to call 911. He "wanted to ambush officers. ... The suspect was waiting by the door for officers to arrive," Thomas said. "They encountered gunfire and returned gunfire." No other injuries were reported. Thomas said the officer who repeatedly shot the suspect has been with the department for less than a year. "We are not immune to workplace violence or violence directed at our first responders," the chief said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Meghalaya Minister Lahkmen Rymbui told the Assembly on Wednesday that there are many schools in the state where there are only two or four students. While the teacher-pupil ratio is 1:30, Rymbui said there are many Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA) schools which are functioning with two teachers teaching only two or four students. "We are in the process to rationalise teachers placement in SSA schools so that resources of the government is not wasted," he said. In Meghalaya, there are 395 lower primary schools with 808 teachers and 508 upper primary schools with 1874 teachers, he informed. On the delay of payment of salaries to school teachers, the Minister said the disbursement of salaries take place as and when the funds are released from the Centre. The Minister replying to a call attention moved by opposition Congress MLA Mayralborn Syiem on the delay in construction of an SSA lower primary school building at Khlieh Umwang village in Ri Bhoi District said the lower primary school building in the village along the inter-state boundary with Assam was demolished by Assam Police. He said the incident had taken place in August last year wherein a departmental inquiry was made. According to the report, some part of the building, which was under construction and sanctioned by the office of the Ri-Bhoi District Mission Coordinator for the year 2017-18 was destroyed by the Assam police. The minister said the state government is taking the issue seriously and solutions to the problem are being explored so that social and educational developmental works could be implemented for the benefit of the children living in those areas. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) JVM chief Babulal Marandi has filed a writ petition in the Jharkhand High Court challenging the Assembly Speaker's decision to approve the merger of six party MLAs with the BJP. The former chief minister and the Legislature Party Leader of the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik), Pradip Yadav, filed the petition on Tuesday, pleading the court to quash Speaker Dinesh Oraon's ruling as it was "unconstitutional" because he did not give "attention to several facts". The petitioners claimed that the Speaker allegedly overlooked the anti-disqualification law under the 10th Schedule and allowed the merger of the six JVM MLAs. The petitioners also claimed that only six MLAs had left the JVM and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and that the Election Commission had recognized the JVMs bylaws, which "found the merger did not take place". The Speaker had on February 20 said he went through all the legal points and found that their merger with the BJP was "legal". The turncoat MLAs are - Amar Kumar Bauri (Land & Revenue Minister), Randhir Kumar Singh (Agriculture Minister), Naveen Jaiswal, Ganesh Ganju, Janki Yadav and Alok Kumar Chourasia. Along with their supporters the MLAs joined the BJP on February 11, 2015 and asked the Speaker to allot them separate seats with the ruling party in the House as they have merged with the BJP along with 2/3rd of the JVM party members. The writ petition filed by Marandi has not yet been listed in the high court. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and the United States have asked Islamabad to "meaningfully address" the international community's concerns on terrorism, including that emanating from across the border from Pakistan. The concern was raised in an statement by the Indian Embassy here after Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale and his American counterpart Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale held Foreign Office Consultations here at the State Department, nearly a month after the Pulwama terror attack. "Both sides called on Pakistan to meaningfully address the concerns of the international community on terrorism, including cross-border terrorism," the statement said. Tensions between India and Pakistan flared up after a suicide bomber of the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terror group killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force personnel in Kashmir's Pulwama district on February 14. India has provided a dossier to Pakistan, detailing the role of JeM in the Pulwama terror attack. India has also said that Pakistan has failed to take any credible action against JeM and other terrorist organisations, which continue to operate with impunity from Pakistan. On Monday, Gokhale called on US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and they agreed that Pakistan must take "concerted action" to dismantle terrorist infrastructure and deny safe haven to all terror groups on its soil. Gokhale and Hale also reaffirming their commitment to the Indo-US Strategic Partnership and they reviewed the progress made since the first Ministerial 2+2 meeting held last September and discussed ways to further expand cooperation. While cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region formed an important part of their deliberations, they also discussed counterterrorism cooperation and a range of global and regional issues of mutual interest, including the current situation in Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela, the State Department said in a readout of the meeting. "They affirmed the vitality of the US-India strategic partnership and the importance of joint leadership to strengthen the rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region," the State Department said, amidst China increasingly flexing its muscles in the region. The Indo-Pacific is a biogeographic region, comprising the Indian Ocean and the western and central Pacific Ocean, including the South China Sea. Beijing asserts nearly all of the South China Sea as its territory, while Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam all claim parts. During the meeting, Gokhale and Hale affirmed their support for increased cooperation to include advancing initiatives undertaken as part of the 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue process. "Recognising that the US and India share complementary visions for the Indo-Pacific, they agreed to deepen cooperation toward their joint goals in the region, including in conjunction with other Indo-Pacific partners," the State Department said. According to the Indian Embassy, Gokhale and Hale exchanged views on building convergence in the Indo-Pacific and agreed to work with each other and regional partners to promote inclusivity, stability, peace and prosperity in the region. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Jharkhand High Court has granted bail to Father Alfonso Aind in the alleged abduction and gang rape of five women activists in Khunti district in 2018. Allowing his bail petition on Tuesday, the court of Justice A B Singh directed Aind to deposit Rs 15,000 in the 'Martyrs Fund' set up for the families of deceased soldiers. Aind was the head of the missionary school at Kochang village from where the women were abducted. The bench also directed Aind not to leave Khunti district without the lower court's permission and deposit his passport in the court. The victims, all tribals, had visited the school on June 19, 2018 to stage a play against human trafficking when they were allegedly abducted, forcibly taken to a forest about 7-8 km from the school and gang-raped at gunpoint. Aind, against whom two FIRs were registered in connection with the heinous crime, was charged with not stopping the culprits and failing to inform the police about the incident. He had reportedly asked the victims to accompany the criminals and told them that they would be let off after some time. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Delhi court Wednesday said it would pronounce on March 18 its order on framing of charges in the Muzaffarpur shelter home sexual assault case in which 21 accused have been chargesheeted by the CBI. Several girls were allegedly raped and sexually abused at an NGO-run shelter home in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, and the issue had come to light following a report by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). An FIR was lodged in the case on May 31, 2018. Additional Sessions Judge Saurabh Kulshreshtha reserved the order on framing of charges after the concluding arguments from both the sides. During the arguments, the counsel appearing for one of the accused, Ashwani Kumar, said there were no direct allegations of sexual assault against him. Kumar, an alleged close aide of prime accused Brajesh Thakur, was associated with Thakur's NGO 'Sewa Sankalp Aur Vikas Samiti' as a doctor and he allegedly used to administer injections laced with sedatives to the girls at shelter home before they were subjected to sexual abuse. All the accused have denied the allegations levelled against them by the CBI and said there was not enough evidence to prosecute them. CBI had earlier claimed in the court that several girls were sexually assaulted in the shelter home and charges for the offences under various provisions of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) including Section 375 (rape) and POCSO Act were made out against the accused. On February 7, the Supreme Court had ordered transfer of case from Bihar to a Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) court in Saket District Court complex in Delhi and had said that trial in the case be concluded within six months by preferably holding day-to-day hearing. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An accused in the Muzaffarpur shelter home sexual assault case Wednesday claimed before a Delhi court that there were no direct allegations or enough evidence against him. Ashwani Kumar, a close aide of main accused Brajesh Thakur, made his submissions before Additional Sessions Judge Saurabh Kulshreshtha who was hearing arguments on the point of framing of charges in the case. The court after hearing the counsel for Kumar posted the matter for March 18 and in all likelihood will frame the charges after the Holi break. Kumar was associated with Thakur's NGO 'Sewa Sankalp Aur Vikas Samiti' as a doctor and he allegedly used to administer injections laced with sedatives to the girls at shelter home before they were subjected to sexual abuse. The counsel for Kumar argued that there were no specific allegations against him on rape or assault, so no charges should be framed against him, especially on stringent sections of the Indian Penal Code and the POCSO Act. Advocate Gyanendra Mishra said that the court also directed the probe agency that the witnesses would be brought in a batch of five. The court asked the DGP, Bihar to provide all support and help in bringing the witnesses to Delhi. All the accused have denied the allegations levelled against them by the CBI and said there was not enough evidence to prosecute them. CBI had earlier claimed in the court that several girls were sexually assaulted in the shelter home and charges for the offences under various provisions of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) including Section 375 (rape) and POCSO Act were made out against the accused. Several girls were allegedly raped and sexually abused at an NGO-run shelter home in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, and the issue had come to light following a report by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). On February 7, the Supreme Court had ordered transfer of case from Bihar to a Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) court in Saket District Court complex in Delhi and stated that the trial be concluded within six months by preferably holding day-to-day hearing. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Describing Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu as a "confused man,"TRS working president KT Rama Rao has said he was at the fag end of his political career and on the way out after the coming elections. Maintaining that the Telangana Rashtra Samithi has no role to play in Andhra politics, he said Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao will soon appeal to the people of the neighbouring state to make a 'wise' choice in the coming elections. Assembly elections are to be held in Andhra along with the parliamentary polls. "The writing on the wall (the outcome of AP polls) is clear. If people are not willing to see, it is a different thing. Naidu is on his way out... He (Naidu) is at the fag end of his political career. I think people of Andhra will decide to basically grant a long leave to Chandrababu Naidu," he told PTI. As the TRS is a Telangana-based party and does not have any plans to expand footprint in Andhra, he said it is not fair on the part of the AP CM to describe the ensuing polls as a fight between him and KCR. "Chandrababu Naidu seems to be like very confused man. He calls it an election between KCR garu and TDP which is very strange... "Secondly we would want to ensure that the people of Andhra make a wise choice and therefore we believe, in the interest of Andhra Pradesh we would like to appeal at a later date and our chief minister will decide whento make that appeal," Rama Rao said. Soon after the TRS emerged victorious in the Assembly polls in December last year drubbing the Congress-TDP alliance, KCR sarcastically said he would give a "return gift" to Naidu. Telangana Minister Srinivas Yadav also toured Andhra Pradesh a couple of times and made bitter comments against Naidu, a development did not go down well with the ruling TDP. TDP leaders alleged that KCR and his party leaders were trying to meddle with AP affairs by "colluding" with the Andhra Leader of Opposition and YSR Congress Party chief YS Jaganmohan Reddy. "Firstly let me make it very clear that TRS is not present in Andhra Pradesh. TRS does not have an office or establishment in Andhra. It is not contesting in Andhra elections. So even suggesting that it will affect somebody's chances is nothing but tweaking the reality," Rama Rao added. Replying to a query, he said his role as the working president of TRS was to strengthen the party at the grassroots level and ensure it emerges victorious in the coming general, municipal and local body elections. He said his role was also to ensure that the party had offices in all the 33 district headquarters. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) State-owned hydro power giant NHPC said Wednesday that its board would on Friday consider a proposal to raise up to Rs 2,017.20 crore through taxable non-convertible bonds on a private placement basis. "The NHPC board in its meeting on Friday will consider proposal to issue 'GOI Fully Serviced Bonds' worth up to Rs 2,017.20 crore as per mandate given by the Government of India for 2018-19," the company said in a statement. The unsecured, redeemable, non-cumulative, non-convertible, taxable bonds will be issued in one or more tranches on a private placement basis in the domestic market, it added. Besides, it said the company would also consider a proposal to raise funds through external commercial borrowing in the Japanese yen equivalent to USD 100 million from MUFG Bank, Japan's leading lender, to part-finance capital expenditures for on-going projects and other permissible end-uses. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US aviation regulator said Tuesday that there is "no basis" for grounding Boeing's 737 MAX aircraft, one of which was involved in a crash in Ethiopia that killed 157 people. "Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft," Federal Aviation Administration chief Daniel Elwell said in a statement. "Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action." A new Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. That followed the October crash of a new Lion Air jet of the same model in Indonesia, which killed 189 people shortly after takeoff from Jakarta. Despite Boeing's assurances that the plane is safe and reliable, the European Union, Britain and India joined China and other countries that either grounded the best-selling plane or banned it from their airspace as they await the investigation into the crash. "In the course of our urgent review of data on the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash, if any issues affecting the continued airworthiness of the aircraft are identified, the FAA will take immediate and appropriate action," the FAA added. India sees "no post-Brexit challenges" but only opportunities for greater synergies with the UK in naval cooperation, Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba said here. Lanba, who is on a four-day visit to Britain, described the UK as India's preferred port of call in northern Atlantic due to the "strong bonds" of defence cooperation. "Over the years, our multi-faceted bilateral relations have grown from strength to strength to a sustained and mutually beneficial friendship. We have a common perspective on maritime challenges and agree to developing a cooperative framework to face them," Lanba said during a discussion on 'Martime strategy and its contribution to the Indo-Pacific and global commons' at the Institute of Strategic Studies here. "The maritime bonds between our two countries have been further cemented to a deepening defence cooperation. Konkan, the bilateral naval exercise, is the cornerstone of our maritime cooperation and the UK has been a preferred port of call whenever we operate in the northern Atlantic," he said, adding that one of India's ships will head to the UK later this year to participate in the Konkan 19 exercise. First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Sir Philip Jones hailed the leadership role played by the Royal Navy alongside the Indian Navy. "There are obvious similarities between our two navies a shared outlook, common goals, very clear intentions for the future, reflected in ambitious shipbuilding programmes and maritime innovation programmes. "Britain and India are both in the list of top 10 Indian economies and those powerful economies are built on a bedrock of global maritime trade," he said. Later, during a conversation on the background in reference to the growing presence of China in the Indian Ocean, Admiral Lanba described it as a challenge on which India keeps a close eye. He referred to an estimated six to eight Chinese units in the northern part of the Indian Ocean at any given time as well as submarines. "No nation has invested as much as China in shipbuilding. It is a challenge; we keep a close eye on their presence and deployments... it is here to stay," he said. Lanba is set to hold talks with the UK Chief of Defence Staff as well as visit the Naval Base in Portsmouth for a tour of the HMS Queen Elizabeth carrier as part of the India-UK Carrier Capability Partnership. On Tuesday, British Prime Minister Theresa May suffered yet another crushing Parliament defeat over Brexit when MPs overwhelmingly rejected her plan to quit the EU, plunging the UK into a further period of political uncertainty just 17 days before its divorce from the bloc. The March 29 deadline for Brexit kicked in when the UK triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty following a referendum in favour of Brexit by nearly 52 per cent to 48 per cent in June 2016. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Low-cost airline Norwegian Air Shuttle, which has grounded its 18 Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft pending an investigation into the cause of a crash in Ethiopia, said Wednesday it will demand financial compensation from Boeing. Norwegian, whose finances are currently under pressure, cancelled 19 flights on Wednesday, the day after it decided to ground all flights with the Boeing 737 MAX 8, the same model that crashed in Ethiopia on Sunday killing all 157 passengers and crew. "We're going to send the invoice to those who built the plane," a spokesman for the company, Lasse Sandaker-Nielsen, told AFP in an email. Sandaker-Nielsen said the airline "should not suffer financially from this." Norwegian said it had reorganised its operations and transferred passengers to other flights to remedy the situation. "We've worked very hard to find solutions for our passengers and have succeeded for the most part. There are only a few hundred left" to rebook, he said. A string of countries and carriers have grounded the Boeing 737 MAX 8 and the EU aviation safety agency closed European airspace to the aircraft after Sunday's crash, the second with that model in the space of five months. Norwegian, which recently raised new capital after suffering financial losses in the past two years, has seen its shares punished on the Oslo stock exchange this week, losing around 10 percent of their value. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An Afghan official says a journalist who has long been threatened has been wounded in a bomb blast in southern Helmand province. Omar Zwak, spokesman for the Helmand governor, says TV and radio journalist Nesar Ahmad Ahmadi was wounded by a sticky bomb that exploded as he was heading to the office in his vehicle. It happened in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, on Tuesday. Zwak said Ahmadi had a leg wound and was transferred to Kabul for further treatment. He is the director for Sabahoon radio and also a reporter for Sabahoon television broadcaster in Helmand. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but Taliban insurgents are active in southern Afghanistan especially in Helmand. The Taliban have been carrying out near-daily attacks across Afghanistan. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged British MPs to reject Wednesday a potentially chaotic no-deal exit from the EU, saying that an "orderly" Brexit was in both sides' interest. "Achieving an orderly exit together, and I particularly want to repeat this today, remains in our mutual interest," Merkel said, expressing "regret" that Britain's parliament on Tuesday had rejected for a second time the withdrawal deal agreed between Brussels and Prime Minister Theresa May. "That remains our objective." Merkel said it was up to the British parliament to provide clarity about how it wants to proceed with the divorce agreement. She praised the "unity" of the 27 remaining member states during the Brexit negotiations. "And because we 27 are working for each other and with each other, it is also important to reach a sensible result," she told reporters after talks with her counterpart from Laos, Thongloun Sisoulith. "But we can't make it happen on our own. Rather, we are dependent on finding common solutions." The House of Commons is expected later Wednesday to vote against leaving the bloc without a deal, although it remains the default option come March 29 unless an alternative can be secured. A further vote is scheduled for Thursday on delaying Britain's departure date but there is no agreement on how long an extension should be and no certainty the EU will agree to it. Michel Barnier, the EU's chief Brexit negotiator, said Brussels had done "everything it can" and must now brace for the possibility of a messy divorce. Asked whether she would be open to a delay, Merkel said she would wait for the outcome of the votes in the British parliament before deciding on the next steps. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi took potshots at the BJP-led NDA government over holding polling in Anantnag Lok Sabha constituency in Jammu and Kashmir over three phases. "Have you ever heard that election to a parliament seat would be held in three days, in three phases... there are four districts in Anantnag. Two districts in one phase, one district in second phase and one district in third phase... Wah Modiji Wah. What have you made of Kashmir. Because of your governance, the election of a parliament seat is held in three phases," he said addressing a gathering here Tuesday night. The BJP was in power in the state in partnership with the PDP and it has been Governors rule since the BJP-PDP government fell, he said. Though Assembly polls are due in Jammu and Kashmir, it could not be held as the Election Commission expressed inability as the situation is bad, Owaisi said. The Jammu and Kashmir assembly was dissolved in November last year, months after the Mehbooba Mufti-headed government in the state fell following the BJP withdrawing support to it in June. The Election Commission decided to announce the schedule for only Lok Sabha polls in the state and not for the assembly elections due to inputs it had received from authorities on constraint of availability of central forces for enforcing security in the wake of recent violence, according to Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora. Owaisi, Lok Sabha member from Hyderabad, made light of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's reported speech in which he had related an anectode about a tea seller to illustrate the possibility of generating fuel from gas generated from sewers. "How much gas you will release? You released only gas in five years...," Owaisi said. He also attacked the Nitish Kumar government in Bihar over death of two young men at Sitamarhi allegedly due to police torture. Referring to those who expressed concern over polls being held during Ramzan, he said the festival has nothing to do with the election. Owaisi had earlier said coinciding of Lok Sabha polls with Ramzan would not hamper poll percentage, rubbishing claims made by some leaders to the effect. Leaders of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) have claimed that elections during the Muslim holy month will inconvenience the community, largely seen to be backing the opposition parties, and help the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) president reiterated that his party supported the TRS in Telangana and the YSR Congress in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh. The AIMIM had announced support to Prakash Ambedkar in Maharashtra, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Kerala Congress (M) leader P J Joseph, who is peeved over the party's decision to not field him from the Kottayam Lok Sabha seat, called on senior Congress leaders Oommen Chandy and Ramesh Chennithala here Wednesday. The meeting came after KC(M) vice chairman Jose K Mani said the party has decided to field ex-MLA Thomas Chazhikadan as the UDF candidate from the seat after consultations with all sections in the party. Joseph, the working chairman of the KC(M), met Chandy at his residence Wednesday morning and followed it up with a visit to the Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala. The Congress-led opposition United Democratic Front (UDF) has allocated the lone seat of Kottayam to KC(M), turning down the party's demand for two seats. Later, Joseph told reporters here that he had met the UDF leaders and discussed the issue. The leadership would collectively discuss the matter and find a solution, he said. Kerala Congress (M) chairman KM Mani fielded loyalist Chazhikadan from the Kottayam parliamentary constituency, turning down Joseph's wish to contest from the prestigious seat. Making it clear that the party would not be cowed down by pressure from Joseph, KM Mani's son and Rajya Sabha MP Jose Mani said the party had selected Chazhikadan in a "democratic manner." There is nothing unusual in Joseph meeting UDF leaders, he told reporters in Kottayam. Rejecting the allegations that the candidature of Chazhikadan was announced in a unilateral manner, Jose Mani said, "Candidature of Chazhikadan was decided in a democratic manner. All due procedures were carried out before deciding his candidature. Everything has been documented. The candidate has started election campaign." A powerful faction led by Joseph, who represents Thodupuzha in the Kerala assembly, had opposed KM Mani's decision to field Chazhikadan from the seat, saying it was taken undermining the general sentiments of the Kerala Congress (M) workers. Two Joseph loyalists have quit their party posts, alleging that Mani fielded "a weak candidate to ensure the victory of CPI(M) candidate from Kottayam, V N Vasavan. The seat was lying vacant since Jose K Mani, who had won from the constituency in 2014, resigned in June last year after he was nominated to the Upper House. Former Union minister, P C Thomas, leader of another faction of the Kerala Congress, which is part of NDA, is likely to be the BJP candidate from Kottayam. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Political parties in Kerala were Wednesday asked by the poll authority to refrain from soliciting votes in the name of Lord Ayyappa, the presiding deity of Sabarimala, in the coming polls. Sabarimala had witnessed frenzied protests over the women's entry issue after the CPI(M)-led LDF government had decided to implement the September 28, 2018 Supreme Court verdict, allowing women of all age groups to offer prayers at the hill shrine. The parties must not use the name of Lord Ayyappa for soliciting votes and creating disharmony, Chief Electoral Officer Teeka Ram Meena told an all-party meeting here. "Sabarimala is a religious place. If somebody is using the name of a temple or a mosque for soliciting votes, it is a clear violation of the model code of conduct," he said. Meena said political parties should be responsible enough to decide to what extent they should use the Sabarimala issue during the campaign in the April 23 Lok Sabha polls. "I cannot ban any action by a particular political party. I cannot ask any political party not to use the name of a particilar religious institution. But if anyone uses any picture, poster, video of any religious institution to solicit votes, it will be considered as an act against the model code of conduct," Meena told mediapersons after the meeting. The ruling Left Democratic Front, Opposition Congress led United Democratic Front and BJP took part in the meeting. A political slugfest ensued after the poll authority allegedly gagged parties from raising the Sabarimala issue in the run up to the elections. The BJP and Congress had opposed the move, while the ruling CPI(M) had backed it. Meena said he had asked political parties not to use the pictures, videos or statements which could create disharmony as it was a violation of the model code of conduct. BJP state President P S Sreedharan Pillai,who attended the meeting, said the CEO had said "the Sabarimala issue must not be used to create hatred or disharmony in society. But we can use the issue related to the stand of the government, police, atheists," Pillai told reporters. He also said political parties can discuss Sabarimala during campaign in the manner the Babri Masjid, Ayodhya, Triple Talaq issues were being raised. The BJP chief also said his party workers know the 'lakshman rekha' while campaigning about the Sabarimala issue in the state. The CPI(M), however, said the BJP wants to focus on the Sabarimala issue alone as the party lacked any other topic to dicuss in the polls. "We are not against any religious institutions. The BJP, which talks about faith, had asked the devotees not to give offerings to devaswom board temples, thus paving the way for their destruction. Our focus will be highlighting the failures of the Modi government at the centre," CPI(M) leader Anathalavattom Anandan said. The UDF, however, said it wanted the people to discuss all the issues faced by society. The UDF leaders said their party would not violate the model code and Sabarimala was one among the various subjects to be discussed in the state ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. The Opposition Congress, which had extended support to Ayyappa devotees at the time of the Sabarimala agitation, came out against Meena's directive, asking how such a grave issue should not be raised during the elections. Meena said Tuesday that whether it was the Sabarimala temple, a church or mosque, these should not be used to solicit votes as it would be a violation of the model code of conduct. Reacting to the directive, BJP state general secretary K Surendran said on Monday that the state government's stand on the Sabarimala issue would surely be an election issue. Meena had Monday said that "inviting religious feelings, using any kind of Supreme Court judgement, invoking or soliciting votes in the name of religion or by inciting religious feelings is a clear violation of the model code." The CEO also said the Election Commission would not allow any kind of violation that puts a particular political party at an advantage over the other. The BJP has already pinned its hopes on the Sabarimala issue as it believes that it was able to create a momentum among its workers. The party's central leadership brought back former BJP state chief Kummanam Rajashekharan, who was appointed as Mizoram governor nine months ago, to lead the party in Kerala. The Lok Sabha elections will begin on April 11 and continue for over a month till May 19 across seven phases, followed by counting of votes on May 23. Kerala will go to the polls on April 23. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) president Sukhbir Singh Badal Wednesday claimed that voters in Punjab were keen to "teach" Congress a "lesson" in the upcoming general election for "betraying" every section of the society. Speaking here following the working committee meeting of the party, Badal said that he had visited 85 assembly segments of the state last month and found that people had made up their mind to "teach a lesson" to the Congress. "The Lok Sabha elections will witness the SAD sweeping the state and will pave the way for the assembly election victory in 2022," Badal said, adding that the Akali Dal would observe March 16 as 'Vishvasghat divas' (betrayal day). The working committee also discussed the party's strategy and poll campaign as well as authorised Badal to nominate candidates for the Lok Sabha polls. The SAD chief hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi for forming a Special Investigation Team (SIT) for reexamining the anti-Sikh riot cases. He also thanked Modi for taking "special interest" to establish the Kartarpur Corridor to facilitate Sikh pilgrims. Senior party leader Balwinder Singh Bhundur spoke on the alleged politicisation of the probe into the Kotkapura and Behbal kalan police firing incidents by the Congress government. He accused SIT member Inspector General of Police Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh of acting at the behest of Congress leaders against their political opponents. The SAD's working committee also condemned the Pulwama terror terrorist attack and appreciated the "decisiveness" shown by Modi in ordering an air strike on the Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist camp in Balakot in Pakistan. The resolution which was passed by the committee, hailed the PM for successfully isolating Pakistan internationally. The committee also condemned Congress politicians including Kapil Sibal, Randeep Surjewala, Shashi Tharoor, Navjot Sidhu and rebel AAP leader Sukhpal Khaira for allegedly questioning the armed forces. Another resolution was passed by the committee, thanking Modi for giving "unprecedented priority" to the celebrations of the 550thbirth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev by deciding to give the status of Heritage City to Sultanpur Lodhi, besides recreating "Pind Baba Nanak Da" and holding international seminars. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) With four awards each in their kitty, Hindi adaptation of Dharamvir Bharati's 1954 play "Andha Yug", and "Agarbatti" swept this year's Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META) on Tuesday. While "Andha Yug" (Hindi adaptation) by TAMM Manipur won in the best play, best stage design, best costume and best innovative sound design categories, Jabalpur Samagam Rangmandal's "Agarbatti" bagged the award for best director, best original script, best light design and best female actor. The two plays were among the 10 productions that battled it out during the week-long festival for one of the most coveted awards in Indian theatre. "From unique interpretations of stories from the 'Mahabharata', to the realities of living in an urban neighbourhood basti (slum) told through the narratives of four young spirited girls, to scathing narratives of the widows of the Behmai massacre ... this year's selection of plays have been diverse in themes, styles and languages," Jay Shah, head, cultural outreach, Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd, said. Malayalam production "Chillara Samaram" by Kerala-based Little Earth School Of Theatre took home the awards for best ensemble and best choreography. While Rukmini Sircar (Agarbatti) and Anjana Balaji (Chandala, Impure) shared the award for best female actor, the award for best innovative sound design was a tie between Debarati Majumdar (Andha Yug) and Sumant Balakrishnan and Sudheer Rikhari (Loose Woman). "Bhagi Hui Ladkiyan" by the Agaaz Theatre Trust received a special jury mention for "their spirited performance". The annual META Lifetime Achievement Award this year was conferred upon eminent playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar for his contribution to Indian theatre. "I am very happy to receive this prestigious award. META has been consistently honouring good theatre. It is a nice feeling to receive an award from people who genuinely love theatre," Elkunchwar, who has written over 30 plays and essays, said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Eight illegal liquor distilleries were raided by the police in Thane district of Maharashtra, an official said on Wednesday. The raids were conducted on Monday on the liquor dens located near a creek at Moti Desai village in Mumbra town, a police spokesperson said. Those working in the units managed to escape, she said, adding that the police seized illicit liquor, equipment and other material worth Rs 6.16 lakh from there. A case was registered and a search for those operating the units was underway, she added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The National Commission for Women on Wednesday asked the Tamil Nadu Director General of Police to initiate action against the men accused in the alleged sexual harassment of a woman in Coimbatore district. A 19-year-old woman had alleged that unidentified men in Pollachi town of the district recently took her in a car and attempted to disrobe her and videographed it. As the woman refused to yield to their advances, the men started blackmailing her with the video. They later threw her out of the vehicle after snatching her gold chain. The police has so far arrested four men in the case. Reacting to the reports, NCW chief Rekha Sharma has issued a notice to DGP, Tamil Nadu, T K Rajendran to take appropriate action against the accused. "The commission is seriously concerned about the safety and security of the women in the state of Tamil Nadu," Sharma said in a letter. "Considering the gravity of the matter, it is requested that appropriate action be taken as per the relevant provisions of law against all the accused and a detailed action taken report in the matter be sent to the commission," she added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) China is in a "league of its own" when it comes to human rights violations, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday as Washington slammed Beijing for rights violations and deterioration of conditions. In its annual report, the State Department alleged that in 2018, the Chinese government significantly intensified its campaign of mass detention of members of Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang). "There's China, which is in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations. In just 2018, China intensified its campaign of detaining Muslim minority groups at record levels," Pompeo said as he released the annual Congressional-mandated country reports on human rights. "Today, more than one million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslims are interred in reeducation camps designed to erase their religious and ethnic identities. "The government also is increasing its persecution against Christians, Tibetans and anyone who espouses different views from those or advocates of those of government or advocates change in government," Pompeo alleged. The report alleged that the Chinese authorities were reported to have arbitrarily detained 800,000 to possibly more than two million Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs and other Muslims in internment camps designed to erase religious and ethnic identities. Government officials claimed that the camps were needed to combat terrorism, separatism and extremism. International media, human rights organisations, and former detainees reported security officials in the camps abused, tortured, and killed some detainees, it alleged. The latest annual report evaluates the practices of roughly 200 countries and territories. In his opening remarks, Pompeo listed countries like Iran, South Sudan and Nicaragua, in addition to China, as some of the worst abusers of human rights. "Today, the State Department continues to play a leading role in championing human rights across the globe, honouring the vision of our founders and expressing our time-honoured American aspiration for all people to be free," he said. Pompeo said that their aim is always to identify human rights challenges and use American influence and power to move every nation towards better, more consistent human rights practices. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Asserting that law must not be applied selectively, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said if his brother-in-law Robert Vadra can probed so can Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his alleged role in the Rafale deal. He also said economic growth is directly related to the mood of the nation and one cannot expect it to happen in a negative and fearful atmosphere. The Congress will change the mood of the country and make people feel happy and empowered, the Congress chief said while addressing women students at a college here. Gandhi, who asked students to refer to him as Rahul, said the law must apply to everybody and not be applied selectively. He said this in response to a question on Vadra, who is being probed in connection with a money laundering case related to purchase of assets abroad and a land case in Rajasthan's Bikaner district. During his informal interaction with the students, he also brought up the issue of the Rafale deal and reiterated his allegations about the pricing of the aircraft and the process. "I will be the first person to say it... Investigate Robert Vadra but also investigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi," he said. Modi is a "corrupt" man, he bypassed negotiations and ran parallel negotiations on the Rafale deal, Gandhi alleged while responding to the question. The Congress chief said the prime minister should have the guts to face the media and asked why Modi was "hiding". The BJP and the government have repeatedly rejected the Congress's allegation of corruption in the Rafale fighter jet deal. He also alleged that the BJP's idea is to capture every institution of the country and run them from Nagpur, the RSS headquarters. Gandhi said the Congress would pass the women's reservation bill if it comes to power. "Don't see enough women in leadership positions. You cannot have women in power in India until the attitude towards them changes," he told the cheering crowd. In response to a question, he said he had learnt the lessons of humility and love from his mother Sonia Gandhi. He asked the gathering, "Did you like demonetisation?" When the audience answered, "No", he said, "I think it's pretty clear the damage demonetisation did. PM should have taken your advice." Gandhi, who asked the students to challenge him and "make him uncomfortable", also questioned whether the prime minister could stand in a large audience and answer people's questions. Referring to Modi's policies on Jammu and Kashmir, he said these were setting fire to the state and blamed the Centre for not strategically and systematically handling terrorism. As soon as Modi assumed power, he made a "huge mistake" of forging an alliance with PDP just for the sake of power. "Today Narendra Modi ji's policies are actually setting fire to Kashmir," he said, alleging that it was his policies that were allowing Pakistan to carry out terrorist acts in India. Gandhi underscored the need to engage the people of Kashmir and bring them "on our side." The prime minister's policies "pushes the people away so you cannot fight terrorism with one off gestures," he said. Noting that it was "our responsibility" to stop the neighbouring country from carrying out terror strikes and save our people, Gandhi said, "It is not good enough to say that 45 CRPF men died and now we will do something." He sought to know why the attack (in Pulwama) was not stopped in the first place. Forty CRPF personnel were killed and five injured on February 14 in one of the deadliest terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir when a Jaish-e-Mohammad suicide bomber rammed a vehicle carrying explosives into their bus in Pulwama district. Claiming that the Congress pursued a policy of systematic and strategic approach in Jammu and Kashmir, he said the NDA government had not followed a similar policy. "We actually crushed terrorism," he said and referred to the "drastic fall" in the number of soldiers and people killed during UPA's tenure. The Congress followed a multi-pronged approach when it came to power in 2004 and toed both systematic and strategic lines, he said. "And it was successful," he said adding it led to diplomatic isolation of Pakistan. Gandhi also called his party's minimum income guarantee scheme a revolutionary idea. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) German sporting goods maker Adidas said Wednesday it booked vaulting profits in 2018, but crimped its expectations for this year as it runs into limits on production capacity. Net profit at the Herzogenaurach-based group leaped 45 per cent year-on-year, to 1.7 billion euros (USD 1.9 billion), Adidas said. The firm booked an 3.0-per cent increase in revenues to a record 21.9 billion euros last year, a figure it aims to lift by "between five and eight per cent" in 2019. But while Adidas claimed in a statement to see a "strong increase in demand" for its clothing, "supply chain shortages" mean it will not manage to keep up. "Growth is expected to be negatively impacted, particularly in North America during the first half of the year," it added. The region had been one of the "strategic growth drivers" contributing double-digit expansion to 2018's result alongside China and the group's growing e-commerce operation, chief executive Kasper Rorsted said. Across the world, Adidas' flagship three-stripe brand saw sales grow 9.0 per cent adjusted for currency effects. But subsidiary Reebok's turnover fell 3.0 per cent, continuing a struggle for growth that has persisted since Adidas took it over in 2005. Looking ahead to 2019, Asia will defend its title as the Adidas group's sales powerhouse with double-digit expansion, while North America and emerging markets are expected to add high single-digit figures. Meanwhile the firm hopes to "return to growth" in Europe after a 6.0-per cent decline in sales in the final quarter of 2018, forecasting "a slight increase" in currency-adjusted revenues. Adidas aims for a bottom line between 10 and 14 per cent higher than 2018, at up to 1.95 billion euros. And it said it would offer investors a dividend of 3.35 euros per share for last year, up 29 percent on 2017. But the higher payout failed to impress the market, with the group's stock falling 5.6 per cent to 198.15 euros by 9:15 am in Frankfurt (0815 GMT), trailing the DAX index of blue-chip shares. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The National Green Tribunal has directed the Uttarakhand and the UP pollution control boards to publicise the water quality of the Ganga river at all strategic locations on a monthly basis and indicate if it is fit for bathing and drinking. A bench headed by NGT Chairperson Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel warned that the failure to do so may result in coercive action against the pollution control board of both states. The tribunal also rapped the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) over its affidavit which alleged that Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal have not provided relevant information for the stretch from Kanpur to Buxar (Phase-II) and Buxar to Ganga Sagar (Phase-III). It said that the affidavit filed by the NMCG presents a dismal picture. "It has indicated that the states have not provided the information and, therefore, action plans could not be formulated within the stipulated time frame. The lackadaisical approach of the NMCG can hardly be appreciated as it has been set up by the government with the sole object for rejuvenation of Ganga and its functioning and coordination with the states has been specified in The River Ganga (Rejuvenation, Protection and Management) Authorities Order, 2016," it said. The tribunal said there is no justification for the delay in filing the action plan by the NMCG and the state governments as the Ganga has been declared a "national river". "We may have to take coercive action, including compensation being required to be paid by the NMCG and the states of UP, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal for not responding and failing to formulate the action plans for Phase II and III," the tribunal said. "We give final opportunity to the NMCG and the concerned state governments of UP, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal to take further steps forthwith, latest within seven days and file the action plans before April 30, particularly indicating interception and diversion of each drain to the existing or proposed sewage treatment plant, utilisation plan for treated sewage and demarcating of the flood plain zone, preventing encroachments, etc," the tribunal said. "The NMCG may also, in consultation with the states, specify the issues relating to the maintenance of e-flow as applicable for the states of UP, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal," it added. The green panel also directed the Uttar Pradesh government to ensure that the committee headed by Justice Arun Tandon is consulted with regards to post-Kumbh Mela management of waste in Allahabad. The matter is fixed for next hearing on May 2. The panel also noted that its directions relating to the interception of drains, construction of sewage treatment plants, setting up of common effluent treatment plants at Jajmau, Unnao and Banthar have not been complied with till date and the common effluent treatment plants are not meeting the stipulated standards. "Since NMCG and UP state have failed to ensure setting up of CETP at Jajmau and upgradation at Unnao and Banthar, we direct NMCG, CPCB and UPPCB to examine whether tanneries who are members of such CETP are to be closed till compliant CETPs are set up. The directions of this tribunal are clear," it said. The tribunal had earlier said that the water of the Ganga, between Haridwar and Unnao in Uttar Pradesh, was unfit for drinking and bathing, and expressed anguish over the situation. The green panel had said that innocent people drank and bathed in the river with reverence, without knowing that it may adversely affect their health. It had directed the NMCG to install display boards at gaps of 100 kilometres, indicating whether the water was fit for bathing or drinking. Voicing dissatisfaction over the steps taken by the Uttarakhand government to clean the Ganga, the NGT had said the situation was extraordinarily bad and hardly anything effective has been done to clean the river. The green panel, in a detailed judgment, had passed a slew of directions to rejuvenate the Ganga and declare as 'No Development Zone' an area of 100 metres from the edge of the river between Haridwar and Unnao. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Automobile dealers' body FADA Wednesday said retail sales of passenger vehicles (PV) in February declined by 8.25 per cent to 2,15,276 units as compared to the same period last year, hit by lower offtake by end customers. According to Federation of Automobile Dealers Associations (FADA), PV sales stood at 2,34,632 units in February 2018. Two-wheeler sales declined by 7.97 per cent to 11,25,405 units last month as compared with 12,22,883 units in year-ago period. "After a month of spike in PV sales in January which was largely due to year-end stock clearance getting extended and few new launches which generated some excitement, the industry is once again witnessing downward trend as February turned out to be one of the slowest month for auto retail during this financial year," FADA President Ashish Harsharaj Kale said in a statement. Domestic auto sales are experiencing a prolonged slowdown as it is already been six months of downturn with no positive triggers visible in near term, he added. "Starting with the huge hike in insurance costs in September, we have seen a lot of negative factors come together in the past few months, leading to major postponement in purchase decisions and overall weakening of consumer sentiment," Kale said. across the country are in a high stock situation across all categories and inventory levels of passenger and commercial vehicles, which had seen partial correction in the past two months, but are now back to the unsustainable levels seen in November 2018, he added. "FADA has been highlighting the high level of inventory amongst the two-wheeler dealers and would like to express serious concern that it has now reached alarming proportions and in some geographies has breached the unheard level of 100 days of stock," Kale said. Dealers are already facing a substantial increase in operational costs in recent times due to various factors as well as increased working capital needs, and would be urgently looking to reduce their inventory in the months of March and April, he added. Retail sales of commercial vehicle during last month declined by 7.08 per cent to 61,134 units as compared with 65,789 units in February 2018. Three-wheeler sales also declined by 10.32 per cent in February at 50,263 units, as compared with 56,045 units in the year-ago period. Total automobile sales during February declined by 8.06 per cent to 14,52,078 units as compared with 15,79,349 units in February 2018. Last week, the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) had reported 1.11 per cent drop in wholesale PV sales in February. It was the seventh decline in PV sales in last eight months. The continued spell of weak sales has prompted the auto industry body to suggest that PVs will miss even the scaled down forecast of 6 per cent for the ongoing fiscal. Congress president Wednesday promised 33 per cent reservation of government jobs for women and reforms in the Goods and Services Tax(GST) if the party-led UPA wins the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. Launching the UPA's campaign in Tamil Nadu during a hectic day-long visit to the southern state, Gandhi also asserted law must not be applied selectively and that if his brother-in-law Robert Vadra can be probed for any alleged irregularities so can Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his alleged role in the Rafale jet deal. Gandhi touched upon a range of issues during his informal interaction with students of Stella Maris College for Women and at a conference in Chennai and a poll rally in Nagercoil. He listed unemployment and farmers distress as the key issues for the Lok Sabha polls. Congress has tied up with DMK in Tamil Nadu where 39 seats are at stake. Observing there were not many women in leadership positions, Gandhi said if his party comes to power it will reserve 33 per cent of all government jobs at the national level for women. "One of the things that we have decided that in 2019 we are going to pass the women's reservation bill in Lok Sabha, Vidhan Sabhas and we are also going to reserve 33 per cent of all government jobs at the national level for women. That is a starting point," he said in a response to a question by a student. Wearing a jeans and T-shirt, Gandhi also said he has "genuine" affection for Narendra Modi and that is what he tried to show when he hugged the prime minister after watching him become "very angry" in Parliament. During his interaction, he recalled the day he hugged Modi in the Lok Sabha and said he cannot hate him since love "is in the country's grain, every religion, and the Tamil people". When a student asked why he chose to hug the prime minister, Gandhi said he watched a 'very angry' Modi in Parliament running down his party, his late father Rajiv Gandhi and mother Sonia. However, deep inside, he said, he felt affection for Modi and he thought the prime minister was angry "because he is not able to see the beauty of the world". "So I thought that at least from my side, I should show him some affection." When Gandhi said, "I genuinely feel love for the prime minister," the students broke into laughter and raised their voices, to which he repeated "I genuinely do (love him)."Gandhi, who asked the students to challenge him and "make him uncomfortable", also questioned whether the prime minister could stand in a large audience and answer people's questions. Exuding confidence that a Congress-led Opposition would emerge victorious in the Lok Sabha polls, Gandhi promised initiatives such as reforms in the goods and services tax(GST), encompassing its simplest form, and a "phenomenal and revolutionary idea" of a minimum income guarantee scheme. He also said economic growth is directly related to the mood of the nation and one cannot expect it to happen in a negative and fearful atmosphere. The Congress will change the mood of the country and make people feel happy and empowered, the Congress chief said. Gandhi, who asked students to refer to him as Rahul, said the law must apply to everybody and not be applied selectively. He said this in response to a question on Vadra, who is being probed in connection with a money laundering case related to purchase of assets abroad and a land case in Rajasthan's Bikaner district. During his interaction, he also brought up the issue of the Rafale deal and reiterated his allegations about the pricing of the aircraft and the process. "I will be the first person to say it... Investigate Robert Vadra but also investigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi," he said. Modi is a "corrupt" man, he bypassed negotiations and ran parallel negotiations on the Rafale deal, Gandhi alleged while responding to the question. The Congress chief said the prime minister should have the guts to face the media and asked why Modi was "hiding". The BJP and the government have repeatedly rejected the Congress's allegation of corruption in the Rafale fighter jet deal. He also alleged that the BJP's idea is to capture every institution of the country and run them from Nagpur, the RSS headquarters. At his conference, Gandhi said he harboured no hatred towards those convicted for the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and asserted that it was for the courts to decide on their release. On Rajiv's assassination in 1991, the Congress chief said it had two aspects. "While one was personal, which we have dealt with, the other was the legal issue, which has to take its course. Whatever course the legal issue takes, we are happy with it," Gandhi said. "We are quite forgiving people. We do not have animosity or hatred towards anybody and it is for the courts to decide (on the convicts' release)." Months ago, the Tamil Nadu government recommended the release of seven convicts in the case to Governor Banwarilal Purohit. The move was fully backed by all state parties. At his public rally, Gandhi launched a frontal attack on the AIADMK-BJP alliance in Tamil Nadu, alleging the AIADMK government was controlled by the Prime Minister's Office, something that has never happened before. "In the past DMK and AIADMK fought each other, there were big leaders on both sides. However, never was a government in Tamil Nadu controlled from Delhi," Gandhi said, kickstarting his campaign in Nagercoil in Kanyakumari district. Rajasthan chief electoral officer (CEO) Anand Kumar on Wednesday directed departmental nodal officers to monitor daily sale of liquor in their respective areas during the Lok Sabha polls. "Liquor sale and sale on the basis of slips should be monitored during the model code of conduct. Monitoring should be done to curb retail sale of liquor from godowns, besides strengthening informer mechanism and increasing number of check-posts," he said in a meeting of nodal officers here. Lok Sabha polls in Rajasthan would be held on April 29 and March 6, which are the fourth and fifth phases of the seven-phase parliamentary election. He also directed the state-level banking committee to closely monitor transactions above Rs 1 lakh and issued directives to all the banks to not open separate bank accounts of candidates. He said the Income Tax Department should constitute teams to monitor flow of cash at airports, besides constituting teams at district levels. Additional Chief Electoral Officer Dr Jogaram, while discussing the agenda points in the meeting, said all nodal officers should ensure the arrangements in the order of instructions as told by the Election Commission of India. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) : Engineering Services veteran V G Ramesh Kumar has joined Bengaluru-based Ibhaan Digital Edge Advance Solutions (P) Ltd as its Chief Operations Officer. Kumar has experience of more than 38 years in the rail transportation industry, of which 27 years was with the Indian Railways where he held key positions, and the later 11 years with the Global Transportation Industries, a company release said. He had last served as Head of Engineering India (Railways & Mass Transit) with Ansaldo STS, a Hitachi Group company in India. His experience in the corporate global transportation systems include his role as Chief Project Manager in Ahmedabad Metro Rail project and in Malaysian Railway doubling and electrification signaling project of Seremban-Gemas Project, the release added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) : Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu Wednesday said climate change, growing levels of pollution and eradicating poverty were some of the major challenges faced by the modern world and out-of-the-box ideas were required to tackle them. Participating in a function, here, he said, the challenges faced by the modern world were multi-dimensional and there was increasing urbanisation and industrialisation on the one hand and agrarian distress on the other. "Climate change, growing levels of pollution, increasing demand for energy, eradicating poverty are major challenges that require innovative and out-of-the-box ideas.", he said. The government and the private sector need to step up the funds for taking up research and development, he said. "Similarly, the linkages between the academia and the industry have to grow organically", he added. Naidu was here to inaugurate the Centre of Excellence for Manufacturing of National Initiative for Developing and Harnessing Innovation at Vel Tech University, Avadi. Holding that innovation, incubation and start-ups were the buzzwords in today's world, he said, it was time for India to seize and promote the culture of innovation and technology-based entrepreneurship. India has to stay ahead of the curve if it has to play a meaningful and important role in the fourth industrial revolution, Naidu said. "Innovation, incubation and start-ups are the buzzwords in today's word and countries which are knowledge- centric and technology-driven will play an increasing role in global economy," he said. India is a tremendous demographic dividend that was waiting to be realised, the Vice-President said. "We have to stay ahead of the curve, if we have to play a meaningful and important role in 4th industrial revolution," he added. Pointing out that 65 per cent of the Indian population was below the age of 35 years, he said, "We need to convert this huge human capital into a force multiplier for the economy by technologically empowering the youth." The Vice-President said, the country has an opportunity to focus on innovation in the field of education to meet the global competition. "But this requires tremendous transformation from reorienting the curriculum framework to refining the infrastructure with the sole objective of imparting world class quality education," he said. Innovation and entrepreneurship are going to be the twin engines that propel India to a new era of economic prosperity and social inclusion, he said. The country was producing lakhs of engineering graduates every year and the need of the hour was to provide the right eco-systems to make India a leader in start-ups and technology driven high growth ventures, he said. "Therefore, it cannot be business as usual. We have to press the accelerator to be in the forefront of a new technology driven world...," he said. The Global Innovation Index has ranked India in 57th position ahead of many smaller countries, Naidu said, adding, "we need to focus on reorienting our higher education system, particularly engineering and scientific streams, to ensure students come up with solutions to the problems faced by the country and world". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BJP national general secretary Muralidhar Rao Wednesday criticised Kerala Chief Electoral Officer Teeka Ram Meena's directive not to use the Sabarimala temple row in the coming Lok Sabha polls, saying it was not just a matter of religion but a "Constitutional issue". "Sabarimala issue is the issue of the public and it is a matter related to human rights and fundamental rights," he told reporters here on the sidelines of a programme organised by the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM). He was replying to a question on the raging controversy over the state CEO's directive to the political parties when the general elections were just weeks away. "...its is constitutional issue and not just a religious matter..it is becoming part of the discussion and discussion is there..," he said. When pointed out that the issue of Ayodhya and Babri Masjid had been mentioned by leaders during the time of polls, the BJP leader said it was part of public discourse. "If anybody mentions, how can we stop? It is not one political party which is talking about it..but every party has its own perspective and talking about the matter..public is also participating in the discussion... that's called democracy," he said. Meena had Monday said "inviting religious feelings, using any kind of Supreme Court judgement, invoking or soliciting the votes in the name of religion or by inciting religious feelings is a clear violation of the model code of conduct." BJP leaders, including former state unit chief Kummanam Rajasekharan, and Congress have opposed the directive, saying the matter was about beliefs. BJP has said it would approach the Chief Election Commissioner on the issue. Earlier, while interacting with the students and young professionals as part of the "Youth Townhall" programme, organised by BJYM, Rao said the BJP was not claiming it would solve the Sabarimala issue. "BJP, as a political party, issued a statement that we should go for review petition and tell the Supreme Court that these are logics of the believers. "Once you give a chance to discuss, argue and hearing, then, definitely the problem will get resolved...and we have faith in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence," he said. He said the CPI(M)-led LDF government had not gone for a review petition on the September 28, 2018 Supreme Court verdict permitting women of all age groups into the Sabarimala shrine, even though Lord Ayyapap devotees in and outside the state had requested for it. "They (state government) could have gone for the review petition..but they are not doing it...but they are doing everything to scuttle it," he alleged. Rao said the grand alliance by the opposition parties against the BJP would not be able to offer a "stable, development-centric and corruption-free government." The leader also expressed confidence that the Narendra Modi-led BJP-NDA government would come back to power with a majority of not less than 300 seats in the Lok Sabaha polls. Sabarimala had witnessed frenzied protests over the women entry issue after LDF government chose not to file a review petition against the apex court order and went ahead with its implementation. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court Wednesday pulled up the Assam government for not being sincere enough in deporting from the state, observing the situation has gone too far and become a joke. The apex court gave vent to its ire while dealing with the functioning of the foreigners tribunals and the problem of "external aggression" faced by the state due to influx of A bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna also questioned the Assam government whether the foreigners tribunals and the law-enforcing authorities are functioning properly. "It has become a joke now. We must say that the situation has gone too far. You have not done anything. The foreigners tribunals have identified 56,697 persons as foreigners and yet only around 900 persons are in detention centres," the bench said, telling the Assam government it was not able to deport to the country of their origin. Referring to the 2005 verdict in the Illegal Migrants(determination by Tribunal) Act--IMDT--case filed by Sarbananda Sonowal, the incumbent chief minister of Assam, the bench said it was held that Assam was facing threat of "external aggression" because of the large scale influx of immigrants. "We would like to know from government of India and government of Assam about what is being done about this threat," it asked. "It is evident from the record as how sincerely the government of Assam is dealing with the issue and how it plans to go further. It seems no body is bothered. We want everything in detail." Not satisfied with the replies of Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Assam government on the issue of functioning of foreigners tribunals, the bench said it would summon the chief secretary and the home secretary of the state to explain the situation. "We are not even told who are the foreigners or who were detected or suspected to be foreigners. Who are the presiding officers in the foreigners tribunals and how many foreigners tribunals are functioning properly in the state," the bench said. Mehta said that the affidavit with all the queries of the bench will be filed in the course of the day and urged the court to hear the matter on Thursday or any other day. He said that 150 people who have come to India on valid documents need to be deported while 823 people who are mostly illegal immigrants are detained in six detention centres of the state. The bench asked Mehta to inform it about how many migrants have been declared as foreigners by the tribunal and where are those persons. The solicitor general replied in the past ten years 56,697 people were declared as foreigners and only 823 people are living in detention centres. "Most of the persons against whom proceedings get initiated in the foreigners tribunal try to abscond and mingle with the crowd. Under the law they cannot be detained with the start of proceedings and can only be detained after the award from the tribunal," he said. Mehta said that it is only for this reason that most of the award from the tribunal are exparte and explains the huge difference between the award and persons in detention centres. The submission of Mehta further annoyed the bench which questioned whether the law enforcing machinery and the foreigners tribunal are working properly. The bench asked him as to how many detention centres are working and how many people are being kept in such centres. Mehta said that around 900 people who have entered the country illegally or whose term have expired and declared as foreigners are kept in six detention centres of the state which are connected with the district jails. "You are unable to deal with the situation. You have to explain everything as how the detention centres are functioning and in what conditions. Where are the foreigners tribunals located and how are they functioning. Are they adequate? Is the order of tribunal enforceable? What is the number of illegal foreigners," the bench said. It said that for the present the court is not insisting on personal presence of Assam chief secretary but the state government should file a detailed affidavit during the course of the day explaining everything. The apex court was hearing a PIL filed by activist Harsh Mander through advocate Prashant Bhushan on the plight of foreigners in detention centres. It posted the matter for further hearing on March 27. The court had earlier expressed concern over thousands of illegal migrants being kept in detention centres for years in Assam without being repatriated or deported to their countries of origin. It had raised several issues connected with the detention centre and said the detainees could not be held for an indefinite period. On January 28, the apex court had asked the Centre and the state to provide details of functional detention centres in Assam and the foreigners detained in them during the last 10 years. The Centre said over 27,000 foreigners have been pushed back at border points while attempting to enter India illegally. The Supreme Court on Wednesday pulled up the Assam government over inadequacies in the functioning of foreigners tribunals in the state and sought details on it by March 27. The government told a bench, headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, that 50,000 migrants were declared foreigners by the tribunal in the past 10 years. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Assam government, said around 900 people were kept in six detention centres of the state. The bench, which also comprised Justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna, said the state government would have to specify through an affidavit whether the foreigners tribunals functioning in the state were adequate and how they were functioning. The top court, however, added that it was not insisting on the presence of Assam chief secretary in the court at present. The apex court was hearing a PIL filed by activist Harsh Mander through advocate Prashant Bhushan on the plight of foreigners in detention centres. The plea alleges that they were kept in detention indefinitely just because they were not Indians and were treated as "illegal aliens". During the previous hearing, the court had expressed concern over thousands of illegal migrants being kept in detention centres for years in Assam without being repatriated or deported to their countries of origin. It had raised several issues connected with the detention centre and said the detainees could not be held for an indefinite period. The apex court had also sought to know the condition of detention centres, saying the PIL alleged sub-human conditions there. Mehta had said there was a need for evolving a mechanism for repatriating them and it should be done expeditiously. The solicitor general was responding to the January 28 queries of the apex court which had asked the Centre and the state to provide details of functional detention centres in Assam and the foreigners detained in them during the last 10 years. He had told the apex court that 938 people were lodged in six detention centres in Assam and 823 of them have been declared foreigners by tribunals. The Centre had said over 27,000 foreigners have been pushed back at border points while attempting to enter India illegally. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court on Wednesday pulled up the Assam government over inadequacies in the functioning of the foreigners' tribunal and sought details on it by March 27. A bench of Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi along with Justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna was informed by the Assam government that in past 10 years over 50,000 migrants were declared as foreigners by the tribunal. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for Assam government, said around 900 people were kept in six detention centres of the state. The bench said the state government would have to specify whether the foreigners tribunals functioning in the state were adequate and how they were functioning. The top court said at present it was not insisting on presence of Assam chief secretary in the court, but would like to know through an affidavit filed by the state whether foreigners tribunals functioning in the state were adequate or not. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Geely is now set to test international waters with an all-new compact BEV model code-named GE11. Recently, the automaker announced the name of the GE11Jihe A, meaning Geometry A in Chinese. Following the Xingyue coupe SUV, which is named after a main-belt asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, Geely did a new naming creation by using a mathematical term. The new BEV model will go on sale on April 11 in Singapore and may be priced between RMB150,000 and RMB170,000, according to previous reports. From the official photos exposed before, we can see that the Jihe A adopts a closed-off front face, which features a new logo officially named quantum silver shield. The lack of a grille suggests that the GE11 is a pure electric vehicle that has no internal combustion engine under the hood. As to the side profile, smarter aerodynamics is characterized by sharp body lines and hidden door handles that helps reduce the air resistancedrag coefficient for the car is 0.2375Cd. The new vehicle measures 4,736mm long, 1,804mm wide and 1,503mm tall with a wheelbase that spans 2,700mm. Featuring a fastback design, the rear end adopts flat taillights that are connected by a chrome trim. Besides, there are two charging ports at the right-front wheel eyebrow and the left-rear wheel eyebrow respectively. With a minimalism design, the interior largely covered by gray materials. The dual-spoke flat bottom accentuates a sense of sports. In addition, many key presses are integrated in the auxiliary instrument panel and the center console that carries a large-sized touch screen. Under the 12.3-inch high-definition LCD is a 1.6-meter ambiance light bar that is available for 7 colors. The new vehicle is able to run at a top speed of 150km/h powered by a 177hp (130kW) electric motor and a lithium-ion power battery pack offered by CATL. It will provide users with two range options410km and 500km. / -- Kolkata police raided shops in Radha Bazaar Lane on Saturday evening (9.3.2019), and seized large quantities of fake watches bearing the trademarks of CASIO. Umesh Kumar Gupta, Legal Head of Casio India said, "Casio has been contemplating the raid action in Radha Bazaar since a long time. We would like to thank Kolkata police for their swift action. The Company will continue to take appropriate action to protect its brand image and safeguard the intellectual property associated with CASIO products. Interest of customers is paramount and the Company will also continue to educate customers about the genuine Casio products and authorized channels." The brand is continuously advising consumers to purchase Casio products only from authorized retail partners, modern retail outlets and official online channel partners. Consumers can visit https://locator.casio.com/en-IN/store/wat/map/ and https://www.casio-intl.com/in/en/news/2015/BewareofFakeCasioCalculatorswhenpurchasingonline/ or contact Casio India on casiocare@casio.co.in for more information on its official channel partners. About Casio India Casio India Co. Pvt. Ltd. has been operating in India since 1996 and has established the distribution channel as well as the brand for most of its products. Casio Computer Co. Ltd, Japan, the parent company of CIC is engaged into manufacturing and marketing of various consumer products throughout the world. Casio India's range of products include sales & marketing of Handheld Calculators, Desktop Calculators, Scientific Calculators, Printing Calculators, Label Printers, Laser-LED based green Projectors, Wrist Watches, Clocks, ECR (Electronic Cash register) and EMI (Electronic Musical Instrument). The company has also established service Centre's across the country to provide after-sales-service at the doorstep of the customer. Today, Casio is known for its reliable product quality and exemplary innovations and is one of the world's most recognized brands due to its vast product range. Source: Casio India Co. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A number of Hurriyat Conference leaders arrested in a terror funding case accused the NIA on Wednesday of delaying the case, which also involves Lashkar-e-Taiba chief and 26/11 Mumbai attacks mastermind Hafiz Saeed. The NIA had accused Saeed and others, including Hizbul Mujahideen head Syed Salahuddin, of "conspiring to wage war against the government" and fomenting trouble in the Kashmir Valley. Some of the accused arrested in the case, including Farooq Ahmad Dar alias Bitta Karate, Mohammad Akbar Khanday and Raja Mehrajuddin Kalwal, besides hardline pro-Pakistan separatist Syed Ali Shah Geelani's son-in-law Altaf Shah alias Altaf Fantoosh, told the court that their bail applications are pending for a long time and the probe agency was seeking repeated adjournments. The submissions were made after the NIA sought adjournment on their bail matter on the ground that its Special Public Prosecutor was not available today. Meanwhile, Naval Kishore Kapoor, an UAE-based businessman arrested in the case, requested through advocate Shariq Reyaz that his bail application be heard separately since allegations against him were different than the other accused persons. The court had earlier allowed the Enforcement Directorate to quiz Kapoor after Special Public Prosecutor Nitesh Rana, who is representing the agency pro bono (without charging), told the court that his interrogation was required to unearth the money laundering and the money trail. During the hearing on Wednesday, Advocate Rajat Kumar, appearing for Dar and other jailed accused, blamed the NIA for delaying the matter. "I am pressing for the bail for my clients. Case is being delayed for some time now, only on the ground that Zahoor Watali's (co-accused) bail is pending with the Supreme Court. My case is entirely different. "The case is going on for last two years. Kindly give me an early date of hearing. For last several dates only adjournment is being sought continuously," he told the court. The court has now posted the matter for further hearing on April 6. The NIA had earlier filed a charge sheet against the accused persons, also including Hizbul Mujahideen head Syed Salahuddin, in the case accusing them of "conspiring to wage war against the government" and fomenting trouble in the Kashmir Valley. The 12,794-page charge sheet and annexure, also alleged that officials of the Pakistan High Commission here were passing on money through businessman Zahoor Watali, who has been arrested, to separatists. The separatist leaders have been accused of taking a cut before handing over the money to foment trouble. Saeed has been accused of using the services of Watali for passing on the money to separatists and some individuals who were actively indulging in stone-pelting in various areas of the Valley, the NIA said in the charge sheet. The agency has charged Pakistan-based terrorists Saeed and Salahuddin, besides 10 others with criminal conspiracy, sedition, and under stringent provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. All the 10 arrested accused are currently in judicial custody. The agency has charged the Hurriyat leaders with acting under the overall guidance of and instructions from Saeed and Salahuddin, and their "Pakistani handlers". They have been accused of plotting strategies to launch violent protests. Saeed, Salahuddin and their Pakistani handlers informed people about the agenda of violence through "protest calendars", the NIA said. These calendars were released through newspapers, social media and religious leaders, it said. These acts were aimed at creating an atmosphere of terror and fear in Jammu and Kashmir, the NIA alleged in the charge sheet. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Serbia's aviation authorities barred Boeing 737 MAX planes from the country's airspace, a spokesperson told AFP Wednesday, joining a wave of government bans worldwide after a second deadly crash involving the model. Serbia has also banned the aircraft "for take-off and landing at all airports" in the country, a spokesman for the Civil Aviation Directorate said of the measure, which went into effect Tuesday. He explained that "Serbia is aligning itself with the directives of the European Union Aviation Safety Agency", which decided on Tuesday to close European airspace to Boeing 737 MAX. On Sunday, a new Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board. This followed the October crash of a Lion Air jet of the same model in Indonesia, claiming 189 lives. Despite the aviation giant's assurances that the aircraft is safe and reliable, countries including Britain, India and China have grounded the plane or banned it from their airspace as they await the results of the investigation into the crash. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Sikh-Americans have urged the to ensure that the work on the landmark is not impacted by the tension between India and in the aftermath of the terrorist attack. Tensions between India and flared up after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed killed 40 CRPF personnel in Jammu and Kashmir's district on February 14. India launched a counter-terror operation in Balakot on February 26. The next day, Air Force retaliated and downed a in an aerial combat and captured its pilot, who was handed over to India on March 1. A delegation of eminent Sikh-Americans from various parts of the US, gathered in Washington DC on Tuesday to present a memorandum to the here. The delegation, under the banner of California-based United Sikh Mission, also met nearly half a dozen lawmakers, including two Senators and Congressman Greg Pence, elder brother of the US Vice President, Mike Pence, urging them that the US play a role a role in ensuring peace in the region. Leaders of various Sikh organisations including SikhsPAC from Indiana, Gadhar Memorial Foundation from Oregon, Sikh SEVA from Virginia, Sikh Religious Society from Illinois, Let's Share a Meal from New Jersey and those from various gurdwaras formed part of the delegation. ALSO READ: India to construct passenger terminal building for Kartarpur corridor The ongoing tension between India and Pakistan "should not slow the progress" that has been made on the implementation of the Kartarpur Corridor, said Rashpal Singh Dhindsa, founder of United Sikh Mission in a memorandum submitted to Indian to the US Harsh Vardhan Shringla. "The approval of the peace corridor is a great step in the right direction for all parties affected by this conflict. Now is the time to continue our efforts to create a peaceful resolve to this situation," the memorandum said. India and Pakistan agreed to open up a special border crossing linking Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Pakistan's Kartarpur - the final resting place of Sikh faith's founder Guru Nanak Dev - to Dera Baba Nanak shrine in India's Gurdaspur district. The corridor will facilitate the visa-free travel of Indian Sikh pilgrims to Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur. "There is no time for us to slow down or stop completely. Now is the time for action. And we should not let anything get in the way of our great progress," said the memorandum submitted by the Sikh delegation to the Indian / -- Simplilearn, a leading digital skills training provider, today announced that the company has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) to upskill learners in digital skills. As a part of the MoU, 33 of Simplilearn's courses will be accredited by NSDC, making Simplilearn a part of the government's Skill India program. (Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/535442/Simplilearn_Logo.jpg ) The first year of partnership aims to train 3,000 learners from across the country. Simplilearn will provide essential training and upskilling solutions to all the registered candidates of NSDC in various digital skills through its 33 courses. The course details will be available on the Skill India portal for the interested candidates. NSDC certified courses are highly regarded in the public sector and hence, students or professionals may see higher chances of getting jobs in their respective fields. "We are honoured to gain accreditation by the NSDC which has recognised the impact Simplilearn's courses can create in making professionals job-ready with the right skills," said Krishna Kumar, Founder & CEO of Simplilearn. "With digital transformation disrupting organisations of all sizes across sectors, business functions and job roles are being reprised which is leading to a mismatch between the skills in demand and the current pool of talent. Our focus has always been to constantly upskill professionals and the young talent pool so that they stay relevant in the industry and benefit from the wide array of modern job roles that have been opening up." "NSDC, through its wide network of partners, endeavours to bring in diverse technological interventions to help build an efficient learning system and create a workforce for new age skills," said Dr. Manish Kumar, Managing Director & CEO, National Skill Development Corporation. Simplilearn has helped more than 1,000,000 professionals across 150 countries to upskill, get trained and be prepared for the digital future. Being learner-centric has been extremely critical to Simplilearn's operations and this, coupled with high-engagement curriculums, has resulted in achieving 72 percent completion rates - much higher than the industry average. Simplilearn recently won the Stevie Award for Sales and Customer Service, one of the world's most coveted prizes for businesses to recognize their commitment to customers. About Simplilearn: Simplilearn enables professionals and enterprises to succeed in the fast-changing digital economy. The company provides outcome-based online training across digital technologies and applications such as Big Data, Machine Learning, AI, Cloud Computing, Cyber Security, Digital Marketing and other emerging technologies. Based in San Francisco, CA, Raleigh, NC and Bangalore, India; Simplilearn has helped more than one million professionals and 1,000 companies across 150 countries get trained, acquire certifications and reach their business and career goals. The company's high-engagement curriculum blends self-paced online learning, instructor-led live virtual classrooms, hands-on projects, student collaboration and 24/7 global teaching assistance. Simplilearn was recognized by Training Industry as a Top 20 Online Learning Library Company of 2018. For more information, visit Simplilearn.com. About NSDC NSDC is one-of-its-kind public-private-partnership organisation with a mandate to facilitate skill development in partnership with private training providers. NSDC has approved over 400 training providers and 38 Sector Skill Councils, which are operating more than 7,000 skill training centres across 550+ districts in India. To date, NSDC has trained more than 1.4 crore people across sectors. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Sri Lankan Government appeared to be at loggerheads over the country's representation at the 40th session of the UN Human Rights Commission where a resolution to address the human rights concerns in the island nation will be taken up next week. Colombo is once again under international pressure to implement fully the measures identified by the UNHRC in 2015 to address human rights concerns after the United Kingdom and Germany on Tuesday tabled a resolution at the UN body in Geneva. The UN rights office calls for international investigations into alleged war crimes and encourages member states to prosecute Sri Lankans suspected of war crimes in accordance with universal jurisdiction principles. The resolution which Sri Lanka is expected to co-sponsor was also endorsed by Canada, Germany, Montenegro, North Macedonia, the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. There is a clear division within the government over its representation and the approach as was evident in Parliament on Wednesday. The leader of the House of Parliament and senior minister Lakshman Kiriella probed if President Maithripala Sirisena was sending his own delegation to attend the UNHRC sessions. An announcement from Sirisena said that he was sending his own men as part of the government delegation. Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who are from different political parties, are at loggerheads over governance. In October last year, Sirisena sacked Wickremesinghe in a move declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The prime minister was later restored after the apex court intervened. The government has come under fire from the main opposition for agreeing to co- sponsor the resolution. The government's defence has been that this strategy will prevent international war crimes allegations being continuously levelled against Sri Lankans through strengthened ownership of the implementation process. Kiriella asked Mahinda Samarasinghe, a Sirisena loyalist who had been named as a member of the team to Geneva, if Sirisena was sending his own men. Samarasinghe replied that even though he had pulled out from it, three others representing Sirisena will be attending. The aim is to show the consensus within the government, Samarasinghe said. However Sirisena's public statement made last month on the Geneva resolution said that the president wanted the UNHRC to grant Sri Lanka a reprieve to mind Sri Lanka's own business without any interference. Notwithstanding Sirisena's public statement on rights accountability sought by the UNHRC, the foreign ministry which is under Wickremesinghe's control reiterated the government's commitment to implement the UNHRC resolution. The main Tamil party legislator Tamil National Alliance (TNA) MA Sumanthiran questioned Sirisena's intentions in sending his own men who are in effect opposition representatives. The resolution presented in the UNHRC session calls for accountability to alleged human rights violations committed by both government troops and the LTTE during the last phase of the conflict in 2009. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Telecom industry body COAI has asked leading e-commerce companies such as Flipkart, Amazon India and Snapdeal to stop selling mobile signal boosters as their sale without a valid licence is a punishable offence. In a letter to e-commerce players, the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), whose members include Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea and Reliance Jio, mentioned mobile signal boosters and repeaters that require licence are being sold on their platforms. "Thus, it is pertinent to note that possession and sale of such equipment, without obtaining requisite permissions under the (Indian Telegraph) Act and rules framed thereunder constitutes violation of the provisions of the Act and is punishable offence," COAI Director-General Rajan S Mathews said. The letter was sent separately to Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Amazon India Country Manager Amit Agarwal, Snapdeal CEO Kunal Bahl, Rediff.com CEO Ajit Balakrishnan and Shopclues CEO Sanjay Sethi. Mathews said boosters and repeaters of wireless signal fall under the definition of wireless telegraph apparatus and wireless transmitter under the Indian Wireless Telegraph Act, which prohibits their sale without a licence. He cited Section 6 of the Act that states: "Whoever possesses any wireless transmitter in contravention of the provisions of Sections 3 shall be punished with imprisonment which may extend to three years, or with fine which may extend to one thousand rupees". The Department of Telecommunications had also written to e-commerce companies in 2015 and 2016 asking them to stop sale of products and equipment that require licence but the companies have not stopped their sale. A Snapdeal spokesperson said, "As an intermediary, Snapdeal has a robust takedown mechanism in compliance with its legal obligations. COAI's communication will be acted upon as per due process." An Amazon India spokesperson said: "Amazon operates an online marketplace in India. Sellers selling their products through the amazon.in marketplace are solely responsible for all necessary product compliance and are required to sell products which are legally allowed to be sold in India. Whenever concerns about the listed products get raised, we review the case with the sellers. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) TRS Working President K T Rama Rao Wednesday attacked the BJP-led NDA government, saying it has not done anything special for Telangana during its tenure. "What right do the BJP and Narendra Modi ji have to seek votes here when we have not been given even a half paisa extra except our share of taxes as per Constitution. BJP leaders should say," Rama Rao said, addressing a TRS preparatory meeting for the coming Lok Sabha elections. He said no special measure had been extended to Telangana by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. TRS should get 16 Lok Sabha seats and its ally AIMIM should retain the Hyderabad Lok Sabha constituency to ensure that Telangana plays a crucial role post the Lok Sabha polls and the state gets substantial funds and development projects, he said. The total number of Lok Sabha constituencies in Telangana is 17. BJP is doing with "communal feelings", while Congress does with "regional feelings," he claimed. The TRS working president had earlier said neither NDA nor UPA was in a position to form the government at the centre after the Lok Sabha elections. Meanwhile, BJP MP and former MP Bandaru Dattatreya told reporters in Delhi that the BJP would form the government at Centre without requiring the support of TRS. He found fault with Rama Rao's comments that the popularity graph of Modi was on the wane. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US President Donald Trump's former campaign chief Paul Manafort, sentenced to 47 months in prison last week for tax and bank fraud, returns to court on Wednesday to find out whether he faces even more jail time. Manafort, who turns 70 on April 1, is to appear before Judge Amy Berman Jackson in a federal court in Washington for sentencing on two conspiracy charges to which he has pleaded guilty. The veteran Republican political consultant and lobbyist faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison for each count. Jackson can decide whether any sentence she imposes runs concurrently with Manafort's current sentence or is tacked on to the end. Manafort's case is the highest-profile one yet stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He is one of a half-dozen former Trump associates and senior aides charged by Mueller, although none of them have been accused so far of direct collusion with Moscow to get Trump elected to the White House. Manafort was convicted by a jury in August of five counts of filing false income tax returns, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failing to report a foreign bank account. His conviction was a stunning downfall for a man who also worked on the White House bids of three Republican presidents -- Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush -- and party hopeful Bob Dole. The charges were not connected to Manafort's role in the Trump campaign, which he headed for two months in 2016, but were related to lucrative consulting work he did for Russian-backed Ukrainian politicians from 2004 to 2014. Prosecutors alleged that Manafort used offshore bank accounts to hide more than USD 55 million he earned working for the Ukrainians. The money was used to support a lavish lifestyle which included purchases of luxury homes and cars, antique rugs, and expensive clothes, including a USD 18,500 python jacket. Manafort was sentenced to 47 months in prison last week by US District Judge T.S. Ellis -- a jail term that was well below the federal sentencing guidelines of 19 to 24 years and was criticized by many as too lenient. Ellis described the guidelines as "excessive" and said Manafort had led an "otherwise blameless life" before being convicted of tax and bank fraud. Jackson may not prove to be as forgiving. She sent Manafort to jail last year after he was accused of tampering with witnesses, one of the two conspiracy charges to which he has pleaded guilty. And it was Jackson who ruled that Manafort had breached a plea agreement reached with the special counsel's office by lying repeatedly to investigators. Since June, Manafort has been jailed just outside Washington in Alexandria, Virginia, and he appeared in court in a wheelchair last week looking haggard, his once jet black hair now mostly gray. Trump has denounced the Mueller probe as a "political witch hunt" and dangled the possibility of pardons for some of those indicted by the special counsel, a former FBI director. Last week, Trump said Manafort has been going through a "very tough time" and that he "feels very badly" for him. Trump's remarks on Manafort contrasted sharply with what he had to say about his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, who has denounced his longtime boss as a racist, a conman and a cheat. "He directly asked me for a pardon," Trump said. "I said NO." Cohen is to begin serving a three-year prison sentence on May 6 for fraud, tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions and lying to Congress. Manafort's former deputy Rick Gates reached a plea deal with the special counsel's office and is awaiting sentencing. Former national security advisor Michael Flynn admitted lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials and is also awaiting sentencing. George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and spent 12 days in prison. Another Trump advisor, Roger Stone, awaits trial. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A colossal replica of the Lord Venkateswara shrine at Tirumala built in Telangana capital Hyderabad was thrown open to devotees Wednesday. The Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam, which governs the over 2000 Lord Venkateswara shrine at Tirumala near here, has built the replica temple at a cost of Rs.20 crore on a 3.5-acre site in the posh Jubilee Hills area in Hyderabad, a temple official told PTI here. After priests performed special rituals, including Mahakumbabhishekam (consecration) at the crack of dawn, the the devotees were allowed to offer prayers at the new shrine. Early in 2014 when Congress was at the helm of affairs in the undivided Andhra Pradesh, the TTD had decided to build a Lord Venkateswara temple in Hyderabad. In 2017, Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao had made two princely golden ornament offerings, totally weighing about 19 kg and worth about Rs.5 crore, to the presiding deity. The TTD has opened a replica temple of Lord Venkateswara in Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu and proposed to build another one in Amaravathi, the capital of Andhra Pradesh. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Wednesday accused Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being a "tyrant" who "massacred" Palestinian babies, in the latest exchange between the two leaders. "Hey Netanyahu, behave yourself. You are a tyrant, you are a tyrant who massacred seven-year-old Palestinian children," Erdogan told a rally, in response to the Israeli leader branding him a "dictator". Turkey and Israel have tense relations and Erdogan, who sees himself as a champion of the Palestinian cause, is a vocal critic of Israeli policies. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Police seized nearly half kg mephedrone worth Rs 18 lakh from a car in Maharashtra's Palghar district and arrested two persons, an official said Wednesday. Acting on a tip-off, police searched a car near Charoti toll naka on Mumbai-Ahmedabad highway Tuesday and recovered the banned drug from possession of its occupants, an official said. The accused are identified as Omar Usman Khan and Vasim Abdul Sattar Shaikh, he said. Both are residents of Mumbai. The duo were booked under various sections of the Narcotics Drug and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act. Furher investigation is underway. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The United States Special Forces Group stationed in Japan is involved in a joint exercise with India's National Security Guard here, aimed at enhancing the capabilities of the armed forces of the two countries. The US forces are from the 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) stationed out of Okinawa in Japan, a release from the US Consulate General said Wednesday. The Hyderabad-exercise would help build interoperability and comradeship between the two forces and was designed to enhance the capabilities of both Indian and U.S. armed forces, it said. The training focuses on mutual defense operations so both nations can more effectively employ forces and assist in the event of crises that may endanger public health and safety. The exercise will be overseen from the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi and U.S. Special Operations Pacific Command at Camp H.M. Smith in Hawaii, the release said. The U.S.-India security partnership is strong, and growing stronger. This Special Forces exercise in Hyderabad further advances our two countries' operational coordination, and it will clearly benefit both our nations, U.S. Consul General Katherine Hadda said. Trainings such as the ongoing exercise was critical to U.S. Special Operations Forces, as soldiers learn how to effectively work with Indian partners in new environments, experience that will be valuable should a crisis occur. The overall aim of the program was to enhance professionalism and the ability to operate together during times of crisis, the release said. The US has recognised India as a major defence partner, and military collaboration between the two countries was a result of high-level trust and also consistent efforts to broaden the ways in which they can work together, it added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A day after British Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit divorce bill was rejected in a bruising 149-vote defeat, MPs returned to the House of Commons on Wednesday to vote on whether to prevent the UK's exit from the European Union by the March 29 deadline without any deal in place. The latest motion to try and avert the no-deal Brexit, which would see UK crash out of the 28-member economic bloc without any transition phase, follows a rejection of May's withdrawal agreement 391 to 242 despite a final push by her to try and convince hard-Brexiteers that the concessions she had won to the controversial Irish backstop clause would not see the UK tied to EU rules indefinitely. "I may not have my own voice, but I understand the voice of the country," May said as she took to the Commons despatch box for her weekly Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs) on Wednesday, still struggling with a sore throat. "I believe we have a good deal. No deal is better than a bad deal but I have been working for us to leave on 29 March and leave with a good deal," she said. The motion tabled by her to be voted on Wednesday evening reads: "This House declines to approve leaving the European Union without a withdrawal agreement and a framework on the future relationship on 29 March." Besides, Speaker John Bercow announced that MPs will debate on two amendments to the government motion during yet another long day at Parliament in Westminster. While one amendment will consider ruling out a no-deal Brexit indefinitely, the second one will direct the government to pursue a Plan B divorce strategy. May will whip her MPs to vote against the first amendment, which is tabled by the backbench Conservative MP Caroline Spelman and Opposition Labour MP Jack Dromey and seeks to remove a phrase from the government's motion saying a no-deal Brexit remains the default option if a deal is not in place. However, her party MPs will be allowed to vote freely on the Plan B amendment, which seeks a so-called managed no-deal Brexit. If, as expected, MPs reject a no-deal Brexit on March 29 in the final vote on the government motion, May will have to announce how she plans to proceed. Rival groups of MPs are therefore seeking to influence the process by tabling amendments to any motion the government brings at this stage. If, on the other hand, MPs vote in favour of a no-deal exit from the EU, then the UK will cease to be a member of the economic bloc by March 29 and automatically revert to World Trade Organisation (WTO) norms on trade. Speaking moments after yet another Parliament defeat over Brexit on Tuesday night, May said MPs would have to decide whether they want to delay Brexit, hold another referendum, or whether they "want to leave with a deal but not this deal". While some hard-Brexiteers such as former Cabinet minister Boris Johnson are in favour of a no-deal exit, there is unlikely to be a majority for it in Parliament. The Opposition Labour Party has been demanding no-deal be taken off the table for months now. If no-deal is rejected, MPs will then vote on Thursday on delaying Brexit by extending Article 50 the legal mechanism that takes the UK out of the EU. This would have to be ratified by the EU and the length of extension will become the next focus on both sides. However, how the EU will react to an extension request remains unclear at this stage, given that it is preparing for its own EU elections towards the end of May. The EU side has expressed dismay at the agreement being rejected by Britain for a second time since the last vote in January and said it would need "a credible justification" before agreeing to any extension. Unless agreed otherwise, Britain leaving the EU by March 29 remains the default Brexit option by law. With that in mind, the UK government also unveiled plans for trade across borders under such a scenario. As a temporary measure, most imports into the UK would not attract a tariff in the event of a no-deal Brexit, the UK's Department for International Trade (DIT) announced. Under a temporary scheme 87 per cent of imports by value would be eligible for zero-tariff access up from 80 per cent at present. The government also announced it will not introduce any new checks or controls, or require customs declarations for any goods, moving from across the border from Ireland to Northern Ireland if the UK leaves the EU without a deal. The move comes amid a hectic week in at Westminster, when MPs have a flurry of crucial decisions before them that would determine UK's future with the EU. Although May managed to convince about 40 Tory MPs to change their mind since her historic 230-vote defeat on the Brexit withdrawal deal in January, she failed to get it through the Commons finish line. The Irish backstop, an insurance policy designed to maintain an open border on the island of Ireland between UK territory Northern Ireland and EU member-state the Republic of Ireland proved insurmountable in the end, despite some "legally binding" changes May hoped would be enough for the second vote on the agreement this week. The March-end deadline had kicked in when the UK triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty following a referendum in favour of Brexit by nearly 52 per cent to 48 per cent in June 2016. Unless MPs are able to rule out leaving by March 29 without any exit strategy or agreed terms, the UK is set to crash out of the bloc leading to deep uncertainties for businesses relying on cross-border arrangements. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The fate of the proposal to designate Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed's chief as a global terrorist by the will be known in less than 24 hours when the deadline to raise objections to the bid expires. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the was moved by France, UK and the US on February 27. It was under the no-objection period and Committee members had a period of 10 working days to raise any objections to the proposal. The no-objection period deadline ends 3 pm Wednesday (12:30am IST). The Committee makes its decisions by consensus of its members. All eyes are on China, which has in the past blocked India's bids to get Azhar listed as a UN-designated global terrorist. According to the listing rules of the Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee, if no objection is received by the end of the no-objection period, the decision will be deemed adopted, meaning that Azhar will become a UN-designated global terrorist. The proposal is the fourth such bid at the UN in the last 10 years to list Azhar as a global terrorist. In 2009, India moved a proposal by itself to designate Azhar, whose JeM had taken responsibility for the suicide attack against Indian security forces in Pulwama on February 14 in which 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were killed. In 2016 again India moved the proposal with the P3 - the United States, the United Kingdom and France in the UN's 1267 Sanctions Committee to ban Azhar, also the mastermind of the attack on the air base in Pathankot in January, 2016. In 2017, the P3 nations moved a similar proposal again. However, on all occasions China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, blocked India's proposal from being adopted by the Sanctions Committee. A designation will subject Azhar to an assets freeze, travel ban and an arms embargo. An assets freeze under the Sanctions Committee requires that all states freeze without delay the funds and other financial assets or economic resources of designated individuals and entities. The travel ban entails preventing the entry into or transit by all states through their territories by designated individuals. Under the arms embargo, all states are required to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale and transfer from their territories or by their nationals outside their territories, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, of arms and related materiel of all types, spare parts, and technical advice, assistance, or training related to military activities, to designated individuals and entities. Hectic diplomatic and political parleys have preceded the closely-watched March 13 deadline as New Delhi reached out to member countries of the In the wake of the February 14 terror attack in Pulwama, India launched a major diplomatic offensive against Islamabad, holding briefing for envoys of 25 countries, including from the five permanent members -- the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom and France -- to highlight Pakistan's role in using terrorism as an instrument of state policy. India also handed over to Pakistan a dossier on "specific details" of involvement of the JeM in the Pulwama terror attack. Just two days before the March 13 deadline on Azhar's listing, Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale met Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in New Delhi said in a statement that Pompeo expressed his "understanding" of India's concerns regarding cross-border terrorism. "They agreed that Pakistan needs to take concerted action to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure and to deny safe haven to all terrorist groups in its territory. They also agreed that those who support or abet terrorism in any form should be held accountable," the MEA said. The State Department said in a statement that Pompeo affirmed that the United States stands with the people and government of India in the fight against terrorism. Pompeo and Gokhale "discussed the importance of bringing those responsible for the attack to justice and the urgency of Pakistan taking meaningful action against terrorist groups operating on its soil", according to a statement by Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino. On Monday, America's National Security Advisor John Bolton tweeted that he had spoken with Pakistani Foreign Miniter Shah Mahmood Qureshi to "encourage meaningful steps against JeM and other terrorist groups operating from Pakistan." Bolton said Qureshi assured him that Pakistan would deal firmly with all terrorists and will continue steps to deescalate tensions with India. An inkling of Beijing's view on the issue came during Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang's press conference Monday in Beijing when he was asked about how China would respond to the proposal to list Azhar in the UNSC. "The and its subsidiary bodies are run on strict rules.We already stressed China's position on the listing of terrorist organizations and individuals in the UN Security Council 1267 Committee on many occasions," Lu said. The fate of the proposal to designate Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed's chief Masood Azhar as a "global terrorist" by the UN Security Council will be known on Wednesday and all eyes are on China, after it blocked the move thrice since 2009. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, the UK and the US on February 27, days after the Pulwama terror attack carried out by a suicide bomber belonging to the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) that led to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan. The Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee members have 10 working days to raise any objections to the proposal moved by France, the UK and the US. The no-objection period deadline ends 3 pm local time (New York) Wednesday (12:30am IST Thursday). The Committee makes its decisions by consensus among its members. China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, and an "all-weather ally" of Pakistan, has blocked India's proposal from being adopted by the Sanctions Committee in 2009 and 2016. In 2017, Beijing also blocked a move by the US, the UK and France to designate Azhar as a global terrorist by the UN. According to the listing rules of the Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee, if no objection is received by the end of the no-objection period, the decision will be deemed adopted, meaning that Azhar will become a UN-designated global terrorist. A UNSC designation will subject Azhar to an assets freeze, travel ban and an arms embargo. An assets freeze under the Sanctions Committee requires that all states freeze without delay the funds and other financial assets or economic resources of designated individuals and entities. The travel ban entails preventing the entry into or transit by all states through their territories by designated individuals. Under the arms embargo, all states are required to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale and transfer from their territories or by their nationals outside their territories, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, of arms and related materiel of all types, spare parts, and technical advice, assistance, or training related to military activities, to designated individuals and entities. Hectic diplomatic and political parleys have preceded the closely-watched March 13 deadline as New Delhi reached out to member countries of the 15-member UNSC. In the wake of the terror attack in Pulwama, India launched a major diplomatic offensive against Islamabad, holding briefing for envoys of 25 countries, including from the five permanent UNSC members -- the US, China, Russia, the UK and France -- to highlight Pakistan's role in using terrorism as an instrument of state policy. India also handed over to Pakistan a dossier on "specific details" of involvement of the JeM in the Pulwama terror attack. Days before the March 13 deadline on Azhar's possible listing, Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale met Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in New Delhi said in a statement that Pompeo expressed his "understanding" of India's concerns on cross-border terrorism. "They agreed that Pakistan needs to take concerted action to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure and to deny safe haven to all terrorist groups in its territory. They also agreed that those who support or abet terrorism in any form should be held accountable," the MEA said. On Wednesday, the US said Azhar meets the criteria to brand him as a "global terrorist" by the UN and China's opposition to the move to "update" the designation list went against the interests of Washington and Beijing in achieving regional stability and peace. "The United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal," State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino said in response to a question on previous successful attempts by China to block the UN designation of Azhar. Meanwhile, an inkling of China's stand on the issue came during Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang's press conferences on Monday and Wednesday in Beijing when he was asked about the proposal to list Azhar as a global terrorist by the UNSC. "The UN Security Council and its subsidiary bodies are run on strict rules. We already stressed China's position on the listing of terrorist organisations and individuals in the UN Security Council 1267 Committee on many occasions," Lu said on Monday. "China will continue to adopt responsible attitude and participate in the deliberations in the UNSC 1267 Committee," Lu said on Wednesday. On the issue of listing Azhar, he said, "I want to say that China always adopts a responsible attitude, engage in consultations with various parties and properly deal with this issue." "The discussions, I want to say must follow the rules and procedures of the relevant bodies and only the solution that is acceptable to all sides is conducive for resolving the issue," he said, indicating that Beijing may again block the move to list Azhar as a global terrorist. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The United States issued an emergency order to ground all Boeing 737 Max aircraft, a decision a number of countries, including India, have taken following the second deadly crash of the plane in less than five months in Ethiopia. "All those planes are grounded immediately," US President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. The United States is one of the major last countries to have taken a decision to ground Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft. These planes would be grounded till further orders, he said. Several other countries, including India, China and all of Europe, have ordered the jets off air after the crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 in Ethiopia on Sunday. The aircraft crashed minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people on board. Four Indians were among those killed. That crash was the second involving the jet, after a 787 Max operated by Lion Air, an Indonesian carrier, crashed into the Java Sea in October similarly and 189 people died. Trump's announcement came as political and international pressure on the airliner started to build. He said all 737 Max planes currently in the air would be grounded upon reaching their destination. Boeing, the company, agree with the action, he added. "Safety is our paramount concern," Trump added. He expressed hope that Boeing will get to the bottom of the problem with the planes, but until then the jets will remain grounded. Boeing said "out of an abundance of caution", it has decided to recommend to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of the jets. "On behalf of the entire Boeing team, we extend our deepest sympathies to the families and loved ones of those who have lost their lives in these two tragic accidents," said Dennis Muilenburg, president, CEO, and chairman of Boeing Company. "We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution. Safety is a core value at Boeing for as long as we have been building airplanes; and it always will be. There is no greater priority for our company and our industry. We are doing everything we can to understand the cause of the accidents in partnership with the investigators, deploy safety enhancements and help ensure this does not happen again," he said. The FAA has ordered the temporary grounding of Boeing 737 Max operated by US airlines or in US territory. The agency made this decision as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analyzed ann Wednesday. This evidence, together with newly refined satellite data available to FAA, led to this decision, it said. The grounding will remain in effect pending further investigation, including examination of information from the aircraft's flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders. The FAA had said a tweet earlier Wednesday that its "review shows no systematic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft". It, however, had added that it will take "immediate and appropriate action" if issues affecting the airworthiness of the aircraft were identified. An FAA team is in Ethiopia assisting the National Transportation Safety Board as parties to the investigation of the Flight 302 accident. The agency will continue to investigate. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US Senate on Wednesday confirmed Indian-American Neomi Rao, who was under scrutiny for her past writings on sexual assault, as a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most powerful benches in the country. Rao, 45, will replace controversial Brett Kavanaugh who endured a bitter confirmation battle last year after US President Donald Trump named him to the US Supreme Court. Her confirmation came amidst stiff resistance from the opposition Democratic lawmakers and a nationwide campaign against her by rights groups for her previous position on sexual assault and minorities. Rao was confirmed by 53-46 votes in the US Senate, which was basically on party lines. The Republicans enjoy majority in the 100-member US Senate. After being sworn in, she would be the second Indian-American on this court, which is considered only next to the US Supreme Court. Meanwhile, opposition Democratic party said Rao did not deserve to be confirmed. "A vote for Neomi Rao is a vote for a judge who blamed survivors of sexual assaults for being attacked. It is a vote for a judge who claimed sexual orientation is a behavior' that can be changed, said Democratic National Committee's Women's Media Director Elizabeth Renda and LGBTQ Media Director Lucas Acosta. Rao is currently serves as the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) of the Office of Management and Budget. In this capacity she played a key role in regulatory reform. Prior to her service as OIRA Administrator, Rao was a professor of structural constitutional law, administrative law, and legislation and statutory interpretation at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. She founded the Law School's Center for the Study of the Administrative State and focused her scholarship on the political and constitutional accountability of administrative agencies and the role of Congress. She has served in all three branches of government including Associate Counsel and Special Assistant to President George W Bush. She also served as counsel to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, where she was responsible for judicial nominations and constitutional law issues. In between government service, Rao practiced in the London office of Clifford Chance LLP, specializing in international law and commercial arbitration. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US Senate on Wednesday confirmed another of Donald Trump's controversial picks for a powerful federal judgeship, as the president leaves an increasingly prominent mark on the nation's courts. Neomi Rao was confirmed on a party-line vote of 53-46 in the Senate, where Trump's Republicans hold the majority, despite her past writings that some critics have interpreted as blaming survivors of sexual assaults for being attacked. At 45, Rao now becomes a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most powerful benches in the country, replacing Brett Kavanaugh who endured a bitter confirmation battle last year after Trump named him to the US Supreme Court. During that hearing Kavanaugh faced allegations of sexual abuse dating back to his time high school. In Rao's own hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she distanced herself from some of her early writings, saying she penned them during "a time of exploration." "If a woman drinks so much that she cannot choose, well, getting there is part of her choice," Rao wrote in a review while studying at Yale University in the early 1990s. Democrats were united against her. They accuse Rao, a lawyer who until now headed the administration's office of regulatory affairs, of weakening protections for consumers and the environment. The US Constitution stipulates that the president nominates federal and Supreme Court judges for life. The Senate has to date confirmed 90 of Trump's judicial nominees, as the president seeks to reshape the federal judiciary to make it more conservative. "Will soon be 145 Judges!" Trump tweeted at the weekend, referring to the dozens of his nominees awaiting confirmation for federal district courts and circuit appellate courts. Several of the vacancies in the 860 permanent judicial positions have been filled with jurists that earned stamps of approval from the conservative Federalist Society. Many of the new judges are young. Last week the Senate green-lighted Trump's pick Allison Jones Rushing to a US appeals court despite concerns about her experience. Born in 1982, she could spend several decades on the bench. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BJP state unit president Jitu Vaghani Wednesday told the Gujarat High Court that he did not know or could not recall the chain of events leading up to Congress leader Ahmed Patel's victory in the August 2017 Rajya Sabha election from the state. Vaghani, also an MLA, made the submission when he was cross-examined by Ahmed Patel's lawyer P S Champaneri in the court. He is a witness in an election petition filed by BJP leader Balvantsinh Rajput, who has challenged Ahmed Patel's election to the Rajya Sabha from Gujarat. Rajput had narrowly lost the election. During his cross-examination, Vaghani told the high court that he did not know about a BJP delegation visiting the Election Commission (EC) in New Delhi on the evening of the Rajya Sabha election in Gujarat on August 8, 2017. Vaghani said he had no idea about either the BJP or Congress delegation approaching the EC in New Delhi on the evening of the voting day. The BJP leader said he cannot recall the chain of events that led to the votes of two then rebel Congress MLAs getting cancelled, a development that helped Patel emerge victorious. A delegation of Congress leaders had approached the EC in New Delhi after the State Election Commission rejected the party's request to invalidate the votes of rebel Congress MLAs Bholabhai Gohil and Raghavji Patel. This was followed by a BJP delegation meeting the EC with the request to reject the Congress' plea. Delegation of both the parties visited the EC twice even as the counting was suspended awaiting its order. The EC eventually ordered invalidation of the two votes. Asked by Patel's lawyer that if there was a TV set at the hall of Swarnim Sankool in Gandhinagar where the voting took place, Vaghani first replied in the negative. He then said even if there was a TV set in the hall he could not recall if it was turned on. Champaneri said developments related to the Rajya Sabha election were being telecast on TV that day. Vaghani said between the time of voting and counting of ballots on August 8, 2017, he was mostly with BJP president Amit Shah. The BJP leader said he cannot recall Congress MLA Shailesh Parmar taking objection to Raghavji Patel showing his ballot paper to a BJP election agent, an action that invalidates a vote. Vaghani said he cannot recall Parmar and senior Congress leader Shaktisinh Gohli, polling agent of Ahmed Patel, objecting to this on the election day. He said Shaktisinh Gohil had tried to snatch the ballot paper of Raghavji Patel and claimed that the senior leader had even captured a booth during the 2007 assembly polls. Rajput, a former Congress MLA, had quit the party to join the BJP ahead of the August 8 election. He has accused Ahmed Patel of bribing MLAs to vote for him and requested the high court to quash the EC order invalidating the votes cast by the two rebel Congress MLAs. Rajput has also prayed that votes of two other Congress MLAs be declared invalid. The EC's decision to invalidate the votes of Bholabhai Gohil and Raghavji Patel had helped Ahmed Patel get 44 votes, the minimum he needed to win. Rajput had polled 38 votes. Rajput's petition claimed that once the returning officer used his discretion to accept the two votes as valid, the EC had "no power to issue any direction to the returning officer for accepting or rejecting any vote". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Goa RSS chief Subhash Velingkar on Wednesday said his political outfit will contest both the Lok Sabha seats in the state and will not support the BJP. The Goa Suraksha Manch (GSM) head also said that if elected, his party MPs would support Narendra Modi as prime minister at the Centre. "We will be fielding our candidates in both the Lok Sabha seats in Goa. The names of the candidates will be announced soon. If we win, our MPs will support Modi as prime minister," Velingkar told PTI. He, however, said his outfit will not support BJP Lok Sabha candidates in Goa as the saffron party's local leadership has "miserably failed" to take up the state's issues with the Centre. BJP leaders Shripad Naik and Narendra Sawaikar currently represent the North Goa and South Goa Lok Sabha seats, respectively. Besides, BJP state chief Vinay Tendulkar is a Rajya Sabha member. The GSM fought the 2017 Goa Assembly poll in alliance with the Shiv Sena and Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India Wednesday night expressed "disappointment" after China blocked yet another move at the United Nations to designate Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed's chief Masood Azhar as a "global terrorist". In its reaction, the External Affairs Ministry, without naming China, said the UN's 1267 Sanctions Committee was not able to come to a decision on the proposal to list Azhar on account of a member country placing the proposal on hold. The proposal was a fourth such bid at the UN in the last 10 years to list Azhar as a global terrorist. China has been blocking the moves. The External Affairs Ministry said India will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that leaders of terror groups involved in heinous attacks on Indian citizens are brought to justice. "We are disappointed by this outcome. This has prevented action by the international community to designate the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a proscribed and active terrorist organisation which has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on February 14," the MEA said. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, the UK and the US on February 27, nearly two weeks after the Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed. The JeM had claimed responsibility for the attack. "We are grateful for the efforts of the Member States who moved the designation proposal and the unprecedented number of all other Security Council members as well as non-members who joined as co-sponsors. We will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens are brought to justice," the MEA said. The Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee members had 10 working days to raise any objections to the proposal. China put a hold on the proposal just before the deadline to raise any objection to the move was coming to an end. An inkling of China's stand on the issue came during its Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang's press conferences on Monday and Wednesday in Beijing when he was asked about the proposal to list Azhar as a global terrorist by the UNSC. In 2009, India moved a proposal by itself to designate Azhar. In 2016, India again moved the proposal with the P3 -- the United States, the United Kingdom and France -- in the UN's 1267 Sanctions Committee to ban Azhar, also the mastermind of the attack on the air base in Pathankot in January, 2016. In 2017, the P3 nations moved a similar proposal again. However, on all occasions China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Security Council, blocked the proposals from being adopted by the Sanctions Committee. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Delhi High Court on Wednesday asked the Centre and the AAP government why they have not followed its suggestion to have a separate account in hospitals run by them to receive donations from charitable entities or companies under corporate social responsibility (CSR). A bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice A J Bhambani issued notice to the Ministry of Health and the Delhi government's Health Department seeking their response on the issue which the court has taken up as a PIL on its own. The court initiated the PIL after receiving a letter from an NGO, Heart Care Foundation of India, which claimed that neither the central government nor the Delhi government had followed the various suggestions, including having a separate CSR account, given by the high court in a 2014 judgement. CSR is an initiative under which companies can contribute to welfare of society either financially or through their products and services free of cost. In its 2014 judgement, the high court had suggested that all government hospitals, run by the Centre and the state, could have a separate CSR or charitable entity account wherein donations can be received. The donations could be subject to an audit. Apart from that it had also suggested having a designated officer in all hospitals to whom applications for assistance can be made by patients in need. "Government hospitals could put up a list on the state department of Health website of the drugs, implants and devices they require for economically weaker section (EWS) or below poverty line (BPL) patients. This way people would donate as per the need of each hospital. This could be revised on a monthly basis. "The state government may put up a list of drugs, implants and devices which are excluded from its budget for which donations would be welcome," were the other suggestions given by the high court. The suggestions by the court had come in its judgement directing the Delhi government to provide enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) free of cost at AIIMS to a poor minor boy, who was suffering from a rare genetic disorder for which ERT was the only treatment, whenever he needs it. The NGO in its letter to the high court has contended that more than four years after the judgement, none of the suggestions have been followed till date. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BJP's election in-charge for Uttarakhand, on Wednesday said winnability was the only criterion for selection of candidates in the forthcoming polls. Gehlot, who heads the Pradesh BJP poll management committee, said candidates for the five seats in the state will be announced by March 18. "The party's central poll committee will hold its meeting from March 16-18 to decide the candidates for the seats going to polls in the first phase," he said. The hill state goes to polls in the first phase on April 11 with the saffron party facing the challenge of retaining all the five seats. To a question on whether Pauri MP Bhuvan Chandra Khanduri will contest the polls this time, Gehlot said it depended on the former's wish. It is being speculated that the Pauri MP may not contest the polls on health grounds. Claiming that the atmosphere in the country was in favour of the BJP, Gehlot said the party was set to return to power again under the leadership of Narendra Modi. He said the prime minister's constant focus on the poor was reflected in schemes like the Jan Dhan, Ujjwala, Man Dhan, Kisan Samman Nidhi and Ayushman Bharat. The BJP leader also said the so-called 'mahagathbandhan' (grand alliance) of opposition parties lacked coherence and consistency. "If they take four steps forward in the morning, they retreat five steps backward by the evening. The alliance lacks clarity and is in no position to give BJP a fight," he said. Accusing the of speaking the "language of Pakistan", Gehlot said its demand for proof of the air strike against terror targets in Balakot has earned the party many admirers in the neighbouring country. (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.) / -- Wisdom Jobs, a Hyderabad-based online career portal, found that average hikes are expected to be around 9.8% this year. Top paying sectors for 2019 would be consumer internet, professional services, BFSI, and ITeS. Wisdomjobs.com found through a survey of companies across 15 industries that 10 amongst them will see better salary hikes compared to the last year. Those sectors are IT, Retail, Hospitality, FMCG, Healthcare, Automotive, Infrastructure, Education, ITeS and BFSI. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/825002/Wisdomjobs_Logo.jpg ) It added that this year, overall pay hikes are expected to be higher than last year. The predicted average salary increment for 2019 is 9.8% as compared to 9.6% last year. Increased focus on performance-driven appraisals is expected to result in high double-digit salary hikes for top talent. Many companies expect a positive economic outlook with high domestic demand. With companies actively trying to curb attrition through higher salary hikes, attrition rates are expected to decline while hiring rates are expected to grow. 5-year salary hike trends; Source: Wisdomjobs.com YearAverage Salary Hike20199.8(expected)20189.620179.4201610.3201510.5Ajay Kolla, Founder and CEO, Wisdomjobs.com said, "The survey found that most industries that are part of the Manufacturing and Technology sectors such as Life Sciences, Chemicals, Energy and Engineering are expected to see double-digit salary hikes this year. That said, the average salary hikes will depend on several factors such as the size of the company, business dynamics and the nature of their talent requirements."The survey found that digitization and technology upgradation have resulted in upskilling of workforces and this has in turn contributed to higher salary hikes in most industries and sectors. Sectors such as Consumer Internet, Professional Services, Life Sciences, Automotive, and FMCG are also expected to see double-digit salary hikes on average in 2019, although the average increase in hikes over the last year will be below 1%. About Wisdom jobs Wisdomjobs.com along with its sister portal, Wisdomjobsgulf.com, are unique, skill assessment-based job portals that help job seekers and employers to find the right fitment through a proprietary skill assessment tool named Pragnya Meter. Source: Wisdomjobs. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) When it comes to political power, women are totally outnumbered by men, accounting for less than 7 per cent of the world's leaders and only 24 per cent of lawmakers, according to the latest statistics. UN General Assembly President Mara Fernanda Espinosa told delegates to the Commission on the Status of Women on Tuesday that there has been a "serious regression" in the political power of women across the world in recent years. According to statistics from the Inter-Parliamentary Union released last week, the percentage of female elected heads of state dropped from 7.2 per cent to 6.6 per cent 10 out of 153 from 2017 to 2018. The percentage of female heads of government dropped from 5.7 per cent to 5.2 per cent 10 out of 193 in the same period. "Despite some positive movement, the overwhelming majority of government leaders remain male," said Gabriela Cuevas Barron, head of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. In parliaments, the global share of women increased by nearly one percentage point from 2017 to 2018, to 24.3 per cent. But Cuevas said at a conference that it took 25 year to get to that figure, from 11 per cent in 1995. "That's why we believe we need to encourage parliaments to have affirmative action," she said. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the executive director of UN Women, called the current environment "not the most enabling for women to rise." "We also have pushback right now, which contributes to the slowing down of women wanting to contest for office, because it is brutal," she said, citing political violence, verbal abuse, and abuse on social media that female candidates and politicians face in many countries. Mlambo-Ngcuka said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres "called on us to push back against the pushback so we just have to be stronger in pushing back against the pushback ourselves." Women must be "change-makers," she said, because national and global institutions were "made for men and by men. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Jammu and Kashmir High Court Wednesday ordered listing of a petition of arrested JKLF chief Yasin Malik seeking stay on trials before a designated TADA court in Jammu in three-decade-old cases of kidnapping of the then Union home minister's daughter and killing of IAF personnel. Chief Justice of the High Court Geeta Mittal passed the order after hearing arguments on two applications filed by the CBI seeking transfer of Malik's petition to the Jammu Wing of the High Court as well as vacation of an interim stay order of November 26, 2009 on holding trial before a TADA court in Jammu. The JKLF chief has been out since April 2009, when the Srinagar wing of the Jammu and Kashmir HC stayed his trial in a designated TADA court in Jammu in two high-profile cases -- kidnapping of the then union Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's daughter Rubaiya Sayeed on December 8, 1989, and the killing of the four Indian Air Force (IAF) officials on January 25, 1990 -- based on CBI charge sheets. Squadron leader Ravi Khanna, Corporal DB Singh, Corporal Uday Shankar and Airman Azad Ahmad were gunned down at Rawalpora Chowk, when over 40 IAF personnel were waiting for their morning bus on the outskirts of Srinagar. Malik had approached the Srinagar bench of the HC in 2009 seeking stay of trial and challenging the trial court's order of shifting the case to Kashmir. The HC in 2009 had directed that the proceedings before the trial court shall remain in abeyance and there was no further movement on the writ petitions which have remained pending ever since and the trial also stands interdicted since November 26, 2009, Justice Mittal observed in her order. The CBI, which approached the High Court recently, had contended that the matters pertain to charge sheets which have been filed before the designated TADA Court in Jammu and as such, the matter falls entirely within the jurisdiction of Jammu Wing of the HC which alone can adjudicate upon the subject matter. The counsel representing Malik contended that the CBI has acquiesced in the orders granting permission and no application was filed for nine years. But the lawyer representing the CBI drew attention of the Chief Justice on counter affidavits to the writ petitions in which the agency had contested the maintainability of the writ petitions. While directing for listing of the petitions before the Jammu wing of the High Court, the Chief Justice said "the permission granted by the (then) Chief Justice...was on the administrative side, which permission was given exparte without hearing the other side. "Even if the CBI in the present case could be held to have recorded its consent or acquiesced to hearing of the writ petitions by the Srinagar Wing, such proceedings in this Wing would be by a court which does not have the jurisdiction to do so. The adjudication would be without authority of law and completely without jurisdiction," the 26-page order said. Malik is the main accused in the kidnapping of Rubiya Sayeed, daughter of former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mufti Mohd Sayeed, and the killing of four IAF personnel in Srinagar. Sayeed was then the Union Home Minister. Rubiya, who is sister of former state chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, was kidnapped at gunpoint from a mini-bus while she was on her way home from Lala Ded Hospital in Srinagar where she worked as a doctor. The incident took place on December 8, 1989. JKLF terrorists were behind Rubiya's kidnapping and had demanded the release of five of their colleagues who were in prison. After 15 days of hectic negotiations, five terrorists were released by the Centre in exchange for Rubaiya's freedom. The five released by the then VP Singh government were Abdul Hamid Sheikh, a Pakistani terrorist Sher Khan, Noor Mohammad Kalwal, Altaf Ahmed and Javed Ahmed Jargar. The case was handed over to the CBI on February 22, 1990. The charge sheet in IAF officers killing was filed by CBI on August 31, 1990, under Section 120-B read with Section 302 of RPC, Sections 3 and 4 of TADA and Section 27 of Arms Act in the Court of 3rd Additional Session Judge (TADA cases Jammu) against the accused. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The United States on Wednesday grounded Boeing Co's 737 MAX jets, citing new satellite data and evidence from the scene of Sunday's crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed 157 people, the second disaster involving the 737 in less than five months. It was the second time the US Federal Aviation Administration has halted flights of a Boeing plane in six years. It had grounded the 787 Dreamliner in 2013 because of problems with smoking batteries. Shares of the world's biggest plane maker, which were up earlier in the session, fell 2 per cent to $370.48. The ... The fate of the proposal to designate Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed's chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist by the UN Security Council will be known in less than 24 hours when the deadline to raise objections to the bid expires. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, UK and the US on February 27. It was under the no-objection period and Committee members had a period of 10 working days to raise any objections to the proposal. The no-objection period deadline ends 3 pm Wednesday (12:30am IST). The Committee makes its decisions by consensus of its members. All eyes are on China, which has in the past blocked India's bids to get Azhar listed as a UN-designated global terrorist. According to the listing rules of the Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee, if no objection is received by the end of the no-objection period, the decision will be deemed adopted, meaning that Azhar will become a UN-designated global terrorist. The proposal is the fourth such bid at the UN in the last 10 years to list Azhar as a global terrorist. In 2009, India moved a proposal by itself to designate Azhar, whose JeM had taken responsibility for the suicide attack against Indian security forces in Pulwama on February 14 in which 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were killed. In 2016 again India moved the proposal with the P3 - the United States, the United Kingdom and France in the UN's 1267 Sanctions Committee to ban Azhar, also the mastermind of the attack on the air base in Pathankot in January, 2016. In 2017, the P3 nations moved a similar proposal again. However, on all occasions China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, blocked India's proposal from being adopted by the Sanctions Committee. A UNSC designation will subject Azhar to an assets freeze, travel ban and an arms embargo. An assets freeze under the Sanctions Committee requires that all states freeze without delay the funds and other financial assets or economic resources of designated individuals and entities. The travel ban entails preventing the entry into or transit by all states through their territories by designated individuals. Under the arms embargo, all states are required to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale and transfer from their territories or by their nationals outside their territories, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, of arms and related materiel of all types, spare parts, and technical advice, assistance, or training related to military activities, to designated individuals and entities. Hectic diplomatic and political parleys have preceded the closely-watched March 13 deadline as New Delhi reached out to member countries of the UNSC. In the wake of the February 14 terror attack in Pulwama, India launched a major diplomatic offensive against Islamabad, holding briefing for envoys of 25 countries, including from the five permanent UNSC members -- the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom and France -- to highlight Pakistan's role in using terrorism as an instrument of state policy. India also handed over to Pakistan a dossier on "specific details" of involvement of the JeM in the Pulwama terror attack. Just two days before the March 13 deadline on Azhar's listing, Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale met Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in New Delhi said in a statement that Pompeo expressed his "understanding" of India's concerns regarding cross-border terrorism. "They agreed that Pakistan needs to take concerted action to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure and to deny safe haven to all terrorist groups in its territory. They also agreed that those who support or abet terrorism in any form should be held accountable," the MEA said. The State Department said in a statement that Pompeo affirmed that the United States stands with the people and government of India in the fight against terrorism. Pompeo and Gokhale "discussed the importance of bringing those responsible for the attack to justice and the urgency of Pakistan taking meaningful action against terrorist groups operating on its soil", according to a statement by Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino. On Monday, America's National Security Advisor John Bolton tweeted that he had spoken with Pakistani Foreign Miniter Shah Mahmood Qureshi to "encourage meaningful steps against JeM and other terrorist groups operating from Pakistan." Bolton said Qureshi assured him that Pakistan would deal firmly with all terrorists and will continue steps to deescalate tensions with India. An inkling of Beijing's view on the issue came during Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang's press conference Monday in Beijing when he was asked about how China would respond to the proposal to list Azhar in the UNSC. "The UN Security Council and its subsidiary bodies are run on strict rules .We already stressed China's position on the listing of terrorist organizations and individuals in the UN Security Council 1267 Committee on many occasions," Lu said. Also read: Pulwama terror attack: India now shares evidence on JeM, Masood Azhar with UNSC member countries Also read: Britain, US and France ask UN to blacklist Jaish-e-Mohammad leader Masood Azhar The Indian Air Force (IAF) can now station its fighter jets safely at locations close to Pakistan and China borders as the government has cleared the construction of around 110 hardened shelters at key frontier locations. The missile-proof shelters will act as a shield from any kind of bombing threat during enemy attacks. "The central government has cleared a project for the construction of around 110 hardened shelters also known as blast pens which protect the fighter planes from enemy missile or bomb attacks", government sources told ANI. The project cost of these blast pens has been pegged at Rs 5,000 crore and will be built in a phased manner at the air bases allowing the IAF to keep its frontline planes at forward bases without the worry of getting damaged on ground, the sources said. Here is how this shelter project of the IAF will be carried out These facilities will have concrete walls surrounded by a strong embankment on two or three sides but open from the front to admit and store aircraft. They will have the capability to guard the aircraft from bombs, explosives or missiles. "After the development of these blast pins, IAF will have the option to deploy its frontline aircrafts like Su-30MKI at the borders without getting vandalized", the sources stated. Meanwhile, the IAF is in process of equipping the Su-30MKI fighter jets used with Israeli SPICE-2000 Bombs which were used by the force's Mirage 2000 fighter jets during the Balakot air strike. This development comes as a pre-emptive step by the IAF to thwart any further terror attack after Pulwama incident being planned by Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), as informed by India's foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale in the Press Conference after the IAF's retaliatory air strike at JeM's terror den at Balakot in Pakistan on February 27. (Edited by: Nehal Solanki) Also read: SpiceJet cancels 14 flights, offers full refund after DGCA bans Boeing 737 Max 8 Also read: Indian Navy declares AA, SSR results 2019; check details here The Ministry of Defence on Wednesday filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court in connection with the Rafale fighter jet case, claiming that the documents submitted in the Rafale review petition are sensitive to national security. Earlier in the day, the Defence Ministry had sought permission to file the affidavit, which was granted by the apex Court. The Court was hearing petitions seeking review of its December 14th, 2018 verdict in which the Modi-government was given clean chit in the deal with France for procurement of 36 Rafale jets. The Ministry told the Court that documents filed by the petitioners seeking review of its Rafale deal verdict are "sensitive to national security" and relate to war capacity of the combat aircraft. In its affidavit, the government said, the petitioners--former Union ministers Yashwant Sinha, Arun Shourie and advocate Prashant Bhushan --are guilty of leaking the sensitive information which has been widely circulated and is available to the country's enemy and adversaries. Also Read: Secret Rafale documents not stolen from Defence Ministry, petitioners used photocopies: Attorney General "This puts the national security in jeopardy. Without consent, permission or acquiescence of the Central Government, those who have conspired in making the photocopy of these sensitive documents and annexing it to the review petition/ miscellaneous application and thereby committing theft by unauthorized photocopying of such documents...have adversely affected the sovereignty, security and friendly relations with the foreign countries," the affidavit said. The Defence Ministry said that even though the Centre "maintains secrecy", the review petitioners are "guilty of leakage of sensitive information, which offends the terms of the agreements". It also affects relationship between India and France, it said. It told the court that inquiry into alleged leak of sensitive documents from Defence ministry started on February 28, 2019. It also claimed that petitioners are using unauthorised accessed documents with the intention to present a selective and incomplete picture of internal secret deliberations on a matter relating to national security and defence. The Supreme Court will hear the review plea on the Rafale case on Thursday. Edited by Chitranjan Kumar Also Read: Narendra Modi did 'bypass surgery' in Rafale deal; his role should also be probed, says Rahul Gandhi The Civil Aviation Ministry will hold a meeting with airlines at 4 pm on Wednesday to prepare a contingency plan as a number of flights have been cancelled following the grounding of Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, a senior government official said. On Tuesday night, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced its decision to "immediately" ground the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft that are currently being used by airline companies in India. Also read: Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft to stop operations in India by 4 pm today: DGCA official "We will ground all 737 Max 8 aircraft, which are currently in use by Indian airlines, by 4 pm today," a DGCA official told PTI on Wednesday morning. The decision came days after a 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by the Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa killing 157 people, including four Indians. SpiceJet has around 12 such aircraft in its fleet. Jet Airways has five, which have been already grounded. "The meeting regarding a contingency plan will happen with airlines at 4 pm Wednesday," a civil aviation ministry official said. Also read: Pilots must have 1,000 hours of experience to fly Boeing 737 MAX; DGCA issues stricter rules A DGCA spokesperson, on Wednesday morning, said," The B737Max operations will stop from/to all Indian airport's. Additionally, no B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600hrs Indian time or 1030 UTC." "The time line is to cater to situations where aircraft can be positioned at maintenance facilities and international flights can reach their destinations," the spokesperson said. In a statement Wednesday, SpiceJet said," SpiceJet has suspended Boeing 737 Max operations following DGCA's decision to ground the aircraft." "Safety and security of our passengers, crew and operations are of utmost importance to us and we will be working with the regulator and the manufacturer to attain normalcy in our operations. "We are confident of accommodating the vast majority of our passengers and minimise inconvenience," the airline said. On Sunday, a 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa killing 157 people, including four Indians. The incident on Sunday was second such crash involving the 737 MAX 8 aircraft in less than five months. In October last year, an aircraft operated by Lion Air crashed killing over 180 people in Indonesia. The European Union and many other countries across the world have already banned the use of 737 Max 8 aircraft in their respective airspace. In a tweet on Tuesday night, Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu said,"Directed secretary to hold an emergency meeting with all airlines to prepare a contingency plan to avoid inconvenience to passengers." "While passenger safety is a zero tolerance issue, efforts are already on to minimise the impact on passenger movement as their convenience is important," he tweeted. Also read: Ethiopia Plane Crash: DGCA to issue safety instructions on Boeing 737 MAX planes for domestic airlines Also read: Ethiopian Airlines crash: India bans Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes Amid the ongoing tension between India and Pakistan, the officials of the two neighbouring countries will meet for the first time on Thursday to finalise the modalities of the Kartarpur Corridor to facilitate Indian pilgrims to pray at the historic Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara throughout the year. In November last year, the Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, passed the resolution regarding the corridor to celebrate the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev, which falls in 2019. If the corridor, which was proposed by the then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1999, gets connected on the both sides, this could also provide a major tourism boost as more pilgrims would be able to visit the holy shrine throughout the year. The meeting will take place on the Indian side of the Attari-Wagah border on March 14. The two sides will discuss the technical aspects and draft agreement for setting up a dedicated corridor that will allow a passport and visa free `darshan' for the Indian pilgrims. India-Pakistan relations hit a new low last month after the Pulwama terror attack in which 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personals were killed. The Indian government has approved the construction of a passenger terminal building (PTB complex) with investment of Rs 190 crore which is expected handle immigration and customs clearance facilities for 5,000 pilgrims on regular days. Pakistan, on its part, has also decided to begin building the Kartarpur corridor, with Prime Minister Imran Khan laying the foundation stone. Kartarpur is located in Shakargarh in Narowal district of Pakistan's Punjab. Guru Nanak Dev had spent over 18 years of his life here. The Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara is located about three to 4km from the Indo-Pak border in Pakistan. Officials from the various ministries including Ministry of External Affairs, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of Punjab, National Highway Authority, Road Transport and Border Security Force (BSF) will be attending the meeting. The Indian side will be led by Joint Secretary (Foreigners) MHA, Anil Malik and will also include Joint Secretary (PAI-Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran) MEA, Deepak Mittal and other officials, the Financial Express reported. Last week, the Ministry of Home Affairs had clarified that talks over Kartarpur corridor doesn't mean it is resumption of the dialogue between the two sides. "It is related to the emotions of Indian citizens of Sikh faith. Our decision to meet reflects our strong commitment to operationalise the Kartarpur Sahib Corridor on the occasion of 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev, and also to meet the long-pending demand to have easy and smooth access to Gurudwara Kartarpur Sahib (in Pakistan)," said Raveesh Kumar, the MEA spokesperson. Edited by Chitranjan Kumar Also Read: India bans Boeing 737 Max aircraft: All you need to know The Civil Aviation Ministry has closed the Indian airspace for Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft. The decision was taken during an emergency meeting of Indian airlines with the Civil Aviation Secretary earlier today. The airlines also discussed ways to remedy passenger inconvenience caused due to grounding of Boeing 737 Max 8 planes in their fleet. DGCA has already ordered Indian airlines to ground these narrow-body aircraft in their fleet after 4:00pm today. "As of now, all flights of Boeing 737 Max have been grounded, before the deadline of 4:00 pm. We had a discussion with the airlines as to how they plan to reduce inconvenience to the passengers," Civil Aviation Secretary Pradeep Singh Kharola told reporters after the meeting. The meeting comes in the backdrop of action being taken against Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft after one such plane operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa, killing 157 passengers, including four passengers. This incident occured a few months after a Boeing 737 Max aircraft of Lion Air went down over Java Sea. SpiceJet, which has 12 Boeing 737 Max 8 planes in its fleet, cancelled 14 flights today. Most of the passengers from the cancelled flights were accommodated in other SpiceJet flights, while other were given full refund. SpiceJet and Jet Airways are the only air carriers in India that fly Boeing 737 Max 8 planes. The ban is expected to drive air ticket prices further, with frequency of flight cancellations likely to increase in coming days. Following the crash of Ethiopian Airlines aircraft, aviation regulator DGCA has grounded all Boeing 737 Max 8 planes run by Indian air carriers. Aviation regulaties in several other coutries have also grounded the fleet of Boeing 737 Max 8 planes operated by airlines under their jurisdiction. China, Indonesia Mongolia, Ethiopia, Oman and UAE have already prohibited their domestic carriers from flying Boeing 737 Max 8 planes. Meanwhile, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, UK and the European Union have closed their airspace to these aircraft. India and New Zealand are the latest additions to this list. Several carriers, including Cayman Airways, South African airline Comair, Aeromexico and Brazil's Gol Airlines, have independently decided to ground Boeing 737 Max 8 plane in their fleet. Meanwhile, pilots with Argentina's Aerolineas Argentinas reportedly refused to fly the jet. ALSO READ: India bans Boeing 737 Max aircraft: All you need to know ALSO READ: SpiceJet cancels 14 flights, offers full refund after DGCA bans Boeing 737 Max 8 Joining an ever-growing list of countries, India has decided to ban Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes following the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 people. Current Indian airlines that operate these aircraft are SpiceJet that has twelve of these planes in its fleet and Jet Airways that has five. "DGCA has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately. These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations," the Ministry of Civil Aviation said in a tweet. "As always, passenger safety remains our top priority. We continue to consult closely with regulators around the world, airlines, and aircraft manufacturers to ensure passenger safety," it added. Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu said, "Directed Secy to hold an emergency meeting with all Airlines to prepare a contingency plan to avoid inconvenience to passengers. While passenger safety is a zero tolerance issue, efforts are already on to minimise the impact on passenger movement as their convenience is important (sic)." On Sunday, a 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa killing 157 people, including four Indians. This was the second such major crash in less than five months involving a 737 MAX 8. An aircraft operated by Lion Air crashed in Indonesia killing over 180 people. In response to this move, SpiceJet said, "We are actively engaged with both Boeing and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation and will continue to put safety first, as always. We have already implemented all additional precautionary measures as directed by the DGCA yesterday." The statement further added, "The Boeing 737 Max is a highly sophisticated aircraft. It has flown hundreds of thousands of hours globally and some of the world's largest airlines are flying this aircraft." Countries that have banned Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes Several countries have grounded Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplanes in their airspace. New Zealand's aviation watchdog Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) banned the aircraft on Wednesday. The Netherlands, too, banned the aircraft on Tuesday. Turkish Airlines banned the 737 MAX 8 and suspended flights that were using the aircraft on Tuesday. "Until the uncertainty surrounding the safety of the 737 MAX is clarified, we are withdrawing these planes from commercial flights from March 13," airline boss Bilal Eksi said on Twitter. Norwegian Air Shuttle, South Korea's Eastar Jet and South Africa's Comair also said they would halt flights. The European Union banned the airplanes on Tuesday. The EU aviation safety agency said it was closing European airspace to all MAX aircraft currently operating. The UK Civil Aviation Authority said it was banning the planes from UK airspace "as a precautionary measure". Singapore, Australia, Malaysia and Oman were among countries that banned all MAX planes from their airspace. China, a hugely important market for Boeing, had already ordered domestic airlines to suspend operations of the plane on Monday, as did Indonesia. Argentina's flag carrier also grounded five MAX 8 aircraft on Tuesday, as did airlines in countries including Brazil, Mexico and Ethiopia. US carriers have so far appeared to maintain confidence in Boeing, which has said it is certain the planes are safe to fly. The US federal aviation authority, the FAA, has not grounded the MAX but ordered the manufacturer to make design changes. (Edited by Anwesha Madhukalya; with PTI inputs) Also read: Pilots must have 1,000 hours of experience to fly Boeing 737 MAX; DGCA issues stricter rules Also read: Ethiopian airline crash: US to take 'immediate' action on Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft if needed, says official Budget carrier IndiGo is offering jobs to pilots of Jet Airways along with compensation for overdue salaries from the cash-strapped full service airline. IndiGo, the country's largest airline in terms of market share, Tuesday also said that all job offers are in line with its current terms and conditions. Crisis-hit Jet Airways has not paid salaries to its pilots, engineers and other senior management for more than three months now. "IndiGo is offering Jet Airways' pilots job opportunities," an IndiGo spokesperson told PTI. The no-frills airline's response came to queries on whether it was looking to hire pilots from Jet Airways and also offering them significant amount as joining bonuses. The queries were sent to IndiGo's Chief Operating Officer Wolfgang Prock-Schauer. "We are not offering a signing bonus. We are offering a compensation for overdue salaries," the spokesperson said. On whether IndiGo is offering a bonus after third year of contract for pilots who would join from Jet Airways, the spokesperson replied in the negative. Regarding shortage of pilots, IndiGo said it has an internal upgrade programme in place and is able to upgrade pilots in sufficient manner. "Our pilot hiring programme always includes hiring from the market and Jet Airways is part of the external hiring programme," the spokesperson said. IndiGo is facing acute shortage of commanders amid aggressive expansion of its fleet. The carrier has more than 210 planes in its fleet. Earlier, an aviation industry source told PTI that IndiGo was wooing Jet Airways pilots with attractive pay packets to meet the shortage of commanders. "We are conducting open house interviews to getting contact with pilots. That's a common practice in the aviation industry not specific to Jet Airways," the spokesperson noted. Shortage of trained and experienced pilots has been a problem for domestic airlines amid capacity expansion to meet rising passenger traffic. Also read: Jet Airways: Naresh Goyal seeks funding of Rs 750 crore from Etihad; says no funds will ground airline Also read: Cash-strapped Jet Airways defaults on foreign loan repayment Majority of passengers are being accommodated on other flights, while others are offered full refund by SpiceJet After Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) banned Boeing 737 Max 8 from the Indian airspace, following two fatal crashes as of March 2019, SpiceJet has cancelled 14 flights. "SpiceJet has presently announced cancellation of 14 flights for today and will be operating additional flights from tomorrow," SpiceJet said in its statement. The civil aviation ministry has also called for an emergency meeting at 4 pm to discuss the situation. Airlines, meanwhile, will prepare a contingency plan to cope up with the cancellation of flights, said a senior official. India has now joined the global suspension wave of Boeing 737 MAX planes, after 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa, killing 157 people on board. Currently, two Indian airlines fly the Boeing 737 Max 8 Aircraft, including Jet Airways (5 planes) and SpiceJet (12 planes). "We are confident of minimising the inconvenience to our passengers and attain normalcy in our operations", SpiceJet said in its statement. "While a majority of passengers affected as a result of these cancellations have been accommodated by SpiceJet on alternate flights, rest have been offered a full-refund," it said in its statement. On Tuesday, the ministry of civil aviation tweeted saying, "DGCA has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately. These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations." The DGCA has given a 4pm deadline to ground all Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircrafts in India. (Edited by Nehal Solanki) Also read: Ethiopian Airlines crash: India bans Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes Also read: Jet Airways share price falls after four more aircraft grounded due to non-payment of dues The first human to set foot on Mars is likely to be a woman, according to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. "It's likely to be a woman, the first next person on the Moon. It's also true that the first person on Mars is likely to be a woman", CNN cited Bridenstine as saying on a science and technology radio talk show Science Friday. Although Bridenstine did not name a specific person, yet he mentioned that women are at the forefront of the US Space agency's upcoming plans. NASA will also have its first all-female spacewalk at this month-end where astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch will get to float around in space. According to the US Space Agency, the spacewalk will last for about seven hours. "So these are great days. We have the first all-female spacewalk happening this month at the end of March, which is of course, National Women's Month", Bridenstine said. Both the astronauts were the part of 2013 astronaut class, half of which included women. They were a part of the second-largest applicant pool that NASA has ever received - more than 6,100. NASA also said that the most recent class of flight directors had fifty per cent women. "NASA is committed to making sure we have a broad and diverse set of talent and we're looking forward to the first woman on the moon", Bridenstine said. According to the agency, women comprise 34 per cent of active astronauts. NASA first started recruiting women astronauts in 1970s. (Edited by: Nehal Solanki) Also read: OnePlus 7 leaks and rumours: Everything we know so far Also read: Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 Pro to go on sale today at 12 pm; check out price, features, offers Embassy Office Parks, a joint venture of Blackstone and realty firm Embassy, which is launching India's first real estate investment trust (REIT) next week, also proposed to raise Rs 4,000 crore through non-convertible bonds to partly meet its construction finance requirements. The firm is raising Rs 4,750 crore through REIT issue, comprising of 12,95,56,000 units. The REIT issue will open on March 18 with a price band of Rs 299-300 per unit. The issue closes on March 20. The joint venture firm has already entered into unit subscription agreements with strategic investors like American Funds Insurance Series, New World Fund INC and Smallcap World Fund Inc to allot them 2,92,08,800 units for Rs 876.3 crore. "Post the REIT issue, we plan to raise Rs 4,000 crore through debt financing which would be used for repayment of debt as well as for construction financing and working capital requirements at asset SPVs," Embassy Office Parks Management Services deputy CEO and COO Vikaash Khdloya told reporters here Tuesday. However, he did not disclose the timeframe for issuing the bonds. Embassy Office Parks had in September last year filed the draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) with market regulator Sebi to launch REIT having a portfolio size of 33 million sqft comprising of seven business parks and four city-centric buildings spread across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune and Noida. Out of the 33 million sq ft, about 24 million sq ft area is operational at 95 per cent occupancy and yielding rental income of over Rs 2,000 crore annually. Another 3 million sqft area is under construction and 6 million sqft area in the pipeline. "We will also be looking at expanding the REIT portfolio. We are considering the assets of Embassy which are under development for acquisition. But there is no obligation to buy from the sponsor. We may also go out in the market and buy projects. Such acquisitions can happen either by increasing debt or swap for units in trust," Embassy Office Parks CEO Michael Holland said. He further said that nearly 500 million sqft of Grade A office space is available in the country. "Also, due to consolidation, we think there is an opportunity for strategic acquisitions in the coming future," he added. On the utilisation of the proceeds of the REIT issue, Khdloya said that nearly Rs 3,700 crore out of the Rs 4,700 crore issue would be used for repaying the debt which is over Rs 8,400 crore. "Around Rs 460 crore from the proceeds will be utilised for acquiring one of the assets from the sponsor 'Embassy One', while the remaining funds would be used for general corporate purposes," he added. Embassy Office Parks' rental income is expected to rise by 55 per cent in the next three years as it expects to lease area at a higher rent. The JV firm said it has top MNC clients in its commercial projects. More than 50 per cent of the rents come from Fortune 500 companies. It has clients such as Microsoft, Google, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan in the office parks. Also Read: Azim Premji commits Rs 1.45 lakh crore, 67 per cent stake in Wipro to philanthropy Also Read: Angel Tax: Govt now plans mechanism to identify genuine investors Also Read: Boeing 737 Max won't be allowed in Indian airspace; airlines brace for flight cancellations Late last evening India finally joined the growing number of countries grounding Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes following two deadly plane crashes killing 346 people in the space of five months, both involving this aircraft model. Announcing the development on Twitter, India's aviation watchdog Directorate General of Civil Aviation had added that these planes "will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations". Furthermore, the government has made it clear that this aircraft will not be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace from 4 pm today. The deadline, according to a DGCA spokesperson, was picked "to cater to situations where aircraft can be positioned at maintenance facilities and international flights can reach their destinations". Also Read: Boeing 737 Max grounding: Aviation ministry to hold meeting at 4pm with airlines for contingency plan Here's all you need to know about this move, and its impact: SpiceJet will take a hit In India, Boeing 737 Max 8s are operated by two airliners - Jet Airways and SpiceJet. Jet Airways owns five of these planes, but all of them were previously grounded due to the airline's financial troubles. But SpiceJet's fleet of 13 Max 8s were very much in operation till the DGCA's new order came in. "SpiceJet has presently announced cancellation of 14 flights for today and will be operating additional flights from tomorrow. Of the 76 planes in our fleet, 64 aircraft are in operations and we are confident of minimizing the inconvenience to our passengers and attain normalcy in our operations," tweeted Tushar Srivastava, the airline's Head of Communications. He added that a majority of passengers affected by these sudden cancellations have been accommodated by SpiceJet on alternate flights while the "rest have been offered a full-refund". Impact on air passengers Air fares in the country were already shooting up courtesy flight cancellations by Jet Airways and IndiGo, and with SpiceJet planes also getting grounded, they are poised to sky-rocket further. According to The Financial Express, spot fares - for flights booked 7-15 days before the date of travel - have risen by up to 20% on key metro routes since January this year, when the flight schedules were more or less normal. In the past month, IndiGo and Jet Airways have cancelled around 200 flights daily. Prepare for more cancellations in the days ahead courtesy the Boeing ban. This will also impact domestic air traffic growth. The latter had already dropped to a 52-month low at 9.1% year-on-year during January mainly due to higher fares. What is the Civil Aviation Ministry doing about it? The Civil Aviation Ministry will hold an emergency meeting with the domestic airlines at 4 pm today to prepare a contingency plan to deal with the flight cancellations stemming from the ban on Boeing 737 Max planes and minimise inconvenience to passengers. "While passenger safety is a zero tolerance issue, efforts are already on to minimise the impact on passenger movement as their convenience is important," Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu tweeted on Tuesday night. Interestingly, the DGCA had said on Monday that it had reviewed recent snags and defects reported in the Indian Boeing737 Max 8s and had found "no significant concern" and had simply issued additional safety guidelines for flying these planes. Among other things, the regulator said that pilots flying these planes must have at least 1,000 hours of flying experience while the minimum experience level for co-pilot is 500 hours. The revised decision to ground these planes came following a similar stand by several countries across the globe following the Ethiopian Airlines' flight that crashed in Addis Ababa on Sunday, killing all 157 passengers and crew on board, including four Indians. The plane that crashed was a new 737 MAX 8. Growing ban on the Boeing 737 Max 8s China was the first country to order its domestic carriers to ground the nearly 100 Boeing 737 MAX 8s in operation, following this news. The past two days have seen Indonesia, Mongolia, Ethiopia, Oman and UAE follow suit. In addition, several countries started closing their respective airspace to these planes, starting with Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, UK and the European Union. India and New Zealand are among the latest ones to do this. Also Read: Boeing ban: Aviation Secretary begins emergency meeting with airlines Several carriers, including Cayman Airways, South African airline Comair, Aeromexico and Brazil's Gol Airlines, have also independently decided to suspend operations of this aircraft model pending reviews while pilots with Argentina's Aerolineas Argentinas reportedly flatout refused to fly the jet. However, the US and Canada, which has the maximum numbers of this aircraft model, continue to fly them. Yesterday, the US aviation regulator said that there is "no basis" for grounding Boeing's 737 MAX aircraft. "Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action," Federal Aviation Administration chief Daniel Elwell said in a statement. In a similar vein, Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau clarified that the government currently has no plans to order the grounding of the plane but "all options are on the table". What is triggering the global panic? Before the recent Ethiopian Airlines crash, a Max 8 flight operated by Lion Air crashed into the Java Sea killing all 189 people on board in October last year. The pilots of both fatal flights had reportedly tried to return to the airport a few minutes after takeoff but were unable to do so. And both flights experienced drastic fluctuations in vertical speed during ascent, while negative vertical speeds should typically be recorded only when an aircraft is about to reach its destination and departs from cruising altitude. Could a problem with the new software system on these planes - the manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system (MCAS) - be another common factor? In the case of the Lion Air crash, a malfunction had prompted MCAS to command a dive and the pilots were not able to correct it. Only time, and further investigations, will reveal exactly what went wrong in the Addis Ababa crash. About 350 Boeing 737 Max 8s were in service before the snowballing ban kicked off, with more than 5,000 of them on order. Sunday's plane crash sent Boeing shares tumbling, reportedly wiping off a whopping $24 billion from its market cap in just two days. Meanwhile, Indonesia's Lion Air said yesterday that it would postpone taking delivery of four new Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets. The low-cost carrier - Southeast Asia's biggest airline by fleet size and a major Boeing customer with 10 Max 8 jets - said the jets had been on order for delivery this year. Boeing, nonetheless, steadfastly insists it has no reason to pull the popular aircraft from the skies. The US plane maker issued a statement on Monday outlining software enhancements it has been working on "to make an already safe aircraft even safer". The list includes updates to the MCAS flight control law, pilot displays, operation manuals and crew training. "The enhanced flight control law incorporates angle of attack (AOA) inputs, limits stabilizer trim commands in response to an erroneous angle of attack reading, and provides a limit to the stabilizer command in order to retain elevator authority," said the company. With agencies inputs (Edited by Sushmita Choudhury Agarwal) Also Read: SpiceJet cancels 14 flights, offers full refund after DGCA bans Boeing 737 Max 8 Also Read: SpiceJet share price falls up to 8% after govt grounds Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft The Mumbai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has raised suspicion over the manner in which the insolvency proceedings against Streling Biotech have been withdrawn. In an observation made yesterday, NCLT has asked the central government to look into the matter and see if it wants to make any representation against the withdrawal before the tribunal could pass any further order. Also Read: Azim Premji commits Rs 1.45 lakh crore, 67 per cent stake in Wipro to philanthropy The NCLT has questioned the manner in which withdrawal of the insolvency proceeding was carried out. It says while the promoters of the group -- Nitin Sandesara, Chairman and Managing Director and Chetan Sandesara, Joint Managing Director -- are absconding and government agencies like Enforcement Directorate, CBI and other agencies have failed to track them down, yet the lenders accepted the proposal of one-time settlement from the promoters. That is not all, observed the NCLT. The proposal of one-time settlement (OTS) came from a person named Farhad Daruwalla on behalf of Sandesara Group. However, it is not mentioned in the OTS proposal if the Sandesaras authorised the said person to submit the one-time settlement proposal. The tribunal also pointed out when the resolution to withdraw the insolvency proceeding was cleared by the committee of creditors (CoC), the insolvency resolution professional (IRP) had asked the CoC for details of the OTS proposal, sources of funds of the debtor (for one-time settlement) and if the proposal met the RBI norms. The CoC led by Andhra Bank (which initiated the insolvency proceedings against Sterling Biotech) said that the details would be directly given to the NCLT and did not submit any details with the IRP. Also Read: Angel Tax: Govt now plans mechanism to identify genuine investors It is to be mentioned here that the resolution to withdraw the insolvency proceeding against Sterling Biotech could not get the mandatory 90 per cent CoC votes during the 13th meeting of CoC on February 27 this year. After that, the IRP put the resolution proposal from ACG Associated Capsules Pvt Ltd for vote, which was also rejected by 93 per cent CoC votes. Then the IRP put the proposal for liquidation, which was again rejected by the CoC. When a fresh proposal for withdrawal was brought by Andhra Bank, it was finally accepted by the CoC by 90 per cent votes. It is to be noted here that the Enforcement Directorate has filed a prosecution complaint against Nitin Sandesara, Chetan Sandesara and two of their associates --Dipti Sandesara and Hitesh Patel -- in a money laundering case involving bank fraud of Rs 8,100 crore. Investigation in ED revealed that the promoters of Sterling group laundered the proceeds of crime through various layers and routed the funds outside India. They incorporated more than 100 entities abroad in various countries including UAE, USA, UK, BVI, Mauritius, Barbados, Nigeria etc. Their main entities outside India include Richmond Overseas, Sunshine Trust Corporation, SEEPCO BVI, SEEPCO Nigeria, Atlantic Blue Water Services Pvt Ltd. etc. Plans by Britain to levy import tariffs on beef, lamb and dairy products if it crashes out of the EU without a deal would be potentially disastrous for Irish farmers, Agriculture Minister Michael Creed said on Wednesday. Britain laid out plans to temporarily eliminate tariffs on many goods and keep the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland free of customs checks as lawmakers prepared to vote on Wednesday on it should leave the European Union without a transition agreement. But protections would remain in place for, among others, carmakers and meat and dairy farmers. Ireland's 3.1 billion euros of trade in food and live animals with Britain last year represented over 40 percent of all exports in that category. The Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) estimated the additional cost to beef producers alone from the tariffs would be almost 800 million euros. "This is potentially a disaster, yes," Creed told RTE. "We're involved now in a very detailed analysis of what the implications are (and) ...it's not a pretty picture... But this is in the event of no deal and we're not there yet." IFA President Joe Healy said in a statement that Ireland's most exposed sectors, particularly beef, "simply will not survive" the kind of tariffs being talked about and that it would have a devastating effect on the rural economy. Creed said officials from his department were in Brussels on Wednesday for further discussions on interventions that would be required in response. The European Commission President has promised to assist Irish farmers and other businesses under a no-deal Brexit. London said Northern Ireland would not be subject to the tariffs, a feature the province's Federation of Small Businesses said would likely lead to a rush of Irish exporters using Northern Ireland as a backdoor to avoid the British duties. The British government said those arrangements can only be temporary and that it would seek to enter urgent discussions with the European Commission and Dublin to agree long-term measures to avoid a hard border. Ireland's position - that it will not make plans for managing the currently seamless border in a no-deal Brexit until such an outcome emerges - remains unchanged, European Affairs Minister Helen McEntee told RTE. She said London's temporary plan to keep Northern Ireland aligned with EU-member Ireland replicated what was already on offer in the Irish "backstop" arrangements opposed by British lawmakers. (Reuters) Source: www.businessworld.ie The European Union will not negotiate Brexit again, it said on Tuesday, after Britain's parliament rejected the divorce package for a second time in a vote that made a chaotic no-deal scenario more likely. "The EU has done everything it can to help get the Withdrawal Agreement over the line," Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said after the House of Commons vote. "The impasse can only be solved in the UK. Our 'no-deal' preparations are now more important than ever before." In coordinated statements, European Council President Donald Tusk and the bloc's executive European Commission said the EU had done "all that is possible to reach an agreement ... it is difficult to see what more we can do." The bloc insists the divorce deal - already rejected by parliament in January - will not be revisited. It expects Prime Minister Theresa May to ask for a delay to Brexit to avoid economic disruption should Britain leave with no plan in place. "With only 17 days left to March 29, today's vote has significantly increased the likelihood of a 'no-deal' Brexit," the EU said. "Should there be a UK reasoned request for an extension, the EU27 will consider it and decide by unanimity. The EU27 will expect a credible justification for a possible extension and its duration," it said, adding that any Brexit delay must not interfere with EU parliamentary elections due on May 24-26. EU envoys from the remaining 27 member states were due to meet at 0800 GMT on Wednesday to discuss next steps. While a short Brexit delay is acceptable to the EU, few in the bloc believe it would be enough to break the deadlock in Britain's government, parliament and the wider country, all split in half on Brexit. Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker said on Monday Britain must leave on May 23 at the latest or would have to take part in the EU elections. Typical of the exasperation felt in Brussels, one EU diplomat said: "What credibility does she (May) have left? Why would EU leaders engage with her again after yet another failure? This really needs to end." But there were some more sanguine voices too, with Ireland's foreign minister calling for patience and another national EU diplomat saying: "There is still more drama to be had - and then we'll see." An EU lawmaker dealing with Brexit, Philippe Lamberts, said the UK needed a second referendum or make a U-turn and seek to remain in the EU's customs union after Brexit to break the deadlock. "The EU has gone to every length to try and accommodate the UK government's red lines," he said. "We cannot continue to witness Theresa May's traveling circus of CO2 and hot air to Brussels, London, Dublin and Strasbourg, so long as Westminster is unable to agree with itself." (Reuters) Source: www.businessworld.ie Mercer has today released its latest Mercers 21st annual Quality of Living survey which Dublin ranked 33rd overall, ahead of London (41), Edinburgh (45), Glasgow (48), Birmingham (49), Aberdeen (57), and Belfast (64). Mercers authoritative survey is one of the most comprehensive of its type in the world and is conducted annually to enable multinational companies and other organisations to compensate employees fairly when placing them on international assignments. Quality of living is determined by many factors, from access to public transport and traffic congestion levels, to the availability of housing and international schools, to a citys cultural scene. Mercers 21st annual Quality of Living survey shows that trade tensions and populist undercurrents continue to dominate the global economic climate. Combined with the spectre of monetary policy tightening and volatility looming over markets, international businesses are under more pressure than ever to get their overseas operations right. The report shows that many cities around the world still offer attractive environments in which to do business, and the best understand that the quality of living is an essential component of a citys attractiveness for businesses and mobile talent. Globally, Vienna tops the ranking for the 10th year running, closely followed by Zurich (2). In joint third place are Auckland, Munich and Vancouver the highest ranking city in North America for the last 10 years. Dublin (33) remains the highest ranked city for quality of living in the UK and Ireland, and improved from 34th place last year. Dublin is followed by London (41), Edinburgh (45), Glasgow (48), Birmingham (49), Aberdeen (57), and Belfast (64). Dublin also ranks highest in the UK and Ireland for safety (32) followed by Edinburgh (36), Aberdeen (36), Glasgow (36), Birmingham (53), Belfast (61) and London (64). Commenting on the results, Senior Reward and Mobility consultant for Mercer in Ireland, Noel OConnor said, "Dublin continues to score highly for quality of living and safety in this years rankings. As the potential effects of Brexit continue to evolve its important that Dublin sustains its position as an attractive location for multinational organisations." He added, "Companies are looking for urban centres to attract and retain talent, and a high quality of living is essential to this. Some of the factors placing Dublin in 33rd place include a stable poitical environment, lower levels of air pollution and a strong socio-cultural environment. While Dublin has opportunities for improvement with regard to transportation and the availability of international schools, the results once again demonstrate that it is an attractive location for international businesses to send their employees." Source: www.businessworld.ie Valeo today announced it is to invest 44m in a major RD&I investment programme, which will build on the Groups capability in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) with the aim of positioning the company at the forefront of developments in autonomous vehicles. This investment will lead to the creation of 50 new R&D roles over the next three years, which will see its Irish R&D centre grow to over 500 people and become one of the largest R&D facilities in Ireland. Speaking about the investment, Minister of State for Rural Affairs & Natural Resources, Sean Canney said, "Valeo is a substantial and valued employer in Tuam and indeed Galway and the West region and this announcement that VVS is to make a major investment in an RD&I programme is great news, demonstrating significant commitment by the company to the Tuam site as it positions itself at the leading edge of the development of autonomous vehicles." Valeo Comfort and Driving Assistance Systems Business Group President, Marc Vrecko added, "Our facility in Tuam is one of the leading Research centres in the Group. With the support of IDA Ireland, Valeo continues to have a sustained and rewarding investment in Ireland. We are very excited about the announcement today to further expand our footprint here to build on the proven innovation in Product and Process R&D. The investment will help fuel the global growth of the Vision Product Line and extend Valeo as global leader for ADAS systems and related MaaS products." Source: www.businessworld.ie Irish technology company, Netwatch Group, has today announced that it will create 100 new positions in sales, engineering, project management and finance. Over the past eight years, Netwatch has grown their business from a single sales employee in Boston to their present US workforce across six locations including New Jersey, Boston, Atlanta, Lake Forest, California, Dallas and Houston, Texas. The announcement was made at a round table business briefing with the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar TD in the US Chamber of Commerce offices in Washington, D.C. The latest expansion at Netwatch is being driven by the demand for its proprietary technologies that allow for real-time intervention during an attempted security breach. The company's in-house R&D team in Ireland is developing new solutions built on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) which is revolutionizing the proactive visual monitoring segment of the security industry globally. Headquartered in Carlow, Netwatch Group has had a presence in the US since 2012, when it opened its first office in Boston, Massachusetts. In April 2018, Netwatch acquired NMC in California and CalAtlantic in Texas and now operates three communications hubs in the US. Welcoming the announcement, Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar said, "I am really pleased to see the Netwatch Group continuing to expand in the United States with this significant jobs announcement. Netwatch is an innovation-led company which has illustrated how jobs created in Ireland can in turn lead to job creation in multiple locations across the US." Source: www.businessworld.ie The tech segment now serves as a vital bedrock of the Canadian commercial real estate sector, according to a new analysis by Marcus & Millichap. In its newly released 2019 Commercial Real Estate Canada Investment Forecast study, Marcus & Millichap noted that tech firms demand for usable space will foster greater investment in the oft-ignored outskirts of major metropolitan markets. Elevated pricing expectations and fewer high-quality listings in downtown areas motivate investors to broaden search parameters to suburban locations near major metros. Higher yields beyond the urban core will be a large driver to sales activity in 2019, the report stated. Moreover, tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon which have already taken roost in Canadas leading commercial markets have been predicted to hire new workers in the tens of thousands over the next few years, as well as spend billions in office expansions during that same period. Microsoft currently has 2,300 employees in the country and 14,000 partners, which could grow to 60,000 overall jobs between employees and partners. Amazon will also grow substantially with plans for 6,000 new jobs across corporate offices in Vancouver and Toronto and multiple new fulllment centres, the report explained. Read more: Tech firms are the foundation of the commercial segments stability Toronto, as a globally acknowledged leader in innovation, will immensely benefit from this trend. Microsoft, Intel, Uber and others have plans to increase operations in the city and bring on new workers. Additionally, in recent years an abundance of international retailers have made a push into Canada, often landing on Toronto when deciding on their rst location in the country. Sidewalk Labs, a sister company to Google, will undertake one of the greatest projects as they transform Torontos waterfront to a smart city of the future, which will be anchored by Googles new Canadian headquarters. Montreal hosts two of Canadas top-tier universities, along with a burgeoning artificial intelligence R&D scene. This is encouraging the development of new purpose-built rentals to meet the growing demand. Rental rent growth will remain robust this year despite a new delivery high for the current cycle, drawing more investment capital to the apartment sector. In recent months, more multi-family buildings were constructed than any other housing type in Canadas hottest markets, according to a new report by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. The national trend in housing starts resumed its downward trajectory in February while still remaining above historical average, CMHC chief economist Bob Dugan said. The Crown corporation said that despite the nationwide housing starts trend falling to 203,554 units in February 2019 (from the 207,742 units exactly a year before), multi-family complexes represented much of recent home construction activity. Both single-detached and multi-unit dwellings starts trended lower. Higher mortgage rates combined with still-favourable, but less stimulative economic conditions have contributed to softer demand on new home markets in urban centres. Vancouver, in particular, saw the predominance of multi-unit buildings in new projects. Condo starts significantly increased in the 12 months ending February 2019, accounting for 77% of the citys new housing units last month. In contrast, single-detached starts fell by 24% annually. Read more: Rental demand to boost further apartment construction CMHC Meanwhile, Torontos lower February numbers mainly stemmed from low condo apartment starts, although demand for the asset class is not stopping any time soon as sales of new condominium apartment starts have been strong in 2017 and 2018 and these units will continue to break ground throughout this year at a varying pace. Row and semi-detached home starts trended higher underlining their popularity among buyers looking for lower priced ground-oriented homes, the CMHC noted On the other hand, Montreals total housing starts decreased by 47% year-over-year in February, but rental apartment construction has continued to show strong growth. The low vacancy rates, the aging of the population and the greater proportion of young households now opting for the rental market have continued to stimulate rental housing starts, the CMHC stated. news, latest-news Good morning, Canberra. Have you been up early to watch the Balloon Spectacular yet? There's just a few days left. We're looking at a top of 27 degrees today with a medium chance of showers in the afternoon and evening, before tops of 24 and 26 over the weekend. Let's have a look at what's making news today. Just when you think the decentralisation agenda may have slunk away, it's back again. Now the Coalition government is moving 76 jobs from Canberra, with the Murray Darling Basin Authority set to give staff the choice to move to Mildura, Griffith, Murray Bridge or another yet to be announced town. The Authority currently has 288 staff in Canberra. Doug Dingwall has the story here. This was such a sad story to wake up to yesterday, that a dog had attacked two of Canberra's therapy alpacas, and that one of them, Mimosa, had to be put down. "He slept by the gate last night hoping she'd come home," owner Nils Lantzke said of his surviving alpaca Hercules. Mr Lantzke is devastated, exhausted, overwhelmed by the loss and lifted by the response from the community. But, ultimately, sceptical anything will change in Canberra to prevent ongoing dog attacks. Megan Doherty and Jasper Lindell explain here. ACT government ministers and bureaucrats have admitted there's actually not much they can do when it comes to regulating household delivery drone services. In evidence given to a Legislative Assembly inquiry looking into the Project Wing drone delivery trial, Attorney General Gordon Ramsay said the government had "very limited" ability to mitigate the disturbance. "The simple reality is that we have very limited space in which the ACT government has the capacity to move into the regulation of drones," Mr Ramsay told the inquiry. "The Australian government has exclusive power to regulate safety in terms of safety and in terms drone noise." Dan Jervis-Bardy has all the details here. Are you feeling very excited about the Raiders' season finally starting tonight? If you can fit in some more excitement, check out this interview with co-captains Jarrod Croker and Josh Hodgson. There's interesting insight into the leadership group, what success looks like and how the Raiders will turn it around this season. David Polkinghorne asks all the big questions here. Many things get better with age, including the Canberran individuals and groups recognised at the Canberra Gold Awards on Wednesday. Among the groups recognised were the Woden Valley Youth Choir, which started in 1969, and the YWCA Canberra, which has been going for 90 years. The awards recognise people or community groups that have been here for 50 years or more. Megan Doherty has the story here. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/7fc5b7f2-13a4-42c0-bf77-cb384242adc0/r0_359_6720_4156_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, latest-news, Support for household delivery drones is starting to emerge across Canberra, flying against otherwise vehement opposition to the technology's presence in the national capital. Residents, a traders' group and a private drone operator have endorsed the drone's potential as a convenient, cost-effective and environmentally-friendly delivery service in new submissions to an Assembly inquiry into the technology. But the overwhelming sentiment expressed in the almost 150 submissions to the inquiry remains one of firm opposition to the innovation, as debate rages over Wing's divisive Bonython trial and planned expansion into Canberra's northern suburbs. The ACT Equestrian Association's submission expressed alarm about drone noise frightening horses, potentially risking the recreation's future in the national capital. The Green Institute, led by Greens federal election candidate Tim Hollo, used its submissions to call for a halt to the technology's expansion pending independent reviews. The Environmental Defenders' Office has also added its voice to the chorus of those concerned about gaps in the regulation of drone technology. But the latest batch of submissions, published online as the inquiry held its first public hearings last week, shows a degree of community support for Wing's world-leading service. In his submission, Phillip Balding, an administrator of the "Bonython For Drones" Facebook page, said drones could offer cost savings for customers, when compared with traditional food delivery services such as Uber Eats. Research commissioned by Wing has shown drones could save customers a combined $5 million in delivery costs a year by 2030. "This is the major reason I got on board with drone deliveries and want them to succeed I want my friends and family to save money - without getting in their ears about cooking and investing, andannoying them," Mr Balding said. A number of other submissions sought to balance the well-publicised views of drone opponents, whom they argued had overstated noise from drone flights and disturbances to local wildlife. Richard Beaton, a licensed drone operator, said in his submission that the innovation "tend(s) to bring out the worst in people", as he expressed concern the inquiry was being overrun by an "organised and particularly vocal group of so-called haters". Mr Beaton said continual technological improvements would reduce the noise emitted from the aircraft. Wing last week unveiled a new, quieter-model drone, which it plans to start flying in Crace, Palmerston, Franklin, Gungahlin and Harrison in the coming months. Those flights are set to be launched from the company's new headquarters in Mitchell - and with the backing of the local traders association. "Traders in the Mitchell precinct are open minded towards new technology and understand the transformative impact that drones will have in the future," Mitchell Traders' Association secretary Julian Kusa in a submission. "We believe drone-based deliveries will be beneficial to local ACT businesses andconsumers who wish to use the service." Amid those positive endorsements, more groups have declared their opposition to the drones in submissions to the inquiry. The ACT Equestrian Association said it had for some time been concerned about the noise from drones, which it said was known to alarm and confuse horse due to their heightened sense of hearing. A horse panicked by the noise could "throw its rider, bold, end up in traffic, injure itself and those around it", the association's submission stated. "It is easy to see how the likelihood of having your horse panicked by a drone anytime you went for ride is of great concern," it stated. "As we cannot imagine that Project Wing will be given a monopoly over deliveries, the risk to the life and limb of both horses and their riders will be compounded exponentially, should this technology be given approval. Potentially an entire recreational activity could be made untenable because some people are too lazy to go out for a cappuccino. If we do not limit this technology now, it will become a monster very difficult to put back in its box." The association's president, Christine Lawrence, said while she had not experienced Wing's drones in flight, her group feared delivery drones would be more detrimental to horses than recreational aircraft. "Their needs to be a line of sight between the pilot and a recreational drones, so if they see a horse they can move away," Ms Lawrence said. "You don't have that with delivery drones". A Wing spokeswoman said the company had conducted extensive testing of the drones near horses and "did not observe any ill effects". The spokeswoman said Wing had no plans to fly near Canberra's designated horse trails, meaning there was "no chance" its operations would disturb the animals. The speed and height at which the drones flew would also mean they were unlikely to spark alarm in the horses, the spokeswoman said. The two parties have been in regular contact during the drone trials. Representatives from the ACT government and Civil Aviation Safety Authority are scheduled to give evidence at the drone inquiry on Wednesday. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/8a844253-a14b-45a5-8189-9a6185cb8624/r0_268_5000_3093_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg (ANSA) - Belluno, March 12 - The world is on the verge of a global climate crisis, President Sergio Mattarella said Tuesday. "We're on the verge of a global climate crisis, to avert which coordinated measures are needed at a global level," he said at the commemoration of Veneto storm victims. This was the meaning of an appeal by European heads of State last autumn, he said. "The efforts made in international conferences in successive times have, up till now, achieved significant results but partial ones, and still insufficient." President Sergio Mattarella on Tuesday vowed the "utmost support" for Milan and Cortina's bid to host the 2026 Winter Olympics. He said the Winter Games "have great importance, not only for the two protagonist cities but also for the while of Italy". Mattarella said "I assure all the support and backing possible". Modified On May 20, 2019 09:50 AM By Dinesh for Honda Civic The tenth-gen sedan is available in three variants and five colours Honda has launched the 2019 Civic in India. Available in three variants - V, VX and ZX - it is priced between Rs 17.70 lakh to 22.30 lakh (ex-showroom pan-India). For the first time in India, the Civic is available with both petrol and diesel engine options. However, while the petrol engine is available with a CVT only, the diesel can only be had with a 6-speed MT. Now, let us find out which variant and engine combination suits your budget and needs the best. Colour Options: Radiant Red Metallic Platinum White Pearl Modern Silver Metallic Golden Brown Metallic Lunar Silver Metallic Standard Safety Features: Four airbags Vehicle stability assist Agile handling assist Hill start assist ISOFIX child seat anchors Front seatbelt reminder ABS with EBD Electronic parking brake with auto hold High speed alert Rear parking camera and sensors Front seatbelt pretensioner with load limiter Rear defogger Honda Civic V: Available with petrol-CVT only; logical purchase V CVT Petrol V Diesel Price Rs 17.70 lakh NA Exterior: Halogen projector headlamps with LED DRLs, fog lamps, LED turn indicators on ORVMs, LED tail lamps, 16-inch alloy wheels and sharkfin antenna. Interior: Fabric seat upholstery. Infotainment: 5-inch music system (non touchscreen) with Bluetooth connectivity. Comfort: Steering-mounted controls, paddle shifters (petrol only), smart entry with push-button start, walk away auto lock, remote engine start, all four power windows, remote opening and closing of windows, electrically adjustable and foldable ORVMs, sliding front armrest, tilt and telescopic steering and adjustable front and rear headrest. Verdict: The base variant of the Civic is only available with the petrol-CVT powertrain. This variant covers most your needs (apart from auto-dimming IRVM). Wed recommend the entry-level variant for those looking for a petrol-powered sedan within a budget but doesnt want to skimp on basic features. That said, buyers whore upgrading from a top or even mid-level variant of a compact car like the Honda City or the Hyundai Creta will feel the absence of feel-good features such as a touchscreen infotainment system, an auto dimming IRVM and a power adjustable driver seat. Honda Civic VX: Incremental value doesnt justify the additional equipment; diesel-manual doesnt justify the price difference over petrol-CVT powertrain VX CVT Petrol VX MT Diesel Price Rs 19.20 lakh Rs 20.50 lakh Over V Rs 1.5 lakh NA Safety: Pop up bonnet (diesel only) Interior: Ivory leatherette upholstery, digital instrument cluster and ambient lighting. Infotainment: 7-inch touchscreen infotainment system with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Comfort: Dual zone climate control, auto dimming IRVM, cruise control, auto folding ORVMs, 8-way power adjustable driver seat and multi-view rear parking camera. Verdict: In this variant, the Civic not only covers all your needs but packs some feel-good features as well. It gets a dual-zone climate control, digital instrument cluster, 8-way electrically adjustable drivers seat, a 7-inch touchscreen infotainment system and ambient lighting over the V variant. However, these additional features are priced at a premium of Rs 1.5 lakh over the petrol-powered V variant, which is quite pricey in our opinion. However, if its a diesel-powered Civic that you need, this is the sedans entry-level variant. But a price difference of Rs 1.3 lakh between the petrol and diesel powertrain makes the Civic diesel an expensive proposition, especially when you consider that the diesel version does not get the option of an automatic gearbox. Honda Civic ZX: Not interested in the Civic V for the lack of modern-day equipment? Splurge and buy Civic ZX instead. Its priced at a premium but appeals to the heart. ZX CVT Petrol ZX MT Diesel Price 20.99 lakh 22.29 lakh Over VX 1.8 lakh 1.8 lakh Safety: Curtain airbags Exterior: Auto LED headlamps, LED fog lamps, electric sunroof and 17-inch alloy wheels. Comfort: Rain-sensing wipers, Honda Lane Watch camera, remote opening and closing for sunroof. Verdict: The Civic ZX is definitely an upgrade over the VX as far as safety features are concerned. It also feels more premium thanks to additions like a sunroof, LED headlamps and fog lamps, and bigger alloy wheels. It also gets the Honda Lane Watch camera which assists in changing lanes while on the move. The Civic ZX appeals to the heart more than the other two variants. If you are the sort of person who has an emotional connect with your car, then this is definitely the variant to go for. The ZX variant also appeals to those whore buying the Civic not because they want an upgrade in terms of size, but in terms of equipment as well. For all others, the Civic V do the job just fine. Best of all, youll be able to save a substantial amount of money as well. Also Read: 2019 Honda Civic Warranty, Maintenance Details Revealed Read More on : Civic Automatic Our Promise: Welcome to Care2, the world's largest community for good. Here, you'll find over 45 million like-minded people working towards progress, kindness, and lasting impact. Care2 Stands Against: bigots, racists, bullies, science deniers, misogynists, gun lobbyists, xenophobes, the willfully ignorant, animal abusers, frackers, and other mean people. If you find yourself aligning with any of those folks, you can move along, nothing to see here. Care2 Stands With: humanitarians, animal lovers, feminists, rabble-rousers, nature-buffs, creatives, the naturally curious, and people who really love to do the right thing. You are our people. You Care. We Care2. Union Bank of India (UBI), a leading public sector bank in the country, releases the recruitment notification annually for several positions to run the bank smoothly. A job in Union Bank is a dream to many job aspirants because of the overseas presence beside fast career advancement. The Bank recruit the Probationary Officers (PO), Clerks and Specialist Officers (SO) through IBPS' Common Recruitment Process. Apart from IBPS, the bank also recruits some other posts under Specialist Officer which were not listed in the IBPS SO. Some of the most popular posts that fall under Specialist Officer are Fire Officer, Economist, Security Officer, Integrated Treasury Officer, Credit Officer and Forex Officer. In order to crack the Specialist Officer in the Union Bank of India, aspirants need to get familiar with the most important details such as exam pattern. Here, we have decided to display exam pattern and preparation tips to crack Specialist Officer in Union Bank. Union Bank SO Selection Process The selection of the candidates for Union Bank SO comprises of online written examination/ group discussion and personal interview. Aspirants should note that the bank decides whether to use all or any of these modes for the selection. Union Bank SO Exam Pattern The online written examination is available in both English and Hindi language. One-fourth of the marks will be deducted for each wrong attempt. Candidates will be shortlisted for the interview based on the merit in the written examination. The total duration of the online written examination is 120 minutes. S No Name of The Tests Number of Questions Maximum Marks 1 Reasoning 50 25 2 Quantitative Aptitude 50 50 3 Professional Knowledge relevant to the post 50 100 4 English Language 50 25 Total 200 200 Union Bank SO Personal Interview The personal interview will be held for a total of 50 marks and candidates will be tested on job knowledge, the power of expression, clarity of thought, qualities of leadership, extracurricular activities, hobbies, general demeanour, behaviour, communication skills, etc. Candidates should obtain at least 25 marks out of 50 in the personal interview round. One who doesn't obtain the minimum qualifying marks in the personal interview will not be considered for final selection. Union Bank SO Preparation Tips Practice is the most important phase to stand out in the online test specifically for quantitative aptitude and reasoning section. The professional knowledge relevant to the post is very important in the written examination with a total of 100 marks out of 200. Candidates are advised to be strong in the basic concepts of professional knowledge because of many repetitive fundamental questions. After professional knowledge, candidates are advised to focus on quantitative aptitude because of high weightage. Be familiar with the basic concepts to stand out in the quantitative aptitude. Reading comprehension and sentence corrections are the most important topics to score well in the English language. Aspirants are advised to take at least one mock test daily during the final week of preparation. Preparing short notes while preparing the basic concepts will help a lot during revision. Compared to non-verbal, verbal reasoning is more important. Hence, aspirants should focus on the logical reasoning part. Also Read: 7-Step Guide To Prepare For The Probationary Officer Exam While Working (ANSA) - Beijing, March 6 - Beijing hit back on Wednesday after an American official was quoted as saying that Italy's global standing could be affected if it signs up to China's huge Belt and Road infrastructure initiative. The initiative features a series of Beijing-funded major port, rail and road projects to better connect China to Europe, Africa and Asia for a modern version of the silk road. Rome is reportedly close to signing a memorandum of understanding to join the initiative, making it the first G7 country to do so. The Financial Times quoted Garrett Marquis, White House National Security Council spokesperson, as saying that this could "damage Italy's global reputation". Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang said this was not true. "I think those judgements are truly absurd," Lu said. "As a great country and a great economy, Italy knows where its interests are and it can conduct independent policies". The Karnataka Power Corporation (KPCL) a premier power generation company under Govt. of Karnataka has invited online applications from eligible and interested candidates for filling 37 vacancies to the post of Junior Personal Officers (JPO) to be posted at KPCL power stations in Hyderabad-Karnataka (HK) and Non Hyderabad-Karnataka (NHK) regions through direct recruitment. The online application process towards the same starts from March 20, 2019 and closes on April 22, 2019 by 5:00 pm, with April 26, 2019 as the last date for paying application processing fee. CRITERIA DETAILS Name Of The Posts Junior Personal Officers (JPO) Organisation The Karnataka Power Corporation (KPCL) Educational Qualification Bachelors Degree/PG Diploma/LLB Degree/MBA Experience Freshers can apply Job Location Karnataka Salary Scale Rs. 14,395 to Rs. 40,785 per month. Industry Power Application Start Date March 20, 2019 Application End Date April 22, 2019 Age Criteria And Fees Candidates interested in applying for the post of Junior Personal Officers (JPO) through KPCL Recruitment 2019 must have attained 18 years of age as on April 22, 2019 and must not have exceeded 35 years (Gen), 38 years (OBC categories) and 40 years (SC/ST/CAT-I) respectively. Candidates must pay a prescribed amount of Rs. 525 (GEN/OBC) and Rs. 275 (SC/ST/CAT-I) as application processing fee-cum-postal charges through Challan mode at any Post Office branch. However, PWD, Children of Defence Personnel killed and Ex-Serviceman candidates are required to pay only Rs. 50 as application fee-cum-postal charges. KPWD Recruitment 2019: Apply Online For 870 Assistant Engineer And Junior Engineer Vacancies Region Wise Vacancy Details For KPCL-JPO Post Region No. Of Vacancies Non Hyderabad-Karnataka (NHK) 23 Hyderabad-Karnataka (HK) 14 Total 37 Educational Criteria Desirous candidates applying for the post of Junior Personal Officers (JPO) through KPCL Recruitment 2019 must possess a Bachelor's Degree of a recognized University/Institution along with PG Diploma in Personnel Management/Social Work with specialisation in Personnel Management/Industrial Relations from a recognised institute, or the candidate must possess a Bachelor's Degree in law/Diploma in Labour Laws/MSW/MBA with specialisation in Personnel Management. Selection And Pay Scale The selection of candidates as Junior Personal Officers (JPO) through KPCL Recruitment 2019 will be done based on the candidates' performance in Written Test (Objective Type) and Kannada Language Test. Candidates selected as Junior Personal Officers (JPO) will be paid an emolument in the scale of Rs. 14,395 to Rs. 40,785 per month. KPCL Recruitment 2019 For Medical Officers And Accounts Officers; Application Starts From March 20 How To Apply Candidates applying for the post of Junior Personal Officers (JPO) through KPCL Recruitment 2019 must submit their applications on the official KPCL website at http://karnatakapower.com/en/ through online mode only from March 20, 2019 onwards. Candidates applying for posts under HK and NHK regions must submit separate applications and remit application fees separately at http://karnatakapower.com/en/recruitment/ Read the detailed notification about KPCL Recruitment 2019 for Junior Personal Officers (JPO) here http://karnatakapower.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Web-Notfn-NHK-ENG-JPO-2019.pdf?x86893 The Karnataka Power Corporation (KPCL) under Govt. of Karnataka has invited online applications from eligible and qualified candidates for filling 15 vacancies to the post of Factory Medical Officers (05), Medical Officers (08) and Accounts Officers (02) to be posted at the KPCL units in Hyderabad-Karnataka (HK) region and Non Hyderabad-Karnataka (NHK) through direct recruitment. The online application process towards the same starts from March 20, 2019 and closes on April 22, 2019 by 5:00 pm, with April 26, 2019 as the last date for payment of application fee. CRITERIA DETAILS Name Of The Posts Factory Medical Officers, Medical Officers and Accounts Officers Organisation The Karnataka Power Corporation (KPCL) Educational Qualification MBBS Degree/Graduation Experience 2 years in relevant domain Job Location Karnataka Salary Scale Rs. 20,895 to Rs. 49,895 per month. Industry Power Application Start Date March 20, 2019 Application End Date April 22, 2019 Age Criteria And Fees Candidates interested in applying for the post of Medical Officers and Accounts Officers through KPCL Recruitment 2019 must have attained 18 years of age and must not have exceeded 35 years (Gen), 38 years (OBC categories) and 40 years (SC/ST/CAT-I) respectively. Candidates must pay a specified amount of Rs. 525 (GEN/OBC) and Rs. 275 (SC/ST/CAT-I) as application processing fee-cum-postal charges through Challan mode at any Post Office branch. However, PWD and Ex-Serviceman candidates are required to pay only Rs. 50 as application fee-cum-postal charges. KPWD Recruitment 2019: Apply Online For 870 Assistant Engineer And Junior Engineer Vacancies Educational Criteria And Experience Desirous candidates applying for the post of Medical Officers and Accounts Officers through KPCL Recruitment 2019 must possess the following qualifications: Factory Medical Officers: MBBS Degree from a recognized College/Institute in Karnataka, with minimum three-months Training in Industrial Health. Candidates must have at least two-years experience in a private/recognised Medical Hospital/Institution apart from internship. Medical Officers: MBBS Degree from a recognized College/Institute in Karnataka, with at least two-years experience in a private/recognised Medical Hospital/Institution apart from internship. Accounts Officers: Graduation (First Class) and must possess membership of ICWA. Selection And Pay Scale The selection of candidates as Medical Officers and Account Officers through KPCL Recruitment 2019 will be done based on the total marks (percentage) obtained in MBBS/ICWA by the candidates and a compulsory Kannada Language Test. Candidates selected as Medical Officers and Account Officers will be paid an emolument in the scale of Rs. 20,895 to Rs. 49,895 per month. Income Tax Department Recruitment 2019 For IT Inspector, Tax Assistants, MTS And Stenos How To Apply Candidates applying for the post of Medical Officers and Account Officers through KPCL Recruitment 2019 must submit their applications through online mode only on the official KPCL website at http://karnatakapower.com/en/ from March 20, 2019 onwards. Candidates applying for both HK and NHK posts must submit separate online applications and deposit application fees separately at http://karnatakapower.com/en/recruitment/ Read the detailed notification about KPCL Recruitment 2019 for Medical Officers and Account Officers here http://karnatakapower.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/HK-ENG-FMO-MO-BACKLOG.pdf?x86893 Photo: The Canadian Press Nelson Peltz of Trian Group, Heinz's second-largest investor, addresses shareholders during the annual meeting in Pittsburgh. Aurora Cannabis shares are up following news that it has appointed U.S. billionaire Nelson Peltz as a strategic adviser and given him the option to buy a stake in the company. The Edmonton-based cannabis company says it has granted Peltz options to purchase nearly 20 million common shares at $10.34 per share, slightly below Tuesday's closing price. The shares were up more than 12 per cent in early trading, rising to $11.97 up from Tuesday's close of $10.64. Peltz is CEO and founding partner of Trian Fund Management LP, a multi-billion dollar investment management firm. He also serves as the non-executive chairman of The Wendy's Company and director of The Procter & Gamble Company, and was previously a director of H.J. Heinz Company and Mondelez International Inc. Aurora said it will work with Peltz to explore potential partnerships for entry into certain market segments, and he will also advise on the cannabis producer's global expansion strategy. Peltz said Aurora has a "solid execution track record" and is poised to go to the "next level" across a range of industry verticals. "I also believe that Canadian licensed producers, and Aurora in particular, are well positioned to lead in the development of the international cannabis industry as regulations evolve, with a strong, globally replicable operating model," Peltz said in a statement. The options granted to Peltz will become effective gradually over a four-year period on a quarterly basis, with accelerated vesting if specified events occur. Those events include the consummation of certain transactions and the closing price of Aurora's common shares reaching certain levels. (ANSA) - Rome, March 12 - Air Force Chief of Staff General Alberto Rosso told parliament on Tuesday that Italy has not paid "389 million euros in invoices issued in 2018" by Lockheed Martin for F35 fighter jets. Reporting to a joint session of the Lower House and Senate defence committees, Rosso expressed "major concern about uncertainty over the programme" and the "hypothesis of a quantitative reduction" in the number of aircraft Italy will buy. The general said the alternative would be "older and more expensive" aircraft. The Air Force chief said that "this aircraft is the future. "Any slowdown or fall in the number would be worrying not just for us, but also for the nation's industry, given the economic impact of the programme". SNIC reports rise in February sales but warns of uncertainty ICR Newsroom By 13 March 2019 Cement sales in Brazil increased by 6.4 per cent YoY to 4.1Mt in February 2019, according to the country's cement association, SNIC. According to SNIC President, Paulo Camillo Penna, last month's results were directly influenced by the comparison of working days. "February's performance was increased by just two working days more than in February 2018 due to the carnival holiday. If we analyse the sales per working day the result of February is 3.2 per cent lower than the same month last year," he said. However, domestic cement producers saw export sales rise by 20 per cent from 5000t in February 2018 to 6000t in February 2019. January-February 2019 In the January-February 2019 period total sales advanced 5.4 per cent to 8.6Mt when compared with the first two months of the previous year. Sales robustly increased by 9.6 per cent YoY in central-eastern Brazil to 0.888Mt while in the south the advance was 6.9 per cent to 1.441Mt. In the southeast, the countrys biggest market, off-take rose by 4.5 per cent to 4.055Mt while in the second-largest market, the northeast, they advanced by 4.7 per cent to 1.858Mt both below the national average of 5.4 per cent. In the smallest market of the north the increase was only 3.5 per cent to 0.383Mt. Exports were flat at 13,000t in the first two months of 2019. Uncertain performance for 2019 However, data for the last 12 months (March 2018-February 2019) show that accumulated sales slipped by 0.4 per cent to 53.1Mt in comparison with the March 2017-February 2018 period, leading to concerns within the industry about the current trend. Mr Penna highlighted the uncertainty going forward. "Despite the recent realignment of the housing market in recent months, the sector still does not have a consistent environment capable of leading to sustainable growth and enabling recovery of the accumulated loss of almost 30 per cent in the last four years," he explained. "Our projection is for the first half of 2019 to grow by close to 1.5 per cent and the expectation is for an even stronger second half, leveraged mainly by the possible start or resumption of infrastructure works by the federal government, which should help us to close the year with a three per cent increase," SNICs president added. Published under Kenya's cement consumption drops to 5.49Mt in 2018 13 March 2019 Kenya's cement consumption dropped for the second year in a row to 5.49Mt n 2018, according to Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS). The decline in cement consumption comes despite ongoing public infrastructure projects such as roads and phase two of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) as well as continued development of buildings in the country. Last year's reduced consumption forced cement producers to cut production by 8.6 per cent to 5.63Mt from a high of 6.7Mt in 2016. "The first half of the year reflected a difficult business environment on the backdrop of increased input prices, a sluggish market as well as production challenges arising from a tight East African Portland Cement Company (EAPC) working capital position," said EAPC. EAPC's board also warned that the government's focus on affordable housing and manufacturing may trigger a very competitive environment, leading to subdued cement prices in the near future. The value of residential and non-residential building plans approved declined by 12.6 per cent or KES30.5bn (US$304.2m) to KES240.75bn in 2018. Published under Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Ltd (CATL) hasnt reached intent of cooperation or signed any business agreement with Tesla, the company said in a statement on March 12. Bloomberg cited people familiar with the matter and reported on March 11 that the two companies are in talks about battery supply. The report said that CATL was discussing with Tesla about the required specifications for the batteries, but also added that there was no guarantee that an agreement would be reached. According to an industry analyst, the statement from CATL was to prevent public comments from spreading and the main reason may be that both parties havent finalized cooperation details. The analyst said that it is very likely for them to cooperate. Since Teslas battery supplier Panasonic is unable to produce in China, local suppliers are of great significance to Teslas production in China. In January, Reuters reported that Tesla had entered into preliminary agreement with Tianjin Lishen to supply batteries for its Shanghai factory. Some production lines of Teslas factory in Shanghai are expected to start production at the end of this year. ROME - Leonardo da Vinci was an "immortal genius" who still has the power to surprise us today, Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte said in presenting events marking the 500th anniversary of his death on Wednesday. "The fascination and mystery of the multiform and eclectic genius of Leonardo is incredible," said Conte. "He was a genius who still surprises us today, there is no discipline that did not see him involved, from the arts to philosophy to anatomy. "He is an immortal, we can say. "Leonardo is always evoked and is always present. He makes us proud, also as 'the Italian system'." Culture Minister Alberto Bonisoli said at the Leonardo Celebrations 1519-2019, presented at the Galleria Colonna, that he was "one of the key figures of the Renaissance. "Leonardo's personality is vertical because it draws its roots in culture but flies high and experiments, moved by a great curiosity. "He also has a horizontal approach because he deals with almost everything, from hydraulics to physic and from military fortifications to bronze fusion. Bonisoli said there would be "over 78 events all over Italy in all this year but I want to recall three in particular. "The first, at the Royal Museums in Turin, is entitled 'Leonardo da Vinci: Drawing the Future'; the second is at the Academy Galleries in Venice; and the third, which has just opened at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome. "I'd like to stress how Leonardo invented science before science because he was a scientist before the scientific method had been invented". Agriculture Minister Gian Marco Centinaio said a "Leonardo 500 app" would be ready for all the events taking place across Italy this year. "We have decided to create a Leonardo 500 app to monitor and make known all the initiatives on Leonardo, also to all our own tourists." He said it would be "in several languages and will show addresses and web sites where you can get information." Interior Minister Matteo Salvini quipped that "we are working to get the Mona Lisa back from the Louvre". ZAGREB - Several European governments are complicit in the systematic pushbacks and collective expulsions - often accompanied by violence - of thousands of migrants and refugees along the so-called Balkans route, mostly at the border between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, Amnesty International said in a report published Wednesday. The report is called ''Violence and abuse against refugees and migrants along the Balkan route''. According to Amnesty International, European governments are clearly prioritizing the protection of the EU's borders over the respect of international law on the protection of asylum seekers. Violent behavior by Croatian police is ignored despite reports by several international organizations denouncing systematic illicit pushbacks and abuse. Moreover, consistent financial aid over the past few years provided to Croatian security forces by the EU, according to Amnesty International, directly supports such illegal operations and abuse ''further fueling the humanitarian crisis along the Balkan route''. ''Humanitarian aid is significantly scarcer than aid for border security'', stressed Massimo Moratti, who is in charge of research at Amnesty's European office. The report cited several examples of abuse and violence. Amnesty said that while migrants and refugees are continuing to flee war, Croatian police officers abuse them, sometimes depriving them of their belongings before sending them back to Bosnia, where they remain in limbo, at the mercy of a dysfunctional asylum system. Moreover, migrants apprehended in Italy and Slovenia are illegally pushed back to Bosnia through Croatia, the report claims. ''Some 5,500 migrants'' are currently living in camps in Bosnia at the border with Croatia in ''precarious hygienic conditions, with no hot water or medical assistance''. According to Amnesty International, the abuse and violence appear to be part of a systematic and deliberate policy by Croatian authorities to discourage future attempts to enter the country. Due to bureaucratic obstacles, inadequate legal assistance and the limited capability of authorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, asylum seekers can only attempt to reach the Schengen area, usually Slovenia and Italy, through a dangerous and difficult route. They are forced to cross, often on foot, a mountainous area with woods, rivers and sometimes landmines, at the border between Bosnia and Croatia. The report said that in the first 10 months of last year ''at least 12 people drowned'', mainly as they attempted to cross the Slovenian-Croatian border. Dozens of others died in other ways, it said. BEIRUT - A reported 500 ISIS militants surrendered on Wednesday morning to Kurdish-Syrian forces in south-eastern Syria, Kurdish military sources were quoted as saying by local media. Meanwhile, a US-backed offensive against ISIS fugitives in the area of Baghouz, between the Euphrates and the Iraqi border, is continuing, reports said. Syria: Baghouz clashes resume, jihadists fleeing - sources Some bringing civilians along as human shields (ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, MARCH 13 - Clashes between Kurdish forces and ISIS militants resumed on Wednesday morning in the area of Baghouz, according to military sources in the area. Some jihadist fighters have fled towards the Euphrates while others have sought refuge on hills nearby bringing along civilians as human shields, according to the sources on the ground. The US-led international Coalition carried out air raids overnight and on Wednesday morning. (ANSAmed) Croatia rejects Amnesty accusations of anti-migrant violence Interior minister says police defend border lawfully (ANSAmed) - ZAGREB, MARCH 13 - Croatia on Wednesday rejected accusations made by Amnesty International against it regarding the treatment of migrants. The human rights organization claims that Croatian police systematically make use of collective, illegal push-backs and abuse including violence against migrants and refugees on its border with Bosnia. In an open letter to Massimo Moratti, head of the European office of Amnesty International, Interior Minister Davor Bozinovic said that the ''Republic of Croatia as a member state of the European Union has the task of carrying out the protection of the state border and preventing illegal migration'', noting that the Croatian border "is also the external EU border". Bozinovic said that violence and abuse by police is neither encouraged nor tolerated and that all reports about such behavior by the police are investigated. So far these investigations have not found any abuse, violence, or illegal push-backs by Croatian police, he noted. The minister repeated explanations repeatedly given in the past after reports of abuse and violence made by various international organizations. Often, Bozinovic alleged in a statement, migrants "falsely accuse" police officers of violence after they are prevented from entering Croatia, ''in the hope that this can in some way help them enter Croatia''. In its report, Amnesty International made use of 94 statements made by migrants in migrant camps in the Bihac area of Bosnia, not far from the Croatian border. The Croatian ministry noted that the organization had not offered any information that would make it possible to identify the people reporting the abuse or verify their claims. ''We are convinced that in most of the cases of the migrants interviewed, they are people who have never entered Croatia but against whom possible prevention measures at the border were taken, in line with Schengen zone riles,'' Minister Bozinovic said.(ANSAmed). Mayor Berke, By way of introduction, my name is Will Adams. I was born and raised in Knoxville, graduated from UT, and come from a long family line of Tennesseans. For many decades, my aunt passionately served the children of Chattanooga through public education. And my parents live just outside Nashville on our family farm. In short, I love the great state of Tennessee. Several weeks ago, on my way home from the family farm, I took a detour through Chattanooga to show my oldest daughter a few areas of interest. It was time well spent, as we had a great time visiting the area. That was until I received a "notice of speed violation" from the City of Chattanooga. In accordance with Chattanooga City Ordinance No. 24-273 (photographic speeding violation), your city is demanding that I pay a $50 civil penalty or Chattanooga City Court will pursue all legal means of collecting this judgement, including wage/bank account garnishment, personal property seizure, and vehicle impoundment/immobilization. Well its nice to meet you as well Mr. Mayor! And while we're exchanging such pleasantries, let me thank you and your fine city for such a warm and welcoming greeting! Rather unfamiliar with the area, I failed to see any speed limit signage, nor did I see any posted notices of cameras being used to monitor speed. And according to section B3 of the ordinance, such signs indicating the use of traffic control photographic systems shall be clearly posted. I assume such signs are posted, but I assure you they are not clearly posted. And Im sure thats not by accident. To receive such a threatening demand for payment, by your city, through a third-party vendor, nearly two weeks after the alleged speeding violation, has left me dumbfounded. Quite frankly, your program has all the markings of a privatized, clandestine policing operation and a prosecution for profit scheme orchestrated by you and other elected officials of Chattanooga. In researching the legality of this, 13 states have passed laws that prohibit the use of speed cameras. And rightfully so. Why do you and others within the City of Chattanooga think its okay, or even legal, to privatize your law enforcement? Why do you think its ethical to contract out such a faux law enforcement program to a private, third-party company (Sensys America) thats driven by profit? And are you aware of what kind of access that company has to my (and others) data and/or what they do with it? In reviewing the citys contract with Sensys America, its abundantly clear why the city has decided to embrace privatized law enforcement: Money. Both Sensys America and the city are financially incentivized through the (1) issuance of violation notices and (2) through violation fee collection policies. If this program was about safety, as its purported to be, why are there no financial incentives attached to reductions in accidents, moving violations, and other safety measurements? That answer: Its not about safety, its about money. The fact that a private company, contractually incentivized by profit, can influence the driving privileges of private citizens is unethical and fraught with constitutionality issues, to say the least. No matter which way you slice it, everything about this program is deeply flawed and ripe for fraud, abuse and corruption. And most importantly, it erodes the waning trust people have in their elected officials. I want to be clear: If I failed to adhere to a posted speed limit, then I have zero issue owning the consequences of my actions. Thats not what this is about. My (and many others) issue is with you and your citys decision to privatize your citys law enforcement and willfully (and contractually) participate and encourage a prosecution for profit scheme to prop up your citys operating budget. Its a really, really bad look for your city. As youre aware, were living in a time in which law enforcement is constantly under attack and narratives are being written that we shouldnt trust those who wear a badge. Unfortunately, this type of unethical overreach by your city feeds into that destructive narrative. I hope that you and your city reconsider this erroneous ordinance; and instead, reinvest in those that have nobly chosen law enforcement as their lifes work, so they can promote safety and build a more trustworthy relationship with the community they've vowed to protect and serve. Privatized law enforcement driven by profit is not the answer! As long as your city embraces this policy, I will not spend another dollar in Chattanooga. And Im certain that Im not the only one whose taken such a stance. Regards, Will Adams * * * I feel your pain; I do. However, here are the facts: The signs are posted and visible. Where you got caught red-handed not obeying traffic locations are in specific locations for a reason. They are located in areas that are prone to accidents, involving fatalities. Heres what Id suggest, use an app that shows you the speed limit. Apps like Waze are very useful since you seem to have an issue locating posted speeds. This will keep a couple of things from happening. First, it will keep you from speeding. Second, it will keep you from writing a long-winded article blaming others for your faults. Lastly and most importantly, it will help keep others safe while you reduce your speed. Furthermore, while as area residents we dont want to see your valuable tax dollars go away, we also dont want the following: Unsafe drivers are not obeying posted speed limits. Chattanooga taxpayers prefer not to park a patrol car at dangerous intersections 24/7. Ive seen some of the wrecks at those locations, and I can assure you, they were all completely avoidable. Sorry, Not Sorry, James Berry Hamilton County Resident * * * Mr. Adams, I am sorry your drive though our hometown resulted in a camera ticket. I know the courts have determined camera tickets are legal. It is a problem and remains a work in progress through the work of Rep. Andy Holt, my second favorite state legislator. It is really an injustice when a citizen is not afforded the opportunity to explain the circumstance to an actual officer, such as going to an emergency room. Yes, one emergency to the hospital can cost you an entire day in a court to simply be heard. Poor roadway postings should also be considered, but you cannot speak to an officer in either case. Hopefully, one day our state legislature will follow the lead of other states and prohibit camera fee grabbing by municipalities. I believe if you would have been afforded the opportunity to explain, an officer may have weighed the circumstances appropriately and issued a warning ticket. Of course, you were not afforded a field screening of the circumstances. The alternative is to sit in court all day long to present your case, and lose work time from your employment and family. The speeding for profit camera companies count on you opting to pay the fine instead of taking the time to seek justice. Our state of Tennessee legislature is not blind to the problems with municipal camera ticketing, and have placed many constraints on municipalities attempting to collect the fines. The constraints are that a civil camera citation cannot impact your credit score, insurance rates, and is not criminal, and therefore limited to a $50 fine. State of Tennessee Rep. Andy Holt has taken this camera bull by the horns and strengthened citizen protections from camera fee grabbing. I would encourage you to watch Rep. Holts video explanation on the new constraints placed on municipalities imposing camera fines. Simply google Rep. Andy Holt camera traffic ticket and watch the YouTube video. Rep. Holt also explains the relatively new state law placing constraints on the camera fee grabbing in the video. The city of Chattanooga can no longer increase their revenue through annexation due to the leadership of Rep. Mike Carter. We had a time when city government was annexing and not providing services. At the same time, our hometown exempts rich corporations from paying property taxes under PILOT. As a result, our city government is always looking for opportunity for new revenue sources through fee grabbing as a growth mechanism. You are not alone in your view, see Rep. Andy Holt. I believe our state legislature will eventually prohibit the camera citations, as other states have. Yall come back, ya hear. April Eidson * * * Gee whiz, Mr. Adams. I wonder what stings the most: that you were caught unaware speeding, that you did not have a chance to argue with the police officer about it or that you were shamed? The fact is youve been given a enormous discount. By statute, fines are limited to $50 when detected by a device without an officer in attendance. No points were added to your license because the ticket is not transferred to your state (by that same statute). You didnt have to take time to travel back to Chattanooga for traffic court (which would have achieved absolutely nothing) and you avoided all court costs. You got off with a minor slap on the wrist and youre upset. As for your threat to never come back to Chattanooga, I think you would be on the losing end of that idea. I have worked in many cities around the U.S. and Chattanooga is the place I settled, raised a family and retired. The cost-of-living is one of the lowest in the country, gasoline is well below par, the cheapest electricity around, the fastest internet in the countryand the list goes on. Forget all that and just take a look at Chattanoogas scenic beauty. We will miss you, Mr. Adams. But life will go on in your absence. Dave Fihn * * * I have lived and worked around Chattanooga for 62 years. I know that there has been a long battle over the use of "traffic cameras". Two years ago I received one of the tickets myself. I paid the fine and vowed to be more alert about my observance of speed limits. Ignorance of speed limits as an excuse would not be entertained by a patrol officer or the court. I'm sure you have heard "Ignorance of the...........OK, just checking. I apologize that Chattanooga and the state do not have enough patrol officers and highway patrol to sit and watch all the roads in our region. I would suggest that if you are within city limits pretty much anywhere, the speed limit is 55 mph. No one is obeying that speed limit of course, but you have the option to do so. If you have further doubt, stay in the right lane. There is one and only one way to beat the traffic cameras each and every time. Drive the speed limit and obey all other traffic laws. You will be invincible to those demonic cameras. Ted Ladd Ooltewah Senators Lamar Alexander and Marsha Blackburn said a bill signed today by President Trump will take the next step to protect and preserve President James K. Polks home in Columbia, Tn.Tennessee is full of history, and Tennessees President James K. Polks home is a special prize for Tennesseans as well as all Americans, Senator Alexander said. We talk a lot about the importance of science and math, but, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, most high school seniors in America score the worst in history.I can think of no better way to encourage the study of U.S. history than to protect and preserve sites like Tennessees President James K. Polks home and I am glad that President Trump signed this legislation into law. This will also provide an opportunity to attract more visitors to Tennessee and strengthen local economies.Tennessee has a legacy of raising leaders, and President James K. Polk is one that plays a chief role in our states history, Senator Blackburn said. Designating our former presidents home as a unit of the National Park System would preserve his legacy for generations to come, so that all Tennesseans can study his presidency while enjoying the place that meant so much to him.Senators Alexander and Blackburn introduced the James K. Polk Presidential Home Study Act on Jan. 16. The legislation, which was included in the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, passed the Senate on Feb. 12 by a vote of 92-8, and passed the House of Representatives Feb. 26 by a vote of 363 to 62, and it was today signed into law by President Trump. Senator Alexander is a cosponsor of the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act.The legislation directs the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a special resource study to evaluate the suitability and feasibility of designating the site as a unit of the National Park System. Once the study is completed, the conclusions and recommendations will be submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources and the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, of which Senator Alexander is a member. If the study recommends the Polk Home should be included in the National Park System, Congress would then need to pass legislation designating the Polk Home as a new unit of the National Park System.Senators Alexander and Blackburn also introduced the James K. Polk Presidential Home Study Act last Congress. Dr. Le Andrea Ware returned to her alma mater at the end of the 2017-2018 school year as interim principal to lead The Howard School through the remainder of the year and her love for the school and community led her to make the move permanent. Her love for The Howard School and innovation as an educational leader has resulted in her selection as the 2019-2020 principal of the year for Hamilton County Schools as she closes out her first year as the schools leader. Dr. Ware has a passion for exuding HOPE (Helping Others Pursue Excellence) and working to foster an environment of success for all students and teachers. She also believes in shared leadership and empowering students and teachers to engage in school leadership in creating positive change. Four administrators alone will not transform Howard High School, Ware said. It definitely takes a collective effort from all! Changes at Howard High started early this school year and signaled the vision Dr. Ware had for the Hustlin Tigers. A back to school Parade of Stars led by Dr. Ware lined the parking lot and hallways of Howard to welcome all students back to school. The parade involved over 300 faculty members, staff, parents, community leaders, business volunteers, and school partners. The group marched under 1,000 stars hung in the school hallways that represented students and teachers and the great expectations for each this school year. Dr. Ware also hung a large banner in the school in an area she calls the Vision Wall that lists the goals of Howard becoming the fastest improving school in Tennessee and garnering a Level 5 composite growth score for the 2018-2019 school year. Those committed to this vision have signed the banner through the school year, and there are now over 1,000 signatures on the banner. Having worked for several principals in my 35 years, you are, without a doubt the most enthusiastic and energetic of them all, said Timothy Davenport, a math teacher at The Howard School, in a message to Dr. Ware upon learning about her selection as principal of the year. Your desire for student success and genuine love of each one is evident in your words and actions, added Davenport. Some of the Howard High innovative programs and strategies established under Dr. Wares leadership include: Transition Academy: A customized non-traditional learning program for students with extenuating circumstances Intermission vs. Suspension: Students are assigned to a smaller, intensified learning lab instead of short-term suspension Saturday Success Academy- Extended and enriched Saturday learning labs for high school scholars New Comer Center: One-year of intensified language acquisition support for non-English speaking students to build a strong English speaking foundation Intensified Support Services: Combining the skills of behavior specialists and school counselors to provide customized support to help restore and rebuild student Attendance Mentor Initiative: All faculty and staff members assigned as attendance mentors to help reverse chronic absenteeism trends of students. Early results indicate progress at Howard. Benchmark results are positive for the 2018-2019 school goals of increased student achievement, reduced out-of-school suspensions, reduced behavioral infractions and reduced chronic absenteeism rates. Dr. Ware has also worked to provide a pathway for all students by enlisting the support of community partners to improve Advanced Placement courses, dual enrollment opportunities, career technical courses, Future Ready Institutes, and a revitalized theatre program. Dr. Ware will advance in the Tennessee principal of the year program in the search for the best principal in the state. Hamilton County Schools has had two winners of the state award in recent years with Robin Copp, former principal of Ooltewah High, earning the honor for 2017-2018; and Ronald Hughes, principal at Apison Elementary, taking the top honor in 2014-2015. Finalist for the state honor for this year will be selected by July with the winner announced in the fall. A Pikeville man has been charged with killing two people at Crossville and wounding two others.. John Fields, 47, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted first-degree murder. Fields is being held in the Cumberland County Jail on a $5,000,000 bond. He is due in court next Tuesday. The body of Lowell Chip Simmons II, 47, of Brewer Road, Crossville, was found on Critter Creek Road. The body of MaKayla Laray Manning, 23, of Vandever Road, Crossville, was found at 2593 Vandever Road. The two individuals found wounded at 2593 Vandever Road and transported to UT. Medical Center were Joseph Manning, 39, of Vandever Road, Crossville, and Eleashea lne Curry, 42 of Bee Hive Lane, Crossville. The bodies of the murder victims have been sent for autopsies to determine the cause of death. At approximately 5:58 p.m. Cumberland County deputies were dispatched to Critter Creek Road regarding a call from a concerned citizen about finding a body. Deputies arrived on the scene and discovered a body in a trash pile on a vacant lot. The scene was secured and investigators from the Cumberland County Sheriffs Office and Tennessee Bureau of Investigation were sent to the scene to conduct an investigation. Then at approximately 10:30 p.m., another call came in concerning a shooting in the 2500 block of Vandever Road. Cumberland County Sheriffs Deputies arrived and discovered multiple victims that had been shot at the scene. The Tennessee Highway Patrol and Crossville Police Department also responded to the scene to assist the on-scene units. Cumberland County Sheriffs Investigators and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation arrived and began to conduct the investigation. Law enforcement units discovered two victims at the Vandever Road scene that were wounded and one deceased. One body was found at the Critter Creek Road address. A groundbreaking bill that will make registering to vote as easy as applying for a driver's license is making its way through the Tennessee legislature. The legislation would make elections more accessible and convenient in the state which ranks No. 3 among states that make voting most difficult for their residents. Released last October, a University of North Illinois study used 30 voting criteria, including registration restrictions, to determine how much time and effort states require of voters. The study found voting easiest in Oregon, which introduced automatic registration in 2016 and that year registered over 50,000 new voters, half under age 35. Through the Tennessee measure, every eligible person applying to the state Department of Motor Vehicles for a driver's license or a license renewal will be automatically registered to vote. Besides enlarging the state's electorate, the new system will cost less, increase the accuracy and security of voter rolls and curb the potential for fraud. At a time when too many states are restricting voting rights, Tennessee will be making a commitment to removing barriers to voting with this law. Show your support for automatic voter registration by contacting our state representatives. Carolyn Mitchell Realtor Chrissy Jones and The Next Gen team, consisting of Affiliate Brokers Sara Poteet and Maria Kissner, received the 2019 Crye-Leike Rookie Agent of the Year and Rookie Team of the Year awards for the Chattanooga region. Ms. Jones and The Next Gen team were the number one agents for sales transactions among new Crye-Leike agents in 2018 within their region. Ms. Jones is affiliated with Crye-Leikes Downtown Chattanooga branch office and, within just one year of joining the real estate industry, has become a licensed realtor in Tennessee and Georgia. She is a member of the National Association of Realtors and the Greater Chattanooga Association of Realtors. Ms. Jones serves the residential real estate needs of home buyers and sellers in Hamilton County and across state lines to Dade and Walker counties in Georgia. Recently honored at the companys annual meeting for the Chattanooga region, Ms. Jones said, I am so excited to have been the Rookie of the Year for the Chattanooga area, and I am really looking forward to growing my business even more in 2019. Ms. Poteet and Ms. Kissner, of The Next Gen team, are affiliated with Crye-Leikes Fort Oglethorpe branch office and are members of NAR, GCAR and the Georgia Association of Realtors. The duo specializes in residential, first-time home buyers and relocation services in Catoosa, Walker and Hamilton counties. Ms. Poteet and Ms. Kissner are licensed brokers in Tennessee and Georgia, and are multi-million dollar producers as well. The team said they are proud of their accomplishments with Crye-Leike and excited about their future. We are so thankful for all of the people we got to help in 2018 with their home buying and selling experience, said Ms. Poteet. Definitely looking forward to what 2019 brings and the new people we will meet. For more information regarding real estate in and around Chattanooga, visit the Downtown branch office, 1201 Market St. Realtor Chrissy Jones may be reached at 423-313-5095, or via email at chrissy.jones@crye-leike.com. For more information regarding real estate in and around Fort Oglethorpe, visit the branch office, 69 Crye-Leike Dr. To contact The Next Gen team, call Sara Poteet at 423-987-2501 or Maria Kissner at 423-888-7818. The team may be reached at the emails of sarapoteet88@gmail.com and mariakissner58@gmail.com. One of the most exciting things about The Bachelor season finale is learning who the brand new Bachelorette will be. But when Chris Harrison announced the woman who will star next season, social media went crazy and not in the way the producers probably wanted. While some were thrilled to see that Hannah B. would find love next, others were quick to criticize the shows choice but they did so in a lighthearted, comical way. Hannah Brown is the new Bachelorette. | Josh Vertucci/Getty Images Hannah B. is a former pageant queen from Alabama Hannah B., whose real name is Hannah Brown (but she became known as Hannah B. to fans in order to differentiate her from Hannah G.) grew up in Alabama and began competing in pageants when she was 15. Brown was eventually crowned Miss Alabama USA 2018 and went on to compete for the crown of Miss USA but lost to Miss Nebraska. However, it didnt stop her from continuing to compete that is, Brown eventually became one of the women who would compete for Colton Underwoods love. Although Underwood eventually eliminated her from the competition, she left a lasting impression on The Bachelor fans but maybe not in the way the producers would have wanted. When she was announced as the next Bachelorette, she seemed to be at a loss for words When host Chris Harrison announced that Brown would be the next Bachelorette, he brought her out for an interview during the live show. However, people quickly noticed Brown seemed to have trouble expressing her thoughts. It was likely both the excitement of being the Bachelorette as well as the awkwardness of being on camera, but Browns interview answers seemed a bit unrehearsed (maybe thats what fans should want, though someone who isnt fake in front of the camera). Either way, fans of the show took to social media to express their true thoughts on Brown. The social media reactions to Brown probably werent what producers had hoped for but they were funny As soon as Brown was announced, people took to social media to share how they felt about the decision. Various tweets, gifs, and memes took over Twitter some positive, some not, but all funny. Most people were confused about why Brown was the chosen one out of every woman, and some thought her lack of conversation skills would make for a difficult season to watch. Brown even poked fun at herself during the live show, saying she hoped the men could express their feelings a little better than she could. Were chalking it up to nervousness anyone would be a little awkward meeting a bunch of potential lovers all at once. Bachelor producers, please hire a conversation coach for Hannah B before she premieres as The Bachelorette. Im scared. pic.twitter.com/sfzAQIcmPH realityTVcommentator (@opeeniun) March 13, 2019 How I feel about Hannah B being the Bachelorette #TheBachelor pic.twitter.com/YZzsGGpmwK Kasity (@kasityn) March 13, 2019 People also had hilarious thoughts about how former contestant Caelynn might feel knowing Brown is the Bachelorette, since the two seemed to have a feud from the past that stayed alive during the entire show. Caelynn calling up the producers after Hannah B is announced as #TheBachelorette. #TheBachelor pic.twitter.com/gAa8mmt74m Amanda Orr (@amandakokesh) March 13, 2019 Still, some were thrilled to see that the former pageant queen would be on the show Unpopular opinion: its going to be refreshing to have a Bachelorette without so much history and drama attached, and Hannah B is wonderfully awkward, unaffected and charming. It will be a different kind of season, but Im looking forward to it. #thebachelor #thebachelorette pic.twitter.com/BkfNAvrdkG Kristin Miller (@KristinL_Miller) March 13, 2019 Despite a lot of backlash when Brown was announced, there were plenty of people who agreed she would make a great Bachelorette. Some were relieved she didnt have as much baggage and drama as former contestants. And some thought her awkwardness on camera only meant that she was actually very real as opposed to some of the shows choices in the past. Either way, its up to the public whether or not they want to tune in next season. Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook! As the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills doggy drama drags on, fans continue to post their opinions about who they think is really at fault. Even though the drama is rooted between Lisa Vanderpump and Dorit Kemsley, Teddi Mellencamp is caught in the middle and taking a lot of heat. During her appearance on Watch What Happens Live, RHOBH cast member, Kyle Richards likened the caper to a mystery. When did this become a mystery show, Richards asked after trying to explain the timeline of gossip. Teddi Mellencamp Arroyave |Photo by Gary Gershoff/Getty Images Richards said all the text messages have not been revealed. But the audience poll still was on Vanderpumps side. Mellencamp live-tweeted and posted more text messages on Twitter during the episode. Did her tweets and new blog post clear everything up for fans? She lays out a timeline in her blog Her blog reads more like a math problem from A Beautiful Mind. Mellencamp tries to show, step by step, how the exchange went down. She posts her texts, videos, explanationsit gets very complex. Mellencamp even addresses that fans may have dog fatigue too. I know some fans are confused, upset, or tired of this dog mess, she wrote. I do apologize for my part in all of it. Mellencamp admits she should have come clean right away, but told Richards everything and showed her the texts in the Bahamas. I shouldve shared all of the information up front. I did not, I regret that, and I apologize. Then Mellencamp reviews the text messages she shared on Twitter. Plus she pokes holes in Vanderpumps story. She recounts Vanderpumps blog about how she insists the day Mellencamp and Richards met at Vanderpump Dogs it was for grooming and to take Instagram pictures. But in a recent interview, John Sessa says LVP texted him to shut this down 15 minutes before filming, Mellencamp wrote. Shut what down? If there wasnt a plan, what would need to be shut down? She also posted more on Twitter Although Richards insisted the entire story has yet to be revealed, most fans are still backing Vanderpump. And slamming Mellencamp on Twitter. During the episode, Mellencamp posted more text messages and explanations. In the first tweet, Mellencamp wrote, Blizzard says he owns that he put words in LVPs mouth but then why just last week were they both insinuating that I was misrepresenting the text messages? The text message from John Blizzard from Vanderpump Dogs was a retweet from Vanderpump about coming clean. Next, Mellencamp re-posted a text message she previously shared. She wrote, Blizzard to LVP: Everyone was so frustrated this is being flipped onto you. Huh. Not what he was texting me. A fan tweeted, Yes LVP did know, she was there when John told u and Kyle about the dog. So whats ur point? If LVP had something to say to Dorit about the dog she would she doesnt need u to get her point across. Mellencamp responded, She told Dorit I knew BEFORE we filmed that day at Vanderpump Dogs. Do fans finally believe her? A few fans sided with Mellencamp. She retweeted this comment from a fan. Can people start seeing that @TeddiMellencamp is taking ownership of her behaviour . She is acknowledging she was involved and explaining her motivation. Lisa isnt. The reason the other women have no tolerance for her is because theyve seen this dozens of times before. But fan support was few and far between. For the most part, fans are still lashing out at Mellencamp, especially when she tried to prove her case. In fact, one fan hurled this mean-spirited insult at her. Trash!!! You are trash!!! You liar!!!!! Go away you piece of crap!!!!! But for the most part, fans continued to insist that Mellencamp was lying. Busted again..Just give it up, one fan wrote when responding to her text tweet. At this point, Mellencamp appears to be staying strong and sticking to her convictions. She even has a good sense of humor about the situation. She posted a hilarious meme and wrote, Walking into @erikajaynes chapel like . Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook! PALERMO - Palermo Mayor Leoluca Orlando on Wednesday said ''we are working on a deep transformation of Palermo with the involvement of some entrepreneurial forces of this city called 'Palermo Mediterranea 2030' which does not coincide with any election''. Addressing a ceremony for the swearing in of six new councilors in the administration, including Adham Darawsha, a Palestinian doctor and former president of the council of cultures of Palermo, who was appointed as culture councilor, Orlando hailed the city's efforts to ''rescue migrants who are often mortified by criminal and inhuman European laws''. ''Palermo is a city with the logo 'I am a person, we are a community''' also thanks to ''those who chose to live in Palermo although they were not born here'', continued the mayor. ''This is the way we have become a community of equal yet different'' people, with ''deep cultural change'' thanks to which Palermo is vying to become ''Italy's Mediterranean city''. He said the appointment of Darawsha as culture councilor was a strategic step, among others, and that Palermo is a ''welcoming city'' that promotes mobility. ''We want to promote deep cultural change in Palermo, there is no other city in Europe that has changed as much as Palermo over the past 40 years, not even Berlin'', added the mayor. ''For this reason we are thanking first of all those who fought the government of the Mafia in this city, like Piersanti Mattarella'', the former Sicilian governor who was killed by the Mafia in 1980. Felicity Huffman star of Desperate Housewives and American Crime was one of several dozen individuals recently convicted in a massive college cheating scandal. Joseph Bonavolonta of the FBIs Boston field office accused the parents involved of flaunt[ing] their wealth, sparing no expense to cheat the system so they could set their children up for success with the best money can buy, according to Fox News. Felicity Huffman | Photo by Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic/Getty Images Huffman joins the likes of Full Houses Lori Loughlin and her fashion designer husband Mossimo Giannulli. Huffman reportedly paid $15,000 to have her eldest daughters SAT answers doctored post-exam. Making the payment on behalf of their eldest daughter, Sofia Grace, documents later revealed that the payment was disguised as a charitable donation. The FBI stated they have phonecalls of Huffman discussing the conditions with a witness who has since agreed to cooperate with authorities. Huffman now face charges of mail fraud. Felicity Huffman never claimed to be a righteous one When discussing her dynamic with William H. Macy, and their respective parenting styles, Huffman revealed that shes the less sensible of the two. In a statement to US Weekly, Huffman stated: Hes very pragmatic and hes very level-headed and hes very moral, and Im on the other side. Im very reactionary, amoral and not level-headed. Us Weekly Whether Felicity Huffman was speaking from a place of sincerity and full-disclosure or harboring guilt for her recent actions is up for debate; however, either way, it does suggest that her involvement in the cheating scandal should come as no surprise. Macy, speaking on behalf of the college admissions process stated: Im the outlier in this thing. Were right now in the thick of college application time, which is so stressful. I am voting that once she gets accepted, she maybe takes a year off. God doesnt let you be 18 twice. I know from casting, if you need a 25-, 26-year-old actress, there are a lot of them out there and theyre really good. But if you need a 15-, 16-year-old actress, its tough. Sofia looks young. I think this is an opportunity for her. But its just my opinion, and well see what she wants to do, what Felicity thinks and how the chips fall. My daughter Georgia, shes interested in politics, political science and pursuing that. Shes in a very academic school and killing it. Parade Considering the eldest daughter, Sofia is not painted as the academic genius Felicity seems to be in Macys eyes, Huffman was likely concerned that Sofia would not receive admission into an elite institution. However, putting ration and law aside, it seems that Huffman decided to put status and reputation before the urge to do whats right. However, despite Felicitys apparent knack for academia, Huffman nearly participated in the cheating scandal a second time before deciding to back out, according to Fox. How the college entrance exam scam worked According to ET, a witness met with Macy and Huffman in 2017, prior to the SAT exam date, and explained how the scam worked. The witness told the couple that he controlled a test center, and he could arrange for a third party member to adjust her test answers after completion. According to the witness, Huffman and Macy agreed to the plan. Huffman and the witness, according to court papers, had several email exchanges throughout the Summer of 2017 to ensure that everything went as intended. A second witness stated that, after Sofia took the exam, he flew from Florida to L.A to proctor the test, according to ET. This was a well thought out, and extremely intricate plan involving several members. Huffman, Loughling, and all others involved should not be able to use their wealth, privilege, and status to guarantee collegiate success; thus, all should, and according to the FBI and College Board, will be held accountable. The Rookie, which premiered on ABC in their fall lineup of 2018, has been greenlighted for seven additional episodes in Season 1, according to Deadline. Learn more about the series and whether or not its based on a true story, ahead. The Rookie premise The Rookie centers around rookie cop, John Nolan, as he learns how to become a cop on the streets of Los Angeles. The show focuses on Nolan and his fellow rookie officers as they go through the rigorous training process. The only catch is that Nolan is 40 years old, making him practically twice the age of the average rookie cop. On the show, he becomes the oldest rookie the department has ever had. At the beginning of Season 1, the audience learns why Nolan chose to become a cop in his forties. He spoiler alert! witnessed a bank robbery when he and his son were at their local bank. All of the sudden they were being held at gunpoint by robbers in their home state of Pennsylvania. The experience coupled with a divorce, inspired Nolan to shut down his construction business and move to L.A. to pursue a career as an officer of the law. Nathan Fillion plays Nolan Nathan Fillion of ABCs long-running hit series, Castle, plays officer John Nolan. On Castle, Fillion played a successful mystery writer who shadowed the New York Police Department to get inspiration for his books thanks to a relationship with the citys mayor. LOS ANGELES, CA FEBRUARY 20: Actor Nathan Fillion arrives at the CBSs The Big Bang Theory Celebrates 200th Episode at the Vibiana on February 20, 2016 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jennifer Lourie/Getty Images) In Castle, Fillions character falls in love with detective Kate Beckett. A storyline on The Rookie involves Nolan possibly dating an author. A little nod to Castle and Fillions previous role. Fillion is also known for his role on the cult show, Firefly, which he starred in before landing a role on Castle. Is The Rookie based on a true story? The Rookie does have an interesting twist compared to other cop shows on TV. But is it based on a true story? The answer is yes. Mark Gordon, now an executive producer on The Rookie, called Alexi Hawley, a former Castle executive producer and co-showrunner, according to Deadline. Gordon told Hawley he had the life rights to a guy who moved out to L.A. to become a cop, making him the oldest rookie. I immediately understood the potential of that character, Hawley said. Hawley is now the creator of The Rookie. The conversation quickly became about whether or not Fillion would be interested after ending Castle recently. The series wrapped in 2016 and the pilot episode of The Rookie aired in the fall of 2018. I couldnt say no, Fillion told TV critics at the Television Critics Association. This January I will have been 25 years in the business. I see an opportunity; I know what to do. Who is the real John Nolan? The character of John Nolan may be based on Edward Olivares. Olivares was a rookie cop with the LAPD until he resigned in March of 1995 after four months on the force, according to the Los Angeles Times. Other rookie cops of a certain age are well documented and could also be a source of inspiration for the show. Zachary Quinto will be starring in NOS4A2 as Charlie Manx. The character has been living over 100 years feeding off the life force of children and therefore has a creepy look. Zachary Quinto as Charlie Manx in NOS4A2 | IGN/AMC Quinto, executive producer Jami OBrien, book author Joe Hill, and Ashleigh Cummings had a press conference to talk about the TV adaption on March 11 at SXSW. This is what was revealed about Quintos transformation and more. Zachary Quinto said he wanted makeup artist, Joel Harlow to create Charlie Manx The actor has several different looks to play the aging Charlie Manx. He said that he knew exactly who would be up for the hard task of creating the characters makeup. Quinto said he told director Kari Skogland and executive producer Jami OBrien, if Im going to do this [and] were going to pull it off I really think we need to get Joel Harlow to do the special effects makeup. Joel and I worked together a number of times on Star Trek and obviously, hes kind of the top of the top and I didnt realize hed be available or interested but he was both. He continued to talk about the Oscar-winning makeup artist. Joels like just a mad genius and was able to really create some looks and some ideas. He said, the first thing I think we identified was that we needed to create stages for the character. So that stage 1 is the most like me and then stage 5 is the most extreme. The executive producer still wanted Charlie to physically be a man Executive producer, Jami OBrien also revealed what they kept in mind when creating the makeup for the character. One of the things we talked about a lot in terms of Manx and then the entire world was grounding it, she said. So Manx in his more extreme looks we all kind of felt hes still a man. OBrien then continued with He looks different because men dont usually live to be 135, but hes not turning into another creature hes always a man whether hes a young man or an old man or an extremely old man. Hes a man from another time. One of the things that were changed throughout the process was Manxs teeth. Although some may describe him as a vampire he doesnt have fangs. OBrien said she got on the phone with author , Joe Hill to talk about the characters teeth. We got on the phone and he was like listen the teeth arent fangs, the teeth are bad because hes from the 19th century. They didnt have dental care.' The younger teeth actually started off looking healthier in Manxs early days, but that was also changed. Quinto worked on the physical and vocal changes for the character The actor couldnt just rely on makeup to portray the supernatural character. He had to work on other changes on his own. Separately I was working in my own way on the physical transformation, said Quinto. The physicality of it and the vocal kind of transformation and that was part of what really drew me into playing this role more than just about anything else. Ive been looking for a way to really transform and this gave me that. Quinto also gave some insight into the characters emotional journey, which starts off everything. He explained its when unresolved trauma and unexamined psychological neglect it festers and has nowhere to go and so he becomes this very, very demented warped version of a wounded child himself, and thats who Charlie Manx is in the world and to these children who he does think hes trying to protect. The actor continued but in reality, hes serving something much darker in himself that was perpetuated by people who should have been caring for him when he was younger. Zachary Quinto is unrecognizable as the very old Charlie Manx. Fans will have to wait and see how it all comes together when NOS4A2 premieres this summer. Read more: Will AMCs The Terror Return for Season 2? Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook! To Live and Die in LA was announced in February 2019. The first episode, released on February 28, 2019, opens with a recording of an emotional woman accusing someone of beating her. From there the host, Neil Strauss, begins to tell the story of Adea Shabani. The podcast was in production within weeks of Shabanis disappearance, and what the team manages to find out leads to a tangled and disturbing double life, a web of lies and all eyes focused on a 34-year-old aspiring actor. What is To Live and Die in LA all about? To Live and Die in LA is all about the disappearance and death of Adea Shabani, a 25-year-old aspiring actress from Macedonia. To unravel the twisted web of crucial players, Neil Strauss, an author, is taking his first shot at narrative podcasting. While the podcast follows a familiar format, broken up into 12 episodes, this is the first time a true crime podcast is actively involved in a case that is so recent. Adea Shabani disappeared in February 2018, and her body was discovered nearly 400 miles from her apartment the following month. By the end of March 2018, Adeas boyfriend and the key suspect in her disappearance was dead, and police were fresh out of leads, according to Newsweek. How is Tenderfoot approaching the investigation? To get answers, Strauss and the Tenderfoot TV production crew are injecting themselves directly into the investigation and hunting down witnesses. Tenderfoot TV is the production company behind Up and Vanished and Monster: The Zodiac Killer, two podcasts that take aim at strange and baffling true crime cases. While Tenderfoot is famous for helping to shine a light on long-forgotten criminal cases, this is the first time the team is entrenched in a recent, active investigation. On the onset of the investigation little is known about Shabani, but by the end, the case is likely to be blown wide open. Who is the main suspect? Christopher Spotz, now deceased, is the main suspect in the murder. The 34-year-old aspiring actor admitted to being with Shabani on the day of her disappearance but insisted he had nothing to do with the aspiring actress death. That was all before he led police on a high-speed chase before turning a gun on himself, according to The Mercury News. Los Angeles at Sunset While Shabani and Spotz had a complicated relationship, in the months leading up to Shabanis disappearance and death, the couple got engaged and even filled out an application for an apartment. While police believe Spotz is involved in the death of Shabana, the information stops there. Police were able to uncover a twisted love triangle and a concocted story that points every finger at Chris Spotz as the murderer. Albeit not a royal rule, learning a foreign language is highly recommended in the royal family. After all, much of their job involves traveling to different parts of the world, hosting world leaders, and giving speeches outside of the United Kingdom. And while many royal family members know enough of a foreign language to get by, some are full-on fluent. Here are the languages members of the royal family have mastered. Many members of the royal family speak French fluently. | KIRSTY WIGGLESWORTH/AFP/Getty Images French French is the most common foreign language spoken in the royal family and many royals are fluent. Its the only foreign language Queen Elizabeth has fluency in, and her husband (Prince Philip) and children (Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, and Prince Edward) also know the language very well. According to Express, Her Majesty likely learned the foreign language as a young child from her tutor and governess, Marion Crawford. When visiting France, the queen always speaks the language and even delivered a speech in French at a State Banquet in 2014. Her reading skills were excellent both pronunciation and rhythm were very good, but you could feel she was quite tense, linguist expert, Camille Chevalier-Karfi told French newspaper, The Local. I was impressed by the quality of her French no stuttering pour la reine. In addition to Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, and their children, Prince William and Kate Middleton also know French. However, their fluency is unknown. Meghan Markle allegedly knows a little bit of the language, too. German Unlike French, German isnt as widely spoken in the royal family. However, one royal is completely fluent in the language. Prince Philip speaks fluent German and has stated that he grew up in a family that spoke German, French, and English, which is where he gets his fluency from. Welsh Some members of the royal family know enough Welsh to get by. However, when Prince William was a young boy, Prince Charles encouraged his son to learn from a young age so that he gains fluency by the time he becomes Prince of Wales. Their exact fluency is unknown. However, many believe Prince William might be fluent and Prince Charles knows enough to give speeches and hold conversations while visiting. What languages does the royal family speak? While they might not be fluent, some members of the royal family can speak a variety of other foreign languages. Here are some of the languages Prince William, Prince Charles, Meghan Markle, and other members of the royal family are familiar with. Gaelic: Prince Charles and Prince William both speak a little Gaelic. Its likely that they use their linguist skills while visiting Northern Ireland and Scotland. Tagalog: Meghan Markle allegedly knows a little Tagalog, the language of the Philippines. While visiting Edinburgh with Prince Harry, the Duchess of Sussex was overheard saying Salamat Po, which means thank you. Swahili: The royal family has a soft spot in their hearts for Africa and, when visiting some of its countries, some members speak a little Swahili. Rumor has it, Prince William taught himself the language. Spanish: Prince George and Princess Charlotte are already learning their first foreign language. According to reports, the royal littles are learning Spanish and often practice with their Spanish-speaking nanny, Maria Turron Borrallo. Russian: Some royals can also speak and understand a little Russian. Prince Michael of Kent and his wife, Princess Michael allegedly know some Russian. Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook! Queen Elizabeth II has been the longest reigning monarch in the history of the United Kingdom. Its definitely an impressive feat that even many royals in other countries have not been able to accomplish. However, as the queen is approaching her mid-90s, many people are starting to ask about the inevitable what will happen when the countrys beloved monarch passes away? The government will carry out Operation London Bridge Queen Elizabeth II | Mark Cuthbert/UK Press via Getty Images Operation London Bridge is the code name for the plan that has been set up specifically to deal with Queen Elizabeths death. It is practiced and updated often in order for the government forces involved to carry it out smoothly should the time come. First, the news will be given to important officials, such as the prime minister of the United Kingdom, via a predetermined code phrase. Afterwards, the media will be informed and several channels will have to switch their programming schedules to ones specifically prepared for this situation (that is, many documentaries will be shown and absolutely no comedic or offensive content is allowed). There are different procedures in place depending on where the queen happens to die, but in all circumstances, her body will be moved to London. There will be a public funeral The queens body will lie in state at Westminster Hall, where the Houses of Parliament typically meet, for the public to come pay their respect. When the Queen Mother died in 2002, around 200,000 visitors showed up at Westminster Hall. The number is expected to be higher for Queen Elizabeth II given her popularity. After several days, there will be a state funeral at Westminster Abbey before the queens coffin is moved to her final resting place. It is likely that she will be buried at St. Georges Chapel in Windsor Castle, where her parents and sister have been laid to rest. The procession to Windsor will be a full-on state funeral with troops lining the street, gun carriage surrounding the coffin, and leaders of various other countries attending. It will be a much bigger even than the funerals of Princess Diana in 1997 or the Queen Mother in 2002. Prince Charles will ascend the throne soon after her death On the day that Queen Elizabeth dies, Prince Charles will make a speech addressing the public in the evening. Then, at 11 A.M. the next morning, he will be sworn in as the next monarch. There will be a royal salute to welcome the new king. However, his coronation will not happen until after the mourning period for Queen Elizabeth has passed, and that could possibly take months. In fact, when Queen Elizabeths father, King George VI, died in February of 1952, the mourning period lasted more than one year, which means that she did not have her coronation until June of 1953. Having a new monarch also means a lot of changes will take place in the United Kingdom. Most notably, a new national anthem will be sung. Additionally, new money and postage stamps will have to be printed. Prince Charles might also make changes to the succession line It has been said that Charles has plans to slim down the monarchy once he becomes king. Currently, there are a number of royals who are able to enjoy perks and privileges of their status despite not being in the position to inherit the throne any time soon. This includes Charles three siblings and their children. Under Charles wishes, however, those who are not his direct descendants might have to start living more as private citizens and not members of the royal family. During Queen Elizabeths Diamond Jubilee in 2012, the famous family gathering on the balcony of Buckingham Palace only included a few people as opposed to the 2002 Golden Jubilee which showed twenty family members. Prince Andrew, Charles younger brother, famously has been at odds with the heir to the throne for this reason, feeling that he and his daughters are being pushed to the side despite having been a big part of the royal family for decades. Regardless of what happens, it is clear that Queen Elizabeths death will bring forth numerous changes within both her country and family. While news continued breaking about the college admissions scandal that ensnared Felicity Huffman and other celebrities, a funny thing happened on ABCs The View. During a discussion about the story, moderator Joy Behar found co-host Meghan McCain once again going off on a tangent. McCain was fired up about an insult someone involved in the scandal had hurled at Arizona State University. (Thats where the McCain Institute for International Leadership was established.) Annoyed, she began the sort of rant that hasnt earned her much respect from her colleagues of late. Aunt Beckys husband, whoever the hell you are I had no idea who you were until yesterday sorry, your kid probably wouldnt have been good enough to get in, McCain said, in a reference to ASU. It wouldnt be the only time during the brief discussion McCain referenced name-recognition, her father, and her extended family. However, it shouldnt surprise anyone whos followed McCains career over the years. In too many cases, the daughter of late Arizona Senator John McCain has traded on the family name to get ahead in her career. Its why people consider her a shining example of nepotism at work in America. McCains career began with her fathers presidential campaign. Megan McCain and Senator John McCain attend the 100th Annual White House Correspondents Association Dinner on May 3, 2014. | Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images If you look back at McCains career as a political pundit, youll find it starts with her fathers 2008 presidential campaign. Thats when she launched McCain Blogette, which offered a youthful twist on a familiar theme. Her book Dirty Sexy Politics, which hit the New York Times best-seller list, also told stories about the campaign. By that point, McCain had enough of a following to author a second book on politics. After that, she got a show on the now-defunct Pivot TV network. Instead of trying something different for the shows title, McCain went with something familiar. She (or her producers) called the series Raising McCain. It makes you wonder if the show would have reached the same audience with another title. Over on The View, the audience gets almost daily references to McCains family. On The View, McCains arguments often revolve around her familys history. Earlier today on The View, McCain wasnt done after defending her fathers ASU institute from an assumed detractor. She also took the opportunity to defend legacy admissions at universities or at least in one instance. When it comes to military academies, my family goes back generations at the Naval Academy, she said. Thats service to your country. My grandfather, great-grandfather, my brothers, they all served their country. After referencing her fathers resting place at the Naval Academy, Behar exploded. Joy Behar shut Meghan McCain down for trying to make the college admission scandal discussion about herself: "I'm not talking about your family!" https://t.co/Xyz8Rv9njq The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 13, 2019 Im not talking about your family! Behar said. Im talking about the policy of where legacy admissions came from. It was yet another day of McCains arguments veering in that direction. In January, after comments from Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) led to talk of racism within the GOP, McCain didnt even try to make a point. Im John McCains daughter! she said, slamming her hand on the table for emphasis. McCains lack of preparation for work would sink people in most jobs. Meghan McCain | Charles Sykes/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images Since quality work speaks for itself, McCain might be able to shoot down charges of nepotism if her performance on The View was better. Many people will forgive lazy columns like Why I Love Bikers from a twenty-something, but you have to expect more from a 34-year-old pundit. On The View, McCain has not brought the goods on enough occasions, and thats why shes became an easy mark for guests and co-hosts alike. In February, she ended up silently pouting after Behar told her to stop interrupting her. It was an awkward TV moment, to say the least. Earlier this month, during a visit from Washington Governor Jay Inslee, McCain had no problem interrupting the shows guest. In this case, she wanted to read talking-points she had about the Green New Deal. Were talking about $51 trillion, the elimination of planes, the elimination of cows, no planes, she said. Inslee, realizing hed have an easier time than expected, simply smiled. That is not what is proposed with the Green New Deal, he said, to applause. Time after time, McCain has come to work unprepared to discuss the topics of the day on a substantive level. Ask yourself: If you performed that way on the job, would you survive long? If the answer is no, you might wonder how Meghan McCain has her job on ABC and why people wont stop describing it as nepotism anytime soon. Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook! More than 50 people have been charged in a cheating and bribery scheme. Among those indicted were celebrities Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin. Both allegedly took part in a college admissions scam in order to guarantee acceptance into the schools for their children. As word continues to spread people are realizing these two actresses may be found guilty. According to US Weekly, both were charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services fraud. What do these charges mean and are Huffman and Loughlin facing prison time if found guilty? Lori Loughlin and husband Mossimo Giannulli have both been indicted Federal authorities charged 50 people in what the Justice Department is calling the largest college admissions scandal it has ever prosecuted. Heres a full list of the people who have been charged. https://t.co/2v85gVwYyz The New York Times (@nytimes) March 12, 2019 Its strange to think about a member of the Tanner household being charged with a felony, but its true. Lori Loughlin, best known for her role on Full House and Netflixs Fuller House, has been charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services fraud. Her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, was also indicted on the same charges. He is well-known for the Mossimo brand founded in 1986 and sold at Target store around the country. The couple allegedly took part in the bribery and cheating in order to get their daughters into college. NBC News reports, Loughlin and her fashion designer husband, Mossimo Giannulli, agreed to pay bribes totaling $500,000 to bolster their two daughters chances of gaining admission to the University of Southern California. The couple is not the only ones taking heat for the scandal. Their daughters are being harassed on social media, even though they have not been charged with any crimes. Felicity Huffmans husband has not been charged Just in case you needed the reminder, there is one solution to every problem and that solution is listening to your mother always. Grab this mug and others like it for just $4 today @whattheflicka. https://t.co/6hskJ7DfrA pic.twitter.com/Wbs7MSgcgo Felicity Huffman (@FelicityHuffman) February 15, 2019 Felicity Huffman may be best known for her roles on Desperate Housewives and the movie Transamerica. While she stood up in front of the judge answering questions, her husband, William H. Macy, sat and watched. Although court documents state that her Spouse was involved, Macy has not yet been charged in connection to the scandal. The Los Angeles Times reported that Huffman was released on $250,000 bail and is expected to appear in a Boston courtroom on March 29. It is not clear if Macy will be charged in the future or whether he will also be in Boston. The couple is accused of making a $15,000 bribe in the form of a donation to help their oldest daughter get a higher score on college entrance exams. They could go to prison if guilty The U.S. Attorneys Office in Boston and the FBI have charged Huffman and Laughlin with at least one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services fraud. Lets break these charges down to better understand the trouble they face if convicted. When a person commits mail fraud it means that they have: Purposefully created a plan to defraud a person or an institution Displayed an intent to commit fraud against a person or an institution Mailed something, using the United States Postal Service, USPS with the purpose of carrying out a fraudulent act Mail fraud is a felony. Each count could have stiff penalties. If found guilty Huffman and Laughlin face up to 5 years in prison and fines as high as $250,000 for each count. Understanding honest services fraud Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin | LISA OCONNOR ,TOMMASO BODDI/AFP/Getty Images If a person is charged with Honest services fraud, it means that they have deprived another individual the intangible right to honest services. Basically, it means that while many people work very hard in school, sports, and community services in order to be accepted into topped ranked schools, others might try to buy or cheat their way in. In this case, Huffman and Laughlin allegedly chose to bribe, cheat, and lie to get their children a spot at these colleges. That caused other, more deserving students to lose that opportuning. ROME - Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said Wednesday that all possible efforts would be made to ensure that human rights are respected in centers for migrants in Libya managed by the government and with humanitarian aid organizations working inside of them. He made this pledge during an interrogation at the lower house of parliament during which he was asked to suspend agreements with Libya. ''Italy,'' Salvini said, ''is working to ensure that Libya fully respects human rights'' and is supporting ''programs for voluntary repatriation'' in which humanitarian organizations working in Tripoli are involved. The country, he noted, is also helping Libyans to ''strengthen border control'' by providing motorboats and equipment for satellite and radio communications. There is thus no intention to suspend accords with Libya, Salvini said, underscoring that the ''EU Agenda calls for greater development of relations'' with the North African country. China vows to rid Christianity of 'western' influence: 'One more Christian, one less Chinese' Christian Post Contributor | 13 March, 2019 by Leah MarieAnn Klett A Chinese official who heads state-sanctioned Christian churches in China has vowed to rid Christianity in the country of any Western "imprint," calling for further "sinicization" of religion. In a speech on Monday, Xu Xiaohong, head of the National Committee of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement of the Protestant Churches in China, identified what Beijing perceives to be problems with Christianity in the country, including "infiltration" from abroad and "private meeting places," the South China Morning Post reports. "[We] must recognize that Chinese churches are surnamed 'China,' not 'the West'," Xu told delegates to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. "The actions by anti-China forces that attempt to affect our social stability or even subvert the regime of our country are doomed to fail," he said. Xu pointed out that because Christianity was spread to China at a time when Western powers were invading the country, the religion will always be connected to the "West." Western influence, he said, made the churches in China to want to stay independent and focus on themselves. 'Therefore, people often say: "One more Christian, one less Chinese," Xu said, according to Xinhua News Agency. "For individual black sheep who, under the banner of Christianity, participate in subverting national security, we firmly support the country to bring them to justice," he declared. Introduced by President Xi Jinping in 2015, China's "sinicization campaign" seeks to bring religions under the officially atheist party's absolute control and into line with Chinese culture. In his speech, Xu hailed earlier attempts to sinicize Christianity in the country, including the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and the anti-Christian movement of 1922-1927. Both events were characterized by violence against Christianity and resulted in a large number of deaths among Christian missionaries. "We all know very well that in comparison to other religions, Protestantism in China carries a heavier historical burden and faces greater pressure from reality in its push for sinicization," Xu said, adding that Christianity in China must rid itself of all imprints of a "foreign" religion and establish its own Chinese theology. Read more from "China vows to rid Christianity of 'western' influence: 'One more Christian, one less Chinese'" on The Christian Post. United We Stand Christian Examiner Contributor | 13 March, 2019 by Mark Klages Ok, so here's the thing. We're a divided nation. That's nothing new, seriously. Our social media-loving, 24-hour-news-cycle-watching, Tweeting and Instagramming selves do not have a monopoly on a divided United States. Anyone over 100 years old might still remember the nation so divided that Teddy Roosevelt declared himself Progressive and split the vote, handing the White House to Woodrow Wilson over incumbent President William H. Taft. Just 5 years later, the US enters WWI and Congress votes on prohibition. In the 1920's, we pass the 19th Amendment because before that women could not vote. The Emergency Quota Act "curbed illegal immigration" and Native Americans were finally declared citizens! Al Capone orchestrates the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and the Stock Market crashes. In the 1950's, labor threatens to strike and the Government federalizes steel mills, which is overturned by the Supreme Court. Racial segregation ends with Brown v. Board of Education. I could go on and on, but by now you should get my point. These United States of America still exist 243 years after declaring our independence, not because we are wholly united in our theology, our politics, or our opinion, but because we have always overcome our divisions for the betterment of all. We are West Virginians, Texans, Californians and New Yorkers, but we are all Americans. We are Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Libertarians, and Socialists, but we are all Americans. We are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, and Mormons, but we are all Americans. Recently, newspapers and web pages would have us all believe that anyone who rejected Jussie Smollett's attack claims is a racist bigot, not an independent thinker. Those same "news" organizations would have us believe anyone who supports a Southern Border Wall is also racist, while anyone against the Wall is somehow more "American." Poppycock, I say. Agents and agencies that spin social conflict to make a buck are as old as the conflicts that dot the American landscape. Through generations we Americans have found our common interests greatly outweigh our divisions, and that will never change. We. Are. Americans. So Jesus called them over to him and began to speak to them in parables: "How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. (Mark 3:23-25, NIV) Mark Klages is an influential contributor, a former US Marine and a lifelong teacher who focuses on applying a Christian worldview to everyday events. Mark blogs at https://maklagesl3.wixsite.com/website under the title "God Provides where Hate Divides," with a heart to heal social, political, relational, and intellectual wounds through God's divine love and grace. Mark can also be found on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-klages-04b42511/. NAIROBI, Kenya (RNS) Amid shock and grief after the Ethiopian Airline crash, leaders from the worlds faith traditions gathered in Nairobi for a United Nations event, united in prayer on Monday (March 11) for the 157 victims of the air disaster, among them a Roman Catholic nun and a Catholic and a Lutheran priest. Some 5,000 delegates to the U.N. Environment Assembly, meeting at the U.N.s Nairobi campus this week, held a moment of silence for 22 of their number who died on their way to the assembly. I stand before you this morning with a very heavy heart, as we mourn the loss of our sisters and brothers, our colleagues, delegates and members of the United Nations family in the tragic Ethiopian Airlines plane crash, Maimunah Mohd Sharif, acting director of the U.N. Office in Nairobi, told the gathering. In the wake of this tragedy, it has been difficult to navigate how to proceed without showing respect to the many lives lost yesterday. I want to assure that as the day and week unfolds we will not forget this tragedy, nor those that perished with it. In a tent set aside for clergy on the sidelines of the U.N. meeting, leaders from Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Bahai and Judaism took turns to offer the prayers. The leaders are hosting a side event at the assembly dubbed Faith for Earth. We have gathered here to pray for those who have lost their lives in an untimely manner. May God comfort and give strength to their families. We are sad, but there is nothing we can do now, said Nigerias Imam Shefiu Abdulkareem Majemu, president of the Strength in Diversity Development Center. We remember all the nations that have lost their citizens in the tragedy, said Anglican Bishop Julius Wanyoike of Thika Diocese in Kenya. At this time we pray for blessing. May grace be sufficient. Help us to understand why a ship could crash into the earth with people from different nationalities, said Israeli Rabbi Yonatan Neril, executive director of the Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development in Jerusalem. The jetliner en route to Nairobi crashed near the Ethiopian town of Bishoftu soon after takeoff from the Bole International Airport in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, on Sunday. The international aid community was hit hard by the crash, as Nairobi and Addis Ababa are hubs for relief and development work. The Rev. Norman Tendis, an Austrian Lutheran priest and a consultant for the World Council of Churches, was killed in the downed Boeing jet, as were the Rev. George Mukua and Sister Florence Wangari Yongi, both Roman Catholics. Four relief workers from Catholic Relief Services who were traveling to attend a training in Nairobi were also killed. In all, 35 nations were affected by the crash, the second involving Boeings 737 Max 8, a relatively new model, in the past six months. Some countries have grounded the 737 Max 8s in their fleets. The tragedy hit Kenya hardest, with 32 citizens lost. Canada followed with 18, while Ethiopia lost nine. The U.S., Italy and China lost eight each and Britain seven. Its a difficult time. Our hearts go to the family, a friend and our dear brother Norman, said Arnold Temple, a Sierra Leonean Methodist and president of the All Africa Conference of Churches, referring to Tendis. Mukua, a Kenyan in his second year as a Mariannhill missionary priest, was returning to Nairobi from Rome via Addis Ababa. As his confreres we are shaken by this tragic death and ask for your continued prayers for him and especially his family. May the soul of Fr. George and all passengers that have died rest in eternal peace, wrote the Rev. Patrick Chongo, a fellow priest, on Facebook. Yongi was traveling to Kenya from Kisangani, in Congo, where she had worked as a missionary for three and a half years. She was returning to Kenya to renew her passport. READ THIS STORY AT RELIGIONNEWS.COM. Article originally published by Morning Star News. Used with permission. Photo courtesy: RNS/AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene The Temple Mount was closed off on Tuesday after several people reportedly threw a Molotov cocktail firebomb into one of the police stations at the holy site. According to the Jerusalem Post, a riot broke out at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem after Israel accused the Palestinian Authority of inciting a religious war there. The Temple Mount has long been a site of conflict for Israelis and Palestinians as it is of religious significance to Jews, Christians and Muslims. In a statement on Tuesday, Israels Public Safety Minister, Gilad Erdan said, Abu Mazen [PA President Mahmoud Abbas] continued to lie and incite violence together with the terror organizations of Murabitoun and Hamas, in an attempt to ignite a fire and cause a religious war on the Temple Mount. He continued, We will not allow this to happen. We will continue to act to restore calm on the [Temple Mount]. Police will respond with strength and determination to any act of violence or attempt to harm Israeli sovereignty on the Temple Mount. While Israeli authorities claim that the flames were ignited by a firebomb several eyewitnesses claimed that the fire was started by young kids who were playing with fireworks. According to reports, two adolescents were initially arrested in connection with the attack. After the riot broke out, however, three more Palestinians were arrested. Palestinian activist groups then began to encourage other Palestinians to swarm the al-Aqsa Mosque to defend it against the assault by police and Jewish extremists. This call, along with the chaos of the fire and the riot, forced police to have to close down the al-Aqsa compound. The Jerusalem Post reports that one police officer sustained injuries from smoke inhalation in the attack and the compound is expected to reopen on Wednesday. Photo courtesy: Sander Crombach/Unsplash Iowas Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the state can no longer ban Medicaid recipients from receiving sex-reassignment surgeries through taxpayer funds, deeming the surgeries medically necessary. The case began as a discrimination suit in a district court when two transgender women Eerieanna Good and Carol Beal sued the Iowa Department of Human Services over its administrative classification of transition-related surgeries as cosmetic, reconstructive or plastic surgery. The code excluded surgeries for the purpose of sex reassignment, writes The Blaze. The district court agreed with the plaintiffs argument that the surgeries are necessary for the health of individuals suffering from gender dysphoria. Assistant Attorney General Matthew Gillespie and other state health officials appealed this decision. Life Site News writes that Gillespie argued this case was not about discrimination against transgender Iowans, but whether the treatment in question was for physical or psychological purposes, and that the Iowa Constitution contained no mandate to overall services. Gillespie explained that the departments funds are limited in what they can cover, and gender-reassignment procedures can range from $20,000 to $100,000, according to the Des Moines Register. In the end, the Supreme Court stood by the district courts ruling. Justice Susan Christensen wrote that barring Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming surgical procedures discriminates against transgender Medicaid recipients in Iowa referring to Iowas civil rights laws. She added that an amendment to the Iowa Civil Rights Act of 2007 explicitly added gender identity to the list of protected criteria. Additionally, Justice Christensen pointed out that Medicaid already covers some cosmetic or reconstructive procedures for purposes such as the correction of a congenital anomaly, but does not allow coverage for this same procedure if [it is] a transgender individual. this case presented a difficult question involving individual rights and the states interest, said Lynn Hicks to the Des Moines Register. This issue was a first for Iowas courts, and we thank the court for its guidance and for resolving this issue. Life Site News reported that a spokesperson for the attorney generals office suggested that it is unlikely for the matter to be appealed. Photo courtesy: Getty Images/Drew Angerer/Staff I dont know what you did last night, but Ill bet it wasnt more significant than the way Belinda George spent her evening. Dr. George is the first-year principal of Homer Drive Elementary School in Beaumont, Texas. Her students reading scores last year were low, so she launched Tucked-in Tuesdays in December. She dresses in costumes, from a onesie with a unicorn head to a Cookie Monster outfit to pajamas covered with pink hearts. When her students log on to their schools Facebook page, she reads books to them over her iPhone. She acts out the stories as the kids type in questions. Dr. George grew up with five sisters in a three-bedroom trailer. Her father never learned to read. She learned her love of reading from her school librarian in Louisiana. Now she is paying it forward. 3-D printed houses and robot-delivered meals Technology affects every dimension of our lives today, from the airplanes we ride to the cars we drive, the homes we inhabit, the food we eat, and the air we breathe. The innovations of our day can be a force for tremendous good, as Dr. Georges Facebook Live reading sessions show. Other examples: A Texas company says it has developed a way to build homes in just a few days using 3-D printing, saving 30 percent off total construction costs. Companies are testing automated cooler-sized robots that can deliver food to any address. Technology is also helping police with crimes that have been unsolved for years, if not decades. One genealogist has predicted that suspects in hundreds of unsolved murders and rapes will be identified using public DNA databases in the near future. Last week, for instance, DNA and genetic genealogy helped police find a woman who left her newborn baby to die thirty-eight years ago. Selfie-taker attacked by a jaguar Of course, nearly anything that can be used for good can also be used for bad. A doctor in California told a patient via computer video link that he was going to die. The patient passed away the next day. His granddaughter told CNN, I think they should have had more dignity and treated him better than they did. A woman using her cellphone to take a selfie crossed a barrier in an Arizona zoo and was attacked by a female jaguar. The woman was taken to the hospital and later apologized to the zoo for the incident. And a Florida policeman allegedly used a police database to mine information for his personal dating service. He reportedly contacted 150 women over the last seven years. The officer has resigned. When a Pharisee met a carpenter One of the most remarkable encounters in all of Scripture is recorded in John 3. Nicodemus was a man of the Pharisees (v. 1a), the most powerful and respected religious group in Israel. He was also a ruler of the Jews (v. 1b)a member of the Sanhedrin, the Supreme Court of their nation. And he was the teacher of Israel (v. 10), a venerated religious scholar. Nonetheless, he sought out Jesus of Nazareth, an itinerant Galilean carpenter and rabbi. Jesus shocked him with the declaration, Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God (v. 5). This new birth comes only through faith in Jesus: Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him (v. 36). He must increase, but I must decrease John 3:30 Those who have received such life from the Son should now say with John the Baptist, He must increase, but I must decrease (v. 30). Nicodemus later made the same commitment, defending Jesus before the Sanhedrin (John 7:5051) and risking his social standing to bury his Lords body (John 19:3942). The highest priority in this world From Nicodemus encounter with Jesus, we learn that the highest priority in this world is not this world. Technology can improve our lives in ways that earlier generations would not have believed. But nothing humans do can save human souls. Knowing Jesus as our Savior is the only way we experience eternal life in the next world. And knowing Jesus as our King is the only way we experience abundant life in this world (John 10:10). Heres the problem: our spiritual enemy and our secular culture conspire to keep non-Christians from the first commitment and Christians from the second. Our motive for surrender If you have not asked Jesus to forgive your sins and become your Savior, let me encourage you to make this life-transforming decision today. To talk to someone personally about this commitment, click here. If Jesus is your Savior, let me encourage you to make him your King today. Salvation only starts the process of sanctification. Most of us know far less about surrender to Jesus when we become Christians than we learn as we grow in Christ. Sanctification (literally being made holy) is the work of the Holy Spirit, not the result of human effort. Our role is deciding daily to surrender to Jesus as our King (Luke 9:23) and asking the Spirit to help us (Ephesians 5:18). The peace, purpose, and power that result from such surrender to our Lord are his gifts of grace to us. However, such blessings are not the reason to make this commitment. The reason is that our King deserves the unconditional submission of our lives. Beware of stopping anywhere short of total surrender to God. Oswald Chambers Oswald Chambers: Beware of surrender that is motivated by personal benefits that may result. . . . Our motive for surrender should not be for any personal gain at all. We have become so self-centered that we go to God only for something from Him, and not for God Himself (his italics). By contrast, Genuine total surrender is a personal sovereign preference for Jesus Christ Himself. . . . Beware of stopping anywhere short of total surrender to God. How surrendered to God would he say you are today? For more from the Denison Forum, please visit www.denisonforum.org. The Daily Article Podcast is Here! Click to Listen Publication Date: March 13, 2019 Photo Courtesy: Unsplash/Clay Banks Its a typical Sunday morning for Powell Missionary Baptist Church. The choir is in place, the ushers are pointing people in the right direction and the mood of the congregation is just as upbeat as its young Pastor Vinton Copeland, who exudes with love and enthusiasm for his people. The feeling is mutual from the congregation, who seems to not only to like but deeply respect and love their pastor. There's only one thing out of place and that's what's happening outside of the church in the small town of Talbotton, Georgia. According to the National Weather Service, this small town endured a category EF-3 tornado last Sunday after church. "I had just left the church and was visiting family members, when all of a sudden a roaring sound came out of nowhere," Copeland shared. He would realize later that he had experienced the worst tornado to come through the small town that he was born and raised in. Copeland can remember walking out of the family members house that he was visiting, to sirens and people crying, not knowing what to do next. "It looked like a war zone, as the rain was still coming down, the pastor said. Fast forward to this past Sunday. It is night and day compared to the trauma that the people of Powell Missionary had gone through. By the energy in the room, you wouldn't know that an EF-3 tornado had touched down a week ago. If one were to walk into Powell Missionary Baptist Church, they would see how the members love each other and the guests who come to visit. When I visited the Georgia-based church I was welcomed by the choir enthusiastically singing "God, made a way and then by member Willie George Eppss testimony which highlighted this truth. Epps told the congregation about how God had prepared him before the tornado by waking him up in the middle of the night to pray for the last two weeks. Epps said, "When I look back, God was preparing me for the tornado that destroyed my home. What's amazing about Willie is that one wouldn't know the trauma he endured from the sound of his grateful spirit. Willie was very clear when sharing with the congregation that even though he had lost his house, he was still thankful. Pastor Copeland then shared a Sunday morning message that was full of both hope and mourning as Copeland told his parishioners that it was okay to wonder why their homes were destroyed but their neighbors homes were spared. "Sometimes, you have to allow people to sit and grieve," Copeland who has been at the church every day for the last week to collect items and minister to people in their time of need said. The Bible verse that has ministered to Copeland during this time of tragedy is John 13 when Jesus is washing the feet of the disciples and serving them. He said, "I want to make sure that I have the towel in my mind. Copeland said that when he thinks about how he can minister to the community, he believes it is through serving them and helping them through the trauma they've experienced. Although many in the community don't know what will happen next, no matter what happens Powell Missionary Baptist Church will be finding themselves worshiping, even if the outside of the building isn't. From the beginning prayer to the music to the sermon to the benediction, Powell Missionary Baptist Church believes that the same God who created the storm is the same God that will guide them in putting their town back together again. Photo courtesy: Pixabay Did you know you can get Christian Headlines flash briefings on Amazon Alexa? Gregory the Great, so tradition tells us, was a reluctant pope. Well-educated and from a wealthy family, Gregory experienced inner tension between his longing for the contemplative life and his sense of calling toward secular responsibilities. After converting to the monastic life and transforming his house into a monasterythe happiest years of his lifeGregory often was called into service of the church in public ways, including serving as Pope Pelagius IIs legate to Constantinople. When troubles gathered around Rome, Gregory was called from his monastic life to the city to help. Soon afterward, Pope Pelagius died of the plague sweeping through Rome at that time, and Gregory was elected to succeed him. Gregory tried to refuse the office, preferring his monastic life, but once elected, he accepted his duties faithfully and worked hard to serve God in his new position. The best leaders, according to the old proverb, are reluctant leaders. Of course, as my own story shows, reluctance is not an inherently laudable trait. My calling into pastoral ministry came when I was in high school, in a small Presbyterian church in the Mississippi River Valley of western Illinois. I hoped to be a music minister of some sort, though I wasnt sure if churches hired people to do that. Following my internal inclinations and external affirmations toward pastoral ministry, I studied at a Christian college where my eyes were opened to some of the great ministry leaders of that time: Billy Graham, John Stott, Dallas Willard, John Piper, Elisabeth Elliott. Many of them spoke at my college. I prayed, God, use me however you wanteven like these great women and men. I didnt want to be a big deal in peoples eyes, but I did want to be a big deal in Gods hands for his kingdom. Eventually, I transitioned from music ministry to college ministry, and I was hired to my first full-time pastoral position at a megachurch in the suburbs of Milwaukee. It was an amazing experience, but I slowly became enamored by celebrity ministry culture. I wanted to accomplish great things, speak at Christian conferences, and write life-changing booksall for the glory of God, of course. The temptations Henri Nouwen wrote about in In the Name of Jesus surrounded me daily: the temptation to be relevant, the temptation to be popular by doing something remarkable, and the temptation to be powerful in leadership by leading rather than being led. After a while, however, I started to sour on celebrity ministry culture. I emceed an event in our area with a big-name author, and I was excited to meet him. Backstage, however, he revealed an arrogant attitude toward those serving at the event, which left me confused. After a few more encounters with celebrity ministers who were less than pleasant to be around, I became cynical about North American evangelical church culture, including the publishing industry and the speaking circuits. If this was what high-profile ministry brought out of people, I wanted no part of it. I started looking for an escape route. The prayer I had prayed in college changed to God, use me however you wantbut get me out of here as fast as you can. From Celebrity to Obscurity God answered my prayer, and I was sent out to plant a church at the edge of the suburbs, where rural and suburban life collided. It was a chance to step out of the spotlight and become obscure. I could not wait. My family moved into an unincorporated area on the edge of town, and I did my best to serve God faithfully as a second-chair leader, wearing more hats than I could handle as the church became established. I was in a small-but-growing area, in a small-but-growing church. It was one of my favorite seasons of ministry. My wife and three boys loved the pace of life, and the community-oriented ministry seemed natural and powerful as we all served beside many wonderful people in those early days of the church. Stepping away from the temptation of celebrity and into a ministry of obscurity was a gift to my soul. My own pursuit of recognition was checked in this new ministry context, as was my cynicism. Yet something lingered inside of me. Whenever I flipped through the latest Christian book catalogs or attended a ministry conference, I said things like, Im glad Im not in that merry-go-round of ministry anymore, and Real ministry doesnt happen on big stages, but in the unknown trenches of small settings. I heard in my voice an odd mixture of pride in my obscurity and jealousy of others celebrity. One afternoon I was talking about ministry with a friend who also pastored a small church. As we enjoyed lunch, we shared stories about how we saw God at work in the small groups within our churches. Im grateful our efforts can actually transform people since we pastor in small churches, I said. No one but God will hear about what were doing. Our work will never make it into a book or be lifted up from the stage of some mega-conference. But at least were real pastors who know everyones names. Driving home afterward, I realized something inside me was not right. Leaving the limelight of high-profile ministry was supposed to remove the pride from my heart, or so I thought. But my heart didnt feel dramatically different in this new setting. As the old saying goes, Wherever you go, there you are. I thought I had escaped the temptations of celebrity ministry culture, but there were just as many temptations in my new setting of relative obscurity. My impulse toward obscurity had become something less noble: a desire for recognition through reverse optics. I smugly stood at a distance and criticized celebrity pastors with their new books and accompanying curriculum being hawked in the household of God, as if they were money changers in the temple. I was just waiting for an opportunity to turn over their tables. The temptations Nouwen wrote about were just as close in obscure ministry as they had been in high-profile ministry. I had simply turned them upside down. The temptation to be relevant took the form of resisting mass-market appeal in favor of what people really need. The temptation to be popular by doing something remarkable showed up when I took pride in just how remarkably countercultural my obscure ministry was. The temptation to be powerful in my leadership by leading instead of being led became clear as I led myself into the only place Jesus really did ministry. Escaping Responsibility? But something else was happening that took me longer to notice. My obscurity had become an attempt to escape responsibility. After a few years at my small church plant, I received a call from another church in the area to consider following a founding pastor of nearly 30 years as their new senior pastor. This urban church of over 1,000 people was exactly the sort of place from which I had run away. The first conversation I had about this opportunity went well, but I never called back because I had convinced myself that the Jesus of Philippians 2 and John 13 would not lead me back into that type of ministry. A friend challenged me on this. Dont be so sure this isnt Gods plan, he said. You have the right gifts and experience for this new role. You should consider whether God might be asking you to step out of your comfort zone to be used in a different setting. Shortly after that conversation, I met with a mentor to get his opinion. He wondered if I was succumbing to the temptation to plateau in ministry, referencing the work of Robert Clinton in The Making of a Leader. According to Clinton, leaders plateau when they fail to see their need for growth, becoming complacent in the comfort of their current situations. Is your resistance to this new context really about Jesus in Philippians 2, my mentor asked, or is it about you trying to have things your way? The more conversations I had, the greater my sense that God might actually want to plunge me into this role in the heart of the city. I felt like Gregory the Great, called away from the comfort of obscurity into a high-profile position I didnt really want. It was so much easier to critique larger ministries from afar than to actually pastor in that context. Late one night, my wife, Kelly, and I decided we would call the church the next day and tell them I was not going to take the role. This decision to stay in obscure ministry granted us a sense of peace and resolve, and we went to sleep peacefully. Then in the middle of the night, I was startled from sleep by a dream in which I sensed God calling me directly into the new role. What is going on? I wondered. I left this all behind to save my soul. Surely God would not make me feel uncomfortable in ministry! That thought scared me. Was it possible I had turned away from Jesus command from Luke 9:23: Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me? Could leaving obscurity behind actually be Gods calling? In the morning, I told Kelly the dream, and we both felt something different from the simplistic peace we had experienced the night before. We felt a sense of resolve to follow Christ no matter the cost. We left what we loved in our small-but-growing ministry to enter a bigger-but-growing ministry context. In the nine years Ive served this urban, multi-ethnic church, Ive realized that ministry is hard no matter where you find yourself. The work of following a founding senior pastor is not for the faint of heart. There is a reason the pastor after the founder is sometimes called The Sacrificial Lamb. The church has grown, and we have weathered many storms together, but I still grapple with the temptations to grow in popularity through my preaching and pastoral care, to be relevant by having the most interesting multi-ethnic church in town, or to be powerful by imposing my will instead of remembering I am only an undershepherd of the Good Shepherd. Through it all, the words of John the Baptist in John 3 have become my ministry mantra: I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him. The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegrooms voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease (John 3:2830, ESV). Matt Erickson is senior pastor of Eastbrook Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Evangelist Todd White says spending time with God helps fight the devils temptations Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment ORLANDO Todd White, one of the organizers of The Send, a "new Jesus movement" that was attended by nearly 60,000 people at Camping World Stadium last weekend, shared advice with The Christian Post on how believers can discipline themselves to overcome temptation. White, a former drug addict turned evangelist, spoke at the event about resisting evil and focusing on God in a world full of distractions. When I got saved, I realized I was living for the devil my whole life and I was blind," he told CP. "This master of darkness blinded me and I was ball and chained to him and I had no idea that I was a slave to sin and an instrument of unrighteous my whole life." The Lifestyle Christianity leader said he fell in love with Jesus once he was saved and realized that those who love Jesus will obey His commands. The two greatest commandments are to love God and love my neighbor as myself. I can't love my neighbor unless I love myself, and I can't love myself unless I know how much God loves me. And so when I dove into this, I just started to spend time with Him, White said, detailing the process of his transformation. The former atheist emphasized that its all about spending time with Jesus. If I do it out of discipline, it's kind of out of duty, but if I do it out of love then it's completely different, White continued. His love empowers me to walk out what the grace of God has called me to, He's called me to the truth. The truth in love is different. So when I find out how much the father loves me, I find out my value. And when I find out my value, I no longer want to do those things that [my flesh] calls me to do. But I want to spend time with Him because the greatest opportunities we have is to know Him. "The Send," was a 10-hour event organized by Youth With A Mission, Christ for All Nations, and Lou Engle of Lou Engle Ministries. The event featured several collaborators from various national ministries including White, who all hoped to motivate Christians to fulfill their God-given call. "Unless we fall in love with Him, we can't do anything the Bible calls us to do. When we can love with a phileo love, but it's not agape love, I have to spend time with love itself in order to become the very instrument of righteousness that He's called me to be, White added. When White wakes up every morning his first words, he says, are always, Jesus. "It's making sure that I carve time every day as soon as I wake up, I want to carve that time out. I want to spend time with Jesus, White said. God says, it's the love of the Father, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the communion in the Holy Ghost. So I need to know how much the Father loves me and the reality of the price He paid for me determines my value. When I see my value I start to recognize His love for me. When I see His love for me, I can actually look in the mirror and like what I see, because I see Him inside me and the price that He paid. Then I can see people's value all around me, he said. The discipline part is more out of duty, but the relationship part, like intimacy, I don't have to think about. White ended by saying that he never has to think about loving his wife, because intimacy naturally activates that love. I love my wife out of an intimate relationship with her. The Send event was a call to action, a call to repentance and a call to service. White has also made that motto his mission statement. To watch The Send 2019, visit bethel.tv/thesend. (ANSAmed) - TUNIS, MARCH 13 - The preparatory meeting in Tunis of the foreign ministers of Arab League countries scheduled on March 29, two days ahead of the 30th summit of Arab League countries, is set to discuss a number of urgent issues, including the potential return of Syria within the Arab League, Tunisian Foreign Minister Khemaies Jhinaoui told reporters. The minister made the statement after a meeting with the delegation of the Independent high authority for elections (Isie), stressing that Tunisia cannot unilaterally decide on Syria's participation in this summit. ''This is a collective decision that should be taken by Arab countries'', said Jhinaoui. The Tunisian minister also indicated that preparations for the Arab League summit on March 31 are making progress, mainly at a logistic level, to welcome in the best possible way leaders from Arab countries. Talking about the latest current events in the Maghreb region, Jhinaoui said that Tunisia ''is an integral part of Maghreb's landscape and hopes in the stability and success of neighboring countries''. ''Algeria's domestic affairs exclusively concern Algerians'', he said, referring to the current situation in Algeria. The ministerial meetings of the 151st ordinary session of the Arab League's ministerial council, held in Cairo on March 6, focused on the preparation of the agenda for the 30th summit of Arab League countries scheduled on March 31 in Tunis. Jhinauoi said issues discussed in Cairo included the Palestinian dossier, developments in Libya, Syria and Yemen, the fight against terrorism and ways to strengthen Arab national security, boosting the cooperation and economic integration of Arab countries and Arab cooperation with various regional and international blocs. The 30th summit of Arab League countries on March 31 in Tunis is one of the most highly anticipated events of 2019 for the North African country, Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi said. He stressed that the summit is ''an honor for Tunisia and Tunisians'' that will be an opportunity for Arab countries to get closer to ''strengthen joint Arab action''. (ANSAmed) How do pastors guard against abusing their power? Evangelical leaders weigh in Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment To guard against the temptations and abuses that come with positions of power and influence in the church, pastors must cultivate a life of prayer marked by honesty and vulnerability, two evangelical leaders have said. In a recent video posted on the Gospel Coalition website, Kyle Strobel, professor of spiritual theology and formation at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California, and Jamin Goggin, a pastor at Mission Hills Church in San Marcos, California, warned that every pastor will, at some point, be tempted by worldly power in ministry. Just because youre doing ministry doesnt mean somehow youre not going to be tempted to employ worldly power for the sake of it, said Strobel. One way to combat this temptation, Strobel said, is to cultivate a life of prayer where honesty is at its core. He encouraged pastors to consider the areas in their lives where they might be tempted toward power, from getting more people to download sermons to filling church pews. We need to be open to all these areas in our hearts where we're actually trying to use God, he said. We're actually trying to come up with ways where we can employ ourselves and wield them to try to further His Kingdom. All of these things are temptations toward power. As I see myself being tempted by these things, now I have to come and say, Lord, look at this, Strobel continued. "'I hear your message. I hear that without you, I can do nothing. I look at my life. I know how much you've done for me. I know everything I have is because you are a gracious Father, and yet I consistently look for ways where I can wield worldly power.'" The Formed for the Glory of Godauthor pointed out that far too often, pastors read Scripture to preach and explain it, but they dont take time to truly feel the weight of the words. We have to cultivate this openness of heart so that we can really sit with and see the truth of ourselves in the very presence of God, Strobel said. Goggin, co-author of Beloved Dust, added that according to Scripture, the pastoral office is a position of power, vested with authority by Christ. The question is not, are we in a position of power, but ... what kind of power are we embracing in those moments, he explained. Is it worldly power or Kingdom power? Is it power and strength for the sake of control? Or is it power known in our weakness for the sake of love and dependence upon Christ? Prayer is incredibly important in this conversation, that what were cultivating in our prayer life is an ongoing dialogue with God about the very real temptations we face in these moments of preaching and pastoral care and all the areas of leadership and life of churches, he continued. Goggin added that friendships marked by genuine reciprocity, vulnerability, and honesty help combat the temptations that come along with ministry. I think we need a variety of kinds of friendships that can help us guard against temptations and power, Goggin said, adding that pastors need to be friends not just with church leadership, but with congregation members, too. When I was a young pastor, I was often told, I think implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that I couldn't really be friends with people in my church, and I've come to just believe this is a false reality, he said. Of course, there are proper boundaries we need to hold and wisdom and discernment in this regard. But we need to have real relationships with people in the life of our church, where were known ... and where vulnerability is a part of our relationships. Goggin also encouraged pastors to be friends with those outside of the church who are thoroughly unimpressed with the fact that we're pastors. These are really important relationships to have, he said. [They see us] as people and value us, but don't find our position or authority in the life of the church as anything noteworthy or impressive. It's these kinds of relationships that can actually be really grounding for us and provide a helpful mirror of humility in our vocation. In recent years, a number of scandals involving the abuse of authority by leaders in churches have made headlines. In 2014, Mark Driscoll, the former pastor of the now-defunct Seattle megachurch Mars Hill, was forced to resign from his position following accusations of bullying and fostering an abusive work environment. Previously, Jimmy Evans, senior pastor of Gateway Church, a multicampus church in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, told The Christian Post that the problem often begins when pastors isolate themselves from others, from accountability, and ultimately, from the truth. "We're all human beings, and I believe pastors who fall put themselves in a position of secrecy," he explained. "I've never met a pastor that didn't have the same basic temptations as the other guy. The difference is how we deal with it." Isolation, Evans contended, is one of Satan's greatest weapons. "The devil works in the darkness," he said. "As pastors, we need to not put ourselves in a position of living a private life away from the eyes of others. That's why pastors fall, and it can happen to any pastor. It's the way we carry ourselves, the way we relate to people around us, whether we're honest or dishonest." Ronnie Floyd, senior pastor of Cross Church of Northwest Arkansas, told CP that pastors, just like everyone else, are not exempt from spiritual warfare, and Satan loves to attack those who lead God's church. He encouraged church members to "gather together and pray for your pastor, that there will be a shield of protection around him, and that he will be able to discern when something isn't right and flee from it like Joseph (in Genesis) did." Pro-LGBT churches not leaving UMC just yet, advocacy groups say Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment While many predicted that there would be schism within the United Methodist Church following a recent General Conference vote affirming the denominations stance against homosexuality and gay marriage, it may not be coming just yet, according to pro-LGBT groups. In February, delegates at the UMCs special session of General Conference in St. Louis, Missouri, voted to adopt a plan that not only upholds the church bodys position against homosexuality and the ordination of noncelibate homosexuals, but also put in place stricter enforcement of said rules. The Traditional Plan succeeded in large part because of delegates representing Africa and other overseas regional bodies within the UMC. Jan Lawrence, executive director of the Reconciling Ministries Network, which has hundreds of churches affiliated with them, told The Christian Post that leaving the denomination is not being considered. We do not know of any churches currently discussing exit. We are encouraging our churches not to discuss leaving at this point, explained Lawrence. Bridget Cabrera, executive director of the Methodist Federation for Social Action, another pro-LGBT group, told CP that she has found many churches her organization has ties with are saying they will dissent from the plan and continue to welcome everyone. None of the churches that I'm connected to have voiced they are planning to leave. The response has been the opposite, said Cabrera. For the past several years, there has been a great deal of internal debate over the UMCs official stance on LGBT issues, with many American liberals seeking to have them changed. In April 2017, the UMC Council of Bishops announced that there was going to be a special session of General Conference in St. Louis, Missouri, on Feb. 2326 centered on adopting a plan to help the denomination end the debate. The two plans with the greatest support going into the special session were The One Church Plan and The Traditional Plan. The One Church Plan sought to have regional bodies and local congregations determine their own stance on LGBT issues. It was supported by most members of the Council of Bishops. The Traditional Plan sought to maintain the UMCs current position and also provide stricter enforcement of said rules while possibly giving a gracious exit for pro-LGBT congregations. During the special session, delegates rejected the One Church Plan and then approved the Traditional Plan in a vote of 438-384. Many theologically liberal United Methodists and leaders denounced the decision, with several congregations restating their support for the LGBT movement. Adam Hamilton, senior pastor of the Church of the Resurrection, which is the largest UMC congregation in the United States, entertained the idea of leaving the denomination. I think it would not be hard, said Hamilton in an interview with The Kansas City Star that was published days after the special session ended. I think our folks here love the United Methodist Church they love the kind of church we have created and so we could start a new United Methodist Church and thousands of churches would join us. Other megachurch pastors, including Pastor Talbot Davis of Good Shepherd UMC of Charlotte, North Carolina, which has approximately 2,000 worshippers every Sunday, praised the passage of the Traditional Plan. I am delighted that the Special General Conference of the United Methodist Church adopted the Traditional Plan as we believe in the beautiful picture of celibacy in singleness and faithfulness in heterosexual marriage that is woven throughout the pages of Scripture as well as church teaching for since its inception, Davis told CP in an earlier interview. We gladly join with our global brothers and sisters in teaching this truth with as much love and winsomeness as we can. The Rev. Shane Stanford, teaching pastor at Christ Church in Memphis, Tennessee, which has over 5,000 members, told CP that he was pleased with the result, especially the plans increased accountability. For my congregation in particular, the adoption of the Traditional Plan will have minimal effect. The vast legacy of my congregations spiritual DNA leans to a more evangelical, orthodox heritage, said Stanford. While approved by the majority of delegates at the special session, the Traditional Plan will need to be reviewed by the United Methodist Judicial Council in April to determine whether it will be allowed to take effect. Education Sec. will no longer enforce restriction on religious organizations providing equitable services Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Calling the restriction unconstitutional, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy Devos said Monday that her agency will no longer enforce a restriction that bars religious organizations from providing contract-based equitable services such as special education and tutoring solely due to their religious affiliation. Speaking at the Council for American Private Education State Directors Annual Meeting, Devos saida provision in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which governs the nations elementary, middle and high schools, was also unconstitutional. The ESEA requires that school districts offer low-income or vulnerable students who attend private schools the same services, such as special education, tutoring or mentoring, that their public-school counterparts get. The law requires that those contractors, however, be independent of any religious organization. Devos concluded after consulting with her legal team that the restriction on religious organizations in providing services run counter to the 2017 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer. In that case, it was found that the state of Missouri had unconstitutionally engaged in religious discrimination when it denied a church-run preschool publicly funded tire scraps for its playground. The Trinity Lutheran decision reaffirmed the long-understood intent of the First Amendment to not restrict the free exercise of religion, DeVos said in a statement. Those seeking to provide high-quality educational services to students and teachers should not be discriminated against simply based on the religious character of their organization. It was noted that the education agency would continue to enforce all other applicable provisions of federal law ensuring that school districts hire contractors that are independent of the private school for which they are providing services and that the educational services and other benefits being provided by contractors are secular, neutral and non-ideological. Devos sent a letter on Monday to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat, and several other congressional leaders outlining her decision, The New York Times reported. Democrats are also reviewing its legality. House Democrats are carefully reviewing the legality of the administrations new policy, Joshua Weisz, a spokesman for the House Education Committee, told the Times. Elizabeth Hill, a spokeswoman for DeVos, told Education Week that the recent decision "is further evidence of the secretary and the administration's commitment to making sure that schools are not discriminated against based on their religious affiliation." Jeff Simmering, director of government relations for the Council of the Great City Schools, argued that the decision is likely to be challenged. "I'm not saying it's incorrect, but it's a jump in legal logic to go from saying it's OK to provide funds to a contractor who is going to resurface a private school playground to a contractor that's going to provide instructional services," he said. "I'm sure we will all have an opportunity to think long and hard" about the impact of that, "because I'm sure it's going to be challenged." Church and state separation advocates such as Maggie Garrett, vice president for public policy at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, argued that the decision is cause for concern. "Betsy DeVos is neither the Supreme Court nor Congress. She does not get to unilaterally declare that a statute is unconstitutional, especially with a provision that is designed to protect church-state separation, a bedrock of our democracy," she told Education Week. "Trinity Lutheran was an incredibly narrow decision that was about providing playground material to a church not about providing educational services to impressionable young schoolchildren." Republican Sen. James Lankford from Oklahoma said, meanwhile, that the move was a great one for the faith community. Great news for the faith community. Thank you to @usedgov for protecting religious liberty, he tweeted Tuesday morning. Galen Carey, vice president of government relations for the National Association of Evangelicals, agreed. Organizations shouldn't be disqualified from serving on an equal basis just because of their religious views. Grateful the federal government is (finally) recognizing this. Thanks to @SenatorLankford for his support, Carey tweeted. Should Christians cremate or bury the dead? Evangelical leaders respond Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Southern Baptist ethicist Russell Moore has weighed in on the burial vs. cremation debate, explaining that while God can resurrect a cremated body, burial better reflects the Christian concepts of the coming resurrection and a high view of the body. In a recent video for The Gospel Coalition website, Moore said Christians often become alarmed when he says burial is the Christian way to dispose of the dead because they fear hes implying that people who are cremated are somehow now unresurrectable. Thats obviously not the case, he clarified. Even in the case of burial, the body decomposes and so at the shout of the archangel and the peal of the trumpet, the coming of the Lord Jesus is able to, by the power of God, reassemble the body at resurrection regardless of what has happened to that person. The sea will give up its dead, the Scripture tells us. People who have been eaten by lions and ripped into pieces will be resurrected at the last day. All sorts of things can happen to the body, and God is still able to resurrect that person, he continued. Thats not what the question is about. Moore said that the actual question is: What do we, as the people of God, intend to communicate when we are dealing with our dead? He pointed out that cremation comes from eastern religions that would hold that the persons ultimate destiny is to be disintegrated. In the 19th century, there was a great move from those who would advocate for cremation because burial gave a picture of sleep and of a coming resurrection an idea that was religiously offensive to them. They were right to see that because the Scripture says we are but dust and we will return to the ground from which we came, Moore said. The Scripture also uses that language of sleep. We are put away in sleep in order to be awakened, in order to see the resurrection of the entire body one day. Christians, Moore said, should care what they communicate about death because of the very high view that the Bible has of the body. The body isnt just a disposable container of the person, he said, pointing out that according to Scripture, the women who visit the tomb of Jesus went to anoint Him. They were not going to anoint some meaningless piece of tissue, Moore explained. They were going to anoint Him; His body was Him. And so, death unnaturally separates the soul from the body, but we are soul and body together. When we care for the body and when we honor the body, we communicate that the body matters and that a day of resurrection is coming. The speaker and author said he wouldnt want to judge anyone who has chosen cremation for themselves or put guilt on those who have chosen to cremate a loved one. Still, he encouraged Christians to hold on to the meaning of burial because it communicates what we believe about the body and the future day of resurrection. Preference for cremation in the United States has risen dramatically in recent decades. In 2016, just over half (50.2 percent) of Americans chose cremation, while 43.5 percent opted for burial, according to a report from the National Funeral Directors Association. By 2025, according to research from the Cremation Association of North America, more than half (56 percent) of America's dead will be cremated. While Christians have historically opposed cremation since the body of every human being was made by God in His image and thus deserving of respect, no explicit condemnation of the practice exists in Scripture. Still, a number of pastors and faith leaders have weighed in on the issue. Craig Groeschel, pastor of Life.Church, previously pointed out that Genesis 3:19 reads, For you were made from dust, and to dust you will return." If you were buried in a box, youre going to become dust. If youre cremated, youre going to become dust, its just going to be faster, he said. My guess is that if Jesus can put you back together, cremation is probably OK. But John Piper, former pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, advised against the practice of cremation, believing that Scripture does not condone burning but burying the body. Unlike Greek religion, Piper explained, biblical faith "does not view the body as the prison of the soul." "So the afterlife has never been viewed as the 'immortality of the soul' finally liberated from its physical prison. Rather, Christianity has always viewed the body as essential to full humanity so that the life to come has primarily been seen as the resurrection of the body in glorious eternal life. [The Apostle] Paul did not consider the intermediate bodiless state, between death and resurrection, as ideal." "The greatest thing that can be said about the human body is that the eternal Son of God was incarnate in a human body and will have one forever," he continued. Piper stressed that Jesus paid for our bodies with His blood and that the human body is described in the Bible as the "temple" of the Holy Spirit. "Christians also have seen burial as the laying to rest of the body as though it is sleeping, waiting for the waking of the resurrection," he said. 4 Christian aid workers among those killed in Ethiopian Airlines crash Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Four Christian aid workers on their way to attend training were among the 157 people killed in the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash last weekend. Sara Chalachew, Getnet Alemayehu, Sintayehu Aymeku and Mulusew Alemu, employees of Catholic Relief Services, were on board the fallen Boeing 737 MAX 8 that was en route to Nairobi, Kenya. The airliner crashed just minutes after taking off from Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Sunday. CRS is the official international humanitarian arm of the Catholic community in the United States and provides much-needed assistance to some of the worlds most vulnerable people in over 100 countries. CRS has worked for nearly 60 years in Ethiopia to respond to natural and man-made disasters that have affected the East African nation. It has led recovery projects for drought and food-prone areas and has rebuilt individual and community assets through aid programs. It is with heavy hearts that we share the news that four members of our staff were killed when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed just after take-off Sunday morning, a CRS statement reads. All four individuals were Ethiopian nationals traveling to Nairobi to attend a training on our behalf. According to the charity, Aymeku served in Ethiopia for over a year as a senior procurement officer and is survived by his wife and three daughters. Alemayehu worked for CRS in Ethiopia since 2009. Until 2018, Alemayehu served as a procurement officer and later as a senior procurement officer. In December 2018, he began serving as a senior project officer of procurement and compliance. He is survived by a wife and one daughter. Chalachew served at the aid agency in Ethiopia since 2010. She began working as a commodity accountant and senior commodity accounts officer in the logistics department. Last December, she began serving as a senior project officer for grants. Alemu has worked for CRS in Ethiopia since May 2015 as a finance officer, project grant accountant and senior finance officer. Although we are in mourning, we celebrate the lives of these colleagues and the selfless contributions they made to our mission, despite the risks and sacrifices that humanitarian work can often entail, the Catholic agency said. Our thoughts and prayers are with their families and all of those who lost loved ones as a result of this tragedy." The Ethiopian Airlines flight was the second Boeing 737 Max 8 jet to have crashed in the last five months following a Lion Air crash that occurred 12 minutes after taking off in Jakarta, Indonesia, that killed 189 people. The pilot of the Ethiopian Airlines crash plane reported a problem to flight control shortly after takeoff and asked to return to the airport. But the plane would not make it back and crashed near the town of Bishoftu, about 40 miles away from Bole International Airport. As dozens upon dozens of families are now faced with living the reality of life without their loved ones, CRS is also feeling the pain of losing their co-workers. Al Jazeera reports that flowers and candles have been placed at the entrance of CRS offices in memory of Chalachew, Alemayehu, Aymeku and Alemu. "We are shocked," Felicity Loowe, CRS' head of operations in Ethiopia, told the Arabic news outlet. "We are thinking about our colleagues and we miss them." Loowe added that the four aid workers were incredibly well-respected and valued within the charity. They were well-known and well-loved by everyone, she said. They were very strong, dedicated and committed individuals. We will really miss them. Since the Ethiopian Airlines crash, at least 40 countries, including the United States, and multiple airlines have grounded Boeing 737 Max 8 jets. As reported Wednesday, American pilots had issued complaints to federal authorities about perceived safety problems with how the aircraft performed in flight. According to CNN, one captain reported an autopilot anomaly that led to a brief nose-down situation. Another pilot reported that the aircraft pitched nose down after the autopilot was engaged during departure. According to USA Today, one captain of a November 2018 flight called the aircrafts manual inadequate and almost criminally insufficient. The U.S. federal government is ordering Boeing to make safety-related software updates for its 737 Max 8 planes. According to the Wall Street Journal, updates to the software were already in the works prior to last weekends crash. Ark. senator's viral speech on racism and gun laws draws praise from Thabiti Anyabwile Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Thabiti Anyabwile praised an Arkansas state senator's passionate speech on racism and gun laws. Prominent Washington, D.C. Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile of Anacostia River Church was among many who praised Sen. Stephanie Flowers for rebuking her colleagues in the senate judiciary committee in an impassioned speech when they voted to limit public debate on a proposed Stand Your Ground law last Wednesday. Flowers, who is the only black member of the committee, spoke against the proposal, and refused to curtail her comments due to what she argued is the fear of how gun violence would impact her son as well as members of the black community. It doesn't take much to look on the local news every night and see how many black kids, black boys, black men are being killed with these Stand Your Ground defenses that these people raise, and they get off. So I take issue with that. I'm the only person here of color. I am a mother, too. And I have a son. And I care as much for my son as y'all care for y'all's. But my son doesn't walk the same path as yours does. So this debate deserves more time, she told her white colleagues. I'm in Pine Bluff. We have killings regularly down there. ... I don't know where Mr. Ballinger is from. But I can tell you for a long time since I've been back here in Arkansas, I have feared for my son's life. Now he's 27 and he's out of Arkansas, and I thank God he is when you're bringing up crap like this. It offends me. And then to limit the debate, too? This is crazy, she said addressing Two Republican Sen. Bob Ballinger. OMG. I want to give this woman, Arkansas State Senator Stephanie Flowers, the biggest hug. I wish more people were as fired up and passionate as she is about gun violence prevention. Shes not afraid of the @NRA; shes afraid of more gun deaths. https://t.co/BrGAKRBMENpic.twitter.com/hmR2UJNjTz Khary Penebaker, Fx (@kharyp) March 8, 2019 A dramatic clip of Flowers extended comments on the issue has since gone viral on social media, racking up more than 10 million views along with praise. Reacting to the video in a series of tweets last Friday, Anyabwile said Flowers speech captured how many African Americans feel about gun laws. This [Arkansas] state senator speaks with a lot of raw passion. She captures the angst of many. She's (a) generally scared for her son; (b) threatened by violence in her community; (c) threatened by gun carriers; (d) trying to be heard vs senate rules that silence, Anyabwile began. Think what you will about gun laws. What I'm trying to point out is the incredible helplessness and chronic sense of threat and dread so typical to our people and communities. It comes from inside and outside the community and there appears to be no allies in the system, he continued. For this senator and many AAs, the issue isn't intellectual. It's existential. If you think the senator's display is out of bounds or too intense, I would suggest to you that We Wear the Mask and far more people feel this internally than would ever display it publicly, he ended. Flowers told the Associated Press Monday that she has received dozens of phone calls and emails from people all over the South who supported her opposition and she had no plans to apologize for her comments. "They were glad to have and see somebody speak what they could not speak, and to express it the way they could not express it," Flowers said. "So I won't apologize for my expression and my passion and my emotion." Flowers, who is a Democrat, maintained her stance during remarks in the senate on Monday and revealed she is a follower of Christ who hopes God approved of her opposition to the Stand Your Ground bill which failed. "My outburst and the words I used? God will judge me and I will accept his judgment. I hope he's well pleased, she said. China vows to rid Christianity of 'western' influence: 'One more Christian, one less Chinese' Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A Chinese official who heads state-sanctioned Christian churches in China has vowed to rid Christianity in the country of any Western imprint, calling for further sinicization of religion. In a speech on Monday, Xu Xiaohong, head of the National Committee of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement of the Protestant Churches in China, identified what Beijing perceives to be problems with Christianity in the country, including infiltration from abroad and private meeting places, the South China Morning Post reports. [We] must recognize that Chinese churches are surnamed China, not the West, Xu told delegates to the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. The actions by anti-China forces that attempt to affect our social stability or even subvert the regime of our country are doomed to fail, he said. Xu pointed out that because Christianity was spread to China at a time when Western powers were invading the country, the religion will always be connected to the West. Western influence, he said, made the churches in China to want to stay independent and focus on themselves. 'Therefore, people often say: "One more Christian, one less Chinese, Xu said, according to Xinhua News Agency. For individual black sheep who, under the banner of Christianity, participate in subverting national security, we firmly support the country to bring them to justice, he declared. Introduced by President Xi Jinping in 2015, China's "sinicization campaign" seeks to bring religions under the officially atheist partys absolute control and into line with Chinese culture. In his speech, Xu hailed earlier attempts to sinicize Christianity in the country, including the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and the anti-Christian movement of 1922-1927. Both events were characterized by violence against Christianity and resulted in a large number of deaths among Christian missionaries. We all know very well that in comparison to other religions, Protestantism in China carries a heavier historical burden and faces greater pressure from reality in its push for sinicization, Xu said, adding that Christianity in China must rid itself of all imprints of a foreign religion and establish its own Chinese theology. According to a five-year plan to sinicize Protestant churches released by the Chinese religious authorities, efforts to make the faith more Chinese included a rewrite of the New Testament using Buddhist scripture and Confucian teachings to champion socialist ideals. "There are outlines that the new Bible should not look westernized and [should look] Chinese and reflect Chinese ethics of Confucianism and socialism," Bob Fu, founder of ChinaAid, previously told The Christian Post. "The Old Testament will be messed up. The New Testament will have new commentaries to interpret it." Additionally, all Christian churches must be approved by the government, with their activities strictly regulated and monitored. Christians who do not comply with government demands continue to be arrested for worshiping according to their faith. Recently, Chinese authorities arrested just over 40 Christians worshiping in homes after the closure of Chengdus Early Rain Covenant Church. Their arrests came after over 160 more arrests of church members were made last year. Last Friday, the Trump administrations top religious freedom official, Sam Brownback, declared during a speech at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong that the Chinese government is at war with faith. Its a war they will not win, Brownback said, according to reports. The Chinese Communist Party must hear the cry of its people for religious freedom. Brownback warned that the Chinese government is trying to make sure religious minority groups are brutally and forcefully controlled. Somehow, men and women of faith are viewed as a threat to the Chinese Communist Party, he said. It is clear that Chinas misguided and cruel policies in Xinjiang are creating resentment, hatred, division, poverty, and anger. Evangelicals voice concerns with Trump's Israeli-Palestinian peace plan at White House Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Evangelical leaders gathered last week at the White House to offer their concerns as the Trump administration will soon unveil its Israeli-Palestinian peace proposal that reportedly could give the Palestinians a capital in parts of East Jerusalem. Last Thursday, a group of conservative evangelical leaders met with Jason Greenblatt, President Donald Trumps adviser on Israel and special representative for international negotiations, for a listening session about what has been coined the deal of the century. Greenblatt is regarded as a chief architect of Trumps Middle East peace plan along with Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman. During the session, Greenblatt fielded questions and concerns the leaders had with the Middle East peace plan, which is expected to be released in April. The group of evangelicals, many of whom have interacted informally with the Trump White House in the past, included Pastor John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel; Georgia megachurch pastor Jentezen Franklin; New York Times best-selling author Joel Rosenburg, and Florida pastor Paula White. While Im not at liberty to share what Greenblatt told us, I was encouraged by the conversation and by the Administrations desire to answer Evangelicals questions and address our concerns, Rosenberg, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen who has been involved in high-profile meetings with Arab leaders in the past several months, wrote on his blog. One source who attended the meeting told Axios that several evangelical leaders in the room raised concerns about reports that the plan could include a provision to give Palestine a capital in the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. Israeli media had previously reported that the U.S. Israeli-Palestinian peace proposal would provide for a Palestinian state in 85 to 90 percent of the West Bank. As one of Trumps most loyal voting bases, white evangelicals are also one of the political demographics most supportive of the state of Israel. "Our topic of discussion was discussing the forthcoming peace plan concerning Israel. Israel and the Jewish people need our prayers and our advocacy like never before," Hagee says in a video posted to Twitter by CUFI. "The Bible gives the command, 'For Zion's sake, I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem's sake, I will not keep my peace.' I urge you tonight to pray for the peace of Jerusalem." Greenblatt reportedly told the group the peace plan will be fair and beneficial to both sides. However, both sides will have to make compromises. In a blog post, Rosenberg said that following the meeting with Greenblatt, he went on to have a private lunch with Vice President Mike Pence. Later, he would meet with Trump in the Oval Office. The VP and I have been friends for many years, going back to his days as a member of Congress. This was our first opportunity to sit down and debrief on the evangelical delegations I led to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates last fall, he wrote. I was glad to be able to share with him what my colleagues and I saw and heard and how this may factor into the prospects for peace in the Middle East. Pence asked Rosenberg if he has ever met President Trump. When he Rosenberg said, No, Pence said, "Follow me." The next thing I knew, the VP led me into the Oval Office and introduced me to Americas Commander-in-Chief, Rosenberg said. The President then invited me to sit down with him and the VP around the Resolute Desk, joined by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton. Rosenberg said that it was a fascinating meeting. Rosenberg told the president that he was a NeverTrumper until a few days before the 2016 election and went on thank him for fulfilling many of his campaign promises to white evangelicals. Many commentators have claimed that Trumps Israel-Palestinian peace proposal is dead-on-arrival. The Palestinian envoy to the United Nations even said so himself last year. Kushner, a senior adviser to his father-in-law, said last month that he hopes people will look at the peace plan with a fresh perspective when it is released next month. [T]his is the right package of compromises for both sides to take, in order to leave the past behind and try to start a new chapter where there can be tremendous hope and opportunity in the region, Kushner told Sky News Arabia. Rosenberg wrote in an op-ed that he believes that the Trump team could stun everyone by including provisions that Palestinians would find too attractive to dismiss. He believes it could bring the Palestinians back to the negotiating table despite all their trash talk. Last August, Trump contended that the Palestinians will get something very good in peace negotiations because of the decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Trump suggested that Israel would have to pay a higher price because of the moving of the embassy. The Palestinians will get something very good, because its their turn next, Trump said at the time. As Rosenberg noted, such a prospect is concerning for Israeli leaders. He added, though, that the Trump team may actually be counting on Palestinian leaders to reject the proposal. Indeed, it may actually be counting on it and hoping that one Gulf Arab state after another will become so fed up with perennial Palestinian rejectionism that they will decide to finally take bold steps toward full peace with Israel, Rosenberg wrote. Ex-Vatican official, adviser to Pope Francis, sentenced to 6 years for assaulting 2 choirboys Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A former Vatican City treasurer and former senior adviser to Pope Francis was sentenced to 6 years in prison after being found guilty of sexually assaulting two choirboys. Cardinal George Pell was sentenced Wednesday by a court in Australia after being found guilty, making him the highest ranking Vatican official ever convicted of sex abuse. Your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance, stated Judge Peter Kidd to Pell at the sentencing, as reported by the New York Times, adding I would characterize these breaches and abuses as grave. A prominent leader in the Australian Catholic Church, in 2017 Pell was charged with multiple counts of sexually assaulting minors. Pell denied the accusations. I'm looking forward finally to having my day in court. I'm innocent of these charges, they are false. The whole idea of sexual abuse is abhorrent to me, stated Pell at the time. These matters have been under investigation now for two years. There have been leaks to the media, there's been relentless character assassination and for more than a month, claims that a decision on whether to lay charges was imminent. Last December, a 12-member jury in the County Court of the State of Victoria in Melbourne found Pell guilty on five counts of sex abuse. The Jesuit publication America Magazine described the guilty verdict as a grave blow not only to the church in Australia but also to the Vatican and to Pope Francis, due to Pells prominence. Pells sentencing comes as a growing number of Catholics are seriously considering leaving the Catholic Church due to the ongoing fallout from its sex abuse scandal. According to a newly released Gallup Poll, 37 percent of U.S. Catholics, a 15 percent increase since the last sexual abuse scandal in 2002, are currently questioning whether they should stay with the church body. The poll results were based on telephone interviews with a sample of 581 Catholics conducted Jan. 21-Feb. 28 that had a margin of error of 5 percentage points. As an indication of frustration, it seems like a pretty significant step, said Jeff Jones, Gallup Poll senior editor, to the Washington Post regarding those thinking of leaving. Leaving is another one, and we dont have good data on that. But it does give a sense of the impact [the scandal] is having. And that the impact is greater than it was in 2002." Iowan taxpayers must fund transgender surgeries through Medicaid, rules court Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Iowa taxpayers will be forced to fund gender reassignment surgery through Medicaid after the state Supreme Court ruled that such procedures are medically necessary for transgender individuals. On Friday, Iowas Supreme Court ruled that transgender people can now use Medicaid for gender-affirming surgeries, overturning the states previously held administrative code regarding Medicaid, which classifies transition-related surgeries as "cosmetic, reconstructive or plastic surgery" and explicitly bans "surgeries for the purpose of sex reassignment, the Des Moines Register reports. The justices agreed with a district judge's ruling that the rules contradicted protections in the Iowa Civil Rights Act, which added gender identity to the state's list of protected classes. That law's "gender identity classification encompasses transgender individuals especially those who have gender dysphoria because discrimination against these individuals is based on the nonconformity between their gender identity and biological sex," Justice Susan Christensen wrote for the court. The ruling ends a two-year legal battle between EerieAnna Good and Carol Ann Beal, transgender individuals backed by the ACLU, and the Iowa Department of Human Services. The two individuals had sued the DHS for its policy against funding transition surgeries, calling it discriminatory and claiming the surgery was medically necessary to treat their gender dysphoria. The record evidence shows that this surgery is medically necessary, John Knight, an attorney with the ACLU representing Beal and Good, told justices when the case was argued. Its really lifesaving treatment for a number of individuals. However, Iowa Assistant Attorney General Matthew Gillespie, who represented the DHS, had argued that the ACLU attorneys could not prove that the measure was discriminatory in nature. He said the case was really about whether the state denied coverage for surgeries meant to treat psychological problems rather than those that are medically necessary. The DHS also resisted on the grounds of the high cost of transition-related care, explaining that its regulation against such coverage "serves the purpose of conserving limited state resources." The Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery prices the full suite of procedures for transgender individuals at more than $100,000. The Supreme Court's decision upheld a lower court ruling to undo the ban, which had been appealed by the state. According to USA Today, the decision is the first by a state's highest court holding that transgender people have the right to use public money for transition-related surgeries. While the ACLU praised Fridays ruling as a landmark win, Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for Policy Studies at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., told The Christian Post that political correctness, not the law or medicine, dictated the ruling forcing taxpayers to fund gender reassignment surgery through Medicaid. Iowas regulatory exclusion of procedures which are performed primarily for psychological purposes rather than for restoring bodily function fully justified the exclusion of such surgery from Medicaid coverage, Sprigg argued. All such cosmetic procedures were excluded from coveragegender reassignment surgery is merely one example that falls under that more general exclusion. There was no discrimination based on gender identityit was the nature of the procedure, not the identity of the person, that was at issue. Sprigg told CP it is unfortunate that the court did not even consider the 2016 decision by the federal Centers from Medicare and Medicaid Services, which concluded that there is not enough high-quality evidence to determine whether gender reassignment surgery improves health outcomes. More Catholics question leaving faith after sex abuse scandal: study Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A growing number of Catholics are now questioning their commitment to the church body in the wake of the recent sexual abuse scandal involving young people and priests, a new Gallup poll has found. The poll, which was published on Tuesday, shows that 37 percent of U.S. Catholics, a 15 percent increase since the last sexual abuse scandal in 2002, are currently questioning whether they should stay with the church body. The results of the poll are based on telephone interviews with a random sample of 581 Catholics conducted January 21-February 28 and has a margin of sampling error of 5 percentage points. While many more Catholics are questioning their commitment to the church since the 2002 scandal, there was no clear data to suggest whether or not the recent revelations of widespread abuse will cause them to ultimately leave the church. Jeff Jones, Gallup Poll senior editor, told The Washington Post that the recent polling results are a clear indication of the frustration many Catholics are currently dealing with in the wake of the latest scandal. As an indication of frustration, it seems like a pretty significant step, said Jones about Catholics who are thinking of leaving. Leaving is another one, and we dont have good data on that. But it does give a sense of the impact [the scandal] is having. And that the impact is greater than it was in 2002. Last summer, the Pennsylvania Attorney Generals Office released the results of a two-year grand jury investigation into widespread sexual abuse of children within six dioceses of the Catholic Church in that state that also showed systemic cover-up by senior church officials in Pennsylvania and at the Vatican. Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun from Erie, Pennsylvania, who has authored several books about the turmoil caused by sex abuse scandals, suggested in a recent NPR interview that Catholics can use Lent to help them recenter their faith in the wake of the recent revelations. She also suggested that even though people are angry, people shouldnt allow their anger to harm others. It doesn't bother me that people are angry, as long as their anger does not harm other people, but works for good in society, then I consider that anger the grace of God. Anger is a holy fuel. If you use it right, and you don't let it get out of control in your life, anger is what can drive you to do good in the face of evil, she said. John Capparelli, 70, a former New Jersey priest who had been "credibly accused" of sexually abusing minors, was found shot dead in his Nevada home on Saturday, NBC News reported. His name had appeared on a list in February with 187 other clergy the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark said had been "credibly accused" of abusing minors the report said. While he was never convicted of a crime, he was laicized and permanently removed from ministry. Capparelli reportedly groped teenage boys and made them wrestle in swimwear while he took photos of them. He also allegedly ran a fetish website from his home. People are dismayed by their institutions, are broken-hearted about what they see happening in the structures of the church. That's a holy concern. But what they must also do, what we must also do, starting with me, is we have to separate the concerns of the institution from the spiritual life and the following of Jesus. We have to get back to the center of the faith, Sister Chittister warned. The Gallup poll showed that while substantial minorities of both practicing and non-practicing Catholics say they are questioning their commitment to the church, those less committed to the religion are more likely to be questioning it. A similar pattern existed in 2002 but both practicing and non-practicing Catholics are more likely now than in 2002 to be questioning their place in the church. Catholics are also less confident in priests in the U.S. more generally, and in U.S. bishops and other Catholic leaders. Approximately one in four U.S. Catholics say they have very little or no confidence in those two groups. One in eight has little or no confidence in Pope Francis or their own priests. Most American Muslims as Concerned About Islamic Extremism as General US Population: Pew Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A majority of Muslims in the United States are as concerned about global Islamic extremism as the general population, according to a Pew Research Center survey. In findings released Monday, Pew noted that 82 percent of Muslim American respondents said they were either "very" or "somewhat" concerned about global Islamic extremism, which was nearly the same as the general population at 83 percent. Pew also found a nearly identical concern for domestic Islamic terrorism, with 71 percent of Muslims saying they are somewhat or very concerned compared to 70 percent of the general population. "Muslim American women are particularly worried about global extremism in the name of Islam," noted Pew. "Nearly nine-in-10 U.S. Muslim women (89 percent) say they are at least somewhat concerned about it, up 16 points since 2011. A smaller share of U.S. Muslim men (75 percent) say they feel this way." Pew did chart differences between the Muslim community and the general population on efforts to combat terrorism, like undercover sting operations. "Four-in-1- U.S. Muslims (39 percent) say that when law enforcement officers have arrested Muslims on suspicion of plotting terrorist acts, they have mostly arrested 'violent people who posed a real threat.' But 30 percent say such arrests have mostly involved 'people who were tricked by law enforcement and did not pose a real threat,'" continued Pew. "The general public is less divided on this question: 62 percent of U.S. adults say anti-terror arrests have mostly stopped real threats, while only 20 percent say authorities mostly have entrapped people who did not pose a real threat." Pew's study comes at a time when the current administration has garnered controversy for its efforts to curb immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries over terrorism concerns. Since taking office, President Donald Trump has issued executive orders aimed at temporarily barring refugees from six majority-Muslim nations that have a substantial presence of terrorist groups or have expressed support for Islamic extremism. In late June, the United States Supreme Court allowed parts of President Trump's travel ban to take effect as the high court agreed to hear arguments on its constitutionality. "The Supreme Court cleared the way ... for President Trump to prohibit the entry of some people into the United States from countries [the Obama administration deemed] dangerous, but the justices imposed strict limits on Mr. Trump's travel ban while they examine the scope of presidential power over the border," reported The New York Times in June. "Mr. Trump quickly hailed the court's decision to hear arguments on the travel ban in October, saying ... that the justices' temporary lifting of some of the legal roadblocks to his ban was a 'clear victory' for national security." Most evangelicals favor LGBT nondiscrimination protections: poll Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A majority of white evangelical Americans support laws providing legal protections for gays, lesbians and transgenders so that they cant be discriminated against for jobs, public accommodations and housing, newly released polling data shows. As Democrats in Congress reintroduced the Equality Act on Wednesday, the Public Religion Research Institute released data Tuesday showing that majorities from every state favor nondiscrimination protections for LGBT people. The data was taken from PRRIs 2018 American Values Atlas, a research project in which over 54,000 Americans across 50 states were surveyed last year about a number of critical issues facing the country. While 79 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of independents said that they favor legislation that would protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people from discrimination, a majority of Republicans (56 percent) said they also favor such laws. While support among Democrats and independents has remained relatively constant, Republican support for these provisions has fallen five percentage points over the past few years, down from 61 percent in 2015, a PRRI analysis of the data reads. When broken down by religious affiliation, white evangelical Protestants and Jehovahs Witnesses were the least likely to support LGBT nondiscrimination protections. But even though white evangelicals are largely seen as theologically opposed to homosexuality and transgender identity, 54 percent of white evangelical Protestants surveyed said they support LGBT nondiscrimination protections. Sizable majorities of white mainline Protestants (71 percent), black Protestants (65 percent), other non-white Protestants (61 percent), Hispanic Protestants (60 percent), and Orthodox Christians (59 percent) expressed support. Among other religious groups, most also supported legal protections, including Muslims (60 percent), Mormons (70 percent) and Jews (80 percent). The data released by PRRI did not include results for a question on whether or not respondents support religious exemptions for individuals and religious institutions who oppose the LGBT lifestyle over theological reasons. A PRRI representative told The Christian Post that data on that type of question would not be released until March 26. The survey comes as there has been much debate over the last several years when it comes to the intersection of religious freedom rights and LGBT discrimination laws. Several business owners have faced lengthy court battles and punishments because they refused to provide services for same-sex weddings in order to uphold their religious convictions. Evangelical leaders have long called for religious freedom exemptions for Christian institutions and business owners that hold a traditional Christian belief on sexuality and gender. All Americans should be treated with dignity and respect and our laws should protect the freedoms of speech, religion and conscience of every citizen, no matter who they are, Greg Baylor, a senior counsel with the conservative Christian legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom and director of its Center for Religious Schools, said in a statement provided to CP. Unfortunately, the polling presented by PRRI fails to accurately portray the views of conservative evangelicals and fails to reveal the implications of so-called nondiscrimination laws. In 2017, PRRIs American Values Atlas found that 53 percent of white evangelical protestants supported allowing business owners to refuse service based on religious beliefs. White evangelicals joined believers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in being the only religious groups to have a majority supporting a business owners right to refuse based on religious belief in that survey. Also in 2017, LifeWay Research found through a survey of over 1,000 Americans that when issues of sexual freedom rights and religious freedom come under conflict, about 90 percent of white evangelicals believe religious freedom is more important. In total, 68 percent of Protestants and 48 percent of Americans said the same. A Marist poll commissioned by the Catholic fraternal organization Knights of Columbus that was released in early 2017 found that 60 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of moderates support protecting religious freedom even it goes against laws and ordinances. In his statement to CP, Baylor noted that a recent poll conducted by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation found that a majority of Americans do not support forcing transgender ideology on others, including parents, doctors, nurses, business owners, charities, and women. PRRI released its data on Americans views of nondiscrimination policies the day before Democrat lawmakers reintroduced the Equality Act in the House and Senate. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi previously vowed to pass the Equality Act in the Democrat-controlled House. The legislation would ensure federal civil rights protections for members of the LGBT community. Although LGBT rights groups have praised the legislation, critics say that the bill does not include exemptions for religious objectors. According to Andrew Walker, senior fellow in Christian ethics at the Southern Baptist Conventions Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the Equality Act represents the most invasive threat to religious liberty ever proposed in America. Given that it touches areas of education, public accommodation, employment, and federal funding, were it to pass, its sweeping effects on religious liberty, free speech, and freedom of conscience would be both historic and also chilling, Walker wrote in an op-ed posted by The Gospel Coalition. Its passage would sound the death knell for hopes of detente in the culture wars that pit conservative Christians against their LGBT neighbors. For progressives, it would be winner-takes-all. Virtually no area of American life would emerge unscathed from the Equality Acts reach. No less significant would be the long-term effects of how the law would shape the moral imagination of future generations. While Walkers argument may sound a bit exaggerated to some, Denny Burk, professor of biblical studies at Boyce College in Kentucky, tweeted that Walker is not engaging in alarmism. Burk called Walkers claim that the Equality Act represents the most invasive threat to religious freedom a fact. Baylor told CP that the more Americans learn about coercive pieces of legislation like the Equality Act, the more they will see them as threats to the fairness and freedom for all Americans. Last year, the National Association of Evangelicals and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities gave their public support to a legislative proposal called the Fairness for All compromise. In theory, the compromise would see the enshrinement of sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes under civil rights law in exchange for religious exemptions for traditional Christian beliefs on sexuality. Although some evangelical leaders have spoken out against Fairness for All, others support the plan because it puts down markers in an important conversation. There is a risk to Fairness for All, Shirley Mullen, vice chair of the board of directors for the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, said in February. [T]here is also a huge risk to not being in this dialogue. It's not just the risk of losing legal protection for our freedom of beliefs. It is also, I would say, losing that capacity to have the Christian community viewed as people who are respectful and who want to treat [with respect] human beings who differ from them in fundamental ways. The debate is not about the importance about the traditional view of marriage. The debate is about the best strategy for preserving this. UMC Megachurch Hosts Ramadan Dinner With Muslims to 'Demonstrate Love of Christ' Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment The largest United Methodist Church congregation in the United States hosted a dinner with the local Muslim community as part of the Islamic season of Ramadan. Church of the Resurrection of Leawood, Kansas, which is headed by the Rev. Adam Hamilton, hosted the iftar dinner, the meal which Muslims eat after sunset during Ramadan, on May 22. In an interview with The Christian Post on Wednesday, Hamilton explained that his church wanted to "dissipate fear" and "demonstrate the love of Christ" by holding the event. "We've been trying to look for ways to build bridges with the Muslim community in Kansas City and to demonstrate the love of Christ to them," said Hamilton. "There's an organization here in Kansas City who said [to us], 'is there any interest you all would have in having an iftar dinner with us?' We talked about it last year and we said, 'let's do that.'" About 320 people attended the event last week, including about 40 Muslims. In addition to dinner the event featured opening remarks by Hamilton and a Muslim representative of the interfaith group the Dialogue Institute of Kansas City. Hamilton explained to CP that each table had about six to eight people, including members of Church of the Resurrection and at least one or two Muslims. From there, both groups engaged in conversation about matters including how Ramadan is celebrated and experiences with fasting. "In the end, I think it was a chance for Muslims to get to know who we are. That we're a congregation of people who try to demonstrate the love of Christ," Hamilton noted. "We had a chance, our people enjoyed the chance to hear other people's stories and hear what they experienced in their fasting and why it was important to them." Hamilton felt that both Muslims and Christians who attended the event learned from each other in what the senior pastor and best-selling author described as a "win-win." The church's interfaith dinner event comes as some claim there is rising hostility toward Muslims in America, especially those from an immigrant background. For example, President Donald Trump has issued executive orders aimed at temporarily barring refugees from a handful of majority-Muslim nations that have a substantial presence of terrorist groups or have expressed support for Islamic extremism. Some have expressed concern over churches, especially mainline Protestant denominations, holding events for the Islamic community out of concern that they are either compromising the Gospel or are oblivious to extremism. In response, Hamilton told CP that he did not believe any of his congregation thought about converting to Islam as a result of the event, adding that he believed this was something that Jesus would probably have done. "He would break bread with people who He disagreed with," Hamilton said. "So much of Jesus' ministry, whether it was with sinners and tax collectors, or it was with Pharisees, breaking bread was done." "If we're going to dissipate fear, it's going to be by breaking bread with people." Gay pres. candidate Buttigieg talks Christian faith, slams Pence supporting 'porn star presidency' Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who announced himself in January as the first openly gay Democratic presidential candidate, says he tries to live a life that is consistent with Christian teachings and questioned whether Vice President Mike Pence truly believes in Scripture. First of all I try to live a life that is consistent with Christian teachings. I know that it is my responsibility not to ever do anything that would in public life, not be equally beneficial or make as much sense to people of another faith or people of no faith. But in my life I believe in that Christian ethic, the idea that was drilled into me in Catholic school even though Im not Catholic, Im Episcopalian, said Buttigieg at during a Q&A at The South by Southwest Conference & Festivals on the weekend. The Harvard graduate who served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve and was deployed in Afghanistan, earned the Joint Service Commendation Medal for his counterterrorism work. He was responding to a question about what role faith plays in his life and he had a lot to say about it. That idea of the invitation of Christ, this sense that when God himself comes to earth, he is rejected in many ways largely because he tells the truth. He concerns himself with whats going on with those who are marginalized. He understands his role on earth not to be glorified but to serve, Buttigieg said before pointing out how Jesus demonstrated how Christians should serve by washing the feet of his disciples. Foot-washing is one of the most powerful images in the New Testament Feet are gross and even more so then, right. Not what you would expect the divine to be doing when He comes down to earth. And then the Old Testament full of the complexity of trying to be in contact with the absolute. Wrestling with God, these images. And so I try to live a life thats consistent with that, he said. The Rhodes Scholar who also attended Oxford and lives with his husband in South Bend, described himself as a rationalist enlightenment kind of guy who tries to be attentive. But I also know that there are limits on where reason can take you especially in public life. A lot of the problems I deal with are not technical problems that have a right answer like how can I treat wastewater at 10 percent less of the cost? Right, that has like a right or wrong answer, if we can figure out a way to do it then by definition we should do it, he said. But if the question is there is no way to have these peoples rates going down without those peoples rates go up thats a moral question. How do you want to share a burden? We need more than technical tools to deal with that. We need moral reasoning and in my own experience, faith is a helpful way to tune ourselves to that need, Buttigieg explained. When asked when was the last time he prayed he said he prayed in Church on Ash Wednesday in the morning but noted it is an activity he finds challenging. I find prayer challenging. Im liturgically conservative. I like to pray in church when we are all saying prayers at the same time because I think thats a communal act of tuning our hearts a certain way. I have trouble with the traditional formats for prayer just because I have trouble, I mean grammatically, he said. Grammatically when we pray we are in the imperative mood which means were telling God what to do. I get that theres a lot more to prayer but personally I think prayer is mostly about making sure that I am tuned. The prayer that makes the most sense to me is that may we delight in Thy will and walk in Thy way which is what were supposed to be, not telling God what hes supposed to do, he added. The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate also questioned Vice President Mike Pences faith on Sunday during the conference noting that Pences religious convictions dont appear to align with his support of President Donald Trump's "porn star presidency." "I mean, I don't know. It's really strange," Buttigieg said. "Because I used to at least believe that he believed in our I've disagreed with him ferociously on these things but I thought, well, at least he believes in our institutions, and he's not personally corrupt. But then, how could he get on board with this presidency? How could somebody who you know, his interpretation of Scripture is pretty different from mine to begin with." He argued that Pence's understanding of religious text "has a lot more to do with sexuality and, I don't know, a certain view of rectitude." "But even if you buy into that, how could he allow himself to become the cheerleader of the porn star presidency?" Buttigieg added. "Is it that he stopped believing in Scripture when he started believing in Donald Trump? I don't know, I don't know." 84-y-o widow facing eviction from veterans' home after discussing Heaven, Hell with another resident Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment An 84-year-old widow who leads a Bible study at her place of residence, a California Veterans Home, may face eviction after her discussion of Heaven and Hell with another resident caused him to lose sleep, prompting allegations of elder abuse. Artis Breau and her husband moved to the Veterans' Home of California in Yountville nine years ago, according to the Pacific Justice Institute. Breau's late husband served as a Merchant Marine, Army, in World War II and then, during the Korean War he served in the Air Force. The couple met in the 1950s while Breau worked at the Pentagon as a civilian employee in the Office of the Chief of Staff of the Army. According to PJI, Breau, an evangelical Jew who believes in Jesus, has been volunteering with the chaplaincy program and led Bible studies for the past nine years at an area of the residence known as the Holderman Building, which is a shared space for residents of the home. Recently, the California Department of Veterans Affairs (CalVet) notified Breau that she would face "involuntary discharge," or expulsion, from the home if she didn't abandon her role as a volunteer Bible study leader. "This shocking attack from the state against our client's exercise of religious convictions is deeply disturbing," said Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, the firm representing Breau. "The state seeks to punish Artis based on non-existent directives, and deprive her of a personal ministry to the veterans who have benefited from her religious services for years. Artis isn't fighting just for herself, but for the Gospel and for the residents who are unable to fight for themselves against the state's attempted intimidation." The issue stemmed from a Bible study Breau led last September, where she discussed Heaven and Hell with another resident. The discussion allegedly caused the man to lose sleep and was deemed "elder abuse, emotional abuse, and otherwise illegal," according to PJI. In December, the veterans home notified Breau that her volunteer status was being suspended indefinitely due to an ongoing investigation. Until early March, she was permitted to continue leading Bible studies for some of CalVet's most elderly and mobility-challenged residents who have difficulty attending chapel services. But last week, a CalVet attorney threatened Breau with expulsion if she didn't stop offering the voluntary Bible studies, claiming the decision was for the "health and wellbeing" of the residents. "The safety, security, and wellbeing of all of our residents is our top priority. We are very proud of the religious services provided to all of our residents through our chaplaincy services. This investigation concerns the private conduct of an individual. Beyond that, we are unable to comment on an ongoing investigation," Lindsey Sin, deputy secretary of Women Veterans Affairs at CalVet, said in a statement. PJI sent a strongly-worded response to the State and is currently weighing all legal options. PJI Attorney Matthew McReynolds, who has been representing Artis, called CalVets treatment of the elderly widow shameful. Throughout this process, we have been deeply disturbed not only by the lack of constitutional guidelines, ineptitude, and lack of due process in the investigation, but even more by the notion that discussing religious views on the eternal state of the soul is somehow elder abuse or emotional abuse, he said. Our clients husband fought for his country to preserve the freedoms now being threatened by CalVet. Our veterans deserve better. Jim Bakker says he prophesied in 2007 Trump would become president to 'wound the left' Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Controversial televangelist Jim Bakker stated that he predicted the election of Donald Trump back in 2007, referring to it as a a great wounding that would happen to the left. On an episode of The Jim Bakker Show that aired last Thursday, Bakker talked about how on New Years Day 2007 he predicted that the Lord showed me there is going to be a great wounding on the left. Regarding those comments from 2007, Bakker said that while it took him some time to figure out what that wounding was, he has since concluded that it was the election of Donald Trump. Why did God tell me that? Why would He have me to blurt that out on television? It was because whats going on right now. If you want to understand whats happening in America, this wounding is happening in America because of the anger on the left, said Bakker. He said there will be a great wounding on the left. And theyre so upset because their candidate did not win. They guaranteed their candidate would win. But she did not. And theyre mad. Bakker went on to claim that some liberals who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 will kill Donald Trump if they can, quoting MorningStar Ministries founder Rick Joyner in saying civil war is coming to America. Hemant Mehta of the popular Friendly Atheist blog critiqued Bakkers claim, pointing out in a blog post last Friday that soon after his prediction, Barack Obama was elected president and served for two terms. Just a Christian preacher claiming a decade-old prophecy has come true and that liberals are going to go on a murderous rampage. Its catnip for gullible conservative Christians who survive on daily doses of fear, wrote Mehta. Bakker is not only person claiming to have predicted the rise of Trump. Retired firefighter Mark Taylor had a book published in 2017 titled The Trump Prophecies saying that he was told by God that Trump would become president back in 2011. In an interview with conservative Christian radio host and author Eric Metaxas last November, Taylor also claimed that prominent liberal Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would be tried for treason in the near future. "They will be charged with treason, including Barack Obama and they will go to prison," said Taylor in the 2018 interview, adding that "I know it's coming." They are going to go down. Bill Clinton will be charged with things. Hillary Clinton will be charged with things. Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment When I arrived, boarding was closed and I watched the last passengers in (the) tunnel go in. I screamed to put me in but they didnt allow it. This is how a Greek passenger named Antonis Mavropoulos described his attempt to board Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 last Sunday morning. He was not allowed to board the next flight to Nairobi after the airline lost contact with the flight he was supposed to take. He says that a security staff member told me gently not to protest and say thank you to God, because I am the only passenger who did not enter the flight. Antonis Mavropoulos has abundant reason to say thank you to God today. What about those who lost someone on the airplane he tried to board? The 157 victims of Flight 302 were a small percentage of the 153,424 people who die every day around the world. But the sudden shock of their deaths made their loss especially tragic. Is the Christian faith truly relevant at a time like this? Is God a clockmaker? One of the finest pastors in America, a dear friend of mine, lost his oldest son recently. As the father of two and grandfather of four, I cannot begin to imagine his pain. Or that of the families grieving over the Ethiopian airline tragedy. At times like this, grief can turn us from God in bitterness and disappointment. If hes our loving Father, why does he allow his children to suffer so terribly? Or grief can turn us toward God in faith and hope. Since hes our loving Father, wont he help us through these days of despair and pain? Nothing about the Ethiopian jet crash changed the character of God. If he loved us before, he loves us still. If he was King of the universe on Saturday, he is King on Tuesday. What we fear is that the tragedy reveals something about God we dont want to believe. Perhaps he is not as loving or as powerful as we thought he was. Perhaps he is not as relevant to our lives and suffering as we believed him to be. Maybe he is a clockmaker watching his invention run down on its own. Or maybe hes not there at all. When a hammer cannot drill a hole The key is to understand what the Christian faith promises and what it does not. It is unfair to blame a hammer when it cannot drill a hole or a drill when it cannot drive a nail. Jesus never promised us that his followers would be immune from death and grief. Just the opposite: In the world you will have tribulation, he warned us (John 16:33). What Jesus did promise is that he will be with us to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). He said of his followers: I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand (John 10:28). He promised that he would reward his persecuted followers: Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven (Matthew 5:12). He promised the thief on the cross what he promises us in the moment of our death: You will be with me in paradise (Luke 23:43; Philippians 1:21). The last of human freedoms In the meantime, his Spirit is using our challenges to mold us into the character of Christ (Romans 8:29). In Mans Search for Meaning, holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote that he and his fellow prisoners experienced the last of the human freedomsto choose ones attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose ones own way. He discovered that in responding to their suffering, the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. It is precisely herewhen we must choose the sort of person we becomethat Jesus presence and power are especially relevant to us. But theres a catch. Why do you seek the living among the dead? When women came to Jesus tomb to finish his burial, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus (Luke 24:23). While they were perplexed about this, two angels appeared to them (v. 4). They asked the women, Why do you seek the living among the dead? (v. 5). Twenty centuries after Easter, Christians can still do the same. We seek the living among the dead when we treat Jesus as anyone or anything other than our living Lord. When he is an idea, a theology, a model, a movement, he is as dead as if he were Muhammad or Buddha. When we experience him as a living person, only then do we not seek him among the dead. It is hard in our materialistic culture to trust that which must be known through faith rather than through experience. We understand cemeteries more than resurrections. We are comfortable with theology (a word about God), less with Theo (God himself). I feel the bottom and it is good What grief are you carrying for yourself or for someone you know? Bring it to the risen and living Christ. Ask him to use it to make you more like himmore dependent on your Father (John 5:30), more obedient to his will (Matthew 26:39), and more compassionate for those who suffer(John 11:35). Then ask his Spirit to make you the presence of Jesus for someone who is hurting (1 Corinthians 12:2627). And know that whatever you face, the worst is only the gateway to the best. Yandall Woodfin was one of my professors and mentors in seminary. His marvelous textbook, With All Your Mind: A Christian Philosophy, ends with these words: It can be for any of us who trusts in Christ as it was for Christian and Hopeful in John Bunyans Pilgrims Progress. As they approach the river of death, which has no way around nor bridge across, they ask about the depth of the water and are told, You shall find it deeper or shallower, as you believe in the King of the place. Upon entering the water Christian begins to sink and cries to his companion that the billows and waves are going over his head. To this Hopeful responds, Be of good cheer, my Brother, I feel the bottom and it is good. Christian soon finds solid ground to stand on and the rest of the River was but shallow.' What river are you crossing today? Originally posted at denisonforum.org Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Quite a lot, actually, and its very affirming. Take for example, the Apostle Pauls words to the early church in Rome: "We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully." (Romans 12:6-8) The call of God is connected to gifts that are received from the Holy Spirit. Nothing in this passage connects the gifts and calling of God to a specific gender. When Paul tells leaders to "lead" diligently, he uses the Greek word "proistamenos" (Romans 12:8). The noun form of this word is "prostatis." In Romans 16:2, Paul refers to Phoebe as a "prostatis." When Paul refers to himself as a "minister of the gospel," he uses the Greek word "diakonos" (Colossians 1:23). Similarly, Phoebe is described by Paul as a diakonon in the church of Cenchrea (Romans 16:1). Priscilla taught a man "the way of God more accurately" (Acts 18:26). The Greek word is "exethento"; this is the same activity Paul engaged in when he explained from the Law and the Prophets that Jesus was the Messiah (Acts 28:23). Some misinterpret 1 Timothy 2:12 to be saying that women cannot teach men. 1st Timothy was a letter written to the church in Ephesus. Priscilla taught a man the way of God more accurately in Ephesus. From chapter 1 through chapter 6 of 1st Timothy, Paul is addressing people who were engaged in false teaching. It appears that at least one of these false teachers was "a woman." In 1 Timothy 1:20, however, we see that some of these false teachers were men. Some also misinterpret 1 Timothy 2:12, to be saying that women may not exercise authority over men in the church. However, the word translated exercise authority in Latin and English versions of the Bible was repeatedly used in 1st century Greek to refer to someone who was responsible for someone's death. In the writing of Philo of Alexandria, for example, being an authentes was connected to causing death by embracing a false knowledge (gnosis) of God (see Philos The Worse Attacks the Better"). Using similar language, Paul prohibits a woman from authentein andros, possibly referring to a false teaching that would be responsible for the death of a man. The woman is compared to Eve in 1 Timothy 2:13-14, who was deceived and gave the forbidden fruit to her husband, who ate it and then died. Early Gnostics completely misunderstood the creation account found in Genesis. They taught that the serpent was a messenger from God, and that Eve did a good thing when she shared divine gnosis with Adam. In 1st Timothy 6:20, Paul warns Timothy to guard the gospel against profane babblings that are falsely called gnosis. Womenlike menproclaimed the gospel message, taught spiritual truths about Jesus Christ, and provided leadership to the early church. These are the roles performed by a person commonly referred to as a "pastor," though that particular title is not explicitly found in the Greek New Testament. In Greek, we see church leaders referred to metaphorically as "poimenas" (shepherds) in Ephesians 4:11. The Latin equivalent is "pastores," and this is likely where the title pastor comes from. Literally, being a shepherd, however, was by no means an exclusively male occupation. Rachel, for example, is described as a shepherd in Genesis 29:9. As far as metaphors go, poimenas is certainly a fitting description of a pastoral role. This role, however, was by no means limited exclusively to men. When the church became the official state religion of the Roman Empire, centuries after Christs earthly ministry, Rome's patriarchal laws and customs began to strongly influence the institutional leadership of the church. Human custom began to supersede the call and gifting of the Holy Spirit, and leadership eventually became exclusively male. Today some still confuse this fallen human tradition with the will of God; this hinders the gospel, harms the body of Christ and grieves the heart of God. Does the New Testament support women being pastors in the church? Yes, when read in its original language and context, and not confused with fallen human traditions, it most certainly does. Bob lives with his family in Ontario, Canada. He holds degrees in Religious Education, Social Development Studies & Social Work. In 2013 he received the Delta Epsilon Chi award from the Association for Biblical Higher Education. A social worker since 1996, he provides therapy in a variety of settings and is the author Let My People Go: A Call to End the Oppression of Women in the Church. Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment America is getting older. In 1950, near the beginning of the Baby Boom era, the average life expectancy of Americans was 68. Today, it is 79. By the year 2040, one in five Americans will be over the traditional retirement age of 65. With so many facing life at or beyond retirement age, a new group of Christian leaders based in Colorado Springs is asking us to engage in some non-traditional, but thoroughly biblical, thinking about retirement itself. This group says that age 65 isnt the age to retire. Its an age to re-fire, re-boot, and re-focus on your calling, influence, and ministry. Its a time to pursue purpose, not pastime. To focus their commitment, this group has produced a Retirement Reformation Manifesto, which begins: Reforming retirement requires a reframing of our thinking, allowing us to shine a light into the purposeless retirement void and finding freedom from unending leisure, indulgence, and self-gratification. The group is led by Bruce Bruinsma, a 77-year-old entrepreneur and financial planner still active in business. Bruinsma says the Bible teaches that Christians are called to bear fruit in every season of life. Thats why the Manifesto aims to inspire a movement where every Christ follower is confident in Gods plan for a lifetime of faithful service and committed to helping the Body of Christ reform its understanding of retirement. Bruinsma said: As Christians, we are to remain faithful for a lifetime. My hope is that the Retirement Reformation Manifesto will inspire many, many people to believe God still has more for them in their later years. According to a statement released by Bruinsma and the other drafters of the document, the 10-point manifesto challenges signatories to overturn traditional attitudes toward senior years as merely a time of relaxation and leisure. Instead, they are urged to embrace their final quarter of life as time to find spiritual fulfillment and meaning in using their life experiences and resources to serve and enrich others. Among the commitments those who sign the manifesto make are to: challenge societys typical view of retirement exercise wise physical and financial stewardship to ensure making the most of what could be as many as 30 years of post-work build intergenerational community The topic of retirement is one we care about at the Colson Center, in large part because Chuck Colson himself talked about it often in the last years of his life. He swore hed never spend his final years chasing a little white ball around. Older Christians, he firmly believed, should be actively pouring their lives into other, younger people who could carry on Kingdom work. In fact, the Colson Center owes its current vitality in part to Chucks belief that Christians should always die with our boots on. Chuck modeled that for us when, at 80 years old during The Colson Centers 2012 Wilberforce Weekend, he collapsed on-stage mid-speech and had to be helped into a waiting ambulance. He died just a few weeks later. In that speech and in many others, Chuck said that senior-citizen Christians might give up their 9 to 5 jobs, but they should never retire from Kingdom work. Deuteronomy says that teaching our children and our childrens children to love and fear the Lord is a part of the Christians job description. The Apostle Paul praised Lois, Timothys grandmother, for discipling her grandson in the faith. Bruinsma and the Retirement Reformation team is taking up that message. We believe that the Retirement Reformation Manifesto has the potential to be history-making, said Bruinsma. Imagine what might happen if millions of seniors are inspired and equipped to approach their retirement radically differently, finding meaning and satisfaction through helping extend Gods kingdom, as they pursue purpose rather than just pastimes. I can imagine it. Come to BreakPoint.org, click on this commentary, and well link you to the Retirement Reformation Manifesto. Resources The Retirement Reformation Manifesto: Don't Retire. Re-fire! Warren Smith, BreakPoint, March 1, 2019 Originally posted at Breakpoint. Asia Bibi's daughter pleads for mother's release; Bibi still hidden away in Pakistan Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Pakistani Christian Asia Bibi, who served approximately nine years on death row for blasphemy before being acquitted in October, remains hidden away in Pakistan as her daughter pleads for the government to release her. The beleaguered Christian, whose acquittal was upheld in February, is still unable to leave the country amid protests and calls for her death from Islamic radicals. She is reportedly experiencing low blood pressure and is thought to be being denied medical care. In a Sunday interview with the Daily Mail, Bibi's 18-year-old daughter, Eisham Ashiq, said she misses her mother terribly. Bibi is being held in an undisclosed location. "I think about her all the time and I speak to her on the phone all the time. I say to her, 'Have faith in God, because if God can release you from jail, God can release you from where you are now. He will bring you out.'" The last time she hugged her mom was nine years ago, although she was able to see her through prison bars in October where she could hold hands and kiss her but not hug. "When she comes, I will hug her and kiss her, and that day will be a very special day when my mummy arrives, and I know I will be very happy, and will thank God before anything else," Ashiq said. Ashiq has been living in Canada and resides with her older sister. She is urging Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to release her mother and said that neither she nor her mother will speak ill of their home country. The family is concerned that the longer Bibi remains in Pakistan she is at greater the risk of being harmed. "We love Pakistan very much, and my mummy will never speak against Pakistan as she loves it too," she said. "At the moment, she has security, but she could face problems any moment, any time, and it could happen very quickly." Ashiq was nine when she saw her mom be beaten by a mob in front of village elders. Bibi's long ordeal began approximately a decade ago when fellow field workers who were Muslim accused her of insulting the Prophet Muhammad after a dispute when other women from the village refused to drink water from the same cup as her because she was Christian. She has maintained her innocence throughout and her plight has become one of the most famous international religious freedom cases in the world. Calls for action after research reveals higher risk of suicide among gambling addicts Gambling addicts are 15 times more likely to commit suicide, new research has revealed, prompting calls for the Government to intervene. Christian Action Research and Education (CARE) said the findings from the Swedish study were a 'wake-up call' to the Government to confront the growing problem of gambling addiction in the UK. Researchers at Lund University examined the mental health of 2,000 people with a gambling disorder over a period of 11 years and found that suicide rates were 15 times higher than the rest of the population. The likelihood of suicide was even more acute among men, with male gambling addicts between the ages of 20- and 49-years-old being 19 times more likely to take their own life than the general population. CARE spokesman James Mildred said the figures were 'extremely shocking' and that it was likely the situation would get worse unless more was done to help problem gamblers. There is only one specialist gambling clinic in the UK located in London, although plans are afoot to open a second this year in Leeds. However, Mr Mildred said that current provision was 'clearly not enough' and that the lack of help on the NHS was a 'major issue'. We know that there are many gambling-related suicides in the UK - but we need high quality, independent research to find out what is actually happening, so we can help those afflicted by gambling addiction. https://t.co/bSjAsIaQhe Alan Smith (@BishopStAlbans) March 13, 2019 'We need to recognise that often the factors behind a suicide are multi-layered, rather than isolated to one particular reason,' he said. 'However, given what we know about the scale of problem gambling and the suicide rates in the UK it is absolutely reasonable to draw a link between the two. 'There are estimated to be more than two million adults across Great Britain who have a gambling problem or are at risk of developing one. 'We also know there are thought to be hundreds of thousands of children gambling on a regular basis.' He added: 'We are facing a problem gambling epidemic and if we fail to act, the situation is likely to get far worse.' Clergy support ministry rebrands to be more inclusive of women With women now making up nearly a third of the clergy in the Church of England, a 364-year-old support ministry is rebranding to be more inclusive. Sons & Friends of the Clergy has re-launched as the Clergy Support Trust at the Christian Resources Exhibition North taking place in Manchester today. The organisation, which dates back to 1655, was formerly two separate organisations - the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy and the Friends of the Clergy Corporation - which merged in 2012. It is believed that the name goes back to the days when 'sons of clergy' gathered to raise funds for priests who had been left destitute during the rule of Oliver Cromwell. The change was announced one day after the Church of England marked the 25th anniversary of women priests. The charity exists to promote the wellbeing of active and retired Anglican clergy and their families, but a consultation with beneficiaries found that the former name wrongly suggested support was only available to male clergy or the sons of clergy. In a survey of over 1,200 stakeholders, only 27 per cent said the old name was good or excellent. Almost two thirds - and 79 per cent of female respondents - agreed that it was a good idea to change the name. In addition to the change of name, the charity is embarking on a new strategy to provide grants and other charitable support to clergy totalling over 12m over the next four years. In 2018, the charity gave out grants to 549 clergy households and provided assistance to a further 900 Anglican ordinands. It now also wants to double the number of Anglican clergy families receiving help. Chief Executive Jeremy Moodey said the change was about bringing help to the clergy who need it. 'Most Anglican clergy families do well and thrive in their lives and ministries. But a small minority struggles, whether with financial problems or other challenges such as stress or mental health,' he said. 'We hope that this re-branding, and further changes to our grant-making to be introduced later this year, will help us reach many more clergy families in need.' The Clergy Support Trust's chair of trustees, the Rev Canon Simon Butler said: 'Any change of a charity's name involves risk. 'But, in this case, our new name only highlights the true work we do, at a time when clergy wellbeing is an important element of the agenda of the wider Church. 'We are confident that this new name will enable us to increase our visibility, especially where our work is less well-known.' Cohabiting parents are more likely to doubt their relationship will last Parents who live together without tying the knot are more likely than their married counterparts to doubt that their relationship will stand the test of time, according to new research. The Global Family and Gender Survey asked 16,474 adults across 11 countries about their relationships and found that married parents were not only more likely to be optimistic about their chances of remaining together; they were also more likely to cherish their relationship above other things in their life. Over a third (39 per cent) of cohabiting parents in the UK said they had 'serious doubts' about the future of their relationship with their partner, far higher than married parents (27 per cent). Asked whether their relationship with their partner was more important than almost anything else in life, over two thirds (71 per cent) of married parents in the UK agreed with this statement, compared with just over half (54 per cent) of cohabiting parents. This trend was evident across Australia, Canada, the US and Ireland, where cohabiting parents were considerably less likely than their married counterparts to view their relationship as a vital part of their lives. 'Marriage remains the gold standard for families when it comes to stability and commitment,' said Bradford Wilcox, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and senior fellow of the Institute for Family Studies, which commissioned the survey. According to the research, cohabiting parents in the UK were also more likely than those across the 10 other countries surveyed to have 'serious doubts' about their future, coming ahead of the US (36 per cent), Canada (34 per cent), Australia (35 per cent) and France (31 per cent). Across all 11 countries surveyed, married parents were less likely to question whether their relationship would last. Harry Benson, research director for the Marriage Foundation, said the study was further evidence of a 'persistently large' gap in attitudes between married and unmarried couples. 'For years, we have been told by policy makers that so long as you're committed, you don't need to get married,' he said. He pointed to a recent study establishing a link between divorce and the prevalence of emotional and behavioural problems in young people as an indication of how important it was that couples with children stay together. 'Falling divorce rates show that married parents are increasingly committed, happy and stable,' he said. 'Given that teenage mental health outcomes are so strongly linked to whether or not there are two parents in the home, it should be a matter of deepest concern that we are not seeing this improvement among cohabiting parents.' Sir Paul Coleridge, founder of the Marriage Foundation and a former high court judge, said: 'How many more surveys do we need to encourage government to back marriage unequivocally? 'Children would be the biggest winners but so would we all with the cost to the taxpayer of family breakdown running at 50bn plus per annum. 'The big social issues of our time mental health, education, poverty, crime are all rooted in the instability of families. 'Whatever surveys we look at and whatever indicators we use, the outcomes are almost always better if children have the extra stability created by having married parents.' Six years in prison for Cardinal George Pell after being convicted of child sexual abuse Cardinal George Pell, the most senior Catholic leader to be convicted of child sexual abuse, was today sentenced to six years in prison by Melbourne county court. The 77-year-old, who is the former Vatican treasurer, was sentenced after being found guilty in December of one count of sexual penetration of a child under 16 and four counts of committing an indecent act with a child. The jury were unanimous in determining that Pell had abused two 13-year-old choir boys following Mass in St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne in the 1990s. Pell continues to deny the charges and has lodged an appeal against the conviction, which will be heard on 5 and 6 June. He had been facing up to 50 years in prison, a decade for each of the five counts according to Australian law. He will be eligible for parole after three years. 'Your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance,' Judge Peter Kidd told him. 'Your abuse involved multiple activities and actions. You moved from one victim to the other,' he added. The judge told the courtroom that Pell had engaged in 'multiple activities and actions' and that he had 'moved from one victim to the other'. 'The brazenness of your conduct is indicative of your sense of authority and power in relation to the victims. You may have thought you could control the situation by reason of your authority, as archbishop, whether or not that belief was well-founded,' he said. During the sentencing, Pell was instructed by the judge to sign the sex offenders register. He was then led away to return to the maximum security prison in Melbourne where he is being held in solitary confinement. A statement read outside court by the lawyer of one of the victims, now in his 30s, said: 'It is hard for me to allow myself to feel the gravity of this moment . . . the moment when justice is done.' The Vatican is in the process of conducting its own investigation into Pell's conduct. Spring Statement is a 'missed opportunity', says Trussell Trust Christian food bank charity The Trussell Trust has said the Chancellor's Spring Statement will not end austerity as it called on the Government to make eradicating poverty and hunger in the UK a greater priority. Philip Hammond told MPs today that the promise to end austerity would be impossible to keep if Britain crashes out of the EU in a no-deal Brexit. Speaking of a 'deal dividend', the Chancellor said a deal would ensure that there was money available to inject into public services and lowering tax rates. But The Trussell Trust, which operates over 1,200 food banks across the UK, said it was disappointed by the Spring Statement. The Trussell Trust's chief executive Emma Revie said it would not end austerity as promised but keep people in poverty. 'The Chancellor has missed a real opportunity to do the right thing and give people on the lowest incomes financial support and certainty before Brexit,' she said. 'Our benefits system was created to make sure proper support would be in place for each other when help was most needed. But right now, more and more people across Britain are struggling to make ends meet, unable to afford food and facing hunger as a result. This isn't right.' The Spring Statement showed that the UK economy is in trouble regardless of Brexit https://t.co/Bo8Z4OTeJs Jonathan Reynolds (@jreynoldsMP) March 13, 2019 The Trussell Trust says it has seen record demand for its food banks, with a 13 per cent rise in the number of emergency food parcels handed out in the past year up to 1.3 million. Ms Revie said the key driver of demand for the food banks was incomes that are too low to cover the cost of essentials, with the majority of the recipients' incomes being benefits. 'By failing to end the benefits freeze and five week wait for Universal Credit, thousands more people will become trapped in poverty and may be forced to a food bank as a result,' she said. 'The Government needs to put money back into the pockets of people who have lost the most to austerity. Ending poverty and hunger in the UK shouldn't be sidelined the time to act is now.' Luisa Palacios, the recently appointed chairwoman of Citgo Petroleum, reassured the energy industry Tuesday that the Houston refiner remains reliable and flexible, despite the political and economic crisis that has crippled its parent, the Venezuelan national oil company PDVSA. Palacios, speaking in Houston at CERAWeek by IHS Markit energy conference, made her first major public appearance since she and new Citgo board were appointed by the opposition government of Juan Guaido, whom the United States and its allies have recognized as the Venezuelan president. They replaced directors loyal to President Nicolas Maduro, whom the Trump administration is working to oust. Addressing a packed room, Palacios struck an optimistic tone about Citgo's current operations. The Houston refiner was a major customer for Venezuelan crude oil exports to the U.S. until sanctions were put in place in January. "For the last month (Citgo) has been developing contingency plans because of the risk that could be in place, Palacios said. I have to say, the flexibility of our refiners has allowed us to adjust to shock in a quite substantial way. Related: Board, named by opposition, takes control of Citgo Palacios said Citgo, which operates refineries in Texas, Louisiana and Illinois, has been "a very important receiver" of Venezuelan crude. The company imported about 56 million barrels of Venezuelan crude in the first 10 months of last year, according to the U.S. Energy Department. But Venezuelan oil only represents about 25 percent of the company's total crude intake, she said. Last year, Citgo's refineries ran 60 different types of crude from 38 suppliers in 19 countries, she pointed out. Power struggle So while the sanctions affected the type of crude the company uses, it wasn't a catastrophic disruption to the company's refining system. "It's a shock, but it's one we're very well placed to weather," she said. Citgo, which employs about 3,4000 in the United States, including about 800 in Houston, has become a piece in the geopolitical power struggle between Trump administration and Maduro, whose recent re-election was marred by fraud and voting irregularities, according to independent observers. It has also become a prize for the long list of Venezuelas and PDVSAs creditors, some of whom have made moves to seize Citgos assets. At first it was unclear whether Citgo would follow Guaido's board, but the company officially has now backed the new opposition-appointed corporate board. The new board ousted pro-Maduro executives, including the president, Asdrubal Chavez, the cousin of the late socialist leader and Maduro mentor Hugo Chavez. Palacios, the first woman to lead Citgo's board, said the new directors represent a diverse mix of executives with institutional knowledge of PDVSA from the days when it first bought Citgo in 1980s and a newer generation with broad professional experience in finance. Palacios herself is an outsider with a background in finance at companies such as Barclays Capital and Japan Bank for International Cooperation. Related: Venezuelan sanctions wont choke U.S. refinery runs Most recently though she focused on Latin American research as senior managing director at the geopolitical analysis firm Medley Global Advisors. Protecting an asset Palacios said the new board will focus on protecting Citgo as an asset for post-Maduro Venezuela, strengthening its financial stability and enhancing corporate governance. "I have to say I am very impressed with this asset, with this company. I think the board is very committed to providing value for our shareholders," Palacios said. "This is an asset that will not only be able to increase value to shareholders, this is a company to give back." The company could aide in helping Venezuela recover its energy sector and economy by continuing to supply reliable gasoline and diesel. "There is a lot we can do from the U.S.," she said. marissa.luck@chron.com twitter.com/marissaluck7 Energy ministers from the eastern Mediterranean pledged to work together to tap the region's massive natural gas finds. Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said he hoped nations were moving past historic tensions, pointing at a recent agreement between his nation, Egypt, Greece and Cyprus. "The fact we are sitting here together on one stage, speaking about collaboration, this is a new phenomenon," he said at the CERAWeek by IHS Markit conference. "Maybe it's just the beginning of wider regional cooperation." GAS RUSH As oil companies expand into Mediterranean, tensions build Tensions have been building in the region, with Turkey making claims on gas fields controlled by Cyprus. At the same time the breakaway state Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is pressuring the Cyprus government to give them a greater role, as companies including Exxon Mobil, Noble Energy and Royal Dutch Shell develop offshore wells around the island. Both Turkey and Northern Cyprus have so far resisted attempts at cooperation by other nations in the region. But the message from energy ministers Wednesday, including those from Greece and Cyprus, was nothing would stop them from developing their fields. "We are very optimistic about it, and I think we demonstrate this by the four of us sitting together," said Egyptian Petroleum Minister Tarek El Molla. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Wednesday the Trump administration continues to look at steps to stop coal and nuclear power plants from closing. More than a year after Perry was shot down by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on a proposal to increase wholesale power rates for those plants, the former Texas governor said the grid is becoming too reliant on natural gas. "Gas is cheap right now, but gas is interruptibility," he said, referring to potential pipeline disruptions. "How do you make sure you have [a reliable power supply with coal and nuclear], I'm open for conversations. I've thrown a lot of jello at the wall on this one." Perry argues coal and nuclear plants are less susceptible to cyber and physical attacks because, unlike natural gas-fired plants, they store fuel on-site, a claim criticized by a broad coalition of American industries as a ploy to prop up a coal industry President Donald Trump championed on the campaign trail. The statements by Perry at a press conference in Houston followed a speech earlier Wednesday at the CERAWeek by IHS Markit conference, in which the energy secretary laid out his vision for "the dawn of the new American energy era." Trump focus He said the country needed to focus on innovation over regulation, rebuffing calls for government action to cut reliance on fossil fuels. He recalled how foreign ministers who had pressured him to try to stop Trump from pulling out of the Paris climate accord were the same ones looking to buy U.S. liquefied natural gas. "We would go into the (bilateral discussions) and they would say how buying some of that LNG you guys got," he said. Expanding U.S. energy exports has become a focus of the Trump administration, using the nation's booming oil and gas production to not only grow the domestic economy, but to pressure rivals like Russia and China. He echoed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who spoke at the conference Tuesday, touting U.S. oil and gas production as counterweight to nations that would used energy for "malign ends." "We've got more than enough energy to share with the world, and with that energy comes freedom of choice for countries around the world," Perry said. Perry has spent much of the week at the CERA conference meeting with foreign energy ministers from around the world, a role he relishes, describing himself as the American energy sector's top salesman. On Thursday, Perry recounted how years ago when his daughter was in elementary school she was asked what her father did for a living. "She looked them in the eye and deadpanned, 'He talks,'" Perry said. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on oil companies Tuesday to aid the Trump administration in its bid to increase U.S. oil and gas exports to replace supplies from countries including Russia, China and Iran. Speaking at the IHS CeraWeek by IHS Markit conference, America's top diplomat said those countries and others were trying to use energy as a weapon to gain power over other nations. "Some nations are using their energy for malign ends and not to promote prosperity the way we do here in the West," he said. "We're not just exporting American energy. We're exporting our commercial value system." EXCLUSIVE: Pompeo reveals how shale boom is reshaping U.S. foreign relations The Trump administration has made increasing American energy production a top priority and increasingly urged foreign leaders to buy American when it comes to energy. The decision last year to reimpose U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil has already dropped exports from there to around 1 million barrels a day, less than half what they were at the time of the announcement. "We have every intent of driving Iranian exports to zero as quickly as we can," Pompeo said. The former CIA director and Kansas congressman also said China's building of islands in the South China Sea was an attempt to control oil and gas production in the region. And he pointed to the nation's efforts to sign oil and gas deals in Africa and Latin America as signs of an energy imperialism that threatened global energy security. "It isn't a commercial transaction," he said. "It's a political transaction." Pompeo is touring the nation speaking on energy issues, following unrealized speculation he would run for a Senate seat in his home state in 2020. In his speech Tuesday, he spoke of his own experience running an oil company in Kansas and expressed wonderment at how the United States had so quickly grown its oil and gas production through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technology. "When I meet with my foreign minister counterparts they ask how did America do this," he said. "I tell them they should look at places like Midland, Texas, places where people are willing to work their tails off." The all-time favorites at Whataburger are items your stomach craves and loves, but an A1 Thick & Hearty might actually make your heart skip a beat. Items from the iconic Texas fast food restaurant can make up most of your daily recommended calorie intake - and that's without the drink and fries. Mesa Airlines Capt. Matthew Hoshor bought burgers for his entire plane on Tuesday afternoon when weather delayed their flight to Houston by more than two hours. Operating United Airlines flight 6329 from Tulsa, Okla., to Bush Intercontinental Airport, Hoshor bought 70 hamburgers from Fat Guy's Burger Bar to feed the passengers. The world is moving in the wrong direction in its fight against climate change, and BP Chief Executive Bob Dudley said Tuesday that energy companies must step up and play their part to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The reality is the world isn't even close to on track to meet the recent Paris climate accord goal of keeping a global temperature rise below 2-degrees Celsius by 2100. On the current track, global energy demand will spike by about one-third by 2040, including growing demand for crude oil and other liquid fuels before eventually plateauing, according to BP's analysis that Dudley highlighted Tuesday at the CERAWeek conference in Houston. "As bright as our future may seem, we are operating in a world that is not on a sustainable path," Dudley said. "Greenhouse gases are expected to rise by about 10 percent over the next two decades, when they need to be falling dramatically." Dudley cited possible solutions, like federal regulators pushing the coal industry out of the power sector, and governments worldwide adopting more carbon prices, or taxes, on energy companies. "We have to move from being pure-play oil and gas companies into broader energy businesses," Dudley said. "Our focus has to be on developing an energy system that is cleaner, better and kinder to the planet." RELATED: BP, raising concerns about climate, puts much of blame on power sector BP remains the top producer in the Gulf of Mexico with more growth on the way and, in October, BP paid $10.5 billion to buy the onshore Texas shale assets of Australia's BHP Billiton, including sizable positions in the booming Permian Basin and South Texas' Eagle Ford shale. Last year, BP said it would hold greenhouse gas emissions from its operations at or below its 2015 levels in the years ahead. While natural gas burns cleaner than oil, the challenge is ensuring that methane doesn't leak during the drilling and production of gas. Those emissions are viewed as the Achilles' heel of natural gas. So BP is setting a target of keeping its methane emissions down to 0.2 percent of the gas produced. Dudley said the British energy giant must be "progressive for society and pragmatic for investors," and nimble enough to shift as the market changes. At the beginning of this century, BP invested heavily in renewable energy, perhaps before it was economically viable. The company lost money then. Now, it's strategically investing again on a smaller scale. "We continue to invest in low carbon - to the tune of around half-a-billion dollars a year - but in smaller, smarter, very focused and disciplined ways," Dudley said. Earlier Tuesday, Gretchen Watkins, president of Shell's U.S. subsidiary, Shell Oil of Houston, called on the White House to tighten the rules on methane leaks from oil and gas production, rather than roll them back as proposed by the Trump administration. "We need to do more," Watkins said. But some environmental groups, including Greenpeace, are calling BP hypocritical for lobbying the White House to roll back some methane emissions regulations. BP responded that it doesn't oppose methane regulations per se. Rather, it prefers one set of rules, instead of having to follow the different ones put in place by different agencies, in this case the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department. British energy major BP and the Environmental Defense Fund said Wednesday they're partnering to develop new technologies and strategies to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas production and transportation. The news comes one day after BP Chief Executive Bob Dudley warned Tuesday at the CERAWeek by IHS Markit conference that the world is not on a sustainable path to combat and survive climate change. "Greenhouse gases are expected to rise by about 10 percent over the next two decades, when they need to be falling dramatically," Dudley said late Tuesday. RELATED: BP CEO says the world is not on a sustainable path The reality is the world isn't even close to on track to meet the recent Paris climate accord goal of keeping a global temperature rise below 2-degrees Celsius by 2100. On the current track, global energy demand will spike by about one-third by 2040, including growing demand for crude oil and other liquid fuels before eventually plateauing, according to BP's analysis. The new agreement with the Environmental Defense Fund is a three-year strategy to partner with universities, including Colorado State University, and other third parties to test new technologies and emerging strategies to reduce methane emissions and leaks to cut back on the release of the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. "BP is taking a leading role in addressing methane emissions, and this collaboration with EDF is another important step forward for us and for our industry," said Bernard Looney, BP's upstream chief executive. EDF President Fred Krupp said the hope is the progress made in this partnership will translate across the entire oil and gas sector. "EDF and BP don't agree on everything, but we're finding common ground on methane," Krupp said. "BP has shown early ambition to lead on methane technology. We hope to see more as BP delivers on its own stringent methane goal and we work together to spread solutions industry-wide." Last year, BP said it would hold greenhouse gas emissions from its operations at or below its 2015 levels in the years ahead. While natural gas burns cleaner than oil, the challenge is ensuring that methane doesn't leak during the drilling and production of gas. Those emissions are viewed as the Achilles' heel of natural gas. So BP set a target of keeping its methane emissions down to 0.2 percent of the gas produced. The news potentially is important for the industry as BP expands rapidly in Texas shale. Last fall, BP paid $10.5 billion to buy the Texas shale assets, including in the Permian Basin and South Texas' Eagle Ford shale, of Australia's BHP Billiton. Earlier Tuesday, Gretchen Watkins, president of Royal Dutch Shell's U.S. subsidiary, Shell Oil of Houston, called on the White House to tighten the rules on methane leaks from oil and gas production, rather than roll them back as proposed by the Trump administration. "We need to do more," Watkins said. Oil prices climbed to their highest so far this year as a decline in U.S. crude and fuel stockpiles added to evidence of a tightening market. Futures in New York rose 2.4 percent on Wednesday, closing above $58 a barrel for the first time since mid-November. The U.S. Energy Department's closely watched weekly inventory report showed a 3.86 million-barrel decline for crude last week, defying forecasts of an increase. A 4.62 million drawdown for gasoline was the steepest since October. Oil has rallied almost 30 percent this year as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies curbed production and Venezuela's exports collapsed under political turmoil. Record U.S. output has hung over the market, but falling stockpiles in one of the world's biggest energy consumers suggest the risk of a glut is receding. PREVIOUSLY: Oil rally stalls as traders expect report to show storage jump "We see this data as bullish for crude over the longer term," Leo Mariani, a Keybanc Capital Markets Inc. analyst, wrote in a note to clients. The combined fall in crude and refined products "implies that the market is under-supplied." Oil also rode a surge for equities fueled by encouraging data on U.S. factory orders. West Texas Intermediate for April delivery gained $1.39 to close at $58.26 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. FUTURE OF SHALE: Early goings or seventh inning? Brent for May settlement rose 88 cents to $67.55 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. The global benchmark crude traded at an $8.96 premium to WTI for the same month. Prices had already been on track for their third straight advance after an industry group released its own report of declining inventories, a mild surprise at a time when refinery maintenance usually undercuts demand. Crude and refined products in storage fell by 10.2 million barrels last week, according to the Energy Information Administration's report. Total petroleum stockpiles were the lowest since December. Oil imports also slipped, offering another sign that OPEC cuts and U.S. sanctions on Venezuela are impacting the market. "On the bullish side we have a rapidly deteriorating situation in Venezuela," said Bjarne Schieldrop, Oslo-based chief commodities analyst at SEB AB. "Further on the bull side, OPEC+ continues to deliver on pledged cuts." --With assistance from James Thornhill, Tsuyoshi Inajima and Grant Smith. 2019 Bloomberg L.P. The U.S. government cut its oil production forecast for the first time in six months as drillers scale back in smaller shale plays and the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. While crude output is still expected to reach record levels, the Energy Information Administration trimmed its 2019 forecast to 12.3 million barrels a day -- 110,000 barrels-a-day lower than it had forecast previously. In 2020, production is expected to reach 13.03 million barrels a day -- 170,000 barrels a day lower than last months estimate. This is just the beginning, said Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at Price Futures Group Inc. in Chicago. The reality of the situation is that a lot of these guys are not making money and are having a hard time keeping these production levels up. Any pullback is going to make it harder to keep that upward trajectory of oil production moving higher. PRODUCTION: Future of shale: Early goings or seventh inning? The U.S. rig count tumbled to a 10-month low last week, suggesting the rate of production growth could slow, the EIA said in its monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook. Most of the growth expected through 2020 will come from the Permian basin of West Texas and New Mexico, rather than smaller shale plays, the report said. "One of the common themes was Lets not drill this space as hard as we can and lets try to return cash to shareholders instead," said Bob Yawger, director of the futures division at Mizuho Securities USA in New York. I think maybe that message played to the EIA and they cut the production number here a little bit. The report came on the same day that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was due to meet with senior U.S. oil executives at the CERAWeek by IHS Markit conference in Houston to discuss boosting crude exports and advancing Americas position as a global energy powerhouse, according to people with knowledge of the meeting. Earlier on Tuesday, shale pioneer Mark Papa warned that the industry he helped create is facing fundamental obstacles that will slow Americas oil boom. While technological advances will help improve the rates at which drillers recover oil, that growth will be offset by challenges with well spacing and the degradation of shale rock quality, said Papa, the chief executive officer of Centennial Resource Development Inc. --With assistance from Ben Foldy, Kevin Crowley and Rachel Adams-Heard. 2019 Bloomberg L.P. More Information IAH Facts: The airport's IATA code of IAH derived from the stylization of the airport's name as "Intercontinental Airport of Houston." The international terminal D was named after African American U.S. Congressman Mickey Leland. He passed August 7, 1989, Leland died in a plane crash in Gambela, Ethiopia during a mission to Fugnido, Ethiopia IAH is one of the only airports in the Americas to fly to every inhabitable continent in the world. Changing the airport's name to honor President George H.W. Bush was a unanimous decision by the Houston City Council. Good news apparently knows no bounds. In addition to Houston-area headlines that the Katy Fire Department on March 3 saved the life of a drowning 3-year-old, the news also traveled overseas thanks to social media. At the March 11 Katy City Council meeting, Ward B City Councilman James C. Jimmy Mendez Jr. reported that a friend of his in Sweden commented on the Katy Fire Department saving the life of the toddler and that the story had been broadcast widely on Facebook. The spotlight shone closer to home at the March 11 meeting where members of the Katy Fire and Police departments received recognition from Mayor Chuck Brawner and Katy Fire Chief Russell Wilson. In his Above & Beyond proclamation, Brawner praised the fire and medic crew and the police dispatcher for their quick response to a 911 call from Homewood Suites. Brawner said the police dispatcher Neil Lange instructed the childs father on life-saving procedures to take until first responders arrived. The mayor said first responders from Fire Station 2 arrived about a minute after the call to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation and revive the youngster. Katy Fire Chief Russell Wilson presented each first responder with a letter of commendation. For Wilson, who was hired in 2016 by Mayor Fabol Hughes, the quick emergency response with a happy ending is proof positive of the work accomplished through an upgrade and transition to a full-time department. Any Katy Fire Department crew in a similar situation would act in a similar fashion, added Wilson. The Katy Fire Department takes great satisfaction in recognizing the actions of the crews from Station 2 and the police dispatcher, said Wilson, who called them an outstanding example of the responders, department and city. The city celebrated the grand opening of Station 2 at 25420 Bell Patna Drive, Katy, on March 2. karen.zurawski@chron.com From a bright yellow shipping container in Montrose, Cafe Bustelo is serving up Latin coffee, caffeine buzzes and community now through May 25. Although the weather was gray and drizzly, the pop-up coffee shop opened on Tuesday, March 12, at 3615 Montrose Blvd. to a crowd of coffee enthusiasts who braved the elements to get their morning perk. Known for its espresso-style Latin coffee packaged in yellow canisters, Cafe Bustelo was founded in 1928 by Spanish entrepreneur Gregorio Bustelo. He moved to New York and then discovered Latin America while traveling with the United States Merchant Marine. He fell in love with the culture, with the coffee, and he brought it back to New York, said Cafe Bustelo Senior Brand Manager Eduardo Merino. Bustelo liked the coffee so much that he made a business out of it starting from a Latin community in East Harlem. More than 90 years later, Merino said the coffee brands first fully operational coffee shop is a dream come true with two main objectives. The first, he said, is increasing brand awareness as people experience their culture and try their coffee with pairings like pastelitos and empanadas. But Merino said building relationships within the community is also key. For that purpose, Cafe Bustelo is giving a portion of the shops proceeds to MECA Houston (Multicultural Education and Counseling through the Arts) and HACU (Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities) to further educational programs in the Houston area. Also, Merino said all the shops baristas live in the Houston area and that local artists helped to give the coffee shop its unique and attractive look. Muralist Armando Castelan painted the large mural on the back of the shop and said the Montrose neighbors made the project a fun experience. The community, the neighborhood especially, people would stop by and realize that I was actually painting on the container, and they would ask me some questions about the process, he said. So that was pretty cool, and then I was getting free coffee the whole time. So that kept me going. Castelan said he appreciated that Cafe Bustelo opted to support local art instead of just using a big decal. Courtney Jones waited among the crowd to receive her coffee order. A teacher that lives in the neighborhood, she wandered into the shop on her spring break, unaware it was opening day and thinking the place would be empty. Jones didnt seem to mind the wait though and said she was looking forward to trying a drink she originally started ordering during a year she spent in Miami. I havent really found a place since moving back to Houston that I like their cafe con leche, so I thought Id try it, Jones said. Artist Shelbi Nicole collaborated with artist GONZO247 to create a mural for a shop Cafe Bustelo opened for a couple of days last fall to test things out. She came out to the grand opening of the latest shop to show her support and of course to have some joe from her favorite coffee brand. Im just here to support it, and I love their coffee, Nicole said. I think that I love that its so strong. Its really bold. Its different. It keeps me going all day when Im painting long hours. Moreno said plans are in the works for the pop-up shop to debut in other cities, but details are not yet available. In the meantime, the pop-up coffee shop will be open every day from 7 a.m. 4 p.m. now through Saturday, May 25, at 3615 Montrose Blvd. tracy.maness@hcnonline.com The 35th annual Young Texas Artists Music Competition culminated on Saturday, March 9, with the highly anticipated Finalists Concert & Awards at Conroes Crighton Theatre. The event featured CEO of Steinway & Sons Ron Losby, who flew in from New York City, as guest of honor and drew a full house. Young Texas Artists three-day competition leading up to the concert and awards event saw musicians ages 18-30 (ages 20-32 for Voice) who are Texas residents or affiliated with a Texas university or school of music competing in one of four divisions: Voice; Piano; Strings; and Winds, Brass, Percussion, Harp and Guitar. Finalists in each division vie for the opportunity to compete for a share of $20,000 in monetary prizes and performance opportunities. Young Texas Artists President/CEO Susie Pokorski attributes much of the consistent excellence of the competition to Artistic Director Emelyne Bingham, an internationally known conductor, musician, lecturer and music professor at Vanderbilt University. Her knowledge, passion and input combined with her empathy and dedication to our competitors has a tremendous impact on the quality of our competitions and our ability to provide meaningful support to young artists, Pokorski said. Immediately following the annual Bach, Beethoven & Barbecue benefit gala, co-chaired by Terry Husbands Giles and Allyson Ayton, the Finalists Concert & Awards was led by Mistress of Ceremonies Jade Simmons. The concert pianist, professional speaker, media personality and emerging artist specialist also conducted the finalists interviews onstage. This years competition featured 70 contestants, including international musicians from Canada, China, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. In addition, Texans studying outside the state at Cleveland Institute of Music, Indiana University, Louisiana State University, Michigan State University, New England Conservatory of Music, University of Hartford and University of Louisville came home to be a part of the event. The 2019 Grand Prize winner was Russian pianist Artem Kuznetsov, who accepted his award from Susie Pokorski and Young Texas Artists Co-Founder Jim Pokorski. Kuznetsov also received the Gold Medal in the Piano Division with his performance of Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat Minor, Op. 23 - III. Allegro con Fuoco, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The Gold Medal was presented by Ron Losby and one of the 2019 competition judges, William Wellborn, pianist and faculty member at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. A native of Balashov, Russia, Kuznetsov is a graduate student at Rice Universitys Shepherd School of Music, studying under Jon Kimura Parker. He has performed as a soloist and a chamber performer across Europe and the United States. Throughout 2017-19, he has participated in outreach recitals for underserved communities in Texas and Washington State and has given more than 35 presentations and masterclasses for elementary, middle and high school students. Mezzo-Soprano Brennan Blankenships performance of Sein wir wieder gut from Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss earned her the Gold in the Voice Division. The Strings Division Gold Medal went to cellist Lukas Goodman, who performed Concerto in B minor for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 104, B. 191-I. Allegro by Antonin Dvorak. Flutist Won Lee of Carrollton, Texas, was named the Gold winner in the Winds, Brass, Percussion, Harp and Guitar Division with his performance of Concerto for Flute and Orchestra No. 2 in D Major K. 314 - I. Allegro aperto by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. For more information about Young Texas Artists and sponsorship or volunteer opportunities contact Susie Pokorski at susiepokorski@gmail.com or 936-756-7017. he Montgomery County Sheriff's Office A pair of 16-year-old twin sisters ran away from their Willis home in late December and have been spotted throughout southeast Texas counties, according to the Montgomery County Sheriffs Office. Kendall and Kelsey Clark are not in immediate danger, but the two have been seen in Montgomery, Harris and Colorad counties. Kelsey Clark is described as having shoulder-length blond hair and is 5 feet, 5 inches tall. Kendall Clark is described as having red hair and is 5 feet, 3 inches tall, according to information in the press release. 3 1 of 3 Harris County Precinct 4 Constable's Office Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Harris County Precicnt 4 Constable Show More Show Less 3 of 3 A man accused of hitting and killing a pedestrian near Spring early Wednesday is now behind bars. Shane Allen Fischer, 31, is accused of running down a man in the 4500 block of Treaschwig Road and leaving him for dead around 5:20 a.m. DALLAS (AP) Dr. Albert Karam knows how important vaccines are for children. He's seen firsthand how immunizations virtually eradicated measles, the disease that made him seriously ill as a child in the 1960s. While sick with measles, he recalled, he screamed and cried whenever someone turned on the lights, and his skin darkened from hemorrhaging. "I never, ever, ever want to see another measles case again," he said last month at a news conference highlighting the importance of immunizing children. READ ALSO: First measles case diagnosed in San Antonio Karam's Dallas pediatrics office has a policy of not taking unvaccinated patients. It's something he firmly believes in he said he can't risk unimmunized children spreading illness to infants too young to have been inoculated. He has had the policy since he started his practice in 1985, he said. Now, he sees more of his peers turning away unvaccinated patients a policy that gained acceptance by the American Academy of Pediatrics a few years ago. See the most unvaccinated places in Texas in the slideshow above Dallas-area pediatricians tell The Dallas Morning News they've found that more and more parents want to be certain their children won't be in a waiting room with children who haven't had their shots, especially in light of recent measles outbreaks around Texas. Some pediatricians have long-standing policies of not accepting patients who refuse to vaccinate their children. The website of Pediatricians of Dallas, where Dr. Chafen Hart practices, includes a strongly worded policy stating that its doctors may ask parents to find a new health care provider if they refuse to vaccinate their children. By not inoculating their children, the policy reads, parents are "taking selfish advantage of thousands of others who do vaccinate their children." Hart said the policy, which has been in place about 10 years, is strongly worded because the office's pediatricians passionately believe that vaccinating children is the right thing to do. She said she believes more doctors are adopting similar policies because "more patients are also demanding that we do." And while ready availability of Pediatricians of Dallas' policy on its website helps vaccine-conscious parents select an office, it also serves as a warning to anti-vaxxers that they're not welcome. Karam said parents who use his practice rarely refuse to vaccinate their child, perhaps because he's gained a reputation as a doctor who won't tolerate it. Plus, the anti-vaccine crowd can easily go online to find lists of doctors who are not "vaccine friendly." Some physicians accept unvaccinated families with an expectation that they'll be able to change their mind over time, said Dr. Jason Terk, a pediatrician with Cook Children's in Keller who is chair of the Texas Medical Association's Council on Legislation. RELATED: Texas No. 1 'hotspot' for vaccine exemptions The Texas Medical Association doesn't have a policy on whether doctors should or shouldn't dismiss families that refuse to vaccinate, but Terk said he has had a policy against accepting unimmunized patients for years "since before it became popular," he joked. "My first duty is to the patients who currently exist in my practice, and I have to be able to provide them with an environment that is safe," he said. Lately, he said, many more prospective patients are asking whether his practice takes unvaccinated patients before they decide to commit to a pediatrician. "The tide is sort of turning toward people who really want practices who they know are going to be safe places to go," he said. Doctors disagree Before 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics discouraged dismissing families that refuse to vaccinate. But that changed after pediatricians spoke out, asking for the academy to support pediatricians who bar unvaccinated patients, said Dr. Sean O'Leary, who serves on the academy's committee on infectious diseases. Now, the American Academy of Pediatrics' official stance is that physicians "may consider dismissal of families who refuse vaccination as an acceptable option," but they shouldn't make that decision lightly or without respecting the parent's point of view. When O'Leary discussed years ago with his colleagues what their policy would be on accepting unvaccinated patients, they decided to allow them at their practice. But that conversation could've gone differently "if we had a bunch of parents in our practice saying, 'I like you guys and all, but if you're going to accept nonvaccinators in your practice ... I'm going to find a practice that doesn't,'" O'Leary said. O'Leary, who along with his colleagues published a 2015 paper examining characteristics of physicians who dismiss families for refusing vaccines, said there can be disagreements among doctors about how to handle these situations. Some doctors, including Karam and Hart, will agree to take on parents who want their child's immunizations to be spread out over a certain period of time. Karam said there's no truth to the idea that the vaccine schedule recommended by medical officials "overwhelms" a child's immune system, but he's willing to work with those parents. "That's not ideal, but it's better than nothing," he said. "I can live with that. We're going to get them vaccinated and safe." Other doctors won't allow departures from the vaccine schedule. Some will only turn away new patients who refuse to immunize, and some will take it a step further and dismiss existing families if they won't vaccinate their children. But some doctors disagree, arguing that what is best for the children is to keep them in the practice, where the pediatrician can ensure they still get proper care and work to persuade the parents to vaccinate their children, O'Leary said. "We don't really know when parents are sort of confronted with this policy," he said. "Do they go ahead and decide to get the child vaccinated, or do they just not end up seeing a pediatrician?" To O'Leary, there's no clear answer on whether physicians should ban unvaccinated patients from their practices. He said he's seen people "in good conscience" make decisions on both sides of the issue. Where does vaccine hesitancy come from? Experts say the anti-vaccine movement began with the publication of a now-discredited study by former doctor Andrew Wakefield that linked the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine with the development of autism in children. READ ALSO: One Texas city has the lowest rate of measles vaccinations among young children The study was retracted in 2010, but the damage had been done, said Dallas County's new health director, Dr. Philip Huang. "There was a good decade over a decade of misinformation out there that spread and propagated and magnified," Huang said. Anti-vaccine propaganda spreads easily on social media platforms such as Facebook, where The Atlantic found that seven anti-vax pages were responsible for the spread of 20 percent of the top 10,000 vaccination posts on the platform from January 2016 through February. Pinterest recently cut off search results for the words "vaccine" and "anti-vax" in an effort to stop the spread of misinformation, according to The New York Times. Search for those words on the app, and nothing shows up. When Hart sees vaccine-hesitant parents, particularly those influenced by misinformation they've seen online, she'll often share a story about vaccinating her own children, she said. "I have a little bit of a pedestal I get on, because my oldest is autistic, and when he was diagnosed I had my second child," she said. "I still vaccinated her exactly according to the CDC schedule, because I felt that strongly that vaccines had nothing to do with my son's diagnosis." Hart said she's able to counsel most of those parents and convince them that they should vaccinate. But she deals with the questions constantly. She said every two to three days, she'll interact with a parent who either wants to forgo vaccines entirely or wants to space out vaccinations rather than follow the recommended schedule from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Despite disagreements over vaccines and even disagreements among pediatricians on whether they should treat unimmunized patients, doctors stressed that there's a common goal between physicians and parents: to do the right thing for children. "Pediatricians are doing their best they went into the specialty to take care of children," O'Leary said. And he said parents, whether they want to space out vaccinations or go without them, truly believe they're doing the right thing for their child. "They're doing it based on misinformation and myths, but they're doing what they think is best," he said. Measles in Texas Texas has already seen 11 cases of measles this year, including one in Collin County and one in Denton County. He said we're a "victim of our own success" when it comes to measles. Before the vaccine was developed, 450 to 500 people died every year from the highly contagious disease. After the vaccine, deaths from measles dropped dramatically. Because the vaccine was so effective, there's been a drop in public consciousness of the severity of measles, he said. Huang said Dallas County has room for improvement when it comes to vaccine coverage: 65.6 percent of children in the county are up to date on immunizations, per data from a 2017 survey. That highlights the importance of making sure children get vaccinated, he said. "The consequences can be very severe, and people forget about how severe they used to be," Huang said. Bob Sanborn, president and CEO of Children at Risk, a nonprofit that advocates for children, attributed the return of measles to more kids not being immunized against the disease. When parents pay attention to anti-vaccine misinformation, they're "dead wrong," he said at a news conference in February. "If someone has misled you to say that your children are not safe if they take a vaccine, of course as a parent you want to listen, because you want your children to be safe," Sanborn said. "But what we're here to say is you've been misled if you believe this, and it's your duty as a parent it's your duty as a Texan, in a sense not only to immunize your own children, but to make sure that all children are safe," he said. ___ Information from: The Dallas Morning News, http://www.dallasnews.com This is an AP Member Exchange shared by The Dallas Morning News. Diversifying Fort Bend Countys economy and attracting international business is a goal of County Judge KP George. With the creation of the Fort Bend Global Initiative, it is hoped that it will work with international companies and organizations to attract, foster, and grow businesses, and in the process, create new, well-paying jobs for Fort Bend County residents. The Fort Bend Global Initiative has existed in one form or another since 2009 when former County Judge Bob Herbert created the Fort Bend County Friendship Committee to foster international business relationships. The committee was renamed the Fort Bend Global Initiative in 2012. According to a resolution passed by the 84th Texas Legislature, members of the Global Initiative visited the Republic of Turkey, where they have forged strong ties with the cities of Ankara, Adana, Kocaeli, and Kahramanmaras; these bonds of friendship with China and Turkey have also resulted in comprehensive educational exchanges with both the Lamar Consolidated and Fort Bend Independent School Districts, enabling the students of the Fort Bend region to learn about other countries and cultures. The Global Initiative has made trips to China to forge relationships there. To help relaunch the Global Initiative, George recently met with Consul Generals representing the United Kingdom, France, China, Taiwan, Russia, Switzerland, Norway, Germany and India. The goal of the meeting was to identify opportunities to advance international relations with an emphasis on economic and commercial results. It is crucial that Fort Bend build strong relationships with our Consular Corps and international economic development partners so that we can encourage job growth and attract private investment, for the benefit of residents across Fort Bend County, George said in a news release. I am grateful that we have a Consular Corps that is willing to collaborate and help improve the economic fabric of our community. With its 92 consulates, the Consular Corps of Houston is the third-largest consular corps in the nation, serving as a link between the Houston region and the world. rkent@hcnonline.com Attention "Brady Bunch" fans! As you've no doubt heard, HGTV has purchased the Studio City, CA, home that was used for exterior shots in the original show. Now, the network plans to renovate both the exterior and interior, to match the backdrops we all came to know and love, in a new reality show slated to air in September, "A Very Brady Renovation." Yet apparently, finding those iconic furnishings that played a supporting role for the family's shenanigans is proving to be a real needle-in-a-haystack huntand HGTV needs your help! So start sifting through your attic, basement, local flea market, eBay, and otherwise to find these hidden gems. The Very Brady Scavenger Hunt is on! Many of these 1970s items are very rare and hard to find, Abbi McCollum, vice president of convergence and social media for HGTV, explained in a press release. Weve seen an incredible response from 'Brady Bunch' fans across social media since we first announced the series. Now, we need their help to get the renovation of the house just right. LIVING LARGE: Take a tour inside the 10 most expensive homes sold in Houston last month While HGTV has provided a full list of what it's looking for, here's a sampling that is sure to inspire a TV flashback or two: The avocado-and-cream flowered sofa that was the seat of many a family conference The credenza under the staircase and the horse statue on top of it Gregs old-fashioned attic radio Alice's matchy-matchy bedroom furniture suite Those fish trivets that were hung on the kitchen wall by the green refrigeratorand the green refrigerator itself The stainless-steel double wall oven The stuffed giraffe in the girls' bedroom A vertical, trapezoid shaped curio cabinet The handles on the front door Where to look for 'Brady Bunch' furnishings If you want to get involved in this treasure hunt, or are just interested in scoring a few iconic '70s pieces for your own (fill in the blank) Bunch House, we have a few ideas on where to start looking (that is, once you've exhausted digging through the junk collection in your parents' garage). Los Angeles interior designer, blogger, and collector Colette Coco Shelton of Cococozy.com loves using vintage pieces in her designs, and this Brady scavenger hunt is right up her alley. "My first stop to find the items they are looking for would be a flea market," she says. "Each month here in Southern California, for example, there is either the Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena, or the Long Beach Flea Market, where there are so many California classic retro items for sale from different vendors. I feel like I've seen the bedroom set, the credenza, the starburst clock, and more there." Southern Californians may have the edge in terms of finding these items. "Since the show was shot here in the '70s," Shelton continues, "the likelihood is that the items were sourced locally and not necessarily one of a kind." ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: This is literally becoming the hot new part of room makeovers Which means they may be lying around awaiting stardom if only the right fan spots them. But what if you don't live in Southern California? Fear notyou still have a chance. "Another resource, of course, is online," advises Shelton, mentioning sites like Chairish.com, 1stDibscom, Ebay, Etsy, and EBTH.com (or Everything But The House), where vintage items can be searched out and then bid on or bought outright. Shelton thinks that the sofa will probably be the hardest piece to find, since it might have been custom-made, but she recommends that you not give up. The '70s are an era that hasn't yet been completely picked over for furniture and accessories by designers and collectors. "This is a super fun challenge," says Shelton. "I can't wait to see how it turns out!" Where these Brady furnishings will end up OK, then. Once you've located the perfect items for the Brady home, just what are you supposed to do with them? What are HGTV's plans for them? Will you be paid? Will HGTV cover shipping? Those details are not clear right now, but all will be revealed in due course to those who've got the goods. "Fans who own vintage furniture and decor items true to the original TV series are encouraged to contact HGTV via social media for a chance to see the special items featured in the series," according to the HGTV press release. Fans are asked to post a photo or video of the item on HGTVs Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter using the #verybradyreno hashtag. A quick glance at those links reveals that they are also good places to check and see what other people have already located. And the nationwide scavenger hunt begins. The post The 'Brady Bunch' Home Renovation Needs Your Help! Check Your Attic appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com. The broader NSE Nifty closed with gains of 40.50 points, or 0.36 per cent, at 11,341.70. The 30-share BSE index ended 216.51 points, or 0.58 per cent, higher at 37,752.17. Mumbai: Continuing its rising streak for the third session in a row, the BSE Sensex on Wednesday climbed by over 216 points on unabated buying in banking stocks amid strong foreign fund inflows and positive domestic cues. The 30-share BSE index ended 216.51 points, or 0.58 per cent, higher at 37,752.17. The broader NSE Nifty closed with gains of 40.50 points, or 0.36 per cent, at 11,341.70. In the Sensex pack, IndusInd Bank rallied 4.15 per cent. Other gainers included Yes Bank, Bajaj Finance, HDFC Bank, SBI, Bajaj Auto, RIL, HCL Tech, HDFC and ICICI Bank -- rising up to 3.67 per cent. On the other hand, Bharti Airtel emerged as top loser with 4.08 per cent fall on the Sensex list. Other major laggards were Vedanta, Sun Pharma, Tata Steel, ONGC, Tata Motors, NTPC and Coal India -- shedding up to 3.48 per cent. Sectorally, the BSE bankex, finance, realty and energy realty indices surged up to 1.42 per cent. While, BSE telecom, metal, power, teck and healthcare indices ended in the red, losing as much as 2.60 per cent. Experts attributed the continuing market rally to robust investor sentiment driven by sustained foreign fund inflows, stronger rupee, among others. Strengthening gains, the Indian rupee Wednesday further appreciated by 24 paise to 69.47 against the US dollar intra-day. On a net basis, foreign institutional investors (FIIs) bought shares worth a net of Rs 2,477.72 crore on Tuesday, provisional data available with BSE showed. Elsewhere in Asia, Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell 0.39 per cent, Shanghai Composite Index was down 1.09 per cent, Korea's Kospi dropped 0.41 per cent, and Japan's Nikkei ended 0.99 per cent lower. Similarly, in the Eurozone, Frankfurt's DAX slipped 0.05 per cent. Paris CAC 40 rose 0.32 per cent and London's FTSE was up 0.04 per cent in early deals. Global crude benchmark Brent crude futures rose 0.33 per cent to USD 66.89 per barrel. The mayor of Devers, Texas, issued a proclamation Tuesday banning the state's STAAR exams within city limits. Steven Horelica, who also is a fifth grade teacher and bus driver in Devers ISD, said the statement does not have legal teeth and was made symbolically to give voice to growing opposition against the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR tests. Everything is judged by one single event. Kids are labeled by what they do on one day of the year, Horelica said. Students are judged by that number, teachers are judged by that number instead of, lets look at the big picture lets see how much the child has grown this year, lets look at them and see how they can get better. LEGISLATURE: Families worry bill could help accused Santa Fe shooter win early parole He said the mayor of Sour Lake, near Beaumont, will put forward a similar proclamation in the next month. The idea to symbolically ban the standardized test within Devers population: 447 in 2010 began with a Jan. 29 Facebook post in which Horelica half-jokingly presented a draft resolution. At the time, he said it was not serious, but more and more people began to ask him to actually do it. Texas Education Agency officials declined to comment on the proclamation, but federal laws require standardized testing and other accountability measures in order for districts and state departments of education to receive federal funding. The Texas Education Code also states that school districts accreditation and funding are tied to test participation and performance, and students who fail the exams can be held back. In 2017-2018, about 35,000 Texas students were counted as not tested in the state's accountability ratings. Since 2012, only about 1 percent of all eligible students have not taken the STAAR test each year, although the state does not separate out that data to show who missed the test intentionally and how many students missed it due to medical issues or emergencies. Horelica said since news broke that he was doing it for real, messages of support have flowed into his inbox from across Texas and the country from people sick of year-round test preparation and the stakes tied to the once-a-year exams. Its a bad thing for education, Horelica said. I think we should all be working to put an end to it no matter who we are. shelby.webb@chron.com Families of those killed and injured in Texas deadliest K-12 school shooting last May are raising concerns that a bill to allow parole boards to review cases of juvenile inmates more quickly could reduce the amount of time accused Santa Fe gunman Dimitrios Pagourtzis could spend in prison. The bill, House Bill 256, would let a juvenile inmates who have been sentenced to life plead their cases in front of a parole board 20 years after being convicted, halving the 40-year period they now must wait. While the bill would not guarantee such inmates would be granted parole that early, families of the 10 people killed and 13 injured in the Santa Fe High School shooting say even the possibility of the accused shooter being let out early is cause for outrage. GUN DEBATE: More mass shootings occur in states with less restrictive gun laws, study shows Steve Perkins, whose wife Ann was killed in the May 18 massacre, said he and several others plan to travel to Austin to testify against the bill during a public hearing Wednesday. He said he worries that a parole board hearing Pagourtzis case may be more sympathetic in 20 years, when memories of the incident have faded. He bemoaned the fact that under existing Texas law, Pagourtzis cannot be sentenced to death or life without parole. They took the death penalty from us, and he only had to serve 40 years before he could be paroled. Now they want to cut that in half? Perkins said. Why not just make it a misdemeanor and give him a traffic ticket? Ellic Sahualla, chief of staff of bill author Rep. Joseph Moody, D-El Paso, said the legislation does much more than cut the time before people who committed serious crimes before they were 18 can be paroled. It would require parole boards to consider more factors when deciding whether juvenile offenders should be released including age at the time of the offense, developmental stage at the time of the crime, intellectual capacity, and family and community involvement. Families, school personnel and faith leaders also could submit statements about an inmates personal growth or maturity before the first parole hearing. The goal, Sahualla said, is to have parole boards take a closer look at juvenile offenders, whose brains and decision-making capabilities are not as developed as adults. A teen who joined a friend in an armed robbery in which no one was injured may be more likely to reenter society without issues than a 30-year-old who committed the same crime, he said. MOVED: Judge grants change of venue for Santa Fe shooting trial Of the roughly 4,500 juveniles in the custody of the Texas Department of Juvenile Justice, about 1,510 have been given sentences of 40 years or longer. Sahualla said he cannot imagine a parole board giving leniency to someone who killed 10 people and tried to murder more when he was 17. While its true the Santa Fe case would be affected, I cant imagine a parole board saying this is one case where we need to let him out, Sahualla said. That assumption means little to John Conard, whose nephew Jared Conard Black was killed at Santa Fe High School. He plans to travel from Midland to speak at the public hearing in Austin. He worried that allowing family, medical professionals and clergy to vouch for any potential transformations of the accused gunman could make it more likely he will get out early if he is convicted. I dont think he deserves a second chance, Conard said. There may be individual cases the statute provides for, 15- or 16-year-olds who made a terrible mistake, but the victims deserve more consideration than the offenders, especially in a capital murder case. Houston area schools reported more than 7,000 fights during the 2017-2018 academic year. 223 Harris County schools reported ten or more fight incidents occurred between students during that period, according to Texas Education Agency Record. In total, 7,084 Fighting/Mutual Combat incidents took place at those 223 schools. In addition, 258 middle and high schools in Harris County were not counted in the finally tally of fighting incidents because they recorded fewer than 10. STAAR TESTING: Wording of test questions catches lawmakers' scrutiny Of the 29 school on this list (there were several ties), 19 of them were middle schools. That includes junior highs and intermediary schools. Chron.com reached out to the school districts with campuses on the list for comment. However, many of them are closed for Spring break and did not respond. Spring ISD had the most combined middle and high schools on the list. A spokesperson for the district replied that after conferring with one of their data analysts, "Spring ISD feels as though it has thoroughly followed and executed its disciplinary policies." A TEA spokesperson told Chron.com that school districts are required by law to submit data to the agency. The individual districts are responsible for collecting their own data. TEA said it does have a compliance overview system in place to confirm the accuracy of any data that is submitted to the agency. The TEA also provides the districts guidelines to follow and interpret. Schools are expected to follow the same guidelines, regardless of the size of its enrollment. However, the TEA spokesperson said "It can be difficult to compare campuses, districts, or regions with each other because they may vary by many factors, including the size and makeup of student populations." RELATED: How good is your hospital? New report rates Houston hospitals from worst to best Peter Dawson is a digital reporter in Houston. Read him on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and on our subscriber site, houstonchronicle.com. | Peter.Dawson@chron.com | NEWS WHEN YOU NEED IT: Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message | Sign up for breaking news alerts delivered to your email here. A Houston state senator known for calling criminal justice officials to the carpet floated a surprise plan Tuesday to combat gang warfare and persistent violence in the states juvenile prisons by moving all teenage inmates to a mothballed adult lockup north of Austin. On the heels of a series of Houston Chronicle reports on continuing turmoil at the Texas Juvenile Justice Department, state Sen. John Whitmire offered the proposal during a tense Senate Criminal Justice Committee meeting in Austin and faced immediate pushback from agency officials. Instead of working to fix the unrest and understaffing at the five existing juvenile prisons, the Houston lawmaker suggested consolidating the agencys 850-kid population into the former Bartlett State Jail and filling the current juvenile lock-ups with geriatric prisoners from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The proposal came after Whitmire spent about an hour laying out the agencys problems, demanding to know why officials hadnt asked for more money, questioning their staffing figures and chastising their pushback against the Chronicles description of a six-day disturbance that officials contended was not a riot. It just sounds to me like total chaos, Whitmire told the agencys visibly exasperated director, Camille Cain. Im frustrated that youre not reaching out to the leadership where you need help because you need help. Cain, whos been on the job just over a year, raised concerns about the idea of putting so many kids in a single facility and questioned how the already understaffed agency would find enough workers to manage a unit that size. But still, she conceded the current units are pretty maxed and grappling with a series of problems. The fact of the matter is that these facilities are not doing well, she said, adding that smaller units with more guards would be a preferable solution. Ongoing problems Before jumping into the current problems at the troubled juvenile prisons, Whitmire opened with a review of the decade-old sex abuse scandal that prompted an agency name change and complete overhaul. Afterward, the department stopped holding kids on lower-level offenses, bringing down the juvenile prison population as youth shifted into county-run facilities and alternatives to incarceration. Now, there are under 1,000 youths in state custody but the prisons are still plagued by violence and scandal. In 2017, a number of staffers were accused of having or trying to have sex with youths in their care. Cain took over as the agencys new executive director near the start of 2018, but problems continued with a series of employee arrests, an inmate suicide, an escape, a drowning and chronic understaffing issues. Then in November, a six-day disturbance broke out at the Gainesville facility north of Dallas when up to 40 teens blew dust in the smoke detectors to set off the fire alarms and release the unit doors. Repeatedly over the course of six days, the unruly youths got out of their dorms and ran around the sprawling campus, climbing on the roof, hiding in trees and assaulting guards and each other. At one point, a teen grabbed hold of an officers keys and started opening the doors. Afterward, youths told oversight officials the disturbance stemmed from a combination of boredom, desire to protest and ongoing gang conflicts between the Crips and the Bloods. After the Chronicle reported on the unrest, Cain fired back with a press release disputing the description of the violent mass disruption as a riot. At no time did the actions of the youth threaten to compromise the security of the facility, she said in a statement at the time. I do not say this to minimize the seriousness of these events; I do it to set an inaccurate record straight. Arrests and assaults During Tuesdays meeting, Whitmire raised concerns about other issues at the state lockups, including widespread marijuana use and problems with kids tattooing themselves and each other with gang signs. One teen at Gainesville ended up with an infection after inking himself using a staple, while another said hed gotten tattooed using a needle smuggled in by a staffer. Many of the problems, officials said, start with a small portion of the population. The Office of the Inspector General arrested 92 kids for assault during the last fiscal year. Together, those youths accounted for about 5,000 uses of force during their time in the states juvenile lock-ups. And the agency saw more than 281 workmans compensation claims stemming from incidents of youth aggression in 2018. Those injuries, Cain said, can exacerbate the existing understaffing issues. After questioning discrepancies in staffing figures given by the agency when compared to those given by oversight officials, Whitmire demanded to know why the department hadnt asked for more money to bump up officer salaries as a means to combat low staffing levels. According to one state report, he said, some staff are forced to work 17-hour shifts, and one officer urinated on herself because there was no one to relieve her so she could go to the bathroom. Three of the facilities are only 75 percent staffed if no one calls out sick. Money wont solve that, Cain said, pointing out that 40 percent of new hires quit within the first six months. If you take a job at a certain price point and quit four months later, its not the money that made you quit. But despite disagreements about the specific problems and the best solutions, both agency officials and lawmakers agreed on the need for immediate action. Cain advocated sending some youths to contract facilities and working to reduce the number of kids sent to juvenile prison every year. Whitmire, on the other hand, pushed for making the former state jail into a juvenile facility where kids could get programming in a more controlled environment. At the same time, the state could shift elderly adult inmates to the air-conditioned juvenile prisons. Though she raised repeated concerns about that plan, Cain said she was open to discussion on the matter, which could come up again as soon as Friday when the agency holds its bimonthly board meeting. keri.blakinger@chron.com A motorcyclist crashed Tuesday night during a police chase that reached speeds of 140 mph in west Houston, according to Metro Video. A Texas Department of Public Safety trooper tried to pull the male rider over on Fry Road near Interstate 10 around 11:45 p.m. The story revolves around a young boys emotional plea to the Prime Minister of India, raising the issue of open defecation. Mumbai: Ahead of the release of his next, Mere Pyare Prime Minister, filmmaker Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra has shed light on the exhausting, yet enriching journey of the film. The story revolves around a young boys emotional plea to the Prime Minister of India, raising the issue of open defecation. Kanhu lives in the slums of Mumbai, and his life takes a serious turn after his mother gets raped due to the lack of sanitation facilities. At the core of the narrative is a heart-warming mother-son relationship. About highlighting two social issues in the film, the director said, Theres no progress as far as tackling social issues are concerned, mainly because we tend to think that it would never happen to us. You will be able to relate to it only when you put yourself in the victims shoes. This is why we have been asking the question, Agar aapki maa ke sath aisa hota, toh aapko kaisa lagta? He added, We all know it (the problems) and see it, but only a few take steps towards changing it. So, when a young boy from the slums makes an attempt to reach the Prime Minister after his mother is attacked, the viewer tries to connect with him emotionally. The film was shot in real locations, and during the shoot, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra got a first-person account of the difficulties slum-dwellers face, especially when it comes to sanitation. In a bid to make a difference, the director took initiatives to build toilets in the area. After watching its preview, the film has been appreciated by eminent personalities like Sadhguru, Milkha Singh and Sunil Gavaskar, among others. The movie stars Anjali Patil, Makarand Deshpande, Rasika Agashe, Sanjay Manjrekar, Niteesh Wadhwa, OM Kanojiya and Nachiket Purnapatre in pivotal roles. Dr. Jayantilal Gada (Pen) and PVR Cinemas present Mere Pyare Prime Minister releases on March 15. Homicide detectives believe a young man who was dropped off at a free-standing emergency room in Spring Branch with a fatal gunshot wound was shot inside a hotel off the Northwest Freeway. The man, believed to be in his late teens, was shot around 10:30 a.m. inside a second-story room at the Red Roof Inn along the Northwest Freeway near Hollister, according to Houston Police Department Homicide Detective Ken Fregia. A San Antonio man was arrested after his wife found a hidden recording device in her bedroom three weeks after the couple separated, according to the Bexar County Sheriff's Office. Ricky Wray, 38, was arrested Monday on suspicion of invasive video recording, jail records showed. A Texas law banning a common second-trimester abortion procedure will remain blocked after federal judges Wednesday postponed a decision until the Supreme Court takes action on a similar case. A federal district court in 2017 struck down the ban, which was passed as part of state Senate Bill 8. Attorney General Ken Paxton and other officials then appealed the decision to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Abortion providers argue the dilation and evacuation procedure is the most common method used to perform an abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The state and the laws supporters say the practice is brutal and inhumane. For subscribers: Senate bill would block state, local funding for abortion providers The case the appeals court is waiting on may or may not ever make it to the highest court in the countrys judiciary. Still, it has captivated the attention of pro-choice and pro-life advocates alike for its potential to be the first abortion-related case before the Supreme Court since Justice Brett Kavanaugh took the bench. But the Supreme Court has yet to decide whether it will take up that case, which was launched by abortion provider June Medical Services. The case challenges a Louisiana law that required doctors who perform abortions to have hospital admitting privileges. For subscribers: Kavanaugh on Supreme Court would give Texas lawmakers a green light for conservative causes Justices struck down a similar law, House Bill 2, in Texas in 2016 in the Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt case, ruling that it placed an undue and unconstitutional burden on abortion access. Following that decision, a district court found Louisianas law unconstitutional. However, on appeal, the Fifth Circuit reversed that decision by claiming that the states situation called for a different means of review than the Texas Supreme Court case. U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris is bringing her campaign for the White House to Texas. The California Democrats campaign announced she will hold a rally in Houston on March 23 at a location still yet to be announced. San Antonio Democrat Joaquin Castro today pressed GOP senators to vote Thursday to rebuke President Donald Trump for declaring a national emergency to free billions of dollars to build the wall along the border with Mexico. President Trumps action was an act of constitutional vandalism and the nation will be watching tomorrow to see if the senators stand up to the president or they cower, Castro told reporters. Castro is chief sponsor of a resolution overwhelmingly passed by the Democratic-run House last month that would to nullify the presidents declaration. Trump invoked the rarely used executive power in hopes of securing $5.7 billion that he says is needed for border barriers. The Senate, controlled by Republicans, is expected to join with the House in the anti-Trump vote as early as Thursday. Trump has pledged to veto the measure and it is highly unlikely that Congress can muster enough support for an override. Texas Take: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox The remaining intrigue surrounds how many GOP senators join with Democrats. Thus far, four Republicans - Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina - have said theyll defect from their party. But Trump is pressing to keep his partys senators in line, and Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday met privately with senators in hopes of preventing further support for Castros resolution and a significant embarrassment for Trump. Castro said he and his staff have been trying to pressure Senate Republicans on the fence. Texas Sen. John Cornyn has pledged to vote no on the resolution and support the president. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has given no clear indication of how he will vote. Related: Cornyn to vote no on resolution nullifying Trump veto What is most disturbing to me is that some of the senators who have in the past made statements very critical of the president using an emergency declaration in this way now seem to be falling in line with President Trump. Theyve demonstrated particular weakness and timidity on this vote, he said. Castro was joined by other Texas Democrats speaking with reporters about the vote. Rep. Henry Cuellar, of Laredo, contended that more than $500 million could be diverted from military construction at Joint Base San Antonio and other regional military facilities under the presidents plan. If youre those men and women who serve in the military and were saying were not going to give you a hospital or were not going to give you a dorm because were going to build a wall, we know what theyre going to say. Theyll say, we dont want that, Cuellar said. Rep. Veronica Escobar, of El Paso, contended that the emergency declaration is about the president securing his base. This is about the president delivering on a campaign promise that he failed to deliver on when his party was in control, she said. AUSTIN The state Senate wants to give school districts up to $100 million to install security equipment and other devices to deter future school shootings in light of last years massacre at Santa Fe High School. The one-time funding, approved 31-0 on Wednesday, could be used by schools to improve doors at entry points, install video monitors and other elements in an effort to harden schools by increasing security features on campus. Other options include metal detectors, vehicle barriers, security systems, shooter-alarm systems, two-way radios, security fencing, bullet-resistant glass and door-locking systems. AUSTIN Nineteen months after Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas, the Legislature took a major step Wednesday toward paying some of the bills related to the storm. The Texas Senate approved a budget amendment that covers about $6 billion in unexpected state expenses since the last time the Legislature met. About $3 billion is due to Hurricane Harvey, with about $900 million needed just to shore up school districts that still havent recovered from the lost property tax revenue after people were forced to flee their homes. Now I know those are big numbers, said Sen. Jane Nelson, a North Texas Republican who chairs the Senate Finance Committee. But $3 billion of this package is due to Harvey, which we knew was going to have a significant price tag. Another $2 billion is aimed at addressing a shortfall in Medicaid and $542 million is needed to address pension liabilities for the Teacher Retirement System. Just over $4 billion of the money the Senate proposes spending is from the states Economic Stabilization Fund, known as the rainy day fund. Senators defended having to tap the money after criticism on social media from conservative groups that say they are spending too much in the supplemental budget bill. State Sen. Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood, said this is exactly why the states rainy day fund exists. He said that with events like Harvey and the shooting at Santa Fe, the fund is proving why it has been necessary to build up over the years. More Information $6 billion supplemental state budget bill $3 billion for Harvey-related expenses; $2.1 billion to address a Medicaid shortfall; $100 million for school safety $300 million to continue the Legislature's commitment to improve state hospital facilities $542 million to address pension liabilities for the Teacher Retirement System $211 million to pay obligations of the Texas Tomorrow Fund $160 million to address the Correctional Managed Health Care shortfall $100 million to refill the Governor's Disaster Fund to help rebuild from natural disasters See More Collapse If we are not going to use the rainy day fund for something like that, I dont know when you will ever use it, Taylor said. The Texas Senate passed the budget amendment 31-0, despite criticism from some conservative political groups like Empower Texans. That groups leader, Michael Quinn Sullivan, took to social media to accuse the Senate of going on a spending spree. That brought a reaction from senators. Im hearing outside people say were spending too much money, Taylor said. This is a very responsible budget from what Im looking at, he said. The University of Houston, the Lone Star College System and Texas A&M are other big recipients of Harvey-related funding in the supplemental budget bill. It calls for $20 million for the University of Houston, $4 million directly for the schools downtown campus, $1.7 million for the Victoria campus and just over $83,000 for the Clear Lake campus. Lone Star College is set to receive $13 million for Harvey expense. Another $2.5 million is going to the Texas A&M Forest Service for Harvey-related expenses. The measure still must go to the House. After Chhapaak, Meghna to direct a film on Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw. Rumours doing the rounds over the past few days in the trade have it that Ranveer has been approached by Meghna to star in her next film after Chhapaak starring Deepika Padukone. Meghna has been signed on to direct a film on Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw. It will be bankrolled by Ronnie Screwvala. The trade claims that Ranveer has already heard the script and has given his nod to the biopic. Known as Sam Bahadur for his work during the India-Pakistan war of 1971, he was the first Indian Army officer to be promoted to the rank of Field Marshal. The film has been written by Gulzaarsaab along with Bhavani Iyer and Shantanu Srivastava. The casting will be done only when Meghana completes her film with Deepika, says a trade source. However, another source close to the development of the film rubbishes the claims that Ranveer was doing the film. Just because Ranveer is Deepikas husband does not mean that all her producers will cast him in the same projects or other films that they are doing. These are just speculations and not true, informs the source. Meanwhile, the trade says that it is a matter of time now. Both parties are busy now. Once Ranveer and Deepika return from their London event, things may be finalised. Deepika will be proceeding to Delhi to shoot with Meghna as well, adds our trade source. We will wait! Sanskriti Media Spaces will provide PR pathway for workers at the intermediate skill level Canada announces 2,000 additional Provincial Nominee Program spaces for temporary workers Spaces will provide PR pathway for workers at the intermediate skill level Canada announces 2,000 additional Provincial Nominee Program spaces for temporary workers Spaces will provide PR pathway for workers at the intermediate skill level Canada announces 2,000 additional Provincial Nominee Program spaces for temporary workers Spaces will provide PR pathway for workers at the intermediate skill level CIC News Aa Accessibility Font Style Serif Sans Font Size A A An additional 2,000 temporary foreign workers could be admitted to Canada as permanent residents this year through Canadas Provincial Nominee Program, the Government of Canada has announced. The Provincial Nominee Program, or PNP, allows participating provinces and territories to nominate a set number of economic immigration candidates for Canadian permanent residence each year in order to meet local labour market needs. In a news release issued March 12, the Government of Canada said the 2,000 additional PNP spaces are intended primarily for existing long-term Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada with intermediate skills classified as National Occupational Code C who have integrated into Canadian society. Temporary foreign workers fill long-term labour market needs and contribute to the growth of our economy, Canadas Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Ahmed Hussen said in a statement. We recognize the need to provide opportunities for them to transition to permanent residence and these additional spaces under the Provincial Nominee Program will do just that. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) said the additional spaces will also help address worker vulnerability. Under its Multi-Year Immigration Levels plan, Canada has a 2019 admissions target of 61,000 for the PNP, which is an increase of 6,000 admissions over 2018. A spokesman for Ahmed Hussen told CIC News that the 2,000 spaces for temporary foreign workers are part of this planned increase. The announcement follows IRCCs creation of the Interim Pathway for Caregivers, a temporary permanent residence pathway that opened March 4 and will remain open until June 4, 2019, for eligible in-home temporary foreign worker caregivers who came to Canada after November 30, 2014. Find out if you are eligible for any Canadian immigration programs 2019 CICNews All Rights Reserved For most of Long Islands history, its representatives in the state Senate have been white men. But with the election of state Sen. Monica Martinez, a new type of leader is emerging on the island. The former Suffolk County legislator was elected as part of the Democratic blue wave that gave the party large majorities in the Assembly and state Senate. However, a recent vote on gun control and her stated positions on issues like recreational marijuana legalization and free college tuition show that she is carving out an identity as a moderate in the chamber. City & State recently caught up with Martinez to discuss her first months in office, what she likes and dislikes in the budget and what a native of El Salvador thinks about drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Your revenge porn bill passed the Legislature. Whats it like to pass your first bill? I carried this bill as a Suffolk County legislator so it was definitely a priority for me to bring it up to the state level. As soon as I came in, I spoke to the former sponsor, who was (Republican) state Sen. Phil Boyle. He joined me as a sponsor as he has been trying to pass this for quite some time. Honestly, I looked into what was the delay in terms of why it hadnt passed all these years. It was the Internet Association (a global trade organization of major web companies) that had put blocks on some legislation, so I met with them to ask what would be a good compromise. They (were concerned that they) may not have knowledge that an intimate image has been put on their sites, and worried that they would be held liable if they did not take it down. We found language that they were comfortable with and it all worked out. What are some things you are keeping an eye on in the state budget process? I have been a very vocal against the legalization of marijuana from the beginning. The tax cap is also a very important thing, but we also have to keep in the back of heads that our schools have their hands tied. We need to find a ways to allow our schools to govern as well as educate our children with a quality and sound education and unfortunately sometimes the tax cap holds them back. Therefore we have to find different avenues to help them in order for them to able to fund security for their buildings, to make sure they have enough personnel and teachers, and building aid. Do you think fully funding Foundation Aid, as state Sen. Robert Jackson would put it, is the right was to meet those needs? As lawmakers, weve got to see how our schools are set up. Each school is different. Each region is different. We cant put every single school under one umbrella because they are all different. New York City is completely different from Long Island and we have different needs. I want to make sure that whatever is done to Foundation Aid, the building aid, you name it, it has to be done according to the region. The governor has said you got to look at per-pupil spending at the school level rather than by district level. What do you think? I think schools should be able to govern themselves. Obviously, we understand that they get state funding, they get federal funding, but the schools know their kids best. The schools, the teachers, the administrators, they know what their schools need. When you tie their hands, it does not allow them to do what they need to do. We also have to be cognizant that Long Island has become a very transient area. You have students who go from one area to another. We have an influx of undocumented students. We have to make sure that we provide them the education they need. Amid all the recent conflict between the governor and state Senate Democrats, how do you think the proposal to allow drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants will play out for Long Island senators compared with the rest of your colleagues? I can tell you that the executive branch and the Legislature are different bodies and were co-equal branches of government. Therefore, the one thing as elected officials that we cannot do is pit one another against the other. My big priority is always public safety, making sure that our law enforcement is able to ensure safety in our communities. We also have to make sure that we listen to different groups. As of right now, those conversations are ongoing so I could not say where the Long Island Six are at on this. Other regions of the state could be different, but this is a collective decision for us to make. For me personally, I havent made up my mind either. There are too many unanswered questions. The Assembly Committee on Health recently passed the New York Health Act. What is your position on single-payer health care? Do I believe that individuals should have affordable health care? I think as the bill stands now, it does not do that. I think there is still a lot to do to this bill. As of right now, I have not taken a position whether I agree or not. As an immigrant and a woman, what does your election show about how Long Island is changing? My mother came on her own and my mother just ventured out herself to make sure it was the right thing to do. She stayed here for two years on her own just trying to figure it out. After two years, she found a sound job. She went to school at night to learn the language and then we all came over. (Martinez said in a follow-up conversation that her family came legally to the United States from El Salvador through a visa program, not with Temporary Protected Status.) The sacrifices that she made is the reason that I never want to let her and my father down. Who knows where we would be if we were still there. There was civil unrest. We might not even be living today. For me, this is a journey that I respect my parents for doing. Because I know that the opportunities were there for me, I know that opportunities could be there for others. I believe there should be a pathway to citizenship just like I had a pathway. Every child should have the ability to go to school to learn. But I owe a whole bunch in loans so I honestly dont believe in free education because I didnt have a free education. I worked my way to where I am today. Long Island is changing. I represent a very diverse district, from low-income, high-minority areas to very affluent areas. It doesnt matter where you come from, what matters is the journey youve been through. Ministry of Civil Aviation Secretary said that the while 14 flights were cancelled today, tomorrow will be a more challenging day. Ministry of Civil Aviation Secretary Pradeep Singh Kharola also said that instructions have been issued to the concerned airlines to make sure that no sector should be left uncatered owing to cancellation. (Image: ANI) New Delhi: Announcing that the all B737 aircrafts operating in India have been grounded, Ministry of Civil Aviation Secretary Pradeep Singh Kharola on Wednesday informed that the discussions were held between the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and all airlines to minimise inconvenience caused to passengers. Speaking to media-persons after the meeting, Kharola said, "All flights of Boeing B737 Max have been grounded. Last flight was grounded around 2:30 PM. We had held a meeting with concerned airlines to ensure that safety instructions of DGCA are followed and also to ensure that because of pulling out of about 12 Aircraft of this make, passengers should not be unconvinced." "Airlines have ensured that the grounding of 12 aircraft will not significantly impact the passengers and they have drawn a very elaborate plan," he added. Elaborating on the cancellations, Kharola said that the while 14 flights were cancelled today, tomorrow will be a more challenging day. "Today Spicejet cancelled just 14 flights out of about 500 flights it operates every day. Spice Jet has said that they have increased the utilisation of existing aircraft so that cancellations get limited. With all the planned measures, tomorrow out of about 520 flights which Spice jet flies every day about 30-35 flights will get affected," he said. He also said that instructions have been issued to the concerned airlines to make sure that no sector should be left uncatered owing to cancellation. "We have told them that while cancelling flights it must be taken care that connectivity to any place is not affected and cancellation should take place on those sectors which has multiple flights. They have assured that no airport that has SpiceJet service will go un-serviced. They will be setting up a special cell to monitor the passengers' complaints," said Kharola. DGCA chief B S Bhullar also said requests have been made with all the airlines to not to surge pricing and same will be monitored by DGCA. "We have requested all airlines that fares should be kept roughly at the same level as it was before. DGCA will also be monitoring the fair trade," he said. Bhullar also informed that a NOTAM has been issued stating that no Max aircraft will be allowed to overfly, come to India or leave from India today onwards. DGCA today announced that all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in India should be grounded by 4 pm today. In 1972, Christopher Dickey had a summer job in North Georgia. His dad, James Dickey, was having his novel Deliverance turned into a movie. So Christopher got a job working on the filmas a body double for Ned Beatty, in the squeal like a pig scene. The scene, which takes up more space in the film than in Dickeys novel, also occupies more cultural space than almost any other image of the mountain South. (Another scene from Deliverancethe one with the banjo boyis a close second.) The association of that scene with Appalachia remains damaging to an entire region. Christopher Dickey eventually wrote a memoir, Summer of Deliverance, that describes his own helpless feelings as he saw his fathers more complex work of fiction turn instrument for stereotypes, built to conflate innocence and evil to justify the abuse of a place through extractive industries and neglect. Related: Appalachia finds its voice I thought of Deliverance recently, after Netflix secured the film rights to J.D. Vances Hillbilly Elegy in a $45 million deal. Hillbilly Elegy, published a few months before the 2016 presidential election, became an answer to didactic questions of Trumps win, which were framed in terms of red and blue, urban and rural. Vances story is compellingpoor kid raised in Ohio with roots in Kentucky is shuffled back and forth by his addicted mother, joins the Marines, goes to college, ends up at Yale Law Schooland he tells it as a classic bootstraps myth. It is the story of one mans way out of a dying place. But Vance goes further, to say that not only did he make it without much help, but that nobody in Appalachia will take any help anyway. Part memoir and part pseudo-sociology, Vances work makes claims for all of Appalachiachiefly, that poverty in the region is no one elses fault. Vance told his story as though it were more than just his own; as his subtitle signals, Hillbilly Elegy is a Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis. Following publication, Vance became a media celebrity and the unofficial spokesperson for Appalachia, a CNN contributor and, for a brief moment, a potential US Senate candidate. (He announced early last year that he would not run.) As a talking point to people from Appalachia, Hillbilly Elegy became the new Deliverance. Hillbilly Elegy also met with an uproar from people with a stake in Appalachiaas natives, citizens, scholars, and protectors. The writing that followed Vances book and challenged his narrative was almost worth the pain that produced it. As Hillbilly Elegy climbed best-seller lists, writers invested in Appalachia pushed back against the way that the book was being used to explain the region. It offered a too-easy answer. Op-eds, blog posts, rants, and analyses opened up new exchanges about the region. Elizabeth Cattes What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia complicated a conversation that had been stuck on repeat and that had focused on doomed industries and brain drain rather than supporting solutions. Writers such as Ivy Brashear told Vance to keep his elegy. Scholars such as T.R.C. Hutton offered a historians analysis of the book. It started to feel like Vances elegy had inadvertently catalyzed an awakening of Appalachian voicessometimes angry, sometimes joyful in their reclamation, a chorus that might just drown out the hillbilly turned venture capitalist who kept stepping to the mic. There should be no first Appalachian. There should be a wide pool of people to speak up about Appalachia. Sign up for weekly emails from the United States Project And then someone decided to turn the book into a movie. Ron Howard, who was raised in Hollywood and on all of our television sets, will direct. Vanessa Taylor, television writer on Game of Thrones and Academy Award nominee (with Guillermo del Toro, for The Shape of Water), will write the screenplay. The well-financed film will inevitably drive more attention to Vances book. The media frenzy over the movie deal reactivated the not-quite-dormant angst over Hillbilly Elegy, which has been divisive since its publication and which keeps selling. Its appeal, and the longevity of its popularitythe book spent over a year on the New York Times best-seller list, and a paperback edition has been there for monthsowes much to continued coverage of Vances Appalachia. It isnt simply that Vance keeps stepping to the mic; people also keep passing the mic to him. For too many media outlets, he has become the first Appalachian, its translator and spokesperson. But there should be no first Appalachian. There should be a wide pool of people to speak up about Appalachia. Journalists, historians, activists, photographerspeople who are already spending their time reading and talking and thinking about the region. News of the $45 million Hillbilly Elegy deal arrived in late January. Around that time, West Virginia teachers prepared once more to go on strike for a pay raise. Inside Appalachia reported that parts of eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia do not have access to safe drinking water. The Kentucky House Speaker shut down an effort to raise what is currently the lowest pension in the country. Can that $45 million draw critical attention to the region, or will it deflect aid and endorse a narrative of exceptionalism? I cringe when I think of how often people who are not from Appalachia have told me that they read Hillbilly Elegy and understand the region now. But I hold out some hope that more attention to Appalachia might make space for debate, and debate might shed some light on the wild range of life that is happening right now in those mountains: angry protests and mournful music and joyful poetry and determined activism, all derived from and leading to a love of place. An unwillingness to be the subject of an elegy. A commitment to vibrant stories and dynamic truths. There is space for these stories of Appalachia as a living placeon-screen and off. ICYMI: Ive spent two years trying to shift narratives about the South. Heres what Ive learned. Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Meredith McCarroll is the director of writing and rhetoric at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film and co-editor of the anthology Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. To become a journalist, Rajaa Elidrissi knew she would need a strategy. Growing up in a low-income household in Elmhurst, Queens, she started collecting clips at age 13. I went to a high school that was not a high-ranking high school, and I was pretty aware that it was really hard to get into a good college, she explains. After graduating in 2016 with an anthropology degree from Wesleyan University, she knew she needed to be practicalshe couldnt afford to take an unpaid internship; she had to start workingand looked for where the jobs were. That year, the jobs were in video. Currently a producer for CNBC, Elidrissi is on a secure track, for now at least. But if the industry should pivot away from video any time soon, shes ready. I see a lot of jobs for social media editors, she says, so shes started studying content analytics tools. She knows she has to stay smart and keep moving if she wants to continue as a journalist. Elidrissis calculus is familiar to mecoming from a low-income background, I entered journalism by looking for where the jobs were. I graduated from a blue-collar public high school in Appalachian Virginia, and attended a conservative Christian college because, with scholarships, its where I could afford to go. To get a job out of college, I deliberately built a skill set to supplement a resume deficient in elite degrees or high-profile internships, and became a social media editorElidrissis backup careerand eventually, a staff writer. From where I sit, I dont know many national journalists who have a background like mine. In fact, the industry sometimes seems designed to keep us out of newsrooms altogether. Trending: NYT reporters tweet sparks controversy among journalists Differences do separate me from Elidrissi. My parents arent immigrants, and I dont belong to a cultural or religious minority; overall, society placed fewer obstacles in my path. But speaking with her provided a moment of real catharsis. Anyone coming from a low-income background runs similar mental calculations: How do we get into journalism? And if we do get in, how do we afford to stay in? My conversations with Elidrissi and other sources for this piece are the only conversations of their kind Ive had since I entered journalism full timehonest conversations about class, ambition, and storytelling. Perhaps thats a function of the career. Journalists arent supposed to become the story, and talking about your background can veer into navel-gazing. But journalists arent automatons, either. Whether you cover pop culture or poverty, your background shapes your path into your chosen field. And if your background includes poverty, that path contains boulders. Sign up for CJR 's daily email The first hurdle was paying for college. So I studied very hard. I got scholarships. I worked two or three jobs to pay the bills while I was in college, says Sarah Smarsh, a Kansas-based independent journalist who has been covering class, inequality, and red-state politics for 17 years. Smarsh comes from a working-class family, and she knew that just making it to college signaled the start of a longer battle. I didnt know anyone in a newsroom who was picking me out of the pile for an internship, she says. I convinced newsrooms to bring me in as an intern. I would say the second hurdle was social capital, she adds. Even though I made it to college, I still didnt possess social capital. Like Smarsh, I knew I had to earn scholarships, and once in college, I quickly learned that my Walmart wardrobe set me apart in all the wrong ways. To achieve social mobility, the poor must culturally assimilate. You have to dress a certain way, speak a certain way, and get to know certain people. The third is impossible unless you accomplish the first two goals. Even if you manage all three, you may not experience true social mobility. Assimilation may grant you a certain degree of social capital, but social capital does not inevitably bestow its financial equivalent. Real capitalwealthremains the surest way to survive journalisms fluctuations. But by entering journalism at all, low-income people agree to extend their precarity for an indefinite term. Smarsh felt that precarity keenly when she went freelance six years ago. I had no savings and no family financial cushion to lean on. I didnt have a bread-winning husband, she explains. It was just me, and literally nothing in a bank account. Hustling. Sending pitches. Being uninsured. The only people who get to rage about poverty and economic hardship are people who are not experiencing it. Possession of a cushionwealth, againcan become necessary to stay in the field. I try to open doors as much as I can for other women of color and other journalists of color, New York Times journalist and MacArthur Fellow Nikole Hannah-Jones recently told the Womens Media Center. For an unemployed journalist who has had seven or 10 interviews and nothing pans out, I dont think I can rightly tell that person not to leave the industry . . . . And its hard to tell people to stay in a field thats not valuing them, where they are having a hard time finding full-time work. Thats a precarious position. RELATED: Puerto Ricos devastation takes a backseat to Roseanne coverage To shore up their positions, some would-be journalists go on to advanced degrees. A lack of social capital means a need to take on debt, just to get to square one. As a black woman, I didnt have a choice not to go to J-schooland thats a sentiment shared among many of my classmates. Journalism is an industry rife with nepotism, where career trajectories are determined more often by the people that you know rather than the quality of your work, notes Slates Rachelle Hampton. After paying her way through journalism school at the University of Kansas, Smarsh also took on debt to earn an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University. That might seem foolish to someone who even grew up middle-class, because of the risk inherent in taking on such debt to enter a field that hardly assures the sort of income thats going to pay it off, she says. For me, in the context of poverty, it was like I had nothing to lose. Getting that first job is a partial victory. There are bills to pay afterwards, and collectors dont care about your prose. But lets say you get that first job, and then a second. And lets say, for arguments sake, you keep going, and now youre based in a national newsroom or some other big-name outlet. It doesnt even matter if you cover poverty. You could cover pop culture, or review books, or turn numbers into charts. Youll still be an outlier, working a newsroom that may consistently miss the class angle to stories, if it covers class at all. A 2013 study by the Pew Research Centers Journalism Project found that in 52 major newsrooms, poverty accounted for less than 1 percent of coverage every year from 2007 to 2012. Journalists are drawn more to people making things happen than those struggling to pay bills; poverty is not considered a beat; neither advertisers nor readers are likely to demand more coverage, so neither will editors; and poverty stories are almost always enterprise work, requiring extra time and commitment, Dan Froomkin wrote for the Nieman Center. Journalists who cover class exclusively, or as part of an intersecting beat like gender or racial justice, tell me they sometimes have to convince editors that their stories are even newsworthy. I have heard so many times: Wheres the surprise? Gary Rivlin, author of Broke, USA, says. In Rivlins telling, editors frequently want a sensationalistic angle if theyre interested in the story at all. I try to tell stories of payday lending. The only way to sell a story of payday lending was a contrarian take that said, well, its actually a good thing. The only problem is that its not a good thing. Its a rip-off. Other journalists say theyve had similar difficulties placing pieces on class and poverty. Smarsh tells me shes woven a class sensibility into her work since her first days in a newsroom more than 15 years ago. When I started being more pointed and overt about class, even five years ago, I had a hell of a time getting the pieces picked up, she says. And interestingly, I found that what editors at top US outlets turned down, almost inevitably a top British outlet would pick up. It became such a pattern that I did develop a little bit of a theory that the UK has centuries on us, as a society or as a political unit, in reckoning with the concept of class and in finding a language to discuss it, she adds. We are in a country that has been telling itself, falsely and hypocritically, since its very foundation, that this is a country where your economic origins do not determine the outcome of your life. Smarshs statement seems obvious: I know from life and from reporting that American society is boldly, unrepentantly rigged against its most marginalized members. But this fact, while clear to me, may not be to everyone else. America is wedded to the myth of its own greatness. It insists it has created a meritocracy, which it sustains through the power of assertion. This has a knock-on effect: Journalists inhabit a skewed society, and not all of them realize it. The industry therefore suffers from structural inequalities that reflect its surroundings. Women, people of color, and people with disabilities are relatively absent from newsroom leadership for the same reasons they are relatively absent everywhere. These absences impact coverage in every respect, and poverty reporting is not exempt. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and Fear of Falling, tells me that even with decades of experience, shes always found it difficult to convince editors to cover poverty. And when outlets do assign a piece, financial hardship can complicate the reporting process. I got an assignment from The New York Times in 2009 to write a series of essays about the effects of the recession on people who were already economically struggling, she explains, because at that time, the typical Times article was about people who had to drop their private pilates class. So Ehrenreich hit the road, collecting stories from working-class Americans across the countryonly to encounter a financial roadblock. I realized I was not going to make enough money from my payments from the Times to cover my expenses, she continues. My next great realization was that the only people who get to rage about poverty and economic hardship are people who are not experiencing it, who have some kind of buffer and savings. Ehrenreich later launched the Economic Hardship Reporting Project to fill in this funding gap and support working-class journalists covering poverty in America. But nearly a decade later, the national press still frequently stumbles over poverty, and the related issue of class. Well, Ive said enough about the subject of sexual harassment, and how the focus has lingered so much on activists and media people, and thats not where the rampant sexual harassment is going on, Ehrenreich says. Its important to cover and bring to light; the world is a better place without Harvey Weinstein. But it leaves out these stories of housekeepers and agricultural workers. Jenni Monet, an independent journalist who covers indigenous stories, got her start working in a tiny newsroom in the Four Corners region, where covering Navajo tribal events was part of the daily beat. Shes noticed differences between local and national newsrooms when it comes to writing about class. My entire career has been trying to convince editors to cover Native stories in a way that isnt poverty porn, she says. It wasnt until I started working in places like New York City [that] I started to see the extreme disconnect that exists, she adds. Its realizing the enormous amount of explaining involved. Those failures became particularly clear during the 2016 coverage of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservations protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Here you have the largest indigenous-led movement of our modern time, says Monet. It started with an environmental agenda deeply rooted in race-based politics that dealt with segregation, that dealt with cyclical poverty based on government decisions that have gravely affected tribal communities for decades. Whether you cover pop culture or poverty, your background shapes your path into your chosen field. And if your background includes poverty, that path contains boulders. And guess how the media responded? Monet asks. At first, they didnt show up. When they finally did, it was all novelty-based. Look at this camp, they have teepees and kitchens and they cook and its cute! Standing Rock, as Monet recounts it, was a missed opportunity for the national press, an inevitable failure for such a whitewashed industry, whose coverage of the intersection of race and poverty is uneven at best. But sometimes newsrooms can get it right. Matthew Desmonds 2017 New York Times article on the mortgage-interest deduction is a superlative example: Desmonds reportage both flips a popular narrativethat entitlements mostly benefit the poorand examines the way one benefit for home ownership reinforces structural inequalities. Differences in homeownership rates remain the prime driver of the nations racial wealth gap, he writes. If black and Hispanic families owned homes at rates similar to whites, the racial wealth gap would be reduced by almost a third. Readers came away from Desmonds piece better understanding how class inequality reinforces racial inequality, and its because he presents context. When pieces lack context, they provide incomplete accounts that can reinforce damaging stereotypes. NPRs 2017 investigation into fraudulent graduation rates at Washington, DCs Ballou High School focused heavily on the schools high truancy rate, but restricted mention of poverty to an anonymous students brief quotes and a few passing references to traumatic events in students lives. Ballou, of course, is a predominantly black school in a predominantly black neighborhood. The schools problems can be traced directly to segregation, gentrification, broken-windows policing, and education reform; each problem or policy binds a knot where race ties into class. I think the national press does have a strain of language around economic inequality, says Jamilah King, who covers race and justice for Mother Jones magazine. We dont necessarily do a good job of marrying that with racial justice. Journalists who arent from low-income backgrounds arent necessarily hostile to the poor, but class prejudice can manifest as a form of blindness. Based on my own experiences and the experiences others related to me for this piece, simple ignorance is much more common. Its more that certain experiences, like poverty, are opaque to people who have not lived them. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, journalisms class blindness showed everywhere: Story after story reinforced Trumps self-appointed role as the champion of white working-class America. The vast majority of Trump voters, as we now well know, boasted an income of $50,000 or higher. Suburban America is Trump Country. Though there have been some corrective pieces, the average Trump Country profile still stars low-income whiteswho, shock of shocks, still support their candidate, no matter the swing in the news cycle. These profiles dont produce any real news, and they dont bring readers any closer to understanding the reasons for Trumps victory, more than a year later. ICYMI: Covering a country where race is everywhere For once, its not so difficult to convince editors to cover poor people. But that Trumpian focus can also narrow coverage. While theres value in understanding how Obama counties became Trump counties, these stories form one narrative thread in a broader story about the consequences of de-unionization, extractive capitalism, and ingrained racial prejudice. Meanwhile, the other true stories of working-class America struggle to break through the noise. When Trump was first elected, there was a lot of talk and discussion in the media at large, but also inside newsrooms, about what we should do to better cover the white middle and white working class, says King. I think thats sort of misguided. Obviously, white folks are not the only working-class folks. Coverage of the working class skews powerfully to Trump, partly because the president spews so much chum into the news cycle. But a reactive press cannot necessarily fulfill its function as the fourth estate. No story springs fully formed from the ether. Stories have histories, and their lineages can overlap with each other in meaningful ways. Consider the electoral weakness of the Democratic Party: This is a multifaceted story. De-unionization is one of those facetsand it, in turn, is linked to a decline in mining and manufacturing jobs. Its easy to criticize in hindsight, but it seems fair to say that if de-unionization had received more national attentionif it had been linked, repeatedly, to economic losses and to organized labors status as an electoral engine for Democratsperhaps the press would have anticipated Hillary Clintons Rust Belt woes. Post-Trump, national interest in unions increased. A recent statewide teacher walkout in West Virginia received coverage on CNN and headlines in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other major outlets. Its not yet clear if walkouts in Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona will benefit from the same attention, and theres still a disparity visible in which labor stories receive national coverage, and which do not. Labor stories are instructive because theyre about working people, who can also be low-income. Its hard to see how this will change as long as Trump is the most popular hook. The stories of the poor possess their own texture and weight. Poverty is a series of surprises, most of them horrible; life, for the poor, means careening from one plot twist to another while the world looks straight through you. It shouldnt be this way, and in journalism, at least, the solutions are obvious. Pay a living wage. Openly advertise your jobsand send the entry-level listings to state schools as well as the Ivy League. Reconsider keeping your entire staff in an expensive coastal city. Dont limit class, or the various beats in its category, to election-year hits or special investigations. These stories deserve everyday attention for what they tell us about the cracks in Americas facade. Make it easier for poor folks to enter your world, and well even tell those stories for you. Were resilient, after all, and we make damn good journalists. RELATED: After new death toll report Friday, Sunday TV ignores Puerto Rico Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Sarah Jones is a staff writer for The New Republic. She earned degrees from Cedarville University and Goldsmiths, University of London, and grew up in rural Washington County, Virginia. Yesterday, after British Prime Minister Theresa Mays Brexit deal went up in flames (again), The New York Times accidentally published pre-prepared copy outlining both, opposing outcomes of the latest Brexit vote, as if both had actually happened. Successive paragraphsseparated by the word or on a line of its ownreferred, respectively to Parliaments second rejection of the plan and its surprise approval. Clearly, someone forgot to delete the latter. Scott Bryan, the British journalist who spotted the flub and put it on Twitter, asked: What if the world just split in two and we are now living in two dimensions? The Timess choose-your-own-Brexit-adventure moment is a convenient metaphor for a process that could still plausibly go in any number of totally contradictory directions before Britain leaves the European Unionor doesntin 16 days. After months of legislative gridlock, journalists covering Brexit are running out of new things to say and trite ways to say them. In previous Theresa May stories weve already used Groundhog Day, high noon, crunch time, cliff edge, cockroach/nuclear winter, Maybot, dead woman walking, wounded she-elephant, the Timess Ellen Barry tweeted. Running out of metaphors. Will pay cash. Robert Peston, the political editor of Britains ITV, went with a Game of Thrones comparisonthat, too, felt tired. May herself offered up a metaphor by losing her voice and addressing Parliament in a hoarse whisper yesterday. Many outlets prominently mentioned it; The Sun, a well-read British tabloid, this morning splashed the headline CROAKY HORROR SHOW. It wasnt a good pun, or a new reference. In 2017, May famously coughed her way through an excruciating speech. ICYMI: An odd trend being adopted by CNN, NYT, and Politico Mays lost voice symbolized her loss of control over the Brexit process, which is now more or less in the hands of Parliament. In the UK, several major newspapers spelled that out. The Guardian hailed The day May lost control; The Financial Times and the i used similar wording in front-page headlines. Many US outlets took uncertainty as their lead theme. The Timess Stephen Castle described Britain hurtling into unknown political territory. An AP article by Jill Lawless and Raf Casert painted a picture of chaos and doubt. Its headline? May Day. What happens next? As Jack Blanchard, who writes Politicos daily UK newsletter, wrote this morning: We dont know. I dont know, you dont know, they dont know. She [May] definitely doesnt know. Seriously, nobody knows. We just dont know. Blanchard, to his credit, gamely outlined how the next few days could pan out. British lawmakers will vote today to rule outor notthe prospect of quitting the EU without a transition deal. (Confusingly, May seems to be asking her colleagues to both oppose no deal and leave it on the table for future leverage; perhaps she took a leaf from the Timess book.) If no deal is ruled out, lawmakers will vote tomorrow on the terms of an extension to the Brexit process. An extension, however, is not entirely in Britains controlit would need to be approved by all 27 other EU member states. That outcome, itself, is hard to predict: a CNN flowchart mapping out possible ways forward peters out into question marks. So far today, British Brexit headlines are trading in ifs, expected tos, and would-bes. Early this morning, the government confirmed that it would, in the event of a no-deal Brexit, temporarily stop checking goods crossing between Northern Ireland (part of the UK) and the Republic of Ireland (part of the EU)a key sticking point in the Brexit deadlock. That eventuality would, officials conceded, give smugglers free rein. The announcement saw journalists reach, once again, for the metaphors; it would, they wrote, effectively amount to a customs honesty box (an honor system). Metaphors, increasingly, are all we have to go on. Sign up for CJR 's daily email Below, more on Brexit: How we got here: If, for some reason, you want to revisit coverage of previous Brexit false dawns, I wrote about UK media reaction after May first struck her deal, in November, and US media reaction after she canceled a vote on it, in December. Stupid people and journalists: Before yesterdays vote, Geoffrey Cox, Britains attorney general, stood up in Parliament to offer legal advice on the last-minute tweaks to Mays deal. While Cox voted for the deal, his advice helped kill it among his colleagues. A government minister told the Financial Times s George Parker and Sebastian Payne that Cox erred by putting a criticism of the deal right at the end of his advice, where stupid people and journalists would easily see it. Backstop to the future: Coxs advice concerned the backstop, a controversial mechanism in Mays deal that would prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland, whatever happens with Brexit. If youve seen the term but dont know what it means, the AP has an explainer . What is Labours stance? Britains opposition Labour Party seems to change course from one day to the next. Under pressure from many rank-and-file members, the partys leadership recently backed a second referendum on Brexit. As BuzzFeeds Mark Di Stefano notes , that story was Sky Newss most viral political story of the past six months. But Jeremy Corbyn, Labours leader, did not mention a second vote in his rebuttal of May yesterday, and a party spokesperson this morning suggested pushing for one is not a top priority. Other notable stories: ICYMI: A speculative, yet explosive claim causing awkward tension at WaPo Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among other outlets. He writes CJRs newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop. Honda Motor Co. will recall more than a million vehicles in the U.S. to replace a batch of faulty air bag parts that were installed as part of the largest auto safety recall in history. A driver in Maryland was injured in a January crash when a 2004 Honda Odyssey driver-side air bag inflator, made by the now-defunct Takata Corp., ruptured, Honda said in a statement. The inflator that failed was a replacement installed in 2015 under the terms of a prior recall. The vehicle was included in one of Hondas earliest campaigns to replace Takata air bag inflators that contained a propellant that can become unstable and explode in a crash, a defect linked to more than a dozen deaths and at least 220 injuries worldwide. The Maryland incident is the first reported injury linked to a Takata air bag made with a chemical additive known as a desiccant that absorbs moisture to prevent the ammonium nitrate propellant from becoming unstable. Honda is the only automaker affected by the recall, Kathryn Henry, a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration spokeswoman, said in an email. The agency has an ongoing investigation into the safety of similar Takata air bag inflators containing a desiccant, she said. The addition of the additive and was thought to be a solution to the problem with the original air bags that were been found to activate with too much force in a crash, spraying the interior of vehicles with metal parts and leading to the recall of some 37 million vehicles in the U.S. Honda said it suspects the desiccant was improperly handled at a Takata plant in Mexico, allowing the additive to become saturated with moisture when it was used to make the inflators. In a statement, the automaker noted that a definitive root-cause had not yet been identified. The type of inflator covered by the recall announced Tuesday contains substantially more desiccant than other desiccated inflator types, and it appears that the excessive moisture contained in the desiccant introduced humidity into the sealed inflator during assembly, accelerating propellant degradation over time, Honda spokesman Chris Martin said in an email. NHTSA said drivers should check their recall status at www.nhtsa.dot.gov/recalls, noting that not all Honda and Acura vehicles that have received replacement air bags under recalls are affected by the latest recall. Copyright 2021 Bloomberg. An investigation into fierce wildfires that swept Northern Californias wine country in 2017, killing 46 people, found no basis to criminally charge PG&E, the utility whose power lines helped spark the conflagration, prosecutors said on Monday. The decision, which leaves the company potentially liable for billions of dollars in civil damages, capped a review by the district attorneys of Sonoma, Napa, Humboldt and Lake Counties, as well as the state attorney generals office, according to a joint statement. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection concluded last June that a dozen of the wind-driven blazes were ignited by power lines owned by the Pacific Gas & Electric Company and cited code violations in eight of those fires. CLEVELAND, Ohio Even in dance, theres still such a thing as a labor of love. Dance may be an expensive, elaborate, and time-consuming art form, but that didnt keep acclaimed choreographer Pam Tanowitz from pursuing a purely sentimental project shes calling Recital #1: Five Small Dances for Cleveland. This is for my soul, explained the founder of Pam Tanowitz Dance, by phone from New York. Its not an assignment or a commission. This is coming from someplace else. Tanowitz isnt just speaking figuratively. The immersive new work shes developing in Northeast Ohio via The Movement Project has a literal, physical place of origin: Clevelands Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ. During a recent visit to Northeast Ohio for DanceClevelands ADF in CLE, Tanowitz had occasion to rehearse at the church, home to The Movement Project, and the experience inspired her to create a work for and loosely about the historic space. I just started poking around and exploring, Tanowitz recalled. It was just a really cool space and cool vibe that I got there. The stained-glass window, balcony, and chairs are what sold me. The origin of Five Small Dances is special enough. Indeed, its not often that a dance work is born strictly out of love for a place. But what really sets the piece apart is the way its coming together. Talk about working under pressure. Where most works of modern dance evolve over periods of weeks or months, Five Small Dances has less than a week to materialize. As of this writing, in fact, Tanowitz has yet to begin rehearsing or even to hire all her dancers. Thats because the forces shes using arent strictly her own. For a multitude of reasons, Tanowitz is making Five Small Dances a collaborative affair, pairing dancers from her own company with local freelancers and artists from The Movement Project. She has some choreography in mind, but wont begin setting it on her impromptu, three-part company until next week. I think she likes what were doing in the community and wanted to make that connection, said dancer Grace Nicklos, director of education and outreach at The Movement Project. The work is also unusual from a viewing perspective. Forget those seats at Pilgrim Church that inspired Tanowitz. Five Small Dances wont be a traditional, sit-and-watch kind of dance performance. Rather, it will be an immersive experience. Two waves of patrons will spend roughly 30 minutes each touring the church, both upstairs and downstairs, while viewing a series of simultaneous, ongoing performances. Tanowitz said dancers, adorned in costumes by Maile Okamura, will be organized into small groups, or nodules, and viewers will be able to take in their work individually or collectively. All the while, composer Dana Jessen, an associate professor at Oberlin College Conservatory, will fill the space with the sound of what Tanowitz called structured improvisation on bassoon and electronics. Its a bit of a different process, but were excited for the opportunity, Nicklos said. We think itll be neat to see all the different elements come into play. Therell be that element of surprise. As for the content and meaning of the dance, thatll be entirely up to the viewer. With Five Small Dances, Tanowitz said shes not attempting to depict anything or relate any sort of story or message. Her only goals, she said, are to raise awareness of an interesting space and establish a medium for mutual interaction. Its really about me coming there and engaging with the audience, Tanowitz said. Its a layered dialogue. Its an experiment, and it might fail. But Im excited to try. PREVIEW Pam Tanowitz Dance and The Movement Project What: Recital #1: Five Small Dances for Cleveland When: 7 and 9 p.m. Friday, March 22. Where: Pilgrim Church, 2592 W. 14th St., Cleveland. Tickets: $10, available online or at the door. Visit themovementproject.org. BEACHWOOD, Ohio -- Theft, Cedar Road: At 1:35 p.m. March 8, it was reported that boxes of cigarettes worth a total value of $7,931 were stolen from a truck in the parking lot of Saks Fifth Avenue at Beachwood Place mall, 26300 Cedar Road. Suspicion, Auburn Drive: At 1:10 p.m. March 7, a man who had just left Ahuja Medical Center entered the lobby of Cleveland Clinics Opthalmology Center, 2000 Auburn Drive, wearing only underwear and shoes. Police found that the man, 26, of Cleveland, was the subject of an active Newburgh Heights police warrant and arrested him. Open container, Park East Drive: At 1:45 a.m. March 7, police arrested a Mayfield Heights man, 29, in the parking lot of the DoubleTree Hotel by Hilton, 3663 Park East Drive. The man was charged with failure to maintain physical control of a motor vehicle, possession of drug abuse instruments and having an open container of alcohol in his car. OVI, Chagrin Boulevard: At 2:40 a.m. March 8, police arrested a Euclid man, 27, for operating a vehicle while intoxicated, speeding and marijuana possession. Driving under suspension, Cedar Road: At 9:40 a.m. March 9, a Cleveland woman, 24, was arrested outside of Saks Fifth Avenue for driving with a suspended license and for possession of marijuana. OVI, South Woodland Road: At 2:30 a.m. March 9, police stopped a car that was being driven erratically and learned that the driver, a Cleveland man, 31, was intoxicated and in possession of a handgun. The man was charged with OVI, not driving within marked lanes, prohibited blood-alcohol content and improper handling of a firearm. Physical control, Larchmont Drive: At 4:45 p.m. March 9, an East Cleveland woman, 22, was charged with failure to maintain physical control of an automobile. Assured clear distance, Cedar Road: At 7:10 p.m. March 10, a Parma man, 41, was involved in a crash. He was charged with failure to maintain an assured clear distance after he followed too closely behind the vehicle in front of his. The man was also found to be driving without a license. Theft, Cedar Road: At 5:30 p.m. March 10, a Garfield Heights boy, 16, was arrested for stealing merchandise worth $320 from Dillard's at Beachwood Place. Driving under suspension, Richmond Road: At 6:15 p.m. March 11, police were called to LaPlace Mall at Richmond and Cedar roads on complaints that a man was walking in the street and asking passing motorists for money. Police located the man nearby in a car. He was charged with driving a car without displaying license plates and for multiple license suspensions. If you would like to discuss the police blotter, please visit our crime and courts comments page. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- FirstEnergy Solutions and its creditors hope FES can emerge from bankruptcy as an entirely new company, debt-free and maybe free of its union contracts at its nuclear power plants. The new company would be entirely free of FirstEnergy, have its own board of directors and issue its own stock, according to initial company filings last month and during the past weekend. The reorganization, the subject of what is sure to be a contentious hearing next week and possibly up for a vote of all FES creditors in May, is already the target of heavy criticism from labor, consumer and environmental groups. The Utility Workers Union of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers representing employees at the companys four nuclear and two remaining coal plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania noted in objections filed Tuesday that the re-organization plan is designed deliberately to breach the collective bargaining agreements at the plants by not requiring that the new company accept the contracts. And that could pose safety issues, especially at the nuclear plants, the unions warned. Operating power plants without the trained workforce that now exists by virtue of the tenure and stability of experienced unionized employees introduces serious risk into the future operations of the plants, the unions wrote. They also are arguing that when FES recently sold off two of its smaller power plants it followed the letter of the contracts, which required the buyers to accept, at least initially, the contracts as they were written. If FES insists on this course, the unions have the right under bankruptcy case law to file for damages that will impair the recovery [of money owed] for other creditors, Cleveland-based labor lawyer Joyce Goldstein wrote. A group of Ohio and regional consumer and environmental groups led by the Midwest-based Environmental Law and Policy Center has objected to the re-organization plan because it appears to assume that the new company will own and continue to operate its four nuclear plants and two coal-fired plants. But that is not a certainty, they argue, and further point out that the company has until the end of this month to report the fiscal health of the decommissioning funds that by law each must accompany each reactor, whatever company owns it. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, relying on 2016 figures from the company, earlier said the funds were adequate -- but that was an analysis based on the plants continuing to operate. FES has officially announced that it will close all of the plants by the fall of 2021. One reality that the environmental and consumer groups are not acknowledging in their objection is the companys effort to persuade at least Ohio lawmakers to create new subsidies to support the continued operations of the plants. Proposed legislation is expected by the end of March. The Ohio Consumers Counsel also has objected to the re-organization plan as it now stands and has sided with the environmental and consumer groups. The current disclosure statement contains insufficient details for parties in interest to assess the risks that these decommissioning costs are not being sufficiently funded under the Plan. If the power plant decommissioning costs are not being sufficiently funded under the FirstEnergy Debtors Plan, then OCC is concerned and the Court should be concerned that there may later be an effort to make Ohioans pay for these power plant decommissioning costs, the OCC wrote in a filing Tuesday. An FES spokeswoman said in an email that the company believes that the cost of doing nothing to save the nuclear plants will ultimately cost Ohio taxpayers more in the long run. Closing those plants will cost 4,000 jobs, affect the state GDP and take out 93 percent of the current carbon-free energy produced in Ohio. Michel also told the court that he was put in prison with 16-17 Kashmiri separatist leaders. NEW DELHI: Christian Michel, the alleged middleman in AgustaWestland chopper scam case, claimed in a Delhi court on Tuesday that former CBI special director Rakesh Asthana met him in Dubai and threatened to make his life hell inside jail if he did not toe line of the agency in its investigation. Sometime back, Rakesh Asthana met me in Dubai and threatened that my life would be made hell and thats what is going on. My next-door inmate is (gangster) Chotta Rajan. I dont understand what crime I have committed to be put along with those who have killed several people, he said. Michel also told the court that he was put in prison with 16-17 Kashmiri separatist leaders. The statements were made by Michel before special judge Arvind Kumar allowed the ED to interrogate him inside Tihar Jail. The court said a jail official will remain present and Michels lawyer has been allowed a limited access during interrogation, it said. The court took note of Michels submission alleging mental torture inside the jail and directed the jail authorities to produce the CCTV footage and reports by Thursday. CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Fire Chief Dave Freeman knew that his 2018 annual report was not going to get the same fanfare as the police departments. Thats because our fire calls didnt go down by 28 percent last year, Freeman said in response to the corresponding statistical drop in violent crimes recorded in 2018. Like overall calls to the Police Department rising in 2018, Cleveland Heights firefighters registered a roughly 11 percent increase in emergency runs last year, up to 7,158 calls. Of those, nearly 1,500 (21 percent) were fire calls, compared to over 5,650 medical-related calls (79 percent), including nearly 3,700 hospital transports. This reflects a steady rise in calls that has been going on since 2014. Freeman said he tried compiling statistics from last year to see what areas were most affected. "We just went up in everything, so I can't pinpoint it to any specific cause," Freeman said, although some new software may change that in about six months. Thats when the ages of patients may be fully factored into the fire statistics, something that area hospitals are already investigating in terms of the silver tsunami, or baby-boomer aging. Freeman noted that a large portion of the department's call volume are "non-transports," where patients don't want to be taken to hospitals, so the city can't collect on an ambulance run. There are times when a rescue squad is unnecessary and probably shouldn't have been called, he added. Although it could be potentially controversial, Freeman said that some communities are starting to charge for those calls, generally seeking reimbursement on the third time after two warnings. But where transports have only been allowed to hospital emergency rooms, which Freeman characterized to council as prohibitively expensive in some cases, new guidelines might allow firefighters to take patients to urgent care or even their own doctors offices. Another innovation being rolled out could involve on-site care through tele-medicine, with a physician prescribing medication through the responding firefighters at the scene for things such as rashes or flu. Councilman Kahlil Seren recommended that the department continue to point seniors and qualifying residents in touch with programs that can lessen the chance of falls throughout the house with railings, banisters and other fixtures. As for the current throes of the opioid crisis, Mayor Carol Roe, who is also a nurse, asked how Cleveland Heights appears to be skirting the statewide and national epidemic. Freeman is also compiling more detailed statistics there, but noted that the Cuyahoga County medical examiner only registered two deaths from opioids in Cleveland Heights last year, as opposed to many more in cities of similar size. But one "happy coincidence" may be the fact that there are no major highways running through Cleveland Heights, which seems to be a recurring theme in opioid use, where presence of the drug correlates to major transportation arteries, Freeman reasoned. In other highlights from the 2018 annual report, about 1,570 fire inspections were conducted last year, and 170 smoke detectors were installed free of charge through a homeowners' program sponsored by the Red Cross. Meanwhile, the citys fire inspector remains busy working on the renovation projects at Monticello and Roxboro middle schools to keep them up to fire code and on schedule to reopen in the 2019-20 school year. The number of car fires continued to dwindle, down to nine last year, with Freeman recalling over 25 years ago when 50 car fires a year was the norm. Cleveland Heights was also in the process of attaining its "Ready Certify" designation for emergency preparedness that was awarded through the county earlier this year. And in the process of getting that certification, local firefighters were doing some training in December at a Fairmount Boulevard area church when a call came in about an injured arborist nearby. "We had numerous personnel there that we could send over right away," Freeman said, commending Fire Lt. Brian Gorski for essentially holding the man up in the tree by way of a ladder truck for about 45 minutes. If he had dropped down with the injuries he had, it would have killed him -- we had to get him supported and cut his harness loose, Freeman told council, explaining later that a large tree branch had struck the man and pinned his lifeline, trapping him in place and injuring his abdomen. Crews with the East Tech Regional Rescue team and Cleveland Heights firefighters were able to get him safely to the ground and then to the hospital. As for following Police Chief Annette Mecklenburgs 2018 Annual Report -- which also showed property crimes dropping by nearly 20 percent from the previous year, burglaries by half -- Freeman told council I should have gone first. NORTH OLMSTED, Ohio -- Even though residents twice voted down a parks and recreation new-money levy last year, most folks agree that theres a need for added amenities in the community. Thats why city officials are once again applying for an Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) NatureWorks Program grant for a proposed outdoor fitness park at North Olmsted Community Park. In 2018, we requested a little over $70,000 in funding for the project, which was estimated at $107,000, North Olmsted Director of Planning and Development Kimberly Lieber said. We were the runner-up in Cuyahoga County, and ODNR offered us just $4,000, so the project could not move forward. However, weve been offered an opportunity to reapply for the same grant and to submit additions and amendments that will score a few more points for the city. We were so close last year. Considering the levy failures, Lieber said the city is working extra hard to come up with additional funding. This includes reaching out to community groups asking for letters of support, as well as small donations to the project to illustrate partnerships and investments by the greater community. As far as the proposed outdoor fitness park, which would be located in the vicinity of the current playgrounds, the amenities include eight pieces of equipment permanently installed on a concrete pad, with sidewalk connections. As the area is currently an open field, a removable shade structure will be installed to ensure the space is usable and comfortable on warm and sunny days, Lieber said. A low fence will create a sense of separation from the nearby playgrounds. Benches will be installed on the perimeter to give patrons an area to rest during their workouts. The proposed equipment is entirely senior-friendly and includes pieces to serve those with disabilities, as well, so the park can meet the needs of all abilities in the community. Mayor Kevin Kennedy said the grant provides an excellent opportunity for the city to present a type of new equipment that is growing in popularity. This is where people spend half an hour working out as they walk around, Kennedy said. It would really be a nice addition to the North Olmsted Park. The hope is that outdoor fitness could draw new users looking for exercise options that dont require a paid membership to participate. Lieber said the application is due June 1, with the grant amount being awarded this fall. If successful, this would be a 2020 construction project, Lieber said. If North Olmsted doesnt receive significant funding for the outdoor fitness park, Lieber is unsure if the city will move forward. At this point, I dont know, Lieber said. The administration and council are currently discussing a strategy for parks and recreation since the failure of the levy last year. It will depend on the direction city leaders decide to take. Added Kennedy: Were kind of formulating a plan. I think the key thing is we have a rec plan, so we want to stay with that. Its just how can we get this thing started and get the ball rolling without having to go to the taxpayers in the near future. SOLON, Ohio -- Feasibility studies have had a rough go of it lately in the city. Back in December, City Council tabled a $37,000 engineering and design study for the proposed Solon-to-Chagrin Falls trail, after a $2.9 million line item was removed from the proposed 2019 budget. Talks continue between the city and neighbors concerned about their proximity to the proposed trail, which has already qualified for $800,000 in state grants. Then last month, a $45,280 feasibility study to look at the city becoming a municipal internet service provider (ISP) did not make it out of council's Finance Committee. A Request For Proposals was issued in September and six responses were received, ranging from about $37,000 to more than $194,000. After a Feb. 19 discussion with city Information Technologies Director Jim Gibbs, the Finance Committee voted 3-0 against the acceptance of the RFP, removing it from the ensuing City Council agenda. Most of the concern centered on the initial ballpark figure of $15 million to get the fiber optics network up and running. I dont even know if Im there to do the study, Councilman Jeremy Zelwin said, citing the need to remain fiscally responsible to our residents and not increase taxes. Gibbs provided background on seven success stories, the closest being Fairlawn in Summit County, with 7,500 residents and a system that is operationally cash positive after three years. Gibbs said that FairlawnGig is viewed as a quality of life amenity, an approach that he argued Solon should also take. He also noted that the Municipal ISP Research Team was recommending a firm that worked initially with Fairlawn to do the Solon feasibility study. The idea is that we dont have to compete based on a bottom-line profit, which frees us to provide service in a different way, Gibbs said. We can benefit and we dont have to be beholden to our stock price. Ward 2 Council Representative Robert Pelunis questioned whether Solon would be starting out from a flawed analysis, then wind up with not enough revenue to support breaking even on it. Gibbs acknowledged that Solons industrial stalwarts, such as Nestle and Swagelok, would likely stick with the bigger world players as their internet providers, with the city serving more as a backup system. As for competing with private enterprise, the city is "still the backstop on those bonds" that might be needed for startup costs, Pelunis said. That's one big reason why a feasibility study is needed, Gibbs said, comparing the overall investment to a mortgage and a 30-year commitment. "I'm not asking you to render judgment on the entire network at this time," Gibbs said. "But at least give us a chance to get another data point so we can make that final decision in the coming months." Councilwoman Nancy Meany, who chairs the Finance Committee, questioned why the close and comparable city of Hudson was not included in Gibbs Feb. 19 presentation. Gibbs said it was not a case of avoidance. In fact, Hudson and its high-speed fiber Velocity Broadband system were visited by Solons ISP research team. The City of Hudson shared very openly and honestly what aspects of their network implementation went right and what items could have gone better, Gibbs wrote. Gibbs noted that Hudson worked with another finalist for the Solon feasibility study contract. Overall, they were pleased with the feasibility study (the other company) did. However, they also felt that Hudson quickly outgrew the guidance offered and needed to seek other sources of input from other outside agencies for continued growth of their network, Gibbs wrote. Hudson officials could not be reached for comment late Tuesday (March 12), but an announcement posted on their website stated that City Council had passed legislation on March 5 that places Velocity Broadband in an enterprise fund. In governmental accounting, an enterprise fund is a fund that provides goods or services for a fee that makes the goods or services self-supporting, the Hudson website explained. This also provides additional transparency, as it separates the financial results of Velocity Broadband from other city operations. Gibbs reasoned that Hudson set out to provide for a handful of businesses in the early going, then moved into the residential market. "If you under-capitalize these projects, they fail," Gibbs told the Finance Committee. "If you dip your toe into these projects, they fail.' Meany said she had "concerns right away" last August when the RFP was introduced to council, and they have only intensified since then. "I look at this as a potential disaster," Meany said. "I think it's a huge mistake for the city to undertake something like this. There are way, way too many alarm bells for me." Meany believes that broadband, at least in Solons case, should remain in the private sector, rather than some pie-in-the-sky public initiative. Zelwin asked if there had been any interest in competing cable and internet providers coming in to give Spectrum and AT&T a run for their money. Gibbs said that Wide Open West -- "WOW!" -- had approached the city about building out its network into the Solon market, but that interest cooled upon learning that the city might launch is own ISP. They did not want to split the pie four ways, Gibbs said. Womans miscarriage excuse may have been lie: Mayfield Heights Police Blotter MAYFIELD HEIGHTS, Ohio --Traffic stop, Mayfield Road: A vehicle was stopped March 2 on suspicion of the driver having an active warrant with the Lake County Sheriffs Office. The driver told officers she was bleeding and having a miscarriage, but had left Hillcrest Hospital because she was told it would be a two-hour wait to be seen. She said she had been contacted earlier that day by the sheriffs office regarding the warrant, but told them she was having a miscarriage. She was told to be medically cleared before turning herself in, but she did not go to the hospital because she did not have a car. Officers asked why she did not call 911, but she had no explanation. The Painesville woman, 37, was subsequently taken to the hospital. Dispatch later advised officers that the womans mother had called and said her daughter is not pregnant. A passenger in the vehicle was found to have active warrants out of Macedonia, Cleveland Heights and Parma. While the warrants were being confirmed, the Cleveland man, 42, complained of a diabetic episode and requested paramedics. Domestic violence, SOM Center Road: A 39-year-old woman was arrested at her home Feb. 27 for domestic violence after an incident involving her husband, who told officers she is bipolar and not taking her medication. She was later taken to Hillcrest Hospital and pink-slipped after her therapist told police she should be admitted to a mental health facility. Fraud, Cobblestone Drive: A resident reported Feb. 28 that someone had hacked his online bank account and changed his contact phone number and email address. There was also a fraudulent $500 transaction transferred from his account to another account. His bank is investigating. Harassment, Marsol Road: A woman said Feb. 28 that a man she had met on an online dating website started threatening her after he asked her for money and she refused to send him any. Officers told her the description of events was consistent with a scam and they assisted her with blocking the suspect through social media. Motor vehicle accident, Westerham Road: A utility pole was struck March 1 by a vehicle that went off the roadway. Power lines came down as a result, and the driver, a 37-year-old resident, was cited for not maintaining reasonable control and taken to the hospital for treatment of her injuries. Theft, Marsol Road: An apartment resident said March 1 that his laundry -- consisting of towels and underwear -- went missing from a washing machine in a laundry room. Surveillance video is being obtained to try to identify a suspect. Theft, Maplewood Road: A woman said March 1 that firearms had been removed from her home in 2015 while she was being evaluated for schizophrenia. She said they were taken by her ex-husbands grandmother, but that woman was now denying she had ever taken them. The incident was documented. Disturbance, Mayfield Road: Officers responded March 2 to a report of a disturbance between a woman and the father of her children at the Gates Mills Place apartments. They learned the woman was dropping off their children and got into an argument with the man and his new girlfriend. Nobody chose to pursue the matter, but the man, 27, was arrested on an active warrant with South Euclid police. Harassment, SOM Center Road: A Starbucks manager said March 4 that a customer has been calling the store continually in reference to an incorrectly made drink. Officers learned the man was supposed to have received a free drink the last time he went through the drive-through, but due to a misunderstanding, he did not. The manager said he told her he would have fought the manager on duty, but had marijuana in his vehicle and his friends were not going to jail over a drink. Officers contacted the Solon man, 43, and advised him to stop contacting the business. He said he has degrees in food service management and was trying to share his knowledge with the manager. Theft, Fox Hollow Drive: A rug cleaner and blender were reported missing from a residents home March 5. The resident utilizes an assisted living company and has had several people in his home. The incident is under investigation. See more Mayfield Heights news at Cleveland.com/hillcrest. If you would like to discuss the police blotter, please visit our crime and courts comments page. CLEVELAND, Ohio More than three years after Ohio lawmakers passed a law forbidding the state from contracting for health services with any entity that performs or promotes non-therapeutic abortions, a federal court gave the state the OK to put the law into effect. An 11-6 ruling by the full 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati says the law is constitutional, overturning a decision made by a federal judge who blocked the law in 2016. This means taxpayer money that Planned Parenthood uses for non-abortion-related services can be stripped from the organization. Pro-life advocates hailed the ruling, while Planned Parenthood said it was weighing its legal options. The law then-Gov. John Kasich signed was first introduced by former state Reps. Bill Patmon, a Cleveland Democrat, and Margaret Conditt, a Butler County Republican. It came in the wake of the release the release of three undercover videos by anti-abortion activists with what they claimed were Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of fetal body parts to medical researchers. Lawmakers were not dissuaded even after a Texas grand jury in January found no wrongdoing by the abortion provider and instead indicted the anti-abortion activist who filmed the videos. Those charges later were dropped. Planned Parenthood has 26 locations in Ohio, though only three provide abortions. The organization says the law will deprive rural areas of much needed health services. AKRON, Ohio A 79-year-old woman was grazed in the head after shooting broke out between two vehicles, police say, with the victims car hit by stray bullets. The unidentified woman was not seriously injured and was treated and released at Cleveland Clinic Akron General Hospital. According to police, the shooting broke out at 3 p.m. Monday near the intersection of West Crosier and Princeton streets, which is just south of Interstate 76 in the Summit Lake neighborhood. Occupants in the two vehicles were shooting at each other and left the scene before officers arrived. A witness tells police that one of the vehicles was a gold four-door Chevrolet. No other injuries were reported. Anyone with information can call police at 330-375-2490 or 330-375-2TIP, or the Summit County Crimestoppers Inc. at 330-434-COPS. Tips can be sent by texting TIPSCO to 274637 (Crimes). Callers can remain anonymous. If youd like to comment on this story, visit Tuesdays crime and courts comments section. CLEVELAND, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine reiterated his commitment to combating lead poisoning in the state Wednesday and laid out his plan to address the lingering issue, telling local public health leaders and lead-poisoning prevention advocates attending a roundtable our commitment to you is that we want to be more helpful than the state has been in the past. DeWine announced a new tax credit up to $10,000 aimed at middle class families earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level who safely remove lead-based paint from their homes and rental properties, as well as plans to increase the available workforce to complete assessments and clearances of homes with lead hazards. Under current federal poverty guidelines, a family of five could earn $103,000 and qualify for the tax credit. DeWine made the remarks in a roundtable discussion with doctors, public health officials and lead-poisoning prevention advocates at University Hospitals Rainbow Center for Women and Children ahead of the expected release of his proposed state budget on Friday. Since his election, DeWine has repeatedly emphasized his plans to address lead poisoning as part of his administrations focus on childrens health. It does not appear his promises will translate into any dramatic increases in state spending on the problem, however. Lead poisoning at a level requiring public health action affects more than 4,000 Ohio children every year, according to the Ohio Department of Health (ODH). Even low-level exposure to the toxin can cause lifelong behavioral, developmental and health impacts in children. Cleveland, with its high percentage of older housing, receives the most referrals for childhood lead poisoning in the state. DeWines lead poisoning plans DeWine promised a tax credit for homeowners cleaning up their properties during his campaign, telling The Plain Dealer he planned to include language in his first budget similar to bipartisan legislation he co-sponsored as a U.S. Senator. The Home Lead Safety Tax Credit Act of 2003 proposed maximum $1,500 per unit tax credit to homeowners and landlords who safely removed lead-based paint from their homes and rental properties. It was never enacted. Some details of DeWines tax credit plan were unclear Wednesday, including whether it would be a refundable credit or what standard would be required to prove a property was safe from hazards. Those details are still being worked out, DeWines staff said. DeWine said the efforts announced today were the first of more to come. This is kind of our opening shot in this battle of what we want to do, but were going to do more, he said. What DeWines budget will not include is any new funding for the clean-up of homes with lead hazards. ODH, which oversees the states lead-poisoning efforts, has relied mainly on federal grants to sustain its programs, and that money has dwindled in recent years. The state and localities have struggled to investigate and follow up on all cases where children are poisoned. In 2017, under former Gov. John Kasich, the state pursued new funding for lead abatement by leveraging federal Medicaid dollars through the states Childrens Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), targeted to low-income children. Under a two-year plan approved that year, the state committed to spending about $300,000 from its general revenue fund to leverage $10 million in Medicaid funding aimed at cleaning up problem properties across the state. A statewide group of lead-poisoning prevention advocates had been lobbying DeWines administration to kick in more state money to double the SCHIP funding to $20 million over the next two years to target homes across the state that are known hazards and may still pose a threat to children and families. LeeAnne Cornyn, director of Childrens Initiatives in the Governors office, a newly created cabinet position, said expanding the program at this point does not make sense because very little, only about $1.2 million of the available $10 million, was spent or budgeted for the two-year period. Funding for 2020 and 2021 will therefore remain the same at $5 million per year. The states plan was to first target the 1,200 homes across the state with known lead hazards. To qualify for the abatement money, a Medicaid-eligible child or a pregnant woman had to reside in the home and the landlord or homeowner could not qualify for other clean-up programs. Only 11 homes were cleaned up, with 19 slated for work in 2019. Instead of pursuing more abatement funding, the DeWine administration hopes to shift and amplify existing lead-poisoning prevention programs, Cornyn said in an interview with The Plain Dealer. Cornyn said she talked to state health officials who identified a slew of barriers to spending the SCHIP funds, including a required 50 percent match by property owners, the low value of some of the homes, the high cost of total abatement and identifying enough qualified contractors willing to take on work. Pumping more money into abatement isnt going to help if there is a giant workforce issue, she said. DeWine said Wednesday his budget contains $450,000 in new money for ODH over the next two years to reimburse people for the cost of getting licensed or certified. Cornyn said the state will work to revamp the guidelines originally approved by Medicaid to better use the remaining $9 million in allocated funds and make the program more accessible to families. DeWine during the roundtable said the state will seek a complete removal of the requirement for landlords or homeowners to match any of the cost of the work. A release from his office later said Medicaid has agreed to assume the matching requirement for eligible families. The revamp will also likely will include working with agencies like the Ohio Housing Finance Agency to help identify a pipeline of homes that could be remediated, for instance, by working with the states network of community land banks, Cornyn said. An effective strategy might also require a shift from state programs that focus exclusively on abatement, or completely removing lead-painted surfaces to make a home lead-free, to instead use lead-safe measures that reduce or manage the hazards of lead paint and dust without removing them completely. Were in a crisis, Cornyn said. Do we need to be lead-free or lead-safe? During Wednesdays roundtable, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson said that it is still unclear how many children are actually poisoned and thats where he thinks we have to start. Jackson has shared similar sentiments about the issue dating back to after The Plain Dealer published a series of stories on the issue in 2015 and 2016. Since then, more than 4,600 Cleveland children screened have had high levels of lead in their blood. In response to Jackson, Dr. Aparna Bole, a pediatrician at University Hospitals, said that while increasing screening is an important goal, its not a prerequisite for action. DeWine added: We have to do both. A study by Case Western Reserve University released in January found more than a quarter of kindergartners in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District were poisoned before entering school. DeWines office also said it will address lead poisoning in the following areas: Workforce: Cornyn said the governor is asking the state to dedicate money to building the needed workforce of licensed lead workers and contractors who can assess and remediate homes. This includes an additional $450,000 over the next two years for the Department of Health to reimburse people for the cost of getting licensed or certified. Assessments: DeWine also is recommending providing an additional $24 million to the Department of Developmental Disabilities Early Intervention program (EI) as part of the administrations goal to provide assessments, and physical, speech and occupational therapy services to young children who are lead-poisoned at a level that requires action by the state. Im incredibly grateful for the expansion of early intervention eligibility, which will likely affect all my patients, University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Childrens pediatrician Aparna Bole told the Governor. Lead Safe Registry: Money will be allocated to increase awareness of the rollout of the states voluntary registry that will list homes certified as being free from lead hazards to ensure it reaches the target population of families with children. Screening: In response to a question from Terry Allan, commissioner of the Cuyahoga County Board of Health, who pointed out the low rate of screening for lead poisoning among children enrolled in Medicaid, DeWine said We agree, and we have to ramp that up. Thats one of the missions that we have in this administration. Working group: Cornyn will lead an internal working group of experts from the Health, Development Services, Medicaid and Job and Family Services to streamline and improve how the state detects and abates lead and provides intervention to young children who are poisoned. AKRON, Ohio A 19-year-old man has been sentenced to 12 years in prison after he pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges in connection with him trying to rape a 5-year-old girl he was baby-sitting. Sage Smerk of Uniontown, Ohio, pleaded guilty in Summit County Common Pleas Court to a second-degree felony of attempted rape, according to the prosecutors office. He also pleaded guilty to felonious assault, a first-degree felony, and failure to comply, a third-degree felony. Judge Alison Breaux also designated Smerk as a Tier III sex offender. Smerk will have to register with the local sheriff every 90 days for the rest of his life after his release from prison. Authorities say the incident occurred in October. They say he then left the child alone in the home and tried to escape from police when officers attempted to pull him over. Sage Smerk If youd like to comment on this story, visit Tuesdays crime and courts comments section. CLEVELAND, Ohio The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame isnt messing around with its 2019 Induction Ceremony. The event, which will take place on March 29 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., will feature some of the biggest names in music, past and present. Pop stars Harry Styles and Janelle Monae, rocker Trent Reznor, Hall of Famers David Byrne and Brian May will all take part in this years ceremony as presenters. Styles will induct Stevie Nicks. Monae will honor Janet Jackson. Byrne will present Radiohead. Meanwhile, Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles will pay homage to The Zombies. [Purchase Tickets to the 2019 Rock Hall Ceremony] The news follows rumors (and now confirmed news) that Queens Brian May will induct Def Leppard, while John Taylor and Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran will show love to Roxy Music. It is one of the more star-studded lineups of presenters the Rock Hall has put together for its annual Induction Ceremony. Save for a few VIP packages, tickets for the 2019 event are sold out. Tickets for the museums annual simulcast are still available. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame also announced its Red Carpet live stream, something that has been absent from previous New York ceremonies. Carrie Keagan will return, following her hosting gig at the 2018 Inductions in Cleveland. The Red Carpet, which is closed to the public, will stream live on the Rock Halls websites and social media channels BAY VILLAGE, Ohio -- Bay Village City Council unanimously passed a bill last week that will allow police to make traffic stops for people seen texting and driving. The council passed the bill, which is now in effect, at its March 4 meeting making texting while driving a primary offense and a minor misdemeanor. The punishment would be up to the court, Bay Village City Councilman The law gives the police the power to pull over and cite someone for texting without the driver committing another traffic violation, Bay Village Police Chief Mark Spaetzel said. Spaetzel said he and his department backed the bill. We have all experienced as private citizens seeing someone driving while texting, understanding the danger it causes, he said. Now our officers who observe texting while driving will have the ability to stop that vehicle and advise or cite the driver for the offense. In the past we would have had to let these violations go if no other offense was observed. The Ohio Department of Public Safety says it does not have a running list of cities in the state that consider driving as a primary offense. Texting while driving has already been a secondary offense in Ohio since 2012. Northeast Ohio communities like Beachwood, Fairview Park and Pepper Pike have similar laws. With the advanced technology, its been something thats diverted peoples attention, Mace said. Its not talking on the phone its doing the texting. Police dont intend to come in heavy-handed when it comes to texting while driving, Bay Village police Lt. Calvin Holliday said. The incident needs to be a cut-and-dry situation. Weve seen it happen but we havent been able to enforce it, he said. It (the violation) has to be clear and concise. There is no gray area. It needs to be clear (to us) that you were texting and driving. If youd like to comment on this story, visit Wednesdays crime and courts comments section. Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Tuesday said his one-year-old statement was kind of a pun. New Delhi: Under attack by the opposition over his Hafiz ji comment, Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Tuesday said his one-year-old statement was kind of a pun and it should be seen in its full context of the video, where he had slammed terrorists. A day after the BJP targeted Congress president Rahul Gandhi for referring to Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar as Masood Azhar ji, the Congress put out a video of Prasad referring Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed as Hafiz ji. Speaking at a Times Network event here, Prasad said, You have to show that one-year-old video of mine in its entirety. The day we exposed Hafiz Saeed in our press conference... and showed video of that terrorist and killer. I said it in vyang (satire). I say they are murderers and killers and terrorist and we will continue to expose them...It was kind of pun. When asked about his statement being described as a pun while the remark by Gandhi becoming a subject of BJPs attack, Prasad said that his remark should be seen in the totality. I would earnestly request... please show my entire press conference of that day, then you will see how belligerent and blistering I was against the terrorists, Prasad, who is in charge of IT and Law ministries, said. Show that video... Our commitment to India, and commitment to fight against terrorism is complete. We dont make a political bargain of it. It is our commitment that India should become a global power in the fight against terrorism and also in the field of economic, digital and other sectors, he said. On Monday, Prasad criticised Gandhi for calling Masood Azhar ji. Come on Rahul Gandhi Ji! Earlier it were the likes of Digvijay Ji who called Osama Ji and Hafiz Saeed Sahab. Now you are saying Masood Azhar Ji. What is happening to Congress Party?, Prasad had tweeted. On Tuesday, Congress spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi shared a video of the minister referring to terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed as Hafiz ji. At the event Tuesday, Prasad continued his attack on Gandhi and the Congress party. When evidence is being sought on whether the Balakot attack has happened or not... You are seeking to disbelieve the narrative of India and, wittingly or unwittingly, you are seeking to weaken the morale of forces of India. Surely, those questions will be asked, he said. Asked about Priyanka Gandhis statement that BJP was raising useless issue like Balakot when the real issues are unemployment and demonetisation, Prasad said, This is a question that country should understand. If she says Pulwama is a useless issue, is terrorist attack really a useless issue? That 40 CRPF jawans were killed is that fizool (useless)?. Distinction under Modi government is that we have given a clear message to terrorists that if you commit terrorism against India you have to pay the price... After 1971, for the first time our forces crossed border inside Pakistan. That is the message. If Priyanka ji considers that useless what can I say, the minister said. He said the Indian economy is attracting the biggest FDI in the world and had transformed into the biggest electronics manufacturing hub. Is it fizool to her?, he quipped. Prasad said India is rising and emerging as a world power on the back of transformative reforms like GST. On the issue of demonetisation, he said, I want to say when such (black money holders) people are caught Congress has a problem. To a question on the BJP website being down after being hacked, Prasad said the information was wrong and the website was hacked for a few minutes. Asked when the website will be back, he said: We are operational. There are certain rogue element in the world. It also happened in America for sometime, also in China. There are certain people in Pakistan. We keep fighting that. On a national highway there are accidents. Should we stop making national or information highways then? You must fasten your seat belts tight. You must maintain speed limit. Same kind of caution, we have always advised (for digital world)... have proper auditors, routine check ups, he added. COLUMBUS, Ohio Ohio Auditor Keith Faber said Tuesday he expects greater transparency from JobsOhio, particularly about how the states private economic development nonprofit pays its employees. Faber told reporters that JobsOhio officials agreed to completely disclose their employee compensation including any potential deferred compensation, instead of just what they are paid in a given year and also disclose what theyre paid in a more timely fashion. I got assurances from them that they are now reporting all their compensation, said Faber, describing a meeting he and his staff had with JobsOhio officials last week. In the past, theyve taken a little bit of a hedging position as to what their compensation was, and I dont think they were completely forthcoming. A reporter asked about JP Nauseef, the Dayton businessman recently chosen by Gov. Mike DeWine and JobsOhio board members to lead the nonprofit. JobsOhio officials havent said how much Nauseef will be paid. They declined to comment for this story. They should disclose their CEOs compensation promptly, said Faber, who otherwise was meeting with reporters to discuss a pair of government-transparency initiatives he is pursuing. While running for state auditor last year, Faber, a former Ohio Senate president who was involved with creating and designing JobsOhio, said he supported greater transparency at the economic-development nonprofit. That includes supporting a proposed law change, which passed the state senate last year but not the Ohio house, that would allow the state auditor to review JobsOhios books. Former Gov. John Kasich and others created JobsOhio in 2011 to functionally replace the state development department as Ohios main business-attraction and retention arm. It is exempt from the states public records laws and other disclosure requirements typical of government agencies. However, state law requires JobsOhio to annually disclose its employee pay, although it only shares employee titles and pay, but not their names. Last week, the state released records that showed in 2018, the average JobsOhio employee received more than $100,000 in compensation including salary and benefits and that outgoing Chief Investment Officer John Minor received compensation totaling about $621,300, 16 percent more than the previous year. WASHINGTON, D.C. - Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and other Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday accused newly appointed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief Kathy Kraninger of abandoning the agencys consumer mission by moving to overturn restrictions on payday lenders. Director Kraninger wants us to believe that an endless cycle of debt is a benefit to hardworking families," Brown said of the the CFPBs proposed abandonment of a regulation that would require payday lenders to determine upfront whether low-income borrowers could afford the terms of the small loans they were securing with income from their next paychecks. The bureau last month suggested the rule should be scrapped because it would reduce consumer access to credit, and theres insufficient evidence to justify it. It is taking public comments on the change for 90 days. Federal change in payday lending restrictions wont undermine Ohio law Brown and other Democrats on the committee strongly defended the regulation to Kraninger on Tuesday. Brown argued that that payday lenders like Ace Cash Express aim to ensnare customers in a cycle of debt by giving them high-interest loans they cant repay and repeatedly refinancing them. Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen echoed Browns criticisms, noting that payday lenders stand to pocket more than $7.3 billion more every year if the restriction is removed. Kraninger - a Chagrin Falls native who was a college intern in Browns congressional office - told Brown shed like to see a broad panoply of products available to consumers, and they can make the best decision possible for themselves. She said the rule is being challenged in court, and that her agency is reviewing all comments before it decides whether to rescind it. Brown also criticized Kraninger for continuing to employ a man with a history of writing racist statements on his blog. The employee, Eric Blankenstein, is responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination laws. As a University of Virginia law student in 2004, Blankenstein argued online that hate-crime hoaxes are about three times as prevalent as actual hate crimes and that not everyone who uses the n-word should be labeled a racist, according to The Washington Post. In 2016, he argued online that it wasnt racist to question whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Replace President Obamas Kenyan heritage with Swedish (and for fun change his name to Sven Laarson), but he holds the exact same positions, says the exact same things, etc. If Trump went around arguing that President Laarson was actually born in Malmo, you wouldnt call that racist, would you? he wrote, according to a The New York Times report. Help me understand why questioning the place of President Obamas birth is racist. The Post reported that Blankenstein apologized by email to colleagues for using intentionally provocative language" in past blog posts. Poor judgment in my choice of words back then, or how I framed my arguments, does not make me racist or a sexist, and I have always rejected racism and sexism in the strongest terms possible, Blankenstein said in the email. Brown noted that black home buyers are denied mortgages twice as often as white home buyers, and said its inappropriate for someone with those attitudes to police the situation. When you took over I asked you to remove him," said Brown. Kraninger replied that Blankenships statements were being investigated by the CFPBs inspector general. Senator, I believe in due process and I certainly believe that the process should be followed in this case, Kraninger said. This isnt due process in terms a court of law, said Brown, the committees top Democrat. This is someone who has proudly uttered racist statement after racist statement after racist statement and you have chosen to keep him in a job to enforce laws on anti-discrimination. Gov. Mike DeWine is expected to reveal his first two-year budget proposal later this week, possibly fleshing out funding sources for many of the priorities he outlined in his State of the State message last week. What DeWine should not do is harm the Local Government Fund -- previously raided by former Gov. John Kasich. Kasichs cuts hurt localities and contravened a longstanding revenue-sharing paradigm in Ohio. If anything, DeWine should look for ways to restore most of those cuts. But, without touching LGF funding, the governor could make huge strides on one of his priorities -- needy children. With two key steps, he could, at minimal cost, address the growing problem of homeless children and children who are lead-poisoned because they are living in substandard housing. The widely respected Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio (COHHIO) has come up with a modest two-part approach. It would expand funding for the Ohio Housing Trust Fund -- the primary source of affordable-housing assistance in Ohio -- and create a new rapid rehousing and homeless prevention program, the Homeless Families Assistance Program, the latter using $25 million in existing Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funds, which could be accomplished via executive order. Not long after the Ohio Housing Trust Fund got a stable funding source in 2003 -- via a separate fee paid to county recorders -- the bottom fell out of the housing market in Ohio and revenue sagged. A relatively tiny $20 million-a-year increase in OHFT funding -- either through the general revenue fund, or by modifying the fee county recorders collect -- would greatly increase the reach and impact of the fund. COHHIO points to rising homelessness among Ohio families with children and a shocking 52 percent increase in homeless babies under the age of 1 from 2012 to 2017. Safer affordable housing should also help reduce infant mortality and the lead-poisoning crisis in cities like Cleveland, where thousands of kids show up for kindergarten showing evidence of past exposure to toxic levels of lead. The need is great. The solutions are modest. Gov. DeWine, please act. About our editorials: Editorials express the view of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer -- the senior leadership and editorial-writing staff. As is traditional, editorials are unsigned and intended to be seen as the voice of the news organization. Have something to say about this topic? * Send a letter to the editor, which will be considered for print publication. * Email general questions about our editorial board or comments on this editorial to Elizabeth Sullivan, director of opinion, at esullivan@cleveland.com. * Use the comments to share your thoughts. Then, stay informed when readers reply to your comments by using the Follow option at the top of the comments, & look for updates via the small blue bell in the lower right as you look at more stories on cleveland.com. Gov. Mike DeWine signaled last week in his State of the State that he would be a different kind of governor - one who cares about local issues, down to and including lowly pothole repairs. He repeatedly returned to that theme as part of his pitch for an 18-cent gas-tax increase in Ohio given the money it would provide local communities for road repairs after a 14-year drought. Local mayors and city councils -- you should be listening, and beating down the doors of your representatives in Columbus to make sure youre not shorted in the political gamesmanship now at play over how much to raise gas taxes -- and how much to share with local communities. Under current law, Ohio communities get 40 cents of every gas-tax dollar raised. The House version of House BIll 62, the transportation bill, which must be passed by March 31, would raise that to 45 cents. But it provides only a fraction of the increase DeWine is seeking, by proposing a 10.7-cent gas-tax increase phased in over two years. If enacted at this lower level, that would slice major dollars off the local share, particularly since officials with the Ohio Department of Transportation warn that a phase-in of gas-tax increases would add additional implementation costs. The gas tax hasnt been raised since 2005, DeWine noted -- eroding local funding for road work. Our local partners townships, villages, cities, and counties have received no relief for 14 years," he said. Each year, their infrastructure degrades more and more. Each year, they fall further and further behind. And each year, their roads and bridges get less and less safe. DeWine noted that more than 200,000 miles of Ohio roads fall to local governments to maintain. That includes nearly 2,600 bridges already rated in poor condition. At a 45 percent match, DeWines 18-cent gas-tax proposal would not only provide sufficient highway construction funding to avoid a significant deterioration of Ohio highway safety, but would also result in hundreds of millions for localities. The House version would effectively halve that. Mayors, especially local GOP mayors, make your voices heard. Call your state senators, who are now considering HB 62. Their deliberations should be about road safety, and local needs, not anti-tax shibboleths. You can make a difference. About our editorials: Editorials express the view of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer -- the senior leadership and editorial-writing staff. As is traditional, editorials are unsigned and intended to be seen as the voice of the news organization. Have something to say about this topic? * Send a letter to the editor, which will be considered for print publication. * Email general questions about our editorial board or comments on this editorial to Elizabeth Sullivan, director of opinion, at esullivan@cleveland.com. * Use the comments to share your thoughts. Then, stay informed when readers reply to your comments by using the Follow option at the top of the comments, & look for updates via the small blue bell in the lower right as you look at more stories on cleveland.com. COLUMBUS, Ohio -- You deserve to know who is funding campaigns aimed to influence the outcome of elections. Its really that simple. A variety of motivating factors underlie political donations and many of them are laudable and altruistic. While what inspires those contributions is varied, what should never change is our right to know their source. Each year around this time, newspapers from around the nation recognize Sunshine Week an opportunity to highlight the need the right for voters to know what makes their government tick. As Ohio secretary of state, it is my mission -- in fact, my sworn duty -- to protect our elections. I believe that includes an obligation to do what I can to empower Ohio voters with the information they deserve to make an educated decision each election. Right now, if you wanted to find out who was contributing to your local city council member, or school board member, or mayor the last place youd want to look is online. Why? Because today, state law doesnt even allow local candidates for office to submit their campaign finance reports online. Instead, each campaign is required to go to their local board of elections and drop off their campaign finance report in paper form .... yes, in the year 2019, local candidates are required to submit campaign finance reports in dead-tree format. Interested in doing a quick search of their contributors? Good luck with that! The only way to do it is by hand. There is no search functionality. Its just you slowly and diligently digging through form after form to find the information you need. Now lets be fair. The average voter doesnt often search through campaign finance reports. But do you know who does? The journalists, academics and activists we entrust with the sacred obligation to search out facts relevant to our daily life and report them back to us. And they could use some extra sunshine. These campaign finance reports should be searchable and available on your county board of elections and the Ohio Secretary of State websites. Thats why Im supporting new legislation being introduced this week by state Sen. Michael Rulli that will allow local candidates for office to finally submit their campaign finance reports online. Its 2019. Not 1999. Submitting these reports online is just common sense -- and for two decades its been the law for state-level candidates. In the last General Assembly, I introduced very similar legislation that unanimously passed the Ohio Senate. Republicans and Democrats came together once on this, and Im hopeful they will do so again. In addition to the reforms being proposed in this new Ohio Senate bill, there is much more work to be done to bring true and real transparency to campaign finance reform. For too long, partisans on both sides of the aisle and deep-pocketed special interests have taken advantage of loopholes in campaign finance law to anonymously influence our elections. Need an example? In 2017, voters were debating Issue 2, a ballot initiative which focused on drug pricing. Without debating the merits of the policy, consider that more than $74 million was spent on the ballot issue by both sides -- making this the most expensive campaign in Ohio history. Whats worse is that this money, spent to motivate voters, was completely anonymous. The two entities on either side of this contest reported their money in and money out, as required by law -- but who really were the Ohioans in the Ohioans Against the Deceptive Rx Ballot Issue and Ohio Taxpayers for Lower Drug Prices organizations? Well never know specifically where that money came from. Unless we do something about it, theres nothing to stop this from happening again and again for both issue campaigns and independent efforts seeking to help one candidate or another. Im committed to finding ways for state law to help reform this broken system. Its simply the right thing to do for the health of Ohios civic life. Its about time we begin shining a bright light on the dark money that influences our politics. Voters deserve the opportunity to be fully informed when they make their voice heard in each and every election. Together, we can get it done. Frank LaRose, of Hudson, is the Ohio secretary of state. ******************* Have something to say about this topic? Use the comments to share your thoughts. Then, stay informed when readers reply to your comments by using the Follow option at the top of the comments, and look for updates via the small blue bell in the lower right as you look at more stories on cleveland.com. COLUMBUS, OhioTwo new bills from Dayton-area Republican state Rep. Niraj Antani would create a new three-day sales-tax holiday every March on sales of energy-efficient appliances and expand the states existing back-to-school sales-tax holiday in August. The twin pieces of legislation, neither of which have yet been assigned a bill number, mark the latest effort by Ohio lawmakers in recent years to carve out weekend-long sales-tax exemptions for various products. The first bill, co-sponsored by Antani and Democratic state Rep. Casey Weinstein of Hudson, would stop sales-tax collection on Energy Star appliances such as dishwashers, refrigerators, washers, and dryers on the first Friday in March, as well as the following Saturday and Sunday, according to a release from the two lawmakers. Not only will Ohioans save money at the store, theyll enjoy years of lower energy bills. This is a win-win, Weinstein said in a statement. The second bill, which Antani introduced by himself, would increase the amount of clothing and school supplies that are tax-exempt during a three-day period starting the first Friday of August every year. Right now, state law gives a sales-tax break on clothing and shoes priced at $75 or less and school supplies or instructional materials that cost $20 or less. Antanis bill would raise both limits to $100 or less, according to the release. The legislation would also make laptops and tablets that cost up to $2,000 tax-exempt during the August holiday. Like the current tax holiday, Antanis bill contains no requirement that consumers have to use the tax-exempt products they buy for school-related activities. In a statement, Antani said raising the tax limit on school supplies from $20 to $100 would help students (or their parents) to buy graphing calculators for math classes. My job is to cut taxes for Ohio families. These bills will give all families in Ohio a tax cut on major purchases, Antani said. The back-to-school sales tax holiday has been proven to be effective, and thus should be expanded to help families more. Its unclear so far how these two bills would affect Ohioans or state revenue. However, a 2016 University of CIncinnati study found that consumers saved a total $3.3 million from the 2015 back-to-school tax holiday, while state sales tax revenue actually increased (the study suggested that was because customers bought more non-exempt products while shopping). Its remains to be seen how much support either measure will get in the GOP-dominated Ohio General Assembly. WASHINGTON - Paul Manafort received a sentence totaling 7 1/2 years in prison after being ordered by a federal judge in the District of Columbia to serve 43 months on top of the 47-month sentence the former Trump campaign chairman was given in Alexandria federal court last week. Judge Amy Berman Jackson pushed back on defense attorneys' repeated assertions that he was mere collatoral damage in the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. "This defendant is not public enemy number one, but he's also not a victim either," Jackson said. "There's no question this defendant knew better, and he knew exactly what he was doing." The question of whether anyone in the Trump campaign "conspired or colluded with" the Russian government "was not presented in this case," she said, so for Manafort's attorneys to emphasize that no such collusion was proven, she said, is "a non-sequitur." She added that the assertion may not even be "accurate" because the special counsel probe is not over and she found that Manafort lied to investigators about issues at the heart of their investigation. "It's not appropriate to say investigators haven't found anything when you lied to the investigators," she said. Manafort, 69, faced as many as 10 more years in prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States by illegally lobbying in Ukraine and hiding the proceeds overseas, then encouraging witnesses to lie on his behalf. He apologized to the judge from a wheelchair to "all those negatively affected by my actions," acknowledging that he did not express such regret when sentenced days ago by Ellis for bank and tax fraud. "Let me be very clear: I accept responsibility for the actions that led me to be here today, and I want to apologize for all I contributed to the impacts on people and institutions. While I cannot change the past, I can work to change the future," Manafort said from a wheelchair, turning to face Jackson. "I want to say to you now, I am sorry for what I have done and for all of the activities that have gotten us here today." He added that nine months in solitary confinement after being jailed when accused of witness tampering gave him "new self-awareness." Jackson said Manafort's crimes were "not just a failure to comply with some pesky regulations" but "lying to the American people and the American Congress. . . . It is hard to overstate the number of lies and amount of money involved." His motivation, she added, was "not to support a family, but to sustain a lifestyle that was ostentatiously opulent and extravagantly lavish - more houses a family can enjoy, more suits than one man can wear." But she agreed with Judge T.S. Ellis in Alexandria, Virginia, that sentencing guidelines in the case were excessive. She said that 30 months of her sentence must run concurrently to his Virginia term because the underlying conduct is the same. Prosecutors questioned whether Manafort was capable of such change, depicting him as a a mastermind of a conspiracy in which he was paid $50 million over more than a decade by a Russian-backed politician and party in Ukraine, and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to Russian president Vladimir Putin. "His work was corrosive to faith in the political process, both in the United States and abroad," prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said. "He served to undermine, not promote, American ideals of honesty, transparency, and playing by the rules." His attempts to cover up his crimes by asking witnesses to lie for him, Weissmann said, "is not reflective of somebody who has learned a harsh lesson. It is not a reflection of remorse. It is evidence that something is wrong with sort of a moral compass." He led a sophisticated scheme "to avoid a duty all Americans have" to pay their taxes, Weissmann said, hiding wealth in 30 foreign bank accounts containing more than $50 million for his work for the government of Ukraine and Deripaska. Manafort defense attorney Kevin Downing said his client is genuinely remorseful and has already endured a "media frenzy" that few other defendants in this country have faced. Downing said all sides have sought to spin Manafort's predicament to their political advantage, adding, "But for a short stint as campaign manager in a presidential election, I don't think we would be here today. I think the court should consider that too." Jackson dismissed that argument, telling Manafort, "Saying 'I'm sorry I got caught' is not an inspiring call for leniency." The investigation into Manafort predated Mueller's 2017 appointment, and it wasn't the special counsel's office that made Manafort lie to investigators, she said. Manafort himself asked for mercy on more personal grounds, telling Jackson he is the sole caregiver to his 66-year-old wife. "She needs me, and I need her. I ask that you think of this and our need for each other as you deliberate today. Please let my wife and I be together," Manafort said. Jackson acknowledged Manafort's generosity and care for his family and other causes, calling them "commendable," and said she did not discount that she did "not know everything that there is" to Paul Manafort, or will be to him. She said his age, the money his forfeited, and the fact that his finances and career were "in tatters" minimized the chances he would offend again. The judge ruled earlier this year that Manafort breached his plea deal by lying to the FBI, prosecutors and grand jurors during more than 50 hours of interviews. Jackson found that Manafort's lies included matters "material" to the Mueller probe, including interactions with his longtime Russian aide in Ukraine, Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the FBI assessed to have ties to Russian intelligence. Kilimnik has denied having connections to Russian intelligence and is believed to be in Russia. He was indicted with Manafort on charges of conspiring to tamper with witnesses in Manafort's D.C. case but is unlikely to be brought to court because Russia does not extradite its citizens. Those lies, she said, tainted any cooperation he may have genuinely offered. "So was he spinning the facts before hand to get a good deal, or was he spinning the facts afterward to protect other people?" Jackson asked. "We don't know." Manafort's convictions stem from his earlier work in Ukraine. Manafort joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 and left in late August of that year amid reports about his payments for his political work in Ukraine. Judge Ellis in the Eastern District of Virginia last week appeared moved by Manafort's claims, sparking a public backlash by going far below guidelines that recommended a sentence of about two decades in prison. "I think it's excessive," he said of those guidelines. "He's lived an otherwise blameless life." The second sentencing will cap a legal saga which began in October 2017 when he and his longtime employee and campaign deputy Rick Gates became the first defendants publicly charged in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe. Gates later pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI. He agreed to cooperate with the investigation and has yet to be sentenced. Manafort faced two federal trials because he exercised his option to keep the tax and bank fraud charges in the state where he lived. At trial in Virginia in August, a jury found him guilty on eight counts and deadlocked on 10 others. But Manafort admitted guilt on all charges in his Washington plea. Spencer S. Hsu, Rachel Weiner, Ann E. Marimow, The Washington Post CLEVELAND, Ohio Chefs Melissa Khoury and Penny Barend pose in evening dresses, meat cleavers in hand, surrounded by cuts of meat. Theyre butchers in ball gowns. And they believe you dont need to change who you are to do what you love. The longtime friends transformed their passion for meat to open Saucisson, a meat shop and lunch spot in Slavic Village, which celebrates its storefronts second anniversary this month. They sign their emails off as The Lady Butchers, and Khoury earned the nickname Queen of Pork after she smoked a 300-pound hog and served pork for every course of a 2011 dinner. Barend, meanwhile, is introduced as a local meat maven. You are who you are, right? You should never be ashamed to show that. Not that were wearing ballgowns on the regular while were butchering and, matter of fact, thats probably the last dress that Ive worn in a really long time, Khoury said. But, I have a feminine thing about my hair. My hair is really long, and it will always have to be long. Nearly 80 percent of butchers or other meat processing workers in 2016 were men, according to Census Bureau data compiled by Data USA. And restaurant kitchens have been notoriously sexist. But these friends arent fazed. I think its a challenge to be a woman and be a chef. Its a challenge to be a woman and a butcher, but its not something insurmountable, Barend said. If you strongly believe in your skillset and your ability and your personality and all that good stuff, then you just go do it. Saucisson is a butcher shop in Slavic Village. Finding the confidence Barend and Khoury connected while working as line cooks at an Orlando, Florida, restaurant. They benefited from the support of chef and restauranteur Kathleen Blake, who they view as a mentor. Blake said she recognized their talent and passion immediately but realized they needed someone to tell them so. She asked Khoury began to butcher for the restaurant full time. Later, when Blake opened the Rusty Spoon in Orlando, Barend drove its charcuterie program as the chef de cuisine. They just needed someone to just keep prodding them and nagging them to have confidence in what they were doing and their capability, Blake said. I learned so much from them. It wasnt just me being the mentor, I think I was more of the cheerleader, like you have to believe in yourself. Blake said female mentorship in cooking is important because women often are their own worst critics. I think were harder on ourselves. On the outside we show confidence, but on the inside were questioning, like how could we have done this better? Blake said. The start of Saussison Khoury and Barend linked back up in Cleveland in 2014, shortly after Khoury quit her restaurant job to open Saussison, named for a thick type of French herbed sausage the first she made by herself. The duo first sold sausage at farmers markets, pop-up events, anywhere somebody would let us set up a six-foot table, Khoury said. Their sausage developed a following. When customers couldnt make it to a farmers market, they would message Barend and Khoury to see if they could buy meat another time. I mean we would meet people in gas station parking lots if they were addicted to the chorizo, Barend said. When Khoury and Barend looked for a storefront, they saw potential in the Slavic Village neighborhood hit hard by the foreclosure crisis. We get to be first in, Barend said. We got first dibs. That is a huge part why we chose the neighborhood. We wanted to be part of something. They are focused on making their mark on the community, and help plan a dinner for their neighbors every summer. They hope to change the narrative surrounding Slavic Village. We also we want to be part of our neighborhood and remind people that although sometimes this neighborhood gets a bad rap, its a really cool neighborhood, Barend said. Its very diverse. And theres a lot of really different, interesting, awesome, wonderful people that live here. Saucisson is open Thursday, Fridays and Saturdays for lunch, and also serves brunch on Sunday once a month. Expanding their brand Recently, the pair were featured on Andrew Zimmern's Travel Channel show featuring other prominent Cleveland restaurants, like Michael Symons Mabels BBQ. Saucisson offers lunch specials like chicken Philly sandwiches and beef vegetable soup on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, and serve Sunday brunch once a month. They offer sausage-making classes, and sell a slew of meats: linked sausage, smoked tasso ham, raw and smoked pork and cured meats. They also sell wholesale meat to about 15 Cleveland restaurants. Selling 80 or 90 pounds of something out the back door is a great way to keep building the business while were still open in the front and selling one or two pounds at a time to just your average consumer, Barend said. UK, France, Germany also act on safety concerns. In October, a Lion Air jet of the same model crashed in Indonesia, killing 189 but no evidence has emerged to link the two incidents. New Delhi: In a major decision, Indian aviation regulator DGCA late on Tuesday night grounded Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft operated by Indian carriers following the Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday and similar action taken by several countries including major European countries. This means that 12 aircraft of SpiceJet and and five aircraft of cash-strapped carrier Jet Airways will not be allowed to fly with immediate effect. The DGCA has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately. These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations. As always, passenger safety remains our top priority. We continue to consult closely with regulators around the world, airlines, and aircraft manufacturers to ensure passenger safety, tweeted the civil aviation ministry. As Britain, France and Germany joined a growing list of countries to ban Boeing 737 MAX planes from their airspace on Tuesday, the US remained the only major country not to ground the jets following a second deadly accident in just five months. On Sunday, a new Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight to Nairobi, killing all 157 on board from 35 countries, including six Indians. In October, a Lion Air jet of the same model crashed in Indonesia, killing 189 but no evidence has emerged to link the two incidents. The widening airspace closures puts pressure on Boeing, the US-based worlds biggest planemaker, to prove 737 MAX 8 planes are safe as increasing numbers of fleets have been grounded. Earlier, civil aviation minister Suresh Prabhu tweeted on Tuesday night, Directed (civil aviation) secretary to hold an emergency meeting with all airlines to prepare a contingency plan to avoid inconvenience to passengers. While passenger safety is a zero tolerance issue, efforts are already on to minimise the impact on passenger movement as their convenience is important. The government had on Monday ordered the DGCA to undertake a safety assessment of the aircraft of the same make used by Indian carriers. The DGCA had also issued a list of interim safety measures in the form of fresh technical guidelines on aspects such as dual autopilot, yaw damper system, spoiler systems and Angle of attack (AOA) sensor. Following that Lion Air jet air crash and based on subsequent inputs from the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and aircraft manufacturer Boeing, the DGCA had last year asked these two Indian carriers to take corrective action to address a possible technical problem in the aircraft that could lead to a loss of altitude of the aircraft. In the light of this, the DGCA had also called for changes to the airplane flight manual for the aircraft. The technical problem that had been identified by the US FAA and Boeing was one relating to the erroneous high Angle Of Attack sensor input that has a potential for repeated nose-down trim commands of horizontal stabiliser. As per these inputs from the US FAA and Boeing, lack of taking corrective action could cause the flight crew to have difficulty controlling the airplane, and lead to significant altitude loss and possible impact with terrain. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Assam government, said around 900 people were kept in six detention centres of the state. New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday pulled up the Assam government over inadequacies in the functioning of foreigners tribunals in the state and sought details on it by March 27. The government told a bench, headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, that 50,000 migrants were declared foreigners by the tribunal in the past 10 years. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Assam government, said around 900 people were kept in six detention centres of the state. The bench, which also comprised Justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna, said the state government would have to specify through an affidavit whether the foreigners tribunals functioning in the state were adequate and how they were functioning. The top court, however, added that it was not insisting on the presence of Assam chief secretary in the court at present. The apex court was hearing a PIL filed by activist Harsh Mander through advocate Prashant Bhushan on the plight of foreigners in detention centres. The plea alleges that they were kept in detention indefinitely just because they were not Indians and were treated as "illegal aliens". During the previous hearing, the court had expressed concern over thousands of illegal migrants being kept in detention centres for years in Assam without being repatriated or deported to their countries of origin. It had raised several issues connected with the detention centre and said the detainees could not be held for an indefinite period. The apex court had also sought to know the condition of detention centres, saying the PIL alleged sub-human conditions there. Mehta had said there was a need for evolving a mechanism for repatriating them and it should be done expeditiously. The solicitor general was responding to the January 28 queries of the apex court which had asked the Centre and the state to provide details of functional detention centres in Assam and the foreigners detained in them during the last 10 years. He had told the apex court that 938 people were lodged in six detention centres in Assam and 823 of them have been declared foreigners by tribunals. The Centre had said over 27,000 foreigners have been pushed back at border points while attempting to enter India illegally. The girl addressed with The request left the young and nervous Azra blushing and drew giggles from the crowd. (Photo: Screengrab) Chennai: During an interactive session at Chennai's Stella Maris College, Congress President requested a student to address him 'Rahul' and not 'sir.' The girl addressed with "Hi Sir," to which Congress president interrupted and asked the student to call him "Rahul instead of sir". The request left the young and nervous Azra blushing and drew giggles from the crowd. Accepting Gandhi's word, she began with "Hi Rahul" that amassed cheering from the crowd. Continuing her question, the department of finance student begun her question and amid paused to emphasize on Rahul again that got more applauds from then before. #WATCH: Congress President Rahul Gandhi asks a student at Stella Maris College, Chennai, to call him Rahul, when she starts a question with "Hi Sir". #TamilNadu pic.twitter.com/01LF5AxSex ANI (@ANI) March 13, 2019 Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday was in Tamil Nadu for a student interaction session, press conference and public rally in light of crucial 2019 general elections. The semiconductor sector is turning the corner and showing signs that the global economy could be stronger than previously thought, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Tuesday. The industry's attempt to bounce back from its 2018 woes is being propped by Nvidia's roughly $6.8 billion cash bid for Israeli chipmaker Mellanox and Bank of America's upgrade of Apple, which could mean that the inventory glut in chips could be gone, he said. "These days the semiconductor companies have their tentacles in everything," the "Mad Money" host said. "Now, I often tell you that housing punches above its weight when we talk about the economy. If housing's strong, then the strength might spread to banks and retail. These days, in the new global economy dominated by data, the semiconductor stocks punch well above their weight, just like housing." Semiconductors, he noted, once led the market until last spring the segment began running into troubles. That included Skyworks' exposure to China as the trade war picked up, American regulators rejection of Broadcom's bid to buy Qualcomm, Chinese regulators rejection of Qualcomm's bid to buy NXP Semiconductors, and Nvidia's weak outlook on gaming, artificial intelligence and data center, Cramer said. The host also highlighted issues that struck the stock prices of Micron and Lam Research. "So, [with] no more deals, declining demand for auto chips, a strangling by China that includes cellphone chips, overwhelming glut of commodity chips, and peaking in data center and gamingthe whole gamut of chipmakers seemed to be painting a picture of a worldwide slowdown and in every end market, coupled with an inability to consolidate an overpopulated group," Cramer said. "We had pain." But as both the data center segment and trade negotiations between the U.S. and China appear to be improving, the outlook is better than before, he said. Furthermore, Nvidia's move for Mellanox doubles down on the data center and artificial intelligence segment, and eases worries that China would block the deal, the host said. The PHLX Semiconductor Sector Index is still down more than 6 percent over the past year, but it has gained more than 17 percent in 2019. "That's how a couple of research notes can lift an entire market, it seems fanciful but it's true, as so many stocks are caught up in these end markets that now seem to be more solid than most people think," Cramer said. "The semiconductor stocks have changed the market's perception to the positive. You know what? I'd buy any of the ones I just mentioned anytime they pull back." Weibo Corp.: "I'm not a fan. I'm just not a fan, what can I tell you? I just feel like it's a dice roll. I'm recommending Alibaba, that's it." Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructure Capital Inc.: "I have to do work. I do not know that. It's a closed fund. I don't what they're in, I will find out if I can and come back." AeroVironment Inc.: "I thought it was a good quarter. There are constantly shorts in this thing. The drone business is good. A lot of the defense stocks are down. People didn't like the federal budget for the defense stocks, but I think you're fine AeroVironment, AVAV." Invitae Corp.: Genetic information companies. We've been recommending them for [speculative] only, but we do recommend them. We think there's a lot to like. Remember, we had Veeva on, I've heard a lot of good things. We've been listening to a lot of cloud-based companies that do stuff, includingby the way Charles River [Laboratories], it's not cloud-based but they do a lot of the technical work. I like this group." Charles Schwab Corp.: "I wouldn't give up on it because I'm generally bullish for 2019, not bearish, and therefore it would be ill-advised for me to tell you to dump the stock here." Ormat Technologies Inc.: "I like it. It's renewable energy. I've like this company for absolutely forever. I know it hasn't done that much lately, but I do like it very much." Watch the full lightning round here: Gandhi said the Congress would pass the women's reservation bill it if it comes to power. Rahul Gandhi also questioned whether the prime minister could stand in a large audience and answer people's questions. (Photo: ANI) Chennai: Economic growth is directly related to the mood of the nation and one cannot expect it to happen in a negative and fearful atmosphere, Congress president Rahul Gandhi said Wednesday. Addressing women students at a college here, he said the Congress will change the mood of the country and make people feel happy and empowered. Gandhi, who asked students to refer to him as Rahul, said the law must apply to everybody and not be applied selectively. He said this in response to a question on his brother-in-law Robert Vadra. During his informal interaction with the students, he also brought up the issue of the Rafale deal and reiterated his allegations about the pricing of the aircraft and the process. "I will be the first person to say it... Investigate Robert Vadra but also investigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi," he said. Modi is a "corrupt" man, he bypassed negotiations and ran parallel negotiations on the Rafale deal, Gandhi alleged while responding to the question. The Congress chief said the prime minister should have guts to face the media and asked why Modi was "hiding". He also alleged that the BJP's idea is to capture every institution of the country and run them from Nagpur, the RSS headquarters. Gandhi said the Congress would pass the women's reservation bill if it comes to power. "Don't see enough women in leadership positions. You cannot have women in power in India until the attitude towards them changes," he told the cheering crowd. In response to a question, he said he had learnt the lessons of humility and love from his mother Sonia Gandhi. He asked the gathering, "Did you like demonetisation?" When the audience answered, "No", he said, "I think it's pretty clear the damage demonetisation did. PM should have taken your advice." Gandhi, who asked the students to challenge him and "make him uncomfortable", also questioned whether the prime minister could stand in a large audience and answer people's questions. Referring to Modi's policies on Jammu and Kashmir, he said these were setting fire to the state and blamed the Centre for not strategically and systematically handling terrorism. As soon as Modi assumed power, he made a "huge mistake" of forging an alliance with PDP just for the sake of power. "Today Narendra Modi ji's policies are actually setting fire to Kashmir," he said, alleging that it was his policies that were allowing Pakistan to carry out terrorist acts in India. Gandhi underscored the need to engage the people of Kashmir and bring them "on our side." The prime minister's policies "pushes the people away so you cannot fight terrorism with one off gestures," he said. Noting that it was "our responsibility" to stop the neighbouring country from carrying out terror strikes and save our people, Gandhi said, "It is not good enough to say that 45 CRPF men died and now we will do something." He sought to know why the attack (in Pulwama) was not stopped in the first place. Forty CRPF personnel were killed and five injured on February 14 in one of the deadliest terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir when a Jaish-e-Mohammad suicide bomber rammed a vehicle carrying explosives into their bus in Pulwama district. Claiming that the Congress pursued a policy of systematic and strategic approach in Jammu and Kashmir, he said the NDA government had not followed a similar policy. "We actually crushed terrorism," he said and referred to the "drastic fall" in the number of soldiers and people killed during UPA's tenure. The Congress followed a multi-pronged approach when it came to power in 2004 and toed both systematic and strategic lines, he said. "And it was successful," he said adding it led to diplomatic isolation of Pakistan. Gandhi also called his party's minimum income guarantee scheme a revolutionary idea. The United States will continue to do whatever it takes to rid Venezuela of disputed leader Nicolas Maduro, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CNBC after delivering an address to the energy industry in Houston. "As the president said, every option is on the table to deliver to the Venezuelan people the democracy they deserve. And then ultimately we'll build back an economy where they can again have the wealth that they have under their own feet," Pompeo said in an interview with CNBC's Brian Sullivan, referring to Venezuela's vast oil reserves. The U.S. has slapped a range of sanctions on Venezuela, including against state oil giant PDVSA, a critical source of revenue for Maduro's embattled government. Still, Maduro is clinging to power, sparking a series of deadly clashes and prolonging Venezuela's punishing economic crisis. Asked whether military action is off the table, Pompeo said President Donald Trump has made it clear that the U.S. will achieve its goal of ensuring the success of the transition government led by opposition leader Juan Guaido. Every option remains available, and the U.S. will work with its allies to get the right outcome, he added. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaking at the 2019 CERAWeek in Houston Texas on March 12, 2019. Mary Catherine Wellons | CNBC "Now 50 plus countries have recognized that Maduro is illegitimate. It's time for him to go," Pompeo said on the sidelines of the CERAWeek by IHS Markit conference. Pompeo made his comments in an appearance with Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, who is also in Houston for one of the year's biggest gatherings of energy executives and thought leaders. The two cabinet members delivered a forceful message on the potential of U.S. energy supplies to bolster allies and disrupt countries that would use their resources as a weapon. "You can get American energy and there aren't any strings attached. That's the message," Perry said. In addition to the Maduro regime, Pompeo and Perry hit out at China, Russia and Iran. In his keynote speech earlier on Tuesday, Pompeo said China is preventing Southeast Asian countries from developing offshore energy resources by laying claim to vast swaths of the South China Sea. Asked how the United States can blunt China's growing influence, Pompeo said the U.S. must put its diplomatic corps to work to make sure Southeast Asian nations can access their oil and gas wealth. The U.S. can also use its own energy innovation and growing role as an oil and natural gas exporter to help the region meet its needs, he said. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) talks with reporters as he heads for a meeting at the Capitol October 02, 2018 in Washington, DC. The Senate Finance Committee said Tuesday it invited five major pharmacy benefit managers to testify before Congress about high prescription drug costs in the U.S. Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the committee's ranking member, asked Cigna, CVS, Humana, OptumRx and Prime Therapeutics to testify on Capitol Hill on April 3. Both senators have been critical of PBMs, sometimes referred to as middlemen, which negotiate drug benefits with manufacturers for insurance plans and employers. "Middlemen in the health care industry owe patients and taxpayers an explanation of their role. There's far too much bureaucracy and too little transparency getting in the way of affordable, quality health care," Grassley and Wyden said in a joint statement Tuesday. "We've heard from pharmaceutical companies and it's only fair that the committee has the opportunity to ask questions of other players in the health care supply chain." CNBC has reached out to each company for comment. High drug costs have become a rare bipartisan issue with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle demanding something be done. President Donald Trump has made lowering prices one of the key issues of his administration. Democrats are jockeying to prove they can lead reform. Spending on prescription drugs in the U.S. increased to $333.4 billion in 2017, according to the latest data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The April hearing would mark the committee's third on drug prices this year. Late last month, the committee heard from executives of AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer and Sanofi. The pharma executives didn't talk much about list prices. Instead, they blamed middlemen for pocketing discounts instead of passing them along to patients. They suggested changes to Medicare, including capping the amount seniors would pay for on their own at the pharmacy counter every year. Grassley had hinted last month that the committee's drug pricing probe wouldn't end with pharmaceutical companies. The nation's four largest PBMs are now all integrated with health insurance firms, following the recent completion of CVS Health's merger with Aetna and Cigna's acquisition of Express Scripts. UnitedHealth Group owns the OptumRX PBM and Anthem will be launching its own unit IngenioRx. Edward Scicluna, Malta's finance minister. Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images Another European country is weighing the possibility of joining China's international infrastructure investment plan. Malta, a small country in the Mediterranean that's part of the European Union, has indicated there's a possibility that it could join China's Belt and Road Initiative. In an exclusive interview, Edward Scicluna, the country's finance minister, said that "certain prejudices" should not come in the way of good business. "One has to be wary of any country, especially with political ambitions or any sort of ambitions, but that's life," Scicluna told CNBC in Brussels. The Belt and Road scheme is meant to create a vast global network of land, sea and digital connections linking China with Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Critics say the unprecedented infrastructure plan will favor Chinese firms, boost Beijing's international influence and force developing nations to take on high debt burdens. "You have to be careful, but it doesn't mean you say no to any business, because of certain prejudices, or this, or that, or because someone is pressuring you. For a country to survive and to be competitive, especially a small country, we need to have diversification," Scicluna said. Earlier this month, Italy the euro zone's third-largest economy signaled its interest in joining the Chinese plan. Other European countries, namely Greece and Portugal, have also been supportive of Beijing's efforts. But there's much less support for Beijing's global investment push in the U.S. The White House has previously said Italy's potential involvement in the BRI could hurt its international reputation, according to the Financial Times. "I have heard the alarm being raised from the United States," Italian Deputy Prime Minister Luigi di Maio said Sunday. "Let it be clear that, if we are looking at the Silk Road towards China for our exports, it is not to strike a political deal with China, but only to help our companies," he said, according to Reuters. Speaking to CNBC, Malta's finance chief said the issue of the BRI is still quite new and "very sensitive." "One should not invite a fight, definitely not ... But on the other hand, as a region we are sovereign, we have our own interests and we should look at that first." China can be a 'partner' and a 'problem' Algerian students demonstrate one day after President Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced his withdrawal from the presidential race as well as the postponement of April 2019 presidential election, following weeks of protests against his candidacy for a fifth term in office. The protesters considered the decision as an attempt by Bouteflika to prolong his current term. Algeria's longtime president has conceded to popular demands to abandon his re-election bid after three weeks of massive protests rocked the North African country of 41 million. But a giant question mark now hangs over what happens next, leaving Algerians and investors alike particularly those in the oil and gas sector mired in uncertainty. "There will be no fifth term," a statement from 82-year-old President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who is in his 20th year in power but has rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013, said on Monday. Silent throughout the Arab Spring, Africa's largest country and third-largest oil producer erupted in protest in late February after its ageing president announced his fifth re-election bid. The protests, leaderless and largely peaceful, represented a wide cross-section of society including students, teachers, lawyers, and the working class. Tweet1 "There was never any question of it for me," the president's statement continued. "Given my state of health and age, my last duty towards the Algerian people was always contributing to the foundation of a new Republic." Algeria's general election, scheduled for April 18, has now been postponed. But demonstrations continued this week in Algerian cities as protesters read Bouteflika's concession as simply a maneuver to prolong his presidency. Asia Pacific markets were mostly lower on Wednesday amid fresh global uncertainties after U.K. lawmakers again rejected the terms of a deal for Britain to withdraw from the European Union. Japan's Nikkei 225 fell nearly 1 percent to 21,290.24 while the Topix index was down 0.84 percent at 1,592.07. The Kospi index in South Korea retraced some of its earlier losses and declined 0.41 percent to 2,148.41 while Hong Kong's Hang Seng index slipped 0.52 percent. Mainland Chinese shares were also lower. The Shanghai composite was down 1.09 percent at 3,026.95 while the Shenzhen composite fell 2.31 percent. In Australia, the ASX 200 dropped 0.22 percent to 6,161.20 as some of the sectors turned positive before market close. The energy sector fell 0.88 percent as oil stocks struggled for gains. That was despite a small uptick in overnight oil prices after a Saudi official said the kingdom plans to cut its crude oil exports in April to below 7 million barrels per day as it seeks to drain a global supply glut. Oil prices continued their upward trend on Wednesday during Asian hours. U.S. crude rose 0.7 percent to $57.27 a barrel while international benchmark Brent was up 0.46 percent at $66.98 at 3:29 p.m. HK/SIN. Consumer sentiment in Australia deteriorated in March, falling to its lowest level since September 2017, according to a report issued by Westpac Bank and the Melbourne Institute. Respondents were said to have been reacting to a slowdown in Australian economic growth in the second half of last year. Former candidate for U.S. Senate Beto O'Rourke speaks to thousands of people gathered to protest a U.S./Mexico border wall being pushed by President Donald Trump February 11, 2019 in El Paso, Texas. The move by O'Rourke to start holding conversations with those he considers strong candidates to lead his 2020 operation comes after he reportedly has decided to not pursue a bid for Sen. John Cornyn's seat. The interview comes after CNBC reported that O'Rourke has started engaging with potential campaign managers in case he decides to run for President in 2020. Both sides of the aisle have been waiting to see if O'Rourke will decide to join the race. "You can probably tell that I want to run," he said. "I do. I think I'd be good at it." Former Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke is "just born to be in" the 2020 presidential race, he told Vanity Fair in a report released Wednesday. In a recent Dallas Morning News report, O'Rourke said he has made a decision about his future but wouldn't elaborate further. "Amy and I have made a decision about how we can best serve our country," he told The Dallas Morning News. "We are excited to share it with everyone soon." O'Rourke and his wife Amy both spoke with Vanity Fair from their home in El Paso, Texas. They described what they believe is the former congressman's innate political ability. "There is something abnormal, super-normal, that we both experience when we're out on the campaign trail," O'Rourke said. Although O'Rourke feels "magic" on the campaign trail, he was defeated by Senator Ted Cruz in the 2018 midterm election. He said he thought he had won until the very last moment. "So many of the stories that we had heard, especially in the weeks leading up to the election, you're like, How can you not win when there is that level of just dedication and passion from so many people that we had met?" he said. If O'Rourke does get into the race, one of his defining issues in a crowded field of competitors might be immigration. He recently led a counter-protest when President Donald Trump held a rally in El Paso to drum up support for his border wall. Beto has advocated for a path to citizenship for young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children, ending the War on Drugs, and working with the Mexican government to track illegal immigrants. O'Rourke is headed to Iowa this weekend, fueling speculation that he will soon officially enter the packed Democratic primary race. Read the full Vanity Fair report A Batik Air Boeing Co. 737 Max 8 aircraft, operated by Lion Air, center, sits on the tarmac at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Cenkareng, Indonesia, on Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Boeing investors lost $26.6 billion in the first two trading days this week following the deadly crash of one of its popular 737 Max 8 jets in Ethiopia. Boeing's shares slid 11 percent from $422.54 Friday to $375.41 at Tuesday's close before turning positive Wednesday morning. The share slide cut its market value from $238.7 billion to $212.1 billion over Monday and Tuesday as international aviation regulators and airlines moved to ground 737 Max jets from China to Mexico. Its shares were up by less than 1 percent Wednesday. Edward Jones downgraded Boeing's stock to hold from buy, noting a possible "delay in orders." Sunday's crash of a passenger jet en route from Addis Ababa to Nairobi killed all 157 people on board. The disaster came five months after a Lion Air 737 Max 8 crashed in Indonesia, killing all 189 people aboard. The cause of the Ethiopian Airlines plane is under investigation. The U.S. is increasingly alone in defending the American-made jets since the Federal Aviation Administration deemed the 737 Max to be "airworthy" earlier this week. The aircraft hasn't been grounded in the U.S. The Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday grounded all Boeing 737 Max jets in the U.S., citing new evidence that showed similarities between two fatal crashes of the popular planes that have killed 346 people in less than five months. The move marks a stunning turnaround for the U.S., which has stood by the American-made aircraft as dozens of countries around the world grounded the planes. The crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on Sunday came less than five months after a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 the same type of plane plunged into the Java Sea minutes into the flight from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board. Both planes were new, delivered from Boeing just months before their doomed flights. New satellite data shows the plane's movement was similar to the October crash, the FAA's acting administrator Daniel Elwell told reporters on a call Wednesday. The agency also took physical evidence into account, but Elwell declined to elaborate. "It became clear the track was very close and behaved similarly to the Lion Air flight," Elwell told reporters on a call Wednesday. "My hope is the FAA, the carriers, the manufacturers and all parties will work very hard to make this grounding as short as possible so that these airplanes can get back up in the sky." The FAA, which is investigating the crash along with Ethiopian authorities and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, said the grounding will remain in effect during the investigation. The FAA did not have enough data to warrant grounding the planes earlier, he said. "We are a fact-driven, a data-based organization," said Elwell. "Since this accident occurred we were resolute in our decision that we would not take action until we had data to support taking action. That data coalesced today and we made the call." The NTSB said it is sending a three-member team to help investigators download and analyze data from the Ethiopian Airlines plane's black boxes, which arrived in France on Thursday. Those devices contain flight data and cockpit voice recordings that will likely shed light on what brought down the Ethiopian Airlines plane. Boeing said it recommended taking the 737 Max planes out of service out of an "abundance of caution" after talking with U.S. aviation regulators. "On behalf of the entire Boeing team, we extend our deepest sympathies to the families and loved ones of those who have lost their lives in these two tragic accidents," CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in a statement. "We are doing everything we can to understand the cause of the accidents in partnership with the investigators, deploy safety enhancements and help ensure this does not happen again." President Donald Trump said he spoke with Boeing's CEO, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and the acting head of the Federal Aviation Administration, Daniel Elwell about the decision. U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. is grounding flights by Boeing Co.'s 737 Max aircraft following the model's second crash in five months on Sunday. Al Drago | Bloomberg | Getty Images "They are all in agreement with the action. Any plane currently in the air will go to its destination and thereafter be grounded until further notice," Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. Of the more than 370 Boeing 737 Max jets in global fleets, 74 are flown by U.S. airlines, according to the FAA. Those include United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines. Southwest Airlines' fell by about 1 percent while Delta was about flat. Boeing investors lost $26.6 billion in the first two trading days this week with shares sliding 11 percent from $422.54 Friday to $375.41 at Tuesday's close. The company's market value fell from $238.7 billion on Friday to $212.1 billion by the end of Tuesday. Shares of Boeing slipped by more than 2 percent after Trump's announcement, but closed up 0.5 percent for the day at $377.14. It is very uncommon, but not unprecedented, for the FAA to ground all jets of a certain type. In 2013, the agency ordered the then-new Boeing 787 Dreamliners grounded because of lithium-ion battery malfunctions. (They were flying again about three months later.) However, in that case, European regulators and other airlines followed the FAA's lead. With the Boeing 737 Max planes, the U.S. grew increasingly isolated as country after country decided to ground the jets. Southwest Airlines planes stand on the tarmac at San Francisco International Airport Jan. 19, 2018. Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images Lawmakers and labor unions representing flight attendants urged airlines and the government to ground the planes. Countries from India to Italy had decided to take the planes out of service, unnerving travelers and putting airlines in the tough position of alienating customers and defending the safety of the plane. United and Southwest loosened some of their ticket change fees for flyers nervous about traveling on the plane. The pilots at the controls of fatal Lion Air flight battled an automated, anti-stall system, possibly due to erroneous information from the plane's sensors, investigators have indicated. Boeing added the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, known as MCAS, to the new 737 models, which automatically pushes the nose of the plane downward to help it recover from a stall. If the data the sensors are receiving is inaccurate, the results could be catastrophic. Boeing earlier this week said it is working on a software fix as well as updates to pilot manuals and training and the FAA said it would mandate those changes by April. The FAA's Elwell said the agency did not tie its order to the software changes Boeing is preparing but said he is confident it would make it "far less likely" that pilots will have to deal with that kind of malfunction, adding that he is "absolutely" confident the federal certification of the Boeing planes. He said that the 35-day government shutdown did not delay the addition of the software to the Boeing planes. While passenger flights of the Boeing 737 Max models are banned under the order, Boeing can still operate test flights of the aircraft. The manufacturer is currently testing a smaller model, the 737 Max 7. Before they were delivered, American Airlines ordered optional cockpit displays for its Boeing 737 Max planes that show if the plane's so-called angle of attack its angle relative to the air isn't consistent with sensor data. Southwest told CNBC it added this feature after the Lion Air crash. American has 24 of the planes in its fleet of nearly 1,000 aircraft and said it would comply with the FAA's order and rebook passengers. The Canadian government said Wednesday it is temporarily grounding Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 planes and barring them from the country's airspace, joining dozens of nations suspending service after the second fatal crash of the planes in less than five months. "The advice the experts have provided is based on the information they have been receiving; the requirements for new procedures and training for Boeing 737 MAX 8 and 9 flight crews they have already put in place; and the latest information available from the incidents," Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau said in a statement. Canada's decision made the United States a notable holdout for allowing the Boeing planes to fly as investigators seek clues as to what brought down an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 shortly after takeoff on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. The Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday reiterated its stance on the plane, saying it saw no reason to order the jets be taken out of service. Canada's transportation ministry said it's immediately restricting all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and 9 aircraft "from arriving, departing, or overflying Canadian airspace." Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC EXCLUSIVE interview with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, and CNBC's Brian Sullivan. The interview was first broadcast on CNBC's "Squawk Box Asia" on March 13, 2019. Following is a link to video of the interview on CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/03/13/watch-cnbcs-full-interview-mike-pompeo-and-rick-perry.html. All references must be sourced to CNBC. BRIAN SULLIVAN: First to you Secretary Pompeo. You were just talking on stage about China. China would like to develop its own oil and gas assets in many disputed waters. What is the greatest tool that we have got from an energy policy perspective to blunt their growing influence and their desire to capture their own oil and gas in those disputed waters? MIKE POMPEO: So Brian thanks for having me on the show. There's two. One is the rule of law. The fundamental idea that these energy sources belong to China. Everyone knows that to be true. So American diplomats need to do the hard work to make sure that the countries that own those resources get access to them. For their people. Second there's nobody who can innovate and work like American businesses. We're here at CERA where we're talking about the enormous energy abundance that's been created all across America. We can deliver for South Asia and Asia in the same way we've done for the rest of the world. That'll keep China at bay. BRIAN SULLIVAN: Secretary Perry, should American companies be afraid to sell their oil and gas to China right now, given China's own ambitions. RICK PERRY: Well obviously we're looking for the market in the global marketplace. The American producer has the ability to get out there and compete with anybody around the world. So where it goes. We want to send the message that listen, American energy is available, our LNG is going to 34 countries now in five different continents, and you can get American energy and there aren't any strings attached. That's the message for - BRIAN SULLIVAN: How far are we willing to go, Secretary Pompeo, on the economic side to blunt China's increased activity in those areas? MIKE POMPEO: So President Trump's made clear what we want is a fair shot. We want tariffs that are even, non tariff barriers to be shut out. We want the rule of law transparency and contracts. When we get those things I am very confident that American companies will prevail. We can always outcompete. BRIAN SULLIVAN: At the same time this is happening Germany and Russia are getting closer together, the second part of a very important pipeline called the Nord Stream 2 is being completed. It will further tie Russia and Germany together. What is the proper U.S. response to Germany moving closer to Russia from an energy perspective? MIKE POMPEO: Well it's clear this is Germany giving the Russians money while others are defending them. We would urge them not to finish the pipeline. We want them to have energy diversity. I'm sure Secretary Perry has some real thoughts on this as well. RICK PERRY: Well here's the real message. The American energy doesn't have strings attached, as I said. It's clear that Russian gas has strings attached. We think it's important for our friends and Europe, whether the Central Europeans or whether it's the Western Europeans, to know that they can get that LNG late in there from the United States, from Qatar, Australia, wherever it might be. Having diversity of fuel, diversity of supply, diversity of routes. That's the real key here. The American LNG has the ability to truly make Europe free from that Russian intervention. BRIAN SULLIVAN: Secretary Perry do we have enough capacity and export capacity to Europe to even mitigate the impact of that Russian gas? MIKE PERRY: Absolutely we can. Obviously we've got some infrastructure work that we need to do in the United States. We need to get those FERC commissioners out of the Senate in their work in getting those permits in. But get that permitting done so that this infrastructure can be built. Whether it's out of the Permian Basin, whether it's north out of the Bakken, or whether it's out of the Marcellus Shale. America can deliver the energy needs of a lot of our allies. BRIAN SULLIVAN: Is energy, Secretary Pompeo, our greatest policy lever to affect foreign policy change? MIKE POMPEO: Well we have a couple. Our Department of Defense is important lever as well. But I'm here at CERA because American energy security matters, the abundance. The fact that we're now the largest exporter of crude oil. That we've grown so much so fast gives us a lot of power, a lot of capacity to influence for good, all around the world. BRIAN SULLIVAN: We are almost effectively energy independent. We probably could be if we decided not to export. How does that change the way you approach your job and dealings, with China with Russia? MIKE POMPEO: So it changes everything. Every conversation we've had. I was in Vietnam. I was in the Philippines. I travel to the Middle East next week. Every one of those conversations was fundamentally different because of American energy. We didn't have the capacity to take our technology, our products, our pipelines, deliver them around the world, provide safe affordable energy, diversify energy resources for each of these countries. They'll be safer, the American people will be safer too. BRIAN SULLIVAN: Should we keep up or extend the oil sanctions on Iran? MIKE POMPEO: Yes. BRIAN SULLIVAN: How long? MIKE POMPEO: Until we get the change in behaviour that the people in the Middle East and the rest of the world so desperately need. BRIAN SULLIVAN: Well you said you'd like to bring down the 0 barrels of export. Do you think that's possible? MIKE POMPEO: Not gonna get ahead of myself or ahead of the President, but make no mistake, about it, that's the direction of travel. We want to deny Iran the resources to continue to underwrite Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, a whole list of terrorists around the world. We want to deny them those resources when their behavior changes we'd be happy to invite them back into the community of nations. BRIAN SULLIVAN: You know Secretary Perry about an hour down the road, the biggest U.S. gasoline refinery will go to the Saudis; I can go a little further and talk about Golden Pass a huge LNG export facility to be 71 percent funded by Qatar petroleum with Exxon and Conoco as minority partners. Do you worry that some of the tougher feelings that we have around could discourage foreign direct investment especially by those in Middle East? RICK PERRY: I don't. I know everyone wants to do business in the United States. Just like Secretary Pompeo said. When you know that the rule of law is in place, when you know the transparency that's going to be there, people around the world want to do business with someone that they trust and they know that they can trust the United States to come forward with our product and give them what they traded for. I think this is great opportunities for us to solidify our relationships with other countries around the world coming in and being partners with us. That's how you build real coalitions. BRIAN SULLIVAN: Will we be welcoming Chinese partnerships? MIKE PERRY: Well we already do. I mean the Chinese are already investing here. If they will abide by the rule of law. If they'll show us that they'll be good partners, we'll trade with anybody in the world. But we're going to demand that they're good partners. That's the reason. We're looking at these sanctions and continuing these sanctions against Russia when they come into Crimea. It's the reason that we stand up to Iran and say no we're not going to allow that type of action. And the same message is going to be true to China. Where they're leaning in on those islands out in the South China Sea for no other reason than to keep other people from producing those. So powerful message here, you want to do business in the United States, we're more than happy to do it. But you're going to do it with transparency and you're going to do it in good faith. You're going to do it with the rule of law. BRIAN SULLIVAN: Twenty years ago Venezuela produced about three point seven million barrels of oil per day. Today we don't know for sure. It's probably under a million barrels and going lower. People are eating garbage. The hospitals have no medicine. Money is worthless but bullets are invaluable. You believe that Cuba is propping up the Maduro regime. But what is the US willing to do about? How far are we willing to go in Venezuela? MIKE POMPEO: Brian, it's not just my belief it's a fact. The Cuban regime has poised their model of economics on the Venezuelan people and you can see the massive humanitarian catastrophe that is only getting worse. Energy systems don't work electrical grids don't work. The socialist model state control. It's just a failed model that's causing enormous grief to the Venezuelan people. United States is determined to work along with allies: the Brazilians the Colombians the Paraguayans, and now 50 plus companies have recognized that Maduro is illegitimate. It's time for him to go and we're going to continue to do whatever work it takes. The President said every option is on the table to deliver to the Venezuelan people the democracy they deserve. And then ultimately we'll build back an economy where they can again have the wealth that they have under their own feet and offshore in Venezuela so that that's going to be a once once great country. BRIAN SULLIVAN: They are still selling some barrels, we tracked their ships. Getting loans potentially from Russia, Cuba perhaps trading oil for dollars for help. Is military action off the table? MIKE POMPEO: I mean President's been very clear. We're gonna make this happen. Every option still remains out there and available to the United States. We'll work with our allies to get the right outcome here point there Brian exactly right look at look who their friends are. The Cubans. The Russians. Hezbollah, the Iranians in Venezuela today. This the cast of characters, this is not what the Venezuelan people need or want. It's not what they deserve. And America is going to help deliver them out of this difficult place. BRIAN SULLIVAN: And US company Secretary Perry, once Maduro is gone, whenever that may be. Should they be willing and able and free to go into Venezuela under a new regime? RICK PERRY: Oh absolutely. And I think that's the real message, that the American companies want to see this regime out of the way so that we can come back in. Do the humanitarian aid. Do the medicines. I mean the idea that they block that. And that's everything you need to know about the Maduro regime right there in that one picture. Americans are ready to help American companies are ready to go in there. Once he's out of the way Americans will be first in line to be able to deliver to those people the type of assistance that they need. And that they deserve. For more information: Clarence Chen Communications Manager APAC, CNBC International D: +65 6326 1123 M: +65 9852 8630 E: clarence.chen@cnbc.com This has given some relief to the party in the state which issurrounded by many problems. Ahmedabad: Amid speculation that he could be joining the Bharatiya Janata Party, Congress MLA Alpesh Thakor has finally made it clear that he will remain with the party. At a time when many Congress MLAs are crossing over, there wasapprehension that he would do so too. But after meeting top party leaders in New Delhi last week, the young OBC leader has cleared the air. This has given some relief to the party in the state which issurrounded by many problems. Everyone wants to become a minister. Everyone wants power. I would accept that I also want power but that is for my people. I would be able to do something for them if I had a power. I had an offer, but I thought I shouldnt accept it, Mr Thakor admitted. Sources say that Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state unit was keen to take Mr Thakor in its fold. State cabinet minister Kunvarji Bawalia, who crossed over from the Congress in July 2018, and other state BJP leaders, were in touch with Mr Thakor. The BJP wanted Mr Thakor to contest the Lok Sabha seat so that the party could field former minister Shankar Chaudhary. Below is the transcript of a CNBC Exclusive interview with Mike Pompeo, U.S. Secretary of State and Rick Perry, U.S. Secretary of Energy. The interview was first broadcast on CNBC's Squawk Box Asia on 13 March 2019. All references must be sourced to a "CNBC Interview'. Interviewed by CNBC's Brian Sullivan BRIAN SULLIVAN (SULLIVAN): First to you Secretary Pompeo. You were just talking on stage. About China. China would like to develop its own oil and gas assets in many disputed waters. What is the greatest tool that we have got from an energy policy perspective to blunt their growing influence and their desire to capture their own oil and gas in those disputed waters. MIKE POMPEO (POMPEO): So Brian thanks for having me on the show. There's two. One is the rule of law. The fundamental idea that these energy sources belong to China. Everyone knows that to be true. So American diplomats need to do the hard work to make sure that the countries that own those resources get access to them. For their people. Second there's nobody who can innovate and work like American businesses. We're here at CERA where we're talking about the enormous energy abundance that's been created all across America. We can deliver for South Asia and Asia in the same way we've done for the rest of the world. That'll keep China at bay. SULLIVAN: Secretary Perry, should American companies be afraid to sell their oil and gas to China right now, given China's own ambitions. RICK PERRY (PERRY): Well obviously we're looking for the market in the global marketplace. The American producer has the ability to get out there and compete with anybody around the world. So where it goes. We want to send the message that listen, American energy is available, our LNG is going to 34 countries now in five different continents, and you can get American energy and there aren't any strings attached. That's the message for - SULLIVAN: How far are we willing to go, Secretary Pompeo, on the economic side to blunt China's increased activity in those areas. POMPEO: So President Trump's made clear what we want is a fair shot. We want tariffs that are even, non tariff barriers to be shut out. We want the rule of law transparency and contracts. When we get those things I am very confident that American companies will prevail. We can always outcompete. SULLIVAN: At the same time this is happening Germany and Russia are getting closer together, the second part of a very important pipeline called the Nord Stream 2 is being completed. It will further tie Russia and Germany together. What is the proper U.S. response to Germany moving closer to Russia from an energy perspective? POMPEO: Well it's clear this is Germany giving the Russians money while others are defending them. We would urge them not to finish the pipeline. We want them to have energy diversity. I'm sure Secretary Perry has some real thoughts on this as well. PERRY: Well here's the real message. The American energy doesn't have strings attached, as I said. It's clear that Russian gas has strings attached. We think it's important for our friends and Europe, whether the Central Europeans or whether it's the Western Europeans, to know that they can get that LNG late in there from the United States, from Qatar, Australia, wherever it might be. Having diversity of fuel, diversity of supply, diversity of routes. That's the real key here. The American LNG has the ability to truly make Europe free from that Russian intervention. SULLIVAN: Secretary Perry do we have enough capacity and export capacity to Europe to even mitigate the impact of that Russian gas? PERRY: Absolutely we can. Obviously we've got some infrastructure work that we need to do in the United States. We need to get those FERC commissioners out of the Senate in their work in getting those permits in. But get that permitting done so that this infrastructure can be built. Whether it's out of the Permian Basin, whether it's north out of the Balken, or whether it's out of the Marcellus Shale. America can deliver the energy needs of a lot of our allies. SULLIVAN: Is energy, Secretary Pompeo, our greatest policy lever to affect foreign policy change? POMPEO: Well we have a couple. Our Department of Defense is important lever as well. But I'm here at CERA because American energy security matters, the abundance. The fact that we're now the largest exporter of crude oil. That we've grown so much so fast gives us a lot of power, a lot of capacity to influence for good, all around the world. SULLIVAN: We are almost effectively energy independent. We probably could be if we decided not to export. How does that change the way you approach your job and dealings, with China with Russia? POMPEO: So it changes everything. Every conversation we've had. I was in Vietnam. I was in the Philippines. I travel to the Middle East next week. Every one of those conversations was fundamentally different because of American energy. We didn't have the capacity to take our technology, our products, our pipelines, deliver them around the world, provide safe affordable energy, diversify energy resources for each of these countries. They'll be safer, the American people will be safer too. SULLIVAN: Should we keep up or extend the oil sanctions on Iran? POMPEO: Yes. SULLIVAN: How long? POMPEO: Until we get the change in behaviour that the people in the Middle East and the rest of the world so desperately need. SULLIVAN: Well you said you'd like to bring down the 0 barrels of export. Do you think that's possible? POMPEO: Not gonna get ahead of myself or ahead of the President, but make no mistake, about it, that's the direction of travel. We want to deny Iran the resources to continue to underwrite Hezbollah, Yahoudis in Yemen, a whole list of terrorists around the world. We want to deny them those resources when their behavior changes we'd be happy to invite them back into the community of nations. SULLIVAN: You know Secretary Perry about an hour down the road, the biggest U.S. gasoline refinery will go to the Saudis; I can go a little further and talk about Golden Pass a huge LNG export facility to be 71 percent funded by Qatar petroleum with Exxon and Conoco as minority partners. Do you worry that some of the tougher feelings that we have around could discourage foreign direct investment especially by those in Middle East? PERRY: I don't. I know everyone wants to do business in the United States. Just like Secretary Pompeo said. When you know that the rule of law is in place, when you know the transparency that's going to be there, people around the world want to do business with someone that they trust and they know that they can trust the United States to come forward with our product and give them what they traded for. I think this is great opportunities for us to solidify our relationships with other countries around the world coming in and being partners with us. That's how you build real coalitions. SULLIVAN: Will we be welcoming Chinese partnerships? PERRY: Well we already do. I mean the Chinese are already investing here. If they will abide by the rule of law. If they'll show us that they'll be good partners, we'll trade with anybody in the world. But we're going to demand that they're good partners. That's the reason. We're looking at these sanctions and continuing these sanctions against Russia when they come into Crimea. It's the reason that we stand up to Iran and say no we're not going to allow that type of action. And the same message is going to be true to China. Where they're leaning in on those islands out in the South China Sea for no other reason than to keep other people from producing those. So powerful message here, you want to do business in the United States, we're more than happy to do it. But you're going to do it with transparency and you're going to do it in good faith. You're going to do it with the rule of law. SULLIVAN: Twenty years ago Venezuela produced about three point seven million barrels of oil per day. Today we don't know for sure. It's probably under a million barrels and going lower. People are eating garbage. The hospitals have no medicine. Money is worthless but bullets are invaluable. You believe that Cuba is propping up the Maduro regime. But what is the US willing to do about? How far are we willing to go in Venezuela? POMPEO: Brian, it's not just my belief it's a fact. The Cuban regime has poised their model of economics on the Venezuelan people and you can see the massive humanitarian catastrophe that is only getting worse. Energy systems don't work electrical grids don't work. The socialist model state control. It's just a failed model that's causing enormous grief to the Venezuelan people. United States is determined to work along with allies: the Brazilians the Colombians the Paraguayans, and now 50 plus companies have recognized that Maduro is illegitimate. It's time for him to go and we're going to continue to do whatever work it takes. The President said every option is on the table to deliver to the Venezuelan people the democracy they deserve. And then ultimately we'll build back an economy where they can again have the wealth that they have under their own feet and offshore in Venezuela so that that's going to be a once once great country. SULLIVAN: They are still selling some barrels, we tracked their ships. Getting loans potentially from Russia, Cuba perhaps trading oil for dollars for help. Is military action off the table? POMPEO: I mean President's been very clear. We're gonna make this happen. Every option still remains out there and available to the United States. We'll work with our allies to get the right outcome here point there Brian exactly right look at look who their friends are. The Cubans. The Russians. Hezbollah, the Iranians in Venezuela today. This the cast of characters, this is not what the Venezuelan people need or want. It's not what they deserve. And America is going to help deliver them out of this difficult place. SULLIVAN: And US company Secretary Perry, once Maduro is gone, whenever that may be. Should they be willing and able and free to go into Venezuela under a new regime? PERRY: Oh absolutely. And I think that's the real message, that the American companies want to see this regime out of the way so that we can come back in. Do the humanitarian aid. Do the medicines. I mean the idea that they block that. And that's everything you need to know about the Maduro regime right there in that one picture. Americans are ready to help American companies are ready to go in there. Once he's out of the way Americans will be first in line to be able to deliver to those people the type of assistance that they need. And that they deserve. END Media Contact: Clarence Chen Communications Manager APAC, CNBC International D: +65 6326 1123 M: +65 9852 8630 clarence.chen@cnbc.com About CNBC CNBC is the leading global broadcaster of live business and financial news and information, reporting directly from the major financial markets around the globe with regional headquarters Singapore, Abu Dhabi, London, and New York. The TV channel is available in more than 410 million homes worldwide. CNBC.com is the preeminent financial news source on the web, featuring an unprecedented amount of video, real-time market analysis, web-exclusive live video and analytical financial tools. CNBC is a division of NBCUniversal. For more information, visit www.cnbc.com Quick actions by dozens of countries to ground Boeing 737 Max planes before new evidence emerged Wednesday were "premature" and not based on "facts," the ranking member on the Aviation subcommittee of the House Transportation Committee told CNBC. "You can't go out there and start grounding aircraft and cause a disruption in air travel and business around the United States and around the world based on emotion," Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., told "Closing Bell." "If you took that same standard and applied it to cars, boats and everything else, we'd all be walking." New evidence emerged Wednesday showing that the behavior of the Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 before its crash Sunday was similar to that of the Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 before it plunged into the Java Sea in October shortly after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA said Wednesday it would ground all Boeing 737 Max jets, a turnaround from its decision earlier in the week. President Donald Trump said he spoke with Boeing's CEO, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and the acting head of the Federal Aviation Administration, Daniel Elwell, about the decision. The U.S. had been a notable holdout among other nations for allowing the Boeing planes to fly as investigators sought clues as to what brought down the plane. Dozens of countries and airlines grounded planes in the wake of the Ethiopian crash that killed 157 people. Earlier in the week, U.S. flight attendants and ground crews urged their airlines to take their Boeing 737 Max airplanes out of service. Graves, who said he supported the FAA's actions Wednesday, argued the new evidence "is the first evidence that even potentially connects the two crashes that would simply justify" grounding Boeing 737 Max planes. Flying "continues to be the safest form of transportation," he added. "In the United States, we've had tens of thousands of flights on the 737 8." CNBC's Leslie Josephs contributed to this report. Not even a 20 percent rebound off the December low is changing David Stockman's bearish prognosis for the stock market. Stockman, who served as President Ronald Reagan's director of Office of Management and Budget, suggests fundamentals are not driving the 2019 rally. "This is just day traders, chart monkeys, robo machines. This has nothing to do with rationality or investment analysis on any reasonable time basis," Stockman said Tuesday on CNBC's "Futures Now." "There's no Trump boom. We're near the end of this cycle. Recessions haven't been outlawed. It will happen in the next year or two." It's a subject that's in his new book, "Peak Trump: The Undrainable Swamp and The Fantasy of MAGA." "We hit peak Trump and peak market at 2,940 on the S&P back in September. I think that's the peak for a long time to come, and I think Trump foolishly embraced the stock market," Stockman added. He sees the plunging to 1,600 or lower a more than 40 percent drop from current levels. For years, Stockman has been warning investors a sell-off of that magnitude is inevitable. Two years ago, he predicted a "horrendous storm" would hit stocks. It never happened. Last year, he called it a "daredevil market." Yet, he's unwavering in his bearish case. "We've got headwinds coming from all over the world, and you can see it in the export data, in the European economy, in the big troubles going on in China, [and] you can see it in our own data, which has been really weak," said Stockman. He also emphasizes the record budget deficit as an unnerving headwind. "It is a huge risk. I mean it's actually crazy time that this market and Washington, both ends of the Acela corridor, are totally ignoring," Stockman said. "We're going to go into a fiscal crisis in the 2020s when the entire baby boomers are retiring and Social Security and Medicare are soaring that we won't come out of. That's the big elephant in the room." According to Stockman, President Donald Trump's budget released this week reinforces and underscores how bad the deficit has gotten. "We should be having almost no deficit at the top of a business cycle," Stockman said. "We have a serious problem of unhinged central banking, and we have a Washington that has totally been euthanized by cheap yields on the debt. And, they pretend you can borrow $4 trillion at the top of a business cycle and live to tell about it." He contends a resolution to the U.S.-China trade war wouldn't alter his negative view. "The idea that somehow there is going to be a China deal and that will make everything better, I think, is laughable," Stockman said. Asked about Stockman's comments, White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters said via email: "Due to the President's pro growth policies the economy is booming. More people are employed today than previously were and more jobs are remaining on our shores. The President's budget calls for economic policies that drive down the deficit and continue to bring prosperity to all Americans." Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaks to potential voters during a campaign stop at the Veterans Memorial Building on February 10, 2019, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said Wednesday that Democrats should wait until special counsel Robert Mueller completes his investigation before they decide whether to press to impeach President Donald Trump. The liberal senator, who is running for her party's nomination for president, said during an interview on MSNBC that she believed that lawmakers will know what to do after Mueller releases his findings. "Here's my rule on this one," Warren said after she was asked about impeachment. "Let's wait until we get the Mueller report. Combine it with everything else we've seen. Then we'll know what to do." It is not clear whether Mueller's findings will be presented to the public, and the special counsel has not given any guidance about when his probe may conclude. Warren's position appeared to be in line with several senior Democrats in Congress who have said that any discussion of beginning impeachment proceedings should proceed after Mueller is finished. But Warren drew a line between her view and that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who told The Washington Post last week that impeachment is "so divisive" and that Trump was "just not worth it." "I'm not sure where Nancy is," Warren said. Asked about divisiveness, she said that was "not the point." "What I see is that the Mueller report is coming," Warren added. "Let's all take a look at the Mueller report. And when the Mueller report comes, we will know exactly what to do." Earlier Wednesday, Trump wrote in a post on Twitter that he appreciated Pelosi's comments on impeachment, "but everyone must remember the minor fact that I never did anything wrong, the Economy and Unemployment are the best ever, Military and Vets are great and many other successes!" Trump tweet Impeachment proceedings would begin in the House and then possibly move to a vote in the Senate, where the removal of the president requires a two-thirds majority. The House is controlled by Democrats, while the Senate has a GOP majority. Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., who chairs the committee that would originate the proceedings, has established a high bar for initiating impeachment proceedings, saying he believes the action would have to have bipartisan support. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters on Tuesday that he believed there was sufficient evidence for an indictment of the president, but he stopped short of calling for impeachment. He said he saw "little to be gained by putting the country through that kind of wrenching experience." Department of Justice policy bars the indictment of a sitting president. Sunday's still unexplained crash of the passenger jet, just after take-off from Addis Ababa en route to Nairobi, killed 157 people and followed another disaster involving a 737 MAX in Indonesia five months ago that killed 189 people. Ethiopian Airlines said on Wednesday it would send the black boxes from its crashed Boeing 737 MAX abroad, while a Norwegian airline sought compensation from the U.S. planemaker after two thirds of that model were grounded globally. That has spooked the global airline industry and heaped pressure on Boeing, whose shares have plunged. Multiple nations have suspended the 737 MAX, leading to the grounding of about two-thirds of the 371 jets of that make in operation around the world, according to Reuters calculations. With no link proven between the two crashes, however, the United States has bucked the trend and allowed 737 MAX planes to continue operating even though Europe has suspended them. Boeing, the world's biggest planemaker, has said it retains "full confidence" in the 737 MAX. Its shares fell 6.1 percent on Tuesday, bringing losses to 11.15 percent since the crash, the steepest two-day loss for the stock since July 2009. The drop has lopped $26.65 billion off Boeing's market value. Adding to the pressure on Boeing, Norwegian Air said it would seek recompense for lost revenue and extra costs after grounding its 737 MAX aircraft. "We expect Boeing to take this bill," Norwegian said in an emailed statement to Reuters. In Ethiopia, which lacks the forensic capabilities of other countries, a spokesman for Ethiopian Airlines said the black box voice and data recorders recovered on Monday would be sent overseas for analysis. "There is no capacity here so the black box will be sent elsewhere for analysis. The investigation team will decide where," the spokesman told Reuters. That could be in Europe, the company's CEO told CNN. U.S. officials said the black box devices suffered some damage but they were confident of some initial results within 24 hours of the data being downloaded. More than a dozen relatives of those who perished in the crash, mainly Kenyans who have flown in, left Addis Ababa early in the morning to pay their respects at the rural crash site where Flight ET 302 came down in a fireball. It may take weeks or months to identify all the victims, who include a prize-winning author, a soccer official and a team of humanitarian workers. Trust between the U.S. and the European Union is at an "all-time low," a European lawmaker said Wednesday after both sides failed to find common ground on trade. American and European trade representatives met in Washington last week in an attempt to iron out their differences on trade. But talks hit a stalemate after both sides couldn't agree on details that involve the EU buying more U.S. agricultural products, reported CNN. The U.S. under President Donald Trump has been at odds with the EU. Last year, Trump threatened to impose tariffs of up to 25 percent on European cars and raised levies on steel and aluminum imports from Europe. "Trust is really at an all-time low," Marietje Schaake, a member of the European parliament, told CNBC's "Squawk Box." "The EU is very clear that we want to have rules-based trade, we want to strengthen the multilateral system and we think it is to our mutual benefit to have the U.S. as a partner here," she added. "But President Trump clearly has other ideas. He believes in a more protectionist, nationalist agenda and it's hard to deal with because we don't really know what we can discuss there." The United States shouldn't try to intimidate European countries over their efforts to tax top tech companies, the EU's commissioner for taxation told CNBC. Taxing digital companies, such as Facebook and Alphabet's Google, has become a priority for certain European governments, including France. Last week, Paris introduced a 3 percent duty on French revenues of roughly 30 major companies, mostly from the U.S. This policy sparked criticism in the U.S., where officials argued the tax is an attack on its own companies. "We are not disputing the capacity of the U.S. to decide on their own tax issues and they must also respect our own national and European sovereignty," Pierre Moscovici, who's in charge of taxation matters at the European Commission, told CNBC in an interview Tuesday. "This is why, frankly, I don't think this is a respectful attitude, to attack a country because it would create a digital tax. These digital taxes, and our proposal, are not anti-U.S.," the former French finance minister said. According to data from the Commission, digital companies pay on average an effective tax rate of 9.5 percent in the EU compared to 23.2 percent for traditional businesses. Chip Harter, the U.S. Treasury's top international tax official, said Tuesday that digital levies are "ill conceived." "What we have seen of the most recent French proposals, we view them as highly discriminatory against U.S. businesses...Various parts of our government are studying whether that discriminatory impact would give us rights under trade agreements, WTO, treaties," he said. "The United States opposes any digital services tax proposals whether they be French or U.K.," Harter added, according to Reuters. Aside from France, the U.K., Spain and Italy are also looking at imposing higher taxes on digital firms. Speaking to CNBC, Moscovici also said: "The United States are our allies, they are our friends and between friends you don't try to intimidate, you don't attack each other." The Federal Aviation Administration grounded Boeing 737 Max planes after receiving new data, not because the agency gave into pressure, Acting Administrator Daniel Elwell told CNBC on Wednesday. Earlier, the agency grounded all Boeing 737 Max jets in the U.S. while it investigates the Sunday crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which killed all 157 people on board. That crash came less than five months after a Lion Air 737 Max 8 plunged into the Java Sea, killing 189 people. The FAA's decision to ground the planes marked a stunning turnaround for the U.S., which has stood by the American-made aircraft as dozens of countries around the world ground the planes. Elwell said the FAA was "certainly aware" of decisions other countries made to ground the planes. But the official emphasized, "We didn't feel global pressure." "As I said, we are a data-driven, action-oriented agency and we don't make decisions about grounding aircraft or regulating or even shutdown decisions for airports or aircraft without actionable data. And in this case, the actionable data didn't arrive until today," Elwell said in an interview on "Closing Bell." President Donald Trump told reporters earlier that he was ordering the planes to be taken out of service. He said he made the decision after speaking with Boeing's CEO, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Elwell. But Elwell clarified that the emergency order grounding the aircraft was not issued by the White House. "So the decision is an emergency order to ground the airplanes and that is authority rested in the FAA with me," he said. While Elwell said he did make the decision, he consulted experts as well as Chao and the White House because of the magnitude of the order. With reporting from CNBC's Leslie Josephs. WATCH: U.S. grounds 737 Max 8 & Max 9 aircraft The Malaysian government is considering whether to shut, sell or refinance national carrier Malaysia Airlines (MAB), Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Tuesday. The government was studying options for the national carrier, and a decision should be made "soon", Mahathir said, when asked about analysts' suggestions the airline be shut down or spun off. "It is a very serious matter to shut down the airline," Mahathir told a news conference at parliament. "We will nevertheless be studying and investigating as to whether we should shut it down or we should sell it off or we should refinance it. All these things are open for the government to decide." The airline has been trying to transform its operations and return to profitability by 2019 as it recovers from two disasters in 2014, when flight MH370 disappeared in what remains a mystery and flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine. Sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional Bhd, which took MAB private in 2014, said the government needed to decide on its investment in, and level of support for, the struggling airline. The fund also said that it was waiting for MAB to present a review of its business strategy. On Jan. 14, 2019, a group of countries met in Cairo. The buzzing city had hosted many international events in the past, but this one had a special twist. For the first time ever, the Cypriot, Egyptian, Greek, Israeli, Italian, Jordanian and Palestinian Ministers of Energy met to discuss the establishment of the East Med Gas Forum, a platform for energy collaboration and partnership that could eventually take the form of an international organization. But what caused this special meeting in the first place? After all, such a gathering in the Eastern Mediterranean, where high tensions and religious, political and national rivalries were the norm, would have been unthinkable a mere few years ago. And yet, quietly but surely, the countries have been utilizing energy diplomacy to align interests and foster long-lasting relations with each other, essential elements for the much sought-after regional stability and peace. Their goal: to create a regional gas market, ensure supply and demand, optimize resource development, cut infrastructure costs, offer competitive prices and improve trade relations. Discoveries of natural gas are not uncommon in the Eastern Mediterranean basin. As a matter of fact, there have been plenty over the past few decades, albeit confined close to the Nile Delta. The "Tamar" discovery offshore Israel in 2009 changed the scene and initiated the emergence of what some geologists call the Nile Delta Cone, a vast area extending northeast and northwest of the river's banks. And it appears the Nile has been pretty busy over the past few million years. A number of world gas discoveries offshore Cyprus, Egypt and Israel have propelled the Eastern Mediterranean into the global energy stage. In the meantime, other countries in the region, such as Greece and Lebanon, are lining up with their own exploration plans. Unsurprisingly, these developments have increased the stakes for everyone involved. To put the numbers into perspective, since 2009 East Med discoveries amount to around 2,100 billion cubic meters of natural gas, including the latest big find offshore Cyprus, at Glaucus-1 well, announced a few days ago by ExxonMobil. By comparison, EU consumption in 2017 the region's closest major gas market was around 410 billion cubic meters. Naturally, most of the gas discovered so far has gone toward domestic or regional consumption. Even so, around a quarter of these discoveries, primarily in Cyprus and Israel, are earmarked for exports. Couple that with the extensive exploration work currently under way, the increasing attractiveness of natural gas as a bridge-fuel toward a renewables future and the reduction in European indigenous production, and it's easy to see why the Eastern Mediterranean is well positioned to reap the rewards of the "Gas Renaissance," the name given to a panel discussion dedicated to the region at CERAWeek 2019 by IHS Markit this week. The meeting coincided with the 89th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhis Dandi March launched on March 12, 1930. AICC general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra walks towards the podium to address party workers as Congress president Rahul Gandhi looks on during the Jan Sankalp Rally in Gandhinagar on Tuesday. On extreme right is Patidar leader Hardik Patel, who was inducted into the Congress Party on Tuesday. (Photo: PTI) Ahmedabad: The Congress on Tuesday kicked off its Lok Sabha poll campaign from Gujarat, challenging Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his home state and accusing him of cynically exploiting the issue of national security to divert attention from his colossal failures and persistent falsehoods. Congress president Rahul Gandhi said no sacrifice is too great and no effort is too little to keep the BJP and RSS out of power, as the Congress Working Committee (CWC) in its first meeting in Gujarat in 58 years, deliberated political strategy in Ahmedabad and decided to seek a mandate for change in the Lok Sabha elections for providing better governance and repair the damage caused to the economy and the country by the BJP government. The meeting coincided with the 89th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhis Dandi March launched on March 12, 1930. The partys Gujarat offensive also saw Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who was appointed party general secretary two months back, launch her first political rally in Ahmedabad by taking on the Prime Minister Narendra over unfulfilled promises. Urging people to vote for Congress, Ms Vadra said, There is no bigger patriotism than to be an aware citizen, your awareness is a weapon, your vote is a weapon Only you can protect the country. Earlier, Indira Zindabad slogans and cutouts of the late PM greeted Ms Vadra at her maiden public speech. Amid political symbolism, the Congress sought to project the 2019 elections as a battle of Mahatma Gandhis idea of India versus Nathuram Godses idea of India even as the CWC also reaffirmed its commitment to serve the country and the people in its endeavour for inclusive growth and shared prosperity. The CWC assures the people that the Congress party believes in what it promises and has proven its credibility on delivering the same, the partys resolution said. The committee, in its resolution, blamed Mr Modi for not fulfilling the promises he had made five years ago, and accused him and his party of making deliberate attempts to attack constitutional institutions and weakening them. The partys highest decision-making body, which met for the first time after the announcement of Lok Sabha poll dates on March 10, was chaired by the Congress president and attended by senior leaders, including Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, Ahmed Patel, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Ms Vadra. An atmosphere of fear and insecurity is all pervasive particularly among women, students, academics, writers and the business community; there are deliberate attacks on the constitutional and other safeguards for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, OBCs and minorities; and there is subversion of all institutions of governance, the strongly worded resolution said. In his speech at the CWC meeting held at Sardar Patel National Memorial, Mr Gandhi underlined the need to fight divisive forces together and said, On the anniversary of Gandhi jis historic Dandi March, the CWC Committee in Ahmedabad, resolved to defeat the RSS/BJP ideology of fascism, hatred, anger and divisiveness. Sources said say that important like the minimum income support scheme were discussed in the meeting as part of the election strategy. The partys election manifesto, possible alliance with other parties and need to strengthen booth management were the other topics discussed at length in the meeting. The Congress said it will approach people with humility to seek their support in the general elections for itself and its allies in different states. The party said it seeks a mandate for better governance and accountability, to repair the grave damage caused to our democratic polity, economy and society by the Modi government, a mandate for change to restore the health of the Indian economy, for job creation, social justice and harmony. The Congress expresses its strong disappointment that the Prime Minister is cynically exploiting the issue of national security, on which we are all united, to divert attention from his colossal failures, bogus claims and persistent falsehoods, the resolution passed by the CWC said. The CWC sends a stern and unequivocal message to Indias enemies that the country stands united and resolute as one to confront and defeat their nefarious agenda, it said. Briefing the media after the meeting, Congress leader Anand Sharma said, It is unfortunate that PM Modi and the BJP are spreading hate for political gain. To hide the failure of the government, they are misleading the people of the country and playing with national security. He said that the Congress is confident of winning the general election. We will not allow Mr Modi and the BJP to play with the emotions of the people, he said. By making wrong decisions, the Modi government has destroyed the economy of the country. People had to suffer due to demonetisation and wrong implementation of GST. Dr Manmohan Singh also raised concerns over agricultural and job crisis in the meeting, Mr Sharma said. He added, In the backdrop of the Pulwama terrorist attack, the nation spoke in one voice. Our party stood with the government, but to divert the attention of the people Mr Modi and the BJP are trying to question others patriotism. By launching its poll campaign from Gujarat, the Congress has sought to send a strong message to the BJP and the government that it will fight back strongly and not allow the narrative to be taken away from real issues confronting the people, instead of rhetoric that the BJP wants to focus on. The party earlier started the day by paying rich tributes to Mahatma Gandhi at the Sabarmati Ashram. The day also marks the anniversary of the historic Dandi March, started by Mahatma Gandhi from Sabarmati Ashram on March 12, 1930. The day also saw Patidar quota agitation leader Hardik Patel join the Congress in the presence of party president. At the party rally in Ahmedabad, Mr Patel said that he has joined the Congress to serve people. While raising the slogan of Chowkidar he chor hey, he asked the gathering, Is my decision to join the Congress right? The crowd responded saying yes. Tourists sit on rocks with a view of the Parthenon temple on Acropolis Hill in Athens, Greece Angelos Tzortzinis | Bloomberg | Getty Images Greece, the euro zone economy that suffered the most during the sovereign debt crisis and a country with the highest debt and unemployment, is now "among the top performers in the euro zone," according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In a new report on the Greek economy, the IMF which was one of Greece's principal lenders in bailouts during its economic crisis said Greece had made positive economic progress. "There are a lot of positive developments to point to. We expect growth to accelerate to nearly 2.5 percent this year from around 2 percent in 2018. This puts Greece in the upper tier of the euro zone growth table," the IMF's mission chief for Greece Peter Dohlman said in a report Tuesday. "The government is meeting its ambitious fiscal targets agreed with European member states, though not without some cost to growth. Market access has been re-established with two successful government bond issuances this year." "We also see normalization in other areas. For example, customers are now free to move their cash to any bank in Greece, and the banks themselves have almost fully repaid emergency liquidity assistance provided by the European Central Bank. Over the medium-term, we expect growth to gradually moderate as the economy reaches full employment," he added. Greece no longer has a borrowing arrangement with the IMF, which along with the European Commission and European Central Bank, was a lender of last resort to the stricken country during its government debt crisis during the global financial meltdown of 2009. Greece currently owes the IMF 9.4 billion euros ($10.6 billion) following its role in the country's three bailouts since 2010. Collectively, the bailouts were worth 289 billion euros and were funded and overseen by the EU and, to a lesser extent, the IMF. Bailouts came with stringent conditions ranging from widespread austerity measures to privatization programs and Greece was given tough economic targets. Greece completed its last, three-year bailout program last August. Keen to make sure reforms in Greece remain on track, the IMF conducts two formal consultations with Greece every year akin to what it called an "economic health check." The Eurogroup of euro zone finance ministers also continues to watch Greece's economic, fiscal and financial situation closely in what it calls "enhanced surveillance reports." A meeting of the Eurogroup on Monday praised Greece for making progress on reforms but said it needed to do more, delaying a decision on debt relief measures worth almost a billion euros until its next meeting in April. Pressures As the trade war between the U.S. and China has continued to heat up, Chinese nationals potentially could turn to a surprising way around tariffs: increasing the number of counterfeit goods, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Trade groups have warned Congress that tariffs could increase costs and drain resources available to fight illicit counterfeits. They also caution that consumers may knowingly or unknowingly seek counterfeit goods as legitimate goods become more expensive. Six trade groups sent a letter to the House Ways and Means Committee with the warning in June, according to World Trademark Review. Counterfeit goods cost the U.S. economy an estimated $600 billion a year, or 3 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, according to Steve Shapiro, the unit chief for the FBI's intellectual property rights unit. Twenty-four federal and international law enforcement agencies work together to stop the illegal products. But booming e-commerce sales are adding to the flood of products agencies must monitor, and counterfeiters are increasingly learning how to make harder-to-spot fakes or finding new ways around the systems that were put in place to prevent fraudulent products. "Every day I come into the office and I see new product categories that criminals are manufacturing fraudulently," Shapiro said. Shipments from China are including an ever-increasing number of counterfeit items, according to Frank Russo, the port director for Customs and Border Protection at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. A flood of online purchases CNBC visited JFK's international mail facility, the busiest in the country. Here, CBP officers scan packages coming from overseas looking for counterfeit goods. Their goal is to keep legitimate trade flowing while stopping impostors. "Transnational criminal organizations are shipping illicit goods to the United States via small packages due to a perceived lower interdiction risk and less severe consequences if the package is interdicted," said Kevin McAleenan, acting CBP commissioner, in a strategic plan put out by the agency. Frank Russo is the JFK Port Director for Customs and Border Protection, one of the agencies tasked with stopping counterfeit goods. Source: CNBC The number of packages they are sorting through is on the rise, especially small packages being shipped directly to consumers from e-commerce websites. "It certainly is easier to get duped than ever before because of the advent of e-commerce platforms and the proliferation of counterfeit goods across the space," said Shapiro. The increased volume is creating a challenge for CBP. "Here at JFK, we get about 120,000 e-packets a day. Those are packages that weigh less than four pounds," Russo said. "When you see that kind of volume, it makes it that much more challenging for us to do our job." In the 72 hours before CNBC's visit, CBP found a counterfeit gun, jewelry, guitars and designer handbags. "Last year alone, 4,500 shipments of counterfeit goods came through JFK. That represents 12 percent of the total volume across the country," Russo said. In CBP's most secure room, they store potentially counterfeit drugs such as Tramadol, oxycodone, ecstasy and MDMA, according to Russo. The room also contained counterfeit money and IDs. Spotting the 'super fakes' Another challenge for officers is what is known as "super fakes," or counterfeits that appear to be so real it is hard to tell it's an impostor. "We're talking about products that are so close to being genuine, or close to being exactly the same as the genuine products, that they're hard to decipher and detect as being counterfeit," Russo said. Technology has made it easier for fakes to pose as legitimate brands. "Manufacturing and 3D printing has made it very hard to tell the difference between a super fake and a legitimate product. Oftentimes you have to bring a particular brand in and have their experts look at it to tell if this was real or fake," Shapiro said. Hijacking a brand's identity One way counterfeiters get their items on e-commerce sites is hijacking well-known brands by duping the U.S. Patent and Trade Office. Then, they sometimes can register on e-commerce sites such as Amazon. Steven Shapiro is the FBI's unit chief for intellectual property rights. Source: CNBC Dyan Finguerra-DuCharme, a partner at law firm Pryor Cashman who specializes in intellectual property, including trademarks, says it's happened to her clients. "[The counterfeiters] file a document with the trademark office that says, 'Our email address has changed.' Then they go over to the Amazon brand registry and they say, 'We're the owner of this mark.' And they give their email," she said. "Amazon then looks at the USPTO records and confirms the email. At that point Amazon gives them access to all of their tools, as the rightful brand owner. With access to those tools, they can take down legitimate product. And they can ensure that their own counterfeit product is sold on Amazon." Amazon's Brand Registry is designed to help brands protect their "intellectual property and create a trusted experience for customers on Amazon," according to the program's website. "Amazon's proactive technologies and services for protecting brands, including Brand Registry, are increasingly effective. As a result, bad actors are attempting to find new ways to abuse our protections. We are working closely with brands, the USPTO, and others to continue to strengthen our protections and stay ahead of these bad actors," said an Amazon spokesperson in an email. The company declined to provide any more details on its Brand Registry program. Amazon said it strictly prohibits the sale of counterfeit products. "We also work closely with vendors, sellers, and rights owners to strengthen protections for their brands on Amazon," the spokesperson said in part. "We remove suspected counterfeit items as we become aware of them, and we permanently remove bad actors from selling on Amazon." When the USPTO receives a change of address for an email on a trademark, they send out an email to the old address to confirm, according to Finguerra-DuCharme. There are no stats on how many times the scheme has happened, since it is relatively new. "For my clients alone, I've received about 12 or 15 of these email alerts," she said. Dyan Finguerra-DuCharme is a partner at law firm Pryor Cashman and specializes in intellectual property, including trademarks. Source: CNBC The issue has reached the FBI's attention. "They'll [the counterfeiters] communicate with the Patent and Trademark Office as if they are the actual brand-holders, in an attempt to change the contact information and things along those lines, to make them seem like they are in control when they're certainly not," Shapiro said. "USPTO takes very seriously the issue of fraudulent, unauthorized, or otherwise improper submissions and is engaging in active measures to identify them, prevent them from being processed, and mitigate any harm caused by such filings," an agency spokesperson said in an email. The reason for the email changes may come back to trade wars. "There are some that feel that as tariffs increase and other policy issues come along, that counterfeit is seen as an alternative route towards making additional profits," Shapiro said. He added that counterfeiting is potentially a way to circumvent any possible new rules. The uptick in counterfeiting cannot be tied solely to trade wars. Shapiro said it's too early to tell and could just be related to increases in e-commerce sales. Preventing fraud For brands, the best way to protect yourself is to use a monitoring service. "There are services that allow you to monitor the Patent Trademark office filings and postings and changes of record," Shapiro said. Consumers should check if a retailer is an authorized seller before purchasing items. Brands often list authorized retailers online, according to STOPfakes.gov. Also, keep an eye out for taxes or other fees. Often counterfeit sellers will not charge sales taxes or other fees, even in states with sales tax, according to the government website, which is dedicated to counterfeit education. And beware of price. "If the price is too good to be true, then it's probably a counterfeit," Russo said. The JFK International Mail Facility, which 60 percent of international mail arrives at, is on the front lines stopping counterfeit goods. Source: CNBC When beauty retailer Ulta reports earnings Thursday, Wall Street will be watching for two key words in the results Kylie Jenner. The billionaire social media mogul launched an exclusive brick-and-mortar distribution deal for her Kylie Cosmetics line in Ulta stores last November. The popular assortment of lip kits and color cosmetics is currently valued at around $800 million and has continually attracted both consumers and investors to Ulta. The retailer's stock is up 29 percent just this year and is one of top-performing stocks in the S&P 500 off the December lows up 38 percent. Here's what top analysts are watching for in the report: The "Kylie Jenner" effect Stephanie Wissink, senior research analyst at Jefferies notes that due to Jenner's wide-reaching social influence, the decision to pick Ulta as the sole brick-and-mortar distributor for Kylie Cosmetics gave the retailer a "stamp of approval" as the hub for the cosmetics shopping experience. "I think there is going to be an increasing number of properties and brands that are seeing Ulta that way and for Kylie in particular as she expands her assortment," Wissink told CNBC. "I think if we start thinking about Ulta more as a connectivity concept versus just a retail transactional venue [it] could really start to push the bounds of valuation and value creation within the beauty market place." Dana Telsey founder of Telsey Advisor Group currently holds the highest price target for Ulta at $360. Telsey believes the popularity of Kylie Cosmetics has helped contribute to Ulta's closely watched same-store sales and will "continue to drive the business" as the retailer seeks to take advantage of its large customer base. "I've seen that when the Kylie products got put into Ulta on Nov. 17, they've [still] been running out of some of the selections and some of the palettes," she said. "The beauty bloggers and micro influencers are the new ambassadors of brands and you want to be connected to those micro influencers because they bring you customers." J.P. Morgan's Chris Horvers notes that while the initial launch of Kylie Cosmetics featured a limited selection of in-store items, investors should watch for tweets by Jenner which are likely to announce an expansion of product availability. "You come in with something small you sell it out, you create that scarcity value. I think that sets the stage for further expansion," Horvers said. "So we think it's coming. I'm not sure if it's [this] week but we definitely expect more and more product from Kylie over 2019." Key drivers Ulta's ability to keep up with new product assortments and a lack of any near-term competitive threats act as positive catalysts for the company, according to Jefferies' Wissink. Telsey highlights growth potential in Ulta's salon services which attract some of the retailer's highest spenders. Horvers warns of a broader slowdown in color cosmetics demand, which makes up 51 percent of Ulta's business segment. According to Horvers, while the company's latest investment in its services and sudden rise in skin care product demand create growth opportunities, margin pressure should be expected as Ulta invests more heavily in these areas. Wall Street expectations Ulta currently has 16 buy ratings and zero sells among Wall Street analysts, according to FactSet. The average price target is $323.24 with shares currently trading less than 3 percent away from its all-time highs. The company's stock is expected to move around 7 percent in either direction when it reports fiscal fourth-quarter earnings Thursday after the bell, according to Susquehanna's Stacey Gilbert, and she notes the options market suggests the rally is expected to continue. However, a recent slowdown in volume implies investors who've cashed in on Ulta's run are "kind of taking a pause here." For those trying to play the move, Gilbert sees "opportunity here for investors who are concerned heading into earnings that there could be a pullback, that the risk-reward for those puts is attractive." Shares of Ulta were trading around $315.50 midday Wednesday. Investors should remain optimistic about the ongoing negotiations between the U.S. and China, according to an expert. Speaking to CNBC's "Street Signs" two weeks ago, Peter Andersen, chief investment officer at Massachusetts-based Andersen Capital, said that "everyone wants to negotiate for their own good," so that suggests there will be a positive outcome from the U.S.-China talks. According to Andersen, the involved parties are "intelligent enough to realize that a mutually beneficial solution is the best way to go." In other words, current negotiations are not likely to result in damages to either side. "As long as there is engagement, and as long as there is pen put to paper and ... a memorandum of understanding is being drafted, et cetera, I think that's all very positive," Andersen said. Despite a cloud of uncertainty hanging heavily over current trade negotiations, the fact that the world's two largest economies have taken the step of engaging diplomatically shows that an ideal outcome is a possibility. "What we have to worry about is: What are the details of the agreement? Is it something really substantial, which would be fantastic; or is it something more symbolic, and indicative of further discussions and negotiations down the road?" Andersen said. "But even if that happens, that is a tremendously positive sign because look how far we've come compared to where we were, say, a year ago just dreaming about negotiations." However, while it might be tempting to speculate about the final result, Andersen emphasized that investors should decouple political events and trade because the situation is currently still "highly uncertain," with insufficient data available for analysis. "We can watch very closely as to what's going on with President (Donald) Trump, but in terms of actually having solid data on which to do analysis on as compared to stock analysis, it is really really thin," said Andersen. He suggested watching consumer sentiment closely to gauge market sentiment. The Justice Department reportedly is probing whether a $100,000 donation to a political fundraising group linked to President Donald Trump's re-election campaign came from Jho Low the fugitive who is accused of helping to steal billions of dollars from 1MDB, a state-run investment fund in his native Malaysia. The Wall Street Journal, citing sources, reported Wednesday that investigators are trying to see if some of the $1.5 million in total transfers Low made in mid-2017 to Hawaii investment firm LNS Capital was used by its owner Larry Davis to make a $100,000 donation to the Trump Victory political action committee in December of that year. Because he is not a U.S. citizen, the 36-year-old Low is barred from making either direct or indirect donations to American politicians or to PACs. The Journal reported that Low, who is suspected to be living in China, in an email denied knowing Davis and having any knowledge about Davis' donation to Trump Victory. The PAC helps fund not only Trump's re-election campaign but also the Republican National Committee and other GOP election campaigns. The newspaper said that Low, minutes after sending the email about Davis, followed up and said that email was meant for his lawyer, and asked a reporter to disregard it. The newspaper said that $60,000 of Davis' donation went to the RNC, $5,400 went to the Trump campaign and the balance went to state GOP parties and campaigns. The Justice Department already was investigating Low's alleged effort to have the U.S. government abandon its probe of his alleged looting of the 1MDB investment fund, formally known as 1Malaysia Development Berhad. Low and his alleged co-conspirators are accused of using the stolen money to fund high-flying lifestyles, and to finance films, including the Martin Scorsese movie "The Wolf of Wall Street." Cassie Smedile, a spokeswoman for the RNC, said in a statement that "Trump Victory does not accept contributions from corporations or foreign nationals in accordance with the law. We vehemently deny any wrongdoing on the part of the RNC or Trump Campaign." Low's lawyer Robin Rathmell, in an email to CNBC, said, "Mr Low categorically denies having made any of the alleged donations mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article." "These allegations are completely false and without any basis at all as the Wall Street Journal was informed before publishing them," Rathmell said. "Mr Low has never entered into any agreement and/or paid (or authorised payment of) any money to the entities referred to in the Wall Street Journal article as supposedly having made political donations. Indeed, Mr Low had never heard of LNS or Larry Davis until referenced by the Wall Street Journal. It is disappointing that the Wall Street Journal chose to ignore legal privilege and publish an email that was clearly sent in error." Davis is married to a woman named Nickie Lum Davis, who co-owns LNS Capital, the Journal reported. In 1997, her parents, Nora and Eugene Lum, who had previously raised significant amounts of money to fund Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign, pleaded guilty to making $50,000 in illegal contributions to the 1994 campaigns of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and to another congressional candidate that year. CNBC has reached out to Larry and Nickie Lum Davis for comment. Larry Davis did not respond to a request for comment from the Journal. Read the full Wall Street Journal article here. Former White House National Security Advisor Michael Flynn leaves the Prettyman Federal Courthouse following a sentencing hearing in U.S. District Court December 18, 2018 in Washington, DC. President Donald Trump's former national security advisor Michael Flynn has completed his cooperation with Robert Mueller's investigation, said the special counsel's office. That development, outlined in a joint status report filed Tuesday by attorneys for Flynn and Mueller, follows a dramatic December sentencing hearing in which Judge Emmet Sullivan told Flynn "you sold your country out." Sullivan at the time postponed sentencing until Flynn could finish cooperating with the government and suggested that could result in a lighter sentence. "The court likes to be in a position to say there is nothing else this defendant can do to help the United States of America," Sullivan said. Despite the special counsel's view that Flynn has completed his cooperation, Flynn remains "in a position to cooperate with law enforcement authorities," according to the status report. Flynn may continue to cooperate with prosecutors in Virginia who are investigating his former business partners, Bijan Rafiekian and Kamil Alptekin, ahead of a trial slated to begin in July. The two men have denied charges that they unlawfully lobbied on behalf of Turkey. But the attorneys wrote that "in the government's view his cooperation is otherwise complete." Flynn is likely to face a sentence of between zero and six months in jail, according to federal guidelines. Mueller's office has recommended that he receive the low end of that range. Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to federal investigators about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador. On Wednesday, Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sentenced to 43 months of prison time on conspiracy charges, bringing his total sentence on charges brought by the special counsel to more than seven years. CNBC's Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report. OPEC Secretary General Mohammad Barkindo Mary Catherine Wellons | CNBC For many Americans, OPEC is the villain of the oil market, a secretive cabal whose members enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of the world by withholding petroleum and driving up the cost of the precious resource. This week, the group's chief representative suggested that OPEC itself bears some responsibility for that perception if only because it has neglected to tell its own story. "We have been operating in silos for too long, and this is not good practice in today's globalized world," OPEC Secretary Mohammed Barkindo told reporters gathered in Houston for CERAWeek by IHS Markit, one of the year's biggest energy conferences. The admission was just one example of how OPEC is seeking to take ownership of its reputation and change the way Americans think about the group. Under Barkindo's stewardship the group is increasingly communicating with U.S. audiences at conferences, think tanks and other events. The key message is that OPEC is a stabilizing force in a volatile oil market prone to a destructive cycle of boom and bust. By opening the taps or throttling back supply, OPEC can keep oil flows and crude prices at sustainable levels not too high to hurt consumers, but not too low to choke off necessary investment in future supply. Barkindo said OPEC continues to reach out to stakeholders throughout the energy world because "with more dialogue there will come more understanding" and less "miscommunication." Turning around OPEC's image in the U.S. would be difficult at any time. Many Americans still view the group through the lens of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, when the Middle East-dominated group cut off oil supplies in retaliation for the West's support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. More recently, President Donald Trump has reinforced that perception. Throughout the past year, he has regularly taken to Twitter to blame OPEC for rising oil prices. At last year's United Nations General Assembly, he told the nations of the world that OPEC is ripping them off. Those barbs have heightened concerns about anti-OPEC legislation advancing in Congress, injecting a urgency into Barkindo's project to reframe its role in the global market. The legislation, the No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act, would give the U.S. Justice Department authority to sue OPEC for coordinating output. Cutting production to drain oversupply and boosting output in times of scarcity are OPEC's main levers for balancing the market and adjusting prices, so the NOPEC legislation represents something of an existential crisis for the group. That is putting market manager in an unfamiliar position: advocating against the legislation of a foreign country. "It is not within our purview to dabble in domestic legislation in the U.S., but as stakeholders, since our industry is a global one, we have gone some way in breaking down these barriers through our outreach to the U.S.," Barkindo said on Tuesday. Yet people who knew Barkindo before he rose to international prominence say the effort is little surprise. When he became OPEC's secretary general in 2016, he made an effort to bring in more outside voices and make the group more transparent, said Roger Diwan, vice president for financial services in IHS Markit's energy practice. "He created a role for himself by being an ambassador," Diwan said. "He asked, 'Why are we hiding all the time as if we are doing something wrong?'" But OPEC's diplomatic push under Barkindo faces obstacles. The most important American audience for the group is arguably Congress, but building ties with OPEC remains politically sensitive for lawmakers in light of the group's reputation among voters. That is in part why Barkindo and OPEC members have delivered their message through influential, nonpartisan forums like the Atlantic Council and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I think they are still learning what their messaging should be, but just that they're doing it I think is what's important that they're getting out there," said Randy Bell, director of the Global Energy Center at the Atlantic Council, which hosted Barkindo last week. A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to 43 months of additional prison time. Washington, D.C., federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced the 69-year-old Manafort to 60 months in prison on the first of two criminal conspiracy counts lodged by special counsel Robert Mueller. But 30 of those months will be served concurrently with Manafort's prior sentence in a separate case, also lodged by Mueller. Jackson sentenced Manafort to 13 months of consecutive prison time on his second criminal count. Jackson's final sentence came in below the maximum sentence of 10 years allowed under federal sentencing guidelines. "I am sorry for what I have done and for all the activities that have gotten us here today," Manafort told Jackson before she delivered her sentence. "I will be 70 years old in a few weeks. My wife is 66. She needs me. I need her. I ask you to think of this and our need for each other," Manafort said in an emotional plea to the judge. Manafort's combined sentences will put him behind bars for 7 years. Minutes after being sentenced in Mueller's cases, New York prosecutors indicted Manafort on 16 counts related to residential mortgage fraud and conspiracy. Jackson admonished Manafort before delivering her judgment. "Saying I'm sorry I got caught is not an inspiring plea for leniency," Jackson said. "A significant portion" of Manafort's career "was spent gaming the system," she added. Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday afternoon that he feels "very badly" for Manafort, calling his situation a "very sad thing" on "a human basis." Asked about whether he planned to issue a presidential pardon to Manafort, Trump said he has "not even given it a thought as of this moment." Less than a week earlier, Manafort had been sentenced to 47 months in another case lodged by Mueller in Virginia federal court. In that case, Manafort was convicted on eight criminal counts including bank fraud, tax fraud and failing to file a foreign bank account report. Federal guidelines suggested Manafort's crimes warranted a sentence of between 19 and 24 years a determination Mueller's prosecutors did not object to. But federal Judge T.S. Ellis sentenced Manafort to less than four years in prison, saying at the sentencing that Manafort had lived an "otherwise blameless life." Manafort was also ordered to pay a $50,000 fine, which was the lowest amount provided for by federal guidelines. Ellis had previously criticized Mueller of lodging the bank fraud charges merely as a way to pressure Manafort into cooperating with the special counsel's ongoing investigation of Russian interference and possible Trump campaign collusion during the 2016 presidential election. Trump has denied any wrongdoing and has regularly attacked Mueller's probe as a "witch hunt." At the Virginia sentencing last Thursday, Manafort made a plea for pity from the judge, telling him it "would be a gross understatement" to say he has "been humiliated and ashamed" over his highly publicized involvement in Mueller's probe. Mueller's team has accused Manafort of hiding millions of dollars in income from the U.S. government in offshore accounts, and lying to banks to secure millions of dollars in loans. Much of that money, prosecutors contended, was used to maintain Manafort's opulent lifestyle. Jackson said Wednesday morning that "what is happening today is not or can not be a revision of a sentence that is imposed by another court." Manafort pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy on the eve of his second trial in Washington. He had agreed to cooperate with the Russia probe as part of the deal. But that agreement collapsed after prosecutors accused him of lying to them on multiple subjects. As in his sentencing last week, Manafort appeared in court in a wheelchair, though he swapped his green prison garb for a dark suit with a purple tie. His attorneys say Manafort has suffered from health issues, including "severe gout," after Jackson ordered him to jail pending trial after prosecutors accused him of tampering with potential witnesses in the case. Manafort has been held in jail in Alexandria, Virginia, since June. Jackson ruled on several disputes between the prosecution and the defense before issuing Manafort's sentence Wednesday. She denied to amend her ruling from February that Manafort had lied to prosecutors in breach of his plea deal, saying that the special counsel's office "proved beyond a preponderance of evidence that Mr. Manafort intentionally gave false testimony." But Jackson did decide to give Manafort credit for accepting responsibility "given his plea and given his sworn admissions in court." Jackson also ruled that an enhancement to sentencing guidelines for having a leadership role in criminal activity, laid out in a pre-sentence report, should apply to Manafort. Prosecutor Andrew Weissman, in a final argument to the judge, tried to stress the severity of Manafort's crimes. Tampering with witnesses "goes to the heart of the American criminal justice system," Weissman said. Manafort "served to undermine, not promote, American ideals of honesty, transparency and playing by the rules." Weissman said that Manafort violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, not only by submitting a "woefully false and incomplete" filing in June 2017, but by getting "many other people and entities to violate the act." Manafort's lawyer, Kevin Downing, argued before the sentencing that the few other FARA violations in recent history have involved conduct that was largely different than Manafort's. Downing also said that the extreme level of attention the media has paid to Manafort's case should be considered in sentencing. "The media attention, political motivation and disagreement is so unreal in this particular instance and so out of whack with what another case would have looked like if we didn't have a special counsel," Downing said. "But for a short stint as a campaign manager in a presidential election, I don't think we'd be here today," he added. Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for Donald Trump, exits the District Courthouse after a motion hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, on Friday, May 4, 2018. The indictment, unveiled by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, charges Manafort with 16 counts related to mortgage fraud, conspiracy and falsifying business records. New York prosecutors Wednesday announced criminal charges against President Donald Trump 's former campaign chief, Paul Manafort, only minutes after his sentencing in a federal case . "No one is beyond the law in New York," Vance said in a statement. Manafort's alleged actions "strike at the heart of New York's sovereign interests, including the integrity of our residential mortgage market," Vance added. Click here to read the indictment. Crucially, Trump does not have pardon power for state charges. The president has not explicitly ruled out pardoning his former campaign official. But Trump has lambasted special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe as a "witch hunt," and in recent days has appeared to criticize investigations in New York related to his business empire. Trump TWEET presidential harassers White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday that the president would decide whether to pardon Manafort "when he's ready." But Trump, when asked about whether he planned to pardon Manafort, told reporters at the White House on Wednesday afternoon that he has "not even given it a thought as of this moment." Earlier Wednesday, a federal judge sentenced Manafort, who is 69 years old, to 43 months of additional prison time on conspiracy charges lodged by Mueller as part of his probe of Russian election meddling and possible Trump campaign collusion. Less than a week earlier, Manafort had received a 47-month prison sentence in another federal case lodged by Mueller. Manafort's combined prison time in the Mueller cases totals 7 years. A spokesman for Manafort did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment on the state prosecutors' charges. Manafort's charges in Mueller's cases largely related to consulting work he did for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine years before joining Trump's presidential campaign. But the New York charges involve Manafort's conduct between 2015 and 2017, according to the indictment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, speaks during a luncheon event at the Economic Club of Washington D.C. in Washington, D.C., March 8, 2019. The House will not take up a Senate GOP bill that could give Republicans political cover as they vote on whether to block President Donald Trump's national emergency declaration, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday. By promising not to bring the legislation to the floor, Pelosi hopes to put pressure on Republican lawmakers who are trying to balance their desire to support Trump's immigration policy and their professed concerns about presidential power. Later Wednesday, Trump himself dashed hopes for one alternative that would give lawmakers more power to check future emergency declarations but not the current one. During a Senate Republican lunch, the president called Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and said he would not back the senator's legislation to give Congress more power over emergency declarations, a Lee spokesman said. Under Lee's proposal unveiled Tuesday, national emergencies would end after 30 days if Congress does not vote to extend them. Politico first reported Trump's call to Lee. The president declared an emergency at the southern U.S. border to secure money for his proposed border wall last month after Congress allotted less money than he wanted for the project. The Democratic-held House already passed a resolution to block Trump's declaration. Trump has pledged to veto the House-passed bill if the Senate passes it. Neither the House nor Senate appear to have the two-thirds majority support needed to overcome his opposition. The Senate will vote on the measure to block the emergency declaration Thursday. While five Republican senators enough to pass the House bill in the Senate with a simple majority have pledged to back it, some GOP lawmakers have looked for a way out of dealing an embarrassing blow to Trump. Still, the resolution is likely to pass the Senate. In a statement cited by multiple news outlets Wednesday, Lee said he would vote to block the emergency declaration after seeing that Trump would not support his legislation. By saying she would not bring Lee's bill to the floor, Pelosi aimed to take away an exit ramp for the GOP. "Republican Senators are proposing new legislation to allow the President to violate the Constitution just this once in order to give themselves cover," the California Democrat said in a statement Wednesday. "The House will not take up this legislation to give President Trump a pass." Along with Lee, Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina have also said they will vote to block the president's emergency declaration. However, Tillis "appeared to be wavering" at a weekly Senate policy lunch on Tuesday, according to The New York Times. The resolution is set to pass even in a GOP-held chamber where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has backed the president's declaration. A Tillis spokesman did not immediately respond to a request to comment on whether the senator is reconsidering his vote. The White House has made a late push to stop the resolution from getting through the Senate. Vice President Mike Pence met with GOP senators Tuesday to try to find an alternative path. Trump has recently tried to pressure Republicans by framing the vote as one about border security rather than executive power. "Republican Senators are overthinking tomorrow's vote on National Emergency," he wrote in a tweet Wednesday. "It is very simply Border Security/No Crime - Should not be thought of any other way." Trump national emergency tweet Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube. Ahead of the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls, the opposition partys highest decision-making body, Congress Working Committee (CWC) met in Ahmedabad. New Delhi: On a day the Congress sounded its poll bugle from Prime Minister Narendra Modis home state Gujarat, Mr Modi on Tuesday noted that Mahatma Gandhi had wanted the Congress disbanded. Mr Modi, in a blog titled When a handful of salt shook an Empire! to mark the 89th anniversary of Mahatmas Dandhi March, said the Congresss culture is the anti-thesis of Gandhian thought whereas the BJP led NDA governmnent is working on Bapus path and a Jan Shakti that is fulfilling his dream of freeing India from the Congress Culture. Ahead of the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls, the opposition partys highest decision-making body, Congress Working Committee (CWC) met in Ahmedabad on Tuesday. In the blog, the Prime Minister wrote how Mahatma Gandhi taught us to think of the plight of the poorest person and we have seen and thought about how our work impacts that person. I am proud to say that in all aspects of our governments work, the guiding consideration is to see how it will alleviate poverty and bring prosperity. Sadly, the anti-thesis of Gandhian thought is the Congress culture, Mr Modi said. The PM said that while Mahatama did not believe in inequality and caste divisions, sadly, the Congress has never hesitated from dividing society. He wrote how Mahatma had said that he does not believe in inequality and caste divisions and the worst caste riots and anti-Dalit massacres happened under Congress rule. The Prime Minister said though Mahatma held that detachment and staying away from excess wealth was necessary, all that the Congress has done is to fill their own bank accounts. WASHINGTON The Department of Defense is asking for $14.1 billion to fund space operations in the fiscal 2020 budget, and the Air Force is behind the bulk of the requests. The $14.1 billion would allocate funding to several national security programs, from satellites to missile warning systems. Of the total, about $1.6 billion will fund improvements to space-based missile warning capabilities, a missing link in America's layered missile defense system. "We have to defend what we have in space, because it's going to be there for a while and we all depend on it," U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein told members of the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee on Monday. "Space has been a benign domain, and so we have a lot of efforts going forward in the Air Force to make sure we are developing the cadre of space warriors to be able to do what the nation requires us to do," he added. Former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, on CNBC Wednesday, doubled down on his call for the Federal Aviation Administration to join most of the rest of the world and ground Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, after two of those jets were involved in deadly crashes less than five months apart. Two U.S. airlines operate 737 Max 8s in their fleets. Southwest Airlines has 34. American has 24. United does not have any Max 8s, but it does operate 14 Max 9s, a larger version of the jet, which has not been involved in any crashes. Asked if he would be concerned about flying on a Southwest or American 737 Max 8, LaHood said in a "Squawk on the Street" interview, "I would be until you can be assured through an inspection by FAA and by Boeing that the planes are safe to fly." He wants to see what comes of the investigation into the latest crash, which involved an Ethiopian Airlines flight on Sunday. The other one was in October, when Indonesia's Lion Air saw one of its Max 8s go down in the Java Sea. LaHood, a Republican who ran the Department of Transportation during former President Barack Obama's administration, reiterated his recommendation that all 737 Max 8s be grounded in the U.S. For its part, the FAA has maintained there's no basis to take the planes out of service. Canada on Wednesday joined other nations and temporarily grounded Boeing 737 Max planes, making the U.S. a notable holdout. Canada also barred the jets from its airspace. On Tuesday, Boeing chief Dennis Muilenburg called President Donald Trump to express confidence in the plane's safety. LaHood said he does not believe politics are playing any part in the Trump administration's decision not to ground the planes. The Senate passed a resolution Wednesday to end American support for a Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen in a challenge to President Donald Trump's relationship with the oil-rich Saudi kingdom. The proposal passed by a 54-46 vote short of the two-thirds majority the Senate would need to overcome Trump's expected veto. The rare bipartisan admonishment of the president, if it became law, would force the U.S. to stop backing a Saudi-led coalition fighting Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in the bloody conflict. The U.S. gives only limited support to the forces. But the measure rebukes Trump as lawmakers grow increasingly concerned about both the White House's policies toward Saudi Arabia and the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. The Democratic-held House is expected to take up and pass the resolution. Still, the White House has threatened a veto if the bill makes it to Trump's desk. Congress likely does not have the votes to overcome Trump's veto. The vote Wednesday is expected to be the first of two bipartisan rebukes of the president this week. On Thursday, the Senate is expected to pass a bill to block Trump's declaration of a national emergency at the southern border. The president is also set to veto that proposal if the Senate approves it. Senators across the ideological spectrum have backed the measure to end U.S. involvement in the Yemen conflict, a step that Congress did not authorize. Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Ct., Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have led the effort in the Senate. They have cited the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, where famine and disease have ravaged the populace. They have also criticized Trump's warm relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, particularly after the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Ahead of the vote, the measure's backers argued that U.S. support for the Saudi-led forces in Yemen is not only immoral but also illegal. "I urge my colleagues once against to vote to end our involvement in this unauthorized, unjustified, unconstitutional and immoral war," Lee said Wednesday. Sanders called it a "catastrophic and unconstitutional war." Murphy said the U.S. had "a chance to end our support for this nightmare" through the resolution. The White House has opposed the measure through various congressional attempts to pass it. The Senate approved it once in December. But the House, then controlled by Republicans, never took it up. The House, under new Democratic control in February, then passed the war powers resolution. But due to a procedural issue, it will have to vote on the Senate-passed version again. In a statement Wednesday threatening a veto, the White House argued that the measure "would harm bilateral relationships in the region." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also opposed the resolution.In remarks Wednesday, he called it "inappropriate and counterproductive." It is unclear how quickly the House plans to take up the war powers resolution. This story is developing. Please check back for updates. Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, left, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk at the Kennedy Space Center following the March 2, 2:49 a.m. EST launch of the SpaceX spacecraft mission to the International Space Station. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told a Senate committee on Wednesday the agency will consider using commercial rockets for its lunar crew test flight, opening the door for SpaceX to win a pair of potentially lucrative launch contracts. "I think we should launch around the moon in June of 2020, and I think it can be done. We need to consider as an agency all options to accomplish that objective," Bridenstine said. "Some of those options would include launching the Orion crew capsule and the European service module on a commercial rocket." Instead of the space agency's own SLS rocket, Bridenstine said NASA "could use two heavy-lift rockets" to send the two spacecrafts into orbit. Bridenstine also mentioned the "amazing capability that exists right now" in the U.S., and that means only two commercial possibilities: SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. @Bridenstine commercial rockets tweet ULA, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, launched the first test flight of the Orion program on its Delta IV Heavy rocket in December 2014. Bridenstine pointed to that mission as an example of how NASA has leveraged commercial rockets successfully. But Delta IV Heavy comes at a steep price, at more than $350 million per launch. Additionally, ULA says Delta IV rockets require two to three years from order to launch. Whether or not the mission could launch on Delta IV Heavy is a "question of whether ULA has one ready," space policy consultant Jim Muncy told CNBC. Music streaming giant Spotify filed a complaint against Apple with the European Commission's antitrust regulators, saying Apple Music has an "unfair advantage" over rivals. In a blog post published Wednesday, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said Apple's control of its App Store deprives consumers of choices and puts unfair restrictions, including fees, on competitors. Ek said that after failing to resolve the issue directly with Apple, Spotify is seeking action from the European Commission. "In recent years, Apple has introduced rules to the App Store that purposely limit choice and stifle innovation at the expense of the user experience essentially acting as both a player and referee to deliberately disadvantage other app developers," Ek said in the post. Apple launched its own Apple Music streaming service as a competitor to Spotify in 2015. Apple was not immediately available when contacted by CNBC for comment. According to Ek, Apple requires Spotify and other digital services to pay a 30 percent tax on purchases made through Apple's payment system. The fees makes it impossible for Spotify to keep its prices competitive with Apple Music, Spotify said. Ek added other apps on the App Store, including Uber and Deliveroo, are not subject to the "Apple tax." Those fees are commonly referred to as a "tax" Apple imposes on app developers, but Apple characterizes it as a revenue share model for the App Store. Paid apps that don't have a subscription model are also required to give Apple a 30 percent cut of each sale. Ek also accused Apple of blocking Spotify and other competitors from Apple's services such as Siri, Homepod and Apple Watch. The State Department acknowledges Saudi Arabia's killing of U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi in its annual human rights report but makes no mention of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the section on his death. That's despite reports that the CIA determined the Saudi leader ordered Khashoggi's assassination. The Trump administration has long resisted implicating the crown prince in the murder, citing what it says is insufficient evidence. While the report fails to connect the crown prince to Khashoggi's death, it notes that Saudi Arabia's King Salman "pledged to hold all individuals involved accountable, regardless of position or rank," adding that several officials have been removed from their positions. Khashoggi, who was a columnist for The Washington Post, was killed in October when he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to pick up documents that would allow him to marry his Turkish fiancee. Initially, Saudi Arabia claimed Khashoggi, an outspoken critic of the Saudi government, left the consulate unharmed. Days later, Turkish authorities released images of a 15-person "hit squad" from Saudi Arabia arriving at the consulate at the time of Khashoggi's disappearance and later said he was killed by them. Saudi Arabia has charged 11 people in the murder the kingdom said it's seeking the death penalty for five of those people but the country has remained firm in its assertion that the crown prince was not involved in the plot. At a press conference unveiling the report, Ambassador Michael Kozak said the U.S. has made it clear Khashoggi's death was a "horrendous" and "horrific" act. Regarding the crown prince's possible role in the killing, Kozak said the U.S. is committed to getting all the facts and that Saudi Arabia has not completed its own investigation. "We're going to hold the government of Saudi Arabia to its promise that it will do a thorough investigation and find all of the facts," Kozak said. We "can all have our suspicions or our speculation as to where it may lead, but our effort has been to have where it comes out be fact-driven rather than opinion-driven." The U.S. sanctioned 17 people allegedly involved in the murder. Despite outcry from lawmakers demanding an answer from Trump on whether he believes Mohammed bin Salman was involved, Trump has cast doubt that the crown prince played a role. "Maybe he did and maybe he didn't!" Trump said. The Saudis have denied the CIA allegations. Trump said in November that he stood with Saudi Arabia because spoiling relations could negatively impact oil prices, the U.S.' plan to counter Iran in the Middle East and a promise to buy U.S.-made arms. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, however, told CNBC in January that oil prices would not affect America's response to the Khashoggi killing. The Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not immediately respond to CNBC's requests for comment. The Jan Sankalp Rally organized by the party at Ahmedabad witnessed a huge gathering (one lakh) and put on display the famed charisma of Ms Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Two months after she made her formal debut into the Congress, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, took on Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a rally in his home state, in a way that those who had written off her arrival in the Congress as the partys Brahmastra against Modi to do a rethink. Priyanka, who had energized the party when she was inducted as the UP east Congress General Secretary in January, did not disappoint with her sharp questions. Where is the Rs 15 lakhs that was supposed to be deposited in your bank account? Where are the two crore jobs? Where is the safety of women? The Jan Sankalp Rally organized by the party at Ahmedabad witnessed a huge gathering (one lakh) and put on display the famed charisma of Ms Gandhi. Ms Gandhi told the gathering, You have a weapon. It is your vote with which you can make the decision. This is the weapon that will not harm anyone, but will strengthen you. I appeal to you to make the right decision and ask the right questions. In the coming two months, they will try to divert your attention but you keep on asking the right question. Decide on what is important for you. Your awareness is patriotism. This election is nothing less than the independence movement. It is significant that she invoked Mahatma Gandhi during her speech, saying how touched she was listening to his prayers and bhajans. Although her brother, Congress President Rahul Gandhi, and mother, UPA chairperson, Sonia Gandhi, were present, she was the cynosure of the crowd which chanted Indira Zindabad. She did not name Modi, but left no doubt on whom she was referring to, when she said during her short speech, Hatred is being spread by some people, but this nation is built on love and brotherhood. Our fitrat (nature) is to seek the truth and to blow away winds of hate with love. Check out the companies making headlines before the bell: Boeing Boeing remains on watch, as noted above, after falling more than 11 percent over the past two sessions. Some U.S. lawmakers are calling for the Federal Aviation Administration to ground the 737 Max jets after their involvement in two overseas air crashes, but the agency maintains that the jet is airworthy. Boeing has now released details of a software update for the jet, which has been in the works for several months and predates those crashes. Aurora Cannabis The cannabis producer has appointed Trian's Nelson Peltz as a strategic adviser, to help explore potential partnerships that would advance Aurora's market strategy. Peltz will be granted options for nearly 20 million shares, that would vest over a four-year period. Express The apparel retailer earned an adjusted 19 cents per share for its latest quarter, 3 cents a share above estimates. Revenue was below forecasts, however, and a 6 percent drop in comparable-store sales was below the consensus Refinitiv estimate of a 5.6 percent decline. Express called its performance "disappointing" and said it faces more short-term challenges. Sanderson Farms JPMorgan Chase upgraded the poultry producer to "neutral" from "underperform" pointing to recent outperformance by the stock, higher chicken prices, and the prospect of China opening its markets to U.S. poultry products. Spotify Spotify filed a European Union complaint against Apple, saying Apple unfairly abused its dominance of its app store to favor Apple Music over Spotify. Separately, the music streaming service announced an expansion of its partnership with Samsung, with Spotify being pre-installed on new Samsung devices and customers eligible for six months of Spotify Premium. Kraft Heinz Kraft Heinz is considering a sale of its Breakstone business, known for its cottage cheese and sour cream products, according to people familiar with the situation who spoke to CNBC. The unit is said to be worthy roughly $400 million. Rite Aid Chief Executive Officer John Standley will leave that job once a successor is appointed. Chief Financial Officer Darren Karst and Chief Operating Officer Kermit Crawford are also leaving the drugstore chain. Rite Aid also announced it was cutting about 400 corporate positions in a move that it says will save about $55 million per year. Tesla The Securities and Exchange Commission has received permission from a federal judge to respond to Tesla CEO Elon Musk's defense of his tweet involving production levels. The SEC had asked that Musk be held in contempt of court for that tweet, which it claims violated terms of a settlement between the two parties. Goldman Sachs Goldman is opening its special situations group to outside investors, according to The Wall Street Journal. The profitable group has been investing Goldman's own money in Asian property, troubled U.S. retailers, and other ventures. Carnival Carnival was upgraded to "buy" from "neutral" at Goldman Sachs, which cites upbeat growth figures for the cruise line operator. CVS Health CVS was rated "outperform" in new coverage at Bernstein, which said the current price doesn't reflect the solid managed care organization business of its recently acquired Aetna unit and that threats to profit margins are already reflected. Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry speaking at the 2019 CERAWeek conference in Houston, TX on March 11, 2019. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Wednesday that he would "absolutely" have a conversation with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., about the Green New Deal. "I think having a conversation about the Green New Deal is a good thing and to do it in a thoughtful and a polite and a respectful way," Perry said during a panel at CERAWeek by IHS Markit. Ocasio-Cortez has so far only released a broad sketch of the Green New Deal, not a full policy blueprint. Its goals include generating 100 percent of U.S. electric power from renewable sources, slashing greenhouse gas emissions and largely phasing oil out of the transportation sector all within 10 years. "Just because someone doesn't agree with what I believe in, or I don't agree with their take, doesn't mean we don't need to continue to have a conversation," Perry said. "I think it's wise to have those." Perry's stance on the firebrand freshman lawmaker's ambitious policy proposal clashes with comments made by other members of his administration including his boss, President Donald Trump, who appointed Perry to the role. Trump has attacked the Green New Deal as a threat to U.S. industries and Americans' liberties. "It would shut down American energy, which I don't think the people in Texas are going to be happy with," Trump said in a speech in February. Some of Perry's fellow Republicans in Congress have also dismissed Ocasio-Cortez's proposal as a pipe dream and a financial quagmire. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., recently said he plans to hold a vote on the resolution in support of the Green New Deal. That move was widely seen as a bid to highlight divisions among Democrats over the proposal. Perry, in response to CNBC's question at a news conference following the panel, said he had a conversation with a young entrepreneur a few days ago about setting up a meeting with Ocasio-Cortez. "I don't think that the representative should be castigated and pushed aside just on the face of her comments relative to that she wants to live in a place where there's clean air and clean water. So do I," he said. Perry said one of the things he would like to speak to Ocasio-Cortez about is how U.S. liquefied natural gas can help reduce carbon emissions. The boom in U.S. natural gas production is one of the biggest factors in the decline of coal in America's power sector. The U.S. is now aiming to become a major exporter of LNG, or natural gas chilled to liquid form for transport overseas. Perry said he would like to talk to Ocasio-Cortez about exporting LNG to places such as China and India to help them bring down their emissions. Those countries could also benefit from implementing technologies to capture and store carbon emissions because they are still burning coal in power plants, he said. "I think she and I would both say those are good goals," Perry said. He added: "There are going to be places that we disagree, but the idea we have to be disagreeable I'm sorry, but I've been in this business a spell and I'd rather be agreeable." Indian protesters hold a scratched photo of Jaish-e-Mohammed group chief, Masood Azhar, as they shout slogans against Pakistan during a protest in Mumbai on Feb. 15, 2019. A series of retaliatory air strikes between India and Pakistan last month escalated already tense relations between the two South Asian nuclear powers. A UN vote set for Wednesday could further increase tensions and China may be the key. After Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed responsibility for February's suicide attack that killed 40 Indian security officers in Kashmir, three members of the United Nations Security Council moved a proposal to sanction JeM leader Masood Azhar as a global terrorist. If passed, the proposal from France, the United Kingdom and the United States would subject Azhar to an assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo. On Wednesday, the Security Council is set to vote on whether to designate Azhar as a global terrorist. While JeM has been listed by the UN as a terror group since 2001, efforts to blacklist its leader have not been successful February's proposal marks the fourth attempt in 10 years. China, a permanent veto-wielding member of the Security Council and Pakistan's "all-weather" ally, blocked previous attempts in 2009, 2016 and 2017, claiming in the second instance that the militant leader did not meet "the Council's requirements" to be a terrorist. Although Pakistan has clamped down on other militant groups such as the local Taliban, JeM continues to operate publicly in the country. Azhar openly runs camps in several towns across Pakistan including a camp in Balakot, which India said its Air Force hit during a strike on Feb. 25. Indian politicians and experts have suggested that Islamabad supports the group because it helps Pakistani political aims. The country "pursues its strategic goals by sponsoring, training, equipping, and financing terror groups that attack targets in India, Afghanistan, and Iran," Indian Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor wrote in a recent commentary. As Wednesday's vote draws closer, all eyes are on China which has not given a firm indication of whether it will again wield its veto. "My suspicion is that (China) will not budge despite American pressure and India's entreaties. It considers its alliance with Pakistan to be far too important," said Sumit Ganguly, an Indiana University professor of political science. U.S. pilots expressed confidence in their ability to safely fly their airlines' Boeing 737 Max planes and said it is too early to know what brought down one of the planes in Ethiopia over the weekend, the second fatal crash of one of the bestselling aircraft in less than five months. The Allied Pilots Association, which represents about 15,000 American Airlines pilots, broke from flight attendants and mechanics in backing the plane. The pilots' group said they "have the necessary training and experience to troubleshoot problems and take decisive actions on the flight deck to protect our passengers and crew." United's pilots union, the Air Line Pilots Association, issued a similar statement. The statements come after airlines and governments around the world said they grounded the planes as a precaution. The Federal Aviation Administration has repeatedly said it does not see any reason to order the planes be taken out of service. Still, lawmakers, travelers and flight attendants and other airline employees called for the planes to be grounded until more is known about the cause of the Ethiopian Airlines crash. On Wednesday, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, said the committee is planning an aviation safety hearing in light of the crash. The FAA on Tuesday reiterated its position that it does not have any reason to ground the planes. American Airlines has 24 Boeing 737 Max 8 planes in its fleet of about 1,000 mainline aircraft. Following the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 in October, which plunged into the Java Sea after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board, American's pilots union said it has reviewed flight data of more than 14,000 flights. The pilots of the Lion Air plane, another Boeing 737 Max 8, appeared to be battling an automated system that pushes the nose of the plane downward to prevent stalling, investigators have indicated. That can be catastrophic if the plane is receiving erroneous data that signal the plane is in a stall. Boeing on Monday said it is preparing a series of software fixes as well as updates to training and manuals for the planes, its bestselling aircraft. It said those changes are "designed to make an already safe aircraft even safer." "We have not seen a single anomaly" related to the maneuvering characteristics augmentation system, known as the MCAS, American's pilot union APA said in a statement. American added optional cockpit displays for its Boeing 737s that show if there is a disagreement between sensors showing the so-called angle of attack, which is the angle of the plane relative to the oncoming air, and the actual angle. Southwest Airlines, the biggest U.S. operator of Boeing 737 Max planes with 34 in its fleet of more than 750 planes, told CNBC it added such displays after the crash of Lion Air in October. For its part, United's union said that its review of more than 23,000 hours of flying show that none of "these data points has been attributable to performance or mechanical deficiencies." Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reemphasized his policy of driving Iran's oil exports to "zero" when he spoke at the annual IHS Markit CERAWeek energy conference in Houston on Tuesday. That is one of the most critical questions in the global oil market. The U.S. will decide by May 8 whether to continue making exemptions for certain buyers of Iranian crude. In October it exempted eight countries from the sanctions that went into place last November. However, Brian Hook, the State Department Representative for Iran, would not comment on whether the U.S.will continue to make exceptions for buyers of Iran's oil. A high-ranking State Department official said a well-supplied world oil market helps the U.S. maintain, or even tighten, sanctions on both Iran and Venezuela without causing an oil price spike. The oil tanker 'Devon' prepares to transfer crude oil from Kharg Island oil terminal to India in the Persian Gulf, Iran, on March 23, 2018. On Wednesday, Hook said the fact that forecasts show more supply than demand for 2019 should help the U.S. be more aggressive in its efforts to take Iran's exports to zero barrels. He said Iran is currently exporting from somewhere under 1 million to 1.1 million barrels a day. "Last year when we did our waivers it was a tight and fragile market, but we were able to successfully balance our interests," he told reporters after an appearance before gathering of industry officials. "There are projections that supply will exceed demand, but those are projections. But we will continue to balance our national security and our economic interests," Hook said. The forecast that Hook referenced shows that supply would exceed demand globally this year by 400,000 barrels. Industry officials are acutely interested in the amount of oil the U.S. can remove from the market since they were taken by surprise last October when the U.S. exempted certain buyers after threatening to remove all Iranian crude. That helped send oil prices tanking, and West Texas Intermediate lost more than 40 percent before bottoming in late December. "We don't preview exemptions or nonexemptions," Hook said. He said U.S. officials keep an eye on supply as it works to sanction both Iran and Venezuela. Elliot Abrams was brought into the State Department recently as the special representative for Venezuela. "I work very closely with Elliott Abrams, and so what Secretary Pompeo has created is a team of diplomats that work very closely together so each has an awareness of what the other [is doing] so that we are able to execute our foreign policy, taking into account the mean factors that go into this. There's probably no industry that has more variables than the global oil market," Hook told reporters. "As I said, we track what's happening in Venezuela, Libya, Iraq and Kuwait, and we're working with the Saudis, and so that's going to continue. We're really pleased with how we've done so far." On Tuesday, OPEC Secretary General Mohammed Barkindo said the Iran sanctions and the ongoing questions about the waivers are creating uncertainty as OPEC attempts to balance supply and demand in the oil market by curbing its output. "It makes our job more difficult in focusing on the fundamentals, not to talk of our efforts to maintain balance and more challenging to sustain this balance going forward," he told reporters at CERAWeek. Hook on Wednesday declined to comment on whether the administration will telegraph its waiver decision to OPEC. "We don't get into our confidential discussions with countries," he told CNBC. Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan testifies before a House Financial Services Committee hearing titled: "Holding Megabanks Accountable: An Examination of Wells Fargo's Pattern of Consumer Abuses" in Washington, March 12, 2019. Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan got a 5 percent pay raise for leading the troubled bank last year. The executive received $18.4 million, including a $2.4 million salary, $14 million in stock awards and $2 million in incentive awards, according to a regulatory filing. That compares to the $17.5 million he earned for 2017, which was a 36 percent increase from the previous year. Sloan, 58, took over the fourth-biggest U.S. bank in October 2016. Charged with cleaning up the fake-accounts scandal that claimed his predecessor, Sloan has struggled to satisfy regulators' demands to overhaul the sprawling institution. Last year, thanks to "widespread consumer abuses," the Federal Reserve capped the bank's asset growth after the bank found more problems with customer dealings. Wells Fargo shares dropped 25 percent in 2018, under-performing its biggest rivals. During a four-hour long testimony this week before the House Financial Services committee, Sloan revealed that the bank was operating under 14 separate consent decrees with his regulators. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat running for president, has repeatedly called for Sloan to resign. Meanwhile, J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon received $31 million for his work last year, while Brian Moynihan of Bank of America got $26.5 million, and Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman got $29 million. A European Union (EU) flag flies outside the Houses of Parliament in London, U.K., on Thursday, March 7, 2019. Luke MacGregor | Bloomberg | Getty Images The U.K.'s Brexit deal with the European Union is dead in the water after a majority of lawmakers rejected the withdrawal agreement in a crucial vote. The agreement was rejected by 149 votes which included 75 members of U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May's own Conservative Party and the majority of opposition parties in Parliament. Lawmakers from each of the main political parties in the U.K. told CNBC why they were so compelled to vote against the deal. "Imagine in America if the American people found themselves governed by, shall we say, a mixture of Canada, Mexico and South America over and above Congress and that the Supreme Court itself would be subject to a superior court they just simply couldn't even believe it was happening," Bill Cash, a Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) and a prominent Brexiteer told CNBC Wednesday. "Remember that the American War of Independence was about no taxation without representation. The reality is that this is the kind of principle that is coming to the fore and this is why we voted against the withdrawal agreement because we have to govern ourselves," he told CNBC's Steve Sedgwick outside the Houses of Parliament in London. "No taxation without representation" is a slogan originating from the 1700s that reflected the resentment of American colonists at being taxed by a British Parliament to which they elected no representatives, symbolizing anti-British sentiment before the American Revolution. The contentious backstop Cash is a prominent member of the European Research Group (ERG), a euroskeptic pressure group of Conservative MPs that has campaigned for Brexit. Cash led a committee of lawyers appointed by the group to scrutinize the Brexit deal and legal assurances given over the "Irish backstop." The backstop was an insurance policy to prevent a hard border between Northern Ireland (a part of the U.K.) and the Republic of Ireland (a member of the EU) and a way to keep trade, goods and people moving freely on the island if the U.K. and EU could not agree a trade deal in the 21-month transition period after Brexit. Although seen as a last resort, the backstop was contentious for many Brexiteers because it would have kept the U.K. in a customs union with the EU for an indefinite amount of time and, crucially, the U.K. could not withdraw from the backstop unilaterally. May's government is propped up by support from the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and it indicated Tuesday afternoon that it would, similarly to most members of the ERG, reject May's deal. Disgruntlement In a bid to save the Great Indian Bustard (GIB), currently on the brink of extinction, Indian governments Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) has asked wind power developers to identify the birds critical habitats in Rajasthan and Gujarat and take risk mitigation measures against bird hits, one of the causes of the reducing population of the bird. Listed as Critically Endangered under the International Union for Conservation of Natures (IUCN) Red List, the GIB also has the highest protection under the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972. States such as Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh are considered to be GIBs habitat. But right now, the majority of its population is in Rajasthan followed by Gujarat. Over the years, its population in India has taken a severe beating from an estimated 1,260 GIBs in 1969 to less than 150 at present a decline of nearly 90 percent. Indian governments Minister of State in the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) Mahesh Sharma recently said that as per estimates of the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) the total number of GIB in India is less than 150 individuals. The main factors that are considered responsible for its decreasing population are the loss of habitat and industrial project. However, in recent times, death due to collision with wind turbines and power transmission lines has emerged as another major factor. Take Risk Mitigation Measures To Save The GIB The latest directive of MNRE to power companies is looking at addressing this concern. It is requested that power transmission line agencies and wind energy farm developers may identify critical power transmission lines and wind energy firms passing through the Great Indian Bustard (GIB) habitats in Rajasthan and Gujarat in consultation with the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and concerned states governments and accordingly take up risk mitigation measures against bird hits like putting up bird diverters on the conductors, painting of vane tips of the wind turbines, said a circular (February 22, 2019) by the MNRE to wind farm operators and developers. In February 2019, the MNRE also unveiled the draft offshore wind energy lease rules, 2019 which states that an offshore wind energy project can get cancelled if found causing environmental damage to marine ecology. But wildlife experts want the authorities to go an extra mile. The Great Indian Bustard is staring at extinction, and in Gujarat, the situation is especially perilous. We have been complicit in it. If we are to save the GIB, the need of the hour is to underground existing transmission lines, urgently and immediately, and no new transmission line in critical GIB areas which have been identified should be permitted. It is shameful for a nation so rooted in nature, to allow the extinct of a bird that is endemic to India, said wildlife conservationist Prerna Bindra, who is also a former member of the NBWL. The new and renewable energy ministrys directive is significant as wind power is one of the main pillars of Indias renewable sector. As of January 31, 2019, Indias total installed renewable power was 75,055.92 megawatt and of that 35,288.10 MW was from wind power. India also has an ambitious plan to install 175,000 MW of renewable power including 60,000 MW of wind power by 2022. The GIB is facing a threat from power transmission lines and wind farms. Photo by Pawar Pooja/Wikimedia Commons. The GIB is facing a threat from power transmission lines and wind farms. Photo by Pawar Pooja/Wikimedia Commons. Environment Ministry Pursuing Several Measures To Protect The GIB Large in size, the GIBs take low flights that lead to the collision with electricity transmission lines often resulting in their death. Thus, the directive is important for states like Rajasthan and Gujarat, where the majority of GIBs are found and also a significant number of wind power projects. The MNREs order to wind farm operators and developers have come after a series of directives and actions by the environment ministry and its expert panels on the issue. For instance, the standing committee of the National Board of Wildlife (NBWL) in its meeting in January 2018 has made the submission of the animal passage plan, prepared on the basis of WII guidelines, mandatory for considering approval of any new linear infrastructure project proposal passing through protected areas and other wildlife-rich areas. The WII guidelines suggest for putting up the bird diverters on the conductors of the power transmission lines. In March 2018, the forest advisory committee of the MoEFCC made it mandatory for power transmission line agencies to deploy bird diverters on conductors and paint the vane tips of the wind turbine with the orange colour to avoid bird hits. The call for action to save GIB has grown in the past few years. The MoEFCC too has taken several measures to protect and conserve the bird. For instance, the environment ministry has taken an ambitious Great Indian Bustard species recovery programme in collaboration with the WII and GIB range states like Rajasthan and Gujarat, which includes identification of the critical power transmission lines and wind energy farms in GIB habitats and making them GIB-friendly. The environment ministry is also consulting an inter-ministerial task force including officers of the power ministry, the Central Electricity Authority, environment ministry and the Power Grid Corporation Of India Limited in compliance of the order of the Supreme Court direction in an ongoing case for suggesting various measures for avoiding death of the birds and other animals due to electrocution and collision with the power transmission lines. The ministry has also taken by conservation breeding measures to check the GIBs dwindling population. Indian governments Minister of State in the MoEFCC Mahesh Sharma while replying to a query in parliament in February 2019 stressed that the environment ministry has taken up the initiative for conservation breeding of the GIB under the endangered species recovery programme scheme in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. In consultation with state government, WII and international experts, a site for the establishment of conservation breeding centre have been identified in Kota district, Rajasthan, Sharma added. He further informed that a conservation breeding program has been formulated by MoEFCC, the government of Rajasthan and WII as part of the tripartite memorandum of agreement under the project Habitat Improvement and Conservation Breeding of Great Indian Bustard (GIB)-An Integrated Approach with financial support from the MoEFCC. An important component of this programme is to initiate conservation breeding as insurance against total extinction and possible restocking of wild populations of GIB and Lesser Florican species in the future, Sharma emphasised. Bazaar Corporate Radar | Feb 22, 2021, 12:00 AM IST Bazaar Corporate Radar Bazaar Corporate Radar is your window into the minds of top CEOs, Boardrooms, global economists, fund managers and sector analysts. If it?s making news, you?ll find it on Bazaar Corporate Radar. Priyanka suggest new named during CWC meet. Patidar leader Hardik Patel with Congress president Rahul Gandhi as he joins Congress during a public meeting in Gandhinagar on Tuesday. (Photo: PTI) New Delhi: The minimum income guarantee scheme, which is considered as the brainchild of Congress president Rahul Gandhi, and is going to be the fulcrum of the partys campaign for the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls, has been given a new name by Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra Nyunatam Aamdani Yojana or NYAY. According to party sources, Ms Gandhi gave the name during the day-long meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), which was held in Ahmedabad on Tuesday. Rahul Gandhi had first mentioned about NYAY during his visit to Chhattisgarh soon after the Congress had stormed to power in the state after the assembly elections in December 2018. NYAY, or the minimum income guarantee scheme is going to be the main highlight of the Congress Lok Sabha elections campaign, as it aims to focus on rising unemployment during the NDA regime. Mr Gandhi specifically mentioned in Ahmedabad that lack of employment will be a major issue for Congress during polls as unemployment has been at its highest in the last 45 years, thus clearly indicating that the Narendra Modi-led government has failed in job creation. Listing demonetisation and faulty implementation of GST as main reasons behind loss of jobs, Congress leadership feels that creating job opportunities is the need of the hour, and party sources pointed out that Mr Gandhi is going to strongly project the NYAY scheme as the antidote for solving the perennial problem of unemployment. He said in the CWC meeting that a minimum limit would be fixed for income under the scheme, which will ensure that all beneficiaries get at least a regular basic amount in terms of income on monthly basis. The near-consensus across Colorados political spectrum is that campaign finance is a problem in need of reform. Here are eight views on how to do that. Colorado Politics is published both in print and online. Our website features subscriber-only news stories daily, designed for public policy arena professionals. Member subscribers also receive the weekly print edition of our award-winning newspaper, containing outstanding features and news stories, in their mailboxes every Saturday. Hi! I'm an education beat reporter for Fall 2018, and I'm a senior studying print and digital news. Please provide me with any feedback, questions or tips you have my email is kyle.lahucik@mail.missouri.edu and my phone number is 708.359.9917. Follow this search Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today Scientists have studied wildfires for decades learning much about the impact on air, soil and nearby ecosystems in the urban communities. Paradise: As an uncontrollable wildfire turned the California town of Paradise to ash, air pollution researcher Keith Bein knew he had to act fast: Little is known about toxic chemicals released when a whole town burns and the wind would soon blow away evidence. He drove the roughly 100 miles to Paradise, located in the Sierra Nevada foothills, from his laboratory at the University of California, Davis, only to be refused entrance under rules that allow first responders and journalists but not public health researchers to cross police lines. It was the second time Bein says he was unable to gather post-wildfire research in a field so new public safety agencies have not yet developed procedures for allowing scientists into restricted areas. Fires like the one that razed Paradise last November burn thousands of pounds of wiring, plastic pipes and building materials, leaving dangerous chemicals in the air, soil and water. Lead paint, burned asbestos and even melted refrigerators from tens of thousands of households only add to the danger, public health experts say. Beins experience highlights the difficulties in assessing the impact of todays massive disasters, whether wildfires that burn entire towns or flooding after major hurricanes, incidents scientists say are becoming more common due to climate change. Everything that were doing, it feels like this is a question nobody has asked before, and we have no answers, said Irva Hertz-Picciotto, director of the Environmental Health Sciences Centre at U.C. Davis. Researchers are examining soil tested for the presence of chemical compounds in neighbourhoods destroyed by the 2017 wildfire that swept into Santa Rosa, located in Californias Sonoma County north of the Bay Area, and comparing it to uninhabited land nearby where only trees had burned, Hertz Picciotto said. In that still-uncompleted study, researchers found nearly 2,000 more chemical compounds in the soil than in uninhabited parkland nearby. Researchers are now working to identify the compounds. While scientists have studied wildfires for decades learning much about the impact on air, soil and nearby ecosystems fire that race from the forest into large urban communities were, until recently, exceedingly rare. Scientists, many of them funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), are studying pregnant women exposed to polluted air and water after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017; residents of Puerto Rico forced to live in unrepaired homes where mold and fungi grew after Hurricane Maria in 2017; eggs from backyard chickens that ate California wildfire ash, among other topics. Its fundamentally critical that we be able to understand these situations and the risks to populations both in the short term and in the long term, said NIEHS senior medical adviser Aubrey Miller, who is helping to develop quick-response disaster research cutting across scientific specialties. To do that, NIEH has sped up the time it needs to fund research, from months or years to as little as 120 days, said Gwen Collman, who directs the agencys work with outside researchers. At U.C. Davis, where researchers are studying eggs from backyard chickens that may have breathed smoke and pecked at ash in areas affected by wildfires, the work is complicated. In an urban fire youre dealing with contaminants that dont go away arsenic, heavy metals, copper, lead, transformer fluid, brake fluid, fire retardant, said veterinarian Maurice Pitesky, who is leading the study. Any contaminants found in the eggs could stem from other factors such as the proximity of the home to a factory, a waste disposal site or a highway, he said. In an as-yet-uncompleted study, researchers have tested eggs sent by individual owners of roughly 350 backyard properties concerned about possible contamination from wildfires and other causes, researcher Todd Kelman said. The locations of the yards were mapped to see which homeowners lived near wildfire areas, and the eggs were tested to see if they have high levels of contaminants such as lead, cadmium and other chemicals associated with human buildings and activities. The cleanup protocols after such disasters are evolving along with the public health science, he said. That gap in knowledge concerns researchers like Bein, who plans to train as a fire-fighter to get access to the burned areas in the next big blaze. As these types of fires become more frequent in nature, where instead of once every decade its once every summer. Then we really need to know how this is going to affect health, Bein said. I'm a graduate from the Missouri School of Journalism and former reporter with the Missourian. Currently, I'm a working for a law firm in Dallas, Tx before beginning law school later this year. Reach me at @ByHunterGilbert on Twitter Follow this search Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today The Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy's weekend conference marked the unofficial kickoff of the commemoration of the state's bicentennial. Panelists discussed the controversial history of Missouri's road to statehood and how it set the stage for the Civil War. 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 In Pics: Stunning scenes from 'Kesari' featuring Akshay Kumar This Holi, gear up for the Akshay Kumar starrer Kesari, a biopic featuring one of Indian soldiers most heroic last stands at the Battle of Saragarhi. The movie is slated to hit the screens on March 21. Akshay takes on the role of Havildar Ishar Singh, the commander of the 36th Sikh Regiment detachment of the British Indian Army involved in a historical battle in September 1897 which pitted 21 Sikh soldiers against 10,000 Afghan Orakzai tribesmen. The movie is directed by Anurag Singh and co-produced by Karan Johar and also stars Parineeti Chopra in a pivotal role. Keep scrolling to get a sneak peek of Akshay as Havildar Ishar Singh from photos between the scenes of Kesari: Akshay Kumar as Havildar Ishar Singh gives a menacing look in a still for the film Kesari based on the heroic battle of Saragarhi. Photo courtesy: Zee Studios Akshay as Havildar Ishar looking to inspire the troops he is leading in a scene from the film...so far as we know. Photo courtesy: Zee Studios Director Anurag Singh (right) with Akshay Kumar on the sets of Kesari. Photo courtesy: Zee Studios Havildar Ishar Singh in full field uniform and kit on the marching trail. Photo courtesy: Zee Studios Soldiers of the 36th Sikh Regiment detachment throwing a mess party in a scene from the movie. Photo courtesy: Zee Studios Akshay Kumar in character as Havildar Ishar Singh getting ready to leap into action. Photo courtesy: Zee Studios Highlighting the sacrifice made by the detachment that went down in history, this scene from the movie reminds us of the family of the soldiers they had to leave behind. Photo courtesy: Zee Studios Click here to read more about Akshay Kumar and his releases. Mays deal suffers second crushing defeat One Tory in four votes against as escape bid fails FT Only 40 MPs won over by assurances The Times All ten Democratic Unionist MPs vote against News Letter Rees-Mogg accused of losing Brexit Daily Express Eurocrat slams Labours tactical behaviour The Sun What the papers said about Mays defeat The Guardian Britain was last night plunged into chaos once again as MPs voted to kill off Theresa Mays Brexit deal by 391 votes to 242. Now 993 days after the referendum, and with just 17 days before Brexit, Brits are still in the dark about when or if we will ever leave the EU. Furious MPs blasted the uncertainty saying the wretched soap opera of Brexit continues as the country heads back to square one. And Cabinet ministers were summoned for a crisis meeting at No10 to work out how to move forward. Parliament has repeatedly voted against Mrs Mays strategy for leaving the EU on March 29 last night the Commons laughed and cheered after the the fresh chaos was confirmed. The Sun Comment: Why I took the tough decision to vote down the deal Michael Fabricant MP, Daily Telegraph The day MPs turned their backs on Brexit Henry Deedes, Daily Mail Deeply-flawed deal shows how we have caved to the EU from day one Andrea Jenkyns MP, Daily Telegraph Editorial: Parliament of pygmies have sold Britain down the river The Sun >Today: >Yesterday: Vote on no-deal exit will be held today. The motion is ambiguous and controversial Now that Mrs Mays vote did not pass the vote, Brexit is less certain and another vote is impending. President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker has warned that should MPs vote the deal down for a second time, there will be no third chance and Parliament will have to determine the next course of action. MPs have been promised an immediate vote on whether the UK should leave the EU with no deal and this vote could take place as soon as Wednesday. Should MPs elect for a no deal, this means the UK will leave the bloc as planned on March 29 but will automatically switch to World Trade Organisation trade rules. However, if a no deal Brexit is rejected, a third vote will follow on whether a delay to Article 50 should be requested. Daily Express Businesses urge MPs to vote against crashing out FT Hammond warns that no-deal exit would mean revising spending plans Daily Mail Government would slash tariffs to zero to mitigate damage The Guardian Comment: A free vote on this means the Government is shrugging Philip Cowley, Times Red Box >Today: MPs Etc.: Free vote today on No Deal. If that falls, one on extension on Thursday. Mays statement. and the Prime Minister is expected to vote against No Deal Tusk says EU would need credible reason to extend Article 50 The Guardian Frustrated Brussels talks up cliff-edge exit The Times Johnson says no-deal departure is only path which maintains self-respect Daily Express The defeat the fourth worst suffered by a British government paves the way for a series of votes this week which are set to block a no-deal Brexit and delay Britains exit from the EU. The apparent decision by Mrs May to vote against no-deal follows her repeated insistence over the past two and a half years and a manifesto pledge that no deal was better than a bad deal. In Parliament after the defeat, she even appeared to refuse to accept her deal was dead, potentially setting the scene for a third meaningful vote before the end of March. The Prime Minister offered Tory MPs a free vote on the issue of whether to take no-deal off the table, to the fury of Brexiteers, and she is now braced to face growing calls to step aside. Daily Telegraph Editorial: Extension would be a national humiliation Daily Telegraph >Today: ToryDiary: May loses Brexit vote by 242 to 391. The majority against her is 149. Can Malthouse II rescue the Government? A group of Tory MPs is also preparing to revive the so-called Malthouse plan for Britain to offer an extended transition followed by a no-deal Brexit. Figures such as Damian Green and Nicky Morgan from the Remain wing of the party and the Brexiteers Steve Baker and Jacob Rees-Mogg put down the amendment outlining the plan last night, with ministers understood to be indicating their support for it. It requires new negotiations with the EU because it does not involve passing the withdrawal agreement, something Brussels and No 10 are likely to resist. Mrs May, her voice failing, told MPs, who had rejected her deal by a margin of 149 votes, that they now faced a series of unenviable choices, including whether to cancel Brexit. The Times Plan would give businesses more time The Sun Now even the ERG want to delay Brexit Daily Mail More: Remainers launch plot to seize control Daily Express Corbyn fails to back a second referendum The Times SNP reveal wording of pro-independence amendment The Scotsman Comment: To fix the backstop, May must push on with Malthouse Mark Harper MP, Daily Telegraph For MPs, the real crisis starts now Anand Menon, The Guardian Unless the Government presents a clear plan fast, it could lose control Nikki da Costa, Daily Telegraph From Brexiteer ultras to conniving Remainers, what a pitiful shower Stephen Glover, Daily Mail Brexit is now in the hands of Remainers and the EU Asa Bennett, Daily Telegraph Editorial: MPs must now take over FT >Today: Cabinet divided over whether to push for a third meaningful vote EU says it can do nothing more to help Daily Telegraph Power slips from Mays damaged hands FT The Cabinet is also set for another major bust up over what to do now, when it meets at 8am today to be shown the Chancellors Spring Statement mini-Budget. Several Cabinet ministers, including Transport Secretary Chris Grayling, headed-up a bid yesterday to persuade the PM to hold a third meaningful vote on her deal later this week. Mr Grayling told a meeting of her Cabinet that a few more tweaks from Brussels could turn around the defeat. But pro-Remain Cabinet ministers will instead urge her to rip up her deal and forge a consensus with Labour for a softer Brexit deal instead, currently lead by rebel Tory grandee Sir Oliver Letwin. The Sun Comment: Even now, she still believes one last heave could work Robert Shrimsley, FT DUP will put Brexit first depite risk of self-destruction Ruth Dudley-Edwards, Daily Telegraph Daniel Finkelstein: The Tories Brexit problems run even deeper than they appear The Conservative Party, so stuck tactically after last nights crushing defeat, with little idea what to do next, is stuck even more tightly strategically. Just at the moment when the economic argument for deregulation will look strongest, and at the moment when the party is likely to choose a Brexiteer and deregulator as its next leader, the political ability to follow this path will look ever more difficult. Outside the EU Britain will have to work hard to encourage foreign companies to invest. We will have made it more difficult for them in a number of ways, so we will have to compensate. This means making the countrys tax, regulation and immigration regime more attractive to investors. Something that many Brexit leaders would have no problem with themselves. Indeed, for them, the opportunity of doing this is part of the point of leaving. However, the political problems quickly become obvious. The Times May lost to the ultimate adversary: reality Rafael Behr, The Guardian Parties have split before, but you aint seen nothing yet Steven Fielding, Times Red Box Prime Minister is not going anywhere after Commons rout Apallingly weak, she has plumbed new depths of crisis Allison Pearson, Daily Telegraph May really has little option but to battle on to the end Philip Collins, The Times A heroic leader clings on for dear life, but for how much longer? Peter Oborne, Daily Mail Face facts, Prime Minister: its time to step aside Philip Johnston, Daily Telegraph Theresa May was tonight forced to deny shell quit as PM after her Brexit deal was all but killed off in the Commons. The Prime Minister hasnt discussed resigning with her top team, her spokesperson has said. Earlier this week it was rumoured that Mrs May could be forced to go if she suffered another damning defeat. Ministers floated the idea of the PM naming the day she would step down as Tory leaders too to persuade the Brexiteers to get behind her. Nicky Morgan said last weekend: Her position is going to be very difficult if the agreement goes down on Tuesday. And an MP was overheard earlier saying they may back the deal, but only if the PM keeps 29th March as the exit date or she must resign. Its as simple as that. The Sun Comment: The question is: does she have anything more to offer? The Times >Yesterday: ToryDiary: Commons sketch: How much more of this agony can May take? Corbyn leads calls for election Jeremy Corbyn has demanded a general election in response to Theresa Mays 149-vote Brexit deal defeat but made no mention of a second referendum. The Labour leader also pledged that his party would vote against a no-deal Brexit outcome in Wednesdays vote and signalled that he would continue to press for a customs union with the EU. The prime minister has run down the clock and the clock has been run out on her, he said in the House of Commons. Its time that we have a general election and the people can choose who their government should be. But despite Corbyns call for another poll, the party is understood to not have immediate plans to call for a vote of no confidence that could precipitate what would be the third general election in four years. The Guardian Senior Tory raises prospect of going to the country The Times Coxs legal advice riles ministers been more helpful, a cabinet source said. The Times Attorney Generals words lead Brexiteers to kill deal FT Cox has completely f***** us Daily Mail From the backbenches to the eye of the storm The Times Geoffrey Cox came under fire from his cabinet colleagues yesterday as they realised his legal advice had scuppered any chance of Theresa Mays Brexit deal passing at the second attempt. The attorney-general ruled that the changes to the deal secured by the prime minister in Strasbourg had left the risk of the UK being stuck in the backstop unchanged. Mr Cox, 58, a practising QC until his appointment last July, presented his advice at a cabinet meeting yesterday morning, telling his colleagues he had been up all night writing it. Mrs May and her team only received the advice shortly before the meeting began. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, explicitly criticised Mr Cox for undermining the prime minister. He said Cox could and should have Comment: Cox chooses law over politics David Allen Green, FT Rumpole of the Commons sank the deal with five deadly words Andrew Pierce, Daily Mail Blunt verdict was final nail in the coffin Tom Harris, Daily Telegraph >Yesterday: Spring Statement: Hammond to fund fresh blitz against knife crime Philip Hammond will today announce a 100 million funding package to tackle Britains knife crime epidemic, The Sun can reveal. The cash will go towards violent crime units in the seven worst affected UK cities. It is a major victory for Home Secretary Sajid Javid, who demanded the cash after the surge in knife killings this year. Chancellor Philip Hammond had offered a new package of 50 million but Mr Javid held out for more Officials in the two departments were locked in talks until late last night over the final amount. They finally struck a deal just hours before Mr Hammonds Spring Statement today. Some 80 million of the funding will be new money from the Treasury. The Sun Chancellor to launch consultation on infrastructure spending FT NAO boss attacks money wasted on ministers vanity projects The Sun Analysis: What to look for from the Chancellors statement Thomas Pope, Times Red Box News in Brief: Michael Tomlinson: The Prime Minister must stick to her word. We must vote this evening to leave the EU on March 29 Michael Tomlinson is MP for Mid Dorset and North Poole. After last nights vote, and as we contemplate what happens next, it is worth reflecting on the winning phrase that the Prime Minister kept repeating as she ran for leadership back in 2016. It ws of course Brexit means Brexit, and it worked. In particular, it sent reassuring signals to Brexiteers like me, who needed to hear that our leader understood the result of the referendum that she got it. On winning the leadership, Theresa Mays statement on the steps of Downing Street outlined the burning injustices that she wanted to tackle. A compassionate agenda that Conservatives can unite around. She was right to highlight those issues then, and that agenda is just as relevant today. However, the Prime Minister has but one central task for her premiership. It is the one that she seemed to embrace so readily in the early days, and the one she articulated so clearly at Lancaster House. Her mission is to follow through on her promise and deliver Brexit. Why, then, has she more recently began to assert that we may never leave at all? It is an odd about-turn, given that her leadership is predicated upon Brexit means Brexit. When did this change to mean that there may be no Brexit? That would be a political failure of catastrophic proportions, which the Prime Minister should not articulate, and which we will not countenance. And yet that is the curious threat that has been uttered repeatedly in recent days to try to encourage Brexiteers like me to back her proposal. Last night, that did not work. As a result we are faced with two further key Brexit questions. First, an extension of Article 50. The Prime Minister has said at the despatch box more than a hundred times that we are leaving on the March 29th. Now, there would have been a perfectly reasonable argument for a short extension in order to pass any necessary legislation. But no-one who actually wants to leave should argue for an indefinite extension, and for no stated purpose. Delay will not help. It will give certainty neither to our constituents nor our businesses. Nor will it heal the divisions in the country. It will simply serve to prolong the agony. The Prime Minister must stick to her word and stick to the 29th March, deal or no deal. Which brings me to the second point. There is no such thing as no deal. On this occasion, although it is so obvious that we should be more positive, I dont just mean that we should use my positive phrase a Clean Global Brexit. I mean something more fundamental. There is no such thing as a no deal, because we already have numerous deals secured. These have not been announced or trumpeted with anywhere near sufficient fanfare. It is almost as if they have been sneaked out by politicians too embarrassed to admit their existence or efficacy. Here are but a very few examples. If we leave without a deal, UK citizens in Spain will continue living there, as now. Further, our financial services have been granted temporary permissions by the EU. And guess what? Flights from the UK will continue flying into and over the EU. Then there is agreement for visa free travel. And again we have agreement for hauliers. The UKs nuclear sector is now entirely No Deal ready. And on it goes. The Governor of the Bank of England is no natural optimist when it comes to the benefits of Brexit. But even he has recently reassessed our prospects for leaving without a deal. I do not pretend that it will be a walk in the park. And in the eyes of some people, we will never be fully ready. Politicians often need the wisdom of Solomon, and perhaps the following from Ecclesiastes 11 will help: If you wait for perfect conditions, you will never get anything done. My point is this. We already have deals in place. Scaremongering that we will crash out and fall off the edge of a cliff into an economic Armageddon will not work. We were warned about that before and the people of this great country of ours considered it, and voted leave despite these dire predictions. As we eagerly await the next round of Brexit debates, and as we contemplate our votes later on, the Prime Minister must be reminded that Brexit really does mean Brexit, and that we leave on the 29th March. India and Indonesia have enjoyed strong cultural and social relationships for ages. An outfit doesnt only have the power to make one look good. An outfit, a fabric or a dress design can speak a lot more than that. In this particular circumstance, outfits have become a means of celebrating international bond. India and Indonesia have enjoyed strong cultural and social relationships for ages. To mark 70 years of diplomatic relations of Indonesia and India, and to commemorate 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia along with IAMKHADI (not for profit social enterprise) held Batik and Khadi Fashion Show. Star designers like Ritu Beri from India and Arty Israwan, Hendri Budiman and Carmanita from Indonesia displayed amalgamation of Khadi and Batik in their respective clothes line all choreographed by Vinay Gupta. Designs by Ritu Beri Batik and Khadi share a similar past and history and this may be one of the reason why both fuse together so well. Batik originated in Indonesia and symbolizes cultural ethos of it where as Khadi originated in India and can be called as an Indian national dress. Batik is a method (originally used in Java, but now spread throughout Indonesia) of producing coloured designs on textiles by dyeing them, having first applied wax to the parts to be left undyed. Quite similarly Khadi is an extensive process of creating hand spun yarn and then hand weaving into cloth. But despite originating from two different cultures both gel as both are traditional and largely hand woven. With this as back drop, Indias celebrated Fashion designer Ritu Beri opened the Fashion Show with a collection of contemporary and traditional Khadi silhouettes. This was followed by classical Batik patterns on Khadi by noted Indonesian designer Arty Israwan and contemporary Batik patterns on Khadi by another well-known Indonesian designer Hendri Budiman. The show ended with display of exquisite Batik patterns on saree by the celebrity fashion designer Carmanita from Indonesia. According to his Excellency Sidharto Reza Suryodipuro, Ambassador of Indonesia, The fashion show not just showcases strong cultural and social bond enjoyed by both the countries but by promoting Batik and Khadi, we can open up significant employment and business opportunities for villagers both here in India as well as in Indonesia. It can have multiplier impact on the rural economy and contribute to further strengthening of ties between the two countries. Yash Arya, Founder, IAMKHADI, says, This fashion show also aims to bring buyers and sellers together, especially in the textile industry to see the potential of Batik and Khadi as a classy fashion wear, thus making it popular in both classes and masses. The Indonesian Embassy has lined up a series of events here in India to celebrate 70 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Only recently, a 15 days event was held at Dilli Haat on the occasion of the 33rd edition of Dastkari Haat Crafts Bazaar. During this, craft and skill exchange program, batik and pottery workshop by Indonesian artists was organised. Andrew Gimsons Commons sketch: How much more of this agony can May take? The House was crowded for and excited by the vote in a way that it had not been when the Prime Minister opened the debate. For some reason the result took longer than normal to arrive, but when it did, she had still lost by the humiliating margin of 149 votes. Yet she rose at once, her face very pale but standing as straight and elegant as ever in her red jacket, and in her hoarse voice declared that she still believes there is a majority in the House for leaving in an orderly way with a deal, thereby fulfilling the referendum result. How much longer will the House allow her to go on pursuing her version of that deal? How much longer will her divided party allow her to carry on? How much more of this agony can she herself take? Is her instinctive clinging to a dead policy still viable? There was a stunned atmosphere after the vote, for nobody could tell the answers to those questions. They could just see a frail Prime Minister who had failed to wring anything like the concessions from the European Union which would have satisfied her critics that she had obtained an acceptable deal. Her authority is now so diminished that it is hard to see how she can restore any sense of direction to the Government, or to her party, so many members of which defy her with impunity. The sense that power was ebbing away from her was intensified by her announcement of a free vote on Wednesday on whether or not the House wishes to leave without a deal on 29th March. Sir Vince Cable, for the Liberal Democrats, asked the Speaker whether he could think of any precedent for this defeat since the American War of Independence. His clear implication was that Theresa May is the worst Prime Minister since Lord North. This comparison is actually very unfair to Lord North, who was a brilliant parliamentarian. But Lord North, despite his gifts, is now only remembered for the loss of the American colonies. He took the blame, and that after all, is what the Prime Minister is there for: to take the blame. We are about to break one of this sites golden rules namely, never to list MPs who abstain on a Government motion. The reason for this is that absention doesnt automatically equal defying the whip. The MP concerned could be abroad. He or she could be ill. He could be on urgent family business. None the less, there must be a reasonable presumption that, if a pro-Remain or Soft Brexit Minister didnt vote with the Government in the final vote this evening, he was breaking the Whip. The following names are being listed: David Gauke, Justice Secretary. Greg Clark, Business Secretary. David Mundell, Scotland Secretary. Amber Rudd, Work and Pensions Secretary. Claire Perry, Business Minister, entitled to attend Cabinet. Robert Buckland, Solicitor-General. Alistair Burt, Foreign Office Minister. Tobias Ellwood, Defence Minister. Stephen Hammond, Health Minister. Richard Harrington, Business Minister. Margot James, Business Minister. Ann Milton, Education Minister. Now, it may well be that there are extenuating circumstances. First, it wasnt expected that the Governments motion would be amended. Before it was passed, the whip for the Governments motion was for a free vote. Next, it is being claimed that a senior MP, or Downing Street aide, or both, indicated to some of the Ministers concerned that they would be able to abstain on the motion still despite the amendment, originally tabled by Caroline Spelman, having been passed. The long and short of it is that it isnt clear as we write which of the above, bar Mundell, acted knowingly in defiance of a three-line whip. And the waters will doubtless be muddied sufficiently so that we never know. Sarah Newton, a Work and Pensions Minister, and Paul Masterton, a PPS, are reported to have voted against the whip, and resigned. 8.30am Update March 14: It is being reported that Bim Afolami, Vicky Ford, Peter Heaton-Jones, Simon Hoare and Victoria Prentis, all PPSs, also abstained, together with Nigel Huddleston, a Party Vice-Chair. An amendment has been tabled to todays ambiguous No Deal motion. It puts four main proposals. First, that the Government publish its Day One Tariff Schedules for No Deal. Second, that to allow businesses time to prepare for the operation of any tariffs, it seeks a brief Article 50 extension to May 22. Third, that there should be a set of mutual standstill agreements between the UK and EU until December 2021, during which the UK would pay an agreed sum equivalent to its net EU contributions and satisfy its other public international law obligations. Fourth, that the rights of EU citizens resident in the UK should be unilaterally guaranteed. This is Malthouse Two. It offers something to almost everyone in the Conservative Party, at least. For harder Brexiteers, it offers No Deal as a last resort. For softer ones, no cliff-edge. For many of both, a generous move on EU citizens. For all, a country that honours its obligations. It is the product of the most creative current alliance in the Parliamentary Party. It contains MPs who voted Remain, such as our columnist Nicky Morgan and Damian Green; others who voted Leave, such as Steve Baker, Iain Duncan Smith and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Simon Hart (pictured), co-chair of the loyalist Brexit Delivery Group, is a signatory to the amendment. So, significantly, is Nigel Dodds: that presumably squares the DUP. At a time when Tories are losing their heads, this group are keeping theirs. By voting for the amendment today, assuming the Speaker selects and calls it, Theresa May and her Ministers could back a plan without incurrring legitimate criticism for breaking manifesto commitments of the kind that Graham Brady was properly making yesterday evening. Were the Government functioning properly, it would whip for this amendment. But since the Prime Minister has bowed to blackmail from a cabal of Cabinet Remain-leaning fanatics Amber Rudd, David Gauke, Greg Clark by promising a free vote on the Government motion, it is hard to see how this could happen. Still, Julian Smith will surely see the point of a move that can bring Conservatives together. Readers will understand that we dont exaggerate in writing that the amendment may be a last chance to do so. So if its all so easy, I hear you ask, whats the problem? It is that the EU is publicly rejecting a managed No Deal although, of course, it has announced plans for one already. No Deal is by definition a grey area. Malthouse Two seeks simply to make it greyer. Were hoping that the EU sees sense, one of the plans pushers told this site yesterday evening. We understand why Malthouse Two is a very long shot indeed. But the alternatives are deep winter: more resignations, leadership chaos, the likely defeat of Mays Deal third time round, Oliver Letwin taking control of the Commons, a possible election, a formal Tory split, and a Marxist Government which sees Venezuela as a role model. It would be easy this morning to accentuate the negative, eliminate the positive. We resist the temptation. Amidst the darkness, there is a glimpse of light. Buckle up, folks. The online travel agency business is about to experience some possible turbulence. Anyone whos surfed the web looking for vacation ideas knows all too well that theres plenty of companies waiting for the consumers mouse-click to go in their favor. Airlines, hotels, bed and breakfasts, cruise lines, automobile rental companies, and others are at each others throats trying to lure their share of the nearly 600 million consumers who book some sort of travel-related aspect online. Why? Because the grass is very green on the travel playing field. Expedia -- which owns Hotels.com, Orbitz, CheapTickets, Travelocity, Hotwire and others -- pulled in $11 billion in 2018. Bookings.com -- the umbrella for Kayak, Priceline, and others -- also posted $11 billion last year. Now, the most feared elephant in any online business room -- Google -- has entered the vacation rental fray. On Wednesday, the company announced that it, too, is launching a platform where consumers can see and book vacation rentals as part of Google Hotel Search. You can narrow your search with price and amenity filters, plus browse photos, read reviews and see rates and availability of the vacation rental property, wrote Pratip Banerji, Googles Travel Product Manager. Here we go! It's game-on in the alternative accommodations market, Dennis Schaal, the executive editor at travel news and research site Skift told ConsumerAffairs. Google will certainly be on the rise in the sector, and because of its footprint, could definitely take market share away from Airbnb, which is apparently seeing its growth already slow in some of its biggest markets. If Schaal is right, Googles entrance will either make Airbnb stronger or force it to find a vacation rental pocket that Google doesnt have its hand in, yet. Nonetheless, the goal of taking market share away from Airbnb can have a handsome payoff for Google. Since Airbnb started up some 10 years ago, its notched 500 million guest arrivals and a market valuation of over $30 billion. Going for the win-win If youre asking if Airbnb will take a hit, wont others in the sector like HomeAway and VRBO take one, too? Yes and no. Google knows it could be foolhardy to take this on solo, so its setting its sights on being a friendly elephant in the room by taking the aggregator route, where it will partner with other travel planning stalwarts like Expedia, HomeAway, Hotels.com, NextPax, RedAwning, Rentals United, TripAdvisor, and VRBO. As they say, a rising tide lifts all boats. Google will make a tidy commission off of getting consumers to those sites and, in turn, those sites will presumably be happy about cutting Google in on the action for doing that. Plus, on the marketing end, Googles partners arent really losing much, if anything. When a traveler clicks Book, theyre transported to the travel partners page to complete their transaction, and all property information and bookings are provided and done by those travel partners. Schaal says not to rush to judgment on Airbnbs place in the food chain. Although Airbnb isn't participating yet in Google's new vacation rentals' offering, Airbnb certainly could choose to participate in the future, bidding for placement like (Googles other partners) in Google's vacation rentals' product, he said. Preparing for a shakeout A shift this seismic will certainly produce changes and adjustments consumers will notice when making travel plans. Expedia, for another, also had a big announcement on Wednesday. Its VRBO (Vacation Rentals by Owner) brand rolled out two sizeable changes. One is that the company wants to now be known as Vrbo -- as if its ver-boh. The second is a new collaborative tool that allows travelers to create their own Trip Boards to like and save their favorite properties in one place. This will let consumers share travel plans with others in their travel group, ask for feedback, and vote on the ones they like best. Seems like a smart move. According to Vrbo data, 86 percent of U.S. travelers ask others for advice when planning a trip. With app push notifications, each person can choose to be notified about votes or comments right away, making it easier and faster to choose the best place for everyone, the company said in a news release. Virtual tours are another way technology helps Vrbo customers find a perfect match. Currently,15,000 360-degree virtual walkthroughs bring homes to life for travelers before they book, with more tours quickly being added. Schaal predicts consumers might also see some movement from Booking.com as it maneuvers the playing field, trying to maintain its connection with 1,334,878 active properties in 225 countries. Don't count out Booking.com in this discussion of Google versus Airbnb, he said. Booking.com is a very capable company and offers nearly as many alternative accommodations as Airbnb although Booking.com, which is the dominant online travel agency player in Europe, often gets left out of the conversation. You will be hearing a lot more about Booking.com in this sector. A shortage of customer service employees may make it difficult for travelers to make a changes Airlines around the world are finally getting to enjoy life in the air again. With international flight restrictions eased and vaccinated passengers feeling good about their health safety, its all systems go for the holidays and 2022. While airlines have handed out great fares as a lure to get consumers back in the air after 20 months of pandemic fits and starts, will they jack up the prices again? The easy answer is yes. Most experts agree that prices will go up becau... Data shows that 9 Kashmir-based terrorists were arrested in the national capital and only 3 were convicted. NEW DELHI: Only 32 per cent of terrorists based in Kashmir, Punjab and North-east states, who were arrested by the Delhi police special cell from January 2010 to December 2018, were convicted by various courts. According to the data provided by the Delhi police, the special cell has arrested a total of 25 terrorists based in Kashmir, Punjab and North-east states between January 2010 and December 2018. However, only eight of them were convicted. Data shows that 9 Kashmir-based terrorists were arrested in the national capital and only 3 were convicted. Two Punjab-based terrorists were arrested and one was convicted, while out of 14 North-east terrorists arrested in the national capital, only four were convicted. They wanted to strike terror in the national capital during the festivals, Republic Day and Independence Day ceremonies. Their targets were VIP areas, iconic places and vital installations. Interrogation revealed that they were planning a major strike in the national capital. Delhi police, Jammu & Kashmir police and Punjab police were working in tandem after they were alerted by the security agencies about terrorist outfits active in Kashmir Valley, Punjab and North-east states, sources said. Timely arrest of these terrorists prevented major strikes as they were planning to carry out a series of attacks across the national capital, said the sources. 100% Website senff.com.br uses latest and advanced technologies. It is very popular on the web, it's within the 1 million most visited websites of the world at position 356932 by Alexa. It supports HTTPS. The main html page has a size of . This CoolSocial report was updated on 2021-12-05, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want. 100% Website ultimaora.net uses latest and advanced technologies like: JQuery. It supports HTTPS. The main html page has a size of 58467 bytes (57.10 kb uncompressed). This CoolSocial report was updated on 2019-09-17, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want. Mr Kolambkar is likely to get his BJP ticket from the Wadala constituency. Mumbai: Senior Congress Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) Kalidas Kolambkar is likely to quit his party and join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) soon. The MLA from Naigaon has given ample indication of his plans to join the BJP ahead of the Vidhan Sabha (VS) elections. Word that Mr Kolambkar is planning to join the BJP started doing the rounds after the image of chief minister Devendra Fadnavis was found on a banner put up at his office on Tuesday. Bang opposite the Congress Tilak Bhavan office at Dadar, the banner had the image of Mr Fadnavis instead of his current party leaders. According to political experts, Mr Kolambkar has made his intentions clear by putting the chief ministers image on his banners. I dont want to remain in the Congress any more. Mr Fadnavis possesses strong will power for the development of the state, he said. The senior MLA, who is a close associate of former chief minister Narayan Rane, has been elected six times from the earlier Naigaon and now Wadala Assembly constituency. While Mr Rane formed his own party, the Swabhimani Party, Mr Kolambkar decided to join the BJP. He is likely to get a BJP ticket from the Wadala constituency in the forthcoming Vidhan Sabha polls. In the 2014 Assembly polls, Mr Kolambkar had a narrow escape by defeating a BJP candidate. Sujay claims he made move against his dads wishes. Mumbai: In the wake of his son joining the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Congress leader Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil on Tuesday said that he would remain in the grand old party and stated that he is ready to carry out any responsibility given to him by its high command. The Congress leader also ruled out his resignation from the post of Leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly. Congress leader Sujay Vikhe-Patil in a move considered to be a big blow to his party just ahead of the election joined the BJP in the presence of chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and the BJP state president Raosaheb Danve in south Mumbai on Tuesday. Sujay Vikhe-Patil claimed he took the decision against the wishes of his father. I don't know to what extent my parents will like this decision of mine, but I will work under the direction of the BJP and will try to make my parents proud, he said. He also added the chief minister and BJP legislators had a cooperative approach and they helped him take the decision. Sources in the Congress said that Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil had apprised party president Rahul Gandhi of his sons intention to contest the election from Ahmednagar Lok Sabha (LS) constituency, but the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) was not ready to give this seat up, so Mr Gandhi had asked him to direct his son to join the NCP. However, NCP chief Sharad Pawar in a press meet in Pune on Monday raised questions over Sujay Vikhe-Patil's contribution to the constituency and also said that his party had defeated the Vikhe-Patils, an apparent reference to the defeat of Sujay Vikhe-Patil's grandfather, the late Balasaheb Vikhe Patil, who was a rival to Mr Pawar. Royal Caribbean International has announced its 2020-2021 winter itineraries. Among the highlights, the Adventure of the Seas will homeport in Galveston, sailing four- and five-day cruises, alongside the Liberty of the Seas sailing seven days. The Enchantment of the Seas will sail south for the winter to homeport in San Juan for the first time, following her summer season in Galveston. She will be sailing seven-night itineraries in addition to the Freedom of the Seas, which sails year-round from San Juan. The Explorer of the Seas will return to Miami for five and nine-night cruises. The Independence of the Seas will return to Port Everglades in November 2020, sailing four and five nights to the Western Caribbean and Nassau. The Vision of the Seas will be offering 10- and 11-night cruises from Port Everglades to the Southern Caribbean. The Rhapsody of the Seas returns to her longtime homeport of Tampa in 2020. Also returning to Tampa will be the Brilliance of the Seas on a mix of four- and five-night sailings to the Western Caribbean. Windows computers and servers update on a monthly basis. Most of these updates are self-installing and need no other interaction. Sometimes, though, you need to add registry keys to enable or disable additional security settings. I discussed the additional registry keys needed for Spectre and Meltdown protection earlier, but other updates often need additional settings. One way to learn about these needed registry settings is to read the security bulletin. Your vulnerability scanner might indicate missing protections after it scans your network, too. At times the new registry keys are not part of a security bulletin but part of a security advisory. An advisory is sent when there is no patch released. Advisories often give information about additional protections you need or an upcoming change in updates that will impact your systems. Blocking unsafe ticket-granting tickets in Windows In the February updates, for example, advisory ADV190006 pointed out an upcoming change that will impact Active Directory implementations. The advisory notes a change outlined in Knowledge Base article KB4490425 in how Microsoft handles ticket-granting tickets (TGTs). Currently the default configuration when you trust identities from another Active Directory forest lets an attacker in the trusting forest request delegation of a TGT for an identity from the trusted forest. This unsafe condition impacts Server 2019, Server 2016, Server 2012 R2 and Server 2012. In July 2019, Microsoft will release an update to harden Server 2008 R2 and Server 2008. In the meantime, the advisory gives guidance on how to block unsafe TGT delegation across an incoming trust by setting the netdom flag EnableTGTDelegation to no using the following command. netdom.exe trust fabrikam.com /domain:contoso.com /EnableTGTDelegation:No Clear plain-text passwords from WDigest memory Often there are much older Knowledge Base articles that still can impact your network, such as a 2014 security advisory that relates to KB2871997. You might have installed the patch on your workstations and servers but didnt run the registry key to delete the clear-text password in WDigest memory. Often the password tool Mimikatz can find this leftover password in Server 2008 R2 servers. Add the following registry key to clear out the password. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\ WDigest When the UseLogonCredential value is set to 0, WDigest will not store credentials in memory. This value is not by default set up on a Server 2008 R2 system. You will need to add it. Scroll down to HKEY local machine to the value noted, right-click on New and Add a Dword 32-bit value, and add the UseLogonCredential. Susan Bradley Adding a registry key Have all users log out of the server, and then reboot for the password to be cleared from the system. Other security bulletins that require new Windows registry keys These security bulletins also need registry keys to be effective. MS15-011 impacts Group Policy and requires this registry key set: HKEY_LOCAL_Machine\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\ NetworkProvider\HardenedPaths . Add the value Netlogon with data of RequireMutualAuthentication=1 RequireIntegrity=1 . Add the value Netlogon with data of MS15-124 is an Internet Explorer patch that requires these registry keys: HKEY_LOCAL_Machine\Software\Microsoft\InternetExplorer\Main\ FeatureControl\FEATURE_ALLOW_USER32_EXCEPTION_HANDLER_HARDENING . Add a value of 1 and then set: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\InternetExplorer \Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_ALLOW_USER32_EXCEPTION_HANDLER_HARDENING . Use a value of 1. Alternatively you can use the easy fix in the KB article that will set the registry key for you. . Add a value of 1 and then set: . Use a value of 1. Alternatively you can use the easy fix in the KB article that will set the registry key for you. KB3140245 covers an update for TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2. You need to make a change to: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\WinHttp DefaultSecureProtocols and HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ Internet Settings\WinHttp DefaultSecureProtocols . Alternatively, you can use the easy fix in the KB article that will set the needed registry key for you. Get the idea that you need to check for additional steps needed to protect your Windows network besides patching? If your vulnerability scanner is telling you that you arent patched and yet you know youve installed the update, look for missing registry keys that might be buried in the details of the KB article. STAMFORD Purdue Pharma CEO and President Craig Landau confirmed the company is considering bankruptcy as it faces hundreds of lawsuits that allege it fueled the opioid crisis through deceptive marketing of pain drugs such as OxyContin. Landaus announcement made in a rare interview, with The Washington Post comes amid reports in the past two weeks that the Stamford-based company has been preparing to file for bankruptcy as it faces settlements or jury decisions that could amount to tens of billions of dollars . It is an option, Landau told The Post. We are considering it, but weve really made no decisions on what course of actions to pursue. A lot depends on what unfolds in the weeks and months ahead. More than 1,000 cities, counties and states , including Connecticuts attorney general , have sued Purdue. The company has denied the allegations and said it wants to work with public officials to combat the epidemic of opioid abuse. A prospective bankruptcy could halt the pending litigation against Purdue. Any subsequent moves, such as settlements, would then have to be approved by the bankruptcy court handling the case. Significant creditor support would be needed to implement a Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan. In Purdues case, the stakeholders would include the local and state governments that have sued. Banks and other organizations that might be financing the company would also participate in the proceedings. The litigants have to consider how serious is Purdues interest in possibly filing for bankruptcy, said Robert Bird, a professor of business law at the University of Connecticut. If you settle too early, before a bankruptcy, you might not get enough. If you settle too late, after a bankruptcy, you may end up being one of many creditors. In contrast with a Chapter 7 filing, Chapter 11 proceedings would not liquidate the company. Essentially, what you would be trying to show is that the company is worth more to creditors alive than dead, said Jeff Hellman, a New Haven-based attorney, whose practice concentrates on commercial litigation and bankruptcy. There are many examples of companies doing well after coming out of Chapter 11. Attorneys general press ahead At the same time, attorneys general across the country press ahead with their cases. In Oklahoma, the trial for the states lawsuit against Purdue and several other pharmaceutical companies is scheduled to start May 28. Purdue filed an unsuccessful motion to delay the start after it said it would need more time to respond to the state producing 165,000 documents last month. Meanwhile, about 1,500 municipal and county lawsuits against Purdue and other pharmaceutical firms have been consolidated in multidistrict litigation federal court in Cleveland, Ohio. The first trial linked to those cases is scheduled to start in October. Paul Hanly, co-lead counsel for the MDL plaintiffs, has declined to comment on the possibility of a Purdue bankruptcy. In an interview last year, he expressed his desire for Purdue to keep operating. We dont want any of these companies to go out of business; this is not an act of vengeance, Hanly said in October. This is litigation to recover money that these government entities have spent and lost as a consequence of the defendants. Purdue has engaged in settlement talks, but it has also sought to throw out many complaints. Earlier this month, it filed a motion to dismiss Massachusetts lawsuit. The company asserts that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healeys litigation creates a misleading narrative that mischaracterizes internal company emails and documents. Many of those records involve members of the Sackler family who own Purdue. Healeys office opposes the motion. Other developments On Wednesday, Purdue announced it had gained a fast-track designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to speed up the review and development of its nalmefene hydrochloride injection to treat known or suspected opioid overdoses. The drug would focus on combatting adverse reactions to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. In 2018, fentanyl was involved in 760 deaths in Connecticut, according to the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. It contributed to 75 percent of drug-related fatalities in the state last year. We believe we have a responsibility as a pharmaceutical company to do what we can, and were leaning forward with what we believe could be a very meaningful solution and a very meaningful contribution to the public health, Landau told The Post. Purdue said in a statement that it would not profit from nalmefene hydrochlorides sale, if it were to go on the market. There is no guarantee that the treatment would complete clinical development or gain FDA approval, the company said. In January, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb confirmed the agencys support for the development of an over-the-counter version of naloxone, a nasal spray widely used to treat opioid overdoses. pschott@scni.com; 203-964-2236; twitter: @paulschott A woman who worked as the accounting manager of a Stratford company, pleaded guilty Wednesday to stealing nearly $134,000 from the business. Susanna Kurus, 43, of of Garner, North Carolina, guilty before U.S. District Judge Michael P. Shea in Hartford to one count of wire fraud stemming from an embezzlement scheme. According to the report, the stipend payout increased in proportion with the educational qualification. The report also highlighted that apprentices under the other employability scheme (OEES) received 7.66 per cent higher stipend than what was paid under the Apprenticeship Act. Mumbai: The growing demand for skilled talent coupled with revisions in the Apprenticeship Act seems to be positively impacting the apprenticeship ecosystem in India, with Maharashtra topping the list as the highest paying state. While the median stipend is around 41 per cent higher than applicable minimum wages in majority of sectors and cities, a study report released by Team Lease Skill University has revealed that the apprenticeship stipend in Maharashtra is 159 per cent higher than minimum wages. This is followed by Andhra Pradesh (132 per cent), Tamil Nadu (112 per cent) and Gujarat (84 per cent). The report also highlighted that apprentices under the other employability scheme (OEES) received 7.66 per cent higher stipend than what was paid under the Apprenticeship Act. Interestingly, the study noted that the higher payout failed to meet the candidates expectation by a huge margin across cities. In Mumbai, the average apprenticeship payout stood at `9,400 per month, 36 per cent lower than `12,800 expected by candidates, according to the report. In cities like Delhi and Bengaluru, the percentage variation in actual payout and expectation was as high as 71 per cent and 42 per cent, respectively. According to the report, the stipend payout increased in proportion with the educational qualification. Post-graduates and engineering graduates were the best paid across sectors, as per both other employability schemes (OEES) and Market (Apprentice Act). Non-engineering graduates and diploma holders were paid almost on par across sectors. However, non-engineering graduates were paid significantly higher than diploma holders in construction, banking and financial services, and tourism and hospitality. A majority of employers (46 to 77 per cent of those who participated in the survey) expected applicants to be aware of essential soft skills and a good 63 per cent expected them to possess domain awareness. WASHINGTON A Pentagon official said concerns about threats from U.S. foes prompted the decision to boost the number of Virginia Class submarines built next year from a traditional two-a-year to three, at a cost of $10.2 billion. In a detailed release of its 2020 budget request to Congress on Tuesday, the Pentagon has also asked for $72.3 million for a major upgrade at the Naval Submarine Base in New London the construction of a new submarine berthing pier at the facility. This is the first time in years the Defense Department has asked for military construction money for the base. The Pentagon has also asked for $11.2 billion to build 78 new F-35 fighter jets - whose engines are built by Pratt & Whitney, and increase its purchase of Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters to 73, an increase from the Armys 2019 buy of 58 helicopters. The Defense Department also plans to purchase six King Stallion helicopters and six presidential helicopters from Sikorsky in 2020. Rear Admiral Randy Crites, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Budget, said the new focus on submarines is directly tied to the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which prioritizes countering Chinese and Russian threats. Were not in Kansas anymore, Crites said. We know that the competition is on and we need to be bigger. The Pentagon will ask Congress for $10.2 billion to allow Electric Boat, and its partner Newport News Shipbuilding, to build three fast attack Virginia class submarines, instead of the two it had scheduled for 2020 in previous budget projections. Thats a huge increase over the less than $6 billion that has been traditionally appropriated each year for the Virginia-class program, because each sub will cost more, $3.2 billion apiece, up from $2.7 billion for the older boats. The new subs will cost more because they will be larger and modified to included the Virginia Payload Modules, which will be placed on all boats built in 2020 and beyond, that increases the number of missiles each sub is able to launch. Questions about shipbuilding capacity The Navys request for an additional Virginia-class submarine was a surprise because, according to its 30-year shipbuilding plan, the Navy identified available shipyard capacity for increasing production in several years and determined 2022 was the earliest year EB and Newport News could support building three fast attack submarines. The Navy last year also rejected calls to build an additional submarine in 2022. The added submarine also comes as the Navy prepares to start building its huge and costly Columbia-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines in 2021. The Navy has asked Congress for $2.2 billion to continue preliminary work on the Columbia submarine program. Electric Boat said it is ready to ramp up production. We are making significant investments in hiring and training the next generation of shipbuilders, in expanding our supply base and in upgrading and building new facilities so that we can meet the needs of the Navy now and in the future, said Electric Boat spokeswoman Liz Power. Connecticut lawmakers lauded the proposed boost in submarine production, but are critical of the Pentagons decision to trim the number of F-35s it wants to buy in 2020. At a cost of about $8 billion, the Pentagon has requested 78 F-35s, which are built by Lockheed Martin. Thats down from the 84 fighter jets the Defense Department had projected to purchase in 2020. Instead of buying more F-35s, the Air Force decided to purchase eight new advanced F-15 jets. Unlike the F-35s, the F-15X is built by Boeing, and its engines made by General Electric. The F-15X is considered a 4th generation fighter, while the F-35 is a stealthy, and more expensive 5th generation fighter. We really didnt need, and couldnt really afford, all fifth generation aircraft. And there was a really important place for fourth generation aircraft, an administration official told reporters on a phone call with reporters. President Donald Trumps proposed $4.75 trillion budget to run the federal government in 2020 is under attack by Democratic lawmakers for its proposed cuts to health care and social safety net programs and for its inclusion of $8 billion to construct a border wall between the United States and Mexico. Reaction from many Republican lawmakers has been lukewarm, and even cool. Despite the problems Trumps budget may face from lawmakers, most of the Pentagon request is expected to be approved, with changes. Besides tapping some defense money to build his border wall, the major problem facing the $750 billion Defense Department budget request, which is about 5 percent larger than last years, is that it raised some of the money for operations and weapons systems by tapping the Overseas Contingency Operations account, a Pentagon war chest that is usually used to fund combat operations and is not subject to budget caps. The Trump administration requested $165 billion for the account in the 2020 fiscal year, up from $69 billion this year. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a senior Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the presidents budget shortsighted because it would slash investments in infrastructure, medical research, and American families, cuts that have been rejected by Congress two fiscal years in a row. But now he relies on a budget gimmick, Overseas Contingency Operations funding (OCO), to fund a massive increase for the Department of Defense that is not subject to the budget caps, a gimmick his own Acting Chief of Staff rightfully criticized as a misuse of funding Leahy said. FAIRFIELD Sacred Heart University says Caitlin Nelson only had herself to blame. The 20-year-old college student died after taking part in an on-campus, school-sanctioned pancake eating contest for charity in March 2017. Her family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the university last year, saying Sacred Heart not only approved the contest and the use of pancakes, but also failed to have adequate medical personnel there. Too bad, the universitys lawyer said in a response to the lawsuit filed Tuesday. The lawsuit fails to state a claim upon which relief may be granted, the lawyer, James M. Sconzo, wrote. And if anyone is to blame for Nelsons death, Sacred Heart says, its Nelson herself. Her injuries and damages were caused in whole or in part by Caitlin Nelsons own carelessness and negligence, the filing says. In the filing, the university denies not having medical personnel at the eating contest, without elaborating. In an e-mail Tuesday, Sacred Heart Director of Communications Deb Noack said The Sacred Heart community continues to mourn the loss of Caitlin Nelson. Beyond that, we are unable to comment on ongoing litigation, Noack said. The lawsuit says that moments after the contest began, Nelson began struggling to breathe, and police officers were called to provide emergency medical care. Responding officers described finding a mass of pancake paste like concrete in her airway, which was impossible to dislodge. Nelson died after being taken to St. Vincents Hospital and then to New York Presbyterian Hospital, where tests determined her brain was severely damaged from oxygen deprivation, the lawsuit says. According to Sacred Heart, Nelson should have investigated the risks of eating contests and techniques on how to participate in them safely. In Tuesdays filing the university also accused her of not exercising reasonable caution or judgment and failing to maintain proper and appropriate use of her senses. A scheduling order in the case envisions settlement talks will take place in September 2020, with a trial tentatively scheduled for January 2021. Nelson, a Clark, N.J., resident whose father was a Port Authority police officer killed in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, planned to obtain a master of social work upon graduating from Sacred Heart, according to the lawsuit. She also devoted her time to the Resiliency Center of Newtown, working with children affected by the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. A message was left with the lawyer representing her family Tuesday. ethan.fry@hearstmediact.com ANSONIA Crews have dug about 22 feet of the 30-foot trench needed to reach the broken sewer pipe that is threatening businesses along Pershing Drive. Theyre putting in more shoring today, said Michael DAlessio, the citys Public Works director, on Wednesday. Its probably going to take them at least three more days before they can reach the broken pipe and start to replace it. The nearly 100-year-old pipe which services Pershing Drive, and Howard and Clifton avenues, broke Feb. 22 dumping raw sewage into the Lemko Club and threatening the Haddad building. Pershing Drive is lined with several businesses including Duchess Restaurant, Dunkin Donuts, Alexander Hardware and CVS, among others. Cost of repairing the break is estimated at $760,000. A temporary pump is being used to send raw sewage around the breakage to the Water Pollution Control Authority treatment plant on the other side of the Naugatuck River Frank Pepe Construction is general contractor for the project; subcontractor Brennan Construction is doing the shoring, digging the trench and eventually replacing the pipe. Pepe has a backhoe and tri-axle dumptruck on the scene, DAlessio said. Theyre hauling our millings down there to build a road for their equipment. The cracked pipe is on a sloped area that leads down to the Metro-North Railroad tracks and the Naugatuck River. It is near the entrance to the Riverwalk. A ramp is being built inside the trench to allow workers to reach the broken pipe. Mayor David Cassetti said he has appointed Fred DAmico, the citys engineer, to conduct a daily inventory of all the work done each 24-hour time period. The city will use a camera to photograph a nearby trunk line that leads to the sewage treatment plant to determine if there are any cracks in it. Pepe recommended to both the Board of Aldermen and the Water Pollution Control Authority last month that the extra search be done while the equipment is there. That way youll be able to sleep at night, he said. I suspect were going to find hairline cracks in it, the DAlessio said. If thats the case, we are going to reline it now. Cassetti said he expects the cost to reach around $1.1 million if the city needs to reline the nearby line. Februarys break is the third sewage line break in the past four months. In December, during the last stages of the renovation of Wakelee Avenue, two lines broke one at the intersection of Wakelee and Mary Street and the other near the intersection of Wakelee and Dwight Streeet. And heavy rainfalls played havoc with sewer lines at both Grove Street and Crescent Street, which is near Howard Avenue and the citys Middle School, last year. A lot of our infrastructure is very, very old, DAlessio said. Were working on starting a 10-year project to have cameras photograph all our lines to determine if there are any problem areas. Meanwhile, the Ansonia Board of Aldermen voted Tuesday night to accept the resignation of Nunzio Parante, who stormed out of last weeks Water Pollution Control Authority meeting after the commissioners voted to pay the full cost of the sewer replacement project. Parente, who served as the WPCA chairman, recommended only paying part of the estimated $760,000 repair bill and to have the city pick up the rest. Cassetti commended Charles Stowe, a first ward alderman and WPCA commission, for making the motion that WPCA pay the entire bill. The mayor said Stowe spoke up on behalf of our residents and as a result ensured the Water Pollution Control Authority pays for work done to pipes that go to their plant. Washington Post photo by Katherine Frey. ANNAPOLIS, Md. - Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican weighing a primary challenge to President Donald Trump, has accepted an invitation from the New Hampshire Institute of Politics to speak at the Politics & Eggs series at Saint Anselm College next month. The Politics & Eggs series is a must-attend event for potential presidential candidates. Amelia Chasse, a spokeswoman for Hogan, said the governor will speak on April 23. Mr Ambedkar is likely to contest the Solapur seat against Congress leader Sushilkumar Shinde. Mumbai: Virtually ruling out the possibility of joining hands with the Oppositions grand alliance, Dalit leader Prakash Ambedkar said that his front would contest all 48 seats in Maharashtra in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. No further talks will be held with the Congress leadership, he said. Several proposals were made for forging an alliance with the Congress but nothing came out of it. The Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi has already announced candidates in 22 seats and will declare the remaining names soon. We will contest all 48 seats in Maharashtra, said Mr Ambedkar in Akola Tuesday. Mr Ambedkar is likely to contest the Solapur seat against senior Congress leader and former Union home minister Sushilku-mar Shinde in the Lok Sabha polls. Mr Ambedkars decision to fight independently is expected to affect the Congress and NCP heavily. For the Lok Sabha polls, he has forged an alliance of his Bharip Bahujan Mahasangh party with the Asaduddin Owaisi-led All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (AIMIM) in Maharashtra. Their rallies have been receiving good support from the Dalit and Muslim community, which is the traditional vote bank of the Congress. Mr Ambedkars front is likely to divide the Dalit and Muslim votes, causing a severe dent to the Congress chances in the LS polls. The Congress had tried desperately to accommodate Mr Ambedkars front in the Opposition alliance. However, the Dalit leader remained firm on his demand for more seats. He also refused to withdraw from the seats, where he had already announced his candidates. The Opposition alliance had decided to allot only the Akola seat to Mr Ambedkar. Marijuana legalization isnt just about stopping arrests under War on Drugs-era laws for cannabis possession. In California, its also about clearing the records of thousands who were arrested during that era and still struggle with the stigma of a criminal record for actions that ara legal now. With the help of a volunteer organization that uses technology to make governments more efficient, San Francisco officials plan to expunge records of 9,300 marijuana-related convictions that go back as far 1975. San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon called expunging the records the morally right thing to do, according to the Los Angeles Times. He then added, If you have a felony conviction, you are automatically excluded in so many ways from participating in your community. Related: Holy Smokes! Tel-Aviv's Cannabis Industry Is Lighting Up No need to ask. The district attorneys office has set up a process which allows people to ask for a conviction to be expunged, but only 23 people had applied, according to NPR. Gascon said that process was cumbersome and decided to just get on with it. The district attorney's office partnered with Code for America, a nonprofit group of coding volunteers who take on projects that make government more efficient. They focus on issues of criminal justice, the social safety net and workforce development. For example, they are running pilot projects in five states to make social benefits more accessible to thousands of poor Americans. In the San Francisco situation, the issue was criminal justice. Gascons people started about a year ago to go through cases by hand and had found about 1,000 to expunge. Volunteers with Code for America were able to create a program in minutes that searched through criminal records back to 1975 and found thousands more to clear. San Francisco is the first to take on this issue in a substantive way (i.e., doing something rather than talking about it). Los Angeles may not be far behind. There have been about 40,000 felony convictions for marijuana-related offenses in Los Angeles County since 1993, many of which might be eligible, according to the Times. Related: New Jersey Inches Closer to Legalizing Marijuana Without Voter Referendum War on Drugs vs. Minorities Politicians across the country are now arguing that marijuana legalization is a social justice issue because the War on Drugs disproportionately impacted minority communities. San Francisco provides a good example of how this played out, statistically. The Cannabis Equity Report done by San Francisco (the city and county) found that in 2000, 7.8 percent of the population in San Francisco was black, but 41 percent of all marijuana-related arrests involved black suspects. By 2011, arrests involving black San Franciscans hovered around 50 percent of all arrests, according to the report. In a statement on the issue from last year, Gascon said that a criminal conviction can be a barrier to employment, housing and other benefits, so instead of waiting for the community to take action, were taking action for the community. To stay up to date on the latest marijuana-related news make sure to like dispensaries.com on Facebook Related: 3 Compliance Risks Cannabis Dispensary Owners Can Eliminate Right Now Volunteer Coders Partner With San Francisco to Clear 9,300 Marijuana Arrest Records The Mooch Makes the Case for Cannabis Investment Copyright 2019 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved The court then said that if a corporator were too scared to take an initiative, how citizens take such a step. Mumbai: The Bombay high court said that it is the moral duty of corporators to inform the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) if illegal hoardings are being erected in their area. If corporators are scared to register complaints, how will citizens come forward to register them, the court asked. A division bench of Justice Abhay Oka and Justice M.S. Sanklecha expressed its view while hearing a contempt petition against Murji Patel, a municipal corporator from Andheri who had allegedly beaten up BMC employees who were pulling down illegal hoardings in Andheri. On Wednesday, Mr Patel assured the court that in future he would not erect any illegal hoardings in his area. The court then asked him to ensure that no one erects illegal hoardings in his area and if someone does so, he himself should register a complaint with the BMC. Mr Patel, however, refused to do so. The court then said that if a corporator were too scared to take an initiative, how citizens take such a step. As a public representative, it is the moral responsibility of corporators and they should take steps for it, the bench observed. The court asked Mr Patel to file an affidavit within a week stating he is taking responsibility for beating up corporation employees. Several attempts by US, Britain and France to designate Azhar as a global terrorist by UN were blocked by China. Masood Azhar heads the Jaish-e-Mohammed or JeM, which had carried out many terror strikes in India. (Photo: File) Washington: Masood Azhar meets the criteria to be designated as a global terrorist and not doing so is against regional stability and peace, the US said on Tuesday, a day ahead of the crucial meeting at UN Security Council on the Jaish-e-Mohammed chief. Masood Azhar heads the Jaish-e-Mohammed or JeM, which had carried out many terror strikes in India and was also involved in the attack on Parliament, the Pathankot air force base, army camps in Jammu and Uri. The Pak-based terror outfit had also claimed responsibility for the suicide attack on Central Reserve Police Force or CRPF in Pulwama which claimed the lives of 40 personnel. Three permanent members of the UNSC -- the United States, Britain and France -- have moved a resolution to designate Azhar as a global terrorist. Several previous attempts by these three countries inside the UN Security Council were blocked by China, the all-weather ally of Pakistan. China, which is one of the five veto-powered members of the Security Council, so far has vetoed proposals to ban Azhar, claiming lack of evidence to designate him as a global terrorist. Amidst a mounting global outrage in the wake of the Pulwama attack that led to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan, US, Britain and France hope that Beijing would act wisely and would not oppose their move against Azhar. On the eve of the crucial decision by the UN Security Council, the Trump Administration on Tuesday made it clear that there is enough evidence against Azhar to designate him as a global terrorist. "Azhar is the founder and the leader of the JeM, and he meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations," State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino told reporters at his daily news conference. The JeM, he said, has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability and peace. The US and India work closely together on counterterrorism efforts, and that includes at the United Nations, he added, noting that their views on the Jaish-e-Mohammed and its founder are well known. However, he refrained from making a direct comment on the deliberations inside the UN on this issue. "The United Nations Sanctions Committee, their deliberations, are confidential, and as such we don't comment on specific matters, but we'll continue to work with the Sanctions Committee to ensure that the designation list is updated and accurate," Palladino said. "The United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal," Palladino said in response to a question on previous successful attempts by China to block the UN designation of Azhar. This appeared in Wednesday's Washington Post. - - - The best that can be said for President Donald Trump's $4.75 trillion budget plan for fiscal 2020 is that it has no chance of becoming law. This is almost always true of presidential budgets, because ultimately Congress does the nitty-gritty work on spending legislation. Even by the standards of previous nonstarter White House blueprints, however, Trump's effort this year stands out for dishonesty and warped priorities. First, dishonesty. There is, to be sure, a smidgen of candor in the fact that the plan does not purport to balance the federal budget within the next decade, though it does suggest that balance may be achieved by 2034; so much for the pretense that growth sparked by the 2017 tax cuts will solve the United States' fiscal problem. The budget claims instead that trillion-dollar annual deficits over the next three years will taper off thereafter, such that overall national debt will decline from 78 percent of gross domestic product today to 71 percent in 2029. However, it reaches that modest achievement for fiscal responsibility by projecting 3 percent growth through 2024 and near-3 percent growth thereafter. More realistic forecasts produce an estimated debt of 87 percent of GDP by 2029, according to the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, a Washington think tank on fiscal issues. Second, warped priorities. Such budgetary savings as Trump does claim to achieve over the next decade come disproportionately from domestic programs, including those targeted at the neediest people in our society. It adds work requirements - difficult to administer and sometimes counterproductive - to key safety-net programs such as Medicaid, housing assistance and food stamps. At a time when evidence of dangerous harm from climate change is mounting, the budget proposes to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, to the tune of a 31 percent cut in its budget next year. Defense comes in for a 5 percent increase, meanwhile, which might indeed be necessary - but which the president would achieve by invoking a special uncapped warfighting account, an obvious gimmick Congress won't countenance. There's more: cuts to refugee assistance while asking $8.6 billion for a border wall; decreasing scientific research while freezing the maximum Pell Grant for low-income college students. Here and there, the Trump budget proposes valid reforms to expensive programs, such as its suggestion for "site-neutral" Medicare payments (i.e., similar fees for services either performed in a hospital or not), which the Obama administration also backed. But you get the picture. This is a document whose good ideas can't get traction because its bad ones simply swamp them. Last week the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the largest coordinated sweep of elder fraud cases in history. More than two million Americans, largely seniors, were victimized by more than 260 defendants from around the globe in these cases. Total alleged losses from the elder fraud financial schemes were over three fourths of one billion dollars. This DOJ interactive map provides details on its cases. An increasingly more common form of elder fraud is the technical-support (tech-support) scam. This is where criminals trick victims into giving remote access to their computers while pretending to give technical support. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), older adults are the hardest hit by such scams. The FTCs Consumer Sentinel Network received nearly 143,000 reports with a loss of $55 million on tech support scams in 2018. Consumers 60 and over filed more loss reports on tech-support scams from 2015 to 2018 than on any other type of fraud reported to the Consumer Sentinel Network. The median individual reported loss to tech-support scams was $400, however, people 60 and over reported a 25 percent higher median loss of $500. STORY LINK Euro to Pound Exchange Rate: EUR/GBP Sinks Ahead of Vote on No Deal Brexit EUR/GBP Exchange Rate Sinks on Brexit Extension Hopes EUR/GBP Exchange Rate Falls as Spanish CPI Figures Hold Steady GBP/EUR Exchange Rate Rises despite Tory MPs Threatening to Resign EUR/GBP Forecast: Sterling Could Rise on an Extended Brexit Like this piece? Please share with your friends and colleagues: The Euro Pound (EUR/GBP) exchange rate is down by 0.5% today and is trading around 0.8597 on the inter-bank market.Sterling (GBP) recovered today following last nights vote on Prime Minister Theresa Mays Brexit deal which lost by a majority of 149. This has opened up todays vote on a possible no-deal Brexit, which is likely to be voted down in favour of an extension to Article 50.Pound traders have been buoyed by comments by Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, in which stated recently that it would be easy for the UK to secure a delay to the Brexit process until 30 June.Today, meanwhile, will see the Spring Statement which will be headed by Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, although this is likely to be overshadowed by Brexit developments, with just 17 days to go until the 29 March leaving date.The Euro, meanwhile, has fallen against the strengthened Pound today despite the improvement of the Eurozone industrial production figures for January, which exceeded expectations at 1.4% a significant improvement on Decembers -0.9%.Today also saw the publication of the Spanish CPI figures for February which held steady at 0.2%.Many Euro investors will be paying attention to the speech by the European Central Banks Benoit Cure, a member of the executive board, today, and with any dovish comments about the state of the Eurozones this could prove Euro-negative.EUR traders will be watching Brexit developments closely today, following comments from Michel Barnier, the EUs Chief Brexit Negotiator, indicated that the likelihood of a no-deal has, he says, never been higher.Barnier warned of possible preparations for a Brexit no-deal today, saying:We are at a critical point. The risk of no deal has never been higher. We are ready for this, we are preparing for this, it is not a scenario we want.There have been reports that some Tory MPs could resign if the Malthouse Compromise amendment is not given a fair vote, which has put Theresa May under further pressure today and clipped some of the Pounds gains.Barnier, however, has called the compromise a dangerous illusion, saying that leaving the EU without an agreement would be entirely unsatisfactory and without benefit to the UK.Many Pound traders, however, are focusing on the no-deal vote today, and with any signs of a possible rebellion within the Conservative party, this could see the Pound begin to fall against many of its competitors.Euro traders will be looking ahead to the publication of the German Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices figures for February tomorrow, which are expected to hold steady at 1.7%.Tomorrow will also see the publication of the French EU normalized CPI figures for February, and with any signs of an improvement this could provide some uplift for the single currency.Pound traders, however, will be awaiting the outcome of todays vote on a no-deal Brexit, however, with this likely to be voted down, tomorrow will see a vote on an extension to Article 50, which will determine the course of the UKs relationship with the EU.The EUR/GPB exchange rate will remain sensitive to Brexit development over the next couple of days, and with any signs of a breakthrough or an extension of the Brexit process we could see Sterling rise once again. International Money Transfer? Ask our resident FX expert a money transfer question or try John's new, free, no-obligation personal service! ,where he helps every step of the way, ensuring you get the best exchange rates on your currency requirements. TAGS: Euro Forecasts Euro Pound Forecasts Pound Euro Forecasts Top Six Cyber Secure Countries Cyber risks represent a genuine risk to governments, economies, organisations and people. In 2015, the US Governments Office of Personnel Management was breached and traded off, with the organisation declaring that 21.5 million social security numbers were stolen from one source, and 4.2 million from another. The World Economic Forums Partnership for Cyber Resilience is an initiative made in light of the developing significance of cyber security. More than 100 enterprises are included, concentrating on measuring the effect of cyber-attacks. Organisations and governments are progressively putting resources into enhancing their cyber security conventions as the recurrence of attacks rises. Actually, every one of them is attempting to remain on track against the most recent cyber-attacks, yet there are a few nations committing most to cyber security. United States of America The United States of America is one of the nations that is encountering a huge amount of cyber-attacks every year. That is the reason around 58% of the digital security organisations are situated there and endeavor to discover better approaches to battle with the most recent attacks. Among the methodologies that the nation has deployed is significantly encouraging policies and best practices. The government is constantly reassuring transparency, productivity and development with regards to data security. All the more along these lines, the government has been seen working with stakeholders in cultivating internet governance through the development of models and the dismissal of fake cyber security concerns. The United States has attempted consolidated endeavors with accomplices in executing cyber security strategies, outlying cyber security principles, addressing cybercrime and protecting sensitive framework from cyber threats. It has been very much successful. Russia The United States and Britain blamed Russia for launching cyber-attacks on computer routers, firewalls and other systems administration equipment utilised by government organisations, companies and critical infrastructure operators around the world. US intelligence agencies a year ago blamed Russia for interfering in the 2016 election race with a hacking and purposeful publicity campaign supporting Donald Trumps battle for president. The Trump administration pointed the finger at Russia for a launch of cyber-attacks that focused the US power grid. In spite of the fact that they are all the time blamed for digital cyber activities and attacks by their political adversaries, it isnt difficult to advise that they additionally realise how to ensure themselves against similar threats and risks. We can be sure enough to believe that Russia has a good hold against such cyber-attacks. Israel Israel is the nation that takes the second-largest number of cyber security measures and this number is developing as the number of new cyber security startups show up and get funding. Israel is additionally tenaciously putting resources into human capital. That is in light of aptitudes and knowledge that the general population have with respect to the subject. It is through putting resources into cyber-security education which begins as soon as middle school. China In 2017, China has adopted another Cyber Security Law and its fundamental intention was to strengthen the cyber security and the national security. However, it has pulled in warmed discussions among remote businessmen there. The Cyber Security Law is an achievement for cyber security legislation in China and fills in as a Fundamental Law in its field. The Law is a development of the beforehand existent cyber security policies and regulations from different dimensions and fields, acclimatising them to make an organised law at a large-scale level. Spain The country has been successful with regards to framing contingency courses of action for national cyber. All the more in this way, endeavors have vigorously been dedicated to the security of foundation. Reaction to incidence has been drastically enhanced in the country, including the reporting of the same. Innovative work has likewise been empowered which have made a basic commitment to the organisation of cyber security activities. Estonia After facing a bad cyber-attack in 2007, Estonia has turned into a worldwide heavyweight in cyber security-knowledge, exhorting numerous different states on the issue. In December 2016, NATO came up with its largest cyber defence exercise in Estonia. Named Cyber Coalition 2016, the three-day occasion pulled in more than 700 cyber defenders and legitimate specialists, government authorities and military officers, academics and industry delegates, taking part from many areas over the alliance and partner countries. Analytics Insight: You Might Also Read: Cybercrime In The EU - Where Are You Safe?: Seven Springs to be sold Sevens Springs officials have announced that Somerset County's three ski resorts will be sold this winter. Donald Trump, concerned about the deadly crash of a Boeing 737 MAX passenger plane, spoke to Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg. The president, who owned his own airline, Trump Shuttle, from 1989 until 1992, is an aviation enthusiast. (File Photo) WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump, concerned about the deadly crash of a Boeing 737 MAX passenger plane in Ethiopia, spoke to Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg on Tuesday and received assurances that the aircraft was safe, two people briefed on the call said. Trump was expected to hold an additional meeting on the issue later on Tuesday, according to an administration official. The president, who owned his own airline, Trump Shuttle, from 1989 until 1992, is an aviation enthusiast. Before becoming president he flew on his own private jet and, after his inauguration, praised the presidential aircraft, Air Force One. The Ethiopia crash on Sunday killed 157 people and prompted the European Union's aviation safety regulator to suspend all flights in the bloc by Boeing 737 MAX planes. The cause of Sunday's crash, which followed another disaster with a 737 MAX five months ago in Indonesia that killed 189 people, remains unknown. Trump seemed concerned broadly that planes had become too complicated to manage. "Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better," he wrote on Twitter, adding that such complexity created danger. "I don't know about you, but I don't want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane!" he wrote. He did not refer specifically to Boeing or recent accidents, but his comments echoed an automation debate that partially lies at the centre of a probe into the crash in Indonesia. Investigators are examining the role of a software system designed to push the plane down, alongside airline training and repair standards. Boeing says it plans to update the software in the coming weeks. Trump unsuccessfully pushed early in his administration to privatise air traffic control. In January 2018 Trump touted that worldwide there were no fatal passenger jet crashes in 2017, the safest year on record. U.S. Senators Mitt Romney and Elizabeth Warren called on the Federal Aviation Administration to temporarily ground Boeing's 737 MAX 8. White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said on Fox TV that the White House would be in "constant contact" with the FAA "to make determinations at an appropriate time." Spokesman for the Arab-Kurdish forces: in addition to the militants, you also save "three women and four children". The use of civillians as human shields has slowed the advance. In response, the Caliphate calls on jihadists worldwide to "stand up against the crusaders" and "avenge" Islam. Since December, at least 59,000 people have left the area of the offensive. Damascus (AsiaNews / Agencies) - In the last 24 hours at least 3 thousand jihadists, barricaded in the last enclave of the Islamic State (IS, ex Isis) in Syria, have surrendered to the Syrian democratic forces (SDF). The Arab-Kurdish alliance, supported by US air strikes, recently launched an offensive against the portion of territory on the border with Iraq that remained under the control of the Caliphate militiamen. According to reports from SDF spokesman Musefa Bali, "the number of members of the Islamic State who were handed over from Monday evening (11 March) has risen to 3,000". He added that the soldiers also rescued "three Yazidi women and four children". Part of Baghouz, a small cluster of houses and tents on the banks of the Euphrates, not far from the borders with Iraq, is today what remains of what was once called the "Caliphate" and which had occupied half of the territory of Syria and Iraq. In the area, an ever increasing number of militants - cornered by heavy bombing - are surrendering, handing themselves over to the military of the alliance. The large number of civilians in the hands of jihadists, and used as human shields, has slowed down the final offensive that today appears ever closer to the conclusion. However, as has already happened in neighboring Iraq, a probable military victory will not erase the jihadist threat for the future. In these last few hours the official media of Daesh [Arabic acronym for the Islamic State] have broadcast messages inviting supporters and sympathizers around the world to launch attacks against sensitive targets, in response to the Baghouz offensive. In the recording, lasting about a minute and a half, it is stated that men, women and children barricaded inside the village are victims of a "holocaust". An unidentified ISIS militiaman appeals to Muslim "brothers" "in Europe and around the world", inviting them to "stand up against the crusaders" and "avenge your religion". According to reports from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a NGO based in the United Kingdom with a dense network of informers in the area, almost 59,000 people have fled from the last stronghold of the Caliphate in Syria since last December. One tenth of these would be jihadist militiamen. However, UN sources say that the flow of refugees going to the reception centers in the north of the area seem to have decreased in recent days compared to the previous weeks. At the same time, their conditions are increasingly critical and among the experts there is great concern about the health of those still holed up within the stronghold. Over 50 ambassadors and senior army officers (retired) critical of the president's choices. For the signatories, the pact has a strategic value for the US and strengthens security in the Middle East. It is essential to re-establish relations with Europe. We need a "multilateral" initiative to contain Tehran. Washington (AsiaNews) - The United States must re-enter the Iranian nuclear agreement, because it will help strengthen national security and strategic policies implemented by Washington in the Middle East. This is the appeal launched in recent days by over 50 former senior army officers and prominent US diplomats, who criticize the Trump administration's decision to cancel a historic pact and which contributes to the security of Washington and the world. The 2015 agreement, explained the promoters of the initiative gathered within the American College of National Security Leaders, has placed severe restrictions on the ayatollahs' atomic program. At the same time, it has effectively prevented the Islamic Republic from pursuing research aimed at producing nuclear weapons, guaranteeing the security of the United States and its allies. US President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),wanted by his predecessor Barack Obama. The JCPOA deal was signed in 2015, but the United States pulled out in May 2018 despite the opposition of the international community. US President Donald Trump followed the withdrawal by imposing the toughest sanctions in history against Iran. The decision has negatively impacted the Iranian economy as noted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Oil exports have dropped considerably, which was the goal of the second round of sanctions that came into effect on 4 November. Among the signatories of the appeal are ambassadors, diplomats and senior officials who have held prominent positions in the past within the military and politics. They include Laura Kennedy, for 40 years in service to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, her colleague Susan Burk, special representative at the time of nuclear talks and Admiral Sandy Adams, for years on mission in Afghanistan. An initiative that follows the online petition launched in January in which activists, teachers, Jewish religious leaders, Christians and Muslims asked Trump to relax his grip on Tehran and avoid the danger of a conflict. Appealing to the White House to reverse its withdrawal from the agreement, generals and diplomats explain why it is fundamental for global security and the strategic interests of the United States, starting from a stronger collaboration with Europe, set aside in recently. The signatories recall that, despite the US withdrawal, the Islamic Republic continues to keep faith with the commitments made in the context of the nuclear agreement, as certified several times by the IAEA experts. Furthermore, thanks to JCPOA, Iranian companies cannot carry out the activities necessary for the production of atomic bombs and international monitoring is strengthened. The European allies, the promoters recall, are "committed" to keeping the agreement alive, which they consider "a key element for the non-proliferation of atomic weapons" and "multilateral diplomacy". While condemning the missile experiments, they affirm that "re-entering the nuclear agreement will contribute to putting in place a broader" diplomatic and military "strategy for the Middle East" and containing the Iranian threat with a "multilateral" initiative. "We must remember - the appeal concludes - that the initial agreement was a long-term strategic effort focused on one objective: to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapons program". The bishop of Balanga issued a circular that will come into force on Easter Sunday. The goal is to eliminate fixed fees for liturgical services across the country by 2021, 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christian missionaries. Manila (AsiaNews/CBCP) More and more Filipino bishops are scrapping the arancel (fee) system for the services offered by the Church such as funerals, memorial Masses, weddings, confirmations, etc. In its lieu, the faithful are encouraged to donate what they can. The latest to do this is Bishop Ruperto Santos of Balanga who ordered the end of fees for funeral masses and blessings in his diocese as of 21st April, Easter Sunday. The decision by the Diocese of Balanga comes in response to appeals by Pope Francis, who since his election has called for a "poor Church for the poor". The Pope, who is marking the start of the seventh year of his pontificate today, has repeatedly pointed out that the sacraments are a gift from God and asked churches to celebrate the rites for free. According to Mgr Santos, the move was necessary to help people already grieving by their loss. Financial obligations from the perspective of the Church are not of prime importance and must not be a burden to them, he noted. For this reason, he ordered the priests of his diocese not to demand fees for funeral Masses and memorial chapels. The Church "can be open for their free will to give or donate to the Church, he explained. The Philippines is Asias most Catholic country. The first bishop to drop fees for religious services was Mgr Socrates Buenaventura Villegas, archbishop of Lingayen-Dagupan, in 2015. Instead of fixed rates, he wanted the spirit of stewardship (Pananabangan) to come into play. This means that parishes will just accept whatever parishioners can offer. Fr Roy Bellen of the Manila archdioceses communications office said the goal is to end the arancel system by 2021, the fifth centenary of the arrival of Christianity in the Philippines. This hopefully can be a gauge of the faithful of their change of paradigm in support the Church rather than thinking of buying the sacraments from the Church, he said. WEST CHESTER A state appeals court has upheld the state prison sentence of an ex-convict who spray-painted racist graffiti in Coatesville in the wake of the deadly white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Va., finding that the punishment he received was not overly harsh. George Rissell, a member of a white nationalist prison gang, had argued that the judge who imposed a seven- to 14-year sentence had improperly added prison time to the charges involved in the graffiti incident, increasing what otherwise would have been a sentence with a minimum term of fewer than five years. But a state Superior Court panel of three judges ruled that the sentence by Judge Patrick Carmody was within bounds, and had properly taken into account all of the factors in the case, including the fact that Rissell had just been released from prison when the episode occurred in 2017 and was on parole. The opinion by Superior Court President Judge Emeritus John T. Bender upholding the sentence called Carmodys reasoning behind his sentence extensive and well-reasoned. Bender said he had adopted Carmodys opinion as his own in dismissing Rissells appeal. Rissell, a high school dropout with a history of mental health issues and substance abuse who had moved to Coatesville after his release from state prison, pleaded guilty in 2018 to charges of ethnic intimidation and criminal mischief for his actions, which occurred about one week after the Charlottesville protests that inflamed the Virginia city and left one woman dead after being struck by a car driven by a white nationalist. In sentencing him on those crimes, Carmody said Rissells actions spray painting hate messages and neo-Nazi symbols across the city while in a drunken rage in July 2017 -had destroyed the peace of mind of the city, a majority of whose residents are racial and ethnic minorities. Carmody sentenced him to 4 1/2 to nine years on those charges, but then added another 2 1/2 to five years in prison for violating terms of his parole and probation on previous convictions. In his opinion responding to Rissells initial appeal of the sentence, Carmody said his decision was based on a number of factors that weighed against Rissell, including the impact his crimes had on the community in which they occurred, the fact that they occurred while (Rissell) was on parole, the fact that these crimes occurred shortly after (his) release from prison, and (his) conduct while he was in prison. After considering defendants lengthy prior criminal record, the failure of all prior efforts at rehabilitation, the seriousness of the crimes charged, and all other factors, the court determined that an aggregate sentence of 7-14 years incarceration was warranted, the judge wrote, also noting that the prosecution had sought a longer total sentence. In imposing the sentence in June, Carmody had quoted the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The time is always right to do the right thing, he said. I have to do the right thing here. Rissell was accused of vandalizing multiple sites on Coatesvilles western edge, including a car, a garage door and the wall of a convenience store located at Valley Road and Strode Avenue. Multiple areas were also vandalized in Valley, including street signs and the street pavement. Police said they initially received an anonymous tip about the racially charged graffiti via a text message through the departments Tip411 line. Through further investigation and review of street surveillance videos, information was developed that led to the identification of Rissell as a suspect. When confronted by police, he confessed. Fans of Rumpole of the Bailey will probably recognise this quote from their ruddy-cheeked hero: 'I often think that knowledge of the law is a bit of a handicap to a barrister.' The same sentiment could be applied to Attorney General Geoffrey Cox after his legal advice scuppered the Government's deal last night. Unlike some past Attorneys General, Cox has been lauded for his independence of thinking. He refused to compromise his legal view. Fans of Rumpole of the Bailey will probably recognise this quote from their ruddy-cheeked hero: 'I often think that knowledge of the law is a bit of a handicap to a barrister.' The same sentiment could be applied to Attorney General Geoffrey Cox (seen speaking in the House of Commons) after his legal advice scuppered the Government's deal last night If he had compromised his integrity, he might have earned the undying gratitude of the Prime Minister. For her part, though, commendably, she never tried to bully him into changing his mind. That said, over the past few months since Cox's elevation to the Cabinet, this basso profundo-voiced lawyer has played to the gallery in the manner of John Mortimer's fictional creation. Pleading with MPs and stabbing the air with his finger in the Commons yesterday, we could have been watching a scene from Rumpole and the Last Resort. But Horace Rumpole would not have engaged, as Cox did, in an unedifying spat with a TV presenter, typing 'Bollocks' on Twitter in response to the claim that he'd made up his mind overnight that Mrs May's deal was legally invalid and had been sent away to think again. What on earth was Cox doing? Instead of firing off an obscenity on social media, he should have been preparing for the most important speech of his life and keeping his judgment for the floor of Parliament, not for Twitter. As one MP told me: 'Sadly, Cox has bought into the idea that he has become some sort of media personality.' 'Most notoriously, that was said to have happened in the Labour government when Tony Blair was accused of trying to persuade his Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, to alter his opinion on the legality of the Iraq War. But Geoffrey Cox, 58, is not the sort of Attorney General who works in the shadows' Already, he had revelled in the fact that the extra agreement or codicil he was attempting to win from Brussels had been given a saucy nickname in his honour. 'It's come to be called Cox's codpiece!' he told the Commons. 'What I am concerned about is to ensure what's inside the codpiece is in full working order.' The Brexit crisis, the most serious since the war, was reduced to schoolboy humour. Except not many Tory MPs are laughing. Worse was to come when Cox appeared to risk sabotaging the deal in his written statement, saying: 'The legal risk remains unchanged.' In the Commons shortly afterwards, though, he said the concessions from Brussels would 'reduce the risk' that Britain could be indefinitely trapped in the backstop. His audience was clearly confused whether this was a contradiction or if he was separating the legal risk from the political risk. And by adding that the decision for MPs was not a political one, but a legal one, he was mixing the two definitions. One senior ministerial source said: 'If only he'd written in his statement that 'the legal risk was reduced' and made the call to arms for MPs to vote for Mrs May's deal, we might have got it over the line. 'He could have gone down in history as the Attorney General who delivered Brexit.' But he didn't. 'An ardent Brexiteer, Cox likes the sound of his own voice especially since being the unexpected star turn at last year's Tory Party conference when he was Mrs May's warm-up act' Attorney General Geoffrey Cox gave a one-word response to claims he had told Theresa May her new Brexit deal was not legally valid: Describing the suggestion as 'b*ll*cks' Cox had already revealed his unhealthy love of the limelight by telling The Mail on Sunday that he was unlikely to change his legal opinion on Brexit unless he was certain there was 'no legal risk of us being indefinitely detained in the backstop'. Pompously, he said: 'I have been a barrister for 36 years, and a senior politician for seven months. My professional reputation is far more important to me than my reputation as a politician.' Perhaps if he had taken more care of his reputation as a politician, the country would not be in crisis this morning. Traditionally, Attorneys General are not in the Cabinet and thus not directly involved in political discussions. This means that whenever legal advice is required, there is no suspicion that the country's most senior law officer might bend his view to please his political colleagues. His damning paragraph 19. However, the legal risk remains unchanged that if through no demonstrable failure of either party, but simply because of intractable differences, that situation [ where Britain is stuck in backstop] does arise, the United Kingdom would have... no internationally lawful means of exiting the Protocol's arrangements, save by agreement Advertisement Most notoriously, that was said to have happened in the Labour government when Tony Blair was accused of trying to persuade his Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, to alter his opinion on the legality of the Iraq War. But Geoffrey Cox, 58, is not the sort of Attorney General who works in the shadows. An ardent Brexiteer, he likes the sound of his own voice especially since being the unexpected star turn at last year's Tory Party conference when he was Mrs May's warm-up act. Last week, before heading to Brussels for talks with EU negotiators, he vaingloriously posted online an image of the Duke of Wellington the victor of the Battle of Waterloo with the simple caption: 'The Iron Duke.' Wellington secured a victory that has gone down in history. Cox secured a lame defeat. Cox's supporters argue that in his legal judgment he had no choice because he had to preserve his reputation at the Bar the source over the years of lucrative barrister work for himself. Indeed, legal work will be his livelihood again after his Cabinet career ends which could be sooner rather than later. He named his legal practice Thomas More Chambers after Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor. Famously, More was beheaded for refusing to agree to the annulment of the King's first marriage. Thankfully for Mrs May's Attorney General, courtiers who fail their masters these days suffer a less awful fate. But whatever happens, Geoffrey Cox will pay a high price for his failure. An international hunt to find a UK-based 999 call handler who helped send an ambulance to a poorly grandmother's home in Estonia has succeeded in its search. Liisi Kadanik, who lives in Manchester, dialed the European emergency number 112 when her grandmother, 75, started to struggle breathing during their FaceTime call. One of North West Ambulance service's dispatchers answered the panicked call but after hearing a British voice Liisi hung up thinking she'd called the wrong number. However, the call handler rang back and managed to contact colleagues in Estonia to arrange help - and after an online search Liisi managed to track down her 'hero' - Megan Hollinrake, 21, from Broughton, Lancashire. Liisi Kadanik (left), who lives in Manchester, launched a search online to try and find the UK-based emergency call handler who helped to arrange an ambulance for her grandmother Valve Oolup (right), 75, in Estonia Liisi, pictured, called the European emergency number 112 when she noticed her grandmother was struggling to breathe while they were on FaceTime. She said she phonetically spelled everything out while on the phone to the operator The grateful granddaughter thanked 'amazing' Megan for her help on social media and penned: 'You saved a life by picking up the phone and giving me a call back. You did not have to do that but you chose to do it' The ambulance service shared the great news that Megan had been identified as the helper online and grateful granddaughter Liisi thanked her for taking her call on February 21. 'Megan - you saved a life by picking up the phone and giving me a call back,' Liisi said. 'You did not have to do that but you chose to do it.' 'Not everyone would, you are an amazing person and a true asset to the team. Words cannot express how grateful I am and always will be. Thank you so so so much.' In her appeal to the European Emergency Number Association, Liisi explained what had happened and how everybody worked to help her grandmother, Valve Oolup. Megan Hollinrake, 21, pictured, is an emergency medical dispatchers based in Broughton. She described being able to help Liisi as 'brilliant' 'I phonetically spelled everything out for them and gave them an overview of my nan's medical history while keeping her on FaceTime with my other phone,' said Liisi. 'An ambulance actually came to her house and I was able to instruct them over the phone. I just cannot believe how amazing everyone was and the technology these days. 'I really really hope my message reaches them because without the lady calling me back i'm not sure my nan would be here this morning.' Liisi added that the frightening ordeal has been 'surreal' but that she'll always be grateful to Megan for her help. North West Ambulance Service helped to track down Megan after the call, which took place on February 21 Liisi first asked the European Emergency Number Association for help finding Megan and then tried to track her down online 'Megan has saved someones life in a "random" country because of her obvious passion for the job,' said Liisi. 'She is a true hero and I will forever be grateful to her.' 'The whole experience has been surreal as I had to trust a voice at the end of the phone. When I heard the sirens from over the phone to my nan, I don't think Ive ever felt any more relieved and happy in my life.' 'All I had at that moment was blind faith and to be honest, I didnt think this would work as I kept trying to reach my relatives.' Megan said the call was an unusual one to get on shift, but described being able to help Liisi as 'brilliant.' 'It's not every day that this happens so it was brilliant to be able to help someone in an emergency situation, even when they're in a different country,' she explained. 'It goes to show the great communication we have between ambulance services worldwide.' For women with varying proportions, off the rack garments may not fit the contours of their bodies. And even though fit is key to looking your best in your clothing, when people hear 'couture' they think expensive, unattainable and frivolous. Thanks to e-tailers eShakti, Frilly and Sumissura, you can say goodbye to standard sizes and hello to custom-fit clothes. FEMAIL breaks down the three companies that have made a bespoke wardrobe easy and affordable. eShakti Make it your own: eShakti recently launched a proprietary customization feature called eShakti FX that allows customers to change the style of any garment - with a click of a mouse No guesswork: Necklines, sleeve and hem length can all be altered on blouses, dresses, jackets and more with the ability to see the changes happen in real time eShakti recently launched a proprietary customization feature called eShakti FX that allows customers to change the style of any garment - with a click of a mouse. Necklines, sleeve and hem length can all be altered on blouses, dresses, jackets and more with the ability to see the changes happen in real time. Offering both standard US sizes, as well as the option to send in specific measurements, consumers receive garments that fit their bodies perfectly. Just for you: Offering both standard US sizes, as well as the option to send in specific measurements (including height), consumers receive garments that fit their bodies perfectly The perfect fit: Every eShakti product is offered in sizes XS 6X (0 36W) and takes height into account eShakti (Shakti, meaning female power in Sanskrit) empowers women of all shapes and sizes to create clothing made exclusively for them at a moderate price point. 'When we first launched over 10 years ago, we knew that standard US sizes and styles-as-shown were not meeting the needs of majority of customers,' said, B G Krishnan, Founder & CEO of eShakti. 'We were ahead of our time then, and continue to be now. With eShakti FX, we have taken the customer experience to a whole new level that most customers would never have dreamed of,' he continued. Every eShakti product is offered in sizes XS 6X (0 36W) and takes height into account. Made to measure items are delivered within 13-17 days. Frilly You choose: Los Angeles-based Frilly helps you play designer Los Angeles-based brand, Frilly, helps you play designer. With a guiding principle of quality over quantity, and clothing that's built to last beyond a season, each Frilly piece is hand-crafted by a tailor in their privately owned factories using innovative fabrics from around the world. Start with a baseline style, buy as-is, or personalize the piece with customization options that include fabric choice, hardware, cut, detailing, sleeve length and more. The eco-conscious companies operates on a made-to-order model, eliminating typical inventory issues that lead to pollution and waste. The site offers everything the modern day fashionista needs in her wardrobe, from tops and outerwear to dresses, pants, skirts, jumpsuits and more. Prices range from approximately $150-$400. Made to oder: Each Frilly piece is hand-crafted by a tailor in their privately owned factories using innovative fabrics from around the world The solution: Start with a baseline style, buy as-is, or personalize the piece with customization options that include fabric choice, hardware, cut, detailing, sleeve length and more Sumissura Stand out: Sumissura believes in giving people the freedom to choose their own style and reveal their personality through their outfit Why wear what everyone else is wearing? Sumissura believes in giving people the freedom to choose their own style and reveal their personality through their outfit. With an emphasis on professional attire, Sumissura offers chic button-down blouses, pencil skirts, pant suits and a lot more boss lady options. After you've selected a design, drop it into your cart as-is, or choose from hundreds of fabrics (including corduroy, tweed, wool, cotton, merino wool, velvet, and linen) and colors offered. Personalized options such as collar color, pocket details and adding your initials are also available. All Frilly garments are tailor-made from scratch based on the measurements provided and come with a Perfect Fit Guarantee. Customers all around the world receive free shipping on orders over $150. Leader of the pack: With an emphasis on professional attire, Sumissura offers chic button-down blouses, pencil skirts, pant suits and a lot more boss lady options A mother-of-two who launched her own bag range despite having no previous design experience has generated a turnover of 4 million since launching her business in 2011. Charlotte Jamme, 47, from Milton Keynes, who lives with her children Amelia, 13, Mia, 12, and her husband Philippe, 54, was living in Vietnam when she came up with the idea of designing a handbag. After struggling to find one that suited her needs, the mumtrepreneur set about creating a product which would work for her while regularly on the go with her daughters - and Mia Tui was born. Growing the brand with no investment, Charlotte has since gone on to sell her award-winning bag range, which start at 5, on QVC shopping and her own website - and it has also been stocked in the likes of John Lewis and Jo-Jo Maman Bebe. Charlotte Jamme (pictured) 47, from Milton Keynes, had no design experience before launching her successful bag range. She now sells the products on her website and QVC and has since generated a turnover of over 4 million. Above, with the 'Charlotte' bag The mother-of-two, who lives with her children Amelia, 13, Mia, 12 (above) and her husband Philippe, 54, has formerly had her products stocked in John Lewis and Jo-Jo Maman Bebe It was her husband Philippe's job in the wine and spirits industry that took the couple to the Far East back in 2004. 'I was living in Vietnam when I came up with the idea of making a travel bag - my two girls were three and four,' said Charlotte. 'I would travel alone with the two girls and could never find anything in my bag. Everything would sink to the bottom, and as the lining was generally black you could never find or see anything.' She continued: 'On a girls weekend away with all the kids we got talking on what would make the perfect travel bag - it had to have pockets and be large enough to find things. This then got my imagination running and I started to draw up some ideas.' It was around April of 2010, that Charlotte designed her very first bag, which she named after her eldest daughter. While the mumtrepreneur extended her range, each bag was designed specifically to help busy mothers stay organised when on the go 'Charlotte was living in Vietnam with her husband Philipe, 54, (left) when she came up with the idea of making a travel bag The first bag that Charlotte designed was the Amelie (above), which she named after her eldest daughter. It is a large travel bag that allows you to actually find things inside 'The Amelie is a large travel bag that actually allows you to find things inside,' explained Charlotte. 'I had a rough sketch on how I wanted the bag to look, and more importantly how the inside should look, and found a company that said they could make a prototype.' 'But when the bag came back it was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. So I went to the local markets in Vietnam, looked at fabric, and bought a small quantity to make my sample.' She continued: 'My husband was making some promotional items for his company and put me in contact with a lady who could help me make my design. She took away my drawings and actually came back with a bag that looked like it could work.' The family travelled back to the UK in the June 2010 and Charlotte found her bag made travelling easier. But the next challenge the mother-of-two faced was finding someone who could actually take the bag and make more than one. 'I met someone called Van,' said Charlotte. 'She spoke English and understood what I wanted to achieve and said she would help me. So together we made our first 200 bags in a small room above a house, which I sold at expat fairs.' But it wasn't all plain sailing as Charlotte had the task of juggling her new business with looking after her children. Charlotte specifically designed her bags from the inside out to meet the needs of busy women needing organisation in their bags. Above, with a popular choice from her range Pictured, the Jennie bag from Charlotte's range, which can be bought on her website or QVC for 55 'It was a bit crazy,' she explained. 'I was going to the markets looking for fabric, and having bags made then trying to sell them. I flew to Hong Kong and Singapore to sell the bags at Christmas and expat fairs.' She continued: 'Even though I was so busy juggling kids, I felt like I was starting something big. Everyone loved the travel bags.' And Charlotte had to overcome many obstacles, including a whole batch of products which were deemed unsellable. 'I received a whole container of bags that were due to be to be sent to John Lewis and Jo-Jo Maman Bebe,' she explained. 'But it was by facing them head-on and working tirelessly to find a solution that I could move things forward.' While the teething issue affected Charlotte's cash-flow, the turning point came on the 1st April 2015. 'I had always wanted to get my bags on to QVC as I thought that selling on TV would really allow me to showcase the bags and the unique interiors,' explained Charlotte. 'I had applied many times and got rejected.' Charlotte has always sold her bags on the Mia Tui website, but the first retailers who stocked the range were John Lewis and Jo-Jo Maman Bebe Charlotte revealed that her daughters Amelia, 13, Mia, 12 didn't like Mia Tui for many years. She said 'they saw it take their mum away at weekend to work shows, or being upset when things dont go to plan' She continued: 'I managed to get some samples to a buying team, and then I got the call from my then PR agent who said to me sorry they didnt like the bags. My heart sank, then came April fools!". They loved the bag and wanted me to go and meet the buyer in May.' After Charlotte had the successful meeting, she called Van in Vietnam and told her the good news. 'We then had to work out how we would get the bags made and shipped in time,' she explained. 'In the end I had to fly in the bags which is so expensive, but I believed this was the turning point and worth the cost.' 'I had already designed two new bags by the time we arrived back into the UK and had created two-three bags a year since,' she added. 'Our range of travel handbags are unique as they have a hidden pocket to slip over standard suitcase handles making travel easy.' And on 5th August, two years to the day when she had received the unsellable bags, Charlotte found herself standing in front of the TV cameras selling three from her Mia Tui collection. 'I have always sold my bags on the Mia Tui website, but our first retailer was John Lewis and Jo-Jo Maman Bebe,' she explained. 'Two styles were baby changing bags, and we've won the best changing bag with The Mother and Baby Awards four times.' The family moved back to England in June 2010 and five years later, Charlotte found herself standing in front of the TV cameras selling three of her Mia Tui bags. Pictured, the Jamme family The family are delighted with the success of the company which launched in the UK in 2011. Pictured, Philippe, Charlotte, Amelie and Mia 'It's all consuming, you play chicken with school pick up time, running late as you need to send that last email,' Charlotte said, explaining what life is like with a successful business and two children. 'You give up a piece of yourself. You try to be the perfect mum, wife and business woman, and for that you always feel a slight failure in all aspects.' She added: 'The girls didn't like Mia Tui for many years. They saw it take their mum away at weekend to work shows, or being upset when things dont go to plan. 'They were super proud when our Instagram account got the blue tick somehow, I was famous, all their friends had noticed.' Charlotte's bags are all designed from the inside out to meet the needs of busy women needing organisation in their bags - and even Jane McDonald used the brand throughout her Channel 5 series. And the successful mumtrepreneur has words of advice for anyone else who may be eager to go down the business route. 'It takes time,' she explained. 'I remember hearing someone say youre a ten year overnight success and it's so true. You don't know how long or the path someone has travelled to become successful.' Speaking of the turnover from her bag company (one pictured above) Charlotte has so far made 4 million She added: 'Also go with your gut, all my mistakes have been because I have not listened to my gut feeling, dont doubt yourself. 'Being an entrepreneur is lonely. Try and find a networking group that can give you some support. Dont be afraid of making mistakes, as long as you learn from them they are not all bad.' Now, Charlotte's business has generated a total of 4 million since it launched in the UK in July 2011 - something which she said she 'can't believe.' 'I actually think we will finish this year 31st March at around 2 million alone,' said Charlotte. 'Its been a rollercoaster of a ride, and one that I have just hung on to and tried to enjoy. I am very proud of what I have achieved.' She now employs a team of six and has moved from working in her own kitchen to warehouses and two units in Newport Pagnell and a factory in Vietnam - where she was living when she came up with the idea. 'I have an amazing team, who are all instrumental to the growth,' said Charlotte. 'We have a solid foundation of customer service which I hope sets us apart from other companies.' by Nirmala Carvalho The vote will take place over seven days, from 11 April to 19 May. Several Catholic schools will be polling stations. The bishops of Tamil Nadu write to the electoral commission to change the date of the elections that take place on that April 18, Holy Thursday. Mumbai (AsiaNews) - Christians in India are "unhappy because the dates of the elections were set during Holy Week", Sajan K George, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians (GCIC) tells AsiaNews. The Christian leader reports the disappointment of the religious minority, especially in those states where their presence is more numerous. "In Goa - he says - where Christians represent one third of the population, the vote was scheduled on April 23rd. Here the political parties compete for two seats in the Lok Sabha [Lower House of the Indian Parliament, ed]. There will be a bitter battle during the Easter Triduum, which will end at 5 pm on Easter Sunday [April 21]". This week the Indian Electoral Commission released the general election calendar, which will be attended by about 900 million Indians. The seven dates are: 11-18-23-29 April and 6-12-19 May. The seats to be assigned to the Lok Sabha are 543. In Tamil Nadu, continues Sajan K George, "the elections are held on April 18 and coincide with Holy Thursday. For this the Council of Bishops of Tamil Nadu has written to the Electoral Commission (Eci) to ask for a change of dates ". Archbishop Antony Pappusamy believes that the coincidence between the day of the vote and Holy Thursday "will not be in favor of members of the Christian community" because "those who teach in public schools and government officials that will serve as polling stations will not be able to attend mass . According to the bishop, another critical aspect is the fact that several Catholic schools will be polling stations, but they are located in the compound of the churches. "This is a drawback - he writes in the letter to the Electoral Commission - because during the Easter Triduum most churches organize liturgical services in the open air, in the atrium of the structure". L Sahayaraj, deputy secretary of the Council, laments: "The polling stations in the schools run by the Church will damage both Catholics and Protestants because, for security reasons, many agents will be deployed". Actor Michael Sheen is taking part in a video campaign, aimed at fathers, which is hoping to break down the stigma of talking about periods. Talking about periods can be painfully awkward for both parents and children, and Michael Sheen is proving that the embarrassment doesn't vanish even if you're a famous movie star. The initiative, called #Pads4Dads, hopes to help dads feel more confident discussing periods with their daughters. Father of 20-year-old Lily Mo, who he had with former flame actress Kate Beckinsale, he heads the campaign where he encourages fathers to 'join the bl**y conversation.' SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO Actor Michael Sheen, 50, says fathers shouldn't be left out of the 'bloody conversation' in national video campaign that aims to help fathers talk about periods with their daughters 'If you're out shopping for your daughter, you know what food they like right?' Sheen asks in the video. 'But when it comes to pads and tampons, you don't have a clue,' he adds, 'I have a daughter, I get it.' The Frost/Nixon and Twilight star went on to say: 'It can feel hard to start the conversation, but that's okay.' Speaking about the campaign Michael said: 'Its awkward for dads to have this chat because chances are, they didnt learn about periods in school.' Michael Sheen had daughter Lily Mo, now 20, with former flame Kate Beckinsale. The actor is now dating comedian Aisling Bea 'Believe me, we want to be supportive, but theres almost no information out there aimed at dads. Lets not leave Ddds out of the bloody conversation,' he added. Hey girl, the organisation behind the campaign, tackles period poverty in the UK. Along with the video, it will also release a written guide written by fathers to help de-stigmatise periods. Celia Hodson, Founder of Hey Girls, said: 'Education is so important to break down the myths and taboo that still surround periods.' Kate Beckinsale (left) Lily Mo Sheen (left) and Michael Sheen (middle) are seen out together in New York in 2016 'Everyone in my family is totally used to chatting about periods now but I do understand talking to teenagers about puberty can be awkward. 'However, for dads of daughters with no female relatives around, it can be more than that its often quite scary. We wanted to create something empowering to give dads a helping hand. It was a pleasure to work with Michael in doing so,' she added. Michael Sheen and actress Kate Beckinsale met when they were both in a 1995 touring production of The Seagull. A few years into their relationship Beckinsale got pregnant. Lily is the couple's only child. Michael Sheen and actress Kate Beckinsale met when they were both in a 1995 touring production of The Seagull. Pictured together in 2011 Sheen is helping out social enterprise Hey Girl promote their #padsfordads campaign. Hey Girl aims to tackle period poverty across the UK by giving one pack of pads to girls in difficulty for each pack they sell Sheen opened up about his daughter, when she turned 18, in 2017. He told Hello Magazine: 'I'm sure, for anyone who's had their child go off to college they've left home for the first time it's exciting to see them going off on that adventure and having their own independent life,' 'But at the same time you don't want to let go and you don't want to see them go completely, so there are two sides to it. Michael Sheen went on to date America comedian Sarah Silverman for four years before an amicable split in 2018. Michael Sheen went on to date America comedian Sarah Silverman (left) for four years before an amicable split in 2018 Hey Girls is a social enterprise that tackles period poverty by donating a pack of sanitary pads to girls in need for every pack that it sells The Welsh actor is now dating comedian Aisling Bea. While Kate Beckinsale's new relationship with Ariana Grande's former beau Pete Davidson, 25, is raising a few eyebrows. Hey Girls made headlines last year upon its launch in Waitrose and Asda. It ran a paper advert inviting readers to 'cut out their own pads.' The second page of the advert went on to reveal that one in ten girls in the UK can't afford sanitary products so must resort to using loo roll, socks or even newspaper. In a time when an alarming number of parents aren't vaccinating their children despite overwhelming scientific evidence supporting the practice, a pair of Pennsylvania teenagers wanted to show their appreciation for their own mother getting them immunized as kids. Alyssa Jackson, 17, and her younger sister surprised their mother with a special ice cream cake recently. On top, the teens scrawled in icing: 'Thx 4 vaccinating us, Mom.' Surprise! Alyssa Jackson, 17, and her younger sister recorded themselves while they surprised their mother with a special ice cream cake thanking her for getting them vaccinated Too funny! Their mom was thrilled and cracked up at the sight Alyssa shared a video of the pair delivering the cake to their mother on the video-sharing platform TikTok. She told BuzzFeed News that they were inspired to do so after Alyssa needed to present her vaccination records at a new school. Together, they picked up a cake at Dairy Queen, deciding it 'would be funny' to record themselves buying it and giving it to their mom. 'When we walked in my mom was confused because she was working and we just came home with a cake,' she said. Grateful: They were inspired to do so after Alyssa needed to present her vaccination records at a new school Scribble: Alyssa wrote the sweet message herself while in the car Alyssa, who teamed up with her sister to organize the cake, said: 'Vaccinations are important because it's not only your kid. They'll go to school and other kids can get sick from your child' 'She knows when my sister and I are together we like to be funny and do ridiculous things so the first thing she said was, "You can't smash that in my face."' Ultimately, her mom figured it out. Though the cake was a joke, however, the sentiment behind it was not. 'I am happy that I'm vaccinated, because I have seen that some old-time diseases are coming back,' Alyssa said. 'I'm glad my mom hasn't contributed to that. 'Vaccinations are important because it's not only your kid. They will go to school and other kids can get sick from your child. Your child should not have to worry about different diseases.' Since Alyssa shared her video online, it's been liked 69,200 times and received lots of comments. There has been an uptick in so-called 'anti-vaxxers' in recent years, who swear off vaccines for their children, believing they are dangerous. Most commonly, anti-vaxxers insist that vaccines which have wiped out deadly diseases like polio cause autism. The belief originated with a now-debunked study by a doctor named Andrew Wakefield, who has since lost his license to practice medicine. The battle over vaccines has nevertheless raged on. This week, schools in Italy which made vaccines mandatory for school children in 2017 turned away 300 unvaccinated children. The news from Italy comes amidst a worldwide measles outbreak, which has put lives at risk despite the presence of a vaccine (as part of the MMR vaccine schedule). Earlier this year, the World Health Organization said that 'vaccine hesitancy' is one of the top 10 threats to global health, alongside the Ebola virus and antibiotic resistant bacteria. A mother-of-six from South Australia has taken to social media to call the actions of a person who attacked her and her family online. Krechelle Carter, 29, from Adelaide is followed by thousands for her unconventional approach to parenting and recently shared a screenshot of a message she was sent by a troll while she was recovering from a surgery. 'You have absolutely no credibility also your vag must be a train wreck,' the message read. 'The quality of life your kids are going to have in the future is gonna (sic) be just terrible. F*** you're also chronically obese; Jesus man you hit the trifecta in life.' A mother-of-six from South Australia has taken to social media to call the actions of a person who attacked her and her family online 'Feral. I feel so bad for the children, I hope you at least adopt one out in hopes that it at least gets a good life.' Along with a photo of the message, Krechelle also took to social media to address how the person's remarks had affected her directly: 'I just want to make one thing very CLEAR - no form of bullying should be tolerated. 'This message came through my personal messenger. And you are not my friend.' Krechelle said this type of behaviour had the potential to cause devastating levels of harm and needed to be called out. Krechelle then went on to say how this type of behaviour had the potential to cause devastating levels of harm and needed to be called out. 'People are losing their lives. We're actually losing people because of this. So, when does it stop? When?' She wrote. Krechelle hit out at the cyberbully's statement that her kids were going to have terrible futures, by saying as far as she was concerned she was happy with her 'free range approach to parenting' and her children were just fine. Krechelle is pictured left with her six children and her husband Krechelle's unconventional approach to parenting has won her thousands of fans, many who are wowed by her ability to wrangle a large brood all while successfully blogging What is Cyberbullying? * Cyberbullying is when technology is used to hurt or embarrass someone or to make them afraid. * Instant messaging, text messages, email, social networking sites and forums can all be used to cyberbully someone. * One in five Australian kids aged between eight and 15 have been cyberbullied. Source: Better Health Channel Advertisement 'We eat broccoli and have craft supplies somewhere and we let them run around enough and cut bed time stories in half like all good parents do,'she said. 'We're just your average f****** family. 'We free range parent - except for when we lock them up at night (gotta rest at some point) and don't want the foxes to get them. 'We have choir charts that haven't been filled out in weeks... We've missed two of the last six swimming lessons 'But gosh, my kids - they are the best thing I ever did with my life. 'They are the only thing I wouldn't change. They are loved and special. The outspoken mum didn't hold back when it came to addressing each of the points raised by the person who'd sent her the abusive message The mother-of-six also took a no holds barred attitude to dealing with comments about her weight. 'Yep it's true I'm obese, have been up and down my whole adult life,' she said. 'Give me six months to recover from all this bulls**t and we'll race.' 'My kids - they are the best thing I ever did with my life,' Krechelle said in reply to the cyberbully's remarks She then went on to tell her followers the reason why she'd spoken out wasn't for 'sympathy or more assault', more it was to let others know they weren't alone. 'I share this because there are people that need to see it's happening everywhere. It's not just you. 'You are not alone. You hear me?' Krechelle said she wanted to call out this person's actions to highlight how harmful bullying could be Krechelle said it was important to call out this person's actions in order to draw attention to how harmful any form of bullying could be. 'To receive this malicious message while on bed rest after surgery. 'Shame on you. Shame on you. 'I said it last night and Ill say it again "It just takes one wrong word, at the wrong time; to the wrong person". 'Are you really willing to be that trigger? Krechelle said her children, her gorgeous husband and 'family and friends spread for miles' allowed her to feel as if she'd hit the trifecta Her post closed with her saying that as far as she was concerned she viewed her life as having hit the trifecta. 'Gorgeous adoring husband, beautiful, healthy children and family and friends that spread for miles'. 'Now go get a new profile pic and stage name,' she said to the person who messaged her. 'Grey and white is so last season.' If you are experiencing cyberbullying and think you may need help, please contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 A mother has been left furious after she was told not to pack her son homemade biscuits in his lunchbox - unless there's one for everyone in his class. Australian mother Joanne said the uneaten cookies were sent home from the school with a handwritten note after her little boy wasn't allowed to eat the treat. The note read: 'Dear mummy, can you please avoid sending cookies unless there is one for everyone. It's difficult for the other children when one has treats. Thank you.' A mother has been left furious after she was told not to pack her son homemade biscuits in his lunchbox unless there's one for everyone in his class (picture of the handwritten note left inside her son's lunchbox, along with his uneaten cookies) Taking to Facebook, Joanne said she was shocked by the comment but she wanted to see the teacher the next morning to get an explanation. 'I got this note sent home in my son's lunchbox because he had homemade biscuits in his lunchbox. I was horrified but didn't lose sleep over it, I figured I'd talk to the teacher the next day and see what she meant,' she said. But when she met with the teacher, she was 'gobsmacked' by her response. 'She said it was "policy that homemade goods aren't encouraged unless there was enough to share with everyone". I questioned why and tried to talk to her openly but she said that it wasn't encouraged,' the mother said. 'I asked "if a pack of Tiny Teddies or Shapes would be okay and she said "that would be fine". So... I questioned how a homemade biscuit with four ingredients isn't encouraged, but a processed packet supermarket option was okay? 'She just kept saying it was policy and that the parent committee runs the policies so I'd need to take it up with them.' Australian mother Joanne said the uneaten cookies were sent home from the school with a handwritten note after her little boy wasn't allowed to eat it (stock image) The mother - who runs an additive-free living business - said she even suggested to the teacher she could come in to talk to the parents about the appropriate foods to pack in children's lunchboxes. 'She shut me down and questioned why I was feeling so passionate about this. I got nowhere,' Joanne said. Despite the outcome, Joanne said she has since taped the blue note on her office wall as 'motivation' to remind her of the healthy lifestyle she already follows at home. She clarified the incident happened in early 2017 but she later shared it to her Facebook page, which has since been met with outrage from fellow parents. One woman said: 'That is madness! You are doing an amazing job at educating others. Keep going one family at a time and the ripple effect will catch up. Some are slow learners.' Another said: 'This is rough! I was asked to stop sending sultanas in my child's lunchbox as it was deemed too unhealthy but packaged muesli bars, cakes and roll ups are fine. Sigh.' Another woman suggested: 'Surely he wouldn't be able to share with everyone, what about the allergies issue?' And one said: 'That is absolutely ridiculous! How dare they shut down a parent supplying their child with decent food! As a teacher I am constantly battling the opposite way, I can't imagine discouraging home baked goods. Keep fighting the good fight.' A young mother has revealed that her postnatal depression made her 'almost hope that her newborn baby had stopped breathing in his sleep.' Hypnobirthing teacher Tahnee Knowles, 27, had meticulously planned her dream at-home water birth to welcome her son into the world in November 2017. However she was robbed of the 'magical moment' when a complication meant she was admitted to St Mary's Hospital, in Newport, near her home on the Isle of Wight, for a caesarean section. As a result Tahnee felt 'no connection' when she first held her newborn son, Gus. The mother-of-one went on to silently battle PND for a few weeks before telling her husband Bernardo Hamester, 35, a Brazilian lawyer, but remained too afraid to seek help for seven months. Now much stronger and calling Gus, 17 months, her 'best friend,' she has decided to speak out, saying: 'There are so many societal norms around how you should act when you first become a mum, that I felt under pressure to put on a brave face. Tahnee Knowles, 27, from Newport, Isle of Wight pictured with newborn son Gus, has revealed she hoped her baby would stop breathing in his sleep when her postnatal depression was at is worst Tahnee, pictured with Gus when she began to feel better, said her son is now her 'best friend' The young mother, pictured with her husband Bernardo Hamester, 35, and their son Gus, had planned a water birth at home but ended up being induced at 39 weeks 'I felt almost angry with my husband for being so besotted with Gus. I didn't understand why I was the only one to feel the way I did. 'At first, I wondered if I just had the baby blues then one night, I was watching him sleep, and suddenly realised I was unsure if he was breathing. 'A thought flashed across my mind, that I almost hoped he wasn't, as that way, things would go back to the way they'd been before I had him. 'I knew then that something far more severe than baby blues was going on.' The mother-of-one, pictured with Gus in the Summer of 2018, didn't get help for seven months and even worried about telling her husband of her feelings Tahnee, who wants to encourage other women with PND to seek help said she physically had a textbook pregnancy and was even able to exercise. Mentally though, she found herself on an emotional rollercoaster, which she put down to hormones. Although planning a water birth at home, when she was 39 weeks in November 2017 Tahnee was pottering around at home and noticed a wet patch on her jeans. She recalled: 'I thought it could be my waters breaking, but it was hardly any liquid, so I wasn't sure. After Gus was born Tahnee, left at the end of her pregnancy and right with Gus at three days old, said she felt 'pressure to react in a certain way, so I put on this facade' 'I called the midwife who came out right away. She tested the fluid and confirmed it was amniotic. She then said that if I hadn't gone into labour within 24 hours to get to hospital. 'I struggled to sleep that night. I tried to stay relaxed, but every movement I felt was so exciting.' The next day, with no signs of labour showing, Tahnee was strongly advised to head to hospital. She added: 'I asked the midwife if I'd be able to come back home again, to have the birth I'd planned if I started to progress. 'She advised I bring a bag, as it was likely I'd need to stay in hospital and that's when I knew it wouldn't be going to plan. 'At hospital, I was checked over and doctors said they would induce me. That's when a cloud just came over me. I felt silly, but I was getting really upset. Tahnee, pictured with Gus when he was one-day old, was discharged a day after giving birth but said that for a good 72 hours she did not want to be around her newborn baby 'The birth of your first baby is such a huge thing, and none of it was going how I'd dreamed.' While she was disappointed, Tahnee knew that the most important thing was for Gus to arrive safely, so she agreed to be induced and stay at St Mary's. For hours, though, despite also being given syntocinon - a synthetic hormone used to bring on contractions - she did not start to dilate. And on 23 November, a day after being admitted to hospital, a caesarean was mentioned for the first time. A natural birth at this point would very likely have involved the use of forceps or ventouse, which neither Tahnee nor Bernardo wanted. When Gus, pictured with his parents in February 2018, was two weeks old Tahnee said she started to feel real connection but she still had 'feelings of self doubt about her role as a mum' Tahnee recalled: 'A new consultant came on shift and he was just amazing. He sat down beside me on the bed and said how sorry he was that the birth plan I'd worked so meticulously on wasn't going to happen. 'It meant so much to hear someone acknowledge that, to me, this birth wasn't just a medical thing, it was hugely emotional. 'He explained that we could do a Caesarean and still keep some of the things I'd wanted, like dim lights and music. 'I could meet my baby within the hour and he could be born into a calm, relaxed environment, rather than me keep waiting for something to happen naturally and exhaust myself.' WHAT IS POSTNATAL DEPRESSION? Postnatal depression is a form of the mental-health condition that affects more than one in 10 women in the UK and US within a year of giving birth. As many men can be affected as women, research suggests. Many parents feel down, teary and anxious within the first two weeks of having a child, which is often called the 'baby blues'. But if symptoms start later or last longer, they may be suffering from postnatal depression. Postnatal depression is just as serious as others form of the mental-health disorder. Symptoms include: Persistent sadness Lack of enjoyment or interest in the wider world Fatigue Insomnia Struggling to bond with your baby Withdrawing from others Difficulty concentrating and making decisions Frightening thoughts, such as hurting your baby Sufferers should not wait for their symptoms to just go away. Instead they should recognise that it is not their fault they are depressed and it does not make them a bad parent. If you or your partner may be suffering, talk to your GP or health visitor. Treatments can include self-help, such as talking to loved ones, resting when you can and making time to do things you enjoy. Therapy may also be prescribed. In severe cases where other options have not helped, antidepressants may be recommended. Doctors will prescribe ones that are safe to take while breastfeeding. Postnatal depression's cause is unclear, however, it is more common in those with a history of mental-health problems. Lack of support from loved ones, a poor relationship with the partner and a life-changing event, such as bereavement, can also raise the risk. Source: NHS Advertisement So, at 10am on 23 November little Gus arrived via caesarean section but as soon as Tahnee held him, she could tell something was wrong. She continued: 'I'd asked for immediate skin to skin contact, but as Gus was passed on to me, I felt no connection. It was like he was an alien. He could have been anybody's baby. 'Everyone around me was cooing and I felt mounting pressure to react in a certain way, so I put on this facade, but inwardly, I just didn't want to hold him.' The following day, Tahnee was discharged but said that, for a good 72 hours, she did not want to be around her newborn baby. As the weeks passed, her mood did not lift and she soon realised it was more than just the baby blues. She explained: 'I felt as if I had to trick people into thinking I was fine, but deep down, I worried I'd made a huge mistake. Tahnee, pictured with Gus now, has launched her own pregnancy wellness retreats to try and help other expectant mothers It wasn't until a friend asked how she was doing that Tahnee, left on Gus' first outing and right with her family, spoke openly about how she was coping with becoming a mother 'When Gus was around two weeks old, I had a moment of real connection with him. He looked up at me one day and I just thought, 'Oh my god I do love you.' I cried out of pure relief and felt on top of the world. 'After that, my bond with Gus continued to grow, but those feelings of self doubt about by new role as a mum soon came back. 'It continued like that for months. I loved Gus but I wasn't sure if I wanted to be a mum. I didn't relate to this new person I'd become. 'I didn't dare speak up though, as I felt frightened people would think I was a bad mother. I was struggling to connect with him. For the first few weeks, I didn't even tell Bernardo, as I was scared of coming under scrutiny.' Then, around seven months after Gus was born, Tahnee had a lightbulb moment when a friend asked her a question nobody else had 'how are you doing mentally.' The floodgates open, she spoke openly about how she had been struggling, and said that simply saying the words out loud was a huge relief. Tahnee, pictured, said: 'I want to break the taboo around postnatal depression and show others that they aren't bad people for needing help' It finally gave her the courage to seek help from the birth advisor she had been assigned. 'I never had antidepressants, as I only spoke out once I was coming out the other side of things, but I would encourage others to get help as soon as they can,' she said. 'If this happened to me again, I'd explore avenues like CBT and therapy. It's such a huge help to talk these things out and get them off our chests.' Now, keen to use what she has been through to help others, Tahnee has launched her own pregnancy wellness retreats called Bump and Mind. She has also trained as a hypnobirthing teacher and passes on techniques to her clients, as well as providing them with guided meditation materials to use after they have given birth. She said: 'I know how important it is to go into giving birth relaxed, so my retreats are very focused on mindfulness and meditation. They aren't just for mums dads are welcome too, and they can be great for really bonding a couple. 'I can also speak about all the 'what ifs,' as birth doesn't always go to plan. 'Now, I haven't suffered in a long time. Gus is my best friend and he's a dream, but I don't feel guilty for struggling, which I think is really important. 'I want to break the taboo around postnatal depression and show others that they aren't bad people for needing help.' The parents of a six-month-old baby with an extreme head of hair are stopped in the street over her resemblance to Despicable Me character Agnes. Anna Pendowska, 33, and Lee Blackburn, 35, from Basingstoke, Hampshire, have revealed that when little Lilliana Blackburn was born via emergency c-section on August 29 last year weighing a healthy 7lbs 10oz, doctors and nurses couldn't believe their eyes at her full head of dark brown hair. As a result, their little bundle of joy is constantly compared to Agnes, the youngest of the three sisters in the animated Despicable Me films, who wears her hair in a large ponytail on top of her head. 'When Lilliana was born, the doctor said she had the most hair he had ever seen,' said Anna, a cafe manager who is currently on maternity leave,' explained Anna. Anna Pendowska, 33, and Lee Blackburn, 35, from Basingstoke, Hampshire are stopped in the street over their six-month-old daughter Lilliana's resemblance to Despicable Me character Agnes - all because of her extreme head of hair When Lilliana Blackburn (above) was born via emergency c-section on August 29 last year weighing a healthy 7lbs 10oz, doctors and nurses couldn't believe their eyes at her full head of dark brown hair The six-month-old baby is constantly compared to Agnes (above), the youngest of the three sisters in the animated Despicable Me films, who wears her hair in a large ponytail on top of her head 'We were rushed for a c-section because they were having trouble getting her out and the first thing that the doctor sad was "I can see hair". 'All the nurses were commenting too, and couldn't believe it. People often say she looks like Agnes from the Despicable Me films.' The couple now spend two to three hours a week styling and washing Lilliana's hair and have to buy special shampoos and products to tame her locks - but the tot has grown to love a blow dry with the sound of the hairdryer even sending her off to sleep. 'We wash it every day, especially now that she started weaning and she loves touching her hair whether her hands are clean or dirty,' Anna continued. 'But I don't blow dry it every second day to avoid damaging it too much. Mother Anna revealed that when her 'little bundle of joy' wakes up, she looks like Elvis as her hair is all over the place and she looks like she has a quiff (above) It's not only her hair that is advanced for her age, as Lilliana was trying to hold her head up as soon as she was born and was sat up at four months old. Above, with her parents Anna and Lee Lilliana (above) showed of her impressive set of dark brown locks as soon as she entered the world via c-section She added: 'People do stop us when they see her, especially in shopping malls and coffee shops. People tend to whisper "look at that baby's hair".' Despite the myth that mothers carrying babies with more hair have an increased amount of heartburn, Anna had a pretty straight forward pregnancy. And like mother like daughter, she also believes her daughter got her luscious looks from her, as she was also born with an impressive amount of hair. After a 30-hour labour, Anna was rushed into theatre for an emergency c-section at Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital, and the couple were overjoyed to meet their new little one. As soon as Lilliana was born, Anna had to dash out a purchase a bigger hair brush as the little baby one just didn't cut it. Pictured, Lilliana's scan A newborn Lilliana had no idea she would be compared to the youngest of the three sisters in the animated Despicable Me films later in life Lilliana with her hair in a large ponytail on top of her head - just like the Despicable Me character she is often compared to Lilliana's parents spend two to three hours a week styling and washing her hair and even have to buy special shampoos and products to tame her unruly locks (above) The hairy baby is given a blow-dry by her mother to try and tame her wild locks. Above, Lilliana wearing her hair loose 'Lilliana gets the hair from me as I was the same when I was born, she gets her lovely blue eyes from her dad,' said Anna, who is originally from Poland. 'She is very advanced for her age.' 'As soon as she was born she was trying to hold her head up and was sat up at four months old, I don't think it will be longer before she is talking or even standing.' 'When she was born I had to go out and buy a bigger hair brush as the little baby one just didn't cut it, plus shampoos and conditioners to try and tame it. She continued: 'When she wakes up in the morning she looks like Elvis, her hair is all over the place and she looks like she has a quiff.' Even little Lilliana is shocked by her resemblance to the much-loved Despicable me character, Agnes While the myth stands that mothers carrying babies with more hair have an increased amount of heartburn, Anna didn't experience any. Pictured, Lilliana Anna revealed that her daughter got her luscious looks from her, as she was also born with an incredible amount of hair. Pictured, six-month-old Lilliana with parents Anna and Lee Mother Anna said she doesn't think it will be long before Lilliana (above) is talking, so she will soon be able to express what she feels about the comparison 'She loves the hairdryer and we find it really soothes her. It even sends her to sleep sometimes as she likes the noise.' Anna and Lee, who works as a foundry manager, have recently entered Lilliana into a beautiful baby competition and hope her abundance of hair could help her win the top prize - the chance to be on the May cover of Baby Magazine and a year-long modelling contract. 'As every Mum, I would love for her to be a little model but Lee is a musician hopes she will pick up an instrument in the future,' said Anna. 'But whatever she chooses to do we will stand behind her 100% and she can do whatever will make her happy.' You can follow Lilliana on her Instagram page: @p.a.n.n.a-a.n.n.a Lilianna is a little star in the making and even boasts her own Instagram account, so you can see the best of her hairstyles With her abundance of locks, six-month-old Lilliana is quite the hair-raiser and her parents revealed she often gets stopped in the street Proud parents Anna and Lee have recently since entered Lilliana into a beautiful baby competition and hope her precious locks could help her win Advertisement It may not carry the clout of Ascot, but Cheltenham Ladies Day revellers went all out to up the style stakes for day two of the annual festival. This year sees the return of the #ColourMeMarch competition, where for the first time male as well as female racegoers are encouraged to add a splash of colour to their outfits. Judges will narrow it down to four finalists, who can then spin the Winning Post of Fortune to land one of the luxurious prizes up for grabs. These brave ladies (left) braved the cool March weather and ditched the tights to show of their tanned pins while others braved floaty flocks (right) despite the gale force winds as they arrived for a day of racing Revellers at Cheltenham put on a very animated display as they cheered on the riders during a fun-filled atmosphere on day two The lady on the left has clearly taken style inspiration from the Duchess of Cambridge, while her companion opted for a hot pink ensemble - and appeared to be wearing a long sleeve thermal top under her satin dress Cream of the crop! Ladies Day revellers went all out to up the style stakes for day two of the annual festival, with one reveller (right) risking a plunging blazer which revealed a lace body below, while another went for a daringly short tuxedo-dress This lady, who was wrapped up to beat the cold weather, enjoyed a drink at the festival A pretty Ladies Day visitor plumped for an off-the-shoulder floral embroidered frock with velvet accents and a summer boater hat Revellers get into the party spirit as the races roar on at Cheltenham, with Ladies Day goers knocking back the beer and gin and tonics What a fine bunch of fillies! Ladies descend on the course for an action-packed day of racing at Cheltenham - with many braving short hemlines and daring necklines These include a brand new Mini ONE car, a Boodles item of jewellery worth 3,800, a hotel spa package and hat worth 350 and 250 worth of fashion vouchers. The second day of racing will go ahead as planned despite fears over high winds following a precautionary track inspection earlier this morning. The chance of a cancellation due to the weather today raised the prospect of a 'People's Saturday' at the Festival for the first time. Zara and Mike Tindall returned to the Cheltenham Festival today for Ladies Day, with the Queen's daughter swapping her navy coat and hat for a purple alternative, while her husband traded his jeans for green check chinos. Zara and Mike Tindall returned to the Cheltenham Festival today for Ladies Day, with the Queen's granddaughter swapping her navy coat and hat for a purple alternative, while her husband traded his jeans for green check chinos Zara looked a royal picture in a purple double-breasted wool coat by Pip Howeson and a matching plum felt cocktail hat by London milliner Juliette Botterill. She also carried an Aspinal Letterbox Saddle handbag Princess Anne also returned to the Gloucestershire event, today sporting a rich green velvet coat with navy pocket detailing and a gold horse brooch Princess Anne was seen speaking to Andrew Parker Bowles, the ex-husband of the Duchess of Cornwall, during the day The Duchess of Cornwall was also in attendance to present the winning jockey of the Queen Mother Champion Chase with their trophy, and struggled with her hat against the wind Duchess of Cornwall (centre left) presented the trophy to Owner Patricia Pugh (centre) Trainer Nicky Henderson (left) and Jockey Nico de Boinville (right) after winning the Betway Queen Mother Champion Chase during Ladies Day Model and TV presenter Vogue Williams was one of the first celebrities to arrive at the event, dressed in a Holland Cooper floor length tartan trench coat and black trilby hat. Vogue will compete in a charity horse race later this year Among the early celebrity arrivals was Good Morning Britain presenter Charlotte Hawkins and TV host Jeremy Kyle with his partner Vicky Burton. Charlotte wore a tweed coat by Guinea London, a fuscia and purple jacquard suit by Claire Mischevani and a hat by Juliette Botterill Tennis ace Andy Murray put his best foot forward in a stylish grey wool coat and black snood, while his wife Kim plumped for a distinctive patterned jumpsuit from Boden with orange suede boots and a dusky pink blazer The pair looked to be enjoying themselves as they cheered on their favourites from a prime spot on the balcony Andy beamed at his delighted wife as she celebrated from the balcony while taking in the action at Cheltenham Fashionistas donned their feathered finery as they arrived at Prestbury Park for Cheltenham Ladies Day today Today's feature race is the 400,000 Grand 1 Betway Queen Mother Champion Chase, the trophy for which will be presented by the Duchess of Cornwall. Early arrivals were clearly dressed to impress as they entered Prestbury Park this morning, with knee-high boots, fur stoles and extravagant hats clearly the order of the day. Many had clearly taken inspiration from the glorious Gloucestershire countryside, plumping for tweed coats and feathery accessories. It was a far cry from yesterday, where some ladies resorted to using plastic bags to cover their shoes to protect them from the lashing rain. One even used a box used to sell daffodils in a supermarket as a makeshift hat. The dreaded 50mph winds were clearly an issue, with many revellers clinging to their hats and clothing as they entered the race track. On Day One, Espoir D'Allen, rode by jockey Mark Walsh, defied the odds to beat favourite and two-time winner Buveur D'Air to take gold in the Champion Hurdle. A group of hens celebrated their bride-to-be at Ladies Day - with some rather cheeky props to mark the special occasion Former Made in Chelsea star Georgia 'Toff' Toffolo was all smiles as she entered the paddock for the start of the races in a sixties-inspired jacket and Fairfax & Favor Regina Boots, while former England cricketer and Dancing on Ice contestant Ryan Sidebottom gave onlookers a thumbs up as he arrived in a sharp three-piece blue tartan check suit An excited fan cheers her horse from the paddock as fellow racegoers look on during the third race at Ladies Day Check this out! Fashion-conscious visitors teamed bright summer colours with vintage tweeds and check prints Many arrivals took inspiration from the glorious surrounding Gloucestershire countryside, donning tweed jackets, fur accessories and feathered hats Everything in the garden's rosy for this Ladies Day visitor (left) who opted for a floral theme with her outfit, while these two ladies (right) refused to let the windy weather and cool temperatures rain on their parade, sporting bright primary colours and short hemlines Excited racegoers watched in excitement as the day's showpiece race - the Queen Mother Champion Steeple Chase - got underway Is she fur real? A racegoer stands out from the crowds thanks to her voluminous white fur hood - and the male fans behind her didn't look too chuffed Gill Carpenter went all out with her head gear, introducing fabrics from her floral patterned pink blazer into the plume of feathers Outsiders race to glory in today's races at Cheltenham City Island won the curtain-raiser - the Ballymore Novices' Hurdle Race - on day two at Cheltenham, rode by jockey Mark Walsh. He told ITV Racing: 'We still don't know how good he is because even when he gets to the front he doesn't do a stroke.' Jockey Harry Cobdens horse Topofthegame was true to his name in the Novices' Steeple Chase, galloping to glory to beat closest rival Santini. The third race of the day - the Coral Cup Hurdle - was decided by a photo finish, with William Henry taking it by a whisker. It was neck and neck between Altior and Sceau Royal after the last in the Queen Mother Champion Steeple Chase, with Altior clinching the win. Winning jockey Nico de Boinville told ITV Racing: 'He's an absolute warrior, what an absolute monster, he's right up there, what a horse, we'll enjoy the moment.' Tiger Roll was one of the favourites to take the Glenfarclas Cross Country Chase, and he did just that, with jockey Keith Donoghue calling it a 'dream come true'. The penultimate race of the day - the Boodles Juvenile Handicap Hurdle Race - was won by Band of Outlaws, ridden by J J Slevin. Envoi Allen held off the challenge by Blue Sari to win the final event of the day - the Weatherbys Champion Bumper. Jockey Nico de Boinville celebrates winning the 3.30 Betway Queen Mother Champion Chase on Altior Advertisement Sealed with a kiss: Owner Michael O'Leary celebrates with his wife Anita Farrell after Tiger Roll won the 4.10 Glenfarclas Chase ridden by Keith Donoghue TV presenter Francesca Cumani (left) looked chic in a pearl-studded black beret and matching fur stole, while this glamorous racegoer (right) also went for a monochrome look, with her companion opting for a neutral palette of beige, cream and brown Ladies Day revellers stroll through the paddock in towering heels, with one (far left) flashing her pins as the wind blew open her coat Winners and losers: One fan looks disappointed during today's Cheltenham races, while another appears to celebrate a win The stands were packed as the racing got underway this afternoon. One reveller used his teeth to cling onto his pint while he sent a text A female racegoer looked a vision in teal, with a wool check coat, a luxurious fur stole and an elaborate hat adorned with peacock feathers Former Olympic swimmer Sharon Davies watches on intently as the races come to a close of Ladies Day at Cheltenham The forecasted 50mph winds were clearly an issue as several guests clung onto their hats and clothing as they entered the race track A Ladies Day visitor clings to her wide-brimmed hat (left) as she arrived in all black ensemble, with a bright red lip and red check coat her nod to the 'splash of colour' theme, with another (right) opts for a chain link design dress cinched in at the waist by a thick black leather corset belt Racegoers brave the wind as day two of 2019 Cheltenham Festival Ladies Day gets underway, with one guest plumping for a tuxedo-style green outfit and top hat Purple rain! These ladies embraced shades of pink and purple for their outfits, and opted for some pretty spectacular headgear One trendy reveller sported a spectacular pair of Yves Saint Laurent black patent high heels with an eponymous-style heel Pretty in pastel: These Ladies Day revellers opted for a Spring colour palette, with a muted coral coat and dusky pink accessories (left) and a chic beige and cream ensemble (right) The crowds piled in after racing was given the go ahead today, despite concerns over gale force winds as a result of Storm Gareth Berry windy! Mary Berry holds onto her hat as she arrives in a chic wool ensemble at Cheltenham Ladies Day with daughter Annabel Hunnings Many female visitors didn't trust the gusty winds when smiling for photos, keeping a trust hand on their headwear Cheltenham Ladies Day race card and top tips Sportsmail's racing expert Robin Goodfellow dishes out his tips for day two of the Cheltenham Festival featuring the Queen Mother Champion Chase... 13:30: Ballymore Novices' Hurdle Race Best bet: Battleoverdoyen 10-3 Next best: Sams Profile 10-1 14:10: RSA Insurance Novices' Steeple Chase Best bet: Delta Work 9-4 Next best: Drovers Lane 16-1 14:50: Coral Cup Hurdle (handicap hurdle) Best bet: Vision Des Flos 16-1 Next best: Scarpeta 16-1 15:30: Betway Queen Mother Champion Steeple Chase Best bet: Altior 2-15 Next best: Min 4-1 16:10: Glenfarclas Cross Country Chase Best bet: Fact of the Matter 16-1 Next best: Tiger Roll 11-10 16:50: Boodles Juvenile Handicap Hurdle Race Best bet: Brunello 11-1 Next best: Lethal Steps 13-2 17:30: Weatherbys Champion Bumper Best bet: Meticulous 8-1 Next best: Master Debonair 12-1 Advertisement Hats off to them! These ladies went to great lengths to impress with their hats, which set off their eye-catching outfits Punters gathered for an exciting day of racing. The showpiece event today is the 400,000 Grand 1 Betway Queen Mother Champion Chase Comedian Lee Mack sported a salt and pepper beard to the glamorous occasion, while actor Keith Allen grinned as he chatted to pals in the paddock Bright colours, fur and feathers were very much the order of the day, with many ladies vying for the coveted best dressed crown Blue-ming lovely! Ash Robinson dons a bright blue suit in homage to the splash of colour theme at Cheltenham Festival today Ex-Coronation Street actor Nigel Havers looked suave in a brown bool coat and mmatching trilby, with a hint of colour from his purple scarf, while This Morning presenter Eamonn Holmes looked windswept as he arrived for the day of racing No doubt the designers at Gucci put a lot of thought into how their creations should look. But at the end of the day, the wearer is entitled to put their own spin on things. And the Duchess of Cambridge certainly had a different take on the labels 790 blouse yesterday seemingly wearing it back to front. The purple silk-crepe pussy-bow shirt has a row of small buttons down the back, according to Net-a-Porter. But Kate noticeably put hers on with the buttons at the front. Fashion forward: The Duchess of Cambridge wore her Gucci blouse backwards for a visit to the Henry Fawcett Children's Centre in London yesterday, pictured The Gucci shirt, as seen on Net-a-Porter above, is intended to be worn with a plain front (left) and the the button detail at the back (right). However Kate reversed the garment The switch meant the seams on the shoulders and buttons on the cuffs didnt fall exactly as they should and the bow was pulled round her neck and fastened looser and lower. Whether this was by accident or design wasnt clear and Kensington Palace werent commenting. Either way, the ensemble was a popular choice among style experts who hailed her choice of blouse which she sported with wide-legged 130 Jigsaw trousers and block-heeled shoes as an unusually fashion forward look for the duchess. The Duchess of Cambridge looked perfectly polished as she arrived for the visit to the Henry Fawcett Centre. She teamed the Gucci blouse with 130 trousers by Jigsaw The royal mother-of-three wore her long brunette locks blown out and accessorised with a simple pair of drop earrings With her wide leg trousers and silk blouse, the Duchess of Cambridge cut an elegant figure for the outing on Tuesday. She finished the look with a 595 bag from Aspinal of London Despite wearing an expensive silk shirt, the Duchess was still eager to join in the fun and happily sat and cuddled little ones as they toddled across the soft play mats. Swapping stories with other parents, Kate revealed her 10-month-old son Louis has started to 'bomb around' in his walker. 'Louis just wants to pull himself up all the time,' she told one mother. 'He has got these little walkers and is bombing around in them.' The Duchess of Cambridge waved to well-wishers as she left the children's centre, right, and made her way to her car The outing comes just a few weeks after the Duchess revealed she was feeling 'broody' while speaking to well-wishers during a visit to Northern Ireland. Kate was visiting the centre to learn more about support being offered to youngsters and their families through Lambeth Early Action Partnership (LEAP). The duchess took part in session of 'Together Time', where parents can come with their children and learn from each other and childcare professionals. It was, unsurprisingly, noisy but Kate, also mother to George, five, and Charlotte, three, took it all in her stride as she sat down to chat to families who were there about everything from bath time to breast feeding. Photographer Brock Elbank has taken an array of beautiful pictures of men and women, of different ages, born with a rare and untreatable skin condition as part of a striking new exhibition. The 'How Do You C Me Now?' series of photos aims to give a clear message to the world encouraging people 'to love the skin you are in'. The models from around the world, including Rosabella Harrison, seven, from Suffolk, all live with potentially life-threatening skin condition called congenital melanocytic naevus (CMN). Alkin Emirali, who is in his late 40s and from Brighton, joins fellow models for the series. Some of the participants photographed have never publicly displayed their birthmarks before Yulianna Yusef, 26 from Ukraine, poses topless for the striking exhibition as she proudly shows off her skin condition, which has spread across her pack, and on her arms Brock has captured Callum White, 17 from Gloucestershire, who battles with the rare skin condition for his exhibition. Callum shows off the dark birthmark spread across his right arm in the portrait Baby You Kang Wu, three from China, has been photographed in black and white for photographer Brock Elbank's new exhibition How Do You C Me Now, with the portrait capturing dark patches on You's face Rosabella Harrison, seven, from Southwold, Suffolk has Congenital Melanocytic Naevus (CMN), which leaves dark brown birthmarks on the body, and for the young child the darkened pigment is on one side of her face Agnieszka Palyska, 32 from Poland, proudly shows off her birthmark for Brock's latest venture, as she poses topless to give a closer look at the pigmented skin, which covers around 80 per cent of her body Frederik Port, 20 from Norway, also features in the How Do You C Me Now exhibition, which features images taken by London photographer Brock WHAT IS CONGENITAL MELANOCYTIC NAEVI? Congenital melanocytic naevi are a type of birthmark that are also known as congenital moles. They're relatively large brown or black moles that are present from birth and are caused by an overgrowth of pigment cells in the skin. Most congenital melanocytic naevi become proportionally smaller and less obvious with time. They may darken during puberty or become bumpy or hairy. Source: NHS.uk Advertisement CMN can cover up to 80 per cent of the body and presents itself in large, dark-brown birthmarks. The exhibition - which is being supported by UK CMN charity Caring Matters Now - has been presented throughout 30 different portrait images, including black and white shot of a baby You Kang Wum, three, as well as seven-year-old Rosabella Harrison from Southport. Model Yulianna Yusef, 26 from Ukraine, Callum White, 17 from Gloucestershire, Agnieszka Palyska, 32 from Poland, and Mariana Mendes, 26 from Brazil, are among people photographed up close for the project. Many of the models photographed for the series have never revealed their birthmarks publicly before. The demonstration, which 'challenges conventional perceptions of beauty', will run for 10 days at the Oxo Tower Wharf, in London before touring globally. A spokesperson from Caring Matters Now charity says: 'People with CMN often feel isolated due to the rarity of the condition and have to deal with negative comments because of their visible difference, resulting in low self-esteem. 'How Do You C Me Now? aims not only to improve the self-esteem of the children and adults affected by CMN, but also to encourage the public to consider how living with visible differences can add to beauty rather than detract from it'. The 30 portrait images have been taken by photographer Brock Elbank, from London, who focuses on specific physical features. He is best known for his 'Beard' series which featured 80 bearded individuals and was seen by nearly 40,000 visitors when it was exhibited at Somerset House in 2015. The spokesperson added: 'In a world where people work hard to stand out from the crowd, 'How Do You C Me Now?' aims to celebrate diversity and educate the public about this rare condition'. The 'How Do You C Me Now?' exhibition launches at the Oxo Tower Wharf, London on 13 March with a private viewing taking place and will open to the public the following day at 10am. Mariana Mendes, 26 from Brazil, proudly displays her birthmark on the bridge of her nose in Brock's upcoming exhibition, which focuses on specific physical features Zara Tindall was flanked by a posse of glamorous friends today as she made a stylish appearance on day two of the Cheltenham Festival. The equestrian and mother-of-two looked chic in a purple coat, and was joined by pals including trainer Dolly Maude who was vibrant in a bright pink trouser suit. Chanelle McCoy, wife of legendary jokey AP McCoy also went for hot fuchsia tailoring as she joined Zara and the girls. Bringing up the royal contingent was the Duchess of Cornwall who was joined by her sister-in-law Princess Anne. Here come the girls! Zara was joined by trainer Dolly Maude (second left), Chanelle McCoy, wife of legendary jokey AP McCoy (right) at Cheltenham Festival Ladies Day Zara Tindall chose a deep purple coat and fetching fascinator as she visited the Cheltenham festival for the second day Camilla, who was without her husband Prince Charles, struggled with windy weather as she held on tight to her brown and fur hat. She later presented jockey Nico de Boinville with a trophy after he won the Betway Queen Mother Champion Chase on Altior. It was the horse's 18th consecutive victory, matching the record held by four-time Stayers' Hurdle winner Big Buck's. Camilla also presented the winning horse's owner Patricia Pugh and trainer Nicky Henderson with their own trophies. Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall congratulated jockey Nico de Boinville after presenting him with the trophy for winning the race Camilla chatted with the winning horse's (left to right) trainer Nicky Henderson, owner Patricia Pugh, and jockey Nico De Boinville after presenting them with their well-earned trophies Camilla, who struggled with her hat earlier, handled the trophies with a hand of steel Feeling dotty! Camilla added a fun touch to her look in a polka dot dress, teamed with a pristine cream coat and brown suede boots Princess Anne, who is known for her love of horses, opted for a deep green double-breasted coat with navy and red detail. She complemented the look with leather gloves and a horse brooch pinned under her collar Camilla struggled to hold on to her hat in the windy weather, but luckily she was wrapped up warm for battling the elements All smiles! The royals couldn't stop giggling as they were joined by horse trainer Dolly Maude while watching the race Zara was clearly enjoying herself on the phone as she matched leather gloves with her chic outfit (right) Meanwhile Olympian Zara swapped her navy coat she wore yesterday for a purple alternative, while her husband traded his jeans for green check chinos. Princess Anne opted for a bottle green coat, with she paired with a red hat as she joined her daughter, son-in-law, and sister-in-law. The Duchess of Cornwall is set to present the winning jockey of the Queen Mother Champion Chase with their trophy later in the day. This year sees the return of the #ColourMeMarch competition, where for the first time male as well as female racegoers are encouraged to add a splash of colour to their outfits. Judges will narrow it down to four finalists, who can then spin the Winning Post of Fortune to land one of the luxurious prizes up for grabs. These include a brand new Mini ONE car, a Boodles item of jewellery worth 3,800, a hotel spa package and hat worth 350 and 250 worth of fashion vouchers. The second day of racing will go ahead as planned despite fears over high winds following a precautionary track inspection earlier this morning. Zara looked smart in a plum-coloured coat with a flower-trimmed fascinator, while her husband Mike was dapper in green check chinos and a baker boy cap Clearly loved up, the Tindalls, who have daughters Mia and Lena together, held hands as they walked through the windy racecourse Mother-of-two Zara, 37, opted for a simple make-up look as she looked radiant in a plum outfit. She tied her hair up in her signature low-bun and paired the outfit with stud earrings The chance of a cancellation due to the weather today raised the prospect of a 'People's Saturday' at the Festival for the first time. Zara and Mike Tindall returned to the Cheltenham Festival today for Ladies Day, with the Queen's daughter swapping her navy coat and hat for a purple alternative, while her husband traded his jeans for green check chinos. Today's feature race is the 400,000 Grand 1 Betway Queen Mother Champion Chase, the trophy for which will be presented by the Duchess of Cornwall. The Princess Royal showed off her love for horses with a chic gold pin on her deep green coat Wind in her sails! While Zara kept it colourful in a purple ensemble, her mother Princess Anne, 68, opted for a darker look in bottle green and red Early arrivals were clearly dressed to impress as they entered Prestbury Park this morning, with knee-high boots, fur stoles and extravagant hats clearly the order of the day. Many had clearly taken inspiration from the glorious Gloucestershire countryside, plumping for tweed coats and feathery accessories. It was a far cry from yesterday, where some ladies resorted to using plastic bags to cover their shoes to protect them from the lashing rain. Camilla, who was without her husband Charles, looked delighted as she joined her family at the race day. She opted for simple white coat with a spotted silk scarf and pretty pearl earrings The Duchess of Cornwall is set to present the winning jockey of the Queen Mother Champion Chase with their trophy later in the day One even used a box used to sell daffodils in a supermarket as a makeshift hat. The dreaded 50mph winds were clearly an issue, with many revellers clinging to their hats and clothing as they entered the race track. On Day One, Espoir D'Allen, rode by jockey Mark Walsh, defied the odds to beat favourite and two-time winner Buveur D'Air to take gold in the Champion Hurdle. In his latest pastoral letter, the archbishop warns Catholics against art that offends and divides. An artists vocation involves social responsibilities. The letter follows government censorship of a Satanist musical group. Singapore (AsiaNews) The Archbishop of Singapore, Mgr William Goh Seng Chye (pictured), issued a pastoral letter titled An Exhortation to Artists and Promoters of the Arts. In it, he writes that an artists vocation is not to provoke but to serve beauty, truth and love. Through their works, artists can inspire humanity to appreciate the beauty of creation and thereby lead people to connect with the Sacred and the Transcendence. Mgr Gohs letter comes a few days after the Singapore government banned Watain, a controversial Swedish death metal group, from performing in the country. On the advice of the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Media Development Authority (MDA) cancelled a concert scheduled for 7 March. In a statement, the latter justified the measure by referring to the bands history of denigrating religions and promoting violence, which has potential to cause enmity and disrupt Singapores social harmony. For Mgr Goh, by virtue of the important role they hold within society, Artists, therefore, must use their vocation for the common good. [. . .] Unfortunately today, art has become synonymous with anything that is avant-garde. This has become the licence for people to push the boundaries of convention. It has become the platform for people to put down and mock anything that they do not agree with, such as religious beliefs, in the name of freedom of expression, and advocate a nihilistic philosophy that is destructive to the well-being of humanity. "It is in this context that we need to be vigilant in our discernment of what is truly art, and what is vile disguised as art, warns the archbishop. "Whilst we must respect that people have different tastes and values, yet, we have a moral duty to ensure that peoples of all communities, religious or otherwise, co-exist and live in peace and mutual respect for each other." Ultimately, governments have an obligation to protect the common good of society by ensuring that arts promoted are for the service of truth, love and unity." Thus, I call upon all Christians and people of good-will to recover the true meaning of arts and encourage all artists to promote arts that inspire peace, true love and beauty, give life, joy and hope to our peoples. A British woman says she was left 'shaking' after Thomas Cook staff threatened to kick her off a flight to Tenerife unless she 'covered up'. Emily O'Connor, 21, from Birmingham, was flying to the Canary Island holiday destination on 2 March when she claims airline workers told her that her black crop top and yellow trousers were 'inappropriate' and 'causing offence' to other passengers. The holidaymaker was eventually given a jacket to wear by her cousin, after staff allegedly 'made comments about the situation' over the tannoy, leaving the young woman 'shaking and upset'. Emily added that she wore the same outfit on the journey back to Birmingham, and had 'no complaints'. In a statement issued on Wednesday, the travel group apologised but pointed to its 'appropriate attire' policy which appears in its in-flight magazine. Emily, who says she was wearing a 'summer top' from high street retailer Zara at the time, has won support of social media users including reality star Gabby Allen after tweeting about the incident this week. Inappropriate? Emily O'Connor was flying to Tenerife on 2 March when she claims Thomas Cook staff told her crop top and trousers were 'causing offence' to other passengers (pictured here after landing in Tenerife) Emily has won support of social media users including reality star Gabby Allen after tweeting about her ordeal this week According to Thomas Cook's clothing policy, which appears in the travel group's in-flight magazine, 'customers wearing inappropriate attire (including items with offensive slogans or images) will not be permitted to travel unless a change of clothes is possible.' Speaking about her ordeal, Emily said: 'Flying from [Birmingham] to Tenerife, Thomas Cook told me that they were going to remove me from the flight if I didn't "cover up" as I was "causing offence" and was "inappropriate". 'They had four flight staff around me to get my luggage to take me off the plane. 'I informed the staff that there is no "appropriate wear" policy stipulated online. I stood up on the flight and asked if anyone was offended, no-one said a word. 'To top it off they allowed a man [to] hurl abuse at me whilst the flight manager and four air staff stood and said nothing.' Thomas Cook's clothing policy Advertisement Emily said that she wore the same outfit on the journey back from Tenerife to Birmingham (pictured boarding the flight home) and had 'no complaints' from Thomas Cook staff, who she described as 'friendly' Emily (far left) enjoying dinner with her friends in the Canary Island holiday destination earlier this month. She said she was told Thomas Cook were conducting a 'formal investigation' Emily (second left) on a night out with friends. She jetted to Tenerife earlier this month but claims she was left 'physically shaking' after staff told her to 'cover up' her outfit Emily, who says she was wearing a 'summer top' from Zara, has won support of social media users including reality star Gabby Allen after tweeting about her ordeal this week She added: 'I wore this through the airport [security, passport control etc], boarded the plane, [was] told to cover up by the greeting staff. 'I was physically shaking, and they could see that, yet they continued to sexualise me and ridicule me. It was the worst experience of my life.' Responding to her tweet, Love Island star Gabby Allen wrote: 'It's safe to say, I will never fly with Thomas Cook again.' Speaking to MailOnline about her ordeal, Emily said: 'They said they would investigate but [I have] heard nothing back really. 'I contacted them this morning where they said they are doing a formal investigation into the flight staff.' Emily (pictured in a recent Twitter photo) said she was left shaken by the incident. In a statement issued on Wednesday, the travel group pointed to its 'appropriate attire' policy Emily (pictured in a social media snap) has won support of social media users including reality star Gabby Allen after tweeting about the incident this week Twitter users have rushed to support Emily after she tweeted about her ordeal, with Love Island star Gabby Allen declaring she will 'never fly with Thomas Cook again' Another Twitter user added: 'This woman deserves an explanation and an apology. How can you deem what's appropriate to wear if there are no rules stipulated? Next time I wear shorts and a vest on a flight, am I causing offence? Should I 'cover up?'' And after one Twitter user accused Emily of 'travelling in underwear' in reference to her cropped camisole, she replied: 'This was in the @ZARA summer tops section when I purchased this last year.' A spokesperson for Thomas Cook said: 'We are sorry that we upset Ms O'Connor. It's clear we could have handled the situation better. In common with most airlines we have an appropriate clothing policy. 'This applies equally to men and women of all ages without discrimination. Our crews have the difficult task of implementing that policy and don't always get it right.' A mother-of-two happily dotes on her loving husband and cares for her baby twins - despite being a double amputee. Neo Keitumetse originally from Botswana, South Africa, was born with a congenital defect in her legs which meant she had to get them amputated when she was just five years of age. And despite sometimes being made fun of by children at school when she was a child, the now 29-year-old doesn't care what people think about her disability anymore. Journey: Neo Keitumetse, 29, was born with a congenital defect in her legs that resulted in doctors having to amputate them when she was just five years old Caring: The Botswana-native now cares for her twin babies and her husband despite having only 'stumps' to make her way around Hard: Neo said that growing up as a child amputee was difficult, as children in her school in Botswana, South Africa, would sometimes stare at her or make fun of her Struggle: However, Neo now says she doesn't care what others think of her, as she goes about her daily life as a mother just like any other woman The 29-year-old told Barcroft TV: 'For me it was a birth defect my legs, you know how the legs should be straight but the other leg was facing down. She explained: 'My mom took the advice of the doctors, they told her that there is nothing to do so they decided to amputate both of them in 1994 and I was five years old.' Neo has been a double amputee for 24 years, and doesn't care what people think about her disability - however this wasn't always the case. She said: 'Life in Botswana when I was young it was fine but when you went to school children look at you and some children make fun of you, you don't have legs so when children made fun of me it was hard. 'But eventually when you grow up and you have a family that cares about you it doesn't matter anymore. I still studied hard at school.' Neo left for Canada to study, and while she was visiting a friend in America in 2014 she met her husband Garrett Kirchway. She said: 'I think he liked me when he first saw me, he was single and I was a student in Canada and I was coming here only for two weeks, the Christmas break. I met him on the 21st of December in 2014 and in that two weeks we clicked.' The couple, who now live in Tempe, Arizona, got married and shortly after Neo found out she was pregnant with twins. Unfortunately Neo's pregnancy was very difficult, and had many complications. She explained, saying that her pregnancy was 'high risk'. 'We found out I was pregnant but when I was four months. I got really sick and then I had to go to the hospital, I had a kidney infection because of pregnancy. Academic: Neo studied hard at school in Botswana before moving to Canada for university. While visiting a friend in the U.S. during this time, she met her now husband, Garrett Kirchway Happy: The couple (pictured) got married shortly after Neo discovered she was pregnant - which proved very difficult, and had many complications 'My stumps are fine but when I put more weight on them they become painful, because I was heavy because of having two babies in my belly.' But fortunately she gave birth two two healthy twin boys, Caleb and Joshua. She said: 'When I found out that I was gonna have twins I was so happy because I am someone that loves twins.' Out and about: When Neo goes out with her family, she uses prosthetic legs, however, she finds them difficult to use on long journeys Neo does all the regular duties of a mother, but without any legs. She said 'Being an amputee doesn't affect life as a mother, being a mother and a double amputee is just a matter of adjusting and knowing that I cannot reach something on the top. 'I cannot have a crib that is high so what I can do I can make my baby sleep on the floor,' she added. When the couple go out, Neo uses her prosthetic legs, however she finds them difficult for long journeys. Neo's main goal in the disabled community is to show that those who are less-abled should be considered the same as those with full ability. She began a YouTube channel where she posts about cooking, looking after her children and everyday life as a double amputee, as she aims to show other amputees that it is possible to carry out regular motherly duties. Since she began her channel last year, she has garnered over 6,000 subscribers who regularly tune in to follow her journey. She said: 'I created my YouTube channel in 2018. My main reason was to raise an awareness that because you don't have legs doesn't mean you cannot have children. Success! However, despite having a high risk pregnancy, Neo, pictured in the hospital after giving birth, successfully gave birth to two healthy twin boys - Caleb and Joshua Proud: Neo does all the usual tasks associated with motherhood, and says that 'being a mother and a double amputee is just a matter of adjusting' Important message: In 2018, Neo created a YouTube channel to show others that just because they don't have legs, it doesn't mean they cannot have and raise children Positivity: Neo's YouTube channel has so far been a success, as she has received many positive comments, and has grown her following on the video sharing platform 'I wanted to show people that you can have children and that I was able to get a husband that just shows people that not having legs doesn't not mean that you are not a person, you can still do everything that the other person who have legs can do.' When discussing her YouTube channel, her husband Garrett said: 'Basically three different types of videos cooking videos vlog videos amputee videos but I think she tries to corporate all those things into her vlog and so it seems like a good mix so far. 'She has got a lot of positive comments from Africans and from people who have disabilities and obviously 99 per cent of those comments have been really positive' Neo said: 'If I could speak to my younger person I would say you are a person too just because you don't have legs doesn't make you different from any other person. 'So hold your head up don't be offended by these people who bully, don't be offended by them, just go out and just get it,' she added. Transgender youTube star Gigi Gorgeous has revealed that she backed out of sexual reassignment surgery at the last minute because she didn't feel like she was ready to have such an 'intense and invasive' procedure. In her latest YouTube video, the 26-year-old opened up about her decision to postpone the procedure until the timing was right, explaining that she had traveled all the way to Thailand and consulted with a surgeon before deciding against it. 'Usually, when I set my mind to something, I just am committed and I follow through and I end up doing it, but in this case, the surgery was so intense and invasive,' she explained. Scroll down for video Change of heart: Gigi Gorgeous revealed in her latest YouTube video that she backed out of sexual reassignment surgery at the last minute Candid: The 26-year-old transgender YouTube star said she wasn't ready for the surgery, which is 'so intense and invasive' 'Like, I have been through some pretty scary things in my life surgically, but this just seemed so hard to overcome and intimidating, and just, like, body mutilating.' Gigi, who was born Gregory Lazzarato, came out as a transgender woman in 2013; a year later, she legally changed her name to Giselle Loren Lazzarato. Over the years, she has undergone various procedures as part of her transition, including a tracheal shave to reduce the appearance of an Adam's apple, hormone replacement therapy, facial feminization surgery, electrolysis to remove hair, and a breast augmentation. In the YouTube video, Gigi recalled 'feeling really, really strongly' about having sexual reassignment surgery after she finished writing her upcoming book, 'He Said, She Said: Lessons, Stories, and Mistakes from My Transgender Journey,' last year. The YouTuber said she believed the surgery would 'complete' her. 'I feel like a lot of trans people feel that and they feel like they're not "done" until they get the bottom surgery or whatever it is that makes them happy,' she explained. Sexual reassignment surgery to covert male anatomy to female anatomy involves removing the penis muscle and constructing a vagina by turning the skin inside out. 'After you get it, obviously, there's not going back, which is why it's kind of such a mind f**k,' she said. Transformation: Gigi, who was born Gregory Lazzarato, came out as a transgender woman in 2013. She is pictured as Gregory in 2008 (left) and as Gigi in 2018 (right) Journey: Over the years, she's undergone various procedures, including a tracheal shave, facial feminization surgery, electrolysis, and a breast augmentation Gigi knew she wanted to have her surgery done by a doctor in Thailand because a friend who had already had the procedure done by him assured her that the technology was really advanced and promised her a 'great result.' 'I would only want to do this one time. For the love of God, I don't want to get mutilated twice down there,' she said, adding that just the thought of undergoing the operation gives her 'cold sweats.' When she called the surgeon, she was told she needed to travel to Thailand for her consultation. Gigi asked if there was any way she could schedule the surgery for a few days the meeting, so she wouldn't have to travel from California to Thailand twice if she got approved for the procedure. However, the waitlist was six months long, and she was left waiting to see if there were any cancellations. Looking back, Gigi said she could tell she wasn't ready to go through with the procedure because she only told a couple of people and was essentially keeping it a secret. The Instagram influencer also worried about what her new vagina would look like and how it would function. 'I have had a lot of friends who have gotten the surgery. I've seen a lot of vaginas post-vaginas and some are gorge and functioning and some are not so gorge. 'Obviously, it goes without saying, I want a gorge, functioning vagina.' Without naming any names, Gigi recounted one of her friends who had the surgery going into the bathroom ahead of her at a house party. Almost a done deal: Gigi said she had traveled all the way to Thailand and consulted with a surgeon before deciding against having the surgery Going with her gut: The social media star said she wants the moment to be 'perfect,' and she knew the timing wasn't right because she was 'dreading' the surgery 'She opened the door and a wall of smell and fog hit my face from her using the toilet,' she said. 'It's not funny because that's beyond her control, obviously. Something was going on down there. 'Literally, for years after that, I thought that is what a sex change would smell like.' A month after she was put on a waitlist for the doctor in Thailand, Gigi was in discussions with two plastic surgeons in the U.S. but hadn't decided to go through with the procedure. However, she ended up getting an email from the doctor in Thailand that stated there was a cancellation, and if she wanted, she could come for a consultation and have the surgery a few days later if everything worked out. Although she was 'over the moon,' Gigi said she still didn't tell that many people about the surgery. 'When I think about it, I really didn't reach out to as many people as I should of,' she said. 'I felt really, really inconsiderate about [keeping it from] people who love me and want the best for me and would want to know if I am going through with such a big surgery like this.' When Gigi and her friend arrived in Thailand, she said she immediately started having doubts because the facility wasn't nearly as gorgeous and high-tech as she was led to believe. 'Me and my friend are giving each other eyes the whole time. I feel like I am seeing tumbleweeds and clay walls,' she recounted. Gigi was approved for the surgery within 15 minutes, but instead of being happy, she headed to the bar while struggling with her doubts. Looking back: Gigi said she could tell she wasn't ready to go through with the procedure because she only told a few people. She is pictured with her fiancee, Getty oil heir Nats Getty Timing: Gigi said she is ultimately happy that she didn't go through with the surgery when she was having doubts 'I was so unsure it wasn't even funny. I feel like if you are going to do something like this, you should be f*****g excited,' she said. 'You should be on the edge of your seat, like, "God I wish I could fast-forward three days." But at that point, I was kind of dreading it.' The next morning, Gigi said she woke up and told her friend that she couldn't go through with the surgery. At that point, she had only given the doctor a down payment, and they hadn't extended their flights yet. She called to let the doctor know that she wouldn't be going through with the surgery while stressing that her decision had nothing to do with him or his work. 'I didn't go through with the surgery, and I am really, really happy I didn't,' she said. Although her friend had a great result and she might have done too, Gigi felt like it wasn't her moment. 'I don't know what my reassignment surgery story looks like,' she said. I'm just taking it day by day and what feels right to me because this is my body. I have to live with this every single day, and when that moment comes, I want it be perfect.' Gigi, who chronicled her transition in the 2017 documentary 'This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous,' revealed in August last year that she hadn't had gender confirmation surgery yet. In the candid YouTube video, she opened up about her desire to start a family with her fiancee, Getty oil heiress Nats Getty, explaining that the two of them were still actively trying to conceive a child together. 'I have not had a sex change yet. It's something that I have held off on doing,' she said in the YouTube video. 'I thought that I needed sexual reassignment surgery, or as they call it now sexual confirmation surgery. I thought I needed that right away, as soon as possible. Struggle: Last year, she revealed that she and Nats, 26, were looking into freezing their eggs and sperm because they 'were trying' to conceive but had 'no luck whatsoever' 'But when I started living my life, my womanhood, I started feeling really feminine, I started being like, "You know what? I don't need to do it right away. I don't need to do it as soon as I thought I needed to do it. It can wait a little bit. I can live my life with what I have for a couple more months or a year." 'But that year turned into years. And now I've still not gotten the surgery and it's not because I can't. I could get it tomorrow if I wanted. 'It is a very, very, very scary, intense surgery obviously, a sex change is probably one of the craziest things you can do to your body.' She explained that she and Nats, 26, were looking into freezing their eggs and sperm because they 'were trying' to conceive but had 'no luck whatsoever.' Gigi is not the only transgender woman to speak out so candidly about the process of gender reassignment; in March 2016, a transgender lesbian known only as Jessica explained to Truth Speak Project exactly what it was like to undergo a vaginoplasty - while detailing her experience of going through an incredibly painful recovery process. 'There are going to be parts of you that are going to melt off... It is really scary,' she wrote. 'But its also perfectly normal and most people recover from that completely as if nothing has happened. 'Basically the furniture down there gets rearranged during the surgery. One of the many things I learned along this journey is that male genitalia and female genitalia arent that different. Theyre arranged differently, but the individual parts are really similar. 'So vaginoplasty consists of a re-positioning and folding of all these tissues using the existing tissues. 'When thats done, some of the tissues might not get as much blood flow as they did before, so they get starved of nutrients and oxygen. 'Thats when the surface tissue tends to die off which is as gross as it sounds. It is really really awful.' A travel company has offered to cover the travelling expenses for six people to explore places in the United States, Europe and Asia but the lucky winners selected will have to do activities voted on by social media followers. The opportunity to travel for free is an incredible dream for anyone who finds themselves itching to visit other places, and travel company Busabout is offering this experience to fellow travelers. Busabout is hiring six people for an all-expenses-paid trip lasting six to 11 weeks with the caveat that the winners have to let Instagram decide what they do at their locations once they get there. Exciting: Busabout is a travel company that offers excursions and programs for people traveling to places around the world Time to travel: The company is offering an all-expenses-paid travel opportunity for six people with one trip involving going coast-to-coast in the United States Ready to go! The company is looking for three content creators and three videographers for the trips. One content creator and one videographer will travel together through Europe The Great Travel Experiment features three different opportunities for applicants to receive 6-week coast-to-coast trip in the US, 11-week trip through Europe, or 6-week trip through Southeast Asia. The coast-to-coast throughout the US will include hot spot cities such as San Francisco, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Nashville and New York City. Those chosen for Europe will experience popular spots such as Paris, Amsterdam, Rome and Athens. Then the Southeast Asia tour will experience Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Ho Chi Minh City to name a few. Each trip is valued at $10,500 with Busabout offering those who win free accommodations, flights, daily allowances, and weekly stipends after covering various posts for the travel site. Busabout will be selecting three content creators who enjoy being photographed in front of the camera as well as three videographers with skills in video editing and creating. The six winners will then be paired together one content creator and one videographer to go on one of the three excursions scheduled for summer 2019. While gallivanting through the travel spots, the working pairs will be expected to create content for Busabout on Instagram. The catch, though, is that the activities done by the people each day will be decided by followers through an Instagram poll. 'Votes from our amazing Instagram followers will decide the experiences you'll enjoy on the trip,' the Busabout website explained about the job. 'Anything from the flavor of ice-cream you'll slurp on in New York, to whether you'll sky-dive the Swiss alps. Our winners will have to be prepared for anything, and be ready to embrace traveling in the moment.' Incredible: The people chosen will be put into pairs with one of the pairs traveling to the US, through Europe, and along Southeast Asia (pictured) In their hands: Busabout Instagram followers will then vote on what each pair does every day during their excursion through their select area The idea of letting followers vote for activities was made popular with influencers on YouTube and Instagram. These videos where Instagram followers control one person's life for the day have wracked up millions of views on YouTube with viewers loving the ability to dictate the day. So Busabout took this popular trend and decided to employ it with the new opportunity the company is offering to the lucky six people selected. To apply, people have to create a 60-second YouTube video showing of their hometown. People can also follow the company on its Instagram and share a picture from the page in order to get additional points towards their entry. 'Be creative as possible, but remember the main thing we're looking for someone who can tell a great story,' the company advised. The application will be open for everyone until April 8 before the section process will begin to finalize the six winners. Then the first trip, which will be through Southeast Asia, will start at the beginning of May for the chosen pair. A mother-of-one shared stunning images of the moment she gave birth to her son, revealing how she snapped the photos herself while pushing her child out into the world. 29-year-old wedding photographer, Megan Mattiuzzo, wanted to capture the moment her son took his first breaths from her perspective as she lay down on the bed in the hospital during labor. Despite having several friends who offered to take the photos for her the photographer, from Hamburg, New York, was adamant that she wanted the photo to be taken from an angle only she could capture it at. Incredible! Megan Mattiuzzo, from Hamburg, New York, captured photos that document the moment she gave birth to her first child last week Wow! The 29-year-old photographer balanced her camera on her stomach and looked in the view finder in her camera to take the photos as her son was delivered Special: Megan, from Hamburg, New York, said she wanted to capture the unique photos from an angle only she could capture them from in order for them to be even more special Megan gave birth to Easton, her first son, last week. The new mother told Buzzfeed News that she was eager to capture the moment her son took his first breaths. She said: 'I wanted one photo and it would be from my perspective from what I'm seeing: my son's first breaths and what he's seeing in the world. 'They all said they thought I was crazy,' she said, explaining that friends had offered to take the photos for her so she didn't have to do it while also giving birth. And eager to capture the photos herself, Megan ensured she was well prepared for when the special moment arrived. The 29-year-old made sure she had adjusted her camera's settings to suit the lighting of the hospital room. She had her husband hold the camera for the majority of her labor, which she described as 'very intense'. Megan explained: 'My epidural wasn't a hundred per cent effective. The left side of my stomach didn't take [and the] labor was very intense. 'At one point I looked at my husband and said. "I don't know if I can do this,"' she added. However, the difficulty of labor didn't stop Megan from capturing the special moment. She explained that it was during the last 'push' that she took the camera from her husband and prepared to shoot the photos. She said: 'About an hour into my pushing, my doctor said, "This should be your final push," and I tucked my chin to my chest, I balanced my camera on my stomach, I looked in my view finder, and started shooting.' Adorable! Megan and her husband named their baby son Easton (pictured) Happy: Megan (pictured with her husband) said her husband held the camera during her labor until she was ready to capture the photos during her 'last push', when she took it from him Sentimental: The new mother and photographer said she is glad she managed to take the special photos, despite struggling through an 'intense' labor And although it was hard to shoot photographs while delivering her baby, Megan said it was helpful to have something to take her mind off it. She said: 'The focus went away from the pain. Its your son, its your child. Seeing him I cant describe the feeling. 'You go nine months not knowing what they look like, who they are. And then to see finally see a healthy baby, youre just overwhelmed with happiness,' she added. The impressive photographs perfectly document the newborn's first few seconds as he was delivered and then held by midwives. Speaking about the photos she captured, Megan said: 'First you see the top of his headthen his handsit was amazing.' She added that the moment resembled a 'Simba moment' - referring to a scene in Disney's The Lion King. She explained that after capturing the images, she gave her husband back the camera so she could hold the baby. Megan said she is glad she stuck to her plan and took the photos, as she now treasures the precious photos. Megan shares her work, most of which consists of wedding photography, on her website and Instagram page. Have you ever struggled to reach a high bookshelf? Shivered in a freezing office in July? Or tried unsuccessfully to use voice recognition technology? All these daily irritations are examples of what happens when women have to use products, software and spaces that have been designed by men, for men. They fail to take into account womens typically smaller size and different needs. This gender data gap is not generally malicious or even deliberate. But it can be deadly like crashing in a car whose safety measures dont account for the height and weight of womens bodies. This is what I mean when I say women are invisible. We are living in a world made for men, itself a product of a way of thinking that has been around for millennia and which is, therefore, a kind of not thinking. It comes from assuming that a male viewpoint is the default, while women half of the global population are a niche interest. Caroline Criado Perez explores how women are often overlooked in society in a fascinating new book, she revealed textbooks (pictured) at school feature far fewer images of girls A few years ago, I fought, successfully, to stop the Bank of England removing the only woman (other than the Queen) from our banknotes. The Bank said it was all for celebrating female achievement, it just couldnt find a single woman who met its criteria, which included having broad name recognition and not being controversial. And, as I discovered when researching my new book, this is sadly the case many times over . . . IT STARTS WITH OUR SCHOOLBOOKS A U.S. study of school history textbooks from 1960 to 1990 found only 9 per cent of names were female. A 2017 analysis of political science textbooks found only 10.8 per cent of pages referenced women. And in language example sentences, men outnumber women three to one, according to 30 years of Western studies. The result of all these missing women? When girls start primary school aged five, they are as likely as boys to think that women can be really, really smart, research shows. But, within a year, something changes. If six-year-olds are told a game is for children who are really, really smart, girls are suddenly uninterested. They no longer see themselves that way. Boys learn this, too. A 2016 study found male students consistently ranked fellow men as more intelligent than better-performing women. ONE SIZE FITS ALL. . . MEN Product designers leave womens bodies out of the equation, too. Take your smartphone. Its screen is probably around 5.5 in, so the average man can use it one-handed but the average woman cant. (This is despite the fact that women are more likely to buy an iPhone.) My friend Liz recently told me shed been complaining to a friend about how difficult it was to zoom in on my phone camera. He said his was easy. Turns out we have the same phone. On the subject of smartphones, whats the fastest-growing language? Not Spanish or Mandarin, but emoji those little pictures on your screen, now used by more than 90 per cent of the online population. The average smartphone screen is around 5.5in which is ideal for using one-handed as a man however many women cant use large smartphone screens onehanded And they started out with a big problem with women. The first emojis were designed to be gender-neutral, with names such as runner. But, almost universally, phone companies represented them all as men. When women pointed out that this didnt make much sense, coders had to create two sets of emojis to even things out so now we have male runner and female runner. Pianos, too, were made for male handspans: the octaves on a standard keyboard are 7.4 in wide quite a stretch for women whose average fully extended handspan is 7.9 in, compared to mens 8.9 in. A study of 473 pianists found all 12 of the most renowned had handspans of 8.8 in or above, and only two were women. Female pianists also have a 50 per cent higher risk of pain and injury than male pianists. A smaller piano does exist, and numerous studies confirm its better for players health and musical ability. And yet, there remains a real reluctance in the music world to adapt. WHOSE SAFETY COMES FIRST? When a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47 per cent more likely than a man to be seriously injured and 17 per cent more likely to die. Why? Well, for starters, women tend to sit further forward when driving, as were usually shorter. This, car-makers say, increases the risk of internal injury, as it is not the standard seating position although it is the only way that we can reach the pedals and see out. Crash test dummies based on the male physique can make cars more dangerous for women as they don't take into account the average differences in height The reason for this discrepancy is that crash test dummies are typically 1.77m tall and 76 kg, with male muscle mass and a male spinal column (womens vertebrae are spaced differently, among other things). Theres now a single European regulatory test that uses a female dummy but its only tested in the passenger seat and is really just a scaled-down male dummy. RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE JOB In a 2017 study of emergency workers, only 5 per cent of women said their protective gear, largely designed for men, never hampered their work. This can prove fatal: in 1997, a British female police officer was stabbed and killed while using a hydraulic ram. She had removed her body armour because it was too difficult to use the ram while wearing it. Another female officer revealed that shed had breast reduction surgery because of her ill-fitting body armour and, shortly afterwards, 700 more officers came forward to say their stab vests rode up over their breasts, leaving them unprotected. But its not just women on the front line who face dangers at their jobs. While serious injuries at work have long been decreasing for men, there is evidence that they have been increasing among women and our knowledge of why is limited. A recent study revealed only 5 per cent of women who work within the emergency industry haven't had their protective gear hamper their work (file image) We know everything about dust disease in miners, says Rory ONeill, a professor of occupational research at the University of Stirling. You cant say the same for exposures in womens work. And yet toxins affect women differently to men: women tend to be smaller, with thinner skin, lowering the levels with which they can safely cope, and also have more body fat in which chemicals can accumulate. In industries where men and women work together, Professor ONeill adds, women were often left out of studies altogether as confounding factors who might muddle the data. Meanwhile, in most female-dominated industries such as nail salons, where workers use a toxic cocktail of chemicals with known links to cancer, miscarriage and lung disease an incredibly small number of studies have ever been done. WHY THE DRUGS DONT WORK For millennia, medicine has assumed that male bodies are the default. The ancient Greeks started it, seeing the female as a mutilated male (thanks, Aristotle). As a result, we have a huge data gap when it comes to womens health. Female bodies are seen as too complex and very often excluded from clinical trials; medical students learn about womens bodies and health as an extra, not the norm. And yet there are big differences between male and female physiology. Dr Tami Martino conducted a respected study that found having a heart attack during the day triggers a greater immune response, giving you a better chance of survival. Then, in 2016, another study found daytime heart attacks triggered a greater immune response but led to a worse chance of survival. There is a huge gap in data for women's health as female bodies have often been excluded from clinical trials and viewed as not the norm (file image) Perplexed, Dr Martino eventually realised her study used male mice the norm while the new paper used female mice. Different sex: opposite result. Which is why, from blood pressure pills to aspirin, many drugs just dont work as well for women. U.S. data on adverse drug reactions from 2004 to 2013 shows women suffered 2 million bad reactions, compared to 1.3 million for men. The second most common adverse reaction for women, after nausea, was that the drug simply didnt work at all. In the UK, young women are almost twice as likely as men to die in hospital after a heart attack, found a 2016 study in the British Medical Journal. Although some groups of women are now more likely than men to have a heart attack, they often have different symptoms only one in eight women experience chest pain, for example. The risk prediction strategies used in many hospitals are based on two-thirds male patients, found a 2016 U.S. report, meaning womens atypical heart attacks are often missed. And, while we have around 50 drugs for heart failure, some just arent safe for half the population. One, used to break up blood clots, can cause significant bleeding problems in women. Viagra may cure period pain but theres no funding for research, the drug was rushed to market after its uses for curing erectile dysfunction was discovered (file image) Worse, we may be completely missing drugs that would work for them. Period pain affects up to 90 per cent of women, myself included, but there is precious little doctors can do. So I was amazed by a 2013 study that appeared to have found a cure. The study ran out of funding before it could prove its primary hypothesis, but it suggested that sildenafil citrate could give four hours of total pain relief without apparent side-effects. Nonetheless, no further funding has been forthcoming. Yet sildenafil citrate is no new drug its the medical name for Viagra. In the Nineties, it was tested as a heart medication. It didnt work, but the all-male study participants reported an increase in erections, and so it was rushed to market for erectile dysfunction. A happy ending for men, then. But what if that first trial included women? Might we have had an effective drug for period pain for decades? STAYING (TOO) COOL IN THE OFFICE Modern workplaces are riddled with gender design gaps, from doors that are too heavy for the average woman to open with ease, to glass stairs and lobby floors that mean anyone below can see up your skirt, and paving thats exactly the right size to catch your high heels. Granted, these are small, niggling issues that arent the end of the world, but they irritate nevertheless. Standard office temperatures were determined in the Sixties according to the metabolic resting rate of the average 40-year-old man however the rate of a young adult female is significantly lower (file image) Then theres the standard office temperature. The formula to determine this was developed in the Sixties around the metabolic resting rate of the average 40-year-old, 70kg man. But a recent study found that the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower than mens. In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35 per cent, meaning current offices are on average five degrees too cold for women. Which leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped up in blankets while male colleagues wander around in summer clothes. FALLING ON DEAF EARS You might hope that modern technology would be a little more egalitarian. But stories abound of products that forget about women, from virtual reality headsets that fall off the average womans head, to augmented reality glasses with lenses too far apart for a woman to focus on the image. Even Apples much-hyped health tracker app failed to build in the most basic of female needs a monthly period tracker. Womens hands struggle to reach across a full octave on a piano keyboard (file image) Research last year by Boston Consulting Group found female business owners receive less than half the investment of their male counterparts, but generate twice as much revenue. And this male-dominated world is where our future is being built. Recently, I was with my mother in her Volvo, watching her try to use the built-in voice recognition system to call her sister. After five failed attempts, I suggested lowering her voice to sound more masculine. It worked first time. Why? Because voice- recognition software is often hopelessly male-biased. One study found Googles was 70 per cent more likely to recognise male speech. Some helpful experts have suggested women have lengthy training to fix the many issues with their voices. But, of course, the problem isnt with womens voices. Its with our old friend, the gender data gap. Speech-recognition technology is trained on large databases of voice recordings which appear dominated by men (the data used is confidential, but the results speak for themselves). It might sound like a small problem, but when women are under or misrepresented in data, it can play havoc with modern technology. Voice recognition technology is 70 per cent more likely to recognise a mans voice (file image) In one 2017 study of image databases, pictures of cooking were 33 per cent more likely to involve women than men not a massive difference, but significant. However, algorithms trained on this dataset amplified the link and connected pictures of kitchens with women 68 per cent of the time. Over time, the algorithm became so convinced that only women cook that it labelled a photo of a portly, balding man standing by a stove as female. James Zou, assistant professor of biomedical science at Stanford University in the U.S., explains why this matters. He gives the example of someone searching for computer programmer on a program trained to associate that term with a man. The algorithm could deem a male programmers website more relevant than a female programmers. If a customer searched for a programmer to hire, the woman would never even get the chance to compete. Adapted by Josephine Forster from Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias In A World Designed For Men by Caroline Criado Perez, published by Chatto & Windus at 16.99. Caroline Criado Perez 2019. To order a copy for 13.59 (offer valid to March 21, 2019; P&P free on orders over 15), visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640. Ask any person on the wrong side of 70 what they fear most about old age, and top of the list has to be loneliness and isolation. Never hearing the sound of someone elses key in the door at night. Never seeing another coffee cup in the sink or hearing footsteps overhead. Never seeing another coat on the stand or shoes kicked on the doormat. But Neil Dowding and his wife Sandra dont have to worry about that. Their coat stand is groaning with coats of all shapes and sizes three generations worth, in fact. And with this, the retired district nurse believes he may have stumbled on the answer to Britains spiralling crisis in care for the elderly. Instead of downsizing or moving into a care home as he enters his twilight years, Neil has upsized by buying a small working farm near Chard, in Somerset, and setting up a family commune. Neil Dowding, 71, (pictured third from right) from Somerset explained why he believes a family commune is a good thing at a time when many are suffering from isolation and loneliness, pictured from left: Ione, Andrew Marsh, his wife Melissa, Annelise, Neil, Sandra and Aaron Under this roof live Neil, 71, Sandra, 69, their 48-year-old daughter, Melissa, and her 53-year-old husband, Andrew Marsh. A youthful element is made up of Melissas children, Annelise, 23, and Ione, 21, and Annelises fiance, Aaron Jenkins, a 23-year-old farmer. The family live cheek-by-jowl with 60 sheep, 13 horses, four milking cows and a Hereford bull called Prince. Added to that are seven dogs Millie, Pip, Bella, Travis, Spud, Rupert and Malarchy seven Gloucester Old Spots pigs, a rescue calf called Rosie, 11 ducks, three bantam hens, two rabbits and a couple of fish. Its a bit of a madhouse, says Neil, who without a doubt is the patriarch of the clan, but our different ages are a strength, not a source of conflict. We all support each other and, as my wife and I get older, we know we will be looked after instead of having to go into a care home. These are some of the best years of our lives. The property they share is a 650,000 newly built detached four-bedroom house bought with five acres of land from a neighbouring farmer in 2016. Neil rents a further nine acres. Inside the house theres a large kitchen-diner with a huge table where everyone gathers, a spacious yet cosy sitting room and three bathrooms. Neil is converting the loft and a garage to add three more bedrooms, which, ideally, he would like to offer to two more like-minded pensioners to join his project. And, if any babies come along, theyd be welcome, too. Of course, communal living wouldnt suit everyone and Neil acknowledges that others might struggle to emulate his model in urban areas where property prices are much higher and space is a premium. Neil (pictured) revealed each of the family members have their own role - Sandra is the family cook and their daughter Melissa helps with domestic duties But his story is food for thought given that the UK is facing a surge in the number of people aged over 65, and people are living longer than ever before. The average cost of residential care rose by nearly 10 per cent between 2016 and 2017. On top of that, soaring property prices have pushed younger generations out of the market, and childcare costs for those who want to work while raising families are crippling. While Neils commune idea might sound attractive, the possibilities for conflict in such a diverse mix are enormous. Anyone whos navigated the horrors of shared living as a student, for example, will have tales of resentments and wars over washing up and bathroom cleaning rotas. But the Dowding clan say their system works: each family member has his or her own role and responsibilities. Every day, Sandra, a retired hospital care assistant, pootles down to Tesco in Chard to buy fresh bread and milk and the ingredients for that days dinner. Parental guidance One in four UK adults aged 20 to 34 lives with their parents, says Civitas one million more than in 1997, when it was one in five Advertisement She is the family cook and takes care of all the catering and most of the housework. Her daughter, Melissa, is a nurse in the minor injuries unit at Chard Community Hospital, but helps her mother with domestic duties when shes at home. Melissas husband, Andrew, owns a window cleaning business. Annelises fiance, Aaron, juggles work as a self-employed builder with caring for his livestock and building up the farm with Neil. Sisters Ione and Annelise, who both studied animal care at Bicton College in Budleigh Salterton, Devon, are in charge of 13 horses, including four miniature Shetlands, two wild ponies and a rescue pony called Nugget. Right now they are bottle feeding six orphan lambs three times a day, as well as Rosie the calf . They are also responsible for washing the floors every day. No-one is used and everyone is useful, says Neil, who does most of the family ironing. Sandra (pictured right) says living with younger family members is mentally stimulating and stops her from becoming isolated We all help each other where we can. One of the attractions of this way of life, he says, is that while no-one is ever lonely, everyone is given space to be on their own if they wish. The one house rule is that everyone sits around the large kitchen table for dinner each evening and that phones are switched off during meals. Everyone has a TV in their own room, but more often than not the family comes together after dinner to watch favourites such as Dancing On Ice or Im A Celebrity. We all enjoy watching that, says Sandra. I love being around the younger ones because it stops me becoming isolated. Its mentally stimulating and keeps you on your toes. The family has even managed to find a way around the tricky matter of family finances, despite the fact each of them has a vastly different income. I love being around the younger ones because it stops me becoming isolated - Sandra Household expenditure is around 2,000 a month, including mortgage repayments and a 200 weekly food bill. Neil has a 1,200-a-month NHS pension, while Sandras monthly NHS pension is 400. There is a business bank account to cover the cost of animal feed and farm equipment, and the rest of the family contribute as and when they can on a pretty informal basis. Neither Ione nor Annelise receives wages, for example, although once the farm business comes into its own, they hope that will change. For now, Annelise is subsidised by Aaron, while Ione turns to her parents if she needs cash for anything. We dont need much because were here working with the horses all the time, says Annelise. Neil (pictured right) recalls generations of families living together in the past and believes its the way that things should be Not surprisingly, given their living arrangements, there are occasional spats between members of the household, or accusations that someone isnt pulling their weight. Its very important for people to be able to speak their mind, says Neil, who has been known to call family meetings if tensions rise. We dont tiptoe around each other. We bicker like a normal family One discussion point recently was car keys. Its really annoying when someone goes off with a key in their pocket, or doesnt put it back in the right place so no one else can find it. We also discussed driving lessons for the younger members of the family, and how they would be paid for. Its usually light-hearted, but you have to have some sort of order with so many of us living together, and think about what others might need. This is how families used to be and how I believe they should be - Neil Such an arrangement might not suit everyone. Neil admits his other two children office worker Nathalie, 46, and chef Edward, 44, havent joined the family commune, although they do live in the neighbouring county. Melissa and her husband have always lived with her parents, while Annelise and Ione grew up in a large, comfortable home with Gramphy and Granny on-hand. Like so many twentysomethings, the younger members of the commune would struggle to get a foot on the property ladder in the current economic climate, so the arrangement works well for them. Above all, Neil and Sandra have peace of mind knowing that if they become frail or infirm, they will always be looked after. There are so many lonely and isolated elderly people out there, says Neil. Surely this is a better way to live? This is how families used to be and how I believe they should be. The idea for what many may see as an old-fashioned way of life took shape for Neil when he was a young man. After Neil's parents died he put the empty rooms to good use by inviting two elderly patients that he had met during his time as a district nurse to share the property Born and raised in Sidmouth, Devon, he was 17 when he volunteered in the Royal Engineers and was posted to Nicosia in Cyprus. There he met Sandra, the 16-year-old daughter of Neils NCO. Three years later, they returned to the UK and married, and they will celebrate their golden wedding anniversary in September this year. Back in Sidmouth, they initially lived with Neils parents hairdresser Nancy and ex-Royal Marine Nobby as Neil went to evening classes and trained as a nurse. He ended up with a nursing degree from Plymouth University. Sandra worked as a home help and nursing assistant at Sidmouth Hospital. After the arrival of their three children, Neils parents helped with childcare. We wouldnt have been able to manage without their help with the children, says Neil. We always said to them that when they were older, we would give back by looking after them. Younger generations need more support and older people should have more options about where they want to live. Its a two-way thing Neil and Sandras first home was a three-bedroom council house in Sidmouth, which they purchased for 7,500 in 1980. Five years later, they sold that for 35,000 and bought an 80,000 house close by. Over the next 25 years, Neil extended the house, building up into the loft, down into the basement and out to the side until there were eight bedrooms. And when the time came, he moved his parents in to live with the family so that, at one stage, there were four generations under one roof. When Melissa began her own family and Annelise and Ione were born, he and Sandra helped care for them while she trained as a nurse and started work. Even after Neils parents died, the empty rooms were put to good use. He invited two of his elderly patients, ladies he met during his rounds as a district nurse, to share the home. Neither of them had children and they couldnt live independently any more, but didnt want to move into a care home, he says. Neil says the commune is a two-way thing as younger generations need more support and older people should have options about where they want to live Formal financial arrangements were drawn up with the help of the pensioners solicitors the women had their own bedrooms and sitting rooms, round-the-clock care and company, assisted by a team of district nurses, for around 500 a week, a snip of the cost of the average UK care home fee, which, with nursing, can cost up to 1,000 a week. Margery, an ex-piano teacher, was with them for eight years until she died aged 99, and Lorna, a former ballet dancer, stayed until her death at the age of 83. We just gave them what they wanted, says Neil. They were both independently minded. They liked the stimulation being around different generations gave them. He says that he has never been interested in setting up a care home, but wants instead to have a home that cares. Two years ago, he sold the extended eight-bedroom house in Sidmouth for 550,000 and, after searching for a small farm, found his current home, which he bought with a private mortgage from the farmer who previously owned it. The main reason for moving, he says, was to find accommodation for Annelises and Iones horses, which were costing a fortune to keep in stables. But Aaron, who met Annelise while studying agriculture at Bicton College, was also keen to set up a farm. As he walks in the door at night, normally stepping over a few prostrate dogs and several pairs of Wellington boots, Neil counts himself a very lucky man. He believes his solution could work for the young and old. Younger generations need more support and older people should have more options about where they want to live. Its a two-way thing. What you give to the house, the house gives to you. Bristol Palin has revealed that she has only had one conversation with her son Tripp's stepmother Sunny in the six years that she has been married to her former fiance Levi Johnston. The 28-year-old real estate agent was answering some questions on Instagram Stories Tuesday when one fan asked her how she feels about Sunny, 27, allegedly taking screenshots of her Q&As and putting them on hers. 'I don't watch her Instagram nor do I care to,' Bristol said. 'The only time I've ever had a conversation with her has been filming for Teen Mom. So, she does not affect me whatsoever.' Keeping it real: Bristol Palin, 28, opened up about her former fiance Levi Johnston's wife Sunny during an impromptu Q&A on Instagram Stories Tuesday Distant: Bristol said she doesn't follow Sunny's Instagram, noting that they have only had one conversation in the six years she has been married to Levi (pictured) The mother-of-three made it clear that she couldn't care less about what Sunny is doing on social media, adding: 'She could do whatever she wants. More power to her. Good for her.' Levi, 28, and Bristol were teenagers when they welcomed their now-10-year-old son Tripp in 2008. After calling off two engagements, the two split for good in 2010. Two years later, Levi married Sunny and they went on to have their daughters Breeze Beretta, six, and Indy Rae, four. They are expecting their third child together, a baby girl, in July. While filming Teen Mom OG last year, Bristol claimed that Levi wasn't always a 'solid' father-figure in Tripp's life, and Sunny took to Instagram Stories to defend her husband. 'As long as Ive been in the picture: Levi was never allowed to have Tripp overnight until the court ordered it when he was around three despite trying to be there for all the years prior,' she wrote. Connection: Bristol and Levi share a 10-year-old son Tripp, who lives in Texas with her Close: Sunny, 27, has been a stepmother to Tripp for the past six years Growing family: Sunny and Levi are expecting their third child together in July. Last year, Sunny said she never speaks to Bristol unless she is alone with Tripp 'I just pray for Levi and her to always keep striving to have a better co-parenting relationship for Tripp,' she added. Sunny also admitted that she and Bristol had never formed a relationship because they've never had any one-on-one time together. 'Its never her and I unless Im alone with Tripp,' she wrote. 'Always Levi and her, and every once in a while through a group text about Tripp.' During her impromptu Q&A, a fan asked Bristol why it seems like her ex-husband Dakota Meyer and Sunny are close, noting that they are 'always liking each other's stuff.' 'I don't follow either one of them,' she replied. 'So I am unphased and unaffected by anything that they do. I don't care.' Baby on the way: The two recently revealed that they are having a baby girl. Sunny proudly showed off her growing baby bump in January When they were one: Bristol also revealed in her Q&A that she doesn't follow her ex-husband Dakota Meyer on Instagram either Co-parenting: Bristol and Dakota have two daughters together, Sailor Grace, three, and Atlee Bay, one. While she doesn't follow Dakota and Sunny on Instagram, they follow each other Bristol doesn't follow Dakota, Sunny, or Levi on Instagram, and while they don't follow her either, they do follow each other. 'I think Levis incredible. I have nothing but great things to say about Levi as a father,' Dakota told Us Weekly in October. 'I consider him a friend. 'I have nothing but great things to say about Sunny, shes a loving mother. She cares,' he added. 'I still will continue my friendship with them.' Over the years, Bristol and Dakota, 30, have had an on-and-off relationship. After a broken engagement and the birth of their now-three-year-old daughter Sailor Grace, the two reconciled and married in 2016. They moved their family to Austin, Texas, before they welcomed their second daughter Atlee Bay in 2017. The former couple divorced a year later. Keeping the peace: In December, Bristol and Dakota happily posed for a photo while taking Tripp paintball shooting with friends New home: Bristol is raising her three children outside of Austin, Texas, after moving their with Dakota a few years ago Candid: During her Q&A, Bristol explained to her confused fans that Sunny is Tripp's stepmom. She also said that having to stay in Texas post-divorce has been a 'blessing in disguise' Bristol and the Medal of Honor recipient were previously embroiled in a bitter and very public war of words over the breakdown of their relationship, which was documented on the latest season of Teen Mom OG. However, in recent months, they've been dedicated to keeping the peace while co-parenting their children. In December, Bristol and Dakota happily posed for a photo while taking Tripp paintball shooting with friends. A month later, she revealed that her ex had asked her to sell their former marital home, which he got in the divorce. Although they seem to be getting along, Bristol revealed that she no longer follows him on social media and has little interest in what he is doing. The mom continues to live outside of Austin, and she told one of her followers that being unable to move back to her home state of Alaska after her divorce has turned out to be a blessing. Post-divorce: Bristol admitted that marriage counseling didn't work for her and Dakota. She also jokingly told a fan not to get married Honestly: The mother-of-three insisted that she doesn't really think about her life being 'in the public eye,' adding that she doesn't think any of her children look like her 'A year ago it seemed like the most impossible pill I was going to have to swallow,' she admitted, 'but it has truly been God's plan to place us here. This is home, and I am so so thankful for it. 'Biggest blessing in disguise, we couldn't be surround[ed] by better people and in a better spot,' she added. 'I wouldn't move back to Alaska if I could. (Doesn't mean we don' miss our family and friends!)' As part of her Q&A, Bristol opened up about living life in the public eye, insisting that it's not as glamorous as people think. 'My life is so boring. You guys probably think it's way cooler than it actually is,' she insisted. 'I never really think about it being in the public eye. It's just normal. Go to work, take care of my kids, that's all.' One of Bristol's followers asked for advice ahead of her wedding, but the reality star refused to give it because of her failed marriage. 'Don't do it!' she wrote. 'JOKING! I can't give advice on marriage, mine didn't work!' A one-year-old boy may never walk or talk after a rare medical condition triggered his brain to stop working. Teddy Mansell, of Derbyshire, was just seven months old when he was diagnosed with Aicardi-Goutieres syndrome. The condition, thought to affect 400 people worldwide, stops the brain sending signals to the rest of the body, and causes the body to regress. It has no cure and most sufferers aren't expected to live past childhood because of their complexity of health issues. Doctors told his parents that they have no idea if he will ever walk or talk. Teddy is unable to sit or crawl and has 'no head control'. Teddy Mansell, of Derbyshire, was just seven months old when he was diagnosed with Aicardi-Goutieres syndrome (pictured with his mother Kelly Mansell, 24) Doctors told his parents that they have no idea if he will ever walk or talk. Teddy is unable to sit or crawl and has 'no head control' (Miss Mansell and Teddy's father Robert Smith, 26, is pictured holding a picture of their son) Teddy's mother, Kelly Mansell, a pharmacy administer, described her pregnancy as being 'perfect'. She said: 'I gave birth just one day early. 'But at eight weeks, out of the blue, he slept for over 10 hours which was unlike Teddy. As first time parents we didnt know if this was normal.' Tests at hospital showed nothing wrong with Teddy, whose condition worsened when one weekend he was violently sick. Miss Mansell, 24, said: 'He was choking, had movements like seizures and he was taken straight to hospital. 'He underwent so many tests, and initially they didnt tell us what they were testing for as the doctors didnt want to worry us.' Recalling the moment she was told Teddy had AGS, she said: 'The diagnosis was so rare, it took a while before they were sure. Teddy's mother, Kelly Mansell, a pharmacy administer, described her pregnancy as being 'perfect'. She said: 'I gave birth just one day early' (pictured with Mr Smith and Teddy) Tests at hospital showed nothing wrong with Teddy, whose condition worsened when one weekend he was violently sick (the couple are pictured with Teddy) Recalling the moment she was told Teddy had AGS, she said: 'The diagnosis was so rare, it took a while before they were sure' 'You hear stories and see children but dont ever think anything like this will happen to you. 'But now we have a whole new aspect of parenting which is completely different to the norm. 'However, we have embraced this and Teddy has taught us to not take things for granted and look at the bigger picture.' Miss Mansell, from Swadlincote, added that Teddy is currently stable after a period of six months. But she said: 'We dont know if Teddy will regress further down the line and lose the few skills he has. 'However, currently we see so much determination in Teddy and feel with the right help he can progress and meet some milestones.' Teddys father, Robert Smith, 26, a maintenance engineer, added: 'He has no head control, cant sit or crawl. 'Because the disease is so rare, we dont know what is next... When he was first diagnosed, we were in disbelief. Miss Mansell, from Swadlincote, added that Teddy is currently stable after a period of six months (pictured together) Teddys father, Robert Smith, 26, a maintenance engineer, added: 'He has no head control, cant sit or crawl' (the pair are pictured together) With no medication or alternatives available, his parents are hoping to be able to fund and participate in a trial treatment in the US (pictured together) Miss Mansell said: 'We hope in time he will be able to be a bit more independent - we have a lot of hope for him' Teddy's parents hope to take him to The Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia, to allow researchers to examine him and see if they can offer drugs HOW CAN AGS RAVAGE THE BODY? Aicardi-Goutieres syndrome (AGS) is thought to affect 400 people worldwide. It stops the brain sending signals to the rest of the body, and causes the body to regress. At birth, some infants with AGS show symptoms which could be explained by an infection, including an enlargement of the spleen and liver, elevated liver enzymes, and an abnormally low number of platelets (which are involved in blood-clotting). Otherwise, most affected infants show symptoms during the first few months of life, often after a period of apparently normal development. Usually, they begin to show early signs of a degenerative brain disease by being extremely irritable, have a fever (but apparently no infection), loss of skills, and slowing of head growth. As many as 40 per cent of patients have chilblains on their fingers, toes, and ears. Advertisement 'The doctors said to us, "we cant tell you if your son will ever walk or talk". We never expected Teddys condition to be so serious.' With no medication or alternatives available, his parents are hoping to be able to fund and participate in a trial treatment in the US. They hope the treatment could stop his condition from becoming active, and damaging his brain further. Mr Smith added: 'We do not know if Teddy will suffer from further regression and want to help prevent this through the US trial.' Miss Mansell said: 'We hope in time he will be able to be a bit more independent - we have a lot of hope for him. 'The trial in America is at a hospital [in Boston] where around 20 children go with Teddys condition, so we hope we can learn a bit more. 'But the clinic, any treatment in America will cost significantly. 'Its clear to us that Teddy will always need treatment, and well always do whatever is possible to give Teddy the best possible chance.' She added: 'Teddy has the most contagious smile and laugh, he is the most amazing little boy we are so grateful of each day we get to be his parents. 'We are grateful we have a team at Derby Hospital that work hard to help Teddy but the treatment in Philadelphia will provide the specialist care he needs. 'We are hoping to set up a UK charity for his condition in the future so families with children suffering from this can get the support they desperately need.' Teddy's parents hope to take him to The Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia, to allow researchers to examine him and see if they can offer drugs. The syndrome affects white matter and nerve pathways - the signals that are required to make purposeful movements of the body. The immune system is constantly heightened, which in turn causes damage within the brain which leads to severe physical and mental impairment. Anyone wanting to donate can do so here. A toddler born with a are condition has defied doctors by living beyond her second birthday, her parents say. Charlotte Patt was born with Shprintzen-Goldberg syndrome, a genetic condition which has left her with a deformed head and body. One organisation estimates only 50 people worldwide have ever been recorded as having the illness. Charlotte's mother, Tammy, has three other children and said, to begin with, looking after Charlotte was more like being a nurse and made it difficult to bond. But she has since learned to cope and, as Charlotte has grown older, she has been a 'warrior' and had a 'miracle' life so far even after doctors nearly gave up on her and Mrs Patt was unsure whether she'd survive. Charlotte Patt, from Wisconsin, was born with Shprintzen-Goldberg syndrome, a condition believed to have only been recorded in around 50 people around the world Charlotte's condition causes the bones in the skull to fuse too soon and it has left her with a narrow, long head, which is a deformity characteristic of the condition Charlotte, pictured with her brother, Wyatt, has needed 10 operations already and her family and doctors weren't sure whether she would survive beyond infancy 'It was overpowering to know that our child had such a rare disorder,' Mrs Patt, from Wisconsin, said. 'It was also a very hard thing to navigate because so much was happening to our baby all at once.' Mrs Patt and her husband, Dustin, were told their daughter would be deformed after doctors spotted problems during pregnancy scans. But nobody could put their finger on what exactly was wrong with her, so the couple didn't find out until after Charlotte was born. She was born 'very floppy' and didn't cry after birth in February 2017, and needed resuscitation and life support within four hours. Unable to breathe on her own, Charlotte had a tracheotomy on the day she was born an operation to create a new windpipe through which she can breathe. Charlotte has now had 10 operations to try and deal with the effects of her genetic condition and has lived longer than her family expected. Mrs Patt said doctors nearly gave up on her daughter when she was young. 'Doctors still did not know how to manage the severity of Charlotte's care and we found many doctors who were not willing to work with us and be "Team Charlotte",' Mrs Patt said. 'I honestly thought and was led to believe that Charlotte would not live long, but I've since seen her progress and pushed to get her the treatment she needs. 'You never expect to become a special needs parent. There was a lot of grief after Charlotte was born. 'We were so incredible happy that she was alive, but it hurt to know that she would face challenges her entire life, that we did not have what we knew as normal with her to any degree.' Charlotte's Shprintzen-Goldberg syndrome means she has weak muscles and reduced mobility, which her mother, Tammy, says is becoming more of a problem as she grows When Charlotte was born she didn't cry and was 'very floppy', her parents revealed, and she needed to be put into intensive care within four hours of the birth Charlotte pictured with her family parents Dustin and Tammy, and her siblings Novella and Wyatt. Mrs Patt said it 'melts her heart' to see how fond her other children have become of Charlotte Shprintzen-Goldberg syndrome is a genetic condition which affects the connective tissues in the body that which is between muscles, bones and organs. One of the most noticeable effects of the condition which has affected Charlotte is that the bones in the skull fuse too quickly and stop the head developing properly. WHAT IS SHPRINTZEN-GOLDBERG SYNDROME? Shprintzen-Goldberg syndrome is a very rare genetic condition which causes babies to be born deformed. It is not known how many people have the condition, but The Marfan Foundation estimates only around 50 people have been recorded as having it. Its most noticeable effect is a misshaping of the head, caused by the skull bones fusing too soon. This can leave babies with narrow, long heads and eyes set far apart. Other effects include deformed jaw and ears, brain and heart development problems, intellectual disability, and muscle weakness. The condition is caused by a genetic mutation and cannot be cured. It can be inherited but most recorded patients are the first in their family to have it, meaning it was caused by a random mutation during gestation. Source: The Marfan Foundation Advertisement This can leave babies with long, narrow, or misshapen heads and far-apart eyes, according to The Marfan Foundation, an American research organisation. Children born with the condition may also have weak muscles and heart or brain abnormalities, and are likely to have a mild-to-moderate intellectual disability. Mrs Patt hopes most of her daughter's serious surgeries are over and done with, but she might need more skull surgery depending on how her head develops. The stay-at-home mother has two other children, Novella, five, and Wyatt, three. She said the way Charlotte's siblings have come to accept and love her has been one of the most rewarding parts of the experience. 'We had to learn ways to explain Charlotte's differences to our littles,' Mrs Patt said. 'It was a very hard balancing act of being there for Charlotte and also being there for Novella and Wyatt. 'As they have grown, and Charlotte has gone through several surgeries we try our best to explain things to them. 'They understand that they need to treat Charlotte differently than other babies her age, for example, they can't hold her the same, they need to be gentle and that their sister's facial expressions let them know how she is feeling. Charlotte needed a tracheotomy soon after she was born so she could breathe, and is pictured with tape on her eyes because she used to be unable to open them Charlotte, pictured with her sister Novella, has made a 'miracle journey' so far, her mother Tammy said, although she admits 'there are still very hard days' 'They understand that their sister was born this way and needs help from the doctors. You can tell it affects them at times and they get sad or upset. 'The one thing that melts my heart is that they see Charlotte as beautiful and see past her physical features.' Mrs Patt said her daughter has shown noticeable improvements as she has grown older, but weak muscles are becoming more of an issue as she grows taller and heavier. 'There are still very hard days when all I want is for all the medical issues to disappear,' she said. 'I get frustrated that I can't comfort my child at times, that we can't do the things we want. 'I'll always worry that I can't give Charlotte everything she needs. I worry that doctors won't have the treatments or knowledge she needs, and something will get missed that could threaten her life. 'Charlotte has made a miracle journey so far and proved so many medical professionals wrong and everyone that sees her can tell that things keep getting better and better. She is a warrior through and through. 'We will continue to fight to make her quality of life easier. Our family's current goal is to purchase a brand-new van to accommodate all of our family and have it converted with a handicap ramp, so Charlotte is able to travel easier and more often.' by Thanh Thuy The trial of the young Catholic woman will resume tomorrow. All the relatives are gathered in prayer, her mother said. The other defendant has been released. Both have the same defence argument: They were duped by North Korean agents. Hanoi (AsiaNews) Vietnam has called on the Malaysian government to release oan Thi Huong (pictured), a 30-year-old Vietnamese woman held in connection with the murder of Kim Jong-nam, half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Two days ago, the Shah Alam High Court released Siti Aisyah, an Indonesian woman also accused of the assassination. Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh, who is also Deputy Prime Minister, spoke with his Malaysian counterpart Saifuddin Abdullah yesterday, noting that senior leaders and the people of Vietnam were paying close attention to the trial. Vietnam asked Malaysia to ensure a fair trial and free Vietnamese citizen Doan Thi Huong, the government said. In a separate statement on Wednesday, Vietnamese authorities also said that Justice Minister Le Thanh Long had sent a letter to Malaysias Attorney General, Tommy Thomas, asking Malaysia to free Huong. The murder took place on 13 February 2017 at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. oan Thi Huong and Siti Aisyah were taken into custody three days after the assassination. After their arrest, the two women claimed that they were duped by some North Korean agents, who got them involved in what they thought was a television prank. I dont know what will happen to me now. I am innocent, please pray for me!" Huong said on the day of Siti Aisyahs release. The young woman was born into a Catholic family from Nghia Binh, a town near Nan inh City (northern Vietnam). Fr Ph Xm Xuan Thi, a priest from Phuong Lac parish, said that the accused's father turned to him "for help and pastoral advice". According to Fr Thi, "in the parish no one has anything negative to say about the young woman, except perhaps that she doesnt come home very often." The trial against her will resume tomorrow. Meanwhile, family members continue to clamour for her innocence. "I don't think my daughter is capable of committing such a crime," said oan Van Thanh, the defendants 65-year-old father. "I don't sleep at night because of anxiety over the verdict. My daughter was deceived. I love her, but now I can't do anything," said Nguyen Thi Vy, the young womans mother. "All the relatives are gathered in prayer, so that my daughter will soon be reunited with our family." For five months, Shaylee Bedward hadn't had a period. Concerned, she went to visit her doctor in Bloomington, Indiana, in summer 2017, but was told it was simply a side effect of her contraceptive pill. But as the months passed, she began experiencing severe abdominal pain and decided to have a pelvic examination in October of that year. A mass was located on Bedward's ovaries, and a subsequent ultrasound and blood test revealed the cause: stage 3 ovarian cancer. Bedward immediately began chemotherapy, but when doctors saw it wasn't working, they recommended a hysterectomy, which would remove her uterus and ovaries. It would send the recent graduate into early menopause and leave her unable to have children. Bedward, now 25 and still battling cancer, said the pain of learning she would never have the big family that she and her boyfriend had been planning was one of the hardest things she has ever had to endure. But she is sharing her story to show other people in similar situations that she is powering through. Shaylee Bedward, 25, from Bloomington, Indiana, visited her doctor in summer 2017 - worried that she hadn't had a period in five months - but she was told it was simply due to her contraceptive pill. Pictured: Bedward undergoing chemotherapy A mass was located on Bedward's ovaries and she had an ultrasound and blood test, after which she was diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer. Pictured: Bedward at her first round of chemotherapy in November 2017 'Unfortunately, we weren't able to preserve any of my eggs beforehand,' Bedward said. 'It was heartbreaking and devastating and every other awful word you can use to describe an experience. 'Hearing the news that I can't have children of my own is still the hardest thing I've ever had to go through.' WHAT IS A HYSTERECTOMY? A hysterectomy is a surgical procedure to remove a woman's uterus. There are three kinds: PARTIAL HYSTERECTOMY: Removes two-thirds of the uterus. Removes two-thirds of the uterus. TOTAL HYSTERECTOMY: Removes uterus and cervix. Removes uterus and cervix. RADICAL HYSTERECTOMY: Removes uterus, cervix and ovaries. The operation is most commonly performed on women between the ages of 40 and 49. More than 20 million American women have had a hysterectomy, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As women approach menopause, the odds that they will develop one of several serious uterine health conditions increases. Doctors may recommend a hysterectomy as a treatment for: fibroids endometriosis uterine (endometrial) cancer chronic uterine pain or bleeding collapsed uterus In some cases, doctors may suggest a hysterectomy as a preventative measure if a woman has significant warning or early signs of developing one or more of these conditions. When necessary, surgeons may also remove the ovaries and fallopian tubes, if these have also been damaged or are at serious risk of damage. The removal of reproductive organs sends a woman's body into menopause, no matter how old she is. This comes with unpleasant side effects like hot flashes, and many women have to start hormone therapy, taking estrogen to balance out their own hormones. Advertisement Sometime hysterectomies just involve removing part of the uterus, or the entire uterus, and preserving other reproductive organs. However, doctors said she needed a radical hysterectomy, which involved moving her uterus, cervix and ovaries. Because the removal of her ovaries meant she was no longer producing estrogen, she was forced into early menopause, which took another toll on her body. 'Lots of women can take medicine to regulate their hormones during menopause, but since ovarian cancer is often estrogen-receptive, I had to take pills that even further blocked any hormones from being produced,' Bedward explained. 'It affected more parts of my life than I ever could have imagined. I'm only 25 years old, but my body feels like it's at least 60.' Bedward admits that she was not expecting a cancer diagnosis when she went in for her original pelvic exam. 'Cancer was honestly the furthest thing from my mind,' she said. 'I hadn't even heard of ovarian cancer at this point. I received the HPV vaccine when I was 13 and honestly thought that meant I was immune to any type of gynecological cancer.' Ovarian cancer ranks fifth in cancer deaths among women and accounts for more deaths than any other cancer of the female reproductive system. It occurs when the disease originates from the cells in and around the ovary. In the majority of cases, ovarian cancer affects women over the age of 50, or postmenopausal women. The cancer has been called the 'silent killer' because it is often diagnosed at an advanced stage when it has already spread to other parts of the body. About 80 percent of ovarian cancer cases are diagnosed in the advanced stages of the disease. However, if caught in an early stage, a woman has a more than 90 percent chance of long-term survival. Ovarian cancer ranks fifth in cancer deaths among women. The cancer has been called the 'silent killer' because it is often diagnosed at an advanced stage when it has already spread to other parts of the body. Pictured: Bedward in the hospital Doctors put Bedward (left and right) on chemotherapy infusions, which began in November 2017. When chemotherapy didn't work, doctors recommended a hysterectomy, which would remove her uterus and ovaries, in February 2018 Symptoms include persistent abdominal pain and/or bloating, heartburn, frequent urination and feeling full quickly. Bedward underwent an exploratory laparotomy, a surgical procedure in which the abdomen is opened and the organs are examined so her cancer could be removed. Once she healed from surgery, doctors began weekly chemotherapy infusions in November 2017. 'I don't even like taking Ibuprofen, so when I found out I'd be undergoing intense chemotherapy my heart sank,' Bedward said. 'I hated what I was about to put my body through.' She said that chemotherapy left her incredibly fatigued and she experienced nausea and flu-like symptoms. 'You ache constantly and feel flu-like for weeks at a time, you can hardly eat, you constantly worry about every twitch and immediately think of the worst-case scenarios,' Bedward said. 'Losing my eyelashes and eyebrows was even harder. I could rock the head scarves and turbans, but it's impossible to feel sexy or feminine without a single eyelash.' In February 2018, after doctors noted that chemotherapy wasn't working, they recommended that she undergo a hysterectomy to remove her uterus and ovaries. Because the removal of her ovaries meant she was no longer producing estrogen, Bedward went into early menopause at just 24 years old. Because the removal of her ovaries meant she was no longer producing estrogen, Bedward went into menopause at 24 years old. Pictured: Bedward, right, with her boyfriend, Evan Currently, Bedward (pictured) is taking part in a clinical trial at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, to replace her white blood cells with healthier versions that can hopefully destroy all remaining traces of cancer Currently, Bedward is taking part in a clinical trial at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, to replace her white blood cells with healthier versions that can hopefully destroy all remaining traces of cancer. She has been sharing her journey on Instagram in the hopes of showing others that despite the pain and heartache her cancer journey has caused, it is still possible to be positive and to thrive. 'Cancer is really hard, and it strips you of everything you know and forces you into a brand-new life that you never asked for,' Bedward said. 'My life now consists of back to back hospital visits, being poked and prodded, and constantly being strapped into machines where I have to hold my breath until I feel like I'm going to pass out. 'I share my story to bring awareness to this silent but deadly disease so that other women can take control of their own health before it's too late. I choose to show the world that you can survive and thrive with ovarian cancer.' The US Food and Drug Administration is going after at least one website that sells abortion pills online, according to an agency statement. AidAccess.org provides an online consultation to assess whether women qualify to receive mail order drugs to end a pregnancy. Medical abortion was deemed a safe and effective way to end an unwanted pregnancy within its first 70 days by the FDA in 2000. But access to the drugs is subject to state laws as well and is often more limited for certain groups, such as minors, the LGBTQ+ community and people who live in poor or rural areas. Aid Access made waves last year when it began offering the most affordable way yet for US women to get abortion pill prescriptions via telemedicine and a foreign pharmacy. But as many anticipated, the FDA has now warned Aid Access that its activities amount to the sale of 'misbranded and unapproved new drugs' in the US, meaning it will face legal consequences if it continues to prescribe in the US. Mifipristone, previously known as RU486 is one of two drugs that, in combination, can terminate a pregnancy. Aidaccess.com is an online service that gives women a consultation, fills a prescription for the abortion pills in India and send them to the US. The FDA says it can't More than 45 years after the Supreme Court legalized abortion in the landmark Row v Wade decision, the subject is back in the spotlight - and surrounded by controversy on all sides. An abortion is typically completed via a simple procedure, called a dilation and curettage (D&C), which involves the scraping of the uterine lining where a fertilized egg implants. It's low risk, but some women find it traumatic, others can't afford it, and for others, getting into a clinic that could perform a D&C is next to impossible. About one in four women has an abortion by the time they are 45, according to recent research. Yet nearly as many (20 percent) have to travel 42 miles or more to get to a clinic. A number of those women live in areas in the Midwest and South where there are tougher laws about the timing of abortions, how many doctors visits are needed and what a woman must go through before an abortion. The advent of the so-called 'Plan C' set of abortion pills - containing Mifepristone and Misoprostol - was a source of hope and comfort to many who looked forward to being able to take the simple drug in the privacy and comfort of their own homes. Some of those states, including Texas, North Dakota and Ohio also have laws that require women and their doctors to strictly adhere to the FDA's instructions on the pills' label, which is meant to further restrick its use. But in 2016, the FDA actually relaxed the guidelines it put on those labels. It made the dosage lower, reduced the number of doctor's visits a woman had to make from three to two approved the drug for use up to 10 weeks into a pregnancy (instead of seven). The move was seen as a major victory by proponents of abortion rights, but now the FDA is once again acting against these groups' hopes by going after organizations like Aid Access. 'Aid Access supports women who cannot otherwise access an abortion and protects their human rights,' Aid Access's site explains. 'Unfortunately some countries violate human rights and try to prosecute women who induced their own abortion.' The European group came to see the US as one of those countries and began connecting women need with doctors that could prescribe the abortion cocktail from afar and mail them to women's homes for just $95 (far less than the $350-$950 it costs to get an abortion in the first trimester). A report also rated Aid Access highly for providing doctor consultations and the organization received over 3,000 requests from women in the US between April and November 2018, its founder Dr Rebecca Gomperts told CNN. But as promised in October, the FDA is now after Aid Access. Although mifiprsitone and misoprostol tablets are FDA-approved, the agency argued that the particular marketed by Aid Access are not. Earlier this year, a Columbia University study found that there were 18 sites where abortion drugs could be purchased online. All of the mifepristone pills were within eight percent of the active ingredient they claimed to be. The misoprostol pills also contained the claimed ingredient, just somewhat smaller amounts. But the researchers ultimately agreed that these online options were very viable and rational' ones for women with poor access to care to consider. The FDA disagrees. 'FDA is taking this action against Aidaccess.org because of the risks posed by its conduct in causing the introduction of a misbranded and unapproved new drug into US commerce,' the letter said. The FDA has given Aid Access 15 days to respond to its cease and desist letter. The US Food and Drug Administration proposed new e-cigarette guidelines to tighten restrictions on the sale of fruity, minty or sweet tobacco flavors, it announced Wednesday. E-cigarettes and the teen vaping 'epidemic' have been the prime target for Dr Scott Gottlieb during his time as the Food and Drug Administration's Commissioner, and the proposed guidelines come just days after he announced he will be stepping down next month. Backed by research that suggests that sweet flavors make e-cigs more appealing to children and teens - among whom vaping rate shave surged in recent years - the proposed guidelines aim to limit youth access to the nicotine products. Dr Gottlieb and the agency aim to ban the sale of some e-cig flavors altogether while requiring others to get pre-approval from the FDA before hitting the shelves, according to the proposal. In response to the teen 'vaping epidemic,' the outgoing-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced proposed guidelines to restrict the sale of sweet e-cigarette flavors on Wednesday Between 2017 and 2018, the US saw a startling rise in teen vaping. By last year, 3.6 million youth and teens said that they were current e-cigarette users - a 1.5 million person increase over the prior year. First marketed as cessation aids, e-cigarettes were quickly picked up by youth and teenagers. The FDA has particularly gone after Juul, whose devices have several angles of appeal to the younger generation. Its slim, sleek device closely resembles a USB drive and emits only odorless vapor, making vaping easy to conceal from adults. Juul also originally made their e-liquids in tempting, sweet flavors like mango, creme and cucumber. And Juul's slick marketing campaign featuring young, attractive models who looked like they could themselves be teenagers added to the product's cache, and theFDA demanded that Juul show evidence that it was shifting the target of its ads. Though Juul has borne the brunt of the FDA's wrath, it is by no means the company guilty of fueling teen vaping. Some have even been critical of the FDA itself for failing to interfere with and regulate e-cigarettes. In 2016, the agency announced that it would not review e-cigarette products before they were brought to the market - at least not until 2022. But today, the FDA warning e-cig companies that it can and will examine their products. 'We're putting all manufacturers and retailers on notice: you may be subject to FDA enforcement for selling certain flavored [electronic cigarette] products without authorization,' Dr Gottlieb said in a statement. 'We'll prioritize enforcement to prevent the access and appeal of these products to kids.' The agency has bumped up the deadline for e-cig and e-liquid manufacturers to submit applications to get their flavored products approved by a year. Applications now must be in by August 8, 2021. In the wake of recent research on the widespread use of sweet mini-cigars among teens and youth - especially young people of color - the FDA tacked measures to restrict the sale of these products as well, creating a new guidelines requiring flavored cigars to undergo similar approval processes or be pulled from shelves. But as far as tobacco- and menthol- flavored e-cigs are concerned, the proposal does not change much. The FDA will continue to apply its previous guidance to these products, which it views as posing less risk to children and teens. 'Nobody wants to see children becoming addicted to nicotine,' Gottlieb said in his statement. 'We wont tolerate a whole generation of kids becoming addicted to nicotine as a tradeoff for enabling adults to have unfettered access to these same unreviewed products, and well continue to put the full scope of our regulatory tools against this mounting public health crisis.' A pharmacy has been granted permission to stay in business despite making an eye injection that allegedly left 68 people partially or completely blind. The patients in Dallas had all been promised clear eyesight, free of their cataracts, if they endured the spine-tingling process of having a needle pushed into their eyes to administer a steroid-antibiotic liquid. The medication is designed to be a permanent alternative for eye drops, decreasing inflammation and irritation. However, it appears a batch of the liquid may have been contaminated - and there were no checks on the liquid before it was rolled out to patients - leaving dozens with irreversible symptoms. After a five-month inquiry, a federal court in Texas gave Guardian Pharmacy Services the green light to keep working as usual, without admitting wrongdoing, as long as the firm pays for the FDA's future inspections of their products. The firm will be able to sell the eye liquid again once the FDA approves that each batch does not carry a health risk. Curtis Cosby, a lorry driver, wanted to do something that could banish his blurry vision, without having to keep stopping the van to take eye drops. Now he says he can't work In a statement, outgoing-FDA director Dr Scott Gottlieb hailed the decision as proof that the FDA's oversight works. 'This case is yet another reminder of why unlawful compounding is fraught with risk, how bad actors who have the potential to significantly harm people persist and why the FDA's work in collaboration with our state partners remains critical to protecting consumers,' he said on Tuesday. Others don't see it that way. Speaking to Buzzfeed News, which first broke the story, pharmacy expert Larry Sasich said: 'It looks to me like they threw the book at them... I don't see how they can operate.' When the story first emerged in September, the clinic, Key-Whitman Eye Center, was quick to pass the blame to the manufacturer, Guardian Pharmacy Services, also of Dallas (unrelated to the business of the same name in Atlanta). Andrew Sommerman, an attorney who represents 43 of the 68 affected, raised an eyebrow at that response. 'It makes you wonder, does it not, what sort of vetting occurred by Key-Whitman allowing this product to be used on over 100 patients,' Sommerman said to DailyMail.com at the time. 'It's the duty and obligation of the surgery center to make sure that all of its products are safe and effective. This product was never tested.' All of the affected patients were treated between February 9 and February 16 at Key-Whitman in Dallas, Texas. According to Sommerman, all of his clients are blind in at least one eye, and he has not met one person, even outside of his patients, who recovered. Most of his patients were 'newly retired, planning to see the world', he said, (adding 'well they're not going to see it now, are they?'). Many of them, though, were working as drivers, artists, and other visual jobs that drove them to get surgery. One of them is Curtis Cosby, a lorry driver, who wanted to do something that could banish his blurry vision, without having to keep stopping the van to take eye drops. Now, though, he's been told he may never see clearly again, and Sommerman says he can no longer work. The product, an antibiotic-steroid mix, had not been tested, a lawyer representing 43 of the patients claims 'It was really blurry, as if looking through a defrosted window or something,' Cosby told NBC 5. 'I chose to take an injection that something was wrong with, and it's eating up part of the tissue in the eye, and I'm going to lose my sight totally.' Cosby and the five dozen others is seeking unspecified compensation from Key-Whitman. Dr Jeffrey Whitman, president and chief surgeon at Key-Whitman, insists 'some patients have regained normal - or close to normal - visual acuity', and distanced himself from the other cases, saying 'others are apparently still experiencing visual impairment'. He also says that while Cosby was treated at Key-Whitman, he was treated by an external surgeon. Whitman maintains he is outraged himself. 'If you went to the pharmacy and they gave you a medication that wasn't made correctly, you'd be angry. I'm angry as well,' Whitman said in a statement. 'We've never seen a problem like that in the 30 years I've practiced.' He added: 'Our first priority was the wellness of the patients. 'We've contacted the FDA and whatever agencies need to investigate to make sure they do more work on what happened to make sure it never happens again.' Guardian Pharmacy Services has been contacted by DailyMail.com for a comment. The liquid was injected direct into the eye of the patients (file image) A group of international scientists have today called for a worldwide ban on editing genes to make 'designer babies'. The suggestion comes after a Chinese scientist caused global controversy by altering the embryos of twins to make them immune to HIV. Researchers now want a ban on editing the DNA of living humans because they say there's a need to slow down the 'most adventurous plans to re-engineer the human species'. Experts in the field are divided some have come out in support, while others called the ban 'neither necessary nor useful' and said it could interrupt important work. Gene editing could in theory change the DNA of people to make them less likely to develop certain genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy In a comment published by experts from the US, Canada and Germany in the journal Nature today, the group of experts called for the temporary ban. They want an international set of standards to be created to control how germline editing the changing of DNA in sperm, eggs or embryos is used. Editing DNA for research purposes in labs would still be permitted, and countries would ultimately still be able to decide what their own scientists do. 'Although techniques have improved in the past several years, germline editing is not yet safe or effective enough to justify any use in the clinic,' they wrote. 'There is wide agreement in the scientific community that, for clinical germline editing, the risk of failing to make the desired change or of introducing unintended mutations (off-target effects) is still unacceptably high.' Gene-editing is a process in which scientists can add, remove or change sections of DNA which ultimately affect how an organism is formed. Genes are sections of DNA which work as blueprints for the body and essentially programme cells to tell them what to do. In humans, editing them could one day mean manipulating DNA to instruct the body to produce a certain hair or eye colour, or changing those which cause incurable conditions like cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy. In November, Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced that, in a world first, twin girls had been born after he changed their DNA to make them immune to HIV. The announcement caused uproar because Professor Jiankui had done the experiment in secret and in spite of laws in China banning germline editing in embryos. HOW DOES CRISPR DNA EDITING WORK? The CRISPR gene editing technique is being used an increasing amount in health research because it can change the building blocks of the body. At a basic level, CRISPR works as a DNA cutting-and-pasting operation. Technically called CRISPR-Cas9, the process involves sending new strands of DNA and enzymes into organisms to edit their genes. In humans, genes act as blueprints for many processes and characteristics in the body they dictate everything from the colour of your eyes and hair to whether or not you have cancer. The components of CRISPR-Cas9 the DNA sequence and the enzymes needed to implant it are often sent into the body on the back of a harmless virus so scientists can control where they go. Cas9 enzymes can then cut strands of DNA, effectively turning off a gene, or remove sections of DNA to be replaced with the CRISPRs, which are new sections sent in to change the gene and have an effect they have been pre-programmed to produce. But the process is controversial because it could be used to change babies in the womb initially to treat diseases but could lead to a rise in 'designer babies' as doctors offer ways to change embryos' DNA. Source: Broad Institute Advertisement And the researchers warned in their Nature article the gene change he had made could make the girls more likely to die of West Nile virus or flu. Professor Jiankui was last month placed under police investigation, the Chinese government ordered a halt to his research work and he was fired by his university. Writing in Nature today, researchers want the moratorium temporary ban to avoid the same thing happening again. 'There is no doubt that genome editing technologies hold huge potential for the future health of patients,' said Professor Sir Robert Lechler, president of the Academy of Medical Sciences. 'But I agree that the clinical use of germline genome editing should remain prohibited. 'There are currently just too many unanswered safety, ethical and scientific questions.' Around 30 countries already have specific laws preventing germline editing in live human offspring, leading some experts to be sceptical about what a ban would change. University College London's Dr Helen O'Neill said: 'This letter serves to ignore rather than reiterate that a global ban is already in existence and only attempts to address what would happen in the case of another extreme scientist. 'Currently, there are (as there was in China) legal and ethical measures in place globally which regulate the use of gametes and embryos. 'Let's not forget that He Jiankui broke many rules, and was aware of this by choosing to do his work outside of the auspices of the university (and taking unpaid leave). 'It was not that he did this because the law allowed it.' And Dr O'Neill added putting a ban in place could make it more difficult for scientists to get funding for research. She said: 'Naming a "moratorium" sheds a negative light on the potential for germline genome editing. 'This will have huge consequences for research funding, many of the bodies requiring the proposal to be "clinically translatable".' The announcement came after He Jiankui's controversial experiment saw him become the subject of a police investigation, the government called a stop to his research and he lost his job The Progress Educational Trust, a charity encouraging debate on assisted conception and genetic science, agreed that a ban would not avoid another case like Professor Jiankui's. 'A moratorium on the clinical use of germline genome editing is neither necessary nor useful,' said PET director Sarah Norcross. 'We do not think a moratorium would have deterred He Jiankui, who acted secretively and in breach of a clear scientific consensus that germline genome editing should not be used in the clinic at this time. 'Moreover, He Jiankui's practices were scientifically and ethically unsound in so many different ways, that they would have been wrong regardless of whether or not they involved germline genome editing.' This graphic reveals how, theoretically, an embryo could be 'edited' using the powerful tool Crispr-Cas9 essentially cutting and pasting sections of DNA to defend humans against HIV infection. But, experts say, editing this gene could make people more vulnerable to other viruses The researchers today said when the guidelines are drawn up, distinctions need to be made between genetic correction trying to avoid disease and genetic enhancement trying to improve something. They added: 'We recognize that a moratorium is not without cost. 'Although each nation might decide to proceed with any particular application, the obligation to explain to the world why it thinks its decision is appropriate will take time and effort. 'Certainly, the framework we are calling for will place major speed bumps in front of the most adventurous plans to re-engineer the human species. 'But the risks of the alternative which include harming patients and eroding public trust are much worse.' Cases of hepatitis A have been surging across the US, largely driven by homeless people. Last year, more than 11,000 cases of the liver disease were reported, nearly eight times higher than what was reported in 2015. With outbreaks popping up in 17 states, health officials are recommending for the first time that a routine shot be given specifically to the homeless community. In turn, nurses, police officers and sanitary inspectors are taking to the streets - visiting homeless shelters, drug rehab centers and soup kitchens and asking people if they've been tested. The vaccinations have then been given at these establishments at no cost. Worcester - an industrial city in central Massachusetts with the unfortunate nickname of Hepatitisville - has been a bright spot in this crisis. City officials planned for an outbreak before it happened and used a coalition of agencies and community groups to meet homeless people where they live. The relative success has limited the illness and shown how long-term outreach to homeless people and drug users can pay dividends in desperate times. In the last two years, outbreaks have popped up in 17 states. Last year, more than 11,000 cases were reported across the country, about eight times as high as were reported in 2015 Health officials are visiting the streets urging the homeless to get vaccinated. Pictured: Worcester Police officer Angel Rivera, right, returns a license to an unidentified man as Rivera asks if he has been tested for Hepatitis A in Worcester, Massachusetts There are different types of hepatitis - known by different letters - that vary in how common they are, how sick they make people and how they're spread. In the US, hepatitis A - a highly contagious liver infection caused by the hepatitis A virus - is less common that other forms of the disease. It is primarily spread when a person who isn't vaccinated ingests food or water that has been contaminated with feces of an infected individual. WHAT IS HEPATITIS A AND HOW CAN IT BE TREATED? Hepatitis A is a viral liver disease that can have both minor and severe symptoms for the person infected. It is primarily spread when a person who isn't vaccinated ingests food or water that has been contaminated with feces of an infected individual. The virus is one of the most frequent causes for foodborne infections. Symptoms The incubation period of hepatitis A is normally 14 to 28 days. People can experience: Fever Loss of appetite Diarrhea Nausea Dark-colored urine Jaundice Acute liver failure Who is at risk? Anyone who has not been vaccinated or has never been infected with the hepatitis A virus is at risk. Other factors that increase risk include: Poor sanitation Lack of clean water Recreational drug use Living with an infected person or having sexual relations with one Traveling to areas with high risk without a vaccination Treatment There is no specific treatment for hepatitis A. It may take some people a couple weeks to a couple months to recover from the symptoms. Doctors recommend everyone to get a vaccination to help prevent the risk of getting infected by the virus. Advertisement Most infected adults suffer fatigue, low appetite, stomach pain, nausea, and jaundice - symptoms that usually end within two months of infection. It was also thought to be vanishing . Hepatitis A rates fell by more than 95 percent since a vaccine first became available in 1995. As recently as 2015, there were fewer than 1,400 cases reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Then came the recent outbreaks. It began with one in San Diego in November 2016 that killed 20 and hospitalized around 400. Officials eventually declared an emergency and sent nurses out with homeless service workers to visit people living in parks and ravines. Last year, more than 11,000 cases were reported across the country with about 40 deaths, according to the CDC. The number of cases is nearly eight times higher than in 2015. Kentucky and West Virginia alone were responsible for nearly half of them. The outbreaks have drawn relatively little attention, some health officials say, in part because of the people who are the victims: mostly homeless people and people who inject drugs. The surge coincided with outbreaks of HIV and hepatitis C, and like them was tied to a national overdose epidemic involving heroin and other opioids. But it was unusually deadly because many of the people who got infected had livers already damaged by hepatitis C or longtime alcohol consumption. 'When you already have a diseased organ, adding another infection can lead to increased risk for bad outcomes' like liver failure and death, said Dr Denise De Las Nueces, medical director of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. To fight the outbreaks, the CDC last month took the unusual step of recommending all US homeless adults get shots to prevent hepatitis A. It was the first time the agency has targeted the homeless in a routine vaccination push. So last spring, when a hepatitis A outbreak sprung up in Worcester - about 50 miles west of Boston - health officials geared up. They knew they had to persuade homeless people and drug users to get vaccinated. With resources limited, they turned to an array of local organizations to help, including the quality of life team. 'They know us. We've been able to build a little bit of trust with them,' said team member Mike Girardi, a police officer. 'It's not like a policeman in uniform that they've never seen before is showing up to their tent with a needle.' Most shots were given at the more than 50 clinics held at homeless shelters, drug rehab centers and soup kitchens. The outbreak now seems to be petering out at 58 confirmed cases. To fight the outbreaks, the CDC last month took the unusual step of recommending all US homeless adults get shots to prevent hepatitis A City officials in Worcester, Massachusetts, planned for an outbreak before it happened and used a coalition of agencies and community groups to meet homeless people where they live. Pictured: Officer Angel Rivera, right, asks Brian Pickering, left, if he has been tested for hepatitis A Most shots were given at the more than 50 clinics held at homeless shelters, drug rehab centers and soup kitchens. The outbreak now seems to be petering out at 58 confirmed cases. Pictured: Officer Angel Rivera, right, asks a woman, whom identified herself only as Ashley, if she has been tested for hepatitis A Some homeless people and drug users in Worcester said they were steered to vaccinations by team members. Others were motivated by seeing friends and acquaintances get sick. Julie Scricco, 38, lives in a Worcester shelter and was persuaded to get vaccinated after seeing the outbreak unfold her around her. 'People's eyes were getting yellow, and puking seriously,' she said. 'I didn't want to catch it.' Tonya Bys, 31, and Amine Fodaile, 35, said they were vaccinated in January after recognizing they were at risk due to being both recovering addicts and homeless. Victoria McMahon, 26, was one of the early cases in the Worcester outbreak. At the time she got sick, she was homeless and had shared needles with someone who also caught hepatitis A. She's now in an addiction recovery program. McMahon called it a near-death experience but said it caused family members who had been distant during her years of drug use to rally to her side. 'There's nothing that can bring people together like [someone] almost dying,' she said. 'I'm kind of glad it happened.' Breast cancer survivors may soon know exactly how likely their cancer is to come back. A new test offers women peace of mind through predicting their risk of getting breast cancer again in the next 20 years. Scientists have examined tumours to find there are 11 different types of breast cancer, all with separate risks of relapsing. They can now identify those women who do not need to worry because they are in a group mostly likely to be cured after five years. Simply by looking at genes in breast cancer tumours, they can also break the news to some women that their cancer has a 62 per cent chance of coming back in 20 years. A new test offers women peace of mind through predicting their risk of getting breast cancer again in the next 20 years (stock) The good news for these patients is that doctors can then keep a closer eye on them, or keep them on the drug tamoxifen which makes it less likely their breast cancer will return. More than 14,000 breast cancer survivors in Britain are believed to fall into this unlucky 'late-relapsing' group. The test, developed by a team including the University of Cambridge and Stanford University, was developed by analysing the tumours of nearly 2,000 breast cancer patients and tracking their health over an average of 14 years. Researchers say a simpler version could be available for doctors to use within five years. Professor Carlos Caldas, lead researcher at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, said: 'Treatments for breast cancer have improved dramatically in recent years. 'But unfortunately for some women, their breast cancer returns and spreads, becoming incurable. 'For some, this can be many years later - but it's been impossible to accurately predict who is at risk of recurrence and who is all clear. 'In this study, we've delved deeper into breast cancer molecular subtypes so we can more accurately identify who might be at risk of relapsing and uncover new ways of treating them.' Currently doctors work out if someone's cancer will come back by looking at things like the tumour size and aggressiveness, the patient's age, their type of breast cancer and time spent in remission since surgery. WHAT IS SECONDARY BREAST CANCER? Secondary breast cancer, also known as metastatic breast cancer, is when tumour cells which started in the breast move to other parts of the body. The secondary cancer can take years to return, and does not always reappear in the breast. Some 35,000 people are thought to be living with the disease some 35 per cent of women who get breast cancer will be diagnosed with secondary cancer within 10 years. Places commonly affected by spreading cancer include the bones, brain, liver, lungs and skin. While primary breast cancer can usually be operated on or cured with drugs or radiation, secondary cancer is incurable. Because secondary cancer has already started spreading around the body you can never be completely cured of it. But chemotherapy, hormone drugs and other treatments can slow down the growth and spread of tumours and improve patients' lives. Life expectancy varies depending on how advanced the cancer is, but many women live for years with the condition under control. Source: Breast Cancer Care and Breast Cancer Now Advertisement But scientists can be far more precise by looking at genes in their tumours. Multiple copies of genes that trigger cancer, or help cancer cells to divide, put unlucky women with two types of breast cancer into an 'aggressive' group with a high chance their cancer will come back. In women with the deadliest form of breast cancer, called 'triple-negative' breast cancer, scientists found some have a tiny risk of this cancer coming back if they survive the first five years after treatment. But for women with the same cancer but more unlucky genes, the risk of getting breast cancer again is 50 per cent higher after 20 years. The same lottery was found for a type of breast cancer affecting three-quarters of patients, where tumours are 'oestrogen receptor-positive', meaning they need the hormone oestrogen to grow, but negative for a protein called HER2. There were eight groups of patients for this cancer type - four with a good chance that their cancer would not come back. But the quarter of women with this type of cancer who fall into the other four groups have a risk of 47 to 62 per cent of getting breast cancer again in 20 years. Experts believe that people relapsing after this type of cancer do so because they do not respond well to radiotherapy, chemotherapy and drugs designed to eradicate cancer cells from the body. These can come 'back to life' many years later, causing someone to get cancer again. The researchers also worked out relapse rates for women with HER2-positive breast cancer, but say these are out of date because the patients in the study did not have access to a relatively new drug called Herceptin. The test gives women their chance of breast cancer coming back after 10, 15 or 20 years and their chances of dying from breast cancer or another cause. The results, published in the journal Nature, also reveal triple-negative breast cancer is more likely to spread to the brain, while oestrogen receptor-positive, HER2-negative cancer more often spreads to the bone. Next researchers will investigate different treatment options for the 11 breast cancer groups they have found. Professor Karen Vousden, chief scientist for Cancer Research UK, said: 'One in seven women will get breast cancer in their lifetime in the UK, and we hope that research like this will mean that if faced with the disease, even more of our daughters and granddaughters will survive.' Profits at fast food chain Dominos have tumbled amid a battle with its franchisee store owners and troubles overseas. It posted profits of 61.9million, down 22 per cent on a year earlier. Sales in stores open more than a year in the UK increased 4.6 per cent compared with a year earlier, while revenues across the entire group increased by 9 per cent to 1.2billion. In addition to the UK and Ireland, Dominos also operates stores in countries including Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany. But its international business has hurt growth as it struggles abroad to replicate the success of its pizza. Domino's posted profits of 61.9m, down 22 per cent on a year earlier. Sales in stores open more than a year in the UK increased 4.6 per cent compared with a year earlier Norway and Sweden have proved particularly tough to crack. David Wild, the chief executive of Dominos, said: Internationally, we have experienced some growing pains which have hampered our overall financial performance. Analysts said the slump in profits came as a shock. Earnings were hit by one-off costs such as 4.5million for the Norwegian expansion. Wayne Brown, an analyst at Liberum, said: There is no comment from Dominos on current trading and vague guidance on openings both quite telling in our view. The pizza firm has also been struggling to meet ambitious store opening targets in the UK amid a backlash from franchisees who run its shops and who have been dragging their heels over opening new outlets as they demand a larger slice of Dominos profits. They have also complained of a financial hit from higher ingredient costs. Dominos opened 58 stores in the UK last year but has scrapped targets for the year ahead, saying openings are likely to be lower given the dispute. It now has more than 1,100 stores, a figure which is 500 short of its long-term target. Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said: Once the poster child of the franchise industry, profit is now going backwards. It would be fair to say Dominos language is increasingly cautious and that the outlook is gloomy. Boss Wild said the firm was confident the rift between management and franchisees would be resolved soon. He said: I talk to franchisees every day and whats clear is everyone wants this bridge to be built where we start working collaboratively together with success. You have to build a bridge from two sides though. Were reaching out now and were getting a positive response. But weve got to complete the construction of the bridge and thats something that were still working on. I think that it will definitely resolve itself over the next year, hopefully sooner. The Milton Keynes-based firm, which is completely separate from Dominos in the US, makes 90 per cent of its sales in Britain. It sold a record 102m pizzas last year, which is equivalent to 6.5 every second. The fast food chains best-sellers included its cheeseburger pizza which comes topped with ground beef, gherkins, onions and burger sauce. The company recently launched a low-calorie range of pizzas called Delight, which contains around 100 calories per slice, compared with 200 for the average Dominos slice. Wild said the range was doing OK but added: I wouldnt say its blowing the doors off. Dominos Pizza shares were 0.7 per cent, or 1.6p, higher last night, at 234.7p. Ahead of today's (rather overshadowed) Spring Statement, and more Brexit votes this evening, the Government has said it will slash tariffs on most goods entering the UK in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Supermarket Morrisons said its turnaround is 'well on track' as it revealed a near 9 per cent rise in annual profits to 406million and sales nudge up. Elsewhere, the Financial Conduct Authority has fined Dixons Carphone 29.1million for mis-selling a mobile phone insurance and technical support service called 'Geek Squad'. This is Money's team of reporters will be following Chancellor Philip Hammond's speech, gauging the reaction from across the City and trawling the treasury document for any nasty hidden surprises. Refresh to stay up to date. And to follow on the This is Money app, click here >> by Mathias Hariyadi She triggered the detonator as bomb squad and special agents surrounded house. Hours of negotiation came to nought. The standoff lasted about 12 hours, during which she threw an explosive device. The husband was arrested following revelations by another terror suspect. Jakarta (AsiaNews) In Sibolga, North Sumatra province, the wife of a suspected terrorist blew herself up along with one of her children using a rudimentary explosive device in the middle of the night, a few hours after her husbands arrest. Hours of tense negotiations between the woman and the anti-terrorist police unit to convince her to surrender came to nought. Religious leaders and family members, including her husband Husein (aka Abu Hamzah) tried to get her to surrender. We have received information that the wife blew herself and the children up at 1:30 am, National Police spokesman Brigadier General Dedi Prasetyo said. Husein's wife, whose identity was not revealed, activated the detonator as the bomb squad and agents of the Special Detachment 88 (Detasemen Khusus 88 or Densus 88) surrounded her home. The standoff lasted about 12 hours. During this time, the woman threw an explosive device at security forces, wounding a police officer and a civilian. The investigators believe that her husband heads the local cell of Jemaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), the largest jihadist group linked to the Islamic State (IS) group in the country. Husein was arrested yesterday after the interrogation of another suspected militant, Rinto Sugiharto, who was arrested in Lampung (South Sumatera) on Saturday with plans for an attack in Jakarta. Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo was scheduled to visit Lampung on Sunday. Today, Widodo praised the work of the intelligence services, but dismissed suggestions that planned terror attacks are linked to the upcoming general election on 17 April 2019. Google and Facebook rake in around half of Britain's 13bn online ads market between them Philip Hammond has called on the UK's competition watchdog to investigate the murky world of digital advertising. The Chancellor's move was in response to a major review that highlighted the dominance of Google and Facebook. It will pile pressure on the two US tech giants, which rake in around half of Britain's 13billion online ads market between them. In a letter to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), Hammond said the digital ads sector had been 'widely described as lacking transparency'. Hammond told MPs: 'We need to adapt our regulatory environment to ensure competition works for consumers in the digital market place, as it does in the real market place.' He has asked the CMA to make clear whether it would investigate soon, after it had suggested it would look at the issue. It follows similar recommendations for a study by House of Commons committees and Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright. Hammond said he recognised the CMA's ability to carry out a study could be hampered if there is a No Deal Brexit, which would mean it would have to assume several responsibilities that are handled by EU organisations at short notice. The CMA said its ability to launch new probes was 'heavily dependent' on the outcome of Brexit negotiations. Hammond said: 'The UK will remain a great place to do digital business but it will be a place where successful global tech giants pay their fair share, where competition policy works in consumers' interests and where the public are protected from online harms.' Veronique Laurys future as chief executive of B&Q owner Kingfisher looks increasingly uncertain after analysts asked if time was running out for the FTSE 100 boss. Investment bank Stifel downgraded the DIY group, suggesting shareholders were losing confidence in her five-year transformation plan. Laury, 53, joined Kingfisher in 2015 and has been racing to reduce costs, improve its IT system and integrate the products sold across the entire business. It also owns Screwfix and international brands Brico Depot and Castorama. Investment bank Stifel downgraded B&Q owner Kingfisher, suggesting shareholders were losing confidence in her five-year transformation plan But Stifel suggested that shareholders now think Laurys ambitions to achieve 500million in additional profits in less than two years are unachievable. She is now more than halfway through the transformation plan. Analysts at the bank blamed poor planning and an out-of-date DIY business model for the groups woes. Stifel has now urged the board to take action on management ahead of Kingfishers full-year results next Wednesday. The companys shares fell 0.6 per cent, or 1.3p, to 223.8p. Shopping centre owners Hammerson and Intu both fell after a report by Liberum issued a disappointing outlook for the retail property sector. It forecasted a 20 per cent decline in retail values across the two companies portfolio over the next two years. The grim forecast follows Hammersons botched attempt to buy Intu for 3.4billion last year. Stock Watch - Red Emperor Resources Shares in the oil and gas explorer Red Emperor Resources tanked after a test at a well at its Alaska site turned out to be a dud. The London-listed company, with partners 88 Energy and Pantheon Resources, said the quality of oil at the site did not warrant further testing. It was a major blow for the firm, which lists the location as one of only two projects it is involved in on its website. Yesterday, shares in Red Emperor plunged 85.2 per cent, or 4.33p, to 0.75p. Hammerson fell by 1.1 per cent, or 4p, to 374.8p. Intu was down 1.1 per cent, or 1.2p, to 110.25p. G4S, the worlds biggest security firm, was the biggest faller on FTSE 250 index, down 4.6 per cent, or 9.3p, to 194.5p, after its price target was slashed by RBC. The brokerage blamed messy results for the downgrade and said it was sceptical of a plan to separate its cash business. On the up was insulation and roofing firm SIG, with the biggest gains on the FTSE 250 after it was boosted by a Stifel research note. Analysts lifted their price target to 130p from 116p, sending shares up 6.9 per cent, or 9.1p, to 141.2p. Meanwhile, oilfield services provider Petrofac jumped 4.5 per cent, or 20.8p, to 486.3p, after it won a 760million project in Algeria. A buy recommendation for online travel firm On The Beach lifted shares by 4.9 per cent, or 19.5p, to 415.5p. Analysts at Liberum said the market has undervalued the companys potential and slapped a 560p target price on the stock. On The Beach has been expanding overseas amid a boom in demand for budget holidays. Liberum said its new products and overseas expansion gave it a long runway for the future. Cigarettes giant British American Tobacco fell 3.4 per cent, or 106p, to 2980p, after the US Food and Drug Administration revealed draft rules which could see flavoured e-cigarettes removed from convenience stores across America. Rival Imperial Brands also fell 1.8 per cent, or 47p, to 2583.5p. The two firms have been investing heavily in alternatives to traditional tobacco products, such as battery-powered vapour products. Dominos Pizza fell after Liberum raised concerns about its international prospects and the dispute with franchisees which run its outlets. Franchisees have been dragging their heels on new store openings as they demand a bigger share of Dominos profits. Analysts said: We do not feel the market fully appreciates the situation Dominos finds itself in. Debt is high and it may find that it has backed itself into a corner. Liberum said the row remains a crucial debate as to how Dominos returns to a sustainable growth model. Shares fell 3.4 per cent, or 8p, to 226.7p. Chancellor Philip Hammond has today committed 3billion in extra borrowing to deliver 30,000 new affordable homes in England. In the Spring Statement, the Chancellor announced that the Government will guarantee the extra borrowing by housing associations to support the delivery of the homes, but did not supply a timetable for delivery. The Chancellor also announced that 717million from the 5.5billion Housing Infrastructure Fund will be used to help 'unlock' up to 37,000 homes at sites including Old Oak Common in London, the Oxford-Cambridge Arc and Cheshire. The Government has not yet announced when it expects the new homes to be completed Chief executive of modular homes builder Project Etopia Joseph Daniels said: 'Supply of new homes remains the country's biggest problem so the Government's previously declared shift away from Help To Buy towards these new promises for tens of thousands of new homes represents a telling and important shift in ministers' chosen strategies to solve the housing crisis. 'Help to Buy has been a popular and successful initiative to give first-time buyers a leg up onto the housing ladder, but as a demand-side solution it would never have provided the antidote that only building can.' In November This is Money revealed that local councils have fallen over six years behind their own house building targets. Councils' own figures revealed that development across the UK is moving at such a glacial pace that 316 sites will have fallen short of targets by 889,803 homes within the next eight years. L&G Mortgage Club director Kevin Roberts Kevin Roberts, director, Legal & General Mortgage Club, said: 'Getting onto and up the housing ladder remains an aspiration for many people across the country. 'It's great to see that the Chancellor has announced an additional funding. 'However, if we are to keep the housing market moving, help is needed for those higher up the property ladder too. 'We have already seen stamp duty scrapped for first-time buyers, but reviewing this tax for last-time buyers would assist older homeowners to downsize or move to a home more suitable for their circumstances. 'This would help to free up housing stock, for example larger properties in school catchment areas for growing families.' Retail experts blasted the Chancellor's failure to address support for struggling High Streets as they continue to battle crippling business rates. Industry groups said Philip Hammond had missed a 'golden opportunity' to help, with more than 47,000 retailers facing a 128million hike to their rates bill from April 1. Thousands of jobs have been lost as stores shut across the country. High Street gloom: Thousands of jobs have been lost as stores shut across the country. Now, rates are set to soar to 50.4% of retailers' annual rent payments Now, rates are set to soar to 50.4 per cent of retailers' annual rent payments, the highest level since the system was introduced in 1990. The rates are based on the estimated rental value of a property and traditional retailers are often subject to much higher bills due to the size of their stores and number of people they employ. Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the British Retail Consortium, said it was disappointing that the statement did nothing to support shops. Analysis suggest the Treasury is set to rake in an additional 400million from business rates each year from this year until 2021. Robert Hayton, at property adviser Altus Group, said: 'The Chancellor missed a golden opportunity to help major retail and hospitality businesses who are reducing their estates and headcount as well as manufacturers and the services industries hurting from current uncertainties.' A former UBS trainee claims she was raped by a colleague 20 years her senior Investment bank UBS is being sued by a former trainee who claims it failed to protect her after she was raped by a senior colleague. The ex-staff member was allegedly raped by a banker 20 years older than her, then complained to the Swiss bank which did not do enough to help. She says she had to sit near the alleged rapist for almost three weeks after raising concerns. The alleged victim said the bank monitored her movements after she spoke up and allegedly coerced her into handing over hundreds of messages from the personal phones of friends who were also graduate trainees. It is claimed UBS also monitored her Twitter account. She is now suing the firm in a London employment tribunal. The woman has left UBS, and her alleged rapist also quit. UBS said: 'While we would never comment on individual claims ahead of formal hearings, in November an independent investigation into the allegations made by the former UBS employee concluded UBS made no fundamental errors.' The Government is being urged to delay the Making Tax Digital programme amid fears businesses won't be ready to meet the requirements by the 1 April deadline. This is due to lack of understanding, high costs of compliance and concerns that an overstretched HMRC won't be able to cope and assist businesses. According to figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility today, just 37,000 businesses have signed up. However, by the end of April this is predicted to rise to around 300,000 - suggesting a huge surge in firms leaving it until the very last minute. Headache: The Government says it remains committed to tax reform but the British Chambers of Commerce are urging for a delay to the Making Tax Digital programme Those who fail to comply face fines - although the Chancellor Philip Hammond says in the first year, these will be 'light'. It comes as he delivered a Spring Statement where he reiterated the Government's commitment to modernising the British tax system. Making Tax Digital involves mandatory digital record keeping for VAT and applies to businesses over the VAT threshold (with turnover over 85,000). The British Chambers of Commerce has called on the Government to delay it. Suren Thiru, head of economics at the British Chambers of Commerce, said: 'Business communities across the UK will view the lack of action to ease the administrative and cost burden related to the introduction of Making Tax Digital as a major misstep by the Government. 'Our Chamber research shows that with only a matter of weeks to go there still isn't sufficient understanding or preparation among businesses to make its rollout a success right now.' Today Chancellor Hammond made assurances that businesses wouldn't be heavily penalised for missing the 1 April deadline. 'The Government can confirm a light touch approach to penalties in the first year of implementation. 'Where businesses are doing their best to comply, no filing or record keeping penalties will be issued. 'The focus will be on supporting businesses to transition and the Government will therefore not be mandating Making Tax Digital for any new taxes or businesses in 2020.' Suren Thiru, head of economics at the British Chambers of Commerce says businesses will be concerned about the government's lack of action over Making Tax Digital But Suren added: 'While steps have been taken to have a light touch approach to penalties in the first year of implementation, businesses will want to know how this will work in practice and seek reassurances that HMRC's already stretched resources will be able to cope with supporting businesses through such a fundamental change to the tax system.' A week ago the BCC highlighted in a report that 19 per cent of companies required to take part have never heard of Making Tax Digital or know it only by name. Xero's small business tips with preparing for Making Tax Digital Software company Xero issued these tips for businesses to become compliant: 1. Don't panic. Digital tax is a big change and HMRC recognises that businesses require time to become familiar with the new system and requirements 2. Start preparing now. Businesses should aim to have access to the software they need by 1 April, and during the first year of MTD, the HMRC has said they will not pursue record-keeping penalties when businesses are doing their best to comply with the law 3. Seek professional help: The MTD programme is going to be a permanent change to the way businesses pay their tax, so there's no escape. If you're unsure, speak to an accountant who will be able to help. It said there was widespread dissatisfaction on the rollout of Making Tax Digital, particularly from small business, with significant new administrative burdens and a lack of clear guidance from HMRC commonly reported. A spokesperson added: 'We think that there will be chaos two days after scheduled Brexit and they won't know what they will do and HMRC won't have the resources to help as they are already stretched it's the wrong time to make moves of this size.' Gary Turner, Co-founder and managing director of Xero, an online accounting software business, recommends that business owners take action if they are uncertain. He said: 'Small business owners feel overwhelmed by paperwork and rules they don't have time to get to grips with. Many may see Making Tax Digital as another thorn in their side, but our research also shows that once business owners get on top of their finances, these businesses often prosper more quickly. 'The UK is a world leader when it comes to online spending per capita, yet we lag behind developed economies when it comes to business productivity and our archaic tax system, both of which need to be tackled.' 'Those already using HMRC approved accounting software should be fully compliant. 'Anyone that isn't should speak to an accountant or visit HMRC's website for a full list of approved providers.' To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee accused her Alabama hometown of trying to exploit her success by turning it into a tourist attraction like Elvis Presley's Graceland in a letter to a friend. The writer's bitter assessment of Monroeville came in a three-page letter that is being sold along with other items by the London-based Bonhams auctions. Lee used Monroeville as the model for fictional Maycomb, Alabama, in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book about racial injustice in the Jim Crow South. But in a letter she wrote to a friend in 1993, Lee complained harshly about the town. Referring to a sordid Southern family featured in some of William Faulkner's works, Lee wrote: 'You remember the Faulknerian prophecy - the Snopeses shall inherit the earth? They've already taken over Monroeville. To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee accused her Alabama hometown of trying to exploit her success by turning it into a tourist attraction like Elvis Presley's Graceland In her letter to the late Charles Weldon Carruth Lee bemoaned both an interstate sign pointing the way to Monroeville and the prevalence of mockingbird images in the city of about 5,900 people. Pictured: Mockingbird Inn, Monroeville 'What was once a tiny town of considerable character is now 6 times its size and populated by appalling people. 'Guess what: They are trying to turn Harper Lee into a tourist attraction like Graceland and Elvis Presley.' Lee died in 2016 following publication of Go Set a Watchman, an early version of Mockingbird that became only her second published book. In her letter to the late Charles Weldon Carruth, an old friend and fellow Alabama native, Lee bemoaned both an interstate sign pointing the way to Monroeville and the prevalence of mockingbird images in the city of about 5,900 people, which is located 90 miles north of Mobile. She wrote: 'Guess what: They are trying to turn Harper Lee into a tourist attraction like Graceland and Elvis Presley.' Pictured: items in a gift shop in the Monroe County Museum Her most pointed criticism was aimed at the Monroe County Museum, which has displays about Lee and her book located in the old courthouse that was used as a set model for the film version of 'Mockingbird' starring Gregory Peck. 'The hypocrites in charge, not one of whom I know, say they are doing this to `honor' me. What they are doing is trying to drown me in their own bad taste, and are embarrassing me beyond endurance,' said Lee. Lee later sued the museum for selling souvenirs related to her novel and using the title of the book for its website address. Her estate filed suit last year over the script for the current hit Broadway adaption of 'Mockingbird,' starring Jeff Daniels as lawyer Atticus Finch. Aside from the letter, the auction includes several sketches by Lee and a signed first edition of 'Mockingbird.' Vietnam has called for charges against a woman accused of murdering Kim Jong-un's half brother to be dropped after the other suspect in the case was set free. Foreign Minister Pham Binh Binh asked Malaysian counterpart Saifuddin Abdullah to 'ensure a fair trial and free Vietnamese citizen' Doan Thi Huong. It comes two days after a Malaysian court dropped charges against Huong's co-defendant, Indonesian Siti Aisyah. Aisyah and Huong have been accused of poisoning Kim Jong Nam, half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, with liquid VX nerve agent at Kuala Lumpur airport in February 2017. Conviction could carry the death penalty. Huong made headlines after she was pictured posing for a Facebook selfie in an image posted online just days before the assassination. A similar white top was worn by a woman shown in CCTV footage from the terminal minutes after Jong-nam was poisoned to death. Vietnam has called for charges against Doan Thi Huong (centre on Monday) to be dropped after the other suspect in the Kim Jong-nam murder case was set free Huong made headlines after she was pictured posing for a Facebook selfie in an image posted online just days before the assassination A similar white top was worn by a woman shown in CCTV footage from the terminal minutes after Jong-nam was poisoned to death Minh said in the phone conversation to Abdullah that senior leaders and the people of Vietnam have paid close attention to the trial. Huong's father, Doan Van Thanh, said Siti Aisyah's release was good news for his family. 'I believe that my daughter will be released too because she is innocent. We haven't received any information from Malaysia recently, and we are eager to hear from them now,' Thanh told Reuters. Huong and Aisyah have been accused of poisoning Kim Jong-nam, right, half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, left, with liquid VX at Kuala Lumpur airport in February 2017 The court is scheduled to presume proceedings on Thursday. Defence lawyers have maintained that the women were pawns in an assassination orchestrated by North Korean agents. During the trial, the court was shown CCTV footage of two women allegedly assaulting Kim Jong Nam while he prepared to check in for a flight. Siti Aisyah and Huong have maintained that they believed they had been hired to participate in a reality TV prank show. A HIV-positive man has become the father to healthy twin daughters after paying 80,000 to a clinic in Cyprus for a surrogate birth. Antonio Marsocci, 47, was so determined to have children that he defied doctors who warned him of the small risk that his offspring would be born with the disease. The British businessman, who is gay and single, was repeatedly turned down before a clinic in Cyprus offered its services, claiming the risk of passing on his HIV was remote. An egg was donated by a mother-of-one living in Eastern Europe which was then fertilised with Mr Marsocci's sperm and implanted into a surrogate from the Ukraine. Identical twins Anna and Maria were born months later on December 28, and Mr Marcossi is now waiting for his daughters to be issued with British passports before returning to south-west London. Antonio with Maria right and Anna left. Mr Marsocci had the girls via an egg donor He said: 'I can't stop looking at them and cuddling them, they are so beautiful. When a blood test confirmed they were both free from HIV I broke down and wept. 'I knew the risk of me passing on the virus was tiny but there was always that little element of worry so I was overjoyed when the girls tested negative. I have been through so much disappointment in my life. 'So to finally be a dad feels like a miracle, just a dream come true.' His journey to become a parent began at the end of 2017 when a long-term relationship broke down. Anna left, Maria right, at four weeks. Antonio had skin to skin shortly after the birth 'I always longed to have children and I always believed I'd have a baby with a partner,' he said, adding: 'But I began to consider going it alone.' Italian-born Mr Marsocci, looked into adoption and even travelled to the States in the hope of having a family. 'But the fact I was single, gay and HIV positive was always a barrier. While adoption agencies said I could adopt, priority would always be given to couples and single mums first - which meant I might wait for years and never get to the top of the list. 'Meanwhile IVF clinics in America said I would never find a surrogate to carry the babies of a man diagnosed with HIV.' Antonio with newborn Maria and Anna. Fifteen 15 years ago he was diagnosed with HIV Then in January 2018 a friend mentioned to him that a pioneering clinic in Cyprus might be able to help. 'When doctors there explained modern medicine meant a woman could safely carry my babies and they would be born healthy I was delighted.' Within weeks of signing up to the clinic, an anonymous egg donor was found in Eastern Europe. 'We never met - all I know is she is blonde, blue-eyed and tall and a married mum of one,' he said. After taking drugs to help her ovulate, five eggs were successfully fertilised and the resulting embryos frozen while a surrogate was found who would carry them. Mr Marsocci said: 'Only one embryo was implanted into he surrogate to guard against twins. So I was amazed to be told she was pregnant and then that I was having twins! But it was meant to be and I was delighted.' Within weeks of signing up to the clinic, an anonymous egg donor was found in Eastern Europe In November Mr Marsocci was told the surrogate was being cared for in hospital and that his babies could be born any day Over the next six months Mr Marsocci regularly flew to Cyprus to accompany the pregnant surrogate to ultrasound scans. He admitted: 'Those scans were so emotional and I feel so grateful to both women. However the meetings with the surrogate were very clinical - mostly because she didn't speak any English so we couldn't converse at all.' In November Mr Marsocci was told the surrogate was being cared for in hospital and that his babies could be born any day. He said: 'In fact they arrived two weeks shy of their due date. I got a call on Christmas day to say it was likely to happen and the next day, a bundle of nerves, flew to Cyprus.' Mr Marsocci regularly flew to Cyprus to accompany the pregnant surrogate to ultrasound scans On December 28, Anna was born by c-section swiftly followed by Maria two minutes later with both weighing a healthy 5Ib 7oz. He said: 'I said to the nurse, 'How will I tell them apart?' She laughed and said, 'don't worry we'll dress them in different clothes.' Three days later Mr Marsocci left the hospital with his daughters. The whole process has cost Mr Marsocci 80,000 of his savings. 'But my girls are worth every penny,' he said Sadly his 80-year-old mother and brother, 49, have so far refused to speak with him. 'Friends and some family were very supportive and thrilled for me,' he said, 'but when I told my brother of my plans he didn't want me to go ahead and my parents were never able to accept I am gay.' He added: 'Some might say I have denied my daughters a mum. But I believe having a loving parent is what really matters and I will be honest with my girls about how they were conceived as they grow up.' 'Most of my friends are women - a good woman friend came with me to Cyprus to help me care for the twins.' 'As a single working dad I will also have to have help - maybe a female nanny. ' 'Also the girls each have a sister - they already sleep entwined together in the same cot. I think they will be close, even though they are developing quite distinct personalities. Anna is very smiley and always demanding cuddles whereas Maria smiles but is more independent and reserved.' Both girls were the result of one egg donated by a mother-of-one living in Eastern Europe He added: 'I am on tablets to keep my HIV under control. As long as I continue to take medication my life expectancy is normal.' Meanhile, he didn't rule out having a son. 'I still have four frozen embryos left,' he said, 'a little boy would be a lovely balance to my family.' The whole process has cost Mr Marsocci 80,000 of his savings. 'But my girls are worth every penny,' he said, 'I don't even mind when they cry. I'm just loving every minute of being a dad.' The heartbroken parents of a University of Southern California senior killed during an off-campus robbery attempt appeared at a press conference on Tuesday begging anyone with information to come forward. Music student Victor McElhaney, 21, was shot dead early Sunday after leaving a market with friends. Detectives were searching for three or four male suspects who fled in a newer model, dark sedan, police Capt. Billy Hayes said. Grief: Oakland City Councilwoman Lynette McElhaney, left, comforts her husband Clarence McElhaney, as they talk about their slain son, USC student Victor McElhaney, 21 The councilwoman said her son is 'not a homicide number or statistic, or just another black boy gunned down in South Central Los Angeles' Councilwoman McElhaney spoke movingly of her son (right), saying he came into the world a drummer and was drumming from the moment he could sit up Members of the local media film the scene of a fatal shooting in Los Angeles, Sunday The victim's mother, Oakland City Councilwoman Lynette McElhaney, described her son's life from a high-risk pregnancy and premature delivery through an early talent for drumming to his start of classes at USC. 'Victor's not a homicide number or statistic, or just another black boy gunned down in South Central Los Angeles,' she said. 'I want you all to know that Victor came into the world a drummer. He was drumming from the moment he could sit up.' Her son was an inquisitive young man who believed music could heal the world, she said. 'Victor was my sunshine,' the councilwoman said. 'And I prayed like every mama, every day: Please dont take my sunshine away.' Addressing the person who took her son's life directly, the bereveaed mother said: 'you can come forward and we will love you.' Victor's father, Clarence McElhaney, broke down in tears as he pleaded for anyone with information on possible suspects to speak up. Music man: McElhaney transferred to USC in 2017 to study jazz at the Thornton School of Music Victor's mother (center) said of the young man was her 'sunshine' and believed music could heal the world 'Silence is worse than the bullet that killed my son,' he said, as he urged the culprit to 'be a man' and take responsibility for his actions. Police say McElhaney and eight other USC students were confronted shortly after midnight at the market about a mile from campus. The 21-year-old musician was shot as the assailants, said to be three or four men in their 20s, rifled through the victims' pockets, Hayes said. McElhaney was in critical condition when he was rushed to a hospital and later died. 'We're looking at this as a robbery attempt that went bad,' Hayes said. Lynette and Clarence McElhaney listen as others eulogize their son Tuesday Oakland City Councilwoman Lynette McElhaney is embraced Los Angeles Police Captain William Hayes said detectives were searching for three or four male suspects who fled in a newer model, dark sedan McElhaney transferred to USC in 2017 to study jazz at the Thornton School of Music. Friends said he was a member of USC's Center for Black Cultural and Student Affairs and mentored young musicians. He also taught at the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music. Angela Wellman, founding director of OPC, posted a message on the organization's Facebook mourning McElhany, whom she called 'a shining light that gave us hope.' 'Victor, you embody our dreams and hopes for our children,' the post read. 'Thank you for your music and your service and dedication to the music.' The slain musician's family had previously suffered through the killing of 17-year-old Torian Hughes, who Lynette McElhaney helped raise and described as her grandson. Hughes was shot on an Oakland street in what prosecutors described as robbery attempt. Trial for a suspect, Shiheim Johnson, is currently underway in an Alameda County court. A GoFundMe campaign launched to help the McElhaney family lay Victor to rest and organize a memorial concert has drawn more than $39,000 as of Wednesday morning, easily surpassing its initial goal of $30,000. More young girls pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and math thats the hope of Open Science Network, Vancouvers first community science lab. STEM Mentoring Cafe program promotes science education for young girls through STEM programs and activities by connecting young girls with STEM professionals. Two of the programs participants, Crystal and Ruini, have been working with one of their mentor, Biologist and Neuroscientist Emily Fan, on developing a novel biocompatible material made out of chitosan and silk, with support from OSNs President, Scott Pownall. TED Rogers Community Grant has recognized their work. Almost four in ten families with unmarried parents are in danger of breaking apart, research suggests. While 39 per cent of cohabiting mothers and fathers had serious doubts their family would stay together, only 27 per cent of married ones had similar concerns. The international survey found British parents were more troubled by their relationship than those in other countries. The international survey found British parents were more troubled by their relationship than those in other countries (stock image) In the US, 36 per cent of cohabitee parents said they had serious doubts. In Canada it was 34 per cent, and in France just 31 per cent. The findings were based on a survey of nearly 16,500 parents in 11 countries, including 2,344 from the UK. Scientists at the University of Virginia worked on the project for the US-based Institute for Family Studies. When asked if their relationship was more important than other things in their life only 54 per cent of British cohabitee parents put their partnership first. By contrast, 71 per cent of married parents said their relationship was their top priority. One in five British families about 1.25million include unmarried cohabiting parents. More than one in 20 of these families are thought to break up each year, about four times the rate of those led by married parents. Cyclists are fearing for their safety after a number of booby traps appeared on popular cycle paths. Shattered glass, screws and thumbtacks have recently been found spread across suburbs in Brisbane, Queensland, leaving residents concerned they could suffer serious injury. The cyclists are fed up with the targeted attacks, which they believe are road rage taken to the extreme. Aidan, from Brisbane, was enjoying his morning run on March 1 when he noticed the booby traps sprawled across a bike path. Shattered glass, screws and thumbtacks have been found spread across suburbs in Brisbane, QLD, leaving residents concerned they could suffer serious injury 'At 8am this morning as I was running along the Bicentennial Bikeway I saw two other joggers frantically trying to stop cyclists whilst picking up something off the path,' he wrote on Facebook. 'As I got closer I realised hundreds of nails had been scattered along the path.' 'Within minutes there was a group of around 20 of us picking up these nails.' After clearing the trap, Aidan continued his run but was only stopped 200 metres later to find glass across the width of the path. The concerned jogger questioned why someone would target cyclists who are freeing up the roadways. 'Why would anyone target people for keeping cars off the road and staying fit and healthy?' he wrote. The cyclists are fed up with the targeted attacks which they believe is road rage taken to the extreme (pictured: thumbtack in a tyre) Aidan, from Brisbane, was on his morning run on March 1 when he noticed the booby traps sprawled across a bike path (pictured) 'Attitudes towards cyclists in our society is appalling. The silence of government and QPS is deafening.' Over 300 concerned resident's commented on Aidan's Facebook post, sharing their shock at the sighting. 'Not only a risk to walkers and cyclists but dogs that are walked along the river too,' one person wrote. 'This is truly dreadful. It's okay to have an opinion but definitely not okay to put someone else's safety at risk,' wrote another. Barry Fields, from Jax Tyres in Yeerongpilly, south Brisbane, said there has been an increase in motorists visiting with busted tyres - suggesting the attack is not just directed at cyclists. 'Probably six times as many as what we usually have all the same sort of objects in the tyres as well,' Mr Fields told 7 News. After clearing the trap, Aidan continued his run but was only stopped 200 metres later to find glass across the width of the path (pictured) Barry Fields, from Jax Tyres in Yeerongpilly (pictured), south Brisbane, said he's had an increase in motorists visiting with busted tyres Many of the motorists have reported the flat tyres after driving through the Brisbane Corso. They have been forced to spend about $500 to repair the tyres. 'The other day we had four ladies in all lived in the same street,' Mr Fields said. Mr Fields said his tyre store had also fallen victim to the attacks, claiming someone had slingshot marbles through his window. Bicycle Queensland CEO Anne Savage spoke to the attacks on bike paths and said she hoped the mystery attacker was caught. 'It's a life-endangering offence and we do hope to see the police crackdown and catch this person,' she said. A man accused of killing his girlfriend allegedly put her body in the boot of his car and drove to a shopping centre before dumping it. Samah Baker, 30, was last seen after she was dropped off by a friend at her Parramatta home, in Sydney's west, in the early hours of January 4. Her on-and-off lover James Hachem, 32, has been charged with her murder. His lawyer Warwick Korn said Mr Hachem will defend the charge. Scroll down for video Samah Baker, 30, was last seen after she was dropped off by a friend at her Parramatta home, in Sydney's west, in the early hours of January 4 Her on-and-off lover James Hachem (pictured), 32, has been charged with her murder Ms Baker was seen on CCTV in a hotel elevator (pictured) with her alleged murderer in the days prior to her death Ms Baker disappeared on January 4, along with her two mobile phones, and her Facebook account was used at a time police have alleged she was dead. Police have alleged that Mr Hachem put Ms Baker's body in the boot of his car after killing her and drove her to several locations across Sydney on January 4. Mr Hachem allegedly bought cleaning products at a store in Hurstville before returning home. He then allegedly drove to a rural area that night with rubbish bags in the car and disposed of her body there. Mr Hachem told police investigators that the last time he saw her she was watching a Netflix television series called You, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. Police have alleged that they examined her computer and found she was actually watching Gilmore Girls. You is a show about a stalker who uses a murdered person's social media accounts in order to deceive their friends and family into thinking they are still alive. Ms Baker was seen on CCTV in a hotel elevator with her alleged murderer in the days prior to her death. THE DEATH OF SAMAH BAKER January 2, 3 Samah Baker, 30, spent time at the Vibe Hotel in North Sydney with her on-and-off again lover James Hachem, 32. January 4 Early hours: Ms Baker is last seen after being dropped off by a friend at her unit in Parramatta. 7am: Police allege after killing Ms Baker, Mr Hachem put her body in the boot of his car and drove to his family home. 9am: Mr Hachem allegedly drove to Hurstville Westfield and parked his car. 3pm: Mr Hachem allegedly left the Westfield and returned home with cleaning products. Later that night: Mr Hachem allegedly drove to a rural area and disposed of Ms Baker's body. Advertisement Police believe the Ms Baker spent most of her last two days alive with Hachem at the $183-a-night Vibe Hotel in North Sydney. Mr Hachem was arrested at Hurstville Shopping Centre on Friday morning and charged with her murder. Hachem did not appear when his matter was briefly mentioned at Parramatta Local Court on Tuesday. His lawyer Warwick Korn did not apply for bail and it was formally refused. Mr Korn told reporters outside court he intended to prepare a bail application in the coming weeks. 'It's a murder charge - it is the most serious criminal offence we have - it warrants and it deserves a well-prepared bail application and we'll do that in the weeks to come,' he said. The matter was adjourned until May 16. Detectives are continuing to search for Ms Baker's body. Local detectives, with help from the homicide squad, launched an immediate investigation and last week searched bushland at Yarra, southwest of Goulburn. According to court documents, Ms Samah was allegedly murdered between 2.30am and 8am on January 4. Investigators are appealing for anyone who saw a 2014 silver Mitsubishi Lancer on Early Street between 1am and 4am on January 4, or along the Hume Highway between 5pm later that day and 5am on January 5. Labor Opposition leader Bill Shorten has attacked 'fat cat' bosses as he throws his support behind a union proposal to increase the minimum wage by $43 a week. The Fair Work Commission would have to deliver a $2,200 annual pay rise to 2.3 million low-paid workers if Mr Shorten's union-backed plan is successful. Labour leader Bill Shorten called Australian bosses 'fat cats' as he supported a union proposal to increase the weekly minimum wage by $43 However, small business owners and employer groups are opposed to Shorten's plan, which comes as his party leads the Coalition in polls. 'I love this argument put aside by the bosses of Australia, the fat cats, the top end of town,' Mr Shorten said. 'They say if we pay the poorest workers in Australia a bit more, that's out of control. But how is it that the executives are happy to take more and more in corporate profits?' The Fair Work Commission, which sets the minimum wage, is an independent body that operates under the Fair Work Act 2009. Mr Shorten has suggested a Labor government could use 'another tool or mechanism ... to change legislation' to boost the minimum wage instead of relying solely on the commission. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry is against governments using legislation when the rate of pay rises has been set by an independent body for more than a century. 'Australians living on the minimum wage desperately need a pay rise,' according to the Australian Council of Trade Unions (Bill Shorten pictured) 'No one in Australia should be forced to work below the poverty line but that is exactly what the current minimum wage guarantees,' Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) Secretary Sally McManus said. The ACTU is pushing for a six per cent rise to the weekly minimum wage equating to $762.20 a week, up from $719.20, this year. A living wage is 60 per cent of the average national median wage, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The ACTU wants a further 5.5 per cent increase in 2020 to $852 a week to achieve their living wage target. Australia's minimum wage is $18.93 an hour or $719.20 per 38 hour week before tax. Australia's minimum wage is $18.93 an hour or $719.20 per 38 hour week before tax. The ACTU is pushing for a six per cent rise to the weekly minimum wage equating to $762.20 a week Council of Small Business Australia CEO Peter Strong said the idea is 'impractical' for small businesses and would make goods more expensive for consumers. 'We're not against pay rises. This isn't a war between employers and employees. Staff know to have a job the business needs to be profitable,' he said. 'A lot of small businesses would need to retrench by cutting down hours or letting staff go.' What exactly are Mr Shorten and unions proposing? CURRENT MINIMUM WAGE Hourly: $18.93 Weekly (38 hours): $719.20 Yearly: $37,398 PROPOSED MINIMUM WAGE Hourly: $20.06 Weekly (38 hours): $762.20 Yearly: $39,634 Advertisement Council of Small Business Australia CEO Peter Strong said the idea is 'impractical' for small businesses and would make goods more expensive for consumers Dozens of customers who had their money returned when a travel agency went bust are outraged that their refunds were pulled from their credit card accounts. Brisbane-based Bestjet Travel went into voluntary administration a week before Christmas, leaving 4,684 unsecured creditors seeking $10.8million. Most of those are customers who haven't been refunded, with more than 3,500 people joining a Facebook group. The Australian Financial Complaints Authority has received a series of complaints about customers' credit card charge refunds being reversed by a third party payments company. Brisbane-based Bestjet Travel (founder Rachel James, left, with husband Michael James) went into voluntary administration a week before Christmas, leaving 4,684 unsecured creditors seeking $10.8million and dozens of customers demanding refunds 'A common complaint we have received has been in relation to credit card charge backs,' a spokeswoman for the government agency said. 'These complaints include financial firms reversing charge backs or being slow to process requests.' AFCA said that in a 'number of cases', payment companies associated with Bestjet had disputed charge backs on the basis that 'they believe the bookings have been honoured'. IntegraPay has been accused of failing to honour charge backs to customer credit cards. Daily Mail Australia has contacted them for a response. Chartered accounting firm Pilot Partners, which is handling the administration of Bestjet, said it could take years for customers to recover their money. 'It could take months, it could take years,' the group's partner Nigel Markey told Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday. The Australian Financial Complaints Authority has received dozens of complaints about Bestjet customers having their refunds being pulled from their banks accounts 'What we don't know is how many of those will get charge backs.' Disgruntled customers have joined the Bestjet Fiasco Action Group on Facebook, which has more than 3,500 members. Group administrator Kate Ryder, a registered nurse, lost $3,150 in early December after booking Emirates flights from Sydney to Dublin for herself and a partner for June this year. It was to include a stopover in France so she could see the Women's World Cup. Bestjet, however, failed to process the order, leaving Ms Ryder with no airline tickets and a fight to recover her money. 'Look, I'm furious,' she told Daily Mail Australia. Ms Ryder is particularly angry at IntegraPay for failing to process her credit card charge refund after Bestjet collapsed. Kate Ryder (pictured), a registered nurse, lost $3,100 in early December after booking Emirates flights from Sydney to Dublin for herself and a partner for June this year 'Until this collapse happened, we thought we were just dealing with Bestjet and this has been what's most frustrating,' she said. After going into voluntary administration, Bestjet customers were sent emails advising them not to cancel bookings made before December 11 last year. Bestjet's founder and former managing director Rachel James sold the business McVicker International in November last year, weeks before Bestjet and its subsidiaries Wynyard Travel and Brooklyn Travel went into voluntary administration. Despite that, Pilot Partners said the new owner Robert McVicker had told them Bestjet's servers were still under the control of the previous owner last year. Rachel James is also the wife of failed Air Australia boss and bankrupt Michael James. A judge has ordered demolition to start on billionaire Mohamed Hadids controversial monster mansion which neighbors dubbed the Starship Enterprise because its so huge. Mohamed Hadid, 70, has been ordered to demolish the third floor of his megamansion by May 15 The 70-year-old father of supermodels Gigi and Bella Hadid has just two months to tear down the illegal third floor of his half-built house in ritzy Bel Air, California. And the buildings giant pool deck - also built without a permit - must be torn down by September 15 this year, ruled Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Craig Karlan. Neighbors suing Hadid to try to force him to demolish the building, were jubilant. Its good news, said Bibi Horacek. The Starship Enterprise is coming down. In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Hadid vowed to adhere to the judges orders. But he warned: If we continue to have the heavy rain weve been having in LA, that could delay the demolition work and we may have to go back to the judge to ask for an extension. It took six court hearings for Hadids attorneys, LA City lawyers and attorneys from the citys Department of Building and Safety to come up with a demolition plan that satisfied both Judge Karlan and concerned neighbors who worry that if the demolition work is not done properly and safely, it could pose a danger to nearby homes. Addressing the safety issues in his order, Judge Karlan ruled that the City shall make two unannounced visits each weekday, and one on Saturdays, to make sure the demo work is being done safely. Hadid must pay the costs of those inspections. A Certified Safety Monitor must also be on site during any demo work, which must be carried out by a licensed contractor. In addition, the judge ordered that no explosives or bulldozers could be used in the demolition and before the pool deck is torn down, a five-foot high chain link fence, lined with plywood, must be put up to absorb the shock of any debris rolling down the hill. Monster house: Billionaire developer Mohamed Hadid was ordered to demolish the illegal third floor of his unfinished Bel-Air mega-mansion Hadid - the father of models Gigi and Bella Hadid - was sued in a civil case by angry neighbors of the 30,000 sq ft house who would like to see it torn down Judge Karlan ruled that the houses third story - including roof, walls and stairs leading to it - must be torn down by May 15 this year. And demolition of the pool deck must start by April 15 and be finished by September 15 this year. Of the judges demolition deadlines, Hadid told DailyMail.com: Weather permitting, I think we will be able to complete the work by the dates the judge ordered. We want to do the demolition work properly and safely. We are trying to minimize the impact of the demolition on the local community. Hadid - who, in an earlier interview vowed to finish, not demolish the partially-built mega-mansion - added that he plans to replace the current sprawling, and illegal, pool deck with a smaller deck and pool. I have applied for a building permit for a new pool deck and once that is approved, and the existing pool deck is demolished, I will start construction of the new pool deck and complete the house. The neighbors suing Hadid commissioned stunning photographs - taken by drone and featured exclusively in DailyMail.com - which illustrate just how colossal Hadid's house is. Bibi Horaceks husband Joe calls the house a gigantic monstrosity,' which is not only an eyesore but also a danger to neighbors. And he insists it spans at least 30,000 square feet, more than double the size it was supposed to be. The saga of how Hadid set out to build one of the biggest and most expensive luxury homes in LA has been full of controversy since he bought the hilltop plot in 2011 for $1.9 million. He knocked down the ranch-style house that was already there and started building his monster mansion. Neighbors have been fighting for years for the demolition of the property because of all the alleged unapproved construction. The development of the home has also been an eyesore to nearby residents After demolishing the original house, Hadid began work on his monster project which, as the pictures show, soon came to dominate the site and surrounding area Slide me Original plans: A rendering shows the mansion was intended to be 14,000 sq ft and two stories high (pictured left) but Hadid expanded the home to nearly double its size without the city's approval Neighbors watched with increasing alarm as the massive house grew bigger and bigger, adding a 70-seat movie theater, plus two huge decks included on the property, which are also illegal, they contend. But Hadid - hoping to sell the giant mansion for $100 million plus - continued to build, despite orders from Los Angeles City to stop, and in December 2015, in an almost-unprecedented move, the city decided to prosecute him criminally. Hadid pleaded no contest to three criminal charges involving illegal construction and in July 2017 he was sentenced to a 180-day jail sentence if he doesnt reduce the size of the house and bring it into compliance with city building codes - or demolish it - within the three years of probation the judge also imposed. In addition, he was fined $3,000, ordered to pay $14,191 in fees to LA city, and serve 200 hours of community service. A record-breaking heatwave in parts of Australia has created prime conditions for a tropical cyclone to form off the coast of Queensland. Meanwhile, Sydneysiders have been warned to brace themselves as the city is slammed with rainfall and thunderstorms. The wild weather will bring showers on Wednesday afternoon, before progressing into significant rainfall and storms by Thursday morning. The wild weather will bring showers on Wednesday afternoon, before progressing into significant rainfall and storms by Thursday morning A record-breaking heatwave in parts of Australia has created prime conditions for a tropical cyclone to form off the coast of Queensland 'There is a potential for widespread rain in coming days, especially Thursday and early Friday,' Weatherzone Meteorologist Jacob Cronje told Daily Mail Australia. 'We're looking at very good rainfall potential from early in the morning in Sydney and on the Central Coast.' The showers are expected to strengthen throughout Thursday and into Friday morning. Forecasters are also witnessing early indications of a tropical low pressure system off the Cape York Peninsula, in far north Queensland. The wild weather comes only days after parts of the nation sweltered through yet another record-breaking heatwave (pictured) The indications don't necessarily mean a cyclone will certainly form, though. Mr Cronje said conditions need to perfectly align for the pressure system to continue to develop. 'But if it does form a cyclone, it is going to change direction each day and the outlook will continue to change,' he said. 'At this point, whatever does form looks fairly stationary up until next weekend.' He said there is a 'slightly elevated chance of enhanced tropical activity in the region', while lower areas of the state battle warmer weather. If the cyclone does form, it would be the third to hit the region in a matter of months If the cyclone does form, it would be the third to hit the region in a matter of months, after Cyclone Owen and Penny dumped substantial rain on the Gulf of Carpentaria and the region was hit with 120km/h winds. Cyclone Oma also hit in February, drowning the south-east coast of Queensland in rain. Ipswich reached 41C this week, while Brisbane's CBD sweltered through 37C temperatures. Amberley and Barcaldine in regional Queensland also broke March temperature records, with the mercury soaring to the low 40's. Mr Cronje also said early indications suggest another low pressure system will develop off the Kimberley coast by the middle of next week. Victoria is expected to avoid most of the unusual weather patterns, with temperatures reaching 29C by Saturday in Melbourne. The mercury in Perth will reach 31C in the coming days, while Adelaide and Darwin will reach low 30's. Shocking footage has emerged of a small child sitting behind the wheel and steering a car down a busy motorway. The motorist who filmed the incident said he was passing the other car on the Auckland-Waiwera motorway on Tuesday when he spotted the boy driving. The child was sitting in the passenger seat without a car seat before moving into the driver's lap and taking control of the steering wheel while driving towards the Auckland Harbour Bridge. The boy noticed he was being filmed and looked directly at the camera while still in control of the car. The stunned man who captured the video told Stuff he couldn't believe what he had witnessed. 'You can get your kids driving and stuff like that around the neighbourhood but on the harbour bridge? Probably not,' he said. The man hasn't reported the incident to police as he was unable to obtain information about the car. A driver was passing on the Auckland-Waiwera motorway towards Auckland Harbour Bridge when he noticed a young boy driving a car However, the video was shared on Facebook and has attracted attention from shocked individuals. 'If someone smashes into them, that kid's gone,' one user posted. Similar photos emerged on Facebook in January as a woman witnessed a young child sitting in a mother's lap. The young child was driving the car while the mother in the drivers seat was using her phone. 'The child was jumping around on the front seat playing with his mother and then he moved over to the driver's seat,' the woman posted. 'The driving started to get a bit crazy and when they changed lanes, I got alongside her and saw the kid driving the car and mum was texting on her phone,' she wrote. The conviction of Cardinal George Pell paves the way for blanked out pages from the child abuse royal commission report to be released for the first time. The Royal Commission redacted more than 60 pages of its 2017 final report about the Ballarat diocese, at least some of which was believed to relate to Pell. Pell, 77, was born and grew up in the regional Victorian city, and served as a priest and as a senior administrator in the Catholic church there from 1973 until 1987. The mystery pages are believed to report on what was done about paedophile priests in the diocese where Pell was in a position of power. One of Australia's worst paedophile priests, Gerald Francis Ridsdale, worked in the area. He was most recently found guilty of abusing 11 boys and one girl from 1962 to the 1980s. Pell and Ridsdale shared a house together for 10 months in the presbytery where Ridsdale molested an 11-year-old girl. George Pell in 1987, when he was named as an assistant bishop for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne A redacted passage from the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse report Pell with Gerard Ridsdale, one of Australia's worst paedophile priests, on left. His mugshot is on right The redactions to the royal commission were made so 'current or future civil or criminal proceedings' were not prejudiced. Court watchers have foreshadowed that the report will be released in the near future, and the royal commissioners always expected the unredacted report would be published one day. Louise Milligan, author of a Pell about book, tweeted: 'All of the Royal Commission's final report as concerns Pell has been redacted while his trial was running. 'Pages and pages of blacked out stuff. It's coming'. But Daily Mail Australia understands the pages are unlikely to be released until after Pell has exhausted his appeal options. The federal Attorney-General's department said in a statement that unredacted parts of the royal commission report would not be released until state prosecutors deemed that the legal process was finalised. George Pell grew up in Ballarat. He is pictured here (centre) in a 1957 St Patrick's College, Ballarat, yearbook hamming it up in a school play Protesters call for justice outside Cardinal Pell's sentencing in Melbourne on Wednesday A tweet from Louise Milligan, author of Cardinal, a landmark book about Pell Pell was today sentenced to a minimum three years and eight months jail time, with a maximum sentence of six years. Pell was convicted of five charges of rape and molestation for incidents involving two boys, in late 1996 and early 1997. He was born in Ballarat in 1941 and rose to become one of Pope Francis's closest advisors and Vatican treasurer. He has since been dumped from that role after becoming the highest ranking Catholic priest in the world to be convicted of sex abuse charges. Pell's appeal is listed to face court in June. His lawyers will argue grounds including that the verdict was 'unreasonable or unsafe.' Another ground of appeal will involve an argument that the jury was not allowed to watch an animated video in the defence's closing remarks. The Victorian Office of Public Prosecutions did not respond to a request for comment. A Connecticut university has denied it was at fault after a student choked to death during a pancake eating contest on campus in 2017. Caitlin Nelson, 20, was participating in Sacred Heart University's Greek Week celebration on March 20, 2017 when she began choking. The sorority woman fell to the floor and started shaking uncontrollably after eating multiple pancakes in a short period of time. Lawyers for Sacred Heart University blamed Nelson's own actions for her death in court documents filed Tuesday in response to a wrongful death lawsuit brought by Nelson's mother, who is seeking an undisclosed amount of money. Rosanne Nelson is accusing the Catholic school of approving the contest despite the dangers and failing to provide adequate medical personnel. Nelson's mother filed a lawsuit against Sacred Heart in October Nelson, 20, was participating in Sacred Heart University's Greek Week celebration on March 20, 2017 when she began choking. Pictured is Sacred Heart University Rosanne filed the lawsuit against Sacred Heard in October, saying she wanted to raise awareness of the dangers of amateur eating contests. She said responding officers who treated Nelson found a mass of pancake paste 'like concrete' in her airway. The official cause of death was 'asphyxia due to obstruction of airway by bolus of food'. Nelson passed away at Columbia University Medical Center three days after the event. Nelson, whose father was a police officer killed in the September 11 attacks, received a heroes' escort by Port Authority police as her body was taken to the New York Office of the Chief Medical Examiner's office. Witnesses at the Greek life dinner said Nelson had eaten about four or five pancakes when she suddenly fell to the floor and started shaking uncontrollably. Two nursing students who were there immediately began lifesaving measures and were quickly joined by police officers and paramedics, Fairfield Police Lt Bob Kalamaras said at the time. Nelson was taken to a hospital in Bridgeport in critical but stable condition and transferred to New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, where she died days later. Lawyers for Sacred Heart University blamed Nelson's own actions for her death in court documents filed Tuesday in response to a wrongful death lawsuit brought by Nelson's mother A Mass dedicated to Nelson took place days after the tragedy. It was followed by an impromptu candlelight vigil (pictured) Kalamaras said Nelson suffered from food allergies but that they did not contribute to her death. 'It's a tragic event that started out as something fun,' Kalamaras said. 'It was just a tragic accident.' Nelson was studying to be a social worker and was the vice president of her sorority, Kappa Delta. Several thousand people gathered on the Sacred Heart campus after the tragedy to remember Nelson and share their grief. A video surfaced of Nelson paying tribute to her father at a 9/11 memorial service at Ground Zero in 2012 (pictured) after her death A Mass dedicated to her was followed by an impromptu candlelight vigil. Nelson's father, James Nelson, was a Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police officer. The 40-year-old was killed while trying to rescue people trapped on the 27th floor of one of the towers. He also went into the smoking World Trade Center to rescue workers during the 1993 bombing, despite having asthma. His obituary said he was survived by two daughters, 11-year-old Anne and five-year-old Caitlin. The Nelson sisters volunteered with the Resiliency Center of Newtown, helping survivors of the Sandy Hook School shooting deal with their loss. Nelson was also involved with America's Camp, an annual retreat for children of 9/11 victims. By Ariadna Matamoros-Fernandez, Lecturer in Digital Media at the School of Communication, Queensland University of Technology rachit tank / unsplash, CC BY Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared last week that the company would shift away from open networks that embody the town square towards private, encrypted services that are more like the digital equivalent of the living room. The announcement comes in response to numerous privacy scandals, which have often involved third party apps accessing information about millions of Facebook users for financial and political gain. Zuckerberg aims to make private messages private and ephemeral meaning Facebook cant read our messages, and the data doesnt stick around on the companys servers for longer than necessary. His vision involves merging Facebook and the companys other digital platforms Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger into a super app, similar to Chinas WeChat. But will these changes actually make Facebook better? Our research on the encrypted messaging platform WhatsApp suggests end-to end encrypted services pose important challenges. Read more: Privacy pivot: Facebook wants to be more like WhatsApp. But details are scarce WhatsApp: a digital living room Facebook acquired the instant messaging service WhatsApp in 2014. It began rolling out end-to-end encrypted messaging on the service in the same year. In theory, that means messages sent via the platform are completely private. No one aside from the sender and receiver is supposed to be able to read them not even WhatsApp (the platform) itself. While there has been some take up of WhatsApp in countries such as Australia and the US, its much more popular in countries such as India, Brazil, Malaysia, and South-Africa, where it has become the preferred messaging app. WhatsApp has also become popular among activists and whistleblowers confronting authoritarian state power in China, Malaysia, and Latin America, where surveillance of political organising on open platforms has put activists advocating for social change in danger. Our research (to be published in a November 2019 special issue of the internet journal First Monday) shows WhatsApp has played a key role in resistance to state control in Spain, Malaysia and Indonesia. Despite these positives, we believe becoming more like WhatsApp isnt a magic bullet solution to Facebooks privacy and other concerns. Why? Here are three reasons. 1. Encryption only creates the illusion of privacy Since encryption minimises the ability of third parties to read the content of messages, it does go some way towards enhancing privacy. But encryption alone doesnt necessarily make WhatsApp a secure service, neither does it prevent third parties from accessing chat histories altogether. In an article for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, technology experts Bill Budington and Gennie Gebhart stress that while encryption may well work to protect chat messages, it doesnt make communication on WhatsApp safer if we take a more holistic approach to the app. They argue WhatsApp surrounding functionalities are the threat to privacy: for example, chat history backups are stored unencrypted to the cloud, and WhatsApp web interface can easily be hacked. In a similar vein, blogger and developer Gregorio Zanon says Facebook could potentially access WhatsApp chat history because of the way operating systems work on smartphones. Zanon argues that in order for us to do everyday tasks with our phones, from editing a picture to pushing content to Apple Watch, operating systems such as Apple iOS decrypt WhatsApp files and messages stored in our phones. In his own words: Messages are encrypted when you send them, yes. But the database that stores your chats on your iPhone does not benefit from an extra layer of encryption. It is protected by standard iOS data protection, which decrypts files on the fly when needed. Read more: The law is closing in on Facebook and the 'digital gangsters' 2. Metadata means theres always a digital trail Zuckerberg claims Facebook could limit the amount of time it stores messages. But media scholars argue it is not the content of messages itself that enables profiles to be built of users for the purposes of targeting advertising, its the metadata. This is a key privacy concern. Metadata includes users contacts information and details about messages, such as the time they are sent and the identities and locations of senders and receivers, information that WhatsApp can share with the backing of the legal system. For example, researchers have shown that WhatsApp caches popular media files. This allows the company to track forwarded media files reported as problematic, and potentially identify the source without breaking encryption. Crucial questions around metadata and potential data breaches become even more concerning when considered in light of Facebooks plan to enable data to be shared across platforms (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger). There are concerns this may make data less, rather than more, secure. The proposal is likely to face stiff opposition in Europe, given that the EUs data protection regulator, the Data Protection Commission (DPC) has previously raised concerns around security at Facebooks plans to integrate services. Read more: Facebook's cryptocurrency: a financial expert breaks it down 3. Encrypted messages cant be moderated In his latest manifesto, Zuckerberg avoids addressing Facebooks other great problem beyond privacy: content moderation. Zuckerberg acknowledges in his long Facebook post that a problem with encryption is that bad actors can exploit it to do bad things, such as child exploitation, terrorism and extortion. But what might end-to-end encryption mean for the spread of fake news and misinformation? Recent scholarship on Indonesia and Brazil has shown that WhatsApp has become a safe haven for producers of fake news, who cant be easily traced on encrypted services. To deal with this problem, WhatsApp has limited the number of times messages can be forwarded in countries like India and Myanmar, where WhatsApp hoaxes have led to violence. A more private, end-to-end encrypted system would partially free Facebook from the burdens involved in having to moderate this kind of content. This is a task the company has been reluctant to pursue, but it has been forced to do it due to its pivotal role as the contemporary town square. Although the app is used to discuss public issues through public groups of up to 256 people, there is no specific tool on WhatsApp that allows users to flag problematic content. Questions also remain about the challenges that end-to-end encryption pose for the spread of racist, misogynist, and other discriminatory content. Clearly there is a lot at stake with Facebooks proposed changes. We are right to hold the companys plans up to scrutiny, and ask whether users will be the beneficiary of these planned changes. Amelia Johns is the recipient of an Australia Research Council Discovery Award for project: 'Fostering Global Digital Citizenship: Diaspora Youth in a Connected World'. She is also an Investigator on a team project which has received funding from Facebook's Integrity Foundational Research Award. The project is called 'Decoding the Weaponising of Pop Culture on WhatsApp in Singapore and Malaysia'. Emma Baulch receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Ariadna Matamoros-Fernandez does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Originally published in The Conversation. Extraordinary photos have revealed the makeshift bush camp two stranded hikers used to survive in the wilderness for four nights. Trevor Salvado, 60, and Jacinda Bohan, 58, from Melbourne, sparked a massive search after they became lost on a walking trail on Mount Buffalo on Friday morning. New images depict the couple's incredible ordeal, in which they were forced to create their own hut using tree branches and leaves and SOS signs made of rocks. The pair, who were rescued on Tuesday, survived with just a day pack of food consisting of muesli bars, which they ran out of on their last day, as well as wild berries, and found water from a nearby stream. This is the makeshift hut where missing hikers Trevor Salvado, 60, and Jacinda Bohan, 58, took shelter during their five-day ordeal in the wilderness The couple, who became lost while walking a walking trail on Mount Buffalo, made SOS as signs using rocks and a clothing The couple (pictured) spent four nights in frosty conditions, with the temperature dropping to five degrees on Monday morning 'The track disappeared, or we weren't good at spotting the track and we think we followed an animal track and we just got to the wrong spot,' Ms Bohan told reporters on Tuesday, after spending four nights on a steep ledge. They had been walking for a few hours when they realised they had gone off trail. 'We basically got lost, that's all that happened, and then we stayed in one spot for four nights,' she said. Incredibly, they survived frosty conditions, with temperature dropping to 5C on Monday morning. After realising they were lost, the pair set up camp near a cliff, next to a 'trickle' of water, which they used to drink from. The pair told reporters that despite the grim conditions, they were always confident they would be found. 'We could hear the choppers, we were in a good spot, we were in a safe spot, I really believed that we would get found but I knew that we had to think about our mind-set,' Ms Bohan said. 'We could hear speed boats on Lake Buffalo and there were campers below us, there were cows and a dog and there were lights as well, so we knew we weren't far away from people and help,' Mr Salvado added. 'But we had about a 250-foot drop in front of us so we took a few days just to take a look at it and work out if we could get down there.' After four nights lost in the wilderness, the couple were found by a kayaker near a road at about 11am on Tuesday Found at last: Experienced hikers Trevor Salvado, 60, and Jacinda Bohan, 58, (pictured together) disappeared from Mount Buffalo in Victoria's alpine region on Friday Finally, on Tuesday, after five days in the rough terrain, they attempted to make the trek to find the trail they had lost. 'We just knew if we stayed too much longer and they hadn't found us, oh my God. So, today we got the energy, let's go,' Ms Bohan said. Once they found the track they thought: 'yep, we're home'. A short time later, Ms Bohan flagged down a mini-bus filled TAFE kayakers just after 11am near Buffalo River Road in the Mount Buffalo National Park. Looking tired and worn out, covered in scratches from brambles, Mr Salvado and Ms Bohan said they were not injured and kept calm during the ordeal and were looking forward to having a shower. After being found they were taken to Wangaratta Hospital to be treated for exposure and dehydration, footage showing Mr Salvado walking unaided from an ambulance followed by Ms Bohan on a stretcher. Mr Salvado and Ms Bohan were meant to meet friends shortly after midday on Friday but never showed up. Their car was found the next day and authorities spent the next few days scouring Mt Buffalo. Their disappearance sparked a full-scale search, involving up to 150 personnel covering several kilometres of rugged terrain. Ms Bohan said the experience won't deter the couple from future outdoor adventures. The pair were then looking forward to heading home and taking a shower. The couple had planned to meet friends for an annual long weekend getaway but were last seen at a caravan park in Bright in their Skoda car on Friday. They left the caravan park for a walk at Reservoir Track on Mount Buffalo at 9.30am. The pair were due to return at 12.30pm but did not do so and their car was later found abandoned. Desperate friends and family never gave up hope the pair would be found. Ms Bohan's sister Maria Bohan (pictured left) said the pair's large extended family were supporting one another during a difficult time. The couple's son Nathan (pictured) said he last spoke to his parents on Wednesday On Monday, Ms Bohan's sister Maria Bohan said the pair's large extended family were supporting one another during a difficult time. 'We've been getting loads of messages and good old-fashioned prayers,' Maria Bohan said. 'We've got a big team behind us, and we can't speak more highly of the police.' The couple's son, Nathan, said he last spoke to his parents on Wednesday or Thursday and they told him they'd be gone for a few days. 'Come home, please. I miss you,' he said as reporters gathered on the sidelines of the search on Monday. 'We're looking for you. We're trying the best we can.' 'Victoria Police would like to thank all emergency management partners, members of the public and the media for their ongoing support during this search,' police said in a statement on Tuesday. A woman has criticised high school students on a packed bus for refusing to stand up and offer their seats to full-paying adult customers. Shannon Mitchell took a photo of Sylvania High School students riding on the 970 bus route to Hurstville in south Sydney. Ms Mitchell said there were four other adults standing but the students did not give up their seats. Scroll down for video Shannon Mitchell took a photo of Sylvania High School students (pictured) riding on the 970 bus route to Hurstville in south Sydney 'There wasn't a single adult sitting when I got on and no attempt was made for any of them to get up even from the seats dedicated for the elderly,' she told Yahoo7. Ms Mitchell said she didn't tell the children to move but she was upset they did not offer up their seats. She took another photo of students sitting down on the bus at 3pm on Friday. Ms Mitchell said students standing in the aisle did move out of the way and towards the back of the bus. She said because the students were travelling on a free ticket at the expense of taxpayers they should stand for paying passengers. She said because the students were travelling on a free ticket at the expense of taxpayers they should stand for paying passengers 'I think it's a matter of respect. It's an entitled generation where it doesn't seem to have been passed down. When I was younger we were told travelling on a buss pass meant standing for paying customers. 'I think the rules should be reinforced. They need to be reminded they are travelling on a buss pass for free and should adhere to the rules.' Since Ms Mitchell took photos of students on the bus, Sylvania High School has reminded students to give up their seats for adults who have paid for a ticket. Daily Mail Australia has contacted Sylvania High School for comment. University students have sparked uproar on campus by displaying a sign calling for a debate on Australia's immigration rate. Members of the University of New South Wales's Conservatives society set up a desk at the Kensington campus, in Sydney's south east, with a sign: 'Our immigration level is too high'. The club encouraged fellow students to approach them on Tuesday to debate the provocative issue and change their minds. Immigration is a hotly contested issue across the political spectrum in Australia. Twenty-five per cent of residents in Sydney and regional New South Wales want the population growth pace to be slashed, a Newspoll released on Tuesday found. UNSW students have caused uproar with a politically incorrect sign at a controversial 'change my mind' event on campus (pictured) In 2018, a record 832,560 permanent and long-term migrants decided to call Australia home, marking a 7.1 per cent increase compared with 2017, official statistics released in February showed. With the number of people leaving Australia for good taken into account, the nation's annual net immigration rate stood at 291,250, the highest in four-and-a-half years. House prices have surged in Sydney and Melbourne by double-digit margins after Australia's net annual immigration pace climbed above 200,000 in 2012 to a level that was almost triple the average of the late 1990s. However, the UNSW Education Collective, a campus collective that claims to fight for progressive issues, denounced the message both on campus and on social media. The UNSW Education Collective, a campus collective that fights for progressive issues, denounced the message both on campus and on social media 'We had a good go at them but it seemed like they weren't willing to change their mind?' the collective wrote with a picture of the event. Australia's population growth 1881: 2.3 million 1918: 5 million 1959: 10 million 1981: 15 million 1991: 17.4 million 2004: 20 million 2013: 23 million 2016: 24 million 2018: 25 million Sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics; House of Representatives Standing Committee for Long-Term Strategies, December 1994 Advertisement The collective called the Conservatives 'campus incels' and apologised for making their 'small brains hurt'. 'Maybe the government should tax corporations to fund decent public infrastructure and services instead of beating up racist BS about over immigration,' the collective wrote. The 'change my mind' campus initiative was introduced by American right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder, who suggested male privilege was a myth outside Texas Christian University in February 2018. Mr Crowder shared the image to twitter, where it became a meme and an incentive for other right-wing students to debate social topics. The Conservative society re-shared the collectives' Facebook post and said their stance on immigration was not linked to their views on race. 'It was a pleasure to be visited by members of the UNSW Education Collective at our 'change my mind' event today,' they said. UNSW Conservatives (pictured) encouraged fellow students to approach the desk to debate the provocative issue and change their minds 'Granted, their screaming in our faces was not as effective at changing our minds as a little calm discussion might have been. 'We would also like to politely clarify that our position on immigration has absolutely nothing to do with race.' The group signed off their post by welcoming more 'interesting' discussion at other events later in the year. The event has been met with a number of responses on social media, with some questioning how the UNSW Education Collective handled the situation. 'Why do you think it's cool to personally attack people for their political affiliations and opinions, how is it at all useful to anyone to call theses guys 'incles' and collectively mock them online,' one person said. The fiery UNSW Education Collective Facebook post was re-shared by the conservatives who said their stance on immigration was not linked to their views on race 'Reasonable political discussion is healthy but all I saw were people attacking them, pretty sure I heard someone get called a racist and now incels,' commented another. One social media user said: 'It's not conservative to say our immigration level is too high. It's not about race it's about population.' But the UNSW Education Collective disagreed with the call for debate and said the two could not be separated. The event has been met with a number of responses on social media, with some questioning how the UNSW Education Collective handled the situation (pictured: UNSW Conservatives logo) Education Officer Caitlin Keogh told Daily Mail Australia the collective argued that infrastructure and services needed to be expanded and improved to make Sydney more livable for migrants and those born here. 'The focus on immigration level acts to scapegoat migrants for Sydney's problems rather than place the blame squarely on successive governments that have allowed the erosion of public services and not kept up infrastructure to improve people's lives,' Ms Keogh said. Ms Keogh claimed the conservatives did not respond to those arguments, but instead 'wanted a platform to discuss anti-immigration and anti-immigrant ideas'. The education officer added that the conservatives did not want to change their mind. 'Anyone opposed to bigotry should see through the facade of the conservatives wanting 'rational debate' because it is a cover for wanting to espouse racist ideology unopposed,' Ms Keogh said. UNSW, one of Australia's top universities, encourages diversity and inclusion on campus 'As Education officer I am totally opposed to anti migrant rhetoric and see it as lending itself to racism.' UNSW Conservatives told Daily Mail Australia that they held the event to have healthy discussion on a topical issue with students concerned about housing affordability and congestion. 'Most people who walked by merely scoffed or glared. A few people came and talked to us with whom we enjoyed constructive debates,' they said. 'Our position on immigration has nothing to do with race, and we did not make any race-based arguments at the event.' The society said were insulted by the UNSW Education Collective who called them racists. 'It was ironic that they called us 'racists' despite the fact that we have a racially diverse membership and several of the members at the table were immigrants themselves,' they said. UNSW, one of Australia's top universities, encourages diversity and inclusion on campus. 'UNSW will be recognised as an international exemplar in equity, diversity and inclusion. Our success will have been built upon embracing the diversity and cultural richness of our communities and ensuring that our staff and students can achieve their full potential regardless of background,' UNSW 2025 vision says. Chancellor Philip Hammond is expected to warn MPs in his Spring Statement that in the event of No Deal Brexit, the Government will have to revise their 20bn public spending pledge in favour of helping businesses to cope with transition Theresa Mays government will today issue a string of dire warnings about a No Deal Brexit. Philip Hammond will tell MPs in his Spring Statement that a departure from the EU without a deal would force him to revise plans to invest 20billion in public services. The Chancellor is expected to warn that money can only be found to end austerity if the Commons votes to leave the EU with a deal. The deal dividend is based on the latest predictions from the Office for Budget Responsibility, which assume Britain leaves the EU with a smooth transition period. In the event of No Deal, this would be revised, he will tell MPs. The Government would have to prioritise helping businesses cope with the sudden transition to World Trade Organisation terms. The Government will also publish a plan for the Irish border in the event of a No Deal Brexit, as well as a No Deal tariff schedule. Under the plans, the UK government is expected to axe tariffs on up to 90 per cent of goods entering the country. Transport Secretary Chris Grayling was yesterday accused of presiding over rushed and risky preparations for No Deal, which could lead to shortages of medicine and food. The Department for Transport will be responsible for laying on emergency transport to bring in essential goods if Britain leaves without a deal. But a report by the Commons public accounts committee says it failed to make timely preparations to secure extra ferries to transport critical goods across the Channel. Transport Secretary Chris Grayling was yesterday accused of presiding over rushed and risky preparations for No Deal, which could lead to shortages of medicine and food Tory MP James Cartlidge warned that No Deal tariffs would lead to the destruction of the British farming industry. The National Farmers Union agreed, saying a No Deal exit would be a catastrophe. Business groups called on MPs to shut down the possibility of No Deal too, with finance industry body The City UK saying it would be an own goal of historic proportions. Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the British Retail Consortium, said the public would be hit by No Deal in the form of tariffs, non-tariff trade barriers and falls in the value of sterling. These would all push up costs and reduce the choice on the shelves we currently enjoy, she told the BBC. The EUs chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, said in a tweet: Our No Deal preparations are now more important than ever before. The Defense Department has approved a new policy that will largely bar transgender troops from transitioning to another sex, and require most individuals to serve in their birth gender. The memo outlining the new policy was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, and it comes after a lengthy and complicated legal battle. It falls short of the all-out transgender ban that was initially ordered by President Donald Trump, but it will likely force the military to eventually discharge transgender individuals who need hormone treatments or surgery and who refuse to serve in their birth gender. The order says the military services must implement the new policy within the next 30 days, giving some individuals a short window of time to qualify for gender transition if needed. As of April 12, anyone diagnosed with gender dysphoria or who is actively transitioning sexes will be forbidden from joining the military Currently serving transgender troops and anyone who has signed an enlistment contract by April 12 may continue with plans for hormone treatments and gender transition (pictured: Transgender soldier Sergeant Shane Ortega) It also allows service secretaries to waive the policy on a case-by-case basis. Under the new rules, currently serving transgender troops and anyone who has signed an enlistment contract by April 12 may continue with plans for hormone treatments and gender transition if they have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. But after April 12, anyone who has been diagnosed gender dysphoria, who is taking hormones, or has transitioned to another gender, will not be allowed to enroll. And any currently serving troops diagnosed with gender dysphoria after April 12 will have to serve in their birth gender. They'll also be barred from taking hormones or getting transition surgery. The memo lays out guidelines for discharging service members based on the new policy. It says a service member can be discharged based on a diagnosis of gender dysphoria if he or she is 'unable or unwilling to adhere to all applicable standards, including the standards associated with his or her biological sex, or seeks transition to another gender.' The Pentagon's order says the military services must implement the new policy within the next 30 days, giving some individuals a short window of time to qualify for gender transition if needed It's considered a watered-down version of Trump's original declaration to implement a total ban on transgender military participation. A few weeks after taking office, Trump tweeted about not allowing transgender troops to serve 'in any capacity' The policy is likely to draw widespread legal opposition in the coming months It adds that troops must be formally counseled and given a chance to change their decision before the discharge is finalized. In a statement Tuesday night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blasted the ban, calling it a 'cowardly' declaration of prejudice, rather than patriotism. 'The President's revival of his bigoted, disgusting ban on transgender service-members is a stunning attack on the patriots who keep us safe and on the most fundamental ideals of our nation,' the California Democrat said. 'The President's years-long insistence on his cowardly ban makes clear that prejudice, not patriotism, guides his decisions,' Pelosi continued. Palm Center, a California research institute, protested the new policy Tuesday. Director Aaron Belkin said, 'The Trump administration is determined to bring back "don't ask, don't tell," a policy that forced service members to choose between serving their country and telling the truth about who they were.' The final legal injunction blocking the new policy was lifted last week, allowing the Pentagon to move forward. But restrictions on transgender troops are likely to face ongoing legal challenges and have been slammed by members of Congress as discriminatory and self-defeating. The memo was signed by David L. Norquist, who is currently serving as the deputy defense secretary. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., said in February that barring service by transgender individuals 'would cost us recruits at a time when so few Americans are willing to serve.' Nancy Pelosi blasted the policy change as 'cowardly', calling it a declaration of prejudice, rather than patriotism Transgender military members (left to right) Navy Lt. Cmdr. Blake Dremann, Army Capt. Alivia Stehlik, Army Capt. Jennifer Peace, Army Staff Sgt. Patricia King and Navy Petty Officer Third Class Akira Wyatt, listen before the start of a House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington She spoke at a hearing in which transgender troops testified that transitioning to another sex made them stronger and more effective members of the military. Until a few years ago service members could be discharged from the military for being transgender, but that changed under the Obama administration. Then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced in 2016 that transgender people already serving in the military would be allowed to serve openly. And as of July 1, 2017, transgender individuals would be allowed to enlist. After Trump took office, however, his administration delayed the enlistment date and called for additional study to determine if allowing transgender individuals to serve would affect military readiness or effectiveness. A few weeks later, Trump caught military leaders by surprise, tweeting that the government won't accept or allow transgender individuals to serve 'in any capacity' in the military. 'Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail,' he wrote. His demand for a ban triggered a legal and moral quagmire, as the Pentagon faced the prospect of throwing out service members who had willingly come forward as transgender after being promised they would be protected and allowed to serve. And as legal battles blocked the ban from taking effect, the Obama-era policy continued and transgender individuals were allowed to begin enlisting in the military a little more than a year ago. 14,700 transgender troops are currently on active duty. The Department of Defense has spent just $8 million of its $50 billion health budget on transgender care since 2016 An estimated 14,700 troops on active duty and in the Reserves identify as transgender, but not all seek treatment. Since July 2016, more than 1,500 service members were diagnosed with gender dysphoria; as of Feb. 1, there were 1,071 currently serving. According to the Pentagon, the department has spent about $8 million on transgender care since 2016. The military's annual health care budget tops $50 billion. Last year, all four service chiefs told Congress that they had seen no discipline, morale or unit readiness problems with transgender troops serving openly in the military. But they also acknowledged that some commanders were spending a lot of time with transgender individuals who were working through medical requirements and other transition issues. The five transgender troops who testified in February said their medical transitions took anywhere from four weeks to four months to complete, and they did most of it on their own time. All said they were fit to return to deploying afterward. A late-winter storm this week could dump up to two feet of snow and bring fierce winds to the U.S. Central Plains states. Winter Storm Ulmer could bring potentially snarling travel and bringing flooding to the Upper Midwest, U.S. forecasters said on Tuesday. The storm, now brewing as low-pressure center in the southwest, will quickly move into the Rocky Mountains and deliver one to two feet of snow. A late-winter storm this week could dump up to two feet of snow and bring fierce winds to the U.S. Central Plains states The storm, now brewing as low-pressure center in the southwest, will quickly move into the Rocky Mountains and deliver one to two feet of snow Blizzard conditions are expected in much of Colorado and parts of Wyoming, Nebraska and South Dakota on Wednesday, the National Weather Service predicted. Winds gusts could reach 70 miles per hour and cause snow drifts, whiteout conditions and power outages throughout the region, forecasters said. 'We are advising to stay off the roads through the afternoon and evening,' Treste Huse, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Denver, said on Tuesday afternoon. 'It will be a quick, but powerful storm... with the worst of it probably late morning or afternoon.' Storm Ulmer will also unleash a powerful wind across the central USA through Thursday. 'While not a tropical system, winds will rival what's seen in a Category 1 hurricane,' said weathermodels.com meteorologist Ryan Maue. The worst weather is forecast for the Plains, from Texas up to the Dakotas. 'We expect a major blizzard to unfold with winds likely to approach hurricane force, heavy snow and massive drifts,' according to AccuWeather meteorologist Alex Sosnowski. Destructive winds, gusting at more than 100 mph, are expected in Texas, New Mexico, Kansas and Colorado, where widespread power outages are possible. Blowing dust will reduce visibility to less than a mile at times. The weather service office in Midland/Odessa, Texas, said Wednesday could be 'the windiest day in years, USA Today reported. Winds gusts could reach 70 miles (113 km) per hour and cause snow drifts, whiteout conditions and power outages throughout the region, forecasters said Blizzard conditions and snowfall are expected from the Front Range across the central and northern Plains, the National Weather Service said The biggest air travel hub likely to be affected by the snow is Denver International Airport. However cross-continental air travel lanes could be disrupted as well as the system brings a line of rain squalls eastward, forecasters said. 'The calm before the storm,' Denver International Airport said on Tuesday on Twitter as the airport prepared for the blizzard. 'We are anticipating some possible delays and cancellations, be sure to check your flight status with your airline." Schools across Colorado canceled classes ahead of the storm while Denver Public School District officials were considering closing school early on Wednesday, local media reported. Taran Vollmer, (left), and Ethan Bush (right), clear snow from in front of First Presbyterian Church in downtown Rapid City, S.D on Thursday in South Dakota Judy Hartman clears snow from her driveway in Box Elder, South Dakota, following Winter Storm Taylor last week Snow is cleared from near Main Street Square in downtown Rapid City in South Dakota on Thursday The storm will also bring heavy rain to areas of eastern Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota that already have a good deal of snow on the ground, the NWS said. 'We could have the potential for major river flooding, given the rain and the snow melt,' meteorologist Mark Chenard said from the NWS Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland. An earlier round of heavy, wet snow caused several roofs to collapse, including those of a church and a hotel, in the Upper Midwest last weekend. By Thursday, the storm system will weaken as it moves over the Tennessee River Valley, bringing mostly rain from Michigan southward to the Gulf Coast and some remaining snow only in the far northern parts of the country, he added. The National Weather Service warned the storm would create a myriad of weather hazards across the U.S. through Thursday. It said: 'Heavy snow is likely to spread across the Rockies and into the Plains. The San Juan Mountains, Central Rockies, and parts of the Central to Northern Plains are expecting 12 to 18 inches of snow, with isolated amounts of 2 feet. 'The calm before the storm,' Denver International Airport said on Tuesday on Twitter as the airport prepared for the blizzard 'The heavy snow and visibility near zero will create extremely dangerous travel conditions, and power outages are also possible.' It claimed blizzard conditions are possible for the Central and Northern High Plains. The heavy snow and visibility near zero will create extremely dangerous travel conditions, and power outages are also possible. Winter Storm Taylor has already spread snow and gusty winds from coast to coast across the northern tier of the U.S. in early March. In contrast, temperatures in New York were milder today with sunshine. Pictured is a woman running with her dog in Jersey City with the New York skyline in the background People enjoyed a warm afternoon at New York's Coney Island in New York City following a cold and windy week Taylor entered the U.S. through Northern California late on March 7, then crossed through Nevada and the central Rockies on March 8. Dozens of avalanches were reported in the Rockies, including one near Copper Mountain, Colorado, that buried cars on Highway 91 on March 7. The avalanche came in between an earlier disturbance and Winter Storm Taylor. The weather event concluded its cross-country journey on March 10 by spreading snow and gusty winds through parts of New England and the northern Great Lakes. Primary school children are to be taught how to escape grooming by online sexual predators. It comes amid warnings of an explosion in child sex crimes on the internet, with web paedophiles encouraging the abuse of very, very young children. Now pupils between the ages of four and seven will be taught how to recognise the signs of online abuse, blackmail and manipulation. The National Crime Agency campaign which takes the form of an animated cartoon series marks the first time it has specifically targeted four-year-olds. Primary school children are to be taught how to escape grooming by online sexual predators. Stock image Rob Jones, of the NCA, said it was still easy for paedophiles to access indecent images of children on the open web. He said: The technology exists to detect known child abuse images. It is a constant battle but the scale of that battle and the scale of the response really needs to go up to meet the trajectory of the threat. In 2017, there were about 10 million reports of child abuse images being viewed online globally. Last year, that rose to a staggering 18 million. It is believed about 110,000 reports relate to paedophiles in Britain. Rob Jones, of the NCA, said it was still easy for paedophiles to access indecent images of children on the open web. Stock image An increasing number of child abuse images are generated by the victims themselves, either by children who dont know they will end up in the hands of paedophiles, or those who have been manipulated into taking them. The NCA cartoon shows a four-year-old girl called Jessie watching a video on an iPad alone after her dad is distracted by a phone call. While she enjoys the first video a song about internet safety she is soon faced with a scary second video. Her pet dog convinces her to tell an adult she trusts that she had seen something online that had made her feel worried, scared or sad. Three Kenyan healthcare workers who specialised in childhood cancer were killed in Sunday's air disaster in Ethiopia, it has emerged. Jayne Kamau, Bella Jaboma and Dr Grace Kariuki were among 157 passengers who died when the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet crashed within minutes of take-off from Addis Ababa. The cancer specialists were returning from a medical conference in Cairo, the International Society of Paediatric Oncology revealed. Tributes were paid to the three victims from across the world of medicine as colleagues mourned a 'great loss'. Expert health care workers Grace Kariuki, left, and Jayne Kamau, right, were among the 157 passengers killedin the Ethiopian Airlines disaster on Sunday Ms Jaboma was presenting her research on childhood cancer at the conference, her brother Allan said on a fundraising page. Describing her as a 'selfless daughter, sister and friend', he said she had hosted parties which would 'bring joy to young cancer patients'. Dr Kariuki's colleagues at Kenya's disease control agency said they were 'deeply saddened by her death', saying she was 'passionate' about her field'. The oncology society said: '[We] would like to offer our heartfelt condolences and solidarity to the friends we have lost, their families, their work colleagues and the children with cancer for whom they cared so well, all of whom are now bereft. Cancer specialist Bella Jaboma, pictured, also died in the crash. Her brother Allan called her a 'selfless daughter, sister and friend' 'We offer our sympathies too to the families of all those who have lost a loved one and all those affected by this terrible accident. We will keep them in our thoughts and prayers.' The American Childhood Cancer Organization said the three experts' death was a 'huge loss'. 'ACCO joins the international childhood cancer community to mourn the loss of three Kenyan colleagues,' they said in a statement. The Ethiopian Airlines crash was the second deadly incident involving the new model of Boeing passenger jet in less than five months, prompting concerns over its safety. Some 189 people died when a Lion Air flight crashed into the Java Sea shortly after taking off from Jakarta on October 29. Max aircraft feature an automated system which forces the plane's nose down when it detects there is a danger of stalling. A report into the Lion Air disaster found the system repeatedly forced the plane's nose down despite it not stalling. Yesterday the Boeing jets were banned from European airspace while investigations into Sunday's crash continue. A high school principal who allegedly had sex with an on-duty sheriffs deputy on campus grounds will be allowed to keep her job, it has been reported. Amanda ONan, the principal of Hilton Head Island High School on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, was reprimanded by administrators on Tuesday. Since January, ONan has been under investigation by Beaufort County School District and the South Carolina Department of Education. She has consistently denied having sex with DeJuan Holmes, a former sheriffs deputy, on school grounds. But ONan did acknowledge that she had put herself in a sensitive position by meeting an individual for reasons unrelated to school business on school grounds after hours. The investigation was prompted by an admission from former Beaufort County Sheriffs Deputy Staff Sgt. Holmes, who told authorities that he and ONan were having an extramarital affair while he was on duty, according to The State. Amanda ONan (left), the principal of Hilton Head Island High School on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, was reprimanded by administrators on Tuesday. DeJuan Holmes (right), a former sheriff's deputy, said he and O'Nan had sex on school grounds while he was on duty Since hired to run the school in 2006, Amanda ONan has been praised for improving the academic performance of her students. Hilton Head Island High School is seen in the above stock image Authorities learned of the affair in April 2016, when ONans then-husband, Chris ONan, filed a complaint with the sheriffs office against Holmes, who was a deputy at the time. Chris ONan alleged that the affair took place on school grounds, an accusation that Amanda ONan denied. Holmes decided to resign in lieu of submitting to an internal affairs investigation. Around the same time, the school district conducted its own investigation and found no evidence of wrongdoing by the principal. Since hired to run the school in 2006, Amanda ONan has been praised for improving the academic performance of her students. Last June, Holmes attempted to regain his job by submitting to an inquiry by the internal affairs department at the sheriffs office. Holmes told investigators that he and ONan had sex inside the high school while he was on duty. The former deputys admission led to the re-opened investigation against ONan, and a public reprimand, which is the lowest level of discipline meted out by the state. She acknowledges the serious nature of her lapse of judgment but contends there was no detrimental impact on the school, South Carolinas board of education said. The Federal Aviation Administration has said there is 'no basis' to ground Boeing 737 Max airplanes, after a second deadly crash involving the model in less than five months prompted other governments worldwide to ban the aircraft. 'Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft,' FAA chief Daniel Elwell said in a statement on Tuesday. Despite Boeing's assurances that the plane is safe and reliable, the European Union, Britain and India joined China and other countries grounding the plane or banning it from their airspace as they await the results of the investigation into the crash. But the US has so far refused to take similar action against the American aerospace giant's best-selling workhorse aircraft, despite the two recent crashes as well as a history of pilot complaints in recent months. Workers are pictured next to a Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplane on the tarmac at the Boeing Renton Factory in Renton, Washington on Tuesday. The US said there is 'no basis' to ground Boeing 737 MAX airplanes, after a second deadly crash involving the model in less than five months Airline pilots on at least two U.S. flights have reported that an automated system seemed to cause their Boeing 737 Max planes to tilt down suddenly. The pilots said that soon after engaging the autopilot on Boeing 737 Max 8 planes, the nose tilted down sharply. In both cases, they recovered quickly after disconnecting the autopilot. As described by the pilots, however, the problem did not appear related to a new automated anti-stall system that is suspected of contributing to a deadly October crash in Indonesia. The Max 8 is at the center of a growing global ban by more than 40 countries following a second fatal crash, this time in Ethiopia, in less than five months. In the U.S., however, the Federal Aviation Administration and airlines continued to permit the planes to fly. American Airlines and Southwest Airlines operate the 737 Max 8, and United Airlines flies a slightly larger version, the Max 9. All three carriers vouched for the safety of Max aircraft on Wednesday The pilot reports were filed last year in a data base compiled by NASA. They are voluntary safety reports and do not publicly reveal the names of pilots, the airlines or the location of the incidents. An American Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8, on a flight from Miami to New York City, comes in for landing at LaGuardia Airport in New York on Tuesday It was unclear whether the accounts led to any actions by the FAA or the pilots' airlines. In one report, an airline captain said that immediately after putting the plane on autopilot, the co-pilot called out 'Descending,' followed by an audio cockpit warning, 'Don't sink, don't sink!' The captain immediately disconnected the autopilot and resumed climbing. 'With the concerns with the MAX 8 nose down stuff, we both thought it appropriate to bring it to your attention,' the captain wrote. 'Best guess from me is airspeed fluctuation' due to a brief weather system overwhelming the plane's automation. On another flight, the co-pilot said that seconds after engaging the autopilot, the nose pitched downward and the plane began descending at 1,200 to 1,500 feet per minute. As in the other flight, the plane's low-altitude-warning system issued an audio warning. The captain disconnected autopilot, and the plane began to climb. The pilots talked it over later, 'but can't think of any reason the aircraft would pitch nose down so aggressively,' the co-pilot recounted. Preliminary information released by Indonesian investigators suggests they are looking at the possible role of the Max's new automated anti-stall technology as a factor in a Lion Air crash in October shortly after takeoff from Jakarta. Data indicates that the pilots struggled with repeated nose-down commands from the plane before it crashed into the Java Sea and killed 189 people. However, that anti-stall system - called MCAS for its acronym - only activates if the autopilot is turned off, according to documents Boeing has shared with airlines and the FAA. 'That's not to say it's not a problem, but it is not the MCAS,' said Dennis Tajer, an American Airlines pilot who received additional training on the Boeing anti-stall system after the Lion Air crash. 'The autopilot has to be off for MCAS to kick in.' American Airlines spokesman Ross Feinstein said the airline has received no reports from pilots about problems with the anti-stall technology. Southwest has said the same thing. Concern about the Max's safety seemed to be abating but returned on Sunday when an Ethiopian Airlines Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board. Again, preliminary data appears to capture a brief and erratic flight. Investigators will analyze information from the planes so-called black boxes in hopes of understanding what caused the accident. A man searching for personal effects belonging to his brother who was a passenger on ET 302 speaks to a journalist and Recovery worker at the crash site of Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 on Tuesday in Bishoftu, Ethiopia. All 157 passengers and crew perished in the crash That followed the October crash of a new Lion Air jet of the same model in Indonesia, which killed 189 people shortly after takeoff from Jakarta. The widening actions against the aircraft puts pressure on Boeing -- the world's biggest plane manufacturer -- to prove the MAX planes are safe, and the company has said it is rolling out flight software updates by April that could address issues with a faulty sensor. The full extent of the impact of the aircraft bans on international travel routes was unclear. There are about 350 MAX 8 planes currently in service around the world. Southwest Airlines Co, American Airlines Group Inc and United Airlines said they were still confident in their fleets. Southwest and American have both said their fleet data showed the plane was safe. U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao flew aboard a Southwest 737 MAX 8 on Tuesday to Washington from Austin, according to two people briefed on the matter. A spokesman for Chao did not immediately comment. However airlines and governments around the world have begun taking action to ground the planes. Air Canada, for example, announced it was canceling flights to London following Britain's decision to ban the aircraft. The EU aviation safety agency also closed European airspace to all MAX planes. It noted that the 'exact causes' of the Lion Air crash were still being investigated. 'At this early stage of the related investigation, it cannot be excluded that similar causes may have contributed to both events,' the agency added. Oliver Vick (pictured), 45, has been named as another British victim of the Ethiopia crash A 45-year-old UN worker who helped to bring elections to Afghanistan has been named as another British victim of the Ethiopian Airlines disaster. Oliver Vick, who was described as 'inspiring' and 'well-loved' by relatives, was on his way to Somalia when the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet crashed near Addis Ababa. He died in the crash alongside his partner Jessica Hyba, a 43-year-old Canadian national who worked for the UN's refugee agency. Mr Vick, who worked for an assistance mission in Somalia, was one of numerous crash victims connected to the United Nations. His family told BBC News: 'Olly was well-loved and had an energy and zest for life which lifted and inspired all that met him.' His UN colleagues said in a statement: 'Deeply saddened by the loss of our colleague Oliver Vick in the Ethiopia plane crash. 'We express our heartfelt sympathies to his family and loved ones and mourn the loss of a passionate and talented friend who worked tirelessly for peace in Somalia. 'We will miss Olly every day.' Mr Vick had two daughters from a previous marriage and hailed from Wargrave, Berkshire, The Times reported. Former colleague Timur Nusratty said he had met Mr Vick when he worked on Afghan elections in 2005. The country held its first elections since the fall of the Taliban that year after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. Mr Nusratty said he 'took his work very seriously' and said: 'He was very sociable. I liked him from the first time I met him.' Oliver Vick, left who was described as 'inspiring' and 'well-loved' by relatives, was on his way to Somalia when the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet crashed near Addis Ababa. He died alongside his Canadian partner Jessica Hyba, right, who worked for the UN's refugee agency His partner Ms Hyba, who had two daughters aged nine and 12, was working for UNHCR in Mogadishu, Somalia. She was one of three refugee agency workers killed in the crash, along with Sudanese national Nadia Ali, 40, and Rwandan Jackson Musoni, 31. Mr Vick was one of nine British victims of the crash. Fellow UN worker Joanna Toole, polar expert Sarah Auffet, former probation worker Joseph Waithaka, aid worker Sam Pegram and British-Somali dual nationals Sarah Hassan Said and Nasrudin Abdulakir also died in Sunday's air disaster. UK Prime Minister Theresa May said: 'I was deeply saddened to hear of the devastating loss of life following the plane crash in Ethiopia. 'At this very difficult time my thoughts are with the families and friends of the British citizens on board and all those affected by this tragic incident.' Yesterday Britain's aviation chiefs banned the 737 Max plane from UK airspace, a move later replicated by the rest of Europe. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said its ruling was 'a precautionary measure' and would remain in place 'until further notice'. But U.S. officials said said that their review had so far provided 'no basis to order grounding the aircraft'. Briton Joanna Toole (left) and French-British dual national Sarah Auffret (right) have been named among victims of the air disaster in Ethiopia Nasrudin Abdulkadir and his mother Sarah Hassan Said, both Somali-British nationals, died on the doomed plane, the FCO confirmed on Monday evening Sam Pegram (left), a 25-year-old aid worker, and Kenyan-British dual national Joseph Waithaka (right) - who used to live in Hull - were also among the 149 passengers killed A Georgia politician has proposed a law that would allow for men to be charged with aggravated assault for having sex without a condom in an effort to highlight unfair restrictions on women's reproductive rights. The law is part of Democratic minority whip Dar'shun Kendrick's 'testicular bill of rights' - a list of absurd proposals drawn up in response to last week's passage of a 'heartbeat bill' banning abortions in Georgia after six weeks into a pregnancy. Kendrick's other proposals include a statewide ban on vasectomies, a law requiring men to obtain permission from their sexual partner before seeking a Viagra prescription and a mandatory 24-hour waiting period for men to buy porn or sex toys. She also suggested mandatory DNA paternity tests at the sixth week of pregnancy, after which the father would have to immediately start paying child support. Kendrick announced the 'testicular bill of rights' on Twitter Monday, saying that she'd instructed one of her aides to start drafting an official version. She then explained the unusual legislation during a radio interview on Georgia Public Broadcasting on Tuesday afternoon, saying that it was meant 'to draw attention to what I think is an absurdity'. 'If the state of Georgia is going to be concerned with regulating women's reproductive rights, I think it's only fitting that we also do that for men's reproductive rights,' she said. Georgia Democratic State Representative Dar'shun Kendrick's tweet detailing her 'testicular bill of rights' is seen in full above Kendrick (above) introduced a 'testicular bill of rights' with several absurd proposals to restrict men's reproductive rights in response to the state legislature passing a 'heartbeat bill' that would ban abortions after six weeks Georgia's 'heartbeat bill' - HB 481 - would ban most abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected via ultrasound, which can happen as early as six weeks into a pregnancy but is typically not reliable until 10-12 weeks. Under current laws, women in Georgia can terminate a pregnancy up to 20 weeks in. The bill was passed by the state's House of Representatives on Thursday and will now be put before the Republican-controlled State Senate. The'heartbeat bill' passed in the House last week is supported by Gov Brian Kemp Kendrick explained her unusual legislative ideas during a radio interview with Georgia Public Broadcasting on Tuesday HB 481's sponsor, Rep Ed Setzler, called abortion a 'barbaric procedure' and claimed that under the bill women would still have options, including the 'morning after' pill or adoption. The bill also makes exceptions in cases of rape or incest, but only after an official police report has been filed. Gov Brian Kemp is fully behind the legislation, which he called a 'powerful moment' to 'give all Georgians including the unborn a good chance to live, grow and prosper'. Kendrick, however, believes HB 481 will do more harm than good by leading women to seek out unsafe options for abortions. She said her overall goal is to reduce the number of abortions in the state. Statistics show that restricting access to abortions does not in fact reduce their frequency. The bill was passed in the Georgia House the same day that Tennessee passed an almost identical one, joining a string of states including Mississippi, Florida, Kentucky, Ohio and South Carolina that have moved to enact tough abortion restrictions. Several woman legislators brought coat hangers into the Georgia House Thursday, March 7 to show opposition to the state's proposed bill to ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected About one in 400 to 500 women are unaware they are pregnant until they are some five months along. Opponents of so-called 'heartbeat legislation' argue it flies in the face of Roe v Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, which many pro-life advocates hope will be overturned at the hands of the two new Justices. Kendrick said she believes her colleagues may intend HB 481 to be a 'test case for the Supreme Court'. A cook who raped his female coworker after offering to take her home after work will be deported back to India. Gurmeet Singh pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting his coworker, 20, in Southport District Court on the Gold Coast on Tuesday. Singh offered to take the victim home after work but stopped the car to have a drink at The Spit, which separates Southport Broadwater and the Pacific Ocean. Gurmeet Singh pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting his coworker, 20, and will be deported back to India (file image) He then kissed her in the car before climbing on top of her, holding her hands down, pulling her pants off and sexually assaulting her, Gold Coast Bulletin reported. The victim refused to give a statement as she was traumatised and didn't want to relive the assault. Judge Katherine McGinness sentenced Singh to 18 months' jail which was suspended as he will remain in immigration detention before being returned to India within weeks. Crown prosecutor Stephanie Gallagher said: 'It really is despicable conduct which demonstrates that he thinks he is entitled to take what he wants despite her protests.' 'She would have had concerns she was about to be raped,' Ms Gallagher said. Singh's barrister, Nick McGhee said the attack was 'out of character' and his fiancee, who supported him, is yet to decide if she was going to follow him to India. Australians have reacted with fury at the sentence given to Cardinal George Pell for sexually abusing two 13-year-old choirboys. Pell, 77, is the world's highest-ranking Catholic official to be convicted of child sex abuse. He was found guilty in December of orally raping a choirboy and molesting another at St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne after a Sunday mass. In a publicly-broadcast sentencing from Melbourne County Court on Wednesday, Pell was jailed for six years for abusing the two teenagers in the 1990s by Judge Peter Kidd. He has maintained his innocence and plans to appeal his conviction. While a cheer was heard outside court when the six-year jail term was announced, some onlookers - as well as social media users around the globe and celebrities such as Lisa Wilkinson - argued it was too lenient. Scroll down for video Pell, 77, is the world's highest-ranking Catholic official to be convicted of child sex abuse While a cheer was heard outside court when the six-year jail term was announced, some onlookers - as well as social media users around the globe and celebrities such as Lisa Wilkinson (pictured) - argued it was too lenient 'What message does this sentence send to abusers?,' The Project host Wilkinson asked In a publicly-broadcast sentencing from Melbourne County Court on Wednesday, Pell was jailed for six years for abusing the two teenagers in the 1990s by Judge Peter Kidd (pictured) 'What message does this sentence send to abusers?,' The Project host Wilkinson asked. 'Or to survivors of sexual abuse who are considering coming forward? A case of the more famous you are, and the longer you can get away with your crimes before you are brought to justice, the lighter your sentence will be?' Weekend Today Show host David Campbell said the sentence paled in comparison to the experience of Pell's victims. 'A reminder, victims of child sexual abuse live with this for their entire lives.' Senator Derryn Hinch said Judge Peter Kidd performed a 'demolition of Pell in 69 minutes' but also said the length of his sentence was appropriate and 'fairly strong'. 'I understand the emotion but Pell's crimes did not have a possible maximum of life in jail,' Mr Hinch tweeted. Another person tweeted: 'Six years (three years and eight months non-parole) for Pell... what a joke! He should be getting the rest of this life in jail!' Another social media user echoed the sentiment that Pell's sentence was a 'joke'. 'Watch it become a suspended sentence, always protecting the paedophile never the victims,' they said. One person compared Pell's sentence to the plight of those who suffered at his hands. Abuse survivor Michael Advocate (pictured) said the sentence failed to provide justice Weekend Today Show host David Campbell said the sentence paled in comparison to the experience of Pell's victims Senator Derryn Hinch said Judge Peter Kidd performed a 'demolition of Pell in 69 minutes' but also said the length of his sentence was appropriate and 'fairly strong' 'How about the life sentence for the victims he abused?' they said. After the court hearing, campaigners called the sentence lenient and a 'disgrace'. Abuse survivor Michael Advocate told Seven News the sentence failed to provide justice. Referring to the non-parole period, he added: 'Jail time of less than four months for destroying the lives of two innocent young boys - is their life only worth two years each?' Mr Advocate said it gave sex abuse victims comfort to know that Pell will be behind bars tonight and added: 'May Pell rot in his cell.' In a statement, the unidentified victim said it was 'hard' for him to 'take comfort' in the sentencing. Social media users echoed the sentiment that Pell's sentence was a 'joke' 'It is hard for me to allow myself to feel the gravity of this moment. The moment when the sentence is handed down. The moment when justice is done,' he said in a statement read by his lawyer Dr Vivian Waller. 'I appreciate that the court has acknowledged what was inflicted upon me as a child. However there is no rest for me.' Pell stared directly at Chief Judge Peter Kidd when he imposed the sentence on Wednesday morning which allows Pell to apply for parole after three years and eight months. In remarks broadcast live around the world from Melbourne County Court, Judge Kidd called Pell's crimes 'breathtakingly arrogant' and said the abuse has caused 'long-term and serious harm.' He said Pell's age and lack of offending for 22 years meant he is not a danger to the community and is not likely to re-offend. The judge also took into account Pell's ailing health as he suffers from high blood pressure and congestive heart failure which requires him to have a pacemaker - and said there was a chance Pell will die in jail. But because the disgraced cardinal still denies the abuse, Judge Kidd said he had shown 'no remorse or contrition' which could have reduced the sentence. Pell, who was until late February the Vatican's treasurer and once considered a pope in waiting, will be placed on the sex offender's register for the rest of his life. The cardinal wore an open neck black shirt with no collar for the sentencing - the first time he has been seen in public without the collar. At the start of proceedings at 10am, Judge Kidd said Pell's offending had a 'profound impact' on his victims. But he made clear that Pell would receive the 'stable hand of justice' and told him 'you are not to be made a scapegoat for any failings or perceived failings of the Catholic Church.' Pell's lawyer Robert Richter QC leaves the County Court in Melbourne on Wednesday 'Nor are you being sentenced for any failure to prevent or report child sexual abuse by other clergy in the Catholic church,' the judge added. Judge Kidd said he accepted Pell's lawyer's argument that the abuse 'involved opportunistic and spontaneous offending, rather than pre-planned or premeditated conduct.' 'Had it been preplanned or involved grooming, it would have been more serious,' he said. Referring to the victims as J and R, he went into graphic details about the oral rape of one of the boys and the abuse of another in two incidents in 1996 and 1997. The judge said the acts were conducted with 'physical aggression and venom' and said 'it was by no means a minor indecent act.' Pictured: A protester outside court for the sentencing of George Pell Judge Kidd said the boy who was orally raped was 'struggling and flailing' during the act. 'You moved from one victim to the other,' he said. Judge Kidd said the first episode in the priest's sacristy involved a 'brazen and forceful sexual attack on the two victims'. 'The acts were sexually graphic. Both victims were visibly and audibly distressed during this offending,' Judge Kidd said. 'The obvious distress and objections of your victims is relevant to my assessment of the impact of your offending on (the victims). 'There is an added layer of degradation and humiliation that each of your victims must have felt in knowing that their abuse had been witnessed by the other.' The second episode was 'brief and spontaneous' but could not be viewed as an 'isolated lapse' as Pell had ample time to reflect on his previous abuse of one of the boys, the judge said. WHAT JUDGE PETER KIDD SAID WHEN SENTENCING PELL 'The acts were sexually graphic. Both victims were visibly and audibly distressed during this offending' 'You were confident your victims would not complain. It is fanciful to suggest that you may not have fully appreciated this' 'There is an added layer of degradation and humiliation that each of your victims must have felt in knowing that their abuse had been witnessed by the other' 'You had had ample time to reflect upon your previous abuse .... despite this, you still indecently acted against (victim J), and did so with what I consider to be a degree of physical aggression and venom' 'I consider your moral culpability across both episodes to be high' There was a clear relationship of trust with the victims, and you breached that trust and abused your position to facilitate this offending' 'Your obvious status as Archbishop cast a powerful shadow over this offending' 'I would characterise these breaches and abuses as grave' 'You continued to offend with callous indifference to the victim's distress' 'Your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance' 'There is no evidence of your remorse or contrition for me to act upon to reduce your sentence' 'On the one hand I must punish and denounce you for this appalling offending. Yet on the other hand, I am conscious of the heavy reality that I am about to sentence you, a man of advanced years, who has led an otherwise blameless life, to a significant period of imprisonment, which will account for a good portion of the balance of your life' Advertisement 'Despite this, you still indecently acted against (the boy), and did so with what I consider to be a degree of physical aggression and venom,' Judge Kidd said. 'It was by no means a minor indecent act.' Judge Kidd said by his offending in such a 'risky and brazen' manner, it was inferred Pell was prepared to take such risks. 'I conclude that your decision to offend was a reasoned, albeit perverted, one, and I reach that conclusion to the criminal standard.' Pell also abused his position by breaching the trust of his victims. 'I find beyond reasonable doubt that, on the specific facts of your case, there was a clear relationship of trust with the victims, and you breached that trust and abused your position to facilitate this offending,' the judge said. Judge Kidd rejected Pell's defence argument the crimes were committed by Pell the man, not the archbishop. 'Your obvious status as Archbishop cast a powerful shadow over this offending,' he said. 'I would characterise these breaches and abuses as grave.' Talking about Pell's role as Archbishop of Melbourne, the judge said: 'There was breach of trust and you abused your position to facilitate the offending. 'You were a pillar of St Patrick's community by virtue of your role as Archbishop. Victim J gave evidence that the choirboys were expected to show reverence in your presence. 'The evidence shows that you were profoundly revered, Cardinal Pell, which imbued you with and legitimised your authority. As Archbishop, you did have a relationship of approval in relation to the choirboys. In part, the choirboys were performing to please you as Archbishop. 'There was evidence that you would, from time to time, visit the robing room to congratulate the boys on their singing. The choirboys were the least powerful and the most subordinate individuals at the Cathedral. 'The victims themselves were 13 years of age. The power imbalance between the victims and all the senior church leaders or officials, yourself included, was stark.' In summarising his decision to sentence Kidd to six years in jail, he said: 'On the one hand I must punish and denounce you for this appalling offending. Yet on the other hand, I am conscious of the heavy reality that I am about to sentence you, a man of advanced years, who has led an otherwise blameless life, to a significant period of imprisonment, which will account for a good portion of the balance of your life.' Ahead of the sentencing, campaigner against child sexual abuse Leonie Sheedy said outside court that she hoped for a long sentence. 'I hope that justice prevails and that Mr George Pell is treated like every other pedophile and sex offender in this state and he is incarcerated for a sentence that is appropriate to the crime that he committed,' Ms Sheedy told 3AW radio. Melbourne County Court was packed with abuse survivors including Pell's surviving victim, now in his 30s. He was orally raped by Pell in the priest's sacristy after a Sunday mass in December 1996, forced to watch as Pell molested his 13-year-old friend, and then molested again by Pell a month later. The other victim died in 2014 after a heroin overdose. James Bond will drive a 250,000 electric car in the next film in a bid to make the character more environmentally friendly. Director Cary Joji Fukunaga, 41, wants star Daniel Craig, 51, to take the wheel of a limited edition Aston Martin. The Rapide E is the British company's first electric car and only 155 of the unique vehicles exist in the world. The Rapide E is the British company's first electric car and only 155 of the unique vehicles exist in the world The decision to use the zero-emission vehicle will signal a move from a traditional petrol-fuelled Aston Martin which was first driven by Sean Connery in Goldfinger more than 50 years ago. Mr Joji Fukunaga is working closely with the iconic company to ensure the car will grace the big screen, The Sun reports. An insider told the newspaper: 'The decision was spearheaded by the film's new director, who's a total tree-hugger. 'He is working directly with Aston Martin to get one of their electric cars ready for its big close-up. 'Everybody is afraid of Bond getting labelled 'too PC' but they all felt the time was right to put him in a zero emission vehicle.' The decision to use a zero-emission vehicle will signal a move from a traditional petrol-fuelled Aston Martin which was first driven on the big screen more than 50 years ago The latest Bond film, which has the working title Shatterhand, will start shooting next month and is due to be released in 2020. The film is speculated to be a remake of George Lazenby's On Her Majesty's Secret Service by screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. The plot sees Bond as he hunts down Ernst Starvo Blofeld in the Swiss Alps, which lead to suggestions from fans that Christoph Waltz would be returning as the character after he played the part in Spectre. Lea Seydoux is also apparently going to star in the next film, fans have commented that she may meet her death in a similar fashion to Tracy Bond, the only Bond girl to marry James in the films. The latest Bond film, which has the working title Shatterhand, will start shooting next month and is due to be released in 2020 Danny Boyle reportedly quit as director of the new James Bond film because bosses would not let him kill off the iconic secret agent. The filmmaker, 62, is said to have wanted 007 to die in the arms of returning Bond girl Lea Seydoux in the 25th Bond film. A source told the Daily Star: 'Boyle thought that killing 007 would be a brilliant way to pave to introduce a new Bond.' However, they allege that Bond producer Barbara and actor Daniel Craig were not impressed with the idea. They said: 'When the dust settled there was push back from Barbara and Daniel. 'The feeling was that the audience should be left guessing as to the plight of their man.' It will be several lonely months in a prison cell before Cardinal George Pell and his legal team return to court in a bid to clear his name. Pell, the highest ranking Catholic ever convicted of child sex abuse, was today sentenced to up to six years' imprisonment by the Victorian County Court. His crime - the rape and molestation of a 13-year-old boy, and abuse of another - was described by Chief Judge Paul Kidd as 'breathtakingly arrogant''. Judge Kidd acknowledged Pell may die in jail and, if he ever walks free, will be a registered sex offender for the rest of his life. But it is not the end of the road for Pell, who has always maintained his innocence and has the backing of several high-profile supporters. Cardinal George Pell may never again step foot in Vatican City under new laws that cancel the passports of convicted paedophiles After his conviction was announced earlier this year, Pell's barrister, Robert Richter QC, quickly sought to appeal the jury verdict in a higher court. The appeal is based on three grounds, documents released by the court said, and legal sources have said Pell has a 'reasonable' chance of convincing appeal judges. Pell's first ground of appeal is that the jury verdict was 'unreasonable'. Pell's lawyers argued the the body of evidence did not leave it open to the jury to be satisfied of 'his guilt beyond reasonable doubt'. Pell's defence barrister Robert Richter QC has described the guilty verdict as 'perverse'. He will remain part of his legal team during the appeal The defence claimed Judge Paul Kidd erred when he banned them from playing a 'Pac Man' animation depicting people moving around the Cathedral (pictured) at trial PELL A SEX OFFENDER George Pell today signed documents making Australias highest ever ranking Catholic official a registered sex offender for life. That will have serious consequences if his conviction be upheld and the 77-year-old walks free from prison at the end of his sentence. Pell is the highest ranking Catholic to ever be convicted of child abuse The Turnbull government last year implemented a law which cancels the passports of paedophiles to prevent child sex tourism. Senator Derryn Hinch said Pell, who used to live in Rome, will no longer be able to travel to the Vatican, Rome, or anywhere else outside Australia. Hinch was a leading proponent of the law change. Pell will also be bound by Victorian laws surrounding registered sex offenders. He would have to report contact with children, membership of any groups, residential and frequented addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, internet usernames, motor vehicles, travel and employment details to police each year. If Pell failed to report any of those details, he could be charged with an offence. Advertisement One of the two boys Pell abused died of an accidental heroin overdose years before the case went to trial. The other boy's evidence was critical to the prosecution case and accepted by the County Court jury. The second appeal ground is that the judge made an error when he prevented Pell's legal team from using a 'Pac-Man' style animation of people moving around the Cathedral during the trial. The defence had planned to use the video, which showed people as coloured dots moving around the cathedral, to demonstrate their argument that it was 'impossible' for Pell to have committed the crimes. The third appeal ground is that there was a 'fundamental irregularity' in the trial. The defence claimed Pell was not 'arraigned' in front of a jury. The arraignment is the part of the trial where an accused person enters their plea. Pell is expected to be represented by a new barrister, Bret Walker SC, on appeal, with Mr Richter remaining on Pell's legal team. Legal sources said it was common for different lawyers to present the appeal case as it 'allows the barrister to dismiss the other lawyer's failings at trial'. Mr Richter has bluntly described the jury verdict as 'perverse'. Meanwhile, Pell's victim is holding his breath for the appeal. 'It is hard for me to allow myself to feel the gravity of this moment,' he said in a statement today. 'I appreciate that the court has acknowledged what was inflicted upon me as a child. However, there is no rest for me. 'Everything is overshadowed by the forthcoming appeal.' Two days have been set aside for the appeal so far, June 5 and June 6. For Pell, alone and condemned in his prison cell, it will be particularly long wait. A young father-to-be has been shot and killed just days before his wife was expected to go into labour with the couple's first child. Arthur Brown, known as Afa, was killed in the early hours of Sunday morning on Vine Street in Mangere, south Auckland, New Zealand. The 26-year-old recently married his partner Atiliai Brown, who was due to give birth on Tuesday. Mr Brown's cousin, Geoff, said the family was offering their support to Ms Brown while they mourned his tragic death. Arthur Brown, known as Afa, was killed in the early hours of Sunday morning on Vine Street in Mangere, south Auckland, New Zealand (pictured with his wife on their wedding day) The 26-year-old (pictured) recently married his partner Atiliai Brown, who was due to give birth on Tuesday 'Giving her space to see her through, the space she needs to bring a child in this in to the world,' Geoff said. 'We're here to support her.' 'It's a harsh reality in life, you've really got to look after yourself, your family.' Geoff said it was only a couple of months ago the big family gathered to celebrate their wedding. The joyous occasion was supposed to be the start of 'really good things for Afa and his wife to look forward too'. Geoff said Mr Brown, one of his younger cousins, was 'like a brother' to him. Mr Brown's cousin Geoff said it was only a couple of months ago the big family got together to celebrate their wedding Geoff (right) said his cousin, who had a troubled youth, had turned his life around for the better and had happened to go for a walk when he was fatally shot in 'bad timing' Their family, which sprawls across Australia, Samoa, New Zealand and America, have been hit hard by the news. 'Afa had a lot of friends, his friends were his family too,' Geoff said. Geoff described Mr Brown as a 'great kid' who gave a lot to those around him. 'Pretty big bloke but he's got a big heart of gold,' Geoff said. Geoff said his cousin, who had a troubled youth, had turned his life around for the better and had happened to go for a walk when he was fatally shot in 'bad timing'. 'We live in a society now, where people have no respect for life,' Geoff said. He warned others to make sure they don't walk around late at night. The joyous occasion filled with smiles was supposed to be the start of 'really good things for Afa (centre) and wife to look forward too' 'I hope these young men understand these actions... affect people for life.' 'We want justice, we want to see that these people are caught.' A number of friends have shared their condolences to social media, remembering Mr Brown's life. 'We are so sorry for the loss of your son, brother, nephew, uncle and husband and a father to be,' wrote one mourner. 'So devastated this young man was just sorting his life out, just got married and baby on the way, living life to the fullest.' 'He was a polite young man and also he had a sense of humour/and a character. You won't be forgotten. May you RIP Afa Brown.' A number of friends have shared their condolences to social media, remembering Mr Brown's life The local police are still continuing to appeal for public assistance into Mr Brown's death. 'It's still early days in our investigation and our priority at this stage is piecing together all the circumstances leading up to this incident,' said Detective Inspector Tofilau Faa Va'aelua. 'There is a team of investigators working on this investigation and we are determined to find those responsible and hold them to account. Earlier, police said they were acquiring CCTV footage for their investigation. 'Police are aware of the concern in the community especially with this level of violence. We are extremely committed to apprehending the perpetrators of this senseless crime as soon as possible,' said Tofilau Faa Va'aelua. 'I have no doubt there are people in the community who know the identity of those responsible.' Investigators urge anyone with information about the incident to contact police or Crimestoppers. Cardinal George Pell entered the Victorian County Court on what would be his judgement day looking every bit a broken man. While he stood tall and proud on entry, his powerful presence had been removed - just like the clerical collar he had worn in public for nearly all of his life. In the front row of the packed courtroom sat probably his arch nemesis - ABC reporter Louise Milligan. The reporter had written a damning book about his alleged offending and now sat directly behind Pell's prosecutor alongside complainants from an abandoned trial. The hurls of abuse and heckling from Pell's detractors - present at previous court appearances - was nowhere to be heard on this momentous occasion. Mighty fall from grace: Disgraced Cardinal George Pell showed glimpses of despair during his sentence George Pell at an earlier hearing in Melbourne before he was jailed. He tried his best not to show any emotion at his sentence but gave some glimpses into how he was feeling In the front row of the packed courtroom sat probably Pell's arch nemesis - ABC reporter Louise Milligan (pictured outside court last year) A police van transporting Cardinal George Pell leaves the County Court in Melbourne after Pell was sentenced to six years in jail for child sex crimes At a pre-trial hearing, Judge Peter Kidd had warned those who abused Pell's barrister Robert Richter, QC, that he would jail them if they played up. It had been a quiet morning outside of court, with only a handful on protesters present along Lonsdale Street. In the days of his trial, Pell had been shouted at and abused day in and out as he attended court. Today they were outnumbered massively by reporters, who had come from across the country and the world to watch one of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church be sentenced. Pell's defence had protested against a television camera broadcasting the sentence live to the world. But a cameraman stood in the area usually reserved for a jury to film every word. The rest of the public was moved onto an adjoining courtroom where they were beamed in the live feed. When Pell took his seat in the dock, he was surrounded by four burly guards - much like the men who will be his only point of contact over his future years behind bars. Judgement day: Judge Peter Kidd delivered a damning assessment of the Cardinal's crimes Pell's barrister Robert Richter, QC, spent much of the hearing stroking his beard and staring directly at the bench in front of him A woman shouts outside the County Court after the sentencing of Cardinal George Pell During his pre-sentence hearing, a confident Pell made it his business to eyeball anyone who stared at him - and there were plenty in the courtroom who did. Pell would not break his gaze. It was a different George Pell in the dock today. He sat stony faced. Those that took only a passing gaze at him might say he showed no emotion at all. But Pell's body could not totally hide his inner emotions. As the sentence kicked off, mention of his power within the church and his seniority caused Pell to rock back in his seat and straighten his slouched shoulders. He would go onto do this repeatedly throughout the more-than-an-hour long sentence. Pell's normally steely eyes also gave him away throughout Judge Kidd's drawn-out sentence. The disgraced Cardinal would take long, sustained blinks as Judge Kidd painfully outlined every detail of Pell's past few years. The media outrage, his vilification - albeit justifiably now - and the shocking details of the abuse of two choir boys in 1996 he had been found guilty of. At times it appeared as if Judge Kidd himself was almost sympathetic to Pell - repeatedly mentioning that he had to act on the jury's verdict. But Judge's Kidd's ultimate sentence looked anything but sympathetic - at least to some of those within the media who had covered the majority of his trials. Sins of the father: Protesters were out in force at the sentencing of Australia's most powerful Catholic cleric Robert Richter barrister for Cardinal George Pell arrives at the County Court for sentencing Abuse survivors and campaigners (pictured) arrived at court for the sentencing of disgraced Cardinal George Pell for abusing two teenage boys in 1996 Victims would later complain Pell had 'got off easy' and 'deserved a bigger hit'. Some had been tearful throughout the sentence - beacons of misery among a bunch of laptop pounding journalists. In the back row of the courtroom an artist glared at Pell as she no doubt created a masterpiece of him seated in the dock. Pell cleared his throat after Judge Kidd described his attack on a young choir boy as 'nasty'. Mr Richter, who fought so hard to clear Pell, spent much of the hearing stroking his beard and staring directly at the bench in front of him. As Pell's mental capacity was aired, the Cardinal removed his glasses and casually scratched his eye with the tip. He combed his hand through his hair when his breach of trust was mentioned and again cleared his throat when his power at St Patrick's Cathedral was raised. When Judge Kidd said Pell would often go in and congratulate the boys after choir, Pell's lips pursed together even tighter. Overwhelmed: The jailing of Cardinal George Pell brought forward a flood of emotions for some outside the sentence hearing It was as if in his mind, this was the only ounce of truth in the entire sentence. For more than half an hour Pell copped a tirade of Judge Kidd's accusations and assesment. But Pell again lifted his shoulders and sat proud when it was suggested he might be at the end of his days. After 53 minutes, Pell took his first swig of water from a paper cup. It had been a tiring sentence for all involved. Pell began to stretch out his dodgy knee and appeared uncomfortable. Even Judge Kidd stumbled a couple of times and was forced to restart his sentence. But as the time drew nearer to his ultimate doom, Pell began to become more active. On the other side of the room is a kitchen sink and cabinets next to the altar wine cabinet, a small room with a white door left slightly ajar This is the sacristy of St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne, as it looks today and shown to the jury, where Cardinal George Pell molested two 13-year-old choirboys in his ceremonial robes He adjusted his hair, took another swig of water and cleared his throat. With a strong right hand, he pulled himself to his feet. Judgement was delivered. The once untouchable George Pell - the third most powerful man in the Catholic Church - was handed a maximum sentence of six years, to serve at least three years and eight months in jail. There was hardly a sound. Pell signed some paperwork and bowed before being escorted out of court by the armed guards to begin his sentence. Some in court embraced. Outside court police were given three cheers by those still milling about. WHAT JUDGE PETER KIDD SAID WHEN SENTENCING PELL 'The acts were sexually graphic. Both victims were visibly and audibly distressed during this offending' 'You were confident your victims would not complain. It is fanciful to suggest that you may not have fully appreciated this' 'There is an added layer of degradation and humiliation that each of your victims must have felt in knowing that their abuse had been witnessed by the other' 'You had had ample time to reflect upon your previous abuse .... despite this, you still indecently acted against (victim J), and did so with what I consider to be a degree of physical aggression and venom' 'I consider your moral culpability across both episodes to be high' There was a clear relationship of trust with the victims, and you breached that trust and abused your position to facilitate this offending' 'Your obvious status as Archbishop cast a powerful shadow over this offending' 'I would characterise these breaches and abuses as grave' 'You continued to offend with callous indifference to the victim's distress' 'Your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance' 'There is no evidence of your remorse or contrition for me to act upon to reduce your sentence' 'On the one hand I must punish and denounce you for this appalling offending. Yet on the other hand, I am conscious of the heavy reality that I am about to sentence you, a man of advanced years, who has led an otherwise blameless life, to a significant period of imprisonment, which will account for a good portion of the balance of your life' Advertisement But the cheers might need to be saved until June, when Pell returns to court to appeal his conviction and now, quite possibly, his sentence. Pell became the world's most senior Catholic official to be convicted of child sex abuse when he was found guilty in December of orally raping a 13-year-old choirboy and molesting another at St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne after a Sunday mass. The 77-year-old stared directly at Chief Judge Kidd when he imposed the sentence on Wednesday morning which allows Pell to apply for parole after three years and eight months. In remarks broadcast live around the world from Melbourne County Court, Judge Kidd called Pell's crimes 'breathtakingly arrogant' and said the abuse has caused 'long-term and serious harm.' He said Pell's age and lack of offending for 22 years meant he is not a danger to the community and is not likely to re-offend. The judge also took into account Pell's ailing health as he suffers from high blood pressure and congestive heart failure which requires him to have a pacemaker - and said Pell may die in jail. But because the disgraced cardinal still denies the abuse and is appealing the conviction, Judge Kidd said he had shown 'no remorse or contrition' which could have reduced the sentence. Pell, who was until late February the Vatican's treasurer and once considered a pope in waiting, will be on the sex offenders register for the rest of his life. Pell's surviving victim, who testified and was cross-examined at the trial, issued a statement through his solicitor saying he found it hard to take comfort in the verdict for now. 'Being a witness in a criminal case has not been easy. I am doing my best to hold myself and my family together,' said the victim. Campaigners called the sentence lenient and a 'disgrace'. Abuse survivor Michael Advocate said: 'It doesn't send any deterrent, it doesn't give the victims any sense of justice. Referring to the non-parole period, he added: 'Jail time of less than four years for destroying the lives of two innocent young boys - is their life only worth two years each?' Mr Advocate said it gave sex abuse victims comfort to know that Pell will be behind bars tonight and added: 'May Pell rot in his cell.' Pell's barrister had argued it would have been impossible for him to abuse the children while wearing the large robes he was dressed in when he committed the vile abuse Pope Francis (right, with Pell) banned him from saying Mass in public and from going near children until his appeal against the conviction is over The cardinal wore an open neck black shirt with no collar for the 70-minute sentencing - the first time he has been seen in public without the collar. At the start of proceedings at 10am, Judge Kidd said Pell's offending had a 'profound impact' on his victims. But he made clear that Pell would receive the 'stable hand of justice' and told him 'you are not to be made a scapegoat for any failings or perceived failings of the Catholic Church.' 'Nor are you being sentenced for any failure to prevent or report child sexual abuse by other clergy in the Catholic church,' the judge added. Judge Kidd said he accepted Pell's lawyer's argument that the abuse 'involved opportunistic and spontaneous offending, rather than pre-planned or premeditated conduct.' 'Had it been preplanned or involved grooming, it would have been more serious,' he said. Referring to the victims as J and R, he went into graphic details about the oral rape of one of the boys and the abuse of another in two incidents in 1996 and 1997. Pictured: A protester outside court for the sentencing of George Pell The judge said the acts were conducted with 'physical aggression and venom' and said 'it was by no means a minor indecent act.' Judge Kidd said the boy who was orally raped was 'struggling and flailing' during the act. 'You moved from one victim to the other,' he said. Judge Kidd said the first episode in the priest's sacristy involved a 'brazen and forceful sexual attack on the two victims'. 'The acts were sexually graphic. Both victims were visibly and audibly distressed during this offending,' Judge Kidd said. 'The obvious distress and objections of your victims is relevant to my assessment of the impact of your offending on (the victims). 'There is an added layer of degradation and humiliation that each of your victims must have felt in knowing that their abuse had been witnessed by the other.' The second episode was 'brief and spontaneous' but could not be viewed as an 'isolated lapse' as Pell had ample time to reflect on his previous abuse of one of the boys, the judge said. 'Despite this, you still indecently acted against (the boy), and did so with what I consider to be a degree of physical aggression and venom,' Judge Kidd said. 'It was by no means a minor indecent act.' Judge Kidd said by his offending in such a 'risky and brazen' manner, it was inferred Pell was prepared to take such risks. 'I conclude that your decision to offend was a reasoned, albeit perverted, one, and I reach that conclusion to the criminal standard.' Pell also abused his position by breaching the trust of his victims. 'I find beyond reasonable doubt that, on the specific facts of your case, there was a clear relationship of trust with the victims, and you breached that trust and abused your position to facilitate this offending,' the judge said. After the court hearing, campaigners called the sentence lenient and a 'disgrace'. Pictured: A man watches proceedings outside the court Judge Kidd rejected Pell's defence argument the crimes were committed by Pell the man, not the archbishop. 'Your obvious status as Archbishop cast a powerful shadow over this offending,' he said. 'I would characterise these breaches and abuses as grave.' Talking about Pell's role as Archbishop of Melbourne, the judge said: 'There was breach of trust and you abused your position to facilitate the offending. 'You were a pillar of St Patrick's community by virtue of your role as Archbishop. Victim J gave evidence that the choirboys were expected to show reverence in your presence. 'The evidence shows that you were profoundly revered, Cardinal Pell, which imbued you with and legitimised your authority. 'As Archbishop, you did have a relationship of approval in relation to the choirboys. In part, the choirboys were performing to please you as Archbishop. Talking about Pell's role as Archbishop of Melbourne, the judge said: 'There was breach of trust and you abused your position to facilitate the offending.' Pictured: Media outside court 'There was evidence that you would, from time to time, visit the robing room to congratulate the boys on their singing. The choirboys were the least powerful and the most subordinate individuals at the Cathedral. 'The victims themselves were 13 years of age. The power imbalance between the victims and all the senior church leaders or officials, yourself included, was stark.' In summarising his decision to sentence Kidd to six years in jail, he said: 'On the one hand I must punish and denounce you for this appalling offending. Yet on the other hand, I am conscious of the heavy reality that I am about to sentence you, a man of advanced years, who has led an otherwise blameless life, to a significant period of imprisonment, which will account for a good portion of the balance of your life.' 'I am conscious that the term of imprisonment, which I am about to impose upon you, carries with it a real, as distinct from theoretical, possibility that you may not live to be released from prison. 'Facing jail at your age in these circumstances must be an awful state of affairs for you.' FROM ALLEGATIONS TO CONVICTION: A TIMELINE OF THE CARDINAL GEORGE PELL CASE 1996 - Pell appointed Archbishop of Melbourne by Pope John Paul II - Pell sexually abuses two 13-year-old choirboys after a Sunday solemn mass at St Patrick's Cathedral - A second indecent act is committed by Pell against one of the choirboys in a corridor at the Cathedral. 2016 - The Herald Sun reports Pell is being investigated by Victoria Police's Sano taskforce for 'multiple offences' committed while he was a priest in Ballarat and Archbishop of Melbourne - Pell says the allegations are 'without foundation and utterly false' and calls for an inquiry into how the police investigation became public - Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton asks the anti-corruption watchdog to investigate the leak, but denies it came from police - Pell gives evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse's inquiry into abuse in Ballarat - Under Vatican rules, Pell gives Pope Francis his resignation on his 75th birthday, as is customary. It is not accepted - Victoria Police investigators hand over to the state's Office of Public Prosecutions a brief of evidence on allegations of sexual abuse by Pell - Officers travel to Rome to interview Pell over the abuse claims. He voluntarily participates in the interview. 2017 - Police present their final brief of evidence to the Office of Public Prosecutions to consider charges - Prosecutors give police the green light to charge Pell. JUNE 2017 - Pell is charged with multiple counts of historic child sex offences - He denies the charges and vows to clear his name - Lawyers for Pell appear in the Melbourne Magistrates Court - Pell takes leave from his Vatican finance chief role to fight the charges. JULY 2017 - Pell returns to Australia - He hires top barrister Robert Richter QC - Supporters set up a fund to help Pell fight the charges. MARCH 2018 - Prosecutors drop one of the charges against Pell - A month-long committal hearing begins to determine if Pell will face trial - Prosecutors withdraw more charges - Mr Richter claims police conducted a 'get Pell operation' and accuses magistrate Belinda Wallington of bias. She refuses to disqualify herself from the case. MAY 2018 - Magistrate Belinda Wallington orders Pell stand trial on some charges, but throws out others - Pell formally pleads 'not guilty' - Two trials are ordered, separating the 1970s and 1990s allegations - A Victorian County Court employee is sacked for looking up information on the Pell case. AUGUST 2018 - The 1990s 'cathedral trial' begins in the Victorian County Court in Melbourne - Pell pleads not guilty again to one charge of sexual penetration of a child under 16 and four of indecent acts with a child, over incidents involving two 13-year-old choirboys at St Patrick's Cathedral in 1996. SEPTEMBER 2018 - The jury is discharged, unable to reach a verdict following a week of deliberation. Some jurors weep. NOVEMBER 2018 - A retrial begins. The jury aren't told of the previous hung jury. DECEMBER 2018 - Pell is found guilty on all charges by an unanimous jury - Mr Richter says Pell will appeal - Suppression orders prevent Australian media reporting the verdict but it spreads through international media within hours. FEBRUARY 2019 - Hearings begin ahead of the second trial. Prosecutors drop another charge - An appeal is filed against the cathedral trial conviction - A County Court judge deems vital evidence inadmissible - Prosecutors withdraw all remaining charges against Pell and drop a second trial over allegations Pell indecently assaulted boys in Ballarat in the 1970s when he was a parish priest - Pell is due to be taken into custody on Wednesday February 27 as the plea hearing begins. MARCH 2019 - Pell is due to be sentenced by County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd. Australian Associated Press Advertisement Thousands of Australians have been unable to access their funds on Wednesday after Bendigo Bank's ebanking feature crashed causing an hours-long outage. The bank alerted customers of the disruption in a tweet around 6am, but the service remains down as of this afternoon. 'Alert! We have been advised our ebanking is currently unavailable. We're working to resolve this as soon as possible and will update as soon as we have any information. We apologise for any inconvenience caused,' the bank tweeted. Thousands of Australians have been unable to access their funds on Wednesday after Bendigo Bank's ebanking feature crashed causing an hours-long outage The bank alerted customers of the disruption in a tweet around 6am, but the service remains down as of this afternoon Four hours later: The bank sent a follow up tweet saying there still was no 'ETA for a fix' In an update four hours later, the bank said there was still 'no ETA for a fix' while adding that some branches have also been affected. 'We're still working on this unexpected outage with no ETA for a fix at this point. Some branches are also affected and may not be able to process transactions. We will update as we know more. Thank you for your patience.' Angry customers have taken to Twitter to complain about the outage, with some claiming they haven't been able to access their money since last night. 'This is pretty disappointing considering it's been down since about 9pm last night and it took till this morning for someone to acknowledge the problems,' one person said. In response to the update, one woman tweeted: 'Do you really think this is good enough? I had medication to get this morning, and thanks to your outage, i cannot get it now, so thank you for inconveniencing everyone who banks with you.' 'Couldn't pay for petrol this morning i put in my car thanks to your app not working. If it is not up by this afternoon no idea what ill do,' said another. In response, Bendigo said it was 'working hard to resolve this and will update as soon as its fixed.' A California man risked his life to run past firefighters to save his dog as his house was engulfed in flames. Firefighters yelled at Jose Guzman to stop as he ran past them into the house in Pala, San Diego, this week. Shocking footage shows him ignoring firefighters who tried to stop him as they battled the massive blaze. California man Jose Guzman (pictured) risked his life to run past firefighters to save his dog as his house was engulfed in flames A couple of minutes later, Guzman emerges with his dog. He appears to have a burn on his arm and can be seen checking it in the video footage. Neighbors and onlookers are also seen outside, with some expressing their shock at Guzman's actions. But Guzman didnt care about belongings. He said he just wanted to save his pit bull, Gabbana. Guzman is seen emerging from his burning house with his pit bull Gabbana moments later He had ignored firefighters calls not to go into the house but he said he had to save his dog He told ABC10 News: 'When I ran through curtain of fire where my van was and fence, I didn't know what was behind that. 'I knew my dog was here, I knew she was here. I ran through here tried to stay in the middle this was going, this was on fire, I couldn't see anything.' Guzman said Gabbana was hiding behind the toilet and it took him a matter of seconds to get her out of the house. He added: ''All I wanted was to get my dog, I came in here, I didn't hesitate, I just, I had to get her, she's part of the family.' Guzman, (left), said Gabbana, (right), was hiding behind the toilet and it took him a matter of seconds to get him out of the house Guzman burned his face and his arms as a result of running into the burning building Guzman said he, his wife, and three daughters had only lived in the house for just two months. He added: 'There's nothing that survived, nothing, all our savings were here. 'Me and family would've been destroyed, we love that dog, I'm sure there's people that would do the same thing.' In the blaze, Jose and his family almost all their possessions, including the tools that Jose uses for work Firefighters would caution people against untrained people running into fires, Guzman's rescued had a happy ending. However no one was hurt and the community is helping the family through GoFundMe. In the blaze, Jose and his family almost all their possessions, including the tools that Jose uses for work, KUSI News reported. Guzman works two jobs, in construction, and as a landscaper. A Northern Territory mayor has slammed his own council's decision to ban merchandise bearing the controversial slogan 'CU in the NT'. T-shirts, beer stubbies, caps and thongs bearing an allusion to a rude word will banned from being displayed at Darwin's popular Nightcliff and Mindil Beach markets. Darwin Lord Mayor Kon Vatskalis actually voted for a motion on Tuesday night to pull the merchandise from public display, following a series of complaints from the public about a particular stall on council-leased land. A Northern Territory mayor has slammed his own council's decision to ban merchandise (pictured) bearing the controversial slogan 'CU in the NT' T-shirts, beer stubbies and caps bearing an allusion to a rude word will banned from being displayed at Darwin's popular Nightcliff and Mindil Beach markets Mr Vatskalis, a former NT Labor minister, did however express misgivings about people being too easily offended. 'My problem is that we live in a "I find offence society" and there's always a push to remove things from the public,' he told Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday. 'Where do we stop? 'I'm not going to actively try to find out what's moral, what's offensive or what's not offensive.' Mr Vatskalis, who has quit the Labor Party, said he personally found the slogan 'childish'. 'I find it stupid and other people take offence of it,' he said. The 'CU in the NT' merchandise had been displayed at Darwin's popular Mindil Beach markets for the past three years Darwin's Lord Mayor added the 'CU in the NT' merchandise had been displayed at market stalls for three years and wondered why the public wasn't more outraged at drug paraphernalia like bongs being sold at the Darwin markets. Darwin Lord Mayor Kon Vatskalis said people were too easily offended 'Which I find very extraordinary,' Mr Vatskalis said. Greens councillor Robin Knox, whose council ward covers the Nightcliff markets, moved the motion after receiving complaints about children seeing the 'CU in the NT' stall. 'The market stall was next to a children's playground - it's a very family friendly market,' she told Daily Mail Australia. Councillor Knox also noted the Northern Territory had some of Australia's highest rates of domestic violence and that the industry's Advertising Standards Board had in 2017 regarded the allusion to the C-word as 'denigrating'. Greens councillor Robin Knox, whose council ward covers the Nightcliff markets, moved the motion after receiving complaints about children seeing the 'CU in the NT' stall 'It's a negative word. In common language it is not a joke,' she said. 'It's used in a derogatory manner. It's a swear word. 'I've had an enormous number of emails and phone calls from men and women.' A man had also complained to police about the merchandise, on the grounds it was offensive to women. A council by-law will be enforced banning the market associations at Nightcliff and Mindil Beach from allowing offensive material to be displayed in public. The council motion narrowly passed seven votes to six, with the Lord Mayor exercising his casting vote in favour of the motion. Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grilled Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan about the bank's involvement in the caging of children at the US Mexico border and the Dakota Access Pipeline during a House hearing regarding the bank's practices. As Sloan sat before the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez told him: 'I am interested in the human rights abuses and environmental disasters that some say are financed by your bank, Wells Fargo.' She went on to cite an opinion piece published by The Guardian in April 2017 that accused Wells Fargo of 'pursuing profits without principles' by investing in for-profit immigration detention centers, private prisons and loan shark payday lending schemes. 'Is it true Wells Fargo invested or financed in some of these industries?' the freshman Democrat asked. Sloan responded by saying that Wells Fargo was terminating relationships with two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic, both of which have been involved with immigration detention. He said one exit was finalized and the other was still pending, but he couldn't remember which was which. Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grilled Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan about the bank's involvement in the caging of children at the US Mexico border and its financing of the Dakota Access Pipeline during a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Tuesday CEO Tim Sloan seemed caught off guard by a couple of Ocasio-Cortez's pointed questions during the heated hearing on Wells Fargo's practices Ocasio-Cortez followed up by asking: 'Why was the bank involved in the caging of children, and financing the caging of children to begin with?' Sloan appeared to be caught off guard by the question and didn't answer it directly. 'I don't know how to answer that question because we weren't,' he said. 'For a period of time, we were involved in financing one of the firms. We aren't anymore. I'm not familiar with the specific assertions that you're making, but we weren't directly involved in that.' Ocasio-Cortez responded curtly: 'Okay, so these companies run private detention facilities run by ICE, which is involved in caging children, but I'll move on.' She went on to address Wells Fargo's financing of the Dakota Access Pipeline, asking whether the bank should be required to cover environmental clean-up costs if something went wrong. 'Hypothetically, if there was a leak from the Dakota Access Pipeline, why shouldn't Wells Fargo pay for the cleanup of it, since it paid for the construction of the pipeline itself?' she probed. Sloan responded by explaining that the pipeline is not operated by the bank and noting that Wells Fargo was one of more than a dozen banks that financed it. Just before she ran out of time, Ocasio-Cortez questioned why Wells Fargo agreed to finance it 'when it was widely seen to be environmentally unstable'. Sloan answered: 'Our team reviewed the environmental impact and we concluded that it was a risk that we were willing to take.' Sloan fought to convince the committee that the beleaguered bank has cleaned up its act after a series of scandals that affected millions of Wells Fargo customers Committee Chair Maxine Waters opened the hearing by recounting Wells Fargo's missteps, saying the bank had failed to prove it had abandoned harmful policies Members of the House Financial Services Committee kept Sloan on his toes throughout Tuesday's hearing as the CEO fought to convince them that the beleaguered bank has cleaned up its act after a series of scandals that affected millions of customers. Committee Chair Maxine Waters opened by recounting Wells Fargo's missteps, saying the bank had failed to prove it had abandoned harmful policies. 'Wells Fargo's ongoing lawlessness and the failure to right the ship, suggests the bank is simply too big to manage,' the California Democrat said of its $1.9trillion in assets. Sloan responded by saying that the bank's size wasn't a problem. The committee's ranking Republican, Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, said his party wouldn't show any sympathy for Wells Fargo. 'You will hear bipartisan criticism of the actions you have taken and the failures that you have overseen under your watch,' he said. Sloan stressed that Wells Fargo is compensating customers who had been harmed, strengthening risk management and internal controls, and improving the culture at the consumer banking giant. The bank has paid billions of dollars in fines to regulators for consumer abuses in virtually every part of its business. Sloan stressed that Wells Fargo is compensating customers who had been harmed, strengthening risk management and internal controls, and improving the bank's culture Former and current Wells Fargo employees rallied with members of Congress and Communications Workers of America union members outside the Capitol on Tuesday Activists with Climate First and Sierra Club are seen outside the Rayburn House Office Building as Sloan testified at the hearing titled: 'Holding Megabanks Accountable: An Examination of Wells Fargo's Pattern of Consumer Abuses' Ocasio-Cortez blasted Sloan in a tweet after the hearing on Tuesday afternoon Among a litany of scandals in recent years was Wells' acknowledging that its employees had opened up to 3.5 million accounts without customers' authorization or knowledge in order to meet sales quotas. The Federal Reserve took unprecedented action on Wells Fargo's business in February of 2018, forcing the bank to replace four of its directors and capping its growth until the bank developed better risk-management practices. Other scandals engulfing the biggest US mortgage lender have included selling auto insurance and other financial products to customers who didn't need them; charging service members higher rates on loans than allowed by law; and improperly selling complex financial products to retail investors. Sloan was the first bank executive to be grilled by the Committee since it was taken over by Democrats. The CEOs of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group Inc , Citigroup Inc, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Bank of America Corp are expected to appear before the committee next month. Shocking footage has emerged of the aftermath of a triple stabbing at a south London rap concert last night as Britain remains in the grip of a knife-crime epidemic. A man in his 20s can be seen staggering through crowds at Electric Brixton with blood pouring from a wound in his arm as other concertgoers scream. Earlier footage from the gig by US rapper Roddy Ricch shows a group of men squaring up to each other on a raised platform as a bouncer tries to break them up. One concertgoer can be seen jumping over a railing to flee the trouble. The violence, which witnesses said began during a song called Die Young, led to three men in their 20s being taken to hospital. They have all be discharged. No arrests have been made. Police are struggling against a wave of violence in the capital, with 24 murder investigations launched this year. A man is seen showing his bloodied arm after being stabbed at the Electric Brixton music venue in south London last night where two others were also knifed Britain as a whole has seen 42 people stabbed to death so far this year, including 12 in just two weeks. Yesterday afternoon, a woman in her 20s accompanied by a child was stabbed by a heavily-built attacker outside a Co-op in Oxford. She was not critically injured and is believed to have known her victim, who police are now pursuing. On Monday, a 19-year-old man was badly injured after being stabbed in the chest outside a DLR station in Lewisham, south-east London. Jodie Chesney and Yousef Makki, both 17, both died after being stabbed earlier this month. In an attempt to stem the violence, Operation Spectre was launched on Monday to encourage young people carrying knives to give them up anonymously using amnesty bins. The Metropolitan Police has also unveiled plans to stop and search 1,000 suspects every day to reduce the number of knives on the streets. A blurred image from Snapchat shows the moment the altercation broke out Other footage shows the chaotic aftermath of the fight, with people screaming and security staff rushing to intervene No arrests have been made. Police are struggling against a wave of violence in the capital, with 24 murder investigations launched this year A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said: 'Police were called to a music venue in Town Hall Parade, Brixton SW2 at 22.30hrs on Tuesday, 12 March. 'It is believed that a fight broke out in the venue, during which three males in their 20s were stabbed. 'They were attended to by colleagues from London Ambulance Service and taken to hospital. All have now been discharged. 'The venue was evacuated and there have been no other reports of injuries. There have been no arrests.' Witnesses to the Brixton stabbing were told to contact 101 and quote CAD 8088. Fearless, a charity for young people affected by knife crime, can be reached at www.fearless.org. Another image from social media shows concert-goers outside the venue after the violence broke out in Brixton last night The Electric Brixton venue (left, file picture) was evacuated following the incident at the concert by Roddy Ricch (right, shown performing in Birmingham on February 16) President Donald Trump attacked California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday after the Democrat halted the execution of hunreds of condemned inmates on the nation's largest death row. Newsom's office said Tuesday that he will issue an executive order granting a reprieve to each of the state's condemned inmates, guaranteeing them a reprieve for at least as long as he's governor. He's also withdrawing the lethal injection regulations that death penalty opponents have already tied up in court. And he's shuttering the new execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison that has never been used. 'Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers,' Trump complained on Twitter. 'Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!' California hasn't executed anyone since 2006, under then-Republican Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger, and death row inmates are far more likely to die of old age. The state's voters have narrowly supported the death penalty, most recently in 2016 when they voted to speed up the process. President Donald Trump clobbered California's Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday over his decision to halt all executions in the Golden State: 'Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!' Newsom is halting the executions of 737 condemned inmates on the nation's largest death row, his office announced on Tuesday Trump tweeted Wednesday about that '737 stone cold killers' whose executions will be abandoned in the Golden State Since California's last execution in 2006, the state's death rows have grown to house one of every four condemned inmates in the US. A condemned inmate can be seen above as he's led out of his east block cell on death row at San Quentin State Prison in 2016 (file photo) California's condemned population is now the nation's largest, representing one-quarter of those awaiting execution in the United States. They include Richard Davis, who kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas during a slumber party and strangled her, and Lonnie Franklin Jr, convicted of killing nine women and a teenage girl in Los Angeles. He's known as the 'Grim Sleeper' because detectives thought he took a 14-year break in killing between 1988 and 2002. Newsom's office said he can act unilaterally because he's enacting a moratorium, not changing anyone's sentence. He's not commuting any death sentences, which in many cases would require agreement from the state Supreme Court. A governor needs approval from the state Supreme Court to pardon or commute the sentence of anyone twice convicted of a felony, and the justices last year blocked several clemency requests by former Gov Jerry Brown. While the governor's move is certain to be challenged in court, aides cite his power to grant reprieves written into the state Constitution. 'I do not believe that a civilized society can claim to be a leader in the world as long as its government continues to sanction the premeditated and discriminatory execution of its people,' Newsom said in prepared remarks. 'In short, the death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian.' He called the death penalty 'a failure' that 'has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or can't afford expensive legal representation.' He also argues that it doesn't act as a deterrent, wastes taxpayer dollars and is flawed because it is 'irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error.' California has spent $5 billion since 1978 on its death row, he said. 'The intentional killing of another person is wrong,' he said, 'and as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual.' His office said more than six in 10 condemned California inmates are minorities, citing racial disparities in who is sentenced to die. And it said five condemned California inmates were eventually exonerated since 1973. Kim Kardashian West tweeted about Newsom's announcement on Tuesday night, writing: 'I have met with and am very supportive of Governor Newsom and his decision to help bring an end to the California Death Penalty. Racial bias and unfairness run deep throughout the justice system but especially when it comes to the death penalty.' Kim Kardashian West tweeted about Newsom's announcement on Tuesday night Gov Newsom is also withdrawing the lethal injection regulations that death penalty opponents have already tied up in court and will shutter the new execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison that has never been used California is the sixth state where a governor has enacted a moratorium. Republican Illinois Gov George Ryan was the first to do so in 2000, though Illinois has since abolished the death penalty. The governors of Pennsylvania, Washington and Oregon have imposed moratoriums on executions, and the former Colorado governor refused to execute someone on death row. The state's new governor supports a repeal bill in the Legislature. Newsom, a Democrat, told reporters earlier this month that he 'never believed in the death penalty from a moral perspective,' also citing ethical and economic concerns. He said he's campaigned 'vigorously' for the last two ballot measures where voters rejected repealing the death penalty. 'The disparities are very real and raw to me now especially as I spend every week working on the issues of paroles and commutations,' he said. Newsom cited one offender serving a sentence of 57 years-to-life for injuring three people, while another offender was sentenced to 17 years-to-life for a double murder: 'One happened to be of one race, one happened to be another race. Other people I've seen literally put to death for lesser crimes, and that concerns me.' Former Democratic Gov Brown also opposed the death penalty, but his administration moved to restart executions after voters acted in 2016 to allow the use of a single lethal injection and speed up appeals. His administration's regulations are stalled by challenges in both state and federal court, though those lawsuits may be halted now that Newsom is officially withdrawing them. Brown said he was satisfied with his record number of pardons and commutations, though he never attempted to commute a death sentence, and with his sweeping changes that eased criminal penalties while reducing the prison population. 'I've done what I want to do,' Brown said shortly before leaving office, defending his decision not to endorse death penalty repeal efforts in 2012 and 2016. 'I've carved out my piece of all this.' Democratic Assemblyman Marc Levine of Greenbrae plans to seek the two-thirds vote the Legislature requires to put another repeal measure on the 2020 ballot. Levine's district includes San Quentin State Prison, which houses California's death row and execution chamber. Newsom's aides said it has not yet been decided what will become of the execution chamber, nor whether corrections officials have been told to top preparing for executions, for instance by running drills. Seventy-nine condemned California inmates have died of natural causes since California reinstated capital punishment in 1978. Another 26 committed suicide. California has executed 13 inmates, while two were executed in other states. Newsom's office said 25 condemned inmates have exhausted all of their appeals and could soon have faced execution if the courts approved the state's new lethal injection method. The Covington Catholic teenager who was vilified over a viral clip of a face-off with a Native American activist has sued CNN for $275million over its coverage of the incident. Attorneys for 16-year-old Nicholas Sandmann filed the federal lawsuit on Tuesday in the Eastern District of Kentucky, seeking $75million in compensatory and $200million in punitive damages. Sandmann was widely portrayed as a racist over a January 18 video clip of him wearing a Make America Great Again hat and standing face-to-face with Nathan Phillips, who claimed he'd been surrounded and abused by the group of Catholic teens who were on a school trip. Extensive video told a very different story, however, indicating that the teens had been abused with racist and homophobic slurs by a group of Black Hebrew Israelites, before Phillips waded into the middle of the school group with his drum. Nick Sandmann (left on January 18) sued CNN for $275M on Tuesday over the network's controversial coverage of his interaction with activist Nathan Phillips (right) CNN boss Jeff Zucker is seen at SXSW on March 9. Sandmann says the network defamed him in order to pursue an 'anti-Trump agenda' and smear the president's supporters Sandmann's lawyer L Lin Wood discussed the impending lawsuit on Fox News, saying that he believed CNN had done greater damage to his client's reputation than the Washington Post In the complaint, Sandmann's attorney's allege that CNN was blinded by political bias, and defamed the teen in a quest to smear President Donald Trump and his supporters. 'CNN brought down the full force of its corporate power, influence, and wealth on Nicholas by falsely attacking, vilifying, and bullying him despite the fact that he was a minor child,' the complaint stated. The filing claims that CNN failed to do its basic journalistic duty by propagating false claims about Sandmann. 'CNN ignored the facts and put its anti-Trump agenda first in waging a 7-day media campaign of false, vicious attacks against Nicholas, a young boy who was guilty of little more than wearing a souvenir Make America Great Again cap while on a high school field trip,' the complaint states. The court filing says that CNN, in multiple broadcasts and online articles, falsely accused Sandmann of 'instigating a threatening confrontation with several African American men ('the Black Hebrew Israelites') and subsequently instigating a threatening confrontation with Native Americans who were in the midst of prayer following the Indigenous Peoples March at the National Mall.' 'In fact, it was Nicholas and his CovCath classmates who were bullied, attacked, and confronted with racist and homophobic slurs and threats of violence by the Black Hebrew Israelites, a recognized hate group, before being unexpectedly confronted by Phillip, an activist, who proceeded to target Nicholas while chanting and beating a drum inches from his face and being flanked by activists companions filming the event,' the complaint states. Both Nick Sandmann (left) and Nathan Phillips (right) have said they were attempting to defuse the situation when the confrontation was filmed A spokesperson for CNN did not immediately respond to a message from DailyMail.com late on Tuesday. Sandmann's latest suit seeks even higher damages than one previously filed against the Washington Post, which asked for $50million in compensatory damages and $200million in punitive damages. After the suit was filed, the Post issued an 'editor's note' on its controversial coverage, in which it admitted that its initial coverage of the encounter was flawed. 'Subsequent reporting, a student's statement and additional video allow for a more complete assessment of what occurred, either contradicting or failing to confirm accounts provided in that story,' the note said. One of Sandmann's lawyers, L. Lin Wood, explained in an interview last week that he believed CNN had done even greater damage to his client's reputation than the Washington Post. 'CNN was probably more vicious in its direct attacks on Nicholas than The Washington Post. And CNN goes into millions of individuals' homes,' Wood told Fox News. 'They really went after Nicholas with the idea that he was part of a mob that was attacking the Black Hebrew Israelites, yelling racist slurs at the Black Hebrew Israelites. Totally false,' Wood added. A private investigative firm hired by the Covington Diocese and Covington Catholic High School concluded that the students did not instigate the confrontation (file photo) On Tuesday, another of Sandmann's attorneys, Todd McMurtry, suggested that the lawsuits may not end with CNN. McMurtry told Fox News that they're also "looking very closely" at NBC, the Associated Press and HBO "for the conduct of Bill Maher" in covering the incident. He said the legal team is also of examining the Twitter posts of individual people, like Kathy Griffin, "who sent out these horrible tweets that are called doxxing." A private investigative firm hired by the Covington Diocese concluded that the students did not instigate the confrontation. In a report released last month, Greater Cincinnati Investigation Inc said it found no evidence students made 'offensive or racist statements' - though it acknowledged that the students performed the tomahawk chop. In a letter to parents, Covington Bishop Roger Foys said the students 'were placed in a situation that was at once bizarre and even threatening'. 'The immediate world-wide reaction to the initial video led almost everyone to believe that our students had initiated the incident and the perception of those few minutes of video became reality,' the bishop wrote. Students told investigators that they felt Phillips was coming into their group to join their own cheers, which were meant to drown out insults from the Black Hebrew Israelites. They claimed that they were confused but did not feel threatened by Phillips, the report said. 'We found no evidence of racist statements to Mr. Phillips or members of his group,' the report said. 'Some students performed a 'tomahawk chop' to the beat of Mr Phillips' drumming and some joined in Mr Phillips' chant.' A Greens candidate has been stood down from his teaching job after he urged students to skip class and sign up for a climate change protest. Will Douglas won't be offered more work by the New South Wales Education Department after he told students to attend a climate strike on March 15. Mr Douglas, who is a casual teacher at Moruya High, addressed 12 to 25 year olds at a youth forum at Moruya Gold Club on Thursday. Will Douglas (pictured) is being investigated by the NSW Education department after he told youth to attend the March 15 climate strike The Daily Telegraph reported that he introduced himself as a teacher before urging youth to sign up. 'If there's something happening at your school, will you please get online and register because there's a whole community out there wanting to support you guys, young people, in that strike,' he said. Education Minister Rob Stokes said that teachers should not include any political opinions in the work environment. 'If this teacher is found to have used his privileged position as an educator to influence students, he can face action,' he said. 'I'm appalled that this teacher, while being paid by the taxpayer, has sought to undertake political activity,' Mr Stokes said. It is alleged that Mr Douglas breached the Education Departments code of conduct. Mr Douglas claims the event was held during his lunch break and the school was aware he would be speaking as a candidate However he claims that the school was informed that he would be addressing youth at the forum. Mr Douglas also said that he was speaking as a candidate and the event was held during his lunch break. The School Strike 4 Climate Australia event encourages students to 'strike from school and tell our politicians to take our futures seriously and treat climate change for what it is - a crisis.' A mother who survived the deadly Mumbai terror attack that left hundreds dead has revealed the terrifying episode and her fight to be reunited with her family. Photographer Daniela Federici - from Melbourne but now living in New York - was at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai, India, working on a documentary in 2008 when terrorists stormed the building. Lying on the ballroom floor with her film crew, with gunshots sounding off in the background, Ms Federici said she had made peace with the thought her time was up. 'We all lay down in a circle to die,' she told Nine News. Photographer Daniela Federici (pictured) - a former Melbourne local now living in New York - had been at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai, India working on a documentary when terrorists stormed the hotel back in 2008 Lying on the ballroom floor with her film crew and gunshots sounding off in the backdrop, Ms Federici (pictured) said she had made peace with the thought her time was up Only moments before she had texted her then-husband and three-year-old son. 'I love you guys, I don't think I'm going to make it,' the message read. Members of Lashkar-e-Taiba - an Islamic terror organisation based in Pakistan - had targeted the resort as well as another hotel, train station, cafe and Jewish centre on November 26. The entire attack lasted 60 hours and its death toll reached more than 160 people - more than 30 of the victims were staff and guests from the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. Ms Federici had only entered the hotel's lobby moments before the terrorists entered, already two hours late to an important meeting because of a delayed flight. A rushed Ms Federici was midway up the staircase to the first floor bar before the gunshots were heard. 'We could hear people screaming and bodies being thrown over that staircase,' she said. Ms Federici and her team pushed themselves into the bar before they barricaded the doors behind them. Under the hail of bullets ricocheting across the room, they fled into a nearby function room where a wedding was being held. They pounded on windows with ice buckets looking for an escape, but the glass wouldn't break. For the next 26 hours, the trapped guests were holed up in the room with the sound of gunfire and explosions sounding all around them. Ms Federici texted her then-husband and three-year-old son one last time before the occupants lay on the ground expecting to die. Ms Federici and her team pushed themselves into the bar before they barricaded the doors behind them (pictured, Indian soldier takes cover as Taj Mahal Hotel burn during gun battle) Under the hail of bullets ricocheting across the room, they fled into a nearby function room where a wedding was being held (pictured, hostages and guests come out of Taj Mahal hotel) As fate would have it, this was not to be Ms Federici's end. A terrorist had thrown a grenade off the roof and the force from the explosion cracked a window. Together, the trapped occupants worked together to tie the curtains together into a makeshift rope and the guests escaped to safety. Two years after the frightening attack, the hotel reopened and Ms Federici was asked to photograph the moment. The masterminds behind the attack remain at large and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has put out a $US5million reward leading to their conviction. Queensland dairy farmers have travelled from across the state to protest Coles' refusal to increase the price of milk. Farmers from the Darling Downs, Sunshine Coast and Gympie regions congregated at a Coles in Brisbane to deliver their message on Wednesday. The farmers, armed with placards written in bold red and black text, condemned the supermarket for their choice to sell Coles brand milk for $1 per litre. Queensland dairy farmers have travelled from across the state to protest Coles' refusal to increase the price of milk (pictured) Farmers from the Darling Downs, Sunshine Coast and Gympie regions c ongregated at a Coles in Brisbane to deliver their message on Wednesday (pictured) The farmers, armed with placards written in bold red and black text, condemned the supermarket for their choice to keep their prices the same The supermarket giant has refused to follow major competitor Woolworths, who announced last month they'd charge an additional 10 cents a litre for own-brand milk. Woolworths said the extra cash would end up in the pocket of dairy farmers affected by drought. 'It's just 10 cents,' one sign read. Another read 'bad things are happening at Coles' in reference to the supermarket's advertising slogan. One protester dressed as bush ranger Ned Kelly and held a Coles 'down down' hand. The Kelly improviser wore a misspelled sign over his neck claiming Coles is robbing farmers. Coles has refused to follow major competitor Woolworths, who announced last month they'd charge an additional 10 cents a litre for own-brand milk One protester dressed as bush ranger Ned Kelly and held a Coles 'down down' hand One sign read 'bad things are happening at Coles' in reference to the supermarket's advertising slogan Another sign requested shoppers boycott all Coles stores across across the country. Despite Woolworths' announcement, Coles and Aldi refused to follow suit. Coles said it was concerned the increased price would impact customers struggling with the cost of living and instead would look for other ways to help farmers. Federal Agriculture Minister David Littleproud has urged shoppers to boycott the supermarket. The Kelly improviser wore a misspelled sign over his neck which claimed Coles is robbing farmers Coles was concerned the increased price would impact customers struggling with the cost of living and instead would look for other ways to help farmers Woolworths said the extra cash would end up in the pocket of dairy farmers affected by drought 'Coles' customers want to help farmers and this just makes it harder. They should show their support for drought-hit communities by shopping somewhere else,' he said in January. 'Coles only introduced a drought payment because it had to follow Woolworths' lead. Its half-hearted attempt did not include a proper payment process to make sure the farmers supplying the milk were paid per litre they supplied. A Coles spokeswoman told Daily Mail Australia the supermarket chain supports farmers in other ways. 'Over the past nine months, Coles has pledged more than $16 million for drought relief through our CWA Drought Appeal, Coles Dairy Drought Relief Fund and the Coles Nurture Fund,' the spokeswoman said. 'As a result of these Coles funds, more than 2600 drought-affected farmers across Australia have already received CWA grants and an additional 639 dairy farmers have received payments from the Coles Dairy Drought Relief Fund.' 'On top of this, Coles continues to support drought-affected farmers by raising funds for the CWA Drought Appeal and matching all customer donations made at our check-outs dollar for dollar.' An IT worker who allegedly made hundreds of thousands of dollars from selling stolen subscription details for streaming services including Netflix and Spotify has been granted bail after facing a Sydney court. Evan Leslie McMahon, 21, was arrested after the Australian Federal Police were alerted by the FBI to his alleged activities via a website called WickedGen.com in May 2018. It is alleged the account generator operated for about two years, selling details stolen from unknown victims in Australia and abroad - including the United States - for online subscription services such as Netflix, Spotify and Hulu. Evan Leslie McMahon, 21, allegedly made hundreds of thousands of dollars from selling stolen subscription details for streaming services including Netflix and Spotify The AFP alleges the account details were obtained through 'credential stuffing', in which a list of previously-stolen or leaked usernames, email addresses and corresponding passwords are re-used and sold for unauthorised access. Before the website was shut down, it claimed it had more than 120,000 users and almost one million sets of account details. 'Police will allege the administrator of WickedGen made an estimated AUD$300,000 selling the stolen account subscriptions through this website, and other similar sites identified through the course of investigations,' the AFP said in a statement on Wednesday. McMahon was charged with multiple cybercrime offences and appeared via video link at Sydney's Central Local Court on Wednesday. Before the website was shut down, it claimed it had more than 120,000 users and almost one million sets of account details He was granted strict conditional bail with a $200,000 surety and was ordered not to access the internet apart from his workplace and have only one phone with no internet capacity. McMahon's LinkedIn profile lists him as web developer at personal finance comparison website Finder. The company on Wednesday confirmed he was a 'former employee.' 'The investigation centres around activities that commenced prior to Evan's employment and are unrelated to Finder. It involves the inappropriate use of online subscription credentials from other websites,' it said in a statement to AAP. 'We can't comment further at this stage as the matter is before the courts.' The man's lawyer Mark Peoples told reporters outside court it was a 'very complicated computer fraud-type case.' The matter is due to return to the Downing Centre Local Court on May 7. Borce Ristevski has admitted to killing his wife, two years after her remains were found in bushland. The 54-year-old Melbourne father pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of 47-year-old Karen Ristevski on Wednesday, one day before he was set to stand trial for murder in Victorian Supreme Court. Ristevski is accused of killing the woman at their Avondale Heights home and later dumping her body on June 29, 2016. His plea comes as a shock after he had long denied any involvement in Ms Ristevski's death claiming she had gone for a walk and never returned. Prosecutors withdrew the murder charge and Ristevski entered a plea of guilty to manslaughter on Wednesday. The plea confirmed Ristevski had been covering up the slaying for years. The Melbourne father had long denied any involvement with his wife's (far left) death and claimed she had gone on walk and never returned. Her body was found in February 2017 in Macedon Regional Park Borce Ristevski (pictured in 2017) pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of 47-year-old Karen Ristevski on Wednesday, one day before he was set to stand trial for her murder in Victorian Supreme Court Ms Ristevski's skeletal remains were found in Macedon Regional Park in February 2017 by two horticulturalists who had noticed a strange smell. Ristevski is said to have dumped his wife's body between two logs and concealed it with branches before returning home TIMELINE OF KAREN RISTEVSKI'S DEATH June 29, 2016 Karen Ristevski last seen at her Melbourne home in Avondale Heights Her mobile phone pings off a tower in the Macedon Ranges A car similar to her black Mercedes SLK coupe spotted by CCTV cameras near Diggers Rest railway station July 14, 2016 Husband Borce Ristevski and daughter Sarah make a tearful plea for information to help find their missing wife and mother December 19, 2016 Police search grassland, waterways, creeks and farms February 20, 2017 Karen Ristevski's body found at Mount Macedon Regional Park March 6, 2017 Funeral service held with Borce Ristevski a pallbearer and daughter Sarah leading the procession August 31, 2017 Police recreate the journey of Ms Ristevski on the day she went missing in a black Mercedes, identical to hers December 13, 2017 Borce Ristevski charged with murder and faces court where a lawyer indicates a not-guilty plea and he is remanded in custody April 18, 2018 Ristevski returns to court where it's revealed detectives tapped phone calls and planted listening devices as they investigated the alleged killing, compiling a 22,000-page evidence brief Ristevski is granted state-funded legal aid as he fights the allegations July 16, 2018 Ristevski's two-week committal hearing begins and later hears evidence from his daughter Sarah who said he was never "aggressive" towards her mum. August 2, 2018 Ristevski ordered to stand trial in the Supreme Court charged with murdering his wife December 4, 2018 A five-week trial for Ristevski is set for March 2019 March 13, 2018 A day before a jury is due to be empanelled for his murder trial, Borce Ristevski pleads guilty to manslaughter after prosecutors withdraw the murder charge Advertisement Ms Ristevski's skeletal remains were found in Macedon Regional Park in February 2017, eight months after she disappeared, by two horticulturalists who had noticed a strange smell. An autopsy could not ascertain her cause of death. He was charged with murder months later in December, after an investigation that involved listening devices and CCTV footage analysis. It's alleged he took Ms Ristevski's Mercedes-Benz roadster to dispose of the body in bushland, killing the signal of his and her mobile phones on the way. He then allegedly dumped his wife's body between two logs and concealed it with branches before returning home. Ristevski claimed the two had argued over money and Karen left the home to clear her head. But detectives allege he killed his wife, bundled her into the car and drove to the park, taking the Calder Freeway. Ristevski had maintained his innocence, even putting on an emotional display as a pallbearer during Karen's funeral in March 2017. Ristevski was a pallbearer at his wife's funeral and was seen breaking down in tears after the service as he embraced mourners The couple's daughter Sarah Ristevski (pictured) said her father was never aggressive towards her mother but admitted his behaviour was off in the days after she vanished Court hearings revealed the family's dire financial situation with details of Ms Ristevski's fashion store Bella Bleu floundering He did not speak during the service, but was later seen breaking down in tears as he embraced mourners and hopped in the back of the hearse. During earlier court hearings, Ristevski's lawyers had argued the murder charge should be abandoned because no jury could find there was murderous intent. Prosecutors pushed hard for a murder trial, saying his deceitful behaviours after the killing gave rise to the required intent. They said the way he concealed the body and lied to family and police were not the actions of a man who accidentally killed his wife. Sarah Ristevski pictured during her mother's funeral procession, carrying her portrait The magistrate said the evidence was largely 'circumstantial' but taken at its highest, the case was strong enough for a jury to convict him for murder. During previous proceedings, the court learned of the family's dire financial situation with details of Ms Ristevski's fashion store Bella Bleu floundering. In emotional testimony last year, the couple's daughter Sarah Ristevski said her father was never aggressive towards her mother. She did, however, admit her father's behaviour 'didn't make sense' in the days after her mother vanished and questioned why he had switched off his phone. Prosecutor Matt Fisher detailed a conversation between the father and daughter during closing submissions of a July 2018 hearing to decide whether Ristevski stands trial for murder. As read by Mr Fisher, Sarah said: 'You were out of the house for two hours. Your phone is off for two hours... They pinged you on the Calder [Freeway].' Ristevski responded: 'That's what they are trying to plant out there, Sarah.' 'That doesn't make sense,' Sarah said. 'Nothing makes sense because they're making it up as they go,' he replied. In 2016, days after she disappeared, Ristevski was asked by a Channel Seven journalist if he murdered his wife. He remained stony-faced at the accusation, refusing to answer and turning away, holding his daughter by the arm. The public are being warned not to approach a man they believe was involved in a daylight shooting in Perth on Tuesday. Hari Darsan Ganeshan is allegedly on the run following the violent incident, which took place in the suburb of Langford. West Australian officers claim the 28-year-old may be armed and dangerous and are urging anyone with information on his whereabouts to contact them immediately. Hari Darsan Ganeshan is allegedly on the run following the violent incident, which took place in the suburb of Langford (pictured) Ganeshan is described as being approximately 179 centimetres tall, with dark skin and black hair. Police allege he may have had a hand in Tuesday's shooting, which left a man hospitalised with stomach wounds. The victim, aged in his 20s, was shot in his own home shortly before 1pm. The incident prompted a quick response from heavily armed officers in the Tactical Response Group, who stormed the property believing the shooter was still inside. However, he had already allegedly fled the scene and no firearm was found on the premises. Speaking on Tuesday, Detective Sergeant Tom Morris told The West Australian that the public should be alert, but not alarmed. 'It's not an incident where it's an unknown suspect. Both parties - the victim and the suspect - are believed to know each other,' he stated. Do you know more? Call police immediately on 131 444 The driver accused of fleeing a hit-and-run crash that killed a 12-year-old boy has complained about eating prison food. Labourer John Pagakis, 34, has been charged with 10 offences after allegedly crashing into six cars as they sat stationary at a red light in Baulkham Hills, north Sydney, on March 2. During a visit with his mother Demetra Pagakis this week, Mr Pagakis said he hated living behind bars and eating food served to him at Silverwater jail. John Pagakis (left) is facing ten charges over the high-speed crash that killed a 12-year-old boy Mr Pagakis told his mother Demetra (pictured) that he hated living behind bars and eating food served to him at Silverwater jail Mr Pagakis crawled from the wreckage of his car and allegedly fled the scene after the accident (pictured) 'I hate jail, the food here is runny and tastes like snot,' Mr Pagakis told his mum, the Daily Telegraph reported. The 55-year-old told the publication her son was not happy being locked up. 'Yiannis (John) has lost so much weight, he says the meals are inedible, he's so skinny, he's used to eating fresh vegetables and meat every day,' she said. 'I visited him yesterday, he's in an ugly overall that ties up with string at the back, the vending machine takes your money and doesn't work, it's awful.' Police allege Mr Pagakis was travelling 45km/h over the speed limit when his Holden Commodore became airborne and ploughed into the six vehicles just after 7pm. TIMELINE OF THE KILLER M2 CRASH Saturday March 2 7pm: Mr Pagakis, travelling on the westbound M2 off ramp, hits a median strip before striking multiple cars on the intersection of Windsor Road Minutes later Mr Pagakis allegedly flees the scene on foot Sunday March 3 2am: Mr Pagakis arrives at his mother's home 35km away in Narraweena, on Sydney's northern beaches 3.30am: Police arrive at the home and arrest the driver Advertisement A 12-year-old boy in a Holden Captiva was pronounced dead at the scene, while his mother, 36, and five-year-old sister were admitted to the hospital in a critical condition. The boy's 38-year-old father, who had been driving, was not injured in the crash, but was taken to hospital for assessment. The man was heard screaming 'my son, my son' when he learned the boy did not survive, according to reports. Rebecca Simpson, who was a witness at the scene, told Nine News the father 'was in hysterics.' The driver of another car, a 65-year-old man, and his passenger, a 58-year-old woman, were taken to hospital with minor injuries. The occupants of another four cars escaped unhurt but the drivers were taken to hospital for tests. Witness Brett Simpson said: 'The first thing I saw, the car in my rear-view mirror off the ground and I heard the crash obviously, next thing and then it was just chaos'. Mr Pagakis fled the Baulkham Hills area around 7pm, leaving behind his mobile phone and keys, and arrived at Narraweena seven hours later A 12-year-old boy (pictured) in a Holden Captiva was killed in the crash before Pagakis allegedly ran from the scene Fire and Rescue NSW Inspector Kernin Lambert described the scene as 'absolutely horrific' and said five people had to be 'cut' out of their vehicles. 'It was an extremely severe collision. People are fighting for their lives. We have been trying to keep people alive.' Mr Pagakis crawled from the wreckage of his car and allegedly fled the scene after the accident, before turning up at his mother's home at Narraweena, 30 kilometres away, at 2am. Police arrived at the home of Mrs Pagakis about 3am on March 3 and found her son asleep in a bedroom. They tracked him to the address with help from his girlfriend and specialist dog units. He was arrested and taken to Manly Police Station where he was charged. An avid surfer from New Jersey who was dedicated to saving the environment has been identified as one of the eight Americans killed in the horror Ethiopian Airlines crash over the weekend. Matt Vecere's heartbroken family released a statement confirming his death on Tuesday, saying that he 'would be missed by many'. 'Matt was passionate about the environment, civil rights, social and environmental justice, and advocating for those less fortunate,' his family said, according to NBC10. 'His passion turned to direct action, rolling up his sleeves to serve causes where he could make a tangible difference. He volunteered countless hours with charitable organizations, at community events, and with numerous relief efforts after natural disasters. The family said Vecere was in Africa to attend the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, where Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 was headed when it crashed minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Sunday morning. Scroll down for video Matt Vecere has been identified as one of the eight Americans killed in the Ethiopian Airlines plane crash. His family said he was in Africa to attend the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya. That's where Flight 302 was headed when it crashed minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Sunday morning Vecere was described by those who knew him as an avid surfer and environmental activist who grew up in South Jersey and moved to California in 2005. He is pictured in a Facebook photo Vecere was also dedicated to helping victims of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, having made several mission trips to the island over the past several years Vecere had grown up in South Jersey but had lived in California for more than a dozen years, according to his family. He worked as a write for an air quality company called IQAir, which released a statement about his death on Tuesday. 'It is with profound sadness that we announce the loss of our friend and colleague Matt Vecere,' the air quality company wrote on its website. 'Matt was an amazing writer, an avid surfer, and a truly selfless person. We will miss his laugh, his wit, his sense of humor, but most of all, the kinship and friendship that he brought to everything he did.' Vecere, one of many passengers who were heading to the UN assembly, felt a deep connection to environmental causes, according to those who knew him. He was also dedicated to helping victims of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, having made several mission trips to the island over the past several years. US plane maker Boeing is facing questions over the safety of one of its key aircraft models after an Ethiopian Airlines jet crashed killing 157 - the second disaster involving a 737 MAX 8 in just five months. Pictured: The crash scene on Monday The Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 headed for Nairobi, Kenya, went down minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Sunday morning. All 157 people onboard were killed President Donald Trump (above Sunday) tweeted about the crash on Tuesday morning - saying that planes have become 'too complex - but has yet to pay tribute to the victims President Donald Trump tweeted about the crash on Tuesday morning - saying that planes have become 'too complex - but has yet to pay tribute to the victims. As of early Wednesday, five of the eight victims had been named. Among them were two brothers, Melvin and Bennett Riffell of Redding, California. Melvin's wife Brittney was expecting their first child, a daughter due in May. They had embarked on a final adventure before Melvin welcomed his first child. The brothers had been in Australia and Mogadishu before traveling to Africa. Following the brothers' death, flowers have been placed at the base of a bell tower of their elementary school Saint Joseph Parish where their mother is the parish secretary. 'These are two guys that when they're in the room, you really know it,' Jake Mangas, their longtime family friend and the Redding Chamber of Commerce President said to NBC late Monday. 'These guys were just wonderful, and they're going to be missed deeply by this community [and] for those family and friends that knew them the best,' he added. Brothers Melvin Riffell (left) and Bennett Riffell (second right in brown polo) were among the eight Americans killed in the deadly Ethiopian Airlines plane crash on Sunday Melvin Riffell and his wife Brittney (above) were expecting their first child together, a daughter due in May, when he was tragically killed The brothers were in Ethiopia for one last adventure before Melvin welcomed his first child Flowers have been laid at the elementary school of California plane victims brothers Melvin and Bennett Riffell of Redding, California Mucaad Hussein Abdullah, who was a resident of Saint Cloud, Minnesota, also died in the plane crash. Another American victim on board the fatal flight was 40-year-old Antoine Lewis. He was an army captain from Chicago who had served in Afghanistan and was the third generation in his family to enlist in the Army. He is survived by his wife Yalena Lopez, who he married just last year, and a 15-year-old son. He was also one of nine siblings. He was doing Christian missionary work in Africa at the time of his death, according to WGN, and even planned to move there one day. 'He had told us he was excited about it. I will say that plane went down with him doing what he wanted to do most, and that was to stretch out and embrace our mother country,' his mother Antoinette said to CBS Chicago. 'He was also stationed in South Korea, he was a military rat, he loved it, he was moving up through the military. He went in as an enlisted man and he got his undergraduate degree and his graduate degree,' his father Rodney Lewis told WLS. Mucaad Hussein Abdullah, a resident of Saint Cloud, Minnesota, also died in the plane crash Antoine Lewis, an Army captain from Chicago, is among the eight Americans who were killed in the horrific Ethiopian Airlines plane crash Lewis, who served in Afghanistan, leaves behind a wife (pictured) and a 15-year-old son Lewis, a highly decorated soldier who was promoted to captain, was doing Christian missionary work in Africa at the time of his death List of nationalities on board the Ethiopian Airlines flight Kenya: 32 passengers Canada: 18 Ethiopia: 9 China: 8 United States: 8 Italy: 8 UK: 7 France: 7 Egypt: 6 Germany: 5 Netherlands: 5 India: 4 Slovakia: 4 Russia: 3 Austria: 3 Sweden: 3 Spain: 2 Morocco: 2 Israel: 2 Poland: 2 Belgium: 1 Djibouti: 1 Norway: 1 Mozambique: 1 Nepal: 1 Nigeria: 1 Rwanda: 1 Saudi Arabia: 1 Sudan: 1 Somalia: 1 Serbia: 1 Togo: 1 Uganda: 1 U.N. passport: 1 Yemen: 1 Advertisement A list issued by Ethiopian Airlines revealed that victims hailed from 35 countries total. This is the second crash involving the Boeing 737 plane model in just five months. As of Tuesday the crash site was still being combed for identification and the collection of debris. There were also 18 victims from Canada in the devastating crash. One was identified as Danielle Moore, a 24-year-old activist from Canada. Before the plane went down she excitedly posted to Facebook that she was selected to attend the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi. Nigerian professor Pius Adesanmi at Carleton University in Ottawa was also killed in the crash. He was on his way to a meeting of the African Union's Economic, Social, and Cultural Council in Nairobi. 'Pius was a towering figure in African and post-colonial scholarship and his sudden loss is a tragedy, said Benoit-Antoine Bacon, Carleton's president and vice chancellor. Amina Ibrahim Odowaa and her five-year-old daughter Safiya were also killed in the crash. The 33-year-old Edmonton woman and her daughter were traveling to Kenya to visit with relatives. Derick Lwugi, an accountant with the City of Calgary, was also among the victims. He leaves behind three children aged 17, 19, and 20, according to his wife Gladys Kivia. The couple had been in Calgary for 12 years, and Lwugi had been headed to Kenya to visit both of their parents. Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said he is deeply saddened by the Ethiopian Airlines plane crash that killed 157 people, including 18 Canadians. Canadian victims: Danielle Moore (left) and Nigerian professor at Carleton University in Ottawa Pius Adesanmi (right) were among the 157 people who were killed when the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 headed for Nairobi went down minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa on Sunday morning Amina Ibrahim Odowaa and her five-year-old daughter Safiya of Canada were also killed in the crash Derick Lwugi, an accountant with the City of Calgary, was also among the victims. He leaves behind three children aged 17, 19, and 20 The devastated owner of a therapy alpaca that was mauled to death by a staffy claims the dog's owner watched the horrific attack unfold and did nothing about it. Nils Lantzke was walking two alpacas in Giralang in the Australian Capital Territory on Tuesday, when he claims they were attacked by a young man's black staffy dog. Mr Lantzke said he asked the man to keep the dog away, but he allegedly refused and set the canine on the alpacas - while filming the savage attack with his phone. A devastated owner of a therapy alpaca (pictured) that was mauled to death by a staffy claims the dog's owner watched the horrific attack unfold and did nothing about it The dog allegedly attacked Hercules (pictured right) before it attacked Mimosa (pictured left) 'He attacked Hercules first, the white boy, and Hercules went into classic attack position on his hind legs, to attack the dog, but the dog left him and attacked Mimosa, a tiny little girl,' Mr Lantzke told ABC News. He said the dog attack was so severe it, his friend - who was holding the Mimosa - was forced to let go and the animal bolted up the street with the dog on its tail. When Mr Lantzke and his friend eventually caught up with Mimosa near his home, they found the animal lying in the grass with a deep wound on her leg. The dog was nowhere to be found. Both of Mimosa's front legs were broken in the savage attack and her left leg had been bitten to the bone, which meant she needed to be euthanised, he said. Mr Lantzke said Hercules was clearly distraught by the sudden death of his female companion because he slept near the gate, waiting for her to come home. He said he later tried to report the incident to police, but was allegedly told the ACT Government's Domestic Animal Services handled matters such as these. A DAS spokesman told the publication the matter was currently being investigated. Both of Mimosa's (pictured) front legs were broken in the savage attack and her left leg had been bitten to the bone, which meant she needed to be euthanised Mr Lantzke said Hercules (pictured) was clearly distraught by the sudden death of his female companion because he slept near the gate, waiting for her to come home The distraught owner said he will continue to provide the animals for therapy work in mental health units and hospices, but he hopes authorities can find the dog's owner. 'We are just here to help people. My alpacas and llamas, we have always done it just to create smiles, and we'll keep on doing that,' he said. New South Wales alpaca breeder Rob Harborne told the publication alpaca-directed violent dog attacks are common, and he has lost eight of the animals. He said whiles some dog breeds were more likely to attack alpacas, the problem was owners not keeping their dogs effectively restrained. 'I've had alpacas with their back legs broken because, as they're running away, dogs follow them and smash their back legs,' Mr Harborne said. State prosecutors in New York dramatically charged Paul Manafort with mortgage fraud and other charges Wednesday in a sudden development that emerged just minutes after a federal judge handed down a sentence that could put him in prison for nearly seven years. The charges were a stark reminder that even if Donald Trump were to pardon his longtime campaign chair for the federal charges he has been convicted of committing - a widely-speculated on move - Manafort could still stay behind bars. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. revealed the charges in a 16-count indictment Wednesday afternoon. The New York crimes Manafort is being charged with are residential mortgage fraud, conspiracy, falsifying records, and a scheme to defraud. The alleged scheme involved falsifying bank records in order to obtain big loans in a state where Manafort held property and did business. 'No one is beyond the law in New York,' Vance said in a statement announcing the charges. The state investigation had been ongoing, and was brought before a grand jury in New York. The development came after a federal judge sentenced former Donald Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort to an additional 43 months in prison Wednesday a making a determination that could put him behind bars for nearly seven more years. The latest charges were filed on March 7, the date last week when Manafort was sentenced in federal court in Virginia. The latest legal chapter burst onto the scene just after Judge Amy Berman Jackson handed down the sentence at a dramatic hearing where she tore into Manafort for his deception, lack of remorse, and even his lavish spending habits. Jail: Judge Amy Berman Jackson listened to Paul Manafort speaking from his wheelchair before sentencing him to an effective extra three and a half years in prison Remember when: Paul Manafort got to wear a suit for his sentencing but was a far cry from the dyed-hair figure who was seen when he was free Venue: Charges filed in New York mention the condo in Manhattan's trendy SoHo for which Manafort obtained bank credit while allegedly lying about the mortgage already on it Manafort's wife, Kathleen, whom he had invoked in seeking leniency, had just left the courtroom when the latest legal blow struck. The latest charges relate to loans Manafort received on a Howard St. condo in SoHo that was allegedly used to launder money. Vance said the year-long investigation 'yielded serious criminal charges for which the defendant has not been held accountable. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's prosecutors brought up loans at his earlier trial. The latest indictment includes emails seeking an appraisal and loan. The Mueller indictment states that Manafort got the apartment for $2.85 million transferring funds from a company in Cyprus, then falsely claimed it was a second home for his daughter and son-in-law, and used it as an Airbnb rental. The New York indictment also references another element of Manafort's federal trial his actions to wire funds from a Cyprus-based account as a reimbursement for Yankees season tickets. According to the indictment, Manafort asked 'Individual 6' while in New York County to sign a letter stating: 'Thank you for allowing me to use the AMEX Business Plum card to purchase season tickets for the 2016 baseball season.' Prosecutors described the transaction in Manafort's Virginia trial, saying Manafort got is deputy, Rick Gates, to sign the letter, at a time he was seeking millions in bank loans and making representations about his financial viability, Politico reported at the time. The sentence adds an additional 3 1/2 years onto Manafort's jail time, through complicated calculations that involved some time served concurrently, and credit for time he has already served. It comes on top of a 47 month sentence he got last week, a sentence that has been criticized as too lenient but that Jackson said did not affect her ruling. He may also get a reduction for good behavior. Jackson's sentence exceeded that amount, totaling 60 months, minus 30 to be served concurrently with his other sentence. The sentence could get a reduction of 15 per cent for good behavior. Kathleen Manafort (2nd L), wife of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, leaves US District Court in Washington, DC on March 13, 2019 after her husband's sentencing Defense attorney Kevin Downing speaks to reporters after his client, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, was sentenced to about 3-1/2 more years in prison, totaling more than six years, for charges arising from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 U.S. election Manafort said in federal court Wednesday he was 'sorry' for the crimes he admitted to just a week after failing to express remorse in another court last week. But Judge Jackson said there was 'no reason' to justify leniency that Manafort was seeking, tearing into the defendant's conduct as she prepared to announce her decision. She said the 'element of remorse and responsibility were completely absent' from Manafort's filings. 'Saying I'm sorry I got caught is not an inspiring plea for leniency,' Judge Jackson said from the bench. 'It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved,' Judge Jackson told her courtroom while Manafort's fate hung in the balance. She accused Manafort of lying to members of Congress and the American public by failing to accurately disclose his overseas lobbying work. The judge even brought up the 'opulent' lifestyle Manafort lived off monies he failed to report to tax authorities even referencing his infamous $15,000 ostrich leather bomber jacket and other tailored garments submitted by prosecutors. Manafort splurged on 'more suits than one man can wear,' she said. 'There's no question that this defendant knew better, and he knew exactly what he was doing,' said the judge. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, had to decide whether Manafort would serve his sentences in sequence or concurrently Then she unloaded on him for witness tampering even after being charged with federal crimes. 'He pled guilty to conspiring to corruptly persuade another person two people with the intent to influence their testimony in an official proceeding. And which official proceeding? This one the case against Mr. Manafort himself,' she said. However the judge took pains to note that Manafort was not being sentenced for anything having to do with collusion in this case. 'The question of collusion or conspiracy with Russia was not presented in this case, therefore it was not resolved in this case,' she said, as her barbs filtered out of the courtroom. She said of the Manafort's defense use of the 'no collusion' argument that it was 'just one more thing that's inconsistent with any genuine acceptance of responsibility.' The statement comes amid one final potential play hanging in the background of Manafort's case whether President Trump will issue a pardon that could let his former campaign chair out of prison at any point. In a sharp line freighted with political implications in Washington, Judge Jackson said court is a place 'where facts still matter.' Jackets included in the government's exhibits admitted into evidence, at the trial of President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, are seen in this combination image of pictures released from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office in Washington, DC, U.S. on August 1, 2018 She said remorse was 'completely absent' from his submissions to the court, and called it 'striking' Manafort didn't submit a letter laying out a reason for contrition, adding that even defendants who haven't finished high school have done so, BuzzFeed reported. Manafort's disclosure failures struck to the core of the U.S. democratic system, she argued. 'If the people don't have the facts, democracy can't work,' Judge Jackson said. In another line, Judge Jackson appeared to rebut a statement by Judge T.S. Ellis that Manafort lived an 'otherwise blameless life.' 'The criminal conduct in this case was not an isolated, single incident,' she said, saying a significant amount of his career 'has been spent gaming the system.' Manafort's courtroom expression of contrition was a turnaround from his earlier appearance, where he failed to express remorse while seeking 'compassion' and ultimately earned a sentence far below what prosecutors were seeking anyway. 'I am sorry for what I've done,' Manafort said as he pleaded to limit his sentence and cited his own time in solitary confinement and his wife's health. 'Let me be very clear I accept the responsibility for the acts that caused me to be here today. While I cannot undo the past I can assure the future will be very different,' Manafort said, CNN reported. He also played up his age as he begged to be with his wife, Kathleen, who was in the courtroom. 'Your honor, I will be 70 years old in a few weeks. My wife is 66. I am her primary caregiver,' Manafort said. 'This case has taken everything from me already. Please let my wife and I be together.' 'My behavior in the future will be very different. I have already begun to change,' he said. Manafort appeared to try to get a do-over on his remarks last week seeking leniency. 'In my previous allocation I told Judge Ellis I was ashamed for my conduct,' he said. 'I want to say to you now that I am sorry for what I have done and for all the activities that have gotten me here today.' Kathleen Manafort, wife of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, arrives at the US District Court in Washington, DC on March 13, 2019 The judge hearing the case was expected to tack additional prison time onto Manafort's sentence, after the former power broker managed to secure a sentence of 47 months in jail despite a recommendation by prosecutors he be put away for up to 24 years. This time, he is being sentenced for two conspiracy counts, to which he has already pleaded guilty. But prosecutors also accuse him of lying in violation of his cooperation agreement, which could weigh on the outcome. Manafort spoke after spending nine months in prison as his case made its way through the courts. Judge Jackson formalized the government's move to seize $11 million in assets from him. At the top of Manafort's hearing, Judge Jackson, a Barack Obama appointee, acknowledged last week's sentencing, when Manafort avoided a sentence that could have put him away for the rest of his life. The 'Club Fed' prison where Manafort will serve his sentence The former Trump campaign chairman will spend his four-year sentence in the Federal Correctional Institute in Cumberland, Maryland. The prison - a go-to for white-collar Washington criminals - has in the past been described as 'a stress free environment' and 'more like a college'. According to reports, Manafort will be able to receive mail, make outgoing phone calls and see visitors when he chooses once a week. And if that doesn't keep him entertained, there's a gym, a softball field with a running track and televisions showing sport on every wing. Inmates can also enroll in classes including music, business, and educational programs. They are free to leave the premises when they choose to do jobs in the yard - which is surrounded by swathes of thick leafy woodlands with barely a neighbor in sight. A top D.C. defense attorney said his clients described the prison as a 'boys dormitory', according to the Washington Post. And there's rarely any trouble or conflict because inmates understand they're getting it easy and don't want to be sent somewhere tougher, the attorney added. Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Clinton administration official Webb Hubbell both served time at the facility. Both NFL star Michael Vick and musician Chris Brown have also been incarcerated in the facility during their stints in jail. A typical day at the camp starts with wake-up call a 6am. There's then more than an hour before breakfast at 7.15am. Prisoners can work or take classes until lunch is served at midday. Inmates can fill their afternoons with more work, take classes or workout before a head count at 4pm and dinner an hour later. There's then 'free time' after dinner to watch television, send mail or talk on the phone before lights out at 11pm. Advertisement 'What's happening today is not and cannot be a review or revision of a sentence that was imposed in another court,' she said, the Washington Post reported. At the outset, she indicated that some of his sentence might be served concurrently since his Virginia sentence related to the conspiracy he was being sentenced for Wednesday. 'Whether he lied during his cooperation sessions and breached the plea agreement has some relevance,' she said, CNN reported. Manafort's lawyers argued that he should get credit for having pleaded guilty. 'Your honor, our position is Mr. Manafort did accept responsibility,' lawyer Thomas Zehnle said. 'Did he truthfully admit the conduct comprising the offenses charged? He did.' But prosecutors said Manafort lied to investigators 'repeatedly.' Some of the courtroom back-and-forth related to Konstantin Kilimnik, Manafort's former business associate who the special counsel's office says has ties to Russian intelligence. And following last week's remark by Judge T.S. Ellis that Manafort had lived an 'otherwise blameless life,' prosecutors argued his crimes cut to the core of the democratic process. 'Mr. Manafort committed crimes that undermined our political process,' Prosecutor Andrew Weissman said, CNN reported. He highlighted Manafort's work for the pro-Moscow government in Ukraine, work he concealed by stashing earnings in offshore bank accounts. 'It is hard to imagine a more righteous prosecution of this act,' Weissman said. Manafort faced a choice of whether to represent foreign governments 'or represent the United States. And he chose to represent foreign governments.' As he did last week, Manafort appeared in court in a wheel chair. This time, he was wearing a suit. In Virginia, he wore a prison jump suit. Manafort, 69, faces up to 10 additional years in prison when he is sentenced Wednesday in Washington in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. In Virginia last week, Judge Ellis sentenced Manafort to 47 months in prison, far below sentencing guidelines that allowed for more than two decades in prison, prompting national debate about disparities in how rich and poor defendants are treated by the criminal justice system. Brian Ketcham(L) and Kevin Downing, lawyers for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, arrive at the US District Court in Washington, DC Thomas Zehnle(R) lawyer for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, arrives at the US District Court in Washington, DC on March 13, 2019 As U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington decides whether the sentences should run consecutively or at the same time, she is likely to take into account allegations by prosecutors that Manafort tampered with witnesses after he was charged and that he lied to investigators even after he pleaded guilty and pledged to cooperate. The hearing may offer a window into tantalizing allegations that aren't part of the criminal cases against him but have nonetheless surfaced in recent court filings - that Manafort shared Trump campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a business associate the U.S. says has ties to Russian intelligence, and that the two men met secretly during the campaign in an encounter that prosecutors say cuts 'to the heart' of their investigation. Then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as his campaign manager Paul Manafort looks on during Trump's walk through at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, July 21, 2016 Special Counsel Robert Mueller's prosecutors say Manafort lied despite his cooperation agreement This handout image, obtained courtesy of the Alexandria Sheriff's Office, shows the July 12, 2018 booking photograph of Paul Manafort WARDROBE UPGRADE: This March 7, 2019, courtroom sketch depicts former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, center in a wheelchair, during his sentencing hearing in federal court before judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria, Va. Manafort appeared in court in Washington wearing a suit The sentencing hearings for Manafort mark a bookend of sorts for Mueller's investigation as it inches toward a conclusion. Manafort and business associate Rick Gates were among the first of 34 people charged, and though the charges against Manafort weren't tied to his work on the Trump campaign, his foreign entanglements have made him a subject of intrigue to prosecutors assessing whether the campaign colluded with Russia to sway the outcome of the election. PAUL MANAFORT'S CRIMES Paul Manafort is now a multiple felon. His convictions are from a trial and a guilty plea. Here is the complete list. On August 21, 2018 by a jury after trial at federal court in Alexandria, VA, found guilty of: Five counts of submitting false tax returns Two counts of bank fraud One count of failing to disclose a foreign bank account The jury did not reach a verdict on 10 more charges On September 14, 2018, ahead of a trial at federal court in Washington D.C., he pleaded guilty to: One count of conspiracy to defraud the United States One count of witness tampering In the plea deal Manafort agreed to co-operate and pleaded guilty to 10 other charges, with the deal saying those would be dropped if he completely co-operated. But he did not completely co-operate meaning he is also going to be sentenced for: Three counts of failing to disclose a foreign bank account Two counts of bank fraud Five counts of bank fraud conspiracy Advertisement Wednesday's sentencing comes in a week of activity for the investigation. Mueller's prosecutors on Tuesday night updated a judge on the status of cooperation provided by one defendant, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and are expected to do the same later in the week for Gates. The Mueller team has prosecuted Manafort in both Washington and Virginia related to his foreign consulting work on behalf of a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party. Manafort was convicted of bank and tax fraud in the Virginia case and pleaded guilty in Washington to two conspiracy counts, each punishable by up to five years in prison. The decision by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III to sentence Manafort to 47 months stunned many who'd been following the case given both the guideline calculation of 19.5 to 24 years in prison and the fact that the defendant was convicted of hiding millions of dollars from the IRS in undisclosed foreign bank accounts. But Ellis made clear during the sentencing hearing that he found the government's sentencing guidelines unduly harsh and declared his own sentence 'sufficiently punitive.' 'If anybody in this courtroom doesn't think so, go and spend a day in the jail or penitentiary of the federal government,' Ellis said. 'Spend a week there.' Manafort has been jailed since last June when Berman Jackson revoked his house arrest over allegations that he and Kilimnik sought to influence witnesses by trying to get them to testify in a certain way. Mueller's final tally: Trump's inner circle of convicts and turncoats - and 25 wanted Russian trolls GUILTY: MICHAEL FLYNN Pleaded guilty to making false statements in December 2017. Awaiting sentence Flynn was President Trump's former National Security Advisor and Robert Mueller's most senior scalp to date. He previously served when he was a three star general as President Obama's director of the Defense Intelligence Agency but was fired. He admitted to lying to special counsel investigators about his conversations with a Russian ambassador in December 2016. He has agreed to cooperate with the special counsel investigation. GUILTY AND JAILED: MICHAEL COHEN Pleaded guilty to eight counts including fraud and two campaign finance violations in August 2018. Pleaded guilty to further count of lying to Congress in November 2018. Sentenced to three years in prison and $2 million in fines and forfeitures in December 2018 Cohen was investigated by Mueller but the case was handed off to the Southern District of New York,leaving Manhattan's ferocious and fiercely independent federal prosecutors to run his case. Cohen was Trump's longtime personal attorney, starting working for him and the Trump Organization in 2007. He is the longest-serving member of Trump's inner circle to be implicated by Mueller. Cohen professed unswerving devotion to Trump - and organized payments to silence two women who alleged they had sex with the-then candidate: porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. He admitted that payments to both women were felony campaign finance violations - and admitted that he acted at the 'direction' of 'Candidate-1': Donald Trump. He also admitted tax fraud by lying about his income from loans he made, money from taxi medallions he owned, and other sources of income, at a cost to the Treasury of $1.3 million. And he admitted lying to Congress in a rare use of the offense. The judge in his case let him report for prison on March 6 and recommended he serve it in a medium-security facility close to New York City. GUILTY AND JAILED: PAUL MANAFORT Found guilty of eight charges of bank and tax fraud in August 2018. Sentenced to 47 months in March 2019. Pleaded guilty to two further charges - witness tampering and conspiracy against the United States. Jailed for total of seven and a half years in two separate sentences. Additionally indicted for mortgage fraud by Manhattan District Attorney, using evidence previously presented by Mueller Manafort worked for Trump's campaign from March 2016 and chaired it from June to August 2016, overseeing Trump being adopted as Republican candidate at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. He is the most senior campaign official to be implicated by Mueller. Manafort was one of Washington D.C.'s longest-term and most influential lobbyists but in 2015, his money dried up and the next year he turned to Trump for help, offering to be his campaign chairman for free - in the hope of making more money afterwards. But Mueller unwound his previous finances and discovered years of tax and bank fraud as he coined in cash from pro-Russia political parties and oligarchs in Ukraine. Manafort pleaded not guilty to 18 charges of tax and bank fraud but was convicted of eight counts in August 2018. The jury was deadlocked on the other 10 charges. A second trial on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent due in September did not happen when he pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and witness tampering in a plea bargain. He was supposed to co-operate with Mueller but failed to. Minutes after his second sentencing hearing in March 2019, he was indicted on 16 counts of fraud and conspiracy by the Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., using evidence which included documents previously presented at his first federal trial. The president has no pardon power over charges by district and state attorneys. GUILTY AND GOING TO WEEKEND JAIL: RICK GATES Pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and making false statements in February 2018. Sentenced to 45 days weekend jail and three years probation, December 17, 2018 Gates was Manafort's former deputy at political consulting firm DMP International. He admitted to conspiring to defraud the U.S. government on financial activity, and to lying to investigators about a meeting Manafort had with a member of congress in 2013. As a result of his guilty plea and promise of cooperation, prosecutors vacated charges against Gates on bank fraud, bank fraud conspiracy, failure to disclose foreign bank accounts, filing false tax returns, helping prepare false tax filings, and falsely amending tax returns. GUILTY AND JAILED: GEORGE PAPADOPOLOUS Pleaded guilty to making false statements in October 2017. Sentenced to 14 days in September 2018, and reported to prison in November. Served 12 days and released on December 7, 2018 Papadopoulos was a member of Donald Trump's campaign foreign policy advisory committee. He admitted to lying to special counsel investigators about his contacts with London professor Josef Mifsud and Ivan Timofeev, the director of a Russian government-funded think tank. GUILTY AND JAILED: RICHARD PINEDO Pleaded guilty to identity fraud in February 2018. Sentenced to a year in prison Pinedo is a 28-year-old computer specialist from Santa Paula, California. He admitted to selling bank account numbers to Russian nationals over the internet that he had obtained using stolen identities. GUILTY AND JAILED: ALEX VAN DER ZWAAN Pleaded guilty to making false statements in February 2018. He served a 30-day prison sentence and was deported to the Netherlands on his release Van der Zwaan was a Dutch attorney for Skadden Arps who worked on a Ukrainian political analysis report for Paul Manafort in 2012. He admitted to lying to special counsel investigators about when he last spoke with Rick Gates and Konstantin Kilimnik. His law firm say he was fired. GUILTY: W. SAMUEL PATTEN Pleaded guilty in August 2018 to failing to register as a lobbyist while doing work for a Ukrainian political party. Sentenced to three years probation April 2019 Patten, a long-time D.C. lobbyist was a business partner of Paul Manafort. He pleaded guilty to admitting to arranging an illegal $50,000 donation to Trump's inauguration. He arranged for an American 'straw donor' to pay $50,000 to the inaugural committee, knowing that it was actually for a Ukrainian businessman. Neither the American or the Ukrainian have been named. CHARGED: KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK Indicted for obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice. At large, probably in Russia Kilimnik is a former employee of Manafort's political consulting firm and helped him with lobbying work in Ukraine. He is accused of witness tampering, after he allegedly contacted individuals who had worked with Manafort to remind them that Manafort only performed lobbying work for them outside of the U.S. He has been linked to Russian intelligence and is currently thought to be in Russia - effectively beyond the reach of extradition by Mueller's team. INDICTED: THE RUSSIANS Twenty-five Russian nationals and three Russian entities have been indicted for conspiracy to defraud the United States. They remain at large in Russia Two of these Russian nationals were also indicted for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and 11 were indicted for conspiracy to launder money. Fifteen of them were also indicted for identity fraud. Vladimir Putin has ridiculed the charges. Russia effectively bars extradition of its nationals. The only prospect Mueller has of bringing any in front of a U.S. jury is if Interpol has their names on an international stop list - which is not made public - and they set foot in a territory which extradites to the U.S. INDICTED: MICHAEL FLYNN'S BUSINESS PARTNERS Bijan Kian (left), number two in now disgraced former national security adviser Mike Flynn's lobbying company, and the two's business partner Ekim Alptekin (right) were indicted for conspiracy to lobby illegally. Kian, an Iranian-American was arrested and appeared in court charged with a conspiracy to illegally lobby the U.S government without registering as a foreign agent. Their co-conspirator was Flynn, who is called 'Person A' in the indictment and is not charged, offering some insight into what charges he escaped with his plea deal. Kian, vice-president of Flynn's former lobbying firm, is alleged to have plotted with Alptekin to try to change U.S. policy on an exiled Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania and who is accused by Turkey's strongman president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of trying to depose him. Erdogan's government wanted him extradited from the U.S. and paid Flynn's firm through Alptekin for lobbying, including an op-ed in The Hill calling for Gulen to be ejected. Flynn and Kian both lied that the op-ed was not paid for by the Turkish government. The indictment is a sign of how Mueller is taking an interest in more than just Russian involvement in the 2016 election. GUILTY AND AWAITING SENTENCE: ROGER STONE Roger Stone, a former Trump campaign official and longtime informal advisor to Trump, was indited on seven counts including obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and lying to Congress about his communications with WikiLeaks in January 2019. Convicted on all counts November 15, 2019, awaiting sentence Stone was a person of interest to Mueller's investigators long before his January indictment, thanks in part due to his public pronouncements as well as internal emails about his contacts with WikiLeks. In campaign texts and emails, many of which had already been publicly revealed before showing up in Mueller's indictment, Stone communicated with associates about WikiLeaks following reports the organization had obtained a cache of Clinton-related emails. Stone, a former Nixon campaign adviser who has the disgraced former president's face permanently tattooed on his back, has long been portrayed as a central figure in the election interference scandal. 'They got nothing,' he said of the special counsel's investigation. Stone gave 'false and misleading' testimony about his requests for information from WikiLeaks. He then pressured a witness, comedian Randy Credico, to take the Fifth Amendment rather than testify, and pressured him in a series of emails. Following a prolonged dispute over testimony, he called him a 'rat' and threatened to 'take that dog away from you', in reference to Credico's pet, Bianca. Stone warned him: 'Let's get it on. Prepare to die.' CLEARED: GREG CRAIG Greg Craig, President Barack Obama's White House counsel, was indicted for failing to register as a foreign agent. Mueller's investigators uncovered Craig's work on behalf the government of Ukraine while probing Manafort, who did business with Craig. Prosecutors released a grand jury indictment of Craig in April 2019, after Craig's law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP agreed to pay more than $4.6 million as part of a settlement. The prominent firm also acknowledged it had failed to register, and placed much of the blame on Craig, a senior partner there. Craig's lawyer blasted the decision as an abuse of prosecutorial discretion, and prepared to argue that omission of information during an interview is not tantamount to making false statements. The charges stem from a 2012 report Craig and the firm produced on behalf of the Ukrainian government on opposition figure and former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. She was an opponent of Manafort's client , former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Craig was cleared on September 9 2019. Advertisement At the funeral of his wife Karen Ristevski, Borce broke down and cried in the arms of friends and family. He sat in the front row of the church, and listened to friends and family tell stories of their enduring love, and how it ended too soon. Later, alongside Mrs Ristevski's brother, Stephen Williams, Borce would carry his wife's coffin as a pallbearer at the emotional service in Essendon. It was a truly galling performance. On Wednesday - just one day before Borce Ristevski was due set to stand trial for the murder of his wife in the Victorian Supreme Court - he admitted to killing her, finally ending the long-running charade he was innocent. Borce Ristevski, 54, entered the bombshell guilty plea one day before he was set to stand trial for the murder of his wife Karen, 47, (pictured) in Victorian Supreme Court Crocodile tears: Killer Borce Ristevski was comforted during his wife's funeral two years ago Pall-bearer: Borce Ristevski (pictured in 2017) pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of 47-year-old Karen Ristevski on Wednesday ending the long-running charade he was innocent At the funeral two years ago, his cousin's wife Anica Naumovski had eulogised her 'best friend'. TIMELINE OF KAREN RISTEVSKI'S DEATH June 29, 2016 Karen Ristevski last seen at her Melbourne home in Avondale Heights Her mobile phone pings off a tower in the Macedon Ranges A car similar to her black Mercedes SLK coupe spotted by CCTV cameras near Diggers Rest railway station July 14, 2016 Husband Borce Ristevski and daughter Sarah make a tearful plea for information to help find their missing wife and mother December 19, 2016 Police search grassland, waterways, creeks and farms February 20, 2017 Karen Ristevski's body found at Mount Macedon Regional Park March 6, 2017 Funeral service held with Borce Ristevski a pallbearer and daughter Sarah leading the procession August 31, 2017 Police recreate the journey of Ms Ristevski on the day she went missing in a black Mercedes, identical to hers December 13, 2017 Borce Ristevski charged with murder and faces court where a lawyer indicates a not-guilty plea and he is remanded in custody April 18, 2018 Ristevski returns to court where it's revealed detectives tapped phone calls and planted listening devices as they investigated the alleged killing, compiling a 22,000-page evidence brief Ristevski is granted state-funded legal aid as he fights the allegations July 16, 2018 Ristevski's two-week committal hearing begins and later hears evidence from his daughter Sarah who said he was never "aggressive" towards her mum. August 2, 2018 Ristevski ordered to stand trial in the Supreme Court charged with murdering his wife December 4, 2018 A five-week trial for Ristevski is set for March 2019 March 13, 2018 A day before a jury is due to be empanelled for his murder trial, Borce Ristevski pleads guilty to manslaughter after prosecutors withdraw the murder charge Advertisement 'She had the biggest love of her beautiful daughter Sarah and the love of her life, Borce,' Ms Naumovski told hundreds of mourners. 'The three of them were not just a family. They were a team ... I can truly say they were inseparable'. Mrs Ristevski's body had been found in bushland at Macedon Regional Park on February 20, 2017 by a walker after months of mystery following her disappearance on June 29 the year before. Her husband was the last to see her alive. She had left her Oakley Drive, Avondale Heights home about 10am following an alleged disagreement with him over money. At least that is what Ristevski told police. They never believed him - even as he fronted the media with his daughter Sarah to beg for information on her disappearance. They would never be seen in public again. At a pre-trial hearing, Sarah said her mum would be the one to raise her voice in arguments and that her father was 'never' aggressive towards her. 'Dad was always the calm one,' she said. She said the couple would often argue over their fashion boutique Bella Bleu, which was going down the gurgler. In the months after his wife went missing, Ristevski and members of his extended family suggested his wife may have packed up and just left. Ristevski's brother, Vasko, went so far as to claim she had jumped on a plane and left Australia on a fake passport. Prosecutors believed Ristevski either killed or incapacitated his wife between 8.58am and 10.43am on the day she went missing during an argument over their finances. An autopsy could not determine her cause of death. But Ristevski had made some rookie mistakes in disposing of his wife's body. For starters, he used his own car and carried his own mobile phone to dump her body between two logs. Detectives scoured Victoria for clues and hit the jackpot when CCTV footage of Mrs Ristevski's black Mercedes emerged showing it travelled between Avondale Heights and through Diggers Rest on the day she went missing. Both her and her husband's phones were later found to have 'pinged' off mobile towers along that very same route. During a pre-trial hearing last year, Crown prosecutor Matt Fisher was adamant Mrs Ristevski's death had been no accident. 'Something happened in the house,' he said. 'The accused man engages in behaviour soon after he has either killed her or caused her serious injury.' Sarah admitted in court that her father's behaviour 'didn't make sense' in the days after her mother vanished and questioned why he had switched off his phone. As read by Mr Fisher, Sarah said: 'You were out of the house for two hours. Your phone is off for two hours... They pinged you on the Calder [Freeway].' Ristevski responded: 'That's what they are trying to plant out there, Sarah.' 'That doesn't make sense,' Sarah said. 'Nothing makes sense because they're making it up as they go,' he replied. Ristevski had lied about what he did that day and the new information was set to sink him. He told police he had been doing bookkeeping, showered and then went out in the afternoon to do an Uber driving shift. When his lies were exposed he spun up another yarn to try and explain the unexplainable. Court hearings revealed the family's dire financial situation with details of Ms Ristevski's fashion store Bella Bleu floundering Ms Ristevski's skeletal remains were found in Macedon Regional Park in February 2017 by two horticulturalists who had noticed a strange smell. Ristevski is said to have dumped his wife's body between two logs and concealed it with branches before returning home A daughter betrayed: Sarah Ristevski, daughter of Karen Ristevski, carries a photo of her mother at the funeral of Karen Ristevski at St Johns Uniting Church in Essendon, Monday, March 6, 2017. He told police he had taken Mrs Ristevski's Mercedes out to refuel it as the petrol gauge was broken. The story was almost laughable but Ristevski persisted with his cruel denials. He was set to go on trial over the murder this week, but he was thrown another lifeline. This time it came from the Victorian justice system. Standing before Justice Christopher Beale at the Supreme Court of Victoria today, Ristevski knew he could not get a better deal and the 54-year-old Melbourne father finally pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of the manslaughter. Justice Beale ruled the prosecution could not use evidence about Ristevski's conduct after his wife's death to prove he had murderous intent. The murder case had hinged on this evidence. Without it the jury would need to be convinced on nothing but Ristevski's behaviour leading up to his wife's disappearance. An undated photo shows a black-coloured Mercedes Benz SLK coupe believed to belong to Karen Ristevski As a result, Crown prosecutor Brendan Kissane filed a new indictment for manslaughter instead of murder and Borce, who lied to his family, friends and the public finally pleaded guilty. At most, Ristevski could get 20 years for manslaughter. In reality, he will get nowhere near that. In 2016, days after she disappeared, Ristevski was asked by a Channel Seven journalist if he murdered his wife, sparking speculation he was responsible for his wife's death. He remained stony-faced at the accusation, refusing to answer and turning away, holding his daughter by the arm. Commuters were shocked on Wednesday as police performed a sweeping drug search of Sydney's Central Station during the peak hour rush home. At least 15 police and their sniffer dogs were seen roaming the busy station on Wednesday, pulling up terrified commuters suspected of being in possession of drugs. Witnesses claimed police were seen performing strip searches behind two privacy screens that were set up near the main entrance to Sydney's biggest station. Police were also seen performing strip searches behind temporary screens that have been set up The moderator of Greens administered social media page Sniff Off - informing the public of of police drug dog operations - told Daily Mail Australia there were at least 15 officers and their dogs roaming during rush hour. New South Wales Police told Daily Mail Australia the cubicles weren't strip searching tents. KNOW YOUR RIGHTS Strip searches are constrained under the Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Act 2002. The act says strip searches occur where it is deemed 'necessary and urgent'. Police don't need a warrant to do sniffer dog operations in parts of major cities or on the public transport network, such as Central Station. Once the operation is set up, police 'use their own peculiar indicators to work out who they will search,' Greens MP David Shoebridge said. Police need additional 'reasonable doubt' to search members of the public. Advertisement 'The NSW Police Force regularly patrol our train station and it is common practice to erect privacy screens for the purpose of a search,' a spokesperson said. 'These operations are conducted on a regular basis and often utilise privacy screens,' another statement said. NSW Police couldn't confirm whether or not anyone had been searched at Central Station as it was dependent on whether the sniffer dogs had found anything suspicious. Police didn't elaborate on the outcome of the operation but said the operation is run regularly throughout the city. Commuters took to social media to slam the police action - questioning why they should be subjected to invasive searches on the way home from work. 'Strip search tents' at the railway station. Where am I living?,' one person wrote. 'Strip search tents, is this actually for real? People can't even go to work without the possibility that they may have to strip naked, squat and cough.' An active police operation is currently underway at Central station, in Sydney's CBD 'And at least two-thirds of those searched will be innocent,' another said. Greens NSW MP David Shoebridge called the operation 'sickening'. 'Imagine being on your way home from work and being stop by police with their drug dogs and strip searched in a tent on a station platform,' Mr Shoebridge wrote. 'This isn't some dystopian future, this is happening right now in Sydney. This is sickening.' Gmail and Google Drive users worldwide have been hit by outages leaving them unable to send emails or access files. Australian users have been among the hardest hit by the malfunctioning service. More than 3,000 people have registered complaints on downdetector.com.au - a website that tracks where there are outages - just after 1pm on Wednesday. Australian users have been among the hardest hit by the malfunctioning service More than 3000 people have registered complaints on downdetector.com.au - a website that tracks where there are outages - just after 1pm on Wednesday Google also revealed a map showing outages throughout North America, South America, Asia, Australia and Europe. Google acknowledged the issue at 1.53pm and reported 'error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior'. At this point it is not clear as to what caused the outage. The company posted an update at 3.44pm acknowledging the outage and have told customers they are working to rectifying the issue. 'Users will have issues accessing or attaching files in various products.' Google has not yet addressed the issue but some users have reported that some services are being restored. The brother of a tradesman who died from a chronic lung disease says many more will meet the same fate as the 'national epidemic' worsens. Anthony White was the first in Australia to die of silicosis, 16 months after he was diagnosed, and became the face of what doctors fear could be the 'next asbestos'. Dozens of stonemasons have been found to have the incurable condition caused by breathing in silica dust from while making artificial stone benchtops. Mr White's brother Shane Parata said himself and 30 of his Gold Coast colleagues have been diagnosed with silicosis since his brother got sick in November 2017. Anthony White died of silicosis on Saturday night 16 months after he was diagnosed and became the face of what doctors fear could be the 'next asbestos' Mr White's brother Shane Parata (pictured) said himself and 30 of his close friends had been diagnosed with silicosis since his brother got sick in November 2017 'Anthony dying has everyone really scared, they all think they could be next (to die),' he told Daily Mail Australia. 'Some have mild cases and others are in a bad way but we're all unsure of how bad we will get as there's not enough known about the disease. 'He won't be last to die from this, there will be many more soon.' Mr Parata said WorkCover was inundated with stonemasons wanting to get tests to see if they had contracted the progressive condition. 'Seeing how he went from working 13-hour days to being in a coma within two weeks has got a lot of people to get checked. He has saved a lot of lives,' he said. A recent Queensland Government audit of the state's stone industry found 98 workers had contracted silicosis, with 15 of those cases considered terminal. Mr White (bottom) and Mr Parata (top) worked at the same stone company for 10 years and both developed silicosis Mr Parata said he was last week diagnosed with silicosis and emphysema, but his case was much milder than his brother's. However, it made him tired faster, restricted his airflow, and forced him to quit the stone industry, where he worked alongside Mr White, after 15 years. 'I put off getting tested after his brother went to hospital because last thing I wanted to do was tell my mother were both had it,' he said. 'But a couple of weeks ago I was having trouble swimming so I had a CT scan and it showed up. My doctor was really upset when he told me.' Mr Parata said the family held drinks at a local pub on the weekend, and dozens of other stonemasons showed up to show support to his parents. Many of them have also been diagnosed with silicosis or were awaiting test results. 'Our parents are really struggling with Anthony's death,' he said. 'Little things like flowers showing up at the door for my mum trigger them. It's just exhausting for them.' Mr White (pictured) is believed to be the first tradesman to die after experts warned about engineered stone last year, calling it 'the next asbestos.' Mr White (pictured as a child) was found dead in the early hours of Saturday while playing the pokies at his local pub where shocked staff found him unconscious in the bathroom and were unable to revive him Mr Parata was frustrated by lax regulation in the industry and what he saw as a lack of will to protect tradies working 60-70 hours weeks to keep up with demand. 'It feels like we don't have anyone at the top fighting for us. The problem is so severe and this product is so dangerous, so why are we using it and why has nothing been done?' he said. What is silicosis? Silicosis is the scarring of the lung tissue which leads to a shortness of breath due to a buildup of silica dust in the air sacs. It typically affects tradesmen who work with concrete, bricks, tiles, sandstone and granite. Symptoms include shortness of breath, coughing, chest pain, loss of appetite, fatigue It is commonly caused from exposure to respirable crystalline silica over many years, but extremely high short-term exposures can cause it to develop rapidly Exposure to respirable crystalline silica can lead to a range of respiratory diseases, including silicosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer Source: Queensland Workplace Health and Safety Advertisement Mr White was found dead in the early hours of Saturday while playing the pokies at his local pub where shocked staff found him unconscious in the bathroom and were unable to revive him. His brother said he was thankful that his brother didn't die in a hospital bed, and was doing something that made him happy. Mr White needed a double lung transplant and was put on the waiting list only last week because doctors thought he was in good enough health. 'Everything was starting to go on the up for him, so it was quite sudden that he died,' Mr Parata said. 'He was doing a lot better and we were both pretty confident he'd live long enough to get his transplant. 'Me and my brother always confided in each other. He was always there for me and I was always there for him.' Silicosis is a progressive and irreversible disease is contracted by breathing in tiny particles of silica dust that settle in the lungs. The particles are found in engineered stone, a common substitute for marble benchtops which is made of around 90 per cent crystalline silica. Last September, WorkCover received 22 silicosis claims, six of which involved people who had been diagnosed as terminally ill, the ABC reported. Engineered stone is becoming more common as a substitute for marble benchtops, but is made of around 90 per cent crystalline silica - a major cause of silicosis (stock image of engineered stone on a kitchen unit) A dramatic spike was predicted before the end of the year, with senior occupational physician Dr Graeme Edwards, who is assisting the screening process, expecting an additional 300 people to be diagnosed in Queensland alone. The national emergency has been compared to devastation caused by asbestos at the peak of its impact in Australia in the 1990s. 'We need all stonemasons informed of the grave risk of inhaling this dust, and we need more than just the Queensland government committing to these important legal changes,' Mr White said. Fellow tradesman Tahir Ozkul, 46, who was left looking like a 'snowman' every day for years while working at a small Melbourne factory, was also diagnosed with accelerated silicosis and has to carry oxygen everywhere. 'I can't do normal activity like walk, I can't go somewhere easily, I have to carry all the time my oxygen. The pain, the short breath is very bad, I feel very uncomfortable,' he told ABC's 7.30. Many across the country are suffering from the silent killer, with the government in September issuing an urgent warning urging workers to be tested. Silicosis expert Dr Edwards said 50 per cent of sufferers were going to have progressive massive fibrosis (severe lung scarring). 'It's horrendous, it's alarming,' he said. Silicosis is a progressive and irreversible disease is contracted by breathing in tiny particles of silica dust that settle in the lungs. Pictured: Mr White in hospital He said the situation was a public emergency because Australia's system could only accommodate about 200 lung transplants a year. Dr Edwards said a continuing rise of silicosis would add an extra 130 patients lining up for lung transplants in the next three to five years. Sixteen silicosis claims have been made by stonemasons in Victoria in the past three financial years, and a total of 23 silicosis claims in NSW, including by stonemasons. The biggest concern for doctors was the likelihood many workmen were completely unaware they were living with the disease, according to Melbourne-based respiratory physician Dr Ryan Hoy. 'I've seen more and more patients, about eight patients in the last 12 months. This is the largest occupational lung crisis we've seen since the peak of asbestos use in the 1960s and the 1970s,' Dr Hoy said. A primary school in Sydney's affluent eastern suburbs has come under fire amid claims students were left int tears after missing out on free popcorn because their parents hadn't paid their fees. The popular snack was given out at Bondi Public School on Monday as a special reward to students whose parents had paid their fees by February 25. NSW P&C Federation president Susie Boyd said the popcorn giveaway public shamed pupils and embarrassed parents. Bondi Public School (pictured) is under fire for its incentive to make parents pay school fees 'I spoke to a parent whose child, who did receive the popcorn, didn't eat it, and felt really bad that they were put into that situation. It was dividing children as young as four-and-a-half,' she told the Sydney Morning Herald. NSW Education Department policy. The school fees are around $500 per year per pupil, according to a recent newsletter. 'Add in a few excursions and it might get a bit higher but the average weekly cost about $10 per school week,' principal Michael Jones wrote. 'We pride ourselves on the programs we offer that sit outside the funding to schools from the government. Our amazing P&C fully support these programs as they directly benefit our children. I suggest that families who struggle put aside a small amount for these added resources.' In a message sent to parents on Tuesday, it's understood Mr Jones said the initiative was so successful the prize would be given to all pupils 'as a thank you to the community'. At the start of the school year, Mr Jones announced a free canteen lunch raffle as an incentive for parents to pay their fees. The popcorn initiative was so successful that it will be extended to all pupils (stock image) 'There really is such a thing as a free lunch at Bondi Public School,' Mr Jones wrote in a school newsletter dated February 14. 'If you pay your school fee invoice before Monday 25th February then your child is in the draw to win a week's free lunch and recess orders at the canteen. All fees are due by Friday 1st March so it is only a payment fast track of a few days to be eligible for the FREE LUNCH! If you win you can have the orders spread out over a term or longer if that suits you better. There will be one child per grade chosen.' Daily Mail Australia has contacted the school and NSW Department of Education for comment. Bondi Public School principal Michael Jones, pictured with former Waverley Council mayor Sally Betts announced a free canteen lunch raffle as an incentive for parents to pay their fees The department's deputy secretary of school operations and performance Murat Dizdar told the Sydney Morning Herald the principal's initial message on the popcorn initiative 'did not meet the policy requirements of voluntary contributions'. 'We as a department have reminded the principal of his obligation in respect to seeking voluntary contributions,' he said. There was online backlash against the principal on social media. Bondi Public School's 'popcorn initiative' has received online backlash (pictured) 'A principal lied about fees being compulsory then shamed kids parents who hadn't paid. Outrageous,' one man tweeted. Another wrote: 'Is this an attempt to apply for a private school gig or are you too much of an a******e, even for them? A learning advantage is afforded to students who can afford to pay their fees early in some schools, according to Ms Boyd. 'We understand that some parents can and actually like to pay - which is fabulous,' she told Daily Mail Australia. 'However the growing practice of putting all of these costs together, and especially where it is not clearly articulating the voluntary nature of the fees and publicly shaming children is just plain wrong.' The P&C Federation recently called on the NSW Government to waive the practice of asking parents for voluntary contributions. 'In the government school sector, its the responsibility of governments, not parents, to ensure that children have access to proper facilities and services,' Ms Boyd said. 'The practice of asking for voluntary contributions is being abused by schools using high-pressure tactics on parents to collect funds, so the Government should instruct schools to cease the practice, and then take that opportunity to put in place strict policies for schools guidance in collection of funds.' A young Brisbane woman has been handed a life sentence for murdering her adoptive mother by striking repeatedly her in the face with a wooden stake as she slept. Simona Zafirovska, 22, killed Radica Zafirovska at the 56-year-old's home at The Gap in Brisbane's inner northwest on October 28, 2016. She then attempted to cover it up by making a frantic triple-zero call and pretending Radica had been killed by intruders. Simona Zafirovska, 22, (pictured) has been handed a life sentence for murdering her adoptive mother by striking repeatedly her in the face with a wooden stake as she slept Simona Zafirovska (pictured during her arrest in 2016) killed Radica Zafirovska at the 56-year-old's home at The Gap in Brisbane's inner northwest on October 28, 2016 In fact, she had inflicted seven blunt force injuries to her head while she lay in her bed. 'You did for a long period of time maintain an elaborate ruse,' Justice Ann Lyons said in sentencing. 'You falsely caused a disturbance in the house to make it look as though there were intruders in the house.' Radica has been remembered as a loving person. Throughout the Brisbane Supreme Court trial, her friends testified 'what a loving person she was and how fond of you (Zafirovska) she was, how much she loved you, how generous she was to you', Justice Lyons noted. Radica Zafirovska (pictured) died with 26 severe injuries, including skull fractures and brain bleeding Zafirovska even told police how she had only given her good and never bad, the trial heard. But Radica died with 26 severe injuries, including skull fractures and brain bleeding. '(It) indicates the force with which you killed your mother,' Justice Lyons said. 'She was horribly, horribly injured.' Zafirovska pleaded not guilty at the start of her lengthy trial last month before the jury found her guilty on Wednesday. She has been sentenced to life in jail with a non-parole period of 20 years. With time already served, she will be eligible for release in November 2035. Radica adopted Zafirovska as a young child in Macedonia before they moved to Australia. She was motionless, sobbing and gasps were heard in the near-full public gallery when the verdict was read out. 'We'll miss her terribly,' a family victim impact statement read. 'She was a wonderful person and she didn't deserve this. 'She didn't deserve to lose her life in such a horrific way. She was a very positive person full of life." A mother-of-two has been charged with drink driving after she allegedly arrived to pick up her six-year-old daughter from school while five times over the limit. The 30-year-old was allegedly drunk when she arrived to pick up her young daughter from a Salamander Bay school, in the NSW Hunter region, on Monday afternoon. Shockingly, police allege the mother also had her two-year-old son in the car. Police were called to the school after a concerned parent called authorities. A mother-of-two who returned a blood alcohol reading five times the legal limit while picking up her child from school will face court next month (file photo) Police allege a roadside breath test returned a positive reading. As a result the woman was arrested and taken to Nelson Bay Police Station where a second breath test returned an alleged reading of 0.252, five times the legal limit. Her licence was suspended immediately and a Child at Risk Notification was lodged. The Nelson Bay woman is scheduled to to appear in Raymond Terrace Local Court on April 1. The pound has steadied today as traders await the result of the vote in Parliament over whether to reject a no deal Brexit. Sterling has slowly increased in value throughout the day, rising by around a cent against the Euro to 1.167, restoring some of the losses that occurred yesterday. Meanwhile it has spiked by two cents against the dollar to $1.32, continuing a positive trend that began when Theresa May's Brexit deal was defeated. But there are fears it will plunge again should Parliament vote to leave the EU without agreements over the UK's future relationship with Brussels. Sterling had yesterday slumped by more than one per cent after Geoffrey Cox admitted the 11th-hour agreement with Brussels on Monday had not changed his legal advice about the Irish backstop. The pound continues to creep upwards today after a volatile Tuesday when it soared and slumped in reaction to Brexit uncertainty The pound has also risen against the dollar but has slightly dipped to $1.31 this morning Financial expert Sue Trinh, of RBC Wealth Management based in Hong Kong, told the Financial Times the markets will continue to fluctuate and that a second referendum would likely have the most positive effect on the currency. She said: 'Today, the Commons will likely vote to rule out leaving with no deal and tomorrow for the government to request a Brexit extension beyond the current 29 March deadline. 'The risk of political deadlock being broken by either a general election (probably sterlingnegative on increased uncertainty) or a second referendum (strongly sterling positive) is also rising, having been stable recently.' Minutes after Cox's advice, the pound was 1.1 percent lower at $1.3014, almost two cents down from where it was earlier. But the defeat of the Prime Minister's deal and the impending votes on no deal or extending Article 50 appear to be steadily pushing it back up. David Cheetham, chief market analyst at XTB, said it now 'looks like any hopes of an unlikely victory for the PM's deal later have just been extinguished.' Another massive rebellion and implacable opposition from Labour and the DUP sunk the deal Investors initially welcomed news that Mrs May could secure a Brexit deal after winning legally binding changes from the European Union. Sterling peaked at 1.17 yesterday after Cabinet Office minister David Lidington announced the Brexit break through in the House of Commons at about 10pm on Monday. But it meant the pound went from being the best-performing major currency on the markets to the worst in just a few hours. Mrs May said she 'passionately believed' in her Brexit deal and had now addressed the concerns raised by Parliament in January over the Northern Irish backstop, but was unable to convince MPs, losing the vote 391 to 242. She said she had ensured there would be 'no indefinite backstop' and any attempt to keep the UK in the backstop by the EU would be dealt with by an 'arbitration mechanism'. European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said: 'Our agreement provides meaningful clarifications and legal guarantees to the Withdrawal Agreement and backstop. 'We left no stone unturned, our mind has always been open, our work always creative and our hand has always been outstretched. 'It is in this spirit that today the Prime Minister and I have agreed on a joint legally-binding instrument relating to the Withdrawal Agreement. This instrument provides meaningful clarifications and legal guarantees on the nature of the backstop. 'The backstop is an insurance policy, nothing more, nothing less. The intention is for it not to be used, like in every insurance policy.' A former Greens activist has been thrown out of a Queensland surf lifesaving club press event by one of Gladys Berejiklian's elite protection unit officers. Footage of the bizarre moment showed the officer physically restrain Jim Beatson and drag him out of the press event at Brunswick Heads Surf Club on Wednesday. In the video, Mr Beatson is seen being dragged away from where the NSW Premier was announcing an upgrade, while screaming 'why can't a journalist ask a question?' Scroll down for video Footage of the bizarre moment showed the officer physically restrain Jim Beatson (pictured) and drag him out of the press event at Brunswick Heads Surf Club on Wednesday In the video, Mr Beatson (pictured) is seen being dragged away from where the NSW Premier was announcing an upgrade, while screaming 'why can't a journalist ask a question?' Mr Beatson was then manhandled by the Premier's security staff, who kept referring to him by his first name, and pushed into a nearby room while he continued to shout. The video of the incident, which was later posted to social media, revealed Mr Beatson was a community newsroom journalist at radio station Bay FM. Other people in the video could also be heard shouting out: 'Ask the question!' A second video showed Mr Beatson continue to push against the plain-clothed police officer, while saying he wanted to ask the premier a question. 'I did it in a polite way but immediately I was propelled backwards by her staff including this gentleman here,' he says in the video. 'I'm not threatening. I'm a miserable little light, very ...', Mr Beatson began before someone in the room cut him off labelling him a 'loudmouth'. Mr Beatson previously co-founded Brisbane youth radio station 4ZZZ in 1975 before a lengthy career as a newspaper journalist. He has advocated progressive politics and, in 2012, was a Greens candidate for Byron Shire Council. Mr Beatson was then manhandled by the Premier's security staff (pictured), who kept referring to him by his first name, and pushed into a nearby room while he continued to shout The surf live saving club incident isn't the first time the veteran reporter has needed to be ejected from an official meeting, however. He was escorted from a Byron Bay Council meeting in 2014 after he shouted at a councillor, according to local newspaper reports at the time. In a Bay FM audio archive from August 2018, Mr Beatson is heard confronting Ms Berejiklian at another press conference over koala habitats and overdevelopment in the region. 'The negative to being a reporter is it's considered bad form to be continually interrupting the speaker as they wander off into poli-speak or mistruths,' he tells the audience. Following the incident on Wednesday, NSW Police confirmed a specialist officer intervened but did not arrest Mr Beatson. 'Officers removed the man from the location to prevent any further breach of the peace,' a police spokeswoman said on Wednesday. Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Mr Beatson and Bay FM. A two-year-old toddler who tragically died in a house fire has been remembered as a lovable and friendly little boy. Emergency services were called to the Great Ocean Road property in Nullawarre, south-west of Melbourne just before 9.15am on Wednesday and arrived at the scene to find the home fully alight. Two men, a woman, and two other children who managed to flee the burning home were taken to hospital with smoke inhalation and have since been discharged. Sadly, the two-year-old was unable to escape the blaze and his body was later found in a bedroom. A family is not only homeless but also mourning the death of a little boy in a tragic house fire The boy's great uncle described the little boy as a jovial little fella who was 'very loved'. 'We are talking about a family that is in absolute devastation and has been left absolutely homeless,' indigenous elder Lenny Clarke told the Warrnambool Standard. 'But there is no doubt that everyone in that community will pull together.' The body of a two-year-old boy was later found in a bedroom inside the guttered home The boy's aunt posted on Facebook: 'Our hearts are a little heavier today.. I hope you're flying high little angel. The sky will be shining brighter tonight, with you in it.' The little boy was earlier feared missing as family and friends frantically doorknocked the close-knit community. 'He came in and asked us if we'd seen a little boy roaming around and we just said no,' a woman told Nine News. The Great Ocean Road was blocked in both directions as emergency crews attended the scene Warrnambool Police Acting Inspector David Reither described the fire as tragic for everyone involved. Police will prepare a report for the coroner. 'The circumstances surrounding the fire are yet to be determined and an arson chemist is attending to establish the cause,' a Victoria Police statement read. The mother of a Russian 'Mowgli' girl rescued from a home piled high with filth told court she was raising her child 'in good conditions' and she left the apartment clean. Worried doctors in Moscow say the five-year-old child called Lyubov cannot speak, has never seen fruit nor slept in a bed, and is terrified of water. Her university-educated mother Irina Garashchenko, 47, has been remanded in custody for two months on suspicion of attempted murder. She faces up to 15 years in jail if convicted, but claims someone staged a 'provocation' to mess up her apartment. Irina Garashchenko, 47, the mother of a 5-year-old girl left alone in a Moscow apartment, charged with attempted murder, during a hearing at Moscow's Savyolovsky District Court According to doctors, the girl, pictured above with rescue workers and neighbours, 'could not speak, only make sounds, and was not socialised' After police rescued the child, the mother returned and was prevented from fleeing again by neighbours, say multiple reports Garashchenko stands in the dock at the Moscow court as she spoke to reporters to protest her innocence Speaking for the first time from behind the bars of a court cage she told reporters that Moscow investigators suspect her of 'beating' the child and risking her life by neglect. On the state of her home - so bad that rescuers wore chemical protection equipment when they entered it - the mother insisted: 'It cannot be true.' She insisted she raised her daughter in 'good conditions' adding: 'I do not know what happened in the flat.' However she admitted: 'The investigator told me allegedly I was driving my daughter towards suicide, that I was beating her. 'But I'm her mum, I gave birth to her, to my first child, when I was 41. And for five and a half years I fed her, raised her. Of course I love her. I would never leave her.' The horrific conditions in which Lyubov was found have deeply shocked Russians with Vladimir Putin's children's ombudsman Anna Kuznetsova personally visiting the girl in hospital to hug her. The mother told Life news outlet: 'So far I cannot understand what has happened in the flat and I want to find out by myself. 'I was not let in and I'm not allowed to see my daughter. So I do not know what happened in the flat. I was detained nearby.' She said she had been absent 'a few hours' but neighbours believe she had left the child home alone for some days. The five-year-old 'Mowgli girl', Lyubov, who was rescued from a cockroach-infested flat in Moscow, Russia The neglected child is comforted by the Kremlin's children's ombudsman Anna Kuznetsova The young girl plays with Ms Kuznetsova after she is taken into hospital care at the weekend. When she was found, the young girl appeared to be living in a 'den' built of garbage Lyubov's incessant crying altered altered them and they called police. 'I have raised this child for five-and-a-half years and do everything for her,' she told NTV, denying any wrongdoing. The mother has claimed to work for an energy company and in financial services. 'I earn money, pay for everything, maintain her, feed her and so on. She was in a good condition' The girl did not go to nursery school 'because I was educating her myself She can communicate, she can speak. I worry like every mother. I want to see her, hug and kiss her. A necklace was ingrown into her skin, pictured above, and the five year old girl may not have seen the outside world since she was a baby, say reports 'She is my child. I want to see how she reacts to me. I will fight for my daughter.' But neighbours say they had not seen the girl since she was a baby, when she was healthy. There were claims the child was hidden from the world and had a necklace ingrowing into her neck - now removed by doctors. Earlier the mother had an obsession with cleanliness, sweeping public areas in the block of flats, said neighbours. 'She loved cleanliness, often washed the floor near her door and and the elevator,' said one. Chief doctor Ismail Osmanov who is caring for the girl said: 'Unfortunately she does not speak. She pronounces only separate syllables. 'At the same time, she has no physiological disorders. Such a developmental lag is due to the fact that no-one was engaged with the child.' She can point to her eyes, nose and mouth, he said. But she 'unfamiliar with sleeping in a bed. She falls asleep on the chair, curled up, and only after that the doctors put her into a bed.' While she tried to use a spoon and fork, she was 'really afraid' of water. 'She had never seen fruit,' he said. 'When we offered her a mandarin, she looked at it for a long time, intently. Then she tried it and smiled with happiness.' But he said: 'She did not know what a shower is. We still have difficulties with hygienic procedures. She does not want to take a bath at all. Garashchenko claimed she had left the apartment in good condition and that someone had staged a 'provocation' against her Neighbours pass the terrified girl to doctors after finding her living in a cockroach-infested flat in Russia The young girl's mother was brought to court today and is under investigation for attempted murder The girl's mother is escorted by police into court today and is currently under investigation Irina Garashchenko is taken away by police for interrogation after her five-year-old daughter was found to living up to her neck in foul-smelling rubbish 'She is scared of electronic devices, too We want to make an ECG, but for now she won't have this.' No other family members have asked about her, said the doctor. Rescuers had to wear chemical protection equipment to enter the flat and save the half-naked girl, according to reports. The mother was reported to have been absent for days, leaving her daughter 'half starving and dehydrated'. Chairman of the Russian Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin, a close friend of Vladimir Putin, has taken the distressing case under his 'personal control'. The girl's mother is reported to have told investigators that she was a single parent and had left the child alone when she went to work. Neighbours say they repeatedly called police because of concerns over the girl, but their pleas were ignored. On Monday police were seen wearing chemical protection suits as they rescued the five-year-old who was living up to her neck in foul-smelling rubbish infested with cockroaches. The neglected half-naked child was dehydrated and sickly after her mother had been 'absent for days' from her noxious Moscow flat. Upon entering the flat, police officers found the state of the flat was so bad that they had to use chemical protection suits Neighbours said that five years ago the mother brought home a baby but then said the child had gone to live with a grandmother. Her husband was deported to Ukraine. In fact the child was still in the flat, say reports The half-starved girl, widely described by the Russian media as a 'Mowgli', made a den amid the piles of stinking garbage. She was offered water and 'drank two litres'. Investigators believe she has 'pronounced signs of anorexia', said reports. A neighbour who entered the flat after summoning police due to the girl's desperate crying said: 'We almost fainted at the condition of the apartment and from the smell. 'Police had to wear chemical protection. 'A five-year-old girl was sitting on the windowsill in the kitchen in a hat, and T-shirt with no underwear. 'She was crying. There was no food. 'There were cockroaches everywhere.' Neighbours said that five years ago the mother brought home a baby but then said the child had gone to live with a grandmother. Her husband was deported to Ukraine. After police rescued the child, the mother returned and was prevented from fleeing again by neighbours, say multiple reports. Neighbours said the woman was often 'dressed well' and claimed to have a professional job. Carlos Carranza, 24, is accused of stalking 59-year-old Bambi Larson then stabbing and beating her to death inside her home An illegal immigrant with a lengthy criminal history has been charged with beating and stabbing a mother to death inside her home in California. Carlos Eduardo Arevalo Carranza, 24, was arrested on Monday for the murder of 59-year-old Bambi Larson, who was found dead at her home in San Jose on February 28. Police say Carranza, who has no address and is a known gang member, stalked Ms Larson through her neighborhood before breaking into her home and attacking her. San Jose Police Chief Eddie Garcia also revealed Carranza's lengthy criminal history, which began in 2013 when he was arrested crossing the border illegally in Texas and deported back to Mexico. That was followed by ten arrests and at least three convictions for offences ranging from drug possession to battery, false imprisonment and burglary. When he was arrested for Larson's murder, Carranza was on probation for possession of methamphetamine, paraphernalia, false imprisonment and burglary. Garcia also revealed that ICE had applied nine times for a detainer on Carranza, a move which allows suspects to be held longer than their prison term so their immigration status can be investigated by federal officials. All nine requests had been ignored by county officials, ICE field director Erik Bonnar said, allowing Carranza to be freed so he could offend again. ICE applied for a tenth detainer on Tuesday, following Carranza's latest arrest. Bonnar told CBS San Francisco: 'How many more people have to be killed or injured before California lawmakers will open discussions to revise the state policy prohibiting local law enforcement agencies from working with ICE to apprehend dangerous criminal aliens? Police say Carranza was arrested at least ten times before he killed Ms Larson (pictured), but San Jose county officials ignored requests from ICE to investigate his immigration status 'Its unfortunate that our communities face dangerous consequences because of inflexible state laws that protect criminal aliens. 'These sanctuary policies have unintended, but very real, and often tragic consequences to public safety.' San Jose Police Officers' Association echoed those remarks, saying: 'When it comes to policing, there's a distinct difference between a Dreamer who commits a victimless crime and a violent serial sexual predator with multiple offenses. 'Our society must recognize there's a difference between someone who is trying to make ends meet for their family, and a self-admitted gang member, a monster who brutally murders an innocent woman in her own home.' Larson was found dead on February 28 by her son, who she worked with, after she failed to turn up to her job as a systems manager. The son went over to her house around 1.45pm and discovered her body in her bedroom, suffering from multiple lacerations and blunt force trauma. CCTV led them to a t-shirt outside the home which had both her blood and DNA from her attacker on it. Carranza was arrested on unrelated drug charges on March 10 and a DNA sample was taken, which matched the DNA on the t-shirt. He was rearrested the following day when police say they found Larson's cellphone and e-reader in his possession. Kim Kardashian has spoken out in support of ending the death penalty and said she has 'immersed herself in learning about the criminal justice system'. The reality star posted her comments on Twitter as she revealed she is working with California's Governor, Gavin Newsom, who has halted the execution of all 737 condemned inmates on the nation's largest death row. Kim, 38, who has been on a much-publicised crusade for criminal reform, tweeted on Tuesday night: 'For the last year, I have immersed myself in learning about the criminal justice system. I visited prisons, met with formerly incarcerated people, and helped with cases of individual injustice including two death penalty cases. 'I have met with and am very supportive of Governor Newsom and his decision to help bring an end to the California Death Penalty. Racial bias and unfairness run deep throughout the justice system but especially when it comes to the death penalty.' Scroll down for video Reality star Kim Kardashian, 38, has voiced her support for eliminating the death penalty Kim posted her comments on Twitter as she revealed she is working with California's Governor, Gavin Newsom, who has halted the execution of all 737 condemned inmates on the nation's largest death row The reality star tweeted about Gov Newsom's announcement on Tuesday night. Her sentiments come as Newsom is halting the execution of the condemned inmates - for at least as long as he's governor Above, one of Kim's tweets in support of Newsom. While the governor's move is certain to be challenged in court, aides cite his power to grant reprieves written into the state Constitution She added: 'And we should not be okay with the risk that an innocent person could be executed. I hope we can turn toward better solutions that focus more on healing victims of trauma and prioritizing fairness and justice.' Her sentiments come as Gov Newsom is halting the execution of the condemned inmates - for at least as long as he's governor. He will issue an executive order granting a reprieve to each one of the state's 737 condemned inmates, his office told The Associated Press. He's also withdrawing the lethal injection regulations that death penalty opponents have already tied up in court. And he's shuttering the new execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison that has never been used. Last September, Kim's husband Kanye West said that she had enrolled in law school. Speaking to Extra host AJ Calloway, the rapper said: 'My wife is in law school now, and it's extremely serious to us.' However, Kim's rep later intervened, saying the Keeping Up With The Kardashians star wasn't actually going to law school, but that she is going to 'continue her legal activism'. The office of California Gov Gavin Newsom (above in February) said he can act unilaterally because he's enacting a moratorium, not changing anyone's sentence. He's not commuting any death sentences, which in many cases would require agreement from the state Supreme Court Since California's last execution in 2006, the state's death row population has grown to house one of every four condemned inmates in the US. A condemned inmate can be seen above as he's led out of his east block cell on death row at San Quentin State Prison in 2016 (file photo) In June 2017, Kim celebrated freeing Alice Johnson, a 63-year-old from Tennessee who was sentenced to life in prison in 1996 on non-violent drug charges. President Trump commuted her sentence after Kardashian's tireless campaign against her harsh mandatory punishment. Although Kim never attended college, she has law in her blood: her late father Robert Kardashian was a lawyer who famously worked on OJ Simpson's murder trial. California hasn't executed anyone since 2006, under then-Republican Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger, and inmates are far more likely to die of old age. Since then, the death row population has grown to house one of every four condemned inmates in the United States. They include Richard Davis, who kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas during a slumber party and strangled her, and Lonnie Franklin Jr, convicted of killing nine women and a teenage girl in Los Angeles. He's known as the 'Grim Sleeper' because detectives thought he took a 14-year break in killing between 1988 and 2002. Keeping up with Kim: Reality star... and legal activist From her native city of Los Angeles all the way to the The White House in DC, Kim Kardashian has been on a much-publicised crusade for criminal justice reform. In June 2017, Kim celebrated freeing Alice Johnson, a 63-year-old from Tennessee who was sentenced to life in prison in 1996 on non-violent drug charges. President Trump commuted her sentence after Kardashian's tireless campaign against her harsh mandatory punishment. She added to the cause this January with a visit to the California Capitol in Sacramento for a visit with Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins of San Diego and some of his lawmaking colleagues. Lobbying: Kim Kardashian visited the California Capitol as part of her criminal justice reform crusade ; she documented the trip with a photo on her Instagram Story During her time in the Senate Chambers, the reality star also spoke with lawmakers who had proposed a constitutional amendment that would allow parolees to vote earlier in the day. If approved, the 'Free the Vote Act' would allow about 48,000 California parolees the legal right to cast ballots. Assemblymember Todd Gloria (D-San Diego) tweeted a group photo featuring the reality star and several lawmakers and wrote: 'When you show up to work and @KimKardashian is there.' There was also a tweet from Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel (D-Los Angeles) who said is was 'always nice to see one of his constituents from the 45th Assembly District to the State Capitol. Thanks @KimKardashian for stopping by!' Causing a stir: The reality star's visit created some excitement in the Senate Chambers Kardashian had previously lobbied for criminal justice reform in the California Capitol, when she tweeted last July that she hoped then-Governor Jerry Brown (D-California) would sign a bill that would prohibit male correctional officer from conducting pat-downs searches on female inmates; Brown did sign that bill the following month. Her most famous plea for reform came when she visited President Donald J. Trump in the oval office of The White House last last year. The President went on to sign the First Step Act in December, which reduces mandatory minimum sentences in certain instances and expands on 'good time credits' for well-behaved prisoners looking for shorter sentences, as reported by The Hill. Last September, Kim's husband Kanye West said that she had enrolled in law school. Speaking to Extra host AJ Calloway, the rapper said: 'My wife is in law school now, and it's extremely serious to us.' However, Kim's rep later intervened, saying the Keeping Up With The Kardashians star wasn't actually going to law school, but that she is going to 'continue her legal activism'. Although Kim never attended college, she has law in her blood: her late father Robert Kardashian was a lawyer who famously worked on OJ Simpson's murder trial. Advertisement The state's voters have narrowly supported the death penalty, most recently in 2016 when they voted to speed up the process. Newsom's office said he can act unilaterally because he's enacting a moratorium, not changing anyone's sentence. He's not commuting any death sentences, which in many cases would require agreement from the state Supreme Court. A governor needs approval from the state Supreme Court to pardon or commute the sentence of anyone twice convicted of a felony, and the justices last year blocked several clemency requests by former Gov Jerry Brown. In June 2017, Kim celebrated freeing Alice Johnson, a 63-year-old from Tennessee who was sentenced to life in prison in 1996 on non-violent drug charges. President Trump commuted her sentence after Kardashian's tireless campaign against her harsh mandatory punishment While the governor's move is certain to be challenged in court, aides cite his power to grant reprieves written into the state Constitution. 'I do not believe that a civilized society can claim to be a leader in the world as long as its government continues to sanction the premeditated and discriminatory execution of its people,' Newsom said in prepared remarks. 'In short, the death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian.' He called the death penalty 'a failure' that 'has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or can't afford expensive legal representation.' Gov Newsom is also withdrawing the lethal injection regulations that death penalty opponents have already tied up in court and will shutter the new execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison that has never been used He also argues that it doesn't act as a deterrent, wastes taxpayer dollars and is flawed because it is 'irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error.' California has spent $5 billion since 1978 on its death row, he said. 'The intentional killing of another person is wrong,' he said, 'and as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual.' His office said more than six in 10 condemned California inmates are minorities, citing racial disparities in who is sentenced to die. And it said five condemned California inmates were eventually exonerated since 1973. California is the sixth state where a governor has enacted a moratorium. Republican Illinois Gov George Ryan was the first to do so in 2000, though Illinois has since abolished the death penalty. The governors of Pennsylvania, Washington and Oregon have imposed moratoriums on executions, and the former Colorado governor refused to execute someone on death row. The state's new governor supports a repeal bill in the Legislature. Newsom, a Democrat, told reporters earlier this month that he 'never believed in the death penalty from a moral perspective,' also citing ethical and economic concerns. He said he's campaigned 'vigorously' for the last two ballot measures where voters rejected repealing the death penalty. 'The disparities are very real and raw to me now especially as I spend every week working on the issues of paroles and commutations,' he said. Newsom cited one offender serving a sentence of 57 years-to-life for injuring three people, while another offender was sentenced to 17 years-to-life for a double murder: 'One happened to be of one race, one happened to be another race. Other people I've seen literally put to death for lesser crimes, and that concerns me.' Former Democratic Gov Brown also opposed the death penalty, but his administration moved to restart executions after voters acted in 2016 to allow the use of a single lethal injection and speed up appeals. His administration's regulations are stalled by challenges in both state and federal court, though those lawsuits may be halted now that Newsom is officially withdrawing them. Brown said he was satisfied with his record number of pardons and commutations, though he never attempted to commute a death sentence, and with his sweeping changes that eased criminal penalties while reducing the prison population. 'I've done what I want to do,' Brown said shortly before leaving office, defending his decision not to endorse death penalty repeal efforts in 2012 and 2016. 'I've carved out my piece of all this.' Democratic Assemblyman Marc Levine of Greenbrae plans to seek the two-thirds vote the Legislature requires to put another repeal measure on the 2020 ballot. Levine's district includes San Quentin State Prison, which houses California's death row and execution chamber. Newsom's aides said it has not yet been decided what will become of the execution chamber, nor whether corrections officials have been told to top preparing for executions, for instance by running drills. Seventy-nine condemned California inmates have died of natural causes since California reinstated capital punishment in 1978. Another 26 committed suicide. California has executed 13 inmates, while two were executed in other states. Newsom's office said 25 condemned inmates have exhausted all of their appeals and could soon have faced execution if the courts approved the state's new lethal injection method. A Boeing software update to fix a suspected nosedive problem in its 737 Max 8 jets was delayed by the US government shutdown, it has been claimed. The safety fixes were reportedly slated for announcement as early as January in the wake of October's Lion Air disaster in Indonesia which claimed 189 lives. But Boeing has now said its updates will happen 'in the coming weeks.' On Sunday, another 737 Max 8 crashed killing all 159 onboard shortly after take off in Ethiopia. There is no evidence of a link between the two disasters, and investigations into Sunday's crash are continuing. The planned updates dragged amid engineering and regulatory complications while 'consideration of the fixes was suspended' during the 35-day partial government shutdown in America, industry and government officials told the Wall Street Journal. It comes as Norwegian Air said it will seek compensation from Boeing for lost revenue and extra costs after grounding its 737 Max 8 aircraft. Industry sources have said the firm faces big claims after the Ethiopian Airlines crash. A Boeing software update to fix a suspected nosedive problem in its 737 Max 8 jets was delayed by the US government shutdown, it has been claimed. Pictured: Red Cross workers carry a body bag at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines crash on Tuesday The safety fixes are said to have been initially earmarked for completion by early January in the wake of October's Lion Air disaster which claimed 189 lives. Pictured: American civil aviation and Boeing investigators search through the debris at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines crash yesterday Members of the African Union (AU) hold flowers to commemorate the victims of the Ethiopian Airlines disaster This morning, Egypt, Lebanon and Kosovo added to the growing list of nations that have barred the Max 8 from their airspace. America's Federal Aviatoin Administration continues to back the plane's airworthiness - but more than 40 countries including the entire European Union have suspended flights by the plane. The European Aviation Safety Agency said that 'at this early stage' of the most recent investigation, 'it cannot be excluded that similar causes may have contributed to both events.' While defending the Max as safe, the company has promised to upgrade some flight-control software 'in the coming weeks.' Boeing began working on the changes shortly after the Lion Air crash. It is tweaking a system designed to prevent an aerodynamic stall if sensors detect that the plane's nose is pointed too high and its speed is too slow. Officials at Lion Air in Indonesia said sensors on their plane produced erroneous information on its last four flights, triggering an automatic nose-down command which the pilots were unable to overcome. The plane plunged into the sea. Q&A: Britain's Boeing 737 Max ban What's happened? The Civil Aviation Authority has banned all Boeing 737 Max aircraft from landing or departing in Britain, or flying through UK airspace. Many nations have done the same. Will this affect me? It is most likely to if you booked a flight with TUI or Norwegian. Check with the airline if you are due to fly on a Boeing 737 Max. Will my flight be axed? Norwegian does not have enough replacement planes and warned of 'temporary delays and cancellations'. TUI predicts a 'small number of short delays' and said customers will 'travel as planned on other aircraft'. What are my rights? Those whose flights are axed are unlikely to be compensated if airlines cite 'extraordinary circumstances'. But they may be entitled to a refund or rerouting and meals, refreshments, hotel accommodation or transfers. When will the ban end? The US has told Boeing to install a software fix by April, which could satisfy safety authorities. Advertisement A Boeing spokesman said once updated software is installed, the system will rely on data from more than one sensor to trigger a nose-down command. Also, the system won't repeatedly push the nose down, and it will reduce the magnitude of the change, he said. There will also be more training for pilots. According to a Wall Street Journal report in February, a month before the Ethiopian Airlines disaster, work on the fixes dragged on months longer than anticipated following the Lion Air crash. Sources familiar with the situation told the newspaper reasons for the delays included differences of opinion among some federal and company safety experts over how extensive the alterations needed to be. Discussions included whether to add extra pilot training and cockpit alerts to the package of changes, one of the sources claimed. It was also reported that consideration of the changes was suspended while the 35-day partial government shutdown took place. No U.S. airlines have grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8 models that they fly, but at least one group representing flight attendants at a major carrier has said it does not want to put its members on the plane until further investigations are completed. After the second deadly crash involving the model in five months, several airlines and countries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East have grounded it or banned it from their airspace. Norwegian Air said on Wednesday it will seek compensation from Boeing for lost revenue and extra costs after grounding its fleet of 737 MAX 8 aircraft in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash. 'We expect Boeing to take this bill,' Norwegian said in an emailed statement to Reuters. The Oslo-based airline has 18 'MAX' passenger jets in its 163-aircraft fleet. European regulators on Tuesday grounded the aircraft following Sunday's crash of a similar plane in Ethiopia, which killed 157 people and was the second crash involving that type of plane since October. Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg told employees on Monday that he was confident in the safety of the 737 MAX in an email to employees which was seen by Reuters. Industry sources, however, said the planemaker faces big claims after the crash. Meanwhile, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which represents more than 26,000 flight attendants at American Airlines, called on the carrier's CEO Doug Parker to 'strongly consider grounding these planes until an investigation can be performed.' The group said flight attendants will not be forced to fly if they feel unsafe. Brian Parrish, a spokesman for Southwest Airlines which flies 34 Max 8s, said the carrier remains confident about the plane's safety. American Airlines Group, which flies 24 of the planes, said it has full confidence in the model. Pressure is mounting on Boeing after more airlines and countries grounded their fleets of 737 Max 8 jets in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines disaster. Pictured: Emergency crews at the scene of the crash But the FAA is facing mounting criticism for backing the Max 8's airworthiness. The rest of the world typically takes it cues from the FAA, long considered the world's gold standard for aircraft safety. Yet other aviation safety regulators, including the European Union, China, Australia and the United Kingdom, have decided not to wait for the FAA to act. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said in a statement Tuesday that he's concerned that international aviation regulators are providing more certainty to the flying public than the FAA. 'In the coming days, it is absolutely critical that we get answers as to what caused the devastating crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 and whether there is any connection to what caused the Lion Air accident just five months ago,' DeFazio said. The FAA has increasingly become cozy with airplane manufacturers and airlines when it should be more pro-active in safety, said Bill McGee, aviation adviser for Consumer Reports. The magazine and website on Tuesday called on airlines and the FAA to ground the 737 Max planes until an investigation into the cause of the Ethiopian crash is completed to see if it's related to the Lion Air crash in October. Pictures have emerged showing the scale of the crash site from above. Diggers have been excavating the site in a bid to locate bodies The disaster was the second deadly incident involving the new model of Boeing passenger jet in less than five months, prompting concern over its safety The graphic shows how the plane's vertical speed fluctuated in the minute before it crashed near Addis Ababa airport 'They have not presented any evidence that the problems that we've seen with these two crashes are not problems that could potentially exist here in the U.S.,' McGee said. 'Increasingly the FAA is relying more and more on what the industry calls electronic surveillance,' added McGee, who has written about aviation for nearly two decades. 'Not going out and kicking the tires, seeing the work being done, making sure it's being done properly.' Former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood also called for the U.S. to ground the 737 Max, just as his agency halted flights of another Boeing plane six years ago because of safety concerns. 'These planes need to be inspected before people get on them,' LaHood said Tuesday. 'The flying public expects somebody in the government to look after safety, and that's DOT's responsibility.' LaHood was Department of Transportation secretary in 2013 when the department grounded the Boeing 787 because of overheating lithium-ion battery packs. The planes were idled for less than a month, until Boeing crafted new fire-resistant compartments around the batteries. LaHood said current Secretary Elaine Chao should do the same thing with the Max 8, even if it means overruling the FAA, which has taken no action in the face of the dozens of other countries banning the plane from their skies. 'The secretary has the authority to suspend these planes' and require inspections by both FAA and Boeing personnel, he said. 'She has the authority to do it no matter what the FAA thinks.' But veteran accident investigators defended the FAA, which has said there's no data to link the two crashes. 'I don't see the facts to justify what they've done,' John Goglia, an independent safety consultant and former member of the National Transportation Safety Board, said of the moves by other countries to stop the Max 8 from flying. 'If they have facts, I wish they would share them with the rest of the world so we can protect the air-traveling public.' The FAA said it was reviewing all available data, and so far had found no basis to ground the planes. John Cox, president and CEO of the aviation consultancy Safety Operating Systems, said countries that have grounded the Max 8 may have linked the Ethiopian and Indonesian crashes even though investigators had yet to analyze the Ethiopian plane's black boxes. 'The FAA is on solid ground so far,' said Cox, a former airline pilot and accident investigator. 'But politics may overwhelm them if enough members get together and demand the planes be grounded.' Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Dianne Feinstein of California already have urged FAA to do just that, signaling that the agency may soon face escalating pressure from Capitol Hill. 'My fear is that the FAA is simply trying to save face and avoid acknowledging the safety defect that they failed to find when they certified the plane's safety,' said Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. Air safety regulators in at least 40 countries, including the European Union, have either grounded Boeing 737 Max jets or banned them from their airspace after Sunday's deadly crash in Ethiopia. In addition, at least 10 airlines worldwide have stopped flying the planes. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency, which covers 32 countries, announced Tuesday that it would ban the planes from flying in its airspace. Other countries that have either grounded the planes or temporarily banned them include China, the United Kingdom, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Oman, Malaysia and Australia. Airlines that have stopped using the planes include Gol Airlines of Brazil, Cayman Airways, Ethiopian Airways, Jet Airways of India, Aeromexico, Norwegian Air Shuttle, Turkish Airlines, Eastar Jet of South Korea, Smartwings of the Czech Republic and LOT of Poland. Sandy Morris, an aerospace analyst at Jefferies in London, called the string of bans on the Boeing Max jets unprecedented. 'It seems like a rebellion against the FAA,' Morris said. A drowsy seal could barely keep its eyes open when a diver appeared in its watery home. The little mammal kept shutting its eyes and floating to the seafloor when it was spotted off the Farne Islands in Northumberland. The two main types of seal that live off the UK's coast are the common and, slightly less spotty, grey seal. The seal can't stay awake for its diver visitor in the cold seas off the Farne islands, Northumberland It tips its head back and nods off, gently coming to rest on the sea floor The seal is floating on a bed of brown seaweed in the murky blue waters, in the video, before it closes its eyes and gently drops beneath them. The cute little pup desperately tries to keep awake by flapping its fins, but can't quite fight off the slumber. It slowly drops to the seafloor and comes to rest on the sandy seabed. As it tries to right itself it tips its head back again and falls back into a soothing sleep. There are around 55,000 common seals in British waters, and 120,000 grey seals, according to The Mammal Society. Then, not to be defeated by slumber, the seal gets up and tries to stay awake before drifting off again surrounded by waving brown seaweed Common seals can be identified by a fine spot-patterned grey or brown fur it said, visible ears and long whiskers. Grey seals, on the other hand, have the same features but are slightly larger and their spots also tend to be larger and less numerous. Seals are also at the top of the seas foodchain, so tend to accumulate heavy metals and other pollutants in their bodies. This can mean females are not able to breed if they feed on fish that contain high levels of pollutants. A husband-to-be gave his girlfriend the surprise of her life when he got down on one knee and gifted her with the puppy she had always dreamed of. Mathew Harris made the unforgettable proposal to his girlfriend of nine years Andrea Pavia after he handed her a Dachshund wearing a collar that read 'will you marry me?' on February 24. The couple stood at the Mount Keira lookout, south of Sydney - the very same location where he asked her to be his girlfriend nine years earlier. Scroll down for video Mathew Harris (pictured left) made the unforgettable proposal to his girlfriend of nine years Andrea Pavia (right) after he handed her a Dachshund wearing a collar that read 'will you marry me?' A husband-to-be gave his girlfriend the surprise of her life when he got down on one knee and gifted her with the puppy she had always dreamed of Mr Harris knew his girlfriend was desperate for the dachshund, but waited until they were living together to combine the proposal with the adorable puppy. Mr Harris recruited Ms Pavia's sister Carlie to help the day go off without a hitch, arranging for her to not only document the day but also pick up the puppy and bring him to the location. As the couple arrived to the lookout, Mr Harris snuck away to the car park where he was given the chocolate brown puppy - which the couple have named Cino. With the puppy in his arms Mr Harris went back to his unsuspecting girlfriend and gifted her the dog of her dreams. Ms Pavia became emotional over the puppy, but it wasn't until she saw the collar that she realised what Mr Harris was doing and broke down. Overlooking the Wollongong coastline, Mr Harris got down on one knee and asked his girlfriend of nine years to marry him. 'We had spoken about getting married before but I had absolutely no idea about the puppy,' Ms Pavia said. Mr Harris knew his girlfriend was desperate for the dachshund, but waited until they were living together to combine the proposal with the adorable puppy The couple stood at the Mount Keira lookout, south of Sydney - the very same location where he asked her to be his girlfriend nine years earlier 'He really wanted to keep it a surprise for me so he organized for the breeder to only message him during work hours where he knew I wouldn't see any messages pop up on his phone. 'I discovered a local breeder, South Coast Sausages, and constantly tagged Mathew in photos of their adorable litters.' The young business owner's dream dachshund was chocolate, so as soon as the breeder announced they were having a chocolate litter, she made sure her boyfriend knew. 'Little did I know he had secretly reached out to the breeder and secured one of the pups in that same litter I was tagging him in,' Ms Pavia said. With the help of Ms Pavia's sister (pictured, left) she brought the puppy to the lookout and filmed the surprise Ms Pavia (pictured) became emotional over the puppy, but it wasn't until she saw the collar that she realised what Mr Harris was doing and broke down The couple met in 2009 while studying at the University of Wollongong and have been together since, but Ms Pavia admitted she wasn't expecting the proposal. 'Instantly I broke down in tears and couldn't believe what was happening,' Ms Pavia said. 'It was one of the happiest moments of my life - not only did I get my dream dog but I also get to marry my best friend. 'I wasn't surprised Mathew involved Carlie because he knows how close we are and that I would love for her to be involved in something like this. 'She is also incredibly good at keeping secrets and really good at planning.' Mr Harris recruited Ms Pavia's sister Carlie to help the day go off without a hitch, arranging for her to not only document the day but also pick up the puppy and bring him to the location The boss of one of the world's largest cigarette companies has urged Britons to stop smoking. Peter Nixon is the UK managing director for Philip Morris, which produces 800 billion cigarettes across the world every year. But today, on National No Smoking Day, he appeared on ITV's Good Morning Britain to implore smokers to switch to his new heated tobacco products - claiming they are less harmful. He was ridiculed by hosts Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid who compared his scheme to 'McDonald's selling salad' and branded it 'a joke'. Mr Nixon admitted smoking is bad for you and that his firm's products contribute to 100,000 smoking-related deaths in the UK every year. He told the programme: 'People die because of cigarettes and we sell them. I take that very, very seriously. 'We are part of the problem but we want to be part of the solution. What we're trying to do is give alternatives to smokers.' The cigarette boss also admitted he has given up smoking, which led presenter Susanna to brand his campaign 'staggeringly hypocritical'. Grilled on why Philip Morris doesn't just stop selling cigarettes altogether, he claimed that would not lead to people giving up smoking - and would just see them switch to another brand. He also refused to reveal his annual salary, which he says is less than 1million, claiming it was 'unfair' to expect him to do so on national television. But he added that his annual bonus is dependent on the number of smokers he can get to switch to alternative tobacco products per year. The boss of one of the world's largest cigarette companies has urged Britons to stop smoking. File image used Peter Nixon (pictured on Good Morning Britain today) is the UK managing director for Philip Morris, which produces 800 billion cigarettes across the world every year He said: 'Id love to stop selling cigarettes. But we would go out of business and that wouldn't mean people give up they would just switch to another brand. 'There are going to be smokers in the UK for another 30 or 40 years, but there's no reason for people to smoke anymore. 'We have been investing in alternative products and I have put all my energy into converting people from the most harmful form of tobacco, which is cigarettes, to less harmful, e-cigarettes and heated tobacco.' GMB health editor Dr Hilary agreed that vaping is less harmful than smoking cigarettes, but Philip Morris's heated tobacco products still have toxins that are dangerous and nicotine, which is addictive. On National No Smoking Day, he appeared on ITV's Good Morning Britain (host Piers Morgan pictured) to implore smokers to switch to his new heated tobacco products - claiming they are less harmful Mr Nixon claimed that after offering consumers E-cigarettes, 20 to 30 per cent were able to give up smoking completely. He also said that after trying their heated tobacco products 80 per cent stopped smoking. According to recent figures, there are 9.4million smokers in the UK and 100,000 of them die every year. Statistics also show that one in 10 mothers have admitted smoking well into their pregnancy. GMB's Piers also quizzed Mr Nixon on why Philip Morris spends 94million on TV advertising in Indonesia, where youngsters are also targeted. A Delaware doctor is accused of prescribing opioids in exchange for sexual favors from a female patient who was undergoing treatment for long-term drug addiction. Nihar B. Gala's behavior at several walk-in medical centers in 2017 endangered the woman, an administrative hearing heard Monday. He is also accused of threatening the patient and her family in the wake of the allegations. Deputy Attorney General Zoe Plerhoples said: 'He placed her in danger of overdose given that she was from the outset a high-risk patient.' Gala's work at 'Got-A-Doc' walk-in medical centers in Millsboro and Camden shows he wrote prescriptions for the patient, who is not named, without requesting or reviewing her medical records, according to the complaint. The complaint centers on his work there before January 2017. It also alleges he wrote a prescription for Oxycodone and increased her dosage - despite no office visit with the patient. Nihar B. Gala is accused of prescribing opioids in exchange for sexual favors from a female patient who was undergoing treatment for long-term drug addiction Nihar B. Gala worked at 'Got-A-Doc' walk-in medical centers in Millsboro and Camden. He now runs a Millsboro pain management and addiction clinic called Alpha Care Medical, pictured The alleged victim, who had been treated for opiate addiction since December 2015, is said to have first seen Gala in September 2016. He is accused of prescribing opioids in exchange for sexual favors from October 2016. Stephen Thomas, a Pennsylvania pain medicine physician and the state's expert witness, said Gala's actions were 'medically nonsensical and therefore grossly negligent'. He added: 'My opinion is that his care did not meet the standard of care and was not in the patient's medical interest.' Gala, who now runs a Millsboro pain management and addiction treatment center, denies the allegations and says the case is part of a 'conspiracy'. The complaint states he denied seeing the patient for several months when questioned over his actions in late 2016 - despite prescriptions in November. A complaint was filed in December 2016 and the state has asked for an administrative hearing officer to recommend the Board of Medical Licensure and Discipline revoke Gala's medical license, The News Journal of Wilmington reports. His lawyer, Ben Schwartz, says the allegations are part of a competing doctor's efforts to hurt Gala's career. Attorney Schwartz said: 'Dr. Gala has been falsely accused of some behaviors that are inconsistent with his obligations to the community as a physician and he will do everything in his power to prove that those allegations are false. He's here to clear his name. 'The case brought against him is based on medical records he believes were created by another physician who had an interest of, for lack of a better term, railroading him and his career and his competing medical practice.' Aziz Khan, 22, met the woman during a night out in Newcastle-under-Lyme and took her back home to film the assault. He is pictured in an undated police mug shot A rapist who filmed himself brutally attacking a drunken, unconscious student before posting the footage on Snapchat has been jailed for 11 years. Aziz Khan, 22, met the woman during a night out in Newcastle-under-Lyme and took her back home to film the assault, after which he boasted to friends of his 'conquest'. The Staffordshire University student was described in court as an 'opportunist' who had preyed on woman in the past and 'had one thing on his mind - sex'. Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court heard the 'really drunk' victim and her friends began their evening in Revolution bar before moving on to The Kiln. The victim handed her bag and phone to a friend for safe keeping, before getting separated from the group 'in the haze of drink', prosecutor Robert Price said. Sometime later she met Khan who took her back to his house in Stoke, where he attacked her. 'The defendant raped her and as he did he filmed the act on his mobile phone,' Mr Price said. 'It shows a young lady unconscious and immobile through intoxication being raped by a male making grunting noises.' 'She had no idea where she was, who she was with or what she was doing. She was not capable of making decisions or consenting to any form of sexual activity.' The court heard she left the defendant's house at 4am and knocked on the neighbouring house for help. The victim slid down a brick wall onto her bottom and made no sense but the neighbour helped her to her feet and into a taxi. The next day the defendant showed his friend the 10-second video of the rape and bragged about having sex with her. He also made boasts to another man in Hanley. The court heard the victim had no recollection of what happened but later became aware of the video. She told her parents and the police were informed. In a statement, the victim said she remains affected by what happened and feels physically sick on a daily basis. She has experienced profound fatigue, sleep deprivation, and flashbacks. She once overdosed on tablets and says she feels dirty, ashamed and angry. The ordeal also led to her leaving her university course and has had a detrimental impact on her family. Khan pleaded guilty to rape and disclosing private sexual photos or films with intent to cause distress. Khan met the woman in The Kiln bar in Newcastle-under-Lyme before taking her back to his house Prosecutor Mr Price paraphrased an account of Khan's character provided by a friend who was out with him on the night of the attack. 'He told police as a general rule Khan had one topic on his mind and that was sex. He described him as a sleaze and a pest and he formed the view Khan was a bit weird with women. 'Khan was the ultimate opportunist and he took advantage of the victim who was vulnerable and incapable through drink. She was completely intoxicated.' Barry White, mitigating, said the defendant's offending has had an immense effect on his family. Mr White said: 'He has found it difficult to admit what he has done. Since this happened he has not had alcohol or gone out.' He said the defendant's pleas prevented the victim from having to give evidence in a trial. Mr White added that the defendant has completed his accountancy course at university and will have a qualification to fall back on when released. Judge David Fletcher made the defendant the subject of an indefinite restraining order which prevents him contacting his victim or her parents. Jailing Khan for 11 years and two months, Judge Fletcher told him: 'It is quite clear when you got in the taxi you were fully aware of the extreme state of intoxication. 'You had only one thing on your mind - sex. You had sexual intercourse with her without her consent, and on the basis of the very disturbing video footage, without her knowledge. 'She had not got a clue what was happening to her. She was not in a conscious state at all. You filmed it in the most graphic detail.' Khan, who will serve half his sentence with the rest on licence, was placed on the sex offenders' register for the rest of his life. Pictured: Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court, where he was tried Describing the aftermath of the rape, Judge Fletcher continued: 'You pushed her out. You did not go in the street with her to make sure the taxi was going to take her safely home. 'All you could do was shout down from the roof above - the behaviour of a callous coward. 'You showed your friend the video. Within 24 hours you showed it to another person. The video's existence became general knowledge. This is a serious case.' Khan, who will serve half his sentence with the rest on licence, was placed on the sex offenders' register for the rest of his life. Speaking after the sentencing at Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court, Detective Constable Ann Blairs, of Staffordshire Police CID, said: 'This was a very serious offence and Khan will serve a prison sentence for what he has done. 'I want to commend the victim for having the courage to come forward and have the confidence in us to bring this case before the courts. 'I also want to thank her family and friends for their support.' British plans to slap import tariffs on foreign food and drink after a no-deal Brexit would be 'very damaging' to the Irish economy, the country's foreign minister has warned. In a further deterioration of the relationship between Dublin and London over Brexit Simon Coveney warned that the 'crisis' would provoke a response. British ministers said today that products from the EU including beef, pork, chicken, butter, cheese and fish would also be subject to import taxes as high as 40 per cent in some cases that are expected to push up prices in the supermarkets from March 29 if there is no deal. It came as Ireland was also at the centre of a second row after UK politicians said there would be no new checks or tariffs on EU goods moving across the land border into Northern Ireland under a no-deal scenario - sparking smuggling fears. Mr Coveney told Irish MPs today: 'Undoubtedly any tariff being imposed on agricultural product between the UK and Ireland will be very damaging and we will need to respond to that appropriately and we will as a government.' Simon Coveney said new agriculture tariffs under a no-deal Brexit regime would be 'very damaging' and said officials would be meeting with the EU today to discuss action He revealed that Irish agricultural officials were meeting with the European Commission today and in the event of a no-deal Brexit Dublin would seek a further relaxation of state aid rules and for EU supports for businesses. 'The solidarity is clear. There is no pressure on Ireland to change our approach in relation to the Withdrawal Agreement, the Irish protocol in it or indeed the backstop in all of its detail,' Mr Coveney said. Border agents could face a battle with profiteer gangs creating a black market for EU goods including cars and food after March 29, critics have said. The worrying situation could arise because new tariffs will be slapped on imports to the UK mainland from the Republic by sea or air if Britain crashes out of the EU. But there will be no charges if it enters the UK via Northern Ireland by land. Today UK Government has announced that it will not introduce any new checks or controls on goods moving across the land border into Northern Ireland (pictured at Newry) if the UK leaves the European Union without a deal Fears that the Northern Irish border could become 'bandit country' again There is a long history of smuggling across the Northern Irish border, which was established in 1923. Britain set up 15 'approved frontier crossing points' (pictured in 1998) and smugglers started their work soon afterwards. Profiteers set about swimming cattle across lakes at night, hiding butter and cheese in their underpants and even stupefying pigs by force-feeding them Guinness so they would pass out on boat journeys from south to north, according to Queen Mary University in London. Others stuffed bicycle handlebars with smaller items and pushed babies in prams with false-bottoms to hide items from soldiers standing at border posts. In the other direction white bread and contraceptives from the UK were smuggled into the Republic where condoms were banned and coarse brown bread was the staple. But during the 30-year Troubles the land along the 300-mile long border became known as 'bandit country'. The British Army was stuck in an constant battle with the IRA as members carried guns and explosives into the UK and often came under attack themselves. Many of the weapons came to Ireland from America and Gaddafi's Libya. The IRA's main gun runner in the United States was George Harrison, an IRA veteran, who lived in New York. Harrison bought at least 3,000 guns for the IRA from a Corsican arms dealer who helped smuggle the weapons into the Republic. Within two years of the Troubles starting in 1969, British police had already grabbed 700 guns and two tonnes of explosives. It was only in 2005 the border became invisible due to the Good Friday Agreement signed in 1998. Smugglers have since turned to cigarettes, alcohol and diesel fuel. It is estimated that its peak 'fuel laundering' - where cheaper agricultural fuel is sold as motor fuel - costing up to 40million a year in lost tax. But there are major concerns that tariffs imposed in the event of a No Deal Brexit could increase smuggling activity. Advertisement Today the European Commission said it was unhappy about the proposed the 'differential treatment' of trade on the island of Ireland. For example cars from the EU would be subject to a a 10.6 per tax on the cost of all 'fully finished' vehicles - making the prices of an average vehicle surge by 1,500. However in a seemingly confusing loophole in no deal plan, Northern Ireland's border would remain open for at least 12 months and goods entering from the Republic would not face tariffs to preserve the Good Friday agreement. However, tariffs will be payable on goods moving from the EU into the rest of the UK via Northern Ireland under a schedule of rates also released on Wednesday. The Government insists that this will not create a border down the Irish Sea, as there will be no checks on goods moving between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Instead, normal compliance and intelligence methods will be used to detect any traders attempting to abuse the system. Ministers accepted that the new regime will cause 'concerns' to Northern Irish businesses and farmers about the impact on their competitiveness . But they said these were the only steps that could be taken to deliver on the Government's commitment to avoiding a hard border in the case of no deal. Under the new regime for Northern Ireland, goods arriving from the Republic will still be subject to the same VAT and excise duty as at present. Small businesses trading across the border will be able to report VAT online without any new processes at the border. To protect human, animal and plant health, animals and animal products from outside the EU would be required to enter Northern Ireland through a designated entry point, while regulated plant materials from outside the EU and high-risk plants from inside Europe will require certification and pre-notification. There will be new UK import requirements such as document checks and registration for a small number of goods such as endangered species and hazardous chemicals which are subject to international agreements. Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley said: 'The Government has been clear that a deal with the European Union is the best outcome for Northern Ireland. 'But we will do all we can to support people and businesses across Northern Ireland in the event that we leave without a deal. 'The measures announced today recognise the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland. These arrangements can only be temporary and short term.' In the case of no-deal, the UK Government is committed to entering discussions urgently with Brussels and Dublin to agree long-term arrangements. Another massive rebellion and implacable opposition from Labour and the DUP sunk the deal Around 3,000 ISIS fanatics have surrendered from the group's last holdout in Syria as air raids and shelling resumed after a brief lull today. A ragged tent encampment in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz is all that remains of a once-sprawling ISIS 'caliphate' declared in 2014 across large swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq. The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) has been trying to crush holdout ISIS fighters for weeks but the mass outpouring of men, women and children from the riverside hamlet has bogged down its advance. Backed by the US-led coalition, the SDF renewed its assault on Sunday after warning remaining ISIS fighters their time was up. An illumination round lights up the battlefield as the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces fire on ISIS militant positions in Baghouz, Syria, Monday An SDF warrior unloads rounds of his machine gun on ISIS positions within Baghouz on Monday night Thousands of women and children have been saved by the SDF who have carted them north to safety at a refugee camp in al-Hol Air strikes and shelling have since pummelled Baghouz three nights in a row, killing scores of fighters and prompting hundreds of jihadists and their relatives to surrender. Thousands handed themselves over on Tuesday, after a deluge of fire hit the ISIS encampment the previous night. 'Number of Daesh (ISIS) members surrendered to us since yesterday evening has risen to 3,000,' Syrian Democratic Forces spokesman Mustefa Bali tweeted in English on Tuesday evening. Three women and four children of the Yazidi minority were also rescued, he added. The SDF and the US-led coalition resumed shelling and air strikes on the last IS bastion Tuesday evening, interrupting a brief lull in fighting that had taken hold during the day to allow for people to surrender. Explosions erupting over Baghouz in eastern Syria on Monday night as the SDF resumed their bombardment Another 3,000 people - many suspected fighters - have surrendered to the SDF in recent days after being savaged by SDF shelling Tracer rounds light up the sky over Baghouz as the SDF attempt to wipe out the last remaining ISIS fighters An AFP correspondent near the front line heard warplanes rumbling overhead, as the sound of mortar fire and explosions rang from the IS encampment. Dozens of SDF fighters massed at the entrance of the village of Baghouz on Tuesday evening. Sherif, the unit commander, said his force was preparing to storm the jihadist redoubt. 'We readied ourselves today and our spirits are high,' he told AFP. 'We will enter with full force and we will be at the forefront' of the advance, said the fighter who has been battling jihadists for years. Earlier Tuesday, Ali Cheir, an SDF unit commander, said his force and the coalition were pummelling the ISIS enclave at night to flush out jihadists. 'The objective of our advance is to terrorise ISIS fighters so they surrender, and for the civilians to come out,' said the 27-year-old. Coalition warplanes Monday pounded the jihadist redoubt with 20 air strikes, destroying armoured vehicles and arms caches, SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali said. A tracer round whistles through smoke filling the air over Baghouz as the SDF rained down shells on the tunnels and caves of the IS militants A line of women wait to be screened by SDF fighters after they fled from Baghouz last week SDF fighters walk through a tent encampment that had been occupied by ISIS militants in Baghouz on Monday He said US-backed forces clashed with jihadists on several fronts, killing nearly 40 ISIS fighters. Since December, around 60,000 people have left the last ISIS redoubt, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, around a tenth of them suspected jihadist fighters. The United Nations said the numbers from Baghouz arriving in one Kurdish-run camp further north for the displaced were smaller than in previous weeks. It said they were reaching the camp in a worse state than before. The UN's food agency said it is concerned about their wellbeing. An SDF soldier takes a smoke break in a tent encampment that had been occupied by ISIS militants The last remaining ISIS fanatics have been living underground with tents draped over their squalid, disease-ridden tunnels SDF soldiers aid men wounded by airstrikes, during an offensive on the last area held by ISIS extremists, are treated at a reception area for evacuees on Sunday 'On Sunday night more than 3,000 people, mostly women and children in a poor state, reached the camp,' the WFP said. 'WFP is deeply concerned about the welfare of tens of thousands of people recently arriving at the Al-Hol camp,' it said Tuesday. Around 113 people - two-thirds of them children under five - have died en route to the camp or shortly after arriving since December, the UN's humanitarian coordination office OCHA says. At the height of its brutal rule, ISIS controlled a stretch of land in Syria and Iraq the size of the United Kingdom. The total capture of the Baghouz camp by the SDF would mark the end of the cross-border 'caliphate' it proclaimed more than four years ago. Wounded men are hauled into trucks and taken away from the battlefield after the SDF took them from Baghouz But beyond Baghouz, ISIS retains a presence in eastern Syria's vast Badia desert and sleeper cells in the northeast. The jihadists have continued to claim deadly attacks in SDF-held territory in recent months, and the US military has warned of the need to maintain a 'vigilant offensive'. The group released a video late Monday allegedly showing jihadists in Baghouz, quietly defiant in the face of the advancing SDF. 'If we had thousands of kilometres and now we only have some kilometres left, it is said we have lost - but God's judging standard is different,' said a man named Abu Abdel Adheem. 'The battles are not over,' he said, sitting on the ground in a circle with two men and a young boy in a hooded jacket. Baghouz is the latest front on Syria's complex civil war, which has killed more than 360,000 people since 2011. An extremely rare model of the German Enigma machine which allowed users to print and correct their work and was found buried in a farmyard in central Europe is to go on display at Bletchley Park. The heavily rusted machine, which was found on the Polish-Czech border and is believed to have been buried by retreating Hungarian forces, is one of only two known surviving examples of the G31 Enigma. It has a different configuration to many of the other 400 surviving devices, and was a later model of the device which was first invented in the 1920s prior to the breakout of the Second World War. It included the ability to allow the operator to go back if they made a mistake and a counter to show how long a message was - and also had a plug socket in its side which allowed it to be connected to a printer. The heavily rusted machine (pictured) , which was found on the Polish-Czech border, is one of only two known surviving examples of the G31 Enigma.It had a number of functional improvements and was one of the successors to the earlier Zahlwerk Enigma (model A28) device More than 100 hours of restoration was required to allow historians to fully understand how it came to be buried on the Polish-Czech border. It features a cog-wheel driven wheel mechanism with irregular stepping and a crank to wind it back and forth The only other machine with this feature was auctioned by the German auction house Hermann Historica in October 2009. Describing how unique the device is, Erica Munroe, Exhibitions Manager at Bletchley Park told MailOnline: 'There is no one enigma machine, and the devices were actually invented in the 1920s and sold around the world. 'They were being developed and adapted all the time, and so there are a variety of different models. What makes the G31 Enigma machine so unique are a number of functional improvements including the ability to print.' These newer models, built in the early 1930s and delivered to Hungary at a similar time, improved significantly upon the earlier models. Known as Enigma G, it had a number of functional improvements and was one of the successors to the earlier Zahlwerk Enigma (model A28) device. It features a cog-wheel driven wheel mechanism with irregular stepping and a crank to wind it back and forth. Earlier models had been distributed globally, but when WWII began models started to be developed for Axis forces alone - and were not distributed again after Hitler's defeat in 1945. The G31 machine was first borrowed by the museum from a collector in 2012, and then subsequently purchased in 2016, after it was dug up in the central European farmyard. Historians at Bletchley Park then spent more than 114 hours restoring the device, and were able to discover the secrets of its past - including that it was likely sold to the Hungarian military in the early 1930s who buried it during their retreat in 1945. The extremely rare type of Enigma machine allows the operator to go back if they made a mistake and a counter to show how long a message was - and also had a plug socket in its side which allowed it to be connected to a printer. Conservation work revealed the presence of a hidden serial number, 110, allowing the Bletchley Park Collections team to pinpoint the model to the year it was produced and where, revealing the machine to be much rarer than previously thought The machine's rotors and plugboard had been removed, exactly the top-secret equipment a retreating army would remove before disposing of it. Conservation work revealed the presence of a hidden serial number, 110, allowing the Bletchley Park Collections team to pinpoint the model to the year it was produced and where, revealing the machine to be much rarer than previously thought. Ms Munroe continued: 'Enigma machines were not used to send messages, but were instead used to encrypt them. These would then be communicated by other means. 'The G31 had a number of useful features, including a crank which allowed the operator to go forwards and backwards and also a slot for connecting a printer. 'Although the machine was quite small when used on its own, it became quite cumbersome when connected.' Intelligence from Bletchley played a vital part in the defeat of the U-boats in the six-year Battle of the Atlantic, British naval triumphs in the Battle of Cape Matapan in 1941 and the Battle of North Cape off the coast of Norway in 1943 At Bletchley Park (pictured is one of the huts where code-breaking operations took place), a group of mathematicians found the key to deciphering the German enigma code - which meant the Allies had advance warning of much that the Germans planned The machine will go display at Bletchley Park tomorrow, once the top-secret home of the WWII codebreakers and where a team of researchers, including famed British mathematician Alan Turing, eventually broke the enigma code in 1941. Enigmas, which resembled large typewriters, were used by German air, naval and army forces to safely send messages throughout the Second World War. It used a complex series of rotors and lights to encrypt messages by swapping letters around via an ever-changing 'enigma code'. The code was broken in 1941 by mathematicians at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, a feat that allowed the allies to intercept key German messages. While stationed at Bletchley Park during World War Two, Cambridge-educated Alan Turing created the 'bombe' (CORR) machine which broke the Nazi Enigma codes. And later the Colossus was developed, a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 19431945, to help break the Lorenz cipher - another Cipher machine used by the Germans during WWII. Both helped Allied forces decrypt German messages and gain an advantage in the war effort - including playing a vital part in the defeat of the U-boats in the six-year Battle of the Atlantic. Bletchley Park was the British forces' intelligence centre during WWII, where cryptographers deciphered top-secret military communiques between Hitler and his armed forces. Pictured are codebreakers using the British Typex cipher machines in Hut 6 Code-breakers led by Alan Turing - played by Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game, which charts the operation - worked with other mathematicians to decipher the Nazi machines at Bletchley Park (pictured) The secrets of the G31 Enigma, which will be one of 12 more common models exhibited at Bletchley Park, will be revealed almost 75 years after it was buried by retreating Hungarian forces near the Czech border in Southern Poland. Peronel Craddock, Head of Collections and Exhibitions: 'We're really looking forward to putting this rare Enigma on display and sharing its fascinating story with our visitors. 'Thanks to the conservation work, we were able to uncover its serial number and unique features, which allowed our historian David Kenyon, and cryptography expert Frode Weierud, to unravel its secret. 'It's a piece of world history so it is very fitting it is now on public display for all to visit.' Thanks to research by cryptography expert Frode Weierud, and a listing from the Enigma manufacturer Chiffriermaschinen Gesellschaft Heimsoeth & Rinke from October 1935, it is now known that this machine was from the first batch of the G31 model ever made, and was one of 24 machines delivered to Hungary. There are around 400 surviving Enigma machines (one of which is pictured) but there are a number of different models. It used a complex series of rotors and lights to encrypt messages by swapping letters around via an ever-changing 'enigma code' David Kenyon, Research Historian at Bletchley Park, has also deduced that the area where this Enigma was discovered was the location of the final surrender of Hungarian forces to the Red Army in 1945. Mr Kenyon said: 'There was not just one type of Enigma, but a whole family of different machines. It is exciting to discover an example of one of the rarest types. 'What makes this especially interesting is that our research has revealed the life story of the machine from its original manufacture and sale, to its sad fate at the end of the war. 'The object sums up in an individual way the wider story of WWII.' A five-year-old boy who hadn't been seen in two weeks has been found safe after Queensland Police issued a desperate amber alert. The boy was last seen at a home in Windsor, in Brisbane's inner-north, and police held grave concerns for his safety. He was last seen on March 6 with his mother Cassandra Standley, 38, and her friend Shannon Adams, 35, who were both also reported as missing. Queensland Police located the boy and the two adults safe and well on Wednesday night. Queensland Police are desperately searching for a five-year-old boy (pictured) who has been missing for a week Police issued an Amber Alert early Wednesday evening, saying the pair were known tot he boy, and all three were believed to have been in the Aspley area. The boy is about 120cm tall, and described as Caucasian in appearance with a fair complexion and short blonde hair. Ms Standley is approximately 165cm tall, described as Caucasian in appearance with a slim build, light brown hair and brown eyes. Mr Adams is approximately 175cm, described as Caucasian in appearance, of a medium build, with short brown hair and blue eyes. Labour may throw its weight behind moves to hold a second Brexit referendum - but not until next week, a senior frontbencher has claimed. Shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry said she thought it would happen then but admitted 'I don't know for sure'. She admitted that in the unlikely event Theresa May's Brexit deal had passed last night Labour would have called for a second vote. In moves that have frustrated a lot of Remain-supporting Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn has continued to be cool on the idea of a new referendum. This was despite the party agreeing at its conference last year to seek a referendum if Theresa may refused to agree to their own version of Brexit, or call a general election, both of which she has refused to do. Shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry said 'I don't know for sure, because I just don't - I don't even know what's going to happen today' when asked about when Labour would call for a second referendum Jeremy Corbyn, pictured today, is expected to whip Labour MPs to vote against a no deal Brexit in the House of Commons tonight Appearing on the Emma Barnett Show on BBC Radio 5, Ms Thornberry was pressed on when the party would call for a new Brexit vote, saying: 'I suspect it will be next week. 'But I don't know for sure, because I just don't - I don't even know what's going to happen today.' However she did confirm that a second referendum remained party policy. 'Frankly if we end up in some log jam, then I'm afraid we are going to need to go back to the people and we are going to need to ask them what they want to do next,' she added. Labour is set to help block a no deal Brexit tonight in another crunch vote in the House of Commons. Jeremy Corbyn will whip his MPs to vote against a plan that would see the UK crash out of Europe without agreements for future co-operation with Brussels. It comes after the Labour leader called for no deal to be 'taken off the table' following the defeat of Prime Minister Theresa May's plan last night. Mr Corbyn wants a General Election and, if successful, would put forward an alternative exit plan that would keep Britain in a customs union with the EU. If MPs reject no-deal - as most Westminster observers expect - a third vote will follow on Thursday on whether to request an extension of the two-year Article 50 negotiation process, delaying Brexit by a number of months. It comes after Labour helped block Theresa May's Brexit deal in last night's vote, with the Prime Minister's plan defeated by 149 votes The Prime Minister's hopes of saving her deal after a last minute dash to Strasbourg late on Tuesday turned to ashes in the Commons last night as the new concessions were hammered by MPs Labour's support for a second referendum remains unclear, with shadow business secretary Rebecca Long Bailey today saying the party has 'not ruled out' a People's Vote weeks after Mr Corbyn told his MP's he would call for one to 'stop a damaging Tory Brexit' Ms Long Bailey told BBC Radio 4's Today: 'Now I think it's the opportunity for Parliament to set the agenda and take control because we have a Government now which isn't in control.' Asked if Labour would push for another motion of no confidence in the Prime Minister she said it was 'something that we may consider in the future'. Mr Corbyn, pictured at his London home today, wants a General Election to be called and, if successful, would put forward his own plan to keep the UK in a customs union with the EU Pressed on Labour's position on a second referendum she said: 'We have not ruled out a People's Vote but our priority is securing a deal.' Labour MPs were previously whipped to oppose a no deal Brexit in January when they helped narrowly pass the Spelman amendment, a non-binding motion calling for the scenario to be ruled out. Mrs May has given Conservative MPs a free vote tonight, meaning they can vote with their conscience rather than follow the party line. Mrs May has indicated she will vote against no deal, and with Labour's support it is likely a majority in Parliament will follow suit. It is expected to be a very different result from last night, when just three Labour MPs - John Mann, Caroline Flint and Kevin Barron - voted for the Government's deal to leave. Hours before tonight's vote, ministers announced worrying new tariffs that are likely to provoke more accusations of scaremongering after months of apocalyptic warnings about the impact of a no deal Brexit. Under the no deal plan revealed this morning, 87 per cent of products would be subject to zero tariffs in an effort to stop price spikes and kick-start trade with Britain from across the world. But ministers said products from the EU including beef, pork, chicken, butter, cheese and fish would also be subject to import taxes expected to push up prices in the supermarkets from March 29 if there is no deal. Labour's opposition - and the deal's rejection by 75 Brexiteer Tory rebels alongside the DUP - sunk Mrs May's motion last night with Boris Johnson saying Mrs May should put her deal to bed There were 75 Tory rebels - down from 118 last time - as well as all 10 DUP MPs. Just three Labour MPs backed the deal. The Prime Minister got back about 40 MPs from the January 15 vote Cars from the EU would be subject to a a 10.6 per tax on the cost of all 'fully finished' vehicles - making the prices of an average vehicle surge by 1,500. However in a seemingly confusing loophole in no deal plan, Northern Ireland's border would remain open at least 'temporarily' and goods entering from the Republic would not face tariffs to preserve the Good Friday agreement. The situation will raise fears that the Northern Irish border could become a smuggling route for EU products. With just 17 days until the UK is scheduled to leave the EU, hardline Eurosceptics sided with Labour last night to inflict a crushing 149-vote defeat on the Prime Minister. A delay to the March 29 departure date is now almost certain. Mrs May's massive defeat also opens the door to drastic options such as a general election or second referendum. Speaking in Strasbourg, where the European Parliament is gathering for a debate on Brexit ahead of the next European Council summit, the EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier said: 'Again the House of Commons says what it doesn't want. Now this impasse can only be solved in the UK.' Amid speculation about how long she can survive in Downing Street, the Prime Minister's aides insisted she had not considered resigning. Boris Johnson is among leadership candidates sizing up their chances. Howard Matthew Webb, 31, has been jailed for nine days with six months of probation A man caught on camera dipping his testicles into a customer's salsa, while it was being delivered by car, was told off by a judge for laughing as he entered a guilty plea in court. Howard Matthew Webb, 31, was sentenced to six months of probation with nine days in jail as part of a plea deal struck with Tennessee prosecutors. But he almost sabotaged that deal after he started chuckling in front of a judge, who snapped: 'There is nothing about this situation I find cute or funny. It's abhorrent!' Webb ended up in court after tagging along with a friend as she delivered food from a Mexican restaurant in Maryville via online delivery service, Dinner Delivered. During the ride, Webb decided to insert his testicles into the customer's salsa as 'revenge' for an 89-cent tip on a 30 minute journey. The friend, who has not been identified, recorded the incident and posted the footage online. In the video, the delivery driver can be heard laughing as they say, 'This is what you get when you give an 89-cents tip for an almost-30-minute drive.' Webb then replies: 'Oh, it feels good on my [testicles].' The delivery driver recorded the act on her cellphone and posted the 14-second video on Facebook. Webb is seen dipping his testicles in salsa After the footage was posted, Webb was arrested and initially charged with adulteration of food, which is a Class C felony, but that was downgraded to misdemeanor assault as part of the plea. Webb was sentenced to a total of six months supervised probation, 30 days in jail minus the 21 he has served since his arrest, and 90 days of drug and alcohol rehabilitation sessions. He has also been prohibited from contacting the customer whose food he spoiled. Dinner Delivered said that the driver Webb was with was a 'rogue independent contractor', according to Fox News. The female friend was not charged but has been fired from her job. Yazidi sex slaves freed from their ISIS captors have burned the burqas they were forced to wear after fleeing the terror group's last foothold in Syria. One woman, named only as Israa, 20, told how she was driven out of the town of Baghouz last week by ISIS fighters before escaping and handing herself over to Kurdish troops. Freed from the oppressive Islamist regime, she and other Yazidi women lined up in the desert where they stripped off the burqas, piled them up and burned them. Israa, 20, a Yazidi woman kept as a sex slave by ISIS, fled the terror group's last stronghold in Syria before handing herself over to Kurdish troops After being save by the Kurds, she stripped off the burqa that ISIS forced her to wear and burned it, saying: 'I wish I could burn [them] like I burned my clothes' In a video posted to social media, Israa said: 'The first time they made me wear it, I felt like I was being suffocated. 'It bothered me a lot. I didn't want to wear it but they wouldn't let me [take it off]. They said everyone was wearing it. 'Every time I was alone I'd take it off. They'd say; "Don't go outside like this. Don't appear around men like this." 'But every time they'd leave me alone, I'd take it off. Now I've arrived and I've taken it off and burned it and finished with it, thank God. 'I wish I could bring Daesh [ISIS] and burn them like I burned my clothes.' ISIS attacked the Yazidis when they arrived in Sinjar, Iraq, in August 2014 because they view them as devil-worshippers. While most of the men were slaughtered and buried in mass graves, it is though almost 6,500 women and children were captured and sold into slavery. Israa was helped to remove her burqa by female soldiers of the PKK Kurdish fighting units She explained that she felt 'suffocated' by the garment when she was first told to put it on, and removed it whenever she was alone ISIS views the Yazidis as devil-worshippers, and their warped moral code permits them to sell the women into sexual slavery Younger children changed hands for around 400 and were sold to couples who could not have children to be brought up as Muslims. Older boys were forced to train as fighters or were sold on as house slaves if they were unfit for the frontline. Teenage girls and women were sold as sex slaves. ISIS zealots believe they are free to murder, rape, torture and abuse Yazidi people because they are considered devil worshippers. Yazidism is an ancient faith that integrates some Islamic beliefs with elements of Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion, and Mithraism, a mysterious religion originating in the Eastern Mediterranean. Israa had been taken to ISIS's last pocket of territory, around Baghouz in Syria, before being driven out by the terrorists, then escaping them and fleeing to the Kurds An estimated 6,500 Yazidi women and children were sold into slavery after ISIS attacked Sinjar in 2014 while the men were slaughtered and buried in mass graves Yazidis began to face accusations of devil worship from Muslims in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, of which the Kurds form a major component, are in the midst of a battle to drive ISIS out of Baghouz, which is their last territorial stronghold. The SDF paused its assault last week in order to allow civilians to flee the area, before resuming airstrikes, artillery bombardments and ground attacks this week. Since then around 3,000 ISIS fighters have been captured, even as the terror group put out propaganda messages online describing the attacks as a 'holocaust'. The message also called on radicals to carry out terror attacks overseas as revenge for their impending defeat in Syria. ISIS once controlled a swathe of territory stretching from the outskirts of Aleppo in Syria to Baghdad in Iraq, but that has now been reduced to a single town which is about to fall. An Instagram famous ex-Hells Angels enforcer says his girlfriend sparked a KFC car park brawl with a rival bikie. Ben 'Notorious' Geppert exchanged blows with the rival in front of a Gold Coast fast food restaurant in May last year. The fight was caught on camera by Geppert's girlfriend Allaina Vader, who could be heard encouraging him with calls of 'you go Ben' throughout the video. Now, Geppert has revealed it was Ms Vader who pointed out the rival bikie, telling him to 'get out of the car and have a crack'. Scroll down for video A notorious bikie says his girlfriend Allaina Vader (pictured) sparked a KFC car park brawl Geppert told the back story to the fight on Nomads president Moudi Tajjour's podcast, Can't Fight Fate. He said there was weeks of build up to the confrontation, with the rival Mongols Motorcycle Club 'calling him out' on social media. 'I swear I've got a target on my back, some c**t's tattooed it on me,' Geppert said. 'I don't even know who this f**kwit was, I just seen this c**t tagging me, so I did a bit of research and he was the Mongols president.' He said the motorcycle club have since 'done the right thing' and removed him from the club. Geppert says the bikie would stand on the same street he lived on and invited him out to fight. On the day they actually came to blows, however, he said it was his girlfriend who pushed him into the fight. Ben Geppert and another man were filmed fighting in a KFC car park. Gebbert was given a five-year ban from the shopping centre, as well as a suspended prison sentence He says Ms Vader saw the rival bikie standing in the car park of the KFC as they drove past, telling him: 'There he is, get out of the car and have a crack, I'll record it.' Geppert said he complied. 'So I rushed out, kids everywhere, families everywhere, it was about 4 o clock in the arvo and I was like 'f**k whatever'.' The pair scuffled and swore at one another ('eat a d**k', one said) until the second man toppled into a white Range Rover. Ms Vader taunted Geppert's counterpart by yelling 'suck s**t' but also tried to defuse the incident by warning police would be on their way. Few blows connected between the two men. Online, people joked 'the Range Rover was the only one to get a hit in'. Geppert (left, with girlfriend) was given a suspended prison sentence over the brawl Geppert was given a six-month prison sentence, suspended for three years in July, over a number of charges relating to the brawl. During sentencing, Magistrate Andrew Sinclair said there were 'two Gepperts' - one who would wind up in prison and another that was kind-hearted. 'One with tattoos on his face, replica guns, a four page criminal history who consumes steroids and gets into fights in public that person will spend the rest of his life in prison,' Mr Sinclair said, the Gold Coast Bulletin reported. Mr Sinclair said there was another version of Geppert 'under the tattoos' that his friends and family knew and loved. 'I'm prepared to give the person they see a chance,' he said. Cohan Semple, 18, arriving at Suffolk magistrates court in December A teenager in a gang which hurled flour and eggs over a vulnerable woman is facing a jail sentence for attacking a man in a separate incident. Cohan Semple, 18, was told by a judge that a custodial sentence was 'inevitable' after he admitted attacking Matthew Banks, causing actual bodily harm on October 15 last year. Semple was part of a teenage gang whose abuse of a vulnerable woman went viral, last summer. He and four others rounded on Janice Morris, 49, in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. The gang pelted the woman with flour and eggs, on July 27. The yobs then posed laughing and smiling behind their cowering victim who was covered in flour from head to toe. Semple of Bury St Edmunds posted the picture to his 20 contacts on Snapchat, only for it to go viral after it was shared by others on social media leading to widespread outrage. He was subject to threats and abuse from around the world for his role and the case led to him losing a college place and his job as a warehouseman for a delivery firm. Semple admitted the assault charge on Mr Banks when he appeared at Ipswich Crown Court on Tuesday. Miss Morris who is schizophrenic and alcohol dependent was attacked after she went to enjoy the evening sun in the park off St Olaves Road on the Howard estate near her home in Bury St Edmunds. The yob was among five boys who targeted a disabled woman as she cowered on a park bench She was spat at by the teenagers who jokingly asked her if she wanted to buy drugs before she was pelted with the flour and eggs bought by three of the youths from a local Spar shop. All the youths were arrested after they were quickly identified by members of the public who recognised them as the picture of the attack spread around on Facebook. Semple claimed he was 'remorseful and sorry' when quizzed by police. His solicitor Declan Gallagher told the hearing in December that he had had been subject to 'practically worldwide opprobrium' as a result of being identified in the case. He had originally been warned he faced a possible custodial sentence for the 'despicable' attack after he admitted using threatening or abusive words or behaviour towards Miss Morris. Suffolk Magistrates Court gave him a 12-month community order with 60 hours of unpaid work and a 20 hour rehabilitation activity requirement, last December. Two youths aged 16, a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old who all cannot be identified due to their age admitted using threatening or abusive words or behaviour towards Miss Morris at Suffolk youth court last November. They were each given a 12 month referral order during separate hearings and ordered to pay 100 compensation to their victim, a 20 victim surcharge and 85 prosecution costs. Another 17-year-old youth pleaded not guilty to the same charge, saying he had simply come across the incident and joined in by posing with the others for the picture. But the teenager was found guilty at the youth court last week and given a three month reparation order requiring him to do 24 hours of unpaid work. Grinning Semple, 18, has been told he should expect jail time after he admitted attacking a man - despite claiming he was filled with remorse over an assault on a woman. Pictured in December He was also ordered to pay 150 compensation to Miss Morris and 620 costs with a 20 victim surcharge. Now, he is likely to be jailed for the second attack. Semple is also due to be a sentenced for a string of drugs offences when he returns to Ipswich Crown Court. Semple, 18, arriving at Suffolk magistrates court in December before being sentenced for his part in the flour and eggs attack He is accused of possessing cocaine and possessing MDMA with intent to supply on August 11 last year, and possessing cannabis on the day of the assault on 28-year-old Mr Banks last October. Semple is also charged with possessing cannabis and MDMA with intent to supply on April 27 last year, and possessing amphetamines on the same date. He pleaded guilty to all the drugs offences at earlier hearings when he was committed to crown court for sentencing. A Suffolk Police spokesperson confirmed said that officers had been called to reports of an assault on Mr Banks in St John Street, Bury St Edmunds, at around 6.30pm on October 15. The spokesperson said: 'It was reported that two men approached a third male and kicked him multiple times in the upper and lower body, and in the head, until the victim lay on the ground. 'The victim was taken to hospital with minor injuries and discharged himself. He suffered a large graze to the top of his head, a graze to the chin, graze to his knees, and cuts to hands. The suspects were identified by CCTV. ' Cohan Semple was subsequently arrested and interviewed where he was released under investigation, pending further enquiries. He was later charged and summonsed to court.' Sam Mills, 20, of no fixed address who appeared via video link also admitted attempting to cause grievous bodily harm with intent to Mr Banks on October 15 last year. Mills further admitted causing religiously aggravated harassment, alarm or distress to a police officer on the same date. Judge John Devaux adjourned sentence on both defendants until the week commencing April 15 and asked for a pre-sentence report to be prepared on Semple. He warned Semple that a custodial sentence was 'inevitable', saying the probation report would address the length of sentence rather than the type. A drunk man who decided to test his wife's love by standing in the middle of a road to see if she would pull him back was knocked over by a van, leaving him with serious injuries. Shocking footage captured on traffic cameras in east China shows the 30-year-old man fighting with his wife in the middle of the busy road as cars narrowly avoid hitting him. The woman, who was in her pyjamas, is seen desperately trying to pull him to safety but to no avail. The pair continued to struggle for 40 minutes before an oncoming van suddenly crashed into the man, sending him flying. A drunk man who decided to test his wife's love by standing in the middle of a road to see if she would pull him back was knocked over by a van in east China, leaving him with serious injuries The woman, still in her pyjamas, is seen desperately trying to pull him to safety but to no avail The bizarre incident happened at 3am on Monday at Jinhua, Zhenjiang province, according to BTime. The man, surnamed Pan, later told police that he wanted to know if his wife really loved him. He said he left home for a drink after a heated argument with his wife, surnamed Zhou. On his way back, the couple fought again on the phone, prompting Pan's irrational act. The pair is filmed struggling for nearly 40 minutes as the husband keeps running towards oncoming traffic on the two-lane road. He was almost hit by two vehicles Minutes later, a silver van comes into view and crashes into Pan, sending him flying 'I wanted to know if she would pull me back,' Pan said. 'I wanted to test if she still loved me.' The pair is filmed struggling for nearly 40 minutes as the husband keeps running towards oncoming traffic on the two-lane road. He was almost hit by two vehicles. Minutes later, a silver van comes into view and crashes into Pan, sending him flying. His wife immediately alerted emergency services and the man was rushed to hospital, where he was treated for head injuries and fractures in his chest. It is believed that the driver of the van was unhurt. His wife immediately alerted emergency services and the man was rushed to hospital, where he was treated for head injuries and fractures in his chest It is believed that the driver of the van (pictured) is unhurt. The accident is under investigation Police told BTimes that the man was not in a critical condition and is lucky to survive the accident. The incident is under investigation. Net users slammed the man's irresponsible behaviour, calling him 'a fool'. 'No sympathies given, he deserved it,' one comment read on Chinese microblogging site Weibo. 'What a rubbish test. He sure doesn't love her very much, putting her life at risk like that,' another user said. 'Poor van driver, I hope he won't get charged or fined,' one person said. The European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier speaks in Strasbourg today The European Union today called for a 'clear answer' from the UK about its next step in the Brexit process after MPs rejected Theresa May's deal, warning the risk of a No Deal has 'never been higher'. The House of Commons will vote tonight on whether to accept a No Deal Brexit after Mrs May suffered a humiliating defeat as her EU Withdrawal Agreement was rejected for a second time. With a majority of MPs expected to reject leaving without a deal on March 29, the chance of a Brexit delay is rising - but the EU wants to know what the purpose of any extension would be given Parliament's inability to agree on a way forward. The EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier again insisted there will be no further offer from Brussels apart from the deal already on the table. He said it was now 'the responsibility of the UK' to suggest a way forward, telling the European Parliament: 'What will their choice be, what will be the line they will take? Mr Barnier insisted there will be no further offer from Brussels apart from the current deal 'That is the question we need a clear answer to now. That is the question that has to be answered before a decision on a possible further extension. 'Why would we extend these discussions? The discussion on Article 50 is done and dusted. We have the Withdrawal Agreement. It is there. 'That is the question asked and we are waiting for an answer to that.' Mr Barnier added: 'The risk of No Deal has never been higher. That is the risk of an exit - even by accident - by the UK from the EU in a disorderly fashion.' In order to avoid a walkout by Cabinet ministers who oppose a No Deal Brexit, Mrs May has given Tories a free vote on Wednesday evening's No Deal motion. Prime Minister Theresa May suffered a humiliating defeat in the House of Commons last night as her EU Withdrawal Agreement was rejected for a second time They will vote on a motion stating: 'This House declines to approve leaving the European Union without a Withdrawal Agreement and a framework on the future relationship on March 29.' No Deal tariff would be a 'sledgehammer' to UK economy, CBI says A new tariff regime on EU products in the case of a No Deal Brexit will act as a 'sledgehammer' to the UK economy, businesses have warned. The new levies, to be imposed from the day after a March 29 Brexit if MPs vote for a No Deal withdrawal, would force up prices on EU imports including cars and many food products. The unilateral and temporary regime includes levies of 10.6 per cent on European cars and trucks which had previously been free of tariffs, potentially increasing the cost of a typical family hatchback by around 1,500. Car parts would face no extra tariffs to avoid disruption to supply chains. And it introduces tariffs on EU goods like beef, chicken, lamb, pork and Cheddar-style cheese if MPs vote to leave without a deal. But tariffs will be slashed on imports from outside the EU, potentially lowering prices on goods from countries like the USA and China, in a move which unions warned would 'destroy' jobs in manufacturing sectors like steel. Advertisement If MPs reject No Deal- as most Westminster observers expect - a third vote will follow on Thursday on whether to authorise Mrs May to request an extension of the two-year Article 50 negotiation process. Members of the Malthouse Compromise group of Tories from both Leave and Remain wings immediately tabled an amendment proposing a 'standstill' agreement lasting as late as the end of 2021, during which the UK would observe EU rules and pay into Brussels budgets while a full trade deal is negotiated. Mr Barnier has already insisted there could not be a 'transition' period without a full Withdrawal Agreement. Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said he would prefer a No Deal scenario - even though it risks economic harm and threatens to break up the United Kingdom - to the prospect of not leaving the European Union. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'Between those very unpleasant choices, I think no Brexit is the bigger risk.' But Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd, one of the ministers who may have quit if asked to back a No Deal Brexit, told Sky News: 'Leaving without a deal would be very bad for our economy, very bad for our security.' In preparation for a No Deal outcome, the UK has set out its new tariff schedule which would force up prices on EU imports including cars and many food products but could reduce costs on goods from elsewhere. Mr Barnier kisses Mrs May's hand after she arrives at the European Parliament on Monday The CBI warned the new tariffs would act as a 'sledgehammer' to the economy. The UK Government will also not introduce any new checks or controls on goods moving across the land border into Northern Ireland, raising fears it would potentially create a loophole which could be exploited by smugglers. The Brexit deal was defeated by 149 votes last night, with 75 Conservatives rebelling. Former foreign secretary Boris Johnson said he still expects Brussels to come up with a new deal, telling LBC Radio: 'The horses always change places in the final furlong, it's always at five minutes to midnight that the real deal is done.' He said it is 'absurd' for Mrs May to grant a free vote on No Deal, because it is a 'fundamental' part of the Brexit negotiating strategy. Advertisement Brexiteers today pledged to stop Theresa May's EU deal 'come what may' as it was revealed she could hold a third vote on her plans after MPs rejected No Deal and will no push hard for a Brexit delay. The PM's deal could be put to another vote as soon as next week - despite being defeated twice already - following Wednesday's fresh humiliation in the Commons, where Remain MPs hijacked her plan to end the immediate risk of No Deal on March 29. Today Chancellor Philip Hammond hinted that Attorney General Geoffrey Cox could revisit his legal advice on whether Britain would be trapped in the Irish backstop 'indefinitely' - unlocking votes for Mrs May's deal. But members of the Tory Brexit group ERG have already refused to budge with MP Steve Baker saying 'come what may we will continue to vote down the deal' while Mark Francois insisting Mrs May's deal is 'not a win - its a lose', adding: 'I was in the Army I wasnt trained to lose'. The DUP is said to have held talks with ministers last night and Tory Simon Clarke - sho has so far voted against the PM's deal admitting he and other Eurosceptics could vote for the deal 'with a gun to my head' - a nod to the fact that a harder Brexit is slipping away. Last nigh, amid chaotic scenes, MPs voted twice against No Deal as a raft of pro-EU ministers abandoned the PM in a crucial vote and abstained. In the main division, MPs voted 321 to 278 to rule out No Deal. The new defeats prompted Mrs May to tell MPs they have a week to agree her Brexit deal or face delaying the country's exit from the EU - potentially for years. Tonight the Commons will vote on whether to ask EU leaders for an extension to Article 50, but Brussels has indicated it will not automatically agree to the request. With a new 'meaningful vote' looming - just 24 hours after the ailing PM lost the second one by 149 votes - deep splits began to emerge among Brexit hardliners. The leaders of the European Research Group Jacob Rees-Mogg, Steve Baker and Mark Francois vowed to fight on for a No Deal and defeat Mrs May's deal for a third time. Theresa May (pictured last night in the Commons) signalled she could hold a third vote on her Brexit deal as the only way to get Britain out of the EU withing weeks Commons Speaker John Bercow (pictured in the Commons last night) will preside over another round of showdown votes tomorrow MPs voted 312 to 308 in defiance of the Tory whips attempt to quash the plan to scrap No Deal for good. Mrs May had wanted to only rule it out on March 29 but keep it on the table for further talks. Then, on a procedural second vote MPs voted 321 to 278 to confirm their original plan - defying a Government three line whip to block the rebel proposal at the second attempt The leaders of the European Research Group Jacob Rees-Mogg, Steve Baker (left) and Mark Francois vowed to fight on for a No Deal and defeat Mrs May's deal for a third time. But Tory Simon Clarke (right) admitted he and other Eurosceptics may have to vote for the deal 'with a gun to my head' if it is brought back for a third time. The 12 ministers who abstained and the 17 Tories who voted against the Prime Minister The 12 Conservative cabinet members and ministers who failed to vote or abstained: Solicitor General Robert Buckland, Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt, Business Secretary Greg Clark, Defence minister Tobias Ellwood, Justice Secretary David Gauke, Business minister Richard Harrington, Health minister Stephen Hammond, Culture minister Margot James, Education minister Anne Milton, Scottish Secretary David Mundell, Business minister Claire Perry and Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd. The 17 Conservatives who voted against the PM: Guto Bebb (Aberconwy), Richard Benyon (Newbury), Nick Boles (Grantham and Stamford), Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe), Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon), George Freeman (Mid Norfolk), Justine Greening (Putney), Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield), Sam Gyimah (East Surrey), Phillip Lee (Bracknell), Oliver Letwin (West Dorset), Paul Masterton (East Renfrewshire), Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth), Mark Pawsey (Rugby), Antoinette Sandbach (Eddisbury), Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex), Edward Vaizey (Wantage). Advertisement After the votes, Mrs May warned the Commons it must 'face up to the consequences' of its votes over the past two days. MPs crushed her Brexit deal in a second so-called meaningful vote last night. She said if her deal is not successful at a third meaningful vote, the EU would demand a long extension and Britain would have to take part in the European Parliament elections on May 23. Mrs May said 'the options before us are the same as they always have been' despite MPs voting to reject a no-deal Brexit. Amid open rebellion against Mrs May, Truro and Falmouth MP Sarah Newton resigned as a minister at the Department for Work and Pensions, after defying the whips to vote for the cross-party proposal. So what happens now? May plots vote on Brexit delay after No Deal showdown The Government's defeat and apparent lack of control over events paves the way for a dramatic series of votes tomorrow that could play a pivotal role in determining when the UK leaves the European Union. How it unfolds will greatly affect what, if any, bargaining power the Prime Minister has when she goes to the European Council in Brussels to ask for a delay to Brexit on March 21. Mrs May will set out two scenarios. Firstly, if they pass a Brexit deal before the meeting of EU leaders in the Belgian capital, she will ask for a three-month extension to June 30 to allow it to be ratified by member states. But if they do not manage to pass a deal before March 21 it sets out clearly that she will be forced to ask for a longer extension to look at alternatives, potentially for years. Implicit in this is a threat to Brexiteers to get behind her deal at the third time of asking, or deal with the alternative. Advertisement Amid chaotic scenes, MPs first voted 312 to 308 in defiance of the Tory whips' attempt to quash the plan to scrap No Deal for good. Mrs May had wanted to only rule it out on March 29 but keep it on the table as a bargaining tool in further talks. Then, on a procedural second vote MPs voted 321 to 278 to confirm their original plan - defying a Government three line whip to block the rebel proposal at the second attempt. The second defeat for the Government was worse because a raft of ministers - including Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd, Business Secretary Greg Clark and Justice Secretary David Gauke - abstained rather than vote against ruling out No Deal. At least eight ministers refused to vote with the Prime Minister on her plans for No Deal - but Downing Street signalled they would not be fired unless they actively voted against. The Commons also rejected a Brexiteer plan to try and secure radical 11th hour concessions from Brussels ahead of a delayed No Deal on May 22. MPs voted by a landslide 374 to 164 against the plan. The immediate consequence is MPs will tomorrow vote on a motion about delaying Brexit. Mrs May will outline two choices in a debate tomorrow. First she will say a short delay to June 30 could be agreed at next week's EU Council - but only if they have passed the deal in a third 'meaningful vote' - which would have to be agreed by the end of next week. If MPs refuse to do this, they must endorse an alternative Brexit plan and accept a much longer delay. The EU has hinted at a two year delay. Speaking after the result was read out, the Prime Minister said: 'The House has today provided a clear majority against leaving without a deal, however I will repeat what I said before. 'These are about the choices this House faces. The legal default in EU and UK law is that the UK will leave without a deal unless something else is agreed. The onus is now on every one of us in this House to find out what that is. 'The options before us are the same as they always have been.' How did your MP vote last night? MPs sensationally took No Deal off the table 321 to 278 MPs voted in favour of an amended Government motion to reject a no-deal Brexit at any time and under any circumstances by 321 votes to 278, majority 43. Labour Aye Votes (235) Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich West) Margaret Beckett (Derby South) Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) Tracy Brabin (Batley and Spen) Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West), Lyn Brown (West Ham) Nicholas Brown (Newcastle upon Tyne East) Chris Bryant (Rhondda) Karen Buck (Westminster North) Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) Richard Burgon (Leeds East) Dawn Butler (Brent Central) Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley) Alan Campbell (Tynemouth) Dan Carden (Liverpool, Walton) Sarah Champion (Rotherham) Jenny Chapman (Darlington) Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) Vernon Coaker (Gedling) Julie Cooper (Burnley) Rosie Cooper (West Lancashire) Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) David Crausby (Bolton North East) Mary Creagh (Wakefield) Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) Jon Cruddas (Dagenham and Rainham) John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) Judith Cummins (Bradford South) Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) Janet Daby (Lewisham East) Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) Wayne David (Caerphilly) Geraint Davies (Swansea West) Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) Emma Dent Coad (Kensington) Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) Peter Dowd (Bootle) David Drew (Stroud) Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) Angela Eagle (Wallasey) Clive Efford (Eltham) Julie Elliott (Sunderland Central) Louise Ellman (Liverpool, Riverside) Chris Elmore (Ogmore) Bill Esterson (Sefton Central), Chris Evans (Islwyn) Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) Colleen Fletcher (Coventry North East) Caroline Flint (Don Valley) Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) Vicky Foxcroft (Lewisham, Deptford) James Frith (Bury North) Gill Furniss (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough Hugh Gaffney (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) Barry Gardiner (Brent North) Ruth George (High Peak) Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) Roger Godsiff (Birmingham, Hall Green) Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) Nia Griffith (Llanelli) John Grogan (Keighley) Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East) David Hanson (Delyn) Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) Harriet Harman (Camberwell and Peckham) Carolyn Harris (Swansea East) Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) Sue Hayman (Workington) John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) Mark Hendrick (Preston) Mike Hill (Hartlepool) Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) Margaret Hodge (Barking) Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) Kate Hollern (Blackburn) George Howarth (Knowsley) Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) Imran Hussain (Bradford East) Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) Darren Jones (Bristol North West) Gerald Jones (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) Graham P Jones (Hyndburn) Helen Jones (Warrington North) Kevan Jones (North Durham) Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) Liz Kendall (Leicester West) Afzal Khan (Manchester, Gorton) Ged Killen (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon), Peter Kyle (Hove) Lesley Laird (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) David Lammy (Tottenham) Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) Karen Lee (Lincoln) Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) Clive Lewis (Norwich South) Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) Rebecca Long Bailey (Salford and Eccles) Ian C. Lucas (Wrexham) Holly Lynch (Halifax) Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr) Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) Sandy Martin (Ipswich) Rachael Maskell (York Central) Christian Matheson (City of Chester) Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) Conor McGinn (St Helens North) Alison McGovern (Wirral South) Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) Jim McMahon (Oldham West and Royton) Anna McMorrin (Cardiff North) Ian Mearns (Gateshead Edward Miliband (Doncaster North) Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) Jessica Morden (Newport East) Stephen Morgan (Portsmouth South) Grahame Morris (Easington) Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) Lisa Nandy (Wigan) Alex Norris (Nottingham North) Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) Kate Osamor (Edmonton) Albert Owen (Ynys M?n) Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) Teresa Pearce (Erith and Thamesmead) Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) Laura Pidcock (North West Durham) Jo Platt (Leigh Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) Stephen Pound (Ealing North) Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) Faisal Rashid (Warrington South) Angela Rayner (Ashton-under-Lyne) Steve Reed (Croydon North) Christina Rees (Neath) Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) Rachel Reeves (Leeds West) Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) Matt Rodda (Reading East) Danielle Rowley (Midlothian) Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown), Naz Shah (Bradford West), Virendra Sharma (Ealing, Southall), Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield), Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury), Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn), Dennis Skinner (Bolsover), Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith), Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North), Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood), Eleanor Smith (Wolverhampton South West), Jeff Smith (Manchester, Withington), Laura Smith (Crewe and Nantwich), Owen Smith (Pontypridd), Karin Smyth (Bristol South), Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central), Alex Sobel (Leeds North West), John Spellar (Warley), Keir Starmer (Holborn and St Pancras), Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central), Wes Streeting (Ilford North), Paul Sweeney (Glasgow North East), Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside), Gareth Thomas (Harrow West), Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen), Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury), Stephen Timms (East Ham), Jon Trickett (Hemsworth), Anna Turley (Redcar), Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East), Derek Twigg (Halton), Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby), Liz Twist (Blaydon), Keith Vaz (Leicester East), Valerie Vaz (Walsall South), Thelma Walker (Colne Valley), Tom Watson (West Bromwich East), Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green), Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington), Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test), Martin Whitfield (East Lothian), Paul Williams (Stockton South), Phil Wilson (Sedgefield), Mohammad Yasin (Bedford), Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) Tory No Votes (265) Nigel Adams (Selby and Ainsty), Adam Afriyie (Windsor), Peter Aldous (Waveney), Lucy Allan (Telford), David Amess (Southend West), Stuart Andrew (Pudsey), Edward Argar (Charnwood), Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle), Richard Bacon (South Norfolk), Kemi Badenoch (Saffron Walden), Steve Baker (Wycombe), Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire), Stephen Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire), John Baron (Basildon and Billericay), Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk), Paul Beresford (Mole Valley), Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen), Bob Blackman (Harrow East), Crispin Blunt (Reigate), Peter Bone (Wellingborough), Peter Bottomley (Worthing West), Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine), Ben Bradley (Mansfield), Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands), Graham Brady (Altrincham and Sale West), Suella Braverman (Fareham), Jack Brereton (Stoke-on-Trent South), Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire), Steve Brine (Winchester), James Brokenshire (Old Bexley and Sidcup), Fiona Bruce (Congleton), Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar), Conor Burns (Bournemouth West), Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan), James Cartlidge (South Suffolk), William Cash (Stone), Maria Caulfield (Lewes), Alex Chalk (Cheltenham), Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham), Christopher Chope (Christchurch), Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds), Colin Clark (Gordon), Simon Clarke (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland), James Cleverly (Braintree), Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds), Therese Coffey (Suffolk Coastal), Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe), Robert Courts (Witney), Geoffrey Cox (Torridge and West Devon), Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford), Chris Davies (Brecon and Radnorshire), David T. C. Davies (Monmouth), Glyn Davies (Montgomeryshire), Mims Davies (Eastleigh), Philip Davies (Shipley), David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden), Caroline Dinenage (Gosport), Leo Docherty (Aldershot), Michelle Donelan (Chippenham), Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire), Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay), Oliver Dowden (Hertsmere), Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock), Richard Drax (South Dorset), James Duddridge (Rochford and Southend East), David Duguid (Banff and Buchan), Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green), Alan Duncan (Rutland and Melton), Philip Dunne (Ludlow), Michael Ellis (Northampton North), Charlie Elphicke (Dover), George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth), Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley), David Evennett (Bexleyheath and Crayford), Michael Fabricant (Lichfield), Michael Fallon (Sevenoaks), Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster), Kevin Foster (Torbay), Liam Fox (North Somerset), Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford), Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire), Marcus Fysh (Yeovil), Roger Gale (North Thanet), Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest), Nusrat Ghani (Wealden), Nick Gibb (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton), Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham), John Glen (Salisbury), Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park), Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby), Michael Gove (Surrey Heath), Luke Graham (Ochil and South Perthshire), Bill Grant (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock), Helen Grant (Maidstone and The Weald), James Gray (North Wiltshire), Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell), Chris Green (Bolton West), Andrew Griffiths (Burton), Kirstene Hair (Angus), Robert Halfon (Harlow), Luke Hall (Thornbury and Yate), Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge), Matt Hancock (West Suffolk), Greg Hands (Chelsea and Fulham), Mark Harper (Forest of Dean), Rebecca Harris (Castle Point), Trudy Harrison (Copeland), Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire), John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings), James Heappey (Wells), Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry), Gordon Henderson (Sittingbourne and Sheppey), Nick Herbert (Arundel and South Downs), Damian Hinds (East Hampshire), George Hollingbery (Meon Valley), Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton), Philip Hollobone (Kettering), Adam Holloway (Gravesham), John Howell (Henley), Eddie Hughes (Walsall North), Jeremy Hunt (South West Surrey), Nick Hurd (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner), Sajid Javid (Bromsgrove), Ranil Jayawardena (North East Hampshire), Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex), Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood), Robert Jenrick (Newark), Boris Johnson (Uxbridge and South Ruislip), Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham), Gareth Johnson (Dartford), Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough), David Jones (Clwyd West), Marcus Jones (Nuneaton), Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham), Gillian Keegan (Chichester), Seema Kennedy (South Ribble), Stephen Kerr (Stirling), Julian Knight (Solihull), Greg Knight (East Yorkshire), Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne), John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk), Mark Lancaster (Milton Keynes North), Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire), Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire), Edward Leigh (Gainsborough), Andrew Lewer (Northampton South), Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth), Julian Lewis (New Forest East), Ian Liddell-Grainger (Bridgwater and West Somerset), David Lidington (Aylesbury), Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster), Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke), Jonathan Lord (Woking), Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham), Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet), Rachel Maclean (Redditch), Anne Main (St Albans), Alan Mak (Havant), Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire), Scott Mann (North Cornwall), Theresa May (Maidenhead), Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys), Patrick McLoughlin (Derbyshire Dales), Stephen McPartland (Stevenage), Esther McVey (Tatton), Mark Menzies (Fylde), Johnny Mercer (Plymouth, Moor View), Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle), Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock), Maria Miller (Basingstoke), Amanda Milling (Cannock Chase), Nigel Mills (Amber Valley), Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield), Damien Moore (Southport), Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North), Nicky Morgan (Loughborough), Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot), David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale), James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis), Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills), Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall), Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire), Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst), Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North), Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire), Neil O'Brien (Harborough), Matthew Offord (Hendon), Guy Opperman (Hexham), Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton), Priti Patel (Witham), Owen Paterson (North Shropshire), Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead), John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare), Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole), Chris Philp (Croydon South), Christopher Pincher (Tamworth), Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich), Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane), Mark Prisk (Hertford and Stortford), Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin), Tom Pursglove (Corby), Will Quince (Colchester), Dominic Raab (Esher and Walton), John Redwood (Wokingham), Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset), Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury), Mary Robinson (Cheadle), Andrew Rosindell (Romford), Douglas Ross (Moray), Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire), David Rutley (Macclesfield), Paul Scully (Sutton and Cheam), Bob Seely (Isle of Wight), Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire), Grant Shapps (Welwyn Hatfield), Alok Sharma (Reading West), Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell), Chris Skidmore (Kingswood), Chloe Smith (Norwich North), Henry Smith (Crawley), Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon), Royston Smith (Southampton, Itchen), Mark Spencer (Sherwood), Andrew Stephenson (Pendle), John Stevenson (Carlisle), Bob Stewart (Beckenham), Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South), Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border), Mel Stride (Central Devon), Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness), Julian Sturdy (York Outer), Rishi Sunak (Richmond (Yorks)), Desmond Swayne (New Forest West), Hugo Swire (East Devon), Robert Syms (Poole), Derek Thomas (St Ives), Ross Thomson (Aberdeen South), Maggie Throup (Erewash), Kelly Tolhurst (Rochester and Strood), Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon), Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole), Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire), David Tredinnick (Bosworth), Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed), Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk), Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling), Shailesh Vara (North West Cambridgeshire), Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes), Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet), Charles Walker (Broxbourne), Robin Walker (Worcester), Ben Wallace (Wyre and Preston North), David Warburton (Somerton and Frome), Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness), Giles Watling (Clacton), Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent), Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire), Craig Whittaker (Calder Valley), John Whittingdale (Maldon), Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire), Gavin Williamson (South Staffordshire), Mike Wood (Dudley South), William Wragg (Hazel Grove), Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam), Nadhim Zahawi (Stratford-on-Avon). Labour No Votes (2) Stephen Hepburn (Jarrow) Kate Hoey (Vauxhall DUP No Votes (10) Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry), Nigel Dodds (Belfast North), Jeffrey M. Donaldson (Lagan Valley), Paul Girvan (South Antrim), Emma Little Pengelly (Belfast South), Ian Paisley (North Antrim), Gavin Robinson (Belfast East), Jim Shannon (Strangford), David Simpson (Upper Bann), Sammy Wilson (East Antrim). Independent No Vote (1) Sylvia Hermon (North Down) Tory Aye Votes (17) Guto Bebb (Aberconwy) Richard Benyon (Newbury) Nick Boles (Grantham and Stamford) Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon) George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) Justine Greening (Putney) Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield) Sam Gyimah (East Surrey) Phillip Lee (Bracknell) Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) Paul Masterton (East Renfrewshire) Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) Mark Pawsey (Rugby) Antoinette Sandbach (Eddisbury) Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) Edward Vaizey (Wantage) SNP Aye Votes (35) Hannah Bardell (Livingston), Mhairi Black (Paisley and Renfrewshire South), Ian Blackford (Ross, Skye and Lochaber), Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North), Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith), Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun), Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow), Douglas Chapman (Dunfermline and West Fife), Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West), Ronnie Cowan (Inverclyde), Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East), Martyn Day (Linlithgow and East Falkirk), Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire), Marion Fellows (Motherwell and Wishaw), Stephen Gethins (North East Fife), Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran), Patrick Grady (Glasgow North), Peter Grant (Glenrothes), Neil Gray (Airdrie and Shotts), Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey), Stewart Hosie (Dundee East), Chris Law (Dundee West), David Linden (Glasgow East), Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar), Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South), Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East), John McNally (Falkirk), Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West), Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North), Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute), Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East), Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West), Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central), Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire), Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire). INDEPENDENT GROUP NO VOTES (11) Heidi Allen (Independent - South Cambridgeshire) Luciana Berger (Independent - Liverpool, Wavertree) Ann Coffey (Independent - Stockport) Mike Gapes (Independent - Ilford South) Chris Leslie (Independent - Nottingham East) Joan Ryan (Independent - Enfield North) Angela Smith (Independent - Penistone and Stocksbridge) Anna Soubry (Independent - Broxtowe) Gavin Shuker (Independent - Luton South) Chuka Umunna (Independent - Streatham) Sarah Wollaston (Independent - Totnes) OTHER NO VOTES (22) Tom Brake (Liberal Democrat - Carshalton and Wallington) Vince Cable (Liberal Democrat - Twickenham) Alistair Carmichael (Liberal Democrat - Orkney and Shetland) Edward Davey (Liberal Democrat - Kingston and Surbiton) Tim Farron (Liberal Democrat - Westmorland and Lonsdale) Christine Jardine (Liberal Democrat - Edinburgh West) Ben Lake (Plaid Cymru - Ceredigion) Norman Lamb (Liberal Democrat - North Norfolk) Kelvin Hopkins (Independent - Luton North) Ivan Lewis (Independent - Bury South) Caroline Lucas (Green Party - Brighton, Pavilion) Liz Saville Roberts (Plaid Cymru - Dwyfor Meirionnydd) Jared O'Mara (Independent - Sheffield, Hallam) Fiona Onasanya (Independent - Peterborough) Jamie Stone (Liberal Democrat - Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) Jo Swinson (Liberal Democrat - East Dunbartonshire) Hywel Williams (Plaid Cymru - Arfon) Chris Williamson (Independent - Derby North) John Woodcock (Independent - Barrow and Furness) Advertisement Theresa May arrived back at the Commons this evening ahead of the votes which ruled out Britain leaving with No Deal on March 29 and has now paved the way for Brexit to be delayed Last night's votes do not change the law and Brexiteers insist it is not binding - but it will be seen in Brussels as a clear signal Britain is blinking over Brexit. MPs vote to block no-deal - what does the Spelman amendment mean for Brexit? Last night's vote on the Spelman amendment sends out a strong symbolic and political message even if it does not actually change the law. The amendment passed by 312 votes to 308 is non-binding on the Government, so they can choose to ignore it if they wish. Ms Spelman and Mr Dromey saw a similar amendment pass in January but it has fallen by the wayside. Avoiding No Deal entirely can only be done in two ways: revoking Article 50 and cancelling Brexit or by adopting the Brexit deal. A delay to Brexit of several months or longer would postpone that choice - and would require a change in the law which spells out exit day as March 29 - but it cannot be avoided forever. But it does indicate the strength of feeling among MPs that a no-deal Brexit must be avoided and will be seen in Brussels as a clear signal Britain is blinking with the deadline just days away. This is likely to have a huge impact when and if Theresa May heads to Brussels to ask for an extension to Article 50 to achieve a workable Brexit deal. Advertisement Avoiding No Deal entirely can only be done in two ways: revoking Article 50 and cancelling Brexit or by adopting the Brexit deal. A delay to Brexit of several months or longer would postpone that choice - and would require a change in the law which spells out exit day as March 29 - but it cannot be avoided forever. In the aftermath of the vote, European Research Group chairman Jacob Rees-Mogg said the amendment had no legal force. He told Sky News: 'We live under a system of law and a motion passed in Parliament does not override the law.' Earlier, The PM could do no more than nod in support as the Environment Secretary set out the Government's plan to block a No Deal Brexit on Britain's scheduled exit date - but desperately try to keep it on the table. Brexiteers pushed an alternative plan based on the so-called Malthouse Compromise. It says the Government should delay Brexit until May 22, and offer to 'buy' an almost three-year transition period until 2021. The idea was there is either a full-blown UK-EU trade deal in place by then or both sides are ready for a No Deal on basic World Trade Organisation terms. The Eurosceptics say if the EU rejects the offer, Britain must crash out without a deal on May 22 - following a short two month delay to prepare. The Brexiteer plan was defeated by a landslide after Remain MPs secured enough support to win on the Spelman plan. With Mrs May's voice failing Mr Gove began the debate by praising her saying: 'She may temporarily have lost her voice, but what she has not lost, and will never lose, is her focus in the national interest, and a full-hearted desire to do what is right for our country.' In a desperate last attempt to win round support, Mrs May met with members of her Cabinet inside Parliament ahead of the votes at 7pm. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn whipped his Labour MPs to vote against Mrs May's plan and back the Spelman amendment. Irish premier Leo Varadkar has said that if the United Kingdom wants to change its mind over Brexit, it would be welcomed back like the 'Prodigal Son'. Ahead of the debate, Chancellor Philip Hammond used his Spring Statement to issue a stark warning about No Deal and called for the Commons to 'compromise'. Theresa May is losing her voice and asked Michael Gove to open the debate ahead of a vote on taking No Deal off the table - having previously said she would speak Mr Gove paid tribute to Mrs May's efforts in her negotiations and said: #She always, always, always acts in the national interest - we are lucky to have her' Michael Gove said that since Mrs May lost the first meaningful vote on her Withdrawal Agreement in January she has spent 'more than 19 hours at the despatch box', and: 'Has shown fortitude, tenacity, thoughtfulness, diligence - and above all an unselfish and unstinting patriotism.' Mr Gove said it was only appropriate that 'on all sides of the House' MPs recognise the way in which the Prime Minister 'always, always, always puts country first' - but told them that after rejecting her deal they now have 'difficult choices to make' about Brexit. Earlier the croaky Tory leader insisted she understood Britain's demand to get Brexit done as she croaked through PMQs with a blast at Jeremy Corbyn for refusing to help pass her deal. Hours after she was humiliated by a second drubbing at the hands of MPs, Mrs May returned to the Despatch Box to insist: 'I want to leave the EU with a good deal - I believe we have a good deal.' The Prime Minister is already fighting for her political life after being humiliated by a crushing Commons defeat last night which saw her on the 'last chance' Brexit deal voted down by 391 to 242. At Prime Minister's Questions Mrs May confronted MPs for the first time since the fresh humiliation. She made light of her own inability to speak blasted at Mr Corbyn: 'I may not have my own voice but I understand the voice of the country.' Mrs May repeatedly told MPs that the only way to take no deal off the table for good was to either cancel Brexit altogether or ultimately back her deal. But an hour later Chancellor Philip Hammond used his Spring Statement to undermine his leader by calling for No Deal to be taken off the table by MPs. Minutes later Liz Truss undermined him by saying: 'No deal would be better than not Brexit-ing'. What is the Spelman no No Deal plan? How did the plan come about? The cross party amendment tabled by Tory Dame Caroline Spelman and Labour's Jack Dromey is their latest attempt to block a No Deal Brexit. They laid a similar one in January which was passed by the Commons. But it is none-binding and the goalposts have been moved by Mrs May's two failed attempts to get a Brexit deal through parliament. So they are doing it again. What does it propose? Quite simply it rejects a No Deal Brexit at any time and under any circumstances. Who is backing it? A cross-party group of mainly Remain-supporting MPs, including Sir Oliver Letwin, Hilary Benn, Nick Boles and Yvette Cooper, as well as all 11 members of the new Independent Group. Jeremy Corbyn's Labour is expected to whip his MPs in favour of the plan. Who opposes it? The Government. Theresa May is to whip her MPs to oppose it - including Dame Caroline - under pressure from Brexiteer ministers who have threatened to quit if no-deal is removed as an option. They regard it as an important tool in persuading the EU to offer the UK a better deal, even at this late stage with just 16 days until Britain is supposed to leave the European Union. How much would the UK have to pay? Passing this amendment would more firmly pave the way to tomorrow's vote on asking the EU for an extension of Article 50. If a delay to Brexit was agreed with the European Union Britain would have to continue to pay contributions. How much this is would depend on how long an extension is achieved. It has been reported that Brussels will demand another 13.5billion in Brexit divorce payments if Theresa May seeks an extension to Article 50. The deal obliges Britain to pay about 39billion in divorce settlement. Advertisement What is the 'Malthouse Compromise'? How did the plan come about? Housing minister Kit Malthouse brought Remain and Leave-supporting Tories together in a bid to break the Brexit impasse concocting the plan which now bears his name. What does the 'Malthouse Compromise' propose? In simple terms, it calls for the UK to negotiate a new transition period until 2021 or leave the EU in May if Brussels fails to offer an agreement. The plan contains two choices to be offered to the EU: one for how the UK will leave with a deal, and one for how it will leave without. Plan A is similar to the current Withdrawal Agreement, but with changes to replace the Irish backstop and the implementation period with 'alternative arrangements'. Plan B assumes that agreement on the Withdrawal Agreement is not possible and creates a 'transitional standstill period'. How is plan B different to May's deal? The current Withdrawal Agreement is stripped down to little more than the deal on citizens' rights and the transition period. This would be extended by a year until no later than December 2021. The aim of this is to provide a longer period to agree the future relationship, but it could also involve paying more money to the EU. The second major difference is to the controversial backstop, which would be deleted. Instead, if there is no trade deal at the end of transition the UK and EU would use a 'basic free trade agreement' - essentially trading with the EU on WTO rules. It relies on existing administrative processes. Is plan B different to a no-deal Brexit? Yes the plans says Britain would remain in a transition period on existing rules for three years outside the EU. The UK would become a third country, in practice, but would offer to pay the EU in exchange for retaining the implementation period until no later than December 2021. Plan A would remain on offer as long as the EU was willing to consider it. If there is still no trade deal in place by the end of the three year transition, then Britain would finally leave with no deal. How much would the UK have to pay? Under plan B, Britain would offer around 10 billion per year in exchange for the tranition period to continue. Advertisement Theresa May insisted in PMQs she understood Britain's demand to get Brexit done as she croaked through PMQs (pictured) with a blast at Jeremy Corbyn for refusing to help pass her deal. But it appears her voice was too weak to go again this afternoon Britain will face 'significant disruption' in the short and medium term if it crashes out of the European Union without a deal, Philip Hammond has warned, as he called for no-deal to be taken off the table. The Chancellor, delivering his Spring Statement to MPs, said there would be a 'smaller, less prosperous' economy in the long term, with higher unemployment, lower wages and higher prices in shops. In comments seen as a veiled call for a softer Brexit, he called for a compromise on what the Commons can agree to in the national interest. Mr Hammond said the economy was 'fundamentally robust' but pleaded with MPs to lift the 'uncertainty' that 'hangs over' the UK because of the no-deal threat, after Theresa May's deal was rejected for the second time on Tuesday night. He said: 'Our economy is fundamentally robust but the uncertainty that I hoped we would lift last night still hangs over it. 'We cannot allow that to continue: it is damaging our economy and it is damaging our standing and reputation in the world. 'Tonight, we have a choice: we can remove the threat of an imminent no-deal exit hanging over our economy. 'Tomorrow, we will have the opportunity to start to map out a way forward - towards building a consensus across this House for a deal we can collectively support, to exit the EU in an orderly way to a future relationship that will allow Britain to flourish.' A Treasury source insisted Mr Hammond supported the Prime Minister's deal, saying: 'He has been very clear that he supports the PM's deal but he has also been saying for months that compromise is how we get through this and he is calling for compromise.' Earlier, Senior Brexiteer Steve Baker, a key figure in the hardline European Research Group, said the new version of the Malthouse Compromise would 'throw three safety nets' around leaving the EU without a Withdrawal Agreement on March 29. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that plan A remained putting 'alternative arrangements' in place to replace the backstop in the Withdrawal Agreement that was defeated last night. The 'sledgehammer' tariffs threatened on EU products if there is a No Deal Brexit Food Proposed tariff rates on a range of food products were announced as a proportion of the so-called 'most favoured nation' (MFN) currently imposed by the EU on imports from countries which do not have a free trade agreement. Lamb/mutton: 100% of MFN Beef 53% of MFN Poultry 60% of MFN Pork 13% of MFN Butter 32% of MFN Cheddar-like cheese 13% of MFN Protected fish and seafood products 100% of MFN Milled and semi-milled products (83%). INDUSTRIAL Finished buses: 12.6% Finished cars and trucks: 10.6% Transport equipment: 2.9% Fertilisers: 2.1% Ceramics: 1.2% Textiles and textile products: 0.9% Stone and cement: 0.3% Leather and hides: 0.2% Mineral products: 0.2% Glass: 0.2% Chemical products: 0.1% Plastics and rubber: 0.1% Advertisement The second element was to 'buy' an implementation period 'so they get about 10 billion a year and we all get a transition arrangement'. The third was offering 'standstill' arrangements with the EU to provide a third way to have a smooth exit. The EU's Michel Barnier has repeatedly stressed that a transition arrangement could only be offered if there was a formal Withdrawal Agreement, but Mr Baker said 'negotiability is a dynamic concept'. He repeated there will be no further offer from Brussels apart from the deal already on the table, and it is now 'the responsibility of the UK' to suggest a way forward. He told the European Parliament: 'What will their choice be, what will be the line they will take? That is the question we need a clear answer to now. 'That is the question that has to be answered before a decision on a possible further extension 'Why would we extend these discussions? The discussion on Article 50 is done and dusted. We have the Withdrawal Agreement. It is there. 'That is the question asked and we are waiting for an answer to that. Mr Barnier added: 'The risk of no-deal has never been higher. That is the risk of an exit - even by accident - by the UK from the EU in a disorderly fashion.' In other developments, Brexiteers insisted that a No Deal Brexit would be 'good news' for Britain despite ministers revealing alarming new tariffs that would be charged on products imported from the EU. The new import taxes will be imposed on items from the continent including cars, meat and cheese if the UK crashes out of the bloc on March 29 - but will not apply in Northern Ireland. But excited members of the Tory ERG group led by Jacob Rees-Mogg were quick to point out that the arrangements would ensure nine out of ten global imports would land in Britain completely tax-free without an EU deal. Tory Brexiteer and ERG chairman Steve Baker said: 'No Deal is nothing to be scared of it's just Brexit with many mini-deals' while ERG spokesman Sir Bill Cash, who is also Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee, said these tariffs will help the British public 'enormously' making 'imports much cheaper' from non-EU countries. The new levies would force up prices on EU imports including cars and many foods plus products such as televisions and leather jackets At the moment products from EU countries such as Germany and France can be imported into Britain without any charges under the single market, but if Britain leaves without a deal the Government will have to introduce new import taxes. However in a seemingly confusing loophole in No Deal plan, Northern Ireland's border would remain open at least 'temporarily' and goods entering from the Republic would not face tariffs to preserve the Good Friday agreement. The situation will raise fears that the Northern Irish border could become a smuggling route for EU products. Under the No Deal plan revealed yesterday morning, 87 per cent of products would be subject to zero tariffs in an effort to stop price spikes and kick-start trade with Britain from across the world. The current figure is 80 per cent. Critics have said that a No Deal would be a 'disaster' for Britain who would be 'blocked' from trading with its closest trading partner - the EU. CBI director-general Carolyn Fairbairn said: 'This tells us everything that is wrong with a no-deal. 'What we are hearing is the biggest change in terms of trade this country has faced since the mid-19th century being imposed on this country with no consultation with business, no time to prepare. 'This is a sledgehammer for our economy.' The new tariff regime would be applied temporarily in an attempt to minimise disruption to the economy and stop price hikes. But ministers said products from the EU including beef, pork, chicken, butter, cheese and fish would also be subject to import taxes expected to push up prices in the supermarkets from March 29 if there is no agreement. Cars from the EU would be subject to a a 10.6 per tax on the cost of all 'fully finished' vehicles - making the prices of an average vehicle surge by 1,500. Among the 13 per cent of imports - most from the EU - which will be subject to tariffs, will be: Beef, lamb, pork and poultry and some dairy products including butter and cheese - in order to protect UK farmers and producers from cheap imports; A number of tariffs on finished new cars, vans, lorries and buses imported from the EU - but charges will not apply to vehicle parts imported from the EU to prevent disruption to supply chains; Ceramics, fertiliser and fuel, where tariffs protect UK producers against unfair practices like dumping and state subsidies; Goods including bananas, raw cane sugar and certain kinds of fish, where tariffs are used to permit preferential access to the UK market for developing countries. On the new tariff regime, Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay told Today it was a 'modest liberalisation' of trade, adding: 'This is for a short term while we engage with business and see what the real-term consequences are'. But British Retail Consortium chief executive Helen Dickinson hit back: 'Even as the Brexit clock approaches midnight, MPs continue to squabble. 'Yet it is the public who will feel the impact of a No Deal Brexit tariffs, non-tariff barriers and currency depreciation will all push up costs and reduce the choice on the shelves we currently enjoy. 'Businesses are exasperated by the lack of clarity over their future trading arrangements'. Hammond promises a 26BILLION 'deal dividend': Chancellor warns crashing out means 'job losses, lower wages and higher prices' Philip Hammond dangled a 26billion 'deal dividend' in front of MPs yesterday as he issued stark warnings about the risks of crashing out. The Chancellor used his Spring Statement to insist that a no-deal Brexit would mean 'higher unemployment, lower wages and higher prices in the shops'. Mr Hammond appealed for 'consensus' over how Britain should leave the EU, as he painted a rosy picture of the economy if Brexit hardliners back down and endorse the deal. The Chancellor said the economy would continue to grow in every year to 2023 - at a faster rate than Germany - if the deal is agreed, even with a slowdown this year. He said the strong economy meant Britain was taking 'another step of... the road out of austerity' if it avoided a no deal shock. Mr Hammond said if MPs pass the deal he will decide in the Spending Review later this year how to share the proceeds from any 'Deal Dividend' that Treasury aides said was worth 26billion - 11billion more than thought at the Budget in November. The money is available deal or no deal - but would be soaked up dealing with the consequences of no deal if Britain crashes out of the bloc. If there is a deal, the money would go on increased spending on public services, capital investment and keeping taxes low. Mr Hammond also announced a 100million funding boost to combat knife crime. The money will pay for a 'surge' in street policing in an effort to tackle rising levels of violence on the country's streets. There were also spending announcements on free sanitary products for schools and a package to tackle climate change. In the Spring Statement this lunchtime, the Chancellor is expected to pledge an immediate 100million boost for police forces The latest economic forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility suggest the economy will be slower this year than expected in November (pictured) but with growth every year to 2023 Philip Hammond (pictured leaving No 11 Downing Street) will announce a major funding boost to combat knife crime as he unveils his spring statement 16 days before Brexit Spring Statement 2019: What has Hammond revealed? The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts GDP growth of 1.2% this year, then 1.4% in 2020 and 1.6% for each of the following three years. The OBR expects to see 600,000 new jobs by 2023, with wage growth at 3% or higher in each year of the forecast period. UK debt is forecast to be lower in every year than predicted at the Budget, falling to 82.2% of GDP next year, then 79%, 74.9% and 74% in the following years and 73% in 2023/24. 260 million for the Borderlands Growth deal covering the border regions of England and Scotland and said negotiations are progressing on future deals for mid-Wales and Derry/Londonderry. A 700 million package of reforms to help small businesses take on more apprentices, announced in the autumn Budget, is to be brought forward to the start of the new financial year in April. From June, the UK will begin to abolish the requirement for paper landing cards at points of entry to the country and will allow citizens of the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Singapore and South Korea to use e-gates at airports and Eurostar terminals. Funding of 79 million allocated to the ARCHER2 supercomputer at Edinburgh University, 45 million for genomics research at the European Bioinformatics Institute and 81 million for a new Extreme Photonics Centre in Oxfordshire, along with a guarantee of UK funding for the JET nuclear fusion reactor, whatever happens with Brexit. The Government will fund free sanitary products in secondary schools and colleges in England from the next school year. Some 445,000 square kilometres of ocean around Ascension Island to be declared a Marine Protected Area. A new 3 billion Affordable Homes Guarantee scheme to support delivery of around 30,000 affordable homes and 717 million from the Housing Infrastructure Fund to unlock up to 37,000 new homes on sites in West London, Cheshire, Didcot and Cambridge. Advertisement In his 35-minute statement, Mr Hammond said that Tuesday's vote to reject the EU Withdrawal Agreement 'leaves a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the economy' and his most urgent task is to lift it. He announced the latest economic forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility suggest the economy will be sharply slower this year than expected - with a downgrade from 1.6per cent to 1.2 per cent - in November. But growth will rise again to 1.6 per cent a year in 2021, 2022 and 2023, the forecasts say. He said: 'Last night's events mean we are not where I hoped we would be today. 'Our economy is fundamentally robust. But the uncertainty that I hoped we would lift last night, still hangs over us. 'We cannot allow that to continue. It is damaging our economy and it is damaging our standing and reputation in the world. 'Tonight, we have a choice. We can remove the threat of an imminent no-deal exit hanging over our economy. 'Tomorrow, we will have the opportunity to start to map out a way forward towards building a consensus across this House for a deal we can, collectively support, to exit the EU in an orderly way to a future relationship that will allow Britain to flourish, protecting jobs and businesses 'A brighter future is within our grasp. Tonight, let's take a decisive step towards seizing it and building a Britain fit for the future; a Britain the next generation will be proud to call their home.' The Chancellor warned that the country's economic progress will be at risk in a no-deal Brexit, and said he was 'confident' that the Commons will agree a smooth and orderly EU withdrawal 'over the coming weeks'. Mr Hammond told MPs: 'A no-deal Brexit would deliver a significant short- to medium-term reduction in the productive capacity of the British economy. 'And because our economy is operating at near full capacity, any fiscal and monetary response would have to be carefully calibrated not to simply cause inflation.' Mr Hammond said he will decide in the Spending Review later this year how to share the proceeds from any 'Deal Dividend', if the UK leaves the EU with a deal, between increased spending on public services, capital investment and keeping taxes low. Responding to Mr Hammond's statement, shadow chancellor John McDonnell said: 'We have just witnessed a display by the Chancellor of this Government's toxic mix of callous complacency over austerity and ... mishandling of Brexit.' Mr Hammond is also expected to warn that money to end austerity can be found only if MPs vote to leave the EU with a deal. He is expected to unveil a 'deal dividend' of 20 billion to invest in public services. PIctured is the current state of the deficit Mr McDonnell said downgrading forecasts were a 'pattern' under Mr Hammond before he criticised Government borrowing. Free sanitary products will be made available in ALL schools so that 'girls no longer have to miss a day' because they can't afford them The Government will fund free sanitary products in schools to tackle period poverty, Philip Hammond announced. Mr Hammond said 'some girls are missing school' because they can't afford to buy them. The Chancellor said the Department for Education would develop the new scheme in time for the next school year. The surprise announcement came amid a small spending spree in Mr Hammond's Spring Statement. Advertisement He added: 'On the deficit, he's boasting about the deficit - he's not eliminated the deficit as we were promised by 2015. 'He's simply shifted it on to the shoulders of headteachers, NHS managers, local councillors and police commissioners and, worst of all, onto the backs of many of the poorest in our society. 'The consequences are stark - infant mortality has increased, life-expectancy has reduced, and our communities are less safe. 'Police budgets have faced a cut of 2.7 billion since 2010 and nothing the Chancellor has said today will make up for the human and economic consequences of those cuts.' Mr McDonnell added there is 'nothing balanced' about a Government giving more than 110 billion of tax cuts to the rich and corporations while '87 people a day die before they receive the care they need'. Last week Mr Hammond urged forces to divert existing resources from lower priority crime instead of demanding more. He said backed a 'surging of resources from other areas of policing activity into dealing with this spike in knife crime' and said forces should 'move' money from other areas. Mr Hammond's plan again some positive economic figures - including wages (blue line) rising sharply faster than prices (red line) But Mr Javid publicly backed senior police officers who said they needed more money to pay for overtime to put more officers on the streets. Hammond pledges 100million to fight the 'scourge of knife crime' Philip Hammond yesterday announced a major funding boost to combat knife crime. In the Spring Statement, the Chancellor pledged an immediate 100million boost for police forces. The money will pay for a 'surge' in street policing in an effort to tackle rising levels of violence on the country's streets. It follows a major Whitehall row between the Home Office and Treasury, and represents a major victory for Home Secretary Sajid Javid. Last week Mr Hammond urged forces to divert existing resources from lower priority crime instead of demanding more. Advertisement Sources said around two thirds of the cash would go to paying for a surge in street policing, and the remainder to fund specialist Violence Reduction Units. On Monday 46 London MPs called for Mr Hammond to use the Spring Statement to help the Metropolitan Police fight knife crime. Last week a string of former senior officers said there was an urgent need for more police to be recruited. Lord Hogan-Howe, the former Met commissioner, has called for an extra 20,000 officers across the country and told ministers to 'get a grip on the crisis'. Police numbers have fallen by 20,000 in England and Wales since 2010. The number of knife-related deaths rose from 186 in 2015-16 to 285 in 2017-18. Violent crime rose by nearly a fifth in the year to September 2018, according to police figures, and the increase in knife killings has been particularly pronounced. In the last year alone, 27 under-19s have been stabbed to death, and there have been 285 knife killings in all - the highest level since the Second World War. Ahead of the statement, shadow chancellor John McDonnell urged him to end Government cuts Downing Street is also understood to have been backing calls for extra cash. Forces are already set to receive nearly 970 million extra in the next financial year. End of the gas boiler: Fossil-fuel heating systems will be BANNED in all new-build houses from 2025 Fossil-fuel powered boilers will be banned in new build homes from 2025, the Chancellor revealed yesterday. Philip Hammond's move spells the beginning of the end for gas boilers in Britain. The move is part of a package of reforms aimed at tackling climate change in the Spring Statement. But shadow housing secretary John Healey tweeted: 'Seriously underwhelming housing announcements from the Chancellor - debt guarantees a recycled pledge from 2017, and what sounds like a partial backtrack on the Tories' 2015 decision to scrap Labour's zero carbon homes plan... by 2025!' Advertisement Theresa May last week ordered an urgent set of ministerial meetings to discuss action against knives, but she came under fire after claiming there was 'no direct correlation between certain crimes and police numbers'. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick rejected that claim saying it was obvious 'there is some link between violent crime on the streets and police numbers' Mrs May is also considering plans for would-be knife thugs to be treated in the same way as potential jihadis. A new regime would see councils, schools and other agencies required to report youngsters considered to be at risk of being dragged into knife and gang crime. Ahead of the statement, shadow chancellor John McDonnell urged him to end Government cuts. Mr McDonnell said: 'Living standards have been squeezed by relentless cutbacks to public services, as part of a toxic Tory cocktail of callousness and incompetence. 'Philip Hammond must abandon this disastrous austerity agenda of the past nine years. 'Labour will tax the rich and giant corporations to end austerity, fund our public services properly, and rebuild our economy so it works for the many, not the few.' MPs look set to force Theresa May to go cap in hand to the EU and ask for delay to Brexit. With Parliament almost certain to demand Article 50 be postponed when it comes to a vote on Thursday, the question facing the Prime Minister and European politicians is how long that extension to our membership should be. Her begging mission is due to start place on March 21 and 22 in Brussels, when she takes part in what is currently due to be Britain's final European Council meeting as a member of the EU. If Westminster is utterly divided over Brexit, the length extension is where there is division in Brussels. Theresa May (pictured leaving 10 Downing Street today) looks set to have to go cap in hand to the EU when the European Council meets in Brussels on March 21 and seek a Brexit delay following a vote by MPs on Thursday that will likely sanction such a move Michel Barnier is among senior EU figures who have warned that Britain will only get an extension if it has a clear idea of what it would be used for Here is how the next few weeks and months could play out if MPs block a no-deal Brexit and back asking the EU for an extension The EU has said it will grant a two month extension to get the current deal through but that this should not extend beyond EU Parliament elections at the end of May. It might also extend a much longer extension to allow for a general election or second referendum - but this would be for many months or even years. Martin Selmayr, the divisive deputy of Jean-Claude Juncker is said to favour this extension. But others are said to favour a shorter extension because of the European Parliament elections on May 23. The UK remaining in the EU at that point would create a constitutional headache - would we field candidates? 'Make up your minds in London' is the EU's demand before an extension Theresa May is said to favour a three-month grace period - which by happy coincidence would allow her to surpass Gordon Brown's tenure as Prime Minister. What it currently is ruling out is giving Britain an extension without some clear indication of what it might achieve. The EU's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, told the European Parliament in Strasbourg today it was now 'the responsibility of the UK' to suggest a way forward. Another massive rebellion and implacable opposition from Labour and the DUP sunk the deal 'They have to tell us what it is they want for their future relationship,' he said. 'What will their choice be, what will be the line they will take? That is the question we need a clear answer to now. That is the question that has to be answered before a decision on a possible further extension. Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament's divisive Brexit co-ordinator added that the UK must put 'queen and country' before party politics. 'That is what we need and so I am against every extension, whether an extension of one day, one week, even 24 hours, if it's not based on a clear opinion of the House of Commons for something,' he said. 'That we know what they want. 'Please make up your minds in London, because this uncertainty cannot continue. Not for us, not for Britain and certainly not for our citizens.' He also warned that the UK remaining in the EU after May 23 meant the elections could be 'hijacked by Brexiteers' Can the meaningful vote be resurrected a third time? So Theresa May will need something concrete to take to Brussels. But what? Her Brexit plan might have been rejected by a bruising 149 votes last night (following the record-setting 230-vote defeat in January) but Theresa May still appears to believe that there is life in her withdrawal agreement. Theresa May's Brexit deal may seem to be as dead as Monty Python's Dead Parrot (above) but she reportedly may seek to try to get it past MPs again before the month is out To the rest of the world it may seem like Monty Python's Dead Parrot but there are suggestions she might make a third attempt to force it through the Commons. This could be done as early as next week, to allow her to go to the European Council with a better result than she achieved yesterday - if not a victory then a narrow defeat. But more likely is that what is being dubbed MV3 will take place after the European Council. 'Back me or get no Brexit or a Brexit you don't like' Opinion polls show that the British public will stomach a short delay to Brexit, but support drops away markedly the longer the extension is. The same is true of many MPs. The thinking is that Mrs May will go to Brussels and be told that we will have to stomach a longer extension than she or anyone else. There is also the cost of remaining in the EU - we will have to make financial contributions every day we remain a member. Brussels will demand another 13.5billion in Brexit divorce payments if Theresa May seeks an extension to Article 50, it has been claimed. EU states are said to be 'hardening' their stance against a longer Brexit process and could force Britain to stay in a customs union as the price of agreeing a delay. Delaying a third meaningful vote until after the EU Council, when we should know what the EU will offer, means she will be able to confront hardline Brexiteers and say 'back me or face a long delay, followed possibly by no Brexit at all or a Brexit you will not like'. At least eight children have died and dozens more are feared trapped after a primary school collapsed in Nigeria. The three-storey building, which housed the school on the top floor, came down around 10am in the city of Lagos while classes were going on. Emergency workers and desperate parents rushed to the scene before at least 25 children were pulled alive from the rubble. At least eight children have died and dozens more are feared trapped after a three-storey building which also housed a primary school collapsed in Nigeria A boy is pulled alive from the rubble of a school which collapsed in Lagos on Monday before being loaded into a waiting ambulance A child is given oxygen from a respirator after being pulled alive from the collapsed building Hundreds of people rushed to help dig out the remains of the building - a mixture of locals and concerned parents from around the city A boy with a badly swollen face is passed through the crowd to a waiting ambulance after being pulled from the rubble Dozens of volunteers hold out their arms as they wait to collect more survivors from the school A distraught woman near the scene of the collapse, where it is feared more than 100 children could be trapped But others were shown being carried through the crowds while limp and lifeless. It is thought more than 100 children attended the school, though it is not clear how many were in the building when it came down. In chaotic scenes, panicked parents, local residents and shocked onlookers rushed to the area as police, firemen and medics staged a massive rescue operation. 'We are still trying to find out how many are trapped inside,' said police officer Seun Ariwyo, who added that the number was probably scores. He said 'at least 20 have been brought out' but did not say whether they were alive or dead. A young man helping rescue efforts who gave his name only as Derin said 'at least 10 children' were trapped inside but 'thought to be alive.' An AFP reporter at the scene saw at least eight people pulled from the wreckage, including a small boy with blood on his face. Covered in dust, he was alive but unconscious and appeared to be badly hurt. Locals said the building was in an advanced state of disrepair and had been earmarked for demolition before it came tumbling down on Wednesday A boy is placed on to a stretcher and carried away from the rubble by dozens of volunteers A firefighter is helped by a member of the public as the search for victims goes on Locals said around ten children appeared to be trapped alive inside the building, but could give no estimate of the number killed Locals pack the streets surrounding the building, which is close to a busy market, after the structure collapsed on Wednesday One local resident who witnessed the moment of collapse said there was no warning. 'We were smoking outside when the building just collapsed,' Olamide Nuzbah said. As rescuers worked furiously to reach those inside, distraught parents begged them to find their children. 'Please, save my child, save my child!' wept one traumatised mother whose seven-year-old daughter was trapped inside, as people tried in vain to console her. School bags, toys and clothes could be seen among the piles of rubble as a bulldozer tried to clear a path through some of the wreckage to help the rescue efforts. As the day wore on, an AFP correspondent saw several children being brought out, at least one of whom appeared to be dead. Elsewhere, hundreds of local residents tried to help, passing water and helmets through to dust-covered rescuers working tirelessly to sift through the rubble, some of whom appeared to be distressed. Hundreds of people along with a fire truck and heavy lifting equipment floods the street in Lagos after the building (pictured to the right of the frame) collapsed Chaos and confusion reigned at the scene of the accident, as authorities said they had no idea how the collapse happened Men pass up a shovel to those working on the pile of rubble so they can dig children out Building collapses are common in Nigeria where substandard construction materials are often used, along with lax building regulations Emergency services and local people dig at the scene after a school building collapsed Many locals told AFP that the building, which was in an advanced state of disrepair, had been 'earmarked' for demolition by the authorities in Lagos state. Lagos, which has a population of 20 million people and serves as Nigeria's economic capital, is made up of a collection of islands. One of them is Lagos Island, a densely-populated area which is one of the city's oldest neighbourhoods. It is characterised by its Afro-Brazilian architecture, a style brought over by thousands of freed slaves who headed back home after decades working the plantations in Brazil. Despite efforts to renovate the area, a large number of buildings remain abandoned or in a state of disrepair which have been taken over by families or businesses, despite being dilapidated and unsafe. Building collapses are tragically common in Nigeria, where building regulations are routinely flouted. In September 2014, 116 people died - 84 of them South Africans - when a six-storey building collapsed in Lagos where a celebrity televangelist was preaching. An inquiry found it had structural flaws and had been built illegally. And two years later, at least 60 people were killed when the roof collapsed at a church in Uyo, the capital of Akwa Ibom state, in the east of the country. Chancellor Philip Hammond has today called for an urgent review of the digital advertising industry today following an independent review of the influence of huge technology firms including Google and Facebook. Speaking during his Spring Statement, he asked the Competition and Markets Authority to probe online advertising revenue 'as soon as possible' and added Britain would be a place where digital giants 'pay their fare share' and the public is 'protected from online harm'. The balance of digital advertising has been criticised for months. In 2017, UK the market was estimated to be worth 11.55billion, of which Google and Facebook combined earned around 54 per cent. It comes after Mr Hammond commissioned a report led by Harvard University Professor Jason Furman, former chief economic adviser to Barack Obama, who recommended a host of changes to the way individual consumers use digital platforms, including being able to transfer images and data between competing apps. The report also urges the biggest firms to agree to a new code of conduct to promote competition and avoid the need to end monopolies by breaking those companies up. It is unclear which firms would be considered 'tech giants' outside of the big six - Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix and Amazon - but it will focus on social media and aggregation websites It is understood an independent regulator would be set up to police the code and it will have powers to enforce rules, such as fines, although the exact punitive measures have not been decided yet. Prof Furman's report comes a month after the Cairncross Review into the sustainability of journalism in the UK, which also recommended its own code of conduct to prevent tech firms from having too large a share of advertising revenue. Chancellor Philip Hammond, pictured giving the Spring Statement, has called for an urgent review of the digital advertising market by the Competition and Markets Authority Meanwhile a review commissioned by Mr Hammond, pictured today left, has urged the UK Government to introduce a new code of conduct for large technology firms that promotes competition and also gives consumers more control over their data. It was led by Harvard University Professor Jason Furman, right Among the key findings were: A code of conduct agreed between Big Tech firms to give users fair access to their services and not penalise them for using alternative platforms, enforceable by fines, Allowing users to transfer pictures, message archives and other data between competing platforms, Give consumers the ability to connect with each other between different apps such as Facebook's WhatsApp to Apple's iMessage, Increase scrutiny on mergers and review past takeovers such as Facebook's acquisition of Instagram. Mr Hammond will now consider the proposals with a response due in the summer. It comes after months of criticism aimed at major tech platforms amid claims they have too much power over advertisers, are misusing personal data, not doing enough to prevent child exploitation and being used to spread misinformation to influence political campaigns. Report calls for review of digital advertising market The Furman Review has urged the Competition and Markets Authority to launch a probe into the digital advertising market amid concerns Google and Facebook have too large a share of revenue. In 2017, UK digital advertising spend was estimated to be worth 11.55 billion, of which Google and Facebook combined earned around 54 per cent. Last month's Cairncross Review said the two sites domination of the market made it hard for traditional publishers and newspapers to survive in modern journalism. The Furman Review has called for an investigation claiming domination of the market could harm businesses and consumers alike. The report said: 'A lack of effective competition in the digital advertising market may lead to harm for consumers and businesses, for example through higher prices for advertisers, higher prices for consumers for goods and services that use digital advertising if these costs are passed through.' It added: 'It is clear that the market is opaque, with limited information disclosed either at an aggregate or an individual level. 'A thorough investigation of its workings, encompassing the entire value chain, would be helpful in either identifying any valid grounds for concern about effective competition, or dispelling the mistrust that exists.' The CMA said it is considering launching a probe but claimed its ability to start an investigation was hampered by Brexit. A spokesman said: 'The CMA has also been considering whether to undertake work in the digital advertising market, as recommended today by the panels report. However, its ability to launch new projects is heavily dependent on the outcome of EU Exit negotiations.' Advertisement Calls have recently been made to break up Google to 'create a competitive environment for search engines' and concerns have also been raised over Apple and Amazon from their domination of their markets to the amount of corporation tax they pay. But Prof Furman stopped short of calling for these firms to be broken up into separate companies, claiming it would make things 'more uncertain and potentially risky'. The review urged the Chancellor to back up these proposals with legislation to ensure the new rules are followed and set an example to the rest of the world. Prof Furman said: 'These policies would create substantial benefits for UK consumers, businesses trying to start up and scale up in the UK, and greater predictability for the major digital companies. 'Effective implementation in the UK could also serve as a model for the many governments around the world wrestling with these same questions.' He added: 'The digital sector has created substantial benefits but these have come at the cost of increasing dominance of a few companies which is limiting competition and consumer choice and innovation. 'Some say this is inevitable or even desirable. I think the UK can do better. 'The Chancellor, Philip Hammond, was right to recognise there is a better way than just continuing with the status quo. 'My panel is outlining a balanced proposal to give people more control over their data, give small businesses more of a chance to enter and thrive, and create more predictability for the large digital companies. 'These recommendations will deliver an economic boost driven by UK tech start-ups and innovation that will give consumers greater choice and protection.' The review also recommends changes to merger rules so that the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is better equipped to stop mergers that are considered likely to damage future competition or consumer choice. In addition, it calls for the introduction of powers that would force large companies to open up to smaller firms by providing access to certain data, where doing so would not affect user privacy. It said if the proposals were adopted it could help boost the economy by encouraging the development of new platforms alongside established names. In response, Mr Hammond said: 'The UK leads the world in embracing technology and the opportunities it delivers for people. 'Competition is fundamental to ensuring the market works in the interest of consumers, but we know some tech giants are still accumulating too much power, preventing smaller businesses from entering the market. 'The work of Jason Furman and the expert panel is invaluable in ensuring we're at the forefront of delivering a competitive digital marketplace. What is the Cairncross Review? Prof Furman's report comes a month after the Cairncross Review into the sustainability of the Press in Britain and whether there is too much domination of advertising revenue by tech giants. The review, led by former journalist and academic Dame Frances Cairncross, also said news aggregation sites including Google and Facebook had an 'obligation' to provide users with quality news to improve levels of trust in content. It said that the power of online platforms like Google and Facebook captured the majority of online advertising revenues, making it hard for traditional publishers, such as newspapers, to compete effectively. To remedy this, the Cairncross Review also recommended a new code of conduct be created to 'level the playing field'. This code would be overseen by a regulator to ensure platforms do not impose their own advertising software on news publishers and would make firms be more transparent on their share of online advertising revenue and pledge to work together on how best to present news on the web. The review concluded that after evidence of 'market failure' in the supply of public interest news, Government intervention may be the only solution. Advertisement 'I will carefully examine the proposals put forward by the panel before responding later this year, setting out how the Government will implement the changes needed to ensure our digital markets are competitive and consumers get the level of choice they deserve.' Damian Collins MP, chairman of the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) select committee also backed calls for tighter regulation. 'I welcome the publication of Professor Furman and his expert panel's report on unlocking digital competition. 'Its central conclusions that digital markets only work well if they are supported with strong pro-competition policies, corroborates a number of the findings of my committee's report into disinformation and 'fake news' published in February,' he said. 'It is clear that a strong code of ethics is needed to regulate online platforms, and I agree with the report's conclusion that the proposed code of competitive conduct is complementary with the code of ethics suggested by my committee. 'We welcome the measures put forward to tackle anti-competitive practices and bullying tactics by market leaders. 'This comes at a critical moment ahead of the beginnings of regulation from Government to rein in the powers of the tech companies. 'I agree with the report that common data standards, including around the treatment of inferred data, should be set. 'My committee was concerned by the treatment of inferred data by large tech companies such as Facebook, and it is essential that the Government acts to protect consumers. 'The report is right to highlight that United Kingdom has the opportunity to lead by example in the area of digital regulation. Mr Hammond, pictured in Downing Street today ahead of the Spring Statement, welcomed the report and said he would review the recommendations before deciding whether to implement changes in the UK later this year 'With a history of fair and robust regulation, and with the largest tech sector in Europe, the UK is uniquely placed to set world-leading standards in the digital arena. 'Through the formation of the International Grand Committee it has already been demonstrated that other nations are ready to work with us to tackle the plethora of challenges presented by social media platforms.' Later this month, a government white paper on online harms is expected to be published, which is likely to include some proposals for new regulation on social media platforms and internet companies. What is the new code of conduct? The Furman report has suggested a new code of conduct to be agreed between major tech firms. It is currently unknown which firms would be subject to the code, how it would be enforced or what punitive measures would be. But the principles have been laid out in the report and, if approved, businesses would have to: Ensure users have access to platforms on a fair, consistent and transparent basis, Be provided with rankings and reviews of apps on a fair, consistent and transparent basis Be not unfairly restricted from, or penalised for, using alternative platforms. Advertisement Prof Furman's report comes a month after the Cairncross Review into the sustainability of the Press in Britain and whether there is too much domination of advertising revenue by tech giants. The review, led by former journalist and academic Dame Frances Cairncross, also said news aggregation sites including Google and Facebook had an 'obligation' to provide users with quality news to improve levels of trust in content. It said that the power of online platforms like Google and Facebook captured the majority of online advertising revenues, making it hard for traditional publishers, such as newspapers, to compete effectively. To remedy this, the Cairncross Review also recommended a new code of conduct be created to 'level the playing field'. This code would be overseen by a regulator to ensure platforms do not impose their own advertising software on news publishers and would make firms be more transparent on their share of online advertising revenue and pledge to work together on how best to present news on the web. The review concluded that after evidence of 'market failure' in the supply of public interest news, Government intervention may be the only solution. It also recommended the creation of a new institute of public interest news, along the lines of the Arts Council, to channel a combination of public and private finance into those parts of the industry deemed most worthy of support. Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright welcomed the review's findings, saying that while some could be acted on immediately, others would require 'further careful consideration' with interested parties on the way forward. Jack Ralph (pictured) is on trial charged with murder and attempted murder A pensioner broke down in tears as he told police of the moment his next-door neighbour 'went mad' and stabbed his wife and daughter to death in their home. David Harris recalled how Jack Ralph was armed with a butcher knife as he forced his way through the back door of their house at 7.30am on September 29. Nine hours earlier, the former chef, 28, had allegedly Googled 'How long for murder' on his phone. He stabbed Mr Harris, 76, four times in the neck, back, ear and arm as the pensioner tried to fight him off with a rolling pin, Maidstone Crown Court heard. Mr Harris's 55-year-old daughter Sharon suffered a fatal chest wound while his 78-year-old wife Margaret was fatally stabbed three times in her neck. She had been in bed and came downstairs in her nightdress at the sound of the commotion at the back door. Despite his own life-threatening wounds, Mr Harris was able to dial 999. Paramedics found him lying on his back in his living room, clutching his hand to his neck. Margaret and Sharon were both laying in the hallway of the property in Hadlow, Kent. They were pronounced dead at the scene. Mr Harris's neck wound to a major artery came within 1mm of proving fatal and required surgery. He also suffered a heart attack, the court was told. In a police interview three weeks later, he told police he and his daughter had tried to 'hold off' Ralph as he pushed his way in, lashing out with the 8-inch blade. 'No words were spoken. He just kept pushing at the door to get at us. I had no idea what his intention was apart from he was coming at us with a knife,' said Mr Harris. The court heard Ralph, who also worked as a labourer, had lived next door with his mother for about 18 years. He had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in December 2017 and was under non-statutory care of the local community mental health. David Harris recalled how Ralph was armed with a butcher knife as he forced his way through the back door of their house at 7.30am on September 29 He had also been prescribed anti-psychotic medication and had taken his last dose just half an hour before attacking the Harris family. In the interview, Mr Harris said he was surprised to see Ralph at his door that morning but they chatted for about five minutes on the doorstep. The pensioner described Ralph as staring at him throughout, with no change in his demeanour. It was when Mr Harris said he 'had to go' that Ralph pulled the blade from behind his back and 'came at him', striking him in the neck. Mr Harris told police: 'I have tried to slam the door but didn't have any strength left. I managed to get back inside the inner door with my daughter. 'Then my wife came down the stairs wondering what the commotion was. He just went mad by the sounds of it.' 'I was surprised to see him....I was standing partially to the side of the door. I wondered what he wanted. He was outside and I was inside,' continued Mr Harris. 'He just stood there, basically staring at me. I thought I don't know what you are doing, Jack, what you want. He just stood there, staring. Ralph stabbed Mr Harris, 76, four times in the neck, back, ear and arm as the pensioner tried to fight him off with a rolling pin inside his home (pictured) 'I didn't know what he wanted or what he was going to do. He just stood there staring, talking. He was just asking how we were and everything.' However, Mr Harris told police that Ralph said nothing as he carried out his knife attack. 'Not a word was said at all. He just kept completely quiet. No words were spoken. He just kept pushing at the door to get at us. 'I had no idea what his intention was apart from he was coming at us with a knife. I didn't know what he was going to do or anything,' he said. 'Margaret was upstairs in bed but heard the commotion and so came downstairs. I don't know if she spoke to him. I can't recall anything like that. 'With the amount of blood I was losing, it was literally gushing out of my neck. I made a dash to the phone and called emergency services before I passed out. What happened then I don't know.' Mr Harris ran to fetch a rolling pin to fight Ralph off but he continued to lash out with the knife as the pensioner retreated into his living room. He could not say how his wife and daughter suffered their injuries. He began to cry as he explained: 'I was collapsed at the phone. 'I don't know what happened to them. I never saw what happened to them unfortunately.' In his 999 call, Mr Harris was able to name their attacker and Ralph was arrested at his home. Police found him sitting on his sofa with his arms raised above his head. He told them he suffered from schizophrenia but said he was 'feeling fine'. The court heard officers described him as calm and compliant, and said he made 'small talk' once in custody He asked for, and was allowed, two calls - one to his car insurance and mobile phone companies to cancel his policy and contract. Bodyworn camera footage of his arrest and CCTV footage in the holding cell and custody area of Tonbridge police station was also played to the jury. He later told officers he was 'in full regret' but described being 'in a blind rage' when he attacked his neighbours. Ralph also said he was 'a strong guy', fully trained in Brazilian Jujitsu, but had 'blacked out', adding: 'I don't know what came over me.' Ralph denies two charges of murder and one of attempted murder. The jury of seven women and five men was told he does not deny killing Margaret Harris and Sharon Harris, or stabbing Mr Harris. But they will have to consider the issue of insanity. Prosecutor Philip Bennetts QC said four psychiatrists all agreed Ralph was suffering from schizophrenia at the time and his responsibility was diminished. But he said they disagreed whether he was so affected by his mental health condition he did not know what he was doing was wrong. Mr Harris told police there had been no difficulties between his family and Ralph, and that everything leading up to the attack had been 'completely normal'. Asked why Ralph would do this to them, Mr Harris replied: 'I don't know.' Police found Ralph's blood-stained hoody in his room, and three knives on the kitchen worktop, one of which had been used to carry out the stabbings. A chip was missing from the blade. Ralph said he kept his knives under his bed but had taken them out that morning. When interviewed, he claimed he had been involved in 'a slight altercation' the previous evening with Margaret and David, and agreed he had gone to their house that morning as a result. Ralph claimed Mrs Harris did not like him smoking cannabis and he had bought her a gift to apologise. He also describe a letter he had written seven months earlier to say sorry for snapping at the family. Police found the note on his toaster. It read: 'I'm sorry I said nasty things to your mum. I was tired and confused. I was really out of order. 'I'm sorry, I'm really sorry. Please find it in your hearts to forgive me. You are amazing neighbours. You deserve better than I have been to you.' The trial continues. Advertisement Devastated relatives have arrived at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines crash as investigations continue into the cause of the disaster. Grieving friends and family members wept while some had to be held back as they gathered at the crash site about 40 miles from Addis Ababa. At one point, armed guards appeared to block a US family from advancing towards the scene of the disaster as they tried to leave flowers for a female relative. At least eight Americans were killed in the accident on Sunday. Some mourners placed flowers, cards and photos under a floral arch installed as a tribute to the dead, who came from 35 countries. Others simply stood in silence. Nine Britons were killed in the crash and ambassador Alastair McPhail was among those who made the journey to the scene today, insisting: 'We owe it to the families to understand what happened.' The accident, six minutes after take-off on Sunday, claimed the lives of 157 people with eyewitnesses saying it appeared as though the plane had slipped right into the earth. No bodies will be recovered from the scene because only fragmented remains survived the impact, an airline spokesman said. Officials said this morning that the black box from the doomed jet will be sent overseas for analysis. Ethiopian Airlines said it has 'a range of options' for the data and voice records of the flight's last moments. Multiple nations, including European Union members, have suspended the 737 Max in the wake of the crash. This afternoon, Canada become the latest country to close airspace to the aircraft. Devastated relatives have arrived at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines crash as investigations continue into the cause of the disaster Grieving friends and family members broke down in tears while some had to be held back (pictured) as they gathered at the crash site 40 miles from Addis Ababa Harrowing: Armed Ethiopian police try to block an American family from advancing any further as they lay flowers for a loved-one at the crash site An American family lays flowers today for a female relative who died in the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash The accident, six minutes after take-off on Sunday, claimed the lives of 157 people and sparked the grounding of the jet model involved - Boeing's 737 Max 8 - around much of the world, including the entire European Union Meanwhile, the boss of Norwegian has gone on camera to vow his airline will present Boeing with a bill for grounded 737 Max 8 jets. CEO Bjrn Kjos told customers via Twitter the company's financial situation will not be affected by the parked flights. He said: 'Many have asked questions about how this will affect our financial situation. 'It is quite obvious that we will not take the costs related to the new aircraft that we have to park, temporarily. We will send this bill to those who produce this aircraft.' It comes amid claims a Boeing software update to fix a suspected nosedive problem in its 737 Max 8 jets was delayed by the US government shutdown. The safety fixes were reportedly slated for announcement as early as January in the wake of October's Lion Air disaster in Indonesia which claimed 189 lives. But Boeing has now said its updates will happen 'in the coming weeks.' There is no evidence of a link between the two disasters, and investigations into Sunday's crash are continuing. The planned updates dragged amid engineering and regulatory complications while 'consideration of the fixes was suspended' during the 35-day partial government shutdown in America, industry and government officials told the Wall Street Journal. It comes as Norwegian Air said it will seek compensation from Boeing for lost revenue and extra costs after grounding its 737 Max 8 aircraft. Industry sources have said the firm faces big claims after the Ethiopian Airlines crash. Family members hug each other at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday No bodies will be recovered from the site where Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crashed, the airline's spokesman said on Wednesday, because only fragmented remains survived the impact. Families of victims are pictured at the scene today A Chinese man sinks to his knees today as he joins other grieving relatives at the site of the Ethiopian Airlines disaster on Sunday Some knelt and broke down in tears at the scene as they gathered at the spot where the plane crashed down on Sunday Workers walk past flowers laid at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday A grieving relative who lost his wife in the crash is helped by a member of security forces and others at the scene Villagers from Hama Quntushele village weep as relatives of the victims of the Sunday plane crash visit the crash site of the Ethiopian Airlines operated Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, in the Oromia region Family members of the victims of the Sunday plane crash weep as they visit the crash site of the Ethiopian Airlines operated Boeing 737 MAX aircraft Chinese relatives of victims who died in the crash visit and grieve at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed Dawit Gebremichael, brother of crash victim air hostess Sara Gebremichael, 38, speaks to the press in Addis Ababa following the crash which killed 157 people on board This morning, Egypt, Lebanon and Kosovo added to the growing list of nations that have barred the Max 8 from their airspace. America's Federal Aviatoin Administration continues to back the plane's airworthiness - but more than 40 countries including the entire European Union have suspended flights by the plane. The European Aviation Safety Agency said that 'at this early stage' of the most recent investigation, 'it cannot be excluded that similar causes may have contributed to both events.' While defending the Max as safe, the company has promised to upgrade some flight-control software 'in the coming weeks.' Boeing began working on the changes shortly after the Lion Air crash. It is tweaking a system designed to prevent an aerodynamic stall if sensors detect that the plane's nose is pointed too high and its speed is too slow. Officials at Lion Air in Indonesia said sensors on their plane produced erroneous information on its last four flights, triggering an automatic nose-down command which the pilots were unable to overcome. The plane plunged into the sea. The still unexplained crash, which happened just after take-off from Addis Ababa, followed another disaster involving a Boeing 737 MAX in Indonesia five months ago that killed 189 people Ethiopia Airlines spokesman Asrat Begashaw told Reuters it was still unclear what happened on Sunday, but its pilot had reported control issues - as opposed to external factors such as birds Ethiopia Airlines spokesman Asrat Begashaw told Reuters it was still unclear what happened on Sunday, but its pilot had reported control issues - as opposed to external factors such as birds Multiple nations, including the European Union, have suspended the 737 MAX, grounding about two-thirds of the 371 jets of that make in operation around the world, according to Reuters calculations. The US has held out while Boeing affirmed its 'full confidence' in the model. Flight tracking maps show how the plane is still operating over North America Q&A: Britain's Boeing 737 Max ban What's happened? The Civil Aviation Authority has banned all Boeing 737 Max aircraft from landing or departing in Britain, or flying through UK airspace. Many nations have done the same. Will this affect me? It is most likely to if you booked a flight with TUI or Norwegian. Check with the airline if you are due to fly on a Boeing 737 Max. Will my flight be axed? Norwegian does not have enough replacement planes and warned of 'temporary delays and cancellations'. TUI predicts a 'small number of short delays' and said customers will 'travel as planned on other aircraft'. What are my rights? Those whose flights are axed are unlikely to be compensated if airlines cite 'extraordinary circumstances'. But they may be entitled to a refund or rerouting and meals, refreshments, hotel accommodation or transfers. When will the ban end? The US has told Boeing to install a software fix by April, which could satisfy safety authorities. Advertisement A Boeing spokesman said once updated software is installed, the system will rely on data from more than one sensor to trigger a nose-down command. Also, the system won't repeatedly push the nose down, and it will reduce the magnitude of the change, he said. There will also be more training for pilots. According to a Wall Street Journal report in February, a month before the Ethiopian Airlines disaster, work on the fixes dragged on months longer than anticipated following the Lion Air crash. Sources familiar with the situation told the newspaper reasons for the delays included differences of opinion among some federal and company safety experts over how extensive the alterations needed to be. Discussions included whether to add extra pilot training and cockpit alerts to the package of changes, one of the sources claimed. It was also reported that consideration of the changes was suspended while the 35-day partial government shutdown took place. No U.S. airlines have grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8 models that they fly, but at least one group representing flight attendants at a major carrier has said it does not want to put its members on the plane until further investigations are completed. After the second deadly crash involving the model in five months, several airlines and countries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East have grounded it or banned it from their airspace. Norwegian Air said on Wednesday it will seek compensation from Boeing for lost revenue and extra costs after grounding its fleet of 737 MAX 8 aircraft in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash. 'We expect Boeing to take this bill,' Norwegian said in an emailed statement to Reuters. The Oslo-based airline has 18 'MAX' passenger jets in its 163-aircraft fleet. European regulators on Tuesday grounded the aircraft following Sunday's crash of a similar plane in Ethiopia, which killed 157 people and was the second crash involving that type of plane since October. Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg told employees on Monday that he was confident in the safety of the 737 MAX in an email to employees which was seen by Reuters. Industry sources, however, said the planemaker faces big claims after the crash. Meanwhile, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which represents more than 26,000 flight attendants at American Airlines, called on the carrier's CEO Doug Parker to 'strongly consider grounding these planes until an investigation can be performed.' The group said flight attendants will not be forced to fly if they feel unsafe. Brian Parrish, a spokesman for Southwest Airlines which flies 34 Max 8s, said the carrier remains confident about the plane's safety. American Airlines Group, which flies 24 of the planes, said it has full confidence in the model. Pressure is mounting on Boeing after more airlines and countries grounded their fleets of 737 Max 8 jets in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines disaster. Pictured: Emergency crews at the scene of the crash Rescuers work at the crash site of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 during the continuing recovery efforts in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Families struggle to contain their grief after the visit the crash site of the Ethopian jet which crashed at the Hama Quntushele village in the Oromia region A man breaks down as he lights incense with his family at the crash site of the Ethiopian Airlines operated Boeing 737 MAX aircraft But the FAA is facing mounting criticism for backing the Max 8's airworthiness. The rest of the world typically takes it cues from the FAA, long considered the world's gold standard for aircraft safety. Yet other aviation safety regulators, including the European Union, China, Australia and the United Kingdom, have decided not to wait for the FAA to act. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said in a statement Tuesday that he's concerned that international aviation regulators are providing more certainty to the flying public than the FAA. 'In the coming days, it is absolutely critical that we get answers as to what caused the devastating crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 and whether there is any connection to what caused the Lion Air accident just five months ago,' DeFazio said. The FAA has increasingly become cozy with airplane manufacturers and airlines when it should be more pro-active in safety, said Bill McGee, aviation adviser for Consumer Reports. The magazine and website on Tuesday called on airlines and the FAA to ground the 737 Max planes until an investigation into the cause of the Ethiopian crash is completed to see if it's related to the Lion Air crash in October. Pictures have emerged showing the scale of the crash site from above. Diggers have been excavating the site in a bid to locate bodies The disaster was the second deadly incident involving the new model of Boeing passenger jet in less than five months, prompting concern over its safety The graphic shows how the plane's vertical speed fluctuated in the minute before it crashed near Addis Ababa airport 'They have not presented any evidence that the problems that we've seen with these two crashes are not problems that could potentially exist here in the U.S.,' McGee said. 'Increasingly the FAA is relying more and more on what the industry calls electronic surveillance,' added McGee, who has written about aviation for nearly two decades. 'Not going out and kicking the tires, seeing the work being done, making sure it's being done properly.' Former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood also called for the U.S. to ground the 737 Max, just as his agency halted flights of another Boeing plane six years ago because of safety concerns. 'These planes need to be inspected before people get on them,' LaHood said Tuesday. 'The flying public expects somebody in the government to look after safety, and that's DOT's responsibility.' LaHood was Department of Transportation secretary in 2013 when the department grounded the Boeing 787 because of overheating lithium-ion battery packs. The planes were idled for less than a month, until Boeing crafted new fire-resistant compartments around the batteries. LaHood said current Secretary Elaine Chao should do the same thing with the Max 8, even if it means overruling the FAA, which has taken no action in the face of the dozens of other countries banning the plane from their skies. 'The secretary has the authority to suspend these planes' and require inspections by both FAA and Boeing personnel, he said. 'She has the authority to do it no matter what the FAA thinks.' But veteran accident investigators defended the FAA, which has said there's no data to link the two crashes. 'I don't see the facts to justify what they've done,' John Goglia, an independent safety consultant and former member of the National Transportation Safety Board, said of the moves by other countries to stop the Max 8 from flying. 'If they have facts, I wish they would share them with the rest of the world so we can protect the air-traveling public.' The FAA said it was reviewing all available data, and so far had found no basis to ground the planes. John Cox, president and CEO of the aviation consultancy Safety Operating Systems, said countries that have grounded the Max 8 may have linked the Ethiopian and Indonesian crashes even though investigators had yet to analyze the Ethiopian plane's black boxes. 'The FAA is on solid ground so far,' said Cox, a former airline pilot and accident investigator. 'But politics may overwhelm them if enough members get together and demand the planes be grounded.' Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Dianne Feinstein of California already have urged FAA to do just that, signaling that the agency may soon face escalating pressure from Capitol Hill. 'My fear is that the FAA is simply trying to save face and avoid acknowledging the safety defect that they failed to find when they certified the plane's safety,' said Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. Air safety regulators in at least 40 countries, including the European Union, have either grounded Boeing 737 Max jets or banned them from their airspace after Sunday's deadly crash in Ethiopia. In addition, at least 10 airlines worldwide have stopped flying the planes. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency, which covers 32 countries, announced Tuesday that it would ban the planes from flying in its airspace. Other countries that have either grounded the planes or temporarily banned them include China, the United Kingdom, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Oman, Malaysia and Australia. Airlines that have stopped using the planes include Gol Airlines of Brazil, Cayman Airways, Ethiopian Airways, Jet Airways of India, Aeromexico, Norwegian Air Shuttle, Turkish Airlines, Eastar Jet of South Korea, Smartwings of the Czech Republic and LOT of Poland. Sandy Morris, an aerospace analyst at Jefferies in London, called the string of bans on the Boeing Max jets unprecedented. 'It seems like a rebellion against the FAA,' Morris said. An adopted daughter who brutally murdered her mother tried to cover her tracks with a chilling triple-0 call, claiming intruders broke in and attacked her mother. Teaching student Simona Zafirovska, then 20, made the frantic call just hours she bludgeoned Radica Zafirovska, 56, to death with a wooden stake The Gap in Brisbane's inner northwest on October 28, 2016. The details of that call have been made public for the first time after Zafirovska, now, 22, was given a life sentence in the Brisbane Supreme Court on Wednesday. Simona Zafirovska, 22, (pictured in a forensic jumpsuit) was sentenced to life behind bars on Wednesday for murdering her mother The woman, who was adopted as a child, used a wooden stake (pictured) to beat her mother to death as she slept. She was beaten so severely that her brain was exposed 'There's somebody in my house,' Simona whispered down the phone line to a triple-0 operator. 'I can hear them and the dogs have been barking.' When asked by the operator what she can see or hear she replied: 'Footsteps on the wooden, from the wooden floors.' During the 4.55 minute call, Zafirovska then told the operator she was hiding in her bedroom and wasn't sure if the intruders were still there. Radica Zafirovska died from 26 severe injuries, including skull fractures and brain bleeding The murder weapon, a wooden plank pictured above, was found in Zafirovska's bedroom 'But I can still hear something,' she whispered. 'I can hear someone speaking.' She then admitted she was too scared to leave her room. 'OK, don't talk unless you have to,' the operator said. The phone call was described as an elaborate ruse during sentencing. 'You maintained that ruse in your triple-zero call when you pretended falsely that there were intruders in the house,' Justice Ann Lyons said. 'You then falsely caused a disturbance in the house to make it look as though there were intruders in the house. By the verdict it's clear the jury has not accepted that that was, in fact, the case.' The jury reached an unanimous verdict on Wednesday after a day of deliberations. The court heard on Wednesday that Zafirovska only discovered she wasn't Radica's biological daughter after the murder, when police tested the pair's DNA to try and track down the killer, The Courier Mail reported. Radica adopted Zafirovska as a young child in Macedonia before they moved to Australia. Neighbours told the jury earlier during the trial they heard no dogs barking and didn't see anyone else at the home that morning. Prosecutors told the court Zafirovska bludgeoned her mother to death with a piece of artificial wood later found in the accused's bedroom. Zafirovska (pictured in a forensic jumpsuit) made a chilling phone call to triple-zero just hours after she brutally murdered her mother in their Brisbane home in 2016 Radica was remembered as a loving person as Zafirovska's sentence was handed down. Throughout the trial, her friends testified 'what a loving person she was and how fond of you (Zafirovska) she was, how much she loved you, how generous she was to you', Justice Lyons noted. Zafirovska even told police how Radica had only 'given her good and never bad', the trial heard. Zafirovska only learnt she wasn't Radica's biological daughter after the murder when police tested the pair's DNA. Pictured are her fingernails But Radica died with 26 severe injuries, including skull fractures and brain bleeding. '(It) indicates the force with which you killed your mother,' Justice Lyons said. 'She was horribly, horribly injured.' Zafirovska pleaded not guilty at the start of her lengthy trial last month before the jury found her guilty on Wednesday. She has been sentenced to life in jail with a non-parole period of 20 years. With time already served, she will be eligible for release in November 2035. Simona Zafirovska is pictured during her arrest in 2016 Zafirovska will be eligible for release in November 2035. Pictured is the crime scene Zafirovska was motionless, sobbing and gasps were heard in the near-full public gallery when the verdict was read out. 'We'll miss her terribly,' a family victim impact statement read. 'She was a wonderful person and she didn't deserve this. 'She didn't deserve to lose her life in such a horrific way. She was a very positive person full of life. Zafirovska's solicitor confirmed they had lodged an appeal. Boris Johnson has sparked fury by claiming millions of pounds of police funding is being 'spaffed up the wall' investigating allegations of historic abuse. The former Cabinet minister and favourite to succeed Theresa May as Tory leader made the crude reference as he suggested 'an awful lot of police time' is being spent looking at 'historic offences and all this malarkey'. His comments sparked a storm of criticism on Twitter, with former CPS chief prosecutor Nazir Afzal tweeting: 'Boris Johnson thinks spending money on delivering justice to victims of child sexual abuse is wasted. 'Tell that to those whose lives were devastated by abusers. Tell that Frances Andrade who took her own life 30 yrs after the abuse she lived with every day.' Speaking on LBC this morning, (right) Boris Johnson suggested 'an awful lot of police time' is being spent looking at 'historic offences and all this malarkey'. He is pictured on the left on his bike after leaving the LBC studios Mr Johnson's comments prompted a storm of outrage on Twitter, with screenwriter Adil Ray saying they were 'disrespectful to victims of all abuse' In an LBC interview, Mr Johnson said people 'want to see officers on the streets', and he backed increased use of stop-and-search tactics as a way to tackle knife crime. After being asked whether police cuts had contributed to the problems on London's streets, he replied: 'Keeping numbers high on the streets is certainly important. But the question is where you spend the money and where you deploy the officers. 'One comment I would make is that I think an awful lot of the money, an awful lot of police time, now goes into these historic offences and all this malarkey - 60 million I saw was being spaffed up the wall on some investigation into historic child abuse and all this kind of thing. 'What on earth is that going to do to protect the public now? What the people want is to see officers out on the streets doing what they signed up to do.' His comments sparked an angry reaction, with one critic describing them as an 'insult to every survivor of child sex abuse'. Katie Russell, from Rape Crisis, said: 'Both the suggestion that investigating these devastating crimes is a waste of resources, and the highly inappropriate use of language, are deeply insensitive and offensive towards the hundreds of thousands of people impacted by sexual violence and abuse living in this country.' The NSPCC said: 'Bringing child abuse perpetrators to justice is not a 'malarkey' and such crass language is an affront to victims who have suffered in silence for decades. 'Investigation of historic allegations is an important part of creating a culture where we can talk more openly about abuse. 'These investigations will also help us all to learn lessons so that as a society we do not repeat the mistakes of the past.' The charities' comments were echoed on Twitter, where feminist activist Sophie Walker said: 'This is horrible. A punch in the stomach to anyone who has experienced abuse. 'What good to investigate such 'malarkey?' Perhaps to show that our society cares about its most vulnerable and really wants to end violence against them.' And screenwriter Adil Ray said: 'Johnson thinks people don't care because he doesn't care, thinks he's funny & smart but in fact he's vulgar and unbelievably out of touch. How disrespectful to victims of all abuse.' The comments were made hours after Cardinal George Pell was sentenced in Australia to six years in jail for child sex offences. He is seen outside court on July 26, 2017 Several Labour MPs also weighed in with their criticism. John Mann said: 'Boris Johnson says investigating child abuse was a waste of money. Try telling that to my constituent whose rapist got 19 years after we pressured for the case to be reopened.' Ian Lavery MP, the party's chairman, added: 'These disgusting comments are an insult to every survivor of child sex abuse. 'If Boris Johnson has even a little bit of decency he will now apologise to the victims and families of those who have suffered.' The comments came hours after Cardinal George Pell was sentenced in Australia to six years in jail for child sex offences. Pell was convicted of sexually assaulting two 13-year-old choirboys in 1996, becoming the most senior Catholic to be convicted of abusing children. It also comes as the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which was set up after Jimmy Savile was exposed as a serial paedophile, continues a three-week probe into allegations involving politicians. Earlier this week, MI5 expressed its 'deep regret' that an allegation of possible child sex abuse by a Tory MP in the 1960s was not passed to police. A member of the security service, giving evidence anonymously, said the report on the late Chester MP Peter Morrison was looked at from a 'narrow security-related view'. A 1986 letter from MI5 to the Cabinet Office read to the Westminster strand of the inquiry, which is sitting for its second week, referred to a rumour that Mr Morrison had a 'penchant for small boys'. Peter Kaiser was crowned the winner of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on Wednesday, throwing his arms over his head and pumping his fists in the air as he became the first Alaskan native to win the iconic prize in nine-years. Kaiser, 31, crossed the finish line in Nome after beating back a challenge from the defending champion, Norwegian musher Joar Ulsom. Ulsom was around 40 minutes being Kaiser going into the last 77 miles of the race, but he made up good ground to bring the race to one of the closest finishes in Iditarod history. Despite a valiant effort, Ulsom placed second, crossing the line 12 minutes after Kaiser, just as he was having his picture taken on the winner's podium. Peter Kaiser poses with his lead dogs, Morrow (left) and Lucy (right) on Wednesday, March 13, in Nome, Alaska Kaiser (pictured above on Sunday) has attempted the race 10 times before. He pipped last year's winner, Joar Ulsom, to the post by 12 minutes Kaiser's finished the 1000-mile race in nine days, 12 hours, 39 minutes and six seconds, 39 minutes behind Ulsom's time last year. Kaiser greeted Ulsom under the finish line and shook his friend's hand. It's his first Iditarod victory after nine previous attempts. He said he wasn't sure what made everything come together this year for him. 'Just years of knowledge gained and trying to put it all together to have a better race, better dog team this year, every little detail coming into play,' he said in a post-victory interview from the finish line. Crowds cheered and clapped as Kaiser came off the Bering Sea ice and mushed down Nome's main street with a police escort to the famed burled arch finish line. His wife and children greeted him, hugging him at the conclusion of the race, which began March 3 north of Anchorage. Kaiser, who is Yupik, is from the southwest Alaska community of Bethel. A large contingent of Bethel residents flew to Nome to witness his victory. Alaska Native dancers and drummers performed near the finish line as they waited for Kaiser to arrive, after 3 am local time. 'I've always said that I'm very fortunate to have the support system I have, the whole community of Bethel, and the whole Kuskokwim River and all of western Alaska,' he said. Kaiser called the support shown 'extremely humbling', saying it motives him every time to perform at the top of his game. 'This is just awesome,' he added. Kaiser will receive $50,000 and a new pickup truck for claiming first prize. Kaiser was joined at the finish line by his wife and two children The Alaskan musher was presented with a $50,000 check and the keys to the new car upon his first-place finish on Wednesday Only four other Alaska Native mushers have won the race, including John Baker, an Inupiaq from Kotzebue, in 2011. This year's race was marked by the stunning collapse of Frenchman Nicolas Petit, who was seemingly headed for victory as late as Monday. Kaiser became the first Alaskan to win the competition since John Baker, in 2011 A native of France living in Alaska, Petit had a five-hour lead and was cruising until his dog team stopped running between the Shaktoolik and Koyuk checkpoints. Petit said one dog was picking on another during a rest break, and he yelled at the dog to knock it off. At that point, the entire team refused to run. He was forced to withdraw, and the dog team had to be taken back to the previous checkpoint by snowmobile. Petit's downfall came near the same spot on the Bering Sea coast where he surrendered the lead in the 2018 race after getting lost in a blizzard. He recovered in time to finish second last year. Fifty-two mushers began the race in Willow. Petit was among 10 racers who withdrew during the race. The 46th annual race took place over two mountain ranges, along the frozen Yukon River and then across the treacherous, wind-swept Bering Sea coast to the finish line in Nome. Peter Kaiser's approaches the finish line just after 3 am local time on Wednesday The competition once again came under fire from animal rights organisation PETA, who claimed Kaiser's and other racers' dogs are 'sick, exhausted or injured' This year's race came during a bruising two-year stretch for the Iditarod that included a dog doping scandal and the loss of national sponsors amid protests by animal rights activists. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is the biggest critic of the race. 'Hundreds of dogs (including six from Pete Kaiser's team) were so sick, exhausted, or injured that they were pulled from the race, forcing the ones remaining to work even harder, struggling on in what is a grueling test - not of human endurance but of a dog's ability to survive extreme cruelty,' PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman said in a statement on Wednesday. 'As the Iditarod draws to a close, PETA makes the point that the mushers' prize money comes at the expense of exhausted dogs' broken bones, bruised paws, and bloody ulcers and says that the race must end,' Reiman said. A baby orangutan starved to death after his mother was shot with 74 airgun pellets in a 'savage attack' that left her too badly injured to feed him. Rescue workers discovered the 30-year-old primate, now given the name Hope, curled up on the forest floor in Indonesia's Aceh province on March 9. She had been repeatedly shot with metal pellets by cruel thugs in an unprovoked attack, conservationists said. Her one-month-old baby son was slumped by her side, severely dehydrated and malnourished after being unable to fend for himself. He was unable to survive. Hope receiving treatment at the veterinary clinic in North Sumatra after she was left with broken bones, lacerations and 74 pellets which had been fired into her Hope's one-month-old baby was severely malnourished and dehydrated when rescuers found them and succumbed to illness before he could be saved An x-ray taken by vets in Indonesia shows the metal pellets which had been fired into the majestic primate with an air rifle The infant succumbed to illness shortly after he was taken with his mother to a rehabilitation centre in North Sumatra province. Government officials are now hunting those behind the senseless attack, which has left the mother wounded and facing an uphill struggle to return back to the wild. Sapto Aji Prabowo, the head of the government-run Nature Conservancy Agency in Aceh on Sumatra island, said the mother orangutan had suffered broken bones, bruises and cuts to her legs. He said: 'An X-ray photo showed 74 airgun pellets spread all over its body. She was severely injured and her child eventually died of severe nutritional deficiencies and trauma. 'Truly barbaric are those people who tortured them. The orangutan is currently in the care of the BKSDA.' Orangutans are classified as a 'critically endangered' species and number around 111,000 in the wild on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, according to the World Wildlife Fund conservation group. The 30-year-old primate is being held at the rehabilitation as she continues her recovery without her newborn Air rifle bullets littered Hope's body from the top chest and head (left) down to her pelvis and legs (right) The Forestry and Environment Ministry said in a statement that she would need therapy before being released back into the wild. 'We condemn the savage attack on orangutans carried out by irresponsible people,' a spokesman said. Conservationists have said the survival of orangutans is threatened by widespread poaching and the destruction of their habitat through the logging industry. Similarities between two air disasters involving Boeing 737 Max 8 jets have shone a spotlight on an anti-stalling system used in the aircraft model. An Ethiopian Airlines Max 8 crashed on Sunday killing all 157 on board less than five months after a Lion Air plane of the same type came down in Indonesia claiming 189 lives. Both planes were fitted with the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) - an automated safety feature designed to prevent the plane from entering into a stall, or losing lift. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), while noting the similarities between the accidents, said it was too early to draw any conclusions. But the jets experienced similarly erratic steep climbs and descents and fluctuating airspeeds before crashing shortly after takeoff. Similarities between two air disasters involving Boeing 737 Max 8 jets have shone a spotlight on an anti-stalling system used in the aircraft model An Ethiopian Airlines Max 8 (pictured) crashed on Sunday killing all 157 on board less than five months after a Lion Air plane of the same type came down in Indonesia claiming 189 lives MCAS was introduced by Boeing on the 737 Max 8 because its heavier, more fuel-efficient engines changed the aerodynamic qualities of the workhorse aircraft and can cause the plane's nose to pitch up in certain conditions during manual flight. Angle of attack sensors on the aircraft tell the MCAS to automatically point the nose of the plane down if it is in danger of going into a stall. This is done through horizontal stabilizers on the plane's tail which are activated by the aircraft's flight control computer. According to Boeing, MCAS does not control the plane during normal flight but 'improves the behaviour of the airplane' during 'non-normal' situations. These could be steep turns or after takeoff when a plane is climbing with flaps up at speeds that are close to stall speed. According to the flight data recorder, the pilots of Lion Air Flight 610 struggled to control the aircraft as the automated MCAS system repeatedly pushed the plane's nose down following takeoff. The pilots of the Ethiopian Airlines plane reported similar difficulty before the aircraft plunged into the ground shortly after takeoff. A preliminary report on the Lion Air Flight 610 accident blamed it in part on a faulty angle of attack sensor that triggered the MCAS system and automatically forced the plane's nose down. Pilots flying the same Lion Air plane the previous day had managed to override the automated flight control system. A preliminary report on the Lion Air Flight 610 accident blamed it in part on a faulty angle of attack sensor that triggered the MCAS system and automatically forced the plane's nose down The pilots of the Ethiopian Airlines plane reported similar difficulty before the aircraft plunged into the ground shortly after takeoff Boeing came in for some criticism after the Lion Air crash for allegedly failing to adequately inform 737 pilots about the functioning of MCAS or provide training about the system. Following the Lion Air crash, Boeing issued a bulletin to airlines operating the 737 Max 8 advising pilots how to override the MCAS system. The US aircraft manufacturer issued a statement on Monday saying it was too early to understand the cause of the Ethiopian Airlines accident. Boeing also said it was working on software updates to the MCAS system which would be deployed across the 737 Max fleet. It said procedures already exist to 'safely handle the unlikely event of erroneous data coming from an angle of attack (AOA) sensor,' the suspected cause of the Lion Air crash. 'The pilot will always be able to override the flight control law (MCAS) using electric trim or manual trim,' the aircraft manufacturer said. A growing list of countries have grounded their 737 Max aircraft after the two deadly crashes in just five months. Boeing has described the Max series as its fastest-selling family of planes, with more than 5,000 orders placed to date from about 100 customers. But not since the 1970s - when the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 suffered successive fatal incidents - has a new model been involved in two deadly accidents in such a short period. The graphic shows how the Ethiopian Airlines plane's vertical speed fluctuated in the minute before it crashed near Addis Ababa airport Last night it emerged that pilots on at least two U.S. flights had reported that an automated system seemed to cause their Boeing 737 Max planes to tilt down suddenly. The pilots said that soon after engaging the autopilot on Boeing 737 Max 8 planes, the nose tilted down sharply. In both cases, they recovered quickly after disconnecting the autopilot. As described by the pilots, however, the problem did not appear related to the new automated anti-stall system suspected of contributing to the deadly Lion Air crash in Indonesia. The Max 8 is at the centre of a growing global ban by more than 40 countries following a second fatal crash, this time in Ethiopia, in less than five months. In the U.S., however, the Federal Aviation Administration and airlines continued to permit the planes to fly. American Airlines and Southwest Airlines operate the 737 Max 8, and United Airlines flies a slightly larger version, the Max 9. All three carriers vouched for the safety of Max aircraft on Wednesday. The pilot reports were filed last year in a data base compiled by NASA. They are voluntary safety reports and do not publicly reveal the names of pilots, the airlines or the location of the incidents. It was unclear whether the accounts led to any actions by the FAA or the pilots' airlines. In one report, an airline captain said that immediately after putting the plane on autopilot, the co-pilot called out 'Descending,' followed by an audio cockpit warning, 'Don't sink, don't sink!' Devastated relatives have arrived at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines crash as investigations continue into the cause of the disaster Grieving friends and family members broke down in tears while some had to be held back (pictured) as they gathered at the crash site 40 miles from Addis Ababa The accident, six minutes after take-off on Sunday, claimed the lives of 157 people and sparked the grounding of the jet model involved - Boeing's 737 Max 8 - around much of the world, including the entire European Union The captain immediately disconnected the autopilot and resumed climbing. 'With the concerns with the MAX 8 nose down stuff, we both thought it appropriate to bring it to your attention,' the captain wrote. 'Best guess from me is airspeed fluctuation' due to a brief weather system overwhelming the plane's automation. On another flight, the co-pilot said that seconds after engaging the autopilot, the nose pitched downward and the plane began descending at 1,200 to 1,500 feet (365 to 460 meters) per minute. As in the other flight, the plane's low-altitude-warning system issued an audio warning. The captain disconnected autopilot, and the plane began to climb. The pilots talked it over later, 'but can't think of any reason the aircraft would pitch nose down so aggressively,' the co-pilot recounted. Preliminary information released by Indonesian investigators suggests they are looking at the possible role of the Max's new automated anti-stall technology as a factor in a Lion Air crash in October shortly after takeoff from Jakarta. Data indicates that the pilots struggled with repeated nose-down commands from the plane before it crashed into the Java Sea and killed 189 people. However, that anti-stall system - MCAS - only activates if the autopilot is turned off, according to documents Boeing has shared with airlines and the FAA. 'That's not to say it's not a problem,' American Airlines pilot Dennis Tajer said of the incidents reported to NASA, 'but it is not the MCAS. The autopilot has to be off for MCAS to kick in.' A third pilot complained that Boeing had not explained changes to the plane's automation to pilots. 'I am left to wonder: what else don't I know?' the pilot wrote. 'The Flight Manual is inadequate and almost criminally insufficient.' The FAA declined to comment on the incidents that pilots reported, but said it was not aware of any verified reports of MCAS-related issues in the U.S. American Airlines spokesman Ross Feinstein said the airline has received no reports from pilots about problems with the anti-stall technology. Southwest has said the same thing. Leaders of the union representing United Airlines pilots, some of whom have flown the airline's 14 Boeing 737 Max 9 jets since last May, said the airline has tracked 23,000 hours of flights and found no performance or mechanical problems. The group, part of the Air Line Pilots Association, added, 'It is imperative that pilots refrain from interacting with the media and adding to the sensationalism surrounding these incidents.' Concern about the Max's safety seemed to be abating but returned on Sunday. Again, preliminary data appears to capture a brief and erratic flight. Investigators will analyze information from the planes so-called black boxes in hopes of understanding what caused the accident. Sea World on the Gold Coast could be banned from keeping dolphins in captivity after animal activists launched a public petition this week. World Animal Protection on Tuesday launched a petition to ban the marine park from breeding in captivity, which it claims goes against the basic tenet of conservation. Senior campaign manager for World Animal Protection Ben Pearson told 9News there's nothing about the program that supports the idea of conservation. Sea World on the Gold Coast could be banned from keeping dolphins in captivity after animal activists launched a public petition this week World Animal Protection on Tuesday launched a petition to ban the marine park from breeding dolphins in captivity, which it claims goes against the basic tenet of conservation 'We want these dolphins at Sea World to be the last generation kept captive in Queensland,' Mr Pearson said. One of the biggest issues with breeding animals in captivity is that you can't then release them into the wild, the animal activist said. He said if Sea World was rescuing injured dolphins and rehabilitating them and letting them go it would be acceptable, but breeding in captivity is not doing that. Sea World is one of only two remaining venues on the Gold Coast that keep dolphins in captivity - the other being Dolphin Marine Magic in Coffs Harbour. Mr Pearson said the venue needs to start viewing their business from a sea sanctuary point of view that focuses on rescue and rehabilitation. According to the online petition, there are currently more than 30 dolphins at Sea World, most of which were born and bred there. Given that dolphins can live up to 50 years and swim hundreds of square kilometres, it can be a very boring life for those enclosed at Sea World, the petition stated. 'Join us and call on the Queensland Government to ban breeding at Sea World, and begin work on a sea sanctuary for the dolphins who can't be released into the wild.' According to the World Animal Protection petition, there are currently more than 30 dolphins at Sea World, most of which were born and bred there But Sea World has defended its dolphin breeding program, saying the operation has a conservation key objective first and foremost. A Sea World spokesperson told the publication the company is proud of its world class facilities and the role it plays in conservation and education. 'All of the breeding at Sea World is done as part of a managed breeding program and is done naturally,' the spokesperson said. The marine park also stated the dolphins live in social groups so they have plenty of opportunity to play and interact with each other. Senior campaign manager for World Animal Protection Ben Pearson said there's nothing about breeding in captivity that supports the idea of conservation Sea World is one of only two remaining venues on the Gold Coast that keep dolphins in captivity - the other being Dolphin Marine Magic in Coffs Harbour But Mr Pearson denied Sea World's enclosures were adequate when it comes to meeting the basic needs of the animals. 'In the wild, a bottlenose would swim 100kms a day, it can dive 450 meters. They have a rich marine environment. There is no way a small concrete pool in Sea World can in any way replicate that, he said. While the petition has already amassed more than 5,500 signatures since yesterday, the Queensland government told the publication it supports Sea World. Sea World is approved to hold dolphins and breed in captivity, providing they do not exceed a certain number, Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries Mark Furner said. President Donald Trump thanked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusing to impeach him on Wednesday morning. He contended on Twitter that he's innocent of the 'high crimes and misdemeanors' the Constitution sets as the threshold for his removal, which he called it a 'minor fact' in the debate that's playing out in the Democratic Party. Besides, Trump is 'considered by many to be the President with the most successful first two years in history,' he argued. 'I greatly appreciate Nancy Pelosis statement against impeachment, but everyone must remember the minor fact that I never did anything wrong, the Economy and Unemployment are the best ever, Military and Vets are great - and many other successes!' he said. President Donald Trump thanked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusing to impeach him on Wednesday morning He contended on Twitter that he's innocent of the 'high crimes and misdemeanors' the Constitution sets as the threshold for his removal, which he called it a 'minor fact' in the debate that's playing out in the Democratic Party Trump asked moments later, 'How do you impeach a man who is considered by many to be the President with the most successful first two years in history, especially when he has done nothing wrong and impeachment is for high crimes and misdemeanors? ' The Democratic leader has said she's 'not for' beginning a process to remove Donald Trump from office, sparking a new debate among Democrats about allegations that the president may have committed crimes. Pelsoi said the issue is so 'divisive' that that 'unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan' her party should not chase impeachment. 'And he's just not worth it,' she told a news publication this week. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders subsequently argued that the impeachment push is the latest sign that Pelosi is 'starting to lose control of her party' two months into her tenure as speaker. 'I'm glad that she sees what the rest of us see, and that there's no reason, no cause for impeachment,' Sanders said in a Fox News interview on Tuesday. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders says Democrats' impeachment push is the latest sign that Nancy Pelosi is 'starting to lose control of her party' two months into her tenure as speaker House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she she's 'not for' beginning a process to remove Donald Trump from office in the face of allegations from her caucus that the president may have committed crimes She claimed Tuesday, as she briefed the press for the second time in 2019 after the White House put out its annual budget, that she was not aware of checks made out to his former lawyer after he took office that were part of hush-money scheme. Michael Cohen testified that the billionaire ordered him to pay off a woman claiming she had sex with Trump and the president covered it up while in office with checks he claimed were a legal retainer. He lost his law licence last month after pleading guilty to crimes he said he committed at the direction of the sitting president. Trump and his attorneys have claimed he that Cohen's a liar and nothing about the payment structure was illegal. He should not have copped to campaign finance violations, because the payoff was not related to the presidential election. Cohen's testimony has some Democrats chomping at the bit to remove Trump from office. Sanders contended that Democrats arguing in favor of impeachment are 'making excuses' for their embarrassing loss to Trump in the last presidential election. 'Nobody wants to see President Trump impeached because, other than Democrats in Congress who are failing who have no other message,' she said, 'and that's because our country is doing better and they know that that is hard for them to run against in 2020.' The chief Trump spokeswoman added: 'And I think they've got a very very hard uphill battle ahead of them.' She claimed Tuesday, as she briefed the press for the second time in 2019 after the White House put out its annual budget, that she was not aware of checks made out to his former lawyer after he took office that were part of hush-money scheme Sanders did the interview in studio, allowing her to evade questions on camera from reporters, except for 'Outnumbered Overtime' host Harris Faulkner. She has held a mere two briefings in 43 days, now that Democrats are in control of the lower chamber. After interviews on Fox, which she typically does from the White House lawn, the president's spokeswoman frequently takes several minutes of questions. But it's a rare occurrence that she takes questions in an official capacity from behind the White House podium. The disappearance of the press briefing has coincided with an aggressive push from Democrats for documents from the White House and the Trump organization linked to a host of alleged crimes, including payments to Cohen and accusations of inappropriate relations with the Kremlin. House Intelligence Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff said Tuesday that evidence gathered in the Stormy Daniels scandal 'militates very strongly in favor' of indicting President Trump after he leaves office. Schiff, whose powerful panel is probing any foreign influence on Trump and his associates, cited the emergence of checks that show Trump made a series of $35,000 payments to longtime lawyer Michael Cohen while in office as evidence of an illegal campaign finance scheme that would merit his being charged with a crime. He said since Cohen is heading to jail for what prosecutors said and Cohen admitted was a crime, Trump should be charged as well as the person who 'directed' the scheme. 'I think we can certainly say from the indictment in the Southern District of New York that identifies Individual 1 as having directed and coordinated a campaign fraud scheme in which the department urged that Michael Cohen be sent to jail,' Schiff told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast in Washington. 'We have a profound interest in making sure that the policy of the United States is not up for sale,' said House Intelligence chair Rep. Adam Schiff 'It's very difficult to make the argument that the person who was directed and was coordinated should go to jail, but the person who did the directing and did the coordinating should not. I don't think that's a supportable position,' Schiff argued. 'So I think that militates very strongly in favor of indicting the president when he is out of office if the southern District of New York has the evidence to prove the case against Individual 1 [who] Michael Cohen identified as the president. Schiff brought up Michael Cohen's $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels as part of a 'hush' agreement and his reimbursement by the president 'Given the documentary evidence, the cancelled checks, given the audio tapes, given the other witnesses who are cooperating with the special counsel, it certainly appears there's no shortage of evidence,' said Schiff. The former prosecutor said the feds should indict Trump after he leaves office, if they maintain that he cannot be charged until the voters oust him or his two, constitutionally-allowed terms run out. 'If the Justice Department the position that you cannot indict a sitting president, when the president is no longer sitting then I think it has to consider whether it should hold a former president to a different standard than it holds everyone else,' Schiff said making sure to state that the decision should be in the hands of career prosecutors based on the evidence they gather. At the same time, Schiff, a senior California Democrat, stood behind Pelosi's statement that she is 'not for' impeaching Trump. Schiff said without Republican buy-in, impeachment 'becomes a partisan exercise doomed to failure' Schiff made repeated reference to the Moscow tower deal pursued by Trump lawyer Michael Cohen during the campaign Schiff brought up President Trump's 'hush money payment checks, reimbursements to Michael Cohen' for payments to porn star Stormy Daniels Pelosi told the Washington Post that it was 'not worth' it to hold a vote to remove him a day prior. 'I'm not for impeachment. This is news. I'm going to give you some news right now because I haven't said this to any press person before,' Pelosi had said. She told the paper: 'Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there's something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don't think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he's just not worth it.' Schiff made the case that evidence already exists that Trump is unfit, but Democrats should not proceed with impeachment until there is Republican support for the idea. 'We have already seen deeply concerning evidence of the president's lack of fitness for office. Profound conflicts of interest may be guiding his foreign policy,' he said, 'as well as evidence of criminality on the part of the president as it pertains to the direction and coordination of an illegal campaign finance scheme.' He added, 'The president was secretly pursuing a business deal in Russia, Moscow Trump tower, through much of the campaign, concealing it form the public, seeking the Kremlin's approval to make that happen, at the same time he was espousing a different policy towards Russia, a more favorable policy towards Russia.' Democrats do not have the super majority that's necessary to toss him from office, though, the lawmaker conceded. 'The reality is that the Republican Members of Congress, with very few exceptions, have been utterly unwilling to stand up to this president in any way,' he said, pointing to Trump's emergency declaration on building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. 'In its absence, an impeachment becomes a partisan exercise doomed to failure,' he concluded. A myriad of conspiracy theories and rumours surrounded the disappearance and death of Karen Ristevski before her husband of 20 years confessed to killing her. From claims of incest within the family to sexual fantasies and a dodgy fuel gauge - the police investigation seemed to move from one bizarre storyline to the next. But two-and-a-half years of speculation came to an abrupt end on Wednesday when husband Borce, one day out from a five-week murder trial, confessed to killing her. Ristevski, who turns 55 today, will face a maximum jail sentence of 20 years after prosecutors withdrew a murder charge and he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He will spend his birthday behind bars awaiting sentencing after being ushered away in handcuffs from Victoria's Supreme Court following the shock confession. Here, Daily Mail Australia takes a look at some of the stranger theories about 47-year-old Karen's disappearance. Scroll down for video Borce Ristevski (right) admitted to killing his wife Karen (centre) on Wednesday after two years of denial Karen left Borce, saying: 'I'm going to clear my head' June 2016: Mr Ristevski told police this was the last conversation the pair ever had as his wife stormed out of their house. They had just argued over her struggling clothing business store Bella Bleu. Mr Ristevski said the last thing she ever told him was 'I'm going because I can't think straight', walking out the front door. However, his story got mixed up after he later told police she left through a different door. His family had no idea Ms Ristevski was already dead, eating dinner with her husband and being told she was 'at the store'. Mr Ristevski told his family, including daughter Sarah (right) that his wife had to 'clear her head' and was at their family store the night she had gone missing Karen's stepson claims his mother was planning to leave Borce, makes affair claims July 2016: Mr Ristevski's son from a prior relationship, Anthony Rickard, came forward as 'Karen's stepson'. He made a police statement claiming Ms Ristevski was embroiled in a feud with the rest of the family and fled. He told police that their marriage was a farce and they'd only stayed together for money and for their daughter. Mr Rickard said his stepmother was planning to leave her husband when Sarah, their daughter, turned 21. After he began being sought after by media, he offered interviews for $200,000, claiming he was in a secret relationship with his stepmother. Ms Ristevski's stepson Anthony Rickard (pictured) claimed she had fallen in love with him and fled her marriage to be with him The faulty fuel gauge August 2016: CCTV footage showed a man behind the wheel of Ms Ristevski's 2004 Mercedes Benz coupe. Initially, Mr Ristevski denied he'd driven his wife's car that day, but later admitted he had. He told police he was driving the car to test a 'faulty fuel gauge' his wife had complained of. During his drive, he said he hit a bump in the road and the gauge corrected itself, so he turned around and went home. The car really did have a faulty fuel gauge, though investigators believe he was making the trip to Mount Macedon Regional Park to dispose of his wife's body. Mr Ristevski claimed he was testing his wife's Mercedes for a fuel gauge fault when he was caught in it on CCTV footage. Pictured is police sharing the breakthrough evidence in 2017 Borce's brother claims his sister-in-law was alive and had fled the country August 2016: Mr Ristevski's brother Vasko claimed his sister-in-law was alive and well, living either in China or the United States on a fake passport. He told media he 'reckoned she's run away' because of all the 'rumours' of her disappearance. 'I don't think she'll come back,' he said. 'I reckon she's gone for good.' Channel Nine's A Current Affair captured footage of Vasko bushwalking near the grave site in the wake of her body's discovery. He ignored the camera crews when they asked him what he was doing there. Borce's brother Vasko was caught on camera snooping around the grave site by a camera crew Borce claims his wife was kidnapped by a stranger August 2016: Mr Ristevski tells his family Karen could have been abducted by a stranger during a random attack. A woman later claims she was confronted by a strange man on a footpath behind the Ristevski house. The unsolicited theory coincides with a claim Mr Ristevski had just asked to borrow money from his wife's father to settle a debt. He allegedly asked for money only days before his wife disappeared. Mr Ristevski and his daughter leave a press conference in July 2016 after they both pleaded for information on Ms Ristevski The psychic and the burnt-out restaurant December 2016: Vasko attends a burnt-out restaurant after being urged to by a psychic. The restaurant is later searched by police and ends up being only a short distance from where Ms Ristevski's body was later found. Expert claims at least two people were involved in disposing Karen's body May 2017: An FBI-trained criminal profiler was brought in by Victoria Police to assist with the investigation. He suggested there had to be at least two people involved in the disposal of Karen's body, due to the physical exertion required. Her badly decomposed body was found in a shallow grave between a pair of logs at least 50 metres from the closest place to park a car. Police believe Mr Ristevski used the family's Mercedes Benz to transport her body to Mount Macedon Regional Park, with CCTV footage capturing him driving it a short time after she was last seen. However, the profiler, who is adamant at least two people were involved, said anyone involved would have needed prior knowledge of the grave site. Ms Ristevski's body was found in a shallow grave between two logs in secluded bushland Police interrogate Borce's former girlfriends about sex December 2017: One of Mr Ristevski's former girlfriends revealed she was asked by police if he was violent towards her during sex. The anonymous partner was quizzed about his sexual fantasies and whether he'd had any violent outbursts during intercourse. A detective, who called her out of the blue, reportedly asked if he had ever hit her and whether she thought he had a temper. The inquiries were reportedly made to determine whether the Ristevski's marriage had become 'volatile'. Mr Ristevski carried the coffin carrying his wife in 2017, crying but fully aware he had killed her Borce Ristevski admitted to killing his wife two years after her remains were found in bushland. The 54-year-old Melbourne father pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of his 47-year-old wife on Wednesday, one day before he was set to stand trial for murder in Victorian Supreme Court. Prosecutors withdrew the murder charge and Ristevski entered a plea of guilty to manslaughter. The plea confirmed Ristevski had been covering up the killing for years, though he is now expected to avoid a life sentence. Jakob Calder returned to his London flat after working a night shift to find a woman wrapped in a blanket sleeping on his balcony. And out of the kindness of his heart, he decided to whip her up a home-cooked meal and a hot chocolate. Mr Calder, who is a paramedic from Melbourne, filmed the moment he found the woman snoozing as temperatures dropped to a cool 6C in London on Tuesday night. Jakob Calder (pictured) returned home to his London flat after working a night shift to find a woman wrapped in a blanket sleeping his balcony 'Do you want some scrambled eggs?' he can be heard calling out to the woman. The woman can then be heard faintly responding: 'Yes please.' 'Bit of paprika?' he asks. Moments later the lovely Aussie can be seen carrying a plate filled with two pieces of toast covered in scrambled eggs with avocado sliced on top for the woman. 'Mate you wouldn't believe it, I even had some avocado in there,' he says as he hands her the food. 'Eat your greens, keep lean.' He later brings her out a cup of hot chocolate and a banana before surprising her with a spare pillow as well. The lovely Aussie can be seen carrying a plate filled with two pieces of toast covered in scrambled eggs with avocado sliced on top for the woman. Then delivers her a cup of hot chocolate Once Mr Calder heads back inside the woman then be seen reaching for the hot chocolate before devouring the food. 'Straight for the hot choccy, you lil ripper,' Mr Calder says Once Mr Calder heads back inside the woman then be seen reaching for the hot chocolate before devouring the food. 'Straight for the hot choccy, you lil ripper,' Mr Calder says. 'I like your style.' Mr Calder then heads back outside to clear away the dishes as the woman falls back asleep. The video has been posted to his Instagram account. He told Daily Mail Australia he attends to homeless people all the time in his line of work and whenever he can, he tries give them a bit of food. 'Theyre always extremely grateful for it,' he said. 'Who knows when shes last eaten or when shes getting her next meal?' South Africa: North West healthcare facilities improve Following governments intervention in the North West to restore governance and service delivery, there has been an increased availability of medicines and functioning operating theatres in that province. Also, public employment programmes have led to more opportunities being created for the unemployed. Deputy President David Mabuza said this when fielding questions in the National Assembly on Tuesday. At its last meeting with the committee last month, the inter-ministerial task team on the North West province was commended on its work in addressing the service delivery and governance failures in the province. As national government, we are satisfied with the progress that has been recorded on the ground. This is testimony that the intervention we made was necessary to ensure that our people are not adversely impacted in accessing government services, he said. Mabuza said ever since the inter-ministerial task team invoked Section 100 (1) on the entire North West Province: Medicine availability in hospitals is at 83% (up from 67% in April 2018); Key vacant executive positions are being filled in service delivery departments such as Roads and Public Works; Four out of five operating theatres in Mahikeng Hospital are now functional; Provincial road maintenance programme has been revived, with contractors now on site in 33 roads; and Progress has been made in stabilising the finances of the province, through improving controls to prevent unauthorised expenditure which was R384.8 million during 2017/18). Mabuza said in addition, the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (the Hawks) is handling 46 cases involving theft, fraud and contraventions of the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act, 2004 in relation to government contracts in the North West. As for the rollout of Public Employment Programme, this intervention continues to play a vital role towards alleviating poverty by creating work opportunities for the poor and unemployed people in the North West province. Training and enterprise development are also implemented in sector specific programmes to enhance service delivery and beneficiary well-being, he said. He said that during the first two quarters of the 2018/2019 financial year, the Expanded Public Works Programme created 51 583 work opportunities in the North West province, which is a 33% increase from the 34 527 work opportunities created during the same period in 2017/2018. [This] shows that 17 056 more work opportunities were created in the North West province during the first two quarters of 2018/19 compared to the same period in 2017/2018. The highest percentage (69%) of work opportunities beneficiaries were women, followed by the youth. In terms of training, the EPWP created 822 training opportunities in the North West province during the first two quarters of 2018/19, which is 587 more training opportunities compared to the same period in 2017/2018, he said. SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Nearly 90 percent of the nations high school principals are contending with hostile clashes between students and a swirl of other problems that have been inflamed by the political division and heated rhetoric during Donald Trumps presidency, according to survey results released Wednesday. The report, released by the University of California-Los Angeles , paints a picture of schools deeply affected by angry confrontations between students, and by confusion and fear arising from their growing distrust of information, whether it comes from mainstream news outlets or social media.The study also shows schools struggling mightily with polarizing debates about gun safety and immigration enforcement and with the ripple effects of opioid addiction. UCLAs Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access studied 505 principals in communities that are nationally representative regionally, racially, and by family income and political party affiliation. In an online survey in the summer of 2018, the principals discussed how those five problems affected their schools during that year, and how theyd responded. Forty of the principals also participated in longer, followup interviews. Almost all of the principals in the survey said theyd experienced at least two of the five problems UCLA described. Seventy percent reported dealing with four or more. More than 30 percent are juggling all five. We Had Fists Flying One principal described the environment at his school in a politically divided county in Wisconsin. Recalling a day when some students wore hats to school showing their allegiance to President Trump, he said, a politically liberal student took offense to the Make America Great [Again] hat and the next thing you know we had fists flying in the hallway and what not. The study said: Our findings make clear that in the age of Trump, Americas high schools are greatly impacted by rising political incivility and division. The studys author, education professor John Rogers, called for schools to focus on making themselves relationship-centered and meeting students needs for support, while building social trust and understanding in their communities. But he also said that addressing the problems principals face will likely require broader educational and social policies that address fear, isolation, and distrust. The UCLA researchers examined links between principals struggles in the five key problem areas, and recent presidential voting patterns of their surrounding communities. They found that in congressional districts where the majority voted for Trump in 2016, principals were more likely to report political incivility. Linking Problems to Voting Patterns They were less likely than colleagues in anti-Trump districts to say that their students are concerned about immigrant enforcement policies. And in those districts, leaders of predominantly white high schools were the least likely group of principals to say that theyve talked with students about promoting tolerance and respect toward immigrants. Rogers said in an interview that hes not arguing that the dynamics he found in schools are the direct product of Trump and his policies. Some, such as students using bigoted remarks, is a problem thats dogged schools for decades, and others, such as mistrust of information sources and political division, have been building in society for years. But theyve been amplified by the political climate that marks the Trump presidency, Rogers said. Fear about immigration enforcement, however, is more clearly attributable to Trumps actions, he said. Deborah Temkin, the senior director for education research at Child Trends, which studies childrens well-being, said that linking problems like incivility and distrust to Trumps policiesor anything outside school wallscan divert educators focus from productive solutions. The data collection [in the UCLA study] wasnt set up to show causality to any one factor in the environment, she said. And placing external blame for whats happening can distract schools from the steps they can take to make their environments more safe. Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education history at the University of Pennsylvania, said the study demonstrates the inextricable link between schools and society first outlined by education philosopher John Dewey. Schools reflect society, and society is polarized and embittered, he said. It would be surprising if the students didnt bring that into schools. Although the results are depressing, I dont find them surprising. The UCLA research team examined how geography and racial makeup of schools affect their experience with the problems they studied. For instance, rural and small-town schools, and predominantly white schools, are more affected by problems stemming from opioid addiction, and racially mixed schools are more affected by political divisions and untrustworthy information. Here are highlights of what principals reported in the five problem areas UCLA researchers surveyed: Division, Incivility and Hostility 9 in 10 said incivility and contentiousness in the broader political environment has affected their school communities. The overwhelming majority report contentious classroom environments, hostile exchanges outside class, and demeaning remarks about peoples political viewpoints. 8 in 10 report students have made derogatory remarks about peoples race or ethnic group. 6 in 10 said students have made derogatory remarks about immigrants. 8 in 10 said theyve disciplined students for uncivil behavior toward other students in the past year. Untrustworthy Information More than 8 in 10 said theyve dealt with students making claims based on unreliable media sources or rejecting the information a teacher is using in class. More than 9 in 10 said students have shared hateful posts on social media. The Opioid Crisis More than 6 in 10 say their schools have been affected by the opioid crisis. Addictions in students families have created worry and distraction, and made them miss class. Parents are more absent too, offering less support to students and participating less often in school activities. Immigration Enforcement More than two-thirds said federal immigration enforcement policies and their attendant rhetoric has harmed their students well-being and learning, and made it tough for parents to support their childrens learning. Gun Violence More than 9 in 10 said their school grapples with problems linked to the threat of gun violence, including students fearing for their safety, losing focus in class or being absent. One in five reported incidents involving firearms on their campuses. One in three said theyd received threats of mass shootings or bombings in the past year. Zimmerman, whos written about the importance of teaching controversial topics in schools, said he was surprised that the report didnt address the role that curriculum and instruction can play in addressing the problems principals face. Rogers said that teaching absolutely figures in as part of the solution. But he chose to focus his report on the emotional support that principals and their staff members can provide by building a good school climate. Too often, Rogers said, principals faced with the problems he studied can feel pressured to take action by taking the first and easiest option to show they are doing something. For instance, in response to fears about gun violence, many principals reported projects to harden their campuses. But those responses, however well intentioned, overlook important steps that can have long-lasting, profound effects, Rogers said. To build a deeper sense of safety among students, principals might consider enacting and modeling a set of democratic dynamics with their faculty and students, so theyre showing what it looks like to have respectful, civil dialog amidst diversity, he said. Theyre showing what it means to interrogate and examine where knowledge comes from, how our information is tied to systems of power, so that faculty and students can think about these issues and develop those skills. Fostering Dialog The principal of a diverse school in Connecticut embodies the approach that Rogers believes can inform school leaders who are facing the problems he studied. Heres how the principal described his approach: Students at our school occasionally will get caught up in conflicts about racism, the economy, presidential politics, or about what law ought to be passed or not passed. About how things ought to be, he said. When conflicts come up we try to use them as an opportunity for growth and learning. The fact that there are social challenges in the world is not something that were going to hide [from] our teenagers... People very often underestimate what teenagers can handle. Teenagers know whats going on. ... I tell teachers that their job is to facilitate dialogue and learning; I dont want any sort of dialogue to be smashed. ... I want teachers to have the attitude of theres nothing wrong with disagreement. We need to be able to foster and model how to properly do this for our kids. We desire for students to have a strong approach to collecting, reasoning [about], and using information in a fair way. Hopefully there is a strong academic sense of how we vet facts, what is or is not the truth. And then from there, based on that information, [we want them to] make a decision about whats best to do. But also [we want them to] develop [a] perspective on the world, grounded in empathy, and to [understand]: Just because something is not my lived experience doesnt mean that I cant step into my classmates shoes and say, What does the world look like from your perspective? See also: Students Learn to Put the Civil in Civl Discourse Students Get Too Little Civics Teaching, Principals Say Education Weeks Generation Z series on civics education Photo: President Donald Trump gestures to people cheering on the tarmac as he arrives in West Palm Beach, Fla., on March 8.Carolyn Kaster/AP Get High School & Beyond posts delivered to your inbox as soon as theyre published. Sign up here . Also, for news and analysis of issues that shape adolescents preparation for work and higher education. Advertisement The devastated classmates of 17-year-old stabbing victim Yousef Makki have called for more police on the streets in an emotional statement before his packed funeral. Yousef, who dreamed of becoming a heart surgeon, was attacked on March 2 in Hale Barns, a leafy village south of Manchester. Today, his family was joined by hundreds of people at the Dar Al Hadi Foundation, in the Ardwick area of the city, for a traditional Muslim funeral service ahead of a burial ceremony at Southern Cemetery. Earlier, a pupil from Manchester Grammar School read a statement on behalf of Yousef's friends, scores of whom attended the funeral. Robin Tetlow-Shooter said: 'Yousef's life will not have been taken in vain if we are able to achieve something positive from the debate that has ensued following his death. More police officers on the streets to protect our young people may be a good start. We will miss Yousef so dearly.' Yousef's killing was among 26 knife-related murders in the UK this year, which have sparked a heated political debate about how to tackle the violence. Recently, Prime Minister Theresa May was criticised for suggesting the increase in murders 'wasn't directly correlated' with the reduction of police on the streets. The coffin of 17-year-old Yousef Makki from Burnage, is carried from the Dar Al Hadi Foundation, in Manchester Crowds of mourners gathered today inside the meeting hall of the Dar Al Hadi Foundation in Manchester, a charity that runs educational and social projects from youngsters Friends of the victim stood outside the venue in jackets and ties as one pupil, Robin Tetlow-Shooter, read a statement to the Press. They then filed in to the building, which was packed with well-wishers Mr Tetlow-Shooter said: 'We would like to thank everyone for their messages of support and condolences. Yousef was a truly special person. We cannot express the magnitude of our loss' Young mourners - many wearing their school ties, file into Yousef's funeral today at the Dar Al Hadi Foundation in Manchester Yousef's father, Abu Yousef Makki, sits on a chair inside the Dar Al-Hadi Foundation hall in Ardwick where his son's funeral took place Buses were organised to ferry pupils from 12,000-a-year Manchester Grammar School, where Yousef is believed to won a scholarship. Pupil Robin Tetlow-Shooter added in his statement: 'We would like to thank everyone for their messages of support and condolences. Yousef was a truly special person. We cannot express the magnitude of our loss. 'He was the son every parent dreams of - loving, caring, kind yet ambitious and determined. 'We have no doubt he would have lived to fulfil his dream of becoming a heart surgeon. Instead he was taken away from us as a result of a stab wound to his heart.' Yousef's family also issued a statement to coincide with the service. It said: 'We can't express how devastatingly painful the loss of a brother, son, cousin and ultimately a best friend has been. Our hearts will bleed eternally for the loss of our beautiful, clever and talented brother Yousef. 'Yousef was an inspiration to all. His determination, wit and dedication to his family and studies were the foundations of his outstanding personality and he showed an extremely promising future that was tragically cut short. 'Yousef's early departure has torn a huge, empty hole inside of everyone's hearts. For his friends, family and even neighbours, a world without him is a world turned upside down. The teenager was stabbed in the village of Hale Barns at around 6.40am on March 2 on a weekend of violence that also saw the murder of Jodie Chesney, also 17, at a park in Romford, east London 'Yousef didn't care about circumstances or which area he came from. Instead, Yousef strived to do the best he could and use any opportunities given to him to the fullest. 'Words alone cannot convey the trauma and emptiness this has left, particularly for our family. 'Although not in physical presence there are many, many lasting memories that we all have of Yousef that will last a lifetime, even though, unfortunately, he couldn't.' Yousef was stabbed in the village of Hale Barns at around 6.40am on March 2 on a weekend of violence that also saw the murder of Jodie Chesney, also 17, at a park in Romford, east London. Officers attended the scene and Yousef was taken to hospital, where he died a short time later. Floral tributes have been left on the tree-lined street where Yousef was found. A two-minute silence was held on Monday by pupils and staff at his school, which described him as 'a dearly loved young man and incredibly bright pupil' who was studying four A-levels and had aspirations to pursue a career in medicine. In an earlier tribute, his family described the teenager as a 'loving and caring son and brother' who was sporty and a dedicated student. 'We are absolutely devastated and cannot believe that our son has gone. This senseless loss has affected the whole community,' they said. 'Yousef had only phoned home hours earlier to say that he would be home for his tea, but the next knock at the door were officers with the tragic news, it is every parent's worst nightmare.' A group of mourners comfort each other outside the service, where Yousef was described by his family as 'an inspiration to us all' Among the mourners were scores of teenagers from Manchester Grammar School, where Yousef, from Burnage, was a student. The school organised buses for the students to attend the ceremony The ceremony today was attended by dozens of Yousef's family and friends. A two-minute silence was held on Monday by pupils and staff at his school The statement paying tribute to Yousef that was read out by his schoolmate Robin Tetlow-Shooter to the Press before the funeral The teenager's body is carried from the Dar Al Hadi Foundation after the service, which was attended by hundreds of people The epidemic of 26 knife murders in 2019 has sparked a frenzied political debate, with Chancellor Philip Hammond facing criticism yesterday for ignoring police demands to reverse cuts imposed under austerity measures A 17-year-old boy appeared in court last week to answer charges that he murdered the teenager. The youngster's mother broke down in tears as the teenager walked into Manchester's Youth Court for the two-minute hearing. The youth, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is accused of murder and possession of a silver lock-knife. Another 17-year-old boy, who has been bailed, is accused of trying to help him dispose of the weapon. Dressed in a grey sweat-shirt, black trousers and displaying a black-eye, the teenager acknowledged his mother and father with a brief nod and a downward smile as he stood in the dock. The defendant was asked to state his name and give his date of birth. He nodded as he was told he would be remanded. Meanwhile, the second teenager appeared in court, also last week, charged with assisting an offender and possession of a knife and was released on bail. The 17-year-old, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was told to 'keep out of trouble' by magistrates. He told he would be released on bail and ordered to come back to court in two weeks' time. A police van carrying the 17-year-old charged with the murder of Yousef Makki arrives at Manchester Crown Court last week Officers attended the scene in Hale Barns on March 2 and Yousef was taken to hospital, where he died a short time later Jerome Antonio Booze, 39, of Decatur, Georgia, was found guilty of raping the student on the backseat of his car after driving to a parking lot in December 2016 A depraved Lyft driver convicted of raping a drunk passenger has been jailed for 35 years, after a jury ruled the college-age victim was incapable of consenting to sex. Jerome Antonio Booze, 39, of Decatur, Georgia, was found guilty of raping the student on the backseat of his car after driving to a parking lot in December 2016. The court heard the woman was a 'severely intoxicated college student' who slept for most of the journey before throwing up in the back seat of the car after a night spent celebrating her friend's 21st birthday at the Anchor Bar in northeast Atlanta. The attack happened in the backseat of Booze's car at the woman's apartment complex in Vinings, Cobb County District Attorney spokeswoman Kim Isaza said. During the sentencing, Judge Ann Harris said the evidence clearly proved the victim was incapable of consenting to sex. 'She was vulnerable and she was at your mercy,' Harris said. 'You decided you were going to have sex with her, and that is rape.' The woman's friends called a Lyft for her and helped her into the car just after 4am, the court heard. Booze was supposed to drive her home but instead took her to the parking lot where he raped her. The following morning, the victim said she began having flashbacks of someone having sex with her but had no memory of the Lyft ride or how she got home. After telling her parents and visiting Grady Hospital to be examined, the victim filed a police report and Booze was arrested. During his interview with Cobb police, the driver initially denied any sexual activities had taken place, before admitting they had sex but insisted she had initiated the act. Booze admitted the vulnerable woman slept for the majority of the journey and vomited twice in the backseat, and said brazenly that he had sex with her because 'she was attractive'. Prosecutor Courtney Veal read a statement on behalf of the victim, Channel 2 Action News reported. 'He pretended to be concerned about my welfare but... instead preyed on me,' she said. 'I thank God I was blacked out.' A Lyft spokesman said the company was devastated, in a statement. Lyft say they have banned Booze from its app and helped police in their investigation. Following his jail term, Booze will serve life on probation as a registered sex offender. Chinese children will be banned from going to 'elite' schools in the country if their parents are deemed 'untrustworthy' by the social credit system. Instead, the youngsters will have to go to ordinary schools, according to a senior Chinese official. The policy is a way to force those discredited citizens to fulfil their legal duties, such as paying off their old debts. The sons and daughters of Chinese citizens with poor social credit records will no longer be able to study in 'elite' schools in the country, according to a senior Chinese official (file photo) The regulation is backed by a nation-wide database, which rates the country's 1.4 billion people based on their daily activities - mainly in financial and legal areas. A citizen or a company can be discredited - or even blacklisted - for a variety of reasons, from refusing to follow a court order to failing to pay their mortgages for more than two months. Some behavior, which people might regard common and insignificant, would also land them in trouble, such as paying their gas bills late. The defaulters, known as 'lao lai' in China, could be punished in more than 100 different ways, depending on the seriousness of their offence. One of them is the restriction on their children's education choices. Chinese individuals and companies can check their social credit ratings on Credit China Chinese people value education highly. Many of them have the life-long dream of sending their children to elite schools for a brighter future - even they themselves lead a frugal life. Liu Guixiang, a member of the judicial committee of China's Supreme People's Court, explained the controversial penalty yesterday at a major political meeting in Beijing: '[If the school's] fees are higher than those of normal schools, that is luxury spending.' According to Liu, the children would be subjected to the restriction only when their tuition fees are paid by the exact person who has been discredited. In other words, if the tuition fees are covered by another family member, the pupils would be able to carry on studying. Liu also stressed that those children would still be able to enjoy China's compulsory education policy in ordinary schools and universities. A citizen can be discredited for a variety of reasons, such as falling behind on credit card bills China plans to complete building its national social credit system by the end of 2020 after starting out in 2014. With a tagline of 'once discredited, everywhere restricted', it vows to punish 'untrustworthy' citizens - many of whom persistent debtors - in all areas of life. But official Liu claimed that the social credit system would not punish anyone wrongly or penalise their family members in order to pressure them. He stressed that the Chinese judicial administration and legal system 'are very civilised'. Apart from the education ban, restriction on travels is another common punishment used by the Chinese authorities on defaulters. Offenders could be banned from taking high-speed trains or planes. Last month, a renowned Chinese actress and former beauty queen was banned from leaving the country as a result of her poor social credit records. China-born, U.S.-raised Michelle Ye Xuan is the first high-profile figure to be punished by Beijing's controversial social credit system since it was launched in 2014. The star is pictured at a film premier in Beijing in 2014 (left) and at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2010. China-born, U.S.-raised Michelle Ye Xuan, 39, only found out about the action against her when she was about to board a plane in Beijing on February 24. The star had failed to follow a court order from last year after being found guilty of defaming her then boyfriend's ex-girlfriend on social media, which led to the penalty. Ms Ye, who grew up in Hangzhou and New York City, is the first high-profile figure to be punished by Beijing's controversial social credit system. She fulfiled her legal duty on the same day after being barred from travelling abroad, according to a court in Shanghai. A Perth man has been found guilty of murdering his six-month-old daughter by shaking her and throwing her onto the floor. McDonald's manager Nicole Martin had been tag-teaming care of Isabella Sully Jean Martin with her baker husband Arron Colin Martin for less than two months in November 2017 when their child died from injuries he inflicted after returning to their Brookdale house from an early morning shift. Martin, 37, told his Supreme Court of Western Australia trial this week he 'just snapped' because he was sleep-deprived and the baby wouldn't settle. Perth man Arron Colin Martin (pictured right) has been found guilty of murdering his six-month-old daughter by shaking her and throwing her onto the floor Martin, 37, told his Supreme Court of Western Australia trial this week he 'just snapped' because he was sleep-deprived and Isabella (pictured) wouldn't settle The court heard he hurled the infant from a height of almost two metres, saw her head start to swell and she was still breathing but he did not call for help. Instead, he picked her up, put her in her cot and left the room. He twice tried to end his own life at the house before turning himself in to police. His 35-year-old wife of four years testified she had said 'hi and bye' to her spouse before leaving for her day shift, and the infant might have been 'a bit grizzly' with a stuffy nose as she was recovering from a cold, but wasn't particularly unsettled. Defence counsel John Rando said the couple loved the child but with their work schedules, 'something was bound to happen.' Mr Rando told the jury his client did not intend to kill his baby and they could find he committed the lesser charge of manslaughter, but Martin was convicted of murder on Wednesday. European Council president Donald Tusk has been accused of trolling hardline Brexiteers after posting a childs picture of a unicorn on Instagram. The Polish politician was sent the picture by a six-year-old British girl, he informed the world in a post to his 111,000 followers, telling her: 'We will always be friends'. The letter, written by Sophie from London, included a drawing of the mythical horned beast and a message urging both sides of the Brexit row to remain friends afterwards. Chasing unicorns has been used a jibe to describe some of the solutions to the Brexit deal impasse suggested by some Brexiteers, because they are about as likely to appear. Donald Tusk posted this picture onto his Instagram feed for his 111,000 followers on Wednesday morning The Polish politician, the president of the European Council, maintains a lighthearted approach to his Instagram feed. Mr Tusk appeared to snipe at Mrs May in an post about his English dog at the weekend Henry Newman, from the Open Europe think tank, told the BBC that it was embarrassing, adding: 'What is the president of European Council doing? It is a very serious negotiation and he is playing on Instagram. In her message Sophie wrote: 'Dear Mr Tusk, I live in Britain. I know we are leaving the EU. 'But I think we should be friends. Please may I have a signed photo of you for my Europe book. From Sophie, aged six.' People responding to Mr Tusk's picture by calling it 'cuteness overload', 'touching' and 'so cute'. It came after he appeared to snipe at Mrs May again in an post about his English dog at the weekend. He posted an Instagram story of himself lounging in a chair with his 'English friend' - his English Springer Spaniel - in what critics said was a blatant goading of Mrs May. Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the European Research Group, reacted more warmly. Appearing on the BBCs Politics Live alongside Mr Newman he said: God bless her, I want us to be friends with the European Union too. Mr Baker is behind an amendment that would alter the terms of the no-deal Brexit plan to be voted on tonight to extend Article 50 until 10.59pm on May 22 before we leave without a deal. Mr Baker described it as 'Malthouse Plan B' after a compromise passed by MPs last month but already rejected by the EU. This would give businesses time to prepare for a new customs tariff system that would come into play if the UK crashed out without a deal. It would also see the UK leave before the European Parliament elections on May 23. He told the BBC that while some plans to deal with the continued differences over the Irish border backstop were like unicorns, his was not. We have tested our proposals with officials and a joint workstream has been established with the EU to work them up, he said. That is an acceptance that it is not magical thinking, it is not pursuing unicorns. Philip Hammond dangled a 26billion deal dividend in front of MPs today as he demanded they take an immediate No Deal Brexit off the table. The Chancellor used his Spring Statement to issue stark warnings about the risks of crashing out, insisting it meant 'higher unemployment, lower wages and higher prices in the shops'. Mr Hammond appealed for 'consensus' over how Britain should leave the EU as he painted a rosy picture of the economy if Brexit hardliners back down and endorse the deal. His intervention comes a day after Tory rebels humiliated Theresa May by handing down a second drubbing of the deal. The Chancellor said the economy would continue to grow in every year to 2023 - at a faster rate than Germany - if the deal is agreed, even with a slowdown this year. The Chancellor said the strong economy meant Britain was taking 'another step of... the road out of austerity' if it avoided a no deal shock. Mr Hammond said if MPs pass the deal he will decide in the Spending Review later this year how to share the proceeds from any 'Deal Dividend' that Treasury aides said was worth 26billion - 11billion more than thought at the Budget in November. The money is available deal or no deal - but would be soaked up dealing with the consequences of no deal if Britain crashes out of the bloc. If there is a deal, the money would go on increased spending on public services, capital investment and keeping taxes low. Mr Hammond also announced a 100million funding boost to combat knife crime. The money will pay for a 'surge' in street policing in an effort to tackle rising levels of violence on the country's streets. There were also spending announcements on free sanitary products for schools and a package to tackle climate change. In the Spring Statement this lunchtime, the Chancellor is expected to pledge an immediate 100million boost for police forces The latest economic forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility suggest the economy will be slower this year than expected in November (pictured) but with growth every year to 2023 Philip Hammond (pictured today leaving No 11 Downing Street) will today announce a major funding boost to combat knife crime as he unveils his spring statement 16 days before Brexit In a spring statement largely overshadowed by chaos over Brexit: Hammond announced Britain would continue to grow every year until 2023 - but only if MPs pass the deal; Chancellor used his spring statement to warn MPs about the risks of a no deal Brexit if they refuse to adopt a deal; He admitted last night's crushing defeat had left the country in chaos and was not the backdrop he wanted to today's statement; Hammond said if MPs pass the deal he could unlock a 'deal dividend' that would finally mean a true end to austerity; In a series of relatively small crowd-pleasing announcements Hammond promised 100 million this year for police forces in England to pay for overtime aimed at addressing the 'epidemic' of knife crime; A 3 billion affordable homes guarantee scheme, to support delivery of around 30,000 homes; A 'Future Homes Standard' setting out the end of fossil-fuel heating systems in all new houses from 2025; The provision of free sanitary products in secondary schools and colleges in England from the next school year; Shadow chancellor accused Hammond of 'callous complacency' amid the Government's 'mishandling of Brexit In his 35-minute statement, Mr Hammond said that Tuesday's vote to reject the EU Withdrawal Agreement 'leaves a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the economy' and his most urgent task is to lift it. Spring Statement 2019: What has Hammond revealed? The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts GDP growth of 1.2% this year, then 1.4% in 2020 and 1.6% for each of the following three years. The OBR expects to see 600,000 new jobs by 2023, with wage growth at 3% or higher in each year of the forecast period. UK debt is forecast to be lower in every year than predicted at the Budget, falling to 82.2% of GDP next year, then 79%, 74.9% and 74% in the following years and 73% in 2023/24. 260 million for the Borderlands Growth deal covering the border regions of England and Scotland and said negotiations are progressing on future deals for mid-Wales and Derry/Londonderry. A 700 million package of reforms to help small businesses take on more apprentices, announced in the autumn Budget, is to be brought forward to the start of the new financial year in April. From June, the UK will begin to abolish the requirement for paper landing cards at points of entry to the country and will allow citizens of the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Singapore and South Korea to use e-gates at airports and Eurostar terminals. Funding of 79 million allocated to the ARCHER2 supercomputer at Edinburgh University, 45 million for genomics research at the European Bioinformatics Institute and 81 million for a new Extreme Photonics Centre in Oxfordshire, along with a guarantee of UK funding for the JET nuclear fusion reactor, whatever happens with Brexit. The Government will fund free sanitary products in secondary schools and colleges in England from the next school year. Some 445,000 square kilometres of ocean around Ascension Island to be declared a Marine Protected Area. A new 3 billion Affordable Homes Guarantee scheme to support delivery of around 30,000 affordable homes and 717 million from the Housing Infrastructure Fund to unlock up to 37,000 new homes on sites in West London, Cheshire, Didcot and Cambridge. Advertisement He announced the latest economic forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility suggest the economy will be sharply slower this year than expected - with a downgrade from 1.6per cent to 1.2 per cent - in November. But growth will rise again to 1.6 per cent a year in 2021, 2022 and 2023, the forecasts say. He said: 'Last night's events mean we are not where I hoped we would be today. 'Our economy is fundamentally robust. But the uncertainty that I hoped we would lift last night, still hangs over us. 'We cannot allow that to continue. It is damaging our economy and it is damaging our standing and reputation in the world. 'Tonight, we have a choice. We can remove the threat of an imminent no-deal exit hanging over our economy. 'Tomorrow, we will have the opportunity to start to map out a way forward towards building a consensus across this House for a deal we can, collectively support, to exit the EU in an orderly way to a future relationship that will allow Britain to flourish, protecting jobs and businesses 'A brighter future is within our grasp. Tonight, let's take a decisive step towards seizing it and building a Britain fit for the future; a Britain the next generation will be proud to call their home.' The Chancellor warned that the country's economic progress will be at risk in a no-deal Brexit, and said he was 'confident' that the Commons will agree a smooth and orderly EU withdrawal 'over the coming weeks'. Mr Hammond told MPs: 'A no-deal Brexit would deliver a significant short- to medium-term reduction in the productive capacity of the British economy. 'And because our economy is operating at near full capacity, any fiscal and monetary response would have to be carefully calibrated not to simply cause inflation.' Mr Hammond said he will decide in the Spending Review later this year how to share the proceeds from any 'Deal Dividend', if the UK leaves the EU with a deal, between increased spending on public services, capital investment and keeping taxes low. Of the deal divided, a Treasury spokesman said the extra cash had been generated by wage growth driving increases in income tax and national insurance contributions. In the event of a Brexit deal being agreed the cash would be 'spent on our collective priorities and they include keeping the debt falling, public services, keeping taxes low and capital investment'. The spokesman added: 'It is there to spend on those four priorities once we no longer have the uncertainty of no deal hanging over us. Otherwise it remains an insurance fund if needed. 'In the event of a deal we will spend a large proportion of it, in the event of no-deal we will need it as well.' Mr Hammond is also expected to warn today that money to end austerity can be found only if MPs vote to leave the EU with a deal. He is expected to unveil a 'deal dividend' of 20 billion to invest in public services. PIctured is the current state of the deficit Responding to Mr Hammond's statement, shadow chancellor John McDonnell said: 'We have just witnessed a display by the Chancellor of this Government's toxic mix of callous complacency over austerity and ... mishandling of Brexit.' Mr McDonnell said downgrading forecasts were a 'pattern' under Mr Hammond before he criticised Government borrowing. Free sanitary products will be made available in ALL schools so that 'girls no longer have to miss a day' because they can't afford them The Government will fund free sanitary products in schools to tackle period poverty, Philip Hammond announced today. Mr Hammond said 'some girls are missing school' because they can't afford to buy them. The Chancellor said the Department for Education would develop the new scheme in time for the next school year. The surprise announcement came amid a small spending spree in Mr Hammond's Spring Statement today. Advertisement He added: 'On the deficit, he's boasting about the deficit - he's not eliminated the deficit as we were promised by 2015. 'He's simply shifted it on to the shoulders of headteachers, NHS managers, local councillors and police commissioners and, worst of all, onto the backs of many of the poorest in our society. 'The consequences are stark - infant mortality has increased, life-expectancy has reduced, and our communities are less safe. 'Police budgets have faced a cut of 2.7 billion since 2010 and nothing the Chancellor has said today will make up for the human and economic consequences of those cuts.' Mr McDonnell added there is 'nothing balanced' about a Government giving more than 110 billion of tax cuts to the rich and corporations while '87 people a day die before they receive the care they need'. Last week Mr Hammond urged forces to divert existing resources from lower priority crime instead of demanding more. He said backed a 'surging of resources from other areas of policing activity into dealing with this spike in knife crime' and said forces should 'move' money from other areas. Mr Hammond's plan again some positive economic figures - including wages (blue line) rising sharply faster than prices (red line) But Mr Javid publicly backed senior police officers who said they needed more money to pay for overtime to put more officers on the streets. Hammond pledges 100million to fight the 'scourge of knife crime' Philip Hammond today announced a major funding boost to combat knife crime. In the Spring Statement, the Chancellor pledged an immediate 100million boost for police forces. The money will pay for a 'surge' in street policing in an effort to tackle rising levels of violence on the country's streets. It follows a major Whitehall row between the Home Office and Treasury, and represents a major victory for Home Secretary Sajid Javid. Last week Mr Hammond urged forces to divert existing resources from lower priority crime instead of demanding more. Advertisement Sources said around two thirds of the cash would go to paying for a surge in street policing, and the remainder to fund specialist Violence Reduction Units. On Monday 46 London MPs called for Mr Hammond to use the Spring Statement to help the Metropolitan Police fight knife crime. Last week a string of former senior officers said there was an urgent need for more police to be recruited. Lord Hogan-Howe, the former Met commissioner, has called for an extra 20,000 officers across the country and told ministers to 'get a grip on the crisis'. Police numbers have fallen by 20,000 in England and Wales since 2010. The number of knife-related deaths rose from 186 in 2015-16 to 285 in 2017-18. Violent crime rose by nearly a fifth in the year to September 2018, according to police figures, and the increase in knife killings has been particularly pronounced. In the last year alone, 27 under-19s have been stabbed to death, and there have been 285 knife killings in all - the highest level since the Second World War. Ahead of the statement, shadow chancellor John McDonnell urged him to end Government cuts Downing Street is also understood to have been backing calls for extra cash. Forces are already set to receive nearly 970 million extra in the next financial year. End of the gas boiler: Fossil-fuel heating systems will be BANNED in all new-build houses from 2025 Fossil-fuel powered boilers will be banned in new build homes from 2025, the Chancellor revealed today. Philip Hammond's move spells the beginning of the end for gas boilers in Britain. The move is part of a package of reforms aimed at tackling climate change in today's Spring Statement. But shadow housing secretary John Healey tweeted: 'Seriously underwhelming housing announcements from the Chancellor - debt guarantees a recycled pledge from 2017, and what sounds like a partial backtrack on the Tories' 2015 decision to scrap Labour's zero carbon homes plan... by 2025!' Advertisement Theresa May last week ordered an urgent set of ministerial meetings to discuss action against knives, but she came under fire after claiming there was 'no direct correlation between certain crimes and police numbers'. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick rejected that claim saying it was obvious 'there is some link between violent crime on the streets and police numbers' Mrs May is also considering plans for would-be knife thugs to be treated in the same way as potential jihadis. A new regime would see councils, schools and other agencies required to report youngsters considered to be at risk of being dragged into knife and gang crime. Ahead of the statement, shadow chancellor John McDonnell urged him to end Government cuts. Mr McDonnell said: 'Living standards have been squeezed by relentless cutbacks to public services, as part of a toxic Tory cocktail of callousness and incompetence. 'Philip Hammond must abandon this disastrous austerity agenda of the past nine years. 'Labour will tax the rich and giant corporations to end austerity, fund our public services properly, and rebuild our economy so it works for the many, not the few.' A couple in south China have been arrested for selling all five of their children. The man, only identified by his surname Zhong, and the woman, surnamed Quan, gave birth to three boys and two girls between April 2013 and February 2018, according to Wuzhou city procuratorate in Guangxi Autonomous Region. The infants were sold for a profit of more than 100,000 yuan (11,300) in total, the authorities said. Above, a group of 60 children at the Guiyang Welfare Center for Children are waiting to reunite with their parents after police rescued them from human traffickers in Guiyang, Guizhou province in October 2009. A couple in Guangxi Autonomous Region, south China have been arrested for selling all five of their children for more than 100,000 yuan (11,300) The 'lazy' couple have been living together for a decade and did not have a steady income, according to the statement released by prosecutors on Tuesday. 'The suspects, surnamed Zhong and Quan, did not have a source of income... and sold their five babies for profit,' it said. The Wuzhou city procuratorate immediately launched investigations and started collecting evidence as soon as local police alerted them about the case. The couple have been arrested on suspicion of human trafficking amid ongoing investigations, the statement said, without giving further details. Residents looking at a massive poster with information of more than 2,700 child trafficking victims in Zhengzhou, Henan province in 2010. A politician last week called for an amendment to the law to impose the death penalty on those convicted of trafficking women and children Child abduction and trafficking has long been a serious social problem in China, with an estimated 70,000 children going missing each year for forced labor, adoption or prostitution. Above, rescued children pose with their parents and police officers in July 2009 Child abduction and trafficking has long been a serious social problem in China, with an estimated 70,000 children going missing each year for forced labour, adoption or prostitution, according to a previous report by China Daily. Chinese courts ruled on 2,806 cases involving the abduction and trafficking of women and children between 2015 and 2018, according to the Supreme People's Court cited by Global Times. In January, a boy in Jinjiang, Fujian province was reunited with his grandparents after his parents sold him to another couple for 120,000 yuan (13,600) last year. The unmarried couple in split the money before going their separate ways. Zhang Baoyan, a delegate to the 13th National People's Congress, last week called for an amendment to the Chinese law to impose the death penalty on those convicted of trafficking women and children. A boy, nicknamed Hao Hao, is reunited with his grandfather. He was only two years old when his birth parents decided to sell him to another couple for 13,600 in January last year Zhang, who has been a long-time advocate for women's and children's rights in the country, said that the current penalty of five to 10 years' imprisonment is 'relatively lenient' and not harsh enough to deter child kidnappers. By adjusting the penalty to 10 years' imprisonment with the maximum punishment of the death sentence, Zhang stressed that it is time for authorities to demonstrate a 'zero-tolerance policy' on the violation of the rights of women and children. 'The trafficking women and children is a crime that seriously violates the rights of citizens and obstructs social order,' Zhang said in a statement published last Tuesday. 'Trafficking cases often involve other crimes such as rape, ill-treatment, illegal detention, violent beatings, forced prostitution and even death, some of which many lead to suicide and mental disorders,' she added. 'However, due to the relatively light sentence, some criminals remain undeterred.' She also called for a stiffer punishment for buyers, who fuel the trade but are seldom held accountable. Currently, convicted buyers of human trafficking victims face no more than three years in prison. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduros cousin and nine other relatives were turned away at the Colombian border as they tried to escape the chaos amid a massive blackout in their own country. Argimiro Berde Maduro Moran, 52, showed up at a border crossing point in Riohacha, Colombia, with his wife, Mariangeles Ceberg Badell, and their three children. Maduro Moran was also accompanied by his sister-in-law, Maria Antonieta, her husband, Niccio Gerardo Vargas Escobar, and the couple's three children. Colombian immigration officials turned them all away Tuesday afternoon and they had to remain in Venezuela where electricity is limited and drinking water scarce. Colombian Immigration officials deny entrance to Nicolas Maduro's cousin, Argimiro Berde Maduro Moran (second from right), at a border crossing point in northern Colombia on Tuesday. Maduro Moran said he and nine other relatives were looking to get away from Venezuela for 'five days' because of the shortage of electricity. He is accompanied by his sister-in-law's husband, Niccio Gerardo Vargas Escobar (third from left) Nicolas Maduro has been involved in a war-of-words with opponents of his regime since a massive blackout last Thursday sent Venezuela into chaos Immigration agents in the northern Colombian town off the Caribbean Sea coast said Maduro Moran and his party claimed they 'would be in Riohacha for five days while the energy service was restored' and that 'the heat in Venezuela was impossible.' The group was transported to another border crossing point and returned to Venezuela. '[He] sought to protect himself in Colombia from the energy and food crisis and, above all, from the lack of water in Venezuelan territory,' Colombian Immigration director Christian Kruger Sarmiento said in a video statement. The immigration official put his foot down, declaring that the neighboring South American nation, which has opened its doors to thousands of suffering Venezuelans, wouldn't be a safe haven for anyone directly connected to the Maduro regime. 'We will not allow relatives of the dictator Maduro to enter our country,' he said. The Colombian immigration department followed a January directive from the Lima Group, made up of 11 Latin American countries and Canada created in 2017 to find a solution to the Venezuelan crisis. Nicolas Maduro's cousin, Argimiro Berde Maduro Moran (second from right), is one of 300 people who are not allowed to enter 11 Latin American countries and Canada Argimiro Berde Maduro Moran was denied entry to Colombia on Tuesday. According to immigration officials, he 'sought to protect himself in Colombia from the energy and food crisis and, above all, from the lack of water in Venezuelan territory' None of the member countries have permitted persons directly associated with the embattled leader entrance into their territories. Maduro Moran and his companions are among 300 people registered on a banned list connected with Maduro and his upper government cohorts. 'We aren't going to allow, while the people of Venezuela die in hospitals due to lack of energy, people close to the Maduro regime to enter Colombia to spend their holidays evading the reality,' Kruger Sarmiento added. Maduro Moran's attempt to flee comes just weeks after the president's right-hand man, Diosdado Cabello, sent his two children off to China in late February. Cabello, considered to be the second-most powerful person in Venezuela and leader of its National Constituent Assembly (ANC), booked a flight for his two youngest children, Daniella Cabello, and Tito Cabello. The sudden trip immediately raised suspicions after they boarded the Havana to Beijing flight as Desiree Contreras and Tito Contreras, apparently using their mother's surname to hide their identities. The crisis in the oil-rich country worsened last Thursday when a power outage left the nation dark, pitting Maduro's socialist government in a back-and-forth war of words with interim president Juan Guiado and the international community that has called for him to step down. The blackout sent hospitals into a state of chaos. Medicos por la Salud [Doctors for Health], an independent Venezuela-based organization that has been closely following medical institutions, told Univision that between March 8 and 11, 19 of the 24 patients reported dead were awaiting treatment for dialysis. In total, the blackout has left at least 43 people dead in a nation of 30 million. Amid talk that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen again lied to Congress, Cohen's lawyer sent a letter Tuesday to the head of the House Oversight Committee clarifying Cohen's testimony that he never sought a pardon from the president. Michael Monico told Maryland Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings in the letter that Cohen, once President Donald Trump's personal attorney, had asked his lawyer to explore the possibility of a pardon before Cohen left a joint-defense agreement and turned against Trump last June. Cohen hasn't done so since, Monico said. Monico denied Trump's claim, in a tweet last week, that Cohen had personally asked him for a pardon. Cohen's public committee testimony last month 'could have been clearer and more complete' when it came to pardons, Monico wrote in the letter obtained by The Associated Press. Cohen's remarks about not seeking a pardon pertained to the time after his split from Trump, Monico said. 'In retrospect, while the sentence could have been clearer regarding the time frames, the sentence is true, and Mr. Cohen stands by his statement,' Monico wrote. Cummings' office didn't immediately respond to messages. FILE - In this March 6, 2019 file photo, Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's former lawyer, speaks as he departs after testifying before a closed-door session of the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill, in Washington. Cohen sues the Trump Organization, on Thursday, March 7, saying he is owed $1.9 million.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File) Congressional investigators appeared to be zeroing in on the president's pardon power as Democrats embark on a series of sweeping investigations into Trump's political and personal dealings. Cohen declared under oath on Feb. 27 that 'I have never asked for, nor would I accept, a pardon from President Trump.' That statement, with millions of people watching on television, set off a firestorm that culminated on Friday with Trump's tweet calling Cohen a liar and alleging he had 'directly asked' for a pardon. Before that, Cohen's lawyer and spokesman, Lanny Davis, and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani went back and forth in dueling interviews, trading their own versions of events. 'Bad lawyer and fraudster Michael Cohen said under sworn testimony that he never asked for a Pardon,' Trump tweeted. 'His lawyers totally contradicted him. He lied! Additionally, he directly asked me for a pardon. I said NO. He lied again!' Cohen, who is slated to begin a three-year prison sentence in May, denied that in a tweet of his own minutes later. He called Trump's allegations 'just another set of lies.' Monico reiterated that denial in his letter to Cummings, saying Cohen never asked Trump for a pardon and that Trump never offered one. Monico said Cohen had asked his previous lawyer to ask about a possible pardon after an FBI raid on his New York City home, office and hotel room in April 2018 because Trump had 'publicly dangled the possibility of pardons when commenting about ongoing investigations.' 'With that in mind, as a past member of the joint defense team, Mr. Cohen asked his then attorney to discuss with another Trump attorney possible pardon options consistent with the President's prior public declarations,' Monico said. Nothing ever came of that effort, he said. Giuliani said last Thursday he was contacted in May or June about a possible pardon for Cohen. He said his answer was that the president 'is not going to consider or give any pardons now.' 'As I have said in the past, the president has the right to, and that doesn't mean he won't consider it when the investigation is over,' Giuliani said. 'But there are no plans to do so.' Trump tweeted last week that Michael Cohen 'directly asked me for a pardon. I said NO' As controversy grew over Cohen's pardon remarks, his legal team stressed that he was one of Trump's closest confidants and if he wanted a pardon, he would have just asked Trump himself. There is nothing inherently improper about a subject in a criminal investigation seeking a pardon from a president given the president's wide latitude in granting them. But investigators want to know if the prospects of presidential pardons were somehow offered or used inappropriately. Congressional investigators are also looking into whether anyone on Trump's legal team tried quietly to reach out to Cohen last year before he turned on the president and as his legal problems mounted. The House Judiciary Committee, which is conducting a probe into possible obstruction of justice, corruption and abuse of power, sent letters to the FBI, the Justice Department and others for documents related to possible pardons for Cohen, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. All three have been charged in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible coordination between Russia and Trump's presidential campaign. Dr. Ezequiel Fernandez Bugin was arrested at a clinic in Buenos Aires, Argentina, after he allegedly masturbated and ejaculated on a 27-year-old patient while the woman underwent an ultrasound on her vagina A doctor is behind bars after a patient reported him for allegedly sexually assaulting her while he performed an ultrasound on her vagina. Dr. Ezequiel Fernandez Bugin, 33, was quickly taken into custody at the Canning Medical Center in the Argentine province of Buenos Aires. He was charged with sexual abuse. The 27-year-old woman was visiting a medical diagnostic imaging center in the town of Canning when she noticed Dr. Fernandez Bugin making strange movements, according to Argentine news outlet, La Prensa. The woman, who's name was withheld by authorities, claimed the physician was masturbating when she turned around. The victim, who also underwent a kidney exam, said she touched her back and discovered that Dr. Fernandez Bugin had ejaculated on her back. She confronted him and rushed out the room before calling 911. Cops arrived at the medical facility and placed the doctor under arrest. Law enforcement officials requested that the woman turn in her clothes for further investigation and also ordered a review of the clinic's video surveillance system. The United States is the only nation still flying the Boeing 737 Max after an Ethiopian Airlines Max 8 crashed Sunday shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board. American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and United Airlines haven't grounded planes despite 40 countries opting not the fly the aircraft pending an investigation. On Wednesday morning, 33 of the model were spotted on Flightradar24, most over the US. Meanwhile Canada's transport minister, Marc Garneau, said the country is closing air space to the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet Wednesday morning due to information they'd received in the form of satellite data, showing a possible but unproven similarity to a previous Max 8 crash. Scroll down for videos The United States was the only nation still flying the Boeing 737 Max Wednesday Southwest Airlines hasn't grounded planes despite 40 countries opting not the fly the aircraft pending an investigation American Airlines has 24 Max 8s and said in a statement they will keep taking passengers on the planes until there's solid proof there's a problem. A statement from the airline read: 'At this time there are no facts on the cause of the accident other than news reports. We have full confidence in the aircraft and our crew members, who are the best and most experienced in the industry.' Southwest Airlines continues the fly the aircraft too. The Texas-based operator believes the aircraft is perfectly fine. 'We remain confident in the safety and airworthiness of our fleet of more than 750 Boeing aircraft,' the low-cost carrier said. United Airlines is flying Max 9s, which were not involved in the Ethiopian Airlines or Lion Air crashes that took place within five months of each other, but were part of the FAA's emergency airworthiness directive after October's crash Canada's WestJet which has 121 Boeing 737s - kept them in the air until the country banned the Boeing Max from Canadian airspace Wednesday United Airlines is flying Max 9s, which were not involved in the Ethiopian Airlines or Lion Air crashes that took place within five months of each other, but were part of the FAA's emergency airworthiness directive after October's crash. Canada's WestJet which has 121 Boeing 737s - kept them in the air until the country banned the Boeing Max from Canadian airspace Wednesday. The transport minister said it was a precautionary measure based on new information received this morning. The fleet includes 13 Max 8 aircraft, the same kind involved in Sunday's crash six minutes after take-off, and the October 2018 Lion Air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 passengers over then Java Sea. Up until Tuesday UAE-based low cost carrier flydubai was the only airline outside of North America that remained 'confident in the airworthiness of our fleet' for the Max 8s, of which they flew 11. But their Max 8 and Max 9 planes were grounded at the order of the country's General Civil Aviation Authority which banned them from air space in the United Arab Emirates from Wednesday. The US has so far refused to take similar action against the American aerospace giant's best-selling workhorse aircraft, despite the two recent crashes as well as a history of pilot complaints in recent months. Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and United Kingdom have grounded the Max 8 Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Oman, France, Ireland, India, United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, did so too. Turkish Airlines and Norwegian Airlines (pictured) have ditched the planes Pilots said in prior reports that soon after engaging the autopilot on Boeing 737 Max 8 planes, the nose tilted down sharply 'Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft,' FAA chief Daniel Elwell said in a statement on Tuesday. Airline pilots on at least two US flights have reported that an automated system seemed to cause their Boeing 737 Max planes to tilt down suddenly. The pilots said that soon after engaging the autopilot on Boeing 737 Max 8 planes, the nose tilted down sharply. In both cases, they recovered quickly after disconnecting the autopilot. The pilot reports were filed last year in a data base compiled by NASA. They are voluntary safety reports and do not publicly reveal the names of pilots, the airlines or the location of the incidents. An Ethiopian pilot who saw the crash site minutes after the disaster said the plane appeared to have 'slid directly into the ground'. American Airlines spokesman Ross Feinstein said the airline has received no reports from pilots about problems with the anti-stall technology. Southwest has said the same thing. An Ethiopian pilot who saw the crash site minutes after the disaster on Sunday said the plane appeared to have 'slid directly into the ground' Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg also spoke with US President Donald Trump and reiterated that the 737 Max 8 is safe, the company said. Its technical team, meanwhile, joined American, Israeli, Kenyan and other aviation experts in the investigation led by Ethiopian authorities. The specific Max 8 model has been grounded by India, the UAE, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Iceland and Germany, and the airlines LOT Polish, TUI Airways, GOL Linhas Aereas, Aeromexico, Aerolineas Argentinas, Cayman Airways, Comair Airways, Eastar Jet, Jet Airways, Mongolian Airlines, China Airlines, China Eastern, China Southern, Lion Air, Silkair and Thai Lion. The European Union and UK Civil Aviation Authority have banned the entire Boeing 737 Max fleet. Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Oman, France, Ireland, India, United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, did so too. Turkish Airlines and Norwegian Airlines have ditched the planes for now. Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page's newly-released testimony to Congress proves James Comey 'lied' and there was rampant corruption within the law enforcement agency before the Trump administration cleaned house, the president claimed in Wednesday morning tweets. 'The just revealed FBI Agent Lisa Page transcripts make the Obama Justice Department look exactly like it was, a broken and corrupt machine. Hopefully, justice will finally be served. Much more to come!' the president promised. Trump suggested that he'd been watching Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz, a former House Oversight Committee chairman, break down Page's testimony to Congress on the network. 'Comey testified (under oath) that it was a unanimous decision on Crooked Hillary. Lisa Page transcripts show he LIED,' the president tweeted, tagging the former Republican congressman. Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page's newly-released testimony to Congress prove James Comey is a liar and there was a conspiracy within the law enforcement agency to get Trump, the president claimed in Wednesday morning tweets 'The just revealed FBI Agent Lisa Page transcripts make the Obama Justice Department look exactly like it was, a broken and corrupt machine. Hopefully, justice will finally be served. Much more to come!' the president promised Trump suggested that he'd been watching Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz, a former House Oversight Committee chairman, break down Page's testimony to Congress on the network Chaffetz signaled he'd seen the tweet and was maybe confused about the president's intended message, writing back, 'Yes...' The hosts of 'Fox & Friends' had discussed the testimony on their program that morning. Steve Doocey said 'it sounds like there was a deep state' in Barack Obama's Department of Justice. They tossed to a clip of GOP Rep. Doug Collins talking about the 'two-tiered system' in which Hillary Clinton 'was treated completely differently' in the probe into her emails. Collins is the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, the panel that interviewed Page for its Russian election meddling investigation. Page acknowledged in her July 2018 testimony to the committee that allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia were thin in the beginning. She said the FBI 'knew so little' about the accusations and had insufficient evidence to determine whether the accusations were 'true or not true.' The former FBI attorney, who briefly worked on Robert Mueller's probe, told lawmakers 'it is entirely common, particularly in a counterintelligence investigation, that you would only haveyou would have a small amount of evidence' at the beginning of the process. Lisa Page, former legal counsel to former FBI Director Andrew Mc Cabe, testified that the Justice Department weighed in against charging former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with 'gross negligence' in connection to her email scandal She also revealed that Justice Department lawyers weighed in to argue against charging former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with 'gross negligence' in connection with her email scandal, because they didn't believe there was enough evidence to prosecute her. Page, whose anti-Trump texts with lover Peter Strzok surfaced during an inspector general probe and the GOP's probe of the FBI's handling of the Clinton and Russia probes, testified that investigators flagged the possible charge in inter-agency talks. But her comments reveal that it is Justice Department lawyers and prosecutors who nixed the idea. 'We neither had sufficient evidence to charge gross negligence, nor had it ever been done, because the Department viewed it as constitutionally vague,' Page told a joint committee investigating the prosecutorial decisions. Page testified that investigators did consider whether or not Clinton had been grossly negligent in her conduct, which included using a private server for her work email communications, the Washington Examiner reported. 'We did not blow over gross negligence. We, in fact and, in fact, the Director because on its face, it did seem like, well, maybe there's a potential here for this to be the charge,' she said. 'And we had multiple conversations, multiple conversations with the Justice Department about charging gross negligence,' Page testified. Under questioning by Rep. John Ratcliffe, a Republican from Texas, Page said the FBI engaged in 'multiple' conversations on the topic. 'On its face, it did seem like, well, maybe there's a potential here for this to be the charge,' Page testified about Clinton's use of private email system, despite strict guidelines of handling of classified and sensitive information Deputy Assistant FBI Director Peter Strzok testifies before a joint committee hearing of the House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees on Capitol Hill July 12, 2018 in Washington, D.C. 'In fact, the Director because, on its face, it did seem like, well, maybe there's a potential here for this to be the charge. And we had multiple conversations, multiple conversations with the Justice Department about charging gross negligence,' Page said. Explaining DOJ's view, Page said: 'And the Justice Department's assessment was that it was both constitutionally vague, so that they did not actually feel that they could permissibly bring that charge, and also that it had either never been done or had only been done once like 99 years ago. And so they did not feel that they could sustain a charge,' she said. In studying the matter, she said Comey 'asked the Department to pull for him a record of every mishandling [of information] case that had been brought in the last like 30 years,' she said. It was previously reported that Strzok changed the language in Comey's infamous July 2016 statement to say that Clinton's email was 'extremely careless' rather than having to do with 'gross negligence.' At another point, Page said: 'We had multiple conversations with the Justice Department about bringing a gross negligence charge. And that's, as I said, the advice that we got from the Department was that they did not think that it was constitutionally vague and not sustainable.' Ultimately Clinton was not charged. The panels that questioned Page are now being run by Democrats, and have now sent out a flurry of information requests from associates of President Trump seeking information about campaign ties to Russia. Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek has kept his promise to 'keep working' by returning to the set of the long-running trivia show after announcing that he has been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Trebek, 78, was back in front of the camera on Tuesday, a spokesperson for the show confirmed, saying, 'Alex is here and behind his lectern as scheduled.' Trebek posted a message on YouTube on March 6, saying: 'Now, just like 50,000 other people in the United States each year, this week I was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. 'Now normally, the prognosis for this is not very encouraging, but Im going to fight this, and Im going to keep working.' Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek has kept his promise to 'keep working' by returning to the set of the show on Tuesday, after announcing last week that he has been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Trebek is pictured on the set of Jeopardy! in a file photo from April 21, 2012 Trebek shared the message personally with his many fan on Jeopardy's YouTube channel. '[W]ith the love and support of my family and friends and with the help of your prayers also, I plan to beat the low survival rate statistics for this disease,' he said. 'Truth told, I have to! Because under the terms of my contract, I have to host Jeopardy! for three more years! 'So help me. Keep the faith and well win. Well get it done. Thank you.' Trebek, 78, returned to filming after announcing on March 6 that he has been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Trebek has been the host of Jeopardy! for 35 seasons. Trebek is pictured in a still image from the video where he shared the news of his diagnosis Trebek, who has been the host of Jeopardy! for 35 seasons, will immediately begin chemotherapy treatment, TMZ reported. The syndicated program is viewed by 23 million people each week, making it the top-rated quiz show on U.S. television. Jeopardy! is produced by Sony Pictures Television Sony, a division of Sony Corp, and distributed by a division of CBS Corp. The show is recorded on the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City, California. 'The show normally has two production days a week, when multiple episodes of the daily show are taped in a row,' a spokesperson said. On Monday, the official Jeopardy Instagram account shared a photo of Trebek with television writer and producer Norman Lear, teasing an episode that aired later that day in which an entire category was devoted to Lear. It's not clear how far in advance the show films, so the date the photo was taken is not known. On Monday, the official Jeopardy Instagram account shared a photo of Trebek (right) with television writer and producer Norman Lear (center), teasing an episode that aired that day In the years leading up to Trebek's recent announcement of his cancer diagnosis, the Ontario native has had a few health scares. In December 2017, he underwent brain surgery after he was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Trebek was experiencing complications from a fall the month before when he hit his head. Trebek is seen above during his first season hosting the successful quiz show in 1984 The syndicated program is viewed by 23 million people each week, making it the top-rated quiz show on US television Trebek has been married to his wife Jean Currivan Trebek for 29 years. The couple is seen above in Hollywood in November 2014 On December 16 of that year, he underwent surgery to remove a subdural hematoma, which occurs when there is a build-up of bleeding on the brain usually after a head injury. In 2015, he needed to host Jeopardy! sitting down due to a knee replacement that he underwent. In 2012, he suffered a mild heart attack. Trebek is married to his wife of 29 years, Jean Currivan, with whom he shares two children - Matthew, 29, and Emily, 27. Matthew Trebek is the owner of the popular Mexican eatery Oso in New York City. Emily works in real estate in Los Angeles, according to PEOPLE. Two people identified in connection with a break-in at the North Korean embassy in Madrid have links to the US intelligence agency CIA, Spanish media claims. The mysterious incident took place on February 22 just five days before the start of a nuclear summit between North Korea and the United States attended, among others, by Pyongyang's former ambassador to Spain Kim Hyok Chol. Ten suspects allegedly broke into the embassy with fake handguns drawn, tying up diplomatic staff and stealing computers, the El Pais daily said. 'At least two of the ten assailants... have been identified and have ties with US secret services,' the paper said, citing sources from the police and Spain's intelligence agency, the National Intelligence Centre (CNI). A Spanish National Police car is seen outside the North Korean embassy in Madrid, Spain on February 28 following the raid The view of the front door of the North Korean embassy in Madrid after ten men were alleged to have conducted an audacious robbery of documents and computers The brazen invasion allegedly took place just days before President Donald Trump's meeting with North Korea's Kim Jong Un in Hanoi (pictured together on February 27) It specifically identified the CIA. According to investigators quoted by El Pais, they were looking for information linked to Kim. The CNI has refused to comment. According to El Pais, Spain asked for clarification from the CIA but the US spy agency denied any involvement. Spanish authorities however said the response was 'not very convincing'. The report said the CIA acted 'in probable cooperation' with South Korean intelligence services. Kim Hyok Chol (pictured outside a guesthouse in Hanoi last month) was formerly Kim's ambassador in Spain, but is now his special representative for US affairs The Spanish government and police have only confirmed that on February 22, emergency services attended to a North Korean woman with mild injuries on the street near the embassy. According to El Pais, which has quoted investigators as saying this could be 'political espionage', the ten men entered with fake handguns, tying up and gagging the staff. They reportedly escaped with documents, computers and telephones in two embassy cars with diplomatic number plates which they later abandoned. Investigators have discarded the theory of a petty crime as the break-in was well organised and similar to a military commando operation that knew what it was looking for. After analysing CCTV footage and questioning witnesses, they identified two of the assailants as having links with the CIA, El Pais said. Although Chol was expelled from Spain in a row over nuclear testing, the Spanish still permitted diplomatic representation to continue without a designated ambassador Since 2017, when Kim Hyok Chol was expelled from Spain as 'persona non grata' after nuclear tests and missile firings by Pyongyang, the secretive state has had diplomatic representation in Madrid but no ambassador. Kim is one of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's most trusted officials. He is now Pyongyang's special representative for the US and was involved in preparations for the summit in Hanoi between the North Korean leader and US President Donald Trump. The talks failed to reach a nuclear accord. A Florida corrections officer was detained after she allegedly attacked officers who were apprehending her for driving drunk with her two kids in the backseat. Miya Bell, 27, was arrested on Sunday following a traffic stop on Southwest 137th Avenue near Southwest 160th Street in Miami-Dade. She is said to have been driving recklessly and was 'crashing into things' in a gray Nissan Rogue, an arrest affidavit obtained by NBC Washington states. An officer noted that Bell wasn't driving in a single lane, almost crashing her vehicle as she swerved from lane to lane. Scroll down for video Miya Bell, 27, was arrested on Sunday following a traffic stop on Southwest 137th Avenue near Southwest 160th Street in Miami-Dade When the officer stopped the woman, they discovered that there were two young children sleeping in the backseat. The officer also noticed that the woman reeked of alcohol, had bloodshot and watery eyes. The police report states that Bell refused to take a sobriety test, informing officers that she had just left 'the club.' Bell refused to walk toward the cop car while being taken into custody, wrapping her legs around an officer's so that they couldn't walk. She was said to have been combative and violent throughout the whole ordeal, kicking the officers. When the officer stopped the woman, they discovered that there were two young children sleeping in the backseat Bell is said to have bit one of the officers on the arm, breaking the skin and causing a deep laceration and bleeding. She is then said to have headbutted a second officer on the bridge of his nose. The mother-of-two also bit another officer on the thigh, causing him to bruside and ripping his uniform pants. Bell was put in leg restraints and placed in the back of patrol car. She continued to refuse a breath test, according to the police report. The officer also noticed that the woman reeked of alcohol, had bloodshot eyes and watery eyes. She bit two officers while avoiding arrest The two officers were taken to the University of Miami Hospital for treatment. Bell was charged with three counts of aggravated battery on a law enforcement officer, three counts battery on a police officer, three counts resisting an officer with violence, two counts child abuse, one count of DUI, and one count resisting officer without violence In bond court on Monday, Bell was blasted by the judge for her behavior. 'These allegations are quite horrific, especially somebody in a position that you're in,' Judge Renatha S. Francis said to Bell. 'These allegations are just really outrageous, they really are.' Bell was placed on a $25,000 bond and will be on house arrest if released. She has also been ordered away from her children and cannot be in the proximity of a gun or weapon. A psychiatric patient stabbed an Oregon man to death after being released from a secure treatment center on a holiday pass, a $6.5million lawsuit claims. The family of victim Spiros Ghenatos, 49, is now suing the state, claiming Joshua Jaschke should never have been granted leave in the first place. The lawsuit claims that Oregon's Psychiatric Security Review Board was overseeing the care of Jaschke when he launched his bloody attack. Jaschke, 37, was given a holiday pass from Oregon State Hospital in Salem in December 2016. But he didn't visit his mother as expected, failed returned to the psychiatric facility, and three months later allegedly killed Ghenatos, of Eugene. He had been sentenced to 20 years of supervision under the psychiatric board for first-degree assault in 2006 and was 10 years into that sentence when he was granted the pass, as per the lawsuit. A lawsuit against the state alleges that a local Oregon hospital should have never released psychiatric patient Joshua Jaschke on a holiday pass because he failed to return and in that time murdered a man After he failed to the return to the hospital, on March 27, 2017 he allegedly killed Ghenatos, who was ill and bed-ridden, according to Oregon Live. He repeatedly stabbed Ghenatos in the face and body in his apartment. According to the lawsuit Ghenatos was a 'frail and ill man', it's not clear how the two knew each other. Witnesses said Jaschke emerged from that apartment visibly coated in blood then tried to carjack the vehicle of a local high school principal, then stripped off his clothes in a nearby creek. He was arrested wearing just his underwear and boots, according to news accounts. Jasche was charged with murder and other crimes. He's scheduled to go to trial in Lane County Circuit Court in April. The lawsuit was filed on Monday in Multnomah County by his Ghenatos' estate and beneficiaries. He allegedly stabbed Spiros Ghenatos, 49, to death on March 27, 2017 and when he was arrested his listed address in court records was Oregon State Hospital. The lawsuit alleges he should have never been released from the hospital This picture shoes Jaschke being taken into custody after he allegedly killed Ghenatos then stripped his clothes in a nearby creek. He was charged with murder and other crimes The lawsuit also sues Springfield Police for briefly detaining and handcuffing Jaschke after his release from the hospital because he was involved in a 'domestic disturbance' and was acting erratically, but then released him afterwards. This incident took place before the murder. 'After the telephone discussion between all defendants concluded, Jaschke was released from his handcuffs and walked off into the Oregon night,' the lawsuit states. At the time of his arrest, his listed address in court records was Oregon State Hospital. Officials from the state and the psychiatric board or the Springfield have not commented on the lawsuit filed Monday. The lawsuit alleges that Jaschke should have never been given a holiday pass in the first place due to his history of acting dangerously and erratically including 'stabbing, robbing, menacing, thieving from, and assaulting human beings in Oregon.' Eugene lawyers Travis Eiva and Erin Zemper are representing Ghenatos estate. Ghenatos mother is listed as the only heir to his estate. An on-duty Georgia school bus driver has been accused of driving under the influence of drugs while heading to pick up children. Sharon Fisher was arrested for driving under the influence of drugs, failure to maintain lane, and reckless driving, officials said. Emerson Police Chief W. Kyle Teems said eyewitnesses had reported seeing her 'driving all over the roadway, almost striking other vehicles' on Monday afternoon. He said: 'The officer located the bus on Georgia 1000 [near the Georgia 293 Connector], where a traffic stop was conducted, and the driver, Sharon Fisher, was given a field sobriety test and was subsequently arrested for DUI-drugs, failure to maintain lane and reckless driving.' No children were on the bus at the time of her arrest. Sharon Fisher has been accused of driving under the influence of drugs while heading to pick up children. She was arrested for driving under the influence of drugs, failure to maintain lane, and reckless driving Emerson Police Chief W. Kyle Teems said eyewitnesses has reported seeing Fisher 'driving all over the roadway, almost striking other vehicles' on Monday afternoon Fisher, thought have worked for both Bartow County and Fulton County Schools as a driver, is reportedly confident her drug test will come back negative. Her husband Steve said an issue with the windshield wipers caused her to move out of her lane, AJC reports. He told WSB-TV: 'She's the straightest goody two-shoes person I've ever known in my life. 'She does an occasional a muscle relaxer, 5 mg, that the doctor prescribes, and they know about that.' But Deshon Rodd, whose six-year-old son is driven by Fisher, told the network: 'That's not acceptable. That's not acceptable at all. 'She was on duty on the way to pick him up from his school. It's kind of crazy. I don't see how they let that slide. Fisher has worked as a bus driver for both Bartow County and Fulton County Schools, according to her Facebook page He added: 'You trust them with your kids. That's their lives. What would have happened if she would have made it? That's definitely very scary.' Fisher is now on leave pending the results of an investigation after she was bonded out of jail for $2,924 Tuesday. The school district said: 'The Bartow County School System is diligently looking into the matter that's currently under investigation by an outside agency. Ms. Fisher is on leave pending that investigation.' A driver who filled up with fuel without paying sent a member of petrol station staff sprawling when he rammed her with his Audi RS6 during a brutal hit-and-run. The garage staffer, who had tried to prevent the thief from leaving, was knocked off her feet when the car's bonnet smashed into her legs. She was rushed to hospital but fortunately escaped the alleged assault, which occurred at the Leicester Road Texaco in Lutterworth, Leicestershire, with only a black eye and bruising. Alarming CCTV footage of 8.15pm on March 10 captured the moment the driver ploughed into the garage staff member before zooming off. The garage staffer was knocked off her feet when the car's bonnet smashed into her legs at the Texaco in Lutterworth, Leicestershire It shows a bearded man filling up his dark blue Audi RS6 at the pumps of a petrol station at night. Yet when he returns the hose to its slot and closes the car's cap, he gets inside the driver's door and quickly reverses the vehicle. A woman dressed in black is then seen sprinting towards the car, presumably from the garage kiosk, with her arms outstretched signalling to the driver to stop. As the Audi stops reversing, the staff member stands in front of the bonnet to block the man's exit. But suddenly it shoots forward and slams into the woman who is pushed backwards on to the ground where she lies motionless. The driver brakes, and it appears that he is about to stop, but then he speeds off and flees the garage. When the driver returns the hose to its slot and closes the car's cap, he gets inside the driver's door and quickly reverses the vehicle A woman dressed in black is then seen sprinting towards the car, presumably from the garage kiosk, with her arms outstretched signalling to the driver to stop The woman can be seen flinching on the ground as startled onlookers gesture toward her, with one reaching for his phone while another makes his way towards the injured staffer. Leicestershire Police are now investigating the assault and a spokeswoman said: 'Officers are investigating an assault in Leicester Road, Lutterworth, after the driver of a vehicle failed to pay for fuel at a service station. 'The incident took place 8.15pm on Sunday (March 10). The driver of a Audi RS6 filled their vehicle with fuel and then failed to pay. A member of staff tried to stop the vehicle from leaving the forecourt.' James Peakes, managing director of the petrol station, said: 'We are concerned for our staff. 'I would ask anyone who knows who this is to contact the police. 'Hopefully she will have no lasting injuries but it could have been a lot worse than it was.' Anyone who witnessed it and hasn't already spoken to the police is asked to call 101. As the Audi stops reversing, the staff member stands in front of the bonnet to block the man's exit But suddenly it shoots forward and slams into the woman who is pushed backwards on to the ground The man jailed for South Australia's infamous bodies-in-the-barrels murders has written a desperate letter asking to be released from prison so he can spend time with his son. Notorious for torturing and murdering 10 people, Robert Joe Wagner this week lodged an application with the Supreme Court to have a non parole period set. Wagner, who is serving 10 consecutive life sentences without parole for his role in the 1999 murders, has penned a creepy letter as part of the request. He reportedly wants to have his non-parole period - which is likely to be lengthy - finalised so he can set a goal to work towards while serving time in jail. Scroll down for video Notorious for torturing and murdering 10 people, Robert Joe Wagner (pictured right in 2002) this week lodged an application with the Supreme Court to have a non parole period set Wagner, who is serving 10 consecutive life sentences without parole for his role in the 1999 murders, has penned a creepy letter (pictured) as part of the request In the one-page handwritten letter, obtained by Nine News, Wagner pleads for mercy by saying he hasn't spent time with his son since he was 18 months old. 'I am a father of a 21-year-old son. I have been in custody since he was 18 months old and would very much like the chance to spend some time with him in the community,' the letter reads. 'I believe that having a non-parole period set this would greatly assist my mental wellbeing. Even if the non-parole period was lengthy just having a date would be beneficial for me.' The convicted killer continues to plead by saying his behaviour while in prison has been 'reasonably good', and says he is 'eager' to continue his good behaviour. 'I pled (sic) guilty to 3 counts of murder which I hope to also be taken into consideration with this request,' the letter concluded. Wagner was arrested in May 1999, after detectives discovered eight bodies hidden in six barrels in a disused bank at Snowtown in South Australia's Mid North. Another two bodies were found days later in the backyard of a Salisbury North home. His co-accused, John Bunting, who was the ringleader of the group, is serving 11 consecutive life sentences in jail for his involvement in the horrific murders. Wagner and Bunting's accomplices, Mark Haydon and James Vlassakis are also serving sentences of up to 26 years without parole. In the one-page handwritten letter, Wagner pleads for mercy by saying he hasn't spent time with his son since he was 18 months old Robert Wagner (pictured in 2002) being escorted by a court sheriff outside the house in Snowtown, where the bodies in barrels had been stored for a period of time What shocked people the most about the grisly killings was that Wagner fried and ate the flesh of his last victim. When Justice Brian Martin eventually sentenced Wagner in 2003, the serial killer stated: 'Paedophiles were doing terrible things to children. The authorities didn't do anything about it. I decided to take action. I took that action. Thank you.' The majority of Wagner's victims weren't paedophiles. Wagner's application to set a non-parole period and bid for eventual freedom has sparked outrage from the Homicide Victims Support Group. Group founder Lynette Nitschke told the Advertiser the news will only make it difficult for the victims' relatives, who will have to relive the trauma of the killings again. 'It always retraumatises, especially in cases such as this where parole or release is involved anything that looks like they are going to get out of prison,' she said. Wagner was arrested in May 1999, after detectives discovered eight bodies hidden in six barrels in a disused bank (pictured) at Snowtown in South Australia's Mid North Another two bodies were found days later in the backyard of a Salisbury North home (pictured) Ms Nitschke said she believes the community would expect Justice Martin's sentence to remain in place, given the murders were so horrific. 'This case involves so many more victims because there are multiple murders. It is going to affect a lot of people,' she said. Director of Public Prosecutions Adam Kimber SC declined to comment about the application on Monday, and instead stated his office was available to assist victims. Applying for a non-parole period to be set falls under the Sentencing Act 2017, which can be rejected if it's deemed 'inappropriate' due to the seriousness of the offending. Wagner and Bunting are among a group of criminals, including Ivan Milat and Port Arthur gunman Martin Bryant who were sentenced without the prospect of parole. Wagner is serving ten consecutive life sentences without parole for his role in the 1999 murders (pictured are three of his victims) John Llewellyn Jones, 65, was on a day trip to Weston-Super-Mare when the bird knocked the bag of chips from his hands, so he grabbed it by the leg and battered the creature almost to death. He is pictured shortly after the attack last summer on July 17 A thug who killed a seagull by smashing it into a wall when it stole his chips on a trip to the seaside has been ordered to pay 750. John Llewellyn Jones, 65, was on a day trip to Weston-Super-Mare when the bird knocked the bag of chips from his hands, so he grabbed it by the leg and battered the creature until it was left with 'its eyes twitching' and on the brink of death. Children who witnessed the sickening attack were left shaken, and some burst into tears. Afterwards, an adult passer-by took the dying lesser black-backed gull to a vet to be put down. The species is protected in the UK and it is illegal to kill them. Witness Rachael Beer was working in a seaside sweet shop when she saw the sickening attack on July 17 and passed photos on to the RSPCA. The mother of three said: 'I saw a seagull squawking and then taking a chip from a man's plate. Suddenly he then grabbed it by its feet and swung it against the wall. 'I heard one of the mums say 'why did you do that in front of my child?' and he said 'it's vermin, you should teach your children about vermin'. 'I walked up to the gull and took a photo of it and then him. I said 'why did you do that' and he just shrugged his shoulders and walked away.' She said children were left in tears after seeing the injured bird on the promenade. 'The seagull wasn't dead at first,' she said. 'We could see its eyes twitching. Thankfully a passer-by came and took it to the vet. Seagulls are a problem but to kill one like that is just wrong.' Jones, a retired delivery driver from Cardiff, denied a charge under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 but was found guilty by a judge at North Somerset Magistrates' Court. Burly Jones was sentenced to a 12-week curfew and ordered to pay 750 in costs as well as an 85 victim surcharge - which went into a general fund for other victims. The seagull which was attacked and killed by Mr Jones was pictured by a passer-by, who passed the photos on to the RSPCA RSPCA inspector Simon Evans said: 'This was an unthinkable and despicable way to treat an animal - with this gull smashed against a wall by the man, solely because it knocked chips from his hand. 'This was deliberate cruelty, borne from the fact that this man cared more for his chips than what his actions did to the poor gull. Simply, the man showed blatant disregard for an animal because he was annoyed about his chips. 'Witnesses saw the attack - and shocked by-standers, including children, had to look on as the man killed the gull.' Retail giant Claire's is urgently recalling three makeup products that could contain traces of cancer-causing asbestos, it has been announced. The company, which sells millions of products globally, is recalling Claire's Eyeshadows, Claire's Compact Powder and Claire's Contour Palette, after FDA tests indicated that the potentially fatal fibers may be present. Claire's Stores Inc. said in a statement that the products were sold between October 2016 and March 2019, both in stores and online, and has urged consumers to stop using the products immediately. The company, which sells millions of products globally, is recalling Claire's Eyeshadows, Claire's Compact Powder and Claire's Contour Palette, after FDA tests indicated that the potentially fatal fibers may be present Claire's Stores Inc. said in a statement that the products were sold between October 2016 and March 2019, both in stores and online, and has urged consumers to stop using the products immediately (file image) Claire's said in a statement: 'Any consumers who have purchased these products should discontinue use and return them to a Claire's store for a full refund. Pictured: Claire's eyeshadow set Asbestos, a highly toxic mineral substance that can cause serious respiratory illnesses and even incurable cancers through prolonged exposure, is found near talc, an ingredient in many cosmetics products. Because of this, if the talc is not carefully purified during the mining process, it may be contaminated with asbestos. Tests carried out on the products found traces of the carcinogents, despite days earlier criticizing the FDA testing as showing 'significant errors.' Claire's Stores Inc. said in the statement that in the last year, it has switched to talc-free manufacturing for all of its products. Cosmetics don't have to be reviewed by the FDA before they're sold. Crucially, the industry is far less regulated than those of the medicine and food industries in the US. Lawmakers have not passed new regulations for cosmetics since 1938, with a mere 11 ingredients banned nationally, compared to more than 1,300 prohibited ingredients in Europe and Canada. Claire's said in a statement: 'Any consumers who have purchased these products should discontinue use and return them to a Claire's store for a full refund. Products recalled No. 8/17 of the Eyeshadow No. 7/15 of the Compact Powder No. 4/17 of the Contour Palette Advertisement 'To date, Claire's is not aware of any adverse reactions, injuries or illness caused by the possible presence of asbestos in the recalled products. 'Claire's continues to have confidence in the safety and composition of its products and is taking these actions out of an abundance of caution.' Disgraced Cardinal George Pell is likely to spend the next four years locked up in isolation after being jailed for sexually assaulting two choirboys in the 1990s. Chief Judge Peter Kidd warned Pell, 77, there was a very 'real possibility' he could die in jail as he sentenced him to six years in prison on Wednesday. The former Vatican treasurer, who suffers from hypertension and congestive heart failure, must spend three years and eight months in jail before applying for parole. In handing down his sentence, Chief Judge Peter Kidd told Pell his days of freedom could be over. Scroll down for video Judgement day: Judge Peter Kidd delivered a damning assessment of the Cardinal's crimes Mighty fall from grace: Disgraced Cardinal George Pell showed glimpses of despair in court 'I am conscious that the term of imprisonment, which I am about to impose upon you, carries with it a real possibility that you may not live to be released from prison,' Chief Judge Kidd said. 'Facing jail at your age, in these circumstances, must be an awful state of affairs for you.' He acknowledged Pell could face security threats from vigilante criminals in custody because of his high profile and the nature of his offences. Pell will begin his sentence isolated from other inmates as there are already 'concerns' about his safety. Corrections Victoria judged the cardinal as being 'at immediate risk of serious threat. Pell could face security threats from vigilante criminals in custody because of his high profile and will likely be placed in isolation (stock image of jail cell) 'Life in prison will be more onerous for you than other prisoners in the general population and indeed other sexual offenders because of your notoriety and the animosity to which you are likely to be exposed,' Judge Kidd said. Pell will be classified as a high-profile prisoner and will be given protection status, according to the Corrections Victoria affidavit. 'The affidavit also highlights that the conditions of persons with protection status at various different prisons are no longer significantly more restricted than those within the mainstream prison populations,' Judge Kidd said. Pell 'may' be able to interact with 'a limited number of heavily vetted prisoners' after some time. 'I emphasise the term - the use of the term 'may',' Judge Kidd said. George Pell at an earlier hearing in Melbourne before he was jailed. He tried his best not to show any emotion at his sentence but gave some glimpses into how he was feeling In the front row of the packed courtroom sat probably Pell's arch nemesis - ABC reporter Louise Milligan (pictured outside court last year) While Pell stood tall and proud on entry in the courtroom, his powerful presence had been removed - just like the clerical collar he had worn in public for nearly all of his life. In the front row of the packed courtroom sat probably his arch nemesis - ABC reporter Louise Milligan. The reporter had written a damning book about his alleged offending and now sat directly behind Pell's prosecutor alongside complainants from an abandoned trial. The hurls of abuse and heckling from Pell's detractors - present at previous court appearances - was nowhere to be heard on this momentous occasion. A police van transporting Cardinal George Pell leaves the County Court in Melbourne after Pell was sentenced to six years in jail for child sex crimes At a pre-trial hearing, Judge Peter Kidd had warned those who abused Pell's barrister Robert Richter, QC, that he would jail them if they played up. It had been a quiet morning outside of court, with only a handful on protesters present along Lonsdale Street. In the days of his trial, Pell had been shouted at and abused day in and out as he attended court. On Wednesday, they were outnumbered massively by reporters, who had come from across the country and the world to watch one of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church be sentenced. Pell's defence had protested against a television camera broadcasting the sentence live to the world. But a cameraman stood in the area usually reserved for a jury to film every word. The rest of the public was moved onto an adjoining courtroom where they were beamed in the live feed. When Pell took his seat in the dock, he was surrounded by four burly guards - much like the men who will be his only point of contact over his future years behind bars. Pell's barrister Robert Richter, QC, spent much of the hearing stroking his beard and staring directly at the bench in front of him A woman shouts outside the County Court after the sentencing of Cardinal George Pell During his pre-sentence hearing, a confident Pell made it his business to eyeball anyone who stared at him - and there were plenty in the courtroom who did. Pell would not break his gaze. It was a different George Pell in the dock on Wednesday. He sat stony faced. Those that took only a passing gaze at him might say he showed no emotion at all. But Pell's body could not totally hide his inner emotions. As the sentence kicked off, mention of his power within the church and his seniority caused Pell to rock back in his seat and straighten his slouched shoulders. He would go onto do this repeatedly throughout the more-than-an-hour long sentence. Pell's normally steely eyes also gave him away throughout Judge Kidd's drawn-out sentence. The disgraced Cardinal would take long, sustained blinks as Judge Kidd painfully outlined every detail of Pell's past few years. The media outrage, his vilification - albeit justifiably now - and the shocking details of the abuse of two choir boys in 1996 he had been found guilty of. At times it appeared as if Judge Kidd himself was almost sympathetic to Pell - repeatedly mentioning that he had to act on the jury's verdict. But Judge's Kidd's ultimate sentence looked anything but sympathetic - at least to some of those within the media who had covered the majority of his trials. Sins of the father: Protesters were out in force at the sentencing of Australia's most powerful Catholic cleric Robert Richter barrister for Cardinal George Pell arrives at the County Court for sentencing Abuse survivors and campaigners (pictured) arrived at court for the sentencing of disgraced Cardinal George Pell for abusing two teenage boys in 1996 Victims would later complain Pell had 'got off easy' and 'deserved a bigger hit'. Some had been tearful throughout the sentence - beacons of misery among a bunch of laptop pounding journalists. In the back row of the courtroom an artist glared at Pell as she no doubt created a masterpiece of him seated in the dock. Pell cleared his throat after Judge Kidd described his attack on a young choir boy as 'nasty'. Mr Richter, who fought so hard to clear Pell, spent much of the hearing stroking his beard and staring directly at the bench in front of him. As Pell's mental capacity was aired, the Cardinal removed his glasses and casually scratched his eye with the tip. He combed his hand through his hair when his breach of trust was mentioned and again cleared his throat when his power at St Patrick's Cathedral was raised. When Judge Kidd said Pell would often go in and congratulate the boys after choir, Pell's lips pursed together even tighter. Overwhelmed: The jailing of Cardinal George Pell brought forward a flood of emotions for some outside the sentence hearing It was as if in his mind, this was the only ounce of truth in the entire sentence. For more than half an hour Pell copped a tirade of Judge Kidd's accusations and assesment. But Pell again lifted his shoulders and sat proud when it was suggested he might be at the end of his days. After 53 minutes, Pell took his first swig of water from a paper cup. It had been a tiring sentence for all involved. Pell began to stretch out his dodgy knee and appeared uncomfortable. Even Judge Kidd stumbled a couple of times and was forced to restart his sentence. But as the time drew nearer to his ultimate doom, Pell began to become more active. On the other side of the room is a kitchen sink and cabinets next to the altar wine cabinet, a small room with a white door left slightly ajar This is the sacristy of St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne, as it looks today and shown to the jury, where Cardinal George Pell molested two 13-year-old choirboys in his ceremonial robes He adjusted his hair, took another swig of water and cleared his throat. With a strong right hand, he pulled himself to his feet. Judgement was delivered. The once untouchable George Pell - the third most powerful man in the Catholic Church - was handed a maximum sentence of six years, to serve at least three years and eight months in jail. There was hardly a sound. Pell signed some paperwork and bowed before being escorted out of court by the armed guards to begin his sentence. Some in court embraced. Outside court police were given three cheers by those still milling about. WHAT JUDGE PETER KIDD SAID WHEN SENTENCING PELL 'The acts were sexually graphic. Both victims were visibly and audibly distressed during this offending' 'You were confident your victims would not complain. It is fanciful to suggest that you may not have fully appreciated this' 'There is an added layer of degradation and humiliation that each of your victims must have felt in knowing that their abuse had been witnessed by the other' 'You had had ample time to reflect upon your previous abuse .... despite this, you still indecently acted against (victim J), and did so with what I consider to be a degree of physical aggression and venom' 'I consider your moral culpability across both episodes to be high' There was a clear relationship of trust with the victims, and you breached that trust and abused your position to facilitate this offending' 'Your obvious status as Archbishop cast a powerful shadow over this offending' 'I would characterise these breaches and abuses as grave' 'You continued to offend with callous indifference to the victim's distress' 'Your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance' 'There is no evidence of your remorse or contrition for me to act upon to reduce your sentence' 'On the one hand I must punish and denounce you for this appalling offending. Yet on the other hand, I am conscious of the heavy reality that I am about to sentence you, a man of advanced years, who has led an otherwise blameless life, to a significant period of imprisonment, which will account for a good portion of the balance of your life' Advertisement But the cheers might need to be saved until June, when Pell returns to court to appeal his conviction and now, quite possibly, his sentence. Pell became the world's most senior Catholic official to be convicted of child sex abuse when he was found guilty in December of orally raping a 13-year-old choirboy and molesting another at St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne after a Sunday mass. The 77-year-old stared directly at Chief Judge Kidd when he imposed the sentence on Wednesday morning which allows Pell to apply for parole after three years and eight months. In remarks broadcast live around the world from Melbourne County Court, Judge Kidd called Pell's crimes 'breathtakingly arrogant' and said the abuse has caused 'long-term and serious harm.' He said Pell's age and lack of offending for 22 years meant he is not a danger to the community and is not likely to re-offend. But because the disgraced cardinal still denies the abuse and is appealing the conviction, Judge Kidd said he had shown 'no remorse or contrition' which could have reduced the sentence. Pell, who was until late February the Vatican's treasurer and once considered a pope in waiting, will be on the sex offenders register for the rest of his life. Pell's surviving victim, who testified and was cross-examined at the trial, issued a statement through his solicitor saying he found it hard to take comfort in the verdict for now. 'Being a witness in a criminal case has not been easy. I am doing my best to hold myself and my family together,' said the victim. Campaigners called the sentence lenient and a 'disgrace'. Abuse survivor Michael Advocate said: 'It doesn't send any deterrent, it doesn't give the victims any sense of justice. Referring to the non-parole period, he added: 'Jail time of less than four years for destroying the lives of two innocent young boys - is their life only worth two years each?' Mr Advocate said it gave sex abuse victims comfort to know that Pell will be behind bars tonight and added: 'May Pell rot in his cell.' Pell's barrister had argued it would have been impossible for him to abuse the children while wearing the large robes he was dressed in when he committed the vile abuse Pope Francis (right, with Pell) banned him from saying Mass in public and from going near children until his appeal against the conviction is over The cardinal wore an open neck black shirt with no collar for the 70-minute sentencing - the first time he has been seen in public without the collar. At the start of proceedings at 10am, Judge Kidd said Pell's offending had a 'profound impact' on his victims. But he made clear that Pell would receive the 'stable hand of justice' and told him 'you are not to be made a scapegoat for any failings or perceived failings of the Catholic Church.' 'Nor are you being sentenced for any failure to prevent or report child sexual abuse by other clergy in the Catholic church,' the judge added. Judge Kidd said he accepted Pell's lawyer's argument that the abuse 'involved opportunistic and spontaneous offending, rather than pre-planned or premeditated conduct.' 'Had it been preplanned or involved grooming, it would have been more serious,' he said. Referring to the victims as J and R, he went into graphic details about the oral rape of one of the boys and the abuse of another in two incidents in 1996 and 1997. Pictured: A protester outside court for the sentencing of George Pell The judge said the acts were conducted with 'physical aggression and venom' and said 'it was by no means a minor indecent act.' Judge Kidd said the boy who was orally raped was 'struggling and flailing' during the act. 'You moved from one victim to the other,' he said. Judge Kidd said the first episode in the priest's sacristy involved a 'brazen and forceful sexual attack on the two victims'. 'The acts were sexually graphic. Both victims were visibly and audibly distressed during this offending,' Judge Kidd said. 'The obvious distress and objections of your victims is relevant to my assessment of the impact of your offending on (the victims). 'There is an added layer of degradation and humiliation that each of your victims must have felt in knowing that their abuse had been witnessed by the other.' The second episode was 'brief and spontaneous' but could not be viewed as an 'isolated lapse' as Pell had ample time to reflect on his previous abuse of one of the boys, the judge said. 'Despite this, you still indecently acted against (the boy), and did so with what I consider to be a degree of physical aggression and venom,' Judge Kidd said. 'It was by no means a minor indecent act.' Judge Kidd said by his offending in such a 'risky and brazen' manner, it was inferred Pell was prepared to take such risks. 'I conclude that your decision to offend was a reasoned, albeit perverted, one, and I reach that conclusion to the criminal standard.' Pell also abused his position by breaching the trust of his victims. 'I find beyond reasonable doubt that, on the specific facts of your case, there was a clear relationship of trust with the victims, and you breached that trust and abused your position to facilitate this offending,' the judge said. After the court hearing, campaigners called the sentence lenient and a 'disgrace'. Pictured: A man watches proceedings outside the court Judge Kidd rejected Pell's defence argument the crimes were committed by Pell the man, not the archbishop. 'Your obvious status as Archbishop cast a powerful shadow over this offending,' he said. 'I would characterise these breaches and abuses as grave.' Talking about Pell's role as Archbishop of Melbourne, the judge said: 'There was breach of trust and you abused your position to facilitate the offending. 'You were a pillar of St Patrick's community by virtue of your role as Archbishop. Victim J gave evidence that the choirboys were expected to show reverence in your presence. 'The evidence shows that you were profoundly revered, Cardinal Pell, which imbued you with and legitimised your authority. 'As Archbishop, you did have a relationship of approval in relation to the choirboys. In part, the choirboys were performing to please you as Archbishop. Talking about Pell's role as Archbishop of Melbourne, the judge said: 'There was breach of trust and you abused your position to facilitate the offending.' Pictured: Media outside court 'There was evidence that you would, from time to time, visit the robing room to congratulate the boys on their singing. The choirboys were the least powerful and the most subordinate individuals at the Cathedral. 'The victims themselves were 13 years of age. The power imbalance between the victims and all the senior church leaders or officials, yourself included, was stark.' In summarising his decision to sentence Kidd to six years in jail, he said: 'On the one hand I must punish and denounce you for this appalling offending. Yet on the other hand, I am conscious of the heavy reality that I am about to sentence you, a man of advanced years, who has led an otherwise blameless life, to a significant period of imprisonment, which will account for a good portion of the balance of your life.' FROM ALLEGATIONS TO CONVICTION: A TIMELINE OF THE CARDINAL GEORGE PELL CASE 1996 - Pell appointed Archbishop of Melbourne by Pope John Paul II - Pell sexually abuses two 13-year-old choirboys after a Sunday solemn mass at St Patrick's Cathedral - A second indecent act is committed by Pell against one of the choirboys in a corridor at the Cathedral. 2016 - The Herald Sun reports Pell is being investigated by Victoria Police's Sano taskforce for 'multiple offences' committed while he was a priest in Ballarat and Archbishop of Melbourne - Pell says the allegations are 'without foundation and utterly false' and calls for an inquiry into how the police investigation became public - Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton asks the anti-corruption watchdog to investigate the leak, but denies it came from police - Pell gives evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse's inquiry into abuse in Ballarat - Under Vatican rules, Pell gives Pope Francis his resignation on his 75th birthday, as is customary. It is not accepted - Victoria Police investigators hand over to the state's Office of Public Prosecutions a brief of evidence on allegations of sexual abuse by Pell - Officers travel to Rome to interview Pell over the abuse claims. He voluntarily participates in the interview. 2017 - Police present their final brief of evidence to the Office of Public Prosecutions to consider charges - Prosecutors give police the green light to charge Pell. JUNE 2017 - Pell is charged with multiple counts of historic child sex offences - He denies the charges and vows to clear his name - Lawyers for Pell appear in the Melbourne Magistrates Court - Pell takes leave from his Vatican finance chief role to fight the charges. JULY 2017 - Pell returns to Australia - He hires top barrister Robert Richter QC - Supporters set up a fund to help Pell fight the charges. MARCH 2018 - Prosecutors drop one of the charges against Pell - A month-long committal hearing begins to determine if Pell will face trial - Prosecutors withdraw more charges - Mr Richter claims police conducted a 'get Pell operation' and accuses magistrate Belinda Wallington of bias. She refuses to disqualify herself from the case. MAY 2018 - Magistrate Belinda Wallington orders Pell stand trial on some charges, but throws out others - Pell formally pleads 'not guilty' - Two trials are ordered, separating the 1970s and 1990s allegations - A Victorian County Court employee is sacked for looking up information on the Pell case. AUGUST 2018 - The 1990s 'cathedral trial' begins in the Victorian County Court in Melbourne - Pell pleads not guilty again to one charge of sexual penetration of a child under 16 and four of indecent acts with a child, over incidents involving two 13-year-old choirboys at St Patrick's Cathedral in 1996. SEPTEMBER 2018 - The jury is discharged, unable to reach a verdict following a week of deliberation. Some jurors weep. NOVEMBER 2018 - A retrial begins. The jury aren't told of the previous hung jury. DECEMBER 2018 - Pell is found guilty on all charges by an unanimous jury - Mr Richter says Pell will appeal - Suppression orders prevent Australian media reporting the verdict but it spreads through international media within hours. FEBRUARY 2019 - Hearings begin ahead of the second trial. Prosecutors drop another charge - An appeal is filed against the cathedral trial conviction - A County Court judge deems vital evidence inadmissible - Prosecutors withdraw all remaining charges against Pell and drop a second trial over allegations Pell indecently assaulted boys in Ballarat in the 1970s when he was a parish priest - Pell is due to be taken into custody on Wednesday February 27 as the plea hearing begins. MARCH 2019 - Pell is due to be sentenced by County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd. Australian Associated Press Advertisement The Government will fund free sanitary products in schools to tackle period poverty, Philip Hammond announced today. Mr Hammond said 'some girls are missing school' because they can't afford to buy them. The Chancellor said the Department for Education would develop the new scheme in time for the next school year in September. The surprise announcement came amid a small spending spree in Mr Hammond's Spring Statement today. The Government will fund free sanitary products in schools to tackle period poverty, Philip Hammond announced today (pictured during the Spring Statement) Mr Hammond said: 'In response to rising concern by headteachers that some girls are missing school attendance due to inability to afford sanitary products, I have decided to fund the provision of free sanitary products in secondary schools and colleges in England from the next school year.' A spokesman for the National Association for Head Teachers said they welcomed the move, saying it was 'the right thing to do'. However, while the National Education Union (NEU) also welcomed the move, it expressed disappointment that school funding was not addressed. Joint general secretary Kevin Courtney said: 'Parents, teachers, heads, school staff and MPs from across the House will be dismayed that the Chancellor did not address the national school funding crisis. 'Philip Hammond's boast that the economy is in recovery prompts the question of why he cannot address the issue of school funding now. 'Following his 'little extras' gaffe last year, it remains the case that the Chancellor is out of touch with the issues schools face on a daily basis. 'There is nothing new for children with SEND (special educational needs and disability) who are not getting adequate provision, nor for teachers who use their own money to resource lessons, or headteachers with difficult decisions to make around the lengths of the school day. 'The Chancellor had an opportunity today to end uncertainty for schools about budget planning. He failed.' Mr Hammond said 'some girls are missing school' because they can't afford to buy tampons and sanitary pads . Liberal Democrat Education spokeswoman Layla Moran claimed victory over the announcement. She said: 'With 1 in 4 women saying they have experienced forms of period poverty, the Liberal Democrats have been fighting to ensure schools and hospitals are places where you can get free tampons and pads. National Education Union (NEU) Joint general secretary Kevin Courtney welcomed the move but expressed disappointment that school funding was not addressed. ''However, this is not a silver bullet and we must continue to demand better for girls and women. It is vital the Conservative Government bring in more ambitious measures if we are to bring about the full eradication of period poverty.' Last year a Labour council in Nottingham pleddged to fund free sanitary products in a new plan to tackle 'period poverty'. Nottingham City Council voted to provide free tampons in schools, and also said it aims to encourage businesses to take similar measures for staff. The move is a response to statistics that show some women are being forced to choose between paying the bills and buying tampons. It was put forward by Labour Councillor Nick Raine after speaking to teachers on his ward. Last year Scotland piloted a scheme to provide free sanitary products for low-income women in Aberdeen, and earlier this year the Scottish Parliament voted to extend the programme across the country. Free sanitary products were also made available at Scottish schools, colleges and universities for this academic year under a 5.2million government plan. President Donald Trump on Wednesday slammed the #FakeMelania conspiracy theory bouncing around the internet and placed the fault with the 'fake news.' The president charged the 'deranged' media with photoshopping images of the first lady, which he claims led to conspiracy theories that she was not at his side during their visit to tornado victims in Alabama on Friday. 'The Fake News photoshopped pictures of Melania, then propelled conspiracy theories that it's actually not her by my side in Alabama and other places. They are only getting more deranged with time!,' he tweeted Wednesday morning. The ladies of The View on Monday gossiped about the #FakeMelania conspiracy theory This Twitter user claims to have started the #FakeMelania conspiracy theory President Trump slammed the #FakeMelania conspiracy theory on Wednesday as part of 'deranged' media after the internet went abuzz the first lady was not with him in Alabama on Friday. The photo above started the body double talk He charged the media with photoshopping images of Melania, which he claims led to conspiracy theories that she was not at his side in Alabama The president did not elaborate on what images he believed were altered. The White House did not respond to DailyMail.com's request for comment. It's not the first time the internet bounced the idea that it was not actually Melania Trump at the president's side. And it happened again in the wake of Friday's trip by the first couple to the storm ravaged South. The ladies of ABC's 'The View' discussed the #FakeMelania conspiracy theory on their Monday show and the hosts of 'Fox & Friends' mocked them for it on Wednesday morning. 'It's shameful,' said Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt. 'In typical fashion 'The View' chooses to laugh in the face of tragedy.' On 'The View' on Monday, host Joy Behar noted that 'the fake Melania conspiracy is back.' She showed a photo collage from one twitter user promoting the #FakeMelania conspiracy and conceded: 'That one doesn't look like her. I wasn't going to go along with this but that one in that picture doesn't look like her.' 'It's a different shaped face,' Behar added. First lady Melania Trump greets people at Providence Baptist Church in Smiths Station, Ala., on Friday Host Sunny Hostin agreed. 'Melania is a very tall statuesque woman and the one we saw, the first one that we showed. She looks kind of short,' she said. But Abby Huntsman played devil's advocate. 'I'm not convinced,' she said. 'If it's not her, why not just stay home? Why go through all this effort?' The first couple visited communities in eastern Alabama on Friday that were devastated by recent tornadoes that left 23 people dead. Almost as soon as they arrived in the state, Twitter was alight with the hashtag #FakeMelania as conspiracy theorists fed the baseless claims that Melania had a stand in. Those convinced she uses a body double at public events drew on her height, hair, nose and demeanor on Friday. They claimed that the differences proved it wasn't actually Melania in Alabama with her husband. 'The recasting of Melania is the worst I've seen since they recast Aunt Viv in Fresh Prince #fakemelania,' one Twitter user wrote. 'I clicked on #FakeMelania against my better judgement and I have to say that it DOES NOT look like Melania,' another tweeted. The claims about Melania using a body double at public events first arose in October 2017 when she appeared beside her husband as he addressed the media about hurricane relief for Puerto Rico. During the press conference, Trump pointed out the presence of his wife even though she was standing in clear view of the cameras. 'My wife, Melania, who happens to be right here,' he said. Conspirators have based their theory of a Melania body double on the fact that Trump pointed out the first lady was there to cover for the fact she was actually somewhere else. The theory resurfaced again in August last year during a trip to Columbus, Ohio with the President. The conspiracy theories are often renewed when Melania appears alongside her husband wearing sunglasses or whenever a grainy photo of her emerges. In Alabama on Friday, Melania wore sunglasses as she paid her respects to the victims in the tornado-ravaged area. The Trumps then went on a helicopter tour of the area, visited the homes of some victims and went to a disaster relief center at the Providence Baptist Church in Opelika to meet with survivors, volunteers and first responders. A transgender woman who allegedly carried out a string of pepper-spray attacks while shouting anti-white slurs has been charged with hate crimes. Tasha Heard, of the Bronx, New York City, was arrested on Saturday in connection with at least two attacks, though police are investigating several similar incidents. In one alleged incident on Saturday, Heard, who is African-American, cornered a white couple in their 50s who were shopping in the Bronx and told them she hated 'white people' before kicking both victims and spraying them with mace. Surveillance footage shows the suspect in a blue coat kicking a woman 'They were approached by the defendant who kicked both victims and sprayed a substance in their face,' an NYPD spokesperson said. 'The victims suffered minor injuries.' Tasha Heard, of the Bronx, New York City , was arrested on Saturday in connection with at least two attacks, though police are investigating several similar incidents Another incident is alleged to have taken place on Saturday in the same borough. 'The defendant approached a 30-year-old male and a 24-year-old female, asked them if they were white and displayed a sharp object causing fear,' the NYPD said. 'The female victim was sprayed in the face with an unknown substance causing redness, burning and discomfort.' Police said Heard pepper-sprayed six other white people in Manhattan, five others at a subway stop in Harlem and one at on the Upper West Side. One alleged victim, Joshua Smith, said Heard brazenly attacked him at the subway stop on 125th Street in Harlem, using mace to briefly blind him. 'She held the mace directly to my eye and sprayed it in my eye,' Smith told NBC New York. 'She just walked up to me, like literally walked up, maced me and kept walking.' Smith said being sprayed in the face was 'rough.' The suspect is seen to use a spray as a man walks down the street in the Bronx 'It lights your whole face on fire, your sinuses, your throat feels like it's closing up,' he said. The attacks come amid a worrying rise in hate based crimes in the United States, with the FBI reporting a 17 percent rise across the country in 2017 - the third year in a row the figures rose. Among these figures, the report indicated that almost half were motivated by an anti-black bias, compared to 17.5 percent of which motivated by anti-white and almost 11 perfect by an anti-Latino bias. A 51-year-old holidaymaker is set to sue a Turkish hotel where she caught salmonella after claiming the resort allowed sick animals to freely roam the hotel. Tracy Marlor was hoping for a relaxing time in a luxury resort overlooking the picturesque Antalya bay when she travelled to the country with her husband for a week. But Mrs Marlor, from Darlington, was unimpressed with various elements of the holiday, saying sick cats would eat food from the tables and described it as a 'five-star cattery.' Towards the end of her stay at the Paloma Foresta Resort and Spa, the 51-year-old began developing gastric illness symptoms including diarrhoea, severe stomach cramps, bloating, lethargy and weight loss. Tracy Marlor ended up in hospital diagnosed with salmonella after her stay at a luxury resort in Turkey The business support officer returned to the UK and visited her GP who told her she needed urgent medical treatment in hospital. After staying on a ward for four days, she was diagnosed with salmonella. Mrs Marlor, was forced to take two weeks off work following the holiday May last year. She said: 'I had not been impressed by many aspects of the resort to be honest, as I'd seen issues like food being served lukewarm on occasions, at times inadequate cleaning and even cats wandering around and taking food from tables too. 'However, I simply never expected to fall ill like I did. 'It was quite surreal, the cats would roam around the hotel freely, and quite often they were being sick around the hotel. 'It was like we were staying at a five-star cattery, not a holiday resort. 'I was in a really bad way and while I managed to make it home, I was stunned when my GP told me to get to hospital. Towards the end of her stay at the Paloma Foresta Resort and Spa (pictured), the 51-year-old began developing gastric illness symptoms including diarrhoea, severe stomach cramps, bloating, lethargy and weight loss 'I couldn't believe I had salmonella and the whole thing was a nightmare that completely turned my life upside down. 'This was meant to be an unforgettable holiday but now it will only ever be remembered for all of the wrong reasons.' The break was booked via Thomas Cook and started on May 20, with the illness developing on the penultimate day of the holiday. Speaking to MailOnline a spokesman for Thomas Cook said: 'We are sorry to hear that Mrs Marlor was unwell while on holiday with us. We take all reports of illness seriously and carefully reviewed the medical evidence the customer supplied along with hygiene, health and safety reports from the Paloma Foresta Resort and Spa as part of our investigation. 'This is now a legal matter and once we receive the claim from Irwin Mitchell we will look into it further.' Mrs Marlor approached solicitors Irwin Mitchell and their holiday illness team to investigate. Jennifer Mullins, a specialist lawyer at Irwin Mitchell, said: 'We are hugely concerned by the first-hand account provided to us regarding the resort in question and have already begun our own investigation into the holiday. 'We are keen to determine what caused Tracy to fall ill. 'As part of our work and to assist with our investigations, we would be keen to hear from anyone else who may also have been affected by illness whilst staying at the Paloma Foresta Resort, Turkey.' A Kansas woman who stole $8,000 of donations intended for an 11-year-old burn victim after setting up a GoFundMe with her husband has been sentenced to just one year of probation. Cinthia Davis, 34, was found guilty of felony theft in January after raising money for Haysville girl Halley Mae Cooper who was burned in September 2015. She was sentence by Judge Bruce Brown who also told her to pay back the remaining money owed to the victim's family, Kake.com reports. More than $8,000 was raised in less than a month. But a police investigator testified during Davis' trial that all the funds were withdrawn and spent within 60 days after the fundraiser ended. The girl's mother received only a few hundred dollars. Cinthia Davis, of Wellington, was sentenced Tuesday and ordered restitution to the victim's family. Davis was found guilty of felony theft in January. Davis' husband, Martin Kerr, pleaded guilty to theft and was sentenced to probation last year Prosecutors allege Davis and her husband set up a GoFundMe account to raise money for a Haysville girl who was burned in September 2015 Davis' husband, Martin Kerr, also pleaded guilty to theft and was sentenced to probation last year. He was ordered to repay more than $7,000. The couple are said to have used the money for withdrawals, to pay for groceries and bills, as well as dining out at restaurants and a pawnshop. Little Halley's dress caught on fire while out playing with a friend who had a lighter. She spent 18 days in hospital with third-degree burns covering 17-percent of her body. During that time Davis, of Wellington, and Kerr were said to have set up the GoFundMe to help her. More than $8,000 was raised in less than a month after Halley spent 18 days in hospital Halley suffered third-degree burns covering 17-per cent of her body. The girl's mother, Wendi Bernstorf, who received only a few hundred dollars, said she was 'angry, devastated and betrayed' by their actions Speaking in 2016 her mom Wendi Bernstorf told KSN: 'We had asked for money in December because we had bills coming in and they said it was all gone. 'Every emotion you can think of went through me entire body. I was angry, I was devastated, I was betrayed. 'You better know the people or set it up yourself. It may be a family member, but once people see dollar signs, it's the root of all evil.' DailyMail.com has contacted Wendi Bernstorf and GoFundMe for comment. A Utah gynecologist has been sentenced to 15 years in state prison, in addition to time to be served in federal custody, for live streaming the sexual abuse of a 13-year-old girl. Dr. Nathan Clark Ward, 57, was sentenced on Tuesday, which will not begin to run until after he serves 22 years in federal prison for the same acts which occurred in 2012. Ward admitted to live streaming video as the clothing of the teen, whom he had a relationship 'of special trust' with, the Deseret News reported. Judge Thomas Kay blamed pornography for Ward's abuse of power and sex crimes, as did Ward in August, when he first admitted to the allegations. 'The abundance, the access through the internet and everything else, has had more people looking at pornography in our society and acting it out in a later time,' Kay said, reflecting on what he's seen in his two decades on the bench. 'Our society has gotten so much coarser and meaner and worse than it was 20 years ago.' The combined sentences mean that Ward, who was married when he first admitted to the sexual abuse, may be anywhere between ages 85 and 93 when he's released, depending on determinations of parole authorities. Gynecologist Nathan Clark Ward, 57, has been sentenced to 15 years in a Utah state prison on top of 22 years in a federal prison in Colorado for live streaming video of a child sex abuse 'It would be a life sentence and it should be, because theyre living with a life sentence,' deputy Davis County Attorney Nathan Lyon said, referring to the victim and her family. The victim addressed Ward in court on Tuesday at the state sentencing hearing. 'The day you were arrested was the day I finally knew it was over, that I could finally breathe,' the current college student said. 'That day the weight was lifted from my shoulders and I hope it came crashing down on you. You took too much from me.' Her mother also spoke, detailing how Ward's actions fractured her family. '[You] will be the object of horror because of what youve done to her,' the mother said, while noting her daughter is a warrior who will fight to recover. 'We are finally free from your control,' she added. Ward was initially charged in 2017 with 11 counts of sexually abusing children, including possession of child pornography, sexual exploitation of a minor, sodomy on a child, aggravated sexual abuse of a child, forcible sodomy, and forcible sex abuse. In July, Ward was sentenced to serve 262 months (nearly 22 years) in federal prison in Colorado for the same acts. The following month, Ward initially pleaded guilty to the state charges against him, saying at that time, 'Unfortunately, I dabbled with pornography a long time ago and it's something that I've tried to kick, and it has led me down a slippery slope to hell.' Ward admitted to sharing footage as he removed the clothing of a 13-year-old, blaming porn for his actions, saying in August, 'Unfortunately, I dabbled with pornography a long time ago and it's something that I've tried to kick, and it has led me down a slippery slope to hell' The combined state and federal sentences mean that Ward may be anywhere between ages 85 and 93 when he's released, depending on determinations of parole authorities After entering the plea, however, Ward withdrew the admission when he learned whatever sentence he received would be stacked on top of, rather than running currently with his federal prison sentence. In January, he changed his mind and officially pleaded guilty to aggravated sexual abuse of the teen, which is a first-degree felony, in exchange for having four other felony charges dropped. He also promised to drop the appeal of his federal conviction. Ward was first arrested on July 20, 2017 following an eight-month investigation that began in November of 2016, conducted by the Internet Crimes Against Children task force into child pornography. Ward was charged with sharing at least six images of child porn between January and September 2016. The ICAC had received a CyperTip from Yahoo Messenger regarding 'apparently child sexually exploitative images' being uploaded by the account 'clark_bueno'. Photos from the account had been uploaded from two IP addresses traced to Lakeview Hospital and St Mark's Hospital, according to The Standard-Examiner. Ward, who had been a practicing OB-GYN for more than 25 years, was working at both the Saint Mark's Hospital in Salt Lake City and Lakeview Hospital in Bountiful at the time. An ICAC detective first met with Ward in February 2017, but the doctor denied knowing anything about the clark_bueno account or the photos. But in May police discovered that the account, created in 2002, was opened at the same address where Ward was living at the time and had the same date of birth. Six IP addresses from Lakeview and St. Mark's Hospital, as well as Ward's current residence, were also connected to the account, police revealed. Seven of the 37 photos provided by Yahoo were of sexually exploited children, while others included 'voyeuristic photos of underage females'. The investigation also unearthed 'several' conversations conducted on instant messenger, email, and Craigslist that were 'explicit in nature', police said. In one conversation Ward allegedly disclosed he 'raped a 15-year-old drunk on vodka after her father 'set it up', according to the probable cause report. The report states that Ward also disclosed he 'raped a 13-year-old' and described 'desires to rape females and minors'. The doctor, who previously worked as a staff physician for 13 years in the Air Force, was suspended from Lakeview Hospital following his first arrest. All schools in China should teach children about death to help them respect life in a quickly ageing society, urged an official. The course should teach youngsters all information about death, including the causes, process and meaning of it, to help them deal with death-related events better, according to Gu Jin, a member of China's National People's Congress. Gu's proposal comes as China faces a rapidly ageing society. There are now more people aged 60 or over in China than those aged 15 and under. All children in China should learn about death at school to prepare them for their future lives in a quickly ageing society, says a member of China's National People's Congress (file photo) Gu, a doctor from Beijing, told BJ News that education on death - a taboo topic in China - was 'particularly necessary' because it could teach people to respect life in a silver-haired society. He said not only children needed 'death education', every adult in the country should be given it too. He explained that in China - the world's fastest ageing population - many senior citizens suffer from serious illnesses, such as cardiovascular diseases and malignant tumours, and four people die of cancer every minute. However, many people find it difficult to handle the news of a family member dying or provide them with suitable care, according to Gu. The course should teach youngsters all information about death, including the causes, process and meaning of it, to help them deal with death-related events better (file photo) Gu gave an example. He said people would choose to give their terminally ill family members 'intensive' medical treatment - instead of more natural, gentle ones - to show their filial devotion. This would not only bring extra pain on the patients at the very end of their lives, but also cost the family their live savings in an unnecessary way, he added. Gu also said that death education could also help prevent children and teenagers from committing suicide - another major societal issue in the country. Gu submitted his proposal to China's central government during the country's annual parliamentary meetings in Beijing. Philip Hammond today announced a major funding boost to combat knife crime. In the Spring Statement, the Chancellor pledged an immediate 100million boost for police forces. Only 80million is new money. Most of the money will pay for a 'surge' in street policing in an effort to tackle rising levels of violence on the country's streets. Police forces will be required to spend the money on front line policing. The Treasury said it should free up existing officers to respond to crime and go on patrols. It follows a major Whitehall row between the Home Office and Treasury, and represents a major victory for Home Secretary Sajid Javid. Chancellor Philip Hammond today announced a 100million funding boost to combat knife crime after a surge in killings Most of the money will pay for a 'surge' in street policing in an effort to tackle rising levels of violence on the country's streets. Last week Mr Hammond urged forces to divert existing resources from lower priority crime instead of demanding more. Announcing the emergency funding for police forces struggling to cope with violent crime, Mr Hammond acknowledged 'action is needed now'. He said police funding was already due to rise by up to 970 million from April but it would take time to recruit and train extra officers. Mr Hammond said: 'The Prime Minister and I have decided, exceptionally, to make available immediately to police forces in England an additional 100 million over the course of the next year, ring-fenced to pay for additional overtime targeted specifically on knife crime and to fund new Violent Crime Reduction Units to deliver a wider cross-agency response to this epidemic.' Mr Javid, said he was 'deeply concerned' about rising levels of knife crime. He said: 'I've been doing everything in my power to ensure we have the strongest possible response in place, but tackling this requires action on many fronts. 'Law enforcement plays a key role - and it is clear from speaking to police leaders in recent weeks that they need an immediate increase in resources. 'I've listened to their concerns and this 100million including 80million new funding from the Treasury - will allow them to swiftly crack-down on knife crime on the areas of the country where it is most rife.' It follows a major Whitehall row between the Home Office and Treasury, and represents a major victory for Home Secretary Sajid Javid (pictured today in Downing Street) Some of the funding will also be invested in Violence Reduction Units, bringing together a range of agencies including health, education, social services and others, to develop a multi-agency approach in preventing knife crime altogether. The units will be based on models used in Glasgow where homicide rates fell by 54 per cent from 2006/07 to 2015/16. The cash is for one year only and is made up of 80million in new Treasury cash and 20million from existing Home Office funds. Most will be spent in the highest knife crime areas of London, West Midlands, Merseyside, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, South Wales and Greater Manchester. A daredevil speedflyer narrowly avoided hitting the ground wearing just shorts and trainers as he flew along a mountain riverbed. Jamie Lee, who describes himself as a flyer and traveller, went down Shark's Tooth in Mount Aspiring National Park, New Zealand at high speeds using a paraglider. Social media reacted with shock and amazement to the Daredevil's post this month, with one user saying they get anxiety just watching it. The speedflyer skimmed down Shark's tooth in Mount Aspiring National Park, New Zealand, wearing just shorts and trainers for protection In the shocking video footage the flyer, Jamie Lee, and his friend (pictured) seem to be inches away from rocks and treetops as they fly over them Video footage shows the adrenaline lover swinging from side to side as he descends the mountain behind his friend, tracking a riverbed. The pair fly over the near bed, full of exposed rocks, and appear to fly within inches of the surface before pulling up. 'That was lovely', Jamie Lee shouts to his friend before they jump off another ridge and descend again. Jamie is seen narrowly missing rocks and dangling his trainer-clad feet within what appear to be inches of the ground before pulling back up. Social media reacted with shock to the video. Commenting on the video posted on Instagram, thebig_elvd said: 'I would really love this ride in Disneyland'. He shouts 'well that was fun!' to his friend after they have done the first flight before gliding off to do the second Social media reacted with shock and amazement to the video on Instagram. One user wrote: 'My tailbone gets anxiety just watching this'. 'Some amazing stuff you guys do, love watching it,' said illustrator.artist. Sonnyxxmoon said: 'My mum would actually fight me if I tried this. Like...The kind of fighting someone watching would be like, 'we should call someone'. Very cool though.' Sirrodgerwilliams said: 'My tailbone gets anxiety just watching this.' Speed flying was originally invented as a winter sport, and was created by paragliders and skydivers as a way to link ski'ing to the air. However, it has now been expanded to include flying down snow-free slopes with no ground contact until you get to the end of the slope. Residents of a tiny Spanish village have been left mystified by an anonymous donor who leaves envelopes of cash in postboxes or under people's doors. Since Wednesday last week, about 15 people in Villarramiel, northern Spain, have received envelopes containing up to 100 euros in notes, Mayor Nuria Simon told AFP. Locals are trying to work out why a group of apparently unconnected people in a village of just over 800 residents have been singled out for the gifts. An anonymous donor leaving envelopes of cash in postboxes or under people's doors in a northern Spanish village has been labelled the 'Robin Hood of Villarramiel' (stock image) Some residents of Villarramiel (pictured) have received messages addressed to them, including adoring phrases, such as 'The princess of the household' Some Spanish news reports have labelled him the 'Robin Hood of Villarramiel'. 'We're all bewildered and expectant as we don't know where this money comes from or who the benefactor is,' Simon said. 'We don't know what the intention is.' While some got their banknotes in a brown envelope, others also received messages including the recipients' names, addresses and phrases, such as 'The princess of the household' - complete with a heart, Simon said. Mayor Nuria Simon said residents are 'bewildered' because they do not know where the money is coming from Residents of the tiny Spanish village have reported receiving envelopes containing up to 100 euros in notes (stock image) 'A widow living with her son, couples with small children, elderly couples, middle-aged couples without kids...', she said. There is no obvious link between recipients. Some of those who received the money have gone to the police or the bank to report it, and to check that the banknotes are real: they are. No police investigation has been opened because, so far as anyone is aware, no offence has been committed, Simon added. Christopher Freeman, pictured, was arrested after showing up at his son's school with a loaded AK-47 handgun An upset father allegedly showed up at his son's school armed with a loaded AK-47 handgun after the crying boy called him claiming a teacher had 'slammed' him. Christopher Freeman, who lives near West Palm Beach in south Florida, arrived at Bear Lakes Middle School with the weapon on Monday at around 4pm, reports WPTV. Earlier that day, Freeman had allegedly threatened the school's Assistant Principal who called him about the incident, saying 'you're all dead'. After arriving at the school with the pistol sticking out of the front of his pants, he told a school resource officer who stopped him: 'I want to see the guy who slammed my son. I've got something for him.' He was searched by officers who put the school on lock down immediately. They found a Romarm/Cugir AK-47 Mini Draco pistol. The weapon had a bullet in the chamber and a 30-round magazine attached. After being arrested, Freeman claimed he bought the gun for protection but forgot he had it with him. He added that he did not plan to hurt anyone. Freeman is being charged with aggravated assault and possession of a firearm on school property. Freeman, pictured in court, said his son had called him claiming a teacher had 'slammed' him at Bear Lakes Middle School in West Palm Beach, Florida A nimble-fingered thief stole a hotel concierge's phone while he was asking the worker for help. The criminal places a sheet of paper over the phone while he asks questions and then picks it up. When he pulls away the sheet of paper, the phone has disappeared. Police say thefts like this doubled in January in the City of London, and are warning people to be more vigilant. The man places the piece of paper over the phone, asks the London concierge some questions while he's grabbing the phone, and then picks up the sheet of paper while holding the phone underneath After taking the device he asks a few more questions and even shakes the concierge's hand before leaving Shocking footage shows the criminal come into the hotel wearing a camouflage patterned top and black hat to ask for some help. He leans over and places the sheet of paper over the phone and then uses his right hand to grab it. Once he has the phone he then pulls his hand away while still talking to the concierge. He then stays for a few moments longer, grabs a leaflet to ask the concierge about, and even shakes his hand before leaving. People have previously been jailed for distracting others before stealing their property. Magdalena Stanescu, 38, was jailed last month for eights weeks after she struck up a conversation in a coffee shop and dropped her scarf on a person's phone, before walking away with both items. Police say they take a 'zero tolerance' approach to this kind of crime. Magdalena Stanescu, 38, was jailed for eight weeks after she stole a person's phone by dropping a scarf on it. Detective Inspector Mark Forster of the City of London Polices Criminal Investigation Department called for 'greater vigilance'. He said: 'Despite our efforts to help reduce the number of distraction thefts in the City in February 2019, people still need to remain alert and vigilant. 'It is much easier to lift a small item from a table without the owner realising, such as a mobile phone, than it is to steal a whole bag. 'Stanescus jail sentence shows that we have zero tolerance towards theft in the City and we will do everything in our power to bring those responsible to justice.' City of London Police has issued a warning after almost 30 similar incidents in January - with thieves distracting their victims. City of London Police says the number of crimes of this type doubled in January this year There was a spike in January with 28, more than double the number of incidents in both November 2018 and December 2018. The force reported a 36 per cent decrease in 'distraction thefts' after Stanescu was arrested, but claim the risk still stands. Figures suggest thieves are hitting up pubs and restaurants in central London, and are most likely to 'strike' at the weekends. Victims are usually asked for directions, money, or asked to read a note on their table, before thieves slide away with their valuables. Ten women's rights activists have gone on trial in Saudi Arabia, more than nine months after they were arrested in a crackdown on dissent. Loujain al-Hathloul, who campaigned for Saudi women to have the right to drive, was among prominent campaigners to appear before a judge in Riyadh on Wednesday. It comes after the Arab kingdom was denounced by the Western world over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last year. Loujain al-Hathloul, who campaigned for Saudi women to have the right to drive, was among ten activists who appeared in front of a judge in Riyadh on Wednesday Iman al-Nafjan and Aziza al-Yousef were also among those to appear at the closed-door hearing in Riyadh, charged with 'undermining social harmony' (pictured, protesters in Paris) Last week, more than 30 countries criticised Saudi Arabia at the United Nations security council for detaining the women. Also appearing before a judge was Aziza al-Yousef, Eman al-Nafjan and Hatoon Al-Fassi, along with six others who were not identified. Court president Ibrahim al-Sayari announced the start of the trial to reporters and more than a dozen diplomats who were barred from attending the hearing, and cited privacy concerns for not making the trial public. The women are among more than a dozen activists, including men, arrested in the weeks before a ban on women driving cars in the conservative kingdom was lifted. A few were previously released without trial. At the time of the arrests, the public prosecutor said five men and four women were being held on suspicion of harming Saudi interests and offering support to hostile elements abroad. State-backed media labelled them as traitors and 'agents of embassies', unnerving foreign diplomats in the key US ally. Some of the women appeared in the courtroom together on Wednesday, but their cases appeared to be separate. Relatives were allowed to enter only for certain parts of the session. ALQST, a London-based Saudi rights group, said the women were charged under the kingdom's cybercrime law. The law stipulates prison sentences ranging from one to ten years. The accusations are related to human rights work and communications with 'hostile entities', ALQST said on Twitter. The status of legal representation was unclear. Rights groups have previously said the activists had no access to lawyers during more than nine months of detention and interrogation. Fellow campaigners say the women have been charged under the kingdom's cybercrime law and could be landed with up to ten years in jail Western governments called on Saudi to release the women, after they blasted the Arab kingdom over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul Relatives said they were told at the last minute that the trial had been moved from the Specialized Criminal Court, which was set up to try terrorism cases but is often used for political offences. It was unclear what was behind the decision, but diplomats said they were hopeful it signalled a more lenient handling of the cases after months of lobbying by Western governments. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and British counterpart Jeremy Hunt have said they raised the issue with Saudi authorities during recent visits. It remains to be seen if Riyadh will bend to that pressure - with the women possibly receiving acquittals or pardons - or pursue harsh sentences. Critics say the case has revealed the limits of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's promises to modernise Saudi Arabia. The prince has courted the West to support ambitious economic and social reforms, but his reputation was tarnished after Saudi agents killed Khashoggi, a royal insider-turned-critic, last October at the kingdom's Istanbul consulate. The outcry over the murder increased scrutiny of the detained women's rights activists, who also include Nouf Abdelaziz, Mayaa al-Zahrani, Samar Badawi, Nassima al-Saada, Shadan al-Onezi, Amal al-Harbi and Mohammed al-Rabia. They say some of the women, including Hathloul, were held in solitary confinement and subjected to mistreatment and torture, including electric shocks, flogging and sexual assault. Saudi officials have denied those allegations. Hathloul, who had advocated an end to the driving ban and the kingdom's male guardianship system, was previously detained twice, including for 73 days in 2014 after she tried to drive into Saudi Arabia from the United Arab Emirates. Nafjan and Yousef participated in a protest against the driving ban in 2013. Yousef also authored a petition, which Nafjan and Hathloul signed, in 2016 seeking to end male guardianship, which requires women to obtain the consent of a male relative for major decisions. Activists and diplomats have speculated that the arrests may have been aimed at appeasing conservative elements opposed to the relaxation of social strictures. They may also have been meant as a message to activists not to push demands out of sync with the government's own agenda. Dozens of other activists, intellectuals and clerics have been arrested separately in the past two years in an apparent bid to stamp out possible opposition. A cunning sibling pulled a sinister prank on her unsuspecting sister, causing her to run screaming out of the basement of her new home. The woman - named online as Megan, from Drayton Valley, Canada - was said to be annoyed when her sister, Ranae, uploaded a video of her drunk to Facebook. With revenge on her mind, Megan she spent weeks orchestrating a plan to get her own back. She spotted an opportunity to do exactly that when her sister listed a creepy looking porcelain doll for sale on Facebook. On the $25 listing, Ranae details that she was given the doll as a gift, but, as she's moving house, she'll no longer have room and needs to part ways with it. Megan sneaked down to the basement of Ranae's new property and placed the doll in the corner of the room, with the message 'How could you?' scrawled on the wall next to it In a call to action, Megan privately posted to friends on the social media app at the same time, asking someone to buy the doll on her behalf. 'Around the end of January 2019, I saw on the Facebook market place that my sister was selling a porcelain doll,' Megan said. 'My friend, Kevin, who I would like to credit, is actually the one who came up with the idea for the prank.' Not short of recruits, Megan purchased the doll through a friend and stored it in secrecy for over a month. Then on February 27, while her daughter distracted Ranae upstairs, Megan sneaked down to the basement of Ranae's new property and placed the doll in the corner of the room, with the message 'How could you?' scrawled on the wall next to it. Calling her sister to check out the 'strange thing' she found in the basement, Ranae tentatively peers around the corner of the room before unleashing a petrified scream. Hilariously, she pauses for a few seconds, before turning and running from the doll, as her niece desperately tries to console her that it was all 'just a prank'. Ranae pauses for a few seconds, before turning and running from the doll Her screams even startle her niece - who was in on the plans - causing her to follow her screaming to the floor above Megan can be heard be laughing throughout the despair, as her sister screeches at her to 'Get the F**k out' of her house Caught up in her Aunt's emotion, the little girl then starts screaming and follows Ranae, running up the stairs. Megan can be heard be laughing throughout the despair, as her sister screeches at her to 'Get the F**k out' of her house. 'I thought that her reaction would be confusion,' Megan said. 'But then she screamed and ran, scaring my daughter too. She did get really mad at me, but she does think it's funny now.' On Facebook, Megan shared a gallery of images showing the various stages of her meticulous plan to friends, calling it 'the best prank I've ever pulled in my life.' 'Dearest Sister,' she continued. 'Remember when you posted that drunk video of me on Facebook after I asked you not to? Don't hate me, I love you, I'm kind of sorry.' The video has since been viewed more than 2.5 million times. Financial adviser Ed Butowsky is suing Anderson Cooper, The New York Times and The Democratic National Committee for allegedly peddling 'fake news' about his involvement in Donald Trump's alleged Russian collusion to win him the presidency. In the lawsuit exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com, Butowsky claims he and his family have been the victims of death threats, rocks were thrown in his windows and he lost a third of his business clients after 'left-wing extremists' engaged in a 'smear campaign' against him. The suit says Butowsky's life was 'upended' in the summer of 2017 by the the 'false allegations' that he conspired with White House officials to push a fake story about stolen emails in order to divert attention away from allegations that Trump colluded with Russia to 'steal' the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. Butowsky names a dozen attorneys and law offices, three CNN journalists, including Anderson Cooper, a New York Times reporter and Vox Media for damages and legal costs. Financial adviser Ed Butowsky (left) is suing Anderson Cooper (right), The New York Times and the Democratic National Committee, claiming he is the victim of a 'smear campaign' The suit, exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com, claims that in March 2018, CNN's Anderson Cooper reported on his show (pictured) that Butowsky made up lies about slain DNC staffer Seth Rich to divert attention away from Trump's alleged Russian collusion The suit says that on August 1, 2017, New York attorney Douglas Wigdor and his partners filed a 'bogus lawsuit' alleging that Butowsky, Fox News reporter Malia Zimmerman, and Fox News itself had fabricated a false story that a former Democratic National Committee (DNC) employee was responsible for stealing DNC emails and giving them to Wikileaks. Butowsky was a guest on Fox News during the time its site published a story in March 2017 that the DNC employee who leaked emails was Seth Rich, who was shot and killed in 2016 in Washington, DC. The story stated that investigators had evidence showing Rich leaked thousands of Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks throughout the 2016 presidential election, just weeks before he was shot. Fox retracted the story a week later, citing that it did not meet its editorial standards. Butowsky's latest suit says that for more than two years, CNN and its employees have attempted to 'demonize and discredit anyone who questions the official narrative about the murder of Seth Rich. 'During that period, CNN has generally portrayed Mr. Butowsky as an unscrupulous political activist who knowingly and maliciously concocted and spread false stories.' Butoswky says the he has been made out to be a 'ruthless political operative of President Trump', but insists he has never met Trump nor has he ever spoken to him. The suit states that Butowsky supported three candidates other than Trump in the primary, and in 2007 donated $2,700 President Barack Obama's campaign. The lawsuit states that Butowksy is the victim of 'anti-Trump confirmation bias in the media', and is suing CNN, Vox and The New York Times for publishing or airing negative stories about him Butowky's lawsuit goes on to say that the 'bogus suit' filed against him by attorney Douglas Wigdor got traction because 'most American journalists were (and are) consumed with hatred of President Trump'. DNC staffer Seth Rich was shot and killed in Washington, DC in 2016 and unsubstantiated rumors swirled that he leaked emails to Wikileaks, which were pushed by Butowsky He says Widgor and his partners 'knew that most American media would publish or broadcast nearly anything with little concern for accuracy so long as it portrayed President Trump (or anyone tangentially connected to him) in a negative light.' Butowsy's latest suit names Anderson Cooper for his March 2018 interview on his CNN with attorney Michael Gottlieb, who spoke about the previous lawsuit against Butowsky. The new lawsuit highlights 'false and defamatory' allegations that Gottlieb made against the financial advisor, including that Butowsky spread a conspiracy theory 'as far as possible' to 'make money off of it' from t-shirt sales and other paraphenelia. 'In reality, Mr. Butowsky has never spread a conspiracy, and he never made nor sought to make a penny from Seth Rich, [his brother] Aaron Rich, or any conspiracy theory,' according to legal documents. The suit then implicates Anderson Cooper for not pushing back on any of Gottlieb's allegations 'no matter how false or outrageous.' 'Instead, Defendant Cooper endorsed those statements, directly implying that Mr. Butowsky and his co-defendants were responsible for ''promoting unfounded claims that Seth Rich was tied to the DNC hacking,'' 'In another statement, Defendant Cooper directly implied that Mr. Butowsky was responsible for traumatizing Joel and Mary Rich because of ''[having their son] being accused of stuff that there's no evidence of,''' the suit claims. Butowsky claims that he and his family (pictured) have received death threats since the 'smear campaign' by 'left-wing extremist' began and he has had to hire a bodyguard for his son (right) The suit states that 'false allegations'were peddled that Butowsky conspired with White House officials to push a fake story about stolen emails to divert attention away from claims that Trump colluded with Russia to 'steal' the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton Butowsky's suit goes on to name The New York Times and Vox as other outlets who have published defamatory stories about him, calling one Vox reporter a 'a left-wing extremist who masquerades as a journalist.' According to the legal documents, as a result of the 'lies fabricated and perpetuated' against Butowsky, he and his family received death threats, he lost one third of his business clients, rocks were thrown through the windows of his home, his automobiles were burglarized, his computers were hacked, he lost friendships, and he lost the opportunity to host a planned television program. Butowsky says he's also hired a bodyguard for his son while attending college for fear he would be targeted. The suit says, the 'smear campaign' against Butowsky 'never should have begun and it has lasted far too long. 'Now it's time for the Defendants to answer for the lies that they spread and the harm that they caused,' it says. Butowsky is demanding a jury trial in his case as well as money in damages and legal fees. The installation of new gas boilers to provide heating and hot water is set to banned for new homes from 2025 in a move that could add 5,000 to the average price, Chancellor Philip Hammond revealed today. The Government's advisory Committee on Climate Change recommended ending the connection of new homes to the gas grid by 2025 in a report last month, with properties heated with low-carbon energy instead. The Chancellor announced new standards 'mandating the end of fossil fuel heating systems in new homes from 2025 delivering lower carbon, and lower fuel bills too'. But the government have not specified exactly what will replace the traditional boiler - with concerns about how long high-tech low carbon heaters can take to warm a room and cost implications for taxpayers. New homes will no longer be heated by gas from 2025, as part of efforts to tackle climate change, Chancellor Philip Hammond revealed today (file image) Heat pumps use the method illustrated above to extract compress and channel ambient heat The most likely replacement for gas are air source heat pumps. These extract heat from the outside air, even in the depths of winter, and channel it into a compressor that amplifies the heat which is then used to warm up water for the heating, taps and showers. The pumps are generally combined with extra insulation, however the total cost of including these two elements in a new property is currently estimated to be around 5,000 more expensive than a gas boiler. They have other draw backs, such as being noisy, requiring a highly insulated home to see any benefits, are less efficient in winter, and require electricity. Other could also be in the pipeline such as utilising local heatworks which is a system of insulated pipes that takes heat from a central source and delivers to buildings. They are a cost-effective way of carbon emissions, but can require a large initial capital expenditure. Another option is replacing natural gas with hydrogen - but fitting a range of boilers to replace traditional ones could also have a huge cost implication. The move is one of a series of environmental measures unveiled in a short Spring Statement, as he sought to address one of the major concerns of young people ahead of a second school climate strike on Friday. The proposals also include increasing the amount of so-called 'green gas' in the National Grid to replace Natural Gas from the North Sea. The new green energy options - All future homes will be future proofed with low carbon heating. The most likely replacement for gas are air source heat pumps. - The pumps are often combined with extra insulation, but the total is 5,000 more expensive than a gas boiler. - There will also be measures to help small businesses cut emissions. - A study will be conducted into carbon offsets for air travellers, such as tree planting schemes. Advertisement Green gas - or biomethane - is created from biodegradable material, such as food and farm waste, and is purified and pumped into the pipes for cooking and heating. There are a number of advocates of this method of, such as Prince Charles, who has a digester at Poundbury, his new town near Dorchester, Dorset, which pumps gas and electricity into the national grid network to power homes and businesses. But vegans have raised ethical concerns saying generated in this way could never be compatible with veganism, due to the use of animal waste. And the supposedly green energy source comes at a heavy cost to taxpayers and to the environment it is supposed to protect. For example the anaerobic digesters rely increasingly on specially-grown crops from prime arable land, such as maize and sugarbeet and rely on 216 million a year in taxpayer-funded subsidies. Mr Hammond also announced measures to help small businesses to cut emissions and a study into carbon offsets for air travellers, such as tree planting schemes, as part of efforts to move to a carbon-neutral economy. The Chancellor's announcement follows a recommendation from the Committee on Climate Change (CoCC),which argued developers should be blocked from connecting homes to the gas grid from 2025. This would have stopped connections for boilers and cookers. Mr Hammond seems to have watered down this proposal to some extent by limiting the ban to gas central heating, so averting a backlash from home cooks who prefer gas. He said: 'To help ensure consumer energy bills are low and homes are better for the environment, the government will introduce a Future Homes Standard by 2025, so that new build homes are future-proofed with low carbon heating and world-leading levels of energy efficiency.' An anaerobic digestion facility in Hampshire. The supposedly green energy source comes at a heavy cost to taxpayers and to the environment it is supposed to protect Mr Hammond also outlined a call for evidence on whether travel providers should be required to offer 'genuine carbon offsets' for their customers to reduce the pollution from their journeys, and proposals to boost green gas in the grid. Along with measures on climate change, Mr Hammond also announced that the Government would mandate 'biodiversity net gain' for developments in England - to ensure new housing and infrastructure does not hit wildlife. He also announced the protection of all the waters around Ascension Island in the Atlantic, where no fishing would be allowed. And a comprehensive global review of the link between biodiversity and economic growth, to be led by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, emeritus professor of economics at Cambridge, will be launched as part of efforts to stem declines in wildlife. Campaign group 10:10 Climate Action's director, Max Wakefield, backed the move to end fossil fuel heating in new homes from 2025. 'All our homes and buildings must be made efficient, affordable and zero-carbon within the next two decades to address the climate crisis. 'Ending the scandal of poor quality new homes is a no-brainer that's good for everyone.' The Chancellor announced new standards 'mandating the end of fossil fuel heating systems in new homes from 2025 delivering lower carbon, and lower fuel bills too' Mel Evans, senior campaigner at Greenpeace UK said the plan to end fossil fuels in new homes 'is vital' and welcomed the measures to protect wildlife. But she warned that tackling the climate 'emergency' required much bigger thinking. 'Issues like the shoddy state of our existing housing stock and rapid adoption of electric vehicles require serious money behind serious policies,' such as banning new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2030, she urged. Dave Timms, from Friends of the Earth, said: 'The nation's children are calling out for tough action to cut emissions; Mr Hammond must listen harder to the lesson they're teaching him. And he said: 'The Chancellor should have announced a massive programme of investment in home insulation and public transport, instead of pushing the false solution of carbon off-setting for aviation.' The House Builders Federation warned that, while it supports a shift to green energy, it is important that alternative heating options are available at a reasonable price before gas boilers are abandoned. A spokesman said: 'Developers have demonstrated a clear commitment to this agenda and new homes are already considerably more energy efficient than older ones. New technologies are increasingly being incorporated that drive down emissions and we are committed to continuing to work with Government on this. 'The ongoing costs and comfort of homeowners is an absolute priority for home builders and it must be ensured that alternative heat sources are suitably attractive, available and efficient before withdrawing existing options.' Director of the campaign group 10:10 Climate Action, Max Wakefield, backed the move to end fossil fuel heating in new homes. 'All our homes and buildings must be made efficient, affordable and zero-carbon within the next two decades to address the climate crisis. Ending the scandal of poor quality new homes is a no-brainer that's good for everyone,' he said. An elderly woman beat her partly-paralysed husband to death with a wooden stick after claiming that he abused and bullied her for years. Packiam Ramanathan, 73, is said to have killed her 76-year-old spouse Kanagusabi Ramanathan at the home they shared in East Ham, east London, on September 21. Paramedics found the victim, who suffered from blood cancer and used a wheelchair, lying dead in one of the bedrooms. Mrs Ramanathan accepts she used the stick to kill her husband and admits manslaughter, but denies murder. She claimed that she had attacked her husband following years of mistreatment, bullying and abuse following their arranged marriage in 1983. Sri Lankan Packiam Ramanathan, 73, is alleged to have killed her husband Kanagusabi Ramanathan, 76, at the flat they shared in East Ham, east London The couple had been arguing about money a day before the attack and Mr Ramanathan had written a letter to the Sri Lankan police alleging fraud and theft by his wife's brother in relation to property in Sri Lanka. A post-mortem found that he died of multiple head and neck injuries. Jurors also heard that his arm was broken and that he had a number of defensive injuries to his arms and hands. A blood-stained long wooden stick was found in the hall cupboard, the Old Bailey heard. Sally O'Neill, QC, prosecuting, told the jury that Mrs Ramanathan would claim she suffered a loss of control and diminished responsibility. The prosecutor said Mrs Ramanathan may also claim she was suffering from a mental condition which 'substantially impaired her ability to either understand the nature of her conduct and or form a rational judgement and or exercise self-control'. 'The prosecution case is that this was a brutal and sustained attack by this defendant on a disabled and defenceless elderly man whilst he was lying in his bed and was probably motivated by anger,' Miss O'Neill said. Both Mr and Mrs Ramanathan were born in Sri Lanka and they married after her parents died. The Old Bailey heard that Mrs Ramanathan was found with multiple head and neck injuries and that his arm was broken and he had a number of defensive injuries to his arms and hands In 1985, the couple left Sri Lanka due to civil war and went to live in Germany in a refugee camp for two years. In 2005, the couple went back to Sri Lanka and Mrs Ramanathan refused to leave and head back to Germany with her husband, staying with her family for two years. The couple reunited in 2007 and moved to the flat in East Ham, east London where they stayed until the husband's death. When they returned to Sri Lanka in 2012, Mrs Ramanathan again refused to leave and spent another two years there. She went back to England in 2014 but travelled to Sri Lanka again in 2015 and her husband reported her as a missing person. At this point, his health was deteriorating and he was being looked after by sisters. The court heard that he asked a relative, Mathusha Fernando, to bring his wife back to London. She had been back in London for six months before the attack on her husband. Ms O'Neill added: 'It may well be that she resented being asked or required to return to London to look after her husband who was becoming increasingly dependent on her.' A woman in central China has been detained by police for faking her own abduction and death in order to break up with her boyfriend. The 37-year-old woman, surnamed Yu, had wanted to split up with the man after finding out that he was poor, but feared he would 'get too clingy' and refuse, Chinese media reported. Pretending to be her ex-husband, Yu sent threatening messages to her boyfriend, saying she had been killed and her body had been thrown into a lake in Wuhan city, Hubei province. The 37-year-old woman, surnamed Yu, had wanted to split up with the man after finding out that he was poor, but feared he would 'get too clingy' and refuse, Chinese media reported The 36-year-old boyfriend, surnamed Lin, alerted local police after receiving the messages, Wuhan Evening News reported on Tuesday. Lin said his girlfriend disappeared from their dormitory at the Huangpi Jiahai Industrial Park where they worked on the night of February 21, shortly after the couple returned from Lin's hometown in Yichang city for Chinese New Year. Minutes later, Lin's phone rang. It was his girlfriend telling him she had been kidnapped. 'Come and save me, my ex-husband has kidnapped me, come quickly. I think I'm on the highway already,' she cried, before the line went dead. Following an investigation and checking surveillance footage, a team of 20 officers was finally able to locate the woman (pictured) at a motel in Tenglong district Pretending to be her ex-husband, Yu sent threatening messages to her boyfriend, saying she was killed and her body was thrown into a lake in Wuhan city (above), Hubei province Following the call, Lin received several messages from someone claiming to be Yu's ex-husband, threatening to murder his girlfriend. 'Call the police and your wife is dead,' one of the messages read. Lin finally reported the incident to Huangpi police the next day after failing to negotiate with the 'kidnapper'. Following an investigation and checking surveillance footage, a team of 20 officers was finally able to locate the woman at a motel in Tenglong district. However, when they arrived at her room, they were shocked to find the 'victim' resting on the hotel bed, unhurt. When the police couldn't find any trace of the said abductor, the truth came out - Yu owned up and said it was all an act to break up with her boyfriend, Lin. Officer Bai Xiangang from the Huangpi police department said the woman (pictured) appeared 'surprisingly calm' when officers found her in the room Officer Bai Xiangang from the Huangpi police department said the woman appeared 'surprisingly calm' when officers found her in the room. 'She was lying in bed and watching television,' he told Chutian Metropolis Daily. The woman told police she found out Lin was 'really poor' after visiting his home during Chinese New Year and had wanted to leave him. Her original plan was to trick the man into leaving the dormitory so she could sneak back in to pack her belongings and leave, but then she realised that Lin had the only key to the room. By continuing the kidnapping act, she had hoped that her boyfriend would 'give up'. The woman has been detained by police for 10 days for disrupting social order, according to Wuhan Evening News. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been slammed for praising a fitness writer who claimed vaccines cause autism after appearing on his podcast. The Twitter boss, 42, retweeted a post from fitness personality Ben Greenfield promoting his appearance on his podcast, saying the pair had a 'great conversation.' Almost immediately, the post attracted scrutiny from users who blasted Dorsey for sitting down for an interview with Greenfield, despite his track record of promoting widely refuted anti-vaccination theories. Dorsey's decision comes as other Silicon Valley giants, ranging from Facebook and YouTube to Pinterest, have all taken sweeping steps to crack down on the spread of 'anti-vaxxer' content on their platforms. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been slammed for praising a fitness writer who claimed vaccines cause autism after appearing on his podcast 'Thanks Ben,' Dorsey tweeted. 'Great conversation, and appreciate all you do to simplify the mountain of research focused on increasing one's healthspan! Grateful for you.' Greenfield tweeted that he had recorded an 'epic' podcast with Dorsey, and that the pair discussed topics including DIY cold tubs and extreme time-saving workouts. He added that they didn't talk about vaccines during the episode, which is slated to be released later this month. A source confirmed to NBC News that the pair didn't discuss vaccine safety on the podcast. Additionally, a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch that Dorsey was unaware of Greenfield's beliefs on anti-vaccination. The spokesperson added that Dorsey's appearance on the podcast shouldn't be interpreted as an endorsement of Greenfield's anti-vaxxer stance. However, Greenfield published a post just a few weeks ago falsely claiming 'vaccines do indeed cause autism,' before saying fact-checking organisation Snopes should not be trusted. His tweet racked up more than 7,000 replies, with many users calling him out for spreading false information. Matilda star Mara Wilson also criticized Greenfield at the time, saying: 'They f***ing dont, Andrew Wakefield was discredited, autism rates have risen in countries where they took out the supposed offending chemical, vaccines save lives.' Many Twitter users questioned why Dorsey had given a platform to someone who 'spreads misinformation'. Alex Howard wrote: 'Why are you giving a platform on your platform to someone who undermines @snopes & spreads misinformation about vaccines, one of the greatest public health successes in human history?' Kirk Dedenbach added: 'Awesome way to use your mega-platform - to promote an anti-vaxer in the midst of a measles outbreak. Well done! #genius.' Susan Reiner tweeted: 'Please. This is serious. Affects the health of so many. Make Twitter a place where real science plays a role in what we read.' Disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield's so-called research popularised the idea that the MMR jab could cause autism in the late 1990s, but the paper has since been widely debunked. The pseudoscientific movement has seen a resurgence in recent years, with a report from the CDC last year finding that the number of unvaccinated children up to 35 months old increased four-fold between 2001 and 2015. 'Vaccine hesitancy' was also named as one of the top threats to global health in 2019 by the World Health Organization (WHO) last month. There have been a number of measles outbreaks across the globe in recent months, with an unvaccinated French boy being suspected of reintroducing measles to Costa Rica - five years after the country eradicated the disease. The move comes as Dorsey has been making the rounds on several popular podcasts over the past several months, in addition to sitting down for interviews with numerous major news outlets. Twitter has been criticized for its inaction around anti-vaxxer content on its platform, as other tech giants have taken action against these types of posts. Last month, YouTube announced that it would stop advertisements from running alongside videos that promote anti-vaccination content, saying it considers these types of content to be 'dangerous or harmful.' The move came after BuzzFeed News found YouTube's 'Up Next' algorithm, which auto-plays a new video after one has finished, was recommending anti-vaccination videos. Facebook stopped short of removing anti-vaxxers from its platform, but said it would no longer show anti-vaccination groups or pages in its recommended content. The firm also plans to hide anti-vaccination content from appearing on Instagram. Amazon on Tuesday said it would no longer host books promoting false autism cures or vaccine misinformation on its marketplace. A three-year-old boy has died at a Michigan hospital two days after a suspected DUI head-on crash that killed his mother on the spot and left his father clinging to life. Ryan Lahaie, 38, his wife, 36-year-old Dana Lahaie, and their toddler son, identified by family members as Reed, were traveling westbound on Interstate 96 in Eagle Township at around 6.35pm on Saturday when deputies say an eastbound driver crossed the median and crashed into the family's vehicle head on. Paramedics pronounced the mother dead at the scene. Her three-year-old son was rushed to Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, where he was placed on life support. Scroll down for video Tragedy: Dana Lahaie, 36 (left), was killed in a crash in Michigan, which also took the life of her three-year-old son, Reed (center), and critically injured her husband, Ryan (right) Cops say an eastbound driver crossed the median on Interstate 96 in Michigan on Saturday and smashed into the Lahaies' westbound car Despite doctors effort to save him, Reed Lahaie succumbed to his injuries on Monday, reported Mlive.com. The boy's father was also critically injured and remained on a ventilator Tuesday, according to an update from his relatives on GoFundMe. The driver of the car that struck the Lahaie family's vehicle, identified as 55-year-old Thomas Hahn, from Ottawa, Illinois, was also critically injured. Officials with the Clinton County Sheriffs Office said in a news release that alcohol appears to have played a role in the deadly collision, as Fox 47 reported. According to the description of the online fundraiser for the Lahaie family, Ryan, Dana and Reed had traveled to Ann Arbor to visit a relatives new baby and were returning to their home in Lowell at the time of the crash. Dana Lahaie died on the spot. Ryan suffered broken bones and internal injuries Ryan Lahaies cousin wrote that the 38-year-old man suffered multiple broken bones and internal injuries, and was in a medically induced coma. On Tuesday, his mother wrote that Ryan was still fully sedated and chemically paralyzed to keep him from moving his fractured limbs. Betsy Orsmbee also revealed that her late three-year-old grandsons organs will be donated through the organization Gift of Life in the next few days. According to his Facebook profile, Ryan owns an architecture firm in Grand Rapids. Joannah Houghton, 47, from Chirk, was told she was not eligible for the palliative medication Avastin on the Welsh NHS, leaving her the victim of a postcode lottery An NHS worker of more than two decades has been denied a life-prolonging drug for her cervical cancer because she lives in Wales - but she would be entitled to it if she lived just half a mile down the road. Joannah Houghton, 47, from Chirk, was told she was not eligible for the palliative medication Avastin on the Welsh NHS, leaving her the victim of a cruel cancer postcode lottery. Miss Houghton would qualify for the drug if she lived just half a mile further west but cannot afford to move house after she was forced to quit her job due to her illness. She fumed: 'I feel upset extremely angry and let down by the Welsh health authorities especially when I have dedicated 22 years of my life as a health care professional. 'I have worked half my life for the NHS yet it comes down to a postcode lottery, which is just not right. I was told if I changed my address the circumstances might be different. 'But why should I have to move house to gain access to something that could prolong my life?' Miss Houghton said a move would be too expensive, especially as she had not built up a significant pension because her life had been cut short by cancer. She continued: 'Also they might still reject my request because its obvious I have moved just for the drug. 'It's just crazy. When I found out about this medication I thought it was great and then to be told I can't have it feels absolutely awful. They are literally playing with people's lives. 'I'm currently appealing the decision via an individual patient funding request form, which has already been rejected once. I'm in limbo at the moment, the weeks are passing and I need this drug.' Miss Houghton said she saw her case as part of a wider fight for other patients like her. 'I'm not willing to let this go when this is a drug that would help me and prolong my life,' she said. 'I'm not just doing this for my life but I'm fighting for other patients in Wales who are too scared to speak out and who may suffer a similar fate in future.' Miss Houghton, who lives with her partner Tim, 42, and their two children Ryan, 19, and Emily, 22, was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2016. The disease has since spread to her lymph nodes and lungs. She has been given five to seven years to live and travels over the border to have chemotherapy sessions at Clatterbridge Hospital, in Wirral, Merseyside. Miss Houghton, who screens new born babies at Wrexham Maelor Hospital, said: 'I was told the cancer was incurable back in 2016. 'I've had 25 radiotherapies and five chemotherapies as well as three brachytherapies. 'Avastin is a drug that could prolong my life but whether you are entitled to have it depends on where you live. 'I am having six sessions of chemotherapy every three weeks, but my oncologist at Clatterbridge told me NHS Wales had questioned the use of Avastin to run alongside my other two cancer drugs Paclitaxel and Carboplatin. 'But the Avastin is a targeted therapy which will shrink the tumours.' A graphic showing the distance between Miss Houghton's home and England, where she would be able to access the drug on the NHS Miss Houghton said has not asked how many years the drug could add to her life as she 'didn't really want to know'. She added: 'This fight has taken my mind away from all the negative thoughts and the chemo. 'I'm one of those people who keeps positive and if you look at me you would not think I was a cancer patient. I believe there is light at the end of the tunnel.' Miss Houghton's case has now been taken up by Pamela Northcott Fund, a charity which supports cancer patients denied access to new drug therapies yet to be approved by NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) While women in England can access Avastin through the Cancer Drugs Fund and it is available on the NHS in Scotland, the Welsh Government's All-Wales Medicines Strategy Group (AWMSG) has recommended against it being routinely used on the NHS. Kate Northcott Spall, founder of The Pamela Northcott Fund, said: 'Joannah is one of many cancer patients let down by Welsh NHS Bureaucrats. 'Due to the cross border agreement many North Wales patients receive their care in England. 'It is devastating for patients and clinicians alike that Welsh patients sitting in the same chemo ward will be denied access to new drugs given to their peers from England.' Mrs Northcott Spall set up the charity in honour of her mother who died from cancer on August 12, 2017. Pamela became the first patient in Wales to access the new cancer drug, Nexavar after months of battles with her local Trust and the Welsh Assembly Government. Sadly, by the time she got the treatment Pamela had just days to live - however she lived another 4 months on just a quarter dose of Nexavar. The Fund has now been contacted by 1,200 cancer patients and has won NHS funding for over 250 cancer patients. A Welsh Government spokesman said: 'The AWMSG examined the evidence for using Avastin to treat recurrent or advanced cervical cancer and recommended against its routine use. 'Where a treatment is not routinely available in the Welsh NHS, but a clinician thinks that his or her patient is likely to gain significant clinical benefit from the treatment, the clinician may make an Individual Patient Funding Request to the health board on the patient's behalf.' A 'terrified' dog that became stuck on a 200ft mountain ledge in the eye of Storm Gareth for more than 48 hours has been winched to safety. The stranded pooch was rescued by a Coastguard helicopter crew who were training when they spotted the missing animal perching precariously on the ridge in the Cairngorms, Scotland, today. And the Inverness-based team were happy to put their skills to the test and lend a hand to the the helpless hound. A thermal camera fitted to the chopper displays an image with a single white dot on the mountain But as the lens zooms in, it becomes clear that the source of heat is a dog cowering on the edge of a vertical drop A thermal camera fitted to the chopper displayed an image with a single white dot on the mountain. But as the lens zooms in, it becomes clear that the source of heat is a dog cowering on the edge of a vertical drop. The footage then cuts to show a winchman being lowered down on to the snowy mountainside, where he scoops the dog up in his arms, and is hauled back up, swinging violently in the stormy conditions. Back in the Coastguard office, a visibly happy but muddy dog warms up and shakes off the muck picked up from its two days in the wilderness. Captain Simon Hammock, co-pilot Roger Sherriff, winch operator Rob Glendinning and winchman Mark Stevens were undertaking some essential winter training with another winchman Kate Willoughby visiting from Humberside Coastguard helicopter base at Stag Rocks in the Cairngorms. A close-up shot shows the dog, wrapped in a red coat, cowering on the snowy Cairngorms where it had been stuck for two days An Inverness-based Coastguard helicopter crew who were completing training exercises were on hand to help A winchman is lowered down on to the snowy mountainside, where he scoops the dog up in his arms, and is hauled back up, swinging violently in the stormy conditions 'To put their winter skills to the test, the two winchmen were dropped off at a nearby bothy to undertake essential medical training in the snow,' said a spokeswoman for the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. 'The remaining helicopter crew flew off to simulate a refuel and as they circled 1000ft up Loch Avon in the Cairngorms, a nearby section of cloud cleared and they happened to spot the dog perched precariously on the ledge. 'The helicopter crew noted the position, went back to collect the two training winchmen and returned to the stranded dog. 'The weather had luckily presented them an ideal window of opportunity to use the rest of their training time to rescue the dog! 'The dog was terrified and cold, so it was flown to the nearby Glenmore Lodge who then rushed it to the Strathspey Vets. 'We have since heard that the dog is doing well and has been happily reunited with its owner.' Stormy Daniels is looking forward to trolling President Donald Trump when he runs for re-election next year but the porn star admitted she fears he will win again. 'Some days I'm like, 'There's no way - this is gonna be amazing,'' she said. 'Other days I'm like, 'This motherf***er's going to win again,' she added. Stormy Daniels let loose on her former attorney Michael Avenatti during a talk in DC Tuesday night; the two are seen here together in Las Vegas in January Daniels also slammed former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen as 'dumber than herpes' Daniels revealed her worries during an appearance in Washington D.C. Tuesday night, The Hill reported. During her talk, she let loose on her former attorney Michael Avenatti and Donald Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen and promised 'it's about to get real f***ing good.' Daniels told the women of Washington it was 'adorable' that Avenatti claimed he fired her and argued it was an 'I quit' so 'you can't fire me' scenario. 'He knew that I was unhappy and looking for new counsel,' she said during an appearance at The Wing, a private social club, according to the New York Post. Avenatti announced on Twitter Tuesday he was no longer representing Daniels, who, in returned announced a new attorney, Clark Brewster. And she hinted there could be new legal maneuverings to come. 'Sit tight ladies, it's about to get real f***ing good,' she said. Daniels claimed Avenatti only pushed her lawsuit against the president because he wanted to deposeTrump. 'That his agenda,' she noted, the Post reported. She also bashed Cohen as 'dumber than herpes.' She recalled how she tried to get away from him the day he publicly testified on Capitol Hill but even when she went to get her nails done, he was on the TV. 'I can't escape this guy,' she said. 'He's like herpes,' she continued and then added: 'Actually dumber, dumber than herpes.' Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and to facilitating a hush-money payment to Daniels to keep her quiet during the 2016 election. For that payment, he pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and faces three years in jail. She also joked she planned to visit Cohen in prison. 'I'm thinking about visiting him in prison for s***s and giggles,' Daniels said, according to The Hill. Avenatti argued on Twitter Tuesday he ended the partnership with Daniels, an arrangement that made the two house hold names. 'On February 19, we informed Stormy Daniels in writing that we were terminating our legal representation of her for various reasons that we cannot disclose publicly due to attorney-client privilege,' Avenatti said. Attorney Michael Avenatti (left) is no longer representing porn star Stormy Daniels (right) 'This was not a decision we made lightly and it came only after lengthy discussion, thought and deliberation, as well as consultation with other professionals,' he added. 'We wish Stormy all the best.' Daniels announced on Twitter she has a new attorney. 'I have retained Clark Brewster as my personal lawyer and have asked him and his firm to review all legal matters involving me. Upon completion of Mr. Brewster's review and further consultation with me, I anticipate Mr. Brewster will serve as my primary counsel on all legal issues,' she wrote. Brewster, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, won't comment on who dumped who. But he told the Daily Beast of Avenatti: 'What he thought came first or second, I'm not going to get into his head. He can make any statement that he wants. I think it was obvious from the communication or lack thereof, that she was seeking new counsel.' And when asked if Avenatti's recent legal troubles or bankruptcy played a role, Brewster said: 'I'll simply say this. In addition to reviewing the legal matters that are pending, we would expect a full accounting and disclosure with regard to the representation of Stormy. That's another issue we'll deal with. I'm not, at this point in time, able or informed sufficiently to form opinions on that.' Avenatti represented Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, in her lawsuits against Trump and the president's former personal attorney Michael Cohen. The duo became household names in their fight against Trump, dominating cable news shows for months and taunting the president in interviews. As conservative pundits hit back, Avenatti became Daniels' top protector and promoter, defending her life choices and job as a porn star, calling out hypocrisy against her and painting her as an American hero. He represented Daniels in her suit against Trump and Cohen, which was her an attempt to void a non-disclosure she signed after a hush-money deal paid her $130,000 days before the 2016 election to keep silent about an alleged tryst with Trump in 2006. Trump has denied an affair. Daniels also sued Trump for defamation but a federal judge in Los Angeles threw that out and ordered Daniels to pay Trump's legal fees - an estimated to be $350,000. Last week that same federal judge threw out Daniels' suit seeking to void the non-disclosure agreement, saying it was irrelevant after Trump and Cohen agreed not to penalize Daniels for violating it. In August, Cohen admitted in federal court he arranged the payment to silence Daniels and help Trump win the presidency. He pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations. Before Avenatti began representing Daniels in February 2018, he was virtually unknown outside of the California legal community. But in months, he had become known as a no-holds-barred lawyer with a media style parallel to Trump's. Avenatti had toyed with a 2020 presidential run, but ultimately ruled that out. He's also been involved in some of America's biggest cases in the last year, including representing dozens of parents whose children were separated from them at the U.S. border as a result of the Trump administration's immigration policies. More recently, he's been representing women who said they were sexually abused by R&B star R. Kelly. But all the while, Avenatti has said he's been aggressively fighting in Daniels' case - and keeping his client out of legal trouble. Stormy Daniels and Michael Avenatti became household names in their suit against President Trump; they're seen here in January at the 2019 Adult Video News Awards Last week a judge threw out Daniels' suit against President Trump seeking to invalidate a nondisclosure she signed as part of a hush-money payment in the 2016 election After Daniels was arrested at an Ohio strip club and accused of illegally rubbing undercover police officers' faces against her bare breasts during a performance, Avenatti met with prosecutors and they agreed to drop the charges hours later. They said an Ohio law prohibiting contact between strippers and customers applies only to someone who 'regularly' performs at a club. In Daniels' case, it was her first appearance at the club. But their relationship had rocky spots as well. In November, Daniels told the Daily Beast that Avenatti had filed a defamation case against Trump 'against my wishes' and alleged that he refused to give her an accounting of the funds collected by her supporters, would not tell her how the money was spent or how much was left in the crowdsourced legal defense fund. Days later, she tweeted that they had worked it all out and that the 'accounting is on the up and up.' Avenatti was arrested in November on a felony domestic violence charge in Los Angeles when a woman he was dating said he dragged her across the floor of his apartment after an argument over money. Los Angeles county prosecutors declined to file charges and kicked the case to the city attorney's office, which also declined to bring charges but said a hearing would be held in the matter. A bachelorette party was left stranded after American Airlines refused to allow the bride's mother to board a flight because she 'looked too drunk' to fly. Flying from Sacramento to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, Alyssa Zayas and her group of 14 friends and family touched down in Phoenix for what should've been a brief stopover on March 7. But instead, Zayas and her 'Brides Babes' spent the evening stranded in Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, sleeping next to their luggage. The bachelorette party say they flew into Phoenix without issue, but when attempting to board their second and final flight, the women were turned away at the gate. Flying from Sacramento to Cabo, Mexico, the group of 15 said they spent more than $30,000 on flights alone. before they were turned away at the gate on March 7 Zayas said told ABC15 that her mother, who hasn't flown in over 20 years, was told she appeared too drunk to board the plane by American Airlines workers. Though she admits her mom did have a few drinks before their first flight to stem her nerves, Zayas insists her mother wasn't drunk. Instead, she says her mother, who's in her late fifties, became 'anxious', nauseous and started breathing heavily during landing, appearing a little worse-for-wear as a result. 'She is not travelling, okay?' the American Airline worker can be heard saying to one of the bachelorettes in a video captured by the group. 'She's too intoxicated.' Speaking to Fox40, bridesmaid Amber Grunland said: 'The bride's mom doesn't do the greatest with traveling. 'She's in her fifties, almost sixties. There could've been something else going on.' The group stayed overnight in the airport and spent an additional $16,000 to fly to Mexico the next day Alyssa Zayas (left) said her mother did have a few drinks before flying, but insists she wasn't drunk. Instead, she says her mother became anxious and nauseous before landing Zayas is tying-the-knot next month and says she and her friends have spent the last year planning the trip, spending more than $30,000 on flights in the process. According to the bachelorettes, when the group confronted the airline employees about the misunderstanding, they were called 'unruly'. 'Im pretty frustrated in the sense that there are 15 women that were going to celebrate a pretty monumental thing, and what do we do now?,' Zayas said to ABC. 'Naturally, there was 15 of us that were like well none of us are leaving without her,' she added. The entire group were then denied entry and the airline called police. When the group complained, American Airlines branded then 'unruly' and refused all of them entry In a statement, the airline stood by their staff members' decision, calling their team the 'best in the business' Adding an additional $16,000 in travel costs, Zayas and her bachelorettes slept overnight in the airport and bought new flight tickets the next day. The women originally said they were not given a refund by American Airlines, but it's understood a partial-refund has now been issued. 'Americans team members are the best in business and we support their decisions to deny boarding or remove from a flight passengers who are disruptive or become a safety risk,' a spokesperson told Fox News. 'One member of the party appeared to be intoxicated while boarding in Phoenix. After this individual was told they would not be able to take the flight, several other members of their group become irate. They were deemed a safety risk to the crew and others on the flight and not allowed to board.' A family court judge scolded former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his estranged wife Judith Nathan for their antics in a divorce proceeding that's been dragging on for nearly one year with no discernible progress. Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Michael Katz told the two of them on Wednesday that they were turning the hearing into a 'circus,' amid outbursts from Giuliani. Nathan's attorney suggested Giuliani's lover could be of help in getting properties appraised, which Giuliani took offense to, while claiming Nathan was hiding as little as $100 from him. 'I think were going to be moving this case along to a lengthy and unpleasant trial but so be it,' Katz said, according to the New York Post. 'We'll do what we need to do to resolve this case.' Katz said the pair had failed to make 'any progress in [the] direction' of a settlement in the divorce case, first filed on April 15, where each party claims to have a monthly budget of $230,000. Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Michael Katz told Giuliani and Judith Nathan (pictured in court on November 7 in Manhattan) on Wednesday that they were turning the hearing into a 'circus,' amid outbursts from Giuliani Outside of court, Giuliani told Page Six that it's Nathan who is holding up the process. 'I have no desire to remain married to her for one more day,' he said. 'At this juncture in a case its been almost a year since filings the process calms down. Yet its still a circus,' Katz said. At one point, Giuliani blurted out that 'Thats total bulls**t! Thats total bullst!' when Nathan's attorney, Bernard Clair, suggested that Giulianis reported mistress, Dr. Maria Rosa Ryan, could help the process along by granting appraisers in Florida access to properties. With arms crossed, Giuliani hissed 'Cheap shot!' at the suggestion. The current lawyer for president Donald Trump also took issue with Nathan's failing to disclose a bank account containing $100, which the charitable fundraiser said was due to Giuliani have her mail rerouted to him. The two had been married for 15 years when they filed for divorce, on account of Giuliani's affair with Dr. Maria Rosa Ryan, who he's said to be supporting financially. The two are pictured on December 14, 2017 in New York City At one point, Giuliani blurted out that 'Thats total bulls**t! Thats total bullst!' when Nathan's attorney, Bernard Clair, suggested that Giulianis reported mistress, Dr. Maria Rosa Ryan (pictured), could help the process along by granting appraisers in Florida access to properties Meanwhile the founding board member of the Twin Towers Fund claimed that Giuliani had not been paying the bill for her mother's stay in a nursing home, leading to a past due balance of $21,000, despite being ordered by Katz to do so. 'It never comes to me directly,' Giuliani said, referring to the bills, adding 'God dammit' for emphasis. Katz scolded Giuliani for refusing to remain quiet during the hearing, reminding him that he had representation to speak for him. 'Mr. Giuliani, don't interrupt the proceeding, the judge said. 'You have lawyers representing you. Youre not the lawyer.' Despite claiming to never receive the invoices, Giuliani said he had been paying the nursing home fees when they come due. These seemingly trivial arguments are just a small part of the multi-million dollar estate the two are battling over, which includes properties in both the Hamptons and Manhattan in New York, as well as Florida. The two had been married for 15 years when they filed for divorce, on account of Giuliani's affair with Ryan, who he's said to be supporting financially. When everything is all said and done, Nathan will be Giuliani's third ex-wife. The next court date has been set for May 30. Two Hungarian men who trafficked women into the UK to exploit them as prostitutes could have escaped justice because their victims were earning so much money they would not co-operate with cops. Geza Horvath and Daniel Zemencsik's brothels made a profit of more than 175,000 in the 12 months they operated their seedy business. But it all came crashing down when a punter who paid for sex with one of the girls rang police to expose the 'squalid' conditions the girls were being kept. That call set the wheels in motion an investigation that uncovered a large sex-trafficking ring in Derby. Geza Horvath, 33, left, trafficked the women into the UK while Daniel Zemencsik, 28, right, ran the brothels 'day to day' and drove the women to punters When officers carried out coordinated raids on three properties, they discovered 20 girls had been flown into work in the sex trade with 'the promise of a better life in the UK'. Now the two men have been jailed for a total of eight years and two months after earlier pleading guilty to human trafficking offences. They claimed in Hungary such a business operation is legal and taxed and they did not realise how serious employing women as sex workers are viewed in this country. Nadia Silver, prosecuting, told Derby Crown Court the conspiracy ran from May 2017 to April 2018. She said Horvath, a former University of Derby student, rented the properties and advertised on a Hungarian website for prostitutes to come and work in the city. Miss Silver said Zemencsik would collect women from airports including East Midlands, Birmingham and Luton and they would be set up as sex workers in the properties. The website on which Horvath advertised for Eastern European prostites to come and work in the UK also showed adverts to work in the sex trade in Switzerland and Germany This advert for sex workers to work in London offering 'tantric massages' was posted on the now-defunct site in 2018 She said: 'The turnover of women was high and some complained of the squalid conditions, with the hot water or heating sometimes not working. One woman who worked at a flat in the city described it as 'unkempt and stinky.' Miss Silver said after police became aware of the operation, the properties were watched and around 20 girls are believed to have passed through the properties during the year the business ran. As well as a house and flat a third address in Burton-on-Trent, Staffs, was being used as an office where Horvath and his co-conspirator Zemencsik spent 15,000 advertising the girls online. She said the estimated profit made by the two men and their co-conspirators was 175,000. Horvath and Zemencsik both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to facilitate the travel of others with a view to exploitation. Derbyshire police's investigation is still ongoing with co-conspirators still being sought. The Red Life website homepage offered this pitch to its users. The pair's barrister pointed out there was no deception on their part and the women were not coerced Philip Tulley, for Horvath, said his client came to the UK from Hungary in 2005 and had been educated here. He said he studied at the University of Derby and had worked in both the automotive industry and as an IT programmer. Mr Tulley said: 'Although the women were trafficked here to work in the sex industry they did so in the full knowledge of what they were doing. 'They were not brought here to work as prostitutes against their will. They were not forced or coerced.' Roger Wilson, for Zemencsik, who has no previous convictions, said his client had arrived in the UK from Hungary in 2012 hoping for a better life. He said: 'Where he is from in Hungary operations like this are legal and taxed and he did not realise how serious this type of offence is viewed in this country. 'He has used his time in custody well and has volunteered for the early deportation scheme which will see him sent back to Hungary when he is released. He has no intention of returning to the UK.' Jailing Horvath, 33, of Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire for five years and Zemencsik, 28, of Derby, for three years and two months, Judge Jonathan Bennett said: 'It was a conspiracy and each person played their role over a period of time. 'You, Mr Horvath, played a senior role, overseeing the operation, running the office, renting the properties and advertising the girls. 'You, Mr Zemencsik had an essential role transporting the women and looking after the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the properties. 'The condition (of the properties) was so bad, described as so 'squalid' that the women did not stay long and the turnover was high.' More than 900 adverts to work in the sex trade in the UK, like this one for prostitutes in Manchester, were listed on the site which was aimed at Eastern European women After the hearing, Derbyshire Police said one of the problems securing convictions was the lack of co-operation from the girls, who were earning more working at the brothels than they would in their home country. Detective Inspector Andrea Parkin said: 'It would have been great if these girls had come forward themselves but they simply did not want to engage with us. 'Instead our investigation began when we received a call from a man who was visiting one of the girls who told us how concerned he was about her.' DI Parkin said at the early stage of the investigation it became clear that Horvath was advertising for sex workers on a Hungarian website called Red Life. In the adverts he promised girls a better life in the UK and invited them to come from Hungary, where prostitution is legal, with the promise of better earnings. She said: 'Between May 2017 and April 2018 around twenty girls came to Derby where Horvath set them up in brothels he created. Zemencsik was his number two, he would act as the runner. Three flats at this property in Uttoxeter New Road were being used by prostitutes 'He would be the one to arrange their flights, collect them from the airports and bring them here. 'Once they were set up he would visit them every day to check on them. 'He would leave envelopes into which each of the girls would put half their money and once every two-to-three days he would go and collect them up.' DI Parkin was assisted by former police superintendent Andy Stokes, now working as an investigative support manager for the force. He said computers were seized and analysed and it was discovered that the two brothels were being advertised online on UK websites. Mr Stokes said: 'They spent 15,000 on advertising which goes to show the scale of the operation. 'When we carried out the warrants at the three addresses, we found all of the paraphernalia you would expect to find at a brothel. 'We found out that the girls were being charged a daily rate by Horvath and Zemencsik, who were also taking half of the money. 'The estimated profit figure we can put on the pair of 175,000, but that figure is possibly higher than that. 'This was an organised crime group, there is no doubt of that, it had a high turnover of girls with a constant flow of customers.' DI Parkin said detectives here in the UK worked with their counterparts in Hungary and investigations are still ongoing in that country into further possible suspects. She said: 'It is abundantly clear that these two men were not looking after the interests of the girls. 'They were simply looking to make money through illegal means and we are pleased to see them brought to justice. 'We hope that this sentencing will help stem the flow of girls being trafficked to Derbyshire from other countries and sends out a strong message that people trying to bring this type of criminality to our streets will be dealt with in the most severe way. 'We would also like to say that there are avenues open for women being trafficked where they can talk to us about what is happening to them.' A man has been arrested in Estonia over the murder of a French film producer found dead in a shallow grave in Kew. The body of 34-year-old Laureline Garcia-Bertaux was found buried in the west London suburb after she was reported missing from work on March 5. A post-mortem examination found she died from injuries 'consistent with compression of the neck'. Today, the Met Police announced that a 32-year-old ex-boyfriend had been arrested in Tallinn, the Estonian capital. Laureline Garcia-Bertaux, 34, was found buried in the garden of her home in Kew on March 4 Frederique Bertaux (left) updated her Facebook profile picture in the early hours of Saturday to display a photograph of her with her murdered daughter Laureline Garcia-Bertaux (right) A Scotland Yard spokesman said: 'Met homicide detectives have been working with Eurojust in the Hague and police colleagues in Europol to trace and detain the man sought in connection with the investigation. 'The 32-year-old man was detained at an address in Tallinn, Estonia and is being held in an Estonian Police Station prior to extradition proceedings commencing. 'A murder investigation led by Detectives from the Met's Homicide and Major Crime Command continues apace.' Miss Garcia-Bertaux was reported missing after she failed to turn up for work at a PR agency on Tuesday, March 5. Her body was found by police late on Wednesday in the back garden of her 400,000 ground-floor flat on a tree-lined road in the wealthy suburb of Kew, south-west London. The 34-year-old's mother Frederique Bertaux updated her Facebook profile picture in the early hours of Saturday to display a photograph of her with her daughter. After moving to Britain in 2009, Miss Garcia-Bertaux graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and went onto help produce films starring Dame Joan Collins and Sheridan Smith. She hoped to become a director and screenwriter and also ran a lifestyle blog. Film producer Laureline Garcia-Bertaux (pictured), 34, was found buried in the garden of her house on a tree-lined street in the wealthy suburb of Kew in south-west London Police go through the contents of rubbish bins as they investigate the 34-year-old's death Dame Joan Collins, who worked with her on Gerry, paid tribute, saying: 'I am shocked by the horrifying news of the murder of Laureline. She was passionate about film and was instrumental in bringing together my latest short film.' Jonathan Hughes, chief executive of public relations company Golin where she had worked since January, said: 'On behalf of everyone at Golin I want to express our deepest sympathies to Laureline's family and friends. 'We are all still very shocked by this senseless and tragic news and we continue to do everything we can to support her family, the police and our team as the investigation evolves. 'Laureline was a wonderfully creative, caring and charismatic woman, full of energy and joie de vivre. That is the way she will always remembered by me and every one of her colleagues.' Laureline Garcia-Bertaux, a 34-year-old PR executive assistant from Richmond on Thames, was reported missing after she failed to turn up to work on Monday President Trump told GOP senators to quit 'overthinking' his national emergency as they deliberated how to vote on a resolution rebuking him. Trump says he told them to 'vote anyway you want, vote how you feel good' while cautioning that it will 'very bad thing for them long into the future' if they move to terminate it. 'I think anybody going against border security, drug trafficking human trafficking, that's a bad vote,' he warned on Wednesday. A movement to curb executive authority was afoot as Republicans looked for an off-ramp on the eve of the emergency vote that put them on their first major collision course with the Republican Party leader. Trump signaled he wasn't concerned enough to take them up on a deal to preserve his emergency in exchange for future limitations, however, noting at a White House briefing on drugs that he may have to exercise his first veto to protect it. 'We have a vote tomorrow on national emergency, we'll see whether or not I have to do the veto, and it will be, I think, all very successful regardless of how it all works out,' he stated. President Trump told GOP senators to quit 'overthinking' his national emergency as they deliberated how to vote on a resolution rebuking him President Trump told GOP senators to quit 'overthinking' his national emergency as they deliberated how to vote on a resolution rebuking him He insisted the country has a 'MAJOR NATIONAL EMERGENCY' on the border and that's all they need to be considerin Trump insisted early Wednesday afternoon on Twitter that the country has a 'MAJOR NATIONAL EMERGENCY' on the border and that's all senators need to be considering. Trump claimed later, at his meeting on drug trafficking, that it is an 'urgent national crisis' his administration is 'doing many, many things' to combat, in addition to a wall. He argued once again that the vote that will take place on Thursday in the U.S. Senate is not about about constitutionality, nor is it a vote on precedent. 'You should take a look at what President Obama did with DACA and with so many other things, that was no precedent,' he said. 'And I think most Republican senators fully understand that.' He denied a charge from Rand Paul that he was putting extreme pressure on senators to back him in the vote, telling a reporter, 'Nobody's beaten up, I said use your own discretion.' Trump insisted that Democrats voting to terminate his resolution are for open borders and want drugs and crime to flow into the country unregulated. 'I guess they think its good politically. I happen to think it's bad politically,' he assessed. 'And the Republicans aren't, but I told Republican senators vote any way you want, vote how you feel good.' A group of Republican senators pitched the vice president Tuesday on a deal to spare the president the embarrassment of having the border emergency voted down in the GOP-controlled Senate. But one of them said after a meeting between Trump and senators from the party on Wednesday afternoon, that the White House had signaled there was no such deal to be had. The offer involved the president backing a proposal that would limit his power to railroad Congress with future emergencies. They presented it as a way to preserve Trump's border crisis declaration and save him from having to exercise his first veto. Republican senators put it to Mike Pence in a meeting he took at the request of Sen. Thom Tillis on Tuesday, a senior administration official told DailyMail.com. Pence pledged to take the deal back to the president but made no other commitments. One of the proposals came from Sen. Mike Lee. His bill would cancel any future emergency that does not receive the approval of Congress within 30 days. Lee's office said Wednesday afternoon that the White House 'had communicated it would not support' the bill that would 'reclaim legislative powers' from the executive branch. 'Unfortunately, it appears the bill does not have an immediate path forward, so I will be voting to terminate the latest emergency declaration,' Lee said in a corresponding statement. 'I hope this legislation will serve as a starting point for future work on this very important issue.' A group of Republican senators pitched the vice president on a deal to spare the president the embarrassment of having his national emergency voted down in the GOP -controlled Senate Republican senators put it to Mike Pence in a meeting he took at the request of Sen. Thom Tillis (pictured) a source said The White House has not commented directly on the offer. Trump said prior to a meeting with Republican senators, 'I'll have to take a look at what they present. They are coming over in a little while to present something.' 'But we're in very good shape, in terms of the money and in terms of the national emergency,' the president said. Lee's bill was gaining sponsors on Wednesday, with prominent Republican senators like Chuck Grassley and John Cornyn signing on. President Trump assailed Democrats on Twitter in the meantime for backing 'open borders' and 'crime' as he used Twitter to rally support for his declaration. 'Republican Senators are overthinking tomorrows vote on National Emergency. It is very simply Border Security/No Crime - Should not be thought of any other way,' he tweeted. 'We have a MAJOR NATIONAL EMERGENCY at our Border and the People of our Country know it very well!' he tweeted. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had also sought to deflate Lee's effort to save Trump's emergency on Wednesday when she put out a statement calling his bill a nonstarter. 'Republican Senators are proposing new legislation to allow the President to violate the Constitution just this once in order to give themselves cover,' she said. 'The House will not take up this legislation to give President Trump a pass.' Trump said this week that he needs roughly $8.6 billion to complete his border structure, in addition to the money the national emergency will provide him. He says he cobbled together $8 billion so far from previous appropriations. He won't get it from Democrats in Congress and may have kneecapped himself by agreeing to new restraints on his emergency powers like the ones that Lee wanted. One of the proposals came from Sen. Mike Lee. He is pushing legislation that would end future national emergencies unless Congress votes to approve them within 30 days The president still runs the risk of having his border emergency overturned, although it seemed less likely on Wednesday evening that Democrats would have the votes to override a veto. Opponents of the emergency have the votes to pass a resolution terminating it. They do not currently have a veto-proof majority of 67 Senate votes. Up to a dozen Republicans could break with the president on the emergency, Republican senators have said. So far, just five have said they said they will not bail out Trump: Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Thom Tillis, Paul and Lee. It's enough support, if no one waivers, for the resolution of disapproval to pass. Chief White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said in a Monday briefing that the president has been in contact with lawmakers about the emergency in advance of the vote, but she did not identify them and did not elaborate on their discussions. She argued that the president has the 'authority' to call an emergency and is doing what is 'necessary' to protect the border. 'Let's not forget, the only reason he has the authority to call a national emergency is because Congress gave him the right to do so,' she said in response to a question from DailyMail.com. Sanders asserted: 'They failed to do their job. The President is fulfilling his duty, and he's going to make sure he does what is necessary to protect the people of this country and secure our borders.' The president has personally broached the topic of the vote on Twitter, telling Republican senators to reject claims that his emergency would create a 'precedent' for future action by Democrats. A Monday tweet encouraging his party to stick by him said, 'Republican Senators have a very easy vote this week. It is about Border Security and the Wall (stopping Crime, Drugs etc.), not Constitutionality and Precedent. It is an 80% positive issue. The Dems are 100% United, as usual, on a 20% issue, Open Borders and Crime. Get tough Rs!' Manfred Kurz, 61, is facing jail after police found thousands of rounds of ammunition at his home during one of the biggest busts in the force's recent history A former German soldier who supplied Londons underworld with thousands of rounds of ammunition is facing jail after one of the 'Met Police's largest-ever busts'. Manfred Kurz, 61, moved to the United Kingdom in 2004 having served in the Deutsches Heer. He had a full firearms licence and was able to pass through border controls with live bullets. His niece Sian Alexandra Miller, 25, began selling the ammunition to contacts throughout the country, police said. On 5 February 2018, Millers south London home was raided, and officers found 1,800 rounds of ammunition of varying calibers, two pistols and canisters of CS spray. Bullet-making equipment including empty cartridges, primers and black powder, which could be used to make live cartridge rounds, were also recovered. Miller was arrested and later officers carried out a second raid on the address of Kurz. They found black explosive powder and a live .357 caliber pistol. More than 3,000 rounds of ammunition was seized during the massive haul, most of which was found stuffed in suitcases Police seized black explosive powder and this pocket pistol at the former German soldier's address Bullet-making equipment including empty cartridges, primers and black powder, which could be used to make live cartridge rounds, were also recovered Police officers accepted ammunition was sold to underworld figures and is out on the streets. A cousin of Miller, Lorenzo Brooks, 28, and Lukas Duncan, 22, used their contacts in the underworld to sell some of the bullets. Following an investigation police raided the home of Sierra Denton, 21, and her boyfriend Mishak Wright-Martin, 33, and found more ammunition. In total more than 3,100 rounds of ammunition two incapacitant sprays and an ounce of heroin were found. Kurz had a full firearms licence and was able to pass through border controls with live bullets in his suitcase His niece Sian Alexandra Miller (pictured), 25, began selling the ammunition to contacts throughout the country. She was found guilty of conspiracy to sell or transfer ammunition It was one of the Mets biggest hauls of ammunition in recent times. Detective Constable Martin Reader, of the Trident and Area Crime Command, said: The recovery of this haul of ammunition and black powder represents one of the Mets largest-ever seizures of ammunition and explosive substances in recent times. A huge amount of ammunition has been recovered, which we believe was destined to be sold to criminals with gang connections. This amount of firepower in the hands of the criminal fraternity is a truly terrifying thought. The haul of ammunition and explosives was described as 'one of the Mets largest-ever seizures in recent times' A cousin of Miller, Lorenzo Brooks (left), 28, and Lukas Duncan (right), 22, used their contacts in the underworld to sell some of the bullets Thankfully the rapid action of Trident officers has taken this weaponry off the streets before it could be used, and for that, every person who lives in, or visits, our capital should be thankful. I honestly believe the action of Met officers has saved lives and brought a number of people to justice, who put their own greed above the safety of their community. Kurz, from Croydon, admitted two counts of possession of firearms; two counts of possession of ammunition; possession of explosive substances, and possession of component parts of a firearm. Police also raided the home of Sierra Denton, 21, and her boyfriend Mishak Wright-Martin, 33, and found more ammunition. They are both due to be sentenced Brooks, of Catford, was found guilty of conspiracy to sell or transfer prohibited weapons and possession of component parts of a firearm. Miller, of South Norwood, was found guilty of conspiracy to sell or transfer ammunition. Duncan, of Surbiton, was found guilty of conspiracy to sell or transfer ammunition. Wright-Martin, of Kennington, was found guilty of conspiracy to sell or transfer ammunition. Denton, of South Norwood, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to sell or transfer ammunition and possession with intent to supply Class A drugs. All six will be sentenced at Croydon Crown Court on April 3. Patients in an emergency room in central Mexico erupted in anger over long wait times. A shocking cell phone video shot by a hospital visitor captured the wild scene Monday at Dr. Columba Rivera Osorio General Hospital in Pachuca, Hidalgo, after patients lost their composure over the prolonged queues in the waiting room area. A concerned mother, who has been only identified with her initials, G. Z. M., ran out of patience after waiting three hours for her four-month-old daughter to be tended to by a doctor. The woman then flew into a rage after learning that another patient was going to be attended to while her infant struggled with a respiratory infection. A mother (pictured left carrying child) in Mexico, who has been only identified with her initials, G. Z. M., ran out of patience after waiting three hours for her four-month-old daughter to be tended to by a doctor. She flew into a rage and broke a glass door Medical facilities in Mexico like Dr. Columba Rivera Osorio General Hospital in Pachuca, Hidalgo, battling budget cuts, forcing patients to endure longer wait times Doctors carry a woman towards the medical care area after she began convulsing Following the hospital's medical guidelines for admittance into the urgent care wing, the facility's personnel referred the mother and her child to a doctor at Family Medical Practice because the baby's condition didn't present any danger to her health. The upset mother then shattered a glass entrance door. Her reaction trickled down and riled up the rest of the patients that were waiting, including one woman who said she had been waiting for five hours, according to Mexican news radio, Radio Formula. Patients have had to endue longer wait times during hospital visits due to budget cutbacks in the Mexican health system. The video then shows the moment the mother walks past security officers standing by the broken door, and in the background screams can be heard as a woman begins convulsing. Onlookers in the background yell for help before a team of doctors pick up the woman and carry her into a treatment room. She was treated and released after doctors were able to stabilize her. Medics at a hospital in Mexico rush to the aid of a woman who was accompanying a friend inside the emergency ward on Monday. The woman started convulsing and was quickly treated and released. The patient has been complaining about the long wait 'When she was told that another patient entered before her, classified as a real emergency, she became annoyed, reacting violently when she kicked the patient's access door into the medical care area, causing the lower window to break, and prompting other people to react aggressively because of the delay,' a statement from the Mexican Civil Service Social Security and Services Institute said. 'It goes to show that she should not have gone to an emergency service, but to their corresponding Family Medicine Practice.' Dr Christopher John Salgado (pictured), has been fired for allegedly sharing photos on Instagram that showed patients' genitalia after gender reassignment surgery A University of Miami Health System plastic surgeon, who appeared on transgender teen Jazz Jennings' reality show, has been fired for allegedly sharing graphic photos on Instagram that showed patients' genitalia after they had undergone gender reassignment surgery. Dr Christopher John Salgado was recently let go as the section chief of UHealth's LGBTQ Center for Wellness, Gender and Sexual Health. According to a petition, Salgado, 50, shared photos on the Instagram account @sexsurgeon that violated patient privacy policies and that contained 'racist, transphobic, homophobic comments and hashtags'. The petition, which was launched by transgender advocates, called for the American College of Surgeons to immediately address Salgado's 'public vulgarity, lack of professionalism, and questionable ethics around patient privacy'. It's believed the posts were shared beginning in October 2018, but the account has been taken down. However, one photo seen by DailyMail.com showed a penis that had been shaped into a heart. That photo was shared as recently as Valentine's Day, and had the caption: 'There are many ways to show your LOVE.' According to a petition , Salgado, 50, shared photos (above) on the Instagram account @sexsurgeon The first photo showed a recently removed penis that had been shaped into a heart with the caption: 'There are many ways to show your LOVE' 'The CT scan on the left shows a very large dildo of a transman that inadvertently released into this person's butt/rectum requiring surgical removal,' reads the caption of another photo This photo showed the 'testicular implants in transman after phalloplasty' This photo shows a team of doctors holding a 'radial forearm phalloplasty of 10 inches' It's believed the posts were shared beginning in October 2018, but the account has been taken down It's believed the photo was a recently removed penis from a patient who had just undergone gender reassignment surgery. Other photos showed male and female genitalia in various stages of surgery. One photo showed a CT scan of a dildo that had become stuck in a person's rectum. It's caption said that the dildo was from a 'transman that inadvertently released into this person's butt/rectum requiring surgical removal'. 'This mishap during anal intercourse could have been avoided if the transman had a real phalloplasty,' the caption continued. Some of the hashtags included '#megacock and #analfun'. A DailyMail.com request for comment to the University of Miami Health System was not immediately returned. Salgado's information and image has been removed from the UHealth website, but he was previously listed as the co-director of the University of Miami Hernia Center and section chief plastic surgery, University of Miami Hospital. Salgado (pictured), who has never been disciplined by the Florida Department of Health, also met with transgender teen and reality star, Jazz Jennings, for a gender reassignment consultation He appeared on one episode of her show, I Am Jazz, where he talked about his 16 years of experience in the field. Jazz (right) is seen speaking to Salgado on her show Salgado ended up not doing Jennings' (left) surgery; Dr Jess Ting, who is based in New York City, did the operation instead Salgado, whose schedule is usually booked for months at a time, hasn't commented on the claims against him. However, sources have claimed that his Instagram account had been hacked. Salgado, who has never been disciplined by the Florida Department of Health, also met with Jennings for a gender reassignment consultation. He appeared on one episode of her show, I Am Jazz, where he talked about his 16 years of experience in the field. Salgado ended up not doing her surgery; Dr Jess Ting, who is based in New York City, did the operation instead. A high school student has taken her own life by shooting herself in her school's auditorium after asking to be excused from class to go to the bathroom. The 17-year-old junior, who has not been named, killed herself Lake Mary High School in Seminole, Florida, on Wednesday morning. The public high school was put in lockdown immediately after the incident. Several students and the school's two resource officers heard the shot. The resource officers ran to the auditorium when they heard it, fearing it may be an active shooter, and found the girl inside. The 17-year-old girl killed herself inside the auditorium building at Lake Mary high school in Seminole, Florida. The auditorium is pictured The school was placed in lockdown after the incident on Wednesday morning They and a school nurse tried to render air to her but she was pronounced dead. The girl was alone when she committed suicide in what police described as an 'isolated' area in the auditorium building. Some students were nearby in drama classes but no one saw her shoot herself. It remains unclear why she took her own life. The Seminole County Sheriff's Office has not yet indicated a motive. The school lifted its lockdown on Wednesday afternoon and students were allowed to return home. Students react outside Lake Mary High School after the girl's suicide. The teenager was not named All classes on Thursday were canceled as a result of the incident. The sheriff described it as a 'horrible tragedy'. 'What a horrible tragedy. We want to remind the public, if there are signs of depression ... there are services, love, guidance and faith,' Sheriff Dennis M. Lemma said. For confidential help, contact the National Suicide Prevention Hotline on 1-800-273-8255 or visit their website here. A creative woman has proposed to her partner - by hiding the question in a crossword. Anna Sanders, 25, took out a front-page advert on Monday's edition of her local paper, York Press, to propose to her girlfriend Tessa Klein, 29. The couple completed the crossword together by their favourite location at the River Ouse in York. Anna Sanders (left) took out the front page advert in York Press to propose to her girlfriend Tessa (right wearing her engagement ring) Anna had included the question: 'Will you marry me?' in the puzzle by planting a series of clues - including '---- Jowell, Labour Baroness' for Tessa to add her own name. Anna, who grew up in the city, said it was the 'perfect' proposal for the crossword-loving pair. She said Tessa had no idea when completing the puzzle what was about to happen. Anna said: 'We both do the crosswords together in newspapers on a morning so I thought that it would be a romantic way to propose. 'I included a number of clues in the crossword such as words associated with love, marriage and even her name. The couple, who do newspaper crosswords together in the mornings, will marry in Autumn of next year 'When she uttered the words and I pulled the ring out she was so surprised. 'I was worried that she wouldn't get it but fortunately she managed to fill in the puzzle and thankfully she said yes. 'We had a perfect day. We went for lunch in the city centre and then walked round the bar walls before completing the crossword. 'I grew up in York so it was a special place for me to propose and it was Tessa's first time visiting York.' Anna, who is currently studying a PhD on policy research at the University of Manchester, said that she first met Tessa a year ago when she travelled to America. She said: 'Tessa is from West Lafayette in Indiana. 'We met at Purdue University when I was working out there to gain some experience on a project. Anna (right) grew up in York and proposed on Tessa's first visit to the city. The pair met at Purdue University in Indiana last year 'Tessa is a student nurse and is hoping to move over to England by June, so I thought this was good time to ask the question.' Tessa said it was the a wonderful surprise and the perfect proposal. She said: 'After a wonderful day exploring Anna's home town we sat by the river and Anna suggested doing a crossword puzzle. 'I had no idea that this crossword would turn out to be so special. 'It was the best surprise I have ever received and the most perfect proposal.' Anna added they have both told their parents. She said: 'We both rang our parents last night and they were over the moon about the news. 'Most of my friends already knew that I was going to propose so they were all thrilled to find out, but I still have a few more to tell.' The couple said they had not set a wedding date yet. However, they were looking to tie the knot in the Autumn of next year. A aspiring rapper accused of using her Snapchat to manipulate fans into sharing their credit card information appeared in court on Wednesday, where it was revealed that she was recently indicted on more charges. Ashley Bautista, who goes by the stage name Young Ash, showed up to the Manhattan Supreme Court for the grand larceny charges she was blasted with last summer. The 23-year-old wore a Burberry plaid top with black trousers and a black suit jacket. Scroll down for video Ashley Bautista, who goes by the stage name Young Ash, appeared in the Manhattan Supreme Court on Wednesday for larceny charges The 'Poppin' rapper also sported a pair of UGG boots and a black purse, and wore her hair in box braids. Bautista was given a charge for grand larceny and a charge for scheming to defraud for the 2018 card crack scheme. On January 22, the woman was arraigned for a second case in Criminal Court. The case details are currently sealed but Bautista has been indicted, a spokeswoman from the Manhattan District Attorney told DailyMail.com. Bautista is due back in court for the Supreme Court case on April 3rd. She will be back in court for the criminal court matter on March 27. Bautista was given a charge for grand larceny and a charge for scheming to defraud for the 2018 card crack scheme Young Ash is said to have flaunted wads of money on Snapchat, promising fans that they could receive a huge payout if they provided their credit card information The woman was tapped along with four others for the shady dealings - Gabriel Molina, Frayluis Henriquez, Justin Simon and Jarod Bailey. Young Ash is said to have flaunted wads of money on Snapchat, promising fans that they could receive a huge payout if they provided their credit card information. The rapper and her accomplices are then said to have used ATM cards to steal money from the unsuspecting victims, using their information to forge checks. They would then deposit those checks into the fans' bank account and withdraw the money before banks could catch on to what was happening. Shane (pictured) and Lenny Crawt, now 19 and 18, were both jailed for life for murder at Guildford Crown Court yesterday, and 24-year-old smith was jailed for 13 years for manslaughter A keen angler was beaten to death with a plank of wood during a summer fishing trip by two teenagers and their cousin. After Lenny Crawt, 19, Shane Crawt, aged 18, and their cousin Charlie Smith, murdered Scott Wilkinson, the sick trio then bragged to pals they were on the run for murder, telling them 'we just killed a man'. Mr Wilkinson ,48, had been enjoying a summer fishing trip on Donkey Island, near his home in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey in July 2016, when he was murdered. Shane and Lenny Crawt, aged 16 and 17 at the time of the incident, were both jailed for life for murder at Guildford Crown Court yesterday, and 24-year-old Smith was jailed for 13 years for manslaughter. After his partner left, Scott was attacked by the trio of young thugs - who were the only other people camping on the little island. The evil gang punched, kicked and stabbed Scott before smashing his head in with a piece of wood, causing fatal head injuries. The jury heard how Shane and Lenny Crawt and their cousin Charlie Smith had been camping on the island as well. Smith, of no fixed abode, and his cousins fled to nearby Grovelands Park, and met a gang of youths they knew. Shane, from Purley, South London, and Lenny, from West Molesey, Surrey, will serve a minimum of 15 years. Smith, 24, was sentenced after being acquitted of murder. He will serve half his sentence and the remainder of the sentence on license. Scott Wilkinson (pictured) was battered to death with a plank of wood by brothers Lenny and Shane Crawt, who were just 16 and 17 at the time, and their-then 21-year-old cousin Charlie Smith According to Surrey Police, one of the three said 'I wouldn't say anything if I was you because we killed someone tonight.' Smith told an old school friend that he was on the run 'for murder' Judge Johnathan Black said: 'The three of you left the island without checking how badly he was hurt and without alerting the emergency services,' said the judge. 'He was placed into the River Thames and left to die alone and without succour.' The three men had denied involvement in Mr Wilkinson's death - which records from a heart monitor he wore suggest did not occur until three hours after the assault on the night of July 27 2016 - and in court deployed what is known as a 'cut-throat defence', blaming each other for the murder. The three men had denied involvement in Mr Wilkinson's death - which records from a heart monitor he wore suggest did not occur until three hours after the assault on the night of July 27 2016 - and in court deployed what is known as a 'cut-throat defence', blaming each other for the murder. The jury heard how Shane Crawt, Lenny Crawt (right) and Charlie Smith (left) had been camping on the island as well The trio were convicted on Friday after after a five-week trial. An earlier hearing heard, the keen angler is believed to have spoken with the thugs, shortly before the attack. They were the only other people on the island and Mr Wilkinson was later reported missing by his girlfriend. The Crawt brothers hid his body in shallow water and the island was deserted when emergency workers went looking for the 48-year-old angler. However, they found an abandoned tent drenched in blood and his body was later recovered from the river. A post mortem examination showed he had been killed by a blow to the head with a blunt object. CCTV footage shown to the jury during the trial showed the Crawts and Smith leaving the island on the night of the murder. The jury was told the men in the three tents had been seen burning clothes and were 'on the run'. In statements read out on Tuesday by prosecution counsel Paul Cavin QC, Mr Wilkinson's family spoke of the 'devastation' they felt after his murder. 'We exist,' said the statement prepared by his parents, brother and aunt. 'We function, we go through life in a robotic state, hurting deep within our soul, crying inside, and yearning for some solace, which never comes. 'We will never recover, we will never find peace in a world without Scott. We will never be the same again and we will never forgive those responsible.' A statement read out on behalf of Mr Wilkinson's four sons also spoke of the loss they felt, and the counselling two of them had required after hearing the news of their father's death. One said: 'Most people hold on to childhood memories of their father. Before the vicious and senseless action of that night, I would think of these childhood memories whenever people would talk about their fathers. Sentencing the three, Judge Black said there no motive had been presented for the killing, but several theories had been suggested by the prosecution. 'This was not a senseless, motiveless crime,' he said. 'There were intimations that robbery had been planned, or he was to be taught a lesson as he had removed and hidden your fishing gear. 'It is quite clear the three of you discussed how the combined attack was to be carried out.' DNA evidence has also established that the three men had tried to return to their pitch and destroy evidence linking them to the crime Detective Inspector Paddy Mayers, who led the investigation said: 'The sentences given today reflect the severity of the ferocious actions the three took that night back in 2016. 'Today and always our thoughts and sympathies remain with Scott's family. 'I hope the sentences can begin to provide them with some closure for what happened knowing that those responsible are finally where they belong.' Passing sentence, Judge Black mentioned that no motive had been advanced for the killing, but several theories had been suggested by the prosecution. 'This was not a senseless, motiveless crime,' he said. 'There were intimations that robbery had been planned, or he was to be taught a lesson as he had removed and hidden your fishing gear. 'It is quite clear the three of you discussed how the combined attack was to be carried out.' The judge found there was 'a significant degree of pre-meditation', adding: 'The defendants had a motive, they waited until it was dark, they waited until [Mr Wilkinson's partner] Lisa Lane left the island and they armed themselves with a weapon.' In mitigation, Smith's barrister, Graham Trembath QC, argued that his client could not have foreseen the risk of death or serious injury to Mr Wilkinson in the attack, although had clearly intended him 'some harm', adding that Smith was 'utterly immature' at the time. Both Joe Stone QC and Tyrone Smith QC, barristers for Shane and Lenny Crawt respectively, mentioned their clients upbringing in care and relative youth at the time of the murder. Mr Stone said Shane Crawt had led 'a fairly atomised, pointless existence' while Mr Smith argued Lenny Crawt had experienced a 'fractured upbringing' and suffered under the 'toxic' influence of his older brother. Mr Smith sought to argue that Lenny Crawt's role was restricted to 'encouragement' while his brother carried out the attack, but Judge Black disagreed, finding that all three had physically taken part in the assault. He said: 'Despite your relatively young age, all three of you are well known to the criminal justice system. 'It is clear that all three of you had already embarked on a career path of offending. 'Nothing that has been said on your behalf seems to mitigate in any way the awfulness of your behaviour on that night.' The Law Lord who chaired the 12-year probe into the Bloody Sunday massacre has said his inquiry was 'not about prosecutions'. Lord Saville spoke out as 17 surviving British Paras anxiously await tomorrow's decision, by Northern Irish prosecutors, whether to bring charges over the deaths of 13 civilians on January 30, 1972. After the publication of the Saville Report, then-Prime Minister David Cameron apologised to the Bloody Sunday families, calling the killings 'unjustified and unjustifiable'. Youths confront British soldiers minutes before paratroopers opened fire killing 13 civilians on Bloody Sunday, in a standoff is near barricade 14 on William St, Londonderry, British troops search civilians on the day of the Bloody Sunday massacre, January 30, 1972 Lord Saville said former soldiers gave evidence to his 200m inquiry, which concluded in 2010, under assurance from the director of public prosecutions that any submissions would not be used in a subsequent trial. But the seventeen surviving former soldiers, the oldest of whom is now 77, may be charged tomorrow with offences including murder, attempted murder, grievous bodily harm and perjury. If found guilty of murder, they face life in jail. Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, terrorists subsequently convicted of atrocities committed during the Troubles can be jailed only for a maximum of two years. On the eve of tomorrow's announcement in Londonderry, the BBC asked Lord Saville today whether he accepted that without his inquiry, the prospect of former soldiers being prosecuted may not have happened. Police began the criminal probe in the wake of the 12-year, 200million inquiry led by Lord Saville, which concluded in 2010 that soldiers from the Parachute Regiment had 'lost control' during a civil rights march, causing the 'unjustified and unjustifiable' deaths of 14 civilians Eighteen former paratroopers were under investigation, but one died last year Lying on the ground is a man receiving attention, during the shooting incident in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, which became known as Bloody Sunday on January 30, 1972 British troops in Northern Ireland during the Troubles which began in the late 1960s and lasted until 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement Former paratroopers fear that if charges are brought against Army veterans involved in Bloody Sunday shootings in Londonderry 1972 it will pave the way for another witch-hunt into troops over shootings five months earlier High velocity bullets fired by the British Army on Bloody Sunday are on display at The Museum of Free Derry in Derry City's Bogside Lord Saville said: 'I simply don't have the answer. The campaign by the families was for a new inquiry. 'Some thought that those soldiers who were found responsible should be prosecuted but overall the campaign for Bloody Sunday originally was for an inquiry to find out what happened and why, rather than a question of prosecutions.' Former soldiers were granted anonymity and assured that submissions to the Saville Inquiry would not be used in any subsequent criminal proceedings. 'If we had not given those assurances, backed by the director of public prosecutions, people could quite legitimately have refused to answer questions on the grounds that answering might incriminate them. The mural depicting those who lost their lives on Bloody Sunday in Rossville Street Liam Wray, the brother of Bloody Sunday victim Jim Wray, by a mural depicting the late Bishop Edward Daly waving a white handkerchief as Jackie Duddy is carried away on Bloody Sunday 'So, we were there to find out what happened rather than investigating criminal offences. We sought assurance and gave it to those people, which is protected in law.' When asked if he had believed the Savile Report would draw a line under Bloody Sunday, he said: 'I didn't know what was likely to happen. We hoped the inquiry would help the situation in Ireland and I think and hope it did to a degree. 'The question as to whether it draws a line under events or whether there should be prosecutions is not one for me, it's one for politicians and prosecuting authorities. What is the timeline of peace in Northern Ireland? Here is a timeline of events in the years before and after the Good Friday Agreement. 1988 Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams and his main nationalist rival, SDLP leader John Hume, begin secret peace talks 1991 Martin McGuinness, a senior figure in the IRA, starts secret peace talks with MI6 1993 October - Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds UK Prime Minister John Major produce the Downing Street declaration setting out their peace vision 1994 August 31 - The IRA announced a ceasefire with loyalist paramilitaries following suit. 1995 May 10 - First official meeting in 23 years between Sinn Fein and a British Government minister. 1997 May - Tony Blair gives a speech in Belfast, warning republicans: 'The settlement train is leaving. I want you on that train.' July 20 - The IRA reinstates its ceasefire to enable Sinn Fein to take part in talks 1998 April 10 - The Good Friday Agreement is signed and is endorsed a month later in a referendum 2007 Sinn Fein endorses the police in Northern Ireland, and elections for Stormont are held May 8 - The DUP's Rev Ian Paisley becomes First Minister and Sin Fein's Martin McGuinness is appointed Deputy First Minister The pair's surprisingly warm relationship leads to them being referred to as the Chuckle Brothers. 2010 The Saville Report exonerates the civilians who were killed on Bloody Sunday leading to a formal apology from then Prime Minister David Cameron to the families. 2019 Prosecutors announce whether to brig charges against the 17 surviving Paras who fired shots that day. If found guilty the former soldiers, the oldest of whom is 77, could face life jail terms. Advertisement 'If people want more and feel that justice can only be served by prosecutions against those that they believe to be responsible, then that is a matter again on which I can't really comment.' 'I think we did a pretty thorough job and I was satisfied we had done a fair job at finding out what happened that day as was realistically possible.' The Savile Inquiry was the longest and most expensive public inquiry in British legal history. It looked into the circumstances surrounding the massacre in Londonderry in which 13 people were shot dead when members of the Parachute Regiment opened fire on civilians on January 30, 1972. The incident became one of the most infamous incidents in the history of The Troubles, with allegations that IRA instigators were among the crowd and that British gunfire was provoked. Troops fired more than 100 bullets into the crowd, killing 13, and injuring 15. One of the injured died five months later, but the Saville Inquiry concluded he did not died as a result of wounds he sustained on Bloody Sunday. The report exonerated the dead and injured. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) began a murder investigation in 2010 after the Saville Report said those who were killed or injured on Bloody Sunday were innocent. Eighteen former paratroopers were reported to Northern Ireland's Public Prosecution Service over the killings, one of whom died last year. Tomorrow prosecutors in Northern Ireland will meet with victims' families before making the long-awaited announcement on whether former soldiers will stand trial. Several senior former Army commanders have viced deep concerns over possible prosecutions of men now in their 60s and 70s, who were not in positions of command on the day, after almost 50 years. Ex-head of the Army Lord Dannatt has campaigned against a 'witch hunt' of Northern Ireland veterans, and last week Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said plans to introduce a ten-year limit on soldier prosecutions will 'sadly, not come in time' for Bloody Sunday veterans. Claims that charges could impact future military operations have been made by Democratic Unionist MPs. However members of Sinn Fein, the Ulster Unionist Party and the Social Democratic and Labour Party, have backed prosecutions for soldiers if there is evidence that they broke the law. It comes as the families of those killed during Bloody Sunday restated their calls for prosecutions. The families of those killed on Bloody Sunday are hopeful they will not have to pass their fight for justice onto the next generation, a campaigner has said. John Kelly, whose brother Michael was gunned down aged just 17, said he and other relatives of those injured and shot dead are nervous and anxious on the eve of the decision as to whether the British soldiers involved will be prosecuted. Tomorrow morning the families will gather outside The Museum of Free Derry, just yards from where the killings took place 47 years ago, and march together to a city centre hotel to hear whether charges will be brought. Mr Kelly, 70, said: 'At the minute we're nervous, anxious, trying to anticipate or even think about what the outcome is going to be. John McKinney, whose brother William was killed on Bloody Sunday, stands beside the Civil Rights mural in Derry City's Bogside. Army veterans will find out on Thursday whether they face charges over the infamous shootings John Kelly whose brother 17 year old Michael was killed in Derry on Bloody Sunday standing beside the Civil Rights Bogside mural 'It's been a day that we've been waiting for, for many, many years and hopefully tomorrow we will see justice delivered.' Mr Kelly said he hopes the decades-long journey to justice can finally come to an end with a decision by the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) to charge those involved. He said: 'It's closure to the families, closure in every aspect of it because the thing that we don't want to do is see this being passed on to the next generation. 'I think after this length of time, the time is right now to bring it to an end and hopefully by the delivery by the PPS tomorrow we can look to a better future. I don't want to pass it on to my children, or my grandchildren and all the families feel exactly the same way. 'Hopefully, depending on what the PPS delivers tomorrow, we will be in a position where we can bring it to an end.' Mickey McKinney, whose brother William was also killed aged 27, said while he is hopeful of a murder charge, even if that news does not come he will know he and the others have done their utmost for their loved ones. A 1998 photograph of Lord Saville of Newdigate chairing the Bloody Sunday inquiry The 67-year-old said: 'If we didn't get good news, I can still live with the fact that we've ruffled them [the soldiers and the establishment] a bit. 'If [a prosecution] doesn't happen, we'll take legal advice to see if there can be a challenge. If there's no challenge, if our solicitors tell us we can't do anything here, I can live with me. We've given this our all.' Seventeen former members of support company of the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment are facing possible charges by the Public Prosecution Service on Thursday. All 13 of those killed were declared innocent in 2010 following a lengthy public inquiry conducted by Lord Saville, after a years-long campaign by the families to right the wrongs of false claims that their loved ones had been armed. Recalling his sibling, who was known as Willie, Mr McKinney said: 'Willie was my brother and he never took part in a riot, he never threw a stone.' Of the soldiers, he said: 'How dare they take his life? They had no right to do that. They had no right to do what they did on Bloody Sunday.' David Cameron, prime minister in 2010, issued a public apology to the families on behalf of the state for what happened. However, Alan Barry, from the Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans campaign group, said he feared the paratroopers would face charges, accusing the justice system in Northern Ireland of being one-sided. 'I think the whole thing is appalling, that these soldiers could be prosecuted,' he said. 'This is a new line being drawn in the sand here. If they are prosecuted, what will be next?' A decision is also due to be taken tomorrow by the PPS as to whether to charge two Official IRA suspects. Martine Vik Magnussen, who was found raped and murdered in 2008 Police hunting the fugitive son of a billionaire businessman over the rape and murder of a Norwegian socialite have vowed they'll never give up pursuing him. Farouk Abdulhak remains the only suspect in the death of Martine Vik Magnussen, whose semi-naked body was found in the basement of a flat on Great Portland Street in central London on March 16 2008. She was last seen with Abdulhak son of billionaire sugar magnate Shaher Abdulhak as the pair left the Maddox nightclub in Mayfair in the early hours of March 14. Detective Superintendent Andy Partridge, of the Metropolitan Police's homicide and major crime command, said: 'March 14 will mark 11 years since Martine was brutally murdered and this case remains a priority for myself and my officers to solve. 'The suspect wanted for Martine's death fled the UK within hours of her murder and to this day he remains wanted. I want to make it clear that we will not stop in our efforts to get justice for Martine's family and bring the person responsible for her murder to justice.' Farouk Abdulhak, the playboy son of a billionaire suspected of raping and killing Norwegian student Martine Vik Magnussen in 2008 The pair studied international business relations at the private Regent's Business School in Regent's Park. By the time 23-year-old Ms Vik Magnussen's remains were found, Abdulhak had fled to Egypt and on to Yemen. A post-mortem examination gave her cause of death as compression to the neck. She had also been raped. An inquest at Westminster Coroner's Court in 2010 recorded a verdict of unlawful killing. Police fear they are unable to bring Abdulhak to justice while he remains at large because there is no extradition treaty between Yemen and the UK, meaning he cannot be forced to return. Mr Partridge, who has kept Ms Vik Magnussen's family informed of developments, said: 'The family and loved ones of Martine have remained dignified and resolute throughout the years and they deserve answers. Detective Chief Inspector Andy Partridge, of the Homicide and Major Crime Command, added: 'A decade on and our ambition remains the same - to obtain justice for Martine' 'The passage of time only serves to make this injustice greater and I am appealing once again to Farouk Abdulhak to return to the UK. 'This matter will not go away no matter how many years pass by. 'My officers will never give up on seeking justice for Martine and her grieving family and friends deserve some measure of closure from what must be an unimaginable nightmare.' He said targeted social media posts would be published in Arabic this week in an effort to encourage those who know Abdulhak to encourage him to return to the UK. CCTV footage emerged last year showing Martine leaving Maddox Nightclub in Mayfair with Abdulhak. Abdulhak is believed to have fled the country for Yemen after the Norwegian student's semi-naked body was discovered in a basement of a house in Great Portland Street in 2008. President Trump says he is grounding all U.S. flights on Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 planes 'effective immediately' in an emergency order of prohibition. Any plane that is currently in the air will be allowed to land, and then the planes will be grounded until further notice, he said in a surprise announcement on Wednesday afternoon. Trump said he made the decision following conversations with Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg and acting FAA administrator Dan Elwell after 'new information' and 'physical evidence' emerged on tragic incidents involving the Max 8 aircraft. 'They are all in agreement with the action,' Trump announced from the White House. 'Planes that are in the air will be grounded, if they're the 737 Max, will be grounded upon landing at the destination.' An Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed Sunday, shortly after taking off from Addis Ababa. All 157 people on aircraft perished. A Lion Air flight on a 737 Max 8 crashed in October in Indonesia, taking the lives of its 189 passengers and crew, too. Scroll down for videos President Trump says he is grounding all flights on the Boeing Max 8 and Max 9 - 'effective immediately' - in an emergency order of prohibition Any Max 7 or Max 8 plane that is currently in the air will be allowed to land, and then the planes will be grounded until further notice, Trump said in a surprise announcement Airlines have been notified that the Boeing Max aircraft are being taken out of circulation temporarily, and they are in agreement with the decision, Trump claimed. 'Our hearts go out to all of those who lost loved ones, to their friends to their families in both the Ethiopian and Lion airlines crashes that involved the 737 Max aircraft,' the president said. 'It's a terrible terrible thing. Boeing is an incredible company. They are working very, very hard right now.' Boeing will hopefully come up with an answer swiftly, he said. 'But until they do, the planes are grounded.' The company suggested in a statement a half-hour after Trump's shocking announcement that the company asked the FAA to suspend the flights. It said in the statement, as its stock shares started to tumble, 'Boeing continues to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX. 'However, after consultation with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and aviation authorities and its customers around the world, Boeing has determined -- out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircrafts safety -- to recommend to the FAA the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of 371 737 MAX aircraft,' it said. Boeing's stock shares tumbled on Wednesday afternoon following the announcement More than 35 of the Boeing Max 8 and Max 9 planes were still in the air when Trump said he was grounding them as soon as they arrive at their destinations Muilenburg simultaneously put out a condolence statement to families affected by both the Lion Air crash in October and the tragedy in Ethiopia. 'On behalf of the entire Boeing team, we extend our deepest sympathies to the families and loved ones of those who have lost their lives in these two tragic accidents,' Muilenburg said. 'We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution. Safety is a core value at Boeing for as long as we have been building airplanes; and it always will be. There is no greater priority for our company and our industry,' he added. 'We are doing everything we can to understand the cause of the accidents in partnership with the investigators, deploy safety enhancements and help ensure this does not happen again.' Boeing's shares shot back up after it released the statement, and the company was on track to close higher than it opened late Wednesday afternoon. Trump made the announcement at the beginning of a briefing on drug trafficking at the White House. He called it a 'very tough decision,' especially for Boeing. 'They want this solved. They want it solved quickly. They don't know the problem yet,' he stated. 'The United States has the greatest record in the world of aviation, and we want to keep it that way, so I didn't want to take any chances,' he explained. 'We didn't have to make this decision today, we could have delayed it. We maybe didn't have to make it at all, but I felt it was important, both psychologically, and a lot of other ways.' Trump was known to have spoken to Boeing, but he said he'd also been in contact with American and other airliners. 'We just thought it was the right thing to do,' he said. Southwest Airlines hasn't grounded planes despite 40 countries opting not the fly the aircraft pending an investigation The FAA said almost an hour later in a statement that conflicted with both Trump's and Muilenburg's version of events that it was 'ordering the temporary grounding' of the Boeing Max airplanes. It said, 'The agency made this decision as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analyzed today.' The site evidence in coordination with new satellite data available just this morning 'led to the decision,' according to the statement the FAA sent out after Boeing and Trump got in front the announcement. Investigators will continue to review flight data recorders and cockpit data recorders as it assesses the safety of the planes, the FAA asserted. The agency's official order grounding the planes hinted at similarities that 'warrant further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents that needs to be better understood and addressed.' It further posits that the Max 8 and 9 planes are nearly identical. Accordingly, the FAA said all it was grounding all 737 Max flights until further notice. American Airlines, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines hadn't grounded the planes on their own, despite 40 countries opting not the fly the Boeing aircraft pending a full investigation. On Wednesday morning, 33 of the models were spotted on Flightradar24, most over the U.S. There were as many flying over North and South America at the time that Trump said he was grounding them. After Canada's transportation minister, Marc Garneau, also said the country is closing air space to the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet, due to information it had received in the form of satellite data that showed a possible but unproven similarity to the previous Max 8 crash, the U.S. said the two countries would be working together hand-in-hand. American Airlines has 24 Max 8s and said in a statement they would keep taking passengers on the planes until they receive solid proof of a problem. A statement from the airline read: 'At this time there are no facts on the cause of the accident other than news reports. We have full confidence in the aircraft and our crew members, who are the best and most experienced in the industry.' Southwest Airlines continued the fly the aircraft, too. The Texas-based operator said the aircraft is safe to ride in. 'We remain confident in the safety and airworthiness of our fleet of more than 750 Boeing aircraft,' the low-cost carrier said. United Airlines was still flying Max 9s, which were not involved in the Ethiopian Airlines or Lion Air crashes that took place within five months of each other, but were part of the FAA's emergency airworthiness directive after October's crash Canada's WestJet which has 121 Boeing 737s - kept them in the air until the country banned the Boeing Max from Canadian airspace Wednesday United Airlines was still flying Max 9s, which were not involved in the Ethiopian Airlines or Lion Air crashes that took place within five months of each other, but were part of the FAA's emergency airworthiness directive after the October crash. Canada's WestJet which has 121 Boeing 737s - kept them in the air until the country banned the Boeing Max from Canadian airspace Wednesday. The transportation minister said it was a precautionary measure based on new information received this morning. The fleet includes 13 Max 8 aircraft, the same kind involved in Sunday's crash six minutes after take-off, and the October 2018 Lion Air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 passengers over then Java Sea. Up until Tuesday, UAE-based low cost carrier flydubai was the only airline outside of North America that remained 'confident in the airworthiness of our fleet' for the Max 8s, of which they flew 11. But their Max 8 and Max 9 planes were grounded at the order of the country's General Civil Aviation Authority, which banned them from air space in the United Arab Emirates from Wednesday. Yesterday, the FAA's Elwell said the agency had no basis for grounding the aircraft. 'Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft.' Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and United Kingdom have grounded the Max 8 Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Oman, France, Ireland, India, United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, did so too. Turkish Airlines and Norwegian Airlines (pictured) have ditched the planes Pilots said in prior reports that soon after engaging the autopilot on Boeing 737 Max 8 planes, the nose tilted down sharply Airline pilots on at least two U.S. flights have otherwise reported that an automated system seemed to cause their Boeing 737 Max planes to tilt down suddenly. The pilots said that soon after engaging the autopilot on Boeing 737 Max 8 planes, the nose tilted down sharply. In both cases, they recovered quickly after disconnecting the autopilot. The pilot reports were filed last year in a data base compiled by NASA. They are voluntary safety reports and do not publicly reveal the names of pilots, the airlines or the location of the incidents. An Ethiopian pilot who saw the crash site minutes after the disaster said the plane appeared to have 'slid directly into the ground.' President Trump voiced concerns of his own with advanced aircraft. 'Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products,' he said in a tweet. 'Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are needed, and the complexity creates danger.' Trump assessed: 'All of this for great cost yet very little gain. I dont know about you, but I dont want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane!' Boeing's said later that Muilenburg had spoke with Trump and reiterated that the 737 Max 8 is safe, the company said. An Ethiopian pilot who saw the crash site minutes after the disaster on Sunday said the plane appeared to have 'slid directly into the ground' American Airlines spokesman Ross Feinstein said the airline has received no reports from pilots about problems with the anti-stall technology. Southwest has said the same thing. Boeings technical team, meanwhile, joined American, Israeli, Kenyan and other aviation experts in the investigation led by Ethiopian authorities. The Max 8 model had been grounded by India, the UAE, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Iceland and Germany, and the airlines LOT Polish, TUI Airways, GOL Linhas Aereas, Aeromexico, Aerolineas Argentinas, Cayman Airways, Comair Airways, Eastar Jet, Jet Airways, Mongolian Airlines, China Airlines, China Eastern, China Southern, Lion Air, Silkair and Thai Lion. The European Union and UK Civil Aviation Authority have banned the entire Boeing 737 Max fleet. Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Oman, France, Ireland, India, United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, did so too. Turkish Airlines and Norwegian Airlines have ditched the planes for now. The mother of a toddler whose disappearance prompted the biggest criminal investigation in Maine history has issued a desperate plea to track down the father who she blames for her child's death. Trista Reynolds claims no one can find Justin DiPietro, who reported angelic Ayla Reynolds, aged just 20 months, missing in 2011 in Waterville. Although the body was never found and no charges have been filed, a judge declared her legally dead in 2017, so Reynolds announced in December last year that she is suing the girl's father for wrongful death. But she says her team is running out of time to serve DiPietro with legal papers. She posted a plea on social media Tuesday morning, writing that time is running out. If DiPietro isn't served with the summons by Sunday, 90 days from when the complaint was filed, the whole case could be thrown out. Trista Reynolds claims no one can find Justin DiPietro, who reported angelic Ayla Reynolds, aged just 20 months, missing in 2011 in Waterville (pictured announcing a lawsuit against DiPietro in December) Ayla Reynolds went missing in December 2011 from her father's home in Waterville, Maine She posted a plea on social media Tuesday morning, writing that time is running out. If DiPietro (pictured) isn't served with the summons by Sunday, 90 days from when the complaint was filed, the whole case could be thrown out Reynolds told CBS 13 she often wonders what her daughter would be like now. 'Would she have short hair? Long hair? Would it still be blonde the way that it was?' Reynolds said during an interview via video conference. 'I'm stuck and I really have not much more I can do,' added Reynolds. Last year, as she announced the legal proceedings, she said in a heart-breaking statement to cameras: 'As we hit Ayla's anniversary, I wonder if this is haunting you, Justin. 'I wonder if our daughter haunts your dreams or if you see her blue eyes when you close your eyes at night. I wonder if you even think about that night that night you murdered her.' The little girl's blood was found in DiPietro's home and car and law enforcement have said he is withholding information about her disappearance. Ayla was last seen wearing pajamas with the words 'Daddy's Princess' on them. She posted a plea on social media Tuesday morning, writing that time is running out Although the body was never found and no charges have been filed, a judge declared her legally dead in 2017 and Reynolds announced in December last year that she is suing the girl's father for wrongful death Although no version of the story has been offered in the lawsuit, Reynolds is suing the father for 'intentional wrongful actions' and subjecting Ayla to 'pre-death pain, fright, terror and physical injuries'. As she vowed to 'live inside a courtroom until the day I get justice for her', the mother said to reporters she often wondered if her daughter cried out for her or if she 'stayed strong'. DiPietro claimed she must have wandered away from the property or been abducted but law enforcement ruled it out saying foul play was involved. Reynolds is determined to find out his whereabouts to serve him the lawsuit. His last known address was in California according to Reynolds' pro bono lawyer. The legal representative said they had tried previously to serve him regarding other matters but a man who looked 'remarkably' like DiPietro, claimed he was not him. Trista Reynolds filed a wrongful death lawsuit seven years to the day the toddler vanished Attorney William Childs (left) said the lawsuit is about 'trying to find out how Ayla was killed', Also pictured are Reynolds, Jeff Hanson (second from left), Trista Reynold's stepfather, and Kevin Cady (right) a private investigator working on the case She hopes depositions related to the suit will help solve the case and although the filing also seeks a monetary award from DiPietro, the mother suspects he probably has no money to provide. Her attorney William Childs said that the lawsuit is more about 'trying to find out how Ayla was killed, why Ayla was killed, and where Ayla was killed'. Detectives have said in the past that adults in the home where Ayla was last seen alive know more than they have shared with authorities. The home belonged to Phoebe DiPietro - Justin's mother and Ayla's grandmother - and the present adults include Justin's sister Elisha DiPietro, and his then-girlfriend Courtney Roberts. The little girl's blood was found in Justin DiPietro's home and car and law enforcement have said he is withholding information According to a GoFundMe page launched last week to help raise funds for civil action, Ayla had lived with her father for 59 days when she vanished. The baby had broken her arm during that time which according to Justin was due to him dropping her while carrying her. Reynolds' attorney also said the child was scared of her father and the child's aunt, Trista's sister, warned authorities when they took the baby to live with her dad that it was a bad idea. He added that Justin's mother admitted she lied to police to cover for her son when initially questioned by law enforcement and the women in the house at the time of Ayla's death declined to take a polygraph test. The crowdfunding page, that raised $1,500 of a $25,000 goal in the first four days, noted that Justin took out insurance on Ayla's life in the time she lived with him. Reynolds' attorney hopes the money will pay for blood splatter experts, criminologists, polygraphers, private investigators, interrogatories, depositions, body language experts, and statement analyses. Reynolds read from a statement at the time: 'Justin, I promise you, wherever you are, one day you will have to face me and tell me the truth of what really happened to Ayla. You can't hide from this forever.' Phoebe DiPietro (left), grandmother of missing toddler Ayla Reynolds, is comforted by an unidentified woman during a vigil for Reynolds in downtown Waterville on March 3, 2012. Ayla was living in her home for 59 days when she died Justin's sister Elisha DiPietro, and his then-girlfriend Courtney Roberts were present at the home the night Ayla went missing Sworn testimony from DiPietro and others who were in the house, who could potentially be served subpoenas, could help shed light on exactly what happened that night. Reynolds said she hopes it builds groundwork for eventual criminal charges. Ayla was last seen wearing pajamas with the words 'Daddy's Princess' on them. Trista Reynolds now lives in South Portland and has two young children. She said she lights a pink candle every December in Ayla's name. 'We've been at this for seven years,' she said before the news conference, 'so I've got to have hope somewhere.' Mathieu Biselx, pictured, has described the horrific moment his three climbing friends were engulfed by snow on Ben Nevis A climber who survived the Ben Nevis disaster in which three people were killed has described the horrific moment his friends were engulfed by snow after one of them shouted: 'Avalanche!' Mathieu Biselx, 30, was seriously wounded in the avalanche on Britain's tallest peak which 'wiped out' the rest of his climbing party. He was airlifted to Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, where he remains in a stable condition in intensive care. Speaking from his hospital bed, the father-of-one said it was a 'miracle I am still alive' but said: 'My three closest friends are dead'. One of the dead climbers, aged 43, was also Swiss and the others, aged 41 and 32, were French. Their next of kin have been informed. The group were caught by the river of snow and ice in a gully on Ben Nevis as Storm Gareth blew in with strong winds on Tuesday morning, triggering a huge search and recovery operation in 'brutal conditions', a rescuer said. Mr Biselx, father of a little girl, said the group arrived in Scotland on Sunday evening and the climb on Tuesday was their first excursion on the mountain. Mathieu Biselx, who is currently in intensive care after barely surviving the avalanche on Ben Nevis, pictured with his family Talking to Swiss newspapers Le Nouvelliste and Tribune De Geneve, he said: 'We were not very high and all of a sudden we heard a noise. One of us yelled: 'Avalanche'. 'We got into a safe position but in two seconds we were swept away by heavy, compact snow. I felt myself fly through the rocks.' Describing how he freed his head from the mass of snow, he said: 'I called my friends, I shouted. No response. Then I realised the magnitude of the drama.' The friends, who lived near each other in the canton of Valais in Switzerland and were members of the same mountain club, were on a climbing holiday in Scotland. Mr Biselx, President of the Club Alpin Suisse (CAS), in Sion, said: 'This trip was not organized by the CAS. 'My three friends proposed this trip because I have been going through a difficult time on a personal level. I finally agreed and we organized this trip around Christmas time. Donald Paterson, deputy team leader of Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team (MRT) points to gully five on the north ridge of Ben Nevis where an avalanche took place A diagram showing Number 5 Gully on Ben Nevis, where the avalanche struck on Tuesday Mathieu Biselx, left, said the group's climb on Tuesday was their first excursion on the mountain. Pictured right: a climber on Ben Nevis prior to the avalanche 'We had dreamed of this trip for weeks. My three closest friends are deadIt's horrible. 'We arrived Sunday evening in Scotland. Our first trip into the mountains was on Tuesday. 'We knew the dangers. We consulted guides but it wasn't sufficient. We clearly had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's a miracle I am still alive. 'I think of my friends and their families. It goes round and round in my head.' Mr Biselx, who has a young daughter, said: 'It's a terrible drama. Two died instantly, the third soon after. They were great people. A Police vehicle at the Nevis Range Mountain Resort, with Britain's highest peak in the background, following the three deaths on the mountain A climber walking on Ben Nevis on Tuesday prior to the avalanche which killed three people He continued: 'Both my legs are seriously injured. 'My back, one shoulder and one arm are affected, but I'll get through it. While my friends... It's a terrible drama. 'It's terrible, they are no longer here. They will not see their family again.' Ben Nevis, near Fort William in the western Highlands, is a popular destination for experienced climbers, attracting 125,000 visitors each year. Tuesday's incident follows two recent fatal accidents on the mountain, which at 1,345m is the UK's highest. On New Year's Day, a 21-year-old German woman, who was a student at Bristol University, died after she fell from a ridge she had been climbing with three other people. She had been hiking on what is known as the 'ledge route' when she fell around 500ft. In December, Patrick Boothroyd, 21, from West Yorkshire, died after falling in the Tower Gully area. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson shredded White House counselor Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, over mixing his personal interests with U.S. foreign policy, a new book revealed. Journalist Vicky Ward detailed the confrontation between Kushner and America's top diplomat in her new book, 'Kushner, Inc.,' The Guardian revealed. Her book examines the lives of Washington D.C.'s most prominent 'it couple': Kushner and wife Ivanka Trump, the first daughter and White House counselor. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (left) shredded White House counselor Jared Kushner (right) over mixing his personal interests with U.S. foreign policy Former White House economic counselor Gary Cohn was also reported to have clashed with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump; the three are seen at a Sept. 11 2017 remembrance ceremony at the White House Ward, editor at large at HuffPo, 'digs beneath the myth the couple has created, depicting themselves as the voices of reason in an otherwise crazy presidency, and reveals that Jared and Ivanka are not just the Presidents chief enablers: they, like him, appear disdainful of rules, of laws, and of ethics,' according to the book's summary. The flap copy hardly presents a favorable view of the couple, noting 'they are entitled inheritors of the worst kind; their combination of ignorance, arrogance, and an insatiable lust for power has caused havoc all over the world, and may threaten the democracy of the United States.' White House press secretary Sarah Sanders has denounced it as a work of 'fiction.' Ward revealed clashes between Kushner and Ivanka Trump with high-profile aides in the Trump administration. The two were reported to be trying to set up their own power center in the West Wing. Tillerson blamed Kushner for Trump's decision to endorse a blockade against Qatar by Saudi Arabia and its allies in June 2017. The then-secretary of state 'told Kushner that his interference had endangered the US', Ward reported in her book, a copy of which was obtained by The Guardian. And there is also a report on how Trump's former top economic adviser Gary Cohn tore into Kushner after he learned the president's son-in-law dined with executives from the Chinese company Anbang, which was considering investing in the Kushner family's troubled property at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City. 'You've got to be crazy,' Cohn is said to have told Kushner. The Kushner family's tower was eventually refinanced by Qatari-backed investors. 'Kushner Inc,' which comes out March 19, portrays Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump as a couple who pushed their power on White House staffers while lashing out at anyone who was against them, ABC News reported. 'They talk to you as if they grew up in an ivory tower, which they did but they have no idea how normal people perceive, understand, intuit,' a person close to the White House legal team told Ward, adding that they seemed like 'the type of people who, if you don't pretty much indicate quickly that you're happy to shove your head up their ass, you're immediately a threat.' Ward reported that White House staffers nicknamed Kushner as the 'secretary of everything' and joked Ivanka Trump's team was Habi - 'home of all bad ideas,' the Guardian reported. Ivanka Trump was reported to want to establish a Trump dynasty to rival the Kennedy or Bush families and that includes becoming president herself. 'She thinks she's going to be president of the United States,' Cohn says. The book is filled with juicy stories likely to be dissected in Washington's back room, including an incident where Cohn noticed a document on his printer in his West Wing office that appeared to be a letter from Trump firing then-FBI director James Comey, Axios reported. It apparently went to the wrong printer. Cohn told his aide to take the letter straight to then-White House counsel Donald McGahn. Upon receiving it and realizing it gone to the printer, McGahn said, 'Oh, f***!' The book examines Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's role in the Trump White House; the couple is seen here at Joint Base Andrews with their children Joseph, Arabella and Theodore The book, denounced by the White House as 'fiction,' is out March 19 The New York Times reported on the first shocking excerpt from the book, which claimed President Trump told his incoming White House chief of staff John Kelly in 2017 that his daughter and son-in-law were lacking in media savvy and that he wanted them to move away from Washington. 'Get rid of my kids; get them back to New York,' he told Kelly. Kushner's camp blasted the book, with a spokesman for Jared's attorney Abbe Lowell telling the Times that '[e]very point that Ms. Ward mentioned in what she called her 'fact checking' stage was entirely false.' 'It seems she has written a book of fiction rather than any serious attempt to get the facts. Correcting everything wrong would take too long and be pointless,' Peter Mirijanian, the spokesman, said. Ward fired back on Twitter, saying that 'the 220 people I interviewed for the book might beg to disagree.' Ian Rylett, 55, reportedly pleaded guilty last week to 'lewd or lascivious molestation' and was sentenced to 90 days in prison instead of a possible 15 years YouTube has shut down channels targeting a tween audience after the 55-year-old co-founder pleaded guilty to child abuse, according to a report. The man behind SevenAwesomeKids, loved by eight to 12-year-old girls, reportedly entered a plea deal last week to avoid going on trial after being accused of 'lewd or lascivious molestation' against one of his underage video stars. Ian Rylett faced 15 years in prison if convicted but News 6 says he was sentenced to 90 days in Florida's Orange County Jail instead. He had already served 29 of those days while awaiting trial since the time of his arrest - when police were called to his hotel room near Walt Disney World following an incident that allegedly occurred on August 16 - and last week. Rylett is accused of verbally abusing a girl, who was 15, insisting that she take off her clothes in front of him and 'practice wrapping her breasts down, to make them appear smaller for the video shoot,' according to an arrest warrant obtained by BuzzFeed News. The warrant also states that the girl, who has not been named, said that Rylett touched her breasts and fondled her during that time and even attempted to take off her underwear. Rylett's SevenAwesomeKids YouTube video brand aimed at tweens had 17 million subscribers Once released from his three-month sentence, video producer Rylett will be placed on supervised probation for five years and cannot have contact with the victim or her mother. The only minor he's allowed to have contact with is his daughter. On Wednesday, Rylett's video pages displayed the message: 'This channel does not exist'. A YouTube spokesperson told DailyMail.com: 'We take safety on YouTube very seriously. We work closely with leading child safety organizations and others in our industry to protect young people. 'When we're made aware of serious allegations of this nature we take action, which may include terminating channels upon conclusion of an investigation.' One of Rylett's channels, SevenGymnasticsGirls, said to be the most popular, was terminated for violating YouTube's Community Guidelines in early August, not long before his arrest. Until recently, all other channels remained live on YouTube, despite the company being aware of Rylett's arrest for alleged child molestation. On Wednesday the YouTube page showed a message saying 'this channel does not exist' Rylett's SevenAwesomeKids brand's seven YouTube channels bearing names such as SevenFuntasticGirls and Seven PerfectAngels had more than 17 million subscribers combined, with the videos having been watched 10 billion times. The clips star a cast of more than 20 girls who are between the ages of eight and 18 years old. No new videos have been posted since August 14, two days prior to Rylett's arrest. Rylett, who lives in the UK, had previously pleaded not guilty during his August arraignment and was said to have surrendered his passport. He was due to stand trial later this year. His attorney claimed the girl accusing him and her mother had a financial motivation for the claim. She accused him of inappropriately touching her while showing her how to bandage her bare chest to appear younger. The accuser said he threatened to fine her via a recently-signed contract that allowed bodily contact. Rylett was arrested and charged after being accused of verbally abusing and fondling one of his YouTube channel stars aged 15. The accuser said he threatened to fine her via a recently-signed contract that allowed bodily contact News 6 reported the contract stated: 'Talent and Parent understand and agree that Talent's body proportions are not optimal. Talent and Parent understand and agree that certain activities, practices, procedures, shoots or projects will involve talent being seen in a state of undress and it is likely there will be physical or bodily contact, potentially of an intimate nature.' 'Talent and Parent hereby agree and consent without limitation, objection or question to Talent being subject to physical or bodily contact of any type on any part or parts of the body, for any reason or any purpose, and Talent shall remove any items of clothing as directed by management,' the contract stated, according to prosecutors. Assistant State Attorney Jenny Rossman said last October: 'This contract was used as a sophisticated way for Mr. Rylett to engage in inappropriate sexual activity with the victim. 'The defendant had been zeroing in on the victim, that he gave her more attention than any of the other girls. He only entered into a contract with her, none of the other girls.' The prosecutors previously said Rylett later told his female manager he shouldn't have been alone with the teen when the incident occurred in his hotel room. They said it was 'the first time something was done behind closed doors' without female manager present. YouTube never told the girls starring in the videos about Rylett's arrest, according to reports. The company told DailyMail.com that for accusations of abuse happening offline, they suggest users call and report to the police. YouTube told DailyMail.com that for accusations of abuse happening offline, they suggest users call and report to the police. They demonetized Rylett's channels in August after arrest The video-sharing website, which was launched in February 2005 and bought by Google in November 2006, demonetized Rylett's channels in August shortly after his arrest. They said in serious cases they terminate the channel immediately upon conviction or guilty plea and in Rylett's situation terminated a number of channels he is associated with. YouTube claims anyone can flag content on the website using the flagging tool and there is a drop-down option for child abuse content. The Google division reports child sex abuse material and grooming to National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) who in turn report to law enforcement. The company insists they've always been committed to working across the industry on fighting back against exploitation of young people with technology such as their Child Sexual Abuse Imagery (CSAI) Match tool and state they continuously invest in new technologies and make them available for free to industry partners. YouTube told DailyMail.com they helped terminate and report 46,000 offender accounts to NCMEC from YouTube (not including Google referrals). The platform said they have also been steadily hiring social workers, child development specialists, colleagues from NCMEC, former prosecutors and former FBI and CIA personnel dedicated to child safety and catching those who wish to harm children. This is the shocking moment a Wisconsin woman appears to attack two police officers while threatening 'you dead' after they accused her of driving the wrong way down a road. Denisha Davis, 26, is said to have passed cops in her white Toyota headed westbound in an eastbound lane in Brown Deer shortly before midnight on Saturday. She did then not pull over for several blocks as police attempted to make her stop the car, law enforcement officials say. In the footage Davis then appears to stumble and giggle her way through sobriety tests. She can be seen laughing, spinning on the spot and a breath test revealed a reading of 0.191. Once handcuffed she looks at the dashboard video camera before swearing by sticking up her middle finger and poking out her tongue. Denisha Davis faces two counts of throwing/discharging bodily fluid at public safety workers or prosecutors, operating while intoxicated and operating while revoked. Her initial breath test revealed a reading of 0.191 Once handcuffed she looks at the dashboard camera swearing and poking out her tongue Davis appears to stumble and giggle her way through sobriety tests before spinning Davis appears to strike one of the police officers before she is brought to the ground. She is said to have continued to lash out and even spit at officers In the booking room, as two policemen attempt to remove her jacket, Davis appears to strike one of them before she is brought to the ground. Later, in a fit of laughter, she can be heard telling officers: 'Try me, b****. Don't play with me. I'll hit you in your chin again if you let me go b****.' She can be heard adding: 'We are going to war with you m**********, and that's a promise,' the 26-year-old said. 'B****, you dead. You got that?' Davis is said to have continued to lash out and even spit at officers. She is accused of telling officers she had drank a margarita but they noted her speech was slurred and her eyes were glassy. Brown Deer Police Officer Nick Andersen told FOX6: 'The suspect decided to spit at officers multiple times. 'Obviously, the job is dangerous enough as it is. People get upset with our actions and decide to take it in their own hands. It's unfortunate for the men and women out there trying to keep the roads safe.' Davis faces two counts of throwing/discharging bodily fluid at public safety workers or prosecutors, operating while intoxicated and operating while revoked. She appeared in court on Tuesday, where a $650 signature bond was set. Tennessee Democratic Rep. John DeBerry (pictured) who has voted in favor of an aggressive abortion ban has said it is women's lack of 'personal responsibility' that leads to procedure being performed One of three Democratic lawmakers in Tennessee who has voted in favor of an aggressive abortion ban has said it is women's lack of 'personal responsibility' that leads to the medical procedures being performed. On Thursday, Rep. John DeBerry counted himself among those seeking to ban abortions in the state after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can be as early as six weeks after conception when many woman are not yet aware they are pregnant. 'I choose my battles, and I choose to give girls self esteem, self worth, to where they dont feel that their bodies are just a vessel for somebody to play with and they dont get themselves in that position,' DeBerry, who represents parts of Memphis in the state's House of Representatives, told the Tennessean. 'I think thats whats being lost. Personal responsibility, pride, self esteem it makes a person walk away from those situations that get them in this position. Because the woman ultimately has to bear the burden.' The 99-member House passed the measure by a vote of 65-21, with only three Democrats in favor of it, and seven Republicans abstaining. It now moves on to the Senate, which has indicated its reluctance to take up the measure at this time, in favor of waiting to see what happens with similar bills that are being considered in several states across the country. On Thursday, DeBerry counted himself among those seeking to ban abortions in the state after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can be as early as six weeks after conception when many woman are not yet aware they are pregnant. An ultrasound of the uterus of a woman who is six weeks pregnant is shown 'This was the first chance in 25 years that I had to go on record and say I disagree with abortion,' DeBerry, who has served in the Tennessee House since 1995, said. 'There hasnt been another vote like this. There have been a lot of little ancillary votes here and there, chipping away (at abortion access).' The bill, as passed, would not allow for abortions in cases of rape or incest. The official party line in Tennessee, however, is that women should be free to make their own choices regarding whether to undergo an abortion, according to Tennessee Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini. The state Democratic party platforms is that 'age-appropriate reproductive health education, comprehensive health care and readily available and affordable contraception' are the most effective ways to reduce the number of abortions. The only other Democrats in the House to join DeBerry in voting for the bill were Rep. John Mark Windle, who represents Livingston, and Rep. Joe Towns, also for Memphis. The only other Democrats in the House to join DeBerry in voting for the bill were Rep. John Mark Windle (left), who represents Livingston, and Rep. Joe Towns (right), also for Memphis Tennessee's Lt. Gov. Randy McNally told the Tennessean on Thursday that he would rather wait to see what happens with other fetal heartbeat abortion bans around the country before the Senate calls a vote on the bill. 'So far, it hasnt had a very good reception,' McNally said, noting the the Senate would like to avoid spurring a successful legal challenge from, and thus paying money to, abortion rights activist groups. 'Im hoping that we can find a way that doesnt get us in court on a losing battle and does accomplish what the intent of (the bill) is to do,' he said. '[I] would hate to see a court rule that the whole thing is unconstitutional and charge the state attorneys fees.' Pro-choice groups in the state have already said they'll file lawsuits seeking to upset the measure, if it becomes law. Pro-life advocacy group Tennessee Right to Life has also opposed the bill. The organization's president, Brian Harris, has said the group has its attention on fighting for abortion restrictions it believes can survive legal challenges. In January and Iowa state judge struck down that state's version of a 'fetal heartbeat' abortion law, which would have been the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the nation. Judge Michael Huppert found the law unconstitutional, based on earlier decisions from the Iowa Supreme Court that affirm a woman's fundamental right to an abortion. He also cited several cases in federal court, including decisions in 2015 and 2016 in the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals that indicated such abortion laws were unconstitutional. The now defunct law had been passed in the Iowa state legislature last year and signed by Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, but it never took effect due to immediate legal challenges by abortion providers Planned Parenthood of the Heartland and the Emma Goldman Clinic last July. Still, similar measures are continuing to be considered around the country. On Wednesday, the Senate in Ohio passed its own version of a fetal heartbeat bill which would ban abortions at the detection of a heartbeat. That measure will now move on to the House. In Georgia, a similar measure passed the state's House of Representatives last week. The Kentucky Senate overwhelmingly passed its own bill that would ban most abortions in the state once a fetal heartbeat is detected on Valentine's Day. As for Tennessee, McNally said the Senate could make a decision on the bill toward the end of the legislative session, which runs through late April or May. Rosie O'Donnell has revealed that she was molested by her father as a young girl growing up in Long Island in the 1970s. The 56-year-old actress, comic and talk show host addressed the alleged sexual abuse for the first time in an interview with Varietys New York bureau chief Ramin Setoodehive, who is the author of the upcoming book 'Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of "The View."' 'It started very young,' O'Donnell told Setoodeh. 'And then when my mother died, it sort of ended in a weird way, because then he was with these five children to take care of. Speaking her truth: Rosie O'Donnell has revealed that she was molested by her father as a young girl Rosie (pictured left with a friend circa 1966) said the molestation stopped around the time her mother died in 1973, when she was 10 Her father, Edward Joseph, died in 2015 at age 81, and he was buried under the same headstone as his late wife, Roseann, in Long Island She went on to say: 'On the whole, it's not something I like to talk about. Of course, it changes everyone. Any child who is put in that position, especially by someone in the family, you feel completely powerless and stuck, because the person you would tell is the person doing it.' O'Donnell's father, Edward Joseph O'Donnell, passed away in 2015 in Atlantic Beach, Florida, following a bout with cancer. He was 81. O'Donnell's revelation appears in the upcoming book 'Ladies Who Punch,' out on April 2 Her mother, Roseann O'Donnell, succumbed to breast cancer in 1973, when she was just 38 years old, leaving her electrical engineer husband to raise their children alone. The couple are now buried together under the same headstone at Saint Charles Cemetery in East Farmingdale, New York. O'Donnell's explosive revelation appears in a chapter of the new book dedicated to The Rosie O'Donnell Show, which went off the air in 2002 after a six-year run. The star of A League of Their Own has spoken in past interviews about how her father emotionally distanced himself from his children after his wife's death. 'He had his own issues and demons. He had a very tough childhood,' she told Piers Morgan in 2012. 'He had an alcoholic, abusive father and never really got the help that I think every person needs when they have lived through that as a child. I think that he had a lot of problems to deal with.' In the same CNN interview from seven years ago, O'Donnell appeared to have alluded to the sexual abuse, telling Morgan: 'There are some unforgivable things I think that as a child, the statute of limitations has to wear off. 'You get to be 50 years old, and you can't be still angry at what your father did in 1970.' O'Donnell, 56, is engaged to Elizabeth Rooney, a 33-year-old mounted police officer (left) O'Donnell has six adopted children from her two past marriages. In January, she became a grandmother for the first time when her 21-year-old daughter, Chelsea, gave birth to a baby girl. The actress and philanthropist is currently engaged to Elizabeth Rooney, a 33-year-old mounted police officer from Massachusetts. 'Ladies Who punch' comes out in print on April 2. Advertisement More than 70 million people are in the path of a 'bomb cyclone' that has prompted the cancellation of more than 1,000 flights and closed hundreds of miles of highways in the West and Upper Midwest. Winter Storm Ulmer brought blizzard conditions to parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota. Warnings extended to North Dakota and northwest Minnesota, where the late-winter storm is expected to hit Thursday. 'This is a very epic cyclone,' said Greg Carbin, chief of forecast operations for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Weather Prediction Center. 'We're looking at something that will go down in the history books.' Parts of seven states were under blizzard warnings, and 20 states were under some level of high wind alert, Carbin said. Tornadoes were also possible on the storm's eastern edge. More than 70 million people are in the path of a 'bomb cyclone' that has prompted the cancellation of more than 1,000 flights and closed hundreds of miles of highways in the West and Upper Midwest. Pictured is a traveler in Denver, Colorado The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's satellite captured this image of winter storm Ulmer becoming a 'bomb cyclone' over central USA on Wednesday Traffic comes to a halt on eastbound Interstate 70 near Tower Road as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over Aurora, Colorado on Wednesday A lone pedestrian struggles along Broadway as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over Denver on Wednesday Corporal Daniel Groves, 52, was killed after he was hit by a car while helping another driver who slid off the road in Denver on Wednesday In Colorado, a state patrol officer was hit and killed by a car as he was helping another driver who slid off Interstate 76 near Denver. Corporal Daniel Groves, 52, was outside his patrol car when he was struck. He died at a hospital. Hundreds of drivers were stranded on Colorado highways, including 500 in the Colorado Springs area alone. Gov Jared Polis activated the National Guard to help find and rescue snowbound drivers. Scores of motorists took refuge at truck stops in eastern Wyoming while blowing snow forced portions of major highways to close in Colorado, Nebraska and South Dakota. Bria McKenzie, 22, said she and her mother, brother and sister were stuck in their car for more than two hours on a hilly road in Colorado Springs. The snow was blinding and numbing, and the wind was whipping so hard she didn't feel safe walking to a hospital just down the road, she said. 'We thought about it, well maybe we'll run over to the hospital - at least we'll be warm,' she said. 'But we were soaking wet already just from trying to keep the windshield clear and from trying to push our car and help other people push their cars.' 'It was just like every second you were out there, it felt like parts of you were just freezing.' A man helps push a car off the side of Union Blvd in Colorado Springs, Colorado on Wednesday. Some of Colorado's busiest highways are closed as a raging storm brings heavy snow to a wide swath of the West and Midwest Trees snapped by high winds from a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow cover the Eugene Field house in Washington Park in Denver Canada geese battle choppy waterin Denver as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over Shoppers struggle to make their ways back to the vehicles outside in Denver. Many schools and government buildings have been closed due to the storm The storm brought blizzard conditions to parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota this week Joe Miller's beard freezes over as he walks through downtown Casper, Wyoming on Wednesday during the storm McKenzie said they were eventually rescued by her father in his pickup truck. A total of 1,386 flights were canceled at Denver International Airport on Wednesday, which closed all runways at 12.30pm. The runways remained closed at 5.30pm and most airlines canceled all their departing flights for the rest of the day. 'Safety is the number one priority of our entire airport community here at DEN,' Denver International Airport CEO Kim Day told the Denver Channel. 'At this time, conditions have deteriorated and our major three carriers have all proactively canceled their afternoon and early evening flights, and our airfield is closed.' 'When visibility improves,' crews will work quickly to re-open runways.' Day said that most concessions remained open at the airport to 'ensure the comfort of passengers' who were stuck inside. Wind gusts up to 80 miles per hour had been recorded at the airport, which was expecting 7 to 11 inches of snow, earlier on Wednesday. The raging storm could rival one that hit the region in 1979 in terms of the extent of heavy snowfall, according to meteorologist Richard Emanuel with the National Weather Service in Cheyenne, where wind was gusting up to 60mph with heavy snow. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the storm has officially undergone a phenom called bombogenesis, which occurs when a 'bomb cyclone' rapidly or explosively intensifies over a 24-hour period. This type of storm system usually, but not always, accelerates and strengthens over the ocean as its central pressure drops at least 24 millibars in 24 hours. Tom Skaar laughs while walking his dogs on House Avenue during a blizzard on Wednesday in Cheyenne, Wyoming Maintenance supervisor Dan Leach frees storm drains of ice and snow at Episcopal Church Homes in St Paul, Minnesota 'They typically do get strong systems this time of the year in that part of the country, but this one is maybe a notch stronger than what you typically see,' said meteorologist Marc Chenard of the Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland. 'Pretty much through much of the Plains there's going to be a threat for potential power outage issues,' he added. More than 100,000 electric power customers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area were left in the dark early Wednesday after a line of rain squalls associated with the system moved through the area. Xcel Energy said high winds caused about 184,000 homes and businesses to lose electricity, mostly in the Denver area. Zero visibility made conditions difficult for repair workers and it could take days to restore power to everyone, according to Xcel spokesman Mark Stutz. The storm was expected to drop up to 22 inches of snow in Wyoming, 14 inches in South Dakota and a foot in Colorado. Many schools and government offices closed for the day in places where more than a foot of snow and winds as high as 100mph were possible, which would be the equivalent to the wind speed of a Category 2 hurricane. A wind gust of 92mph was recorded in the mountains northwest of Denver. The storm was expected to drop up to 22 inches of snow in Wyoming (residents shoveling snow on Wednesday), 14 inches in South Dakota and a foot in Colorado The Denver International Airport had severe whiteout conditions on Wednesday. In this photo, a jet is barely seen as crews work to remove snow from around it Greg Giannini needed to get gas for his generator, because the lights were flickering at his home and he was afraid he was going to lose power. Even though he has four wheel drive, his car got stuck at the pumps and he was trying to dig out to get home as the blizzard swirled around him. He was stuck near North Gate Blvd. in Colorado Springs, Colorado A truck drives north on I-25 during the snowstorm in Colorado Springs, Colorado on Wednesday The culprit was a sudden and severe drop in ground-level air pressure in Colorado, the most pronounced dive since 1950, Carbin said. It was caused by a combination of the jet stream and normal conditions in the wind shadow of the Rockies. Air rushed into the low-pressure area and then rose into the atmosphere. 'It's like a vacuum cleaner, really,' Carbin said. And when that much air rushes higher into the atmosphere, it causes severe weather. Government workers in Denver, Wyoming and South Dakota were told to stay home and many colleges also closed their campuses. Hundreds of miles of interstate and smaller highways were closed in Wyoming and western Nebraska because of whiteout conditions. High water floods in Hooper, Nebraska oin Wednesday. The storm has not only brought snow, but also floods and tornadoes across more than 25 states Flooding forced evacuations in northeast Nebraska and western Iowa, including a retirement home in Pierce, Nebraska (pictured is Hooper, Nebraska) A corn field is flooded with water in Ashland, Nebraska on Wednesday. Residents of Avoca, Iowa, were filling sandbags to keep floodwaters from spreading, and the American Red Cross set up a shelter for anyone who was displaced A 250-mile stretch of Interstate 80 from Cheyenne to Rock Springs in southern Wyoming was closed, along with a 300-mile section of Interstate 25 from Buffalo, Wyoming, to the Colorado border. About 100 miles of Interstate 80 was closed in western Nebraska. Severe thunderstorms in North Texas damaged buildings and flipped over small planes parked at an airport. Flooding forced evacuations in northeast Nebraska and western Iowa, including a retirement home in Pierce, Nebraska. Residents of Avoca, Iowa, were filling sandbags to keep floodwaters from spreading, and the American Red Cross set up a shelter for anyone who was displaced. The storm is expected to rapidly intensify overnight on Wednesday. Schools were closed in many places where more than a foot of snow was possible Warnings extended to North Dakota and northwest Minnesota, where the late-winter storm is expected to hit Thursday Forecasters have warned that wind gusts in certain areas may reach up to 100mph Forecasters said the storm could last through Friday. But by Thursday, the storm system may weaken as it moves over the Tennessee River Valley, bringing mostly rain from Michigan southward to the Gulf Coast and some remaining snow only in the far northern parts of the country, experts said Winter storm warnings for heavy snow were issued throughout the region, including areas of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. A tornado in New Mexico ripped roofs from buildings in the small town of Dexter, about 200 miles southwest of Albuquerque. Authorities said five people were hurt, but none of the injuries were life-threatening. A dairy euthanized about 150 cows injured by the tornado. Authorities also blamed high winds for a train derailment in the state after approximately 25 freight cars went off a trestle over a mostly dry river bed. The New Mexico State Police said no injuries resulted from the wreck Wednesday near Logan, about 184 miles east of Albuquerque. State Police photos posted on Twitter showed shipping containers strewn across the river bed, with a jumbled pile of containers on the slope above one bank of the Canadian River. A snow plow rumbles north on Capitol Avenue during a blizzard on Wednesday in Cheyenne, Wyoming. White-out conditions closed I-80, I-25, and U.S. 85, effectively closing off the state capital from Nebraska, Colorado and the rest of Wyoming Ryan Bredensteiner of Top Flight Maintenance shovels Central Avenue during the blizzard on Wednesday Authorities have blamed high winds for a train derailment in eastern New Mexico where approximately 25 freight cars went off a trestle over a mostly dry river bed. The New Mexico State Police said no injuries resulted from the wreck Wednesday near Logan, about 184 miles east of Albuquerque Union Pacific spokeswoman Raquel Espinoza said the derailed cars were the tail end of a mixed-freight train consisting of two locomotives and 73 rail cars. A high wind warning issued earlier by the National Weather Service said the storm moving through the area would produce 'one of the strongest wind events in years for West Texas and southeast New Mexico.' Rivers in Wisconsin are expected to reach flood stage over the next few days as thunderstorms and showers melt away snow that has accumulated this winter. Forecasters said the storm could last through Friday. But by Thursday, the storm system may weaken as it moves over the Tennessee River Valley, bringing mostly rain from Michigan southward to the Gulf Coast and some remaining snow only in the far northern parts of the country, experts said. A controversial new Netflix documentary claims Madeleine McCann might still be alive and could be being held by people traffickers - 12 years after she disappeared. The eight-part series called 'The Disappearance Of Madeleine McCann' was commissioned in 2017 as the true crime genre exploded with TV shows such as Making A Murderer. But the missing toddler's parents Kate and Gerry have refused to take part in the show, with sources claiming they are 'horrified' it is being made without their approval. It has also been subject to delays and industry insiders feared it could have been cancelled over a lack of new material. Clarence Mitchell, the family's former spokesman, told The Guardian: 'Kate and Gerry and their wider family and friends were approached some months ago to participate in the documentary. 'Kate and Gerry didn't ask for it and don't see how it will help the search for Maddie on a practical level, so they chose not to engage.' Maddie's parents (pictured above) had received numerous requests from producers Pulse Films over the past 18 months The programme will include interviews with top British police officer Jim Gamble, who claims the case will be solved 'within his lifetime'. The senior child protection officer in the UK's first investigation into the youngster's disappearance, said: 'I absolutely believe that in my lifetime we will find out what has happened to Madeleine McCann.' 'There's huge hope to be had with the advances in technology. Year on year DNA is getting better. 'Year on year other techniques, including facial recognition, are getting better. 'And as we use that technology to revisit and review that which we captured in the past, there's every likelihood that something we already know will slip into position.' But other experts featured in the documentary believe the youngster is more likely to have been 'kept alive' by traffickers due to her financial value as a 'middle-class British girl'. Jim Gamble Private investigator Julian Peribanez, who was hired by the McCann family suggests that traffickers 'usually go for lower-class kids from third world countries'. He said: 'That's the main supplier of these gangs. The value that Madeleine had was really high because if they took her it's because they were going to get a lot of money.' The documentary also hears from the former Portuguese police chief, who claimed the youngster is dead and that her parents faked her kidnap in one of the key interviewees of the new Netflix movie about the missing girl. The streaming giant is due to trial the show today with the first programme in the series - already predicted to be a huge global hit - going live on Friday. Madeline McCann Kate and Gerry McCann (pictured above) have said they want 'nothing to do with' the new Netflix show The company was locked in crisis talks and even considered shelving it but has decided 'the show must go on.' The McCanns, who refused to take part in the project and declined to watch a preview, will be infuriated that their tormentor Goncalo Amaral - 'a thorn in our sides' - is set to be starring in it. The couple, who are still challenging a libel win by the ex Portuguese detective in the highest court in the land, will be 'horrified to learn' that the worldwide streaming service has interviewed the retired officer. He accused them of covering up their daughter's accidental death in a holiday apartment nearly 12 years ago. A friend of the McCann's said last night: 'Kate and Gerry will be mortified and horrified to learn that one of the lead roles has gone to Mr Amaral who has caused them so much extra hurt and pain over the years. He has been a thorn in their sides since the very beginning.' Mrs McCann in her 2011 heart wrenching best seller book 'Madeleine' writes about Mr Amaral: 'That man has caused us so much upset and anger because of how he has treated my beautiful Madeleine and the search to find her. 'Here was a person who had been entrusted with finding our little girl and who failed her.' Goncalo Amaral (pictured above) has previously stated that Kate and Gerry McCann had faked Madeline's kidnapping But Oscar-winning Netflix is boasting the new show has 'riveting' new interviews with key investigators as the 12th anniversary of the world's most famous missing child cases approaches in May. MailOnline first exclusively revealed that Kate and Gerry wanted 'nothing to do with' the drama which has cost up to a reported 20 million. Kate and Gerry McCann are vowing to sue retired police chief Goncalo Amaral The parents of Madeleine McCann are vowing to sue retired police chief Goncalo Amaral if he happens to libel them during his key role in the movie. A source close to Kate and Gerry told MailOnline tonight: 'Their lawyers will be watching with interest and are warning 'Beware!' 'Mr Amaral is the one who has continued to make false and malicious accusations against Madeleine's parents which has resulted in a long running libel battle. Whilst he won on a counter appeal Kate and Gerry are challenging the Portuguese Supreme Court judgement. 'Kate and Gerry wanted absolutely nothing to do with the Netflix programme but they now understand Mr Amaral is playing a part in it and they want to ensure he says nothing again to incriminate them.' The couple are asking their lawyers top London based libel experts Carter Ruck to look into it. Meanwhile they are awaiting a decision by the European Court of Human Rights to say if they have a case to answer against Mr Amaral and the Portuguese court in their ongoing battle. An ECHR spokesperson said today: 'The case is currently under consideration and there is no fixed time frame for examining it.' Advertisement They spoke out after the Home Office confirmed it was considering a new request for extra funding from Scotland Yard to continue the hunt for Maddie - giving them hope there is 'still work left to be done.' Three-year-old Maddie vanished from a holiday apartment in Portugal's Praia da Luz in May 2007 while her parents were dining with pals in a nearby tapas restaurant. She had been left sleeping alone with her younger twin siblings Sean and Amelie with regular half hourly checks being made on the children. Her parents cling onto a glimmer of hope their eldest child could still be found alive.She would now be aged 15, nearly 16. The entire McCann family, holiday friends, British police and UK private investigators have also snubbed the venture. Maddie's parents had received numerous requests from producers Pulse Films over the past 18 months. A source close to the movie makers, which scooped three awards at last month's Oscars for Roma, which follows the life of a live-in housekeeper of a middle-class family in Mexico City - said: 'Everyone everywhere is fascinated by the Maddie story. 'We would have welcomed the opportunity of working with the McCanns directly but they informed us they couldn't and wouldn't consider taking part while a police investigation is into their daughter's abduction is ongoing. 'But we have interesting new interviews with people close to the inquiry and we believe we can give justice to this unbelievably tragic story.' An insider at Pulse Films said: 'Netflix are hoping it will be a massive hit.' Pictured: This Praia da Luz holiday apartment in the Algarve was where Madeleine McCann went missing in 2007 The search for Maddie - who was just nine days away from her fourth birthday - has become the most high-profile missing person investigation in history. The youngster's face in iconic pictures is recognisable around the world. Netflix has had a string of successful true crime documentaries including hit documentary Making A Murderer on wrongly jailed American student Amanda Knox for British student Meredith Kercher's murder. And the streaming service scooped three gongs at the Oscars for Best Director for Roma, Best Cinematography and Foreign Language Film while being nominated for Best Picture. Film makers have made several trips to the family's village to speak to locals and have also interviewed journalists who have been covering the story over the years. The McCann's have so far failed in their long running court battle to silence Mr Amaral over claims he made against them. They were left angry and disappointed after Portugal's top court threw out their libel claim against the ex cop in January 2017. They vowed to contest the judgement, slamming it as 'terrible.' Kate, now a medical worker, had previously said that Mr Amaral's poisonous words had been 'very upsetting and incomprehensible.' She added: 'It has caused a lot of frustration and anger which is a real negative emotion.' Victorious Mr Amaral said: 'I'm pleased I have a court ruling which defends the freedom of expression.' The Policia Judiciaria inspector led the initial bungled hunt for Maddie but was later pulled off the case after criticising British police assisting. In his once banned book Mr Amaral claims Maddie accidentally died in an accident at the holiday flat or by being given an overdose of sedatives. It is based on statements from Portuguese police files which are open to the public. Maddie's parents fiercely denied his allegations. In their original 36-page writ they described Mr Amaral as a self obsessed, manipulative money-grabber and accuse him of libel and breaching their and their now 14-year-old twins human rights. The divorcee, 59, has since blamed Kate and Gerry for wrecking his marriage and his career by taking legal action against him in June 2009. Michael Cohen was told he should 'sleep well' because he had 'friends in high places,' a lawyer who was speaking with President Donald Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani reassured him in April 2018, it was revealed on Wednesday. The conversation played out in two emails that Cohen handed over to Congress as part of the documents he submitted to back up his claim that a pardon was dangled before he decided to cooperate with federal prosecutors, CNN reported. The two emails - both dated April 21, 2018 - do not specifically mention a pardon. The attorney who wrote the emails, Robert J. Costello, released a statement disputing Cohen's claim that Trump 'dangled' a presidential pardon in front of Cohen before he began cooperating with federal prosecutors and special counsel Robert Mueller. 'We have documents to back our position up, and are preparing to provide these to the U.S. Attorney's office, who has asked for them,' Costello said in the statement. The statement referred to Cohen's account of the pardon discussions as 'utter nonsense.' Federal prosecutors requested emails and documents from Costello last week amid an investigation into 'possible violations of federal criminal law,' the New York Times reported Wednesday, citing a copy of the request. Michael Cohen was told he should 'sleep well' because he had 'friends in high places. He was reassured in April 2018, shortly after the FBI raided his office The revelation came in emails from attorney Robert Costello (above), who was speaking with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, and were submitted to Congress by Cohen Costello told CNN that Cohen's interpretation of events is 'utter nonsense.' In the emails, Costello reassures Cohen that all is well. 'I just spoke to Rudy Giuliani and told him I was on your team,' Costello wrote. 'He asked me to tell you that he knows how tough this is on you and your family and he will make (sure) to tell the President. He said thank you for opening this back channel of communication and asked me to keep in touch.' In a follow-up email, Costello told Cohen he had spoken to Giuliani and it was 'very very positive.' 'There was never a doubt and they are in our corner,' Costello wrote. 'Rudy said this communication channel must be maintained. He called it crucial and noted how reassured they were that they had someone like me whom Rudy has known for so many years in this role.' 'Sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places,' Costello added. The word 'pardon' does not appear in the emails but Costello told CNN Cohen asked him to raise the issue with Giuliani. 'Does dangled mean that he (Cohen) raised it and I mentioned it to Giuliani, and Giuliani said the President is not going to discuss pardons with anybody? If that's dangling it, that's dangling it for about 15 seconds,' Costello told the news network. He was exploring the possibility of representing Cohen at the time. But those close to Cohen argued it was the other way around, with Costello pushing his ties with Giuliani, whom he had known for four decades, on Cohen. Giuliani told CNN the emails weren't about pardons at all. 'That was about Michael Cohen thinking that the President was mad at him,' Giuliani said. 'I called (Costello) to reassure him that the President was not mad. It wasn't long after the raid and the President felt bad for him.' Costello said he and Cohen first spoke after the FBI conducted its raid on Cohen's hotel room, office, and home. At that time, Cohen was represented by Stephen Ryan and was still part of the Trump joint defense agreement. But Costello and Cohen ultimately did not sign a legal retainer. Cohen declared under oath on Feb. 27 during his public Congressional hearing that 'I have never asked for, nor would I accept, a pardon from President Trump.' Rudy Giuliani said the emails weren't about pardons at all but a reassurance Trump was not mad at Cohen The emails were sent shortly after the FBI raided Cohen's office and President Donald Trump's team claim there were meant to reassure Cohen that Trump was not angry with him His lawyer sent a letter Tuesday to the head of the House Oversight Committee clarifying Cohen's testimony that he never sought a pardon from the president. Michael Monico told Maryland Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings that Cohen had asked his lawyer to explore the possibility of a pardon before Cohen left a joint-defense agreement and turned against Trump last June. Cohen hasn't done so since, Monico said. Monico denied Trump's claim, in a tweet last week, that Cohen had personally asked him for a pardon. 'In retrospect, while the sentence could have been clearer regarding the time frames, the sentence is true, and Mr. Cohen stands by his statement,' Monico wrote. A teacher has been accused of punching a high school student twice in the head, leaving the 14-year-old with a swollen and bruised face. The Year 9 student - who wished to remain anonymous - was standing on the school oval at Kawana Waters State College, south of the Sunshine Coast, on Tuesday when the teacher allegedly punched him and pulled at his hat and hair, The Courier Mail reported. The alleged altercation reportedly followed a verbal disagreement between the pair. A person known to the student told the publication the alleged attack left the boy with swelling and bruising to his face and jaw. The student was on the school oval at Kawana Waters State College (pictured, secondary campus), south of the Sunshine Coast when the alleged incident occurred on Tuesday The teenager was reportedly left with significant trauma and has yet to return to school. Kawana Waters Police Station officer-in-charge Senior Sergeant Mark Cordwell said the child protection unit was investigating the alleged incident. The investigating officer told Daily Mail Australia 'at this stage of the investigation it is inappropriate to make any comment'. A Department of Education and Training spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia the department treated all matters involving students seriously. 'Departmental employees are expected to interact professionally with students at all times. 'Parents and students can be confident that if an allegation of harm is reported in a state school, it will be dealt with immediately and in a sensitive manner.' The spokesperson added that guidance, support and counselling services are available for students and staff when necessary. However, the department declined to comment further because of 'confidentiality reasons.' More than 1,500 students are enrolled at Kawana Waters States College, with grades from kindergarten through to Year 12. Daily Mail Australia contacted The Queensland Teachers Union, but it would not comment. Daily Mail Australia contacted Kawana Waters State College for comment. An NYPD officer inadvertently recorded herself performing a sex act on a male colleague in her patrol car. Police are looking into the alleged encounter between a female officer and her male sergeant during a recent midnight shift in East New York, Brooklyn. It is thought the camera switched on when the officer tucked the device inside her vest. As the exchange took place, audio of them talking about the sex act was also captured, sources told The New York Post. Police are looking into the alleged encounter between a female officer and her male sergeant, who are assigned to New York's 75th Precinct (pictured) The recorded liaison was likely uncovered by a precinct superior during a routine review of the couples body camera footage after their shift, sources claimed. An NYPD spokeswoman said these claims were under 'internal review' and investigators were reviewing the body camera footage. It is understood the pair are still working as the investigation is carried out. Each week, about 86,000 recordings between police and members of the public are made More than 3.5 million interactions between cops and the public have been recorded, officials told New York Daily News. Precinct supervisors are required to regularly look over footage to make sure officers are using the cameras and taking proper police action. Each week, about 86,000 recordings are made, making it the largest such initiative in American policing. About 4,000 additional cops from a number of specialty units, including Emergency Services and the Strategic Response Group, will get cameras by August. Butchers have warned that meat prices are skyrocketing and will continue to do so because of the drought. Beef and lamb prices are rising as the market is flooded with low-quality stock from desperate Australian farmers. Farmers are killing their cattle prematurely to avoid the cost of feeding them, resulting in a huge demand for mature stock. Premium beef and lamb prices are continuing to rise as the market is flooded with low-quality stock from desperate Australian farmers (stock image) Sydney butcher Nathan Iowa told Daily Mail Australia there has been a 40 per cent price increase in red meat and customers are the first to notice. 'What was $50 a few months ago is now $70 for premium cuts and cheaper cuts used to be $30 but is coming up to $50,' he said. 'The good stuff is going to keep on going up.' A 2kg beef roast sells for $52 at Coles, $56 at Woolworths and up to $70 at butchers. A 2.5kg lamb leg roast sells for $34 at Coles and Woolworths and fetches up to $50 at some butchers. Mr Iowa also said the price of chicken has gone up by 10 per cent. It is cheaper for farmers to kill cattle before they are ready to eat because of the cost of feeding them during the drought (pictured is a drought-affected farm in New South Wales) Mr Iowa said: 'The farmers are absolutely screaming.' 'It's cheaper for them to kill the animal before they're ready to eat.' Earlier this month, a NSW farmer sold 10 cows in poor condition for $97.42 each Mr Iowa said these cattle are not usually sold for eating and that his butcher Craig Cook does not sell low-quality meat. 'It's constant, the prices are always going up,' he said. Police shot a home intruder in the wrist on Thursday morning after two men were attacked in a horror home invasion. Attackers stormed a property in Sydney's West, shooting one man in the thigh and attacking another in the head with an axe. Neighbours told how two men stormed the home on Stephen Street, in Blacktown, armed with a gun and an axe. 'I heard bang, bang, bang, like people were hitting each other against the wall,' neighbour Krish Naidoo told Nine News. 'I then went back inside and heard a shot.' Emergency Services were called and arrived at around 4.45am when the two victims received medical attention. A man is rushed to hospital following a home invasion in Blacktown in Sydney's west on Thursday morning - one man was shot in the thigh while another was found with injuries believed to have been caused by an axe They were then rushed to Westmead Hospital with non life-threatening injuries. A NSW Ambulance spokesperson confirmed the head wound was caused by the blunt sized of the axe. Another man, who was armed with a gun, was caught running from the back of the home and was shot in the wrist and arm by police. The 33-year-old was also taken to Westmead Hospital where remains in a stable condition and is under police guard. Another man was arrested nearby and taken to Blacktown Police Station. A crime scene has been established and a Critical Incident Team are now investigating. Anyone with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers. An 18-year-old man is the third person to have been charged with the murder of Jodie Chesney, who died after a knife was plunged seven inches into her back while she was at a London park with friends. Svenson Ong-a-kwie, 18, was arrested on 10 March on suspicion of murder and is set to appear at Barkingside Magistrates' Court on Thursday 14 March. Jodie, a 17-year-old girl scout, was fatally stabbed in a park in Harold Hill, east London, on March 1 as she listened to music with a group of friends. The Explorer Scout, described by her heartbroken father as a 'great girl' and a 'proud geek', died at the scene. Jodie Chesney was murdered in London while at a park with her friends Jodie Chesney, 17, was stabbed in the back in a park in Harold Hill, Romford, east London Police work at the scene in Harold Hill, Romford where Jodie Chesney was stabbed to death Two other males have previously been charged with Jodie's murder, including Manuel Petrovic who was arrested in Leicester and later charged with the murder before appearing at the Old Bailey on March 11. On 8 March, a 16-year-old male from Romford was arrested in London. He was charged with murder and remanded to appear at Barkingside Magistrates' Court on 11 March and subsequently at the Old Bailey on 12 March. Three other people including a 50-year-old man, a 38-year-old woman and a 17-year-old boy - who were also arrested on 10 March on suspicion of assisting an offender - have been released under investigation. Jodie Chesney posted a birthday message to her father just hours before she was killed Purple bows and ribbons attached to lamp posts and railings in Harold Hill, east London, in memory of 17-year-old Jodie Chesney A murder investigation launched by detectives from the Homicide and Major Crime Command (HMCC) continues. Anyone with information should call the HMCC Incident Room on 020 8345 3775, Tweet @MetCC or call Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111. It was revealed yesterday that the stab wound that killed the teenager had been seven inches deep. A 16-year-old boy accused of the murder wept as he was remanded in youth detention at the Old Bailey yesterday. Manuel Petrovic (pictured), originally from Croatia, was in the dock at the Old Bailey today charged with the murder of Jodie Chesney Manuel Petrovic has also been charged with the murder. Pictured: Artist's impression of Petrovic in the dock at the Old Bailey Wearing a grey jumper and joggers, his sobs echoed across the court room and he held his lower right arm which was in a medical cast. Through tears, the boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, spoke only to confirm his name and age. On Monday, Manuel Petrovic, originally from Croatia, was in the dock at the Old Bailey also charged with the murder of Jodie Chesney. Girl Scout Jodie was with her boyfriend and four other friends when she was stabbed in the back in a park Jodie Chesney's father, stepmother and sister said they want justice for the teenager Yesterday, prosecutor Joel Smith said: 'The deceased, Jodie Chesney was 17-years-old when she was fatally stabbed at 8.40pm in a public area in Romford. 'The deceased met with six other friends and she got a bus to the park where they listened to music. On arrival they sat on a picnic bench in a children's playground. 'After being stabbed, Jodie fell to the ground and her friend realised she had been stabbed. 'She was stabbed in the back of the right of the chest, it was 18cm in depth. Defending, Louise Sweet QC did not make an application for bail. She said: 'The defendant is a child, he is 16-years-old and is of good character .' Judge Anthony Leonard QC said: 'The deceased was 17 and was with her friends in a playground. 'The defendant is to be remanded in youth detention until his pre trial hearing on May 28. 'The trial is scheduled for September.' The teenager wept when he was asked to stand up by the Judge and told he will stay in youth detention. Four family members and friends sat in the public gallery which looked down on the court room. A beleaguered Theresa May will attempt to force Brexiteers into backing a Brexit deal today by threatening to postpone the UK's departure for years. The Government's defeat last night and apparent lack of control over events paves the way for a dramatic series of votes tonight that could play a pivotal role in determining when the UK leaves the European Union. How it unfolds will greatly affect what, if any, bargaining power the Prime Minister has when she goes to the European Council in Brussels to ask for a delay to Brexit on March 21. Prime Minister Theresa May speaks in Parliament following the vote last night Mrs May will sets out two scenarios. Firstly, if they pass a Brexit deal before the meeting of EU leaders in the Belgian capital, she will ask for a three-month extension to June 30 to allow it to be ratified by member states and pass into law. But if they do not manage to pass a deal before March 21 it sets out clearly that she will be forced to ask for a longer extension to look at alternatives, potentially for years. Implicit in this is a threat to Brexiteers to get behind her deal in a third meaningful vote or deal with the alternative. Could Brexit be stopped? Mrs May has warned this is a possibility. While she will not revoke Article 50 herself, she has warned political chaos could see the Government replaced by Jeremy Corbyn or another pro-Remain administration. If Article 50 is not revoked or extended on March 29, and UK law changed accordingly, Britain will leave the EU without a deal, despite the votes last night to block it. Could there be a third meaningful vote? It seems highly likely. But the EU has warned it is not prepared to negotiate further on the deal so it would seem it is likely to be a rerun rather than a different deal to that which failed on Tuesday. But the events of last night and today could see Brexiteers swing in behind Mrs May's deal, little more than a week after overwhelmingly rejecting it. That will be what Mrs May will be hoping in any case. Some ministers were suggesting the meaningful vote three (MV3) take place this week, though next week seems more likely. So it's a clear choice between June 30 or a much longer deal? It is more complicated than that. Today's motion, like yesterday's, is amendable. So MPs can try to control how long an extension of Article 50 the PM should ask for. Some Brexiteer MPs may propose shorter extensions. There have even been reports that some hardliners might back an amendment which blocks an extension - which seems on last night's evidence likely to fail. Will there be a second referendum? As well as shorter extensions MPs are able to table amendments today asking for specific longer lengths of delay to Brexit for specific reasons, like a second referendum or even a general election - which is favoured by Labour. Such is the state of disarray in Parliament these could in theory pass, although there are as many splits between Remain backers as there are among Brexiteers so it would need to be carefully worded to achieve maximum support. What will the EU tell Mrs May? Michel Barnier is among senior EU figures who have warned that Britain will only get an extension if it has a clear idea of what it would be used for EU leaders have already spelled out that an extension will not be granted just because British politics is bitterly divided. They want to see clear reasoning for extending Article 50. If she arrives with a deal that has been agreed between now and then it seems likely that a shorter extension could be agreed. If MPs still have not agreed a deal, they will want to see evidence that another plan is in place, like a second refrendum or a general election. But all of the EU's 27 other nations have to agree. Are there any other reasons they could refuse an extension? The EU has hinted at a two year delay, although some prominent figures have pushed for a short delay. Another key date is May 23. Mrs May's own motion points out that any extension beyond June 30 'would require the UK to hold European Parliament elections' due to take place on that day. This would raise the prospect of Brexiteer MEPs like Nigel Farage running for office again. European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said that Brexit should be completed before the European elections which take place between May 23 and 26. 'If the UK has not left the EU by then, it will be legally required to hold these elections,' he said. What happens if the EU27 do not agree to a delay to Brexit? A refusal to get an extension would most likely be because there was no deal in place and no alternative prospect. Despite last night's votes, it could see the UK leave without a deal on March 29 or try to force through a new deal in a matter of days. Henry VIIIs England has long been seen as an exclusively white society. But analysis of skeletons recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose has revealed that the Tudor kingdom might have been much more multicultural than experts have previously believed. Scientific tests on eight crew members remains found that two of them almost certainly had North African heritage, while two others were of Mediterranean origin. How 'Henry' might have looked, according to scans of his skull The year-long investigation commissioned by the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth involved advanced DNA genetic tests which can establish eye, hair and skin colour, and isotope analysis, which can reveal where someone was born and raised by analysing chemical elements within their bones. The ship sank in 1545 in the Solent while leading an attack on a French invasion fleet. Its remains were recovered in 1982 and are now housed in the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth. The complete skeleton of a crew member, nicknamed Henry by the divers who found it, was among those to be analysed. The year-long investigation commissioned by the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth involved advanced DNA genetic tests which can establish eye, hair and skin colour Isotope tests at Cardiff University found Henry was born in England. But DNA analysis by Portsmouth University confirmed his genetic profile is similar to that of the Berbers of Algeria. The findings, which will be detailed in a Channel 4 TV documentary, suggest Henrys father was North African. Tests on his skeleton found he was aged 16 to 19 and had lived a life of hard physical work. His job on board the Mary Rose may have involved helping to waterproof it against leaks because his remains were found near barrels of pitch and tar at the bottom of the ship. The research also allowed the experts to reconstruct his eye, hair and skin colour. An image of what Henry looked like will feature in the museums Many Faces of Tudor England exhibition, which opens on Monday. Another skeleton tested was that of a man believed to be an archer royal, a member of the Kings personal guard. Analysis of his bones found he was from a far warmer climate than Britains and suggests he is also from North Africa. One of the other skeletons was found to be of Spanish origin, and another Italian. The other four were British. The Mary Rose would have had a crew of more than 200. Historian Dr Onyeka Nubia, author of Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England, their Presence, Status, and Origins, said yesterday: To a large extent most peoples idea of Tudor Britain has been shaped by the Victorians. Its also the legacy of the likes of Blackadder II. Tests on his skeleton found 'Henry' was aged 16 to 19 and had lived a life of hard physical work My studies of parish, court and prison records have shown that in some areas four or five per cent of the population were from abroad. This could be a result of Englands connections with the Iberian peninsula at the time. Spain had a significant population who were of North and West African descent. Crew members could also have been enlisted as navigators during voyages in unfamiliar waters, then continued to serve on British ships. They were not slaves. The documentary also reveals that descendants of a crew member have been tracked down. Genealogist Megan Owens traced the 13 times great-grandchildren of an officer called Roger Grenville, one of only two men on the ship whose names were recorded. They were Laura Campbell, 46, from Wareham in Dorset, and her sister Lucy Taylor, 38, of Peterborough. The Skeletons of the Mary Rose is to be shown on Channel 4 at 8pm on Sunday. Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin has ended his legal fight with his children over whether Aldrin is competent to manage his affairs. The 89-year-old former astronaut said in a statement on Wednesday that the guardianship proceedings and his counter-suit against his children had both been dropped. 'This was the most charitable way to manage a difficult situation, as this year, which marks 50 years since we first step foot on the moon, is too important to my family, the nation and me,' Aldrin said in the statement. He went on to say that he looked forward to attending an anniversary celebration of the first moon walk on July 13 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, saying it would be an 'event to remember.' Buzz Aldrin's (pictured at the State of the Union) son, Andrew, is trying to stop his dad from moving assets from a trust in the latest dispute between the former astronaut and his two children over whether he is capable of managing his affairs Aldrin issued this statement on Wednesday, saying his family legal battle had ended Aldrin's attorney Keith Durkin confirmed that two of Aldrin's adult children have withdrawn their petition seeking guardianship of Aldrin's affairs, and the former astronaut has dropped his civil lawsuit against his children and former manager. Aldrin had accused them of financial shenanigans and slandering him. Durkin didn't offer any further details. In a statement, his children, Andy and Jan Aldrin, asked for privacy in allowing the family to work through their issues. Aldrin sued his children after they filed a petition saying their father was suffering from delusions and paranoia. The dispute had continued as recently as last month, when Buzz Aldrin's son tried to stop his father from transferring assets from a trust. Andrew Aldrin's lawyer sent a letter last month to an associate in Morgan Stanley's private wealth-management division with instructions not to transfer any assets from two financial accounts in the trust, which names the younger Aldrin as trustee. Buzz Aldrin had tried to terminate the trust and wanted the assets distributed to him. Andrew Aldrin's (left) lawyer sent a letter last month to Morgan Stanley with instructions not to transfer any assets from two financial accounts in the trust. The filing is in connection with a lawsuit Buzz filed against Andrew and his daughter Janice (right) in June The letter from Andrew Aldrin's lawyer warned Morgan Stanley that the son, acting as trustee, will seek damages if his instructions aren't followed. 'Please govern yourself accordingly,' the letter said. The filing was in connection with a lawsuit Buzz filed against Andrew Aldrin, daughter Janice Aldrin and a business manager in June. The suit accused them of misusing his credit cards, transferring money from an account, and slandering him by saying he has dementia. Buzz sued after the two children filed a petition claiming their father was suffering from memory loss, delusions, paranoia and confusion. Morgan Stanley said it was seeking to intervene in the case 'to protect itself from exposure to liability.' Buzz Aldrin was the lunar module pilot when he and mission commander Neil Armstrong became the first two humans to walk on the moon on July 21, 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission. Buz Aldrin's suit accused his children of misusing his credit cards, transferring money from an account, and slandering him by saying he has dementia Buzz (left in 2018 and right in July 1969) sued after the two children filed a petition claiming their father was suffering from memory loss, delusions, paranoia and confusion Last month, Aldrin attended the State of the Union address in Washington. He made a surprise appearance at the State of the Union, as President Donald Trump promised to resume the US manned space program. Buzz was introduced near the beginning of the address, after three D-Day veterans were honored by the president. 'In 2019, we also celebrate 50 years since brave young pilots flew a quarter of a million miles through space to plant the American flag on the face of the moon,' Trump said. 'Half a century later, we are joined by one of the Apollo 11 astronauts who planted that flag, Buzz Aldrin. 'Thank you, Buzz. This year, American astronauts will go back to space on American rockets.' Trump publicly proposed a Space Force in March 2018 as a sixth branch of the United States Armed Forces. Aldrin supported the initiative in a tweet in August, after a new law was passed to re-establish the US Space Command. 'One giant leap in the right direction,' Buzz wrote at the time. The Prime Minister looked spent last night. Done for. Sitting there on the front bench, she appeared totally ashen. Face like a granite slab. Eyes more piercing than a piranha. Its hard to see how much more of this can she put up with. The decision by her one of her own ministers to vote for an amendment effectively ruling out No Deal and numerous others abstaining in defiance of a three-line whip was a slap on the cheek to whatever scintilla of authority she had left. An upturned digit from her own inner sanctum. Brexit? Sorry. Might never happen. To all the rabble-rousers on the Government benches who refused to back her deal on Tuesday: See what merry hell you have created. The House naturally turned rowdy when last nights result dropped. Theresa May in the debate this evening. What must have been going through her mind as she prepared to face the House following the thumping Brexit vote defeat just 16 hours earlier, one dreads to imagine Chaos everywhere. Clasping the dispatch box, Mrs May struggled to find words to articulate what was happening. The options before us are the same as they always have been, she mumbled. It was like watching a kite flapping helplessly in a tornado. Not that we could hear much. Her diction, such it was, had morphed from a ticklish whisper from the night before into a throaty garble. Think of a cat coughing up a furball. Gollum from Lord Of The Rings. Whatever potions hubbie Philip brewed up in the Downing Street galley clearly hadnt made a dicky-bird of difference. My personal remedy: Bit of honey, squeeze of lemon and a nice long pour of good malt whisky. She had already limped through a lifeless PMQs earlier in the day. She arrived in the chamber shortly before midday. What must have been going through her mind as she prepared to face the House following the thumping Brexit vote defeat just 16 hours earlier, one dreads to imagine. She hovered for a while beside the Speakers chair, taking one last glance at her notes. How alone she looked. How isolated. The options before us are the same as they always have been, she mumbled. It was like watching a kite flapping helplessly in a tornado As she took her seat, her front bench gave her a cheer. Not exactly an inspirational rallying cry but the poor woman needed any encouragement she could get. Up above, occupants of the packed public gallery gawped through the glass anthropologically, like visitors to a zoo. If they had hoped to witness a personal collapse, they were disappointed. Ridicule bounced off her like hailstones from a car bonnet. She gasped, she croaked, she reiterated her determination to see Brexit through. I may not have my own voice, she gasped nobly. But I understand the voice of my own country. Back up in the gallery, a row of schoolchildren sat sullen-faced. If this was history in the making, it was of the Horrid Histories kind. As usual, Jeremy Corbyn fluffed his response. Hed fired any slugs in his holster the night before. At one point he said Mrs May needed to show leader-sip. Yes, she needed Lemsip. Though Corbyn at least was graceful enough to express sympathy for her dodgy larynx. For the Chancellors Spring Statement which followed, the PM remained seated. Philip Hammond and his opposite number, John McDonnell, volleyed statistics aimlessly around the chamber. Sunday Night At The London Palladium this was not. At least we had Michael Gove to blow away the cobwebs during the Brexit debate. The Govester opened proceedings in place of the hoarse Prime Minister, valiantly trying to convince the House to keep No Deal on the table. He spoke lucidly for nearly an hour, aided by just a few shorthand notes. The Tiggerish Aberdonian wound up the Scottish Nationalists a treat. Part-time partitionists he referred to them as then pointedly refused to take their interventions. Angus MacNeil (SNP, Na h-Eileanan an Iar) worked himself into such a cauldron of oil at one point I thought he might blow a gasket. Before taking her seat on the front bench she hovered for a while beside the Speakers chair, taking one last glance at her notes. How alone she looked. How isolated Ex-criminal barrister Anna Soubry (Ind, Broxtowe) barracked at length that No Deal had not been taken off the table, thwacking the bench with her order paper. Mr Gove responded by saying he now knew how felt like to be cross-examined by her in court. He also said he realised why prolix lawyers such as her charge by the hour. La Soubrys nostrils flared with indignation. She claimed she had practised law pro bono [for the public good without a fee] thanks to his cuts. Contributions followed from the usual suspects. Hilary Benn (Lab, Leeds East) wondered why it was considered democratic to keep asking MPs to vote on the same Brexit deal, but undemocratic to ask the public in a second referendum if they want to change their mind. Swotty lawyer Dominic Grieve (Con, Beaconsfield) spewed forth like a talking statute book. Meanwhile, theatrical Jess Phillips (Lab, Birmingham Yardley), heckled and guffawed discourteously all day. All of them desperate to stop Brexit. Thanks to those idiotic Tory rebels, they may well now get their wish. Elon Musk has confirmed that Tesla made a mistake by announcing it would slash the prices of its top-tier vehicles. In a series of tweets on Tuesday, the billionaire tech mogul explained that Tesla 'shouldn't have offered' the lower prices on the Model S and Model X vehicles. Tesla is now making a major u-turn and will on Monday reinstate normal prices for its cars, aside from the base price Model 3. This means most of its vehicle prices will increase by about 3 percent. Scroll down for video Less than two weeks after saying it would shift all of its sales online in effort to cut costs, Tesla now says it will keep physical stores open and instead raise the prices of its vehicles. File photo 'In retrospect, lower price shouldn't have been offered,' Musk said in a tweet. 'Was done so because some simply couldn't afford it. Prices revert to normal on Monday.' Outraged users had reached out to Tesla after purchasing the firm's Autopilot software, which cost $5,000 before the discounted prices were released. Users had been told that they if they purchased the software alone, it would come at a discount. Tesla has yet to release its full Autopilot software. Then, on February 28th, Tesla announced that Autopilot would cost just $3,000 - thousands of dollars cheaper than what consumers had originally paid. The price of Autopilot will 'revert to normal' on Monday as well, according to Musk. Additionally, Musk explained that Tesla is 'still closing stores,' as it plans to shutter about half of the stores it initially announced were closing. On Monday, Tesla issued a blog post saying it will keep most of its physical stores open and instead raise the prices of a slew of its vehicles. To make up for this, Tesla will raise the prices of its high-end vehicles by about 3 percent on average, as it strives for profitability. The recently unveiled $35,000 Model 3 - Tesla's cheapest vehicle yet - will not be affected by the price hike. TESLA'S CHEAPEST MODEL 3 VEHICLE YET Tesla has finally launched the $35,000 Model 3. Range: 220 miles Top Speed: 130 mph Acceleration: 0-60 in 5.6 sec Tesla is also offering the $37,000 Model 3 Standard Range Plus, which boasts: Range: 240 miles Top Speed: 140 mph Acceleration: 0-60 in 5.3 sec Advertisement The company said late Sunday that it would now be closing only about half as many stores than initially planned in a widely criticized move earlier this month to cut overhead and shift its whole distribution network online. 'Over the past two weeks we have been closely evaluating every single Tesla retail location, and we have decided to keep significantly more stores open than previously announced,' the electric carmaker said. 'As a result Tesla will need to raise vehicle prices by about 3 percent on average worldwide.' Separately, Chief Executive Officer Musk has until the end of the day on Monday to explain why he should not be held in contempt for recent tweets that U.S. securities regulators say violated a September fraud settlement. The case is the latest major challenge by authorities to Musk's leadership as Tesla seeks to make good on his promises to Wall Street that it will soon by consistently profitable and will not need more capital. The three percent increase on its top-end cars would be the first hike in prices after a series of cuts over the past year aimed at offsetting a reduction in green tax credits and the impact of rising tariffs overseas. Tesla said the worldwide price increases would apply to the more expensive versions of the Model 3, Model S and Model X, and that there will be no price increase to the $35,000 Model 3. 'The 3 percent price increase announcement still indicates ... strong demand,' said Ivan Feinseth, an analyst with Tigress Financial Partners. The carmaker said potential buyers can place orders until March 18 at the old prices. Currently, the Model S and Model X models are priced starting at $79,000 and $88,000 before savings, respectively. Shares of the company, among Wall Street's most volatile in recent months, were roughly flat in early trading on Monday. Tesla will unveil its highly-anticipated Model Y crossover in LA later this week, Elon Musk said at the beginning of the month Cost savings from store closing will be only about half the expected amount as the company will close only half the number of stores planned, it said. A few stores in high-visibility locations that were closed because of low throughput would be reopened with a smaller Tesla crew and would carry fewer cars in inventory. Separately, Bloomberg reported on Monday that Tesla is in discussions with Chinese battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Ltd on a deal for the production of rechargeable batteries for the Model 3. In January, sources told Reuters that Tesla had signed a preliminary agreement with China's Tianjin Lishen to supply batteries for its new Shanghai car factory. The talks come as Tesla looks to localize battery cell production and push forward with the 500,000-vehicle-capacity Shanghai plant, expected to be completed in May. Environmental pollution is responsible for the premature deaths of nine million people a year, a landmark study from the United Nations has revealed. A report six years in the making from the UN's Global Environment Outlook (GEO) revealed a quarter of all premature deaths and diseases worldwide are due to pollution and environmental damage. It cites emissions, polluted drinking water and the destruction of ecosystems as major issues and uses the word 'risk' 561 times in the 740-page dossier. Scroll down for video A report six years in the making from the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) revealed a quarter of all premature deaths and diseases worldwide are due to pollution and environmental damage A group of 250 scientists from 70 nations revealed a growing chasm between rich and poor countries as rampant over-consumption, pollution and food waste in the developed world leads to hunger, poverty and disease. It found poor access to clean drinking supplies kills 1.4 million people each year from preventable diseases such as diarrhoea and parasites linked to pathogen-riddled water and poor sanitation. Chemicals pumped into the seas cause 'potentially multi-generational' adverse health effects, and land degradation through mega-farming and deforestation occurs in areas of Earth home to 3.2 billion people. The report says air pollution alone causes 6-7 million early deaths annually. And the way Earth is set, unchecked use of antibiotics in food production will see drug-resistant superbugs become one of the largest causes of premature death by mid-century. It comes as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise amid a preponderance of droughts, floods and superstorms made worse by climbing sea levels. There is also a growing political consensus that climate change poses a future risk to billions. World leaders in 2015 came up with the Paris climate deal, which saw each nation promise action to cut emissions in a bid to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C (2.7F). But the health impacts of pollution, deforestation and the mechanised food-chain are less well understood. There is also no international agreement for the environment close to covering what the Paris accord does for climate. A report from the GEO cites emissions, polluted drinking water and the destruction of ecosystems as major issues and uses the word 'risk' 561 times in the 740-page dossier World leaders in 2015 came up with the Paris climate deal, which saw each nation promise action to cut emissions in a bid to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C (2.7F). But there is also no international agreement for the environment close to covering what the Paris accord does for climate 'Urgent action at an unprecedented scale is necessary to arrest and reverse this situation,' said a note to policymakers accompanying the report. 'If you have a healthy planet it supports not only global GDP but it also supports the lives of the very poorest because they depend on clean air and clean water,' Professor Joyeeta Gupta, GEO co-chair, told AFP. 'If you turn that around, an unhealthy system has massive damage on human lives.' The report called for detoxifying of human behaviour while insisting that the situation is not unassailable. Food waste for instance, which accounts for 9 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, could be slashed. The world currently throws away a third of all food produced. That figure is fuelled by 56 per cent in richer nations going to waste. 'Everyone is saying that by 2050 we have to feed 10 billion people, but that doesn't mean we have to double production,' Professor Gupta said. 'If we reduce our waste and perhaps have less meat you could immediately reduce that problem.' At the same time, she acknowledged, 'that would require changes in the way we live.' The report also called for a rapid decrease in greenhouse gas emissions and pesticide use to improve air and water quality. Smog, polluted drinking water and the destruction of ecosystems are cited as major issues and uses the word 'risk' 561 times in the 740-page dossier THE PARIS AGREEMENT: A GLOBAL ACCORD TO LIMIT TEMPERATURE RISES THROUGH CARBON EMISSION REDUCTION TARGETS The Paris Agreement, which was first signed in 2015, is an international agreement to control and limit climate change. It hopes to hold the increase in the global average temperature to below 2C (3.6F) 'and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C (2.7F)'. It seems the more ambitious goal of restricting global warming to 1.5C (2.7F) may be more important than ever, according to previous research which claims 25 per cent of the world could see a significant increase in drier conditions. The Paris Agreement on Climate Change has four main goals with regards to reducing emissions: 1) A long-term goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels 2) To aim to limit the increase to 1.5C, since this would significantly reduce risks and the impacts of climate change 3) Governments agreed on the need for global emissions to peak as soon as possible, recognising that this will take longer for developing countries 4) To undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with the best available science Source: European Commission Advertisement 'Human behaviour is due to environment. It's the way we eat. It's the way we get around, it's the energy we use and it's how we build our homes,' GEO co-chair Professor Paul Ekins said. The report estimates that global infrastructure will increase by two thirds by 2050. 'The way it is built will determine what kind of world we have,' he said. The GEO draws on hundreds of data sources to calculate the environmental impact on over 100 diseases. Its unveiling at the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi is likely to add to the debate over who bears the greatest responsibility for the damage already borne by Earth. Sources close to the negotiations told AFP some developed nations, led by the United States, had threatened not to 'welcome' the GEO report. Professor Gupta said that nations, however big or small, would all have to adapt to the environmental reality facing every human on the planet. 'If you look at land, it's fixed,' she said. 'If the population is going to go up we have to redistribute, one way or the other. 'If you look at freshwater, it's more or less fixed. You have to end up sharing. This is a discourse that many developed countries don't like.' Technology is being developed to track and monitor every tiny movement of a car's driver and its passengers. Radar, lasers and cameras are making their way inside cars with the intention to keep occupants safe and make controlling the vehicle even easier than normal. A plethora of firms are employing millimetre-wave radar which has such a small wavelength it can take highly detailed measurements. They are working on various applications which involve measuring biometrics, tracking respiration and heart rate, identifying males, female and pets. It also opens up a wealth of possibilities to control a car's features using only gestures and even by just looking at them. Scroll down for video Radar, lasers and cameras are making their way inside cars with the intention to keep occupants safe and make controlling the vehicle even easier than normal. A plethora of firms are employing millimetre-wave radar US-based firm Texas Instruments uses a mounted device to identify people in the car and classify them as a woman or a man (pictured) US-based firm Texas Instruments uses a mounted device to identify people in the car and classify them as a woman or a man. It is also able to spot the presence of pets and, with enough developments in computing ability, it would be able to detect bodily functions such as respiration. Start-up Caareys has built two systems that utilise radar, with one performing analysis of heart rate, breath rate and driver health condition while its other project counts the number of passengers and positioning of them. Biometrics and the information this provides is also being integrated into cars. British firm B-Secur is working on technology that will place medical-grade sensors inside a car's steering wheel to monitor a person's unique cardiac rhythm. BMW claims drivers will soon be able to look outside the car windscreen at a restaurant they are passing and learn its menu, opening hours and even book a table. BMW claims drivers will be able to look outside the car windscreen at a restaurant they are passing and learn its menu, opening hours and even book a table (artist's impression) Start-up Caareys has built two systems that utilise radar, with one performing analysis of heart rate, breath rate and driver health condition while its other project counts the number of passengers and positioning of them Gaze recognition will be available to customers for the first time in the BMW iNEXT as of 2021 alongside improved gesture and voice recognition in a package the German car manufacturer is calling Natural interaction British firm B-Secur is working on technology that will place medical-grade technology inside a car's steering wheel and monitor the driver's unique cardiac rhythm. This could also be used as a 'key' to the device, only opening following the detection of the heartbeat of the owner An embedded electrocardiograph (ECG) will be able to track a person's physical well-being based on their individual and unique heart signature. Cars of the future will be able to use this information to detect any anomalies that could lead to excessive stress, fatigue and even cardiac arrhythmias. This could also be used as a 'key' to the device, only opening following the detection of the unique heartbeat of the owner. BMW unveiled gaze recognition technology at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year that will let drivers control the inside of the car using only their eyes. A high-definition camera mounted in the dashboard will track a customer's head and eyes to precisely identify what they are looking at - either inside or outside the car. BMW claims drivers will be able to look outside the car windscreen at a restaurant they are passing and learn its menu, opening hours and even book a table. Google's Soli project. It identifies subtle finger movements using radar built into tiny microchips. Google says it allows users to press an invisible button between the thumb and index fingers Gaze recognition will be available to customers for the first time in the BMW iNEXT as of 2021 alongside improved gesture and voice recognition in a package the German car manufacturer is calling Natural interaction. Cameras may soon also come equipped with the same technology found in Apple's FaceID system thanks to advancements in vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL). This could one day be integrated with cars to reveal a range of information on who is inside a car. This level of non-physical interaction with a car's controls is being taken a step further by Google's Soli project. It identifies subtle finger movements using radar built into tiny microchips. Google says it allows users to press an invisible button between the thumb and index fingers or operate a virtual dial that turns by rubbing a thumb against the index finger. Camera-based sensors are already available, such as Leap Motion, that can capture gestures, but these are cumbersome and require additional hardware. Earlier this year, it received permission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allow the technology to work at higher power levels. The FCC said the decision 'will serve the public interest by providing for innovative device control features using touchless hand gesture technology.' Elon Musk's tunneling company has gotten the greenlight to get started on its next project. The Las Vegas visitors authority selected the Boring Company to build an underground 'people mover' as part of a massive convention center expansion. In a tweet late Tuesday, Musk said he expects the tunnel to be 'operational by the end of [the] year.' Scroll down for video A concept design of the entrance to the Boring Company's express-route loop tunnel in Las Vegas. Elon Musk said Tuesday that he expects the tunnel to be operational by late 2019 The Boring Company will design, construct and operate a convention center transport system consisting of a loop of express-route tunnels capable of carrying passengers in autonomous electric vehicles at high speeds, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA). 'Looking forward to building a Boring Company tunnel in Vegas,' Musk said in a message fired off on Twitter. 'Assuming to be operational by end of year!' If the tunnel isn't ready by the end of 2019, the Boring Company is eyeing a completion date of January 2021, just in time for the annual Consumer Electronics Show. A final contract for the project was to be negotiated and presented for approval at a meeting in June. The cost was expected to range from $35 million to $55 million, depending on the route and number and size of stations. While the route would only serve the convention center, the LVCVA said it could potentially expand the tunnel to connect downtown, the McCarran International Airport, the Las Vegas Boulevard Resort Corridor and other parts of the city. A map of proposed Boring Company tunnel routes connecting to the convention center. The LVCVA said it has the potential to be expanded to include other destinations around the city The firm will construct a loop of express-route tunnels that can carry riders in autonomous electric vehicles at high speeds. Pictured is a concept design of a transport vehicle The Las Vegas Convention Center will cover some 200 acres when the expansion is completed. A walk from one end to the other would stretch approximately two miles, creating a need for 'an on-property guest transportation solution,' according to the visitors authority. It marks the latest in a series of contracts won by the Boring Company to construct high-speed tunnels in a major urban area. Most recently, the Boring Company's plans to build an express loop in Chicago have been called into question with the upcoming mayoral race. The city had previously agreed to move forward with the Boring Company's plan to construct a high-speed tunnel connecting the O'Hare International Airport and the downtown district. Aside from the Boring Company's high-speed loop tunnel, the city of Las Vegas also received proposals to build trams, gondolas and monorails. 'Las Vegas is a high-energy, high-technology destination equipped to welcome the world, and we are excited to deliver a system that will help visitors efficiently navigate the citys many offerings,' said Steve Davis, president of The Boring Company, in a statement. Davis told the Verge that the Boring Company is considering using Model Xs, Model 3s or another specially designed vehicle to transport passengers in the underground tunnel. A proposed map of possible extensions for the tunnel beyond the convention center. The route could be extended to parts of downtown, as well as the Las Vegas Boulevard Resort Corridor Musk late last year took a break from futuristic electric cars and private space travel to unveil a low-cost tunnel he sees as a godsend for city traffic. The billionaire behind Tesla and SpaceX put the spotlight on the a 1.14 mile (1.8 kilometer) tunnel created by his Boring Company in Southern California for about $10 million. The sample tunnel is part of Musk's vision to have an underground network that cars, preferably Teslas, can be lowered to by lifts, then slotted into tracks and propelled along at speeds up to 150 mph (241 kmh). Musk founded the Boring company slightly more than two years ago as a self-financed, side-endeavor to his work at Tesla and SpaceX. The broad vision is that electric vehicles on city streets would be able to easily drop into tunnels or rise out using elevator platforms built into streets, or ramps where space allows. Advertisement Ancient Britons travelled for hundreds of miles to attend huge celebrations at Stonehenge and feasted on their own home-reared pigs, who also completed the mammoth journey. The monoliths of the Neolithic monument provided the backdrop for the huge celebrations, which scientists say are the earliest mass banquets ever discovered. Evidence of the ritualistic 'parties' came from the devoured carcasses of 131 pigs unearthed at four Late Neolithic complexes, including the world-famous Wiltshire site. Scroll down for video Ancient Britons travelled for hundreds of miles to attend huge celebrations at Stonehenge and feasted on home-reared pigs The monoliths of the Neolithic monument has been found to be the site of huge celebrations, the earliest mass banquets ever discovered Home-reared animals were brought to the feasts from as far afield as Scotland, North East England and West Wales. Discarded bones have been analysed by scientists from more than 4,000 years ago at four four Late Neolithic sites serving the famous stone circle monuments at Stonehenge and Avebury. Bones were also found at Durrington Walls, Marden, Mount Pleasant and West Kennet Palisade Enclosures and Chemical signals - known as isotope analysis - in the bones were traced back to the food and water the animals consumed. This information was then used to narrow down where the creatures were raised. The scientists were surprised to find that the pigs had come from as far away as Scotland, north-east England, and west Wales. Before now, the origins of people that took part in rituals at these megalithic monuments and the extent of the population's movements at the time have been long-standing enigmas in British prehistory. Lead researcher Dr Richard Madgwick, from the University of Cardiff, said: 'This study demonstrates a scale of movement and level of social complexity not previously appreciated. 'These gatherings could be seen as the first united cultural events of our island, with people from all corners of Britain descending on the areas around Stonehenge to feast on food that had been specially reared and transported from their homes.' Pigs were the prime source of meat for Neolithic feasting, said the scientists. The team focused on the henge complexes of Durrington Walls, Marden, Mount Pleasant and West Kennet Palisade Enclosures. The scientists were surprised to find that the pigs had come from as far away as Scotland, north-east England, and west Wales. Here, an archaeologist digging a section through a Neolithic ditch The team focused on the henge complexes of Durrington Walls, Marden, Mount Pleasant and West Kennet Palisade Enclosures. Pigs were the prime source of meat for Neolithic feasting, said the scientists. Here, an antler, perhaps part of a pick used for digging the chalk Discarded bones have been analysed by scientists from more than 4,000 years ago at four four Late Neolithic sites serving the famous stone circle monuments at Stonehenge and Avebury. Chemical signals - known as isotope analysis - in the bones was traced back to the food and water the animals consumed STONEHENGE'S CONSTRUCTION REQUIRED GREAT INGENUITY Stonehenge was built thousands of years before machinery was invented. The heavy rocks weigh upwards of several tonnes each. Some of the stones are believed to have originated from a quarry in Wales, some 140 miles (225km) away from the Wiltshire monument. To do this would have required a high degree of ingenuity, and experts believe the ancient engineers used a pulley system over a shifting conveyor-belt of logs. Historians now think that the ring of stones was built in several different stages, with the first completed around 5,000 years ago by Neolithic Britons who used primitive tools, possibly made from deer antlers. Modern scientists now widely believe that Stonehenge was created by several different tribes over time. After the Neolithic Britons - likely natives of the British Isles - started the construction, it was continued centuries later by their descendants. Over time, the descendants developed a more communal way of life and better tools which helped in the erection of the stones. Bones, tools and other artefacts found on the site seem to support this hypothesis. Advertisement Experts say the most surprising element of the research is that participants invested in contributing pigs that they themselves had raised. A variety of tools were found at the site as well as bones. Here, neolithic arrowhead Dr Madgwick added: 'Arguably the most startling finding is the efforts that participants invested in contributing pigs that they themselves had raised. 'Procuring them in the vicinity of the feasting sites would have been relatively easy. 'Pigs are not nearly as well-suited to movement over distance as cattle and transporting them, either slaughtered or on the hoof, over hundreds or even tens of kilometres, would have required a monumental effort. 'This suggests that prescribed contributions were required and that rules dictated that offered pigs must be raised by the feasting participants, accompanying them on their journey, rather than being acquired locally.' The research is reported in the journal Science Advances. Advertisement NASA's Opportunity Rover took one last stunning image of Mars's landscape, before losing touch with it after 15 years last month. The incredible 360-degree panorama shows what would been Opportunity's final resting spot in Perseverance Valley. It gives a view of the rim of the Endeavour Crater in the distance, rover tracks from Opportunity, and to the far right and left is the bottom of Perseverance Valley. The space agency lost contact with Opportunity after its years exploring the surface of the planet, laying the groundwork for future missions. Scroll down for video A dust storm blanketed its location in June last year. After several attempts to restore contact from Earth, they received the final communication from Opportunity on the June 10th. It sent back a stunning 360-degree panorama of the red planet. The panorama is made up of 354 individual images, which Opportunity snapped from May 13th to June 10th. John Callas, Opportunity Project Manager, said: 'This final panorama embodies what made our Opportunity rover such a remarkable mission of exploration and discovery. 'To the right of centre you can see the rim of Endeavor Crater rising in the distance. 'Just to the left of that, rover tracks begin their descent from over the horizon and weave their way down to geologic features that our scientists wanted to examine up close. 'And to the far right and left are the bottom of Perseverance Valley and the floor of Endeavour crater, pristine and unexplored, waiting for visits from future explorers.' NASA's Opportunity Rover took one last stunning image of Mars's landscape, before losing touch with them after 15 years last month. It sent back a stunning 360-degree panorama of the red planet. The panorama is made up of 354 individual images, that Opportunity snapped from May 13th to June 10th The incredible 360-degree panorama shows what would been Opportunity's final resting spot in Perseverance Valley. The space agency lost contact with Opportunity after its years exploring the surface of the planet, laying the groundwork for future missions The solar-powered Opportunity Rover's trail blazing mission was lauded as one of the most successful and enduring feats of interplanetary exploration. 'It is because of trailblazing missions such as Opportunity that there will come a day when our brave astronauts walk on the surface of Mars,' NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said last month. 'And when that day arrives, some portion of that first footprint will be owned by the men and women of Opportunity, and a little rover that defied the odds and did so much in the name of exploration.' Its scientific discoveries contributed to an advanced understanding of the planet's geology and environment, setting foundations for future robotic and human missions to the harsh environment of Mars. The agency made one final attempt to contact Opportunity Rover (pictured) eight months after the spacecraft last made contact. A giant dust storm blocked sunlight from Mars in 2018, stopping Opportunity's solar-powered batteries from being able to recharge The filters admit light centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers (near-infrared), 535 nanometers (green) and 432 nanometers (violet). A few frames remain black and white, as the rover did not have the time to record those locations using the green and violet filters before the dust storm. After eight months of effort and sending more than a thousand commands in an attempt to restore contact with the rover, NASA declared Opportunity's mission complete on February 13th, 2019. However, NASA's Mars exploration perseveres with the InSight lander, which touched down in November, now just beginning its scientific investigations and the Curiosity rover, which has been exploring Gale Crater for more than six years. The upcoming 2020 rover mission will for the first time seek signs of past microbial life on the planet, together with the European Space Agency's ExoMars rover. WhatsApp is doubling down on its efforts to fight misinformation on the app. The Facebook-owned messaging service is testing a new feature that helps users verify whether or not an image is real. The 'search image' tool would let users take an image found on WhatsApp and run it through Google. Scroll down for video WhatsApp is doubling down on its efforts to fight misinformation. The Facebook-owned messaging firm is testing a new feature that helps users verify whether or not an image is real Part of the release notes for WhatsApp's latest update, version 2.19.73, mentioned a 'search by image' function,' according to WABetaInfo, which first spotted the tool. After clicking the 'search by image' button in the app, Google will tell users if a 'similar or equal' image exists on the web. It's not yet clear when the feature will be available for all users. The move marks the latest example of WhatsApp taking steps to curb the spread of fake news on its platform. Over the past several months, WhatsApp has banned bot and spam accounts, with its software capable of wiping some 2 million accounts each month. The company said last month that it's often able to remove fake accounts before they even make it onto the platform. 'Search image' would let users take an image found on WhatsApp and run it through Google, but it's not yet clear when the tool will be released Pictured is a WhatsApp ad that ran in India Additionally, in perhaps its most sweeping move yet, WhatsApp moved to limit the number of times users can share messages with others. The new policy, revealed in January, limits message forwarding to up to five users. Before the new policy, users could forward messages up to 20 times. Last July, the Facebook-owned social media app began limiting message forwarding to up to five times for users in India, but it has since expanded the policy globally. The company said the move was initiated to fight 'misinformation and rumors.' WhatsApp, which has around 1.5 billion users, has been trying to find ways to stop misuse of the app, following global concern that the platform was being used to spread fake news, manipulated photos, videos without context, and audio hoaxes, with no way to monitor their origin or full reach. Forwarding limits were put into place in India after the spread of rumors on social media led to killings and lynching attempts. German airline Lufthansa has announced it is ordering 20 Boeing 787 and 20 Airbus A350 long-haul jets and will sell six of the beleaguered A380 superjumbo aircraft in its fleet back to Airbus. The carrier's board today approved the purchase of 20 Boeing 787-9 planes and 20 Airbus A350-900s. Lufthansa will take delivery of the ordered planes by instalments between 2022 and 2027. Out with the old: Lufthansa follows trend to offload Airbus A380s with plans to sell six of its fleet It plans to sell six of its 14 A380 planes to Airbus, with the planes leaving Lufthansa in 2022 and 2023. It is not known how much the manufacturer will pay for the decommissioned A380s. Meanwhile, the carrier said it had negotiated a significant reduction on the $12 billion (9.1 billion) list price for the 787s and A350s, but did not disclose the extent of the discount. Newer models: Lufthansa plans to order 20 A350s and 20 787s (the latter pictured above) Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr said: 'By replacing four-engine planes with new models, we are laying a sustainable foundation for our future.' The airline's move follows the announcement last month that Airbus would end production of its flagship A380 superjumbo, putting about 200 UK and 3,500 global jobs at risk, over the next three years. The A380 - the world's largest commercial jet - proved a commercial failure after 12 years in the air, although it was conceived as a competitor to US company Boeing's offerings. The model was not viable. It never turned a profit and sales slowed as airlines favoured smaller, more agile aircraft and as Boeing's 787 Dreamliner enjoyed greater success. Critics of the A380 argued the double-deckers are too large, proving too tough a challenge for airlines to fill. Last month, analyst Richard Aboulafia of Washington-based Teal Group told Mailonline that the aircraft's demise 'was inevitable', adding: 'For Boeing, it has been a very long time since they needed to worry about the A380 as a competitive factor.' Rolls-Royce, which makes the model's engines, said at the time that it doubted that the Airbus decision to stop making the A380 would have a knock-on effect for the company but stopped short of ruling out an impact on its workforce. Sylvia Jeffreys made a triumphant return to prime time television last month, filing her first report for A Current Affair. And on Monday, the 32-year-old took some time off from her career to spend time with her sister in Noosa. Taking to Instagram, the Channel Nine journalist shared a photo of her and her sibling enjoying a swim in a pool. Scroll down for video Living her best life! Sylvia Jeffreys enjoyed s a holiday in Noosa with her sister Claire on Monday after returning to work following her Today show axing Both wearing woven sun hats and oversized sunglasses, the lookalike pair beamed as they posed in bikinis. Sylvia filed her first report for A Current Affair last month. Back to work: Sylvia filed her first report for A Current Affair last month. The Channel Nine journalist interviewed Australian model Madeline Stuart, 22, who has Down syndrome The Channel Nine journalist interviewed Australian model Madeline Stuart, 22, who has Down syndrome. It was an emotional moment for Sylvia, who got choked up and seemed on the verge of tears as Madeline's mother Rosanne Stuart recounted the model's surgery. Madeline required surgery after suffering heart failure, and it was her mother's job to explain that to her. Tough: Sylvia got choked up and seemed on the verge of tears as Rosanne Stuart recounted her model daughter Madeline Stuart's surgery. Pictured: Madeline (right) and Rosanne Stuart 'I was put that decision for her where I had to make because I can't explain to her you're scared now, "Darling I know 'but if you don't have it, in five years time, you could be dead,"' Rosanne said of the difficult conversation. Hearing the moving tale, Sylvia was visible shaken, had tears in her eyes, and appeared choked up as she nodded in agreement. Sylvia shared a clip of the interview and some behind the scenes photos to social media and revealed how proud she was of her report. Good work! Earlier that day, Sylvia shared a clip of the interview and some behind the scenes photos to social media and revealed how proud she was of her report 'So pleased to share this story tonight on @ACurrentAffair9. Maddy's tenacity will impress & inspire,' Sylvia captioned the clip. 'You may have seen Madeline on catwalks around the world, but the Brisbane model has just faced the fight of her life. I'm happy to say she's fitter, happier and healthier than ever. And today she's putting me through my paces,' she says in the clip. Earlier last month, Channel Nine confirmed that Sylvia was moving to A Current Affair after being dropped as the Today show's newsreader, last year. The network said the blonde reporter will be redeployed across 'several departments' in 2019. As one of the most famous women in the world, she boasts an almost divine status. And Kim Kardashian radiated pure goddess vibes while modeling a vintage Thierry Mugler number for Instagram Tuesday. The reality diva, 38, looked breathtaking in a pearlescent-pink gown with a stunning structured breastplate framing her famous curves. Heaven sent! Kim Kardashian looked like a goddess as she modeled vintage Thierry Mugler on her Instagram Tuesday The photo appeared to be from February 25, ahead of her appearance at the opening of the Thierry Mugler retrospective exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The wife of Kanye West expertly showcased the piece from the brand's Fall/Winter 1999/2000 les Meduses collection. Kim's dress was gathered upon one shoulder and cascaded down over her curves, with another flounce at the hip forming a subtle train. Her look also featured a made-to-match bangle. Making sure not to distract from her couture, Kim added see-through Cinderella heels by her husband's Yeezy brand. From Mount Olympus! Kim's dress was gathered upon one shoulder and cascaded down over her curves, with another flounce at the hip forming a subtle train Vintage vixen: Kim thanked the French fashion house for lending her the piece, captioning the shot: 'I am forever grateful to @manfredthierrymugler @muglerofficial for letting me wear this Couture dress from les Meduses collection FW 1999-2000.' Seen above on the runway Kim paired with look with a messy-chic bun with loose strands swept across the side of her dramatically made-up face. The KUWTK star thanked the French fashion house for lending her the piece, as she captioned the shot: 'I am forever grateful to @manfredthierrymugler @muglerofficial for letting me wear this Couture dress from "les Meduses" collection FW 1999-2000.' This is not the star's first encounter with the cult fashion favorite. The same night of the Mugler opening, she switched into a pleated white look which evoked angelic wings. Showing skin: Back in February she donned a ravishing Mugler number to the 5th Annual Hollywood Beauty Awards in LA To shell and back! Cardi B memorably donned an absolutely Aphrodite-inspired number to this year's Grammy Awards And back in February she donned a ravishing Mugler number to the 5th Annual Hollywood Beauty Awards in LA. Kim isn't the only A-lister who's been embracing Thierry. Cardi B memorably donned an absolutely Aphrodite-inspired number to this year's Grammy Awards. And Mugler's work appeared on stage during Beyonce's On The Run II tour with husband Jay-Z. They both shot to fame when they starred in a string of reality shows. And Millie Mackintosh and Lucy Mecklenburgh looked at home in front of the camera as they posed at the opening of the Bar of YES! in Soho, London on Tuesday. Former Made In Chelsea star Millie, 29, channel her exotic side as she donned a zebra print dress from Rixo with a racy slit down the middle. Stunning: Millie Mackintosh, 29, looked at home in front of the camera as she posed at the opening of the Bar of YES! in Soho, London on Tuesday She completed her chic ensemble with white ankle boots and showed off her glittering rock on her wedding finger. The aspiring fashion designer left her freshly blow dried locks loose and opted for dashings of nude make up. While former TOWIE starlet Lucy, 27, displayed her take on a trouser suit in an embroidered tweed blazer over a beige jumper. Style: She was joined by former TOWIE star and Lucy Mecklenburgh, 27, who displayed her take on a trouser suit in an embroidered tweed blazer Fashion: Former Made In Chelsea star Millie channel her exotic side as she donned a zebra print dress from Rixo with a racy slit down the middle Best dressed: While Lucy added skinny black trousers to her number and polished it off with sky high metallic heels She added skinny black trousers to her number and polished it off with sky high metallic heels. The reality star added plenty of glamour with a silver Gucci ring, a two-toned watch and sparkling earrings. Lucy wore her cropped brunette locks in a sleek do while sporting plenty of heavy eye makeup. Glitzy: Also attending was TV presenter Olivia Cox who dazzled in a sequin mini dress with star tights Pals: The Bachelor UK's Tonique Campbell (L) and Lilly Douse (R) donned plenty of leather as they made their way to the snack bar Fun: The pals then tested the idea behind the eatery which involves wearing a blindfold to taste different foods The duo joined a host of faces for the event which offers visitors blindfolds to wear as they taste plates of food. While Millie went solo for the event, she and husband Hugo Taylor revealed they may be hearing the patter of tiny feet sometime soon. 'We talk about [babies] all the time,' Hugo revealed. 'We love kids but right now we're very happy seeing all our friends having babies.' The couple married in a lavish ceremony in June last year at Whithurst Park in West Sussex. Amber Rose is on the up and up. The reality star and feminist icon, 35, recently moved into a new luxury abode and showed off her 'custom furniture' via Instagram on Tuesday. 'I Just moved into a brand new home and got all CUSTOM FURNITURE from @sofa.design.gallery!!! I picked out my own Materials and Colors! They made it especially for me!' she captioned the video. New space: Amber Rose, 35, recently moved into a new luxury abode and showed off her 'custom furniture' via Instagram on Tuesday One clip revealed a large white sofa with royal blue pillows and matching arm chairs off to the side. The other video shows off shiny silver metallic clothed furniture including an upholstered bed and matching sofa. A chic metal and glass coffee table features a book of pin ups as Amber panned the camera around the bedroom. Amber has come a long way since her days as an exotic dancer in Philadelphia back when she was a teenager. Fit for a king: One clip revealed a large white sofa with royal blue pillows and matching arm chairs off to the side Sleep like a princess: The other video shows off shiny silver metallic clothed furniture including an upholstered bed and matching sofa She went on to appear in several music videos and, in 2008, caught the attention of Kanye West, which led to a two-year romantic relationship. Around the same time she signed with Ford Models and began the first of many reality show gigs with her appearance on Running Russell Simmons. She has since gone on to do commercial ads, publish her first book How to Be a Bad Bitch and host The Amber Rose Show on VH1. She even created an emoji app called MuvaMoji that earned her $4million. Brand new: 'I Just moved into a brand new home and got all CUSTOM FURNITURE from @sofa.design.gallery!!! Custom: 'I picked out my own Materials and Colors!' Recently, Amber cannot be seen without her new beau by her side. Alexander Edwards is a Def Jam Records executive and the two have reportedly been spending time together since October 2018. In January, Amber posed a sweet tribute to her man with an adorable picture. Chic: A chic metal and glass coffee table features a book of pin ups as Amber panned the camera around the bedroom 'He thinks he soooo cute!,' she began. 'He really is tho... and sweet, smart, talented, charismatic and overall just an amazing man. 'In the past Ive used the words 'best friend' very loosely while speaking of my exs but I can honestly say I feel like this man really is my BEST FRIEND! 'We talk for hours, he makes me a better person, he listens to me and understands me. Thank you for all of ur love and support baby. I love you so much!" She's just weeks away from welcoming her second child into the world. And Alex Jones was looking stylish as ever as she left the BBC studios in London after a busy night celebrating the end of Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman's Comic Relief danceathon. The expectant mother, 41, flashed her baby bump in a bold black and gold printed dress covered up by a classic longline cream coat. Expecting: Alex Jones was looking as stylish as ever as she left the BBC studios in London after a busy night on The One Show The Welsh presenter teamed her ensemble with a pair of dark leggings and statement black biker boots. Finishing her elegant look, the mother-of-one wore her curled hair loose around her shoulders and accessorized her dress with natural makeup and gold hoop earrings. Alex, who has a son, Teddy, with husband Charlie Thomson, was grinning from ear-to-ear as she displayed her burgeoning bump on her way out of work. Bold: The expectant mother, 41, flashed her baby bump in a flawless black and gold printed dress covered up by a classic longline cream coat The presenter had stuck around at the studios to speak to Tess and Claudia as they completed their 24-hour danceathon. The pair had kicked off the challenge at 7pm on Monday evening, launching the fund-raising endeavor on The One Show. They kept dancing throughout the night and over the course of Tuesday, with special guests popping in throughout the day to cheer them on. Claudia and Tess were joined by family, friends and celebrity guests - many of whom joined them on the dance floor to show off their own moves. Challenge complete! Claudia Winkleman and Tess Daly had been on their feet for 24 hours and five minutes, completing the longes-ever Dance-a-thon in aid of Comic Relief Susan Calman, Greg James, and Hugh Dennis made appearances, along with some surprise visits from Davina McCall and Jon Snow (who boogied to Madonna). Rylan Clark-Neal challenged presenter Jeremy Vine to an impressive dance-off as Mary Berry treated Claudia and Tess to some chocolate cake in the studio. Ed Balls and Katya Jones revisited their Strictly days and Ed spoke about his recent Kilimanjaro climb for Comic Relief, while Anton Du Beke lifted spirits (and Claudia) as he twirled the pair around the dancefloor. Special guests: There were also special performances from Beverley Knight, Fleur East, Andy Burrows, Calum Scott, Hair the musical, Mamma Mia the musical, the cast of Everybody Loves Jamie and Fishermans Friends Winning! The duo danced their final song Destinys Child, Survivor - at 7:20PM, making it over 24 hours since they kicked off their epic challenge There were also special performances from Beverley Knight, Fleur East, Andy Burrows, Calum Scott, Hair the musical, Mamma Mia the musical, the cast of Everybody Loves Jamie and Fishermans Friends. The duo danced their final song Destinys Child, Survivor - at 7.20pm, making it over 24 hours since they kicked off their epic challenge. Tess and Claudia's endeavour raised 782,686 for Comic Relief - and donations are still trickling in. She's been wowing fans with her maths knowledge on Countdown for ten years. And Rachel Riley showed off a different side to herself when she attended and gave a speech at the Science Museum in London on Tuesday to celebrate thirty years of the World Wide Web. The channel 4 presenter, 33, looked mesmerising as she showed off her sensational figure in a fitted cobalt number before stopping for a snap with founder of the internet Sir Tim Berners-Lee and pal David Tennant. Wow: Rachel Riley showed off a different side to herself when she attended and gave a speech at the Science Museum in London on Tuesday to celebrate thirty years of the World Wide Web She completed her form-fitting number with nude heels and deep burgundy nails. The blonde beauty wore her locks in loose curls around her shoulders and sported plenty of heavy makeup for the event. Rachel was in high spirits as she gave a speech to the crowd later in the evening. Say cheese: The channel 4 presenter, 33, looked mesmerising in a fitted cobalt number before stopping for a snap with founder of the internet Sir Tim Berners-Lee and pal David Tennant Blonde bombshell: She completed her form-fitting number with nude heels and deep burgundy nails The Countdown co-host joined the show in 2008 after she took over from icon Carol Voderman and was an instant hit with viewers after filling Carol's very large shoes. She was a recent Oxford graduate when she joined the show and the tenth anniversary episode of her joining aired in January this year. Rachel, who began dating former Strictly professional Pasha Kovalev when they met on the show five years ago, previously spoke out about the pair's relationship. Style: The blonde beauty wore her locks in loose curls around her shoulders and sported plenty of heavy makeup for the event Speaking out: Rachel was in high spirits as she gave a speech to the crowd later in the evening about tackling the problems the web poses Honouring: Rachel was one of many speaking out about how Sir Tim's invention has shaped her life Speaking to Lorraine earlier this year she admitted she's still no better at ballroom, as the only dancing she has done was on a night out at a salsa club in Mexico but she had nothing but kind words to say about Pasha, 39, as she gushed about their sweet romance. She said: 'He's gorgeous, he's amazing when you need a bit of support that's when you know you're with the nice person. He's a good egg.' Rachel went on to admit she's still not improved on any of the dancing skills she learned while taking part in Strictly 2013, when she first sparked up a romance with Pasha. She joked: 'I keep telling him to teach me! My last birthday we were in Mexico we went to a salsa club, but he did most of the dancing. 'I was never going to get the Glitterball, but I got a Russian.' He was reportedly an instant hit with the ladies when filming kicked off at the Bachelor mansion in Sydney last week. And Bachelor Matthew Agnew, 31, was captivated by one particular contestant, who he pulled aside for a one-on-one chat shortly after meeting for the first time. The Melbourne-based academic proved to be quite the romantic while feeding the blonde toasted marshmallows. Will she win Matthew Agnew's heart? The Bachelor Australia was seen feeding the contestant toasted marshmallows during filming last week The pair shared a tender moment as they sat around a bonfire together, away from the other contestants. Matthew looked dapper in a black and white tuxedo, while his date oozed glamour in a strapless white gown. It comes after NW magazine reported on Monday that the astrophysicist was an instant hit with the contestants at the first cocktail party last week. Tender moment: The pair shared a tender moment as they sat around a bonfire together, away from the other contestants This season's diverse selection of women were reportedly smitten with the 'hot nerd' and charmed by his intelligence. 'He seemed incredibly charming,' revealed an on-set source. 'And he had all the girls in fits of laughter and hanging off his every word.' Smitten: Matt and his date were see toasting their fluffy treats over the fire Relaxed: Despite only meeting moments earlier, the pair looked comfortable around in each other's presence While last year's Bachelor, former rugby star Nick Cummins, struggled to impress the contestants early on, Matt's journey seems to be quite the opposite. Meanwhile, Matt recently told Woman's Day that he's looking for a woman who will complement his down-to-earth nature. Glamour: The blonde oozed glamour in a strapless white gown as she made her way to Matt 'I want someone who doesn't take themselves too seriously and we can just have a laugh and fun together,' he said. 'I'm looking for a best friend, the same way I've seen so many of my friends find one in their partners.' He touched down in the French capital earlier this week. And Brad Pitt looked stylish as he attended the Almost Human exhibition by sculptor Thomas Houseago at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris on Tuesday. The Fight Club actor, 55, wore an all-black ensemble of trousers, a fluffy jumper and a tailored coat, he layered the items of clothing with a white T-shirt underneath. Dapper: Brad Pitt looked stylish as he attended the Almost Human exhibition by sculptor Thomas Houseago at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris on Tuesday Finishing his look, Brad accessorised his outfit with a black baker boy hat, with his long blonde locks worn loose underneath, and wore worn out suede boots. The actor appeared in good spirits as he checked out the Almost Human exhibition and was spotted chatting with a group of people. On Monday, Brad took a moment to enjoy the view of the French capital when he looked out onto the Eiffel Tower from his balcony after arriving in Paris on Monday morning. Handsome: The Fight Club actor, 55, wore an all-black ensemble of trousers, a fluffy jumper and a tailored coat, he layered the items of clothing with a white T-shirt underneath Details: Finishing his look, Brad accessorised his outfit with a black baker boy hat, with his long blonde locks worn loose underneath, and wore worn out suede boots The Hollywood hunk, who previously was married to Jennifer Aniston and later Angelina Jolie, has always had a strong passion for art. And he was thought to have romanced Israeli-born architect, computational designer and artist Neri Oxman at one stage. The brunette beauty, 43, seemed to be the first woman the Allied actor had fallen for since his split from Angelina, with whom he co-parents six children. In his element: The actor appeared in good spirits as he checked out the Almost Human exhibition Happy: Brad was later spotted talking to a group of people inside the museum Chat: The Oscar nominee looked in good spirits as he chatted with a friend as he left the exhibition Dapper: The actor looked dapper as he left the glittering exhibition Good spirits: The star looked relaxed and happy as he spoke with a friend However, Neri later revealed that she never dated the hunky star in an interview with The New York Times and she is now happily married to Bill Ackman. Neri is a professor of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Media Lab. Brad is said to be a design fanatic and has taken classes in the subject, he has also made furniture and worked on building houses in hurricane ravaged New Orleans. She had been spotted frolicking around New York City with a male companion last weekend. Come Tuesday, and Lily-Rose Depp had made her way to Montreal, Canada, to continue work on her latest film, Dreamland. And the daughter of actor Johnny Deep and musician/model Vanessa Paradis came prepared for some brutal winter weather. Bundled up: Lily-Rose Depp arrived in Montreal, Canada on Tuesday to continue work on the drama film, Dreamland The 19-year old made her way through the airport turnstiles make-up free and with her long brown tresses pulled back into a loose ponytail. She dressed down in faded denim jeans and a dark green hoodie as she held on to a dark puffy winter jacket. With winter in mind, she wore a pair stylish grey Chanel boots. Good thing she had her jacket handy; because when she stepped out of the airport she got greeted by brisk temperatures and the start of a snow storm. El natural: The 19-year old actress dressed casual and went makeup free during her travels Depp stars alongside Gary Oldman, Greg Kinnear, Michelle Rodriguez, Evangeline Lilly and Armie Hammer in Dreamland, which has been billed as the first theatrical film to tackle the international opioid crisis. According to Variety, the drama follows three stories centered on opioids. There's a university professor (Oldman) who makes a disturbing discovery about his employer, a pharmaceutical company with profound government influence bringing a new non-addictive painkiller to market; a drug trafficker who organizes a multi-cartel Fentanyl smuggling operation between Canada and the US; and an architect recovering from an OxyContin addiction who tracks down the truth behind her sons involvement with narcotics. Depp plays the troubled but brilliant sister of Hammer's drug trafficking character. Brisk: The Parisian-born star was greeted by a snow storm when she stepped out of the airport The Parisian-born star will also star opposite Timothee Chalamet, Joel Edgerton and Robert Pattinson in The King. The Netflix film, which is an adaption of several plays from Shakespeare's Henriad, wrapped filming last summer, and is currently in post-production. It is expected to be released in 2019. She chopped all her hair off over a year ago and she's been growing it out ever since. On Tuesday, Kate Hudson posted a photo to Instagram showing off a startling new look - with the help of extensions. The 39-year-old actress suddenly had her shoulder-length blonde tresses again in the elegant photo. 'I got hair!': On Tuesday, Kate Hudson, 39, posted a photo to Instagram showing off her long blonde hair after getting extensions In her mirror selfie, the Almost Famous star's wavy golden hair cascades over one shoulder as she stares knowingly into the mirror. She was dressed in an elegant, long white dress with full-length sleeves. The hems and collar featured frilly, intricate lace patterns. The Mother's Day actress also had a large brown leather belt on with a large buckle adorned with tiny metallic decorations. She captioned the photo: 'I got hair!' Natural color: Kate's short hair saga began in the summer of 2017, when she buzzed her long locks off for a film role requiring a shaved head Embracing it: 'The shaved head was awesome,' she told Harper's Bazaar last year; pictured with mother Goldie Hawn in 2018 Kate's short hair saga began in the summer of 2017, when she buzzed her long locks off for a film role requiring a shaved head. Freed from her regular looks, she even grew out her natural brunette color. 'The shaved head was awesome,' she told Harper's Bazaar last year. 'I didn't think I'd love it so much. The connection to it [her hair] was powerful and I wasn't prepared for that. It's so liberating.' She even recommended other women try shaving their heads at least once for the liberating experience. 'If you've got the guts to do it, do it.' 'Do it': She even recommended other women try shaving their heads at least once for the liberating experience Elegant locks: The Deepwater Horizon star eventually went back to her standard dyed blonde look as she went from a pixie cut to a bob; pictured February 28 The Deepwater Horizon star eventually went back to her standard dyed blonde look as she went from a pixie cut to a bob. At a recent appearance for the Women's Cancer Research Fund in Beverly Hills, she her golden tresses delicately curled and playfully flipped to one side. Cute cut: At a recent appearance for the Women's Cancer Research Fund in Beverly Hills, she her golden tresses delicately curled and playfully flipped to one side; pictured with Danny Fujikawa, 32, on February 28 Former beau: In addition to her five-month-old daughter Rani Rose with Danny, Kate shares her son Bingham, seven, with Muse frontman Matthew Bellamy, 40, whom she dated from 2010-2014; pictured with Matthew Bellamy in 2014 The Skeleton Key star is currently partnered with musician Danny Fujikawa, 32. Though the two have only been together since 2017, Kate has actually known the father of her youngest child for over a decade. During an appearance on The Talk, she explained how they came to know each other. 'We've known each other for 15 years. He's my best friend's stepbrother,' she said. 'We kind of skipped through the part of knowing what the hiccups were. You kind of skip the part of going, 'Oh, you're like that?'' In addition to their five-month-old daughter Rani Rose, Kate shares her son Bingham, seven, with Muse frontman Matthew Bellamy, 40, whom she dated from 2010-2014. She and her ex-husband, Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes, 52, share a 15-year-old son, Ryder. They were married from 2000-2007. From from superhero to another. Anne Hathaway, who played Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, heaped praise on Brie Larson for her performance in Captain Marvel. 'You know what I love most about [Captain Marvel] (among all the things I loved about Captain Marvel?)' Anne commented on Larson's Instagram post on Monday. 'Seeing YOU up there. So impressed and proud, sis.' She ended by gushing, 'You did it! Now go get Thanos!' So sweet: Anne Hathaway, who played Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, heaped praise on Brie Larson for her performance in Captain Marvel; pictured in September 2016 in Toronto Hathaway wrote the comment to a post Larson made that showed her kneeling down with a city skyline as the backdrop. Inside the caption she shared some words of wisdom to her 3.1 million Instagram followers. 'Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity,' she began. 'It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live. Superhero support: 'You know what I love most about [Captain Marvel] (among all the things I loved about Captain Marvel?)' Anne commented on Larson's Instagram post on Monday Deep thoughts: Hathaway made the flattering comment on a post where Larson had shared some words of wisdom about following your dreams in life Leading ladies: The Catwoman actress gushed about Larson on Instagram Captain Marvel, the first female-led superhero movie from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is a blockbuster hit, raking-in $153 million domestically and $455 million globally in its opening weekend. The only movie with a female lead that's opened better globally was Star Wars: The Force Awakens which grossed $529 million when it debuted in 2015. The film also makes history as the most successful feature to be directed or co-directed by a woman; it's co-helmed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck who also co-wrote the screenplay. Lady behind the mask: Hathaway starred alongside Christian Bale (left) in Dark Knight Rises, which was the third installment in the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight trilogy Hathaway played the role of Selina Kyle/Catwoman alongside stars Christian Bale, Gary Oldham, Tom Hardy, Michael Caine and Marion Cotillard in The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. The filmed grossed over $1 billion worldwide. It was the final installment in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy that included -- Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). Channel 10 and Foxtel are casting two new households for season 10 of Gogglebox Australia. In a statement to TV Tonight on Wednesday, the show's executive producer David McDonald said they will begin searching for people in Brisbane and the Gold Coast. 'We're very excited to find Queensland personalities to put in the mix,' he said. Calling all couch potatoes! Channel 10 is casting two new households for season 10 of Gogglebox Australia. Pictured Anastasia and Faye McDonald explained that previous seasons of Gogglebox only featured households from NSW and Victoria due to production limitations. 'When Gogglebox first started we were restricted in what we could accommodate with the fast turnaround of the show,' he said. 'Now in our fifth year of production, it's time to expand, so it was decided (very wisely) to go north and capture the unique voice of the Queensland territory.' Going north: The decision to cast Queenslanders will be a first for the three-time Logie Award-winning show, and producers are expecting a deluge of applications. Pictured: Mick and Di The decision to cast Queenslanders will be a first for the three-time Logie Award-winning show, and producers are expecting a deluge of applications. It comes after 'unfiltered siblings' Tim and Leanne Lai were announced as new additions to Gogglebox last month. The departures of original cast members Wayne Mott and Tom Walsh as well as Yvie Jones and Angie Kent created openings on the show. Newbies: It comes after 'unfiltered siblings' Tim and Leanne Lai (pictured) were announced as new additions to Gogglebox last month Last month, it was revealed that Yvie and Angie had been blacklisted by Foxtel after signing up for Channel 10's I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! and making disparaging comments about their salaries. Foxtel's Executive Director of Television Brian Walsh told TV Tonight that the network had made the decision to ban them from appearing on Gogglebox ever again. 'You will not see a review of them on Gogglebox,' Walsh said. 'From a promotional point of view, the issue that upsets Foxtel is the exploitation of the Gogglebox brand to market and sell another program.' Banned: Last month, it was revealed that Yvie and Angie had been blacklisted by Foxtel after signing up for Channel 10's I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! and making disparaging comments about their salaries In August 2018, Angie told Who magazine that 'everyone [in the Gogglebox cast] still has to work' because of their relatively low salaries. 'Oh God, otherwise we'd be on the streets!' she said. You can apply for Gogglebox Australia season 10 here Rachael Taylor has added more speculation to rumours she has 'secretly wed' her beau Mike Piscitelli. The 34-year-old Australian actress wore two rings on her wedding finger while attending the Finding Steve McQueen screening in Los Angeles, on Tuesday. Two bands, including a diamond ring (thought to be an engagement ring), were spotted on her left hand, which was clearly visible during the course of the evening. Is it official? Rachael Taylor (pictured) flashed two rings on her wedding finger as she attended the Finding Steve McQueen screening... amid claims she 'secretly wed' partner Mike Piscitelli Rachael has been wearing the diamond ring since 2017, but has now added a plain gold band as well. The Red Dog actress kept it casual on the day and opted for a yellow shirt tucked into cropped jeans, finishing her look with a checkered bomber jacket and black stilettos. Showcasing her natural beauty, she kept her makeup minimal and added a dusting of pink rouge to her cheeks and a soft pink lipstick to her perfect pout. Casual chic: The Red Dog actress kept it casual on the day and opted for a yellow shirt tucked into cropped jeans, finishing her look with a checkered bomber jacket and black stilettos All smiles: Rachael posed with her co-stars - Rhys Coiro, Jake Weary, William Fichtner and Louis Lombardi, producer Anthony Mastromauro, director Mark Steven Johnson and actor Travis Fimmel She left her blonde locks out and straightened to cascade down past her shoulders. The Q and A appearance comes amid reports in Woman's Day Rachael and Mike recently 'made it official'. 'Right now she's in a love bubble,' the magazine quoted an unnamed source as saying. Natural beauty: Showcasing her natural beauty, she kept her makeup minimal and added a dusting of pink rouge to her cheeks and a soft pink lipstick to her perfect pout The source reportedly added: 'Word is that they got married over the (Christmas) holidays... She's found someone who makes her truly happy'. Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Rachael for comment. Rachael first revealed she had been dating Mike two years into their relationship in 2015. 'It's one of the things I'm most proud of, my relationship with him,' Rachael gushed to Daily Life at the time. Married At First Sight 'villain' Sam Ball has officially taken a step back from the spotlight. The 26-year-old tradesman recently deleted his Instagram account following a string of disasters, including his affair with co-star Ines Basic and legal dramas with his ex-girlfriend Akila Ahmunett. Sam, who was 'married' to jewellery store manager, Elizabeth Sobinoff, on the show, drew the ire of fans when he began a torrid romance with the Bosnian beauty, 29. Scroll down for video Sam Ball (pictured) recently deleted his Instagram account following a string of disasters, including his affair with co-star Ines Basic and legal dramas with his ex-girlfriend Akila Ahmunett. Sam also gained the label of most hated man in Australia after he 'fat-shamed' his wife Elizabeth during their television 'wedding.' It all came to a dramatic end last month, when Sam admitted he regretted the affair and voted to leave the experiment - without Elizabeth or Ines. Sam revealed he has not been in contact with Ines since he decided not to peruse their relationship. Troubled union: Sam (right) was 'married' to jewellery store manager Elizabeth Sobinoff (left) on Married At First Sight Shock affair: Sam attracted the ire of viewers after conducting a brief but intense affair with co-star Ines Basic (pictured) Not speaking: Sam (right) revealed he has not been in contact with Ines (left) since he decided not to peruse his relationship with her The Sydney-based tradie finished filming the reality show last October, before beginning his relationship with his most recent ex-girlfriend Akila. Sam took out an AVO against Akila last month. He had called the police after she allegedly confronted him at his home in Alexandria, Sydney on February 4. She was taken to Newtown Police Station where she was charged with stalking and intimidation with intention to cause fear or physical harm, using a mobile phone, email and social media to menace and harass, and 'entering [the] prescribed premises of any person without lawful excuse'. After her arrest, Akila was granted conditional bail and appeared at Newtown Local Court on March 4. Both Sam and Akila are scheduled to appear in court on April 15. The couple reportedly split late last month. Married At First Sight continues Wednesday at 7:30pm on Channel Nine. Claim to fame: Sam Ball is pictured on Married At First Sight with fellow 'villain' Ines Basic (left) Fan favorite Hannah Brown will be this year's Bachelorette. Chris Harrison announced the pageant queen would be the next lead during the finale of The Bachelor on Tuesday. 'I feel all the emotions, but honestly, I'm just really grateful for this opportunity,' Hannah, 24, raved during the unveiling. It's her turn! Fan favorite Hannah B. has been announced as this year's Bachelorette Not only was Hannah unveiled as The Bachelorette, but fans watched the moment the pageant queen learned she would be the next lead. The star was seen during a FaceTime conversation with Chris, who asked Hannah, 'Do you want to be the Bachelorette?' 'Are you asking me?' she said. 'I'm not asking you, I'm telling you,' he said to Hannah, as she broke down into tears. Let's do this! Brown grinned from ear-to-ear during her unveiling Are you ready? Brown was introduced to her suitors right on stage It's an honor: The pageant queen seemed genuinely overwhelmed Shortly after the announcement Hannah, who was crowned Miss Alabama in 2018, met several of her future suitors on stage. Future contestants on stage included two men named Luke, Dustin, Connor, and Cam, who all introduced themselves to the new love interest on stage. After meeting all the men, Hannah jokingly wondered who would get her rose. Oh boy! Luke and Dustin introduced themselves to the future lead Nice to meet you! Luke gushed about the future Bachelorette The rose didn't seem to be apart of the initial plan, but Chris made it happen and the University of Alabama alumni ended up giving her first rose to Cam. Hannah competed for Colton Underwood's heart on the current season of The Bachelor. Initially, Hannah got off to a rocky start on the show after stumbling through a toast during her first date with Colton and continuing a feud with her rival, pageant queen Caelynn Miller-Keyes. Hello petal! Cam rapped to Hannah before blowing a handful of rose petals in her direction Step right up! Connor brought a step ladder he decorated himself for Miss Alabama He won her over! Brown pinned the rose upon the victorious Cam Though it didn't take long for fans to warm up to the quirky competitor, who affectionately referred to herself as 'Hannah Beast.' She eventually professed her love for Colton, but was given the axe after meeting his parents during a one-on-one date in his hometown of Denver. Hannah attended the University of Alabama, joined Alpha Chi Omega, and graduated magna cum laude in 2017 with a degree in Communication and Information Sciences. She became Miss Alabama in 2018, and competed in Miss USA that same year, though did not place. The Bachelorette will premiere on May 13 on ABC. The journey for love begins! The Bachelorette will premiere on May 13 on ABC The host with the most: Harrison proudly posed with the next Bachelorette All is well between NeNe Leakes and Andy Cohen. Leakes, 51, took to social media Tuesday to deny claims she unfollowed Andy Cohen, 50, on Instagram amid a bit of drama over the issue in recent days. 'I will say it AGAIN! I was NEVER following @andy on Instagram,' the Real Housewives of Atlanta star wrote on Twitter Tuesday. 'He wasn't following me or any housewives! He knows this!' Scroll below for video All well: NeNe Leakes, 51, took to social media Tuesday to deny claims she unfollowed Andy Cohen, 50, on Instagram amid a bit of drama over the issue in recent days. She posed with the Bravo star earlier this month while taping Watch What Happens Live The issue sprang out of a joint appearance NeNe's RHOA peers Cynthia Bailey and Marlo Hampton made on Cohen's chat show Watch What Happens Live Sunday, when a caller noted that Leakes wasn't following Bailey on Instagram. Cohen said he didn't 'think NeNe was thrilled when she left the reunion' taping, and had 'heard that she actually unfollowed everyone on the cast' with the exception of Shamari DeVoe. Cohen then piled on, 'The control room is telling me NeNe also unfollowed me as well ... they said she unfollowed me from Instagram for sure, and they're now checking Twitter.' (He later confirmed she was among his 2.29 million Twitter followers.) The reality star, who's also been seen on The Celebrity Apprentice and Dancing with the Stars, said she reached out to the Bravo and SiriusXM personality in an effort to make clear the chain of events. Making things clear: NeNe on Tuesday said that she and Andy had not followed one another in the first place on Instagram The last word: After Cohen fessed up to the fact he and NeNe followed one another on Twitter, she thanked him and had an extra suggestion 'In fact i texted him and asked, why did u say that on WWHL when we don't follow each other! ALL FACTS! Now go ask him! I NEVER need to lie. For what?' Cohen confirmed as such, writing, 'NeNe is right! We follow each other on Twitter.' No holding back: Leakes recently had an outburst toward castmates Kandi Burrus, Porsha Williams and a cameraman for entering her closet against her wishes Stalwart: Leakes has been one of the most successful stars to emerge from the Real Housewives universe NeNe has had a tumultuous time during RHOA's 11th season, as she's supported her husband Gregg Leakes in his cancer battle, and recently had an outburst toward castmates Kandi Burrus, Porsha Williams - and a cameraman - for entering her closet against her wishes. 'I'm a strong woman!' NeNe tweeted Tuesday. 'Always have been, but I am also human! In fact, I'm just like a well. I give out all the water, and when I need some, the well is dry.' Real Housewives of Atlanta airs on Bravo airs Sundays at 8/7c. Hollywood came to the Gold Coast on Tuesday, with actors Alexander Skarsgard and Rebecca Hall seen filming the upcoming blockbuster, Godzilla vs. Kong. The 42-year-old Big little Lies actor was seen on-set with his 36-year-old co-star, as they got to work filming scenes for the big budget action film. Appearing to have just captured an action sequence, Alexander was spotted looking sweaty and slightly disheveled, his muscles visible beneath a plain black T-shirt. Hard at work: Alexander Skarsgard was seen on the set of the upcoming blockbuster, Godzilla vs. Kong at Warner Bros. Studios on the Gold Coast on Tuesday The Swedish-born star was seen squinting into the hot Aussie sun as he took a break from filming at Warner Bros. Studios. Rebecca was also spotted outside a sound stage, posing for photos as part of a photo shoot. The British-born actress was seen wearing a black and white polka dot button-up short-sleeve shirt. Picture perfect: Alexander's co-star Rebecca Hall was also spotted outside the sound stage where they were filming, posing for photos as part of a photo shoot Well spotted: The British-born actress was seen wearing a black and white polka dot button-up short-sleeve shirt Her long brown hair sat loose over one shoulder. The film also stars Stranger Things actress Millie Bobby Brown, 15, and the cast has reportedly been filming since January. While not much is known about the upcoming movie as yet, it is said to see Godzilla face off against King Kong. All in his stride: Alexander confessed he doesn't take Hollywood too seriously during an interview with The Guardian in February last year. Seen here at The 2018 Innovator Awards in New York City in November Despite the scale of the film though, Alexander confessed he doesn't take Hollywood too seriously during an interview with The Guardian in February last year. 'Hollywood is very silly in a way,' he said. 'Its like playing marbles when you were a kid in the schoolyard. People are so anxious: "What filmmaker is hot right now? Which actor is hot?" Same thing in the school playground, the cool kid says: "This is the marble to get." And everyone is like: "Oh my God, I want it!"' She plays Gamora in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and is Neytiri, the star of James Cameron's Avatar movies. And on Tuesday, Zoe Saldana paid a visit to the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas. The actress, 40, was the special guest for Featured Session: Changing the Narrative. In the spotlight: Zoe Saldana paid a visit to the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas where she was the special guest for Featured Session: Changing the Narrative Saldana looked stylish in a white shirt which she wore with the sleeves rolled up and tailored black trousers. She added a silk scarf wrapped a couple of times around her neck and stepped out in black heels. Saldana juggles her career with raising her three sons whom she shares with husband Marco Perego. Looking good: Saldana looked stylish in a white shirt which she wore with the sleeves rolled up and tailored black trousers Stylish: She added a silk scarf wrapped a couple of times around her neck and stepped out in black heels Busy: Saldana plays Gamora in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Neytiri in James Cameron's Avatar movies. She juggles her career with raising her three sons with husband Marco Perego Also on Tuesday at SXSW there was a screening of Elle Fanning's new movie teen Spirit. The actress, 20, was stylish in a white blouse and black tailored trousers worn with a black corset. Her blouse featured pretty broderie anglaise detailing down the front and at the cuffs. The tapered trousers narrowed to her ankles and she stepped out in black heels with bows on top. Premiere: Also on Tuesday, Elle Fanning walked the red carpet at SXSW at a special screening of her new movie Teen Spirit In Teen Spirit, Fanning stars as a shy teenager Violet who dreams of winning a singing competition as a way of escaping her dreary life. She was joined at the screening by Max Minghella, 33, who makes his directorial debut with the musical drama. The actor son of The English Patient Oscar-winning filmmaker Anthony Minghella, who stars in The Handmaid's Tale, also wrote the screenplay for Teen Spirit. On hand, too, was actor Jamie Bell, 32, who served as an executive producer on the film. Red carpet: Also at the screening were the musical drama's director Max Minghella, 33, left, and Jamie Bell, 32, right, who is an executive producer of the movie Stephen Amell's wisecrack aimed at Dave Bautista didn't land as expected. The 37-year-old actor made a joking comment referring to his own brushes with the squared circle amid the news Monday that Bautista, 50, would step into the ring for the biggest pro wrestling show of the year - Wrestlemania 35 - in a match against Triple H. Amell, a longtime fan who was the focal point of a celebrity-driven WWE storyline in 2015, took to Twitter Tuesday with a tongue-in-cheek jab at Bautista, the former WWE champ who's gone on to Hollywood fame playing Drax alongside Chris Pratt in the Guardians of the Galaxy series. Scroll below for video Mr. Blue Sky: Bautista was snapped in London last year Amell wrote, 'Just landed and found out about @DaveBautista v @TripleH Really pumped for the match but also dont want to see a celebrity angle detract from an awesome wrestling card.' Bautista didn't seem to sense the irony Amell was intending with the self-deprecating post, reminding the Arrow star that his pro wrestling pedigree preceded his success in Tinseltown. 'Considering that celebrity could actually f*** someone up,' Bautista wrote, 'and that celebrity is a former 6x heavyweight champ, and that celebrity is there because he loves it, maybe it just adds to the card. Maybe.' Amell - who's been seen on shows such as Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl playing Oliver Queen/Green Arrow - got back on the site to clarify he was not intending to start anything with the comment, which was meant to be self-deprecating. Opening salvo: Amell made a joking comment referring to his own brushes with the squared circle Feedback: Bautista didn't seem to sense the irony Amell was intending with the self-deprecating post, reminding the Arrow star that his pro wrestling pedigree preceded his success in Tinseltown Mea culpa: Amell posted again making clear to Bautista he wasn't disrespecting him 'Hey Dave - I went out of my way to introduce myself to you in Atlanta at a convention so I could tell you what a big fan of yours I am,' Amell wrote. 'You couldnt have been more pleasant. My tweet was meant to poke fun at me. It clearly wasnt funny.' The Toronto native, who's also gotten in the ring for the organization Ring of Honor, ended the post in writing, 'Please dont kill me.' Bautista makes his return to the ring at Wrestlemania 35, which will air April 7 from MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Ready to rumble: The actor took part in a match in Chicago last year for All In Wrestling Alex Nation famously knocked back an opportunity to appear on the debut season of Bachelor In Paradise in 2018. But Alex's tune has since changed, with the blonde now readily promoting her upcoming on-screen feud with ex-boyfriend Richie Strahan on Paradise this year. The blonde was reportedly lured back to the franchise by a sizable paycheck, with The Daily Telegraph claiming she pocketed '$5000 a day' while filming the reality show in Fiji last November. She's back! How Alex Nation 'reluctantly' returned to the Bachelor franchise after turning down offer to appear on Paradise last year - amid her failing Instagram career 'Producers lured her with a bigger pay packet than the other contestants,' a show insider allegedly told the publication, while speaking of the 'reluctant' star. The newspaper claimed that Alex's fellow contestants pocketed '$500 a day', while the mother-of-one earned 'ten times that amount' for her time. Months before signing on to Paradise, Alex revealed to her fans that her career as an Instagram star was drying up. Highly-anticipated clash: Alex (left) will go head-to-head with her ex-boyfriend Richie Strahan (right) on Bachelor In Paradise this year Taking to social media in June last year, the single mother revealed she was forced to return to full-time work because she couldn't make enough money as an 'influencer'. The 2016 Bachelor winner wrote that returning to a more traditional workplace has meant sacrificing quality time with her son Elijah. 'I usually love a challenge but lately this one has proven quite difficult,' Alex wrote at the time. The sad reality of winning The Bachelor: Alex revealed last year she couldn't make enough money from sponsored Instagram posts and was forced to return to work full-time in June last year 'I've gone from spending almost all of my time with Elijah to working full time, getting home at seven just in time for bunk bed snuggles and doing readers.' The Melbourne socialite - who broke up with Richie in 2017 before embarking on a short-lived romance with a woman - admitted that she was feeling 'exhausted'. 'I miss (Elijah) and crave the time I had with him when I was working sporadically and doing sponsored posts for Ponstan,' she wrote. Overworked: The Melbourne socialite - who broke up with Richie in 2017 before embarking on a short-lived romance with a woman - admitted that she was feeling 'exhausted' 'The reality is for me, sponsored Instagram posts weren't sustainable enough and I really wanted a full time job/career. So I went out and got it and I f**king love it!' Alex then asked her Instagram followers for advice, writing: 'I know my struggle isn't unique, most mothers/parents and just humans in general struggle with balance.' Alex's short-lived career as a social media influencer has resulted in some rather embarrassing slip-ups. In December 2017, she was ridiculed for sharing a sponsored Instagram post for period pain medicine. Cringe! In December 2017, she was ridiculed for sharing a sponsored Instagram post for period pain medicine She posted a photo of herself cuddling up to her dog while conspicuously holding up a packet of Ponstan. 'Don't let 'that time of the month' keep you indoors in your trackie dacks and granny undies,' she captioned the post, adding: 'Ponstan allows me to take our fur baby for a walk in the sunshine. Head to Priceline now and check out the awesome promotion Ponstan is running!' Months earlier, in October 2017, Alex confirmed on live radio that she had declined an offer to appear on the first season of Bachelor In Paradise. In a segment on Southern FM's Jay, Foz and Alex, Alex's radio co-host Luke 'Foz' Forrest joked: 'Alex is spewing they're not offering her a spot on Bachelor in Paradise!' Alex hit back: 'Actually, they did. I declined. I said, 'No, thank you very much!'' She was unceremoniously dumped by her 'husband' Billy Vincent, 28, on Tuesday night's episode of Married at First Sight. And on Wednesday, MAFS star, Susie Bradley showed her TV 'groom' what he's missing as she posed up a storm on Instagram. The 25-year-old Queensland nurse flashed major sideboob in a cleavage-baring off-shoulder floral dress as she snapped a mirror-selfie in an elevator. Scroll down for video Take that Billy! Married at First Sight's Susie Bradley (pictured) flashed major sideboob in cleavage-baring ensemble after her 'husband' finally walked out on her Susie oozed sex appeal as she accentuated her features with thick eyelashes and a red pout. Seconds later, the blonde bombshell took to the photo-sharing app to show off her wares once again in a racy boomerang clip. She was seen panning the camera down her chest, offering her 27,500 followers a closer view of her ample assets. 'Cant wait to see the gang tonight, nothing better than good, honest company!' she captioned the boomerang clip. Busting out! She (pictured) was seen panning the camera down her chest, offering her 27,500 followers a closer view of her ample assets Given the flick! Susie (pictured) was unceremoniously dumped by her 'husband' Billy Vincent, 28, on Tuesday night's episode of MAFS Earlier on Wednesday, Susie's TV 'spouse' blasted the single mum as a 'hustler' and claimed she only went on MAFS 'to get on Instagram' during an appearance on radio show, Fitzy and Wippa. 'The girl's a straight-up hustler. She cast for the show and said all the right things to all the right people to get onto the show so she could get on Instagram,' he said. 'She tricked everyone, me, my family - they thought she was sweet and bubbly then when it came to the show [she was like] 'nah I'm not up for this, I'm just here for the ride.' 'She's a hustler!' Billy has claimed Susie only went on Married at First Sight to boost her Instagram followers Shock claim: Billy said, 'The girl's a straight up hustler. She cast for the show and said all the right things to all the right people to get onto the show so she could get on Instagram' On Tuesday's episode of MAFS, Billy dumped Susie during an awkward exchange at her home. 'Me and you are done, completely over and it makes me extremely extremely happy...' he said. 'I'm trying to help you, my dear, but you're a brat. You know, beauty is only skin deep... as well... some day you're not as.. gonna look as goo... good as you look now, my dear... and then what?' Out: Billy dramatically left Susie's home after an awkward rant. 'I'm trying to help you, my dear, but you're a brat. You know, beauty is only skin deep... as well... some day you're not as.. gonna look as goo... good as you look now, my dear... and then what?' he stuttered Busy Philipps opted for understated elegance Tuesday while attending the Marie Claire Change Makers Celebration in West Hollywood, California. The 39-year-old talk show host wore a high-collar grey floral print Cynthia Rowley dress with long flared sleeves to the party at Hills Penthouse. Busy completed her outfit with leopard-print heels and accessorized with dangling earrings. Floral print: Busy Philipps donned a grey floral print Cynthia Rowley dress Tuesday to the Marie Claire Change Makers Celebration in West Hollywood, California She had her blonde hair pulled back with the exception of a few strands that framed her winsome features and added a pop of color with red lipstick. Busy was spotted catching up at the event with actress Jessica Chastain, 41. Jessica graced the Change Makers cover of the April edition of Marie Claire along with director Ava DuVernay, 46, and actress Constance Wu, 36. The magazine's headline read: 'This Is What Power Looks Like In 2019'. Wild heels: The 39-year-old late-night talk show host added some flair with leopard print heels Catching up: Busy caught up with Jessica Chastain at the Marie Claire event Change maker: The Oscar-nominated actress was recognized in the Change Makers edition of Marie Claire magazine Busy is best known for her roles on the TV series Freaks And Geeks, Dawson's Creek and Cougar Town. Her films roles include I Feel Pretty, The Gift, He's Just Not That Into You, White Chicks, and The Smokers. Busy also recently became a late-night talk show host with her series Busy Tonight on the E! network. Talented trio: Ava DuVernay, Jessica and Constance Wu graced the April cover of Marie Claire as the magazine honored change makers Busy Tonight premiered October 28, 2018 with Mindy Kaling, 39, as the first guest. Christina Hendricks and a surprise special guest were scheduled to appear Wednesday on Busy Tonight. The talk show's recent guests have included: Rita Moreno, Lauren Cohan, Margaret Cho, America Ferrera, The Bella Twins, Adam Devine, Daniel Radcliffe and Michelle Williams. The Kardashian sisters slayed Los Angeles on Tuesday night. Khloe, 34, and Kourtney, 39, left little to the imagination as they stole the spotlight in revealing ensembles for a girls' night out at celeb-hotspot Giorgio Baldi. The perfectly poised pair turned heads in a snakeskin dress and black leather couture as they headed out to meet siblings Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner. Sibling stunners: Kourtney, 39, and Khloe Kardashian, 34, slayed Tuesday night in Los Angeles Daring to impress, Khloe showcased her enviable physique as the python-inspired number accentuated her famous curves. Her newly-dyed platinum tresses were parted down the middle and barely brushed over her shoulders allowing a full view of her youthful good looks. She topped off the fashion-forward look with a small black clutch and tan brown high heels. Kourtney gave her fans a charge as she flashed her ample cleavage in the dress that boasted fabric beginning below her chest. Impressive: Daring to impress, Khloe showcased her enviable physique as the python-inspired number accentuated her famous curves New 'do: Khloe's newly-dyed platinum tresses were parted down the middle and barely brushed over her shoulders allowing a full view of her youthful good looks She covered the rest of her torso with a black leather jacket. Her trademark raven locks were also parted down the middle as she went virtually makeup free with a slight smokey eye and dab of berry lip. The family has been reeling ever since they learned family friend Jordyn Woods 'made out' with Khloe's beau Tristan Thompson on February 17 at his home in Los Angeles. Back in black: Kourtney gave her fans a charge as she flashed her ample cleavage in the dress that boasted fabric starting below her chest Covered up: She covered the rest of her torso with a black leather jacket Woods made the situation ever more tense when she gave an interview to Jada Pinkett Smith on Red Table Talk on Friday. The beauty - who was given her start in the modeling world by Khloe - cried as she claimed all she did was briefly kiss Tristan on the lips after she partied with him until 7 am. Khloe quickly called Woods a 'liar' and also said she was hurt that someone she considered a sister would do this to her. Hair story: Her trademark raven locks were also parted down the middle as she went virtually makeup free with a slight smokey eye and dab of berry lip Wild thing: Kim Kardashian also wore a snakeskin print Lil sis: Kylie Jenner showed off her famous curves as well The Good American designer also set blame on Tristan, with whom she has daughter True, aged 11 months. The couple have since split up. Kourtney doesn't seem to have publicly commented on the scandal. But Kim has told friends she is 'livid' with Woods and Thompson. And on Monday People reported that Kanye West has cut them out of his life. It was added he feels like the 'godfather' to the family and wants to protect Khloe. In the whip: Kim and Kylie posted snaps from their ride to the restaurant Rear view: Kylie dropped it low for a saucy selfie Ladies night: The sister took to the bathroom to powder their noses She's been a Victoria's Secret angel since 2015. Taylor Hill continued to rep the iconic brand on Tuesday when she led an event in Los Angeles to introduce the brand's new scent, Tease Dreamer. The 23-year-old fashion model showed off a revealing white crop top at the event that put her flat tummy on display. Flat tummy: Taylor Hill, 23, continued to rep Victoria's Secret on Tuesday when she led an event in Los Angeles to introduce the brand's new scent, Tease Dreamer The 5ft9in model seemed to channel a German beer hall girl look with her white top with its short, fluffy sleeves, aided by her long brunette braids. The white crop top featured lacy stripes around the sleeves and midriff and showed off her toned abs. She wore a pair of high-waisted acid wash FRAME bell-bottoms with a white braided rope for a belt. Taylor completed the summery outfit with a set of gray and white derby shoes with pearl-adorned heels. Germanic outfit: The 5ft9in model seemed to channel a German beer hall girl look with her white top with its short, fluffy sleeves, aided by her long brunette braids Revealing top: The white crop top featured lacy stripes around the sleeves and midriff and showed off her toned abs. She wore a pair of high-waisted acid wash FRAME bell-bottoms with a white braided rope for a belt Fashionable footwear: Taylor completed the summery outfit with a set of gray and white derby shoes with pearl-adorned heels The skate park-themed event was for the launch of Tease Dream, the new fragrance from Victoria's Secret. Taylor made sure to display the square bottle of perfume throughout the evening. Earlier on Tuesday, the lingerie label released an ad to YouTube for the new fragrance. New scent: The skate park-themed event was for the launch of Tease Dream, the new fragrance from Victoria's Secret Showing the merchandise: Taylor made sure to display the square bottle of perfume throughout the evening Classy ad: Earlier on Tuesday, the lingerie label released an ad to YouTube for the new fragrance Dynamic duo: The stylishly filmed clip stars Taylor and her fellow Victoria's Secret angel, Stella Maxwell, 28 The stylishly filmed clip stars Taylor and her fellow Victoria's Secret angel, Stella Maxwell, 28. The two beauties are seen skateboarding and biking around the Venice Beach Boardwalk. The clip, which seems indebted to the seaside LA neighborhood, takes the two models to a skate park, where Taylor tries her best to ride a board flat on her stomach. Whee! The two beauties are seen skateboarding and biking around the Venice Beach Boardwalk Seaside paradise: The clip, which seems indebted to the seaside LA neighborhood, takes the two models to a skate park, where Taylor tries her best to ride a board flat on her stomach Awesome ladies: During the sun-dappled event, Taylor relaxed with skaters Eunice Chang, Victoria Taylor and Claire Weaver atop a half-pipe ramp Major reunion: Later in the evening, the angelic beauty was pictured with her ad co-star, Stella During the sun-dappled event, Taylor relaxed with skaters Eunice Chang, Victoria Taylor and Claire Weaver atop a half-pipe ramp. Later in the evening, the angelic beauty was pictured with her ad co-star, Stella. The Northern Irish model was dressed in a punky black leather jacket and a skintight pair of black leather pants with combat boots. Next to Taylor she looked like a photonegative, her dark outfit contrasting with the white crop. The two models showed off the new fragrance and mimed giving the little bottle a kiss. Edgy look: The Northern Irish model was dressed in a punky black leather jacket and a skintight pair of black leather pants with combat boots Night and day: Next to Taylor she looked like a photonegative, her dark outfit contrasting with the white crop Having some fun: The two models showed off the new fragrance and mimed giving the little bottle a kiss Earlier in the day, Taylor attended an event at the Victoria's Secret store at Los Angeles' Beverly Center. The brunette beauty was dressed in a glittery, sheer orange jumpsuit. She rolled the sleeves up on the flowing outfit to show off her toned arms and had a matching pair of striking orange heels. Unmissable: Earlier in the day, Taylor attended an event at the Victoria's Secret store at Los Angeles' Beverly Center. The brunette beauty was dressed in a glittery, sheer orange jumpsuit It's the hot new hotel on the New York City scene. And Cara Delevingne and Suki Waterhouse were putting in appearances at the Times Square Edition launch party in the Big Apple on Tuesday night, settling in for a wild sleepover. The 26-year-old model and actress ditched her usual low-key, tomboy style in favour of an uber glamorous look. Stepping out: Cara Delevingne was putting in an appearance at the Times Square Edition hotel launch party in the Big Apple on Tuesday night, settling in for a wild sleepover Cara put on a leggy display in a pair of thigh-high boots and a matching minidress with a daring cut-out slashed across the bust. The long-sleeved look was impossibly chic, showing off her svelte model physique. She styled her dark blonde locks in a high ponytail complete with long hair extensions, and opted for a heavy make-up look. Fellow British beauty: Suki Waterhouse was also in attendance, celebrating the hot new hotel on the NYC scene Keeping it casual: She dressed down in a khaki T-shirt bearing the slogan 'Woman' and a pair of baggy boyfriend jeans By contrast, Suki was dressed down in a khaki T-shirt bearing the slogan 'Woman' and a pair of baggy boyfriend jeans. The 27-year-old star styled her long bob in perfect waves, tying one section up with a twee white bow. The British beauties joined a host of famous faces at the event, where all the models had rooms at the hotel. Models united: The British beauties joined a host of famous faces at the event, where all the models had rooms at the hotel. Pictured (from left to right) Joan Smalls, Cara, Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber and Elsa Hosk VIP guests: The models enjoyed a VIP preview of the lavish new hotel suites Motown legend Diana Ross put in a surprise appearance at the event, delighting the crowd with a special performance. The likes of Kendall Jenner, Joan Smalls, Elsa Hosk and Hailey Bieber were also in attendance at the glamorous event. Cara has been keeping a low profile since the Chanel show at Paris Fashion Week, where she paid tribute to late designer Karl Lagerfeld. She joined fellow muses Penelope Cruz, 44, and Kaia Gerber, 17, as they paraded down a snowy runway for the show which marked Karl's final collection as creative director for the design house following his death from cancer last month. Her prosperous career in the TV and film industry spans over two decades. But Keira Knightley stunned viewers when she displayed her hidden musical talent during an hilarious appearance with presenter Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday's edition of The Tonight Show. The Bend It Like Beckham actress, 33, received a standing ovation from the host, 44, as she used her teeth as an instrument to play classic track Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head by B. J. Thomas and Luis Fonsi's hit single Despacito. Keira Knightley Plays "Despacito" on Her Teeth and Reveals a "Love Actually" Secret Keira Knightley shows off her ability to play Luis Fonsis "Despacito" on her teeth, and she reveals little-known trivia about her hat in THAT scene of Love Actually Posted by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 Bizarre: Keira Knightley stunned viewers when she displayed her hidden musical talent during an hilarious appearance with presenter Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday's edition of The Tonight Show During the interview, the screen star revealed she was inspired to play songs with her teeth by a child from her old primary school. When asked whether she has a hidden talent, the London native revealed: 'I can play my teeth! 'There was a boy at school when I was about seven or eight and he went on a talent show on TV, so he was like the coolest person ever, and he played his teeth. 'So, everybody at my school was like, thats cool, so everybody from that school can probably play their teeth.' Hilarious: The Bend It Like Beckham actress, 33, received a standing ovation from the host, 44, as she used her teeth as an instrument to play classic track Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head by B. J. Thomas and Luis Fonsi's hit single Despacito History: During the interview, the screen star revealed she was inspired to play songs with her teeth by a child from her old primary school Keira demonstrated her bizarre skill by playing singles Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head and Despacito, with garnered a standing ovation from an impressed Jimmy. Following her performance, the brunette beauty joked: 'I can't believe my husband [musician James Righton, 35] hasn't put me in a band yet!' Elsewhere in the interview, she revealed her daughter Edie, three, is 'obsessed' with CGIanimated television series PAW Patrol, and branded it 'toddler crack'. Keira explained: 'My baby is three and a half, she's a toddler, she's huge! She loves PAW Patrol, we're really deep into it, it's like toddler crack! Impressive: 'So, everybody at my school was like, thats cool, so everybody from that school can probably play their teeth', she explained Wow: The London native demonstrated her bizarre skill by playing singles Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head and Despacito, with garnered a standing ovation from an impressed Jimmy 'We have to act the show out during bathtime. When I join in, she's says ''no, don't do that', but I get paid for this! The Pride & Prejudice star went on to share the reason behind her choice of accessory during her appearance in 2003's romantic comedy Love Actually. Keira said: 'The only thing i remember from the film is that I got the biggest zit of my life! It was like a head on top of my head, so that's the reason why I wore a hat. 'I only watch my movies once. It's weird, it's like hearing your own voice, so I only see the bad bits', she admitted. 'I had the biggest zit so I wore a hat': The Pride & Prejudice star went on to share the reason behind her choice of accessory during her appearance in 2003's romantic comedy Love Actually Shy: 'I only watch my movies once. It's weird, it's like hearing your own voice, so I only see the bad bits', she admitted further into her appearance The actress, who has starred in over 40 films to date, recently spoke about the effect of a breakdown she suffered at the age of 23, when the lifestyle that comes with being an actress became too much for her. The New Year's Eve star had featured in over 20 movies, including adventure film King Arthur and romantic drama Pride & Prejudice. Keira shared with Balance Magazine: 'My world crashed when I was 22. Everything stopped working and I felt as if I was broken into tiny pieces; as if my brain was literally shattered. 'Yet all of a sudden, people were being very vocal with their views on me as a young woman and as an actress. I lost confidence in myself because I was made to feel that I didnt deserve to be doing what I was doing. 'There was no way I was going to be able to get on the red carpet without having a f*****g panic attack. So I had hypnotherapy and it worked. Thankfully, I havent had that feeling for a long time.' Aside from being a Hollywood star, Keira is the mother to her three-year-old daughter Edie whom she shares with her husband James Righton. She's been on the tourist trail in Singapore with her boyfriend Daniel Spiller. And Danielle Armstrong couldn't resist taking one final bikini snap before heading on to the next phase of her holiday, Dubai, on Wednesday. The 30-year-old former TOWIE star showcased her slender physique in a lime green two-piece with tiny puncture detailing on the triangle top. Snap happy: Danielle Armstrong couldn't resist taking one final bikini picture in Singapore before heading on to the next phase of her holiday on Wednesday Danielle's neon bright swimwear emphasised her deep tan and she covered up in a matching kimono top with check detailing. She captioned the image: 'Blending In Bikini @ittybittykinis Beach Kimono @prettylittlething #blendingin #lastday #infinitypool #rooftop'. Speaking directly to her followers, Danielle filmed herself at her lavish hotel pool, wiping sweat from her brow as she cast surreptitious looks at her fellow bathers. 'Sticking out like a sore thumb!': Danielle filmed herself at her lavish hotel pool, wiping sweat from her brow as she cast surreptitious looks at her fellow bathers She lamented: 'Last day in Singapore, I feel like I'm kind of ready to go, we've been in this hotel for over a week now. 'It's so hot, it's that weather where you don't want to sunbathe, it's so humid. 'I feel like I'm sticking out like a sore thumb right now. Girls from Essex, Manchester, Scousers are known for wearing very over the top, bright swimwear. Everyone's looking at me like, "What are you wearing?!"' Living the high life: She's been on the tourist trail in Singapore with her boyfriend Daniel Spiller She declared: 'I am in my element right now, the biggest Louis Vuitton shop in the world!' Aside from the typical tourist hotspots, Danielle made a beeline for the designer boutiques during her stay. Ferne McCann's BFF was left frustrated when her Herne Bay player boyfriend Daniel managed to find all the luxury purchases he wanted, while she left empty-handed. She declared: 'I am in my element right now, the biggest Louis Vuitton shop in the world!' Just a few minutes later, she moaned: 'Everything I wanted, they didn't have in stock. Girls can never find what they want. A guy walks in, and they find everything!' She has just returned from the Maldives after celebrating pal Billie Faiers' wedding. And while she has returned home, Ferne McCann was feeling nostalgic for the exotic jaunt on Wednesday morning as she shared a stunning throwback snap while frolicking with her daughter on the beach. As she swung Sunday, 16 months, into the air, the 28-year-old former TOWIE star was showing off her phenomenal frame while rocking matching swimwear to the tot. Cheeky! Ferne McCann was feeling nostalgic for the jaunt on Wednesday morning as she shared a stunning throwback snap while frolicking with her daughter on the beach Ferne recently released her fitness DVD Fit As Ferne and she proved to be her own best advertisement while showing off her stunning frame. Sporting a spotted two-piece, she not only showed off her flat stomach but also her muscular legs which boasted incredible definition. Sunday meanwhile sported a one-piece which complimented her mum's stylish ensemble while gazing lovingly during the jaunt in the air. The sweet snap comes after Ferne surprised Billie by performing a rendition of Stand By Me during the big day in the Maldives. Cheeky! The sweet snap comes after Ferne surprised Billie by performing a rendition of Stand By Me during the big day in the Maldives The new bride, 29, revealed her long-time pal delighted her by taking to the mic during her reception to belt out the Ben E King classic, making it a day to remember for her and new husband Greg Shepherd, 33. Speaking after tying the knot at the five-star Kuramathi Island Resort last Tuesday, Billie told OK! Magazine: 'It was such a lovely surprise.' Ferne clearly impressed the happy couple with her vocal ability, with The Mummy Diaries star adding: 'Shes got a brilliant voice'. Belting it out: The former TOWIE favourite is no stranger to showcasing her voice, and shocked her Instagram followers with her vocals last year The former TOWIE favourite is no stranger to showcasing her voice, and shocked her Instagram followers with her vocals last year. Fans were left stunned as Ferne sang baby daughter Sunday, 16 months, to sleep with a moving rendition of Paolo Nutini's Last Request. The star also revealed last year that she once tried to make it big in the music industry by auditioning for the X Factor in the past - however, she wasn't successful. She's been keeping busy following the release of her latest film The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part. But Tiffany Haddish proved there is no rest for the wicked as she attended the Los Angeles Community College 2019 Gala, held at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, on Tuesday evening. The comedian, 39, put her best fashion foot forward at the event as she slipped into a bright pink wide-leg jumpsuit, which cinched her svelte waist with its trendy tie-belt. Busy bee: Tiffany Haddish proved there is no rest for the wicked as she attended the Los Angeles Community College 2019 Gala, held at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, on Tuesday Upping the style ante, the Girls Trip star complemented her outfit with a navy kimono-style cardigan, embellished with leaf printing throughout. The actress ensured all eyes were on her as she boosted her physique in a pair of patent peep-toe heels. Keeping in theme with her bright out, Tiffany opted for a glossy rose-toned make-up look and wore her tresses in a straight fashion. All eyes on her: The comedian, 39, put her best fashion foot forward at the event as she slipped into a bright pink wide-leg jumpsuit, which cinched her svelte waist with its trendy tie-belt Chic: Upping the style ante, the Girls Trip star complemented her outfit with a navy kimono-style cardigan, embellished with leaf printing throughout The event featured a special performance by musicians Herb Alpert and Lani Hall. During the gala, Laugh Factory's Jamie Masada scooped the first ever Rodney Respect Award, while Harvey Englander of Englander Knabe & Allen and Dennis Gilbert of The Gilbert Group were also honoured. Tiffany's appearance comes after she told The Guardian that despite her huge success, she never really feels as though she fits in with the other A-listers. The comedian said: 'I definitely, totally, feel like I'm on the outside. I mean, where I came from is definitely on the outside, and that's what made me who I am.' Los Angeles native Tiffany also recalled the time she hit on Hollywood royalty, Leonardo DiCaprio, 44, after meeting him at a Beverly Hills party. Standing tall: The actress ensured all eyes were on her as she boosted her physique in a pair of patent peep-toe heels Having fun: Maintaining her hilarious persona, the star stuck her tongue out and danced along the red carpet Star-studded: Legendary host Larry King was also in attendance at the event She said to him: 'So I want to hit that - but I only want to do it to you as your character out of What's Eating Gilbert Grape.' The star adds that he never called. It comes as little surprise that Tiffany still gets starstruck as she admits her life now is a far cry away from her humble beginnings. The If Loving You Is Wrong star was born and raised in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in South Central Los Angeles. Stunning: Keeping in theme with her bright out, Tiffany opted for a glossy rose-toned make-up look and wore her tresses in a straight fashion In good company: The brunette appeared in great spirits as she joined comedian Dom Irrera Her father left at three and when she was eight, her mother was involved in a car accident which left her brain damaged and potentially triggered her schizophrenia. She claims her stepfather admitted to cutting the brakes in the hope of killing her and her children, but remarkably they get along and he came to her show recently. Tiffany ended up in the care system where she was molested. Eventually her grandmother got custody of her and her siblings. She has been sharing a plethora of bikini-clad snaps after marrying Greg Shepherd in an idyllic beach ceremony in the Maldives last week. And Billie Faiers didn't disappoint fans as she kept them updated with their adventures on day three of her blissful honeymoon. The newlywed, 29, slipped into a red and white patterned bikini to cool off from the balmy climes in an outdoor shower after a busy afternoon snorkelling. Beach babe: Billie Faiers didn't disappoint fans as she kept them updated with her and Greg Shepherd's adventures on day three of her blissful honeymoon Billie showcased her jaw-dropping figure in the halterneck tie-string bikini as she posed up a storm in the waterfall shower. Greg, 33, played the devoted Instagram husband in taking the sizzling snap, but joked he was getting fed-up of the constant impromptu photoshoots. He wrote atop of it: '"Take a picture of me in the shower" she says. I would like a for every time she asked'. Taking a dip: The newlywed, 29, slipped into a red and white patterned bikini to cool off from the balmy climes in an outdoor shower after a busy afternoon snorkelling Out at sea: It wasn't long until Billie and Greg ventured into the clear blue waters as they explored the reef Underwater: Not one to miss a photo opportunity, the mother-of-two showcased her slender physique in a white bridal swimsuit as she posed underwater in her snorkelling gear The Mummy Diaries star and Greg kick-started their day with a romantic bike ride around the island, with Billie commenting the stunning sea views looked like something out of a postcard. After a celery juice and freshly-cooked breakfast, the pair headed out on a boat trip, where they watched a pod of dolphins swim past. And it wasn't long until Billie and Greg ventured into the clear blue waters as they explored the reef. Delicious: After exhausting themselves out with their exercise, the pair headed for a romantic lunch date where they tucked into the island's cuisine Blissful: Donning matching white bibs and enjoying a chilled glass of white wine, Billie told fans she was in 'heaven with her hubby' as she lapped up the sunshine Not one to miss a photo opportunity, the mother-of-two showcased her slender physique in a white bridal swimsuit as she posed underwater in her snorkelling gear. After exhausting themselves out, the pair headed for a romantic lunch date where they tucked into the island's cuisine. Donning matching white bibs and enjoying a chilled glass of white wine, Billie told fans she was in 'heaven with her hubby' as she lapped up the sunshine. Wow: The Mummy Diaries star and Greg kick-started the day with a romantic bike ride around the island Idyllic: Billie commenting the stunning island views looked like something out of a postcard The happy couple, who are proud parents to Nelly, four, and Arthur, two, flew out on their honeymoon on Wednesday after tying the knot in front on 95 of their closest family and friends in a beach ceremony last week. The couple spoke to OK! magazine about the ceremony as Billie gushed it was like a 'fairy tale', with Greg pulling out all the stops by arriving on a speedboat. The blonde confessed: 'Other than the days that Nelly and Arthur were born, it was the best day of my life. It was like a fairy tale - all the stress and tears were worth it. She added: 'Its so lovely for me to finally be a Shepherd and share a surname with my children. Marriage ties our little family together completely.' Trip of a lifetime: After a celery juice and freshly-cooked breakfast, the pair headed out on a boat trip, where they watched a pod of dolphins swim past before going snorkelling Greg admitted he was blown away by his new wife's beauty at the nuptials, revealing: 'She looked incredible in her dress. Explaining her decision making process behind the gown, which featured a risque sheer panel to showcase her cleavage, the yummy mummy said: 'As soon as I tried it on I had "the feeling"; when you know you know! 'Because we didnt get married in a church I could get away with something more daring'. Celebrations: The happy couple, who are proud parents to Nelly, four, and Arthur, two, flew out on their honeymoon on Wednesday after tying the knot in a beach ceremony last week Whilst Billie and Greg had a wonderful wedding surrounded by their nearest and dearest, the pair have been hit by claims that there was loud, disruptive behaviour amongst their wedding party. Billie, who partied until 3am on her wedding night, dismissed the claims, stating: 'The hotel manager hasn't had any complaints about our party. 'I was half expecting some loudness as there are 95 of us out here celebrating [but] we have always been very respectful of the island and the other guests holidaying here'. Greg popped the question to Billie in 2014 when she fell pregnant with their first child Nelly, two years after first embarking on a relationship. She was just granted a restraining order against a man who pretended to be fictional assassin John Wick. And Natalie Portman appeared to rest a little easier following the news, as she went out with her daughter Amalia, 23 months, to a bakery in Los Angeles on Wednesday. The Oscar-winning actress, 37, put on a casually chic display as she donned a white button-up shirt over denim jeans. Family outing: Natalie Portman looked casually chic in a shirt and jeans as she headed out to a bakery with daughter Amalia in Los Angeles on Tuesday Natalie pulled her brunette locks into a tight ponytail, while she shielded her eyes in a pair of shades and showcased her clear complexion by going make-up free. Stepping out in colourful trainers, the V For Vendetta star completed her look by carrying a denim tote bag over her shoulder. Ever the doting mum, Natalie carried Amalia in one arm as the adorable tot tucked into a pastry, and the little one was dressed in a Time's Up T-Shirt and jeans. Her outing comes after Natalie was granted a permanent restraining order against a man who claimed to have a telepathic connection with her. Sweet: Ever the doting mum, Natalie carried Amalia in one arm as they adorable tot tucked into a pastry, and the little one was dressed in a Time's Up T-Shirt and jeans The Black Swan actress sought the order against the man - whose real name has not been made public, but who told police his name was John Wick - after he showed up at her house and tried to get into her gated community last month. And now, according to The Blast, Natalie has had her application approved by courts, which 'will last for five years and bars him from coming within 100 yards of her' as well as her husband Benjamin Millepied, and their two children Aleph, seven, and Amalia, 23 months. According to documents obtained by the website, the man showed up at her house and attempted to enter the gated community on January 31. The man, whose identity is unknown, was said to have given the name 'John Wick' when confronted by police with a driving licence later confirming his true identity. The website reported a petition for a firearms restraining order was filed two weeks prior by the LAPD against a man with the same name. The officer who submitted the report explained the man 'rang the intercom/doorbell multiple times but said nothing when attempts to engage him were made over the intercom'. When police made contact with him, 'he identified himself as John Wick, even though officers had his Colorado Driver's License which confirmed his true identity.' The man told them he had 'spoken to the reporting person several times, telepathically, and that he had travelled from Colorado to Los Angeles to meet the individual.' He was eventually placed under a mental health hold and the detective had the firearms restraining order granted. Cheat viewers were left scratching their heads after Tuesday night's episode as they desperately attempted to find the link between warring duo Leah and Rose. The new ITV1 drama, starring Katherine Kelly and Molly Windsor as the respective leads, follows the story of uni student Rose who is accused of cheating on an essay by professor Leah, leading to a campaign of terrorism and Leah's husband's death. Following the episode, debate was sparked far and wide about what the possible link could be between the duo shortly before fans were left raging at the fact that Leah's husband Adam, played by Tom Goodman-Hill, sent Rose an intimate snap. Who did it? Cheat viewers were left scratching their heads after Tuesday night's episode as they desperately attempted to find the link between warring duo Leah and Rose Since hitting screens on Monday, Cheat has left viewers captivated as the story plays out of Leah accusing student Rose of plagiarising on an essay - leading to Rose's revenge mission which led to steamy moments with Adam. Flash-forward scenes show the student and professor chatting through a prison plexiglass over Adam's death, although it is unclear who was the culprit. Prior to the show's release, Tom said: 'You dont know who did it or how or why. There are two women facing each other in a prison interview room and you dont know who pushed whom too far.' Many toyed with the idea that Rose and Leah are related, with different mothers but share the same father. One user penned: 'She's leah's half sister....or She's PHYSCO'. Oh no: The new ITV1 drama, starring Katherine Kelly and Molly Windsor as the respective leads, follows the story of uni student Rose who is accused of cheating on an essay by professor Leah leading to a campaign of terrorism and Leah's husband's death Another far reaching claim read: 'Rose's mum was a mature student/student and was accused of cheating by leah's dad which lead to her "accident" which Rose when she grew up plotted her revenge him by destroying his daughters life'. The relation theories prevailed, as a user wrote: 'Can only assume that Leah and Rose are sisters by other mothers #revenge #cheat... #cheat Im guessing the dad had a fling with #rose last year and thats when she nicked the pic off wall. #grippingstuff'. Another, reading: 'My theory on #Cheat... Rose is her daughter. Put her up for adoption yrs ago, hence the reluctance to have a kid now and Rose stalking her'. Shocker: Another, reading: 'My theory on #Cheat... Rose is her daughter. Put her up for adoption yrs ago, hence the reluctance to have a kid now and Rose stalking her' Shocker! He was seen to send a 'd**k pic' to Rose Others were looking at the theories, saying: 'Hope the writer of #Cheat isn't looking at Twitter, thinking; 'Why didn't I think of that - when I realised I'd got to 9.55 on the final episode and shoe-horned any old rubbish into the last 5 minutes'. Fans were equally stunned at the fact Adam sent Rose an intimate picture following a boozy night in the pub - despite his wife's fight with the student. Shocked viewers wrote: 'Oh adam you dirty sod.. #cheat... IM CRINGING SO HARD. Adam is like a cringey school kid .ughhhhh. #Cheat'. Hilariously, a viewer made a spoof account for Leah, in which they referenced the 'd**k pic' Adam sent to Rose, the death of their cat and her engagement ring which Rose stole on Tuesday night's show. Cheeky: Hilariously, a viewer made a spoof account for Leah, in which they referenced the 'd**k pic' Adam sent to Rose, the death of their cat and her engagement ring which Rose stole on Tuesday night's show Daniel Radcliffe resumed filming for biographical drama Escape from Pretoria in Adelaide, Australia on Wednesday. The former Harry Potter, 29, transformed into South African activist anti-apartheid Tim Jenkin, who was imprisoned in Pretoria's Maximum Security prison in the late 1970s. Clad in a button down blue shirt and grey flared trousers, the British actor appeared in his element as she shot an intense scene to bring to life Jenkin's real life escape from the brutal prison. And action! Daniel Radcliffe, 29, resumed filming for biographical drama Escape from Pretoria in Adelaide, Australia on Wednesday Sporting longer shaggy hair and spectacles, Daniel nailed the throwback look as he sprung into action while cameras commenced. Daniel was seen covered in sweat as he quickly fled, before stopping to take a break with the camera crew. Filming began for the highly anticipated movie at Mitcham train station, in the suburb of Lower Mitcham, Adelaide, three weeks ago, and is set to continue over the next few weeks. The film is written and directed by Francis Annan and based on Tim Jenkin's autobiography, Inside Out: Escape From Pretoria Prison. In character: The former Harry Potter star transformed into South African activist anti-apartheid Tim Jenkin (R), who was imprisoned in Pretoria's Maximum Security prison in the late 1970s Role: Clad in a button down blue shirt and grey flared trousers, the British actor appeared in his element as she shot an intense scene to bring to life Jenkin's plight to life Cameras rolling: Sporting longer shaggy hair and spectacles, Daniel nailed the throwback look as he sprung into action while cameras commenced Daniel's character Tim and his friend Stephen Lee were two white South Africans branded as 'terrorists' and thrown in jail in 1978. Staunch supporters of Nelson Mandelas African National Congress, they had been locked up in the maximum-security jail for setting off harmless leaflet propaganda bombs in a bid to spread dissent against the apartheid regime in 1970s South Africa. The men were so determined to break free that they had asked relatives to smuggle them money for taxi fares to a train station. A third prisoner, Alex Moumbaris, was brought in to be part of the escape. The idea for the makeshift key came to Stephen when he was lying on his bunk one evening and he remembered how he had learned to pick the lock of his back door of his home as a youngster. But they would have to do it right under the noses of the guards. So he smuggled the parts he needed from the workshop to his cell in a flask and began work in the dead of night. By trial and error, he would try the key each day, using marks left on it when it jammed to work out which parts he needed to file. Within days it worked. Over the next 18 months the pair would slip out each night after lights out to start work on the next door, then the one after that. Intense: Daniel was seen covered in sweat as he quickly fled, before stopping to take a break with the camera crew Resuming: Filming for the upcoming drama is set continue over the next few weeks in Adelaide Real: The film is written and directed by Francis Annan and based on Tim Jenkin's autobiography, Inside Out: Escape From Pretoria Prison But it was the fifth and sixth doors that would test their nerves to the point of breaking. These were right next to the guards' office and they would surely be seen or heard if they tried passing through with anyone nearby. So they came up with an ingenious plan to leave dummies - made from boiler suits stuffed with sheets - in their beds, sneak downstairs, hide in a cupboard and wait for the warder to go upstairs. Then they would get to work as they had done already on all the other doors behind them. One by one, they fashioned keys for them all. All except the eleventh and final door, which they decided it would be too risky for a dry run so it would have to be done once, on the fateful night of their actual escape. Real story: Daniel's character Tim and his friend Stephen Lee were two white South Africans branded as 'terrorists' and thrown in jail in 1978 History: Staunch supporters of Nelson Mandelas African National Congress, Jenkin (L) and Lee (R)had been locked up in the maximum-security jail for setting off harmless leaflet propaganda bombs in a bid to spread dissent against the apartheid regime in 1970s South Africa A huge police manhunt was launched to re-capture the fugitives, but by then they were already across the border en route to the UK. Escape from Pretoria is an Australian/UK co-production, financed with the assistance of the South Australia Film Corporation. Jurassic Park star Sam Neill, 71, plays South African social campaigner and activist Denis Goldberg - who distracted the guards while they made their escape. As reported by Screendaily.com, Goldberg was imprisoned with other key members of the anti-apartheid movement. Goldberg received four life terms in 1964 and was released in 1986 having served 22 years in Pretoria's Maximum Security prison. She recently sparked concern among fans as it was revealed her father had been unable to contact her. Yet Paris Hilton looked in good spirits as she attended the ProD.n.a. Skincare launch party at the Just Cavalli nightclub in Milan on Tuesday. The hotel heiress, 38, looked sensational on the red carpet as she posed up a storm in a plunging purple gown. Working it: Paris Hilton looked in good spirits as she attended the ProD.n.a. Skincare launch party at the Just Cavalli nightclub in Milan on Tuesday Paris was a vision of beauty in the glamorous dress which featured a daringly low-cut neckline that was slashed to the navel to showcase her cleavage. The semi-sheer skirt was voluminous with its layers of tulle, and Paris wasted no time swishing the fabric around as she posed on the red carpet. Putting a quirky spin on the look, she accessorised with a pair of sheer fingerless gloves, whilst she also donned a pair of silver chandelier earrings. Dressed to impress: The hotel heiress, 38, looked sensational as she posed up a storm in a plunging purple gown Paris' outing came after she sparked concern when her father revealed he had desperately been trying to contact her to no avail. She took to Instagram on Friday to share a throwback clip of her music video, Stars Are Blind, but fans were more concerned by her dad Rick's comment. Under the clip, Rick Hilton, 63, posted: Paris it is very important you call Dads cell. We can't reach you on any of your lines [sic]'. Taking the plunge: Paris was a vision of beauty in the glamorous dress which featured a daringly low-cut neckline that was slashed to the navel to showcase her cleavage Leggy lady! The semi-sheer skirt was voluminous with its layers of tulle and featured a daring split across the front that showed off her tanned and toned pins All about the accessories: Putting a quirky spin on the look, she accessorised with a pair of sheer fingerless gloves, whilst she also donned a pair of silver chandelier earrings Concerned fans replied to his post, writing: 'dying to know what was so important'; 'Call your dad @parishilton'; 'girllll, call your dad!!!!!!'; 'omg! i hope she's ok'. Despite the concerns, it seems Rick's mind was put at ease, as he later shared a carefree clip listening to a song. Paris was no doubt kept away from her phone due to her busy schedule, with the television personality and DJ recently admitting that she's always rushed off her feet. Glam: Rodrigo looked dapper in a gold brocade suit at the event The star, who broke off her engagement to actor Chris Zylka in November, told The Mirror earlier this month: 'I don't have time for love right now. I hardly have time for myself.' She continued, saying: 'I am constantly travelling over 250 days a year, never home hardly, just focusing on myself, my business and my friends.' But Paris isn't worried about finding a man when the time comes, as she says there's 'always' guys for her to choose from, and insists her ideal man would be someone 'loyal' whom she can trust. The blonde beauty added: 'There is always a lot of guys everywhere, always. When I am ready, the most important thing is loyalty, someone who is your best friend and who you can trust and who loves you for you. 'When you know you know. But I don't know yet.' She was forced to backtrack on her comments regarding Liam Neeson last month, after saying he wasn't racist because of his performance in the film Widows. And Michelle Rodriguez tried to move past the incident, as she headed out to grab dinner-to-go at the Giorgio Baldi restaurant in Santa Monica, California, on Tuesday. The actress, 40, embraced a casually chic style, as she stepped out in a white co-ordinated ensemble that saw her pair a zip-up hoodie with a maxi skirt. Comfy: Michelle Rodriguez showcased her casually chic style in a white hoodie and maxi skirt as she grabbed dinner at an upmarket eatery in Santa Monica on Tuesday Michelle wore her cropped raven locks in a sleek, straight style, and the Fast And Furious beauty embraced her natural look as she sported a clear complexion. Keeping her feet warm in a pair of furry beige trainers, she opted not to wear any accessories so that she didn't distract from her striking ensemble. After grabbing her food, the star couldn't help but smile as she made her way home while carrying two brown paper bags. Natural look: Michelle wore her cropped raven locks in a sleek, straight style, and the Fast And Furious beauty embraced her natural look as she sported a clear complexion The actress is currently filming a new movie called Dreamland which explores the US opioid crises. The film also stars Evangeline Lily, Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp's daughter Lily-Rose Depp. The drama will follow the story of a university professor (Gary) as he makes a disturbing discovery about his employer, a pharmaceutical company with profound government influence bringing a new 'non-addictive' painkiller to market. A drug trafficker (Armie) who organises a multi-cartel operation moving Fentanyl between the US and Canada and an architect who is recovering from an OxyContin addiction who discovers the truth behind her son who is also involved with drugs. Michelle plays a DEA supervisor who clashes with Armie's character while Lily will portray his younger sister. Career: Michelle is currently filming a new movie called Dreamland which explores the US opioid crises (pictured in February, 2019) The film star's outing comes after she apologised to fans after saying Liam Neeson was not racist, despite his controversial interview last month, because he stars in Steve McQueen's film Widows. Liam hit the headlines when he talked to British newspaper The Independent about the theme of revenge in his new movie Cold Pursuit, admitting he once roamed the streets looking for a 'black b*stard' to hurt after someone close to him was raped. Liam sparked outrage regarding comments he made, with many branding him racist after he revealed a prior experience of wanting to 'murder a black man.' Taking to Instagram at the time, she wrote: 'To my friend and colleagues and my fans and community: I want to deep apologise for my recent choice of words, and poor use of example. 'In a pressure-filled situation, I defended a friend in the wrong way. I now realise how insensitive it was, and I had no intention of invoking such a terrible historical comparison.' She concluded: 'I have learned from this, and will grow from it. One love, MRod.' She has focused her attention on building her eponymous swimwear brand after being propelled into the spotlight with a six-month stint on Made In Chelsea in 2012. And Kimberley Garner turned up the heat as she slipped into a tiny black bikini for a sun-soaked trip to Miami beach on Tuesday, shortly after purchasing a house on America's Gulf Coast After arriving in America earlier on in the morning with her mum Geraldine, the socialite, 28, wasted no time in showcasing her lithe physique in the plunging two-piece. Bikini babe: Kimberley Garner turned up the heat as she slipped into a tiny black bikini for a sun-soaked trip to Miami beach on Tuesday Kimberley looked tanned and toned on the beach jaunt, with the triangle bikini top exhibiting her envy-inducing cleavage and taut midriff. The microscopic string bottoms, meanwhile made the most of her peachy derriere while making the most of her leggy frame. The television personality let her blonde locks fall loosely over her face in tousled waves while she accentuated her sun-kissed complexion with a dark smoky eye and pink lip. Kimberley proved the best advert for her swimwear line as she strutted down the beach before heading into the sea. The blonde beauty then headed out for dinner with her mum after settling into their plush hotel. Gym-honed: The socialite, 28, wasted no time in showcasing her lithe physique in the plunging two-piece after arriving in America Barely-there: The microscopic string bottoms, meanwhile made the most of her peachy derriere while making the most of her leggy frame Svelte: Kimberley looked tanned and toned on the beach jaunt, with the triangle bikini top exhibiting her envy-inducing cleavage and taut midriff Wow: The style of bikini bottoms Kimberley chose drew attention to her enviably peachy deteriorate as she frolicked on the shoreline Strutting her stuff: The television personality let her blonde locks fall loosely over her face in tousled waves Devoted: Kimberley has focused her attention on building her eponymous swimwear brand, after being propelled into the spotlight with a six-month stint on Made In Chelsea in 2012. Designer: Kimberley showed off her expensive taste for fashion as she carried her essentials in a Chanel pink beach bag Working it: Kimberley proved the best advert for her swimwear line as she strutted down the beach Beauty: She accentuated her sun-kissed complexion with a dark smoky eye and pink lip Speaking to MailOnline, Kimberley admitted she flew to Miami after purchasing a dream home in the coastal city. 'I worked very hard last year and had even moved home for a few months to save money,' she explained. 'I really had my head down working to concentrate on goals, but achieved it on New Years Eve, praise God, and flew over here. Completing the sale on the plane over.' Time for dinner! Kimberley clutched a pair of white plimsolls and a patterned pashmina as she collected her belongings and headed back to her hotel At ease: The star looked thoroughly relaxed as she took a swim Reflecting on her new home, the swimwear designer admitted it is a world away from the hustle and bustle of her busy life in London, 'Its right on the beach, and really is a dream come true,' she explained. 'I am over doing the interior design, going for a beachy chilled vibe for the place. 'I wont be moving here, as London is one hundred percent home, but really overjoyed and proud to have achieved it.' Across the pond: Kimberley arrived in America earlier on Tuesday with her mum Geraldine Although the reality personality is a swimwear designer - she is now following in her familys footsteps and venturing into high-end property development. After extensive renovations, the former reality star is said to have increased the value of a house which she bought in 2013 for 1.2 million, by over 1 million. The starlet's choice to go into property has resulted in her London pad doubling in value over a five-year period. Kimberley recently split from her ex-boyfriend, who she kept very much out of the spotlight - something she doesn't plan to do with her next relationship. Speaking to MailOnline, she said: 'When I take it to the next step and when I decide to be with someone forever I will be more than happy to have them in the public eye. Latest venture: Although the reality personality is a swimwear designer - she is now following in her familys footsteps and venturing into high-end property development 'It would be really cool to have my husband and babies in the public eye. It was nice to have a bit of privacy with my ex, but in the future I wouldn't mind.' Speaking of her split with her mystery man ex, Kimberley said: 'We broke up for a year and got back together for a few months and broke up again. He's still lovely and we're really good friends.' Kimberley shot to fame on the third series of Made In Chelsea back in 2012, where she was romantically linked to Richard Dinan and Spencer Matthews.' She became a household name thanks to her role as Demelza in Poldark. But despite being devastated the show has come to an end, Eleanor Tomlinson has described starring opposite Aidan Turner on the BBC drama as a 'springboard' for her career. The 26-year-old British actress is excited to start the next chapter of her life, jetting off to Los Angeles for pilot season to see if she can make it in Hollywood. Moving on: Eleanor Tomlinson has described starring in BBC drama Poldark as a 'springboard' for her career Revealing that she's focusing on the positives about the end of Poldark, she told The Daily Telegraph: 'There were lots of tears; it was very sad, but also exciting.' Eleanor has come a long way since her first major role in teen rom com Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging and is now hoping to capitalise on her success. The actress has flown out to Los Angeles on the hunt for auditions and says it feels 'liberating' to be trying something new. While her early experience of the industry saw her crushed by knockbacks and upset by the 'cut-throat' and 'mean' audition process, Eleanor insists she is a different girl these days. Big things ahead: The 26-year-old British actress is excited to start the next chapter of her life, jetting off to Los Angeles for pilot season to see if she can make it in Hollywood (oictured with Aidan Turner in Poldark) 'When I walk into a room, I'm no longer the unknown actress. That's really nice in an industry that's so competitive, to be able to walk in and be seen and not be belittled', she told the paper. She won't be reinventing her look for Hollywood, however, admitting her flame-haired tresses had become her trademark. 'I've established myself as a redhead now, I could never be quite as strong as a blonde. And who cares if it's not natural?', she said. Eleanor has already started to carve a name for herself elsewhere, recently impressing with her role in Colette opposite Keira Knightley. Debut: While her early experience of the industry saw her crushed by knockbacks and upset by the 'cut-throat' and 'mean' audition process, Eleanor insists she is a different girl these days Early career: Eleanor has come a long way since her first major role in teen rom com Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (pictured right) and is now hoping to capitalise on her success She shared a tribute to co-star Aidan, 35, as well as the cast and crew of Poldark, after filming ended in Bristol in February. The actress planted a kiss on the actor's cheek while holding his face, as he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and smiled. Wearing a red dress to transform into her character Demelza, Eleanor gushed about the cast and crew as she expressed her gratitude for working with them on the show. Eleanor wrote: '"Life is precious and should not be scorned. The thing is to find some purpose, to go on living". Goodbye Poldark. 'Thank you to the incredible cast and crew that have made this series over the last 5 years. What a family we are.' Tribute: Eleanor paid tribute to Aidan and the cast and crew of Poldark after filming ended in Bristol in February Human Ken Doll Rodrigo Alves has revealed three surgeons turned him down for corrective chin surgery after his implant exploded, but a miracle doctor has stepped in to save the day. The TV star, 35, had a new implant fitted just weeks ago in Iran, but woke up to discover a permanent dent had appeared. He admitted he was left feeling devastated over his appearance and worried for his health as the three screws holding his implant in place became infected. Stressful time: Rodrigo Alves told MailOnline three surgeons declined to treat him after his chin EXPLODED... but a miracle doctor will fill in the dent with fat from his neck and back Happy news: On Saturday, Rodrigo, pictured at Nomad restaurant in Istanbul, will be treated by Dr Ali who feels confident that he can replace the implant and fill the dent Rodrigo told MailOnline: 'Three surgeons turned me down for surgery and I didn't know what I was going to do. 'One declined to do the operation last minute after realising it wouldn't be possible for him to fix it to my level of expectations. It's been very stressful. 'I have found a surgeon called Dr Ali, who can perform the procedure in Istanbul, Turkey, on Saturday, where I have been filming a new project. He continued: 'He has taken lots of X-Rays and done a CAT scan and feels confident that he can fix it. Working on his health: Rodrigo admitted he was left feeling devastated over his appearance and worried for his health as the three screws holding his implant in place became infected Tough time: Rodrigo has been putting a brave face on things after being left in lots of pain from his recent surgery He said: 'My new doctor is going to use a type of implant called Medpore, which is like a fake piece of bone - I want my chin to look smaller on a V shape' 'During my last chin surgery, the surgeon used a silicone implant that got infected causing me a lot of pain. 'The doctor used three screws to hold the silicone implant firmly in place, but this is now affecting my teeth and making them spread apart.' 'I have been very upset and I'm on pain medication. It is very frustrating to find myself in this situation right now. 'I had to cancel all my TV shows and it's got in the way of me promoting my single, Plastic World.' Oh no! Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, he said he was 'in tears' over his recent chin rupture For the cameras: Human Ken Doll joined forces with Doctor Ali to film scenes for new TV show Behind the scenes: The Brazilian ensured his trip to Istanbul was captured on camera for a new TV documentary series on plastic surgery Rodrigo said he's more confident that this surgery will be a success. He said: 'They are going to use a type of implant called Medpore, which is like a fake piece of bone. 'Then he will use fat from my neck and jaw line to fill up the dent which has been created by the infection. A sense of purpose: Rodrigo said he wanted to bring awareness of the risks that comes with plastic surgery and potential complications Trip: The trendy star caught the eye in a red and black blazer while he sat with the doctor discussing plastic surgery Location, location, location: Rodrigo took a trip to Comfort Zone, cosmetic surgery 'I want my chin to look smaller on a V shape and he will shave my bone to achieve that look.' Rodrigo also recently had his 11th nose job done in Iran, which he said has been a huge success. He enthused that he was able to breathe for the first time in four years after during his recent 6,000 cosmetic surgery quest for perfection. The right look: Human Ken Doll framed his chin with his hands as he revealed three surgeons turned him down for corrective chin surgery after his implant exploded Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, Rodrigo said he was 'in tears' over his recent chin rupture. He lamented about a future singing appearance: 'How can I go there to talk about my song when I have a big dent in my chin? 'I have been in tears as I have been in pain, can't feel my mouth and have been struggling to eat.' She always exudes sophistication. And Mary Berry was impeccably turned out as always as she joined her daughter Annabel Hunning for Ladies Day at Cheltenham Festival on Wednesday. The beloved baker, 83, seemed in good spirits as she attended the second day of the racing event, beaming broadly on the outing. Two's company: Mary Berry was impeccably turned out as always as she joined her daughter Annabel Hunning for Ladies Day at Cheltenham Festival on Wednesday Mary cut a sophisticated figure on the outing as she teamed a eggshell wool coat with a matching pencil skirt. She teamed the garment with a matching trilby hat, whilst peeking out from her jacket was a silk pussybow blouse. The former Great British Bake Off judge finished off the look in appropriate fashion by donning a pair of riding boots. Stepping out in style: The beloved baker, 83, seemed in good spirits as she attended the second day of the racing event, beaming broadly on the outing Annabel looked equally as stylish for the outing, yet opted for a bolder colour scheme than her mother. She turned heads in a canary yellow coat with a fur-trim, whilst she concealed her blonde locks with a cherry red hat. She completed the look with a pair of teal gloves, whilst she grasped an oversized navy clutch bag. Dressed to impress: Mary cut a sophisticated figure on the outing as she teamed a eggshell wool coat with a matching pencil skirt Annabel has followed in her mother's footsteps by choosing a career in the culinary world, and made several appearances on her mother's eponymous series, Mary Berry Everyday last year. It's prompted some to speculate that Mary is preparing to hand over her baking crown to her daughter, who is married to master builder Charles Bosher, and transform 'Brand Berry' into a family business. However if Annabel, a mother of three, was to take over, the decision would be far from nepotistic. Annabel is a professionally trained cook in her own right - and went into business with her mother in the 90s to make salad dressings. The pair set up Mary Berry & Daughter in the 1990s, which made salad dressings, chutneys, cake mixes and sauces. The former Great British Bake Off sold off the company in 2014 for 2.5million, however, dishing out the cash windfall to her family members. Annabel was reported to receive the majority of the windfall, about 1.5million, according to the Sun on Sunday at the time. Just like her mother, Annabel trained at the prestigious Cordon Bleu cookery school. They are reportedly set to wed in the Caribbean next year. And Jeremy Kyle, 53, and girlfriend Vicky Burton, 37, looked in high spirits as they stepped out for day two of the Cheltenham Festival on Wednesday. The pair opted for matching grey coats as they shielded themselves from the extreme British weather. Smitten: Jeremy Kyle, 53, and girlfriend Vicky Burton, 37, looked in high spirits as they stepped out for day two of the Cheltenham Festival on Wednesday Vicky cut an incredibly chic figure in her double breasted coat which she teamed with a pair of thigh high suede boots. She tamed her tresses in place with a matching grey fedora hat and toted her belongings in a black handbag. Jeremy cut a dapper figure in a grey coat, which he teamed with a white shirt and back trousers. Their sighting comes amid reports they will tie the knot in the Caribbean next year surrounded by family and friends in a no expense spared ceremony. Oh so chic: The pair opted for matching grey coats as they shielded themselves from the extreme British weather Jeremy and Vicky, who is a former nanny to his children, confirmed their romance in 2016, around 15 months after his divorce from Carla Germaine. A source told The Mirror: 'Jeremy has been telling those closest to make sure they are available next summer as that is when he is looking to marry. The pair havent confirmed an exact date but have started thrashing out plans with the Caribbean being one of their main destination choices. 'But what is important to them is having their friends and family at the bash, if it is abroad they just have to firm up all the logistics.' In June 2018, the father-of-four became a grandfather after his daughter Harriet, 28, whom he shares with first ex-wife Kristy Rowley, gave birth. Looking good: Vicky cut an incredibly chic figure in her double breasted coat which she teamed with a pair of thigh high suede boots As well as daughter Harriet, Jeremy has daughter Alice, 15, Ava, 13, and Henry, nine, from his marriage to Carla. Back in October, Jeremy discussed how he is now getting along much better with his ex-wife Carla since becoming a granddad. The presenter also spoke about how his romance with fiancee Vicky has changed his life for the better. He said during an appearance on on ITV's Lorraine: 'It's great fun being a granddad. Everyone says its because can give them back. We're babysitting for the whole weekend. It's great fun. He said he and ex Carla have sorted out childcare and sharing the kids, saying: 'It's absolutely fine. We're just getting on with life. 'I did ask Victoria to marry me because she changed my life. There is no shadow of a doubt.' Oscar Isaac has confirmed that the hotly-anticipated Star Wars Episode IX will mark the 'end of the entire Skywalker saga' in the franchise. Making an appearance on The Today Show on Tuesday to discuss his film Triple Frontier, the actor, 40, said the final movie would give their story a 'fulfilling' ending. Oscar, who plays Rebel Alliance pilot Poe Dameron in the sequel trilogy, explained: 'It is the end of the entire Skywalker saga, nine stories and this is the culmination of the thing.' End of an era: Star Wars star Oscar Isaac confirmed on Tuesday that Episode IX will mark 'the end of the Skywalker saga'... after first starting in 1977 with George Lucas' A New Hope 'I think what J.J. [Abrams, director of The Force Awakens and Episode IX] has done, and really the whole Lucas team, is going to be incredibly fulfilling and also special for us because you will get to learn a lot more new things about these characters.' The Skywalker saga began in 1977 with George Lucas' ground-breaking first film of the space opera series, which saw the rise of iconic characters Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher). It also saw the introduction of Darth Vader (James Earl Jones) whose ominous black costume and deep voice made him one of cinema's most prolific villains ever. The start: The Skywalker saga began in George Lucas' ground-breaking first film A New Hope, which saw the rise of iconic characters Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia Organa Iconic: It also saw the introduction of Darth Vader (James Earl Jones) whose ominous black costume and deep voice made him one of cinema's most prolific villains Upon its release, A New Hope changed the industry forever, and spawned two more films in the trilogy: The Empire Strikes Back and The Return Of The Jedi. In 1999, George went on to explore the back story, and creation of, Darth Vader, with the prequels The Phantom Menace, Attack Of The Clones, and Revenge Of The Sith. While universally panned, the trilogy presented Anakin Skywalker's journey from child to Jedi, and culminating in him taking on the Sith Lord mantle. Prequel: In 1999, George explored the back story of Darth Vader, aka Anakin Skywalker (R) with the films The Phantom Menace, Attack Of The Clones, and Revenge Of The Sith New blood: In the sequel trilogy, the Skywalker legacy continued through Leia and Han's son Ben Solo (Adam Driver, pictured), who turned to the Dark Side and took on the name Kylo Ren Now in the sequel trilogy, the original cast returned to reprise their roles as Luke, Leia and Han respectively, while introducing a new set of characters. The Skywalker legacy continued through Leia and Han's son Ben Solo (Adam Driver), who has since turned to the Dark Side and taken on the name Kylo Ren. Kylo, while torn between the call of the Dark and Light sides, remains the villain of the franchise, who lead characters Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega) and Poe aim to defeat alongside the Rebel Alliance. Carrie died of a cardiac arrest at the age of 60 in December 2016, and of working on the next film without her, Oscar said: 'Weve thought about her so much, her spirit is there. One hell of a pilot: Oscar plays Rebel Alliance pilot Poe Dameron in the sequel trilogy The fight: Kylo remains the villain of the franchise, who lead characters Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega) and Poe aim to defeat alongside the Rebel Alliance 'Billie Lourd, her daughter, came and played a part that she played in the last couple of films so her spirit was definitely there with us, and we're missing her a lot.' It was revealed in July last year that J.J. Abrams would be using unreleased footage of her in the next Star Wars film, following her tragic death. Of using the scenes, which were shot in the 2015 film The Force Awakens, the director said in a statement: 'Finding a truly satisfying conclusion to the Skywalker saga without her eluded us. We were never going to recast, or use a CG character.' 'With the support and blessing from her daughter, Billie, we have found a way to honour Carrie's legacy and role as Leia in Episode IX by using unseen footage we shot together in Episode VII.' They're two of the most down-to-earth girls on TOWIE. And Courtney Green and her BFF Chloe Meadows have been treating their followers to a number of sizzling bikini snaps since the cast touched down in Thailand last week. The pair posed up a storm with some coconuts, rocking cute monochrome two-pieces and boho chic hairstyles. Inseparable: Courtney Green and her BFF Chloe Meadows have been treating their followers to a number of sizzling bikini snaps since the cast touched down in Thailand last week 'Island girls', Courtney captioned her snap, while Chloe opted for the pun-tastic 'Im coco"nuts" about you'. Courtney also shared a sultry pool shot of herself modelling a bright blue bikini, perched by the water's edge. Chloe was on the tourist trail, visiting a temple and taking an arty shot of herself in front of the cultural landmark. Idyllic: Courtney also shared a sultry pool shot of herself modelling a bright blue bikini, perched by the water's edge Feeling fruity: Chloe opted for the pun-tastic 'Im coco"nuts" about you' Seeing the sights: Chloe was on the tourist trail, visiting a temple and taking an arty shot of herself in front of the cultural landmark The latest updates from their amazing getaway come after Courtney spoke exclusively to MailOnline about her new love with beau Calum. She has triumphantly moved on from her toxic relationship with ex Myles Barnett with her new man, who she has been dating for five months. The 23-year-old reality star gushed about Calum and admitted how refreshing their romance is as he is 'so in touch with his emotions'. Courtney's new romance was revealed by a pal in November and while she has shared a handful of shots on social media she has remained guarded over the union. New love: Courtney has now triumphantly moved on from her toxic relationship with ex Myles Barnett as she spoke exclusively to MailOnline about her new love with beau Calum, who she has been dating for five months Now however, she has opened up about the love as she told MailOnline: 'We've been together for five-months. He is a normal boy with a normal job... Because I've been treated so bad in the past I can't believe how nice he is.' Following her ill-fated union with Myles, who is now dating Love Island star Kady McDermott, she seems extremely reluctant to have Calum involved on the show. She said: 'He doesn't want to join the show either which is really nice. He said he would film an episode for me if I needed him but he has no interest in becoming a regular character which is also really nice.' Describing their first meeting, she said: 'We met at a house party the old fashioned way. I saw him in the kitchen and thought he was so fit so I thought f**k it, I'm so single I have nothing to lose so went over and spoke to him.' Stunner: Far from remaining coy, she gushed: 'It is love. I'm obsessed with him but in a good way. I've never been with a boy who is so in touch with his emotions' Far from remaining coy, she gushed: 'It is love. I'm obsessed with him but in a good way. I've never been with a boy who is so in touch with his emotions.' After her turbulent romance with Myles, she went on: 'He tells me all the time how beautiful I am and how much he loves me which I'm not used to hearing... 'With Myles I never knew where I stood so I was always on edge but with Calum I know how much he loves me.' What helps in their romance appears to his closeness to the show as she said: 'He knows a lot of the cast from going out in Essex. He's not the jealous type and he totally trust me. He knows I love him and am not interested in anyone else.' Way back when: The scars of her relationship with Myles, who was kicked off the show in a huge cast cull, appear to run deep in their relationship The scars of her relationship with Myles, who was kicked off the show in a huge cast cull, appear to run deep in their relationship. She said: 'It can be hard sometimes because of the way Myles treated me though. When someone cheats on you so much it has an affect and you does have a long-lasting affect... 'But I know how much Callum loves me and I know he would never do that to me. I feel like I'm in a healthy relationship now. We are both secure with each other.' Laura Dundovic is known for her amazing figure and excellent taste in fashion. And on Wednesday the 31-year-old beauty was flaunting both in a post shared to Instagram. In the stunning social media photo, the model wears a fitted dress from luxury fashion brand Alice McCall, worth $395. 'Wednesdays aren't so bad!' Model Laura Dundovic (pictured) showed off her slim figure and endless legs in short Alice McCall dress in an Instagram post on Wednesday The frock clung to her slender curves and featured intricate, multi-coloured embroidery in a floral motif. The rather short dress, which sat at thigh-height, made the most of her endless, tanned legs. Wearing minimal makeup on her glowing visage, the blonde had her hair up in a very high bun. Laura captioned the eye-catching post: 'Wednesday's aren't so bad!' She completed her look with a pair of towering heels with a clear panel across the foot, and a Gucci cross-body bag. Laura captioned the eye-catching post: 'Wednesdays aren't so bad!' It comes after another stunning post from the Australian model, who took to Instagram on Monday to share a series of photos of herself in the water at Sydney's Balmoral Beach. Lovely lass: The Australian model also took to Instagram on Monday to share a series of photos of herself in the water at Sydney's Balmoral Beach (pictured) 'Summer's back,' she captioned the cheeky photos. In the photos, Laura can be seen wearing just an animal-print bikini, while flashing the camera a mischievous smile over her shoulder. Her high-cut swimsuit showed off her toned curves, and her wet hair sat around her famous features following her swim. Olivia Culpo has one of the best bodies in the business. And the former beauty queen - who used to date Nick Jonas - put her figure on display on Tuesday evening. The 26-year-old brunette beauty showed off her chest as well as her legs in a very flirt mini dress as she hit the red carpet of Cosmopolitan Fashion Night at Campo Marte in Mexico City, Mexico. Looking fine: Olivia Culpo has one of the best bodies in the business. And the former beauty queen - who used to date Nick Jonas - put her figure on display on Tuesday evening WOW: The 5ft7in star made the most of the black dress which had a nude background that made it appear semi sheer The 5ft7in star made the most of the black dress which had a nude background that made it appear semi sheer. The round neckline dipped low and was held up by wide straps. The siren also had a high slit on the bottom which showed off plenty of tanned, toned leg. Culpo added strappy heels that revealed a fun pedicure. South of the border: The 26-year-old brunette beauty showed off her chest as well as her legs in a very flirt mini dress as she hit the red carpet of Cosmopolitan Fashion Night at Campo Marte in Mexico City, Mexico Le look du jour: Her hair was slicked back and her makeup looked dewey with heavy lip gloss. And the star kept it light with a small, boxy black clutch purse and no jewelry Her hair was slicked back and her makeup looked dewey with heavy lip gloss. And the star kept it light with a small, boxy black clutch purse and no jewelry. Olivia seems to be back on with athlete Danny Amendola. The former couple split in November for a second time, after he was pictured getting close to a pretty brunette CBS reporter on Miami Beach, while Olivia was en route to Australia to work. She tweeted 'Wow' after the photos surfaced amid reports she felt 'humiliated'. However Danny was said to have denied any cheating, insisting he was simply being friendly to the woman. A little photo shoot in the elevator: In this image she said 'goodnight' as she headed home He and Olivia had reconciled earlier in the summer, following a brief split early in 2018. At the time of their summer reconciliation, Olivia told a reporter: 'If you want to make something work, you make it work. I always just say that you can't think about how. You just have to try your hardest and know what feels right. 'If it's meant to be then it should be easy and it should be something that is fun. And if it doesn't work out then that's because it wasn't meant to be. That's my attitude.' Former Miss Universe Olivia, 26, first began dating Danny in 2016. Hello Mexico! Here she was seen in her hotel room while sporting a casual look Hannah Brown can't wait for the next chapter in her life as she prepares to be the next Bachelorette. The 24-year-old interior decorator, who was unveiled on Tuesday night as the next leading lady who will get to choose from 30 suitors on the upcoming ABC show, talked to People about her excitement. Hannah was crushed when Bachelor Colton Underwood sent her home just before the hometown visits but says she has no regrets. 'This is something I really believe in,': Hannah Brown says she's excited to meet her person as she embarks on being the next Bachelorette The fan favorite told People: 'I didnt end up with Colton, but I ended up loving myself more,' 'I came into that show as someone who wasnt as open as I am now. I was terrified to be my true self because I felt that it wasnt enough. But I allowed myself to break down those walls.' And she has no hard feelings when it comes to Colton. 'I'm happy for Colton. He was able to choose somebody and it wasnt me, and thats okay. Ive moved on. And I'm excited to find my person.' Wish me luck! Hannah posted this cute snap of her as a toddler dressed up in a wedding gown after the news was announced Hannah dished that she doesn't really have a type but is looking for 'someone with a good heart.' and she's ready to get engaged. 'This is something I really believe in,' Hannah said. 'And at the end of the day, I want somebody who loves me and chooses me. I'm ready for my moment.' Shortly after the news was announced Hannah shared a cute throwback snap of herself when she was a toddler dressed up in a wedding gown and veil. 'Wish me luck, yall. #thebachelorette' she captioned the snap During the unveiling on Tuesday night's finale episode of The Bachelor Hannah said 'I feel all the emotions, but honestly, I'm just really grateful for this opportunity,' Shortly after the announcement Hannah got to meet several of her future suitors as they were brought out on stage. Hannah dished that she doesn't really have a type but is looking for 'someone with a good heart.' and she's ready to get engaged Hey there: Shortly after the announcement Hannah got to meet several of her future suitors as they were brought out on stage Hannah attended the University of Alabama, joined Alpha Chi Omega, and graduated magna cum laude in 2017 with a degree in Communication and Information Sciences. She became Miss Alabama in 2018, and competed in Miss USA that same year, though did not place. The Bachelorette will premiere on May 13 on ABC. She's just months away from giving birth to her first child. And Lisa Hyde is already eager to meet her daughter, taking to Instagram to show off her 24 week bump. The 32-year-old shared a photo of her growing belly on Wednesday, and revealed that she could feel her little one kick. 'I'm just so in love already!' Former Bachelor star Lisa Hyde (pictured) showed off her 24 week baby bump in an Instagram post on Wednesday She captioned the photograph: 'Starting to feel kicks and Im just so in love already. Cant wait to meet you my little angel.' In the photo, the former Bachelor star posed in white, red and black underwear from the brand Calvin Klein. Over the top, she wore a khaki colored shirt, open to reveal her bump, that featured pearl buttons. She captioned the photograph: 'Starting to feel kicks and Im just so in love already. Cant wait to meet you my little angel.' Pictured: Lisa Hyde While her face is out of the frame, the mum-to-be is wearing a religious pendant and has her brunette hair around her shoulders. Lisa has been dating her child's father, Damon Collina, since mid-2018, just months after her ill-fated appearance on Bachelor In Paradise. The pair threw a 'gender reveal' party earlier in the year to announce the sex of their first child. Coming soon! Lisa (pictured) recently revealed that she is expecting a little girl She told her fans: 'It's a girl. Thank you to all our amazing family and friends who witnessed this special moment with us!' Lisa first shot to fame on the 2014 season of The Bachelor, starring Perth-based auctioneer Blake Garvey. She also struck up a romance with Luke McLeod on Bachelor in Paradise, but they split by April 2018. Lisa and Damon's baby is due in around July. Advertisement A host of celebrities hit the red carpet at the glittering Prince's Trust Awards at the London Palladium on Wednesday. Maya Jama, Laura Whitmore and Iskra Lawrence led the stars making stylish arrivals at the awards, with the guest list also including Queen rocker Brian May, Luke Evans, Gemma Atkinson and Gorka Marquez, AJ Pritchard, Anne Marie, Colin Salmon and Kate Garraway. Presenter Maya, 24, dazzled in a white kimono-inspired gown, adorned with humming bird and tropical flower prints. Wow: Maya Jama, Laura Whitmore and Iskra Lawrence led the stars making stylish arrivals at the glittering Prince's Trust Awards at the London Palladium on Wednesday The stunning gown featured an elegant sweeping sleeve, with the star completing her ensemble with nude stiletto heels and a matching metallic clutch bag. Her raven tresses were pulled into a sleek side ponytail while her pretty features were enhanced with a radiant dusting of make-up. Laura, 33, was suited and booted for the awards ceremony, showing off her lithe figure in a powder blue trouser suit paired with teal crushed velvet ankle boots. Lavender: Model Iskra, 28, oozed confidence as she posed up in a lavender trouser suit which clung to her toned curves Diaphanous: Presenter Maya, 24, dazzled in a white kimono-inspired gown, adorned with humming bird and tropical flower prints Glow: Laura showed off her pearl encrusted silver slides as she posed up on the red carpet Elegance: Laura, 33, was suited and booted for the awards ceremony, showing off her lithe figure in a powder blue trouser suit paired with teal crushed velvet ankle boots A tailored blazer worn over a white slip cinched in at the star's slender waist while the matching culottes drew the eye to her lean legs. The Survival of the Fittest star's locks were pulled into a tousled updo and she accessorised with a white leather handbag. Model Iskra, 28, oozed confidence as she posed up in a lavender trouser suit which clung to her toned curves. Cute couple: Pregnant Gemma Atkinson looked positively radiant as she joined boyfriend Gorka Marquez at the awards Stunning: Gemma showcased her pregnancy curves in a printed maxi dress that skimmed over her bump and featured a dipped hemline Hot mama: Gemma was proud of her bump as she showed off her growing stomach in her chic dress Delightful duo: Strictly pro Gorka looked dapper as he cosied up to his other half, with the Spanish dancer donning a suave navy suit The Instagram sensation's blazer wrapped around her honed waist, with the star adding a touch of sparkle with a metallic Chanel handbag. Her locks were slicked back off her face to emphasise her smoky eye make-up. Gemma Atkinson looked positively radiant as she cradled her baby bump at the glittering awards. HRH: Prince Charles looked in great spirits as he arrived at the awards ceremony His cause: The Prince founded the charity in 1976 as a way to help vulnerable young people LBD: Singer Anne Marie slipped her lithe frame into a strapless black dress with feathered trim Looking good: Kate Garraway and Jenni Falconer looked sensational as they posed for the cameras Line-up: Cheat actress Katherine Kelly, Corrie actress Helen Worth and presenter Anna Williamson attended the awards Pals: Kate was joined by presenting pal Richard Arnold with radio DJ Clara Amfo looking incredible in a military style jacket Dapper line-up: Actor Luke Evans, Queen rocker Brian May and actor Colin Salmon looked dapper as they arrived Musical moment: The Vamps rockers James McVey and Brad Simpson looked handsome as they posed Joined by her boyfriend Gorka Marquez at the event, the 34-year-old soap star seemed in good spirits as she posed on the red carpet. Gemma showcased her pregnancy curves in a printed maxi dress that skimmed over her bump and featured a dipped hemline. The Hollyoaks stunner kept her accessories simple for the event, donning nude heels with a silver clutch bag and wearing delicate chandelier earrings. Style: Olympic champion boxer Nicola Adams, presenter Fiona Phillips and radio DJ Neev Spencer were among the attendees Hunks: Chiwetel Ejiofor and Danny Dyer were among the guests of honour at the awards Dance sensation: Strictly pro AJ Pritchard showed off his flair for fashion silk floral blazer at the event Handsome: Nathan Sykes, Russell Kane and George Shelley posed up at the event Strictly pro Gorka, 28, looked dapper as he cosied up to his other half, with the Spanish dancer donning a suave navy suit. Gemma and Gorka announced their big news on February 1st this year with an adorable post featuring a picture of her two dogs with signs around their necks - one of which read: 'Guess what... Mum's pregnant!'. The couple met on Strictly Come Dancing in 2017 before going public with their relationship in February last year. Lads: Danny looked delighted to be chatting with the Prince at the awards Banter: The TV legend was seen shaking hands with the royal as they got to know one another Greeting: The Prince greeted Anne Marie and Tinie Tempah at the award's line-up Meeting: Gemma, Anna and George smiled as they listened to one of Prince Charles' anecdotes Since making the happy announcement, Gemma has been keeping fans in the loop with her pregnancy, sharing plenty of snaps and videos. The Prince's Trust and TK Maxx & Homesense Awards honour the achievements of young people supported by The Trust. The awards recognise young people who have who have succeeded against the odds, improved their chances in life and had a positive impact on their communities. Hosts: Philip Schofield and Ferne Cotton hosted the awards at the Palladium Here comes the boys: Levi Roots and Tom Walker were among the high-profile men on the red carpet Happy couple: Russell Kane looked delighted as he posed with his glamorous wife Lindsey Cole The Prince's Trust is a charity founded in 1976 by Charles, Prince of Wales to help vulnerable young people get their lives on track. The awards were hosted by Phillip Schofield and Fearne Cotton, with the Prince seen chatting with celebrity guests in the star-studded line-up. Good to see you: The Prince shook hands with Michael McIntyre at the awards Peaches Geldof was tragically found dead at her home in Wrotham, Kent in April 2014, aged just 25. Fifi Geldof has now paid tribute to her late sister, sharing a throwback post on Wednesday to mark what would have been her 30th birthday. The 35-year-old star posted a heartbreaking throwback picture of Peaches as a little girl on her Instagram account to honour the milestone. 'Thinking of her': Fifi Geldof has paid tribute to her late sister Peaches, sharing a throwback post on Wednesday to mark what would have been her 30th birthday. She wrote: 'Thinking of her and missing her more than ever on what would've been her 30th birthday.' Her father Bob, 67, sister Pixie, 28, half-sister Tiger Lily, 22, and widower Thomas Cohen, 28, chose not to comment publicly on the sad day. Thomas was left a single father to sons Astala, now six, and Phaedra, now five, after Peaches suffered a fatal heroin overdose in 2014. He had discovered his wife's body after returning from a weekend away on April 7. Tragedy: Peaches was found dead at her home in Wrotham, Kent in April 2014, aged just 25 Sad day: Fifi, 35, posted a heartbreaking throwback picture of Peaches as a little girl on her Instagram account to honour the milestone Their then 11-month-old son Astala had remained in the house with her for eight hours. In a cruel twist of fate, her mother Paula Yates had died from the same cause when Peaches was 11 years old. Former S.C.U.M. frontman Thomas has focused on raising his children, shielding them from the public eye since her tragic death. Close family: Her father Bob, 67, (pictured centre with Fifi, left) sister Pixie, 28, (second from right) and half-sister Tiger Lily, 22 (front) chose not to comment publicly on the sad day Speaking to German newspaper Bild in 2017, he discussed the drug that killed her: 'Heroin, is a drug where you're trying to enforce something on you that's greater than life. You can only really... its horrible you're filling your body with something. 'It was incredible traumatising, after it happened... a few months after. Because it was so deeply traumatising you know that moment. 'I want them to be happy, I don't care what they end up doing. They are miraculously having happy childhoods which hopefully leads to happy fruitful lives.' Difficult time: Thomas was left a single father to sons Astala, now six, and Phaedra, now five, after Peaches suffered a fatal heroin overdose in 2014 While he has remained mostly stoic and silent in his grief, he previously gave an insight into the terrible time. He told Sunday Times Magazine: 'Firstly, at the time, I was 23. I had two children who needed to be taken care of and, in maybe early June 2014, I started to do that, and we're now here in 2016. 'I just made the decision to start looking after myself and I refused to lose myself and become a traumatized, grief-stricken single father who everyone's going to look at and think and feel all of these things about. 'And that's absolutely fine. However, by this stage, if somebody looks at me like that, then it's just a projection.' They are set to portray paleontologist Mary Anning and her supposed lover Frances Bell for new period drama Ammonite. And Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan were seen getting to work on the Dorset set of the upcoming lesbian romance, as they shot scenes in Lyme Regis on Wednesday. Production on the film continues even after the family of dinosaur pioneer Anning hit out at the filmmakers for 'inventing' the fact that she was gay. Getting into character: Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan got to work on set of lesbian period drama Ammonite in Lyme Regis on Wednesday Kate looked demure in a blue gown with a chequered print, which had starch white lace detailing around the collar. The Titanic star wrapped a black shawl around her shoulders to protect herself from the winter chill, while she wore her brunette locks in a loose pinned-back style. Saoirse transformed into her character as she dressed in a light green print dress that was designed to mimic the fashion of the Victorian era. Completing her period costume by wearing a large bonnet that had dramatic bow detailing, the Hanna star styled her blonde locks into loose ringlets. Blasting: Production on the film continues even after the family of dinosaur pioneer Anning hit out at the filmmakers for 'inventing' the fact that she was gay Victorian era ensemble: Kate looked demure in a blue gown with a chequered print, with starch white lace detailing around the collar Dressed up: Saoirse transformed into her character as she dressed in a light green print dress that was designed to mimic the fashion of the Victorian era Barbara Anning, a distant niece who still lives near the Jurassic Coast where the fossil hunter made many discoveries, said there was no proof she was ever in a same-sex relationship. Ms Anning, of Axminster, said: 'The lesbian storyline is pure Hollywood as far as I know and there was no suggestion that she was a lesbian at all. That's just what they do I suppose.' The plot centres around the famous paleontologist, who becomes involved with a young woman sent to convalesce by the sea. Saoirse plays her love interest in the film, 'a London woman of means to whom she must unexpectedly play nursemaid.' Action! Kate and Saoirse filmed scenes where they walked along a stone cobbled staircase together as they put on downcast expressions Cosy: The Titanic star wrapped a black shawl around her shoulders to protect herself from the winter chill, while she wore her brunette locks in a loose pinned-back style Stylish: Completing her period costume by wearing a large bonnet that had dramatic bow detailing, the Hanna star styled her blonde locks into loose ringlets It is directed by Francis Lee, who was recognised at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017 for God's Own Country. Lyme Regis, famously depicted by novelist Jane Austen, has undergone a makeover ahead of the Hollywood duo descending upon the town. The project marks Kate and Mary Queen Of Scots star Saorise's first collaboration on the big screen. Anning's niece had previously written on an online forum: 'I do not believe there is any evidence to back up portraying her as a gay woman... I believe Mary Anning was abused because she was poor, uneducated and a woman. Is that not enough?' Drama: The plot centres around the famous paleontologist, who becomes involved with a young woman sent to convalesce by the sea Complaint: Barbara Anning, a distant niece to the fossil hunter, said there was no proof she was ever in a same-sex relationship Experts and fans of her work are also upset, claiming Miss Anning, who never married or had children, was 'interesting enough' without needing her life to be spiced up. A fan society dedicated to the fossil finder called Mary Anning Rocks also objected to the plotline, including Harvard University geologist Bretton Carter, who said: 'I have mixed feelings about this movie. 'Being gay, I'm all about the inclusion of LGBTQ characters, but I feel like Mary Anning is an interesting enough person as she is, they didn't have to throw in same-sex affair with her (as it has no known historical basis).' Hitting out: Ms Anning, of Axminster, said: 'The lesbian storyline is pure Hollywood as far as I know and there was no suggestion that she was a lesbian at all' False? There is apparently no evidence that Anning, pictured, ever had a same-sex relationship A spokesperson for the society added they would 'love Mary even more' if there was evidence she was gay, but hoped the director Francis Lee would treat her story with respect The spokesperson said: 'We are all hoping the press has exaggerated the Mary being gay part! Francis Lee is an amazing writer/director, I doubt contrived gay scenes are his thing! I hope that wouldn't wash with a straight-talking, gay pig farmer from the Pennines! 'But don't get us wrong, if there was proof Mary, a working class, Victorian, self-educated powerhouse was also a lesbian we'd love her, even more.' Slammed: Some on Facebook, including Harvard geologist Bretton Carter, pictured, have also criticised the film for adding the plot without historical basis Anning is known for making major discoveries in Jurassic marine fossil beds in the cliffs at Lyme Regis and Charmouth. Her work contributed to important changes in scientific thinking about prehistoric life. However, due to being a woman, she was prevented form joining the Geological Society of London and did not receive full credit for her findings. It is also thought she was the inspiration for the 1908 tongue-twister 'She sells seashells on the seashore' by Terry Sullivan. They're known for serving looks on any red carpet. And Julia Roberts gave full praise to her 'dream girlfriend' Elizabeth Stewart for creating her red carpet aesthetic in the latest issue of The Hollywood Reporter. The 51-year-old actress wore a luscious pink ombre gown for the Stylists & Stars issue while Emily Blunt added feminine details to a black suit as she posed with Jessica Paster. Pride: Julia Roberts gave full praise to her 'dream girlfriend' Elizabeth Stewart for creating her red carpet aesthetic in the latest issue of The Hollywood Reporter Julia's multi-colored frock featured layers of woven tulle in various shades of pink before ending in a deep purple haze. Adding a massive touch of patriotism to her otherwise romantic gown, Roberts had an image of a bald eagle plastered to her chest with Freedom stitched below in white block lettering. 'Elizabeth is like the dream girlfriend who builds a closet around your trip and, 'Oh this is what you can wear to lunch, and then when you work that evening, you can wear this, and then, you can change into these shoes.' It's a dream scenario,' Roberts said. Star power: Emily Blunt added feminine details to a black suit as she posed with Jessica Paster Suits you! Roberts and Stewart donned matching black and red Gucci suits in one shot by photographer Kwaku Alston. The pair boasted that they've worked together for eight years creating classic looks for red carpet appearances. 'Julia has a very specific style, but is also interested in the world of fashion and trying new things,' Stewart said. Roberts and Stewart donned matching black and red Gucci suits in one shot by photographer Kwaku Alston. 'This woman is tireless in her efforts to make me look like I am effortless,' Julia said. 'She has brought color into my life.' 'We wanted to translate the magic of the movie onto the red carpet,' Paster said of Emily's looks this year following an impressive roster in Mary Poppins Returns and A Quiet Place 'I dress like a teenage boy every day of my life,' Blunt said. 'I do really love red carpets because they're full of fantasia and its so not what I wear every day' 'We wanted to translate the magic of the movie onto the red carpet,' Paster said of Emily's looks this year following an impressive roster in Mary Poppins Returns and A Quiet Place. Emily was draped in a sheer and sequined Valentino gown with Lorraine Schwartz earrings for the photo shoot at Milk Studios in New York. The pair started working together in 2008 and have since created iconic looks for the actress who admitted that prior to Paster, she only had 'tight and beaded' ensembles in her wardrobe. 'I dress like a teenage boy every day of my life,' Blunt said. 'I do really love red carpets because they're full of fantasia and its so not what I wear every day.' Powerful: Van Van Alonso teamed up with Mahershala Ali after an editorial shoot in 2016 and have been working together since he contacted her via DM on Instagram. Style: Ali said his favorite look was definitely 'the Oscars' as he stepped out in a black brocade Ermenegildo Zegna XXX tuxedo, a Gigi Burris hat and aviator glasses Impressed: Idris Elba credited Cheryl Konteh with his aesthetic after working together for nearly eight years Van Van Alonso teamed up with Mahershala Ali after an editorial shoot in 2016 and have been working together since he contacted her via DM on Instagram. Ali said his favorite look was definitely 'the Oscars' as he stepped out in a black brocade Ermenegildo Zegna XXX tuxedo, a Gigi Burris hat and aviator glasses. Idris Elba credited Cheryl Konteh with his aesthetic after working together for nearly eight years. She noted his look is always 'effortlessly cool' but the pair agreed his 'money green' Ozwald Boateng suit for the Golden Globes was an all-time favorite. Stunning: Wayman Bannerman and Micah McDonald are credited with creating more than 140 looks this past season for both Regina King and Kiki Layne Dapper: Ilaria Urbinati chose more classic styles for Rami Malek's award-winning run, with the Oscar winner admitting that he trust's her 'opinion and taste, not just about styling. She's always decisive, and it's always fun' Wayman Bannerman and Micah McDonald are credited with creating more than 140 looks this past season for both Regina King and Kiki Layne. 'I've had stylists in the past say to me, "You need to stand like this, you need to do more of this," but Wayman and Micah have always just embraced who I am. If anything, they've pushed me to be more comfortable,' King said. Ilaria Urbinati chose more classic styles for Rami Malek's award-winning run, with the Oscar winner admitting that he trust's her 'opinion and taste, not just about styling. She's always decisive, and it's always fun.' Rebecca Corbin-Murray dressed Gemma Chan in brands by designers of Asian descent while on the Crazy Rich Asians press tour, including Jimmy Choo, Prabal Gurung and Joseph Altuzarra. Statement: Rebecca Corbin-Murray dressed Gemma Chan in brands by designers of Asian descent while on the Crazy Rich Asians press tour, including Jimmy Choo, Prabal Gurung and Joseph Altuzarra She frequently treats her social media followers to envy-inducing snaps from her fun-filled trips around the world. And Tina Stinnes sent temperatures soaring as she shared a series of sizzling Instagram images from her hot tub session at members' club Soho Farmhouse in Chipping Norton on Wednesday. The Love Island star, 24, ensured all eyes were on her as she slipped into a tiny red two-piece, putting on lithe figure on full display. Wow-factor! Tina Stinnes sent temperatures soaring as she shared a series of sizzling Instagram images from her hot tub session at members' club Soho Farmhouse in Chipping Norton on Wednesday Commanding attention, the TV personality posed up up a storm as she relaxed in the small pool in a halterneck bikini top and matching briefs. The MIC star opted for minimal glamour in the hair and make-up department as she swept her blonde tresses into a loosely-tousled bun and wore light strokes of mascara. In the romance department, Tina has been dating Matthew Mawhinney since last summer. Hot stuff! The Love Island star, 24, ensured all eyes were on her as she slipped into a tiny red two-piece, putting on lithe figure on full display Smitten: In the romance department, the TV personality has been dating Matthew Mawhinney since last summer In June, insiders revealed the couple were 'all over each other' as they debuted their romance at the PrettyLittleThing x Maya Jama launch party. Tina told The Sun of her relationship: 'We've been going out for a while. It's going really well. So far, so good.' The reality TV star confessed she was the first to break the ice when they met as she said 'hello' to him at the bar while he was chatting to one of her friends. Loved-up: In June, insiders revealed the couple were 'all over each other' as they debuted their romance at the PrettyLittleThing x Maya Jama launch party Sources also dished to the newspaper at the time: 'They were all over each other.' Matthew is the son of Patricia Scotland - who was the Attorney General under then Prime Minister Gordon Brown between 2007 and 2010. Proving to be even further connected, Matthew's dad is Richard Mawhinney, a barrister who is the brother of former Tory chairman Brian. Her hunky boyfriend's Instagram feed, which is now private, was littered with images of his lavish life, including snaps meeting former US President Bill Clinton, at a lavish party at St Jamess Palace, at Buckingham Palace and St Jamess Palace. She's never been afraid to take a risk with her style. And Kim Kardashian exuded mermaid vibes wearing a long, platinum blonde wig for a selfie shared on Instagram Wednesday morning. The 38-year-old social media maven made sure to tag her beauty brands in the flawless image just hours after enjoying a girls' night out with sisters Kourtney, Khloe and Kylie Jenner in Santa Monica. Kim Kardashian exuded mermaid vibes wearing a long, platinum blonde wig for a selfie shared on Instagram Wednesday morning Kim showed off her tanned arms as she rocked a nude tank top with thin straps for the quick selfie. Chris Appleton seemed to be adjusting the luscious wig while she credited her makeup to artist Ariel Tejada who is known for creating Kylie's glam aesthetic. Just the night before, the mother-of-three looked supremely chic in a tight white top paired with a snakeskin skirt as she stepped out for dinner at Giorgio Baldi. Strike a pose: The 38-year-old social media maven enjoyed a girls' night out with sisters Kourtney, Khloe and Kylie Jenner in Santa Monica She made sure to grab a snap of the family affair as she posed with her sisters for a mirror selfie at the Italian eatery. Kim and sister Kylie had a blast before dinner singing songs and taking photos in the backseat of their ride. Earlier in the evening, Kim took a more serious tone online as she posted her support of ending the death penalty and said she has 'immersed herself in learning about the criminal justice system.' Good times: She made sure to grab a snap of the family affair as she posed with her sisters for a mirror selfie at the Italian eatery Fashion: The mother-of-three looked supremely chic in a tight white top paired with a snakeskin skirt as she stepped out for dinner at Giorgio Baldi A party! Kim and sister Kylie had a blast before dinner singing songs and taking photos in the backseat of their ride She shared her comments on Twitter and Instagram, revealing that she is working with California's Governor, Gavin Newsom, who has halted the execution of all 737 condemned inmates on the nation's largest death row. 'For the last year, I have immersed myself in learning about the criminal justice system,' she wrote. 'I visited prisons, met with formerly incarcerated people, and helped with cases of individual injustice including two death penalty cases. 'I have met with and am very supportive of Governor Newsom and his decision to help bring an end to the California Death Penalty. Racial bias and unfairness run deep throughout the justice system but especially when it comes to the death penalty.' And we should not be okay with the risk that an innocent person could be executed. I hope we can turn toward better solutions that focus more on healing victims of trauma and prioritizing fairness and justice.' Supporter: Earlier in the evening, Kim took a more serious tone online as she posted about ending the death penalty and said she has 'immersed herself in learning about the criminal justice system' She has spent the past week in Los Angeles attending red carpet events and partying with A-list stars. And Tammy Hembrow enjoyed another wild night out in West Hollywood on Wednesday, this time joined by fellow Instagram model Jena Frumes. The mother-of-two, 24, looked glamorous as she was spotted leaving celebrity hotspot Catch LA in a nude skintight dress. Scroll down for video Party girl! Tammy Hembrow (right) enjoyed another wild night out in West Hollywood on Wednesday, this time joined by fellow Instagram model Jena Frumes (left) Tammy looked thoroughly bronzed as she showed off her sensational figure in the low-cut, figure-hugging number. She paired her party dress with matching nude heels, and styled her platinum blonde hair loosely across her shoulders. Jena, meanwhile, rocked a plunging white mini dress and ankle strap heels, and accessorised with a Chanel handbag. Out on the town! The two women held hands as they left the Catch LA nightclub, before stepping into a waiting car and bursting into fits of giggles The two women held hands as they left the nightclub, before stepping into a waiting car and bursting into fits of giggles. Tammy, who hails from the Gold Coast, had showed off her racy outfit several hours earlier in a video shared to Instagram. She flirtatiously twirled around in the footage, showing off every angle of the dress while grooving to a Nicki Minaj song. Instagram sensation: Tammy looked thoroughly bronzed as she showed off her sensational figure in a nude skintight dress In January, it emerged that Tammy had discussed with her family the idea of permanently relocating to Los Angeles. Her sister Emilee Hembrow said in a YouTube video that the fitness entrepreneur was 'trying to make us all move to LA or America'. Emilee, who has two children under the age of four and is also based on the Gold Coast, admitted she was concerned about the move. Sneak peek! Tammy, who hails from the Gold Coast, had showed off her racy outfit several hours earlier in a video shared to Instagram 'I have mixed feelings, because I hear raising kids in America isn't the best,' she said. Tammy, who owns her own activewear label, boasts more than 9.3 million Instagram followers and 1.3 million subscribers on YouTube. She is the daughter of Australian director, screenwriter and musician Mark Hembrow and has four sisters - Amy, 28, Emilee, 26, Starlette, 18, and Ava, 13. Until last year, she was engaged to Australian streetwear designer Reece Hawkins, who is the father of her two children: son Wolf, four, and daughter Saskia, two. She was recently linked to U.S. rapper Tyga, who is the ex-boyfriend of Kylie Jenner. Kerry Katona shared her family heartache on Wednesday as she revealed her auntie Josie had died in an emotional Instagram post. The Celebs Go Dating star, 38, took to the social media site to post a throwback picture of herself with her late auntie. She penned: 'RIP Auntie Josie,' followed by praying hands emoji, while she later confirmed to a fan that Josie was her mother Sue's sister. Heartache: Kerry Katona shared her family heartache on Wednesday as she revealed her auntie Josie had died in an emotional Instagram post Kerry's fans were quick to share their condolences as they posted their sympathies to the former Atomic Kitten star. One person said: 'Aww I'm sorry for your loss kerry what a beautiful pic, huge hugs. Xx.' A different person put: 'So sorry for your loss xxxx.' Tragic: The Celebs Go Dating star, 38, took to the social media site to post a throwback picture of herself with her late auntie Another fan commented: 'Awww Kerry , thinking of you all and sending positive thoughts your way.' While a different account added: 'Sorry for you're loss Kerry thinking of you and you're family.' Kerry has had a difficult few weeks after she revealed earlier this month that her ten-year-old son Max had been left with a black eye after he was reportedly attacked by three older boys. The television personality went on to speak about her child's, the youngest of two children with second husband Mark Croft, altercation with bullies on This Morning and said 'he could have lost his eyes'. Family heartache: Kerry has had a difficult few weeks after she revealed earlier this month that her son Max, 10, had been left with a black eye after he was reportedly attacked by three boys Cruel: The television personality went on to speak about her child's altercation with bullies on This Morning and said 'he could have lost his eyes' She said: 'They started saying things to him and one of them went like this in his eye. He had a big black eye and he burst into tears and ran all the way to school. 'I was heartbroken. I know he can be quite shy around people he doesn't know - they were older boys.' Kerry was in London at work at the time and said Max often walks to school, so was very upset to find out what had happened. She said: 'I was furious. I wanted to rip their heads of. You want to put your hands around their throat, but violence doesn't solve violence and the school did everything they could.' Nasty: She said: 'They started saying things to him and one of them went like this in his eye. He had a big black eye and he burst into tears and ran all the way to school.' Kerry said Max is trying his best to be brave, but he's been left very upset over the ordeal. She said: 'He was fine and trying to brush it off. The next day, I woke him up for school and he was crying because he had delayed shock. 'He didn't want to go to school so he played on his Xbox and we went for a walk in Ashford forest and then I walked him to school. 'It could have been so much worse. He could have lost his eyes. I cried all the way home. I was heartbroken for him. 'I made him walk to school himself on Friday because I didn't want him to get scared of walking on his home.' Her business was valued just shy of $1billion back in October 2017. So it comes as no wonder Jessica Alba feels comfortable calling herself 'smart.' The 37-year-old business woman admitted in her April 2019 Health magazine cover story that had questioned her intelligence until her success in the business world. Rising: Jessica Alba business woman admitted that had questioned her intelligence until her success in the business world She was interviewed by fellow entrepreneur Ayesha Curry who asked her what she has been too hard on herself for in the past. Alba answered: 'When I was younger, I thought I wasnt smart. I didnt have a conventional or higher education. Now, after starting a business, I feel OK with identifying myself as smart.' She goes on to admit that even she has even struggled in the acting world as she has not had the same education in theater. Stunning: The 37-year-old actress is featured on the cover of the April 2019 Health magazine 'When I was younger, I thought I wasnt smart': She was interviewed by fellow entrepreneur Ayesha Curry who asked her what she has been too hard on herself for in the past. The Dark Angel star explained: 'I even felt inferior saying I was an actress without being classically trained. It took me a while to find my confidence.' 'I may not be the best actress ever, but do I have my moments? Definitely. And dont underestimate street smartsall of that hustle and life experiences. You have to roll with the punchesthats how youre going to be successful in life.' The Honest Company was founded by Alba in 2011 and will soon be extending to Honest Beauty slated for a release later this year in Western Europe. Jessica is also known as a Hollywood celebrity who has known how to take care of her body so no doubt many will be surprised that she isn't a fan of the latest health trend of celery juicing. 'That just doesnt taste good': Jessica is also known as a Hollywood celebrity who has known how to take care of her body so no doubt many will be surprised that she isn't a fan of the latest health trend of celery juicing 'I hate waking up early': The A-lister's definition of wellness is about 'checking in' as she says she changes up her routine on a daily basis while holding herself accountable She said: 'I tried celery juicing, and it empties your bowels in a very violent way all day longand I like things that taste good, and that just doesnt taste good.' The A-lister's definition of wellness is about 'checking in' as she says she changes up her routine on a daily basis while holding herself accountable. She said: 'Some days I just need to go in my room and read a book for an hour and put a face mask on. Other days I need to wake up at 5:15 a.m. and get a spin class in to feel goodeven though I hate waking up early. 'Ive tried to get into TM, a type of meditation, but it felt so hard-core. Wellness should feel like something I want to do. If Im going to do a meditation, I like to do a guided one, and there are apps for that.' Paving the way: She was interviewed by fellow enterpreneur Ayesha Curry, as she is pictured on the Today Show set last month She has been married to 40-year-old film producer Cash Warren since 2008 as they have three kids together: Honor, 10, and Haven, seven, and son Hayes, one. Alba says her relationship with Warren is what she is most proud of when it comes to her personal life as she told Ayesha for Health: 'My husband and I like each other still. [Laughs] Im not good with conflict. 'I didnt know how to express myself, and I feel like Ive evolved into this person who can communicate so you can address stuff before it gets out of control. Were best friends, and we respect each other.' Channel 10 announced last week that an unknown astrophysicist named Matthew Agnew had been cast as the new Bachelor. It was a surprising decision for many viewers, who expected the network to pick another celebrity after Nick Cummins delivered strong ratings last year. But according to WHO magazine, producers deliberately chose a non-famous candidate to 'refresh' the six-year-old franchise. 'They want to give viewers a real love story': The Bachelor producers hired astrophysicist Matt Agnew after 'the novelty of celebrity suitors like Sophie Monk and Nick Cummins wore off' 'The novelty of watching a celebrity search for love has worn off and producers figured that out pretty quickly after Nick's finale,' a source told the publication. In last year's Bachelor finale, rugby star Nick shocked the nation by dumping both contestants, Brittany Hockley and Sophie Tieman, leaving the show a single man. But according to the insider, Matt is there for the right reasons (to borrow a popular Bachelor catchphrase) and will give viewers the 'happily ever after' they deserve. Unexpected choice: Many viewers expected Channel 10 to pick another celebrity Bachelor after Nick Cummins (pictured) delivered strong ratings last year 'Matt is a normal, decent guy who is genuinely looking to meet someone,' they said. 'Producers see this as a way of giving the public what they failed to give them last year - a happily ever after!' It comes after NW magazine revealed earlier this week that Matt was an instant hit with the women at the first cocktail party. 'He seemed incredibly charming,' said an on-set source. 'He had all the girls in fits of laughter and hanging off his every word.' Stunt casting: Celebrities were introduced to the Australian Bachelor franchise in 2017 when Sophie Monk (pictured) was cast as the Bachelorette Matt previously told Woman's Day that he's looking for a woman who will complement his down-to-earth nature. 'I want someone who doesn't take themselves too seriously and we can just have a laugh and fun together,' he said. 'I'm looking for a best friend, the same way I've seen so many of my friends find one in their partners.' The Bachelor will air on Channel 10 later this year Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham bonded over being loathed. In a profile for The New York Times Schumer, 37, revealed that she and the HBO star became good friends thanks to the mutual abuse they receive online. 'Its a pretty specific experience,' Dunham, 32, told the Times in a phone call. Something in common: Amy Schumer has revealed she bonded with Lena Dunham over online hatred they receive 'Most people dont know what its like to open social media in the morning and hear you are physically, socially and politically worthless.' she added. Praising her pal on how she handles the criticism, the former Girls star said, 'Shes titanium, and part of her skill is the ability to make it look easy.' Schumer admitted that the abuse started taking a toll a few years ago and she started shying away from the public eye. But kind words from a fellow comedian made her re-think things. 'Its a pretty specific experience,' Dunham, 32, told the NY Times in a phone call for a profile on the comedian. They are pictured in 2014 together 'I was kind of retreating a bit in general after years of getting beaten down, and [David] Chappelle was like: "Theres a lot of love out there for you, Amy. I dont know why, but I heard it,"' she recalled. Schumer is promoting her new standup special Growing which is coming out on Netflix on March 19. The Trainwreck actress said she's curious about what people will hate about this one but doesn't want to walk on egg shells. Used to it: Lena is no stranger to hateful comments online and praised Amy for being 'titanium' in how she deals with it all Schumer is promoting her new standup special Growing which is coming out on Netflix on March 19 'I don't know whats going to happen with my special what's the thing people will be furious about?' Schumer said. 'It sucks to have everyone mad at me. But I'm not too careful.' The New York born star is currently expecting her first child with husband Chris Fischer this spring. She was recently forced to cancel the last four dates on her stand-up tour in Phoenix, Houston, Dallas and Austin, Texas, on doctors orders due to pregnancy complications. She revealed in February that she wouldn't be able to fly anymore due to hyperemesis, a pregnancy complication that is characterized by severe nausea, vomiting, weight loss and possibly dehydration - which caused her to cancel her remaining tour dates. She is one of the most prominent faces in the modelling industry. But supermodel Ashley Graham claims she's still turned away by designers because of her body shape. The brunette beauty, who models a dress size 18, tells Harper's Bazaar Australia that when it comes to high-end clothing, there are limited options for curvier women. Stunning: Supermodel Ashley Graham looks fierce on the cover of the April edition of Harper's Bazaar Australia 'There's a huge lack in the quality, high-end feel of clothing for curvy girls,' she says. 'My stylist, Jordan Foster, and I usually reach out to designers to ask if they want to dress me and I have been told "no" or "we don't have time" or "we don't have the money". 'There is still a huge lack of designers who are willing to learn how to dress a curvy girl, or who are creating clothes curvy women have access to.' Meanwhile, the brunette beauty stuns on the cover of the April edition of the magazine, wearing nothing but a $3500 Maticevski coat and black Zadig & Voltaire boots. Flashing her bare legs, she shoots the camera a sultry stare. 'I usually reach out to designers to ask if they want to dress me and I have been told "no"': The brunette beauty, who models a dress size 18, tells the magazine that when it comes to high-end clothing, there are limited options for curvier women Ashley looks confident and effortlessly-chic in the editorial, with her hair voluminously styled and her makeup flawlessly applied. The stunner launched her own lingerie line in 2014 to combat the lack of intimate apparel available for people of a larger size. After the success of every season selling out, she questioned: 'How can I take this "beauty beyond size" movement that I've created and expand it to all areas of women's lives?' 'How can I expand the "beauty beyond size" movement I've created': Ashley launched her own lingerie line in 2014 to combat the lack of intimate apparel available for people of a larger size Already hosting her own podcast 'Pretty Big Deal', this year she will begin hosting an Ellen DeGeneres-backed series titled 'Fearless'. Ashley started modeling at age 12 after being scouted in a shopping mall in her hometown of Nebraska. Read more of Ashley's interview in the latest issue of Harper's Bazaar, out now. She is one of the most beautiful women to grace the movies. And Penelope Cruz was a spectacle to behold at the premiere of her movie Pain & Glory with her handsome co-star Antonio Banderas, in Madrid on Wednesday. The actress, 44, looked jaw-dropping in a fairytale gown embellished with a beaded bodice and pleated skirt as she joined smart Antonio at the Capitol Cinemas. Picture perfect: Penelope Cruz, 44, stunned in a fairytale gown as she joined her co-star Antonio Banderas at their movie Pain & Glory premiere in Spain on Wednesday Twinkling beads were stitched into the bodice of her dress and winked in the spotlight when Penelope worked her magic on the red carpet. In a swift hand movement, the Everybody Knows star took hold of the edge of her skirt and splayed the pleated fabric out like the delicacy of a hand fan. Curls framed the Spanish beauty's face, with only a handful of her locks pinned back in a half updo hairstyle, and she made up her flawless complexion with make-up. Wonderful in white: Twinkling beads were stitched into the bodice of her dress and winked in the spotlight when Penelope worked her magic on the red carpet What a move! In a swift hand movement, the Everybody Knows star took hold of the edge of her skirt and splayed the pleated fabric out like the delicacy of a hand fan A rectangular silver clutch bag held everything she needed for the evening's events and complemented her statement earrings. Dashing Antonio didn't let his co-star down on the style stakes in a navy shirt, paired with a dark blue suit for the special occasion. Dolor y gloria which translates as Pain & Glory tells the story of a film director who reflects on the choices he has made as his life comes crashing down. Penelope plays opposite her co-star Antonio as he fills the shoes of the troubled protagonist in the Spanish movie. Different worlds: While she is known to the rest of the world as an actress, at home Penelope is the mother to her two children Luna, five, and Leo, eight Beautiful woman: Curls framed the Spanish beauty's face, with only a handful of her locks pinned back in a half updo hairstyle, and she made up her flawless complexion with make-up While she is known to the rest of the world as an actress, at home Penelope is the mother to her two children Luna, five, and Leo, eight. The Loving Pablo star who raises her children with her husband Javier Bardem said being a mother is the thing that makes her the 'happiest'. However, the Hollywood beauty confessed motherhood had 'surprised' her because it made her completely selfless in the devotion to her offspring. How to accessorise: A rectangular silver clutch bag held everything she needed for the evening's events and complemented her statement earrings She told Marie Claire magazine in January: 'It's the thing that has made me happiest. But there are a lot of things that have surprised me about it. 'Its like a revolution inside youa very animal-like one. The whole world looks different. Youll never think of yourself first again, and I think thats a very good thing. It happens in a second... 'Were all superwomenthose of us who have children and those of us who dont.' Iranian humman rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh seen in this 2013 picture alongside her husband is an award-winning activist jailed on charges of espionage Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh has been sentenced to an extra 10 years in jail on top of the five-year term she is already serving, her husband said Tuesday. Sotoudeh is an award-winning rights activist who was arrested last June and told she had been found guilty in absentia of espionage charges and sentenced to five years. The new 10-year sentence was the longest of seven verdicts totalling 33 years bundled together and communicated to Sotoudeh in prison, according to her husband Reza Khandan. "But only the longest sentence will be served, which is 'encouraging corruption and debauchery and providing the means,'" he told AFP by telephone. He said Sotoudeh had also been sentenced to a total of 148 lashes for appearing in court without the hijab Islamic head covering and for another offence. She had been found guilty of "colluding against the system, propaganda against the system... disrupting public order" and several other counts. On Monday, a judge at Tehran's Revolutionary Court said Sotoudeh had been sentenced in her latest conviction to five years for colluding against the system and two years for insulting Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But Khandan said that to the best of his knowledge his wife had not been charged with insulting the leader. - 'Beyond barbaric' - The United Nations' top expert on human rights in Iran, Javaid Rehman, said the reported conviction was "a crystal-clear illustration of an increasingly severe state response". "There is an increasing concern that the civil space for human rights lawyers and defenders is being reduced," he told journalists in Geneva. Amnesty International condemned the latest case against Sotoudeh as an "outrageous injustice" and called for her immediate and unconditional release. "Nasrin Sotoudeh has dedicated her life to defending women's rights and speaking out against the death penalty -- it is utterly outrageous that Iran's authorities are punishing her for her human rights work," it said. The United States, which has made Iran its biggest foe in the Middle East, said it condemned the sentence "in the strongest possible terms." "This sentence is beyond barbaric," added deputy State Department spokesman Robert Palladino. Before her arrest, Sotoudeh, 55, had taken on the cases of several women arrested for appearing in public without headscarves in protest at the mandatory dress code in force in Iran. Sotoudeh won the European Parliament's prestigious Sakharov Prize in 2012 for her work on high-profile cases, including those of convicts on death row for offences committed as minors. She spent three years in prison after representing dissidents arrested during mass protests in 2009 against the disputed re-election of ultra-conservative president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. burs-oh/ft Governments around the world are grounding Boeing 737 Max aircraft or barring them from their airspace Ethiopia said Wednesday it would send the black boxes from last weekend's deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash to Europe for analysis as demand grew for urgent answers over the safety of the Boeing 737 MAX 8. The second deadly crash involving the plane type in less than six months prompted governments worldwide to ban Boeing's bestselling jet from their airspace. The move has heaped pressure on the US aerospace giant to provide proof the plane is safe. In Ethiopia, distraught families wept and lit candles as they visited the deep black crater where the plane smashed into a field, killing 157 passengers and crew, an AFP correspondent said. Ethiopian Airlines said it would decide by Thursday which country would examine the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder recovered from ill-fated Flight ET 302, spokesman Asrat Begashaw told AFP. "We are going to send it to Europe, but the country is not specified yet," said Asrat. The airline said Ethiopia does not have the equipment to read the black box data that could provide crucial information about what happened. The Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 was less than four months old when it went down six minutes into a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi on Sunday, disintegrating on impact. Asrat said families of the victims from Kenya, China, America, and Canada, as well as diplomatic staff from embassies, were visiting the crash site. Experts have pointed out similarities with a crash in October when an Indonesian Lion Air jet went down, killing 189 passengers and crew. - 'Significant similarities' - Ethiopian Airlines crash Both planes reportedly experienced erratic steep climbs and descents as well as fluctuating airspeeds before crashing shortly after takeoff. Questions have honed in on an automated anti-stalling system introduced on the 737 MAX 8, designed to automatically point the nose of the plane downward if it is in danger of stalling. According to the flight data recorder, the pilots of Lion Air Flight 610 struggled to control the aircraft as the automated MCAS system repeatedly pushed the plane's nose down following takeoff. The Ethiopian Airlines pilots reported similar difficulties before their aircraft plunged into the ground. Boeing came in for criticism after the Lion Air crash for allegedly failing to adequately inform 737 pilots about the functioning of the anti-stalling system. According to anonymous pilot reports on a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) database seen by AFP, several American pilots reported problems with the same system in late 2018. During one incident, a co-pilot said that shortly after take-off, when autopilot was engaged, the plane suddenly began pointing downwards. The captain immediately disconnected the autopilot and straightened the plane. Biniyam Demssie, another spokesman for Ethiopian Airlines, told AFP the pilots had received the relevant training. For "every new technology, we provide training at Ethiopian Airlines," he said. Airline CEO Tewolde GebreMariam on Sunday said captain Yared Mulugeta Getachew, 29, was an experienced aviator with more than 8,000 flight hours. Speaking to CNN on Wednesday, Tewolde told CNN Wednesday there were "significant similarities" between the Lion Air and ET 302 crashes. "There are a lot of questions to be answered on the airplane." In a separate interview with the BBC, he called for all Boeing 737 MAX models to be grounded. - Banned from the skies - A dozen airlines have grounded the plane, while Lebanon, Egypt, Serbia, Vietnam, New Zealand and Hong Kong on Wednesday became the latest countries to ban it from their airspace. All European Union countries, as well as major hubs such as the United Arab Emirates and Australia have already done so. "At this early stage of the related investigation, it cannot be excluded that similar causes may have contributed to both events," the EU aviation agency said. Low-cost airline Norwegian Air Shuttle has said it will demand financial compensation from Boeing as the implications of the mass grounding for the airline industry remained unclear. The United States, however, is resisting calls to ground the MAX series, which is Boeing's fastest-selling model, with more than 5,000 orders placed to date from about 100 customers. "Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft," Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Daniel Elwell said in a statement on Tuesday. There are about 350 MAX 8s in service around the world. Thomas Anthony, head of the Aviation Safety and Security Program at the University of Southern California, said increasing automation of planes means crews have less experience flying manually. "So it's not just a mechanical, it is not just a software problem, but it is a problem of communication and trust," he said. burs-fb/hmw The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have regularly clashed in public forums Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday slammed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a "dictator" and "a joke" in the latest exchange of insults between the two leaders. Turkey on Tuesday denounced Netanyahu's "blatant racism" after he called Israel the nation-state of "the Jewish people" only, not all its citizens. Netanyahu's initial comment had come amid an online spat sparked by Israel's right-wing firebrand culture minister Miri Regev, ahead of April elections and subsequently joined by Israeli Hollywood star Gal Gadot. Regev, a member of Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party, had in a TV interview warned voters not to support its main rival because it would ally with Israeli Arab parties -- a highly unlikely scenario. Israeli model and actress Rotem Sela responded on Instagram, asking: "When the hell will someone in this government convey to the public that Israel is a state of all its citizens and that all people were created equal?" Netanyahu reacted with his own Instagram post, telling Sela: "Israel is not a state of all its citizens." "According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people -- and only it," he said, referring to a deeply controversial piece of legislation passed by his right-wing government last year. Gadot, star of "Wonder Woman", jumped to Sela's defence. "Love your neighbour as yourself," Gadot wrote on Instagram late Sunday. "This isn't a matter of right or left. Jew or Arab. Secular or religious," she wrote. "It's a matter of dialogue, of dialogue for peace and security and of our tolerance of one towards the other." On Tuesday, Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin weighed in on Netanyahu's comments. Writing on Twitter in both Turkish and English, he said: "I strongly condemn this blatant racism and discrimination." Netanyahu struck back in a statement from his office early Wednesday. "Turkey's dictator Erdogan attacks Israel's democracy while Turkish journalists and judges fill his prisons," it read. "What a joke!" - 'Apartheid state'- Kalin was swift to respond on Twitter, accusing Netanyahu of attacking Erdogan "for exposing him" after the Israeli premier's "racist remarks" towards Arabs and Muslims. "The apartheid state he leads occupies Palestinian lands, kills women & children & imprisons Palestinians in their own land," he wrote. "Lies and pressure will not hide your crimes." Turkey and Israel have tense relations and Erdogan, who regards himself as a champion of the Palestinian cause, is a vocal critic of Israeli policies. The two countries in 2016 ended a six-year rift triggered by the Israeli storming of a Gaza-bound ship that left 10 Turkish activists dead and led to a downgrading of diplomatic ties. Netanyahu has been accused by critics of demonising Israeli Arabs, who make up some 17.5 percent of the population, in a bid to boost right-wing turnout for April polls. He is facing a tough challenge from a centrist political alliance led by former military chief of staff Benny Gantz and ex-finance minister Yair Lapid. After the polls, he will also face a hearing to defend himself against corruption allegations which have dogged his campaign. President Bashar al-Assad's forces now control almost two-thirds of Syria Bashar al-Assad has won his war for political survival but as Syria's conflict enters its ninth year, his country is fractured, cash-strapped, and prey to both friend and foe. The civil war reaches its eighth anniversary this month with more than 360,000 people killed, millions more displaced, and devastation worth $400 billion. As the war winds down, Syrians in regime-held areas may no longer have to worry about bombardment, but they face fuel shortages, frequent power cuts, unemployment and rampant poverty. From the brutal repression of anti-Assad protests in 2011, the war spiralled into a complex conflict involving jihadists. Syria's president may have reversed the initial gains of the armed opposition and jihadists, but foreign powers have entered his turf. "The Syrian conflict is more complicated because there are now powerful foreign actors that control large zones inside Syria," said Nicholas Heras, an analyst at the Centre for a New American Security. "And these foreign actors are not likely to leave Syria any time soon." Backed by Russia and Iran, Assad's forces now control almost two-thirds of the country. But key areas remain beyond his control, including a swathe of the oil-rich northeast held by US-backed Kurdish-led forces fighting the Islamic State group. The northwestern region of Idlib, held by Syria's former Al-Qaeda affiliate, is protected by a ceasefire deal, which has seen Turkish troops deployed to the area. And Ankara's Syrian rebel proxies hold several northern cities near the border. Joshua Landis, of the University of Oklahoma, painted a grim picture. "The Syrian map is one of division and despair," he said. "Over 30 percent of the country is occupied by foreign governments who have built and funded local militaries." - Return on investment - Various foreign powers are competing to reap a return on years of military investment, or protect their interests. Russia has backed Assad with troops and air strikes since 2015, while Iran has dispatched advisers as well as Shiite fighters from Lebanon and Iraq. "Russia wants to stabilise Assad to keep a steady local partner to guard its expanding bases in Syria" and project power region-wide, Heras said. Iran wants a foothold in Syria, in case of a war between its Lebanese ally Hezbollah and Israel to the southwest, he said. Both allies hope to play a key role in reconstruction and have signed deals including for electricity, oil and infrastructure projects. Turkey and the United States, who have traditionally backed non-state actors, have other interests. President Recep Tayyip "Erdogan wants to rip the Kurds out of America's embrace" and impose Turkey in northern and eastern Syria, Heras said. Washington backs Kurdish-led fighters who control a large and oil-rich northeastern swathe, and has US troops in Syria as part of the anti-IS fight drawing to a close near the Iraqi border. Turkey views Kurdish fighters as "terrorists" and has long threatened to attack the Kurds south of its border. Washington is to dial down its presence to 200 "peace-keeping" troops after IS is expelled from its last pocket. As well as shielding the Kurds from Turkey, a US presence piles pressure on Assad. "Assad needs the water and wheat that the United States controls in eastern Syria," Heras said. But "it is US policy to keep these resources from him and force the economy of Assad's statelet to collapse around him," he added. - 'Three jobs' to get by - Along with the European Union, the United States has ramped up sanctions on Syrian officials and companies, including by seeking to prevent oil shipments to the country. Landis said those measures were compounding post-war challenges, chief among them relaunching a devastated economy. "The US is imposing one of the strictest sanctions regimes on Syria which will continue to deepen the misery of the people," he added. Plus "the worst characteristics of the regime have been strengthened in the struggle to win the civil war: corruption, violence, and the absence of the rule of law," he said. Shadi Abbas, 40, is struggling to return to a normal life after a routine military service lasted a whole eight years. "I feel I have to work three jobs" to make ends meet, he said. "Even if I found some money and work, who will give me back my youth," he said. But after years of war, Assad has secured his capital, regained control of key commercial arteries, and started a timid comeback on the Arab scene. Much to the despair of the fragmented opposition, several countries have called for Syria to be reintegrated into the Arab League, from which it was suspended as the death toll mounted in 2011. Remaining rebels and jihadists are largely confined to Idlib after being ferried out of other parts of the country retaken by the regime. The political opposition is scattered abroad and has failed to end the bloodshed in numerous rounds of abortive peace talks. Whatever the challenges, "revolution is on low flame, and that is a win for Assad," Heras said. A man fills containers with water flowing down from the Wuaraira Repano mountain in Caracas -- a move necessitated by a blackout that left millions without running water Venezuela's public employees were called to return to work Thursday after the government ended a nearly week-long hiatus caused by an unprecedented nationwide blackout that deepened widespread anger against President Nicolas Maduro. Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez said in an address on state television Wednesday that Maduro decided the public sector would resume work on Thursday, although state schools would remain closed for an extra day. The span of decreed public holidays started last Friday, a day after power went out in 22 of Venezuela's 23 states, disrupting transport, causing stockpiled food to rot in fridges and forcing some Caracas residents to source water from sewage outflows as taps ran dry. By Wednesday, electricity was back in Caracas and other regions. But swaths of western Venezuela remained without power, including the city of Maracaibo where more than 500 shops reported having been looted, according to a retailers' association. The blackout -- the worst in the history of the once-rich oil-producing nation -- deepened an already grave economic crisis. According to Ecoanalitica, an economic analysis firm, the vast power cut cost Venezuela $875 million. A man bathes in a stream at the Wuaraira Repano mountain in Caracas, Venezuela "There is major paralysis in many critical areas in the oil sector," it said, estimating that up to 70 percent of the one million barrels of oil a day Venezuela still managed to produce could end up being affected. "No water, no power, no medicine, no cash, no transport. This has been dreadful," one Caracas resident, Victoria Milano, 40, told AFP. The worsening situation has bolstered Juan Guaido, an opposition leader whose claim to be Venezuela's interim president is backed by the US and 50 other countries. "This desperation and darkness is caused by the dictatorship," he told supporters on Tuesday, alleging that 20 people had died in hospitals because of a lack of power. He added that he expected to take over the presidential palace "very soon." Venezuela's pro-Maduro prosecutor's office has hit back with a criminal investigation against Guaido for "sabotage," alleging he had a hand in the blackout. But the opposition leader remains free after the US warned of "consequences" if he were arrested. - Maduro sees 'victory' - A handout photo released by the Venezuelan presidency's press office showing Nicolas Maduro (L) speaking next to Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino (R) at the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas Maduro has accused Washington of waging "cybernetic" and "electromagnetic" attacks against Venezuela's Guri hydroelectric plant, which provides power to 80 percent of the country's 30 million inhabitants. As he declared "victory" on television late Tuesday, asserting that power had been restored "in almost all" the nation, Caracas residents in formerly middle-class neighborhoods banged pots in the street in protest. Experts said an attack by a foreign state actor on Venezuela's grid was possible, but unlikely. "Knowing Venezuela, it was likely an internal failure," Jeff Middleton, the chief technology officer at The Vault Foundation, a company that secures crypto currency transactions, told AFP. Venezuela's infrastructure has degraded over years because of lack of investment, a significant brain drain, and the government's practice of putting the military in charge of key civilian facilities and companies. That has impacted not only the electricity grid but also the country's vital oil industry. The situation has worsened with successive rounds of US sanctions against Maduro's government, including steps that have severely curbed its oil exports. - China, Spain offer help - An opponent of the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro flutters a Venezuelan national flag from her window during a demonstration While much of Latin America and Europe have thrown their weight behind Guaido with a view to forcing presidential elections in Venezuela, Maduro has the support of Russia and China, major creditors and buyers of Venezuelan oil. China on Wednesday said it stood ready to help Venezuela get its electricity up and running again. "China hopes that Venezuela can quickly find the cause of this accident and restore normal power and social order," foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said at a regular briefing in Beijing. "China is willing to offer assistance and technical support to Venezuela to restore the power system," Lu said. The spokesman said China was "very concerned" about reports of a cyber attack, but declined to directly blame the United States. Spain, one of the EU countries strongly backing Guaido, also offered help to fix Venezuela's "badly deteriorated" electricity system. Pakistani protesters burn an Indian national flag during a protest in Peshawar on February 26, 2019, following the Indian Air Force (IAF) strike launched on a Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) camp China on Wednesday put on hold a request by Britain, France and the United States to add the leader of a Pakistan-based Islamist group behind a suicide attack in Kashmir to the UN terror blacklist, diplomats said. It was the fourth time that the UN Security Council was considering a request to put Masood Azhar, leader of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), on the UN sanctions blacklist, which would subject him to a global travel ban, an assets freeze and an arms embargo. Jaish-e-Mohammad has claimed responsibility for the February 14 attack in Kashmir that killed 40 Indian troops and which was condemned by the Security Council. In a note, China said it needed more time to examine the sanctions request targeting Azhar and asked for a technical hold which could last up to nine months, diplomats said. "It appears as though the Chinese have been protecting Pakistan's priorities on counter-terrorism in the committee and so they are Pakistan's protector," said a Security Council diplomat, who asked not to be named. China has blocked three previous attempts at the committee on sanctions against Al-Qaeda and IS-linked groups to blacklist the JeM leader. The group itself was added to the terror list in 2001. The United States, France and Britain are "actively considering" a new attempt, this time with a draft Security Council resolution that would designate Azhar as a terrorist, the diplomat added. "The case is compelling to list Azhar," said the diplomat. "Certain countries are not going to stand for this. This is the fourth time now." China defended its decision by saying it was upholding a "responsible attitude" and seeking to deal "with this issue with relevant parties via thorough consultation," said the Chinese mission to the United Nations. "China believes that only a plan adopted by all can offer a long-term solution," said the mission, quoting foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang. - India-Pakistan tensions - Tensions between India and Pakistan have soared since last month's attack in Kashmir that prompted tit-for-tat air raids, stoking fears of an all-out conflict between the two nuclear-armed countries. India on February 26 staged an air raid on a camp inside Pakistan that it said belonged to JeM. One day later, Pakistan responded with fighter jets crossing into Indian-administered Kashmir. A pilot who was shot down over Pakistani territory was later sent back to India. Islamabad announced last week that more than 100 militants, including many from JeM, had been detained, but India has greeted those statements with suspicion. Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi also recently denied in a television interview that JeM had claimed responsibility for the suicide attack. Kashmir has been split between India and Pakistan since their independence and angry division in 1947. India has long accused its neighbor of supporting Kashmir rebels. Pakistan denies any role in attacks in the Indian side of the Himalayan region, where tens of thousands have died in an armed insurgency since 1989. DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - A prominent opposition politician in Bahrain faces up to six months in prison for a tweet about Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Bahraini prosecutors have long targeted Ebrahim Sharif over his outspokenness in an island kingdom in the grips of a yearslong crackdown on dissent. Both Amnesty International and the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy reported the court ruling Wednesday. Sharif must pay bail of over $1,300 to remain free pending a possible appeal. His tweet in December 2018 called for al-Bashir to leave office. The Sudanese president has faced months of protest over his rule. Authorities in Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet and a British naval base, did not respond to a request for comment. Northern Ireland could become a Wild West-style smugglers paradise under the Governments no-deal Brexit plans, hauliers have warned. Seamus Leheny of the Freight Transport Association held confidential talks with civil servants ahead of Wednesdays official announcement. Irish goods entering the Northern Ireland market will not face tariffs if the UK leaves without an agreement. Irish products entering the rest of the UK would face high tariffs on a range of food products. Mr Leheny said: Northern Ireland could become a smuggling channel to avoid tariffs. In essence we are looking at an honesty box on the border. The Northern Ireland policy manager at the FTA addressed a conference for businesses held near the Irish border in Co Louth. Northern Ireland could become a Wild West-style smugglers paradise under the Governments no-deal plans, hauliers warned. He recognised that UK officials were adamant they had no appetite for regulatory controls on the border. But he concluded: You create this place almost like the Wild West, you become that neighbour from hell, both for the EU and Great Britain. The No Deal plan for NI is shambolic & as I've said before, in a No Deal scenario NI will be biggest loser * no tariffs on ROI/EU goods entering NI across border * tariffs applicable on goods entering GB via Dover, Holyhead etc * NI therefore treated differently #Brexit Seamus Leheny (@Freight_NI) March 13, 2019 Mr Leheny added: It is an avenue to get goods into Great Britain avoiding checks or tariffs. Transport companies strongly oppose any extra red tape which could delay the free flow of goods across the currently invisible Irish border. Mr Leheny expressed alarm about the Governments proposed way of ensuring that continues after any hard Brexit. He said: It is something that would be severely detrimental to Northern Ireland, that would disadvantage us, both with businesses in the Republic of Ireland but also more severely with businesses in Great Britain as well. There would be no tariffs, no regulatory controls on goods entering Northern Ireland. So for a company based in Northern Ireland, they will face competition from goods coming into Northern Ireland that are not paying any tariffs. For similar company based in England or Scotland, imports coming in from the Republic of Ireland or the EU would be subject to tariffs. That means they would not face the same competition as their counterparts from Northern Ireland, Mr Leheny added. So it gives them that competitive advantage. Also it is a system that could be open for abuse as well. A company owner based in the EU who wanted to avoid tariffs could ship goods into Northern Ireland and sell them there, avoiding UK tariffs. Mr Leheny added it would be a system open to abuse. Most companies would like to abide by rules and good business practice with that, but if you are an agri-food business based, for example, in the Republic of Ireland or the Netherlands, and you are facing tariffs of up to 50%, you are going to face those tariffs as soon as your goods arrive into Dover or Holyhead or Felixstowe. But they will be looking at this situation with Northern Ireland and will say, hold on a minute, we can get our goods into Northern Ireland, maybe sell them to an intermediary, an agent based in Northern Ireland tariff-free, and from Northern Ireland those goods can be dispersed anywhere within the UK avoiding any tariffs. Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai has visited Edinburgh to mark the launch of a charity collaboration aimed at supporting thousands of homeless and displaced people around the world. Her organisation, Malala Fund, is partnering with homelessness campaigners Social Bite in an international tie-up to help address the problem. Under the plan, Social Bites Sleep in the Park concept which raised millions of pounds for the charity in Scotland over the last two years will be extended to other countries. Organisers hope the project will see fundraising events take place in towns and cities across the world in December this year. The campaign will aim to see around 50,000 people sleeping out on the same night, in a bid to raise awareness of the issue of homelessness and international displacement. Education campaigner Ms Yousafzai, whose fund is described as both a key partner and a beneficiary in the project, visited Social Bites Edinburgh restaurant Vesta for a private lunch on Wednesday and she was also due to speak at an evening dinner at the citys EICC. Malala Yousafzai (right) and Josh Littlejohn are teaming up to help combat homelessness and displacement (Stewart Attwood/PA) Ms Yousafzai, 21, a co-founder of Malala Fund, said: Educated girls have the power to transform our world. But without a home or access to education, millions of refugee and displaced girls are unable to fulfil their potential. I am excited to partner with Social Bite and have their support for Malala Funds work to get refugee girls get back in school. Social Bite started as a sandwich shop in Edinburgh in August 2012 and it has grown to have five shops in Scotland. A quarter of its staff are homeless and the charity has notably received visits from Hollywood stars Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney. Its Sleep in the Park events in Scotland in 2017 and 2018 raised over 7 million and saw more than 18,000 people sleeping out. Under the new proposals, a fundraising target in the millions of pounds will be distributed to a range of charities throughout the world. The project will also work with UNICEF USA and the Institute of Global Homelessness to support homeless and displaced people with the funds raised. Social Bite co-founder Josh Littlejohn MBE said: It was such an honour for Social Bite to host Malalas visit to Scotland. Malalas fight for girls education and the work her foundation does in supporting refugees and creating social justice is an inspiration. Im thrilled that Malalas visit marks the announcement of our Worlds Big Sleepout campaign, to bring our Sleep in the Park event concept to an international stage. We have seen the power of the events in Scotland in terms of raising significant funds to make a difference to homeless people and to shine the political spotlight on this issue. Pakistan-born Ms Yousafzai made headlines after she was shot in the head by Taliban militants in 2012 for speaking up for womens education. Her career as an activist began in early 2009, when she started writing a blog about her life under Taliban occupation and promoting education for girls in Pakistans Swat Valley. But her campaign angered local militants and she was shot in an assassination attempt while taking the bus to school. She was treated at Birminghams Queen Elizabeth Hospital and, fearing reprisals in her native country, made the city her home. In 2014 she became the youngest person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. On October 20 and 21, 2018, 3.5 million people in Afghanistan showed their commitment to uphold their democratic duty to vote. Unfortunately, the credibility of the Election Commission has now come under question. Allegations of commissioners requesting bribes and the methodology used to count votes created suspicion, with the extension of election dates creating a window for overnight election fraud. People queued up to cast their votes. But the electoral process now stands mired in controversy. (Source: Reuters) Analysts shared their perspective, candidates held demonstrations, people registered their complaints with the Election Complaint Commission, but were finally told that the dispute would be settled with judicial intervention. Did this make me angry? No. Why? I ran for a seat in Kabuls Parliament and won. I won the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. I may not be announced as an official member of Parliament, but I live in the hearts of my people. During my campaign trails, I identified gaps between the public and government, and between the people themselves and this led me to draw some conclusions. One major fear among the public in Afghanistan is not knowing what tomorrow will bring. Government communication with the public is slow. The public is last to be informed about visiting delegations, about laws passed, policy and regulation developed. I am bringing up this topic now because of the possibility of an agreement with the Taliban. This is truly unacceptable. Where to, Kabul? There is an atmosphere of deep uncertainty in volatile Afghanistan. (Source: Reuters) There needs to be a two-way conversation, not a one-way portal. Listen to the public, solutions to many problems could be found by holding a consultative process with the public. The public shares the same concerns as the government and everyone should hold a stake in these talks. The Afghan public needs to be part of any dialogue with the Taliban. (Source: Reuters) Therefore, I recommend to the government that an open communication be held with the citizens to understand their grievances and find a constructive solution to the problems ailing us. Another issue I must highlight is the lack of inter-community conversation within the society of Afghanistan. We are not aware of what is happening on our streets and in the neighbourhood. The repercussions of this social breakdown are seen in the growth of insurgency, sectarianism and a lack of ownership that ultimately divides us. We must communicate with each other to create a consensus on security, migration and other civic issues ailing us. I recommend that the governors office, the municipality and police work together to form community forums, where people can assemble and discuss ideas to face the common challenges facing them. After decades of war and violence, Afghan society suffers from alienation and divided houses. (Source: Reuters) A consultative approach of this nature would help rebuild Afghanistan into a robust and vibrant democracy. I won the election because I could understand the pulse of the Afghan people. I won by recognising my responsibility to my nation and people. I won because I will work tirelessly to bring change for a better tomorrow. Also read: Old friends, continuing partners: Why India is crucial for Afghanistan's stability and growth The Indian Air Forces air-strike on terror camps in Pakistans Balakot continues to be in the news the daredevil air-strike is a reality which even Pakistan doesnt dispute. The only thing disputed, however, is the number of casualties. Pakistan has been caught spreading lies about the Balakot air-strikes. (Source: Reuters) On the Indian side, the discrepancy in the number of causalities cited, coupled with the governments reluctance to clear the air, has put the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Opposition at loggerheads. While the Opposition parties continue to raise questions over senior BJP leaders assigning numbers to the casualties without any confirmations, New Delhis silence is only giving birth to more questions. The unfortunate part is that the war of words within India is letting Pakistani lies find an easy escape Pakistan has been claiming that India itself disputes the impact of the Balakot strikes. But the fact is that amid the current standoff between the two neighbouring countries after the deadly suicide bombing in Kashmirs Pulwama, Pakistan has been lying through its teeth. And these lies are largely drawing strength from a crow, whose story has been scripted by the Pakistani media. Well, the story has no traditional caw-caw like that in the legendary tale 'The Thirsty Crow' in the Pakistani story, the crow was found silent, inactive. Dead. As per the Pakistani establishment, the only casualty in the Balakot air-strike was that of a crow. A day after the airstrike, reporting from ground zero of the hinterland in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, prominent Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir had shown the carcass of a slain crow and even tweeted about it. I visited mountain area of Jabba 25 km away from Balakot today in KPK where Indian Air Force dropped bombs yesterday I found one dead body at the spot and it was a crow pic.twitter.com/FmiMQZ60DK Hamid Mir (@HamidMirPAK) February 27, 2019 The video clipping of the news report went viral but mainly because people made it the subject of memes, despite it being a serious issue. The memes apart, there are some critical questions that Pakistan needs to answer. The first being how Pakistan has been changing its position over the Pulwama terror attack and its aftermath. A day after the Balakot air-strike, the Pakistani air force reacted by sneaking into Indian territory in Jammu region, only to be chased away by the alert Indian Air Force on February 27. In the subsequent dogfight then, one Indian fighter jet was hit, forcing Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthman to eject from his aircraft. He thus landed in Pakistani captivity. On February 27, Pakistan claimed to have captured two Indian pilots. Major General Asif Ghafoor took to Twitter reportedly to spread his lies. And his PM, Imran Khan, went a step further in sharing details, apparently saying one of the two captured pilots had been hospitalised. Well, who was other one, supposedly hospitalised? Even Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has been spreading 'the tale of two pilots'. (Source: AP) Was he the one flying the F-16 that had sneaked into Indian territory before being shot down? Was he the one mistaken as an Indian pilot and allegedly lynched by his own fellow citizens of Pakistan? Or had the misinformed army general misinformed his PM to mislead the world community? Can Pakistani lawmakers or journalists like Hamid Mir dare to ask questions about why their country apparently lied about the second pilot? But then, while such questions remain unanswered, Imran Khans subsequent statements have added to the kitty of Pakistani fibs. On March 8, Imran Khan said no militant group would be allowed to operate from Pakistani soil and carry out attacks abroad (especially in India), days after his government announced a sweeping crackdown against Islamist militant organisations. As per Pakistan, at least 182 religious schools run by banned groups have been shut, and more than 120 people detained. Well, if Pakistan had refuted a hand in the Pulwama bombing that left over 40 paramilitary personnel dead on February 14, why did it go for a crackdown? And how had the banned terror groups actually been operating from Pakistani soil? Well, Pakistan does have a history of launching such crackdowns on terror with fanfare only to fade out. A similar pledge was made in early 2002, after Pakistan-based militants attacked the Indian Parliament. Since then Pakistani terrorists have attacked Mumbai, Pathankot and Pulwama, just to name a few. After every new terror strike in India, Pakistan goes for a customary crackdown only as a show for the world. After a lull, terror strikes resume. So, why should Pakistan be taken seriously this time, when its army and PM are not sure even about the number of pilots who landed in their territory after the Balakot air-strike? Pakistans lack of seriousness on terror is reflected in its slain crow' story. But then, theres a perceptible link between Pakistani lies and the dead crow. As per Indian traditions, the crow has proverbially been intolerant to lies remember the saying, 'Jhoot bole kauwa kaate'. The crow could have died, miffed with Pakistani lies, for all we know. In a country where terror camps exist, despite 150 schoolchildren being killed by extremists in Peshawar, a crows life is only a joke. Also read: Hey New York Times, Pulwama was not an explosion, just like 9/11 wasnt 'a plane crash' India lacks quality human resources to collect ground level intelligence and neutralise intermittent attacks India bombed Jaish-e-Mohammads Balakot training camp inside Pakistan in a meticulously planned early dawn operation and avenged the deaths of 40 Indian elite soldiers. India has so far lost 5,000 soldiers not in war but in fighting Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in the Kashmir valley. It has let 3.5 lakh Kashmiri Pandits become strangers in their homeland and has paid a heavy price for its shabby Kashmiri policy. It had got three decades from 1950 and 1980 to de-radicalise Kashmiri youth and maintain the natural demographic composition in Kashmir. Even after the air attack, the fundamentalist controlled Pakistan government will continue to instigate Kashmiri youth in order to divert peoples attention from core Pakistan issues: poverty, backwardness, unemployment, internal strife and lack of economic growth. Its army will raise more training camps again and silence the sane voices in Pakistan. So, what should be the preparedness for India from now onwards? First of all, our intelligence agencies should own the responsibility of security lapses for the horrific Pulwama attack, killing of innocent Amarnath pilgrims, the dastardly assault on the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai and Parliament. India lacks quality human resources to collect ground level intelligence to neutralise intermittent attacks on security personnel and innocent people. Recruitment to intelligence agencies and internal promotion in those agencies should be made on the basis of pure merit since the nations safety cannot be compromised at any cost. Second, India should train the entire Army along the lines of the tough Indo-Tibetan Border Police, which was raised in 1962 soon after the China war. We cant blame the Army for corruption in various purchases, recruitment and in buying armaments. Army people are the products of Indian families and educational institutions. The government should have revamped educational institutes by now in order to fill the shortage of morally and physically strong people. Third, any political or religious leader, if found covertly or overtly planting radical thoughts in the minds of the youth, should be booked instantly. There is a need for a state-of-the-art method for speech monitoring of radical ideologues. Schools run by them tacitly should be monitored closely. Any religious community, which is not compatible with the liberal philosophy of Indian religions, should be watched. Unfortunately, all of our political leaders almost block the process of de-radicalisation as they keep an eye on consolidating votebanks. The nation pays a heavy price for this brand of politics. De-radicalisation should start not only in Kashmir but in other parts of India with simultaneous greater integrative processes that stem alienation. The disproportionate change in Indias demographic composition is not happening spontaneously. It is being done in a planned and systematic manner in border districts around Pakistan and Bangladesh as every party relies on immigrants of every hue to shore up votebanks. Settlers from contiguous states, be they Hindu or Muslim, disrupt the local economy and socio-cultural ethos. Further, there has to be a severe crackdown on the terror financing industry. The Government should not show any mercy to those elements who want to push a potentially strong Kashmir economy and culture into the stone age. The new generation in Kashmir does not want to be hired for terrorism but wants peace, family life and jobs. Kashmir has world-famous handicrafts, a strong horticulture market and a healthy tourism sector. People there do not want this economy to vanish into smoke. Besides, its talented youth make for an incredible human resource in the country with their scientific temperament. A sensible handling of the Kashmir issue is the need of the hour. The Supreme Court has rightly directed State Governments to prevent violence against Kashmiri youth after the Pulwama attack. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, too, has said the fight is against terrorism and not against Kashmiris. The government should pinpoint the religious ideologues who suppress the sane voices in Kashmir and hold them hostage to their beliefs. The country has to create the right environment and set admirable governance standards so that vulnerable people can earn their bread with self-respect, which is the core strength of any country. Both India and Pakistan should internalise that sound socio-economics is the key to growth and prosperity. Both the nations are victims of greedy politico-global traders. Steering clear of hurdles created by the controversial Citizenship Bill impacting Assam and other States in the North-East, the BJP has finalised its alliances in the region, setting a target of winning at least 22 of the 25 Lok Sabha seats from the eight States. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav who is incharge of the North-East held a series of discussions here on Tuesday till past midnight and sealed the alliances with the Asom Gana Parishad, Bodoland Peoples Front (BPF), Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura (IPFT), National Peoples Party, Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party and the Sikkim Krantikari Morcha. Madhav said, BJP and AGP have decided to work together in the coming Parliament election in Assam to defeat Congress. Bodoland Peoples Front will be the third partner in the alliance. We will together ensure that Congress is defeated in all the 14 seats of the State, he added. The BJP leader will be holding a meeting with Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb and leaders of the IPFT in Agartala. The alliances have been finalised under the North East Democratic Alliance (NEDA), the BJP-led NDAs political coalition with the regional parties of the region. This alliance has the potential of winning not less than 22 out of 25 seats in the region and play an important role in seeing Modiji as the PM once again, Madhav posted on Facebook. Earlier, last month the Citizenship Bill which seeks to give citizenship rights to minorities, particularly Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Christians, Budhists facing prosecution in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, had triggered protests in Assam and other parts of the north-East. Ending speculation, the AGP returned to the NDA fold and will fight the Lok Sabha elections in alliance with the BJP, two months after breaking ties over the contentious Citizenship Bill. Three AGP Ministers -- Atul Bora, Keshab Mahanta and Phani Bhusan Choudhury -- took charge of their old respective departments after Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, who had not accepted their resignation letters, invited the AGP to join the Government. The AGP-BJP alliance for the Lok Sabha poll was hammered out in a meeting here between BJP national general secretary Ram Madhav, AGP president Atul Bora, NEDA convener Himanta Biswa Sarma and BJP State President Ranjit Kumar Dass, along with others, that ended past midnight. After discussion, BJP and AGP have decided to work together in the coming Parliament election in Assam to defeat Congress, Madhav had said on Twitter. Announced it at Guwahati in d presence of Himanta Biswa Sarma of BJP and Atul Bora and Keshav Mahanta of AGP. BPF will be d 3rd partner in d alliance, he tweeted. Assam Finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said the seat sharing agreement between the three parties has been finalised and a formal announcement will be made on March 16 from New Delhi after a meeting with BJP chief Amit Shah. The Bodoland Peoples Front (BPF) had on Tuesday announced its MLA and State Cabinet Minister Pramila Rani Brahma as the only candidate for the Lok Sabha polls from the sensitive Kokrajhar seat. Talking to reporters after sealing the alliance, Bora said both the former allies had joined hands again to defeat the Congress. On January 7 this year, the AGP had withdrawn its support to the BJP Government in Assam in protest against the Centres decision to go ahead with the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. At a joint media address after the meeting, Sarma, Bora and Dass said the two parties will resolve their differences over the Bill by consultation and consensus. The two parties decided that as the new Citizenship Bill will come in the new Lok Sabha and both BJP and AGP will get time, the two partners will discuss how to sort out the differences and safeguard the interest of Assam. As of today, the BJP is firm in its stand and we do not want the AGP also to change their position. We will discuss it in the next two months, Sarma said. Our stand on the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill remains the same since the Jana Sangh days and there is no need to review it. The people of Assam and India know what is the stand of the BJP on the Bill, he added. Bora too said that there were some issues and those would be sorted out amicably through discussion. We now fully convinced that the three parties will be able to defeat the Congress in the election. In the coming days, the misunderstanding and the clash over the Citizenship Bill will be resolved through consultation and consensus... We kept our commitment and now there is no Bill, he added. Asked about the charged animosity between ground workers of two parties in the last two months, Sarma said: There are difficulties as the AGP and the BJP fought separately in the panchayat polls. There is a strain in our relation during the last two months, but we have a common a goal to defeat Congress. He added that Dass and Bora will jointly address the workers of the BJP and the AGP at various places in Assam from Thursday. I think that the two leaders presence will motivate the ground level workers in the districts and we will be successful. There are of course problems and we have discussed it, Sarma said, without elaborating further. The senior BJP leader asserted that the people of Assam gave their mandate to all the three parties of the alliance in 2016 and there should not be any issues on that. We will complete this term smoothly. From now on, BJP State president Ranjeet Dass and AGP president Atul Bora will hold frequent talks to avoid any differences. We have reached a firm conclusion that we have to run the Government and give a very good governance to the people, Sarma said. Talking about Tuesday nights meeting, Dass said they were given the example of the Shiv Sena and the BJP forming an alliance despite having severe differences. Here in Assam, we dont have any clash. It was just an ideological issue regarding the Citizenship Bill. We will settle our differences over CAB through dialogue in coming days... We will for sure win 12 seats, he added. On Monday night, the AGP MLAs had held a discussion over realigning with the BJP, but the meeting remained inconclusive. They went into a huddle again on Tuesday night and decided to go ahead with the alliance. The AGP was bitterly critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the Citizenship Bill that sought to grant Indian citizenship to various non-Muslim minorities from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, who fled religious persecution in their countries, after six years of residence in India even if they did not possess any documentary proof. The AGP called it a communal piece of legislation aimed at settling Bangladeshi Hindus in Assam which, it claimed, was detrimental to the interests of the indigenous people. The BJP-AGP-BPF alliance had defeated the Congress in the 2016 assembly polls, bringing to an end its unbroken stint of 15 years in power. Several organisations came together Wednesday and pledged to build a social movement with their staff and customers supporting the government's 'Poshan Abhiyaan' to make India healthy and free of malnutrition. The 'IMPAct4Nutrtion' platform convened by UNICEF, Tata Trusts, Sight and Life, CSRBOX, CII, WeCan and NASSCOM Foundation was launched to provide an opportunity to the private sector to be part of a large initiative that will positively impact the nutritional and health status of India. Niti Aayog Advisor Alok Kumar said one-third of the children in India have stunted growth and tackling malnutrition is a key challenge for the country. "This needs to change for a nation that is doing well in many other areas, and we need to come together to tackle the problem of malnutrition," he said. Kumar said the government, with its schemes, has done a lot to strengthen the supply side response but needs cooperation from the private sector and the civil society to address the demand side. For example, junk food products are available in all kinds of convenient packs. The private sector can take up experimental projects to come up with similar packages and solutions for nutritious food, he said. "Only nine per cent of the children in the age group six to 24 months in our country receive adequate nutrition. Perhaps the main reason is lack of awareness around nutrition issues. This requires inducing behavioral change in a campaign mode to reach every household," he said. The launch event saw new commitments and updates from companies, industry associations, development partners and the Government of India on how to scale up nutrition and make sure that nutrition really does become everyone's business. Even before the formal launch, Bosch, Arvind Mills, Moody's Analytics and CareNX Innovations pledged their support to the platform. The UNICEF, in a statement, said, this quick endorsement by the private sector is a testament to the need for actively developing engagement strategies for working with the private sector and promoting good nutrition. On the occasion, Arjan De Waqt, OIC Deputy Representative at UNICEF India said, "According to the 'Copenhagen Consensus' investing in nutrition is the best public health investment one can make. "For every dollar of investment, there is a return of USD 16 due to employee retention, dip in absenteeism and increased productivity. When you reach out to employees, their families and customers and empower them to improve their nutritional status, you benefit the business." "The private sector has not only the resources, but the convening power to improve nutrition awareness in the country. After all, the private sector employs the largest share of a country's workforce and through 'IMPAct4Nutrition' it can directly influence the nutritional status of its business ecosystem," he said. 'IMPAct4Nutrition' will engage companies in three strategic areas, which businesses term as the ACE card and this includes assets/core business for nutrition, cash/CSR for nutrition as well as employee engagement for nutrition, the UNICEF statement said. BJP national vice-president Raman Singh, who served Chhattisgarh as Chief Minister for 15 consecutive years, made a stinging remark against his successor Bhupesh Baghel, terming him king of disorder for carrying out an agenda of political vendetta and repeatedly reshuffling top officers. He (Baghel) is behaving like a king of disorder, he has not settled down in his job as Chief Minister and even not allowing bureaucrats and police officers to settle down, Singh remarked in an interview with The Pioneer. Singh was referring to a spree of unreasonable transfers of IAS and IPS officers since Baghel took charge as CM on December 17, 2018. He said, there is a total chaos in States administrative and police set up, the State has witnessed a spree of transfers and retransfers right from DGP to SP level since Congress came to power. Several officials were even retransferred within weeks, which show how Bhupesh Baghel functions,. He added, as far as my understanding goes, these senseless transfers of top officers were made because the Chief Minister expects from bureaucrats and police officers to carry out his political agenda against Opposition leaders and certain top officers. The Congress which was voted to power late last year with a massive mandate, has though delivered its prime pre-poll promise of writing off farm loan of 16.65 lakh farmers, but the Government has so far largely hit headlines for mind-boggling transfers and suspension of top officers. Baghel has also formed Special Investigation Teams (SIT) to probe into alleged scams of previous BJP government. In a latest of such transfers, the Congress government has come under severe criticism for transferring Naxal-hit Sukma district police chief Jitendra Shukla who literally refused to obey a written instruction of Industry Minister Kawasi Lakhma regarding transfer of a Thana In-charge (TI). Shukla has strongly resisted his transfer order through a post on social media. The ayurvedic doctor-turned politician, Singh claimed that the BJP-led NDA would retain power at the Centre as Rs the nations mood is entirely with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi regime has heralded a new era of hope and development in the country, people will surely hand over a larger mandate to the NDA in April-May general elections, the 66-year-old politician remarked, adding he would strive to help party win all 11 Lok Sabha seats from Chhattisgarh, which goes to polls in three phases in April. BJP had won 10 seats in 2014 polls. Singh ducked a question on whether he would contest Lok Sabha polls from Rajnandgaon seat as it has been widely speculated in Chhattisgarh. Lets party decide, I dont have any desire (to contest) and even party has not indicated anything so far, Singh opined. nBharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national general secretary and Chhattisgarh party in-charge Anil Jain said party workers had reasons to be angry with the party over several issues which led to its massive defeat in the 2018 state assembly elections. Their anger would be assuaged now, Jain said while talking to media after two hours meeting with BJP state office bearers and party workers under Bastar Lok Sabha constituency at Jagdalpur on Wednesday. BJP had commenced the series of meetings at cluster and assembly levels after the announcement of poll schedule. Chhattisgarh will go to polls in three phases starting from April 11. On the first phase elections will be held in one seat. In the second phase on April 18 elections will be held in three constituencies. For remaining seven seats, the last phase of elections will be held on April 23. All the party workers will be pacified. We will approach them and convince them to work for the party again in the Lok Sabha polls to help install Narendra Modi-led government at the Centre again, Jain said. Every party worker will be motivated so that they work for the victory. Now country is first, then comes the party and workers. Bastar will witness polling in the first phase. With blessings of Goddess Danteshwari BJP will commence its victory run from here, BJP leader said. Party workers are being motivated to work hard keeping the past behind, said Jain. Irrespective of who is the candidate, party workers will work unitedly for the victory of those nominated by the party, as the target is to make Narendra Modi Prime Minister for the second term. Bracing itself for the royale battle of the upcoming 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the State unit of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is going to conduct a meeting with top executive members from all 70 Assembly constituencies and 14 districts of the national Capital. Delhi BJP General Secretary Rajesh Bhatia said that executives will interact with senior leaders of party High command and will prepare a roadmap to deter opponents Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Congress. Pertinently, this would be the first meeting with Delhi State Election In - charge , Nirmala Sitharaman. We were expecting elections in April month , since Election Commission has cleared the voting dates in Delhi , hence party is further gearing up to work on roots and will prepare strategies, said Bhatia to The Pioneer. Meanwhile, Leader of Opposition (LoP) in Delhi assembly Vijender Gupta said that BJP will demand Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) and Delhi Police Commissioner that strict action must be taken against AAP convener Kejriwal and Member of Parliament (MP) Sanjay Singh for violation of the code of conduct by obstructing the functioning of Election Commission and Delhi Police. Kejriwal insulted the constitutional office of Election Commission by calling it an offshoot of BJP. The letter of Sanjay Singh to CEC today is a bundle of lies wherein he has alleged that Election Commission is working at the behest of BJP. It is AAPs political conspiracy to defame and threaten election and police officials, Gupta alleged. Gupta said that the lie of Arvind Kejriwal about deletion of 30 lakh names from voters list was exposed by his own Minister for Elections Imran Hussain in a reply to his question in Vidhan Sabha. As per the facts presented by the Minister in the House, 11,54,332 names were deleted and 18,44,711 names were added during the four years 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. Thus, 6,90,379 names were added during these four years. This figure exposed the lie and propaganda of Chief Minister. But inspite of this revelation, the AAP machinery continues to churn out lies after lies about deletion of names, Gupta added. The Election Commission (EC) has issued a show-cause notice to Delhi BJP MLA Om Prakash Sharma for putting up two posters featuring him, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and IAF Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman on Facebook. The posters, shared on social media on March 1, feature Modi, BJP chief Amit Shah, the IAF officer, and Sharma, who represents the Vishwas Nagar seat in the Delhi Assembly. The EC has asked him to take down the post and give a reply by Thursday. In its show notice, the EC said that the Commission has directed political parties to advise their candidates and leaders to desist from displaying photographs of WC Abhinandan in advertisement as part of their poll campaign. You (OP Sharma) are directed to delete the post on your Facebook timeline immediately, said the EC adding that the Commission had issued directions that any post on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Youtube, Google violating the directions of EC must be deleted. Your attention is drawn to the fact that you have posted the matter regarding your picture with photo of WC Abhinandan Varthaman of Indian Air Force with the Prime Minister of Indiamentioned in the show cause dated March 12, in your Facebook, the notice said. Defending himself to a notice from the EC, BJP MLA Sharma on Wednesday claimed that his photograph with Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman was posted before Model Code of Conduct (MCC) came into effect. The Election Commission (EC) of India sent me a notice last night. The post was made before Lok Sabha poll dates were announced. I cannot understand how Election Commission is operating, Sharma added. The Lok Sabha election is scheduled to begin on April 11 and will continue till May 19. Polling in Delhi will be held on May 12. Pakistan has bowed down. Our brave soldier has returned. Its a big diplomatic victory that Modiji has brought Abhinandan back in very little time, the posters read. District Magistrate, Shahdara, K M Mahesh, said, We issued a show-cause notice to Sharma on March 11 for posting posters featuring Abhinandan Varthaman on Facebook. Its a violation of the Model Code of Conduct and appropriate action will be taken, Mahesh, who is also the district election officer, said. The EC had earlier directed political parties to advise their candidates and leaders to stop displaying photographs of Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman in advertisements as part of their election campaign.: the Armed Forces of a nation are the guardian of its frontiers, security and the political system. They are apolitical and neutral stakeholders in a modern democracy. It is therefore necessary that the political parties and leaders exercise great caution while making any reference to the Armed Forces in their political campaigns. The ECI said it was of the view that photographs of the Chief of Army Staff or any other defence personnel and that of functions of defence forces should not be associated with or used in any manner in advertisement/ propaganda/campaigning or in any other manner in connection with elections by political parties and candidates. With the State Finance Department having asked all Government departments to maintain austerity while purchasing vehicles, the Forest Department has been regularly demanding and obtaining luxurious vehicles from mining companies, industries and even PSUs. The department insists on the user agency to provide such vehicles apparently for patrolling and supervision of compensatory afforestation forests (CAF). Vehicles are also obtained for site specific wildlife conservation plans. Almost all these luxurious vehicles are being used by senior officers based in Bhubaneswar and Circle HQ who never carry out patrolling. Every DFO has at least 2-3 Government vehicles already at his disposal; hence there is no need for new luxurious vehicle for supervision. Moreover, luxurious vehicles like Toyota Innova or Toyota Crysta model can never be used for visiting the jungles. Information obtained vide RTI application dated 10.12.2018 has revealed that even Forest Minister Bijoyshree Routray is using a Toyota Crysta donated by steel major Tata Steel in 2018 costing Rs 25 lakh in lieu of a site specific wildlife conservation plan for Joda West Manganese mines by Tata Steel. He has never done patrolling with the luxurious vehicle which cannot run on rough roads. Though the Forest Department spends at least Rs 400 crore of CAMPA money every year for forest improvement, they have not used the money to purchase such vehicles. They are aware that the Government rules prohibiting purchase of luxurious vehicles. No Government officer can purchase high end luxurious AC vehicles as per the austerity circular dated 14.03.2001 issued by Finance Department. No vehicle other than non-AC diesel Ambassador car or non-AC diesel jeep can be purchased. Forest officials have been regularly circumventing the ban by ensuring that vehicles are purchased by companies directly and handed over to them. Interestingly, no other Government Department which badly needs vehicles like Health and Mass Education for public services is recipient of such largesse because the mining companies can never get any benefits from them. The Government is aware of the huge conflict of interest but has never stopped the unethical practice. The Forest Department is the regulator and enforces forest laws. In fact, the Forest Secretary was also using a vehicle in 2008 donated by a mining company. Forest officials cannot be expected to enforce forest laws if they use vehicles gifted by mining companies. That was the reason why the mega mining scam occurred in the forest areas of Sundargarh and Keonjhar districts. (Mohanty is a Member, Transparency International, India) Koh-e-Fiza police have booked Leader of Opposition in the BMC and Congress leader Mohammad Saghir for sexually assaulting a 35-year-old woman near filter plant at Karbala VIP road; case was registered on Tuesday. Police said that the complainant was sexually assaulted after she was assured that she would get patta of the shanty in the year 2016 in a car. The victim in her complaint state that in the year 2016 her neighbor Basit Nai lured her that she could get her house as there are schemes and took her to the spot where she was raped by Mohammad Saghir in a car and was threatened to keep mum and assured that she would be provided with the patta of her shanty. Later she continued to follow regarding the patta but failed to get anything and in the month of January this year she was again assaulted by Saghir. Basit is co-accused in the case. The police have registered a case under section 376 and 506 of the IPC and have started further investigation. Earlier the victim lodged a complaint with the Jehangirabad police and later she withdraw the complaint but the reason remained unknown. Search for the co-accused has been started while case against Saghir has been registered by Koh-e-Fiza police. Sher Singh Rana, accused in the sensational murder of bandit-turned-Lok Sabha MP Phoolan Devi on Wednesday announced that his political outfit-Rastrawadi Janlok Party (RJP) will make electoral debut in Haryana. Rana, who is national president of RJP, announced here that his party will contest on Karnal Lok Sabha constituency in Haryana and Gautam Budh Nagar seat in Uttar Pradesh. We will contest on both these Lok Sabha seats in an alliance with a national party. The alliance will be announced in a few days, Rana said while talking to The Pioneer. During his electoral debut earlier, Rana had unsuccessfully contested from Jewar assembly constituency in Uttar Pradesh in 2012 assembly polls. Rana had hit the headlines after he allegedly killed Phoolan Devi, popularly known as Bandit Queen in New Delhi in July 2001. A Delhi court had convicted him in the murder case in the year 2014 and sentenced him to life imprisonment and a fine of Rs 100,000 for Phoolan Devis assassination, as well as charges of conspiracy. Rana had later challenged the lower courts decision in the Delhi High Court, which had granted him bail in 2016. On the high-profile murder case, he says, I was framed Even Phoolan Devis sister had came out in my support and said that I was framed in the murder case. When pressed further to comment on his conviction, he says that the case is now sub-judice in Delhi High Court and I was given bail in 2016. I have done nothing wrong and had no role in assassination of Phoolan Devi, he adds. Rana had earlier reportedly admitted that he killed Phoolan Devi to avenge the killings of Thakurs by her in Behmai in the year 1981. An author of a book, Jail Diary: Tihar Se Kabul-Kandhar Tak, Rana was also involved in a sensational jail break case in Tihar. Stating that he did fled from the Tihar Jail in 2004, Rana claims that he had gone to Afghanistan to get back the remains of Rajput king Prithviraj Chauhan. But I had surrendered again in 2006, he adds. The murder accused also says that a biopic based on his life is scheduled to be released next year. A top actor and director have collaborated for this biopic which will be released next year. The director had met and also discussed about my book Jail Diary: Tihar Se Kabul-Kandhar Tak and my journey so far, he says without revealing their names. Last year, it was reported that actor Ajay Devgn, might play Sher Singh Rana on the silver screen. Ironically, Phoolan Devi, who was allegedly assassinated by Sher Singh Rana, also had a biopic Bandit Queen made on her life. Ranas RJP to make electoral debut in Haryana , who belongs to western Uttar Pradesh says that his party will field a candidate in Karnal Lok Sabha seat of Haryana and will also independently contest Vidhan Sabha elections in Haryana due to be held later this year. On choosing Chief Minister Manohar Lal constituency Karnal for electoral battle, he says, Karnal has been chosen as the constituency has Kshatriya vote bank. While there are 10 Lok Sabha seats in Haryana, the State Assembly has 90 seats. When asked about RJPs election strategy, he said that the party has planned to carry out padhyatra in Haryana in the last week of May soon after Lok Sabha polls. We will study each district of Haryana and people will be apprized about partys ideology and it will be only after studying each district that party will decide on which seats it would be contesting assembly elections, Rana adds. The RJP chief further says, The party will work for the welfare of general category who have not been taken care by anyone, including the current BJP Government in Haryana. There is a need to create more employment opportunities for them. The name of Haryana party unit president will be announced later. The office bearers of Haryana party state unit which has been announced today, would be working to strengthen the party presence in the state, Rana adds. A host of bureaucrats and a senior police officer who had joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a month before the 2018 assembly elections, resigned from the party on Wednesday. It was not immediately known what prompted them to resign en masse. As per party sources, the resignation letter in which all of them signed has been sent to the BJP state president Vikram Usendi. All these former senior government officials had joined the party with much fanfare in presence of BJP national president Amit Shah during his public meeting at Raipur before the state assembly poll, in which the party got the drubbing. Among those resigned were former director general of police Rajiv Shrivastava and a former bureaucrat R C Sinha of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Other prominent names are N K S Thakur, Vimal Chand Gupta, H K Dhagmwar, R K Tiwari, Banshilal Kurrey, R K Sharma, Bhojendra Uike, Pradeep Mishra, Shamsheer Khan, Ajit Choubey, Dr Hemu Yadu, Ghanshyam Sharma, Dr Neeta Sharma and Subhash Verma. BJP state spokesperson Sanjay Shrivastava confirmed the resignation. In a democracy, the people have the liberty to shift their political alliance with changing times. The retired bureaucrats had joined the party thinking of getting some benefits if it comes to power but their dreams were smashed as party lost the assembly election. So, they might have decided to quit, he said Many others, who had joined the party after resigning from their respective services, are still with the party and working with dedication, he added. A 53-year-old terrorist and a member of the banned terrorist group Khalistan Commando Force (KCF) and an associate of Jarnail Singh Bhinderwale, who was killed by the Indian Army in Operation Blue Star in 1984 was arrested by the Delhi Police. The accused Gursewak Singh, wanted by Indian security agencies, was planning to revive the moribund Sikh militancy in Punjab and was in regular touch of KCF chief Paramjeet Singh Panjwad, who resides in Pakistan under the watchful eyes of rogue Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). Singh was also in touch with Jagtaar Singh Hawara and other terrorists lodged in various jails in India including Tihar jail. Gursewak was arrested by Crime Branch sleuths from Inter-State Bus Terminal (ISBT) Kashmiri Gate in North Delhi on March 12 where he had come to meet one of his contacts, said Dr Ajit Kumar Singla, Additional Commissioner of Police, Crime Branch. Gursewak was previously involved in more than 50 cases of terrorist activities, murders of police officials and informers, robberies in banks and police station among others. He remained in jail for more than 26 years in different cases and was in regular touch with some Pakistan based terrorists. Dr Singla said that Singh was born in a farmer family residing in Raikot village in Punjabs Ludhiana district. His elder brother Swaran Singh was a member of terrorist group led by Bhinderwale in Punjab in 1980s. Gursewak also joined the group in 1982, said Additional CP. In 1984, when Binderwale was killed, most of his associates fled to Pakistan where they were trained and supported by ISI. During that time, Gursewak joined the newly formed KCF constituted by terrorist Manveer Singh Chehdu and actively participated in anti national activities, said Dr Singla. Gursewak along with his associates remained involved in dozens of murders of suspected informers of Indian security agencies and bank robberies in Punjab, Delhi and Rajasthan. In May 1984, the accused along with his associates, Labh Singh, Gurinder Singh and Swaranjit Singh had also killed group editor of Hind Samachar newspaper Ramesh Chander in Jallandhar, said Additional CP. In 1986, Singh along with his associates attacked the residence of Julio Riberio, Ex-DGP Punjab in Jallandhar. In the same year, the accused along with his associates killed eight police personnel of Punjab Police while freeing the KCF Chief Jarnal Labh Singh and terrorists Gurinder Pal Singh Bhola and Swaranjit Singh from police custody in court complex in Jallandhar after a shootout, said Additional CP. The accused persons had also attacked on a police station in Punjab and robbed 16 rifles, six carbines, cartridges, two revolvers, police jeep and a Fiat car. The accused along with his associates had also killed all nine members of a family in Punjab, said Additional CP. The accused remained in jail and most of the time in High Risk Ward of Tihar Jail till 2004 for period of about 18 years. While at Tihar Jail, he planned to smuggle arms including AK-47 and explosives from Pakistan in order to carry out an attack in Delhi, said Dr Singla. However, this conspiracy of the accused persons was foiled by Crime Branch of Delhi Police, which arrested two terrorists from the area of Punjabi Bagh on July 9, 1998, said Dr Singla. After coming out of jail in 2010, he remained involved in several cases of robbery and was arrested thrice by Ludhiana Police in 2014, 2015 and 2016 respectively. During this period, he remained in contact with Paramjeet Singh Panjwad. He was again arrested by Delhi Police in 2017 under the Arms Act. He is facing trial in a case in Patiala House Court and was not attending the court following which the court had issued non-bailable warrants against him, Dr Singla added. The Bhopalites witnessed an electrifying performance at Ravindra Bhavan on Wednesday. Alliance Francaise de Bhopal organized VIA a tremendous combination of western and eastern traditions and cultures. Ode dances on Chinese pole, live instruments and Kalaripayattu was delightful view for the Bhopalites to watch on Wednesday evening. VIA performance featured live instruments of bamboo and wood. The twists and twirls on a 19 feet long Chinese pole was another great sight for the art lovers of the city. Ode Rosetts aerial contortions on the Chinese Pole to the ambient sounds of music were totally charismatic. Her control over the gravity-defying postures and acrobatic movements were swift. With tremendous determination and calmness, she appeared as a valiant performer on stage. A regional flavour was added Kozhikode-based artistes Kishore and Subheesh PB performed rhythmic Kalapariyattu with great ease and perfection. It is to be noted Ode had learnt Kalaripayattu in Kerala and continued visiting the institute to hone her skills. Besides, she also taught the members of the Kalari how to use the Chinese Pole. The performance was accompanied by Jerome Cury from France on percussions. His performance was a sheer music to the ears. He maintained the interest of the audience as he created a calm ambiance for them at Ravindra Bhavan. Also vocalist Fatima El Hassounis enchanted the audience. Fatima was able to make audience glued to their seats. Her melodious voice and her enchanting performance was much liked by the audience and they applauded her performance. A Dehradun-based social organisation- Jan Hastakshep- has alleged that many of the day labourers are finding it difficult to get their due legal rights for years. They further said that despite repeatedly meeting the officers concerned on the matter, the workers grievance has remained unaddressed. . Addressing a press conference on Tuesday, the members of the organisation stated that they had sent a letter to the President on the issue in October 2018. The letter dwelt on the problem being faced by over 70 labourers of pending applications and thousands of pending registration of the labourers. However, we have received no answer to the letter so far, said a member of the organisation. The activists further alleged that the welfare schemes being launched both by the Centre and the state government, meant to promote the interests of such workers, are falling flat. They said that the government has totally failed to execute the existing schemes for the good of the workers. Earlier, the labourers accompanied by the activists met the deputy labour commissioner Anil Petwal. The officer is learnt to have assured the delegation that the matters raised by them would be adequately looked into and necessary steps would be taken to have the problems resolved soon. After pausing investments in its "Allo" mobile messaging app, Google has finally bid goodbye to the platform that was launched with much fanfare in 2016. A banner across the official Allo website confirmed that March 12 was its last day in operation, The Verge reported on Monday. "During our time together, we brought you a smarter way to chat, with features like the Google Assistant, 'Allo' for web and selfie stickers but now the app is signing off," the banner on Allo's page read. Last year in April, Anil Sabharwal, the head of the communications group at Google told the media that "Allo" as a product did not achieve the level of traction the company had hoped for. Even though the app's successor is not quite ready yet, Google has incorporated some of Allo's features like smart replies and desktop support into the Android Messaging app. "We're working to bring your favorite features to the Messages app so you can have richer conversations with all your friends. If you have an Android phone, we hope you'll try Messages!" the banner said. "Allo" was launched as an instant messaging mobile app for the Android and iOS mobile Operating Systems (OS), with a web client available on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera browsers. After Allo's exit, Google is going all in on Rich Communication Services (RCS) -- the successor to SMS that's been a long time coming -- to give Android a successful messaging app. "It's far from universal, but now that Google is focused on just a single messaging app, it has a better chance of gaining some momentum," The Verge said. British Parliament on Tuesday rejected Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal for a second time, plunging the UK into a state of uncertainty just two weeks ahead of the country's divorce from the European Union. The House of Commons voted against the deal by 391 votes to 242. Seventy-five Conservative MPs rebelled against their party's position by rejecting May's deal. Three Labour parliamentarians rebelled against their leader by voting in favour of the agreement. There will now be a debate on Wednesday on whether the UK should leave the EU without a deal. In her address to the parliament after the defeat, May said she "profoundly regrets" MPs decision. May said she is conscious of the "potential damage" leaving the EU without a deal would do and the lawmakers now face "an unenviable choice" of what to do next. Declaring May's Brexit deal as "dead", opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn called on the government to adopt his proposals for a softer Brexit. "Their deal, their proposal, the one the prime minister's put is clearly dead," the Labour Party leader told parliament. The Sri Lankan Government appeared to be at loggerheads over the countrys representation at the 40th session of the UN Human Rights Commission where a resolution to address the human rights concerns in the island nation will be taken up next week. Colombo is once again under international pressure to implement fully the measures identified by the UNHRC in 2015 to address human rights concerns after the United Kingdom and Germany on Tuesday tabled a resolution at the UN body in Geneva. The UN rights office calls for international investigations into alleged war crimes and encourages member states to prosecute Sri Lankans suspected of war crimes in accordance with universal jurisdiction principles. The resolution which Sri Lanka is expected to co-sponsor was also endorsed by Canada, Germany, Montenegro, North Macedonia, the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. IndigoVision Group plc engages in the design, development, manufacture, and sale of networked video security systems. Its IP video security systems allow full motion video to be transmitted with digital quality and security using local or wide area networks, wireless links, or the Internet. The company provides control center security management software, IP video walls, surveillance keyboards, integration modules, mobile centers, cameras and encoders, network video recorders, and body worn cameras. It serves airport, casino, city, finance, and police, as well as other markets comprising education, government, health, hospitality, industrial, events, mining, petrochemicals, ports, rail, residential, retail, and traffic. The company operates in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, and the Asia Pacific. IndigoVision Group plc is based in Edinburgh, the United Kingdom. Read More iShares Russell 3000 ETF's stock was trading at $158.74 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, IWV stock has increased by 72.1% and is now trading at $273.15. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. BlackRock North American Income Trust plc is a closed-ended equity mutual fund launched by BlackRock Fund Managers Limited. The fund is managed by BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited. It invests in the public equity markets of the United States. The fund seeks to invest in stocks of companies operating across diversified sectors. It primarily invests in dividend paying stocks of large cap companies. The fund also invests a part of its assets in derivatives. It benchmarks the performance of its portfolio against the Russell 1000 Value Index. BlackRock North American Income Trust plc was formed on August 30, 2012 and is domiciled in the United Kingdom. Read More The Boeing Co. is an aerospace company, which engages in the manufacture of commercial jetliners and defense, space and security systems. It operates through the following segments: Commercial Airplanes; Defense, Space and Security; Global Services; and Boeing Capital. The Commercial Airplanes segment includes the development, production, and market of commercial jet aircraft and provides fleet support services, principally to the commercial airline industry worldwide. The Defense, Space and Security segment refers to the research, development, production and modification of manned and unmanned military aircraft and weapons systems for global strike, including fighter and combat rotorcraft aircraft and missile systems; global mobility, including tanker, rotorcraft and tilt-rotor aircraft; and airborne surveillance and reconnaissance, including command and control, battle management and airborne anti-submarine aircraft. The Global Services segment provides services to commercial and defense customers. The Boeing Capital segment seeks to ensure that Boeing customers have the financing they need to buy and take delivery of their Boeing product and manages overall financing exposure. T Read More Bridgepoint Education, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides postsecondary education services in the United States. Its academic institutions, Ashford University and University of the Rockies, offer associate's, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree programs in the disciplines of business, education, psychology, social sciences, and health sciences. The company offers its programs primarily through online; and at its campuses. As of December 31, 2017, its institutions offered approximately 1,200 courses and 80 degree programs; and had 45,730 students enrolled. The company was formerly known as TeleUniversity, Inc. and changed its name to Bridgepoint Education, Inc. in February 2004. Bridgepoint Education, Inc. was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in San Diego, California. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Arthur J. Gallagher & Co.: 2235158 Alberta Limited, A.J. Amer Agency, AHC Digital LLC, AIX Limited, AJG Coal LLC, AJG Financial Services LLC, AJG Meadows LLC, AJG North America ULC, AJG RCF LLC, AJGRMS of Louisiana LLC, ARM RE Ltda., AVIATION INSURANCE SERVICES, AVRECO, Ace IRM Insurance Broking Group, Acumus Holdings Limited, Acumus Interco Limited, Acumus Ltd, Adams & Associates International, Adaptive Marketing LLC, Adco General Corporation, Advanced Benefit Advisors, Aequus Trade Credit, Affinity Marketing Group, Ahrold Fay Rosenberg, Aires Consulting Group, Alesco Risk Management Services Limited, Alize Limited, Allied Claims Administration Inc., Alternative Market Specialists, Altman & Cronin Benefit Consultants, American Freedom Carriers Inc., American Security Services Corp., American Wholesalers Underwriting Ltd, Andrew-Anthony Insurance Agency, Anthony Hodges Consulting Limited, Antrobus Investments Limited, AquaSurance, Argentis, Argentis Financial Group Limited, Argentis Financial Management Limited, Argus Benefits, Armstrong/Robitaille/Riegle, Artex (SAC) Limited, Artex Cedar Hill, Artex Corporate Services (Malta) Limited, Artex Corporate Services Limited, Artex Holdings (Gibraltar) Limited, Artex Holdings (Malta) Limited, Artex Insurance (Guernsey) PCC Limited, Artex Insurance (Tennessee) PCCIC Inc., Artex Insurance Brokers (Malta) PCC Limited, Artex Insurance ICC Limited, Artex Intermediaries Ltd, Artex Risk Solutions (Bermuda) Ltd, Artex Risk Solutions (Cayman) Limited, Artex Risk Solutions (Gibraltar) Limited, Artex Risk Solutions (Guernsey) Limited, Artex Risk Solutions (International) Ltd, Artex Risk Solutions (Malta) Limited, Artex Risk Solutions (Singapore) Pte Ltd, Artex Risk Solutions (UK) Limited, Artex Risk Solutions Inc., Arthur J Gallagher (Norway) Holdings AS, Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. (AUS) Ltd, Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. (Bermuda) Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. (Illinois), Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. Insurance Brokers of California Inc., Arthur J. Gallagher (Aus) Pty Ltd, Arthur J. Gallagher (Bermuda) Holding Partnership, Arthur J. Gallagher (Life Solutions) Ltd, Arthur J. Gallagher (Singapore) Pte Ltd, Arthur J. Gallagher (U.S.) LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher (UK) Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher Asesoria S.A.C., Arthur J. Gallagher Australasia Holdings Pty Ltd., Arthur J. Gallagher Brokerage & Risk Management Services LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher Broking (NZ) Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher Financial Services Professionals Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher Group Quebec ULC, Arthur J. Gallagher Holdings (UK) Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher Insurance Brokers Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher Latin America LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher Management (Bermuda) Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher Real Estate Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Arthur J. 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Inc., Gallagher (Bermuda) Insurance Solutions Ltd., Gallagher - Grace/Mayer Insurance Agency, Gallagher Bassett Aires Inc., Gallagher Bassett Canada Inc., Gallagher Bassett Insurance Services Ltd., Gallagher Bassett International Ltd., Gallagher Bassett NZ Pty Ltd., Gallagher Bassett Services Inc. , Gallagher Bassett Services Pty Ltd., Gallagher Bassett Services Workers Compensation Victoria Pty Ltd., Gallagher Benefit Services (Canada) Group Inc., Gallagher Benefit Services (Holdings) Limited, Gallagher Benefit Services Inc., Gallagher Benefit Services Management Company Limited, Gallagher Benefit Services Pty Ltd, Gallagher Benefits Consulting Limited, Gallagher Bomford Couch Wilson, Gallagher Burgess, Gallagher Canada Acquisition Corporation, Gallagher Caribbean Group Limited, Gallagher Clean Energy LLC, Gallagher Communications Limited, Gallagher Community Clinic RPG LLC, Gallagher Consulting Ltda, Gallagher Corporate Services LLC, Gallagher Coyle, Gallagher CyberRisk, Gallagher Energy Risk Services Inc., Gallagher Fiduciary Advisors LLC, Gallagher Holdings (UK) Limited, Gallagher Holdings Bermuda Company Limited, Gallagher Holdings Four (UK) Limited, Gallagher Holdings Three (UK) Limited, Gallagher Insurance Brokers (Barbados) Limited, Gallagher Insurance Brokers (St. Kitts & Nevis) Limited, Gallagher Insurance Brokers (St. Lucia) Limited, Gallagher Insurance Brokers (St. Vincent) Limited, Gallagher Insurance Brokers Jamaica Limited, Gallagher International Cash Management s.r.l., Gallagher International Holdings (US) Inc., Gallagher Investment Advisors LLC, Gallagher Inwest Group, Gallagher Koster, Gallagher Lambert Group, Gallagher Madison Risk & Insurance Services, Gallagher Mauritius Holdings, Gallagher Mississippi Brokerage LLC, Gallagher RE Colombia Ltda Corredores de Reaseguros SA, Gallagher Risk & Reward Limited, Gallagher Risk Group LLC, Gallagher Risk Placements Pty Ltd, Gallagher SKS, Gallagher Service Center LLP, Gallagher-Tarantino, Galtney Group, Game Day Insurance Inc., Gardner & White Corp., Gardner Marine Agency, Garza Long Group, Gatehouse Consulting Limited, Gault Armstrong Kemble Pty Ltd, Gault Armstrong SARL, Giles Group, Giles Holdings Limited, Giles Insurance Brokers, Gillis Ellis & Baker Inc., Goodman Insurance Agency, Grandy Pratt Co., Greenseed Alternative Mangaers Platform Ltd, Grossman & Associates, Group Benefits of Arkansas, Group Insurance Associates, Gruppo Marcucci, HLG Holdings Limited, HMG-PCMS Limited, HPF Investments LLC, HR Owen Insurance Services Limited, Hagan Newkirk Financial Services, Hagedorn & Company, Hardman & Howell Benefits, Harlequin Insurance PCC Limited, Hartstein Associates Inc., Healthcare Professionals Purchasing Group LLC, Healthcare Risk Solutions, Heath Lambert Group Ltd., Heath Lambert Limited, Heath Lambert Overseas Limited, Heiser Insurance Agency, Henderson Phillips Fine Arts Insurance, Herbruck Alder & Co., Heritage Insurance Brokers (CI) Limited, Hesse & Partner AG, Hesse Consulting, Hexagon ICC Limited, Hexagon Insurance PCC Limited, Hill Chesson & Woody, Hogan Insurance Services, Home & Travel Limited, Honour Point Limited, Horseshoe Corporate Services Ltd, Horseshoe Fund Services (Cayman) Ltd, Horseshoe Fund Services Ltd, Horseshoe Fund Services USA Inc., Horseshoe ILS Services UK Ltd, Horseshoe Insurance Advisors US LLC, Horseshoe Insurance Advisory Ltd., Horseshoe Insurance Services Holdings Ltd, Horseshoe Insurance Services Holdings US Inc., Horseshoe Management (Gibraltar) Limited, Horseshoe Management (Ireland) Ltd, Horseshoe Management Ltd., Horseshoe PCC Limited, Horseshoe Re Limited, Horseshoe Services (Cayman) Ltd, Horseshoe Services (Pty) Ltd, Horton Insurance Agency, Housing Authorities Services Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Human Resource Management Systems, I-Protect Underwriting Pty Ltd, IBIS Advisors, IBS Reinsurance Singapore Pte Ltd, ILS Fund Services Ltd., ISG International, ITI Solutions, Igloo Insurance PCC Limited, Independent Benefit Services, Independent Fiduciary Services, Ink Underwriting Agencies Limited, InsSync Group Pty Ltd, Inspire Underwriting Limited, Instrat Insurance Brokers, Instrat Insurance Brokers Pty Ltd, Instrat Integration Holdco Pty Ltd, Insurance Acquisitions Holdings Limited, Insurance Associates Inc., Insurance Dialogue Limited, Insurance Dialogue Ltd., Insurance Plans Agency, Insurance Plus Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Insurance Point, Insurance Risk Managers of Missouri Inc., Insure My Villa Limited, Insure Pty Ltd, Integrated Healthcare Strategies, InterNational Insurance Group, InterPacific Underwriting Agencies, Intermountain Financial Benefits, Interstate Insurance Underwriters, JPGAC LLC, James F. 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Inc., Kane Group - Insurance Management Operations, Kelly Financial, Kent Kent & Tingle and RBS, Keyser Benefits Corp., Kingspark Enterprises Pty Ltd, L&R Benefits, LSG Insurance Partners, Learn About Money Limited, Lewis & Associates Insurance Brokers, Leystone Insurance & Financial, Life Plans Unlimited, Lincoln Financial Management, Longfellow Financial, Lucas Fettes Limited, Lucas Fettes and Partners Limited, Lutgert Insurance, MA Underwriting Pty Ltd, MDM Insurance Associates, MG Advanced Coal Technologies-1 LLC, MGA Insurance Services, MRS Holdings Ltd., Madison Scott & Associates, Managed Healthcare Solutions, Mannequin Insurance PCC Limited, Marchetti Robertson & Brickell Insurance, Marine Insurance Service, Martin Gordon & Jones Inc., McDowall Associates Human Resource Consultants, McIntyre Risk Management, McLean Insurance Agency, McNeary, McPherson Benefits Group, McRory & Co., Mecacem Insurance SPC Ltd, MedInsights Inc., Melton Insurance Associates, Memberworks Canada LLC, Merit Insurance, Metcom Excess, Metzler Bros. 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Ltd., Pen Underwriting Limited, Pen Underwriting Pty Ltd, Persing Dyckman & Toynbee Inc., Personal Advice Services Pty Ltd, Petty Burton Associates, Pointer Insurance Agency, Portmore Insurance Brokers (Wilshire) Limited, Portmore Insurance Brokers Limited, Potter-Holden & Co., Powell Insurance Agency, Premier Insurance Services Inc., Premier Risk Services, Premium Finance Corporation, Preston-Patterson, ProSource Financial, Professional Agents Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Professional Claims Managers, Proinova AB, Proinova Agency AB, Pronto California Agency LLC, Pronto California General Agency LLC, Pronto Florida Claims LLC, Pronto Florida General Agency LLC, Pronto Franchise LLC, Pronto General Agency Ltd, Pronto General Agency Management LLC, Pronto Holdco Inc., Pronto Holding California LLC, Pronto Holding Florida LLC, Pronto Insurance Agency of Laredo Inc., Pronto Premium Finance LLC, Property & Commercial Ltd., Property Insurance Initatives Limited, Property and Commercial Limited, Protected Insurance Company, Protection Plan Association Inc., Protek Group Limited, Providium Consulting Group, Ptarmigan Underwriting Agency Limited, Ptarmigan Underwriting UK Limited, Purple Bridge Claims Management Limited, Purple Bridge Finance Limited, Purple Bridge Group Limited, Purple Bridge Investments Limited, Purple Bridge Online Services Limited, Purple Bridge Publishing Limited, Quantum Underwriting Solutions Limited, Quillco 226 Limited, Quillco 227 Limited, R. L. Youngdahl & Associates, R.G. Speno Inc., R.W. Scobie, RA Rossborough (Guernsey) Ltd., RA Rossborough (Insurance Brokers) Ltd, REGENCY Group inc., RGA Referencing Limited, RGA Underwriting Limited, RIL Administrators (Guernsey) Ltd., RJ Dutton Inc., RSM Insurance Services Limited, Reassurance Holdings Inc., Rebholz Insurance Agency, Reid Manson Ltd., Reimbursement Services, Rentguard Limited, Reward Management Limited, Reynolds & Rodar Insurance Group, Riley & Associates, Rio 587 Limited, Rio 588 Limited, Risk & Reward Group, Risk Management Partners Limited, Risk Placement Services Inc., Risk Planners, Risk Services (NW) Limited, Risk Services (NW) Ltd., Risk Solutions Group Limited, Robert A. Schneider Agency, Robert Keith & Associates, Roberts & Roberts Insurance Service, Robinson-Adams Insurance, Rossborough Healthcare International Ltd, Rossborough Insurance (IOM) Ltd., Rossborough Insurance Services Ltd. (Jersey), S. A. Freerks & Associates, SEG Insurance Ltd, SGB-NIA Insurance Brokers, SHILLING Ltd, SKANCO International, SMERI AB, SRS Underwriting Pty Ltd, Secure Enterprises Pty Ltd, Securitas Re, Sellers Group, Sentinel Indemnity LLC, Septagon Insurance PCC Limited, Shuford Insurance Agency, Sigma II Insurance Agency, Sinclair Billard and Weld Limited, Sobieski & Bradley, Solid Benefit Guidance, Spanjers Insurance Agency, Spataro Insurance Agency, Specialised Broking Associates, Specialty Risk, Stackhouse Poland, Stackhouse Poland Bidco Limited, Stackhouse Poland Group Limited, Stackhouse Poland Holdings Limited, Stackhouse Poland Midco Limited, Stackouse Poland Limited, Stanton Group, Stark Johnson & Stinson Inc., Steel Agency, Strata Solicitors Ltd, Strategic Health Plans Corp., Strathearn Insurance Brokers, Strathearn Insurance Brokers (Qld) Trading Trust, Strathern Insurance Group Pty Ltd, Strathern Integration Holdco Pty Ltd, Strathern Unit Trust, Strong Financial Resources, Summit Insurance Group, Sunday and Associates, Sunderland Insurance Services, Super Advice Corporate Services Pty Ltd, Taylor Benefits, Texas Insurance Agency, Texas Insurance Managers, The BeneTex Group, The Buchholz Planning, The Chapman Group, The Commonwealth Consulting Group, The Daniels Group Inc., The EHE Group LLC, The EHE Insurance Agency LLC, The Eagle Insurance Agency LLC, The Eriksen Group, The Forker Company, The Gleason Agency, The Great Lakes Agency, The HR Group, The Hawk Agency, The Human Capital Group, The Lance Group, The Levitt/Kristan Co., The MW Bagnall Company, The Old Greenwich Consulting Group, The Parks Johnson Agency, The Plus Companies Inc., The Presidio Group, The Producers Choice, The Rains Group, The Splinter Group, The Titan Group, The Treiber Group, The Woodsmall Companies Inc., Title & Covenant Brokers Ltd., Title Investments Limited, Tom Sherwin Insurance Agency, Total Reward Group, Total Rewards Group (Holdings) Limited, Towle Agency, Transwestern, Tri-State General Insurance Agency, Triad Insurance Agency, Triad USA, Tribeca Strategic Advisors, Trinder & Norwood, Trip Mate, Trissel Graham & Toole, Tropp & Co., Tudor Risk Services, Tyloma Holdings Limited, Uni-Care Inc., Unison Inc., Universico Group, Unoccupied Direct Limited, V2V Holdings LLC, VEBA Service Group, Vasek Insurance Services Limited, Velo ACU LLC, Velo Holdings Inc., Verbag AG., Vertrue LLC, Victory Insurance Agency, Vincent L. Braband Insurance, Vital Benefits, Voluntary Benefits Solutions, W. E. Kingsley Co. Inc., WM. W. George & Associates, Walker Taylor Agency, Welling Associates, Wesfarmers Insurance - Insurance Brokerage Operations, Western Benefit Solutions, White & Company Insurance, Whitehaven Insurance Group, William Gallagher Associates Insurance Brokers, William H. Connolly & Co., Williams Insurance Agency Inc., Williams-Manny Insurance Group, Winn & Company Insurance Brokers, Wischmeyer Benefit Partners, Woodbrook Underwriting Agencies, Woods & Grooms, WorkCare Northwest, Worksite Communications, Y. S. Liedman & Associates, YOA Capsicum Reinsurance Broker Limited, Zenor Limited, Zuber Insurance Agency, and e3 Financial. iShares MSCI EAFE ETF's stock was trading at $56.05 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus (COVID-19) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, EFA stock has increased by 40.8% and is now trading at $78.90. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. The following companies are subsidiares of Marsh & McLennan Companies: 8WORKS INC., 8WORKS LTD, A. Constantinidi & CIA. S.C., A.C.N. 000 951 146 Pty Limited, A.C.N. 001 572 961 Pty Limited, A.C.N. 076 935 683 Pty Limited, A.C.N. 102 322 574 Pty Limited, ACE Insurance Agents Limited, ACE Insurance Consultants Limited, ACE Insurance and Reinsurance Brokers Limited, AD Corretora de Seguros, AFCO Premium Acceptance Inc., AFCO Premium Credit LLC, Access Equity Enhanced Fund GP LLC, Admiral Holdings Limited, Agnew Higgins Pickering & Co. (Bermuda) Ltd, Aldgate Investments Limited, Aldgate Trustees Ltd, Alexander Forbes Group Holdings Limited, Alpha Consultants Limited, Alta SA, Altius Real Assets (GP) LLC, Amal Insurance Brokers Limited (in liquidation), Anda Insurance Agencies Pte Ltd, AssetVal Pty Ltd, Assur Conseils Marsh S.A., Assurance Capital Corporation, Assurance Services Corporation, Australian Insurance Brokers Pty Ltd, Australian World Underwriters Pty Ltd., BBPS Limited, Barney & Barney Orange County LLC, Beaumonts (Leeds) Limited (in liquidation), Beaumonts Insurance Brokers Limited (in liquidation), Beaumonts Insurance Services Limited, Beneficios Integrales Oportunos SA, Benefitfocus Inc., Blue Marble Micro Limited, Blue Marble Microinsurance Inc., Bluefin, Bluefin Insurance Group Limited, Bluefin Insurance Services Limited, Boulder Claims LLC, Bowring (Bermuda) Investments Ltd., Bowring Marine Limited, Bowring Marsh (Bermuda) Ltd., Bowring Marsh (Hong Kong) Limited, Bowring Marsh Asia Pte. Ltd., Bowring Marsh Corretora de Resseguros Ltda., Bowring Marsh Limited, Broderick Piller Pty Ltd, Broker 2 Broker Limited, BuildPay LLC, Burke Ford Trustees (Leicester) Limited, C.T. Bowring Limited, CMC-Belgibo NV, CPRM Limited, CPSG Partners LLC, Carpenter Marsh Fac Chile Corredores de Reaseguros Limitada, Carpenter Marsh Fac Colombia Corredores de Reaseguros S.A., Carpenter Marsh Fac Peru Corredores de Reaseguros S.A.C., Carpenter Marsh Fac Re LLC, Carpenter Turner Cyprus Ltd, Carpenter Turner S.A., Cascade International Holdings C.V., Cascade Regional Holdings Limited, Central Insurance Services Limited, Charter Risk Management Services LLC, Chartwell Healthcare Limited, Chronos Insurance Brokers Pty Limited, Claims and Recovery Management (Australia) Pty Limited, Clark Thomson Insurance Brokers Limited, Client Provide Limited, Colombian Insurance Broking Wholesale Limited, Consultores 2020 C.A., Cronin & Co Insurance Services Limited, DVA - Deutsche Verkehrs-Assekuranz-Vermittlungs GmbH, Dawson Insurance, DeLima Marsh S.A. - Los Corredores de Seguros S.A., Dovetail Insurance Corp., Dovetail Insurance Corp., Dovetail Managing General Agency Corporation, Dovetail Technology Service India Private Limited, Draw Connect Limited, Draw Create Limited, Draw Group London Limited, Eagle & Crown Limited, Echelon Australia Pty Limited, Echelon Claims Consultants Sdn Bhd, Echelon New Zealand Limited, EnBW Versicherungs Vermittlung GmbH, Encompass Insurance Agency Pty Ltd., English Pension Trustees Limited, Epsilon (US) Insurance Company, Epsilon Insurance Company Ltd., Eustis Insurance & Benefits, Evolution Management Ltd, Exchange Insurance Services Limited (in liquidation), Exmoor Management Company Limited, Faulkner & Flynn LLC, Freedom Trust Services Limited, GC Genesis LLC, GCube Insurance Services Inc, GCube Underwriting Limited, Gama Consultores Associados Ltda., Gem Insurance Company Limited, Global Premium Finance Company, GrECo International Holding AG, Gracechurch Trustees Limited, Gresham Pension Trustees Limited, Group Promoters Pty Limited, Guy Carpenter & Cia (Mexico) S.A. de C.V., Guy Carpenter & Cia. S.A., Guy Carpenter & Co. Labuan Ltd., Guy Carpenter & Company AB, Guy Carpenter & Company Corredores de Reaseguros Limitada, Guy Carpenter & Company Corretora de Resseguros Ltda., Guy Carpenter & Company GmbH, Guy Carpenter & Company LLC, Guy Carpenter & Company Limited, Guy Carpenter & Company Limited, Guy Carpenter & Company Ltd./Guy Carpenter & Compagnie Ltee, Guy Carpenter & Company Participacoes Ltda., Guy Carpenter & Company Peru Corredores de Reaseguros S.A., Guy Carpenter & Company Private Limited, Guy Carpenter & Company Proprietary Limited, Guy Carpenter & Company Pty. Ltd., Guy Carpenter & Company S.A., Guy Carpenter & Company S.A. (Uruguay), Guy Carpenter & Company S.A.S., Guy Carpenter & Company S.r.l., Guy Carpenter (Middle East) Limited, Guy Carpenter Bermuda Ltd., Guy Carpenter Broking Inc., Guy Carpenter Colombia Corredores de Reaseguros Ltda., Guy Carpenter Insurance Brokers (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Guy Carpenter Japan Inc., Guy Carpenter Mexico Intermediario de Reaseguro S.A. de C.V., Guy Carpenter Reasurans Brokerligi Anonim Sirketi, HAPIP GP 2009 LLC, HAPIP GP LLC, HSBC Insurance Brokers International (Abu Dhabi) LLC (in liquidation), Hamilton Bond Limited, Hansen International Limited, Hayward Aviation Limited, INSIA Europe SE, INSIA SK s.r.o., INSIA a.s., INSURANCE BROKERS OF NIGERIA LIMITED, IRC Asia Insurance Brokers Limited, InSolutions Limited, Industrial Risks Protection Consultants, Ingeseg S. A., Ingeseg S.A., Insbrokers Ltda., InsurTech Alliance LLC, Insure Direct (Brokers) LLC, Insure Direct (Brokers) LLC [BAHRAIN BRANCH], Insure Direct - Jardine Lloyd Thompson Limited, International Catastrophe Insurance Managers LLC, International Loss Control Services Limited, International Risk Consultants (Asia) Limited, Invercol Limited, Irish Pensions Trust Limited, Isosceles Insurance (Barbados) Limited, Isosceles Insurance Company Limited, Isosceles Insurance Ltd, Isosceles PCC Limited, J&H Marsh & McLennan Limited, J.W. Terrill Benefit Administrators Inc., JI Holdings Limited, JIB Group Holdings Limited, JIB Group Limited, JIB Holdings (Pacific) Limited, JIB Overseas Holdings Limited, JIB UK Holdings Limited, JL Marine Insurance-Brokers GmbH & Co. KG, JLM Verwaltungs GmbH, JLT (Insurance Brokers) Limited, JLT Actuaries and Consultants Limited, JLT Advisory Limited, JLT Affinity Colombia Solutions SAS, JLT Agencies Limited, JLT Asesorias Ltda, JLT Asia Holdings BV, JLT Asia Shared Services Sdn Bhd, JLT Belgibo, JLT Benefit Consultants Limited, JLT Benefit Solutions Limited, JLT Benefit Solutions SA (Pty) Ltd, JLT Bermuda Ltd, JLT Brasil Holdings Participacoes Ltd, JLT Chile Holdings SpA, JLT Colombia Retail Limited, JLT Colombia Wholesale Limited, JLT Consultants & Actuaries Limited, JLT EB Holdings Limited, JLT EB Services Limited, JLT Employee Benefits Holding Company (PTY) LTD, JLT Employee Benefits SA (Pty) Ltd, JLT Financial Planning Limited, JLT France Holdings, JLT Group Services Pty Limited, JLT Holdings (Barbados) Ltd, JLT Holdings (NZ) Limited, JLT Independent Insurance Brokers Private Limited, JLT Insurance Agencies Limited, JLT Insurance Brokers Co. Limited, JLT Insurance Brokers Co. Limited ( Shanghai Branch), JLT Insurance Brokers Co. Limited (Beijing Branch), JLT Insurance Brokers Co. Limited (Guangzhou Branch), JLT Insurance Brokers Ireland Limited, JLT Insurance Brokers SA, JLT Insurance Group Holdings Ltd, JLT Insurance Management Malta Limited, JLT Intellectual Property Limited, JLT Intellectual Property [UK Branch], JLT Interactive Pte. Ltd., JLT Investment Management Limited, JLT LATAM (Southern Cone) Wholesale Limited, JLT Latin American Holdings Limited, JLT Life Assurance Brokers Limited, JLT Management Services Limited, JLT Marine (Pty) Ltd, JLT Mexico Holdings Limited, JLT Mexico Intermediario de Reaseguro S.A. de C.V., JLT Netherlands BV, JLT Norway AS, JLT PLA, JLT Pension Trustees Limited, JLT Pensions Administration Holdings Limited, JLT Pensions Administration Limited, JLT Peru Reinsurance Solutions Limited, JLT Peru Retail Limited, JLT Peru Wholesale Limited, JLT QFM Services Limited, JLT RE Brasil Administracao e Corretagem de Resseguros Ltda, JLT Re (French Branch), JLT Re (Northern Europe) AB, JLT Re Argentina Corredores de Reaseguros S.A.U., JLT Re Labuan Limited, JLT Re Limited, JLT Re Pty Ltd, JLT Reinsurance Brokers GmbH, JLT Reinsurance Brokers Limited, JLT Reinsurance Brokers Limited [French Branch], JLT Risk Management Limited, JLT Risk Solutions AB, JLT Risk Solutions AB Branch - Germany, JLT SA IB Holdings Company (Pty) Limited, JLT SCK Affinity Administracao e Corretora de Seguros Ltda., JLT SCK Corretora e Administradora de Seguros, JLT Secretaries Limited, JLT Sigorta ve Reasurans Brokerlii A.., JLT Singapore Holdings Pte. Ltd., JLT Specialty France, JLT Specialty Insurance Broker A/S, JLT Specialty Limited, JLT Specialty Limited [DUBAI BRANCH], JLT Specialty Pte. Ltd., JLT Towner Insurance Management (Anguilla) Limited, JLT Trust Services (Barbados) Ltd, JLT Trustees (Southern) Limited, JLT Trustees Limited, JLT UK Investment Holdings Limited, JLT Vantage Risk and Benefit Consulting Private Limited, JLT Wealth Management Limited, JLT do Brasil Corretagem de Seguros Ltda, JLTPCS Holdings Pte. Ltd., JMIB Holdings BV, JSL Securities Inc., Japan Affinity Marketing Inc., Jardine IBR Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson (Proprietary) Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Asia Pte Ltd, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Australia Pty Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Canada Inc, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group Ltd, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group plc, Jardine Lloyd Thompson India Private Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson India Private Limited (UK Branch Office), Jardine Lloyd Thompson Insurance Consultants Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Insurance and Reinsurance Brokers Inc., Jardine Lloyd Thompson Ireland Holdings Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Ireland Unlimited Company, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Korea Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Limited [Macao Branch], Jardine Lloyd Thompson PCS (Dubai) Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson PCS Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson PCS Pte Ltd, Jardine Lloyd Thompson PCS SA, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Private Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Pty Limited, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Sdn Bhd, Jardine Lloyd Thompson Valencia y Iragorri Corredores de Seguros SA, Jardine Pension Trustees Ireland Limited, Jardine Risk Consulting Co. Limited, Jardine ShunTak Insurance Brokers Limited, Jardine ShunTak Insurance Brokers Limited [Macao Branch], Jardines PF- Consultoria Em Gestao De Risco Limitada, Jelf, Jelf Commercial Finance Limited, Jelf Financial Planning Limited, Jelf Insurance Brokers Limited, Jelf Limited, Jelf Risk Management Limited, Jelf Wellbeing Limited, John Lampier & Son Ltd, Johnson & Higgins (Bermuda) Limited, Johnson & Higgins Limited, KESSLER & CO AG, Kepler Associates Limited, Kessler & Co Inc., Kessler Consulting Inc., Kessler Prevoyance Inc., Key Underwriting Pty Limited, Kroll, Lambert Brothers Holdings Limited, Lambert Brothers Insurance Brokers (Employee Benefits) Limited, Lambert Brothers Insurance Brokers (Hong Kong) Ltd, Laterlife.com Limited (in liquidation), Lavaretus Underwriting AB, Lavaretus Underwriting AB (BRANCH - Denmark), Libra Insurance Services Limited (in liquidation), Lloyd & Partners Limited, Local Government Insurance Brokers Pty Limited, Lomond Macdonald Limited, Lynch Insurance Brokers Limited, M&M Vehicle L.P., M.P. Bolshaw and Company Limited, MAG JLT SpA, MERCER ALTERNATIVES LIMITED, MM Risk Services Pty Ltd (for dissolution), MMA Mid-Atlantic Employee LLC, MMA Securities LLC, MMB Consultores S.A., MMC (Singapore) Holdings Pte. Ltd., MMC 28 State Street Holdings Inc., MMC Borrower LLC, MMC Brazilian Holdings B.V., MMC Capital Inc., MMC Cascade Regional Holdings LLC, MMC FINANCE (EUROPE) LIMITED, MMC FINANCE HOLDINGS LTD, MMC Finance (Australia) Limited, MMC Finance (Singapore) Limited, MMC France Holdings (Luxembourg) S.a.r.l., MMC GP III Inc., MMC Group Services sp. z o.o., MMC Holdings (Australia) Pty Ltd, MMC Holdings (New Zealand) ULC, MMC Holdings (UK) Limited, MMC International Finance (Barbados) SRL, MMC International Holdings LLC, MMC International Limited, MMC International Treasury Centre Limited, MMC Middle East Holdings Limited, MMC Poland Holdings B.V., MMC Realty Inc., MMC Regional Asia Holdings B.V., MMC Regional Caribbean Holdings Ltd., MMC Regional Europe Holdings B.V., MMC Regional LATAM Holdings B.V., MMC Securities (Europe) Limited, MMC Securities LLC, MMC Treasury Holdings (UK) Limited, MMC UK Group Limited, MMC UK Pension Fund Trustee Limited, MMOW Limited, MMRC LLC, MOW Holding LLC, MPIP III GP LLC, MPIP IV GP LLC, MPIP V GP LLC, MPIP VI GP LLC, Mangrove Insurance Europe PCC Limited, Mangrove Insurance Solutions PCC, Mangrove Insurance Solutions PCC Limited, Manoel Management Services Ltd, Marchant McKechnie Insurance Brokers Limited, Marine Aviation & General (London) Limited, Marsh & McLennan (PNG) Limited, Marsh & McLennan Agencies AS, Marsh & McLennan Agencies Limited, Marsh & McLennan Agency A/S, Marsh & McLennan Agency LLC, Marsh & McLennan Agency Limited, Marsh & McLennan Agency Pty Ltd., Marsh & McLennan Argentina SA Corredores de Reaseguros, Marsh & McLennan Colombia S.A., Marsh & McLennan Companies Acquisition Funding Limited, Marsh & McLennan Companies Acquisition Limited, Marsh & McLennan Companies Asia Pacific Treasury Center Limited, Marsh & McLennan Companies BVBA/SPRL, Marsh & McLennan Companies Finance Center (Luxembourg) S.a.r.l., Marsh & McLennan Companies France S.A.S., Marsh & McLennan Companies Holdings (Luxembourg) S.a.r.l., Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc., Marsh & McLennan Companies Regional Holdings S.a.r.l., Marsh & McLennan Companies Services B.V., Marsh & McLennan Companies UK Limited, Marsh & McLennan Europe S.a.r.l., Marsh & McLennan GP I Inc., Marsh & McLennan Global Broking (Bermuda) Ltd., Marsh & McLennan Holding GmbH, Marsh & McLennan Holdings (Canada) ULC, Marsh & McLennan Holdings Inc., Marsh & McLennan Incorporated (for dissolution), Marsh & McLennan Innovation Centre Holdings II, Marsh & McLennan Innovation Centre Holdings S.a.r.l., Marsh & McLennan Innovation Centre Limited, Marsh & McLennan Insurance Services Limited, Marsh & McLennan Ireland Limited, Marsh & McLennan Management Services (Bermuda) Limited, Marsh & McLennan Risk Capital Holdings Ltd., Marsh & McLennan Servicios S.A. De C.V., Marsh & McLennan Shared Services Canada Limited, Marsh & McLennan Shared Services Corporation, Marsh (Bahrain) Company SPC, Marsh (Beijing) Risk Management Consulting Co. Ltd., Marsh (China) Insurance Brokers Co. Ltd., Marsh (Hong Kong) Limited, Marsh (Insurance Brokers) LLP, Marsh (Insurance Services) Limited, Marsh (Malawi) Limited, Marsh (Middle East) Limited, Marsh (Namibia) (Proprietary) Limited, Marsh (Pty) Ltd, Marsh (Risk Consulting) LLP, Marsh (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Marsh A/S, Marsh AB, Marsh AG, Marsh AS, Marsh Advantage Insurance Holdings Pty Ltd, Marsh Advantage Insurance Pty Ltd., Marsh Africa (Pty) Ltd, Marsh Argentina S.R.L., Marsh Associates (Pty) Ltd, Marsh Austria G.m.b.H., Marsh Aviation Insurance Broking Pty Ltd (for dissolution), Marsh B.V., Marsh Botswana (Proprietary) Limited, Marsh Brockman y Schuh Agente de Seguros y de Fianzas S.A. de C.V., Marsh Broker Japan Inc., Marsh Broker de Asigurare-Reasigurare S.R.L., Marsh Brokers (Hong Kong) Limited, Marsh Brokers Limited, Marsh Canada Limited/Marsh Canada Limitee, Marsh Company Management Services Cayman Ltd., Marsh Compensation Technologies Administration (Pty) Ltd, Marsh Corporate Services (Barbados) Limited, Marsh Corporate Services Isle of Man Ltd, Marsh Corporate Services Limited, Marsh Corporate Services Malta Limited, Marsh Corretora de Seguros Ltda., Marsh EOOD, Marsh Egypt LLC, Marsh Emirates Consultancy LLC, Marsh Emirates Insurance Brokerage LLC, Marsh Employee Benefits Limited, Marsh Employee Benefits Zimbabwe (Private) Ltd, Marsh Eurofinance B.V., Marsh Europe S.A., Marsh FJC International Insurance Brokers Limited, Marsh For Insurance Services S.A.E., Marsh Franco Acra S.A., Marsh GSC Servicos e Administracao de Seguros Ltda., Marsh GmbH, Marsh Holding AB, Marsh Holdings (Pty) Ltd, Marsh India Insurance Brokers Private Limited, Marsh Insurance & Investments LLC, Marsh Insurance Brokers, Marsh Insurance Brokers (Macao) Limited, Marsh Insurance Brokers (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Marsh Insurance Brokers (Private) Limited, Marsh Insurance Brokers AO, Marsh Insurance Brokers Limited, Marsh Insurance Consulting Saudi Arabia (in liquidation), Marsh Insurance and Reinsurance Brokers LLC, Marsh Intermediaries Inc., Marsh International Broking Holdings Limited, Marsh International Holdings II Inc., Marsh International Holdings Inc., Marsh Investment B.V., Marsh Ireland Brokers Limited, Marsh Ireland Brokers Limited (UK Branch), Marsh Ireland Holdings Limited, Marsh Israel (1999) Ltd., Marsh Israel (Holdings) Ltd., Marsh Israel Consultants Ltd., Marsh Israel Insurance Agency Ltd., Marsh Israel International Brokers Ltd. (in liquidation), Marsh JCS Inc., Marsh Japan Inc., Marsh Kft., Marsh Kindlustusmaakler AS, Marsh Korea Inc., Marsh LLC, Marsh LLC Insurance Brokers, Marsh LLC [Ukraine], Marsh Lda., Marsh Limited, Marsh Limited [Fiji], Marsh Limited [New Zealand], Marsh Limited [PNG], Marsh Ltd. [Wisconsin], Marsh Management Services (Bahamas) Ltd., Marsh Management Services (Barbados) Limited, Marsh Management Services (Bermuda) Ltd., Marsh Management Services (Dublin) Limited, Marsh Management Services (Labuan) Limited, Marsh Management Services (MENA) Limited, Marsh Management Services (USVI) Ltd., Marsh Management Services Cayman Ltd., Marsh Management Services Guernsey Limited, Marsh Management Services Inc., Marsh Management Services Isle of Man Limited, Marsh Management Services Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Marsh Management Services Malta Limited, Marsh Management Services Singapore Pte. Ltd., Marsh Management Services Sweden AB, Marsh Marine & Energy AB, Marsh Marine Nederland B.V., Marsh Medical Consulting GmbH, Marsh Mercer Holdings (Australia) Pty Ltd, Marsh Nest Inc., Marsh Oman LLC, Marsh Oy, Marsh PB Co. Ltd., Marsh Philippines Inc., Marsh Privat A.I.E., Marsh Private Client Life Insurance Services, Marsh Pty. Ltd., Marsh Qatar LLC, Marsh RE S.A.C. Corredores de Reaseguros, Marsh Rehder Consultoria S.A. (MRC), Marsh Rehder S.A. Corredores de Seguros, Marsh Resolutions Pty Limited, Marsh Risk Consulting B.V., Marsh Risk Consulting Limitada, Marsh Risk Consulting Ltda., Marsh Risk Consulting S.L., Marsh Risk Consulting Services S.r.L., Marsh Risk and Consulting Services (Pty) Ltd, Marsh S.A. Corredores De Seguros, Marsh S.A. Mediadores de Seguros, Marsh S.A.S., Marsh S.p.A., Marsh SA [Argentina], Marsh SA [Belgium], Marsh SA [Luxembourg], Marsh SA [Uruguay], Marsh SIA, Marsh Saldana Inc., Marsh Saudi Arabia Insurance & Reinsurance Brokers, Marsh Secretarial Services Limited, Marsh Semusa S.A., Marsh Services Limited, Marsh Services Spolka z.o.o., Marsh Sigorta ve Reasurans Brokerligi Anonim Sirketi, Marsh Spolka z.o.o., Marsh Szolgaltato Kft., Marsh Takaful Brokers (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Marsh Treasury Services (Dublin) Limited (in liquidation), Marsh Treasury Services Limited, Marsh Tunisia S.a.r.l., Marsh UK Limited, Marsh USA (India) Inc., Marsh USA Borrower LLC, Marsh USA Inc., Marsh Uganda Limited, Marsh Venezuela C.A. Sociedad de Corretaje de Seguros, Marsh Vietnam Insurance Broking Company Ltd, Marsh Zambia Limited, Marsh Zimbabwe Holdings (Private) Limited, Marsh d.o.o. Beograd, Marsh d.o.o. za posredovanje u osiguranju, Marsh for Insurance Services - Jordan, Marsh i-Connect (Pty) Ltd, Marsh s.r.o., Matthiessen Assurans AB, Mercer (Argentina) S.A., Mercer (Australia) Pty Ltd, Mercer (Austria) GmbH, Mercer (Belgium) SA-NV, Mercer (Canada) Limited/Mercer (Canada) Limitee, Mercer (China) Limited, Mercer (Colombia) Ltda., Mercer (Danmark) A/S, Mercer (Finland) OY, Mercer (France) SAS, Mercer (Hong Kong) Limited, Mercer (Ireland) Limited, Mercer (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Mercer (N.Z.) Limited, Mercer (Nederland) B.V., Mercer (Norge) AS, Mercer (Polska) Sp.z o.o., Mercer (Portugal) Lda, Mercer (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Mercer (Sweden) AB, Mercer (Taiwan) Ltd., Mercer (Thailand) Ltd., Mercer (US) Inc., Mercer Administration Services (Australia) Pty Limited, Mercer Africa Limited, Mercer Agente de Seguros S.A. de C.V., Mercer Asesores de Seguros S.A., Mercer Asesores es Inversion Independientes S.A. de C.V., Mercer Broking Ltd., Mercer Career Unipessoal Lda, Mercer Consultation (Quebec) Ltee., Mercer Consulting (Australia) Pty Ltd, Mercer Consulting (Chile) Limitada, Mercer Consulting (France) SAS, Mercer Consulting (India) Private Limited, Mercer Consulting B.V., Mercer Consulting Group Inc., Mercer Consulting Holdings Sdn. Bhd., Mercer Consulting Limited, Mercer Consulting Middle East Limited, Mercer Consulting S.L.U., Mercer Consulting Venezuela C.A., Mercer Corredores de Seguros Limitada, Mercer Corretora de Seguros Ltda, Mercer Danismanlik Anonim Sirketi, Mercer Deutschland GmbH, Mercer Employee Benefits - Medicacao de Seguros Unipessoal Lda., Mercer Employee Benefits Limited, Mercer Financial Advice (Australia) Pty Ltd, Mercer Financial Services Limited, Mercer Financial Services Limited liability company, Mercer Financial Services Middle East Limited, Mercer Global Investments Europe Limited, Mercer Global Investments Management Limited, Mercer HR Consulting Borrower LLC, Mercer HR Services LLC, Mercer Health & Benefits (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Mercer Health & Benefits Administration LLC, Mercer Health & Benefits LLC, Mercer Holdings Inc., Mercer Holdings Inc. [Philippines], Mercer Human Resource Consulting Ltda, Mercer Human Resource Consulting S.A. de C.V., Mercer ICC Limited, Mercer Investment Consulting Limited, Mercer Investment Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Mercer Investment Solutions (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Mercer Investments (Australia) Limited, Mercer Investments (Hong Kong) Limited, Mercer Investments (Japan) Ltd, Mercer Investments (New Zealand) Limited, Mercer Investments LLC, Mercer Ireland Holdings Limited, Mercer Italia Srl Socio Unico, Mercer Japan Ltd., Mercer Korea Co. Ltd., Mercer LLC, Mercer Limited, Mercer MC Consulting Borrower LLC, Mercer Master Trustees Limited, Mercer Mauritius Ltd., Mercer Oliver Wyman Holding B.V., Mercer Outsourcing (Australia) Pty Ltd, Mercer Outsourcing S.L.U., Mercer Pensionsfonds AG, Mercer Pensionsraadgivning A/S, Mercer Philippines Inc., Mercer Private Investment Partners IV General Partner S.a.r.l., Mercer Private Markets AG, Mercer Private Markets Advisers (US) AG, Mercer Services Poland Sp. z.o.o., Mercer Sigorta Brokerligi Anonim Sirketi, Mercer South Africa (Pty) Limited, Mercer Superannuation (Australia) Limited, Mercer Switzerland Inc., Mercer System Services LLC, Mercer Technology Acquisitions Limited, Mercer Treuhand GmbH, Mercer Trust Company LLC, Mercer Trustees Limited, Mercer WorkforcePro LLC, Mercury Insurance Services Pty Ltd, Moola Systems Limited, Mountlodge Limited, Muir Beddal (Zimbabwe) Limited, NERA Australia Pty. Ltd., NERA Economic Consulting GmbH, NERA Economic Consulting Limited, NERA S.R.L., NERA SAS, NERA UK Limited, NERA do Brasil Ltda. (for dissolution), National Economic Research Associates Inc., NetComp Insurance Corp., Neuburger Noble Lowndes GmbH, Normandy Reinsurance Company Limited, Northern Alliance Brokers Limited (in liquidation), OWL Marine Insurance-Brokers GmbH & Co.KG, OWL Marine Verwaltungs GmbH, Oliver Wyman (Bermuda) Limited, Oliver Wyman (Hong Kong) Limited, Oliver Wyman AB, Oliver Wyman AG, Oliver Wyman Actuarial Consulting Inc., Oliver Wyman B.V., Oliver Wyman Consulting (Shanghai) Ltd, Oliver Wyman Consultoria em Estrategia de Negocios Ltda., Oliver Wyman Energy Consulting Limited, Oliver Wyman FZ-LLC, Oliver Wyman Group KK, Oliver Wyman Inc., Oliver Wyman LLC, Oliver Wyman Limited, Oliver Wyman Limited Liability Company, Oliver Wyman Limited/Oliver Wyman limitee, Oliver Wyman Ltd., Oliver Wyman Pte. Ltd., Oliver Wyman Pty. Ltd., Oliver Wyman S. de R.L. de C.V., Oliver Wyman S.A.S., Oliver Wyman S.L., Oliver Wyman S.r.l., Oliver Wyman SNC, Oliver Wyman SPRL/BVBA, Oliver Wyman Sdn. Bhd., Oliver Wyman Services Limited, Oliver Wyman Servicios S. de R.L. de C.V., Oliver Wyman sp. z o.o., Omega Indemnity (Bermuda) Limited, Organizacion Brockman y Schuh S.A. de C.V., Osbornes Insurances Oxford Limited (in liquidation), PFT Limited, PI Indemnity Company Designated Activity Company, PT JLT Reinsurance Brokers, PT Jardine Lloyd Thompson, PT Marsh Indonesia, PT Marsh Reinsurance Brokers Indonesia, PT Mercer Indonesia, PT Nexus Asia Pacific, PT Oliver Wyman Indonesia, PT Quantum Computing Services, PT Quantum Investments, PT Quantum Support Services, Pallas Marsh Servicos Ltda., Pavilion Alternatives Group (Singapore) PTE. Ltd, Pavilion Financial Corporation Holdings UK Limited, Pavilion U.S. Investments Holdco LLC, Pension Trustees Limited, Pensionsservice Benefit Network Sverige AB, Perils AG, Personal Pension Trustees Limited, Pet Animal Welfare Scheme Limited, Portsoken Trustees (No. 2) Limited, Portsoken Trustees Limited, Potomac Insurance Managers Inc., Premier Pension Trustees Limited, Premium Services Australia Pty Limited, Professional Claims Handling Limited (in liquidation), Profund Solutions Limited, Promerit AG, Promerit Hungary Kft, Promerit Schweiz AG, Pymetrics Inc., R G Ford Brokers Limited, R R B Beratungsgesellschaft fuer Altersversorgung mbh, R. Mees & Zoonen Holdings B.V., Renewable Energy Loss Adjusters LLC, Renewable Energy Loss Adjusters Limited, Resource Benefit Associates, Rightpath Reinsurance SPC Ltd., Risk Management Australia Pty Limited, Rivers Group Limited, Rockefeller Risk Advisors Inc., Rutherfoord International Inc., SAFCAR-Marsh, SBJ Holdings Limited, SCIB (Bermuda) Limited, SCM Global Real Estate Select GP LLC, SCM Infrastructure General Partner S.a r.l., SCM International Private Equity Select III GP LLC, SCM LT General Partner S.a.r.l., SCM PE General Partner S.a.r.l., SCM PE II GP Ltd., SCM PE II Scotland GP Ltd, SCM Strategic Capital Management (Luxembourg) S.a.r.l., SICAR Marsh S.a.r.l., SME Insurance Services Limited, Sail Insurance Company Limited, Scalene Re Ltd, Seabury & Smith Borrower LLC, Seabury & Smith LLC, Secure Limited, Sedgwick (Holdings) Pty. Limited, Sedgwick Consulting Group Limited, Sedgwick Dineen Group Limited, Sedgwick Financial Services Limited, Sedgwick Forbes Middle East Limited, Sedgwick Group, Sedgwick Group (Australia) Pty. Limited, Sedgwick Group (Bermuda) Limited, Sedgwick Group (Zimbabwe) Limited, Sedgwick Group Limited, Sedgwick Internationaal B.V., Sedgwick Limited, Sedgwick Management Services (Barbados) Limited, Sedgwick Management Services (Singapore) Pte Limited, Sedgwick Noble Lowndes (UK) Limited, Sedgwick Noble Lowndes Group Limited, Sedgwick Noble Lowndes Limited, Sedgwick Overseas Investments Limited, Sedgwick Private Limited, Sedgwick Re Asia Pacific (Consultants) Pte Ltd (for dissolution), Sedgwick Trustees Limited, Sedgwick UK Risk Services Limited, Sedgwick Ulster Pension Trustees Limited, Settlement Trustees Limited, Shanghai Mercer Insurance Brokers Company Ltd., Shorewest Insurance Associates LLC, Sirota Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Sirota Consulting UK Limited, Smith Long Term Disability Management Group Inc., Societe d'Assurances et de Participation Guian SA, Software Underwriting Systems Limited (in liquidation), Southern Marine & Aviation Inc., Southern Marine & Aviation Underwriters Inc., Sudzucker Versicherungs-Vermittlungs GmbH, Sumitomo Life Insurance Agency America Inc., Sylvite Financial Services, TBX Solutions Limited, Talent Tech Labs LLC, The Benefit Express Holdings Limited, The Benefit Express Limited, The Carpenter Management Corporation, The Insurance Partnership Holdings Limited, The Insurance Partnership Services Limited, The Positive Ageing Company Limited, The Purple Partnership Limited, The Recovre Group Pty Ltd, Thomsons Online Benefits (HK) Ltd., Thomsons Online Benefits Inc., Thomsons Online Benefits Limited, Thomsons Online Benefits Pte Ltd., Thomsons Online Benefits S.R.L, Torrent Government Contracting Services LLC, Torrent Insurance Services LLC, Torrent Technologies, Torrent Technologies Inc., Tower Hill Limited, Tower Place Developments (West) Limited, Tower Place Developments Limited, U.T.E. AMG, U.T.E. Marsh - Caja Castilla La Mancha Junta de Comunidades, U.T.E. Marsh - Salvado Reus (in liquidation), U.T.E. Marsh - Salvado Reus 2012, U.T.E. Marsh - Salvado Vila-Seca 2010, UAD BB Marsh Lietuva, Vezina & Associes Inc., Vezina Assurances Inc., Victor Insurance Europe B.V., Victor Insurance Holdings Inc., Victor Insurance Italia S.r.l., Victor Insurance Managers Inc., Victor Insurance Managers Inc./Gestionnaires d'assurance Victor inc., Victor O. Schinnerer & Co. (Bermuda) Ltd., Victor O. Schinnerer & Company Limited, Victoria Hall Company Limited, Wellnz Limited, William M. Mercer (Canada) Limited/William M. Mercer (Canada) Limitee, William M. Mercer AB, William M. Mercer Comercio Consultoria e Servicos Ltda., Wortham Insurance & Risk Management, everBe SAS, and realright GmbH. Medtronic Plc is a medical technology company, which engages in the development, manufacture, distribution, and sale of device-based medical therapies and services. It operates through the following segments: Cardiac and Vascular Group; Minimally Invasive Technologies Group; Restorative Therapies Group; and Diabetes Group. The Cardiac and Vascular Group segment consists of products for the diagnosis, treatment, and management of cardiac rhythm disorders and cardiovascular disease. The Minimally Invasive Technologies Group segment focuses on respiratory system, gastrointestinal tract, renal system, lungs, pelvic region, kidneys, and obesity diseases. The Restorative Therapies Group segment comprises of neurostimulation therapies and drug delivery systems for the treatment of chronic pain, as well as areas of the spine and brain, along with pelvic health and conditions of the ear, nose, and throat. The Diabetes Group segment offers insulin pumps, coninuous glucose monitoring systems, and insulin pump consumables. The company was founded in 1949 and is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. Read More China Mobile Limited provides mobile telecommunications and related services in Mainland China and Hong Kong. The company offers local calls; domestic and international long distance calls and roaming services; and value-added services, such as caller identity display, call waiting, conference calls, and others. It also provides wireless Internet service, as well as digital applications comprising music, video, reading, gaming, and animation; wireline broadband services; and wireline voice services. In addition, it offers dedicated line and IDC services to corporate customers in a range of industry sectors; and basic corporate communication products comprising corporate VPMN and SMS, and tailor made solutions. Further, the company provides international telecommunications services, which includes IDD, roaming, Internet, MNC, and value added business services. Additionally, it offers telecommunications network planning, design, and consulting services; roaming clearance, IT system operation, and technology support services; value-added platform development and maintenance services; mobile data, and system integration and development services; network construction and maintenance, network planning and optimizing, and training services; electronic communication products design and sale of related products; and non-banking financial services. It also provides mobile cloud research and development services; call center services; e-payment, e-commerce, and Internet finance services; and mobile Internet digital content services, as well as operates a network and business coordination center. The company serves 950 million mobile customers and 187 million wireline broadband customers. The company was formerly known as China Mobile (Hong Kong) Limited and changed its name to China Mobile Limited in May 2006. The company was incorporated in 1997 and is based in Central, Hong Kong. China Mobile Limited is a subsidiary of China Mobile Hong Kong (BVI) Limited. Read More iShares MSCI Denmark ETF's stock was trading at 60.79 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 (Coronavirus) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, EDEN stock has increased by 80.0% and is now trading at 109.42. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. The following companies are subsidiares of Travelers Companies: 10762962 Canada Inc., 350 Market Street LLC, 8527512 Canada Inc., Aetna Life and Casualty Co, American Equity Insurance Company, American Equity Specialty Insurance Company, Aprilgrange Limited, Arch Street North LLC, Auto Hartford Investments LLC, Bayhill Restaurant II Associates, Camperdown Corporation, Constitution State Services LLC, Discover Property & Casualty Insurance Company, Discover Specialty Insurance Company, F&G UK Underwriters Limited, Farmington Casualty Company, Fidelity and Guaranty Insurance Company, Fidelity and Guaranty Insurance Underwriters Inc., First Floridian Auto and Home Insurance Company, Gulf Underwriters Insurance Company, IHP Capital Partners Fund VIII L.P., Northbrook Holdings Inc., Northfield Insurance Company, Northland Casualty Company, Northland Insurance Company, Phoenix UK Investments LLC, SPC Insurance Agency Inc., Select Insurance Company, Simply Business Holdings Inc., Simply Business Inc., St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company, St. Paul Guardian Insurance Company, St. Paul Mercury Insurance Company, St. Paul Protective Insurance Company, St. Paul Surplus Lines Insurance Company, Standard Fire Properties LLC, Standard Fire UK Investments LLC, TCI Global Services Inc., TPC Investments Inc., TPC U.K. Investments LLC, The Automobile Insurance Company of Hartford Connecticut, The Charter Oak Fire Insurance Company, The Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company, The Family Business Institute LLC, The Phoenix Insurance Company, The St. Paul Companies Inc., The Standard Fire Insurance Company, The Travelers Casualty Company, The Travelers Home and Marine Insurance Company, The Travelers Indemnity Company, The Travelers Indemnity Company of America, The Travelers Indemnity Company of Connecticut, The Travelers Lloyds Insurance Company, TravCo Insurance Company, Travelers (Bermuda) Limited, Travelers Brazil Acquisition LLC, Travelers Brazil Holding LLC, Travelers Casualty Company of Connecticut, Travelers Casualty Insurance Company of America, Travelers Casualty UK Investments LLC, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of America, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of Europe Limited, Travelers Commercial Casualty Company, Travelers Commercial Insurance Company, Travelers Constitution State Insurance Company, Travelers Distribution Alliance Inc., Travelers Excess and Surplus Lines Company, Travelers Global Inc., Travelers Indemnity U.K. Investments LLC, Travelers Insurance Company Limited, Travelers Insurance Company of Canada, Travelers Insurance Designated Activity Company, Travelers Insurance Group Holdings Inc., Travelers Lloyds of Texas Insurance Company, Travelers London Limited, Travelers MGA Inc., Travelers Management Limited, Travelers Marine LLC, Travelers Participacoes em Seguros Brasil S.A., Travelers Personal Insurance Company, Travelers Personal Security Insurance Company, Travelers Property Casualty Company of America, Travelers Property Casualty Corp., Travelers Property Casualty Insurance Company, Travelers Seguros Brasil S.A., Travelers Syndicate Management Limited, Travelers Texas MGA Inc., Travelers Underwriting Agency Limited, Ultramar Travel Management, United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company, Xbridge Limited, Zensurance Brokers Inc., and Zensurance Inc.. There is not enough analysis data for Nuveen California Municipal Value Fund 2. 4.5 Community Rank Outperform Votes Nuveen California Municipal Value Fund 2 has received 59 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.) Underperform Votes Nuveen California Municipal Value Fund 2 has received 28 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.) Community Sentiment Nuveen California Municipal Value Fund 2 has received 67.82% outperform votes from our community. MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Nuveen California Municipal Value Fund 2 and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe NCB will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe NCB will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days. Previous Next Nuveen Diversified Dividend and Income Fund is a closed-ended balanced mutual fund launched by Nuveen Investments Inc. The fund is co-managed by Nuveen Fund Advisors, LLC, NWQ Investment Management Company, LLC, Security Capital Research & Management Incorporated, Symphony Asset Management LLC, and Wellington Management Company LLP. It invests in public equity and fixed income markets across the globe. The fund seeks to invest in securities of companies operating across diversified sectors. It primarily invests in dividend-paying value stocks of companies across all market capitalizations, dividend paying common stocks issued by Real Estate Investment Trusts, emerging markets sovereign debt, and adjustable rate senior loans. The fund's fixed income portion seeks to invest in securities that are issued by governments, government-related and supra-national issuers, and corporate issuers. It benchmarks the performance of its performance against a composite benchmark comprised of 18.75% Russell 3000 Value Index, 6.25% MSCI EAFE ex-Japan Value Index, 25% Wilshire U.S. Real Estate Securities Index, and 25% JPMorgan EMBI Global Diversified Index, 25% CSFB Leveraged Loan Index, as well as against the JPMorgan Corporate Emerging Markets Bond Index and JPMorgan Government Bond Index-Emerging Markets Index. Nuveen Diversified Dividend and Income Fund was formed in July 18, 2003 and is domiciled in the United States. Read More Nuveen New Jersey Quality Municipal Income Fund is a closed ended fixed income mutual fund launched by Nuveen Investments, Inc. The fund is co-managed by Nuveen Fund Advisors LLC and Nuveen Asset Management, LLC. It invests in the fixed income markets of New Jersey. The fund invests in undervalued municipal securities and other related investments that are, exempt from regular federal and New Jersey income taxes that are rated Baa or BBB or better. It employs fundamental analysis with bottom-up stock picking approach to create its portfolio. The fund benchmarks the performance of its portfolio against the Standard & Poor's (S&P) New Jersey Municipal Bond Index. The fund was formerly known as Nuveen New Jersey Dividend Advantage Municipal Fund. Nuveen New Jersey Quality Municipal Income Fund was formed on June 1, 1999 and is domiciled in the United States. Read More Nuveen Ohio Quality Municipal Income Fund is a closed ended fixed income mutual fund launched by Nuveen Investments, Inc. The fund is co-managed by Nuveen Fund Advisors LLC and Nuveen Asset Management, LLC. It invests in the fixed income markets of Ohio. The fund invests in tax exempt municipal bonds. It employs fundamental analysis, with bottom-up stock picking approach, to create its portfolio. The fund benchmarks the performance of its portfolio against the Standard & Poor's Ohio Municipal Bond Index and Standard & Poor's National Municipal Bond Index. The fund was formerly known as Nuveen Ohio Quality Income Municipal Fund. Nuveen Ohio Quality Municipal Income Fund was formed on October 17, 1991 and is domiciled in the United States. Read More Oasis Petroleum Inc., an independent exploration and production company, focuses on the acquisition and development of onshore unconventional oil and natural gas resources in the United States. It operates through Exploration and Production(E&P), and Midstream segments. The E&P segment engages in the acquisition and development of oil and gas properties. The Midstream segment offers midstream services, such as natural gas gathering, compression, processing and, gas lift supply; crude oil gathering, terminaling, and transportation; produced and flowback water gathering, and disposal; and water distribution. As of December 31, 2020, the company had 401,766 net leasehold acres in the Williston Basin; and 24,396 net leasehold acres in the Permian Basin, as well as approximately 152.2 million barrels of oil equivalent of estimated net proved reserves. The company sells its crude oil and natural gas to refiners, marketers, and other purchasers that have access to pipeline and rail facilities. Oasis Petroleum Inc. was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Houston, Texas. Read More Pacific Booker Minerals Inc. engages in the exploration of mineral properties in Canada. The company primarily explores for copper, gold, silver, and molybdenum concentrates. It primarily holds interests in the Morrison property located in British Columbia. The company was formerly known as Booker Gold Explorations Limited and changed its name to Pacific Booker Minerals Inc. in February 2000. Pacific Booker Minerals Inc. was incorporated in 1983 and is based in Vancouver, Canada. Read More American Consumer News, LLC dba MarketBeat 2010-2021. All rights reserved. 326 E 8th St #105, Sioux Falls, SD 57103 | U.S. Based Support Team at [email protected]arketbeat.com | (844) 978-6257 MarketBeat does not provide personalized financial advice and does not issue recommendations or offers to buy stock or sell any security. Our Accessibility Statement | Terms of Service | Do Not Sell My Information 2021 Market data provided is at least 10-minutes delayed and hosted by Barchart Solutions. Information is provided 'as-is' and solely for informational purposes, not for trading purposes or advice, and is delayed. To see all exchange delays and terms of use please see disclaimer. Fundamental company data provided by Zacks Investment Research. Mexico's First National Tequila Day a 7 Day Celebration Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico - There's a party going on in the state of Jalisco this week as Mexico celebrates the first-ever National Day of Tequila, in honor of the iconic drink that has become the country's 'ambassador par excellence.' Last year, the Mexican Congress declared the third Saturday in March of each year as the day dedicated to this alcoholic beverage, so restaurants, hotels, and distilleries located along Jalisco's Ruta del Tequila, which encompasses the city of Guadalajara and towns such as Tequila, Arenal and Amatitan, decided to join together to celebrate for an entire week. The celebrations started on Monday with all kinds of activities, such as tastings, contests, and several distilleries opening their doors to the public, and continues through Saturday, March 16, National Tequila Day. Rodolfo Gonzalez Gonzalez, the president of the National Chamber of the Tequila Industry (CNIT) said that participating restaurants are preparing special tequila-based cocktails with 40 different brands provided by producers, and that twenty-four amateur mixologists from around the country will get the chance to show off their prowess in a cocktail contest. "The celebration of this date makes the industry and the whole country proud; our beverage is found in over 120 countries, and at least 70,000 people are involved in its production, a sign of its importance in the cultural and economic development of our country," Rodolfo Gonzalez said. National tequila production last year was 300 million liters, 222 million of which were exported. It has been predicted that tequila will be the second fastest growing alcoholic beverage in terms of sales growth internationally by 2021, behind whisky. Xem them ... Tin bai cuoi cung Khong con du lieu e load Camouflaged Vento and Polo are possibly hiding a restyled rear bumper. Expect the front fascia to also get subtle cosmetic changes. If the updated models are to come soon, expect powertrains to be carried forward. Before Volkswagen launches the second-gen Vento and Polo in India in a couple of years from now, yet another update for the Polo twins seems to be in the works. While the carmaker is yet to confirm this, a camouflaged Vento and Polo have been spotted testing in the country. Pictured: Russia-Spec Polo GT Although the test mules are heavily camouflaged, we could spot a restyled rear bumper. It could be similar to the Russia-spec Polo GT (Vento is called Polo in the Russian market). In the Russia-spec Polo GT, the rear bumper gets a dual-tone finish, whereas the India-spec Vento comes with a single-tone bumper. Pictured: Russia-Spec Polo GT We also expect other cosmetic changes on the Polo twins, similar to the Russian model. The front bumper and grille on the Russian Polo GT look similar to that of the now-discontinued India-spec Polo GTI, although with chrome inserts instead of the red highlights in the Polo GTI. Expect the updated Polo to feature similar design changes as the updated Vento. If launched in the coming few months, the updated Vento is expected to carry forward the same set of petrol and diesel engines. The petrol Vento is available with two engines: a 1.6-litre unit producing 105PS of power and 153Nm mated to a 5-speed MT and a 1.2-litre TSI engine good for 105PS and 175Nm with a 7-speed DSG. The Vento diesel is available with a 1.5-litre diesel engine producing 110PS and 250Nm. It can be had either with a 5-speed MT or a 7-speed DSG. However, with the introduction of BSVI in India from April 2020, VW might offer the Vento here in petrol guise only. The carmaker might introduce the 1.0-litre petrol engine from Polo and Ameo on the Vento. In that case, though, the 1.0-litre unit will be available in turbocharged avatar, making more power and torque. Along with the Vento and the Polo, Volkswagen is also expected to update the Ameo. The updated Ameo is expected to look similar to the current Vento. It could get Vento-like horizontally slatted chrome grille, new front bumper and tail lights. The updated Volkswagen cars are expected to go on sale later this year. Expect their prices to be largely similar to the current models. While the Polo is priced from Rs 5.70 lakh to Rs 9.70 lakh, the Ameo and the Vento are priced from 5.82 lakh to Rs 9.99 lakh and 8.63 lakh to Rs 14.32 lakh, respectively (all prices ex-showroom pan-India). Also Read: New-Gen Skoda-VW Cars From 2020 Likely To Get CNG Image Source 1 Image Source2 Disclaimer: This article has not been edited by Deccan Chronicle and is taken from a syndicated feed. Photos: CarDekho. Mumbai: Aquawhite one of the fastest growing oralcare brand in Kids category from the house of JHS Svendgaard Laboratories Limited (JHS) announces Tiger Shroff as the brand ambassador for aquawhite. Tiger Shroff, a youth icon, well known for his fitness enthusiasm, action & great dance moves is one of the most loved celebrities amongst the kids. Aquawhite under JHS Svendgaard brands (a subsidiary of JHS) is the largest license holder of some of the most prominent kid's characters namely Chhota Bheem, Angry Birds, Peppa Pig, The Jungle Book, Pokemon, PAW Patrol, Shimmer and Shine, SpongeBob Squarepants, Shiva & many more for the kids oral care range. The company had launched concept-based innovative products like FLASHHH & BUDDY BEST toothbrush (2 minutes flashlight-auto off), MUZICA toothbrush (2 minutes music-auto off), WATCHHA toothbrush (2 minutes Sand Timer), Jiggle Wiggle toothbrush, Tiffany toothbrush, Bestie toothbrush, Zig-Zag toothbrush, Fluoride-Free toothpastes in Strawberry, Strawberry Burst, Chill-Gum, Dubble Bubble & Sweet Bubble flavors and Lollipop Tongue Cleaner for all age groups 0-3 years, 3-8 years & 8-12 years. Commenting on this development Mr Nikhil Nanda, Managing Director - JHS said We are extremely happy and overwhelmed to have a youth icon like Tiger Shroff to be associated with our brand aquawhite. Making kids brush their teeth can be a difficult task for most parents, but with our product range we understand the needs of parents and make the task of brushing a fun and engaging activity without supervision. We are confident that combination of our exciting range of products and Tiger will create a strong connect with kids and their mothers. I am very excited to endorse aquawhite a brand which specialized & has keen focus on kids oral care products. As a child, I too found brushing to be a mundane activity, but with the aquawhite innovative products available in kids favorite character the narrative will change soon. It will also ease out the pain & discomfort of the parents who have to run behind their children every day to inculcate the habit of brushing teeth properly for two minutes twice a day. It`s very important for the new age parents to understand that for a fit body & mind of their children, oral hygiene has to be the no. 1 priority. I wish aquawhite a great success in future and hope they win the hearts of children & parents with their range of innovative range of toothbrushes, commented Tiger Shroff, Brand Ambassador, aquawhite, when asked about his association with the brand. "HDFC is not going to get any board berth and controlling premium in the deal," a top Bandhan Bank source said. (Photo: File) Kolkata: The Bandhan Bank's proposed 14.9 per cent stake allotment to HDFC for merging Gruh Finance will test the Reserve Bank of India's regulations of 2016 on shareholding in private sector banks. Gruh Finance, the affordable housing finance arm of HDFC, was taken over in January by Kolkata based Bandhan Bank in a share swap deal. "RBI's approval had been sought for allotment of 14.9 per cent stake of Bandhan Bank to HDFC post-merger. Though there is no apparent regulatory hurdle in this regard, this is the first case going through the RBI regulations of 2016," sources involved in the deal told PTI. The deal will allow Bandhan Bank's promoter Bandhan Financial holding to come down to about 61 per cent from about 82 per cent, and HDFC to hold around 15 per cent in the merged entity from about 57 per cent in Gruh. Meanwhile, Bandhan Bank has denied that it took control of Gruh in a costly deal. "HDFC is not going to get any board berth and controlling premium in the deal," a top Bandhan Bank source said adding that analysts are not taking these factors into account. Moreover, both the companies (Bandhan Bank and Gruh Finance) are listed entities and the swap ratio was determined by exchange traded prices on which no one has any control, he said. The swap ratio for the amalgamation will be 568 shares of Bandhan Bank for every 1,000 shares of Gruh Finance. The Capital Raising Committee of the board in its meeting on March 12 allotted 48,700 BASEL III compliant unsecured, redeemable, non-convertible tier II bonds in the nature of debenture of Rs 1,00,000 each aggregating to Rs 487 crore, Karur Vysya Bank said in a regulatory filing. (Photo: File | PTI) New Delhi: Karur Vysya Bank on Wednesday said it has raised Rs 487 crore through Basel III compliant bonds to fund its growth plans. The Capital Raising Committee of the board in its meeting on March 12 allotted 48,700 BASEL III compliant unsecured, redeemable, non-convertible tier II bonds in the nature of debenture of Rs 1,00,000 each aggregating to Rs 487 crore, the bank said in a regulatory filing. The capital was raised on private placement basis, it said. The instrument will be listed on NSE. Basel III is an international regulatory framework with a set of reforms to improve the regulation, supervision and risk management within the banking sector. To comply with global Basel-III capital regulations, banks need to improve and strengthen their capital planning process. The revolutionary eyewear brand, Scott, is proud to introduce its Spring/Summer 2019 collection in partnership with popular actors, Anil and Sonam Kapoor. Featuring sun glasses and opticals, the collection is perfectly complemented by the dynamic father-daughter duo, as a first ever shoot featuring them both. Scott has curated a wide selection of frame shapes, exclusive accents and alluring combinations to add to your style quotient this summer. The excellent craftsmanship with unique contours in hues of black, blues, pink etc. make the shades a must have accessory this summer. The exciting designs are further enhanced with functional properties, including UVA and UVB protection, polarized lenses, anti-reflection coating, double gradient mirrors, light weight and much more. With regards to the fashion forward association with Scott Eyewear, says Sonam Kapoor, This campaign is extremely special to me because its a first for me, with my dad. I believe cool accessories are what set you and your style apart from others, I love the new summer range from Scott. One of my most important accessories are a good pair of glares and optics, be it travel or outdoors or a style statement, shades are equally important for men and women. Says Anil Kapoor, The first thing you'll notice about Scotts collection is the staggering variety of options that are available! There's something for all kinds of faces, ages and across a range of designs. Colour and print have inspired the collection and been interpreted into a style that is modern, fashionable and contemporary. Scott Eye wear is definitely the ultimate choice for anyone looking for fresh & trendy sunglasses this summer. Adds Sonam Kapoor, Scott Eyewear appealed to me due to the range of creativity and diversity, the collection showcases. Each piece has been designed to perfection, offering a compelling blend of contemporary lifestyle and modern fashion that suits consumers across all ages. The wide range also ensures that one has a trendy option for every look. With their constantly evolving designs, Scott has blurred the lines between retro and modern. About Scott eyewear A part of the renowned Sterling Group, Scott Eyewear has become the epitome of quality and technology. With over 33 years of experience in distribution of international brands in India, they have become the pioneers in innovation and fashion. Says Amit Parikh - Director, Sterling Group - There is a lot of potential for young, aspirational and trendy brands in India, a country which boasts of having the worlds youngest population. Scott is here to do just that; a fashion forward, innovative and an iconic brand for the young and the young at heart. When it comes to capturing that segment, we could think of none better than Sonam Kapoor and Anil Kapoor. The association enriches our current portfolio and strengthens our desire to be a coveted accessory in every consumers wardrobe. The entire campaign was conceptualized, executed and produced by Bottomline Media Pvt. Ltd., headed by Tanaaz Bhatia. Disclaimer: This article has not been edited by Deccan Chronicle and is taken from a syndicated feed. Photos: NewsVoir. While packaged liquid milk is to remain a key driver in the Indian dairy industry, value added products are promising a growth of 15 per cent to 20 per cent with expected growth in cheese, UHT milk, ice-cream and baby food segments. Notably, Union Minister of State for Agriculture and Farmer Welfare informed to the Lok Sabha that milk production in the country stood at 165.4 million tonnes during 2016-17 which increased to 176.35 million tonnes in 2017-18. As per industry experts, India is contributing about 17 per cent of the total milk production globally. With the projected milk production of 254.5 million tonnes in 2021-22, India will become the largest milk producer in the world. As per Rabobank analysis, in 2016-17 Indian dairy market was largely divided into Liquid Milk (64 per cent), Value Added Products (25 per cent), Ghee (7 per cent) and Milk Powder (4 per cent). Value Added Products in dairy segment is further growing at 15 per cent to 20 per cent year on year that has varied products like cheese, UHT milk, curd, baby Foods, Ice-cream, Butter, Flavored Milk and Dairy Whitener. Mr Anuj Modi, Director, Lotus Dairy Products Ltd. says, Value added market in dairy industry is expected to expand to 30 per centof dairy industry by 2020. Indian organised dairy sector is required to strengthen the procurement and processing line to scale up for value added market. On the other side, Industry is looking health aspects very strictly and focus is shifting on nutrition in the milk and value added products which unorganised market is not serving. Indian consumer is becoming more health conscious and demand for healthier products with natural, organic and an ayurvedic ingredient is increasing. Changing consumer lifestyle, increasing number of working women and increasing personal disposable incomes are leading to an increase in demand of value added dairy products. Smaller packs of packaged dairy products are being aggressively marketed for the second and third tier markets to deepen a brands penetration and increase the volume in the country. The increasing numbers of players in the dairy sector are focusing their strategies towards the untapped semi-urban and rural regions, which offer significant opportunities for growth. The US dairy industry is indirectly putting pressure on India to open market access. Recent decision of US administration to terminate the preferential trade status granted to India was warmly welcomed by US dairy Industry. If both the countries will join hands with good-faith negotiations in future, small organised dairy players may face stiff competition or may look forward JV possibilities. Among the top cities, Mumbai topped the list with a 27 per cent average decrease in apartment sizes from 960 sq. ft in 2014 to 700 sq. ft. in 2018. Chennai: The top seven Indian cities collectively saw average apartment sizes shrink by nearly 17 per cent between 2014 and 2018. On an average apartments have become smaller from 1390 sq ft in 2014 to 1100 sq ft in 2018. In order to make housing projects more pocket-friendly for a higher customer base, developers are shrinking the sizes of the apartments, finds Anarock Property Consultants. Among the top cities, Mumbai topped the list with a 27 per cent average decrease in apartment sizes from 960 sq. ft in 2014 to 700 sq. ft. in 2018. Delhi-NCR was the sizes coming down by 16 per cent from 1,485 sq ft to 1,250 sq ft in the five years. Kolkata saw the sizes reducing by 23 per cent and Chennai 14 per cent. Bangalore saw the least decline in size at around 12 per cent in five years. The current average size in Bangalore is 1260 sq ft. Prior to 2017, the average sizes in Bangalore fluctuated by 1-2 per cent y-o-y. But in 2018, they dropped by over 12 per cent against the preceding year. Hyderabad currently has the highest average property sizes about 1,600 sq. ft. Property buyers in Hyderabad have traditionally preferred large-sized homes. The maximum reduction in average property was seen in the budget housing priced less than Rs 40 lakh. The average size of homes priced below `40 lakh was 750 sq. ft. in 2014 and it reduced by 23 per cent in 2018. Apartment sizes in the luxury-housing, priced above Rs 80 lakh also saw a 20 per cent reduction over the last five years. The average size of properties in this segment was 1,830 sq. ft. in 2014, which came down to 1,460 sq. ft. in 2018. Mid-segment housing priced between `40-`80 lakh saw the least size reduction of 17 per cent from 1,150 sq. ft. in 2014 to around 950 sq. ft. in 2018. According to Anarock the millennials preferences are key changes in the apartment sizes. Millennial homebuyers prefer affordability coupled with good location over larger-sized homes in the far-flung suburbs. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways collects and holds data as part of issuance of vehicle registration certificates (RC) and driver licence (DL). Chennai: Organisations and researchers can buy bulk data pertaining to vehicle registrations on an annual basis from the next fiscal. However, the government has put in place checks and balances to ensure the security of this data. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways collects and holds data as part of issuance of vehicle registration certificates (RC) and driver licence (DL). The ministry currently shares complete data only with specified agencies such as police, banks and insurance companies. As per the 'Bulk Data Sharing Policy and Procedure', sharing of vehicle registration data in a "controlled manner, can support the transport and automobile industry". The sharing of data will also help in service improvements and wider benefits to citizens and government, the policy said. Organisations requesting for data should be registered in India with at least 50 per cent ownership by an Indian resident or an Indian company. All bulk data accessed by the organisation shall be processed/stored in servers/ data centre residing in India. The data at any point shall not be transferred/processed/ stored in a server outside India, it said. The commercial organisations and individuals seeking bulk data will have to pay an amount of Rs 3 crore for FY 2019-20. Educational institutions can use this data only for research and internal purposes and would be provided one time on payment of an amount of Rs 5 lakh for the FY 2019-20. There shall be an annual increase of 5 per cent from the FY 2020-21 onwards. But government has warned that breach of data will result in action under the IT Act and other applicable laws besides debarring the agency from access to this data for a period of three years. It will monitor, control and block any sensitive data being transferred from the data processing organisation network. All sensitive data should be in encrypted format while stored in disk and only to be decrypted while accessed through proper mechanism. According to Naveen Dham, CEO of GIS Consulting, the cyber security scenario in India is not that desirable to permit such wide use of vehicle and personal data. It has been experienced in the recent past that many renowned organisations have been unable to keep up with the advancements in hacking, and introduction of IoT has worsened the situation wherein the devices like IOT-enabled devices, electrical grids and IoT-enabled factories are at the mercy of cybercriminals. Since we are living in a reactive environment wherein we react and take mitigation action after the organisation is attacked by cyber criminals it is similar to buying a fire extinguishers only after experiencing the fire incidents, he said. We have to ensure that we have to establish a robust system which will ensure the adequate prevention and treatment to refrain from cyber attacks, he added. Mumbai: Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's upcoming film 'Mere Pyare Prime Minister' is creating an immense buzz ahead of its release. While the film has garnered accolades globally, netizens express their disappointment as the film didn't even earn a mention at Oscars. Highlighting a social issue the film emotionally binds the audience in the story of a mother and son. Receiving appreciation at international film festivals and special screenings before release, Mere Pyare Prime Minister left the social media masses disheartened as the film did not qualify for Oscars. What troubled the digital audience is the film was not even mentioned for the Oscars. Depicting the same sentiment on social media, tweeple started a trend with keywords 'AFilmThatDidntGoToOscar' and 'Mere Pyare Prime Minister'. Here are a few tweets: MPPM looks so honest. Must be a great movie with Oscar winning content. But its AFilmThatDidnt GoToOSCAR. pic.twitter.com/BWV8QIi2NE (@Rajpurohit_7) March 13, 2019 its too good.. Mere Pyare PM is grievingly AFilmThatDidnt GoToOSCAR. pic.twitter.com/WKqOVOlJ92 Neha jadon (@jadon_neha1) March 13, 2019 MPPM was a great contender for Oscar's. It's a film AFilmThatDidnt GoToOSCAR sadly. pic.twitter.com/j0sXbEmS74 Neha jadon (@jadon_neha1) March 13, 2019 Mere Pyare Prime Minister found its location in Ghatkopar East, where an entire hill is covered by the slums. The Slums of Mumbai are more than the high rise of the city. After Gully Boy, Mere Pyare Prime Minister is the second film of the year that will have a backdrop of the slums. Delivering a social message with an emotional storyline yet again, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra who has earlier helmed 'Rang De Basanti', 'Delhi-6', amongst others is all set to present 'Mere Pyare Prime Minister'. The film starring National award-winning actress Anjali Patil, Makarand Deshpande, Rasika Agashe, Sonia Albizuri and Nachiket Purnapatre brings together power-packed performances. The musical trio of Shankar Ehsan Loy joins hands for the music to the lyrics penned by Gulzar. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's directorial 'Mere Pyare Prime Minister' is all set to release on 15th March 2019. Actress Felicity Huffman was arrested at gunpoint on Tuesday for her alleged involvement in the US college admissions scandal. According to reports on TMZ.com, seven Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived at the Desperate Housewives stars Los Angeles home at 6 am on Tuesday and had their guns drawn as they ordered her to surrender. Huffman, her husband, William H. Macy, and their two daughters, Sofia and Georgia, were reportedly asleep at the time of the arrest. The Cake actress was one of dozens of people including Fuller House star Lori Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli who supposedly took part in the scam. ABC News obtained court documents that alleged Huffman made a purported charitable contribution of $15,000 to participate in the college entrance exam cheating scheme on behalf of her eldest daughter. Reportedly, a judge has ordered Felicitys release on $250,000 bond. Stunning and skilled, danseuse Sanaz Bakhtiari who had made Bengaluru her home few years ago teaching dance, is back in town, and this time, on a mission. The gorgeous Persian belly dancer, fresh from her international certification by UNESCO, Paris, wants to spread her love for dancing with people in the city. As president of the Bengaluru section of the International Dance Council (CID), UNESCO, she says, I'm here to personally certify dancers in the city who have more than 150 hours of practice. I will meet more people through dance studios and create a better network for our dancers and encourage them to travel, attend conferences and dance events. The amount of interest and potential in Bengalureans to learn different styles is amazing. She will be teaching belly dance and Persian dance to the experts. After her stint in nammooru, where she taught belly dancing and other forms, Sanaz had to return to Iran due to family commitments. I was back home as my dad was unwell and I needed to support my mum. While in Iran, I started doing research about the history of dances of Persia. I visited different libraries, met people. Im glad I could contribute to my country, she says. While growing up in Iran, Sanaz didnt have many opportunities to learn dancing due to the ongoing war. I started dancing only as a teenager. I performed at theatre and learnt folklore which is something we have to learn here before moving to ballet and other dance forms. I was practicing different Persian styles inspired by pictures and paintings and Oriental dance from the Middle East. In India, we call it belly dance. When I started teaching the dance form in Bengaluru, no one was doing it here and people did not know what it was. I wanted to try and learn Indian classical dance. But when women here started showing interest in the dance form, I started off by teaching four to five women at a small gym. I told them they could shake like Shakira. This was a huge hit and now I have a record of having taught at least 3,000 students, says Sanaz, who calls India her home. Her studio will continue teaching dance, while Sanaz will continue her travels to various countries to meet dancers through her job, and conduct workshops. Ill try to bring more dance teachers to Bluru and share my knowledge with people. When I come here, I try to stay as long as possible in this city that I love so much, she signs off. They later threw her out of the vehicle after snatching her gold chain. (Representational Image) New Delhi: The National Commission for Women on Wednesday asked the Tamil Nadu Director General of Police to initiate action against the men accused in the alleged sexual harassment of a woman in Coimbatore district. A 19-year-old woman had alleged that unidentified men in Pollachi town of the district recently took her in a car and attempted to disrobe her and videographed it. As the woman refused to yield to their advances, the men started blackmailing her with the video. They later threw her out of the vehicle after snatching her gold chain. The police has so far arrested four men in the case. Reacting to the news reports, NCW chief Rekha Sharma has issued a notice to DGP, Tamil Nadu, T K Rajendran to take appropriate action against the accused. "The commission is seriously concerned about the safety and security of the women in the state of Tamil Nadu," Sharma said in a letter. "Considering the gravity of the matter, it is requested that appropriate action be taken as per the relevant provisions of law against all the accused and a detailed action taken report in the matter be sent to the commission," she added. Sources said announcement of general elections won't be an issue as there is precedence in this regard. (Photo: ANI) New Delhi: The Defence Ministry has initiated the process to appoint the next chief of naval staff as the incumbent Admiral Sunil Lanba is scheduled to retire from service on May 31 this year. Sources said the decision is expected to be announced soon. "A proposal has been initiated with the names of senior-most officers in it for the appointment of the next Navy chief. A decision in this regard is expected to be announced very soon," government sources told ANI. As per seniority list of the Navy, Vice Admiral Bimal Verma is the senior-most among the top three officers of the maritime force followed by Vice Admirals Karambir Singh and Ajith Kumar, respectively. However, sources did not rule out the possibility of supersession in the appointment as the service record of one of the senior officers has the mention of the Navy war room leak case in it. On whether the announcement of general elections and model code of conduct will have any impact on the appointment, the sources said this should not be an issue as there is precedence in this regard. The UPA government in April 2014 before the polling process was completed had appointed Admiral Robin Dhowan as the chief of Navy after the controversial resignation of Admiral DK Joshi in view of the submarine mishaps on February 26, 2014. It also went ahead to announce the appointment of General Dalbir Singh as the Chief of Army Staff almost two months before the retirement of his predecessor Gen Bikram Singh. Vice Admiral Bimal Verma is presently commanding the Andaman and Nicobar Command in Port Blair while Vice Admiral Karambir Singh is heading the Vishakhapatnam-based Eastern Command. Vice Admiral Ajith Kumar is heading the Navy's sword-arm Western Command in Mumbai and looks after the international maritime boundary with Pakistan. Ayodhya: As the three-member mediation panel meets for the first time on the Ayodhya title suit today, Muslim Rashtriya Manch and Hindu Maha Sabha have expressed support for the construction of Ram Temple by resolving the issues through talks. The Supreme Court had on March 8 referred the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid land dispute case for court-appointed and monitored mediation and expressed the view that the proceedings should be conducted with utmost confidentiality to ensure its success. We welcome this decision by the Supreme Court. I believe that through this meet will give a push to the new start for the construction of Ram Temple. If there will be a decision taken by the mediators soon then I feel it will be positive for the country and the people, Syed Yaser Jilani of Muslim Rashtriya Manch told ANI. Resonating similar sentiments, Hindu Maha Sabhas Swami Chakrapani said, This country belongs to all of us. Through talks, we can resolve big-big issues. The Supreme Court wants both the parties to win. It does not want anybody to lose. Even I have received a letter to be a part of this. I will definitely go there. Even after the construction of Ram Temple in Ayodhya we all have to stay in this country. We dont want to construct the temple through violence. We want to make it through the support of everybody. We believe that through mediation a decision will surely be taken on this matter. While hearing the matter on March 8, a five-judge Constitution bench of the apex court headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi said, We have considered the nature of the dispute arising. Notwithstanding the lack of consensus between the parties in the matter, we are of the view that an attempt should be made to settle the dispute by mediation". After taking note of the submissions made by the parties concerned, the bench constituted a three-member committee which would be chaired by retired top court judge Justice Fakkir Mohamed Ibrahim Kalifulla. The panel would have Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and senior Madras High Court advocate Sriram Panchu as members. In its order, the bench, which also comprised Justices S A Bobde, D Y Chandrachud, Ashok Bhushan and S Abdul Nazeer, said that the mediation proceedings will be held in Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh and the state government will provide the mediators all facilities. The bench was hearing appeals against the September 30, 2010 verdict of the Allahabad High Court which ordered a three-way division of the disputed 2.77 acres of the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid site in Ayodhya between the Nirmohi Akhara sect, the Sunni Central Wakf Board, Uttar Pradesh and Ramlalla Virajman. European Union and many countries across the world have already banned the use of 737 Max 8 aircraft in their respective airspace. (Photo: AP) New Delhi: Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) on Wednesday said, all Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft would be grounded by 4 pm. This would be done to aircraft scheduled to fly back to India or go to the maintenance facility for parking. Civil Aviation Secretary has called an emergency meeting of all airlines at 4 pm today in Delhi. On Tuesday India banned the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft in light of the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 people. SpiceJet has around 12 '737 Max 8' planes in its fleet, while Jet Airways has five. "DGCA has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately. These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations," the Ministry of Civil Aviation said in a tweet. DGCA has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately. These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations. (1/2) Ministry of Civil Aviation (@MoCA_GoI) March 12, 2019 "As always, passenger safety remains our top priority. We continue to consult closely with regulators around the world, airlines, and aircraft manufacturers to ensure passenger safety," it added. On Sunday, a 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa killing 157 people, including four Indians. This was second such crash involving the 737 MAX 8 aircraft in less than five months. In October last year, an aircraft operated by Lion Air crashed killing over 180 people in Indonesia. Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu said, "Directed Secy to hold an emergency meeting with all Airlines to prepare a contingency plan to avoid inconvenience to passengers. While passenger safety is a zero tolerance issue, efforts are already on to minimize the impact on passenger movement as their convenience is important (sic)." European Union and many countries across the world have already banned the use of 737 Max 8 aircraft in their respective airspace. In a statement, SpiceJet said, "We are actively engaged with both Boeing and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation and will continue to put safety first, as always. We have already implemented all additional precautionary measures as directed by the DGCA yesterday." "The Boeing 737 Max is a highly sophisticated aircraft. It has flown hundreds of thousands of hours globally and some of the world's largest airlines are flying this aircraft," it said. It is to be seen from the perspective that he is a youth and is struggling. He is raising his voice and saying to society to hear his pain, said Priyanka Gandhi. (Image: ANI) Meerut: Congress general secretary and in-charge for the partys east UP affairs Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Wednesday said that her decision to meet Bhim army chief Chandrashekhar Azad had nothing to do with politics. It is to be seen from the perspective that he is a youth and is struggling. He is raising his voice and saying to society to hear his pain. But this government is so arrogant that it wants to suppress the youth. The government doesnt want to hear the voice of the youth, said Gandhi. I am here because I like his energy and the way he raises his voice for the youths, said Priyanka, who met Chandrashekhar here at a hospital where he is undergoing treatment. On Monday, Azad was taken into the police custody along with his supporters for allegedly violating the Model Code of Conduct (MCC), which is in force in view of the ensuing Lok Sabha elections. After some time of his arrest, Azad complained of high blood pressure and fell unconscious. He was admitted to a hospital here, where he is undergoing treatment. Police said the case was registered against Azad and 28 others on Wednesday for violating the Model Code of Conduct. Senior Superintendent of Police Dinesh Kumar said: Azad organised a rally and violated the Model Code of Conduct on Monday. The local officials tried to stop them, but he continued with his rally. He was held for four hours in a private school. Police said the rally had been organised without required permission at Kasimpura village by Azad. When the police tried to stop the rally, they resisted and later blocked Muzaffarnagar-Saharanpur highway. On Tuesday, Azad started a Padayatra from Saharanpur to Delhi and announced to address a rally in New Delhi on March 15. He has also announced to fight the Lok Sabha election against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Devi, assistant professor at private Devanga Arts College in Aruppukottai affiliated to the MKU, was arrested on April 16 last year on a complaint by the college and a women's forum after an audio-clip of her purported conversation with students went viral on social media. (Photo: File) Madurai: A woman college teacher was Tuesday granted conditional bail by the Madras High Court, nearly 11 months after her arrest in a sensational sex scandal case. Justices N Kirubakaran and SS Sundar of the Madurai Bench granted bail to suspended assistant professor Nirmala Devi, who has been accused of luring some girl students to extend favours to senior officials of the Madurai Kamaraj University (MKU) in return for higher marks and money. The government counsel submitted they had no objection to grant of bail. The judges directed her to fully cooperate with police in the investigation and barred her from giving any interview to the media that would harm the probe. Earlier, her bail petitions were rejected by the lower court and the high court as well. Devi, assistant professor at private Devanga Arts College in Aruppukottai affiliated to the MKU, was arrested on April 16 last year on a complaint by the college and a women''s forum after an audio-clip of her purported conversation with students went viral on social media. In the audio-clip, she was purportedly heard advising girl students to "adjust" with some officials "for getting 85 per cent marks and money", a suggestion seen as asking them to extend sexual favours. She was suspended by the college after an internal enquiry before her arrest. As the alleged luring of the girl students triggered an outrage, the case was transferred to the Crime Branch CID within days of it being registered. Based on interrogation of Devi, police arrested Assistant Professor V Murugan of the university and research student Karuppasamy for their alleged involvement in the case. The two were granted bail by the Supreme Court later after the high court turned down their pleas. The CB-CID had filed a 200-page final charge sheet in the case in the judicial magistrate court in Srivilliputtur in September last year. Earlier, it had submitted a 1,160 page preliminary charge sheet in July. In the final charge sheet, CB-CID altered the charges to include offences of trafficking, sexual harassment and conspiracy under the Indian Penal Code and also under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Harassment of Women Act and the Information Technology Act. The fresh charges were included based on investigation, including voice test of Devi conducted at a high-tech laboratory in Chennai by police. During the proceedings in the Judicial Magistrate court at Srivilliputhur, Devi had denied the charges and alleged police "coerced" her to give a statement. Dr M. D. Srikanth of the Indian Dental Association says, tobacco companies are trying new ways to market their products by saying that e-cigarettes are safe but that is not true''. (Representational Image) Hyderabad: The ban on e-cigarettes in Telangana state is under consideration as the health and family welfare department of the state is waiting for more views before finally heeding the advice of the Centre. The Union ministry of health and family welfare on August 2018 asked all state governments to ensure that Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS) are not sold, manufactured, distributed, traded or advertised in their states. To date, 12 states in the country have implemented the order. According to sources, the file on ENDS has been under consideration in the state health department from September 2018. A senior health official of the state department explained, Tobacco has a history in both Telugu states. There are tobacco farmers in Andhra Pradesh and there are beedi workers in Telangana districts. Files have to be kept 'under consideration' when factors such as manpower, employment and also the revenue from taxes collected by the state government are involved. Dr M. D. Srikanth of the Indian Dental Association says, tobacco companies are trying new ways to market their products by saying that e-cigarettes are safe but that is not true. In the case of ENDS the nicotine is inhaled and that is harmful. Nicotine is an addiction in any form. The traditional tobacco use in Telangana is 17.8 per cent in adults of which 8.3 per cent are cigarette smokers, 4.2 per cent are beedi smokers and 5.2 per cent are smokeless tobacco users. The total number of tobacco smokers in India is 28.6 per cent, of which four per cent are cigarette smokers, 7.7 per cent beedi smokers and 21.4 per cent use smokeless tobacco. Bhopal: Congress was mulling to field former chief minister Digvijay Singh, AICC general secretary Jyotiraditya Scindias wife Priyadarshini and chief minister Kamal Naths son Nakul as party candidates in the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections in Madhya Pradesh. A senior party leader disclosed to this newspaper on Wednesday that their candidatures have been recommended by Pradesh Election Committee (PEC) of Congress to Central Election Committee (CEC) for clearance. Of the total 29 parliamentary constituencies, single names have been recommended each in half-a-dozen parliamentary constituencies by the PEC to the CEC for consideration. While Mr Singh has been recommended for Rajgarh parliamentary constituency, Ms Priyadarshini and Mr Nath have been projected as party candidates in Gwalior and Chhindwara LS seats respectively, he added. Mr Nath was set to contest in Chhindwara LS seat, currently held by his father, chief minister Kamal Nath. Similarly, Mr Scindia has been re-nominated for Guna seat, while sitting MP Kantilal Bhuria has been re-nominated for Ratlam constituency by the Pradesh Election Committee. Similarly, All India Congress Committee legal cell chairman Vivek Tankha was recommended for Jabalpur. Sources said the chief minister has shot down demands by at least three party MLAs to contest in the ensuing parliamentary elections, considering that the party was running a minority government in the state with outside support of two BSP MLAs, one SP legislator and four Independents. Hyderabad: Soon Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) would be divided into five corporations to facilitate citizens with better administration. The current six zones will be divided into five corporations based on geographical continuity and population. As per central norms, these corporati-ons would attain A1 recognition with a population of at least 20 lakh and they would also receive grants worth Rs 200 crore. Corporation sources said that the existing zonal system did not yield desired results due to centralised funding and staff crunch. The five new corporations would not only strengthen the grievance readdressal system but would bring governance to the public. This could also strengthen current weak wings like health, and sanitation and revenue. According to highly placed sources, each of the five corporations will have the geographical continuity which will not be less than 20 lakh population. For instance, areas including Serilingampally, Ramchandrapuram and Patancheruvu circles will be merged to form a single corporation which will have population of a 20 lakh. Similarly, circles including Alwal, Kapra and Uppal will be formed into another corporation. The division exercise will be taken to expedite ongoing projects, strengthening systems including revenue, health, sanitation, engineering and town planning. These corporations would be eligible for A1 class and as a consequence will be allocated `200 crore towards Compensatory City Allo-wance (CCA) as recommended by the Sixth Central Pay Finance. Sources said the grants would not only be useful for the ongoing development works but also to recruit permanent staff to address public grievances efficiently. However, a senior GHMC official, on condition of anonymity, said that rather than dividing the civic body into five corporations, it would be easy to provide budgetary power to the existing zonal commissioners who execute work at the field level. He said that the corporation should concentrate on grey areas like grievance readdressal, curbing illegal constructions, transparency in tax collection and attending sanitation-related issues at the earliest. He said that the headquarters have to be used for policy making and other innovative measures. The official further said that even though the exercise in making five different corporations was in the pipeline, it would create greater confusion among citizens pertaining to five different policies that would be implemented in these corporations. The official pointed out that if common policies were chalked out prior to the formation of the new corporations, it would bri-ng governance closer to the public and speed development of the city. PWD minister H.D. Revanna wipes tears after his father H.D Deve Gowda announced that he would not be contesting the LS poll from Hassan. (Image DC) It was an emotional moment for the family of Janata Dal (S) supremo and former Prime Minister, H.D. Deve Gowda as he formally made way for his grandson, Prajwal in Hassan constituency for the coming parliamentary poll, here on Wednesday. Family members turned teary eyed as Mr Gowda presented a garland and a shawl to his grandson at the Chennakeshava temple in Moodalahippe village of Holenarsipura, heralding the entry of the next generation of the clan into politics. Prajwals father, minister H.D. Revanna, mother Bhavani, also a zilla panchayat member, and party men attended. Mr Prajwal later joined Mr Gowda in a symbolic launch of his campaign by riding with him in an open jeep around the village. Like his grandfather and father, Prajwal began his campaign from the Chennakeshava temple where an aarti was performed while he faced east. To add to the auspicious mood, two transgenders visited his home in Holenarsipura town to perform an aarti and wish him success in the Lok Sabha poll. Speaking to reporters later, Mr Gowda said he would announce the candidature of his other grandson, Nikhil Kumaraswamy for Mandya after holding discussions with the leaders concerned, but asserted there was no doubt he would contest from the constiutency. On the Nikhil Go back campaign on a social networking site, he said, I will go to Mandya and hold a meeting before announcing Nikhils name. Asked about his new constituency for the Lok Sabha poll, Mr Gowda replied, I dont know where I will contest from. New Delhi: Congress will contest from 11 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar while the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) will fight from 21 seats in the state during the forthcoming general elections. This was finalised after talks between both the parties on seat sharing ended on Wednesday evening. There are 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar. Former NDA ally Upendra Kushwaha, who has now joined the UPA fold, is likely to get four seats while former chief minister Jitan Ram Manjhis Hindustan Awam Morcha (HAM) may contest from three seats, with the Begusarai seat is likely to go to the Communist Party of India (CPI) candidate and former JNU student leader Kanhaiya Kumar, sources aware of developments, said. The negotiations between the Mahagathbandhan partners, which had been going on since Tuesday, were held at Congress general secretary (organisation) K.C. Venugopals residence in the national capital with RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav present in the meeting. While the Congress was keen to contest around 15 seats, the RJD was firm that it could not give it more than 11 seats. Sources privy to developments said that while on Tuesday the seat sharing negotiations had got stuck as the Congress was adamant on 15 seats, on Wednesday it finally accepted RJDs offer of contesting from 11 seats. In 2014, the Congress had contested from 12 seats in Bihar, but could manage to win only one seat, while the RJD had contested all the 40 seats and managed to bag only four seats, amid a strong Narendra Modi wave. Though the number of seats for all the Mahagathbandhan allies in Bihar have more or less been finalised, former JD(U) chief Sharad Yadav, who has floated his own outfit Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD), is keen to contest the Madhepura seat under his own banner. Indian carrier SpiceJet that operates 12 of these aircraft, announced cancellation of 14 of its flights on Wednesday. New Delhi: Operations of Boeing 737 Max-8 aircraft in India ceased at 4 pm on Wednesday as per official orders, after the Government allowed some time to cater to situations where aircraft can be positioned at maintenance facilities and international flights can reach their destinations. Indian carrier SpiceJet that operates 12 of these aircraft, announced cancellation of 14 of its flights on Wednesday. As reported, Indian Government aviation regulator DGCA had on Tuesday night decided to ground the Boeing 737-Max8 aircraft operated by Indian carriers with immediate effect following the Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday and similar action taken by several countries including major European countries. The Government is also working out a contingency plan with airlines to minimise inconvenience for passengers. But controversy broke out on Wednesday morning, with reports that some Boeing 737 Max aircraft were still operating in the Indian skies. The Civil Aviation Ministry then swiftly clarified the situation by tweeting, In continuation to the decision of DGCA to ground the B737 Max operations, further clarification follows. B737Max operations will stop from/to all Indian airports. Additionally no B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600hrs (4 pm) Indian time or 1030 UTC. The time line is to cater to situations where aircraft can be positioned at maintenance facilities and international flights can reach their destinations. The other Indian carrier that has these planesfive of themis cash-strapped Jet Airways but there were reports that these planes may have already been grounded earlier due to the financial woes of the airline. Meanwhile, in a statement issued at noon on Wednesday, SpiceJet said, Consequent to the regulatory directive on the Boeing 737 MAX, SpiceJet has already initiated grounding of its MAX fleet. Government sources said security considerations (for the pilgrimage) are always a national concern and that there would be no dilution. New Delhi: At the Indo-Pak talks on the Kartarpur Sahib corridor project that will take place at Attari in (Indian) Punjab on Thursday, India is expected to ask Pakistan for visa-free access for Indian Sikh pilgrims to visit the historic Kartarpur Sahib Gurudwara close to the border in Pakistani Punjab in November this year for the 550th birth anniversary celebrations of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism and the first Guru of the Sikhs. This was made clear by Government sources on Wednesday. In addition, New Delhi is also expected to make it clear to Islamabad that Indian Sikh pilgrims should not be harassed during the pilgrimage by pro-Khalistan elements in Pakistani Punjab. Government sources said security considerations (for the pilgrimage) are always a national concern and that there would be no dilution. The (security) arrangements (for the pilgrimage) will be fool-proof and intrusion-free. Government sources said India and Pakistan would try to resolve the mismatch arising from both sides proposing different border crossing points for the pilgrims. Both sides are expected to discuss Kartarpur draft agreement and the alignment of their respective corridors being built by both sides on their respective territories for the pilgrimage. New Delhi has also proposed that a technical level discussion on the alignment of the corridor be held on the same day on the sidelines of this meeting. India is already working on creating facilities for the corridor on its side from Dera Baba Nanak in Gurdaspur to the International Border with all modern amenities to facilitate movement of upto 5,000 pilgrims daily who will cross over into Pakistani Punjab. Hubballi: It was a role reversal of sorts and went a long way in driving home the message of gender equality in the remote Nalathwad village of Muddebihal taluk in Vijayapura district. Two brides did what you may call the unthinkable-they tied the sacred thread (Mangalasutra) around the neck of their grooms going against the rituals of Hindu weddings where the groom ties the mangalsutra on the bride. And the women did it in the Lingayat heartland where 12th century community icon Basavanna had preached the equality of men and women. Interestingly, the brides and grooms even belong to different castes. One pair, Amit and Priya, are software engineers. Priya belongs to the Kuruba community and Amit is a Lingayat. Industrialist Prabhuraj too entered into wedlock on the occasion in the same style with his bride Ankita tying the sacred thread on him. The grooms are children of two brothers who are ardent followers of the teachings of Basavanna. The marriage ceremony was a simple one and was intended to send out a message that people should get rid of social evils including the dowry menace and obscure beliefs. "We have performed several such marriages, my two daughters also got married in a similar style in North Karnataka," said the groom's father Ashok Baragundi, an assistant executive engineer with the PWD. Chennai: Congress president Rahul Gandhi threw cold water on the hopes of Arupthammal, mother of Perarivalan and scores of others, that he would come out with a strong statement in support of the release of the seven convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case. But contrary to expectations, he made a distinction between personal issue and rule of law and said the law should take its course. We are quite forgiving people and we dont have hatred or animosity towards anyone. This (assassination of his father and former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991) presents two issues me and my family, which is personal; and the legal aspect. Law should take its own course. Whatever the course will be, we will be happy with it, he told reporters here on Wednesday on the emotive issue, before leaving for Nagercoil to launch the UPA poll campaign. Several agitations were held in various parts of Tamil Nadu and neighbouring Puducherry, too, by Arputhammal, along with members of various political parties and civil society, demanding Governor Banwarilal Purohit to order the release of the seven life convicts in the former Prime Minister assassination case. The convicts: Nalini, Murugan (Nalinis husband), Santhan, A.G. Perarivalan, Robert Payas, S. Jayakumar and Ravichandran, have spent the last 28 years in prison. New Delhi: The Congress on Wednesday released its second list of 16 candidates from Uttar Pradesh and first list of five candidates from Maharashtra for the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections. Notable among the candidates are former home minister Sushilkumar Shinde, former coal Minister Sriprakash Jaisawal, ex-MP Priya Dutt, and Uttar Pradesh Congress chief Raj Babbar. Mr Shinde will contest from Solapur (SC) Lok Sabha seat, from where he has been a lawmaker on several occasions, while Mr Jaisawal will enter the electoral battle from his home turf of Kanpur. Mr Babbar will contest from Moradabad. Priya Dutt Ms Priya Dutt will contest from Mumbai North-Central seat, which she had won in a by-election in 2005. Her father, veteran actor and senior Congress leader late Sunil Dutt had won from this seat on five occasions. This newspaper had on March 9 reported exclusively that Mr Shinde and Ms Dutt have been shortlisted as candidates for Lok Sabha polls from Maharashtra. Having declared 16 candidates from Uttar Pradesh in its second list, the Congress has now named 27 candidates from the politically crucial state till now. There are 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh. Raj Babbar While this indicates that the party does not seem to be interested in any alliance in Uttar Pradesh as it has now declared its candidates in more than one-fourth seats, Congress general secretary in charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh Priyanka Gandhi had told party workers that the focus should be on the 21 seats which the party had won in 2009 in the state, and also on those where it had finished a close second 10 years back. While in the first list declared last week, out of the 11 seats named by the Congress, it had won eight seats in 2009 Lok Sabha polls. In the list of 16 candidates declared on Wednesday, the Congress had won six seats in 2009. These seats are Moradabad, Bahraich, Sultanpur, Pratapgarh, Kanpur and Kheri. In Maharashtra, former minister Milind Deora will be contesting from Mumbai-South, while Kisan Congress (the farmers wing of the party) chief Nana Patole will contest from Nagpur, the seat which was in 2014 wrested from the Congress by BJP. . Notable among the candidates are former home minister Sushilkumar Shinde, former coal Minister Sriprakash Jaisawal, ex-MP Priya Dutt, and Uttar Pradesh Congress chief Raj Babbar. Mr Shinde will contest from Solapur (SC) Lok Sabha seat, from where he has been a lawmaker on several occasions, while Mr Jaisawal will enter the electoral battle from his home turf of Kanpur. Mr Babbar will contest from Moradabad. Ms Priya Dutt will contest from Mumbai North-Central seat, which she had won in a by-election in 2005. Her father, veteran actor and senior Congress leader late Sunil Dutt had won from this seat on five occasions. This newspaper had on March 9 reported exclusively that Mr Shinde and Ms Dutt have been shortlisted as candidates for Lok Sabha polls from Maharashtra. Having declared 16 candidates from Uttar Pradesh in its second list, the Congress has now named 27 candidates from the politically crucial state till now. There are 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh. While this indicates that the party does not seem to be interested in any alliance in Uttar Pradesh as it has now declared its candidates in more than one-fourth seats, Congress general secretary in charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh Priyanka Gandhi had told party workers that the focus should be on the 21 seats which the party had won in 2009 in the state, and also on those where it had finished a close second 10 years back. While in the first list declared last week, out of the 11 seats named by the Congress, it had won eight seats in 2009 Lok Sabha polls. In the list of 16 candidates declared on Wednesday, the Congress had won six seats in 2009. These seats are Moradabad, Bahraich, Sultanpur, Pratapgarh, Kanpur and Kheri. In Maharashtra, former minister Milind Deora will be contesting from Mumbai-South, while Kisan Congress (the farmers wing of the party) chief Nana Patole will contest from Nagpur, the seat which was in 2014 wrested from the Congress by BJP. Hyderabad: The United States Military Forces from the 1st Battalion, an elite Group (Airborne) stationed out of Okinawa, Japan, are in Hyderabad for special training for conflict prevention and crisis management. Along with the Indian National Security Guard (NSG), the US troop is undergoing joint exercises at the Southern Regional Center (SRC) in Ibrahimpatnam, Hyderabad. The training is learned to be critical to the US Special Operations Forces, as the soldiers are still learning how to effectively work with Indian partners in new climatic environments. The US military is working with India to boost interoperability, build partner capacity, prevent conflict, and to promote regional strength throughout the Indo-Pacific region. The training envisaged on mutual defense operations so that both the nations can effectively employ forces and assist each other in the event of crises that may endanger public health and safety. The Hyderabad exercise will help build interoperability and comradeship between the two forces and is designed to enhance the capabilities of both, the Indian and the US armed forces. The US-India security partnership is strong, and growing stronger, said the U.S. Consul General Katherine Hadda. This Special Forces exercise in Hyderabad further advances our countries' operational coordination, and it will clearly benefit both our nations, the consul general added. The training events are part of US Indo-Pacific Commands Theater Security Cooperation Program conducted by the US military with a select group of nations in the Indo-Pacific region. The exercise is being overseen by the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi and the U.S. Special Operations Pacific Command at Camp H.M. Smith in Hawaii. The US considers India as its Major Defense Partner. Additionally, Hyderabad has become a hub of US-Indian defense manufacturing including joint-venture facilities, technology centers, and skills-development capacity. New Delhi: Under attack by the opposition over his Hafiz ji comment, Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Tuesday said his one-year-old statement was kind of a pun and it should be seen in its full context of the video, where he had slammed terrorists. A day after the BJP targeted Congress president Rahul Gandhi for referring to Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar as Masood Azhar ji, the Congress put out a video of Prasad referring Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed as Hafiz ji. Speaking at a Times Network event here, Prasad said, You have to show that one-year-old video of mine in its entirety. The day we exposed Hafiz Saeed in our press conference... and showed video of that terrorist and killer. I said it in vyang (satire). I say they are murderers and killers and terrorist and we will continue to expose them...It was kind of pun. When asked about his statement being described as a pun while the remark by Gandhi becoming a subject of BJPs attack, Prasad said that his remark should be seen in the totality. I would earnestly request... please show my entire press conference of that day, then you will see how belligerent and blistering I was against the terrorists, Prasad, who is in charge of IT and Law ministries, said. Show that video... Our commitment to India, and commitment to fight against terrorism is complete. We dont make a political bargain of it. It is our commitment that India should become a global power in the fight against terrorism and also in the field of economic, digital and other sectors, he said. On Monday, Prasad criticised Gandhi for calling Masood Azhar ji. Come on Rahul Gandhi Ji! Earlier it were the likes of Digvijay Ji who called Osama Ji and Hafiz Saeed Sahab. Now you are saying Masood Azhar Ji. What is happening to Congress Party?, Prasad had tweeted. On Tuesday, Congress spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi shared a video of the minister referring to terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed as Hafiz ji. At the event Tuesday, Prasad continued his attack on Gandhi and the Congress party. When evidence is being sought on whether the Balakot attack has happened or not... You are seeking to disbelieve the narrative of India and, wittingly or unwittingly, you are seeking to weaken the morale of forces of India. Surely, those questions will be asked, he said. Asked about Priyanka Gandhis statement that BJP was raising useless issue like Balakot when the real issues are unemployment and demonetisation, Prasad said, This is a question that country should understand. If she says Pulwama is a useless issue, is terrorist attack really a useless issue? That 40 CRPF jawans were killed is that fizool (useless)?. Distinction under Modi government is that we have given a clear message to terrorists that if you commit terrorism against India you have to pay the price... After 1971, for the first time our forces crossed border inside Pakistan. That is the message. If Priyanka ji considers that useless what can I say, the minister said. He said the Indian economy is attracting the biggest FDI in the world and had transformed into the biggest electronics manufacturing hub. Is it fizool to her?, he quipped. Prasad said India is rising and emerging as a world power on the back of transformative reforms like GST. On the issue of demonetisation, he said, I want to say when such (black money holders) people are caught Congress has a problem. To a question on the BJP website being down after being hacked, Prasad said the information was wrong and the website was hacked for a few minutes. Asked when the website will be back, he said: We are operational. There are certain rogue element in the world. It also happened in America for sometime, also in China. There are certain people in Pakistan. We keep fighting that. On a national highway there are accidents. Should we stop making national or information highways then? You must fasten your seat belts tight. You must maintain speed limit. Same kind of caution, we have always advised (for digital world)... have proper auditors, routine check ups, he added. Gandhi will arrive here this evening after his programmes in Nagercoil and Kanyakumari in neighbouring Tamil Nadu. (File Photo) Thiruvananthapuram: Congress President Rahul Gandhi will formally launch the party's poll campaign in Kerala on Thursday when he will address a huge rally of workers at Kozhikode on March 14. Gandhi will arrive here this evening after his programmes in Nagercoil and Kanyakumari in neighbouring Tamil Nadu. He has no official programmes in the state Wednesday and after reaching here, would board a special flight to Kochi and spend the night at a guest house in Thrissur, KPCC president Mullappally Ramachandran said. The Congress chief would attend a series of programmes on March 14, beginning with the "fishermen's parliament" at Triprayar in Thrissur. Later, he would fly to Kannur, where he would meet the family of slain Youth Congress leader Shuhaib at the airport there. He would leave for Kasargod and meet the families of Kripesh and Sarathlal, the youth congress activists, who were allegedly killed by the CPI(M) recently. Gandhi would then leave for Kozhikode, where he would attend the Janamaha rally, in which thousands of party workers from six north Kerala districts are expected to participate. Though he was earlier scheduled to visit the house of slain CRPF jawan V V Vasanathakumar in Wayanad, there are media reports that it is unlikely to happen as the security agencies are yet to give clearance owing to Maoist threat. He is also expected to hold discussions with senior party leaders on the selection procedure of candidates, poll preparations and strategy as the crucial Lok Sabha polls is just 40 days away in the state. Though the Congress is yet to finalise and announce its nominees, Gandhi's visit is expected to rejuvenate the workers in Kerala, one of the states where the party is pinning its hopes high. Bengaluru: Karnataka BJP Chief BS Yeddyurappa on Wednesday said Dr Umesh Jadhav will contest elections from Kalaburagi against Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge, while Tejaswini Ananth Kumar is likely to contest from Bengaluru South. However, the former Karnataka chief minister said the final decision will be taken by party high command. "Dr Umesh Jadhav will contest elections from Kalaburagi against Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge and Tejaswini Ananth Kumar is likely to contest from Bengaluru South. The final decision will be taken by party high command," he said at a press conference here. It is worth mentioning that Tejaswini Ananth Kumar is the wife of late former Union minister Ananth Kumar, while Jadhav had recently quit the Congress and joined the BJP. Jadhav, a two-time legislator from Karnataka's Chincholi constituency, was among the three Congress MLAs who went "missing" last month. Thereafter, Congress had recommended their disqualification to the assembly speaker. At the press conference, Yeddyurappa told media here that the BJP can win 28 Lok Sabha seats in Karnataka on three issues-achievements of Modi government, failures of Karnataka government, and successful campaign and work of Bharatiya Janata Party workers. "I am confident that failure of the state govt and the successful policies of central government will give us at least 26 seats in Karnataka," he said. Stating that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has fulfilled all the promises made by the BJP, Yeddyurappa said: "Five years ago, Narendra Modi has fulfilled all his promises -- corruption free country, development and enhance security and international relations. After the dastardly Pulwama attack, the international community stood with India and condemned Pakistan. This shows that India has succeeded in maintaining diplomatic ties with countries like the US and China." "Narendra Modi was recognised and felicitated by the United Nations, Palestine, France and several other nations. Every scheme of the Prime Minister starting from Ujjwala scheme to Jan Dhan Yojna has helped the deprived sections of the society," he added. Yeddyurappa further confirmed that four to five rallies of Prime Minister Modi will be held in Karnataka ahead of the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections. Seven-phased elections in the country will begin on April 11 and will go on till May 19. Counting of votes will be done on May 23. Karnataka will go to polls on April 18 and 23. Last month, BJP state chief said that Indian air Forces air strike in Balakot would help BJP to win 22 seats in Karnataka. (Photo: ANI | Twitter) Bengaluru: The BJP can take power in Karnataka within 24 hours if it wins 22 seats in the Lok Sabha elections, the partys state chief BS Yeddyurappa said. However, BJP currently has 16 seats of Karnatakas 28 parliamentary seats. "I am not telling you this is out of audacity. If the people of Karnataka give us 22 seats in the coming Lok Sabha elections, we will form the government in Karnataka within 24 hours," Yeddyurappa bragged at a public meeting on Sunday. Yeddyurappa has often been in the news over his pronouncements while campaigning for 2019 national elections. Last month, BJP state chief said that Indian Air Forces air strike in Balakot would help BJP to win 22 seats in Karnataka. Yeddyurappa was sworn in as chief minister soon after the Karnataka elections last year in May. He was forced to resign as the BJP was short of the majority mark of 111 in the state assembly. Later, JD(S) and Congress formed an alliance to form the government. Bengaluru: State BJP president, B.S.Yeddyurappa, on Wednesday made it clear that all the 16 sitting MPs of the party from the state would be fielded again this Lok Sabha poll, putting to rest speculation that a few could be dropped in the face of anti-incumbency in their constituencies. "All sitting MPs will be given tickets and the first list of candidates will be finalised at the core committee meeting on March 15. Following this we will meet the party's central leaders in Delhi on March 16 for their approval of candidates for 22 of the 28 Lok Sabha constituencies," he revealed. Speaking to reporters here, Mr. Yeddyurappa said the party would take a final call on whether or not to field a candidate in Mandya based on whether Ms Sumalatha Ambarish, wife of the late actor/politician, M H Ambarish, decides to contest from it as an independent or on a BJP ticket. He revealed that her decision was expected on March 18. The BJP chief was confident that Dr. Umesh Jadhav, who recently quit the Congress to join the party, would be fielded from Kalaburagi against Congress veteran, Mallikarjuna Kharge. "His resignation (from the assembly) will be accepted (by the Speaker). We have discussed the matter with a legal expert and there is no reason why it should not be," he argued, adding that Ms Tejaswini Ananthkumar, wife of the late Union minister, was likely to be given the ticket for Bengaluru south . Claiming that many Congress and JD(S) leaders were willing to join the BJP, he said the party would take a call on this after discussing the matter with its central leadership. Revealing that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would hold four or five rallies in Karnataka for the coming poll, he said as he had already addressed two rallies in north Karnataka, the rest would be held in south,central and coastal Karnataka. HYDERABAD: Telangana Rashtra Samiti working president K.T. Rama Rao on Wednesday lashed out at the BJP-led NDA government for its step-motherly treatment towards Telangana state. In his address to the party cadre in Secunderabad parliamentary constituency, Mr Rama Rao said, Modi said sab ka saath sab ka vikas, but for Telangana state he only gave haath (hand). He added that despite several requests from the TRS leaders to the Centre to confer national project status to Kaleshwaram and sanction a special grant for it, the Centre never responded to the demands. Mr Rama Rao said, We had asked for 100 acres of defence land to construct two flyovers in Secun-derabad. In exchange, we offered 500 acres in Shamirpet, but the Centre turned a blind eye to our request. Mr Rama Rao also recalled that he and Mr Padma Rao, former minister, made multiple requests for the allocation of 8 acres of railway land in Secunderabad for the construction of double bedroom houses for the poor, but it was also not considered by the Centre. He alleged that the Prime Minister also failed to fulfil the promises of creating 10 crore jobs and bringing back black money. Netaji said his army would join in the assault even though his soldiers had barely one bullet each and little to eat. (Photo: File) Many years ago, while researching the World War II Battle of Kohima, I had travelled to Moreh on the India-Myanmar border in Manipur. Friendly border guards allowed me to cross over to the Myanmar side from where a road ran to Mandalay. A few kilometres from the border checkpost is a small hillock where I was told Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army (INA) had rested before moving towards India. The year was 1944; and the Japanese Army, after having swept across Southeast Asia, now exhausted and short of supplies, planned a bid on the well-stocked British garrison at Imphal. Netaji said his army would join in the assault even though his soldiers had barely one bullet each and little to eat. He rightly believed that Indian soldiers joining the fight against their British masters would shake the foundations of colonial rule in India and force London to concede independence. Standing somewhere near that hill, on February 4 that year, Subhash Chandra Bose exhorted his troops: There, there in the distance beyond the rivers, beyond those hills, lies the Promised Land, the soil from which we sprang the land to which we shall now return. Hark, India is calling, Indias metropolis is calling, three hundred and eighty million of our countrymen are calling. Blood is calling blood The road to Delhi is the road to freedom Chalo Dilli! I could not help the goose bumps recalling those lines on that lonely hillock in Myanmar. That was the event that had electrified a nation and sent shivers down the spine of the British Empire. The Japanese and the INA were badly defeated in the Battle of Imphal. Thousands perished as Manipurs rice fields turned red with those killed in the bombings by the Allied forces. But the Empire was shaken. A secret military memo written by the head of the British Indian Army a couple of years later warned: If it became impossible to rely on the Indian Army, British troops in or within easy reach of India would not suffice to maintain law and order throughout India. A top secret British Cabinet note further noted: The Cabinet Mission have proposed that an emergency plan should be worked out in consultation with GHQ India for the removal of United Kingdom civilians from India in view of the very considerable risks to which Europeans may be exposed The Cabinet Mission had also pointed out that it would be very helpful if immediate steps could be taken to expedite the passage of women and children in India now awaiting return to the United Kingdom. The wheel had turned, and the idea of nationalism had electrified a once enslaved people. Nationalism had become sanctified in the lexicon of not only Indias political leaders but also its intellectual elite. Since then, though, it has been a steady slide downhill. We have finally reached a point today where nationalism is suspect in many quarters, equated with jingoism, war-mongering and right-wing politics. This development is both regrettable and dangerous. Regrettable because nationalism is the basis that binds together our disparate nation with its multitudinous socio-ethnic groups, cultures and beliefs. Novelist Salman Rushdie had once said of the idea of India: It may be the most innovative national philosophy to have emerged in the post-colonial period. It deserves to be celebrated because it is an idea that has enemies, within India as well as outside her frontiers, and to celebrate it is also to defend it against its foes. The nation state in one form or the other has proved indispensable so far in history for the perpetuation of a civilisation. When the nation state perishes or atrophies, so does the civilisation, its culture and everything else associated with it. Take the case of Afghanistan and parts of northwest Pakistan, which was once a flourishing Buddhist kingdom called Gandhara. A series of invasions culminating with Islamic rule both destroyed the kingdom and its associated civilisation. All that remains today is a small museum at Takshila (Pakistan), and the machine-gunned ruins of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Demeaning or opposing the idea of nationalism is also dangerous as then the latent sentiments associated with it is invariably usurped for narrow partisan purposes. This is precisely what has happened in recent times with the BJP and its leader, Narendra Modi, projecting themselves as the sole custodians of nationalism. The Opposition has lost it, failed to judge the popular pulse and forfeited an essential aspect of the collective consciousness. Political leaders such as Mayawati, Akhilesh Yadav, Mamata Banerjee and others who aspire to national power have reduced themselves to being champions of narrow notions of caste, race and parochialism. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has waded into the gulf with gusto and even taken the fight to the Congress Party, which was once the heir of the nationalist movement. Half-truths and ahistorical claptrap are being employed to project Jawaharlal Nehru, the father figure of the Congress Party and dynasty, as the root of all national evil, even though in truth he was the one responsible for fixing the firm foundations of an electoral democracy. Nehru was at the helm of affairs when things could have gone horribly wrong as it did in neighbouring Pakistan and many an emerging republic. Nehru also transformed rural India by abolishing zamindari, land revenue and implementing a host of other reforms which constitute the basis of our agrarian system. The countrys industrial base, heavy industries included, were also the results of his policies. Did Nehru err at times? Of course he did, as have most political leaders. But it would be ridiculous to blame him for all the countrys present-day ills, just as it would be absurd to claim that the economy has been destroyed only because of demonetisation. The Congress Party, instead of reinforcing its legacy as the champion of nationalism, has abandoned it, thereby ceding the nationalistic space to its rival, the BJP. The countrys liberal elite are guilty of the same mistake, thereby allowing the concept of nationalism to be abused by the right-wing fringe of hyper-nationalists and rabble-rousers. This is tragic. For nationalism, in the ultimate analysis, cannot be the sole preserve of any one party or leader; it is a gift bequeathed equally to all Indians; it is also the unshakable foundation of our freedoms. Just before the first phase of polling for the Lok Sabha election, by holding its Working Committee meeting in Ahmedabad and staging a public rally near Gandhinagar, the Gujarat capital, the Congress has evidently tried to raise the level of challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his home turf. This is fine as symbolism, but the Congress has work to do to regain the spirit of 2017, when it was able to mobilise sufficient momentum to give the BJP a big scare in the Assembly election in Gujarat. As the parliamentary polls approach, several Congress MLAs in the state have switched to the BJP. This is an old BJP method of demoralising the opponent before an election. The only means the Congress has to counter such an effort is to engage in mass mobilisation of voters around issues that matter to them in a basic way. The Congress failed to do this on the national level and has been distracted by other concerns. Speeches by top party leaders, or criticism made by them of the ruling side, no matter how valid, are no substitute for appealing to citizens through matters that are of the greatest concern to them. In the recent work style of the Congress, the campaigning zeal of 2017-18, spearheaded by party chief Rahul Gandhi, appears to be absent. Earlier this year, much was made of his charismatic sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra formally entering active politics and being given charge of Eastern UP, with a view to mobilising voters through the personal connect she is thought to readily establish on the election trail. Not much has been heard of Ms Vadras work in UP in terms of mass mobilisation, even if she has been working at getting the party organisation ready for the gruelling work that lies ahead. In the public rally held in Gandhinagar after the CWC meet ended, Ms Vadra spoke as a member of the CWC in her capacity as a party general secretary for the first time, and appeared to leave a good impression. But still, the best one can say is that the Congress has miles to go. Patidar firebrand leader Hardik Patel officially joined the Congress on Tuesday. As a charismatic young agitator, he has shown remarkable energy and capability. Its to be seen how his presence helps the Congress take on the formidable electoral challenge it faces in Gujarat. At the CWC meeting, the party gave the impression that it was returning to the issues of unemployment and farmers difficulties, which fetched it great dividends in three state elections last year, instead of playing the BJP on its turf of strident nationalism and loudly-orchestrated security concerns after Pulwama. This is sensible. Any party, after all, needs to play to its own strengths. Amid demands by the Opposition parties that the government give proof of its surgical strikes on the terror camps at Balakot in Pakistan, the Indian Air Force has rebutted the satellite image released by Reuters suggesting there was virtually no damage to the Jaish camp. The IAF reiterated that the bombs, which were fed in with satellite images and geographical coordinates of the JeM facility, hit the targeted buildings and exploded inside. The Air Force, unlike the Army, carries out strikes on the basis of intelligence inputs as it has to penetrate deep into alien territory. It carried out its operation on the basis of NTRO surveillance which found approximately 300 active mobile phones there. So it can be safely surmised that around the same number of terrorists were camping there. According to the IAF, it was a precision strike and the images taken by Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR) were given to the government. That an Indian pilot was captured in Pakistan is conclusive evidence of the airstrike but the controversy is over the number of dead. In such operations, its simply impossible to give the exact number of the dead. But the question is: What is the truth and how far is it desirable to demand proof when the country faces an undeclared war from a hostile neighbour determined to inflict a thousand cuts and wage a thousand-years war? True, the family members of some slain CRPF jawans also demanded proof, but this can be overlooked given that they arent expected to be phlegmatic at such a time of tragedy. However, political parties are expected to behave more responsibly. The statement of a senior Congress leader that India should produce evidence as America did in the case of Osama bin Laden is a total distortion of facts. The US military had in fact refused to release any photographic or DNA evidence of his death. Perceptions about the truth may vary. What appears as a snake may be a piece of rope when seen from close quarters, but may ultimately turn out to be a streak of coal tar. Actually, the truth has many facets. Syadvad, also known as Anekantvad in Jain philosophy, is a multiple-vision theory which believes that the truth is always multi-dimensional. There cannot be one final judgment as the truth is relative. Albert Einstein is best remembered for his Theory of Relativity. His contemporary American scientists, Michelson and Morley, tried to measure the speed of light, but their efforts came a cropper. Einstein commented that they were unsuccessful because in truth, the speed of light is always constant, while everything else in the universe is comparable or relative. However, even this has been contested lately. Prof. Joao Magueijo from Imperial College, London, and Dr Niayesh Afshordi of the Perimeter Institute in Canada refuted Einstein in the 1990s, suggesting that after the Big Bang there may have been a time when the speed of light was much higher than what it is now. They claimed that the density of the universe was erratic after it expanded subsequent to its formation after the Big Bang, and the expansion was rapid before slowing down to its present rate of expansion. Isaac Newton had said that time always remained the same. But Einstein propounded in his paper that time was relative. Perspectivism, a term coined by Friedrich Nietzsche, is the philosophical view that all ideations take place from particular perspectives. Thus, there cant be only one way of visualising the world and the judgment of truth can vary according to perspectives. Even the truth about many scientific inventions and discoveries is shrouded in mystery. At least three people lay claim to the discovery of oxygen, and each claim is rightful to a great extent. Swedish apothecary C.W. Sheele is the first claimant to have prepared a relatively pure sample of gas. But since he did not get it published until its discovery, his claim is not tenable. The second to make such a claim was Joseph Priestley, who, in course of his protracted normal investigation of the airs evolved by many solid substances, collected the gas released by a heated red oxide of mercury. In 1774, he identified it as nitrous oxide, and next year after further tests, as common air, which contained less amounts of phlogiston than is normally found. The third claimant, Lavoisier, perhaps taking a cue from Priestley, reported in 1775 that the gas procured by heating the red oxide of mercury was air itself entire without alteration (except that) it comes out more pure, more respirable. In 1777, he enunciated that the gas was a distinct species, and was one of the two main constituents of the atmosphere, which Priestley never accepted. Thomas B. Kuhn writes: Priestleys claim to the discovery of oxygen is based upon his priority in isolating a gas that was later recognised as a distinct species. But Priestleys sample was not pure, and, if holding impure oxygen in ones hands is to discover it that had been done by everyone who ever bottled atmospheric air... Lavoisiers claim may be stronger, but it presents the same problems. If we refuse the palm to Priestley, we cannot award it to Lavoisier for the work of 1775 which led him to identify the gas as the air itself entire. War strategies include chicanery and deception as well. During World War II, Britain used actor and soldier M.E. Clifton James, Gen. Bernard Montgomerys lookalike, to deceive Germany under Operation Copperhead. While the real Montgomery got busy chalking out strategies to attack France, on May 25, 1944, James flew to Gibraltar on Winston Churchills private aircraft where he was given a reception at the governor-generals house. It was at this reception that he dropped hints of Plan 303 a bogus invasion of southern France which was overheard by German agents. Subsequently the Allied invasion of Normandy, codenamed Operation Neptune, popularly referred to as D-Day, took place with Gen. Montgomery as one of the main commanders. The blitzkrieg liberated German-occupied France from Nazi control. The Allies also conducted Operation Bodyguard to mislead the Germans about the date and location of the main Allied landings. War or war-like conditions permit even deception, but in India, the Opposition excoriates the government for camouflaging the truth. Mark Twain, in an interview to Rudyard Kipling, said: Get your facts first, and then you can distort em as much as you please. Here some people distort matters without getting their facts right. The Army fights for the country, not for any political party, and the country is represented by the Prime Minister. Politicking over every security operation is loathsome. In the coming weeks, the software enhancement will be deployed across the 737 Max fleet. (Photo: Tech Central) Following deadly crashes in recent months, Boeing has promised that it will release software updates for its Boeing 737 Max aircraft by April. In the aftermath of the Lion Air Flight 610 crash that killed 189 people and the more recent Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 disaster that killed all 157 people onboard, Boeing has announced that it has been developing a flight control software enhancement for the 737 Max since the October crash in collaboration with the FAA. Some of the improvements include updates to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) flight control law, pilot displays, operation manuals, and crew training. In the coming weeks, the software enhancement will be deployed across the 737 Max fleet, said the company. Although two separate instances of an aircraft crash, experts consider the Lion Air Flight 610 and the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 disasters as related and similar in nature. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. San Francisco: Tech titan Google agreed to pay its former India-born top executive Amit Singhal a whopping $45 million as an exit package when he resigned from the company in 2016 after being accused of sexual harassment, according to a media report. The previously undisclosed amount was in the separation agreement for Singhal, a senior vice president who ran Google's search operations until early 2016. The amount was revealed on Monday in a shareholder lawsuit accusing the board of directors of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, of shirking their responsibilities by agreeing to pay executives accused of misconduct instead of firing them for cause, the New York Times reported. The lawsuit was part of the fallout over how Google has handled sexual harassment cases, it said. The lawsuit was filed in January in California Superior Court with redactions in the passages referring to board discussions. An amended version was filed on Monday without the redactions. According to the amended suit, Google agreed to pay Singhal $15 million a year for two years and between $5 million and $15 million in the third year as long as he was not employed by a competitor. He agreed to take a job at Uber about a year after his departure, then resigned from the ride-hailing company a few weeks later when the sexual harassment claim at Google became public, the report said. PTI Masood Azhar heads the Jaish-e-Mohammed or JeM, which had carried out many terror strikes in India. (Photo: File) Washington: Masood Azhar meets the criteria to be designated as a global terrorist and not doing so is against regional stability and peace, the US said on Tuesday, a day ahead of the crucial meeting at UN Security Council on the Jaish-e-Mohammed chief. Masood Azhar heads the Jaish-e-Mohammed or JeM, which had carried out many terror strikes in India and was also involved in the attack on Parliament, the Pathankot air force base, army camps in Jammu and Uri. The Pak-based terror outfit had also claimed responsibility for the suicide attack on Central Reserve Police Force or CRPF in Pulwama which claimed the lives of 40 personnel. Three permanent members of the UNSC -- the United States, Britain and France -- have moved a resolution to designate Azhar as a global terrorist. Several previous attempts by these three countries inside the UN Security Council were blocked by China, the all-weather ally of Pakistan. China, which is one of the five veto-powered members of the Security Council, so far has vetoed proposals to ban Azhar, claiming lack of evidence to designate him as a global terrorist. Amidst a mounting global outrage in the wake of the Pulwama attack that led to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan, US, Britain and France hope that Beijing would act wisely and would not oppose their move against Azhar. On the eve of the crucial decision by the UN Security Council, the Trump Administration on Tuesday made it clear that there is enough evidence against Azhar to designate him as a global terrorist. "Azhar is the founder and the leader of the JeM, and he meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations," State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino told reporters at his daily news conference. The JeM, he said, has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability and peace. The US and India work closely together on counterterrorism efforts, and that includes at the United Nations, he added, noting that their views on the Jaish-e-Mohammed and its founder are well known. However, he refrained from making a direct comment on the deliberations inside the UN on this issue. "The United Nations Sanctions Committee, their deliberations, are confidential, and as such we don't comment on specific matters, but we'll continue to work with the Sanctions Committee to ensure that the designation list is updated and accurate," Palladino said. "The United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal," Palladino said in response to a question on previous successful attempts by China to block the UN designation of Azhar. Washington: Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar meets the criteria to be designated as a "global terrorist" by the UN and China's opposition to the move counters a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, the US has said. State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino's remarks came on the eve of a crucial decision by the UN Security Council on listing Azhar as a global terrorist. The JeM, headed by the 50-year-old Azhar, carried out many terror strikes in India and was involved in the attack on Parliament, the Pathankot air force base, army camps in Jammu and Uri. It also claimed responsibility for the February 14 Pulwama suicide attack which left 40 CRPF personnel dead. In the aftermath of the Pulwama attack, three permanent members of the UNSC - the US, Britain and France - have moved a resolution to designate Azhar as a global terrorist under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council. All eyes are on China, which has in the past blocked India's bids to get Azhar listed as a UN-designated global terrorist. "Azhar is the founder and the leader of the JeM, and he meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations," Palladino told reporters at his daily news conference. The JeM, he said, has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability and peace. The US and India work closely together on counterterrorism efforts, and that includes at the United Nations, he added, noting that their views on the JeM and its founder are well known. However, he refrained from making a direct comment on the deliberations inside the UN on this issue. "The United Nations Sanctions Committee, their deliberations, are confidential, and as such we don't comment on specific matters, but we'll continue to work with the Sanctions Committee to ensure that the designation list is updated and accurate," Palladino said. "The United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal," Palladino said in response to a question on previous successful attempts by China to block the UN designation of Azhar. China, which is one of the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council, blocked India's efforts in the past to list Azhar as a global terrorist, saying there is not enough evidence against him. Amidst a mounting global outrage in the wake of the Pulwama attack that led to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan, the US, Britain and France hope that Beijing would act wisely and would not oppose their move this time. Kentucky: A Kentucky teenager sued CNN on Tuesday for defamation, saying the cable network falsely conveyed to viewers that he was the "face of an unruly hate mob" confronting a Native American activist at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in January. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann in federal court in Kentucky, seeks $275 million in compensatory and punitive damages over the videotaped incident in the nation's capital. Sandmann and other Covington Catholic students had been in Washington to attend a March for Life anti-abortion rally. In photos and videos that went viral from the incident, Sandmann is seen standing face to face with Native American activist Nathan Phillips. Sandmann stares and smiles at Phillips while Phillips sings and plays his drum. The footage sparked outrage on social media, with many viewers saying that Sandmann and a group of fellow students seen gathered around Phillips appeared to be mocking the activist. The complaint said CNN, a division of Turner Broadcasting System Inc-owned Warner Media LLC, aired four "defamatory" broadcasts and nine online articles falsely accusing Sandmann, 16, and his classmates of "engaging in racist conduct." "The CNN accusations are totally and unequivocally false, and CNN would have known them to be untrue had it undertaken any reasonable efforts to verify their accuracy before publication," the complaint said. A CNN spokeswoman said the network declined to comment. A private investigation firm commissioned by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington in Park Hills, Kentucky, to review the incident concluded last month that there was no evidence the students provoked a confrontation. Instead, the report found that the teenagers were met at the Lincoln Memorial by offensive statements directed at them by several African-American protesters from a group known as the Black Hebrew Israelites. According to this account, the students responded with permission from the teacher chaperones by shouting "school spirit" chants before Phillips waded into scene playing his drum. The complaint said CNN exhibited a bias against President Donald Trump by focusing on Sandmann and other Covington students because they were wearing red caps emblazoned with the president's "Make America Great Again" slogan. Trump has a contentious relationship with CNN, frequently calling it "Fake News." Last month, Sandmann sued the Washington Post for $250 million over its reporting of the same incident. The newspaper said in a statement that it would "mount a vigorous defense," and later published an "Editor's Note" explaining how its coverage of the incident evolved as new information came to light. United Nations: In yet another setback to Indias bid to designate Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammeds (JeM) chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, China on Wednesday put a technical hold on a proposal in the UN Security Council to ban him following the Pulwama terror attack. A diplomat at the UN said that China put a technical hold. The proposal was the fourth such bid at the UN in the last 10 years to list Azhar as a global terrorist. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, the UK and the US on February 27, days after a suicide bomber of the JeM killed 49 CRPF soldiers in Pulwama, leading to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan. The fate of the proposal to designate Pakistan-based Azhar as a global terrorist by the UN Security Council will be known in less than 24 hours when the deadline to raise objections to the bid expires. (Photo: File) Beijing: Hours before the UN Security Council is to take up a resolution on listing Jaish-e-Muhammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, China on Wednesday hinted that it may once again block the move, saying only "the solution that is acceptable to all sides" is conducive to resolve the issue. The fate of the proposal to designate Pakistan-based Azhar as a global terrorist by the UN Security Council will be known in less than 24 hours when the deadline to raise objections to the bid expires. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, UK and the US on February 27. "I could reiterate that China will continue to adopt responsible attitude and participate in the deliberations in the UNSC 1267 Committee," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing here. China, a veto-wielding member of the UNSC, has blocked the move by India and other member nations three times in the past to designate Azhar. China has been insisting that the solution should be acceptable to all. Asked to clarify whether the issue has been listed for discussion for March 13 and China is in talks with all the parties concerned, Lu said, "First I want to clarify that I don't recall saying anything about the deadline about the UNSC committee and other UN subsidiary bodies". On the issue of listing Azhar, he said, "I want to say that China always adopts a responsible attitude, engage in consultations with various parties and properly deal with this issue." "The discussions, I want to say must follow the rules and procedures of the relevant bodies and only the solution that is acceptable to all sides is conducive for resolving the issue," he said. Recently, China's Vice Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou travelled to Pakistan and held talks with Prime Minister Imran Khan and Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa and other officials. India on Saturday said all UNSC members were aware about the JeM training camps and the presence of terror group's chief Masood Azhar in Pakistan, and urged them to designate him as a global terrorist. The JeM, headed by the 50-year-old Azhar, carried out many terror strikes in India and was involved in the attack on Parliament, the Pathankot air force base, army camps in Jammu and Uri. It also claimed responsibility for the February 14 Pulwama suicide attack which left 40 CRPF personnel dead. Critics allege Uighurs in the camps are being brainwashed in a massive campaign to enforce conformity with Chinese society and the abandonment of Islam. Beijing: China says heavily guarded internment camps for Muslims which it calls vocational training centers will gradually disappear if there comes a day that society does not need them. The camps in the far-west Xinjiang region have elicited an international outcry, with former inmates describing harsh conditions where Muslim minorities are subject to political indoctrination and psychological torture. Human rights groups, researchers and the U.S. government estimate that around 1 million people from the predominantly Muslim Uighur and Kazakh ethnic groups are held in the vast network of compounds. Xinjiang Gov. Shohrat Zakir declined at a news conference on Tuesday to disclose the number of what he called trainees. However, he said the figure is far less than 1 million. Zakir said religious activities are banned in the camps. As a whole, the number of people in the education centres should be less and less, and if one day society no longer needs it, these education centres can gradually disappear," he said, without providing the number of people at the facilities. Former inmates have said they found themselves incarcerated for transgressions such as wearing long beards and face veils or sharing Islamic holiday greetings on social media. Critics allege Uighurs in the camps are being brainwashed in a massive campaign to enforce conformity with Chinese society and the abandonment of Islam. Shohrat also hit out at certain individuals, whom he says sensationalised" the number of people in centres. A city-based inventor and a government health official unveiled a new device to address the sticky problem of piles, which they said contributes to a 40% decline in workforce efficiency. Speaking to DH on Tuesday, Dr Rajah Vijay Kumar, described piles or hemorrhoids, as not only being one of the oldest known ailments known to humans but also the most secretive. Husbands dont tell wives, wives dont tell husbands, he said. In an effort to keep the condition secret, sufferers spurn their doctors and instead turn to unlicensed medical practitioners for ointments, creams and suppositories, added Dr T S Prabhakar of the Karnataka Department of Health and Family Welfare. This new device is a way to fight back against quacks, Dr Prabhakar said adding that the government had registered several deaths due to treatments recommended by unlicensed practitioners. Dr Prabhakar could not be reached later for clarification. The device, which is priced at roughly Rs 6,900 per unit, involves cooling its inner nano-material to a temperature of -18 degrees C, using a common freezer. Once cooled, the device is applied to the affected area where the nano material gradually releases cold temperatures over a 10-minute period. Dr Kumar insisted the procedure could be be done in the privacy of ones home and was relatively non-invasive. There is no cold shock or frostbite, he said. I am proud to say that I was patient number one. When queried about the cost of the product which might deter some Indians, Samson John, director of a renewable energy company which has partnered with Dr Kumar, insisted that it is the cheapest solution to treating piles in the market. Ointments are a temporary measure and surgeries are expensive and time-consuming, he said. Of the 1,291 people who used the device in clinical trials, 88.7% said they had been cured. As per figures released by WHO and the Rajiv Gandhi Institute, roughly 41 million people in India suffer from piles. Furthermore, 1.2 million new cases are diagnosed every year, said Dr Kumar. Nearly 40% of these are pregnant women while 60% are people living in South India. The harmful effects of the condition is said to cause job absenteeism and a 30 to 40% drop in efficiency across the job market. They detained three people on arrival at the Kempegowda International Airport who travelled with passports containing fake validations. Labhu Ram, the Foreigners Regional Registration Officer (FRRO), said the three, including a woman, had been handed over to Bengaluru International Airport police on March 9. Unable to get a work visa, the three went to Malaysia on a tourist visa and got their passports validated with fake seals by travel agents without them having to get out of that country. Another person was arrested on similar offences on March 1. Police said travel and passport agents had duped the arrested people with jobs abroad. While one agent sent them on tourist visas, passport agents created fake employment passes for them on arrival and got them employed. They affixed fake signatures of Indian immigration officials with fake arrival and departure seals to ensure their clients are not caught in India. On suspicion, immigration officials detained Mithun Bhai Tulsibhai Khunt, 45, a resident of Surat, Gujarat. Khunt arrived at the KIA from Kuala Lumpur on March 9. Officials found his documents had been tampered with. They found that Khunt, a high school dropout, had a job offer from Mumbai Kiran Games as a manager. He flew to Kuala Lumpur on May 19, 2018, from Hyderabad on a tourist visa. But immigration officials denied him entry into Kuala Lumpur on arrival and sent him back to Hyderabad. Undeterred, Khunt flew once again to Malaysia from Chennai and met Jignesh Maaru, an agent from Gujarat. The agent got him a job as a waiter at a restaurant in Malaysia. When Khunt wanted to visit his family back home, Maaru told him he could not travel to India as he was an illegal immigrant in Malaysia. But later, the agent took money from him and got fake arrival and departure seals from Mumbai and Bengaluru, with which the Gujarat man flew back. While checking his papers, officials could not find corresponding arrival or departure documents in their records to match the seals on Khunts passport. Chhaya Dineshbhai Gondaliya, 28, an intermediate college dropout from Surat, was also sent from the KIA on a tourist visa to Kuala Lumpur on November 18, 2018. The agent, Jignesh Maaru, received her at KL and promised her a job. Despite staying for four months in the Malaysian capital, Chhaya could not find a job. Since her father suffered from diabetes, she wanted to return to India. Maaru reminded her of her illegal stay in Malaysia and told her she could not get home, but after repeated requests, got fake seals on her passport to enable her return. Hardeep Singh, 25, from Muktsar, Punjab, told officials on detention at the KIA that he paid the agent Kuldeep Singh a large sum for a job offer in Malaysia. On January 31, 2018, Singh flew to Malaysia on a tourist visa from the Amritsar airport. Having worked in Malaysia for more than a year, Hardeep wanted to visit his family. Kuldeep presented him with forged travel documents and got the fake seals and signatures of immigration officials in Delhi on his passport. On March 1, officials caught Jaswant Singh, a resident of Sangrur, Punjab, who arrived with forged travel documents. An agent named Gurjant Singh had also created a fake work pass for him. The Bengaluru international airport police took up all the four cases under various sections of the Passport Act and booked agents Gurjant Singh, Jignesh Maaru and Kuldeep Singh. Suspecting a larger racket, they are on the lookout for the agents. Deputy Commissioner and District Election Officer Annies Kanmani Joy has asked the leaders of various political parties to follow the election model code of conduct as per the directions issued by the Election Commission of India. Chairing a meeting of political party leaders at the DCs office hall in Madikeri on Tuesday, she said that the political parties should adhere to the instructions issued by the ECI without fail. Displaying banners and posters in public places is strictly prohibited. Prior permission should be obtained from the concerning authority for mounting the posters and banners. Prior permission should also be obtained before printing leaflets, posters and other publicity material. Superintendent of Police Dr Suman D Pennekar, Additional Deputy Commissioner T Yogesh and political leaders Sajil Krishna and Tennira Maina were present. Complaints Members of the public may submit their complaints against illegalities, storage or transportation of liquor and other malpractices at toll-free number: 18004252550, phone: 08272 229295, stated a press release. The Congress on Tuesday launched a blistering attack on Narendra Modi, as the party began its election campaign with a massive rally in the prime ministers home state. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who was given a key party post nearly two months ago, went full throttle as she took on Modi and urged people to use their vote against those who spread hate. There is no bigger nationalism than being aware. Your awareness is a weapon and so is your vote. It is a weapon which doesnt hurt anyone. This weapon should make you stronger. Safety of women, condition of farmers... These are the issues of elections, said Priyanka in her first election speech at the rally on the outskirts of state capital Gandhinagar. Today, institutions are being destroyed, hatred is being spread... Where are the two crore jobs? Ask those who promised you the moon. Ask them where is the Rs 15 lakh, said the Gandhi scion, without naming anyone. Modi, while campaigning in 2014, had promised to deposit Rs 15 lakh in every citizens bank account. Gandhi, Nehru and Indira The mood was upbeat as thousands braved the scorching sun amid fluttering flags and patriotic songs. There were life-size cutouts of Congress president Rahul Gandhi flanked by those of Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and even Mahatma Gandhi. The enthusiasm among the crowd was something new for the state Congress. People cheered as senior leaders, including Rahul, started appearing on the giant stage one by one. Police said there were 80,000 people who had come from different parts of the state which was an impressive crowd for the state Congress. Priyanka, who was made AICC in-charge of Uttar Pradesh (east) on January 23, spoke for barely eight minutes during her first visit to Gujarat. Recalling her trip to the Sabarmati Ashram, she said, I thought about how Mahatma Gandhi must have started the freedom struggle. I thought about all those patriots who sacrificed everything for this country. It is painful to see what is happening these days. Next was brother Rahul Gandhis turn. The Congress president made it clear that he was going to aggressively take on Modi on issues like corruption in Rafale deal, terror attack, unemployment and farm distress. We did our meeting in Gujarat because India is fighting two ideologies, and you will find both of them in Gujarat. Mahatma Gandhi and Gujarat have made this country. But today, there other powers which are trying to weaken the country. This time, we have decided to do something historic. If they (BJP) can give everything to the rich, we can give money to the poor. I want to assure you all that we are going to form the government in 2019 and will implement the minimum income guarantee scheme. Every poor will get money directly in their bank accounts, Rahul said. To his chowkidaar cue, the crowd responded, chor hai. For the first time in the history of this country, four Supreme Court judges went to the Press and said they were not allowed to work. Normally, people go to the apex court for justice, but in todays Hindustan, SC judges are going to public and asking for justice, he said. The Congress chief also linked Modi with Anil Ambani, Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi. He attacked the Modi government over the Pulwama attack and said the main perpetrator Masood Azhar was freed by the BJP government. He said that Azhar was taken to Kandahar in a special train escorted by current National Security Advisor Ajit Doval. Hardik Patel joins Congress On the occasion, Patidar agitation leader Hardik Patel also officially joined the Congress party. Attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP, Patel said that he joined the Congress, which has a history of patriots. To know them all, one would need a life time, Patel said. The party touched upon the issue of patriotism as well. Senior leader Mallikarjun Kharge said, You (BJP) ask us about patriotism. Congress defeated Pakistan thrice in war. Modiji was not even born when we got freedom. Monday was quite a day for investigations. First state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale weighed into the controversy swirling around the Glen Mills Schools, the nations oldest reform school. DePasquale announced his office was launching an investigation into allegations of decades of abuse at the privately run, state-licensed institution. The allegations were first aired in an investigative piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer. DePasquale is getting his foot in the door because, although a private institution, Glen Mills receives public funding. As auditor general, DePasquale said the focus of the probe will be on whether the school properly handled any claims of abuse and complied with all laws regarding the reporting of such cases. Protecting kids from abuse is job one, DePasquale said in a statement. Glen Mills officials have steadfastly denied the charges. A school spokesman said Glen Mills would work with the auditor general to address any concerns, noting it has done likewise with other state agencies. The school has sent letters to both Attorney General Josh Shapiro and U.S. Attorney William McSwain indicating the school would welcome a visit to the campus and a full and fair investigation. DePasquales becomes the latest voice raised seeking investigations of the school. Just a few hours after DePasquale released his statement, the two Democrats on Delaware County Council along with the Democratic candidate for district attorney all called for the state attorney general to investigate the claims against Glen Mills. They want current D.A. Katayoun Copeland, who previously announced her office was investigating the claims against Glen Mills, to turn the probe over to state Attorney General Josh Shapiro. Copeland has indicated she would not cede her investigation to state officials. All of this followed similar calls made last week by a series of Philadelphia officials, after the city announced it was pulling any city youths from the school. Delaware County has does not have any residents currently in the school, and announced it would not be sending any new ones there until the matters are fully investigated. Then it was time for Round 2 on the investigation front. This one focused on the growing furor surrounding the Mariner East Pipeline project. First a bipartisan group of state elected officials fired off a letter to Gov. Tom Wolf asking him to halt the flow of liquid gases through the controversial pipeline. They maintain Energy Transfer Partners, the Texas-based outfit that is building and operating the pipelines that make up Mariner East, has failed to adequately provide local officials with an emergency plan for first responders to use in the event of an accident involving the pipeline. Among those who signed off on the letter were Delco Reps. Steve Barrar, R-160, Chris Quinn, R-168, and Leanne Krueger-Braneky, D-161. On the Senate side, newly minted Sen. Tim Kearney, D-26, signed off on the letter. Notably absent was Sen. Tom Killion, R-9, who represents Middletown Township, which is at the heart of the pipeline resistance. Barrar, who chairs the House Veterans Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee, said he wants to hold a public hearing with first responders where they can get some answers to their questions. At the same time, out in Chester County, the Democrat running for district attorney said she wanted Shapiro to get involved in the investigation of the pipeline announced by current Republican D.A. Tom Hogan. That probably wont sit especially well with Hogan, who followed up on his announcement of a criminal investigation into Mariner East by impaneling an investigative grand jury to hear from witnesses, review documents and decide if indictments are warranted in the case. It turns out, Shapiro had already beaten the fellow Democrat to the punch. Late Monday afternoon, Shapiros office announced they had opened an investigation into Mariner East 2. But it was why he was doing so that raised more than a few eyebrows. For months, as citizen groups have railed against the pipeline project which will ferry hundreds of thousands of barrels of volatile liquid gases every day from the states Marcellus Shale region through densely populated neighborhoods in Delaware and Chester Counties to a facility in Marcus Hook citizens have wondered where Delaware County District Attorney Copeland stood on the issue. Now we know. Shapiros office said in a statement that they were opening the investigation after they got a letter of referral from Copeland. Finally, late Monday night, Copelands office released a statement confirming they were launching a joint investigation of Mariner East along with the state attorney general. There is no question that the pipeline poses certain concerns and risks to our residents, and as district attorney, I am working to do everything possible within my power to ensure the safety of residents, Copeland said. At this time, we are thoroughly reviewing the evidence available to us, working with the attorney generals Office, and seeking action within our jurisdictional boundaries. We want residents to know that we have heard their concerns, and we are willing to hear any new concerns that they may have about the pipeline by contacting my office. Due to the fact that the pipeline spans over 17 different counties in Pennsylvania, we sought assistance from our partners in law enforcement, the Pennsylvania Attorney Generals Office. As this remains an open and active investigation. Copeland, who is running for re-election in November, went out of her way to mention several local grassroots groups that have been at the forefront of the pipeline opposition. I would like to thank the Del-Chesco United for Pipeline Safety, the Middletown Coalition for Community Safety, and other residents for taking the time to meet with us and sharing their concerns and formal complaints, Copeland said. Welcome to the party. It was that kind of day. We laud both investigations of Glen Mills Schools and the Mariner East pipeline projects. The stories surrounding Glen Mills have been around for years. The controversy on the Mariner East pipeline project have been consistent since it was first announced. Local and state agencies are right to finally hold individuals and corporate feet to the fire and root out the truth concerning both organizations, or announce that they have not found any wrongdoing. The questions have been around forever. Now its time for answers. SALT LAKE CITY The mayor of Parowan has been charged with stealing from a previous employer. Preston Griffiths, 51, of Parowan, was charged on March 7 with theft, a class A misdemeanor, in 5th District Court. The Iron County Attorney's Office is prosecuting the case, which was investigated by the Cedar City Police Department to avoid a conflict of interest with Parowan police. The alleged incident happened in December, according to the attorney's office. "Mr. Griffiths is accused of taking inventory from a previous employer at a discounted rate, for which he was not authorized," according to a prepared statement from the office. Griffiths was previously a Parowan police officer and was the chief of the department from July 2003 to 2012. He became mayor in 2018. City officials confirmed Tuesday that the "previous employer" he was allegedly stealing from was not the police department. A class A misdemeanor means the value of the property allegedly taken was worth between $500 and $1,500. His initial appearance in court was scheduled for March 26. Parowan city officials released a brief statement Tuesday saying they were aware of the allegations but had not reviewed any police reports. "Until the city has received more information, it will honor the proper course and conduct of our judicial system, including the presumption that Mr. Griffiths is deemed innocent until a jury of his peers or a judge declares otherwise," according to the statement. Parowan officials added that the city "has not been financially harmed nor does it have any direct financial involvement in this matter," stating the allegations are in connection to Griffiths' "personal life." Griffiths was also charged with obstructing justice, a class A misdemeanor, and official misconduct, a class B misdemeanor, in 2011 in 5th District Court. The charges were the result of Griffiths fatally shooting a dog while police chief. According to court records, Griffiths settled the case with a "diversion agreement," which is similar to a plea in abeyance. The charges against him were dropped after he followed all the terms of his agreement which included no new arrests for six months, court records state. Parowan city officials also reviewed the matter and "disciplined" Griffiths for the shooting, though his punishment was not revealed. The Utah Council on Peace Officer Standards and Training also investigated the incident but took no action. That same year, Griffiths announced his retirement but later stated his intention to sue the city, claiming he was forced into retirement. Correction: A previous version incorrectly stated charges were filed in 1st District Court. Charges were filed in 5th District Court. WEST VALLEY CITY Officers Tuesday arrested a motor home driver who allegedly crossed into oncoming traffic, hit four other vehicles and then ran away, police said. Just after 3 p.m., the motor home allegedly driven by Oliver Byars, 52, of West Valley City, was traveling east on 3500 South in West Valley City when it crossed into westbound lanes. It then hit the four other vehicles, West Valley police said, went onto a sidewalk and hit a power pole along 4000 West. The motor home then went back into eastbound lanes and stopped, and Byars ran away from the vehicle, police said. The incident happened on Byars' birthday. The only reported injury from the crash was one person who complained of leg pain but was not taken to a hospital, police said. Police searched for Byars in the area but were unable to find him Monday. He was arrested Tuesday for investigation of hit and run in an injury crash, open container, no insurance and expired drivers license. Impact to traffic as a result of the crash was minimal, according to police. Correction: An earlier version misspelled Oliver Byars' last name as Byers. SALT LAKE CITY A proposal aiming to eliminate a long-running state program launched over a decade ago to support innovation and so-called "deep tech" companies earned final legislative approval on Tuesday. SB212, sponsored by Sen. Scott Sandall, R-Tremonton, proposes to dismantle the Utah Science, Technology and Research Initiative, known as USTAR, while salvaging a few of the agency's programs under the umbrella of the Governor's Office of Economic Development. On Monday, the proposal made its final legislative stop, garnering a 67-5 vote in the House. A competing bill was in play earlier in the session, but the sponsor, Rep. Mike Winder, R-West Valley City, acknowledged it would likely not earn the support of legislators and conceded the effort. Former Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. announced the creation of the research initiative in 2005. The new program, Huntsman said, was designed to leverage Utah's homegrown scientific innovation into a powerful economic catalyst that would make the state a "haven" for forward-thinking researchers and create a system of returns that would expand with each year. SB212 will now move to the governor's office. LEHI Just weeks after company leaders painted a rosy picture of success and planned expansion, tax preparation software company Canopy slashed its staff by almost a third, leaving over 80 full-time employees out of work. Canopy CEO Kurt Avarell said he announced the layoffs last Friday, following a decision to realign the company's approach to the sales and marketing of its five tax preparation products. "We decided, and the board decided, to refocus efforts on the go-to-market strategy, on a more streamlined, do-it-yourself sign-up process," Avarell said. "Our previous, high-touch sales team worked very well, but for efficiency reasons the decision was made to move to something more streamlined." Avarell said the changes were not on his radar when he spoke with the Deseret News for a story in February. The company staff, after the reduction, stands at about 170 and the layoffs were not reflection of poor performance for the company's product portfolio, according to Avarell. "Sometimes when companies go through something like this its an 'oh my gosh' moment and you need to pivot away from what you're doing," Avarell said. "This is in no way a pivot. "Despite a really tough week and some really tough decisions, the future of Canopy is still to disrupt the tax preparation industry." Avarell, a tax attorney who studied at BYU, founded the company in 2014 and said the idea for launching a businees to revamp the tools for tax preparers came from doing pro bono work at a Wall Street law firm. "It was while doing pro bono work at Milbank that I recognized a problem that needed to be addressed," Avarell said. "I was working with low-income taxpayers and the process, that should have become easier each time we did it, took just as long because of the volume of paperwork required by the IRS. "The amount of time required was startling and I realized automation would change everything." The company recently moved into a brand-new building perched in the foothills east of I-15 near the Point of the Mountain and has raised some $70 million in venture backing to date. About a year ago, Canopy earned a tax incentive package from the Governor's Office of Economic Development that was based on the company's projection of hiring 530 employees in the next five years. The GOED program is structured on a postperformance basis and Avarell said the company has yet to apply for any rebates, though it will remain eligible to do so over the five-year life of the agreement. The tax rebates are worth as much as $1.2 million over that time period, but only if the company hits the agreed upon benchmarks. Avarell said announcing the layoffs was one of the most difficult tasks he's ever faced and said the company is doing everything it can to help the former employees land on their feet. Support for former Canopy workers is also coming from fellow Utah tech industry companies, several of which are co-sponsoring a job fair event on Wednesday at the Silicon Slopes headquarters. A Canopy representative said 80 of its former employees have signed up to participate in a networking breakfast at which some 130 recruiters are expected to discuss job opportunities. Provo-based venture capital firm Peak Ventures is one of the event sponsors. Peak principal Diogo Myrrha said while staff reductions are always difficult, the need to make abrupt adjustments is not unusual in the world of startups where the rates of growth, and change, move very quickly. Just as startups are built to grow at an uncommon pace, so, too, there are times when they have to recalibrate quickly," Myrrha said. "These times come for startups just as often, in fact arguably more often, than the times when its all up and to the right. "There are many talented team members spread throughout Silicon Slopes and Canopy is no exception. We welcome the opportunity to lean in a little to help point that talent to the many other great opportunities in our tech ecosystem. Additional details on the networking event, open to former Canopy employees, can be found online. SALT LAKE CITY A Hyrum man who beat his ex-girlfriend to death and later told the woman's young daughter she had been abandoned is a coward "full of excuses for your pathetic life," according to a judge who sentenced him to prison on Monday. "You have lied to investigators, blamed non-existent disorders and now you are not even man enough to own up to what you really did," 1st District Judge Kevin Allen wrote in a scathing statement directed at the 42-year old Stacy Robert Willis. Allen ordered Willis to at least 15 years in prison but recommended a life sentence in the death of Merrilee Cox-Lafferty, 37, whose body was found in September in a shallow grave in Left Hand Fork Canyon. In a conversation with investigators ahead of his sentencing, Willis claimed to have "outburst disorder" and said the death was a mistake, according to the judge. Investigators said he told a friend he beat Cox-Lafferty to death after she backed his SUV into a tree. "You don't have outburst disorder. You are just a mean, uncaring, self-absorbed horrible person," the judge's statement reads. If Willis had a legitimate diagnosis of intermittent explosive disorder, he would have shown remorse or regret after killing his victim with his own hands, the judge continued. "You chose to brutally take the life of a mother, a daughter, a sister and a friend. You thought no one would care. But you were, once again, wrong." After the killing, Willis drove Cox-Lafferty's daughter to her aunt's house in Boise, telling her that her mother's disappearance "was probably because Merrilee has just abandoned this little girl. That is incomprehensibly horrifying," the judge wrote. Willis pleaded guilty in January to a reduced charge of murder, admitting to killing Cox-Lafferty on or about Aug. 18. She was reportedly returning from California with her young daughter in tow and with marijuana when she died. Willis, whom Allen called a "coward," was originally charged with capital murder, which carries a possible death sentence if convicted. His defense attorney Shannon Demler did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Tuesday. The judge's statement says he hopes Cox-Lafferty's family can take some comfort in the "monumental efforts" of police, who he said pursued every lead. As for Willis, Allen went on, "Your history and penchant for violence is such that you should take your last breath from behind bars." Allen, a 1st District Judge of 11 years, announced last month that he will retire in August. SALT LAKE CITY Utah Sen. Mike Lee introduced legislation Tuesday to curb the presidents power to declare a national emergency. The bill comes just days before the Senate plans to vote on a resolution to reverse President Donald Trumps emergency declaration on border security. "If we dont want our president acting like a king, we need to start taking back the legislative powers that allow him to do so," Lee said Tuesday. If we dont want our president acting like a king we need to start taking back the legislative powers that allow him to do so. The ARTICLE ONE Act will go a long way to restoring the balance of powers in our republic. https://t.co/cOyhJtvPWf Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) March 12, 2019 If passed, the bill, called the Article One Act, would "take back significant legislative powers" given to the executive branch by law, according to a press release issued by Lee's office Tuesday. Currently, Congress is able to cancel an emergency declaration only by passing a resolution with enough support to withstand a presidential veto. Under Lee's proposal, if a president were to declare a national emergency, Congress would have to approve it within 30 days or it would automatically expire. If Congress is troubled by recent emergency declarations made pursuant to the National Emergencies Act, they only have themselves to blame, Lee said in the press release. Congress gave these legislative powers away in 1976 and it is far past time that we as an institution took them back. Republican support for Lee's bill is growing, according to NBC News. In fact, Vice President Mike Pence has reportedly discussed a deal with Republican senators in which Trump would sign Lees legislation reining in his power to declare future national emergencies in return for the GOP voting against the Democratic resolution overturning Trumps emergency declaration, The Hill reported. Pence met Tuesday with a group of Republicans including Lee, the sponsor of the bill, as well as Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), according to The Hill. Lee says the way that the National Emergencies Act is currently written gives too much power to the president, and prevents the legislative branch from acting as a check on the presidents authority. Its a fake check, Lee told the Deseret News Tuesday. Because unless you have a Congress with enough votes to overturn the presidents veto of Congress resolution of disapproval, then the president is going to prevail and whatever action hes chosen to take will remain in effect in full force. The House already approved a resolution to block Trumps emergency declaration to build the wall. As of last week, it appeared that the resolution would also be approved by the Republican-controlled Senate, according to NBC News. The Senate is expected to vote Thursday. But regardless of how the Senate votes, the border wall is far from dead. Trump is expected to veto the resolution, and it is unlikely that the resolution will receive enough support to overturn Trumps veto, according to NBC. To overturn the veto the Senate would need a two-thirds vote. Historically, Congress has overridden fewer than 10 percent of all presidential vetoes. It still gives the president the degree of discretion to act in an emergency, but it puts a fuse on it. Utah Sen. Mike Lee Lee's bill and the backdoor negotiations Pence is leading would allow Trump to save face, The Hill reported. Killing the resolution on the Republican-controlled Senate floor would spare the president embarrassment and avoid him having to issue the first veto of his presidency, according to The Hill. Senate republicans told The Hill that there would have to be an ironclad promise from Trump to sign Lees bill in order to flip Republicans who currently say they will vote no. Trump thus far hasnt made any such pledges. Lee says Congress is to blame for allowing the executive branch to overstep its authority over the years. Lee was highly critical of the Obama administration's use of executive orders. Congress is the problem," he said. "Its happened gradually over the last eight years. Congress has systemically, deliberately, and for the political convenience of members of Congress has delegated out far too much power. And Congress needs to reclaim that power. Lee says the act, however, does not completely negate the presidents ability to leverage emergency powers in an appropriate situation. It still gives the president the degree of discretion to act in an emergency, Lee said. But it puts a fuse on it. Lee says this bill is just one piece of a larger initiative hes been developing over the last few years called the Article I Project, which he says involves identifying areas in which Congress has excessively delegated power away to the executive. This is one of the best potentially bipartisan opportunities that weve had the entire time Ive been in the United States Senate to focus on an area where Congress has unmistakably given up too much power, Lee said. The Article One Act is expected to come to the Senate floor after the March recess. SALT LAKE CITY House members gave final passage to the state's public education budget Tuesday with their unanimous approval of SB4, which fully funds enrollment growth in Utah public schools and will increase the value of the weighted pupil unit by 4 percent. The WPU is the basic building block of education funding and gives districts and charter schools a high degree of flexibility in addressing specific instructional needs. The public education budget bill was held up as lawmakers hammered out a compromise over the entire state budget, which was achieved Tuesday afternoon. The Utah Senate gave unanimous approval to SB4 Monday night, but amid the budget stalemate, it was unclear if it would move forward in the House or if House members would instead vote on HB2, a competing bill. It was a moot point after House Speaker Brad Wilson, R-Kaysville, and Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, announced the legislative houses had come to an agreement on the overall state budget. Scott Jones, Deputy State Superintendent of Operations, likened the budget agreement to a big influx of oxygen for public education. Were all breathing a little bit easier now, Jones said. Rep. Steve Eliason, R-Sandy, the floor sponsor of SB4, said the bill provides funding for the 6,750 additional students expected to enter Utah public schools next fall. Increasing the value of the weighted pupil by 4 percent requires an appropriation of $127 million. SB4 appropriates $15 million for the Teacher and Student Success Act, which calls for school-level plans for student achievement. The initiative will receive about $100 million its inaugural year, said Sen. Lyle Hillyard, R-Logan, sponsor of SB4. Last year, lawmakers appropriated $65 million for the program as part of their compromise with backers of the citizen initiative Our Schools Now. The funding was held in an account until legislation passed creating a process for disbursement and the requirements for school plans. That legislation, SB149, passed earlier in this year's legislative session. The bill allows school districts or charter schools to use 25 percent of the funds for educator salaries. School districts with teacher salaries below the state average may use up to 40 percent for educator salaries if they also make local funding efforts toward that end. The rest is to fund school-level plans approved and monitored by local school boards. The Utah State Board of Education had requested a 5.5 percent increase to the value of the weighted pupil unit. Jones said the budget passed by lawmakers addresses most priorities identified by the Utah State Board of Education. SB4 also provides $3 million in ongoing funds for student busing programs, $1 million in ongoing funding for the Beverly Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program and $501,000 for necessarily existent small schools. SALT LAKE CITY A bill passed through the Utah Legislature which will ban marriage for 15-year-olds and require permission from parents and a court for anyone under 18. HB234 passed in the Senate with a 22-2 vote. Sen. Jake Anderegg, R-Lehi, and Sen. Gregg Buxton, R-Roy, were the only two to vote against the bill. It previously passed the House 55-6 and will now go to the Governor. Senate Minority Whip Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City, is the Senate sponsor for the bill. She said it is an important bill and sends the right message. "When we talk about the sanctity of marriage and what it means, its a child entering into this very important contractual agreement. I think a 15-year-old is not ready to make that commitment," Escamilla said. Sen. Lyle Hillyard, R-Logan, voiced concerns with the bill. He said if a girl is 15 and pregnant and wants to marry her boyfriend it could be beneficial, saying some might start living together and not get married after they turn 16. "Marriage may be the best answer for stability and even for health insurance and other coverage," Hillyard said. Escamilla disagreed saying they would be covered under their parents' insurance and the number of people requesting marriage at 15 is very low. HB234 is sponsored by House Minority Assistant Whip Angela Romero, D-Salt Lake City. Originally the bill raised the minimum age from 15 to 18 and was amended in a House committee. SALT LAKE CITY Research from Brigham Young University might prove whether right-wing political commentator Tomi Lahren is right or wrong about pickle juice. Earlier this week, Lahren posted a short Instagram video that shows her holding a jar with pickle juice. She said she planned to drink it because of the health benefits. Theres health benefits, she said. I googled it. Tomi Lahren says she enjoys drinking pickle juice Theres health benefits, I googled it pic.twitter.com/WUdi5P2EoO Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) March 6, 2019 But is it healthy?: The Daily Beast decided to look into whether pickle juice is actually healthy to determine if its a good idea to drink it. Kevin Miller, a professor at Central Michigan University, told The Daily Beastthat a 2010 study might point to pickle juice being a way to help athletes recover. In the study, 10 healthy men from BYU bicycled for 30 minute on one leg in a hot lab until they lost 3 percent of their body weight in sweat. Oof. (Funny enough, my colleague Sara Israelsen Hartley wrote about the study at the time. You can read more here.) Then, the research team clamped down on the big toe of the other leg, adding an electrical stimulation to cause a cramp. The 10 BYU males were then given a shot of either dill pickle juice or water that had the same level of salinity as pickle juice. The study found that toe cramps disappeared in 85 seconds for those who drank the pickle juice, which was 45 percent faster than those who drank nothing and 37 percent than those who drank water. Miller said the results were a little strange since its impossible for pickle juice to enter the bloodstream so quickly. But he said the sensation of pickle juice might have taken away the pain of the cramp. The vinegar or combination of vinegar and salt (affected) a reflex in the mouth and acted as a counterirritant, Miller told The Daily Beast. Its like when you slam your hand on a car door and you have a painful reaction, but you pinch another part of your body to counter that pain. SANDY A man and woman were injured in a shooting in Sandy Tuesday night, police said. The shooting occurred in the area of 11190 S. Hawkwood Drive, Sandy police tweeted about 11 p.m. A neighbor reported the shooting. The victims were taken to a hospital. Additional information about them and their injuries was not immediately available. Police Tuesday night were going from yard to yard looking for a suspect or suspects in the shooting. Police said they did not immediately know whether the shooting was random or targeted. LONDON In a tentative first step toward ending months of political deadlock, British lawmakers voted Wednesday to block the country from leaving the European Union without a divorce agreement, triggering an attempt to delay that departure, currently due to take place on March 29. Parliament is scheduled to decide Thursday whether to put the brakes on Brexit, a vote set up after lawmakers dealt yet another defeat to Prime Minister Theresa May amid a crisis over Britain's departure from the EU. The lawmakers' 321-278 vote has political but not legal force, and does not entirely rule out a chaotic no-deal departure for Britain. But it might ease jitters spreading across the EU after lawmakers resoundingly rejected May's divorce deal on Tuesday. Exiting the EU without a deal could mean major disruptions for businesses and people in the U.K. and the 27 remaining EU countries. In chaotic scenes that revealed how May's authority has been eroded by Brexit battles, more than a dozen pro-EU government ministers abstained rather than vote with her against ruling out no-deal. Speaking with a raspy voice after weeks of relentless pressure, May hinted that she plans to make a third attempt to get lawmakers to support her Brexit deal, which they have already rejected twice. She said Parliament faced a "fundamental choice" a "short, technical extension" if lawmakers approve a divorce deal with the EU in the next week, or a much longer delay to Brexit if they don't. The EU warned that voting against no-deal Brexit wasn't enough to stop it. By law, Britain will leave the EU on March 29, with or without a deal, unless it cancels Brexit or secures a delay. "There are only two ways to leave the EU: with or without a deal," a European Commission official said. "The EU is prepared for both. To take no deal off the table, it is not enough to vote against no deal - you have to agree to a deal." The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the unresolved situation. Earlier, chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier warned that "the risk of a no-deal has never been higher." As Britain teeters ever closer to the edge of the Brexit cliff, lawmakers are trying to seize control from the divided and squabbling government, although it's far from clear if they can agree on a way forward. There are competing factions that support May's deal, a "softer" deal that would keep close ties with the EU, a no-deal Brexit, or even a new referendum on Britain's EU membership. Parliament likely will agree to delay Brexit, but it would need EU approval. The bloc openly exasperated by Britain's continuing Brexit crisis warned that the U.K. would need to present a strong reason for any extension. "I am against every extension whether an extension of one day, one week, even 24 hours if it's not based on a clear opinion of the House of Commons for something," said the European Parliament's chief Brexit official, Guy Verhofstadt. "Please make up your minds in London, because this uncertainty cannot continue." The bloc is also reluctant to consider a delay that goes beyond elections to the European Parliament in late May, because it would mean Britain would have to participate in the polls even as it prepares to leave. Both Britain and the EU have ramped up planning for a no-deal Brexit, which would rip up decades of rules for travel and trade between Britain and the bloc. Economists say it could cause huge upheaval, with customs checks causing gridlock at U.K. ports, new tariffs triggering sudden price increases and red tape for everyone from truckers to tourists. The U.K. government announced its plans for the Irish border in the event of a no-deal Brexit, saying it wouldn't impose new checks, duties or controls on goods coming from EU member Ireland into Northern Ireland. It also said it wouldn't slap tariffs on 87 percent of goods coming into Britain from the EU though there would be new levies on imports of some items including meat and cars. The tariffs, intended to be temporary, wouldn't apply to goods crossing from Ireland to Northern Ireland, raising fears the plan would spark a rise in smuggling. Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said under the proposals, "Northern Ireland will become a backdoor to the European single market and I think that in a matter of months that will lead to the need for checks at Northern Ireland's ports." "I don't think the U.K.'s proposals will be workable for very long," he said during a visit to Washington. In Irish border communities and U.K. ports, no-deal anxiety was mounting. "Potentially it is going to be a nightmare," said Michael Eddy, a district councilor who lives in the aptly named town of Deal, a few miles from the major Channel port of Dover on England's south coast. He says local authorities have modeled potential disruptions and believe that even "a two-minute delay for every truck going through the port of Dover" would lead to a 50-mile (80-kilometer) traffic jam. "What then happens with local people wanting to go about their business, wanting to get to hospitals, wanting to get their kids to school, all of that kind of stuff?" he said. The European Parliament approved measures Wednesday to ameliorate the immediate hardships of a no-deal Brexit. It backed emergency plans to provide continuity for everything from air, port and road traffic to foreign students to the fishing industry. The U.K. Parliament has twice rejected the withdrawal agreement that May spent two years negotiating with the EU, and the bloc insists there will be no more talks. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas warned British lawmakers that "whoever rejects the (Brexit) agreement plays with the welfare of their citizens and the economy in a reckless way." Yet May has not given up on a third attempt to get her deal through Parliament again. U.K. Treasury chief Philip Hammond said he was "confident that we will do a deal" in the next few weeks. Many Britons wish they could share his optimism. "I think that a bit of unity would be helpful now," said Katharine Beaugie, an artist in Dover. "It would be much better if we could have found some sort of decision." ___ Casert reported from Strasbourg, France. Renee Graham in Deal, England, Gregory Katz and Danica Kirka in London, Frank Jordans in Berlin and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed. SALT LAKE CITY Imagine Dragons Dan Reynolds announced the date and artists for the third-annual LoveLoud Festival Powered by AT&T on Wednesday. The event will take place on June 29 at the USANA Amphitheatre in West Valley City. Reynolds will host the event. Pop star Kesha will headline the festival. Other acts for the show include Martin Garrix, Tegan and Sara, Daya, Grouplove, K. Flay, Pvris, Laura Jane Grace and Reynolds himself. "LoveLoud is back again this year and stronger than ever," said founder and Imagine Dragons front-man Reynolds in a statement. "We are excited to celebrate our LGBTQ youth through music and spoken word. My hope is that they feel loved, accepted and perfect just the way they are. I invite all the political and religious leaders of Utah to join us as we show our LGBTQ youth that they are not just loved, but truly accepted and appreciated." Kesha said shes excited to headline the event. I stand with my talented friend Dan Reynolds and Imagine Dragons in this fight for equality," said Kesha. "We need to make sure that all LGBTQ+ people feel accepted and supported and that families have the support that they need. It's important to try to keep families together and having positive open-minded conversations and, for me, to be a part of something that can continue building the bridge to create a safe space for everyone sounds like a beautiful opportunity. A place that supports all people and all love. This festival has done so many wonderful things to help the LGBTQ+ community over the past few years, is a wonderful loving fun safe space, so I hope to see you all come out for LoveLoud this summer!" Tickets go on sale Friday, March 15, at 10 a.m. MDT through smithstix.com. Flashback: Last year, 35,000 people filled the University of Utahs Rice-Eccles Stadium for the show. Two years ago, 17,000 people attended the first event, according to the Deseret News. SALT LAKE CITY Thirty years ago Tuesday, CERN researcher Tim Berners-Lee published a description of a global hypertext system that would allow for automated information sharing between academics around the world. That system would become the World Wide Web, and it would revolutionize the way the world communicates. Since the first webpage was published on the web in 1991, more than 1.9 billionwebsites have been created, giving the world access to international communication, social media, online libraries, online shopping and much more. Today, were looking back at some of the best, some of the worst and some of the most impactful things aside from all those cat videos, of course that the World Wide Web has brought us. 'Homestar Runner' If you were a kid of the late '90s and early 2000s, youre probably familiar with the Flash-animated comedy web series Homestar Runner, which mixes self-parody with pop culture references from the 1970s to 2000s The series was created in book form around 1995, but it took off when the creators learned Flash and made a web comic out of it in 2000, according to i09. Homestar Runner is well-known for its on-the-nose segments about different facets of the web. At the peak of its popularity, it was one of the most visited Flash cartoon websites on the internet. The site is still up, though with a different look. 'Gangnam Style' YouTube PSYs Gangnam Style music video rapidly won the attention of the web in 2012 for its catchy beat, quirky look and galloping dance moves. To date, the video has been viewed over 3.3 billion times worldwide, making it the sixth most popular YouTube video of all time (Luis Fonsis Despacito ft. Daddy Yankee video is the most viewed YouTube video with over 6 billion views). YouTube became a staple of the web soon after the domain www.youtube.com was registeredin 2005. QWOP Created in 2008 by Bennett Foddy, QWOP became known as the most difficult game ever created. Players use the keys "Q," "W," "O" and "P" to move the limbs of an Olympic runner and ideally get him to run 100 meters. What started out as a serious game quickly became one of the webs funniest. You can still play QWOP today. The Dress The web was truly shook in 2015 when a social media user uploaded an image of a dress that, depending on how you look at it, looks either black and blue or gold and white. Started an argument in the indian restaurant across all the tables about what colour the dress is Rogue (@RogueMoosic) February 27, 2015 Why is the dress changing colors! Is it Blue And Black or Gold and White?! Brandon Vitale (@BrandonVitale) February 27, 2015 In school all everybody was arguing about is what color the dress is Jojo (@_gudvibesx) February 27, 2015 Social media users around the world could not handle the chameleon-like nature of the dress, which, it turns out, was black and blue all along. Social media movements The web, and our ability to rapidly disseminate information through it, has revolutionized not only the way we communicate but also the tenor of our social and political conversations. One of the most notable examples of this is the role of social media websites in the 2010-2012 Arab Spring that led to the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Social media sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook enabled protestors to organize across the Middle East and speak out against oppression at the time, according to Wired. Social media platforms have mobilized movements such as the #MeToo movement, which was first created in 2006 by Tarana Burke and soon became a massive social movement with women around the world sharing their stories of sexual assault and harassment using #MeToo on social media. Social media websites continue to play a key role in modern activist movements, though there has been increased concern about the role of social media in modern political and social events. The Tide and Ice Bucket challenges While it has mobilized movements of national and international significance, many that have led to positive change, the web has also mobilized a lot of not so positive movements, one such challenge being the Tide Pod Challenge of 2018. Teens and adults around the country took to swallowing packets of laundry detergent last year to see if they could do it after several comments that the packets looked like pockets of candy surfaced on the web. It isnt the first, nor the last of its kind, but the web has certainly made those dangerous teenage trends a little more well-known. Though there are some not great trends that have been sparked through the web, there are also some pretty good ones. In the summer of 2014, individuals all around the world took to social media to post videos of themselves participating in the Ice Bucket Challenge and encourage their followers to raise money for ALS. Ice Bucket Challenge participants helped raise over $115 million dollars for ALS research, according to the New York Times. Built communities and made knowledge more accessible Probably the greatest impact the web has had on the world is to automate systems to make life easier for communities around the world, make information more accessible than ever and to build groups of people across the world. Berners-Lee released a statement on the 30th birthday of the World Wide Web, expressing his mixed feelings about how far its come. I stopped by my old office at @CERN yesterday, where I worked on the WWW. Jakub is there now doing his bit #ForTheWeb working on data storage.#Web30 pic.twitter.com/lmOXCH7qIC Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) March 12, 2019 WASHINGTON An 11th-hour rescue mission by Republican senators to stave off an awkward defeat for President Donald Trump on his declaration of a national emergency at the Mexican border, and to protect themselves from a politically dicey vote opposing him, seemed to collapse Wednesday. And a bill Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, proposed to limit future emergency declarations now appears dead. The setback made it all but certain that defections from his own party will force Trump to cast what could be his first veto on a struggle directly related to his signature issue of building barricades along the southwest border. It also left Republican senators facing a painful choice: defy a president who commands passionate loyalty from conservative voters or acquiesce to what many lawmakers from both parties consider a dubious and dangerous expansion of presidential authority. After a closed-door lunch, GOP lawmakers predicted the Senate would approve a resolution Thursday annulling the emergency Trump has declared along the border. The Democratic-led House passed the legislation last month, meaning Senate assent would send it to Trump. "It was called turn out the lights, the party's over," said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., recalling a favorite refrain of Monday Night Football announcers when a game was out of reach. "Well, that's appropriate right now." Republicans had hoped Trump would support a separate measure curbing a president's powers to declare future emergencies. Had he done so, they thought, it would be easier for reluctant GOP senators to support the emergency Trump has proclaimed to steer $3.6 billion more than Congress has approved for barrier construction. But during the GOP lunch, Trump called Lee, chief sponsor of the bill limiting future emergency declarations, and told him he opposed that proposal. The call was described by two officials who weren't authorized to publicly discuss the matter and described it on condition of anonymity. "There's been numerous efforts to engage with the vice president and the president, and the president's not persuaded that he should support it right now," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who advises GOP leaders. "I don't know of any president that likes to give up power." Lee said in a statement that he will now back the resolution canceling the border emergency because his own bill now lacks "an immediate path forward." With Republicans controlling the Senate 53-47, it will take just four GOP defections to approve the measure, which the House passed last month. For decades, Congress has been giving far too much legislative power to the executive branch. While there was attention on the issue I had hoped the Article One Act could begin to take that power back," Lee said. Besides Lee, four have said they would vote no: Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Kentucky's Rand Paul. Tillis and Collins face potentially competitive re-election fights in 2020. Tillis, though, said Wednesday that his vote was "still a work in progress" as talks with the White House continued. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, told reporters again Wednesday that he "made his decision some time ago" but would not announce it until "probably" right before the vote. As many as 15 Republicans might vote to block Trump's emergency, said one Republican who offered the estimate only on condition of anonymity. An administration official said the White House is skeptical there will be enough votes to head off a Senate defeat and is reluctant to back limits on future declarations unless a victory on the resolution is assured. The official was not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations and spoke on condition of anonymity. Any Republican hopes of a turnabout rested largely on a familiar phenomenon of the Trump administration an unexpected change in mind, as he's done in congressional battles over health care and immigration. Trump told reporters that he has advised GOP senators to "vote any way you want" on the resolution blocking his emergency declaration but he added a warning. "Anybody going against border security, drug trafficking, human trafficking, that's a bad vote," he said. Framing Thursday's vote that way seemed to be a message all but aimed directly at undecided GOP senators facing re-election races next year, of whom there are several. Even so, there was little doubt among GOP senators that Thursday's vote would turn out badly for the party. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., tried making it even harder for uncertain Republicans to support Trump's border emergency. She said the House would never even consider the separate bill limiting future declarations by presidents, including Trump. "Republican Senators are proposing new legislation to allow the president to violate the Constitution just this once in order to give themselves cover," Pelosi said in a statement. "The House will not take up this legislation to give President Trump a pass. Under a four-decade old law, presidents have wide leeway in declaring a national emergency. Congress can vote to block a declaration, but the two-thirds majorities required to overcome presidential vetoes make it hard for lawmakers to prevail. Presidents have never before declared an emergency after Congress voted to deny them money for the same purpose. Lee's proposal says a presidential emergency would last 30 days unless Congress votes to extend it. It would apply to future emergencies, but not Trump's current border emergency unless he seeks to renew it next year. The strongest chance of blocking Trump's border emergency is likely several lawsuits filed by Democratic state attorneys general, environmental groups and others. Contributing: Dennis Romboy, Deseret News SALT LAKE CITY Senate leaders readied legislation to restore the full state sales tax on food after the House's efforts on tax reform faltered last week, but now want to see the issue taken up by a new legislative task force. "It was too late," Senate Majority Whip Dan Hemmert, R-Orem, said Wednesday of the bill he was having drafted to boost sales tax revenues while dropping income tax collections, in part through a food tax credit for some Utahns. "I liked this because it was simple. People could understand it. It could get close to the same outcome," Hemmert said. "The con was we had four days left. So it was just too little, too late." The 45-day legislative session ends at midnight Thursday. The decision to give up on the House tax reform bill, HB441, resulted in an impasse over completing the $19 billion budget that wasn't resolved until Wednesday. Part of the deal made by Republican House and Senate leaders calls for the formation of a tax reform task force charged with making recommendations for a possible special legislative session this summer. There's already been talk of going beyond extending sales taxes to a wide variety of services while lowering the state sales and income tax rates, as HB441 would have done, to offset lagging growth in sales tax revenues. Among the options that have come up is imposing a statewide property tax, seen as an even tougher sell than expanding the shrinking sales tax base as consumer spending shifts from goods to services. Raising the 1.75 percent sales tax on food to the full 4.7 percent state rate could be difficult, too. The reduction was made during former Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'s administration at the same time there was a major income tax cut. Gov. Gary Herbert told the Deseret News Wednesday that "nothing should be taboo" when it comes to tax reform, including restoring the sales tax on food. "Whether that's going to fly or not remains to be seen." Herbert, who served as Huntsman's lieutenant governor, said the House "seems to be very opposed to it." The governor said he prefers "a more targeted approach," such as food stamps and other assistance programs. The Senate has long supported treating food the same as other goods to stabilize the sales tax base, while the House passed a bill removing the sales tax on food entirely as recently as last year. That bill failed in a Senate committee. Hemmert said he "got really excited" about taking the issue on again once he realized it would add just about the same amount, $240 million, to the state's general fund that's made up largely of sales taxes, as HB441. The legislation he had prepared but never introduced would have included a $75 per-person income tax credit to offset taxes paid on grocery store purchases. The $60 million credit is aimed at families earning up to $65,000. "They will actually be money ahead," he said. "You can give them more money than that tax differential will cost them through a targeted tax credit. They would have to file a tax return." Utahns who don't file a tax return likely already have a low-enough income to qualify for food stamps so their grocery store purchases are already exempt from sales taxes, Hemmert said. His bill would also have reduced the 4.95 percent state income tax rate to 4.79 percent, including the $75 million tax cut proposed for HB441, and a $55 million child tax credit to help families impacted by federal income tax changes. Hemmert said he'd like to see the bill used to help "jump-start" discussions about tax reform in the new Tax Restructuring and Equalization Task Force created as part of the budget deal worked out between House and Senate Republican leadership. The legislative task force is expected to make an initial report in June and final recommendations in early August after hearing from the public. One of the knocks against HB441 is that it didn't surface until late in the session. Those opposed to restoring the food tax will have the chance to be heard, Hemmert said. "Thats the whole point of this. One of the reasons were doing this is so many people said, You surprised us." The governor said he hopes everyday Utahns will "help us find the solution" to rebalancing state revenues. "It's not over. We're kind of going into extra innings," Herbert said. "I think there will be a significant outreach to the public across the state to give them an opportunity to look at what the situation is (and) understand the problem." In his $19 billion budget released last December, the governor recommended what he called tax modernization, broadening the sales tax base to include a wide range of services while lowering the rate and giving Utahns a $200 million tax cut. Last week, the governor, along with House Speaker Brad Wilson, R-Kaysville, and Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, announced work on tax reform would wait until after this session. Asked about the deal reached by Wilson and Adams to use $320 million in one-time money to fund ongoing programs to pressure work on tax reform, Herbert said that wasn't the only option, but it "did get the budget done" before the session ends. "I think we have to do tax reform," the governor said. "This keeps everybody focused." BRIGHTON Two years ago after the session ended, Gov. Gary Herbert penned a terse, two-paragraph letter to the Legislature's GOP leadership to express his frustration to "once again" extend the life of what he said should have been a one-year commission created in 2015. "I strongly urge Salt Lake County to complete the work this commission was intended to accomplish expeditiously and state that I will not agree to extend the sunset of this commission again," Herbert wrote. It's now 2019, and the law creating the Mountainous Planning Commission is set to sunset, or expire, on June 1, 2020. SB187, now amended, extends the commission's life to 2021 and awaits passage in the House after the Senate approved it Monday. It remains to be seen what Herbert will do, because this has a lot of complexities with powerful politics at play. The bill has the potential to chart the destiny of the newly incorporated town of Brighton and affect transportation in the narrow canyons that receive more visitors than Utah's five national parks combined. The purpose of the commission is to consider the central Wasatch Mountains as a "regional resource," with long-range planning and policy, made up of members from Salt Lake City, Sandy, Cottonwood Heights, South Jordan and the canyons. As the unincorporated area of Salt Lake County continues to shrink, the law creating the commission allows for any registered voter to have a seat at the land use decision table including decisions in the canyons. The discord around the legislation to continue the commission is evident, however, heard in the bitter words offered March 8 by the senator who ran the original bill in 2015 establishing the Mountainous Planning Commission. "Since that time I have heard nothing but complaints about abuse, bullying, failure to follow procedures for open meetings (government records). I am embarrassed I ran this legislation," Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross, said. Wilf Sommerkorn, director of regional planning and transportation for Salt Lake County, told Weiler during a Senate committee hearing last week he may have been confusing the commission with Mountain Accord or the resulting Central Wasatch Commission. Weiler didn't rebuke him, however, and Herbert's own concerns are evidence there's trouble aloft. Plenty of representatives from area community councils have a long list of complaints about the Mountainous Planning Commission, pointing to tactics involving the newly incorporated Brighton and the continuing push to keep the commission alive when they say its authority is unprecedented. Sommerkorn, in an interview with the Deseret News, said the commission's planning work has been tangled up in political fights involving water rights, canyon developments and misunderstandings he says unfairly link into the Mountain Accord planning process. "This is not some nefarious operation," he said. Quid pro quo? In early October, the Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office advised Salt Lake County Deputy Mayor Rick Graham that by state law, it would be illegal for the county to use general funds to provide police and fire services in Big Cottonwood Canyon should residents of the Brighton area vote to incorporate. In November, residents of Brighton did just that, tired of having little say over their destiny. Barb Cameron, head of the Big Cottonwood Canyon Community Council, was a leading proponent of incorporation and like her husband, Bob, felt there was too little accountability from Salt Lake County on how canyon-generated revenues are spent. Cameron learned, too, that incorporation meant the tiny community of just 260 residents that supports around 2 million visitors a year would soon be without police or fire protection. During the campaign leading up to incorporation, she noted in a press release the fear and concern regarding public safety. "Voters are concerned, however, that the county mayor said he will likely withdraw public safety subsidies from Big Cottonwood Canyon if Brighton incorporates. Its a serious threat thats causing discouragement among voters, and alarm among public safety organizations," she wrote. "Most of those services are, in fact, used by visitors, not locals. The burden of providing public safety for the 1.7 million visitors should be a cooperative project, especially since the canyon provides so many tax, tourism and recreation benefits to the county and the state of Utah." In a February email this year, Barb Cameron told her colleagues that then-Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams had offered to create a regional service agreement for public safety funding if the Mountainous Planning District's sunset provision was extended during the session. The commission would lapse the same day Brighton would officially become a town. "It would be irresponsible for us to ignore a solution to the problem of 260 residents providing health and safety funding for 2 million visitors," she wrote. But the dominion of the Mountainous Planning Commission has been widely criticized since its inception because of its membership, land use authority and more recently because of the new dynamic with the incorporation of Brighton. "This commission sets a bad precedent. When we begin to allow planning commissions that are made up of people who do not live in the area being planned, we start down a slippery slope," wrote John Bennett, a former staff member of the Quality Growth Commission, in emails to state lawmakers during this session. "The new town of Brighton is under a lot of pressure to give up their right to manage their own land use. Salt Lake County is conflating two issues that dont need to be conflated in order to put pressure on the new town. I think it is bad for the town of Brighton, and it is a warning sign of what might happen in other municipalities in resort areas in the future," he noted. During the Senate hearing March 8 on the sunset proposal, Greg Schiffman from the Granite Community Council likened the Mountainous Planning Commission to a dismissive parent that gets to do what it wants to residents because of its lack of accountability. "(They are) a planning commission stacked with residents living outside the area and they are determining land planning for that area. Strong-arm tactics," he continued. "We have a Salt Lake County mayor who wants to control land use so badly that they threatened a 70-year-old woman, the community council chair, that if she doesn't give up land use planning, her residents will be straddled with millions each year to pay for safety and emergency services." Critics say passage of the bill will put the state of Utah at odds with itself over zoning authority. On one hand, a municipality is required to have a zoning authority, or a planning commission, in place. Brighton will set up a planning commission for its residents, but to what avail? The law establishing the Mountainous Planning Commission says any municipality established within its boundaries has no jurisdiction over land use unless it came into being prior to 1971. Paulina Flint, the mayor of the White City metro township, said another thorny problem needs to be solved when it comes to county financing. In the early 1990s, there were about 311,000 residents in Salt Lake County who lived in unincorporated areas. Now there are about 12,000. General fund monies cannot be used to pay for emergency services in those cities. This includes emergency management services required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Each municipality is required to appoint a person to manage disasters. Since becoming a municipality, the metro township lost these general fund dollars. Townships, Flint said, have lost that service and with Salt Lake County only looking at Brighton's situation, she noted, "That's not right. That's an ethical dilemma." Former Pula Steel Casting and Manufacturers director, Depaak Verma came short of accusing government officials, CEDA and judicial management officers of being corrupt during a no-holds-barred tirade this week. Verma called a press conference at Hilton Hotel titled, Where is Pula Steel ostensibly to share the familys side of the story. The family are the initial shareholders of Pula Steel. He blasted the liquidation and the ongoing tendering process, which seeks to sell the Plant. So many questions have been asked on the company with much focus lately on why the company went for tendering in the first place, he said. Verma lost control of his company in 2016. He used the conference to attack officers he met in line of duty accusing them of bringing him down and wanting him out of business. Under the Verma family arrangement, huge sums allegedly went missing as per affidavits filed in court during the liquidation process. Liquidation Pula Steel troubles started in 2016 when BCL mine who were the majority shareholders got into liquidation. In 2017 CEDA approved capital funding amounting to P28, 621, 308, 50 following an application by the Verma family on October 2016. CEDA conditions were that shareholders of Pula Steel indemnify CEDA from any claims laid against the company prior to investment period, as well as resignation of all directors and re-appointment of new ones. The new shareholding structure left BCL with 22.70 percent shares, Verma (23.25), Wealth Generation (5.5) and CEDA with 49 percent shares. CEDA never deposited the money because they were not satisfied that their conditions were met. This appears to have caused friction between Verma and CEDAs Thabo Thamane and his leadership team. Bid claim Verma said he failed to win his company back despite having put an impressive bid that no one could match. He cast doubt on the criteria used to award the tender. He suspected that CEDA must have financed someone to win the bid, asking rhetoically; what criteria was used to award the bid? Did I not have the capacity? Did I not have the knowledge? Did I not add value to the plant? I do not know that. I do not know if they had given the name of the potential owner, but the name of the potential owner was not yet announced until March 2nd. I am still a creditor I deserve the right to know who bought the plant. What I can say is in February information came out that my bid is successful. It was agreed that within seven days the potential winner had to deposit 30 percent of the money for whatever bid he put in. I have suspicion of the two companies who won, but I can not name them because it can be defamation. He said he is left with no choice except to take the matter to court as they cannot understand why the bid has not been given to his family. Attack Amongst those Verma attacked were Chief Executive Officer of CEDA, Thabo Thamane, Judicial manager Vijay Kalyanaraman questioning why he was appointed while he was doing jobs for CEDA at the same time. He also asked why CEDA put conditions before they could invest the agreed amount. He claimed that if he was allowed to continue his company model had the potential to grow even much bigger than Debswana. Speaking to Botswana Guardian Kalyanaraman said he was appointed in his professional capacity and was not new as he previously did an assessment on Pula Steel, before CEDA came aboard. Kalyanaraman said he stepped out as judicial manager because he realised that there was misalignment between Pula Steel shareholders as they did not have a common vision. The shareholders under Verma family management had different interest which was not in the best interest of the company. For his part Thamane said it is his responsibility as accounting officer of CEDA to look after the funds of government. I will do that and I will continue looking after these funds within the set parameters, rules and regulations as determined by the CEDA Board. I will not want to comment on Vermas character assassination on my side because we are reviewing his press conference and statements and will be accordingly advised by our advisors. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use, which became effective December 20, 2019. By choosing I Accept, you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. SALT LAKE CITY Legislators passed a bill Tuesday banning pelvic examinations on patients under anesthesia who have not knowingly given consent to the procedure. This practice has been done to help train medical professionals. House sponsor of SB188, Rep. Kim Coleman, R-West Jordan, said she found out near the end of 2017 that conducting pelvic examinations during other procedures is a fairly common practice and often consent is given but is hidden among the many papers a patient signs before surgery. The bill requires consent is given in a large font and in a separate form in order for a pelvic exam to be performed under anesthesia. It applies to both to men and women, encompassing any exams in the pelvic region. A Deseret News article published at the beginning of this year examined the ethics of this practice. Sen. Daniel McCay, R-Riverton, sponsor of the bill, told the Senate the House had made a change to give the ability to perform exams without consent when a patient is not responsive when they arrive. He said it is a great change to help medical care be available in those circumstances. Rep. Jen Dailey-Provost, D-Salt Lake City, expressed support for the bill. "The best thing that any health care provider can give to his or her patients is full and honest information ... if theres a medical need then theres no reason why informed consent should not be given and received from the patient," Dailey-Provost said. SALT LAKE CITY State lawmakers struck a deal Wednesday to allow beer with slightly more alcohol content to be sold in Utah grocery and convenience stores while a work group studies the issue. Compromise legislation would raise the allowable alcohol content by weight from 3.2 percent to 4 percent for beer sold in retail outlets. The original version of SB132 that a House committee rejected last week would have raised it to 4.8 percent. "We've definitely moved the needle with what we've done with this," said Sen. Jerry Stevenson, R-Layton, the bill sponsor. The House passed the revised bill 61-14 on Wednesday and sent it to the Senate, which had overwhelmingly passed the first bill before it stalled in the House. "There are some things going that we think were going to get to the finish line with this," Stevenson said. A group of retailers, including Walmart, beer manufacturers and distributors, and trade associations that had pushed for 4.8 beer, supports the compromise. "Its a kind of a glass half full," said Kate Bradshaw, director of the Responsible Beer Choice Coalition, though she noted it would still be one of the biggest changes in Utah liquor law since Prohibition. The deal also heads off a possible 2020 ballot initiative on the issue. "For now, it pushes that off," Bradshaw said. "We feel like we've made progress." The House Health and Human Services Committee gutted the original bill and replaced it with a task force made up of legislators, beer distributors and manufacturers, alcohol treatment workers and advocates for victims of drunken driving. Committee members raised questions about whether selling stronger beers in stores would lead to more consumption, drunken driving and underage drinking. The new version of the bill includes a working group to study whether the state should go to 4.8 percent beer but changes its makeup from the previous version. It also raises the excise tax on a barrel of beer by 30 cents. The law would take effect Nov. 1. Stevenson said the bill won't add fees to beer sold in grocery stores. Rep. Norm Thurston, R-Provo, called the measure "misguided" and said that lawmakers were making a "huge mistake" in raising the alcohol content while calling for a study at the same time. "We've got the cart before the horse," said Thurston, who sponsored the bill that moved Utah's DUI standard to .05 blood alcohol concentration. Thurston asked, what if the working group finds that stronger beer leads to more drunken driving, underage drinking and binge drinking? "How are we ever going to go back? The answer is we're not," he said. "We're giving away the farm." Utah is one of only two states left selling the lower weight beer after laws in Oklahoma, Colorado and Kansas recently changed, leaving brewers to decide whether to continue what would be a specialty item for a shrinking market. The proposed law would still leave Utah among states with the lowest alcohol content for beer sold in retail stores. Some products from major beer brewers, including Coors and Budweiser, are already disappearing from Utah shelves. A few of them would return if the bill passes. "It doesn't give us everything we've lost in the marketplace, but it does restore some," Bradshaw said. Stevenson said the compromise would allow about 88 percent of products to stay in Utah. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opposed the original bill, citing the increased alcohol content in beer. It supported the substitute measure to create a task force. On Wednesday, Marty Stephens, director of government and community relations for the church, said the proposed compromise is a "significant" improvement over the original bill. "We also believe the interim study group will allow for the Legislature to better consider the public health and safety consequences of expanding access to beer with increased alcohol content levels. Although we still have concerns, we do not oppose the compromise bill as drafted and look forward to reviewing the results of the interim study group," Stephens said in a statement. SALT LAKE CITY Two Ogden officers were legally justified in shooting a man a total of five times after he charged at them with a rock in November, according to the Weber County Attorney's Office. The findings, released Wednesday in response to a publics records request, conclude that 33-year-old Christopher William Parrish ignored officers' repeated commands to drop the rock after running from them in a field. Parrish "could have seriously injured or even killed" the officer nearest him "if he had struck him in the head at close range," Weber County Attorney Christopher Allred wrote in his analysis of the Nov. 9 shooting. Another officer also had reason to use deadly force to prevent his colleague or others from being seriously injured or killed, Allred found. Last week, Allred's office cleared Ogden officers in two other fatal police shootings that also happened late last year. Investigators looking at Parrish's death considered body camera footage from three Ogden police officers, plus interviews with other officer witnesses and an employee with Utah's pardons and parole agency. Parrish's brother, Justin Parrish, on Wednesday called the officers "quick to take a life and ask questions later. They can say justified till they are blue in the face but they will have to answer in court to my lawyer," he said in a message. Police have said the chain of events began about 6:45 p.m. on the November Friday at Walmart, 1959 Wall Ave. A man told an officer that someone tried to fight him in the store's parking lot, and the officer later identified the aggressor as Parrish, who left the lot in a red pickup truck. The officer followed Parrish and tried to make a traffic stop, but when he tried to verify Parrish's identity, he gave a different name, Allred wrote. Parrish became "agitated and aggressive," and sped away, coming to a rest in a dirt field and nearly hitting the officer on the way, according to one witness account. When officers chased him, he picked up the softball-sized rock, yelled an expletive and ran through a field, eventually turning toward Ogden officer Tyson Embley "in a fighting posture." Embley tried to use a stun gun from 20 feet away, but it had no effect, Allred found. Another officer, Brandon Sevenski, came within 7 feet of Parrish, who lunged at him, Allred found. Embley told investigators he believed his colleague could be harmed, so he fired one shot. As Parrish charged Sevenski with the rock raised in his right hand, Sevenski was afraid for his safety and for the officers arround him, so he shot Parrish four times from about 6 feet away, Allred wrote. Parrish was pronounced dead at the scene. "It's fairly rare to see an officer, if they're going to shoot, to shoot simply one time," Allred said Wednesday. "They'll usually shoot more than that to limit the threat." His review does not indicate where the bullets struck Parrish. The two officers were not injured and have returned to work, said Ogden Police Lt. Will Farr. They were on paid administrative leave during the investigation. Ogden police said in November Parrish has a criminal history in Oregon and Arizona that includes violent felonies, adding he has tattoos indicating his affiliation with white supremacist prison gangs. Last week, two officers who shot and killed Richard Galvan, 37, were cleared, and so was an officer who fatally shot 18-year-old Anthony Ray Borden-Cortez. SALT LAKE CITY A $5 million gauntlet dropped by Utah tech leaders earlier this year on Utah lawmakers to boost computer science offerings in Utah schools or leave the money on the table earned at least a partial riposte on Wednesday. The original fiscal request for HB227, a bill that would create a new K-12 grant program to boost computer science curriculum in Utah schools, was $10 million in ongoing funding, but that number has been marching steadily downward throughout the session amid ongoing state budget squabbles. A final funding package of $3.15 million in one-time money was approved by both the Senate and House on Wednesday and the bill is headed for the governor's desk. The bill outlines a K-12 initiative among government, industry and education partners to develop a statewide master plan for computer science. It will give schools an opportunity to apply for grants with the goal of implementing computer science by 2022. The money can be used for staff development, purchase of curriculum materials and other program support. At the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit in January, Pluralsight co-founder and CEO Aaron Skonnard and four other Utah tech company founders announced they would each personally contribute up to $1 million to match whatever legislators put up to build computer science curriculum in Utah public schools in the 2019 session. Skonnard was joined in the funding pledge by four other founders/leaders of well-established Utah tech companies: InsideSales CEO Dave Elkington, DOMO CEO Josh James, Vivint SmartHome CEO Todd Pedersen and Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith. Skonnard has previously noted that "computer science is now a foundational literacy that is critical to preparing Utah students to succeed in our technology-driven world." Right now, computer science courses are unavailable in almost half of all Utah middle and high schools and virtually nonexistent in elementary schools, according to bill sponsor Rep. John Knotwell, R-Herriman. Operator AT&T Mexico has announced the start of deployment of its 5G network in the country. It also says it has plans to connect the first 50 mobile devices to the network, in order, it suggests, to test the browsing experience. Skyband, a member of the Inteltec Group and provider of satellite and networking solutions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has signed a new agreement with LeoSat Enterprises. The company will use LeoSat to upgrade its existing satellite solutions. LeoSats system of low earth orbit communications satellites can achieve lower latency and stronger end-to-end security compared to traditional satellite and terrestrial solutions used today. This is achieved through an advanced and unique system architecture utilising optical inter-satellite laser links which connect the satellites, creating fibre-like symmetry at Gigabit speeds while providing total security as the data is encrypted and secured from end-to-end across the network, with no terrestrial touch points. Big Data is driving the need for new communications infrastructure and data volumes are exploding, with global networks are already carrying more than 1 Zeta Byte of traffic. This is forecast to grow exponentially, and this increasing demand for moving large quantities of data quickly and securely around the world is fast outpacing the infrastructure needed to carry it. LeoSats unique new network has been designed to solve these essential communications and connectivity issues and provide new opportunities for business sectors such as multi-national enterprise, telecommunications, oil & gas, maritime and government services. For Enterprise customers, the key attributes of the LeoSat system can be used for a number of applications - for example, to give banks secured networks with their foreign offices or provide the only native 4G and 5G satellite backhaul connectivity for cellular operators. LeoSats Chief Commercial Officer, Ronald van der Breggen, said: With capabilities beyond satellite and fibre, including transmission speeds of 10+ gigabits per second and latency of 20 milliseconds, LeoSats infrastructure re-defines connectivity in terms of capacity, latency, security, efficiency and coverage. Osman Oueida, CEO of SKYBAND added: Our network provides high-speed, reliable, robust, cost-effective, scalable, and secured communication across the Kingdom which can be used by all Industry segments. LeoSat is backed by leading satellite operators SKY Perfect JSAT and Hispasat, and the system is being developed in conjunction with Thales Alenia Space. The high-throughput satellites (HTS) in the constellation will form a mesh network interconnected through laser links, creating an optical backbone in space which is about 1.5 times faster than terrestrial fibre backbones. macOS users can update their Chrome browsers to version 73 in order to use Dark Mode. Windows Chrome users will have to wait even after updating. Highlights: Chrome's Dark Mode is now live on macOS Enable dark mode on macOS to automatically enable Chrome's Dark Mode Chrome 73 also rolling out on Android Google is finally rolling out Chromes Dark Mode to macOS users with Chrome version 73. The update not only brings with it the ability to switch to Dark Mode on Chrome for Mac, but also includes 60 security fixes. The company announced the update through the Chrome release blog and said, The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 73 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks. Chrome version 73 is also available on Windows, but it currently does not bring Dark Mode to the browser. This is expected to change in the next few days. There is no particular setting to enable Dark Mode on Chrome and those who have it enabled on their computers for macOS and Windows 10 will automatically see Chrome adapt to the Dark theme. If you still havent received Dark Mode on Windows, you can also install one of the many dark themes available on Chrome by heading to the Settings page on the browser. Google has also release Chrome 73 (73.0.3683.75) for Android and has said that it will be available on Google Play Store over the next few weeks. The update will bring with it the ability to browse suggested articles while offline on the Dino Page. Another improvement made to Chrome version 73 for Android is more optimised pages that save data and load faster. Related Reads: Slack is now rolling out dark mode on Android and iOS Citing sources, XDADevelopers reports that the GPU is Qualcomms Adreno 616, and though the chipset offers support for Qualcomm Quick Charge 4+, there is no confirmation on the kind of fast charging that the Motorola Razr will offer. Highlights: Moto Razr is reported to have Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 SoC. It could come in 4GB/6GB RAM and 64GB/128GB storage options. It may have a 6.2-inch OLED display. Several reports have suggested that Motorola is developing a foldable phone that will be named Moto Razr, however, none of them revealed the internals of the device. XDADevelopers now claims that it has spoken to people familiar with the matter and that the handset will be powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 processor. The tech news platform also claims that it got access to the original image that the company will apparently use as the logo of the foldable phone. It says that the logo belongs to the Voyager device which is reportedly the codename of this Moto foldable phone. There are chances that the phone will be called the Motorola Razr or Moto Razr to play the nostalgia angle, but well be using the Moto Razr moniker till the final name is confirmed by the company. The folks at XDA are also confident that the phone is launching on Verizon. Moto Razr specifications As mentioned, Moto's foldable phone is expected to feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 mobile platform under the hood, complemented by 4GB/6GB RAM and 64GB/128GB local storage. The Snapdragon 710 has 8 CPU cores built on Qualcomms customized Kryo 360 architecture. The GPU is said to be Qualcomms Adreno 616. The battery capacity is tipped to be 2,730mAh. The chipset offers support for Qualcomm Quick Charge 4+, but there are doubts about the kind of fast charging that the phone will offer. It is speculated that the smartphone will support Motorolas 27W TurboPower charging. When it comes to the display, the primary display is likely to be a 6.20-inch OLED panel offering 8762142 pixels resolution. The closed or secondary display is said to offer a resolution of 600800 pixels. The phone may be offered in white, black, and gold colors. On the software front, the phone is expected to come pre-installed with applications like Moto Display, Moto Actions, and the Moto Camera app. A previous report which talked about the phones patent showed a notch on top of its display and a thick chin. The chin quite closely resembles the one seen on the legacy Moto Razr handset and it could be a design element that the company could stick with for playing the nostalgia card. A report suggested that it could be priced starting at $1,500. The first mention of a foldable Razr phone was seen in February last year, when Lenovo CEO, Yang Yuanqing talked about bringing it back. Related Read: Galaxy Fold 2? Samsung patents foldable phone that bends outwards 48-megapixel cameras are all the rage right now, but not all 48MP cameras are made the same. Presently, there are four smartphones in the Indian market and they use either the Sony IMX586 sensor or the Samsung GM-1 sensor to offer 48-megapixel imagery with greater sharpness, higher dynamic range and more detail. Thats not the only thing common between the two camera sensors. Both sensors are half-inch in size, the largest ever put in a smartphone. However, the approach to achieving 48MP differs in the Samsung GM-1 and the Sony IMX586. The Samsung GM-1 sensor has 48 million 0.8 micron pixels but the output is 12 million pixels or 12-megapixels. Thats because the Samsung sensor combines four adjacent pixels into one to create a large 1.6-micron pixel size using the technology called pixel binning. When required, it then upscales the image to 48-megapixel. The Sony sensor also has 48 million 0.8 pixels but it uses a quad-Bayer layer and outputs in native 48MP. However, since the file size will be much larger, most smartphone makers have offered 12MP photos in 4:3 aspect ratio by default with the option to generate 48MP shots as a separate feature. The Samsung sensor is apparently relatively cheaper to manufacture and is offered at a cheaper price to OEMs. Considering that the two sensors are using two different approaches to achieve the same result, we used the Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 Pro that comes with the Sony IMX586 sensor and the Vivo V15 Pro that comes with the Samsung GM-1 sensor to take photos in a variety of situations. The result wasnt quite what youd expect Disclaimer: The images used in the article are downsized to be optimised for the web. To see the images in their original 48MP resolution, head to the Flickr gallery linked here (Redmi Note 7 Pro) and here (Vivo V15 Pro). Also note that the images delivered by the Redmi Note 7 Pro and the Vivo V15 Pro are also subject to the algorithms, image processors and the lenses used in the respective phones, which may affect the final JPEG of the 48MP output. Detail One of the primary reason for packing more pixels into a photo is the amount of detail you can see when zoomed in. A higher resolution allows for a larger print of the image, and also for a better crop with the details preserved. Both the Sony IMX586 and the Samsung GM-1 sensor, with their 1/2-inch size and 48 million 0.8 micron pixels, managed to outdo most of the standard camera sensors in use all this while. You do get way more details than ever before, but its not all good. The Sony IMX586 sensor on the Redmi Note 7 Pro, when shot using the 48MP mode, failed to maintain focus on the subject. While the photo looks fine on the phone screen, when viewed on a colour-calibrated monitor, zoomed in to 100 percent, its clear the details are not as sharp. In contrast, the Samsung GM-1 sensor on the Vivo V15 Pro captured far more details than the Redmi Note 7 Pro. It could be that the camera system on the Redmi Note 7 Pro is inferior to that of Vivos but the major heavy lifting is done by the camera sensor in this case. Shot using Redmi Note 7 Pro (1/1257, f/1.8, ISO113) 100 percent cropped Shot using Vivo V15 Pro (1/3445, f/1.8) 100 percent cropped In the first sample, the text on the hoarding is clearly visible on the image taken by the Vivo V15 Pro, while the Redmi Note 7 Pros photo is a little hazy. The output from the V15 Pro is certainly much warmer and Vivo outputs images in DCI-P3 colour space. The Redmi Note 7 Pro also seems to be doing a lot of edge smoothening and noise reduction which is evident in the 100 percent cropped sample. Having said that, both phones capture far more detail than any standard camera sensor will. Shot using Redmi Note 7 Pro (1/1053, f/1.8, ISO 113) 100 percent cropped Shot using Vivo V15 Pro (1/3395, f/1.8,ISO 50) 100 percent cropped In the second photo, the difference becomes more apparent. The Vivo V15 Pro with the Samsung GM-1 sensor seems to be far too adept at preserving details of objects that are far away, as compared to the Sony IMX586 on the Redmi Note 7 Pro. Sharpness Shot using Redmi Note 7 Pro (1/1479, f/1.8, ISO111) 100 percent cropped Shot using Vivo V15 Pro (1/4562, f/1.8, ISO 50) 100 percent cropped While the details of faraway objects are something that this new breed of camera sensors claim to offer, the overall sharpness, quality of textures and the colours are ultimately more important in making a good photograph. In that regard, the Sony IMX586 on the Redmi Note 7 Pro once again fails to offer the same clarity that the Samsung GM-1 sensor on the Vivo V15 Pro does. The 100 percent crop of the historic building look much sharper in the photo taken by the V15 Pro than the Note 7 Pro. You can see by looking at the edges of the bricks in the cropped photo. However, the colours look a lot more oversaturated on the V15 Pro. Its probably the proprietary algorithm at work. The Note 7 Pros photo is more conservative in that regard and the colours appear more neutral. Shot using Redmi Note 7 Pro (1/922, f/1.8,ISO 112) 100 percent cropped Shot using Vivo V15 Pro (1/3394, f/1.8, ISO 50) 100 percent cropped In the second sample, the subject is not that far away as the first one, and ideally, that should result in more retained sharpness when zoomed in. But once again, the Vivo V15 Pro edges past the Redmi Note 7 Pro. The petals of the orange flower are distinctly visible on the Vivo V15 Pro as well as the flower buds while that on the Redmi Note 7 Pro appear blurred. Looking deeper, we figured it could be because the Redmi Note 7 Pro took the photo at a slower shutter speed of 1/922 second while the V15 Pro shot the photo at 1/3394 second which might be the reason for the resulting blur. Both photos were taken handheld. However, with shutter speeds over 1/100th of a second, we have rarely seen blurred images. Theres more to investigate here it seems, and we might have to wait for another phone to corroborate the results. Close-up Shot using Redmi Note 7 Pro (1/795, f/1.8, ISO 113) 100 percent cropped Shot using Vivo V15 Pro (1/3200, f/1.8,ISO 49) 100 percent cropped When you look at macro photos, the sharpness, clarity and the details are all higher on the Vivo V15 Pro, while the Redmi Note 7 Pros image looks like one taken from a standard 12MP camera sensor. Its amazing the level of difference the Samsung sensor is able to produce while the seemingly superior Sony IMX586 sensor doesnt even come close. The results could just be a shortcoming of the Redmi Note 7 Pro. Xiaomi is indeed suggesting users shoot more in the 12MP where the camera uses pixel-binning to generate much more clarity and sharpness. We will explore the difference shooting in 12MP brings as compared to shooting in 48MP with the Redmi Note 7 pro. Dynamic range Both Samsung and Sony with their large sensor promised up to four stops higher dynamic range as compared to smaller sensors. Thats without using any computational photography chops. When shooting in 48MP, both the Redmi Note 7 Pro and the Vivo V15 Pro delivers the native readout of the sensor without applying the AI effects and pixel-binning, which would have tampered with our samples. Shot using Redmi Note 7 Pro (1/574, f/1.8, ISO113) Shot using Vivo V15 Pro (1/798,f/1.8,ISO50) What we saw was a mixed bag of results. In the first sample, the Redmi Note 7 Pro has far better dynamic range than the Vivo V15 Pro. The texture of the wall appears much more prominent on the Redmi Note 7 Pro while on the V15 Pro, that portion is basically much darker with lesser details. Even the plants beside the pathway and the pathway itself are prominently different in both the photos with the Redmi Note 7 Pro offering more details and clarity in the highlights and shadows than the V15 Pro. Shot using Redmi Note 7 Pro (1/1616, f/1.8, ISO113) Shot using Vivo V15 Pro (1/1746,f/1.8,ISO49) In the second sample, however, the Vivo V15 Pro edges out the Note 7 Pro. The leaves have more colour and you can make out the edges of the leaves, while in case of the Note 7 Pro, the leaves all have the same shade of green. The V15 Pro certainly clipped the highlight, but that's expected when you're shooting against the sun. Even the wall looks brighter in Vivo's photo. Final thoughts Based on the spec-sheet of the two camera sensors, the Sony IMX586 is clearly ahead of the Samsung GM-1 sensor. It actually generates a 48MP readout natively, while the Vivo V15 Pro shoots in 12MP first and then upscale it to 48MP. Ideally, Sonys approach should be more rewarding considering there is no loss of data in the 48MP readout while upscaling would ideally result in more data loss. However, we see the Vivo V15 Pro with the Samsung GM-1 sensor edge past the Redmi Note 7 Pro with the Sony IMX586 in terms of detail retention, sharpness as well as in close-ups. The only place where the Sony IMX586 emerges on top is in dynamic range and thats perhaps because of Sonys claim of making the smaller 0.8-micron pixel more sensitive to incoming light. It could also be a result of inferior camera algorithms deployed by Xiaomi in the Redmi Note 7 Pro as compared to the Vivo V15 Pro. For one, the V15 Pro captures images in DCI-P3 colour space, and the result does look significantly more vibrant than the Redmi Note 7 Pro which captures in the standard sRGB colour space. But whats undeniable is the ability to reproduce the details and maintaining sharp textures across a wide range of situations by the Samsung GM-1 sensor. While we did start out with the belief that the Sony IMX586 on the Redmi Note 7 Pro would emerge victorious, the Samsung GM-1 sensor on the Vivo V15 Pro outperformingon the Xiaomi was surely a surprise. 9 hours ago AP-NORC Poll: Income is up, but Americans focus on inflation WASHINGTON (AP) Americans' overall income has accelerated since the pandemic, but so has inflation and a new poll finds that far more people are noticing the higher prices than the pay gains. Two-thirds say their household costs have risen since the pandemic, compared with only about a quarter who say their incomes have increased, according to a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Read Article Subscriber content preview By ELIAS MESERET and YIDNEK KIRUBEL Associated Press HEJERE, Ethiopia Much of the world, including the entire European Union, grounded the Boeing jetliner involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash or banned it from their airspace, leaving United States' airlines on Tuesday as one of the few remaining operators of the plane involved in two deadly accidents in just five months. The European Aviation Safety Agency took steps to keep the Boeing 737 Max 8 out of the air, joining Asian and Middle Eastern governments and carriers that also gave in to safety concerns in the aftermath of Sunday's crash, which killed all 157 people on board. . . . Subscriber content preview PORTLAND (AP) The mayor of Portland is criticizing how local prosecutors and his own Police Bureau handle street violence among political factions that frequently clash on the city's streets. In a news conference Monday Ted Wheeler called for a change to rules and laws if they do not allow police officers to arrest brawlers and vowed that anyone fighting on Portland streets will not escape unpunished. . . . BSNL has no money to pay its 1.76 lakh employees State-owned telecom service provider Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) has failed to pay salaries to its 1.76 lakh employees in February after it reported stagnating revenues and mounting losses that has hit Rs8,000 crore. Reports say this is likely to be the case this month as well and that there could be no immediate end to the salary woes of the staff of public sector telecom provider. While this has been the first time when the company has failed to meet its salary obligations, BSNL sources said the cash flow pattern indicates that the company may have trouble meeting the March salary obligations on time as the state-owned company is sinking more and more into the red. BSNL employees in some states have staged demonstrations demanding the early release of the salary. The Odisha unit of BSNL employees ended a three-day strike today. The employees' union has written to minister of telecommunications Manoj Sinha demanding that the government release sufficient funds to the company to pay the salaries. The employees have also demanded that the government take steps to revive the company. The staff unions allege that the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has been delaying a proposal to raise a bank loan as proposed by the board of directors of BSNL, according to some reports. BSNL's losses have been steadily rising over the past few years. The company reported a loss of Rs8,000 crore in FY18, compared to Rs4,786 crore in the previous financial year. The company's losses are showing no signs of coming down and the FY19 losses could top Rs8,000 crore, says a report. DoT sources say the BSNL, which has a total debt burden of Rs13,900 crore, can take a loan only to meet capital expenditure and not for meeting operational costs. Reports also say that a DoT panel has found about 35,000 employees of the BSNL as excess. Also, according to the panel, about 55 per cent of the BSNL revenues go for meeting the wage bill which keeps rising annually. However, the company's revenues have remained stagnant for many years now as it is the facing tough competition from private players. The price war started by reliance jio has also adversely affected BSNL's revenues. Meanwhile a Financial express report said BSNL has started paying the February salaries to staff at its corporate office in Kerala, Jammu and Kashmir and Odisha. India grounds all Boeing 737 Max aircraft The Director General of Civil aviation (DGCA) has issued fresh directive to domestic airlines to halt flight operations of Boeing B737 Max aircraft, following the crash of the Ethiopian Airline B737 Max 8 aircraft ET-AVJ, soon after take-off on 10 March. India's aviation watchdogs decision to immediately ground the Boeing 737 Max aircraft comes after an Ethiopian Airline crash killed 157 people, including four Indians. All Boeing 737 max planes will stay grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations, the civil aviation ministry said late on Tuesday. The DGCA had, on Monday, prescribed deployment of experienced pilots for operating B737 Max aircraft and ensure the crew have undergone training as advised in the directive issued by DGCA dated 3 December 2018. The Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, while on a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi. This is the second fatal accident to B-737 Max aircraft within a span of five months. At present, two Indian carriers, SpiceJet (12 aircraft) and Jet Airways (5 aircraft) have these aircraft in their fleet. The DGCA on Tuesday reviewed the issue along with the Indian operators covering all reported snags/ defects of significant nature along with rectification action(s) taken on these aircraft. SpiceJet tried to defend the new model of the US aircraft manufacturer's best-selling 737, saying, "The Boeing 737 MAX is a highly sophisticated aircraft." However, following the DGCA directive, SpiceJet too will have to immediately ground the 12-13 B737 Max. The five Max of Jet Airways, however, remain grounded for other reasons. These were grounded even before the Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday. The DGCA also reviewed compliance of an earlier advisory issued after the Lion Air accident on 3 December 2018. During the review, it was observed that the daily defect and daily incident reports contained defects of routine nature and no significant concern were observed. However, in view of the Ethiopian Air accident of 10 March 2019 and based on the discussion held, DGCA prescribed additional actions and compliance of all Boeing SOPs, FAA emergency advisory and Boeing operations circulars for B737-8 Max operations. DGCA said the measures have been communicated to Boeing and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for suggesting any additional measures/ advice. A large number of countries and standalone airlines have grounded the B737 Max, with places like Singapore and Australia even banning overflying of the B737 Max over their airspace. SilkAir, a subsidiary of Singapore Airlines (SIA), used to operate its Max to Hyderabad and Bangalore. SilkAir will be flying the Boeing 737 NG (new generation) to Hyderabad and Bangalore instead of the Boeing 737 Max, said an SIA spokesperson. Singapores aviation authority has suspended all variants of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft into and out of Singapore. Australias Civil Aviation Safety Authority temporarily suspended airlines from flying B737 MAX jets to or from Australia. China and Indonesia had done so soon after Sundays crash of an Ethiopian B737 Max that killed all 157 on board. Aerolineas Argentinas is grounding its five Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes and so are Ethiopian Airlines, Aeromexico, Cayman Airways and South Africas Comair and South Korea's Eastar Jet. It is about a snag in the aircraft, its operating system. It is not something that can be taken care of by simply asking for experienced pilots to fly the plane. That decision of DGCA made no sense, said a senior pilot of the B737 Max who said a new operating system almost gives the Max a mind of its own after which the pilots can do nothing. As a precautionary measure UK has decided to stop any Boeing 737 MAX commercial passenger flights from any operator arriving, departing or overflying UK airspace, the UK Civil Aviation Authority said in a statement. Safety comes first. Until all doubts have been cleared up, I have ordered that German airspace be closed to all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft with immediate effect, Reuters quoted transport minister Andreas Scheuerhe was quoted as saying. Frances civil aviation authority DGAC also said it was banning Boeing 737 MAX aircraft from French airspace. Norwegian Airlines, which operates 18 such planes, will keep them grounded pending advice from aviation authorities, AFP quoted operations chief Tomas Hesthammer as saying. South Korea, meanwhile, ordered the only airline in the country that deploys the jets to suspend operations of its two Boeing MAX 8s. With this nearly 40 per cent of the in-service fleet of 371 Boeing 737 MAX jets is grounded, according to industry publication Flightglobal. That includes 97 jets in biggest market China. While most countries banned their carriers from operating the Boeing737 Max 8, the US carriers, however, said they are not cancelling MAX 8 flights, in a show of confidence in the manufacturer. Reports citing Boeing officials said the 737 MAX 8 was "as safe as any airplane that has ever flown the skies." US regulators on Monday ordered Boeing to make urgent improvements to the best-selling jet, but ruled out grounding before investigation into the crash of the Ethiopian aircraft concluded. Pak army holds sway over Baluch's giant copper and gold mine Pakistans military, the countrys power centre, is looking to have a greater say in the countrys resources as well. An army-controlled engineering firm, Frontier Works Organisation (FWO), is positioning itself to be part of any consortium involved in bidding for the development of one of the worlds biggest untapped copper and gold deposits, say reports. The government of Prime minister Imran Khan is looking to attract foreign investment into the Reko Diq mine, in resource-rich Baluchistan region, which is currently stalled by a multi-billion dollar legal wrangle with foreign mining firms, reports citing sources familiar with the matter said. Development of the mine, which is situated near the borders with Iran and Afghanistan, has been delayed for long by a dispute with previous investors in the project, Canadas Barrick Gold and Chiles Antofagasta. The government is now trying to settle the dispute as a World Bank arbitration tribunal, which ruled against Pakistan in 2017, is in the next few months expected to announce how much in damages the country must pay to the foreign firms, who are claiming more than $11 billion. The dispute relates to the withholding of a mining lease. Analysts say, Pakistans move is backed by state-run companies from resource-hungry China that have long been looking to usurp the coveted Reko Diq. Resource-rich Saudi Arabia has also recently shown interest in developing the mine, according to Pakistani officials. The army sees the Reko Diq mine as a strategic national asset and, according to government officials, the military has become the last word in the development of the mine. The army has come as a drag on Prime Minister Imran Khans move to attract foreign investment to Pakistan and stave off an economic crisis. Not only that the military will be in a position to decide which investor develops the mine, but an army-controlled engineering firm, Frontier Works Organisation (FWO), will be part of any company or consortium involved in developing the mine. Baluchistan government officials say the mine has already been taken over by the Pakistan armys General Headquarters in Rawalpindi. A Reuters report citing the military spokesmans office said: the military may only participate in the development of Reko Diq as per the governments requirement. The army spokesperson, however, acknowledged that the FWO, which currently builds roads in difficult regions, has developed substantial mining capability and would be interested in taking a role in the project. Pakistan government also needs support of the army to operate mines in the insurgency-hit southwestern province of Baluchistan. The army, which has ruled Pakistan for nearly half its history, is believed to have a greater influence over the Imran Khan government and is trying to tighten its hold on the civilian government at federal and provincial level to boost its resources. Figures released by Louth County Council show that the 29 councillors received a combined total of 779,311 in representational payments and expenses in 2018. Each councillor is entitled to receive 16,867 in representational payments pre tax, along with 1,499.96 for being members of their local municipal district committees. There are also allowances for councillors who chair municipal district and Strategic Policy Committees, each councillor also receives allowances for broadband and phone expenses. Liam Reilly (FF) received 11,664.00 of a chairpersons allowance for his six months as chairman of the council, with Colm Markey (FG) receiving 8,333.36 of a chairpersons allowance for his six months as chairperson, along with 2,191 for foreign travel incurred when he travelled to New York for Saint Patricks Day celebrations. Councillor John McGahon (FG) was the highest earning Dundalk councillor earning 35,685, made up in part by 5,000 for his role as chair of Dundalk Municipal District, a payment of 3,500 for chairing a Strategic Policy Committee and 6,592 in expenses. Councillor Conor Keelan (FF) was the second highest earning Dundalk councillor earning 31,048, made up in part of 7,000 for chairing the municipal District of Dundalk and 4,133 in expenses. The third highest earning Dundalk councillor was Mark Deary (GP) who earned a total of 28,947, part of which was made up of 6,000 received for being a chairperson of a Strategic Policy Committee and 4,362.80 in expenses. The total spent on councillors was up by almost 70,000 on last years figures of 710,933.19, this was in part due to a new allowance amounting to 43,498.84 paid to members of Municipal District Committees. Representational payments amounted to 489,152.86 in total, while expenses came to 131,757.14. A total of 14,313.96 was spent on training expenses for training provided by the Association of Local Government in Ireland and the Local Authority Members Association who train local councillors. Finally the overall allowance for broadband and phones came to 11,466.67. Dundalk mum-of-three Heather Oakes has told the Democrat that her family has been left with no hope of buying their current rental property after learning that the Rebuilding Ireland Loan is no longer available. Under the program, first-time buyers who had been refused mortgages by two banks were eligible to avail of a Government-backed mortgage from their local authority for up to 90% of the market value of the property. However, Louth Housing Director Paddy Donnelly confirmed during the Dundalk Municipal District meeting last week that Louth County Council had been given directives to cease issuing loans under the program, despite a statement from the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government stating that the scheme is in full operation. Ms. Oakes explained the couple's situation, both of whom are self-employed, saying: We were getting our application ready but have been told not to bother by the local authority. Two years ago our rent was raised by 15 percent, and we've been informed that it will go up by 25 percent from April 1. To put that into perspective, we will be paying 25 percent more in rent per month and have been refused a mortgage with repayments which are significantly less than the rental payments every month. Our landlord is doing his best, but he's under pressure too. It's a waste of money and now were stuck in limbo. We want to pay towards owning our own place instead of renting. There is no protection for private renters in Louth. We've been advised to get our application ready in case the loan becomes available again. But there is no timeline and we can't get on a waiting list. Ms. Oakes concluded: We had a chance at getting our foot on the property ladder and it's been taken away from us. It sounded too good to be true and it was. Its very frustrating. The Rebuilding Ireland home loan scheme which has been running since February 1, 2018, and was supposed to be available until 2020, was intended to help first-time buyers get a foot on the property ladder. Concerns have been raised that a lack of funding was the reason for the cessation of the loans after it emerged that the Government has already approved more than 25 percent of the nationwide 200 million fund. ALONE, the charity which supports older people to age at home, is calling on Louth people to put a Spring in their step and start volunteering for ALONE this March. As demand for ALONE services increases, ALONE is looking for volunteers throughout the county to help to provide Befriending & Support and Telephone Befriending for older people. ALONE match older people who would like extra social contact with volunteers who provide companionship through a weekly visit or telephone call. Volunteers can also help with practical supports such as helping access information or with phone calls and appointments. Sean Moynihan, ALONE CEO, said: Our volunteers help to support older people by offering a visit or a phone call, having a chat and providing access to support. Often, they go on to make a friend for life. We provide training to volunteers before they are paired with an older person and we are always on hand to support both the older person and the volunteer. We are asking anyone who may be interested to extend a helping hand and help us to support and empower more older people to live happily and securely at home. ALONE supported 500 older people across Louth in 2018 with the help of 100 volunteers. With increasing demand for their services, ALONE will expand further throughout the county in 2019. ALONE is also encouraging older people who may need support to get in touch. We can offer support with problems large and small. Many older people may feel like they are putting someone out by asking for help, but we want them to know that help is what were here for all they need to do is lift the phone, continued Moynihan. ALONEs most recent Annual Report cited a sizable growth in the demand for its services, echoing Irelands rapidly changing demographic and the continued difficulties faced by older people across the country. With over 1.2 million people to be aged over 60 in Ireland by 2032, the need for services to support older people will only grow. To find out more information about getting support from or volunteering for ALONE, visit alone.ie or call (042) 933 0103. As grass cutting season commences, the local Green Party has today called on Louth County Council to set aside areas in public parks and roadside verges for pollinators. The party is calling on all councils to get active in halting the alarming decline in biodiversity by implementing actions within the All Ireland Pollinator Plan. According to the Green Party, there are several simple actions which Louth County Council could do to promote biodiversity and protect pollinators in the Ardee area such as the identification and protection of existing sources of food and shelter for pollinators on general council land. Altering the frequency of mowing grassy areas to allow more native plants to flower is another simple action the Council could take while the funding of pollinator projects on Council land would be a great way for the Council to demonstrate best practice to other sectors. Local Green Party candidate for Ardee/Mid-Louth, Sean Connolly said: Recent reports have outlined the crash in biodiversity globally and throughout Ireland. Biodiversity is essential to the healthy functioning of ecosystems, with a third of the food we eat is depends on animal pollinators. I recommend anyone who is interested in this issue to visit www.pollinators.ie to see what projects they could start within their own local communities such as the installation of a flower meadow. A simple idea Louth County Council could implement is the funding of a Pollinator Award in the Tidy Towns competition. 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Wendi Thomas (R-Bucks) will soon introduce legislation to crack down on home delivery theft. With the ongoing pandemic, online purchases have skyrocketed, said Thomas, who is crafting the legislation with input from Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub. With the continuing COVID-19 health crisis, many packages are being left unattended on porches to avoid unnecessary interactions.... Thirty-six beagles are in danger of being euthanized at the end of a pesticide test, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) revealed Tuesday. The beagles' potential fate was only one of several shocking revelations uncovered by an almost 100-day HSUS investigation into the testing of beagles and hounds at Charles River Laboratories in Michigan. "The disturbing findings at this facility are sadly not unique. Experiments are happening at hundreds of laboratories each year throughout the country, with more than 60,000 dogs suffering. But that does not have to be the fate for these 36 beagles," HSUS President and CEO Kitty Block said in the press release. The beagles are being used in a test by Corteva Agriscience, the Agriculture Division of DowDuPont, to assess a new fungicide called Adavelt. They are being force-fed the fungicide via gelatin capsules for one year, and will be killed in July 2019 to assess damage unless the test is stopped. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) used to require that fungicide be tested on dogs for one year, but abandoned the requirement a decade ago after scientists said it did not give useful information, HSUS explained in the investigation report. However, the test is still technically required by Brazil's Agencia Nacional de Vigilancia Sanitaria (ANVISA), which is why DowDuPont told HSUS they were conducting it. HSUS said it had received an email from ANVISA saying it would grant waivers to companies wishing to be exempt from the test. HSUS also asked for and received a formal, written confirmation of the policy. But DowDuPont's regulatory affairs division said that it needed confirmation from ANVISA on its product specifically, according to HSUS. "For months we have been urging Dow to end the unnecessary test and release the dogs to us. We have gone to considerable lengths to assist the company in doing so, but we simply cannot wait any longer; every single day these caged dogs are being poisoned and are one day closer to being killed. We must turn to the public to join us in urging Dow to stop the test immediately and to work with us to get these dogs into suitable homes," Block said. DowDuPont, for its part, released a statement saying it had been working with HSUS to persuade ANVISA to scrap the test requirement, and would stop the test as soon as the Brazilian agency confirmed it had done so. "Animal testing is not something Dow undertakes lightly, but neither is it something the Company can discontinue when it is required by regulatory authorities," DowDuPont said. In addition to the fungicide tests, the HSUS investigation, which ran from April to August 2018, uncovered other incidents including tests by Paredox Therapeutics and Above and Beyond NB LLC. The press release summarized the findings: Among the beagles tested on, the Humane Society of the United States documented the horrible short life of one dog named Harvey who clearly sought attention by humans and was characterized by the laboratory staff as "a good boy." Harvey was being used to test the safety of two substances when poured into the chest cavity in a study commissioned by Paredox Therapeutics. Hounds were also used when the protocol called for a larger dog breed, such as a study by Above and Beyond Therapeutics for surgical implantation of a device to pump drugs through the spinal canal. Charles River carried out tests on dogs for at least 25 companies during the time of the Humane Society of the United States investigation. The HSUS is working to replace animal testing with more effective ways of assessing the harms and benefits of substances. It said that 95 percent of human drug tests fail even after promising animal results. "We must bring science into the 21st century for the benefit of humans who desperately need treatment and for the dogs whose lives deserve to be spared," the investigation concluded. Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the University of Vermont supported the Paredox Therapeutics study. The post has been changed with the updated information from the Humane Society of the United States. Additionally, the article has been updated to reflect the fact that the fungicide test is being conducted by Corteva Agriscience, the Agriculture Division of DowDuPont, not Dow AgroSciences, according to the companies updated statement. By Patrick Rogers In the U.S., we consume more than 15 billion pounds of tissue each yearmore than 50 pounds per person. It's taking a major toll on forests like the Canadian boreal. Few people give much thought to how their toilet paper is made. And to be fair, there's nothing particularly engaging in the backstory of this industrially produced, single-use paper product. But it's important to remember that many toilet paper products equal treesand we flush them down the drain at an alarming rate. Each year, vast swaths of forest are logged to produce the wood pulp that gets turned into toilet paper, with the final product chemically bleached to whiten and soften. In fact, tissue productsfacial tissues, paper towels, napkins, and toilet paperare the fastest-growing sector of the international paper industry, with production forecast to rise by 6 percent annually through 2022. In the U.S., we consume more than 15 billion pounds of tissue each year. That means we currently buy, use, and flush about 20 percent of the world's supply of tissue products, even though we account for just over 4 percent of the world's population. To see the devastating impact of this market, U.S. consumers need only look north of the Canadian border to the great boreal forest that rings the continent in green, which is being felled at an alarming rate, in part to satisfy the global appetite for tissue. Logging crews mostly clear-cut 28 million acres of woodland between 1996 and 2015, an area roughly the size of Ohio, according to NRDC's report The Issue With Tissue: How Americans Are Flushing Our Forests Down the Toilet. This logging destroys and degrades wildlife habitat, threatens the lands and way of life of indigenous peoples, and robs the planet of one of its most important defenses against climate change. "The boreal is a massive storehouse of carbon that has accumulated in its soils and vegetation over millennia," said the report's author, Jennifer Skene, an environmental law fellow in NRDC's International Program. "When it is released because of logging, it has devastating ramifications for global efforts to mitigate climate change." Only by using alternatives to tissue products made with virgin wood pulp can we begin to reverse the destruction of the Canadian boreal and other forests, Skene said, who points out that "Many people are not aware of the toll tissue takes on our forests." Here's how you can be part of the solution. Shop for Sustainability Fortunately, there are plenty of competitively priced varieties of tissue with minimal impact on forests. The Issue With Tissue report's scorecard assigns grades to all the major brands of toilet paper, paper towels and facial tissues, as well as popular house brands at leading supermarkets and brands that have adopted more sustainable practices. Leading the scoreboard are six products Green Forest, 365 Everyday Value 100% Recycled, Earth First, Natural Value, Seventh Generation and Trader Joe's Bath Tissue that are made entirely of recycled material and use a chlorine-free bleaching process that does less harm to the environment than other methods. Grades of A go to toilet papers that contain the most postconsumer recycled content; this means that most of their materials have already been processed once and therefore reduce waste. (The alternative, preconsumer recycled content, is largely scrap and excess raw material collected during the manufacturing process. While it is far preferable to virgin forest fiber, it does less to offset waste than postconsumer recycled content.) The brands that get an A "have looked into the impact of their products and are embracing alternative materials that will allow us to continue using tissue products with a fraction of the environmental cost," Skene said. Think Twice Before Buying These Products Brands that get an F in the scorecard including Charmin Ultra, Angel Soft, Quilted Northern and Up & Up Soft & Strong rely entirely on virgin forest fiber for their products. These tissue products have three times the carbon footprint of those made from recycled paper; many also use dangerous bleaching processes. You may notice that the label "FSC certified" appears on some of these brands. While the Forest Stewardship Council is the world's most creditable independent certifier of responsibly managed forests and provides an important set of standards for products that require the use of wood (like lumber), there is no reason tissue products should be made from trees in the first place, Skene said. Give Your Household Tissue Use More Consideration Next time you reach for a package of facial tissue at the supermarket, visualize a majestic evergreen spruce or fir in the forest. "Something that we use once and throw away should not be destroying a vital part of our earth," said Shelley Vinyard, who oversees NRDC's work encouraging corporations to establish stronger protections for Canada's boreal forest. In the bathroom, use paper tissue products with reusable materials that get the job done. Keep rags beside your sink and use them as much as possible instead of paper towels. Replace paper napkins with cloth versions, and instead of one-and-done facial tissues, rely on handkerchiefs and washcloths that can be laundered and reused indefinitely. In 92 countries and counting, hundreds of thousands of students are planning to skip school on March 15 as part of the "School Strike 4 Climate" a growing movement of young people demanding that policymakers worldwide take urgent and radical steps to battle the climate crisis. For the past several months, students around the world have joined the #FridaysForFuture school strike launched last year by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, whose solitary protests outside her country's parliament inspired by the Parkland students advocating for stricter gun laws in the U.S. generated headlines that helped spur the global youth climate movement. "I think we are only seeing the beginning. I think that change is on the horizon and the people will stand up for their future," Thunberg told The Guardian about the mass mobilization planned for March 15. "It's going to be very, very big internationally, with hundreds of thousands of children going to strike from school to say that we aren't going to accept this any more." Here's how to get involved: Visit FridaysForFuture.org for more information. Find a protest near you (U.S. protests here). Plan and register your own protest. Check out this 350.org resource page: "5 ways you can support the school climate strikes." Spread support on social media with the hashtags #FridaysForFuture, #ClimateStrike, and #SchoolStrike4Climate. Students striking for climate action in Melbourne, Australia on Nov. 30, 2018. Stop Adani / CC BY 2.0 Although the movement has elevated public demands for coordinated global efforts to cut planet-warming emissions generated from human activity, Thunberg added: "I am not more hopeful than when I started. The emissions are increasing and that is the only thing that matters. I think that needs to be our focus. We cannot talk about anything else." We are striking because our world leaders have yet to acknowledge, prioritize, or properly address our climate crisis," declares a mission statement from the U.S. organizers. "We are striking because marginalized communities across our nation especially communities of color, disabled communities, and low-income communities are already disproportionately impacted by climate change." "We are striking because if the social order is disrupted by our refusal to attend school, then the system is forced to face the climate crisis and enact change," the statement continues. "We are striking for the Green New Deal, for a fair and just transition to a 100 percent renewable economy, and for ending the creation of additional fossil fuel infrastructure." In addition to the Green New Deal, which Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced to Congress as a resolution last month, the U.S. movement calls for declaring a national emergency, pointing to recent warnings from experts that "we have 11 years to avoid catastrophic climate change." The lead organizers of U.S. climate strikes are Alexandria Villasenor, a 13-year-old from New York City; Haven Coleman, a 12-year-old from Denver, Colorado; Maddy Fernands, a 16-year-old from Edina, Minnesota; and Isra Hirsi, the 15-year-old daughter of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). The students' strike has been enthusiastically supported by major environmental organizations, including the Center for Biological Diversity, Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, March for Science, Sierra Club, the Sunrise Movement and 350.org. Reposted with permission from our media associate Common Dreams. The U.S. Department of Education made an arbitrary and capricious decision when it decided last year to delay an Obama-era rule that would change the way states monitor how minority students are identified and served in special education, a federal judge in Washington has ruled. U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkans decision March 7 vacated the Education Departments delaying action because, she ruled, it is in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. That statute governs how federal agencies propose and implement regulations. The decision is a win for the Council for Parent Advocates and Attorneys, which sued the Education Department after it announced the delay last June. COPAA said that putting the rules on hold would cut down on the number of districts that would be required to review their policies, practices, and procedures around special education identification and services for minority students. Today is a victory for children, especially children of color and others who are at risk for being inappropriately identified for special education, said COPAAs executive director, Denise Marshall, in a statement. Education Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Hill said the department is reviewing the ruling. The Equity in IDEA rules that are at the center of this decision are complex. The political moves around them are complicated, as well. Federal Requirements The Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act requires states to monitor how districts identify minority students for special education, discipline them, or place them in restrictive settings. Districts found to have significant disproportionality in one or more of these areas must set aside 15 percent of their federal special education funding to spend on remedies. The law says that states are in charge of determining how significant a problem must be before it merits the set-aside. And, just a fraction of the nations school districts have ever been identified as having problems severe enough to require a federal set-aside. The Obama administration aimed to change that. Implemented in December 2016, in the last weeks of President Barack Obamas second term, the rule would have created a more consistent, standardized evaluation process. As a result, more school districts around the country were expected to have to use part of their federal funds on remedying significant disproportionality. When the department, under Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, announced the delay, it said that we are concerned the 2016 significant disproportionality regulations could result in de facto quotas, which in turn could result in a denial of services based on a childs ethnic or racial status/group. The secretary is concerned that the regulations will create an environment where children in need of special education and related services do not receive those services because of the color of their skin. Another Reversal In her ruling last week, however, the judge said that the Education Department already thoroughly examined the concerns around quotas back in 2016, when it put the rule in place. The department cant just decide to reject those conclusions two years later, she indicated in her decision. The government did not explain why it had changed its position that the 2016 safeguards would be effective. Instead, it concluded that the 2016 regulations could incentivize the use of quotasa conclusion that was contrary to and inconsistent with its prior determination, the ruling stated. This is a second reversal for the Education Department on a policy connected to students with disabilities. In 2018, the Education Departments office for civil rights started closing hundreds of disability-related complaints, following new guidelines that said such cases would be dismissed when they represent a pattern of complaints against multiple recipients. The office enforces laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, both of which prohibit public entities from discriminating against individuals based on disability. It also enforces Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, and other laws that prohibit discrimination based on age, race, color, or national origin. Facing a lawsuit from advocates, the department changed that policy in November to get rid of the pattern of complaints dismissal guidelines. It also committed to conducting investigations of complaints that were previously dismissed under the policy change. Clashes With Advocates Many special education advocates have been highly critical of DeVos, starting from her confirmation hearing when she faced pointed questioning about the IDEA and seemed at first to suggest that states could follow the federal law at their discretion. (The IDEA is not discretionary law.) In 2017, as a part of an administration-wide effort to sweep away outdated, unnecessary or ineffective regulations, the Education Department identified dozens of pieces of guidance that should be eliminated. Most of the documents were simply old and had expired, but the reaction in some corners was furious. The Education Department responded to that by releasing an explanation of just why those particular documents were targeted for elimination. Children and their parents have long felt anxious about school. This year, however, many leave home each morning suffering from an acute fear unknown before 1999: that their school will be the site of another mass shooting. Since last years deadly school shootings, parents, psychologists, and educators report that children are suffering from PTSD and panic attacks that may be adversely affecting their brain development. Given these disturbing trends, it is understandable that community, police, and school leaders feel intense pressure to demonstrate they are taking tangible measures to keep children safe. The most visible way to do so, unfortunately, is also the least effective, most expensive, and most harmful to vulnerable students. Beefing up the presence of police officers on school grounds is a tempting but wrongheaded approach. Problems caused by the haphazard, reactive way in which police have been thrown into schools start at the most basic level." Although there is no convincing evidence that police presence in schools reduces the risk of the violence parents and children most fear, officials have succumbed to the public pressure, at great expense. In just the first six months after last years deadly Parkland shooting, state legislatures in 26 states allocated nearly $950 million for security upgrades and school resource officers. One Florida county voted to nearly triple the number of school resource officers, or SROs, at an additional cost of almost $4 million. We are not going to engage here in a much-needed debate over whether police should be in schools. Our concerns are more immediate and practical. Cops are in schools in growing numbers, but in our experience as youth advocates, they are mostly untrained to work with youth, do not understand how to adjust to educational environments, receive almost no meaningful oversight, and lack even rudimentary policies to guide their decision-making. Without these minimal requirements, their presence is certain to increase, not reduce, the risk that children of color, children with disabilities, and other vulnerable children will be further harmed, not protected. Problems caused by the haphazard, reactive way in which police have been thrown into schools start at the most basic level. The role or purpose of school resource officers is frequently unclear. When we interviewed SROs in 16 Massachusetts school districts in 2010, we found 16 different ways districts hire, train, and manage the position. Many school resource officers told us that, in the absence of clear direction, they made it up as they went along. One viewed his role as primarily being an informal counselor to students, another as an additional set of hands for school administrators, and a third as a strict enforcer of the rules. Given the enormous amount of discretion built into the job, the decision to arrest a student seemed almost arbitrary at times. One officer routinely arrested students caught fighting, another sent them to the principal, and still another marched the students back into class. One officer told us that he arrested an 11-year-old who kept banging the front door because What else was there for me to do? He was driving the assistant principal berserk. In another school, an SRO handcuffed a 7-year-old to make him stop crying. We found that very few officers received specialized training in adolescent psychology, de-escalation strategies, or how to align policing with an educational mission. They were rarely informed about special programs being implemented in the school. For instance, one SRO was unaware that his high school had adopted a trauma informed approach to school discipline. This knowledge gap meant that his responses to student behavior often conflicted with broader school goals. While the National Association of School Resource Officers recommends that officers complete a 40-hour course that includes emergency plans for schools, discussion of SRO roles, de-escalation techniques, and study of the adolescent brain, this is not mandatory. Only three states have enacted laws (Colorado, Massachusetts, and Texas) requiring officers be trained before being deployed to public schools. This situation becomes more dangerous when we consider that, according to the federal Indicators of School Crime and Safety for 2017, almost half of secondary schools have security staff armed with Tasers or other conducted electrical weapons. As a result, we are seeing incidents of inappropriate use of these stun guns on students by police. Two examples, of many, stand out. In Texas, a 17-year-old boy fell forward after being Tased by an SRO. The boy was filmed breaking up a fight. He is now permanently brain damaged. In Ohio, a student was hospitalized after a school police officer accidentally Tased her. A new report from the ACLU found that 1.7 million students attend schools with police, but no counselors . Thats a frightening statistic, given what we know about high arrest rates for minor school offenses, disproportionate targeting of students of color and students with disabilities for the harshest punishments, and the long-term harm to young people who become involved with the justice system. At the very least, these police officers need to be versed in education law, de-escalation strategies, adolescent psychology, and behavioral effects of trauma, violence, and poverty. They should know what other services and supports in the community are availablefor example, mental health counselors, social workers, family crisisto help struggling students. Schools also must do a better job of informing teachers if and when they are allowed to call an SRO to respond. They must also, at a minimum, explain to parents how SROs interact with their children, and the legal consequences of their childrens behaviors. In the not-so-distant future, we hope that officials will reverse investment priorities that favor police over mental health services, counselors, and professional development for teachers. But its already deep into the school year, and we have to move quickly to protect the most vulnerable children. Training, standards and oversight are the very least that we must demand from, and for, law enforcement officers who are charged with serving what we often forget is our nations most precious resource: our children. Students spend more than 1,000 hours with their teacher in a typical school year. Thats enough time to build a relationship that could ignite a students lifetime love of learningand its enough time for the dynamic to go totally off the rails. Education watchers have long known that the relationship with a teacher can be critically important to how well students learn. But emerging research is giving a clearer picture than ever of how teachers can build and leverage strong relationships with their students. People sometimes mistake a kind of casual familiarity and friendliness for the promotion of really deep relationships that are about a childs potential, their interests, their strengths, and weaknesses, said Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Southern California who studies the effects of emotions and mindsets on learning. A lot of teachers ... have really strong abilities to engage socially with the students, but then its not enough, she said. You have to go much deeper than that and actually start to engage with students around their curiosity, their interests, their habits of mind through understanding and approaching material to really be an effective teacher. In a forthcoming longitudinal study with Bank Street College of Education, Immordino-Yang is tracking how the highly effective teachers of low-income students set classroom norms and feelings of trust and safety for studentsbut also leverage that foundation to promote students deeper thinking and engagement. Why are teacher-student relationships important? The relational part of teaching may very well be its most underrated aspect. ... When teachers are good at building relationships with students, the skill is seen more as cover for a lack of content knowledge or wherewithal to instruct with rigor, James Ford, the 2015 North Carolina State Teacher of the Year and the program director for the Public School Forum of North Carolina, told Education Week. To the contrary, he added, Our first job as teachers is to make sure that we learn our students, that we connect with them on a real level, showing respect for their culture and affirming their worthiness to receive the best education possible. A Review of Educational Research analysis of 46 studies found that strong teacher-student relationships were associated in both the short- and long-term with improvements on practically every measure schools care about: higher student academic engagement, attendance, grades, fewer disruptive behaviors and suspensions, and lower school dropout rates. Those effects were strong even after controlling for differences in students individual, family, and school backgrounds. Teachers benefit, too. A study in the European Journal of Psychology of Education found that a teachers relationship with students was the best predictor of how much the teacher experienced joy versus anxiety in class. How does a teachers approach affect that relationship? In a 2018 study, Arizona State University researcher Victoria Theisen-Homer found different teacher-training programs prioritized different kinds of relationships with students: An instrumental focus involved a limited, one-way relationship in which teachers cull bits of information about students specifically to motivate them to behave well and focus on teacher-directed tasks. The relationships were structured as a controlled means to a particular end: student compliance, she found. Students learned that their value was tied to the degree to which they worked hard and behaved in line with what mostly white authority figures demanded. involved a limited, one-way relationship in which teachers cull bits of information about students specifically to motivate them to behave well and focus on teacher-directed tasks. The relationships were structured as a controlled means to a particular end: student compliance, she found. Students learned that their value was tied to the degree to which they worked hard and behaved in line with what mostly white authority figures demanded. A reciprocal focus required teachers to gather complex information and develop a holistic understanding of their students, inviting the students to grapple with content and problems together. These students not only learned to think for themselves, but also had adults who affirmed and responded to their thoughts and experiences. Such interactions prepared them to engage with authority figures, and to someday hold positions of authority themselves, Theisen-Homer said. The study also found in an analysis of two of these programs that teachers trained in the instrumental focus were more likely to go on to teach in low-income, high-minority schools, while those trained in reciprocal relationships ended up in schools with more high-income and white students. It was not clear why teachers ended up sorting in this way, but it raised concerns about differences in the kinds of relationships high- and low-income students might experience with teachers. Sometimes teachers dont understand the importance that their relationship with each student has on that students identity and sense of belonging, said Vicki Nishioka, a senior researcher with Education Northwest who studies teacher-student relationships. What gets in the way of that is a more authoritarian kind of discipline and interaction approach with students, which really doesnt work. For example, a 2016 study randomly assigned teachers to increase their positive interactions with students. Students of teachers who boosted their ratio to five positive comments and interactions for every negative one had significantly less disruptive behavior and more time on task academically than the students of a control group of teachers. How can teachers improve their relationships with students? In a word: Empathy. Across several recent studies, researchers have found that teachers who cultivate empathy for and with their students are able to manage students behavior and academic engagement better. Nishioka finds that trying to suppress biases or stereotypes about students can sometimes make them worse, but practicing perspective-takingactively imagining how a student might perceive or be affected by a situationcan reduce bias and deepen teacher-student relationships. She recommended teachers: Talk to students to understand differences in their perceptions and expectations in class. Research cultural differences between teachers and students to head off cultural misunderstandings, particularly around norms, styles, and language. Teach and model perspective-taking for students in class. How can teachers maintain healthy boundaries with students? Experts caution that for teachers and students, relationship does not equal friend, particularly on social media. Many districts have rules against teachers following or friending current students on Facebook, Twitter, or other platforms, in part because it might open teachers to liability if they see inappropriate behavior from students online. Teachers also should be upfront with students who confide in them that they are required by law to report evidence of abuse and cant keep secrets that could put students in danger. Teacher and education author Starr Sackstein, whose blog is hosted on the edweek.org website, also recommends that while teachers can and should share personal stories if they are purposeful and appropriate to the discussion, they should use these to model for students what level of detail is appropriate for sharing in social conversations. How can relationships with students support teacher quality? While student feedback is often incorporated into teacher evaluations in higher education, it is rarely a direct part of K-12 teacher evaluations. But that doesnt mean districts cant use student feedback to improve teaching practice, and in particular, such feedback can be used to help teachers build deeper relationships with students. For example, the High Tech High Media Arts charter school in San Diego trains students using a six-week course to act as observers. The students met regularly with the teacher to give feedback about their communication skills and engagement in the classroom, and to brainstorm better ways to reach out to students. Teachers and administrators found that going through the training gave students better understanding of the teachers roles. School staff members said that teachers also developed deeper relationships with students, interacted with students in a more positive way during class, communicated information about projects and assignments to students more clearly, generated better questions to stimulate student dialogue during Socratic seminars, and created more collaborative learning environments for students. To build the largest and most complete Amateur Radio community site on the Internet - a "portal" that hams think of as the first place to go for information, to exchange ideas, and be part of whats happening with ham radio on the Internet. eHam.net provides recognition and enjoyment to the people who use, contribute, and build the site. This project involves a management team of volunteers who each take a topic of interest and manage it with passion. The site will stand above all other ham radio sites by employing the latest technology and professional design/programming standards, developed by a team of community programmers who contribute their skills to the effort. The site will be something of which everyone involved can be proud to say they were a part. We welcome your comments. The eHam.net Team, Revision 07/2020. Young construction workers to put their skills to the test Three young apprentices will showcase their skills to the local industry in a day-long competition later this week. Frankie Sansbury, Darren Smith and Owen Bowman will be among the young construction talent competing against each other in six trades: plumbing, carpentry and joinery, painting and decorating, electrical installation, horticulture and brickwork. The homebuilder Dandara is supporting the construction skills test at University College Isle of Man on Friday. Campus News Shibly launches first dental clinic in Iraq to treat families displaced after ISIS attacks By MARCENE ROBINSON The Yezidis were in desperate need of dental care. Dental care that could not only enhance their health, but their self-esteem and create an opportunity for healing. The Yezidis were in desperate need of dental care dental care that could not only enhance their health, but their self-esteem and create an opportunity for healing. The populations that are most affected and vulnerable during times of war are women and children, says Shibly, clinical professor and assistant dean for diversity and inclusion in the School of Dental Medicine. Shibly will return to the Khanke camp March 31 to April 4 with several UB dental school alumni to deliver oral health care to 2,500 children. The clinic was established with the support of the Global Motherhood Initiative, the UB School of Dental Medicine, the University of Duhok College of Dentistry, the Henry Schein Cares Foundation and the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS). The new clinic, established in the Khanke Internally Displaced Population Camp in Duhok, Iraq, will provide the areas nearly 16,000 women and children with their first oral health care in five years. Othman Shibly did not plan to perform any dental work during his first visit to Iraqi Kurdistan. However, a six-day trip to assess the needs of a Yezidi displacement camp led the UB faculty member to launch the camps first dental clinic. From concept to clinic in six days Three women working at the new clinic interview a patient sitting in the dental chair. Shibly is no stranger to launching dental clinics with limited time and resources. Since 2012, he has helped open and support more than 20 dental clinics for Syrian refugees in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. When representatives from Global Motherhood Initiative, a nongovernmental organization that integrates health care with trauma therapy and psychosocial support, learned of Shiblys efforts, they invited him to Iraqi Kurdistan to assess the oral health needs of the Yezidi community living in the Khanke camp. The camp is home to 16,000 people, mostly women and children, who became displaced in 2014 after an attempted genocide by the Islamic State destroyed their communities. Thousands of the women are victims of sexual violence. No dental services have been offered in the camp since its inception. Although care is available in the nearby city Duhok, few of the camps residents have the money or resources to pay for treatment or transportation. During Shiblys visit on Jan. 31, he found cases of severe gum disease, tooth decay and broken teeth. Some of my friends told me that the work Im doing to help Syrian refugees is enough, and any more would be too much. I told them what I always say to my students at UB: We should be like the sun. Anyone under it, human or animal, should feel its warmth, Shibly says. I hope that what we at UB did, and will do, for the Yezidi women will be a step toward their healing. No woman in this time and age should suffer these types of abuses and crimes. To start the clinic, Shibly relied on both previous partners and establishing new connections with organizations in the area. The Global Motherhood Initiative and Yezidi leaders helped him secure a location in the Khanke camp for the clinic. The group hired a plumber and electrician to supply the building with water and power. The Henry Schein Cares Foundation supported the mission by providing dental instruments and supplies, and the UB dental schools Miles for Smiles program helped cover the cost of purchasing locally a dental unit, including a chair, sterilizer and amalgamator. Shibly also partnered with the University of Duhok to gather manpower. More than 100 dental students from the university will support the mission trip at the end of the month. During the clinics first weekend, Shibly performed cleanings and extractions for four women. When he returns on March 31, he plans to treat thousands of children. He will be assisted by UB alum Yousef Al Awadhi, a pediatric dentist based in Kuwait. Erdogan slams 'tyrant' Israeli premier President Erdogan said the Israeli premier was a "tyrant massacring Palestinian children" on Wednesday. Netanyahu had said on Tuesday that Israel is "a nation state not of all its citizens but only of the Jewish people." Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was in Ankara to attend a mass opening ceremony, slammed Benjamin Netanyahu for his remarks on Tuesday. Erdogan also criticized Israel over its assault on the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex, saying the Turkish nation would raise its voice for any attack against the mosque. "WE WILL STAND EVERY ISRAELI ATTACK" Erdogan stated that Turkey will stand against every Israeli attack targeting Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Turkish people would not be silent, even if the rest of the world refused to speak. He said Turkey would maintain its struggle for Jerusalem until the city is administrated in a way that is appropriate with its importance to the Islamic world. In addition, Erdogan warned Israel that Turkey would call it to account for its attacks on the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in front of the international community. Tensions have mounted in Jerusalem since February, when Israeli police briefly sealed the Al-Aqsa compounds Al-Rahma Gate, located adjacent to the eastern wall of the Old City, sparking Palestinian demonstrations. In the weeks since, Israeli authorities have banned scores of Palestinians -- including religious officials -- from entering the compound, which for Muslims represents the worlds third holiest site. Israel occupied East Jerusalem, where Al-Aqsa is located, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. It annexed the entire city in 1980 in a move never recognized by the international community. EU not happy with UK's Brexit vote British parliament rejected Theresa May's improved Brexit deal. The EU on Tuesday warned it had done its part to ensure an agreement on Brexit, however, the possibility of the UKs departure for the bloc without an agreement increased. THE VOTING RESULT OF THE BRITISH PARLIAMENT EU Council spokesman Preben Aaman told Anadolu Agency the bloc was upset with the voting result of the British Parliament. He said the Brexit "deadlock" could only be solved in London because the EU had done everything necessary. Emphasizing that there were only 17 days remaining for the UK to leave the EU, he said, "With today's vote, the possibility of a departure without agreement has seriously increased. We will continue to prepare for a departure without an agreement." Theresa May failed to change the agreement text, which drew reaction due to the "precautionary article" regarding the Northern Ireland border. However, she came to terms with the EU on a mutual document which clarified the term of use of the article. Earlier Tuesday, the British parliament rejected May's "improved" Brexit deal in a 391 - 242 vote. Parliament will vote Wednesday on no-deal Brexit. And Thursday, it will vote on postponing the Brexit date, slated for the end of the month. Over 20 Daesh-linked terror suspects arrested in Turkey Police forces conduct operations in the capital Ankara, Aegean Izmir, northwestern Bursa provinces. Turkish police arrested 23 suspects in separate operations against the Daesh terrorist group on Wednesday, according to police sources. WHO WERE REPORTEDLY OPERATING ON BEHALF OF DEASH The police conducted anti-terror operations across three cities to arrest suspects, who were reportedly operating on behalf of Daesh, said the sources, who asked not to be named due to restrictions on speaking to the media. At least 14 foreign national Daesh suspects who entered the country illegally were held by security forces in the capital Ankara. The suspects were reportedly operating for the terror group in Syria and Iraq. Separately, eight Daesh suspects were arrested in the Aegean province of Izmir. Also, police captured a woman sought with a red Interpol notice for her alleged link to the terror group in the northwestern Bursa province. More than 300 people have lost their lives in Daesh-claimed attacks in Turkey, where the terror organization has targeted civilians in suicide bombs, rocket and gun attacks. Turkish security forces have been involved in a long-running campaign to thwart Daesh activities. Turkish aide slams Netanyahu on remarks against Erdogan Lies and pressure will not hide your crimes, says Turkish presidential spokesman. A senior aide to the Turkish president lashed out Wednesday at remarks by Israel's prime minister targeting the Turkish leader. HE CONDEMNED THE NATION-STATE OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE Presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kaln said Benjamin Netanyahu attacked President Recep Tayyip Erdogan "for exposing the Israeli leader's racist remarks towards Arabs and Muslims". "The apartheid state he leads occupies Palestinian lands, kills women, children, and imprisons Palestinians in their own land," Kaln said on Twitter. "Lies and pressure will not hide your crimes," Kaln added. On Tuesday, Kaln condemned Netanyahu's affirmation of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. "I strongly condemn this blatant racism and discrimination. 1.6 million Arabs/Muslims live in Israel. Will the Western governments react or keep silent under pressure again?" Kaln said on Twitter. On March 12, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel is "a nation-state not of all its citizens but only of the Jewish people". Turkish parliament speaker meets Moroccan counterpart Habib al-Malki praises recent Turkish advancements in the development sector. Turkish Parliament Speaker Mustafa Sentop on Wednesday met his Moroccan counterpart, Habib al-Malki, to discuss means of enhancing cooperation between the two countries. THE PRAISED TURKISH ADVANCEMENTS IN THE DEVELOPMENT SECTOR The meeting took place on the sidelines of the 14th session of the Parliamentary Union of Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) member-states. After the meeting, al-Malki praised Turkish advancements in the development sector, several concrete examples of which he saw during a recent visit to the country. Wednesdays talks, he added, had tackled means of further enhancing bilateral cooperation, especially in the field of parliamentary affairs. Sentop arrived in Morocco on Monday for a two-day visit, during which he met several Moroccan officials. US-backed Guaido wants an office at the palace Venezuelas opposition leader and self-declared interim President Juan Guaido on Tuesday said he would find an office at the presidential palace once he is backed by the army. Venezuela has been rocked by protests since Jan. 10 when Maduro was sworn in for a second term following a vote boycotted by the opposition. Tensions flared when Guaido declared himself acting president Jan. 23 -- a move supported by the US and many European and Latin American countries. "I WILL TAKE MY OFFICE" We will need an office to work, very soon. When I get the support of the armed forces, I will go to Miraflores and take my office, Guaido told supporters in the Santa Monica region of his intention to occupy the presidential palace. Protesters gathered in Caracas, as well as other cities, after Guaidos call for nationwide demonstrations against the power outage which has lasted since last week. A decrease in the number of demonstrations was observed in Caracas, as communication and Internet access were interrupted due to the power blackout. Venezuela plunged into darkness last Thursday with power cuts hitting 21 out of 23 states. President Nicolas Maduro and his government have termed the outage a "sabotage" amid a lingering political crisis in the country. Earlier Tuesday, Maduro announced the arrest of two suspects who were allegedly trying to sabotage a major hydroelectric power plant. US will not suspend Boeing 737 MAX planes; discussion on The US aviation regulator said it would not ground Boeing Co 737 MAX planes after a crash in Ethiopia, bucking a trend of countries around the world that have suspended the aircrafts operations. US and Ethiopian aviation safety officials discussed on Tuesday whether the flight data and cockpit voice recorders from Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, which crashed on Sunday on a flight to Nairobi, would go to Washington or London for download and analysis. NO SYSTEMIC PERFORMANCE ISSUES US officials said the devices suffered some damage but they were confident of some initial results within 24 hours of the data being downloaded. US carriers are eager to see the results as a growing number of countries and carriers are grounding the planes. There were 371 of the 737 MAX family jets in operation before this weeks groundings and about two-thirds of the fleet are now grounded, based on Reuters calculations. It is not clear if a final decision on where the recorders would go for analysis has been made. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) declined to comment. The FAAs acting administrator, Dan Elwell, said its review had shown no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. Trump spoke to Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg and got assurances the aircraft was safe and did not need to be grounded, two people briefed on the call said. The European Unions aviation safety regulator suspended all flights in the bloc by the 737 MAX and a US senator who chairs a panel overseeing aviation suggested the United States take similar action following Sundays crash, the second since October involving that type of plane. But Elwell said no foreign civil aviation authorities had provided data that would warrant action. If any safety issues were identified during an urgent review of the Ethiopian Airlines crash, the FAA would take immediate and appropriate action, he said. Britain, Germany and France joined a wave of suspensions of the aircraft following the crash, piling pressure on the United States to follow suit. Boeing, the worlds biggest planemaker, which has seen billions of dollars wiped off its market value since the crash, said it understood the actions but retained full confidence in the 737 MAX and had safety as its priority. THE CAUSE OF THE ACCIDENT IS UNKNOWN The cause of Sundays crash, which followed another disaster with a 737 MAX five months ago in Indonesia that killed 189 people, remains unknown. On Monday, the FAA released details of a series of design changes and training requirements mandated from Boeing on the MAX fleet after the Indonesia crash. There is no evidence the two crashes are linked. Plane experts say it is too early to speculate on the reason for the latest crash. Most are caused by a unique chain of human and technical factors. Elizabethtown College ranks among the countrys highest value-added higher education institutions, according to a new study by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. Its report, Beyond College Rankings: A Value-Added Approach to Assessing Two and Four-Year Schools, assesses how well colleges affect student post-graduation economic success. Elizabethtown College graduates had mid-career earnings that were 27% higher than predicted. Elizabethtown graduates actual mid-career earning average of $86,500 was 27% higher than the predicted amount. This value-added figure places Elizabethtown College at #6 out of Pennsylvanias 153 other four-year institutions. Signature Learning Experiences (SLE) An important component of Elizabethtown College Real World Learning are Signature Learning Experiences (SLEs), highly engaging and challenging educational activities that supplement classroom learning. Students are required to complete at least two SLEs from the list below. The SLE requirement can be satisfied by focusing on one type of SLE or a combination of SLEs. Student's can complete an SLE requirement in ANY discipline; but, the student must satisfy all prerequisite and/or co-requisite requirements to enroll in the course. Sort by Category: Start typing to further narrow your options: (example: Biology will display all lines with the word Biology) Class SLE SLE Title/Description Department Notes ACM_PROG CA ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. Mathematical & Computer Sciences SLE designation will be awarded upon notification from the Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences AC 405 CA Auditing Business Effective FA 2021 ART 491 CA Senior Exhibition Fine and Performing Arts ART 496 CA Architecture Design Studio (EGR 496) Engineering and Physics/Fine and Performing Arts Previously ART 499B BA 416 CA Marketing Management Business BA 495 CA Business Policy and Corporate Strategy Business BA 497 CA International Business Seminar Business BA 499 CA People Analytics Seminar Business Previously titled Seminar in Management BIO 495 CA Seminar in Biology Biology Previously BIO 412 CH 396 CA Chemistry Seminar II Chemistry Previously CH 362 CH 455 CA Integrated Chemistry Laboratory I Chemistry CH 456 CA Integrated Chemistry Laboratory II Chemistry CH 495 CA Chemistry Seminar III Chemistry Previously CH 461 CH 496 CA Chemistry Seminar IV Chemistry Previously CH 462 COM 495 CA Communications Capstone Communications Previously COM 485 CS 341 CA Software Engineering Computer Science Effective: Fall 2016. CS 341 course registrations prior to this date will not satisfy the SLE:CA requirement. CSC 462 CA Cognitive Science Capstone Interdisciplinary For additional information, contact the Cognitive Science Minor Advisor CTL_CAP CA Called to Lead Capstone Experience Interdisciplinary SLE designation will be awarded upon notification from the Assistant Director of Called to Lead Program. DAT 400 CA Data Analytics Capstone Interdisciplinary ED 495 CA Senior Seminar for Early Childhood Education ED 496 CA Senior Seminar for Elementary/ Middle Level Education ED 497 CA Senior Seminar for Secondary Education Education EGR 400 CA Engineering Portfolio Engineering and Physics EGR 402 CA Senior Project in Engineering II Engineering and Physics Previously EGR 492 EGR 496 CA Architecture Design Studio (ART 496) Engineering and Physics/ Fine and Performing Arts Previously EGR 499B; For additional information, contact the Architectural Studies Advisor EN 496 CA Word, Web, and Design Interdisciplinary Previously CW 386 FBE 494 CA Family Business Governance and Succession Planning Business Effective Fall 2018; Previously in Catalog as BA 494 FIN 425 CA Advanced Financial Management Business FPA 490 CA Arts Administration Strategy Fine and Performing Arts HI 450 CA Topics in Historiography History ILS 491 CA Project in Interfaith leadership Studies Interdisciplinary For additional information, contact the Interfaith Leadership Studies Advisor JOINTDEG CA Joint Degree Programming Interdisciplinary For additional information, contact the Department Advisor for the specific Joint Degree Program. MA 430 CA Creative Problem Solving II Mathematics MA 457 CA Actuarial Models - Financial Economics Mathematics MA 458 CA Actuarial Models - Life Contingencies Mathematics MA 459 CA Short-Term Actuarial Mathematics Mathematics PBH 495 CA Public Health Seminar Public Health Effective Fall 2020 PCS 465 CA Directed Research Project in Peace and Conflict Studies Interdisciplinary For additional information, contact the Peace and Conflict Studies Minor Advisor PH 495 CA Film Studies Capstone Course Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies Previously PH 462 PS 495 CA Senior Seminar in Political Science Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies Previously PS 498 REL 495 CA Capstone in Religious Studies Religious Studies Previously REL 494; Renumbered A.C. 4.16.2019 SOA_EXAM CA National Credentialing Exam - Actuarial Science. Mathematical & Computer Sciences SLE designation will be awarded upon notification from the Chair of Mathematical and Computer Sciences regarding the successful completion of the Societies of Actuaries (SOA) Examination. SRRECITL CA Senior Music Recital. Fine and Performing Arts SLE designation will be awarded upon notification from the Chair of the Fine and Performing Arts Department about the successful completion of the students senior recital SW 495 CA Senior Seminar in Social Work Social Work Previously SW 498 TH 400 CA Senior Project in Theatre Fine and Performing Arts Previously TH 405 AC 474 CB Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program (VITA) Business ASL 105 CB American Sign Language Occupational Therapy BA 360 CB Washington Institute (PS 360) Business BA 370_1 CB Seminar on Economic and Social Development in a Developing Country Business Experimental Course. EC 280 CB International Organizations Seminar Business EGR 201 CB Sophomore Project Engineering and Physics Previously EGR 291 EN 282 CB Technical Writing English Effective Fall 2017 FBE 450 CB Entrepreneurship in the Emerging Economies Business Effective Fall 2018; Previously in Catalog as BA 450 HON 201 CB Elizabethtown History: Campus and Community (PHS 201) Business Effective Fall 2018; Previously in Catalog as BA 450 HON 246 CB Refugees in Global & Regional Context (PS 246/INT 246) Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies Effective Fall 2021 IC 207 CB Aging, Regeneration, Spirituality Occupational Therapy/Sociology INT 246 CB Refugees in Global & Regional Context (PS 246/HON 246) Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies Effective Fall 2021 MFT 300 CB Moving Forward Together Mentor Program (MFT) Center for Community and Civic Engagement SLE designation will be awarded upon notification from the Director of Center for Community and Civic Engagement MU 150 CB Music Therapy Professional Seminar Fine and Performing Arts To earn SLE credit, a student must complete two semesters of MU 150. PBH 111 CB Principles of Public Health Public Health Effective Fall 2020 PBH 330 CB Social Epidemiology Public Health Effective Fall 2020 OT 110 CB Occupations Across the Lifespan Occupational Therapy Effective Fall 2018 PH 370 CB Philosophy of the City and Everyday Life Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies PHS 201 CB Elizabethtown History: Campus and Community (HON 201) Business Effective Fall 2018; Previously in Catalog as BA 450 PS 246 CB Refugees in Global & Regional Context (HON 246/INT 246) Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies Effective Fall 2021 PS 316 CB The American Electoral Process Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies PS 360 CB Washington Institute (BA 360) Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies PSY 245 CB Adult Development and Aging Psychology Previously PSY 227 PSY 360 CB Psychology of Stress Psychology Effective Spring 2018 REL 170_2 CB Amish and Anabaptist Groups in Context Religious Studies SAN 331 CB Social Statistics Sociology SP 325 CB Spanish Service Learning Modern Languages SW 160 CB Social Problems and Response of Social Welfare Institutions Social Work SW 233 CB Human Behavior in the Social Environment Social Work SW 280 CB Multicultural Counseling Skills Social Work SW 344 CB Aging: Social Response and Implications Social Work SW 357 CB Child Welfare Social Work COM 370_3 CX Ireland in Text and Image Communications May Term CP170_2 CX Sophomores & Juniors Abroad Sophomore Year Experience Program Winter Term EGR 401G CX Senior Project in Engineering I - GAMBIA Only Engineering and Physics EGR 401 (GAMBIA) Winter-term Experience ONLY. Previously EGR 491G. FBE 280 CX Global Family Business Business Previously BA 281 FR 171 CX Ethnicity, Identity and Power in the Caribbean: Martinique and St. Johns Modern Language May Term Effective: May 2017. HI 370_5 CX Peacemaking in Shanxi: China and the Church of the Brethren History Experimental Course: Effective May 2018. JA 250 CX Discovering Contemporary Japan: A Three-Week Cultural Immersion Experience Modern Language May Term Effective: May 2017. PSY 237 CX Social Issues in South Africa II Psychology Cross listed with SW 237; Previously PCS 171 REL 370_5 CX Peacemaking in Shanxi: China and the Church of the Brethren SHORTABR CX Study Abroad - Short Term Study Abroad Programs SLE designation will be awarded upon the successful completion of an approved Study Abroad Short-term experience approved by the Director of Study Abroad. For more information, contact the Director of Study Abroad Programs STUDYABR CX Study Abroad Semester Study Abroad Programs SLE designation will be awarded upon the successful completion of an approved Study Abroad experience. For more information, contact the Director of Study Abroad Programs SW 237 CX Social Issues in South Africa II Social Work Cross listed with PSY 237; Previously PCS 171 SW 346 CX Exploring the Culture and Services of Vietnam Social Work SW 347 CX May Term in Vietnam Social Work AC 470-473 IN Internship in Accounting Business AN 362 IN Archeology Field School Sociology AN 470-474 IN Internship in Anthropology Sociology ART 470-474 IN Internship in Fine Arts Fine and Performing Arts BA 345 IN Managing Innovation and Techonolgy Business BA 350 IN European Union Simulation I (PS 350) Business Reclassified from Community-Based Learning; Fall 2020 BA 470-474 IN Internship in Business Business BA 475 IN Co-operative Fellowship in Business Business BA 476 IN Co-operative in Business Business BHA 470 IN Internship in Healthcare Administration Health Professions Effective Fall 2022 BIO 274 IN Biological Internship Biology BIO 473 IN Advanced Internship in Biology Biology BIO 474 IN Internship in Biological Sciences Biology CCN 470 IN Wings of Success Co-Curricular Non-Credit Internship Program Career Development Center SLE designation will be awarded upon notification from the Assistant Director of Internships & Employer Engagement CH 471 IN Internship in Forensic Science Chemistry CH 472 IN Internship in Chemistry Chemistry COM 470-473 IN Practicum Communications COM 474 IN Internship in Communications Communications CS 470-474 IN Internship in Computing Mathematical & Computer Sciences ED 470 IN Special Topics in Education Education EGR 470-474 IN Internship in Engineering Engineering and Physics EGR 475 IN Engineering Coop Engineering and Physics EN 470-474 IN Internship in English English FBE 470-474 IN Internship in Family Business & Entrepreneurship Business FIN 470-474 IN Internship in Finance Business Effective Fall 2020 FR 470-474 IN ML Internship: French Modern Languages GER 470-474 IN ML Internship: German Modern Languages HI 470-474 IN Internship in Historical Studies History HW 470-474 IN Internship in Health & Wellness Health & Wellness IC 206 IN Middle East Politics Interdisciplinary Effective Fall 2020 ILS 470-474 IN Internship in Interfaith Leadership Studies Interdisciplinary For additional information, contact the Interfaith Leadership Studies Advisor INT 332 IN Model United Nations (PS 332) Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies For additional information, contact the International Studies Minor Advisor INT 470-474 IN Internship in International Studies Interdisciplinary For additional information, contact the International Studies Minor Advisor JA 470-474 IN ML Internship: Japanese Modern Languages MA 470-474 IN Internship in Mathematics Mathematics MU 254 IN Practical Experiences I: Music Therapy Fine and Performing Arts MU 331 IN General Music Field Experience Fine and Performing Arts MU 334 IN Choral Music Field Experience Laboratory Fine and Performing Arts MU 355 IN Practical Experiences II: Music Therapy Fine and Performing Arts MU 356 IN Practical Experiences III: Music Therapy Fine and Performing Arts MU 434 IN Instrumental Music Methods Field Experience Fine and Performing Arts MU 457 IN Practical Experiences IV: Music Therapy Fine and Performing Arts MU 458 IN Practical Experiences V: Music Therapy Fine and Performing Arts MU 470-474 IN Music Internship Fine and Performing Arts MU 475 IN Professional Internship in Music Education Fine and Performing Arts MU 478 IN Non-Roster Professional Internship in Music Therapy Fine and Performing Arts MU 479 IN Professional Internship in Music Therapy Fine and Performing Arts NEU 475 IN Internship in Neuroscience Psychology Effective Fall 2019 OT 475 IN Health Internship Occupational Therapy Internship in a health setting for students not pursuing Masters Program. For more information, contact the Chair of the Occupational Therapy Department. OT 532 IN Occupational Therapy Intervention: Pediatric Populations Occupational Therapy Effective Fall 2018 OT 533 IN Occupational Therapy Intervention: Adult Populations Occupational Therapy Effective Fall 2018 OT 571 IN OT Fieldwork I Occupational Therapy Effective Fall 2021 PBH 474 IN Public Health Field Instruction Public Health Effective Fall 2020 PCS 470-474 IN Internship in Peace and Conflict Studies Interdisciplinary For additional information, contact the Peace and Conflict Studies Minor Advisor PHS 470-474 IN Internship in Public Heritage Studies History Effective Fall 2019 PS 302 IN Mock Trial II Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies PS 332 IN Model United Nations (INT 332) Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies For additional information, contact the International Studies Minor Advisor PS 350 IN European Union Simulation I (BA 350) Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies Reclassified from Community-Based Learning; Fall 2020 PS 370 IN Terrorism and Counterterrorism Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies Effective Fall 2020 PS 470-478 IN Internship in Political Science Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies PS 479 IN Capital Semester Internship Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies PSY 475 IN Internship in Psychology Psychology Previously titled: Field Study. A.C. 1.30.2018 REL 470-474 IN Internship in Religious Studies Religious Studies SO 470-474 IN Internship in Sociology Sociology SP 470-474 IN ML Internship: Spanish Modern Languages SW 367 IN Generalist SW Practice I: Individuals Social Work SW 368 IN Generalist SW Practice II: Families and Small Groups Social Work SW 470 IN Field Experience I Social Work SW 471 IN Field Experience II Social Work TH 350 IN Design and Production Practicum Fine and Performing Arts TH 360 IN Performance Practicum Fine and Performing Arts TH 470-474 IN Internship in Theatre Fine and Performing Arts AN 400 SR Senior Project in Anthropology Sociology AN 490 SR Research in Anthropology Sociology ART 401 SR Advanced Studies in Ceramics Fine and Performing Arts ART 402 SR Advanced Studies in Drawing Fine and Performing Arts ART 403 SR Advanced Studies in Painting Fine and Performing Arts ART 404 SR Advanced Studies in Printmaking Fine and Performing Arts ART 405 SR Advanced Studies in Sculpture Fine and Performing Arts ART 406 SR Advanced Digital Arts Fine and Performing Arts Effective Fall 2020 AS 490 SR Directed Research Project in Asian Studies Modern Languages/Asian Studies BA 400 SR Senior Project in Business Business BIO 491 SR Research in Biology Biology BIO 492 SR Research in Biology Biology CH 491 SR Research in Chemistry Chemistry CH 492 SR Research in Chemistry Chemistry COM 400 SR Honors in the Discipline I Communications Previously COM 498 COM 401 SR Honors in the Discipline II Communications Previously COM 499 CS 400 SR Projects in Computing Mathematical & Computer Sciences Previously CS 490 CS 495 SR Honors Projects in Computing Mathematical & Computer Sciences EC 400 SR Senior Project in Economics Business EC 410 SR Econometrics Business ED 399 SR Thesis Preparation Education ED 400 SR Senior Project in Education Education EN 420 SR Pre-1800 British Authors English EN 430 SR Post-1800 British Authors English EN 440 SR American Authors English EN 450 SR World Authors English EN 490 SR Directed Senior Research I English Previously EN 498 EN 491 SR Directed Senior Research II English Previously EN 499 FR 497 SR French Senior Research Project II Modern Languages GER 497 SR German Senior Research Project II Modern Languages HI 400 SR Senior Honors Project History HI 490 SR Independent Research in History History ILS 498 SR Junior-Senior Independent Research Interdisciplinary For additional information, contact the Interfaith Leadership Studies program advisor. INT 465 SR Capstone Directed Research Project in International Studies Interdisciplinary For additional information, contact the International Studies Minor Advisor JA 497 SR Japanese Senior Research Project II Modern Languages MA 400 SR Senior Project Mathematics MA 490 SR Research in Mathematics Mathematics MU 454 SR Psychology of Music and Research Methods II Fine and Performing Arts MU 490 SR Independent Research in Music Fine and Performing Arts MU 495 SR Seminar in Musicology Fine and Performing Arts NEU 490 SR Research Practicum Psychology Effective Fall 2019 OT 492 SR Undergraduate Scholarship Practicum I Occupational Therapy OT 494 SR Undergraduate Scholarship Practicum II Occupational Therapy PH 490 SR Senior Thesis in Philosophy Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies PHY 491 SR Physics Research I Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies PHY 492 SR Physics Research II Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies PS 491 SR Research in Political Science Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies PS 492 SR Research in Political Science Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies PS 490 SR Senior Thesis Politics, Philosophy and Legal Studies Previously PS 499 PSY 410 SR Research in Perception Psychology Previously PSY 413. Renumbered A.C. 1.30.2018 PSY 415 SR Research in Cognition Psychology Previously PSY 414; Renumbered A.C. 1.30.2018 PSY 435 SR Research in Social Psychology Psychology PSY 440 SR Research in Developmental Psychology Psychology Previously PSY 425; Renumbered A.C. 1.30.2018 PSY 485 SR Advanced Psychological Research Psychology SLE designation for Experimental Course. Approved by A.C. 10.31.2017; Approved by A.C. on 1.30.2018 as permanent Catalog course PSY 485 PSY 490 SR Research Practicum Psychology REL 490 SR Independent Research in Religous Studies Religious Studies Previously REL 498; Renumbered A.C. 4.16.2019 SCARP SR Scholarship, Creative Arts and Research Projects Sponsored Research and Programs SLE designation will be awarded upon notification from the Director of the Office Sponsored Research and Programs (OSRP) SO 400 SR Senior Project in Sociology Sociology SO 490 SR Research in Sociology Sociology SP 497 SR Spanish Senior Research II Modern Languages SW 400 SR Senior Project in Social Work Social Work TH 490 SR Independent Research in Theatre Fine and Performing Arts Patients understanding their medications and taking them as instructed are important parts of improving the care and outcomes of heart attack patients, as well as potentially reducing avoidable readmissions, according to research presented at the ACC Quality Summit in New Orleans. A heart attack is typically an unexpected event, which can leave patients overwhelmed by new medications, clinicians and other additions to their health care upon release from the hospital. When patients are discharged from the hospital, hospital staff educate them about their medications. However, many patients have difficulty understanding and following these instructions. A new quality improvement plan, developed at Olathe Medical Center in Olathe, Kansas, and initiated as part of the American College of Cardiology's Patient Navigator Program: Focus MI, showed promising results and shed light on how to approach the issue. The study group considered the patient perspective on the hospital discharge and follow-up experience when developing solutions. "When patients leave a hospital, they often feel there has been little preparation for the discharge plan of care," said Tara See, RN, BSN, Olathe Medical Center and a leader in the initiative. "Another complaint is that follow-up care is not well established at discharge, there is limited communication with providers receiving them after hospitalization, medication reconciliation and instructions may be hard to understand, and expectations are unclear regarding their recovery and needs when they are discharged." In April 2018, an interdisciplinary team at Olathe Medical Center, including an assigned bedside RN, cardiology nurse navigator, floor pharmacists and outpatient cardiac rehab staff, established and implemented the following medication education communication process: After a patient is admitted, an assigned bedside nurse reviews any new medications with the patient, family member, or caregiver, including what they are used for and any side effects of that particular medication. "This can be easily done through patient medication cards that are premade and ready to go," See said. Once the discharge medications have been prescribed by the physician, the cardiology nurse navigator asks the patient to write out medication information on a visual aid form called a medication log. This include the names of their discharge medications, what the medications are used for, dose, frequency and what time of day the medications should be taken. See said, "This can be done in conjunction with the floor pharmacist's instructions at discharge or done separately depending on similar availability." Next, the floor pharmacist educates the patient in greater depth about their medications, explaining potential side effects and any drug interactions, what to do if a dose is missed and offering any other needed instructions. After discharge, the patient will receive a transition of care phone call within 48 hours from a care coordinator or the nurse navigator. This call includes medication teach back, which requires the patient to read back from memory or read from their prescription bottles the name and usage of their medication. At the patient's first outpatient cardiac rehab appointment, they are asked to place a check mark by their current medications from a list of common cardiac medications. This helps ensure they are knowledgeable about their medications. Using the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey--a satisfaction survey required by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for all U.S. hospitals, the study group found the hospital's HCAHPS scores for medication understanding increased by 10 percent between quarter one and quarter two in 2018 following program implementation. Additionally, before plan implementation, the 2018 quarter one unadjusted readmission rate was 8.2 percent. Since implementation, the quarter two rate went down to 3.4 percent and quarter three was 3.6 percent. "We realize improving medication understanding is only part of what hospitals need to do to help reduce readmissions," See said. "We are also continuing to focus on other goals, such as increasing risk assessment and appropriate interventions placed on high risk patients. We believe this will optimize our process and further decrease readmissions." ### About the Patient Navigator Program: Focus MI With 1 out of every 5 patients diagnosed with an acute myocardial infarction (AMI) readmitted to the hospital within 30-days of discharge, preventing avoidable readmissions is a national priority. The ACC's Patient Navigator Program has successfully worked with select hospitals around the country to implement interventions aimed at bridging gaps between inpatient and outpatient AMI care through 30-days post hospitalization. Hospitals participating in the Patient Navigator Program have reported increases in the number of AMI patients assessed for risk of readmissions and greater understanding among MI and heart failure patients about their medications. In addition, they have successfully reached patients with education and community resources aimed at ensuring smoother patient transitions from the hospital to home. The ACC's Patient Navigator Program: Focus MI builds on the success of the ACC Patient Navigator Program and is designed to pull evidence-based best practices to improve the care and outcomes of acute myocardial infarction (MI) patients and further reduce avoidable hospital readmissions beyond 30 days. The American College of Cardiology envisions a world where innovation and knowledge optimize cardiovascular care and outcomes. As the professional home for the entire cardiovascular care team, the mission of the College and its more than 52,000 members is to transform cardiovascular care and to improve heart health. The ACC bestows credentials upon cardiovascular professionals who meet stringent qualifications and leads in the formation of health policy, standards and guidelines. The College also provides professional medical education, disseminates cardiovascular research through its world-renowned JACC Journals, operates national registries to measure and improve care, and offers cardiovascular accreditation to hospitals and institutions. For more, visit acc.org. Many archeological studies based on strontium isotope signatures may have erroneous conclusions; agricultural lime can dramatically alter the isotopic signature of an area, so that it no longer reflects the values in prehistoric times A study by researchers at Department of Geoscience, Aarhus University, Denmark now shows that strontium isotopes may often be used incorrectly in archeological studies, as the widespread use of added (strontium-rich) agricultural lime in low- to non-calcareous soils can dramatically alter the strontium isotopic composition of the surface waters running through them and the plants growing within them. This is of special significance for strontium-isotope based provenance studies, where the strontium isotopic values measured in a prehistoric person's remains or in a given artefact are compared to measured strontium isotopic values in the surrounding, modern environment. Reference maps showing strontium isotope data dominated by the isotopic signature of modern agricultural lime, do not show the true strontium isotopic composition of the area during prehistoric times, when the individual being studied lived., or the object being studied was in created. This can result in erroneous interpretations of the origin and movement of these prehistoric people and artefacts. In their study published in Science Advances, the geologists Erik Thomsen and Rasmus Andreasen from Aarhus University discuss two prominent examples of this: The iconic Bronze Age women, the Egtved Girl and the Skrydstrup Woman, who were found in Denmark in 1921 and 1935 respectively, but were recently (2015 & 2017) interpreted to have originated far away from Denmark. Moreover, the Egtved Girl was interpreted by the study's authors to have traveled back and forth between Denmark and another place, likely her homeland that was believed to be southern Germany. These conclusions became a part of a larger framework of ideas of extended European mobility, migration, and trade, during the Bronze Age. Conversely, the strontium data presented in the new study show that these two women could have obtained their strontium isotopic signatures within 10 km of their burial mounds, and do not indicate any cause to suspect that the women came from afar or traveled great distances during their lifetimes. It is noteworthy that the effects of agricultural lime on the strontium isotopic composition demonstrated here is not isolated to this study's field areas in western Denmark but is likely to occur worldwide in arable areas with non-calcareous soils. The use of agricultural lime is ubiquitous in farming on less fertile soils to provide calcium for the plants and adjust soil acidity. Thus, many studies using strontium isotopes for provenance and mobility studies in these farmed low-calcareous areas may well need revision, and researchers should use care when sampling in these areas for such studies, in the future. ### Physician-scientists in the Cancer Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have developed a preclinical, potent therapy attached to an antibody that targets a surface protein expressed in most childhood neuroblastomas, effectively killing cancer cells. The researchers published their findings today in Science Translational Medicine. "If there is an ultimate 'bad guy' of neuroblastoma cell surface proteins--present on most tumors, but not on healthy tissues, and also vulnerable to immunotherapeutic targeting--this just may be it," said study leader Yael Mosse, MD, a pediatric oncologist and researcher at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). "In 2008, we discovered mutations in the anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) gene as the major cause of the inherited form of neuroblastoma and showed that these same mutations are present in about 14 percent of neuroblastoma tumors from patients with the most aggressive form of this disease. This established ALK as a druggable target in neuroblastoma and provided the rationale for the clinical development of ALK inhibition therapy. We now show that native ALK (in the absence of a mutation) is present on most neuroblastoma tumors, providing us with an exciting opportunity to target ALK in the majority of patients." Neuroblastoma, a pediatric cancer of the developing peripheral nervous system that usually occurs as a solid tumor in a child's chest or abdomen, is the most common cancer in infants, and accounts for more than 10 percent of all childhood cancer deaths. Children with the high-risk form of the disease continue to have a poor prognosis, despite intensive drug therapy. Mosse, along with other scientists in her lab, demonstrated that the ALK protein appears on the surface of most neuroblastoma cells and is not detectable on normal cells, indicating that ALK is a useful target for immunotherapy. Researchers worked with pharmaceutical colleagues to weaponize an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC), one of a rapidly growing class of anticancer agents. That ADC, called CDX-0125-TEI, combines a specific monoclonal antibody engineered to recognize ALK with a potent chemotherapy drug--an alkylating agent called thienoindole (TEI). In cell cultures and animal models of neuroblastoma, the ADC-ALK approach killed neuroblastoma cells, with no discernible toxicity to healthy cells. "The goal of this approach is to harness the presence of ALK to precisely deliver a poison only to the cancer cell, without harming the healthy surrounding cells," said Mosse. "This study is proof of concept that the ALK protein is a good immunotherapy target and, as we optimize this approach for the clinic, has the potential to be useful for the majority of aggressive neuroblastomas and to minimize the harsh consequences of therapy," said Mosse. She added, "In addition, our research could have great relevance for other cutting-edge immunotherapeutic strategies, such as CAR T-cell therapy, that harness the immune system to kill cancer, and is currently showing tremendous efficacy in children with leukemia. Our new data support clinical development of an immunotherapy drug not just for neuroblastoma, but for other hard-to-cure childhood cancers expressing the ALK gene, including rhabdomyosarcomas." Over decades, CHOP clinicians and researchers have built one of the world's leading programs in neuroblastoma. The Mosse laboratory is focused on the underlying molecular mechanisms by which ALK gene activation contributes to development and progression of pediatric neuroblastoma, and to identify targeted, less toxic cancer therapies for children with ALK-mediated disease. ### Funding for this research was provided by the U.S. Department of Defense (award W81XWH-12-1-0486) with additional support from Kolltan Pharmaceuticals, Solving Kids' Cancer and Braden's Hope Foundation. Yael P. Mosse, et al, "An antibody-drug conjugate directed to the ALK receptor demonstrates efficacy in preclinical models of neuroblastoma," Science Translational Medicine, online March 13, 2019. Children's Hospital of Philadelphia: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1855 as the nation's first pediatric hospital. Through its long-standing commitment to providing exceptional patient care, training new generations of pediatric healthcare professionals, and pioneering major research initiatives, Children's Hospital has fostered many discoveries that have benefited children worldwide. Its pediatric research program is among the largest in the country. In addition, its unique family-centered care and public service programs have brought the 564-bed hospital recognition as a leading advocate for children and adolescents. For more information, visit http://www.chop.edu The genetic and molecular make-up of individual breast tumours holds clues to how a woman's disease could progress, including the likelihood of it coming back after treatment, and in what time frame, according to a Cancer Research UK-funded study published in Nature today (Wednesday). In the first study of its kind, scientists at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute at the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with Professor Christina Curtis at Stanford University, examined the patterns of genetic changes within tumours from nearly 2000 women with breast cancer and followed their progress over 20 years - including whether their cancer returned. They used this information to create a statistical tool that can better predict if, and when a women's breast cancer could come back. While the genetic analyses used in the study are too detailed for everyday use, the team are now working on a routine test that could one day help doctors offer women a more accurate prediction of if, and when their disease may return. Although not available to patients yet, this means that in the future, treatments and follow-up can be tailored, improving women's chances of survival. Professor Carlos Caldas, lead researcher at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, said: "Treatments for breast cancer have improved dramatically in recent years, but unfortunately for some women, their breast cancer returns and spreads, becoming incurable. For some, this can be many years later - but it's been impossible to accurately predict who is at risk of recurrence and who is all clear. "In this study, we've delved deeper into breast cancer molecular subtypes so we can more accurately identify who might be at risk of relapsing and uncover new ways of treating them." Previous results from this group of researchers had already revealed that breast cancer isn't just one disease, but instead could be classified into one of eleven different molecular subgroups.* The latest findings highlight how these molecular subtypes have distinct clinical 'trajectories', which can't be predicted by looking at commonly used characteristics (such as size, stage, oestrogen receptor (ER), or Her2 status) alone.** These clinical trajectories vary considerably, even between tumours that seem similar. For example, the team found, among women with a form of the disease called triple-negative breast cancer, there was a distinct subgroup whose outlook is initially poor, but for whom the disease is unlikely to come back in those who survived 5 years.*** They also identified subgroups of women with oestrogen receptor-positive (ER+) tumours, who were at a higher risk of their cancer coming back up to 20 years after they were first diagnosed. Around 12,300 women in the UK **** could belong to one of these late relapse subgroups and therefore might benefit from longer courses of treatments such as tamoxifen, or more frequent check-ups.***** "We've shown that the molecular nature of a woman's breast cancer determines how their disease could progress, not just for the first 5 years, but also later, even if it comes back." said Dr Oscar Rueda, first author of the paper and senior research associate at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute. "We hope that our research tool can be turned into a test doctors can easily use to guide treatment recommendations." The model also revealed how molecular subgroups could behave very differently if a patient's cancer returns. They commonly spread to different parts of the body and some are more aggressive than others, affecting how much time women survive for following a relapse.****** Professor Karen Vousden, Cancer Research UK's chief scientist, said: "This study provides some valuable new insights into how we might identify women whose breast cancer is likely to return. "We're still a way off being able to offer this type of detailed molecular testing to all women and we need more research to understand how we can tailor treatments to a patient's individual tumour biology. But this is incredibly encouraging progress. One in seven women will get breast cancer in their lifetime in the UK, and we hope that research like this will mean that if faced with the disease, even more of our daughters and granddaughters will survive." In addition to developing an affordable test for future use in hospitals, Caldas' team are also already investigating personalised treatment options for different breast cancer subtypes.******* The next steps will be to recruit patients onto different clinical trials depending on the molecular makeup of their tumour. Catharine Scott, 51, from Cambridge, was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer in 2016. She had the molecular biology of her tumour analysed as part of the Personalised Breast Cancer Programme, part funded by Cancer Research UK at Addenbrooke's Hospital. This programme aims to confirm whether women are receiving the best treatment for their tumour type, and if they might be eligible for a clinical trial should they relapse in the future. Since finishing treatment, Catharine had one scare in the summer of 2018, but it was not a recurrence. She has annual check-ups and mammograms. Catharine said: "I finished my treatment and found it very strange knowing I wouldn't see anyone for a year. I was at the hospital every week, then every three, then suddenly that's it. It's quite scary and definitely a worry. I spoke to my consultant at the time and asked, 'how likely am I to get this again?' "They can tell you the risks and likelihood, and how things have been in the past. If they were able to make it more personalised that would be more reassuring. It would definitely be better than feeling you have to cross your fingers. "I feel lucky to have been on the trials and I'm glad to be helping with research. Women in the past contributed to get treatment where it is today and I'm glad to be doing my bit for my daughter, for other women and for the future generations." ### Peer Reviewed Observational Study People For media enquiries contact Kathryn Ingham in the Cancer Research UK press office on 020 3469 5475 or, out of hours, on 07050 264 059. Notes to editor: Rueda, O., et al. Dynamics of breast cancer relapse reveal late recurring ER-positive genomic subgroups. Nature. * Breast cancer is the most common cancer in the UK, accounting for 15% of all new cancer cases (2015) * There are around 55,000 new cases of invasive breast cancer diagnosed in the UK each year, that's about 150 every day * Around two-thirds (65%) of women diagnosed with breast cancer in England and Wales survive their disease for twenty years or more, but the disease still claims around 11,4 00 deaths each year https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/statistics-by-cancer-type/breast-cancer *The METABRIC (Molecular Taxonomy of Breast Cancer International Consortium) study stratified breast tumours into 10 (now 11) different integrative clusters based on distinct genomic drivers. Published results from Professor Caldas in collaboration with Prof Sam Aparicio: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10983 **Women with breast cancer are treated according to their age, menopausal status and the clinical characteristics of their tumour including size, grade, whether cancer is present in the lymph nodes, whether it's hormone receptor positive or negative, and presence of the HER2 protein. ***Cancers clinically classified as triple negative had different recurrence dynamics. For IntClust10, the first 5 years after surgery largely defined patient outcomes and the probability of relapse after 5 years was 0.33, rising to only 0.38 after 20 years for the average patient. This behaviour is distinct from IntClust4ER- cases who exhibit a persistent and increasing risk of relapse with a probability of 0.32 at 5 years and 0.50 after 20 years. ****Estimated assuming the patient population from this study (total: 1865) is representative of the number of women diagnosed with breast cancer in the UK in 2015 (cases: 54751) https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/statistics-by-cancer-type/breast-cancer. *****Researchers found differences in the relapse trajectories amongst ER+ patients. IntClust3,7,8 and 4ER+ had better prognoses than IntClust1, 2, 6 and 9. The latter late recurring subgroups account for 26% of all ER+ cases and are at particularly high risk of late relapse after surgery with mean probabilities of relapse ranging from 0.42 to 0.56 up to 20 years post-surgery. ******For a subset of patients (618 out of 1079 with distant relapse) a complete description of all recurrences is available, enabling analysis of the rates and routes of distant metastases and their lethality. Integrative Clusters revealed additional variability in distribution of metastatic sites, although due to the limited sample size in each group, many differences are not statistically significant. *******METABRIC data and samples are being used in drug development as part of the personalised breast cancer programme https://crukcambridgecentre.org.uk/news/breast-cancer-dna-%E2%80%98barcoding%E2%80%99-programme-be-rolled-out About Cancer Research UK Cancer Research UK is the world's leading cancer charity dedicated to saving lives through research. Cancer Research UK's pioneering work into the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer has helped save millions of lives. Cancer Research UK receives no funding from the UK government for its life-saving research. Every step it makes towards beating cancer relies on vital donations from the public. Cancer Research UK has been at the heart of the progress that has already seen survival in the UK double in the last 40 years. Today, 2 in 4 people survive their cancer for at least 10 years. Cancer Research UK's ambition is to accelerate progress so that by 2034, 3 in 4 people will survive their cancer for at least 10 years. Cancer Research UK supports research into all aspects of cancer through the work of over 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses. Together with its partners and supporters, Cancer Research UK's vision is to bring forward the day when all cancers are cured. For further information about Cancer Research UK's work or to find out how to support the charity, please call 0300 123 1022 or visit http://www.cancerresearchuk.org. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of the earliest large-scale celebrations in Britain - with people and animals travelling hundreds of miles for prehistoric feasting rituals. The study, led by Dr Richard Madgwick of Cardiff University, is the most comprehensive to date and examined the bones of 131 pigs, the prime feasting animals, from four Late Neolithic (c. 2800-2400BC) complexes. Serving the world-famous monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury, the four sites - Durrington Walls, Marden, Mount Pleasant and West Kennet Palisade Enclosures - hosted the very first pan-British events, feasts that drew people and animals from across Britain. The results show pig bones excavated from these sites were from animals raised as far away as Scotland, North East England and West Wales, as well as numerous other locations across the British Isles. The researchers believe it may have been important for those attending to contribute animals raised locally at their homes. Before now, the origins of people that took part in rituals at these megalithic monuments and the extent of the population's movements at the time have been long-standing enigmas in British prehistory. Dr Richard Madgwick, of the School of History, Archaeology and Religion, said: "This study demonstrates a scale of movement and level of social complexity not previously appreciated." "These gatherings could be seen as the first united cultural events of our island, with people from all corners of Britain descending on the areas around Stonehenge to feast on food that had been specially reared and transported from their homes." Representing great feats of engineering and labour mobilisation, the Neolithic henge complexes of southern Britain were the focal point for great gatherings in the third millennium BC. Pigs were the prime animal used in feasting and they provide the best indication of where the people who feasted at these sites came from as almost no human remains have been recovered. Using isotope analysis, which identifies chemical signals from the food and water that animals have consumed, the researchers were able to determine geographical areas where the pigs were raised. The study offers the most detailed picture yet of the degree of mobility across Britain at the time of Stonehenge. Dr Madgwick said: "Arguably the most startling finding is the efforts that participants invested in contributing pigs that they themselves had raised. Procuring them in the vicinity of the feasting sites would have been relatively easy. "Pigs are not nearly as well-suited to movement over distance as cattle and transporting them, either slaughtered or on the hoof, over hundreds or even tens of kilometres, would have required a monumental effort. "This suggests that prescribed contributions were required and that rules dictated that offered pigs must be raised by the feasting participants, accompanying them on their journey, rather than being acquired locally." Dr Madgwick conducted the research in collaboration with colleagues at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Cardiff University, along with scientists from the NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory at the British Geological Survey, University of Sheffield and University College London. The project was funded by the British Academy as part of a post-doctoral fellowship and was supported by a NERC Isotope Geosciences Facility Steering Committee grant. The study, 'Multi-isotope analysis reveals that feasts in the Stonehenge environs and across Wessex drew people and animals from throughout Britain', funded by the British Academy and NERC is published in Science Advances. ### For further information contact: Katie Bodinger Communications & Marketing Cardiff University Tel: 029 20870862 Mob: 07702 819124 Email: BodingerK1@cardiff.ac.uk Cardiff University is recognised in independent government assessments as one of Britain's leading teaching and research universities and is a member of the Russell Group of the UK's most research intensive universities. The 2014 Research Excellence Framework ranked the University 5th in the UK for research excellence. Among its academic staff are two Nobel Laureates, including the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Medicine, Professor Sir Martin Evans. Founded by Royal Charter in 1883, today the University combines impressive modern facilities and a dynamic approach to teaching and research. The University's breadth of expertise encompasses: the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences; the College of Biomedical and Life Sciences; and the College of Physical Sciences and Engineering, along with a longstanding commitment to lifelong learning. Cardiff's flagship Research Institutes are offering radical new approaches to pressing global problems. More at http://www.cardiff.ac.uk Cancer presents an ongoing challenge for physicians, particularly in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. This is, amongst other things, due to tumor heterogeneity. A team of scientists from the Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen, the Juelich Research Center, the Technical University of Munich and the Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf has now shown that harmless purple bacteria of the genus Rhodobacter are capable of visualizing aspects of this heterogeneity in the tumors. With the aid of optoacoustic imaging, the researchers used these microorganisms to visualize cells of the immune system, so-called macrophages* (Greek for 'big eaters'), that also play a role in tumor development. Their research findings have now been published in Nature Communications. Many cancers form solid tumors. Inside, such tumors reveal major differences at the cellular and molecular level. One of these concerns the localization and activity of macrophages. Although these cells are essential for a healthy immune system, they also play a key role in tumor development. With the aid of photosynthetic bacteria, new optoacoustic techniques, which indicate where such macrophages are present and active, have now been developed. "We were able to demonstrate that bacteria of the genus Rhodobacter**, which are harmless to humans, are suitable as indirect markers of macrophage presence and activity," says Dr. Andre C. Stiel, head of the Cell Engineering Group at the Institute of Biological and Medical Imaging (IBMI), Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen. Rhodobacter bacteria produce large quantities of the photosynthetic pigment bacteriochlorophyll a. This pigment enabled the researchers to detect bacteria in a tumor by means of multispectral optoacoustic tomography (MSOT)***. How does the principle work? Macrophages engulf bacteria as part of their natural scavenging activity, which is known as phagocytosis. This alters the surroundings of the bacteria, their absorption of electromagnetic radiation and, as a result, also the optoacoustic signal. Rhodobacter bacteria thus act like sensors for scientists, providing them with information about the presence and activity of macrophages. "In further steps, these bacteria will enable novel approaches to non-invasive technologies and so open up entirely new possibilities for innovative diagnostic and therapeutic procedures," adds Dr. Thomas Drepper, who heads the Bacterial Photobiotechnology Group at Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf. In future, bacteria may be able to reveal the location of a tumor and also detect increased macrophage activity. Depending on their localization, the macrophages could provide information about unwelcome inflammations or the desired response to immunotherapies, and could ultimately be used to improve treatment strategies. ### Further Information *As is known today, tumors harbour specific microenvironments. One of the components of the tumor microenvironment are tumor-associated macrophages. These scavenger cells are part of our immune system, but in the case of a cancerous disease they are involved in unwanted inflammation of the tumor tissue - a process that leads to the further progression of the disease. **Rhodobacter occurs worldwide in stagnant and flowing water. The bacteria produce different pigments in order to carry out photosynthesis. These include bacteriochlorophyll a, which is suitable for MSOT examinations to localize solid tumors. Rhodobacter cells do not cause infections in humans. ***During a MSOT scan, light is initially converted into sound, then into visual information. Initially, a weak, pulsating laser beam is directed towards the body. When the beam encounters molecules and cells, they heat up minimally and respond with minimal vibrations, which in turn generate acoustic signals. These are then picked up by sensors and converted into images. The way in which the individual cells and molecules react to the laser depends on their optical properties - in this case, for example, on the properties of bacterial pigments. Original Publication: Lena Peters et al. (2019): Phototrophic purple bacteria as optoacoustic in vivo reporters of macrophage activity. Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-09081-5 As German Research Center for Environmental Health, Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen pursues the goal of developing personalized medical approaches for the prevention and therapy of major common diseases such as diabetes mellitus and lung diseases. To achieve this, it investigates the interaction of genetics, environmental factors and lifestyle. The Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen has about 2,300 staff members and is headquartered in Neuherberg in the north of Munich. Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen is a member of the Helmholtz Association, a community of 18 scientific-technical and medical-biological research centers with a total of about 37,000 staff members. http://www.helmholtz-muenchen.de The Institute of Biological and Medical Imaging (IBMI) conducts research into in vivo imaging technologies for the biosciences. It develops systems, theories and methods of imaging and image reconstruction as well as animal models to test new technologies at the biological, preclinical and clinical level. The aim is to provide innovative tools for biomedical laboratories, for diagnosis and for the therapeutic monitoring of human diseases. http://www.helmholtz-muenchen.de/ibmi The Technical University of Munich (TUM) is one of Europe's leading research universities, with around 550 professors, 41,000 students, and 10,000 academic and non-academic staff. Its focus areas are the engineering sciences, natural sciences, life sciences and medicine, combined with economic and social sciences. TUM acts as an entrepreneurial university that promotes talents and creates value for society. In that it profits from having strong partners in science and industry. It is represented worldwide with the TUM Asia campus in Singapore as well as offices in Beijing, Brussels, Cairo, Mumbai, San Francisco, and Sao Paulo. Nobel Prize winners and inventors such as Rudolf Diesel, Carl von Linde, and Rudolf Mobauer have done research at TUM. In 2006 and 2012 it won recognition as a German "Excellence University." In international rankings, TUM regularly places among the best universities in Germany. http://www.tum.de/en/homepage Forschungszentrum Julich makes a vital contribution to solving major challenges facing society in the fields of information, energy, and bioeconomy. It focuses on the future of information technologies and information processing, complex processes in the human brain, the transformation of the energy system, and a sustainable bioeconomy. Forschungszentrum Julich develops simulation and data sciences as a key research method and makes use of large, often unique, scientific infrastructures. With some 5,900 employees and about 800 visiting scientists per year from 75 countries, it is one of Europe's large research centres. Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf (HHU) has been the university for the state capital of North Rhine-Westphalia since 1965. HHU sees itself as a university for citizens that shares its knowledge with society in the Dusseldorf region on a continuous basis. It is characterised just as much by its integration in the worlds of business, culture and society as by its status as a full German university with an interdisciplinary gearing. Roughly 35,000 students are enrolled in its Faculty of Medicine, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics and Faculty of Law. Research has traditionally focused on the Life Sciences, supplemented by research priorities such as Competition Research, Internet and Democracy, Algebra and Geometry as well as Language - Science - Cognition. In 2018, the HHU Cluster of Excellence CEPLAS, which has been in existence since 2012 and carries out research into using crop plants to feed the world's population in the future, was recognised as part of the "Excellence Initiative" of the German federal and state governments. Contact for the media: Communication Department, Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen - German Research Center for Environmental Health (GmbH), Ingolstadter Landstr. 1, 85764 Neuherberg - Tel. +49 89 3187 2238 - E-Mail: presse@helmholtz-muenchen.de Scientific contact: Dr. Andre C. Stiel, Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen - Deutsches Forschungszentrum fur Gesundheit und Umwelt, Institute of Biological and Medical Imaging (IBMI), Ingolstadter Landstr. 1, 85764 Neuherberg - Tel. +49 89 3187 3972 - E-Mail: andre.stiel@helmholtz-muenchen.de Scientists have gained clues into how a Parkinson's disease treatment, called deep brain stimulation, helps tackle symptoms. The early-stage study, by researchers at Imperial College London, suggests the treatment boosts the number and strength of brain cell 'batteries' called mitochondria. These batteries in turn provide power to brain cells, which may help reduce problems with movement and tremors. Deep brain stimulation is a treatment used for late-stage Parkinson's disease that involves surgically implanting thin wires, called electrodes, into the brain. These wires deliver small electric pulses into the head, which helps reduce slow movement, tremor and stiffness. However scientists have been unsure how the treatment, which is given to around 300 patients a year, tackles Parkinson's symptoms. Dr Kambiz Alavian, senior author of the study from the Department of Medicine, Imperial College London, said: "Deep brain stimulation has been used successfully to treat Parkinson's for over 20 years, and is often offered to patients once medication no longer controls their symptoms. "But despite the success of the treatment, we still don't know exactly how delivering electric pulses to brain cells creates these beneficial effects. Our results, despite being at an early-stage, suggest the electric pulses boost batteries in the brain cells. This potentially opens avenues for exploring how to replicate this cell power-up with non-surgical treatments, without the need for implanting electrodes in the brain." Parkinson's disease affects around 127,000 people in the UK, and causes the progressive loss of brain cells in an area called the substantia nigra. This leads to a reduction in a brain chemical called dopamine, which is crucial for controlling movement. As a result, the condition triggers symptoms such as tremor and slow movement. The initial causes of the condition are still unknown, but recent studies suggest brain cells in the substantia nigra of the patients have fewer mitochondria - tiny energy-producing structures that keep cells alive. In the latest trial, published in the FASEB Journal, scientists investigated brain cells from three deceased patients with Parkinson's disease who had received deep brain stimulation (DBS), four deceased patients who had Parkinson's disease but did not receive DBS, and three deceased individuals who did not have Parkinson's. All brains came from the Parkinson's UK Brain Bank, at Imperial College London. The team found the brain cells of people who had received deep brain stimulation had a higher number of mitochondria, compared to patients who didn't receive the treatment. The mitochondria in the DBS patients were also bigger than those in patients who didn't receive treatment, suggesting they may produce more energy. The scientists highlight the fact only a small number of brain samples were used for this study, but now hope to start larger investigations. "These type of studies are difficult to perform, as they can only be carried out after a patient has passed away. Without the Parkinson's UK Brain Bank - and ultimately the people affected by Parkinson's disease who choose to donate their brain after death, we wouldn't be able to perform important studies such as these. "We now hope to carry out larger studies to explore new treatments that may preserve brain cell mitochondria. The ultimate goal would be to keep cells powered-up for longer, and Parkinson's symptoms at bay." ### An international research team has developed a new method of synthesizing miniature light sources. It is based on a special laser which produces millions of nanolasers from a perovskite film in a few minutes. Such lasers look like small disks, work at room temperature and have an tunable emission wavelength from 550 to 800 nm. The high speed and good reproducibility of this method make it promising for the industrial production of single nanolasers as well as whole chains. The study was published in ACS Nano. Recently, scientists have been actively working on miniature light sources or nanolasers. It is required, for example, to produce optical chips that could process information in next-gen devices. However, making such light sources is not that easy due to unstable materials, as well as the complex and expensive fabrication methods, which are difficult to control and adjust for industrial production. Scientists from ITMO University, the Far Eastern Federal University, Texas University at Dallas, and the Australian National University have found a new way to solve this problem. They have developed a method allowing for creation of millions of nanolasers from an optically active halide perovskites in a few minutes. The fabrication starts when a half of micron thick perovskite film is deposited on a glass substrate. Then, it is irradiated with a laser beam with a special annular pulse intensity distribution: weak in the center and stronger at the edges. As a result, a set of perovskite disks is obtained from the film. These are the nanolasers: they are located on the substrate at an equal distance from each other, and have the same size and emission characteristics. "Such perovskite disks, unlike regular film, act as so-called "whispering gallery" resonators. The spontaneously emitted light in them can be traped, enhanced, and converted to coherent light. It is very important that we were able to create nanolasers that operate at the same wavelength. Their rough surface supress all the modes, except one, for which the lasing conditions are most suitable. At the same time, we can control the radiation wavelength by varying the composition of the film," says Sergey Makarov, the head of the Laboratory for Hybrid Nanophotonics and Optoelectronics at ITMO University. Previously, scientists from ITMO University have proposed a chemical method for creating perovskite nanolasers. It helped to speed up the process but did not give enough control over the synthesis. Therefore, among the main advantages of this new method are not only high speed but also good "controllability". This makes it promising for industrial adaptation. Researchers currently plan to optimize the fabrication of nanolasers for industrial production and integrate nanolasers with waveguides to create optical chips. ### Reference: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.8b08948 Single-Mode Lasing from Imprinted Halide-Perovskite Microdisks Alexey Zhizhchenko et al. ACS Nano, 7th of March Georgias final presidential elections in October and November 2018 served as a microcosm of the current uninspired state of Georgian politics. Although the incumbent Georgian Dream (GD) party and its leader, Bidzina Ivanishvili, were able to triumph over their opponents, the trials they faced in doing so underscored the degree to which they have lost public confidence. Exiled former president Mikheil Saakashvili, who played a major role in campaigning for the candidate of his United National Movement (UNM) party, also appears to be a largely spent force. Georgia seems to be in need of a new political movement that can mobilize enthusiasm, but it is unclear when, or from where, this will emerge. BACKGROUND: On October 28, Georgia held the first round of its last-ever presidential elections (future presidents will be chosen directly by the Georgian parliament). The event was expected to be rather quiet, as the Georgian president fulfills largely ceremonial duties. But the selection of Salome Zurabishvili, a gaffe-prone and foreign-born politician, as the primary candidate of the ruling GD party created a much closer race than anticipated. Zurabishvili narrowly topped the main opposition candidate, Grigol Vashadze of UNM, in the first round, without securing a majority. She was eventually able to triumph decisively in the November 28 runoff with 59 percent of the vote, after several scandals and accusations of vote-buying in the interim. Despite this victory, GD is not in a strong position. The choice of Zurabishvili (who officially ran as an independent but was closely backed by GD) was emblematic of Ivanishvilis style of leadership, which has increasingly come to chafe the Georgian electorate. The multi-billionaire Ivanishvili, who served as Georgias Prime Minister from October 2012 to November 2013 and is considered to wield enormous power behind the scenes ever since, made his official return to Georgian politics by reassuming leadership of GD in April 2018. Against the near-unanimous counsel of his advisers, who warned that Zurabishvili was a disliked figure likely to alienate voters, Ivanishvili insisted on her nomination. He became more closely linked to her as the campaign intensified following the close-run first round, even appearing on billboards without the candidate herself. Over the past year, the popularity of Ivanishvili and his government have taken a beating. Repeated scandals, growing inequality, and environmental concerns have shaken public confidence in Ivanishvilis leadership: in a June 2018 poll conducted by the National Democratic Institute, a U.S. think tank and public opinion research group, 62 percent of the respondents said they believed the country was going in the wrong direction. Those polled indicated worsening poverty, growing corruption, and a failure of recent economic growth to provide trickle-down benefits, with only 3 percent assessing the economy as good. Ivanishvilis vague promises to improve the lives of Georgias citizens have largely rung hollow after six years of similar rhetoric. IMPLICATIONS: The elections primarily indicated just how weak GD has become. It is a testament to the partys political ineptitude that what should have been a perfunctory event was instead transformed into a major referendum on Ivanishvili and GD, or Saakashvili and UNM. Far from successes, 2018 was a year plagued by scandals for the GD administration. One resulted from the decision to send Special Forces to raid one of the citys most popular nightclubs on a Saturday night in May, ostensibly searching for drug dealers who, it emerged, had already been arrested beforehand. The resulting protests against police conduct came to encompass large sections of Georgias liberalized younger generation, including the LGBT community, often targeted by harassment. These protests were met by mass far-right counter protests, including groups displaying swastikas and giving the Nazi salute. Even larger in scale were the demonstrations led by a pair of grieving fathers, Malkhaz Machalikashvili and Zaza Saralidze, seeking answers regarding their slain sons. Machalikashvilis son died from injuries sustained in an ill-explained December 2017 raid by Georgian Special Forces on their home in the Pankisi Valley. Saralidzes son was stabbed to death the same month by a fellow student in an incident whose legal resolution has been marred by nepotism. The two fathers have since gathered support and have camped in front of parliament since May, demanding transparency. Despite nine months of continuous protests, the GD administration has failed to deliver any further evidence of what occurred in either event, increasing the perceptions of Ivanishvilis unaccountability. The campaign also served as a reminder of just how much Georgian politics are defined by two figures alone, much more than by parties or institutions. Ivanishvili and Saakashvili have formed a duality of Georgian politics for the past eight years; in this time, there have been few national figures even approaching their level of influence. In some ways, this reflects what some have dubbed a messiah complex that characterizes the Georgian populaces approach to their leadership. Much like Saakashvili and Ivanishvili at the start of their respective rule, Georgias first president Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who led the country through the collapse of the Soviet Union, was initially hailed as a national hero. Great hopes were also invested in his successor, former communist-era leader Eduard Shevardnadze, to halt and reverse the anarchy Georgia had descended into. Even the campaign rhetoric of the two current titans of Georgias political landscape were focused mostly on each other rather than their own policies: GD lawmakers urged the populace to prevent the return of the bloody Saakashvili regime, while UNM cited Ivanishvilis undoing of the achievements of their tenure. The two leading Georgian news channels, Imedi TV and Rustavi 2, were each rallied to the side of their patrons (GD for the former, UNM for the latter) to broadcast highly biased coverage for the entirety of the campaign. The primary messages from Ivanishvili and Saakashvili remains how only they and their team can deliver Georgia from stagnation. A final observation concerns the danger an undue command of financial resources can pose to democracy. With an estimated wealth of US$ 5.65 billion, Ivanishvilis personal fortune is roughly one-third of Georgias entire annual GDP. This ratio is far higher than anywhere else in Europe in terms of one mans financial power relative to the country as a whole, leaving him uniquely well-positioned to leverage his personal resources for political means. The OSCE preliminary report on the run-off vote cited numerous concerns regarding vote-buying and stated that the GD-backed candidate (i.e. Zurabishvili) received the vast majority of donations. Such an environment does not augur well for free and fair elections in Georgia. CONCLUSIONS: The Herculean efforts required by Ivanishvili and his GD administration to deliver a victory to their candidate in last falls presidential elections reflects the widespread public disillusionment after six years of GD rule. Numerous scandals and a failure to deliver on economic promises have alienated voters, while neither GD nor the opposition UNM have offered the electorate much beyond attacks on each other. Given the growing apathy, it would seem that Georgias political atmosphere is ripe for a new force able to break with the increasingly discredited existing parties. However, given the vast tract of administrative and financial resources commanded by Ivanishvili in particular, this will prove a difficult task, and no obvious contenders presently exist. As it stands, 2019 will seemingly offer little different in the Georgian political landscape beyond a deepening of the present malaise. AUTHORS BIOS: Neil Hauer is an independent security analyst and journalist based in Tbilisi, Georgia. His work focuses on the Syrian conflict, particularly Russias role, politics and minorities in the South Caucasus, and violence and politics in the North Caucasus, particularly Chechnya and Ingushetia, where he conducts regular fieldwork. He holds an MA in post-Soviet studies from Carleton University and previously served as senior intelligence analyst at The SecDev Group in Ottawa, Canada for three years. Image Source: The Senate of the Republic of Poland via Wikimedia accessed on 3.13.2019 Forests are the filters of our Earth: They clean the air, remove dust particles, and produce oxygen. So far, the rain forest in particular has been considered the "green lung" of our planet. Yet, an international team, including researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), recently found that the world's largest carbon sinks are located in young, regrowing forests. The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). Forests are considered major carbon sinks. These are ecosystems binding large amounts of carbon, thus retarding CO 2 accumulation in the atmosphere and, hence, climate change. These sinks are dynamic, their capacity can grow or shrink regionally. So far, it has been assumed that this is driven mainly by increased photosynthesis due to an increase in the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. Dense tropical forests near the equator, for instance, take up large amounts of CO 2 . Together with an international team of researchers, Professor Almut Arneth of the Atmospheric Environmental Research Division of the Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research (IMK-IFU), KIT's Campus Alpine, reanalyzed global forests with a combination of data and computer models. Based on datasets of the age of forests, the scientists calculated how much CO 2 was taken up by established, at least 140 year-old forest areas between 2001 and 2010. These values were then compared with those of younger forests regrown on former agricultural or deforested areas. They found that these areas take up large amounts of CO 2 from the atmosphere not only because of their increased photosynthesis, but mainly because of their young age. This age effect accounts for about 25% of the forests' CO 2 uptake. This mainly holds for forests at middle and high latitudes, such as areas in the east of the United States, which were used as farmland by the settlers until the late 19th century, or forests in Canada, Russia, and Europe that were destroyed by forest fires. But also big reforestation programs in China largely contribute to this carbon sink. "These sinks that depend on forest growth are limited in principle. When the forests reach a certain age, their CO 2 uptake decreases and the important carbon sinks disappear unless reforestation occurs," Arneth says. "The results of our study are needed to better understand the climate system and help us make substantiated decisions in forestry, as they reveal how much CO 2 will be bound by regrown forests in future. However, the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere by forests is limited. That is why it is crucial to reduce our emissions due to fossil fuels," the professor says. ### Research was funded by the European Commission. Original publication: Thomas A. M. Pugh, Mats Lindeskog, Benjamin Smith, Benjamin Poulter, Almut Arneth, Vanessa Haverd, and Leonardo Calle: 'The role of forest regrowth in global carbon sink dynamics'. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810512116 More about the KIT Climate and Environment Center: http://www.klima-umwelt.kit.edu/english Press contact: Sandra Wiebe, SEK - Gesammtkommunikation, Tel.: +49 721 608-21172, sandra.wiebe@kit.edu Being The Research University in the Helmholtz Association", KIT creates and imparts knowledge for the society and the environment. It is the objective to make significant contributions to the global challenges in the fields of energy, mobility and information. For this, about 9,300 employees cooperate in a broad range of disciplines in natural sciences, engineering sciences, economics, and the humanities and social sciences. KIT prepares its 25,100 students for responsible tasks in society, industry, and science by offering research-based study programs. Innovation efforts at KIT build a bridge between important scientific findings and their application for the benefit of society, economic prosperity, and the preservation of our natural basis of life. NASA's Terra satellite captured an infrared image of Tropical Cyclone Idai approaching the coast of Mozambique. The infrared data provided cloud top temperatures that indicated powerful thunderstorms circled Idai's center. At 4 a.m. EDT (0800 UTC) on March 13 the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Terra satellite gathered infrared data on Idai. Infrared data provides temperature information. Strongest thunderstorms circled Idai's center and contained cloud top temperatures as cold as minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 56.6 Celsius). NASA research has shown that cloud tops with temperatures that cold were high in the troposphere and have the ability to generate heavy rain. MODIS infrared imagery also indicated Idai's eye is about 20 nautical miles wide in diameter, although it was covered by high clouds. At 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC), Idai's center was located near latitude 19.5 degrees south and longitude 38.7 degrees east. That's about 175 nautical miles north-northwest of Europa Island. Idai was moving to the west. Maximum sustained winds were near 103.6 mph (90 knots/166.7 kph) with higher gusts. On March 13, the Mozambique National Meteorology Institute (INAM) noted that Idai is causing very heavy rains of more than 100 millimeters (4 inches) in 24 hours over the Mozambique Channel. Idai is forecast to make landfall just north of Biera, Mozambique between March 14 at 1200 UTC and March 15 at 0000 UTC (on March 14 between 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EDT). Beira is the fourth largest city in the country and is located in the Sofala Province, central region of the country. Heavy rains, thunderstorms and hurricane-force winds are expected as Idai comes ashore. ### For the latest advisory from the Mozambique National Meteorology Institute (INAM), visit: http://www.inam.gov.mz/index.php/pt/novo-sistema By Rob Gutro NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Young scientists from Ural Federal University and Higher School of Economics are trying to understand whether the Internet has influenced Orthodox Christianity, and how the social institution and social practices could have been transformed in the conditions of widespread media. The project "Social media as a factor in the transformation of Orthodoxy in modern Russia" received support from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research for 2019-2021. 'Media has become one of the drivers for change in modern society. The Internet has transformed the existing hierarchies, giving voice to the silent majority. On the other hand, religions are based on tradition, transfer of knowledge through books, rituals and various forms of communication face to face. And it is interesting to see whether social media have changed Orthodox traditions or not,' Ekaterina Grishaeva, the project manager, Associate Professor at the Department of Social Philosophy of UrFU, explains. The researchers' plans are to look at the mediatization of Orthodox Christianity as a two-way process: how the communicative possibilities of the Internet environment transform Orthodox ideologies, practices and hierarchy, and the Orthodox community adapts the Internet to fit its needs. To do so, they study the blogs of people who form the image of Orthodoxy on YouTube, VKontakte, Instagram, Facebook; analyze the popular video blogs of priests Andrey Tkachev, Dmitry Smirnov, Evgeny Popichenko, the social networks of the congregations. The interviews with churchgoers are part of the plan as well. The researchers claim that nowadays religious rituals are performed via the Internet: one can watch a video of readings of sacred texts online, livestreams of worship services, there is an opportunity to order occasional religious services online, etc. Religious leaders use social media as a platform for missionary work. 'For example, in Ekaterinburg, 21 out of 53 congregations have pages in social networks,' Ekaterina Grishaeva says. 'The growing social media presence of Orthodoxy attracted the attention of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. In August 2018, the Synodal Department for Church Relations with Society and Mass Media published a document "Video blogs of the Russian Orthodox Church priests: guidelines," designed to regulate the actions of blogger priests.' It is expected that in the first year of the grant, the young scientists will work out the research methodology, determine the specifics of Orthodox communication in social media, analyze the structure of Orthodox rituals, and conduct interviews with priests and members of Orthodox communities. The results will be presented in scientific articles. ### Bats are among nature's best flyers--able to fly for long periods of time, maneouvre in mid-air with pinpoint precision and get into some very tight spaces. However, scientists have not fully understood exactly how bats manage to fly so well, until now. Engineers at the University of British Columbia have captured the full complexity of bat flight in a three-dimensional computer model for the first time, potentially inspiring the future design of better drones and other aerial vehicles. Researchers built a simple bat wing out of aluminum and exposed it to the currents in a wind tunnel to mimic the flapping, bending and twisting motion of a bat in flight. By tracking and measuring the impact of these movements on turbulent air flows and aeromechanical forces around the wing, they were able to build a complete model of bat flight. The computer model, described in Computers & Fluids, is the first to comprehensively explain the flapping flight of bats in terms of the wing's geometry in motion, says Rajeev Jaiman, the study's senior author and a professor of mechanical engineering at UBC. "Previous numerical models of bat flapping flight were too simplified or incomplete to be of real practical benefit," he added. Bat wings are highly unique because they contain multiple joints and stretchable membranes that allow them to change shape and return to their original form countless times when they fly, explained Jaiman. "While this wing morphing makes bat flight much more complicated compared to bird flight, it also makes bats the efficient flying machines that they are," he said. The research team, which includes engineers from the National University of Singapore, plans to develop a physical bat model next, in collaboration with researchers at Brown University. "We'll be working to further optimize the flapping motion," said Jaiman. "Once this is in place, we'll have a foundation for designing efficient, agile, automated bats - think smart drones that can fly as a flock and serve as tools for business or for emergency response." ### "A novel 3D variational aeroelastic framework for flexible multibody dynamics: Application to bat-like flapping dynamics" was published online in November 2018 ahead of appearing in print in the February 2019 issue of Computers & Fluids . Contact lou.bosshart@ubc.ca for more information or to arrange interviews with the researcher. The respiratory systems of Atlantic salmon function normally even when carrying large loads of piscine orthoreovirus (PRV), new UBC research has found. "We didn't find significant harm to the fish's respiratory physiology despite the virus replicating to a load equal to, if not higher, than those seen naturally in wild or farmed fish" said Yangfan Zhang, a PhD student in UBC's faculty of land and food systems and lead author of the study published today in Frontiers in Physiology. PRV is present in nearly all farmed Atlantic salmon on Canada's west coast, and various strains of PRV have been detected in many salmonid species around the world. Consequently, the results are a positive step in reducing the uncertainty about the potential of infected farmed Atlantic salmon in marine pens to negatively impact migrating wild Pacific salmon. PRV replicates in the red blood cells that carry oxygen throughout salmon's bodies, and is sometimes associated with cardiac inflammation. If a PRV infection were to compromise salmon's respiratory fitness, fish could have trouble reaching their spawning grounds, a consequence that could be dire for a declining salmon population. The researchers performed their 21-week experiment on groups of juvenile Atlantic salmon obtained from a commercial hatchery on Vancouver Island and recently transferred to seawater. One group was injected with a dose of PRV that was high enough to represent a worst-case infection scenario. The scientists used respirometry--not unlike the VO2 max test undertaken by elite athletes--to measure how efficiently oxygen was taken up and transported by the salmon's cardiorespiratory system. They also measured 13 other indicators, such as the fishes' ability to recover from exertion, whether they were settled or active in the testing chamber, and their ability to perform anaerobic tasks. They found no physiological differences between the infected fish and fish from a control group, a result that highlights the distinction between a virus being prevalent and being virulent. Prevalence refers to how widespread a virus is among a population; virulence refers to the damage it causes. While most people equate viral infection with disease, in the case of the B.C.-farmed Atlantic salmon, one did not necessarily lead to the other. "Besides no sublethal effects of a 'full-on' PRV infection, none of our fish died and none developed severe inflammation of the heart. These data show that there is minimal risk of ensuing problems from the B.C. strain of PRV to B.C. farmed Atlantic salmon," said Tony Farrell, a professor in UBC's faculty of land and food systems and a principal investigator of the research team. The authors have performed a similar experiment on wild sockeye salmon with similar results, which they are now compiling for publication. The UBC researchers worked with scientists from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, which funded the study. ### Haiying Huang, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at The University of Texas at Arlington, has earned a pair of grants worth nearly $900,000 to monitor structural health and detect when and where damage happens. Using a $599,928 grant from the Department of Defense, Huang will attempt to design ultrasound transducers, devices that convert mechanical vibrations to electrical signals or vice versa, that can be glued to ships' hulls to detect and monitor material degradation that causes corrosions on high-strength ship-building materials. These material degradations are microscale in size and usually cover the entire surface of the hull. If they are not treated, they can cause the alloys to break down and impact the ship's seaworthiness. Huang's research will focus on degradations that are early in their development, when they are so small that they are undetectable by current sensors. "This type of technology goes beyond normal maintenance for a ship. It captures valuable data about the material state before it becomes a much larger problem. By detecting them earlier, we're hoping it can drastically reduce the maintenance costs in the long run," Huang said. Huang will establish new simulation and experiment techniques to determine the effects of adhesives on the transducers, as well as the effects of material degradation on the signals. She also plans to develop new transducer designs and control strategies for better detection and characterization of material degradation that could help the Navy with maintenance, operation and safety on its ships. Huang will use a three-year, $299,973 grant from the Office of Naval Research to investigate the use of optical fibers as ultrasound waveguides to create sensor networks that can be implemented to detect when and where damage occurs within a structure. These networks could be key components for structural health monitoring, the process of continuously checking the condition of components of buildings, ships and other structures in real time. "Structural health monitoring is a growing technology because of its potential to provide substantial benefits in safety, operational costs and design. We are working to create networks that would allow remote monitoring or make it possible for a few sensors to monitor a very large area, which would speed detection before issues become dangerous," Huang said. Most ultrasound sensing is conducted with transducers that require electric wiring. However, wired transducers add a great deal of weight to a structure and are difficult to maintain, especially on a ship that is exposed to sea water. Huang will attempt to investigate wave coupling, or the transmission of ultrasound waves, between two waveguides to create optical fiber-based ultrasound sensor networks that could be configured to detect certain types of waves. These networks would be lightweight, effective and easy to maintain. Waveguides such as optical fibers can be used to move waves in a prescribed way. They can pick up ultrasound waves along the way and deliver them to a remotely located ultrasound sensor. "The idea is similar to how a spider finds prey on its web," Huang said. "When the prey struggles, it sends vibrations down the strands of web, alerting the spider that the prey is there and its location. "When a crack happens in a structure, it generates a wave. The ultrasound sensors would detect that wave and pinpoint it based on the dissonance between waveguides." Huang's work with ultrasound transducers and waveguides is an example of research in the area of data-driven discovery, one of four themes of UTA's Strategic Plan 2020, said Erian Armanios, chair of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department. "Achieving real-time information on the health of naval and aerospace structures is key to improved safety and performance. Dr. Huang's development of ultrasound transducers reflects her pioneering research in addressing timely challenges in corrosion mitigation and condition-based maintenance for the Navy fleet," Armanios said. ### -- written by Jeremy Agor A study that focuses on the public debate around surrogacy and gay parenthood, by Rafael Ventura and Carles Roca-Cuberes, researchers with the Department of Communication together with Xose Ramon Rodriguez-Polo The media play a key role in informing society and at the same time an important role in shaping perceptions and judgements about social issues, particularly concerning issues on which there is insufficient knowledge and/or a lack of experience. For example, one issue that is beginning to arouse public debate about which most audiences do not have any direct experience is the matter of surrogacy on the part of homosexual couples. The main goal of the research was to explore how public opinion on surrogacy and gay parenthood is shaped. It was carried out by Rafael Ventura and Carles Roca-Cuberes, researchers with the Department of Communication at UPF, together with Xose Ramon Rodriguez-Polo, a researcher at Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid University, published in Journal of Homosexuality. Focus groups regarding information on television According to the barometer of the Sociological Research Centre, 86.8% of the Spanish population claims to get its news via the television. Although in principle television news programmes aim to produce the most objective content possible, it is also true that they construct discourses about reality that may promote certain behaviours and attitudes by their audiences. "In our study, we focus on the formation of attitudes about surrogacy and gay parenthood analysing the audience's interpretation of a news item broadcast on Spanish television", says Rafael Ventura, first author of the paper. To test this, the authors set up four discussion groups consisting of 6 to 10 people each, two adults (40- 60 years) and two younger people (20-30 years), a total of 17 women and 16 men, from Barcelona and Madrid. We analysed each person's interpretation of a television news item broadcast in Spain to perform a qualitative content analysis of the discourse produced by the participants. The researchers based themselves on three main issues: the values transmitted by the media about surrogacy; what relationship they attributed to surrogacy and gay parenthood, and finally, if the interpretation of a news item differed according to the age of the audience. "To study the formation of participants' attitudes, we used a Spanish news item about surrogacy that included all of these key issues. The selected item was broadcast at prime time on TV1, the news programme with the largest audience in Spain", explain the authors of the study. The news item dealt with the fact that surrogacy is illegal in Spain and, therefore, there are increasing numbers of Spanish couples, including homosexual couples, travelling to other countries, such as India, to have a child. The story was illustrated with a real case and the argument revolved around the desire of homosexual couples to become parents and the consequences for the women involved. Surrogacy, gay couples and the commodification of the female body Initially, the two groups of participants (adults and youths) stated that they had limited data and a lack of contextual information that prevented them from forming an opinion based on the evidence explained in the news. Nevertheless, both groups agreed in that they rejected surrogacy after watching the news programme, mainly due to the way the news had presented the Indian women: as victims of exploitation and in a situation of poverty. The authors found that as the debate progressed, there was greater rejection towards homosexuals due to the fact that they were taking advantage of the poverty of women in countries like India to achieve their goal of having a baby. The results show that the focus of the content of the news put to debate contributed to defending an attitude of the repudiation of surrogacy, with a feeling of aversion that also extended to gay couples wishing to become parents. "As we saw in the results of our study, attributing responsibilities, placing the debate on surrogacy on the conflict of homosexual couples who want to become parents, on the one hand, and the feminist rejection of the commodification of the woman's body, on the other, may have very negative consequences for the traditional link between the feminist movement and the LGBT community", alert the authors. "It may feed discriminatory attitudes towards gay couples and create a clash between the feminist and the LGBT causes, forcing the public to adopt a position in favour of one of the two sides, as it is interpreted as a controversy", they add. ### MORGANTOWN, W. Va.-- When their family members struggle with substance use disorders, children bring experiences of neglect, trauma and often, mental health issues into the classroom, creating challenging environments for their teachers. Researchers at West Virginia University have evaluated the impact of the opioid crisis in classrooms across the Mountain State through a survey of 2,205 teachers in 49 counties. The study, conducted by three scholars from the WVU College of Education and Human Services - Sara Anderson, assistant professor in the Department of Learning Sciences and Human Development; Jessica Troilo, associate professor in the Department of Learning Sciences and Human Development; and Frankie Tack, addiction studies minor coordinator and clinical assistant professor in the Department of Counseling, Rehabilitation Counseling and Counseling Psychology - blends Anderson and Troilo's expertise in child development and family systems with Tack's background in the field of addiction. "A lot of the study is based upon developmental and family theories, but Frankie's expertise adds a new dimension," Anderson said. "As far as we can tell, this study will be the first of its kind. I don't think anyone else has taken this approach." The study finds that while 70 percent of West Virginia teachers report an increase in students impacted by substance use in the home, only 10 percent of teachers feel confident in knowing how to support children with parents or caregivers who use substances. Most of the teachers' survey responses indicated that they are experiencing emotional exhaustion, cynicism and a lack of personal accomplishment related to the changing classroom dynamics created by the opioid crisis. "The comments from the teachers were pretty shocking," Tack said. "We expected to hear that the opioid epidemic had an impact in classrooms, but not to this extent. Much of what is known about students relative to addiction focuses on prevention in the classroom and not necessarily on the collateral damage that occurs." "What we're also seeing is that the impact on students extends beyond those with direct experience with substance use disorders at home," Troilo added. "The students who don't have those experiences at home are witnessing behaviors in the classroom that they aren't accustomed to; this is what we call the tertiary effect of higher classroom stress linked to the opioid crisis." Drawing upon best practices in education, addiction studies, and child development and family studies, Anderson, Troilo and Tack recommend additional training and support for West Virginia teachers to curb the downstream effects of the opioid crisis on West Virginia's children. They will present their research to the West Virginia Board of Education on Wednesday, March 13 in Charleston. The goal of this study is to use these initial findings to develop and pilot a teacher training module around addiction in the classroom that Anderson, Troilo and Tack hope to implement statewide. "West Virginia teachers are in desperate need of support in this area, and that's what we hope to provide," Troilo said. ### Read the full summary of this study's findings. This report was supported by small grant funding from the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute (2U54GM104942-02) and by generous support from Dr. Kim Horn. The gift was made through the WVU Foundation, the non-profit corporation that generates and administers private support for the University. UPDATE: The Pound Sterling (GBP) rose against the US Dollar (USD) in early European session trading after drifting lower overnight. The cross was last seen trading at $1.33085. Wednesdays session saw the British Pound gain 2.03% against the Greenback with the Cable hitting a nine-month best of $1.33797 in response to UK Parliaments rejection of no-deal Brexit. Focus for Thursdays session remains on Brexit with UK politicians set to take a third evening ballot on whether to formally request an extension to Brexit. As it stands, despite Wednesdays vote, a no-deal outcome at the end of the month remains the default scenario, notwithstanding a deal or a delay. While a push for a delay would be interpreted as positive for the GBP, as Danske Bank chief analyst, Jens Peter Srensen, points out an extension of the Article 50 deadline is more or less fully priced in and todays vote should not have a big market impact on the GBP. For the Dollar, new home sales are expected to come under particular scrutiny given the cracks beginning to emerge in the US housing market. Lloyds Commercial Banking analyst, Rhys Herbert, wrote The slowdown in both US housing sales and construction over the past twelve months has been seen as evidence that interest rate hikes are impacting on the economy. adding However, new sales have risen sharply for the past two months, an indication that the housing slowdown may be peaking, so it will be interesting to see whether the rally has continued into January. Pound Sterling (GBP) exchange rates continue to swing wildly on fx markets with a vote on a no deal Brexit approaching. This vote is seen to be a formality, but growing support for the Malthouse Amendment means there could still be a surprise. Meanwhile, the eurozone industrial production release posted a solid beat with other countries bouncing back and Germany as the main weight. Are there green shoots in the eurozone economy? Wednesdays session has started quietly, with equity markets flat and commodities such as gold and oil up slightly. The stand out currency once again is GBP, with gains against the Euro and the US dollar of around 0.5%. This is undoing Tuesdays move lower as it became clear Theresa Mays Brexit deal would be rejected. Wednesdays vote is expected to be a formality with around 90% chance of MPs rejecting a no deal Brexit. This is a GBP positive, but has been anticipated and discounted by the markets for some time so is unlikely to be a big market mover. Only a huge shock where MPs vote in favour of a no deal Brexit would cause sustained volatility, and in this case a large GBP crash. While this is unlikely, there has been a slight swing in the odds to support a no deal. MPs will get free vote on the "Malthouse amendment" tonight. The "Malthouse Amendment" is the Brexiteers' Amendment proposing to ditch the whole Brexit deal and instead offer the EU divorce payments plus a deal on citizens rights in return for a transition period. Its growing in popularity with Tory MPs, and the DUP is backing it. The problem is that the EU has repeatedly said it wouldn't fly, and a transition period wouldn't be offered without a withdrawal agreement. Therefore the amendment looks like a path to a no-deal Brexit on March 29 and consequently means plenty of Remain-supporting Tory MPs will oppose it tonight. That, in turn, means it looks highly unlikely to pass. A rejection of a no deal Brexit would lead to a final vote on Thursday where MPs will decide whether to ask the EU27 for an extension. Heres Danske Bank on what to expect, While we expect the House of Commons to support an extension, the EU27 needs to grant it unanimously. While EU leaders and EU Council President Donald Tusk have said they want good explanations for an extension, we think a short extension to mid-May (before the European elections) is quite likely. EU leaders are clearly annoyed by Brexit, as they have other issues to deal with, but it is probably more problematic for the UK to kick the can further down the road. However, given the size of May's defeat, the EU leaders will discuss whether they prefer to offer a long extension. A longer extension could be beneficial to the GBP and could even open the door for a rate hike by the BoE. GBPUSD is hovering around the 1.3-133 area and looks well supported, while EURGBP cannot regain the 0.863 area. Green Shoots in the Eurozone Data has been on a one-way path in the eurozone for many months now and the slow-down in various economies is quite apparent. With every half-way decent release there has been speculation of the data bottoming out, but this will take a series of stronger prints and this has not happened yet. Indeed, last weeks German industrial production figures highlighted further weakness, and these were on top of a December print of -4.2% y/y, the biggest decline since the financial crisis. Yet other countries have fared much better, with a pick-up in Spain, France and Italy. This was reflected today in the eurozone composite release for January which showed a solid beat of 1.4% against 1.0% consensus. Data like this will help support the Euro but must be followed up by further positives or they will be considered as a blip in a downwards trend. EURUSD has managed to recover back above 1.12 support after last weeks breakdown and will need a new or significant catalyst to break it sustainably. Dear Brother's. I am presently on my deputation to Paris, France, I will move back to India in end of this year or beginning of the next year. I am planning to lodge my EOI in Queensland: hopefully by this July , in case of invite, how can i get my PCC in India ? I have to travel back to India along with my family to get the PCC done ? which is very expensive for me... Or do i can apply from Online and get my PCC at my residence address in India ? Hope, i can do my medicals here in Paris, but had a doubt about PCC hence thought of clarifying it with you brothers. Regards PK. I am so happy to be back in the UK after 28 yrs living in the US. Over the past 3 days I've spent 18 hrs working on my a 1040 - final tax return 2018! and a California tax return (My tax accountant has been avoiding my emails and calls - now I know why) I am beyond confused how to work this out - the information I am reading on the IRS website.....the biggest rabbit hole in existence has me in a spin.I left the US on Feb 28 2018 and relinquished my green card - destroyed at US embassy on Oct 10. I thought I was home and dry with Form 1040 and Form 8854 including a letter 'residency termination statement' (and proof of green card destroyed) ONLY to find out from an enquiry to another accountant (based in NY) that I have to file a dual status tax return 1040NR, which is far too complicated to do by myself and appears to have no deductions -due to new tax reformI am self employed and didnt earn very much last year due to my move. I am considering just sending in the 1040 and other paperwork for April 15. Any advice would be so gratefully received. I have learnt so much from this forum but cant seem to find a similar problem BUT I'm sure its out there. The UK Government has issued a number of policy documents for expats living in European Union countries to indicate the challenges ahead if Britain leaves at the end of this month without a Brexit Deal.It says that it has asked EU Member States to protect the rights of UK nationals in the event of a No Deal, particularly when it comes to employment, healthcare, education, driving and benefits.Britain says it has offered guarantees to EU citizens to live in the UK with broadly the same rights in the event of a No Deal Brexit and a number of Member States have already given political assurances to UK nationals about their residency rights.The European Commission has also published a No Deal Contingency Action Plan, which calls upon EU Member States to take a generous approach to UK nationals who are already resident in their territory. This includes a call for Member States to take measures so that all UK nationals legally residing in a Member States on 29 March 2019 will continue to be considered as legal residents of that Member State without interruption.However, currently it is not possible to confirm that registering as a permanent resident will protect status and rights in the country where expats are living as this will depend on the approach that the EU and each EU Member State takes. You should keep in touch with your local authorities and be ready to cooperate with them once they confirm any action UK nationals may be required to take, the documents say.Those working in the EU as an employed or self-employed person who have a UK-issued A1/E101 form, will remain subject to UK legislation for the duration of the period shown on the form but after 29 March 2019 the form may no longer be recognised.It warns people to check their passports are not about to run out as the rules for travel to most countries in Europe change if the UK leaves the EU with No Deal. It means that if there is less than six months left on a passport people may not be able to travel in the EU.Continuing education in the EU and any required fees will depend on the immigration requirements of each Member State and students are being advised to contact the institution where they are studying for advice.There may be issues around the recognition of professional qualifications but the European Commission has published guidance and where UK nationals have already been recognised by an EU country as holding valid professional qualifications this will remain valid after the UK leaves the EU. The Commission has advised holders of qualifications obtained in the UK before the UK leaves the EU to obtain recognition in a EU27 Member State before the end of March 2019.UK nationals living in, working in, or visiting the EU may find that their access to healthcare in EU Member States will change and this will depend on decisions by each country. However, the UK is seeking bilateral agreements to maintain healthcare rights as a top priority.The Government is recommended that British citizens visiting the EU should get travel insurance and make sure that the policy is sufficient to cover possible disruption and insurers should explain if there will be any changes to the way a policy is serviced under a No Deal scenario.It is also advising holders of UK driving licences who are resident in an EU country to exchange their UK licences for a driving licence from the EU country where they are living in before the end of March as under a No Deal they will be subject to the domestic laws of that country and how they treat non-EU licence holders, which could mean needing to retake the driving test.There should be no need to purchase additional third party motor insurance policy cover if driving in EU countries with a UK-registered vehicle but the documents point out that if there is no deal the UK will not be part of the Green Card-free circulation area. Drivers of UK registered vehicles will need to carry a Green Card when driving in the EU, EEA and all other countries that recognise Green Cards.Some EU countries have laws which govern property ownership and differentiate between their own citizens, EU citizens and non-EU citizens and people are advised to check with local authorities about how these might apply. Other experts on these topics Welcome to the News Release Wire Selection Control Panel. Instant News Wire A tax benefit helped San Antonio-based global marketing firm Harte Hanks Inc. turn a profit last year despite a nearly $100 million drop in revenue. Harte Hanks posted net income of about $17.6 million, or $2.38 a share, on $284.6 million in revenue last year. That compares with a loss of $41.9 million, or $6.76 a share, on $383.9 million in 2017. A $18.1 million tax benefit boosted Harte Hanks bottom line last year. The company specializes in direct and digital communications, database marketing solutions, direct mail and call-center operations. It is a successor to the newspaper businessman started by Houston Harte and Bernard Hanks in Texas in the early 1920s. On ExpressNews.com: Harte Hanks charts path to profitability Harte Hanks experienced revenue declines in many of its business lines last year. It previously said it would refocus attention on some of its traditional services as part of an effort to return to profitability. We have taken steps to reposition our core service lines to the market within the context of our data capabilities and we have successfully begun building a pipeline of new opportunities, CEO Bant Breen said in a statement Wednesday. Breen took over as CEO earlier this year following a management shake-up that led to the departure of Karen Puckett, who had been in the position for about three years. On ExpressNews.com: Harte Hanks names CEO, president Harte Hanks has slashed more than 1,000 jobs since the end of 2017. Breen indicated there will be meaningful opportunities to further streamline our organization going forward. In the quarter ended Dec. 31, Harte Hanks earned $1.6 million, or 21 cents a share, on $70.2 million in revenue. It lost $29.3 million, or $4.73 a share, on $99.9 million in revenue in the same period in 2017. Harte Hanks shares fell 7 cents to close at $4 Wednesday. Patrick Danner is a San Antonio-based staff writer covering banking and civil courts. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | pdanner@express-news.net | Twitter: @AlamoPD Even though San Antonio activist investor Sardar Biglari has been unloading shares of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc., he isnt letting up on his criticism of the company. In a fiery letter to Cracker Barrel CEO Sandra Cochran, Biglari the companys largest shareholder said Cochran should sell the fledgling Holler & Dash Biscuit House, a fast-casual restaurant chain that serves Southern food. It has seven locations. Holler & Dash, launched in 2016, is an ill-conceived project destined to fail, Biglari said in his letter Wednesday. Divesting Holler & Dash will reduce corporate expenses and return managements focus to Cracker Barrel, the restaurant and gift shop chain with more than 600 locations, he said. Does anyone believe that Holler & Dash will move the financial needle? Biglari said. It is time you sign the death certificate on the Holler & Dash venture. On ExpressNews.com: Biglari, Cracker Barrel sparring again A call to Lebanon, Tenn.-based Cracker Barrel was not returned. Biglari also didnt respond to a request for comment. Biglaris missive comes at a time when he has been selling Cracker Barrel shares. He now owns about 3.5 million shares, or 14.7 percent of the stock, down from about 4.7 million shares, or 19.7 percent, late last year. Biglari is chairman and CEO of Biglari Holdings Inc., a San Antonio-based publicly traded company that owns the Steak n Shake restaurant chain, Maxim mens magazine and an insurance company. The Cracker Barrel shares are held in Biglari Holdings investment partnerships, called the Lion Fund. On ExpressNews.com: Biglari discusses holdings in annual letter to shareholders In a report to Biglari Holdings shareholders last month, Biglari said the fund purchased the 4.7 million Cracker Barrel shares for $241.1 million from May 2011 through the end of 2012. That investment had turned into $950.8 million in value, counting stock sales and dividends, he said. He previously has taken credit for much of the gains, at one point noting how Cracker Barrel adopted various recommendations he made including halting store expansions, upgrading leadership and licensing the brand. Asit Sharma, a contributor at the financial website The Motley Fool, credited Biglari with helping improve Cracker Barrels cash flow, operating margin and stock price. Biglari Holdings has been good for Cracker Barrel, Sharma said in a podcast last month. Theyve kept management honest. Theyve been responsible for a lot of good change. So our druthers would be for Biglari to stay invested and stay active with this company. Biglaris remaining stake in Cracker Barrel is currently valued at about $545.5 million, or about $115 million more than the market capitalization of Biglari Holdings. Biglaris letter provided no insight into why he is cutting his stake in Cracker Barrel shares. Nor did it indicate how much more stock he intends to sell. Since acquiring the shares, Biglari has lost four proxy contests at Cracker Barrel. He failed three times to win seats on its board from 2011 through 2013. In 2014, shareholders defeated a proposal that could have allowed him to engage in an acquisition of the company. Cracker Barrel had adopted a poison pill in 2012 to ward off Biglari, or anyone else, from acquiring control of the chain without offering a premium to all shareholders. On ExpressNews.com: Cracker Barrel shareholders approve poison pill In 2015, Cochran called Biglari Holdings a threat to Cracker Barrel. In his letter this week, Biglari also asked Cochran to disclose financial data on Cracker Barrels new stores so we can judge the returns for the period under your leadership as CEO. Biglari has been critical of previous store expansions, disputing the companys take that expanding has been a good use of its capital. Biglari also urged Cracker Barrel to continue paying a special dividend of $3.75 a share or more. Special dividends should be paid irrespective of our level of our ownership, he said. Simply because we are a near 15% owner instead of 20% should not change the companys allocation policy. Cracker Barrels shares rose 36 cents to $155.01 Wednesday. Patrick Danner is a San Antonio-based staff writer covering banking and civil courts. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | pdanner@express-news.net | Twitter: @AlamoPD Theres more to CuerposUnidos, the new exhibit at Clamp Light Artist Studios and Gallery, than the 12 pieces on display right now. The Contemporary Art Month show, which was curated by Jose Villalobos and Michael Anthony Garcia, is being presented in two halves. The first, titled CuerposUnidos: Anterior, is up now; the second, titled CuerposUnidos: Posterior, opens March 22. The show will then head to Austin, where it will be exhibited as a single unit at the Museum of Human Achievement. The original idea was, Michael and I wanted to bring a diverse group of artists into Clamp Light, and we talked about doing a two-part show because we could bring a lot more artists in that way, said Villalobos, co-director of Clamp Light. All together, the exhibit will spotlight the works of 14 local, regional, national and international artists, all of whom deal in some way with the human form. It does include some explicit content. According to the curators statement, the exhibit was designed as a means of speaking to varied representations and connotations of the human form, both aesthetic and political. While some works explore the corporeal forms malleable power over the human gaze, others speak to the political cachet some bodies possess that others arent afforded. On ExpressNews.com: Isaac Julien show is a preview of Ruby City Villalobos and Garcia, who also create their own work, had been talking about the possibility of curating a show together for a while. When Villalobos proposed that they come up with something for Contemporary Art Month, they began by each making a list of artists whose work intrigued them. We met and we kind of shared the artists that interested both of us and we started developing this sense that a lot of the art we had been interested in had a lot to do with the human form and the body, Villalobos said. And we ourselves use our bodies as a medium at times. Most of the artists in Anterior are represented by two pieces. Roy Martinez has a dress and matching collar suggestive of a serape as well as a photograph of it being worn; Antonia Padilla is showing a black-and-white photograph; and Ric Nelson has a pair of beautifully crafted boxes that have to be viewed head-on for the work to be fully revealed. The show also holds two giclee prints depicting lovers by Felix dEon and two collages by Sara Cardona. On ExpressNews.com: Citys public art manager showing at Lone Star Art Studio Some of the artists have a single work in the show. Rosemary Meza-DesPlass In Spite of Ourselves is a rectangular expanse of unprimed canvas with free-floating orbs suggestive of breasts that the artist stitched into the fabric with her own hair. And Alexander Hernandez Catfish is a quilt-like piece depicting a pixilated human figure with a three-dimensional arm jutting from it. There also is a video by Bug Davidson and a photograph by Antonia Padilla. Im excited for people to see this work, Villalobos said. Its not just artists from San Antonio, theyre from all over. And for the second installment, Im also excited that its a little bit more performance-based. That half will include photographs by Ingrid Leyva, who also is featured in the CAM Perennial show at Blue Star Contemporary; a live performance piece during the run by Andie Flores; and a video projection of a performance by artist Dorian Wood. After the exhibit closes, it will be reinstalled in Austin, extending the shows reach. Giving the artists a chance to reach as broad an audience as possible is among the curators goals for the show. What I wanted was to create a space for artists of all colors, all different backgrounds, and, whether theyre LGBTQ or not, providing a space for them, Villalobos said. Sometimes, artists go unseen simply because some are not given the opportunity. This is a great opportunity to help these artists and provide a platform for them. At Artist Studios and Gallery, 1704 Blanco, CuerposUnidos: Anterior can be seen through March 19 and Posterior opens with a reception at 7 p.m. March 22. The exhibit moves to the Museum of Human Achievement in Austin in June. Info, clamplightsa.com. dlmartin@express-news.net | Twitter: @DeborahMartinEN Deborah Martin is an arts writer in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | dlmartin@express-news.net | Twitter: @DeborahMartinEN Conjunto accordionist Flaco Jimenez, San Antonios foremost living musician, celebrated his 80th birthday Monday. He will do it all over again with an all-star cast at a birthday-bash concert Friday at John T. Floore Country Store. Music itself keeps me alive. Its my life since I was a kid, said Jimenez, who jokes that he doesnt feel 80 90, maybe. The heart doesnt get old. When Im onstage, whether Im limping a little or sitting down, I feel like the young Flaco. Jimenez, a recipient of the music industrys highest awards, is hailed as a musical treasure. He is music royalty, a global ambassador. There will never be another one like him. What does that mean, exactly? One way to look at it: Leonardo Flaco Jimenez is our Satchmo, the Alamo Citys Louis Armstrong. Both men pioneered distinct musical forms tied to their region, culture, race and ethnicity and brought it to the world. Armstrong did it with his trumpet; Jimenez with a squeezebox. Vital info What: Flaco Jimenez's 80th Birthday Bash When: 9 p.m Friday (doors at 7) Where: Indoors at John T. Floore Country Store, 14492 Old Bandera Road, Helotes Tickets, info: $25 general admission; $50 VIP, liveatfloores.com See More Collapse Like Armstrong, the underage, impoverished Jimenez gathered musical knowledge hanging outside the doors and windows of the bars and cantinas of the red-light district. In San Antonio, that was an area near where Market Square now stands. Just as Satchmo was blessed with personality, showmanship, the ability to improvise and cross over into the mainstream, so was Jimenez. The humble homegrown musician gained worldwide fame recording and performing with Doug Sahm, Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, Willie Nelson, Buck Owens, Dwight Yoakam, Carlos Santana, Texas Tornados and the Rolling Stones. And he did it all with a Hohner Corona II three-row button accordion. He still files the instruments reed blocks to fine-tune his alegre (happy) tone. There are other good ones, but theyre too flashy for me. Some accordions look like Christmas trees, Jimenez joked. Since the demise of the Texas Tornados last year, Jimenez has been performing select gigs and recording with Los TexManiacs and Augie Meyers. Family historian Santiago Jimenez Jr., a revered and influential musician in his own right, said his older brother is the greatest: There is never going to be another Flaco. He is very, very important, very humble, very lovable, Santiago said. Flaco has helped a lot of Anglo acts, big stars. Flaco is in that class. Everyone knows it. In Tex-Mex, he is royalty. He is a pure musician. Once Flaco is gone, thats it. Through it all, Flaco Jimenez has never forgotten where he came from. He was born at home on Pastores Street in San Antonio about 2:30 a.m. on March 11, 1939. The neighborhood, a colonia at the time, no longer exists. Last month at a black-tie event in Austin, after receiving the History-Making Texan Award (along with businessman Charles Butt) from the Texas State History Museum Foundation, Jimenez first thanked his hometown fans and musicians. Los Angeles music journalist Oscar Garza remembers when Jimenez used to play his fathers bar on San Antonios South Side. He was too young to appreciate Jimenezs true genius. I wasnt the biggest fan of Tex-Mex music when I was a teen, Garza said. But once Flaco started playing with the likes of Ry Cooder, I figured he must be cool. Turns out hes cooler than everybody. Jimenez had been a regional star since the mid-1950s. But it was Les Blanks and Chris Stachwitzs documentary Chulas Fronteras in 1976 that really cemented Jimenezs reputation as the genres badass. Only the late iconoclast Esteban Steve Jordan rivaled his musical genius and influence. But he remains a cult figure. Jimenezs ability, and willingness, to go beyond the boundaries of traditional conjunto can be traced to Sahms first solo album in 1973, the commercial failure Doug Sahm and Band. Flaco is still the guy. Hes not an imitator. Hes an original, said Max Baca, whose TexManiacs will serve as the backing band at Fridays birthday concert. Hes just so cool. He is one of a kind. Flaco has surpassed them all, but what makes Flaco is his humility and those licks. Alegre cool. The accolades are nice, but Jimenez plays down the praise. Oh, man. I thank God for having me still be here, he said. Hector Saldana is the curator of the Texas Music Collection at The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos. As a group of nearly 300 migrants approached a levee just north of the U.S.-Mexico border near McAllen, U.S. Border Patrol agents met them early Tuesday morning and one by one apprehended the largest group its seen so far this year. They did not try to run or avoid being detected by the agents responding, said Dustin Araujo, spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the Rio Grande Valley sector. They were seeking to be apprehended and arrested, he said of the group that crossed near Granjeno, a small community about four miles south of McAllen. OnExpressNews.com: Immigration advocates say more infants are being held in family detention The group of 289 immigrants, all family units and unaccompanied minors, had not yet reached the border wall north of them, Araujo said. But the land is still U.S. territory, and its illegal for foreigners without proper documentation to enter between ports of entry. Illegal entry is considered a misdemeanor offense. However, it is not a crime to seek asylum. Many asylum-seekers arent waiting at legal ports of entry to process their asylum claims, instead presenting themselves to Border Patrol agents once on U.S. territory. CBP records encounters with migrants who present themselves to agents seeking asylum as apprehensions. They likely used rafts, Araujo said of this particular group, which crossed the Rio Grande. He didnt know the groups demographicsage range, male or femalenor could he provide any comment on the general mental/physical health of the immigrants. Tuesdays encounter comes on the heels of a surge of apprehensions more than 76,000 in February, the highest for that month in more than a decade. Most were families with children seeking asylum. Lawyers and immigrant advocates say the Trump administrations metering system, which has minimized the number of asylum-seekers accepted at ports of entry each day, has led more immigrants to cross the border illegally in hopes of gaining asylum. In all, CBP reported more than 1,000 migrants had been apprehended within a 24-hour period Tuesday. Araujo said they were brought to a Border Patrol station and were transferred to Ursula the colloquial name for McAllens migrant processing center. OnExpressNews.com: At local shelters, allegations of migrant child sexual abuse The RGV sector continues to be the busiest as far as illegal alien apprehensions in the nation, Araujo said. The criminal organizations are exploiting the lack of infrastructure and technology in the area to cross the border. He said more border wall and cameras were needed in the Rio Grande Valley, especially in the Western portion. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump introduced a national budget that included $8.6 billion for building more border wall, despite arguments that physical barriers at the border arent effective at slowing the flow of immigrants. sfosterfrau@express-news.net | @SilviaElenaFF Former City Councilman Ray Lopez won a runoff Tuesday to become San Antonios newest representative in the Texas House, breaking Democrats recent streak of losing special elections in districts they typically control. With all precincts reporting, Lopez secured 58 percent of the vote to prevail over Republican Fred Rangel and keep the historically blue district in Democratic hands. Most of us dont really like the politics. What we like is the governance. What we like is making a difference in peoples lives, Lopez told supporters at his Bandera Road headquarters after formally declaring victory at 9 p.m. And when we have the confidence of the people that elect us, it emboldens us to go and do the right thing. OnExpressNews.com: Lopez overcomes cynical attacks on abortion issue The mood was decidedly more jubilant there than it has been at the last few watch parties for San Antonio Democrats in special elections. The party had fumbled away the last three races of that kind, including an important Senate seat in September. I believe it was actually kind of a wake-up call to say, Hey, Democrats, yes were blue, this is Bexar County, but that means we still need to get out to the doors, we need to go vote and get out to the polls, said Monica Alcantara, chair of the Bexar County Democratic Party. Lopez had a steep financial advantage, using more than $165,000 in donations that he gleaned from some of the area's most widely-recognized power brokers. He also had a natural demographic edge no Republican has won this district since it was redrawn in 1992 to include more West Side voters. After Rangel became the top finisher in the first round of voting last month, Democratic officials sought to stave off a repeat. Members of the Democrat-dominated Bexar County delegation lent their support in the runoff, and Julian Castro, former San Antonio mayor and Democratic presidential candidate, lent staffers to block walk Tuesday. The voters saw that hes very well prepared to take over this seat, said Castro, noting that Lopezs new seat is the same one his brother, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, held before joining Congress. When you think about the issues that the Legislature deals with education, infrastructure, health care these are issues that Ray Lopez has been tackling for years and years. He is one of the few people that can really hit the ground running. House District 125 was the last remaining vacancy in the Texas Legislature. Justin Rodriguez left the seat in January when he accepted an appointment to replace the late Paul Elizondo on the Bexar County Commissioners Court. Having served with Ray at City Hall, I am confident he will represent the interests of the people of House District 125, Rodriguez said Tuesday night. I look forward to our continued collaboration. Republicans now outnumber Democrats 83-67 in the Texas House, and the GOP also enjoys a super-majority in the Senate along with the governorship. The Legislature is now at full staffing as lawmakers mull big-ticket items, including property tax reform and school finance. OnExpressNews.com: In San Antonio's mayoral race, the two leading candidates are having a debate about debates Like most off-cycle elections, the runoff was determined by low turnout. There were 9,107 votes cast in the race, or about 9 percent of registered voters. Still, election officials said that was impressive for an off-cycle race. The turnout was just over 6 percent in last months special election and 7.22 percent in San Antonios last runoff. Rangel, 64, received support from high-ranking officials such as Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. John Cornyn and conservative groups such as Texas Right to Life, but he could not overcome the financial and demographic challenges that the race presented. Lopez raised and spent about four times as much money as Rangel. My goal was to send a message, and I did, said Rangel. I accomplished my goal. Lopez, 69, represented part of the West Side on City Council for eight years, the maximum allowed by San Antonios term limits. He also served on and chaired the Northside Independent School District and the Metropolitan Transportation Organization. He most recently worked as chair of the San Antonio Mobility Coalition. He has said he brings two areas of expertise vital to San Antonio: transportation and education. He will now join a legislative session will underway. The regular deadline for filing new legislation was last week, which means Lopez wont be able to advance his own bills. But Trey Martinez Fischer, the dean of the Bexar County delegation, said Lopezs presence will still be important. He brings experience, wisdom and his level approach to public policy to Austin, Martinez Fischer said. Lopez has said the state must increase its investment in public schools. Like many, he believes that will help alleviate rising property taxes. The states portion of the public school bill has dropped from around 50 percent to 38 percent in the last decade, according to the Legislative Budget Board. Des jeunes a la recherche d'emplois Archives The International Forum for Jobs and Employment known as SIME opened in Douala this Wednesday, under the patronage of the Minister of Employment and Vocational Training, Issa Tchiroma Bakary, who called on youths to be creative and aggressively haunt for jobs, through various channels put in place by both government and private sector. The 8th edition of the forum, focused on exploiting numerous jobs on the maritime sector in Cameroon. This, according to Minister Bakary, falls in line with President Paul Biya's promise made to the youths this year, to create at least 500,000 jobs for them. Issa Tchiroma told youths ( which he defines as persons from 8-88 years) to exploit the opportunities presented by such forums and government structures like the National Employment Fund, to get jobs. To Minister Bakary, the secret of success is to have jobs or get employed. To have a job, you have to be trained. In this light, he said government has created along with partners, training institutions that can form youths in the fields of employment. He recognised the fact that some youths are frustrated after they obtain university degrees, as they take years to have jobs or dont. He counselled youths to opt for professional education as government continues to set up such schools to train more. He regretted that some youths in the crisis-hit part of Cameroon especially the North West and South West regions, were trapped in an unfortunate war, where greedy ring leaders careless about their lives, but reassured Cameroonians that government was taking control of the situation to put an end to the ongoing war. Deborah Tonye Mvaebeme, main coordinator of the employment fair SIME, said her wish and that of her collaborators have always been to see that more Cameroonian youths get employed. They started with a magazine, whereby they shared all available job opportunities. For 10 years, they have been doing this and decided to follow up this yea with the 8th edition, which targets more youths to work at the Douala Port Authority and the Kribi Deep Seaport. She expects that within three days, many youths would be employed in these areas. For three days, different companies including the two seaports in the Littoral, will be orientating job seekers and final year students on different opportunities on the job market, while some will gain immediate employment. Sheriff Javier Salazar said he is ready for officials to perform a surprise follow-up inspection of the Bexar County Jail, recently found out of compliance with state standards and besieged with problems involving mishandled transfers and accidental releases. I can assure you that with respect to those negligent releases, people will be held accountable in each and every one of those cases, the sheriff told Bexar County commissioners Tuesday, giving an update on the jail, which can hold up to 3,342 inmates but lately has housed about 2,800. In response to a failed inspection conducted Feb. 19-22 by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, the Sheriffs Office submitted an action plan five days into a 30-day deadline period. Salazar credited Deputy Chief Avery Walker, new jail administrator, and Walkers staff, with moving really, really aggressively to develop the plan. The commission will make an unannounced visit to ensure the jail addressed all of the states concerns, from broken toilets and civilians doing work reserved for licensed jailers to inadequate supervision and observation of at-risk inmates. Were ready to roll at any time now, Salazar said after recognizing two 25-year veterans and honoring his employees of the year at the Bexar County Commissioners Court meeting. He said he has asked the jail standards commission to visit more often than once a year. With an agency this size, with a facility this size, and as aged as our facility is, wed like to see more frequent visits from TCJS. We welcome them, in fact, the sheriff said. On ExpressNews.com: Jail chief sidelined after inmates released without monitor Salazar acknowledged there have been continued troubles, including at the jails new $33 million Justice Intake Center, part of the wing known as the South Tower. Last week, a man charged with drug possession slipped into a line of inmates being released from the intake center, which opened in December. He was found about two miles from the jail a few hours later, apprehended and charged with escape from a correctional facility. That escape followed four other mishaps in January two inadvertent releases, one inmate release without a court-mandated electronic monitor and an inmate transfer to the wrong facility. At least one of those mistakes also occurred at the intake center, Salazar said. Quite frankly, each and every one of those cases were employees that were not following the guidelines set forth. Unfortunately, in some of these situations, supervisors werent supervising effectively, he added. Another problem, he said, was that the jail was releasing inmates from its traditional booking area in the old building as well as the intake center, creating two possible points of failure. All releases now are from the new facility. Everybody that walks out of our jail is going to walk out of that new building. Some of the new processes we have in place are theres got to be two supervisors to sign off on each and every one, and a supervisor physically has to walk every person out of the facility, Salazar said. Weve got the right policies in place. Its just a matter of making sure people are trained properly in them and that theyre following them. The Sheriffs Office released a letter sent Monday by Brandon S. Wood, executive director of the jail standards commission, thanking Salazar for developing a thorough plan that will address the operational issues at the Bexar County Jail. Based upon our discussions, it is evident that you have identified the catalyst for each issue and have already initiated corrective action to correct the issues and prevent future occurrences, Wood said in the letter, which also requests that a detailed plan of action to address physical plant issues be provided as quickly as possible. On ExpressNews.com: Inmate mistakenly released from jail The commissions inspection report listed, among the inadequacies at the jail, low water pressure, uncovered trash cans, missing floor tiles, excessive gnats in some areas and dirty inmate cells, shower areas and ventilation grates. The inspection report, dated Feb. 25, requested a long-term plan of action by April 26, but noted that many of the issues were corrected during the four-day inspection. Salazar said the countys facilities staff is doing those corrections that still require attention. As for the intake center, he said hes hopeful that the city of San Antonio, which still is taking detainees to its municipal court building for jail booking, will eventually move its booking operations to the South Tower. Salazar, a 23-year veteran of the San Antonio Police Department who was an internal affairs investigator and later director of communications, said he is sympathetic to Police Chief William McManus concerns that a time-consuming booking process could reduce the hours SAPD officer spend on patrol. Their approach of letting us kind of work the bugs out of the system first, before they make the move, I think thats a good approach. Were going to do everything we can to support them, the sheriff said. Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, whose new book, The Changing Face of San Antonio, includes a chapter on therapeutic justice and jail-diversion options for people with drug addictions and mental health issues, said its not unusual for the jail to be found out of compliance by the state. Salazar had told him the jail was working on several issues, but had already completed most of them, he said. Every time you have a jail inspection, I cant remember when you didnt have an issue or two, Wolff said. It just seemed like in the early talking, that this was more of that than normal. Scott Huddleston covers Bexar County government and the Alamo for the San Antonio Express-News. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | shuddleston@express-news.net | Twitter: @shuddlestonSA San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg told Congress today that Texas needs help from Washington to prevent the worsening highway congestion in the San Antonio- Austin corridor from stifling growth in a region he called Americas next great metropolis. We have all the elements of a successful metro economy - world-class universities, an educated and expanding workforce, a burgeoning tech community, relatively affordable land, a business-friendly environment, he said. Current congestion risks this growth coming to a grinding halt. Nirenberg delivered his testimony to the House Transportation Subcommittee on Highways and Transit. The panel is beginning the task of reauthorizing the nations five-year transportation bill, which expires next year. Texas Take: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox Nirenberg was testifying in front of Congress for the first time since he was elected mayor in 2017. He also was representing the National League of Cities, which is pressing Congress for a new and modern way of dealing with transportation rather than the recent stop-gap approach of emergency budget bills. We believe that investing in infrastructure should be Congresss top priority this year, he said. Nirenberg said he hopes Congress will give priority to achieving regional mobility in areas like San Antonio. He said Congress needs to understand that transportation is changing swiftly with innovations such as ride-sharing and e-scooters. He remarked that the fast-growing stretch of the I-35 corridor from San Antonio to Austin by 2040 will exceed or rival Dallas-Fort Worth. He said that a regional rail line holds promise but that we need a federal partner that invests in regional connectivity to expand our economy. Bills filed to restore provisions of the Open Meetings Act struck down by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals merit bipartisan support. To do otherwise is to sanction secrecy, with the public operating in the dark when it comes to public agencies. The legislation introduced by Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, and Rep. Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, tightens the language in the law that makes it a crime for government officials to meet in small groups to discuss the publics business through successive meetings. These are often called walking quorums. Earlier this month, the states highest criminal appellate court found the section of Texas law dealing with those types of meetings unconstitutionally vague. The proposed bills address the issue by including more precise wording to remove any confusion or ambiguity. In striking down a key provision of the states Open Meetings Act and punting the issue to the Legislature, the court dealt a crushing blow to transparency in Texas government. We have witnessed a slow chipping away at Texas open meetings and records laws in the courts and the Legislature over the past several years. Texas open records law took a major hit following in 2015 when a Texas Supreme Court ruling in Boeing v. Paxton expanded on what can be considered a trade secret and can be legally exempt from public access. The Boeing decision allows keeping confidential information about tax dollars spent by private companies doing business with the government. During the last several sessions, legislation has been passed that limits access to dates of birth in government records and police files that were once considered public. This trend must stop. In todays political climate, we need more transparency when it comes to government activities, not less. Regrettably, not everyone is of the same mindset. Every session, there is legislation intended to provide more transparency and give the public better access to public documents, but it often gets held hostage in committee and never gets a vote. Holding elected officials accountable starts with strong open meeting and open records laws. The case that prompted this most recent ruling involved a Montgomery County judge, who, as a member of the county Commissioners Court, orchestrated private meetings on a county road project. The decision does not affect secret meetings of a board majority; those meetings remain illegal. The issue before the states highest criminal appellate court dealt with successive meetings with less than a quorum among members of an elected body to discuss public matters to circumvent the Open Meetings Act. The ruling lifting criminal penalties for violating the spirit of the Texas Open Meeting Act is a powerful disincentive for elected officials to remain transparent about their activities. The majority of elected officials operate in good faith and are open about their work, but there will be others who will push the law to the limits if they can. The 7-2 court opinion written by Presiding Judge Sharon Keller, who was joined in that ruling by Justices Bert Richard and Barbara Parker Hervey of San Antonio, states the section of the law in question is potentially very broad and lacks any reasonable degree of clarity on what it covers and to give it a narrow interpretation would constitute legislating from the bench. We do not doubt the legislatures power to prevent government officials from using clever tactics to circumvent the purpose and effect of the Texas Open Meetings Act, the court said. The legislation filed by Watson and Phelan must be given priority. The primary criterion to judge the success of a mission to North Korea is the return of the USS Pueblo. Star Carey, Canyon Lake Doesnt fit Trump Re: Rangel gets MAGA boost from Latinos for Trump, by Gilbert Garcia, March 6: I found perplexing the comments by Bianca Gracia, the national vice president of Latinos for Trump. Gracia is quoted in the column as saying, We are all about candidates who are pro-God, pro-family and pro-life. Donald Trump has been married three times and cheated on his current wife with a porn star and a Playboy model. His policies regarding our southern border have only served to split up thousands of children from their parents and deny asylum to countless women and children fleeing violence in Central America. Remind me again, Ms. Gracia, how Trump fits into this criteria of yours. Felix Gonzalez Churches hear them Re: Using religion to discriminate an affront to the Gospel, by Andries Coetzee, Opinion, March 3: It is not unusual to have someone appear at a church door asking if it is a safe place for them to worship. What must it feel like to be a person of Christian faith yet hear your churchly brothers and sisters speak out against people like you on the basis of how they interpret Jesus words? I am grateful that churches like University Presbyterian Church and pastor Andries Coetzee know that now is a crucial time for each of our voices to be heard. Welcome to those who need a welcoming church there are many of us in San Antonio. Thomas L. Robison STAMFORD City representatives overwhelmingly agree that one of their own had to be rebuked for posting hate messages on social media, but not all cast their ballots that way. One representative voted not to censure Democrat Marion McGarry for her anti-immigrant and Islamophobic Facebook posts during a special meeting of the Board of Representatives Tuesday night. Eight abstained from voting. The 24-1-8 vote seven members were absent did not follow party lines. Most Democrats and most Republicans approved censuring McGarry, 75, who has represented the 12th District for 12 years. Members of both parties also abstained. Rather, the vote highlights disagreement among city Democrats, who dominate the board with 31 members to the Republican Partys nine. Democrats were clear in their condemnation of McGarrys posts, one of which pasted a photo of the 9/11 terror attacks next to one showing the swearing-in of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Muslim, with the question, Are we that stupid? Another post said theres no such thing as a moderate Muslim. A third showed a judge telling an illegal immigrant to leave the country and take your lawnmower with you. Rep. Megan Cottrell, D-4, read a statement from the Democratic caucus denouncing hatred and any form of prejudice against any member of society. We must realize that prejudice is not a partisan problem or a Stamford problem. It is an American problem, Cottrell said. When we have disagreements we must not attack each other personally. We must live up to the transcendent principle of tolerance. Rep. Jonathan Jacobson, McGarrys fellow Democrat from District 12 and a Facebook friend, took screenshots of her posts and brought them to the attention of the board. I believe we are tasked with the responsibility of representing all people in the city, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or religion, Jacobson said during the meeting. When one of our fellow representatives deviates from that responsibility by endorsing racially charged and bigoted sentiment toward Muslims and Hispanics on social media, it is our duty to formally denounce such sentiment. He showed the posts to board leaders in January, Jacobson said. They confronted McGarry but the words fell on deaf ears, Jacobson said. Jacobson said he confronted McGarry again last week before submitting the petition for censure. She said, I have nothing to say to you. I know what you are up to, Jacobson said. But some representatives said they arent clear about how the matter unfolded. Could we have handled this in a way that is more respectful of Rep. McGarry? asked Rep. David Watkins, R-1. There are those who say she was told and she did not change her behavior. Others say theyre not sure, or that she was not told directly, or that she tried to delete the posts but needed help doing it. Im hoping for further clarity, said Watkins, who voted to censure McGarry. Rep. Elise Coleman, D-3, was the only one to vote against censure, but expressed similar concerns to Watkins. Until we get to the truth and a timeline of how things happened, this should not have come to this board, Coleman said during the meeting. It attacks a person and opens her to some stuff. Nobody wants to look over their shoulder every day. Rep. J.R. McMullen, R-18, abstained. The Code of Ethics allows an investigative process that can be done confidentially, McMullen said. There is no need for a public spectacle. I think it was done for political purposes much more than to protect the Board of Representatives reputation. The Democratic majority leader, Rep. Rodney Pratt of District 9, called it grandstanding. He was still investigating the matter when Jacobson and other representatives took the story to the media, Pratt said. Rep. Anabel Figueroa, D-8, said she didnt learn about it until the last minute. Why wasnt every member of the board notified? Figueroa said during the meeting. She said she asked Jacobson for more information but he told her he couldnt provide it because of privacy concerns, Figueroa said. Ironically, details of the charges were already announced in an email submitted by our board, she said, and The Advocate and Channel 12 were live with the news. Other representatives, including President Matthew Quinones, D-16, said they are confident the McGarry matter was properly handled. As the posts were public, the reaction needs to be public, said Rep. Eric Morson, D-13, who voted to censure McGarry. McGarry did not attend the meeting and has declined to comment, but just before it began, her attorney, Kenneth Sosnoski Jr., held a press conference. Sosnoski questioned why Jacobson wanted to be her friend on her private Facebook account. He lied about his intent, Sosnoski said. He was no friend at all. He was cyber-stalking her the whole time. McGarry is being targeted because she is an honest politician in a city where that is difficult, Sosnoski said, and because some of McGarrys votes on the board have gone against the agenda of Democratic Mayor David Martin. Sosnoski said there is someone behind the scenes telling Jacobson what to do. He would not elaborate. He would not say that McGarry had indeed posted the Facebook messages. He said her Facebook page is private. How would you feel if someone hacked into your private email account? How would you feel if someone listened to your phone calls? Sosnoski said. He likened McGarrys case to that of a rape victim who is traumatized twice, once by the act, the other by the betrayal. The censure is not a disciplinary action against McGarry, who may continue to serve on the board. The Democratic City Committee is considering a vote on whether she should be removed from the party, Chairman Josh Fedeli said. acarella@stamfordadvocate.com; 203-964-2296. Kenneth Roth, directeur de l'organisation internationale de defense des droits de l'Homme Human Rights Watch, au cours AFP/Lionel BONAVENTURE The Human Rights Watch group, HRW has called on the United Nations Security Council to react now, to reports of human rights violations in Cameroon amongst other countries. The HRW group on its website, published on Tuesday March 12, said they were alarmed that the crises in Cameroon and some other four countries in the world were getting worse, while the council stayed indifferent. As regards Cameroon, the rights group said violence escalated after protest broke out in 2017, and government has responded with rampant rights violations, including arbitrary arrests, torture of detainees, extra judicial executions and the burning of homes and property. It further regrets that the council has taken little or no steps to put in place, investigations, despite the fact that all of the countries involved are sitting members of the council, meant to uphold the highest standards of human rights.The HRW hence made a call to states to give these situations the attention they deserve, because the council's credibility and human life depends on it. Cameroon featured alongside Turkey, Bahrain, Philippines and Egypt. This remark comes to add to several others made by foreign diplomats and other commissions against cases of human rights violations in Cameroon. Human Rights Watch has as objective to defend the rights of people in 90 countries on the continent, by spotlighting abuses and bringing perpetrators to justice. However, the government of Cameroon has on several occasions, denied all accusations on gross human rights violations in the country, insisting that those accusing Cameroon dont master the facts of happenings in the country. At the opening of the National Assembly March 12 in Yaounde, legislators called on the international community to support governments actions towards resolving the Anglophone crisis and other issues of national interest. These calls have been falling on a determined international community, which seemingly is getting tired of the ongoing instability in the country. 5 1 of 5 File / Matthew Brown / Hearst Connecticut Media Show More Show Less 2 of 5 File / Matthew Brown / Hearst Connecticut Media Show More Show Less 3 of 5 4 of 5 File / Matthew Brown / Hearst Connecticut Media Show More Show Less 5 of 5 STAMFORD A substitute teacher who allegedly held onto two students after they acted out in class last week is facing a felony charge, police said. The substitute teacher, Niall Campbell, 49, of White Plains, N.Y., was teaching a class at Stamford High School last Thursday when two boys began play fighting, Lt. Sean Scanlon said. During the ruckus, Campbell called security to have the two boys removed from the classroom, Scanlon said. 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S.A., Mercedes-Benz Financial Services France S.A., Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Hong Kong Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Italia SpA, Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Korea Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Nederland B.V., Mercedes-Benz Financial Services New Zealand Ltd, Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Portugal Sociedade Financeira de Credito S.A., Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Rus OOO, Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Schweiz AG, Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Slovakia s.r.o., Mercedes-Benz Financial Services South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Taiwan Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Financial Services UK Limited, Mercedes-Benz Financial Services USA LLC, Mercedes-Benz Finans Danmark A/S, Mercedes-Benz Finans Sverige AB, Mercedes-Benz Finansal Kiralama Turk A.S., Mercedes-Benz Finansman Turk A.S., Mercedes-Benz Formula E Limited, Mercedes-Benz France S.A.S., Mercedes-Benz Fuel Cell GmbH, Mercedes-Benz Forsaljnings AB, Mercedes-Benz G GmbH, Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Group Services Phils. Inc., Mercedes-Benz Hellas S.A., Mercedes-Benz Hong Kong Limited, Mercedes-Benz Hungaria Kft., Mercedes-Benz IDC Europe S.A.S., Mercedes-Benz India Private Limited, Mercedes-Benz Insurance Broker S.R.L., Mercedes-Benz Insurance Services Nederland B.V., Mercedes-Benz Insurance Services Taiwan Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Investment Company LLC, Mercedes-Benz Italia S.p.A., Mercedes-Benz Japan Co. Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Korea Limited, Mercedes-Benz Leasing (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Leasing Co. Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Leasing GmbH, Mercedes-Benz Leasing Hrvatska d.o.o., Mercedes-Benz Leasing IFN S.A., Mercedes-Benz Leasing Kft., Mercedes-Benz Leasing Polska Sp. z o.o., Mercedes-Benz Leasing Taiwan Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Leasing Treuhand GmbH, Mercedes-Benz Leasing do Brasil Arrendamento Mercantil S.A., Mercedes-Benz Ludwigsfelde GmbH, Mercedes-Benz Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., Mercedes-Benz Manhattan Inc., Mercedes-Benz Manufacturing (Thailand) Limited, Mercedes-Benz Manufacturing Hungary Kft., Mercedes-Benz Manufacturing Poland Sp. z o.o., Mercedes-Benz Manufacturing Rus Ltd, Mercedes-Benz Master Owner Trust, Mercedes-Benz Mechelen N.V., Mercedes-Benz Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Mercedes-Benz Minibus GmbH, Mercedes-Benz Mitarbeiter-Fahrzeuge Leasing GmbH, Mercedes-Benz Museum GmbH, Mercedes-Benz New Zealand Ltd, Mercedes-Benz PRAHA s.r.o., Mercedes-Benz Paris SAS, Mercedes-Benz Parts Logistics Eastern Europe s.r.o., Mercedes-Benz Parts Logistics Iberica S.L.U., Mercedes-Benz Parts Logistics UK Limited, Mercedes-Benz Parts Manufacturing & Services Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Polska Sp. z o.o., Mercedes-Benz Portugal S.A., Mercedes-Benz Project Consult GmbH, Mercedes-Benz Renting S.A., Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America Inc., Mercedes-Benz Research & Development Tel Aviv Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India Private Limited, Mercedes-Benz Retail Belgium NV/SA, Mercedes-Benz Retail Group UK Limited, Mercedes-Benz Retail S.A., Mercedes-Benz Retail Unipessoal Lda., Mercedes-Benz Risk Solutions South Africa (Pty.) Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Roma S.p.A., Mercedes-Benz Romania S.R.L., Mercedes-Benz Russia AO, Mercedes-Benz Schweiz AG, Mercedes-Benz Service Leasing S.R.L., Mercedes-Benz Services Correduria de Seguros S.A., Mercedes-Benz Services Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Mercedes-Benz Sigorta Aracilik Hizmetleri A.S., Mercedes-Benz Slovakia s.r.o., Mercedes-Benz Solihull Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Sosnowiec Sp. z o.o., Mercedes-Benz South Africa Ltd, Mercedes-Benz Srbija i Crna Gora d.o.o.u likvidaciji, Mercedes-Benz Subscription Services USA LLC, Mercedes-Benz Sverige AB, Mercedes-Benz Taiwan Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Trucks Belgium Luxembourg NV/SA, Mercedes-Benz Trucks Center Sint-Pieters-Leeuw NV/SA, Mercedes-Benz Trucks Ceska republika s.r.o., Mercedes-Benz Trucks Espana S.L.U., Mercedes-Benz Trucks France S.A.S.U, Mercedes-Benz Trucks Italia S.r.l., Mercedes-Benz Trucks MENA Holding GmbH, Mercedes-Benz Trucks Molsheim, Mercedes-Benz Trucks Nederland B.V., Mercedes-Benz Trucks Schweiz AG, Mercedes-Benz Trucks UK Limited, Mercedes-Benz Turk A.S., Mercedes-Benz U.S. International Inc., Mercedes-Benz USA LLC, Mercedes-Benz Ubezpieczenia Sp. z o.o., Mercedes-Benz V.I. Lyon SAS, Mercedes-Benz V.I. Paris Ile de France SAS, Mercedes-Benz Vans Australia Pacific Pty. Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Vans Ceska republika s.r.o, Mercedes-Benz Vans Espana S.L.U., Mercedes-Benz Vans LLC, Mercedes-Benz Vans Mobility GmbH, Mercedes-Benz Vans Mobility S.L., Mercedes-Benz Vans Nederland B.V., Mercedes-Benz Vans UK Limited, Mercedes-Benz Vehiculos Comerciales Argentina SAU, Mercedes-Benz Venezuela S.A., Mercedes-Benz Versicherung AG, Mercedes-Benz Vertrieb NFZ GmbH, Mercedes-Benz Vertrieb PKW GmbH, Mercedes-Benz Vietnam Ltd., Mercedes-Benz Warszawa Sp. z o.o., Mercedes-Benz Waterloo S.A., Mercedes-Benz Wavre S.A., Mercedes-Benz Wemmel N.V., Mercedes-Benz Wholesale Receivables LLC, Mercedes-Benz do Brasil Assessoria Comercial Ltda., Mercedes-Benz do Brasil Ltda., Mercedes-Benz Osterreich GmbH, Mercedes-Benz Aluguer de Veiculos Unipessoal Lda., Mercedes-Benz.io GmbH, Mercedes-Benz.io Portugal Unipessoal Lda., MercedesService Card Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH, Mitsubishi Fuso Bus Manufacturing Co. Ltd., Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus Corporation, Mitsubishi Fuso Truck of America Inc., Monarch Cars (Tamworth) Ltd., Montajes y Estampaciones Metalicas S.L., Multifleet G.I.E, NAG Nationale Automobil-Gesellschaft Aktiengesellschaft, P.T. Mercedes-Benz Indonesia, PABCO Co. Ltd., PT Daimler Commercial Vehicles Indonesia, PT Mercedes-Benz Distribution Indonesia, Porcher & Meffert Grundstucksgesellschaft mbH & Co. Stuttgart OHG, R.T.C. Management Company Limited, Renting del Pacifico S.A.C., RepairSmith Inc., Reva SAS, Ring Garage AG Chur, SILVER ARROW CHINA 2017-2 RETAIL AUTO LOAN ASSET BACKED NOTES TRUST c/o CITIC TRUST CO. LTD., SILVER ARROW CHINA 2018-1 RETAIL AUTO LOAN ASSET BACKED NOTES TRUST c/o FOTIC: China Foreign Economy and Trade Trust Co. LTD., SILVER ARROW CHINA 2018-2 RETAIL AUTO LOAN ASSET BACKED NOTES TRUST c/o FOTIC: China Foreign Economy and Trade Trust Co. LTD., STARKOM d.o.o., Sandown Motor Holdings (Pty) Ltd, Sechste Vermogensverwaltungsgesellschaft Zeus mbH, SelecTrucks Comercio de Veiculos Ltda, SelecTrucks of America LLC, SelecTrucks of Toronto Inc., Setra of North America Inc., Silver Arrow Australia Trust 2017-1, Silver Arrow Canada GP Inc., Silver Arrow Canada LP, Silver Arrow Lease Facility Trust, Silver Arrow S.A., Special Lease Systems (SLS) B.V, SportChassis LLC, Star Assembly SRL, Star Egypt For Import LLC, Star Transmission srl, Starexport Trading S.A., Sterling Truck Corporation, Sumperska sprava majetku k.s., T.O.C (Schweiz) AG, Taxibeat, Taxibeat Ltd. UK, Taxibeat Peru S.A., Taxibeat Teknoloji Hizmetleri A.S., Thomas Built Buses Inc., Thomas Built Buses of Canada Limited, Transcovo SAS, Transopco France SAS, Transopco GmbH, Transopco Portugal Unipessoal Lda., Transopco UK Ltd., Trona Cogeneration Corporation, Ucafleet S.A.S, Vierzehnte Vermogensverwaltungsgesellschaft DVB mbH, Western Star Trucks Sales Inc, Zuidlease B.V., Zweite Vermogensverwaltungsgesellschaft Zeus mbH, car2go, car2go Belgium SPRL, car2go Canada Ltd., car2go China Co. Ltd., car2go Danmark A/S, car2go Deutschland GmbH, car2go Europe GmbH, car2go Group GmbH, car2go Iberia S.L.U., car2go Italia S.R.L., car2go N.A. Holding Inc, car2go N.A. LLC, car2go Nederland B.V, car2go Sverige AB, car2go Osterreich GmbH, moovel Group GmbH, moovel North America Inc., moovel North America LLC, myTaxi Iberia SL, myTaxi UG, myTaxi UK Ltd., myTaxi USA Inc., mytaxi Austria GmbH, mytaxi Network Ireland Ltd., mytaxi Network Ltd., mytaxi Portugal Unipessoal LDA, mytaxi Sweden AB, ogotrac S.A.S., smart France S.A.S., smart Vertriebs gmbh, and trapoFit GmbH. iShares MSCI Switzerland ETF's stock was trading at $35.66 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus (COVID-19) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, EWL shares have increased by 42.9% and is now trading at $50.97. View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19. by Blaine Blontz | Patriots Correspondent | Tue, Mar 12th 10:06am EDT Nelson Agholor is expected to remain with the Eagles and enter 2019 with the team. (Jeff McLane on Twitter) Fantasy Impact: McLane notes that it would likely "take an attractive offer to pry him away," referring to Agholor. McLane adds that Agholor could decide to restructure his deal in order to move into a larger role elsewhere. Philadelphia has already added DeSean Jackson this offseason, and they could continue to address the position this offseason after watching Mike Wallace and Golden Tate hit free agency. Agholor has shown flashes, but the former first-round pick has been an inconsistent fantasy option during his career. by Alex Johnson | Tue, Mar 12th 11:58am EDT The Cardinals have agreed to a one-year, $7 million deal with former Ravens pass-rusher Terrell Suggs. (Adam Schefter on Twitter ) Fantasy Impact: Suggs has played all 16 of his seasons in Baltimore but will now return to his home state of Arizona for year 17. The 36-year-old has accumulated 132.5 sacks over his career, which is tied for 13th all-time and is most among all active players. by Blaine Blontz | Bills Correspondent | Tue, Mar 12th 1:30pm EDT The Bills have reached an agreement with free agent WR Cole Beasley on a four-year, $29 million deal. (Mike Garafolo on Twitter) Fantasy Impact: Beasley will be an option over the middle for second-year QB Josh Allen like he was for Dak Prescott in Dallas. Beasley found some value in PPR leagues in 2018, but it wasn't consistent enough to warrant steady ownership, much less starter consideration. He'll be joined by WR John Brown in Buffalo, along with potentially others this offseason. by Blaine Blontz | Tue, Mar 12th 1:33pm EDT John Brown and the Bills have reached an agreement on a three-year, $27 million contract. (Adam Caplan on Twitter) Fantasy Impact: Brown lands in Buffalo after spending seasons in Arizona and Baltimore. He showed promise in 2018 with the Ravens prior to Lamar Jackson taking over at QB and the focus shifting to the run. He's shown flashes in the NFL, and he could certainly be a high-ceiling, low-floor option in 2019 paired with Josh Allen. However, he'll be competing for targets with the newly signed Cole Beasley along with the returning Robert Foster. by Mike Tagliere | Ravens Correspondent | Tue, Mar 12th 1:34pm EDT ESPN Insider Adam Schefter is reporting that the Saints have come to an agreement with free agent running back Latavius Murray on a four-year deal worth $14.4 million. (Adam Schefter on Twitter) Fantasy Impact: He's the Mark Ingram replacement in New Orleans. For those who were holding out hope for Ingram to return to the team, this eliminates that from happening. Over the last two years with Alvin Kamara on the roster, Ingram has averaged 13.1 carries and 2.8 receptions per game, so it's not as if Murray's walking into a backup role like the one he had with the Vikings. That's nearly 16 touches per game to a running back who's delivered whenever his name's been called. If he can cross the 200-carry threshold, Murray should be locked in as a low-end RB2 in this top-six scoring offense. by Brendan Tuma | Vikings Correspondent | Tue, Mar 12th 2:41pm EDT Anthony Barr is re-signing with the Vikings on a five-year contract worth $67.5 million. (Mike Garafolo on Twitter) Fantasy Impact: The deal includes $33 million in guaranteed money. It was reported yesterday that Barr was going to sign with the Jets but he apparently had a change of heart. It's a big blow to the Jets since they were going to use Barr to upgrade their pass rush. The 26-year-old linebacker totaled three sacks in 13 games last year, though Minnesota didn't use him to rush the passer all that much. | BY Ricki Green | AWARD School is pleased to welcome its class of 2019, following an overwhelming response to the call for applications and a rigorous judging process. In 2019, AWARD School received 518 applications, of which 216 were successful. This represents an 11 per cent increase in submissions compared to the previous year. The 2019 AWARD School campaign aimed at increasing diversity of applicants, as well as, improving accessibility to the advertising industry as a career option for everyone. This year, the course will expand beyond major cities to the Northern Territory, and to regional and rural Victoria. In addition, three applicants have been accepted into the AWARD School Indigenous Scholarship Programme an AWARD-first initiative made possible thanks to Pluto Media. The students are based in South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria. Says Josie Burns, NSW AWARD School co-head: Its awesome to see AWARD School becoming more accessible to a broader range of thinkers. We hope to keep building on this in years to come. AWARD School kicks off in NSW and VIC on 8 April, and in Regional VIC, WA, QLD, SA and NT on 15 April 2019. AWARD would like to thank its primary sponsor Facebook; as well as Peter Kirk from Pluto Media, Campaign Edge Sprout (Darwin program) and Redhanded Agency (regional Victoria program) for their support. LAKEVILLE, Ohio Nearing the completion of her meet-and-greet sessions, Ohios newest director of agriculture, Dorothy Pelanda, told farmers from Wayne, Holmes and Ashland counties that she wants them to be included as decisions are made. Pelanda spoke over breakfast March 13, at Round Lake Christian Camp, just north of Loudonville. Most of her talk was about improving water quality, and also issues related to farm profitability, and commercial dog breeder licensing. Water quality has been a priority since she took office in January, and was a priority of the John Kasich administration. Pelanda said her team is reviewing the executive order, signed by Kasich last July, but in a way that puts the measure on hold, so farmer input can be considered. The order would have declared eight northwestern Ohio watersheds to be in distress, and required new rules for the states farmers, which many said were too onerous and not likely to result in the swift action the former governor sought. Conservation leaders were also concerned, citing staff and funding limitations, and the cost of getting thousands of farmers to follow new rules. On hold Pelanda said Gov. Mike DeWine has basically pushed the pause button on the Kasich order, but she assured the group that water quality is still the top priority, with meetings that are held each week by ODA, the Department of Natural Resources and Ohio EPA to discuss the best course of action. The states biggest water quality issue has been with Lake Erie, where farm nutrient runoff, and runoff from municipal and residential waste has led to harmful algal blooms, which threaten the safety and usability of the lakes water. However, Pelanda said DeWine is focused on water quality solutions for all of Ohios 88 counties, including the southern two-thirds of the state, which flows to the Ohio River and into the Mississippi. The DeWine administration announced more than $20 million in funding in February, intended for improvements in the western Lake Erie basin, and the governor is planning more funding in his statewide budget proposal, to be released March 15. More to come According to Pelanda, the governor will announce a new program called the H2-Ohio Fund a targeted water quality approach for the whole state. Farmers and commodity groups have been supportive of water quality improvement in Ohio, investing millions of dollars into on-farm research, and trying new farming practices intended to keep nutrients in place. Theyve been concerned, however, that regulations not get ahead of the science, which continues to develop as new farming practices are studied. We cant ask farmers to do these things without the government stepping in and helping them financially, Pelanda said. And helping be a team together to figure out what the problems are, and whats working and whats not working. Taking action She said the solutions will take time but that there is enough data already collected to explore some shovel-ready ideas. Pelanda is hosting events across the state this week, in celebration of Ohio Agriculture Week, March 10-16. Additional meetings are scheduled through April 12, and can be found online at www.agri.ohio.gov. She said her goal is to hear from everyone, before making big decisions that affect agriculture. We may not ultimately agree on the solutions, but my goal as agriculture director is to not have anybody say I was not part of the conversation, she said. I want our department to be known for its professionalism and its integrity dealing with each and every constituent that we engage in. Related coverage: Europes largest dairy cooperative Arla Foods has introduced new measures to tackle climate change, including a step to be carbon 'net zero' by 2050. The new targets, launched on Sunday 10 March, include a target to be carbon neutral by 2050, with any unavoidable emissions, for example from farms, offset by improvements elsewhere in the supply chain. The move is widely regarded as being in line with the goals of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change. Other targets include a step to balance nitrogen and phosphorus cycles to support clean water systems and a wish to be more closely aligned with nature to further increase biodiversity across Britains countryside. While Arla has managed almost 50% more milk since 2005, its CO2 emissions have reduced by 22% across production and packaging; on farms CO2 emissions per kilo of milk have reduced by 24% since 1990. The dairy cooperative, which is owned by 2,400 UK farmers, already boasts the first carbon net zero milk processing facility in the world. From 2015 to 2018 it cut the annual emissions of carbon from the UKs largest dairy at Aylesbury by more than half, or by 15,000 tonnes, by switching to using biogas. Arla Foods UK Managing Director, Ash Amirahmadi said providing food for a growing population whilst reducing environmental impact is one of the world's 'greatest challenges'. Arla has already shown this is possible and the new ambitions announced today will ensure Arlas farmers, production sites and products continue to play their part in developing a sustainable world for everyone, he said. Examples of actions taken by Arlas UK farmer owners include the fact that over 130 farms now use robotics to allow cows to be milked whenever they want. Meanwhile, almost 1,500 farms have opened parts of their land to public use, with farmers taking responsibility for the maintenance of hedgerows and more than 10,000 kilometres of public footpaths. Farmers have been encouraged to check their oilseed rape crop to prevent boron deficiency, as the nutrient is often 'underused' and 'forgotten' on many farms. Although an increasing number of farmers understand the importance of boron in driving strong yields, experts warn that it is is often 'forgotten' by farmers. The nutrient is vital for oilseed rape, especially for its part in the growth stages of the crop. Symptoms of boron deficiency include hollowness, deformation and necrosis, often presenting as discolouration on the leaves, brittle texture, and lesions across the plant. Natalie Wood, Arable Agronomist at Yara, says: People know they need to apply micronutrients, but boron is often overlooked despite the high rate of boron deficiency in UK soils. Boron is particularly important for pollen formation and viability, which directly affects the yield in all flowering crops, like oilseed rape. When timing a boron application for oilseed, it has historically been done at onset of stem extension. Early tissue-testing is a recommended method to ensure any problems and deficiencies in the crop are identified. Farmers can then get a sense of how their crop is performing and adjust their boron applications accordingly, Ms Wood says. Boron toxicity as a common anxiety amongst farmers, particularly with oilseed rape, she explains. While we should take it into consideration, the reality is that boron toxicity only really occurs with very large applications. It would take multiple kilos to cause an issue whereas with our foliar products you are applying grams. The recommended rate for applying boron is 1 litre per hectare, although farmers are encouraged to increase this amount if deficiency is present. Trends confirm that boron awareness is starting to grow. In 2017, 58% of oilseed samples tested were deficient in boron. In 2018, this number fell to 54% - a slow reduction, but a clear indicator that farmers are perhaps starting to take boron deficiency more seriously. Awareness is improving but its clear that the perception of boron still needs to shift, says Ms Wood. We need to give boron that same level of consideration. Implementing boron application into your spring nutrition programme gives oilseed rape the best chance to perform and increases the likelihood of stronger yields. Tariffs would be applied to beef, lamb, poultry and some dairy products in the event of a 'no deal' Brexit to protect the British farming industry, the government has said. Under the tariff regime, some farming sectors will not have this protection noticeably eggs, cereals, fruit and vegetables. The UK would eliminate import tariffs on a wide range of goods and avoid a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Under the one-year plan, 87 percent of total imports to the UK by value would be eligible for tariff-free access. The government announced the move ahead of a vote by MPs on Wednesday (13 March) whether the UK should leave the European Union without a deal. The NFU said that the late release of the tariff regime is 'appalling' given that the UK leaves the EU in just over two weeks time. NFU President Minette Batters said: Farmers and food businesses have no time to prepare for the implications, which will be exacerbated by the fact that we will face tariffs on our own exports on food into the EU and other countries with whom we currently enjoy free trade arrangements. Although we are pleased to see that the government has listened to our concerns and elected to treat many agricultural sectors sensitively, which may support farmers who are already facing disastrous disruption from no-deal, it is enormously worrying that some sectors will not have this protection. Even those sectors that are treated sensitively will, in most instances, see worrying and large reductions in the tariff rates currently charged on non-EU imports. Mrs Batters added: Furthermore, the approach taken by the government to lump products under the same high-level tariff code, for example whole carcases and high value cuts of fresh beef, means there is a high chance of market distortion for many sectors who are deemed to have been treated sensitively. The NFU said it recognises the importance of ensuring food prices for consumers do not rise in a no-deal Brexit. However, it is 'deeply concerned' that the approach to tariffs published today will mean a greater reliance on food produced overseas. Mrs Batters added: This would not necessarily lead to cheaper food for consumers but would mean we export and increase the environmental impact of our food production while losing control of the high standards of animal welfare to which that food is produced. In a no-deal scenario the government must act immediately to revise these tariffs and quotas should this happen. The Country Land and Business Association (CLA) said that under this potential trading regime many of British products will become 'uncompetitive' in Europe, while quotas for global tariff-free imports will create 'further uncertainty'. CLA Deputy President, Mark Bridgeman said: It is vital that the government makes clear that there will be early action to help those producers directly affected manage the impact. Market interventions and encouraging consumers to buy British, will also help mitigate economic and social hardship in the event of a no deal Brexit and significant market disruptions. The tariff scheme comes as the UK's four farming unions have called for the government to call for an extension to Article 50. McDonalds UK has invested over 270,000 pounds to support British dairy farmers in the latest round of its capital grant scheme. The investment is part of a scheme launched in March 2018 which is part of Farm Forward, McDonalds programme of support for the farming industry. It aims to support the future of the industry and fund applications that are focused on raising animal welfare standards, providing economic benefits to the farmers' business or making environmental improvements. In its latest round of investment, the restaurant giant has announced 273,243 will go to 33 of Arlas UK farmer owners. One farmer, Mark Hornbuckle, who runs an 460 cow organic farm in Nottinghamshire, has received 8,010 in the latest grant allocations and will be using this to invest in ventilation systems and in additional calf jackets this winter, plus some rubber matting and water troughs. Alice Willett, Agriculture Consultant at McDonalds UK, said the company is 'impressed' with how 'ambitious' the dairy cooperative's farmers are in 'driving forward standards'. Whilst Arla supplies organic milk to McDonalds, we recognise that as a supplier working with a farmer owned co-operative we have an opportunity to help the wider group farmers continually invest in their businesses and this scheme is a reflection of that. Graham Wilkinson, Agriculture Director at Arla UK added: In making funding available to our farmer owners in key areas such as animal welfare, economic benefit and environmental improvements, it shows that a collaborative supply chain drives forward industry leading standards for UK dairy farming. Nine winners of a major farming competition will showcase their designs to MPs in the House of Commons, where one overall champion will be decided. The 'Farmvention' competition challenged primary schoolchildren to use Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects to design farm-related products. These include designing a tractor of the future, creating a healthy British snack product and creating an environment for laying hens. The competition, launched by the NFU, received over 1,000 entries from schools all across the country. On Wednesday (13 March) the nine winners will showcase their designs to MPs, stakeholders and other winning schools in the House of Commons. The overall champion will be decided by a judging panel led by NFU President Minette Batters. Mrs Batters said: This week is a critical week in Parliament, which could go down in history as one of the most defining times for Britain and for British farming. But educating our children about food, and about how farmers produce it, goes beyond todays parliamentary activity. Agriculture is a high-tech industry and as the world changes it will need an increasing workforce of scientists, technicians, engineers and mathematicians. We set out with the aim of opening young eyes to the realities of British agriculture and the many exciting opportunities within the industry, and Im proud to say we have done just that, she said. Farmvention has also provided innovative ways for schools to effectively teach STEM subjects. The NFU said they were 'staggered' by the ingenuity and the use of new technologies in some of competition entries. Mrs Batters added: British farming has the potential for a fantastic future where we can continue to provide quality, affordable food for the nation, maintain our high production standards and care for the iconic British countryside, and this future starts with our children. By integrating food and farming into the primary curriculum we are opening the doors for potential career paths that could otherwise pass our young people by. They could be scientists, nutritionists, even members of Parliament. Or better yet, they could be farmers. The nine winners KS1 Tractor of the future: Settle C of E Primary, Settle, North East KS2L Tractor of the future: Afeefa Haroon Ronald Ross Primary School, London, South East KS2U Tractor of the future: Tracticians Armitage C of E Primary School, Manchester, North West Healthy Hens KS1: Class 2H Glascote Academy, Tamworth, West Midlands Healthy Hens KS2L: Oscar Brownmoore - St. Aidan's VC Primary School, London, South East Healthy Hens KS2U: Emily Bailey Bridgewater Primary School, Northampton, East Midlands A Great British Snack KS1: Dosbarth y Gleision Ysgol Bro Idris, Dolgellau, Wales A Great British Snack KS2L: Toby Barribel Wonersh and Shamley Green Primary School, Guildford, South East A Great British Snack KS2U: Team Fruity Flow St John Fisher, Catholic Primary School, Coventry, West Midlands The overall champion will win the grand prize of having their school turned into a farm for the day. Other prizes for the winning schools included fully funded farm visits, chef visits and 600 to spend on robotics products for the school. The import of animal medicines will be prioritised in the event of a 'no-deal' Brexit, the government has confirmed. The government has secured additional freight capacity to relieve potential pressure on the Dover straits and help ensure that critical goods continue to enter the UK. All veterinary medicines authorised under the Veterinary Medicines Regulation 2013 have been listed as 'critical goods for government-secured freight capacity'. The governments priority remains leaving the EU with a deal, but departments continue to carry out contingency planning in case of a 'no deal' outcome. Contracts have been secured with Brittany Ferries and DFDS to run ferries into and out of Poole, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Immingham and Felixstowe. The use of this freight capacity has been agreed by ministers across government, recognising that it supports contingency planning across a number of departments. The farming and veterinary industries have been concerned that there could be interruptions to the supply chain of drug supplies used in veterinary hospitals and other vets if the UK leaves the EU without a trade deal. RSPCA chief veterinary officer, Caroline Allen said: We believe the governments decision to add veterinary medicines to the critical goods list of items considered essential for the preservation of human and animal welfare is a small step in the right direction to mitigate the negative effects a no-deal Brexit could have on animal welfare. However, she said: Any shortage [in vets] will greatly impact on animal welfare especially in the slaughter of farm animals. Its important that welfare, rather than economics, is put first and that the medicines apply to all types of animals, both large and small. The UKs four farming unions have urged MPs to extend the Article 50 deadline as MPs overwhelmingly reject May's Brexit deal. Farm leaders have urged MPs to take 'whatever measures are necessary' to remove the possibility of leaving the EU with 'no deal'. It comes as Theresa May suffers a second defeat on her Brexit deal on Tuesday night (12 March), as MPs voted to reject it by a majority of 149 votes. With just 16 days to go until the UK is due to leave the EU, the UK's four farming unions have issued a joint plea to avoid a 'no deal' Brexit. NFU President Minette Batters, NFU Cymru President John Davies, NFU Scotland President Andrew McCornick and Ulster Farmers Union President Ivor Ferguson issued the following statement in the wake of the vote in Parliament. The outcome of the vote means there is no realistic possibility of achieving an orderly departure from the EU on March 29. A no deal exit from the EU would be a catastrophe for British farming and food production, the four presidents said. Therefore some sort of extension of the Article 50 deadline will be necessary. It is critical that the government and MPs identify a clear strategy to secure parliaments support for a negotiated Brexit deal between the UK and the EU and use any extension of Article 50 constructively. We cannot simply delay the prospect of no deal. They added: This continued uncertainty is having real world consequences on farming businesses and wider British industry already. It is time for MPs to consider the concessions they will need to accommodate to support a deal that finally brings to an end the enormous and damaging uncertainty that is already undermining our food and farming sectors. The unions have highlighted how there could be 'huge disruption' as a result of an effective trade embargo on the export of UK animals and animal based products. In 2017, 31% of domestic sheep meat production was exported and 94% of that was destined for the EU, using carcase weight equivalence this equates to a staggering total of around 4.5 million sheep. Other sectors are equally as reliant on EU outlets and face similar issues including cull cows, cull sows and trade in live chicks. Parliament will now vote on Wednesday (13 March) on leaving the European Union with 'no deal'. If this is rejected by MPs, a vote on Thursday (14 March) will take place looking to extend the date the UK leaves the EU. | BY Ricki Green | Director Georgi Banks-Davies has joined the Scoundrel roster for representation in both Australia and New Zealand. Banks-Davies brings a fresh and honest approach to commercials which has seen her collaborating with some of the worlds largest brands such as Apple, Audi, Coca-Cola, Nike, Lexus, Toyota, Starbucks, O2 and Sport England. Her passion for the automotive & sports/action categories, in particular, are obvious in her a masterful body of work view here. Says Adrian Shapiro, EP and co-founder, Scoundrel: Were thrilled to have someone of Georgis calibre join the family, she has a rare ability to communicate with the audience on a level thats both highly visual and very human all at once. Were really excited to see what shes going to bring to our market. Varun Jets Off To London Varun Dhawan jetted off to London in the early hours of Wednesday morning and he was snapped at the airport. Varun looked cool wearing a white hoodie with black sweatpants, and a pair of red and black sneakers. Varun has been filming for Remo D'Souza's dance film, Street Dancer 3 in London. He will be starring opposite Shraddha Kapoor in the film. He was in Mumbai city for the trailer launch of his next release, Kalank. Disha Patani's Ultra Casual Look Disha Patani was snapped with a friend in the city on Wednesday afternoon. Disha sported an ultra casual look wearing a cropped grey zip up hoodie with matching sweatpants. Disha is rumored to be dating Tiger Shroff but the two have never admitted to the relationship. Recently, Tiger's dad, Jackie Shroff revealed that the two are friends as of now but they may get married in the near future. Ajay Devgn Spotted In The City Ajay Devgn was snapped out and about in the city on Wednesday afternoon. He waved for the cameras looking cool in a black t-shirt and navy blue shorts, wearing a black bandana. Ajay was last seen in the comedy adventure movie, Total Dhamaal. He will next be seen on the big screen in Taanaji: The Unsung Warrior, a period drama film also starring Saif Ali Khan and Kajol. Taimur Gets A Piggyback Ride On Dad's Shoulders Little Nawab, Taimur Ali Khan smiled his adorable smile when he was snapped by the paparazzi on Wednesday. He looked too cute in a red Polo t-shirt with beige shorts and red crocs. He was later snapped getting a piggy back ride on his dad, Saif Ali Khan's shoulders. KGF Similar To Kondaveeti Donga? While talking about KGF, Paruchuri Gopala Krishna said that it was quite similar to the Chiranjeevi starrer Kondaveeti Donga, which was one of the most popular films of the 1990s. Explaining the similarities in detail, he said that both films revolved around gold mines and tribals. His Exact Words "If one has to analyze KGF, it all boils down to how a son fulfills the promise he made to his mother at her deathbed in the eleventh hour. If we observe the film's soul, it is very small and how it collected Rs 160 crs share speaks volumes of the care the makers have taken. The film's plot has been seen in the past in few films. Even we penned many such stories and one such film is Kondaveeti Donga which revolves around gold mines and tribals. The story has mines in the forests and a tiger kills everyone to hide the secret." 'The Makers Penned The Story From The Viewpoint Of The Men' Praising the writers for coming up with a compelling story, the veteran said that the film clicked with the audience as it was told from the male perspective. "(In KGF) While mother dreams of her son to become a king, he wants to become an emperor. This became the strong emotion and wonderful dialogues in 10-15 scenes in the film helped the story movement perfectly. The makers penned the story from the viewpoint of the men," he added. The writer added that Geetha Govindam and Aravinda Sametha too worked with the audience as they were told from the male perspective. To Conclude... KGF is a landmark film for Kannada cinema which is going to be remembered for many years to come. The film's sequel, titled KGF Chapter 2, went on the floors today(March 13, 2019). The buzz is that it will be bigger and more hard-hitting than the first part. AVITA Medical (ASX: AVH, OTCQX: AVMXY), a global regenerative medicine company, announced that management will present at the Cowen and Company 39th Annual Health Care Conference in Boston. The presentation is being made on 13 March 2019 from 11:20 a.m. to 11:50 a.m. EDT at the Boston Marriott Copley Place. A copy of the slide presentation will be posted to the ASX website (https://www.asx.com.au) and to the Company's website (http://avitamedical.com). ABOUT AVITA MEDICAL LIMITED AVITA Medical is a regenerative medicine company with a technology platform positioned to address unmet medical needs in burns, chronic wounds, and aesthetics indications. AVITA Medical's patented and proprietary collection and application technology provides innovative treatment solutions derived from the regenerative properties of a patient's own skin. The medical devices work by preparing a REGENERATIVE EPIDERMAL SUSPENSION(RES), an autologous suspension comprised of the patient's skin cells necessary to regenerate natural healthy epidermis. This autologous suspension is then sprayed onto the areas of the patient requiring treatment. AVITA Medical's first U.S. product, the RECELL System, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in September 2018. The RECELL System is indicated for use in the treatment of acute thermal burns in patients 18 years and older. The RECELL System is used to prepare Spray-On Skin Cells using a small amount of a patient's own skin, providing a new way to treat severe burns, while significantly reducing the amount of donor skin required. The RECELL System is designed to be used at the point of care alone or in combination with autografts depending on the depth of the burn injury. Compelling data from randomized, controlled clinical trials conducted at major U.S. burn centers and real-world use in more than 7,000 patients globally, reinforce that the RECELL System is a significant advancement over the current standard of care for burn patients and offers benefits in clinical outcomes and cost savings. Healthcare professionals should read the INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE RECELL Autologous Cell Harvesting Device (https://recellsystem.com/) for a full description of indications for use and important safety information including contraindications, warnings and precautions. In international markets our products are marketed under the RECELL System brand to promote skin healing in a wide range of applications including burns, acute wounds, scars and vitiligo. The RECELL System is TGA-registered in Australia and CFDA-cleared in China. To learn more, visit www.avitamedical.com. CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS This letter includes forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements generally can be identified by the use of words such as "anticipate," "expect," "intend," "could," "may," "will," "believe," "estimate," "look forward," "forecast," "goal," "target," "project," "continue," "outlook," "guidance," "future," other words of similar meaning and the use of future dates. Forward-looking statements in this letter include, but are not limited to, statements concerning, among other things, our ongoing clinical trials and product development activities, regulatory approval of our products, the potential for future growth in our business, and our ability to achieve our key strategic, operational and financial goal. Forward-looking statements by their nature address matters that are, to different degrees, uncertain. Each forward- looking statement contained in this letter is subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statement. Applicable risks and uncertainties include, among others, the timing of regulatory approvals of our products; physician acceptance, endorsement, and use of our products; failure to achieve the anticipated benefits from approval of our products; the effect of regulatory actions; product liability claims; risks associated with international operations and expansion; and other business effects, including the effects of industry, economic or political conditions outside of the company's control. Investors should not place considerable reliance on the forward-looking statements contained in this letter. Investors are encouraged to read our publicly available filings for a discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties. The forward-looking statements in this letter speak only as of the date of this release, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise any of these statements. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190312005948/en/ Contacts: U.S. Media Sam Brown, Inc. Christy Curran Phone +1-615.414.8668 christycurran@sambrown.com OUS Media Monsoon Communications Sarah Kemter Phone +61 (0)3 9620 3333 Mobile +61 (0)407 162 530 sarahk@monsoon.com.au Investors: Westwicke Partners Caroline Corner Phone +1-415-202-5678 caroline.corner@westwicke.com AVITA Medical Ltd Dale A. Sander Chief Financial Officer Phone +1-661-367-9178 dsander@avitamedical.com WASHINGTON, DC / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / Following MEMRI's March 6, 2019 publication of a report on antisemitic sermons delivered by Imam Abdelmohsen Abouhatab at the Al-Aqsa Islamic Society in Philadelphia, PA between November 2018 and February 2019, Al-Aqsa Islamic Society officials issued an apology. On March 8, 2019, Board of Trustees secretary Chukri Khorchid and Imam Mohamed Shehata posted on the Al-Aqsa Islamic Society website: "Al Aqsa Islamic Society rejects anti-Semitism in any form. We are shocked and outraged to learn that one of our guest speakers said reprehensible anti-Jewish remarks on the floor of Al Aqsa. This in no way represents our beliefs or policies. We condemn this action and will make sure that this never happens again. We expect that all guest speakers will respect and uphold our policy that hatred against any group of people or religion will not be tolerated." While the mosque statement noted "We are shocked and outraged to learn that one of our guest speakers" had made these statements, at the conclusion of Abouhatab's January 11, 2019 sermon, as worshipers prepared to leave, a mosque leader, likely Imam Mohamed Shehata himself, took the microphone and said: "On behalf of all of you, I would like to extend our gratitude to Sheikh Abdelmohsen Abouhattab for this good sermon." Similar expressions of gratitude by the same mosque leader were repeated after each of Abouhatab's sermons. On March 9, Imam Abouhatab issued a "Public Statement" on his website, English and Arabic, denying that his statements were antisemitic, citing Quran verses and stating, in English: "I am not against any religion and what was attributed to me is completely false. I do not promote hate, nor do I insight [sic] violence. The religion of Islam calls me to living peacefully alongside others who share different faiths, and to never transgress against the rights of others, while always speaking the words of truth when need be and under the shade of the law." As highlighted in the MEMRI report, the Al-Aqsa Islamic Society is known for interfaith activity and for working with Philadelphia mayors Michael Nutter (D) and Jim Kenney (D), the ADL and other Jewish organizations, the FBI, law enforcement, and more, including participation in a November 2018 "Securing Sacred Spaces and Places" summit in Philadelphia hosted by the ADL, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (USAO), and the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center (DVIC), at which Chukri Korchid spoke. To date, only the ADL has spoken out about Imam Abouhatab's statements, the mosque's apology, and Abouhatab's subsequent denial. Following Abouhatab's denial, the ADL issued a statement calling it "flying in the face of multiple expert translations" and said he was "shamefully unrepentant for spouting anti-Jewish hate." It added that the organization had conferred with the city's Commission on Human Relations about the incident and that it would continue its interfaith work with Al-Aqsa as the mosque investigates the sermons. Additionally, as of this writing, the videos of Abouhatab's sermons that MEMRI translated remain on the mosque's YouTube channel. MEMRI Lantos Project Mission To Expose Antisemitism And To Educate The Lantos Antisemitism Documentation Project documents antisemitic themes in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu-Pashtu, and Turkish newspaper reports, editorials, and other media sources. This project maintains the Lantos Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial Archives, which is the largest archive in the world of translated antisemitic content from the Middle East from the past decade. MEMRI's objective in highlighting the work of the Lantos Project is to bring the issue of antisemitism to media, to present evidence so that legal countermeasures can be taken, and to inform policy makers in order to provide the informational infrastructure for policies, strategies and legislative initiatives to counter antisemitism. It also seeks to enhance academic research of antisemitism. The Lantos Project distributes all its content - reports, analysis, and videos - through a blog and all its videos through the Lantos MEMRI TV page. The Lantos Project YouTube page includes videos from annual events held in the Speaker's Dining Room of the U.S. Capitol marking the establishment of the Lantos Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial Archives. No other organization does this vital work; all major organizations that focus on antisemitism depend upon the research from this project. MEMRI research and translation efforts on exposing antisemitism in the Arab and Muslim world have provided crucial resources to educate policymakers, media organizations, the public, and others. MEMRI asks for your help to continue this important work through tax-deductible donations. Please visit the Sermons By Imams In The West project page. About MEMRI: Exploring the Middle East and South Asia through their media, MEMRI bridges the language gap between the West and the Middle East and South Asia, providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, Urdu-Pashtu, Dari, and Turkish media, as well as original analysis of political, ideological, intellectual, social, cultural, and religious trends. Founded in February 1998 to inform the debate over U.S. policy in the Middle East, MEMRI is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit, 501(c)3 organization. MEMRI's main office is located in Washington, DC, with branch offices in various world capitals. MEMRI research is translated into English, French, Polish, Japanese, Spanish and Hebrew. MEMRI - Middle East Media Research Institute: https://www.memri.org MEMRI In The Media: https://memriinthemedia.org MEMRI TV - MEMRI: https://www.memri.org/tv Contact Information: MEMRI media@memri.org 202-955-9070 www.memri.org SOURCE: MEMRI View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/538842/MEMRIs-Exposure-Of-Antisemitic-Sermons-By-Imam-Abdelmohsen-Abouhatab-At-Philadelphias-Al-Aqsa-Islamic-Society-Prompts-Mosques-Apology BEIJING, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- SCI successfully held Oil and Gas Industry Seminar 2019 during the International Petroleum (IP) Week 2019 hosted by the Energy Institute in February. Over 60 participants from 40 companies, including Bloomberg, Koch, Gazprom, Eni, Chevron, Ineos, ENGIE, Centrica, etc., attended the seminar and exchanged ideas on hot industry topics with SCI analysts. Mr. John Cai, CEO of SCI, briefed on the mission and business perspectives of SCI during the opening speech. Mr. Cai believes China's oil and gas industries development may bring both opportunities and challenges to all global & local market participants. Michael Mao presented the outstanding performance of China LNG industry in 2018, and conducted an in-depth analysis on future industry entrants and import potentials. He believes with the continuous market-orientation reforms in China natural gas industry, an increasing number of participants will get involved in import businesses. Though facing great challenges from natural gas and other substitutes, China's LPG industry will have a notable supply gap to be fulfilled by imports in the future, which is expected to bring opportunities for China alkane deep-processing players. James Gao then shared his insights on China's oil refining and bunker industries. He said the emerging of private refining projects in China in recent years stimulated the diversification of supply pattern in China's oil refining industry. China's oil refining industry may experience a shuffle and integration in the next five years. Meanwhile, the low-sulfur trend of the global bunker market will bring opportunities for China's bunker industry. James Gao reckons China has enough ability to achieve self-sufficiency in the low-sulfur bunker supply in the near future, and even may export to key global markets with central government's policy support. Recently, SCI has provided information and consulting services, covering basic data, high-end reports, market studies, customized reports, etc. for various leading enterprises from over 30 countries including the U.S., the U.K., Russia, Singapore, etc. Focusing on China and serving global customers, SCI has been recognized as the one to trust for the Chinese commodity market. SCI gains in-depth insights into China energy, chemical, agricultural and metal industry performance, policies and industry trends. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/834095/SCI_1.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/834094/SCI_2.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/834093/SCI_3.jpg Coca-Cola, Fine Hygienic Holding, General Motors and Reckitt Benckiser (RB) step up to lead. DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Coca-Cola, Fine Hygienic Holding, General Motors and Reckitt Benckiser (RB) have stepped up as the early sponsors of the 2019 Middle East Edition of House of Rose Professional's Break the ceiling touch the sky - the success and leadership summit to be held on April 10, 2019 in Dubai. AMCHAM Abu Dhabi, French Business Council Dubai & Northern Emirates and Food industry Asia will serve as the key Industry Partners for the summit. The 2019 Middle East Edition of Break the ceiling touch the sky is an important pillar of the 2019 World Tour of the summit to the USA, Australia-New Zealand, India, Middle East, Europe and Singapore. It features best practices for success, leadership and gender diversity across industries via keynote addresses, panel discussions and mentoring sessions. Participating Companies can access cutting-edge knowledge to inspire and enable their leaders and enhance the leadership skills of their leaders at a fraction of the cost of other expensive training programs. The 2019 Middle East Edition of Break the ceiling touch the sky is led by close to 30 C-suite leaders including James Michael Lafferty, CEO, Fine Hygienic Holding; Shahzeb Mahmood, Regional Director and GM, MENAP, RB; Mohammed Al Fayyad, Director of Customer Care and Aftersales, General Motors, Africa & Middle East; Julie Hamilton, Global Chief Customer and Commercial Leadership Officer & Senior Vice President, The Coca-Cola Company; Noha Hefny, Co-Founder, She is Arab; Luciano Poli, President India, Middle East, North Africa and Turkey (IMET), The Dow Chemical Company; Sherine Moneim, Beauty and Personal Care Marketing Director, Unilever Mashreq; Abdul Rahman Al Thehaiban, Senior Vice President, Oracle MEA & CEE; Jules Lewis, Director, Mountain High UAE & Colorado; Sheena Ganesh, Global Controller - Business Operations, Upstream Finance Manager - UAE, KSA, Shell; Judith Trujillo, HR Manager, GM Middle East; Alizeh Iqbal Haider, Chief Compliance Officer, Fine Hygienic Holding; Carrie Niggli, Senior Director for Customer Development, Middle East and North Africa, The Coca-Cola Company; Liz Beneski, Executive Director at AMCHAM Abu Dhabi; Delel Chaabouni, IT Senior Director - Asia, Middle East & North Africa, PepsiCo; and Susan Mboya, Principal and International Advisor, Navigators Global. Speaking opportunities and sponsors slots are still available for participating Companies. Commented Shahzeb Mahmood, Regional Director and GM, MENAP, Reckitt Benckiser, "At RB, we actively seek to integrate diversity into our business. This is for us the most obvious continuing enabler to unlock the full potential of our people, our brands and our businesses. We believe this integral to be able to provide innovative solutions to our consumers, and positive impact in the communities we operate in. Gender diversity in particular is a stated priority for our Company and we are delighted to be one of the leading industry voices in enabling the advancement of gender diversity in the Middle East. This is important to our customers and our employees and to every one of us at RB." Commented James Michael Lafferty, CEO of Fine Hygienic Holding, "In 2018 we joined the Break the ceiling touch the sky movement via a partnership with the summit in the Middle East and in Singapore. Inspired by the many sharings of success on gender diversity in particular we have made rapid progress, going from zero women leaders on our Executive team to over 30% in under six months. Learning and sharing across industries on Diversity & Inclusion is a critical part of our game plan for success. We are proud to be a Platinum sponsor of the 2019 Middle East Edition of the summit." Julie Hamilton, Global Chief Customer and Commercial Leadership Officer, The Coca-Cola Company shared, "Diversity is at the heart of our business. We strive to create a work environment that provides all our associates equal access to information, development and opportunity. We have seen great contributions via gender diversity. Our business is honored to be a world sponsor of Break the ceiling touch the sky which will give participants a tremendous opportunity to learn from others, share best practices, network with peers and chart their own individual courses for success." Coca-Cola is a 2018 and 2019 World Sponsor of the summit. Fine Hygienic Holding is a Platinum Sponsor; General Motors a Gold Sponsor and Reckitt Benckiser(RB) a Silver sponsor. The move to bring the summit back to Dubai, UAE has been inspired by the UAE's commitment to gender diversity. Concluded Anthony A. Rose, Chairman and CEO, House of Rose Professional and best-selling author of the book Break the Ceiling, Touch the Sky: success secrets of the world's most inspirational women which inspired the summit: "Break the ceiling touch the sky is a unique opportunity for Companies in the Middle East to learn from the best of the best, grow their leaders and positively impact their businesses." For media/sponsorship inquiries contact: Anthony A. Rose, House of Rose Professional Pte. Ltd. Email: anthony@houseofroseprofessional.com or visit www.houseofroseprofessional.com House of Rose ProfessionalPte. Ltd. operates across the People and Public Relations businesses. EP Global Opportunities Trust plc (the "Company") Director changes The Company announces that, following the conclusion of the Annual General Meeting to be held on 24 April 2019, Mr Giles Weaver will retire as a non-executive Director of the Company. He became a Director of the Company in March 2011 when it merged with Anglo & Overseas plc, having served as a director of that company since its launch in 2005. Mr Weaver became Chairman of the Audit and Management Engagement Committee of the Company in April 2014. The Board wishes to thank Mr Weaver for his wise counsel, experience and commitment to the Company over his eight years of service. His investment experience and his knowledge of investment trusts have been of great benefit to the Board. Following the retirement of Giles Weaver from the Board, David Ross will become Chairman of the Audit and Management Engagement Committee. The Company is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr Tom Walker as an independent non-executive Director of the Company and member of the Audit and Management Engagement Committee with effect from 1 April 2019. Tom Walker has recently retired as a portfolio manager from Martin Currie Investment Management Limited where latterly, he headed up their Global Long Term Unconstrained equity team. As part of his responsibilities, he managed an investment trust, Martin Currie Global Portfolio Trust plc, as well as other global segregated portfolios. He joined Martin Currie in 1996, initially to lead their Pacific Basin investment team, subsequently moving to head their North America team. Tom Walker qualified as a chartered accountant with Thomson McLintock, now KPMG, then moved into investment management with Edinburgh Fund Managers and subsequently worked in Hong Kong with Baring Asset Management, before joining Martin Currie. Given his extensive investment management experience and detailed knowledge of the investment trust sector, the Board is delighted that Tom Walker has agreed to become a Director of the Company. Tom Walker currently does not have an interest in any shares in the Company and there is no other information required to be disclosed pursuant to LR 9.6.13R of the Listing Rules in relation to his appointment. 13 March 2019 Legal Entity Identifier: 2138005T5CT5ITZ7ZX58 Enquiries: Kenneth Greig Edinburgh Partners AIFM Limited Tel: 0131 270 3800 The Company's registered office address is: 27-31 Melville Street Edinburgh EH3 7JF XI'AN, China, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The city of Xi'an in China'sShaanxi province has held its 2nd Xi'an Farmers Festival ("the Festival") to further promote the region's agricultural innovation and development, celebrating its agricultural harvest and the fifteenth consecutive year of growth in disposable income per capita . The event gathers experts and professionals in the area of Chinese rural development to discuss and share insights on rural revitalization strategies, policy interpretation, implementation and regional practices. The Festival also consists of a series of workshops and seminars including agricultural forums, agricultural technology roadshows and presentations of quality agricultural products. Tourism is also a highlight, with an introduction of village tourism routes, boutique hostels and photo exhibitions around the region. In addition, Xi'an districts and counties will organize shows including gong and drum performances as well as a singing contest, cooking competition for chefs, and peasant painting and paper-cutting exhibitions to demonstrate the current agricultural and cultural development in the region. Quality products in agriculture and tourism will be rewarded from a selection of agricultural products and boutique sightseeing tours. As part of the city's development initiative to accelerate rural area economic growth by supporting China's farming culture, the Festival is a new model of urban-rural integration which will help to build a modern village in Xi'an with prosperous agricultural industries, sustainable ecology and effective management systems before 2050. To address the "Three Rural Issues" in the region, capacity-building for farmers, revitalization for rural communities, and brand development for specialty crops, Xi'an has been working on regional poverty alleviation through agricultural reform. In 2018, Xi'an set up 496 farmer cooperatives and more than 400 agricultural parks. In addition, tourism has brought 26.5 million visitors to rural areas. Moving forward, Xi'an's rural areas are radiating unprecedented vitality by standing at a new level, digging and building a new rural culture. About the Xi'an Farmers Festival The Xi'an Farmers Festival was established in 2017 to shine a light on China's "Three Rural Issues" and establish Xi'an as a leader in rural and agricultural development. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/834766/XIAN_farmers_festival.jpg 13 March 2019 Acron's Shareholders Approve Dividends PJSC Acron (Veliky Novgorod) summed up the results of its extraordinary general meeting held on 11 March 2019 in the form of absentee voting. The shareholders approved distribution of a part of Acron's profit for previous years as proposed by Acron's Board of Directors. Dividends on Acron's outstanding ordinary shares will amount to RUB 130 per share. The record date for persons entitled to dividends is set for 22 March 2019. The total amount allocated for dividends is RUB 5.3 billion. Media contacts: Sergey Dorofeev Anastasiya Gromova Tatiana Smirnova Public Relations Phone: +7 (495) 777-08-65 (ext. 5196) Investor contacts: Ilya Popov Investor Relations Phone: +7 (495) 745-77-45 (ext. 5252) Background Information Acron Group is a leading vertically integrated mineral fertiliser producer in Russia and globally, with chemical production facilities in Veliky Novgorod (Acron) and the Smolensk region (Dorogobuzh). The Group owns and operates a phosphate mine in Murmansk region (North-Western Phosphorous Company, NWPC) and is implementing a potash development project in Perm Krai (Verkhnekamsk Potash Company, VPC). It has a wholly owned transportation and logistics infrastructure, including three Baltic port terminals and distribution networks in Russia and China. Acron's subsidiary, North Atlantic Potash Inc. (NAP), holds mining licenses for 13 parcels of the potassium salt deposit at Prairie Evaporite, Saskatchewan, Canada. Acron also holds a minority stake (19.8%) in Polish Grupa Azoty S.A., one of the largest chemical producers in Europe. In 2017, the Group sold 7.3 million tonnes of various products to 65 countries, with Russia, Brazil, Europe and the United States as key markets. In 2017, the Group posted consolidated IFRS revenue of RUB 94,342 million (USD 1,617 million) and net profit of RUB 14,260 million (USD 244 million). Acron's shares are on the Level 1 quotation list of the Moscow Exchange and its global depositary receipts are traded at the London Stock Exchange (ticker AKRN). Acron employs approximately 11,000 people. For more information about Acron Group, please visit www.acron.ru/en. PRAGUE, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Zentiva Group a.s. and Siyiara Enterprises have signed a Shared Purchase Agreement for the acquisition of Romanian based pharmaceutical company Solacium, together with its subsidiary Be Well Pharma. Solacium is currently part of the Dr.Max Group and owned by Siyiara Enterprises together with Mr. Trasca Alexandru-Tony. Nick Haggar, CEO of Zentiva stated: "Zentiva is delighted to confirm the signing of its first acquisition following the carve out from Sanofi in the last quarter of 2018. Solacium complements our existing generic medicines business and grows our OTC capability and offering for patients and consumers in Romania." "After Dr.Max's acquisition of A&D Pharma Group, we have decided to primarily focus on three main pillars of our Romanian business: pharma retail, wholesale and marketing & sales. Although Solacium is a fast-growing food supplement and OTC medicines producer, we believe that under the management of a specialised and successful pharmaceutical company, such as Zentiva, it can fulfil its potential and significantly boost its business beyond current levels," said Leonardo Ferrandino, President and Group CEO of Dr.Max. The transaction remains subject to the approval of several conditions including, but not limited to, the Romanian Competition Council. About Zentiva Zentiva is a European producer of high quality medicines serving patients in Europe, Middle East and Africa. With a dedicated team of more than 2.500 people and our network of production sites - including our flagship sites in Prague and Bucharest - we strive to be the champions of branded and generic medicines in Europe to better support people's daily healthcare needs. At Zentiva it is our aspiration that healthcare should be a right and not a privilege. More than ever, people need better access to high quality affordable medicines and healthcare. We work in partnership with physicians, pharmacists, wholesalers, regulators and governments to provide the everyday solutions that we all depend on. About Solacium Pharma SOLACIUM PHARMA's vision is to become one of Romania's leading pharmaceutical companies, by building partnerships with healthcare professionals for the benefit of patients, consumers and employees. These partnerships are based on delivering innovative products that offer people the best choices for their health. Media Contact: Ines Windisch Head of Corporate Affairs & Human Resources ZENTIVA GROUP, a.s. U Kabelovny 130 - 102 37 Prague 10 - Czech Republic Cell: (+420) 601 341 444 E-mail: ines.windisch@zentiva.com www.zentiva.com Ivo Mravinac PR Specialist & CZ Spokesperson PENTA INVESTMENTS, s.r.o. Florentinum, Na Florenci 2116/15, 110 00 Prague 1 - Czech Republic Tel.: +420 225 101 109 Cell: +420 606 656 930 E-mail: mravinac@pentainvestments.com www.pentainvestments.com Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/834905/Solacium_Logo.jpg Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/788903/Zentiva_Logo.jpg Wednesday, March 13, 2019 at 12:00PM By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla After 10 years of living and breathing Canadian tech news, reviews, and opinions, the time has come for me to switch gears and begin a new adventure. I started Canadian Reviewer as a personal blog in 2008. I was in between jobs, having worked as an editor for university-level textbooks and wanting to continue covering consumer technology as I had done as a reporter in the writing for national newspapers and monthly magazines. The world and the media landscape has changed so much since then and my journey has come full circle. The author at Apple's Mothership in 1 Infinite Loop during a press event in 2014 Canadian Reviewer was my personal blog, but it was also a place for me to be able to contribute my reportage and knowledge of mobile and consumer technology, which I had been immersed in since the 90s. Having this outlet enabled me to cover tech between assignments and deadlines. Articles that may not have suited my audience at MacWorld or PC World or the Toronto Star where my pieces appeared under Shaun Conlins Evergeek section, appeared in Canadian Reviewer. It is hard to believe that it has been ten years since the first post went up on Canadian Reviewer. The website eventually took on a life of its own. Simultaneously, It became my outlet to write the reviews and commentary on the technology that excited me the most. It also came at the right time with the explosion of smartphones and 3G technology in Canada. Its 2019 and, sadly, this marks the end of my involvement as editor-in-chief and writer for Canadian Reviewer. I know now that the brand and the publication has grown and evolved beyond what a personal blog can possibly contain. After 10 years of living and breathing Canadian tech news, reviews and opinions, the time has come for me to switch gears and find a new adventure. Starting mid-March, I am joining the Reviews team at PCMag in New York as Business Writer. The author (second from left) representing Canadian Reviewer during one of the many product launches Before I go, I want to thank the many talented and extremely generous individuals who shared Canadian Reviewer with me, and who gave a lot of themselves to make this the independent source for Canadian technology and lifestyle content. First of all, my wife, Cookie, who supported me and our family throughout this endeavour, and who was gracious in times when I needed to travel for coverages and launch events. Canadian Reviewer would not exist without her generosity and patience. My news editor Nicole Batac who has nurtured and curated news on the site and who I cant thank enough for her insight and news instinct. Nicole doted on Canadian Reviewer even if she was half the world away. The author (left) and Lifestyle Editor Sonya Davidson Sonya Davidson our Lifestyle Editor who balanced the onslaught of technology news with delightful lifestyle coverage and with her effervescent personality. Emily Chung, our automotive expert whose sharp vehicle reviews added a lot of value and perspective to the site. Thank you Emily for representing Canadian Reviewer in various press trips and events! A tip of the hat goes to valuable friends and contributors who found Canadian Reviewer a worthy place for their work. Much love and respect goes to you all, thank you so much. Alex Davies, Corey Herscu, Maarten Heilbron, Don Halliwell, Simon Cohen, Nicholas Montgomery, and anyone I may have forgotten to thank, I raise a glass to you. The author (fifth from left) with fellow journalists at an Apple WWDC keynote - Photo credit Serenity Caldwell/iMore For the various companies and marketing and PR firms and practitioners who gave our small, independent blog the opportunity to cover products and events, thanks for the consideration. Most importantly, I am thankful to all the readers and regulars of Canadian Reviewer from all over the world who have continued to support the site, its vision, and its voice, as we tried to bring independent and uncompromising coverage of the consumer technology sector in Canada. We have shared 10 years and 6759 posts together. Its been a grand tour. Because of our readers and the stories Ive crafted for them, Ive been able to cover technology up close in various launch events, Ive traveled the world chasing the cutting edge in technology, and Ive gained a memorable and lasting front-row view of this industry and its players. Now, its time to close this chapter and begin another one. So with this, I bid you farewell and wish you all the best. As for Canadian Reviewers future, Im hoping it can continue in some shape or form, possibly under new ownership. Stay tuned! Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla The Canadian Reviewer RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The World Ethnogames Confederation (Kyrgyzstan) in cooperation with The Camel Club (Saudi-Arabia) proudly announced the start of the global event "Nomad Universe" which is being held from March 9-19, 2019 in the framework of the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. To view the Multimedia News Release, please click: https://www.multivu.com/players/uk/8509951-nomad-universe-started-in-saudi-arabia/ Main goal of "Nomad Universe,", which has no comparable counterparts worldwide, is the preservation and revival of historical heritage and diversity of the original culture of peoples and ethnic groups from all over the world. 2,000 participants from 90 countries are currently attending "Nomad Universe" to perform & present their cultural treasures in Art, Sport & Science. "Through the revival of cultural values and the philosophy of centuries-old traditions, 'Nomad Universe' promotes cultural mutual enrichment and peace among the peoples of the world. It unites the diversity of various peoples and ethnic groups and keeps the deep philosophy and spiritual sacredness of our ancestors alive," as Mr. Askhat Akibayev, President of The World Ethnogames Confederation pointed out. Ethno-Sport competitions are being performed, among others, like Horse Competition "Kok Boru," Horseback Wrestling "Er Enish," Traditional Archery and Traditional Hunting with Falcons, Golden Eagles and Taigan dogs "Salbuurun," Great Nomad Competitions (running with a sheep, saddling up a horse, horse riding with a goat), Demonstration Games and Masterclasses of Traditional Wrestling, Mas-Wrestling and Arm-Wrestling, such as Weight Carrying Competitions and Yakut Jumps Competitions. The element is an expression of the cultural and historic tradition and spiritual identity of its practitioners and serves to unite communities regardless of social status, fostering a culture of teamwork, responsibility and respect. Aside from sporting competitions, art & science is also an important element. Cultural activities are uniting the creme de la creme of ethno-cultural artists, folklore groups, ensembles such as famous sculptors and painters from 90 countries. The King Abdulaziz Camel Festival is the world's largest Camel festival, held annually under the patronage of King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. The Festival is a diverse cultural, economic and sporting event that accentuates the heritage and reflects the cultural depth of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is currently taking place until March 24, 2019 near the village of Al-Sayahid, 150 kilometers from the capital city Riyadh on a stretch of 30 million square meters of desert, visited by 35,000 people per day. For many centuries this historical place has been served as a meeting point for camel caravans arriving from all points of the Arabian Peninsula. "Nomad Universe in the framework of The King Abdulaziz Camel Festival is a global summit of peoples and ethnic groups, who come together for preserving and demonstrating their uniqueness. A great role model for unity in diversity and in-line with Saudi Arabia's 2030 Vision," said Mr. Askhat Akibayev, President of The World Ethnogames Confederation. Video: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/834496/Nomad_Universe_Opening_Ceremony.mp4 Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/834497/Nomad_Universe_Opening_Ceremony.jpg Winnebago Honored by the RV Industry Association for its Pioneering Efforts to Bring Zero Emission Specialty Vehicles to Market SALT LAKE CITY, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Winnebago Industries, Inc. (NYSE: WGO) was honored today with the Sustainability Award by the RV Industry Association (RVIA) for its efforts in bringing an all-electric option to a vehicle segment well-known for daily idling and onboard generators. The award was presented to the company at an award ceremony at the industry trade show, RVX: The RV Experience , in Salt Lake City, Utah. The 33/38 foot vehicle is powered by a Ford F-53 based EPIC chassis from Motiv Power Systems . The zero-emission vehicle is a platform for mobile medical units, mobile imaging vehicles, mobile preschools, bloodmobiles, bookmobiles and more. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/834770/Winnebago.jpg "Our all-electric specialty vehicle offering taps into two growing trends, organizations wanting to take their services and technology to their consumers where they might be and the nationwide electrification of vehicles in an effort to reduce urban idling and onboard generator use for cleaner air," said Jamie Sorenson, Director of the Winnebago Specialty Vehicles. "We are honored to receive this award. It is a testament to the great work the whole Specialty Vehicles Division has accomplished and is validation that this new direction is something welcomed by our industry. Winnebago has had a heritage of designing and manufacturing these innovative specialty vehicles for over 30 years." Winnebago launched the customizable, all-electric offering last year to serve communities and organizations looking to increase access to services in a cleaner and quieter environment. The all-electric commercial shell platform is well suited for urban and semi-urban short range commercial applications, and use cases where idling or running an external generator for extended periods of time is common, such as mobile medical clinics, bloodmobiles, bookmobiles, mobile classrooms, and other mobile activities. The all-electric EPIC chassis from Motiv Power Systems holds enough charge for eight hours of service plus round-trip travel to and from its home facility, with a range of up to 125 miles. "We're proud to have partnered with Winnebago on the electric vehicle," said Matt O'Leary, CEO Motiv Power Systems. "Beyond the saved fuel and maintenance savings, the electric specialty vehicles support community outreach goals without the need for extended idling, a particular sensitivity when these vehicles are performing medical services including exposing visitors to diesel fume emissions when used in the context of lung screening. We couldn't have asked for a better proof point for the shift to commercial EVs." Further illustrating the company's commitment to healthy air, Winnebago also joined the American Lung Association as a Proud Partner. In an effort to increase awareness for clean air and lung health, Winnebago will feature the American Lung Association Proud Partner logo and SavedbytheScan.org information on select zero-emission vehicles and via the company's digital networks. "After successfully collaborating to launch the world's first electric Mobile Lung Unit to provide preventive lung cancer screenings, we are pleased to take our initiatives for cleaner air a step further by becoming an American Lung Association Proud Partner," said Ashis Bhattacharya, Vice President, Strategic Planning and Development, and leader of Winnebago Specialty Vehicles . "The American Lung Association is a trusted guardian of healthy lungs and we are looking forward to leveraging our all-electric, zero-emission vehicles to further promote the importance of improving the air quality in the communities our vehicles serve." Winnebago was awarded the Sustainability Award during The Reveal opening ceremony at RVX on March 12. The all-electric chassis was on display and the ceremony streamed online to thousands of participants through GoRVing . Over 165 individual units submitted for The Reveal, with over 400 competing in all award categories combined. For more information about Winnebago Specialty Vehicles, visit https://winnebagoind.com/product-classes/specialty-vehicles . About Winnebago Industries Winnebago Industries, Inc. is a leading U.S. manufacturer of outdoor lifestyle products under the Winnebago, Grand Design and Chris-Craft brands, which are used primarily in leisure travel and outdoor recreation activities. The Company builds quality motorhomes, travel trailers, fifth wheel products and boats. Winnebago Industries has multiple facilities in Iowa, Indiana, Oregon, Minnesota and Florida. The Company's common stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and traded under the symbol WGO. For access to Winnebago Industries' investor relations material or to add your name to an automatic email list for Company news releases, visit http://investor.wgo.net . About the American Lung Association The American Lung Association is the leading organization working to save lives by improving lung health and preventing lung disease, through research, education and advocacy. The work of the American Lung Association is focused on four strategic imperatives: to defeat lung cancer; to improve the air we breathe; to reduce the burden of lung disease on individuals and their families; and to eliminate tobacco use and tobacco-related diseases. The Lung Association does not endorse products, devices or services. For more information about the American Lung Association, a holder of the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Guide Seal, or to support the work it does, call 1-800-LUNGUSA (1-800-586-4872) or visit: Lung.org. CONTACT INFORMATION: Danielle Sullivan (781) 888-9794 danielle@technicacommunications.com SAN FRANCISCO, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The global biopharmaceutical third party logistics market size is expected to reach USD 120.64 billion by 2025, at a CAGR 4.9% over the forecast period, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. The market for biopharmaceutical third party logistics (3PL) is majorly driven by rising demand for temperature controlled logistic services to transport biologics in various regions and growing distribution networks of biopharmaceutical companies to improve their sales. Rising adoption of automated storage and retrieval systems in the emerging countries is an ongoing trend in the pharmaceutical logistics companies that has gained a significant traction. Key suggestions from the report: In 2018, non-cold chain logistics held the largest market share in terms of revenue owing to the sales of a large number of drugs that do not require any temperature control Cold chain logistics segment is expected to register the faster CAGR over the forecast period owing to the demand for biologics, such as cellular therapies, vaccines, and test kits Warehousing and storage held the largest market share among the types of services in 2018 Asia pacific expected to emerge with the fastest CAGR over the forecast period owing to adoption of medicines from aging population and shift of drug sales from brand manufacturers to generic Key players operating in the biopharmaceutical third party logistics market include DHL International GmbH., SF Express, United Parcel Service of America, Inc, AmerisourceBergen Corporation, DB Schenker, Kuehne and Nagel, Kerry logistics network limited and Agility Read 96 page research report with TOC on "Biopharmaceutical Third Party Logistics (3PL) Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Supply Chain (Cold Chain, Non-cold Chain), By Service, By Region, And Segment Forecasts, 2019 - 2025" at: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/biopharmaceutical-third-party-logistics-3pl-market Furthermore, the trend of shifting from small molecule drugs to biopharmaceuticals, mainly vaccines and biologics, is projected to drive the market. Since, these small molecule drugs are temperature sensitive products, demand for temperature controlled transportation and storage increases and thus is responsible for the market growth. As of now, the pharmaceutical sales through distributors have grown from USD 304.6 billion in 2013 to USD 440.2 billion in 2016. However, the average number of manufacturers per distributor had declined from 1,474 in 2014 to 1,211 in 2016. This data depicts that there is an increase in quantity of pharmaceutical products being distributed, and thus, is expected to surge the demand for 3PL services. Additionally, environmental concerns and cost have caused a slight shift in the means of transport used for commercial product, moving from airway to seaway shipping and in roadways from truck to intermodal (both rail and truck). The intermodal transport is majorly used by these pharmaceutical companies to reduce the carbon footprint. The ongoing trend shows that the pharmaceutical manufacturers have shifted towards sea freight to reduce the cost and risk factor. Although for cold chain products, the companies still prefer air freight. However, some of the large pharmaceutical companies are planning to transport 70% of their products via ocean freight including cold chain products. Grand View Research has segmented the global biopharmaceutical third party logistics market on the basis of service, participant, and region: Biopharmaceutical Third Party Logistics Supply Chain Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025) Cold Chain Non-cold Chain Biopharmaceutical Third Party Logistics Service Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025) Transportation Air Freight Sea Freight Overland Warehousing and Storage Others Biopharmaceutical Third Party Logistics Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025) North America U.S. Canada Europe U.K. Germany France Italy Spain Asia Pacific China Japan India Australia New Zealand Latin America Brazil Mexico Argentina Middle East & Africa & South Africa Saudi Arabia UAE Find more research reports on Pharmaceuticals Industry, by Grand View Research: Radiodermatitis Market - The global radiodermatitis market size was estimated at USD 310.9 million in 2016 and is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 4.0% throughout the forecast period. Prostate Cancer Therapeutics Market - The global prostate cancer therapeutics market size was valued at USD 7.9 billion in 2016 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 4.8% over the forecast period. Gout Therapeutics Market - The Global gout therapeutics market is expected to gain a profitable progress over the forecast period owing to the factors such as the development of newer therapies which can be used as the add-on therapies with the already available treatment for gout Gain access to Grand View Compass, our BI enabled intuitive market research database of 10,000+ reports About Grand View Research Grand View Research, U.S.-based market research and consulting company, provides syndicated as well as customized research reports and consulting services. Registered in California and headquartered in San Francisco, the company comprises over 425 analysts and consultants, adding more than 1200 market research reports to its vast database each year. These reports offer in-depth analysis on 46 industries across 25 major countries worldwide. With the help of an interactive market intelligence platform, Grand View Research helps Fortune 500 companies and renowned academic institutes understand the global and regional business environment and gauge the opportunities that lie ahead. Contact: Sherry James Corporate Sales Specialist, USA Grand View Research, Inc. Phone: +1-415-349-0058 Toll Free: 1-888-202-9519 Email: sales@grandviewresearch.com Web: https://www.grandviewresearch.com Follow Us: LinkedIn | Twitter LAKEWOOD, CO / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / General Moly, Inc . (the "Company") (NYSE American and TSX: GMO), the only western exchange listed, pure-play molybdenum mineral development company, reports that its Board of Directors has retained XMS Capital Partners, Headwall Partners, and Odinbrook Global Advisors (collectively, the "Advisors"), as financial advisors to assist the Board and management with evaluating and recommending strategic alternatives. The range of strategic alternatives being evaluated include sourcing of potential incremental capital financing, sale of interest(s) in the assets of the Company or the Company, and restructuring of the convertible debt issued in a December 2014 private placement, which matures in December 2019. Pivotal 2019 for General Moly General Moly is on the threshold of having a fully permitted Mt. Hope molybdenum ("moly") project in central Nevada later in 2019. The Company recently reported a significant milestone concerning the commencement of the public comment period for the Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement ("DSEIS") for the Mt. Hope Project in a news release on March 6, 2019. The public comment period will close April 22, 2019. Following the public comment period, the Bureau of Land Management will consider comments received in developing a Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement and issuing a Record of Decision ("ROD") later in 2019. Additionally, the Company anticipates receipt of its water permits from the Nevada State Engineer by mid-year 2019 in compliance with the Nevada statutory deadline of June 6, 2019, which represents 240 days after receipt of the September 2018 water hearing transcript. In September 2018, the Company negotiated a settlement agreement with Eureka County and the Diamond Natural Resources Protection & Conservation Association, resolving all of their respective protest issues during the public hearing on the Mt. Hope water applications. The September hearing was completed before the State Engineer, addressing the remaining protest issues asserted by a local ranching family, who refused to participate in the settlement. Once the water permits are issued, AMER International Group ("AMER"), the Company's largest shareholder is committed to subscribe to an additional Tranche 3 purchase of 20 million General Moly common shares priced at $0.50/share, providing General Moly with $10 million under the existing Securities Purchase Agreement. AMER will also help to source and guarantee a $700 million bank loan for the development of the Mt. Hope Project upon further improved moly prices coupled with the receipt of water permits and the ROD. Related to General Moly's Mt. Hope Project financing needs, General Moly has a long-term advisory engagement with Cutfield Freeman & Co. ("Cutfield Freeman") for business development support in China and in its financing discussions with AMER. Private Placement with Management Insiders In advance of receiving the water permits, members of management of the Company led by Chief Executive Officer Bruce D. Hansen agreed in principle with the Audit Committee of the Board to provide interim incremental liquidity to the Company through a private placement purchase of up to $900,000 of Convertible Preferred Shares of General Moly with a 5% annual dividend, which is anticipated to close by the end of March 2019. The transaction is subject to a definitive purchase agreement and approval by the disinterested members of the Board. The Convertible Preferred Shares are priced at $100.00/preferred share, convertible at any time at the holder's discretion into common shares whereby one preferred share converts at a price of $0.27/common share to 370.37 common shares. The conversion price was set as yesterday's closing price of the common stock, which was the day before this announcement of the private placement. Upon maturity or full repayment of the $7.1 million convertible debt currently outstanding, there will be mandatory redemption of the preferred shares in exchange for equivalent cash for the principal invested, plus any accrued and unpaid dividends. The Company believes this transaction will provide the liquidity necessary for the Company to operate through the anticipated receipt of the water permits. The Company is discussing with AMER the potential for AMER to accelerate a portion of the existing Tranche 3 share purchase obligation through participation with members of management, or separately, through a restructured Tranche 3. Mr. Hansen noted, "Receipt of the final Nevada water permits and the Record of Decision approving the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement later in 2019 will be significant steps in de-risking the Mt. Hope Project. Thereafter, the Company will proceed to financing development upon a sustained improvement in the moly price which has been trading in the $12/lb range and risen 1.5 times higher than $5.15 at the end of 2015. (Price source: Platts.) "Moly was the best price performer among the common metals and minerals in 2018. Additionally, the moly market is anticipated to fall into deficit supply later in 2019 through 2022, according to the February 2019 Molybdenum Quarterly report by the CPM Group, a leading commodities research and consulting firm. Strengthening moly demand from rising output in stainless steel and specialty steels for the oil and gas industry in 2018, including the burgeoning liquid natural gas global trade, is expected to continue in 2019 and beyond. CPM forecasts the average nominal moly price to rise from $13.36/lb in 2019 to $17.67/lb in 2022." Mr. Hansen, who currently owns 4.2% of the Company's common shares as well as $1.1 million of the convertible debt and warrants exercisable for an additional 3.5 million common shares, further commented, "Our Board has directly engaged the Advisors for the evaluation of strategic options to optimize the value of the Company's assets and address its sustainability. We look forward to working with the Advisors to consider strategic options and opportunities for the benefit of the Company and its shareholders." Ricardo M. Campoy, Chairman, Lead Independent Director and a member of the Finance Committee of the Board, said, "2019 may prove to be a pivotal year for General Moly. After years of diligent work by our management team and staff on progressing reinstatement of our permits and ROD for the Mt. Hope Project, we are on the cusp of having the Mt. Hope Project fully permitted. The primary focus for the Board and management is to secure and build shareholder value. In view of the fiscal needs of the Company in a challenging market for small cap metal companies, we are pleased to structure a bridge financing agreement with our senior management on fair terms for our shareholders. Equally as important, we have engaged the team of Advisors with the deep experience and relationships with a broad spectrum of investors around the world and within the global steel industry to help us unlock the worth of Mt. Hope and Liberty projects and maximize value for our shareholders. On behalf of the Board, we appreciate the efforts and professionalism of our valued employees who do their utmost every day to strengthen General Moly." Flagship Mt. Hope Project In the meantime, the Mt. Hope Project remains funded at Eureka Moly LLC ("EMLLC"), which is 80% owned by General Moly and 20% by POS-Minerals, a subsidiary of POSCO of South Korea, into 2021, based on estimated care and maintenance expenses with a restricted cash reserve account balance of $8.2 million at the end of September 2018. Engineering at the Mt. Hope Project is approximately 65% complete. Through its 80% interest, the Company has assets valued at $88.1 million in long-lead-time plant and mine equipment at the Mt. Hope Project, ready for future resumption of development at September 30, 2018. The Company also has recorded cost basis of $11.3 million for water rights and land at or nearby the Mt. Hope Project property. Other Company Assets Additionally, the Company has over $9.8 million in assets on a 100% basis attributed to the Liberty Project and other assets at September 30, 2018. As the Company has reported earlier, there is further development potential for a newly identified shallow, high-grade sulfide zinc mineralization, adjacent to the ultimate moly pit planned at the Mt. Hope property. The 2018 drilling also indicated a deeper high-grade copper and silver mineralized zone. The zinc deposit was confirmed by a drill program in 2018. The Company, along with its EMLLC joint venture partner POS-Minerals, is evaluating the drill results as well as historical drill data for the potential to produce a Preliminary Economic Assessment, subject to funding availability The Company anticipates issuance of its 2018 financial results news release and filing of its Annual Report on Form 10-K by March 22, 2019. About the Advisors The Advisors represent a unique group of skill sets to address General Moly's near-term and long-term needs, and to maximize valuation for shareholders. The Board and management will be working closely with the team led by Peter J. Scott, Managing Partner of Headwall, Ted Brombach, Managing Partner of XMS, and Steven Strom, Founding Partner of Odinbrook. About General Moly General Moly is a U.S.-based, molybdenum mineral exploration and development company listed on the NYSE American, recently known as the NYSE MKT and former American Stock Exchange, and the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol GMO. The Company's primary asset, an 80% interest in the Mt. Hope Project located in central Nevada, is considered one of the world's largest and highest grade molybdenum deposits. Combined with the Company's wholly-owned Liberty Project , a molybdenum and copper property also located in central Nevada, General Moly's goal is to become the largest primary molybdenum producer in the world. Molybdenum is a metallic element used primarily as an alloy agent in steel manufacturing. When added to steel, molybdenum enhances steel strength, resistance to corrosion and extreme temperature performance. In the chemical and petrochemical industries, molybdenum is used in catalysts, especially for cleaner burning fuels by removing sulfur from liquid fuels, and in corrosion inhibitors, high performance lubricants, and polymers. Contact: Scott Roswell (303) 928-8591 info@generalmoly.com Website: www.generalmoly.com Forward Looking Statement Statements herein that are not historical facts are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act, as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended and are intended to be covered by the safe harbor created by such sections. Such forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected, anticipated, expected, or implied by the Company. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to availability of cash to continue ongoing operations, metals price and production volatility, global economic conditions, currency fluctuations, increased production costs and variances in ore grade or recovery rates from those assumed in mining plans, exploration risks and results, political, operational and project development risks, including the Company's ability to obtain a re-grant of its water permits and Record of Decision, ability to maintain required federal and state permits to continue construction, and commence production of molybdenum, copper, silver, lead or zinc, ability to identify any economic mineral reserves of copper, silver, lead or zinc;ability of the Company to obtain approval of its joint venture partner at the Mt. Hope Project in order to mine for copper, silver, lead or zinc, ability to raise required project financing or funding to pursue an exploration program related to potential copper, silver lead or zinc deposits at Mt. Hope, ability to respond to adverse governmental regulation and judicial outcomes, and ability to maintain and /or adjust estimates related to cost of production, capital, operating and exploration expenditures. For a detailed discussion of risks and other factors that may impact these forward looking statements, please refer to the Risk Factors and other discussion contained in the Company's quarterly and annual periodic reports on Forms 10-Q and 10-K, on file with the SEC. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements. SOURCE: General Moly, Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/538843/General-Moly-Board-Engages-Financial-Advisors-to-Evaluate-and-Recommend-Strategic-Alternatives-and-Secures-Private-Placement-of-Convertible-Preferred-Shares VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / Sunniva Inc. ("Sunniva", the "Company", "we", "our" or "us") (CSE: SNN) (OTCQB:SNNVF), is pleased to announce the launch of their first three Sunniva brands in California. Sun Fire and KYNDNESS will hit shelves on March 15 and March 22, respectively and will initially be launched at select Harborside dispensaries in Oakland and San Jose and the Mankind dispensary in San Diego. The Herbella brand is anticipated to be in stores in Q2 2019, and all three brands will soon be available in dispensaries through-out the state of California. With the introduction of the first two brands in the series, Sun Fire and KYNDNESS, Sunniva is making good on its promise to deliver safe, full-spectrum, sun-grown products, truly living up to the Sunniva name, which means "Gift of the Sun." The Herbella brand will provide a truly exceptional experience with its line of ultra-pure extracts and select artisanal indoor cannabis flower. These wholly owned brands are made possible due to Sunniva's strategic relationships with industry-leading cultivators, each of whom have been carefully selected for their ability to produce top-quality flower and deliver extraction biomass on a consistent basis, along with their ability to meet Sunniva's standards. Through these unique partnerships and exclusive procurement arrangements, Sunniva is launching a series of highly-curated cannabis brands that cater to a variety of consumer tastes as the Company ramps up production within our state-of-the-art greenhouse. "Sunniva's vision to enhance the lives of consumers with products that preserve the health and wellbeing of our community is supported by a house of brands approach to marketing. Every brand released under this model will offer a unique marketing mix to provide a diverse array of choices at various price points which appeal to individual consumer preferences. The first three brands in this series represent Sunniva's spirit of collaboration and steadfast commitment to developing products which offer the highest level of safety and quality, while never compromising on our promise to adhere to the highest standards of sustainability and responsible growth," said Mary Patton, VP, Marketing, Sunniva. Patton continued, "We are very proud to release some of the best sun grown and indoor cannabis products that can be found in today's California marketplace. However true to our core belief that Better is PossibleTM, Sunniva plans to unveil super premium brands with multiple product lines, which will showcase our own signature genetics, proprietary cultivation techniques crafted within our state of the art glasshouse." About Sun Fire The pride of the central California coast, every Sun Fire product starts with terpene-rich, sun grown cannabis expertly cultivated from our partners in the idyllic Monterey County. Bathed in pure, natural sunlight, offering rich, full-spectrum flavor profiles, Sun Fire's flower and extracts represent some of the hottest products under the California sun. Affordably priced and responsibly packaged for maximum safety and minimal waste, Sun Fire delivers incredible flavor, quality and value for every budget. The initial rollout of the Sun Fire label on March 15 will consist of flower products in 3.5, 7, 14, and 28 gram bags, vape cartridges (0.5 and 1.0 gram), disposable pens (0.5 grams), with shatter concentrate (1 gram) to follow later in the month. Sun Fire will initially be launched at Harborside dispensaries in Oakland and San Jose and the Mankind dispensary in San Diego. About KYNDNESS Driven by a deep desire to brighten lives with a little KYNDNESS, Sunniva teamed up with Harborside's FLRish Farms, to develop a line of personal and sharable sun-grown cannabis products, developed with budget-friendly price points. The KYNDNESS brand aims to embody the spirit of connection with cultivars, consumers and the community at large by collaborating with like-minded businesses that share our values in order to be a shining example of how coming together for the greater good benefits the entire eco-system. Generously packed, recyclable jars of KYNDNESS flower will initially be sold in 5 gram and 10 gram packages featuring both "smalls' and "select' bud sizes. By mid Q2 2019, the KYNDNESS brand will be expanded to include distillate product lines (vape pens and cartridges) and select concentrates. Harborside will be the first to launch the KYNDNESS brand at select locations on March 15, and the entire line will begin hitting shelves at other key dispensaries, such as the Mankind dispensary in San Diego, in late March. About Herbella Herbella is set to launch in Q2 2019, offering more upscale, boutique-quality product lines at a slightly higher price point that will provide the consumer with affordable luxury. Herbella products will include select artisanal indoor cannabis flower packaged in recyclable jars of 3.5, 7, 14 and 28 grams and will also include premium live resin extracts, manufactured within Sunniva's state of the art manufacturing laboratory and available in 1 gram jars of live resin extracts as well as terpene-rich vaporizer pens and cartridges. "As a physician, safety and providing a consistent experience to the consumer is of paramount importance to me and for Sunniva, as many of our customers are looking for relief from insomnia, pain, anxiety and a variety of other symptoms," said Dr. Anthony Holler, CEO and Chairman of Sunniva. Dr. Holler continued, "This is accomplished through rigorous standards within cultivation, extraction and testing of our branded products. Sunniva's world-class greenhouse and extraction facility were designed to adhere to Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) which will support the production of safe, reproducible cannabis products. Our in-house distribution and delivery services will complete our control of products from seed to sale." 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. About Sunniva Sunniva, through its subsidiaries, is a vertically integrated cannabis company operating in the world's two largest cannabis markets - California and Canada. Sunniva is focused on creating sustainable premium cannabis brands supported by our large-scale, purpose-built cGMP designed greenhouse and extraction facilities. We offer a steadfast commitment to safety and quality assurance providing cannabis products free from pesticides, which uniquely positions Sunniva in California as a leading provider of safe, high quality, reproducible products at scale. Through production from Phase One of our strategically positioned 325,000 square foot high technology greenhouse which is nearing completion and our fully operational extraction facility in California, we are launching Sunniva branded products in various product categories and price points including flower, pre-rolls, vape cartridges and premium concentrates. Sunniva branded products will be showcased within our flagship dispensary located at the greenhouse and our in-house marketing and distribution team will ensure the placement of Sunniva branded products at licensed dispensaries throughout the state. Sunniva's management and board of directors have a proven track record for creating significant shareholder value both in the healthcare and biotech industries. 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 relating to the Company's strategic relationships and the launch of Sunniva's brands and the preparation for large-scale production at the Company's greenhouse in Cathedral City, California. 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 Company 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. Company Contacts: Sunniva Inc. Dr. Anthony Holler Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Phone: (866) 786-6482 Investor Contact: Phil Carlson / Erika Kay KCSA Strategic Communications Phone: (212) 896-1233 Email: pcarlson@kcsa.com / ekay@kcsa.com Media Contact: Katelyn Tumino / Tony Forde KCSA Strategic Communications Phone: (212) 896-1252 Email: ktumino@kcsa.com / tforde@kcsa.com SOURCE: Sunniva Inc View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/538801/Sunniva-Launches-First-Three-Cannabis-Brands-in-California 25 years of experience leading finance departments for international companies Expertise in strategic and financial management for listed companies, particularly with the establishment of European public financing related to innovation Regulatory News: VALBIOTIS (FR0013254851 ALVAL PEA/SME eligible), a French Research Development company committed to scientific innovation for preventing and combating metabolic diseases, today announced the appointment of Agnes TIXIER to the Supervisory Board. This appointment, approved during the General Meeting on March 18, 2019, strengthens VALBIOTIS in the lead-up to multiple 2019 structural milestones centered around one primary objective: to launch, within the next two years, the world's first product to be clinically proven and to carry a health claim on reducing the risk of type 2 diabetes. "Agnes TIXIER has the ideal background to support VALBIOTIS in its growth. She is very familiar with the rise of innovative SMEs and their various stages of development. Her extensive knowledge of European financial standards is a real asset for VALBIOTIS, a pioneer in the prediabetes market," emphasizes Laurent LEVY, CEO of NANOBIOTIX and Chairman of the VALBIOTIS Supervisory Board. Currently Director at CM-CIC INVESTISSEMENT, Agnes TIXIER has demonstrated her expertise working alongside and within fast-growing companies. Most notably, she led the initial public offering of AVENIR TELECOM in 1998, prior to overseeing the financial management and external growth of this European telecom giant for 18 years. She has also proven her ability to find the funding levers best suited to support international growth plans. "I especially enjoy working with entrepreneurs who pioneer new markets, and I have conviction in VALBIOTIS' ability to make a difference with its plant-based innovation. VALBIOTIS has had a remarkable journey, from its founding five years ago to its introduction on the Euronext Growth market two years ago. The entire team is fully committed to seeing through the development plan established. I am so pleased to be able to contribute my skills to those of the other Supervisory Board members, and to contribute to driving the company forward," states Agnes TIXIER. VALBIOTIS today employs 38 staff members, of whom 75% work in Research Development, and has structured its governance to comprise a Board of Directors and a Supervisory Board, which will now be composed as follows: BOARD OF DIRECTORS Chairman, Sebastien PELTIER, CEO Member, Jocelyn PINEAU, Administrative and Financial Director Member, Pascal SIRVENT, Director of Discovery and Preclinical and Translational Research Member, Murielle CAZAUBIEL, Director of Development and Medical Affairs SUPERVISORY BOARD Chair, Laurent LEVY, CEO and Co-founder of Nanobiotix Member, Sebastien BESSY, Vice-President of Global Strategic Operations, Ipsen Consumer Health Care Division Member, Jean ZETLAOUI, Special Scientific Adviser to the CEO, Novartis Pharma Member, Agnes TIXIER, Director at CM-CIC INVESTISSEMENT AGNES TIXIER As a graduate of ICN Business School in Nancy, holder of a post-graduate degree in accounting (DECS) and member of the French Society of Financial Analysts (SFAF), Agnes began her career in 1986 in Banque de Vizille, specialized in mid-cap transactions, which would merge in 2011 with other entities of the Credit Mutuel Alliance Federale group to create CM-CIC INVESTISSEMENT. From 1990 to 1997, she served as Financial Director and Administrator of the Lyon hotel group SHB, which would merge with ACCOR. In 1997, she joined AVENIR TELECOM, a distributor specialized in mobile telephony, for whom she led the initial public offering on Eurolist C in November 1998. Over the next 17 years, as Administrative and Financial Director of the group which included 1,800 employees and 290 million in turnover in 2015, she completed a number of mergers and acquisitions and oversaw investor relations. In 2015, she became Financial Director of transport and logistics group TRANSALLIANCE (with 3,000 employees and 600 million in turnover) operating in 7 European countries. From June 2016 to February 2018, she performed her duties as Administrative and Financial Director at IDEOL, an innovative company created in 2010 in La Ciotat (46 employees, 4 million in turnover) and leader in floating offshore wind power. ABOUT VALBIOTIS VALBIOTIS is a French Research Development company committed to scientific innovation for preventing anc combating metabolic diseases. Its products are made for major players in the health care sector. VALBIOTIS particularly focuses on solutions to prevent type 2 diabetes, NASH (nonalcoholic steatohepatitis), obesity and cardiovascular diseases. VALBIOTIS was founded in La Rochelle in early 2014 and has formed numerous partnerships with top academic centers in France and abroad, including La Rochelle University, the CNRS and Clermont Auvergne University located in Clermont-Ferrand. These partnerships have enabled VALBIOTIS to benefit from strong financial leverage, particularly thanks to experts and technical partners who support its projects. The Company has established three sites in France Perigny, La Rochelle (17) and Riom (63) and an American office in Boston (MA). VALBIOTIS is a member of the "BPI Excellence" network and received the "Innovative Company" status accorded by BPI France. VALBIOTIS has also been awarded "Young Innovative Company" status and has received major financial support from the European Union for its research programs by obtaining support from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). VALBIOTIS is a PEA-SME eligible company. Find out more about VALBIOTIS : www.valbiotis.com Name: VALBIOTIS ISIN code: FR0013254851 Mnemonic code: ALVAL Disclaimer This press release contains forward-looking statements concerning the objectives of VALBIOTIS. VALBIOTIS considers that these projections are based on information currently available by VALBIOTIS and on reasonable assumptions. However, there can be no assurance that the estimates contained in such forward-looking statements will be verified, which estimates are subject to numerous risks including the risks set forth in the reference document of VALBIOTIS filed with the French Financial Markets Authority (Autorite des Marches Financiers) under number I.17-012 on April 5, 2017 as well as in its 2018 annual financial report filed with the French Financial Markets Authority on March 8, 2019. These documents are available on the Company's website (www.valbiotis.com). VALBIOTIS declines all responsibility for updating or revising these forward-looking statements. This press release and the information that it contains do not constitute an offer to sell or subscribe for, or a solicitation of an offer to purchase or subscribe for, VALBIOTIS shares in any country. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190319005673/en/ Contacts: VALBIOTIS CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS Carole Rocher / Marc Delaunay +33 5 46 28 62 58 medias@valbiotis.com FINANCIAL COMMUNICATIONS ACTIFIN Stephane Ruiz +33 1 56 88 11 14 sruiz@actifin.fr MEDIA RELATIONS MADIS PHILEO Guillaume De Chamisso +33 6 85 91 32 56 guillaume.dechamisso@madisphileo.com UNITED STATES SOLEBURY TROUT Rebecca John Patrick Till +1 646 378 2935 rjohn@troutgroup.com ptill@troutgroup.com New capability in Database Performance Analyzerand an automated management API in the latest version of Database Performance Analyzer , collectively designed to improve support for monitoring critical IT services and extend support for monitoring private cloud and converged infrastructures. "A slow-running database can significantly affect the end-to-end performance of applications and the experience of end users," said Joe Kim, executive vice president and global chief technology officer, SolarWinds. "With new anomaly detection capabilities, SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer 12.1 empowers database professionals to more accurately identify and respond to performance incidents. We take pride in providing tools designed to allow customers to keep their businesses running smoothly while shifting to a more proactive management approach." When managing large environments, manually-intensive approaches consume time, can be slow to yield actionable insights, and require historical knowledge of baseline performance. With DPA 12.1, customers can save time by not only automating anomaly detection to more quickly find, visualize, and alert when database wait times deviate from the expected, but by also leveraging machine learning capabilities to monitor behavior patterns and gain meaningful insight into what is expected versus an anomaly. Database professionals can also benefit from the addition of the DPA management API, which allows customers to automate instance management (such as registration, licensing, annotations, and more) as well as programmatically scale to meet the needs of large or dynamic environments. With less time spent on redundant tasks, DBAs can focus on bigger picture improvements and proactive innovation. SolarWinds DPA is designed to provide seamless integration with the SolarWinds Orion Platform, and its many modules, including Network Performance Monitor dashboard can provide additional blocking analysis support, designed to help users discover where an incident occurred, the overall impact of the action, and guide informed future troubleshooting strategies. Updates to IT Operations Management Portfolio Improve Management of Hybrid IT Environments "As organizations continue their transition from purely on-premises operations into both private and public cloud infrastructures, along with increased consumption of SaaS-delivered applications like Office 365 , adapting their IT monitoring and management capabilities can pose a significant challenge," Kim continued. "We've substantially expanded our IT operations management product portfolio to deliver improved support for monitoring Active Directory and extended our infrastructure monitoring capabilities with additional support for VMware environments, and adding support for Cisco UCS converged infrastructure. All of these improvements are designed to help today's technology professionals easily extend their monitoring across their ever-expanding IT environment, an integrated experience that delivers monitoring through a single pane of glass." Within its IT operations management portfolio, SolarWinds announced updates to the following software products: Server & Application Monitor (SAM) 6.8: Introduced in this release is AppInsight for Active Directory, delivering deeper insight into the status and performance of Active Directory across environments, while also providing deeper monitoring for customers who have deployed Cisco's industry-leading UCS converged infrastructure portfolio. Introduced in this release is AppInsight for Active Directory, delivering deeper insight into the status and performance of Active Directory across environments, while also providing deeper monitoring for customers who have deployed Cisco's industry-leading UCS converged infrastructure portfolio. Virtualization Manager (VMAN) 8.4: The updated tool offers greater time-to-resolution capabilities to VMware environments by allowing customers to import VMware events to monitor (https://www.solarwinds.com/topics/vmware-events-monitoring/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) and correlate those performance issues and expedite troubleshooting. The updated tool offers greater time-to-resolution capabilities to VMware environments by allowing customers to import (https://www.solarwinds.com/topics/vmware-events-monitoring/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) and correlate those performance issues and expedite troubleshooting. Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) 6.8: With extended support for Kaminario solid-state storage arrays, the updated version of SRM (https://www.solarwinds.com/storage-resource-monitor/whats-new?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) enables resource monitoring and capacity planning across a wider mix of storage infrastructures in multi-vendor environments to meet the needs of a broader set of customers. With extended support for Kaminario solid-state storage arrays, the (https://www.solarwinds.com/storage-resource-monitor/whats-new?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) enables resource monitoring and capacity planning across a wider mix of storage infrastructures in multi-vendor environments to meet the needs of a broader set of customers. Server Configuration Monitor (SCM) 1.1: A valuable configuration tool that provides visibility into configuration changes on Windows servers and applications, along with the ability to detect which user made each change. This latest version adds near real-time change analysis to help technology professionals surface the root cause of performance issues caused by changes. A valuable configuration tool that provides visibility into configuration changes on Windows servers and applications, along with the ability to detect which user made each change. This latest version adds near real-time change analysis to help technology professionals surface the root cause of performance issues caused by changes. Log Analyzer (LA) 2.0: Formerly known as Log Manager for Orion, the updated version brings native Windows support, simplifying the ability to collect Windows systems events (https://www.solarwinds.com/topics/windows-event-log-monitoring?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) alongside logs from other infrastructure, and providing more comprehensive detail about what occurred on a system prior to an incident or performance problem. Pricing and Availability The updated SolarWinds IT operations management portfolio, including DPA 12.1, will be available starting on March 13, 2019. SolarWinds DPA pricing starts at $2,045*; SolarWinds SAM pricing starts at $2,995*; SolarWinds SRM pricing starts at $2,995*; SolarWinds VMAN pricing starts at $2,995*; SolarWinds SCM pricing starts at $1,750*; and SolarWinds Log Analyzer pricing starts at $1,495*. For more information, visit the SolarWinds website , or call +1-866-530-8100. *Prices as of March 13, 2019, in US dollars. Pricing may vary based upon the jurisdiction and applicable currency. Please contact a local SolarWinds sales representative to find pricing specific to your jurisdiction. Additional Resources Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) (https://www.solarwinds.com/database-performance-analyzer/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) (https://www.solarwinds.com/database-performance-analyzer/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) Server Configuration Monitor (SCM) (http://www.solarwinds.com/server-configuration-monitor/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) (http://www.solarwinds.com/server-configuration-monitor/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) Server & Application Monitor (SAM) (https://www.solarwinds.com/server-application-monitor/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) (https://www.solarwinds.com/server-application-monitor/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) Virtualization Manager (VMAN) (https://www.solarwinds.com/virtualization-manager/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) (https://www.solarwinds.com/virtualization-manager/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) (https://www.solarwinds.com/storage-resource-monitor/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) (https://www.solarwinds.com/storage-resource-monitor/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) Log Analyzer (LA) (http://www.solarwinds.com/log-analyzer/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) Connect with SolarWinds THWACK (https://thwack.solarwinds.com/welcome/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) (https://thwack.solarwinds.com/welcome/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/solarwinds/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) (http://www.twitter.com/solarwinds/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SolarWinds/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) (https://www.facebook.com/SolarWinds/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/solarwinds/?cmp=PUB-PR-NVS-SW_WW_X_CR_X_AW_EN_SYSBL_TXT-XSYS-20190313_X_X_XPIL_VidNo_X-X) SWIproducts About SolarWinds SolarWindsonline community, allow us to build products that solve well-understood IT management challenges in ways that technology professionals want them solved. This focus on the user and commitment to excellence in end-to-end hybrid IT performance management has established SolarWinds as a worldwide leader in network management software and MSP solutions. Learn more today at www.solarwinds.com . The SolarWinds, SolarWinds & Design, Orion, and THWACK trademarks are the exclusive property of SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC or its affiliates, are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other SolarWinds trademarks, service marks, and logos may be common law marks or are registered or pending registration. All other trademarks mentioned herein are used for identification purposes only and are trademarks of (and may be registered trademarks of) their respective companies. 2019 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved. MEDIA CONTACTS: Nicole Fachet Jenne Barbour Archetype SolarWinds Phone: +1-212-871-3950 Phone: +1-512-498-6804 nicole.fachet@archetype.co (mailto:nicole.fachet@archetype.co) pr@solarwinds.com (mailto:pr@solarwinds.com) A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/3297fc0c-6687-4d82-ae53-7f9dfc45e42d Results From Francais WATER and WATER II Studies Will Be Presented at the European Association of Urology Annual Congress PROCEPT BioRobotics, a Silicon Valley surgical robotics company, announced today that six-month data from two studies will be presented at the European Association of Urology (EAU) Annual Congress in Barcelona, Spain, March 15 19, 2019. The data will highlight the safety and efficacy of the FDA-approved PROCEPT BioRobotics' Aquablation therapy as a surgical treatment for benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) in prostates up to 150 milliliters (mL). Six-month data from the Francais WATER Study (Waterjet AblationTherapy for Endoscopic Resection of prostate tissue) evaluating the safety and efficacy of Aquablation therapy at three centers in France will be presented in an expert guided poster tour by Vincent Misrai, M.D., a urologic surgeon at Clinique Pasteur in Toulouse, France. Francais WATER follows the successful WATER Study, which demonstrated the superior safety and non-inferior efficacy of Aquablation versus transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP). The goal in the French trial was to determine if the WATER Study findings could be replicated in the local population. Francais WATER enrolled thirty men with moderate-to-severe lower urinary tract symptoms related to BPH. The poster, entitled PT186 "Aquablation for Treating Benign Prostatic Obstruction in Small to Medium-Size Glands: Six Months-Outcomes of the First French Registry," will take place Saturday, March 16 at 15:30-17:30 CET in Green Area, Room B. Six-month data from the WATER II Study, evaluating the safety and efficacy of Aquablation therapy in large prostates 80 to 150 mL in size, will be presented by Mihir Desai, M.D., Professor of Clinical Urology and Vice Chair, New Technology Innovation at the Keck School of Medicine of University of Southern California. WATER II enrolled 101 patients at 16 sites in the United States and Canada with the intent to validate and extend upon the results from the initial WATER Study, where IPSS improvement was superior with Aquablation in men with prostate volume greater than 50 ml as compared to TURP (p<0.02). Initial WATER II data were presented at the 2018 American Urological Association annual conference, meeting both the primary safety and efficacy endpoints and introducing Aquablation therapy as an effective minimally invasive surgical alternative for larger prostates. Recognized as one of the best posters by the EAU, Poster #1107 "Aquablation for BPH in Large Prostates (80-150 mL): Six-Month Results from the WATER II Multicenter Trial," will be presented Monday, March 18 at 14:00-15:30 CET in Green Area, Room 20. "For prostates larger than 80 mL, the surgical options are limited and the risk of complications increase," Dr. Desai said. "The combination of robotics and image guidance empowers the surgeon to consistently develop an optimal tissue removal plan and provide patients with safe and effective outcomes in a wide range of prostate sizes." "The data from the WATER II Study confirms that Aquablation is a viable therapy for this patient population, providing predictable and reproducible outcomes regardless of prostate volume and shape," said PROCEPT BioRobotics President and Chief Executive Officer Nikolai Aljuri, Ph.D. "The results from both of these studies reinforce that, despite limited experience with Aquablation therapy, surgeons can offer their patients an optimal BPH treatment that provides a significant reduction in symptoms while minimizing the risk of sexual side effects." For more information about Aquablation therapy with the AQUABEAM Robotic System, visit PROCEPT BioRobotics at EAU booth J38 in the Fira Gran Via, Access North/Hall 8. About PROCEPT BioRobotics Based in Silicon Valley, PROCEPT BioRobotics is a privately-held surgical robotics company enabling better patient care by developing transformative solutions in urology. Aquablation therapy, delivered by the AQUABEAM Robotic System, is the first FDA-approved surgical robot providing autonomous tissue removal for the treatment of BPH. Aquablation therapy combines the clarity of real-time, multi-dimensional imaging, autonomous robotics and heat-free waterjet ablation for targeted, controlled, and immediate removal of prostate tissue for the treatment of lower urinary tract symptoms caused by BPH. Aquablation therapy offers predictable and reproducible outcomes, independent of prostate anatomy, prostate size or surgeon experience. www.PROCEPT-BioRobotics.com. Important Safety Information All surgical treatments have inherent and associated side effects. The most common side effects are mild and transient and may include mild pain or difficulty when urinating, discomfort in the pelvis, blood in the urine, inability to empty the bladder or a frequent and/or urgent need to urinate, and bladder or urinary tract infection. Other risks include ejaculatory dysfunction and a low risk of injury to the urethra or rectum where the devices gain access to the body for treatment. For more information about potential side effects and risks associated with Aquablation therapy, speak with your urologist or surgeon. No claim is made that the AQUABEAM Robotic System will cure any medical condition, or entirely eliminate the diseased entity. Repeated treatment or alternative therapies may sometimes be required. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005280/en/ Contacts: Diana Soltesz Nobles Global Communications +1-818-618-5634 diana@noblesgc.com Hybrid solution that delivers seamless, uninterrupted connectivity between satellite and cellular draws industry attention as Kymeta showcases always-on, mobile access Kymeta-the communications company that is completing the connectivity fabric for everything, everywhere-demonstrated its hybrid, one-source connectivity platform to more than 50 industry professionals during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Feb. 26-28. Kymeta hosted 30 live demonstrations throughout the show in its fully functioning mobile satellite-cellular vehicle, delivering the solution the industry has been demanding. Channel partners, customers, media, and other attendees rode around the city of Barcelona and observed the network instantly switch between satellite and cellular-based service. Streaming applications such as music from Amazon Alexa and the live Mobile World Congress video stream played continuously throughout each drive. Kymeta's unique solution, that leverages both satellite and cellular networks, enabled all streaming services to perform without observable interruption. "Participants were impressed with our technology and were thrilled to watch the live stream maintain while switching between satellite and cellular without drop-in connectivity," said Tom Freeman, Senior Vice President of Land Mobile at Kymeta. "This real, in-market solution is not merely a concept, it is a milestone in mobile connectivity." The vehicle, integrated by Kymeta partner Excelerate Group, included a software-defined wireless WAN solution from Cradlepoint, LTE services from Cubic Telecom, satellite capacity from the Intelsat satellite network, satellite connectivity provided by the Kymeta u7 terminal and an iDirect modem to provide a complete connectivity solution. Participants were able to observe seamless switching from cellular to satellite in real-time through an application developed by Kymeta which showed what network users were connected to at any given moment. Industry leaders including first responders, connected vehicle experts, vehicle manufacturers, investors, analysts, and more experienced always-on, mobile connectivity first-hand. "Kymeta is simplifying the way data is captured, consumed, and shared, which is changing how professionals are communicating while on the move and in challenging locations," said Benjamin Posthuma, Connectivity Solutions Manager at Kymeta. "Digital technologies continue to change our everyday lives, and the Kymeta solution helps bridge the common connectivity challenges that industries face." Kymeta's hybrid satellite-cellular solution is being used today to help gather data and other statistics to improve Peru's transportation while connecting people in difficult to reach areas around the country. This work is laying the foundation for industry applications using Kymeta's ubiquitous mobile connectivity platform within commercial agriculture, fleet management, public transportation, and critical access for first responders. Find more information on the Peru project here. About Kymeta Kymeta is unlocking the potential of satellite connectivity, combined with cellular networks, to satisfy the overwhelming demand for global ubiquitous mobile connectivity. The company's flat-panel satellite antenna, the first of its kind, and Kymeta KALO connectivity services provide revolutionary mobile connectivity on satellite and hybrid satellite-cellular networks to customers around the world. Backed by U.S. and international patents and licenses, the Kymeta terminal addresses the need for lightweight, slim, and high-throughput communication systems that do not require mechanical components to steer toward a satellite. Kymeta makes connecting easy for any vehicle, vessel, or fixed platform. Kymeta is a privately held company based in Redmond, Washington. For more information, visit kymetacorp.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005235/en/ Contacts: Business Inquiries for Kymeta: Sam Christensen Marketing Kymeta Corporation +1 425.658.8703 schristensen@kymetacorp.com Media Inquiries for Kymeta: Melanie McBride Vice President, Content and PR The Summit Group +1 801.990.8464 mmcbride@summitslc.com RISHON LEZION, Israel, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Cymulate, a leading SaaS-based BAS platform, today announced an A funding round of $7.5M led by Vertex Ventures and Dell Technologies Capital, the investment arm of Dell Technologies; additional funds came from Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE) and Eyal Gruner, who previously led the Seed rounds. The company has now raised $11M total. Cymulate's BAS platform enables organizations to automatically assess their overall security posture, continuously validating that security measures and controls are working as expected. The Cymulate platform is deployable within minutes and the simulated attacks provide immediate results that include vulnerabilities and mitigation procedures to close each gap. The platform offers the largest range of attack vectors in the industry covering pre-exploitation, exploitation and post-exploitation stages of an attack kill-chain: Email, Web Gateway, Web Application, Phishing, Endpoint, Lateral Movement, Data Exfiltration and Immediate Threats. Cymulate will use the funding for expanding its operations in the United States, adding key leadership positions and investing further in the research team to enhance the platform's functionality. "The fast adoption of our platform by organizations optimizing their protection against attacks has enabled Cymulate to consistently surpass revenue and sales targets with triple growth which permits us now to focus on innovation and outreach," said Eyal Wachsman, Co-Founder and CEO of Cymulate. "We've been very strategic about the amount of funding we've raised in this round. This new funding will ensure that we remain ahead of the curve with the best Breach and Attack Simulation platform in the industry, while broadening strategic partnerships as we scale up research and operations to increase market share in 2019 and beyond." "We're impressed with Cymulate's technology and product market fit which has already resulted in a large customer base," said Emanuel Timor, General Partner at Vertex Ventures. "Their easy to use SaaS platform is proving invaluable to CISOs by providing insight that helps maximize security investments whilst minimizing security gaps. As cyber attacks such as data exfiltration, email attacks and phishing continue to be of prime concern to companies, we believe Cymulate has the potential to be the leading BAS company." "Enabling data-driven decisions for cyber security implementations and investments is critical for organizations of all sizes. We believe Cymulate is taking the right approach and has built the right end-to-end platform to enable this vision at scale." said Alon Weinberg, Director at Dell Technologies Capital. "Looking ahead, we are very pleased to be able to support Cymulate and help build the company wider vision." Cymulate was founded in June 2016 by cyber security veterans Avihai Ben-Yossef and Eyal Wachsman, alongside Eyal Gruner, a serial entrepreneur and investor in cybersecurity startups. In less than three years, Cymulate has successfully launched its technology in key markets across all industry verticals, with customers in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. In 2018, Cymulate was recognized as a Cool Vendor in Application and Data Security by Gartner.* In addition, Cymulate was distinguished in 2018 with the Gold Global Excellence Award from Info Security Products Guide, the Fortress Cyber Security Award, and Winner of the InfoSec Awards from the Cyber Defense Magazine. About Cymulate Cymulate helps companies to stay one step ahead of cyber attackers with a unique breach and attack simulation platform that empowers organizations with complex security solutions to safeguard their business-critical assets. By mimicking the myriad of strategies hackers deploy, the system allows businesses to assess their true preparedness to handle cyber security threats effectively. For more information, visit www.cymulate.com and register for a Free Trial . About Dell Technologies Capital Dell Technologies Capital is the investment arm for Dell Technologies. We've invested in over 100 companies that push the envelope on digital technology for enterprises and consumers. We are a team of world-class investors who help our companies succeed. We focus on early-stage investments with passionate founders and often lead rounds. Our companies gain unique access to the go-to-market capabilities of Dell Technologies. Dell Technologies is the parent company of Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks, Virtustream, and VMWare. Dell Technologies is a unique family of businesses that provides the essential infrastructure for organizations to build their digital future, transform IT and protect their most important asset, information. About Vertex Ventures Vertex Ventures is a leading global venture capital group supporting entrepreneurs to transform their innovative ideas into world-class businesses. With cumulative committed capital in excess of $2.5 billion, Vertex invests in early-stage IT and healthcare opportunities in Silicon Valley, China, India, Israel, and Southeast Asia. Since 1988, Vertex is honored to have partnered with the founders of global leaders such as Waze, 91, Grab, IGG, CyberArk, Reebonz, SolarEdge, Force10, FirstCry, Yatra and Changba. Vertex Ventures Israel is one of the pillars of the Vertex Group's network of Funds focusing on early stage opportunities in the Information Technology sector in Israel. Learn more here. *Gartner, Cool Vendors in Application and Data Security, 4 May 2018 NOTE: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 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. ROSEAU, Dominica, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Government of Dominica is extremely disappointed in the new list issued today by the European Council which unfairly and without proper justification names and shames countries as non-cooperative tax jurisdictions, and in particular by Dominica's inclusion thereon. The regional grouping of the EU decided in 2017 to adopt a new set of tax standards over and above that set out by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the international organisation mandated by a wide range of Member States to monitor and set standards of compliance on tax good governance. When this list was first issued in December 2017, Dominica and other Caribbean islands were put on a grey list and were asked by the EU to commit to making certain changes within one year to avoid being put on a blacklist. Dominica was put on the grey list in December 2017 notwithstanding the complete devastation of Maria in September 2017. With our country shut down after Maria, electricity down island wide, communications disrupted, our people homeless and in desperate need of immediate assistance, 90% of homes damaged and in some instances destroyed, roads impassable, businesses shut down for an extended period, the EU gave us, in our devastated condition, no more time than any other country to comply with their demands. Despite these very difficult and devastating circumstances and conditions we ensured that we complied with all the legislative changes that were requested by the EU. The proceedings of the Parliament were broadcast live where these changes were considered and debated. It is important to note that one of the requirements requested by the EU was the joining of the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters which requires the sanction of the OECD. This would have allowed for the passage of the Automatic Exchange of Information Act, that the EU had requested. We had applied since 31st May, 2017 to the OECD to join that Convention. Subsequent correspondences including letters dated 23rd February, 2018, 29th August 2018 and 19th December, 2018 reiterated our commitment and desire to join that 2018. However, and through absolutely no fault of the Government of Dominica, we have to date, not been given final clearance from the OECD or a substantive response to our application. Senior Ministers of the Government including the Minister of Foreign Affairs and public officers have explained these facts and the failure to respond to our application to join the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters, to EU representatives, to the EU Code of Conduct Group, EU TAXUD and the EU Council on numerous occasions. In February this year, we wrote to the EU requesting an extension of time to allow for a response to be obtained from the OECD to our application Regrettably, we received no response. Today and notwithstanding the indisputable facts set out above, we have been blacklisted by the EU on the "grounds" that "Dominica does not apply any automatic exchange of financial information, has not signed and ratified the OECD Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance as amended and has not yet resolved these issues." This statement of the grounds is misleading, and manifestly unfair. The only reason why Dominica "has not signed and ratified the OECD Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance as amended ' is that the OECD has to date not given the go ahead to Dominica to sign on. In other words Dominica is being penalized while it is awaiting a response, and notwithstanding there was and is nothing else it can do or could have done. In fact, and in furtherance of a favourable response, we prepared legislation to take to the Parliament in January this year to have the Parliament approve and pass these Conventions into law. We had to withdraw those Bills when no clearance was received from the OECD. The EU has been a very good development partner of Dominica and has responded in a positive and very tangible way and has been working with Dominica very closely to respond to the challenges of Hurricane Maria. In all of the circumstances we are indeed surprised and dismayed at the decision of the EU ECOFIN Council communicated today. We will at all costs endeavor to have the OECD respond to our request to address this sole outstanding issue with the EU in order that Dominica can be removed from this list as soon as possible. Released by the Government of Dominica Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - March 13, 2019) - Gunpowder Capital Corp., (CSE: GPC), (CSE: GPC.PR.A), (OTCQB: GNPWF), (FSE: YS6N), ("Gunpowder" or the "Corporation") announced today that it has invested Two Hundred and Forty Thousand Dollars ("$240,000.00") CDN into Franchise Holdings International Inc., (OTCQB: FNHI) ("FNHI"). The Corporation purchased Four Million, Six Hundred Thousand ("4,600,000") Subscription Receipts from FNHI at a price of Five Cents ("$0.05") CDN per Subscription Receipt. The Subscription Receipts held by the Corporation will automatically be converted into Units of FNHI upon FNHI being approved in becoming a Reporting Issuer in the Province of Ontario by the Ontario Securities Commission (the "Triggering Event"). Once the Trigger Event has been enacted, the Units issued to the Corporation by FNHI will each consist of one Common Share and one full Purchase Warrant. Each Purchase Warrant will entitle the Corporation the ability to purchase one additional Common Share of FNHI for a price of Ten Cents ("$0.10") CDN for a period of 24 months from the date of the Triggering Event (the "Warrant Expiry Date"). The Warrant Expiry Date may be accelerated by the Issuer, at its sole discretion, at any time following the four-month anniversary of the date of the Triggering Event and prior to the Warrant Expiry Date, if the volume-weighted average trading price of the Shares is greater than $0.20 for any 10 consecutive trading days. Mr. Frank Kordy stated: "FNHI has seen a considerable uptick in demand for its Worksport Ltd., line of tonneau/truck bed covers as FNHI has secured over $1,200,000 USD in orders for its tonneau/truck bed covers since the beginning of Dec 2018. Furthermore, new private label orders are arriving regularly. We are optimistic that FHNI's strong demand will continue for all of 2019 and we look forward in continuing in assisting FNHI in developing its business." About Franchise Holdings International Franchise Holdings International Inc., is a strategic investment company. Franchise Holdings Internationals strategy is to partner or invest in companies and provide them the tools to become the fastest growing businesses in their segments creating shareholder value in the process. Once a business of interest is acquired, invested in and/or partnered with, our mission is to further develop and accelerate the growth for those subsidiaries. Currently the Corporation has one fully owned subsidiary, Worksport Ltd. an innovative fast-growing manufacturer of high quality, functional, and aggressively priced tonneau/truck bed covers for pickup trucks like the F150, Sierra, Silverado, Canyon, RAM, and Ford F-Series. For more information please visit www.worksport.com About Gunpowder Capital Corp. Gunpowder Capital Corp., is a merchant bank and advisory services firm based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Gunpowder invests in both publicly traded and private businesses that have successful management teams and attractive economic models. Gunpowder partners with these businesses to support their growth initiatives with its proven methodology of appropriate financing and structured exits. Gunpowder offers debt financing, including mezzanine and bridge loans, equity financing and advisory services. Gunpowder is also building a portfolio of companies in which it takes a long term position and view. For more information please visit www.gunpowdercapitalcorp.com For further information please contact: Mr. Frank KordyCEO & DirectorGunpowder Capital Corp.T: (647) 466-4037E: frank.kordy@gunpowdercapitalcorp.comMr. Paul HaberCFOGunpowder Capital Corp.T: (416) 363-3833E: paul.haber@gunpowdercapitalcorp.com Forward-Looking Statements Information set forth in this news release may involve forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. The forward-looking statements contained herein are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements included in this document are made as of the date of this document and the Corporation 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 securities legislation. Although Management believes that the expectations represented in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities described herein and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such. Neither CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. - 30 - To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43369 CIRENCESTER, England, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- UK International orthopedic company Corin Group ("Corin") https://www.coringroup.com/, backed by the Permira funds, has acquired the US-based OMNI Orthopedics ("OMNI"), a pioneer in robotic-assisted total knee replacement. It is further evidence of Permira and their co-investors' determination to accelerate Corin's strong organic growth with a focused M&A strategy. Founded in 1999 by a team of medical device engineers, OMNI www.omnils.com is now at the forefront of robotic-assisted knee replacement. Their OMNIBotics is a unique imageless total knee replacement solution which combines a robotic cutting guide with the world's first robotic tool to measure ligament function. The system allows tailoring of the implant positioning to each individual patient, resulting in less patient pain and faster rehabilitationi. Corin's strategy is to revolutionize orthopedics by gaining, understanding and sharing insight at every stage of the joint replacement experience and delivering clinically proven implants which are optimized by unique procedural technologies. OMNIBotics, combined with APEX knee replacement, accelerates Corin's strategy. Corin's CEO Stefano Alfonsi said: "We are delighted to welcome the innovative and talented OMNI team into the Corin global family. We look forward to working together as a combined organization to further develop our presence in the world's largest market - the United States. With the combination of Corin's unique Optimised Positioning System (OPS) for the hip and the OMNIBotics platform for the knee, Corin is now uniquely positioned to address functional patient-specific joint replacement." OMNI's CEO Rick Epstein added: "It is the perfect time to be part of a larger organization that shares our dedication to improving the lives of individual patients through technological innovation. We are thrilled to be joining Corin to maximize the potential of our robotic solutions, adding another unique technology to their ecosystem" Henry Minello, Principal in the Healthcare team of Permira, commented: "The US market for robotics in orthopedics is growing at a very rapid pace, and with the addition of OMNI's technologies, we expect Corin to remain at the forefront of development in robotics and computer assisted surgery. We are excited about the potential to scale OMNI's highly innovative products in the US and into other geographies where Corin operates. We are very pleased to support Corin's management to bring these life changing technologies into new markets. OMNI will also strengthen Corin's footprint in the US, an exciting market experiencing strong technology adoption." Corin is creating a connected digital ecosystem that combines biomechanical, physiological and logistical information to generate insight; this ecosystem will empower patients throughout their treatment journey and support surgeons to improve patient outcomes and maximize value for the healthcare system. This is Connected Orthopaedic Insight. Corin and OMNI will be exhibit together at the incoming AAOS that will be held in Las Vegas from March 12th to 15th. KPMG LLP (financial and tax), Barclays Bank PLC (strategic advisory) and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP (legal) provided advisory services to Corin in support of the transaction. Piper Jaffray & Co. acted as financial advisor to OMNI and Foley Hoag LLP acted as legal advisor to OMNI. Media Contacts: For Corin: Brian Lambton, Global Professional Education Manager + 44 (0) 1285 884 340 + 44 (0) 7875 763 203 David Key (Lucent Communication) +44 (0) 7708 603 697 For Permira: Denise Gallagher, Head of Marketing +44 (0) 207 632 1137 James Olley (Montfort Communications) +44 (0) 203 770 7909 About Corin Headquartered in Cirencester, UK, Corin is an international orthopedic company with a direct presence in a majority of the world's orthopedic markets and a track record of strong double-digit growth. Corin's vision is to revolutionize orthopedics by gaining, understanding and sharing insight at every stage of the arthroplasty experience. The unique combination of shared knowledge and clinically-proven implants delivers better outcomes and maximizes healthcare value for patients, surgeons and healthcare providers. Corin is creating a digital ecosystem that combines biomechanical, physiological and logistical information to generate insight, this ecosystem will empower patients throughout their treatment journey and support surgeons with world-class robotic technology and dynamic pre-operative planning to improve patient outcomes and maximize value for the healthcare system. This is Connected Orthopaedic Insight. About OMNI OMNI's proprietary robotic platform, OMNIBotics, allows surgeons to conduct patient-specific total knee surgery designed to enhance patient satisfaction and reduce hospital costs. In addition, OMNI designs, engineers, manufactures and distributes a wide range of proprietary hip and knee implants and is focused on providing cutting edge technologies to transform outcomes in joint replacement surgery and enhance a surgeon's ability to help patients live active and pain-free lives. About Permira Permira is a global investment firm. Founded in 1985, the firm advises funds with a total committed capital of approximately US$38.5bn (33bn) and makes long-term investments, including majority control investments as well as strategic minority investments, in companies with the objective of transforming their performance and driving sustainable growth. Over more than three decades, the Permira funds have made over 250 private equity investments in five key sectors: Consumer, Financial Services, Healthcare, Industrials and Technology. For more information visit www.permira.com. i Early Clinical Outcomes of a Novel Predictive Ligament Balancing Technique for Total Knee Arthroplasty Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/834749/Corin___OMNIBotics.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/834809/Corin_Group_active_spacer_hand.jpg NARBONNE, France, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Iconic southern French winemaker Gerard Bertrand spoke at the Climate Change Leadership: Solutions for the Wine Industry conference, Porto, Portugal, March 5-7, 2019. On March 5-7, leaders of the global wine industry gathered in Porto, Portugal, to tackle the issue, focusing on practical and proven solutions, both short and long term, to help the wine industry mitigate the impacts of a changing climate. Chaired by former Vice President Al Gore, the conference featured 42 speakers from various sectors of the world's wine industry. Gerard Bertrand, the iconic winemaker from the south of France was among those present. He spoke about Sustainability, Biodiversity, and Soil Management. Joining him were Olga Barbosa, Professor of Ecosystem Ecology in Chile and Heinrich Schloms, soil scientist for Vinpro in South Africa. Bertrand is a global reference in Biodynamics practice, biodynamically farming 920 hectares (2350 acres) that cover all of his 15 estates in various appellations in the Languedoc. The decision to pursue biodynamic practices has been motivated by several factors, first and foremost, a conviction that it is the best form of agriculture for the health of the environment. The practice actively promotes biodiversity in soils and the surrounding ecosystem, plants, animals, insects, and microorganisms. Moreover, Gerard Bertrand and his team are convinced that biodynamic practices is the best way to bring harmony between vines and their environment, allowing the creation of wines that can reveal the unique expression of the place from which they come, reinforcing the fundamental connection between product and earth, or wine, and its terroir. Gerard Bertrand shared his experiences and holistic vision for sustainable, environmentally positive viticulture and winemaking. "In the process of implementing biodynamic farming, we have gained a unique perspective of our place within the natural world. Having learned from this experience, we are bringing in and teaching actual agricultural methods that are beneficial to the preservation of the environment and also let us adapt to and fight climate change. Our humble wish is to see a positive and tangible outcome in the next few years. We believe in it. Be the change!" says Bertrand. (https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/834955/Gerard_Bertrand.jpg) (https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/798323/Gerard_Bertrand_Logo.jpg) Contact: vins@gerard-bertrand.com AUSTIN, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- A delegation from Chengdu, including representatives of officials from publicity Department of the CPC Chengdu Municipal Committee, culture and technology companies visited Austin, Texas for South by Southwest (SXSW). The visit aimed to promote the development of Chengdu and enhance the mutually beneficial relationship between Chengdu and Austin. During the Chengdu Promotion event at Austin City Hall , Zhang Yingming, Deputy Director- General Publicity Department of the CPC Chengdu Municipal Committee, introduced Chengdu's development strategies and achievements in recent years. In the speech, Zhang featured Chengdu's political, economic, social-cultural and technological advancements as one of the fastest-growing cities in China. He also highlighted the goal of "Three Cities and Three Capitals", which contributes to the faster development of a world-famous cultural city. "Chengdu has established the vison of city development based on 'one mountain connects two wings'. This new vision started the change of the next thousand years for Chengdu," Zhang said. "Chengdu's culture and economy is leading in Western China, and Chengdu is becoming one of the new first-tier city of China." Chengdu and Austin are both members of World Cities Culture Forum and have every intention of becoming Friendship cities. "I'm really excited to see the size of the delegation, and it's the first Chinese government delegation to come to Austin and SXSW," said Steve Adler, the mayor of Austin. "The more people that are involved, the better chances we would have for this ongoing relationship, and it's also encouraging for our future collaboration." After the promotion event, the city of Chengdu hosted Chengdu Night - a reception presented by China Gathering@SXSW. During the event, a traditional Chengdu tea ceremony and Sichuan face mask changing Opera held, amazing the guests with the uniqueness and stimulated their interest in learning more about Chengdu's culture. "They both center on improving the cultural environment and see innovation as the main driving force for development," said Ambassador Li Qiangmin, Consul General of the People's Republic of China in Houston. "I hope we can see more dynamic groups like Chengdu show their strength and potential at SXSW and work with the top institutions in the world to create a global innovation map." Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/834217/SXSW.jpg TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / Mongolia Growth Group Ltd. (the "Company") (TSX-V: YAK), announced today that TSX Venture Exchange (the "Exchange") has accepted a Notice of Intention to renews its normal course issuer bid to purchase outstanding common shares of the Company on the open market in accordance with the policies of the TSXV. Pursuant to the NCIB, (the "Bid") the Company may acquire up to 2,550,000 common shares (representing up to approximately 7.7 % of the 33,136,999 common shares of the Company currently issued and outstanding, or approximately 9.9% of the 25,860,049 common shares constituting the Company's current Public Float (as that term is defined in the policies of the Exchange) from time to time during the next 12 months. In accordance with the Policies of the Exchange, the maximum number of common shares that may be purchased under the Bid in any 30-day period may not exceed 2% of the issued and outstanding common shares of the Company when aggregated with all other common shares purchased under the Bid in the preceding 30 days. The Company is undertaking the Bid because, in the opinion of its board of directors, the market price of its common shares, from time to time, may not fully reflect the underlying value of its operations and future growth prospects. The Company believes that in such circumstances, the purchase of the common shares of the Company may represent an appropriate and desirable use of the Company's funds and further enhance market stability. The Company may, subject to market conditions, sell one or more of its investment properties to finance purchases under the Bid from time to time. From March 12, 2018 to March 11, 2019, the Company purchased 408,000 of its shares at an average price of $0.30 under its most recently expired NCIB. The Company has retained M Partners Inc. of Toronto, Ontario as its broker Member for the purposes of conducting the bid. The Bid will commence on or about March 13, 2019 and the Bid will end no later than March 12, 2020. The common shares will be purchased for cancellation on the open market through the facilities of the Exchange, at market price. For further information please contact: Mrs. Genevieve Walkden, Corporate Secretary 877-644-1186 GWalkden@MongoliaGrowthGroup.com This news release includes forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. All statements within, other than statements of historical fact, are to be considered forward looking. 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 or developments may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include general economic, market and business conditions, the regulatory process and actions, regulator and corporate approvals, technical issues, new legislation, competitive and general economic factors and conditions, the uncertainties resulting from potential delays or changes in plans, the occurrence of unexpected events, and the Company's capability to execute and implement its future plans. Actual results may differ materially from those projected by management. There can be no assurances that such statements will prove accurate and, therefore, readers are advised to rely on their own evaluation of such uncertainties. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to sell any securities in the United States. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the 'U.S. Securities Act') or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to U.S. Persons unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available.We seek safe harbour. The TSXV has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this Press release. SOURCE: Mongolia Growth Group Ltd. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/538875/Mongolia-Growth-Group-Announces-Renewal-of-Normal-Course-Issuer-Bid HOUSTON, TX / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / It's only a matter of time before more retailers wake up to the CBD opportunity. DSW has been running tests in its stores with CBD, announcing plans to expand such products to nearly 100 stores. Neiman Marcus is pushing ahead with CBD sales at some of its stores and online. Simon Property Group is partnering with Green Growth Brands to open 108 stores in its malls just in 2019. Barney's is launching 'The High End.' Now, even the CEO of Whole Foods has indicated he's keeping a close eye on cannabis regulation, suggesting that it could show up on shelves. ' If cannabis is ever passed in Texas,' he said, as quoted by Leafly, 'chances are good that grocery stores will be selling that, too.' Along the way, it's creating sizable sales opportunity for several companies, including The Yield Growth Corporation (CSE:BOSS) (OTCQB:BOSQF), Harvest Health & Recreation Inc. (CN:HARV) (OTCQX:HTHHF), and Origin House (CN:OH) (OTC:ORHOF). The Yield Growth Corporation (BOSS) (BOSQF), for example, just announced that its subsidiary Yield Botanicals Inc. entered into an agreement with Vandenbosch Trading Company Ltd. to purchase a 10-acre property. The purchase includes over 2.5 acres (approximately 100,000 square feet) of well-equipped and automated greenhouses, currently operating as an orchid flower grow and essential oil extraction business. The total price for the land, buildings, greenhouses and equipment is $2.4 million. Yield Growth has available cash on hand to complete the purchase. This strategic asset purchase will allow Yield Growth to grow plants and build out extraction facilities in the existing infrastructure, while providing plenty of room for future expansion. Owning a farm will give Yield Growth complete control of key proprietary ingredients for its products, including hemp root oil. The purchase will also empower Yield Growth's in-house research capabilities for growth and innovation. 'We are delighted that we are buying a property to house our extraction facilities as well as potential cultivation of industrial hemp and other plants with therapeutic benefits,' says Penny Green, CEO of Yield Growth. 'One of our initiatives will be to work with local farmers and scientists to develop hemp strains with heavy concentrations of cannabidiol (CBD) in parts of the hemp plant that are exempt from the Cannabis Act.' For More Information on The Yield Growth Corporation (BOSS), Click Here. Harvest Health & Recreation Inc. (HARV) (HTHHF), which recently began trading on the OTCQX is involved in the cultivation, processing and possession, use, sale and/or distribution of cannabis specific to the medical cannabis space. Its goal is to become one of the largest cannabis players in the world. 'Harvest is one of the fastest growing companies in one of the fastest growing industries in the world, and OTCQX will allow us to continue harnessing that momentum. Working up the investor ladder as a cannabis company is a monumental task, and we are excited to continue making strides towards becoming the biggest cannabis brand in the world.,' said CEO Steve White. In addition, the company just entered into an agreement to acquire Verano Holdings, one of the largest privately held multi-state, vertically integrated licensed operators of cannabis facilities, in an all-stock transaction for an estimated price of $850 million. The combined company will be one of the largest multi-state operators in the U.S. Upon completion of the transaction and regulatory approval, Harvest will hold licenses that will allow it to operate up to 200 facilities in 16 states and territories across the country, including 123 retail dispensaries. For More Information on Harvest Health & Recreation, Inc., Click Here. Origin House (OH)(ORHOF) is one of the top distributors of cannabis products in California, distributing more than 130 brands to more than 70% of the cannabis dispensaries on the West Coast. It's also beginning to expand its own brand offerings, expecting to generate 50% of its revenue from branded products early this year. The company just entered into a agreement to provide strategic financing of US$704,000 to Humboldt's Finest, an alliance of heritage cannabis farms representing Humboldt County . Humboldt's Finest produces sun-grown cannabis flower on their farms in Humboldt County, California , which is processed into products including jarred flower, pre-roll flower joints, live resin dabs/jars and/or live resin cartridges. For More Information on Origin House, Click Here. MarijuanaStox.com is a leading web destination for all cannabis related companies. Investors can also find current marijuana-related quality financial, medical, legal and social news. MarijuanaStox.com is a media agency in North America dedicated to the cannabis industry, helping companies that operate in the space to attract quality investors, working capital and real publicity. Since 2005, we have had public companies in the US and Canada have rely on us to grow and succeed. Legal Disclaimer Except for the historical information presented herein, matters discussed in this article contain forward-looking statements that are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such statements. Winning Media which has a partnership with www.MarijuanaStox.com is not registered with any financial or securities regulatory authority and does not provide nor claims to provide investment advice or recommendations to readers of this release. For making specific investment decisions, readers should seek their own advice. Winning Media, which has a partnership with www.MarijuanaStox.com, is only compensated for its services in the form of cash-based compensation. Pursuant to an agreement between Winning Media (partners of MarijuanaStox.com) and The Yield Growth Corp, Winning Media has been paid one hundred thousand dollars for advertising and marketing services for The Yield Growth Corp. We own ZERO shares of The Yield Growth Corp. Please click here for full disclaimer. Contact Information: 281-804-7972 ty@wallstreetnation.com SOURCE: MarijuanaStox.com View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/538847/Retailer-Growth-One-of-the-Biggest-Catalysts-for-Cannabis-in-2019 LANSING, MI / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / Andiamo Corporation (OTC PINK: ANDI), a Wyoming holding company with multiple subsidiaries, announces it has executed a Letter of Intent ("LOI") with AC Partners, Inc.("ACPS"). The purpose of the LOI is to allow both Corporations to perform due diligence with full disclosure and transparency before committing to a final agreement. AC Partners, Inc., headquartered in West Palm Beach, engages in the design, sale, maintenance and installation of central air conditioning systems for commercial and residential customers. ACPS is an authorized dealership for Rheem, American Standard, Goodman and Amana air conditioning systems. ACPS's primary focus is to grow through strategic acquisitions and maximize their customers and partnerships. "The Agreement, once finalized pending the appropriate due diligence, aligns with our plans for expansion into more diverse directions and industries," stated William White, CEO of Andiamo Corporation. "The opportunity for Andiamo to move into an agreement with a growing company with recurring revenues is an exciting proposition to ANDI." About Andiamo Corporation: Andiamo Corporation, a Wyoming publicly traded company, is a dedicated partnership of multi-talented people striving to utilize the micro-cap world in the proper manner, with the goal of ensuring smaller companies in need of financing and direction have these resources available to them. We believe it is our duty to act responsibly and honestly to help ensure the success of our country's greatest source of stability and job growth - the small business owner. In realigning our corporate focus and mission, we have transitioned from a one product company into a true source of developmental resources for other companies spread across a diverse range of industries. This rebranding of our culture and direction has enabled us to expand our role as a holding company, resulting in an increase in new business opportunities. Specifically, we look for established companies with recurring revenues who need a capital infusion to move their business to the next level of profitability. Twitter: @AndiamoCorp. Safe Harbor: This press release contains forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, assumptions and uncertainties that could cause the Company's actual results to differ materially from those projected in such statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date made and are not guarantees of future performance. We undertake no obligation to publicly revise any forward-looking statements. Contact: Andiamo Corporation PR@AndiInc.us SOURCE: Andiamo Corporation View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/538869/Andiamo-Corporation-Signs-Letter-of-Intent 2019 Personalization Development Study highlights data architecture as the top challenge for marketers Monetate, the worldwide leader in personalization, today publishes its third annual Personalization Development Study that explores success factors in how brands create more loyal and lasting customer relationships. Together with third-party researcher WBR Research, the study examines what has the greatest positive or negative impact on a brand's ability to execute a customized marketing strategy and why certain marketers met or fell short of revenue and growth goals. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005156/en/ Monetate's 2019 Personalization Development Study (Graphic: Business Wire) For companies that exceeded ROI goals in 2018, the research found a direct correlation between a brand's willingness to invest in personalization and its embedded technology and expertise within its organizational structure and culture. In this global study, Monetate surveyed 600 senior marketers in North America and Europe within retail, travel hospitality and insurance. Highlights include: Customer Lifetime Value Drives ROI : Companies getting the highest ROI from personalization (3X or more) are twice as likely to name customer lifetime value as a primary business objective than companies getting low ROI (1X or less). : Companies getting the highest ROI from personalization (3X or more) are twice as likely to name customer lifetime value as a primary business objective than companies getting low ROI (1X or less). Data Architecture Emerges as Top Challenge : "Building a sustainable data architecture" overtakes "data quality" this year as the number one obstacle to performing true 1-to-1 personalization. : "Building a sustainable data architecture" overtakes "data quality" this year as the number one obstacle to performing true 1-to-1 personalization. Higher Investments Equal Better Returns : 86% of companies getting high ROI reported that personalization made up 21% or more of their marketing budget. : 86% of companies getting high ROI reported that personalization made up 21% or more of their marketing budget. Formalized Intentions Influence Outcomes : 74% of businesses that exceeded revenue goals in 2018 have a dedicated budget for personalization, and 77% have a documented personalization strategy. In contrast, only half of those who missed revenue expectations had a dedicated budget or a documented strategy. : 74% of businesses that exceeded revenue goals in 2018 have a dedicated budget for personalization, and 77% have a documented personalization strategy. In contrast, only half of those who missed revenue expectations had a dedicated budget or a documented strategy. Incentives Matter : Brands that exceeded revenue expectations in 2018 set personalization-specific financial incentives nearly 50% more often than those that fell short of goals. : Brands that exceeded revenue expectations in 2018 set personalization-specific financial incentives nearly 50% more often than those that fell short of goals. North America Maintains Lead...For Now: North American businesses get more return from their personalization efforts than European counterparts, but the gap is closing. "Monetate's growth, our customers' growth and industry research demonstrate time-after-time that brands who focus on prioritizing customer loyalty and customer lifetime value experience immediate and long-term success," said Stephen Collins, CEO, Monetate. "Many businesses struggle with tunnel vision, performing one-off tactics aimed to achieve short-term goals. While this may show a temporary lift in their metrics, the brands that are meeting and exceeding revenue targets are the ones that take a serious customer-centric approach to drive pervasive and persistent customer experiences." The complete 2019 Personalization Development Study and its methodology is available for download. About Monetate Monetate, the global leader in Personalization software for consumer-facing brands, enables marketers to grow more of their customers into their best customers. Powered by artificial intelligence, the Monetate Intelligent Personalization Engine makes it easy to test and optimize, segment and target, recommend products and even create true 1-to-1 omnichannel experiences. The company was recognized as an industry leader by two leading analyst firms in June 2018 and August 2018. Founded in 2008, with offices in the U.S. and Europe, Monetate is used by leading brands around the world and influences billions of dollars in revenue every year for QVC, Newegg, Timberland, Carnival, The North Face, and hundreds of other market leaders. Learn more at www.monetate.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005156/en/ Contacts: Hotwire for Monetate Christine Penwell MonetateUS@hotwireglobal.com TORONTO, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Former PeopleSoft Executive Craig Halliday joins Intelex to drive market and technology expansion Intelex Technologies, a leading global provider of SaaS-based Environmental, Health, Safety and Quality (EHSQ) management software, today announced the appointment of Craig Halliday as its new CEO to lead the company in its next phase of innovation and growth. In this role, Craig will take over business operations from Mark Jaine, CEO of Intelex for the past ten years who will now move into the role of Executive Chairman where he will continue to lead the company's vision. As Intelex's new CEO, Craig will be responsible for the strategic direction and operational execution of the company to further accelerate Intelex's momentum and expand customer value. "We are now in the midst of another record-setting year, and Intelex has never been better positioned to deliver innovation to help digitally transform EHSQ practices," said Mark. "As we've reached a new phase of growth, it's become clear to me that bringing on an executive with experience growing businesses to global magnitudes is the best thing to maximize the opportunity for Intelex and for our customers. When the time came to identify the right person for Intelex, it was clear that Craig's record of scaling technology brands in competitive markets makes him an ideal leader to support this momentum. I am excited to see where he takes us next." Craig's appointment is a clear reflection of the company's current state - fired up and ready to take on the future after a spurt of hyper revenue growth, global expansion, and differentiated customer experiences. Intelex is poised for major expansion in the EHSQ market on a global scale, and Craig's extensive years of experience leading top companies in the enterprise SaaS software space will enhance the company's path to accelerated growth in key markets and propel innovation of its EHSQ platform to solve for the real-world and future needs of its customers across industries. "I'm privileged to have this opportunity to lead Intelex into its next phase of innovation and growth," said Craig. "Mark Jaine and the talented team have already established an enviable track record of EHSQ innovation and strong credibility and market leadership with an impressive roster of customers. I'm excited to now build on that foundation and deliver enhanced value for our customers and partners." Craig has a strong record of growing businesses to achieve consistent profitable growth and market penetration as proven by his successes as CEO of EMS Software, CEO of eServGlobal, President of PeopleSoft Japan, and progressive executive management roles at J.D. Edwards. Today's announcement follows on the heels of multi-year double-digit growth for the company, as well as further expansion of its operations in the EMEA and APAC regions. About Intelex With more than 1,300 customers and 4 million users in 150 countries, Intelex Technologies Inc. is a global leader in environmental, health, safety and quality (EHSQ) management software. Since 1992 its scalable, web-based platform and applications have helped clients across all industries improve business performance, mitigate organization-wide risk, and ensure sustained compliance with internationally accepted standards (e.g., ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and OHSAS 18001) and regulatory requirements. Intelex is one of North America's fastest-growing tech companies, recognized as a Great Place to Work for over seven years, recipient of Waterstone's Most Admired Corporate Cultures award, and Deloitte's Best Managed Companies award. Intelex is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario (Canada); with office locations in Denver, CO (USA) and Reading (UK). For more information, please visit http://www.intelex.com. INTELEX PR CONTACT: Contact: Jennifer Rollo, Corporate Communications Mgr., Phone: +1-416-646-2597, Email: Jennifer.rollo@intelex.com JACKSONVILLE, FL / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / Duos Technologies Group, Inc. ('Duos' or the 'Company') (OTCQB: DUOT), a provider of advanced intelligent security and analytical technology solutions, will be participating at the 31st Annual ROTH Capital Conference , which is being held on March 17-19, 2019 at the Ritz Carlton in Dana Point, CA. Duos Technologies CFO Adrian Goldfarb will hold one-on-one meetings with institutional investors and analysts throughout the day. For additional information or to schedule a one-on-one meeting with Duos Management, please contact your ROTH representative or the Company's investor relations team at DUOT@liolios.com . About Duos Technologies Group, Inc. Duos Technologies Group, Inc. (OTCQB: DUOT), based in Jacksonville, Florida, through its wholly owned subsidiary, Duos Technologies, Inc., provides advanced intelligent security and analytical technology solutions with a strong portfolio of intellectual property. The Company's core competencies include intelligent technologies that combine machine learning, artificial intelligence and advanced video analytics that are delivered through its proprietary integrated enterprise command and control centraco platform. The Company provides its broad range of technology solutions with an emphasis on mission critical security, inspection and operations within the rail transportation, retail, petrochemical, government, and banking sectors. Duos Technologies also offers professional and consulting services for large data centers. For more information, visit www.duostech.com. Contacts: Duos Technologies Corporate Tracie Hutchins Duos Technologies Group, Inc. 904-652-1601 tlh@duostech.com Investor Relations Matt Glover or Tom Colton Liolios 949-574-3860 DUOT@liolios.com SOURCE: Duos Technologies Group, Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/538803/Duos-Technologies-to-Participate-at-31st-Annual-ROTH-Capital-Conference-on-March-18-2019 ZTEM 3D Data confirms 5km x 2 km X 2km magnetic anomaly at Pecors; ZTEM data comparison to VALE's Voisey Bay, Ni, Cu, Co mine; Strength returns to Nickel up 25% Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 13, 2019) - International Montoro Resources Inc.'s (TSXV: IMT) (the "Company") President, Gary Musil, reports: "With the receipt of September 2018 https://www.slideshare.net/secret/eqThN4pFkSMGou we learned that the ZTEM appears to identify a deep, gently east dipping & north plunging conductive layer at a depth of ~750m that coincides with the magnetic anomaly. The feature layer that is centered on our Pecors area block, also remains open to the north." "In this data we see 3 distinct magnetic anomalies at 750m one being approx. 3.5 km x 1.5 km. Figure 1 To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/6294/43375_51bec3e824119a3d_002full.jpg Included in Montoro's 2D Geotech ZTEM inversion report are ZTEM results over the deeply buried (>800m) Eastern Deeps deposit, from Vale's Voisey Bay Ni, Cu, Co mine. Voisey Bay, being the biggest mining discovery in Canada in the last 50 years, any comparative geophysical data bodes well for our Pecor's Ni, Cu, PGE project. In September 2018 (as reported in the Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal), Vale gave the go ahead for $2 billion in mine developments at its Voisey's Bay operation in Labrador. The Geotech 2D report recommended a 3D inversion report be completed. Remarkably now that we can view the depth with width and length in 3D we can now see that the original 3 anomalies identified by the ZTEM 2D are a large contiguous magnetic anomaly estimated to be 5km long 2km wide and 2km deep." Figure 2: Drill holes completed by Rio Algom (blue) and Montoro (red) as seen on the https://www.slideshare.net/secret/2vLqjOnrClKL9h To view an enhanced version of Figure 2, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/6294/43375_51bec3e824119a3d_003full.jpg ZTEM 2D Survey & 3D Interpretation indicates further encouraging results: The Pecors ZTEM survey shows similarities with ZTEM results over the Vale Canada Limited ("Vale") Voisey Bay, Eastern Deeps-deposit. ZTEM was successfully able to position the Eastern Deeps deposits in the correct location and at the correct depth (~750m) using 2D inversion (Jansen and Cristall: in Proceedings of Exploration 2017). Further to our news release of September 19, 2018, Geotech Ltd. dba Geotech Airborne of Aurora, Ontario has provided the Company with a 3D interpretation of the helicopter-borne ZTEM geophysical survey of approximately 42 km2; 295 line km at 200m line spacing providing further information to depths over 2000 metres. The 3D inversion identified two deep-seated targets (Zd1 and Zd2) with depths to the tops of >600m and >800m respectively. Geotech offered the following interpretation of these targets "The estimated resistivity values for the Zd1 target are ranging from the lowest of 300 ohm-m to 500 ohm-m, and for the Zd2 target are ranging from the lowest of 100 to 300 ohm-m, which makes them good candidates for semi-massive Ni-Cu mineralization." Figure 3 To view an enhanced version of Figure 3, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/6294/43375_51bec3e824119a3d_004full.jpg NI 43-101 Disclosure: Jean M. Legault, M.Sc.A., P.Eng, P.Geo., and Chief Geophysicist of Geotech Ltd., a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and approved the technical information above in this news release as in reference to the ZTEM survey on the Pecors anomaly. The 3D interpretation and Final Summary of the ZTEM survey can be reviewed on our website: https://www.montororesources.com/serpent-river Background: Don Hawke, MSc., P.Geo, consulting geologist for Montoro and a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, has provided the following background information: In 2014 the company completed a 3D inversion of a large magnetic anomaly detected during a previous airborne VTEM survey that outlined a deep seated body with dimensions of about 3.5 km by 1.5 km that was interpreted to be caused by a possible mafic-ultramafic intrusion. A two hole drill program was carried out in 2015 to determine the source of the anomaly and a gabbro intrusion was encountered at depths of 595 and 650 metres respectively. One hole intersected anomalous Cu-Ni-PGE values over a core length of 29 m and xenoliths of sulphide facies iron formation and sulphide rich exhalite were encountered near the lower contact indicating that the gabbro had access to a source of sulphur, an important prerequisite for the formation of magmatic sulphide deposits. The second hole was stopped in gabbro at a depth of 1317m when the depth capacity of the drill was reached. During 2018 Geotech was contracted by the company to carry out a ZTEM survey over the magnetic anomaly to search for conductive targets at greater depths than previous surveys could penetrate. The 3D interpretation and final 2D results of the ZTEM survey will substantially assist in better targeting the next phase of diamond drilling on the Serpent River - Pecors Ni-Cu-PGE project. Strength in the Nickel and Copper Markets returns: Gary Musil comments: "2019 has brought strong Nickel (up 25%) and Copper, in the words of Morgan Stanley, is a metal whose 'stars are aligned'. Last we drilled at Pecors LME nickel was $7lb driven partially by supply and demand economics with the LME Nickel stockpiles reaching multiyear lows, presently the LME stockpile is below those levels, with Nickel trading at $6.00 up 25% on the year. " Forbes, Feb.19, 2019 "Will 2019 be the year of King Copper" Last week Morgan Stanley joined Citi and Goldman Sachs in making a bullish call on the metal. The investment bank projected a 14 percent upside for copper in 2019, based on a widening supply deficit and the likelihood of a resolution to the U.S.-China trade war. Historic discoverer of the Voisey Bay Mine, Robert Friedland comments:"You're going to need a telescope to see copper prices in 2021." U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources Feb. 2019 Simon Moore, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, testifying to the U.S. Senate committee on Energy and Natural Resources, comments:"between 2023 and 2028, lithium demand will increase by over eight times, cobalt demand will rise four-fold (reflecting research aimed at reducing its usage),and nickel by 19 times." About International Montoro Resources Inc. (i) In February 2019 Montoro entered into acquisition agreements with various vendors, to acquire over 3,500 ha of claims in the Cariboo Mining Division, British Columbia, with one claim block adjoining the well-known Wicheeda REE project. (ii) Montoro will continue to focus on advancing its 100%-owned Serpent River - Elliot Lake, Northern Ontario, Pecors magnetic anomaly - a potential Ni-Cu-PGE discovery. The southwestern portion of the property has located Uranium/REE mineralization from previous drilling in the general area where Rio Algom discovered uranium. The property comprises 10 mineral claims (115 units), or approximately 1,840 ha. (iii) In February 2018 Montoro received approval for the acquisition of the Duhamel, Quebec property. The Ni-Cu-Co prospect consisted of nine (9) mineral claims comprising 500 ha. Additional staking of thirty-two (32) adjoining mineral claims and compiling of data has been underway since February; and the expanded property now totals approximately 2,300 ha and prospective for Titanium, Vanadium, and Chromium. (iv) In addition the Company owns jointly with Belmont Resources Inc. (50/50) its Crackingstone (982 ha, 2,427 acres) Uranium properties in the Uranium City District, Northern Saskatchewan, and is seeking a joint venture partner to continue development of this advanced property. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD "Gary Musil" Gary Musil, President/CEO and Director #600 -625 Howe Street Vancouver, B.C. V6C 2T6 Ph.#604-683-6648; Fax #604-683-1350 Website: www.MontoroResources.com E-Mail: gmusil@montororesources.com Disclaimer for Forward-Looking Information: Certain statements in this release are forward-looking statements which reflect the expectations of management. Forward-looking statements consist of statements that are not purely historical, including any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, performance or developments to differ materially from those contained in the statements. No assurance can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will occur or, if they do occur, what benefits the Company will obtain from them. These forward-looking statements reflect management's current views and are based on certain expectations, estimates and assumptions which may prove to be incorrect. 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. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43375 The new location is part of a strategic move as the Company enters the billion-dollar cannabis market and bulk CBD business DAYTONA BEACH, FL / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / Vapor Group, Inc. (OTC PINK: VPOR) ('Vapor Group' or 'the Company'), and its Board of Directors approved the relocation of the Company's headquarters and operations from its current locations in Aventura, and Hialeah, Florida to Daytona Beach. The move is part of a larger strategy to help Vapor Group integrate into the billion-dollar cannabis and CBD markets. The Company's new address is 495 Carswell Avenue, Unit A, Daytona Beach, Florida 32117. Daytona's economy, which is driven by thousands of local enterprises including cannabis clinics like Surterra Wellness, is one of the fastest growing in the nation. State officials report that companies in the area generate up to $437 million in exports and contribute a total of $15 billion in GDP annually within the Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), helping to push the region into the top 40 percent of all MSAs nationally. 'This move further positions us to expand into the burgeoning bulk CBD sector successfully,' said Vapor Group President and Chief Executive Officer David Zinger. 'We're excited about the opportunity to join the thriving Daytona business community while delivering the profits that our shareholders deserve and desire.' Vapor Group's decision to relocate is also part of a larger restructuring process that eliminates its current subsidiaries, allowing the Company to concentrate on providing high-quality, bulk CBD isolate for those looking to enter the growing cannabis industry. It's a move that should benefit all shareholders equally. According to the Associated Press, in 2018 investors poured $10 billion into Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. cannabis businesses. The American hemp-CBD market is expected to grow to $22 billion by 2022, with the overall global cannabis industry predicted to be valued at $146.4 billion as early as 2025. More updates concerning the restructuring of the Company will be announced in the near future. About Vapor Group, Inc. Vapor Group, www.vaporgroup.com, is a publicly traded OTC company, trading under the symbol, VPOR, and today is a holding company for several subsidiaries. Vapor Group is the owner of Simple Cork, Inc., www.simplecork.com, the developer of a new, multi-nationally patented combination wine bottle cork/opener being prepared for market entry. If you have specific questions about the Company, please email us at investors@vaporgroup.com. Safe Harbor Statement: This release includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Such statements include any that may predict, forecast, indicate, or imply future results, performance or achievements, and may contain the words "estimate", "project", "intend", "forecast", "anticipate", "plan", "planning", "expect", "believe", "likely", "should", "could", "would", "may" or similar words or expressions. Such statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause the company's actual results and financial position to differ materially from those in such statements, which involve risks and uncertainties, including those relating to the Company's ability to grow. Actual results may differ materially from those predicted and any reported should not be considered an indication of future performance. Potential risks and uncertainties include the Company's operating history and resources, economic, competitive, and equity market conditions. CONTACT: Vapor Group, Inc. 954-883-9525 SOURCE: Vapor Group Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/538851/Vapor-Group-Inc-Relocates-Headquarters-to-Daytona-Beach Presentation with live audio webcast on Tuesday, March 19, 2019 at 3:20 p.m. ET NEW HOPE, PA / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / Orchestra BioMed, Inc. ("Orchestra BioMed" or the "Company"), a biomedical innovation company developing advanced therapeutic solutions to address major unmet medical needs, announced today that David Hochman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, will present at Oppenheimer's 29th Annual Healthcare Conference on Tuesday, March 19, 2019 at 3:20 p.m. ET in New York, NY. A live audio webcast of the presentation will be accessible on the News and Events page on the Company's website at www.orchestrabiomed.com . The webcast replay will be available approximately two hours after the presentation ends and will be accessible for 90 days. About Orchestra BioMed Orchestra BioMed, Inc. is a biomedical innovation company focused on developing high impact therapeutic solutions to address significant unmet needs in healthcare. The Company advances promising therapies through clinical development and aims to leverage strategic partnerships with established global leaders to optimize commercialization. This strategy positions Orchestra BioMed to generate long-term, high-margin cash flow from revenue sharing, royalty, licensing and product development agreements. With a primary focus on the treatment of cardiovascular health issues that affect tens of millions of people worldwide, the Orchestra BioMed pipeline includes BackBeat Cardiac Neuromodulation Therapy, a patented implantable cardiac stimulation-based treatment for hypertension, and Virtue Sirolimus-Eluting Balloon, a novel, first-in-class drug/device combination product that delivers programmed-release bioabsorbable particle encapsulated Sirolimus to the artery during balloon angioplasty for treatment of atherosclerosis. Orchestra BioMed also has significant strategic ownership in other therapeutic device companies, including FreeHold Surgical (a wholly-owned subsidiary), Motus GI and Vivasure Medical. Forward Looking Statements Some of the statements made herein constitute forward-looking statements. These statements relate to future financial and other performance or anticipated plans and are identified by words such as "may," "will," "should," "expect," "could," "scheduled,""plan," "intend," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "potential," "propose" and "continue" or negative variants of such terms. These and similar forward-looking statements discuss the Company's future expectations and plans. The Company operates in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks emerge from time to time. Given these risks and uncertainties, the Company cautions against placing undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. These statements are only estimates of future performance. Actual performance or events may not meet such expectations or estimates and may, in fact, differ materially. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements made herein are reasonable, the Company cannot and does not guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements. Moreover, the Company does not assume any responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of such forward-looking statements in the future. The Company does not plan and, subject to applicable law, undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements made herein after the date hereof in order to conform such statements to actual results. Investor and Media Contact: Jenene Thomas Communications, LLC Jenene Thomas (833) 475-8247 OBIO@jtcir.com SOURCE: Orchestra BioMed, Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/538816/Orchestra-BioMedR-to-Present-at-Oppenheimer-29th-Annual-Healthcare-Conference 86,000 square foot planned cultivation facility expected to produce 28000 pounds of flower annually LAS VEGAS, NV / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / CLS Holdings USA, Inc. (OTCQB: CLSH) (CSE: CLSH.U) "CLS," a diversified cannabis company operating as Cannabis Life Sciences and an integrated cannabis producer and retailer in Nevada through its Oasis Cannabis subsidiaries, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire an 80% ownership interest in CannAssist, LLC. This agreement, along with the previously announced option agreement to acquire In Good Health, marks a continuation towards CLS's goal to become a significant entity in the rapidly growing Mass market, CannAssist has entered into a contract with the City of Leicester and has applied for a state cultivation grow license. The planned Leicester 86,000 square foot facility is expected to produce its first harvest in Q1 of 2020. This facility is expected to produce 28000 pounds of flower along with 240,000 grams of extract. Once fully operational, total revenues from the facility are anticipated to exceed $100 million. CLS anticipates generating substantial positive cash flow from the grow facility. Massachusetts has a population of 6.9 million people as compared to 5.6 million people in Colorado. Massachusetts is also centrally located to the dense population of New England with a less than 100-mile drive from Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Hampshire and Vermont. The city of Denver currently has approximately 364 dispensaries compared with the entire State of Massachusetts, which currently has less than 50. Jeff Binder, Chief Executive Officer of CLS Holdings USA, commented, "We are extremely excited to enter into this agreement. The market dynamics in Massachusetts are compelling for large scale cultivation. The current cultivation in Mass is approximately 800k square feet, while demand is expected to exceed 8,000,000 square feet. This opportunity fits into our stated objective of entering markets that are on the cusp of implementing a robust adult use market." About CannAssist CannAssist has entered into a contract with the city of Leicester and has applied for a state cultivation grow license. It plans to build a facility that upon completion will have 86000 square feet of cultivation space making it one of the top 3 facilities in the state. The company expects to begin operations and realize its first harvest in Q1 of 2020. About Oasis Cannabis Oasis Cannabis has operated a cannabis dispensary in the Las Vegas market since dispensaries first opened in Nevada in 2015 and has been recognized as one of the top marijuana retailers in the state. Its location within walking distance to the Las Vegas Strip and Downtown Las Vegas in combination with its delivery service to residents allows it to efficiently serve both locals and tourists in the Las Vegas area. In February 2019, it was named "Best Dispensary for Pot Pros" by Desert Companion Magazine. In August 2017, the company commenced wholesale offerings of cannabis in Nevada with the launch of its City Trees brand of cannabis concentrates and cannabis-infused products. http://oasiscannabis.com About CLS Holdings USA, Inc. CLS Holdings USA, Inc. (CLSH) is a diversified cannabis company that acts as an integrated cannabis producer and retailer through its Oasis Cannabis subsidiaries in Nevada, and plans to expand to other states. CLS stands for "Cannabis Life Sciences," in recognition of the Company's patented proprietary method of extracting various cannabinoids from the marijuana plant and converting them into products with a higher level of quality and consistency. The Company's business model includes licensing operations, processing operations, processing facilities, sale of products, brand creation and consulting services. http://www.clsholdingsinc.com Twitter: @CLSHusa Forward Looking Statements This press release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation and "forward-looking statements" as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (collectively, the "forward-looking statements"). These statements relate to anticipated future events, future results of operations or future financial performance, the completion of acquisitions, the anticipated dates for harvests and anticipated growth. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as "may," "might," "will," "should," "intends," "expects," "plans," "goals," "projects," "anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "predicts," "potential," or "continue" or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. These forward-looking statements are only predictions, are uncertain and involve substantial known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause our actual results, levels of activity or performance to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity or performance expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. We cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity or performance and we cannot guaranty that the proposed transactions described in this press release will occur. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date that they were made. These cautionary statements should be considered together with any written or oral forward-looking statements that we may issue in the future. Except as required by applicable law, we do not intend to update any of the forward-looking statements to conform these statements to reflect actual results, later events or circumstances or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. See CLS Holdings USA filings with the SEC and on its SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com for additional details. Contact Information Corporate: Chairman and CEO Jeff Binder jeff@clsholdingsinc.com 888-438-9132 Investors: Adelaide Capital Markets Jackie Kelly Jackie@adelaidecapital.ca 416-301-2949 SOURCE: CLS Holdings USA, Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/538859/CLS-Holdings-USA-Locks-Up-Joint-Venture-Agreement-with-CannAssist Terra Tech Corp Makes Acquisition and Quashes AccusationsAfter a year of disappointing investors, the Terra Tech Corp (OTCMKTS:TRTC) share price has finally turned bullish.Investors have taken a shine to Terra Tech stock ever since the cannabis-focused agriculture company revealed that it had agreed to acquire the remainder of interest in the Blum dispensary in Reno, Nevada.The acquisition also helped put to rest a nasty lawsuit that a former business associate had launched against the company, accusing it of stock manipulation and dubious accounting, among other things.With the acquisition and the resolved lawsuit, Terra Tech can. 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. BLACKROCK GREATER EUROPE INVESTMENT TRUST plc (LEI - 5493003R8FJ6I76ZUW55) All information is at 28 February 2019 and unaudited. Performance at month end with net income reinvested One Month Three Months One Year Three Years Launch (20 Sep 04) Net asset value (undiluted) 4.4% 1.2% 1.7% 44.2% 350.8% Net asset value* (diluted) 4.4% 1.2% 1.7% 44.8% 351.3% Share price 5.0% 2.3% 3.0% 41.4% 337.8% FTSE World Europe ex UK 2.1% 0.4% -3.3% 38.7% 228.4% * Diluted for treasury shares and subscription shares. Sources: BlackRock and Datastream At month end Net asset value (capital only): 345.82p Net asset value (including income): 346.16p Net asset value (capital only)1: 345.82p Net asset value (including income)1: 346.16p Share price: 333.00p Discount to NAV (including income): 3.8% Discount to NAV (including income)1: 3.8% Net gearing: 3.2% Net yield2: 1.7% Total assets (including income): 295.5m Ordinary shares in issue3: 85,373,101 Ongoing charges4: 1.09% 1 Diluted for treasury shares. 2 Based on a final dividend of 4.00p per share and an interim dividend of 1.75p per share for the year ended 31 August 2018. 3 Excluding 24,955,837 shares held in treasury. 4 Calculated as a percentage of average net assets and using expenses, excluding interest costs, after relief for taxation, for the year ended 31 August 2018. Sector Analysis Total Assets (%) Country Analysis Total Assets (%) Industrials 29.6 France 17.0 Health Care 22.8 Switzerland 16.9 Technology 14.2 Germany 12.7 Financials 11.1 Denmark 12.0 Consumer Goods 9.6 Netherlands 9.2 Consumer Services 6.8 Italy 7.2 Basic Materials 4.2 Israel 4.1 Telecommunications 2.3 United Kingdom 4.1 Net current liabilities -0.6 Spain 4.0 ----- Sweden 3.8 100.0 Russia 2.3 ===== Finland 2.2 Ireland 2.2 Belgium 1.9 Greece 1.0 Net current liabilities -0.6 ----- 100.0 ===== Ten Largest Equity Investments Company Country % of Total Assets Safran France 6.7 Novo Nordisk Denmark 5.8 SAP Germany 5.4 Sika Switzerland 5.0 Lonza Group Switzerland 5.0 RELX United Kingdom 4.1 ASML Netherlands 3.5 Unilever Netherlands 3.3 Thales France 3.1 Fresenius Medical Care Germany 3.0 Commenting on the markets, Stefan Gries, representing the Investment Manager noted: During the month, the Company's NAV rose by 4.4% and the share price by 5.0%. For reference, the FTSE World Europe ex UK Index returned 2.1% during the period. European ex UK markets continued to rebound in February, supported by a slightly better than expected earnings season. The earnings season has given market participants the first chance to judge the extent of the global slowdown that led to such weakness in equity markets in Q4 2018. Thus far, both earnings and outlooks support the case for a slower rate of global growth but not recession. Forward guidance has largely remained unchanged, which has comforted investors. Expectations, which had been very elevated, look now to be more realistic and we feel some management teams have guided conservatively, giving themselves room for upgrades later in the year. The Eurozone composite Purchasing Managers' Index surprised to the upside, as did composite measures in France and Germany, both rebounding from prior months' weakness. But the Eurozone manufacturing PMI fell to its lowest level in nearly six years at 49.2. Stock selection was the primary driver of the Company's outperformance of the reference index over the month. Sector allocation was also additive, with the higher weighting to industrials aiding returns. The lower weighting to utilities also benefited performance, as this sector lagged the market reversing some of the gains it had experienced into the end of 2018. The largest contributing stock over the month was a position in Alpha Bank, which rallied almost 40% after shares had come under pressure in Q4. Elsewhere in financials, a position in Italian investment platform business Finecobank aided returns. In a challenging environment for Italian asset gatherers, Q4 proved strong for Finecobank, increasing their fee revenue by 16% year-on-year. All Key Performance Indicators for the business remain robust: new customers, flows and new lending, all of which supported an earnings upgrade. Within the industrials sector, Thales was amongst the largest contributors to returns. Having been weak on no news in January the shares recovered lost ground in February, supported by the disposal of its data encryption business, a required remedy for approval of the Gemalto deal. The full year results were slightly ahead of consensus estimates, implying solid growth in the second half. Within the same sector, owning Kingspan was also positive. The company, benefiting from a global drive to improve energy efficiency, reported revenue growth of 19% for 2018. The outlook remains strong, though it did note a slowdown in the UK in the first couple of months of 2019. Sberbank proved the largest detractor over the period as political volatility weighed on the shares as a new US sanction bill passes through Congress. The majority of relative detractors to performance, however, were those positions not held in the Company. Not holding Airbus, for example, detracted from performance over the month as their Q4 results proved better than expected. At the end of the period the Company had a higher allocation than the reference index towards industrials, technology, consumer services and health care. A lower allocation was held in financials, consumer goods, utilities, telecommunications, basic materials and oil & gas. Outlook The European market is set to face a number of issues this year, not least the impending Brexit date. However, we believe much has been priced into European equity markets, including a greater potential of recession than fundamentals currently point to. We see opportunity for a gentle increase in European growth as we move through the year. This could be driven by fiscal stimulus, abating headwinds and resilience of the consumer. Given the significantly bearish sentiment and positioning towards European equities, we could be nearing the point of maximum pain for the European market, particularly if fundamentals stabilise and improve from here. Where optimism for growth is low, optimism for earnings seems slightly overeager in our view and we see risks of earnings downgrades across the market, particularly in leveraged companies. We believe a selective, stock focused approach could provide meaningful uplift to investors' portfolios in this higher volatility environment. Our portfolios have become more defensive at the margin but we are selectively adding to high conviction ideas which have experienced pull back in their share price with limited or no change to fundamentals. 13 March 2019 ENDS Road Town, British Virgin Islands--(Newsfile Corp. - March 13, 2019) - Talon Metals Corp. (TSX: TLO) announced today that its wholly owned indirect subsidiary, Talon Nickel (USA) LLC (collectively, "Talon" or the "Company"), has made the initial upfront payment of US$6 million to Kennecott Exploration Company ("Kennecott"), a subsidiary of the Rio Tinto Group, in respect of the option agreement previously entered into with Kennecott on November 7, 2018 (the "Option Agreement"). Talon has also issued 25,031,250 common shares to Kennecott (representing US$1.5 million worth of common shares at C$0.08 per share), which was a further requirement under the Option Agreement. Collectively, Kennecott now owns 7.4% of Talon on a partially diluted basis. Pursuant to the Option Agreement, Talon now has the right to acquire up to a 60% interest in the Tamarack Project, subject to certain terms and conditions. "We are thrilled that we have secured the right to earn up to a 60% interest in the Tamarack Project," said Sean Werger, President of Talon."This is the beginning of exciting times ahead for the Company. We look forward to working in conjunction with our partner, Kennecott, to advance the Tamarack Project, with a strategy of producing Class 1 nickel, as well as copper and cobalt, for the electric vehicle and stationary battery market." About Talon Talon is a TSX-listed company focused on the exploration and development of the Tamarack Nickel-Copper-Cobalt Project in Minnesota, USA (which comprises the Tamarack North Project and the Tamarack South Project). The Company has a well-qualified exploration and mine management team with extensive experience in project management. For additional information on Talon, please visit the Company's website at www.talonmetals.com or contact: Sean Werger President Talon Metals Corp. Tel: (416) 500-9891 Email: werger@talonmetals.com Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains certain "forward-looking statements". All statements, other than statements of historical fact that address activities, events or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements reflect the current expectations or beliefs of the Company based on information currently available to the Company. Such forward-looking statements include statements relating to the Company potentially earning up to a 60% interest in the Tamarack Project and advancing the Tamarack Project, with a strategy of producing Class 1 nickel, as well as copper and cobalt, for the electric vehicle and stationary battery market. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise. Although the Company believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such statements due to the inherent uncertainty therein. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43381 Lochem, 13 March 2019 ForFarmers publishes agenda Annual General Meeting of Shareholders 2019 ForFarmers N.V. ('the Company') publishes today the agenda for the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders. The Annual General Meeting of shareholders will be held on Friday 26 April 2019, starting at 10.00, in Cafe-Restaurant-Zalencentrum "Witkamp", Dorpsstraat 8, 7245 AK Laren (Gelderland, the Netherlands). The convocation announcement and the agenda and explanatory notes to the agenda (including the adjusted retirement schedule of the supervisory board)are available via the corporate website of the Company (www.forfarmersgroup.eu/en) under Investors / General Meeting of Shareholders. (https://www.forfarmersgroup.eu/en/investors/financial-calendar/annual-general-meeting-of-shareholders.aspx) Note to the editor / For additional information: Caroline Vogelzang, Director Investor Relations and Communications T: 0031 573 288 194 M: 0031 6 10 94 91 61 E: caroline.vogelzang@forfarmers.eu (mailto:caroline.vogelzang@forfarmers.eu) Company profile ForFarmers N.V. ('ForFarmers', Lochem, the Netherlands) is an internationally operating feed company that offers total feed solutions for conventional and organic livestock farming. ForFarmers gives its very best "For the Future of Farming": for the continuity of farming and for a financially secure sector that will continue to serve society for generations to come in a sustainable way. By working side-by-side with farmers ForFarmers delivers real benefits: better returns, healthier livestock and greater efficiency. This is achieved by offering tailored and Total Feed solutions and a targeted approach with specialist and expert support. With sales of 10 million tonnes of feed annually, ForFarmers is market leader in Europe. ForFarmers has approximately 2,700 employees and is active in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Poland and the United Kingdom. In 2018, revenues amounted to over 2.4 billion. ForFarmers N.V. is listed at Euronext Amsterdam. ForFarmers N.V., Postbus 91, 7240 AB Lochem, T: +31 (0)573 28 88 00, F: +31 (0)573 28 88 99 info@forfarmers.eu (mailto:info@forfarmers.eu), www.forfarmersgroup.eu/en (http://www.forfarmersgroup.eu/en). This announcement is distributed by West Corporation on behalf of West Corporation clients. The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein. Source: ForFarmers N.V. via Globenewswire CALGARY, AB / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / Nextraction Energy Corp. (NEX: NE.H) (the "Company" or "Nextraction") advises that it has filed on SEDAR the following documents: The Company's December 31, 2016 NI 51-101 Report on Reserves Data and ancillary certificates; The Company's December 31, 2017 NI 51-101 Report on Reserves Data and ancillary certificates; The Company's Notice of Ceasing to Engage In Oil and Gas Activities; The Company's Annual Financial Statements and Management Discussion and Analysis for the year ended December 31, 2015 and ancillary certificates; The Company's Annual Financial Statements and Management Discussion and Analysis for the year ended December 31, 2016 and ancillary certificates; and The Company's Annual Financial Statements and Management Discussion and Analysis for the year ended December 31, 2017 and ancillary certificates. Nextraction is proceeding to complete its financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2018. The Company also advises that subject to the approval of the applicable regulatory authorities, including the TSX Venture Exchange, the Alberta Securities Commission (the "ASC") and the British Columbia Securities Commission ("BCSC") Frank Hallam has been appointed by the board of directors as the interim Chief Financial Officer of Nextraction. The board of directors of the Company has also appointed all board members to sit on the Nextraction Reserves Committee. As indicated above, Nextraction has ceased to be involved in any oil and gas activities. It has disposed of its Alberta oil and gas properties and recently, as a result of the failure of Nextraction's United States subsidiary to abandon and remediate a well located in Wyoming, has lost its mineral rights thereby resulting in Nextraction having ceased to be engaged in oil and gas activities. As disclosed by the ASC, on January 17, 2019, the ASC issued a Variation Order (the "ASC Variance Order") varying the ASC Cease Trade Order dated May 6, 2015. As disclosed by the BCSC, on January 17, 2019, the BCSC has issued a Partial Revocation Order (the "BCSC Partial Revocation Order") partially revoking the BCSC Cease Trade Order dated May 8, 2015. Pursuant to both of the ASC Variance Order and the BCSC Partial Revocation Order the ASC Cease Trade Order and the BCSC Cease Trade Order (the "CTOs") were varied or partially revoked allowing Nextraction to raise debt funds from it directors or officers. The funds are to be utilized to bring the Company's disclosure documents up to date. Other than as permitted by the ASC Variance Order and the BCSC Partial Revocation Order, the CTOs remain in effect. Nextraction intends to apply to the ASC and BCSC for full revocation of the CTOs but has not done so as of March 13, 2019. There is no guarantee that the CTOs will be fully revoked. Until the CTOs are fully revoked the securities of Nextraction will remain subject to the CTOs. For further information please contact: John Zang, CEO Email: jzanglaw@gmail.com Telephone: 403 680 9264 Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Information in this news release may contain forward looking information. Statements containing forward looking information express, as at the date of this news release, the Company's plans, estimates, forecasts, projections, expectations, or beliefs as to future events or results and are believed to be reasonable based on information currently available to the company. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate. Actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The forward-looking information contained in this news release is as of the date hereof and Nextraction does not undertake any obligation to update publicly or to revise any of the included forward looking statements contained herein, except as required by applicable law. The forward-looking statements contained herein are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any state in the United States in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. The securities referred to herein have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities and Exchange Act of 1933, as amended, and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from registration requirements. SOURCE: Nextraction Energy Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/538945/Nextraction-Announces-Filing-of-Disclosure-Documents "Drilling results return 243 meters grading 65.2% Iron and 0.50% Vanadium Pentoxide in concentrates from Davis Tube Analysis" TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / Vanadium One Energy Corp. (the "Company") (TSXV:VONE), is pleased to release further assay results for 3 holes from its 2018 fall drilling program at its 100% owned Mont Sorcier Iron Ore Project, near Chibougamau, Quebec. The final 3 holes were drilled in the South Zone, and again, drilling intersected significant continuous mineralization throughout each hole, with Hole MSS-18-18 returning an intersection of 243 meters of concentrate grading 65.2% Fe and 0.50% Vanadium Pentoxide (V2O5) within the Iron formation, using the Davis Tube Test (DTT). On average, across the three holes, the content of Vanadium Pentoxide (V2O5) in magnetite concentrate prepared through DTT analysis is 0.57%, with an average Iron (Fe) content of 64.5% across 548 meters of drill core. This includes composite sample peaks of up to 1.00% V2O5 over 40 meters in drill hole MSS-18-20, as shown in Table 1. At the Company's Mont Sorcier Project, higher grade zones of vanadium pentoxide are found regularly throughout the iron formation in both South and North Zones. Martin Walter, CEO, said, "Our results continue to demonstrate wide zones of Fe and V2O5 mineralization within the two deposits, known as the North and South Zones. We are particularly encouraged by the persistent wide bands of higher-grade Vanadium Pentoxide found inside the magnetite iron formation. Again, this strengthens our opinion that the vanadium content is an important economic credit, in addition to the value of the Iron, when considering future economic studies conducted on the project." Table 1: List of Drill Intersections - 2018 Fall Drill Program (Lengths: downhole meters, Grades: %) Area 2018 Mont Sorcier Drilling Rock (Head) DTT (concentrate) Drill Hole From To Length SG % Fe2O3 % V2O5 Satmagan % TiO2 % Fe2O3 % V2O5 % Fe South Zone Centre MSS-18-18 27.0 270.0 243.0 3.1 34.8 0.23 21.6 1.29 93.2 0.50 65.2 Including 47.0 98.2 51.2 3.3 41.7 0.40 26.4 1.34 92.2 0.80 64.5 MSS-18-19 35.0 221.2 186.2 3.1 38.9 0.28 24.9 1.10 91.0 0.55 63.6 Including 53.0 109.0 56.0 3.4 46.2 0.43 30.0 1.15 93.2 0.74 65.1 MSS-18-20 58.0 192.0 134.0 3.4 45.9 0.40 29.8 1.02 92.4 0.71 64.6 Including 101.0 141.0 40.0 3.5 47.4 0.57 30.8 0.99 92.3 1.00 64.5 This is the third and final release of drilling results from the Company's 2018 Fall drilling program. Previous drilling results were released in two previous news releases on February 7th and February 28th respectively. The Company drilled a total of 17 holes between September and December 2018, adding 13 drill holes in the South Zone and completing 4 drill holes in the North Zone. Drill holes are angled at either 45 or 60 and drilled in either a north or south direction, across the east-west striking iron formation. Drill hole location details and maps can be found on our web site at www.vanadiumone.com . Sample Information Drill core samples up to 4 meters in length were delivered to SGS Laboratories in Val d'Or, from November through December 2018. Once at SGS, the rock (Head) samples are initially crushed and assayed with XRF Technology, plus Satmagan. Each sample then undergoes Davis Tube Testing (DTT), which removes the magnetic fraction from the non-magnetic material, to produce a magnetite concentrate. The magnetite concentrate is then assayed to measure its Iron and Vanadium content recovered. The Company reports both sets of assay grades as shown in Table 1. The total-iron assay (%Fe2O3) reported is split between magnetic commercial grade iron oxide and other non-magnetic minerals bearing iron using Satmagan and/or Davis Tube. Satmagan measures magnetic iron content with a magnet. DTT is a small-scale laboratory magnetic separation analysis designed to measure the amount and quality of potentially commercial iron content concentrate in drill core samples. DTT results can vary depending on grinding. The Company used grinding at 85% passing 75 microns (200 mesh) which is an exploration standard. Previous owner Campbell, in 1974, reported its DTT using 95% passing 38 microns (325 mesh), which is a Feasibility Study standard. The technical information contained in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Pierre-Jean Lafleur, P.Eng. (OIQ), who is a Qualified Person with respect to the Company's Mont Sorcier Project as defined under National Instrument 43-101. About Vanadium One Energy Corp.: Vanadium One Energy Corp. is a mineral exploration company headquartered in Toronto, Canada. The Company is focused on advancing its Mont Sorcier Magnetite Iron Ore and Vanadium Project. The Mont Sorcier Project is a bulk tonnage magnetite iron ore and vanadium deposit, with very low titanium content, located near the northern Quebec mining town of Chibougamau, providing access to excellent infrastructure, including rail, shipping and power. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF VANADIUM ONE ENERGY CORP. Martin Walter, CEO Tel: 416-599-8547 Rodney Ireland, Investor Relations Tel: 416-599-8547 info@vanadiumone.com www.vanadiumone.com Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking 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. This news release contains "forward-looking information" including statements with respect to the future exploration performance of the Company. This forward-looking information involves 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 of the Company, expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These risks, as well as others, are disclosed within the Company's filing on SEDAR, which investors are encouraged to review prior to any transaction involving the securities of the Company. Forward-looking information contained herein is provided as of the date of this news release and the Company disclaims any obligation, other than as required by law, to update any forward-looking information for any reason. There can be no assurance that forward-looking information will prove to be accurate and the reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking information. SOURCE: Vanadium One Energy Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/538941/Vanadium-One-Continues-to-Report-Positive-Drilling-Results-at-its-Mont-Sorcier-Iron-Ore-Deposit FORT WALTON BEACH, FL / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / With graduation just around the corner and millions of Americans turning 18, Gresham Foster with ASG Legal in Fort Walton Beach, Florida has some advice for these soon to be adults. Foster recommends that anyone who is soon to turn 18 should seriously consider signing a Durable Power of Attorney. "If someone is injured in an accident and is no longer able to make decisions for themselves, they need to provide a release for someone else to make those decisions," says Foster. Forbes recently published an article that claims that every year nearly a quarter of a million Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 are hospitalized for injuries sustained in accidents. Many of these injured young people are not able to make their own medical decisions, which leaves their parents often to take their case to court in order to gain approval to act on the behalf of the injured. Those interested in learning more can read more in this article from Forbes. "The gist is this," says Foster. "Young people are injured in an accident and they may become disabled. Anyone who is turning 18 or has turned 18 recently needs to understand that because they are officially declared as an adult when they turn 18, their parents do not automatically have control over their medical care. This means that the parents often have to gain court approval to get the care that the patient needs, and this is often a lengthy process." Foster says that in order for anyone else to make decisions for those who have turned 18, if they are unable to make their own decisions, a Durable Power of Attorney and a Health Care Directive need to be in place. He says that these are simple forms that need to be completed by the recently turned adult and the forms are used by the parents or another adult who will be acting on the behalf of the injured. Foster says that these two forms will allow whomever the newly turned adult elects, which is typically the parents, to make financial and health care decisions for them, access any health records, deal with anyone at their school, and access their bank accounts if necessary. Without these documents, their parents will not have access. Those who are interested in learning more about this process and the benefits that it offers can contact Gresham Foster. The attorney states that without these signed and notarized documents, those who have recently turned 18 could face difficulties in obtaining certain needed medical procedures. At the very least, he states that parents or someone else that the adult deems worthy will have the ability to access the adult's bank accounts to make car payments, pay rent and even pay for needed medical care. The attorney says that anyone who is officially deemed as an adult who does not have these documents in place will find it difficult, or their family will find it difficult, to deal with certain legal situations. Foster says that this is important for those who are turning 18 particularly. Those married will have a spouse that is legally allowed to make certain financial and medical decisions. Those who are not married need these forms in order to allow someone else to make these decisions for them if and when the time comes that they are not able to make them for themselves. Foster says that the courts are filled with families every year that are fighting to make the simplest medical decisions for their children because those children failed to realize the importance of having a Durable Power of Attorney on hand. Parents of, and those who are turning 18 soon, can learn more about this process by contacting Gresham Foster. The attorney is located in Fort Walton Beach and offers legal representation for these and other needs. Foster states that those in need of these documents can contact him at Anchors Smith Grimsley, PLC, to schedule an appointment, or visit the firm online to learn more. For more information about ASG - Gresham Foster, contact the company here: ASG - Gresham Foster Gresham Foster (850) 863-4064 gfoster@asglegal.com 909 Mar Walt Drive, Suite 1014 Fort Walton Beach, Florida 32547 SOURCE: ASG - Gresham Foster View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/538950/Okaloosa-County-Lawyer-Recommends-Signing-a-Durable-Power-of-Attorney VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / Sunvest Minerals Corp. (TSX-V: SSS) (the "Company") announces that it has decided not to proceed further with the acquisition of the McKinnon Hemlo West property, located in the Province of Ontario. With respect to this decision, the Company has entered into a termination agreement with the underlying owners. Pursuant to the termination agreement, the Company will issue an aggregate total of 200,000 common shares to the underlying owners, in consideration for a full release of the Company from any matters relating to or arising out of its option agreement with respect to the property. The issuance of shares is subject to the Company receiving prior approval from the TSX Venture Exchange and will be subject to a four month hold from the date of issuance. "This move demonstrates the Company's mission to focus its efforts on the Golden Triangle in BC this summer. Drill target prioritization is well underway, and we look forward to an exciting work season set to commence in June." stated Mike England, CEO of Sunvest Minerals Corp. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD (signed) "Mike England" _____________________________ Mike England, CEO & director FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: Telephone: 1 604 683 3995 Toll Free: 1 888 945 4770 Email: info@sunvestminerals.com Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. SOURCE: Sunvest Minerals Corp. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/538955/Sunvest-Minerals-Not-to-Proceed-with-Hemlo-Property Regulatory News: Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. (LN:PSH) (LN:PSHD) (NA:PSH) today released its regular weekly Net Asset Value ("NAV") and performance returns on its website, https://www.pershingsquareholdings.com/company-reports/weekly-navs/. The NAV and returns were computed as of the close of business on Tuesday, 12 March 2019. PSH NAV per share as of close of business on 12 March 2019 was 22.16 USD 16.94 GBP and year-to-date performance was 28.1%. Weekly net asset value ("NAV") is calculated as of the close of business on each Tuesday and posted on the following business day. In the event that Tuesday is not a business day, the Company will calculate the close-of-business NAV as of the business day immediately preceding that Tuesday. The end-of-month NAV is calculated as of the close of business on the last day of the month and posted on the following business day. For weeks that include a month-end NAV report, PSH will provide only the month-end NAV and not report the Tuesday NAV. Monthly NAVs are published in accordance with the Decree on Conduct of Business Supervision of Financial Undertakings under the Wft (Besluit Gedragstoezicht financiele ondernemingen Wft). Performance is presented on a net-of-fees basis and reflects the deduction of, among other expenses: management fees, brokerage commissions, administrative fees and accrued performance fees, if any. The performance figure includes the reinvestment of all dividends, interest and capital gains. Depending on the timing of a specific investment, net performance for an individual investor may vary from the net performance as stated herein. Net performance is a geometrically linked time weighted calculation. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. All investments involve risk including the loss of principal. About Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. (LN:PSH) (LN:PSHD) (NA:PSH) is an investment holding company structured as a closed-ended fund that makes concentrated investments principally in North American companies. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005847/en/ Contacts: Media Contact Camarco Ed Gascoigne-Pees Hazel Stevenson +44 020 3757 4989, media-pershingsquareholdings@camarco.co.uk The company sees Spannabis as an opportunity to bring hemp technology and expertise to the European market Nanaimo, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 13, 2019) - Salvation Botanicals Ltd. ("Salvation" or the "Company"), a company that operates one of the first fully-licensed Analytics Laboratories in Canada and is accredited by Health Canada to test cannabis and derivative products for Licensed Producers, announced today that company executives will be attending the 16th Annual Largest Hemp Fair in the World, Spannabis 2019, in Barcelona, Spain, March 15 through March 17, 2019. Attending this internationally recognized convention provides Salvation with the opportunity to network with leaders in the industry and further their goal of expansion into the global cannabis market. According to The Motley Fool, global marijuana sales are expected to grow 38% to nearly $17 billion this year. Additionally, a report by Arcview Market Research and BDS Analytics stated the cannabis industry had $9.5 billion in worldwide revenue in 2017, and an estimated $12.2 billion last year. Canada is the only G7 country that has legalized cannabis for recreational and medical purposes. A recent report by Brightfield Group estimates that Canada's cannabis industry will be worth $5 billion by 2021. "Salvation is actively pursuing expansion into the European, South American and Australian markets. While the international trade in cannabinoids is not well established, we have sought opportunities to add value to cultivators in Europe using our technology," said Salvation Botanicals CEO Rob McIntyre. "Spannabis is an ideal opportunity to continue our discussions with European hemp and cannabis industry participants. Our expertise in Canadian genetics, post-harvest equipment, analytical testing, and high volume extraction and processing is in demand internationally, and the conference brings the global industry leaders together under one roof." Spannabis is known as an event of culture and innovation within the cannabis industry. As the world's largest hemp exposition and trade show, there is expected to be more than 300 exhibitors who are demonstrating the latest research and developments in the industry. Any Spannabis attendees interested in securing a one-on-one meeting with Salvation Botanicals at the conference, please email salvation@cmwmedia.com. To learn more about Salvation Botanicals, please visit their website. About Salvation Botanicals Ltd. Salvation Botanicals is a private company based on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, that is dedicated to the testing and production of high-quality standardized cannabinoid products for the international cannabis market. Salvation operates one of the first analytics laboratories in Canada, licensed by Health Canada to test cannabis and derivatives. Salvation has developed post-harvest technology for the economic extraction of cannabinoids from hemp, as well as extraction equipment designed for high volume economical processing. Salvation Botanicals holds an Analytical Testing License, and a Dealer's License under the Controlled Substances Act. In 2016 Health Canada granted Salvation a Hemp Processing License permitting production and sale and export of seed, grain and their derivatives. The Company is a late stage Standard Processor applicant. For more information about Salvation Botanicals Ltd, visit www.salvationbotanicals.ca. Cautionary Statements Regarding Forward-Looking Information Certain statements within this press release relating to the Company constitute "forward-looking statements", within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including without limitation, statements regarding future estimates, business plans and/or objectives, sales programs, forecasts and projections, assumptions, expectations, and/or beliefs of future performance, are "forward-looking statements." Such "forward-looking statements" involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual and future events to differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. These risks and uncertainties relate to, among other things, to the Company's historical experience with medical marijuana operations, regulatory changes, timeliness of government approvals for the granting of permits and licenses, changes in medical marijuana prices, actual operating performance of facilities, risks associated with completion of the acquisition, including the availability of sufficient financing to complete the acquisition and fund the business of the combined company, other risks relating to the roll-out and intended expansion of a clinical wellness business, business integration risks, competitive risks, and other risks relevant to the medical marijuana and clinical wellness industries in general and to the Company in particular. The Company assumes no responsibility to update or revise forward-looking information to reflect new events or circumstances unless required by law. There can be no assurance that Salvation Botanicals' medical marijuana license application will be approved by Health Canada. Public Relations Contact: Cassandra Dowell Account Manager, CMW Media P. 888-829- 0070 cassandra@cmwmedia.com www.cmwmedia.com To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43387 BUENOS AIRES/BRASILIA (Reuters) - Argentina and Brazil support the candidate nominated by Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido to represent the country at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), officials in both governments told Reuters on Tuesday. BUENOS AIRES/BRASILIA (Reuters) - Argentina and Brazil support the candidate nominated by Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido to represent the country at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), officials in both governments told Reuters on Tuesday. Guaido assumed the interim presidency in January after declaring President Nicolas Maduro's 2018 re-election a fraud. He has nominated economist Ricardo Hausmann to represent Venezuela at the IADB. A spokesman for Argentina's Economy Ministry confirmed it would back Hausmann in a vote expected by the end of the week. In Brasilia, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said Brazil supported Guaido's candidate. Most countries on the IADB board are expected to back Hausmann except those that have not recognized Guaido, namely Mexico, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Bolivia and China, according to a bank official who asked not to be named. Hausmann's election to the IADB board would be the first example of Venezuela's opposition government-in-waiting placing its own man at a major international institution. Hausmann is a former Venezuelan planning minister who served as the IADB's chief economist from 1994-2000. He teaches economic development at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The recognition of Hausmann adds to diplomatic pressure faced by Maduro to step down after months of political unrest. The United States said on Monday it will withdraw all remaining diplomatic personnel from Venezuela this week. Venezuela is also grappling with a days-long electricity blackout that has crippled the OPEC member's oil exports and left millions of citizens struggling to find food and water. (Reporting by Gabriel Burin in Buenos Aires and Anthony Boadle in Brasilia; Writing by Hugh Bronstein; Editing by Leslie Adler) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. A number of flights have been cancelled following the grounding of Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, New Delhi: The Civil Aviation Ministry will hold a meeting with airlines at 4 pm on Wednesday to prepare a contingency plan as a number of flights have been cancelled following the grounding of Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, a senior government official said. On Tuesday night, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced its decision to "immediately" ground the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft that are currently being used by airline companies in India. "We will ground all 737 Max 8 aircraft, which are currently in use by Indian airlines, by 4 pm today," a DGCA official told PTI on Wednesday morning. The decision came days after a 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by the Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa killing 157 people, including four Indians. SpiceJet has around 12 such aircraft in its fleet. Jet Airways has five, which have been already grounded. "The meeting regarding a contingency plan will happen with airlines at 4 pm Wednesday," a civil aviation ministry official said. A DGCA spokesperson, on Wednesday morning, said," The B737 Max operations will stop from/to all Indian airport's. Additionally, no B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600hrs Indian time or 1030 UTC." "The time line is to cater to situations where aircraft can be positioned at maintenance facilities and international flights can reach their destinations," the spokesperson said. In a statement Wednesday, SpiceJet said, "SpiceJet has suspended Boeing 737 Max operations following DGCA's decision to ground the aircraft." "Safety and security of our passengers, crew and operations are of utmost importance to us and we will be working with the regulator and the manufacturer to attain normalcy in our operations. "We are confident of accommodating the vast majority of our passengers and minimise inconvenience," the airline said. On Sunday, a 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa killing 157 people, including four Indians. The incident on Sunday was second such crash involving the 737 MAX 8 aircraft in less than five months. In October last year, an aircraft operated by Lion Air crashed killing over 180 people in Indonesia. The European Union and many other countries across the world have already banned the use of 737 Max 8 aircraft in their respective airspace. In a tweet on Tuesday night, Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu said,"Directed secretary to hold an emergency meeting with all airlines to prepare a contingency plan to avoid inconvenience to passengers." "While passenger safety is a zero tolerance issue, efforts are already on to minimise the impact on passenger movement as their convenience is important," he tweeted. (In this March 11 story, officially corrects in paragraph 3 that Perry was talking about leverage around the globe, not China, regarding U.S. nuclear power technology) By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Rapidly expanding exports of U.S. fossil fuels, including liquefied natural gas (LNG), serve as leverage in trade negotiations with China, Energy Secretary Rick Perry said on Monday (In this March 11 story, officially corrects in paragraph 3 that Perry was talking about leverage around the globe, not China, regarding U.S. nuclear power technology) By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Rapidly expanding exports of U.S. fossil fuels, including liquefied natural gas (LNG), serve as leverage in trade negotiations with China, Energy Secretary Rick Perry said on Monday. "It's part of the mix, it may not be the driver, but it's always hanging out there as part of the matrix," Perry said in an interview on CNBC. "America now has the ability to use that in a very positive way when it comes to trade negotiations." When asked if U.S. energy was a lever in the talks, Perry said, "Yeah, sure it is." In addition, Perry said Washington can also use advanced U.S. technology on renewable energy and small modular nuclear reactors as leverage around the globe. The United States is the world's fastest-growing exporter of LNG and China is the fastest-growing importer of the fuel. Natural gas emits far less unhealthy pollution and carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, when burned. While the U.S. LNG business is booming, shipments are controlled by private companies. Perry did not explain how leverage could be used, but the Trump administration could conceivably prolong tariffs or take other measures if China, or other major buyers, place tariffs on U.S. oil or LNG exports or energy technology. The governments of the world's two largest economies have been locked in a tariff battle for months as Washington presses Beijing to address long-standing concerns over Chinese practices and policies around technology transfers, market access and intellectual property rights. The countries are working to achieve a trade deal that matches the interests of both sides and the hopes of the world, including eliminating tit-for-tat tariffs, a senior Chinese official said over the weekend. The trade war contributed to a 20 percent fall in U.S. shipments of LNG to China last year from the previous year. The shipments also slipped on weak demand for heating amid mild winter weather. But Perry was confident about the power of U.S. energy abundance and China's hunger for U.S. LNG, even if all of the more than a dozen U.S. LNG projects being developed were completed. "As we look at India, as we look at China, these massive economies, we probably need more projects than we've got on the books today to be able to meet that demand," Perry said. Last month the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, approved Venture Global LNG Inc's Calcasieu Pass LNG export plant in Louisiana. The company said it had binding 20-year sale and purchase agreements with Royal Dutch Shell Plc and BP. (Reporting by Timothy Gardner in Washington; Editing by James Dalgleish) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and China may be in the final weeks of discussions to hammer out a deal to ease their tit-for-tat tariffs dispute, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said on Tuesday. Washington and Beijing have slapped import duties on each other's products that have cost the world's two largest economies billions of dollars, roiled markets and disrupted manufacturing and supply chains WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and China may be in the final weeks of discussions to hammer out a deal to ease their tit-for-tat tariffs dispute, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said on Tuesday. Washington and Beijing have slapped import duties on each other's products that have cost the world's two largest economies billions of dollars, roiled markets and disrupted manufacturing and supply chains. The U.S. government is pressing for an end to practices and policies it argues have given Chinese firms unfair advantages, including subsidizing of industry, limits on access for foreign companies and alleged theft of intellectual property. "Our hope is we are in the final weeks of having an agreement," Lighthizer, the top U.S. trade official, said during a U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearing on Tuesday, though he cautioned that major issues remained. "If those issues are not resolved in favor of the United States, we won't have a deal." Lawmakers pressed Lighthizer for details on whether the Trump administration intends to keep its tariffs in place to ensure China is complying with any agreement. "The focus of the negotiation from the Chinese side is the removing" of the U.S. tariffs, Lighthizer said. "If that is a concession, that is something that is under debate." The United States is addressing structural issues over intellectual property rights "with precision" in the talks and is nearing a deal to address currency manipulation, he added. Progress in negotiations last month drove the White House to indefinitely delay hiking tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports that were set to kick in on March 2. That led to mounting expectations a deal was in the offing, though Trump administration officials said on Friday another face-to-face meeting was not yet scheduled. Lighthizer and China's top trade negotiator, Liu He, spoke on Tuesday, China's state media reported, and the U.S. trade representative said during the Senate hearing that he had another call scheduled on Wednesday. "We are working more or less continuously," Lighthizer said. TARIFFS, TRADE TALKS AND THE WTO The U.S. trade representative said the United States is working towards a solution to eliminate tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada and Mexico. Washington had cited national security reasons for the tariffs. But they have complicated the Trump administration's effort to push through final ratification of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal agreed last year. That accord is a reworked version of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. The United States is working toward a deal that would eliminate the steel and aluminum levies and give Canada and Mexico access to the U.S. market while maintaining benefits of the tariff program, Lighthizer said, highlighting quotas as a way to do that. Reworking NAFTA was one of the key objectives of U.S. President Donald Trump, who had attacked the trilateral agreement as destructive for the U.S. economy and its workforce, particularly in the manufacturing sector. Trump has vowed to rebalance the global trading system in favor of the United States as part of his "America First" policy. As well as pushing for major changes from China and reworking NAFTA, Trump has kicked off negotiations on trade with the European Union, Japan and Britain. Lighthizer said the United States is at a "complete stalemate" with EU negotiators over agricultural access. "We are working on other areas with the realization that there is not going to be any (trade agreement) without agriculture," Lighthizer said. While U.S. officials have said agriculture must be included in any deal, the EU has said it will not support a comprehensive deal that includes the sector. Lighthizer also defended the Trump administration's actions to pressure other countries for reforms of the World Trade Organization, saying at the hearing that the United States is working "diligently" to negotiate new rules for the world body to keep the organization "relevant to a rapidly changing world." The Trump administration said earlier this month the United States would not allow the international body to dictate trade policy and defended the use of tariffs to pressure trade partners. U.S. officials have argued for years that WTO judges have routinely exceeded their mandates, imposing new obligations on members. (Reporting by David Lawder, Humeyra Pamuk and Alexandra Alper in Washington; Writing by Chris Prentice; Editing by Simon Webb and Paul Simao) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. The shares of SpiceJet opened on a weak note and had slumped 7.99 percent to touch an intra-day low of Rs 72.50. New Delhi: SpiceJet shares took a beating on Wednesday after aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) decided to ground Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes amid safety concerns. However, airline stocks showed mixed trends as crisis-hit Jet Airways closed in the red while no-frills airline IndiGo gained. The scrip of SpiceJet which has 12 MAX 8 aircraft in its fleet tumbled 8 percent in intra-day trading but managed to recoup losses to close little over 2 percent lower at Rs 77.15 on the BSE. The company's shares opened on a weak note and had slumped 7.99 percent to touch an intra-day low of Rs 72.50. The DGCA decision on Tuesday to ground MAX 8 planes comes after a crash of such an aircraft in Ethiopia killed 157 people on Sunday. Following the move, SpiceJet has grounded all its 12 MAX 8 aircraft resulting in flight cancellations. Jet Airways has 5 such planes but all of them are already grounded. Shares of Jet Airways fell 2.06 percent to end the day at Rs 240.60 on the BSE and had shed nearly 4 percent in intra-day trade. The shares fell 1.67 percent to close at Rs 240.80 on the NSE. "Consequent to the regulatory directive on the Boeing 737 MAX, SpiceJet has already initiated grounding of its MAX fleet," the airline said in a statement on Wednesday. IndiGo, the country's largest airline in terms of market, saw its shares jump 2.11 percent to Rs 1,301.45 on the BSE. It went up over 2 percent to end at Rs 1,296.25 on the NSE. IndiGo does not have Boeing planes in its fleet. SpiceJet has around 12 such aircraft in its fleet. Jet Airways has five, which have been grounded already. After the Directorate General of Civil Aviation's (DGCA) decision to ground all Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft in the country, budget carrier SpiceJet has said that it suspended the operations of the aircraft model following the directions of the aviation watchdog late on Tuesday night. Following the announcement of DGCA, SpiceJets shares plunged 5.5 percent in the first few minutes of trade while Jet Airways was trading 2.2 percent lower. "SpiceJet has suspended Boeing 737 MAX operations following DGCA's decision to ground the aircraft. Safety and security of our passengers, crew and operations are of utmost importance to us," said Tushar Srivastava, head of communications, SpiceJet. SpiceJet statement@flyspicejet has suspended Boeing 737 MAX operations following DGCA's decision to ground the aircraft. Safety and security of our passengers, crew and operations are of utmost importance to us. 1/1 tushar srivastava (@tushar_yes) March 12, 2019 All Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft would be grounded in India by 4 pm on Wednesday, said a senior official of DGCA, reported PTI. The decision came days after a 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by the Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa killing 157 people, including four Indians. On Tuesday night, the DGCA announced its decision to ground the aircraft that are currently being used by airline companies in India. "We will ground all Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft, which are currently in use by Indian airlines, by 4 pm today," the DGCA official told PTI on Wednesday morning. SpiceJet has around 12 such aircraft in its fleet. Jet Airways has five, which have been grounded already. "We are confident of accommodating the vast majority of our passengers and minimise inconvenience," the airline said. "We've already implemented all additional precautionary measures as directed by the DGCA on Monday," the airline added. The Ethiopian Airlines incident on Sunday was the second such crash involving a Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft in less than five months. In October last year, an aircraft operated by Lion Air crashed killing over 180 people in Indonesia. The European Union and many other countries across the world have already banned the use of the 737 MAX 8 aircraft in their respective airspace. With PTI inputs SpiceJet has around 12 such aircraft in its fleet. Jet Airways has five, which have been already grounded. New Delhi: Shares of SpiceJet slumped 8 percent in morning trade on BSE on Wednesday, after the country banned Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes following the Ethiopian Airlines crash. On Tuesday night, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced its decision to "immediately" ground the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft. The decision came days after a 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by the Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa killing 157 people, including four Indians. Following the announcement, shares of SpiceJet opened on a weak note at Rs 74, then fell further to touch an intra-day low of Rs 72.50, down 7.99 percent over its previous close of Rs 78.80. Shares of Jet Airways also witnessed similar trend. The stock opened at Rs 241.70, then lost further ground and fell to a low of Rs 236.70, down 3.64 percent over its last closing price of Rs 245.65 on BSE. SpiceJet has around 12 such aircraft in its fleet. Jet Airways has five, which have been already grounded. In a statement on Wednesday, SpiceJet said, "Consequent to the regulatory directive on the Boeing 737 MAX, SpiceJet has already initiated grounding of its MAX fleet." "In order to cause least inconvenience to its passengers and also bring these aircraft to its maintenance base we expect to complete this exercise on or before 4 pm today (Wednesday)". Last month, Vistara and Japan Airlines had announced a codeshare pact from 28 February, making it the fourth such tie-ups for the youngest full-service domestic carrier. Vistara, the joint venture between Tata Sons and Singapore Airlines, got the government approval to fly on international routes, said media reports. Civil Aviation secretary Pradeep Singh Kharola said that Vistara has been authorised to mount international flights now. Ministry of Civil Aviation Secretary Pradeep Singh Kharola: Vistara has been authorised that they can mount international flights now. pic.twitter.com/hmKzJG1vdk ANI (@ANI) March 13, 2019 Vistaras final hurdle was cleared by the aviation ministry just before the Lok Sabha election dates were announced, according to CNBC-TV18. The airline may launch its inaugural international flight to Colombo in a couple of months, the report said. Last month, Vistara and Japan Airlines had announced a codeshare pact from 28 February, making it the fourth such tie-ups for the youngest full-service domestic carrier, said a PTI report. Vistara already has similar tie-ups with British Airways, Singapore Airlines and its subsidiary and SilkAir. Vistara and the Japanese flag carrier already have an interline/through check-in partnership and the two airlines had signed an initial agreement in September 2017 to pursue commercial opportunities together, Vistara said. Early this month, Vistara Airlines had announced that it would start daily flights from Dibrugarh in Assam to Bagdogra in West Bengal from 3 April this year. Vistara announced the launch of 16 new daily flights, including two new destinations Raipur and Dibrugarh, as part of its network expansion plans. Vistara, which is 51 percent owned by the Tatas and the remaining by SIA, currently operates over 800 flights a week to 22 domestic destinations with a fleet of 22 Airbus A320s/A320 Neos. With inputs from agencies Suspected militants gunned down an Army jawan in Jammu and Kashmirs Pulwama district on Wednesday Suspected militants gunned down a former Special Police Officer in Jammu and Kashmirs Pulwama district on Wednesday, according to PTI. According to CNN-News18, the man killed in the attack has been identified as 25-year-old Aashiq Ahmed Nayek, a resident of Pingleena village in Pulwama district. Reports said that Ahmed was shot outside his home on Wednesday afternoon. He was rushed to the hospital, where he was was declared brought dead on arrival. Nayek had joined the Indian Armys Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry unit, but left in September last year as he could not cope with the training, officials told PTI. A joint team of the Indian Army and Jammu and Kashmir Special Operations Group have launched a cordon-and-search operation in the area to nab the attackers. News of Ahmed's death comes only two days after Mudasir Ahmed Khan, the mastermind of the 14 February Pulwama attack, which resulted in the deaths of over 40 CRPF personnel, was killed in Tral area of Jammu and Kashmir. This is not the first time security personnel from the state have been killed while visiting home. In July 2018, militants had gunned down a BSF constable in Jammu and Kashmirs Sumbal area, while in June last year, Rashtriya Rifles jawan Aurangzeb was abducted and killed by terrorists when he was returning to his hometown Poonch. In May last year, Lt Ummer Fayaz was shot dead in Shopian district, where he was attending a wedding ceremony. Twenty-five litigants in the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid land case appeared before a SC-appointed panel as it began an attempt to resolve the dispute through mediation Faizabad: Twenty-five litigants in the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid land case Wednesday appeared before a Supreme Court-appointed panel as it began an attempt to resolve the dispute through mediation, officials said. The litigants and their counsels altogether over 50 people met the three-member mediation panel on the Avadh University premises here. The Supreme Court has given the panel, led by former apex court judge FMI Kalifulla, eight weeks to explore the possibility of an amicable settlement over the disputed site in Ayodhya. The panel members, who also include spiritual guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and senior advocate Sriram Panchu arrived in Faizabad Tuesday and are expected to spend three days here. Uttar Pradesh Advocate General Raghvendra Singh and Additional Advocate General Madan Mohan Pandey also attended the meeting. Swami Avimukteshwaranand of the Ram Janmabhoomi Punruddhar Samiti, said the meeting began at 10 am with over 50 participants. The discussions were being held in a harmonious manner, he told PTI. Nirmohi Akhara's Mahant Dinendra Das, Triloki Nath Pandey who is representing Ram Lalla Virajman, Mahant Dharam Das appearing for Ram Abhiram Das and Mahant Suresh Das of the Digambar Akhara were among the participants. Swami Chakrapani and Kamlesh Tiwari appeared at the meeting for the Hindu Mahasabha. Litigants Iqbal Ansari, Mohammad Umar and Haji Mahboob attended the meeting, where Maulana Ashhad Rashidi represented Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind. Waseem Rizvi, who heads the UP Shia Waqf Board, and representatives from the Sunni Waqf Board also participated. The Faizabad administration had issued notices to the 25 litigants on behalf of the panel. Authorities said only the participants were being allowed to enter the area where the meeting was taking place. Strict security arrangements have been made on the university premises, Faizabad District Magistrate Anuj Kumar Jha said. The panel in a letter had directed the Faizabad administration to ensure foolproof security in and around the venue, and also necessary personal security for the litigants and their lawyers, the authorities said. The Supreme Court is hearing 14 appeals against the 2010 Allahabad High Court judgment, delivered in four civil suits, that the 2.77-acre site in Ayodhya be partitioned equally among the three parties - the Sunni Waqf Board, the Nirmohi Akhara and Ram Lalla. In 1992, a right-wing mob demolished the Babri Masjid, which many Hindus believe was built on the spot which marks the birthplace of Lord Rama. While appointing the mediation panel last week, a five-member Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi said "utmost confidentiality" should be maintained in the mediation proceedings to ensure their success. The apex court said the progress report on the mediation should be filed before it within four weeks and the proceedings should it be completed within eight weeks. Earlier, the apex court observed that the issue is not about 1,500 square feet of land, but about religious sentiments. The bench said it was conscious of the gravity and the impact of the issue on "public sentiment" and also on the "body politic of the country". "It is not only about property. It is about mind, heart and healing, if possible," the bench had said. The bench also said it was not appropriate to pre-judge that the mediation would fail and people would not agree with the decision. We are not concerned what Babur did in the past or who was the king and who invaded. We cannot undo what has happened but we can go into what exists in the present moment," the bench said when a lawyer contended that injustices were meted out to Hindus by invaders in the past. Apart from Arun Ferriera, the police earlier arrested eight other activists, including Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj, P Varavara Rao, Gautam Navlakha and Anand Teltumbde in connection with the Bhima Koregaon clashes Mumbai: Maharashtra Police on Wednesday told the Bombay High Court that activists arrested in connection with the Koregaon-Bhima violence and Maoist links were mobilising Dalits to achieve the motive of the CPI (Maoist) to "overthrow the government". Pune's assistant commissioner of police Shivaji Pawar said this in an affidavit filed before the court to oppose the bail plea filed by one of the accused, Arun Ferriera. Apart from Ferriera, the police earlier arrested eight other activists, including Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj, P Varavara Rao, Gautam Navlakha and Anand Teltumbde. Ferriera and Gonsalves later filed bail petitions which came up for hearing on Wednesday before Justice P N Deshmukh, who posted the matter for 5 April. The police are yet to submit the affidavit over Gonsalves's petition. In their affidavit, Pune Police claimed that Ferriera and the other accused were senior members of the banned terrorist organisation, Communist Party of India (Maoist). They were "actively supporting and propagating the banned outfit's unlawful activities to overthrow the government established by law", the police said. During investigation, it was revealed that the motive of the CPI (Maoist) was "seizure of political power," the affidavit said further. "With a view to attain this motive, the organisation is waging not the old type of conventional war but a people's war by mobilising public on a massive scale both military and politically," it said. "The CPI (Maoist) is undertaking special efforts to build the party among Dalit masses. They try to rally Dalit masses extensively by taking up struggles for their self-respect and against discrimination, oppression, degradation and physical attacks by the upper caste feudal forces in order to achieve their motive," the police said in the affidavit. The Elgar Parishad meeting held on 31 December, 2017, during which Ferreira and the other accused gave "inflammatory, provocative and rebellious" speeches, saw significant participation of Dalit organisations, they said. "These Dalit organisations were systematically brought together by some active members of CPI (Maoist), which had also funded this meeting," the affidavit said. The police claimed Ferreira and another accused Vernon Gonsalves were senior cadres of CPI (Maoist) and engaged in recruiting cadres for the banned outfit. "The intention of Ferreira and other accused persons along with the banned terrorist organisation CPI (Maoist) is to topple the democratically elected governments (Centre and state) by violent means, that is by creating mayhem, spreading terror and hatred," the affidavit said. "The objective is to assassinate important public functionaries and strike terror in the public," it said. Ferriera and other accused distributed pamphlets and booklets with an intention to incite, abet and promote enmity between different groups on the ground of religion, caste and community, it said. "They created disharmony and a feeling of enmity, hatred and ill-will between different religious groups, castes and communities and therefore, disturbed public tranquillity," the affidavit said. "Net result of the meeting and speeches was riots that erupted at Koregaon-Bhima on January 1, 2018," it said. It was found from certain documents and evidence collected from the accused persons' residences that they were part of a criminal conspiracy and their role was not merely peripheral, but they were found to be playing a vital role in the offences committed, the police said in the affidavit. The study of custodial deaths reveals that more than 65 per cent are attributed to suicide, about 25 per cent to mental shock and less than five per cent to police harassment The death of two men in police custody in Bihars Sitamarhi district on 7 March was just one of many cases of custodial deaths reported every year in India. The details about the police having had tortured the men Gufran Alam and Taslim Ansari, who were detained in a robbery and murder case by driving nails into their thighs, soles and wrists were chilling. As per the Criminal Procedure Code, an accused has to be given grounds of arrest and produced before a judge within 24 hours of being arrested. Additionally, another person needs to be informed of the accuseds arrest. The accused also has to be medically examined and recording of all minor and major injuries has to be made, apart from being examined every 48 hours of detention by a doctor. This is in stark contrast to the case involving the two men who died in police custody, which saw the absence of any answers from the police from the day of their arrest till their bodies were handed over after conducting the postmortem. The issue of custodial death assumed cross-border importance recently after a Pakistani prisoner Shakirullah died after being beaten up by other inmates at the Jaipur Central Jail, amid heightened India-Pakistan tensions, earlier this month. Torture, however, has been reported in not just police custody, but in judicial custody too. According to statistics presented by the home ministry before the Rajya Sabha on 14 March 2018, 144 deaths in police custody and 1,530 deaths in judicial custody were reported in 2017-18. That amounts to five custodial deaths per day, with Uttar Pradesh alone accounting for 365 of these cases. The combined judicial and police custody deaths stood at 1,761 and 1,821 in 2016-17 and 2015-16, respectively. The study of custodial deaths also revealed that more than 65 percent incidents were attributed to suicide, about 25 percent to mental shock and less than five per cent to police harassment, according to a report in Free Press Journal. Torture of inmates saw no age bar, with juveniles being subjected to cruel practices, and marginalised communities have been a target too, according to a report by the Economic and Political Weekly. The 2015-16 National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) Annual report, the article claimed, has confirmed that custodial violence remains rampant in India, representing "the worst form of excesses by public servants entrusted with the duty of law enforcement". What is appalling is the nature of action taken against public servants accused of committing excesses on inmates. According to PTI, the only case since 2000 where atrocities committed by the police on inmates were dealt with strictly was in 2005 when the infamous Urutti Kola, a practice where a heavy wooden or iron log is rolled over a persons body, was used while interrogating accused Udayakumar in connection with a theft case in Thiruvananthapuram. An autopsy found 22 injury marks on the mans body. The two constables who subjected him to torture were awarded death penalties by a special CBI court. In cases like the Sitamarhi deaths, the responsible officers were suspended. As were the eight cops accused of dereliction of duty in the case of the custodial death of a Dalit man on 28 December 2018 in Uttar Pradeshs Amroha. In a judgement in the case of a youth who was held by the Maharashtra Police in a theft case in 1993, tied to an electric pole and beaten with sticks and found dead a few hours later, the Supreme Court enhanced the cops sentences from three to seven years. The apex court asserted that such incidents erode peoples confidence in the criminal justice system, calling out the complete lawlessness demonstrated in the case. What adds to the problem is the reluctance of the authorities in proper documentation of cases related to torture in custody. With the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) not documenting torture-related complaints, data relating to custodial deaths is available only through media reports or NHRC reports. Is it then the lenient repercussions in the form of suspension or transfer and the government's lackadaisical approach to prisoners that results in a sense of impunity among the keepers of the law as they falter in fulfilling their responsibilities towards inmates? While the CrPC defines the rights of an arrested person, the definition of torture does not include discrimination, which may often result in a prisoner committing suicide. While in various cases of custodial torture, perpetrators have been dealt with in accordance with the degree of torture meted out by them, there is a need to define the grades of punishment for such acts as well as compensation to a tortured prisoner. The importance of medical examination remains paramount in these cases and full disclosure of health reports then becomes a mandatory practice. Besides, the UN Convention against Torture or Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT), which was signed by India in 1997, remains unratified. The Prevention of Torture Bill was sent to a select committee in 2008, which presented a draft in Rajya Sabha in 2010. But it didn't move further. Six years later, after the Supreme Case sought Indias compliance with UNCAT, the Law Commission of India recommended the ratifying of the international treaty and also proposed the Prevention of Torture Bill 2017. The treaty remains unratified in 2019, leaving the security of undertrials and inmates hanging in the balance. With inputs from PTI WHY DONT YOU READ THESE? We need to understand that political discussion among Dalit women and our participation in politics is essential for our emancipation. If we look at our country's politics, there has been no one from the scheduled castes who has become the Prime Minister of India till date, let alone a scheduled caste woman. Political engagement of Dalits is necessary, but more importantly, it has to include Dalit women leadership in political spaces. The panel on 'Dalit Women in Politics: Past, Present and Future' organised by The Blue Club, a collective for providing mentorship and support to women filmmakers, and All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch (AIDMAM) was put together with the above vision in mind. More than 60 Dalit women leaders from across India participated in the conference. Firstpost will be publishing some of the important speeches from this panel. This is the eighth of the series of speeches. *** Dr Ambedkar said, pull the chariot forward and if you cant, dont take it back. Leave it there. Others will take it forward. I will start with this phrase. Our life is full of struggles, full of feelings. I started the National Federation of Dalit women in 1994, many people here are witness to that. Since then, we have taken the issue of caste discrimination onto international platforms. Many Dalit women participated at the Beijing Conference of 1995 and gave remarkable inputs. They still are the linchpins in all our social justice movements. Usually, these opportunities are enjoyed by other women, they will call one Dalit woman who can talk in English as tokenistic representation. When I was at the conference, I said that women from the marginalised communities should talk about their issues. People with full stomach and accumulated wealth for generations need not talk about poverty. Those who are affected by it should talk about it. Similarly, violence against women. It affects all of us, all the women. The #MeToo movement was initiated by an oppressed Black woman from the United States. In India too, it was a Dalit woman who initiated it. Dalit womens voices were strong in the #MeToo movement. Its only the women from the margins who are capable of changing society. Dalit politics is the reflection of Dalit reality. The Dalit struggle is never separate from the political movements of this country. If Dr BR Ambedkar did not chair the Constituent Assembly, no women here would have got the right to vote. Its not only the Dalits who benefitted from Ambedkars Constitution but every woman and marginalised person in India owe it to him. If not for him, only the upper caste upper class elitist landowning capitalist men only would have got the right to vote. Ambedkar made sure dominant caste people with all the land, resource and privilege are not benefited asymmetrically, he made one vote for one citizen, One man, One vote. Therefore, Indian women never struggled for their right to vote like the other European and Scandinavian countries. Only because of Dr BR Ambedkar, we have a Constitution which clearly says, "There shall be no discrimination on the basis of class, caste, gender, sex and religion, with the core values of Equality, Social justice and Fraternity. In the 1950s, women formed 4.4 percent of the parliament. Today it is just 11 percent, which is very much lesser than in 1950s when you compare its disproportionality with our population growth. Women are not allowed into the political fray because they are supposed to have no mind of their own and they lack capability. Male dominated political parties of this country do not want women in politics. They want us to stay inside the kitchen, taking care of our children. Even now with all talks about politics and governance they allow us only in municipality and panchayat levels and do not want us anywhere near Delhi. That is why the womens reservation bill is being delayed. But one should look back and see that women participated in the freedom struggle, there were 15 women in our Constitution Committee the very same Constitution that gave us our political structure today. One of them was Dhakshayini from Kerala, a Dalit woman. There were millions of women who participated in freedom struggles, throwing out the British. Their ultimate goal was freedom, women who gave away all their ornaments to raise funds for freedom struggles. Women who vowed never to marry until the country is independent, our freedom was attained with such sacredness. But today women have been sidelined, they think we do not have the capacity and capability. That is the destiny of Dalit women, all women. When women confer to stereotypes, they are easily accepted. This is the same in politics as well. Political parties choose women who confer to their standards of gender and they are retained as a form of tokenism of gender equality in the parliament. They are not given the chance to speak in political spaces like the parliament. If at all given the chance, its all scripted by the status quo of the party and hence very much against the women of this country. They want us to go back to old times, but can we do that? We know only two genders back then, male and female. Now we are talking about third genders, non-binary. We need to understand that political discussion among Dalit women and our participation in politics is essential for our emancipation. We want to be in places of decision making. We are assigned multiple roles all the time. Child rearing, taking care of the husband, house-keeping, cooking. If we are part of an organisation, we need to work twice harder than the men working with us. Multiple roles that we play inhibit us from stepping into politics. We are also made to believe that women cannot survive in politics because its very corrupted. There is a lack of confidence from women and lack of public support which stops women from achieving in politics. Women from social movements should get into politics. In 2014, 17 women went to meet Sonia Gandhi in Delhi as a part of the National Federation of Dalit Women (NFDW). We asked her to give us a list of women politicians in her party and ensure that there is equal representation of women. Her response to us was, My men only dont give me the list. We lack financial support; we dont get positions of power. This brings us to the crucial question Who are the ones that can get into politics? Only if your dad or your granddad or your ancestors have been in politics, can you also venture in? Even women can easily get into politics through nepotism. Women politicians can enjoy power only because they inherited it through their family. If not, then its a wild path for women. Therefore, politics is a place where power is inherited. A woman with a strong ideological thought process cannot get into politics because there is targeted violence against her. There are threats of acid attacks. She is almost always called a prostitute and said that she slept her way to power, we have to face all the sexists comments. People in the womens movement and women in social movements can never say that they are not into politics. You do not need to belong to a political party to be in politics. As an individual, if you are working on womens issues, fighting justice and rights of women, working against caste atrocities, you are already a politician in the making. (Speech transcribed by Priyadharshini and Kanaga Varthan) Ruth Manorama is the 2006 recipient of The Right Livelihood Award. She contested in the 2014 General Elections from Bangalore (South) On 7 February, the Supreme Court ordered authorities to transfer the case from Bihar to a Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) court in Saket District Court complex in Delhi, which would conclude the trial within six months by holding preferably day-to-day hearing. New Delhi: A Delhi court on Wednesday fixed 18 March for the framing of charges in the Muzaffarpur shelter home sexual assault case. Additional Sessions Judge Saurabh Kulshreshtha passed the order after completion of the arguments of all the accused. Five people accused in the case had earlier denied allegations levelled against them by the CBI and said there was not enough evidence to prosecute them. Other accused in the case, too, had denied allegations against them previously. There are 21 people named in the charge sheet. On 7 February, the Supreme Court ordered authorities to transfer the case from Bihar to a Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) court in Saket District Court complex in Delhi, which would conclude the trial within six months by holding preferably day-to-day hearing. Several girls were allegedly raped and sexually abused at an NGO-run shelter home in Muzaffarpur, Bihar. The issue had come to light following a report by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). Boeing has been quiet about the crash, but on Monday the FAA advised that there would be software upgrades to the MCAS on board all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft by the end of April 2019. It has been only about three days since a Boeing 737 MAX 8, registered to Ethiopian Airlines, crashed 6 minutes after it took off. At least, 157 people, including 8 crew members were on board the plane, with no survivors reported. This has been the second hull loss for the newest line of narrow-body aircrafts, of which over 350 are currently in service at 59 airlines around the globe. An earlier crash of Lion Airs 737 MAX 8 a few months ago is still being investigated, but the storyline so far, sounds erringly similar. Although there is no data or proof to point in the direction that the same problem occurred on both the aircraft leading to the loss of two planes and 346 lives, and it would take a long time to establish the facts, public perception has already put two and two together, to figure that it is the plane which is the risk factor. India's DGCA decided late on Tuesday to ground the aircraft. Regulators of China and Indonesia ordered the the same action. Many countries, including United Kingdom, European countries such as Netherlands and France, Singapore and Australian regulators have banned the operation of this aircraft in their respective territories. Many airlines have voluntarily grounded their fleets as well. On the other hand, airlines in the USA continue to operate the aircraft, believing in its capability to deliver a safe flying experience to their passengers. As per the US FAA and other experts, there is no reason to ground the aircraft at the moment. In fact, RyanAir is pressing ahead with the induction of the aircraft in their fleet next month. So, why is everyone panicking and pledging to not fly the aircraft? Many airlines which have taken the decision to keep these aircraft in the air, have faced the ire of passengers who either want the ability to switch from their 737 MAX operated flights, or have termed it the Flying Coffin. The reason is simple it is panic. In the earlier Lion Air crash, it seems the pilot had trouble engaging with a new anti-stall system, called Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which was installed on the new MAX variant of the aircraft. Unfortunately, it was determined that the anti-stall system was not adequately informed to the airlines to be able to build it into their mandatory pilot trainings, and hence, there was no way to override this system. Boeing claims they filed this information in the pilot manuals. In the Ethiopian Airlines 302 crash, the pilots struggled to control the aircraft after take off, and requested to return to the airport. Available data indicates that the jets rate of climb was erratic and that the aircraft was on a very high airspeed of 440 miles per hour very close to the ground. Boeing has been quiet about the latest crash, but on Monday the FAA issued a statement that advised that there would be software upgrades to the MCAS on board all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft by the end of April 2019. One school of thought has called into question the pilot training, but that should not be the case here given the commander of the flight had logged 8,000 hours of flight time before this flight. Ethiopian Airlines has been one of the safest airlines to fly with globally as well, and that reflects their investment in training and safety. So what would it take to make the 737 MAX 8 a safer airplane? Wrong question I say. Who is at fault? We dont know just yet. It would require more time and effort to determine the cause of this fatal accident. Safety is the primary focus of everyone who participates in the aviation ecosystem. It would be wrong to assume that corporate greed overtakes the preference for safe flight. At the end of the day, the crash of an aircraft is the blemish on the record of the airline and the aircraft maker. And hopefully, they realise that they wont be able to sell many unsafe planes or tickets if there is a problem. So, it is in the best interest of everyone in the aviation ecosystem to fix whatever is the issue, when determined, in the shortest possible time frame, whatever the cost. Till then, everyone is looking at Boeing for more definitive responses, and there will be more questions than answers in the near term. Lets hope they find some soon. The author is a business travel and aviation journalist based in Mumbai, and the founder of the Indian frequent-traveller website Live From A Lounge. He tweets @LiveFromALounge Union Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Tuesday that India knows the identity of the deceased Pakistani pilot whose F-16 was downed by Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman's MiG-21. Union Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday said that India knows the identity of the deceased Pakistani pilot whose F-16 was downed by Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman's MiG-21. In doing so, she acknowledged on record for the first time, the fact that a Pakistani pilot had indeed died in the air strikes that followed on 27 February after the Indian Air Force's Balakot operation on 26 February. At an event held by India Today on national security issues, Sitharaman also said, "I don't want to rely on social media, but you may have seen on social media itself that a Pakistani air marshal, perhaps retired, claiming that the issue of two pilots. I have not double checked this, but I do want to ask, is it true? Two trained, top pilots of their countries. Both sons of air marshals. One returns to his country, but the other is unacknowledged by the country he died for. Truth is that the F-16 pilot, he was beaten up by villagers, who probably assumed that he was an Indian soldier. He was admitted to a hospital but I don't think he survived." This confirms a report by Firstpost in which Pakistan Air Force Wing Commander Shahaz-ud-Din, the F-16 pilot shot down in a dogfight over the Nowshera sector, was reported to have been lynched by a mob who mistook him for an Indian airman. In the video above, which Firstpost has accessed from India Today's YouTube channel, Sitharaman can be heard explaining the Indian intelligence's version of the events that took place in the course of the India-Pakistan air strikes. She, however, did not reveal the name of the Pakistani pilot, nor did she give out any other details on the issue. Pakistani military spokesperson Major General Asif Ghafoor had asserted, on the morning of 27 February, that two Indian jets had been shot down and two Indian pilots injured one of whom was in army custody, and the other in the hospital. Later in the evening, Major General Ghafoor stated that only one Indian pilot (Abhinandan Varthaman) was in the Pakistan Army's custody, without explaining his earlier comments. The Director General of the Inter-Services Public Relations said that Pakistan had "not used an F-16 in the entire operation" and that no Pakistani fighter jet had been hit. Sitharaman also criticised Pakistan for not acknowledging its own soldiers. "Pakistan never accepts when their soldiers are captured or killed," she was quoted by India Today as having said. Accusing Pakistan of living "in a state of denial," the defence minister said the country had not acknowledged the sacrifices of its soldiers even during the Kargil War of 1999. Pakistan had for many years denied that its troops were involved in the war leading to protests in the country's northern areas, from where the Northern Light Infantry is drawn. Eleven years after the War, Pakistan's army officially acknowledged its role, naming 453 soldiers and officers killed in the conflict. India and the United States on Tuesday called for Pakistan to address global concerns regarding terrorism, including that emanating from across the border. Washington: India and the United States on Tuesday called for Pakistan to address global concerns regarding terrorism, including that emanating from across the border. The concern was raised in an statement by the Indian Embassy in Washington after Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale and his American counterpart Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale held Foreign Office Consultations at the Foggy Bottom headquarters of the state department. "Both sides called on Pakistan to meaningfully address the concerns of the international community on terrorism, including cross-border terrorism," the statement said. Reaffirming their commitment to the Indo-US Strategic Partnership, the two diplomats reviewed progress made since the Ministerial 2+2 meeting last September and discussed ways to further expand cooperation. While cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region formed an important part of their deliberations, they also discussed counter-terrorism cooperation and a range of global and regional issues of mutual interest, including the current situation in Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela, the State Department said in a readout of the meeting. "They affirmed the vitality of the US-India strategic partnership and the importance of joint leadership to strengthen the rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region," the State Department said. The Indo-Pacific is a biogeographic region, comprising the Indian Ocean and the western and central Pacific Ocean, including the South China Sea. During the meeting, Gokhale and Hale affirmed their support for increased cooperation to include advancing initiatives undertaken as part of the 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue process. "Recognising that the US and India share complementary visions for the Indo-Pacific, they agreed to deepen cooperation toward their joint goals in the region, including in conjunction with other Indo-Pacific partners," the State Department said. According to the Indian Embassy, the two officials exchanged views on building convergence in the Indo-Pacific and agreed to work with each other and regional partners to promote inclusivity, stability, peace and prosperity in the region. Gursewak was previously involved in more than 50 cases of terrorist activities, murders of police officials and informers, robberies in banks and police station among others, said Ajit Kumar Singla, Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime). New Delhi: A member of the banned terrorist group and an associate of Jarnail Singh Bhinderwale, who was killed by the Indian Army in 'Operation Blue Star' in 1984 was nabbed by the Delhi Police, officials said on Wednesday. The accused Gursewak Singh (53), is a member of Khalistan Commando Force (KCF) and was planning to re-constitute his organization on directions of KCF chief Paramjeet Singh Panjwad, who was based in Pakistan, police said. Singh was also in touch with Jagtaar Singh Hawara and other terrorists lodged in various jails in India including Tihar jail, police said adding Gursewak was arrested by the crime branch from ISBT Delhi on March 12 where he had come to meet one of his contacts. Gursewak was previously involved in more than 50 cases of terrorist activities, murders of police officials and informers, robberies in banks and police station among others, said Ajit Kumar Singla, Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime). He remained in jail for more than 26 years in different cases and was in regular touch with some Pakistan based terrorists. Police said Singh was born in a farmer family residing in Raikot village in Punjab's Ludhiana district. His elder brother Swaran Singh was a member of terrorist group led by Bhinderwale in Punjab in 1980s. Gursewak also joined the group in 1982, the police official said. In 1984, when Binderwale was killed, most of his associates fled to Pakistan where they were trained and supported by ISI. During that time, Gursewak joined the newly formed KCF constituted by terrorist Manveer Singh Chehdu and actively participated in anti national activities, he said. Gursewak along with his associates remained involved in dozens of murders of suspected informers of Indian security agencies and bank robberies in Punjab, Delhi and Rajasthan. In May 1984, the accused along with his associates, Labh Singh, Gurinder Singh and Swaranjit Singh had also killed group editor of Hind Samachar newspaper Ramesh Chander in Jallandhar, Singla said. In 1986, Singh along with his associates attacked the residence of Julio Riberio, Ex-DGP Punjab in Jallandhar. In the same year, the accused along with his associates killed eight police personnel of Punjab Police while freeing the KCF Chief Jarnal Labh Singh and terrorists Gurinder Pal Singh Bhola and Swaranjit Singh from police custody in court complex in Jallandhar after a shootout, the officer said. The accused persons had also attacked on a police station in Punjab and robbed 16 rifles, six carbines, cartridges, two revolvers, police jeep and a Fiat car. The accused along with his associates had also killed all nine members of a family in Punjab, he said. Singh remained in jail and most of the time in High Risk Ward of Tihar Jail till 2004 for period of about 18 years. While at Tihar Jail, he planned to smuggle arms including AK-47 and explosives from Pakistan in order to carry out an attack in Delhi. However, this conspiracy of the accused persons was foiled by Crime Branch of Delhi Police, which arrested two terrorists from the area of Punjabi Bagh on 9 July, 1998, the officer said. After coming out of jail in 2010, he remained involved in several cases of robbery and was arrested thrice by Ludhiana Police in 2014, 2015 and 2016 respectively. During this period, he remained in contact with Paramjeet Singh Panjwad. He was again arrested by Delhi Police in 2017 under the Arms Act. He is facing trial in a case in Patiala House Court and was not attending the court following which the court had issued non-bailable warrants against him, police said. The EC has warned the public against fake news about non-resident Indians being allowed to vote online in the Lok Sabha election, beginning from April 11 Panaji: The Election Commission of India (ECI) has warned the public against fake news about non-resident Indians (NRI) being allowed to vote online in the Lok Sabha elections, beginning from April 11. "The general public are informed that the Election Commission of India has not made any provision for NRI of online voting during Lok Sabha Election 2019. As per existing direction, the overseas electors have to come to the polling station with the passport to cast their votes," said Goa Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Kunal. "It is observed that some people are spreading fake news through social media using the logo of Election Commission of India creating confusion among the general public," he said in a statement issued by the Department of Information and Publicity. Taking cognisance of such fake news and complaint received about the same, the Goa CEO has referred the matter to the police to investigate and take necessary action against such people who are spreading such fake news and causing a disturbance in the conduct of election process. The ECI has urged the people to visit the website or voter helpline application or call toll free number 1950 for any assistance and information, the statement said. Voting for the 17th Lok Sabha election will be held in seven phases beginning 11 April. Goa will go to polls on 23 April for two Lok Sabha seats and by-polls in three assembly seats. "The final phase of voting will take place on 19 May. The counting of votes will be done on 23 May. The BA and BCom exams of Mumbai University, scheduled on 22, 23, 24, 29 and 30 April, have been postponed. The examinations scheduled by Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University in Aurangabad on 18 and 23 April will now be held on some later dates. Mumbai: The Lok Sabha election schedule in Maharashtra has forced two universities to postpone some of their examinations overlapping with polling dates, officials said on Wednesday. Elections will be held in the state in four phases on 11, 18, 23 and 29 April, as per the Election Commission. In view of this, the BA and BCom exams of Mumbai University, scheduled on 22, 23, 24, 29 and 30 April, have been postponed, an official from the varsity's examination department said. "The new examination schedule will be uploaded on the university's portal soon," he said. A similar communication has been issued to students by Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University in Aurangabad district of the state. The examinations scheduled by the university on 18 and 23 April will now be held on some later dates, the details of which will be declared soon, an official from the institution said. Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba will begin his four-day visit to the UK from Tuesday with an aim to further consolidate bilateral maritime ties and explore new avenues of cooperation. New Delhi: Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba will begin his four-day visit to the UK from Tuesday with an aim to further consolidate bilateral maritime ties and explore new avenues of cooperation. During the visit, Admiral Lanba is scheduled to hold talks with the Chief of Defence Staff, UK, and Chief of the Naval Staff of the Royal Navy, the Indian Navy said. Admiral Lanba is also scheduled to visit the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, Royal Navy Submarine Rescue Facility at Glasgow, and interact with the organisers of the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo at Edinburgh. The visit of Admiral Lanba to the UK from 12 March to 15 March will consolidate existing maritime cooperation initiatives as well as explore new avenues for cooperation, the navy said. The Indian Navy has had traditional links with the Royal Navy of the UK. With the constitution of the Indo-UK Defence Consultative Group and the Military Sub Group in 1995, a two-tier structure of cooperation was established for progress on various areas of defence cooperation. In September 2004, the two countries inked a pact to embark upon a strategic partnership in which defence cooperation figured prominently. The Odisha government has plenty of funds to implement the Forest Rights Act to benefit tribals, so it can't blame a low budget for the poor enforcement of the law. Editor's Note: A network of 60 reporters set off across India to test the idea of development as it is experienced on the ground. Their brief: Use your mobile phone to record the impact of 120 key policy decisions on everyday life; what works, what doesn't and why; what can be done better and what should be done differently. Their findings straight and raw from the ground will be combined in this series, Elections on the Go, over a course of 100 days. Read more articles from the series here *** Nayagarh: Mahua seeds are among the more important forest produce that the tribals of Odisha's Nayagarh district often gather and sell. It involves an arduous and painstaking process picking the seeds shed by the mahua plant from the forest, segregating them back at home and then drying them before getting them ready for the market. This means a tribal household is able to make just 2 kilograms of the seed per day. Mahua seeds are among the many products classified for procurement by the Tribal Development Cooperative Corporation of Odisha Ltd (TDCCOL) at a Minimum Support Price (MSP) of Rs 20 per kilogram. But out of the blue last year, TDCCOL stopped procurement of mahua seeds, which is mainly collected in April-May. With private traders unwilling to match the MSP, the tribals had to throw their entire mahua seed stockpile away. "A number of households here are dependent on collecting mahua seeds," said Bula Padan, a villager. "When TDCCOL did not take it from us, all our labour went to waste." This is just one example of how the well-intentioned Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006 is failing due to lack of proper implementation on the ground. As 64-year-old Maagi Padan, a Kandh tribal from Dengajhari village in Nayagarh's Ranpur block, asked, "While do we get subsidised ration, school uniforms for children and other aid; what about the issue of MSP and marketing of our products and giving us a fair price? Nobody cares for tribals, except during elections, when politicians roam around in our areas seeking votes." Nayagarh falls under the Puri Lok Sabha constituency, which is a Biju Janata Dal stronghold. The party has won the seat since 1998. Its MP Pinaki Mishra is also a lawyer in the National Green Tribunal. There are examples abound of the indifference of state agencies in ensuring the MSP rights of these tribals, whose only source of income is the roots, shoots and seeds they are entitled to gather from their foragings in the forest. The FRA is great on paper, with all kinds of provisions to ensure tribals community rights and stable income. As part of this Act, the tribal ministry, in 2013, had declared MSP for 12 non-timber Minor Forest Produce (MFP), such as tamarind, sal leaves, mahua and wild honey, which Odisha accepted in 2014. Later, this was expanded to 23 and then to 40. In 2018-2019, the state increased the total MFP brought under MSP to 49 products, most of which are sold by tribals settled in different parts of Odisha. However, despite the Central law and MSP regime, a number of reasons have kept the tribals of Nayagarh district, who make up about 6 percent of the electorate of the Puri Lok Sabha constituency, from getting the full benefits of MSP assistance, at times forcing them into distress sale of their produce. This is primarily due to the lethargy of the state procurement agency in buying forest produce on time and lack of adequate storage capacity and other required infrastructure. Such is the situation even though the tribal ministry's scheme 'Mechanism for Marketing of MFP through MSP and Development of Value Chain for MFP does not lack funds. States are expected to procure the notified MFP only in the event of the market price falling below its notified MSP. Odisha has made little use of this provision. "The state government has failed at creating awareness among tribals and other communities, which are solely dependent solely on the forests. As the Gram Sabha is the owner of the forest produce as per laws, the state should facilitate the process of creating and establishing a friendly-market environment where the tribal and other forest dwellers get remunerative prices of their forest produces, said Chitta Ranjan Pani, an expert on tribal livelihood. "Even after 10 years of the FRA, tribals have yet to get their full rights to sell, dispose of and market their produce. Archaic states laws that contradict the FRA is one reason. Odisha needs a comprehensive law to ensure tribal rights." This correspondent visited Dengajhari village, a predominantly tribal village comprising the Kandh tribe. Even though the Naveen Patnaik government made tall claims of development, access to this village barely 90 kilometres from Bhubaneswar is a narrow kuccha road, with minor forest produce-bearing trees like reetha lining the roadside. Many of the Kandh tribals in this village, most of whom are forest dwellers, still live in kuccha homes. The village presents a sorry tale of blatant neglect by the elected representatives of the constituency, and its residents, a sorry tale of apathy by politicians and bureaucrats alike. Like many tribal families of other areas in Nayagarh district and other tribal-dominated districts in Odisha, the villagers said they seldom go to the local market; instead, traders come to their villages for sales and negotiations. "Local traders often come to the village," said Bhagya Laxmi, a community worker from the area. "They scrutinise the products and negotiate the price with the tribals. Most products are sold at prices lower than MSPs." The traders have their own rationale. "Unlike the government, we make a bond with the tribals," said a trader who would not give his name. "We ensure that their produce, like sal leaf plates and other items, is sold in urban markets like Cuttack and Bhubaneswar, where these products are in demand." Plates made of sal leaf, for instance, find big orders in towns. During the visit to Dengajhari village, we were told that many women are involved in making plates out of sal leaf, which take hours to complete. "Earlier we used to sell siali leaf plates, which are machine-stitched and were procured by the government. But we stopped it and shifted to sal leaves as the compensation was very low," said Mukta Padan. "We now make plates from sal leaves, and the local traders give us Rs 80 for each set of 100 plates." Bula Padan, 35, added: "We go into the forest, pluck it, bring it home, dry it and stitch it. The traders then buy these. We don't think we are paid what our toil deserves." TDCCOL buys forest produce at the MSP only when the tribals face distress conditions. Poor infrastructure in the tribal areas to store forest produce also makes it difficult for them to wait for a good price, which often means they are forced to sell their products at throwaway prices if TDCCOL does not come to their rescue. Villagers said a lot of the forest produce have short life spans, and if not sold or procured within a fixed time period, their quality could deteriorate and ultimately make the whole toil futile. However, a senior TDCCOL officer insisted that they "reach out to the tribals and help them through MSP whenever informed about distress sales". "Meanwhile, they are also linked with private traders and markets to sell MFP," the officer said. However, data from Parliament records show that in recent years, TDCCOL failed to utilise fully the Central support meant for MSP and other needs. Official statistics show that the Ministry of Tribal Affairs had sanctioned Rs 40 crore for Odisha for 2013-2014 but the state spent just Rs 0.73 crore that year. There was no sanction in 2014-2015, while in 2015-2016, the state received Rs 9.91 crore but utilised a mere Rs 0.36 crore of it. "Most tribals in Odisha are landless and primarily dependent on MFP and its marketing for their livelihood," said Y Giri Rao, a Bhubaneswar-based expert on forest rights. "There is an urgent need for better MSP coverage and providing facilities like cold storage and processing units for the tribals' forest produce." The Odisha government cannot cite lack of funds for implementing the law. In fact, indications are that the SC and ST department has asked the Chief Minister's Office to shut down the MSP scheme completely. It is believed that the non-profitability of TDCCOL, lack of coordination between TDCCOL and Central agencies and the rule that the state bear 25 percent of thelosses are cited as reasons for doing away with MSP. The relevant ministries are said to be working on an alternate model, though no details of this are known yet. The author is a Bhubaneshwar-based freelance writer and state editor of 101Reporters Notwithstanding tensions following the Pulwama attack, India and Pakistan will be holding the first meeting to discuss modalities for the Kartarpur Corridor at the Attari-Wagah border on 14 March. New Delhi: The 14 March Kartarpur talks are a formal, professional meeting and not a public event, sources said in response to reports of visa denials to Pakistani journalists for the talks between Indian and Pakistan. Pakistan has alleged that its journalists have been denied visas to cover Thursday's meeting. Mohammad Faisal, the spokesperson for the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted: More than 30 Indian journalists covered the kartarpur ground breaking ceremony in Pakistan last year. They also met PM & were hosted by FM for a dinner during their stay #PakKartarpurSpirit (1/2) Dr Mohammad Faisal (@DrMFaisal) March 13, 2019 Regrettable that #India has not given visas to #Pakistani journalists for the #kartarpur meeting tomorrow. Hope the #PakKartarpurSpirit & meeting tomorrow will bring a change for the better for people of both countries (2/2) Dr Mohammad Faisal (@DrMFaisal) March 13, 2019 Notwithstanding the heightened tensions following the Pulwama terror attack, India and Pakistan will be holding the first meeting to discuss and finalise modalities for the Kartarpur Corridor at the Attari-Wagah border on 14 March. India plans to build the Rs 190 crore passenger terminal building complex by September 2019. It will have 54 immigration counters that will facilitate the movement of 5000 pilgrims every day. Meanwhile, India has also acquired 50 acres of land for the corridor, sources added. The facility's minimum capacity is 5,000 people, while it will be able to handle a maximum of 15,000 pilgrims on special occasions, the sources said. Commenting on security at the Kartarpur Corridor, sources said that security is paramount. "Security is paramount. It is a national concern - it is not a bilateral but our sovereign concern as we are creating a facility on the international border. BSF will take care of security at the corridor. It will be under surveillance and will be completely secure," the sources mentioned. Sources also outlined that India expects Pakistan to not indulge in propaganda activities at the Kartarpur pilgrimage site. The Kartarpur Corridor is a long pending demand of Indian devotees which have been a matter of discussion since 1999 when Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited Lahore. It also figured in discussions in composite dialogue, where Pakistan was asked to make Kartarpur part of 1974 protocol as one of the holy shrines in 2005, sources said. "We exchanged modalities how to mobilise and develop infrastructure so that passage of pilgrims is smooth and in the spirit of religious fervour. We shared coordinates, there is a technical mismatch on many aspects. Tomorrow when we meet, we want to work in a constructive manner and will be approaching the talks with positive and constructive manner, hoping that Pakistan will reciprocate," the sources said while talking about the impending meeting. According to Kohli, the shelling in Poonch took place around 12.30 pm, when the process of scanning of the trucks was almost complete. In yet another provocation from Pakistan, Indian air defence radars had on Tuesday detected two Pakistani Air Force jets close to Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch sector, according to government sources. According to ANI, Indian radars detected the two fighter aircraft go supersonic, 10 km from the LoC. Indian air defence radars detected two Pakistani Air Force jets go supersonic 10KM from LoC (within their territory) in the Poonch sector, loud bangs heard last night in the area were due to sonic booms. All Indian air defences and radar systems are on high alert pic.twitter.com/PHmKAuPtvc ANI (@ANI) March 13, 2019 "Loud bangs heard last night in the area were due to sonic booms," sources said. The sources said all Indian air defences and radar systems have been put on high alert following the incident. On Wednesday, the cross-LoC trade was suspended after Pakistan Army violated the ceasefire along the LoC by resorting to unprovoked mortar shelling and small arms firing in Poonch. "Five mortar shells hit the trade facilitation centre at Chakan-da-Bagh, damaging a few sheds, including the one housing the X-ray scanner," custodian of LoC trade centre, Poonch, Fareed Kohli told PTI. According to Kohli, the shelling took place around 12.30 pm, when the process of scanning of the trucks was almost complete. "There were no casualties, but the shelling caused panic among those present at the centre," he said, adding that the main building remained safe. However, officials said the shelling started in Krishna Ghati sector around 10.30 am and later spread to Poonch sector. "The Indian Army retaliated strongly and effectively," they said, adding that the shelling was continuing when last reports were received. The cross-LoC trade between Poonch on this side and Rawalakot in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), which started in October 2008, takes place from Tuesday to Friday every week on barter system. The latest ceasefire violation comes after a two-day lull in the cross-border skirmishes which had witnessed a spurt after India's pre-emptive air strike on a Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terror camp in Pakistan's Balakot and three other locations on 26 February. The strike followed the 14 February Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed. The JeM had claimed responsibility for the attack. With inputs from PTI Reacting to the news reports, NCW chief Rekha Sharma has issued a notice to DGP, Tamil Nadu, T K Rajendran to take appropriate action against the accused.'The commission is seriously concerned about the safety and security of the women in the state of Tamil Nadu,' Sharma said in a letter. New Delhi: The National Commission for Women on Wednesday asked the Tamil Nadu Director General of Police to initiate action against the men accused in the alleged sexual harassment of a woman in Coimbatore district. A 19-year-old woman had alleged that unidentified men in Pollachi town of the district recently took her in a car and attempted to disrobe her and videographed it. As the woman refused to yield to their advances, the men started blackmailing her with the video. They later threw her out of the vehicle after snatching her gold chain. The police has so far arrested four men in the case. Reacting to the news reports, NCW chief Rekha Sharma has issued a notice to DGP, Tamil Nadu, T K Rajendran to take appropriate action against the accused."The commission is seriously concerned about the safety and security of the women in the state of Tamil Nadu," Sharma said in a letter. "Considering the gravity of the matter, it is requested that appropriate action be taken as per the relevant provisions of law against all the accused and a detailed action taken report in the matter be sent to the commission," she added. After the Pulwama attack, the Kashmir Valley is witnessing one of the biggest coordinated counter-insurgency operations focussed at eliminating 70-80 JeM militants operating in the Valley The Pulwama highway bombing which was the "deadliest attack" on security forces in Jammu and Kashmir since 1989 when insurgency first erupted in the Valley has led to security forces launching combat ops against Maulana Masood Azhars outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) like never before. Since 14 February, 2019, at least 14 among total 18 militants killed were from Jaish. It was the 'fidayeen' outfit's local recruit a sawmill apprentice and a school dropout Aadil Ahmad Dar who rammed his explosive-laden vehicle into the paramilitary convoy at Lethpora in the afternoon of 14 February killing 40 CRPF men. On heels of that rattling attack, the hunt for JeM militants has only grown manifold in the Valley. On Monday, the counter-insurgency grid of the region said that they killed the "main conspirator" of the deadly suicide attack. Identified as an electrician from Tral the home address of the former Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani Mudasir Khan was killed along with his two associates in a gunfight that broke out on Sunday. Khan was dubbed as the person who would recruit young boys into the JeM fold. Earlier, within 100 hours of the suicide attack, the forces killed the"mastermind" Kamran from Pakistan, in a Pulwama gunfight that lasted over 17 hours. "Forces have killed 18 militants in the past fortnight of which 14 belonged to Jaish, two to Lashkar-e-Taiba and two to Hizbul Mujahideen," IGP Kashmir SP Pani said. Post-Pulwama, Kashmir Valley is witnessing one of the biggest coordinated counter-insurgency operations in recent years. Its main targets are all the 70 to 80 JeM militants operating in the Valley. "I wont call it avenge," said Inspector-General, Operations, CRPF, Zulfikar Hussain, "But it is a continuous process." But, unlike Kashmiri militants who are ill-trained and die within an hour of a gunfight, the JeM militants have proved to be 'much lethal', 'battle-hardened' and 'formidable opponents' for security forces in the Valley. "They are ruthless for their sheer ability to mount fidayeen attack," one senior officer said. "Their modus operandi gives you a glimpse of their radicalised mindset. They dont believe in survival tactics unlike others and die while inflicting major damage on their adversaries," the officer added. These days, whenever a gunfight breaks out between forces and JeM militants in Kashmir, it stretches for long hours, if not days. "The biggest problem," says General Officer Commanding (GoC) of the Indian Armys Srinagar-based 15 Corps, Lt Gen KJS Dhillon, "is the forces take casualties in the initial stage of the encounter when trying to evacuate the civilians from the congested localities. We suffer casualties because we expose ourselves." Last year, at least 250 militants were killed, the majority of them being Kashmiris, in gunfights that did not last more than five hours. Unlike their Pakistani counterparts, the killed Kashmiri militants were locally trained and "least skilled in guerrilla warfare", security officials say. "The Pakistani militants go through months of arms training before entering the valley," officials added. A recent gunfight in Baba Gund village in Handwara area lasted for more than 70 hours after which two militants were killed. On 23 February, two militants from JeM were killed in Warpora area of Sopore. The encounter lasted for more than twenty hours. "The militants first fired from a house and when forces targeted that house, within minutes, they were firing from another. The militants survived so long because they changed locations with ease," Bashir Ahmed Bhat, a school teacher, and a resident of Baba Gund area, who was stranded in the village mosque during the encounter along with 16 others civilians, said. It perhaps shows their level of training to engage with the second largest standing army in the world," he added. Although the Indian armys wing of the counter-insurgency force has dealt with many fidayeen attacks along the Line of Control, the location within the valley proves to be a hitch for them, a GoC-level officer recently said. "Most of these operations take place in residential areas, where our priority is to safeguard the civilians," he said, adding, "During this process, when the first contact is established, the casualties happen." But given the rate at which JeM militants are being killed in combat operations at the moment makes it certain that they are the top targets for security forces in the Valley. These militants need to be tackled at the earliest, lest their ruthless militant methods further create havoc around, a senior police officer said. Nawab Khan visited Pakistan last year where he came in touch with an agent of that country's intelligence agency ISI. The ISI agent trained him and gave him tasks of collecting and sharing information related to Army movement, officials said. Jaipur: A 36-year-old man, who was detained near the International Border on suspicion of spying for Pakistan, has been arrested, officials said on Tuesday. Nawab Khan, a resident of Sam area near the India-Pakistan border in Rajasthan's Jaisalmer district, was detained on Sunday, an official said. Khan was involved in espionage activities and was working as a jeep driver, Additional Director General of Intelligence Umesh Mishra said. Khan used to share information to his handlers based in Pakistan through WhatsApp in code language in lieu of money, Mishra said. Khan visited Pakistan last year where he came in touch with an agent of that country's intelligence agency ISI. The ISI agent trained him and gave him tasks of collecting and sharing information related to Army movement, the officer said. He was arrested after being interrogated by a joint team of security agencies. The test which is thus applied by the court to decide on the contempt action is the test of erosion of public confidence. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court of India held advocate Mathews Nedumpara guilty of contempt for referring to senior advocate Fali S Nariman while arguing a case for abolition of the system of senior designation of advocates. The incident occurred last week when Nedumpara, while arguing the case in front of Justice Rohinton Nariman (son of Fali S Nariman) remarked that the practice of designation of senior advocates is fraught with nepotism. He has been given two weeks to reply on the question of sentence. It is for the second time in the past week that the judiciary is resorting to holding someone in contempt. Recently, the Meghalaya High Court issued a contempt notice to two journalists for an article published in The Shillong Times entitled "When Judges judge for themselves which spoke about an order passed by the high court regarding retirement benefit to judges. The court remarked that the article was in bad taste and it showed the high court in very poor light. Some might say the judiciary is too staunch and obstinate to entertain any view which goes against their authority, which gives an impression to the general public that the judiciary is too sensitive to criticism. However, there are a catena of judgments to disprove this view as the judiciary has provided guidelines to issue contempt notices in various instances. On a bare perusal of the rationale of the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971, one will find that the judiciary welcomes fair criticism because every citizen has the freedom of speech and expression in the manner he or she desires. However, the problem arises when a prejudiced, biased and unfair comment is made which inordinately lowers or scandalises the authority of the court. This results in diminishing the authority of the court and taking away the public confidence in the primary institution of justice. Therefore, to safeguard this institution, and the interests of the public, the Act came into existence. The test which is thus applied by the court to decide on the contempt action is the test of erosion of public confidence. This finds its grounding in the rationale of the Act itself. The first and foremost form of judicial restraint which translates to the defence against contempt of court is the defence of truth. This defence was introduced by the 2006 amendment to the Act. Plain, simple facts which present the true picture of any incident cannot therefore be brought under the definition of contempt. However, a dubious situation arises when the statements made are founded in the truth, but are stretched and exaggerated to such an extent that the resulting effect is a negative portrayal of the courts. In such a situation, the courts go to the basics of whether the said article lowers or scandalises the authority of the court. Another defence provided is the right to genuine criticism. This includes the right to criticise the judgments of the courts. This defence stems out of the freedom of speech and expression provided to us under Article 19(1) of the Constitution of India. This freedom provides us the right to criticise not just the judiciary, but any organ of the government, as a conducive healthy democratic environment is provided only when there is a free flow of thoughts. What still remains a contentious issue is the application of the test of erosion of public confidence. Many a time, a personal imputation on a judge is taken to be an imputation on the judiciary itself. This results in a fear created in the minds of people as the Act is then used wrongfully and in this way it defeats the very purpose of the Act: the people start losing confidence in the judiciary. However, in addition to this, it should be noted that the judiciary has exercised restraint on the arbitrary use of the contempt law. Whether it is exercised judiciously or not depends on the individual judge adjudicating the case on the given set of facts. But what remains settled is the importance of the confidence that needs to reposed by the people of the nation in the judiciary is important, and therefore, Contempt of Courts Act is a necessary law, which should be used. The author is an assistant professor of law at Maharashtra National Law University, Mumbai The Supreme Court pulled up the Assam government over inadequacies in the functioning of foreigners tribunals in the state and sought details on it by 27 March New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday pulled up the Assam government over inadequacies in the functioning of foreigners tribunals in the state and sought details on it by 27 March. The government told a bench, headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, that 50,000 migrants were declared foreigners by the tribunal in the past 10 years. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Assam government, said around 900 people were kept in six detention centres of the state. The bench, which also comprised Justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna, said the state government would have to specify through an affidavit whether the foreigners tribunals functioning in the state were adequate and how they were functioning. The top court, however, added that it was not insisting on the presence of Assam chief secretary in the court at present. The apex court was hearing a PIL filed by activist Harsh Mander through advocate Prashant Bhushan on the plight of foreigners in detention centres. The plea alleges that they were kept in detention indefinitely just because they were not Indians and were treated as "illegal aliens". During the previous hearing, the court had expressed concern over thousands of illegal migrants being kept in detention centres for years in Assam without being repatriated or deported to their countries of origin. It had raised several issues connected with the detention centre and said the detainees could not be held for an indefinite period. The apex court had also sought to know the condition of detention centres, saying the PIL alleged sub-human conditions there. Mehta had said there was a need for evolving a mechanism for repatriating them and it should be done expeditiously. The solicitor general was responding to the 28 January queries of the apex court which had asked the Centre and the state to provide details of functional detention centres in Assam and the foreigners detained in them during the last 10 years. He had told the apex court that 938 people were lodged in six detention centres in Assam and 823 of them have been declared foreigners by tribunals. The Centre had said over 27,000 foreigners have been pushed back at border points while attempting to enter India illegally. Talking on 'India's World: Modi Government's Foreign Policy', External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj stated that Pakistan needs to control the ISI and its army who are bent on destroying the bilateral relations time and again. New Delhi: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Wednesday said India cannot have dialogue with Pakistan unless the neighbouring country acted against terror outfits on its soil, asserting that "talks and terror cannot go together". Talking on 'India's World: Modi Government's Foreign Policy', she stated that Pakistan needs to control the ISI and its army who are bent on destroying the bilateral relations time and again. "We do not want talk on terror, we want action on it. Terror and talks cannot go together," she said. Swaraj also questioned Pakistan's retaliation to the Indian air strikes in Balakot when, she said, India had specifically targeted the terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). "Why did the Pakistani military attack us on behalf of JeM? You not only keep JeM on your soil, but fund them and when the victim country retaliates, you attack it on the terror outfit's behalf. "If (Pakistan prime minister) Imran Khan is so generous and a statesman, he should give us (JeM chief) Masood Azhar," she said. The external affairs minister said India can have a good relationship with Pakistan, provided the neighbouring country "takes action against terror groups on its soil". On her invitation to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meeting, she said India avenged the humilation meted out to it 50 years ago by becoming the 'guest of honour' at the OIC meet this year. "In 1969, India was humiliated when it was not allowed to participate in the meeting even after reaching the venue after Pakistan protested against India's then foreign minister's participation. But now, 50 years later, it was India that was on the seat of the guest of honour, while Pakistan's seat was empty," she said. Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi had expressed reservations about the invitation to Swaraj for the OIC meeting, and later decided to boycott the meeting of the 57-member Muslim grouping held earlier this month. Talking about the foreign policy of the current government, Swaraj said it was based upon the two principles of "national interest supreme" and "world is our family". "People often ask us what we get by our frequent travel to countries. I want to tell them we do not travel to have fun, we travel to build our relationship with other countries and it is because of our ties with these countries that we were able to rescue 7,000 people from Yemen. The strength of our bilateral ties was also reflected in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) elections," she said. "I have seen the strength of this relationship time and again," the senior BJP leader said, adding that at the ministerial level, Indian leaders have visited 189 out of 193 countries. Swaraj added that the country's global profile has improved in the last five years. According to reports, the accused had kidnapped the girl and then raped her in Jahangirabad area of Bulandshahr. The incident took place while the girl accompanied by her brother was returning from a wedding ceremony. Bulandshahr: Uttar Pradesh police has detained two persons for allegedly abducting and raping a minor girl in Uttar Pradesh's Bulandshahr on Sunday. The two accused are being questioned after the police detained them on Tuesday morning. According to reports, the accused had kidnapped the girl and then raped her in Jahangirabad area of Bulandshahr. The incident took place while the girl accompanied by her brother was returning from a wedding ceremony. The accused robbed her brother, after which she was abducted. As per the police, the victims medical report has confirmed that she was raped. A case under relevant sections has been registered and further investigation is underway. India-Pakistan tensions: The global forces see the Kashmir issue as a more contentious one. The human rights issue of both sides needs to be carefully weighed. Hindutva forces treat terrorist violation of jawan human rights and state violation of civilian human rights one and the same. But UN covenants and international understanding of state violation of human rights is treated at different level. An oped published in The New York Times warned about possible nuclear war between India and Pakistan had a picture of India and Pakistan warheads clashing. The Indian bomb has a three-colour flag with an Ashok Chakra. The Pakistan flag has a green flag with crescent moon and a star. While the Indian flag does not reflect any religious symbolism, the Pakistan flag shows its theocratic character. Since the founding fathers of India were very careful to not to adopt a flag with Hindu symbolism, the Pakistan founding fathers adopted Islamic symbolism, as it was made a theocratic state. But, imagine if the Indian flag was in saffron colour with a Swastik, and the two bombs were to represent Hinduism and Islam, but not two states. If that were so, any war between these two nations would have always been a religious war. Our founding fathers, with a great vision, avoided that disaster. India and Pakistan so far have fought three wars 1965, 1971 and 1999. In all these wars, Pakistan wished that instead of India and Pakistan, the war would be between Islam versus Hindu. But the Indian State did not allow that. It struck to its secular three colour multi-culturalism and Ashok Chakra of peace. From the Indian side, the wars were fought with a belief in peace and the rulers were conscious and disallowed the religious jingoism to creep into the decision-making process and into the fighting forces. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), sitting in the Opposition, were craving for their turn while, treating the Congress, which was in power at the time of two wars (1965 and 1971), as the 'Muslim appeasement party of weak nerve'. Now, Narendra Modi and Mohan Bhagwat are in control of the system and they believe in theory of 'teach a lesson to Muslims'. They have an ideology that is both understood and misunderstood by Muslims. Earlier, Pakistan fought every war with a religious fervor. India did not allow any war to turn into a religious one. The Kargil war would have turned into, but the coalitional character of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government did not allow that. If the present tension (after 14 February Pulwama attack) was escalated into a full war, the nuclear capabilities of both, India and Pakistan, would have been one of the major threats. On both sides, the ruling elite being of religious jingoism is another threat to both the countries. If the war is perceived to be a religious war, it would be worse than clash of the two neighbouring nations in the East. Pakistan harbours terrorism. It uses Kashmir as a convenient ploy of creating a crisis to dislocate India's economic advancement. The BJP-RSS, on the other hand, have got enough anti-Muslim ideology with lynch politics, cow nationalism and food cultural jingoism. This approach of the ruling forces alienated Kashmiris even more. Hindutva cultural training of its cadre is meant to be anti-Muslim. When one dislikes their dress code, food habits, prayer timings, governing such people with empathy becomes impossible. This is going to be a serious problem in handling Kashmir problem by any Hindutva leader. When the rulers do not like the people based on their religious moorings there is no give and take attitude left between them. The global forces, as The New York Times article says, now see Kashmir issue as a more contentious one. The human rights issue of both sides needs to be carefully weighed. Hindutva forces treat terrorist violation of jawan human rights and state violation of civilian human rights one and the same. But UN covenants and international understanding of state violation of human rights is treated at different level. The NYT editorial pleads for the intervention of America into the Kashmir issue more seriously. This is not acceptable to us, anyway. Violation of human rights in the Valley has drawn more global attention now than ever before because of the social media. The Organisation of Islamic Co-operation in spite of External Affairs Minister Sushma Swarajs appeal passed a resolution treating Kashmir as 'India-Occupied-Kashmir'. It was not an organisation of Islamic-Hindu Co-operation. Even to go by the Hindutva advice. If BJP and the RSS want to organise an Organisation of Hindu Cooperation against the OIC, the only Hindu Nepal declared itself a secular nation after it became communist democratic state. It has better relations with China than India which is ruled by a Hindutva party. The BJP-RSS did not expect this kind of change in a Hindu theocratic state. Though terrorism is serious problem since the 9/11 attacks, the global forces have been attacking India repeatedly. India handled terrorism with lot of caution all these years. After the 9/11 attack, the American response to Iraq created more problems for the US than solving them. Hence, George W Bush does not have very respectable status in the US, let alone the world. Modi and RSS have a track record of being anti-Muslim and not just anti-Pakistan. The NYT article refers to Modis aggressive Hindu nationalist campaign to win the 2019 election, a perception that has already been noticed by the world. Even if the BJP wins this election, the Hindutva approach will gradually distance Kashmir from India. The OIC will also see the Kashmir issue as part of the Islamic world issue. What does it mean to the economic development of India? What kind of impact would that have on the educational and health improvement of India? The India masses do not fully know these implications. If a war breaks between India and Pakistan, it certainly may not end like earlier wars. Both countries will risk the life of those are born and living and also those who are yet to be born. The author is a political theorist and social activist While Arvind Kejriwal's AAP has turned getting full statehood for Delhi into its poll plank, both the Congress and BJP have dropped the subject from their electoral agenda. Chief Minister of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday formally announced that the Aam Admi Party (AAP) will raise the subject of statehood for Delhi as the prime issue in campaigning for the upcoming Lok Sabha election. The move is seen as an attempt by AAP to evoke regional sentiments in Delhi at a time when it is pitted against two national parties in the polls. A day before Kejriwal announced his party's agenda, Congress president Rahul Gandhi had turned the Lok Sabha election in Delhi into a triangular contest among the Congress, BJP and AAP by declaring that his party would have no alliance with AAP in the National Capital. This defused all speculation of the two parties entering a seat-sharing agreement and taking on the BJP in a two-way contest in Delhi. The decision to contest the election on the plank of a purely local subject like full statehood is being seen as AAP's attempt to play the regional card and try to get better positioned than the national parties. At the press conference on Tuesday, Kejriwal said: "Four years ago, Delhi voted for us. In the past four years, we did our best to deliver good work in fields that were within our jurisdiction. In the works related to schools, hospitals, mohalla clinics, water supply, electricity, roads, sewerage and drains, we delivered, despite all hindrances in our path. We even had to hold a sit-in protest for 10 days at the Lieutenant-Governor's house to make these projects happen. But there is so much we cannot do until and unless Delhi is given the status of a state." Saying that women in Delhi suffer because of its half statehood, the chief minister said, "Women in Delhi feel unsafe because the trade of illegal drugs and alcohol has become rampant. Cases of theft and robbery are also on the rise. The police do not listen to them. Whom can they go to? Their chief minister has no power over the police. The Delhi Police falls under the jurisdiction of the home minister and prime minister, but they don't have the time to meet people." He also promised 85 percent reservation for residents of Delhi in Delhi government jobs and colleges if the National Capital was granted full statehood. Kejriwal said his government would also establish new colleges for local students, regularise the temporary employees in various departments of the Delhi government and stop sealing buildings violating construction norms if it became a full state. Significantly, full statehood for Delhi is an issue that both the Congress and BJP have dropped from their electoral agenda. Recently, Delhi Congress chief Sheila Dikshit had said, "We can't say what kind of funds Delhi will be left with if it becomes another state. At present, we get funding from the Centre easily because it is a Union Territory and also the National Capital. But the same won't be guaranteed if it becomes a full-fledged state." The BJP's manifesto for the 2014 Lok Sabha election included granting Delhi full statehood, but it did not feature in the saffron party's 2015 Delhi Assembly manifesto. It is unclear how much AAP's central poll plank will resonate with the residents of Delhi, but it certainly sets the political outfit apart from the other two parties in the triangular contest. AAP had won a historic mandate in the 2015 Assembly election in Delhi with 54.3 percent of the vote share. The BJP had garnered 32.2 percent of the votes and the Congress, merely 9.7 percent. Before AAP emerged as a key player in Delhi politics in 2013, the contest in elections in the National Capital was mostly limited to the BJP and Congress. In the 2008 Assembly polls, the Congress formed government after winning the election with 40.3 percent of the votes and the BJP, 36.34 percent. Looking at these figures, it is evident that most of AAP's vote bank came from the Congress pool in 2015. Even though the Congress had gradually revived itself in national politics then, the trend of its vote share began to reverse rapidly. This reverse trend was clearly visible in the 2017 election for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, when AAP won a disastrous 26 percent of the votes and the Congress an even lower 21 percent; the BJP had swept the polls with 36 percent of the vote share. It is no wonder that AAP made repeated attempts to secure a pre-poll alliance with the Congress. After the Congress spurned the AAP, the Kejriwal-led party is left with no option but to re-position itself as a regional party in Delhi, one that aims to amplify the concerns of the region on a national platform like the Lok Sabha and thus appear closer to Delhi-ites than the national parties in the run. Moreover, the Congress may have decided to not ally with AAP in the hope that its voters return. We now need to wait to see whether the party reaps the benefits of this hope, or whether it results in another disaster like the municipal corporation polls because of division of non-BJP votes. The Asom Gana Parishad had in January, 2019 withdrew its support to the BJP government in Assam in protest against the Centre's decision to go ahead with the bill, which seeks to grant nationality to non-Muslims from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan after six years of residence in India Guwahati: The Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) will fight the Lok Sabha election in Assam in alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), two months after severing ties with the saffron party over the contentious citizenship bill. The alliance was finalised in a meeting among BJP general secretary Ram Madhav, AGP president Atul Bora and others that ended post midnight. "After discussion, BJP and AGP have decided to work together in the coming Parliament election in Assam to defeat Congress," Madhav, the BJP's incharge of Northeast, tweeted early on Wednesday. "Announced it at Guwahati in presence of Himanta Biswa Sarma of BJP and Atul Bora and Keshav Mahanta of AGP," he said, adding that the Bodoland Peoples Front (BPF) will be the third partner in the alliance," he added. Talking to reporters after sealing the alliance, Bora said the former allies had joined hands again to defeat the Congress. The AGP chief, however, did not respond to any query regarding the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill and the party's stand on it during the election. The AGP had in January, 2019 withdrew its support to the BJP government in Assam in protest against the Centre's decision to go ahead with the bill, which seeks to grant nationality to non-Muslims from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan after six years of residence in India. Since then, the AGP has openly criticised the BJP leadership, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for bringing in a "communal bill" to settle the Bangladeshi Hindus in Assam. According to a senior AGP MLA, the party was divided over the issue of tying up with the BJP again, fearing backlash from ground-level workers. On Monday night, the AGP MLAs held a discussion over realigning with the saffron party, but the meeting remained inconclusive. They went into a huddle again on Tuesday night and decided to go ahead with the alliance. In 2014, the BJP had won seven of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in the state, while the Congress and the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) have three MPs each and another is an Independent. The BPF and the AGP have no representation in the Lower House. The AGP, BJP and the BPF had contested the 2016 Assembly election together and defeated the Congress, which had been in power in the state for three consecutive terms since 2001. The AGP and BJP had fought separately in the panchayat polls in December, 2018. Polling for the general election will be held in three phases in the state 11, 18 and 23 April. After a few blundering speeches by the likes of Digvijaya Singh and Navjot Singh Sidhu, the Grand Old Party has now switched its campaign focus back to economic and social issues such as jobs When Imran Khan accused India of upsetting the peace between the two nations just to score political brownie points in an election year, the claim was both outrageous and hypocritical. But the electoral narrative post 26 February when India targeted a Jaish-e-Mohammed camp well within Pakistani territory has transformed nonetheless. Here is how... Various media reports have cited poll surveys to indicate that the Indian Air Force strikes on the Balakot Jaish-e-Mohammed camp may have pushed NDA's approval ratings back on track, after the recent slump due to issues like low farm incomes, joblessness and the Rafale controversy. And so the BJP leaves no stone unturned to capitalise on the developments, sometimes even going overboard, with the leadership citing random figures of deaths when the official stand is to keep mum on the exact extent of the damage caused. The Congress, on the other hand, is finally on the path of course correction after initially repeating the same mistakes it made in the aftermath of surgical strikes in 2016: That of raising questions about how successful it was. After a few blundering speeches by the likes of Digvijaya Singh and Navjot Singh Sidhu, the Grand Old Party has now switched its campaign focus back to economic and social issues such as jobs on Tuesday as pollsters said Prime Minister Narendra Modi's re-election bid has been boosted by hostilities with Pakistan. "How will the youth get jobs? How will women feel safer, and move forward? What will be done for farmers?, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said in her first speech since joining the party as a general secretary earlier this year. "These are the election issues." In her short speech, Priyanka also warned the voters against being swayed by irrelevant issues. "Vote is a weapon, use it cautiously. Take the right decision, ask the right questions," she said as the Congress Working Committee earlier resolved to "not let Modi deflect attention of the people from the basic issues of joblessness, agrarian distress, low economic growth and poor security of women". The unstated reference was to the post Pulwama attack events. Her brother, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi, called unemployment the most important issue in the general election, which starts on 11 April. Thousands of party supporters clapped and cheered as the siblings spoke at a rally in Gandhinagar, the capital of Modis home state, Gujarat. At the CWC meet, held in Modi's home state Gujarat, the party resolved to stop Modi from "cynically exploiting the issue of national security, on which we are all united, to divert attention from his colossal failures, bogus claims and persistent falsehoods." In her speech, Sonia Gandhi accused Modi of playing the "victimhood card" saying it were the people instead who were victims of his "wrong policies". She wanted Congress to come out with a vision for the country going forward as also highlight the achievements of the UPA government. She also said the issue of corruption in the Rafale deal should be highlighted in a big way. Former prime minister Manmohan Singh talked about the agrarian crisis, hampered industrial growth and unemployment under the present regime at the Centre. Elsewhere too, when Rahul was addressing the students at Stella Maris College in Chennai on Wednesday, his speech was decidedly rooted in the core election issues that the party seeks to use against the BJP, rather than the issues of national security. From women's security to economic offenders; from the alleged Rafale scam to the state of economy, Rahul touched upon everything on the Congress party's agenda, but he steered clear of directly questioning or criticising the post-Pulwama military action by India. Pollsters have said Modi's ruling BJP has an early advantage after Indias armed forces clashed with those of arch-rival Pakistan last month. Before then, the prime minister had been under pressure over unemployment and rising problems for farmers. Indias unemployment rate shot up to 7.2 percent in February, the highest since September 2016, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. The BJP lost power in three states late last year. There have been at least five nationwide agitations in the last year, at the root of which were the demand to get reservation in government jobs. However, the jobs numbers took a back seat after the 14 February suicide car bomb that killed 40 Indian security personnel in the disputed region of Kashmir and that was claimed by a Pakistan-based Islamist militant group. In response, India said its warplanes struck a militant camp inside Pakistan, which responded the next day with an aerial attack of its own. Pollsters had said questioning Modi on national security rather than focusing on everyday issues could backfire on the prime ministers opponents. BJP leaders have said the governments economic record and the tough stance on Pakistan will help it retain power. The JD(S) will fight from Uttara Kannada, Chikkamagaluru, Shivamogga, Tumkur, Hassan, Mandya, Bengaluru North and Vijayapura. Karnataka Congress president Dinesh Gundu Rao about the seat-sharing deal being 'confirmed'. Bengaluru: The Congress will contest 20 seats and JD(S) eight in the Lok Sabha polls in Karnataka under a deal finalised by the two ruling coalition partners on Wednesday after weeks of haggling. The deal was hammered out at a meeting between Congress president Rahul Gandhi and JD(S) secretary general Danish Ali at Kochi in Kerala on Wednesday evening, the JDS said. The Lok Sabha constituencies that JD(S) will contest are Uttara Kannada, Chikkamagaluru, Shivamogga, Tumkur, Hassan, Mandya, Bengaluru North and Vijayapura. JD(S) tweeted about the constituencies from where its candidates will be contesting from, on its official Twitter handle. Karnataka Pradesh Congress president Dinesh Gundu Rao tweeted: @INCIndia @JanataDal_S seat sharing for Karnataka #LokSabhaPolls2019 is confirmed. 20 for Congress and 8 for JDS. Dinesh Gundu Rao / (@dineshgrao) March 13, 2019 JD(S) had won Hassan and Mandya Lok Sabha seats in the 2014 general election. The Congress had bagged nine and BJP 17. However in the bypolls, the BJP had yielded the Bellary seat to Congress. During a recent meeting with Rahul Gandhi at New Delhi, JD(S) supremo HD Deve Gowda had scaled down his party's demand and asked the national party to allot at least 10 out of the 28 Lok Sabha seats. The JD(S) had earlier demanded that it be given 12 seats to contest, banking on two-third, one-third formula adopted in ministry formation and allocation of posts of heads of state-run boards and corporations. According to party sources, JD(S) bagged Tumkur seat after a hard bargain as the grand old party had decided not to cede the constituencies where the party has a sitting MP to the regional partner. Congress leader SP Muddahanumegowda is the current MP from Tumkur, and a ticket aspirant. Mysore-Kodagu was another constituency that JD(S) had demanded from the old Mysuru region, but could not bag it due to opposition from Congress Legislature Party leader Siddaramaiah as the seat is in his home turf, the sources said. Sharing of seats from old Mysuru region was an acid test for both the parties as the JD(S) considers it as its bastion, and the Congress has its sitting members from most of the seats there. The Congress and JD(S), which fought bitterly against each other during 2018 Assembly polls, joined hands to form the government as the election threw up a hung verdict. Among the eight seats that JD(S) has got, in Hassan and Mandya the party has its sitting MPs, Tumkur is with Congress, rest five constituencies are represented by the BJP. While the KPCC chief Wednesday said the party will announce its first list of candidates on March 16, JD(S) is too likely to announce its list in a couple of days. The JD(S) has already announced Gowda's grandsons Nikhil Kumaraswamy and Prajwal Revanna as candidates from the party bastions of Mandya and Hassan respectively. While Nikhil is son of Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy, Prajwal is son of Gowda's eleder son and PWD Minister HD Revanna. Gowda has also announced former MLA Madhu Bangarappa as JD(S) candidate from Shivamogga. Madhu is the son of former Chief Minister S Bangarappa and is likely to be pitted against another former chief minister BS Yeddyurappa's son and sitting BJP MP B Y Raghavendra. Congress is not looked upon as a party neither by its own leaders nor its prospective allies to be a potent force that could challenge the might of Modi and the BJP. The Congress Working Committee (CWC) meet in Gujarat, held after 58 years in the state, was billed to be a big bang event. For the first time, three members of partys first family Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra were to attend the meet. The choice of the venue was significant, at least in terms of symbolism, the last meet of partys highest decision-making body held in Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah's home state. The presence of the Nehru-Gandhi family and entire Congress leadership and also the fact that Priyanka ventured out of Amethi, Raebareli and Lucknow to campaign had the potential to grab headlines and eyeballs. In August 2016, acting on the advice of the then Congress strategist Prashant Kishor, Sonia Gandhi sounded the bugle for the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls with a high-voltage campaign by holding a roadshow in Varanasi, the parliamentary constituency of Modi. The campaign couldnt get the desired publicity because Sonia took ill during the roadshow and had to abruptly return to Delhi. The rest was history: BJP won three-fourths of the seats and the Congress was reduced to only 7 seats in the 403-member state Assembly. In terms of strategy, while the CWC meet and a public rally in Gandhinagar follows same pattern as the Sonia roadshow in Varanasi, it would surely be too early to predict Congress prospects in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Though the Ahmedabad CWC meet and public rally went on as per schedule, it couldnt get desired mileage despite Hardik Patel dropping his mask of political neutrality and joining the grand old party and sharing the dais with Rahul and Priyanka. Unfortunately for Congress, their high-profile meet CWC meet occurred in rather awkward circumstances: a day after Rahul made news for his Masood Azhar ji remark at party workers meet in New Delhi. And around the time top Congress leaders were landing in Ahmedabad, four party MLAs deserted Congress and joined BJP. And more setbacks awaited Congress during the day, with BSP chief Mayawati delivering it a decisive snub by announcing that the coalition led by her in Uttar Pradesh (BSP-SP-RLD) would have nothing to do Congress. The press release issued by her made it clear she didnt think Congress would add any value to the alliance. In Maharashtra, senior Congress leader and Leader of Opposition Radha Krshna Vikhe Patil's son Sujay Vikhe Patil joined BJP in presence of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. Vikhe Patil family is one of biggest names in Maharashtra politics. In Bihar, RJD leader Shivanand Tiwari sounded a warning note to Congress: play a quiet second fiddle to Tejeshwi Yadav and that over-optimism and over-enthusiasm on part of state Congress leaders could lead to trouble. Priyanka's start outside of the family strongholds of Raebareli and Amethi also began on a slightly awkward note and did not live up to the billing of senior Congress leaders and workers, who fondly refer to her as Brahmastra. The message emanating out of these developments in different parts of the country is clear: Congress is not looked upon as a party neither by its own leaders nor its prospective allies to be a potent force that could challenge the might of Modi and the BJP. Priyankas formal entry into politics and a change in the Congress hierarchical structure has not changed that. While the BJP has sealed its alliances and has put its seat-sharing arrangements with allies in major states such as Bihar, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu in place, the Congress is struggling to come to terms for seat-sharing arrangement in almost all the states where it has an in-principle agreement for a coalition. In Uttar Pradesh, the Congress is being forced to go it alone, in Bihar seat-sharing negotiations have hit a road bock, in Karnataka, it is facing bumpy ride with JD(S), in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh Congress and TDP have parted ways, and in West Bengal the Trinamool Congress is not conceding any space for Congress despite the former being part of grand opposition. The list goes on. What is troubling Congress and other Opposition parties most is a perceptible change in public mood after Pulwama terror act and Indias air strike at Jaish-e-Mohammed facilities at Balakot, deep inside Pakistan territory. The biggest challenge that Congress now faces is to find an agenda that could set electoral narrative. They couldnt find one at Tuesdays CWC meet in Gujarat. Ravi Shankar Prasad said that the BJP delegation asked that central forces be deployed at every polling booth in West Bengal, as well as a media observer. Union law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Wednesday said that a high-level BJP delegation met with the Election Commission of India and asked it to declare West Bengal a "super sensitive" state ahead of the Lok Sabha elections and investigate Congress chief Rahul Gandhi for violating the Model Code of Conduct. The Election Commission on Sunday announced the dates for the upcoming general elections and also said that the Model Code of Conduct is "now in effect". Addressing the media after the meeting with the EC, Prasad said, "We conveyed to the commission that West Bengal's track record in free and fair elections is deplorable. We put forth the party's observation that hundreds were killed in the local body elections in the state." Apart from Prasad, the BJP leaders meeting with the EC included leaders like Kailash Vijayvargiya, Mukul Roy, JP Nadda, Nirmala Sitharaman. Slamming Trinamool Congress' rule in West Bengal, Prasad said, "This is a state where ballot papers were stamped even during counting, and victorious candidates were not allowed to enter the state. Where officers sit in dharnas with the chief minister of the state. Where the president of the ruling party, Amit Shah, was not allowed to land his helicopter. Other chief ministers' helicopters are also not allowed to land," he added. Alleging that there is freedom of expression for media in Bengal, Prasad said that the delegation has asked Election Commission to appoint a media observer at every polling booth in West Bengal. The BJP delegation told the Election Commission that Rahul violated the Model Code of Conduct by making unverified claims against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "The model code of conduct clearly states that one cannot make unverified allegations against any political leader. But Rahul Gandhi said on Tuesday in Ahmedabad made a scurrilous, shameful and false allegation against the prime minister about 'picking money out of the air force's pockets and put it in the pockets of certain industrialists.'" He said that Rahul's comments were clearly in violation of the code of conduct, which is already in effect. In addition, the BJP delegation also asked that central forces be deployed at every polling booth, because "many civil personnel are deeply biased towards Congress and the ruling party." "We have submitted names of such officers, and we have asked the EC to withdraw them from the election work." He later said that Kolkata Police Commissioner Rajeev Kumar's name has also been included in the list submitted to the EC. Issues related to agrarian crisis, farmer distress, unemployment, safety of women, Dalits, minorities and the poor will be at the heart of the Congress' campaign. After floundering for so long on how to challenge the BJP's nationalism-national security-Hindutva narrative and being boxed into a corner post the Pulwama terror attack and Balakot airstrikes, the Congress appears to have finally hit upon a strategy: Focussing on core issues that ensured the party's victory in last year's Assembly polls in the Hindi heartland. If the speeches of Congress president Rahul Gandhi and general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra after the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meet in Gujarat on Tuesday are any indication, issues related to agrarian crisis, farmer distress, unemployment, safety of women, Dalits, minorities and the poor will be at the heart of the party's campaign. You have a weapon with you... weapon of vote... Use this weapon wisely. In the elections many issues will be presented to you. Its your responsibility to use your vote wisely," said Priyanka, the AICC in-charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh. In her brief address, Priyanka spoke about unemployment, womens security and agrarian distress. She made no mention of Rafale deal and the Balakot air strikes. This is interesting, considering the Congress appeared to have lost the momentum gained by hyping the controversial deal after the Balakot airstrike by the Indian Air Force. The party has realised that engaging with the BJP on issues related to governments stance on the Pulwama terror attack and Pakistan will inadvertently give BJP the upper hand. Her message was clear: given the problems the country is facing, voters should exercise their franchise and choose the right political party. While Rahul has aggressively been attacking the prime minister and government with slogans like chowkidaar chor hai, it seems the party wants Priyanka to take up issues that connect with the common man, especially women. According to a Congress source, Priyanka wont restrict herself to eastern Uttar Pradesh, but will also campaign in other parts of the country. The Congress won three BJP-ruled states Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajathan at the end of 2018 by focussing on issues such as farmer distress, labourers, workers in unorganised sector, small traders, unemployment among youth. Prior to that, the Congress managed to form a government in Karnataka allying with Janata Dal (Secular) and even in the 2017 Gujarat election, it restricted the ruling BJP to 99 seats in a 182-seat Assembly by winning 77 seats. It was from Gujarat that Congress president Rahul Gandhi aggressively campaigned on issues related to farmers, Dalits, youth, small traders and unemployment. In 2014, the grand old party had its worst showing in any general election, winning only 44 seats. Now, after somewhat of a resurgence in 2018, the Congress wants to use what it sees as a winning template against the BJP. Congress will focus on core issues affecting people across the country: from economy to agriculture; unemployment to women security and youth, a senior Congress leader and CWC member told Firstpost on condition of anonymity. This will expose the failure of the Modi government over the past five years. The party will also take up important issues at state-level. However, that doesnt mean Rafale deal and corruption within the government will take a backseat; the emphasis will be on core issues. Weve seen the result in the assembly elections. The core issues that the party wants to take forward and amplify during election campaign were endorsed in CWC resolution passed during the closed-door meeting at Ahmedabad. The Congress party expresses its strong disappointment that the PM is cynically exploiting the issue of national security, on which we are all united, to divert attention from his colossal failures... government is guilty of monumental mismanagement of the Indian economy, the resolution stated. The government has been a failure on all fronts and inflicted pain and misery on the people through its reckless decisions of demonetisation and hasty imposition of a flawed GST. Lakhs of factories were closed, unorganised sector, MSMEs were most affected and tens of millions of workers lost their jobs and livelihood. The unprecedented joblessness, agrarian crisis, distress of kisans and khet mazdoors (farmers and farm labourers) are issues of grave national concern, the resolution further added. If Congress comes to power, its committed to implement Minimum Income support to the poor, weak and marginalised sections of society, the resolution concluded. The EC has issued a show-cause notice to Delhi BJP MLA Om Prakash Sharma for putting up two posters featuring him, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and IAF Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman on Facebook. The Election Commission (EC) has asked him to take down the post and give a reply by Thursday. New Delhi: The EC has issued a show-cause notice to Delhi BJP MLA Om Prakash Sharma for putting up two posters featuring him, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and IAF Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman on Facebook. The Election Commission (EC) has asked him to take down the post and give a reply by Thursday. The Lok Sabha election is scheduled to begin on 11 April and will continue till 19 May. Polling in Delhi will be held on 12 May. The posters, shared on social media on March 1, feature Modi, BJP chief Amit Shah, the IAF officer, and Sharma, who represents the Vishwas Nagar seat in the Delhi Assembly. "Pakistan has bowed down. Our brave soldier has returned. It's a big diplomatic victory that Modiji has brought Abhinandan back in very little time," the posters read. District Magistrate, Shahdara, KM Mahesh, told PTI, "We issued a show-cause notice to Sharma on 11 March for posting posters featuring Abhinandan Varthaman on Facebook." "He (Sharma) has been asked to furnish a reply by 11 am Thursday. It's a violation of the Model Code of Conduct and appropriate action will be taken," Mahesh, who is also the district election officer, said. Referring to its December 2013 letter to all political parties, the poll panel had recently asked them to refrain from making references to the armed forces while canvassing for elections. The directive had come against the backdrop of a picture showing a hoarding with images of Varthaman and leaders of a party. Hardik Patel had repeatedly insisted he was sworn to his cause and not aligned with any party, until this move to officially join the Congress. "Fir se apne haath mein lenge, apne desh ki kamaan, aise vyarth na jaane denge vir Shivaji ka balidaan (we will reclaim the politics of our land so the sacrifice of rulers like Shivaji who rose up against dictators doesn't go to waste)." This was one of the few Hindi phrases doing the rounds at Patidar leader Hardik Patel's Anamat Andolan rallies in Gujarat in 2017. Back then, the 25-year-old would manage to attract thousands of youngsters who would spill onto streets in bikes, open jeeps and on foot, with painted faces, holding placards of Iron Man Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and rattling out slogans invoking Patidar pride. Hardik, who had committed to remain apolitical back then, finally joined the Congress on Tuesday in the presence of party president Rahul Gandhi at the party's working committee meeting in Ahmedabad. Last week, Hardik had announced that he will contest the Lok Sabha election from the Jamnagar constituency. But even in Surat, which was the epicentre of his reservation movement, the BJP won all 12 seats with comfortable margins in the 2017 Gujarat Assembly election. In the city's Patidar-dominated pockets Varachha, Karanj, Katargam his roadshows were huge, but the majority that opposed his ideas seem to have saved their verdict for election day, and his anti-BJP campaign didn't result in electoral gain for the Congress. Hardik had repeatedly insisted he was sworn to his cause and not aligned with any party, until this recent move to officially join the grand old party. He had formed the Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS), which claims to be an apolitical organisation aiming to make Patidars eligible for the Other Backward Classes (OBC) quota. Neither the BJP, nor the Congress can ignore the fact that 45 to 52 of the 189 seats in Gujarat fall in Patidar-dominated regions. Purely from the perspective of vote-bank politics, the two big parties understand that keeping the Patidars on their side in Gujarat will strengthen their game. However, the Patidars are not one monolithic whole, and their concerns are not homogeneous. The first split is between the Leuva and Kadva Patels believed to be descendants of Ramayana's last generation Luv and Kush and they belong to Saurashtra, a peninsular, fertile belt. Hardik belongs to the Kadva sub-sect, but the owners of big diamond and real estate businesses are Leuva Patels, who are strongly opposed to the idea of even marrying their children into the other sub-caste. The other split within the Patidars lies in the demographic history of the caste. Saurashtra's key towns are Jamnagar, Junagarh, Rajkot and Porbandar, and then there are the Gohil princely state towns of Bhavnagar and Amreli. Owing to the locational advantage of being closer to the sight of the royalty and also to South Gujarat, they migrated to the emerging cities of Ahmedabad and Surat in the 1970s before others. The Patels from the other regions followed suit and populated the diamond, textile and real-estate industries. Today, the Patels from Bhavnagar and Amreli are more prosperous and big names in diamond and textile business hubs. For instance, of the 116 members elected to the Surat Municipal Corporation in the 2015 election, 16 were from Bhavnagar and Amreli. In the 2017 Vidhan Sabha election, Patidars from Bhavnagar and Amreli were given tickets in the constituencies of Surat Uttar, Katargam, Kamrej, Varachha and Karanj. At least in Surat, discontent over decades of democratic neglect in the minds of the nearly six lakh Patidars from Junagarh, Jamnagar and Rajkot concretised the Patidar agitation and the rise of Hardik. But, as evident from the election verdict, it wasn't enough reason for them to repose faith in Hardik's movement and consolidate themselves against the ruling party even though Hardik often used the phrase 'hum, Patel' (us, Patel) while making references to the needs of the community. Another reason for the loss was the lack of a positive agenda in Hardik's movement. The agitation seemed more anti-Modi than pro-Patidar. In present-day Gujarat, ideological movements have little relevance because people vote on developmental promises, especially the ones that pertain to their trade. If the attraction towards Hardik's ideas had remained strong among the Patidars, the crowds at his protests and fasts wouldn't have dwindled. Instead of embracing Hardik with much fanfare and making a noise about attracting a popular face, the Congress should address the attrition of its leaders with strong presence on the ground level. Senior Congress leader Kunvarji Bavaliya switched sides. He was popular among the Koli samaaj, which has a long history of being critical of the BJP. Congress should have thrown its weight behind Bavalia, who ultimately won the bypoll and became a Gujarat Cabinet minister in the BJP government. The Jasdan constituency in Gujarat's Rajkot district went to be polls on 20 December, and Bavalia's victory proved that it wasn't a Congress bastion all this while but the fortress of Bavalia, who has won the Jasdan seat five consecutive times. Immediately after Bavaliya, Indranil Rajyaguru tendered his resignation to Gujarat Congress chief Amit Chavda. He reason he cited was that some leaders had indulged in anti-party activities, and instead of taking disciplinary action against them, the Congress awarded them key positions. This highlights the disconnect 10 Janpath has with the layers and sub-layers of leadership in the depths of Gujarat. More recently, Jawahar Chavda, who enjoys a solid grassroots connect because of his mining background, also joined the BJP. A four-time MLA from Manavadar constituency and a prominent leader of the OBC Ahir community, Chavda was inducted as a Gujarat Cabinet minister. He is the son of Congress veteran Pethalji Chavda of Junagadh district and is credited with keeping the party's presence alive in his constituency. Yogesh Patel, a BJP MLA from Manjalpur of Vadodara district, and Jamnagar West MLA Dharmendrasinh Jadeja had also crossed over from the Congress and later inducted into the cabinet. Parshottam Sabariya, the MLA from Dhrangadhra constituency of the Saurashtra region, had also resigned from the Congress. Vallabh Dharaviya from Jamnagar Rural, who had left the BJP to join the Congress before the 2017 state elections, returned to the ruling party; his return to the BJP, along with others, proves that the Opposition is failing to retain local leaders in Gujarat. Instead of celebrating Hardik's entry into the Congress, the party should fix its internal issues, be it lack of communication or the inability to build a stronger development alternative, failing which it won't be able to put up a good fight like it did in 2017, a performance that was dubbed as a moral victory for the party in Narendra Modi's state. Calling Punjab minister Navjot Singh Sidhu a 'Pakistan agent', Union minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal on Wednesday hit out at the Congress leader for questioning the outcome of air strike conducted by the Indian Air Force (IAF) in Pakistan. New Delhi: Calling Punjab minister Navjot Singh Sidhu a "Pakistan agent", Union minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal on Wednesday hit out at the Congress leader for questioning the outcome of air strike conducted by the Indian Air Force (IAF) in Pakistan. Speaking to ANI, Badal slammed Sidhu for taking credit for the construction of Kartarpur corridor and said, "Sidhu was a state guest from Pakistan's side (during foundation stone ceremony), where Pakistan's prime minister invited him to fight elections from his country. It is very clear that what kind of compromises took place between them, since today even after the attack on our Jawans, Sidhu is still speaking Pakistan's language and asking his own armed forces of proof, same as the neighbouring country." "How in (hand-in-glove) he is with Pakistan's army general and prime minister, the world knows. The corridor wouldn't have been possible without Modi government taking prompt decisions. Sidhu can say what he wants, he is a Pakistani agent, and he obviously has to speak about Pakistan," she added. Badal also lambasted former prime ministers of Congress and blamed them of working against the causes of Sikhs. "If Punjab was divided, it was Jawaharlal Nehru's decision. The Gurudwara which is three kilometres away, it could have been in India. After Nehru broke Punjab, Indira Gandhi came and attacked the Golden temple. Rajiv Gandhi for his political reasons massacred millions of Sikhs all over. Now, Rahul Gandhi speaks the language of Pakistan," she said. "Congress party has always been anti-Sikh and anti-Pakistan. Congress and the Gandhi family have always gone against us. God forbid if some other government comes all Sikhs who vote for Congress will be responsible that this corridor doesn't become reality. They are doing everything to derail it," alleged Badal. Alleging further that since the "Congress partitioned India, it was the people of Punjab that bore the maximum brunt of the state being divided," she added, "The maximum amount of blood was also shed at our borders. But the Congress not even take care where the Sikh religion starts from. They were just a few kilometres across the borders, to make the borders of the country such that we have access to at least our own shrine." She also credited the Narendra Modi-led Central government for fulfilling the long-standing demand of Sikh community by paving way for Kartarpur corridor and said, "Since 2014, Shiromani Akali Dal has been saying that this is 550 years of Guru Nanak Dev, we must have a corridor. I am grateful to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who took such a historic and decisive step. Congress even made a Sikh prime minister, but he could not make a single step. Our government not only started it, but within one month allotted the work and now land acquisition is going on, and despite all the tension the talks are going on." The Union Minister also said that Kartarpur is a corridor of peace and is going to harbour good time in future and improve relations. She also said that Pakistan's propaganda is not going to work as the people of Punjab can see through it. "I am not apprehensive, I have full confidence in the people of our state who have gone through dark days of terrorism, that no matter what Pakistan wants to spread our people are not willing to touch them. I have full faith and confidence in our armed forces will be able to handle this," Badal said. On demand of visa-free and passport-free access in the corridor, she cited the concerns of government and said, "All these discussions will take place. Everyone wants it must be full proof and secure. For the Sikh community, the prime importance is that we will finally have access to the Gurudwara to bow our head. Tensions and borders will not come in way to our faith." On 8 March, Congress leader Navjot Singh Sidhu had hit out at the Centre over the air strikes carried out recently and said the government is "not able to discern between trees and structures," despite there being 48 satellites. Sidhu's remark comes as images have surfaced of the area the IAF struck on 26 February, targetting terror launch pads in the region. Congress president Rahul Gandhi's statement was in response to a question on Vadra, who is being probed in connection with a money laundering case related to purchase of assets abroad and a land case in Rajasthan's Bikaner district. Chennai: Asserting that law must not be applied selectively, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said if his brother-in-law Robert Vadra can probed so can Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his alleged role in the Rafale deal. He also said economic growth is directly related to the mood of the nation and one cannot expect it to happen in a negative and fearful atmosphere. The Congress will change the mood of the country and make people feel happy and empowered, the Congress chief said while addressing women students at a college in Chennai. Asking students to refer to him as Rahul, he said the law must apply to everybody and not be applied selectively. His statement was in response to a question on Vadra, who is being probed in connection with a money laundering case related to purchase of assets abroad and a land case in Rajasthan's Bikaner district. During his informal interaction with the students, he also brought up the issue of the Rafale deal and reiterated his allegations about the pricing of the aircraft and the process. "I will be the first person to say it... Investigate Robert Vadra but also investigate Narendra Modi," he said. Modi is a "corrupt" man, and he bypassed negotiations and ran parallel negotiations on the Rafale deal, Rahul alleged while responding to the question. The Congress chief said the prime minister should have the guts to face the media and asked why Modi was "hiding". The BJP and the government have repeatedly rejected the Congress's allegation of corruption in the Rafale fighter jet deal. He also alleged that the BJP's idea is to capture every institution of the country and run them from Nagpur, the where the RSS headquarters is located. Rahul said the Congress would pass the women's reservation Bill if it comes to power. "(We) don't see enough women in leadership positions. You cannot have women in power in India until the attitude towards them changes," he told the cheering crowd. In response to a question, he said he had learnt the lessons of humility and love from his mother Sonia Gandhi. He asked the gathering, "Did you like demonetisation?" When the audience answered, "No", he said, "I think it's pretty clear the damage demonetisation did. The prime minister should have taken your advice." Rahul, who asked the students to challenge him and "make him uncomfortable", also questioned whether the prime minister could stand in a large audience and answer people's questions. Referring to Modi's policies on Jammu and Kashmir, he said these were setting fire to the state and blamed the Centre for not strategically and systematically handling terrorism. As soon as Modi assumed power, he made a "huge mistake" of forging an alliance with PDP just for the sake of power, he said. "Today Modi's policies are actually setting fire to Kashmir," he said, alleging that it was his policies that were allowing Pakistan to carry out terrorist acts in India. Rahul underscored the need to engage the people of Kashmir and bring them "on our side." The prime minister's policies "pushes the people away so you cannot fight terrorism with one off gestures," he said. Noting that it was "our responsibility" to stop the neighbouring country from carrying out terror strikes and save our people, Rahul said, "It is not good enough to say that '45 CRPF men died' and now we will do something." He sought to know why the attack (in Pulwama) was not stopped in the first place. Forty CRPF personnel were killed and five injured on 14 February in one of the deadliest terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir when a Jaish-e-Mohammad suicide bomber rammed a vehicle carrying explosives into their bus in Pulwama district. Claiming that the Congress pursued a policy of systematic and strategic approach in Jammu and Kashmir, he said the NDA government had not followed a similar policy. "We actually crushed terrorism," he said and referred to the "drastic fall" in the number of soldiers and people killed during UPA's tenure. The Congress followed a multi-pronged approach when it came to power in 2004 and toed both systematic and strategic lines, he said. "And it was successful," he said, adding it led to diplomatic isolation of Pakistan. Rahul also called his party's minimum income guarantee scheme a revolutionary idea. Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti said that a result-oriented dialogue with all stakeholders is the only way to make peace in the state permanent Srinagar: Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) president Mehbooba Mufti Wednesday said a result-oriented dialogue with all stakeholders is the only way to make peace in Jammu and Kashmir permanent. "The PDP has always been a staunch advocate of the political process for the resolution of Kashmir (issue) and has been asking the government of India to hold meaningful dialogue with the Hurriyat, Pakistan and with other stakeholders," Mehbooba said at a party workers' convention in central Kashmir's Bandipora. "A result-oriented dialogue with all stakeholders is the only way to make peace in Jammu and Kashmir permanent," she said. The former chief minister said past decades showed that a muscular approach would not work in the state. "This muscular approach and political patchwork will not take us anywhere as this has been tried for many decades and hasn't yielded any positive outcome," Mehbooba said. "It is unfortunate that some people still believe in the efficacy of these methods and are trying to repeat the old mistakes which will be meaningless and will prove counterproductive," she added. Mehbooba said people were well aware of the policies of her party and how it had always preferred to stick to its principles over power. Speaking about Article 35A of the Constitution, she said it could not be challenged in any court of law. "The state of Jammu and Kashmir, as part of the Republic (of India), secured its unique position and the same cannot, in any way, be contested in any court of law," the PDP chief said. "Article 35A is a matter of life and death for the people of J&K and no one has the authority to challenge the very identity of people of the state in any court across the world," Mehbooba said. The Supreme Court is hearing a bench of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of Article 35A, which accords special rights and privileges to the citizens of Jammu and Kashmir and bars non-residents from acquiring any immovable property in the state. NCP chief Sharad Pawar has had ample opportunities to avoid the dynastic compulsions every time election tickets were distributed, but he didnt Acutely conscious of social equations with an ability for social engineering, NCP chief Sharad Pawar who has served thrice as the chief minister of Maharashtra, has a disproportionate weight in national politics. That has been the case ever since Pawar split from the Congress in the 1970s to form his own party. Before that, he was a Maratha strongman, with as much clout as his mentor Yashwantrao Chavan, but it was limited to the state. Pawar appears to have now reached a point where there is a visible loss of initiative, even though he still has his way within the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), the party he set up. It didn't allow him to 'retire' more about it later and wanted him to contest the 2019 Lok Sabha election from Madha constituency, which he had swept in 2009. Pawar, however, has always maintained that he doesn't want a third person from the family to contest the Lok Sabha election at the same time. And that seems to have forced him to back down from the 2019 polls. Because of Pawar's only two-from-family rule, the partys wish that the NCP chief contests from Madha had to be abandoned. This doesn't appear as the best political decision from someone who is easily one of the tallest contemporary Maharashtrian leaders, and especially since he is leading one of the two major parties contesting the Lok Sabha polls in alliance with Congress in Maharashtra to diminish the clout of Bharatiya Janata Party and the Shiv Sena. Pawar's remarks that he did not want to deepen the presence of the Pawar family in politics should also be seen as a major step in a state steeped in the culture of political dynasties, but it also remains a fact that he could have done much more to reduce such tendencies. No doubt, the practice of promoting dynastic sway on constituencies in Maharashtra, as elsewhere, is not confined to NCP. It is a feature found in almost all parties. But the NCP chief has had ample opportunities to avoid the dynastic compulsions whenever election tickets were distributed, but he didnt. When the NCP chief says that the young and fresh blood needs to be injected into politics, it does not necessarily have to be from his own family for eg, former deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar's son Parth Pawar, who is contesting the Lok Sabha polls from Maval. Besides, according to the Indian Express, Rohit Pawar, Parth's paternal cousin and son of Rajendra Pawar (Ajit's elder brother), "will contest the Assembly elections" due in a few months. Then there's the NCP chief's daughter Supriya Sule, an MP who is contesting the Lok Sabha polls from Baramati, so far the safest seat for the Pawars. If this were to happen, with the NCP chief in Rajya Sabha till about the end of 2020 when his term would end, the Pawars would be the largest contingent in politics state Assembly upwards from one single family. Across the state and across parties, no such phenomenon has been seen in Maharashtra where one family has such a presence. Perhaps Mulayam Singh Yadavs extended family could be rivalling the extended Pawar family in this aspect. The NCP chiefs idea of "retirement" from electoral politics has been rather strange not contesting a Lok Sabha seat but getting elected to the Rajya Sabha, and retaining the partys stewardship to the extent it devolves to even attention to the minutiae of local self-government bodies. He had announced his retirement in 2013 which his trusted aide Praful Patel had explained that it only meant not contesting the Madha seat in 2014. Despite this, he was willing to be persuaded to contest the Lok Sabha election from Madha this time, but as the whole thing unravelled, he had to abandon the idea to accommodate his grandnephew Parth for a seat from Maval. Congress general-secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Wednesday met Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad at a hospital where the Dalit leader was admitted a day earlier. Meerut: Congress general-secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Wednesday met Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad at a hospital where the Dalit leader was admitted a day earlier. Chandrashekhar Azad was taken into custody by police on Tuesday for violating the model code of conduct, officials said. Azad was detained while leading a procession that included cars and motorcycles, but was shifted to the hospital when he took ill. The code violation was allegedly over the number of vehicles in the political rally. Ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, the Congress has given Priyanka Gandhi the charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh. Calling out Modi for not speaking to the media and answering questions, Rahul Gandhi called him a flop show for not living up to the promises of generating employment Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday called the Narendra-Modi-led government a "flop show" for not living up to the promises of generating employment in the country. "The BJP has failed to create jobs," Rahul told a media gathering in Chennai ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, adding that India has seen the highest rate of unemployment since 35 years. Promising people that unemployment will be a major poll agenda for the Congress, Rahul said that there will be no family under the Below Poverty Line if his party comes to power. The government has destroyed the SMEs and attacked them through demonetisation and GST. The Modi government has been a flop show when it comes to job creation and employment, he said. Rahul also said that discussions are on with the party's manifesto committee to increase the expenditure on education to six percent. He blamed the central government for ignoring farmers and also sought answers on why Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar was sent back to Pakistan under the NDA rule. On the political front, Rahul confirmed that alliances have been firmed up in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Jharkhand, and that talks on alliances in Bihar and Jammu and Kashmir are in the final stages. "The first thing our government will do is to bring back harmony in the nation. Culture should not be under attack, languages should not be under attack. India belongs to everybody," Rahul told reporters. Slamming BJPs intention to capture every institution, he said that the Tamil Nadu government is remote-controlled from Delhi. "This country is not going to be ruled from Nagpur. BJP differentiates between states where they are in power and where they are not. I believe in decentralisation. I don't think the country should be run from the PMO. I also don't believe that a state should be run from the CM's office," Rahul remarked. Clarifying that the Opposition is not raising questions on the capability of the Rafale aircraft, Rahul said an investigation will find if Modi and Anil Ambani whose company Reliance Defence is an offset partner in the Rs 36,000-crore fighter jets deal are guilty of corruption. By levelling the accusation against the Tamil Nadu government, Congress president Rahul Gandhi sought to strengthen the narrative being pursued by ally DMK to target the AIADMK and its coalition partner the BJP. Nagercoil: Launching a frontal attack on the AIADMK-BJP alliance in Tamil Nadu, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday alleged the state government was controlled by the Prime Minister's Office, something that has never happened before. In his first public rally to launch the UPA poll campaign in the southern state, Rahul said, "Today, the government in Tamil Nadu is controlled by the Prime Minister's Office." By levelling the accusation, the top Congress leader sought to strengthen the narrative being pursued by ally DMK to target the AIADMK and its coalition partner the BJP. He also touched other issues being vigorously pursued by the DMK, including the 'attack on Tamil language and culture' by the BJP-led NDA, and the need for a push to the manufacturing sector in the state. The DMK has been alleging that the AIADMK government was being controlled by the BJP government at the Centre. The MK Stalin-led party has also been claiming that the AIADMK was pressured into going in for a tie-up with the BJP. "In the past when DMK and AIADMK fought each other, there were big leaders on both sides. However, never was a government in Tamil Nadu controlled from Delhi," Rahul said, kickstarting his campaign in Nagercoil in Kanyakumari district. Reciprocating Stalin's support for him becoming the prime minister, the Congress president said Stalin will be the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. "Within a few weeks, Rahul will become the prime minister. In your (Rahul's) hands the country will be safe we believe," the DMK chief said, sharing the stage with Rahul at a grand UPA poll rally. The DMK believes that the bypolls to 18 Assembly seats would usher in a regime change in the state. Bordering Kerala, Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu is the only district where both the Congress and BJP have a significant clout for decades. Rahul said Prime Minister Narendra Modi felt he could "capture" any Indian institution and control any state by "blackmail" and that he can pressure different states from Delhi. The top Congress leader said Modi was absolutely wrong and none can pressure and control the Tamil people. In his first rally after his party inked a poll pact with the DMK, he said Modi had said he wanted to be "chowkidar and not prime minister." However, "after saying that, the chowkidar gave Rs 30,000 crore to (Reliance Group chairman) Anil Ambani," he alleged. The prime minister's "entire foundation is built on lies," he said and quoted Tamil saint poet Tiruvalluvar's verse on truth in Tamil, which meant that truth would triumph (apparently referring to the Rafale deal). "Tamil Nadu has always stood for truth... and the truth will put Modi in jail," he said. Rahul said leaders like DMK patriarch Karunanidhi and former Tamil Nadu chief minister K Kamaraj will continue to live on as they represented the people's heart. While attacking the Congress, Modi had recently said Kamaraj always wanted a government in power which has zero tolerance towards corruption. Attacking the prime minister and the Hindutva ideology, Rahul said, Modi was not only attacking "Tamil people," but also every state and every language. "They believe that one idea should be imposed in the country, which cannot be done. We are not going to let Modi or RSS distort your language and culture... not going to allow them change your history," the Congress chief said. He said the DMK-Congress alliance was not just political but the parties were wedded in the ideological sphere as well which was a meeting of "hearts and minds." While Tamil people were for truth, Modi only spoke lies, he alleged and listed the reported claim of the prime minister to "deposit" Rs 15 lakh in bank accounts, and creation of two crore jobs. He vowed to give a push to the manufacturing sector in Tamil Nadu, if voted to power, and said the state could play a central role in competition with China in manufacturing and generate jobs. A brand 'Made in Tamil Nadu' will be developed, he said. DMK has alleged that several industries had gone to neighbouring states in the AIADMK rule which was refuted by the government. "Today, whenever you look at a cell phone or a shirt, it says 'Made in China'. When we will form governments in Delhi and Tamil Nadu, we will have to write 'Made in Tamil Nadu' behind cellphone, and clothes," he said. He assured 33 percent quota for women in Parliament and state Assemblies and a job quota to an equal extent. If voted to power, Congress would carve out a separate ministry for fishermen welfare, Rahul said. The NDA government has come up with a separate department for them. Citing the protests led by Tamil Nadu farmers in the past in Delhi, he said his party-led state governments had waived farm loans to assuage their pain. However, the prime minister has "handed," the entire insurance sector to his friend Ambani and everything was designed to help the richest in the country, Rahul alleged. On the issue of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, (NEET), he earlier told reporters in Chennai that it was "discriminatory" against youngsters in the state and that was something "we will look into and I think it is resolvable." DMK had demanded taking Tamil Nadu out of the purview of the NEET to ensure social justice. Recreating scenes witnessed during prime minister Modi's previous visits to Tamil Nadu when he faced black balloon protests from MDMK and DMK, Hindu Makkal Katchi staged a demonstration protesting Rahul's visit near Nagercoil. HMK cadres claimed that it was due to the Congress' alleged inaction that Tamils in Sri Lanka were killed during the civil war in 2009 in the neighbouring country. Also, the state was not getting its share of water in river water disputes, they alleged. Hashtags like #VanakkamRahulGandhi, #GoBackRahul, #GoBackPappu also trended on microblogging site Twitter. In the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Congress under Rahul Gandhi seems torn between its ambition to re-emerge as a national alternative to BJP for its long-term survival and the reality of its reduced national footprint It became evident quite early even before the drumroll for 2019 Lok Sabha election had begun that dislodging the BJP would be quite difficult if the Opposition parties dont strike tactical pre-poll alliances. Accordingly, we saw the movement towards a grand alliance or a mahagathbandhan where theoretically every seat among the 543 Lok Sabha seats will be a one-on-one contest between the BJP and the Opposition. This was a formula floated by some Opposition leaders such as Mamata Banerjee who made a grand show of Opposition unity in a giant rally in Kolkata last January. While the theory was sound enough, implementing it on the ground was always going to be a problem. The lack of chemistry quite often runs antithetical to the promise of arithmetic. The bigger question was about the role of Congress. Regional parties that are quite strong in their respective fiefdoms lack national outreach. Their personal ambitions come in the way of stitching up a mythical non-BJP, non-Congress third front. It was evident that the Congress would need to play the role of a conduit for Opposition unity and anchor the grand alliance, but its own compulsions are posing problems for itself and queering the pitch for a united Opposition against the BJP. The Congress, right now, is in a state of suspended animation. It seems torn between the twin impulses of ambition and reality. Its ambition of re-emerging as a national alternative to the BJP is crucial to its long-term existence but in the short term, this ambition is rubbing up against the reality of its reduced national footprint, decrepit party structure in several states and the need to strike smart alliances. The Assembly poll results towards the end of last year have compounded the problem. While the Congress was grudgingly settling down in its new role of playing second fiddle to allies for instance, the offer of chief ministers post to seal the JD(S) deal and keep the BJP away from power in Karnataka the three wins in Hindi heartland seems to have convinced the party that its revival is on course. This could be a red herring. Misreading the Assembly polls results could prove costly to the Congress and throw a spanner in its plan of preventing Narendra Modi's return in 2019. For the Congress to act as a conduit for Opposition unity it must show flexibility in working with regional partners and be prepared to make sacrifices to make the alliances work. While this may delay its structural revival, the immediate imperative for the party is to gain a share of power at the Centre. It is an interesting paradox. If the Congress cedes too much space to alliance partners, its revival as a major political force gets delayed. Conversely, if it chooses not to ally with partners and goes alone, it risks getting left out of the power pie which again, may delay its revival. Mitigating this tension between the need to make space for alliance partners and revive the partys political relevance is the leaderships primary task. Going by the trend so far in the campaign season, Rahul Gandhi is faltering in his job. The Congress president seems unsure about the path to be taken. Lets take the case of Uttar Pradesh, for example. Having been left out of the SP-BSP alliance, Rahul launched sister Priyanka Gandhi and put her officially in charge of Uttar Pradesh East. Initial media hype and soundbites from Congress top leadership created an impression that the party is serious about throwing a challenge to key players in BJP and the SP-BSP alliance. It became quickly clear to Priyanka tasked with building the party ground up in Indias most crucial state where it is almost non-existent on the ground that emerging as a serious challenger in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls will be a stretch for Congress. Accordingly, the goalposts were shifted and Congress now talks about strengthening the base first before the next Assembly polls. As the election dates draw near, the Congress seems unable to stitch alliances and upsetting potential partners. Mayawati has already made it clear that there will be no electoral alliance with the Congress in any state. In reply, the Congress taunted her for not having even a single seat in the Parliament and dismissed her. "How can she decide if the Congress has to come on board or not? We are fighting the election alone and do not want an alliance. We don't need her, Uttar Pradesh Congress spokesperson Rajiv Bakshi was quoted, as saying. It possibly did not occur to Congress that keeping the door open for negotiation works better in politics than arrogance. But its woes in Uttar Pradesh are reflective of its woes elsewhere and utter failure so far in striking pre-poll partnerships. Whats worse is that Congress seems to be still suffering from the big brother attitude that regional chiefs such as Mayawati find abhorring. Then theres the question of Rahuls acceptability. Many regional leaders still prefer dealing with Sonia Gandhi West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, for instance. While the BJP is busy settling differences with estranged partners and reaching pre-poll deals, the Congress appears laden-footed and arrogant. In Karnataka, which has so far showcased the worst traits of coalition politics, senior Congress leader and former chief minister Siddaramaiah declared on Monday that Congress wont yield any sitting MP seats to partner JD(S). The BJP, which understands the need for coalition politics in the absence of a wave factor, appears generous in offering a seat-sharing deal to partners. BJP national general secretary Ram Madhav announced on Monday that the party has sealed a grand alliance in the North East by wooing even estranged partners such as Asom Gana Parishad. The BJP, NPP, NDPP, AGP and BPF will fight together in Assam, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh with the mission of defeating Congress party in the hustings, Madhav wrote, adding that the party will fight alongside Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura (IPFT), its coalition partner in Tripura and will contest from Sikkim in partnership with the Sikkim Krantikari Morcha. The Congress is trying to strike a deal with the Left Front while simultaneously battling it in Kerala. In Delhi, the Congress has rejected AAPs overtures, leaving Arvind Kejriwal to utter that AAP will win without Congres' support. In Bihar, one of the few places where the Congress is still in with a chance to strike a meaningful alliance, the party has threatened RJD, its key partner, that it will go solo in the state if the seat-sharing formula is not respectable. Even the Congress-NCP alliance in Maharashtra seems to have gotten off to a tumultuous start with NCP veteran Sharad Pawar opting out of the race. In both Maharashtra and Gujarat, Congress has been hit by a volley of defections that some analysts say are BJPs ploy to demoralise the Congress. The picture that emerges is that of a party unsure of its core strategy in approaching the elections. Rahuls aggressive attacks on Modi may grab some eyeballs on prime time television but its to be seen whether that alone is enough to stymie BJPs chances. It is time the Congress president addresses the critical failures in alliance formation and adopts a more flexible stance. Rahul Gandhi, who is in Tamil Nadu for a day to launch the UPA's campaign, said the assassination of his father Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 had a personal and a legal aspect. Chennai: Congress president Rahul Gandhi said on Wednesday that he harboured no hatred towards the convicts of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, and asserted that it was for the courts to decide on their release. The Congress chief, who is in Tamil Nadu for a day to launch the United Progressive Alliance's campaign, said the assassination of his father and former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 had two aspects. "While one was personal, which we have dealt with, the other was the legal issue, which has to take its course. Whatever course the legal issue takes, we are happy with it," Rahul Gandhi said. "We are quite forgiving people, we do not have animosity or hatred towards anybody and it is for the courts to decide (on their release)," he told reporters. "You need a conversation to start with stakeholders, that is the type of things we excelled at," the Congress president added. Exuding confidence that a Congress-led Opposition would emerge victorious in the Lok Sabha election, Rahul Gandhi promised initiatives such as reforms in the goods and services tax (GST), encompassing its simplest form and a "phenomenal and revolutionary idea" of a minimum income guarantee scheme. On the Rafale deal, he said while there was no question about its capability, the issue was about corruption and the need was for a probe into it. The Congress chief did not answer if his party would scrap the deal if voted to power. "The prime minister is a corrupt man, bypassed negotiations, ran parallel negotiations on the Rafale deal." Hitting out at Modi, Rahul Gandhi asked as to why the prime minister was not addressing the media and interacting with students like he did. "Why are you (Modi) hiding?" he asked, adding that the prime minister should have the guts to face the media. Lashing out at the BJP, he said the saffron party's idea was to capture every institution of the country and run it from Nagpur, the RSS headquarters. A veteran politician, Sharad Pawar had said that as two members of his family are going to contest the polls somebody had to step back and that his nephew and former deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar's son Parth will be the NCP's candidate from a key constituency. Mumbai: Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar said on Tuesday that the Bharatiya Janata Party may emerge as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha polls, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi is unlikely to get a second term in office. Pawar reiterated that he decided not to contest the Lok Sabha polls, as he wanted to make way for other members of his family and because he felt that it was "time to stop". "The BJP may emerge as the single largest party post parliamentary elections and will have to seek support of allies (to form the government). In that scenario, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is unlikely to get a second term," he told reporters on the sidelines of a function. On Monday, Pawar had announced that he would not contest the next month's Lok Sabha polls. The veteran politician had said that as two members of his family are going to contest the polls "somebody had to step back." He had said that his nephew and former deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar's son Parth will be the NCP's candidate from Maval Lok Sabha constituency. "I have withdrawn my candidature from Madha constituency as I wish to make way for other members in the family. Many people asked me to rethink my decision, but I am 79 years old now. There is a time to stop," he said. "I enjoy people appealing to me. I have personally insisted Vijaysinh Mohite Patil, the sitting MP from Madha LS seat to contest the election again," he added. However, Pawar had last month said that some of his party colleagues are insisting that he contest the Lok Sabha election from Madha in Solapur district. Reacting to Pawar's announcement of not contesting the Lok Sabha polls, Fadnavis had said on Monday that the NCP leader "sensed the change in the air", and decided to rethink on plans to contest the Lok Sabha polls from Madha LS seat. On the chief minister's remarks, Pawar said, "It is childish to call my decision as defeat as I have won elections 14 times, including the Assembly and Lok Sabha elections that I contested so far. On the other hand, late prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and (BJP veteran) L K Advani had tasted defeat." Pawar's opposition to exchange Ahmednagar Lok Sabha seat with the Congress forced Sujay, son of senior Congress leader Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil to join the BJP on Tuesday. When asked whether it would impact the Congress and the NCP during the campaign, Pawar said, "Sujay Vikhe Patil is not a state-level figure. Whether to listen to one's son's demand or not is a family's decision. How can I address someone else's child's demand of contesting election? It would not look good." The former Union minister said he will meet some regional parties across the country on 14 and 15 March in New Delhi, where further strategy of mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) will be discussed. When asked about some regional parties moving away from the Congress and NCP alliance in Maharashtra, Pawar said, "I appreciate the PWP for extending support to the NCP in the Lok Sabha election. The NCP has also held talks with the Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatna (SSS) for seat-sharing, but the farmers' front has some expectations from the Congress as well. It will be decided by these two parties." "The seat sharing formula between NCP and Congress has almost finalised and we will soon make an official announcement," he added. On BJP chief Amit Shah's assertion that his party would win 45 out of 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra, Pawar sarcastically said, "He seems to have made a mistake. He should have said that his party would win (all) 48 seats." Modi had earlier described the NCP chief as his political guru. When asked about it, Pawar said, "When it comes to political decisions, Modi does not seek anyone's advice. He shows his 56-inch chest." Over the IAF air strike in Pakistan and attempts to reap political benefits out of it, he said, "Those who think that they could not win (elections) are now seeking the help of such issues. We do not wish to reap benefits out of it and politicise the issue." Pawar criticised the Modi government over the note ban saying, "In its report, the RBI has said that it had raised objections related to demonetisation. Still the government imposed it and many people lost their jobs." On being asked about several political leaders from the BJP and the Shiv Sena criticising him, Pawar said, "We do not indulge in such things because of our family culture. Let them do whatever they want to say." Smriti Irani also spoke about a money trail amounting to Rs 54 crore between HL Pahwa had CC Thampi, whose name figures in petroleum deal probe under the UPA, financial violation in regard to land transaction in Delhi NCR, amounting to Rs 280 crore Addressing a press conference at the BJP headquarters in Delhi, Textiles Minister Smriti Irani on Wednesday cited a news report by OpIndia to draw links between Congress president Rahul Gandhi and fugitive arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari, who had allegedly lobbied for the Rafale offset contract during the UPA rule. Bhandari known to be an aide of business and Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi's husband Robert Vadra is under the scanner of the income tax department and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for allegedly receiving kickbacks from petroleum and defence deals under the UPA. "In the past 24 hours, news reports have emerged indicating how the Gandhi-Vadra family has perpetrated a 'parivarik brashtachar'. During a recent raid by the ED at one HL Pahwa's house, it was found that Rahul had bought land from Pahwa in Haryana. During this deal, one Mahesh Nagar was Rahul's representative. You must remember that Nagar had also represented Vadra in land deals in Rajasthan and Haryana, " she said. Irani also spoke about a money trail amounting to Rs 54 crore between Pahwa and one CC Thampi, whose name also figures in the petroleum deal investigation. "The relationship between Thampi and Bhandari is publicly known as much as Bhandari's close links with Vadra. Till now, people had only assumed the commercial relationship that existed between Vadra and Bhandari, but these new facts establish a relationship between Rahul and Bhandari, too. Rahul needs to answer what is this special commercial relationship that he shares between Bhandari, Thampi and Pahwa," she added. She also spoke about Pahwa's "connection" with "Mrs Vadra" (Priyanka Gandhi). "The nation has come to the conclusion that Rahul's intervention in the defence preparedness of our country stems from his pursuit of personal commercial interests, his family's interests. He has been hiding behind Vadra," she added. Launching another scathing attack, Irani said Rahul "himself has become a huge roadblock for the Congress". "He is willing to sacrifice the defence preparedness of the country only so his friend Bhandari can have his hands in the cookie jar," she claimed. Sujay was all praise for Fadnavis and BJP chief Amit Shah, as he thanked Fadnavis for giving him the opportunity to serve BJP. After joining the party, Sujay lauded Narendra Modi and Shah for their leadership. He said that the youth and women support his decision to join the BJP, adding that the decision to leave Congress had been difficult as his family has been associated with the party for a long time. The son of the Leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra Assembly and senior Congress leader, Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil Sujay Vikhe Patil joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday in the presence of Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis. Sujay (37), a practicing neurosurgeon, said: I have taken a conscious decision to join the BJP after the Congress-NCP combine sidelined me. I have been working painstakingly for Ahmednagar for three years. The NCPs decision not to concede one seat to the Congress has hurt me. Joining BJP is my personal choice. I have taken this decision against the wishes of my father. I do not know what my mother and father think about this decision. But I consider this as a huge responsibility and promise to work tirelessly to ensure both the seats (other being Shirdi) in my district come to BJP." Sujay was all praise for Fadnavis and BJP chief Amit Shah, as he thanked the chief minister for giving him the opportunity to serve BJP. After joining the party, Sujay lauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Shah for their leadership. He said that the youth and women support his decision to join the BJP, adding that the decision to leave Congress had been difficult as his family has been associated with the party for a long time. "I am impressed with prime minister Modi's leadership. We can count on BJP," Sujay said while addressing reporters after joining the saffron party. He said, "I'll try my best to make my family proud by working under the guidance of BJP. The chief minister and other BJP MLAs were supportive, and helped me take this decision. I subscribe to BJPs developmental and nationalist agenda I admire Prime Minister Narendra Modi because of the reforms he has introduced and his policies for social welfare, which are identical to the politics of the three generations of Vikhe Patils." Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis stood behind me like a father figure, in my bad days. I am happy to join BJP, Sujay said. Interestingly, hours after Sujay joined the BJP, his father Radhakrishna Vikhe Patel also got an offer from the Shiv Sena, which is an ally of the BJP. An MLA from Shirdi, Radhakrishna is the son of veteran politician and former Minister of State for Finance Balasaheb Vikhe Patil. Anticipating one more turnaround in the family, Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut said on Tuesday: "Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil should join the Shiv Sena and make our alliance (with the BJP) stronger. Both he and his father were ministers in the Sena government. It is good if the third generation of the family is also a part of the alliance." Apparently, Sujay's decision to join the BJP was linked with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) president Sharad Pawar refusing to relinquish his party's claim on the Ahmednagar Lok Sabha seat, to make way for the former. However, NCP spokesperson Nawab Malik said his party isn't surprised at Sujay joining the BJP. "Rajmata Vijaya Raje Scindia was in the BJP while (her son) Madhavrao Scindia was in the Congress. Vasundhara Raje (her daughter) was (a BJP) chief minister of Rajasthan while Jyotiraditya Scindia (Madhavrao's son) is a Congress leader. If Vikhe Patil's son joins the BJP, it should not be looked at differently," he said. Malik further said that as far as the contest in Ahmednagar was concerned, the party would fight with full strength against Sujay. Meanwhile, a Congress source told PTI: "Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil will not resign from the Congress. He will work hard in the upcoming elections for the party." Ahmednagar, about 120 km from Pune, is considered to be the stronghold of the Vikhe Patil family and Sujay chose to contest from it, notwithstanding protests from supporters of BJPs sitting MP, Dilip Gandhi. Fadnavis who announced that Sujay's name was being recommended to the Central Parliamentary Board as a candidate from the Ahmednagar South Lok Sabha seat, said: When Sujay decided to join the BJP, he did not lay down any condition. We in the BJP believe in his capacity and would recommend his name to BJPs central parliamentary committee." Fadnavis said that even though Sujay had to rebel against his family to take the decision, his decision will prove right in due course of time. Youngsters of this country know that development and countrys security can be taken care of Narendra Modiji. Sujay is a representative of that youth. His entry in our party will make us stronger in Ahmednagar, Fadnavis said adding that he was happy "a young and educated leader was joining the BJP." He also stated that he was "confident" that Sujay's name will be "approved" for the parliamentary board. I am confident that Sujay will win the seat with record votes, said Fadnavis. Meanwhile, Pawar expressed dismay at the development and said that he can't "fulfil demands of children from other families". I can look after my house. How can I fulfil the demands of children from other families? If anyone is changing the route and think that the journey will be smooth, then I have nothing but well wishes, Pawar told reporters on Tuesday evening. Earlier, on Monday when Pawar had announced his decision to not contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, he had also clarified that there was no question of NCP giving the Ahmednagar seat to Congress. He even recounted the old days of his rivalry with Balasaheb Vikhe Patil. Seat-sharing talks between the Congress and the NCP were disrupted several times in the past over the Ahmednagar seat as Sujay was keen to contest from there. As per the seat sharing formula, the seat is with the NCP and it was unwilling to part with it. The Hindu reported that Sujay was even offered to contest the polls from an NCP ticket. However, he chose to hold a meeting with BJP's Girish Mahajan which led to speculations of him joining the ruling party. In fact, according to The Hindu's report, in a last-ditch effort to pursue the Congress leadership to pressurise the NCP and in a bid to stop his son joining the BJP, Radhakrishna on Monday night had held meetings with Congress president Rahul Gandhi and then with UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi as well. But nothing materialised. In February, Maharashtra Congress chief Ashok Chavan had said that Radhakrishna should convince his son. "Sujay should know that his request is under the Congress party's consideration. I have also suggested to his father that he should convince his son (to back down if necessary)," he was quoted as saying by PTI. However, on Tuesday Sujay said: I didnt want to see my father begging for my candidature. I am an independent professional. I have the freedom to decide my life and career My supporters put pressure on me to take such a decision. Meanwhile, according to reports, Radhakrishna could probably resign from his post soon. Members of the Vikhe Patil family have been turncoats. The late Balasaheb Vikhe Patil had won the Lok Sabha elections in 1998 on Shiv Senas ticket and even became Minister of State for Finance and later Union Minister for Heavy Industries in the NDA government, before returning to Congress in 2004. Radhakrishna too was a minister in the Shiv Sena government and in the BJP from 1995 to 1999. Thereafter, he was the Minister of Educational and Transportation in the government of Ashok Chavan and re-elected as the minister of Agriculture and Marketing in the Prithviraj Chavan government. Maharashtra will vote in four phases in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections on 11, 18, 23 and 29 April. With inputs from PTI In yet another embarrassment for the Congress party in Maharashtra, its MLA from Wadala-Naigaon constituency Kalidas Kolambkar is set to join the BJP Mumbai: In yet another embarrassment for the Congress party in Maharashtra, its MLA from Wadala-Naigaon constituency Kalidas Kolambkar is set to join the BJP. I worked in the Congress party for 10 years. But they stopped a lot of development work in my constituency. I support those who work, Kolambkar told ANI here. He shared that two of his demands have already been fulfilled by the BJP, but one demand of police housing project in his area is still pending as model code of conduct for Lok Sabha polls is already in effect. Kolambkar has replaced the Congress signboard outside his office and has put up Fadnavis portrait there. "After Devendra Fadnavis took over as Chief Minister, I told him about the work needed to be done in my area and he completed those works. Then, whose photo should I put? Those who work or those who don't?" said Kolambkar. A senior Congress leader, Kolambkar is a seven-time MLA. Before joining Congress, he was with the Shiv Sena. Maharashtra's Cabinet Minister Girish Mahajan has also confirmed about Kolambkar being in touch with BJP leaders. In response to a question, Mahajan told ANI, Not only him, but several others are also in touch with us. You will come to know about them shortly." Mahajan made the remark soon after Sujay Vikhe Patil joined BJP on Tuesday. According to a source close to Fadnavis, Kolambkar will join BJP in a week's time. In a blow to the prospects of an opposition grand alliance to take on the ruling BJP in the Lok Sabha polls, BSP chief Mayawati Tuesday said her party will not have an election tie-up with the Congress in any state Lucknow/New Delhi: In a blow to the prospects of an opposition grand alliance to take on the ruling BJP in the Lok Sabha polls, BSP chief Mayawati Tuesday said her party will not have an election tie-up with the Congress in any state. Mayawati's statement drew a sharp retort from the Congress, with its Uttar Pradesh unit spokesperson saying, We don't need her. In a statement, Mayawati said, "It is being made clear again that the Bahujan Samaj Party will not have any electoral alliance with the Congress in any state." Referring to her party's pre-poll alliance with Akhilesh Yadav's Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati said it is based on "mutual respect" and "honest intentions". "The SP-BSP alliance is perfect enough to defeat the BJP, especially in Uttar Pradesh," she said. The SP and the BSP have stitched together an alliance in Uttar Pradesh, keeping the Congress out, though the two parties decided not to field any candidates in Rae Bareli and Amethi, the traditional strongholds of the grand old party. Of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state, the Samajwadi Party will contest 37 and the BSP 38, leaving three for the Ajit Singh-led Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and two for Sonia Gandhi (Rae Bareli) and Rahul Gandhi (Amethi). Mayawati's remarks came on a day when the highest policy-making body of the Congress the Congress Working Committee (CWC) met in Ahmedabad, led by party president Rahul Gandhi and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi. UP Congress spokesperson Rajiv Bakshi said it was not up to Mayawati to decide whether the Congress wanted to enter an alliance with her party. She doesn't have even a single seat in Parliament. How can she decide if the Congress has to come on board or not?" "We are fighting the election alone and do not want an alliance. We don't need her, he told PTI. Instead of speaking about the Congress, she needs to first work on her coalition with the SP, which is breaking up. Wait for 15 to 20 days and see how things unfold," he said. He added there was no discussion on a coalition with the BSP at any level in the Congress. "They are desperate," he said, referring to Mayawati's party. Asked about Mayawati's remarks, Congress party's west UP in-charge Jyotiraditya Scindia told a TV news channel, "We respect the views of every party. This view also we respect." Earlier, he has said the Congress will fight the general election in Uttar Pradesh on its own strength, arguing that the path of his party may be different from that of the SP and the BSP but their objective is the same. The BSP chief's statement comes on a day the Income Tax Department searched a dozen properties in Delhi and Lucknow linked to retired IAS office Net Ram, who served in top positions during Mayawati's tenure as UP chief minister, in connection with an alleged tax evasion case. Addressing party leaders from various states, excluding Uttar Pradesh, in New Delhi, Mayawati has said while several parties are "eager" for an alliance, the BSP would not do anything for mere electoral gains as it could "harm the BSP movement". The Lok Sabha polls will pit the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) against a combination of opposition parties including the Congress, the Left and several regional forces that are still trying to forge a grand alliance to minimise the division of votes. The seven-phase Lok Sabha elections begin on 11 April. Reuters Germany will define its own security standards for a new 5G mobile network, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday, after Washington said it would scale back data-sharing with Berlin if Chinas Huawei was allowed to participate. Merkels conservatives chafed at what some saw as a threat by Washington, although Germanys transatlantic coordinator emphasized that Berlin shared US concerns about Huaweis ability to meet high security standards for the new network. The pushback is the latest incident in which US Ambassador Richard Grenell has faced criticism for his handling of US-German disagreements over trade, a 2015 Iran nuclear deal and the Russian-led Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Grenell last week warned German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier in a letter that security concerns could throttle US intelligence sharing with Berlin if Huawei got a role in Germanys 5G next-generation mobile infrastructure. Merkel told reporters the German government was keenly focused on security of digital networks, including the 5G mobile infrastructure, but Berlin would keep its own counsel. Security, particularly when it comes to the expansion of the 5G network, but also elsewhere in the digital area, is a very important concern for the German government, so we are defining our standards for ourselves, Merkel said. She said the German government would discuss its concerns with its partners in Europe, as well as the appropriate offices in the United States. Merkels transatlantic coordinator, Peter Beyer, cautioned against reading too much into the reaction to Grenells letter, noting that Berlin and Washington agreed on the underlying security issues. There are justified doubts about whether a company that is close to the Chinese government can credibly achieve these security standards, which are imperative for such highly sensitive applications, he said in a statement. Michael Grosse-Broemer, a conservative leader in parliament, said Germany was competent to address its own security, adding, There is no need for pointers from the US ambassador. Grosse-Broemer said if problems arose, Merkel could always speak directly with US President Donald Trump. Juergen Hardt, foreign policy spokesman for the conservatives, told Der Spiegel magazine there was no connection between the 5G licenses and US-German intelligence sharing, which was well established and based on mutual interests. Grenell sparked controversy in Germany when he warned German firms to start closing down their business operations in Iran. His threat to slap sanctions on German firms involved in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline also proved counterproductive, shutting down potential critics of the project as German politicians are reluctant to be seen as bowing to US pressure, experts said. Political smoothness is not his thing and hes proud of that. You could say he was the most undiplomatic diplomat Washington ever had here, said Ruediger Lentz, executive director the Aspen Institute Germany. tech2 News Staff Google is working on an important update for the Gboard that is expected to be released soon. Google is adding the ability for AI-powered offline dictation to the app, which will allow users to dictate emails and texts without worrying about whether theyre connected to the internet. Unfortunately, though, Google is initially rolling out this update only in American English on Gboard and exclusively on Pixel phones. On its Google AI blog, the company explains, that the offline AI dictation will be faster and more reliable. The feature is powered by an end-to-end, all-neural, on-device speech recogniser. It apparently works at the character level, so that as you speak, it outputs words character-by-character. via GIPHY Further, in this new offline model, Google has also slimmed down a part of the system known as the decoder graph". In the earlier model (or the existing one for us), the decoder graph was 2 GB in size, far too big for on-device processing. The new version, by comparison, is just 80 MB, which 25 times smaller. Google says the feature will soon be available in more languages and will be supported on more devices. tech2 News Staff We are sensing that 2019 will be crazier than last year when it comes to launches. We are only three months into the year and we have already seen smartphone launches from Samsung, Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi, Realme, and there are so many more to follow. Next on the line is, once again. Redmi, which has scheduled an event on 18 March in China. While Redmi was until now believed to be unveiling a new smartphone, a recent teaser by the company (via MyDrivers) on Weibo suggests that it may launch more than just a smartphone after all. GizmoChina roughly translates the Redmi post on Weibo as "Who said Redmi is just a mobile phone?". While it's hard to tell what Xiaomi is launching from the teaser, we can spot what looks like a security camera, a tube that could belong to a vacuum cleaner, ear tips for a set of earphones and a few other odds and ends. Your guess is as good as ours. Simultaneously, Redmi General Manager Lu Weibing also shared an image of the retail box of the Redmi 7 on his Weibo page recently. While the teaser does not reveal any details about the smartphone, from what we know so far, the Redmi 7 will be powered by the Snapdragon 632 processor. It will feature a 6.26-inch display with a waterdrop notch, a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, dual rear cameras, a 4,000 mAh battery, and triple SIM support. tech2 News Staff Xiaomi's highly anticipated Redmi Note 7 series comprising of the Redmi Note 7 and the Note 7 Pro was launched last week. After the Note 7 sold out in just a couple of minutes at its first sale, it is now Note 7 Pro's turn to test the water. The Note 7 Pro will go on sale at 12.00 pm today on Mi.com and Flipkart. The Redmi Note 7 Pro comes at a starting price of Rs 13,999 for the base variant of 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage, and goes up to Rs 16,999 for the 6 GB RAM and 128 GB storage variant. While flash sales have been done away with, stocks of the device usually go out in mere minutes as was witnessed during the Note 7 launch. We recommend you login to either of the websites at 11.55 am to have the maximum chance of getting your hands on the device. To read our full review of the Redmi Note 7 Pro, click here. Redmi Note 7 Pro Specifications The Redmi Note 7 Pro is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 675 Octa-core processor making it the first device with this chipset in India. The phone gets a 6.3-inch LTPS LCD display with 1080 x 2340 pixels and an aspect ratio of 19.5:9. In the camera department, the phone has a 48 MP f/1.8 primary lens on the back aided by a 5 MP f/2.4 secondary lens. The phone is fueled by a 4,000 mAh battery pack which is claimed to offer 2 days of battery backup. Also, Redmi Note 7 Pro is the first Redmi Note device to offer a type-C port and it also supports Qualcomm Quick Charge 4 out of the box. Reuters Uber Technologies Inc has agreed to pay $20 million to settle a lawsuit brought by drivers nearly six years ago, according to court filings, resolving one of its many legal battles with drivers ahead of a hotly anticipated initial public offering this year. Drivers for the ride-hailing company argued in the lawsuit they are employees, not independent contractors, as Uber has classified them, and therefore entitled to benefits and reimbursement for their expenses. The settlement amount is one-fifth of the $100 million settlement offer Uber proposed in 2016 to resolve the case, which US District Judge Edward Chen at the time rejected as an inadequate amount. The new settlement, which still must be approved by Chen, was filed in federal court in San Francisco late Monday night. The lawsuit is central to a widely held debate over so-called gig-economy workers, the workforce assigned by technology platforms such as food-delivery and ride-hailing services. Gig-economy workers have often argued they should receive better pay and benefits, and be treated as employees. A California Supreme Court ruling last year made it much more difficult for companies like Uber to argue that their drivers are independent contractors, which poses a threat to Uber's business model. The Uber settlement covers drivers in California and Massachusetts who have driven for Uber from August 2009 through February this year, according to the filing. The class is much smaller than in 2016 when the initial settlement offer was made. Following Chen's rejection of that offer, Uber won an appeals court ruling that upheld the company's arbitration agreements as largely valid and enforceable. That forced most drivers into arbitration, and reduced the class size involved in the class-action lawsuit. Reuters Barking orders at a digital device that responds in a womans voice can reinforce sexist stereotypes, according to academics and creatives who launched the first gender-neutral artificial intelligence voice on Monday. Responding to such concerns, a Denmark-based team has created a voice nicknamed Q that was presented at the South by Southwest (SXSW) creative festival in Texas and is designed to be perceived as neither male or female. There is no reason that a voice has to be gendered, said Julie Carpenter, a research fellow in the ethics and emerging sciences group at California State Polytechnic University, who advised the project Q team. Emerging technology is being designed to rely on these ancient stereotypes. Leading digital assistants such as Apples Siri, the Amazon Alexa and Microsofts Cortana are generally presented as female, Ms. Carpenter said. All three have feminine names and mostly offer a womans voice as the default setting, although Siri is set up to sound male in some languages. People seem to have a preference for female voices when the role of the AI is more supportive and to assist or help someone, while they associate male voices with an authoritative tone or an area of expertise, Carpenter said. Apple and Amazon were not available for comment. A Microsoft spokeswoman said they had researched voice options for Cortana and found a female voice best supports our goal of creating a digital assistant. A team at Vice Medias Virtue creative agency came up with the concept for the Q voice to highlight concerns over gendered technology and offer an alternative. It isnt easy to create a genderless voice, said Nis Norgaard, a sound designer at Thirty Sounds Good studio, who produced Q. He used research which found male voices are usually pitched between 85 to 180 hertz (Hz) and womens are typically between 140 to 255 Hz to identify a potential neutral range where the two overlapped. The team working on Q recorded the voices of 22 transgender and non-binary people as a basis for the voice. tech2 News Staff The Royal Bengal tigers could go extinct in Bangladesh's Sundarbans over the next 50 years, due to a combination of climate change and rising sea levels that are threatening their last remaining habitats. The bold new claim was made in a new study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment by a team of researchers from Bangladesh and Australia. The Sundarbans are the worlds single-largest mangrove ecosystem still in existence, spanning a vast area of more than 6,000 sq km. This is "the last stronghold" of the Bengal tiger, which is particularly adapted to living in the swampy Sunderbans delta. Currently, almost 70 percent of the Sundarbans are within a metre of sea level. Rising water levels are a significant threat to low-lying areas, and the tiger habitats of Sundarbans are particularly vulnerable to it. Moreover, some of the other effects of climate change changing weather patterns, heat waves and extreme weather events, most notably are likely to have an even greater impact, according to the new study. The researchers used detailed simulation models for the two scenarios of climate change that were developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), along with projected sea level rise in the region to arrive at an assessment about how sustainable the region is for its tigers. "While this is preliminary analysis, we can conclude that the largest population of Bengal tigers is in an area where a combination of actors including climate change and human encroachment could both contribute to the decimation of habitats," William Laurence, co-author of the study from James Cook University, told IndiaSpend. With both temperatures and sea levels on the rise, the amount of salinated seawater flowing into land can change the soil's composition, making it harder for some plants to grow. With choices of available food on the decline, Sunderbans' population of spotted-deer, the foremost prey of the Bengal tiger, will be affected severely as the leaves and trees they feed on gradually disappear. With natural resources on the decline, tigers are also more likely to stray into settlements with people, on the lookout for food. Tiger-human conflict is also predicted to increase in this scenario, according to the study. The mangroves at the heart of the Sundarbans, themselves, are critically endangered, as per the IUCN Red List. Mangroves are trees that are salt tolerant, with roots that submerged under water and act as a nursery and nest for marine life. These young ones eventually migrate to reefs, which many of these creatures call home for a significant period of their lives. The collective ecosystem of mangroves, seagrass and corals are of huge importance to ocean health for many reasons they trap and produce food for marine life, protect coasts from the impact of storms, help filter out pollutants in run-off water from land, and make for habitats to turtles, seahorses, manatees, fish and foraging sea life like urchins and sea cucumbers. As for the Bengal tigers, researchers believe the population could still survive in the region if conservation of tigers and the local ecosystem is made a priority. The study calls on the government of Bangladesh to make accommodations designate larger areas for tiger conservation, make more corridors for tigers to move around safely, and remain vigilant about poaching and hunting in the area to avoid any further decline in their population. While the study claims that tigers could be wiped out from the Sunderbans in 50 years, not all experts share the same opinion. Sugata Hazra, an oceanographer at Jadavpur University, Kolkata says that she doesnt subscribe to the same "doomsday view". "When we conducted our 2016 study, we accounted for a 'sediment attrition rate', since mangroves are also building land in the area as they attract sediment," Hazra told Indiaspend. After they adjusted the sea level rise after sedimentation, the land loss was roughly 17 percent. The Sunderbans Tiger Reserve was found to be home to at least 103 tigers in the 2013 census. Of its entire land area, around 40 percent an area the size of Goa falls under West Bengal. Some conservationists believe that this division of Sunderbans (as well its tiger population) between efforts from both, the Bangladeshi and Indian side, is a hindrance. "Tigers can cross easily between India and Bangladesh so the tiger population is not a separate one; they live in a trans-national ecosystem," Hazra told Indiaspend. An approach with closer cooperation on sharing the forest resources, tiger habitat and upkeep of freshwater supply in the area is important, she adds. But any big effort needs time, and there's one thing that the study and Professor Hazra are in agreement about: the fight against habitat loss in the Sunderbans needs to begin immediately. It could take 20 years or more for these efforts to even begin showing results, but there won't be a forest or tigers to save in 50 years if action isn't taken soon. The Associated Press A British-led scientific mission to document changes taking place beneath the Indian Ocean has broadcast its first live, television-quality video transmission from a two-person submersible. Monsoon storms and fierce underwater currents continued to present a challenge at greater depths as scientific work began in earnest on Tuesday off the Seychelles. The Associated Press has successfully broadcast the first multi-camera live signal in full broadcast quality from manned submersibles using optical video transmission techniques, in which the pictures transmit through the waves using the blue region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Previous real-time video transmissions from the worlds deep oceans were livestreams sent from remotely operated unmanned subsea vehicles, with the video moving via fixed fiber optic cable. The first transmission came from 60 meters (200 feet) down. Previous deep-sea livestreams cataloguing the worlds oceans have been via fiber-optic cable. The new broadcast uses cutting-edge wireless technology, sending video optically through the waves. The Associated Press is the only news agency working with British scientists from the Nekton research team on its deep-sea mission that aims to unlock the secrets of the Indian Ocean, one of the worlds least explored areas. The multi-national team of scientists is gathering data to help policy-makers frame protection and conservation measures. Nekton Mission director Oliver Steeds said the experience battling the waves underlines the need to expand scientific knowledge of the waters off the island nation, which the team is there to do. The problem is, when it comes to this place, when it came to the currents, the last current data that was gathered before we came here was in 1882, he said. Its part of the challenge. This is exploration. The day of celebration was cut short when an accident severed the cable of a key piece of equipment, leaving it on the sea bed off the tiny island of Alphonse. It wasnt known what cut the cable of the Remotely Operated Vehicle, or ROV, though it may have been the ships propeller. The camera-carrying ROV is a vital image-gathering tool that can go deeper than the submersibles. It wasnt clear what impact the accident will have on the teams work. The two submersibles will mount a retrieval operation on Wednesday. AP video coverage will include exploring the depths of up to 300 meters off the Seychelles in two-person submarines, the search for submerged mountain ranges and previously undiscovered marine life, a behind-the-scenes look at life on board, interviews with researchers and aerial footage of the mission. The seven-week expedition is expected to run until April 19. Reuters Toyota Motor Corp, one of the worlds largest automakers, and the Japanese space agency said on Tuesday they had agreed to cooperate in developing a manned lunar rover that runs on fuel cell technologies. Although Japan has no plan currently to make a manned rocket that could send people into space, the rover could be a major contribution to an international space probe program in the future, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said. The rover "will be an important element supporting human lunar exploration, which we envision will take place in the 2030s", JAXA Vice President Koichi Wakata told a symposium in Tokyo. "We aim to launch such a rover into space in 2029." The rover is still in the conceptual stage, but an illustration in the news release showed a six-wheel vehicle that somewhat resembled an armored personnel carrier. A spokesman for Toyota, which plans to ramp up fuel-cell cars as a zero-emission alternative to gasoline vehicles, said the project would give the company a chance to test its technologies in the moons harsh environment and improve them. Toyota Executive Vice President Shigeki Terashi stressed the excitement that comes with taking part in a space project. "As an engineer, there is no greater joy than being able to participate in a lunar project by way of Toyotas car-making," Terashi told the symposium. "Being allowed to be a member of 'Team Japan', we would like to take up the challenge of space," he said. By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - A leading researcher on China's ethnic policies said on Wednesday that an estimated 1.5 million Uighurs and other Muslims could be held in so-called re-education centres in Xinjiang region, up from his earlier figure of 1 million. China has faced growing international opprobrium for what it says are vocational training centres in Xinjiang, a vast region bordering central Asia that is home to millions of ethnic minority Muslims By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - A leading researcher on China's ethnic policies said on Wednesday that an estimated 1.5 million Uighurs and other Muslims could be held in so-called re-education centres in Xinjiang region, up from his earlier figure of 1 million. China has faced growing international opprobrium for what it says are vocational training centres in Xinjiang, a vast region bordering central Asia that is home to millions of ethnic minority Muslims. Beijing has said the measures are needed to stem the threat of Islamist extremism. The governor of Xinjiang, Shohrat Zakir, said on Tuesday that China is running boarding schools not concentration camps or re-education camps in the remote region. Adrian Zenz, an independent German researcher, said that his new estimate was based on satellite images, public spending on detention facilities and witness accounts of overcrowded facilities and missing family members. "Although it is speculative it seems appropriate to estimate that up to 1.5 million ethnic minorities - equivalent to just under 1 in 6 adult members of a predominantly Muslim minority group in Xinjiang - are or have been interned in any of these detention, internment and re-education facilities, excluding formal prisons," Zenz said at an event organised by the U.S. mission in Geneva, home of United Nations human rights bodies. "The Chinese state's present attempt to eradicate independent and free expressions of the distinct ethnic and religious identities in Xinjiang is nothing less than a systematic campaign of cultural genocide and should be treated as such," Zenz added. The U.S. State Department on Wednesday sharply criticised human rights violations in China, saying the sort of abuses it had inflicted on its Muslim minorities had not been seen "since the 1930s". Omir Bekali, a Kazakh Uighur, told a panel at the event that he had been tortured by Xinjiang police and held in a camp for six months in a small room with 40 people. "We had to applaud the Communist Party, sing songs about (Chinese leader) Xi Jinping and say thanks for the government. We had no right to talk," he said. A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers complained to the Trump administration this week that its response to rights abuses against China's Muslim minority was inadequate, months after it said it was looking into imposing sanctions. At the Geneva event, U.S. ambassador Kelley Currie, of the State Department's office of global criminal justice, was asked about imposing such sanctions on China. "We are always looking at all of the mechanisms and the tools that we have available to us to identify those who are responsible for serious and gross human rights abuses and to ensure that they don't benefit from opportunities to travel to the United States and that we don't give them access to the U.S. financial system," she told reporters, declining to be specific. (Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Peter Graff) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. On the issue of Masood Azhar's UNSC listing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said, 'I want to say that China always adopts a responsible attitude, engage in consultations with various parties and properly deal with this issue.' Beijing: Hours before the UN Security Council is to take up a resolution on listing Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, China on Wednesday hinted that it may once again block the move, saying only "the solution that is acceptable to all sides" is conducive to resolve the issue. The fate of the proposal to designate Pakistan-based Azhar as a global terrorist by the UN Security Council will be known in less than 24 hours when the deadline to raise objections to the bid expires. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, UK and the US on 27 February. "I could reiterate that China will continue to adopt responsible attitude and participate in the deliberations in the UNSC 1267 Committee," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing in Beijing. China, a veto-wielding member of the UNSC, has blocked the move by India and other member nations three times in the past to designate Azhar. China has been insisting that the solution should be acceptable to all. Asked to clarify whether the issue has been listed for discussion for 13 March and China is in talks with all the parties concerned, Lu said, "First I want to clarify that I don't recall saying anything about the deadline about the UNSC committee and other UN subsidiary bodies." On the issue of listing Azhar, he said, "I want to say that China always adopts a responsible attitude, engage in consultations with various parties and properly deal with this issue." "The discussions, I want to say must follow the rules and procedures of the relevant bodies and only the solution that is acceptable to all sides is conducive for resolving the issue," he said. Recently, China's Vice Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou travelled to Pakistan and held talks with Prime Minister Imran Khan, Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa and other officials. India on Saturday said all UNSC members were aware about the JeM training camps and the presence of terror group's chief in Pakistan, and urged them to designate him as a global terrorist. The JeM, headed by the 50-year-old Azhar, carried out many terror strikes in India and was involved in the attack on Parliament, the Pathankot air force base, army camps in Jammu and Uri. It also claimed responsibility for the 14 February Pulwama suicide attack which left at least 40 CRPF personnel dead. Kashmiri political activists and intellectuals have strongly criticised Pakistan for its duplicity on Kashmir during the 40th Session of United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) at Geneva on Tuesday. Geneva: Kashmiri political activists and intellectuals have strongly criticised Pakistan for its duplicity on Kashmir during the 40th Session of United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) at Geneva on Tuesday. Junaid Qureshi, a Kashmiri and director of the European Foundation of South Asian Studies (EFSAS) lambasted Pakistan for becoming a broker to China. He said, Firstly, Pakistan invaded Jammu and Kashmir in 1947. Since then, it has been an Occupier - And now, it is a broker, as it is negotiating the sale of Gilgit Baltistan to Beijing. In collaboration with China, Pakistans attempts to change the status of Gilgit Baltistan have increased exponentially, as the region is vital for the construction of the illegal China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). He added, The Pakistani Supreme Court, in its verdict of 17 January 2019, rightly acknowledged that Gilgit Baltistan is a disputed territory and its status cannot be changed. However, the said disputed status of this integral part of Jammu and Kashmir, strangely enough, did not prevent the same Supreme Court from extending its own jurisdiction over the region." Pakistan has forcibly divided Jammu and Kashmir while it continues fomenting terrorism and keeps deceiving the world by manifesting itself as a self-styled protector of the rights of the people of Jammu and Kashmir for over seven decades, said Qureshi. Junaid added, "The people of Jammu and Kashmir fear that Pakistans sheer cunningness and utter hypocrisy will keep prevailing at the expense of my generation and coming generations. Unless the UN intervenes and proves us wrong." Activists from Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) also highlighted the issue of gross human rights violations and the mushrooming of terror camps in the region. Sardar Shaukat Ali Kashmiri, the chairman of United Kashmir Peoples National Party told the UNHRC that Pakistan has been using their land as launching pad to orchestrate terror activities and destruction in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere in the region. He said, We are very much concerned about the growing menace of terrorism from Pakistan and its implications on regional and international peace. Kashmiri also raised other issues concerning the people of PoK and Gilgit Baltistan. Pakistan has violated international law as well as United Nations resolutions and created an unfair consolidation in its peripheries. They have constructed many dams in the disputed territories beyond its mandate and deprived millions of Pakistan of basic needs, the diversion of Neelam, Jhelum rivers have created drastic environmental effects in life and livelihood of the people as well as on natural habitat of the region under its illegal control, Kashmiri told the UNHRC. Jamil Maqsood, a political activist from PoK, who now lives in Brussels, told the UNHRC about Islamabad's deliberate attempts to restrict him from travelling back home by blocking his Pakistani passport. Jamil said, Pakistani authorities have restricted my travel back home in so-called Azad Kashmir by blocking my Pakistani passport, since 30th of October 2017 and an online request for the renewal of the said document has not been responded since 9th January 2019 respectively. He further stated that Pakistani authorities have been using these tactics to press the voices at such prestigious forums. "I, request to the Council to take serious heed to human rights violation in so-called Azad Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan. Im not the only victim of such Pakistani policies in recent years. However, I request to the Council to formulate a mechanism of issuing UN travel documents to the people of Pakistani peripheries, so they could permanently get rid of the repugnant attitude of the Pakistani state," he asserted. By Emma Farge HAMILTON (Reuters) - Bermuda's Premier David Burt on Tuesday called the European Union's decision to put the British overseas territory on a list of global tax havens 'a setback' but said he was confident it would soon be reversed. 'The news from Brussels this morning is a setback for Bermuda,' a grave-faced Burt told local journalists at a news conference, flanked by business leaders. 'Bermuda is compliant and we are confident that within a matter of weeks that will be accepted by EU member states and Bermuda will be removed from this list,' he added By Emma Farge HAMILTON (Reuters) - Bermuda's Premier David Burt on Tuesday called the European Union's decision to put the British overseas territory on a list of global tax havens "a setback" but said he was confident it would soon be reversed. "The news from Brussels this morning is a setback for Bermuda," a grave-faced Burt told local journalists at a news conference, flanked by business leaders. "Bermuda is compliant and we are confident that within a matter of weeks that will be accepted by EU member states and Bermuda will be removed from this list," he added. The 28-nation EU set up the so-called blacklist in December 2017 after revelations of widespread tax avoidance schemes used by corporations and wealthy individuals to lower tax bills. EU governments adopted a broadened blacklist of tax havens on Tuesday, adding 10 jurisdictions to the updated list. They are: Bermuda, the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba, Barbados, Belize, Fiji, the Marshall Islands, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Vanuatu and Dominica. Blacklisted jurisdictions face reputational damage and stricter controls on their financial transactions with the EU, although no EU sanctions have yet been agreed by European states. In an effort to meet an EU deadline, the self-governing island passed legislation in December that obliges companies domiciled in Bermuda to have a "substantial economic presence," granting some firms a grace period for implementation. While Britain had pushed other EU states not to include Bermuda on the list, it lifted its objections after the European Commission argued that the island has "been playing games" to dodge EU requirements, according to minutes of a meeting of EU envoys on the matter. Burt rejected that assertion, saying the impression arose due to a "technical omission which was rectified in good time." Jurisdictions are added to the tax haven blacklist if they have shortfalls in their tax rules that could favour tax evasion in other states. They are removed from the blacklist if they commit to reforms by set deadlines. Bermuda was required to change its tax rules by the end of February, but added new loopholes in revised legislation and did not provide a final text by the deadline, according to the commission. Burt denied the deadline was missed and said its legislation was perceived by businesses as more stringent than other jurisdictions. The north Atlantic island, which is also a major reinsurance hub, has far fewer companies on its registry than other British territories like the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands which have more than 100,000 each. But Bermuda made headlines in recent months when documents filed at the Dutch Chamber of Commerce revealed that Google moved 19.9 billion euros ($22.7 billion) through a Dutch shell company to Bermuda in 2017, as part of an arrangement that allows it to reduce its foreign tax bill. Asked whether Bermuda should consider banning Google, owned by Alphabet Inc, Finance Minister Curtis Dickinson said: "We would like to encourage Google to help us through this by establishing a more substantive presence in Bermuda." He added that Bermuda, which has already opened a government office in Brussels, will also send officials to Paris and Berlin in the coming weeks to defend the island's position. (Reporting by Emma Farge; writing by Anthony Esposito; Editing by Tom Brown) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro believes Congress will approve his cornerstone pension reform bill in the first half of this year, local media reported him as saying to journalists at a meeting in Brasilia on Wednesday. Bolsonaro's bill, which will increase the minimum retirement age for men and women and aims to save around 1.2 trillion reais ($314 billion) over the next decade, was presented to Congress on Feb. 20 BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro believes Congress will approve his cornerstone pension reform bill in the first half of this year, local media reported him as saying to journalists at a meeting in Brasilia on Wednesday. Bolsonaro's bill, which will increase the minimum retirement age for men and women and aims to save around 1.2 trillion reais ($314 billion) over the next decade, was presented to Congress on Feb. 20. Bolsonaro said he did not think that approval in both houses in the first half of 2019 was too ambitious. Passage in the Senate would be relatively easy because many senators were aware of the importance of overhauling the pension system and the opposition Workers Party would probably back it too, Globo reported him as saying. Bolsonaro also told journalists that he had personally reached out to lawmakers, Correio Braziliense reported. On Tuesday, Rogerio Marinho, secretary of social security and labor at the Economy Ministry, told Reuters that the bill was still on track for voting in the lower house by the end of May. Marinho also said Bolsonaro's personal support to win over hearts and minds would be critical. "Anything he does will be beneficial, including galvanizing and mobilizing people to get onside with this change that's so necessary for the country," Marinho said. Analysts have said there is significant risk the proposal could be watered down in Congress, with approval unlikely until some time in the second half of 2019. Opponents on the left have said the bill as it stands would hurt poor Brazilians. ($1 = 3.8275 reais) (Reporting by Jamie McGeever, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. By Elizabeth Piper, Kylie MacLellan and William James LONDON (Reuters) - British lawmakers crushed Prime Minister Theresa May's European Union divorce deal on Tuesday, thrusting Britain deeper into crisis and forcing parliament to decide within days whether to back a no-deal Brexit or seek a last-minute delay. Lawmakers voted against May's amended Brexit deal by 391 to 242 as her last-minute talks with EU chiefs on Monday to assuage her critics' concerns ultimately proved fruitless By Elizabeth Piper, Kylie MacLellan and William James LONDON (Reuters) - British lawmakers crushed Prime Minister Theresa May's European Union divorce deal on Tuesday, thrusting Britain deeper into crisis and forcing parliament to decide within days whether to back a no-deal Brexit or seek a last-minute delay. Lawmakers voted against May's amended Brexit deal by 391 to 242 as her last-minute talks with EU chiefs on Monday to assuage her critics' concerns ultimately proved fruitless. The vote puts the world's fifth largest economy in uncharted territory with no obvious way forward; exiting the EU without a deal, delaying the March 29 divorce date, a snap election or even another referendum are all now possible. May might even try a third time to get parliamentary support in the hope that hardline eurosceptic lawmakers in her Conservative Party, the most vocal critics of her withdrawal treaty, might change their minds if it becomes more likely that Britain might stay in the EU after all. While she lost, the margin of defeat was smaller than the record 230-vote loss her deal suffered in January. Lawmakers will now vote at 1900 GMT on Wednesday on whether Britain should quit the world's biggest trading bloc without a deal, a scenario that business leaders warn would bring chaos to markets and supply chains, and other critics say could cause shortages of food and medicines. May said the government would not instruct her own party's lawmakers how to vote, as would normally be the case. An opposition Labour Party spokesman said this meant she had "given up any pretence of leading the country". May's political spokesman said she had not discussed resigning. The prime minister, hoarse after Monday's late-night talks, told lawmakers: "Let me be clear. Voting against leaving without a deal and for an extension does not solve the problems we face." IMPASSE She said parliament was now at an impasse: "Does it wish to revoke Article 50 (announcing intention to leave the EU)? Does it want to hold a second referendum? Or does it want to leave with a deal, but not this deal?" Graham Brady, an influential Conservative lawmaker, said the two most likely scenarios were leaving the EU without a deal "or some kind of endless delay". Andrea Leadsom, who manages government business in parliament, insisted however that "it is still our intention, if at all possible, to leave the EU on March 29 with a good deal". The European Union said the risk of a damaging no-deal Brexit has "increased significantly" but there would be no more negotiations with London on the divorce terms. Sterling, which had earlier in the day fallen by 2 percent to $1.3005, was trading at around $1.3086 shortly after the vote. [GBP/] "One door has closed but other possibilities have opened up and markets are hopeful that Wednesday's vote on a no-deal Brexit will suffer a big defeat," said Timothy Graf, head of macro strategy at State Street Global Advisors in London. Opposition to May's deal among members of the Conservative Party derives from a belief that it does not offer the clean break from the European Union that many voted for. Supporters of Brexit argue that, while a "no-deal" divorce might bring some short-term instability, in the longer term it would allow the United Kingdom to thrive and forge beneficial trade deals across the world. However, parliament is expected firmly to reject a "no-deal" Brexit as well, so lawmakers would then vote again on Thursday - on whether government should request a delay to the leaving date to allow further talks. Both May and the EU have already ruled out any other changes to the deal, struck after two-and-a-half years of tortuous negotiations. "NO THIRD CHANCE" "There will be no third chance," European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Monday. "There will be no further interpretations of the interpretations, no further assurances of the reassurances if the 'meaningful vote' tomorrow fails." The government had been expected to offer parliament the chance to press for a short extension, but announced on Tuesday night that it would be for parliament to decide on the length of the delay that the government would request. This raised the possibility that it might ask to push the exit date past late May, when Britain would have to participate in European Parliament elections - a prospect that both sides have been keen to avoid. A spokesman for European Council President Donald Tusk, representing EU governments, said Britain would have to provide a "credible justification" for any request to delay Brexit. Britons voted by 52-48 percent in 2016 to leave the EU but the decision has not only divided the main parties but also exposed deep rifts in British society, bringing concerns about immigration and globalisation to the fore. Many fear that Brexit will divide the West as it grapples with both the unconventional U.S. presidency of Donald Trump and growing assertiveness from Russia and China, leaving Britain economically weaker and with its security capabilities depleted. Supporters say it allows Britain to control immigration and take advantage of global opportunities, striking new trade deals with the United States and others while still keeping close links to the EU, which, even without Britain, would be a single market of 440 million people. (Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Additional reporting by Michael Holden, Kate Holton, Costas Pitas, Andy Bruce, Alistair Smout; Editing by Giles Elgood and Kevin Liffey) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. By Elizabeth Piper and Kylie MacLellan LONDON (Reuters) - British lawmakers crushingly rejected Prime Minister Theresa May's deal to quit the European Union on Tuesday, thrusting Brexit into turmoil just 17 days before the planned departure date. Lawmakers voted against May's amended Brexit deal by 391 to 242 as her last-minute talks with EU chiefs on Monday to assuage her critics' concerns ultimately proved fruitless. The vote puts the world's fifth largest economy in uncharted territory with no obvious way forward; exiting the EU without a deal, delaying the March 29 divorce date, a snap election or even another referendum are all now possible By Elizabeth Piper and Kylie MacLellan LONDON (Reuters) - British lawmakers crushingly rejected Prime Minister Theresa May's deal to quit the European Union on Tuesday, thrusting Brexit into turmoil just 17 days before the planned departure date. Lawmakers voted against May's amended Brexit deal by 391 to 242 as her last-minute talks with EU chiefs on Monday to assuage her critics' concerns ultimately proved fruitless. The vote puts the world's fifth largest economy in uncharted territory with no obvious way forward; exiting the EU without a deal, delaying the March 29 divorce date, a snap election or even another referendum are all now possible. May might even try a third time to get parliamentary support in the hope that hardline eurosceptic lawmakers in her Conservative Party, the most vocal critics of her withdrawal treaty, might change their minds if it becomes more likely that Britain might stay in the EU after all. While she lost, the margin of defeat was smaller than the record 230-vote loss her deal suffered in January. Lawmakers will now vote on Wednesday on whether Britain should quit the world's biggest trading bloc without a deal, a scenario that business leaders warn would bring chaos to markets and supply chains, and other critics say could cause shortages of food and medicines. May said the government would not instruct her own party's lawmakers how to vote. An opposition Labour Party spokesman said this meant she had "given up any pretence of leading the country". IMPASSE The prime minister, hoarse after Monday's late-night talks, told lawmakers: "Let me be clear. Voting against leaving without a deal and for an extension does not solve the problems we face." She said parliament was now at an impasse: "Does it wish to revoke Article 50 (announcing intention to leave the EU)? Does it want to hold a second referendum? Or does it want to leave with a deal, but not this deal?" Sterling, which had earlier in the day fallen by 2 percent to $1.3005, was trading at around $1.3086 shortly after the vote. [GBP/] Supporters of Brexit argue that, while a "no-deal" divorce might bring some short-term instability, in the longer term it would allow the United Kingdom to thrive and forge beneficial trade deals across the world. However, parliament is expected firmly to reject a "no-deal" Brexit as well, so lawmakers would then vote again on Thursday - on whether government should request a delay to the leaving date to allow further talks. Both May and the EU have already ruled out any other changes to the deal, struck after two-and-a-half years of tortuous negotiations. "NO THIRD CHANCE" "There will be no third chance," European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Monday. "There will be no further interpretations of the interpretations, no further assurances of the reassurances if the 'meaningful vote' tomorrow fails." A spokesman for European Council President Donald Tusk said he regretted the outcome of the vote, which had "significantly increased the likelihood of a 'no-deal' Brexit". He said the EU would expect a credible justification for any request to delay Brexit. Britons voted by 52-48 percent in 2016 to leave the EU but the decision has not only divided the main parties but also exposed deep rifts in British society, bringing concerns about immigration and globalisation to the fore. Many fear that Brexit will divide the West as it grapples with both the unconventional U.S. presidency of Donald Trump and growing assertiveness from Russia and China, leaving Britain economically weaker and with its security capabilities depleted. Supporters say it allows Britain to control immigration and take advantage of global opportunities, striking new trade deals with the United States and others while still keeping close links to the EU, which, even without Britain, would be a single market of 440 million people. (Additional reporting by Michael Holden; Editing by Giles Elgood and Kevin Liffey) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. Two young men wearing hoods and carrying guns, knives and crossbows opened fire at a school in southern Brazil on Wednesday, killing eight people before taking their own lives, authorities said. Suzano: Two young men wearing hoods and carrying guns, knives and crossbows opened fire at a school in southern Brazil on Wednesday, killing eight people before taking their own lives, authorities said. The dead included six students and two teachers, and several other people were hospitalised with injuries, according to Governor Joao Doria, speaking a few blocks from the public school in Suzano, a suburb of Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city. The attackers appeared to be in their early to mid-20s, and authorities don't believe they were former students, the governor said. Doria said the school had been evacuated and police were inspecting what appeared to be possible explosives left by the shooters. "The school is on lockdown," he said. Students gathered outside the school recounted harrowing attacks and seeing several bodies lying in pools of blood. "We were at recess and eating like normal and we heard three pops, then we tried to run to jump over the walls," Rosni Marcelo Grotliwed, a 15-year-old student, told G1 news portal. She said the attackers had guns and knives, and when she ran to the principal's office, she saw many dead people. "My friend was stabbed in the shoulder and my other friend was shot," she said. "I escaped with one friend and went home and then came back to look for another friend." Horacio Pereira Nunes, a retiree whose house is next to the school, said he began hearing shots around 10 am. "Then a lot of kids started running out, all screaming," he said. "It didn't take long until police arrived." The public school, Raul Brasil Professor, has more than 1,600 students from elementary to high school grades, teachers gathered outside said. Latin America's most populous nation has the largest number of annual homicides in the world, but school shootings are rare. In 2011, 12 students were killed by a gunman who roamed the halls of a school in Rio de Janeiro, shooting at them. President Jair Bolsonaro ran on a platform that included promises to crack down on criminals, in part by expanding public access to guns. Soon after being inaugurated 1 January, Bolsonaro issued a decree making it easier for people wanting a gun to buy and possess one. Standing outside the school, Claudio Cabral said he had been trying to reach his nephew, 17-year-old Douglas Mourinho, so far without luck. "He is a smart kid. We heard many students jumped the wall," Cabral said hopefully. "Maybe that's what happened." Boeing stated that the US Federal Aviation Administration is not mandating any further action at this time, and based on the information, it does not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators. As more countries grounded Boeing 737 MAX aircraft involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash, the United States-based aircraft manufacturer said that safety is the company's number one priority and it has full confidence in the security of the flight model. "We understand that regulatory agencies and customers have made decisions that they believe are most appropriate for their home markets. Well continue to engage with them to ensure they have the information needed to have confidence in operating their fleets," Boeing said. Boeing further stated that the US Federal Aviation Administration is not mandating any further action at this time, and based on the information currently available, it does not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators. Boeing Statement on 737 MAX Operation: https://t.co/EL058Iarsg pic.twitter.com/lGQI5zJBfP The Boeing Company (@Boeing) March 12, 2019 Much of the world, including the Asian and Middle Eastern countries besides the entire European Union, grounded the Boeing 737 MAX or banned it from their airspace, leaving the US as one of the few remaining operators of the plane involved in two deadly accidents in five months. Greece's civil aviation agency on Wednesday said it had closed its airspace to Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. "All airports have been ordered to ban flights of the specific model in Greek airspace as of yesterday afternoon," civil aviation agency head Constantinos Lintzerakos told state news agency ANA. Lebanon's civil aviation authority said on Wednesday that it has banned Boeing 737 MAX passenger jets from the country's airspace. The Lebanese authority barred the aircraft from taking off and landing in Lebanon, according to a statement carried by the official National News Agency. Serbia also barred Boeing 737 MAX planes from the country's airspace, a spokesperson told AFP Wednesday, joining a wave of government bans worldwide after a second deadly crash involving the model. The US Federal Aviation Administration is facing mounting criticism for backing the airworthiness of Boeing's 737 MAX jets as the number of countries that have grounded the aircraft grows in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash over the weekend. The rest of the world typically takes its cues from the FAA, long considered the world's gold standard for aircraft safety. Yet other aviation safety regulators, including the European Union, China, Australia and the United Kingdom, have decided not to wait for the FAA to act. The Ethiopian disaster came just five months after the deadly crash of another new Boeing 737 Max 8 operated by Lion Air in Indonesia. With inputs from agencies The rest of the world typically takes it cues from the FAA, long considered the world's gold standard for aircraft safety. Washington: The US Federal Aviation Administration is facing mounting criticism for backing the airworthiness of Boeing's 737 Max jets as the number of countries that have grounded the aircraft grows in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash over the weekend. The rest of the world typically takes it cues from the FAA, long considered the world's gold standard for aircraft safety. Yet other aviation safety regulators, including the European Union, China, Australia and the United Kingdom, have decided not to wait for the FAA to act. The Ethiopian disaster came just five months after the deadly crash of another new Boeing 737 Max 8 operated by Lion Air in Indonesia. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said in a statement Tuesday that he's concerned that international aviation regulators are providing more certainty to the flying public than the FAA. "In the coming days, it is absolutely critical that we get answers as to what caused the devastating crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 and whether there is any connection to what caused the Lion Air accident just five months ago," DeFazio said. The FAA has increasingly become cozy with airplane manufacturers and airlines when it should be more pro-active in safety, said Bill McGee, aviation adviser for Consumer Reports. The magazine and website on Tuesday called on airlines and the FAA to ground the 737 Max planes until an investigation into the cause of the Ethiopian crash is completed to see if it's related to the Lion Air crash in October. "They have not presented any evidence that the problems that we've seen with these two crashes are not problems that could potentially exist here in the US," McGee said. "Increasingly the FAA is relying more and more on what the industry calls electronic surveillance," added McGee, who has written about aviation for nearly two decades. "Not going out and kicking the tires, seeing the work being done, making sure it's being done properly." Former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood also called for the U.S. to ground the 737 Max, just as his agency halted flights of another Boeing plane six years ago because of safety concerns. "These planes need to be inspected before people get on them," LaHood said Tuesday. "The flying public expects somebody in the government to look after safety, and that's DOT's responsibility." LaHood was Department of Transportation secretary in 2013 when the department grounded the Boeing 787 because of overheating lithium-ion battery packs. The planes were idled for less than a month, until Boeing crafted new fire-resistant compartments around the batteries. LaHood said current Secretary Elaine Chao should do the same thing with the Max 8, even if it means overruling the FAA, which has taken no action in the face of the dozens of other countries banning the plane from their skies. "The secretary has the authority to suspend these planes" and require inspections by both FAA and Boeing personnel, he said. "She has the authority to do it no matter what the FAA thinks." But veteran accident investigators defended the FAA, which has said there's no data to link the two crashes. "I don't see the facts to justify what they've done," John Goglia, an independent safety consultant and former member of the National Transportation Safety Board, said of the moves by other countries to stop the Max 8 from flying. "If they have facts, I wish they would share them with the rest of the world so we can protect the air-traveling public." John Cox, president and CEO of the aviation consultancy Safety Operating Systems, said countries that have grounded the Max 8 may have linked the Ethiopian and Indonesian crashes even though investigators had yet to analyze the Ethiopian plane's black boxes. "The FAA is on solid ground so far," said Cox, a former airline pilot and accident investigator. "But politics may overwhelm them if enough members get together and demand the planes be grounded." Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Dianne Feinstein of California already have urged FAA to do just that, signaling that the agency may soon face escalating pressure from Capitol Hill. "My fear is that the FAA is simply trying to save face and avoid acknowledging the safety defect that they failed to find when they certified the plane's safety," said Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. Air safety regulators in at least 40 countries, including the European Union, have either grounded Boeing 737 Max jets or banned them from their airspace after Sunday's deadly crash in Ethiopia. In addition, at least 10 airlines worldwide have stopped flying the planes. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency, which covers 32 countries, announced Tuesday that it would ban the planes from flying in its airspace. Other countries that have either grounded the planes or temporarily banned them include China, the United Kingdom, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Oman, Malaysia and Australia. Airlines that have stopped using the planes include Gol Airlines of Brazil, Cayman Airways, Ethiopian Airways, Jet Airways of India, Aeromexico, Norwegian Air Shuttle, Turkish Airlines, Eastar Jet of South Korea, Smartwings of the Czech Republic and LOT of Poland. Sandy Morris, an aerospace analyst at Jefferies in London, called the string of bans on the Boeing Max jets unprecedented. "It seems like a rebellion against the FAA," Morris said. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lawyers for President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn asked a judge on Tuesday to delay his sentencing in a case that stemmed from an investigation of possible collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election campaign. The lawyers asked Judge Emmet Sullivan for a delay of 90 days while Flynn may need to provide more cooperation in the Russia probe being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The request was made in a joint filing with Mueller, who said he took no position on Flynn's request for a delay. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lawyers for President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn asked a judge on Tuesday to delay his sentencing in a case that stemmed from an investigation of possible collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election campaign. The lawyers asked Judge Emmet Sullivan for a delay of 90 days while Flynn may need to provide more cooperation in the Russia probe being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The request was made in a joint filing with Mueller, who said he took no position on Flynn's request for a delay. (Reporting by Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Sandra Maler) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. By Lamine Chikhi and Hamid Ould Ahmed ALGIERS (Reuters) - Thousands demonstrated in Algeria on Tuesday, demanding immediate political changes a day after ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika abandoned his bid for a fifth term in power but stopped short of stepping down. By Lamine Chikhi and Hamid Ould Ahmed ALGIERS (Reuters) - Thousands demonstrated in Algeria on Tuesday, demanding immediate political changes a day after ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika abandoned his bid for a fifth term in power but stopped short of stepping down. Huge crowds gathered in several cities and Ennahar TV reported workers began a strike that paralysed operations at the Mediterranean port at Bejaia. But in the capital, aside from a few hundred protesters, life carried on normally. Bouteflika, 82, bowed to weeks of mass demonstrations against his 20-year-long rule on Monday and promised a transition to a new leadership. But he postponed an election set for April, meaning he will likely remain in power for some time. Veteran diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi and protest groups are expected to join a conference planning Algeria's future that Bouteflika said should try to finish its work by the end of 2019, government and political sources told Reuters. Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister and U.N. special envoy who is in his 80s, is expected to chair the conference that will oversee the transition, draft a new constitution and set the date for elections, a government source said. While Brahimi is widely respected, he and other people of his generation may not fit the profile of figures who can deliver an energetic Algeria full of fresh ideas. Crowds who came back onto the streets on Tuesday demanded quicker action, reflecting suspicions that the old guard, adept at manipulating opposition groups, might be seeking to weaken and divide the protest movement. "The whole system must disappear immediately. Our battle will continue," 25-year-old student Noureddine Habi said in central Algiers as others chanted: "We want this system to go". HIGH UNEMPLOYMENT Algerians have become disenchanted with Bouteflika and other veterans of the 1954-62 war of independence against France who have dominated a country with high unemployment, poor services and rampant corruption despite its oil and gas. "The government has often encouraged the radicalisation of popular protests in the past as a ploy to divide and rule, and it knows all the moves," wrote North Africa expert Hugh Roberts. More than a quarter of Algerians under 30 are unemployed. "We do not need Bouteflika to decide on behalf of the people," said Ahmed Beddine, a 50-year-old grocer. Algeria's deputy prime minister said Bouteflika's decision was the most important turning point since independence from France, Annahar TV reported. "A competent government will be established, with the confidence of the participants in the national conference, which will supervise the presidential process," said Ramtan Lamamra. Contacts are now underway with war veterans who may take part in the transition, including Djamila Bouhired and Zohra Drif Bitat, two of the most famous guerrilla fighters of the conflict, political sources said. Seen by Algerians as revolutionary heroines, they were part a network of women who carried explosives in a bombing campaign in 1956 that included an attack on the fashionable Milk Bar cafe depicted in the film The Battle of Algiers. Their revolutionary credentials may not be enough to impress restless young Algerians, who are desperate for opportunities and criticise their elderly leaders for dwelling on the past. French President Emmanuel Macron said Bouteflika's statement opened a new chapter and called for a "reasonable duration" to the transition period. "I think it's a sign of maturity. We will do everything to accompany Algeria in this transition with friendship and respect." The United States said it backed the talks going on in Algeria and that it was "closely monitoring" reports elections had been postponed. "We support efforts in Algeria to chart a new path forward based on dialogue that reflects the will of all Algerians and their aspirations for a peaceful and prosperous future," State Department spokesman Robert Palladino told a briefing. Algeria's powerful military is expected to play its traditional behind-the-scenes role during the transition and is currently considering several civilians as candidates for the presidency and other top positions, political sources said. One of them is prominent lawyer and human rights activist Mustafa Bouchachi, who has won a wide Facebook following during the demonstrations. Bouchachi was elected to parliament in 2012 as a member of Algeria's oldest opposition party but resigned less than two years later because he said his efforts to promote reforms in the government were ignored. At the height of the protests, he told young people at a university that Algeria needed an entirely new political system, El Watan newspaper reported. "We need a consensual transition period which will be led by credible people," he said. Many Algerians agree. But some remain doubtful. "Those who have been talking of leaders (from the demonstrations) want to bring you down," activist Fodel Boumala told protesters in Algiers. "There is no leader for now. The real leadership is the people. The top priority right now is to strengthen our protest movement." (Additional reporting by Tareq Amara in Tunis and Nafisa Eltahir in Dubai: writing by Michael Georgy and Aidan Lewis; editing by Andrew Heavens, William Maclean and James Dalgleish) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. By Ellen Francis BAGHOUZ, Syria (Reuters) - Islamic State launched two counter-attacks on U.S.-backed fighters besieging their final shred of territory in eastern Syria on Wednesday but were beaten back without any progress, the Syrian Democratic Forces said. The jihadists, waging a last-ditch battle in Baghouz, a collection of hamlets and farmland near the Iraqi border, dispatched suicide bombers against SDF fighters, who thwarted the attacks, the U.S.-backed force said. By Ellen Francis BAGHOUZ, Syria (Reuters) - Islamic State launched two counter-attacks on U.S.-backed fighters besieging their final shred of territory in eastern Syria on Wednesday but were beaten back without any progress, the Syrian Democratic Forces said. The jihadists, waging a last-ditch battle in Baghouz, a collection of hamlets and farmland near the Iraqi border, dispatched suicide bombers against SDF fighters, who thwarted the attacks, the U.S.-backed force said. Islamic State launched the second counter-attack in the afternoon, "(taking) advantage of smoke and dust over Baghouz", the SDF media office said. "Fighting is still continuing. (Islamic State) made no progress so far and were stopped." Mustafa Bali, head of the SDF media office, said the heavy clashes led to the death of 38 militants including eight suicide bombers while four SDF fighters were killed. There were advances on some points, Bali said. Black smoke mushroomed high over Baghouz as the sounds of gunfire, explosions and planes could be heard in a battle that the SDF has said is as good as over. In parts of Baghouz already under SDF control, dirt roads were littered with the scorched remains of cars, trucks and motorcycles. Many houses had been completely flattened and roads had been cratered by missile strikes. Islamic State's black flag could still be seen painted on walls, while others had been emblazoned with freshly daubed SDF slogans and the words "Down with Daesh", an Arabic acronym for the jihadists. Islamic State (IS) held roughly one third of Syria and Iraq at the zenith of its power in 2014, when its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself "caliph", or leader of all the world's Muslims. Subsequently, IS was steadily beaten back by a range of enemies including the U.S.-led international coalition, suffering its major defeats in 2017 when it lost the Iraqi city of Mosul and its Syrian headquarters at Raqqa. No Islamic State leaders are believed to be in Baghouz, according to a U.S. defence official. U.S. government experts strongly believe Baghdadi is alive and possibly hiding in Iraq. The group is still assessed to remain a potent security threat operating in remote territory in both Syria and Iraq. Bali said SDF forces had bombarded Baghouz heavily overnight before engaging in direct clashes with IS fighters in the pre-dawn hours. Live footage broadcast by Kurdish Ronahi TV overnight showed a series of large blasts lighting up the night sky over Baghouz. SUICIDE ASSAULTS "There were suicide vest attacks by a group of bombers who tried to blow themselves up amidst our forces. Our forces targeted and killed them before they reached our positions," Bali said. The SDF has laid siege to Baghouz for weeks but had repeatedly postponed its final assault to allow thousands of civilians, many of them wives and children of Islamic State fighters, to leave. It resumed the attack on Sunday. The U.S. led aerial coalition campaign to end the militants' last territorial enclave has exacted a heavy human toll with hundreds of casualties among civilians from the heavy aerial bombardment that has razed many villages to the ground, former residents and aid workers say. Around 3,000 IS fighters and their families surrendered to SDF forces in 24 hours, Bali said overnight. Three women and four children belonging to the Yazidi sect, a minority group who were kidnapped and enslaved by IS in 2014, were also freed, he said. Islamic State put out a new propaganda video overnight Monday filmed in recent weeks inside Baghouz, maintaining its claim to leadership of all Muslims and calling on its supporters to keep the faith. "Tomorrow, God willing, we will be in paradise and they will be burning in hell," one of the men interviewed in the video said. Though Islamic State is on the verge of losing its last piece of territory, Syria remains carved up among other parties to its multi-sided conflict: President Bashar al-Assad's government, the Kurdish-led SDF, and anti-government rebels. The war has escalated in recent weeks between the Assad government and insurgents in the northwestern region of Idlib, where Islamist militant group Tahrir al-Sham holds sway. Overnight, government forces rained incendiary bombs on the area, where a full-scale offensive was averted in September by an agreement brokered by Assad's Russian allies and Turkey, which backs his opponents and has forces on the ground. (Reporting by Rodi Said in Deir al-Zor, Ellen Francis in Baghouz and Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman; Writing by Lisa Barrington/Tom Perry; Editing by Mark Heinrich) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. The appeals sentence was handed down in 2017 by an all-female panel but the reasons behind it only emerged when Italy's high court annulled it on 5 March and ordered a retrial Rome: Italy's justice ministry has ordered a preliminary inquiry into an appeals court ruling that overturned a rape verdict on the grounds that the victim was too ugly to be raped. The ruling has sparked outrage in Italy, including a flash mob on Monday outside the Ancona court where protesters shouted "Shame!" and held up signs saying "indignation." The appeals sentence was handed down in 2017 by an all-female panel but the reasons behind it only emerged when Italy's high court annulled it on 5 March and ordered a retrial. The Court of Cassation said on Wednesday its own reasons for ordering the retrial will be issued next month. The Justice Ministry says two Peruvian men convicted in the 2015 assault successfully argued the woman was too "masculine" to be a victim. Pakistan Air Force successfully test-fired a 'smart weapon' with both day and night capability to engage a variety of targets with pinpoint accuracy Islamabad: Amidst tensions with India, Pakistan Air Force has announced successfully test-firing an indigenously developed "smart weapon" from a JF-17 Thunder fighter jet to provide it with a very potent day and night capability to engage a variety of targets with pinpoint accuracy. The PAF also said that experiment marked a great milestone for the country as the weapon has been developed, integrated and qualified solely through indigenous efforts of Pakistani scientists and engineers. "The successful trial has provided JF-17 Thunder with a very potent and assured day and night capability to engage a variety of targets with pinpoint accuracy," the PAF said on Tuesday on the fighter jet jointly manufactured by China and Pakistan. Chief of the Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Mujahid Anwar Khan lauded the efforts of scientists and engineers. He also congratulated the PAF personnel on the achievement of this monumental indigenous capability. "Pakistan is a peace-loving nation but if subjected to aggression by an adversary, we would respond with full force," the PAF statement quoted Anwar as saying. The exact technical details of the weapon test-fired were not shared by the PAF. The JF-17, which was previously referred to as FC-1 Xiaolong, a single-engine multi-role light fighter was being jointly produced by Pakistan with China for several years with engines supplied by Russia. The trial comes amid tensions between India and Pakistan after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammed (JeM) killed 40 CRPF personnel in Kashmir's Pulwama district on 14 February. Amid mounting global outrage, the Indian Air Force carried out a counter-terror operation, hitting the biggest JeM training camp in Balakot, deep inside Pakistan on 26 February. The next day, Pakistan Air Force retaliated and downed a MiG-21 in aerial combat and captured Indian pilot, who was handed over to India on 1 March. A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to an additional three and a half years of prison as she questioned his remorse and criticized him for his crimes and years of lies. That makes seven and one-half years for Manafort, coming on top of the roughly four-year term he received last week in a separate case in Virginia. Washington: A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to an additional three and a half years of prison as she questioned his remorse and criticized him for his crimes and years of lies. That makes seven and one-half years for Manafort, coming on top of the roughly four-year term he received last week in a separate case in Virginia. Adding to his legal woes, Manafort was also charged Wednesday with mortgage fraud, conspiracy and other counts in a new indictment in New York City. The state charges appear at least partly designed to guard against the possibility that he could be pardoned by President Donald Trump and freed early on his federal convictions. The presidential power does not extend to state charges. Before sentencing Manafort in Washington, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson told him, "It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved" in the federal conspiracy charges related to his foreign lobbying work and witness tampering. Manafort asked for mercy, saying the criminal charges against him have "taken everything from me already." He pleaded with the judge not to impose any additional time beyond the sentence he had received last week. "I am sorry for what I have done and all the activities that have gotten us here today," Manafort said in a steady voice as he read from a written statement. "While I cannot undo the past, I will ensure that the future will be very different." The 69-year-old, who arrived in court in a wheelchair, said he was the primary caregiver of his wife and wanted the chance for them to resume their life together. "She needs me and I need her. I ask you to think of this and our need for each other as you deliberate," Manafort said. "This case has taken everything from me already my properties, my cash, my life insurance, my trust accounts for my children and my grandchildren, and more." The hearing was a milestone moment in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election campaign. Manafort was among the first people charged in the investigation, and though the allegations did not relate to his work for Trump, his foreign entanglements and business relationship with a man the U.S. says has ties to Russian intelligence have made him a pivotal figure in the probe. His plea for leniency followed prosecutor Andrew Weissmann's scathing characterization of crimes that the government said spanned more than a decade and continued even while Manafort was awaiting trial. The prosecutor said Manafort took steps to conceal his foreign lobbying work, laundered millions of dollars to fund a lavish lifestyle and then, while on house arrest, coached other witnesses to lie on his behalf. "I believe that is not reflective of someone who has learned a harsh lesson. It is not a reflection of remorse," Weissmann said. "It is evidence that something is wrong with sort of a moral compass, that someone in that position would choose to make that decision at that moment." Defense lawyer Kevin Downing suggested Manafort was being unduly punished because of the "media frenzy" generated by the appointment of a special counsel. "That results in a very harsh process for the defendant," Downing said. Outside court Wednesday, Downing was shouted down by protesters and declined to comment on the new charges against Manafort. Wednesday's sentencing comes in a week of activity for the investigation. Mueller's prosecutors on Tuesday night updated a judge on the status of cooperation provided by one defendant, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and are expected to do the same later in the week for another. By Mike Stone WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Just when it looks like North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may restart his ballistic missile testing program, U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed trimming the missile defense budget, as one set of deterrents is delayed by two years By Mike Stone WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Just when it looks like North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may restart his ballistic missile testing program, U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed trimming the missile defense budget, as one set of deterrents is delayed by two years. The U.S. Missile Defense Agency - charged with developing, testing and fielding a ballistic missile defense system - will delay the expansion of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system by two years because of a delay in the redesign of the Raytheon Co-made "kill vehicle" the system uses. A "kill vehicle" pops off the top of the defending missile above the Earth's atmosphere and seeks out and destroys the attacking missile's warhead. The GMD is a network of radars, anti-ballistic missiles based in Alaska and California, and other equipment designed to protect the United States from intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMS. The expansion of the field of interceptors in Alaska from 44 ground-based interceptors, or GBIs, to 64 had been slated for completion in 2023. But the delay, due to technical issues and not connected to the cut in the agency's budget, now means that the placement of the additional 20 interceptors will not be operational until 2025, the MDA said on Tuesday. "The important thing is to get it right, and if we're going to build more GBI's, we want to put the best kill vehicle on the top of it," said Tom Karako, a missile defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. At the same time, North Korea has been pushing ahead with its nuclear weapons program after a summit meeting between Kim and Trump in Hanoi ended abruptly on Feb. 28 without an agreement on denuclearization. New activity has been detected at a North Korean ICBM plant, South Korean media said on Thursday, as Trump said he would be "very disappointed" if Pyongyang rebuilt a rocket site. In the budget, the Missile Defense Agency, or MDA, saw its appropriation cut by $1 billion to $9.4 billion. Michelle Atkinson, chief financial officer of the MDA, told reporters, "What you are seeing in '20 actually looks like a decrease, but it's really just the declining funding," as the agency comes off recent financial injections. Trump's smaller request comes on the heels of a significant budget boost last year after several North Korean missile tests. The MDA projected a budget of $9.2 billion in 2021, and $9.1 billion in 2022, continuing the trend of declining funding. One Pentagon-wide effort in lasers that could be used to defeat missiles saw investment slow dramatically. After nearly doubling just the MDA's budget for directed energy from $109 million in 2018 to $224 million in 2019, the Pentagon as a whole plans to invest only $235 million in the technology in fiscal 2020. Among other proposals included in a recently published Missile Defense Review is one involving lasers mounted on drones - aimed at stopping missiles just after takeoff in what is called the boost phase. During this portion of the flight the missile is most vulnerable, flying at its slowest speed, easily detected by the heat from its engines and incapable of evading interceptors as it accelerates to break out of the Earth's atmosphere. (Reporting by Mike Stone; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Leslie Adler) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. By Lesley Wroughton WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is preparing to impose 'very significant' Venezuela-related sanctions against financial institutions in the coming days, U.S. special envoy Elliott Abrams said on Tuesday. By Lesley Wroughton WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is preparing to impose "very significant" Venezuela-related sanctions against financial institutions in the coming days, U.S. special envoy Elliott Abrams said on Tuesday. Abrams did not elaborate on the fresh measures but his warning came a day after the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on Russian bank Evrofinance Mosnarbank for helping Venezuelan state oil firm PDVSA evade U.S. financial restrictions. Abrams said Washington was also preparing to withdraw more U.S. visas from Venezuelans with close ties to President Nicolas Maduro. Washington has taken the lead in recognising opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela's rightful president after the 35-year-old Congress chief declared Maduro's 2018 re-election a fraud and announced an interim presidency in January. Most countries in Europe and Latin America have followed suit. Abrams' comments came as Venezuela ordered American diplomats to leave the country within 72 hours. Washington said it had decided to withdraw the remaining diplomats due to deteriorating conditions in Venezuela, which has been plunged into its worst blackout on record. Abrams emphasized that the withdrawal of diplomats was not a change in U.S. policy. "This does not represent any change in U.S. policy toward Venezuela, nor does it represent any reduction in the commitment we have to the people of Venezuela and to their struggle for democracy," he said, adding that the U.S. intended to keep up pressure on Maduro through sanctions. "You will see very soon a significant number of additional visa revocations. You will see in the coming days some very significant additional sanctions," Abrams added. He said the United States was in talks with other countries that could act as its "protecting power" in Venezuela to ensure the safety of the U.S. embassy's premises and provide assistance to Americans in trouble. A "protecting power" is a country that represents another in cases where two countries have broken off diplomatic relations. Washington, for example, has appointed Switzerland as its "protecting power" in Iran. "We are trying to decide on a protecting power," Abrams said. He said the safety of U.S. diplomats was a key factor in the withdrawal decision reached by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in the late hours of Monday night. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton and David Alexander; writing by Doina Chiacu; editing by Bill Trott) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. UN sanctions monitors are investigating Kim Jong-un's luxury purchases of a Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Benz limousines and Lexus four-wheel-drive vehicles rolled out during the North Korean leader's recent international meetings United Nations: UN sanctions monitors are investigating Kim Jong-un's luxury purchases of a Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Benz limousines and Lexus four-wheel-drive vehicles rolled out during the North Korean leader's recent international meetings, the head of the panel said Tuesday. Kim drew the attention of sanctions experts when he turned up at a meeting with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Pyongyang in October in a brand-new Rolls-Royce Phantom limousine. At the Singapore summit with President Donald Trump in June, Kim's entourage was ferried in a fleet of Mercedes-Benz luxury cars, none of which had license plates. And a number of Lexus LX570 all-wheel drive luxury vehicles were used by the North Korean delegation at an inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang in September. "The North Koreans procure what they want. They get the best when they need it," Hugh Griffiths, who for the past five years has been the coordinator of the UN panel of experts investigating sanctions-busting by North Korea, told AFP. The Security Council has barred North Korea from exporting coal and other commodities, curbed deliveries of oil and fuel and restricted banking, among other measures aimed at choking off revenue to Pyongyang's weapons program. The sale of luxury goods including high-end cars, yachts and jewelry to North Korea has been banned since 2013, and the list of lavish items has been extended in subsequent sanctions resolutions. The use of the swanky, expensive cars at summits was seen as a brazen display by Kim of his defiance of international sanctions, at a time when North Korea has appealed for UN help to deal with food shortages. "Violating sanctions is bad behavior and such obvious violations at international events aren't helpful, in my view, for enforcing of sanctions," Griffiths said. "You don't want to make a mockery of the sanctions." The UN panel released a report on Tuesday that detailed highly-sophisticated evasion tactics used by North Korea to circumvent the sweeping sanctions imposed for its nuclear and ballistic missile tests. After providing Rolls-Royce with photos of the Phantom, the company said it appeared to have been produced between 2012 and 2017 at its British plant in Goodwood, the report said. The investigation continues to determine how the Phantom, listed at a price of about USD 450,000 in car trade publications, was shipped to Pyongyang. The fleet of Mercedes-Benz vehicles was sent from a US port in California to Hong Kong at the direction of a Chinese businessman, George Ma, whose company Seajet has ties to North Korea's Air Koryo national airline. Asked about the Lexus vehicles, Toyota told the panel that it had not exported them to North Korea and that the vehicles probably were bought through back channels. Despite the loopholes, Griffiths said the sanctions - the most comprehensive imposed on any country by the Security Council - had put Kim "in a box" and forced him to expend major efforts to circumvent the restrictions. "They are getting around them, but it's not sustainable," said Griffiths, who will be leaving his post next month. One of North Korea's key weapons in battling sanctions is its fleet of vessels, which have been renamed, placed under foreign flags and disguised to avoid detection of illegal cargo. Pyongyang has been able to continue selling banned commodities such as coal and to secure deliveries of fuel through ship-to-ship transfers in international waters, according to the panel's findings. "It's crazy what is happening in international waters now. It's essentially anarchy," said Griffiths. The panel has recommended that governments put pressure on commodity traders, insurers, flag-states and global banks to keep closer watch over vessels used in sanctions-busting. The UNSC on Wednesday will decide on whether or not to ban Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar; here's a list of criteria and process that are followed by the Sanctions Committee during a listing request. The 1267 Sanctions Committee of the United Nations Security Council is likely to take a definitive call on listing Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar in the "ISIL (Da'esh) & Al-Qaida Sanctions List" on Wednesday. The United States of America, the United Kingdom and France had moved the proposal to designate Azhar a "global terrorist" at the UNSC after the 14 February Pulwama terrorist attack, responsibility for which was claimed by the JeM. China, which has blocked such moves by India and other members of the UNSC three times is yet to announce its official stand on the matter, although in veiled statements, it seems to suggest that it is against it. The Sanctions List currently contains the names of 262 individuals and 83 entities. According to the UNSC, member states may at any time submit to the Committee listing requests for inclusion of individuals, groups, undertakings and entities on the Sanctions List. Criteria for listing in ISIL (Da'esh) & Al-Qaida Sanctions List The UNSC has listed out three acts or activities which indicate that an individual, group, undertaking or entity is associated with the Islamic State (also called ISIL or Da'esh) and Al-Qaeda (also spelled as Al-Qaeda: 1. Participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing, or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf of, or in support of; 2. Supplying, selling or transferring arms and related materiel to; 3. Recruiting for; or otherwise supporting acts or activities of, ISIL (Da'esh), Al-Qaida or any cell, affiliate, splinter group or derivative thereof. Masood Azhar has time and again been linked to Al-Qaeda. Guidelines to follow The listing request, however, follows a detailed process and must conform to the relevant Security Council resolutions and Committee Guidelines. The Committee Guidelines (Section 6) set out the process for the submission of listing requests. According to the guidelines, before approaching the Sanctions Committee, an applicant state is advised to "approach the state(s) of residence and/or nationality of the individual or entity concerned to seek additional information". In Masood Azhar's case, the resident state is Pakistan. Information to be provided According to the UNSC, listing requests must contain a detailed statement of case in support of the proposed listing and the specific criteria under which the names of individuals, groups, undertakings and/or entities are being proposed for designation, including: - specific findings and reasoning demonstrating that the listing criteria are met; - details of any connection with a currently listed individual or entity; - information about any other relevant acts or activities of the individual/entity; - the nature of the supporting evidence (for example, intelligence, law enforcement, judicial, media, admissions by subject, etc); and - supporting evidence or documents It is important to note that a listing request for groups, entities or undertaking will not consider listing the members of the said group unless it is explicitly stated in the request. Besides, a listing request should also offer specific information for positive identification of the individual, groups, undertakings or entities. The Sanctions Committee releases these details as a statement upon request, however, a member can prevent certain information from being released by marking it as "confidential" to the Committee. This information is used to develop a narrative summary, which is accessible to everyone after a listing request is approved. Submitting a listing request The submission of listing requests and other listing issues has to be made through approved standard forms for listing, available for download on the "ISIL (Da'esh) & Al-Qaida Sanctions List". There are separate forms for individuals, groups, undertakings and entities, and they all have to be addressed to the Chair of the Committee with a copy to the Secretary of the Committee. Consideration of a request The Committee considers listing requests and reaches its decisions by the consensus of its 15 Members (five permanent members China, France, Russia, UK and the US ten non-permanent members, which currently includes Belgium, Cote dIvoire, Dominican Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Germany, Indonesia, Kuwait, Peru, Poland and South Africa), in accordance with its usual decision-making process as set out in the Committees guidelines. TRIVIA: The non-permanent members are elected for a period of two years. There is a long list of countries who have never been elected as members of the Security Council since 1946. Afghanistan, Bhutan, Switzerland and Israel are in that list. So far, China has blocked India's three attempts to list Masood Azhar in the banned list. It remains to be seen if it will reject the current requests by the US, UK and France. Now, a listing request can be either rejected or accepted. Depending on the outcome, a specific process is followed. When a request is rejected: If a proposal for listing is not approved within the Committees decision-making period of 10 full working days (with exceptions, as the Chairman shall determine emergency and time-sensitive listings) as set out in Section 6 of the Guidelines, the Committee provides feedback to the submitting State on the status of the request. When a request is approved: Once a listing request has been approved, the "ISIL (Da'esh) & Al-Qaida Sanctions List" is updated. Once the name is added to the list, the Committee makes the updated list available on its website, along with a narrative summary of reasons for listing that name. Next, within three working days after adding a name to the list, the Secretariat notifies the Permanent Mission of the country or countries where the individual, group, undertaking or entity is believed to be located and, in the case of individuals, the country of which the person is a national (to the extent this information is known). Also, unless the Committee decides otherwise, any new entry to the "ISIL (Da'esh) & Al-Qaida Sanctions List" is transmitted to Interpol to request, where feasible, the issuance of an Interpol-United Nations Security Council Special Notice. Implementation After a name is added to the Sanctions list, the country where the listed individual, groups, entities or undertakings are based, are expected to implement the sanctions measures imposed by the Security Council. These sanctions include freezing of assets, a travel ban, and an arms embargo. The Sanctions Committee oversees the implementation of these sanctions. The Committee comprises all 15 members of the Security Council and makes its decision by consensus. The current Chair of the Committee, for the period ending 31 December 2019, is Dian Triansyah Djani (Indonesia). The two Vice-Chairs for 2019 are the Russian Federation and Peru. The US Senate on Wednesday confirmed Donald Trump's nominee Neomi Rao to replace Brett Kavanaugh on a high-profile appeals court, despite concerns about her past writings on sexual assault. Washington: The US Senate on Wednesday confirmed Donald Trump's nominee Neomi Rao to replace Brett Kavanaugh on a high-profile appeals court, despite concerns about her past writings on sexual assault. White House official Neomi Rao won confirmation to a seat on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on a straight party-line vote, 53-46. No Republican opposed Rao, and no Democrat supported her. Rao, 45, heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, where she plays a key role in Trump's efforts to roll back federal rules and regulations. She also worked in the George W. Bush White House but has never tried a case in state or federal court. Trump nominated Rao for the seat left vacant when Kavanaugh joined the Supreme Court last fall. Lawmakers from both parties expressed concerns about her past writings, particularly on date rape and other sexual assault. As a Yale undergraduate Rao suggested that intoxicated women were partly responsible for date rape. She also criticized affirmative action and questioned equal rights for women and gay people. Rao distanced herself from language she used as a college student, saying at her confirmation hearing that she cringes at some of the language she used in opinion articles she said were intended to be provocative. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who recently revealed she was raped in college, called Rao's 1990's opinion pieces "absolutely abhorrent and reprehensible at best," but said she was reassured after Rao wrote a letter to senators repudiating her past views. Ernst and other Republicans said she was qualified despite her lack of courtroom experience. They said Rao's work on federal regulations qualifies her for the District of Columbia circuit, which handles many administrative appeals of executive branch actions, Ernst said. But she and other Republicans said they might view Rao differently if she is nominated to the Supreme Court. Rao, widely seen as a future candidate for a Supreme Court seat, is a member of the conservative Federalist Society. The legal policy group has played a key role in Trump's judicial nominations, including Kavanaugh's elevation to the high court. Democrats staunchly opposed Rao, citing her lack of trial experience and publicly stated pride at rolling back federal rules on Trump's behalf. Rao said at her confirmation hearing that she and Trump have successfully pushed deregulation that "gets government out of the way" and helps small businesses and other companies create jobs. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called Rao "an outstanding choice" to serve on the District of Columbia Circuit, widely considered the nation's second-most important federal court, below only the Supreme Court. "She is an expert on administrative law and has a sound, conservative judicial philosophy that one would expect from a Republican nominee for such an important position," Graham said of Rao. But California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the panel's top Democrat, said Rao has a "troubling and aggressive record" on deregulation, particularly on rules that protect health and the environment. She was especially troubled at Rao's efforts to dismantle a rule to increase fuel economy standards for cars, Feinstein said. The rule is based on a law Feinstein co-authored. The Democratic National Committee said in a statement that Rao does not belong on the federal bench. "A vote for Neomi Rao is a vote for a judge who blamed survivors of sexual assaults for being attacked. It is a vote for a judge who claimed sexual orientation is a 'behavior' that can be changed," said Elizabeth Renda, the Democratic National Committee's women's media director, and Lucas Acosta, the committee's LGBTQ media director, said in a joint statement. The Republican senators who voted in favor Rao "willfully turned their back on women, the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, low-income families and countless others," the DNC said. The United States has urged China to not block Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar's listing as a global terrorist at the United Nations Security Council meeting to be held on Wednesday over Azhar's designation. Washington DC: The United States has urged China to not block Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar's listing as a global terrorist at the United Nations Security Council meeting to be held on Wednesday over Azhar's designation. At the behest of Pakistan, China has previously stonewalled efforts to designate the Pakistan-based terror outfit's chief as a global terrorist at the UNSC by putting technical holds. Following the ghastly Pulwama terror attack carried out by the JeM, three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council the US, the UK and France have initiated renewed efforts to get Azhar proscribed. China, on the other hand, has not outrightly supported the move until now. "..., I would say that the United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal," Robert Palladino, the US Department of State's Deputy Spokesperson stated on Tuesday (local time). "JeM is a United Nations-designated terrorist group. Azhar is the founder and the leader of JeM, and he meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations. JEM has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability and peace," Palladino said at a media briefing. 40 CRPF personnel lost their lives in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama on 14 February when a JeM terrorist targetted their convoy. Tensions have been high between India and Pakistan ever since, with India undertaking an anti-terror strike on a major JeM camp in Pakistan's Balakot in the aftermath. The international community has supported India's fight against terror, with the United States bluntly telling Pakistan to stop providing support and a safe haven to terrorists and terror outfits following the attack. Pakistan's military spokesperson, Major General Asif Ghafoor, on the other hand, has denied the presence of JeM in their country - a claim which has been widely ridiculed. "It is regrettable Pakistan continues to deny JeM involvement in Pulwama attack. Is Pakistan defending Jaish and being its spokesperson? 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Simply put, they want more goodness from what they consume. We believe that whats inside matters. And day after day, were driven to make it better. FrieslandCampina Ingredients operates worldwide with regional sales offices in the Netherlands, the United States, Singapore, China and Brazil. The Ingredients division reported combined sales of 1.7 billion in FY18. For additional information, please visit: www.frieslandcampinaingredients.com. FrieslandCampina Ingredients is part of Royal FrieslandCampina N.V. The dairy company daily provides millions of consumers throughout the world with dairy products containing the valuable nutrients from milk. The annual turnover amounted to 11.6 billion euro in 2018. FrieslandCampina has locations in 34 countries and employs about 24,000 employees. The Central Office is based in the Netherlands. Were FrieslandCampina Ingredients, passionate about adding goodness to the foods, beverages, and businesses that nourish the world. Demand is growing for smart, sustainable solutions. Our people collaborate with a passion and focus that ensures every food and beverage solution for our customers is spot-on. We believe that whats inside matters. And day after day, were driven to make it better. Nearly everyone has focused on Aurora Cannabis' ( ACB -4.41% ) great opportunity in the Canadian recreational marijuana market. The company has gotten off to a pretty good start with that opportunity, capturing a 20% market share in its latest quarter. But nearly everyone also knows that Aurora's future rides largely on international medical marijuana markets. The largest of these international opportunities right now is Germany. On Tuesday, Aurora Cannabis announced that it had begun selling cannabis oils to German pharmacies. It's a milestone that should mean that higher revenue and profit margins are on the way. The leader in Germany Germany reformed its laws in 2017, allowing easy patient access to medical cannabis and providing full insurance coverage. However, the country didn't have the infrastructure for domestic cannabis production. That opened the door for Canadian marijuana producers. Aurora Cannabis quickly established itself as the leader in the German medical cannabis market. The company acquired Pedanios in May 2017, renaming its new subsidiary as Aurora Deutschland. Pedanios was already the top importer, exporter, and distributor of dried cannabis flower in Germany. By September 2017, Aurora had secured the necessary approvals to begin exporting dried cannabis flower from Canada to supply the German market. The company continued to forge relationships with physicians, pharmacies, and patients across the country. Germany now claims the most important legal marijuana market outside of North America. Arcview Market Research and BDS Analytics project that marijuana sales in the country will total close to $1.6 billion by 2022. Check out the latest earnings call transcripts for the companies we cover. Higher and higher To be sure, German medical cannabis sales aren't yet anywhere close to the projections for three years from now. Even though Aurora Cannabis is the leader in the market, its sales remain relatively low. In the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2018, Aurora reported European revenue of $2.9 million Canadian (close to $2.2 million). This figure represented only 6% of the company's total cannabis revenue. But cannabis oils are often more popular with patients than dried cannabis flower. Aurora should enjoy higher demand in future quarters as it sells cannabis oils in Germany. That higher demand will translate to higher sales. In addition, cannabis oils command premium prices compared with dried flower. Aurora CFO Glen Ibbott noted in the company's Q2 conference call that derivative products such as oils were priced more than 60% higher than dried flower in the Canadian consumer market. While that premium might be higher than what the company will have in Germany, there's no doubt that cannabis oils will make more revenue there for Aurora than dried flower will. Even better, profit margins will be higher. The opportunity to sell cannabis oils in Germany fits right into the company's strategy of focusing on higher-margin products like oils in medical cannabis markets, which themselves provide higher margins than the consumer market. Just the beginning Last September, Tilray became the first Canadian marijuana producer to supply both dried cannabis flower and cannabis oils to Germany. Aurora's entry into the cannabis oils market could shake things up in the German market. But Germany is just the beginning. Aurora Cannabis chief corporate officer Cam Battley stated in the company's Q2 call that "getting those cannabis oils and, subsequently, different form factors into Germany is going to be a very big deal for us." He added that other European markets would also "be extremely keen on non-flower forms of cannabis products." Battley is probably right. The European Union (EU) represents a market of more than 500 million people (including the United Kingdom, which is in the process of leaving the EU). That's nearly 14 times bigger than Canada's population. There are only eight EU Good Manufacturing Process certified cannabis production facilities in the world. Aurora Cannabis has two of them. Aurora should be able to use its success in Germany as a springboard to establishing market leadership in other European countries. Its latest announcement only solidifies the company's position. What happened Shares of Aurora Cannabis (NASDAQ:ACB) were soaring 11.2% higher as of 10:19 a.m. EDT on Wednesday. The Canadian marijuana producer announced that it had appointed Nelson Peltz as a strategic advisor. Peltz's role will be to help Aurora "explore potential partnerships that would be the optimal strategic fit for successful entry into each of Aurora's contemplated market segments" as well as advise the company on its global expansion strategy. Nelson Peltz runs multibillion-dollar investment management firm Trian Fund Management. He has been an activist investor, serving on the boards of several major corporations. Peltz will receive options to buy nearly 20 million shares of Aurora Cannabis, making him one of the company's largest shareholders. So what Normally, the addition of a strategic advisor wouldn't be a significant thing for investors to care about. In this case, though, Aurora's move could mean good things are on the way for the company. The statement made by Nelson Peltz in Aurora's press release was especially intriguing. He stated that he looked forward to working with Aurora Cannabis "to evaluate its many operational and strategic opportunities, including potential engagement with mature players in consumer and other market segments" (emphasis added). That sounds like Peltz will be instrumental in helping Aurora make deals with companies outside of the cannabis industry. A lack of such a deal has arguably been the biggest competitive disadvantage for Aurora Cannabis so far. Canopy Growth received a $4 billion investment from big alcoholic beverage maker Constellation Brands last year and promptly put the cash it received to work. Tobacco giant Altria invested $1.8 billion in Cronos Group for a 45% stake in the marijuana producer. Aurora, though, has had only rumors of potential deals. Peltz could have the ability to make things happen for Aurora. He has strong connections in multiple industries, notably including consumer goods. Both Aurora Cannabis and Peltz appear to have confidence that the relationship will pay off. The options that will be granted to Peltz over a four-year period could put millions of dollars in Peltz's pocket. This vesting schedule can also be accelerated if specific conditions are met, including "the consummation of certain defined transactions" and the closing price of Aurora's shares reaching at least CA$31.02, and then CA$41.36 for a specified number of trading days. Check out the latest earnings call transcripts for the companies we cover. Now what Investors should watch closely to see if Nelson Peltz can perform some deal-making magic on the behalf of Aurora Cannabis. If he does, the stock is likely poised to jump much more. Even though Aurora has a higher production capacity than Canopy Growth, and the two companies are comparable in several other key areas, Canopy's market cap is much higher than Aurora's. This gap is due in large part to Canopy's relationship with Constellation Brands. Should Peltz help Aurora land a major partner, it could go a long way in helping the company catch up to Canopy Growth's valuation. What happened Shares of would-be gold miner Northern Dynasty Minerals ( NAK -2.56% ) took an 11% tumble in early trading Wednesday before retracing to close the day down "only" 3.7%. The decline appears tied to an announcement Northern Dynasty made this morning to the effect that banks Cantor Fitzgerald Canada, BMO Capital Markets, H.C. Wainwright & Co., and TD Securities have agreed to purchase at least 15.6 million shares of its stock at $0.64 per share -- raising "gross proceeds" of $10 million for Northern Dynasty to use -- and potentially 2.3 million more shares, which would add another $1.5 million. So what Good news? Bad news? Personally, I'd file this story under the heading "missed opportunities." Three weeks ago, Northern Dynasty stock enjoyed a brief moment in the sun when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued its Draft Environmental Impact Statement on Northern Dynasty's southwest Alaskan Pebble Project to develop a gold mine. Northern Dynasty stock, which had been trading in penny stock territory, briefly touched $1 a share. That would have been a great time to sell a bunch of stock and raise some cash. Instead, Northern Dynasty management waited until today -- and raised 36% less cash as a result. Check out the latest earnings call transcripts for the companies we cover. Now what Investors may have reacted today to the missed opportunity, or to the fact that selling so much stock will dilute the stakes of Northern Dynasty's existing shareholders -- or both. The plus side, of course, is that now Northern Dynasty will have upwards of $9 million after fees, and perhaps even more than $10 million, to put toward "operational expenditures, including engineering, environmental, permitting and evaluation expenses associated with the Pebble Project and the advancement of completion of the United States Army Corps of Engineers Environmental Impact Study," and other useful purposes. In the latest move by Yum Brands to further expand its Asian presence, the company announced it would open its first outlet in Thailand, in Bangkok. Adapting the brand to local tastes, the restaurant will introduce new items with local flavors including an extra-spicy sauce to compete with the multiple quick-service chains and higher-end Mexican restaurants in the city center. It also will be serving Thai beer brands Singha and Chang, as well as Philippines beer San Miguel Light. Yum's Thai franchise partner, Thoresen Thai Agencies, is owned by the billionaire Mahagitsiri family, a shipping company that branched out in 2018 into the food and beverage business with Pizza Hut, another QSR brand owned by Yum. "Taco Bell will appeal to the young generation, particularly Millennials," said Chalermchai Mahagitsiri, CEO of Thoresen Thai Agencies. Taco Bell's Asia Pacific's managing director, Ankush Tuli, said Thailand's "strong food culture, adventurous spirit and appetite for trying new things" make it a good market for the brand. The size of the fast-food sector in Thailand is set to climb 22 percent to $4.3 billion by 2022, according to estimates from Euromonitor International. Taco Bell, which has nearly 7,000 outlets in the U.S., has 450 restaurants outside the U.S., almost 100 of them in the Asia-Pacific region. Taco Bell opened its first store in China in 2016, and last year signed a deal to expand in New Zealand and Australia. In this rapidly developing topic, we aim to provide you with the ability to share your experiences, questions and news with us. Simply choose one of the options below and your story may be featured in this section. Learn More Essential Businesses Share Your Story Ask Questions Submit News Subscribe FranNet CEO Jania Bailey Recognized with the Bonny LeVine Award for Her Dedication to Working with Women in Franchising The International Franchise Association has acknowledged Bailey for her service as a role model for women in franchising. LOUISVILLE, KY. (PRWEB) March 12, 2019 - Jania Bailey, CEO of FranNet, which is North Americas most respected leader in matching individuals with franchise ownership opportunities, has been named the latest recipient of The Bonny LeVine award by the International Franchise Association (IFA). According to the IFA, the award is bestowed upon a female franchisor or franchisee who has demonstrated ability in franchising as evidenced by her contributions to the growth of the business; contributions to her community through board positions, volunteer work and activities that promote the professional advancement of women; and her contributions as a mentor to women in franchising. The award was created in 1994 in memory of esteemed IFA member Bonny LeVine to honor her contributions to the professional advancement of women in the industry. Founded in 1987, FranNet is comprised of consultants who are franchise experts that work with qualified franchise candidates to identify the right franchise opportunities and support them throughout their discovery process. Bailey joined the FranNet team in 2007 and subsequently took on the role of President and CEO. During her tenure, Bailey has spearheaded FranNets growth and development, landing the company on several coveted lists including Inc. Magazines 5000 Fastest Growing Companies in America. We are pleased to recognize Jania Bailey with this esteemed award, said IFA President and CEO Robert Cresanti. Baileys career serves as an inspiration to women not only in franchising, but for entrepreneurs and businesswomen, alike. She is exceptionally talented and brings a warm charisma to the industry as a professional who routinely goes beyond the call of duty. After excelling in executive leadership roles in the banking world for over a decade, Baileys experience gave her insight into small business lending, making her an expert in financing options for businesses. She brings this insight to her role as CEO of FranNet, empowering prospective franchisees with a wide breadth of knowledge concerning their investment goals. Im truly honored to be receiving this award, especially given its celebration of women in franchising, Bailey said. I have found considerable support over the years from women across the industry, from franchisors to franchisees to consultants, and it has been a privilege to work in a role that allows me to give back and support current and future generations of female franchising leaders. Bailey is the Chair of the IFA Membership Committee, just completed six years on the IFA Board of Directors, and is the Fund Development Chair for Big Brother Big Sisters of Kentuckiana. About FranNet FranNet is North Americas most respected leader in matching individuals with franchise ownership opportunities. Founded in 1987, FranNet has more than 100 experienced consultants across the United States, Canada and Germany. FranNet uses a proprietary profiling and consultative process to determine a business model unique to each clients goals, skill sets and interests, and has matched thousands of prospective business owners to rewarding small business franchise opportunities. Headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, FranNet is the only locally-owned and operated franchised consulting firm. About The International Franchise Association Celebrating 56 years of excellence, education and advocacy, the International Franchise Association is the world's oldest and largest organization representing franchising worldwide. IFA works through its government relations and public policy, media relations and educational programs to protect, enhance and promote franchising and the more than 733,000 franchise establishments that support nearly 7.6 million direct jobs, $674.3 billion of economic output for the U.S. economy and 2.5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). IFA members include franchise companies in over 300 different business format categories, individual franchisees and companies that support the industry in marketing, law, technology and business development. Media Contact: Nick Powills No Limit Agency 312-526-3996 SOURCE FranNet ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Metal Supermarkets Engages 919 Marketing Company Premier North American Metal Solutions Franchise Hires Leading National Content Marketing and PR Agency March 13, 2019 // Franchising.com // Mississauga, Ontario - Metal Supermarkets, the worlds largest supplier of small-quantity metals, has engaged 919 Marketing, a leading national franchise marketing agency offering content marketing and public relations services to increase brand awareness of the company and its franchise locations across North America. The Canadian-based Metal Supermarkets has more than 90 locations across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Its stores offer a wide variety of metals including aluminum, hot-rolled steel, cold-rolled steel, stainless steel, alloy steel, galvanized steel, tool steel, brass, bronze and copper. Each Metal Supermarkets location provides custom cutting, shearing and delivery services to fit customers exact specifications. "Due to the efforts of our strong network of franchise partners, Metal Supermarkets is known as a proven one-stop shop that can meet any of our customers metal needs, regardless of the size or scope of their project, said Stephen Schober, President and CEO of Metal Supermarkets. "919 Marketing has a proven track record of success marketing franchise-based brands. As the industry leader, its time to tell our brand story on a local and national stage to both our customers and future franchisees. The first Metal Supermarkets store opened in Toronto, Ontario in 1985. It was established to cater to small-quantity metal buyers and serve a wide range of industries. Metal Supermarkets quickly became a popular option for many metal-dependent businesses in the area and it began franchising in Canada in 1987. The company expanded to the United Kingdom in 1994 and started franchising in the United States two years later. Today, Metal Supermarkets stores have a selection of more than 8,000 types, shapes, sizes and grades of metal. Each piece of metal can be cut-to-size on site to the customers desired size and specifications. The stores provide fast, reliable same-day service and can deliver to a home or work site. Customers in need of metal supplies can purchase in person at any of the more than 90 Metal Supermarkets locations. The stores knowledgeable and experienced staff provide advice on many different metal solutions and are committed to providing world class customer service. 919 Marketing will partner with Metal Supermarkets to share the companys brand story by securing national and local market media coverage. 919 Marketing will provide its full scale of public relations and content marketing services to position Metal Supermarkets executives as industry thought leaders and increase brand awareness to reach new customers across each of its locations. Metal Supermarkets unique roster of products and services appeals to a wide customer base, from contractors to manufacturers, maintenance professionals and those interested in do-it-yourself home repair projects or individual hobbies, said 919 Marketings Founder and CEO David Chapman. We look forward to showcasing company and franchisee related stories, along with the many practical and innovative ways metal is used by Metal Supermarkets customers. For more information about Metal Supermarkets, please visit https://www.metalsupermarkets.com/. For more information about 919 Marketing, please visit https://919marketing.com/. About Metal Supermarkets Metal Supermarkets, known worldwide as The Convenience Stores for Metal, is the worlds largest small-quantity metal supplier with more than 90 brick-and-mortar stores across the US, Canada and United Kingdom. It sells a wide variety of metals including Aluminum, Hot-Rolled Steel, Cold-Rolled Steel, Stainless Steel, Alloy Steel, Galvanized Steel, Tool Steel, Brass, Bronze and Copper. Metal Supermarkets offers value-added services such as Production Cutting, Shearing, Punching and more. Its staff are highly-specialized and assists customers in finding the metal they need. Franchise owners are metal experts and have been providing quality customer service and products since 1985. About 919 Marketing Formed in 1996 and headquartered just outside of North Carolinas Research Triangle Park and the capital city of Raleigh, 919 is a national franchise marketing agency with a proven track record of helping companies increase revenue, create a competitive advantage and improve marketing results. 919 provides high-powered strategic planning, public relations, social media, digital marketing, business development support and full creative capabilities - each utilizing proven processes refined over hundreds of client engagements. 919s award-winning staff of marketing strategists, TV and print reporters, and social media trailblazers are seasoned experts, providing customers the content marketing firepower they need to excite, motivate and engage customers and prospects. 919 clients include startups, emerging growth companies and Fortune 500 corporations - from high-tech to health care, hair care and elderly care. 919 Marketing is a proven, go-to source for national companies of all sizes that want to grow their businesses. Media Contacts: Graham Chapman 919-459-8157 gchapman@919marketing.com Brendan Tiernay 905-362-8226 x8220 btiernay@metalsupermarkets.com SOURCE Metal Supermarkets ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus Would you like to receive breaking news notifications from The Post and Courier? Sign up to receive news and updates from this site directly to your desktop. Breaking News Columbia Breaking News Greenville Breaking News Myrtle Beach Breaking News Aiken Breaking News N Augusta Breaking News Click on the bell icon to manage your notifications at any time. Success! Please click the 'Allow' button in the 'Show Notifcations' alert in your browser if one is available. Thank you for signing up! Please enable notifications in your browser and reload the page. Photo: Contributed Losing a loved one to suicide can be one of the most traumatic and painful experiences of a lifetime. To help those who have lost a loved one to suicide, the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) Vernon & District Branch is hosting a free eight-week support group. After a traumatic event, its normal to have a range of experiences from feelings of anger, depression and loneliness, to physical symptoms like headaches or an upset stomach, said Julia Payson, executive director, CMHA Vernon & District Branch. When we lose someone to suicide, grief can be even more complicated and intense. While everybody reacts uniquely, we all need to know that there is help and we are not alone. After losing someone, everyone needs to be treated with compassion and have their experiences respected. Every Wednesday from March 20 to May 8, CMHA Vernon, at 3100 28th Ave., will facilitate the support group from 7-8:30 p.m. The group provides an opportunity to discuss and share feelings and experiences related to the loss of a loved one, including the impact of guilt, anger and regret, coping as a family, building a support network, honouring the memory of a loved one, and coping with birthdays, anniversaries and holidays. Suicide loss support groups are facilitated by CMHA staff and volunteers who have received specialized training in suicide grief support. The groups also include a support worker to assist individuals during group sessions who may require one-on-one support. Pre-registration is required as space is limited. For more information or to register, contact Paula at 250-542-3114 ext. 236 or [email protected] Photo: The Canadian Press A Sunwing Boeing 737-800 passenger plane prepares to land at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. Transport Minister Marc Garneau is set to update Ottawa's position on the Boeing 737 Max 8, the aircraft that crashed in Ethiopia, and whether Canada will fall in line with other nations that have grounded the planes. Garneau is scheduled to address Canada's plan and safety concerns regarding the Max 8, but it's not yet clear whether he will impose similar restrictions on the aircraft. The update comes after Toronto-based Sunwing Airlines announced late Tuesday that it is temporarily grounding its four Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft in the wake of the crash in Addis Ababa that killed all 157 people on board, including 18 Canadians. Sunwing says it made the decision for "evolving commercial reasons" unrelated to safety, including airspace restrictions being imposed in other countries. Garneau is facing an escalating dilemma over the aircraft, which is being grounded or banned by a growing number of countries after the accident that some experts have said has parallels to a Lion Air crash of the same model of aircraft in Indonesia that killed 189 people last October. Garneau said Tuesday that he has no plans to ground Canada's fleet of the Max 8 aircraft, but that "all options are on the table." Lebanon and Kosovo barred the aircraft from their airspace today, and Norwegian Air Shuttles said it would seek compensation from Boeing after grounding its fleet. Egypt banned the operation of the aircraft. The U.S.-based Boeing has said it has no reason to pull the popular aircraft from the skies and does not intend to issue new recommendations about the aircraft to customers. Earlier Tuesday, authorities from more than half a dozen countries and regulators, including the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), announced grounding orders or airspace bans on the aircraft. By Tuesday evening, dozens of airlines had grounded the Max 8, leaving the majority of the nearly 390 Max 8s currently in service around the world confined to the hangar. Air Canada, along with Southwest and American Airlines, are the major outliers. Air Canada has 24 Max 8 aircraft, which it uses mainly for domestic and U.S. routes, while Calgary-based WestJet Airlines Ltd. has 13 Max 8s. They say honesty is the best policy! However, we're not sure how that worked out for one unemployed punter searching for work. Bruce left an ad for his services on the community noticeboard at Countdown on West Auckland's Lincoln Rd, and it has since done the rounds on social media. If you give it a read you'll understand why. 'Any jobs out there?' our desperate hero wrote. 'Il do anything hard worker'. Mamuka Khazaradze's exclusive interview: "I can't rule out the possibility of my detention" - GeorgianJournal Georgia will use all mechanisms to establish objective circumstances of death of 29 year old Georgian in Abkhazia - GeorgianJournal Photo: CTV News Victoria Police Chief Del Manak Support is growing for a regional police force in Victoria's capital region. The mayors of Esquimalt and Victoria have joined the call for an amalgamated force. "We would be in favour of it," Victoria Police Chief Del Manak told CTV News on Tuesday. "Criminals know no boundaries." Having a seamless, comprehensive public safety across the region, or at the very least across the core, is a good rationale for a regional police service, aVictoria Mayor Lisa Helps says. There is significant policing that occurs in the downtown-core area," adds Esquimalt Mayor Barbara Desjardins. "Right now, the two communities of Esquimalt and Victoria are paying for that, and the full region is benefitting from it. But, Saanich Mayor Fred Haynes is opposed to such a move. He says Saanich residents already provide revenue to the City of Victoria by working and spending money in the capital. with files from CTV Vancouver Island Photo: The Canadian Press Richard Wershe sits in a courtroom at Frank Murphy Hall of Justice in Detroit. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Clemency Board are considering early prison release for a man known as "White Boy Rick," once one of the FBI's youngest informants and the subject of a recent Hollywood movie. The board on Wednesday heard the case of Richard Wershe Jr., 49, who's imprisoned in Florida for his role in a large interstate car theft ring operated while he was already in prison. At age 14, Wershe was an FBI informant in Detroit who helped convict a major cocaine trafficking ring but eventually got caught selling drugs himself. His story was the basis of the 2018 film "White Boy Rick" starred Matthew McConaughey, with Richie Merritt in the title role. At the hearing, two retired FBI agents told the board Wershe deserves early release because of all he did for the government, including assistance on several public corruption cases while behind bars. His current release date is Oct. 26, 2020, from the Putnam Correctional Institution in Florida. The board did not immediately issue a decision, although its staff recommended early release. "I believe a great injustice to Richard Wershe has been done by the government," said ex-agent Herman Groman, who said Wershe infiltrated a violent Detroit drug gang and helped prosecutors convict 20 people in the 1980s. "He has never been recognized because of this." Added former agent Gregg Schwartz: "He has never lied to me about anything. I fully recommend for clemency. He's contributed greatly to law enforcement." DeSantis, a Republican chairing his first clemency hearing since taking office, appeared to express skepticism. The governor noted that Wershe got involved in a car theft ring involving some 150 stolen vehicles while behind bars serving his drug sentence. "He had been helping you guys and then turned around and engaged in additional criminal conduct," DeSantis said. "You need to look at the totality of everything he has done over 32 years," Schwartz replied. Attorney General Ashley Moody, a former judge and prosecutor, told the agents it "speaks volumes" that they showed up for Wershe but did not indicate if she supports early prison release. DeSantis told reporters before the board meeting that he has an open mind on all clemency cases. "You know, I want there to be a rough equality of justice here. Not all cases are exactly the same," the governor said. "I do believe in redemption and that does play a role." In Detroit, Wershe became a youthful FBI informant after agents began investigating his father for illegally selling guns. After infiltrating the drug gang and assisting in numerous convictions, Wershe was arrested with a large amount of drugs himself and eventually was sentenced to life in prison in Michigan. He was released on parole in 2017 and then moved to the Florida prison to serve his five-year racketeering sentence in the car theft ring. March 12, 2019 News Release Press Operations Release No. NR-050-19 Readout of Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan's Meeting With Qatari Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Dr. Khalid Al Attiyah Acting Chief Pentagon Spokesperson Charles E. Summers Jr. provided the following readout: Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan met with Qatari Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Dr. Khalid Al Attiyah at the Pentagon on Mar. 12 to reaffirm the strategic security partnership between the U.S. and Qatar. The leaders discussed a broad range of defense and security issues, including Qatari support to the NATO mission in Afghanistan and improvements to Al Udeid Air Base. Acting Secretary Shanahan thanked the Qatari delegation for their continued hospitality in hosting U.S. forces and affirmed our commitment to ongoing security cooperation for peace and stability in the region. https://dod.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/1783177/ NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address March 12, 2019 Transcript Press Operations Remarks by Acting Secretary Shanahan at an Enhanced Honor Cordon and Meeting Welcoming Qatar's Minister of Defense Dr. Khalid Attiyah to the Pentagon Acting Secretary Of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan; Qatar's Minister of Defense Dr. Khalid Attiyah ACTING SECRETARY OF DEFENSE PATRICK SHANAHAN: OK. Everybody in here? Good morning. How are you? Good. This is our other special team. (UNKNOWN): Yeah. MR. SHANAHAN: Let's see. Your Excellency, welcome back to the Pentagon. It's wonderful to see you. And we're glad to host you after your last visit here in November with Secretary Mattis. I'm proud to continue the close, longstanding military partnership between our two nations. We in the Department of Defense are grateful for Qatar's leadership in the Gulf region and beyond. Qatar hosts thousands of U.S. troops at Al Udeid Air Base. Qatar contributes significantly to NATO's mission in Afghanistan. Qatar is also a top foreign military sales partner. Your Excellency, I understand your visit includes stops at U.S. assembly lines producing some of the hardware that helps secure Qatari and U.S. interests. We appreciate Qatar's investment in American jobs. Thank you for your commitment to maintaining an interoperable force with the United States. We all know the U.S. and Qatar have a close defense relationship. And we are growing that relationship, from tactical exercises to collaboration on strategic initiatives, to defense institution building. Your Excellency, thank you for coming. You are welcome here. And I look forward to our conversation. MINISTER OF DEFENSE DR. KHALID ATTIYAH: Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary. On behalf of myself and my colleague, I would like to thank you, and through you to thank the United States for the friendship we have together. And as you mentioned, Qatar believes strongly in our friendship and in our strategic relation. And we intend, with His Highness, the Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad, to continue this relationship and to cement it together. Thank you. MR. SHANAHAN: Very good. Thank you very much. MIN. ATTIYAH: Thank you very much. MR. SHANAHAN: Good. Good. Hey, good morning. Q: Mr. Secretary, if we could ask you, on budget day, the State Department budget is much smaller and shrinking compared to the Department of Defense. Is -- do you agree with that decision by the president's F.Y. '20 request? MR. SHANAHAN: You know, I spoke with Secretary Pompeo this week. He's confident that he'll have the resources that he needs to perform his duties. Q: Mr. Secretary, has President Trump discussed with you the possibility of nominating you to be the formal secretary of defense? MR. SHANAHAN: You know, the president speaks with me about defense matters and we have many ongoing discussions. And today, we're going to roll out the budget, so it should be a good week. And then later, I have the chance to talk with the Senate Armed Services Committee about not just the budget, contents of the budget, and then ongoing operations. So good to see all of you. Thanks for joining us this morning. https://dod.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/1783218/ NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Photo: WestJet Canada's major airlines and customers are scrambling to rebook flights after the federal government grounded all Boeing 737 MAX 8s. Transport Minister Marc Garneau announced Wednesday morning Canadian airspace is closed to all MAX 8 aircraft after "a review of all available evidence." Canada joins most other jurisdictions in the world that have grounded the planes after an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed Sunday, killing all 157 people on board, including 18 Canadians. WestJet, Air Canada and Sunwing all utilize the MAX 8 as part of their fleet. According to information available online, 12.8 per cent of their combined fleet are made up of the MAX 8 aircraft. Air Canada used 28 of the planes (14.9%), WestJet 13 (10%) and Sunwing four (10%). In an email sent to Okanagan Edge, Sunwing officials say the are in the process of revising their flight schedule to accommodate the temporary removal of the planes. Sunwing made the decision to ground the planes Tuesday before the federal government announcement after airspace in in other destinations had been closed to the plane. WestJet, which uses the plane for one of its daily flights in and out of Kelowna International Airport, says it is taking steps to remove its fleet from service. Customers who booked flights from a travel agent are asked to contact their agent directly. Others can call WestJet flights at 1-888-937-8538 or WestJet Vacations at 1-877-737-7001 to rebook or cancel flights. Air Canada, which says 9,000 to 12,000 people travel on its MAX 8 fleet daily, says both cancellation and rebooking procedures are in place. The airline warns customers to expect delays in rebooking and in reaching Air Canada call centres given the magnitude of the situation. Yemen targets southern Saudi Arabia with missile IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency Tehran, March 12, IRNA -- The Yemeni army and the popular committee fired a missile toward Asir district, southern Saudi Arabia. According to Yemeni media 'Al-Masirah', Yemeni forces targeted the area with Zelzal-1 missile. Meanwhile, Yemeni artillery units targeted Saudis' positions in Alab passway, southern Saudi Arabia. The Yemeni forces could prevent advance of the Saudi mercenaries and inflicted heavy damages to their forces and equipment. Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies launched a devastating military campaign against Yemen in March 2015, with the aim of bringing back the government of Mansour Hadi back to power. Some 20,000 Yemenis have been killed and thousands more injured since the onset of the Saudi-led aggression. The assaults of the Saudi-led coalition forces have failed to stop the Yemenis from resisting the aggression. Earlier, Yemeni Armed Forces spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Saree has accused the Saudi-led coalition of repeatedly breaching ceasefire agreement in Al Hudaydah, Yemen, saying that it has breached the truce 966 times in 4 days. The United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2451 to support the Stockholm Agreement on deployment of a team in order to facilitate monitoring and implementing the Agreement and establishing truce in important Yemeni ports. The resolution mainly focuses on sending essential commodities to the Yemeni people, supporting the Stockholm Agreement, assigning the Secretary-General of the United Nations to implement it and observing the ceasefire. 9376**1424 NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address NATO Deputy Secretary General commemorates NATO enlargement in Prague NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation 12 Mar. 2019 NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller participated in a commemoration ceremony in Prague on Tuesday (12 March 2019) to mark the 15th and 20th anniversaries of the Visegrad countries joining NATO. The Deputy Secretary General addressed the conference after President Milos Zeman of the Czech Republic, President Janos Ader of Hungary, President Andrzej Duda of Poland and President Andrej Kiska of Slovakia. In the afternoon, the Deputy Secretary General delivered a keynote speech on "20 Years of NATO Enlargement" at the Defence and Security Conference in Prague. "We are here today in celebration of freedom and security and in recognition of unity and progress," she said. Gottemoeller noted that the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia joined NATO after decades of oppression, determined to forge a freer and more prosperous future for their citizens. "NATO believes that every country must be free to choose its own path, including with regard to its security agreements. This is a sovereign decision for sovereign nations to take and no one has the right to interfere," she said. Gottemoeller also outlined the Alliance's current security challenges, including Russia's breach of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and instability in the Middle East and North Africa. She stressed that investments in defence and Allied unity are essential to keep NATO strong and prepared to meet new challenges from wherever they may come. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Department of the Navy Releases Fiscal Year 2020 Budget Navy News Service Story Number: NNS190312-11 Release Date: 3/12/2019 2:21:00 PM From the Office of the Navy Chief of Information WASHINGTON (NNS) -- The Department of the Navy (DON) submitted its Fiscal Year 2020 (FY20) budget request to Congress today, March 12. The $205.6 billion (Base and Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO)) request is part of the $718 billion (Base and OCO) defense budget, which President Donald Trump submitted to Congress March 11. Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Budget, Rear Adm. Randy Crites, briefed media during a Department of Defense press conference on the Navy and Marine Corps portion of the budget. "This year's budget submission reflects the best possible balance of available resources to build a bigger, better and more ready Navy and Marine Corps team to strengthen the Navy the nation needs," Crites said. "The FY2020 funding invests in our people and demonstrates our commitment to providing the capacity and capabilities needed to fight and win in this new era of great power competition." The FY20 budget represents an increase of 4.8 percent over the FY19 enacted budget (Base and OCO). The increased funding will help to restore the Navy's competitive advantage by building on previous investments in readiness and lethality in support of strengthening the Navy and Marine Corps team's contribution to the Joint Force. This year's budget takes a balanced approach to force structure growth by making targeted investments in readiness and capabilities. The FY20 budget not only supports more ships, submarines, aircraft, people and additional special operations forces but also provides the right mix of small and large surface combatants, submarines, aircraft and unmanned platforms needed to meet the requirements of combatant commanders. The budget provides for a deployable battle force of 301 ships in FY20. This supports 11 aircraft carriers and 10 big deck amphibious ships that serve as the foundation upon which the Navy's carrier and amphibious ready groups are based. This year's budget request funds 12 new-construction battle force ships in FY20, including one aircraft carrier (CVN), three Nuclear Attack Submarines (SSNs), three guided-missile destroyers (DDGs), one future guided-missile frigate (FFG(X)), two Fleet Replenishment Oilers (T-AOs) and two Towing, Salvage and Rescue ships (T-ATSs), as well as two Large Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs); and, 55 battle force ships/10 Large USVs across the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP). A talented, driven and well-trained military and civilian workforce is essential for warfighting success, and the Navy's most critical asset is its dedicated personnel. This year's budget supports an increase in end strength by 5,100 in FY20, and allows for a 3.1 percent pay raise to better support quality of life for Sailors, Marines and their families, in alignment with the Employment Cost Index. The re-emergence of great power competition demands that the Navy invests in superior, innovative and leap-ahead technologies to increase lethality. The Navy cannot expect success fighting tomorrow's conflicts with yesterday's weapons. To maintain a competitive advantage, this year's budget targets the development of long-range hypersonic strike, unmanned aircraft and vessels, and additional capabilities aligned with the Future Force. In this year's budget, Research & Development increases 9.5 percent over FY19, supporting innovative capabilities in shipbuilding, Columbia-class development, aviation (F-35), weapons, hypersonics, NextGen Jammer, unmanned systems, Navy laser family of systems, digital warfare, applied artificial intelligence and big-data analytics. These technological advancements are crucial to maintaining the Navy's competitive advantage. Networked forces that protect, collect and share information enable increased readiness and lethality. The budget request prioritizes the development of resilient, survivable, federated networks and information ecosystems from the tactical level up to strategic planning. A healthy industrial base is a key enabler of Navy readiness, and this year's budget submission supports industry by providing the consistency and predictability needed to retain the highly skilled workers who fulfill shipbuilding orders efficiently and affordably. Continuing to minimize the backlog of deferred readiness, procurement and modernization is also a priority for this year's budget, which requests funding for increased training and flight hours. In addition to supporting the Navy's critical personnel, platforms and programs, the FY20 budget demonstrates the Department of the Navy's (DON) commitment to reforming business processes and driving efficiencies to increase speed, improve value and support the warfighter. The budget provides funding in support of adopting agile business models and technologies, removing layers of overhead, flattening organizations, and applying data-driven decision making helps the Fleet build readiness. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address NCSC Reopens Its Doors at Naval Station Newport Navy News Service Story Number: NNS190312-05 Release Date: 3/12/2019 9:53:00 AM From Naval Education and Training Command Public Affairs NEWPORT, R.I. (NNS) -- The Navy command responsible for developing and delivering religious ministry training returned to Naval Station Newport, Rhode Island, March 11. Naval Chaplaincy School and Center (NCSC), one of 12 learning centers under Naval Education and Training Command (NETC), moved to Fort Jackson, South Carolina in 2009 as part of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission when the school was known as the Naval Chaplains School and only trained officers. "Returning to Newport enhances our ability to provide a more thorough Sailorization to our chaplain community," said Capt. Steve Moses, NCSC commander. "In Newport, our command has the opportunity to engage in dialogue, training opportunities, and mutual cooperation with the Naval Leadership and Ethics Center, the Naval War College, Officer Training Command and the Senior Enlisted Academy. Leveraging these important relationships will strengthen our training courses and offer our instructors opportunities to make contributions to the training of officers from other communities." NCSC and Newport welcomed 49 chaplain corps students, who are attending the Professional Naval Chaplaincy Intermediate and Basic Leadership courses and the Religious Program Specialist (RP) Manager's course. RP "A" School, or initial skills training following boot camp, returned to Naval Air Station Meridian, Mississippi through a NCSC learning site in February 2019. "At Meridian, our RPs will have opportunities to develop closer ties with the administration ratings and our connections to Naval Technical Training Center will offer us an opportunity to build stronger programs by learning from our counterparts in the other communities," said Moses. "We believe these relocations are a win-win for us and the rest of the Navy." NCSC today has evolved into a headquarters that trains U.S. Navy's chaplains and enlisted religious program specialists (RP) both in traditional classrooms and at 13 locations through mobile training teams, spanning initial to more advanced courses. "Chaplains and religious program specialists deliver essential components of fleet readiness by fostering high morale, developing and strengthening moral and spiritual well-being, and ensuring that every member of the command has the maximum opportunity for exercising their first amendment right to the free exercise of religion," said Moses. "Commanders who leverage the full potential of their RMTs [religious ministry teams] can expect warfighters that are better prepared for combat as well as the day-to-day stressors of peace time." Almost 200 chaplains and 200 RPs graduate from NCSC residence courses each year to prepare them to deliver professional religious ministry to the U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Coast Guard, and U.S. Merchant Marine. Another 600 chaplains and 300 RPs receive professional development training annually through mobile training teams. Chaplains and RPs play a critical role in helping the Department of the Navy achieve and maintain a ready force. Religious ministry and compassionate pastoral care are characterized by cooperation, tolerance, mutual respect, and respect for diversity, as well as an emphasis on understanding the pluralistic military environment. Chaplains and RPs are embedded within commands operating at sea and ashore to ensure 24/7 availability for service members and their families. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address U.S. Indo-Pacific Commander Visits Singapore Navy News Service Story Number: NNS190312-03 Release Date: 3/12/2019 8:35:00 AM By Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Greg Johnson, Commander, Task Force 73 Public Affairs SINGAPORE (NNS) -- Adm. Phil Davidson, commander, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) visited Singapore, March 5-7. Davidson visited Singapore to meet with leaders and counterparts in the region, during which he spent time at Changi Naval Base, and met with Rear Adm. Joey Tynch, commander, Logistics Group Western Pacific/CTF 73. Davidson and Tynch discussed COMLOG WESTPAC's critical role in maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific. "The role of COMLOG WESTPAC is vitally important to the Navy's ability to operate in the region," said Davidson. "Without the exceptional logistics support from our Sailors and civilians here, we simply would not be able to sustain operations or continue to build on our partnerships in the Indo-Pacific." "This is an area we are willing to invest in due to its geographical significance, mutual interests and common values," said Davidson. "These steps forward in the region enable us to strengthen our enduring relationships and build new partnerships." Tynch used the visit to showcase COMLOG WESTPAC's focus on working together with friends, partners and allies, in the local community and throughout Southeast Asia. "This was a valuable visit," said Tynch. "It is great for the staff to hear from the USINDOPACOM Commander how everything from daily replenishments-at-sea, to our 25th year of CARAT [Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training], contribute to the vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific." COMLOG WESTPAC/CTF 73 provides combat-ready logistics to the U.S. 7th Fleet and is the executive agent for more than 20 bilateral and multilateral security cooperation exercises with partner nations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address EU warns US against military action on Venezuela Iran Press TV Tue Mar 12, 2019 06:15PM The European Union has cautioned the United States against taking military action against Venezuela, saying the Latin American country's crisis has to be resolved through peaceful and political solutions. "We believe that no military development, from inside or outside of the country, would be acceptable," EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told a United Nations Security Council meeting on cooperation between the European Union and the UN on Tuesday. "A solution cannot be, and should never be, imposed from the outside," she asserted. "The crisis that affects the country has political and institutional causes. It's not a natural disaster. Its solution needs to be peaceful, political, and democratic," said Mogherini. The official also reminded that the bloc had set up a contact group with Latin American countries to push for a political process. Venezuela has been facing dire economic conditions and months-long protests, with President Nicolas Maduro putting the country's woes down to US interventionism and accusing Washington of attempting a coup against his government. Congress chief Juan Guaido named himself as Venezuela's interim president amid the crisis in January. Washington took the lead in recognizing his claim followed by the US' major European allies, including France, Germany, and Britain. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that all options are on the table in promoting Washington's choice for Guaido over Maduro. Russia, China and Iran have, however, roundly rejected the US' meddlesome push targeting Venezuela. Caracas expels US diplomats Also on Tuesday, Venezuela ordered American diplomats to leave the country within 72 hours after Maduro accused Trump of cyber "sabotage" that has plunged the country into days-long blackout. Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza made the announcement after talks broke down over maintaining diplomatic "interest sections" in the two countries. "The presence on Venezuelan soil of these officials represents a risk for the peace, unity, and stability of the country," the government also said in a statement. A day earlier, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had announced that the United States would withdraw the diplomats. The US State Department, meanwhile, said their presence had become "a constraint on US policy." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address U.S.-Taliban Peace Talks End In Doha With 'Real Strides' But No Deal By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan March 12, 2019 The longest round of peace talks between the United States and the Taliban has ended with "real strides" being made but without an agreement on troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said on March 12. "The conditions for peace have improved. It's clear all sides want to end the war. Despite ups and downs, we kept things on track and made real strides," Khalilzad said on Twitter, adding that another round is possible later this month after the 16 days of negotiations in Qatar's capital, Doha. But Khalilzad said "there is no final agreement until everything is agreed." U.S. and Taliban negotiators have been attempting to hammer out the details of the framework agreement reached in January. The main disagreements are over four interconnected issues, including the Taliban breaking off ties with groups designated as terrorists by Washington, the timetable of a U.S. military withdrawal, a cease-fire in Afghanistan, and an intra-Afghan dialogue that would include the Taliban and government representatives. A U.S. State Department spokesman said negotiators made "meaningful progress" during the talks. The spokesman said the Taliban agreed that peace will require agreement on counterterrorism assurances, troop withdrawal, and a cease-fire. "Progress was achieved regarding both these issues," said a Taliban spokesman, referring to the U.S. troop withdrawal and assurances that foreign militants would not use Afghanistan's territory to stage future terrorist attacks. Neither side mentioned any progress made on reversing Taliban's refusal to negotiate with the government in Kabul. The militant group says the Western-backed government is a U.S. "puppet" which must be toppled. The Afghan government has been angered and frustrated at being sidelined at the peace talks. Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah told RFE/RL that he was skeptical of the Taliban's motives and urged Washington to keep troops in the country until a formal settlement that includes the Kabul has been signed with the militants. Abdullah also said Afghans were "concerned" that the Kabul government has been sidelined from the U.S.-Taliban talks in Qatar, but insisted it had not caused a rift with Washington. "Unless the Afghan government has direct negotiations with the Taliban, Afghan people have the right to be concerned," Abdullah, who is the de facto prime minister in the national unity government, said in an interview with RFE/RL in Kabul on March 12. "The Taliban wants to use these peace talks for political and propaganda purposes instead of using this as a step towards peace," he added. U.S. President Donald Trump wants to pull out the roughly 14,000 American troops in Afghanistan and has tasked U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad with reaching a settlement with the militants. During a round of talks in Doha in January, U.S. and Taliban negotiators reached the basic framework of a potential peace deal in which the militants would prevent international terrorist groups from basing themselves in Afghanistan in exchange for the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan. But Abdullah urged Washington to keep U.S. forces in Afghanistan until a comprehensive peace settlement is reached between the United States, the Taliban, and Kabul. "The Taliban wants foreign troops to leave Afghanistan," he said. "It's also the demand of the Afghan people. But our opinion, and that of the Afghan people, is that until the war is over and peace is restored, there is a need for the presence of these troops." Abdullah said the government's absence at the talks had prompted fears in the country that "there will be a deal in which the interests of Afghans will not be considered," but denied a fallout with the country's international allies. "The relationship between the Afghan government and our international partners is not so strained that we suspect there might be a conspiracy against Afghanistan, [especially] after so many years of [mutual] sacrifice and cooperation," he said. Abdullah also questioned the Taliban's commitment to peace, accusing the militant group of "dragging out the process." "The Taliban is propagating that they have made progress during these talks and have come to certain agreements with the United States," he said. "But then they say they need more time [before they sign a formal deal]." U.S. and other foreign troops have been in Afghanistan since an October 2001 invasion that brought down the Taliban government after it refused to hand over Al-Qaeda terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, blamed for launching the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-s- abdullah-says-taliban-using-peace-talks-for-propaganda -urges-u-s-to-keep-troops/29817400.html Copyright (c) 2019. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address At Least 13 Troops Killed, 12 Captured In Taliban Attacks On Afghan Army Posts By RFE/RL March 12, 2019 Taliban fighters have launched attacks on several army posts in western Afghanistan, killing at least 13 Afghan soldiers, officials say. Jamshid Shahabi, a spokesman for Badghis Province's governor, said on March 12 that 42 militants were also killed and 15 troops were wounded in the fighting in the province bordering Turkmenistan. The fate of a dozen other soldiers is unknown, according to Shahabi. Defense Ministry spokesman Qais Mangal said that government reinforcements backed by air support had been sent to Bala Murghab district after the Taliban launched its offensive late on March 9. He said that a total of 20 soldiers were killed and 20 others were captured in the battles. The Taliban overran four posts, Mangal said, adding that the fighting was "still on." Taliban spokesman Qari Yousof Ahmadi confirmed that the group was behind the attack, saying that 28 soldiers were captured. The offensive comes as U.S. and Taliban negotiators are holding peace talks in Qatar aimed at ending the nearly 18-year war in Afghanistan. The Western-backed government in Kabul has been absent from the negotiations, with the Taliban insisting it will not engage with a Western "puppet." With reporting by AP, Reuters, and dpa Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/afghan-army- posts-taliban-attacks-badghis-13 -killed/29816997.html Copyright (c) 2019. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address U.S. Orders Withdrawal Of Diplomatic Personnel In Venezuela By RFE/RL March 12, 2019 U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has ordered the withdrawal of all remaining U.S. diplomatic personnel from Venezuela, hours after Washington imposed sanctions on a Russian bank over its dealings with Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA. The U.S. moves on March 11 turned up the pressure on both Caracas and Moscow, which is one of the biggest financial backers for Venezuela's embattled leader, Nicolas Maduro. "Like the January 24 decision to withdraw all dependents and reduce embassy staff to a minimum, this decision reflects the deteriorating situation in Venezuela as well as the conclusion that the presence of U.S. diplomatic staff at the embassy has become a constraint on U.S. policy," Pompeo said in a statement issued by the State Department. President Donald Trump's administration has declared Maduro to be an illegitimate leader, and has backed opposition leader Juan Guaido to replace him. Prior to Pompeo's announcement, the Treasury Department announced sanctions against Evrofinance Mosnarbank, saying the bank's net assets had grown by over 50 percent during 2018, even as U.S. sanctions had increased. "This action demonstrates that the United States will take action against foreign financial institutions that sustain the illegitimate Maduro regime and contribute to the economic collapse and humanitarian crisis plaguing the people of Venezuela," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said. Founded in 2011, the Moscow-based bank is jointly owned by a group of Russian banks and Venezuela's National Development Fund. Evrofinance Mosnarbank said in a statement on its website that it was operating in a "stable manner" and will "fulfill all of its obligations towards clients and partners." In comments to reporters, Pompeo accused Rosneft of buying oil from Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA). "Russia's state-owned oil company, Rosneft, continues to purchase crude oil cargoes from PDVSA, Venezuela's state-owned oil company, in defiance of U.S. sanctions. And Rosneft's CEO, Igor Sechin, continues to throw a lifeline to the regime," Pompeo said. Separately, U.S. national-security adviser John Bolton issued a warning to international banks and financial institutions. Gazprombank, which is Russia's third-biggest lender and includes among its shareholders Russian state gas company Gazprom, said the U.S. Treasury decision would not affect it. "Gazprombank has a minority stake in Evrofinance Mosnarbank," it said. "Gazprombank does not carry out operations on the accounts of companies that are sanctioned by the U.S. over Venezuela." The United States and more than 50 governments recognize Guaido as interim president of the country. They say Maduro wasn't legitimately re-elected last year because opposition candidates weren't permitted to run. With reporting by Reuters and AP Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/us-venezuela -diplomats-evacuated/29816328.html Copyright (c) 2019. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US, Taliban Make 'Meaningful Progress' in Talks - State Department Sputnik News 22:37 12.03.2019(updated 23:05 12.03.2019) The US Department of State said Tuesday that the Taliban had agreed that peace would require agreement on four issues: counter-terrorism assurances, troop withdrawal, intra-Afghan dialogue and a ceasefire. "The Taliban have agreed that peace will require both sides to fully address four core issues, and they are counterterrorism assurances, troop withdrawal, intra-Afghan dialogue and a comprehensive cease-fire", State Department spokesman Robert Palladino said Tuesday. US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad said in a separate statement earlier on Tuesday that Taliban and Afghan officials had agreed "in draft" during the latest round of peace talks on counter-terrorism assurances and a timeline for US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Khalilzad explained that Taliban and Afghan officials would begin intra-Afghan negotiations on a political settlement and a comprehensive ceasefire as soon as the draft agreement on the US withdrawal timeline and counter-terrorism measures is finalized. Khalilzad also said he will now head to the United States for discussions with US officials and consultations with partners regarding the latest developments in the Afghan-Taliban peace talks. Meanwhile, representatives of Taliban will resume negotiations with the United States in Qatar in late March, a source from the Afghan delegation told Sputnik earlier. The previous round of the US-Taliban talks in January resulted in a framework for a future agreement under which the Islamic radical movement is ready to guarantee it will not harbor al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan, in return for the US ending its military presence in the country. The Taliban has been one of the major forces opposing the Afghan government in the latter's long-standing confrontation with various rebel and terror groups. In 1996, the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, and the United States invaded the country in 2001 to fight the al-Qaeda terror group in retaliation for the 11 September, 2001, terrorist attacks on US soil. The US troops eventually overthrew the Taliban, saying that the country had become a safe haven for al-Qaeda while the group was in power. While most US troops had left Afghanistan by the end of 2014, US forces continues to be present on the ground to support Afghan forces in combating terrorism. * Taliban, al-Qaeda are terrorist organizations banned in Russia and many other countries. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Photo: Google Street View Kamloops RCMP detachment. A man died while in custody at the Kamloops RCMP cells Tuesday night. At about 9:30 p.m., police responded to the 100-block of Victoria Street after a business in the area reported that a drunk man who'd been barred from the business had returned. Officers found the man in a nearby parking lot and arrested him under the Liquor Control and Licensing Act. An RCMP press release says he was placed in the Kamloops RCMP cells for the night. Just before 6 a.m. this morning, March 13, the man was found unresponsive in his cell and has since been pronounced deceased, the press release states. The investigation into the death has been turned over to the Independent Investigations Office of British Columbia, to determine whether the death was linked to police action, or inaction. The IIO investigates all deaths that may involve police. XQ-58A Valkyrie Drone Makes First Flight as Escort for F-22 and F-35 Sputnik News 19:42 12.03.2019 The US Air Force has published a video of a long-range, stealthy unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV), XQ-58A Valkyrie, demonstrator during its inaugural flight on 5 March at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. The XQ-58A UCAV has been developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory, partnered with Kratos Unmanned Aerial Systems, according to the US Air Force. The role of the drone is to escort the F-22 or F-35 during combat missions, the report said. One of the advantages of the XQ-58A Valkyrie is its low cost, the US Air Force reported. The range of the subsonic drone is estimated at three thousand kilometres. The drone is reportedly capable of carrying a radar or two small bombs. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Venezuelan Top Prosecutor Seeks to Probe Guaido Over Sabotaging Electric System Sputnik News 18:56 12.03.2019(updated 20:53 12.03.2019) The blackout has been ongoing in Venezuela for almost a week following an incident at a major hydroelectric power plant, Guri, which national electricity supplier Corpoelec called "sabotage". President Nicolas Maduro blamed the incident on Washington, citing US threats to apply all means against Venezuela. Venezuelan Prosecutor General Tarek Saab has requested to open an investigation into self-proclaimed President Guaido over his alleged role in sabotaging the country's electric system. Earlier, Venezuelan authorities arrested Spanish-Venezuelan journalist reporter and activist Luis Carlos Diaz on suspicion of also being involved in sabotaging the country's electric system. Electricity Grid Restored The Venezuelan power grid has been almost completely restored following a massive blackout on 7 March, Venezuelan Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez announced on 12 March. "At this point, the electricity supply had been restored almost completely throughout the whole national territory", Rodriguez said in a broadcast on state television. The accident at the major Venezuelan hydroelectric power plant Guri on 7 March led to a massive blackout that left most of the country without electricity for days. President Nicolas Maduro holds the US responsible for carrying out "sabotage" at the plant. Maduro recalled that in the past Washington had said that "all options are on the table" in regards to changing the government in Venezuela. Juan Guaido, leader of the Venezuelan opposition, earlier proclaimed himself the interim president of Venezuela, urging elected President Nicolas Maduro to resign. His claims were immediately supported by the US and most European states. However, Russia, China, Turkey, and a number of other countries condemned the move and expressed support for the legitimate president, Maduro. Maduro has repeatedly accused Washington of attempting to stage a coup in his country by using Guaido as "puppet" and attempting to deliver humanitarian aid as a pretext for military intervention. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US, Taliban Agree on American Troop Withdrawal From Afghanistan Reports Sputnik News 18:16 12.03.2019(updated 21:39 12.03.2019) The United States has been conducting a military operation against insurgents in Afghanistan since 2001. The fresh round of negotiations between the American delegation and Taliban representatives started on 25 February. The US delegation and the Taliban, on the last day of the fifth round of Doha talks, drafted an agreement on combating terrorism and the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, TOLOnews reported, citing sources. The media outlet has not, however, specified the details of the deal, only saying that it was a document written in the English and Pashtu languages. According to the outlet, the sources confirmed that the Taliban had agreed to cut ties with all terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda*, and join in the fight against them. However, the sources noted that nothing has been signed between the United States and Taliban, as Washington continues to promote its negotiation formula stating that "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed." Meanwhile, Reuters reported, citing sources, that no deal on the timeline for the pullout of foreign troops has been reached. As the news agency mentioned, the sides will meet for the next round of talks in the near future. The Russian Foreign Ministry previously said that the second meeting of the inter-Afghan dialogue is also planned to be held in Qatar in late March. The Foreign Ministry of Qatar has not yet been able to confirm to Sputnik the dates for hosting this event or who will take part in it. Thus, the timeline for the withdrawal of US troop from the country is unknown, but it is expected that two American bases will remain in Afghanistan. Commenting on the deal, US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad stated that the peace agreement requires agreement on four issues. "Peace requires agreement on four issues: counter-terrorism assurances, troop withdrawal, intra-Afghan dialogue and a comprehensive ceasefire," Khalilzad said via Twitter. "In January talks, we 'agreed in principle' on these four elements. We're now 'agreed in draft' on the first two." US Operation in Afghanistan The United States has been conducting a military operation against the Taliban and other groups in Afghanistan since 2001. This is the longest military conflict that the US has been involved in. A new round of talks between the United States and the Taliban in Doha began on 25 February. Earlier, the Khalilzad said that the negotiations between the American and Taliban delegations in Doha were productive. The Taliban movement has been one of the major forces opposing Kabul in the latter's long-standing confrontation with various rebel and terror groups. The Taliban seized power in the country in 1996, and the United States deployed its troops to Afghanistan in 2001 to fight al-Qaeda in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks. The US troops eventually overthrew the insurgents, saying that the country had become a safe haven for al-Qaeda while insurgents were in power. While most of the US troops left Afghanistan by the end of 2014, Washington continues to support the Afghan armed forces in combating terrorism. *al-Qaeda a terrorist group, banned in numerous states, including Russia Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address What US Sold to India in 10 Years, Russia Sold in Last 6 Months Sputnik News 16:33 12.03.2019 In the last decade, the US remained India's top defence supplier by bagging deals worth over $12 billion, which included a $4.7 billion transaction for C-17 transport aircraft. But it took Russia a mere six months to break this record. New Delhi (Sputnik): With the signing of the lease agreement for an Akula-class nuclear-powered attack submarine worth over $3 billion, the value of defence deals between India and Russia made in the last six months has surpassed the value of defence deals struck between India and the US in the last one decade. Following last year's annual summit, which witnessed India and Russia sealing a $5.43 billion deal for S-400 air missile and defence systems, the two countries have inked defence deals worth over $7 billion, including the sale of submarines, short range air defence systems, frigates, and assault rifles by Russia to the Indian Armed Forces. "Russia provides two advantages that the US cannot. Firstly, it is willing to give much more technology than the US, and secondly, Russia gives strategic protection from China. (Putin is the only leader Xi would listen to). After Doklam, given Chinese People's Liberation Army's massive increase on the Line of Actual Control (de-facto border), vulnerability has increased", Pravin Sawney, a former Indian Army officer and editor of the defence magazine Force, told Sputnik. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a joint Indo-Russian venture to make around 750,000 AK-203 rifles at an Ordnance Board Factory in Korwa, Amethi. "The plant itself will become another symbol of friendship and constructive cooperation between our two countries", Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation, said on the occasion. "Around 170 military and industrial facilities have been set up in India with Russian assistance during the decades-long partnership. Russia has offered joint ventures including research and development in disruptive technologies including hypersonic technology and Artificial Intelligence", Pravin Sawney told Sputnik while outlining some of the major reasons for the booming India-Russia defence co-operation. It is worth mentioning here that the two countries have almost solved the product supply and support issue, as 14 major Russian manufacturers have presidential decrees to deal directly with India, bypassing Rosoboronexport, for product support. Going by arms trade data released by SIPRI, India was the world's second largest importer of major arms in 2014-18 and accounted for 9.5 percent of the global total. Russia accounted for 58 percent of Indian arms imports in 2014-18, compared with 76 percent in 2009-13. Since October 2018, the two countries have also signed a $1.5 billion deal to buy Krivak-class frigates, and are almost at an advanced stage for the signing of a very short range air missile defence system deal worth around $1.5 billion. India has also started formal negotiations with Russia for the purchase of at least 21 MiG-29 fighter jets worth over $800 million to bolster the ageing fleet of the world's fourth-largest air force. In January, India approached Russia seeking to purchase 18 additional Sukhoi Su-30MKI aircraft worth around $700 million. Meanwhile, with the US, India is in talks for $2 billion worth of naval utility helicopters and Sea Guardian armed drones. "Recent hiccups in trade relations and a shortage of funds in the defence ministry may lead to delay in these purchases. Future deals with the US or Russia would depend on policies of the new government after the general elections", Pravin Sawney concluded. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the speaker do not reflect the official positon of Sputnik. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Venezuela Gives US Diplomats 72 Hours to Leave the Country Sputnik News 15:26 12.03.2019(updated 19:19 12.03.2019) Earlier in the day, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that Washington would withdraw all its remaining personnel from Venezuela during the week, noting that the presence of the diplomats in the Latin American country had become "a constraint on US policy". "Venezuela has decided not to grant a new extension for the permanence of the US diplomatic agents still present in the country, for which reason on 11 March 2019, the US Government has been required to leave the national territory with its the remaining personnel", the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry stated. Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza published the statement on his Twitter page. Commenting on the decision, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the United States made the decision to withdraw all remaining diplomats from Venezuela due to security concerns. "It was time for them to come back," Pompeo told a local TV station in Texas. "Their security is always paramount. And it's just gotten very difficult." The top US diplomat attributed the decision to worsening conditions on the ground over the last days and weeks. The US diplomats have remained in the country despite the decision of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to cut off diplomatic ties with the United States after Washington recognised opposition leader Juan Guaido as the Venezuelan interim president in January. Pompeo, however, has previously refused to comply with the demands, stating that Maduro lacked legal authority to declare US diplomats personae non-gratae. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address DR Congo: 'New waves of violence' likely, UN warns, unless State acts to prevent intercommunal reprisals 12 March 2019 - "New waves of violence" could erupt "at any time" in western Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the UN rights office warned on Tuesday, unless the Government acts to ease "tensions and resentment" between the two communities involved. Several days of planned and orchestrated killings took place in Mai-Ndombe province, in Yumbi territory at the end of last year, where hundreds of men, women and children were killed. The final assessment of a UN probe into the events of 16-18 December, says the violence may amount to crimes against humanity. Preliminary results of the investigation released last month, found evidence of extended attacks carried out between 16 and 18 December 2018, in four locations. Initially, it was reported that 890 people had been killed and thousands displaced as a result of clashes between the Banunu and Batende communities, UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani told journalists in Geneva. "We've been able to verify fully that at least 535 men, women and children were killed and 111 others were injured in Yumbi town, Bongende village and Nkolo II village," Ms. Shamdasani said. These figures "are most likely an underestimate", she continued, as the bodies of other victims "are believed to have been thrown into the Congo River". Thousands still displaced in Republic of Congo The OHCHR spokesperson also explained that it was not possible to confirm the number of persons still missing as an estimated 19,000 people were displaced by the violence, 16,000 of whom crossed the Congo River into the Republic of the Congo. According to the investigators who come from the UN's DRC peacekeeping mission, MONUSCO, and the OHCHR team in the vast country - the violence was triggered by a dispute over the burial of a Banunu chief, reportedly on Batende land. The attacks were "strikingly similar" and characterized by their extreme violence and speed, leaving little time for people to escape", Ms. Shamdasani said, noting that Batende villagers were "equipped with firearms, including hunting rifles, machetes, bows and arrows, and gasoline". Among the report's findings are witness testimonies that victims were asked if they were ethnic Banunu, before being killed. No proof of election link to gruesome attacks Ms. Shamdasani highlighted other alleged "horrors" in the report, including how a two-year-old child was thrown into a septic tank and a woman raped after her three-year-old child was decapitated and her husband killed. Faced with such evidence, the OHCHR officials highlighted the investigation's conclusion that the crimes documented in Yumbi "may amount to the crimes against humanity of murder, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, as well as persecution". Asked whether there was a possible link between the intercommunal attacks and elections that were due to take place in December - but which were postponed to the end of March because of the violence - she said that no concrete proof had been found. "There are going to be elections held in this territory on 31 March," she said, "but of course these people who've been displaced and who've had to flee across the border to the Republic of Congo, will probably not be able to vote because of ongoing fears of violence and reality this impossibility for them to get back to their homes." 'Police left before attacks began' Turning to the responsibility of the DRC Government to protect its citizens, Ms. Shamdasani insisted that there were "clear indications that there were rising tensions". She added: "There were police that had been deployed, but they left before the attacks actually took place, so there was a clear absence of preventive action." As for now, the final UN report states that "tensions and resentment between the two communities, combined with rumours of reprisals, could give rise to new waves of violence at any time." The UN Special Representative, and head of MONUSCO, Leila Zerrougui, called on the Government to take urgent measures to restore State authority in Yumbi territory, and to create conditions for the safe and voluntary return of the displaced. "The neutral presence of State institutions, including the police, is important to maintain law and order and prevent the risk of further violence", she added. In addition to an appeal to hold the perpetrators responsible for their actions, Ms. Shamdasani repeated the call by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, for a truth and reconciliation between the Banunu and Batende communities to prevent further violence. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Cameroon Reports Refugee Influx From CAR as Peace Initiative Fails By Moki Edwin Kindzeka March 12, 2019 Cameroon says there has been an influx of refugees from the Central African Republic (CAR) after several armed militias in the CAR rejected the president's new cabinet as not representative enough, sparking fears of renewed fighting. The U.N. refugee agency, or UNHCR, is trying to take care of them. Some of the refugees are seeking help at the Garoua Boulay health center. The center receives an average of 30 patients daily, but this Tuesday it has received 70 people. Nurse Luka Mvondo said a majority of them are children from the CAR who need rest after covering long distances on foot. He said all sick refugees who submit their UNHCR identification cards are treated free of charge as per an agreement between the government of Cameroon and the United Nations. The government of Cameroon says hundreds of returning and new refugees have crossed over from the CAR since March 5, when armed groups blocked a road in the western CAR to show their dissatisfaction with a new cabinet formed by President Faustin Archange Touadera. Only six of the 14 armed groups that signed a peace and national reconciliation accord in Khartoum on February 6 are represented in the cabinet. One group, the Central African People's Democratic Front, accused the president of failing to comply with the Khartoum peace agreement, which they say requires an all-inclusive government with representatives from all armed groups that signed the deal. Ngabede Bachirou fled to Cameroon because, he said, there are conflicts in the making unless Touadera quickly corrects his errors. He said he is very grateful the people and the government of Cameroon have received him and his two children. He said he is particularly happy because his children have been admitted in school so they can have their education and secure their future. Jacques Boyer, the UNHCR resident representative in Cameroon, said the refugees are being taken care of despite the limited resources that are available. He said besides providing humanitarian assistance to the refugees fleeing to safety as fear continues to grip CAR residents, the UNHCR has to reinforce the resilience of the host populations so they are able to handle the different economic, social and environmental shocks. The CAR has been wracked by fighting since rebels overthrew President Francois Bozize in March 2013. The U.N. reports that in 2018, some 650,000 Central Africans were internally displaced and 546,000 were refugees in neighboring countries, with more than 300,000 in Cameroon. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US to Remove All Diplomatic Personnel from Venezuela By VOA News March 12, 2019 The United States says it is removing all remaining personnel from its embassy in Venezuela. In a statement issued late Monday night, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the personnel will be pulled out of Caracas this week. Secretary Pompeo said the decision to shut down the embassy "reflects the deteriorating situation in Venezuela" as well as the conclusion that the presence of the diplomatic staff "has become a constraint on U.S. policy." The State Department ordered all non-emergency personnel to leave Venezuela back in January, days after President Nicolas Maduro ended diplomatic relations with Washington and ordered U.S. diplomats to leave after President Donald Trump officially recognized Juan Guaido as interim president. Guaido had declared himself president after claiming Maduro's re-election was illegitimate. The U.S. announcement that it was closing its embassy comes as Venezuela enters the sixth day of nationwide power outage Tuesday. Desperate residents are fetching water from a polluted river and drainage pipes, with schools and businesses closed and stores unable to keep cold and fresh whatever food is on hand. Some hospitals have generators and doctors are hoping to be able to transfer patients who need operations to save their lives to those facilities. Power was restored to parts of the country Monday, but was reported to be unreliable. It is also hard to confirm reports of deaths and looting coming out of Venezuela because of communication difficulties. President Maduro blames the power outage on the United States and the political opposition, accusing them of a cyberattack on a hydroelectric dam. Guaido says government corruption and mismanagement are the cause. Engineers say a lack of maintenance and skilled experts fleeing the country have left the Venezuelan electrical grid in terrible shape. The United States denies having anything to do with the power shortages and Pompeo Monday blasted Cuba and Russia for backing the Maduro regime. "No nation has done more to sustain the death and daily misery of ordinary Venezuelans, including Venezuela's military and their families, than the communists in Havana," Pompeo said. "Cuba is the true imperialist power in Venezuela." Pompeo says Maduro sends up to 50,000 barrels of oil to Cuba per day to help prop up Cuba's "tyrant socialist economy while Maduro needs Cuban expertise and repression, to keep his grip on power. A match made in hell," said Pompeo. Pompeo added that Russia joins Cuba in showing contempt for the rule of law and prosperity in Venezuela. "Russia, too, has created this crisis. It, too, for its own reasons, is thwarting the Venezuelan people's legitimate democratic hopes and their dreams... The Kremlin is standing with its Venezuelan cronies against the will of the people of a sovereign nation to protect a Moscow-friendly regime." Pompeo said oil-rich Venezuela's plunge from wealth to poverty has left economists with "amazement and horror." The United States expanded sanctions against Venezuela Monday to include a Moscow-based bank jointly owned by the Venezuelan and Russian governments. The Treasury Department says the bank allegedly tried to avoid earlier sanctions on Venezuela by backing Maduro's failed efforts. Nike Ching at the State Department contributed to this report. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US to Hold Venezuela's Military Responsible for Protecting Citizens - Bolton Sputnik News 02:31 13.03.2019 WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The United States will hold Venezuela's military forces responsible for protecting the Latin American country's citizens as it increases its efforts to remove President Nicolas Maduro from power, National Security Adviser John Bolton said on Tuesday. "We will continue to intensify our efforts to end Maduro's usurpation of Venezuela's Presidency and will hold the military and security forces responsible for protecting the Venezuelan people", Bolton said in a statement on Twitter. The United States has imposed numerous rounds of sanctions against Venezuela in response to the political developments in the country. In January, the United States blocked $7 billion in assets belonging to Venezuela's oil company PDVSA. Bolton said Monday that Washington had put "on notice" the insurance companies and flag carriers facilitating oil shipments from sanctioned Venezuela. Meanwhile, Venezuelan Ambassador to the UN Samuel Moncada has said the United States was arming Venezuelan defectors to form a so-called liberation army to invade the country, stressing that Venezuela views Trump's stance of "all options on the table" as a threat of using military force to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro's government. Venezuela entered a tumultuous political crisis in January after opposition leader Juan Guaido proclaimed himself to be the country's interim president. The United States immediately recognized Guaido, after which some 50 other countries followed suit. Russia, China, Turkey, Bolivia, Iran and a number of other states have said they consider constitutionally elected Maduro and his government to be the only legitimate authority in Venezuela. Maduro, who was sworn in for his second presidential term on 10 January after winning the May 2018 election, has called Guaido a puppet of the United States and has insisted that Washington is attempting to stage a coup in Venezuela. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address State Dept: DoD Chief, Qatar Defence Minister Discuss Al Udeid Air Base Upgrade Sputnik News 02:27 13.03.2019 WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - Acting US Secretary of Defence Patrick Shanahan met with Qatar Defence Minister Khalid Al Attiyah to reaffirm an alliance with the Persian Gulf nation that hosts the Al Udeid Air Base, the US Department of State said in a readout of the meeting on Tuesday. "The leaders discussed a broad range of defence and security issues, including Qatari support to the NATO mission in Afghanistan and improvements to Al Udeid Air Base", the readout stated. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in January that he had signed a memorandum of understanding with Qatar to expand US presence at Al Udeid air base southwest of Doha. READ MORE: Qatar Admits It Helped Bail Out Jared Kushner's Manhattan Tower Reports According to Pompeo, the base is home to 13,000 US coalition personnel engaged in battling the Daesh terrorist group in Syria and Iraq. Moreover, the base the largest military facility used by US forces in the Gulf region is considered crucial for US anti-terror campaigns in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, the military base is home to the US Air Force Central Command (AFCENT) and serves as major communications and operational center for the coalition. A coalition of a dozen Muslim nations led by Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic ties with Qatar in June 2017, and imposed a de facto commercial blockade over charges that Qatar supports terrorist groups. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, the Maldives, Mauritania, Senegal, Djibouti, the Comoros, Jordan, as well as internationally recognized governments in Libya and Yemen have joined the Saudi-led boycott, according to published reports. * Daesh (ISIL/ISIS/IS/Islamic State) is a terrorist organisation banned in Russia and many other countries. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Photo: Contributed UBC Okanagan is set to build two new student residences that will house nearly 500 students. The university expects to surpass the 10,000 student mark this September, and it currently has space for only 1,680 students to live on campus. That will be enough room for the school to ensure that every first-year student can live on campus, if they wish. The school continues to grow, however, so more beds are needed to ensure that housing is there for freshmen. Ultimately, wed like to be in a position of being able to offer on-campus housing to about 25 per cent of our student population, which is a very high benchmark when compared to other Canadian universities, UBCO associate vice-president of finance and operations Rob Einarson said in a press release. Residences offer an opportunity for connections into a community of peers and other supports that we know improves student success and their experience of student life on campus. The goal is to have the shovels in the ground shortly, and the buildings completed by the fall of 2021. The schools board of governors recently approved $70 million for the structures, which will be known as Nechako and Skeena. US to Impose 'Significant' Sanctions on Venezuela in Coming Days - Abrams Sputnik News 00:01 13.03.2019(updated 00:30 13.03.2019) WASHINGTON (Sputnik) The United States will impose additional major sanctions on Venezuela in the coming days, US Special Representative Elliot Abrams said during a press briefing on Tuesday. "You'll see in the coming days some very significant additional sanctions", Abrams told reporters at the State Department. Abrams explained Washington will impose more sanctions on financial institutions supporting the government of President Nicolas Maduro. On Monday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States would recall all diplomats remaining in Venezuela later this week. Washington had recalled non-essential diplomats and embassy personnel from Venezuela over security reasons on 24 January. Abrams told reporters on Tuesday that Washington is in discussions with other countries about choosing "a protecting power" for its embassy in Caracas after the decision to withdraw all US diplomats from Venezuela amid the ongoing political crisis. "Normally, we would get a protecting power and that is, I think, what we will do here. We are in discussions now about that", Abrams said during a press briefing. Venezuela has been facing a deep political crisis in recent weeks. On 5 January, lawmaker Juan Guaido was elected head of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, which all other government branches have been refusing to recognize since 2016. The crisis worsened when Guaido declared himself interim president on 23 January. The United States and 54 countries soon recognized Guaido as Venezuela's president. Incumbent President Nicolas Maduro, whose new term began on 10 January, said Guaido is a puppet of the United States and accused Washington of attempting to organize a coup d'etat in Venezuela. Russia, China, Turkey, Bolivia, Iran, Turkey and several other countries have said they recognize the constitutionally elected Maduro as the Venezuela's only legitimate president. The United States has imposed numerous rounds of sanctions against Venezuela in response to the political developments in the country. In January, Washington blocked $7 billion in assets belonging to Venezuela's oil company PDVSA. Maduro said the US sanctions were tantamount to an illegal seizure of the country's sovereign assets. US to Continue Trying to Bring China 'Aboard' on Venezuela, Examine Turkey's Stance Abrams told reporters on Tuesday that Washington would continue encouraging China to halt the support for Maduro. "We will continue to make efforts to bring China aboard, we have told at various places, we have told the Chinese that we think if their concern is, in essence, getting their money back, they will never get it back from the bankrupt Maduro regime and from a basically destroyed Venezuelan economy the only way they will get it back is when Venezuela returns to prosperity which they will not do with Nicolas Maduro", Abrams said. Abrams also warned that the United States will also continue to examine Turkey's support for the Maduro government and its purchase of gold from Caracas, adding that Washington does not exclude the possibility of imposing sanctions on Ankara. "Turkey's support for the Maduro regime obviously is completely contrary to the US policy and very unhelpful, and we will continue to take a look at the ways in which that support takes place and in the context of sanctions by Treasury," Abrams said. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Irish separatists claim responsibility for parcel bombs found in UK Iran Press TV Tue Mar 12, 2019 01:50PM The Irish Republican Army, a violent movement seeking separation of Northern Ireland from the UK, says it was behind a series of bomb packages sent to crowded locations across Britain last week. The UK police said on Monday that IRA's claim of responsibility came earlier in the day through a Northern Ireland media outlet using a recognized codeword. The police said the group had claimed five devices were sent to locations in London and in Scotland although officers recovered only four. The official line of the UK government is that the IRA, the dominant force behind three decades of troubles that ended in late 1990s, has no official presence anymore and those calling themselves IRA are in fact offshoots of the group. However, the country is experiencing a new wave of separatist activities over Northern Ireland, a province where many are still unhappy with the British rule and seek independence or a merger with the Republic of Ireland. There have been a major bombing and two shootings in the province since the start of the year while the arrivals of bomb packages have added to the public concerns that violence could return to the streets of UK. Police Scotland and the Metropolitan Police of London had earlier suspected the parcel bombs, discovered at three London transport hubs and the University of Glasgow last week, could have come from Irish separatists due to similarities they had to devices sent by Northern Ireland dissident groups in the past. The revived separatism in Northern Ireland comes amid warnings that a historic ceasefire agreement signed in 1998 may need to change if Britain fails to guarantee that the border between the two Irelands will remain open following London's imminent withdrawal from the European Union. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address No IS Kids Left Behind: Tajikistan To Repatriate Dozens Of Islamic State Children From Iraq By Farangis Najibullah, Mumin Ahmadi March 12, 2019 As Islamic State's attempt to establish a caliphate crumbles, many countries are turning their backs on children born into the extremist group. Tajikistan is not one of those countries. "We're planning to bring them home," the country's ambassador to Iraq and Kuwait, Zubaidullo Zubaidzoda, told RFE/RL. Hundreds of Tajik citizens went to Iraq and Syria to join Islamic State (IS), according to authorities, and Dushanbe has been known to take a relatively forgiving approach to the issue. In 2015, the Tajik government offered an amnesty to those who voluntarily returned and renounced violence, seeing it as an opportunity to warn citizens of the dangers of joining ranks with radical Islam. Now, with IS's once-formidable swath of territory encompassing large parts of Iraq and Syria having been reduced to a final foothold in eastern Syria, the question of what to do with fighters and their families left stranded and oftentimes stateless abroad has become more pressing. As governments publicly ponder their options, cases of IS family members seeking to return to the homelands they spurned have grabbed headlines. A New Jersey-born woman known as the "ISIS Bride" and who once made calls on social media to murder Americans has sued over the right to return with her toddler son to the United States, which has rejected her claim to birthright citizenship. In Britain, the family of a runaway teen who joined Islamic State and was recently discovered at a refugee camp in Syria had pleaded for her to be allowed to return to raise her newborn son in the "peace and security" of the United Kingdom, which has revoked her citizenship. Most recently, after the 19-year-old's baby died, the Home Office was asked to reconsider its decision as an "act of mercy." In Belgium, a court order that the government repatriate six IS kids and their mothers is being appealed. The French government is now addressing the issue of repatriating IS minors on a case-by-case basis, after having followed a policy of refusing to take back fighters and their wives. Tajikistan, meanwhile, has repeatedly said it doesn't intend to leave any Tajik children behind in Iraq and Syria, fearing that they might pose security threats in the long run. Tajikistan is soon expected to send a plane to Baghdad to repatriate 75 children whose Tajik mothers are imprisoned in Iraq under charges of belonging to IS. Zubaidzoda, who's been tasked with negotiating the repatriation of Tajik citizens from Iraq and Syria, told RFE/RL on March 6 that he has obtained the required permission from the children's mothers to return them to Tajikistan. All in all there are 43 Tajik mothers serving time in Iraq, with 92 children between them, Tajik authorities say. Zubaidzoda said 17 Tajik children will remain for now in Iraqi prisons because their mothers did not grant their permission for them to be repatriated. Among the reasons given were that there were no relatives in Tajikistan willing to look after their children, according to the official. Others said their children were too young. And others, he said, refused to allow their children to be raised in Tajikistan because it was not "Islamic." The ambassador said Dushanbe would not give up on its efforts to bring home "all Tajik children" from Iraq, but didn't give further details. He is working separately to secure the return of some 50 Tajik women and children who are being held in refugee camps in northeastern Syria. Family Time Returning children are expected to undergo medical check-ups and receive any necessary medical treatments and vaccinations soon after their arrival. Officials say trained psychologists and teachers will work with children long-term to help them to adapt to their new life in Tajikistan. All of the children in the group expected to return by the end of March will be placed with family members who were approached by the government and agreed to be named legal guardians. In Dushanbe's Rudaki district, Gulchehra Usmonova is refurbishing her eight-room, two-story house to accommodate her three grandchildren. The children, a boy and two girls, are aged between two and eight. Usmonova has never seen the girls: they were both born in Iraq, she says. The mother of the children, Ganjina Usmonzoda, went to Iraq along with her husband and their son in 2015. The husband is believed to have been killed in Mosul, where Usmonzoda, 27, was arrested by Iraqi authorities. "My daughter, Ganjina, called me in February and said she was sending the children to Tajikistan. We readily accepted that we'll take care of them," the grandmother told RFE/RL on March 6. Usmonova, a businesswoman, says she will do her "best" to raise the children, and that her two grown-up sons who live nearby have promised to help. She blames her son-in-law for taking his family to live under IS. In Dushanbe's Shohmansur neighborhood, Sabzagul Kamolova also awaits the arrival of her grandchildren. Her daughter, who is serving a jail sentence in Baghdad, has five children. Two of them were born under the IS in Iraq. "My grandchildren coming home is the best news I've ever heard," Kamolova says. "My daughter told me she's sending four of them, and keeping the youngest, because she's still breastfeeding the child." Iraq Wants Them Out Baghdad said in 2018 that at least 833 children of 14 nationalities were being held in Iraqi prisons and called on their home countries to repatriate the children. "We ask all diplomatic missions in Iraq, resident and nonresident, to take back their nationals who have served their sentences and children who are not convicted," Iraqi Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ahmed Mahjoub said on July 3. Tajikistan last year returned six Tajik children who were taken by their parents to Iraq. Tajik authorities say more some 2,000 people from the predominantly Muslim country have left for Iraq and Syria since 2014 to join IS. More than 100 people in total, including families with children, have returned from the conflict zone -- both before and after the amnesty was offered in 2015. Some were convicted of being mercenaries or recruiting for foreign terrorist organizations. Most, however, have reintegrated into society under the watchful eyes of authorities, including security services and neighborhood committees. Some of the returnees take an active part in the government's anti-extremism campaign, giving speeches about IS atrocities they witnessed, and warning about potential recruiters who prey on vulnerable young people. The secular government in Dushanbe strictly controls people's practices of Islam, banning school-age children from attending mosque prayers, outlawing the wearing of the hijab in schools and offices, and closing down madrasahs. Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/no-is-kids-left -behind-tajikistan-to-repatriate-dozens-of-islamic- state-children-from-iraq/29817362.html Copyright (c) 2019. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address IRA Claims Responsibility for Recent Bombs in London, Glasgow Sputnik News 13:12 12.03.2019(updated 15:31 12.03.2019) Investigations in to the devices used in the explosions are ongoing and enquiries are being sought in order to verify the claim. The claim was made on behalf of an entity known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA), who have claimed responsibility for planting explosive devices at the University of Glasgow, including three transport hubs in London, according to police sources used by the Scottish Sun News. Later, the UK Metropolitan Police and Police Scotland confirmed they were aware of the claim, but stated they continued probing the devices and the claim itself. "Given the packages received last week bore similarities to devices sent in the past which were linked to dissident groups associated with Northern Ireland-related terrorism, officers were already looking at this as a line of enquiry. However, we continue to keep an open mind and enquiries continue," the police added. The claim was received on Monday 11 March by a media outlet in Northern Ireland outlet using a recognised codeword. Roughly eight buildings were evacuated at the university after a suspicious package was discovered around 10:45am on 6 March. A controlled explosion was conducted after facilities were evacuated at the city's West End, Metropolitan Police said. Counterterrorism officers have also linked similar packages sent to three busy travel hubs in London earlier the same week. A police spokesperson said in a Tuesday press release: "Police Scotland and the Metropolitan Police are aware of the claim of responsibility for the devices that were received at three buildings in London and at the University of Glasgow on 5 and 6 March." "Given the packages received last week bore similarities to devices sent in the past which were linked to dissident groups associated with Northern Ireland-related terrorism, officers were already looking at this as a line of enquiry. However, we continue to keep an open mind and enquiries continue." "We continue to urge the public to remain vigilant and report anything suspicious to police," the spokesperson added. Met Counterterrorism detectives are investigating the three packages in London, whilst Police Scotland are investigating the incident at University of Glasgow. Both agencies are sharing intelligence to assist their inquiries. But only four of the five planted devices have been found, as the group have claimed responsibility for sending five devices, authorities said. Police are informing businesses and sectors in the UK to remain vigilant and report suspicious packages to police, with similar advice being previously sent to UK military forces. Police had discovered suspicious packages around 9:55am at The Compass Centre near Heathrow Airport, Nelson Road, and Hounslow, Metropolitan Police said. The package had been opened by staff at the building, setting off the device. No one was injured and flights were unaffected by the incident. British Transport Police were alerted at Waterloo station around 11:40, and bomb diffusing officers neutralised the device, with no injuries being reported. Similar incidences were reported at the City Aviation House, Royal Docs, Newham, with police conducting staff evacuations and diffusing devices. Flights were also unaffected, police said. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Trump's Proposed Budget Calls for More Immigrant Detention By Aline Barros March 12, 2019 U.S. President Donald Trump wants to increase family immigration detention beds by 10,000 in his 2020 budget proposal, a move unlikely to win Congressional support. In the document released Monday, Trump called for $2.7 billion for 54,000 detention beds, as well as the creation of a Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Fund that would expand immigration detention capacity to 60,000, adding 10,000 family detention beds. The proposed budget is unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. The administration says the requests are an "investment in America," adding that they reflect Trump's "commitment to defending our nation." Immigration beds were an issue in the 2019 budget stalemate which led to the country's longest government shutdown. Democrats had sought a cap on the number of detention beds in use. The 2019 budget passed by Congress in February was a compromise aimed at reducing the number of detention beds to just over 40,000. While the budget authorized a record 45,274 beds through the end of September when the Fiscal Year ends, it was intended to gradually ease a higher surge in immigrant detentions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 'Inhumane,' says immigrant advocate Immigrant advocates are particularly incensed by the president's proposed increase in detention for families. "It's inhumane and it causes irreparable harm to children and their families. Families or children, who are no risk to the community, should be released through an alternative to detention," said Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, a former Democratic primary candidate for Maryland governor, who was recently named president and CEO of Baltimore-based Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS). Vignarajah told VOA that alternative to detentions (ATDs) programs provide support to children and families that have experienced extreme trauma. "Alternatives to detention that are currently used boast high compliance rates and cost, on average, about $6 per day, per person," according to a LIRS report. Vignarajah said she recently went on an exclusive tour of the country's largest child detention center in Homestead, Florida. Though she said the facility was "relatively clean and well-kept the sheer scale of this operation was overwhelming." "At the time of my visit, the facility was housing nearly 1,700 children, and the administration recently announced that it intends to nearly double the facility's capacity. That deeply troubles me because of what I saw already in place: row after row after row of bunk beds 144 children sleeping in one room," Vignarajah said. 'Alarming,' says another advocate "Calling for an increase in the number of family detention centers is very alarming," Kathryn Shepherd, a national advocacy counsel at American Immigration Council, told VOA. Shepherd said she spent "many months" as managing attorney in 2015 and 2016 at the Dilley Pro Bono Project, a local program in the Immigration Justice Campaign that operates a pro bono model of legal services in Dilley, Texas, and it was a "fairly" surreal experience. "It's a very sterilized environment. It's certainly not something you think that you will be doing when you're in law school, which is providing critical 11th hour legal services to a mother and a tiny child inside the walls of a jail," she said. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address China's OneSpace preparing for first orbital launch end of March Global Times By Wang Cong and Yang Kunyi Source:Global Times Published: 2019/3/12 22:08:40 OneSpace preparing for first orbital launch Beijing One Space Technology Group (OneSpace), a Chinese private rocket producer, has completed preparations for its first orbital launch scheduled later this month, the company announced on Tuesday. A successful launch of OneSpace's OS-M rocket would be a significant step in the fast-growing commercial space sector in China, where scores of start-ups are catching up to their foreign counterparts, mostly those based in the US, in a potentially lucrative global market. OneSpace, which is often referred to as China's SpaceX, said it has finished final assembly and system checks and will launch the OS-M launch vehicle at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Northwest China's Gansu Province at the end of March. "The launch of the 'Chongqing Liangjiang Star' will usher in a new era in China's commercial rocket sector," the company said in a press release sent to the Global Times. The rocket was named after the Liangjiang New Area in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, where the company has its headquarters. The firm's Beijing branch focuses on research and development. In May 2018, OneSpace became the first Chinese private company to launch a commercial rocket. However, the company's previous launches of its smaller OS-X series were suborbital missions. The OS-M is capable of delivering payloads into space orbit, according to the company. "Reliability and safety are the thresholds of the industry, and they are also notoriously difficult to achieve," Huang Zhicheng, a professor at the Beijing Institute of System Engineering, told the Global Times on Tuesday. "Several [private companies in China] have attempted to launch carrier rockets into orbits, but so far none have succeeded." In October, Land Space Technology Co (Landspace), tried but failed in its attempt to achieve the first orbital launch of the Zhuque-1 solid rocket. Huang said that there is a good chance for OneSpace to pull off its attempt, given the company's successful suborbital launches. But "any experience in transporting payloads into orbits is meaningful, even if it fails," he said, adding that even companies like SpaceX failed several times before making successful launches. Another private company - Beijing Interstellar Glory Space Technology (iSpace) - is rushing to launch orbital missions. ISpace said last week that after series of tests, its Hyperbola-1 rocket is ready for launch, according to news website jiemian.com. ISpace announced in January that it had secured 700 million yuan ($104.33 million) in funding since its establishment in 2017 and plans to carry out its first orbital launch in the first half of 2019, the Beijing News reported. The rise of Chinese private companies will support the development of the country's space technology, Huang said. Private companies "have lower costs and are more flexible in their exploration," Huang said. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US Should Verify China's Activity on Moon Not Military Related - Army Official Sputnik News 22:01 12.03.2019 ARLINGTON (Sputnik) - The United States should monitor China's activity on the far side of the Moon to ensure there is no military activity, US Space Integrated Planning Element chief Joseph Guzman said during a panel discussion on space support to air and missile defence on 12 March. "If the Chinese are in fact putting a military base on the moon, I'm sure they wouldn't admit it They certainly have the technological prowess to do this and the will", Guzman said. "I think we should actually establish some kind of way to verify what exactly is going on in the far side of the Moon and it's probably not good enough to just believe what the Chinese tell us". Guzman said establishing a military capability on a celestial object would be in violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. In early January, the Chinese lunar mission Chang'e-4 successfully landed on the far side of the Moon for the first time in history. The Chang'e-4 landed in Von Karman crater, which is located in the north-western part of the largest known impact lunar crater, the South Pole-Aitken basin. The module is set to enable studies of the lunar surface's mineral structure and of the lunar mantle. The Chang'e-4 was launched from the Xichang space centre, located in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, on 7 December. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Pentagon Requests $13.6Bln for Missile Defence in Fiscal Year 2020 Dept Sputnik News 21:15 12.03.2019(updated 21:16 12.03.2019) WASHINGTON (Sputnik) President Donald Trump has requested $13.6 billion to upgrade existing missile defence and begin developing space-based weapons to counter hypersonic missile threats, the Defence Department has said in a statement. "The FY 2020 Budget funds the sustainment of the surge in missile defense investment we undertook in FY 2018 and FY 2019, while also investing in Missile Defense Review efforts at $13.6 billion", the Defence Department said in a summary of Trump's proposed military budget. The Missile Defence Review describes weapons systems needed to prevent and defeat adversary missile attacks through a combination of deterrence, missile defences and attack operations, according to the Department of Defence. The US Department of Defence further elaborated that President Donald Trump has requested a budget of $250 million for the Pentagon to support the military and national security forces in Ukraine. "The 2020 budget request for EDI [the European Deterrence Initiative] includes $250 million to provide assistance and support to the military and national security forces of Ukraine, and for replacement of any weapons or defensive articles provided to the Government of Ukraine from the inventory of the United States", the Defence Department said in an overview of its FY 2020 budget proposal. The US government budget proposal listed $750 under "defence total" spending for the fiscal year 2020, which is 4.7 percent more from the $716 billion allocated in the fiscal year 2019. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address China's top judicial organs deliver annual reports: system playing bigger role in ensuring social stability Global Times By Cao Siqi Source:Global Times Published: 2019/3/12 22:08:41 Last Updated: 2019/3/12 22:47:23 Ranging from graft, local mafia, sexual assault, to copyright infringement, China's top court and procuratorate authorities said Tuesday that they have imposed high pressure on law violations, corrected wrongful convictions and safeguarded the good Samaritan spirit, showing that the country's judicial system is playing a bigger role in ensuring social stability. Delivering their work reports Tuesday morning at the ongoing annual national legislative session, Chief Justice Zhou Qiang and Procurator-General Zhang Jun highlighted their progress in the past year. The reports quickly made a splash on Chinese social media platforms and triggered Chinese netizens' heated discussions as they conveyed legal spirits in examples by listing a series of typical and controversial judicial cases last year. Meanwhile, the reports also manifested a more open and intelligent Chinese judicial system such as the smart court, which uses big data to provide legal services for the public and the cloud system that helps judges find files of similar cases efficiently Chinese legal experts hailed the huge progress in judicial reform as being more based on people's increasing demand for democracy, rule of law, fairness and justice, security and a better environment. China's Supreme People's Court (SPC) handled 34,794 cases in 2018 and concluded 31,883 cases, up 22.1 percent and 23.5 percent year on year respectively. Local courts saw an increase of 8.8 percent and 10.6 percent in the cases they handled and concluded, said the SPC report. With unwavering resolve to bring corruption to justice, Chinese courts concluded 28,000 graft cases involving embezzlement, bribery and dereliction of duty last year. Of the 33,000 people involved, 18 were former officials at the provincial level or above. Meanwhile, 32 such former high-ranking officials, including Sun Zhengcai and Wang Sanyun, were charged. Sun is the former Party chief of Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, who was sentenced to life in prison in May 2018 for taking bribes of over 170 million yuan ($25.29 million), while Wang, former Party chief of Gansu Province, stood trial in October 2018, accused of using his position for taking bribes. Justice for the people Making headway in the campaign to combat organized crime and root out local mafia, the reports also revealed that Chinese courts concluded 5,489 related cases in 2018 which involved 29,000 criminals, while procuratorates across the country approved the arrest of 73,385 suspects involved in such crimes, among whom 61,188 were indicted. Li Shenglong, deputy judge at the No.1 Intermediate People's Court of Chongqing, who is also a political advisor, told media after the session that the reports, based on facts and data, fully showcased the Chinese judiciary's efforts in safeguarding social justice and fairness. On Chinese social media platforms, many users said that they were impressed by the judiciary's move to rectify wrongful convictions and solve problems that incurred strong public dissatisfaction. For example, the local procuratorate did not prosecute Zhao Yu, who was detained for intentional assault injury, after stopping an attempted rape of his female neighbor. Zhao posted on his Sina Weibo Tuesday that "I appreciated the acknowledgement from the Supreme People's Procuratorate and hope that the report could encourage more people to be a Good Samaritan without any worries." Qin Qianhong, a constitutional law professor at Wuhan University, told the Global Times that the reports conveyed a strong message to the outside world that China's judiciary aims to fully protect people's rights and needs. Cases like the Peppa Pig copyright infringement case and the private enterprise Kechley case, proved that message, Qin said. In August 2018, the Hangzhou Internet Court adjudicated a copyright infringement case and ordered two offending Chinese companies to compensate the copyright owners of British animation Peppa Pig. A 12-year dispute between Yulin Kechley Energy Investment Company and the Xi'an Geology and Mineral Exploration and Development Institute under Shaanxi Provincial Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources over mining rights worth 100 billion yuan was finally adjudicated by the SPC in favor of Kechley, Qin said, a landmark case of the central government ruling the country by law and protecting the property rights of private enterprises. Cases relevant to intellectual property rights (IPR) were also highlighted in the SPC report. Chinese courts at all levels concluded 288,000 IPR cases of first instance in 2018, up 41.8 percent year on year. A tribunal for IPR-related cases was set up at the Supreme People's Court last year to further strengthen judicial protection of IPR. Protecting IPR means creating a better environment for the international exchange of business activities and also to help guarantee innovation by domestic entrepreneurs, Wang Wanqiong, a lawyer from the Chongqing Exceedon& Partners Law Firm, told the Global Times on Tuesday. Protecting personal safety and property security rights of entrepreneurs, especially those from the private sector, will also be highlighted in the future, Wang noted. Challenges ahead The Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate will continue to provide legal guarantees for sustained and sound economic and social development and strengthen their team building, according to their reports. Fostering a favorable business environment by improving the rule of law and offering better legal services will be a priority in 2019 to promote the country's high-quality development, said the judicial bodies' reports. Having noted the decline in warrants, Qin said that prosecutors should have a clearer mind about their jobs and supervision responsibilities as the country has established a special supervision committee. Qin also urged courts to continue fighting judicial corruption and promote judicial transparency. "Publicizing more judicial documents may be one of the most important steps," he said. An increasing number of judicial documents are uploaded online and more cases are broadcast live via the website of China's judicial bodies, Wang noted. This was "vivid evidence of China's efforts to promote judicial transparency," she said. Although legal awareness has improved remarkably among Chinese people, many still exhibit limited knowledge of how to use the most appropriate legal means when disputes occur, Wang said. For instance, the overuse of litigation in civil and commercial cases has brought huge pressure to China's judicial system, while non-litigation approaches, such as mediation and arbitration, are still strange to many, Wang said. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address China Tweaks Tech Supremacy Plan By Saibal Dasgupta March 12, 2019 For the first time in recent years, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's annual Government Work Report did not mention Made in China 2025, the country's ambitious plan to achieve high-tech dominance, and that has analysts asking whether Beijing is going to completely overhaul the plan or keep it going quietly behind the scenes. Made in China 2025 relies heavily on government subsidies to Chinese companies and their ability to acquire new technologies covering 10 different sectors such as electric cars, emerging bio-medicine, next-generation information technology, advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. The plan is part of China's broader industrial policy outlined in the 13th Five-Year plan, which lays out government goals from 2016-2020. It raised concerns, however, because of China's use of forced technology transfers and specific targets to capture market share by 2025. The plan has been a focus of discussion between U.S. and Chinese negotiators, with Washington demanding an end to subsidies given to local companies under the plan. The United States also wanted China to do away with unfair trade practices that include the forcible transfer of technology from foreign companies. A significant portion of technologies used in China in the 10 listed sectors come from foreign sources. But the government is now amending laws that will leave Chinese companies in a somewhat difficult situation. It is also expected to cut subsidies it gives to local companies in order to overcome objections raised by the United States during the trade war. New laws and policy changes that the government is bringing on during the ongoing sessions of China's legislature, or National People's Congress (NPC), would seriously affect its ability to acquire foreign technology. "China will suffer in the short run but in the medium run they seem to be fine," said Lourdes Casanova, director at Cornell's Emerging Markets Institute. To a great extent, Chinese companies have used three means to acquire technology: the use of borrowed or stolen ideas, the forcible transfer of know-how from foreign partners and the purchase of foreign companies. Acquisitions by Chinese companies have now become problematic because of growing cautiousness and recent legislation in the United States and European Union. Some analysts believe there were design defects in the 2025 plan itself, and the government has been rethinking it for some time now. "The original 2025 plan was too nationalistic and too top down. It was wasteful," Mats Harborn, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, told VOA. "They [government leaders] thought technology should be owned by Chinese companies. There was a 'we can do this on our own' attitude," "There is a shift or maturity in understanding. There is an understanding that China cannot do all things on its own. It has to use international value chains and integrate as much as possible," Harborn said. New information emerging now suggests there has been a struggle within the government about the suitability of this grandiose plan. "It [the strategy] should not have been done that way anyway. I was against it from the start, I did not agree very much with it," Lou Jiwei, China's finance minister between 2013 and 2016, said on the sidelines of the legislative meeting in Beijing. Other legislators told VOA the government is making adjustments in accordance with public opinion. Putting less emphasis on Made in China 2025 "reflects a more rational approach by the government, to reduce unnecessary obstacles, noises and reaction, to keep moving forward in a positive direction," said Tang Nong, a NPC delegate from Guangxi. "The government is moving forward with the 13th Five-Year plan. What is Made in China 2025, is it a plan or a broad outline?" asked Sun Xianzhong, an NPC delegate and professor of international law at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Analysts believe the government may revamp and repackage the plan, but it is unlikely to soften its efforts. "The government remains committed to moving China's economy up the value chain and will continue to use a variety of active industrial policies to achieve this goal," said Duncan Innes-Ker, regional director for Asia at The Economist Intelligence Unit. Harborn believes the government will shift from the idea of acquiring new technologies to absorbing them in the industrial value chain. "This is a wakeup call. The new focus will be on integrating the best technologies at the best price and creating the best final product or service," he said. State owned companies in China may be better able to readjust themselves if the 2025 plan is revamped because their focus is more on revenues than on profit. "For a state-owned company, profits going down in favor of revenues or jobs, so what's the problem? They are fine," said Casanova adding, "Profits are less or not of primary consideration." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Photo: CTV News A teenager struck in a Nanaimo crosswalk last week has died in hospital. The 17 year old was struck March 6 and was rushed to Nanaimo Regional General Hospital before being airlifted to Victoria. The principal of Dover Bay Secondary School sent a letter home to parents confirming the death, CTV News reports. "It is with great sadness that we inform you that a Dover Bay student passed away after succumbing to injuries received in a pedestrian accident last week," the letter stated. The driver of the Toyota RAV-4 that struck the teen remained at the scene and co-operated with investigators. with files from CTV Vancouver Island Whistle-Blower Controversy Casts Shadow Over China's 'Judicial Progress' By Joyce Huang March 12, 2019 The president of China's Supreme People's Court praised the country's progress in advancing judicial reform over the past year during an annual government work report Tuesday to the National People's Congress. An earlier whistle-blower case by a Supreme Court judge tells a different story, which, observers say, may epitomize how China's judicial system remains very opaque. In his 40-minute-long speech, Zhou Qiang told nearly 3,000 members of the country's largely rubber-stamp legislature that China's courts at all levels have fully upheld the principles of legality, presumption of innocence and exclusion of unlawful evidence. Wrongful convictions overturned More than 1,800 wrongful convictions, including 10 major cases of miscarriages of justice, have been overturned in the past year, he added. That was among more than 25 million cases that Chinese courts had tried and closed in 2018, according to Zhou. "[We've] strengthened the mechanism to prevent and correct miscarriage of justice while strictly implementing the principle of excluding [the adoption of] unlawful evidence," Zhou said. Such a mechanism, however, exists in name only, argues rights lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan. Liu noted that courts in China rarely take the initiative a top- down approach in re-opening trials that are problematic. A top-down approach? Instead, he added, most wrongful convictions in China are overturned in a bottom up format: repeated appeals by the victims or their families, some of whom even resorted to extreme measures to seize media attention so that their cases could be brought to light or stood chances of being reviewed again. "Some people, who have been wrongfully accused, serve their jail terms and do not file any appeals. Nor do their family members appeal or lodge any complaints," Liu said. "What would truly be a mechanism to prevent the miscarriage of justice, is if under such circumstances, the Supreme People's Court or the Supreme People's Procuratorate would spot flaws in the cases and re-activate due process to review such cases, uncover mistakes and overturn rulings," the Beijing-based lawyer added. At Tuesday's NPC session, Zhou highlighted other statistics, including that Chinese courts have put nearly 30,000 perpetrators of organized crime behind bars, including village- and city-level thugs and some 33,000 officials guilty of corruption or bribe-taking. Judge's whistle-blowing But, in contrast to the rosy performance of judicial advancement spoken of by Zhou, a recent whistle-blower case involving Wang Linqiang, a former assistant judge to Zhou's top court, shed light on the practice of judicial interference or influence peddling in Chinese courts. Wang was the judge for a long-running contract dispute and, in January, helped expose the loss of court documents in the second trial for the dispute that implicated high-ranking officials, including Zhou. The court papers, which Wang claimed to be stolen in late 2016, detailed a mine ownership dispute between private firm Kechley Energy Investment and the state-owned Xian Institute of Geological and Mineral Exploration in northwestern China's Shannxi province. Notes that spelled out instructions from higher-ups, including Zhou and his deputy, were said to be among the missing papers, evidence Wang said shows that the court's top leaders had interfered in the case's ruling. The case was first tried by a local court in Shannxi, which ruled in favor of Kechley in 2006. But the ruling was later overturned by the province's high court in 2011. Kecheley then appealed to the Supreme Court, which in late 2017, finalized its ruling in favor of Kechley. But Wang revealed, in several pre-recorded video clips that went viral in December, how some of the case's court papers had long been stolen from his Supreme Court office, where security was supposedly tight. "I'd like to use this video clip to protect myself from unexpected mishap and save as an evidence," Wang said in January. Wang added that his superiors were not very eager to locate the papers when he reported the incident of missing papers. A dramatic turn The judge also noted that he was under pressure from his supervisors to rule in favor of the state-owned institute. Things, however, took a dramatic turn late last month, when a joint investigation team, including members of the Communist Party's central political legal affairs commission, the disciplinary commission, the top procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security, concluded Wang was the one who stole the documents. Wang's whereabouts are unknown and he was last seen in a televised confession on state-run channel CCTV. "I took them away on impulse partly to vent my anger, and partly to stop other [judges] from handling the case," he said on CCTV in February. Following the flip-flop of Wang's whistle-blowing act, many have called China's judicial independence into question. Lawyer Liu said the fact that Wang was forced to make a televised confession before any trail has shown that the judiciary in China has no respect for the principle of presumption of innocence. On Weibo, China's Twitter-like microblogging site, one user questioned why Wang "wanted to turn himself in?" and another wrote "such a sloppy ruling reached on TV only discredited the rule of law in China." Thousands of other posts in response to news of Wang's confession were obviously censored, since they were no longer available. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address China: Muslim 'Training Centers' May 'Gradually Disappear' Some Day By VOA News March 12, 2019 Chinese authorities said Tuesday that internment camps in the western region of Xinjiang will "gradually disappear" if a time arises when "society does not need them." China is facing global backlash over the camps, which officials maintain are actually vocational training centers. "Some international voices say Xinjiang has concentration camps and re-education camps," Xinjiang Governor Shohrat Zakir said on the sidelines Tuesday of the annual meeting of China's ceremonial legislature. "These kinds of statements are completely fabricated lies, and are extraordinarily absurd." Some one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim Turkic minorities are being held in the centers, the United Nations estimates. Former detainees have described harsh conditions, including psychological torture and political indoctrination. Beijing contends the camps are part of a broader campaign to reduce the threat of Islamic extremism. "The number of people in the education centers should be less and less, and if one day society no longer needs [them], these education centers can gradually disappear," Zakir said. The Xinjiang Party's current secretary, Chen Quanguo, enacted hard-line policies while serving as secretary in the Buddhist region of Tibet. Observers say he has imposed tighter security and surveillance measures to Xinjiang. Zakir reiterated Beijing's claim at the meeting there have been no violent incidents in Xinjiang in more than two years. But the United States says the conditions in Xinjiang are "completely unacceptable." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Caution needed for Chinese investors in NK as UN sanctions remain Global Times By Hu Weijia Source:Global Times Published: 2019/3/12 21:48:40 Caution on N.Korea needed as UN sanctions remain As UN sanctions on North Korea remain in place, Chinese enterprises need to temper their enthusiasm for potential business opportunities in the virgin land to avoid becoming a target of US attacks. After the summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un failed to reach a deal in Hanoi, Vietnam last month, media reports said Tuesday that UN experts are investigating possible violations of sanctions on North Korea in about 20 countries. The possible violations range from alleged nuclear procurement in China to military cooperation with Iran. It is unclear whether the moves are indirectly related to Washington attitude toward Pyongyang. Since the US and North Korea failed to reach an agreement in Hanoi, sanctions are unlikely to be lifted soon. It will be a long and painful process to ease sanctions on North Korea, and Chinese enterprises need to be prepared for this. Washington will probably maintain maximum pressure on North Korea, and seek to exert its influence on the UN to ensure a stricter enforcement of the sanctions. What's more, the US may take unilateral action to punish those who maintain economic interactions with North Korea they alleged illegal. Compared with companies from South Korea and Japan, Chinese enterprises may more easily become the targets of US actions. Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is in the middle of a tough battle with the US, which accuses the company of violating US sanctions against Iran and North Korea. The US may use sanctions on North Korea as an excuse to crack down on Chinese companies and prompt Beijing to make compromises during the ongoing trade talks with Washington. China has strictly implemented UN Security Council resolutions related to North Korea. But in China, many companies believe the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula will soon lead to sanctions relief and an opening-up in the isolated country, so they are closely watching potential business opportunities in North Korea. They can continue preparing for sanctions relief but should be patient and strictly follow the UN sanctions on North Korea. China is willing to strengthen economic cooperation with North Korea but Chinese firms need to adopt a prudent attitude in case they are unfairly targeted by the US. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Letter to UN Secretary-General Korean Central News Agency of DPRK Date: 12/03/2019 | Source: KCNA.kp (En) Pyongyang, March 12 (KCNA) -- Kim Song, ambassador and permanent representative of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) to the United Nations, sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Manuel de Oliveira Gutterres on March 11 with regard to the fact that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea would not available to host the Seventy-second Session of the WHO Regional Committee for South-East Asia because of an unfair measure recently taken by the UN Security Council established pursuant to resolution 1718. The letter reads: The Seventy-first Session of the WHO Regional Committee for South-East Asia held in India in September last year has unanimously decided to hold its Seventy-second session in the DPRK during September 2019 in agreement by consensus of the whole regional member states. However, the UN Security Council Committee recently disapproved the shipment of the necessary IT-related equipments for the WHO Regional Committee Session into the DPRK, and thus bring about an abnormal situation unprecedented in the history of WHO, in which the DPRK could not host the Session of the Regional Committee as expected. The tentacle of sanctions is now blocking up even the normal activities of holding international meetings of the WHO which is mandated for people's life saving and health management, not only the humanitarian cooperation activities of the international organizations in the DPRK. The "sanctions resolutions" of the Security Council against the DPRK, that prohibit even the shipment of computers and other electronic devices widely used at societies and homes of today, are indeed the action against humanity to destroy modern civilization and turn the society back in a mediaeval dark age. All the facts above clearly show to what extent of the sanctions influence came to the pass against the member state of the UN. This is to request the United Nations should now review in all respects the "sanctions resolutions" against the DPRK that run counter to the prevailing situation and public sentiment of the world and take appropriate measures in accordingly. -0- NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address North Korea Refuses to Hold WHO Regional Session Due to Sanctions - Reports Sputnik News 17:41 12.03.2019 TOKYO (Sputnik) - North Korea notified the United Nations of the impossibility to hold a meeting of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Regional Committee for South-East Asia in September 2019 in Pyongyang due to sanctions against the country, Korean Central News Agency reported on Tuesday. According to the Korean Central News Agency, on March 11, Kim Song, North Korea's ambassador to the United Nations, sent the notification to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Kim Song, in particular, informed the UN chief that the UN Security Council's North Korea sanctions committee had recently imposed a ban on importing electronic equipment to the country, which is necessary for holding the meeting of the WHO Regional Committee. "Thus, an unprecedented and abnormal situation in the history of the WHO has arisen, in which North Korea cannot organize this regional meeting", Kim Song said as quoted by the media outlet. The diplomat also called on the United Nations to revise its resolutions on sanctions against North Korea. Despite the fact that the situation on the Korean peninsula has significantly improved since a series of high-level talks last year between North Korea and the South as well as the United States, the country is still subject to international sanctions. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address UN Investigator: N. Korea's Human Rights Record Still Poor Despite Diplomacy By Lisa Schlein March 12, 2019 A United Nations investigator finds the easing of tensions on the Korean Peninsula has done nothing to improve human rights in North Korea, saying the situation remains widespread and in violation of international human rights law. The investigator submitted his report to the U.N. human rights council in Geneva on Monday. U.N. special investigator Tomas Ojea Quintana welcomes the interaction between the United States and North Korea over that country's nuclear program. He says meetings between leaders of the two countries can build trust and move toward the goal of creating a permanent peace. But he says this high-level diplomatic track is having no impact on alleviating the serious humanitarian problems affecting the population. He says more than 10 million people, or 41 percent of the population, continue to suffer from lack of food and access to essential health services, clean water and sanitation. He notes international and bilateral sanctions are making things worse. Ojea Quintana says he is particularly concerned about serious human rights violations in North Korea's detention and prison system. He says people sent to political prison camps have no legal rights. "I also received reports pointing to widespread and systematic torture and ill-treatment in detention facilities," he said. "North Korean citizens who are detained in China are repatriated and have stated that they are subject to torture, cruel or degrading treatment." Ojea Quintana says prisoners reportedly are being kept in cramped cells with inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene. He says they do not receive adequate food or health care and are subject to forced labor in dangerous conditions. The U.N. investigator is urging the government to allow international monitors to access these camps and to start releasing prisoners. He also calls on China and other countries to protect North Koreans who arrive on their territory as refugees and to not send them back to North Korea where they face many risks. North Korea, which has refused to cooperate with Ojea Quintana or grant him access to the country, boycotted his presentation. The delegation did not bother to use its right of reply as a concerned country. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address India to Build Over 100 Blast Pens for Jets Near China, Pakistan - Reports Sputnik News 18:04 12.03.2019 A majority of the Next Generation Hardened Shelters will be designed to house Russian-made Sukhoi fighter jets. In 2016, a Parliamentary committee on defence had pointed out that Indian Air Force did not have protective shelters to keep the fighter jets. New Delhi (Sputnik) To protect fighter jets from being destroyed in bombings and missile strikes on air bases, the Indian government has sanctioned the construction of around 110 Next Generation Hardened Shelters for Indian Air Force (IAF) fighter jets at locations close to the border with Pakistan and China. The majority of the hardened shelters would house the Russian-made Sukhoi fighter jets that are the mainstay of the Indian Air Force, the news agency ANI reported. "The central government has cleared a project for the construction of around 110 hardened shelters also known as blast pens which protect the fighter planes from enemy missiles or bomb attacks", ANI quoted the governments sources as saying. According to ANI, the next generation hardened shelters would be built in a phased manner at air bases close to the borders with China and Pakistan. At present, the IAF keeps the SU-30MKI and other fighter jets in rear locations during operations near the Pakistan border due to a lack of protective hardened shelters. It was because of this drawback that the IAF had to scramble MiG-21 jets while responding to the Pakistan Air Force strike on 27 February as the Sukhoi fighter jets were not at their ready disposal. Earlier, during a war with Pakistan in 1965, the IAF had lost several of its fighter jets as they were without protective shelters, added the report. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Pakistan Deploys Entire F-16 Squadron on Indian Border - Report Sputnik News 11:59 12.03.2019 Pakistan on Monday issued a warning to India not to undertake any misadventure in view of the upcoming national elections in the country. India had earlier asserted that it is maintaining an optimal level of military preparedness to tackle any eventuality. New Delhi (Sputnik): Even as the international community makes diplomatic efforts to facilitate a de-escalation of tensions between India and Pakistan that began in mid-February, Pakistan has deployed an entire F-16 fighter jet squadron along the Indian border, says a report in the newspaper the Hindustan Times quoting an unnamed Indian defence official. Pakistani authorities have yet to comment on the Indian media report. The fact that the Pakistani government has not opened up the air space along Indian border that was shut down after India's air strike in February, is seen to be an indication that the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) is on full operational alert. Besides, the Rawalpindi-headquartered 10 Corps along with a Special Forces brigade from Sialkot of the Pakistan Army have been deployed along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir. Defence sources have told Sputnik that the Pakistan Army also began moving part of its troops posted in Balochistan towards the Indian border beginning on 28 February. "We have confirmed reports that PAF's F-16 acquired from both US and Jordan are on high alert all along India-Pak border-from Hyderabad in Sindh to Skardu in Northern Areas. The Pak Army deployment including radars and air defence system along the LoC was strengthened immediately after the February 14 Pulwama attack as they expected Indian retaliation similar to that of the surgical strike", said one official to the Hindustan Times. Pakistan has been denying that PAF had used its F-16 fighters against India during recent air clashes. On Sunday, Pakistan's foreign ministry once again reiterated that Indian authorities had made a false and baseless claim that an Indian aircraft had shot down a Pakistani F-16. The Indian Air Force conducted an air-strike on an alleged Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist camp in Balakot located inside Pakistan and termed it as a strike against "non-civilian and non-military targets with clear intent not to cause any damage to life or infrastructure". Over the last 15 days, shelling and firing with heavy arms have been ongoing from the two sides. India and Pakistan have stopped regular Director General of Military Operations level (DGMO-level) talks, a mechanism where two military officers talk to each other over the phone to defuse tense situations on the border. Statements issued by the US, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and China have indicated that the situation is still not conducive to stability between the two nuclear-armed neighbours. "A series of incidents have transpired between Indian and Pakistan recently, which as we see is not conducive to peace and stability in South Asia. Like I said before, China has been mediating between the two sides, engaged in dialogues and working very hard to promote talks, ease tensions, and improve their relations. In our exchanges of views on the regional situation, the security issue features in our discussion with Indian and Pakistan. We have had extensive and in-depth talks with both sides", Lu Kang, China's foreign ministry spokesperson said on Monday. Pakistan on Monday once again cautioned India against any misadventure, which it insinuates that the Indian side may want to undertake keeping in mind the forthcoming elections. The country's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi had a telephone conversation about the cross-border situation with US National Security Advisor John Bolton along with the US ambassador to Islamabad. "Bolton appreciated Pakistan's measures, which helped lower the tension and urged continued restraint on both sides. The need for dialogue between Pakistan and India to find a peaceful resolution to all outstanding disputes was also emphasised. The Foreign Minister cautioned against any Indian misadventure, keeping in view the forthcoming elections. Ambassador Bolton concurred", a statement issued by the Pakistani foreign ministry regarding the phone call read. Last week, the Indian Air Force had asserted that it was maintaining optimal preparedness to thwart any kind of aggression from the Pakistani side. "A strict vigil in the skies to detect and thwart any act of aggression from Pakistan Air Force is being maintained", a statement issued by the Indian Air Force on Thursday read. The backdrop of the current India-Pakistan cross-border hostilities is the February 14 Pulwama terror attack that was claimed by Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and killed 40 Indian paramilitary troops. India after a week had conducted a pre-emptive air strike against purported JeM terror camps at Balakot in Pakistan which infuriated its nuclear-armed neighbour leading to retaliation via a counterstrike in Indian terrioty. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Swedish Defence Institute Disparages S-400, Calls Russia 'Underdog' Sputnik News 11:18 12.03.2019 A string of reports by the Swedish Defence Research Institute has claimed the "Russian threat", a common trope for both politicians and journalists alike, is exaggerated. "Bursting the Bubble", a new report by Swedish Defence Research Institute (FOI), claimed that Russia's ability to deter an enemy's deployment from a distance using long-distance missiles was exaggerated. The "bubble" refers to anti-access and area denial weapons (often referred to as A2/AD). "In our report we establish that Russia's A2/AD capability is less effective than what is claimed by either the Russian military or the Western press. For one thing, it's more difficult than many people think to detect and strike a target that's dozens of kilometres away", FOI deputy research director Robert Dalsjo, the co-author of the report, said. Secondly, analysis shows that the actual range of Russia's new anti-aircraft system, S-400, is actually only 150-200 kilometres, rather than the stated 400 kilometres. Against low-flying missiles, the S-400's range may be as short as 20 kilometres, the Swedish research claimed. According to Dalsjo, this makes it impossible for Russia to "cut off" the Baltics using A2/AD resources alone. Instead, reinforcing the Baltics with NATO troops is "not hopeless as some debaters would claim", Dalsjo pointed out. Dalsjo stressed that there are both passive and active countermeasures against A2/AD systems, ranging from electronic jamming to physical destruction. "One can neutralise an entire system by knocking out just one link in a functional chain, for example a data link or a fire-control radar. And since seeing over the horizon requires airborne radar, it may then be enough to shoot down the radar aircraft", Robert Dalsjo stressed. Among other things, the FOI researchers studied the conflict in Syria to support their claims. "We can see that in spite of the fact that the Russians have sold one of their most modern anti-aircraft systems to Syria, the Syrians haven't managed to shoot down a single Western plane and, in thirty years, only a few isolated Israeli planes". However, making Russia's A2/AD capability into a manageable problem requires commitments, the report concluded, promoting capacity-building and investments in areas such as electronic warfare, countermeasures, and guide weapons. Another report by the Kista-based Defence Analysis Division, claimed that Russia's undeniable progress in electronic warfare largely rests on revived Soviet projects previously mothballed in the 1990s. "It may seem strange that they're going back to such old ideas, but this is what's happening. These projects were intended to operate against the USA and NATO, which is why they fit with Russia's current threat picture", Jonas Kjellen, the author of the report, claimed. Kjellen predicted that Russia will continue on the same path of jamming or even destroying electronics even when it runs out of projects to dust off. This, he claimed, was Russia's solution to retaining its ambitions despite being an outside shot in the superpower competition. "Electronic warfare is the Russians' solution for dealing with deficiencies in traditional military means. In this way, with electronic warfare, they continue to strive to be a military superpower, but from the position of an underdog", Kjellen concluded. According to him, finding technical solutions for avoiding discovery and ensuring protection by means of signature reduction or different kinds of camouflage, is the cheapest solution for Russia, which, he claimed, cannot afford to keep up with the West's military technology. In 2017, Samuel Bendett, a Centre for Naval Analyses expert, penned an opinion piece called "America Is Getting Outclassed by Russian Electronic Warfare", suggesting Russia's investment may have outpaced anything available in the West. Following the 2018 Vostok drills in the Far East, President Vladimir Putin stressed that Russia was a "peace-loving country", refuting the idea that it could ever be aggressive and emphasising that its foreign policy is directed at creating cooperation with all countries that are interested in this. By contrast, NATO has despite pledges of not expanding eastward, admitted most of the former Eastern bloc into its ranks. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Turkish-Russian Military Cooperation Deepens Amid US-Turkish Tensions By Dorian Jones March 12, 2019 Russian and Turkish military cooperation is deepening as Ankara's relationship with Washington deteriorates. Recent joint naval exercises between Russia and Turkey, and increasing military cooperation in Syria, come as NATO allies question Turkey's allegiance to the Western defense alliance. A joint naval drill last Friday was part of a broader Turkish national military exercise. While the drills involved only a few ships, analysts have described its political implications as far more significant. "The realization of the Russian-Turkish common military exercises is a message both for the West and for the region of the Middle East that two sides cooperate," said Zaur Gasimov, an Istanbul-based analyst for the Max Weber Foundation. The choice of the Black Sea for the joint exercise also is heavy on political symbolism, given that it is a focal point of tensions between NATO and Russian forces, and it sends a message that likely will not be lost on Turkey's NATO members, other analysts say. "This is another confirmation that Turkey is the odd man in the room when it comes to the NATO membership; nearly all people think Turkey is only a member on paper," said political scientist Cengiz Aktar, adding, "And how successful Moscow has been to cut Turkey from NATO." "This is a trend thus far, from being temporary or tactical; this is a long-term strategy of Russia," added Aktar. Moscow has been quick to exploit bilateral tensions between Ankara and Washington over myriad differences. "The unprecedented amelioration of Turkish-Russian cooperation at present should be seen in the context of the unprecedented aggravation of the ties between Ankara and Washington," Gasimov said. S-400 missiles Washington's backing of Syrian YPG Kurdish forces in the fight against Islamic State has driven bilateral ties between the U.S. and Turkey, a NATO ally, to the breaking point. Ankara has designated the YPG as terrorists linked to the PKK, which has been waging a decades-long insurgency inside Turkey. Moscow's sale of its S-400 missiles to Ankara has further ratcheted up Turkish-U.S. tensions. Washington is warning of sanctions if the purchase is completed, saying the weapons threaten NATO defense systems. Russians believe that Turkey will buy the S-400 and, for Moscow, the deal has a political impact, Gasimov said. "The entire process of sell and buy of S-400 poisoned the shaky ties between Ankara and Washington." Syria While U.S.-Turkish divisions deepen, Ankara and Moscow are increasing cooperation in Syria. Russia and Turkey back rival sides in the civil war but increasingly are working together along with Iran to end the conflict, under the auspices of the so-called "Astana Process." This month saw Turkish and Russian forces begin coordinating military patrols in the last Syrian rebel enclave of Idlib. The patrols are part of a more comprehensive agreement hammered out between the Russian and Turkish presidents, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The agreement averted a Syrian regime offensive into the province of Idlib which would have likely triggered a refugee exodus into neighboring Turkey. However, analysts are questioning the sustainability of Turkish-Russian cooperation in Idlib. "Russians sooner or later will clear Idlib, which is filled with tens of thousands of terrorists," Aktar said, "and this, the first and foremost point of disagreement between Ankara and Moscow." The Turkish-Russian patrols in Idlib came in response to Moscow voicing frustration with Ankara over what Moscow claimed was the failure by Turkey's armed forces to rein in radical groups in Idlib. Strategies For now, however, it appears Moscow's priority is deepening cooperation with Ankara. Local Turkish media reported Tuesday that Russian and Turkish forces are planning joint patrols in Tel Rifaat, an area controlled by the YPG Kurdish militia. The patrols aim to reduce tensions with the YPG and Turkish troops, which continually skirmish. Moscow, like Washington, has developed a good relationship with the YPG. The PYD, the political wing of the YPG, has offices in Moscow. Russia, unlike Turkey's Western allies, has not designated the PKK a terrorist organization. Ankara voices little public criticism of Moscow's PKK stance, while at the same time castigating its European and American allies for not cracking down enough on the PKK, even though they do categorize the militants as terrorists. Turkey's growing alienation from its traditional Western allies seems set to continue given Ankara's deepening ties with Moscow, and analysts warn of inescapable historical diplomatic realities. "Historically speaking, since Peter the Great [Russian 18th century leader), Turks and Russians never had any joint strategic objective, never, this is for 300 years," Aktar said. "Also, it's not possible now that they start to kiss each other and have joint strategic objectives; these countries will always be regional rivals. Unfortunately, Ankara thinks they can play Russian and Americans against each other; it won't work." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address I felt the need to send Kelowna-Lake Country MP Stephen Fuhr an email in response to the scandal that is rocking our nation to its core of Canadian values. It is our jobs as parents and elders to teach our children the difference between right and wrong, with the hopes that they grow into responsible, law-abiding adults. It is our job to lead them with integrity and by example. Out of all the issues our great nation has to deal with in these trying times, corruption at the highest levels of government is not in any way what we should be facing. Mr. Fuhr, as the representative of your riding, you should be fighting for us, the people who voted you into office. You are fully expected to do the right thing, put your partisan loyalty aside and be the elected official you are meant to be our voice in the house. This is where your integrity will show through. How do you want to be known in your riding? The Prime Minister of Canada is a position, not a person. Its time for you to stand up and push for changing of the guard so the entire party is not taken down. Integrity, with head held high, that you stand for Canada and its citizens, is what is needed. There is now no possible way that any Canadian can have trust or belief in a prime minister who seems to believe in a two-tiered legal system and that he is above it. Corruption has no place in Canada, especially in the Prime Ministers Office. Be the difference and show true colours of what a Canadian member of parliament should be. This corruption at our highest levels tarnishes and puts a scar on this amazing country and who we are as a people. Do we want to be known as a corrupt country or the proud nation we are? It is time for the people of Canada to take steps to ensure we are on the right path. I will be reconsidering if my support in any upcoming elections should be placed with a Liberal representative. All Liberal MPs will be watched by their constituents for the position they take. You are the one to take the next step. Trudeau needs to step down for the good of not only Canada, but your party as well. Tom Lucier, Kelowna May's Brexit deal suffers shattering defeat in Parliament again Iran Press TV Tue Mar 12, 2019 07:35PM British Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit withdrawal deal has been rejected by lawmakers in the House of Commons, sending the country into chaos just 17 days before the planned departure date. MPs voted down May's amended EU withdrawal deal by 391 to 242 on Tuesday. The prime minister also suffered a similar defeat in Parliament in January where her deal was rejected with a margin of 230 votes. In the coming days, British lawmakers now will vote on whether to pull out of the European Union without a deal entirely on March 29, or to delay the exit process. A snap election or even another referendum is now possible. Hoarse-voiced and looking exhausted, May said the government would not provide instructions to her own Conservative Party's lawmakers how to vote. "Let me be clear. Voting against leaving without a deal and for an extension does not solve the problems we face," she said. "Does it (Parliament) wish to revoke Article 50 (announcing intention to leave the EU)? Does it want to hold a second referendum? Or does it want to leave with a deal, but not this deal?" she asked. An opposition Labour Party spokesman said this meant the prime minister had "given up any pretense of leading the country." May, who was in Strasbourg on Monday night to coordinate her position with senior EU officials, said earlier in the day Britain had secured a legally-binding way out of the so-called Irish backstop mechanism which could be used if the country felt it was trapped in the UK's customs union beyond 2020. However, opponents of May's Brexit deal, including lawmakers in the Conservative Party and almost the entire opposition Labour Party, rejected her claims on the backstop, saying the deal she had brought to Parliament was "exactly" the same pact that was dismissed last month. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address British PM secures ''legally binding changes' to Brexit withdrawal agreement from the EU Iran Press TV Tue Mar 12, 2019 02:34AM British Prime Minister Theresa May has claimed to have secured ''legally binding changes" to the Brexit withdrawal agreement from the European Union prior to a key parliamentary vote on Tuesday. British Cabinet Office Minister David Lidington notified Parliament of the development following negotiations between May and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in the French city Strasbourg earlier on Monday. Lidington said the sides had agreed to a joint legally binding mechanism seeking to replace the so-called Irish backstop with alternative arrangements by December 2020. "The EU cannot try to trap the UK in the backstop indefinitely, and that doing so would be an explicit breach of the legally binding commitments that both sides have agreed," Lidington said. The backstop clause of the Brexit deal is an insurance policy designed to prevent the return of border checks between British-ruled Northern Ireland and Ireland, which is an EU member. Critics of May's deal believe the backstop may trap the UK in the EU's customs union indefinitely once the clause is triggered at the end of 2020. Monday's development comes as government sources had said earlier in the day that previous talks with the EU over the matter had reached a standstill. May also didn't appear in parliament following an urgent question called by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn about progress in the Brexit talks. Corbyn accused May's government of "delay", saying that it is now "time for answers". May's draft Brexit deal with the EU was rejected in parliament by a large majority on January 15. She has since vowed to work with the EU to find a solution to the backstop problem. However, many expect the premier to finally fail to gain parliament support for her Brexit deal. May has said that if a revised version of the deal is rejected in the House of Commons, she will have no option but to bring the UK out of the EU on March 29 in a disorderly manner. A no-deal Brexit is speculated by many to entail serious political and economic repercussions for the country. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address UK Parliament Rejects May's Latest Brexit Plan Sputnik News 22:22 12.03.2019(updated 22:53 12.03.2019) The British Parliament has again voted down Prime Minister Theresa May's plan for the UK's departure from the European Union, with 391 voting against and 242 voting for her plan, revised from the last attempt at the start of the year. Speaking after the vote, May said she profoundly regretted the body's decision, saying, "I continue to believe that by far the best outcome is that the United Kingdom leave the EU in an orderly fashion, with a deal." At present, London and Brussels have no agreed upon framework for a relationship after March 29. May has repeatedly warned about the "potential damage to the union" that could be caused by a no-deal Brexit. The previous day, May concluded discussions with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker that attempted to circumvent one of the primary subjects of contention, with the EU promising not to use the question of the so-called "Irish backstop," or the pledge not to form a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and the UK's Northern Ireland, as a "trap" to compel London to stay in the customs union contrary to the British public's vote in June 2016. Following May's comments, Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, who leads the opposition in Parliament, said it was time for a general election. "The government has been defeated again by an enormous majority and they must now accept their deal is dead," Corbyn said, noting that Labour was prepared to work with the prime minister on a new Brexit deal. Because Tuesday's vote has failed, a vote on a no-deal scenario is expected on Wednesday and if that fails, then a vote on extending the Brexit deadline past March 29 will follow. Following the vote, the EU ruled out further negotiation for the meantime. "The EU has done everything it can to help get the Withdrawal Agreement over the line," Michel Barnier, the EU's Brexit negotiator, tweeted. "The impasse can only be solved in the UK. Our 'no-deal' preparations are now more important than ever before." The first time the House of Commons weighed the question of Brexit was on January 15, when it shot down May's negotiated agreement with Brussels in the heaviest defeat ever suffered by any bill in the legislature a devastating 230-vote margin. Tuesday's vote saw only a 149-vote majority, meaning May's negotiations succeeded at winning converts to her plan. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address British Parliament Rejects May's Latest Brexit Plan to Split from EU By Ken Bredemeier March 12, 2019 British lawmakers on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected Prime Minister Theresa May's latest effort to set the terms of Britain's Brexit deal to split from the European Union on March 29. The House of Commons voted 391-242 against May's plan, setting up a Wednesday vote on whether Britain should quit the 28-nation EU bloc without agreeing on any of the details of its departure. And if that fails, a Thursday vote on whether to ask the EU for more time to negotiate an agreement. May implored lawmakers to adopt the deal she negotiated Monday with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker for "legally binding changes" to ensure that the border between EU member Ireland and Britain's Northern Ireland would remain open after Brexit. But the outcome mirrored a January vote on an earlier plan, which May lost even more decisively, by 230 votes. After losing again, May, the Conservative Party leader, told the House of Commons, "I continue to believe the best and only way" to quit the EU is "in an orderly way." She said the next options "are unenviable choices" leaving without a deal, or asking for more time to negotiate after already spending months to reach terms of the now-defeated pacts. Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain's main opposition Labor Party, told the parliamentarians, "The government has now been defeated by an enormous majority. The prime minister has run down the clock, and the clock has run out on her." He called for a new election. Before Tuesday's vote, May told lawmakers, "The danger for those of us who want to deliver, to have faith in the British public and deliver on their vote for Brexit, is that if this vote is not passed tonight, if this deal is not passed, then Brexit could be lost." Key opponents to her plan quickly emerged. Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party said May had only made "limited" progress in negotiating the new terms, and said its 10 members in parliament would vote against her plan. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the EU had made "clear, far-reaching proposals" to address Britain's concerns about the deal. But she deflected a question about whether she was willing to delay the British exit from the EU if British lawmakers could not agree on a plan. The original deal, rejected two months ago, called for a backstop agreement that would keep Britain and the EU in a customs union until they agree on a new trade agreement. Opponents in Britain's parliament said they were concerned about being locked into EU rules instead of being able to gain full control of trade policies. May said the new terms agreed to Monday would ensure the backstop deal is not a permanent part of Britain's exit from the EU. The Labor Party rejected the plan, saying it still does not go far enough to allay its concerns. Juncker warned that Britain is running out of options. "It is this deal, or Brexit might not happen at all," he said. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US says producing banned cruise missile after suspending INF treaty with Russia Iran Press TV Tue Mar 12, 2019 05:48AM The United States is producing a new cruise missile after suspending a Cold War treaty with Russia that banned the use of such weapons, the US Defense Department has confirmed. Michelle Baldanza, a Pentagon spokeswoman, announced on Monday that the military was fabricating parts of a new ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM). The move comes weeks after the administration of President Donald Trump suspended the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty for three months, and said it would withdraw completely unless Russia dismantles the 9M729 ground-launched cruise missile. Washington has complained for over six years that the Russian weapon is in violation of the INF. Singed in 1987, the treaty banned the US and the former Soviet Union from creating ground-launched nuclear-capable missiles with ranges from 500 to 5,500 kilometers. Russia has rebuffed US claims by showcasing the missile to journalists and revealing many of its sensitive specifications to ensure the international community that the Trump administration is being dishonest. Baldanza said Monday that Washington had already started to work on new "treaty-compliant research and development of conventional, ground-launched missile concepts" since late 2017. However, she said the Pentagon only started to fabricate "components to support developmental testing of these systems" after the INF suspension because it "would have been inconsistent with our obligations under the treaty." She insisted that the new GLCM was conventional and not suitable for delivering nuclear payloads. The spokeswoman added that Washington was determined to push ahead with the development work now that it was no longer bound by its INF obligations but said it was up to Russia to decide what happens next. "This research and development is designed to be reversible, should Russia return to full and verifiable compliance before we withdraw from the treaty in August 2019," Baldanza said. Reciprocating the US move, the Kremlin announced in early March that Russia was suspending its participation in the INF over US violations of the treaty. This is the first time since the 1980s the US is building a new GLCM. Back then, Washington deployed cruise missiles in Europe as a response to the Soviet Union's deployment of the nuclear-tipped SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missile. A familiar pattern Washington has a long track record of tying major weapons upgrade plans to an external threat in order to convince the taxpayers. The Pentagon announced in August 2017 that it had hired Boeing and Northrop Grumman to develop a replacement for the US Air Force's arsenal of ageing Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and cruise missiles. The Air Force has estimated that the project would cost US taxpayers at least $62 billion. However, the Pentagon's office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) says the costs would surpass $85 billion. Back then, Washington used an escalated war of words between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, which saw both sides trade threats of nuclear apocalypse, to justify the move. Just days before suspending the INF on February 1, the US announced that it had begun producing a new low-yield nuclear warhead to meet the country's changing priorities under the revised Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). Upon revealing the NPR, the Trump administration emphasized that it was mainly designed to counter Russia and China as the two most imminent threats to US national security. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Burlington, Ontario, Feb. 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Organization of Canadian Nuclear Industries (OCNI) is proud to congratulate Laveer Engineering on their recent office expansion. A member of OCNI, Laveer supplies engineering services to support the Canadian and US nuclear power generation market. Over the last few years, Laveer has established a growing demand for its niche services resulting in an increase in staff, client partnerships and expansion of office space. Laveer continues to partner with various post-secondary institutions in Ontario to bring in top young engineering talent and collaboratively engage in becoming a better vendor to its customers. This local event will celebrate these significant milestones as well as the growth in partnerships and job opportunities for the local economies of Burlington and Ontario. Quotes: Laveer Engineering is excited to continue expanding our business in the nuclear industry. We have established a niche capability that is in demand with our customers. The demand for our services has seen us increase our staff drastically over the last few years. Our model for growth relies heavily on bringing in top young engineering talent including new graduates and interns from post-secondary institutions in Ontario, to work with our experienced engineering staff in a collaborative environment. Having fresh faces with fresh ideas makes Laveer a better vendor to our customers. This generates a cohesive team capable of executing complex projects in a nimble and cost-effective manner. Organizations such as NRC-IRAP, McMaster University, and partners like Promation have all played a pivotal role in Laveers excellence and ability to become the company we are today. Peter Gowthorpe, Director, Laveer Engineering We are proud to have a company like Laveer Engineering as a member of the Organization of Canadian Nuclear Industries. Laveer exemplifies the dynamic and evolving Canadian nuclear supply chain as the company continues to develop new technologies to support the safe, reliable and cost-effective operation of Ontario's nuclear generating stations while creating exciting career opportunities in the nuclear sector for graduates of Ontarios world-class colleges and universities. Dr. Ron Oberth, President and CEO of the Organization of Canadian Nuclear Industries Strong partners like Laveer Engineering help to advance Bruce Powers operations in delivering clean, reliable, low-cost electricity to Ontario businesses and families, said Ian Rowley, Vice President for Outages at Bruce Power. Our Life-Extension Program, which remains on time and on budget, is creating and sustaining 22,000 jobs across the province annually and injecting $4 billion into Ontarios economy each year. Ian Rowley, VP Outage & Maintenance Services, Bruce Power Engineers play a vital role, not only for the nuclear industry as a whole, but across OPGs Hydro, Thermal and Nuclear fleet and specifically as we move forward with our Darlington Nuclear Refurbishment Project, said Chris Fralick, Chief Operating Officer for OPG. I congratulate Laveer on your recent expansion and look forward to our continued partnership in helping to deliver innovative, reliable and low-cost nuclear power for Ontario. Chris Fralick, Chief Operating Officer for OPG The expansion of Laveer Engineering is of special importance to the City of Burlington, its citizens, the Mayor, Marianne Meed Ward, my colleagues on Council and of course to me as Ward 5 Councillor where the company is located. It is important because we are keen to retain growing organizations that place significant emphasis on developing intellectual property, high caliber management and increasing the number of talented employees, as Laveer clearly does. I wish to congratulate the company on its success and look forward to working with them on future opportunities. Paul Sharman, Councillor for Ward 5 Burlington I am delighted to participate in this Roundtable with Laveer Engineering and to have a chance to recognize the phenomenal contribution of Ontarios nuclear advantage in delivering clean energy to our province. By partnering with post secondary institutions as well expanding employment opportunities Laveer is making a significant impact on Burlingtons local economy. Jane McKenna, MPP for Burlington Laveer Engineering Ltd. provides custom equipment solutions to industry. With a focus on welding, machining, and inspection technologies, Laveer delivers unique constraint and harsh environment applications. Laveer is a full-service company supporting your project from technical specification through project execution. Organization of Canadian Nuclear Industries (OCNI) is an association of more than 200 Canadian suppliers to the nuclear industry that employ more than 14,000 highly skilled and specialized engineers, technologists, and trades people. OCNI companies design reactors, manufacture major equipment and components, and provide engineering services and support to CANDU nuclear power plants in Canada as well as to CANDU and Light Water Reactor (LWR) plants in offshore markets. Attachments Glen Rock, N.J., Feb. 19, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- RespireRx Pharmaceuticals Inc. (OTCQB: RSPI) (RespireRx or the Company), a leader in the research and development of cannabinoids for the treatment of sleep-related breathing disorders, is pleased to announce that it has entered into a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) and exclusivity agreement with Impression Healthcare Limited (ASX: IHL)(Impression) for the purpose of negotiating terms by which the parties would enter in an arrangement, such as a license, joint venture or partner agreement, so as to commercialize dronabinol for the treatment of OSA in Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. OSA, a sleep-related breathing disorder characterized by interrupted breathing, represents a significant global health challenge that increases the risk of health problems, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease and mental disorders. To date, RespireRx has focused on dronabinol development in the United States, where approximately 29.4 million individuals have OSA, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. However, Australia also represents a potentially significant market opportunity. According to SNORE Australia, approximately 9% of women and 25% of men in Australia have clinically significant OSA. While continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), the front-line treatment for OSA, is highly effective, it is cumbersome and difficult for many patients to tolerate so that most studies report that 25-50% of patients refuse to initiate or completely discontinue CPAP use within the first several months and that most patients who continue to use the device do so only intermittently. Therefore, there is a significant opportunity for alternative therapies, including pharmaceutical alternatives such as dronabinol. As an alternative to CPAP, Impression currently markets and sells the Sleep Guardian Dorsal, a dental, mandibular advancement device, which is sold through the Companys Preferred Practitioner Network. On December 4, 2018, Impression disclosed its intentions for commercializing dronabinol for certain indications and on February 15, 2019 disclosed its discussions with RespireRx about OSA. The initial intent of the parties is to create an appropriate commercial vehicle in order to rapidly introduce dronabinol to the Australian market through the Special Access Scheme which permits, under certain circumstances, prescriptions of identified unregistered drug products. It is anticipated that this potentially rapid commercialization will be followed by the introduction of a registered product following the completion of RespireRxs planned phase 3 clinical trial program and marketing authorization. RespireRx looks forward to its discussions with Impression, said Dr. Arnold Lippa, Executive Chairman, Chief Scientific Officer and Interim CEO of RespireRx. Their ability to access the Australian OSA market through their existing distribution and sales network, along with their commitment to commercializing dronabinol, makes them an ideal partner to bring dronabinol to this market. Dronabinol has the potential to change the way in which sleep apnea is treated throughout the world and were excited to work with Respire towards our mutual goal to open this new market for dronabinol, said Mr. Joel Latham, Chief Executive Officer of Impression. About RespireRx Pharmaceuticals Inc. RespireRx Pharmaceuticals Inc. is a leader in the development of medicines for respiratory disorders and CNS indications, with a focus on obstructive sleep apnea, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), spinal cord injury and other neurological conditions. The Company holds exclusive licenses and owns patents and patent applications or rights thereto for certain families of chemical compounds that claim the chemical structures and their uses in the treatment of a variety of disorders, as well as claims for novel uses of known drugs. Cannabinoids. RespireRx is developing dronabinol, a synthetic derivative of a naturally occurring substance in the cannabis plant, for the treatment of OSA, a serious respiratory disorder that impacts an estimated 29.4 million people in the United States according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), published in August 2016. OSA has been linked to increased risk for hypertension, heart failure, depression, and diabetes, and has an annual economic cost in the United States of $162 billion according to the AASM. There are no approved drug treatments for OSA. RespireRx believes, for the United States, pending the outcome of an intended meeting with the FDA, that it will be able to commence a Phase 3 clinical study for the treatment of OSA with dronabinol. The Company further believes that it would only require approval by the FDA of a 505(b)(2) new drug application (NDA), an efficient regulatory pathway. RespireRx believes that the most direct route to commercialization in the US is to proceed directly to a Phase 3 pivotal trial using the currently available dronabinol formulation (2.5, 5 and 10 mg gel caps) and to then commercialize a RespireRx branded dronabinol capsule (RBDC). RespireRx also believes that there are numerous opportunities for reformulation of dronabinol to produce a second-generation proprietary, branded product for the treatment of OSA with an improved profile. Therefore, simultaneous with the development of the RBDC, RespireRx plans to develop a proprietary dronabinol formulation to optimize the dose and duration of action for treating OSA. Ampakines. The second platform of proprietary medicines being developed by RespireRx are ampakines, which act to enhance the actions of the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate at AMPA glutamate receptors. Several ampakines, in both oral and injectable forms, are being developed by the Company for the treatment of a variety of breathing and CNS disorders. In clinical studies of respiratory function, select ampakines have shown preliminary efficacy in central sleep apnea and in the control of respiratory depression produced by opioids, without altering the opioid analgesic effects. In animal models of certain orphan disorders, such as Pompe Disease, Retts Syndrome and perinatal respiratory distress, certain ampakines have been shown to improve breathing function. Ampakines also have shown potential as possible therapeutic agents for the treatment of certain neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders. Ampakines have demonstrated positive activity in animal models of ADHD, results that have been extended translationally into statistically significant improvement of symptoms observed in a Phase 2 clinical trial of CX717 in adults with ADHD. At present, the major pharmacotherapies available for ADHD are made up of two types of drugs. Stimulants, such as amphetamine, rapidly produce robust effects, but suffer from side effects typical of stimulants, including tolerance, dependence, withdrawal and abuse. For these reasons, stimulants are scheduled by the FDA. Non-stimulants, such as Straterra (atomoxetine) tend to be less effective than stimulants, with a much longer (approximately 4 8 week) latency to onset of action. In a number of animal and human studies, CX717 and other ampakines did not display any stimulant properties typically associated with drugs like amphetamine. In the Phase 2 ADHD clinical trial, statistically significant therapeutic effects were observed within one week. Therefore, we believe ampakines may represent a novel, non-stimulant treatment for ADHD with a more rapid onset of action than alternative non-stimulant treatment options. RespireRx owns certain composition of matter and use patents and patent applications with respect to ampakines CX1739, CX717 and other ampakines. The Company has received notice from the University of Alberta that purports to terminate the Companys license in respect of patents associated with respiratory applications of ampakines. RespireRx has been in contact with the University of Alberta and has been engaging in a process with the University to resolve the matter. Additional information about the Company and the matters discussed herein can be obtained on the Companys web-site at www.RespireRx.com or in the Companys filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission at www.sec.gov. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the Company intends that such forward-looking statements be subject to the safe harbor created thereby. These might include statements regarding the Companys future plans, targets, estimates, assumptions, financial position, business strategy and other plans and objectives for future operations, and assumptions and predictions about research and development efforts, including, but not limited to, preclinical and clinical research design, execution, timing, costs and results, future product demand, supply, manufacturing, costs, marketing and pricing factors. In some cases, forward-looking statements may be identified by words including anticipates, believes, intends, estimates, expects, plans, contemplates, targets, continues, budgets, may, and similar expressions and such statements may include, but are not limited to, statements regarding (i) future research plans, expenditures and results, (ii) potential collaborative arrangements, (iii) the potential utility of the Companys proposed products, (iv) reorganization plans, (v) the clinical development, regulatory review and commercialization process, and (vi) the need for, and availability of, additional financing. The forward-looking statements included herein are based on current expectations that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements are based on assumptions regarding the Companys business and technology, which involve judgments with respect to, among other things, future scientific, economic, regulatory and competitive conditions, collaborations with third parties, and future business decisions, all of which are difficult or impossible to predict accurately and many of which are beyond the Companys control. Although the Company believes that the assumptions underlying the forward-looking statements are reasonable, actual results may differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. In light of the significant uncertainties inherent in the forward-looking information included herein, the inclusion of such information should not be regarded as a representation by the Company or any other person that the Companys objectives or plans will be achieved. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, regulatory policies or changes thereto, available cash, research and development results, competition from other similar businesses, interest of third parties in collaborations with us, and market and general economic factors. This discussion should be read in conjunction with the condensed consolidated financial statements (unaudited) and notes thereto included in Item 1 of the Companys Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q and the Companys Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2017, including the section entitled Item 1A. Risk Factors. The Company does not intend to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect new information, future events or otherwise. Company Contact: Jeff Margolis Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer and Secretary Telephone: (917) 834-7206 E-mail: jmargolis@respirerx.com TORONTO, March 07, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- dynaCERT Inc. (TSX VENTURE: DYA) (OTCQB: DYFSF) (FRA: DMJ) ("dynaCERT" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has appointed Mr. Amir Farahi to the Board of Directors. Amir Farahi is a Government Relations and Public Affairs consultant. He is the Principal at Blackridge Strategy Inc. (Blackridge) one of the largest Government Relations firms in Southwestern Ontario. Blackridge has established a strong working relationship with all three levels of government in Canada, Federal, Provincial and Municipal, and has a solid track record with its clients in real estate, construction, labour, health care, and heavy industrial industries. Amir was a senior advisor to Fanshawe College and was instrumental on the establishment of its innovation centre which led to the creation of Fanshawes Innovation Village i4C Hub in Q4 2018. This is a one stop centralized shop that supports and provides services through the Centre for Research and Innovation, the Library research team, the Canadian Centre for Product Validation, Centre for Advanced Research in Biotechnology and LEAP junction to innovators on campus. Amir was a columnist for 3 years for Metroland Media Group, a subsidiary of TorStar Corporation and his columns were amongst the top read every year as ranked by the editorial team. He was a political commentator for Bell Media Inc. and has appeared regularly on Newstalk 1290 CJBK radio and CTV News in London. He was also Chair of the City of Londons Transportation Advisory Committee at a time when the City was planning a $500 million investment to implement Bus Rapid Transit. The project is part of the Citys 2030 Transportation Masterplan which is currently being implemented. Amir is the Executive Director of the London Institute, an organization that in partnership with Farhi Holdings Corporation, TechAlliance and Londons Small Business Centre, has planned a $31.5 million entrepreneurship centre, (180,000 square feet) the largest in Southwestern Ontario. The entrepreneurship centres services will be built around TechAlliance (Regional Innovation Centre) and the London Small Business Centre, who will both be moving into the buildings first floor to provide entrepreneurs with one-stop access to supports, services, and workshops. TechAlliance will house its Immersive Digital Experiences Accelerator (IDEA) providing incubation and acceleration for the next generation of local video game developers and BURST for high-potential medical technology startups and scale-ups that will position London as a focal point for life sciences innovation. BURST provides intensive support to 30 companies, including approximately $3 million in cash and in-kind support. Amir was also a Co-founder of FillSpaces Technologies Inc., which was a recipient of Ontario Centre of Excellence funding for its artificial intelligence and machine learning applications to its sales verticals and marketing channels. The company was funded by Western Universitys business incubator (Propel) and accelerator. Amir has a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Western University. During his time at Western University, Amir founded the Kings University College Undergraduate Research Journal, a peer-reviewed publication by faculty showcasing four of the top research papers by students. Mr. Farahi stated, I am pleased to be joining the dynaCERT board at this important juncture of its growth. The company has a positive outlook as it expands into the North American, European, Middle Eastern, South Asian and South American markets. dynaCERTs proprietary technology and the breadth of its patent portfolio is groundbreaking. My background in government relations, business development and public relations will help the company expand its public attention. I look forward to assisting dynaCERT with government relations and transactions while diligently focusing on driving an aggressive sales trajectory. Jim Payne, CEO of dynaCERT, commented, Amir brings to our board a great penetration in relationships, furthering our existing Southwestern Ontario and other Canadian and international sales endeavours. Amirs experience, public profile and relationships can be highly contributory to dynaCERTs strengths and goals, being recognized as Canadas leading Carbon Emission Reduction Technology Company. I trust that Amirs renowned background will integrate very well with our highly dedicated Board of Directors and our appropriately focused Advisory Board which continues to establish dynaCERTs expanding international profile in reducing carbon emissions and enhancing fuel efficiencies world-wide. READER ADVISORY Except for statements of historical fact, this news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward-looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. In particular, forward-looking information in this press release includes, but is not limited to the potential expansion into new markets, industries and segments, such as diesel- powered use of any the dynaCERT products and sales. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. We cannot guarantee future results, performance of achievements. Consequently, there is no representation that the actual results achieved will be the same, in whole or in part, as those set out in the forward-looking information. Forward-looking information is 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 anticipated in the forward-looking information. Some of the risks and other factors that could cause the results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking information include, but are not limited to: uncertainty as to whether our strategies and business plans will yield the expected benefits; availability and cost of capital; the ability to identify and develop and achieve commercial success for new products and technologies; the level of expenditures necessary to maintain and improve the quality of products and services; changes in technology and changes in laws and regulations; the uncertainty of the emerging hydrogen economy; including the hydrogen economy moving at a pace not anticipated; our ability to secure and maintain strategic relationships and distribution agreements; and the other risk factors disclosed under our profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com . Readers are cautioned that this list of risk factors should not be construed as exhaustive. The forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. We undertake no duty to update any of the forward-looking information to conform such information to actual results or to changes in our expectations except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information. 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 the release. On Behalf of the Board Murray James Payne, CEO For more information, please contact: Jim Payne, CEO & President dynaCERT Inc. #101 501 Alliance Avenue Toronto, Ontario M6N 2J1 (416) 766-9691 x 2 jpayne@dynaCERT.com Lance Goudzwaard Appointed to Head Commercialization and Customer Relations for NuGenerex Distribution Solutions Subsidiary MIRAMAR, FL, March 12, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE Generex Biotechnology Corporation ( www.generex.com ) (OTCQB: GNBT) ( http://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/GNBT/quote ), is proud to announce the appointment of Lance Goudzwaard as the Chief Commercial Officer for NuGenerex Distribution Solutions (NDS), the companys wholly-owned subsidiary. Mr. Goudzwaard will be responsible for the delivery and operation of the management services organization (MSO) platform that is currently operational in five states, with an aggressive growth strategy designed to expand the model to 27 states in the next several months. Mr. Goudzwaard will also focus on building and developing our durable medical equipment (DME) service offering called DME-IQO, a software system being introduced to the orthopedic market with turnkey services to support the development and management of compliant and profitable in-office DME programs. The NDS DME-IQ program includes vendor negotiations to decrease cost of goods (COGs), oversight of coding during the billing process, management of the appeals process using patient focused support personnel to improve insurance collections, and technology enabled systems that ensure compliance with state and federal regulations. We are extremely proud to have Lance, a highly regarded thought leader in the field of practice management, joining our team, said Terry Thompson, COO of Generex and President of NuGenerex Distribution Solutions. In his role, Lance will work with the NuGenerex family of companies to expand the companys portfolio of ancillary health services while advancing the corporate mission to provide end-to-end solutions for physicians and patients, leading our client services team, MSO operations, and new product introductions. His vast experience and extensive network will truly enhance the strength of the NDS operation. Mr. Goudzwaard has built a 25+ year career in healthcare as a senior executive implementing operational strategies that result in high impact sales, new business development, and organizational profitability. A nationally recognized speaker, author and thought leader in his field, Mr. Goudzwaard is one of less than a thousand fellows in the American College of Medical Practice Executives. As principle consultant for HealthConnectors, he has led multi-level project teams in the portfolio expansion of ancillary services. His expertise has been sought as an advisory board member for multiple mid-range healthcare organizations. On the national level, Mr. Goudzwaard has served as President and Chairman of the Western Region for the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA). Prior to joining NuGenerex, Mr. Goudzwaard served as an executive in a variety of healthcare settings including hospital, employed physician-based practices, and private practices. His breadth of operational and financial experience spans several roles including Chief Operating Officer (COO) of a large specialty orthopedic and spine conglomerate and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a gastroenterology practice that had 17 locations, 5 Ambulatory Surgery Centers along with an Anesthesia and Pathology practice, giving him an extensive background to lead the MSO operations for NuGenerex. Mr. Goudzwaard holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Wyoming and a Master of Science in Health Administration from the University of Colorado. Growth and diversification are key to success within the healthcare landscape, said Mr. Goudzwaard. I welcome the opportunity to build NuGenerex into a new kind of healthcare company that enhances the physician patient experience with a range of ancillary healthcare services that offer new business opportunities for physician practices to improve outcomes through patient-centric care. About Generex Biotechnology Corp. Generex Biotechnology is an integrated healthcare holding company with end-to-end solutions for patient-centric care from rapid diagnosis through delivery of personalized therapies. Generex is building a new kind of healthcare company that extends beyond traditional models providing support to physicians in an MSO network, and ongoing relationships with patients to improve the patient experience and access to optimal care. In addition to advancing a legacy portfolio of immune-oncology assets, medical devices, and diagnostics, the Company is focused on an acquisition strategy of strategic businesses that complement existing assets and provide immediate sources of revenue and working capital. Recent acquisitions include a management services organization, a network of pharmacies, clinical laboratory, and medical device companies with new and approved products. Our newly formed, wholly-owned subsidiary, NuGenerex Distribution Solutions (NDS), integrates our MSO network with a pharmacy network, clinical diagnostic lab, durable medical equipment company (DME-IQ) and dedicated call center. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This release and oral statements made from time to time by Generex representatives in respect to the same subject matter may contain "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements can be identified by introductory words such as "expects," "plan," "believes," "will," "achieve," "anticipate," "would," "should," "subject to" or words of similar meaning, and by the fact that they do not relate strictly to historical or current facts. Forward-looking statements frequently are used in discussing potential product applications, potential collaborations, product development activities, clinical studies, regulatory submissions and approvals, and similar operating matters. Many factors may cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements, including inaccurate assumptions and a broad variety of risks and uncertainties, some of which are known and others of which are not known. Known risks and uncertainties include those identified from time to time in the reports filed by Generex with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which should be considered together with any forward-looking statement. No forward-looking statement is a guarantee of future results or events, and one should avoid placing undue reliance on such statements. Generex undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Generex claims the protection of the safe harbor for forward-looking statements that is contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. SAN FRANCISCO, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Black Hat, the worlds leading producer of information security events, reveals new programming for Black Hat Asia, developed to continue its service to the wider InfoSec industry as well as the local Singapore community. Black Hat has made strategic steps in welcoming a wide range of professionals and offering a platform to discuss issues impacting the community. This years additions to the Black Hat Asia program will deliver opportunities to address issues impacting the industry, offer a platform for local research, invite and educate individuals from all backgrounds, and more. Black Hat Asia will take place March 26-29, 2019 at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. For more information and to save S$200 on registration prices by March 22, please visit: blackhat.com/asia-19/registration.html H.A.S.H. event taking place alongside Black Hat Asia: Thursday, March 28 Taking place Thursday during Black Hat Asia, the Hackers Appreciation & Social Hour (H.A.S.H.) is a networking and appreciation session organised by the Government Technology Agency (GovTech) & Cyber Security Agency (CSA) for participants of the Government Bug Bounty Programme. Community Talks: Thursday, March 28 Black Hat community talks were developed to provide a focus on relevant issues currently impacting the InfoSec community. For the first time, these talks will be offered to the Black Hat Asia audience, providing insights to help individuals both new to InfoSec, as well as seasoned professionals. Keep Everyone In Sync: Effective Approaches Borrowed from Open Source Communities: Wang Kang, Security Expert with the Alibaba Group, will provide an in-depth discussion around keeping the InfoSec community communications in sync without consuming additional resources or energy. His Briefing will not only provide proven research, but real world examples for an all-encompassing deep dive. Wang Kang, Security Expert with the Alibaba Group, will provide an in-depth discussion around keeping the InfoSec community communications in sync without consuming additional resources or energy. His Briefing will not only provide proven research, but real world examples for an all-encompassing deep dive. The Missing Pieces in Cyber Insurance: Director at CrowdStrike and Black Hat Review Board member, Vincenzo Iozzo, will lead a discussion on the current state of risk modeling for cyber insurance, how the two industries are interacting, and what are the key missing pieces to have a functional insurance market for cyber risk. Director at CrowdStrike and Black Hat Review Board member, Vincenzo Iozzo, will lead a discussion on the current state of risk modeling for cyber insurance, how the two industries are interacting, and what are the key missing pieces to have a functional insurance market for cyber risk. Are We Converting Community Knowledge into Secure Organisations: Pamela OShea, Director of Shea Information Security, will host a talk that identifies where the focus is in our community and what is expected of us in our day-to-day occupations according to industry standards. This analysis sets out where our interests overlap with our work and how we can use new knowledge circulating among researchers to the benefit of our organisations. Local Arsenal Tools: Black Hat Arsenal, which showcases the hottest developments from the open-source community, will be welcoming several local researchers to demo their tools onsite at Black Hat Asia. Among these local tools are researchers who participated and won via HackSmith v2.0, a hackathon co-organised by Black Hat Asia and Division Zero in Singapore that aims to promote Singapore InfoSec tools development. Scholarships For the fourth year, the Black Hat Scholarship program will introduce the next generation of security professionals by awarding 75 complimentary Academic Briefings Passes to a limited number of student applicants. Black Hat is also pleased to announce a new partnership with IN Security Movement that has awarded 20 complimentary Briefings passes to women with a passion for information security looking to successfully start their careers. This year will also see the return of the Educator Scholarship program, through which 10 local educators will be given complimentary Briefings passes as an effort to meet the growing demands placed on local educators and to make training and education accessible to all. Women in Security Meetup: Friday, March 29 Review Board members, local associations and attendees of Black Hat Asia will be invited to connect and network at the Women in Security Meet Up. Black Hat Asia Review Board members Ashley Chen, security researcher at FireEye, and Asuka Nakajima, researcher at the NTT Secure Platform Laboratories, will share their experiences launching and attending Women in InfoSec events and discuss how attendees can do the same in their local communities. Association Partners AISP, Division Zero (Div0), ICE71, Information Security Development Association (ISDA), ISACA Singapore Chapter, Japan Network Security Association (JNSA), OWASP, Singapore Cybersecurity Consortium, Taiwan Cyber Security Alliance, TechTalkThai, and Computer Audit Association. Black Hat Asia Sponsors Top sponsors of Black Hat Asia 2019 include Diamond Sponsors: Infoblox, Tenable; Platinum Sponsors: PolySwarm, Qualys, Tripwire; and Gold: Anomali, Darktrace. For more information on sponsorship opportunities and to see the full list of participating companies, visit: blackhat.com/asia-19/event-sponsors.html Connect with Black Hat (#BlackHat) Future Black Hat Dates and Events Black Hat USA 2019 , Las Vegas, Nevada, August 3-8, 2019 , Las Vegas, Nevada, August 3-8, 2019 Black Hat Europe 2019, London, England, December 3-6, 2019 About Black Hat For more than 20 years, Black Hat has provided attendees with the very latest in information security research, development, and trends. These high-profile global events and trainings are driven by the needs of the security community, striving to bring together the best minds in the industry. Black Hat inspires professionals at all career levels, encouraging growth and collaboration among academia, world-class researchers, and leaders in the public and private sectors. Black Hat Briefings and Trainings are held annually in the United States, Europe and Asia. More information is available at: blackhat.com. Black Hat is organized by UBM, which in June 2018 combined with Informa PLC to become a leading B2B information services group and the largest B2B Events organizer in the world. To learn more and for the latest news and information, visit www.ubm.com and www.informa.com. I tuned in to watch former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould testify before the House of Commons justice committee. Her truth was compelling. However, I cannot agree with Conservative opposition MPs calling for the prime minister's resignation. This government still has much to offer. As I glossed over extensive coverage of the SNC affair, I came across a photograph of the former justice minister and the prime minister from 2015, when they embraced at her swearing-in ceremony. All was sweetness and light then. Deferred prosecution agreements became legal in Canada in 2018 (as they are in Britain and the U.S.). Nonetheless, badgering the then justice minister and attorney-general to allow a DPA for SNC was not appropriate, even if it came from some of her 2015 team players. Would opposition MPs be less strident in demanding the prime minister's resignation if SNC's head office were located in Calgary and not Montreal? Would they still insist that the company be prosecuted? SNC has acknowledged that its former executives need to be charged rather than the company, and it is ready to pay remediation and set up compliance procedures. How many people in Kelowna remember that the William R. Bennett Bridge, completed May 25, 2008, was built by SNC? I would have been in favour of a DPA, especially as prosecution of the company, even if successful, will not change the culture of bribery in the Middle East. Helen Schiele, Kelowna VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 12, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Algernon Pharmaceuticals Inc. (CSE: AGN) (FRANKFURT: AGW) (OTCB: BTHCF) (the Company or Algernon) a clinical stage pharmaceutical development company is pleased to announce that it has retained the services of Renmark Financial Communications (Renmark) to help communicate the Algernon story and its unique value proposition to its well established retail broker network throughout the US and Canada. In consideration of the services to be provided, the Company will pay Renmark a monthly retainer of $7,000 CDN, for a period of 6 months ending on Sept 10th, 2019. About Algernon Pharmaceuticals Inc. Algernon Pharmaceuticals is a clinical stage pharmaceutical development company focused on advancing its lead compounds for of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), chronic kidney disease (CKD) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). CONTACT INFORMATION Christopher J. Moreau CEO Algernon Pharmaceuticals Inc. 604.398.4175 ext 701 info@algernonpharmaceuticals.com investors@algernonpharmaceuticals.com www.algernonpharmaceuticals.com. The CSE does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. The Canadian Securities Exchange has not in any way passed upon the merits of the proposed transaction and has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release. CAUTIONARY DISCLAIMER STATEMENT: No Securities Exchange has reviewed nor accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of this news release. This news release contains forward-looking statements relating to product development, licensing, commercialization and regulatory compliance issues and other statements that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements are often identified by terms such as will, may, should, anticipate, expects and similar expressions. All statements other than statements of historical fact, included in this release are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Companys expectations include the failure to satisfy the conditions of the relevant securities exchange(s) and other risks detailed from time to time in the filings made by the Company with securities regulations. The reader is cautioned that assumptions used in the preparation of any forward-looking information may prove to be incorrect. Events or circumstances may cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted, as a result of numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking information. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated. Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this news release and the Company will update or revise publicly any of the included forward-looking statements as expressly required by applicable law. VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Redfund Capital Corp. (CSE: LOAN) (Frankfurt: O3X4) (OTC: PNNRF) (Redfund or the Company) as Lender is pleased to announce the Companys intention to convert the first tranche of a convertible secured promissory note with Marys Wellness Ltd. (MWL), as Borrower, into an equity position. The Investment : On October 15, 2018, Redfund entered into a CDN $1,000,000 promissory note with Marys Wellness Ltd. and were extended a first tranche of CDN $100,000. The Note may be converted in part or its entirety, at Redfunds discretion at any time during the term. Additionally, the Company has the right of first refusal to provide financing to MWL upon the same business terms as offered to Marys Wellness. Upon conversion of the first tranche of the promissory note, Redfund will own 5.55% of Marys Wellness Ltd. The balance of the promissory note is CDN $900,000. The convertible promissory note is secured by a general security agreement on assets of MWL and remains in place to secure additional tranches. The Portfolio Client: Marys Wellness Ltd. of Ontario, Canada was founded by Virginia Vidal in 2016. She was inspired to start the line of infused hot beverages to help manage her pain after the birth of her triplets in 2007. Since then, Marys brand has become synonymous as a symbol of wellness through cannabis. Virginia is a frequent industry speaker at both Canadian and global cannabis industry conferences and was also most recently a keynote speaker at the Tea and Herbal Association of Canada year end conference as well as Canadas Dragons Den episode on cannabis. Marys current product line is 100% clean and organic, focused on medicinal cannabis and has a total of 20 varieties of convenient on-the-go brews with 12 packets in each box containing 10mg THC and 6mg CBD per serving. Flavours available are sleep & relax, bella coola, chamomile, chai, orange pekoe, lemon, peppermint, earl grey, plain green tea, green tea with ginger or ginseng, echinacea, berry berry, apple cider, hot chocolate, english toffee cappuccino, french vanilla cappuccino and coffee/java. Marys Canadian only revenue projections once Canadian licensing approval is granted to edibles, are estimated at $5.5 million for the first year and a steady growth projection to $8.5 million the second year with ebita in year two to reach $5 million. Additionally, MWL global projections near $12 million of international sales year one including a CBD infused tea rollout strategy. (Marys Wellness Ltd.) According to The Tea Association of the USA, tea globally is the 2nd most consumed beverage next to water. The Zion Market Report published in August 2018, stated that the global tea market was valued at around USD 49,456.52 million in 2017 and is expected to reach approximately USD 73,132.82 million by 2024, growing at a CAGR of around 4.5% between 2018 and 2024. Redfund believes Marys Wellness is primed to be one of the first infused tea companies to reach the global marketplace. Virginia Vidal is a charismatic brand ambassador and a wonderful advocate for the medical cannabis industry in Canada. She is actively working to align MWL with a strong Canadian licensed producer with an extensive distribution network to facilitate a successful entrance into the Canadian licensed market, stated Meris Kott, CEO. About Redfund Capital Redfund intends to provide debt and equity funding in the mid-to-late stages of a target companys development, or in technologies that are developed and validated by revenues. The present focus of the merchant bank is on medical cannabis, hemp and CBD-related, healthcare-related target companies. For further information please visit www.redfundcapital.com For more information on Redfund Capital contact Meris Kott CEO 604.484.8989 or info@redfundcapital.com Further information about the Company is available on www.SEDAR.com under the Companys profile. 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. Certain statements contained in this release may constitute forwardlooking statements or forward-looking information (collectively forward-looking information) as those terms are used in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and similar Canadian laws. These statements relate to future events or future performance. The use of any of the words could, intend, expect, believe, will, projected, estimated, anticipates and similar expressions and statements relating to matters that are not historical facts are intended to identify forward-looking information and are based on the Companys current belief or assumptions as to the outcome and timing of such future events. Actual future results may differ materially. In particular, this release contains forward-looking information relating to the business of the Company, the Property, financing and certain corporate changes. The forward-looking information contained in this release is made as of the date hereof and the Company is not obligated to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws. Because of the risks, uncertainties and assumptions contained herein, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The foregoing statements expressly qualify any forward-looking information contained herein. CLEARWATER, Fla., March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On March 23, 2019, The Way to Happiness (TWTH) Association Tampa Bay is hosting their 4th Annual International Day of Happiness Celebration at the historic Fort Harrison in downtown Clearwater. The event is in honor of the International Day of Happiness, a resolution for which was formally adopted by all 193 members of the United Nations in 2013 and calls for happiness in the world to be given greater priority, every March 20th. The first International Day of Happiness was launched with Ndaba Mandela, grandson of the late President Nelson Mandela of South Africa. Speakers at TWTH March 23rd event will include a retired Pinellas County School Board member, a Broadway Producer and a Youth Art Club Director who will share testimonies of how they create happiness in their communities. The Executive Director of The Way to Happiness Association Tampa Bay, Ms. Tanja Cranton stated, You cant buy happiness even if you have all the money in the world. Happiness is priceless. Imagine for one moment if everyone in the world were truly happy! I think we would see a very different world than the one we live in today. The Way to Happiness book, authored by Mr. L. Ron Hubbard, contains 21 non-religious, common sense guidelines to help them make choices that will lead to a happier life. One quote from the book explains its purpose, Aside from personal benefit, one can take a hand, no matter how small, in beginning a new era for human relations. The pebble, dropped in a pool, can make ripples to the furthest shore. TWTH Association Tampa Bay has distributed over 200,000 booklets in the past 12 months alone, recording a drop of up to 70% in crime in one neighborhood where the book was passed out hand-to-hand. The Way to Happiness is one of nine humanitarian outreach programs sponsored by the Church of Scientology ( http://www.scientology.tv ). The International Day of Happiness Celebration 2019 will be held on March 23rd at the Historic Fort Harrison. For more information on the program or how to obtain materials to share with others, please contact The Way to Happiness Community Center on 33 N. Fort Harrison Ave, Clearwater FL 33755. Open daily from 10am 10pm or call: (727) 467 6961. The Way to Happiness Association of Tampa Bay: The Way to Happiness book was written and published by L. Ron Hubbard in 1981 as a nonreligious, common-sense guide to better living. Its purpose is to help arrest the current moral decline in society and restore integrity and trust to humankind. It is available in 112 languages, with some 115 million copies distributed in 186 nations. The campaign to distribute the book has been embraced by more than 257,000 groups and individuals and millions around the world have received the materials free of charge thanks to the continued sponsorship of the Church of Scientology. The Way to Happiness holds the Guinness World Record as the single most-translated nonreligious book and fills the moral vacuum in an increasingly materialistic society. For more information contact: Tanja Cranton The Way to Happiness Association Tampa Bay 727-467-6961 tanja@twth.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/bfabc43a-4833-4d7c-805b-1a52ebaa8e3e English German Sika has agreed to acquire Belineco LLC, a Belorussian manufacturer of polyurethane foam systems. With the acquisition Sika will further expand its know-how in the production and development of polyurethane foams. Together, the two companies will gain better access to the trade distribution channels in Eastern Europe. The acquired business generates annual sales of CHF 23 million. The transaction is subject to approval by anti-trust authorities. Belineco, based near Brest, has been growing with strong momentum over the past years and has built up a solid market position in Belarus and Russia. In its state-of-the-art manufacturing facility, the company produces polyurethane foams sold via trade distribution channels in Eastern European markets. The acquisition provides Sika with expanded production capacity and know-how for polyurethane foam systems. With its geographical footprint focused on Eastern Europe, it perfectly complements the recently acquired Swiss-based Polypag polyurethane foam business. The acquisition of Belineco will enhance Sika's product offering for the trade distribution channels and improve store penetration with larger distributors. It will open up cross-selling opportunities for the combined portfolio through these channels as well as for Belineco foams in Sika's roofing and facade systems. Ivo Schadler, Regional Manager EMEA: "The acquisition of Belineco will strengthen our Sealing & Bonding business in Eastern Europe and open up exciting, new cross-selling opportunities. The improved access to trade distribution channels will increase our market penetration in this region and drive the continued growth of both companies. We are happy to welcome Belineco's employees into the Sika team and are excited about expanding our business together." CONTACT Dominik Slappnig Corporate Communications & Investor Relations +41 58 436 68 21 slappnig.dominik@ch.sika.com SIKA CORPORATE PROFILE Sika is a specialty chemicals company with a leading position in the development and production of systems and products for bonding, sealing, damping, reinforcing and protecting in the building sector and motor vehicle industry. Sika has subsidiaries in 101 countries around the world and manufactures in over 200 factories. Its more than 20,000 employees generated annual sales of CHF 7.09 billion in 2018. The media release can be downloaded from the following link: English French Press release Paris La Defense, 13 March 2019 Albioma Caraibes: 68 million euros loan signed for converting the power plant to 100% biomass Albioma Le Moule has taken out a new long term loan (19 years, without recourse to shareholders) for its Albioma Caraibes power plant (34 MW - commissioned in 2011), for 68 million euros, in addition to the existing debt. This loan will be used to create new infrastructures and modifications to the power plant's installations, with a view to operating it at 100% biomass as a complete alternative to coal during 2020. The sum will also be used to finance the works required for making the plant comply with the IED directive which comes into force on 1 January 2020. The transaction has been arranged with the company's regular banks: BNP Paribas and CIC, as co-arrangers, and Bpifrance, under very attractive market conditions. Once these investments have been completed, the Group will be operating two thermal units in the Caribbean area operating solely on biomass. In September 2018, Albioma announced the industrial commissioning of its first overseas 100% bagasse/biomass power plant, Galion 2, located in Martinique. Next on the agenda: revenue figures for the first quarter of the 2019 financial year, on 24 April 2019 (before trading). We're sorry, you encountered a page that doesn't exist. English Finnish OUTOTEC OYJ PRESS RELEASE MARCH 13, 2019 AT 9:00 AM Outotec to deliver sulfuric acid plant to Morocco Outotec has signed a contract with the Moroccan OCP Group for the delivery of a sulfuric acid plant for fertilizer production. The approximately EUR 80 million order has been booked into Outotec's 2019 first quarter order intake. Outotec's delivery includes the engineering, procurement and construction of the plant, which is based on Outotec's sulfur burning system. The new acid plant will incorporate advanced proprietary technologies such as HEROS heat recovery system as well as a converter, absorption towers and an acid distribution system that are made of the Edmeston SX stainless steel alloy. With more than 20 acid plants and several mining sites, OCP Group is a global fertilizer producer and leader in the phosphate industry. The acid plant will be built in connection with their existing chemical complexes and support in OCP's fertilizer production from phosphate rock from their mining processes as a raw material. "Outotec's sulfuric acid technology has proven to be one of the leading technologies for decades. We are honored that OCP has selected our design for their new plant. With our leading technologies providing benefits such as safety, high reliability and enhanced heat recovery we are happy to help OCP reach their sustainability targets," says Kalle Harkki, head of Outotec's Metals, Energy & Water business. For further information please contact: OUTOTEC Kalle Harkki, President - Metals, Energy & Water business unit tel. +358 20 529 211 Eila Paatela, Vice President - Corporate Communications tel. +358 20 529 2004, +358 400 817198 e-mails firstname.lastname@outotec.com DISTRIBUTION Main media www.outotec.com French English Dutch Invitation to the Extraordinary General Meeting of 15 April 2019 Shareholders of Befimmo SA are invited to attend the Extraordinary General Meeting to be held on 15 April 2019 at 10.30 AM at the Company's registered office, 1945 Chaussee de Wavre in 1160 Brussels. This Extraordinary General Meeting is about the merger by absorption of Beway SA. This proposed merger by absorption of Beway aims at simplifying the structure of the Befimmo group and at optimising management costs, as all Beway shares are now held by Fedimmo, a 100% subsidiary of Befimmo. This merger would lead to the creation of 2,659,828 new ordinary Befimmo shares. Remaining within the group, no dilution of the net asset value and the EPRA earnings is to be foreseen. At a later stage, when appropriate, these shares could be used to finance accretive growth. Should the required quorum of presence not be achieved at this Meeting, a second Extraordinary General Meeting will be convened on 30 April 2019, which will be empowered to deliberate on the same agenda, regardless of the number of shareholders present or represented. In that case, this second Meeting will take place immediately after the Ordinary General Meeting, which will be convened on the same day at 10.30 AM. All documents related to the Meeting are available on the Company website (http://www.befimmo.be/en/investors/general-meetings): - Agenda; - Proxy; - Correspondence vote form; - Additional information. The practical formalities of participation in the Extraordinary General Meeting are described in the agenda. News release from Vestas Asia Pacific Singapore, 13 March 2019 With emerging markets looking to renewable energy to fuel their growth, securing competitive financing solutions play a key role in ensuring projects achieve attractive financial returns. With challenges associated with project bankability, the cost of local lending, and risk allocation, innovative financial solutions are a key enabler to unlock projects and drive further renewable energy development around the globe. Recently, Vestas Structured Finance function demonstrated its ability to provide customised renewable energy solutions by assisting Vietnamese developer Tan Hoan Cau Joint Stock Corporation (THC) to secure foreign-denominated project funding that made possible the 33 MW Huong Linh 1 Wind Farm in late 2018. Vestas was instrumental in coordinating with the involved parties which included the Danish Export Credit Agency (EKF), a leading offshore bank, and one of Vietnams largest banks and leading a joint effort to identify the challenges and develop a workable solution. By having a thorough market and customer understanding, Vestas was able to lead a collaborative effort in developing an innovative solution that featured structuring a local bank guarantee to the offshore bank, who in turn received a further guarantee from EKF. The result was a better business case and return on investment for THC, thus creating a more bankable project with a lower cost of debt, for a longer term and higher amount of borrowing than would have been otherwise achievable. Achieving the financial close for this deal with EKF, the Danish Export Credit Agency, is a significant milestone in Vietnams wind industry. With Vestas proven track record in the Asia Pacific region and its ability to provide customised solutions, we are glad they connected us with the right partners to finance our project, said Nguyen Trung Thanh, Deputy Director of Tan Hoan Cau Joint Stock Company. Securing this order underlines Vestas expertise in Structured Finance to offer our customers customised financing solutions based on their specific requirements. This project also demonstrates THCs continuous confidence in us since our cooperation in Huong Linh 2 Wind Farm which started generating clean energy in September 2017, said Clive Turton, President of Vestas Asia Pacific. Vietnam is a country with increasing energy needs and good conditions for wind energy. EKF has participated in wind farm financing worldwide, and our guarantees makes it possible to attract project funding from international banks. We see a great potential in Vietnam and are very proud to be part of the financing of the Huong Lihn 1 wind farm. EKF is ready to cover more wind farm financings in Vietnam in the years to come, says Kirstine Damkjaer, CEO, EKF Danmarks Export Credit Agency. The Huong Linh 1 Wind Farm is the first project of this nature in Vietnam, and Vestas was instrumental in bringing this unique financing concept that will help to open a new path for financing wind projects in Vietnam and support the Vietnamese government to achieve its targets for Renewable Energy generation. Furthermore, this solution works to incentivise foreign investment into Vietnam, allowing for further Export Credit Agency support for future renewable energy project. And although this was a solution for a specific Vietnamese project, the solution can with some modifications easily be applied to other developing/emerging wind energy markets. The Huong Linh 1 Wind Farm is located at Huong Hoa town in Quang Tri province and includes supply and installation supervision of 15 turbines of the 2 MW platform as well as a 10-year service agreement AOM 4000 including a Vestas Online Business SCADA solution. The project achieved financial close in December of 2018, with turbine installation expected to commence around the end of first quarter of 2019. For more information, please contact: Stephanie Foo Senior Manager, Marketing & Communications, Asia Pacific Tel: +65 9645 4558 Mail: FOHKH@vestas.com About Vestas Vestas is the energy industrys global partner on sustainable energy solutions. We design, manufacture, install, and service wind turbines across the globe, and with 101 GW of wind turbines in 80 countries, we have installed more wind power than anyone else. Through our industry-leading smart data capabilities and 86 GW of wind turbines under service, we use data to interpret, forecast, and exploit wind resources and deliver best-in-class wind power solutions. Together with our customers, Vestas more than 24,600 employees are bringing the world sustainable energy solutions to power a bright future. For updated Vestas photographs and videos, please visit our media images page on: https://www.vestas.com/en/media/images . We invite you to learn more about Vestas by visiting our website at www.vestas.com and following us on our social media channels: Attachment VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Premier Health Group (CSE: PHGI, OTCQB: PHGRF, Frankfurt: 6PH) (the Company or Premier Health), a Company focused on developing innovative approaches that combine human skill-based expertise with emerging technologies for the healthcare industry, is pleased to announce it is working with Bio Conscious Technologies (BCT) to bring their Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to Premier Healths user base. Premier Health will be partnering with BCT to enable patients and care providers improved monitoring of chronic disease progression and management of chronic conditions, such as diabetes, using BCTs proprietary AI technology. BCT has been developing an ensemble of AI algorithms since 2015 that allow patients with diabetes to better manage their health proactively by accurately predicting their future glucose levels using machine learning techniques. The World Health Organization estimates that 425 million people are living with diabetes. Mismanagement of diabetes can be very harmful. BCTs algorithm, DiaBits, learns an individuals physiology and predicts, with machine learning technology, where their blood sugar will trend over time based on their past trend, behaviour, and activity. BCT successfully piloted its technology at BC Childrens Hospital, resulting in a proven accuracy of 95%. They also presented at the 78th scientific session of the American Diabetes Association. The companies will work on integrating DiaBits into Premier Healths patient-centric healthcare app. Since the beginning, remote patient monitoring has been an integral component of our telemedicine app, said Dr. Essam Hamza, CEO of Premier Health. DiaBits will enable our diabetic patients to dramatically increase glucose control and improve their quality of life. We are eager to work with the team at BCT to bring this innovative solution to our comprehensive telemedicine app. We are excited to be selected by Premier Health to partner for our remote health monitoring technology, said Amir Hayeri, CEO of BCT. Incorporating the DiaBits technology platform into Premier Healths app will reduce the guesswork associated with managing diabetes and result in diabetic users having fewer sugar highs, and fewer sugar lows, all while delaying the onset of complications. We are also in the works for developing similar technologies that predict high blood-pressure and premature contractions for pregnant women at risk of pre-eclampsia. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS Dr. Essam Hamza, MD" Chief Executive Officer About Premier Health Premier Health is a Canadian company that is strategically poised to take advantage of business opportunities in the global health care industry. We are focused on innovative health care approaches that combine human skill-based expertise with emerging technologies. Premier Health, in conjunction with its subsidiary Cloud Practice, a cloud-based SAAS Electronic Medical Records software company, is developing proprietary technology to deliver quality healthcare through the combination of connected primary care clinics with telemedicine and artificial intelligence (AI). We currently have a combined ecosystem of 290 clinics, over 3000 licensed practitioners and almost 3 million registered patients. The Premier Health team has deep clinical, operational and financial expertise and a passion for improving healthcare for all patients. About Bio Conscious Technologies Bio Conscious Technologies is a health analytics company. Their mission is to enable patients and care providers to better understand and treat diseases using intelligent analytics. Their app, DiaBits, allows diabetic users to manage their health without stress. Their multivariate algorithm learns an individual user's physiology and predicts where their blood sugar will trend over time based on their behavior and activity. With DiaBits, users have more glucose control, less Hypo and Hyperglycemia episodes, and better long-term health outcomes. The Canadian Securities Exchange does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CONTACT: Premier Health Group Inc. www.mypremierhealth.com Email: investors@mypremierhealth.com Photo: Colin Dacre The nation has come to Penticton this week for a Federation of Canadian Municipalities board meeting at the Trade and Convention Centre. Elected members of local governments sitting on the FCM board are meeting to discuss issues impacting communities across Canada, determining which issues to push with the federal government during an annual conference in Quebec City later this year. While no Okanagan municipality currently has a seat on the FCM board, Penticton mayor John Vassilaki hosted the group for a reception Tuesday at Poplar Grove Winery. They came all the way from P.E.I. or as far north as as the Yukon, he said. There were from everywhere, we made lots of friends. There is no better way to market our community that with those kinds of people who have the knowledge and make decisions. Vassilaki said during his speech he pushed the needs of smaller communities with the delegates. They should also concentrate on smaller communities like Penticton, not only cities, but rural areas as well. Topics on the agenda Wednesday included support for municipalities after disasters, the opioid crisis, clean energy and more. Meetings wrap Friday. VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Chemesis International Inc. (CSE: CSI) (OTC: CADMF) (FRA: CWAA) (the Company or Chemesis), announces its wholly owned subsidiary, La Finca Interacviva-Arachna Med (La Finca) commences the process towards large scale cultivation. The Company, which received its Seed Producers License in January, is now able to export its high concentrate CBD genetics as well as distillates and other manufactured products. With the initial harvest scheduled for calendar Q2-2019, La Finca is poised for expansion into large scale commercialization by calendar Q4-2019 having accumulated over 1,060 acres through its farming Co-op. Obtaining the Seed Producers License allows La Finca to develop its own genetics which is essential when quickly scaling cultivation. La Finca will continue to proceed with the agronomic evaluations that are required by ICA (Colombian Ministry of Agriculture), to increase its number of cultivars that can be cultivated to achieve country-wide commercialization in all regions and climates across Colombia. The Company currently has been licensed for 5 cultivars, which will be harvested for domestic and international distribution. Furthermore, each of the five cultivars were developed with Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the team utilized selective breeding methods to ensure each plant variety was developed to leverage Colombias climate while obtaining the highest quality and yields from each harvest. This is a significant step forward for Chemesis and the team in Colombia, said CEO, Edgar Montero. The Seed Producer License not only allows the company to grow and harvest, but import and export cannabis derivatives and seeds. The Chemesis team has been working very hard to see our long-term vision take shape, and we see the ability to commercialize worldwide as a significant step forward. On Behalf of The Board of Directors Edgar Montero CEO and Director About Chemesis International Inc. Chemesis International Inc. is a vertically integrated global leader in the cannabis industry, currently operating within California, Puerto Rico, and Colombia. Chemesis is developing a strong foothold in key markets, from cultivation, to manufacturing, distribution and retail. Chemesis has facilities in both Puerto Rico and California, allowing for cost effective production and distribution of its products. In addition, Chemesis leverages exclusive brands and partnerships and uses the highest quality extraction methods to provide consumers with quality cannabis products. Chemesis will add shareholder value by exploring opportunities in emerging markets while consistently delivering quality product to its consumers from seed to sale. Investor Relations: ir@chemesis.com 1 (604) 398-3378 Social Media: Chemesis.facebook Chemesis.twitter Chemesis.instagram DesertZen.instagram CaliforniaSap.instagram Jay&SB.instagram Forward-Looking Information: This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws relating to statements regarding the Company's business, products and future of the Companys business, its product offerings and plans for sales and marketing, including finalizing an acquisition in Colombia. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Such forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, performance and developments to differ materially from those contemplated by these statements depending on, among other things, the risks that the Company's products and plan will vary from those stated in this news release and the Company may not be able to carry out its business plans as expected. Except as required by law, the Company expressly disclaims any obligation and does not intend to update any forward-looking statements or forward-looking information in this news release. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct and makes no reference to profitability based on sales reported. The statements in this news release are made as of the date of this release. The CSE has not reviewed, approved or disapproved the content of this press release SAN JOSE, Calif., March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Skybox Security , a global leader in cyber risk management, won the Trust Award for Best Risk and Security Policy Management for the second year in a row at the 2019 SC US Awards. The announcement was made Tuesday, March 5, 2019, during the 23rd annual SC Awards gala in San Francisco, presented by SC Media. The Skybox Security Suite has been designed to help the most complex, security-conscious enterprises to bridge security management gaps within their organizations, intelligently automating processes to support risk reduction and compliance management. This second Trust Award win in the Best Risk and Security Policy Management category is the latest in a string of accolades awarded to the platform, including being named in CRNs 2019 Security 100 List and JMP Securities 70 Hottest Privately Held Companies, as well as Cyber Defense Magazines InfoSec Award for Best Vulnerability Management Product. Our second successive win at the SC Awards reaffirms the strength of Skybox Securitys solution, said Gidi Cohen, CEO and founder of Skybox. Todays security leaders face an almost impossible task to control risk in mass-scale, highly complex and hybrid IT and cloud environments, all while demonstrating continuous compliance amid rapid change. At Skybox, we recognize the importance of simplifying risk and security policy management and are dedicated to bringing about positive and enduring change to this field. The second Trust Award win shows that our approach resonates with thought leaders as well as practitioners. In SC Medias announcement of the win, they remarked, Companies are always looking for new and better vantage points from which they can view and manage network risk. And in that sense, Skybox Security offers the best seat in the house." Skybox Securitys second win in this category comes after it ended 2018 with its best quarter ever, exceeding its previous record by 62 percent. Faced with a growing skills crisis and mounting complexity, CISOs need a solution which gives them visibility of their entire environment, as well as the context needed to focus teams on their biggest risks, said Executive Vice President of Sales Stewart Fox. Thats what Skybox does. Record sales, strong win and retention rates, as well as accolades like this Trust Award all demonstrate that were right to be confident in our solution. The SC Awards are recognized throughout the security industry as the gold standard of excellence in cybersecurity. Winners of the Trust Award for Best Risk and Policy Management were chosen by a distinguished group of leading IT security professionals from SC Media's readership and selected by SC Medias editorial team. When choosing winners for our Trust Awards, SC Media considered such factors as functionality, innovativeness, scalability, ease of use, cost of ownership, return on investment, and customer friendliness, said Illena Armstrong, vice president of editorial at SC Media. Across these facets, Skybox Security highly impressed our judges. About Skybox Security www.skyboxsecurity.com Skybox provides the industrys broadest cybersecurity management platform to address security challenges within large, complex networks. By integrating with 120 networking and security technologies, the Skybox Security Suite gives comprehensive attack surface visibility and the context needed for informed action. Our analytics, automation and intelligence improve the efficiency and performance of security operations in vulnerability and threat management and firewall and security policy management for the worlds largest organizations. 2019 Skybox Security, Inc. All rights reserved. Skybox Security and the Skybox Security logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Skybox Security, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Product specifications subject to change at any time without prior notice. Tweet This: The Best #CyberRisk and #PolicyManagement Solution for the second year in a row. See why @SkyboxSecurity kept its crown at the @SCMagazine awards: http://ow.ly/ikNY30o0szD CONTACT INFORMATION Victoria Davis Schmidt Corporate Communications for Skybox Security 571.340.0181 | Victoria.Schmidt@skyboxsecurity.com OneChocolate for Skybox Security United Kingdom: Daniel Couzens +44 (0)20 7437 0227 | DanielC@onechocolatecomms.co.uk Germany: Stephanie Thoma +49 (0)89 388 892 012 | Stephaniet@onechocolatecomms.de France: Xavier Delhome +33 1 41 31 75 09 | xavier@onechocolate.fr English German SAN FRANCISCO and BERLIN, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Breakout company, Automation Hero, secured a $14.5M investment led by Atomico and supported by Baidu Ventures (BV) and Cherry Ventures to lead the new generation of AI and data-centric Intelligent Process Automation (IPA). The startup is poised to dramatically shift the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market as companies search for new ways to automate business and IT processes. Its mission is to support information workers by automating mundane, repetitive tasks and give back time for more fulfilling higher value-add activities such as interacting with customers. Ben Blume, principal at Atomico, will join the Automation Hero board with this latest round of funding. The team behind Automation Hero is not new to building disruptive, hyper-growth technology companies. Founder Stefan Groschupf has over 25 years of experience in machine learning and was one of the earliest big data activists working on the Apache Hadoop project. The team and Groschupf started the award-winning big data business intelligence company, Datameer, in 2009, which has counted more than 50 percent of the Fortune 50 companies as customers and secured a place in Gartners BI and Analytic Magic Quadrant in just five years. RPA + AI = IPA The RPA market has seen extreme growth in the last few years, but current technology was architected over a decade ago and is limited to automating simple, repetitive click robots. Data integration, processing and machine learning are added as an afterthought and therefore intelligently automating more advanced business processes in complex IT environments remains challenging. Automation Heros AI and big data-centric intelligent process automation platform tackles the problem with a completely new approach. Instead of running automations as isolated robots, Automation Heros platform runs highly scalable, distributed automation flows that weave together click robots, structured and unstructured data sources, deep learning, data processing and the human workforce into an intelligence fabric that creates an operating system for the modern enterprise. The company is already seeing explosive global growth, especially within large enterprise sales organizations where there are high ROIs from automation. Its three primary use cases focus on eliminating manual repetitive, time-intensive tasks, automating common customer requests and augmenting sales rep decision making. Customers in financial services, telecommunications and travel and tourism have cited ROIs in the hundreds of millions by saving their employees up to one hour per day. Simplest Way to AI Automation Even novice users can quickly automate repetitive business processes with Automation Heros simple-to-use automation recording capabilities. Advanced automations can be easily built from hundreds of functions in the platforms intuitive point-and-click Flow Studio. Data can be loaded or stored through one of the over 50 point-and-click connectors. Click robots can extract data from any kind of user interface and fill documents or forms in Web, Windows or Mac applications. The no-code, visual AI Studio allows users to create operational, deep learning (TensorFlow) models for natural language processing, classification, recommendation, personalization or other business-relevant machine learning tasks. Its the only platform to personify attended automations as a personal AI assistant that handles repetitive tasks on behalf of the end user. The goal is to help alleviate the fear often invoked by AI and emphasize augmenting, not replacing the human worker. Unattended automations can also run completely autonomously on the cluster. Automation Hero is available on-demand in the cloud or on-premise and is built from the ground up with the highest levels of security, data governance, customization and scalability in mind. Sign up now to request access . Automation is the enterprise AI killer use case. However, the decade-old RPA technology out there has only slapped on AI - calling Cloud AI APIs or OCR tools. Given our experience we have built an enterprise-ready AI automation platform from the ground up, said Stefan Groschupf, CEO of Automation Hero. Were already seeing our customers create automations in days, increase productivity and improve customer satisfaction with impressive revenue impact. New Funding for Global Acceleration This next round of funding was raised within just 12 months and brings the total investment to $19M. It will be used to accelerate Automation Heros growth, including the expansion of its international team. It most recently welcomed Peter Voss, former CTO of Datameer. Stefan is an experienced entrepreneur and exceptional technologist, with a relentless focus on building hyper growth companies with category-defining products that provide clear value to enterprise-scale customers. Intelligent Process Automation will drive a whole new kind of transformation across major business processes, and Automation Heros highly experienced team is incredibly well positioned to deliver this to organizations around the world, said Ben Blume, principal at Atomico. About Automation Hero Automation Hero combines RPA with AI to form an intelligent process automation platform that unites AI with the human workforce. By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, Automation Hero improves productivity and drives more successful, optimized business outcomes. Automation Hero is a portfolio company of premier AI and deep learning investment firms, Baidu Ventures (BV) USA, CometLabs, Cherry Ventures, signals VC and Atomico, and is headquartered in San Francisco. Connect with Automation Hero Visit our website Read our blog Follow on Twitter Like on LinkedIn Contact Monique Sherman Head of Marketing, Automation Hero monique.sherman@automationhero.ai About Atomico Atomico partners with Europes most ambitious tech founders at Series A and beyond, leveraging deep operational experience to supercharge their growth. Founded in 2006, Atomico has partnered with over 100 ambitious teams - including those at Supercell, Graphcore, Omio, Klarna, Lilium, MessageBird, Automation Hero, and The Climate Corporation. Atomico's team of investors and advisors includes founders of four billion dollar companies, and operational leaders who were responsible for global expansion, hiring and marketing at companies from Skype and Google to Uber and Spotify. A video accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/23569604-5f73-42ad-a22a-fdbe659df539 Release no. 2, 2019 Columbus delivered revenue growth of 54% in 2018. In 2018, Columbus progressed with the integration of iStone and HiGH Software while launching a new innovative solution and services portfolio. Revenue grew by 54% to DKK 1.9bn and EBITDA* increased by 22% amounting to DKK 181m. Columbus A/S has today published the Annual Report 2018, cf. release no. 1/2019. In 2018 Columbus delivered a revenue of DKK 1.9bn, and EBITDA* of DKK 181m, corresponding to an increase of 54% and 22%, respectively, compared to 2017. The result after tax increased by 1% to DKK 97m. The revenue growth was primarily driven by the acquisitions of iStone and HiGH Software and secondly by the increased sale of Columbus Software. The increase in EBITDA* was primarily due to the mentioned acquisitions, cost reduction in the US business and the increase in sale of Columbus Software. Based on the result for the year and cash flow, the Board of Directors proposes that the General Meeting adopts a dividend payment of 10% of the nominal share capital. Management initiatives in 2018 Execution of the Columbus20 20 strategy strategy Grow organically Integration of iStone Integration of HiGH Software Recovery of the US business Execution of Columbus2020: Investment for growth 2018 was the year of innovation in Columbus. Under the framework of 9 Doors to Digital Leadership (our new service catalogue). Columbus has extended its core traditional ERP competence to address the customers entire business challenges, thus enabling us to expand our customer base and reach out to new markets. In 2018, Columbus released the first five of the 9 Doors to Digital Leadership, comprising Analytics & Business Insight, Customer Experience, ERP services and Columbus Care Application and Infrastructure Management. We have invested significantly in strengthening our global delivery capacity within these new services, thus expanding our Global Delivery Center, which now has 300 employees. This team leads the development and implementation of the 9 Doors to Digital Leadership on a global scale. The 9 Doors to Digital Leadership will be the major organic growth engine in 2019 and beyond. Successful integration of iStone and HiGH Software Columbus has successfully executed the first phase of the 3-year integration plan for iStone, which has confirmed the expected synergies in relation to markets, customers, solution portfolio, organization and delivery capacity. iStone delivered strong results, especially growing the Commerce, Infor M3 and Application Management businesses. HiGH Software has successfully been fully integrated in Columbus, and the DynaRent and DynaLease solutions are integrated into Columbus product portfolio and have shown strong growth in 2018. Recovery of the US business As expected, Columbus US Business Unit continued to face challenges during 2018. Therefore, we saw an overall revenue decline of 13% in local currency compared to last year. However, as the overall cost level has been adjusted, and as we did not face any significant losses on projects like in 2017, the US business was able to increase EBITDA by 166%. The management continues to have thorough focus on improving revenue and margins. Financial statements for 2018 The revenue increased by 54% to DKK 1.9bn in 2018. In local currency revenue increased by 56%. Revenue is in the lower end of our expectations. EBITDA* increased by 22% to DKK 181m and is impacted by a non-recurring income of DKK 6.5m. In local currency, EBITDA* increased by 24%. The revenue from Columbus services business increased by 74% to DKK 1.4bn. The billing rate of service hours increased from 52% to 54%. The revenue from Columbus Software increased by 24% to DKK 103m (2017: DKK 83m). This development is in line with our expectations. External license revenue declined by 22% to DKK 74m despite acquisitions. External Cloud revenue grew by 161% to DKK 24m, but has not grown enough to offset the decline in perpetual licenses sales. Recurring revenue increased from DKK 338m to DKK 426m, an increase of 26%. The increase is due to a good progress in sale of Columbus Care, Cloud and the acquisitions. The recurring revenue constituted 23% of the total revenue compared to 28% in 2017. The decrease is primarily due to the acquisition of iStone as iStone had less recurring revenue compared to Columbus. The development is in line with our expectations. EBITDA after share-based payment increased by 17% to DKK 171m (2017: DKK 146m). Profit after tax increased by 1% to DKK 97m (2017 DKK 96m) and is considered satisfactory. Expectations for 2019 Columbus main goal for 2019 is to achieve organic growth through selling the 9 Doors to Digital Leadership. We will continue to have a strong focus on developing and selling our ERP services and solutions while extending our portfolio with new solutions. Management priorities for 2019 Execute the Columbus20 20 strategy strategy Integration of iStone Grow organically with the 9 Doors to Digital Leadership Recovery of the US Business IFRS 16 impact IFRS 16 Leasing is expected to have an impact on EBITDA of DKK 36m. This will impact the expected EBITDA margin by 1.7 percentage points. Profit before taxes will be slightly negatively impacted by DKK -0.2m. The guidance for 2019 and onwards is including the IFRS 16 impact. Specific targets for 2019 Revenue in the level of DKK 2bn EBITDA in the level of DKK 240m Columbus Software in the level of DKK 110m 10% dividend on nominal share capital Expected integration cost of DKK 5-10m in relation to integration of iStone and HiGH Software is included in the expectations to EBITDA in 2019. Updated long-term targets for 2021 Columbus has updated the long-term guidance for the next three years. The ambition is to grow the business organically at a compounded average growth rate of 3-5% each year. In 2018 Columbus realized an EBITDA of DKK 171.4, a margin of 9.1%. Adjusted for the IFRS 16 impact, the EBITDA margin was realized at 10.8% in 2018. Columbus strives to reach an EBITDA margin of 13% in 2021. We are satisfied with the results for 2018, where we delivered increase in revenue and EBITDA while realizing several growth initiatives to fuel for continued growth, says Thomas Honore, CEO in Columbus. Investor presentation Columbus Executive Board will present the results for 2018 at a conference call today at 13:00 CET. Please use the following dial-in numbers: Denmark: +45 32720417 UK/international: +44 (0) 2071 928338 US: +1 646 741 3167 Conference ID: 9368978 It is also possible to follow the online webcast via this link: https://edge.media-server.com/m6/p/fhu9pseg A recorded version of the presentation will be available on the website after the webcast has concluded: www. columbusglobal.com. EBITDA before share-based payment Ib Kune Thomas Honore Chairman CEO & President Columbus A/S Columbus A/S For further information, please contact CEO & President, Thomas Honore: +45 70 20 50 00 Columbus Columbus2020 strategy towards growth Based on Columbus strengthened position, as a result of successful execution of the Columbus15 strategy, the company launched a growth strategy in March. The strategy is named Columbus2020 and consists of four interconnected strategic elements. Customer Success Taking care of our customers for life Columbus fundamental goal is to take care of our customers for life. Columbus aims to be widely recognized as a strategic business partner that enhances our customers success by improving the value realization of their ERP investments and by leading them in the digital transformation of their business. This means that Columbus will intensify the focus on creating a unique customer experience and increase customer satisfaction from the customer meet Columbus for the first time to delivering unique solutions, high quality services and streamlined project delivery and support 24/7. Digital Leadership Accelerate business innovation Columbus helps our customers in the digital transformation of their business. With Digital Leadership Columbus has two focus areas. Firstly, Columbus will continue to strengthen our leadership position within ERP by investing in new companies, applications, methodologies and business processes that optimizes and improves the implementation of ERP solutions. Secondly, Columbus will establish a leadership position within Digital Transformation. Many companies are about to or in the process of transforming their business in order to succeed in the digital economy. Columbus will develop solutions and services within cloud, mobile, social, analytics and Internet of Things that help companies take advantage of the digital opportunities. Process Excellence Quality in everything we do In Columbus, we constantly strive to optimize and streamline our business operations in order to achieve strong sales excellence and deliver projects, services and support of high quality to our customers. Our goal is to create the best customer experience in the industry. The focal point is quality in everything we do from the initial contact with customers, and sales and design of the business solution to the implementation process and lifetime support. This means an intense focus on optimizing and streamlining our processes globally. Our People Attract, develop and retain the best people Columbus greatest asset is our employees and therefore it is crucial that we attract and retain the best people in the industry. We want to attract highly skilled people by providing challenging career opportunities, attractive working conditions and professional and personal growth. Columbus want to create a customer culture, where meeting the customers expectations sets the direction in everything we do. This means that Columbus always strives to deliver projects on time, within budget and at the highest quality. Attachment 13 March 2019 Acrons Shareholders Approve Dividends PJSC Acron (Veliky Novgorod) summed up the results of its extraordinary general meeting held on 11 March 2019 in the form of absentee voting. The shareholders approved distribution of a part of Acrons profit for previous years as proposed by Acrons Board of Directors. Dividends on Acrons outstanding ordinary shares will amount to RUB 130 per share. The record date for persons entitled to dividends is set for 22 March 2019. The total amount allocated for dividends is RUB 5.3 billion. Media contacts: Sergey Dorofeev Anastasiya Gromova Tatiana Smirnova Public Relations Phone: +7 (495) 777-08-65 (ext. 5196) Investor contacts: Ilya Popov Investor Relations Phone: +7 (495) 745-77-45 (ext. 5252) Background Information Acron Group is a leading vertically integrated mineral fertiliser producer in Russia and globally, with chemical production facilities in Veliky Novgorod (Acron) and the Smolensk region (Dorogobuzh). The Group owns and operates a phosphate mine in Murmansk region (North-Western Phosphorous Company, NWPC) and is implementing a potash development project in Perm Krai (Verkhnekamsk Potash Company, VPC). It has a wholly owned transportation and logistics infrastructure, including three Baltic port terminals and distribution networks in Russia and China. Acrons subsidiary, North Atlantic Potash Inc. (NAP), holds mining licenses for 13 parcels of the potassium salt deposit at Prairie Evaporite, Saskatchewan, Canada. Acron also holds a minority stake (19.8%) in Polish Grupa Azoty S.A., one of the largest chemical producers in Europe. In 2017, the Group sold 7.3 million tonnes of various products to 65 countries, with Russia, Brazil, Europe and the United States as key markets. In 2017, the Group posted consolidated IFRS revenue of RUB 94,342 million (USD 1,617 million) and net profit of RUB 14,260 million (USD 244 million). Acrons shares are on the Level 1 quotation list of the Moscow Exchange and its global depositary receipts are traded at the London Stock Exchange (ticker AKRN). Acron employs approximately 11,000 people. For more information about Acron Group, please visit www.acron.ru/en. LONDON, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The experience of forex trading is changing. Advances in technology are making the market more accessible to new investors and more profitable for experienced traders. FirewoodFX has contributed to these transformations significantly. In honour of the strides it has made, the company has been named the Best STP Broker 2018 by European CEO. One way in which FirewoodFX has worked to expand the forex market is through its ForexCopy feature. This allows less experienced beginners to follow profitable traders by copying each trade they make. Rewards are abundant for both professional fund managers and new traders. The former can receive performance fees of up to 50 percent, while the latter not only benefit from the successful trades they follow, but also any clients they refer to their ForexCopy leader. In an exclusive article for European CEO, Chloe Christina, Multimedia Marketing Manager at FirewoodFX, describes the firms array of cutting-edge functions and features that make forex trading easier and more efficient. New brokers can begin trading with just a minimum deposit of $10 (8.78) and a minimum trade size of 0.01 lot (100). In the future, FirewoodFX hopes to provide cryptocurrency trading instruments, as well as the more advanced MetaTrader 5 trading platform. To find out more about FirewoodFXs award-winning trading platform, check out an exclusive article by Chloe Christina, Multimedia Marketing Manager at FirewoodFX, in the latest issue of European CEO, available online now. www.europeanceo.com World News Media is a leading publisher of quality financial and business magazines, enjoying a global distribution network that includes subscriber lists of prominent and senior decision-makers around the world. Burbank, CA, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Imaging3, Inc. (OTCQB:IGNG, Imaging3 or the Company), a development stage company introducing disruptive technologies in the medical imaging industry, today announced that it has executed a non-binding letter of intent (LOI) to be acquired in a reverse acquisition (the Acquisition) by a privately held Los Angeles based cannabis company (the Acquirer). John Hollister, CEO of Imaging3, explained the intersection of this opportunity with the Companys objectives for development and commercialization of its Dominion 3D X-ray imaging technology: We have continued our progress towards our targeted closure of approximately $3M of funding for our Dominion development program which we anticipate to close in the near future. A critical step in this process is the resolution of certain outstanding obligations owed by the Company. We believe that the proposed Acquisition announced today will help us to more easily resolve these obligations, thereby allowing the Dominion to devote a substantially larger percentage of the anticipated $3M funding to future endeavors as opposed to existing obligations. Conducting the Dominion enterprise in a new private entity will also eliminate the not insignificant costs of being a public entity. Hollister continued: As many of us observe on a daily basis, the healthcare benefits and investment opportunities in CBD and other cannabis-derived products has been the focus of significant attention to investors of every genre. We believe that the Acquirer has wisely positioned itself to be a responsible leader in this emerging field, focusing on regulatory compliance and product quality as the drivers behind a well-planned rollup and integration of multiple facets of the cannabis business. The Acquisition of our fully-reporting and SEC current public company improves their access to the public equity markets and should facilitate their ability to rapidly attract either debt or equity financing and maximize value appreciation and liquidity for their investors and the current IGNG public shareholder. For the above reasons, IGNGs officers and directors sincerely believe that the Acquisition is in the best interest of all parties: Imaging3s current shareholders, the myriad financial and health care beneficiaries of the roll out of our breakthrough Dominion imaging technology, and the Acquirer. The Acquirer holds licenses issued by the State of California to manufacture and distribute cannabis products in California. The Acquirer commenced operations in mid-2018 and has enjoyed more than $550,000.00 in revenue from operations since they commenced. The Acquirer maintains facilities in Riverside County California near Palm Springs. On Thursday, March 7, 2019 the Acquirer obtained its final permit and clearance from the local fire department to commence operation of an ethanol-based extraction laboratory at its facilities, and will initiate related extraction and post-processing operations as soon as practicable. The Acquirers laboratory will be able to extract CBD hemp under Federal law pursuant to the recently signed 2018 Farm Act that classifies CBD hemp as an insurable commodity. Pursuant to the terms of the LOI, the Company and the Acquirer have initiated negotiations intended to result in completion and execution of a definitive equity exchange agreement (the Agreement) defining all of the material terms of the Acquisition on or before March 31, 2019. Per the LOI, the Agreement shall provide that upon conclusion of the Acquisition, the Acquirers designees shall own 80% of the then outstanding common shares of the Company and the Companys current shareholders shall own 20% of such outstanding common shares. The Company will also be required to settle the above mentioned outstanding creditor obligations on terms acceptable to both the Acquirer and the Company. Furthermore the Acquirer is required to obtain a commitment for a bridge loan of not less than $1,250,000.00 to be funded at the closing of the Acquisition and an equity infusion of up to $10,000,000.00 subsequent to closing of the transaction, each from a qualified investor(s), both of which will be applied to the growth of the Acquirers cannabis enterprises. Concomitantly with the successful closing of the Acquisition, all rights to the Companys intellectual property, assets and funding raised relating to its Dominion imaging technology will be assigned and transferred to a new, private closely-held company (the Dominion Company) to be owned by post-Acquisition IGNG, the Acquirers designees, current IGNG management and board members, and certain other persons currently associated with the Company, as finally negotiated by all of the parties to the Agreement. The Dominion Company will thereafter execute its business plan as previously articulated in IGNGs periodic reports to the SEC separately from the cannabis operation. The Companys Chairman of the Board, Jeffrey N. Peterson, offered additional perspective: The Companys management and board have diligently prepared for completion of our planned financing of the Dominion enterprise, and the execution of our vision for an important new value proposition addressing many under-served markets for 3D X-ray imaging technology. The explosion of investor interest in the cannabis space presented us with an unusual opportunity to leverage the asset of our fully-reporting, SEC current public company structure through the serendipitous confluence of these events which we believe strengthen our likelihood to achieve our vision for the Dominion technology, while at the same offering our current IGNG shareholders a valuable opportunity for rapid appreciation of their investment in the post-Acquisition cannabis-focused company. At the closing, current Imaging3 officers and directors shall appoint the Acquirers designees to officer and director positions in post-Acquisition Imaging3, and immediately resign their positions as officers and directors of the Company. About Imaging3, Inc. Imaging3, Inc., founded in 1993, has developed a patented medical imaging technology, called the Dominion SmartScan,that produces 3D X-ray images, effectively in real time. The SmartScan technology has the potential to allow healthcare professionals to perform diagnostic and therapeutic procedures more quickly and accurately, which may result in higher throughput for the clinicians and fewer safety risks for patients. Imaging3s technology exposes patients to less harmful radiation than current equivalent imaging technologies such as CT scans. The company believes this will allow scans to be used in many settings where scanning is currently limited by concerns about radiation exposure. The technology also notably allows for reasonably convenient portability, easier installation and use-readiness, and a significantly reduced cost burden suitable for novel settings and for healthcare systems across varied global settings. Imaging3 plans to submit a 510(k) application to FDA during 2018 to gain marketing authorization for initial applications for the SmartScan technology. Visit the companys website at http://www.imaging3.com for detailed information about the companys technology. Safe Harbor Statement Imaging3 cautions you that any statement included in this press release that is not a description of historical facts is a forward-looking statement. Many of these forward-looking statements contain the words "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "may" "intend," "expect" and similar expressions. Actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those contemplated, expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements contained herein. These forward-looking statements are based largely on the expectations of the company and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties inherent in the Imaging3s business, including, without limitation: the company may not ever obtain FDA approval for any of its devices; the company may not be able to secure the funds necessary to support its product development plans; and the company may not ever achieve the market success to sustain a profitable business. In addition, there are risks and uncertainties related to economic recession or terrorist actions, competition from much larger imaging companies, technological obsolescence, unexpected costs and delays, potential product liability claims, and many other factors. More detailed information about Imaging3 and the risk factors that may affect the realization of forward-looking statements is set forth in the companys filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the companys Annual Report on Form 10-K and its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. Such documents may be read free of charge on the SECs website at www.sec.gov . You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. All forward-looking statements are qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement, and Imaging3 undertakes no obligation to revise or update this press release to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof. This caution is made under the safe harbor provisions of Section 21E of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. English German Chinese (Traditional) AUSTIN, Texas, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SolarWinds (NYSE:SWI), a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, today announced the availability of machine learning-enabled database anomaly detection and an automated management API in the latest version of Database Performance Analyzer (DPA). The company also introduced a broad refresh of its IT operations management portfolio , collectively designed to improve support for monitoring critical IT services and extend support for monitoring private cloud and converged infrastructures. A slow-running database can significantly affect the end-to-end performance of applications and the experience of end users, said Joe Kim, executive vice president and global chief technology officer, SolarWinds. With new anomaly detection capabilities, SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer 12.1 empowers database professionals to more accurately identify and respond to performance incidents. We take pride in providing tools designed to allow customers to keep their businesses running smoothly while shifting to a more proactive management approach. When managing large environments, manually-intensive approaches consume time, can be slow to yield actionable insights, and require historical knowledge of baseline performance. With DPA 12.1, customers can save time by not only automating anomaly detection to more quickly find, visualize, and alert when database wait times deviate from the expected, but by also leveraging machine learning capabilities to monitor behavior patterns and gain meaningful insight into what is expected versus an anomaly. Database professionals can also benefit from the addition of the DPA management API, which allows customers to automate instance management (such as registration, licensing, annotations, and more) as well as programmatically scale to meet the needs of large or dynamic environments. With less time spent on redundant tasks, DBAs can focus on bigger picture improvements and proactive innovation. SolarWinds DPA is designed to provide seamless integration with the SolarWinds Orion Platform, and its many modules, including Network Performance Monitor (NPM) and Server & Application Monitor (SAM). Integration with features like the SolarWinds PerfStack dashboard can provide additional blocking analysis support, designed to help users discover where an incident occurred, the overall impact of the action, and guide informed future troubleshooting strategies. Updates to IT Operations Management Portfolio Improve Management of Hybrid IT Environments As organizations continue their transition from purely on-premises operations into both private and public cloud infrastructures, along with increased consumption of SaaS-delivered applications like Office 365 , adapting their IT monitoring and management capabilities can pose a significant challenge, Kim continued. Weve substantially expanded our IT operations management product portfolio to deliver improved support for monitoring Active Directory and extended our infrastructure monitoring capabilities with additional support for VMware environments, and adding support for Cisco UCS converged infrastructure. All of these improvements are designed to help todays technology professionals easily extend their monitoring across their ever-expanding IT environment, an integrated experience that delivers monitoring through a single pane of glass. Within its IT operations management portfolio, SolarWinds announced updates to the following software products: Server & Application Monitor (SAM) 6.8: Introduced in this release is AppInsight for Active Directory, delivering deeper insight into the status and performance of Active Directory across environments, while also providing deeper monitoring for customers who have deployed Ciscos industry-leading UCS converged infrastructure portfolio. Introduced in this release is AppInsight for Active Directory, delivering deeper insight into the status and performance of Active Directory across environments, while also providing deeper monitoring for customers who have deployed Ciscos industry-leading UCS converged infrastructure portfolio. Virtualization Manager (VMAN) 8.4: The updated tool offers greater time-to-resolution capabilities to VMware environments by allowing customers to import VMware events to monitor and correlate those performance issues and expedite troubleshooting. The updated tool offers greater time-to-resolution capabilities to VMware environments by allowing customers to import and correlate those performance issues and expedite troubleshooting. Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) 6.8: With extended support for Kaminario solid-state storage arrays, the updated version of SRM enables resource monitoring and capacity planning across a wider mix of storage infrastructures in multi-vendor environments to meet the needs of a broader set of customers. With extended support for Kaminario solid-state storage arrays, the enables resource monitoring and capacity planning across a wider mix of storage infrastructures in multi-vendor environments to meet the needs of a broader set of customers. Server Configuration Monitor (SCM) 1.1: A valuable configuration tool that provides visibility into configuration changes on Windows servers and applications, along with the ability to detect which user made each change. This latest version adds near real-time change analysis to help technology professionals surface the root cause of performance issues caused by changes. A valuable configuration tool that provides visibility into configuration changes on Windows servers and applications, along with the ability to detect which user made each change. This latest version adds near real-time change analysis to help technology professionals surface the root cause of performance issues caused by changes. Log Analyzer (LA) 2.0: Formerly known as Log Manager for Orion, the updated version brings native Windows support, simplifying the ability to collect Windows systems events alongside logs from other infrastructure, and providing more comprehensive detail about what occurred on a system prior to an incident or performance problem. Pricing and Availability The updated SolarWinds IT operations management portfolio, including DPA 12.1, will be available starting on March 13, 2019. SolarWinds DPA pricing starts at $2,045*; SolarWinds SAM pricing starts at $2,995*; SolarWinds SRM pricing starts at $2,995*; SolarWinds VMAN pricing starts at $2,995*; SolarWinds SCM pricing starts at $1,750*; and SolarWinds Log Analyzer pricing starts at $1,495*. For more information, visit the SolarWinds website , or call +1-866-530-8100. *Prices as of March 13, 2019, in US dollars. Pricing may vary based upon the jurisdiction and applicable currency. Please contact a local SolarWinds sales representative to find pricing specific to your jurisdiction. Additional Resources Connect with SolarWinds #SWIproducts About SolarWinds SolarWinds (NYSE:SWI) is a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT infrastructure management software. Our products give organizations worldwide, regardless of type, size or IT infrastructure complexity, the power to monitor and manage the performance of their IT environments, whether on-premise, in the cloud, or in hybrid models. We continuously engage with all types of technology professionalsIT operations professionals, DevOps professionals, and managed service providers (MSPs)to understand the challenges they face maintaining high-performing and highly available IT infrastructures. The insights we gain from engaging with them, in places like our THWACK online community, allow us to build products that solve well-understood IT management challenges in ways that technology professionals want them solved. This focus on the user and commitment to excellence in end-to-end hybrid IT performance management has established SolarWinds as a worldwide leader in network management software and MSP solutions. Learn more today at www.solarwinds.com . The SolarWinds, SolarWinds & Design, Orion, and THWACK trademarks are the exclusive property of SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC or its affiliates, are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other SolarWinds trademarks, service marks, and logos may be common law marks or are registered or pending registration. All other trademarks mentioned herein are used for identification purposes only and are trademarks of (and may be registered trademarks of) their respective companies. 2019 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved. MEDIA CONTACTS: Nicole Fachet Jenne Barbour Archetype SolarWinds Phone: +1-212-871-3950 Phone: +1-512-498-6804 nicole.fachet@archetype.co pr@solarwinds.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/3297fc0c-6687-4d82-ae53-7f9dfc45e42d LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga., March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Encompass Supply Chain Solutions, Inc. , a leading provider of Parts Distribution, 3PL and 4PL solutions for a diverse range of finished goods and replacement parts, today announced it is now authorized to supply original component parts to value-added resellers (VARs) that have been identified by Dell for Dells commercial products. Under an agreement with Dell a renowned brand in computer technology the deal extends to parts intended for out-of-warranty repairs only; Dell will continue to support all its products with in-warranty parts. Encompass is pleased to continue increasing our support for the computing industry by adding the Dell brand , said Joe Hurley , Encompass Business Development vice president. We will be able to leverage the knowledge and best practices we have gained by partnering with other similar manufacturers to provide exceptional service to Dell VARs. Encompass is one of the most diversified parts distributors in the country, comprising numerous product categories in addition to Computer, such as Consumer Electronics, Major/Small Appliance and a host of other segments. The company will support Dells customer base through distribution facilities in Georgia, Nevada and Florida. Securing strong, consistent support for Dell products is instrumental in building and maintaining loyalty to our brand, said Kash Shaikh, Dell VP and GM of Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions. We are confident that Encompass shares this commitment and will help ensure first-class customer service with Dell-authorized parts. About Encompass Supply Chain Solutions, Inc. Formed in 1953, Encompass is one of the countrys largest suppliers of repair parts and accessories for products throughout the home. Encompass also offers complete parts supply chain management , 3PL , depot repair and reverse logistics service. In addition to consumers, we support an array of B2B customers, including manufacturers, multi-family property management, warranty providers, service networks, independent dealers and retailers. For more information, please visit solutions.encompass.com and follow us on LinkedIn , Facebook and Twitter . Kristin Hurst Director of Marketing & Communications Ph: 954.474.0325 khurst@encompass.com SUMMIT, N.J., March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Engage Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing a Rapid Epileptic Seizure Termination (REST) therapy for people who experience a predictable pattern of epileptic seizures, today announced it will present clinical data from the open label portion of the randomized Phase 2b StATES Study (Staccato Alprazolam Terminates Epileptic Seizures) at the 2019 American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting, which will be held May 410, 2019, in Philadelphia. The poster is entitled, "A Two-Part, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Inpatient, Dose-Ranging Efficacy Study of Staccato Alprazolam (STAP-001) in Patients with Epilepsy with a Predictable Seizure Pattern: Results from the Initial Open-Label Feasibility Part. The Open-Label data are encouraging and we are very pleased to have the opportunity to showcase research that could lay the ground work for an ultra-rapid option for acute seizure rescue treatment, said Dr. Jaqueline French, the studys principal investigator and professor in the Department of Neurology at NYU Langone Health, in the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center, and founder/director of the Epilepsy Study Consortium. Many patients with epilepsy live with the fear that a seizure may occur at any moment, highlighting the need for a rescue medication that could give patients the confidence that a seizure could be rapidly aborted. Presentation details are as follows: Presenter: Jacqueline French, M.D. Session Date and Time: May 5, 11:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. EDT Poster Presentation Number: 5-023 The StATES study will enroll patients from more than 45 trial sites in the U.S., Australia, Canada and Jamaica. Approximately one hundred fifteen subjects will be enrolled in the double blind, placebo-controlled portion of the trial which commenced in January 2019. A map of U.S. site locations can be found online at www.engagetherapeutics.com/study-locations . About Engage Therapeutics, Inc. Engage Therapeutics is developing Staccato alprazolam, for the immediate cessation of active and acute epileptic seizures. The investigational product is in the Rapid Epileptic Seizure Termination (REST) category of products. It is a small, easy-to-use hand-held drug-device combination that leverages a fast-acting FDA-approved delivery system with FDA-approved alprazolam. Staccato alprazolam demonstrated reduction of seizure-like activity in a photosensitivity model in a Phase 2a proof of concept study. The product has now proceeded into a Phase 2b randomized study known as the StATES study. Engage Therapeutics is based in Summit, N.J. For additional information please see www.EngageTherapeutics.com . Photo: The Canadian Press Nova Scotia's premier says the RCMP has found no evidence that former prime minister Jean Chretien carried out illegal lobbying during a visit to his Halifax office last year. Stephen McNeil said a complaint that Chretien carried out lobbying on behalf of a proposed container port in Cape Breton had been investigated and dropped, citing a news release Wednesday from the Mounties. The Mounties declined to confirm if Chretien was the unidentified subject of their news release. The release said police "began an investigation which determined there was no evidence of lobbying and the investigation concluded without charges." McNeil told reporters at the legislature that the findings are clear. "I went through the (police) interview and the RCMP have confirmed it," he said. "They went through a number of questions with me. ...I have all the faith of law enforcement in the province to follow all the complaints that brought forward to them." "They followed this one through and confirmed no lobbying had taken place." Retired union activist John McCracken launched a complaint last year to the RCMP, alleging the former politician should have registered under the provincial Lobbyists Act before visiting the premier. At the time of the March 21, 2018, meeting, Chretien was an international adviser to Sydney Harbour Investment Partners, which was seeking investor support for the Cape Breton container port project. The day before the meeting, Chretien had attended a conference in Sydney and told reporters about his role as an international adviser to the group. When a Cape Breton Post reporter asked Chretien how he'd market the Sydney container port to the premier, the former prime minister said he felt the premier would be in favour of a provincewide approach to container ports. The provincial Liberal government has been cautious about the Sydney proposal, as a 2016 study prepared for the province and the federal Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency recommended against public money for a terminal that would compete against the Halifax port. As the interview continued, Chretien was asked if the province should invest money in the container port proposal, and he replied: "I hope so." PHILADELPHIA, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- After a rebound in Q3 2018, American workers confidence remained relatively stable in Q4 2018 and saw a 2.6-point year-over-year rise compared to 2017, according to the national Worker Confidence Index (WCI), a survey of U.S. workers from HRO Today Magazine and Yoh, the leading international talent and outsourcing company owned by Day & Zimmermann. The Index gauges workers perceptions of the four key aspects of worker confidence: the perceived likelihood of job loss, the perceived likelihood of a promotion, the perceived likelihood of a raise, and the perceived overall trust in company leadership. While the WCI increased from 104.5 in Q4 2017 to 107.1 in Q4 2018, it did decline slightly from Q3 2018 by 0.3 points. This is driven by the four factors that comprise the WCI each reporting a mixed result. For the year overall, only trust in company leadership saw a decline, from 105.1 in Q4 of 2017 to 103.3 in Q4 of 2018. Each of the other three reported increases in 2018 compared to 2017, with perceived likelihood of a promotion increasing by more than 5 points year-over-year. Perceived job security and perceived likelihood of a raise rose by 2.9 points and 4.2 points year-over-year, respectively. Despite some ups and downs during the past 12 months, 2018 was an encouraging year for businesses and their employees as evidenced by the latest WCI results. However, with workers feeling more confident in their careers, it does mean that highly skilled and available talent is becoming more and more scarce, said Jonathan Grosso, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Solutions, Yoh. Because of this, employers must work harder to retain their talented staff. Through appropriate compensation, company culture and workplace transparency, managers must actively ensure that their workers are satisfied with their careers. Other takeaways: Workers remain secure about job stability as unemployment rate nears historic lows. Employees concerns about losing their jobs is one of the most telling factors in estimating worker confidence about their current and near-term financial outlook. In Q4 2018, the job security index rose to an all-time high of 105.2. Worker perceptions about likelihood of a raise increases by 1.1 points for the year In Q4 2018, nearly one-third (29.3%) of survey respondents indicated that they expected a raise of 3 percent or more at their next review. This resulted in an increase in workers perceived likelihood of a raise to 107.2 in Q4 2018 from 106.8 in Q3 2018. However, this figure did decline slightly (0.4 points) since the start of the year. Workers perceived likelihood of a promotion fell in Q4 but is up 5.3 points year-over-year The Likelihood of Promotion Index declined in Q4 2018 to 112.7 from 113.7 in Q3 2018 with men feeling a promotion is more likely than women (25.7% vs. 18.3%). Respondents with annual incomes between $75k and $100k felt the most optimistic about the likelihood of promotion, with 25.8% believing a promotion was likely. To view the entire study, please visit, http://www.yoh.com/hro-today-employee-well-being-study . ABOUT YOH For over 70 years, Yoh has provided the talent needed for the jobs and projects critical to our clients success by providing comprehensive workforce solutions that focus on Aerospace and Defense, Engineering, Health Care, Life Sciences, Information Technology and Telecommunications. Yoh fulfills immediate resource needs and delivers enterprise workforce solutions, including Managed Services, Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Vendor Management Systems, Independent Contractor Compliance, and Payroll Services. For more information, visit Yoh.com. Media Contact Joe McIntyre (215) 564-3200 ext. 112 joe@gobraithwaite.com Henderson, NV, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- Duo World Inc. (OTCQB: DUUO), announced for customers globally that its www.smoothflow.io cloud subscription offering is hosted on world-class state-of-art infrastructure operated and managed by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Smoothflow application, which powers automation for customer engagement, now auto scales to handle millions of requests in unpredictable workloads. Smoothflow is a remarkable tool that allows businesses to develop and deploy conversational automation for chats by dragging and dropping activities without having to write a single line of code. Smoothflow now has the power to run conversational automation close to where customer interaction takes place. This is facilitated with multi-region replication features for both data and computing, along with the highest levels of infrastructure security compliance with SOC1, SOC 2, and SOC 3. Head of Product Shehan Tissera said We had to design the application to meet great scalability and security standards, which are of the utmost importance. We needed an infrastructure that could be scaled as and when conversation volumes spike. It was also important for us to ensure the highest standards of security throughout the conversational pipeline. Taking all this into consideration, we designed and developed using the great infrastructure API from AWS. This makes our product robust and enables us to bring rich features to the market as when our customers need it. Smoothflow is integrated with highly secure communication channels to WebChats, Social Media and messaging platforms such as Messenger by Facebook, Skype and Slack to enhance security in omnichannel customer communication. Amazon Web Services, AWS are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries, and this Press Release is not affiliated, sponsored, authorized, or otherwise associated with or by the Amazon.com, Inc. Facebook is a trademark or other intellectual property of the Facebook, Inc. and this Press Release is not affiliated, sponsored, authorized, or otherwise associated with or by the Facebook, Inc. Skype is a trademark or other intellectual property of the Microsoft group of companies and this Press Release is not affiliated, sponsored, authorized, or otherwise associated with or by the Microsoft group of companies. Slack is a trademark or other intellectual property of the Slack Technologies, Inc. and this Press Release is not affiliated, sponsored, authorized, or otherwise associated with or by the Slack Technologies, Inc. All the trademarks and intellectual property are the properties of their respective owners. About Duo World Inc. Duo World Inc., (OTCQB: DUUO) having its headquarters in Nevada, United States, and its software development center in Colombo, Sri Lanka, has been catering to the companies across the globe that want to collaborate with their customers and teams to provide great customer digital experience. Driven by innovation, Duo World Inc. has favored the enterprises in many ways, including efficiency, cost reduction, revenue optimization and continuous value addition to their product or service offerings. Learn more about Duo World Inc. at www.duoworld.com Safe Harbor Statement: This release contains forward-looking statements that are based upon current expectations or beliefs, as well as a number of assumptions about future events. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements and the assumptions upon which they are based are reasonable, we can give no assurance or guarantee that such expectations and assumptions will prove to have been correct. Forward-looking statements are generally identifiable by the use of words like "may," "will," "should," "could," "expect," "anticipate," "estimate," "believe," "intend," or "project" or the negative of these words or other variations on these words or comparable terminology. The reader is cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, as these statements are subject to numerous factors and uncertainties, including but not limited to: adverse economic conditions, competition, adverse federal, state and local government regulation, international governmental regulation, inadequate capital, inability to carry out research, development and commercialization plans, loss or retirement of key executives and other specific risks. To the extent that statements in this press release are not strictly historical, including statements as to revenue projections, business strategy, outlook, objectives, future milestones, plans, intentions, goals, future financial conditions, events conditioned on stockholder or other approval, or otherwise as to future events, such statements are forward-looking, and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements contained in this release are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made. Readers are advised to review our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that can be accessed over the Internet at the SEC's website located at http://www.sec.gov . K92 Mining announces formal decision to double capacity at its Kainantu Gold Mine to 400,000 tonnes per annum, increasing production an average of 120,000 ozs AuEq per annum. The key aspects of the expansion include: Production is projected to be 68-75,000 ozs AuEq in 2019 and 115-125,000 ozs AuEq in 2020; Plant processing capacity is expected to be increased to 400,000 tonnes per annum (tpa) by end of Q4 2019; Mine underground production increasing over an 18-month period to achieve the design capacity of 400,000 tpa by Q3 2020; Capital Cost for the expansion is estimated to be US$15 million spent over a 12-month period; The Preliminary Economic Assessment* (PEA) on the expansion estimated: The expansion would achieve an NPV 5 of US$710 million pre-tax, or US$559 million after tax, and a total Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of 350%; and Average production of over 120,000 oz AuEq* per annum with cash costs of US$429/oz AuEq* and all-in sustaining costs (AISC) of US$615/oz AuEq** over a 13-year life. * As reported in the Independent Technical Report, Mineral Resources Estimate Update and Preliminary Economic Assessment of Kora North and Kora Gold Deposits, Kainantu Project, Papua New Guinea, with an effective date of September 30, 2018 (the Technical Report). Refer to the Companys news release dated January 8, 2018 for a summary of the results of the PEA. ** Au Eq calculated on above Current Metal Prices of Au - US$1,300/oz; Ag US$15/oz; Cu US$2.90/lb. VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- K92 Mining Inc. (K92 or the Company) (TSXV: KNT; OTCQB: KNTNF) is pleased to announce the commencement of the expansion of the Kainantu Gold Mine in Papua New Guinea, to double current capacity to 400,000 tonnes per annum, increasing annual production to an average of 120,000 ounces of gold equivalent (ozs AuEq). Based on the PEA, the major outcomes resulting from the decision to expand production include: Total Capital Expenditure for 2019 is projected to be US$30 million, comprising US$12 million in expansion capital, US$8 million in sustaining capital and US$10 million in capital development; Production is projected to be 68-75,000 ozs AuEq in 2019 and 115-125,000 ozs AuEq in 2020; Cash Costs are expected to be between US$580 and US$620 per oz AuEq, and AISC are expected to US$780 to US$820 per oz AuEq in 2019, dropping to Cash Costs below US$500 per oz AuEq and AISC below US$700 per oz AuEq in 2020; Employment is expected to increase from the current 650, to 750 by the end of 2019, and to 800 by the end of 2020, with over 96% of all positions in site being filled by PNG Nationals; Based on the outcomes of the PEA: Total production over the next 13 years would be 1.33 million ozs Gold and 130 million lbs Copper; Total Revenue for the period would be over US$2 billion; Royalty payments for the period would be US$50 million; Total tax paid to PNG Government for the period, from payroll and corporate tax, would total US$300 million; Total sustaining capital of US$202 million would be required over the period; and Net Cashflow would be US$1.03 billion, the Net Present Value (NPV 5 ) would be US$710 million pre-tax, or US$559 million after tax, and the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) would be in excess of 350%. As part of the expansion, the Company has recently purchased two Caterpillar AD45 Low Profile trucks for underground operations, with the first truck expected on site before the end of March and the second shortly thereafter. John Lewins, K92 Chief Executive Officer, states, I am extremely pleased to report that today, the Company is formally announcing that it has committed to the expansion of the Kainantu Gold Mine. This expansion will double plant and mining capacity and increase production to an average of over 120,000 ozs AuEq per annum over the next 13 years, with potentially more to come as we ramp up our exploration efforts. This decision follows the completion of the PEA in January, which showed a robust project capable of producing almost 650,000 ozs Au and 10,000 tonnes of copper over the next five years and over 1.3 million ozs and 60,000 tonnes of copper over a 13-year life. With cash costs of only $429/oz AuEq and AISC of $615/oz AuEq. The Company sees this expansion as another step in developing the Kainantu Gold Mine into a world class operation with costs potentially in the lowest quartile. The Company is committed to a major program of exploration with three diamond drill rigs operating underground and major development focused on expanding the Kora/Kora North resource with a target of 5 million ozs by the end of 2019. With the Kora deposit open along strike and at depth, this target is considered realistic with the current 2019 drilling program scheduled to double the number of metres drilled underground to 20,000 from less than 10,000 in 2018. The Company has already spent almost US$3 million on mobile plant, fixed plant and the camp in Q1 2019, all of which is part of the initial capital expenditure required for the expansion. The Company will continue to fund expansion capital and sustaining capital from cash flow from production. However, it is anticipated that negotiations on a possible debt financing will be completed by the end of Q1 2019 to ensure that the timeframe for the expansion is met. This ability to restart operations at Kainantu, move to profitable operations and then initiate a significant expansion of production in just over two years has been made possible in no small part by the support and assistance of the PNG Mineral Resources Authority (MRA), the Office of the Mining Minister and all levels of Government in PNG. Most important, however, has been the support of our Local Landowners for the operation; they are not only some of our most important stakeholders, but also make up the largest group of employees and are partners in many aspects of the operation. We look forward to working with all of the stakeholders in the Kainantu Gold Mine to successfully complete this stage of development and move forward to the next. The PEA is preliminary in nature and 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 PEA will be realized. Mineral Resources that are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. The Companys decision to expand production is not based on a feasibility study of mineral reserves demonstrating the economic and technical viability of the expansion. As a result, there is increased uncertainty of the economic and technical risks of failure associated with the decision. K92 engaged H and S Consultants Pty Ltd to complete a Mineral Resource Estimate for the Kora North Deposit (Table 1). This resource together with the previously reported Kora Mineral Resource Estimate dated March 2017 (Table 2) provide the resource base for the updated PEA. K92 engaged Mincore Pty Ltd (Mincore) to complete a PEA for the expansion of the existing processing plant to double its capacity to approximately 400,000 tonnes per annum. The study found that the current crushing, milling and concentrate handling circuits have sufficient capacity to treat the Kora mine material at a rate of 400,000 tpa, subject to upgrading the crushing and flotation circuits and plant services. The estimated total cost of such expansion and upgrading would be US$3.7 million, including EPC and commissioning with a contingency of 10%. The Company engaged Australian Mine and Development Pty Ltd (AMDAD) to undertake the PEA mine plan for Kora and Kora North, which involved: applying financial and processing parameters to determine cut-off grades for stope design. generating three-dimensional stope shapes and mining inventory using the CAE Mineable Shape Optimiser (MSO) program. creating a conceptual development layout to suit the MSO inventory. producing a project cash-flow model. producing a simple mining schedule as input to the cash-flow model. The key results from the PEA for the combined Kora North and Kora deposits are as follows: Could have a 13-year operating life and treat 4.9 million tonnes @ 9.0 g/t Au, 20 g/t Ag & 1.3% Cu (11.0 g/t Au Eq*); Could achieve an estimated pre-tax NPV of US$710 million (US$559 million after-tax) using current metal prices, exchange rate and a 5% discount rate; Initial capital cost estimated to be US$13.6 million, including US$3.7 million for the plant upgrade identified in the Mincore Scoping Study; The additional combined development and sustaining capital cost is estimated at US$202 million spent over the life of mine; Operating cost per tonne estimated to be US$163/tonne for the first five years and US$153/tonne thereafter; Cash cost estimated to be US$429/oz Au Eq (inclusive of a 2.5% Net Smelter Royalty) and AISC of US$615/oz Au Eq; Production of an estimated 135,000 Au ozs and 2,100 Cu tonnes over a 5-year period from 2019 through to 2023, with average production of 90,000 Au ozs and 6,500 Cu tonnes for the balance of the life of mine; and Current metal prices used were: Au - US$1,300/oz; Ag US$15/oz; Cu US$2.90/lb. *AuEq calculated on above Current Metal Prices. The Kora North resource estimate was defined after just twelve months of underground exploration drilling. Table 1 - Kora North Mineral Resource Estimate Global Mineral Resources Kora North Gold-Copper Mine - October 2018 Category Tonnes Gold Silver Copper AuEq Mt g/t Mozs g/t Mozs % Mlbs g/t Mozs Measured 0.15 18.7 0.09 8.9 0.04 0.5 1.6 19.6 0.09 Indicated 0.69 11.6 0.26 14.1 0.31 0.8 11.8 12.9 0.29 Total M & I 0.85 12.9 0.35 13.1 0.36 0.7 13.3 14.1 0.39 Inferred Total 1.92 10.7 0.66 13.3 0.82 0.7 29.5 11.9 0.74 M in table is millions. The Mineral Resources estimate was prepared and verified by Simon Tear (PGEO), consultant to the Company and a director of independent consultancy of H & S Consultants Pty. Ltd., Sydney, Australia (October 2018). Key Assumptions and Parameters Mineralization comprises two parallel, steeply west dipping, N-S striking quartz-sulphide vein systems, K1 & K2, within an encompassing dilatant structural zone hosted by phyllite. An additional structure, the Kora Link, has also been defined and provides a possible link between the two main vein systems. Underground drilling consists of diamond core for a range of core sizes depending on length of hole and expected ground conditions. Sampling is sawn half core under geological control and generally ranges between 0.5m and 1m. Underground face sampling is completed for every fired round and is to industry standard. QAQC data indicated no significant issues with the accuracy of the on-site analysis. Core recovery of the mineral zone was initially 90%, this has improved to >95%. There is no relationship between core recovery and gold grade. Geological logging is consistent and is based on a full set of logging codes covering lithology, alteration and mineralization. The geological interpretation of the vein systems is represented as 3D wireframe solids snapped to a combination of diamond drillhole data and underground face sampling. Definition of the wireframes is based on identified gold mineralisation in drillcore nominally at a 0.2g/t Au cut off in conjunction with geological control/sense and current mining widths. Gold Equivalent (Au Eq) g/t was calculated using the formula Au g/t +(Cu% x 1.53) + Ag g/t x 0.0127. (No account of metal recoveries through the plant have been used in calculating the metal equivalent grade. However, production is currently achieving 93% metal recovery for both gold and copper and gold is currently providing 95% and copper 5% of the total revenue of the mine). Gold price US$1,300/oz; Silver US$16.5/oz; Copper US$2.90/lb. The mineral resource estimate for the Kora deposit is based on the technical report prepared in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects (NI 43-101), and titled, Mineral Resource Update and Preliminary Economic Assessment of Irumafimpa and Kora Gold Deposits, Kainantu Project, Papua New Guinea," with an effective date of March 2, 2017. This provides additional information on the geology of the deposits, drilling and sampling procedures, lab analysis, and quality assurance/quality control for the project, and additional details on the resource estimates. Mineral Resources that are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. Table 2 Irumafimpa and Kora/Eutompi Resource Estimates Resource by Deposit and Category Deposit Resource Category Tonnes Gold Silver Copper Gold Equiv Mt g/t Moz g/t Moz % Mlb g/t Moz Irumafimpa Indicated 0.56 12.8 0.23 9 0.16 0.28 37 13.4 0.24 Inferred 0.53 10.9 0.19 9 0.16 0.27 74 11.5 0.20 Kora/Eutompi Inferred 4.36 7.3 1.02 35 4.9 2.23 215 11.2 1.57 Total Indicated 0.56 12.8 0.23 9 0.16 0.3 4.0 13.4 0.24 Total Inferred 4.89 7.7 1.21 32 5.06 2.0 218 11.2 1.76 M in table is millions. Reported tonnage and grade figures are rounded from raw estimates to reflect the order of accuracy of the estimate. Minor variations may occur during the addition of rounded numbers. Gold equivalents are calculated as AuEq = Au g/t + Cu%*1.52+ Ag g/t*0.0141. K92 Mine Geology Manager and Mine Exploration Manager, Mr. Andrew Kohler, PGeo, a Qualified Person under the meaning of NI 43-101 has reviewed and is responsible for the technical content of this news release. Data verification by Mr. Kohler includes significant time onsite reviewing drill core, face sampling, underground workings and discussing work programs and results with geology and mining personnel. ON BEHALF OF THE COMPANY, John Lewins Chief Executive Officer and Director For further information, please contact the Company at +1-604-687-7130. NEITHER TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE. Non-GAAP Financial Measures In this press release, we use the terms cash costs" and "all-in sustaining costs ". These should be considered as non-GAAP financial measures as defined in applicable Canadian securities laws and should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for measures of performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. Cash costs per ounce is a non-GAAP term typically used by gold mining companies to assess the level of gross margin available to the Company by subtracting these costs from the unit price realized during the period. This non-GAAP term is also used to assess the ability of a mining company to generate cash flow from operations. Cash costs per ounce includes mining and processing costs plus applicable royalties, and net of by-product revenue and net realizable value adjustments. Total cash costs per ounce is exclusive of exploration costs. Cash costs per ounce is intended to provide additional information only and does not have any standardized meaning under IFRS and may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other mining companies. It should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for measures of performance prepared in accordance with IFRS. The measure is not necessarily indicative of cash flow from operations under IFRS or operating costs presented under IFRS. The Company adopted an "all-in sustaining costs per ounce" non-GAAP performance measure in accordance with the World Gold Council published in June 2013. The Company believes the measure more fully defines the total costs associated with producing gold; however, this performance measure has no standardized meaning. Accordingly, there may be some variation in the method of computation of "all-in sustaining costs " as determined by the Company compared with other mining companies. In this context, "all-in sustaining costs" for the consolidated Company reflects total mining and processing costs, corporate and administrative costs, exploration costs, sustaining capital, and other operating costs. All-in sustaining costs per gold ounce is intended to provide additional information only and does not have any standardized meaning under IFRS and may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other mining companies. It should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for measures of performance prepared in accordance with IFRS. CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION: This news release includes certain forward-looking statements under applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. All statements that address future plans, activities, events, or developments that the Company believes, expects, or anticipates will or may occur are forward-looking information, including statements regarding the realization of the preliminary economic analysis for the Kainantu Project, expectations of future cash flows, the proposed plant expansion, potential expansion of resources and the generation of further drilling results which may or may not occur. Forward-looking statements and information contained herein are based on certain factors and assumptions regarding, among other things, the market price of the Companys securities, metal prices, exchange rates, taxation, the estimation, timing and amount of future exploration and development, capital and operating costs, the availability of financing, the receipt of regulatory approvals, environmental risks, title disputes, failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated, accidents, labour disputes, claims and limitations on insurance coverage and other risks of the mining industry, changes in national and local government regulation of mining operations, and regulations and other matters.. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The Company 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 required by law. Cloud enables scalable growth and quicker deployment Enables faster response to School Safety issues Cloud-based patent follows U.S. patent for color, make and model capabilities announced in January 2019 SALT LAKE CITY, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Quest Solution, Inc. (OTCQB: QUES), (Quest or the Company) a provider of Supply Chain and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based Machine Vision solutions, announced that its HTS Image Processing, Inc. (HTS) wholly-owned subsidiary has been awarded a patent from the U. S. Patent Office for a patent titled Cloud-Based ALPR Management. The patent covers the Companys new cloud-based architecture for the deployment of LPR/ALPR systems. HTS is a leader in providing Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Based Vehicle Recognition Systems including LPR (License Plate Recognition)/ANPR and recently announced Color, Make and Model capabilities. HTS provides its unique solutions for use in Safe Districts for anti-terrorism and law enforcement, Safe and Smart City projects, School Safety, Secured Facilities, Logistics Centers, Seaports, Parking Automation, and others which operate using installed cameras and computers to capture and decipher license plate data as well as vehicle color and make. This patent simplifies the deployment and infrastructure in LPR/ANPR systems, by using a cloud-based architecture rather than the traditional use of physical locally installed hardware. The cameras upload images to the cloud, where the HTS AI-Based Visual Cortex algorithm on Cloud servers performs the recognition and control process, then the cloud-based management system completes the cycle. Advantages of the cloud-based solution include: unlimited uploading of the system enabling accelerated growth, a lower cost of hardware at the facility, more flexible and scalable systems, increased reliability, shorter turnaround cycles for updates, and improved control and support. Shai Lustgarten, CEO of Quest, stated, We believe that this patented solution combined with our recently announced patented feature which identifies color, make and model, gives us strong competitive positioning in this growing market. The patent award demonstrates the strength and sophistication of our R&D teams efforts in delivering leading edge technology. LPR/ANPR capabilities have revolutionized the estimated $10 billion parking industry and we are focused on continuing to develop and deploy solutions that are broadly effective and applicable within this growing market vertical so that we may optimize our opportunities for growth. About Quest Solution, Inc. Quest Solution is a Specialty Systems Integrator focused on Field and Supply Chain Mobility as well as a provider of Artificial Intelligence (AI) monitoring and surveillance solutions. Additionally the Company is a manufacturer and distributor of consumables (labels, tags, and ribbons), RFID and IoT solutions, and barcoding printers. Founded in 1994, Quest is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah with sales offices located across the United States as well as Israel. Rated in the Top 1% of global solution providers, Quest specializes in the design, deployment and management of enterprise mobility solutions including Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC), Mobile Cloud Analytics, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), and proprietary Mobility software. Our mobility products and services offering is designed to identify, track, trace, share and connect data to enterprise systems such as CRM or ERP solutions. Our customers are leading Fortune 500 companies from several sectors including manufacturing, retail, distribution, food / beverage, transportation and logistics, health care and chemicals / gas / oil. Information about Forward-Looking Statements Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Statements in this press release relating to our competitive position in this growing market and our ability to optimize our opportunities for growth and other statements that are not descriptions of historical facts may be forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. This release contains forward-looking statements that include information relating to future events including expectations regarding billing of products, our ability to add new customer relationships and strengthen our existing partnerships. The words may, would, will, expect, estimate, can, believe, potential and similar expressions and variations thereof are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements should not be read as a guarantee of future performance or results, and will not necessarily be accurate indications of the times at, or by, which that performance or those results will be achieved. Forward-looking statements are based on information available at the time they are made and/or managements good faith belief as of that time with respect to future events, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual performance or results to differ materially from those expressed in or suggested by the forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause these differences include, but are not limited to: fluctuations in demand for Quest Solution, Inc.s products, the introduction of new products, the Companys ability to maintain customer and strategic business relationships, the impact of competitive products and pricing, growth in targeted markets, the adequacy of the Companys liquidity and financial strength to support its growth and other information that may be detailed from time-to-time in Quest Solution Inc.s filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Examples of such forward looking statements in this release include, among others, statements regarding Quests position in this growing market and our ability to optimize our opportunities for growth. For a more detailed description of the risk factors and uncertainties affecting Quest Solution, Inc. please refer to the Companys recent Securities and Exchange Commission filings, which are available at http://www.sec.gov. Quest Solution, Inc. undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless otherwise required by law. Investor Contact: John Nesbett/Jen Belodeau IMS Investor Relations 203.972.9200 jnesbett@institutionalms.com SEATTLE, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- CFN Media Group (CFN Media), the leading agency and financial media network dedicated to the North American cannabis industry, announces publication of an article covering Indiva Incs (TSX-V:NDVA) strategic position in the extracts market. As the cannabis industry matures, extraction is becoming an increasingly important part of any successful venture, as consumers have proven they are more interested in derivative products than simply smoking flower. Extracted cannabis oils, both THC and CBD, are a critical component in a wide array of products in the medical and recreational markets. Looking to hit the ground running when Canada legalizes edibles and other derivative products as early as October 2019, London-based INDIVA Limited (TSX-V:NDVA), a licensed supplier of medical-grade cannabis, is working to diversify its brand and enable its own in-house extraction. According to Health Canada figures, cannabis oil in Q1 2018, months before the legalization of recreational cannabis, outsold flower by 56 per cent as medicinal patients looked to concentrates to alleviate a range of symptoms from chronic pain to seizures, and health practitioners preferred concentrates which enable more accurate dosing. A report published last year by BDS Analytics and Arcview Market Research showed cannabis concentrate sales in adult legal markets have dominated retail sales, representing the fastest growing segment of the industry, ahead of both flower and edibles due to ease of use, discretion & portability, and potency. The report estimates the sale of concentrates alone will bring in $8 billion by 2020, the majority in the form of vape cartridges, which are seen to be beginner-friendly and easily branded. The Indiva brand currently includes pre-rolls, accessories, and soon tinctures and capsules, but a range of other products has already been developed in anticipation derivatives legalization. The company went public in December of 2017, had $24 million on its balance sheet at end the end of Q3 2018, and a fully-funded $13.7 million expansion to its London facility is currently underway, which will result in a 40,000 square foot facility enabling extraction, expanded cultivation, R&D, product manufacturing, and even a retail space. Investing In Extraction Indiva announced at the end of January that it has hired Lucid Lab Group to design its extraction facility, which is planned to begin operation in Q3, 2019 and will serve as the centre of the companys oil manufacturing and for the development of its cannabis extract-based products. The expected capacity of the system is 70 tonnes of biomass and some 4 million grams of distillate. Seattle-based Lucid is renowned for its design and operation of cannabis extraction facilities. In September 2018, in order to advance commercialization of oil products more quickly and supplement planned internal production, Indiva entered into a cannabis concentrate program agreement with MediPharm Labs Inc. Indiva will supply dried cannabis to MediPharm, which in return, will provide cannabis oil to Indiva or to other licensed producers at the direction of Indiva. The program was established at no capital cost to Indiva, but MediPharm will charge the company processing fees for the oil produced. Indiva Quality Enables Supply Agreement At the beginning of February, the company announced a supply agreement with the Ontario Cannabis Retail Corporation, consisting of two strains of pre-rolls for sale through the Ontario Cannabis Store, the provinces government-run cannabis retail chain. The Ontario Cannabis Store only buys cannabis products which have been tested and verified for quality, so becoming one of its first suppliers is a testament to the quality of Indivas cannabis flower, which is produced using aeroponics, a soil-less process in which plant roots are suspended in air and misted with nutrients, producing larger yields and a much cleaner product while also being environmentally friendly. Strong Edibles Offerings Indiva signed two key agreements in April 2018 enabling it to build a unique edibles offering based on the quality and innovation consumers increasingly desire. An exclusive license agreement with DeepCell Industries - a Seattle-based technology development company focusing on material science, microfluidics, and cannabinoid molecule discoveries give Indiva the exclusive right to manufacture and market DeepCells entire line of innovative products produced through its patented Crystal Fusion technology. Crystal Fusion mechanically fuses cannabinoids with sugar or salt, producing a flexible edible which can be used to season food and beverages as they infuse them THC or CBD. Lucid Lab Group also built and operated extraction facilities for other of DeepCells licensees. A 50/50 joint venture with Nevada-based Bhang Corporation , an award-winning producer of THC and CBD edibles and concentrates, will allow Indiva to manufacture and sell Bhang products in Canada, as well as export Bhangs products internationally. Bhangs portfolio of products includes the most awarded line of chocolate bars in the world and a full suite of gummies, oral sprays, isolates, vapes & vape cartridges, and accessories. All Bhang products and Ruby sugars & salts will be cross-branded Powered By INDIVA and position the company to capitalize on the upcoming legalization of derivatives across Canada later this year. Eye On Emerging European Market In November, Indiva announced it had signed a non-binding letter of intent with AEssense Europe for the acquisition of 100% of a medical cannabis cultivation and handling license in Denmark one of only twelve granted. Denmark is poised to become one of Europes leading cannabis producers, and will serve as the companys gateway to the European market, which is predicted to be larger than the US and Canadian markets combined, presenting an enormous opportunity for those with an early presence. Sites have been identified to begin construction of a 1,000 square foot research lab as part of the production facility, with ample room for scaled expansion. Indiva will have the exclusive right to all cannabis-related production, and will leverage the Denmark license for the importation and exportation of EU-GMP cannabis into the Danish and European markets. Indiva is intent on building a global brand recognized for quality and service, and is already well positioned to excel in the extract-based market in Canada, the US, and Europe, meaning the year ahead should be a lucrative one for the company. For more information, please visit: https://www.indiva.com/ Please follow the link to read the full article: https://www.cannabisfn.com/indiva-diversifying-to-excel-in-red-hot-extracts-market/ About CFN Media For Visitors and Viewers CFN Medias Cannabis Financial Network (CannabisFN.com) is the destination for savvy investors and business people profiting from the worldwide cannabis industry. Viewers will see breaking news, exclusive content and original programming involving the people, companies and investments shaping the industry. For Cannabis Businesses & Companies CFN Media is a leading agency and financial media network dedicated to the cannabis industry. We help private, pre-public and public cannabis companies in the US and Canada attract capital, investors and media attention. Our powerful digital media and distribution platform conveys a companys message and value proposition directly to accredited and retail investors and national media active in the North American cannabis markets. Since 2013, CFN Media has enabled the worlds preeminent cannabis companies to thrive in the capital and public markets. Learn how to become a CFN Media client company, brand or entrepreneur: http://www.cannabisfn.com/featuredcompany Disclaimer CannabisFN.com is not an independent financial investment advisor or broker-dealer. You should always consult with your own independent legal, tax, and/or investment professionals before making any investment decisions. The information provided on http://www.cannabisfn.com (the Site) is either original financial news or paid advertisements drafted by our in-house team or provided by an affiliate. 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Please follow the link below to view our full disclosure outlining our compensation: http://www.cannabisfn.com/legal-disclaimer/ Contact CFN Media Frank Lane 206-369-7050 flane@cannabisfn.com Fort Myers, FL, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In February of 1984, Dr. William Harwin, Founder and President Emeritus of Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute (FCS), could only dream of what his fledgling community oncology/hematology practice might become one day. The treatment of cancer at that time was embryonic, compared to modern day methods, and the trend toward moving patients out of a hospital setting into a community oncology office was just beginning to gain momentum as new, improved and safer chemotherapy drugs were being developed. In the beginning, Dr. Harwin recalled, when I opened my Fort Myers practice to treat local oncology patients, it was just my wife Marilyn and me in the office. I always wanted to affiliate other physicians in the practice, but I never envisioned the growth that we have achieved over the past three and a half decades. Its been extremely rewarding for me, particularly when you consider the many advances in treatments that are available to our patients today. Our mission has always been to put the patients first, and I believe that is one of the most important reasons that we have been successful. Over the past 35 years, FCS has pioneered the community oncology model and set a national benchmark for clinical trial research that rivals most academic medical institutions. The statewide practice includes a dedicated Phase 1 Drug Development Unit (DDU) in Sarasota and a second DDU under construction in Lake Mary, FL. Over the past four years, the majority of new cancer drugs approved for use in the U.S. were studied in clinical trials with Florida Cancer Specialists participation, prior to approval from the FDA. Brad Prechtl, CEO of FCS, said, The relationships with our patients are at the heart of everything we do. Cancer patients rely on our physicians and staff to provide the most advanced treatments in a setting close to their homes, so they can have the support of their families and friends. I know that our doctors and employees at every FCS office often feel that our patients are like an extended family, and they inspire us every day with their courage. Dr. Lucio Gordan, President and Managing Physician of FCS, added, Dr. Harwins vision, coupled with the excellent leadership of the Executive Management team, as well as the dedication of our outstanding physicians and staff members, has resulted in the most advanced and personalized cancer treatment in the state of Florida. We are also extremely proud to participate in the national Oncology Care Model (OCM), bringing high quality, value-based care to our patients. New treatments for cancer are being developed at a rapid pace and, at FCS, we are eager to provide these new options to our patients. #### About Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute, LLC: (FLCancer.com) Recognized by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) with a national Clinical Trials Participation Award, Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute (FCS) offers patients access to more clinical trials than any private oncology practice in Florida. In the past 4 years, the majority of new cancer drugs approved for use in the U.S. were studied in clinical trials with Florida Cancer Specialists participation.* Our physicians are consistently ranked nationally as Top Doctors by U.S. News & World Report. Trained in such prestigious medical schools and research institutes as Duke, Stanford, Harvard, Emory, M.D. Anderson, and Memorial Sloan Kettering. Founded in 1984, FCS is one of the largest medical oncology/hematology practices in the United States. With more than 230 physicians, 220 advanced practice registered nurses (APRN) and physician assistants (PA) and nearly 100 locations in our network, we are committed to providing world-class cancer care in community-based settings. Florida Cancer Specialists has built a national reputation for excellence that is reflected in exceptional and compassionate patient care, driven by innovative clinical research and cutting-edge technologies that help targeted treatments and genomic-based treatment and immunotherapy. These values are embodied by our outstanding team of highly-trained and dedicated physicians, clinicians and staff. * Prior to approval For More Information, Contact: Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute Shelly Glenn, Chief Marketing & Sales Officer SGlenn@FLCancer.com 770.365.6168 ChappellRoberts Christine Turner, APR cturner@chappellroberts.com 813.545.8131 Ganick Communications, Inc. Elaine Ganick - elaine@ganick.com 615.377.7877 Attachments English Estonian The annual general meeting of shareholders of AS LHV Group, held today in Hilton Tallinn Park Hotel Las Vegas hall (Fr. R. Kreutzwaldi St 23), approved the Annual Report, decided the dividend payment for 2018, appointed an auditor for a new period and established remuneration of the members of the Supervisory Board. A total of 148 shareholders participated and were represented at the meeting, with their corresponding shares representing a total of 19,378,728 votes. This means 74.49% of the votes determined by shares were represented at the meeting. The notice on calling the annual general meeting was published in the stock exchange information system and on LHV website on 19 February 2019. On the same date, the notice was printed in the Postimees daily newspaper. The annual general meeting of the shareholders of AS LHV Group resolved: 1. Approval of the Annual Report 2018 The general meeting unanimously resolved to approve the Annual Report 2018 of the Group, as presented to the general meeting. 2. Profit allocation for 2018 The profit attributable to the Group as the parent company of the consolidation group in the financial year 2018 amounts to EUR 25,237 thousand. The general meeting decided to transfer EUR 1,262 thousand to the legal reserve. To approve the profit allocation proposal made by the Management Board and pay dividends in the net amount of 21 euro cents per share. The list of shareholders entitled to receive dividends will be established as at 27 March 2019 COB of the settlement system. Consequently, the day of change of the rights related to the shares (ex-dividend date) is set to 26 March 2019. From this day onwards, the person acquiring the shares will not have the right to receive dividends for the financial year 2018. Dividends shall be disbursed to the shareholders on 28 March 2019. 3. Overview of the economic results for the first two months of 2019 The management provided the shareholders with an overview on the economic results for the first two months of 2019, that have been disclosed: 4. Overview of the business environment and the five-year financial forecast The management gave an overview on the business environment and the Group's five-year financial forecast. 5. Appointment of the auditor for the financial years 2020-2022 The general meeting unanimously resolved to appoint KPMG Baltics OU (registry code 10096082) as the auditor for the financial years 2020-2022, to establish the procedure for remuneration of the auditor in accordance with the contract to be entered into with the auditor and to authorize the Management Board to conclude the relevant contract. 6. Remuneration of the members of the Supervisory Board The general meeting unanimously established a remuneration for the members of the Supervisory Board in the amount of 1,500 EUR per each meeting of the Supervisory Board where the member participates. LHV Group is the largest domestic financial group and capital provider in Estonia. LHV Group's key subsidiaries are LHV Pank and LHV Varahaldus. LHV employs over 390 people, and more than 166,000 customers use LHVs banking services. Pension funds managed by LHV have more than 177,000 active clients. Priit Rum Communication Manager Phone: +372 502 0786 Email: priit.rum@lhv.ee Together, Brookfield and Oaktree will provide global investors with one of the most comprehensive offerings of alternative investment products available in the marketplace today Howard Marks, Bruce Karsh, and other members of Oaktree Capital Group Holdings, L.P. will own 38% and retain operating control of Oaktree Oaktree Class A unitholders can elect to receive for each Oaktree Class A unit either $49.00 in cash or 1.0770 Brookfield Class A shares to enable them to stay invested in the overall business NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Brookfield Asset Management Inc. (Brookfield) (NYSE: BAM, TSX: BAM.A, Euronext: BAMA) and Oaktree Capital Group, LLC (NYSE: OAK) (Oaktree) today announced an agreement whereby Brookfield will acquire approximately 62% of the Oaktree business. As part of the transaction, Brookfield will acquire all outstanding Oaktree Class A units for, at the election of Oaktree Class A unitholders, either $49.00 in cash or 1.0770 Class A shares of Brookfield per unit (subject to pro-ration). This represents a premium of 12.4% per Oaktree Class A unit, based on the closing price of Oaktree Class A units and Brookfield Class A Shares on March 12, 2019 and a 15.9% premium based on the 30-day Volume-Weighted Average Price of Oaktree Class A units. The Oaktree Board of Directors, acting on the recommendation of a special committee, composed of non-executive, independent directors, has unanimously recommended that Oaktree unitholders approve the transaction. Both Brookfield and Oaktree will continue to operate their respective businesses independently, partnering to leverage their strengths with each remaining under its current brand and led by its existing management and investment teams. Howard Marks will continue as Co-Chairman of Oaktree, Bruce Karsh as CoChairman and Chief Investment Officer, and Jay Wintrob as Chief Executive Officer. Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh will continue to have operating control of Oaktree as an independent entity for the foreseeable future. In addition, Howard Marks will join Brookfields board of directors. The two companies together will have approximately $475 billion of assets under management and $2.5 billion of annual fee-related revenues, making this one of the leading alternative asset managers, with one of the most comprehensive suites of alternative investment products for investors worldwide. The transaction is expected to be accretive to Brookfield on a per share basis before any benefits from the combination. Bruce Flatt, CEO of Brookfield, stated, As we continue to strategically grow Brookfield, we are thrilled to be partnering with Oaktree and with its exceptional management team whose credit business is second to none. This transaction enables us to broaden our product offering to include one of the finest credit platforms in the world, which has a value-driven, contrarian investment style, consistent with ours. Howard Marks, Co-Chairman of Oaktree, stated, The opportunity to join forces with Brookfield is ideal. Our firms share a culture that emphasizes both investing excellence and integrity, and our businesses mesh without overlapping or conflicting. The rest of Oaktree management and I are excited about the combination of support and independence we expect. We look forward to having Brookfields contribution to our ability to serve our clients, and to doing the same for them. Transaction Details Under the terms of the agreement, Oaktree Class A units will be acquired for a per unit consideration of, at the election of Oaktree Class A unitholders, either $49.00 in cash or 1.0770 Brookfield Class A shares. Elections will be made on a per unit basis and will be subject to pro-ration such that the total consideration paid by Brookfield consists of 50% in cash and 50% in Brookfield shares. In addition, the founders, senior management, and current employee-unitholders of Oaktree Capital Group Holdings, L.P. (OCGH), the holder of all outstanding Class B units of Oaktree as well as a direct interest in certain of Oaktrees operating entities, will sell to Brookfield 20% of their units for the same consideration as the Oaktree Class A unitholders. Pursuant to the agreement, Oaktree may declare and pay a distribution in respect of the quarter ending March 31, 2019 in an amount up to $1.05 per Oaktree Class A unit. No further distributions on the Oaktree Class A units may be paid unless the transaction has not closed by September 30, 2019, in which case distributions in respect of Q3 2019 and any other quarter thereafter until closing may be paid in the ordinary course on Oaktree Class A units, subject to certain limitations set forth in the agreement. The cash portion of the aggregate consideration will be funded by Brookfield from available liquidity. Upon consummation of the transaction, Brookfield will own approximately 62% of the Oaktree business, and the OCGH unitholders, consisting primarily of Oaktrees founders and certain other members of management and employees, will own the remaining approximately 38%. Commencing in 2022, former employee-unitholders will be able to sell their remaining Oaktree units to Brookfield over time pursuant to an agreed upon liquidity schedule and approach to valuing such units at the time of liquidation, and Oaktrees founders, senior management and current employee-unitholders will have the option to do so as well. Pursuant to this liquidity schedule, the earliest year in which Brookfield could own 100% of the Oaktree business is 2029. The agreement includes customary provisions relating to non-solicitation, the ability of Oaktrees board of directors to respond to any unsolicited superior alternative proposals, and Brookfields right to match such proposals. The agreement also provides for the payment by Oaktree of a $225 million termination fee if the agreement is terminated under certain specified circumstances. The transaction is subject to the approval of Oaktree unitholders representing at least a majority of the voting interests of Oaktree and other customary closing conditions, including certain regulatory approvals. OCGH, controlled by Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh, and which represents approximately 92% of the voting interests of Oaktree, has agreed to vote all of its units in favor of the transaction. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2019. All dollar references are in U.S. dollars, unless noted otherwise. Advisors Perella Weinberg Partners L.P. acted as sole financial advisor and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP and Munger, Tolles & Olsen LLP acted as legal advisors to Oaktree. Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP and Torys LLP acted as legal advisors to Brookfield. Sandler ONeill & Partners, L.P. acted as financial advisor and Mayer Brown LLP served as legal advisor to the Special Committee of Oaktrees Board of Directors. Brookfield Asset Management Inc. is a leading global alternative asset manager with over $350 billion in assets under management. The company has more than a 120-year history of owning and operating assets with a focus on real estate, renewable power, infrastructure and private equity. Brookfield offers a range of public and private investment products and services, and is co-listed on the New York, Toronto and Euronext stock exchanges under the symbol BAM, BAM.A and BAMA, respectively. For more information, please visit our website at brookfield.com. Oaktree Capital Group, LLC is a leader among global investment managers specializing in alternative investments, with $120 billion in assets under management as of December 31, 2018. The firm emphasizes an opportunistic, value- oriented and risk-controlled approach to investments in credit, private equity, real assets and listed equities. The firm has over 950 employees and offices in 18 cities worldwide. For additional information, please visit Oaktrees website at oaktreecapital.com. For more information, please contact: Brookfield Asset Management Inc. Oaktree Capital Group, LLC Suzanne Fleming Communications Tel: (212) 417-2421 Email: suzanne.fleming@brookfield.com Andrea D. Williams Communications and Investor Relations Tel: (213) 830-6483 Email: investorrelations@oaktreecapital.com mediainquiries@oaktreecapital.com Linda Northwood Investor Relations Tel: 416-359-8647 Email: linda.northwood@brookfield.com Important Additional Information and Where to Find It This communication is being made in respect of the proposed merger transaction between Oaktree Capital Group, LLC ( Oaktree ) and Brookfield Asset Management Inc. ( Brookfield ). In connection with the proposed merger, Brookfield will file with the SEC a registration statement on Form F-4 that will include the consent solicitation statement of Oaktree and a prospectus of Brookfield, as well as other relevant documents regarding the proposed transaction. A definitive consent solicitation statement/prospectus will also be sent to Oaktree unitholders. This communication does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities or a solicitation of any vote or approval, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of such jurisdiction. INVESTORS ARE URGED TO READ THE REGISTRATION STATEMENT AND THE CONSENT SOLICITATION STATEMENT/PROSPECTUS REGARDING THE MERGER WHEN IT BECOMES AVAILABLE AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS FILED WITH THE SEC, AS WELL AS ANY AMENDMENTS OR SUPPLEMENTS TO THOSE DOCUMENTS, BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION. A free copy of the consent solicitation statement/prospectus, as well as other filings containing information about Oaktree and Brookfield, may be obtained at the SECs Internet site (http://www.sec.gov). You will also be able to obtain these documents, free of charge, from Oaktree by accessing Oaktrees website at ir.oaktreecapital.com or from Brookfield by accessing Brookfields website at bam.Brookfield.com/reports-and-filings. Copies of the consent solicitation statement/prospectus will be available, free of charge, by directing a request to Oaktree Investor Relations at Unitholders Investor Relations, Oaktree Capital Management, L.P., 333 South Grand Ave., 28th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90071, by calling (213) 830-6483 or by sending an e-mail to investorrelations@oaktreecapital.com or to Brookfield Investor Relations by calling (416) 359-8647 or by sending an e-mail to enquiries@brookfield.com. Oaktree and certain of its directors and executive officers may be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from Oaktree unitholders in respect of the transaction described in the consent solicitation statement/prospectus. Information regarding Oaktrees directors and executive officers is contained in Oaktrees Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2018, which is filed with the SEC. Additional information regarding the interests of those participants and other persons who may be deemed participants in the transaction may be obtained by reading the consent solicitation statement/prospectus regarding the proposed merger when it becomes available. Free copies of this document may be obtained as described in the preceding paragraph. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS AND INFORMATION This communication contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the Securities Act), and Section 21E of the Exchange Act, and forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian provincial securities laws, which reflect the current views of Brookfield and Oaktree with respect to, among other things, their future results of operations and financial performance. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements and information by words such as anticipate, approximately, believe, continue, could, estimate, expect, intend, may, outlook, plan, potential, predict, seek, should, will and would or the negative version of these words or other comparable or similar words. These statements identify prospective information. Important factors could cause actual results to differ, possibly materially, from those indicated in these statements. Forward-looking statements and information are based on Brookfield and Oaktrees beliefs, assumptions and expectations of their respective future performance, taking into account all information currently available to them. Such forward-looking statements and information are subject to risks and uncertainties and assumptions relating to their respective operations, financial results, financial condition, business prospects, growth strategy and liquidity. In addition to factors previously disclosed in Brookfields and Oaktrees reports filed with securities regulators in Canada and the United States and those identified elsewhere in this communication, the following factors, among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements and information or historical performance: the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstances that could give rise to the right of one or both of Brookfield and Oaktree to terminate the definitive merger agreement between Brookfield and Oaktree; the outcome of any legal proceedings that may be instituted against Brookfield, Oaktree or their respective unitholders, shareholders or directors; the ability to obtain regulatory approvals and meet other closing conditions to the merger, including the risk that regulatory approvals required for the merger are not obtained or are obtained subject to conditions that are not anticipated or that are material and adverse to Brookfields or Oaktrees business; a delay in closing the merger; the ability to obtain approval by Oaktrees unitholders on the expected terms and schedule; business disruptions from the proposed merger that will harm Brookfields or Oaktrees business, including current plans and operations; potential adverse reactions or changes to business relationships resulting from the announcement or completion of the merger; certain restrictions during the pendency of the merger that may impact Brookfields or Oaktrees ability to pursue certain business opportunities or strategic transactions; the ability of Brookfield or Oaktree to retain and hire key personnel; uncertainty as to the long-term value of the Class A shares of Brookfield following the merger; the continued availability of capital and financing following the merger; the business, economic and political conditions in the markets in which Brookfield and Oaktree operate; changes in Brookfields or Oaktrees anticipated revenue and income, which are inherently volatile; changes in the value of Brookfields or Oaktrees investments; the pace of Brookfields or Oaktrees raising of new funds; changes in assets under management; the timing and receipt of, and impact of taxes on, carried interest; distributions from and liquidation of Oaktrees existing funds; the amount and timing of distributions on Oaktrees preferred units and Class A units; changes in Oaktrees operating or other expenses; the degree to which Brookfield or Oaktree encounters competition; and general political, economic and market conditions. Any forward-looking statements and information speak only as of the date of this communication or as of the date they were made, and except as required by law, neither Brookfield nor Oaktree undertakes any obligation to update forward-looking statements and information. For a more detailed discussion of these factors, also see the information under the caption Business Environment and Risks in Brookfields most recent report on Form 40-F for the year ended December 31, 2017, and under the captions Risk Factors and Managements Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations in Oaktrees most recent report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2018, and in each case any material updates to these factors contained in any of Brookfields or Oaktrees future filings. As for the forward-looking statements and information that relate to future financial results and other projections, actual results will be different due to the inherent uncertainties of estimates, forecasts and projections and may be better or worse than projected and such differences could be material. Given these uncertainties, you should not place any reliance on these forward-looking statements and information. Annualized, pro forma, projected and estimated numbers are used for illustrative purpose only, are not forecasts and may not reflect actual results. Albany, New York, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to a new market research report titled Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Market Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast, 20182026, published by Transparency Market Research, the global extreme ultraviolet lithography market is expected to reach value of US$ 3,807.5 Mn by 2026, expanding at a CAGR of 26.8% from 2018 to 2026. According to the report, the global market is expected to be influenced by a range of macroeconomic and market-specific factors during the forecast period. In terms of demand, Asia Pacific is projected to lead the global market, with the market in the region expanding at a CAGR of 28.6% between 2018 and 2026. Advancements in the miniaturization of electronic devices and reduced number of masking layers are anticipated to significantly drive the market during the forecast period. Get PDF brochure - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=59370 Growing adoption of miniaturization to drive the global extreme ultraviolet lithography market The global extreme ultraviolet lithography is projected to expand at a significant growth rate during the forecast period, due to growing adoption of miniaturization and sophistication of electronic circuit devices. The cutting-edge EUV lithography system enables customers to manufacture smaller, more rapid, and more powerful chips, giving rise to the demand for extreme ultraviolet lithography. Also, the conventional argon fluoride (ArF) immersion technology requires expensive multi-patterning mask sets. This technology needs up to four masks to create a silicon wafer layer, while the EUV lithography technology requires only a single mask to create the layer. This factor is likely to augment the extreme ultraviolet lithography market in the next few years. Request a PDF Sample - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=59370 Global Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Market: Scope of Report The global extreme ultraviolet lithography market has been broadly segmented based on light source, end-use, and region. In terms of light source, the market has been segmented into laser-produced plasma, gas discharge, and vacuum sparks. Among these, the laser-produced plasma segment holds a significant share of the market. The segment is anticipated to expand at a CAGR of 27.4% during the forecast period. Based on end-use, the global extreme ultraviolet lithography market has been classified into memory, foundry, and integrated device manufacturers (IDMs). Among these, the memory segment held a prominent i.e. 46.9% share of the global market in 2017, followed by the foundry segment. In terms of region, the global extreme ultraviolet lithography market has been segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, and South America. In terms of revenue, Asia Pacific held a leading share of the global market in 2017. The market in the region is anticipated to expand at a CAGR of 28.6% during the forecast period. Presence of a large number of semiconductor companies in the region has led to rise in the adoption of extreme ultraviolet lithography in Asia Pacific. In terms of revenue, South Korea holds a major share of the extreme ultraviolet lithography market in Asia Pacific, due to high usage of semiconductor devices such as memories in the country. The country is followed by Taiwan. Moreover, in terms of revenue, the market in Japan is anticipated to expand at a significant CAGR during the forecast period, due to growing semiconductor industry in the country. Get a Custom Report - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=CR&rep_id=59370 Global Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Market: Competition Scenario The research study includes profiles of leading companies operating in the global extreme ultraviolet lithography market. Market players have been profiled in terms of attributes such as company overview, financial overview, business strategies, and recent developments. Currently, only one player i.e. ASML Holding N.V. operates in the global EUVL market. However, in the next few years, companies such as Intel Corporation, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC), Canon, Inc., Nikon Corporation, and Carl Zeiss AG are expected to invest in the market. Get a Discount at https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=D&rep_id=59370 The global extreme ultraviolet lithography market has been segmented as follows: Global Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Market, by Light Source Laser-produced Plasma Gas Discharge Vacuum Sparks Global Extreme ultraviolet Lithography Market, by End-use Memory Foundry IDM Global Extreme ultraviolet Lithography Market, by Region North America U.S. Rest of North America Europe Germany U.K. France Rest of Europe Asia Pacific China Japan South Korea Taiwan Rest of Asia Pacific Middle East & Africa (MEA) GCC South Africa Rest of Middle East & Africa South America Brazil Rest of South America Popular Research Reports by TMR: Graph Database Market - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/graph-database-market.html Flight Inspection Solutions Market - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/flight-inspection-solutions-market.html Load Balancer Market - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/load-balancer-market.html About Us Transparency Market Research is a next-generation market intelligence provider, offering fact-based solutions to business leaders, consultants, and strategy professionals. Our reports are single-point solutions for businesses to grow, evolve, and mature. Our real-time data collection methods along with ability to track more than one million high growth niche products are aligned with your aims. The detailed and proprietary statistical models used by our analysts offer insights for making right decision in the shortest span of time. For organizations that require specific but comprehensive information we offer customized solutions through ad hoc reports. These requests are delivered with the perfect combination of right sense of fact-oriented problem solving methodologies and leveraging existing data repositories. TMR believes that unison of solutions for clients-specific problems with right methodology of research is the key to help enterprises reach right decision. Contact Us Mr. Rohit Bhisey Transparency Market Research State Tower, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany NY - 12207 United States Tel: +1-518-618-1030 USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453 Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.com Website: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via CannabisNewsWire -- CannabisNewsWire (CNW), a multifaceted financial news and publishing company, today announces it will once again partner with leading financial media outlet Benzinga to serve as the official newswire and media sponsor for its Cannabis Capital Conference , taking place April 17-18, 2019, at the Fairmont Royal York in Toronto, Ontario. We were very pleased with our recent successful partnership at the second Cannabis Capital Conference held earlier this year in Miami, said Hannah Genig, Event Content Producer for the Benzinga Cannabis Capital Conference. CNW delivered an impressive lineup of press releases and syndicated articles as they publicized the Cannabis Capital Conference while also providing additional exposure for participants. We are thrilled to once again work with CannabisNewsWire in heightening the visibility of our April event in Toronto. The Benzinga Cannabis Capital Conference is a premier gathering for North Americas cannabis entrepreneurs and investors, offering unparalleled access and interaction for the entrepreneurs who are building North Americas future industry-leading cannabis companies and the investors whose capital can make that happen. Participants at the conference will benefit from two full days of invaluable networking opportunities, investor presentations, panel discussions, lightning rounds, keynote addresses and much more. The Benzinga Cannabis Capital Conference is one of the most auspicious gatherings in the cannabis space, and CannabisNewsWire is excited to be partnering with its organizers once again, said Jonathan Keim, communications director of CannabisNewsWire. This premier conference attracts North Americas leading cannabis innovators, investors and entrepreneurs. Attending and networking among these great men and women, while working to promote this industry and its key players, is a true privilege. For additional information about the Cannabis Capital Conference, please visit https://www.benzingacannabisconference.com/. About CannabisNewsWire (CNW) CannabisNewsWire (CNW) is a specialized information service that (1) aggregates cannabis news, (2) provides CannabisNewsBreaks that quickly updates investors in the space, (3) enhances corporate press releases, (4) helps companies with distribution and optimization of social media, and (5) delivers comprehensive corporate communication solutions. CNW is uniquely positioned in the cannabis market with a strong team of journalists and writers who can help private and public companies reach a wide audience of investors, consumers, journalists and the general public through our ever-growing dissemination network of more than 5,000 key syndication outlets. CNW is bringing unparalleled visibility, recognition and content to the cannabis industry. For more information, please visit https://www.CannabisNewsWire.com . Please see full terms of use and disclaimers on the CannabisNewsWire website applicable to all content provided by CNW, wherever published or re-published: http://CNW.fm/Disclaimer . Corporate Communications: English Norwegian The Annual General Meeting of Orkla ASA will be held on Thursday 25 April 2019 at 3 p.m. at Ingenirenes Hus, Kronprinsens gate 17, Oslo. At a meeting on 13 March 2019 the Board of Directors decided to submit the following resolutions to Orkla's General Meeting: 1) The Board of Directors proposes an ordinary dividend for 2018 of NOK 2.60 per share. See separate announcement regarding key information relating to the cash dividend. 2) The Board of Directors proposes that the General Meeting of Orkla ASA resolves to reduce the share capital by NOK 21,875,000 from NOK 1,273,663,712.50 to NOK 1,251,788,712.50 by redeeming (amortising) 17,500,000 shares owned by Orkla ASA. The number of shares in the company will be reduced from 1,018,930,970 to 1,001,430,970. The amount by which the share capital is reduced will be used to cancel the company's own shares. Orkla's Annual Report 2018 will be released on 18 March 2019. Orkla ASA Oslo, 13 March 2019 Ref.: Group Director Corporate Communications & Corporate Affairs Hakon Mageli Tel.: +47 928 45 828 Email: hakon.mageli@orkla.no IR & Communications Manager Elise Heidenreich Tel.: +47 951 41 147 Email: elise.andersen.heidenreich@orkla.no English French BROSSARD, Quebec, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DIAGNOS Inc. (DIAGNOS or the Corporation) (TSX Venture: ADK), (OTCQB: DGNOF), a leader in early detection of critical health issues through the use of its FLAIRE platform based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), announces today the signing of a significant renewal contract in the United Arab Emirates consisting of a turnkey one-year screening contract for 2 CARA platform services. So far, DIAGNOS healthcare services have been rendered in 16 countries worldwide. During the period covered by the agreement, DIAGNOS estimates that an additional 5,000 patients will be screened in UAE using its CARA platform. We are excited to continue our collaboration with one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. More and more, we, DIAGNOS and our strategic pharmaceutical partner, are educating governments around the world to our Wellness Program (CARA) and demonstrating the benefits and tremendous cost savings that can be attained from it. We also continue to implement our growth strategy with this key pharmaceutical partner, said Andre Larente, President of DIAGNOS. About DIAGNOS DIAGNOS is a publicly-traded Canadian corporation with a mission of early detection of critical health issues through the use of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool CARA (Computer Assisted Retina Analysis). CARA is a tele-ophthalmology platform that integrates with existing equipment (hardware and software) and processes at the point of care. CARAs Artificial Intelligence image enhancement algorithms make standard retinal images sharper, clearer and easier to read. CARA is accessible securely over the internet, and is compatible with all recognized image formats and brands of fundus cameras, and is EMR compatible. CARA is a cost-effective tool for screening large numbers of patients in real-time. CARA complies with local regulations, is FDA cleared for commercialization in the United States of America, is Health Canada licensed for commercialization in Canada and is CE marking compliant in Europe. Additional information is available at www.diagnos.com and www.sedar.com. For further information, please contact: Mr. Andre Larente, President DIAGNOS Inc. Tel: 450-678-8882 ext. 224 alarente@diagnos.ca This news release contains forward-looking information. There can be no assurance that forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in these statements. DIAGNOS disclaims any intention or obligation to publically update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. The forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. WASHINGTON, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- EB5 Capital announced today its $44.5 million preferred equity investment in Douglas Developments 1900 Half Street project closed on March 5th, 2019, finalizing financing terms of the deal. Were extremely excited to be one of the partners in this much-needed waterfront project, said Brian Ostar, EB5 Capitals Senior Vice President of Global Operations. This is our third EB-5 project with Douglas Development and were looking forward to helping them contribute to the revitalization of Washington DCs Buzzard Point neighborhood. EB5 Capital is contributing a $44.5 million preferred equity investment in Douglas office-to-multifamily housing conversion. The building will feature 453 units, over 15,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, and sits directly along the Anacostia River providing unmatched waterfront views. 1900 Half Street is currently under construction and on track to create over 1,300 EB-5 jobs. The 89 foreign investors in the EB-5 partnership hail from various countries, including Canada, China, Eritrea, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Israel, Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Venezuela, and Vietnam. Were thrilled about the diverse group of EB-5 investors who joined this project, said Jon Mullen, Senior Vice President of Investments. Every EB-5 investor has a different set of criteria for what they would deem as a suitable investment. Were proud this project was able to confidently meet the needs of our 89 EB-5 investors. About EB5 Capital EB5 Capital is a leader in the EB-5 immigrant investor industry, raising foreign capital from investors in more than 55 countries for investment in job-creating real estate projects across the United States. EB5 Capital owns and operates six USCIS-authorized Regional Centers that serve 15 states and the District of Columbia. With a portfolio of 25 projects, EB5 Capital maintains a 100% project approval rate from the USCIS. For more information, visit http://www.eb5capital.com . Contact: Ben Carter (202) 652-2437 media@eb5capital.com OAKVILLE, Ontario, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- For those who take the risk of driving after consuming alcohol, cannabis and/or other drugs, there could well be no tomorrow. That is the hard-hitting and emotional message delivered in a new School Assembly Program from MADD Canada and generously supported by the PEI Liquor Control Commission (PEILCC). The program, titled No Tomorrow, educates students in Grades 7 12 about the risks and consequences of driving under the influence of alcohol, cannabis or other drugs. No Tomorrows tour of Prince Edward Island schools is being highlighted with a special screening at Queen Charlotte Intermediate School on March 15. PEILCC generously sponsors 17 presentations to students and school around the province. Media are welcome to attend the screening and speak with special guests, students and staff. Date: Friday, March 15 at 9 a.m. Location: Queen Charlotte Intermediate School, 150 North River Rd, Charlottetown, PE, C1A 3L3 Guests: The Honourable Heath MacDonald, Minister responsible for the PEILCC The Honourable Jordan Brown, Minister of Education, Early Learning and Culture Susan MacAskill, MADD Canada Atlantic Regional Manager No Tomorrow tells the story of bandmates Marcus, Corey, Trevor and Lee. After winning a contest to record a demo, they get an incredible chance to audition for a music school. Before their audition, Trevor has a few drinks. He is affected more than he thinks, and makes mistakes during the audition. Marcus is offered a spot at the school right away, and Corey and Lee are given an opportunity to re-apply next year. But Trevor, who was obviously impaired during the audition, is not offered a spot or chance to re-apply. The school has a zero tolerance policy for alcohol or drugs. Trevor storms off to the car. Marcus tries unsuccessfully to take the keys. Realizing he cant stop Trevor from driving away, Marcus jumps in the car. What happens next changes all of their lives forever. This fictional story is followed by powerful interviews with real-life victims who talk about their loved ones who were killed or seriously and permanently injured in impaired driving crashes. For more information, or to check out a clip from No Tomorrow, please visit https://madd.ca/pages/programs/youth-services/school-programs/no-tomorrow/ . March 13, 2019 Using Philips PAP solutions, results resurface conversation around ASV therapy use for complex sleep apnea and its potential to improve quality of life Amsterdam, the Netherlands Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA), a global leader in health technology, today announced results from a recent study, Comparison of Physiological Performance of Four Adaptive Servo Ventilation Devices in Patients with Complex Sleep Apnea in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, showing adaptive servo ventilation (ASV) is an effective treatment option for patients with complex sleep apnea (CompSA). This study compared the performance of four different ASV devices with different algorithms, including Philips DreamStation BiPAP autoSV , and the ASV device that was originally associated with greater mortality during a prior SERVE-HF trial published in 2015. The recent study revealed that certain physiological performances were quite different across the devices, which may explain the previously noted SERVE-HF trial results. Sleep apnea affects millions of people worldwide, with many of these individuals living with CompSA a sleep disorder thats a combination of obstructive and central sleep apneas [1]. Despite the number of people impacted, the proper therapy is not always available or introduced as an option to patients with CompSA. In the prior SERVE-HF trial, it was suggested that ASV therapy was harmful to central sleep apnea patients with heart failure, with limited information suggesting that some of the patients in the trial may have received excessive minute ventilation that may have increased patient mortality [2]. This Philips-funded randomized controlled study suggests the mechanisms underlying the adverse effects of ASV may be secondary to excessive ventilation due to device-based effect rather than a class-effect [3]. The pursuit for scientific understanding of various disease and treatment processes is an iterative process where we revisit successes and failures to deepen our understanding of disease processes, said Dr. Sairam Parthasarathy, a lead investigator on the study, professor of medicine and interim chief of Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at University of Arizona College of Medicine. Its imperative we keep this in mind and re-visit previous studies when technological advancements show promise for a certain type of therapy. Today, ASV isnt used in certain clinical settings due to safety concerns associated with the therapy in patients with congestive heart failure and predominantly central sleep apnea. Now, through devices with smarter algorithms, providers can potentially ensure that patients are getting the right treatment and thereby improve treatment approaches in patients with complex or central sleep apnea. Philips provides healthcare professionals and patients with innovative treatment solutions and services. The safety of patients who use our devices is our top priority. We also wish to maximize the benefits that patients receive from using our technology, said Dr. Teofilo Lee-Chiong, chief medical liaison at Philips. As a science company, we are obligated to understand why and how ASV in the SERVE-HF trial can be associated with increased risk of mortality in patients with central sleep apnea and severe heart failure. Future research is needed to confirm if excessive ventilation during wakefulness and sleep due to device-specific ASV algorithms can result in potentially life-threatening consequences, especially in patients with heart failure. This Philips-sponsored study expands on Philips commitment and leadership in sleep apnea care. Philips' Dream Family of sleep apnea solutions focuses on connecting and supporting the patient, clinician and homecare provider to enhance patient care and quality of life. For additional information on Philips PAP offerings and additional solutions for sleep and respiratory care, follow @PhilipsResp or visit www.philips.com . [1] https://www.sleepapnea.org/learn/sleep-apnea-information-clinicians/ [2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1506459 [3] https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1164/rccm.201807-1303LE For further information, please contact: Kathy O'Reilly Philips Group Press Office Mobile: +1 978-221-8919 E-mail: kathy.oreilly@philips.com Meredith Amoroso Philips Sleep and Respiratory Care Mobile: +1 724-584-8991 E-mail: meredith.amoroso@philips.com 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 generated 2018 sales of EUR 18.1 billion and employs approximately 77,000 employees with sales and services in more than 100 countries. News about Philips can be found at www.philips.com/newscenter . Attachment HERSHEY, Pa., March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Hershey Company (NYSE: HSY) is taking action to protect forests and restore forest cover in the cocoa growing regions in West Africa. The company today released action plans that are part of the companys commitments as a founding member of the Cocoa & Forest Initiative (CFI). In February 2018, Hershey publicly committed to no new deforestation in its cocoa supply chain, effective immediately, and to implementing agroforestry tree planting programs. The new CFI forest protection plans for the two largest cocoa-producing countries in West Africa Ghana and Cote dIvoire step up Hersheys forestry commitments with specific actions to end deforestation and to begin restoring forests. Hersheys CFI action plans will be delivered through its Cocoa For Good sustainable cocoa strategy, announced in April 2018. The plans focus on sensitive forest areas and are designed to inhibit encroachment on these protected areas by implementing locally tailored development programs. Cocoa, the key ingredient in chocolate, is beloved by people around the world, said Beatrice Moulianitaki, Head of Sustainable Sourcing. We want to ensure that this cherished product continues to be available for a growing number of consumers worldwide without damaging the forests close to where most of the worlds cocoa is grown. With the proper care and resources, we are confident that cocoa can continue to grow while protecting sensitive forests and habitats in the region. Hersheys CFI action plans are organized under three strategic pillars: Forest Protection and Restoration Sustainable Production and Farmers Livelihood Community Engagement and Social Inclusion Hershey has created specific goals, actions and timebound targets for both Ghana and Cote dIvoire under each of the three pillars. The three pillars are designed to work together to ensure a holistic approach to protecting forests while taking into consideration the human impact. This approach ensures that communities are fully engaged in these efforts and the actions benefit both the people and the surrounding ecosystem. Plans include: Distributing 900,000 multi-purpose trees to farms in Ghana and Cote dIvoire by 2022 Distributing more than 2.5 million improved cocoa seedlings to farmers in Ghana and Cote dIvoire by 2022 Satellite mapping of 50,000 farms across Ghana and Cote dIvoire in the Hershey supply chain by 2019 For the past several years under its Cocoa For Good program, Hershey has been implementing programs that meet the CFI commitments. The companys agroforestry programs have already distributed more than 3.5 million cocoa trees and about 320,000 shade trees in West Africa between 2013 and 2017. Hershey will continue to review, expand and improve current programs to meet its CFI 2022 goals. To see Hersheys detailed CFI Action Plans, visit the companys website . About Hershey The Hershey Company, celebrating its 125th anniversary in 2019, is headquartered in Hershey, Pa., and is an industry-leading snacks company known for bringing goodness to the world through its iconic brands, remarkable people and enduring commitment to help children succeed. Hershey has approximately 16,500 employees around the world who work every day to deliver delicious, quality products. The company has more than 80 brands around the world that drive more than $7.8 billion in annual revenues, including such iconic brand names as Hersheys, Reeses, Kit Kat, Jolly Rancher, Ice Breakers, SkinnyPop and Pirates Booty. For 125 years, Hershey has been committed to operating fairly, ethically and sustainably. Hershey founder, Milton Hershey, created the Milton Hershey School in 1909 and since then the company has focused on helping children succeed. To learn more visit www.thehersheycompany.com Follow: http://www.twitter.com/hersheycompany https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-hershey-company?trk=top_nav_home http://www.facebook.com/hersheycompany http://www.youtube.com/hersheycompany http://www.instagram.com/hersheycompany Media Contact: Jeff Beckman, The Hershey Company jbeckman@hersheys.com 717-534-8090 Photos accompanying this announcement are available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/df9e08c8-c148-467e-be6b-8e8de642fd72 http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b40d75e9-6050-4de5-a5f0-ebea02ff6d17 French English Atos to support the transition and transformation of the Western Australian (WA) public health systems ICT infrastructure into a fully managed Hybrid Digital Cloud Service HealthNext transition and transformation program uses GovNext-ICT services including a fully managed Oracle Cloud Platform Atos is the GovNext-ICT provider selected to enable Health Support Services (HSS) utilize public cloud services on demand Paris (France); Perth (Australia), March 13, 2019 Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, has signed an AUD$124m (~EUR 78,2 million) five-year contract with the Western Australian Department of Health (WA Health) to transition and digitize its ICT systems to better support the WA public health system. Atos will work with the WA health systems ICT service provider, Health Support Services (HSS), to transition the current legacy infrastructure from the incumbent provider to Atos Cloud platforms. The digital transformation will utilize GovNext-ICT services to provide a Hybrid Cloud and a recurrent consumption model which scales and shrinks as required, providing WA Health with new agility that will enhance operational processes and reduce costs while improving the patient experience in the public health system. The scope of services is to provide Private Cloud, Managed Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud Orchestration, co-location and managed services for 2,000 servers, over 1,000 applications, and a fully managed Oracle Cloud platform. The Fully Managed Oracle customer environment will be supported by both Oracle and Exadata cloud machines orchestrated into an Atos Hybrid cloud environment hosted on an Extreme Performance Pod, Digital Private Cloud utilizing Atos powerful BullSequana computing platform and supported by a suite of fully managed services. These services include data center housing, capacity management, monitoring and reporting, backup, disaster recovery and OS management. The Atos Managed Public Cloud (MPC) solution, leveraging an Atos-managed ServiceNow platform, provides a single pane of glass for cloud consumption. MPC provides additional virtual infrastructures and operating systems to facilitate the consumption of public cloud environments, removing the burden for HSS to operate these infrastructures as well as OS, backup, DR, routing, firewall and communications dependencies. In addition, WA Health will gain governance over cloud consumption, security and compliancy. The transition will deliver the following benefits: The ability to scale on-demand operational costs based on changing demand in WA Health Infrastructure needs; The ability to provide services with a minimum amount of process overhead regarding both time and cost; The ability to adopt a pay-as-you-go framework and avoid capital expenditure models The ability to leverage new technology and innovation without undertaking large-scale upgrades to infrastructure platforms; The ability to transform WA Health applications to modern architectural frameworks that support greater levels of availability, capacity, performance and scalability. Shirley Ngu, Head of Information and Data Management for Atos in Australia said: WA Health is a highly valued and strategic client we are proud to work alongside. Over several years, Atos has developed a reputation within the Government marketplace for our success of transforming key services and infrastructure workloads into the cloud. We look forward to working with the government and WA Health on their new digital journey improving healthcare services. Holger Kaufmann, Chief Information Officer, Health Support Services said: The HealthNext transition program represents an opportunity to improve the way WA Health utilizes and delivers ICT services to support the provision of healthcare to the WA community. A modern and contemporary cloud-based ICT system will enable us to respond better to innovation that will help improve patient care and reduce unnecessary duplication. *** About Atos Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with 120,000 employees in 73 countries and annual revenue of 13 billion. European number one in Cloud, Cybersecurity and High-Performance Computing, the Group provides end-to-end Orchestrated Hybrid Cloud, Big Data, Business Applications and Digital Workplace solutions through its Digital Transformation Factory, as well as transactional services through Worldline, the European leader in the payment industry. With its cutting-edge technologies and industry knowledge, Atos supports the digital transformation of its clients across all business sectors. The Group is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic & Paralympic Games and operates under the brands Atos, Atos Syntel, Unify and Worldline. Atos is listed on the CAC40 Paris stock index. Press contacts: Global: Laura Fau | laura.fau@atos.net | +33 6 73 64 04 18 | @laurajanefau Australia: Rhoda Dinesen | rhoda.dinesen@atos.net | +65 (0) 67308524 | Attachment NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Brookfield Global Listed Infrastructure Income Fund Inc. (NYSE: INF) (the Fund) today announced changes to the portfolio management team at Brookfield Public Securities Group LLC (Brookfield PSG), the investment adviser to the Fund. The Fund will continue to be managed by co-portfolio managers Leonardo Anguiano, Andrew Alexander and Thomas Miller. Effective by the end of the 3rd quarter of 2019, Craig Noble, CFA, will no longer serve as co-portfolio manager for the Fund. Mr. Noble will be assuming additional responsibilities at Brookfield Asset Management Inc. and will remain a portfolio manager on Brookfield PSG real assets solutions products and a member of certain investment committees for Brookfield PSG, including the global listed infrastructure investment committee. In his role as a member of the global listed infrastructure investment committee, Mr. Noble will continue to work with Messrs. Anguiano, Alexander and Miller on Brookfield PSG global listed infrastructure accounts, including the Fund. Brookfield Public Securities Group LLC (the Firm) is an SEC-registered investment adviser and represents the Public Securities platform of Brookfield Asset Management Inc., providing global listed real assets strategies including real estate equities, infrastructure and energy infrastructure equities, multi-real-asset-class strategies and real asset debt. With more than $18 billion of assets under management as of January 31, 2019, the Firm manages separate accounts, registered funds and opportunistic strategies for institutional and individual clients, including financial institutions, public and private pension plans, insurance companies, endowments and foundations, sovereign wealth funds and high net worth investors. The Firm is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management Inc., a leading global alternative asset manager with approximately $350 billion of assets under management as of December 31, 2018. For more information, go to www.brookfield.com. The Brookfield Global Listed Infrastructure Income Fund Inc. is managed by Brookfield Public Securities Group LLC. The Fund uses its website as a channel of distribution of material company information. Financial and other material information regarding the Fund is routinely posted on and accessible at www.brookfield.com . English French OTTAWA, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Canadian Labour Congress is releasing its list of 10 priorities that Canadas unions will be looking for in the 2019 federal budget. In anticipation of the federal budget planned for release on March 19, 2019, Canadas unions have outlined a list of ten asks in a fairness budget that meets the needs of workers and their families. CLC President, Hassan Yussuff, is available to discuss expectations for the budget in advance of its release. For more information, please contact: WASHINGTON, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- At todays U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing concerning the reauthorization of the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act (DERA), the Diesel Technology Forum submitted a formal statement to the Hearings record, highlighting the effectiveness of the program and its ability to deliver benefits to local communities across the country. Senators would be hard-pressed to find another environmental program that has enjoyed such bipartisan support or that has been as cost-effective while bringing innovative clean air and public health benefits to communities across the country, said Allen Schaeffer, executive director of the Forum. We believe these factors will be compelling as the Senate evaluates reauthorization and funding levels for the coming year. Click here to download a copy of the Forums full statement. The DERA program passed the Senate by a 92 to 1 vote in 2005, by unanimous consent twice since then in the Senate, and by voice vote in the House in 2010. Past solicitations to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for DERA program funding have consistently been oversubscribed, reflecting a high level of ongoing interest and demand from states and local communities. The DERA program is currently authorized to receive $100 million annually. Schaeffer continued: Another measure of DERAs success has been its ability to consistently bring together a broad and diverse coalition of stakeholders representing regulators, engine, vehicle, equipment manufacturers, emissions control technology companies and environmental and public health groups; not just at the federal level but in regional collaboratives and local groups around the country working together to improve air quality. For its part, the EPA has been an effective administrator of this program, establishing a competitive process for funding awards, making awards based on quantitative criteria and need, across a range of fuel, vehicle and equipment types in every state and tribal nations, while also monitoring the effective implementation of projects. Like many others, we anxiously await EPAs 4th Report to Congress, which we believe will be an important consideration for Senators; this report is expected to underscore the substantial cost-effectiveness of the program, and its consistent ability to deliver important reductions in criteria emissions (nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM)) that contribute to clean air attainment. DERA-funded projects also have many co-benefits for both society and project participants in the form of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, fuel savings, and greater economic productivity. Most of the DERA program benefits have occurred through replacing, repowering or retrofitting older generations of technology with the newest generation of clean diesel power which virtually eliminates PM and NOx emissions. DERA has funded a wide range of projects such as upgrading school buses and repowering locomotives, passenger ferries and construction machines, all to operate with substantially lower emissions in communities in which they serve. The program has delivered significant emission reduction benefits to communities all across the country, said Schaeffer. To highlight just a few examples from the last year: Wyoming was awarded DERA funding to replace older engines and equipment in the off-road sector; Oklahoma was awarded a DERA grant to replace 180 older school buses with newer models; In Delaware, the Delaware River and Bay Authority was awarded a DERA grant to replace older engines that power a ferry with new clean diesel models; and In Utah, a DERA grant recently helped replace 83 larger and older commercial vehicles. While funding has been appropriated for DERA activities since 2008, there is still continuing need for the program, to address the many older vehicles, engines and equipment still operating today, and likely for years to come. For example, in the trucking sector, 36 percent of all large trucks are of the newest generation of near-zero emissions performance, meaning that 64 percent are of an older generation of technology. Substantial opportunities for emissions improvements still exist in communities all around the country. The newest generation of clean diesel technology is now deployed across all ranges and types of new diesel-powered vehicles, equipment and machines. Many of these innovations are manufactured here in the United States. In 2017, nearly 900,000 heavy-duty diesel engines were manufactured in facilities located in 13 states. North Carolina is the leading state for the manufacture of heavy-duty diesel engines with 327,500 rolling off assembly lines in the state. Getting more of these newer generation engines in service will deliver immediate air quality benefits. DERA Fast Facts The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates approximately $12.6 billion in health benefits have been gained from the investment of $700 million in DERA in the past 10 years. from the investment of $700 million in DERA in the past 10 years. To date, more than 73,000 vehicles, engines and pieces of equipment have been replaced or retrofitted thanks to the DERA program. thanks to the DERA program. Every dollar from the DERA program that is invested in diesel retrofits and replacements yields at least $13 in environmental and public health benefits . . The program has saved more than 450 million gallons of fuel, and reduced 14,700 tons of particulate matter (PM) and 335,200 tons of oxides of nitrogen (NOX). The program achieves these benefits by requiring significant non-federal matching funds for projects seeking funding. A jointly funded government and industry research effort known as the Advanced Combustion Emissions Study (ACES), carried out through the Health Effects Institute and Coordinating Research Council, evaluated the performance of the latest generation (2011 and newer) of clean diesel technology used in the largest commercial (Class 8) trucks. Phase 1 of that study determined that fine particle emissions generated from these truck engines were lower than the EPA standard, while the second phase of the research determined that there were no adverse health outcomes due to exposure from the exhaust from these engines. Beginning in 2014, similar reductions in PM and NOx emissions have been achieved in the wide range of off-road engines that power everything from small construction equipment and farm machinery to freight locomotives, marine vessels and work boats. # # # About The Diesel Technology ForumThe Diesel Technology Forum is a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness about the importance of diesel engines, fuel and technology. Forum members are leaders in clean diesel technology and represent the three key elements of the modern clean-diesel system: advanced engines, vehicles and equipment, cleaner diesel fuel and emissions-control systems. For more information visit http://www.dieselforum.org. Attachments A man was detained on suspicion of spying for Pakistan near the Indo-Pak border on Sunday. Later, the 36-year-old Nawab Khan, a resident of Sam area near the India-Pakistan border in Rajasthan's Jaisalmer district was arrested on Tuesday on spying for Pakistan. According to PTI reports, Khan was involved in espionage activities and was working as a jeep driver, Additional Director General of Intelligence Umesh Mishra said. He was arrested after being interrogated by a joint team of security agencies. Khan used to share information to his handlers based in Pakistan through WhatsApp in code language in lieu of money, PTI quoted Mishra saying. As per reports, Nawab Khan visited Pakistan in 2018, where he reportedly came in touch with an agent of that country's intelligence agency ISI. The ISI agent trained Khan and gave him tasks of collecting information related to Indian Army movement and sharing the same, the officer said. Earlier, on Monday a man was reportedly caught with two live grenades and a detonator an Army camp in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district. The man identified as Rajinder Singh, a resident of Kalakote area, was noticed moving suspiciously during a recruitment rally in Surankote. Following which he was stopped by the Army men. A C-90 grenade, a UBGL (Under Barrel Grenade Launcher) grenade and a detonator were recovered from his possession, news agency PTI, quoting a police officer said. Singh was immediately arrested and handed over to police for further investigation. Amid tensions between India and Pakistan following the Pulwama attack, the security has been tightening near the international border and in Jammu and Kashmir. Also, read: Rahul Gandhi might go to jail! Case filed against Congress chief over his Masood Azhar ji remark 2050 Motors Appoints Technology and Finance Industry Executive to Advisory Board Reviewing Sales Outlets for M&A to Accelerate B2C Model Announcing Additional Market Focus on PoE, LED, IoT and Smart Cities CHICAGO, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 2050 Motors, Inc. (US OTC: ETFM) is pleased to announce Ted Flomenhaft, CEO and Owner of EDGE FiberNet ( https://edgefibernet.com/ ), as the second member of its recently-formed Advisory Board. Mr. Flomenhaft is an experienced communications and finance executive with substantial experience building emerging growth technology companies. His working relationships with multi-billion-dollar revenue companies in the technology field targeting the substantial, high-growth power over ethernet and light emitting diode (PoE / LED) industry, illustrate a market opportunity for 2050 that provides potential upside to the Companys stand-alone electric vehicle (EV) business plan. Said Ted Flomenhaft of EDGE: EDGE FiberNet, Inc. shares 2050, Inc.s dedication to carbon-neutrality by 2050, individual health, happiness, fun and making the world a better place. Altogether, transportation, heating, cooling and lighting consume 57% of global energy resources and directly impact the planets health and wellness. EDGE is an established provider of technical services in the areas of Internet, phone, energy efficient lighting and HVAC technologies such as PoE LED lighting and VRF HVAC systems. We have immediate plans to use, promote and support electric vehicles in the Northeast United States and have identified 4,000 square feet of space in our NYC headquarters to use as a showroom for 2050 EV product distribution. Were excited to support 2050s goals in the areas of efficient business operations, technical excellence, product affordability, supply-chain efficiency, market awareness and owner-experience. We look forward to building a business like 2050 leveraged to the high growth markets of electric vehicles, lighting and technology. Said Vik Grover, CEO of 2050 Ted and I have worked on technology projects for roughly 20 years. We have been discussing and analyzing multiple opportunities in the PoE, LED and IoT (Internet of things) markets. In the future, and certainly by the year 2050 ( http://www.zeroemissions2050.org/ ), we will live in a world of smart cities that have connectivity to all devices, including electric vehicles, indoor and outdoor lighting infrastructure, and anything that can have a network connection. I believe Teds experience and knowledge will be invaluable to 2050 as the Company attempts to grow its business. To this end, 2050 is no longer just an EV company since it intends to target PoE LED lighting, IoT, and Smart Cities. Ted Flomenhaft Bio Ted Flomenhaft is a former partner of L. Flomenhaft and Co., Inc., a FINRA Member Broker Dealer founded in 1962. In 2008, Flomenhaft started EVA Capital, Inc. to pursue M&A, private equity and merchant banking financing transactions across various industries, with a specialty focus on telecommunications and technology. Flomenhaft is currently CEO and Owner of EDGE FiberNet, Inc. ( https://edgefibernet.com/ ) , a Brooklyn-based company created to acquire and develop leading NYC independent commercial Internet service providers (ISPs), VoIP and UC phone companies (voice over Internet protocol, unified communications) and IT Consultants that serve the Tri-State region. EDGE specializes in Internet, VoIP services, IT Consulting, Smart Building Technology, Internet of Things (IoT) implementation, VRF HVAC Solutions that reduce energy consumption 25% in alliance with Green Star Energy Solutions ( http://gogreenstar.com/commercial/ ), and PoE LED lighting solutions that reduce the lighting build cost of construction by $1-$3/sq. ft. EDGE is a Molex CoreSync Alliance Member and Focused Advisory Representative ( https://coresync.molex.com/coresync_alliance/ ). About 2050 Motors, Inc. 2050 Motors, Inc. ( http://2050motors.com/about-us.html ) is a publicly-traded company founded to develop, produce, distribute and sell the next generation of clean, lightweight, efficient vehicles and their associated technologies. Some of these technologies include alternative renewable fuels, hybrid electric vehicles, advanced graphene lithium batteries and low-cost carbon fiber vehicles. Additionally, the Company is exploring next-generation energy technologies, including Power over Ethernet (Poe), Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), and other emerging clean energy verticals. The Company has been successful in forming long-term relationships and exclusive contracts for a variety of game-changing technologies. Disclosure Statement Statements in this press release about our future expectations, including without limitation, the likelihood that 2050 Motors will be able to meet US DOT requirements, meet minimum sales expectations, be successful and profitable in the US market, bring significant value to 2050 Motors' stockholders, and leverage capital markets to execute its growth strategy, constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and as that term is defined in the Private Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The potential growth of 2050 Motors and its business generally is largely contingent upon receiving adequate funding to fulfill its goals. No information in this press release should be construed as any indication whatsoever of 2050 Motors future revenues, financial condition or stock price. Such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and are subject to change at any time, and our actual results could differ materially from expected results. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or release any revisions to these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this statement or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. CONTACT: English French OTTAWA, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Skills/Competences Canada (SCC), a not-for-profit organization that actively promotes careers in skilled trades and technologies to Canadian youth, is proud to announce that J.D. Irving, Limited (JDI) and Irving Shipbuilding have confirmed as Premier Sponsors of the 2019 Skills Canada National Competition (SCNC). SCC is very pleased to announce that JDI will once again be supporting SCNC in celebration of its 25th anniversary. Under J.D. Irvings Group of Companies, there will be support from Kent Building Supplies and Irving Shipbuilding through this partnership. The Skills Canada National Competition represents an opportunity for J.D. Irving, Limited and Irving Shipbuilding to create awareness of the career options available to youth. Several SCNC trades are related to the ocean industry, including welding, industrial mechanic millwright and many others. The J.D. Irving Group of Companies will be onsite to meet with visiting students, competitors and the public at their Try-A-Trade and Technology activity booth. Over 7,500 students from Nova Scotia are expected to attend SCNC Halifax 2019. Visitors will have the opportunity to participate in over 50 Try-A-Trade and Technology activities, feel the excitement of the competition and meet key industry and educational representatives during the 25th Skills Canada National Competition. The JDI team is proud to sponsor the 2019 Skills Canada National Competition, in Halifax. We look forward to welcoming talented young women and men from across the country. There is a bright future awaiting them in skilled trades. Our 2019-2021 hiring forecast includes 700 skilled trades and this event is a great opportunity to meet the next generation and share with them the careers they can grow at our company, says James D. Irving, Co-Chief Executive Officer of J.D. Irving, Limited. SCC is delighted to be working with JDI and Irving Shipbuilding for this years competition. Their generous support will enable Skills Canada to better promote careers in skilled trades and technology to students and apprentices in Canada through this impactful event. According to Buildforce Canada, as many as 250,000 skilled workers in the construction trades alone, are planning to retire this decade. Building a skilled workforce in this sector is vital to the prosperity of our country. Through our partnership with J.D. Irving, Limited and Irving Shipbuilding, we are able to promote apprenticeship systems and the many skilled trades and technology careers. These careers are evolving with the use of digital tools and emerging technologies, and engaging youth has become increasingly important in order to build our future workforce, says Shaun Thorson, Chief Executive Officer, Skills/Competences Canada. About J.D. Irving, Limited Founded in 1882, J.D. Irving, Limited (JDI) has operations in Canada and the United States. We are a team of over 16,000 (FTE) with business units in: Agriculture Construction & Equipment Consumer Products Food Forestry & Forestry Products Retail & Distribution Shipbuilding & Industrial Fabrication Transportation & Logistics Since our inception over 135 years ago, our employees continue to build JDI into a diverse group of performance-driven enterprises. It is through our dedicated team using the best practices to make the best products that enable us to better serve our customers at home and around the globe. Learn more at www.jdirving.com About Irving Shipbuilding Inc. Irving Shipbuilding Inc. is the most modern shipbuilder and in-service ship support provider in North America. Headquartered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, our skilled team and innovative facilities provide efficient building, fabrication, conversion and servicing of vessels and offshore platforms. As Canada's chosen shipbuilder, Irving Shipbuilding Inc. is working with the Royal Canadian Navy on the next class of Canadian Surface Combatant (CSC) and Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ship (AOPS) vessels under the National Shipbuilding Strategy (NSS). We are proud to continue our long history as a trusted partner in Canadian shipbuilding. Irving Shipbuilding Inc. is a member of the J.D. Irving, Limited group of companies, a diverse family owned company with operations in Canada and the United States. Learn more at www.IrvingShipbuilding.com or www.ShipsforCanada.ca . About Skills/Competences Canada Headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, Skills Canada was founded in 1989 as a national, not-for-profit organization with partner Skills Canada organizations in each of the provinces/territories that work with employers, educators, labour groups and governments to promote skilled trades and technology careers among Canadian youth including students and apprentices. Skills Canada is also the Canadian Member Organization of WorldSkills. Its unique position among private and public-sector partners enables it to work toward securing Canadas future skilled labour needs while helping young people discover rewarding careers. Skills Canada offers experiential learning opportunities including skilled trades and technology competitions for hundreds of thousands of young Canadians through regional, provincial/territorial, national and international events, as well as skilled trades awareness programs. SCC and its member organizations work with the regulatory authorities that administer apprenticeship training for the over 300 skilled trade occupations that are recognized in Canada. Once an apprentice completes their training, they can go on to complete the Red Seal exam, the national standard of excellence, and become a certified journeyperson. Follow Skills/Competences Canada on Twitter , Facebook , YouTube , Flickr and Instagram . MEDIA CONTACT: Michele Rogerson, micheler@skillscanada.com , T. 343-883-7545 ext. 509. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/76e7d891-257d-475f-896f-0d6f96c546ed DALLAS, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Some of the leading young professional and most expensive property markets are coming up with unique ways to offer housing options to those who normally couldnt afford them. The idea is called co-living developments; or apartment-style buildings that provide both separation and shared living spaces to renters. Catching on to young professionals looking to live and work in the top areas across the US, leading property developers in the cities of New York and Los Angeles are joining forces to bring over $100 million worth of shared apartments that will work to meet the growing demand for housing in Southern California. Co-living inhabitants opt-in to shared living areas including kitchens, living and dining areas, with separate bedroom and bathrooms for each resident. The average rent of these properties is affordable when compared to the cost of traditional apartments in locations such as LA and Hollywood, but in terms of median rent in the US, the rent still sits at 15% higher. Affordability isnt the only demand these properties address, the sheer growth in populations is exceeding property availability in markets who have limited development space. The ability to fit more residents into smaller spaces is likely a key benefit driving property investors who are looking to investment in locations where available land is scarce, shares leading property developer in apartment style housing, Marcus Hiles . This type of property is not so unique, however, as new housing models have continued to crossover into modern day. One living style popular with newer generations centers around corporate communities. Property and land complexes where personal and professional lines cross into shared living communities, top firms like Google and Apple have introduced these to allow employees and their families affordable housing options with close proximity to work. What these modernized housing styles reflect is an importance on living where the opportunities are, even if that means sharing a community or building with 15 of your neighbors - who just may happen to be your coworkers. CEO of Western-Rim Properties and key player in the Texas area housing development; Marcus Hiles adds As corporate locations are diversifying into areas like Texas, there is still a large majority of industries and firms operating out of centralized hubs where cost of living is not feasible for the average employee. However, those in demand of these jobs are welcoming new properties like co-living buildings, seeing it as an investment into their future success, as others may see home ownership. California, the most popular location for these new-style properties, finds it is individuals making $40,000-$80,000 per year and at the median age of 29. That age bracket may seem higher than one would expect for residents open to what is described as dorm-style living, but in fact new generations are shown to take longer in making life decisions such as home ownership, marriage and starting a family. Different contributing factors are related to this generational change, though it seems an increasing need for continued education and pre-requisite experience to enter modern corporate careers is a key driver. As this new sector in property development expands it will continue to introduce more residents into city locations, further diversifying the workforce and ultimately housing markets. It is open for discussion, however, if it is a sustainable living alternative or if the interest of todays populations will in turn force corporate headquarters into new areas as housing affordability, and availability diminishes in over-populated areas. See more news from Marcus Hiles at marcushiles-news.com Houzz: https://www.houzz.com/pro/marcushiles/marcus-hiles YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwrLIhyaB0p_0F1gWg4R7cA/videos Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcus.hiles/ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/marcus_hiles/ Media contact: Marcus Hiles media@marcushiles.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b4374721-0733-40e4-914c-df2cd71b1655 The photo is also available at Newscom, www.newscom.com, and via AP PhotoExpress. SALT LAKE CITY, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Northern Minerals & Exploration Ltd. (Stock Symbol: NMEX) is pleased to announce the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with Labrador Capital SAPI De CV (Labrador) on March 8, 2019. This is the first step toward entering into a Joint Venture Agreement for pursuing real estate development opportunities in the Puerto Morelos area of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico with Labrador. Labrador has successfully developed real estate projects in Mexico, specifically in Puerto Morelos which is considered to be the Mexican Riviera in the state of Quintana Roo. Nearly 10 million people visited the state of Quintana Roo each year, according to the Tourism Secretariat of Quintana Roo. Labradors last project was 100% pre-sold prior to completing its construction. Labrador has several real estate projects identified in the Puerto Morelos area and seeks to join with NMEX to acquire, develop and market those project areas of interest. The intent of the Joint Venture arrangement between Labrador and NMEX is to join together to develop real estate projects in Mexico, specifically in the Puerto Morelos area. Labrador is a significant shareholder of NMEX and its president is Victor Miranda, who also serves as the Companys Chief Financial Officer. Change in Officers Roger Autrey regrettably resigned as Secretary of the Company due to family health issues. The Companys board of Directors appointed Robert Campbell to serve as the corporate Secretary. The Company wants to acknowledge Mr. Autrey for his years of hard work and service and wish him all the best for his family. Mr. Campbell, is co-founder and CEO of Crowdvac, a software engineering firm with offices in the USA and Latin America. He studied international business at Thunderbird School Global Management. Opening of New Corporate Office The Company has relocated its corporate offices to Salt Lake City, Utah. The office is located at 10 West Broadway, Suite 700, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101. We are excited about operating NMEX from these new offices to manage the Companys operations as well as it shareholder relations and communications. About NMEX: Northern Minerals & Exploration (NMEX) is an emerging publicly traded company focused on building income and value for its shareholders through oil and gas exploration & production in the United States, gold & silver exploration in northern Nevada and real estate development projects in Mexico. For further information on NMEX please go to www.sec.gov or www.otcmarkets.com. The Companys website is currently undergoing some changes and updating and is under construction. Forward Looking Statements: Statements which are not historical facts contained in this release are forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to, the effect of economic conditions, the impact of competition, the results of financing efforts, changes in consumers preferences and trends. The words estimate, possible, seeking, and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements, which speak only to the date the statement was made. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, because of new information, future events, or otherwise. Future events and actual results may differ materially from those set forth herein, contemplated by, or underlying the forward-looking statements. The information herein is subject to change without notice. Northern Minerals & Exploration Ltd. shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. This article highlights key provisions in the 500-page tax reform bill. It is not a comprehensive explanation of changes to the tax code, nor is it intended for use as tax guidance or advice. Readers should consult with a qualified tax professional on how this new law affects their interests. Sandal plc (Sandal or the Company) Proposed Withdrawal from NEX Exchange Growth Market 13 March 2019 The Board of Sandal announces that the Company is today giving notice of its intention to withdraw its ordinary shares in the Company ("Ordinary Shares") from trading on the NEX Exchange Growth Market ("NEX") with effect from the close of business on 10 April 2019 (the "Withdrawal"). This announcement sets out the reasons for the Withdrawal and explains why the Directors believe that it is in the best interests of the Company and its shareholders. Background and reasons for proposed withdrawal from NEX Sandal joined NEX (then known as ISDX Growth Market) on 2 March 2015 to, inter alia, raise capital for the future development of the business and provide access to new investors and future capital. However, since admission to NEX, there has been limited trading in the Companys shares and the Company has been unable to raise any meaningful growth capital. This has impacted on the Companys ability to realise the full potential of its Energenie MiHome business and to capitalise on its early success. As announced on 26 February, the Directors have continued to review all equity and debt funding options for the Company to enable it to maximise shareholder value and they have now concluded that the pursuit of additional funds would benefit from seeking the withdrawal of the Companys ordinary shares from NEX. This would also have the added benefit of saving costs associated with being admitted to NEX. Effect of withdrawal from NEX The principal effect of Withdrawal from NEX is anticipated to be a reduction in the liquidity and marketability of the ordinary shares. There would no longer be a formal market mechanism enabling shareholders to trade their ordinary shares on NEX or any other recognised market or trading exchange. No dealing and settlement arrangements will be in place following the Withdrawal. Following the Withdrawal, the NEX Exchange Growth Market - Rules for Issuers (NEX Rules) will no longer apply to the Company and it will no longer be required to comply with any of the specific corporate governance requirements for companies admitted to trading on NEX. The Company will, however, remain subject to the City Code on Takeovers and Mergers. Procedure for withdrawal from NEX Under the Rule 81 of NEX Rules, the Company must announce an intention to withdraw its securities from NEX, with any withdrawal of shares ordinarily being conditional on approval at a general meeting by shareholders representing 75 per cent of the votes cast in respect of each class of securities. However, NEX has granted the Company a derogation from the requirement to convene a general meeting and obtain shareholder approval for the Withdrawal on the grounds that the Company has received irrevocable undertakings from shareholders representing 94.17% of shares eligible to vote at a general meeting of the Company, that they would vote in favour of any resolution to approve the Withdrawal. The shareholders who have given these undertakings are as follows: Shareholder Number of ordinary shares % of issued share capital Ordinary shares Share Capital Alan Tadd 9,316,700 59.58 % Greenbrook Industries Ltd Retirement Benefits Scheme 3,858,845 24.68 % Oliver Tadd 1,550,000 9.91 % Total 14,725,545 94.17 % Accordingly, the Company is simply required to give 20 business days' notice of the intended Withdrawal, which will take effect from the close of business on 10 April 2019. This announcement includes inside information as defined by Article 7 of the Market Abuse Regulation No. 596/2014 and is disclosed in accordance with the Company's obligations under Article 17 of those Regulations. The directors of the Company accepts responsibility for the contents of this announcement. Enquiries: Sandal Plc 01279 422022 Alan Tadd, CEO Oliver Tadd, Director www.sandal-plc.co.uk Cairn Financial Advisers LLP David Coffman/Jo Turner 020 7213 0880 Notes to editors: Sandal plc commenced business in 1996 and joined NEX in March 2015. The Company designs, develops and manufactures consumer electronics products. Its business is divided into two distinct product groups, PowerConnections, a long established wholesaler and reseller of a successful and patented range of converter plugs and power cables, and Energenie, which sells a newer product range that includes energy saving products, portable charging devices and the Energenie MiHome range of products aimed at the "Home Automation" and "Internet of Things" marketplace. The range of Energenie MiHome home automation products makes the remote operation of everyday household appliances and energy monitoring more accessible through integration with smartphone and tablet connectivity. The Energenie MiHome range is also integrated with the major players in the home automation market including Google Nest and Amazon Echo. Energenie MiHome products are available through a number of mainstream retailers including Amazon, Robert Dyas, Target Components, Grahams Plumbers Merchants, Plumb Nation, Box.co.uk, Screwfix and Wickes and most recently wholesale channels via Denmans. In addition, Energenie also offers Eco and electrical, travel and energy saving products for homes and offices, reducing energy usage. It has store listings for its current products with several large retailers including Amazon, Argos, and Screwfix. PowerConnections is a supplier to customers in the UK and abroad, of single-phase electrical connection products. The products are manufactured in three partner factories in the Far East and have distributors worldwide for its range of patented converter plugs. The Company's product portfolio consists of International Power Leads, Rewireable Plugs, Converters and Connectors. These products are stocked in the Far East, Australia and UK. ORLANDO, Fla., March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- V oximplant , the serverless cloud communications platform and one of five finalists for the Best Application of AI at Enterprise Connect 2019 , today announced that a new version of Smartcalls , its popular service for easily creating and executing outbound call campaigns. Released today, the new capabilities of Smartcalls make the service an all-in-one tool for call process automation. Smartcalls now supports inbound call processing for businesses and marketers building smart IVRs using the Smartcalls visual editor , in addition to the previously available tools for outbound call campaign automation. Voximplant is making its Smartcalls announcement ahead of Enterprise Connect, the leading conference and exhibition for unified communications and collaboration in North America. A cloud platform for developing real-time communication web and mobile apps with full control over voice and video, Voximplant is one of just five finalists vying for Enterprise Connects Best Application of AI award. More information on how Voximplant leverages AI is here . The Best of Enterprise Connect awards recognize stand-out companies making a significant impact on the enterprise communications and collaboration industry, said Michelle Burbick, Program Coordinator, Enterprise Connect. This years finalists are truly representative of the most innovative companies influencing the future of this space through their cutting-edge technological advancements and initiatives. Smartcalls is a solution built for sales and marketing departments, and offers API integration with third party services including CRMs. It delivers capabilities including real-time speech recognition and speech synthesis (powered by WaveNet from Google) that enables businesses to build human-friendly and completely customizable communication scenarios. Smartcalls also supports SIP protocols for integration into existing telephony infrastructures, whenever a company needs to forward a customer call to a live agent. With todays release, Smartcalls becomes an all-in-one tool for call processing automation you can make an outbound call according to your business requirements and connect the caller ID used for the call to a scenario that will be handling inbound calls, said Alexey Aylarov, CEO of Voximplant. Scenarios are created in an easy-to-use, no-programming-necessary visual editor to simplify and speed up the whole process. Natural language processing services like Google Dialogflow can also be used to make more advanced scenarios. Setting up global business communications should be a straightforward, painless process. That's why Smartcalls chose Voxbone , the leading Communications as a Service (CaaS) provider, to be their infrastructure voice partner. As a result, businesses will be able to start using Smartcalls immediately from 65+ countries around the world. Smartcalls customers will also benefit from Voxbones fully compliant, fully dependable voice infrastructure, and the best-in-class connectivity and scalability of the Voxbone network. With Voximplants Smartcalls and Voxbone, any business can build and operate a global contact center within minutes, said CEO of Voxbone, Itay Rosenfeld. We give you access to the massive infrastructure and functionality of a large-scale contact center solution, with no upfront investment or coding required. Smartcalls + Voxbone makes your business local anywhere you wish to expand, and scales elastically no matter how fast you grow. At Enterprise Connect, Voximplant will be available for demos of Smartcalls as well as the more developer-centric Voximplant platform at booth #2027. Voxbone will be at booth #1111. About Voximplant Voximplant empowers web and mobile apps with voice and video communication through its cloud platform. The company from the founders of the popular click-to-call service Zingaya allows developers to build applications faster and more easily by taking care of the complex infrastructure and technologies all too common when adding audio and visual communication into applications. About Smartcalls Smartcalls is a smart and flexible web service that makes it simple to create outbound call scenarios and campaigns. Smartcalls features an easy-to-use visual editor that requires no technical or other special skills, as well as powerful speech synthesis and recognition technologies. About Voxbone Voxbone makes it unbelievably simple to set up and manage global business communications. Our cloud voice and messaging services are available on-demand and allow businesses to fully engage their customers in the markets that matter most to their business. A global company representing 34 nationalities, Voxbone has offices in Austin, Brussels, Dublin, Hong Kong, Iasi, London, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Voxbones happy customers include: Uber, Skype, Zoom, 8x8, Dialpad, Orange Business Services, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, NICEinContact and Serenova. Check out our website at www.voxbone.com or visit us on Facebook , Twitter and LinkedIn . About Enterprise Connect For more than 28 years, Enterprise Connect has been the leading conference and exhibition for enterprise Unified Communications and Collaboration in North America. Enterprise Connect brings corporate IT decision makers together with the industry's vendors, analysts and consultants to focus on the issues central to enterprise networks and communications. Enterprise Connect owns and produces No Jitter, ( nojitter.com ), providing daily blogging and analysis of enterprise communications, and it also serves the community with a weekly email newsletter, research surveys and a Webinar Series. For more information, visit enterpriseconnect.com/orlando . Enterprise Connect is organized by UBM, which in June 2018 combined with Informa PLC to become a leading B2B information services group and the largest B2B Events organizer in the world. To learn more and for the latest news and information, visit www.ubm.com and www.informa.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/353c009b-7f41-443f-b77a-6466572a0927 13.03.2019: Borregaard ASA ("Borregaard", OSE ticker: BRG) Reference is made to the stock exchange notice of 1 March 2019 where Borregaard announced the intent to repurchase up to 300,000 of its outstanding common stock. Borregaard has today purchased 15,000 own shares through broker at an average price of NOK 85.70 per share. After this transaction Borregaard holds a total of 292,996 own shares, representing 0.29% of total shares outstanding. Contact: Lotte Kvinlaug, Investor Relations Officer, +47 922 86 909 This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to Section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act. NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Greystone, a leading commercial real estate lending, investment and advisory company, announced that it has expanded its full-service multifamily investment sales and advisory capabilities in Texas with the addition of an experienced Dallas-based team led by Todd Franks. Operating as the joint venture Greystone Investment Sales Group, the team includes 12 advisors with extensive experience in multifamily, single-family rental portfolios, seniors housing, student housing, and land sales transactions. The team will leverage a powerful combination of Greystones comprehensive financial platform and Greystone Investment Sales Groups multifamily sales expertise. Recently recognized as a D Magazine Power Broker, Mr. Franks has built an active and respected advisory group in Dallas. He previously founded the Dallas-based SVN | Investment Sales Group operation, ranking in the Top 5 of the companys advisors globally in 2015, with that office location recognized as the #1 in the Southwest Region in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Prior to that, Mr. Franks represented The Cantrell Company and was recognized as an all-time top producer. Mr. Franks and his team have driven over $1.4 billion in sales transactions. With the niche we have built based on submarket knowledge and off-market intelligence, adding Greystones unmatched suite of lending platforms makes our advisory offering incomparable in the Texas market and beyond, said Mr. Franks. Expanding across Texas into Dallas / Fort Worth fulfills a major strategic priority for us in teaming up with the very best in the Southwest to complement our growing national platform of multifamily advisors, said Jim McDevitt, President, Greystone Real Estate Advisors. Todd has proven he is a leader in the market, and we are thrilled to have him and his team on board. In 2018, Greystone welcomed the National Apartment Advisors team in Houston to its sales advisory network. About Greystone Greystone is a real estate lending, investment and advisory company headquartered in New York. Its Multifamily Real Estate Advisors team provides services in sales, acquisitions, and a full spectrum of advisory services including debt, equity, acquisition, and investment sales to multifamily owners and investors of affordable and market rate housing. For more information, visit www.greycoadvisors.com . PRESS CONTACT: Karen Marotta Greystone 212-896-9149 Karen.Marotta@Greyco.com Toronto, ON, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Canadian Credit Union Association (CCUA) announced today that Steinbach Credit Union (Manitoba) is the first credit union in Canada to launch Interac Debit on Samsung Pay. Steinbach Credit Union members can now make purchases directly from their chequing or savings accounts at retailers displaying the Interac Flash logo using eligible Samsung devices. Samsung Pay offers Canadian credit union members yet another digital payment option that is simple, secure and convenient, said Martha Durdin, President and CEO, CCUA. The Canadian credit union sector strives to provide the latest mobile payment options to meet the evolving needs of our members. Samsung Pay is a collaborative development involving some of Canadas largest credit unions. CCUA partnered with Interac Corp. and Everlink Payment Services to deliver Interac Debit on Samsung Pay. It provides consumers with a seamless mobile payment solution that is designed for: Simplicity: To make a payment on Samsung Pay, users can simply swipe up, scan their fingerprint, iris or input their four-digit PIN, or tap To make a payment on Samsung Pay, users can simply swipe up, scan their fingerprint, iris or input their four-digit PIN, or tap Security: Samsung Pay uses three different levels of security to enable secure payments - Fingerprint Authentication, tokenization and Samsung KNOX, Samsung's defense-grade mobile security platform Samsung Pay uses three different levels of security to enable secure payments - Fingerprint Authentication, tokenization and Samsung KNOX, Samsung's defense-grade mobile security platform Convenience: Users can pay at retailers displaying the Interac Flash logo. Other Canadian credit unions involved in the development of Samsung Pay for credit unions include: Samsung Pay is available for download from the Samsung Apps Galaxy Store and Google Play. More information is also available at http://pages.samsung.com/ca/samsungpay/English/ About Canadian Credit Union Association (CCUA) Canadian Credit Union Association is the national trade association for Canadas credit unions and caisses populaires outside Quebec. These financial institutions offer a full-range of retail banking services to over 5.6 million Canadians. Collectively Canadas 240 credit unions and caisses populaires generate over $6.5 billion in economic impact, are leaders in small business lending, and have assets of over $232.6 billion. For more information, visit www.ccua.com. BOLTON, Ontario, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Acrow Bridge , a leading international bridge engineering and supply company, noted today that it has been awarded the contract to furnish a single-lane permanent replacement of the Magaguadavic River Bridge No. 1 in St. George, New Brunswick. The crossing is one of several in the town, where the river meets the Bay of Fundy. The replacement project is part of a larger New Brunswick bridge infrastructure investment announced in January 2018 for the construction, replacement and restoration of numerous structures in the region. It is anticipated the investment will contribute about $500 million in GDP across the province through 2021-22 and will support about 1,600 jobs annually. The Acrow bridge will be 54.9 meters (180 feet) long and 4.2 meters (13.8 feet) wide, with an epoxy aggregate-coated steel deck and a CL-625 ONT Truck load rating. The design of the multi-level bridge is quite unusual as the vehicle deck will be located on the top level, with a separate bottom level carrying a water main and sewage pipe. The structure will also be equipped with a 1.5 meter (5 feet) wide sidewalk erected outside the bridge at the top level. With installations across the province dating back to 1972, Acrow bridges have proven themselves as effective, permanent infrastructure solutions, said Ken Scott, President, Acrow Ltd. Like every Acrow product, this bridge will be constructed entirely of high strength galvanized steel and designed and built to withstand the harshest elements. Bill Killeen, CEO of Acrow Bridge, added, Our prefabricated modular steel bridges are an ideal choice for cost-effective and rapid permanent bridging needs. Our customizable components can be engineered for many different applications, are virtually maintenance-free and have an estimated life span of 75-100 years. Acrows structure was purchased by the New Brunswick Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (NB-DTI), the project owner, and CBCL Ltd. is providing design engineering services. The contract for installation has not yet been awarded. The timeframe for the bridge construction is anticipated to be May October 2019. About Acrow Bridge Acrow Bridge has been serving the transportation and construction industries for more than 60 years with a full line of modular steel bridging solutions for vehicle, rail, military and pedestrian use. Acrows extensive international presence includes its leadership in the development and implementation of bridge infrastructure projects in over 80 countries, covering Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East. For more information, please visit www.acrow.com . DALLAS, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via OTC PR WIRE -- Alternet Systems, Inc. (USOTC: ALYI) (ALYI) is getting noticed for its hemp energy storage initiative. The legalization of recreation marijuana last year in Canada has moved cannabis into the investment news limelight. The legalization of hemp farming in the United States under the 2018 Farm Act is likely to be an even bigger market mover. Cannabis, particularly hemp has far more commercial value than recreational or medicinal uses. ALYIs hemp energy storage is one of the many commercial opportunities for legal hemp. Here are some of the recent articles on ALYIs hemp energy storage technology initiative: ENERGY STORAGE IS BEING MADE CHEAPER WITH HEMP WASTE US LICENSE TO GROW HEMP TO FUEL HEMP ENERGY STORAGE RESEARCH FACILITY GLOBAL ENERGY STORAGE MARKET FORECAST TO RISE FROM FIVE GIGAWATT-HOURS LAST YEAR TO MORE THAN 300 GW HOURS BY 2030 The company recently announced securing acreage in New York to grow and house the facility where hemp bast will be harvested for conducting further research within in the companys hemp energy storage imitative. ALYI launched its hemp energy storage initiative late last year when the company brought Clarkson University Professor David Mitlin on board to lead a hemp energy storage initiative. Mitlin has successfully used hemp bast - the fiber left over from processing hemp - to construct carbon nanosheets that compete with, and in some respects, outperform the supercapacitor performance derived from more typical graphene nanosheets. Mitlin holds a US patent for his proprietary hemp energy storage technology. Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecasts that the global energy storage market will double six times from 2017 levels to 2030, from than 5 gigawatt-hours last year, to more than 300 gigawatt-hours and 125 gigawatts of capacity by 2030. An estimated $103 billion will be invested in energy storage over that time period. ALYI management believes hemp energy storage is a strong candidate for receiving a fair portion of the anticipated investment. Research Report Speculative Buy Rating And $0.09 Target PPS Goldman Small Cap Research recently issued a research report update on the Company. The report confirms a 'speculative-buy' rating with a target price-per-share of $0.09. The report provides an in-depth overview and analysis of Alternet's new strategy, new orders, and upcoming milestones. To view the report, along with disclosures and disclaimers, visit https://www.alternetsystemsinc.com/research-update or http://www.GoldmanResearch.com. ALYI is focused on offering varied, environmentally sustainable, energy storage solutions for targeted markets, including consumer electric vehicles and military applications. The first product category is lithium battery-powered motorcycles, to be followed by motorbikes. ALYI has recently announced $2 million in orders of its Revolt Electric Motorcycles. ALYI also recently brought Clarkson University Professor David Mitlin on board to lead a hemp energy storage initiative. Mitlin has successfully used hemp bast - the fiber left over from processing hemp - to construct carbon nanosheets that compete with, and in some respects, outperform the supercapacitor performance derived from more typical graphene nanosheets. Mitlin holds a US patent for his proprietary hemp energy storage technology. Disclaimer/Safe Harbor: This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Litigation Reform Act. The statements reflect the Company's current views with respect to future events that involve risks and uncertainties. Among others, these risks include the expectation that any of the companies mentioned herein will achieve significant sales, the failure to meet schedule or performance requirements of the companies' contracts, the companies' liquidity position, the companies' ability to obtain new contracts, the emergence of competitors with greater financial resources and the impact of competitive pricing. In the light of these uncertainties, the forward-looking events referred to in this release might not occur. For more information, please visit: http://www.alternetsystemsinc.com Alternet Systems, Inc. Contact: Randell Torno info@lithiumip.com +1-800-713-0297 A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/624fec1a-22f7-4262-87d6-0c55625fdda1 London, UK, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Private Military Security Services Market Report 2019-2029 evaluates current amount of expenditure for different types of services provided by both private military and security companies. The demand for private military security services by modern militaries and commercial companies is increasing at a substantial rate. In addition, the major private military security services contracts will have a major effect on the size of the Australian, Chinese, and Indian markets. India and China will consistently expand the size of their private security forces across the next decade. For free sample pages on this report please click on: https://www.visiongain.com/report/private-military-security-services-market-report-2019-2029/ The visiongain report analyst commented National governments and commercial companies ever-greater demands for private military security services for providing protection against criminal and terrorist activities and alter the private military security services market in the next decade. Growing demand for private military security from emerging markets, increased interest of both public and private actors for contracting out their security related services worldwide, armed conflicts changed nature, increased armed forces expeditionary operations, technological advancements and layoffs of experienced military personnel are some of the key factors which will positively impact the market. The global private military security services market will grow at a substantial rate during the forecast period. If you are interested in a more detailed overview of this report, please send an e-mail to sara.peerun@visiongain.com or call her on +44 207 549 9987 Leading companies featured in the report include Academi (A Constellis Company), Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI International, DynCorp International LLC., Erinys International, Garda World Security Corporation, G4S plc., International Intelligence Limited, KBR Inc., Prosegur, The Brinks Company, Securitas AB, and Unity Resources Group. NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MagnaCare, a leader in health plan management services, announced today that it has entered into an agreement with BeaconLBS, a leader in point-of-care decision support technology, to bring BeaconLBS Physician Decision Support (PDS) solution to its network of physician and laboratory providers. MagnaCare will leverage the PDS technology to provide physicians with a critical tool to help improve the cost and quality of lab testing and help ensure that MagnaCare members continue to have timely, cost-effective access to the care they require. BeaconLBS is the largest laboratory benefit management company with point-of-care decision support technology in the U.S., servicing over eight million members in 50 states. With new advances in laboratory testing, especially for genetic tests, clinicians often find it challenging to select the right tests for their patients. Recent estimates suggest that between 20 25% of genetic tests ordered by physicians are inappropriate for patients conditions, resulting in unnecessary costs and delays in care. The BeaconLBS PDS technology interfaces with electronic health records and lab ordering systems, providing physicians with convenient access to evidence-based guidelines along with price transparency, supporting their selection of the most appropriate test and laboratory facility for each patient. By optimizing lab ordering for genetic and molecular testing, physicians can order tests with greater confidence, said Dr. Bartley Bryt, Chief Medical Officer for MagnaCare. They can order the most appropriate test for the patient and from a lab that has passed a set of high quality indicators for that test. The BeaconLBS PDS platform will also help us reduce costs for our clients and members and provide better care for patients through faster and more accurate testing. The BeaconLBS PDS platform is another example of how MagnaCare is constantly innovating to lower costs and improve care. BeaconLBS provides physicians throughout the country with decision support tools to help them make better decisions, improve quality, and lower costs through the selection of the right test for their patients. Physicians who use the BeaconLBS PDS platform have improved test referrals to high quality labs by up to 28%, improved test selection quality by up to 61%, and lowered patient out-of-pocket costs by up to 59%. BeaconLBS is committed to supporting physicians in the test and laboratory facility selection process with our unique point-of-care technology platform, said Paul Conlin, President, BeaconLBS. One of our technology platforms many strengths is its compatibility with existing lab ordering technologies. We look forward to working with MagnaCares extensive network of providers and its members to improve the quality and affordability of advanced laboratory testing. MagnaCare plans to begin making the BeaconLBS PDS solution available to its network of providers later this year. About MagnaCare For more than 25 years, MagnaCare has been building health communities together with Taft-Hartley funds, TPAs, carriers, and workers compensation and no-fault payors in the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut tri-state area. Its broad, wholly owned network, full health plan management services, comprehensive in-house medical management, and leading outcomes-based casualty solutions offer the ultimate flexibility and customization that help customers control health care costs, improve health, and achieve exceptional value. MagnaCare is a division of Brighton Health Plan Solutions , LLC. About BeaconLBS BeaconLBS, a wholly owned subsidiary of LabCorp (NYSE: LH), is the largest laboratory benefit management company with point-of-care decision support technology in the U.S., servicing over eight million members in 50 states. Its modern laboratory decision support technology is conveniently available to physicians through existing office EHR and lab ordering workflows. NEW YORK, NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As first reported by Broadway.com, the Cancer Support Community (CSC) will recognize Broadway star and acute myeloid leukemia (AML) survivor Ashley Park with the first-ever Marin Mazzie Award for Empowerment at its Spring Celebration slated for Tuesday, April 16 in New York City. In 2016, Mazzie and her husband, Broadway star Jason Danieley, received CSCs Founders Award for Empowerment. After Mazzie passed away last year from ovarian cancer, CSC renamed the award after the three-time Tony nominee to recognize notable public figures who use their platform to both advocate for and inspire people who are living with cancer and their loved ones. Danieley will present the award to Park, a Tony nominee for her performance in "Mean Girls," at the ceremony. Since Parks diagnosis of AML at the age of 15 and her remission after eight months of hospitalization, she has been an advocate for the cancer community, especially in her support for those living with cancer in the Broadway community. Ashley Parks courage in sharing her cancer experience with the world has inspired hope for patients and families on a global scale, said Kim Thiboldeaux, CEO of the Cancer Support Community, a global nonprofit that provides $50 million in free services to patients and their loved ones each year. We are honored to recognize Ashley, who has such a strong relationship with Jason and had such fondness and admiration for Marin. For those of us who were fortunate to know Marin and experience her powerhouse talent and immeasurable strength, seeing Jason present this honor to Ashley will be both emotional and inspiring. Park and Mazzies paths crossed when they performed together in the revival of The King and I. Ashley Parks story, compassion, and wild good sense of humor immediately endeared her to Marin - cut from a similar cloth. That and Ashleys quiet thoughtfulness, during their shared time together, immediately brought her to mind when CSC asked me who should be the inaugural recipient of the Marin Mazzie Empowerment Award, Danieley said. I am certain she will continue down the path of light and love as Marin would have herself. It is honor enough that I had the privilege of experiencing Marin's deep generosity, her vibrant humor, her passionate spirit and incomprehensible strength each performance during her triumphant return to the Broadway stage, her home, in THE KING AND I, Park said. As a long-time fan of Marin, I was profoundly in awe to be in her fierce embrace and glow each show. As a cancer survivor, I was immensely humbled and moved that I could be there for Marin as a support during that transitional chapter of her journey. Marin Mazzie has always been breathtaking. So when her dear Jason first asked if Id accept the inaugural Marin Mazzie Award for Empowerment from the Cancer Support Community, I lost all ability to breathe and had no words. There aren't enough words to express how much this means to me. All I can say is that I will continue to be a champion of life, love and joyful spirit, like my friend Marin. For more information about the Cancer Support Community, please visit www.CancerSupportCommunity.org. Helsinki, 13 March 2019 Ferratum Oyj (ISIN: FI4000106299, WKN: A1W9NS) (Ferratum or the Group) is pleased to announce that Fitch Ratings (Fitch) has assigned the Group a Long-Term Issuer Default Rating (LTIDR) of BB-/Outlook Stable (Rating). The Rating is assigned at holding company level on the basis of Ferratums consolidated financial statements, which include Ferratum Bank p.l.c. In view of this and with Ferratum being majority owned by Jorma Jokela, Group founder and CEO, no institutional support was factored into the Rating. Consequently, Ferratums LTIDR is based on Fitchs standalone assessment of the Group. The Rating is in addition to the Groups credit rating of BBB+ from Creditreform Rating AG, a German rating agency. Dr. Clemens Krause, Chief Financial Offer and Chief Risk Officer, commented: "We are delighted to receive a credit rating assessed to international statistical standards by one of the top three global credit rating agencies. The rating reflects Fitchs favourable assessment of Ferratums through-the-cycle profitability, capital adequacy and approach to risk provisioning for a diversified franchise of online and mobile consumer loans spanning more than 20 countries." Fitchs full-length rating report, including the key assumptions and sensitivities upon which the rating is derived, can be found on Ferratums website: https://www.ferratumgroup.com/ With this release, Ferratum Oyj publishes inside information. About Ferratum Group: Ferratum Group is an international provider of mobile banking and digital consumer and small business loans, distributed and managed by mobile devices. Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, Ferratum has expanded rapidly to operate in 25 countries across Europe, Africa, South and North America and the Asia-Pacific region. As a pioneer in digital and mobile financial services technology, Ferratum is at the forefront of the digital banking revolution. Ferratum's mobile bank, launched in 2016, is an innovative mobile banking platform offering a range of banking services, including real time digital payments and transfers, within a single app. It is currently available in five European markets. Ferratum has approximately 1.9 million active and former customers who have an account or have been granted one or more loans in the past (as at 30 September 2018), of which over 799,000 customers have an open Mobile Bank account or an active loan balance in the last 12 months. Ferratum Group is listed on the Prime Standard of Frankfurt Stock Exchange under symbol FRU. For more information, visit www.ferratumgroup.com . Contacts: Ferratum Group Dr. Clemens Krause Chief Financial Officer & Chief Risk Officer T: + 49 30 921005844 E: clemens.krause@ferratum.com Ferratum Group Emmi Kyykka Head of Group Communications & Investor Relations T: +41 79 940 6315 E: emmi.kyykka@ferratum.com Ferratum Group Paul Wasastjerna Head of Fixed Income Investor Relations T: + 358 40 7248247 E: paul.wasastjerna@ferratum.com UK / European media enquiries : Smithfield, A Daniel J Edelman Company Alex Simmons | Brett Jacobs T: +44 20 3047 2543 | +44 20 3047 2537 E: asimmons@smithfieldgroup.com E: bjacobs@smithfieldgroup.com OCP Global Summit, San Jose, CA, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Open Networking experts STORDIS today announced the launch of two bare-metal switches powered by the fully programmable Barefoot Tofino ASIC. An industry first, the STORDIS Advanced Programmable Switches (APS) offer comprehensive 1588v2 time synchronisation support, as well as providing more powerful processing, higher memory and greater in-built storage capacity. Next generation networking functionality is delivering significant, and often critical, business advantage across an increasing number of markets. The implementation of the open source P4 programming language on Barefoots Tofino networking ASIC, is sparking a new boom in open networking innovation, allowing industry groups, system integrators and end-users to engineer significant new advantage for themselves. STORDIS new, more powerful and feature-rich bare-metal switches have been built in response to previously unmet customer requirements across a variety of markets including telecoms, finance, media and broadcast, cybersecurity, industry and academia (see the packed Supporting Quotes: section below). After delivering P4 trainings for Barefoot in Europe and speaking to customers, we found that users needed a more powerful hardware platform to capture the full benefits of the Tofino ASICs programmable architecture. Support for time synchronization is also essential to engineer solid business advantage across a range of industries, states Alexander Jeffries, CEO of STORDIS. These are the first switches to go beyond simply swapping out the chipset in a standard OTS bare-metal switch. We have put a lot of thought and research into building a broader, open hardware architecture that supports real-world use cases. And we will be releasing the full switch specifications and design documents to the Open Compute Project. Support for 1588v2 time synchronisation on the STORDIS APS range is also designed to enable users to program more advanced (often application-level) functionality into the network. For example, accurate time stamping enables more efficient 5G features development in Telco environments, IP Studio and live digital broadcast for media companies, and can be essential for accuracy within financial trading environments. Both switches are available from early April from STORDIS. STORDIS APS Hardware Specifications Alongside support for boundary and transparent clock time synchronization, both new switch models sport an 8-core CPU, 128GB SSD and 32GB of RAM. The 25G platform (see below) is also the only Tofino based switch to have 1G support, delivering backward-compatibility that is essential in many markets. The first two models in the STORDIS APS series are: BF2556X-1T: 48x25G/8x100G, supporting speeds of 1, 10, 25, 40, 50 and 100G, based on the Barefoot Tofino 2.0Tbps ASIC, 8-core CPU, 128GB SSD, 32GB RAM, 1588v2 support, 1 x 1PPS SMA connector, 2x SFP SDN controller ports, support for 1G on ports 1 to 16 BF6064X-T: 64x100G, support speeds of 10, 25, 40, 50 and 100G, based on the Barefoot Tofino 6.4Tbps ASIC, 8-core CPU, 128GB SSD, 32GB RAM, 1588v2 support, 2x RJ45 SDN controller ports The switches come with AC and DC power supply options, and a 12V DC pass through module (PTM) is also available for the use in OCP racks. Built for Software Defined Networking The switches also incorporate two dedicated SDN controller ports, allowing for easy and redundant integration into a broader, unified SDN architecture. With the flexibility of the programmable Barefoot Tofino ASIC using P4, customers can develop bespoke, specific, business-orientated data-plane code, which can be controlled through open controllers such as ONOS. STORDIS Training and Development Services STORDIS already provides P4 trainings for existing Barefoot customers across Europe, and the company is supporting its own switching hardware with an extensive range of complementary services. Customers will have access to a range of training options around P4 development and other aspects of open networking. In addition, STORDIS is offering expert consultancy and supportive development resources for customers taking on their own in-house development projects. The company is also keen to ensure that open networking does not have to mean Do-it-Yourself. STORDIS is offering bespoke development as a service, giving customers without a dedicated network development team equal access to the benefits of custom network functionality and open networking innovation. NOS/Software Options The new STORDIS switches will support a range of commercial switch operating systems including Kaloom and NoviFlow, with further options to be announced in the near future. In addition, there is support for open source options, such as Open Network Linux (ONL), SONiC and Ubuntu. There is also support for the Open Networking Foundations Stratum project (based on ONL). This choice of switch operating systems allows users to make use of the Tofinos capabilities, providing access to production-ready functionality for dedicated use cases, while STORDIS is providing expert services for customising open source operating systems and bespoke P4 dataplane development. OCP Recognition Continuing STORDIS support for the open networking community, the design documentation of both switches has been submitted to the Open Compute Project (OCP) with the intention of receiving the OCP Accepted recognition. The STORDIS APS line will be the first Tofino-based switches submitted to OCP with time synchronisation support. In addition, a 2U OCP rackmount shelf will also be submitted to receive the OCP Accepted recognition mark. This will be the first 2U switch rackmount shelf submitted to the OCP. Summary of unique facts: First bare-metal switch based on Barefoots Tofino with 1588v2 time-synchronisation support First Tofino switches with highly powerful CPUs, larger SSD and sufficient memory to make best use of the Tofinos capabilities First Tofino-based switches with dedicated SDN controller ports First Tofino-based switches with 1588v2 support to be submitted to the OCP First Tofino-based switch supporting speeds from 1-100GbE Supporting Quotes: Open Networking Community: "We're pleased to see STORDIS embracing the Next-Generation SDN movement, said Timon Sloane, Vice President of Marketing & Ecosystem for the Open Networking Foundation. NG-SDN is poised to enable an unprecedented wave of innovation in networking by supporting full lifecycle management and complete software control of network forwarding behavior, all while enabling plug-and-play interchangeability of components. NG-SDN is helping to create a white-box ecosystem of networking switches, and we're very pleased to see STORDIS stepping up as an early proponent to help build out this ecosystem with their support of the ONF's Stratum thin switch OS on their new Barefoot Tofino powered switches." The STORDIS switches make available new features and technology with a very comprehensive support package. STORDIS decision to support ONL, SONIC, Stratum and programmability with P4 aligns with the needs and opportunities we see in the market. Customers will also value having OCP-recognized switches with this level of support. said Bill Carter, Chief Technology Officer at Open Compute Project Foundation Telecommunications: At KPN, we believe Open, fully programmable switches enable us to deliver extremely competitive wireline, mobile and cloud hosting services, said Michel Geensen Principal Architect, in the CTO Office at KPN. With these new state of the art, OCP-Accepted switches, offering Stratum and ONL support, STORDIS has created important building blocks for Telcos like KPN. This is an example of a development which is expected to help KPN to accelerate the rate of innovation while bringing down the cost. 1588 time sync is a standout feature for the STORDIS APS range. For SKT the ability to deliver a high precision time reference from a white-box network packet broker (NPB), offers an incredibly valuable combination, says Junho Suh, Research Engineer at Software R&D, SK Telecom. Financial Trading: The STORDIS Advanced Programmable Switches are ideally suited for sophisticated financial trading applications through their full programmability. Actant provides trading solutions for financial firms trading on the worlds major derivatives and stock exchanges. The switches enables reduced load, reduced latency and fewer hops for trading applications by proprietary filtering and directing multicast traffic besides others, what makes them a very interesting option for us and our customers, states Daniel Ekengren, COO at Actant. Security: The STORDIS Tofino based switch provides us with the unique ability to create sophisticated custom grooming rules for our applications in the security domain, stated Craig Renfrew, System Architect, Illuminate Technologies. Academia: From the perspective of a researcher, P4 programmable ASICs are one of the most interesting developments in the field of networking. We are happy to see that STORDIS launched their Advanced Programmable Switch series. These switches offer a unique set of features and performance that can enable a wealth of new applications, states Robert Soule, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Informatics at the Universita della Svizzera italiana (USI). Furthermore, STORDIS has been incredibly supportive of research in networking. The STORDIS Academia Program allows us to obtain the latest technical advances at a price point academics and researchers can afford. Networking: "The Barefoot Tofino series of P4-programmable Ethernet switch ASICs are setting the standard for high-performance and scalable networking solutions. Tofino is being adopted across the industry in use cases ranging from intelligent packet processing interconnects enabling Computational Networking to standard Top-of-Rack(ToR) switching with dataplane telemetry and Smart Programmable Realtime INT (SPRINT)," said Ed Doe, Chief Business Officer of Barefoot Networks, "We are pleased to see STORDIS combine their Open Networking expertise, P4 programmability and performance of Tofino to address next generation requirements of data center, financial, broadcast and telecom networks. We welcome STORDIS to our growing list of whitebox partners. We are very proud to work with STORDIS and to be able to offer their new Barefoot based switches to our customers. Kaloom offers a full suite of automated DC networking software for STORDIS new family of switches to simplify the procurement, installation and deployment for the customers, said Laurent Marchand, CEO of Kaloom. The market for OCP compliant whitebox networking switches is growing fast into a $10 B market in three years (excluding FB and MS) which is very exciting These new STORDIS switches combine with NoviFlow's NoviWare NOS for Tofino, to provide the ideal platform for demanding network application areas such as packet brokers, broadcast and cyber-security, especially with the inclusion of TpT time sync and 1G support, says Dominique Jodoin, President and CEO of NoviFlow. In particular, their powerful 8-core host CPUs and generous 32GB of RAM make them ideally suited for security applications. NoviFlow sees our partnership with STORDIS as a key strategic element of our Tofino white-box strategy, and we are thrilled that with this announcement STORDIS is expanding our mutual customers hardware options for powerful Barefoot Tofino technology! Attachment Company announcement No. 10/2019 13 March 2019 Decisions of Annual General meeting Today, at 16:00 CET, Netcompany Group A/S (Netcompany) held its annual general meeting at Industriens Hus, H.C. Andersens Boulevard 18, DK-1787 Copenhagen V, Denmark. At the Annual General Meeting, the following was approved: The annual report for 2018. Proposal for distribution of profit in accordance with the adopted annual report including that net profit be allocated to retained earnings and that no dividend payment for the financial year ended 31 December 2018 be distributed Remuneration of the Board of Directors for 2019. Re-election of Pekka Ala-Pietila, Pernille Fabricius, Juha Christensen, Bo Rygaard and Carsten Gomard as members of the Board of Directors and election of Scanes Bentley as new member of the Board of Directors. Re-election of Deloitte Statsautoriseret Revisionspartnerselskab as auditors. After the annual general meeting, a board meeting was held to appoint Chairman, Deputy Chairman and members of the committees of the Board of Directors. Following the meeting, the Board of Directors is composed as follows: Pekka Ala-Pietila, Chairman of the Board of Directors, member of Nomination and Remuneration Committee Pernille Fabricius, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors, Chairman of the Audit Committee Juha Christensen, member of the Board of Directors, Chairman of Nomination Committee and Chairman of Remuneration Committee Bo Rygaard, member of the Board of Directors, member of Audit Committee Carsten Gomard, member of the Board of Directors, member of Audit Committee Scanes Bentley, member of the Board of Directors, member of Remuneration Committee and Nomination Committee Additional information For additional information, please contact Netcompany Group A/S Thomas Johansen, CFO Tine Kosmider Boye, General Counsel +45 51 19 32 24 +45 24 91 75 33 Attachment PEMBROKE, Bermuda, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sompo International Holdings Ltd., a Bermuda-based specialty provider of property and casualty insurance and reinsurance, announced today that Mr. Steven E. Grippo has joined Sompo Pro as Senior Vice President where he will lead the units U.S. Architects & Engineers practice. The addition of Mr. Grippo to the team will further expand the companys professional liability product and service offerings. Sompo Pros Architects & Engineers practice targets products for architects, engineers, interior designers, landscape planners, agency and at-risk construction managers, in addition to writing coverage for heavy structural, soils, geotechnical and environmental risks. Mr. Grippo brings to Sompo International nearly 30 years of experience as a professional liability underwriter serving architects, engineers, design professionals and complementary areas. He reports to Daniel Wadley, Executive Vice President, Sompo Pro and is based in the companys Boston office. Sompo Pro offers a broad array of primary and excess liability coverage tailored to a range of professional services classes. In addition to architects & engineers, available coverages include errors & omissions (E&O), network security, privacy and media liability, insurance agents and brokers liability, lawyers professional liability and accountants professional liability. Mr. Wadley noted, We are thrilled to have Steve on board to further enhance our Architects & Engineers capabilities, product and service offerings and to strengthen our ability to serve clients in this important target class. Steve is a highly skilled, technical underwriter who has focused his entire career on this niche market. Mr. Grippo joins the company from AIGs Lexington Insurance Company, where he served as Product Line Manager responsible for underwriting the companys Architects & Engineers Professional Liability business in the Northeast U.S., Canada, CorRisk SME segment and National Branch Wholesale platform. He also led Lexington's Architects & Engineers Risk Management service offerings. Prior to AIG, Mr. Grippo served as Employment Practices & Fiduciary Liability Product Line Leader for Travelers Casualty & Suretys Boston office and as a Senior Bond Underwriter for Aetna Property & Casualty. Mr. Grippo holds a Master of Science degree in Finance from Northeastern University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Management from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. About Sompo International Sompo International Holdings Ltd. (Sompo International) is a global specialty provider of property and casualty insurance and reinsurance, headquartered in Bermuda. Through its operating subsidiaries, Sompo International writes agriculture, professional lines, property, marine and energy, and casualty and other specialty lines of insurance and catastrophe, property, casualty, professional lines, weather risk and specialty lines of reinsurance. Sompo International companies are wholly owned subsidiaries of Sompo Holdings, Inc., whose core business encompasses one of the largest property and casualty insurance groups in the Japanese domestic market. We maintain excellent financial strength as evidenced by the ratings of A+ (Superior) from A.M. Best (XV size category) and A+ (Strong) from Standard and Poors on our principal operating subsidiaries. Sompo Internationals headquarters are located at Waterloo House, 100 Pitts Bay Road, Pembroke HM 08, Bermuda and its mailing address is Sompo International, Suite No. 784, No. 48 Par-la-Ville Road, Hamilton HM 11, Bermuda. For more information about Sompo International, please visit www.sompo-intl.com. Contact Investor Relations Phone: +1 441 278 0988 Email: investorrelations@sompo-intl.com EDMONTON, Alberta, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- If Alberta voters want to use the next election to help turn the provincial economy around, they should be looking for candidates with a vision for the future, not a vision of the past. That was the message delivered by Albertas labour movement today as they unveiled a 12-point plan for Albertas future. This follows the release of pre-election blueprints from business groups like the Alberta Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP). This upcoming election will be all about the economy, said Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour. But business people are not the only ones with ideas. Working people have a different diagnosis of what ails our economy and a different set of prescriptions. The AFL plan starts from the premise supported by many in the oil and gas industry itself that what Alberta is currently experiencing is NOT another boom-bust cycle. The fracking-related explosion of production from the U.S. and the growing move away from fossil fuels around the world are changing everything for oil-producing jurisdictions like Alberta. The oil industry has also aggressively embraced automation, meaning that they cant be relied upon to create as many jobs as in the past, even if investment increases, said McGowan. The old policy prescriptions of corporate tax cuts and deregulation never really drove investment. But they are particularly ill-suited to the challenges we face today. And simply waiting for the next boom, as Alberta governments have done for decades, is not an option because it probably wont happen. Like it or not, our future is going to be defined by change. So, the priority needs to be getting our people and our economy ready for that change, instead of sticking our heads in the sand. So, what is the Alberta labour movements prescription to create jobs and bring the provincial economy back to robust health? Here are their top five suggestions (this full 12-point plan can be viewed by following this link: https://www.nextalberta.org/12_point_plan ): Support Albertas oil & gas industry We need to build new pipelines to access markets other than the U.S. We need to incentivize and support oil and gas companies in their efforts to reduce emissions so we can continue to access markets with increasingly stringent environmental standards. Our goal should be to make sure that Alberta is last heavy oil producer standing in an increasingly carbon constrained world. Diversify the economy We need to diversify within oil & gas, by focusing on adding value to our resources and targeting segments of the market where demand is still strong (especially petrochemicals). We need to diversify beyond oil & gas, into areas like renewable energy, manufacturing and agri-business, so we dont have all of our economic eggs in one basket. Our medium-term goal should be to make downstream diversification projects our next oil sands, in terms of jobs creation. Our longer-term goal should be to use the prosperity generated by downstream diversification as a bridge to a greener future. Invest in infrastructure The record from around the world is clear: places that invest in infrastructure thrive; those that dont, stagnate. Infrastructure is win-win: for workers and for business. We need to build resilience by building infrastructure. Invest in people (by investing in public services) High-quality services arent just good for individuals, theyre good for the economy. Education and training are the key to building a productive workforce. A healthy workforce is a productive workforce. So we need to maintain investment in health care. We need make it easier for citizens to face change by investing in new services that make life more affordable (Pharmacare, Child Care, Dental Care, Long-Term Care, Tuition). Protect Workers Rights Workers rights are an economic issue. 60 per cent of the economy is driven by consumer spending. If wages and benefits are suppressed, the economy suffers. So, if governments are concerned about the economy, they need to enhance, not erode workers rights and worker bargaining power. A fairer economy, characterized by stronger rights for workers, is a more resilient economy. English French Bombardier delivered 60 Challenger 350 aircraft in 2018, capturing 58 per cent of the super mid-size segment Challenger 350 aircraft deliveries outpaced other business jet competitors in 2018, leading the industry for the second consecutive year Challenger 300 series aircraft boast more deliveries in the last decade than any other business jet platform The Challenger 350 aircraft features an optimally-balanced wing and engine design for an exceptionally smooth ride MONTREAL, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bombardiers best-selling Challenger 350 business jet continued to outperform the competition in 2018 as the worlds most delivered business aircraft, leading in the super mid-size segment deliveries. As detailed in the General Aviation Manufacturers Associations (GAMA) annual shipment and billings report published in the first quarter of 2019, Bombardier also led deliveries in the super mid-size segment for a second consecutive year with a total of 60 Challenger 350 aircraft, representing 58 per cent of deliveries in the super mid-size segment. Bombardier also delivered 23 of its large-segment Challenger 650 business jets in 2018, and the first in a much-anticipated string of Global 7500 business jet deliveries expected to follow in 2019. The GAMA report revealed a 3.8-per-cent jump in overall business jet deliveries for the year. This is the second consecutive year that our best-selling Challenger 350 business jet has led the pack in the super mid-size segment and in business jet deliveries worldwide across all segments, says Peter Likoray, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Marketing. With its unmatched reliability and economics, unrivaled cabin comfort and ultra-smooth ride, this aircraft offers customers an unbeatable value proposition. As business jet shipments show continued strength, we are confident that the Challenger 350 business jet will remain the leading choice of knowledgeable and experienced operators across the globe. This latest success builds upon a remarkable tradition of leadership for the popular Challenger 300 platform. In the last decade, the Challenger 300 series aircraft accounted for more deliveries than any other business jet platform in the industry. The tried and true Challenger 300 aircraft series continues to maintain a brisk pace of deliveries, surpassing the 700-delivery mark worldwide in 2018. Challenger 350 aircraft: Designed with a no-compromise approach, the Challenger 350 aircraft effortlessly blends powerful performance and sleek styling to deliver a class-leading private jet experience. Industry-leading connectivity, immersive sound and ergonomically-positioned touch screens are seamlessly integrated to create an intuitive and incomparable cabin experience. Paired with impressive high-performance attributes, the Challenger 350 aircraft is designed to access challenging airfields, climb faster and cruise efficiently while providing a smooth ride. The Challenger 350 jet boasts class-defining performance, a true seats-full, tanks-full, 3,200 NM (5,926 km) range capability and can connect Los Angeles to Honolulu*, Los Angeles to Anchorage*, or Los Angeles to New York*, while delivering a smooth ride at the lowest direct operating costs in its category. About Bombardier With over 68,000 employees across four business segments, Bombardier is a global leader in the transportation industry, creating innovative and game-changing planes and trains. Our products and services provide world-class transportation experiences that set new standards in passenger comfort, energy efficiency, reliability and safety. Headquartered in Montreal, Canada, Bombardier has production and engineering sites in 28 countries across the segments of Transportation, Business Aircraft, Commercial Aircraft and Aerostructures and Engineering Services. Bombardier shares are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (BBD). In the fiscal year ended December 31, 2018, Bombardier posted revenues of $16.2 billion US. The company is recognized on the 2019 Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World Index. News and information are available at bombardier.com or follow us on Twitter @Bombardier . Notes to Editors Follow @Bombardierjets on Twitter to receive the latest news and updates from Bombardier Business Aircraft. To receive our press releases, please visit the RSS Feed section. * Under certain operating conditions. Bombardier, Challenger, Challenger 300, Challenger 350, Challenger 650 and Global 7500 are either unregistered or registered trademarks of Bombardier Inc. or its subsidiaries. For Information Anna Cristofaro Bombardier Business Aircraft 514-855-8678 anna.cristofaro@aero.bombardier.com CLEARWATER, Fla., March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On March 10th, the Clearwater Community Volunteers (CCV) Center brought 23 local women together for a Tea Party in recognition of International Womens Day. Although a day honoring women and their role in society has been celebrated in the United States since 1909, the United Nations formally adopted the celebration in 1975. Before the formal program started, there was a brief reception held so that guests could mingle and get to know each other. Six varieties of teas were made available to guests, along with a selection of fruit, finger sandwiches, pastries, clotted cream and jam. At the tea, Lynn Posyton, Community Relations Director of the Concerned Businessmens Association of Tampa Bay, delivered a talk on the importance of women in todays society and how women have their own unique role in our culture, contributing to the advancement of our civilization. The event was free to attend and open to all. Mrs. Posyton said, A woman carries the wonderful ability to bring beauty to what she touches while also being fierce at the same time as she stressed the role of women in todays society as an adaptable being, capable of leadership and motherliness. Mrs. Posyton then introduced Peggy Patrick, Manners Educator for the Florida School of Etiquette, who gave a history of having tea with friends. For example, the idea of holding a tea actually came from France before becoming immensely popular in England. Ms. Patrick then went over the proper ways to eat and drink while at a high tea, including the way one stirs milk into tea and why some people think they need to raise their pinkies when drinking tea, (ideally, you dont raise your pinkie at all). Clemence Chevrot, Director of the CCV Center, said, Humanitarian and Founder of the Scientology religion L. Ron Hubbard once wrote: The arts and skills of woman, the inspiration and creation of which she is capable and which, here and there in isolated places in our culture, she still manages to effect are her beauty, just as she is the beauty of mankind. This spirit is what we celebrated today along with women all over the world. To find out more information about the Clearwater Community Volunteers Center or to reserve the Center for your nonprofits activities please call Michael Soltero at (727) 316-5309 or email ccvcenter@ccvfl.org . About the Clearwater Community Volunteers: The Clearwater Community Volunteers have over 25 years of community service under their belt with over 150,000 families and children helped since their founding in 1992. Sponsored by the Church of Scientology Flag Service Organization, they stay true to their reputation of helping others with their new center located on the corner of Fort Harrison Avenue and Drew Street in downtown Clearwater. Michael Soltero (727) 467-6860 A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/90615d8c-4366-4650-8708-c59702214e03 MIAMI, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Adventurous luxury travelers can now book their 2021 expeditions aboard Crystal Endeavor , as reservations open today for the polar class expedition yachts full year. The journeys range from 10-28 nights, sailing expeditions of true adventure, wilderness and wildlife, and deep cultural immersions in Antarctica; Japan; the Russian Far East, Aleutian Islands and Alaska; Australia/Tasmania and New Zealand; Indonesia and the Indian Ocean; Norway and the United Kingdom; Western Europe; Canary Islands and Atlantic; and South America. Crystal Endeavors groundbreaking itinerary through the Northeast Passage announced last month and initially opened for bookings only to Crystal Society guests has received significant response from travelers with just a few suites still available. The enthusiasm from travelers surrounding Crystal Endeavor has definitely carried over from her inaugural season. The new 2021 voyages are innovative expeditions designed to showcase some of the most legendary destinations, as well as those that reach beyond typical travel lists, and some unexpected discoveries along the way, said Carmen Roig, Crystals senior vice president, marketing and sales. Crystal Endeavor will be outfitted to maximize guests explorations of the bio-diversity and varied terrain featured on the expeditions, offering scuba diving, Zodiac landings and aerial tours in select locales. On board, guest expedition guides, scientists and destination experts will lead interactive presentations that focus on the history, traditions and natural landscapes unique to each region. At all times, itineraries and ports of call are subject to the Captains discretion based on prevailing weather and ice conditions and government permits. Wildlife sightings and wilderness highlights on any itinerary cannot be guaranteed. The German-built, 20,000-GRT Crystal Endeavor will accommodate just 200 guests with elegantly casual, expansive public spaces; all-suite, butler-serviced guest rooms; Michelin-inspired dining options including Master Chef Nobu Matsuhisas Umi Uma & Sushi Bar; full-service Crystal Life Salon & Spa and state-of-the-art Fitness Center. Expedition-specific amenities and spaces will enhance guests experience, including designated mud rooms and helicopter lounge. The ship is being built at MV WERFTEN Shipyard in Stralsund, Germany. Fares from $9,549 per guest with up to $10,000 Book Now Savings per suite when booked by April 30, 2019. About Crystal Only the world-renowned Crystal Experience offers an unwavering, unparalleled standard of excellence and luxury across four distinct cruising options: Crystal Cruises, the Worlds Most Awarded Luxury Cruise Line; Crystal River Cruises, the Worlds Most Luxurious River Cruise Line; Crystal Yacht Cruises, offering boutique luxury and bold adventure in the worlds most elite harbors; and Crystal Expedition Cruises, taking Crystals acclaimed elegance to the farthest reaches of the world. Crystal has been recognized with top honors in the Conde Nast Traveler Readers Choice Awards for a record 25 years; voted Worlds Best by the readers of Travel + Leisure for 20 years; and won the Best Luxury Cruise Line by Virtuoso for four years (2014, 2015, 2016 & 2018). Crystal is proud to be a platinum partner of the advisors of ASTA. For more information and Crystal reservations, contact a travel advisor, call 888.799.2437, or visit www.crystalcruises.com . Join the hundreds of thousands who subscribe to the Crystal Insider blog, follow Crystal Cruises Facebook page and @crystalcruises on Twitter and Instagram , and engage in the conversation with #crystalcruises and #WhereLuxuryisPersonal. ### MEDIA CONTACTS: Susan Robison or Kristine McGlinchey Crystal Global Public Relations (310) 203-4305; mediarelations@crystalcruises.com Lee Edelstein, Account Director The Brandman Agency (212) 683-2442; crystal@brandmanagency.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/08eac1fa-0eaa-4585-a076-64017aa3c970 PLYMOUTH MEETING, Pa., March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AMREP Corporation (NYSE: AXR) today reported a net loss of $32,000, or $0.00 per share, for its 2019 third fiscal quarter ended January 31, 2019 compared to a net loss of $2,851,000, or $0.35 per share, for the same period of the prior year. For the first nine months of 2019, the Company had net income of $84,000, or $0.01 per share, compared to a net loss of $1,125,000, or $0.14 per share, for the same period of 2018. Net results for 2018 were unfavorably impacted by federal tax law changes enacted during the Company's third quarter of 2018 that reduced the value of the Company's deferred tax assets. Revenues were $9,340,000 and $30,663,000 for the third quarter and first nine months of 2019 compared to $10,379,000 and $30,880,000 for the same periods of the prior year. AMREP Corporation, through its subsidiaries, is primarily engaged in two business segments: its Real Estate business operated by AMREP Southwest Inc. and its subsidiaries is a major holder of land and leading developer of real estate in New Mexico and its Fulfillment Services business operated by Palm Coast Data LLC performs fulfillment and contact center services for publications, membership organizations, government agencies and other direct marketers. FINANCIAL HIGHLIGHTS Three Months Ended January 31, 2019 2018 Revenues $ 9,340,000 $ 10,379,000 Net (loss) $ (32,000 ) $ (2,851,000 ) (Loss) per share Basic and Diluted $ (0.00 ) $ (0.35 ) Weighted average number of common shares outstanding - basic 8,103,000 8,075,000 Weighted average number of common shares outstanding - diluted 8,103,000 8,075,000 Nine Months Ended January 31, 2019 2018 Revenues $ 30,663,000 $ 30,880,000 Net income (loss) $ 84,000 $ (1,125,000 ) Earnings (loss) per share Basic and Diluted $ 0.01 $ (0.14 ) Weighted average number of common shares outstanding - basic 8,095,000 8,070,000 Weighted average number of common shares outstanding - diluted 8,140,000 8,070,000 AMREP Corporations financial statements on Form 10-Q are expected to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission concurrently with this release and will be available on the Companys website (www.amrepcorp.com/SECfiles). CALGARY, Alberta, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cordy Oilfield Services Inc. (Cordy or the Company) (TSX VENTURE: CKK) announces it has accepted the resignation of Rick Manhas as Chief Operating Officer. On behalf of the Board and the Company, I would like to thank Rick for his time and dedication to Cordy over the past 2.5 years, stated Darrick Evong, Chief Executive Officer. We wish him the very best in his future endeavors. The Company will not replace the position. Additional information on Cordy is available on its website at www.cordy.ca or on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. For general information, please contact: Darrick Evong Chief Executive Officer IR@cordy.ca Phone: (403) 262-7667 READER ADVISORY 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. LOS ANGELES, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP (GPM) announces an investigation on behalf of Mueller Water Products, Inc. (Mueller Water Products or the Company) (NYSE: MWA ) investors concerning the Company and its officers possible violations of federal securities laws. If you are a shareholder who suffered a loss, click here to participate. On April 27, 2017, Mueller Water Products issued a press release entitled Mueller Water Products Reports 2017 Second Quarter Results. Therein, the Company disclosed that certain of Mueller Technologies products had been failing prematurely, resulting in a $9.8 million warranty charge. On this news, the Companys share price fell $1.43 per share, more than 11%, to close at $11.25 per share on April 28, 2017, on unusually heavy trading volume. Follow us for updates on Twitter: twitter.com/GPM_LLP . If you purchased Mueller Water Products securities, have information or would like to learn more about these claims, or have any questions concerning this announcement or your rights or interests with respect to these matters, please contact Lesley Portnoy, Esquire, of GPM, 1925 Century Park East, Suite 2100, Los Angeles, California 90067 at 310-201-9150, Toll-Free at 888-773-9224, by email to shareholders@glancylaw.com , or visit our website at www.glancylaw.com . If you inquire by email please include your mailing address, telephone number and number of shares purchased. This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules. Homeowners Payments Were Paid by Company While Installation Was Delayed by Permitting Rules OKLAHOMA CITY, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Abe Issa, CEO of Envirosolar, one of the nations leading solar installers and one of Oklahomas largest solar companies, today clarified the facts surrounding a solar panel customers complaint that was distorted in a recent news story. The customers story was recently weaponized in a news story attacking Envirosolar Powers industry leadership position in solar power, lower utility bills, and smart home integrations. Here are the facts, says Issa. As we have grown, we have learned the challenges of our mission to solarize America. While scaling the business, we continue to improve the response times in how quickly we address and fairly resolve any disputes. In this instance, the dispute apparently conflated payments for a roof-replacement loan with payments for the customers solar panels. We have been in constant communication with the homeowner throughout the solar panel installation process, and have records of each step. In our quality control welcome call, the customer stated that he understood the solar payment was separate from his payment to replace his roof. In Oklahoma, permission to operate is required from the electric utility which must inspect the installation. When his systems inspection was delayed for several months, we covered loan payments for the solar system. By the time his solar energy system was operating, it was winter with less sun and less solar generated electric, which increases with Spring and Summer. Our sales representative even helped the customer obtain a new homeowners insurance policy, and Envirosolar paid for one year of insurance as a gift. We are also assisting in the customer recovering money from the Federal Tax Credit. The Envirosolar Power brand is nationally recognized for its consistent dedication to the environmentally clean solar industrys growth and its creation of jobs. Envirosolars management team acknowledge that success hasnt come without learning curves from past experiences, now using a globally recognized independent customer experience protocol for customer satisfaction metrics and energy savings analysis reports. At Envirosolar we have successfully completed and monitor thousands of customer projects across the nation. Our customers experiences during and after a solar installation, setting proper expectations, and continually tightening operations has enabled us to grow solar energy across the country. About Envirosolar Envirosolar is one of the nations top ten rooftop solar companies. Our goal is to see America switch fifteen percent of the electricity grid to solar by 2025, and our commitment is to create a tremendous amount of jobs and a cleaner environment while continually improving our customer satisfaction rating. Media Contact: Gary Douglas gary@douglasstrategic.com 310.592.3049 NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES THUNDER BAY, Ontario, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MEXICAN GOLD CORP. (TSX-V: MEX; OTCQB: MEXGF; FRA: 4QW1) ("Mexican Gold" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it closed the final tranche of the previously announced non-brokered private placement of units in the Company (Units) at $0.20 per Unit (the Private Placement) (see the Companys last update on the Private Placement in its February 8, 2019 news release). Each Unit offered under the Private Placement consists of one common share of the Company (a Common Share) and one Common Share purchase warrant (each whole warrant, a Warrant). Each Warrant is exercisable into a Common Share at the price of $0.30 per Common Share for a period of thirty-six months, subject to the Companys option to accelerate the expiry date of the Warrants on notice to the holders of the Warrants, if at any time after four months and one day from the closing date of the Private Placement, the closing price of its Common Shares on a stock exchange in Canada is greater than $0.45 per Common Share for a period of 20 consecutive trading days (the Acceleration Option). The Company closed the first tranche of the Private Placement consisting of the sale of 10,315,000 Units on November 22, 2018. The second tranche consisted of the sale of additional 400,000 Units, making the overall gross process of the Private Placement $2,143,000. In connection with the closing of the second tranche of the Private Placement, an eligible finder was paid the cash fee of $2,100 and was issued 10,500 compensation warrants exercisable into Common Shares at $0.30 per Common Share for thirty-six months following the issuance of the compensation warrants, subject to the Companys Acceleration Option. The net proceeds from the Private Placement will be used to continue exploration on the Companys Las Minas project located in the State of Veracruz, Mexico, to make the final property payment (done), and for general working capital purposes. Securities issued pursuant to the Private Placement will be subject to a four month and one day statutory hold period. As at the date hereof there is no material fact or material change related to the Company that has not been generally disclosed. The Private Placement is subject to the final approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. About Mexican Gold Corp. Mexican Gold Corp. is a Canadian based mineral exploration company committed to building long-term value through ongoing discoveries and strategic acquisitions of prospective precious metals and copper deposits in North America. Mexican Gold is exploring the Las Minas Project, which is located in the core of the Las Minas mining district in Veracruz State, Mexico, and is host to one of the newest, under-explored skarn systems known in Mexico. For more information, please contact: Carl Hering, PhD Geology, CEO Brian E. Robertson, P. Eng., President Phone: 303-895-5241 or 807-251-1816 Fax: 807-474-4272 E-mail: info@mexicangold.ca Website at www.mexicangold.ca CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION: This news release includes certain information that may constitute "forward-looking information" under applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information can often, but not always, be identified by the use of words such as believes, anticipates, expects, estimates, may, could, would, will, or plan. These statements are based on information currently available to the Company, and the Company provides no assurance that actual results will meet managements expectations. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to, statements about the closing of the Private Placement, the future exploration results relating to the Las Minas project, and exploration plans for the Las Minas project and the exploration potential of the Las Minas project. Forward-looking information is necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including the risks identified in the Company's disclosure documents. 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. All forward-looking information contained in this press release is given as of the date hereof and is based upon the opinions and estimates of management and information available to management as at the date hereof. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law. 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. FORT SMITH, Ark., March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Walther Arms, Inc. is proud to announce a national Walther Days weekend. Over 60 dealers nationwide will have a Walther Representative in attendance to answer questions and help promote the Walther experience. Dealers across the United States will be offering different promotions, sales, free goods, raffles, and range time for the Walther line. Walther sales team will be at each of the locations listed on the website. This gives consumers across the nation the opportunity to go support their local gun shop and take advantage of the new Shoot It. Love It. Buy It. promotion on the PPQ line. All new PPQs sold during this weekend qualify for the 30-day money back guarantee. This event allows us to collectively promote our dealers and give consumers the opportunity to come in and ask any questions they have about our products, and the new Shoot It. Love It. Buy It. program, said Cody Osborn, Marketing Manager at Walther Arms, Inc. With the launch of the innovative Q5 Match Steel Frame and the 30-day money back guarantee on the PPQ family, there is a lot of buzz surrounding the Walther brand. This is a great opportunity to experience Walther handguns. National Walther Days will be held on March 15 and 16, 2019. For more information on participating dealers, visit: https://www.waltherarms.com/waltherdays/ For further information, contact: Cody Osborn cody.osborn@waltherarms.com Marketing Manager, Walther Arms, Inc. About Walther Arms, Inc: LOS ANGELES, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP (GPM) announces an investigation on behalf of Belden Inc. (Belden or the Company) (NYSE: BDC ) investors concerning the Company and its officers possible violations of federal securities laws. If you are a shareholder who suffered a loss, click here to participate. On December 3, 2018, the Company revealed that the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) is conducting an investigation concerning the material weakness reported in its form 10-k filing for the year ended December 31, 2017. On this news, shares of Belden fell $5.43 or nearly 10% to close at $50.45 on December 4, 2018, thereby injuring investors. Follow us for updates on Twitter: twitter.com/GPM_LLP . If you purchased Belden securities, have information or would like to learn more about these claims, or have any questions concerning this announcement or your rights or interests with respect to these matters, please contact Lesley Portnoy, Esquire, of GPM, 1925 Century Park East, Suite 2100, Los Angeles California 90067 at 310-201-9150, Toll-Free at 888-773-9224, by email to shareholders@glancylaw.com , or visit our website at www.glancylaw.com . If you inquire by email please include your mailing address, telephone number and number of shares purchased. This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules. AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Smart recruitment technology firm StartMonday Technology Corp. (CSE: JOB) (OTC: STMDF) (FRANKFURT: JOB) (the Company or StartMonday) adopts a global stance by refreshing its Careerchain product with a positive, consumer-centered brand positioned for global penetration - introducing Bizzy. Bizzy will be the worlds most open, efficient and reliable platform for the instant sharing of career histories. Job seekers will create a Bizzy profile to apply for jobs with just a couple of clicks on any partner job site - enter once, and apply everywhere. The Apply with Bizzy button is poised to become the global standard, propelling an increase in completed job applications for employers. The Bizzy platform launches an entire ecosystem for the job market, enabling the use of Bizzy profiles for third-party application development such as work history verification. Bizzy empowers major industry players, including job boards, staffing agencies, candidate tracking tools and other service providers with a non-competitive, decentralized approach that makes best use of blockchain technology. StartMonday CEO Ray Gibson notes, In a market worth US$200 billion per year according to Forbes, Bizzy radically improves the performance of global-enterprise players. Bizzys influence and added value will grow exponentially due to its ability to seamlessly integrate with virtually any existing job board. Language, job category, industry type simply doesnt matter - Bizzy can improve results across any platform. Currently, the Company is meeting with potential industry partners in Europe and North America and receiving very positive feedback. Further to the press release of April 12, 2018, and considering the dynamic nature of blockchain and cryptocurrency markets, the Companys management team is also deciding on the optimal legal structure for the Bizzy platform in conjunction with raising capital to fund its launch in 2019. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD "Ray Gibson" CEO & Director About StartMonday (CSE: JOB) (XFRA: JOB) (OTC: STMDF) StartMonday helps employers select better candidates, faster, with the power of 15-second video introductions. StartMonday's video-led mobile and web applications deliver a better impression of personality and customer skills, ultimately helping employers decide which candidates they should talk to first - making the process much more efficient. The Company is dedicated to building powerful tools for the Mobile Generation and is further developing its technology with an open blockchain solution for sharing career histories called Bizzy (formerly Careerchain). For more information please visit www.startmonday.com. CAUTIONARY DISCLAIMER STATEMENT: The Canadian Securities Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of this news release. NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- We are advised by KYN Capital Group Inc. (OTC: KYNC) that journalists and other readers should disregard the news release, KYN Capital Group Projects its Sales to Surpass Ten Million in 2019 for all its Companies and Subsidiaries issued March 13, 2019, over GlobeNewswire. Icelandic English Enclosed is the final agenda and proposals from the Board of Directors for the 2019 Annual General Meeting. Eimskipafelag Islands hf.'s Annual General Meeting will be held on Thursday 28 March 2019 at 16:00 (GMT) at the Company's headquarters, Korngarar 2, Reykjavik, Iceland. For further information, please visit the Company's website www.eimskip.is/investors/agm Attachment Hyundai Mobis is investing US$5 million in Chinas Deep Glint, which has key technologies regarding object recognition and behavior pattern analysis utilizing artificial intelligence. Deep Glint is one of the leading Chinese startups in computer vision technology utilizing artificial intelligence. The company is known for its world-class technology in recognizing and analyzing facial, body, and behavior patterns of individuals. The AI-based object recognition and analysis system of Deep Glint is known to be quick and accurate enough to correctly recognize a face of a target person among 1 billion people from a distance of 50m, within 1 second. This equity investment is to secure in-vehicle facial recognition and behavior pattern analysis technology based on deep learning and an advanced artificial intelligence technology. Through this, Hyundai Mobis is planning to provide personalized connected service of controlling automated selection of music or lighting that best suit the driver and passengers needs, which AI identified through recognizing facial expressions. The technical cooperation between Hyundai Mobis and Deep Glint is expected to be carried out in such areas as vehicle security authentication, driver status monitoring and an in-vehicle virtual assistant. Vehicle authentication uses facial recognition technology to authenticate the driver. If a driver is identified, the door of the vehicle will be opened or it will start. As more and more electronic devices in vehicle are being integrated, interest over vehicle security against hacking smart keys or even worse the whole security system arises. For this reason, the industry is devoting to introducing technologies of using multiple authentication methods, such as fingerprint recognition coupled with near field communication (NFC). If individuals biometrics are added under security authentication process, which Hyundai Mobis can achieve with Deep Glint, security will be much enhanced compared to replying only on physical devices. If in-vehicle cameras are used to recognize facial expressions of a driver, the condition of the driver could be monitored. This would enable the vehicle system to watch over the situation and to intervene at proper time if needed; the driver will be able to get an alert if he or she dozes off while driving, or in a medical emergency situations. In such serious situations, vehicle security system will notice and give out proper alerts ahead to drivers or passengers. Another area in which high-performance object recognition technology can be used is reading the emotions of driver and serving as a virtual personal assistant. Hyundai Mobis is planning to fully leverage the facial and behavior recognition and analysis system of Deep Glint to expand the tech cooperation to areas of V2X. Playing pleasant music and provide calming lighting for driver who seems to be tired could be an example. Hyundai Mobis is planning on active and progressive invest in startups in areas of autonomous driving sensors, camera/radar/Lidar sensor fusion, battery cells, and fuel cells in order to quickly secure core future vehicle technologies by 2021. South Africa: Young graduates to boost NW hospitality sector About 200 youth in the North West are set to make a difference in the provincial hospitality industry. The young people recently obtained their Culture, Art, Tourism, Hospitality, and Sport Sector Education and Training Authority (CATHSSETA) accredited National Certificates in Food and Beverages Services (NQF level 4), and National Certificates in Accommodation Services (NQF Level 2). They received their qualification at a graduation ceremony attended by Tourism Deputy Minister Elizabeth Thabethe. The programme was commissioned by the national Department of Tourism in 2011. The programme forms part of the National Hospitality Youth Training Programme, which is a continuous initiative that seeks to afford young people with the necessary skills that will enable them to be employable in the hospitality industry. The Deputy Minister encouraged graduates to use their qualification to change their lives for the better. This programme offers courses that are accredited, and that is done deliberately so that you can be employable or start your own businesses. This means that you have been given a chance to gain practical experience and be absorbed into the job market and the entire industry, said the Deputy Minister at the event held in Potchefstroom. The Deputy Minister encouraged the unemployed youth who are interested in the tourism industry to update their profiles within their respective municipalities. This would help them to be considered for programmes like the one offered by the department. As government this is how we can really show that progress is being made in changing the landscape and making interventions to address challenges of unemployment, poverty and inequality, she said. Tourism MEC Wendy Nelson said the skills that the graduates have acquired will be beneficial for the province. [This] shows that tourism can never be undermined, we are proud of your achievement as you have worked hard to be where you are today. "As a department, we are pleased with the outcome, because this fits with what the President has alluded to, that we have to increase the skills base in the country, said Nelson. Many of the graduates have already secured employment. Graduates Lineo Matlabe said the programme has made a lot of difference in how she views the hospitality industry. We all worked so hard because we understood what this meant for our families, our communities, our knowledge in the field and the way we see things, has really changed. Although at times it was stressful, challenging and hard we have finally pulled through, said Matlabe. - SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. GREENWICH Twenty-six students in Greenwich Public Schools were recognized for their contributions to the communiy through the hundreds of volunteer hours they offered up, the thousands of dollars they raised and the countless lives they changed. For every student, giving back is a way of life. But for two who received awards Tuesday night, the work was motivated by personal struggles. Principal John Grasso of Hamilton Avenue School broke with tradition to honor second-grader John Tembeck, who has raised more money than any other student for the schools annual Math-a-Thon to support St. Judes Research Hospital. Over the last 10 years, students have raised more than $50,000, and this year, raised $4,700. Tembeck, who also had the distinction of being the smallest person on stage, raised $2,000 over two years. The honor has a deep significance to his family, who has lost two family members to cancer. Tembeck listed off the math he loves addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and said that he loves to help people with cancer. They dont die because they have money to buy medicine, he said. The second-grader carries the name of his father, John Tembeck, who died of cancer when he was just 1 year old, his mother Sonia said. My dad had cancer. His dad had cancer. I dont want to have cancer, he said. He has his own way of processing it, his mother said, as she watched her son race for a cookie in the Galleria at Greenwich High School. Luke McQuillan of Eastern Middle School has already battled cancer, a struggle that led him to start the Holiday Gift Drive for Tweens and Teens at Yale New Haven Hospital, which provides positive experiences and gifts to those battling cancer. McQuillan noticed that many holiday gift programs focus on young children, so his charity targets 10- to 18-year-olds who are undergoing painful treatments and battling potentially terminal illnesses. His organization has partnered with Eastern, St. Catherine of Siena Church, Sothebys Realty, Riverside School, North Street School and Americares, as well as friends and family, to raise $35,000 in two years. Community service gives meaning to our lives, said Ernest Fleishman, the former superintendent of schools who led the district from 1976 to 1989 and started the awards program in 1985. He bestowed the Fleishman Award for Community Service on Allison Brea, a GHS senior who juggled working with the homeless, taking part on the varsity swimming and diving team, playing violin and tutoring math in addition to her school work. Brea has also earned the Gold Award, the highest achievement in the Girl Scouts of America, for her contributions to Project Connect, in which she dedicated more than 100 hours of service, collecting undergarments for the Fairfield County homeless population. In fact, she has decided that the check Fleishman will donate to a charity of her choice will go back to the homeless population in the county through the United Way. Brea has also volunteered at the Bridgeport Rescue Mission, preparing and serving dinner to women and children, the St. Catherine of Siena Church annual fair and fundraiser, the Jewish Community Centers Maccabi Games event and the Greenwich Teddy Bear Clinic. The future freshman at Tufts University is also a violinist in the GHS Honors Symphony Orchestra, captain of the Varsity Swim and Dive Team and a member of the National Honors Society, as well as the Mathematics, Science and Spanish national honor societies. Fleishman, Board of Education Chair Peter Bernstein and First Selectman Tesei distributed certificates and shook hands with every student, and each said a few words. Tesei heralded the students as Greenwich heroes. We applaud your efforts to help your fellow man and woman, he said. You see needs and respond in a humane, just and kind way. jo.kroeker@hearstmediact.com Tyler Sizemore / Hearst Connecticut Media GREENWICH Greenwich police officers gather around a1964 Plymouth Savoy police car replica, featuring a vintage light, siren, radio and spotlight, parked on Greenwich Avenue in Greenwich on Wednesday. The old police car led a procession for the funeral of Michael Cofone, who was a Greenwich police officer from 1948 to 1973. GREENWICH Theyre everywhere, yet somehow invisible. The old stone walls of New England largely remain in plain sight, but they also inspire great passion for those who are drawn to take a closer look at them. Sylvia Reiss is a connoisseur and self-described collector of old stone walls, and shes journeyed all over New England with a camera to study and record the rough-hewn structures that crisscross the landscape, for an estimated distance of 100,000 miles. Reiss gave a presentation to the Retired Mens Association in the First Presbyterian Church community room Wednesday morning, offering a primer on how, why and where the stone walls were built. A former teacher and antiques dealer, Reiss called on members of the audience to look closely at stone walls the next time they have the opportunity, to take in all the textures and details. If you look at old stone walls, stop, slow down and really see whats in the wall, she said. The walls were sometimes assembled with great care that can still be appreciated two centuries later. More News Journey to the past in the archives of the Greenwich Historical Society The golden age of stone-wall building ran from roughly 1775 and 1825, following the deforestation of the region for agriculture. With the trees gone, millions of rocks rose from the earth , bedeviling farmers who broke their plows tilling the soil. They had to be hauled off the field to cultivate that field, Reiss said, And the stones kept coming up, one year after another after another. They were referred to as New England potatoes, and there were people who believed it was the work of the devil. The stone walls were often used to enclose farmland, keeping livestock out, or to line roads, but the main goal was to simply get the stones out of the way of a farmers plow. The use of strong backs and legs was the main method applied to build the walls, as well as oxen, sleds and winches, she said. They left behind this great legacy stone walls, said Reiss, a Darien resident. Different kind of walls emerged, some more elaborate than others. Among the most common are the tossed walls, put together with little care or effort, as the name implies. Laid walls are also fairly common, in which the stones were assembled deliberately for sturdiness and longevity. A more elaborate structure was the double wall, parallel rows of stone filled with interlocking thrusters and small stones. Among the rarest are lace walls, which can be seen through. Reiss talked about the different kind of ornamentation for walls, including copestones, which resemble dragons teeth. As she spoke admiringly of the texture and craftsmanship of old stone walls, Reiss poked gentle fun at the modern stone walls that adorn many suburban mansions. Boring company, she called them. As agriculture declined in the region after the Civil War, the walls became ruins, glimpses into the past and a reminder of the hard life that farming entailed in a landscape littered with stones. Reiss said the walls were often deceptively simple, but they offered a study in geology, history and ecology all wrapped up in one stony package. Stone walls theres a lot to see, she said. A RMA organizer called the presentation an impressive one. It certainly opened my eyes, said Hollister Sturges. The New Britain man accused of shooting his girlfriend to death in early February was captured by U.S. Marshals and local authorities Tuesday in South Carolina, police said. Benjamin Morales, 43, of New Britain, had been on the run since his girlfriend, Alice Marie Figueroa, 28, was found gravely wounded by officers responding to a gunfire report. She was later pronounced dead at the hospital. NEW HAVEN It looked like a compromise was in the offing, but then it disappeared. A proposal for a 7-Eleven convenience store to remain open for 24 hours at the gas station at the corner of State and Ferry streets was unanimously rejected by the Board of Zoning Appeals this week. This was the second time it was voted down. The owner, Armand Keurian of PMG Petroleum Marketing Group since 2017, said the crime in the area that residents were complaining about would have been helped by a well lighted 24-hour store, that his proposed renovation would have been an asset. Testimony was split with four business owners welcoming the plan, while eight residents and homeowners gave it a thumbs down. Marie Gallo of Gallo Appliances welcomed the store because Cedar Hill needs economic growth. She said they have three bodegas in a two-block radius. She said two were shut down due to illegal business activity. I think with a nice 7-Eleven, that would deter illegitimate businesses, Gallo said. The owner of a funeral business said he would feel safer if there were a store he could go into when he needed to buy something, rather then using a kiosk. The gas station has always been open 24 hours with a kiosk that sells a limited number of goods and a system, where patrons would slide payment into a drawer. But Lt. Manmeet Colon, from the 7th District, testified that keeping the new store open day and night would continue to attract homeless people who harass patrons by offering to pump gas, as well as prostitution. It is behavior that is being accepted by the workers at the gas station, Colon said. She predicted that crime would increase with an easy getaway on the nearby Interstate 91 highway entrance. She said it could be considered a hangout spot after the bars close. Colon said having to respond to an incident at the new store would take police away from Newhallville, where they are needed, or from spending their time conducting patrols in Cedar Hill. We have many people hanging out loitering, Colon said. She said they also had a kidnapping there when someone left a child in the car with the motor running and the vehicle was stolen. Mamie Gardner, who has been in the neighborhood for 40-plus years, said after midnight she didnt understand who would be shopping at the 7-Eleven. A security expert brought in by the new owner said personnel are trained on how to run a safe store. He compared the crimes at the Foxon Boulevard 7-Eleven to the State-Ferry site, but Gardner said that is not a good comparison. A more apt analogy would be to compare it to the convenience store on Willow Street that has been hit by numerous robberies, Gardner. Colon said they probably solve one out of 10 robberies there because the criminals can make a fast exit out of New Haven. The traffic it is going to bring there is probably going to be a problem, the district manager said. We are a small residential area. ... The older people dont come out anymore. There are a whole lot of drugs drugs, drugs, drugs. Shootings in the day time at the gas station. So you can put as many lights as you want, you can put as many cameras as you want, Gardner said, but she did not think it would make a difference. Gardner said the company did not reach out to the neighborhood. Not one person from that gas station has been on my street, Gardner said. It is a beautiful design, but not for 24 hours, she added. Kenya Adams-Martin, the block watch captain, said our neighborhood needs to rest. We need to go to bed. She said the merchants go home at the end of the day. This is our home, Adams-Martin said. She was critical of the lack of upkeep at the property. She said if the new owner wanted a favorable response, he should have shown his intentions by keeping it clean and fixing the pothole that a whole car could fit in. It has been like that for three months. Another resident said a 24-hour store would be just more crime, maybe not at the gas station, but going into the neighborhood, he said. He complained that people break into cars in the neighborhood, you have women running up the street half naked, he said. It is a lot of traffic ... there is trash all over the place. Alder Anna Festa, D-10, called the neighborhood a diamond in the rough that is going through a very difficult time. She said she understands the need for revenue for the property owner, but maybe this wasnt the right time for the 24-hour store until we get the neighborhood tame and calm and situated where it is safe. I dont know that 24 hours is the answer. Festa commended Colon for her patrols of Cedar Hill. ... Im going to trust Lt. Colon and her crime stats, the alder said. Festa suggested that the store close at 11 p.m. or midnight and open again at 5 or 6 a.m. Also, as the board started to deliberate on the convenience store proposal to stay open 24 hours, several of the BZA members began to talk to each other without using the one microphone, so no one in the audience could hear them. When told by the press that that was unacceptable, one member insisted that it was fine, but then they all agreed to resume using the microphone. In the end, attorney Meaghan Miles, who was representing the owner, disputed the testimony and said the absence of a store will increase crime in what she called this transition site. She said it will also boost the need for a police presence when their security cameras are gone. She suggested that there be a compromise where the store would operate for 24-hours for a year. Miles then offered a second compromise to close the store from midnight to 5 a.m. with a pass-through drawer so people could pay for gas. It looked like a BZA member was about to make a motion to that effect, but the board then unanimously voted to reject the request for a special exception, leaving the situation the same. A few residents afterwards said they probably could have lived with the compromise. mary.oleary@hearstmediact.com; 203-641-2577. A Colorado teen who pleaded guilty to killing a 10-year-old girl has been sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years. Aidan Zellmer was sentenced Monday in the June 2017 beating death of Kiaya Campbell of Thornton, who was the daughter of his mothers boyfriend. Zellmer was 15 at the time and was charged as an adult. He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder after deliberation on Feb. 1, and prosecutors agreed to drop a charge of first-degree murder of a child. The Dever Post reports Campbell was first reported missing on June 7, 2017. Zellmer initially told police the two were going to steal Pokemon cards after he damaged some of hers. After they failed to steal the cards, he said, he lost Campbell as the two walked home through a storm. Aidan was told his story did not make sense and he kept telling us that is what happened, an arrest document stated. Campbell's body was found the next day. When he was told about her body being discovered, Zellmer cried and said he didn't hurt Campbell but left her behind on the walk home because she was being annoying. However, evidence collection and an autopsy linked the murder to Zellmer. The teen told officers he used a metal object to beat Campbell. KDVR reports an affidavit identified the murder weapon as a pipe. He has never provided a motive for his actions. District Attorney Dave Young called it the most violent act he has seen a 15-year-old commit. He dismissed Zellmer's defense, which centered around the boy's mental health issues, troubled family history and alleged abuse. Fifteen-year-olds make bad decisions but they dont commit cruel, heinous crimes like this, Young said, according to the Denver Channel. After striking her five times in the head with a metal pipe, he left her in a field. When he talked to police, he was calm, cool and collected. He misled and deceived police who were looking for her. This is a rare case. Thank God we dont have other 15-year-olds doing what he did." Family members spoke about Campbell's smile, her spirit and goofiness. Her mother, Chantel Campbell, said she keeps a video of her daughter dancing and singing "everywhere" so she can watch it when she misses her most. They wore teal and pink, her favorite colors. A GoFundMe for Campbell's memorial raised nearly $20,000. Entrepreneur Store Having a stellar piece of real estate on the web is crucial for any growing business. Its one of the first things potential customers, clients, investors or business partners will look at when theyre determining if they want to work with you. A great website adds a level of professionalism and credibility, but its easy to make mistakes if youre new to the digital marketing game. Thats why a lifetime subscription to SiteGuru is a must-have for your companys website. The program performs a complete audit of your site, then uses a three-pronged approach to help you get a higher volume of quality clicks. Recently, my wife and I visited friends and family in Charlotte, S.C.; Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; and Pinehurst, N.C.. Everyone we visited as a refugee from Connecticut. Everyone we visited is happy in their new homes and cities and not one will ever return to Connecticut to live. While we were away, the Stamford Advocate published a front page article that highlighted the mass exodus from Connecticut due to taxes and lack of business industry. I realized that my trip was living proof of the veracity of the articles theme. Connecticut is a great little state. Nicely situated geographically; moderate climate; beautiful coastline, hills and trees; and history. All good except the month of February. That I can live without. What happened to our nice little piece of the world? My answer is years of poor political management, the enactment of the income tax in 1991 and a Democratic party which has increasingly moved to the left and caters to special interest groups and state labor unions. People are smart and increasingly very mobile. When taxes go up and services go down, they move. When businesses move and new businesses stop looking at Connecticut as the place to relocate, people move to where there are jobs and opportunities. Take Charleston, S.C., for example. It is a magnificent, historic city in a low tax, business-friendly state. When you leave the airport in Charleston, the first thing you see is the new Boeing 767 plant/campus. It employs about 7,000 people. Across town the new Mercedes truck/van plant just opened. It employs thousands more. Everywhere you look there is new construction and new business moving into town. The energy of the city and vibrant economy is clearly visible. The voters had a chance to stop the hemorrhage of business and people in November by electing a Republican governor. Unfortunately, Bob Stefanowski, whose only strength was that he had enough money to buy a lot of commercials, waged a terrible campaign and lost a race that was considered a sure win. So the voters elected a millionaire, progressive from Greenwich whose plan to save the state was more of the same except it would have a bit of a Lamont twist. Well, we have begun to see what the new governors plan for our immediate future looks like. Despite reports during the campaign which seemed to indicate he was not in favor of tolls, he now favors tolls in a big way. But we are told we should not worry because out-of-staters will be paying a large percentage of those tolls and, of course, truckers will pay a heavy portion as well (the cost of tolls will be passed onto consumers who will purchase the cargo trucks haul). We are told the toll money will be used for infrastructure repair and maintenance. Sure it will. Remember, the income tax was to expire after 10 years (2001). It didnt happen and I am sure the toll receipts will somehow end up in the General Fund to be used in ways the Democrat architects of our states disaster deem best. Also, look for the governor and legislature to increase fees on licenses, permits, etc. The gas tax (the seventh highest in the nation) will no doubt be looked at for an increase. They will do anything but cut spending. Meanwhile, we learn that due to the loss of population there is a good chance Connecticut will lose another Congressional seat after the 2020 census; not a good sign for a state in serious trouble. I think I know where the House seat will go either South Carolina, Florida, or North Carolina. Daniel M. McCabe is former corporation counsel for the City of Stamford (1991-1995) and former chairman of the Republican Town Committee 1996-2006. Samsung Galaxy M20 lands in the EU, yours for 229 Comments Weekly poll: did the Samsung Galaxy S10+, S10 or S10e live up to your expectations? Haiti - Education : Towards an improvement in the management of public schools Tuesday at the Marriott Hotel, Josue Agenor Cadet, the Minister of National Education accompanied by senior officials of the West Departmental Directorate, the Chief of Staff, Jackson Pleteau, and the Director of Secondary Education (DFES) Maxime Mesilas held a working session with the principals of west high schools. Personnel management, leadership, pedagogical and administrative supervision, all of which were discussed for improving the management of public schools. Through this initiative, the Minister Cadet intended on the one hand to salute the directors of institutions who assume their responsibilities with seriousness, responsibility and leadership. On the other hand, he wanted to encourage those who fail in their duties to better assume their responsibilities in the operation of certain public schools marked by the absenteeism of the teachers and a lack of control in the hourly charges by teacher. The case of the high school Faustin Soulouque whose students are deprived of course since January 14th https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-27038-icihaiti-petit-goave-high-school-students-deprived-of-class-for-59-days.html was cited as an example in this sense "Such practices are inconceivable" said Cadet adding "We must punish all those who penalize their students." This meeting allowed several high school directors to draw the attention of the Ministry's authorities to certain problems encountered in the management of their school, which call for an emergency intervention. Maxime Mesilas, on instruction of the Minister, took the opportunity to distribute the schedule of examinations of the renovated Secondary. The second part of this meeting was devoted to an exchange with student representatives of central committees of high schools. It allowed participants to better understand all the actions of the Ministry for better management of high schools and the problems faced by young people left to their fate by absent teachers... HL/ HaitiLibre Haiti - Politic : The Senate Speaker does not believe possible elections this year Tuesday at a press conference, Carl Murat Cantave, the Senate Speaker has estimated that the holding of legislative and municipal elections, announced for the last Sunday of October 2019 was not possible. An opinion he claims to have clearly expressed to the US authorities during his stay in Washington from March 3 to 9 https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27115-haiti-news-zapping.html The socio-political and economic crisis, the insecurity in the neighborhoods, the budget of the elections which is registered in the budget of the exercise 2018-2019, which is always deposited in Parliament, the absence of legal framework (electoral laws and Organic of the Provisional Electoral Council), are some of the points advanced by Cantave to justify his position, recalling that the country needed at least a year to prepare a good election. "Talking about elections in October 2019 is make a reference to something fictitious," says Cantave, who calls on all concerned to go beyond. If the dialogue does not take place or if it does not lead to concrete and applicable solutions, the Senator Cantave fears an institutional vacuum in Haiti and a real disorder citing : deputies at the end of the term, a dysfunctional Senate with 1/3 less senators and comunes without authorities, which will force the Head of State to lead by decree with the negative socio-political consequences that inevitably imply. TB/ HaitiLibre Haiti - News : Zapping... Expeditious People's Justice On Sunday, 3 alleged thieves were killed and their bodies burned by residents of Croix-des-Bouquets. 3 people shot in Miragoane 3 people including 2 women were murdered and two others wounded in the 4th communal section of Miragoane by unidentified individuals. Victims returned from a funeral vigil when people opened fire on them... Edmond Bocchit defends the next UN mission Edmond Bocchit, the Minister of Foreign Affairs warns against any interpretation to see in the next UN special political mission https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27118-haiti-politic-un-recommends-the-creation-of-a-special-political-mission-in-haiti.html a loss of sovereignty of the Haitian State https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27167-haiti-news-zapping.html According to the Chancellor, "this mission is an asset and will surely have a positive impact on Haiti's image abroad" Edmond Bocchit also stressed that this mission will allow Haiti to get out of the fold of Chapter 7 of the United Nations Security Council, which projects the image of a country unstable and not favorable to foreign investments. Jovenel Moise requests the benefit of the emergency "I invite the Parliamentarians to grant the benefit of urgency to the Loan Agreement between Haiti and Taiwan (Republic of China), tabled in Parliament by my Administration, concerning the strengthening of the grid of the metropolitan area [...]" https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27162-haiti-politic-gary-bodeau-talks-about-investments-and-electricity-with-the-ambassador-of-taiwan.html President Jovenel Moise said New postponement in the trial of Clifford Brandt Me Denis Pierre Michel, Dean of the Civil Court of Gonaives, postponed the trial of Clifford Brandt and consort on Tuesday, March 19, 2019. According to Me Adisson Diogene, one of the representatives of the Public Ministry, this decision is due to the absence of Defense Council of Edner Come, accused of instigating the kidnapping of young Moscoso. The Magistrate calls for the responsibility of the various parties so that the audience can resume its course normally. See also : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-26703-haiti-news-zapping.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-26618-haiti-news-zapping.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-26412-haiti-justice-clifford-brandt-admits-to-having-sponsored-the-kidnapping-of-children-moscosso.html CCIHC : Cocktail Debate Invitation The Chamber of Commerce and Industry Haiti-Canadian (CCIHC) invites you to a cocktail-debate as part of the Women's Day to be held Thursday, March 14, 2019 at the Montana Hotel Port-au-Prince from 5:00 pm at 7:00 pm A panel of recognized women leaders will share their experiences. Admission price : Members and students: 500 Gourdes Non-Members: 1,000 Gourdes HL/ HaitiLbre Virginia Ann Kapernick of Havre, age 93, passed away on Tuesday, March 12, 2019, at Northern Montana Care Center due to natural causes. Cremation has taken place and a memorial service will be held on Friday, March 15, 2019, at 1:00 p.m. at First Lutheran Church. Virginia requested that memorials be directed to Flathead Lutheran Bible Camp, First Lutheran Church, or donor's choice. Holland and Bonine Funeral Home has been entrusted with services and arrangements. Please visit Virginia's online memorial page and leave a message of condolence for her family at http://www.hollandbonine.com. Virginia was born July 29, 1925, to Clara and Gilbert Omlie in Havre, Montana. She grew up in Havre and loved teaching Sunday school and singing in the church choir. Virginia graduated from Havre High School in 1943 and graduated from Concordia college, Moorhead, Minnesota in 1947 with Bachelor of Arts degree. She taught one year at Wolf Point High School. In 1948 Virginia married Joe Kapernick. They moved to Bozeman while Joe completed his degree in civil engineering. Their daughter Karen was born while in Bozeman. The family then moved to Helena where Joe worked on the construction of the Canyon Ferry Dam. Several years later, Joe accepted an engineering position in Chicago, Illinois, to work on the interstate highway system. During this time their son Doug was born. Virginia and Joe later divorced, and Virginia and the children moved back to Havre where she taught English at Havre High School. She retired from teaching in 1983. The prior year, Virginia's mother, Clara, passed away. She then became the primary caregiver for her father until he passed away in 1997 at age 100. Virginia enjoyed knitting and crocheting afghans for family and friends. She frequently traveled to Minnesota to visit her children, four grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. She was a member of Delta Kappa Gamma and the Bear Paw Retired Educators. She was an active member of First Lutheran church, as well as WELCA, Esther Circle, and the Thursday afternoon Bible study group. Virginia was preceded in death by her parents, her former husband, brother James Omlie, brother-in-law Dale Skaalure, sister Lorraine Skaalure, and son-in-law Ernie Swihart. Virginia is survived by her daughter Karen Swihart of Minnetonka, MN; son Doug (Nancy) Kapernick of St. Peter, MN; and brother Don (Shirley) Omlie of Fort Collins, CO. Skin is the bodys largest organ, and scientists at UC San Francisco and the San Francisco Veterans Administration (VA) Health Care System think it may be to blame for body-wide inflammation linked to numerous chronic diseases of aging. The good news is that properly caring for the skin with a moisturizing cream may lower inflammation levels and potentially prevent age-related diseases, according to a new clinical pilot study. As humans get older, we experience a low-level of inflammationdubbed inflamm-agingdriven by an increase in molecules in the blood called cytokines. This age-related inflammation has been linked to serious chronic diseases, including Alzheimers disease, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. Scientists initially thought that the inflammation stemmed from the immune system or the liver, but a group of dermatologists at UCSF have a different theory. The inflammation must come from an organ big enough that very minor inflammation can affect the whole body. Skin is a good candidate for this because of its size, said study senior author Mao-Qiang Man, MD, a research scientist in the UCSF Department of Dermatology, who is based at the San Francisco VA Health Care System and is also a visiting professor at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China. Once we get old, we have dermatological symptoms like itchiness, dryness, and changes in acidity. It could be that the skin has very minor inflammation, and because its such a large organ it elevates circulating cytokine levels. Our skin starts to deteriorate around age 50 with changes to epidermal pH, hydration, and the permeability barrier, which keeps water in and bacteria and other potential pathogens out. A loss of moisture and breaks in the permeability barrier cause the skin to release inflammatory cytokines. Ordinarily, these cytokines help to repair defects in the barrier, but in aging skin the barrier cant be fixed as easily, so the inflammatory signals continue to be released, eventually reaching the blood. Until recently, the scientific community didnt believe that skin could contribute to systemic inflammation and disease. But in the last five years, studies of psoriasis and dermatitis have shown that skin inflammation from these diseases likely increases the risk of heart disease, said study lead author Theodora Mauro, MD, a professor of dermatology at UCSF and the San Francisco VA Health Care System. Aging skin is much more common than psoriasis or dermatitis, so the overall risk to the population from aging skin could far outweigh that seen from skin diseases. Decreasing inflammation simply by treating the skin dysfunction seen in aging could have profound health effects. In the study, published March 5, 2019 in the Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, Mauro, Man and colleagues attempted to reverse age-related skin damage using an over-the-counter skin cream formulated based on prior research by Man and colleagues, and which the researchers had previously shown to contribute to skin repair based on its beneficial ratio of three types of lipids (cholesterol, free fatty acids, and ceramides) that are vital for skin health. Thirty-three older adults between the ages of 58 and 95 applied the cream all over their bodies twice a day for 30 days. After a month, the researchers measured blood levels of three cytokinesinterleukin-1 beta, interleukin-6, and tumor necrosis factor (TNF) alphathat have all been implicated in age-related inflammatory diseases. Using the cream reduced the amount of all three cytokines compared to both the participants levels before using the cream and the levels of similarly aged adults who did not use the cream. In fact, using the cream lowered participants cytokine levels to be nearly equivalent with people in their 30s, suggesting that rejuvenating the skin can reverse inflamm-aging. The cream also improved skin hydration, lowered pH, and repaired the permeability barrier. The scientists now plan to conduct a longer, larger study to test if lowering cytokine levels with the cream can delay or prevent age-related inflammatory diseases. Were going to see whether using the cream to keep epidermal function normal as people age will prevent the development of those downstream diseases, said co-author Peter Elias, MD, a UCSF professor of dermatology based at the San Francisco VA Health Care System. If we do, the implication would be that after the age of 50, you would want to be applying an effective topical barrier repair preparation daily for the rest of your life. Authors: The co-lead authors of the study were Li Ye of Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, and Erle Dang of Xijing Hospital in Xian, China. Additional authors on the paper include: Kenneth Feingold of UCSF/SFVAMC; Gang Wang and Chen Yu of Xijing Hospital in Xian, China; Lizhi Hu of Tianjin Medical University in Tianjin, China; Sekyoo Jeong of Seowon University in Cheongju, South Korea; and Chengzhi Lv of Dalian Skin Disease Hospital in Dalian, China. Funding: This work was supported by the National Institute on Aging (AG028492), the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (AR061106, AR051930), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81430037, 81573075). Conflicts: Elias and Man serve as consultants to South Koreabased Neopharm, Ltd., which produces the lipid-balanced moisturizer used in the study. An invention disclosure has been filed with the UCSF Office of Innovation, Technology & Alliances for the concept of preventing/treating systemic disorders using strategies that improve epidermal function. UC San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top-ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy; a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, translational and population sciences; and a preeminent biomedical research enterprise. It also includes UCSF Health, which comprises three top-ranked hospitals UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Childrens Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland as well as Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital and Clinics, UCSF Benioff Childrens Physicians and the UCSF Faculty Practice. UCSF Health has affiliations with hospitals and health organizations throughout the Bay Area. UCSF faculty also provide all physician care at the public Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, and the SF VA Medical Center. The UCSF Fresno Medical Education Program is a major branch of the University of California, San Franciscos School of Medicine. About SFVAHCS: The San Francisco VA Health Care System (SFVAHCS) is a comprehensive network that provides health services to Veterans through the San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC) and six community-based outpatient clinics in Santa Rosa, Eureka, Ukiah, Clearlake, San Bruno anddowntown San Francisco. SFVAHCS has a long history of conducting cutting-edge research, establishing innovative medical programs, and providing compassionate care to Veterans. SFVAMC has several National Centers of Excellence in the areas of epilepsy treatment, cardiac surgery, post-traumatic stress disorder, HIV, and renal dialysis. SFVAMCs $79 million research program is one of the largest in the Veterans Health Administration. SFVAMC has been affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), School of Medicine for more than 50 years. A HUMANITARIAN worker from Wargrave has been named as another British victim of the Ethiopian Airlines disaster. Father-of-two Oliver Vick, 45, was travelling to his posting with the United Nations in Somalia when the flight crashed outside Addis Ababa on Sunday. His family said: Olly was well-loved and had an energy and zest for life which lifted and inspired all that met him. In a statement his colleagues at the UN Assistance Mission in Somali said they were deeply saddened by his death. They added: We express our heartfelt sympathies to his family and loved ones and mourn the loss of a passionate and talented friend who worked tirelessly for peace in Somalia. We will miss Olly every day. Mr Vick, who helped to bring parliamentary elections to Afghanistan, reportedly died with his girlfriend. For the full story see this weeks Henley Standard. Notorious gangland criminal Derek 'Bottler' Devoy remained in custody last night after a daylight machine pistol shooting spree caused a massive garda alert in a north Dublin suburb. The 39-year-old gangster was being questioned in Ballymun Garda Station under firearms legislation. A senior source said he is likely to be charged with serious offences at some stage today. Sources have also con- firmed that a grenade found in the bathroom of a house that Devoy had barricaded himself in before his arrest was confirmed viable after being tested by Army experts. It has emerged that the house Devoy ran into at Cranogue Road, Ballymun, on Monday evening is linked to a drug addict associate of his, who is currently in jail in relation to theft offences. This man, who is aged in his 30s, is not considered to have any involvement in organised crime but would have known Devoy as they grew up together, according to a senior source. Overpowered Devoy was caught on camera roaming around the Poppintree area of Ballymun, firing shots from a machine pistol close to a number of shops at around 4.30pm on Monday. When gardai responded to the situation, the career criminal fled to the house on Cranogue Road, where he was soon overpowered and arrested by unarmed gardai. "It seems Devoy may have thought, for whatever reason, that he may have got a safe haven in that house," a senior source said. "But who knows what he was thinking - the man was completely off his head. "He does know another man whose family home that is, but that man is in jail." Garda Commissioner Drew Harris led the tributes to the unarmed officers who were involved in the arrest operation. "The gardai involved showed great bravery in ensuring the safety of the public," the commissioner said. Devoy is suspected of being in the middle of a number of dangerous feuds, including with north inner city associates of the Hutch mob. It is this gang that is suspected of murdering Devoy's innocent sister Antoinette Corbally (47) in August 2017. British politicians now face the stark choice of actively pursuing a no-deal Brexit or begging the EU to allow them to stall the process. The risk of the UK crashing out of the EU in 16 days time has increased dramatically on foot of Prime Minister Theresa May's Strasbourg deal being roundly rejected. Irish hopes are now firmly pinned on Article 50 being extended beyond March 29. However, aware that many EU capitals are wary of prolonging the Brexit debacle, Mrs May has also raised the possibility of a second referendum. "The EU will want to know what use we mean to make of such an extension," she told the House of Commons. Tariffs "This House will have to answer that question. Does it wish to revoke Article 50? Does it want to hold a second referendum? Or does it want to leave with a deal but not this deal?" A group of hard-line Brexiteers including Jacob Rees-Mogg last night joined forces with the DUP's Nigel Dodds to formally propose that Brexit be delayed until May 22 - the day before European elections. They have tabled an amendment to the motion planned by Mrs May which states this time period would allow businesses to prepare for tariffs. Sources in Dublin said the Government would "help" the UK to lobby other countries for an extension because "March 29 was always a UK deadline, not an EU one". However, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Tanaiste Simon Coveney are increasingly aware of the need for a "clear logic" as to why a postponement should be granted. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who is considered an ally of the Taoiseach on the European Council, said last night that a request from the UK must have "credible and convincing justification". "The smooth functioning of the EU institutions needs to be ensured," he said. While open to the idea of an extension, EU chiefs moved swiftly to shut down any suggestion that Mrs May could seek more changes to the operation of the Irish backstop. European Council President Donald Tusk said the EU had "done all that is possible to reach an agreement". "Should there be a UK-reasoned request for an extension, the EU27 will consider it and decide by unanimity," he said. The House of Commons will vote tonight on a motion to test whether MPs support leaving the EU without a deal. The idea is expected to be defeated. This will open the door to another vote tomorrow on a possible extension. Delay In a further complication, it is understood the length of that delay would have to be agreed by politicians in London before a request goes to the EU. The first proposal to surface is from a group of lawmakers who want to delay the exit until May 22 and mitigate the consequence of leaving without a deal by seeking 'standstill arrangements' with the EU. The DUP-backed motion also urges the government to offer "a further set of mutual standstill agreements with the EU and member states for an agreed period ending no later than December 30, 2021, during which period the UK would pay an agreed sum equivalent to its net EU contributions and satisfy its other public international law obligations". Mr Dodds said the best way to get a Brexit deal through parliament was for the government to maintain that it would be willing to walk away from talks and leave the bloc without a deal. "Once you take that threat off, you are bound to be offered terms which are less advantageous," he said. Mrs May said last night that she "passionately" believed the best outcome for the UK was to agree a deal. In a clear reference to Northern Ireland, she said she was acutely aware of the "potential damage to the Union that leaving without a deal could do when one part of our country is without devolved governance". She will today outline the reality of a hard Brexit so that MPs are "fully informed in making this historic decision". Mr Coveney said he was "deeply disappointed" that the meaningful vote in Westminster failed to get support. Avoiding a crash-out Brexit could not be done without MPs "agreeing something", he said, adding that a no deal would be a "lose, lose, lose" scenario for everyone. "The focus has to be on London. That's where the crisis is," he said. Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin told the Dail yesterday that a no-deal scenario "must be avoided". A nine-year-old schoolboy who broke a bone in his leg at a creche five years ago was yesterday awarded 52,600 damages against its owners. Andrea Geraghty told Circuit Court President Mr Justice Raymond Groarke that her son Cillian, who was four at the time, had been startled and fell in the washroom at the creche when a light was suddenly switched off and on. Barrister Ronan Quinn, counsel for Ms Geraghty and Cillian, from Airpark Court, Stocking Lane, Rathfarnham, Dublin 16, said Cillian was among a group of children taken to the washroom to use the facilities on September 17, 2013, just days after his fourth birthday. Mr Quinn, who appeared with Joe Clancy Solicitors, told the court that Cillian suffered a fracture to a thigh bone as a result of the fall and was confined for some weeks at home in a right hip spica cast. Counsel said Cillian was admitted to Crumlin Hospital on the day of the accident and detained overnight. He underwent surgery the following day. Refused Mr Quinn said that following initial treatment and care, Dr Paula Kelly, consultant orthopaedic foot and ankle surgeon at the Beacon Consultants Clinic, Sandyford, Dublin, noticed a 0.5mm length discrepancy in Cillian's right leg but stated in follow-up reviews that this had resolved. Ms Geraghty told the court in an affidavit that the Personal Injuries Assessment Board had come up with a compensation figure of 32,000 for Cillian's injury but she had refused to accept this. Following talks between the legal teams on both sides, RSA Insurance, on behalf of the creche, had made an offer of 50,000, she added. Cillian's mother, who had brought a 60,000 claim against the Knocklyon Lodge Creche and Montessori Ltd, of Old Knocklyon Road, Rathfarnham, told the court that the family had also had to repay 2,000 to their private health insurers. Negligence and breach of duty had been alleged against the creche owners. Judge Groarke, who said he was satisfied from Ms Geraghty's assurances to the court that Cillian had fully recovered after the accident, approved settlement terms of 52,600. The family of an elderly woman who was knocked down and killed by a garda while responding to an emergency call have said she will always be missed. They were speaking after garda Warren Farrell had a nine-month prison sentence deferred, on condition he pays 5,000 to a charity. Farrell (33), serving in Ballyfermot, Co Dublin, was driving a marked patrol car in response to an incident at a Topaz garage when it hit Elizabeth Core. He had pleaded not guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to dangerous driving causing the death of Ms Core in Fonthill Road South, Dublin, on August 28, 2014. Expand Close Elderly victim Elizabeth Core / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Elderly victim Elizabeth Core Speed After a trial last December, a jury convicted Gda Farrell by a majority verdict on an alternative charge of careless driving causing death. Judge Cormac Quinn said yesterday that the degree of his culpability was in the lower range and the aggravating factor was his speed. Speaking after the sentencing, a family source said that while the sentence garda Farrell received was in line with what they expected, they remained upset at the way in which procedures were followed after Mrs Core was knocked down. In their victim impact statement, the family had said that on the day of the accident GSOC called to their family home. "Our father stated clearly that all he wanted from the investigation was the truth. Due to the fact that a Garda was involved, our father had his doubts regarding this. It hurt him deeply when we were informed that normal procedures were not followed immediately after the accident," said the family source. They added that a formal complaint about this was lodged with GSOC and examined fully by the commission. The trial heard that after seeing Ms Core cross from the far side of the road, Gda Farrell failed to slow. He later told investigators he believed she would see or hear the patrol car and return to her side of the road. Gda Farrell said he was surprised she continued to cross and immediately applied the brakes and entered the bus lane to avoid hitting her. He said he tried to mount the footpath but was unable to do so and the left tyre burst. The front right of the car hit Ms Core and she was pushed on to the windscreen. Forensic investigators put the car's speed at the point of impact, following heavy braking, at between 50 and 56kph. The speed limit was 50kph. Judge Quinn said there was a tension between the duty imposed on gardai to respond to calls as quickly as possible and the duty not to endanger the public. He said there was evidence Gda Farrell experienced a "violation of expectancy" where he had expected Ms Core to stop. When he saw she was continuing to cross, he reassessed the situation and applied the brakes. Judge Quinn noted that as a result of this, up to 2.5 seconds in stopping time were lost. Judge Quinn ordered that Gda Farrell pay a fine of 2,000 as well as pay 5,000 over to the Irish Road Victims' Association in the next four months. He set a proposed prison sentence of nine months which he deferred. A thieving grandmother with a criminal record spanning 40 years claimed she was eating a Big Mac and fries when gardai caught her after her latest attempt to steal. Kathleen Comerford (67), who maintained she was unable to walk, was seen by officers making her way on foot to a McDonald's after trying to snatch a tourist's backpack in a nearby supermarket. Judge Brian O'Shea jailed the widow for six months, noting that she had 133 previous convictions. He said the offences were "mean-spirited" and Comerford was a "bane on decent, law-abiding people". Comerford, of Sean O'Casey Avenue, Dublin 1, pleaded not guilty to attempted theft. A garda told Dublin District Court he saw her enter the Oriental Pantry supermarket off Moore Street at 2.10pm last September 13. She sat close to two young women who were eating and "deep in conversation". One of the women had a backpack on the chair beside her and Comerford tried to pull it away from her. Grabbed The victim pulled the bag back and Comerford left the supermarket. The woman "couldn't believe that an old lady grabbed her backpack". When gardai approached Comerford in McDonald's, she was "in the process" of another theft, having just bought food, the officer said. She had walked there unaided, he added. Comerford claimed she got a taxi straight to the Ilac Centre because she could not walk owing to a medical condition. She told the court she never went to the Oriental Pantry but went to a phone shop first, then was eating a "Big Mac, chips and Coke" in McDonald's when gardai approached her. Judge O'Shea also found her guilty of stealing a woman's purse at the SoMa cafe in North Earl Street last June 8. That victim was viewing something on her phone while having breakfast when the theft happened. Comerford had denied that offence too. The court heard Comerford's previous convictions dated back to 1968. Recognisances were fixed in the event of an appeal. One parcel was sent to Heathrow airport in London The IRA has claimed responsibility for parcel bombs sent to major transport hubs in Britain last week. It also said one parcel, sent to a British army recruitment officer, may not have been discovered yet. The group claims it posted five devices to addresses in Britain. However, only four have been found. The claim was received on Monday by a Belfast-based newspaper, using a recognised codeword. Explosion The packages that arrived at Waterloo railway station and offices at Heathrow and London City airports on March 5 and 6 were sent with An Post stamps and had Dublin as the return address, prompting gardai to join the investigation. The stamps appeared to be those issued by An Post for Valentine's Day last year, featuring a heart motif and the words "Love Eire N". The senders' addresses were given as Dublin, with two adding Bus Eireann. Police Scotland said a controlled explosion was carried out as a precaution on a suspicious package found in the mailroom at Glasgow University, after several buildings had been evacuated. "[The group] claimed that three were sent to 'commercial targets' while the remaining two were posted to British army recruitment officers," according to the newspaper that received the message. "The group said a device discovered at Glasgow University was intended for a British army recruitment officer who works there." All were A4-sized white postal bags containing yellow Jiffy bags and appeared capable of igniting a small fire when opened. No one was injured in any of the incidents and no arrests have yet been made. A spokesman from the Metropolitan Police said the force is aware of the claim. However, investigations are ongoing. "We are also aware that those claiming responsibility have indicated five devices were sent. At this time, only four devices have been recovered," he said. "Extensive advice has already been issued to relevant businesses and sectors to be vigilant and report suspicious packages to police. "This advice was previously sent to armed forces personnel and is being reiterated again in light of this claim." Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan said he has been in touch with UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid about the developments. "I was deeply concerned to learn of the further developments in the investigation into the incendiary devices which were posted to addresses in the United Kingdom last week," Mr Flanagan said. "They are the actions of those who are without any vision for a peaceful future in Northern Ireland. "I reaffirmed to the home secretary our deep commitment to working closely with our colleagues in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom." Miami Beach Police mugshot of Conor McGregor after his arrest Conor McGregor is potentially facing up to 15 years in prison in Miami for his latest brush with the law in the US. McGregor has been charged with "strong-arm robbery and criminal mischief" after allegedly smashing and taking a fan's phone outside the Fontainebleau Hotel on Monday. In Miami, strong-armed robbery - a theft carried out with violence - is a second-degree felony and can lead to a heavy fine and a prison sentence not exceeding 15 years. Sentences depend on criminal history, especially history of violence, the value of what was stolen and whether the victim was injured. Disorderly McGregor avoided a criminal record last July after he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct at a UFC event in New York. Expand Close McGregor is led out of the 78th Police Precinct in the Brooklyn borough of New York in April last year after his arrest for the bus trolley attack / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp McGregor is led out of the 78th Police Precinct in the Brooklyn borough of New York in April last year after his arrest for the bus trolley attack Several people were hurt when he hurled a trolley at a bus, smashing a window, as it left the Barclays Centre in Brooklyn in April 2018. Fighters Michael Chiesa and Ray Borg were injured by shattered glass and unable to compete. McGregor avoided going to jail after striking a deal with prosecutors which saw him do community service. He also had to take anger management courses and pledged to keep the peace for a year. Expand Close McGregor's message on Instagram / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp McGregor's message on Instagram Despite McGregor's violent history, his lawyer insisted that he would not be going to prison over the latest incident. "I believe at the end of the day that we will successfully defend this case," Sam Rabin told Newstalk Breakfast yesterday. "I can't tell you what the outcome will be, but I certainly don't see him going to jail over something like this." Mr Rabin, of Rabin and Lopez PA, issued a statement saying the Crumlin man was giving his full co-operation. "Last evening Conor McGregor was involved in a minor altercation over a cell phone that resulted in a call to law enforcement," Mr Rabin said in a statement issued to MMA Fighting via spokesperson Karen Kessler. "Mr McGregor appreciates the response of law enforcement and pledges his full co-operation." The fighter was arrested when he allegedly "slapped" a phone out of a fan's hand and "stomped on it". He was arrested and charged by Miami police at 6pm Miami time on Monday. He was seen leaving the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Centre a few hours later when he was released from jail after allegedly posting a $12,500 (11,070) bond. Taking to Instagram, he shared a snap of himself leaving the correctional centre wearing a T-shirt that said "When I say something is going to happen, it's going to happen - McGregor is back". He thanked his fans and said his patience was something that he was continuing to work on. Photo "Patience in this world is a virtue I continue to work on. I love my fans dearly. Thank you all," he wrote. McGregor is alleged to have walked away with the phone following the incident, which is said to have happened after a fan tried to take a photo with him. According to the police report, the incident occurred while McGregor and the complainant were leaving the hotel. "The victim and the defendant were exiting the Fontainebleau Hotel and the victim attempted to take a picture of the defendant with his cellphone," the report read. "The defendant allegedly slapped the victim's phone out of his hand, causing it to fall to the floor. "The defendant then allegedly stomped on the victim's phone several times, damaging it. "The defendant then picked up the victim's phone and walked away with it." The complainant had stated in the police report that the phone was worth $1,000 (885). McGregor and family members have been in Miami for several days, celebrating his mother Margaret's 60th birthday. He has posted a stream of photographs on Instagram showing the family partying at the $1,000-a-night Versace Mansion. One series of pictures showed the fighter wrestling an alligator, and managing to grab its tail. In another picture showing the family sitting down to dine in colourful suits, he waxed lyrical about his mother's love of Italian silk. "Thank you for gifting me this life mother! I love you with all my soul," he wrote. His father Tony, sister Erin and long-term partner Dee Devlin are among those on the trip. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, a quasi-public body, voted to move ahead on talks with Boring Co., with the goal of voting on a contract by June. Ensuing talks would nail down details like the proposed route and the types of vehicles used for a project that aims to make it easier for visitors to get around Las Vegas' sprawling convention center. After the addition of a new exhibition hall scheduled to open by 2021, the complex will run 2 miles in length. Illinois used that criteria to obtain its waiver last year, wrapping nearly all of the state into one area with a 5.5 percent unemployment rate, which was 20 percent higher than the national average of 4.6 percent. DuPage was cut out of the equation for the first time last year because its unemployment rate was too low and would have brought the state average down. The creative BBQ concept started when Mauro, fresh from winning Season 7 of Food Network Star, was contacted by an old friend, Kevin Corsello, who had run in the same Italian-American circles when they were growing up in Chicago and the suburbs. Corsello, a recent graduate of Harvard Business School, had an idea for a fast-casual barbecue spot, and over a bottle of tequila the business was born, he said. Tickets for Beer Under Glass, which will be May 10 at Garfield Park Conservatory, go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. Tickets will cost the same as last year: $60 for general admission (entry at 6:30) and $80 for VIP (entry at 5:30). The festival ends at 9:30 p.m. The women are about the same age Bullock 54, Bianca 60 so theres that. But as capable an actor as Bullock may be, playing Bianca will present certain challenges. Biancas life has been a wild and wicked roller coaster ride that has taken her from a relatively comfortable childhood in Oak Park and Little Italy and some lively adventures on the rock n roll road to the dark dangers of the streets and the equally unpleasant perils of prison. It is a life that even the most inventive Hollywood screenwriter would have a hard time concocting. Get into the spirit of the season with these holiday activities Last year, the Terra guided and largely funded the popular Art Design Chicago initiative responsible for scores of exhibitions and new scholarship examining the citys role in 20th-century visual art. Glassman will stay on until a successor can be found, a search the Terra hopes to conclude this year. It could be legitimate imagery, but it could just as well be fake, he said, adding theres no way for ordinary civilians to know for themselves that the earth is a ball. They keep saying were going to go to space one day and see it for ourselves, but that date has been pushed back and pushed back and you can say funding (is the reason) all day, he said. Reality is saying, Hey, if it were true it would have been proven by now. Say Kids! What Time Is It? By Stephen Davis Advertisement Little, Brown, 234 pages, $16.95 What`s your first reaction when you hear the question, ''Say kids! What time is it?'' Advertisement If it`s second nature for you to shout, ''It`s Howdy Doody time!,'' followed, perhaps, by a chorus or two of the song by the same name-Let`s give a rousing cheer, `cause Howdy Doody`s here, it`s time to start the show, so kids let`s go!''-it`s a good bet that you grew up watching Howdy Doody, Buffalo Bob, Clarabell and all of the other denizens of Doodyville. From its beginnings in the late 1940s until a decade or so later, when the show was done in by the burgeoning popularity of the Mickey Mouse Club, Howdy Doody was an institution among members of the Baby Boom generation, not to mention a merchandising gold mine. In 1950 alone, approximately 8 million youngsters watched the show each weekday on NBC and its affiliates-and badgered their parents into shelling out $15 million for Howdy Doody comics, records, lamps, wallpaper, clothing and other goods bearing the likeness of the freckle-faced puppet. Stephen Davis, the author of ''Say Kids!'', was luckier than most Howdy Doody devotees. His father, Howard Davis, was involved in Doodyville doings as a writer and director, and Stephen was a regular visitor to the show`s Peanut Gallery from 1952 until 1956. Now, at age 40, Davis has written a fascinating backstage history of the show that may surprise grown-up kids. The rivalries, manipulation and infighting that figured in many of the scripts were nothing compared to the brutal ''office politics'' that developed offstage. In fact, it seems that Doodyville could be a pretty rough and ribald town. ''We were real hucksters. You might say we were real whores,'' acknowledges Buffalo Bob Smith, the former radio deejay who turned Howdy into a household word, on the subject of merchandising. But the money-grubbing aspects of the show pale into insignificance beside Davis` matter-of-fact revelations about the cast members` propensity for lewd jokes and the rather laissez-faire moral attitudes of Princess Summerfall Winterspring. As played by actress Judy Tyler, who would go on to star with Elvis Presley in ''Jailhouse Rock'' before being killed in a car wreck at age 23, the Princess symbolized purity and wholesomeness. Offstage, Tyler, who had married at 16, was-according to cast members, who remembered her with genuine fondness-famous for her foul mouth, her propensity for getting drunk and stripping on nightclub tables, and the cheerful way she dispensed sexual favors to the cast. But Tyler was by no means the only Doodyville citizen to enjoy a good time, frequently at Howdy`s expense. Rehearsals for the show, in fact, were ribald affairs in which the cast and crew regularly put the puppets through pornographic paces (leading to some embarrassing moments when groups of kids happened to be touring the studio and wondered why the puppets were in such curious positions). Advertisement Drawing upon interviews with former cast members as well as old Howdy kinescopes and archival material, Davis has written a richly detailed, even-handed account of the Howdy Doody phenomenon-and the all-too-human folks who made it all happen. The operators and dispatchers of this hotline often referred to themselves as Sean, officials said. The dispatchers for the hotline would then send drug dealers to different parts of the West Side to conduct business, officials said. This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services, to personalize ads and to analyze traffic. Information about your use of this site is shared with Google. By using this site, you agree to its use of cookies. Learn more here Grand Prize Winner: Donna Rickey Blog Winners: A Song for her Enemies by Sherri Stewart: Mary Ann Hake Spies & Sweethearts by Linda Shenton Matchett: Connie Ruggles Sword of Trust by DebbieLynn Costello: Brenda Walters Justice for Julia by Donna Schlachter: Natalya Lakhno Party Prize winners: Sherri Stewarts Winners A Song for her Enemies: Angie Pool Bottle of Dutch Syrup: Carol Koch Alscheff Corrie ten Boom book: Deb Gramie Burgess Linda Shenton Matchetts winners: $5.00 gift card to online retailer or choice (Kobo, B&N, AppleBooks, Amazon): Karen Hadley A Bride for Seamus: Carol Osterhouse Wotring DebbieLynn Costellos winners: Sword of the Matchmaker: Melissa Planas Sword of Forgiveness: Paty Hinojosa Gomez Shattered Memories: Charlene Zall Capodice Sword of the Perfect Bride: Licha Haney Donna Schlachters winner: Leather Journal: Lisa Turley GIVEAWAY RULES Winners must leave their email address and will be notified by email and the winners name will be announced in the days comments. No one under 18 can enter our giveaways. No purchase is necessary. All winners have one week to claim their prize. USA shipping only. Offer void where prohibited. Odds of winning vary due to the number of entrants. The bridge is due for replacement and has been closed to cars since 2009 and pedestrians since 2015, but was offered to the public in 2017. Although bridge donations are rare in the state, a few offers have been made and at least one accepted. But there were no offers to deconstruct and move Darrows bridge, according to the citys Department of Transportation. India faces acute external threats. We have to be united within to meet them but we have become so divided that sections of the political class, the media, security experts, retired bureaucrats and members of civil society are adopting positions that in effect create distrust in the government, erode public support for military decisions taken, weaken national resolve and damage national security as a result. India is very cautious about military interventions abroad for national security reasons. We act in self-defence, and that too not always because of limited defence capabilities and external factors. We did not take military action despite the grievous provocation of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist killings, or in 2001 when our Parliament was targeted and we threatened but did not attack Pakistan. During the Kargil war we fought purely defensively, with instructions to our air force not to cross the Line of Control (LoC). In 2106, we decided to warn Pakistan that its policy of promoting terrorism through non-state actors will have a state response from us. But these strikes were limited in scope, consistent with our military self-restraint. The Balakot strike was a sharper warning, but with de-escalation built into it with our announcement that it was a non-military pre-emptive strike against terrorist targets, the onus being on Pakistan to escalate. Rather than show solidarity with the government in the difficult decision it took after Pulwama and applaud the narrowing of Pakistans future options to bleed us with terrorism, a coalition of anti-BJP forces have questioned the authenticity of the Balakot operation, sought proof, magnified the controversy over the number of casualties, purveyed the Pakistani version of the strike and quoted foreign sources to refute government claims. By this they have exposed the divisions in the country on our hardened response to terrorism and given comfort to Pakistan. This has happened earlier too. The 2016 surgical strikes were questioned similarly and proof was sought in the light of denials by Pakistan that they took place at all. No thought was given to the morale of those who risked their lives in the operation. In 2017, when the Doklam stand-off occurred, instead of firmly closing ranks behind the government, the narrative was sought to be changed against what the government had achieved by accusing it of a botched-up operation that has left the Chinese more entrenched on the plateau than before. The obsessive attacks on the Rafale contract, despite the findings of no wrongdoing by the Supreme Court and the CAG and the public clarifications given by the top air force brass to prevent an acquisition vital for national security from being derailed, is one more instance of party politics taking priority over the countrys defence. Modis remark about the Rafale changing the result of the recent operation against Pakistan has been twisted by the opposition when what he meant was that the superior capabilities of the Rafale (see further, see better, see first) would have better countered the AMRAM armed F 16s . The government did not time the Pulwama strike or respond more forcefully with electoral gains in mind. It took a bigger military risk in challenging the Chinese at Doklam, and that was not a make believe exercise with electoral considerations in mind. The government needs praise for changing the paradigm of our response to Pakistani terrorism by the Balakot operation rather than be accused of staging a suspect show. How is the larger national purpose served by seeking to put the government on the defensive over a bold military operation against a sworn enemy? If a BJP leader mentions a high figure of Pakistani casualties without official confirmation, he could be boosting national morale rather than violating some political and moral code at the expense of the lives of our brave soldiers. Why create a raging controversy over a minor matter when the air strike ordered at Pakistan proper has much larger strategic implications? This was a major political decision by the government, it bore the ultimate responsibility for it, and it can, therefore, legitimately claim political credit for the strike, without being accused of politicising national security. It is casuistry to argue that it is the military that attacked and took the risks and the credit should therefore go to it alone. Those politicising national security are primarily the opposition political parties who have questioned the professional integrity of the armed forces, desperately want to dislodge Modi from power and fear that the BJP will gain from Balakot, the leftists who place ideology above country, the pro-Pakistan lobbies who argue that Pakistans behaviour can only change through a dialogue, and those who implicitly justify Pakistani terrorism by arguing that we have invited it by mismanaging the internal situation in J&K. Kanwal Sibal is former foreign secretary The views expressed are personal Actors Akshay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan have worked in several films together in the past and have been a hit pair too, particularly in multi-starrers. Now, in a new interview, the Khiladi actor has opened up about a hilarious situation he found himself in while promoting their film, Main Khiladi Tu Anari (1994), many years ago. Speaking to Rajeev Masand, the actor revealed that he loves working with Saif and how he once made a big goof up at the Delhi premiere of Main Khiladi Tu Anari. Rekha, Akshay Kumar and Twinkle Khanna at the wedding reception of Akash Ambani and Shloka in Mumbai, March 10, 2019. (PTI) He said: I love working with Saif. Our partnership always reminds me of Laurel and Hardy. I am playing Hardy and hes Laurel. If you remember Laurel and Hardy, they had some great chemistry. I also have a very good memory about when we had gone for the premiere... it is very funny what happened that day. Rageshwari, Shilpa, me, Saif... We had gone to Delhi. Now suddenly on stage, this guy comes and says: Ab Akshayji, aap ko AIDS ke baare mein kuch kehna hai. I didnt know the whole premiere was for charity for AIDS. Mr Ratan Jain (the producer of the film) didnt tell us; he forgot. Because I am the senior, they have called me first. Saif is looking at me and hes laughing, he knows I am nervous, he knows I dont know what to say suddenly. And guess what I must have said; I can never forget what I said. I had no idea what to say and I just went and I said: Doston, anari mat bano, condom istemal karo aur khiladi bano. Also read | Kesari making video: Akshay Kumar reveals what made the Battle of Saragarhi film challenging. Watch Meanwhile, on the work front, Akshay will soon get busy promoting his next film, Kesari, which is a Dharma Production. The film, which releases on March 21 (Holi), is the story of the valour and sacrifice of 21 Sikh soldiers of the British Indian Army who took on 10,000 Afghan fighters in the Battle of Saragarhi. On Monday, Akshay shared a making of Kesari video in which he detailed the gruelling process. In the video, he says, I had the best time doing action for Kesari because they were raw. The very premise of the film is something that swells my chest with pride. There are two major action sequences the film has. Spiti was a beautiful place but it had it own challenges -- high altitude and low oxygen. The action choreography was quite difficult. Also, to recreate a battle that took place in 1897, we had to learn the traditional battle style then. Follow @htshowbiz for more A notice of the closure was posted outside Sound-Bar at 226 W. Ontario St. several days after Thurman Bailey, 28, was killed. Bailey was working security at the club when a fight broke out and someone fired shots just after midnight. A host of Bollywood celebrities were spotted out and about in Mumbai on Wednesday. Alia Bhatt, who attended the teaser launch of her next film Kalank a day before, was spotted at a restaurant with her friends. Sacred Games actor Saif Ali Khan was spotted visiting Arbaaz Khan on the sets of his chat show Pinch in Juhu. Saifs wife and actor Kareena Kapoor was one of the first guests on the show where she shut down trolls who questioned her parenting skills on social media. Saif was later spotted on one of his usual walks with son Taimur, who comfortably sat on his shoulders, as always. The little one was also seen waving to the paparazzi outside his house. Alia Bhatt goes on an outing with her friends. (Varinder Chawla) Saif Ali Khan with Arbaaz Khan and Taimur in Mumbai. (Varinder Chawla) Taimur waves to the media. (Varinder Chawla) Ileana DCruz was spotted on a lunch outing with rumoured husband Andrew Kneebone at a restaurant in Bandra. The two were twinning in black. Farhan Akhtar was spotted at a salon owned by his ex-wife Adhuna Bhabani. The actor is currently dating Shibani Dandekar and is often seen with her. Disha Patani was spotted at another salon in the city. Ileana DCruz with Andrew Kneebone, Farhan Akhtar and Disha Patani spotted in Mumbai. (Varinder Chawla) Bollywood couple Kajol and Ajay Devgn were also spotted in the city. The two were seen together in the recently concluded sixth season of chat show Koffee With Karan. Also read: This is how Varun Dhawans adopted parents Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone made sure he went to the loo. Watch video Meanwhile, a few celebs were spotted by the paparazzi at the airport. Aditya Roy Kapur got into travel mode after the teaser launch of Kalank a day before. Luka Chuppi actor Kartik Aaryan was also seen heading to catch a flight. Parineeti Chopra was spotted returning from Delhi and was all smiles in white and blue attire. Kajol and Ajay Devgn spotted at a restaurant. (Varinder Chawla) Rajkummar Rao, Kartik Aaryan, Aditya Roy Kapur and Parineeti Chopra at the airport. (Varinder Chawla) Follow @htshowbiz for more India stocks fluctuated after the benchmark equity index closed Tuesday at its highest level in over five months. The S&P BSE Sensex added 0.2 percent to 37,612.06.77 as of 9:37 a.m. in Mumbai after falling by the same magnitude. The NSE Nifty 50 Index also swung between gains and losses of 0.2 percent. Both indexes are headed for monthly gains amid optimism Prime Minister Narendra Modis government may win another term when election results are announced in May, with a rise in nationalistic sentiment seen by some investors as boosting its prospects. Profit booking is expected after two sessions of strong gains but we believe the positive sentiment around rising possibility of a second term for the current government will offset any sharp decline, said Ritesh Ashar, chief strategy officer at Mumbai-based Kifs Trade Capital Pvt. Ltd. Volatility is a given but strong stock and sector specific buying will remain intact. A couple of weeks ago the central government announced the second round of Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of (hybrid) and Electric Vehicles in India, also known as FAME 2. Last week, electric mobility got another impetus as Delhi government issued the tender for procuring the operation of 375 electric buses out of a total of the promised 1,000 e-buses. A World Health Organizations study estimates that nine out of every 10 people in the world breathe air that contains high levels of pollutants. This results in a premature death of over 70 lakh people every year. Air pollution is a major issue in Indias cities and towns, but more notoriously in the northern part of the country. The recent data suggested that Gurugram is the most polluted city while the National Capital Region (NCR) has emerged as the most polluted region in the world in 2018. It has been widely reported that motor vehicles contribute around 30% of PM 2.5 concentration in the NCR. Therefore, both the announcements are good news for urban India. However, it is Delhis electric bus experiment that can create a transformational impact. Let me explain why I say so. Creating a sizeable pilot project Electric bus trial runs have been happening in India for a long time now. Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and many other cities have run a couple of electric buses. But the biggest electric bus fleet operation in the country is happening in Himachal Pradesh. Himachal State Road Transport Corporation (HSRTC) runs a dozen electric buses from Manali to Rohtang Pass. The number of buses will go up by 25. It is estimated that around 30,000 buses run in our cities as public transportation system. Therefore, running a couple of dozen buses will not make any tangible change in the public transport system of the country. However, Delhis approach for having a fleet of 1,000 electric buses is big enough to create a change. In fact, if operational, this will be the largest fleet of electric buses in the world after China. Figuring out the procurement model Delhi governments tender is not about buying buses but procuring the operation of electric buses. This means selected bidder will have to bring in the buses, operate and maintain it for the specified period. Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) decided to cancel a similar tender for Bangalore. The agency, as reported in the media, is looking to buy buses instead of getting the operations. This is where Delhi has got its procurement model right. Let me explain why. Transport companies in India traditionally buy buses and operate them. This works well with the conventional diesel or CNG buses because the entire ecosystem, including manpower, workshops, and other facilities, are built around them. Electric bus is all together a different ball game. Therefore, it is important that public agencies should do what suits them best, i.e. planning and monitoring. The operation and maintenance can be left to manufactures or operators. This is where Delhi gets it right. Removing the fear of a new technology A bulk of the electric vehicles (EVs) are manufactured as well as consumed in China. In fact, the electric bus space is totally dominated by the Chinese manufacturers. However, there are fears and rightly so, around how these vehicles will perform in our conditions, especially when temperatures in the summers touch around 50 degrees Celsius. There are also operation challenges like our bus systems are subjected to huge overloading. Also, the EV technology is evolving and therefore, we still dont know how the vehicles will perform in our conditions, say five to seven years down the line. Besides, the charging of vehicles and its impact on the local grid is also an issue that has been quoted a number of times. Therefore, the 1,000 e-bus project in Delhi will surely provide tangible answers to these questions and hopefully, help alienate fears around this new technology. It is estimated that there are around 16 to 17 lakh buses in India. The majority of them run on highly polluting diesel engines. CNG buses did offer a better choice but their deployment has suffered due to lack of CNG availability in cities. Electric buses, on the other hand, offer a cleaner, healthier and cost-effective alternative. The fuel is not a problem while the source is still coal-based and not green but the rapid rise in renewables is helping in cleaning the electricity. However, for electric buses to scale up we need working examples and Delhi has taken a step forward. This is also a learning for Gurugram, as the city tries to develop its public transport system. In fact, Gurugram has greater opportunity. In addition to buses, it can also look at changing the highly polluting diesel auto rickshaws into electric ones. The combination of buses and auto rickshaws can help it remove the infamous tag of the most polluting city in the world. (Amit Bhatt is the director- integrated transport, WRI India) A 27-year-old Romanian was caught by the public when he and his associate were allegedly removing a data skimmer and miniature camera they had installed at an ATM in east Delhis Jafrabad, police said on Wednesday. His associate, who is also from Romania, escaped. The devices are used to clone details of debit cards. This is the second such arrest of a Romanian in a similar crime in the past one month. On February 4, five Romanian nationals, including two women, were arrested for allegedly installing data skimmers and miniature cameras in ATMs . A total of 102 gift cards of H&M (Hennes & Mauritz AB), a clothing brand, which they had converted into ATM cards, had been seized from them. Deputy commissioner of police (northeast) Atul Kumar Thakur said they recovered the electronic device and two plastic cards with magnetic strips from the Romanian man, Isfan Iustin Georgel. We registered a case of cheating and damaging public property and arrested the Romanian national. A valid Romanian passport and tourist visa were seized from him. Georgel had come to India on March 5. We are looking for his absconding compatriot, Thakur said. Around 11 am on Tuesday, Thakur said, the Jafrabad police received information that some locals had seen two foreign nationals tampering with the ATM of a nationalised bank. The suspects tried to escape when the locals surrounded them. The duo started running after trying to conceal the items they had removed from the ATM. Some people chased them. They caught one suspect with one instrument and two plastic cards but his associate fled, Thakur said. During interrogation, an investigator said, the foreigner said the instrument was a data skimmer. He said the device is installed where the debit card is inserted and used to clone details of customers. A miniature camera, which the police believe Georgels friend took away with himself, is installed above the key pads to capture the passwords. They were supposed to transfer the stolen data to the plastic cards they were carrying with them. The cloned cards were to be used to withdraw money and make purchases. We checked the seized device and found stolen data of some debit cards, the officer said. In less than two months, the United Kingdoms prime minister Theresa Mays Brexit plan has suffered a second setback. Her Brexit deal was voted upon and defeated roundly by the UK Parliament on Tuesday. The scale of the loss (391 votes against her deal, 242 in favour) was smaller than the January vote (432 votes against, 202 in favour). This time around, Ms May was hoping for a better result thanks to a last minute legal concession she had secured from the European Union (EU). The EU could not, under the new terms, continue to apply the Irish backstop indefinitely without the UK reserving the right to legal redress. The Irish backstop is an arrangement to avoid a hard border between the UKs Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, which continues to be a member of the EU. If there is no trade deal during the transition period after Brexit is triggered, the backstop would kick into action and keep Northern Ireland in a single customs territory with the EU. This, many pro-Brexiteers argue, militates against the entire idea of Brexit in the first place. The EUs latest concession has not been able to convert enough sceptics. This newspaper has previously noted that only two of the following three can be achieved: no hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland; a clean Brexit; and the sanctity of the EUs single market. What will happen next? To begin with, a vote on a no deal Brexit in Parliament on Wednesday. Exiting the EU without a deal could be chaotic and disorderly for both businesses and citizens. If Parliament rejects no deal, all other options will be back on the table. Ms May may choose to go back to the EU demanding more concessions. The EU has pretty much made it clear that no further concessions are possible. The Labour party is demanding a fresh election. There are demands for a second Brexit referendum from different quarters. The biggest question right now is whether the UK will move to postpone the Brexit date of March 29? If yes, to what avail? The Election Commission of India (ECI) has announced measures to curb fake news and misinformation on social media platforms. It has brought political parties social media content under the ambit of model code of conduct, and expects candidates to disclose their social media accounts and all expenditure on their respective social media campaigns. But will this be enough? After all, the issue of fake news goes beyond politicians and political parties, partly because social media puts information dissemination into the hands of individuals. Can any measure adequately monitor the gigantic Indian Internet user base, which exceeds 500 million? Monitoring such a large number of users wont be possible for reasons as simple as the volume of content generated, its immediacy and the challenge with identifying sources. Besides, distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic information is in itself a challenge and could be prone to biases, putting enormous power in the hands of those monitoring the content for social media or the commission. Despite their avowed intention to curb fake news and misinformation, social media companies continued to be viewed with distrust by some experts and for good reason -- it is in their interest to maximise time and engagement. At the level of users, social media, it has been found, perpetuate and amplify existing biases, creating so-called filter bubbles. As for the political parties and politicians themselves, even assuming their IT cells (every party has one) are above board, it is unlikely they will have either the means or the inclination to crack down on supporters peddling misinformation. Theres no denying the power of these platforms. James Harkin, fellow at Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, writes in Columbia Journalism Review that journalism is now the second draft of history; the first draft is on new and social media. Nor their impact. Most media consumers have time only to consume first drafts. During the nascent years of social media (the worldwide web turned 30 yesterday), tech champions called it a tool for open dialogue, not anticipating the bubbles it would create. Before a social consensus emerges and as the medium matures it can only be hoped that the ECIs well-publicised steps make users become wary of the sources they get information from.The ECIs seriousness will hopefully bring about a sense of accountability among technology companies and political parties, but the organisation is up against it. Thats because technology companies need incentives to effectively crack down on fake news; political parties must hold themselves back (even as they are likely to succumb to unrestraint in their resolve to win elections); and consumers should be evolved enough to be able to tell the difference between fake and real news. The terrorist attack in Pulwama and the Indian airstrikes in Balakot have brought the Pakistan problem back into Indian drawing rooms. However, wise men like Shyam Saran and Sharat Sabharwal, former diplomats, have cautioned that India should not lose sight of the bigger threat, that is, China. The border with China, though disputed, has not witnessed kinetic action in decades now. The Pakistan border, on the other hand, has seen war, infiltrations and many low level terrorist attacks in the last three decades. Two questions now stare at us. First, why is China then the bigger threat? And, second, if it is indeed the bigger threat, why does Pakistan occupy so much mind space of both the people and the policymakers in India? In a 1985 paper, Stephen Walt, one of the leading lights of international relations theory, posited four factors that make one state a threat to another. They are: a) aggregate power; b) proximity; c) offensive capabilities; and d) offensive intentions. Based on these four factors, it is very clear that China, by far, represents the biggest threat to India. Its overall level of power and capabilities far exceed that of India. Pakistan, on the other hand, is far behind. Why does then Pakistan exercise our minds so much? It clearly enjoys higher salience among Indian people. The salience itself is a function of four India-Pakistan wars, destabilisation in Kashmir and scores of terrorist attacks across India. The history of partition and the reality of Hindu-Muslim politics in India give Pakistan the extra room in domestic political battles. The shared identities, when juxtaposed with divergent political ideologies, intensify the rivalries between the two countries, some experts argue. Not everyone agrees. Bharat Karnad, a renowned conservative strategist, for instance, contends that the intermeshed sociocultural and political milieu is the reason why the two countries have waged only gentlemanly wars, which havent ever escalated into a war of annihilation. In any case, the argument that Pakistan enjoys higher salience than any other foreign and defence policy issue in India remains uncontested. In a recent paper, titled Democratic Accountability and Foreign Security Policy: Theory and Evidence from India, two US-based scholars, Vipin Narang and Paul Staniland, conclude that Indian political leaders are responsive to those foreign security policy issues which enjoy high salience and where the responsibility can be clearly pinned to a leader or a government. Since 1947, Pakistan has almost always satisfied both the criteria and hence has been attended to with alacrity by the political executive. China, on the other hand, enjoyed high salience only in the early 1960s. This paper gives an opportunity to not just understand the importance of Pakistan policy to Indian domestic politics but also unpack why some foreign policy issues impose greater accountability norms than others. Narang and Staniland have done well to differentiate between different regime types. They have also acknowledged that their criteria of salience and clarity of responsibility are flexible and can change with time or be manipulated by suave political operators. However, we need to understand a little more about democratic accountability itself. Governments may face accountability at the hands of not just the electorate but also political elites. The pressure from political elites ensured VK Krishna Menons resignation from the defence ministry after the disaster of 1962 India-China war but he was later elected to Lok Sabha twice as an independent candidate. In another example, the Manmohan Singh government almost lost power on account of going ahead with a civil nuclear deal with the US, an issue that hardly had any salience with the Indian electorate. India-US relations, in particular, offer an interesting case study. In all the surveys conducted so far, the US comes out as the most favourable country among Indian people. Yet, successive Indian governments have been hesitant in moving forward with the US on various issues of bilateral cooperation. The reason is that the US relationship has enjoyed high salience among the Indian political elites. The Singh government at the time of the nuclear deal was in alliance with Communist parties, which staunchly oppose closer India-US relations. Another problem with the framework established by Narang and Staniland is that it implicitly assumes that political leaders are perfectly aware of the issues which carry salience with the electorate. During the domestic debate on the India-US nuclear deal, for instance, MK Pandhe of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), warned the Samajwadi Party that supporting the deal would harm the latters Muslim votebank. There is no evidence that Indian Muslims are any less desirous of better India-US relations than other social groups. A large nationally representative survey carried out in 2009 by Devesh Kapur, another US-based scholar, did not find any statistical difference on sentiments towards the US between states with different levels of Muslim population. On Pakistan, however, the political leaders have their fingers on the pulse of the people. All surveys, including the one by Kapur and global agencies like Pew, have repeatedly found Pakistan to be the most unpopular country among Indians, far ahead of China. The body bags of soldiers clearly create their own impact while threat from China seems distant and exaggerated. The challenge for the Indian political leadership is to be sensitive to the public opinion, while at the same time preparing India for the bigger threat in China. kunal.singh@htlive.com The CBSE Class 10 students in Lucknow were elated with the science question paper and satisfied with their performance. Nandini Goel, a student of GD Goenka Public School, Lucknow said that the paper was very easy and as per her expectations. Ekansh and Sanskriti of the same school said they were easily able to attempt all the questions well within the stipulated limit. Anushka and Aakifa said they were happy with the paper and all their hard work paid off. Aarav said, I hope to score very well in the Science paper. Students at Lucknow Public School, South City expressed satisfaction with Class 10 Science paper of CBSE. Students of this school came out of the examination hall with a smile. Abhishek Kumar, a student of LPS said that the paper was easy with no question out of the syllabus. Drishti Dubey, another candidate commented that the paper was uncomplicated and she could solve it comfortably. The Science teacher of Lucknow Public School, South City branch, Awadhesh Kumar Srivastava, Sabita Pokhrel and Jyoti Pandey jointly said that questions were mostly NCERT based and most of the questions were direct. Only few of them required analytical thinking. The diagram based questions were less. They were also confident that even below average students could score well, teachers said. A curious mother taking note of science paper with students of CBSE Class 10 coming out of Campion school after writing science paper in Bhopal on Wednesday. (Mujeeb Faruqui/HT Photo) Bhopal CBSE Class 10 student of St Francis School in Bhopla Nazish Khan said, It was a moderately difficult exam. Some questions were found tricky and required in-depth knowledge. Mother Teresa School student Shivam Gupta said, The questions from physics were easy but I found questions of biology and chemistry a bit tricky and difficult. I am happy with the paper. The 5 marks questions were difficult. Bal Bharti School student Puja Sharma said, It was a good paper for students who have studied thoroughly. Some questions, especially in section E, really tested the knowledge of students. Shri Sathya Sai Vidya Vihar, Indore student Mehek Nizam said, Third set was the toughest one. All the questions were found tricky. There were only a few direct questions from NCERT. Even, in maths exam, I got the third set and it was tough too. The soft marking should be done otherwise we will not score well in the exam. The US education secretary, John Gardner wrote a great book in the 1960 and asked a pertinent question, Can we be equal and excellent?. The new regulations around the 10% quota for the economically weak sound well intended that a childs life chances should not be fixed by certain morally arbitrary circumstances of their birth such as their social class, race, and economic status. Once implemented, the regulations shall significantly influence such a childs life chances in terms of labour market success, preparation for democratic citizenship, and general human flourishing. However, implementation of the same without impacting the quality of education shall be challenge for universities unless they reinvent themselves education that is multimodal, modular, blended and technology assisted can help institutions overcome this new challenge! Institutions are being instructed to increase the capacity in their already over- crowded classrooms to accommodate this extra demand. This shall call for a massive increase of infrastructure inside classrooms and Universities will need to recruit additional faculty to handle the workload. However, we would like to make a case that counting only on the traditional classroom model for expansion of capacity seems inadequate given our demographic dividend (where 65% of our population is less than 35 years old). This new regulation shall, at the same time, present a large opportunity for higher education institutions both to serve their mission and to increase the number of students they impact; however they will have to creatively think about their product and think of effective ways to deliver them to the modern learner. Universities would need to think beyond the classrooms and integrate several aspects of University 4.0 (U4.0) Is it going to be physical classrooms or online classrooms; text or multimedia; degrees or apprenticeships; study before working or continuing education or creative combinations? Universities will need to think of an education model that is multi-modal, modular and blended where students may not come to the campus everyday but learn the skills on the job; where assessments may not be a year-end activity but continuous feedback; where teachers need not physically come to the classroom but can interact with the students online. Students would need a continuum between certificates, diplomas and degrees where each can be an opening balance to the next one! Credentialing would need a fresh look where students could study several parts of their curriculum online and aggregate credits towards their certification. Universities will need to think harder about collaboration; where industry, academia and government can partner to create a structure that can benefit from the discovery driven culture of the University and the innovation driven culture of the industry! The litany of disruption in higher education redefined by global competition, new technologies, digitisation, growing costs, reservations, strong demand for rapid impact call for a fresh strategy and new approaches to the problem. Universities will need to emerge and create a performance driven culture where there is a hope of rising and a fear of falling. Instead of just quick-fixes, it needs rethinking education always on, on-the-go, online, onsite, on-the-job, gamified, crowd sourced, just-in-time, modular, collaborative and impactful. (The authors work at Schoolguru Eduserve. Views expressed are personal) Indian Navy Result 2019: Indian Navy has declared the results for Artificer Apprentice (AA) and Senior Secondary Recruits (SSR) exam 2019. The result has been declared of candidates for August 2019 batch. Candidates can check the Indian Navy Result 2019 on the official website of Indian Navy at joinindiannavy.gov.in. To check the result the candidates should login and check application dashboard. Indian Navy SSR and AA result 2019: How to check Visit the official website of Indian navy at joinindiannavy.gov.in On the homepage, click on login at the top Enter your Email address and password to login Check the application dashboard The Indian navy will upload the results for MR October 2019 batch on March 15, 2019. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Triple Frontier Director - JC Chandor Cast - Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Pedro Pascal Rating - 4/5 Director JC Chandors Triple Frontier is the first high-profile Netflix original film of 2019, after the streaming service made resounding leaps towards legitimacy with a spectacular 2018 that culminated with the glorious Roma. It is also perhaps one of the best examples of the tightrope that they are walking in terms of balancing a populist approach yet maintaining an auteur-driven identity. Triple Frontier has that something for everyone quality that could either work in its favour, or be its undoing. It constantly keeps reinventing itself every 15 minutes; it goes from gritty drug drama to slick heist movie, and then transforms into an old-school Western, and ends as a survival thriller/ chase film. Understandably, this may be too much for an audience looking for cheap thrills, but for Chandor and his cast, its an excuse to play in five movies instead of one, and to use genre to make important subtextual statements about violence, vengeance and warfare. Watch the Triple Frontier trailer here Five former military veterans, bitter about the sorry hand theyve been dealt by their country despite literally taking bullets for it, plan to take down a larger-than-life Mexican drug lord and keep all his dirty money for themselves. That is about as much as you need to know going in, and it is roughly a summation of what was shown in the films trailer. Immediately after having seen it, I remember thinking that the trailer had essentially revealed the entire films plot. But it turns out that Netflix has taken the Marvel approach to marketing this film, in that what weve seen so far is - to make an informed guesstimate - mostly footage from the first 30 minutes. The element of surprise has largely disappeared from modern mainstream moviemaking. And one of Triple Frontiers greatest accomplishments is how confidently it topples the expectations of a wary and weathered audience. It swerves around into strange and wonderful new directions in its remaining hour-and-a-half, piling set-piece upon set-piece, balancing action (of different styles) with deft character work and brazen political ideas. Pedro Pascal, Garrett Hedlund, Charlie Hunnam, and Ben Affleck in a still from Triple Frontier. (Courtesy of Netflix) And although Ben Affleck is (understandably) the top-billed actor in the credits, Oscar Isaac is ostensibly the films lead. It is he who plays the Bruce Wayne-style role, and rounds up his old brothers for the job. Charlie Hunnam is delivering inspirational speeches to future recruits, and for the first time his typical wooden delivery makes sense. His (actual) brother, played by Garrett Hedlund, is an MMA fighter. Pedro Pascal is once again playing one of his snaky charmers, and Affleck is peddling real estate. They are united by their feelings of resentment towards what they have sacrificed for their country - personally, physically and professionally - and what they have received in return. They are promised that the drug lord Lorea - an unseen entity who lingers like a spectre in the films opening act - has a stash of close to $75 million, which will be more than fair compensation for all their troubles, past and present. Triple Frontier is part-morality tale about selfishness and greed and corruption, part-parable about the perils of military intervention, but more importantly, its an insanely entertaining movie. Of course, its slightly off-putting that its so bashfully masculine (especially in this day and age), but that can be largely credited to writer Mark Boals creative inclinations. Ben Affleck ("Redfly") in a still from Netflixs Triple Frontier. (Courtesy of Netflix) Boal, the Academy Award-winning writer of recent Kathryn Bigelow films such as The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit, is in many ways the only constant in Triple Frontiers long and precarious journey to the (small) screen. Numerous actors - Tom Hanks, Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Tom Hardy to name a few - have signed on and dropped out, several directors were attached before Chandor, including Bigelow, and the film moved from Paramount to Netflix. Itll be interesting to know just how majorly (or not) Boals original screenplay has changed in these years. One would imagine every lead actor having suggested certain adjustments to tailor the role to suit them, but something tells me Affleck just went along for the ride. He is, for the first time in many years, visibly enthusiastic about acting - and at the very least, he doesnt have that look of pure contempt that was plastered on his face for most of Justice League. Follow @htshowbiz for more The author tweets @RohanNaahar The Supreme Court on Wednesday came down hard on the Assam government and said that it was not treating the issue of deportation of illegal migrants seriously enough. This has gone too far. This has become a joke, the court said. During the course of the hearing, the court questioned the solicitor general Tushar Mehta regarding the whereabouts of the foreigners, whether the foreigners tribunal was functioning and whether the states law and order machinery was functioning to implement the tribunals order. The court gave the Assam government time till May 27 to submit a detailed report on the functioning of the foreigners tribunal in the state. How seriously Assam is considering this matter is quite evident from the absence of any officer to brief you in the matter. An officer sitting here (resident commissioner) files affidavit on detention centres in Assam, says the bench led by CJI Recalling a 2005 order on the issue, the Supreme Court said, You must have gone through the order passed by this court in 2005 where this court has said Assam is facing the threat of external aggression... We would like to know what Government of India and Assam has done about it to meet this threat of external aggression. Saying that the court did not think that the problem was being tackled, the bench said, Assam will have to inform the court about the number of persons declared foreigners by the tribunals, number of persons detained at the detention centres and number of persons sent back to the country of origin. Assam also had to inform the number of foreign tribunals in the state are considered to be adequate and precise number of additional tribunals required immediately and near future. The Assam government informed the Supreme Court that more than 50,000 migrants had been declared as foreigners in the past 10 years. The Assam government also informed the court that around 900 migrants who had been declared foreigners were being kept in six detention centres in the state. The Assam governments submission came on a January order by the court directing the central and Assam governments to provide it with details of the number of people who had been declared as foreigners in the north-eastern state in the last 10 years by the Foreigners Tribunal and the number deported. The court had also asked the state to file an affidavit on the total number of detention centres in the state and how many inmates they had. SpiceJet on Wednesday cancelled 14 flights after the DGCA issued an order to ground all Boeing 737-MAX planes and banned the planes from the Indian airspace from 4pm onwards till further decision. In a statement, SpiceJet said that it had already initiated grounding of its Max fleet. SpiceJet has presently announced cancellation of 14 flights for today and will be operating additional flights from tomorrow, SpiceJet said in its statement. The civil aviation ministry has called an emergency meeting of all the airlines at 4 pm to discuss the situation where the Boeing 737-MAX aircraft are to fly back to India or to go to the maintenance facility for parking. Also read: No go for Boeing 737-Max planes after 4 pm, ministry calls meet of airlines At present, only two airlines fly the Boeing 737-MAX in India: SpiceJet and Jet Airways. In its statement, SpiceJet said that of the 76 planes in its fleet, 64 aircraft are in operations. We are confident of minimizing the inconvenience to our passengers and attain normalcy in our operations. While a majority of passengers affected as a result of these cancellations have been accommodated by SpiceJet on alternate flights, rest have been offered a full-refund, it said in its statement. Early on Wednesday morning, the DGCA issued a 4pm deadline for all Boeing 737-MAX 8 aircraft in India to be grounded. The DGCA order comes barely three days after an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed minutes after taking off killing all 157 people on board. On Tuesday, the ministry of civil aviation tweeted saying, DGCA has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately. These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations. While SpiceJet has grounded its fleet of 12 Boeing 737-MAX 8 planes, Jet Airways has five of these aircraft which are already grounded as it negotiates a financial crunch. Jet Airways has five B737 MAX in its fleet but is currently not flying any of these aircraft. The airline is in contact with the manufacturer and the regulator in context of this development, and remains committed to implementing all directives or advisories that may be published by those authorized, said a spokesperson for Jet airways. Hours before the listing of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar comes up in the UN Security Council, China said it will adopt a responsible attitude towards the move and pitch for a solution acceptable to all sides. The Chinese foreign ministry added that the move to list Azhar must follow all the rules and procedures laid down by the UN. The UN Security Council 1267 Sanctions Committee close the mandatory 10-day period on Wednesday for objections to a proposal moved by France, the US and the UK to designate Azhar a global terrorist. Watch: Opinion I Pak dictating Chinas decision on UN sanctions on Masood Azhar? If designated a terrorist by the UN body, Azhar will be subjected to global sanctions that require UN member countries to not host, arm or finance him. The fresh move to list Azhar comes in the backdrop of the JeM claiming responsibility for the suicide attack in Kashmirs Pulwama on February 14. China will adopt a responsible attitude and continue to participate in discussions, ministry spokesperson, Lu Kang said when asked about what position China would take on the issue of Azhars listing. On this issue, I want to say that China always adopts a responsible attitude, engage in consultation with various parties properly deal with this issue. The discussions, I want to say must follow the rules and procedures and relevant bodies and only the solution that is acceptable to all sides is conducive for resolving the issue, Lu said. China has thrice blocked the move by India and other UN members, interpreted by observers as a result of Beijing-Islamabads close ties: Beijing has cited both lack of evidence and consensus on why it did so. The US on Tuesday cautioned Beijing that a failure to designate Azhar as a terrorist would run counter to the shared goal of the US and China of achieving peace and stability in the region. The United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal, Robert Palladino, the state department deputy spokesperson, told reporters in response to a question in Washington.. The three-member Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid title dispute arbitration panel began its work on Wednesday with an in-camera meeting with 53 litigants in the case. A Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi-led Constitution Bench referred the dispute to the panel for an amicable settlement on Friday setting aside the absence of consensus between rival claimants. Former Supreme Court judge, FMI Kalifulla, heads the panel, which also includes Hindu guru Ravi Shankar and lawyer Sriram Panchu. The panel has been asked submit its first progress report within four weeks.The meeting on Wednesday lasted for over six hours and was held at a guest house of Ram Manohar Lohia Awadh University, Faizabad. No one was allowed to take cell phones inside the meeting hall. Even security personnel of some of the litigants were also asked to stay away. Uttar Pradesh advocate general, Raghvendra Singh, attended the meeting to assist the panel along with lawyers of the litigants. The litigants were served food at the meeting venue as no one was allowed to leave the place even during an hour-long lunch break. Swami Avimukteshwaranand, Mahant Dinendra Das, Triloki Nath Pandey, Mahant Dharam Das, Swami Chakrapani, Kamlesh Tiwari, Iqbal Ansari, Mohammad Umar and Haji Mahboob were among those who attended the meeting. As many as 14 petitions have been filed before the Supreme Court challenging the Allahabad high courts September 2010 verdict that called for a three-way division of the disputed 2.77 acres in Ayodhya. The UN Security Council will shortly take a call on designating Jaish-e-Mohammed Masood Azhar. a global terrorist with China saying it will adopt a responsible attitude towards the move and pitch for a solution acceptable to all sides. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, UK and the US on February 27 after the February 14 terror attack that killed 40 CRPF jawans in Kashmirs Pulwama. Jaish had taken responsibility for the suicide bombing. China holds the key to the designation proposal, the fourth so far. Beijing has thrice blocked the move by India and other UN members to designate Masood a global terrorist both lack of evidence and consensus on why it did so. China will adopt a responsible attitude and continue to participate in discussions, foreign ministry spokesperson, Lu Kang said Wednesday when asked about what position China would take on the issue of Azhars listing. The statement is seen as a hint of yet another veto by China at the UNSC. On Tuesday, the US cautioned China that the failure of the UNSC move to designate Azhar a terrorist, would run counter to the shared goal of the two countries of achieving peace and stability in the region. On Monday, India and the US called on Pakistan to take concerted action to dismantle terror infrastructure and deny safe haven to all terror groups, reflecting the growing pressure on Islamabad to crack down on terror after the Pulwama suicide bombing. Pressuring Pakistan to deliver on its counter-terrorism commitments and the move to designate Azhar a global terrorist figured in foreign secretary Vijay Gokhales meeting with US secretary of state Mike Pompeo. Gokhales visit also provided India an opportunity to give a final push to efforts, to list Azhar through the UNs Sanctions Committee. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress exchanged barbs on Wednesday over a report that sought to link Congress president Rahul Gandhi and his sister, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, with controversial arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari in a matter related to the purchase of land in Haryana. Union minister Smriti Irani said at a press conference that Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi purchased land in a deal involving HL Pahwa, who was raided by the Enforcement Directorate, and Mahesh Kumar Nagar, who had a role in a land transaction involving Priyanka Gandhis husband, Robert Vadra. Pahwa, she said, was lent money by CC Thampi, who is friends with controversial arms dealer Bhandari. Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala dismissed the charge, saying the allegation had been made because the BJP was facing imminent defeat in the 2019 election and had no answer to joblessness, agrarian crisis, economic slowdown and other such issues confronting the nation. The war of words came on a day that Rahul Gandhi, during an informal interaction with students in Chennai, said, I will be the first person to say it...Investigate Robert Vadra but also investigate PM Narendra Modi. The reference was to the Rafale jet fighter deal in which the Congress has alleged wrongdoing by Modi-- a charge that has been repeatedly rejected by the government . Hitting out at the Congress chief, Irani said Robert Vadra was merely a mask in the controversial land deals, and Rahul Gandhi was the real face. She alleged that Rahul Gandhis opposition to a defence deal (the purchase of Rafale aircraft) stemmed from his financial and family interests, and that the Congress leader wanted a rival company to bag the contract. In a spirited defence, Surjewala said Rahul Gandhi purchased 6.456 acres of land in Hassanpur village in Haryanas Palwal district on March 3, 2008. The land was bought at a total price of ?26,47,000 that was paid by cheque, which is the equivalent of about ?4,10,006 per acre, he said. On July 26, 2012, Rahul Gandhi gave the 6.4 acres of land to Priyanka Gandhi through a gift deed, registered in the office of the sub-registrar. They also paid stamp duty of ?193,700 on the registered gift deed, Surjewala said. Priyanka Gandhi, on August 12, 2014, gifted the land to Vipassana Sadhna Sansthan, a not-for-profit spiritual organisation. The purchase of land was done by Rahul Gandhi out of his own funds paid from his bank account. At no point of time, this purchase of a small piece of land and consequent gift to a spiritual organisation has any connection with any individual, whatsoever, Surjewala said. Aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation has asked airlines not to overcharge passengers in the wake of the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft being grounded in India. The decision to ground the aircraft came days after a 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa, killing 157 people, including four Indians. After a meeting with airlines on Wednesday, civil aviation secretary P S Kharola said that Thursday will be a more challenging day as the impact of the decision to ground the aircraft would be more visible. Operators have also agreed not to indulge in predatory pricing, DGCA chief B S Bhullar was quoted as saying by PTI. The DGCA announced its decision to ground the aircraft on Tuesday night. SpiceJet has 12 such aircraft in its fleet and Jet Airways has five, which have already been grounded. In the meeting with civil aviation ministry officials, SpiceJet assured that it will adjust most passengers in its own flights. DGCA said lifting the ban will be based on inputs from various agencies and it is unlikely to happen soon. India had on Tuesday announced the grounding of all Boeing 737 Max 8 planes with the Ministry of Civil Aviation tweeting: DGCA has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately. These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations. According to Jet airways, all its 737-800 MAX aircraft are grounded as the airline negotiates a financial crunch. Jet Airways has five B737 MAX in its fleet but is currently not flying any of these aircraft. The airline is in contact with the manufacturer and the regulator in context of this development, and remains committed to implementing all directives or advisories that may be published by those authorized, said a spokesperson for Jet airways. Air fares in India have shot up as a fresh round of cancellations on account of the ban on Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft on Wednesday added to a litany of problems besieging Indian airlines, whose per-day scrapped flight toll is now touching 150. Ticket booking websites put the average jump in fares at 40-50%, with some sectors recording as much as a 100% spike in last-minute ticket prices. The immediate trigger for the problem, which is expected to worsen as school holidays begin next month, was the grounding of 13 SpiceJet Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft, the type involved in a fatal crash in Ethiopia on Sunday and in Indonesia last October. Tomorrow is going to be a real challenging day because today [Wednesday] the ban has come into effect only from the second half of the day... SpiceJet has assured us that they have taken up multiple plans. They have increased the utilisation of existing aircraft so that the cancellations get limited, civil aviation secretary PS Kharola said. IndiGo, the countrys leading domestic airline by market share, in mid-February announced that it will be cancelling 30 flights a day till March 31 due to a shortage of pilots. Jet Airways, the second largest airline by market share, is reeling from a liquidity crunch that forced it to ground 50 jets, which translate to at least 100 flights. Air India, which has the third-highest market share, has grounded 17 aircraft for technical reasons such as non-availability of spare parts, according to Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) data. The average increase in same-day fares is 40-50%, while last-minute fare from Delhi and Mumbai noticed a significant increase, which in some cases has even been 100%, according to Aloke Bajpai, CEO and co-founder of Ixigo, a travel booking website. At least 50 planes are out of action or grounded on the domestic front owing to multiple reasons. That is a significant reduction in domestic airline capacity. The additional capacity coming in is not likely to cover this in the short term, while demand is going to be robust over the next few months because of the school holidays season and surging leisure travel, said Sharat Dhall, chief operating officer (COO) of travel search engine Yatra.com. The shortage of planes and high seat occupancies are expected to push airfares north in the short term. The airfares were at least 15% higher this year compared to last year, and owing to the current situation, airfares are expected to rise further this season, Dhall added. It is unclear how long the problem will last, especially since the most immediate trigger has been the second crash of a new Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft in five months, which has led dozens of countries, including European Union nations, to ban its operations. On Sunday, Ethiopian airlines flight ET-302 slammed into a field in Addis Ababa six minutes after take-off, killing all 157 on board. It may take weeks, if not months, for the reasons to be determined conclusively and any mechanical or electronic vulnerability to be fixed. The crisis has also hit international flights. Following the ban of Boeing 737 MAX in Indian airspace, international inbound flights have been affected: 34 international flights into Mumbai and 12 flights bound for Delhi were cancelled. Grounding of additional planes will further impact fares which were already high this season, the Ixigo CEO said. International flights on some sectors, particularly those headed to the United States and Gulf nations, have also been affected by Pakistans decision to close its airspace following a military confrontation with India last month. The government on Wednesday urged airlines not to increase fares, but airlines are not under any legal obligation to do so since pricing is not regulated. Mark Martin, CEO of Dubai-based Martin Consulting, said Indian aviation was possibly going through its worst phase. Overall fleet of Indian carriers is down by 20% due to multiple reasons. It will certainly have an impact on fare, he said. Last year, at least 30 Airbus A320Neo aircraft were grounded over the 12-month period after concerns arose over flaws in the Pratt&Whitney engines they were equipped with. Earlier this year, DGCA asked airlines not to fly planes of this make to Andamans, a route that puts flights more than an hour away from alternate airports which can be used in case of an emergency. For now, SpiceJet said it is rationalising and optimising the use of its Boeing 737NG and Bombardier Q400 aircraft to minimise inconvenience to passengers. The airline also said that it was adjusting passengers on alternative routes and offering the option of a full refund, change in travel date, or even a change of destination without any cancellation charges or fare difference. The airline has been asked not to take more deliveries of the 737 MAX till problems are rectified. (With inputs from Neha LM Tripathi in Mumbai) This week on Grand Tamasha, Milan Vaishnav (Director of the South Asia programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) discusses the latest economic figures from India with Roshan Kishore (Data and Political Economy Editor, Hindustan Times). The Government of India reported that GDP growth in the third quarter of 2019 slipped to 6.6 percentthe slowest pace in five quarters. Indias GDP growth forecast for 2018-19 has also been revised downwards to 7 percent from 7.2 percent. Milan and Roshan discuss the political implications of Indias slowing economy, the nature of rural distress, and how to make sense of Indias contested employment data. Then, Milan speaks with Neelanjan Sircar, one of Indias leading public opinion experts. Sircar, an assistant professor at Ashoka University and senior visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, explains why pollsters have such a hard time forecasting elections in India and how to make sense of the public opinion surveys that are coming in ahead of the 2019 general elections. Sircar explains why it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for an Indian version of Nate Silverthe star number cruncher of American electionsto emerge. Milan also talks with Sircar about the status of the heated election race in West Bengal, a state Sircar has been researching for a decade. If shes doing a favor for somebody with some influence, that would be unprofessional and she should be criticized, he said. If she was trying to clean up a mess that had compromised even her own office and a clean investigation from the FBI would be in the interest of truth, then what she did is laudable. India and Pakistan will hold talks regarding the finalisation of the draft agreement on the Kartarpur corridor on Thursday, March 14. A delegation from Pakistan is scheduled to arrive in India India today to discuss and finalise modalities for facilitating visit of pilgrims through the Kartarpur corridor. Last week on Thursday, Raveesh Kumar, the external affairs ministry spokesperson, tweeted that a a follow-up meeting can beheld in Pakistan, as required. The meeting is expected to take place on the Indian side of the Wagah-Attari border. Among the numerous things that the two sides will discuss will be the modalities and coordinates for the crossing point of the corridor on the international border as well as an agreement that will allow Indian pilgrims to travel without visas to visit the Gurdwara. Last year, the two sides had announced plans to build the corridor linking Dera Baba Nanak in India with Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Pakistan. The government of India has planned various activities to commemorate the 550th birth anniversary of the Sikh guru Guru Nank Dev. As part of that, the ministry of home affairs has begun the development of a state-of-the-art passenger terminal building (PTB) - with its design inspired by the Khanda symbol - at Kartarpur sahib corridor. The government has also identified 50 acres of land for the Kartarpur corridor, the development of which will take place in two phases. In the first phase, 15 acres of land will be developed, which will include the passenger terminal building. The government is aiming to complete the first phase of the PTB before the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev. As many as 54 immigration counters will be set up for processing of up to 5,000 pilgrims per day at the PTB. The second phase will see the development of a viewer gallery and restaurant atop a watch tower, a 5-bedded hospital, accommodation for around 300 pilgrims, and transit accommodation. India has been keeping a very close eye on Chinas presence in the Indian Ocean, whose growth in recent years includes six submarines ostensibly for anti-piracy patrols, Admiral Sunil Lanba, chief of the naval staff, said here on Tuesday. Addressing policy-makers, researchers and officers from the British and Indian navies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Lanba said Chinas presence in the Indian Ocean is unlikely to go away. He shared the interaction with Admiral Philip Jones, first sea lord and chief of Royal Navy. The Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean started in 2008. It has grown over the years. At any given time, there are six to eight Chinese units in the northern part of the Indian Ocean. They are permanently present and they have three to four survey vessels or hydrographic vessels. The largest numbers were about 14 ships which were there in about middle of 2017. They also deployed submarines; there have been total six deployments of submarines, started in 2015for anti-piracy patrol, which is the most unlikely platform for them to do, Admiral Lanba added. Noting that China now has its first overseas base in Djibouti, Admiral Lanba, who is also chairman of the chiefs of staffs committee, said: We keep a very close eye on their presence and their deployments. I dont think the Chinese presence in the northern Indian Ocean is going to go away. On Chinas growing naval infrastructure, Lanba said no country had invested so much as China. In the last five years, China had commissioned 80 new ships, he said, adding: No nation can match the productivity of their shipyards. So it is a challenge, we keep a close eye. Rahul Roy-Chaudhury, IISS senior fellow for south Asia, said: In a powerful message to India, the UKs First Sea Lord for the first time jointly shared a panel with Indias naval chief at the IISS, which had only happened twice before with his US and Australian counterparts. And, in a strong message to the UK, the visit of Indias naval chief took place despite Indias ongoing tensions with Pakistan. During Lanbas four-day tour of the UK, he is scheduled to hold discussions with the chief of defence staff, UK, and top navy officers at Portsmouth. He will also visit the Royal Navy Submarine Rescue Facility at Glasgow and interact with the organisers of the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Official sources said the Indian Navy has traditional links with the Royal Navy. With the constitution of the Indo-UK Defence Consultative Group and the Military Sub Group in 1995, a two-tier structure of cooperation was established to progress various areas of defence cooperation. The Indian Navy and Royal Navy are also partners in the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium, a maritime cooperation construct conceptualised and pioneered by Indian Navy in 2008. The two navies conduct regular exercises in both countries. Will pass 33% womens reservation bill: Rahul Gandhi Women are the most important part of the country. In 2019, when we come to power, will pass the 33% womens reservation bill first. Women will then be able to enjoy 33% reservation in central government jobs, said Rahul Gandhi. Will not allow anyone to disturb the Tamil spirit: Rahul Gandhi We might have small differences in our view point, we have aligned for the nation. But we are not going to allow anyone to disturb the Tamil spirit, said Rahul Gandhi. We will not let BJP rewrite the history of TN and India. We are one hundred per cent sure that we will stand for Tamils. PM is not only attacking the Tamil, he is also attacking all other languages. One India, One language, One religion is the agenda of PM Modi. But, we will not let that to happen, he further said. Will introduce separate ministry for fisheries department: Rahul Gandhi When cyclones hit Tamil Nadu, Central Government denied giving proper compensation. Millions of Fishermen are facing uncertainties. We want to honour them. We will hear the families who had lost their dear ones. To honour the fishermen, we will make a separate ministry for fisheries department, said Rahul Gandhi in Kanyakumari. Will ensure guaranteed minimum income: Rahul Gandhi We will design a guaranteed minimum income. If anyone is found below that minimum income line, the government will credit money into their account, says Rahul Gandhi. We will implement that scheme without partiality, he added. We will reform GST: Rahul Gandhi in Kanyakumari We will resolve the unemployment issue. We will create jobs. GST and demonetization have destructed industries in the nation. So, our government will reform the GST. The current GST is a nonsense one. We will make one tax and it will be an easy tax, says Rahul Gandhi. The truth will put him in jail: Rahul Gandhi attacks PM Modi Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar said Unmai Vellum, which means the truth will set you free. However, this doesnt stand true for PM Narendra Modi, because the truth will put him in jail, said Rahul Gandhi, renewing his attack on the Prime Minister over Rafale deal. Narendra Modi wants to create two Indias Narendra Modi wants to create two Indias. One is for the rich and other for unemployed youths and farmers, says Rahul Gandhi . PM keeps speaking lies, says Cong chief Rahul Gandhi in Kanyakumari Tamil Nadu government is being controlled by PMO In the past, AIADMK and DMK fought against each other. They were the two big leaders. But, AIADMK is not a big leader anymore , instead the central government is controlling TN Government. PM thinks that he can capture any institution in the country and he can rule any state from Delhi. His intentions are absolutely wrong. He cannot suppress Tamils. Tamils always stand with the truth. PM is speaking lies. He assured that Rs.15 Lakhs will be credited into the accounts of Indian families. He promised 2 crore jobs for the youths. But, now the nation is facing unseen unemployment issues. Farmers are in distress. If we come to the power, we will waive off the farm loans, says Rahul Gandhi in Kanyakumari. Spirit of Tamil Nadu people will speak in 2019 elections: Rahul Gandhi We are on our way to defend the rights of Tamil Nadu Earlier, we [Congress and DMK] did not have a political alliance in Tamil Nadu. But, now it is an alliance for the people. The spirit of TN people will speak in 2019 elections, says Rahul Gandhi. Karunanidhi will always live with us: Rahul Gandhi I realise that DMK patriarch Karunanidhi is living among us. Karunanidhi will never die. His feelings and service will always be with us. Just like Karunanidhi, former CM and Congress leader K Kamaraj will also live with us forever. Its because these giants always worked to towards preserving the Tamil culture, which is now in danger, says Rahul Gandhi . MK Stalin will be next CM of Tamil Nadu: Rahul Gandhi As he began addressing a public meeting Tamil Nadus Kanyakumari, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi said that MK Stalin will become the next chief minister of Tamil Nadu. Rahul Gandhi set to address public meeting in Kanyakumari Congress national president Rahul Gandhi is set to address a public meeting at Scott Christian College ground in Tamil Nadus Nagercoil. Election Commission calls meeting of chief election officers tomorrow EC has called meeting of Chief election officers (CEO) of States & all Observers tomorrow. Meeting is scheduled tomorrow in Delhi. Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora along with Election Commissioners Sushil Chandra and Ashok Lavasa will brief the observers, says ANI. Can win all 10 LS seats in Haryana if JJP, AAP, Congress ally: Kejriwal Kejriwal says all 10 Lok Sabha seats in Haryana can be won if JJP, AAP, Congress ally. I have a proposal for Rahul Gandhi to form an alliance of JJP-AAP-Congress in Haryana so that we defeat BJP in all 10 seats in Haryana&itll play a big role in defeating the Modi-Shah Jodi at national level. In Delhi, we will win without Congress. Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal: Today, I have a proposal for Rahul Gandhi to form an alliance of JJP-AAP-Congress in Haryana so that we defeat BJP in all 10 seats in Haryana&it'll play a big role in defeating the Modi-Shah Jodi at national level. In Delhi, we will win without Congress. pic.twitter.com/G6MpukPoNI ANI (@ANI) March 13, 2019 DMK, Congress alliance constructive, powerful: Rahul DMK and Congresss alliance is a meeting of minds. Its constructive. Its a powerful alliance: Rahul Gandhi. Press meet ends. NEET is a resolvable issue, says Rahul Gandhi On NEET, Rahul says we will look into it. NEET is a resolvable issue. It is discriminatory to students of TN. We could work out a flexible solution, says Rahul Gandhi Tamil people should run this state: Rahul Tamil Nadu does not have its own government. Mr Modi is running this state on remote control. This is an assault on Tamil people. Tamil people should run this state: Rahul We have no animosity towards anyone: Rahul on Rajiv assassination convicts Court has to decide on releasing seven convicts, says Rahul Gandhi on Rajiv Gandhi assassination case convicts. As far as assassination of my father.. legal issue should take its course. We have no animosity towards anyone. If we come to power, we will initiate enquiry in Rafale deal, says Rahul Gandhi As far as Rafale aircraft is concerned, we have no doubt on the capabilities. But corruption in the deal is crystal clear. If we come to power, we will initiate enquiry in Rafale deal. We are 100% certain of Modi and Anil Ambanis involvement, says Rahul Gandhi I do not believe India should be ruled from PMO: Rahul I believe in decentralization. I do not believe India should be ruled from PMO. A state too should not be ruled from the CM office. A panchayat has a role, an MLA has a role, says Rahul Gandhi. BJPs differentiation of states based on power is anti-national: Rahul See how the BJP differentiates based on which one it is in power and where it is not in power. Thats anti-national, says Rahul Gandhi. Congress firming up alliances in states: Rahul Alliances have firmed up in a number of states like Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Jharkhand. Talks on alliance in Bihar have practically concluded, conversation on alliance in J&K is close to the final stages. It is BJP that is not having a strong alliance, says Rahul Gandhi. Wholesale attack on institutions, Tamil language, culture: Rahul There is a wholesale attack on institutions. CBI chief removed at 1.30 in the night. Demonetisation without asking the RBI. Judges saying we want justice. There is an attack on Tamil language and Tamil culture. This is happening in the states and northeast. BJP sent back Masood Azhar: Rahul Gandhi Pakistan will take any whatever opportunity they get. What did the government do to ensure that the Pakistanis did not plant the bomb? asks Rahul Gandhi. The architect of the bomb, called Masood Azhar, was released by the BJP (during Atal Bihari Vajpayee govt tenure), sent to Pakistan. (Current) National Security Adviser Ajit Doval was involved in that deal. BJP needs to explain why they sent that criminal back: Rahul Gandhi Cant expect growth in a divided country: Rahul Gandhi You cannot have a country that is divided and expect solid economic growth. So we are working to bring harmony in the country. We believe India is for everybody. We are going to reform GST. We will give access to small and medium business. We will simplify GST, says Rahul at a press conference in Chennai. Rahul Gandhi tells students to believe in themselves Rahul Gandhi tells students to believe in themselves. You have to be humble. When someone throws hate at you, catch the hate put it down and throw love in return: Rahul Gandhi. Interactive session ends. Your biggest teachers are the people who attack you, abuse you: Rahul Your biggest teachers are the people who attack you abuse you. But you will learn only if you dont return in the same coin. Nature of Tamil people is love and affection: Rahul Gandhi on why he hugged the Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Parliament PM, unfortunately, did not have the love he should have had: Rahul People who dont have affection towards others, the reason is because they have not been loved. PM, unfortunately, for whatever reason, did not have the love he should have had. This man (PM Modi) is so angry that he is not able to see the beauty of the world. At least, I should show him affection. So I genuinely feel love for the Prime Minister. I cant hate Mr Modi: Rahul on why he hugged the Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Parliament Dont ask me to sing, says Rahul Dont ask me to sing, says Rahul, at interaction with students in Chennai, when told that the light music team had something to ask him. The audience burst into laughter. I am part Kashmiri: Rahul I am part Kashmiri: Rahul on solving alienation of Kashmiris. It starts from the heart. Do you actually want to solve the problem? Or are they just a political instrument? A bridge was built. Pakistan will take every opportunity. This govt does it for brownie points: Rahul Its the governments responsibility to protect the people. But they do no do it strategically, systematically. They do it for public opinion, for brownie points: Rahul Modis policies setting fire to Kashmir: Rahul We isolated Pak internationally. We engaged with people in Jammu and Kashmir. Between 2004 and 2012, we finished terrorism. But Modi came to power and made a mistake. BJP aligned with PDP, both are diametrically opposite parties. Modis policies setting fire to Kashmir, allowing Pak to carry out terrorist acts in Kashmir. Why did you not stop the killing of 45 CRPF personnel: Rahul India stands straight, doesnt lean left or right: Rahul India stands straight, doesnt lean left or right, a leader once said when asked: Rahul Gandhi Crony capitalism biggest hurdle to growth in India: Rahul Gandhi Crony capitalism and corruption biggest hurdle to growth in India. Huge amount of resources is captured by 15 or 20 people. There is division: Rahul Gandhi Todays govt has a north India-specific focus: Rahul Tamil Nadu and south India must have a voice in India. Todays govt has a north India-specific focus. P Chidambaram, from Tamil Nadu, determined the economic future of the country for 10 years. How many times have you seen the PM answer questions like this: Rahul How many times have you seen the Prime Minister stand in front of 3000 women and answer questions like this, asks Rahul Gandhi Investigate Mr Vadra, but investigate the Prime Minister: Rahul Gandhi I am in talks with paramilitary forces on their protests. Law should apply to everybody, not selectively. Investigate Mr Vadra, I am the first person to say that, but investigate the Prime Minister on, says Rahul Gandhi on a question on Robert Vadra. Rahul attacks PM Modi, Anil Ambani on Rafale deal. Not a word on Rafale deal. Look at the world not from your position but his/her position: Rahul Humility, says Rahul on a question about what he imbibed from his mother Sonia Gandhi. Look at the world not from your position but his/her position. Respect everybody else. We will give you tools, finance to make India No. 1: Rahul China creates 50,000 jobs in 24 hours. We will give you the tools, environment, finance and create the mood for you to make India No. 1. Nirav Modi was a hollow shell for stealing money from this country: Rahul The money you gave, your parents gave in demonetisation, Narendra Modi gave to Nirav Modi. Nirav Modi was a hollow shell for stealing money from this country: Rahul Did you like demonetisation, Rahul asks students Did you like demonetisation, Rahul asks students, and gets no in answer. He continues, You cant have a negative fearful discriminative atmosphere in the country and expect economic growth. We will change the mood of the country. We will change the structure of GST and lower the tax. I dont think women should be second to men in any way: Rahul South India significantly better than North on treating women. Its a cultural aspect. Tamil Nadu one of the leaders in how it treats women. I dont think women should be second to men in any way. We will pass womens reservation bill in Lok Sabha, assemblies and reserve 33% for women in govt jobs. Generally women are smarter than men: Rahul Blatant privatisation not solution to education: Rahul India spending very little in education. We will spend more. Our target is 6%. Blatant privatisation not solution to education, says Rahul Gandhi on a question on research and education in India Current govt attacking, capturing institutions of the country: Rahul Gandhi Current govt attacking, capturing institutions of the country. We are trying to defend it, says Rahul Gandhi Call me Rahul, dont call me sir, says Rahul Gandhi Call me Rahul, dont call me sir, says Rahul Gandhi at interaction with students in Chennai. Rahul Gandhi arrives in Chennai Congress President Rahul Gandhi arrives in Chennai. He will participate in multiple events, including an interaction with students, in the state today. Tamil Nadu: Congress President Rahul Gandhi arrives in Chennai. He will participate in multiple events, including an interaction with students, in the state today. pic.twitter.com/JgtvIekjrO ANI (@ANI) March 13, 2019 Rahul Gandhi set to address students in Chennai Rahul Gandhi set to address students in Chennai The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Wednesday asked the election commission (EC) to declare West Bengal, where it is fighting a pitched battle against the Trinamool Congress (TMC), as a super-sensitive state to ensure free and fair elections. The party also wants independent media observers sent to the state, to allow the media to function with neutrality. The media is browbeaten in Bengal, law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told mediapersons after meeting the poll panel. Observers must give independent feedback to the Election Commission, he said. West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee hit back and said that by demanding that the entire state be declared highly sensitive, the BJP has insulted people of Bengal. The people of this state want a free, fair and peaceful election, but the BJP doesnt, she added, alleging that the BJP is already shipping in thugs from neighbouring states such as Jharkhand to trigger violence during the polls. She also refuted Prasads claim on media freedom and said the suppression of media is the BJPs culture. Speaking on condition of anonymity, an EC official said they have sought from the state chief election officer. A former EC official said on condition of anonymity that there is no concept of independent media observers to watch over elections and that the Press Council of India, which serves as a regulator for print media, already has norms for checking paid news. The delegation of BJP leaders also told the poll panel that central forces should be deployed at all polling booths in the state; officials whose electoral impartiality is questionable should be withdrawn from poll duty; and that action should be taken against Congress chief Rahul Gandhi for making remarks against PM Narendra Modi. At a rally in Gujarat on Tuesday, Gandhi accused Modi of having stolen Rs 30,000 crore from Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd and giving it to businessman Anil Ambani as part of the Rafale deal. Also read: 10 sitting MPs dropped as Trinamool releases list for 2019 elections Rejecting BJPs charge, Congress secretary Pranav Jha said: It is indeed a supreme irony that a party and PM who have violated Indias constitution, its social fabric and institutional framework are complaining of violating code of conduct. Prasad, who was accompanied by Union ministers Nirmala Sitharaman and JP Nadda and the partys general secretaries Bhupender Yadav and Kailash Vijayvargiya, said: There are certain officials who are very, very biased towards the ruling dispensation [in Bengal] and must be completely withdrawn. In Kolkata, Banerjee countered the Union minister by asking whether the BJP wants officers to ensure that all votes go to the saffron party? Though Prasad did not name any official, he said the names have been submitted to the poll panel. BJP leaders familiar with the matter said former Kolkata police commissioner Rajeev Kumar is one such official. Kumar is now in charge of key police units in the state. Prasad also said the party flagged the incidents of violence that were reported in the state during the local body elections. Also read: Three Bengal Opposition leaders including a TMC MP join BJP Bhopal-based Makhanlal Chaturvedi University of Journalism and Mass Communication has decided to reduce the influence of right-wing leaders in the institutes syllabus and introduce German economist Karl Max and Indias first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in its curriculum from the next academic session. The university has also decided to institute an inquiry into allegations of university funds having been given to some right-wing organisations in the 15 years of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rule in the state. The university, set up in 1990, is considered a premier institution for journalism and has over 1,000 students in its Bhopal campus, apart from several hundred in other campuses including one in Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi. The vice-president is the universitys visitor and the Madhya Pradesh chief minister heads its governing council. Chief minister Kamal Nath replaced BJP government- appointed Jagdish Upasane with journalist, Deepak Tiwari, as the new vice-chancellor of the university on February 25. In 20 days since he took charge, Tiwari has decided to remove undue references to right- wing leaders, including study material in the library and the syllabus. I am in favour of study of all ideologies by students. A journalism university should be ideology-neutral, Tiwari said. An 11-member committee will suggest changes in the syllabus. We have also started an Idea of India lecture series. A university official, who is reviewing the syllabus, said the students would be taught about Nehru and Marx from the next academic year; references to both were removed from the syllabus during tenure of the then VC BK Kuthiala. A chapter on Narad Muni introduced on the ground that he was the first mythological journalist would be removed, the official said, adding that references to right-wing leaders will be taught in a right proportion. Tiwari has replaced a photo in his office of Deendayal Upadhyaya with those of B R Ambedkar and Nehru. The quote of the day on the universitys notice board is now typically a saying by Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, not one by BJP ideologues like Upadhyay, Syama Prasad Mookerjee or Veer Savarkar. The VC has also decided to scrap Pakistan media watch wing and Jammu and Kashmir study centre. The service of a news agency said to be affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, ideological mentor of BJP, has been discontinued and services of two national news agencies restored, he said. The vice-chancellor also said that an inquiry has been instituted to look into allegations of the release of university funds to certain right-wing organisations. I was surprised to see this flow of varsity money to these organisations, he said. Former university VC Kuthiala said that if saffronisation referred to a process of glorifying ancient Indian culture, it could not be treated as an undesirable element in a system of learning. It would be a mockery of the autonomy of universities if with change of government the course curricula are changed, he said. Jayant Tomar, head of journalism department, ITM University, Gwalior, who has been a student of the journalism university, said, I have no hesitation in saying that a particular ideology dominated the campus during the previous government. If there are certain changes now in the new government we should welcome it. Evidence collected and collated by India and shared with Pakistan, members of the UN Security Council, and other prominent countries reveals the umbilical links between Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar with Sunni global terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda and the Taliban. There is evidence now to prove that Azhars elder brother Ibrahim Azhar and younger brother Rauf Asghar orchestrated the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC-814 in 1999 to secure the release of Azhar, the then Harkat-ul-Ansar general secretary from an Indian jail, with the help of Al Qaeda, Taliban and the ISI, in exchange for at least 150 passengers. Such was the clout of Azhar with the then Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and the then Taliban emir Mullah Omar, that he was driven out of Kandahar airport by none other than Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, who would go on to be the Taliban chief, and who was killed in a US drone strike on May 21, 2016. Azhar was in Kot Balwal prison in Jammu at the time of his release; he was arrested on the outskirts of Srinagar on February 11, 1994, after entering India through Bangladesh on a fake Portuguese passport in the name of Vali Adam Issa. According to the evidence that has been shared (HT has reviewed it), Azhar studied at Jamia Binoria, Karachi, the nursery of global jihad in the 1980s, under the tutelage of Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai and later joined Harkat-ul-Mujahideen lead by Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil. He was combat trained in Al Qaeda terror factories in Afghanistan as Khalil was very close to both Laden and Mullah Omar. The Jaish-e-Mohammed terror group was jointly floated by Masood Azhar and Mufti Shamzai in Binoria seminary in 2000. After the assassination of Mufti Shamzai, all the jihadi cadre gravitated towards JeM, which was tightly run by Azhar through his close family members. Rauf Asghar is responsible for running the terror group on a day to day basis. Another brother, Talha Saif, is the head of Al Murabitoon, the student wing of Jaish. Azhars brother in law Yusuf Azhar, who may have been killed in the Balakot air strike, was responsible for the Jaishs terror training. Older brother Ibrahim Azhar is the operational head of the group with another brother-in-law Ashfaq Ahmad being the main coordinator of Al Rehmat Trust, the so-called charity trust of the Islamic jihadist group. According to the collected evidence, Masood Azhar is not only a fiery orator but also an ardent exponent of Islamic jihad since the time he was appointed editor of Harkats Sada-e-Mujahid magazine. His book, The Virtues of Jihad, is a standard textbook for young jihadis and is widely circulated in the subcontinent. After propagating jihad in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Zambia and UK in the early 1990s, Azhar focused on the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir after his release in 1999. He orchestrated the October 2001 Kashmir Assembly attack and then the December 2001 Parliament attack, which nearly led to war between India and Pakistan. Forced to lie low after the 2001 attacks, Azhar had the temerity to target the then Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf in two suicide bombing attacks in December 2003. He stepped up his activities after the 2013 hanging of Parliament attack main accused Afzal Guru with six major attacks on Indian interests. Then came the Lethpora, Pulawama, suicide attack. In Moradabads Kanth town, a group of young men are smoking cigarettes at a small grocery shop. Rinku Saini owns the outlet, but jokingly says that it is more a space for his friends to get together. They pursue different ambitions. Avneet Bishnoi studies hotel management in Dehradun and is back home for a break. Shubham Chauhan works in the electricity department. But they have a common political preference. Narendra Modi must come back as Prime Minister. No one in the Opposition can match him. Have you seen how he has improved Indias image? Have you seen how he taught Pakistan a lesson? Rahul Gandhi would never have been able to do it, says Saini. His friends agree. When asked if employment was an issue for them, given that the government has been criticised for its track record on job creation, Bishnoi says, Yes, we want more jobs. And government recruitments have opened up more in the past few years. But the government cant create jobs for everyone. We have to work hard. It is time to stop blaming Modiji and support him. Pilibhit, up in the Terai belt, represents a different setting from Moradabad. Some distance from the main town square is the Rutpur Kamalu village. A group of men are playing cards. They belong to different castes. And as soon as the conversation turns to politics, their enthusiasm for Modi becomes evident. Vijay Awasthi credits Modi for building roads and expanding electricity generation. But he says he is proud of what the government did recently. Modi took revenge and ensured 350 terrorists were killed when they attacked our jawans. (The figure has never been officially confirmed, and has been contested by various sources.) Thakur Das Prajapati, a small farmer, agrees. Modi is our protector. Our head is held high because of him. Makhan Lal, a barber, chips in. This time, Hindu samaaj is not seeing biradari, caste. We are all united for Modi. In Banat, in Shamli district, on the way to Muzaffarnagar, it is evening and tea shops are busy. Vidhyadhar Sharma is a septugenarian, with substantial land holdings. He is a Modi supporter. He has given housing and gas to many poor people in the village. But for me, above all else, he has shown Pakistan its place. Sanjay Kumar Kashyap mocks the opposition alliance. All thieves have come together against one man. And why? Because he has been like no other PM, thinking about the entire nation. Return of the base The surnames of the interviewees Saini, Bishnoi, Chauhan, Awasthi, Prajapati, Lal, Sharma, Kashyap tell a story. They represent the social groups, upper castes and smaller Other Backward Class (OBC) groups, which propelled the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to resounding victories in the 2014 general elections and the 2017 assembly polls. In 2014, the BJP won 71 of the 80 seats in the state. In 2017, it won 312 of the state assemblys 403 seats. And members of these social groups appear to be most enthused about the party, and Modi, yet again. A week after the Balakot strike, Hindustan Times visited nine west UP constituencies: Saharanpur, Kairana, Muzaffarnagar, Moradabad, Bareilly, Pilibhit, Budayun, Etah and Hathras. Unlike three months ago, when the BJPs own base seemed disillusioned with the party and the government, the pro-Modi mood is visible. Upper castes were then resentful that the government was pro-Dalit and had done little for the construction of the Ram temple; and OBCs, particularly smaller farmers, blamed the governments policies at the menace of stray cattle destroying farms. But all of this has receded from the discourse at the moment. And what you have on the ground is a highly enthused BJP cadre; vocal supporters sitting in public squares; village tea shops actively building opinion in favour of a second term for Modi; and increasing public support. The return of the base is key in BJPs calculation. According to a top party strategist, their strategy is simple. Both in 2014 and 2017, we knew that a majority of Yadavs, Jatavs and Muslims will not vote for us. They together constitute about 35-40% of the vote. We had to focus on the other 60% upper castes, non-Yadav OBCs, non- Jatav Dalits. We succeeded. But this time, we need these groups to back us in higher numbers because the Opposition is more united. After Balakot, our voters are back home. Now in fact, we will go aggressive and try and break into the opposition vote bank too. A caveat is essential here. In the form of a Samajwadi Party (SP)-Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)-Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) alliance, the BJP confronts a challenge that it did not last time. The demographics of key constituencies, the arithmetic of the alliance, and the popularity of some of the candidates from the Opposition is such that BJP will face a formidable challenge in a range of seats. The BJP won eight of these nine constituencies in 2014 (it lost Budayun then, and has subsequently lost Kairana in bypolls). And it will find it hard to replicate the performance, and faces tough contests in at least three additional seats now Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar and Moradabad. But the takeaway for the party, at this stage in the campaign, a month before elections, is one of slow consolidation of its vote share. There is no way to assess with any certainty how it will translate into seats. Shift in narrative Pulwama ne mahaul badal diya (Pulwama changed the mood), said Netra Pal, from the Dhangar caste, an OBC grouping, in Hathrass Rajapura. The country is secure under Modi. He has increased Indias stature. Munna Lal, a Brahman worker affiliated with the BJP in a neighbouring bazaar in Hathras, claims that the strikes have increased the BJPs vote share by two percentage points. It will be the difference between victory and defeat. But while there is little doubt that the strikes have boosted the morale of supporters, swung back the fence sitters, and introduced an emotional component in the campaign for the BJP, voters offer two other reasons for supporting Modi. The first is the creation of rural assets and the direct farm income support initiative. Gyanendra Sharma, a lawyer in Hatisa bazaar of Hathras, said, Why had Indian Prime Ministers before this not thought of providing gas cylinders? Why had they not thought of giving money directly into bank accounts and eliminating middlemen? Why had they not thought of rural housing? And why had they not given farmers money directly? All of this, he claimed, meant that both good people and poor people will vote for Modi. (Two of Sharmas claims do not entirely correspond with facts on the ground. The previous United Progressive Alliance government had initiated direct benefits transfer, while it is indeed true that National Democratic Alliance has expanded it. And rural housing initiatives have been pushed by previous governments too, while once again it is true that the NDA has scaled it up.) But the other reason for support is palpably the absence of leaders on the other side who are in the reckoning directly for Prime Ministership. Indeed, this vacuum in the Opposition could even help the BJP break into the SP and the BSP vote bank partly. Durgesh Kumar, also known as Collector, a Yadav farmer in Etah constituencys Mirachiya bazaar, said, I will vote for Modi in the national elections. For the assembly, I will vote for Akhilesh Yadav. What is the point of voting for SP right now when it wont have enough seats to become a national player? Rakesh Yadav, a BJP worker in the same bazaar, was riding a motorbike with the party flag. He said, You will see Yadavs will not vote that easily for BSP candidates. They would prefer Modiji in those seats. With a month to go for elections in this belt of west UP, a lot could change. The Opposition is not yet on the ground in any effective manner. Once all the candidates are declared, contests could assume a more local hue. The euphoria surrounding the governments response to the terror attack in Pulwama could dissipate. Despite maintaining or even increasing its vote share, the BJP will find it hard to overcome the united challenge of the SP and BSP in seats in which Muslims, Yadavs and Jatavs are in substantial numbers, supplemented with the Jat support of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD). And the nature of the campaigning could alter the mood. But for now, the BJP has reason to smile. As in 2014 and 2017, the appeal of Modi could help swing a high number of seats in Indias most critical state for the party yet again. The Enforcement Directorate (ED), probing the Punjab National Bank (PNB) money laundering case, has found vital evidence in the form of overseas bank statements linked to absconding diamantaire Nirav Modi, which it says proves the overseas money trail . ED team managed to get several bank statements from Barbados, Dubai, Hong Kong etc., which prove vital overseas links and money trail relating to Modi and his aides, the agency said on Tuesday while detailing contents of the second charge sheet filed before the special Prevention of Money Laundering (PMLA) court. ED has gathered vital evidence against Modi, which discloses owning another chain of jewellery named Bailey Bank and Biddle in USA. Diversion of fraudulent letters of undertaking (LoUs) to the tune of at least USD 47 million (around 327 crore) to this firm has also been found during investigations. The ED said a maze of transactions to obfuscate the probe and to cover the tracks of money laundering were unearthed by obtaining foreign bank accounts and financial statements of various foreign dummy entities through various sources. The agency has also found that after the case broke out, one of Niravs brothers, Nehal, got a secure server located in the UAE destroyed. The ED said that through that server, the accused and others used to communicate secretly with close aides. Printouts of some of the incriminating email communications of this secret server have been obtained by us from Dubai, the ED said. Investigators found Niravs sister Purvi and brother Neeshal also allegedly operated shell companies through layers based out of the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and Dubai to launder money. In the first layer, a consultant from Dubai was holding the shares of two BVI companies, namely Madison Capital Private limited and Moore Private Investments Limited, on behalf of Purvi and Neeshal up to 2012. In the second layer, 10 BVI companies were formed by the same firm and in the third layer, eight onshore companies were incorporated in Dubai by the firm as per instructions from Nirav. These third layer companies were recipients of fraudulent LOUs from PNB, the ED said. ED tracked officials of this firm in Dubai and their statements were recorded under PMLA. Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra called on Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar on Wednesday at a Meerut hospital where the Dalit leader was recuperating after taking ill in detention for alleged violation of the model code of conduct a day earlier. After enquiring about Chandrashekhars health, Priyanka Gandhi hit out at the PM Narendra Modi-led government, terming it an ahankari sarkar (arrogant regime) that was out to crush a young leader without hearing out his concerns. I like his [Chandrashekhars] josh (enthusiasm) and sangharsh (struggle) for his people. Therefore, I came here to enquire about his health. This young man has been requesting the government to hear his concerns for his people, but the ahankari sarkar wants to crush him, Priyanka, who was accompanied by partys west UP general secretary Jyotiraditya Scindia and state party chief Raj Babbar, said. Late on Wednesday, BJP west UP president Ashwani Tyagi hit back at the Congress. Those who are terming BJP government as ahankari sarkar should look at themselves. Their party imposed Emergency in the country and killed democracy. They have no right to show pseudo sympathy to people. During the hospital visit, Priyanka Gandhi swatted a query on whether Chandrashekhar would join the Congress. I came to know that he is ill, so I came here to see him. I will not speak about politics, she said. The Bhim Army chief had taken ill on Tuesday after he was detained in Deoband en route to Delhi to convene a Bahujan Hunkar rally on Friday. The model code violation was allegedly over the number of vehicles in the procession he was leading. On Wednesday, Chandrashekhar insisted that no political meaning should be read into his brief interaction with Priyanka Gandhi. She came to enquire about my health as a humane gesture. I am not a political man with whom she could discuss politics, he said. He quoted her as saying that the government was committing excesses on me and my people. Asked if he would join the Congress, he said, I have been fighting for the Bahujan Samaj and will keep fighting till my death. I will not join any political party. But he added, all should come together to defeat Modi. The evidence India shared with Pakistan following a suicide bombing in Pulwama that killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) troopers shows that the neighbouring country has kept up efforts to launch and support terror groups including the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), according to findings of investigations by Indian agencies. The Indian government stepped up diplomatic efforts to isolate Pakistan after the JeM, a terror group based on its soil, claimed responsibility for the February 14 attack. India shared evidence of terrorist safe havens with the Pakistan government shortly after the attack, even as Islamabad said the Masood Azhar-led group has denied its hand in the bombing. Pakistan has regularly provided weapons, training, financial support and use of its soil for these terrorist groups. Pakistani forces help the infiltrating groups to cross over into the Indian territory using all means, including covering fire. Mentored and facilitated by the Pak establishment/ISI, Pak/PoK-based terrorist outfits operating in J&K continued their inimical activities against India, India told Pakistan in a document, reviewed by HT. Data collected by security and intelligence agencies shows that 254 terrorists were killed in Jammu and Kashmir last year, and 115 of those were of Pakistani origin. Since 2004, over 1,900 Pakistani terrorists have been killed in the state, the document added. India has maintained that the ISI, Pakistans spy agency, has continued to assist Pakistani terrorists crossing over into India by providing them training, identifying new infiltration routes, coordinating among terror camps and raising funds. The terrorist group led by Azhar, who is said to be living in Pakistans Bahawalpur, is behind some of the worst terrorist attacks in India, including the September 2016 raid on an Indian Army facility at Uri that killed 19 and an assault on an airbase the same year in Pathankot. Since the Pathankot attack, JeM terrorists have carried out more than a dozen attacks in India, according to the document. The involvement of JeM terrorists in connivance with Pakistani security agencies is evident in all these attacks. However, Pakistan continues to remain in denial mode despite glaring evidence. Moreover, no action has been taken by Pakistan Government on Letter Rogatories (LR) and investigation requests by India. India is making efforts along with the United States, France and Britain to list Azhar through the United Nations Islamic State and al Qaeda Sanctions Committee. The listing will go ahead on March 13 if it isnt blocked by any member of the UN Security Council. China has in the past vetoed attempts to designate Azhar. As part of its cyber campaign, several hundred audio/video messages of Masood Azhar have been despatched from across. JeM continues to mobilise public opinion for the Kashmir cause as well as seek support from Pak establishment/ISI. In 2018, JeM succeeded in recruiting large number of local youths in Valley as well as exploited routes on IB [International Border] for infiltrating its cadres into J&K, the document said. JeM was also noticed for targeting SF [security forces] camps using assault rifles of bigger calibres like M4 rifle. All this would not be possible without states patronage, it added. Indian fighter jets on February 26 bombed a site in Balakot in Pakistan, known to be a terrorist training centre of the JeM, after the Pulwama attack. The strikes triggered a sharp escalation in tensions with Pakistan, which attempted an air operation in retaliation, and brought back into focus Islamabads inaction over curbing terrorist groups operating on its soil. The Indian evidence, to which Pakistan is yet to respond, also provides exact coordinates and satellite images of terrorist training camps that are flourishing in the absence of any action from the government and security agencies. At least 18 training camps are functional in Pak/PoK. But he and others also remembered Keltner outside of the job, where he teased his wife with good-natured pranks and doted on his two young sons. Whatever hard shell he built up to deal with the stress of police work was shed the moment he walked through the door, Koenig said. The widely-circulated review petition against the Supreme Courts December verdict in the Rafale deal that includes leaked defence ministry documents jeopardizes national security and should be dismissed, the defence ministry has told the Supreme Court in an affidavit filed on Wednesday. The Centre has also argued that the documents presented a selective and incomplete picture of internal secret deliberations on a matter relating to national security and defence. It reasoned that the petition should be dismissed and the documents removed from the top courts records. The government also claimed privilege over the documents presented under the evidence law for courts and insisted that the court could not take them into consideration without the governments permission. Also read: Without Rafale, how can we resist F-16s: Centre to Supreme Court Defence Secretary Sanjay Mitra told the top court that the petitioners had attached documents relating to war capacity of Indias combat jets. This information is now available to our adversaries...This puts the national security in jeopardy, the top defence ministry official said. The government also told a bench headed by Chief Justice of India Rajnan Gogoi that an internal inquiry into the leaks had started. The petitioners are guilty of leakage of sensitive information, which offends the terms of the agreements for purchase of the fighter jets, the government said. Additionally, those who have conspired in this leakage are guilty of penal offences under the Indian Penal Code including theft by unauthorized photocopying and leakage of sensitive official documents affecting national security. Also read: Enough proof to prosecute PM: Rahul Gandhi renews attack over Rafale row In the last Supreme Court hearing, the Centres top law officer, attorney general KK Venugopal, had asked the court to reject petitions seeking review of the Rafale verdict claiming that the petitioners case rested on stolen papers acquired from present or former employees of the defence ministry. Brandishing the British-era Official Secrets Act, Venugopal had said that it was a criminal act on the part of petitioners to bring the documents with them. They have come with unclean hands, he had said. A judge of the SC bench had, however, questioned the attorney generals reasoning and asked if the government intended to take shelter under national security when the allegation is of grave crime or corruption. The governments stand in the Supreme Court led to a political storm with Congress president Rahul Gandhi saying that the new motto of the government should be gayab ho gaya (gone missing). He also challenged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to face an investigation over alleged wrongdoing in the Rafale fighter jet deal. Attorney general Venugopal later said that the Rafale documents were not stolen from the defence ministry and that what he meant in his submission before the Supreme Court was that petitioners in the application used photocopies of the original papers, deemed secret by the government. Former Union ministers Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie, and lawyer Prashant Bhushan have filed a petition seeking a review of the Supreme Courts December verdict, which found that there was no occasion to doubt the decision-making process behind the 2016 purchase of 36 jet fighters from Dassault Aviation of France in a 59,000 crore deal. The defence ministry on Wednesday sought the dismissal of a petition seeking a review of the Supreme Courts December judgment rejecting a court-monitored review of the Rs 59,000 crore Rafale jet fighter deal, arguing that the petitioners relied on documents that could jeopardise national security and impair Indias relations with other countries. An affidavit filed by the ministry, a day before the top court starts hearing the review petition, said: Documents attached by the petitioners are sensitive to National Security which relates to war capacity of combat aircraft. Since the Review Petition has been widely circulated and is available in public domain, the same is available to the enemy/our adversaries. This puts the National Security in jeopardy. Resisting the stand of the petitioners, who want the court to take cognisance of the documents produced by them, the affidavit filed by defence secretary Sanjay Mitra said: Petitioners are guilty of leakage of sensitive information, which offends the terms of the agreements. Additionally, those who have conspired in this leakage are guilty of penal offences under the Indian Penal Code including theft by unauthorised photocopying and leakage of sensitive official documents affecting National Security. Attorney general KK Venugopal told the apex court on March 6 that the review petition filed by former Union ministers Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie and advocate Prashant Bhushan was based on stolen papers acquired from present or former employees of the defence ministry and which violated the Official Secrets Act. The governments top legal officer later said he meant the documents were photocopied. A three-judge bench is hearing the petition against the top courts own December verdict. The bench, headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi and comprising justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and KM Joseph, found that there was no occasion to doubt the decision-making process behind the 2016 purchase of 36 jet fighters from Dassault Aviation of France. The petition says that the information that came into the public domain after the courts judgment proved that the government misled the court on various counts. In its affidavit, the government has also claimed privilege with respect to the documents under the Evidence Act, saying the court cannot take cognisance of the papers. The review petition based on them must be dismissed, it argued. These documents present a selective and incomplete picture of internal secret deliberations on a matter relating to National Security and Defence. The selective and incomplete presentation of the facts and records by the petitioners are intended to mislead this Court into deriving wrong conclusions which is very damaging to National Security and public interest, the affidavit said. The documents produced by the petitioners with their review petitions include three sets of secret notes, one of them an eight-page dissent note written by three domain experts in the Indian negotiating team that has already been published by The Hindu newspaper. The December judgment, in which the court ruled that it was satisfied there was no reason to doubt the purchase process or the need for the Rafale fighter jets, was based on an unsigned note given to the court by the government in a sealed cover. The petitioners said this was in violation of the principle of natural justice. Prashant Bhushan declined to comment. Congress spokesperson Pranav Jha said the SC should take the note of the fact that the government had lied on the matter in the past. ...Every time courts cannot be taken for a ride, he said. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) governments decision to enter the government-to-government deal with France to buy 36 Rafale warplanes made by Dassault Aviation was announced in April 2015, with an agreement signed a little over a year later. This replaced the previous UPA regimes decision to buy 126 Rafale aircraft, 108 of which were to be made in India by state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. The deal has become controversial with the Opposition, led by the Congress, claiming that the price at which India is buying Rafale aircraft now is Rs 1,670 crore for each, three times the Rs 526 crore, the initial bid by the company when the UPA was trying to buy the aircraft. It has also claimed the previous deal included a technology transfer agreement with HAL. The NDA has not disclosed details of the price, but the UPA deal, struck in 2012, was not a viable one, former defence minister Manohar Parrikar has previously said, implying that it would have never been closed and that, therefore, any comparison is moot. The deal has also become controversial on account of the fact that one of the offset deals signed by Dassault is with the Reliance Group of Anil Ambani. The Congress claims the earlier deal was scrapped and a new one signed just to provide Ambani this opportunity for an offset deal. Both the government and Reliance have repeatedly denied this. Indias investigations into the Pulwama terror attack have established the involvement of the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist group, which had anyway claimed responsibility for the attack. This proof the group used the same Internet Protocol (IP) address from a location near Rawalpindi, Pakistan, to upload the video confession of the suicide bomber Adil Ahmad Dar, and also the statement of its spokesperson Mohammed Hassan is part of the body of evidence India has handed over to Pakistan and also to top diplomats of other countries (including permanent members of the United Nations Security Council) as New Delhi attempts to once again get Pakistan to act against the terror group, and to have its leader Masood Azhar listed by UNSC as a global terrorist. UNSC will decide that on March 13, but there has been no response from Pakistan to the evidence India has shared with it. The US, UK and France are leading the resolution for the UNSC designating Masood Azhar a global terrorist. China, which has previously blocked efforts directed at this, is expected to take a last-minute decision on whether to apply a three-month hold on it or go with the resolution. According to the evidence collected by Indian security agencies, and seen by Hindustan Times, investigations reveal that the WhatsApp number 7006250771, associated with JeM spokesperson Muhammed Hassan, was used to claim responsibility for the terror attack. This number was last active on WhatsApp on February 14, 2019 at 4.42 pm with the associated IP address of 103.255.7.0. This IP was tracked to a location near Rawalpindi. Jaish used the same Indian tele-selector to upload the confessional video of the suicide bomber on social networking sites including pro-JeM Telegram channel Afzal Guru SquadAl Islam as soon as Adil Ahmed Dar triggered the vehicle-borne, RDX-packed device against the Central Reserve Police Force bus at Lethpora in Pulwama. Kakapora resident Dar was an active terrorist of the Ansar Ghazwat ul Hind since March, 19, 2018, according to the evidence. The same Jaish spokesperson also claimed the groups responsibility for the attack on an army brigade in Tangdhar in 2015. According to the evidence, the plot for the Pulwama attack was hatched by JeM chief Masood Azhar and his younger brother Abdul Rauf Asghar, the de facto operational commander of the terrorist group, to avenge the death of their kin Talha Rasheed, son of Masood Azhars brother-in-law Abdul Rasheed. Talha Rasheed was gunned down by Indian security forces at Kandi Aglar, Pulwama on November 6, 2017. Rauf Asghars close confidant/bodyguard Mohammed Ismail and Mohammed Umar, son of Masood Azhars elder brother Ibrahim Azhar, infiltrated into India in mid-2018. Usman Haider, another son of Ibrahim Azhar, was gunned down by Indian security forces in Tral, Awantipora, Pulwama on October 30, 2018, within days of his infiltration into the valley. India has told Pakistan that JeM cashed in on the killing of Talha Rasheed and Usman Haider for radicalizing more young people in the valley against India and raising funds for terror strikes. Indian investigations have also revealed that Jaishs Abdul Rasheed Ghazi infiltrated into the valley on December 9, 2018 with the objective of training local radicalized Kashmiri youth to avenge the killing of Usman Haider and Talha Rasheed. An Afghan war veteran, Ghazi is an explosives expert. The execution of the Pulwama attack was carried out by Pakistani national Kamran, who along with another Pakistani national Haider were killed in an encounter with the Indian security forces on February 18. The evidence collected by India includes a series of annexures videos of speeches, pamphlets, and social media posts using Pakistan numbers on WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook. In one 2018 speech, Mufti Asghar says in Balakot, the Jaish terror factory struck by Indian Air Force jets on February 26, that he will turn Pulwama into Talhawama by taking spectacular revenge for the killing of his kin. The evidence also includes an audio message from Masood Azhar on February 5, asking Kashmiri Muslims to unite, and that if this happens, they will achieve their ends within a month. The evidence also shows that Pakistani intelligence operatives made pseudonymous calls to CRPF offices, hospitals, police control rooms and locals to ferret out details of casualties as well as the movement of Indian troops after the attack. These details were used to propagate the notion that the strike was carried out by a disaffected native Kashmiri and was an outcome of mass unrest in the Valley. India also has shared brief details about six prominent and older JeM attacks including the near simultaneous attack on Pathankot airbase on January 2, 2016 and the attack on Indian consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan. The evidence concerning the Pathankot attack shows that all four terrorists were in touch with Pakistani phone numbers with one number +92321312786 actually being associated with JeM headquarters in Bahawalpur, Pakistani Punjab. The two JeM handlers of the Pathankot airbase attackers were identified as Shahid Latif and Kashif Shahid Latif; both were released by India in 2010 after serving 16 years in jail on terrorism charges. The attack on the Indian consulate at Mazar-e-Sharif was carried out by three JeM terrorists, who before being gunned down by Afghan forces in a 25-hour battle, inscribed Afzal Guru Ka IntekamEk Shaheed, Hazaar Fidayeen in their own blood on the wall of a nearby building. The evidence shared reveals that the three JeM terrorists moved into Afghanistan from Pakistan and were hosted by local Taliban commander Atta Mohammed. The Indian evidence shared with Pakistan and other countries through diplomatic channels also recounts dozens of JeM attacks in Jammu and Kashmir. The evidence also has a list of 80 JeM terrorists thriving under Islamabads patronage across the border. Despite sharing the past jihadi history of Masood Azhar, Ibrahim Azhar, Rauf Asghar and the pin-point locations of terror training camps in Pakistan and Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, there has been total silence from the Imran Khan government, Indian security officials said. The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked the Centre for details of the steps it has taken to implement directions on electoral reforms issued by the court in February last year, including one on the creation of a permanent mechanism to monitor the wealth of sitting lawmakers. A bench led by CJI Ranjan Gogoi did not issue a formal notice to the government but asked secretary of the legislative department, ministry of law and justice, to file an affidavit before the court within two weeks. The court was hearing a contempt petition filed by a Lucknow-based activisit group, Lok Prahari, which also filed the public interest litigation on which the 2018 February judgement was given. SC ruled at the time that politicians, their spouses and associates would have to declare all sources of income, and details of assets, before the former could contest polls.The law ministry said it cant comment on the issue as the matter was sub judice. The courts order also suggested an amendment to Form 26, filled up along with nomination papers, in which a candidates could swear that they were not disqualified to contest polls as per election rules. The government was also asked to publicise the changes suggested by the court. Lok Prahari subsequently filed a contempt petition claiming the government did not follow up on some of the courts decisions. Lok Praharis SN Shukla said the government has not taken steps to give effect to the judgement. He told the court the EC had only complied with two of its directions: on the disclosure of assets and source of income and the provision in Form 26 regarding income from governments. The Supreme Court on Wednesday asked the Centre and the Assam government to spell out what measures they have taken to tackle the problem of large-scale influx of illegal migrants into the state. It also pulled up the state government over what it called the latters failure to implement orders of the Foreigners Tribunals, which determine if individuals being tried are foreigners and should be deported. The top court noted that while the tribunals have declared 58,000 migrants as foreigners, there are only 900 inmates at detention centres. The bench led by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi termed the steps taken so far by the authorities to tackle the issue as a joke. The CJI also wanted to know how many tribunals are functioning and whether there was a requirement for more. This has gone too far. This has become a joke. We are not even being told these are the number of cases referred (to the tribunal) or declared (foreigners) by the tribunal, the bench told solicitor general Tushar Mehta. State of Assam is facing external aggression. We would like to know what steps Government of India had taken to meet the threat of external aggression. We want to know how you are going to tackle the problem? We do not think you are tackling the problem, the bench also comprising justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna told Mehta who was appearing on behalf of the Centre and Assam. The court was hearing a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by social activist Harsh Mander on the plight of hundreds of illegal migrants living in detention centres. The court asked Assam government to furnish data of the past 10 years relating to: number of persons declared foreigners by the various foreigners tribunals; number of persons staying in the detention centres and the number of persons so far sent back to their countries of origin after being declared foreigners. The state also has to inform the court as to whether the existing foreigners tribunals are adequate and specify the number of additional tribunals required immediately or near future to tackle the menace of illegal migrants. The affidavit has to be filed before March 27. Mehta said, illegal foreigners abscond to avoid deportation while the proceedings are pending before the tribunal. We cannot detain them until the tribunal passes a final order. Meanwhile, these migrants mingle with the local population. There is great variance in the number of persons declared as foreigners and number of persons living in detention centres, Mehta said. The top court on Wednesday said that adequate manpower should be used to complete the work of updating the National Register of Citizens in Assam by July 31. It allowed a plea by state NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela to employ additional manpower, including data operator and information technology related personnel, to complete the work in time. Attorney general K.K. Venugopal informed the court that the Centre had agreed not to disturb the 67 companies of central forces deployed in the state and they will continue to be employed for the NRC as per courts February 5 orders. The draft NRC published on July 30 last year excluded names of around 40 lakh people out of 3.29 applicants in Assam. The SC also agreed to examine the plea of a retired air force official declared an illegal migrant by a Foreigner Tribunal, on March 26. A sanctions committee of the UNSC will meet late on Wednesday night to take a call on designating as global terrorist the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed Masood Azhar. The United States of America, the United Kingdom and France had moved the proposal to designate Azhar a global terrorist at the UNSC after the February 14 Pulwama terrorist attack that left 40 CRPF jawans dead. Jaish took responsibility for the fidayeen attack. This is all you need to know about how the ban comes into effect and what follows: 1. UNSC member countries move a proposal to designate an outfit or an entity as global terrorist. 2.A sanctions committee of the UNSC will wait for the mandatory 10-day period for objections to the proposal. 3. If none of the committees members posts an objection, a complete block or a technical hold before the deadline expires, the entity or individual is designated a global terrorist 4. Once designated a terrorist, several curbs come into effect that make functioning difficult for the banned entity.. 5. Arms embargo: All UN member states have to ensure that no weapons transfer to the designated person directly or indirectlytakes place 6. Travel ban: All member states have to mandatorily prevent the entry into or transit through their countries by the designated individuals 7.The assets of designated individuals or outfits are frozen without delay. 8. If Masood Azhar is designated a global terrorist it will force Pakistan to act against him and individuals and entities associated with him 8. This is the third attempt by India to have the Jaish chief proscribed. 9. China, with its veto power, holds the key to the designation proposal. 10. Beijing put a technical hold on all three previous proposals - the first by India, second by the US, the UK and France jointly and the third by the US alone - seeking more information or citing lack of consensus. RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav after on Wednesday claimed that alliance leaders discussed sharing in talks on New Delhi and said that there was no confusion among alliance partners. All the leaders of the mahagathbandhan today came here for a meeting, we discussed seat sharing. There isnt any confusion between us, we are all clear, ANI quoted Yadav as saying. Top leaders of the mahagathbandhan met in the national capital to thrash out the contentious issue of seat-sharing for 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar. The general election is scheduled to begin on April 11 and will continue till May 19. Tejashwi Yadav had been trying to clinch a seat-sharing deal since the beginning of the year but it has remained elusive so far. The RJD had fought on 27 seats in the 2014 general elections, though it managed to win only four. Earlier Wednesday, Congress president Rahul Gandhi said in Chennai that his party was firming up alliances with different parties in various states to defeat Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP in the Lok Sabha election. Gandhi asserted that the opposition is united against the Narendra Modi government. Also read: Lok Sabha Election 2019: All you need to know about Bihar Polling in Bihar will be held in seven phases. The mahagathbandhan comprises old allies like the Congress and the RJD, besides new entrants such as Upendra Kushwahas RLSP, Jitan Ram Manjhis Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM), Sharad Yadavs Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) and the Vikashsheel Insaan Party (VIP), a fledgling outfit floated by former Bollywood set designer Mukesh Sahni. The grand alliance also seeks to have an electoral understanding with the Left Front, which has three constituents in Bihar the CPI, the CPI(ML) and the CPI(M), and the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party (SP) and Mayawatis Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). According to a tentative formula, the RJD is seeking 17 seats of the 40 seats, followed by 11 seats for the Congress and four for the RLSP. The HAM, LJD and VIP would get one seat each, according to sources in grand alliance. Five seats are proposed for the Left parties, the SP and the BSP. The NDA in Bihar is already ahead with its seat-sharing plans. The BJP and the JD(U) will fight 17 seats each leaving the remaining six for the Ram Vilas Paswans LJP. Sujay Vikhe Patils defection to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday is seen as a major setback for the Congress and more so his father and leader of Opposition in the state Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil. Stung by the double whammy of his sons move and that the party did not pressurise NCP into giving up the Ahmednagar seat for his son, an unhappy Vikhe Patil is reportedly weighing his options. With the option of BJP open for him, he will decide on it sooner or later, said his close aides. As he faces flak for his failure to prevent his son from joining the BJP, sources said Vikhe Patil may step down from the post of leader of Opposition on ethical grounds. He is also disappointed that the state unit leaders did not try hard to get the NCP to give up Ahmednagar seat from its quota, because of which his son had to shift his loyalty. However, Vikhe Patil said he has not resigned and is ready to perform whatever responsibilities his party entrusts him with. During his meeting with party president Rahul Gandhi on Monday, he had expressed his resentment and indicated that he would step down. He feels that state unit chief Ashok Chavan and other leaders did not push for the Ahmednagar seat during their talks with the NCP. Chavan had got Hingoli seat exchanged with the NCP for Rajiv Satav in 2014. Senior Vikhe Patil feels that it was possible for the state leadership to get the seat exchanged, had the effort been sincere, said a leader close to Vikhe Patil. On the other hand, party leaders said it was the decades-old rivalry between Vikhe Patils and Sharad Pawar that played spoilsport. Even Gandhi intervened in the matter and spoke to NCP leaders on Monday, a leader said. A section of party leaders in Maharashtra is also pointing at Vikhe Patils hobnobbing for the past four-and-a-half years. As leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, he hardly raised his voice against CM Devendra Fadnavis and was considered to be soft in his attack on the government, some leaders said. They also claim that Vikhe Patil was in the know and gave his silent approval to meetings between Sujay and BJP leaders. It is unfortunate that the son of one of our top leaders has joined the ruling party. I am sure that Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil will not leave the party. We are surprised over the NCPs stance as their leaders had earlier admitted to conceding the seat during our joint meetings. The decision about stepping down from the post has to be taken by himself, said former state unit chief and senior party leader Manikrao Thakre. The BJP and Sena has eight sitting MLAs (of a total 12) in Ahmednagar district and winning both Lok Sabha seats (Shirdi and Ahmednagar) has believably become easier after Sujay joined the alliance. Radhakrishna and his father, the late Balasaheb Vikhe Patil, had joined the BJP-Shiv Sena government, defecting from the Congress, in the late 1990s. History may get repeated, according to party insiders. Meanwhile, Chavan has criticised the BJP for poaching leaders from other parties by resorting to unethical means. Also, the Congress may agree to exchange the Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg seat with the NCP to accommodate Narayan Rane-led partys candidate. Ranes son Nilesh is contesting the seat on their party Maharashtra Swabhimani Pakshas symbol and has sought support from NCP. The seat is with the Congress as part of the seat-sharing formula, but according to new developments, it may agree to exchange it with the NCP. Meanwhile, Congress MLA from Naigaon Kalidas Kolambkar is reportedly on the verge of shifting loyalty to the BJP. He is likely to join the BJP ahead of the Assembly elections to be held later this year. Can you call me Rahul instead of sir? It makes me comfortable, Congress president Rahul Gandhi told a young woman student during an interactive session at Chennais Stella Maris College. The event, however, was filled with many candid moments. The student, Azra was left blushing as the crowd went hyper, cheering loudly and applauding Rahul. A blushing Azra then responded saying she was really nervous. Her Hi Rahul got more cheers and applause and more again when she stressed on Rahul again. The Congress president put another student, Khushi, in a spot when she referred to him as Rahul sir. You have slotted the sir in, he told her, drawing giggles from the crowd. Rahul, clad in black T-shirt and blue jeans, again charmed the audience when he was told that the colleges light music team had something to ask. His response, before the question came in: Dont ask me to sing, had the crowd hooting. The Congress leader again put another student in a spot when in response to her question on Congresss stance on demonetisation, he answered with a question to her: Tell me what do you think about demonetisation? And quickly added with yet another one: Did you like demonetisation? to which he drew a thunderous No from the crowd and the girl. Drawing more cheers, he said that it was a pity that the Prime Minister did not come and take your advice before he did demonetisation because he would have got the right answer. He then went on to tear into the governments economic policies. At another instance, the 48-year-old politician tried to portray himself as young. While talking about his hug with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he recalled the 2014 defeat of Congress in the Lok Sabha elections to explain how it had helped him. He said, In 2014, I was a young politician, then quickly quipped, I am still young, but, slightly older, drawing cheers again before he continued with his point. Rahul also drew cheers for saying that south India and Tamil Nadu were better than north in treatment of women and a standing ovation at the end of the session. Karnataka ruling partners Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) on Wednesday announced a 20-8 deal for the 28 Lok Sabha seats in the state. Negotiations between the allies had dragged over two months with the two unable to arrive at a consensus on key seats, including those in southern Karnataka. The JD(S) had initially demanded 12 seats, of which four were won by the Congress in 2014. According to the seat-share deal, the JD(S) will contest the Bijapur, Uttara Kannada, Udupi-Chikkamagaluru, Shimoga, Hassan, Mandya, Bengaluru North and Tumkur seats. Crucially, the regional party has given up its claim over the Mysuru seat, which is at the heart of the Vokkaliga-dominated region it is strong in. The Congress had to give up its claim on Tumkur, one of nine seats it won in 2014. But it managed to hold on to its other seats despite pressure from the JD(S). Karnataka Congress president Dinesh Gundu Rao confirmed the deal in a tweet: @INCIndia @JanataDal_S seat sharing for Karnataka #LokSabhaPolls2019 is confirmed. 20 for Congress and 8 for JDS. Local leaders of both parties had expressed anxiety over the delay in announcing the pact with the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) starting its campaign a month ago. Both parties have set out to reverse the trend of BJP dominance in the state in the Lok Sabha polls. In 2014, it won 17 seats in the state, down from 19 in 2009. Gundu Rao said the seat-share talks were amicable and reflected the relative strengths of the two parties. Ideally, we would have liked to have 22 seats but it is a question of give and take in a coalition, he said. Congress leaders were happy the party had managed to retain a majority of its incumbent seats, he said. Getting Mysuru is good because giving up Mandya and Hassan was a big blow to us. We also had to give up our claim on Tumkur that we won last time, he said. Gundu Rao said both parties could now begin campaigning in earnest. The agreement also sends a message to our workers to begin campaigning and has removed any uncertainty in their minds, he said. Repeated attempts to contact JD(S) state president AH Vishwanath and party national secretary General Danish Ali went unanswered. The pact was finalised in Kochi where Ali met Congress president Rahul Gandhi, a JD(S) leader said, not wishing to be named. A meeting between the two in the morning was cancelled as Gandhi had to campaign in Tamil Nadu. The teen, identified as Dareyona Smith, of the 7700 block of South Emerald Avenue, suffered a wound to her chest, and was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn where she was pronounced dead. The man was taken to Holy Cross Hospital with a wound to the foot, said police. The Election Commission on Tuesday assured the Supreme Court that the draft National Register of Citizens (NRC), published on July 30 last year, will not be the basis to deny residents voting rights. The first draft of the NRC, aimed at identifying illegal immigrants in Assam, did not include names of around 40 lakh people out of a total of 3.29 crore applicants. Appearing on behalf of ECI, senior advocate Vikas Singh made the submission before a bench led by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi that was hearing a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by a social activist who alleged that the poll panel had deprived voting rights to those whose names were missing in the draft NRC published on July 30. The bench asked the EC to clarify what action it will take if a persons name is not included in the final NRC, to be published on July 31 this year, but features in the electoral rolls. The court even asked the commission to place before it voters list as revised in January for 2017, 2018 and 2019 and also inform the court the basis on which the updation was done. We are not bothered about the elections, the CJI told the petitioners lawyer who requested the bench to expedite its decision on the matter in view of impending Lok Sabha polls. The ECI secretary, who was present subsequent to courts order last week, told the bench that exclusion from the draft list will have no bearing on the voting rights of individuals. He said so in response to the courts query. Singh later clarified that ECI had made its position clear over the NRC list in 2014 itself. He accused the petitioners for making false claims before the court. He said the names of two petitioners, who are residents of Assam, were never deleted from the electoral rolls in the past three years. The bench will further hear the matter on March 28. In the run-up to the general elections that begin April 11 and culminate on May 23, the date of counting of votes, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and many other BJP leaders will hold as many as 1,000 rallies across India. The PM himself will address as nearly 200 rallies. Apart from him, the other major leaders who will be addressing the rallies across the length and breadth of the country will include BJP chief Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh, Yogi Adityanath, Nitin Gadkari, Sushma Swaraj, Uma Bharti, Smriti Irani, and Shivraj Singh Chauhan. The main theme of these rallies will be 50 years of being power against 50 months of service. BJP chief Amit Shah will hold the maximum rallies during the entire poll campaign. A senior BJP leader who is closely associated with the partys poll campaign said that the partys main speakers will address rallies in all Lok Sabha seats, no matter whether the party was contesting from those seats or its allies. But the primary focus will remain on those seats where it is in a strong position and where its chances of winning are possible. He said that the candidates will address rallies not just in their own seats, but also in other seats and once the elections get over, they will spend all their time in their constituencies. Modi to address rallies in all voting phases of UP, Bihar and bengal Sources say that the PM is likely to address rallies in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal in all seven voting phases of the three states. Analysis of each phase The BJP leaders will not just be holding rallies in various constituencies, but at the end of each voting phase, they will also analyse the situation and help the partys core leadership tweak the partys poll strategy accordingly. Target 50 years of Congress rule The partys main theme for all the rallies will be 50 years of being power against 50 months of service. The party has made a 20-point list in which it has tried to highlight the work done in 50 years of Congress rule as against the 50 months the party has ruled at the Centre under PM Modi. The 20-point list also names various projects and schemes undertaken by the government. The party is ensuring that its main campaigners are conversant with the list so that they can, while talking about the Congresss misrule, also list out the work done by the BJP government. The law should apply equally to all and not selectively, Congress president Rahul Gandhi said at an interaction with college students in Tamil Nadu capital Chennai on Wednesday. Gandhi, 48, was responding to questions from students who had asked him about the probe against his brother-in-law Robert Vadra in a money laundering case. Investigate Mr Vadra but also investigate the Prime Minister, Gandhi said, a reference to the many allegations that the Congress has leveled against PM Narendra Modi over the deal to buy Rafale fighter jets for the Indian Air Force. The row over Rafale has been a running theme in Rahul Gandhis campaign against the BJP-led national coalition. The government has every right to investigate every person. Law should apply to everybody equally not selectively. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has his name in government documents that say he is directly responsible for negotiating parallelly with Dassault Aviation on Rafale. Investigate everybody, be it Mr Vadra or the prime minister, he said. In his dig at PM Modi, Gandhi, How many times have you seen the Prime Minister Narendra Modi standing in the middle of 3,000 women and face questions like this? How many times have you seen him standing here like this being open to any question from anybody? During his interaction, Gandhi promised that if his party is voted to power in the Lok Sabha election, it would get the Womens Reservation Bill passed to ensure greater representation of women in Parliament and state legislatures. He also promised to enact a law for 33 per cent quota for women in government jobs should the Congress wins the parliamentary polls. The way Indian women are treated leaves a lot to be desiredIf you go to Uttar Pradesh, go to Bihar and see how women are treated there, you will be shocked to know, Gandhi told youngsters at the Stella Maris College. The Congress president said, Women should be at the same level as menI look at Parliament, state legislatures, I dont see enough number of women thereWe have decided that we are going to pass the Womens Reservation Bill in 2019We are going to reserve 33 per cent jobs for women. Women are smarter than men, Gandhi said during his interaction with college students in Chennai. The Congress president attacked the Modi government accusing it of attempting to impose one ideology on the entire nation ignoring the diverse culture of the country. There is currently an ideological battle going on in India, he said. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday proposed for an alliance between his Aam Aadmi Party and the Congress in Haryana for the upcoming Lok Sabha election. Kejriwal tweeted his offer claiming that such an alliance will defeat the BJP on all 10 Lok Sabha seats in Haryana. The people of the country want to defeat the pair of (BJP president) Amit Shah and (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi. If the AAP, the JJP and the Congress contest together, the BJP will lose all the 10 seats in Haryana. (Congress president) Rahul Gandhi should think about it, wrote Kejriwal on Twitter. Also Watch: Rahul Gandhi says will win battle, as Cong brainstorms for LS polls Kejriwals offer for alliance came soon after Congress president Rahul Gandhi spoke about combined opposition against the Modi government in the Lok Sabha election. Addressing a press conference in Chennai, Gandhi said the opposition is united against the BJP-led coalition to oust the Modi government from power. Earlier on Tuesday, Gandhi had said no sacrifice is bigger to have an alliance if it is aimed at defeating the BJP-led coalition in the parliamentary election. Kejriwals proposal for alliance with the Congress comes on the back of a failed attempt to strike a deal with the main opposition party in Delhi. Kejriwal repeatedly urged Gandhi to join hands against the BJP and contest the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi together. Gandhi held a meeting with the Delhi unit of the Congress, which opposed the idea of joining hands with the AAP. The alliance talks could not take off in Delhi. Kejriwal did not hide his disappointment at not having an alliance in Delhi saying the Congresss decision would help the BJP. In his offer for alliance, Kejriwal mentioned about the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP), which is led by Dushyant Chautala, the Lok Sabha MP from Hisar in Haryana. He is the son of former MP Ajay Singh Chautala and grandson of former Haryana Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala. Dushyant Chautala claims to be the true inheritor of the familys political legacy that began with former Deputy Prime Minister Devi Lal. The BJP had won seven of the 10 Lok Sabha seats in Haryana in 2014 parliamentary polls. The Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) - the JJP was formed after Dushyant Chautal parted ways with the party - won two while the Congress secured one seat in the state. Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday stepped up attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying that he will go to jail if truth in Rafale deal comes out in the open. He said PM Modi does not want truth to come out in Rafale deal. Truth will put Mr Narendra Modi in jail, Gandhi said at his rally in Tamil Nadus Kanniyakumari. He said the Congress-led UPA government had decided to give the biggest defence deal in the world to the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL). Narendra Modi becomes the prime minister in 2014. He snatches the contract from HAL and gives it to Anil Ambani. An aircraft worth Rs 500 crore was purchased for Rs 1,600 crore, said Gandhi. India and France signed the Rs 59,000 crore Rafale deal in 2016 for the purchase of 36 fighter jets from French firm, Dassault Aviation. The negotiating team wrote in defence files that the prime minister is conducting a parallel negotiation with France, said the congress president adding, The entire foundation is built on lies. In his speech, Gandhi also invoked former DMK chief M Karunanidhi to target PM Modi. He said Kalaignar, as Karunanidhi was popularly referred to as by his followers, represented the spirit of Tamil people and culture which face threat from PM Modi. Gandhi showered lavish praise on the former Tamil Nadu chief minister Karunanidhi, who passed away in August 2018, at his election rally in Kanniyakumari. I regret that I did not spend much more time with Kalaignar, said Gandhi. With DMK chief MK Stalin by his side at a public rally in Kanniyakumari, Gandhi said, This is not simply an alliance (between the two parties). This is a meeting of hearts and minds. We are here because we see a threat to Tamil history, Tamil culture and Tamil history. It is coming from Mr Narendra Modi. We will not allow Mr Narendra Modi to destroy the Tamil culture, language and history, he said. The Congress president also targeted the EK Palaniswami government in Tamil Nadu alleging that it is being controlled by PM Modi from Delhi. It is an insult to the people of Tamil NaduThere has never been a government before in Tamil Nadu which was controlled from Delhi, said Gandhi. You will see that in the election of 2019, the spirit of the Tamil people will win, he said. The AIADMK and the BJP recently announced their seat sharing pact for the Lok Sabha election. The alliance also has the PMK and PT, NJP and NR Congress as partners for the 40 Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. The BJP would contest five Lok Sabha seats while the AIADMK would field candidates in 27 parliamentary constituencies. Gandhi claimed that the 2019 election will see a defeat of the BJP-AIADMK alliance in Tamil Nadu, which goes to polls on April 18 in the second phase of the Lok Sabha polls. The state would go assembly polls in 2021, for which Gandhi made a prediction. The Congress president said, Stalin is going to be the next chief minister of Tamil Nadu. The Congress is contesting 10 Lok Sabha seats under the seat sharing pact with the DMK in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. The two parties had contested the Lok Sabha polls in 2014 separately after the DMK walked out of the Congress-led UPA in 2013. Hectic parleys between the Bharatiya Janata Party and several of its allies in the northeast on Tuesday have resulted in the formation of a grand alliance to defeat the Congress. BJP national general secretary Ram Madhav announced the development on his Facebook page early on Wednesday morning claiming that the alliance has the potential to win at least 22 of the 25 Lok Sabha seats from the northeast. In another development, after parting ways two months ago in protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) forged a pre-poll alliance with the BJP late on Tuesday night. While the opposition is still talking and talking about Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance), we already have ours in place in the northeast and the rest of the country, Madhav wrote. Also read: Election Commission blows poll bugle, parties take poll position Madhav held meetings in Dimapur and Guwahati with chief ministers of BJP-led governments Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and the heads of coalition governments in Nagaland and Meghalaya before sealing the deals. While Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (NDPP) heads the government in Nagaland, National Peoples Party (NPP) is the majority partner in Meghalaya. Besides chief ministers Sarbananda Sonowal (Assam), Neiphiu Rio (Nagaland), Conrad Sangma (Meghalaya), N. Biren Singh (Manipur), Pema Khandu (Arunachal Pradesh), senior Assam minister and convenor of North East Democratic Alliance (NEDA) Himanta Biswa Sarma was also present in several of the meetings. Leaders from Bodo Peoples Front (BPF), BJPs coalition partner in Assam and AGP were also part of some deliberations. The BJP, NPP, NDPP, AGP and BPF will fight together in Assam, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh with the mission of defeating Congress party in the hustings, Madhav wrote. The BJP leader also stated that the party would fight the election together with the Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura (IPFT), its coalition partner in Tripura and will contest from Sikkim in partnership with the Sikkim Krantikari Morcha, the main opposition party in the state. This alliance has the potential of winning not less than 22 out of the 25 seats in the region and playing an important role in seeing Modiji as the PM once again, he wrote. No details are yet available on how many of their own candidates will BJP field in the region. Assam has 14 seats, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh has two seats each and Mizoram, Nagaland and Sikkim have one seat each. For Assam, despite several senior leaders of the state unit denying possibility of any tie-up with AGP, the BJP high command decided to forge an alliance with the regional partner once again. Of the total 14 seats, AGP is expected to field candidates in 2-3 seats, while BJP will give tickets to its candidates on 10 seats. BPF has already announced Assam minister Pramila Rani Brahma as the alliances candidate for the Kokrajhar seat. Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said his party will finalise alliances with regional parties in Bihar and Jammu and Kashmir by the end of this week. Alliances have firmed up in a number of states like Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Jharkhand. Talks on alliance in Bihar have practically concluded. Conversation on alliance in J&K is close to the final stages, Gandhi told a press conference in Chennai. According to Congress leaders familiar with the developments, the party is expected to contest 11 of the 40 seats in Bihar while the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) will get 20. The remaining seats will go to smaller allies. In Jammu and Kashmir, the Congress is set to contest the elections with the National Conference (NC). Both the parties are expected to stick to the 2014 formula of contesting three seats each. NC provincial president Nasir Aslam Wani said his partys parliamentary board is meeting soon to announce its candidates for the Lok Sabha elections that begin from April 11. We are in talks with the Congress for a possible alliance, he said. Both the parties are keen to ensure that the anti-BJP votes, especially in Jammu and Ladakh regions, do not get divided. The Congress has been slow in firming up alliances compared to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which has so far brought about three dozen parties in the National Democratic Alliance fold. It has finalised alliances in Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Maharashtra, where a formal announcement is awaited. The Congress has rejected any tie-up with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi and Punjab. The blue and green coloured dustbins, installed across Himachal Pradesh under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, have raised the hackles of the Congress. For, over 6,000 dustbins display names of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Lok Sabha members from the state Anurag Thakur, Shanta Kumar, Virender Kashyap and Ram Swaroop Sharma. The dustbins were installed at a cost of 2.66 crore by public sector Sutlej Jal Vidyut Nigam Limited under its corporate social responsibility programme. With the model code of conduct in force after the announcement of schedule for 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress has asked the election commission to remove the bins. We have filed a complaint with the election commission, said Congress general secretary Rajnish Kimta, adding that the party had constituted a panel to keep tab on violation of the code of conduct. He said the party leaders had objected to government move and were raising the matter during its rallies and meetings in the last one year. The dustbins were installed for publicity sake as the BJP Lok Sabha members had failed to deliver on ground, Kimta added. Read | Lok Sabha election dates announced: Know when your state goes to polls Not only the Congress, some BJP leaders had also opposed the names of party MPs on the dustbins when they were installed in different parts of the state. Former chief minister Lok Sabha member Shanta Kumar had asked the Kangra district administration to remove the dustbins with his name. An election commission (EC) official said the panel had officially not received any compliant on dustbins. The commission has already ordered government departments to remove all publicity hoarding and banners, said Neeraj Kumar Sharma, officer-on-special duty at the EC office in Shimla. For complete coverage of Lok Sabha Elections 2019, click here The Congress was left red-faced on Tuesday, after Sujay Vikhe Patil, the son of Opposition leader Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the presence of chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and state president Raosaheb Danve. Sujay Vikhe Patil, a neurosurgeon, is now tipped to be BJPs Lok Sabha candidate from the Ahmednagar constituency in Western Maharashtra, instead of the sitting MP Dilip Gandhi. A formal decision on this has not been announced. My father tried earnestly to get the Ahmednagar seat for the Congress, but could not succeed, Sujay Vikhe Patil said/ So, last week, I told him I will take a decision independently. The Ahmednagar Lok Sabha seat is with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), whose chief Sharad Pawar refused to give it to the Congress. Sujay Vikhe Patil said he had not spoken to his father for two days before he finally decided to join the BJP. I took this decision against the wishes of my father, he said, and added that he was humbled by the respect he got from the BJP and CM Fadnavis. I took the decision to join BJP after recent decisions made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, specifically about the air strikes after the Pulwama attack. The country needs his kind of leadership, he said. Fadnavis said Sujay Vikhe Patils entry was a victory for the BJPs top leadership. Dr Sujay Vikhe Patil comes from a long-standing political tradition, but he kept that legacy aside to join the BJP and work under PM Modis leadership. We have decided the Maharashtra election committee will recommend his name to the Parliamentary Board for Ahmednagar, Fadnavis said. Sujay Vikhe Patils move is likely to cast a shadow over his father, who may resign as Leader of Opposition in the Assembly. A senior BJP leader also indicated the party would actively poach candidates like Sujay Vikhe Patil, if it improves their electoral chances especially in Western Maharashtra, which has been a bastion of the Congress-NCP alliance. We have been in touch with some influential families who are keen to join the party. Some names will come out when the time is right, said a BJP minister. Just ahead of Sujay Vikhe Patils induction, NCP MP Vijaysinh Mohite Patils son Ranjitsinh also met BJP minister and CM aide Girish Mahajan. Vijaysinh Mohite Patil is the sitting MP from Madha, also in Western Maharashtra, where Pawar was supposed to contest from, before he pulled out. Ranjitsinh, however, claimed he met Mahajan over his sugar factory, but there was speculation that the Mohite Patils were flexing muscles in a bid to get candidature of the Madha seat. By evening, Pawar had announced Vijaysinh would contest from the Madha seat. On Sujay Vikhe Patils decision to join BJP, Sharad Pawar said, Sujay has left a party to join another and was insisting for a certain seat. It is not the responsibility of others to fulfil his childish demands. I can give in to a childs demand from my family but why should I give in to the demand of others children? It is up to the other (Congress) party to give in to such demands. Meanwhile, Sujay Vikhe Patils mother, Shalini, told a news channel from their hometown in Pravara, Ahmednagar, that her son took the decision independently. There was no discussion with me on this. There is freedom in our family to take decisions independently. He is a neurosurgeon and capable of taking his own decision. Even my father-in-law (Balasaheb Vikhe Patil) did not force any decisions on my husband, she said. Congress president Rahul Gandhi said on Wednesday that his party, if voted to power, would pass a bill to provide 33% reservation for women in Parliament and assemblies, and earmark 33% government jobs for women. Sporting jeans and a T-shirt, Gandhi addressed students at Stella Maris College for Women in Chennai, where he renewed his attack on the central government over the Rafale fighter jet deal. Dont see enough women in leadership positions. You cannot have women in power in India until attitude towards them changes, he told the cheering crowd. In response to a question, he said he had learnt the lessons of humility and love from his mother, Sonia Gandhi. He asked the audience not to address him as sir, and call him Rahul instead, a remark that was greeted with a thunderous applause. During his interaction, he also attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modis government over the invalidation of high-value banknotes in November 2016, and advocated the need for dialogue to usher in peace in militancy-hit Kashmir. On PM Modi, he said, I dont hate him. I learn from him. In Parliament, he was criticising my father [former PM Rajiv Gandhi], grandmother [former PM Indira Gandhi] and great grandfather [Indias first PM Jawaharlal Nehru], and the Congress...I was feeling affection for him....he was angry at not being able to see the beauty of the world. Love is the foundation of every religion, whether it is Hinduism or Islam or Christianity. Later, addressing a press conference in Chennai and at a rally in Nagercoil near Kanyakumari, he kept the heat on government over the Rafale fighter jet deal. Tamil Poet Thiruvalluvar had said truth will triumph. For Narendra Modi, it is completely different. The truth will put him in jail, the Congress president said. The Congress has launched a spirited campaign, alleging wrongdoing in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA)s decision to enter the government-to-government deal with France to buy 36 Rafale warplanes made by Dassault Aviation. The government refutes the charges of graft, accusing the Congress of spreading lies. As far as the Rafale aircraft is concerned, we have no doubt about its capabilities. But, there are several questions over the way deal was finalised, which needs to be investigated properly, Gandhi said in Chennai. At the Nagercoil rally, he accused Modi of serving crony capitalists. The Prime Minister wants to create two Indias. One is for the extremely rich crony capitalists, who fly in private flights and get thousands of crores [of rupees] for doing nothing. Whereas, in the other India, youth are jobless, farmers have no future and people are in severe distress, Gandhi said. Sharing the stage with the Congress president at the UPA rally, DMKs MK Stalin said Rahul Gandhi will become the Prime Minister . In your (Gandhis) hands the country will be safe we believe, he said. He also charged the BJP with remote-controlling the Tamil Nadu government of the AIADMK, which has entered into a poll pact with PM Modis party. The PM wants to destroy all the institutions of the nation and wants to rule all the state he said. Gandhi reiterated his commitment to his proposal of minimum guarantee income for the poor if his party is voted to power. On his partys alliance with the Opposition DMK, he said, We may have minor differences. But, we have aligned for the nations welfare. We will not allow anyone to disturb the Tamil rights. Karu Nagarajan, the general secretary of Tamil Nadu BJP, said, The charges the Congress levels against the government in the Rafale deal are preposterous, and they display the Congress is afraid of losing the polls. The issue of when, if and how the United Kingdom leaves the European Union remained up in the air after MPs on Tuesday rejected the withdrawal agreement sewed by Prime Minister Theresa May over nearly three years after the 2016 referendum. The pound took another beating and business organisations expressed frustration and more over the continuing uncertainty over the way forward beyond March 29, when the UK is due to leave the EU. Carolyn Fairbairn of the Confederation of British Industry said it is time for parliament to stop this circusEnough is enough. This must be the last day of failed politics. A new approach is needed by all parties. Jobs and livelihoods depend on it. The revised agreement package, reached in Starsbourg on Monday evening, was rejected in the House of Commons by 391 to 242; its previous version was resoundingly voted down in January. The continuing impasse threw up a range of options, including another referendum. May said after the defeat: I profoundly regret the decision that this House has taken tonight. I continue to believe that by far the best outcome is that the UK leaves the EU in an orderly fashion with a deal, and that the deal we have negotiated is the best and indeed the only deal available. There are two immediate next steps: MPs will be asked to vote on Wednesday whether the UK should leave with or without an agreement. Then, on Thursday, MPs will vote on whether the May government should seek an extension beyond March 29. May added: But let me be clear. Voting against leaving without a deal and for an extension does not solve the problems we face. The EU will want to know what use we mean to make of such an extension. This House will have to answer that question. Does it wish to revoke Article 50? Does it want to hold a second referendum? Or does it want to leave with a deal but not this deal? These are unenviable choices, but thanks to the decision the House has made this evening they must now be faced. After the defeat, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn demanded that May call a general election to resolve the impasse: The government has been defeated again by an enormous majority and it must accept its deal is clearly dead and does not have the support of this House. Theres a new name for the official vocational training centres in Xinjiang where hundreds of thousands of Muslims are interred to apparently learn livelihood skills and patriotism boarding schools. China is running boarding schools not concentration camps in the province, its chairperson, Shohrat Zakir said on the sidelines of the ongoing annual Parliament session in Beijing on Tuesday. Dismissing international criticism about the camps and targeting of the Muslim Uyghur community, Zakir said the camps would gradually disappear when they are no longer needed. Our education and training centres have been set up according to our needs. The students that come in to learn, its a dynamic number that changes, Zakir, the chairman of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) government said. They are the same as boarding schools, he said. As a whole, the number of people in the education centres should be less and less, and if one day society no longer needs it, these education centres can gradually disappear, he said. Zakir did not provide the number of people at the facilities. He added that the fight was against separatism and extremism. Fighting separatism and extremism is a long-term battle. We cant relax for a moment, he said, adding: It does not target a certain ethnic group or religion, but targets violence and crime, separatism and extremism. According to Reuters, the US government has weighed sanctions against senior Chinese officials in Xinjiang, including on the Communist Party of China (CPC) boss, Chen Quanguo, who as a member of the powerful politburo is in the upper echelons of Chinas leadership. Governor Zakir, the regions most senior Uighur official who ranks below Chen, said that there had not been any violent attacks in more than two years and three months since the government adopted a series of measures to combat terror and extremism. The XUAR is Chinas largest province and shares a border with several countries including India; it contains the disputed territory of Aksai Chin, administered by China but claimed by India. The province has experienced violent unrest for several years, which Beijing says is incited and orchestrated by separatists and foreign-trained terrorists. A massive security crackdown has been carried out in the region in the past couple of years. Uyghur rights groups argue that the violence is a result of spontaneous outbursts of anger at Beijings hardline policies in the region, its efforts to force majority Han culture and language on the local Muslim communities and lack of religious freedom. The architect of the security apparatus in Xinjiang is said to be Party secretary, Chen, who was earlier the Party chief of Tibet. During his (Chen) five years in Tibet, he restored stability through the construction a sophisticated network of surveillance and control. After being transferred to the XUAR in August 2016, he quickly rolled out the same securitisation strategy, accomplishing in a single year what took him five years in the TAR, the Washington-based Jamestown Foundations China Brief wrote about him The Ethiopian Airlines pilot whose jet crashed killing 157 people had reported flight-control problems, the company said on Wednesday, as it prepared to send the black boxes to Europe from a disaster that has rocked the global airline industry. The still unexplained crash, just after take-off from Addis Ababa, followed another disaster involving a Boeing 737 MAX in Indonesia five months ago that killed 189 people. Though there is no evidence of links, the twin disasters have spooked passengers worldwide, led to the grounding of most of Boeings 737 MAX aircraft, and sending shares in the worlds biggest planemaker plunging. Watch: India grounds Boeing 737 Max planes in light of Ethiopian Airlines crash The investigation may focus on an automated anti-stall system that dips the aircrafts nose down. Asrat Begashaw, a spokesman for Ethiopia Airlines, told Reuters the pilot had reported flight control problems - as opposed to external factors such as birds - and had requested to turn back to Addis Ababa. In fact he was allowed to turn back, he said, adding that a decision where in Europe to send the black boxes would be taken by Thursday. Authorities in France and Britain said they had not been approached yet. Multiple nations, including the European Union, have suspended the 737 MAX, leading to the grounding of about two-thirds of the 371 jets of that make in operation around the world, according to Reuters calculations. Boeing has nearly 5,000 more on order. Read more| After DGCA no go to Boeing 737-Max planes, SpiceJet cancels 14 flights Even as many passengers sought reassurances from travel agents that they would not be flying on a 737 MAX, the United States held out against suspension and Boeing continued to affirm its full confidence in the model. Trump speaks to Boeing CEO President Donald Trump, an aviation enthusiast whose ties with Boeing run deep, received safety assurances from its chief executive Dennis Muilenburg. Nevertheless, Boeing shares fell 6.1 percent on Tuesday, bringing losses to 11.15 percent since the crash, the steepest two-day loss for the stock since July 2009. The drop has lopped $26.65 billion off Boeings market value. Possibly presaging a raft of claims, Norwegian Air said it would seek recompense for lost revenue and extra costs after grounding its 737 MAX aircraft. We expect Boeing to take this bill, it said. Ethiopian Airlines said it would decide whether to cancel 737 MAX orders after a preliminary investigation. More than a dozen relatives of those who perished paid respects on Wednesday at the rural crash site where Flight ET 302 came down in a fireball. Workers set up tents decorated with white roses. Given problems of identification of charred remains, it will take days to start returning them to families, probably weeks for some which will require dental or DNA testing. The victims came from more than 30 nations, and included nearly two dozen U.N. staff. Of the top 10 countries by air passenger travel, all but the United States and Japan have halted flights of the 737 MAX. Egypt, Thailand, Lebanon and Uzbekistan on Wednesday joined them, and Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde Gebremariam said Boeing should ground all such craft until safety is clear. Resisting pressure, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administrations (FAA) acting administrator Dan Elwel said its review had shown no systemic performance issues. Read more| Grounding of Boeing planes may drive Indian airfares up by 20% Pilots concerns The three US airlines using the 737 MAX - Southwest Airlines Co, American Airlines Group Inc and United Airlines - stood by the aircraft. The new variant of the worlds most-sold modern passenger aircraft was viewed as the likely workhorse for airlines for decades. But Octobers Lion Air crash in Indonesia sparked a debate on automation, particularly over a software system designed to push the plane down to stop a stall during flight. Boeing says it plans to update the software in coming weeks. Though there are no proven links between the two recent 737 MAX crashes, the United Arab Emirates aviation regulator said on Tuesday there were marked similarities and Chinas regulator noted both occurred shortly after take-off. In November, two incidents were reported to the NASA-run Aviation Safety Reporting Database that involved problems in controlling the 737 MAX at low altitude just after take-off with autopilot engaged, according to documents first published by the Dallas Morning News and verified by Reuters. We discussed the departure at length and I reviewed in my mind our automation setup and flight profile but cant think of any reason the aircraft would pitch nose down so aggressively, one pilot said. In another case, the pilot said: With the concerns with the MAX 8 nose down stuff, we thought it appropriate to bring it to your attention. Boeing did not respond immediately to a request for comment, but it has previously said it provided appropriate information to pilots to use an existing procedure to handle the issue of erroneous data affecting the anti-stall system. Read more| Boeing 737 MAX 8 groundings spread around the world SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON The United States on Tuesday cautioned China that the failure of the UN Security Councils (UNSC) move to designate Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) founder Masood Azhar a terrorist, would run counter to the shared goal of the two countries of achieving peace and stability in the region. A sanctions committee of the UNSC will close the mandatory 10-day period on Wednesday for objections to a proposal moved by France, the United States and the United Kingdom to declare Azhar a terrorist, subjecting him to sanctions that require UN member countries to not host, arm and fund him. If none of the committees 15 members posts an objection - a complete block or a technical hold - by 3 pm US eastern time (12:30 am, March 14, in India), Azhar would be added to the list, joining his own outfit JeM and a host of Pakistan-based terrorists and their organizations and fronts, such as Hafiz Saeed and the other group he founded, Lashkar-e-Toiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai massacre. The United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal, Robert Palladino, the state department deputy spokesperson, told reporters in response to a question. China holds the key to the designation proposal, the fourth so far. All the previous attempts were blocked by Beijing, batting for all-weather friend Pakistan, which has opposed the designation even as it pretends to have cleaned up its act by staging crackdowns every time it has faced global scrutiny, as it has now after Pulwama. Beijing put a technical hold on all three previous proposals - the first by India, second by the US, the UK and France jointly and the third by the US alone - seeking more information or citing lack of consensus. The effect, either way, has been the same: the failure to designate Azhar, a known terrorist who is based in Pakistan and with his organization and thrives under the protection of the Pakistani state. India and the United States on Tuesday called on Pakistan to meaningfully address global concerns on terrorism and cross-border terrorism, during Indian foreign secretary Vijay Gokhales ongoing trip for diplomatic consultations. Both sides called on Pakistan to meaningfully address the concerns of the international community on terrorism, including cross-border terrorism, Indian embassy said in a readout of Gokhales meeting with his US counterpart, under-secretary for political affairs David Hale. The two countries had issued a call to Pakistan to undertake concerted action to dismantle its terror network after Gokhale called on US secretary of state Michael R Pompeo on Monday. And National Security Adviser John Bolton wrote shortly after on Twitter he had asked Pakistans foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi to take meaningful steps toward combatting terrorism. Gokhale and Hale also reviewed progress on subjects discussed and agreed upon at the first 2+2 ministerial meeting in New Delhi last September and on how to build on convergences in the Indo-Pacific and agreed to work with each other and regional partners to promote inclusivity, stability, peace and prosperity in the region. The foreign secretary is in the US for a round of pre-scheduled diplomatic consultations, which given the context of the Pulwama attack, has seen the two countries to stress counter-terrorism, an issue that is of utmost importance to both, and Pakistan continued support of terrorism as a foreign policy tool. When police got them out of there after a few minutes, the mayor defended the project. I do believe this will not only meet the needs of the consent decree, it will also meet the needs of the economic development in the neighborhood, he said, as the chants of protesters could still be heard outside the chambers. For decades, the West Side has been ignored, disinvested. President Donald Trumps former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sentenced on Wednesday to about 3-1/2 more years in prison for charges arising from Special Counsel Robert Muellers probe into Russias role in the 2016 U.S. election, with the judge giving him a stern lecture about his lies and criminal behavior. The sentence of 73 months in prison imposed by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington came six days after a different judge gave Manafort a lenient term of 47 months - just under four years - in prison in a separate case in Virginia, with credit for nine months he already has spent behind bars. Jackson said 30 months of her sentence will run at the same time as the sentence in the Virginia case. That means the combined sentence will be six years and nine months. Unlike at his sentencing hearing last week, Manafort said he was sorry for his actions, but Jackson then told him his expression of remorse rang hollow. Jackson told Manafort that he had lied repeatedly and committed fraud repeatedly, and there was no good explanation for the leniency he sought. Saying Im sorry I got caught is not an inspiring plea for leniency, Jackson told Manafort, who was brought into the courtroom in a wheelchair because of a condition called gout. Jackson sentenced Manafort, a veteran Republican political operative who earned millions of dollars working for pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine, for two conspiracy charges to which he pleaded guilty in September 2018 in Washington. Manafort, 69, had not showed any remorse at his sentencing in his other case last Thursday. I am sorry for what I have done and for all the activities that have gotten us here today, Manafort told Jackson on Wednesday. This case has taken everything from me already - my properties, my cash, my life insurance, trust accounts for my children and grandchildren, and even more, Manafort added. The defendants insistence that none of this should be happening to him ... is just one more thing that is inconsistent with the notion of any genuine acceptance of responsibility, the judge told Manafort. Jackson said at the outset of the sentencing hearing that she would not be influenced by last Thursdays sentence imposed by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis in Alexandria, Virginia, where Manafort was convicted in August 2018 by a jury for bank fraud, tax fraud and failing to disclose foreign bank accounts. That 47-month sentence was two decades below the upper limit of federal sentencing guidelines, prompting criticism among some legal experts that it was too light. Jackson could have given Manafort up to 10 years in prison in the Washington case - five for each of the two conspiracy counts. Jackson ruled on Feb. 13 that Manafort had breached his agreement in the Washington case to cooperate with Muellers office by lying to prosecutors about three matters pertinent to the Russia probe including his interactions with a business partner they have said has ties to Russian intelligence. Manafort wore a dark suit and tie to the hearing. At last weeks sentencing, Manafort wore a green prison jumpsuit emblazoned with the words Alexandria Inmate on the back. In the Washington case, Manafort was sentenced for conspiracy against the United States, which included a range of conduct from money laundering to unregistered lobbying, and a second conspiracy count related to witness tampering. During Wednesdays hearing, Jackson ruled that Manafort should get a tougher sentence because he acted in a leadership role, directing others to participate in a crime. But Jackson said Manafort should get credit for accepting responsibility because he pleaded guilty to the conduct at issue, though he later breached his cooperation deal with prosecutors. Muellers team did not make a specific recommendation on Manaforts sentencing in the Washington case. But prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said during the hearing that Manafort had engaged in an extensive cover-up that deceived the U.S. government and the American public, and continued to try to undermine the investigation even after he pleaded guilty. Paul Manaforts upbringing, his education, his means, his opportunities could have led him to be a leading example for this country. At each juncture, though, Mr. Manafort chose to take a different path, Weissmann said. He engaged in crime again and again. He has not learned a harsh lesson. He has served to undermine, not promote, American ideals, Weissmann added. Jacksons sentence may mark the end of a two-year-old legal battle between Manafort, a veteran Republican political operative who worked for Trumps campaign for five months in 2016, and Mueller, who made exposing Manaforts covert lobbying for pro-Kremlin politicians in Ukraine a centerpiece of his Russia probe. Manaforts lawyers noted that none of the Muellers charges against him related to the special counsels core mandate: collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. But for a short stint as a campaign manager in a presidential election, I dont think wed be here today, Manafort lawyer Kevin Downing told Jackson, and asked her to take media coverage of the case into account in determining the sentence. Manafort started his statement to Jackson by saying that his statement before Ellis last week did not adequately reflect his contrition. Trump has not ruled out a presidential pardon for Manafort, and after last weeks sentencing said I feel very badly for his former aide. A pardon might not, however, end Manaforts legal troubles. The Manhattan district attorneys office is pursuing criminal charges against Manafort, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters last month. The charges, which originate from unpaid state taxes, could not be erased by a presidential pardon, which are only applicable to federal crimes. The two criminal cases pursued by Mueller case caused a stunning downfall for Manafort, a prominent figure in Republican Party circles for decades who also worked as a consultant to such international figures as former Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and Yanukovych. Mueller is preparing to submit to U.S. Attorney General William Barr a report on his investigation into whether Trumps campaign conspired with Russia and whether Trump has unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe. Trump has denied collusion and obstruction and Russia has denied U.S. intelligence findings that it interfered in the 2016 election in an effort to boost Trump. Manafort is one of the 34 people and three companies charged by Mueller. Several others including former campaign aides Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen have pleaded guilty, while longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone has pleaded not guilty. The Trump administration has cut by half its budgetary request for a fund that the US uses to compensate coalition partners for military and logistical support, which could mean Pakistan, the principal beneficiary of the allocation, will get next to nothing from it. The fiscal year 2020 budget request for Coalition Support Fund (CSF) of $450 million reflects a $450 million (50%) decrease from the FY 2019 enacted level of $900 mn, the US department of defence said in a summary of its budgetary requests released Tuesday. The reason for the reduction, it said, was the continuing suspension of US security assistance to Pakistan based on the Presidents January 4, 2018, guidance. There is an additional $150 mn request for another programme related to coalition support, but thats a separate head from CSF. A US expert on South Asia affairs,, who has closely tracked US assistance to Pakistan years, said though the 2020 numbers and the context were not very clear yet, one could read that DoD sentence as implying that the Pakistanis will get zero in FY20, with the $450mn channeled elsewhere. The paltry request signalled that security aid to Pakistan is suspended and the USG (US government) has not ended security aid to Pakistan and wants at least some to remain available now and going forward. The timing of the budgetary announcements, though a complete coincidence, nails Pakistans support and use of terrorists at a time when it faces global scrutiny and isolation in the aftermath of the terrorist strike in Pulwama. Of the $900 mn requested for 2019, $700 mn was meant for Pakistan and the rest for other countries. Congress granted only $350 mn in the National Defense Authorization Act 2019, which was also to be shared with other countries, and was meant for border security. The amount left for Pakistan was only $150 mn, according to experts, That authorisation runs out in December. Pakistan has been the principal beneficiary of the CSF, as confirmed by Lt Colonel Kone Faulkner, a Pentagon spokesperson, till before the current freeze. It received an estimated $14.5 billion since 2002, for operational support provided to US forces in Afghanistan and counter-terrorism operations it has carried out on its soil against terrorists The dead girl was found March 5 by a park worker who spotted part of her upper body sticking out of a black duffel bag at the bottom of an embankment in Hacienda Heights, just southeast of Los Angeles. "So, if we look at the profile, there are vertical fluctuations, in the vertical profile of the aircraft and there were similarities in what we saw," Garneau said. "But I would repeat once again. This is not the proof that is the same root problem. It could be something else." Are you a current print subscriber to Columbia Gorge News? If so, you qualify for free access to all content on columbiagorgenews.com. Simply verify with your subscriber id to receive free access. Your subscriber id may be found on your bill or mailing label. In a statement to The Washington Post this week, Carlson was defiant. "Media Matters caught me saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago," he said. "Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, how about this: I'm on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch. Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why." Pipeline 13 March 2019 Radisson Hospitality AB, part of Radisson Hotel Group, is proud to announce the signing of its first Radisson Collection hotel in France, in the La Defense business area of Paris. The Radisson Collection Hotel & Suites, Paris La Defense will bring the group's portfolio in the country to 17 hotels and more than 3,000 rooms in operation or under development. Set between the famous Grande Arche and CNIT building, the hotel will sit on the doorstep of European business - while offering easy access to the French capital's many iconic landmarks and attractions. The hotel will be located in the Sisters Towers, a new iconic development by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield in the La Defense district. By gathering offices, a hotel and services in the same location, the project perfectly illustrates the new generation of developments, where a greater variety of activities maximizes the use of space for users and operators. As an example, the two towers will be connected by an observation deck run by the hotel, which will include a large, versatile room that can be turned into an auditorium or a banqueting room. The Radisson Collection Hotel & Suites, Paris La Defense will feature 309 rooms and apartments. Alongside its high-quality superior rooms, the hotel will offer 45 suites that include four executive suites and one presidential suite. There will also be an exceptional selection of communal areas, with a relaxing lobby bar and all-day dining restaurant offering tantalizing dishes and drinks created with - and inspired by - the best local produce. Guests seeking stunning views of Paris to go with their meal will be able to head to the Sky-Bar and Restaurant located on the 26th floor and creating the connection between the two towers. The hotel will offer guests a full range of leisure and wellness facilities, including a fully equipped fitness center and a spa. The star of the show, however, will undoubtedly be the indoor infinity pool on the top floor of the hotel, providing breathtaking views of the City of Lights as a backdrop to a relaxing swim. The meetings and events facilities will also deliver an unforgettable experience for business guests. The hotel's Business Center will feature a selection of multiple-use meeting rooms (including a large ballroom) with panoramic views from the top of the tower. The Radisson Collection Hotel & Suites Paris La Defense will enjoy a prime location at the center of the city's renowned business district - and will be easy to access with its proximity to a major transport hub. Guests will also be able to travel to the city center in under 15 minutes by train, making it easy to access the many world-class attractions in Paris. Future developments as part of the Grand Paris project will add further infrastructure to the area, including direct links to Charles de Gaulle Airport. Now Open 13 March 2019 Located in the colorful Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan famous for its Gross National Happiness (GNH) philosophy, Six Senses Bhutan celebrates its highly-anticipated arrival with the opening of its first three lodges in Thimphu, Punakha and Paro. The lodges seamlessly combine the brand's commitment to wellness, sustainability and out-of-the-ordinary experiences with the country's rich culture, warm hospitality and omni-present spirituality. Comprised of five lodges spread over the west and central valleys of this remote Himalayan kingdom, Six Senses Bhutan offers guests a unique adventure with uplifting experiences at every turn. From sunrise meditations and holistic spa treatments to private astrology readings and butter lamp lighting ceremonies to incredible hikes and treks through pristine forests, the aim is to leave enriched and reconnected. Each location has been thoughtfully designed to fully immerse travelers into the local culture. The lodges, which vary in style, showcase the diversity and special character of each valley. Offering sweeping views, the spacious interiors are framed by subtle references to Bhutanese architecture, seen in the simple lines of the natural timber furniture and the presence of locally-inspired touches, such as bukharis (traditional wood-burning stoves) and vegetable-dyed, antique-washed Himalayan rugs. Sustainability lives at the foundation of Six Senses Bhutan and is reflected through active management of energy, water, waste, purchasing and chemical usage. The Kingdom of Bhutan keeps 60 percent of its land under forest cover, as mandated by its constitution. The four pillars of Bhutan's Gross National Happiness (GNH) philosophy are: Sustainable Development, Environmental Protection, Cultural Preservation, and Good Governance, all of which are carefully woven into the design, operations and identity of Six Senses Bhutan. Pipeline 13 March 2019 The highly anticipated AC Hotel Los Angeles South Bay, from design-led European lifestyle hotel brand AC Hotels by Marriott, is slated to open its doors to guests in just a few short months. Located at 2130 East Maple Ave. in the burgeoning South Bay region of Los Angeles County and minutes from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), the 180-room new-build hotel will provide a sophisticated option for business and leisure travelers. Introducing a new hotspot for guests, as well as area residents and businesses, the six-story hotel will be home to a rooftop restaurant and bar with aerial views. Developed and managed by El Segundo-based Welcome Group, Inc., the leadership team behind AC Hotel Los Angeles South Bay is looking forward to filling the void of an elevated hospitality experience in its emerging home market. Built by AXIS/GFA Architecture + Design, AC Hotel Los Angeles South Bay is part of the hotel and office project at Elevon Campus. Nestled near LAX and El Segundo's various aviation and tech industries, the concept is derived from the surrounding area. With a blend of angular and curved surfaces inspired by aeronautical shapes and airfoils, the building's forms, lines and profiles reflect the visual imagery of flight and avionics. Intermixed with these forms is the static window and glass grid, which complements the angled lines, while silver metal panels mimic the color of an airplane's wings and suggest motion, against a backdrop of rich and stable smooth stucco for depth. Design Force is behind AC Hotel Los Angeles South Bay'sinterior look and feel, which, similar to the hotel's exterior, is locally inspired. The dichotomy of nature and aerospace served as an underlying influence of the design. The space will combine hues of warm neutrals, fresh greys and cool metals accented by leathery cordovan, while showcasing original metal artwork and an overall geometry of flight motif throughout in homage to its surroundings. AC Hotels edits away the unnecessary to remove friction, allowing guests to focus on what's important to them. Each AC Hotel is reflective of the uniqueness and character of its urban location and combines sophisticated style with everyday sensibility. AC Hotel Los Angeles South Bay will cater to the modern traveler constantly on the go through its beautiful aesthetic, smart design, creative food and beverage and intuitive service. The nearly 100,000-square-foot property features 180 fully equipped, thoughtfully designed rooms, including sleek furnishing and options with high ceilings. Guests will enjoy starting their morning with a trip to the fitness center followed by a European-inspired breakfast in the AC Kitchen and end the day with an artful cocktail in hand at the AC Lounge. An open-concept, communal space that extends outdoors, the Lounge serves as a creative, co-working hub by day and transitions into a bustling social scene by night. The property offers complimentary Wi-Fi, a library and over 2,000 square feet of flexible event space, perfect for business travelers, as well as locals looking to plan anything from corporate meetings to holiday parties. Topping off the hotel is a stylish rooftop restaurant and bar serving up local craft beer and specialty cocktails paired with tapas-style cuisine. Providing sweeping views of the new Los Angeles Stadium and aircrafts flying in and out of LAX, this new dining destination will be a fast favorite for a business lunch, leisurely dinner or an after work happy hour. The rooftop restaurant and bar will be revealed just after the hotel's opening. In addition to LAX, AC Hotel Los Angeles South Bay is situated just miles from downtown L.A. and Manhattan Beach, as well as nearby the new home stadium for both the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers. Just beyond the neighboring businesses, shopping complexes, and Green Line Mariposa Station, guests will find local Main Street charm in the surrounding beach cities, bursting with new restaurants, distilleries and more. Appointment 13 March 2019 Stockholm the company's appetite has been whetted for more. Therefore, Zleep Hotels has created a new position in the management. The job title reads Director of Business Development Sweden, and the man to carry out the task answers to the name Jonas Holmer. As Director of Business Development Sweden, Jonas Holmer will lead the development of new Zleep hotels in Sweden to the delight of both new Swedish customers, Danish as well as international holiday visitors and the chain's many corporate customers who regularly travel in the neighboring country. Zleep Hotels already has 12 Swedish locations on the wish list, which is why the time has now come to improve on the development front. Jonas Holmer runs the Swedish consulting firm Finio Real Estate Solutions AB, which offers qualified real estate development solutions. In addition, Jonas Holmer has experience from Stockholm Stad as Deputy Property Director, from the real estate company Vectura Fastigheter with responsibility for organizational development and finally, Zleep Hotels' new Director of Business Development Sweden also has experience as Business Area Manager in the real estate company Centrumkompaniet in Stockholm. And that is just to name some of the experience Jonas Holmer will bring to Zleep Hotels. Jonas Holmer, who started on March 1, 2019, is employed as a consultant in Zleep Hotels and will work part-time. Appointment 13 March 2019 Gabor L. Vida has been appointed managing director of Rosewood Washington, D.C., the luxurious urban retreat located in the heart of Georgetown. In this role, which he assumed in late 2018, Vida oversees and leads all aspects of Rosewood Washington, D.C. and its distinct dining and recreational venues. Ideally situated alongside the C&O Canal, the landmark property will reopen this Spring following a partial renovation and redesign that includes the addition of new public spaces and a new restaurant, CUT by Wolfgang Puck. The renovation will also introduce six neighboring townhouses to the property's room inventory later this year. Vida joins Rosewood Washington, D.C. with over 25 years of experience in the hospitality industry, including eight with Rosewood Hotels & Resorts. Most recently, Vida served as the managing director of Rosewood Washington, D.C.'s sister property, Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Previously, he held the same role at Rosewood Sand Hill in Menlo Park, California, where he helped the hotel earn several impressive accolades, including a coveted Five-Star Rating from Forbes Travel Guide. His time with the Rosewood brand began at Rosewood London as director of operations. Outside of Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, Vida has held leadership positions with many of the most renowned hospitality companies worldwide including The Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, Raffles Hotels & Resorts and Crystal Cruises. He graduated from Stratford University with a degree in Hospitality Management and also completed an Executive Leadership Program in Hospitality Administration/Management at Cornell University. Supplier News 13 March 2019 Los Angeles, California INTELITY, the provider of the broadest enterprise guest engagement and staff management platform for hospitality, will be attending HITEC Europe which will take place in Mallorca, Spain this April 10-11. HITEC Europe is part of the worlds largest hospitality technology conference brand, which brings leaders and professionals together to cover the latest trends specific to the industry. We are actively pursuing continued growth in Europe and our presence at HITEC provides considerable access to key players and decision makers from across the region, said David Adelson INTELITY President and COO. The European market is looking for solutions that the INTELITY platform provides, including ways to increase their connectivity across property and streamline daily operations. The INTELITY platform offers a complete suite of tools that create a seamless connection between hotel guests and staff. The platform integrates with over 120 operational systems including PMS, POS, room controls and loyalty programs through INTELITY Connect. Features like mobile check-in and mobile key solve some major challenges European hoteliers face today. Other solutions include multilingual digital access to amenities and services, TV casting, and much more. Using INTELITY Staff, management teams have access to advanced business intelligence tools to gain actionable insights into guests behaviors and preferences. The INTELITY platform is currently in use in more than 200,000 rooms across the globe. Email [email protected] or visit our website to schedule a time to meet with a member of the INTELITY team at HITEC Europe. Press Release 13 March 2019 Markus Semer, Chairman of the Management Board & CEO of Kempinski Hotels leaves Kempinski for new assignment Advertisements Kempinski AG, Munich and Kempinski Hotels SA, Geneva announced today that Markus Semer will not extend his mandate as Chairman of the Management Board & CEO. In order to ensure a continued successful management of the Kempinski Group, Markus Semer has been asked and he has accepted to extend his mandate during the transition until a successor is recruited and appointed. Since Markus Semer joined the company 16 years ago, the portfolio grew from 23 hotels to 78 hotels under operation and 21 under development today with the latest landmark openings in Singapore, Dubai Palm, Muscat and Bali. During his time with Kempinski, Markus Semer has served for over 11 years as a Member of the Management Board of Kempinski AG and as a Director of the Board of Kempinski Hotels SA. In addition, for the past six years he has served as Deputy CEO and subsequently as Chairman of the Management Board & CEO. Markus Semer is credited with having played an essential role in transitioning the brand from an interregional German hotel operator to an independent international luxury hotel management brand. Chairman of Kempinski AG, H.E. Abdulla H. Saif: "On behalf of the Supervisory Board, I would like to sincerely thank Markus Semer for his invaluable involvement and dedication to the Kempinski Group over the last 16 years and over the last three years as CEO for having successfully repositioned and succeeded in making the company profitable by setting a financially sound strategy with an achieved sustainable net portfolio growth. Kempinski, which is celebrating its 122nd anniversary this year, has never been stronger and more competitive as an independent international hotel luxury brand, and we owe Markus Semer and the team our appreciation for this remarkable achievement. We would also like to thank him for having accepted in the interest of the company to extend his mandate during this transition period thus allowing the Board to recruit and appoint a successor in a transparent and coordinated manner. We wish him all the best for his new professional assignment as of next year." Markus Semer: "Over the last 16 years Kempinski was not only a job but also a true passion and matter of the heart and I am very grateful for having been given such a unique career opportunity. We are closing the business year 2018 with again overachieving our profit targets and having fulfilled all strategic KPI's and net portfolio growth objectives. I leave with my mind at ease knowing that together with my colleagues, we were able to prove the financially sound and sustainable competitiveness of Kempinski as an independent international hotel luxury brand while having increased substantially the company value over the last three years for the Kempinski shareholders. I believe it is now the right time for me to begin a new chapter in my professional career and I am excited to start my new assignment in January 2020. In the meantime the Kempinski team and I will continue to deliver a beautiful performance for our hotel asset owners and guests alike in the traditional craftsmanship known as Kempinski." Colin Lubbe to step down as CFO and Vice Chairman of Kempinski Hotels Geneva, 13 March 2019 Kempinski AG, Munich and Kempinski Hotels SA, Geneva announced today that following Markus Semers decision to leave Kempinski for a new assignment as of next year, Colin Lubbe will not prolong his mandate as CFO and Vice Chairman of the Management Board. Colin Lubbe has been asked and has accepted to extend his mandate until a CFO is recruited and appointed. During Colin Lubbes ten years with the company, the portfolio grew from 47 hotels to 78 hotels under operation and 21 under pre-opening and development with the latest landmark openings in Singapore, Dubai Palm, Muscat and Bali. Since his appointment ten years ago, Colin Lubbe has served as a Member of the Management Board of Kempinski AG and as a Director of the Board of Kempinski Hotels SA and has served for the last three years as Vice Chairman of the Management Board. Chairman of Kempinski AG, H.E. Abdulla H. Saif: On behalf of the Supervisory Board, I would like to sincerely thank Colin Lubbe for his contribution and dedication to the group and the Kempinski Brand over the last ten years in his role as CFO, having been in charge of Finance, IT and Technical & Pre-opening Services. We would also like to thank him for having accepted in the interest of the company to extend his mandate during this transition period, thus allowing the Board to recruit and appoint his successor in a transparent and coordinated manner. We wish him every success in his future endeavours. Colin Lubbe: I am very proud to have contributed to increasing the company value substantially over the last three years for the Kempinski shareholders. We are closing the business year 2018 with having yet again exceeded our companys profit targets and having fulfilled all strategic KPIs and net portfolio growth objectives. I leave in place an exceptionally talented team who will continue to build on what we have achieved and have no doubt that they will continue to grow and excel, individually and for the company. Press Release 13 March 2019 - Are we there yet?: North American travelers are spending an average of eight hours researching their vacations despite being bored after just 40 minutes Advertisements - First world problems: Forty-two percent of millennial travelers consider vacation research to be one of their biggest stresses in life - Work n' scroll: Forty-one percent of travelers are being less productive at work while researching vacations Hotels.com comes to the rescue with their 2019 award-winning Loved by Guestshotels most loved based on customer reviewsto help eliminate excessive vacation research DALLAS New research from Hotels.com reveals that North American millennial travelers are experiencing net lag, a.k.a. scroll fatigue from never-ending research when booking a vacation. Whether it's a long trek through the Himalayas or a relaxing stay in a hotel treehouse, the struggle to book the perfect trip is real. Luckily, to help ease some of the stress, Hotels.com has announced the winners of the 2019 Loved by Guests awardshotels rewarded based on their guest reviews. With more than one in eight travelers spending 15+ hours researching before they book, it's no wonder 42% of millennial travelers describe the process as one of their biggest stresses. Thirty-three percent have even booked the wrong vacation or dates because the research became just too much. All it takes is 40 minutes for the scroll fatigue to set in, the same time it takes to watch most, if not an entire episode of your favorite show. The man hours required have resulted in more than half (51%) going on vacation to somewhere they've been to before to avoid the research. Forty percent believe they pay more than they need in order to avoid the research, and over a third (38%) would even consider passing the task on to a friend, with the average person happy to pay $134 to take it off their plate. Productivity levels at work are also taking a hit. Four in ten (46%) have admitted to secretly scrolling in the office, with 30% saying they get less work done during the hunt for a vacation. This isn't very surprising when 22% of millennials look through more than 11 vacation options before making a decision. Yet it's other traveler reviews that 91% rely on to seal the deal, being voted the most important tool to transition from looking to booking. To help everyone get over their scrolling woes, Hotels.com has unveiled its 2019 Loved by Guests awards, featuring over 59,000 winners globally and more than 22,000 winners in North America across 12 categories. Newly added pet-friendly, homes & apartments and sustainable categories have been introduced this year. Top 5 U.S. and Canadian cities winning Loved by Guests Most Wanted Awards: Houston - 13 hotels New York - 12 hotels Chicago - 11 hotels Quebec - 10 hotels Savannah - 10 hotels Adam Jay, President of Hotels.com, said, "Hotels.com can end the tedious vacation hunt with our Loved by Guests award-winning hotels. When you're researching your vacation, these properties can give you a great starting point, and help ease the endless scroll. These hotels have been reviewed by people in the knowthe guests themselvesand we've analyzed over 25 million reviews to find you the best hotels around." To view the full list of 2019 Loved by Guest winners, please see here: https://www.hotels.com/hotel-deals/loved-by-guests-2019 Notes to Editors *The Net Lag survey was conducted by One Poll in February 2019. 7,800 respondents across 26 countries. Supplier News 13 March 2019 IDS Next, a leading global provider of next-generation technology solutions for the hotel industry, today released their list of new clients in the coveted emerging markets of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, signing a total of 36 new deals in February 2019. With the explosion of travel into emerging markets, IDS Next has been positioned as the hotel industry's first choice in technology solutions for Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. For decades, IDS Next has demonstrated unrivalled domain expertise as a provider of leading-edge solutions that optimize operational costs, increase revenues, and surpass guest engagement goals for hotels in all market segments, whether enterprise or single property. Their line of innovative solutions include highly integrated hotel management software, restaurant management software, central reservations, hotel channel management, and mobile apps. "The future of growth in emerging markets is tremendous," explains Binu Mathews, CEO of IDS Next. "New generations of travelers are seeking out authentic, exotic experiences and leaving behind the once trendy, "Euro Trip" destinations. They are exploring Egypt, Sri Lanka, and Morocco. With news of at least 20 new hotels in the pipeline for South Africa, companies with global targeting need to take advantage of the dramatic opportunities for revenue growth in hospitality in the emerging markets of Africa, India, the Middle East and APAC. Those that deliver innovative solutions combined with client-centered, 24/7 support service in local languages, and a deep understanding of how to foster the sales relationship with different cultures will be the ones to watch." In February 2019, IDS Next successfully closed deals in the following countries: 22 deals signed in India including Mayfair Raipur, Ocean Pearl Mangalore, Godrej Tree Club Mumbai & Basilica, Panchagani 6 deals signed in Sri Lanka including Arangala Forest Lodge and Galawilla Boutique Hotel & Spa 1 deal signed in Nepal at Hotel Sabrina 1 deal signed in Rwanda with La Palme Hotel 2 deals signed in Ethiopia with Infini Coffee Bar and Dallol Resort Hotel & Spa 1 deal signed in Kenya at Maiyan Resort, Nanyuki 2 deals signed in the UAE including Spark Residence Hotel Apartments IDS Next software and technology solutions are trusted by over 4800+ hotels in 40 countries across South Asia, South-East Asia, Africa, Middle East, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Oceania. Consistently at the forefront of innovation, IDS Next's team is determined to empower the hotel industry in emerging markets to exceed their operational and guest engagement goals. To learn more, please visit www.idsnext.com. Press Release 13 March 2019 LAUSANNE, Switzerland - EHL Group has drawn from its past experience to rethink the journey it offers high school students to discover the hospitality industry. With courses and activities animated by some of the world's top professionals, the new EHL Junior Academy offers an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look into the worlds of 5-star hotels, fine dining and business management. Advertisements Photo: EHL Junior Program for Future Hospitality Leaders The program devised for the aspiring hospitality students, or those still wondering if hospitality management is made for them, offers a hands-on look into the hospitality business and a chance to explore the latest trends in luxury hospitality and culinary arts. The highly experienced faculty members will introduce the concepts of hospitality service excellence and restaurant management, for a first look at some of the main business concepts. As is customary at EHL, students will have the opportunity to meet people from around the world and sharpen their cultural awareness, creating friendships based on shared values and interests. Learn from the very best EHL has been named the world's TOP hospitality and leisure Management University in 2019 in multiple rankings, holds the world's only Michelin Star as a school, and employs some of the most prominent Chefs (Meilleur Ouvrier de France). EHL has been leading the hospitality industry for 125 years, making it the best possible place to plant the seed of a successful career as a manager. For teenagers who wish to know more about the world's fastest growing industry before committing to four years of hard studying, a week at the Junior Academy will equip them (and their parents) to make the right decision. Parent Academy For the first time, parents accompanying their children to Switzerland will have the opportunity to attend a tailored program of their own. The EHL Parent Academy Program offers a mix of fine dining experiences, regional sight-seeing excursions, workshops to improve wine knowledge, and chocolate tasting. One experience, two locations EHL Group now offers the possibility to discover hospitality excellence on both its Lausanne (Western Switz.) and Passugg (Eastern Switz.) campuses. Whether they wish to be in the world's Olympic capital on the shores of Lake Geneva amid the sun-soaked vineyards, or in the heart of the Swiss Alps in the world's locations that counts the most 4 and 5 star hotels, visitors will benefit from the best hospitality management immersion in the world. More details To find out everything there is to know about the new EHL Junior or Parent Academy and for registrations, visit the dedicated webpage. Performance 13 March 2019 LONDON STR's preliminary February 2019 data for Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, indicates lower occupancy but significantly higher room rates. Based on daily data from February, Abu Dhabi reported the following in year-over-year comparisons: Supply: +9.3% Demand: +7.2% Occupancy: -1.9% to 79.2% Average daily rate (ADR): +31.6% to AED565.07 Revenue per available room (RevPAR): +29.1% to AED447.46 STR analysts note the year-over-year increases in ADR and RevPAR were mainly driven by Pope Francis' visit to Abu Dhabi (3-5 February) and the 2019 International Defence Exhibition & Conference (17-21 February). A jump in rates were seen during the seven-day period surrounding IDEX. STR will release full February results later this month. JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. You should upgrade or use an You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.You should upgrade or use an alternative browser Staying competitive is key to success. In the hotel industry, small independent hotels always have to compete with bigger brands or chain properties to attract guests, sell more rooms and to earn more revenues. The question here is that with their limited budget and reach, how can independent hotels beat their bigger rivals? Staying competitive is key to success. In the hotel industry, small independent hotels always have to compete with bigger brands or chain properties to attract guests, sell more rooms and to earn more revenues. The question here is that with their limited budget and reach, how can independent hotels beat their bigger rivals? Whats in your favour? Given their limited number of rooms and offerings and not bound by any legacy or brand guidelines, independent hotels have the liberty to get creative when it comes to attract and serve more guests. They have the freedom of flexibility to make on-the-spot changes in their policies to offer personalized services to their guests. Whereas, given their restrictive regulations, group hotels often find it difficult to accommodate special or unusual guest requests. Group or chain hotels often neglect customization but focus on uniformity in their management strategy across all the hotels, located across multiple locations. However, an independent property can easily implement customized strategies specific to the location and especially designed for its targeted audience. Thats the reason, many guests nowadays are preferring independent hotels over group hotels. In other words, Originality makes sense for travelers over Uniformity. Lets take a look at some other ways that can help independent hotels stay competitive against group or chain hotels 1. Dont ignore OTAs As an independent hotel owner, you know that your brand is not as sought after. And in todays world of online hotel bookings, you need to strengthen your brand positioning across online portals, mainly on OTAs. Because OTAs help independent hotels across the globe with around 2/3 of all their online bookings. Since merely listing on an OTA does not involve any cost, find out your target audience, their regions and go ahead with listing your properties on popular OTAs. However, to ensure that you make more out of your OTA deal, dont forget to have the right combination of hospitality technology solutions a cloud Hotel PMS that comes integrated with a Channel Manager. This would you distribute rates and inventories on all the OTAs in real-time, sell more rooms while avoiding double bookings and overbookings. 2. Leverage the power of metasearch sites Metasearch helps you drive more direct bookings at a lower cost of acquisition. See this in the independent hotel segment, around 63% of hotels in the United States and 58% in Europe have received direct bookings through one or more of the metasearch systems. While group hotels have an advantage on metasearch with more bidding power, you can play it smart in your bidding strategy. To see more result out of your metasearch investment, make sure that you have a an auto-bidding tool in place which can help you with CPC campaign. Initially be very careful while bidding for a position in metasearch sites. After the first round of campaign, wait for three months to gain enough data so that you can change your bidding strategy accordingly. 3. Own your channels Look for a hospitality technology that can help you with a management software integrated with booking engine solutions one for your website and one for your Facebook business page. This will help you drive more commission-free direct bookings both from your website and from your Facebook page. 4. Automate operations, reduce costs To stay competitive, you need more time on hand and that is possible when your day-to-day operations are taken care of. Handled manually, the process can become prone to error. Adopt a cloud PMS to automate and streamline daily operations with ease. It would help you manage reservations, check-in, checkout, multiple POS outlets, billing and many more with precision. It doesnt only reduce operational errors, it saves enough man-hours and enables you to serve guests better. Plus, the adoption of a cloud PMS also helps you save on CAPEX. Unlike group properties, you dont have to invest om servers at your property to host your data as the cloud PMS provider does this for you. Moreover, you dont have to pay for software upgrade costs. You get better capabilities at a fraction of a cost! 5. Strengthen your online reputation & ratings This is another area which helps you attract more guests to your property. Almost 95% of travelers look at guest reviews while doing their research on hotels. While good reviews can influence a potential buyers booking decision in your favour, bad reviews just do the opposite. Here also you can work with TripAdvisors Review Express that can help you with automating the process of review collection. 6. Serve guests efficiently, win their loyalty This would help you bring them back to your property. Offer them personalized services, like they would get it in a 5-star or 7-star hotel, take care of their needs and be proactive to respond to their queries on time. In this case too, technology like a cloud PMS would help you immensely. It will help you with guest data collection likes type, gender, nationality, contact details, special preferences and spending pattern during their last stay. The more you understand your guests, the more you will be empowered to serve them efficiently. Example: The system can tell you whos your guest, whether it is a returning guest/VIP guest and more. Instead of saying Hi John, you say Welcome back, John. Trust us, small details like this go a long way in creating positive guest experience. Technology levels the playing field by empowering smaller independent hotels with the tools to compete with larger properties. Invest in the right technology to stay competitive, stay successful. Hotelogix Editorial Desk Hotelogix's team of researchers and writers are constantly innovating to share the latest trends from the travel and hospitality space. Got suggestions? Write to us on editorial@hotelogix.com. Daily News Delivery Join your colleagues and stay up to date on the latest Hotel industry news and trends. Subscribe 2021 Hotel News Resource Introducing Trio Version 8 with extensive new functionality added to the core system to deliver a versatile enterprise-grade open data analytics environment with improved data accessibility, availability and real-time processing. Triometric, the leader in API analytics with 20 years experience working with the worlds leading travel distributors and enterprises, today introduces its next generation API data intelligence platform which sets a new standard for real-time B2B online distribution analysis. The platform has undergone a major architectural refresh to leverage new database and cloud technologies that brings clients considerable performance enhancements and flexibility. The Trio platform is the core foundation technology for Trio Enterprise, Trio Express and Trio Data Engine the three ways to deploy the API analytics platform, which is used by some of the biggest names in online travel distribution to optimise their distribution operations and insights. In todays competitive markets, end users of distribution analytics are increasingly setting the agenda in the way they want to access data and how they use it to meet their business needs. This reflects a growing trend in the online travel sector towards agile, connected and open models as powerful growth drivers. The refreshed Trio platform addresses the needs of IT and business users alike, ranging from data for managing infrastructure and application performance to more advanced business analysis on the same platform and with more open data access. The new Trio Analytics Platform, known as Version 8, is designed to reflect the industrys need for increasing high availability systems, secure data environments and efficient real-time processing. Triometric has invested significantly in future proofing its versatile platform with a number of enhancements and features. The key capabilities that differentiate the next-generation Trio platform are: Value Based Processing Different clients represent different value propositions. Focusing data analysis effort on key clients avoids the costly processing of long tail data. Different clients represent different value propositions. Focusing data analysis effort on key clients avoids the costly processing of long tail data. Cloud-centric Analytics Platform Version 8 provides the ability to capture data from Cloud based APIs, process data in the Cloud and report on it via Cloud based service. This architectural approach can be combined with data centre based infrastructure to support evolving hybrid environments. This Cloud environment approach leverages the leading technologies available to deliver enterprise class facilities: High Availability Rapid recovery from server and other infrastructure related issues to provide an enhanced level of service reliability Dynamic Auto Load Balancing and Autoscaling Automated allocation of data processing resources to mirror the rise and fall of API traffic cycles driven by daily, seasonal or market trend. Real-time Operational Alerting and Reporting Prioritised processing of mission critical IT metrics feeding alerts, dashboards and interactive reports to minimise service interruption and shorten recovery times. Open Data Access and Integration (including popular BI tools) Different user have different reporting requirements, skill levels and tools. Delivering data into a users most comfortable environment means better usage, decision making, action taking and ROI. The Trio platform is now able to deliver powerful API insights to Tableau, Kibana, Qlikview, Pentaho and PowerBI. Open Data Capture New data capture capabilities that leverage prevalent Big Data logging technologies including AWS S3 and Apache Kafka complementing existing application and network based data capture. Anomaly Detection Whilst setting rules to detect unwanted or unusual events is quite common place natural fluctuations in data can trigger false alarms. Triometrics Anomaly Detection understands when values are not conforming to a prior pattern to provide accurate alerting and reporting of unexpected events. The travel industry is undergoing unprecedented transformation, said Matthew Goulden, CEO at Triometric. To succeed, firms need to have the flexibility to adapt quickly and seize new opportunities. This means that business intelligence providers such as Triometric, need to offer easier and more open tools to enable better and faster access to timely information to support critical decision-making. We are excited at unveiling our next generation platform, which delivers clean trusted data to best suit our customers operational environments. Analytics is key to success and we are constantly working to improve both the usability of our platform and the underlying analytics power that it provides About Triometric Triometric is the leader in API analytics with 20 years experience working with the worlds leading travel distributor and enterprises, helping them meet the challenges and opportunities of todays fragmented distribution landscape using XML analytics. Our powerful API monitoring and business intelligence platform helps customers manage complex distribution dynamics by giving them deep insight into their search and booking traffic. Actionable insights enables travel enterprises to optimise their business performance by improving their offers, uncovering opportunities and increasing revenue. Triometric is a privately held company based in Surrey, UK. Customers include some of the leaders in the travel industry including GTA, Hotelbeds, Miki Travel, Bonotel and Marriott. For additional information, visit: www.triometric.net Contact: Sonja Woodman Marketing Manager, Triometric email info@triometric.net or call Tel: +44(0)1784 270400 / +44 (0) 7802 667865 email: Sonja.woodman@triometric.net Daily News Delivery Join your colleagues and stay up to date on the latest Hotel industry news and trends. Subscribe 2021 Hotel News Resource M&R Hotel Management, operator of 25 hotels in New York, Texas, Illinois, Missouri and Indiana, today announced the promotion of Paul Viapiano as regional operations director, responsible for four hotels representing more than 600 guest rooms in Midtown Manhattan. M&R Hotel Management, operator of 25 hotels in New York, Texas, Illinois, Missouri and Indiana, today announced the promotion of Paul Viapiano as regional operations director, responsible for four hotels representing more than 600 guest rooms in Midtown Manhattan. Viapiano, a 28-year hospitality industry veteran, oversees the 226-room Fairfield Inn & Suites New York Manhattan/Central Park at 538 W. 58th St., the 114-room TownePlace Suites New York Manhattan/Times Square at 324 W. 44th St., the 177-room Holiday Inn Express Manhattan Midtown West at 538 W. 48th St. and the 88-room Comfort Inn Midtown West at 548 W. 48th St. He joined M&R in July 2018 as a general manager. He previously was area general manager for Sage Hospitality, responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Residence Inn by Marriott World Trade Center in New York. He also had oversight of Hampton Inn and Holiday Inn hotels on Long Island and Element, Courtyard by Marriott and Hyatt House hotels in New Jersey. From 2013 to 2014, Viapiano was complex hotel manager for Marriotts first dual-brand hotel in Manhattan, the Courtyard and Residence Inn by Marriott Central Park. He was general manager of the Courtyard in Montvale, New Jersey, from 2007-2013 and general manager of the Residence Inn in Saddle River, New Jersey, from 2002-2007. Earlier in his career, Viapiano served in increasingly responsible management positions at hotels in New York and New Jersey, dating back to 1991. He earned a bachelor of science degree in hotel and restaurant management at Lynn University, Boca Raton, Florida. He holds certifications in fire safety and diversity awareness. Paul Viapianos extensive industry experience, particularly with hotels franchised by Marriott International and InterContinental Hotels Group, along with his knowledge of the New York lodging market, will provide valuable insight to work on our behalf, said Brian McSherry, M&R Hotel Management chief operating officer. Based in Great Neck, M&R Hotel Management operates seven hotels in Manhattan; seven in Queens; one in Nassau County, New York; one in the Dallas suburb of Addison, Texas; three in Indianapolis; three in Joplin, Missouri; and three in Illinois. M&R manages hotels under the brands of Marriott International, Hilton Worldwide, InterContinental Hotels Group, Choice Hotels International, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts and Best Western Hotels & Resorts. Hyatt Hotels Corp. also has certified M&R to manage selected brands. With more than a decade and a half of success to its credit, M&R also provides consulting services in hotel site and contractor selection, feasibility analysis, permitting, financing, franchising, human resources support, sales and marketing, revenue management, food and beverage management, brand management, account and risk management audits, e-commerce, design, accounting and engineering. M&Rs business plan calls for the expansion of its portfolio nationwide through third-party management contracts. Click HERE to download a high-resolution image of Paul Viapiano CONTACT: Rich Roberts RDR PR LLC 717-685-4142 rich@rdrpr.com Daily News Delivery Join your colleagues and stay up to date on the latest Hotel industry news and trends. Subscribe 2021 Hotel News Resource A study calling upon 250 different scientists to gauge any health risks associated with the new Apple AirPods has produced harrowing results. Their findings were included in a petition (signed by all 250 scientists) forwarded to the United Nations and World Health Organization. One of the main scientists apprised of the study's proto-existence spoke to the press regarding their findings. Stephen Lam/Getty Images The scientist's concerns come from a learned place, even though at this juncture, the overlying community is merely basing their cautious stance on reasoning alone, and perhaps the plausible existence of radiation within its emitters. "My concern for AirPods is that their placement in the ear canal exposes tissues in the head to relatively high levels of radio-frequency radiation, says Jerry Philips, a biochemist with a teaching residency at the University of Colorado. "Effects include increased cancer risk, cellular stress, increase in harmful free radicals, genetic damages, structural and functional changes of the reproductive system, learning and memory deficits, neurological disorders, and negative impacts on general well-being in humans." Phillips admonished the World Health Organization on the behalf of his scientific colleagues, deeming the legislative body negligent in their handling of the situation (proofing the AirPod ahead of its release). And yet, the opposing view exists within the very same scientific community, represented in part by professors at the University of Pennsylvania, calling foul on the alleged effects of EMF radiation on the human body, on the basis of their point of origin. Whatever the case may be, as consumers we should be asking ourselves these types of questions all the more frequently. Returning to social media with a positive attitude and a new haircut, Jordyn Woods was glowing on her recent Instagram photo, her first since taking a step back during her public drama with Kardashians and Jenners. "If youre reading this...it means God has given you another day to wake up and be grateful & better than you were yesterday," Jordan captioned the smiling selfie. And while many were happy that the 21-year-old has been able to rise about the fray, beauty brand Bellami Hair is apologizing to the young socialite for statements made about her hair. https://twitter.com/_/status/1105272269713092608 The company shared a photo on their Instagram, a meme that included Jordan's recent selfie, that reads, "When Kylie Jenner stops paying for your lifestyle, including your hair extensions." The company captioned the meme by writing, "Bad hair is just one betrayal away. These memes have us lolling." Followers of Bellami commented in agreement, laughing at Jordyn's shorter hairstyle sans extensions, but there were many who believed that the company was out of line for calling a black woman's hair "bad." "Every single person in Bellami Hairs comments excusing that insensitive Jordyn Woods post is white," one Twitter user wrote. "It is absolutely baffling to me that white people still think its their place to tell minorities what we should and shouldnt be offended by." Responding to the backlash, Bellami deleted their caption to the meme they posted and rewrote it as an apology. https://twitter.com/_/status/1105542690031222789 "We would like to sincerely apologize to Jordyn Woods and our followers and for the social media post that was shared on our platform yesterday that may of offended anyone either directly or indirectly," Bellami wrote. "We believe that all hair types are beautiful especially natural hair we did not want to hurt or offend anyone with our post but just intentions are not enough. Because of our emphasis on wigs and extensions the inclusion of 'bad hair' was a very poor choice of words and insensitive, we sincerely apologize, this is a subjective phrase and we never wanted to target or insult anyone who chooses not to wear our products." https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu6hvOQgnGr "Regardless of this apology it is unacceptable and we recognize this and will do better. We are deeply sorry to Jordyn and to anyone who was upset by the caption and post regardless of intentions we are striving to continuously expand our product lines so we can provide products that are suited for all hair types, textures, lengths and shades. We will strive to do better and be more mindful of sharing uplifting and positive content as it is never our intention to insult or attack anyone. Thank you all for bringing this to our attention and allowing us to address this with you all." When Yelawolfs deal with Shady Records came to light, it seemed like the logical next step in his career. Armed with his distinct artillery gun flow and a unique set of life experiences to relay, it seemed only right that Eminem should be the one to bring the Alabamian MC to the foot of hip-hops commercial mountain. Not on the grounds on his skin pigment, but on the merits of his impeccable lyricism and his determination to pull himself out from the furnace of deprivation and towards a prosperous future. Acquired in the same time frame as Slaughterhouse, the self-styled ghetto cowboy brimmed with optimism about his role in Shady 2:0 and saw it as the culmination of his toil as an independent artist: I can tell you that when you're willing to give your life up to see a dream through, the reward is great. And now that I've become an apprentice to one of the greatest artists in the world, my potential reaches beyond anything I ever imagined. Let's kill this shit." Michael Tullberg/Getty Images Eight years on, it raises the question of whether those rewards were as plentiful as theyd once seemed to be. Prior to the release of his major label debut Radioactive, Em hastened to praise his latest charge and claimed that Yelawolf is a true original and he has crafted an incredible record. With this ringing endorsement and contributions from Diplo, Killer Mike, Kid Rock and Em himself, it seemed that all the necessary groundwork had been laid for this project to catapult him into the music industry stratosphere. Untilit didnt. In an indication of things to come, the record divided listeners between those marveling at his technical expertise and range of unique selling points to others who felt it was dampened by attempts to ingratiate himself to the commercial realm. Four records into his alignment with the Shady imprint, the two parties have decided its time to amicably part ways. As detailed at a show in Colorado, Catfish Billy revealed that the third edition of his acclaimed Trunk Muzik series will be his last record on the label but expressed how blessed he felt to have this opportunity. Ever since he vocalized his departure, it feels as if the enormity of the transition from major to independent has reignited the fire in his gut. Just days after 2019 got underway, Yelawolf commenced the roll-out of a line of freestyles that have placed him back in the fray with authority. Just as he did in the interim period between Trunk Muzik Returns and Love Storys eventual release, the Gadsden MC has been putting his fearsome lyrical abilities to use and reaffirmed why he still deserves our attention. Three years on from being committed to a mental institution, offerings such as Gangsta Walk, Billy Goat and Elvis Messy sees him rapping with a renewed vigorousness and sense of urgency that shows hes unwilling to subsist among the ranks of the overlooked any longer. After opting to peer over the industry ledge with no safety net, this spate of unofficial releases harks back to the pre-fame days where mixtapes and freestyles emanated from him as though they were uncontainable. With no shortage of praise coming his way, this week saw Yelawolf compound all of the simmering hype and unleash his most incendiary work of 2019 so far with Bloody Sunday Freestyle. A sterling example of the Alabama native at his most incensed, he leaves no stone unturned as he levels shots at G-Eazy, Post Malone and the sleaziness of the rap game in general. Complete with a pledge that well know how I feel about MGK on Trunk Muzik III, the rationale behind the track is clear considering it frontlines everything that sets him apart from the pack. From his tangential, razor-sharp wordplay to the ferocity of his flow when unburdened with commercial concerns, targeting his fellow Caucasian MCs demonstrates why hes compelling at the most pivotal time. At the junction between two converging career paths, Bloody Sunday shows that hes not prepared to dwell at the crossroads and is plowing ahead with what he knows best. In one particularly telling bar, Yelawolf acknowledges that hes no longer afforded the luxury of complacency and must fight for every scrap of recognition that he gets: Dribble through the middle up, crossover on 'em like I'm in the NBA. Look I don't really give a f**k, tell me what do I gotta lose anyway? Aside from this line, Yelas claim that hes the prodigy of an anomaly is a swift rebuttal to anyone that depicts him as a flop for not ascending to the same unprecedented heights as his Shady Records mentor. Relieved of mainstream pressures, this track strikes at the crux of what this departure from Eminems camp signifies and that is freedom from a lingering shadow over his career. Cooper Neill/Getty Images In the prescribed role of an Eminem protege, it led to the formation of a duality in the public perception of Yelawolf. On the one hand, his fans viewed him as an MC with veteran status and talent that far outweighed many of his peers. In the eyes of the casual viewer, it seemed as though he had yet to leave his own definitive stamp. During his time at Shady, the Alabamian clearly knew that his fortunes could turn on a dime and major label backing couldnt be taken as a given. For one thing, his decision to set up his own imprint of Slumerican just one year after inking his major deal attests to the Gadsden MCs foresight. Formed with his Southern kin including DJ Paul, Bubba Sparxxx and Struggle Jennings, Yelawolf described the ethos behind the company in 2012: "I thought it was a pretty descriptive word of what I am. Then it became a record, that became an idea and a crew and a pretty definitive style of people who vibe with me and my music. People who grew up on the same type of s**t." Known to inject his own country-tinged flavour into hip-hop, the disconnect between himself and the mainstreams sound became increasingly overt on Love Story and Trial By Fire. With such a self-devised and idiosyncratic style, the independent route is more befitting of an artist whose strength has always come from his singularity. By laying the foundations of his own company in advance, it seems as though Yelawolf was always prepared for this eventuality and is now exacting a plan to bring his career full-circle. Whats more, his recent actions have resulted in anticipation around his major label farewell that far outweighs his past few records. By producing an acclaimed and unfiltered record as his last dalliance with the record company machine, Yelawolf could hypothetically come out the other side as a self-sustainable phenomenon. Governed by the same business acumen that informed his clothing store and whiskey range, Yelawolf has positioned himself in a way that allows him to dispense with enticing the mainstream. Instead, Bloody Sunday and the fanfare around his recent freestyles justify the decision to focus on crafting the gritty material that brought him to the table in the first place. Now that Trunk Muzik III is shaping up to be a return to form, this is his chance to set the wheels in motion for the longevity that he spoke of to Forbes in 2016: "I picture myself old, silver hair doing something really rad for someone really young." Armed with the courage to relinquish the safety blanket, Yelawolfs fortune looks brighter than it has for years. Kim Kardashian West takes criminal justice reform quite seriously and continues to work toward shifting, or completely uprooting, the United States' prison system. The reality television star made headlines after Matthew Charles, a recently released inmate, publicly thanked her for paying off five years of his rent after he found it difficult to find a place to live due to his criminal record. Also, back in October 2018, Kardashian West tweeted to then-California Governor Jerry Brown, asking him to take another look at the case of death row inmate Kevin Cooper, who was convicted of a quadruple homicide. In 1985, officers responded to a horrific scene at a Los Angeles home. There, they found parents Douglas and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica, and 10-year-old Chris Hughes, all murdered in a bloody scene. There was one survivor, eight-year-old Josh Ryen who was left for dead, but he pulled through and survived. https://www.instagram.com/p/BGaguM_MmAB Cooper was hiding in a nearby home after breaking out of a minimum security prison. Police apprehended him and blamed him for the crime, even though young Josh Ryen insisted that three white or Hispanic men killed his family. The boy continued to tell law enforcement that Cooper wasn't involved in the murders, but Cooper was convicted and sentenced to death. "Governor Brown, please add Kevin Cooper to your legacy of smart, fair and thoughtful criminal justice reforms," Kardashian West tweeted last Fall. https://twitter.com/_/status/1049059175345479680 Today, the mogul shared on social media that she hopes to partner with current California Governor Gavin Newsom in ending the death penalty in the Golden State for good. "For the last year, I have immersed myself in learning about the criminal justice system. I visited prisons, met with formerly incarcerated people, and helped with cases of individual injusticeincluding two death penalty cases. I have met with and am very supportive of Governor Newsom and his decision to help bring an end to the California Death Penalty." https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu7w6JSBlk4 "Racial bias and unfairness run deep throughout the justice system but especially when it comes to the death penalty. And we should not be okay with the risk that an innocent person could be executed. I hope can turn toward better solutions that focus more on healing victims of trauma and prioritizing fairness and justice." Spring Break is coming up in the next few weeks and students are gearing up to head South to blow off some steam. Cancun is a primary destination for college students who are looking to party and get themselves into a bit of trouble before heading back to school. Each year, MTV hosts their own festivities for students across North America with incredibly high-profile musical guests. This year, they've recruited one of the hottest names in hip-hop along with the rap game's biggest party boys for this year's Spring Break. With Spring Break just around the corner, MTV's revealed their list of performers. Tyga and Rae Sremmurd will both be performing at MTV's Spring Break in Cancun as well as Zara Larsson. In addition, Quality Control is set to take over Spring Break with performances from City Girls and Lil Baby. Both Tyga and Rae Sremmurd delivered nothing but bangers in 2018 so they're definitely the right artists to have perform in Cancun. Tyga made his "major comeback" with the release of "Taste" which launched into the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. He followed it up with numerous other bangers such as "Dip" and "Swap Meet." Rae Sremmurd delivered their triple disc offering, Sr3mm last year. They recently revealed that they're gearing up to release the follow-up in the near future. President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that the Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 planes will be grounded in the U.S. In a televised interview, Trump said he had spoken with the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing. They were all in agreement. KEY ROUTES: Southwest adjusts to Boeing 737 Max grounding "Any plane currently in the air will go to its destination and thereafter be grounded until further notice," Trump said. According to the FAA, the groundings follow new evidence collected Wednesday at the Ethiopian Airlines crash site. The groundings will remain in effect pending further investigation. Southwest Airlines, the largest carrier at Hobby Airport, operates 34 of the Max 8 planes. This accounts for less than 5 percent of its 750-plane fleet. In a statement, the airline said its goal is to "operate our schedule with every available aircraft in our fleet to meet out customers' expectations during the busy spring travel season." SAFE LANDING: United flight lands safely in Houston after mechanical issue in plane engine For travelers booked on a canceled Max 8 flight, the airline is waiving fare differences for new flights booked within 14 days of the original travel date and between the original cities. "While we remain confident in the MAX 8 after completing more than 88,000 flight hours accrued over 41,000 flights, we support the actions of the FAA and other regulatory agencies and governments across the globe that have asked for further review of the data including information from the flight data recorder related to the recent accident involving the MAX 8," Southwest said in a statement. "The safety of our customers and employees is our uncompromising priority, and today's action reflects the commitment to supporting the current investigations and regulatory concerns." The grounding of this plane comes just weeks after an unprecedented number of out-of-service aircraft led Southwest to declare an operational emergency. At HoustonChronicle.com: Is Southwest's charmed run coming to an end? United Airlines, which has a hub at Bush Intercontinental Airport, has 14 of the 737 Max 9 planes in its fleet. The Max 9 planes account for about 40 flights a day. "Since Sunday, we have been working diligently on contingency plans to prepare our fleet to minimize the impact to customers," the airline said in a statement. " ... Through a combination of spare aircraft and rebooking customers, we do not anticipate a significant operational impact as a result of this order. We will continue to work with our customers to help minimize any disruption to their travel." NEWS WHEN YOU NEED IT: Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message | Sign up for breaking news alerts delivered to your email here. Uncle Sam needs coders. As the nation becomes more dependent on digital systems for storing information, operating critical services and monitoring potential threats, the federal government needs tech talent. But finding good help is hard, which is why Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting and technology firm working with federal agencies, was at the SXSW Conference and Festivals in Austin. Were at an important nexus where we are trying to modernize the force to fight a different kind of battle with different capabilities, techniques and technologies, said Karen Dahut, executive vice president of the firms global defense business. Its going to require all of us to come together in a new and unique way to modernize that force. Booz Allen tries to collect the right technologies and capabilities to help clients solve their hardest problems, and in the defense business, cyber is a top challenge, Dahut said. The company hires tech workers, buys tech start-ups and partners with others. Probably a full 50 percent to 60 percent of our portfolio in defense is aligned to that kind of technical capability, she explained. On HoustonChronicle.com: San Antonio investing to become cyber hub Out of 700 Booz Allen employees in Texas, most are in San Antonio working with the Air Forces intelligence and cyber warfare command or the National Security Agencys operations center. In Austin, the firm operates a Center for Defense Innovation, where it works with the Armys Futures Command. Dahut said both offices are expanding. Attracting tech talent for defense projects, though, can be tricky. In the past year, protests by software engineers at Google, Amazon and Microsoft have made those corporations rethink their partnerships with the Department of Defense. Google said it would not renew a contract working on the Pentagons Project Maven, which employs artificial intelligence to analyze footage and data collected by drones. Some top engineers quit Google last April in protest, complaining that military contracts violate the companys ethos of dont be evil. Last month, Microsoft workers wrote an open letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to protest a contract to build HoloLens augmented reality goggles for the Defense Department. We are alarmed that Microsoft is working to provide weapons technology to the U.S. military, helping one countrys government increase lethality using tools we built, the letter reads. We did not sign up to develop weapons, and we demand a say in how our work is used. Part of the problem comes from these companies employing workers from dozens of countries. Some worry about when or whether the U.S. will use those systems on their families. Not all defense work, though, is lethal. And the threats from cyber warfare and cyber crime are potentially disastrous. At SXSW, Booz Allen CEO Horacio Rozanksi shared the stage with former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter to explain how the federal government offers the opportunity to address the worlds toughest problems. Booz Allen Vice President Kevin Coggins talked about vulnerabilities in the current tech ecosystem. The start-up community does not understand the mission of defense, Dahut said. They understand the technology, but they dont know how to apply it to the Department of Defense. In San Antonio, many of the entrepreneurs and their teams are veterans working to solve problems they experienced firsthand. Local universities, including the University of Texas at San Antonio, are specifically preparing students to work in cyber warfare and cyber crime. On HoustonChronicle.com: Time to get smart about artificial intelligence I think UTSA is a model for other university systems where they have chosen a specific focus around cyber and technology and built a whole program around entrepreneurism, Dahut said. Booz Allen Hamilton is really well positioned in this marketplace to help the small technology company that really wants to get a foothold into working for the government. But were also in the business of helping the government solve its most intractable problems. I spent seven years as a U.S. Army signals intelligence analyst, mostly working with the National Security Agency to monitor the Soviet Union. I know the best technology is necessary to gather the critical intelligence that keeps the nation safe and prevents armed conflict. Entrepreneurs and engineers should recognize the difference between developing lethal weapons and designing intelligence systems. Helping Uncle Sam protect the nation from cyber-attack is not only a noble mission but a potentially lucrative field for tech experts. And there are plenty of opportunities right here in Texas. Tomlinson writes commentary about business, economics and policy. chris.tomlinson@chron.com twitter.com/cltomlinson Right after college, Draeger worked briefly as a reporter for the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune before taking a reporting job at the Kenosha News. While working in Kenosha, Draeger was active both in his newspapers union and in the community, where he was on the front lines of a successful effort to bring a four-year, University of Wisconsin campus to the Kenosha area. The result was the University of Wisconsin at Parkside, which opened in 1968. Billy By cant stand to see his father sad. But you already knew that. Just about everybody with Twitter, or a TV, or even a pulse knows that. Thanks to a viral tweet sent over the weekend, the world now knows that on the day Billys father, Satharith By, first opened his new sunny yellow doughnut shop in Missouri City, hardly anyone showed up to buy his doughnuts, causing a sullen face that nearly broke his sons heart. My dad is sad cause no one is coming to his new doughnut shop, Billy tweeted, shortly after closing time on Saturday, adding a sobbing emoji and photos of his dad next to still-full cases of doughnuts. He hoped some of his friends would see. He never expected youd see it, too much less that it would be retweeted more than 330,000 times, and land Billys Donuts on news segments around the country, including The Today Show. He certainly never thought it would lead to lines snaking out the shop door as his parents raced to keep the doughnut displays full. But in the social media age, the right tweet can change everything. The rush of retweets began immediately. And by the time Billy went to bed Saturday night, he felt the need to warn his dad. Dad, make a lot of doughnuts, he said. Satharith smiled. On Saturday, he still didnt know quite what Twitter was or Instagram, where the stores following ballooned from 35 followers to more than 125,000. He learned pretty quickly. On Sunday morning, the shop sold out even as Satharith spent the majority of the day making extra batches in the back of the shop. He kneaded and beat the dough, folding it and rolling it out again and again piling it high and spreading it thin over and over in a rhythmic process, like a never-ending tide of dough sweeping across the baking table hed spent two weeks making by hand in his garage. The Bys called in aunts and other family members to help out, as Satharith rolled, cut, glazed and fried. His wife Nakry took orders up front. It got crazy, Nakry said a little after 11 a.m. on Tuesday normally a quiet time in doughnut land. But theres no such thing as a quiet time at Billys this week. And for Nakry and Satharith, this has been a long time coming. Satharith came to America in February 1981, as a refugee from Cambodia; Nakry came a month later. He worked as a machinist hence his deft skill at creating his own tools, like the jumbo-sized metal rolling pin he uses at the new shop. Nakry found a job at Wendys, where she was still working when her mother and Sathariths mother set them up. They were married in 1983, and saved diligently to open their first doughnut shop in 1993. They named it Billys after their son, then a toddler, and became part of Houstons doughnut shop community, in which roughly 90 percent of stores are owned by Cambodian-Americans. For 24 years, their shop and their son were the center of the Bys American dream. Then, in 2016, Nakrys health declined; first came kidney stones, then a cyst. With all the pain, she could no longer bear standing on her feet all day. Satharith couldnt run the shop alone, and they had to sell the business theyd built from scratch. And then I had to stay home, I had nothing to do, Nakry said on Tuesday, a hint of sweat beading along the brim of her ballcap as she pivoted around the small space behind the counter, from where she keeps the tongs to where she swipes credit cards, attempting to multitask her way through the line. And we tried to save money to open this one. And then, the first couple days it was so quiet, and I was so sad. She obviously wasnt alone in that feeling. I was really so sad, said Satharith. It was too slow. And I told my wife maybe wed have to sell the shop and go out to work. And then Billy was so sad. So he said, I can help you Dad. Ill make this better. And he did. Billy's Donuts isnt the first Houston business to find a second wind thanks to a heartwarming social post from a kid. In December 2017, Jacqueline Garza sent out an all-caps plea asking people to patronize her fathers Mexican eatery, La Casa Bakery and Restaurant in the Near Northside. "He been thinking about closing but I can't let that happen, spread the word," Garza tweeted about her father, after a long string of disappointing sales. Twitter rallied. Soon, it had been retweeted more than 60,000 times, and sales quadrupled, saving the bakery from a grim fate. But Billys tweet went even farther. On Monday, a group of Twitter employees who were in Austin for the annual South by Southwest festival hopped into a car and drove to Missouri City to buy out the stores supply of doughnuts. It was the least they could do, the company said in an email to the Chronicle. With just one tweet, Billy sparked an outpouring of love and support around the world, a spokesperson wrote. Were here to show him ours. The company has engaged with and amplified stories like Billys before. But never to this level. And while Twitter is usually reserved for 280 characters and a brief, 15-minute blip of fame, the eye on Billy's Donuts continues to linger. On Tuesday, Satharith easily made more than 200 dozen doughnuts. Thats less than the previous two days, he said, but still well over what hed anticipated the demand would be. I wasnt expecting it to be this crazy this early in the morning, Joe Baltazar of Sugar Land said at around 11:15 a.m. Tuesday, as he waited for his chance to pick up a half-dozen glazed doughnuts and a couple ham-and-cheese croissants. Its out of the ordinary for Baltazar to even stop at a doughnut shop. The last time he did was at least six months ago, at a Krispy Kreme in Houston. But he saw the story of Billy and his parents on the news and thought, I want to support good people like this in our community. So he drove out and waited about 20 minutes in line. At one point, he said if they werent able to fulfill his order, hed just come back tomorrow. This is family, Baltazar said This is local. This is community and this is a happy place. So supporting them? Its the least I can do. Gov. Gavin Newsom is suspending the death penalty in California, calling it discriminatory and immoral, and is granting reprieves to the 737 condemned inmates on the nations largest Death Row. I do not believe that a civilized society can claim to be a leader in the world as long as its government continues to sanction the premeditated and discriminatory execution of its people, Newsom said in a statement accompanying an executive order, to be issued Wednesday, declaring a moratorium on capital punishment in the state. The death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian. He plans to order an immediate shutdown of the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison, where the last execution was carried out in 2006. Newsom is also withdrawing Californias recently revised procedures for executions by lethal injection, ending at least for now the struggle by prison officials for more than a decade to devise procedures that would pass muster in federal court by minimizing the risk of a botched and painful execution. His actions, disclosed to The Chronicle by an administration source late Tuesday, come in the wake of a pair of close but unsuccessful efforts by death penalty opponents to repeal the state law at the ballot box. The initiatives, both endorsed by Newsom, garnered 48 percent of the vote in 2012 and 47 percent four years later, when supporters of capital punishment won passage of a rival initiative aimed at speeding up executions. While that measure has reduced review of the execution process in state courts, Californias lethal-injection procedures are still being scrutinized in federal court. The governor lacks authority to change the state death penalty law, which was enacted by the voters in 1978 and can be repealed only at the ballot box. Newsom, elected to a four-year term last November, did not say whether he would support another repeal initiative in 2020. But he said he would grant reprieves to anyone sentenced to death while he holds office. Eric Risberg/Associated Press The intentional killing of another person is wrong, he said. And, as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual. Michele Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, criticized Newsoms decision. The voters of the state of California support the death penalty, she said. That is powerfully demonstrated by their approval of Proposition 66 in 2016 to ensure the death penalty is implemented, and their rejection of measures to end the death penalty in 2016 and 2006. Gov. Newsom ... is usurping the expressed will of California voters. Want more news from Sacramento? Subscribe to Political Punch, the thrice-weekly newsletter by The Chronicle's political reporters. See More Collapse The announcement appears to contradict Newsoms public position during his campaign for governor. When The Chronicle asked candidates for their views on the death penalty, Dan Newman, a spokesman for then-Lt. Gov. Newsom, cited his long-standing opposition to capital punishment. But he added that Newsom recognizes that California voters have spoken on the issue and, if elected governor, hed respect the will of the electorate by following and implementing the law. The governors statement lays out the case against the death penalty as biased, costly and pointless. While the state has spent $5 billion on trying, convicting, imprisoning and executing Death Row inmates since voters approved the current law in 1978, Newsom said, there is no evidence that the death penalty deters murder, and there has been no increase in homicides in states that ended capital punishment. The death penalty has also discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or cant afford expensive legal representation, Newsom said. He said more than three-fifths of Califorinas Death Row inmates are people of color, while studies have shown that those convicted of killing whites are far more likely to be sentenced to death than killers of blacks or Latinos. Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press But most of all, the death penalty is absolute, irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error, Newsom said. He noted that 164 condemned prisoners nationwide, including five in California, have been freed from Death Row since 1973 based on evidence that they were wrongfully convicted or sentenced. The reprieves granted by Newsom are temporary orders, in effect during his governorship, as opposed to executive clemency that would reduce an inmates sentence to life in prison without parole. Clemency for any inmate with two or more felony convictions would require approval from a majority of the state Supreme Court. Governors in several other states have granted clemency to condemned prisoners, most notably Illinois Republican Gov. George Ryan, who spared the lives of all 167 inmates on his states Death Row in 2003. Illinois abolished the death penalty in 2011. Moratoriums on the death penalty are in place in Pennsylvania and Oregon, where a 2011 order by Gov. John Kitzhaber was extended in 2016 by his successor, Kate Brown. In December, six former Democratic governors in other states wrote a column in the New York Times urging outgoing California Gov. Jerry Brown to commute all death sentences in the state to life in prison. But Brown, despite his longtime opposition to the death penalty, never sought clemency for any Death Row inmates. The last inmate to be executed in California was Clarence Ray Allen in January 2006. Before the next scheduled execution, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose ruled that the states capital punishment procedures were unconstitutional because of flaws in lethal injection procedures, equipment and staff training that could subject inmates to an agonizing death. For much of the past 13 years, the state has been searching for alternatives that would satisfy the federal judiciary. Newsoms order ends those efforts, at least for as long as he is governor. With the state pulling back its attempts to win judicial approval for an execution method, California has no legal method of putting anyone to death although supporters of capital punishment may argue that the voter-approved 2016 measure, Proposition 66, prohibits challenges to execution procedures at the state level. Of the 737 condemned inmates, 25 have lost all appeals of their convictions and death sentences. Their cases are still awaiting review in a San Francisco federal court, which has yet to approve a new single-drug execution procedure authorized by Browns administration. But the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected similar challenges in other states, ruling that the possibility of a painful execution by injection does not violate constitutional standards. Had he not announced a moratorium, Newsom most likely would have faced decisions within the next year on whether to allow individual executions to proceed. Bob Egelko and Alexei Koseff are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com, alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko, @akoseff PEDRO PARDO/AFP/Getty Images President Donald Trump in an interview published Tuesday said his administration is thinking "very seriously" about designating Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. "We are. We are," Trump told Breitbart News. "We're thinking about doing it very seriously. In fact, we've been thinking about it for a long time. . . . As terrorists - as terrorist organizations, the answer is yes. They are." Milwaukee is probably a pleasant city, and one that delegates to the Democratic National Convention might enjoy visiting next July. It also has a colorful political history, apparently. I learned that on Monday, after Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez announced that Milwaukee had prevailed in its bid to host the convention in 2020. With the 2020 Democrat presidential primary field currently stumbling over each other in a race to the radical left, it makes sense that their party would choose to hold its convention in the only American city that has elected three socialist mayors, tweeted the Wisconsin GOP in response to the news. I look forward to learning more about those mayors, and any misfortunes that may have befallen Milwaukee as a result of their election. On HoustonChronicle.com: Firefighters gloat as Dems pick Milwaukee over Houston for 2020 convention My sense, however, is that DNC leaders opted for Milwaukee because the alternative was Houston, and the misfortunes that have befallen Mayor Sylvester Turner of late were notable. Turner supported Houstons bid to host the convention, and helped welcome the DNC scouts who visited last summer after the city was named to the short list, along with Milwaukee and Miami. Houstons bid to host the Democratic convention got a boost courtesy of last years midterm election results, when a blue wave in the area helped raise the prospect that Texas, with its 38 electoral votes, might be competitive in 2020. The mayor, however, has been embroiled in conflict with the Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association over their compensation, which led to passage of Proposition B in November. The measure calls for pay parity between Houston firefighters and police officers, and firefighter union leaders insist they are willing to negotiate over its implementation. On HoustonChronicle.com: Houston firefighters haven't made the case for pay parity Turner maintains that his options are limited, because Prop B has stood up to court challenge. And he last week told city council that it might be necessary to lay off as many as 375 firefighters in order to start giving pay raises to the others. The union supported Turners election in 2016. Needless to say, things have changed. The enmity between the mayor and the firefighters is palpable, and it apparently made an impression on DNC leaders. Where you hold our convention is a very strong statement of your values and who and what we are fighting for, said Perez, in announcing the decision. We need to fight alongside our brothers and sisters in labor to build a brighter future together, and empower the diversity of our party and country," he added. On HoustonChronicle.com: Dems should pounce on chance to hold convention in Houston in 2020 Turner described himself as deeply disappointed after the DNC announced it had opted for Milwaukee. The Houston firefighters union, by contrast, reacted with glee. With national attention on his political and legal attacks on Houston firefighters, vindictive Mayor Sylvester Turner fails with multimillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded bid for 2020 DNC Convention, the union tweeted. All things considered, Proposition B might be described as Houstons version of Brexit. Voters who approved of pay parity between firefighters and police officers last year may be starting to regret their support for the proposal now that the city is being confronted with the consequences. The hostilities between the mayor and the firefighters union, however, are unnecessary. And they were exacerbating the challenges facing the city as a result of Prop Bs passage, even before they helped tilt the DNCs deliberations in favor of Milwaukee. erica.grieder@gmail.com Faced with dwindling enrollment and fast-growing competition from charter schools, Houston ISD has launched a more aggressive marketing and research campaign this year to attract and retain students in the states largest district. In the coming months, HISD will increase its advertising reach and partner with local universities to identify reasons why more parents are enrolling their children in charter schools, HISD Chief Communications Officer Rebecca Suarez recently told district board members. The campaign comes as HISD grapples with an enrollment decline of 4,300 students, or roughly 2 percent, this academic year, and braces for a projected loss of 1,500 students next year. Theres a lot of different factors contributing to this loss, so were trying to figure out what are those factors so we can make sure were more strategic in that targeting, Suarez said. Any enrollment losses further exacerbate the districts budget woes through an increased payment for recapture, the states method of redistributing funds from property-wealthy districts to poorer ones. HISDs school board closed $210 million in shortfalls over the past two years by cutting spending and using reserves. District officials have projected another shortfall of tens of millions of dollars in 2019-2020, though the exact total largely will depend on changes in property values and decisions made during the ongoing Texas legislative session. In recent months, HISD officials have offered several possible reasons for the districts enrollment decline. They include movement of families following Hurricane Harvey, charter school growth within district boundaries, waning parental confidence in HISD and changes in housing patterns. District officials also have surveyed principals leading schools with declining enrollment, asking why families in their neighborhoods are leaving HISD. Suarez said the most common answers were extended school hours in charters, availability of K-through-8 and K-through-12 campuses, prevalence of after-school programs, and HISDs early school start times. Now, HISD plans to take a more scientific approach by partnering with the University of Houstons Institute for Educational Policy Research and Evaluation, as well as the Houston Education Research Consortium at Rice University. The trio will analyze enrollment patterns, demographic data and community feedback to help guide HISDs decision-making. HISD Trustee Sergio Lira, who has pushed for more proactive marketing efforts in recent months, applauded the districts plans. I want to be ahead of the curve, Lira said. We dont want to lose students and all of the sudden were being reactive and (doing) all this marketing to bring them them back. HISD enrolled about 209,800 students this year, but it also lost roughly 41,600 children who live within its boundaries to charter schools and neighboring districts. HISD continues to lose more students each year to charter schools, largely due to the incremental growth of KIPP Texas and YES Prep public schools, as well as the recent arrival of International Leadership of Texas. District officials also are bracing for future losses to the states largest charter network, IDEA Public Schools, which plans to open its first Houston campuses in 2020. HISD staffers already have identified four geographic sections of the district northeast, east, south and southwest where larger numbers of families opt for charter schools. All four areas are home to predominantly lower-income students, HISD campuses with lower-than-average ratings under the states academic accountability system, and schools established by the regions largest charter networks. As HISD awaits the results from university researchers later this summer, district officials are coordinating an early round of advertising aimed at a wider audience. The district plans to advertise on local radio and network television stations in English and Spanish after primarily using billboards and commercials at movie theaters last year. The district also will feature graduates from its EMERGE program, which helps high school students planning to attend prestigious colleges and universities, on billboards located near the graduates home schools. The ads will prominently highlight the names of the graduates high schools, their university destinations and the tagline Attend a Top College on a Full Scholarship. We want them to resonate with the students that are currently going to those high schools, so they know that I, too, can go to a top university if I work hard with the help of HISD, Suarez said. The district spent roughly $150,000 on advertising last year with funds provided by the HISD Foundation, its nonprofit fundraising arm. This years advertising budget and sources of funding have not been finalized. Trustee Sue Deigaard, who has advocated for a study on reasons why families leave HISD, said she wants district officials to show bang-for-the-buck on advertising. My feeling is that it should pay for itself, Deigaard said. Otherwise, if were not attracting additional students because of it, were actually spending money in the wrong place. jacob.carpenter@chron.com twitter.com/chronjacob Houston-area law enforcement agencies arrested 156 parole violators, including 14 high-priority violent offenders, over a two-week period in February as part of a larger effort to prevent violent crimes from being committed after people break the conditions of their release. Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo announced the captures during a Tuesday afternoon news conference along with more than a dozen other police officers and deputies from across the region. The arrests should send a message to parolees that they need to follow the rules set out for them or risk being sent back to jail, the chief warned. Were telling these people that they have two choices: They can abide by the rules of engagement that they agreed to, Acevedo said. Or, they can be certain in our region that were going to come looking for them. The initiative began in 2018, after a parole violator cut off his ankle monitor and set off on a frenzy of crimes, Acevedo said. Jose Gilberto Rodriguez went on a deadly crime spree in July, allegedly killing one person at a home and two people at separate Houston-area mattress stores. Earlier that month, another man broke curfew which should have been detected by an ankle monitor and stabbed his mother to death at her home in Humble, police said. Harris County Sheriffs Office Assistant Chief Tim Navarre said that more than 2,550 people are suspected parole violators in the county. The work to find those violators continues outside of the two-week long intiative, he said. Serving warrants on wanted felons is some of the most dangerous work we do in law enforcement, Navarre said. We do it because we recognize the serious threat to public safety that many of these parole violators pose. The Houston Police Department arrested 79 parolees in the initiative, Acevedo said. The Harris County Constables Office Precinct 3 arrested 31 people with open parole violation warrants. Other agencies that participated included the Harris County Sheriffs Office; Harris County Constables Office Precincts 4 and 8; and the Galveston, Waller, Montgomery and Liberty County sheriffs offices. The initiative takes place with help from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which immediately notifies law enforcement agencies when they notice issues with parolees ankle monitors, Acevedo said. All of the arrested people had previously been in prison on felony convictions. Fourteen of the people were higher-profile criminals convicted of more violent crimes, such as sexual assault. This is the second round of arrests in the effort. The first one, which was completed in November, netted 164 parole violators, Acevedo said. The intiative is set to happen on a quarterly basis. samantha.ketterer@chron.com Published March 13, 2019 Ava Phan, 14, knelt and pushed a stake into the damp earth in the dark. Her younger sister, Remy, 12, tried to snap a tent pole into place, her hands guided by the light of a headlamp. Their lopsided tent began to take shape. It was chilly and too cloudy to see stars. The girls didn't complain. Remy had heard boys at school talk about camping trips. Now she was making a memory of her own, on a ranch 60 miles northwest of Houston. A roadside sign marked the destination: Boy Scout Camp. Seventeen months earlier, Boy Scouts of America announced it would open its signature Cub and Boy Scout programs to girls. The organization says the decision grew from requests from scouting families. Ava and Remy's Troop 1314 became official Feb. 1, the first day possible. They were among 234 Houston-area girls who joined in the first five weeks, and nearly 10,000 nationwide. Required to be single-gender, the troops were part of a program called Scouts BSA, formerly known as Boy Scouts. Reaction to the idea was mixed. Supporters argued girls were already involved in the Boy Scouts organization, hanging around unofficially during Cub Scouts or joining co-ed programs for older teens. BSA in recent years also welcomed transgender and gay scouts. Opponents believed it wrong for girls to abandon Girl Scouts, a program that started for their benefit. On Nov. 6, 2018, Girl Scouts filed suit to protect its brand. The conflict highlighted the role of single-gender organizations founded more than 100 years ago, when ideas about how girls and boys ought to be were much different. A few of the girls in Troop 1314 saw people grow annoyed when they tried to sell Scouts BSA coupon books rather than Girl Scout cookies. But that didn't deter them. On this evening, March 1, the girls were on their second official campout, an annual event called Camporee. It featured competition among troops in their district; they were the only girl troop there. In Scouts BSA, they saw a chance to learn leadership, science and outdoor skills. Remy's and Ava's dad urged them to break the glass ceiling. They shared a philosophy Remy voiced: "If boys can do it, then girls can, too." They snapped the tent clips to the poles. "Look," Ava said, "We did it!" 'You ready?' Ten days earlier, 10 girls stood around a square table, folded down their thumbs and pinkies and recited the Pledge of Allegiance with a three-finger salute. Then they held the same three fingers up, elbows bent at right angles, and recited the Scout Oath and Law. These were the same rituals their brothers knew, repeated in new tones. Remy, as senior patrol leader, guided the meeting. She was elected with a speech on how the girls should strive to be the first Eagle Scouts, the highest rank. Sometimes shy, she thought the leadership role might help with her stage fright. Scoutmaster Todd Thrash, 44, gave Remy a discreet two thumbs-up. The girls might eventually open meetings with a color guard. For now, Thrash was proud Remy started without prompting. She had no experienced scouts to learn from. As Thrash put it: "We're kind of at the epicenter of change right now." For nearly a year, Thrash had been planning for this troop, while also helping Venture, Sea and Boy Scout groups. His son, like him, was an Eagle Scout. His 12-year-old daughter, Izzy, unimpressed by her Girl Scout troop's recent tea party, wanted to pursue the same goal. Thrash intended to find Izzy a troop. But Vivien Liu, 51, wanted him to start one. Liu remained Cubmaster after her son moved to Boy Scouts so her younger daughter, Elizabeth-Grace, 12, could tag along, doing archery, shooting BB guns and canoeing. "I'm like, 'Todd! Let's do this!'" Liu recalled. They gathered this evening, Feb. 19, for their weekly meeting in a Scout House in Bellaire. It was across the street from Bellaire United Methodist Church, their sponsor, which ultimately gave the go-ahead for this girl troop to start. As BSA saw it, the program was single-gender before and that worked. Aside from special events like Camporee, interaction between girl and boy troops was to be limited at most to opening and closing meetings together. Scouts BSA boys met here Mondays. On Tuesdays, it belonged to the girls. (Three Girl Scout troops meet at the church.) Michelle Dilday, 40, who works for the Sam Houston Area Council, walked to the front of the room. This was her second presentation of a troop charter to girls. Half of the girls wore Scouts BSA uniforms, the traditional khaki button-down shirts and olive green pants, tailored for them. "BSA", instead of Boy Scouts of America, was stitched on the shirts. Troop patches displayed their year founded, 2019. Remy wore her hair braided in pigtails. Dilday told them what she told the boys: Prepare for burned dinners. Expect ants in the tent. Help each other. "So, you ready?" Dilday asked, turning to Remy. Memorabilia from the boy troop's 60-year history covered the Scout House walls. Dilday handed over the charter, a piece of history for the girls to hang. Boys v. Girls Madeline Gaiser, 13, screamed as she dangled between three sticks of fresh-cut bamboo, lashed in a triangle shape by her fellow scouts, who didn't really know how to lash. Her 42-year-old dad, Michael, an Eagle Scout, encouraged them: "Do your best!" "Let's go!" shouted Madeline, eager to win. It was Saturday morning at the girls' Camporee competition. Troop 1314 was divided into its two patrols, blue phoenix and flaming narwhal, the latter named for a whale-like animal, with a horn, that spits fire from its spout. The name fit. These girls were silly, but fierce. In Katy, Troop 820 a number that pays homage to August 1920, when women earned the right to vote named their patrol for Sally Ride, the first female American astronaut in space. They, too, were pioneers, trying something that wasn't considered appropriate for them before. The blue phoenix patrol hurriedly carried Madeline across the wet grass. She got out of the bamboo triangle and Maggie Schwierking, 15, wearing her powder-blue troop T-shirt and lime green Camporee neckerchief, jumped on her back. Their hair was pulled into ponytails. Madeline rushed back uphill. Maggie, a high school freshman, was the oldest in the troop and among those who worried at first that people would think she was boyish if she joined Scouts BSA. She was also a Girl Scout and sister of Eagle Scouts, as were several of the others. But she wanted new experiences. When Maggie was younger, her dad, Jim Schwierking, 50, recalled giving his adventurous daughter a copy of "Dangerous Book for Girls," which was about climbing trees and skipping stones, things that maybe weren't actually that dangerous. At their charter meeting, Maggie sprinted into the drizzly dark to time her mile. What they were doing now were called first aid carries, meant to be used if a scout was injured, but which also served as a handy relay. These were outlined in the girls' scout books, which matched those of the boys, except that they had pictures of girls. It was these books that drew many to the program. Some parents considered Boy Scouts more rigorous and strict, and Girl Scouts too dependent on the troop leaders' interpretation. As local Girl Scouts of America leaders see it, people long associated their program with cookies, camping and crafts. They argue their girl-led program is also focused on science and math and evolving to modern challenges and needs with the added benefit of being all about girls. When the blue phoenix patrol reached the finish, Madeline's mom, Stephanie, 42, recorded their first aid carry relay time: three minutes, fifty-seven seconds. Stephanie re-met Madeline's dad when they were Explorer Scouts. Still, she and others were glad to know the Scouts BSA troops were single-gender. The girls interacted cautiously with the boys. Troop 1314 this weekend faced five troops, including 498, a Vietnamese troop that considered scouting a family activity. "We're all here, as scout brothers, and sisters," said Linda Le, with Troop 498, at the opening flag ceremony. (Around the world, girls are also involved in scouting.) That morning, boys from their brother troop, 222, hauled over a Dutch oven, offering their leftover breakfast of layered hash browns, eggs, sausage, biscuits and cheese. "We're glad to have you guys," Troop 222 Scoutmaster Shane Kimzey, 49, told the girls, as they arrived to his activity. He thought it important they feel welcomed, though the boys seemed to see the girls' presence as a non-event. One of Kimzey's scouts, 15-year-old Yvan Martinez, had a 13-year-old sister in Troop 1314, Alani. Yvan was confused at first by why she wanted to join, since she had Girl Scouts. But today it seemed normal for her to be here giving him hugs. The boys of Troop 548 earlier brought a worm to the girls. For girls their age, talking to a cute boy could be nerve-wracking. The worm did not scare them. At Kimzey's station, they planted their patrol flags into the ground. Tomahawk toss Alani, with her sweatshirt sleeves pulled up, hurled a tomahawk at a target, their last challenge before lunch. She'd been told her brother stuck two blades. "So close!" called 10-year-old Christina McClelland. Christina officially joined Troop 1314 six days before, when she graduated, smiling, in a sunny Sunday afternoon ceremony from Cub Scouts to Scouts BSA. Her mom, Lesley McClelland, 35, told her she was a role model. "You're making history," one of the Troop 1314 girls had said. When Cub Scouts in the Houston area opened to girls in August, Christina found her place. Girl Scouts bored her with indoor arts and crafts. With Pack 1020, she got to whittle and start campfires. Her options for which troop to join next were limited there were more 500 boy troops around Houston and, as of March 8, only 26 troops for girls but she was excited for all she would do now in Troop 1314. "It's a place to be free, be who you are," Christina said. "It's for adventurous girls, and boys, who want to learn something new." Yes, some aspects were different. One troop leader had already realized she was going to have to find a way to talk to the girls about handling menstruation in the woods. For Boy Scouts of America, the point of the change was that girls now had a choice. Maggie sank two blades into the wood. That afternoon: The 11 girls' bodies bumped against each other as they raced forward, shuffling, in a single-file line, within a giant loop of taped-together newspaper. "Right, left, right, left, right," Christina called. Victoria Henske, 12, crouched, one knee to the ground, tucked her hair behind her ears, and blew a giant puff of flour from a bowl, filling the air around her safety-goggle-protected face. "Ladies first!" an adult yelled as Christina beat out a boy to the water cooler and opened her mouth. The boys had taken off their shirts. The girls sprinted to their tents for extra layers to strip off and drape end-to-end on the ground. They lay down, E-G's hands grabbing for Izzy's, Izzy's toes touching Victoria's, and Victoria's arm resting against Remy's leg. Remy was smiling, her head on Madeline's thigh. Dinnertime Troop 1314 won every relay that afternoon, with stamps on the hand to prove it, a blue star, a yellow pencil, a pink smudge, a purple smiley face, a pink "Well done!" A campfire with skits, songs and ceremony was planned for that night. They were going to make Thrash's favorite chocolate cherry cobbler for the Dutch oven contest. They didn't know it yet, but between all the days' games, they were in third place. Now it was dinnertime. Not feeling well, Carolyn Ray, 12, sank into a lime green camping chair. She talked Remy and Ava through the steps for making the flaming narwhal's sloppy joes. She practiced cooking them at home a few days earlier where her mom, a principal at an architecture firm, knew all the challenges women pursuing careers faced. "Put your fingers like this, like a spider," Carolyn said to Remy, curling her fingers to demonstrate how to chop with a knife. Maggie and Christina warmed tortillas and sliced avocados for the blue phoenix patrol's fajitas. "Do you know how to cut an avocado?" Maggie asked. "I'm going to wing it," Christina said. Carolyn stood to pour oil on the diced onion, sizzling. Ava squeezed in ground beef from a plastic sleeve with her bare hands. "The camp life is never clean," Christina said. "A scout is clean," Maggie corrected. In went a can of tomato sauce, some water, tomato paste. Alani's dad reported the Troop 222 boys were making lasagna. Her mother was cooking with the Troop 1314 adults. The girls were bringing more parents into scouting: some moms were more comfortable helping with their daughters, and fathers didn't necessarily have sons. Christina wished she could live the rest of her life on this ranch. "Or at least we could have a week here," she imagined aloud. "Yes, that would be good." No one knows if this program for girls will be sustainable. Boy Scouts of America was founded in 1910. The girls were one month in. Christina's feet hurt. Maggie had a blister. Victoria was sick. Even Thrash admitted to pain in his ankles. The temperature dropped with the setting sun. The wind picked up. That night, it was forecast to rain. Carolyn, in her camping chair, appeared asleep. The scouts worried she was dehydrated. Remy patted her awake. The sloppy joes were about ready, and she needed to eat. They took their leftovers to the boys. Emily Foxhall is the Texas Storyteller for the Houston Chronicle. She joined the Chronicle as a suburban reporter in 2015 after two years spent reporting for the Los Angeles Times and its community papers. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Texas Tribune and the New York Observer. She is a Yale graduate and Houston native. Contact her at emily.foxhall@chron.com. Follow her on Twitter at @emfoxhall . Marie D. De Jesus is a staff photojournalist for the Houston Chronicle where she has concentrated on developing relationships with Houston's diverse immigrant and marginalized communities telling their stories with depth, context, and heart.Follow her on Instagram and Twitter, or reach her by email at marie.dejesus@chron.com. Design by Jordan Rubio and Jasmine Goldband *** Beto ORourke has made plans to travel to important early voting state Iowa for the first time this year on Saturday, and is reportedly getting advice from one of the most sought-after Democratic operatives in Iowa two more indications that the El Paso Democrat will run for president. While ORourke, a former congressman, has declined to say whether hell seek the White House, Iowa Democrats say those two moves suggest hes going to join the already crowded field of Democratic candidates vying to challenge President Donald Trump in 2020. The Iowa Caucuses, set for Feb. 3, 2020, are the first step in the presidential nomination process. Texas votes a month later on March 3 as part of Super Tuesday. On Monday night, ORourkes communications director Chris Evans confirmed that ORourke will be in Waterloo, Iowa, on Saturday to help with canvassing, get-out-the-vote operations and grassroots organizing for Democrat Eric Giddens, who is running for the state senate in Iowa. But even more notable are multiple news reports that ORourke is close to bringing former Iowa Democratic Party executive director Norm Sterzenbach onto his team in some capacity. Iowa Democratic Party officials told The Des Moines Register that Sterzenbach is leaving his consultant job with the party to go work with a potential presidential campaign. While Sterzenbachs next job has not been announced yet, he has already been advising ORourke on Iowa, according to a CNN report quoting officials from the Iowa Democratic Party. Texas Take: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox The trip is important, but bringing Norm Sterzenbach in any role is the biggest thing, said Sean Bagniewski, chairman of the Polk County Democratic Party. Polk County, where Des Moines is located, is the most populous county in Iowa. Sterzenbach knows the famously complex process of the Iowa caucuses better than just about anyone in the state, Bagniewski said. The Des Moines Register has listed Sterzenbach as one of the 50 most sought-after Democrats in the state in advance of the 2020 contest. ORourke added to the Democratic anticipation with a Facebook post on Tuesday, telling supporters Im ready to share my plans and directing them to update their contact information to be the first to hear about them. Days earlier, one of his campaign advisers, Deputy Campaign Manager Cynthia Cano, sent out a mass email to supporters telling them And now Im ready for us to bring our movement to the rest of the country. ORourke has said he has made a decision about running for president but that hes not quite ready to make it public yet. I want to make sure I do it the right way, ORourke said Saturday during a stop in Austin. Ive got to be on the timeline that works for my family and for the country. For subscribers: Beto ORourkes ties to his wealthy family draw scrutiny, and attack ads, in U.S. Senate race On Saturday, ORourke will be campaigning for Giddens, the state senate candidate, at the University of Northern Iowa. UNI were counting on you, ORourke, sporting a purple and gold UNI hat, said in a video recorded in El Paso previewing his Saturday visit to Waterloo. And were looking forward to seeing you soon. Polling has shown that ORourke remains in the top half of the potential Democratic field of candidates in Iowa. A poll released by The Des Moines Register showed ORourke in fifth place with 5 percent of the vote. He trails front runners Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders who were at 27 percent and 25 percent, respectively. ORourke lost his 2018 campaign for the U.S. Senate to Republican Ted Cruz. But ORourke raised more than $80 million and came within 3 percentage points of defeating Cruz. It was the closest a Democrat has come to winning a statewide office in Texas since the 1990s. Conservative groups are taking his potential campaign seriously already. Club for Growth has released a two-minute video slamming ORourkes candidacy on a wide range of issues including his tenure on the El Paso City Council and his wealthy upbringing. The ad, which tries to stress that ORourke is not like former President Barack Obama, is set to be aired on social media and in Iowa next week as anticipation swirls around ORourke. Club for Growth Action is committed to presenting the truth to voters in the presidential race, said Club for Growth Action President David McIntosh, and that includes talking to Democrats in their primary. jeremy.wallace@chron.com But the brutal arithmetic of politics could very well make all this as productive as searching for a unicorn. Republican members of Congress and voters have so far exhibited a bottomless capacity to defend, ignore or excuse anything Trump does. Its highly unlikely, from what is now known, that the Senate would convict. As former Obama White House counsel Bob Bauer speculated on the Lawfare website, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell might not even allow a trial. Young Texans turned out in record numbers in the 2018 midterm elections, sending colleges scrambling to extend polling hours on campus and leaving state legislators wondering how to keep the surge in youth enthusiasm going. In November, early turnout for Texans under 30 was 470 percent higher than in 2014, according to TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm. Those voters accounted for 8.1 percent of total turnout, up from 2.5 percent in 2014, state elections records show. The spike in youth enthusiasm came as former Rep. Beto ORourke heavily courted young voters - who lean Democratic - in his unsuccessful bid to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. Hoping to fuel the next crop of young voters, state lawmakers filed bills that would allow 17-year-olds to vote in some primary elections if they are going to turn 18 before the general election. The 17-year-olds would only be allowed to vote for state and county offices not in federal races, such as U.S. congressional or presidential elections. Texas Take: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox If the legislation passes, Texas would join nearly 20 states that allow some form of voting at age 17, including Illinois, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina and Virginia. Supporters say changing the law in Texas will get young people in the lifetime habit of voting, while critics - including some county elections officials - say implementing the policy could confuse more 17-year-olds than it would empower. State Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, who is attempting to pass the bill for the third time, said last session it did not even receive a hearing. This year, Howard filed House Bill 512, and state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, filed an identical bill in the Senate. Related: Texas used to be dead last in voter turnout. After this election, not so much Since passing similar legislation in 2013, Illinois has seen an influx of younger voters, according to Cook Countys March 2018 post-election report. At 29 percent, turnout in the 2018 gubernatorial primary - the second to include the 17-year-old vote - was the highest since 2002 for a gubernatorial primary in the county, Illinois largest. In Texas, however, experts on political participation say allowing primary voting at age 17 would only marginally impact turnout, since a fraction of voters cast ballots in primaries. Statewide, overall turnout was 17 percent in the 2018 primary and 30 percent in the 2016 primary, according to the Secretary of State. This wouldnt spike turnout by any large margin overall, but you might see some improvements or small improvement on the edges, said Jay Jennings, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life at UT-Austin. Jennings said the legislations greatest impact would be getting young people in the habit of voting as early as possible. This is especially important in Texas, one of the lowest-ranked states in the country for both voter registration and turnout, Jennings said. County elections administrators oppose measure Total voter turnout in the 2018 general election was 53 percent, the first time since the 1990s that Texas turnout in a midterm election surpassed 40 percent. [Passing this legislation] would be a sign that Texas is interested in making it easier for young people to get involved earlier, Jennings said. And Texas could do a lot more for that for people to feel like the state really wants them to participate in their elections. Voting rights advocates say Texas has been trying to tamp down turnout with voter ID laws. Texas is also one of 12 states that does not allow voters to register online. For subscribers: Texas officials launched voter purge with big splash, little accuracy Howard said the legislation failed to pass in 2017 and 2015 because of pushback in committee and from some county clerks offices - particularly from officials in Harris County. But that has changed since a Democrat defeated former Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart, a Republican, in November. In a statement, Harris County Clerk Diane Trautman said she is not opposed to [the legislation] as long as the 17-year-olds have completed their civics and government classes so they fully understand their civic duty. But some county elections officials still have concerns about the legislation. Chris Davis, president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators, said the association is opposed to the bills as written because the change would confuse 17-year-olds regarding which elections they can and cannot vote in. One of the predominant challenges is that there are quite a few elections that can occur between a primary, where were allowing that 17 to vote and the general election in November later that year where theyd be 18, said Davis, Williamson County Elections Administrator. It makes for a complex situation the implication being that when other elections happen in their county, in their city, in their school district these voters would not be able to vote, only to be allowed to vote again when they become 18. If the legislation passes, Davis said county elections officials and poll workers will have to deal with a log jam of confused 17-year-old voters. Whats nice and neat and clean about the law as it exists, is when youre 18, you can vote for any election that you qualify for, Davis said. This bill would only allow the 17-year-olds to vote in one election and theyre gonna be confused and theyre gonna think if they voted in that one, they can vote for a whole bunch of other elections when they see campaign signs come up in their neighborhood. Despite the potential pushback, Howard said this session offers a new day for the legislation, with joint authors coming from all over the political spectrum. I think weve had, over the past four years, some movement forward in addressing concerns about how we improve voter turnout and how we utilize technology, Howard said. We have a lot further to go in that area, but hopefully some of the potential kinks of four years ago can be worked out more easily now. STATE POLITICS: Get the most out of what's going on politically through our Texas Take newsletter. Sign up here. AUSTIN Nineteen months after Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas, the Legislature took a major step Wednesday toward paying some of the bills related to the storm. The Texas Senate approved a budget amendment that covers about $6 billion in unexpected state expenses since the last time the Legislature met. About $3 billion is due to Hurricane Harvey, with about $900 million needed just to shore up school districts that still havent recovered from the lost property tax revenue after people were forced to flee their homes. Now I know those are big numbers, said Sen. Jane Nelson, a North Texas Republican who chairs the Senate Finance Committee. But $3 billion of this package is due to Harvey, which we knew was going to have a significant price tag. Another $2 billion is aimed at addressing a shortfall in Medicaid and $542 million is needed to address pension liabilities for the Teacher Retirement System. Just over $4 billion of the money the Senate proposes spending is from the states Economic Stabilization Fund, known as the rainy day fund. More Information $6 billion supplemental state budget bill $3 billion for Harvey-related expenses; $2.1 billion to address a Medicaid shortfall; $100 million for school safety $300 million to continue the Legislature's commitment to improve state hospital facilities $542 million to address pension liabilities for the Teacher Retirement System $211 million to pay obligations of the Texas Tomorrow Fund $160 million to address the Correctional Managed Health Care shortfall $100 million to refill the Governor's Disaster Fund to help rebuild from natural disasters See More Collapse Senators defended having to tap the money after criticism on social media from conservative groups that say they are spending too much in the supplemental budget bill. State Sen. Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood, said this is exactly why the states rainy day fund exists. He said that with events like Harvey and the shooting at Santa Fe, the fund is proving why it has been necessary to build up over the years. If we are not going to use the rainy day fund for something like that, I dont know when you will ever use it, Taylor said. The Texas Senate passed the budget amendment 31-0, despite criticism from some conservative political groups like Empower Texans. That groups leader, Michael Quinn Sullivan, took to social media to accuse the Senate of going on a spending spree. That brought a reaction from senators. Im hearing outside people say were spending too much money, Taylor said. This is a very responsible budget from what Im looking at, he said. The University of Houston, the Lone Star College System and Texas A&M are other big recipients of Harvey-related funding in the supplemental budget bill. It calls for $20 million for the University of Houston, $4 million directly for the schools downtown campus, $1.7 million for the Victoria campus and just over $83,000 for the Clear Lake campus. Lone Star College is set to receive $13 million for Harvey expense. Another $2.5 million is going to the Texas A&M Forest Service for Harvey-related expenses. The measure still must go to the House. Prison reform advocates challenged lawmakers at the Texas Capitol on Tuesday to experience 3 minutes in a mock Texas prison cell to raise awareness about high temperatures at state lockups that dont have air conditioning. The "Beat the Heat" challenge, hosted by Texas Prisons Air-Conditioning Advocates, was held in support of Senate Bill 321 and House Bill 936, which would require the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to maintain temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees within all Texas prison facilities. The cell, made out of plywood and heated with lamps and a generator, hovered at a little over 90 degrees on Tuesday. Robert Lilly, who was formerly incarcerated at Texas Wallace Unit in Colorado City and now works for Texas Advocates for Justice, said the temperatures inside the mock cell were nowhere near what he faced in prison during the summer months. If you were to stand in here 23 hours a day, which some inmates do, you are not comfortable, Lilly said from inside the cell as sweat beaded on his face. Its not humane and it certainly doesnt lend itself to rehabilitation. Texas Take: Get the latest news on Texas politics sent directly to your inbox every weekday Last year, Texas settled with inmates in a class-action lawsuit involving the Wallace Pack Unit near College Station, where temperatures regularly exceeded 100 degrees during the summer. Almost 75 percent of over 100 state-run prisons and jails do not have air conditioning. The inmates argued that temperatures in excess of 88 degrees amount to cruel and unusual punishment. The bills from Sen. Jose Menendez, D-San Antonio, and Rep. Terry Canales, D-Laredo, were filed following last years acknowledgment from officials that 22 prisoners have died from extreme heat indoors over 14 years in prisons from South Texas to Dallas. Theres an ongoing, real concern regarding the temperatures in our Texas prisons, Canales said. They soar into the hundreds, and its had a myriad of negative effects on the facilities .... Anybody who has lived in Texas knows the heat is extreme at times, and the temperatures rise to levels that are well outside the normal guidelines of safe. Furthermore, its inhumane. A flood of civil rights lawsuits were filed after 12 inmates died during heat waves in 2011 and 2012, bringing the issue to the forefront. As of midafternoon, no legislators had taken the challenge. Canales said he doesnt expect many Republican legislators to support the bills or take the challenge. I dont see a bunch of people in suits clamoring to get into a 120-degree cell, but I think you have an obligation to if you dont understand this issue, Canales said. House Speaker Nancy Pelosis comment that she does not support impeachment of President Trump at this time makes sense for her party and more importantly, for America. Pelosi said Monday in an interview for Washington Post Magazine that impeaching Trump now would be too divisive. Unless theres something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, she said, I dont think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And hes just not worth it. Other Democrats disagreed. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said, Its not about whether or not its worth it. Its our obligation to the American people and the Constitution. In her zeal to oust Trump, Jayapal ignores that Pelosi didnt rule out impeachment; the speaker said its too soon to open that door. Whether it is ever opened may depend on the Mueller investigation of allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian operatives to sabotage Hillary Clintons run for the presidency in 2016. Speculation that a final report by special counsel Robert Mueller will soon be released has been swirling for weeks. Even if the Mueller probe doesnt prove collusion, it has already raised the possibility of crimes by the president that may not be impeachable offenses but could make him subject to prosecution after he leaves office. A host of Trumps confidantes have already been indicted or convicted based on information that the Mueller investigation apparently uncovered. That includes Trumps former attorney, Michael Cohen, who told Congress the president is a racist, con man and cheat. Cohen said he paid hush money to two women who said they had affairs with Trump to keep them quiet during his presidential campaign, a charge Trump denies. Cohen has been sentenced to three years in prison for campaign finance violations, tax evasion, making false statements to a bank and lying to Congress. Other implicated members of Trumps orbit include his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, convicted of conspiracy; former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates, convicted of conspiracy and lying to federal investigators; former national security adviser Michael Flynn, convicted of lying to the FBI about his contact with Russian officials; and former Trump adviser Roger Stone, indicted for witness tampering and making false statements in connection with the Russian attempts to affect the 2016 election. The close ties these men had to Trump certainly suggest the president should be worried. Pelosi is right, however, to conclude Congress needs more than it has now to travel down the impeachment trail. Her fellow Democrats need to prove getting Trump isnt the only reason they came to Washington, if they want to build on their gains in last years midterm election. Theres more than enough other business on their plate, including Trumps proposed budget, which would sacrifice Medicare and Medicaid on the altar of deficit spending and finance his ill-conceived border wall. Meanwhile, Republicans must abandon their blind loyalty to Trump if any investigation uncovers impeachable offenses. Besides the Mueller probe, U.S. attorneys in New York, the District of Columbia, and Virginia are separately investigating various campaign and foreign influence allegations involving Trump. New York state is also investigating him for tax fraud. And dont forget that the House Judiciary Committee, now under Democratic leadership, has begun an open-ended investigation that is expected to cover everything from Russian collusion to Stormy Daniels hush money. Pelosis hesitancy to embrace impeachment is a warning to the committee that it is more important to be right than to be partisan. Only two American presidents have been impeached: Andrew Johnson, a Southern sympathizer who succeeded Abraham Lincoln after his assassination, and Bill Clinton, a moderate Democrat by todays standards who lied about having a sexual tryst with an impressionable White House intern. Neither man was convicted by the Senate. In fact, Clinton ended his second term as one of the most popular presidents ever. Let the facts determine whether Trump should be impeached. Maybe by then there will be a preponderance of evidence that leads him to follow Richard Nixons example and resign. If not, the American public will be given the chance to weigh the results of all the investigations and decide whether Trump is the scoundrel Cohen described who doesnt deserve their support. This story was updated after O'Rourke's announcement Thursday. Beto ORourke entered the 2020 on Thursday. In contrast to the entry of, say, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., which was flawlessly choreographed, ORourkes long tease and haphazard approach were getting some Democrats dander up. The New York Times reported: In the four months since his Senate loss, Mr. ORourke, 46, has done little to demonstrate the kind of intensive preparation building national political infrastructure, projecting a signature policy rationale for a candidacy typically associated with a top-flight presidential campaign. There has been no flirtation tour in Iowa, no trip to New Hampshire since his college years as an Ivy League rower. Mr. ORourke had no traditional campaign-in-waiting at the ready after the midterms the sort of operation available to a more experienced holdout like former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. or carefully built over months by first-time presidential candidates like Senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris. ... Is this the moment for a relatively untested white male in a party eager to elevate female and nonwhite voices in the quest to dethrone President Trump? Well, thats rather harsh, but it may be fair. ORourke doesnt have any congressional achievements or any deep expertise. He seems to think he can rewrite the political rules. (Several people who have spoken to his team came away questioning whether Mr. ORourke was thoroughly prepared for the crush of a national race. Some suggested he lacked detailed plans like a comprehensive strategy for amassing delegates.) Maybe instead of the next Barack Obama, he is the next Wheres the beef? Gary Hart. Now wait a second. Critics should have some humility. The last politician with zero political accomplishments, a nonprofessional organization, lots of free media and a lack of policy depth wound up as president. Its also worth noting that almost all the candidates in the race are learning as they go. Aside from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have any of the contenders come out with dazzling policy plans? What today looks like a ragtag operation can grow over time. A high-excitement speech could result in an unprecedented flood of online campaign donations. ORourkes entry might zap Sen. Bernie Sanderss support among young voters or eradicate any hope of lesser candidates breaking through. ORourke needs a few error-free weeks, a big money haul and a quick jump in the polls to convince a lot of naysayers that he is the real deal. His biggest danger? A moment like one that Ted Kennedy faced, when he couldnt explain to Roger Mudd exactly why he wanted to be president, or an interview like the one that Sarah Palin had with Katie Couric, in which Palins paucity of knowledge was impossible to hide. ORourke can drive news and dominate on social media. However, with rock-star status comes intense scrutiny. He is going to have all the cameras and microphones pointed his way. Unlike lesser-known candidates, he wont have the luxury many other candidates had to get into the groove with a stump speech or work out kinks in his advance-team operation. ORourke would be wise to do a few things. First, if he managed to drive huge distances to visit all 254 Texas counties, he should do the same in Iowa (99 counties) and New Hampshire (10 counties). Drawing big crowds in small and midsize venues worked for him in the past. Second, expectations are very low for him on policy. If he rolls out two or three big ideas right away perhaps one on immigration, another on energy and a third on education, he might quiet critics, at least for a short time. Third, nows the time to put his post-midterm road trip experience to good use, sharing the stories and concerns of people he met and explaining what the country is really all about (e.g. neighborhoods, volunteers, small towns). Finally, for the time being, he should stay away from the Sunday shows and the town halls. Too many other candidates have done really well, and a lackluster outing or God forbid, a major flop would set ORourke back. In truth, no one knows whos going to catch fire. If ORourke is a self-absorbed flake, his campaign will implode before the first votes are cast. If, however, he is as talented and inspirational as his fans say, you might see the race narrow to a face-off between former Vice President Joe Biden and ORourke the past vs. future, the insider vs. the outsider, the baby boomer vs. the Gen Xer, etc. If thats the choice, ORourke has a decent chance to win this in a party that is always looking for someone new and exciting. Rubin writes reported opinion for The Washington Post. Subscribing to our services is a three step process. First you have to create an account and then you have to pick if you want to subscribe to digital and or print. Some people only want to be a digital subscriber to get access online and others want to also receive the print edition. If you are already a print subscriber and want online access, it is free, you simply have to create an online account and then attach your print subscription account number to the online account you create. As Margaret Thatcher once reminded us, democracy is a fragile thing. At its shaky foundation is the requirement of an informed electorate. Well that didnt work. Only 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. can name the three branches of government; 1 in 3 cant name a single branch. Not one. Zero! Zilch! And it doesnt appear that its going to get better any time soon. Only seven of the nations top 25 liberal arts colleges require history majors to take an American history course. You can blame the students, but its the generation at the helm, the baby boomers, who gave in to their squeals for relativism and feel-good instruction. As an existing print subscriber it is easy to get FREE access to all our online content. When you click get started below it will walk you through creating an online account to attach your print subscription number to. After your account is created it will ask you to either add a subscription for online access or click on the print subscriber button. Click the print subscriber button header and it will open a dropdown, now click on get started. The page will reload and you will be prompted to enter an account number and a zip code. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO USE THE NUMBER OFF OF THE MOST RECENT ISSUE OR ANYTHING AFTER JANUARY 28, 2019 TO GAIN ACCESS! OLD ACCOUNT NUMBERS WILL NOT WORK The account number and zip code are easily available on your most recent issue of the High Plains Journal or Midwest Ag Journal in the address fields as is shown here. Sometimes the account number has extra zero's in front of it, just ignore those. Local Radio Freedom Act Is Actually Anti-Creator, Anti-Property-Rights [Richard James Burgess] The National Association of Broadcasters and its horde of well paid lobbyists are now working to coerce congress into cosponsoring a bill dubbed the Local Radio Freedom Act, an ironic title given the bill's far more sinister anti-creator, anti-property rights content. Here A2IM CEO Richard James Burgess explains why both parties should lambast the bill. ______________________________ By A2IM's Richard James Burgess. This first appeared in Billboard The LRFA is a deception that both conservatives and progressives in Washington should shoot down, writes A2IM CEO Richard James Burgess. The 116th U.S. Congress and Democratic majority in the House of Representatives are barely two months old, yet special interest groups working against the interests of music creators are already up to their old tricks. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and its army of highly paid lobbyists are asking Members of Congress to cosponsor a bill that they have the nerve to call the Local Radio Freedom Act (LRFA). In past Congresses, many lawmakers have been deceived into cosponsoring this legislation, being told that it is a non-controversial sense-of-Congress resolution aimed at protecting local radio stations. In fact, it is an anti-creator, anti-property-rights bill. LRFA seeks to perpetuate an anomaly in U.S. copyright law under which terrestrial broadcasters (AM/FM radio) are allowed to use creators' music to sell highly-profitable advertising with zero compensation for the artists who created that music. There is no other music distribution platform that is allowed to get away without paying creators. There is no other country in the economically developed world that permits radio to abuse creators' property rights this way. Conservatives focused on private property rights and progressives focused on fair compensation for hard work should find this arrangement anti-business and unethical. The Local Radio Freedom Act is a deception. True local radio is a rarity today. Radio industry consolidation has allowed 10 radio corporations to own hundreds of U.S. stations. These 10 companies generate more than half of the nearly $14 billion radio industry revenues. Despite this imbalance, the NAB is lobbying Trump appointees at the Federal Communications Commission to relax media ownership rules so that radio behemoths like iHeartMedia and Cumulus Media can swallow up even more local stations. The Music Modernization Act corrected many wrongs and improved an outdated music licensing framework. However, the most egregious wrong remains. Terrestrial radio continues to use other peoples' property without compensation. Artists must be paid for the use of their music. Radio must pay creators just as other business that delivers copyrighted content do. Music creators now speak with one voice. We can achieve fair pay from radio while being committed to protecting true, local, small-market stations. Under our legislation, large broadcasters would pay rates comparable to streaming services and satellite radio, while local AM/FM stations with annual revenues below $1 million would pay just $500 a year for all the music they can play. That's little more than $1 a day. Public, college and other noncommercial stations would pay only $100 a year. Religious-radio, talk-radio and incidental uses of music would not incur any royalties at all. The 116th Congress must focus on making sure hardworking Americans get paid for the use of their property. LRFA is nothing more than the NAB trying to perpetuate the theft of creators' property rights to increase the profits of its biggest members. CEO for the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), Richard James Burgess Ph.D. has produced, recorded and performed on many gold, platinum and multi-platinum albums. He was previously head of business at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings where he produced Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology, chronicling nearly one hundred years of recorded jazz. His career path includes: studio musician, recording artist, producer, manager, label owner and author. His current books are, The Art of Music Production: The Theory and Practice, 4th Edition; and The History of Music Production (Oxford University Press). Share on: The Board of Health will encourage Hoosac Valley High School to join a state initiative that raises awareness of the health of e-cigarettes. Adams Board of Health Takes Stand Against E-Cigarettes ADAMS, Mass. The Board of Health want to take a stance on underage smokeless tobacco use and will ask the high school to create a chapter of The 84, a statewide initiative to inform teens about the dangers of smoking. The Board of Health heard from Joyce Brewer of Allied Health Educational Center last Wednesday about smokeless tobacco use among youth and the health issues it presents. "We all know cigarettes are bad, and if you were to ask a teenager if they used cigarettes they would likely say no they are bad for you," Brewer said. "The message we are trying to get out now is e-cigarettes are bad as well." Brewer specifically discussed Juul brand electronic cigarettes that utilize a liquid-filled pod, which Brewer equated to about a pack of cigarettes. "They are the hottest thing on the market and cheap, sweet and they were easy to get," she said. "A pod is worth a pack of cigarettesand you just plug in the pod and as the youth would say rip it." She said a single pod costs around $4, come in a variety of flavors, and that sales are focused on kids. She cited a preliminary study that states more than 20 percent of Berkshire County high school students have used such a device. There is a perception that the devices do not carry the ill health effects of cigarettes, Brewer said, and that they actually help people quit smoking. She said there have been instances when parents have purchased the electronic cigarettes for their kids because they believe them to be harmless. Brewer said it is quite the opposite and it is still not sure how these inhaled chemicals will affect people. "The chemicals in the pods are not supposed to be inhaled and we are seeing increased instances of asthma, bronchitis, and colds in youth," she said. "Some teenagers are using them for weight loss." She said kids are becoming addicted without even knowing. "When they dont have their pod they will act like anyone who hasnt had their cigarettes," she said. "They will get nauseous, cranky, headaches they dont understand what it is like to have an addiction and we need to help them understand that." Board member Bruce Shepley, a registered nurse who often works in the schools, said he has noticed that more kids are using the electronic cigarettes and even complaining of the effects. He said gone are the days when it was obvious someone is smoking in the bathroom because the electronic cigarettes only give off a faint odor and are hard to detect. "When you walked into the bathroom back then you could smell the cigarette smoke. You cant smell these," he said. "I have heard instances of athletes being suspended because they were taking a hit while on the bench. It is so discreet." Brewer agreed and said one puff is often enough. "These are made to cross the blood-brain barrier very efficiently," she said. "One puff of a cigarette takes longer to hit than one of these because of the chemicals. They give the rush more efficiently." This concerned board member Peter Hoyt who said because one inhale is so potent it becomes easier for kids to consume even more increased potential health concerns. Board member David Rhoads asked if a "sledgehammer" approach would be beneficial and asked if a regulation banning the underage procession of smokeless tobacco would help curb the epidemic. Brewer said she was not aware of any other community that has done this and said she thought education would be the most beneficial. "I think we have got get a handle on the best way to provide counseling and education teenagers because this blew up so fast," she said. "We know that the tobacco industry is looking for their next generation." She said many schools have adopted The 84, which creates a group of kids who engage other students and even legislators about the dangers of smokeless tobacco. The initiative is part of the Department of Public Health's Tobacco Cessation and Prevention Program that is a partnership with Health Resources in Action. The number "84" represents the percentage of Massachusetts teenagers who were not smoking when the program began; according to The 84, that percentage is now over 90 percent. "They don't need a lot of kids, just an adviser and a few kids willing to do peer to peer education," she said. "We are encouraging more schools to do this." Hoyt said he would reach out to Hoosac Valley and relay this information. "I am going to approach it this way and reach out to Hoosac Valley," he said. "I am definitely going to recommend this." More than 100 years ago, the United States and Canada signed a treaty to voluntarily manage their shared waterways, one of the first times in history two nations came together to beat back pollution that caused thousands of people to get sick from drinking water, and thousands to die here in Chicago alone. As recently as 2012, the two federal governments again came together to protect our health and safety by signing the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement for the cleanup of dozens of toxic hot spots, prevent invasive species such as Asian carp and deal with the flooding in our communities that is happening more frequently. If this exchange seems short on ideas that create dollars by the tens of billions, it is. Neither candidate can articulate a thorough rescue plan. A Tribune news story noted some of the points for which they had inadequate answers: Both candidates dodged details on how they would come up with $270 million in additional pension payments in their first budget. Lightfoot declined to identify any specific progressive revenues she spoke of, while Preckwinkle talked about reforming workers compensation and the citys special taxing districts, steps that would be difficult to put in place in time for the first budget. Both also lacked specifics on how theyd address the nearly $1 billion in new revenue the city will need to make additional pension payments by 2023. The 2019 mayoral elections will be crucial for middle class families living and working in the city of Chicago. Toni has always been on the side of working families and we trust that she will continue to support fair labor practices and work for a $15 minimum wage, said John Spiros Jr., the business manager and secretary-treasurer for the organization, in a statement. As Cook County Board President, Toni has always stood with and protected workers, and we look forward to working with her again as mayor. 1845 N. Orchard St., Chicago: $5,989,888 | Listed: Nov. 9, 2021 This six-bedroom home has six full bathrooms, two half baths, and a carved limestone and brick exterior. The Christopher Peacock kitchen has Waterworks fixtures, a farmers sink and two Subzero refrigerator/freezers. It also opens to the living room, which leads to an outdoor area with a full kitchen, seating areas, and a wood-burning fireplace. On the second floor, the primary bedroom suite features a dressing room and morning kitchen and an en suite bath with a separate shower and soaking tub. Three additional en suite bedrooms are also on the second floor. Other features include a wine cellar, a library, a media room with a Savant projection and audio system and an attached four-car garage with extra storage. Agent: Carrie McCormick, @properties, 312-961-4612 *Some listing photos are virtually staged, meaning they have been digitally altered to represent different furnishing or decorating options. To feature your luxury listing of $800,000 or more in Chicago Tribunes Dream Homes, send listing information and high-res photos to ctc-realestate@chicagotribune.com. Join our Chicago Dream Homes Facebook group for more luxury listings and real estate news. One of the key industries to have successfully leveraged the advantages of 3D printing is the medical and dental industry. 3D printing allows for the creation of personalized medical devices to be streamlined, and it has also been used to improve surgical outcomes and deliver personalized medicines. IDTechEx has forecasted that the market for 3D printing of medical devices and living tissues will be worth $8.1 billion by the year 2029. IDTechEx will once again be highlighting the use of 3D printing in the medical industry at 3D Printing Europe. 3D Printing Europe is a 2-day conference highlighting key materials and key industry verticals for 3D printing. It is a conference within the IDTechEx Show!, which consists of 8 co-located conferences and one central exhibition. The IDTechEx Show! brings together attendees across inter-related technologies to network and explore new opportunities. It is held on April 10 and 11, 2019, at the Estrel Convention Center in Berlin, Germany. To find out more about the event, please refer to: www.3DPrintingEurope.tech To kick-off 3D printing in the medical industry at 3D Printing Europe 2019 is Materialise, who will be speaking on "3D Printing in Medicine / Software, Guides & Implants" in the "3D Printing Keynotes" session. Materialise have been leading the application of 3D printing to the medical sector, and their 3D printing solutions are used in hospitals around the world in applications such as pre-operative planning and the creation of patient-specific surgical guides and implants. In the main "3D Printing in the Medical Industry" conference session, we have speakers lined up to bring us the latest update on differing applications of 3D printing within the medical industry. The variety of applications presented demonstrates the versatility of 3D printing technology in this industry. These range from 3D printed drugs to 3D printed tissues to 3D printed implants. The key trend here is once again the ability for 3D printing to allow for mass customization. The companies presenting on 3D printing in the medical industry at 3D Printing Europe 2019 are: Materialise : Sales Manager Mr Martin Herzmann will speak on "3D Printing in Medicine / Software, Guides & Implants" : Sales Manager Mr Martin Herzmann will speak on "3D Printing in Medicine / Software, Guides & Implants" DiHeSys - Digital Health Systems: Nanoscribe: KUMOVIS: Managing Partner Dr Miriam Haerst will speak on "3D Printing of High Performance Plastics for Medical Applications using FLM" Managing Partner Dr Miriam Haerst will speak on "3D Printing of High Performance Plastics for Medical Applications using FLM" Sinterit: Magic Candy Factory: Founder and CEO Melissa Snover will speak on "The Benefits of 3D Printing in the Health and Wellness Industries" IDTechEx Launchpad will showcase innovations from 20 start-up companies at the IDTechEx Show! held in Berlin, Germany on 10-11 April 2019 ( www.IDTechEx.com/europe ). All winners will be showing a new working prototype or product, many for the first time. The IDTechEx Launchpad initiative features early-stage start-ups, universities, newly spun-out companies, and research labs or government labs who will demonstrate a working prototype or product that highlights new advances in any of the related event topics of 3D printing, electric vehicles, energy storage, graphene, internet of things printed electronics , sensors, or wearable technology. The initiative provides the opportunity for the winning companies to exhibit their state-of-the-art technologies at this international event, alongside an estimated 200 exhibitors reaching out to over 2,500 attendees, including product developers, technology scouts and integrators. The winners of IDTechEx Launchpad 2019 are: Whether or not gas can flow easily across borders within the European Union is a key focus of the EUs Energy Union Strategy. On this score, our analysis suggests that the internal market is already functioning reasonably well: around 75% of gas in the European Union is consumed within a competitive liquid market, one in which gas can be flexibly redirected across borders to areas experiencing spikes in demand or shortages in supply. Bidirectional capacity has been instrumental in this regard. That said, there are a few areas where markets and physical interconnections need further development. For example, roughly 80 billion cubic metres (bcm), or 40%, of the EUs LNG regasification capacity cannot be accessed by neighbouring states, and some countries in central and southeast Europe still have limited access to alternative sources of supply. On the whole, our projections suggest that targeted implementation of the European Unions Projects of Common Interest (PCI) and full transposition of internal gas market directives can remove remaining bottlenecks to the completion of a fully-integrated internal gas market, thereby enhancing the security and diversity of gas supply. With LNG import capacity and pipeline projects like the Southern Gas Corridor increasing Europes supply options, the gas market in an Energy Union case can build up its resilience to supply shocks while enabling short-term price signals, rather than fixed delivery commitments, to determine optimal imports and intra-EU gas flows. Imperial Valley News Center Who's that sleeping in my bed? busted El Centro, California - Monday, at approximately 9:45 PM, Officers from the EL Centro Police Department were dispatched to a motel on the 1400 block of Adams Avenue, regarding what was originally identified as a trespassing call at the location. When the officers arrived, the victim/reporting party who was detaining a man he found in his room. The man, 32-year-old Diego Daniel Mendez Avila, a resident of San Diego, broke into the room while the victim was away. The victim explained to officers, that he left his room at about 5 pm to have dinner with family. Upon their return to the motel, they found Avila asleep in the bed. When Avila awoke, he tried to push his way past the victim and his parents but they were able to wrestle with him and detain him until the arrival of the officers. Avila had ransacked the entire motel room, ate food kept in the room, and was found sleeping in his bed. When Avila was detained by the victim and his parents, Avila was wearing womens clothing identified as belonging to the victims mother. The clothing was taken from the room. Avila was arrested and transported to the Imperial County Jail and booked for violation of Burglary and Possession of Stolen Property. During the day and prior to this call, the El Centro Police Department Patrol Division had three separate calls on Avila for similar activity. Imperial Valley News Center White House Seeks Billions in Record Investments to Stop Drug Epidemic Washington, DC - Today, Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) Jim Carroll released the Administrations Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 National Drug Control Budget, which requests a record $34.6 billion for counter-drug efforts. This represents a $1.3 billion funding increase from the previous fiscal year. The request includes $6.6 billion in Federal resources to reduce the number of deaths resulting from illicit opioid use. This includes both public health and public safety efforts. Every day, American lives are being lost to an addiction crisis that touches every corner of our country. To meet this challenge head on, the Trump Administration is taking a whole-of-government approach that allocates more resources than at any point in history. The FY 2020 budget request strengthens our continued commitment to reversing the effects of the opioid crisis and making our communities safer, healthier places to live for the next generation, ONDCP Director Jim Carroll said. The $34.6 billion request funds key drug control priorities across 14 Executive Branch departments and agencies, the Federal Judiciary, and the District of Columbia. Displaying his commitment to solving the addiction epidemic, President Donald J. Trumps FY 2020 request represents a 20% increase over the final FY 2017 level. Below are highlights from the FY 2020 National Drug Control Budget: The Budget request for the Department of Health and Human Services Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is $1.5 billion. These grants provide States, tribes, and territories with flexibility in responding to the opioid crisis. The Budget seeks approximately $50 million for the Department of Agriculture to address the opioid crisis in rural America. This includes distance learning and telemedicine networks, brick-and-mortar treatment facilities, and a tribal college grant program. The Budget FY 2020 request for the Department of Homeland Securitys Customs and Border Protection includes $270 million of drug-related funding to support the continued construction of the border wall to stop the flood of illicit drugs coming into our communities. In January 2019, the Trump Administration released its National Drug Control Strategy, which establishes the Presidents priorities for addressing the challenge of drug trafficking and use. The FY 2020 Drug Budget Request, in support of the Strategy, will enable the Federal Government to drive progress forward against the opioid crisis and significantly reduce the number of Americans losing their lives to drug addiction. Mizrahi-Tefahot Bank LTD. Admits Its Employees Helped U.S.Taxpayers Conceal Income and Assets Los Angeles, California - Mizrahi-Tefahot Bank Ltd., (Mizrahi-Tefahot) and its subsidiaries, United Mizrahi Bank (Switzerland) Ltd. (UMBS) and Mizrahi Tefahot Trust Company Ltd. (Mizrahi Trust Company), entered into a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with the Department of Justice filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, announced Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard E. Zuckerman of the Department of Justices Tax Division, First Assistant United States Attorney Tracy L. Wilkison, and Chief Don Fort for Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation. As part of the agreement, Mizrahi-Tefahot will pay $195 million to the United States. Mizrahi-Tefahot is one of Israels largest banks, with more than 4,000 employees, and is publicly traded on the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange. During the relevant period of criminal activity, Mizrahi-Tefahot had branches in Los Angeles, California, the Cayman Islands, and London, England. In 2014, the Cayman Islands branch surrendered its license and was closed. UMBS, a subsidiary of Mizrahi-Tefahot, had one branch in Zurich, Switzerland. Mizrahi Trust Company, a fully owned subsidiary of Mizrahi-Tefahot, operated under the regulatory authority of the Bank of Israel. Collectively, Mizrahi-Tefahot, UMBS, and Mizrahi Trust Company provided private banking, wealth management, and financial services to high-net-worth individuals and entities around the world, including U.S. citizens, resident aliens and permanent residents. Mizrahi-Tefahots admission of guilt and agreement with the United States to pay significant penalties and pay over the fees earned from knowingly assisting tax evading Americans reflects the continuing efforts of the Tax Division to end the criminal role of international financial institutions in perpetuating offshore tax fraud, said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Zuckerman. A financial institution is not a faceless entity, but is the embodiment of the acts of its bankers, relationship managers and all employees. When a banks employees, at any level, facilitate U.S. tax fraud, the bank facilitates tax fraud and will be held responsible. For over a decade, this Israeli bank, through its employees, engaged in conduct designed to hide its clients funds so they could avoid paying U.S. income taxes, said First Assistant United States Attorney Tracy L. Wilkison, Mizrahi-Tefahot solicited customers in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities to open offshore accounts with the hope they would never be linked to the American clients. As a result of this criminal conduct, the bank will surrender fees it earned, repay the United States for lost tax revenue, and pay a substantial fine. Todays announcement sends a clear message that banks, who promote the use of offshore tax schemes against the United States, will be held accountable and face substantial fines and penalties, said Don Fort, Chief, IRS-Criminal Investigation. Any financial institution no matter where it operates will be held accountable if it helps U.S. residents dodge their tax responsibilities. This agreement with Mizrahi-Tefahot is the latest notice to American taxpayers, who might flout the law, that we can and will uncover your hidden assets. In the DPA and related court documents, Mizrahi-Tefahot admitted that from 2002 until 2012 the actions of its bankers, relationship managers, and other employees defrauded the United States and specifically the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with respect to taxes by conspiring with U.S. taxpayer-customers and others. Mizrahi-Tefahot employees acts of opening and maintaining bank accounts in Israel and elsewhere around the world and violating Mizrahi-Tefahots Qualified Intermediary Agreement (QI Agreement) with the IRS enabled U.S. taxpayers to hide income and assets from the IRS. According to the filed statement of facts and the DPA, these employees took steps to assist U.S. customers in concealing their ownership and control of assets and funds held at Mizrahi-Tefahot, Mizrahi Trust Company and UMBS, which enabled those U.S. customer-taxpayers to evade their U.S. tax obligations, including: Assisting and referring U.S. customers to professionals to open and maintain accounts at Mizrahi-Tefahot and UMBS in the names of pseudonyms, code names, Mizrahi Trust, and foreign nominee entities in offshore locations, such as St. Kitts and Nevis (Nevis), Liberia, Turks & Caicos, and the British Virgin Islands (BVI), and thereby enabling those U.S. taxpayers to conceal their beneficial ownership in the accounts and maintain undeclared accounts; Opening customer accounts at Mizrahi-Tefahot and UMBS for known U.S. customers using non-U.S. forms of identification, and failing to maintain copies of required identification and account opening documents; Opening and maintaining foreign nominee bank accounts for certain U.S. clients holding U.S. securities, enabling those U.S. taxpayers to evade U.S reporting requirements on securities earnings in violation of Mizrahi-Tefahots QI Agreement with the IRS; Entering into hold mail agreements with U.S. customers whereby Mizrahi-Tefahot and UMBS employees held bank statements and other account-related mail in their offices in Israel and Switzerland, and by doing so enabling documents reflecting the existence of the offshore accounts to remain outside the U.S.; Until 2008, providing U.S. customers at Mizrahi-Tefahots Los Angeles branch use of their funds held in offshore Mizrahi-Tefahot and UMBS accounts (pledge accounts) through back-to-back loans, while excluding any record of the offshore pledge account at its Los Angeles branch to take advantage of Israeli and Swiss privacy laws and prevent disclosure of the funds to U.S tax authorities; Failing to adhere to the requirements of Mizrahi-Tefahots QI Agreement by (i) permitting U.S. customers who refused to provide the bank with the proper IRS Forms W-8BEN and/or W-9 to continue trading in accounts holding U.S. securities, (ii) transferring assets to foreign entity accounts controlled by U.S. customers to avoid the proper QI reporting requirements, and (iii) failing to timely address compliance deficiencies in U.S. customer accounts holding U.S. securities; and Until 2008, periodically sending Roving Representatives, to the United States to solicit new customers and to meet with existing U.S. customers in Los Angeles, California, New York, and other locations in the U.S. for the purposes of opening accounts and surreptitiously reviewing and managing existing customers offshore accounts. According to the terms of the DPA, Mizrahi-Tefahot, UMBS, and Mizrahi Trust Company will cooperate fully, subject to applicable laws and regulations, with the United States, the IRS, and other U.S. authorities. The DPA provides that Mizrahi-Tefahot will ensure that all of its overseas branches and other companies under its control that provide financial services to customers covered by the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, 26 U.S.C. 1471-1474 (FATCA), will continue to implement and maintain an effective program of internal controls with respect to compliance with FATCA in their affiliates and subsidiaries. The DPA also requires Mizrahi-Tefahot and its subsidiaries affirmatively to disclose certain material information it may later uncover regarding U.S.-related accounts, as well as to disclose certain information consistent with the Departments Swiss Bank Program with respect to accounts closed between Jan. 1, 2009, and October 2017. Under the DPA, prosecution against the bank for conspiracy will be deferred for an initial period of two years to allow Mizrahi-Tefahot, UMBS, and Mizrahi Trust Company to comply with the DPAs terms. The $195 million payment consists of: 1) restitution in the amount of $53 million, representing the approximate unpaid pecuniary loss to the United States as a result of the criminal conduct; 2) disgorgement in the amount of $24 million, representing the approximate gross fees paid to the bank by U.S. taxpayers with undeclared accounts at the bank from 2002 through 2012; and 3) a fine of $118 million. This agreement marks the second time an Israeli bank has admitted to similar criminal conduct. In December 2014, the Bank Leumi Group entered into a DPA with the Department of Justice admitting that it conspired to aid and assist U.S. taxpayers to prepare and present false tax returns to the IRS by hiding income and assets in offshore bank accounts in Israel and elsewhere around the world. Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Zuckerman, First Assistant United States Attorney Wilkison and Chief Fort commended special agents of IRS-Criminal Investigation, who investigated this case, and Western Criminal Enforcement Section Chief Larry J. Wszalek and Trial Attorneys Melissa S. Grinberg and Lisa L. Bellamy of the Tax Division, who prosecuted this case. Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Zuckerman also thanked the United States Attorneys Office for the Central District of California for their substantial assistance. Governor Gavin Newsom Orders a Halt to the Death Penalty in California Sacramento, California - Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order today placing a moratorium on the death penalty in California. The executive order also calls for withdrawing Californias lethal injection protocols and immediately closing the execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison. The order does not provide for the release of any individual from prison or otherwise alter any current conviction or sentence. The intentional killing of another person is wrong and as Governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual, said Governor Newsom. Our death penalty system has been, by all measures, a failure. It has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or cant afford expensive legal representation. It has provided no public safety benefit or value as a deterrent. It has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars. Most of all, the death penalty is absolute. It's irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error." There are 737 people currently on death row in California. California has the largest death row population in the Western Hemisphere -- one in four people on death row in the United States are in California. The death penalty is unevenly and unfairly applied to people of color, people with mental disabilities, and people who cannot afford costly legal representation. More than six in ten people on Californias death row are people of color. A 2005 study found that those convicted of killing whites were more than three times as likely to be sentenced to death as those convicted of killing blacks and more than four times as likely as those convicted of killing Latinos. At least 18 of the 25 people executed in the U.S. in 2018 had one or more of the following impairments: significant evidence of mental illness; evidence of brain injury, developmental brain damage, or an IQ in the intellectually disabled range; chronic serious childhood trauma, neglect, and/or abuse. Innocent people have been sentenced to death in California. Since 1973, 164 condemned prisoners nationwide, including five in California, have been freed from death row after they were found to have been wrongfully convicted. No person has been executed since 2006 because Californias execution protocols have not been lawful. Yet today, 25 California death row inmates have exhausted all of their state and federal appeals and could be eligible for an execution date. Since 1978, California has spent $5 billion on a death penalty system that has executed 13 people. Three states -- Oregon, Colorado and Pennsylvania -- have Governor-imposed moratoria on the death penalty and in 2018, the Washington State Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as unconstitutional and racially biased. Lumber Liquidators Enters into Corporate Resolution for Securities Fraud and Agrees to Pay $33 Million Penalty Washington, DC - Lumber Liquidators Holdings Inc. (Lumber Liquidators) has agreed to pay a total penalty of $33 million for filing a materially false and misleading statement to investors regarding the sale of its laminate flooring from China to its customers in the United States. Lumber Liquidators, a public corporation headquartered in Toano, Virginia, and one of the largest retailers of flooring products in the United States, entered into a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) in connection with a criminal information filed today in the Eastern District of Virginia charging the company with securities fraud. The case was primarily focused on the fact that Lumber Liquidators knowingly filed a false and misleading statement to investors broadly denying the allegations featured in a March 2015 episode of 60 Minutes, and affirming that the company complied with California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulations. Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Departments Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney G. Zachary Terwilliger of the Eastern District of Virginia, Special Agent in Charge David W. Archey of the FBIs Richmond Field Office, Special Agent in Charge Kelly R. Jackson of IRS-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) Washington, D.C. Field Office and Inspector in Charge Peter R. Rendina of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service Washington Division, made the announcement. Lumber Liquidators lied to investors and to the public about its compliance with formaldehyde regulations for the flooring it sold all to protect its stock price, said Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski. False and misleading financial reports undermine the integrity of our securities markets and harm investors. The Department and our law enforcement partners are committed to doing everything we can to ensure that those who commit securities fraud are held accountable. This resolution holds Lumber Liquidators accountable for misleading the investing public, said U.S. Attorney Terwilliger. It also recognizes that the company has cooperated with the government's investigation, completely replaced its senior executive team, and installed experienced executives who have displayed a commitment to building an ethical corporate culture. We will continue to ensure that market participants can trust information communicated by public companies when making investment decisions. My thanks to our prosecutorial team and our investigative partners for their outstanding work on this case. This penalty should serve as a warning to other corporations who seek to mislead investors, said FBI Special Agent in Charge Archey. FBI Richmond is grateful for the commitment to this case of its partners at the U.S. Attorneys Office, the Justice Departments Fraud Section, the IRS Criminal Investigation and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Lumber Liquidators knowingly deceived the shareholders they were entrusted to serve, said IRS-CI Special Agent in Charge Jackson. IRS-CI will continue to work diligently with our federal law enforcement partners to ensure that the punishment for such crimes matches the seriousness of the offense. Those seeking to maximize profits while misleading investors should expect to pay a heavy price, said U.S. Postal Inspector in Charge Rendina. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service has investigated these kind of deceptive practices for years to protect investors and the integrity of the market place. Postal Inspectors work tirelessly to identify and hold accountable any company who uses the U.S. mail to defraud American citizens. According to court documents filed as part of the DPA, Lumber Liquidators was subject to various laws that regulated the chemicals used in wood products, including laminate flooring. Specifically, CARB enforced limits on formaldehyde emissions from composite wood products. In September 2013, CARB announced that it intended to use deconstructive testing to determine whether finished flooring products contained CARB compliant cores. In 2013 and 2014, CARB informed Lumber Liquidators that flooring samples collected from its California stores failed deconstructive testing for formaldehyde emissions. Lumber Liquidators own deconstructive tests of the same products yielded similar results. Also in 2014, foreign and domestic flooring suppliers alerted Lumber Liquidators of CARB compliance concerns related to the companys Chinese laminate products. In February 2014, Lumber Liquidators Chinese laminate suppliers requested a price increase citing concerns about the increased cost of CARB compliant cores and their ability to pass deconstructive testing for formaldehyde emissions. Approximately one month later, a U.S. laminate supplier informed Lumber Liquidators that it tested a Chinese laminate sample purchased from one of Lumber Liquidators stores in the United States and that the sample emitted high levels of formaldehyde. Lumber Liquidators took only limited steps to determine the validity of the suppliers concerns, and instead sought to generate support for its position that deconstructive testing was not a valid test method, the company admitted. To that end, Lumber Liquidators visited two Chinese laminate suppliers in August 2014 to collect and test samples. While collecting samples from Supplier A, a then-Lumber Liquidators employee noticed a pallet of laminate flooring that factory workers indicated was Lumber Liquidators product, but the label on the pallet indicated that it contained non-CARB compliant cores. The former employee took samples from this suspect pallet for testing along with other samples manufactured in his and other employees presence. Laboratory A later provided Lumber Liquidators with test results that undermined the companys criticisms of deconstructive testing. All but one of the products manufactured in front of the Lumber Liquidators employees passed deconstructive testing. But the samples from the suspect pallet, manufactured before employees arrived, failed deconstructive testing. Lumber Liquidators representatives again visited Supplier A in September 2014 and January 2015. Following these visits, Lumber Liquidators concluded that Supplier A had numerous recordkeeping anomalies, refused to implement CARB-related corrective action requests made by the company, and could not reliably demonstrate that its laminate flooring contained CARB compliant cores. Accordingly, in January 2015, the companys former senior management team decided to discontinue its relationship with Supplier A due to CARB compliance concerns. Nevertheless, that same day, Lumber Liquidators admitted it ordered more laminate flooring from Supplier A. In Fall 2014, Lumber Liquidators learned that the CBS news program, 60 Minutes, also retained Laboratory A to conduct deconstructive testing of Lumber Liquidators products. Shortly thereafter, Laboratory A secretly notified Lumber Liquidators that the deconstructive tests commissioned by 60 Minutes yielded significant test failures. The lab then allowed a former Lumber Liquidators employee to review and take pictures of these test results. In December 2014, the lab owner told former Lumber Liquidators employees that a high deconstructive test failure was a strong indicator that the product was not CARB compliant, the company admitted. On Feb. 25, 2015, Lumber Liquidators learned that 60 Minutes obtained undercover videos from three of its Chinese laminate suppliers, including Supplier A, in which the suppliers admitted that the laminates they made for Lumber Liquidators were not CARB compliant. Lumber Liquidators former senior management team retained outside counsel from Law Firm B to interview the suppliers in the undercover videos. On Feb. 28, 2015, Law Firm B informed former Lumber Liquidators executives that it recorded one person from each of the three factories in the undercover videos saying that the product they sold Lumber Liquidators was CARB compliant. Nevertheless, Law Firm B told these former executives that they had limited confidence in the suppliers statements because, among other things, a former Lumber Liquidators inspector alleged that suppliers offered bribes to him and other company employees, the company admitted. On March 1, 2015, 60 Minutes aired a segment alleging that laminate flooring sold by Lumber Liquidators in the United States did not meet CARB emission standards for formaldehyde. The episode featured the undercover videos and test results previously shown to Lumber Liquidators. The next morning, March 2, 2015, the New York Stock Exchange halted trading of the companys stock, with the expectation that Lumber Liquidators intended to issue a statement responding to the 60 Minutes episode. Later that morning, Lumber Liquidators, through its employees, knowingly filed a false and misleading Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Form 8-K broadly denying the allegations in the 60 Minutes episode and affirming Lumber Liquidators complied with CARB regulations, the company admitted. Specifically, Lumber Liquidators omitted material facts from investors, including CARBs investigation of the companys Chinese laminate products; its own deconstructive test results; the companys decision to discontinue sourcing from Supplier A due to CARB compliance concerns; and evidence that undermined the suppliers statements that all products provided to Lumber Liquidators were CARB compliant. Pursuant to its agreement with the Department of Justice, Lumber Liquidators agreed to pay a total criminal penalty of $33 million to the United States, including a criminal fine of approximately $19 million, and approximately $14 million in forfeiture. This amount represents the companys net profits from the sale of 100 percent of its Chinese laminate from approximately Jan. 16, 2015 through May 7, 2015. Lumber Liquidators also agreed to implement rigorous internal controls and cooperate fully with the Departments ongoing investigation, including its investigation of individuals. Under the DPA, prosecution of the company for securities fraud will be deferred for an initial period of three years to allow Lumber Liquidators to demonstrate good conduct. The SEC announced a separate settlement with Lumber Liquidators in connection with related, parallel proceedings. Under the terms of its resolution with the SEC, Lumber Liquidators agreed to a total of $6,097,298.42 in disgorgement of profits and prejudgment interest. The Department of Justice agreed to credit the amount paid to the SEC in disgorgement as part of its agreement. Thus, the combined total amount of criminal and regulatory penalties paid by Lumber Liquidators will be $33 million. This penalty reflects the nature and seriousness of the conduct, as well as Lumber Liquidators ongoing cooperation with the United States and the companys extensive efforts at remediation. Among other remedial efforts, Lumber Liquidators suspended the sale of all laminate flooring from China in May 2015; offered consumers in-home testing for already installed flooring; and implemented new policies and procedures regarding compliance with CARB emission standards and other environmental regulations, sourcing of flooring products, financial reporting and internal controls. The employees involved in wrongdoing either were terminated or resigned from Lumber Liquidators, and the company replaced its executive management team with experienced executives who have displayed a commitment to building an ethical corporate culture. Trial Attorney Cory E. Jacobs of the Criminal Divisions Fraud Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Katherine Lee Martin and Uzo E. Asonye of the Eastern District of Virginia prosecuted the case. The Criminal Divisions Fraud Section plays a pivotal role in the Department of Justices fight against white collar crime around the country. Harper Lee once criticised her hometown for trying to turn her into a tourist attraction, comparing herself to Elvis Presley, a resurfaced letter shows. The missive, which is part of an auction package sold by Bohnams, includes several letters written by the To Kill a Mockingbird author to her friend Charles Weldon Carruth. In a letter dated 1993, Lee, a native of Monroeville, Alabama, tells Carruth: You remember the Faulknerian prophecy the Snopeses shall inherit the earth? Theyve already taken over Monroeville ... they are trying to turn Harper Lee into a tourist attraction like Graceland or Elvis. Elvis Presleys former Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tennessee, has been turned into a public museum and is now a popular destination for tourists and fans. A spokesperson told Voice of America in 2017 that 600,000 people visit the venue every year. The author bemoans the restoration of Monroevilles Old Courthouse, which was used as a model for the film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, and decries the installation of a billboard with a mockingbird on it. The 25 best books by women Show all 25 1 /25 The 25 best books by women The 25 best books by women Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen Austen remains one of historys greatest masters in two tricky literary fields: the world of romance and the world of social satire. Pride and Prejudice, then, sees her at the peak of her powers. Through the eyes of Elizabeth Bennet, her sharp-witted protagonist, we witness upper-class Regency England as both a dream and a farce. Not all is as it seems, and society betrays its holloweness when it deems that money should trump love. The 25 best books by women Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston Despite the fact that Hurston was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, Their Eyes Were Watching God was largely rejected by her peers. It was during the 1970s and 1980s that her novel was essentially rediscovered, with many contemporary black feminists heralding the genius of her work. The novel focuses on Janie Crawford, a black woman who refuses to give in to bitterness or sorrow, as she navigates three marriages and a life marked by poverty. Its a story bursting with passion and soulfulness. The 25 best books by women The Lottery and Other Stories Shirley Jackson Jackson probed the darkest corners of the American psyche during the 1940s and 1950s, all thanks to her collections of ghost stories, including 1959s The Haunting of Hill House, which was recently adapted into a Netflix series. With several novels and over 200 short stories for readers to get lost in, there are very few horror writers like her. Thats especially true when it comes to (arguably) her greatest work, 1948s The Lottery, which traces a small towns annual tradition to its sinister conclusion. The 25 best books by women To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee A Pulitzer Prize winner, To Kill a Mockingbird has carved its place in history. Its depiction of racial injustice in the American Deep South was startling frank for the 1960s, in a way that undeniably had a social impact at the time it became an instant sensation and is now widely taught in American schools. Lee writes about the worlds cruelties with an honesty and compassion that still resonates, with the character of Atticus Finch becoming a enduring model of integrity for the legal profession. The 25 best books by women Kindred - Octavia E Butler Butler was a key figure in sci-fi history, expanding the boundaries of what the genre could achieve and what it could come to represent. First published in 1979, the book still feels as fresh as ever in its first-person account of a young black writer, Dana, who through strange circumstances, finds herself travelling between her own reality and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. Its through this unusual theme that Butler can explore the lasting trauma of Americas history on African-Americans today. The 25 best books by women Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre feels, in many ways, thoroughly modern today. Although originally published under the pen name Currer Bell, it feels likes a dive into the mind of Bronte herself. The story is told through a first-person narrative that feels so psychologically intimate, its as if shes sharing the secrets of her own world with us. We follow Jane through her school years, all the way to her later employment by Mr Rochester, a tortured soul who she falls madly in love with, with many aspects of her journey reflecting elements of Brontes own life. The 25 best books by women Half of a Yellow Sun Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Adichie, who was born in Nigeria, is considered one of the most original literary voices of her generation. You can see why this is when reading Half of a Yellow Sun, which depicts the brutality of the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s, as seen through four different perspectives: twin daughters of a wealthy businessman, a British citizen, a professor, and a houseboy. Its history via an achingly human lens. The 25 best books by women White Teeth Zadie Smith Smith remains a modern titan of the British literary scene, thanks partially to White Teeth, which is considered one of the most sensational fiction debuts of all time, becoming an immediate bestseller and sweeping up multiple awards. Its a tale of two men Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and Englishman Archie Jones who become friends after being stationed together during WWII. Their return to London sees the book examine British post-war attitudes to those from formerly colonised countries, although Smith ensures the subject is approached with both heart and a sense of humour. The 25 best books by women The Hour of the Star - Clarice Lispector Lispector was a literary innovator. The Hour of the Star, published posthumously in 1977, invents a narrator named Rodrigo SM, who in turns tells the story of Macabea, a poor young woman who hails from Alagoas, where Lispectors family first settled when they immigrated to Brazil. However, the way Rodrigo perceives Macabea, and reckons with her story, itself creates a dialogue between the two characters, calling into question notions of identity and authorship. The 25 best books by women Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf One of literatures sharpest minds and inspiration to the feminist movement in the 1970s, Woolf not only helped pioneer the use of the stream of consciousness as a narrative device, but utilised it to speak openly about sexuality, mental illness, and gender roles. The novel largely follows the inner thoughts of two characters, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, one a high-society woman in post-WWI England and the other a veteran suffering from shell shock. The 25 best books by women A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories Flannery OConnor OConnor wrote hard stories for a hard world. Her unsentimental, sardonic use of the Southern Gothic style helped weave her own take on the parable, in which the morally weak often face violent, painful punishment for their misdeeds. That said, the door is always open for transformation and spiritual awakening by the storys conclusion, with her work frequently confronting ideas of morality and ethics through the lens of her own Catholic faith. The 25 best books by women Persepolis Marjane Satrapi At times, it seems less like Persepolis is a story. Satrapis graphic novel, published in two volumes in 2000 and 2004, feels more like an invitation, as she takes our hand and leads us through her childhood and early adult years, so that we can see through the eyes of a curious, funny, smart young girl who must face the personal repercussions of war and religious extremism in Iran during and after the Islamic Revolution. Its the political seen through the personal, but its always Satrapis own spirit that shines the brightest. The 25 best books by women Frankenstein Mary Shelley Many have now come to consider Shelleys Frankenstein as the first pure work of science-fiction, with a central narrative driven a characters exploration of a world beyond what we already know. Not only is it significant for its later influence on culture, but Shelleys work, initially published anonymously, is astonishing in both its emotional vitality and its philosophical implications. Its a work where we both feel the anguish of the misunderstood, while also reckoning with the concept of mans unbridled power. The 25 best books by women Beloved Toni Morrison Beloved takes its inspiration from the true story of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky in 1856 and fled to Ohio, a free state. However, the story itself focuses on a protagonist named Sethe, a former slave, whose home is haunted by a malevolent presence that she believes is her eldest daughter. Its through this vivid sense of magical realism that Morrison can confront the unfathomable trauma that slavery has inflicted on the African-American collective memory. The 25 best books by women The Handmaids Tale Margaret Atwood Although the book has received increased attention thanks to Hulus critically acclaimed TV adaptation, its all thanks to the fierceness of Atwoods critical analysis of gender politics. Her 1985 book, which imagines a near-future New England controlled by a totalitarian state, in which women are completely subjugated to men, has only become increasingly relevant and prescient. Her work provides a continued reminder that it doesnt take much for our world to slip into complete dystopia. The 25 best books by women Middlemarch - George Eliot Mary Anne Evans, amongst other concerns, feared that her work, Middlemarch, would be dismissed entirely due to the notion that womens writing was strictly light and romantic. And so, instead, it was published in eight instalments across 1871 and 1872 under the name George Eliot. The book is far from light; set in the fictitious Midlands town of Middlemarch, it follows a vast, sweeping narrative that encompasses subjects of religion, idealism, and political reform. The 25 best books by women Little Fires Everywhere Celeste Ng Ng writes about American suburbia with an astounding clarity, perhaps partially because she considers the act of writing about ones hometown as a little like writing about a relative, with an attachment that perceives both their greatest attributes and their flaws. Little Fires Everywhere is her second novel to take place in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where she grew up, and focuses on a new arrival to the town, who sense of mystery disrupts its residentss obsession with structure and rules. The 25 best books by women The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath Famous for its popularity with teenage girls, Plaths work speaks to clearly to an adolescent precisely because it makes no attempt to sugar-coat the prospect of the entrance into adulthood. The books protagonist, Esther, a young woman attempting to establish herself in New York, feels more like a front for Plath to discuss her own experiences of struggling with mental health, especially in the context of the 1950s, when womens concerns were so rarely paid attention to. There is an honesty to Esthers frustration that has been a comfort to many. The 25 best books by women My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante My Brilliant Friend is only one part of Ferrantes four-book series, known as the Neapolitan Novels. As the first chapter, it is, de facto, the most well known of the series, but its also an invitation to such raw intimacy that readers will be unable to resist delving into the rest. Ferrante serves as a pseudonym, allowing the books to illuminate with candor the friendship between two women, born in Naples in 1944, who try to find peace in a world of violence and misogyny. The 25 best books by women The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton Edith Wharton captures with vigour both the opulence and the suffocating claustrophobia of New Yorks Gilded Age, as two future newlyweds in every other way societys perfect vision of man and woman find their union disrupted by the arrival of a cousin shrouded in scandal. The Age of Innocence is a wistful, romantic novel that still succeeds in treating societys hypocrisy with an acute sense of disdain. The 25 best books by women The Color Purple Alice Walker Marking a rare mastery of the epistolary novel, The Color Purple focuses on the experiences of black women living in the US South during the 1930s. Although it deals with themes of abuse and violence, the honesty in Walkers voice is disarming in a way that opens us up to her protagonists journey towards self-realisation and personal freedom. Its no wonder that the books continued relevance saw it both adapted into 1985 film, directed by Steven Spielberg, and a Broadway musical. The 25 best books by women Rebecca Daphne du Maurier Rebecca remains one the finest examples of Gothic literature, despite the fact that du Maurier wasnt writing within the confines of some drafty Victorian castle; rather, she was examining the world of spirits during the interwar period. In its story of a woman whose whirlwind courtship with a widower turns sour when she becomes haunted by the lingering presence of her husbands first wife, Rebecca is a book filled with suppressed desires, loss, and a looming sense of threat. The 25 best books by women The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy As Roys debut novel, its an extraordinary first outing. Roy contrasts the innocence of childhood, as seen in the books protagonists, fraternal twins Rahel and Estha, with the rising political turmoil in Kerala during 1969. It also features a non-sequential approach to narrative, with the novel intricately weaving between the twinss reunion in 1993 and the lengthy flashback and sidetracks, all painted with a massive sense of scope and imagination. The 25 best books by women Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie We may know every twist and turn of Christies best works by now, but theres still a frisson to how intricately and confidently she pulls the rug from underneath readers. Murder on the Orient Express still feels like her most enthralling work, as famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot finds himself in the midst of a murder scene, after his train is blocked by the heavy snowfall and a passenger is found dead, making the rest of those on board all instant suspects. The 25 best books by women The Tale of Genji Murasaki Shikibu The oldest book on this list, this classic of Japanese literature was written by Shikibu, a noblewoman and lady-in-waiting, in the early 11th century. Although the original manuscript no longer exists, whats been passed down to us now was translated initially into modern Japanese, with English translations being published at a later time. An account of the life Hikaru Genji, the son of the emperor, its a masterful work of psychological portraiture, which offers a rare glimpse into the cultural customs of post-classical Japan. [They] say they are doing this to honour me. What they are doing ... [is] embarrassing me beyond endurance, Lee writes before telling her friend: So keep an eye out for a small place that will hold 10,000 books ... is near grocery stores & hospitals, and you! ... We can look at each other and celebrate our longevity. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The courthouse in Monroeville, which has been turned into a museum, is advertised on the venues website as the model for Harper Lees fictional courtroom settings in To Kill a Mockingbird. While the courthouse served as a model for the 1962 To Kill a Mockingbird movie, the film was not shot on the premises but on a precise replica built on a Hollywood backlot. Another day, another major report bearing tidings of death and destruction. Today, a United Nations (UN) environmental assembly in Nairobi saw the release of its sixth Global Environment Outlook, and the conclusions werent good. As is often the case in these big UN reports, most of the information contained within its 709 pages is not new to anyone who follows environmental news. Industrial farming, air pollution and antibiotic resistance all feature prominently, as do the usual warnings that world leaders are not taking the threat seriously enough. While climate change does feature, its primary focus is the myriad other problems being inflicted on the planet by humanity. Crucially, it warned that environmental problems like filthy air, contaminated water and resistance to antibiotics are already killing millions of people every year and this trend is only going to get worse. Vegans have expressed their disappointment in the meat-free "full English" breakfast available to them at JD Wetherspoon, condemning the meal for being too "small". First launched in October 2018, the vegan breakfast is described on the Wetherspoon menu as containing two Quorn sausages, two hash browns, a mushroom, a tomato and a slice of toast. While the dish has been around for several months, it recently sparked annoyance within the vegan community when a man shared a photograph on the Vegan UK Facebook page of the breakfast he was served at the restaurant chain. The picture shows a bare-looking plate with only half a tomato included, as opposed to a whole one as stated on the menu. "Disappointed with the Wetherspoons vegan breakfast this morning. Small... half the plate filled up with a piece of toast," the diner wrote. Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Show all 15 1 /15 Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Vegan naked chicken chalupa Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Easy vegan brownie bites Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Maple peach pecan overnight oats Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Macaroni skillet Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Cauliflower buffalo wings Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Vegan animal style fries Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Cheese Brussels sprouts tots Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Vegan beer and cheddar bread bowl dip Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Vegan s'more tacos Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Vegan chicken ceasar wraps Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Caramelised onion dip Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Tortilla soup and cheesy taquitos Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Easy vegan chilli Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Vegan chocolate hazenlut tarts Creative vegan dishes from YouTubers - In pictures Cassava bacon "Am I being just harsh and greedy?" he added. Numerous vegans on the Facebook page commented on his post, many of whom agreed with his point of view. "My cat would eat more than that," one wrote. "One mushroom and HALF a tomato?? What are they saving the other half for??" another added. "Most places do double this AND you get two slices of toast, jam and a hot drink on the side!" A spokesperson for Wetherspoon outlined that the vegan breakfast photographed is served as specified on the menu, and comes with two vegan spreads on the side for the toast. "It's 3.25 in most pubs," the spokesperson said. "We use the no added sugar baked beans and have been in conversation with Heinz to make them vegan. "Yes, we could do the regular beans but that adds a lot of calories and we serve over 350,000 non-vegan breakfasts each week with the beans. "We believe it is a good breakfast for the price, but always happy to listen to feedback." The spokesperson added Wetherspoon provides several vegetarian and vegan meals on its menu, and that the market is "important" to them. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Earlier this month, it was reported sales at Greggs had topped 1bn for the first time, thanks in part to the popularity of its recently launched vegan sausage roll. Greggs chief executive Roger Whiteside paid tribute to the positive response to the vegan snack when the bakery chain's full-year results were announced. "Whilst there are significant uncertainties in the months ahead, Greggs has started 2019 in great form, helped partly by the publicity surrounding the launch of our vegan-friendly sausage roll," Whiteside said. If youve always dreamed of hanging out in Monicas apartment, enjoying a coffee from Central Perk, and pivotting your way around a staircase with a couch, youre in luck. Comedy Centrals FriendsFest is returning to the UK this summer to celebrate Friends' 25th anniversary. Events will take place between July and September across the UK in London, Bristol, Manchester and Milton Keynes. Fans of the show will have the chance to walk through the series most famous sets including Ross apartment, the hallway between Monica and Joeys apartment, as well as Central Perk. Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best Show all 30 1 /30 Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 30. "The One with Chandler in a Box" Season four, episode eight This list wouldnt be complete without a post dedicated to Chandler and Joeys friendship. After a multi-episode arc that sees Chandler falling for and then kissing Joeys girlfriend Kathy, the former is struggling to get his roommate to forgive him. Joey thus sentences him to spending Thanksgiving inside a wooden crate. Kathy, of course, shows up during dinner to give Chandler an emotional farewell prompting Joey to open Chandlers box and tell his friend to go be with Kathy. Sweet. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 29. "The One with the Cop" Season five, episode 16 Joey thinks hes in love with Monica, Phoebe meets a police officer, but none of this matters the beating heart of this episode is Rosss attempt to purchase a new sofa and get it to his apartment without paying the delivery fee. Rachel and Chandler agree to help him, only for Ross to repeatedly instruct them to pivot, pivot, pivot, in one of the funniest, most memorable scenes in the shows 10-year history. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 28. "The One with the Sonogram at the End" Season one, episode two In the second episode of Friendss first season, Ross and Susan struggle to find their places as co-parents at the onset of Carols pregnancy. The storyline manages to address both Rosss and Susans angst in a rather sensitive way, with a sweet denouement when both of them hold Carols hand during her ultrasound. (Side note: Carol is played in this episode by Anita Barone, though the part ultimately went to Jane Sibbett for the rest of the show.) An unrelated scene in which Rachel brings her engagement ring back to her former fiance Barry (while the orthodontists young patient awaits) delivers a nice dose of comic relief. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 27. "The One with the Memorial Service" Season nine, episode 17 This episode aired for the first time in 2003, and its fascinating to see how Friends delivered its take on the beginnings of social media. Ross has discovered an alumni website for people who went to his and Chandlers college and is understandably fascinated to find out his former crush lost an ear in a boating accident and had a failed business. He and Chandler, naturally, end up posting false updates about each other. While the episode is filled with the kind of Friends jokes that havent aged well (quips about Chandler being gay, comments about women not wanting to sleep with a weird man), Rosss need for his former classmates attention prompts him to hold his own funeral wake which of course doesnt go well. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 26. "The One where Emma Cries" Season nine, episode two As Rachel struggles to get her newborn daughter to stop crying, Ross and Joey fight over the latters decision to propose to Rachel after she gave birth. The dispute escalates to hilarious heights when Joey begs Ross to punch him only to dodge the blow, leaving Ross to painfully hit a pole. Things only get worse when Joey takes Ross to the hospital and asks one insulting question after the other. The punching incident is played for laughs a second time after Joey, wanting to demonstrate how natural it is to duck when a punch is approaching, ends up hitting Ross in the face. The whole thing is just goofy and classically funny. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 25. "The One with All the Rugby" Season four, episode 15 Ross tries to impress his English girlfriend Emily by playing rugby with her friends, and ends up rather seriously injured in the process. But the funniest plotline of the episode involves Monica, who grows increasingly obsessed by a light switch in her apartment that seemingly doesnt do anything. Courteney Cox does a wonderful job at bringing to life Monicas increasing frustration and who cant relate to her level of dedication when it comes to solving an inane problem? Meanwhile, Chandler tries to escape his relationship with Janice by telling her hes moving abroad specifically to 15 Yemen Road, Yemen. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 24. "The One where Rachel Has a Baby Part One" Season eight, episode 23 As Rachel progresses through the phases of labour, she and Ross are left sharing their room with several couples, one after the other. Theres the couple that overshares, the couple that fights (with a great guest appearance by Debi Mazar) and ultimately, Janice (Chandlers ex) with her new husband. I happen to find most TV birth episodes a bit, well, exhausting so many times, theyre an overwhelming combination of high-running emotions, screams, and physical approximations but this one is genuinely funny. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 23. "The One with All the Jealousy" Season three, episode 12 Ross showers Rachel with gifts at her office, setting the stage for the pairs break-up a few episodes later. Monica strikes up a romance with her colleague Julio, who writes a poem inspired by her and titled The Empty Vase. Those make for nice sitcom moments, but Matt LeBlanc is the real star of the episode. Joey finds himself in an embarrassing situation when auditioning for a part in the Broadway play A Tale Of Two Cities and is asked to use the advanced dance skills he listed on his resume a brazen line. After failing to train a group of performers to do the instructed choreography, he is asked to perform the dance himself and winds up running away. The whole storyline is hilarious, and its a rather original take on the lying-on-your-CV trope. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 22. "The One with the Dirty Girl" Season four, episode six Per the titular plot, Ross dates a woman who happens to have an extremely messy apartment. The episodes best scene, however, comes when Phoebe and Monica partner up to cater a funeral. When it seems like the widow is trying to avoid paying Monica, the latter cant work up the courage to confront her. Phoebe, however, is having none of it and delivers an impassioned speech about the importance to get paid for ones work. The moment is empowering, played for laughs, and stands out as an instance of Phoebes trademark audacity. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 21. "The One with the Blackout" Season one, episode seven A power blackout in New York City might not be the most thrilling premise in the history of television, but it is brilliantly executed here. Chandler takes the cake when it turns out hes stuck with a Victorias Secret model he admires and his internal monologue grows increasingly panicked as he tries to interact with her. Meanwhile at Monicas apartment, Ross tries to tell Rachel he loves her but is interrupted when a cat jumps on his back. Its a lively episode that showed Friendss potential from season one. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 20. "The One with Ross's Sandwich" Season five, episode nine Another classic one-liner. When Ross finds out someone at work ate his Thanksgiving leftovers sandwich the only good going on in [his] life he goes in a rage at work and winds up yelling at his superior, who not only ate some of the sandwich but threw the rest away. You threw my sandwich away? MY SANDWICH! MY SANDWICH, he yells, loud enough to scare away the pigeons in the Flatiron district. To this day, Ross when he finds out his boss ate his sandwich remains the gold standard for anger among Friends fans. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 19. "The One with Ross's Wedding Part Two" Season four, episode 24 Two pivotal arcs in one episode! First, Monica and Chandler sleep together for the first time after a guest at her brothers wedding mistakes her for the mother of the groom. Then, just as it looks like Rachel is finally ready to let Ross go and let him marry Emily, he says the wrong word at the altar. This was only the season four finale, yet it foreshadowed the end of the series six seasons later in more ways than one. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 18. "The One with Ross' New Girlfriend" Season two, episode one Ross and Rachels on-off love story provided some of Friendss funniest, saddest, and most memorable moments. In this instance, Rachel returns from the airport, where she intended to surprise Ross and confess her feelings for him only to find out he had reconnected with an acquaintance named Julie, now his girlfriend. Anistons comedic talent shines as Rachel goes from one mishap to the next falling from an airport chair, splitting her forehead open, using a bouquet of flowers to stop the bleeding, and running up the stairs to tell the other friends about Julies arrival. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 17. "The One where Rachel Tells..." Season eight, episode three Rosss reaction to Rachel telling him she was pregnant with his child wasnt great, but it was funny. After a couple episodes worth of build-up, Rachel finally feels ready to break the news to her ex only for him to focus on his outrage upon finding out that condoms are only 97 percent effective. Jennifer Aniston delivers a great performance as the calm, confident Rachel, which contrasts brilliantly with Schwimmers outrage as he calls the president of the condom company. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 16. "The One with Unagi" / "The One with the Mix Tape" Season six, episode 17 Who could forget unagi, the concept Ross supposedly learned during his karate training (which is actually the Japanese word for freshwater eel)? After Rachel and Phoebe take a self-defense class, Ross explains somewhat disdainfully that being able to defend oneself in a controlled environment is different from being able to do so when the attacker strikes by surprise. The rest of the episode sees the group trying to scare one another adding unagi to the list of Friends catchphrases fans still reference today. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 15. "The One with the Stripper" Season eight, episode eight Forget about the main plot line, which centres around Monicas efforts to throw Chandler a late bachelor party and unknowingly hires a prostitute instead of a stripper. The best part of the episode and the reason why it deserves the 15th spot on this list is a scene in which Ross gets caught between his girlfriend Mona and Rachels father, Dr Leonard Green, who has just found out that Rachel is pregnant to Rosss child. Ross ends up in the unfortunate position of having to explain both how much he cares for Rachel to Dr Green and why he doesnt want to be with her to Mona. The situation escalates when Joey leaves a message on Rosss answering machine, accusing him of knowing something about the hooker in Chandler and Monicas home. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 14. "The One with the Embryos" Season four, episode 12 This season four instalment has the right balance of emotion and humour. On the one hand, Phoebe goes through IVF and anxiously waits to find out whether the process was successful knowing that her brother and his wife can only afford to try once. On the other hand, Rachel, Monica, Chandler and Joey embark on a silly contest to determine who knows the other friends best. That particular story line ends not only with Monica and Rachel having to trade apartments with Chandler and Joey it also gave viewers a cult sequence that sees Ross going over the top as the host of the groups trivia game, and the two women losing their flat because Rachel doesnt know that Chandlers TV guide gets delivered to Chanandler Bong. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 13. "The One Where Ross Is Fine" Season 10, episode two If you feel the need to state multiple times in a conversation that you are doing just fine, you most likely are not. Ross learns this lesson the hard way in season 10, after finding out that Rachel and Joey are dating while he himself is in a relationship with paleontologist Charlie Wheeler (Aisha Tyler). Yes, Ross was too often a lacklustre romantic partner, but David Schwimmer is a brilliant comedian whose talents shine as he brings Rosss manic energy to life. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 12. "The One with the Holiday Armadillo" Season seven, episode 10 How could we possibly forget David Schwimmers performance as the Holiday Armadillo, the character invented by Ross in an attempt to get his son Ben interested in Hanukkah? Even when Chandler comes close to unknowingly ruin his friends efforts (by showing up dressed as Santa Claus), the episode keeps the sweet, heartwarming tone expected during the holiday season. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 11. "The One Where Ross and Rachel Take a Break" Season three, episode 15 Chronologically, this episode directly precedes The One with the Morning After. Rachel and Ross have a major argument due to Rosss insecure behaviour, which causes him to smother his girlfriend while shes trying to deal with a stressful situation at work. Ross tells Rachel hes tired of having a relationship with her answering machine and brings up Rachels oft-maligned mentor Mark. Whats interesting here is that Ross is getting upset over a situation he helped create in earlier seasons, by rightfully urging Rachel to spread her wings, become assertive, and ultimately chase a fulfilling career. The fact that he cant handle her success and its impact on their personal lives speaks volumes, and many couples might relate. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 10. "The One with the Morning After" Season three, episode 16 The break-up episode to rule them all. When Rachel finds out that Ross slept with someone else shortly after they decided to take a break from their relationship, she makes it clear theres no going back. Seeing the two of them split (for valid reasons!) after trying to find each other for so long is a bitter experience, but the point of no return occurs when Rachel realises the other woman was there when she visited Rosss apartment. Not to sound overly involved in the lives of these two entirely fictional people, but its impossible to watch and not feel it all: Rachels anger, Rosss despair as he tries and fails to fix the unfixable, and the sadness of two people who tried, tried and tried again to make it work but couldnt. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 9. "The One with Frank Jr" Season three, episode five Two elements land this episode a spot in the top 10. First, Phoebe tries to bond with her half-brother Frank Jr, with difficulty and while shes understandably frustrated when she realises how little they have in common, the storyline sets the basis of their unique sibling relationship. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 8. "The One Where No One's Ready" Season three, episode two No, nothing groundbreaking happens in this episode. Its season three. Ross is growing increasingly frustrated because his friends including his now-girlfriend Rachel are taking too long to get ready for an important event. But Monica, who is distracted after hearing a message from Richard, goes through a truly agonising mishap involving her exs answering machine, which escalates to unforeseeable heights. Plus, Rachel ends up putting Ross in his place after he yells at her in front of the rest of the group. Ross was a funny character but often a horrible boyfriend, and its truly refreshing to see Rachel call him out on his behaviour. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 7. "The One with Barry and Mindy's Wedding" Season two, episode 24 Yes, Rachels awful experience as the maid of honour at her ex-fiance Barrys wedding is hilarious and it culminates with an unexpectedly uplifting rendition of "Copacabana". But the real stars of the episode are Monica and Richard, who end up breaking up because they dont see eye to eye when it comes to having children in the future. Their split takes viewers somewhat by surprise Richard was, after all, ready to go through all the stages of parenting again if he had to and rings impressively true. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 6. "The One Where Ross and Rachel...You Know" Season two, episode 15 Its season two. Ross and Rachel are transitioning from their initial friendship to their first attempt at a romantic relationship. Meanwhile, Monica falls in love with Richard Burke, the older ophthalmologist whom, according to many fans, she should have chosen over Chandler (and whether you agree with that take or not is entirely up to you). Its vintage Friends and this episode set up storylines that framed the rest of the sitcom for many seasons to come. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 5. "The One with the Birth" Season one, episode 23 In the penultimate episode of the first season of Friends, Carol give birth to Ben, further exploring the family dynamics of Carol, Ross and Susan as co-parents. Ross and Susans near-constant fighting causes them to get locked in a closet with Phoebe an unlucky accident that ends up giving them the chance to bond in earnest. In short: The One with the Birth puts same-sex parenting on the map, and yes, it does so at times in a very 1995 way, but its overall touching and tackles the theme in a rather convincing way. Plus, the side storyline that sees Joey bond with a single mother as she goes through labour shows a sweet, unexpected side of his character. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 4. "The One Where Ross Got High" Season six, episode nine At first glance, this isnt one of Friendss most memorable tour de forces. The Thanksgiving episode begins with the ordinary concerns Monica doesnt want to tell her parents that she and Chandler are living together, Ross and Joey are itching to get dinner over with so they can spend time with Joeys attractive roommate Janine and her friends but it escalates into amazing levels of absurdism. Rachels failed trifle, which includes beef, remains a cult reference. But most memorable is Judy Gellers monologue when she puts all six friends in their places one by one, swiftly handling everyones issues from Monicas reluctance to tell them about her relationship with Chandler to the revelation that Ross smoked pot as a teen. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 3. "The One with the East German Laundry Detergent" Season one, episode five Its filled with many of the moderately funny Friends staples Chandlers unsatisfying relationship with Janice, Joeys romantic troubles, and of course, Ugly Naked Guy, Monicas neighbour from across the street but the laundromat scene alone salvages the entire episode. What begins as an innocent attempt at learning how to wash her clothes by herself sees Rachel stand up for herself when another woman tries to steal her cart. Its not just a fundamental element of the character journey that sees her grow from a spoiled young woman who has never had to fend for herself into an accomplished professional and capable parent. Its also a moment that will ring true to many who have moved to New York over the course of their lives: the city, because its so big, overpopulated and filled with overachievers, has a way of teaching even the most timid of wallflowers how to advocate for themselves. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 2. "The One Hundredth / The One with the Triplets" Season five, episode three Lisa Kudrow carries this season five episode which, as one of its two titles suggests, was the 100th of the show, on her shoulders as Phoebe, who agreed to be her brothers surrogate, gives birth to triplets. Kudrow gives a memorable performance as Phoebes feelings escalate from fear (while she readies herself for contractions), to frustration (when her doctor turns out to be an overly dedicated fan of the Happy Days character Fonzie) and, finally, to sadness (when her last-minute request to keep one of the babies fails to materialise). Its a touching take on surrogacy, which manages to address some of its emotional entanglements while still showing how Phoebe can move on with her life and find her place as the babies aunt. Netflix / Warner Bros Television Friends' top 30 episodes from worst to best 1. "The One with the Lesbian Wedding" Season two, episode 11 In 1996, The One with the Lesbian Wedding gave viewers the first same-sex wedding between two women shown on network television. Sure, the episode itself isnt without flaws (some might argue that Carol and Susans wedding remained fundamentally heteronormative) but it remains one of the milestones from Friendss legacy. Its also moving and plants the seeds for some of the most enduring character arcs of the show, from Joeys soap opera career to Monicas professional woes and Rachels evolving family dynamics (beginning with her parents divorce). Phoebes storyline, which sees her supposedly possessed by the spirit of a recently deceased elderly massage client, is full of her characters trademark whimsy and quirkiness. This is, in many ways, the quintessential Friends episode. Netflix / Warner Bros Television There will also be the opportunity to feast from Friends-themed food stalls (think Mockolate and the Joey Special), order drinks from a cocktail bar, and take part in a FriendsFest quiz. Actors Courteney Cox Arquette (L), Jennifer Aniston (C) and Matthew Perry are shown in a scene from the NBC series 'Friends' (Getty Images) Photo opportunities include recreating the Thanksgiving floating heads scene and the shows title sequence with umbrellas. The exhibition starts in Manchesters Heaton Park on 2 August through to 18 August. It will then travel to Bristols Castle Estate (23 August 1 September), Milton Keyness Willen Lake (6 15 September) and end in Londons Kennington Park (20 29 September). Tickets will be available to purchase from 15 March from See Tickets, with standard tickets priced at 27.50. To find out more information, visit the FriendsFest website. Dark web drug dealers are turning to popular apps to peddle their products, often using street graffiti to advertise their accounts to customers, and automated bots to communicate with them. The shift follows a crackdown on illicit online markets, together with the introduction of encryption into apps that allows users to remain anonymous. Cyber experts have observed this growing trend among the criminal underground, noting the innovative tactics gangs employ to evade police detection. Speaking anonymously to The Independent, a dark web researcher who has infiltrated channels on the messaging app Telegram explained how automated bots are used to communicate with customers both for convenience and to defer liability. The researcher shared images of the channel names spray-painted on walls near transport hubs and other public places in order to advertise the channels to potential customers. Surfing the dark web Show all 6 1 /6 Surfing the dark web Surfing the dark web Guns on the dark web Guns for sale on a dark web market place, August 2018 Screenshot Surfing the dark web Dream Market vendor guidelines Some popular market places on the dark web still abide by a set of standards, despite selling illegal goods and services Screenshot Surfing the dark web 'Mystery box' for sale on the dark web A 'mystery box' for sale on the dark web, August 2018. Scam listings for the boxes first began appearing on the dark web after fake videos of people opening them trended on YouTube Screenshot Surfing the dark web Religious texts on the dark web Religious and banned texts can be found on the dark web, allowing people to bypass censors in countries that suppress free speech Screenshot Surfing the dark web Seeking help and advice on the dark web The Hidden Guru site on the dark web, offering 'knowledge from beyond', August 2018 Screenshot Surfing the dark web Hidden Guru Waiting for a response from the dark web's Hidden Guru, August 2018 Screenshot Another major change in the way these drug dealers operate is in the use of dead drops to distribute the product. This bypasses the dangers of meeting face-to-face, while also avoiding the risk of drugs being tracked or intercepted through the postal system. Goods are instead hidden in publicly accessible places, such as parks, before the location is sent to the customer once the purchase has been made. Semi-anonymous cryptocurrencies like bitcoin facilitate the payments. The dropgangs, as they have been dubbed, were first discovered operating in Ukraine but have since been observed in Russia, the Balkans and most of central and eastern Europe. Europol special adviser Rik Ferguson points to the end-to-end encryption and limited identity checks that make apps like Telegram attractive to the gangs. Criminals operate increasingly like businesses today, and they need reliable communication tools to get their job done, Mr Ferguson, who also heads up research at cyber security firm Trend Micro, told The Independent. Telegram has become the tool of choice for criminals but it is not the first app to be put to nefarious use. Channels such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger had their day in the criminal underworld too, so Telegram will likely not be the last. Telegram previously gained notoriety after it became the communication tool of choice for the Isis, however, there has since been a significant crackdown on channels that harbour terrorist activity. More recently, an investigation uncovered images of child abuse and stolen credit card numbers being openly traded through Telegram once again pointing to the trend of encrypted apps taking over from the dark web as a venue for crime. Encryption apps started out with good intentions, such as helping protect private communications from government spying, said Boris Cipot, a security engineer at the software firm Synopsys. But, unfortunately, even if this functionality was created for good use, there are those that will abuse it for negative reasons. Telegram did not respond to several requests for comment, though has previously stated that it is engaged in proactive searches to find and remove illegal activity on its platform. Despite the proliferation of dropgangs and the difficulties faced by authorities in tracking and stopping them, security experts warn that forcing apps like Telegram to compromise the encryption they use would be dangerous. The problem wont be solved by governments demanding back doors be built into the software to give them access, Europol adviser Rik Ferguson said. This would only serve to undermine encryption fundamentally back doors come with no guarantees, and open up consumers communications to a whole new world of attacks. Scientists have reversed the direction of time with a quantum computer. The breakthrough study seems to contradict basic laws of physics and could alter our understanding of the processes governing the universe. In a development that also represents a major advance in our understanding of quantum computers, by using electrons and the strange world of quantum mechanics researchers were able to turn back time in an experiment that can be likened to causing a broken rack of pool balls to go back into place. Anyone watching the computer would see the event as if time had turned backwards. The researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and helped by colleagues in Switzerland and the US expect the technique to improve, becoming more reliable and precise with time. Lead researcher Dr Gordey Lesovik, who heads the Laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information at the MIPT, said: We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time. Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Show all 30 1 /30 Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Solar Flare An image from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a 200,000 mile long solar filament ripping through the Sun's corona in September 2013 Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Nasa Celebrates 50 Years of Spacewalking For 50 years, NASA has been "suiting up" for spacewalking. In this 1984 photograph of the first untethered spacewalk, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless is in the midst of the first "field" tryout of a nitrogen-propelled backpack device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space A Hubble Cosmic Couple The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 more commonly known as WR 124 and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it ESA/Hubble & NASA Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the Veil Nebula - expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago Nasa's most stunning pictures of space The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launch The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station. It also took caviar, ready for the satellite's inhabitants to celebrate the holidays Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Earth from the ISS From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Black Hole Friday Nasa celebrated Black Friday by looking into space instead sharing pictures of black holes Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space NuSTAR X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Cassiopeia A c A false colour image of Cassiopeia A comprised with data from the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray observatory Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Orion Capsule splashes down The Orion capsule jetted off into space before heading back a few hours later having proved that it can be used, one day, to carry humans to Mars Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Earth Observations From Gemini IV in 1965 This photograph of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank was taken during the Gemini IV mission during orbit no. 19 in 1965. The Gemini IV crew conducted scientific experiments, including photography of Earth's weather and terrain, for the remainder of their four-day mission following Ed White's historic spacewalk on June 3 Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Frosty slopes of Mars This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Yellowstone from space NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yellowstone via his twitter account Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Saturn This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Worlds Apart Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons. Pandora, "small" by moon standards (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) is elongated and irregular in shape. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across), a "medium-sized" moon, formed into a sphere due to self-gravity imposed by its higher mass Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Solar Flare An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun in this image taken 10 September, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Mars Rover Spirit Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit took the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Morning Aurora From the Space Station Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station Nasa/Scott Kelly Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Launch of History - Making STS-41G Mission in 1984 The Space Shuttle Challenger launches from Florida at dawn. On this mission, Kathryn Sullivan became the first U.S. woman to perform a spacewalk and Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space. The crew of seven was the largest to fly on a spacecraft at that time, and STS-41G was the first flight to include two female astronauts Nasa's most stunning pictures of space A Fresh Perspective on an Extraordinary Cluster of Galaxies Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all, they are huge conglomerations of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Hubble Sees a Galactic Sunflower The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower ESA/Hubble & NASA Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Pluto image Four images from New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view of Pluto Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Fresh Crater Near Sirenum Fossae Region of Mars The HiRISE camera aboard Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a "fresh" (on a geological scale, though quite old on a human scale) impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars. This impact crater appears relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Hubble Peers into the Most Crowded Place in the Milky Way This Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image presents the Arches Cluster, the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way NASA & ESA Nasa's most stunning pictures of space An Astronaut's View from Space Nasa astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this photo from the International Space Station on 2 September 2014 Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Giant Landform on Mars On Mars, we can observe four classes of sandy landforms formed by the wind, or aeolian bedforms: ripples, transverse aeolian ridges, dunes, and what are called draa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Expedition 39 Landing A sokol suit helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the spacecraft landed with Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan (NASA/Bill Ingalls) Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Jupiter's Great Red Spot Viewed by Voyager I Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Chandra Observatory Sees a Heart in the Darkness This Chandra X-Ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region The time machine described in the journal Scientific Reports consists of a rudimentary quantum computer made up of electron qubits. A qubit is a unit of information described by a one, a zero, or a mixed superposition of both states. In the experiment, an evolution program was launched which caused the qubits to become an increasingly complex changing pattern of zeros and ones. During this process, order was lost just as it is when the pool balls are struck and scattered with a cue. But then another program modified the state of the quantum computer in such a way that it evolved backwards, from chaos to order. It meant the state of the qubits was rewound back to its original starting point. Most laws of physics work both ways, in the future and the past. If you see a video of a pool ball knocking into another one, for instance, and then reverse that same video, the physical processes would both make sense and it would be impossible at the level of physics to know which way around would be correct. But the universe does have one rule that goes only in one way: the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the progression from order to disorder. If you saw a video of someone breaking a perfectly arranged triangle of pool balls into a mess, for instance, then watching that backwards would obviously look nonsensical. The new experiment is like giving the pool table such a perfectly calculated kick that the balls rolled back into an orderly pyramid. The scientists found that, working with just two qubits, time reversal was achieved with a success rate of 85 per cent. When three qubits were involved more errors occurred, resulting in a 50 per cent success rate. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The error rate is expected to drop as scientists improve the sophistication of the devices used, the researchers behind the discovery said. The experiment could have a practical application in the development of quantum computers, the scientists said. Our algorithm could be updated and used to test programs written for quantum computers and eliminate noise and errors, said Dr Lesovik. Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey has appeared on a podcast with a controversial fitness personality who has promoted scientifically disproven claims that vaccinations cause autism. Host Ben Greenfield who tweeted in February that vaccines do indeed cause autism thanked Mr Dorsey for an epic podcast. The Twitter boss responded: Great conversation and appreciate all you do to simplify the mountains of research focused on increasing ones healthspan! Grateful for you. His appearance comes as other tech firms like Facebook and Pinterest are cracking down on anti-vaccine content on their platforms. However, Twitter claimed Mr Dorsey was unaware of the hosts controversial opinions. A Twitter spokesperson told The Independent that Mr Dorsey did not know about Mr Greenfields views on vaccinations and that his podcast appearance was not an endorsement of those beliefs. The famous faces of the anti-vaccine movement Show all 7 1 /7 The famous faces of the anti-vaccine movement The famous faces of the anti-vaccine movement Charlie Sheen Sheen fought a legal battle against ex-wife Denise Richards to try and block her from vaccinating their children. Richards of course won and Sheen was reportedly so bitter that he paid the paediatrician bill entirely in nickels Getty The famous faces of the anti-vaccine movement Gwyneth Paltrow Paltrow's "health and wellness" company Goop hosted a notorious anti-vaccine speaker at their 2018 Goop Summit Getty The famous faces of the anti-vaccine movement Rob Schneider Schneider demanded the freedom to decline vaccination Getty The famous faces of the anti-vaccine movement Jenny McCarthy McCarthy has claimed that "people are dying from vaccinations", believes that her son caught autism from a vaccine and has pushed her opinions on the topic publicly for many years AFP/Getty The famous faces of the anti-vaccine movement Bill Maher Maher has long spoken against vaccines sating on Larry King live that "a flu shot is the worst thing you can do." His stance appears to stem from a distrust of government AFP/Getty The famous faces of the anti-vaccine movement Alicia Silverstone In Silverstone's book The Kind Mama, she wrote that "there is increasing anecdotal evidence from doctors who have gotten distressed phone calls from parents claiming their child was never the same after receiving a vaccine." Getty The famous faces of the anti-vaccine movement Andrew Wakefield Godfather of the anti-vax movement, disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield famously published a report in the medical journal Lancet claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism in 1998. The Lancet retracted the report in 2010 and Wakefield was struck off the medical register PA The spokesperson pointed to Twitters advertising policy, which addresses the promotion of controversial health content. Adverts regarding vaccination could potentially fall under any number of policies, including one that says any claims about a cure, treatment, diagnosis or prevention of certain diseases are restricted. On Wednesday, Mr Greenfield posted a further vaccine-related tweet repeating unsubstantiated claims that inoculations could be harmful. He said: I am not against vaccinations. They have saved many lives. I was vaccinated. My children were vaccinated. But I also think we need to respectfully pay attention to potential adverse health effects. I rarely visit the topic, and had no idea until I did how charged this issue was. In his Twitter bio, Mr Greenfield writes: "Athlete, father, entrepreneur. Write & speak on health, longevity, fitness and nutrition". He has more than 70,000 followers. Twitter and Facebook have been repeatedly accused of providing a platform for anti-vaccine propaganda to spread, as well as other disinformation. Disinformation campaigns stemming from the anti-vax movement have become so severe that diseases like measles are making a comeback in countries where it had been almost eliminated. In the US, health officials declared a public health emergency in Washington state following an outbreak of the disease. The reasons for this rise are complex, and not all of these cases are due to vaccine hesitancy, the World Health Organisation said in January, while labelling the anti-vaccine movement one of the worst health threats facing humanity in 2019. Facebook has since taken steps to prevent anti-vaccine content from appearing on its social network by reducing the ranking of groups and pages that spread misinformation. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events If these vaccine hoaxes appear on Facebook, we will take action against them, the companys head of global policy Monika Bickert wrote in a blog post earlier this month. We are exploring ways to give people more accurate information from expert organisations about vaccines at the top of results for related searches, on pages discussing the topic, and on invitations to join groups about the topic. On Sunday 17 March, thousands of people across the world will don garments of Irish green as they celebrate St Patrick's Day. While the actual day only falls on one day, the festivities held in commemoration of the patron saint of Ireland can span weeks. Events to commemorate St Patrick's Day have taken place in Ireland since the ninth and 10th centuries, while in Chicago, USA, its been tradition to dye the Chicago River green since 1962. From whisky masterclasses to boozy, bottomless brunches, here are some of the best events taking place in celebration of St Patrick's Day across the UK: Celebrate in style at a carnival One of the highlights of the annual St Patrick's Day celebrations is the exuberant carnivals that take place across the world. While New York City may be home to one of the oldest St Patrick's Day parades in the world, the UK also knows how to throw an unforgettable (or, in some cases, slightly forgettable) party. St Patrick's Day 2018: in pictures Show all 10 1 /10 St Patrick's Day 2018: in pictures St Patrick's Day 2018: in pictures Spectators in fancy dress and face paint line the streets during the St Patrick's Day parade. AFP/Getty St Patrick's Day 2018: in pictures Participants take part in the St Patrick's day parade as it makes it's way down O'Connell street in Dublin. PA St Patrick's Day 2018: in pictures Star Wars actor Mark Hamill cheers as the annual Saint Patrick's day parade takes place. Getty Images St Patrick's Day 2018: in pictures A street performer dressed as St Patrick poses for pictures with spectators. AFP/Getty St Patrick's Day 2018: in pictures A spectator shows off her hat as the annual Saint Patrick's day parade takes place in Dublin. Getty St Patrick's Day 2018: in pictures Performers make their way down O'Connell street. Dublin hosts the largest Saint Patrick's day parade in the world with a route spanning 2.5 km. Getty St Patrick's Day 2018: in pictures People sit on a statue to watch the St. Patrick's Day parade. Reuters St Patrick's Day 2018: in pictures Performers take part in the St Patrick's Day parade in Dublin. AFP/Getty St Patrick's Day 2018: in pictures Performers take part in the St Patrick's Day parade in Dublin. AFP/Getty St Patrick's Day 2018: in pictures A participant during the St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin. Reuters This year's parade in the English capital is due to see thousands of party-goers meet at midday on Sunday 17 March as they make their way from Green Park to Trafalgar Square. It's expected that more than 125,000 will attend the events being held as part of the London St Patrick's Day Festival, which will span three days from Friday 15 March until Sunday 17 March. The festival will also feature an Irish Film Festival and an array of musical performances. In addition to London, other locations hosting St Patrick's Day parade include Manchester and Birmingham. Festivities for Manchester's St Patrick's Day celebrations are spanning across two weeks, starting on 1 March and ending on 17 March. The main parade was held on Sunday 10 March, a week before St Patrick's Day, and saw thousands of people brave strong winds and hailstones to join in the fun. Parades are also due to be held across Northern Ireland, in regions including Belfast, Londonderry, Cultra and Newry. In Belfast, the carnival will begin at the Belfast City Hall at 12.30pm, and end at Writers Square on Donegall Street. The festivities will also feature a free open-air concert after the parade, which is scheduled to take place from 1.30pm until 3pm in Custom House Square. Become a whisky connoisseur with a masterclass It's widely believed whisky has been distilled in Ireland and Northern Ireland since the 17th century, so what better way to celebrate Saint Patrick than by becoming a bona fide expert of the spirit? On the Wednesday 13 March, The Gallery in West Hampstead, London will host a whisky tasting, providing a menu of four whiskies, four beers and four food pairings for the price of 30 per person. If you're yearning to learn more, Soho wine and cocktail bar 68 and Boston is also holding an Irish whisky masterclass in celebration of St Patrick's Day on the Friday and Saturday before the big day. For the price of 10 per person, the masterclass will include three 10ml tastings of three varieties of Teeling Whisky, in addition to a selection of Irish canapes. Party into the early hours on a pub crawl Nothing says St Patrick's Day quite like a full-blown, excessively green pub crawl. You can expect to see bar crawls taking place in celebration of the joyful event across the UK, in cities including Sheffield, Liverpool and London. The "North vs Midlands vs South St Patrick's Day bar crawl" in Sheffield, organised by student events company EatMyDisco, will see participants venture to bars including Molly Malone's Irish Tavern, Players Bar and Tiger Works. In London, you can join in a bar crawl organised by Leicester Square bar Zoo Too that promises free shots, drinks deals throughout the night and free St Patrick's Day hats for the total price of 10 to 15. The event will be taking place on Saturday 16 March and Sunday 17 March, and is expected to sell out in the lead-up to the big day. The official St Patrick's Day music trail in Camden Market will see attendees watch six Irish music performances at bars across the market. The free event is taking place on Saturday 16 March from 1.30pm until 6pm. Have a few laughs at a comedy show St Patrick's Day is an undoubtedly jubilant occasion, so marking the occasion by attending a comedy show is particularly apt. On Saturday 17 March, The Comedy Store in Manchester will be hosting comedians Mick Ferry, John Lynn and Andrew Ryan for a night full of laughs and Guinness. Starting at 8pm, standard tickets for the event cost 14, which includes a 2 booking fee. London's Comedy Carnival is due to host an all-Irish lineup of top comedic acts for on St Patrick's Day, featuring comedians Jarlath Regan, Patrick Monahan, Micky Bartlett and Matthew McAloone. The event is being held at Bar Rumba near Leicester Square on Sunday 17 March, from 7.30pm until 9.30pm. Ticket prices range from 16.68 to 38.16. Enjoy a tipple at a bottomless brunch If you thought the concept of bottomless brunch couldn't get any better, think again. Brighton karaoke bar Lucky Voice is putting on - yes, you guessed it - karaoke bottomless brunch, so you can sing your heart out while enjoying a sip (or several) of your favourite tipple. Taking place on Saturday 30 March, the bar will provide a complimentary bucket of beer while you sing along to Irish tunes for 35 per person. A similar event will also be taking place at Little Nan's Bar, a cosy, homely bar situated in Deptford, southeast London. For the price of 40 per person, you'll be given a three-hour slot during which you'll be treated to bottomless teapots of Bucks Fizz, Prosecco and an assortment of food. The St Patrick's Day event is themed around pop music, which means you'll be able to enjoy classic pop tunes from Irish acts including Boyzone and Westlife throughout your stay. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events For everything you need to know about St Patrick's Day 2019, click here. For five Guinness-based cocktail recipes that you can make at home in celebration of the big day, click here. Remember when Boris Johnson said f*** business? It now appears that the entire Conservative government has decided that will be its operating principle. You can add in f*** jobs and f*** prosperity. I am, of course, referring to the decision announced this morning to scrap the majority of import tariffs under the the UKs no deal plans - although Im not sure dignifying anything as half baked as this with the word plans really suffices - for a no deal Brexit. Some 87 per cent of them no less. Before you say, but that wont happen its just a bluff and it will be killed off by tonights vote, I remind you that no deal is still the default legal option. Whether it is formally cancelled depends very much upon the wording of the motion. It should also be noted that to get the extension of article 50 necessary to prevent it, something the CBI and many others have called for, the EU's member states will have to play ball and most of them are heartily sick of the UK government. Small wonder. Parliament has, in theory, already voted against the option. But we are still having this discussion because the Spellman amendment that was supposed to kill it off was non binding. The problem with the tariff plan, which we are told is to protect consumers from immediate and sharp rises in prices, is that there will be no quid pro quo. British goods going the other way will be subject to a range of brutal charges that they do not currently attract, not just from the EU but from a range of other countries with which it has free trade deals that we currently benefit from and that trade secretary Liam Fox has failed miserably to get rolled over. UK plc was once a tolerably competitive economy. No deal will overnight make large swathes of it uncompetitive. How long exporting businesses that have already been operating with unprecedented uncertainty will be able to last in that situation is an open question. Then theres the situation at the Irish border. Lets not forget that. Our members in Northern Ireland are tearing their hair out, said the one business group to me this morning. Actually by now they probably havent got much hair left but you know what I mean. Theres also not much point protecting consumers if they dont have any money to spend through loosing their jobs and theres not much point protecting consumers if theres nothing much in the shops to buy. Apparently therell be no customs checks to keep goods coming in. Again, temporarily. So good news for those concerning themselves with the importation of illegal drugs. Lets face it, we might all need to get high to get through this. Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Show all 15 1 /15 Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Pork There will be tariffs on pork in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cheese There will be tariffs in place on some cheeses including 22.10/100kg of cheddar, 19.10/100kg of processed cheese and 18.60/100kg on some blue cheeses Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Milk There will be no tariffs in place on milk Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Car Parts There will be no tariffs on car parts imported from Europe PA Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cars However finished cars will face tariffs of 10.6% Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Alcoholic drinks There will be no tariffs on alcoholic drinks - except on some rums due to ingredients used in their distilling process Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Beef There will be tariffs on beef in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fish There will be no tariffs on many types of fish including cod, haddock, salmon and sea bass Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fruit and vegetables There will be no tariffs on almost all fruit and vegetables Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Chocolate There will be no tariffs on chocolate or other cocoa products Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Poultry There will be tariffs on poultry in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ceramics There will be some tariffs in place on ceramis Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Steel There will be no tariffs on steel Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Coal There will be no tariffs on coal Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Lamb/Mutton There will be tariffs on the meat of sheep in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs will still apply in areas like agriculture, because we mustnt upset the Tory farmers in the shires. But thats about it. This is a stupid, panicked, ill thought out measure by a government lurching drunkenly towards a bridge over which an austerity wracked council has been unable to replace the railings. But you dont need me to tell you that. Business groups - none of whose members were properly consulted - basically said the same, albeit a little more decorously Heres Carolyn Fairbyn, the head of the CBI: What we are hearing is the biggest change in terms of trade this country has faced since the mid-19th century being imposed on this country with no consultation with business, no time to prepare. CBI director Carolyn Fairbairn: no deal Brexit is a 'sledgehammer hanging over business' Alan Renison, from the Insitute of Directors: The belated, cack-handed way in which the Government has handled its no-deal planning is one of the main reasons why many businesses will not be prepared for this outcome by March 29th. British Chambers of Commerce director general Adam Marshall: There has not been enough consultation, preparation or planning to support the firms and communities that could find themselves at the end of a sudden shift in tariffs. Lets not forget the TUC, the members of which represent many of those whose jobs will be threatened. Director general Frances OGrady weighed in with: Ending all tariffs in a no-deal Brexit would be a hammer blow to our manufacturing industries and the communities they support. The government is flying blind. It is indeed. Faced with that sort of thing, most governments would be inclined to stop and think, to put on the breaks, and call people in to talk. Apparently therell be some of that taking place today. Its too little, too late. If only Britain had a half decent opposition there might be an opportunity there. But it doesnt. So fasten your seat belts. Slashing tariffs to zero on the majority of UK imports in the event of a no-deal Brexit will be a sledgehammer for the economy and deliver a widespread shock across the country, business groups have warned. The government announced it would remove import duties on 87 per cent of goods entering the UK as part of measures aimed at preventing billions of pounds of additional costs being passed on to consumers. But business groups firmly condemned the plans as cack-handed, madness and extremely worrying. Firms are worried about being suddenly exposed to cheaper imports which they have been shielded from within the EU. The car industry trade body said the governments plans would do nothing to prevent the devastating effect no-deal Brexit would have on one of the UKs most successful sectors which supports hundreds of thousands of jobs. Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Show all 15 1 /15 Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Pork There will be tariffs on pork in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cheese There will be tariffs in place on some cheeses including 22.10/100kg of cheddar, 19.10/100kg of processed cheese and 18.60/100kg on some blue cheeses Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Milk There will be no tariffs in place on milk Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Car Parts There will be no tariffs on car parts imported from Europe PA Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cars However finished cars will face tariffs of 10.6% Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Alcoholic drinks There will be no tariffs on alcoholic drinks - except on some rums due to ingredients used in their distilling process Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Beef There will be tariffs on beef in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fish There will be no tariffs on many types of fish including cod, haddock, salmon and sea bass Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fruit and vegetables There will be no tariffs on almost all fruit and vegetables Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Chocolate There will be no tariffs on chocolate or other cocoa products Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Poultry There will be tariffs on poultry in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ceramics There will be some tariffs in place on ceramis Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Steel There will be no tariffs on steel Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Coal There will be no tariffs on coal Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Lamb/Mutton There will be tariffs on the meat of sheep in order to protect British farmers Getty The National Farmers Union (NFU) said it was appalling that plans had been unveiled with just two weeks to go until Brexit day. Allie Renison, head of Europe and trade at the Institute of Directors, said the government had provided only the bare minimum needed to prepare for no deal and it has come far too late. Cutting tariffs unilaterally is a necessary and welcome part of a countrys trade policy, but it is crucial to do so in a measured, open and consultative way to get buy-in from both businesses and the public, Ms Renison said. Unfortunately there has been virtually none of that from government in the run-up to this point. Making these tariff decisions temporary will lead to widespread confusion about what may change and when, as firms will want to know well in advance about how duties may rise. Carolyn Fairbairn, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, described the prospect of no deal as a sledgehammer for the economy. This tells us everything that is wrong with a no-deal scenario. What we are hearing is the biggest change in terms of trade this country has faced since the mid-19th century being imposed on this country with no consultation with business, no time to prepare, she told the BBCs Today programme. Recommended Theresa May has lost control of Brexit This is no way to run a country. What we potentially are going to see is this imposition of new terms of trade at the same time as business is blocked out of its closest trading partner. Adam Marshall, director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said abrupt changes to tariffs would be an unwelcome shock for businesses. If the government were to bring these tariffs into effect on 30 March, the move would also have the potential to cede negotiating leverage in future trade talks. While ministers have clearly listened to our arguments and maintained targeted protection in some areas, overall there has not been enough consultation, preparation or planning to support the firms and communities that could find themselves at the end of a sudden shift in tariffs. As MPs vote tonight, this is yet another reason why they must act to avoid a messy and disorderly exit from the EU on 29 March. The government also announced there would not be any new checks or controls on goods moving from the Irish Republic to Northern Ireland. Police in Ireland are concerned that could prove to be lucrative for potential smugglers and existing criminal networks in the country and across the border. Tariffs will apply to goods including beef, lamb, pork, poultry and some dairy products in an attempt to protect farmers but the NFU said this would not be enough. Irish European affairs minister Helen McEntee said the move would be absolutely disastrous for Irish agriculture. NFU president Minette Batters said it was appalling that farmers have only just been given the opportunity to see the tariff rates a fortnight before they could come into effect. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Farmers and food businesses have no time to prepare for the implications, which will be exacerbated by the fact that we will face tariffs on our own exports on food into the EU and other countries with whom we currently enjoy free trade arrangements. Although we are pleased to see that the government has listened to our concerns and elected to treat many agricultural sectors sensitively, which may support farmers who are already facing disastrous disruption from no deal, it is enormously worrying that some sectors will not have this protection noticeably eggs, cereals, fruit and vegetables. Even those sectors that are treated sensitively will, in most instances, see worrying and large reductions in the tariff rates currently charged on non-EU imports. Furthermore, the approach taken by the government to lump products under the same high-level tariff code, for example whole carcases and high value cuts of fresh beef, means there is a high chance of market distortion for many sectors who are deemed to have been treated sensitively. It comes after Theresa May lost a crunch vote on her Brexit deal in the Commons on Tuesday night. MP Jess Phillips plans to leave her son outside Downing Street and transport thousands of children to Westminster to protest against budget cuts forcing schools to close early. She annouced her plans for the demonstration, which she has launched an fundraising campaign to finance, after learning that the school attended by her 10-year-old son Danny, will close at lunchtime on Fridays because it can no longer afford to stay open for a full school week. The Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley raised more than 6,000 of her 10,000 goal within 17 hours of setting up her crowdfunding campaign. Ms Phillips said the money would be used to transport thousands of children to the Department for Education, Downing Street, and the Treasury where she says they will sing the Baby Shark song in protest. The 37-year-old said she knew of 15 other schools in Birmingham that were in the same position as her sons. Thousands skip school to attend climate protest Show all 5 1 /5 Thousands skip school to attend climate protest Thousands skip school to attend climate protest A girl wears a face mask and has a message written on her forehead that reads 'no planet B' during a demonstration against climate change in Brussels on Thursday 17 January 2019. Thousands of students as part of the Youth for Climate movement took time off school to call for stronger action against climate change. (Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP Photo) Thousands skip school to attend climate protest Students and others hold placards as they march during a demonstration against climate change in Brussels, Thursday, Jan. 17, 2019. Thousands of students as part of the Youth for Climate movement took time off school Thursday to call for stronger action against climate change. Sign in center reads in Dutch 'shortly everyone will have a house on the sea'. (Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP Photo) Thousands skip school to attend climate protest Thursday, 17 January 2019. Thousands of students as part of the Youth for Climate movement took time off school to call for stronger action against climate change. (Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP Photo) Thousands skip school to attend climate protest Students and others hold up placards with climate messages during a demonstration against climate change in Brussels, Thursday 17 January 2019. Thousands of students as part of the Youth for Climate movement took time off school to call for stronger action against climate change. Banner at right in Dutch reads 'we are truant for more forests' and at centre-rear reads 'no money if it melts'. (Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP Photo) Thousands skip school to attend climate protest Two girls hold up a banner during a demonstration against climate change in Brussels, Thursday 17 January 2019. Thousands of students as part of the Youth for Climate movement took time off school to call for stronger action against climate change. (Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP Photo) The government has failed in the most basic job it has to provide schooling for all of our children five days a week," she said. "We intend to show them that we will not take this. Together with the Save Our Schools group I am organising a huge campaign day where we will take thousands of children to Westminster on a Friday and at 1pm, the time our schools have to close. We will be leaving our children at the Department for Education, the Treasury, and I will leave my son and some of his friends with special educational needs at Downing Street. Ms Phillips said her sons school can also no longer afford to fund the support needed for children with disabilities and special educational needs and that these pupils may have to leave. As The Independent reported last week, the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) has warned it is highly likely more schools will have to follow suit and shorten the school day to balance the books. More than 7,000 headteachers recently joined forces to tell parents about cash shortages in schools in a joint letter to 3.5million families, organised by the Worthless? campaign group. One headteacher said she had been forced to clean toilets and serve food in the canteen to make ends meet and her pupils had also helped hoover the school amid intense budget pressures. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Geoff Barton, general secretary of ASCL, said school leaders were faced with impossible choices on a daily basis. He said: The level of funding provided by the government to our schools and colleges is not remotely sufficient to meet the demands which are placed upon them. The spate of schools closing early on Fridays, or consulting on whether to do so, is a symptom of this crisis, along with rising class sizes, cuts to the curriculum and fewer resources with which to provide support to vulnerable children. Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), added: Due to the school funding crisis headteachers are having to make decisions that no one working in schools and colleges ever thought they would have to make. The responsibility for all of this lies with the government and their refusal to fund our schools and colleges properly to ensure every child and young person gets the education they deserve. Asked about Ms Phillip's announcement, a spokesperson for the Department for Education said schools have had the flexibility to structure the school week as they choose for some time. A new test could identify breast cancers that are likely to return more than 20 years later a development that might herald an era of personalised medicine. The way a patients cancer will progress can be determined by categorising molecular and genetic markers of breast tumours into 11 subtypes, University of Cambridge researchers found. Following around 2,000 women over 20 years, the team funded by the Cancer Research charity found some women with initially aggressive cancers had a low chance of tumours returning after five years. However, other tumours that might initially respond to treatment were found to be more likely to reappear up to 20 years later, potentially in an incurable form. Weve shown that the molecular nature of a womans breast cancer determines how their disease could progress, not just for the first five years, but also later, said Dr Oscar Rueda, lead author of the paper published in the journal Nature. We hope that our research tool can be turned into a test doctors can easily use to guide treatment recommendations. Mastectomy: Stand Up To Cancer launches powerful photo campaign Show all 13 1 /13 Mastectomy: Stand Up To Cancer launches powerful photo campaign Mastectomy: Stand Up To Cancer launches powerful photo campaign Joanna, Newcastle (Image: Ami Barwell) Mastectomy: Stand Up To Cancer launches powerful photo campaign Mel, Merseyside (Image: Ami Barwell) Mastectomy: Stand Up To Cancer launches powerful photo campaign Lucy, Wakefield (Image: Ami Barwell) Mastectomy: Stand Up To Cancer launches powerful photo campaign Sharon, Bath (Image: Ami Barwell) Mastectomy: Stand Up To Cancer launches powerful photo campaign Jan, Hereford (Image: Ami Barwell) Mastectomy: Stand Up To Cancer launches powerful photo campaign Gillian, London (Image: Ami Barwell) Mastectomy: Stand Up To Cancer launches powerful photo campaign Fiona, Northampton (Image: Ami Barwell) Mastectomy: Stand Up To Cancer launches powerful photo campaign Anon S, West Midlands (Image: Ami Barwell) Mastectomy: Stand Up To Cancer launches powerful photo campaign Debbie W, Worcestershire (Image: Ami Barwell) Mastectomy: Stand Up To Cancer launches powerful photo campaign Debbie B, York (Image: Ami Barwell) Mastectomy: Stand Up To Cancer launches powerful photo campaign Clare, North Lincolnshire (Image: Ami Barwell) Mastectomy: Stand Up To Cancer launches powerful photo campaign Caroline, Brancaster (Image: Ami Barwell) Mastectomy: Stand Up To Cancer launches powerful photo campaign Anon (Image: Ami Barwell) Using molecular markers is a booming field for cancer research. Previously, tumours have been classified by the area in which they originate, and other features such as size. The researchers said around 12,300 women in the UK could belong to one of these late recurring subgroups, which are currently clumped together within cancers classed as oestrogen receptor positive tumours. If doctors are able to test for molecular features, these patients could benefit from longer courses of chemotherapy, or more frequent follow-up screening checks. The new model also helps predict where cancers are likely to spread and how aggressive or treatment-resistant they are likely to be when they return. The tests would have the added benefit of giving women reassurance about their personal risks. Its quite scary and definitely a worry, said Catherine Scott, 51, from Cambridge. She joined the study after being diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer a form with the fewest treatment options in 2016. When her treatment ended, she asked her doctor about her chances of it returning because her next check up was not for a year. The doctor could only predict the chances based on old cases. If they were able to make it more personalised that would be more reassuring, Ms Scott said. It would definitely be better than feeling you have to cross your fingers. The research comes after another Cambridge University group released an online calculator for men with prostate cancer. The tool helps them understand their cancer risks and the side-effects of treatments. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The findings also follow the launch of schemes such as the NHS Genomic Medicine Service, which offers free testing to patients with rare disease or cancers. Such developments bring the prospect of an affordable personalised cancer test in hospitals closer. We hope these 11 molecular subtypes could in future help us better predict long-term outcomes and lead to more personalised treatment plans for patients based on the properties of their tumour, said Dr Simon Vincent, director of research of the charity Breast Cancer Now. Crucially, this major study could help us tease apart the diverse set of hard-to-treat breast cancers currently grouped together as triple negative, and identify certain patients that are unlikely to experience a recurrence more than five years after their treatment. Sometimes Zharqynbek Otan can be found in the middle of the night, standing stiffly at attention beside the bed he shares with his wife, Shynar Kylysheva. She says his memory fails him, and he periodically wanders off into the streets here in Kazakhstans largest city. When his family manages to find him, he has difficulty recognising them and resists returning home. Otan, a 31-year-old cook, spent nearly two years in various forms of detention in neighbouring China, including in one of the notorious reeducation camps in Xinjiang, the massive western region that shares a 1,100-mile border with Kazakhstan. His wife petitioned tirelessly for his release from a camp in Zhaosu County, but when he came home in late 2018, he brought the trauma of his ordeal back across the border with him: Otan is not the man he was. Cases like his are common in this part of the country. And they represent a significant shift in Beijings repressive approach to Muslim minorities. For decades, China has suppressed the language and faith of its Muslim citizens. But until recently, the effort has been contained largely within Chinas own borders. Now the sweep has come to include the fluid region where Chinese nationals and Kazakh citizens have long moved freely back and forth between their countries, with those on opposite sides of the border mingling and marrying and working among one another. Like thousands of other ethnic Kazakhs caught up in the crackdown, Otan is a Chinese national married to a Kazakh citizen and living in Kazakhstan as a legal resident. He travelled to China in late 2016 to obtain documents necessary for taking Kazakh citizenship. Instead, officials arrested him, seized his passport and sent him to a camp in January 2017, Otan says, where he lived alongside people whose ethnic identities, distinct from the Han majority that controls China, seem to scare Beijing. Prisoners at these places are taught to abandon their Turkic-based mothertongues and renounce outward displays of Islam. And while the targets have for years been supposed domestic enemies, China now pursues some Kazakhs with the same zeal cleaving families and even violating Kazakhstans sovereignty to send them for reeducation in the expanding camp system. Its unclear exactly how many people are in some sort of detention in Xinjiang, but the state department estimates that 800,000 to 2 million people have been detained since 2017. After initially denying the existence of the reeducation camps, Beijing has since switched to defending them as necessary to combat Islamist extremism and terrorism. The state primarily targets Uighurs, the Turkic group that makes up the largest share of Muslims in China, but other Muslim minorities, like Kyrgyz, Hui and, increasingly, Kazakhs both citizens of Kazakhstan and ethnic Kazakh Chinese nationals have been caught in the broadening dragnet. Rian Thum, a senior research fellow at the University of Nottingham and an expert on Xinjiang, tells me he was surprised to see Kazakhs swept up in the camps along with Uighurs, given that Kazakhs had long been viewed by the Chinese state as a model Muslim group that accepted Communist Party rule. There are nearly 1.5 million ethnic Kazakhs living in Xinjiang, making them the second-largest Muslim group in the region after Uighurs. Thum says the new hard line against Kazakhs is motivated by the same blend of Islamophobia and racism towards Muslim minorities that has led Uighurs to be viewed as dangerous. Otan looks over his permit for permanent residence in Kazakhstan (Izturgan Aldauyev for The Washington Post) (Photo for The Washington Post by Izturgan Aldauyev) Distrust has spread to any ethnic group that has cultural similarity to the Uighurs, he says. If you are non-Chinese and majority Muslim, your group is viewed as a threat by the Communist Party. Detailed information about what is transpiring in Xinjiang itself is hard to find. The region has become a dystopian police state, complete with public video surveillance, regular scans of digital devices and coded ID cards used to track the movements of their holders. Those who have managed to escape detention and leave Xinjiang report being told to stay silent about their ordeal, lest their relatives in China be imprisoned in their place. But after conducting 60 interviews in Kazakhstan with former detainees and people with relatives missing in Xinjiang, I see a grim picture emerging from inside the region. Theres no single reason for Chinas crackdown in Xinjiang or for its spread. Things took a turn in 2009 after riots in Xinjiang claimed 200 mostly Han lives. Terrorist attacks by Uighurs in the following years escalated the security situation, culminating in swift retaliation by Beijing in the name of fighting extremism. But the current peoples war on terrorism is less about that than about the strategic importance of Xinjiang and a rising strain of Han nationalism. Xinjiangs western location makes it a vital launching spot for Beijings trillion-dollar Belt and Road global infrastructure project, and the Chinese government has taken to stamping out any form of perceived unrest or lawlessness that could hamper its economic prospects. Meanwhile, nationalism has led to more aggressive attempts at coerced cultural assimilation for minorities and a deep suspicion of all religions, with Islam paramount among them. The reeducation camp system is in part an effort to make Muslim minorities adopt a pan-Chinese identity, forcing them to learn Mandarin, memorise Communist Party songs and eat pork. Religion, particularly Islam, is seen as contradictory to this Chinese identity, and officials have spoken openly about the need to Sinicise Islam and make it compatible with socialism. These efforts, however, have taken the form of an extreme human engineering project. Tiananmen Square vigil: anniversary of Beijings military crackdown Show all 8 1 /8 Tiananmen Square vigil: anniversary of Beijings military crackdown Tiananmen Square vigil: anniversary of Beijings military crackdown Tens of thousands of people attend an annual candlelight vigil at Hong Kong's Victoria Park commemorating victims of protesters in 1989 Beijing's Tiananmen Square. AP Tiananmen Square vigil: anniversary of Beijings military crackdown A man raises a candle AP Tiananmen Square vigil: anniversary of Beijings military crackdown Tens of thousands of people attend an annual candlelight vigil at Hong Kong's Victoria Park commemorating victims of protesters in 1989 Beijing's Tiananmen Square. AP Tiananmen Square vigil: anniversary of Beijings military crackdown People attend the annual candlelight vigil AP Tiananmen Square vigil: anniversary of Beijings military crackdown A statue of the Goddess of Democracy is illuminated REUTERS Tiananmen Square vigil: anniversary of Beijings military crackdown Tens of thousands of people attend an annual candlelight vigil at Hong Kong's Victoria Park commemorating victims of protesters in 1989 Beijing's Tiananmen Square. AP Tiananmen Square vigil: anniversary of Beijings military crackdown A woman sings during the vigil AP Tiananmen Square vigil: anniversary of Beijings military crackdown People attend the annual candlelight vigil AP They said that I was a traitor because I lived in Kazakhstan, says Gulzira Auelkhankyzy, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national who spent 15 months in a reeducation camp in Xinjiang. Auelkhankyzy had been working as a seamstress and living in Kazakhstan as a legal resident with her husband, who abandoned his Chinese passport for Kazakh citizenship. Their two children, who are Chinese citizens, stayed in Xinjiang with their grandparents, and Auelkhankyzy was detained in China while fetching them to live in Kazakhstan. During her detention, Auelkhankyzy says, she was interrogated about her ties abroad and accused of espionage because of her time in Kazakhstan. After her release from the camp, where she was forced to learn Chinese and live in squalor, Chinese officials demanded that Auelkhankyzy sign a contract to work at a Xinjiang factory sewing gloves for 70 a month. She laboured for three months there before being allowed to return to Kazakhstan in January. She is now reunited with her husband, although their children remain in Xinjiang. Auelkhankyzy says she still thinks about the women with whom she was interned. Lots of us were mothers, but we couldnt see our children and often wondered who was taking care of them, she says. Xinjiang has become a land of orphans. Ethnic Kazakhs previously moved with ease between China and Kazakhstan, which positioned itself as the ancestral homeland for the Kazakh diaspora spread across Eurasia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Roughly 200,000 Chinese nationals became citizens of Kazakhstan so they could live there after the country of 18 million gained independence in 1991. But cross-border ties have become a liability for those inside China and have caused them to be viewed with suspicion. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, foreign connections are now considered a punishable offence, with the authorities in Xinjiang targeting people who have ties to 26 sensitive countries, Kazakhstan among them. So many Kazakhs [in China] have strong links abroad, says Gene Bunin, a Russian American writer and translator who runs the Xinjiang Victims Database, a project documenting the testimonies of detainees and their families. You cant do a crackdown in Xinjiang without also targeting the Kazakhs, otherwise information would reach the world even more than it has. Otan with his wife Shynar Kylysheva and their six-year-old son outside their home in Almaty (Izturgan Aldauyev for The Washington Post) (Photo for The Washington Post by Izturgan Aldauyev) An exact accounting of the ethnic breakdown of the camp system is unavailable, and the diverging sets of available figures highlight the difficulties and competing interests in gleaning the full scope of what is happening to Kazakhs in Xinjiang. Atajurt Eriktileri, a grassroots organisation in Almaty helping families with missing relatives in Xinjiang, tells me it has documented more than 10,000 cases of ethnic Kazakhs interned in China. The victims database headed by Bunin has collected nearly 3,000 testimonies in the past year, about half from ethnic Kazakhs, but that figure represents only a small fraction of the estimated total. The Kazakh government has spoken publicly only about the cases pertaining to its own citizens, saying that 29 have been detained in recent years in China, of whom 15 have been released, but it has framed the issue as a bureaucratic error rather than extrajudicial detention. For the thousands of ethnic Kazakhs sent to the camps who are Chinese nationals even those who were permanent residents of Kazakhstan there are few avenues for recourse, and cases like Otans and Auelkhankyzys are the exceptions. While the camps are the most extreme form of detention, other Kazakhs have been jailed or placed under house arrest, or simply had their passports seized upon entering China and are now unable to leave. Oral Zhanabil tells me that his father, Turan Mukhametkan, a Chinese citizen living in Kazakhstan, was detained while travelling to Xinjiang to collect his pension money in September 2017. Zhanabil doesnt know the official reason for his fathers detention, but after spending nearly a year in a camp, Mukhametkan was released under house arrest in January; he has still not been able to leave China. Other cases are more politically sensitive for Kazakhstans autocratic government, which prizes its relationship with Beijing. Askar Azatbek, a former Xinjiang official who became a Kazakh citizen, was apparently taken in December 2017 while on the Kazakh side of Khorgos, a free-trade zone on the border. Azatbek was with a friend when two cars came from the Chinese side and detained them. The friend was released, but Azatbek was taken to China, and his relatives have not had contact with him since. Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national who worked in a camp and crossed illegally into Kazakhstan in April 2018 after finding out that she herself would be detained in one, is another diplomatic headache for the Kazakh government. Sauytbay is trying to claim asylum and says she knows the inner workings of the camps, but her application has been denied by the Kazakh government twice. When I interviewed her in January for Foreign Policy magazine, she said Chinese officials had tried to keep her silent by threatening her relatives still in Xinjiang. She feared that Kazakhstan would soon bend to growing pressure from Beijing for her extradition and send her back to China. A board in the Atajurt office with photos and information of Kazakhs detained in Chinese detention camps (Izturgan Aldauyev for The Washington Post) (Photo for The Washington Post by Izturgan Aldauyev) These cases present a diplomatic minefield for the Kazakh government. China is one of Kazakhstans main investors and a strategic partner in the Belt and Road initiative. In the past, Kazakh authorities have sent Uighur asylum seekers back to China, and the Kazakh governments poor human rights record shows that it has few reservations about mistreating its own people. But Sauytbays case and the plight of ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang have shifted public opinion to their side, and the Kazakh government has consequently engaged in behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Chinese to secure the release of some Kazakhs in the camps. While this diplomatic activity has been encouraging for families with relatives interned in Xinjiang, there are signs that the Kazakh authorities are unnerved by the outpouring of support at home for the detained Kazakhs. Serikzhan Bilash, the head of Atajurt Eriktileri, was fined in February by an Almaty court for operating an unregistered organisation, despite having his previous attempts to register denied by the state. Bilash tells me he expects more attempts by Kazakh authorities to use legal means to impede his organisations work. And Sauytbay fired her lawyer after he became unreachable at key moments in her case and encouraged her to be silent, she says. The Kazakh government has made clear that it wont stand up to China as it tries to erase the identities of Muslims in Xinjiang. But with internment camps next door continuing to swell with Kazakhs, Uighurs and other groups, the truth about Xinjiang may become too big to ignore. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Washington Post There is little expensive technology flaunted on the streets of Kibera, a slum in Nairobi, Kenya, often called the largest informal settlement in Africa. So it is a disorientating sight to see children gathering in the corner of a ramshackle bus terminal on the slums outskirts, clutching a disparate collection of flashy cameras, ranging from DSLRs to GoPros, as well as the occasional e-tablet. The children of this juxtaposed scene are students of the Inua Mimi Rescue Centre, a local space dedicated to caring for some of the most disadvantaged children in Kibera. The cameras they hold have been donated by individuals and manufacturers, and are distributed among the kids by Photostart, a growing charity that aims to teach children life skills through photography. Tucker Carlson joked about having sex with a vulnerable teenage beauty pageant contestant, newly unearthed audio has revealed, as advertisers turn their backs on the prominent Fox News presenter over a string of controversial comments. The right-wing talk show host also said the Miss Teen USA contender would make a a pretty good wife because she was so dumb, in a series of misogynistic and degrading remarks during an interview with a US shock jock. The audio, first published by social news provider Now This, is the latest of several clips recorded between 2006 and 2011 and released by left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters for America. In other recordings from radio interviews with Bubba the Love Sponge, Carlson is heard defending statutory rape, describing women as "primitive", and saying he love[s] the idea of schoolgirls sexually experimenting. He also claimed white men deserve credit for creating civilization and describes Iraqis as semi-literate primitive monkeys. Drug company AstraZeneca and sleepwear manufacturer Sheex this week announced they are pulling all advertising from Carlsons show in light of the "inappropriate" comments. They join dozens of other advertisers that have reportedly cut ties with the programme in recent months over the presenters inflammatory remarks about immigrants and women. 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 the latest recording, Carlson is heard making lewd comments about Caitlin Upton, who won the 2007 Miss Teen Carolina contest when she was 17. Ms Upton was subjected to ridicule online and in the media for an answer she gave to a question during the pageant derision she later said left her suicidal. During the interview with Bubba, Carlson says: I gotta be honest, I thought she was kind of appealing. Shed probably be a pretty good wife ... Dont you think, if you had a wife that dumb, would it be good or bad? Bubba replies emphatically: Good. Later in the exchange, Carlson suggests without evidence that actor and Miss Teen USA host Mario Lopez had sex with Upton after the pageant. He jokes the contestant would be easy to trick into sex because shes so dumb. Shes vulnerable, he adds. Shes like a wounded gazelle separated from the herd. Asked by Bubba, who believes the teenager was underage, if it would be a problem legally if Mario f***ed it, Carlson responds: No. No are you kidding. Hes like James Brown. The normal laws for that kind of thing dont apply to him. He gets a pass. Carlson has not commented on the latest clip, but has previously refused to apologise for his remarks on Bubba the Love Sponge Show and vowed he "will never bow to the mob". In a statement posted on Twitter this week, he said: "Media Matters caught me saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago. Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, how about this: Im on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch. "Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why. The Independent has approached Fox News for a comment. Zhores Alferov was the Nobel prize-winning Russian physicist who developed a semiconductor that helped usher in the modern information revolution. This proved an integral part of such wide-ranging technologies as barcode readers, mobile phones, light-emitting diodes and fibre-optic cables. Alferov, who died in Saint Petersburg aged 88, was a pioneer in the development of semiconductor heterostructures, key parts of laser diodes and fast, tiny transistors. He also served as a Communist Party member in the Russian parliament, where he sought to safeguard scientific research. He and Herbert Kroemer, an engineer and physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for their independent work on semiconductor heterostructures. The other half of the prize went to Texas Instruments engineer Jack Kilby for helping to invent the integrated circuit. Developed in the mid-20th century, semiconductors made possible the high-speed, low-power switching of electric currents on and off. This opened the doors to the computer era and the rapid transmission of information. While early semiconductors were often made of silicon, heterostructure semiconductors were made of two different substances, including compounds of gallium and arsenic. They were more efficient, offered far higher speeds of on-off switching, and were more suitable for guiding signals into and out of optical fibres. The Nobel committee credited heterostructure semiconductors and the integrated circuit, known as the microchip, with providing the molecular foundation for the reshaping of society. Zhores Ivanovich Alferov was born in Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, in 1930. His mother was a homemaker and librarian; his father was a committed Bolshevik who led a cavalry unit in the Russian civil war and recounted meetings with Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Alferovs first name, Zhores, was a Russian rendition of the last name of Jean Jaures, a French socialist leader who was assassinated in 1914. Alferovs older brother was given the first name Marx in honour of Karl Marx and was killed while serving in the Red Army during the Second World War. Zhores Alferov, right, and members of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in 2008 (Getty) Zhores developed an interest in physics while at an all-boys school in Minsk and, in 1952, graduated from the Electrotechnical University in what was then known as Leningrad. He completed his schooling at the citys Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute, where he worked as a senior researcher and laboratory head before being elected director in 1987. Alferov and his laboratory began producing heterostructure devices in the late 1960s. Of utmost importance, he wrote in a biographical sketch for the Nobel, was the production of lasers that could operate at room temperature. He recalled that on his first visit to the US in 1969, a report he developed on laser advances produced an impression of an exploded bomb on American colleagues. A competition ensued to develop a continuous-wave laser operating at room temperature, and Alferov said his lab defeated Bell Labs in New Jersey by a month, resulting in the rapid development of optical fibre communication. Alferov had two children with his wife, Tamara Darskaya. In his biographical sketch, Alferov emphasised the importance of upholding scientific research through the Russian Academy of Sciences. The academy was nearly dissolved in the 1920s, he said, when it was viewed as an inheritance from the tsarist regime, and faced a similar threat in the 1990s, when it was deemed an inheritance from the totalitarian Soviet regime. Alferov said scientific workers of all kinds stood firm in support of the academy, and that he consented to become a member of Russias parliament in 1995 only to ensure the organisations safety. In doing so, he said, he and other researchers made compromises with the power but never with the conscience. All that had been made by human beings, in principle, he added, was made due to science. Zhores Ivanovich Alferov, physicist, born 15 March 1930, died 1 March 2019 Washington Post To truly inhabit a role, actors must effectively turn off part of their brain, according to a new study based on brain scans of thespians. In a series of experiments, actors were placed in MRI machines and asked to respond to questions as if they were Romeo or Juliet during the balcony scene from William Shakespeares play. Scientists were surprised to see that as the participants mused on concepts ranging from romance to religion, their brains were truly taken over by those of the famous star-crossed lovers They watched as brain activity dropped off, with a notable deactivation in a part of the frontal lobe. This result suggested the portrayal of a fictional character goes far deeper than simply learning a script. Science news in pictures Show all 20 1 /20 Science news in pictures Science news in pictures Pluto has 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen Pluto has a 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen that is doing strange things to its surface, Nasa has found. The mysterious core seems to be the cause of features on its surface that have fascinated scientists since they were spotted by Nasa's New Horizons mission. "Before New Horizons, everyone thought Pluto was going to be a netball - completely flat, almost no diversity," said Tanguy Bertrand, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and the lead author on the new study. "But it's completely different. It has a lot of different landscapes and we are trying to understand what's going on there." Getty Science news in pictures Over 400 species discovered this year by Natural History Museum The ancient invertabrate worm-like species rhenopyrgus viviani (pictured) is one of over 400 species previously unknown to science that were discovered by experts at the Natural History Museum this year PA Science news in pictures Jackdaws can identify 'dangerous' humans Jackdaws can identify dangerous humans from listening to each others warning calls, scientists say. The highly social birds will also remember that person if they come near their nests again, according to researchers from the University of Exeter. In the study, a person unknown to the wild jackdaws approached their nest. At the same time scientists played a recording of a warning call (threatening) or contact calls (non-threatening). The next time jackdaws saw this same person, the birds that had previously heard the warning call were defensive and returned to their nests more than twice as quickly on average. Getty Science news in pictures Turtle embryos influence sex by shaking The sex of the turtle is determined by the temperatures at which they are incubated. Warm temperatures favour females. But by wiggling around the egg, embryos can find the Goldilocks Zone which means they are able to shield themselves against extreme thermal conditions and produce a balanced sex ratio, according to the new study published in Current Biology journal Ye et al/Current Biology Science news in pictures Elephant poaching rates drop in Africa African elephant poaching rates have dropped by 60 per cent in six years, an international study has found. It is thought the decline could be associated with the ivory trade ban introduced in China in 2017. Reuters Science news in pictures Ancient four-legged whale discovered in Peru Scientists have identified a four-legged creature with webbed feet to be an ancestor of the whale. Fossils unearthed in Peru have led scientists to conclude that the enormous creatures that traverse the planets oceans today are descended from small hoofed ancestors that lived in south Asia 50 million years ago A. Gennari Science news in pictures Animal with transient anus discovered A scientist has stumbled upon a creature with a transient anus that appears only when it is needed, before vanishing completely. Dr Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory could not initially find any trace of an anus on the species. However, as the animal gets full, a pore opens up to dispose of waste Steven G Johnson Science news in pictures Giant bee spotted Feared extinct, the Wallace's Giant bee has been spotted for the first time in nearly 40 years. An international team of conservationists spotted the bee, that is four times the size of a typical honeybee, on an expedition to a group of Indonesian Islands Clay Bolt Science news in pictures New mammal species found inside crocodile Fossilised bones digested by crocodiles have revealed the existence of three new mammal species that roamed the Cayman Islands 300 years ago. The bones belonged to two large rodent species and a small shrew-like animal New Mexico Museum of Natural History Science news in pictures Fabric that changes according to temperature created Scientists at the University of Maryland have created a fabric that adapts to heat, expanding to allow more heat to escape the body when warm and compacting to retain more heat when cold Faye Levine, University of Maryland Science news in pictures Baby mice tears could be used in pest control A study from the University of Tokyo has found that the tears of baby mice cause female mice to be less interested in the sexual advances of males Getty Science news in pictures Final warning to limit "climate catastrophe" The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a report which projects the impact of a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and warns against a higher increase Getty Science news in pictures Nobel prize for evolution chemists The nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three chemists working with evolution. Frances Smith is being awarded the prize for her work on directing the evolution of enzymes, while Gregory Winter and George Smith take the prize for their work on phage display of peptides and antibodies Getty/AFP Science news in pictures Nobel prize for laser physicists The nobel prize for physics has been awarded to three physicists working with lasers. Arthur Ashkin (L) was awarded for his "optical tweezers" which use lasers to grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells. Donna Strickland and Gerard Mourou were jointly awarded the prize for developing chirped-pulse amplification of lasers Reuters/AP Science news in pictures Discovery of a new species of dinosaur The Ledumahadi Mafube roamed around 200 million years ago in what is now South Africa. Recently discovered by a team of international scientists, it was the largest land animal of its time, weighing 12 tons and standing at 13 feet. In Sesotho, the South African language of the region in which the dinosaur was discovered, its name means "a giant thunderclap at dawn" Viktor Radermacher / SWNS Science news in pictures Birth of a planet Scientists have witnessed the birth of a planet for the first time ever. This spectacular image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70. The planet stands clearly out, visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the blinding light of the central star. ESO/A. Muller et al Science news in pictures New human organ discovered that was previously missed by scientists Layers long thought to be dense, connective tissue are actually a series of fluid-filled compartments researchers have termed the interstitium. These compartments are found beneath the skin, as well as lining the gut, lungs, blood vessels and muscles, and join together to form a network supported by a mesh of strong, flexible proteins Getty Science news in pictures Previously unknown society lived in Amazon rainforest before Europeans arrived, say archaeologists Working in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a team led by archaeologists at the University of Exeter unearthed hundreds of villages hidden in the depths of the rainforest. These excavations included evidence of fortifications and mysterious earthworks called geoglyphs Jose Iriarte Science news in pictures One in 10 people have traces of cocaine or heroin on fingerprints, study finds More than one in 10 people were found to have traces of class A drugs on their fingers by scientists developing a new fingerprint-based drug test. Using sensitive analysis of the chemical composition of sweat, researchers were able to tell the difference between those who had been directly exposed to heroin and cocaine, and those who had encountered it indirectly. Getty Science news in pictures Nasa releases stunning images of Jupiter's great red spot The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth. Pictures by: Tom Momary The research was led by Dr Steven Brown, a neuroscientist at Canada's McMaster University, who specialises in how the brain behaves while people are participating in music, dance and other art forms. As no one had ever attempted to measure the brain activity underpinning drama, Dr Brown recruited a group of willing, university-trained actors to participate in his new study. Inspired by a visit to Brazil in which he witnessed an indigenous possession ceremony, he thought there may be parallels to be drawn with actors. I got the idea that maybe acting was a bit similar to possession that when youre acting youre kind of being taken over by character, said Dr Brown. This, he said, influenced his interpretation of the experiments, which he had originally assumed would reveal something quite different. Normally his team looks for increases in brain activity that may underlie artistic pursuits, but in this study they were surprised to find activity was actually decreasing in certain key areas. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events There wasnt a literature to go by to make predictions, because this was the first study of its kind, he said. We thought there might be activation increases relating to pretending to be some kind of character but instead we saw this activation decrease. That was very surprising to us. Over the course of four sessions in the MRI machines, the participants had to respond in four different ways as themselves, as themselves with a British accent, answering for a friend and finally as if they were either Romeo or Juliet. Only while undertaking their Shakespearean role did the people show deactivations in regions across their brains. Like the people in the ceremony he had witnessed, Dr Brown suggested these people were actually losing their sense of self as they inhabited the characters minds. Though this new area of research is still in its early days, publishing their findings in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the scientists said their study provided the first step towards understanding how peoples brains change when they take on different roles whether in their daily lives or on stage. A new species of stiletto snake which can stab sideways and jump a distance equal to its own body length has been discovered in West Africa. Three specimens were found by a team of scientists working in the rainforests of southeastern Guinea and northwestern Liberia, and were later all identified as a species previously unknown to science. The snake is from a family of vipers which have teeth protruding from the sides of their mouths, allowing them to strike prey with their venomous fangs from an unusual angle and without even opening their mouths. The group is also known as mole vipers or burrowing asps and, due to their unusual physiology, they cannot be handled as other snakes can by holding them behind the head. While most of these burrowing snakes are not venomous enough to kill a human, some are able to inflict serious tissue necrosis, which could lead to the loss of a finger or thumb. Snake charmers of Uttar Pradesh Show all 11 1 /11 Snake charmers of Uttar Pradesh Snake charmers of Uttar Pradesh A boy holds a snake as he poses for a photograph in Jogi Dera (snake charmers settlement), in the village of Baghpur, in the central state of Uttar Pradesh, India Reuters Snake charmers of Uttar Pradesh A snake charmer holds a cobra, which was caught in a house in a near-by village, in Jogi Dera (snake charmers settlement), in the village of Baghpur, in the central state of Uttar Pradesh, India Reuters Snake charmers of Uttar Pradesh A daughter of a snake charmer holds snakes as she eats her breakfast in Jogi Dera (snake charmers settlement), in the village of Baghpur, in the central state of Uttar Pradesh, India Reuters Snake charmers of Uttar Pradesh A snake charmer plays a gourd flute in front of cobras after the morning prayer at a temple in Jogi Dera (snake charmers settlement), in the village of Baghpur, in the central state of Uttar Pradesh, India Reuters Snake charmers of Uttar Pradesh Children of a snake charmer prepare dinner outside their home in Jogi Dera (snake charmers settlement), in the village of Baghpur, in the central state of Uttar Pradesh, India Reuters Snake charmers of Uttar Pradesh A cobra is seen in Jogi Dera (snake charmers settlement), in the village of Baghpur, in the central state of Uttar Pradesh, India Reuters Snake charmers of Uttar Pradesh A snake charmer sits on a road with his belongings after returning home from a month-long trip in Jogi Dera (snake charmers settlement), in the village of Baghpur, in the central state of Uttar Pradesh, India Reuters Snake charmers of Uttar Pradesh Snakes are seen inside a pot in Jogi Dera (snake charmers settlement), in the village of Baghpur, in the central state of Uttar Pradesh, India Reuters Snake charmers of Uttar Pradesh Children of snake charmers sit next to a fire on a cold winter evening in Jogi Dera (snake charmers settlement), in the village of Baghpur, in the central state of Uttar Pradesh, India Reuters Snake charmers of Uttar Pradesh Binu Nath poses for a photograph with a snake in Jogi Dera (snake charmers settlement), in the village of Baghpur, in the central state of Uttar Pradesh, India Reuters Snake charmers of Uttar Pradesh A wife of a snake charmer stands outside her house in Jogi Dera (snake charmers settlement), in the village of Baghpur, in the central state of Uttar Pradesh, India Reuters The species has been named Branchs stiletto snake, or Atractaspis branchi, and was named in honour of the South African herpetologist Professor William Branch, a world-leading expert on African reptiles who died in February 2017. It was found by a team led by Dr Mark-Oliver Roedel from Berlin's Natural History Museum. The new species lives in areas of untouched rainforest and on jungle edges in the western part of the Upper Guinea forests a threatened region renowned for its unique and diverse fauna. Branchs stiletto snake is likely endemic to this area, the scientists said. The first specimen of the new species was collected at night from a steep bank of a small rocky riverbed in a lowland evergreen rainforest in Liberia. Upon picking it up, the snake tried to hide its head under body loops, bending it at an almost right angle, so its fangs were partly visible on the sides. Then, it repeatedly struck. The team reported that it jumped distances almost as long as its entire body. The other two specimens used for the description of the species were collected from banana, manioc and coffee plantations in south-eastern Guinea, about 27km apart. The discovery of a new and presumably endemic species of fossorial snake from the western Upper Guinea forests ... is not very surprising, the researchers said. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events They added: However, further surveys are needed to resolve the range of the new snake species, and to gather more information about its ecological needs and biological properties. The teams findings were published in the open-access journal Zoosystematics and Evolution. Fans of violent music are probably not being desensitised to real-world violence by their musical tastes, according to a new study. Music about cannibalism and death was used by a team of Chinese and Australian scientists alongside the song Happy by Pharrell Williams to investigate the impact songs have on their listeners. Concerns about violent films, video games and music influencing peoples behaviour have persisted for decades, with scientists frequently weighing in on both sides of the debate. Most recently in the UK, controversy has surrounded the Metropolitan Polices decision to target drill rappers, whose violent lyrics about gang disputes they have linked to knife crime. In a new study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the scientists set out to understand if exposure to violent music desensitises people to violence. Science news in pictures Show all 20 1 /20 Science news in pictures Science news in pictures Pluto has 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen Pluto has a 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen that is doing strange things to its surface, Nasa has found. The mysterious core seems to be the cause of features on its surface that have fascinated scientists since they were spotted by Nasa's New Horizons mission. "Before New Horizons, everyone thought Pluto was going to be a netball - completely flat, almost no diversity," said Tanguy Bertrand, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and the lead author on the new study. "But it's completely different. It has a lot of different landscapes and we are trying to understand what's going on there." Getty Science news in pictures Over 400 species discovered this year by Natural History Museum The ancient invertabrate worm-like species rhenopyrgus viviani (pictured) is one of over 400 species previously unknown to science that were discovered by experts at the Natural History Museum this year PA Science news in pictures Jackdaws can identify 'dangerous' humans Jackdaws can identify dangerous humans from listening to each others warning calls, scientists say. The highly social birds will also remember that person if they come near their nests again, according to researchers from the University of Exeter. In the study, a person unknown to the wild jackdaws approached their nest. At the same time scientists played a recording of a warning call (threatening) or contact calls (non-threatening). The next time jackdaws saw this same person, the birds that had previously heard the warning call were defensive and returned to their nests more than twice as quickly on average. Getty Science news in pictures Turtle embryos influence sex by shaking The sex of the turtle is determined by the temperatures at which they are incubated. Warm temperatures favour females. But by wiggling around the egg, embryos can find the Goldilocks Zone which means they are able to shield themselves against extreme thermal conditions and produce a balanced sex ratio, according to the new study published in Current Biology journal Ye et al/Current Biology Science news in pictures Elephant poaching rates drop in Africa African elephant poaching rates have dropped by 60 per cent in six years, an international study has found. It is thought the decline could be associated with the ivory trade ban introduced in China in 2017. Reuters Science news in pictures Ancient four-legged whale discovered in Peru Scientists have identified a four-legged creature with webbed feet to be an ancestor of the whale. Fossils unearthed in Peru have led scientists to conclude that the enormous creatures that traverse the planets oceans today are descended from small hoofed ancestors that lived in south Asia 50 million years ago A. Gennari Science news in pictures Animal with transient anus discovered A scientist has stumbled upon a creature with a transient anus that appears only when it is needed, before vanishing completely. Dr Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory could not initially find any trace of an anus on the species. However, as the animal gets full, a pore opens up to dispose of waste Steven G Johnson Science news in pictures Giant bee spotted Feared extinct, the Wallace's Giant bee has been spotted for the first time in nearly 40 years. An international team of conservationists spotted the bee, that is four times the size of a typical honeybee, on an expedition to a group of Indonesian Islands Clay Bolt Science news in pictures New mammal species found inside crocodile Fossilised bones digested by crocodiles have revealed the existence of three new mammal species that roamed the Cayman Islands 300 years ago. The bones belonged to two large rodent species and a small shrew-like animal New Mexico Museum of Natural History Science news in pictures Fabric that changes according to temperature created Scientists at the University of Maryland have created a fabric that adapts to heat, expanding to allow more heat to escape the body when warm and compacting to retain more heat when cold Faye Levine, University of Maryland Science news in pictures Baby mice tears could be used in pest control A study from the University of Tokyo has found that the tears of baby mice cause female mice to be less interested in the sexual advances of males Getty Science news in pictures Final warning to limit "climate catastrophe" The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a report which projects the impact of a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and warns against a higher increase Getty Science news in pictures Nobel prize for evolution chemists The nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three chemists working with evolution. Frances Smith is being awarded the prize for her work on directing the evolution of enzymes, while Gregory Winter and George Smith take the prize for their work on phage display of peptides and antibodies Getty/AFP Science news in pictures Nobel prize for laser physicists The nobel prize for physics has been awarded to three physicists working with lasers. Arthur Ashkin (L) was awarded for his "optical tweezers" which use lasers to grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells. Donna Strickland and Gerard Mourou were jointly awarded the prize for developing chirped-pulse amplification of lasers Reuters/AP Science news in pictures Discovery of a new species of dinosaur The Ledumahadi Mafube roamed around 200 million years ago in what is now South Africa. Recently discovered by a team of international scientists, it was the largest land animal of its time, weighing 12 tons and standing at 13 feet. In Sesotho, the South African language of the region in which the dinosaur was discovered, its name means "a giant thunderclap at dawn" Viktor Radermacher / SWNS Science news in pictures Birth of a planet Scientists have witnessed the birth of a planet for the first time ever. This spectacular image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70. The planet stands clearly out, visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the blinding light of the central star. ESO/A. Muller et al Science news in pictures New human organ discovered that was previously missed by scientists Layers long thought to be dense, connective tissue are actually a series of fluid-filled compartments researchers have termed the interstitium. These compartments are found beneath the skin, as well as lining the gut, lungs, blood vessels and muscles, and join together to form a network supported by a mesh of strong, flexible proteins Getty Science news in pictures Previously unknown society lived in Amazon rainforest before Europeans arrived, say archaeologists Working in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a team led by archaeologists at the University of Exeter unearthed hundreds of villages hidden in the depths of the rainforest. These excavations included evidence of fortifications and mysterious earthworks called geoglyphs Jose Iriarte Science news in pictures One in 10 people have traces of cocaine or heroin on fingerprints, study finds More than one in 10 people were found to have traces of class A drugs on their fingers by scientists developing a new fingerprint-based drug test. Using sensitive analysis of the chemical composition of sweat, researchers were able to tell the difference between those who had been directly exposed to heroin and cocaine, and those who had encountered it indirectly. Getty Science news in pictures Nasa releases stunning images of Jupiter's great red spot The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth. Pictures by: Tom Momary Instead of aggressive rap music, they chose death metal, a genre that often addresses themes like torture and satanic rituals. To test its effects on fans, they first recruited a fairly small sample group of university students, consisting of 32 self-professed death metal fans and 48 non-fans. They then used an experimental set-up in which violent and non-violent images were presented to the study participants one in each eye who were then told to indicate which one they focused on. In such tests, the participants focus is thought to determine their bias towards one theme or another. The scientists found everyone, including those who professed a love for gory lyrics and screaming vocals, was drawn towards the violent images being presented to them. This finding raises doubts about arguments that long-term exposure to violent media may desensitise consumers to violence, the scientists wrote. However, they also wanted to explore how people's responses changed when they were in the act of listening to different songs. They chose two pieces of music to use in their experiments, the first being Eaten by the Swedish death metal group Bloodbath. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The researchers said they chose the song because it has explicitly violent lyrics accompanied by music with acoustic qualities that are characteristics of biological signals of aggression, for example growling and screaming. They opted for the chart-topping Happy due to its prosocial and joyous lyrics accompanied by musical qualities with a positive emotional connotation. These experiments suggested that in the short term while listening to the music, death metal fans did not make the same link between the violence in the songs and the violent images. The scientists attributed this effect to the fans enjoyment of the genre trumping any negative associations arising from its themes. We really would like to see everyone treat each other with dignity, kindness and respect, Rowley said. If we pay attention to the people around us, we should be able to see if someone is moving in an unhealthy direction. Find a supervisor to reach out to and check on the person, so we can avoid the point where someone seeks violence. It is a tough conundrum. During the 2016 Brexit referendum, the countryside was seemingly covered in huge billboards, presumably placed there by farmers and landowners, urging a Leave vote. And yet now, as the outraged response from the National Farmers Union makes clear, agriculture seems set to be one of the biggest losers from Brexit, especially under the no-deal scenario currently under discussion. Their fear, if not their earlier voting record, is easily explained. Boris Johnson has sparked outrage after claiming money spent investigating historic child sexual abuse had been spaffed up the wall. Labour branded the ex-foreign secretary a shameless, dangerous oaf for his latest gaffe, which came in response to questions about police numbers during a radio phone-in. Mr Johnson, who has long harboured Tory leadership ambitions, argued that money spent on investigating historic crimes would be better channelled into boosting police numbers, in the wake of a spate of fatal stabbings. But the former London mayors crude choice of language immediately drew criticism, with MPs urging him to apologise to victims. Recommended Boris Johnson made to apologise for failure to declare earnings Mr Johnson told LBC: Keeping numbers high on the streets is certainly important but the question is about where you spend the money and where you deploy the officers. And one comment I would make is I think an awful lot of money and an awful lot of police time now goes into these historic offences and all this malarkey. You know, 60m I saw was being spaffed up a wall, you know, on some investigation into historic child abuse. Political figures caricatured at German carnival Show all 22 1 /22 Political figures caricatured at German carnival Political figures caricatured at German carnival Donald Trump is depicted as a raging bull AP Political figures caricatured at German carnival Prime Minister Theresa May is depicted as piercing the economy with Brexit Getty Political figures caricatured at German carnival US president Donald Trump is depicted as an angel flying behind Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman who is wielding a bloody chainsaw Getty Political figures caricatured at German carnival Italian Inteior Minister and deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini is depicted as feeding racism and nationalism. He also bears a tattoo of affection for the mafia Getty Political figures caricatured at German carnival Chairman of Poland's leading Law and Justice Party (PIS) Jaroslaw Kaczynski is depicted as crucifying liberal Poland Getty Political figures caricatured at German carnival Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is depicted running towards the EU for asylum AP Political figures caricatured at German carnival Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is depicted running towards the EU for asylum Reuters Political figures caricatured at German carnival Planet Earth is depicted as eating plastic waste EPA Political figures caricatured at German carnival The frontside of a float depicting Germany's far-right party Alternative fur Deutschland (AFD)... Reuters Political figures caricatured at German carnival ...and the backside of the float. Depicting a German nazi AP Political figures caricatured at German carnival US president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin are depicted tearing up the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which the US recently pulled out of Getty Political figures caricatured at German carnival A Catholic bishop is depicted as sleeping on "the merciless processing of abuse cases" Getty Political figures caricatured at German carnival Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is depicted as being covered in blood Reuters Political figures caricatured at German carnival Donald Trump is depicted as a raging bull Reuters Political figures caricatured at German carnival German Chancellor Angela Merkel is depicted as sitting on a knackered horse and holding out a carrot AP Political figures caricatured at German carnival The horse is called "Koalition" in reference to Germany's ruling coalition AFP/Getty Images Political figures caricatured at German carnival The carrot bears the label "AKK", an abbreviation of Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Merkel's successor as leader of the Christian Democratic Union Reuters Political figures caricatured at German carnival A paper mache figure of a priest carrying an attache case reading "let the children come towards me" is seen during the presentation of the floats for the upcoming Rose Monday parade in Mainz, Germany Reuters Political figures caricatured at German carnival German Chancellor Angela Merkel is depicted as a rabbit waiting to be shot by her Interior Minister Horst Seehofer AP Political figures caricatured at German carnival German Chancellor Angela Merkel is depicted as a rabbit waiting to be shot by her Interior Minister Horst Seehofer EPA Political figures caricatured at German carnival German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer is depicted as holding a bent gun that he intends to aim at Chancellor Angela Merkel EPA Political figures caricatured at German carnival Andrea Naples, leader of the German Social Democrats (SPD) who are in coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel's party AP What on earth is that going to do to protect the public now? Shadow policing minister Louise Haigh said his comments were inappropriate and offensive to victims families, branding him a shameless, dangerous oaf. She added: Could you look the victims in the eye and tell them investigating and bringing to justice those who abused them, as children, is a waste of money? Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor in northwest England who led prosecutions into abuse in Rotherham, condemned the remarks. He tweeted: Tell that to those whose lives were devastated by abusers. Tell that Frances Andrade [a musician who accused a former choirmaster of abuse] who took her own life 30 yrs after the abuse she lived with every day. Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, said: Boris Johnson hits a new low even for him, disgusting comments and he must apologise for his remarks. This self-serving individual makes a career out of gaffes but this is truly awful stuff. Ministers established the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in 2014 in the wake of allegations of abuse by Jimmy Savile. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The inquiry has heard evidence of horrific abuse linked to childrens homes, schools, the Catholic and Anglican churches and government migration programmes. Mr Johnson committed a string of humiliating gaffes while foreign secretary, which included reciting a colonial poem in a Myanmar temple and referring to the continent of Africa as that country. At the Conservative conference in 2017, Mr Johnson was widely condemned after claiming the Libyan city of Sirte would have a bright future as a luxury resort once they cleared the dead bodies away. Philip Hammond has challenged Theresa May to start "building a consensus" in parliament for a Brexit plan as he hinted that the prime minister will need to back down if she is to secure MPs approval for deal. In an impassioned plea at the end of his Spring Statement, the chancellor said there was now an "opportunity to start to map out a way forward" to find a Brexit plan "we can collectively support". The comments put him firmly at odds with Ms May, who has insisted her deal is the only one possible. Hinting at his support for a softer Brexit, Mr Hammond said any deal must "allow Britain to flourish, protecting jobs and business". He confirmed that he would be voting against a no-deal Brexit in tonight's crunch vote. A second vote, scheduled for tomorrow, will see MPs decide whether they want to seek a delay to Brexit. Recommended Brexit uncertainty damaging economy says Philip Hammond Mr Hammond's statement followed a cabinet clash over how the government should proceed after Ms May's deal was rejected by MPs last night for a second time. Some ministers reportedly called on the prime minister to now opt for no-deal, while others urged her to drop her red lines and agree to a softer Brexit. The chancellor is said to have led calls for the prime minister to reach out and try to form a cross-party consensus for a Brexit plan. If it is to secure Labour's support, any such agreement would likely need to involve the UK staying in a customs union with the EU - something Ms May has repeatedly ruled out. Repeating his message in the Commons, Mr Hammond told MPs: "Last night's events mean we are not where I hoped we would be today. "Our economy is fundamentally robust. But the uncertainty that I hoped we would lift last night, still hangs over it. "We cannot allow that to continue. It is damaging our economy and it is damaging our standing and reputation in the world. Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Show all 15 1 /15 Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Pork There will be tariffs on pork in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cheese There will be tariffs in place on some cheeses including 22.10/100kg of cheddar, 19.10/100kg of processed cheese and 18.60/100kg on some blue cheeses Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Milk There will be no tariffs in place on milk Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Car Parts There will be no tariffs on car parts imported from Europe PA Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cars However finished cars will face tariffs of 10.6% Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Alcoholic drinks There will be no tariffs on alcoholic drinks - except on some rums due to ingredients used in their distilling process Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Beef There will be tariffs on beef in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fish There will be no tariffs on many types of fish including cod, haddock, salmon and sea bass Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fruit and vegetables There will be no tariffs on almost all fruit and vegetables Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Chocolate There will be no tariffs on chocolate or other cocoa products Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Poultry There will be tariffs on poultry in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ceramics There will be some tariffs in place on ceramis Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Steel There will be no tariffs on steel Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Coal There will be no tariffs on coal Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Lamb/Mutton There will be tariffs on the meat of sheep in order to protect British farmers Getty Diverging dramatically from Ms May's message that her deal is the only one possible, he insisted: "Tonight, we have a choice. We can remove the threat of an imminent no-deal exit hanging over our economy. "Tomorrow, we will have the opportunity to start to map out a way forward towards building a consensus across this House for a deal we can collectively support, to exit the EU in an orderly way to a future relationship that will allow Britain to flourish, protecting jobs and businesses Insisting that "a brighter future is within our grasp", he added: "Tonight, let's take a decisive step towards seizing it and building a Britain fit for the future - a Britain the next generation will be proud to call their home." However, Mr Hammond was immediately contradicted by his de facto deputy, Treasury chief secretary Liz Truss. She said she would be voting to keep no-deal on the table tonight's vote, in which Ms May is allowing MPs to vote how they want, insisting that it was "vitally important" to do so. She told BBC's Politics Live: "I am going to vote to keep no deal on the table. I think it's vitally important that we keep no deal on the table, we hold our nerve and we keep pressure up because if we extend, if we allow the pressure to dissipate, ultimately I fear that we won't end up delivering Brexit at all, and that will be a massive problem with public trust." Theresa May's Brexit deal defeated in the House of Commons When asked about Mr Hammond's comments, Treasury aides played down the idea that he was not supportive of Ms May's deal. Meanwhile the prime minister's official spokesman said: "I point you back to the PM's words last night. She said, 'this House faces choices in the coming days'. She set out her determination to leave with a deal." The spokesman went on: "If we are to do that, that will mean finding common ground on a way forward, and as far as I can see, that's what the chancellor was saying." Michel Barnier has questioned whether and why the EU would grant Britain an extension to Article 50, ahead of a vote by MPs on moving back the date of Brexit. Speaking in the European Parliament the EUs chief negotiator reiterated that negotiations were over. Why would we extend these discussions? The discussion on Article 50, that is done and dusted. We have the withdrawal agreement, it is there. That is the question asked and we are waiting for the answer to that, he told MEPs. Mr Barnier added that before the EU could make a decision on a further extension the UK would have to come up with a plan to build a a constructive majority in its own parliament. It is the responsibility of the United Kingdom they have to tell us what it is they want for our future relations, what will their choice be? That is the question that we need an answer to now. That is the question that has to be answered before a decision, really, on a possible further extension. Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Show all 15 1 /15 Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Pork There will be tariffs on pork in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cheese There will be tariffs in place on some cheeses including 22.10/100kg of cheddar, 19.10/100kg of processed cheese and 18.60/100kg on some blue cheeses Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Milk There will be no tariffs in place on milk Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Car Parts There will be no tariffs on car parts imported from Europe PA Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cars However finished cars will face tariffs of 10.6% Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Alcoholic drinks There will be no tariffs on alcoholic drinks - except on some rums due to ingredients used in their distilling process Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Beef There will be tariffs on beef in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fish There will be no tariffs on many types of fish including cod, haddock, salmon and sea bass Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fruit and vegetables There will be no tariffs on almost all fruit and vegetables Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Chocolate There will be no tariffs on chocolate or other cocoa products Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Poultry There will be tariffs on poultry in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ceramics There will be some tariffs in place on ceramis Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Steel There will be no tariffs on steel Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Coal There will be no tariffs on coal Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Lamb/Mutton There will be tariffs on the meat of sheep in order to protect British farmers Getty He was backed up by European Parliament Brexit chief Guy Verhofstadt, who told MEPs: Im against every extension if it isnt based on a clear opinion of the House of Commons for something they want. Please make up your minds in London, because this uncertainty cant continue not for us, not for Britain, and certainly not for our citizens. The pairs comments echo those made by French president Emmanuel Macron, who said his country would block an extension of Article 50 without a clear objective. He added that any delay had to be justified by a new choice of the British. There is little appetite in Brussels to keep kicking the can down the road, with views among EU diplomats mixed on the possibility of an Article 50 extension. Some countries are more unconditionally open to one to avoid a no-deal Brexit, while others more keen to attach conditions. An extension would require a unanimous vote of the 27 remaining EU member states. Without their approval, Britain would crash out without a deal on 29 March 2019, unless it ratifies the withdrawal agreement or decides to revoke Article 50 completely. Brussels washed its hands of responsibility for trying to pass the Brexit deal late on Tuesday after MPs rejected the withdrawal agreement for the second time. A spokesperson for European Council president Donald Tusk said that the EU had done all that is possible to reach an agreement. Given the additional assurances provided by the EU in December, January, and yesterday, it is difficult to see what more we can do. If there is a solution to the current impasse it can only be found in London, he told reporters in Brussels. Brexit has long come to resemble the messy ending of a long though loveless marriage, replete with resentment and self-perpetuating recriminations. A British six-year-old, however, may have done more than any one of the numerous negotiators to show the power of quiet diplomacy and sincere affection as opposed to hostility and vitriol. A supremely heartfelt letter, sent to Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, and shared on his Instagram account, revealed a distinctly softer side to British demands for a close future partnership. "Dear Mr Tusk," began the handwritten message from Sophie. "I live in Britain. I know we are leaving the EU. But I think we should be friends." Accompanied by a unicorn and heart sticker, she continued: "Please may I have a signed photo of you for my Europe book." As revealed on his official Instagram page, Mr Tusk responded: "We will always be friends, Sophie." Last year Ivan Rogers, the former UK ambassador to the EU, claimed UK hopes of finding a technical solution to the Irish border issue was viewed in Europe as a "fantasy island unicorn model". The letter generated a string of supportive comments including many who backed Sophie's appeal for friendship despite the bad-tempered continentatl relations. "Well said Sophie," wrote one. "Brexit has been so poisonous. We must remain friends." Papers react to the Brexit vote Show all 10 1 /10 Papers react to the Brexit vote Papers react to the Brexit vote The Guardian The Guardian highlights just how soon the Prime Minister's defeat has come Britain's scheduled date of departure Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Mail The Daily Mail takes aim at MPs who political editor Jason Groves claims have "plunged Britain into chaos" by rejecting the Prime Minister's deal Papers react to the Brexit vote The Independent Daily Edition The Independent calls for a second referendum as a way forward Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Express The Daily Express leads with exasperation, with political editor Macer Hall writing that "Brexit was hanging in the balance last night" Papers react to the Brexit vote The Sun The Sun take the Prime Minister's "croaky" voice into account as it reports on last night's "Brexit shambles" Papers react to the Brexit vote Financial Times The Financial Times claims that the Prime Minister's authority is "in shreds" and reports on the fall in the pound in the wake of the vote Papers react to the Brexit vote The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph calls the Prime Minister's defeat "humiliating" and claims that a delay to Brexit is likely Papers react to the Brexit vote The i The i claims that parliament is "out of control" Papers react to the Brexit vote The Times The Times claims that Britain is in crisis and that the Prime Minister "may face resignation calls" Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Mirror The Daily Mirror says that the Prime Minister "surrenders" in reference to the likelihood of Brexit being delayed after the vote The response came a day after MPs rejected for the second time Theresa May's withdrawal agreement, plunging the Brexit process even deeper into chaos. Labour has further backed away from its support for a fresh Brexit referendum by saying it no longer supports a public vote on Theresa Mays deal. A spokesman for Jeremy Corbyn said the party was ditching demands for Ms May to put her deal to a public vote if it passes parliament, because her plan was no longer credible. Labour had previously called for the public to be given a Final Say referendum if MPs do finally pass Ms Mays deal. However, it now says it would not be right for the prime ministers plan to be put to the public after it was rejected by MPs last night for a second time, The announcement marks a further watering-down of the partys pledge to back another referendum. The Independent revealed last week that Labour had almost immediately ditched its promise to support a public vote on whatever deal is agreed by parliament and was instead only calling for a public vote on Ms Mays withdrawal plan. Recommended Corbyn backtracks on Final Say referendum Having now said it would not support a referendum on this either, it is unclear what sort of Brexit deal, if any, Labour would want to see put to the public. A spokesman for Mr Corbyn said: Theresa Mays deal has now been overwhelmingly rejected twice, so were not calling for a referendum against her overwhelmingly rejected deal. He added: Clearly Mays deal has been overwhelmingly rejected and it is loathed by almost all parts of the political spectrum. Therefore clearly it would not be right for that deal in its current form to be put to a referendum. Only last week, however, the party said it would order its MPs to support a Commons motion, tabled by Labour backbenchers Peter Kyle and Phil Wilson, calling for a public vote on Ms Mays deal if it is approved by MPs. And Mr Corbyn has previously said the prime ministers plan must be put to a confirmatory public vote if it is passed by parliament. Labour now sees a fresh referendum as merely one of several ways to block a no-deal Brexit or an exit deal it does not support. It is also working to build a Commons consensus behind a softer Brexit that would see the UK stay in a customs union with the EU and maintain close ties to the single market. Papers react to the Brexit vote Show all 10 1 /10 Papers react to the Brexit vote Papers react to the Brexit vote The Guardian The Guardian highlights just how soon the Prime Minister's defeat has come Britain's scheduled date of departure Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Mail The Daily Mail takes aim at MPs who political editor Jason Groves claims have "plunged Britain into chaos" by rejecting the Prime Minister's deal Papers react to the Brexit vote The Independent Daily Edition The Independent calls for a second referendum as a way forward Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Express The Daily Express leads with exasperation, with political editor Macer Hall writing that "Brexit was hanging in the balance last night" Papers react to the Brexit vote The Sun The Sun take the Prime Minister's "croaky" voice into account as it reports on last night's "Brexit shambles" Papers react to the Brexit vote Financial Times The Financial Times claims that the Prime Minister's authority is "in shreds" and reports on the fall in the pound in the wake of the vote Papers react to the Brexit vote The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph calls the Prime Minister's defeat "humiliating" and claims that a delay to Brexit is likely Papers react to the Brexit vote The i The i claims that parliament is "out of control" Papers react to the Brexit vote The Times The Times claims that Britain is in crisis and that the Prime Minister "may face resignation calls" Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Mirror The Daily Mirror says that the Prime Minister "surrenders" in reference to the likelihood of Brexit being delayed after the vote The spokesman said: |n order to stop a damaging Tory Brexit or a no-deal outcome and find a way through the Brexit impasse, we support a general election, a public vote or finding a close economic relationship that can command the support of the Commons, be negotiated with the EU and bring Leave and Remain voters together. In a hint that securing agreement for a Brexit deal remains the partys priority, he added: We said in our manifesto in 2017 that we respect the result of the referendum so its not our aim to overturn that result. Labour has said it would not necessarily want a referendum on a withdrawal deal the party supported. Asked if the party would want to put a Labour-backed deal to a public vote, the spokesman said simply: That doesnt necessarily follow. Pushed on whether he was saying that Labour would not support a referendum on a Brexit deal it approves of, he added: Thats not what Im saying, but Im not saying we definitely would either. We have to see what happens in this next stage. EU leaders have begun directly urging Theresa May to hold a fresh Brexit referendum, amid frustration on the continent at the political crisis raging in Britain. Andrej Babis, the Czech prime minister, revealed on Wednesday that he had called Ms May at the weekend and urged her to hold another vote with a view to staying in the EU. It comes after French president Emmanuel Macron and other EU figures warned that they would only grant an extension to Article 50 if the UK could come up with a reason why it needed more time. On Saturday I called with the British Prime Minister Theresa May, Mr Babis said in a tweet. We solved Brexit. I told her that the best solution would be for the UK to remain in the European Union. That is why I believe it is worth holding a new referendum. She refused, but I still don't think it was impossible. MPs will vote on Thursday on whether to order the Government to seek an extension of Article 50, but whether the EU would grant one is less than clear-cut, with some member states more enthusiastic than others. A new referendum would require a long extension, with the UKs own Electoral Commission estimating that a delay as long as six months could be required to stage another vote. Another option on the table is a shorter extension which would have the advantage of meaning the UK did not have to participate in EU Parliament elections due for May. But a more limited period would probably not be enough for a public vote. Czech Republic Prime Minister Andrej Babis (AP) In September Maltese prime minister Joseph Muscat said that support for a second referendum was at the time almost unanimous among EU leaders though many have declined to speak out openly on one. EU leaders have repeatedly said that they respect the choice of the British public. Mr Babis himself said then that he was very unhappy that the UK was leaving and that it would be better maybe to make another referendum and the people in the meantime could change their view. Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Show all 15 1 /15 Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Pork There will be tariffs on pork in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cheese There will be tariffs in place on some cheeses including 22.10/100kg of cheddar, 19.10/100kg of processed cheese and 18.60/100kg on some blue cheeses Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Milk There will be no tariffs in place on milk Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Car Parts There will be no tariffs on car parts imported from Europe PA Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cars However finished cars will face tariffs of 10.6% Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Alcoholic drinks There will be no tariffs on alcoholic drinks - except on some rums due to ingredients used in their distilling process Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Beef There will be tariffs on beef in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fish There will be no tariffs on many types of fish including cod, haddock, salmon and sea bass Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fruit and vegetables There will be no tariffs on almost all fruit and vegetables Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Chocolate There will be no tariffs on chocolate or other cocoa products Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Poultry There will be tariffs on poultry in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ceramics There will be some tariffs in place on ceramis Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Steel There will be no tariffs on steel Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Coal There will be no tariffs on coal Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Lamb/Mutton There will be tariffs on the meat of sheep in order to protect British farmers Getty Britain will crash out of the EU on the 29 March without a deal if it does not ratify the withdrawal agreement, get an extension from the other member states, or unilaterally cancel Brexit. But there appears to be little sign of the prime minister getting her plan through, after it was rejected a second time by MPs despite concessions from the EU. The EU has also ruled out any further negotiations and said any solution to the current impasse must be found in London. Liam Foxs claim to have secured a post-Brexit trade deal with Switzerland of huge economic importance has been sharply criticised because it fails to protect about half of current commerce. The agreement one of the few successfully rolled over, with the scheduled departure from the EU just 16 days away does not cover services, a committee of peers has warned. Most trade in services, which make up 52 per cent of all UK-Swiss trade, is not covered by the deal, its report says. Trade with Switzerland, which is outside the EU but participates in its single market, is worth about 31bn a year to the UK economy, making a rollover a key government priority. Signing the deal in a blaze of publicity last month, Dr Fox said: This is of huge economic importance to UK businesses so I'm delighted to be here in Bern ensuring continuity for 15,000 British exporters. But the report, by the House of Lords EU Committee also highlights that: Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Show all 15 1 /15 Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Pork There will be tariffs on pork in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cheese There will be tariffs in place on some cheeses including 22.10/100kg of cheddar, 19.10/100kg of processed cheese and 18.60/100kg on some blue cheeses Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Milk There will be no tariffs in place on milk Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Car Parts There will be no tariffs on car parts imported from Europe PA Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cars However finished cars will face tariffs of 10.6% Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Alcoholic drinks There will be no tariffs on alcoholic drinks - except on some rums due to ingredients used in their distilling process Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Beef There will be tariffs on beef in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fish There will be no tariffs on many types of fish including cod, haddock, salmon and sea bass Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fruit and vegetables There will be no tariffs on almost all fruit and vegetables Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Chocolate There will be no tariffs on chocolate or other cocoa products Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Poultry There will be tariffs on poultry in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ceramics There will be some tariffs in place on ceramis Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Steel There will be no tariffs on steel Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Coal There will be no tariffs on coal Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Lamb/Mutton There will be tariffs on the meat of sheep in order to protect British farmers Getty * The deal risks new limits on the export of agricultural products from the UK to Switzerland for example, a possible ban on organic products. * Switzerland may no longer recognise UK businesses as authorised economic operators, eligible for lighter controls at the Swiss border. Lord Boswell, the committees Conservative chairman, urged MPs and peers to investigate the possible weaknesses before ratifying the Swiss deal. Trade with Switzerland matters. Its our 10th biggest trading partner globally and the third largest of non-EU States, he said. We have a large trade surplus in services with Switzerland, including financial services and professional business services. So its important we get our future trading relationship right. The agreement signed by Dr Fox in many aspects differs significantly from the EU-Swiss agreements it replaces, Lord Boswell added. The report points out that Switzerland is only the UKs 15th largest partner in goods trade but the 7th largest for services. The UK has a large trade surplus in services, overwhelmingly made up of financial services (1.95bn) and other business services (6.5bn), it states. Dr Fox has run into criticism because his department for international trade has struck continuity agreements" with just seven of the 69 countries and regions with which the EU has trade deals. They give businesses a range of preferential market access opportunities, including cheaper import tariffs and duties and more relaxed rules of origin requirements. The deals also deliver enhanced market access for services, public procurement opportunities and improved protections for intellectual property. In 2017, Dr Fox confidently predicted the deals, accounting for around 11 per cent of the UK's trade, would all be ready for a second after midnight on Brexit day. Roll overs with Switzerland, Chile, the Faroe Islands, Eastern and Southern Africa, Israel and the Palestinian Authority have been secured but the deals with Japan and Turkey, for example, will not be ready, he admitted. Commons speaker John Bercow has indicated he will rule on whether Theresa May is allowed to repeatedly make MPs vote on her Brexit deal after it was twice defeated. On Wednesday Mr Bercow said a ruling would be made on the matter with parliamentary convention barring a government from bringing the same motion back to the house over and again. His comments set him on course for another clash with Ms Mays administration, with government advisors believing they could disapply any ruling he makes if they win a commons vote on it. It comes after cabinet ministers and Ms Mays aides suggested she will bring the withdrawal agreement she negotiated with Brussels back to the house for a third time after it was defeated by 149 votes on Tuesday. Mr Bercow made his comments after he was questioned about the matter by Labour MP Angela Eagle, who said it would be out of order for the government to bring the deal back for a third vote. The Speaker said: There are historical precedents for the way such matters are regarded. I dont need to treat of them now and no ruling is required now. There may be people who have an opinion about it, Im not really preoccupied with that, but a ruling would be made at the appropriate time, and Im grateful for [Ms Eagle] for reminding me that such a ruling might at some point in the future be required. Mr Bercow has sought to build a reputation as a champion of backbenchers against the government and has sided with the commons in most disputes. Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Show all 15 1 /15 Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Pork There will be tariffs on pork in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cheese There will be tariffs in place on some cheeses including 22.10/100kg of cheddar, 19.10/100kg of processed cheese and 18.60/100kg on some blue cheeses Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Milk There will be no tariffs in place on milk Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Car Parts There will be no tariffs on car parts imported from Europe PA Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cars However finished cars will face tariffs of 10.6% Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Alcoholic drinks There will be no tariffs on alcoholic drinks - except on some rums due to ingredients used in their distilling process Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Beef There will be tariffs on beef in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fish There will be no tariffs on many types of fish including cod, haddock, salmon and sea bass Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fruit and vegetables There will be no tariffs on almost all fruit and vegetables Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Chocolate There will be no tariffs on chocolate or other cocoa products Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Poultry There will be tariffs on poultry in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ceramics There will be some tariffs in place on ceramis Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Steel There will be no tariffs on steel Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Coal There will be no tariffs on coal Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Lamb/Mutton There will be tariffs on the meat of sheep in order to protect British farmers Getty In the past, he has even gone against the advice of expert commons clerks, using his authority to overrule them and allow a government motion to be amended by backbenchers something which ultimately gave MPs more control of the Brexit process. On repeat votes, the handbook for parliamentary procedure Erskine May says: A motion or an amendment which is the same, in substance, as a question which has been decided during a session may not be brought forward again during that same session. It says a decision on whether verbal alterations amount to real changes are a matter for the judgment of the chair [in this case Mr Bercow]. Government ministers are aware of the potential stumbling block to Ms May staging a third vote on her deal, but believe they have a right to try and disapply any disadvantageous ruling though it would require them to win a vote on it in the commons. Ms May lost the first meaningful vote on her Brexit deal by 230 votes, and then again by a smaller but nonetheless historically large margin on Tuesday night. House speaker John Bercow makes unusual noise in House of Commons Asked after the most recent defeat whether the government would consider bringing back Ms Mays deal for a further vote, the prime ministers spokesman indicated it was possible. Cabinet minister Alun Cairns went further saying that the second defeat for Ms Mays negotiated settlement was not the end of the deal and that there was still everything to play for. He said: I also think that as those votes [on removing no-deal and delaying Brexit] go through, if no deal is taken off the table, I suspect that therell be a lot of ERG colleagues who might then think now this is the time to support a deal. New plans announced by the government to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss have been dismissed as greenwashing by environmental groups. Carbon offsets for flights and an end to gas heating in new homes were among the measures floated by Philip Hammond in his Spring Statement. But with consultations and calls for evidence supplanting hard targets, the chancellor was accused of fiddling while the planet burns. Caroline Lucas said Mr Hammonds rhetoric was littered with contradictions, amid growing unrest in response to the governments perceived environmental failings. He announced energy efficiency standards for new homes, which his party scrapped in 2015. He wants travel providers to offer carbon offsets, while he builds new runways, said the Green MP. Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here Show all 29 1 /29 Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The protest in Parliament Square, London on February 15 AFP/Getty Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The protest in Parliament Square, London on February 15 Getty Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The protest in Parliament Square, London on February 15 EPA Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The protest in Manchester on February 15 Getty Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The protest in Manchester on February 15 Getty Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The protest in Parliament Square, London on February 15 Getty Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The protest in Brighton on February 15 Getty Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The protest in Parliament Square, London on February 15 AFP/Getty Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The protest in Parliament Square, London on February 15 AFP/Getty Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The protest in Parliament Square, London on February 15 Reuters Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The protest in Parliament Square, London on February 15 PA Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The protest in Parliament Square, London on February 15 PA Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The protest in Parliament Square, London on February 15 PA Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The protest in Parliament Square, London on February 15 PA Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The protest in Parliament Square, London on February 15 PA Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The march in Brussels, February 14 Reuters Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The march in Brussels, February 14 Reuters Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The march in Brussels, February 14 AP Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The march in Brussels, February 14 AP Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The march in Brussels, February 14 Reuters Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The march in Brussels, February 14 AP Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The march in Brussels, February 14 AP Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The march in Brussels, February 14 Reuters Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The march in Brussels, February 14 Reuters Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The march in Brussels, February 14 Reuters Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The march in Brussels, February 14 Reuters Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The march in Brussels, February 14 Reuters Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The march in Brussels, February 14 Reuters Climate strike: See the best signs from the protest here The march in Brussels, February 14 AP She said the chancellor was merely paying lip service to biodiversity protection following swingeing cuts to Natural England the body tasked with monitoring the countrys nature and wildlife. After the autumn Budget Mr Hammond was derided for not mentioning climate change at all, just weeks after scientists issued a dire warning about the need to act. Instead, he faced criticism for pledging a huge investment in road building, despite cars now overtaking energy production as the biggest source of British emissions. In the run-up to the statement, Mr Hammond said he had heard calls from young people to take more action on the environment, following a wave of protests and school strikes across the nation. Another such strike is expected to take place on Friday, with thousands of children across the UK staging walkouts alongside pupils in more than 80 countries. Mr Hammond told MPs he intended to apply the creativity of the marketplace to deliver solutions to one of the most complex problems of our time climate change. Philip Hammond's Spring Statement in 60 seconds Housing and businesses were both in the chancellors sights, with promises to investigate ways to make companies more efficient and rely more on green gas in heating systems. Government advisers have warned that UK housing is falling far behind in efforts to tackle climate change, and that emissions from heating as well as transport must be eliminated within two decades if the UK is to meet its legally binding targets. But despite the chancellor pledging to end gas heating systems in new homes by 2025, campaigners said more would need to be done to ensure these targets were met. With the government enthusiastically backing more runways, more roads and fracking, its little wonder the UK is likely to miss future climate targets, said Dave Timms, Friends of the Earths head of political affairs. The chancellor should have announced a massive programme of investment in home insulation and public transport, instead of pushing the false solution of carbon off-setting for aviation. Instead of putting climate change at the heart of economic policy-making, the Chancellor is merely fiddling in the margins while the planet burns. Besides climate change, the chancellor emphasised the economic importance of preventing nature loss, announcing new marine protected areas and a global review of the importance of biodiversity. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Mel Evans, a senior campaigner at Greenpeace UK, said such a move could be a really significant moment in our global nature crisis, and praised Mr Hammonds announcement of marine protections. But unfortunately too much of what weve heard today, from plastic waste to climate change, isn't new and isnt bold enough, she said. It was an unusual moment in an Irish pub usually alive with music and talking. But any rowdiness that night took a back seat to the mission, which was to help the Aurora Strong Community Fund, created by the city to raise money for the families of the five victims of the Henry Pratt Co. shooting Feb. 15. Tariffs will be scrapped or slashed on almost all imports after a no-deal Brexit threatening job losses in UK firms and there will be no checks at the Irish border, it has been announced. The governments secret unilateral plan was finally published just hours before MPs are given the chance to veto the UK crashing out of the EU without a deal. Levies will still be charged on beef, lamb, pork and poultry and some dairy products, to protect UK farmers, and on some products including finished vehicles and ceramics. But Carolyn Fairbairn, the head of the CBI employers organisation, described the situation as a sledgehammer for our economy. The biggest change to tariff policy since the mid-19th century was being imposed with no consultation with business and no time to prepare, she protested. Recommended May loses control of Brexit policy as MPs move to dictate terms Industry leaders fear being undercut by competition from emerging economies, such as China and Brazil, from which unlike EU imports tariffs are currently levied. At the Irish land border, an honesty box will see businesses expected to self-report the movement of goods, with an online system for VAT payments. The move is seen as the only way to avoid border posts and checks despite the risk of a smugglers paradise and severe damage to Northern Irish farms and businesses. Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Show all 15 1 /15 Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Pork There will be tariffs on pork in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cheese There will be tariffs in place on some cheeses including 22.10/100kg of cheddar, 19.10/100kg of processed cheese and 18.60/100kg on some blue cheeses Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Milk There will be no tariffs in place on milk Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Car Parts There will be no tariffs on car parts imported from Europe PA Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cars However finished cars will face tariffs of 10.6% Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Alcoholic drinks There will be no tariffs on alcoholic drinks - except on some rums due to ingredients used in their distilling process Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Beef There will be tariffs on beef in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fish There will be no tariffs on many types of fish including cod, haddock, salmon and sea bass Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fruit and vegetables There will be no tariffs on almost all fruit and vegetables Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Chocolate There will be no tariffs on chocolate or other cocoa products Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Poultry There will be tariffs on poultry in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ceramics There will be some tariffs in place on ceramis Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Steel There will be no tariffs on steel Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Coal There will be no tariffs on coal Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Lamb/Mutton There will be tariffs on the meat of sheep in order to protect British farmers Getty But Stephen Barclay, the Brexit secretary, insisted the plan was a modest liberalisation and a temporary measure that would last while we see what the real term consequences are. It is designed to stop shoppers being hit by higher prices, while protecting the most vulnerable sectors and increasing pressure on MPs to vote down a crash-out Brexit on Wednesday evening. Before that, the strategy will also see Philip Hammond, the chancellor, use his Spring Statement to promise the release of billions of pounds of spending if the Commons changes its mind and passes Theresa Mays deal. The proposed tariffs are set out as a proportion of the so-called most favoured nation (MFN) rates currently imposed by the EU on imports from countries which do not have a free trade agreement. They are beef (53 per cent of MFN), poultry meat (60 per cent), sheep meat (100 per cent), pig meat (13 per cent), butter (32 per cent), Cheddar-like cheese (13 per cent), protected fish and seafood products (100 per cent) and milled and semi-milled products (83 per cent). Tariffs on finished cars and trucks will be set at 10.6 per cent, down from the MFN rate of 11.3 per cent but zero on car parts imported from the EU to prevent disruption to supply chains. Officials said that the cutting of tariffs could have a small positive impact on GDP, although this would be dwarfed by the wider damage to the economy from leaving the EU without a deal. George Hollingbery, the trade minister, said: This balanced approach will help to support British jobs and avoid potential price spikes that would hit the poorest households the hardest. The chancellor Philip Hammond slashed the UKs growth forecast for this year, as he warned MPs his pledge to end austerity would be in tatters if they continue to block a Brexit deal. Delivering a low-key Spring Statement, Mr Hammond sought to emphasise the message that more cash for public services and tax cuts would flow only if a no-deal Brexit was avoided. Promising a deal dividend, he told the Commons: The progress that we have made will be at risk if we cant secure a smooth and orderly exit. Mr Hammond announced that borrowing would be 3bn lower than he predicted in the autumn, as the public finances improved, and that the economy was forecast to grow in each of the next five years. The 1.2 per cent growth in 2019 would be faster than Germany but it is a significant downgrade on the 1.6 per cent set out in last Octobers Budget. Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Show all 15 1 /15 Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Pork There will be tariffs on pork in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cheese There will be tariffs in place on some cheeses including 22.10/100kg of cheddar, 19.10/100kg of processed cheese and 18.60/100kg on some blue cheeses Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Milk There will be no tariffs in place on milk Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Car Parts There will be no tariffs on car parts imported from Europe PA Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cars However finished cars will face tariffs of 10.6% Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Alcoholic drinks There will be no tariffs on alcoholic drinks - except on some rums due to ingredients used in their distilling process Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Beef There will be tariffs on beef in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fish There will be no tariffs on many types of fish including cod, haddock, salmon and sea bass Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fruit and vegetables There will be no tariffs on almost all fruit and vegetables Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Chocolate There will be no tariffs on chocolate or other cocoa products Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Poultry There will be tariffs on poultry in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ceramics There will be some tariffs in place on ceramis Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Steel There will be no tariffs on steel Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Coal There will be no tariffs on coal Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Lamb/Mutton There will be tariffs on the meat of sheep in order to protect British farmers Getty There was no mention of the punishing benefits freeze, suggesting Mr Hammond had ignored cross-party pleas to axe it before its planned expiry in 2020. In two eye-catching announcements, the chancellor pledged free sanitary products for girls in secondary schools and colleges and 100m for extra police overtime to tackle the epidemic of knife crime He confirmed a full three-year spending review before the summer recess, to be concluded in the autumn, despite the huge uncertainty surrounding the damage from Brexit. Mr Hammond also diverted from Theresa Mays script by urging MPs to vote later to remove the threat of a crash-out Brexit and back an Article 50 extension arguing it would help MPs to agree a compromise deal. Speaking in the Commons, he insisted there was good news on the economy, with borrowing this year at 1.1 per cent of GDP and forecast to reach 13.5bn in 2023-24, its lowest level in 22 years. He dangled the carrot of more money for public services, capital investment and keeping taxes low in the spending review to follow. But he warned: Leaving with no deal would mean significant disruption in the short and medium term and a smaller, less prosperous economy in the long term than if we leave with a deal. Higher unemployment; lower wages; higher prices in the shops. That is not what the British people voted for in June 2016. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, accused Mr Hammond of a toxic mix of callous, brutal complacency over austerity and its grotesque incompetence over the handling of Brexit. Teachers are having to pay for the materials their pupils need, working parents are struggling to manage as schools close early and their children are sent home. Five-thousand of our fellow citizens will be sleeping in the cold and wet on our streets tonight. Young people being stabbed to death in rising numbers. And, the chancellor turns up today to threaten us that austerity can only end if we accept a bad Brexit deal. Mr Hammond also announced: * A 3bn affordable homes guarantee scheme, to support delivery of around 30,000 homes. * A future homes standard setting out the end of fossil-fuel heating systems in all new houses from 2025. Donald Trump has announced an emergency order to ground the Boeing 737 Max fleet, making the US the last major country to do so after two of the aircraft crashed in a six month span. Were going to be issuing an emergency order to ground all flights of Boeing 737 Max 8 and 737 Max 9 and planes associated with that line, Mr Trump said during a meeting in the White House. In his remarks, Mr Trump said that any affected aircraft currently in US air space would be held on the ground once they land. Boeing, soon after, announced that it would be grounding its fleet worldwide out of an abundance of caution. The FAA is ordering the temporary grounding of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft operated by US airlines or in US territory. The agency made this decision as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analysed today, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said in a statement following the presidents announcement. This evidence, together with newly refined satellite data available to FAA this morning, led to this decision. Mr Trump, who had come under pressure to ground the planes after it was reported that he had spoken about the crashes with the CEO of Boeing, Dennis Muilenburg, said that the aerospace company is working to fix the issue. Boeing is an incredible company. They are working very, very hard right now. Hopefully they will very quickly come up with the answer but until they do the planes will be grounded, Mr Trump said. Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures Show all 9 1 /9 Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures This picture taken on March 11, 2019, shows debris of the crashed airplane of Ethiopia Airlines, near Bishoftu, a town some 60 kilometres southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. - An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 crashed on March 10 morning en route from Addis Ababa to Nairobi with 149 passengers and eight crew believed to be on board, Ethiopian Airlines said. (Photo by Michael TEWELDE / AFP)MICHAEL TEWELDE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures Family members mourn the victims at the crash site of the Ethiopian Airlines operated Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, at Hama Quntushele village in the Oromia region, on March 13, 2019. - A Nairobi-bound Ethiopian Airlines Boeing crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019, killing all eight crew and 149 passengers on board, including tourists, business travellers, and "at least a dozen" UN staff. Families of the victims were taken to the remote site on March 13, 2019, where the plane smashed into a field with 157 passengers and crew from 35 countries, leaving a deep black crater and tiny scraps of debris. (Photo by TONY KARUMBA / AFP)TONY KARUMBA/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures A page of a Boeing flight crew operations manual is seen at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia March 12, 2019. REUTERS/Baz Ratner REUTERS Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures epa07434278 Rescue workers search the site for pieces of the wreckage of an Ethiopia Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, 13 March 2019. Ethiopian Airlines flight ET 302 carrying 149 passengers and 8 crew was en route to Nairobi, Kenya, when it crashed on 10 March 2019 by yet undetermined reason. All passengers and crew aboard died in the crash. The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft has come under scrutiny after similar deadly crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia within a few months. Several countries have banned the plane type from their airspace and many airlines have grounded their 737 Max 8 planes for safety concerns after the Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed minutes after take-off on 10 March. EPA/STRINGER EPA Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures A grounded Boeing 737 MAX 8 passenger plane of the Norwegian low-cost airline Norwegian is parked at the tarmac at Vantaa airport in Vantaa near Helsinki, Finland on March 13, 2019. - A number of countries have banned Boeing's 737 MAX 8 medium-haul workhorse jet from their airspace in response to the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed all 157 people on board. (Photo by Heikki Saukkomaa / Lehtikuva / AFP) / Finland OUTHEIKKI SAUKKOMAA/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures Rescue workers search the site for pieces of the wreckage of an Ethiopia Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, 13 March 2019. Ethiopian Airlines flight ET 302 carrying 149 passengers and 8 crew was en route to Nairobi, Kenya, when it crashed on 10 March 2019 by yet undetermined reason. All passengers and crew aboard died in the crash. The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft has come under scrutiny after similar deadly crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia within a few months. Several countries have banned the plane type from their airspace and many airlines have grounded their 737 Max 8 planes for safety concerns after the Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed minutes after take-off on 10 March. EPA/STRINGER EPA Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures A heap of debris from the wreckage of an Ethiopia Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft are piled at the crash site near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, 13 March 2019. Ethiopian Airlines flight ET 302 carrying 149 passengers and 8 crew was en route to Nairobi, Kenya, when it crashed on 10 March 2019 by yet undetermined reason. All passengers and crew aboard died in the crash. The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft has come under scrutiny after similar deadly crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia within a few months. Several countries have banned the plane type from their airspace and many airlines have grounded their 737 Max 8 planes for safety concerns after the Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed minutes after take-off on 10 March. EPA/STR EPA Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures A crew working with an investigative team to clear the site after the Sunday crash of the Ethiopian Airlines operated Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, carry debris at Hama Quntushele village in the Oromia region, on March 13, 2019. - A Nairobi-bound Ethiopian Airlines Boeing crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, killing all eight crew and 149 passengers on board, including tourists, business travellers, and "at least a dozen" UN staff. Families of the victims were taken to the remote site on March 13, 2019, where the plane smashed into a field with 157 passengers and crew from 35 countries, leaving a deep black crater and tiny scraps of debris. (Photo by TONY KARUMBA / AFP)TONY KARUMBA/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures FILE PHOTO: An American Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8, on a flight from Miami to New York City, comes in for landing at LaGuardia Airport in New York, U.S., March 12, 2019. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/File Photo REUTERS The US presidents decision follows just hours after Canada grounded its fleet of the planes, and a day after the European Union did so. China, Australia, India and the UK have also grounded the aircraft. Shortly after the UK banned the aircraft on Tuesday, two Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 MAX jets bound for Gatwick and Birmingham turned around in mid-air and headed back to Istanbul. American Airlines said its teams were working to rebook customers due to fly on its 737 Max. The company operates 24 737 MAX aircraft. Norwegian Air Shuttles says it will seek compensation from Boeing after the low-cost carrier grounded its fleet of 737 MAX 8 aircraft. Carrier spokeswoman Tonje Naess said that the Oslo-based airline should not have any financial burden for a brand new aircraft that will not to be used. Before announcing that the FAA would be grounding the Boeing jets, Mr Trump had lashed out on Twitter saying that planes are becoming too complex. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are needed, and the complexity creates danger, Mr Trump wrote. He continued: "All of this for great cost yet very little gain. I dont know about you, but I dont want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane!" The groundings across the globe follow the crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 plane in Ethiopia over the weekend, killing all 157 people on board. The passengers were from at least 32 countries, and there were at least 22 United Nations employees on board. Five months earlier in October, a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8, went down in Indonesia, killing 157 people. In a statement released on Monday night, Boeing said that it had been creating an emergency update for the planes since the Lion Air crash, and that the FAA had been set to approve those changes by April. For the past several months and in the aftermath of Lion Air Flight 610, Boeing has been developing a flight control software enhancement for the 737 MAX, designed to make an already safe aircraft even safer, the statement says. Following Mr Trumps announcement, the aerospace company said that it supports the decision to ground the planes in the US. Californias governor is set to sign an executive order temporarily halting the states death penalty, granting reprieve to all 737 inmates on death row. Gavin Newsom is also closing the states new execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison that has never been used. The intentional killing of another person is wrong and as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual, he is expected to say on Wednesday, according to his office. Mr Newsom will call the death penalty a failure that has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or cant afford expensive legal representation. He will also say innocent people have been wrongly convicted and sometimes put to death. Mr Newsom is expected to sign the executive order on Wednesday. Death row in California's San Quentin prison Show all 8 1 /8 Death row in California's San Quentin prison Death row in California's San Quentin prison A condemned inmate exercises in a cage out in the yard of San Quentin prison Getty Death row in California's San Quentin prison San Quentin State Prison opened in 1852 and is California's oldest penitentiary. The facility houses the state's only death row for men that currently has 700 condemned inmates Getty Death row in California's San Quentin prison The lethal injection facility at San Quentin prison AP Death row in California's San Quentin prison A condemned inmate stands in a cell out in the yard of San Quentin prison Getty Death row in California's San Quentin prison An armrest in the interior of the lethal injection facility at San Quentin prison AP Death row in California's San Quentin prison A cell on death row in San Quentin Getty Death row in California's San Quentin prison A cage on death row in San Quentin Getty Death row in California's San Quentin prison A cell on death row in San Quentin Getty Californias death row is crowded with inmates as it hasnt executed anyone since 2006, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor. Since its last execution, its death row population has grown to house one in every four condemned inmates in the US. Those on death row include Scott Peterson, whose trial for killing his wife Laci riveted the US, and Richard Davis, who kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas during a sleepover and strangled her to death. Mr Newsom was usurping the express will of California voters and substituting his personal preferences via this hasty and ill-considered moratorium on the death penalty, said Michele Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy (Los Angeles County) District Attorneys. But Alison Parker, US managing director at Human Rights Watch, praised Mr Newsoms great courage and leadership in ending the cruel, costly, and unfair practice of executing prisoners, and called for other states to follow Californias lead. The American Civil Liberties Union called it a watershed moment in the fight for racial equity and equal justice for all. The American Civil Liberties Union called it a watershed moment in the fight for racial equity and equal justice for all. Antonio Guterres remarks at panel on transparency and the death penalty Mr Newsom argued that the death penalty isnt a deterrent, wastes taxpayer money and is flawed because it is irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error. It is also costly, with California spending $5bn (3.8bn) since 1978 on its death row, he said. More than six in 10 condemned California inmates are minorities, which Mr Newsoms office cited as proof of racial disparities in who is sentenced to die. Since 1973, five California inmates who were sentenced to death were later exonerated, his office added. Seventy-nine condemned California inmates have died of natural causes since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1978. Another 26 committed suicide. California has executed 13 inmates, while two were executed in other states. Californias governor has signed a moratorium halting the use of the death penalty, saying he would be unable to sleep at night if he sent just one innocent person to their death. Gavin Newsom, who was sworn in as the states 40th governor in January, said statistics suggested at least one of the 737 inmates on Californias death row more than any other state ought not to be there. Citing a National Academy of Sciences report that estimated 1 out of every 25 people on death row was innocent, the governor said he was not prepared to go along with such a system. If thats the case, that means if we move forward executing 737 people in California, we will have executed roughly 30 people that are innocent, Mr Newsom told reporters in the state capital, Sacramento. I dont know about you. I cant sign my name to that. I cant be party to that. I wont be able to sleep at night. The use of the death penalty remains a highly emotional issue across the country, and the governor has his critics. Death row in California's San Quentin prison Show all 8 1 /8 Death row in California's San Quentin prison Death row in California's San Quentin prison A condemned inmate exercises in a cage out in the yard of San Quentin prison Getty Death row in California's San Quentin prison San Quentin State Prison opened in 1852 and is California's oldest penitentiary. The facility houses the state's only death row for men that currently has 700 condemned inmates Getty Death row in California's San Quentin prison The lethal injection facility at San Quentin prison AP Death row in California's San Quentin prison A condemned inmate stands in a cell out in the yard of San Quentin prison Getty Death row in California's San Quentin prison An armrest in the interior of the lethal injection facility at San Quentin prison AP Death row in California's San Quentin prison A cell on death row in San Quentin Getty Death row in California's San Quentin prison A cage on death row in San Quentin Getty Death row in California's San Quentin prison A cell on death row in San Quentin Getty Michelle Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, a prosecutors association, claimed voters of the state supported the death penalty, Governor Newsom, who supported the failed initiative to end the death penalty in 2006, is usurping the express will of California voters and substituting his personal preferences via this hasty and ill-considered moratorium on the death penalty, she said. Others praised the move and said studies had shown people of colour had long been discriminated against when it came to the application of the death penalty and capital sentencing. Nebraska execution Carey Dean Moore becomes first inmate on death row killed using fentanyl Shari Silberstein, executive director of Equal Justice USA, a New York-based campaign group, said Mr Newsom had written a new chapter in the history of justice reform. This is a sweeping move that reflects just how deeply the death penalty has failed. My hope is this will also lead Americans to reconsider our nations approach to violence overall, she said. Our overly punitive approach has devastated communities of colour, deepened racial disparities, and traumatised millions of families. Experts say support for executions in California has fallen considerably in recent decades. However, in both 2012 and 2016, voters there rejected ballot measures that were intended to abolish the death penalty Mr Newsom said the equipment in the execution chamber at San Quentin state prison was already being dismantled, and that he was withdrawing Californias lethal injection protocol. The order will not alter any current conviction or sentence, or lead to the release of any prisoner currently on death row, he said. California has not put an inmate to death since 2006, amid legal challenges to its execution protocols. The move was criticised by Donald Trump. Defying voters, the governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers, he tweeted. Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I! A Florida father has been arrested after allegedly bringing a loaded AK-47 to a school because his son FaceTimed him crying and claiming that a teacher had pushed him. Police say Christopher Freeman, 27, turned up at Bear Lakes Middle School in West Palm Beach and started making death threats towards teachers whilst demanding to speak to his son. A school resource officer alerted law enforcement after seeing what he thought was a large handgun sticking out of Mr Freeman's trousers when he arrived at the school's main entrance. According to the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office's report, Mr Freeman was visibly upset and was screaming: You're going to need more than what you got because of what I got'. He also said 'I want to see the guy who slammed my son. I've got something for him.'. 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 Officers placed the school on lockdown while they searched Freeman and found a loaded Romarm/Cugir AK-47 Mini Draco pistol. He said he carries the firearm with him all the time for protection and had forgotten he had it with him. Mr Freeman was charged with possession of a firearm on school grounds, aggravated assault with a weapon and disrupting the peace. He was being held on a $75,000 (56,950) bond. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events His lawyer Jack Fleischman described the incident as a misunderstanding and insisted his client had no intention of harming anyone. Mr Freeman told police that he saw an adult grab his son before the call ended. He told ABC News: We're interested in seeing if there is any security video from school because there were allegations about his child being hit. A politician in Georgia is suggesting a law that would make it an aggravated assault for men to have sex without wearing a condom. Darshun Kendricks new bill would require men to acquire permission from their sexual partner before getting a prescription for Viagra or similar erectile dysfunction medication. The legislation would also create a 24-hour waiting period for men who wish to buy porn or sex toys in the state of Georgia and ban vasectomy procedures. The Democrat member of the House of Representatives announced the bill, which is called a testicular bill of rights, in a tweet on Monday. It would also require DNA testing when a woman is six weeks and one day (to be performed before she is eight weeks) to determine the father of the child who shall IMMEDIATELY start paying child support. Northern Ireland abortion protest in Westminster Show all 7 1 /7 Northern Ireland abortion protest in Westminster Northern Ireland abortion protest in Westminster Derry Girls cast members Siobhan McSweeney and Nicola Coughlan (right) join MPS and women impacted by Northern Ireland's strict abortion laws PA Northern Ireland abortion protest in Westminster Heidi Allen (second right) joins the protest PA Northern Ireland abortion protest in Westminster A luggage tag on a suitcase, symbolising the women who travel from Northern Ireland to England for terminations PA Northern Ireland abortion protest in Westminster The campaigners march across Westminster Bridge PA Northern Ireland abortion protest in Westminster Counter-protesters Rebecca Morgan (left) and her daughter Helen, one, demonstrate in favour of Northern Ireland's current laws Getty Images Northern Ireland abortion protest in Westminster Protesters supporting Northern Ireland's abortion laws at Parliament Square Getty Images Northern Ireland abortion protest in Westminster Demonstrators pull suitcases to symbolise the women who travel from Northern Ireland to England for a termination AFP/Getty Images Ms Kendricks bill is a direct answer to the "heartbeat bill" passed by her Republican colleagues in the Georgia House of Representatives last week. That bill would ban most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and aims to outlaw terminations carried out after a foetal heartbeat is detected. At six weeks, many women do not yet know they are pregnant. Similar restrictions are under consideration in Mississippi, Florida, Kentucky, Ohio and South Carolina. During a tense debate last week, at least 20 Democrats, who oppose the restrictions, turned their back on the bills Republican author, Ed Setzler. About six female Democrats protested against the vote by walking out of the chamber. Earlier in the day, some Democrats had brought in wire coat hangers, in reference to unsafe home abortions. Recommended Man allowed to sue abortion clinic on behalf of unborn foetus If the anti-abortion bill passes the Georgia Senate and is signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp, it would be among the most restrictive in the US. Women in Georgia currently have the right to undergo an abortion up to 20 weeks into a pregnancy. Ms Kendrick addressed the proposal during a radio interview on Georgia Public Broadcasting on Tuesday afternoon. If the state of Georgia is going to be concerned with regulating womens reproductive rights, I think its only fitting that we also do that for mens reproductive rights, she said. The politician said her proposal really is to draw attention to what I think is an absurdity. Ms Kendrick acknowledged vasectomy requirements or waiting times to buy sex toys are a tongue-in-cheek response. However, she argued her concern about the heartbeat bill is serious, raising fears it could lead to an increase in the number of women who would subject themselves to unsafe abortions. The Democrat, who has been a state legislator since 2011, hopes to have her counter-bill drafted by the end of the week. Recommended US states sue Trump administration to block new abortion obstacles Mr Setzler, the heartbeat bills sponsor, branded abortion a barbaric procedure and said women who become pregnant still have options under his proposal, citing carrying a pregnancy to term and putting the baby up for adoption. His bill makes exceptions in cases of rape or incest but only after an official police report has been filed. Ms Kendrick said she deemed Georgias bill to be definitely unconstitutional and she felt her colleagues aimed for it to be a test case for the Supreme Court that might lead to overturning Roe v Wade the landmark Supreme Court decision which legalised abortion nationwide in 1973. Her bill is a ploy to raise alarm bells about the heartbeat bill and make a point about how it controls womens bodies. She urged citizens to attend the Senates next hearing for the fetal heartbeat bill which is scheduled for Thursday afternoon. Pack. The. Room, she tweeted. Recommended Why abortion remains illegal in Northern Ireland The heartbeat bill will almost certainly trigger legal challenges if it is passed by Georgias state Senate and signed into law. But anti-abortion activists hope that such a challenge will lead to the US Supreme Court reversing Roe vs Wade, especially with new conservative justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh sitting on the court. The Supreme Court has previously ruled that states cannot ban abortion before a foetus is viable - about 23 to 25 weeks. While abortion has become an increasingly partisan issue in the US in recent years, this has significantly increased under the Trump administration as abortion rights have under fire from all angles. A magnitude 5.3 earthquake has hit the island of Hawaii, sending shock waves in the area near the Kilauea volcano. The Hawaii Civil Defence sent a message at 1.30am local time on Wednesday to notify locals of the activity, which received some attention from individuals on social media late in the night. Just felt a huge earthquake on east shore of Big Island. Shook for a good 10-15 seconds, one local tweeted. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre says that the earthquake itself occurred just before midnight, and that its centre was near the Kilauea volcano on the main island of the state. The quake was not, however, large enough to trigger tsunami warnings for the island. 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 Tsunami NOT expected, the US National Tsunami Warning Centre tweeted. Still, locals in Hawaii were warned that there after shocks could still be on the way, and that residents should make precautionary checks for damage. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Among those damages of most concern are impacts on utility connections like gas, electricity, and water, according to the states civil defence. Canada's most populous province is set to ban pupils from using mobile phones in classrooms. The Ontario government hopes a ban in all schools will help students to focus on their learning. Students will not be allowed to use their distracting devices during instructional time, but there will be some exceptions. Teachers who want to use them as part of their lesson can do so. They can be used for medical reasons and students with special needs will also be allowed to use their phones. Lisa Thompson, Ontario's education minister, said in a statement: "Ontario's students need to be able to focus on their learning. 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 "By banning cell phone use that distracts from learning, we are helping students to focus on acquiring the foundational skills they need like reading, writing and math. The province will issue a directive to all public schools for the start of the next academic year in September but the enforcement would be up to individual schools, The Canadian Press reports. The announcement comes after a year of consultations which revealed that the vast majority of parents, educators and stakeholders were in favour of a ban on the devices. But some believe children should be allowed their devices so they can learn about responsible technology use, while other critics doubt whether the ban will be effectively enforced. Charles Pascal, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, told CBC News: Telling post-millennials to get rid of their cellphones is almost like telling them not to breathe. It's not going to work. It comes after pupils in France were banned from using their mobile phones during school hours after a new law was passed. Currently in the UK it is up to schools to decide whether mobile phones should be allowed in the classroom. Government policy says headteachers can decide whether a ban is necessary. Last month, schools minister Nick Gibb said he thought schools should ban pupils from bringing smartphones into school. At least 10 people including six children have been killed in a shooting at a school in Sao Paulo. Two masked attackers gunned down a worker at a nearby car wash before storming the Raul Brasil school, police said. Six children and two staff members were killed before the attackers took their own lives, police said. At least 17 other people, mostly pupils, were also injured. The school in Suzano, an area on the outskirts of Brazils most populous city, has about 1,000 pupils across primary and secondary levels, according to Brazilian media. Classes were just beginning when the shooting began at about 9.30am local time. I have just received the sad news that children were cruelly murdered, Sao Paulo governor Joao Doria tweeted. I have cancelled all engagements and we are on our way to Suzano to accompany the rescue and attend to the wounded. 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 said the attackers, thought to have been aged in their early twenties, were armed with several weapons. Police are inspecting possible explosives left by the shooters. Authorities do not believe the gunmen were former pupils of the school and do not know what motivated the attack. Recommended Four women killed every day so far this year in Brazil More people are murdered in Brazil each year than anywhere else in the world, but school shootings in the country are rare. The last major school shooting was in 2011, when 12 children were killed by a former pupil in Rio de Janeiro. Brazils new president Jair Bolsonaro recently signed a decree that loosened gun ownership restrictions. Additional reporting by agencies Its the same analysis for any other type of crime, you have to establish a probable cause and the evidence must be reliable, recent and is likely to contain evidence of a crime, McMahon said. That is a constitutional protection that benefits all of us and I think there is a big gap in the way the FOID revocation law is currently written that fails to address that reality that law enforcement has to deal with. A California high school was vandalised with 10 flyers just days after a Holocaust survivor visited the school and shared her story with students. The flyers were discovered at Newport Harbor High School on Sunday, prompting a response from Newport Beach, which is now investigating the incident. Sean Boulton, the schools principal, told CNN in a statement: Again we condemn all acts of anti-Semitism and hate in all their forms. We will continue to be vigilant with our stance, and the care of our students and staff. The Holocaust survivor was asked to visit after an incident in March where students were pictured making the Nazi salute and marching around a swastika composed of plastic party cups. Those images, once shared online, prompted local officials to seek out Eva Schloss, an Auschwitz survivor and stepsister of Anne Frank, to visit. Scottish tattoo parlours to offer free swastika inkings in bid to 'reclaim' symbol Show all 2 1 /2 Scottish tattoo parlours to offer free swastika inkings in bid to 'reclaim' symbol Scottish tattoo parlours to offer free swastika inkings in bid to 'reclaim' symbol rexfeatures_3314094e.jpg Five Scottish tattoo parlours will be offering free swastika tattoos Rex Features Scottish tattoo parlours to offer free swastika inkings in bid to 'reclaim' symbol 3438914.jpg Getty Images The United States has experienced a spike in anti-semitic hate crimes recently, with swastikas being marked onto buildings across the country. Evan Bernstein, the regional director in New York and New Jersey for the Anti-Defamation League, recently told The Independent that he and his organisation have documented an uptick in the crimes since the protests and violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events You've seen swastikas on synagogues, swastikas in synagogues, Mr Bernstein said. But there's a lot of stuff that is not taking place in the public square that is a little bit harder to monitor and a little bit harder to track. Its not just what we saw in Charlottesville, he continued. Its beyond that. That was a rare opportunity to see the face of hate in a very meaningful way. Boeing has announced plans to release a software update for its MAX fleets that may fix reported flaws in the new planes automated safety features following a second deadly crash in just five months. Though the cause of the latest accident remains under investigation, the plane company said in a press conference on Tuesday it had been working on the update over the past several months to address a feature that reportedly caused one of its 737 MAX planes to nose-dive into the ocean last year, killing everyone on board. The two pilots on that Lion Air flight struggled to correct the issue as the plane plunged into the sea, according to investigators. The fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash, which also killed all 157 passengers on the flight, followed the US government shutdown the longest of its kind in American history in which pilots warned Donald Trump and Congressional leadership that certification and work on safety-related airworthiness directives had been stalled by the federal closure. A coalition of nearly 61,000 pilots wrote in multiple letters to the government during the shutdown that oversight at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had been significantly reduced or halted outright. There are also airline and aircraft manufacturing oversight activities that either stop or are significantly reduced, the pilots association warned the White House in early January. These safety and oversight inspections will potentially allow for the introduction of safety issues that put passengers and airline crews at risk. Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Show all 15 1 /15 Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia People stand near collected debris at the crash site AFP/Getty Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia A man carries a piece of debris on his head at the crash site AFP/Getty Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Wreckage lies at the crash site of the Ethiopia Airlines Boeing 737 near Addis Ababa EPA Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Debris at the site of the crash near Addis Ababa Reuters Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia CEO of Ethiopia Airlines, Tewolde Gebremariam inspects the crash site AP Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Debris from the crashed aeroplane AP Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia UN staff observe a minutes silence for the victims of the plane crash. 19 UN workers were killed in the crash AFP/Getty Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Rescuers work at the scene of the crash near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia AP Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Rescuers work at the scene of the crash near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia AP Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 (ET-AVM), the same type of aircraft that crashed EPA Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Rescuers work at the scene of the crash near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia AP Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Members of the search and rescue team work at the scene of the crash near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Reuters Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia A boarding pass at the scene of the crash Reuters Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Rescuers remove body bags from the scene of the crash near Addis Ababa AP Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Wreckage at the scene of the Ethiopia Airlines flight AP In another letter sent to Mr Trump, Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell just eight days later, the pilots said that oversight systems critical to resolving identified issues had been suspended due to a furlough involving FAA staff who certify the safety of aircraft, Quartz reported. Airline regulators with the European Union a group that typically provides standards for worldwide aviation safety, according to the outlet said an unsafe condition had been discovered on the Boeing 737, 8 and 9 planes in an updated airworthiness directive to US operators after last years crash involving Lion Air. A growing number of countries have grounded the Boeing 737 MAX, including China, Australia, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia and more. The US continued allowing the models to be used in commercial flights, meanwhile, until Mr Trump issued an emergency order grounding the MAX fleets on Wednesday afternoon. Recommended Pilots across world raised fears over Boeing 737 MAX 8 before crash Mr Trump forced the government into a partial temporary shutdown over his demands for a wall to be built with Congressional funds across the US-Mexico border after failing to receive enough support for his campaign promise from lawmakers. The president has since declared a national emergency, allowing him to circumvent Congress and withdraw money from other federal funds in order to build the wall. The declaration faces a lengthy, nationwide legal battle which could prevent that process from moving forward, however. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The White House did not return requests for comment. Donald Trump has said a conspiracy theory alleging Melania Trump sometimes uses a body double during outings with him has been concocted by journalists doctoring images. The Fake News photoshopped pictures of Melania, then propelled conspiracy theories that its actually not her by my side in Alabama and other places, he tweeted, without providing evidence. They are only getting more deranged with time! The US presidents outburst came after some social media users suggested the First Lady looked different during the couples recent visit to Alabama to pay their respects to 23 victims who died in a tornado. I see unconvincing Melania stunt-double is back, one Twitter user wrote over the weekend, alongside an image showing Ms Trump in dark sunglasses and holding the presidents hand. US president Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump in Alabama (Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty) Claims Ms Trump has used a body double first surfaced in late 2017 during an appearance at a press conference alongside her husband. She again partially obscured her face by wearing large, dark sunglasses. On Tuesday, Ms Trump issued an angry response through her spokesperson to ABC, after a segment on daytime talk show The View made fun of the ongoing conspiracy. Some people think the first lady is using an impostor to stand in for her, co-host Joy Behar said. You mean there are two women who have to pretend theyre listening to (President Trump)? Criminals who worked for Trump Show all 5 1 /5 Criminals who worked for Trump Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Cohen Former lawyer for Donald Trump was sentenced to three years in prison on counts involving evading income tax, false disclosure of the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels and another hush money charge Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Paul Manafort Former campaign manager for Trump Manafort was found guilty in February 2018 of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The crimes occurred prior to his appointment in Trump's campaign Getty Criminals who worked for Trump George Papadopoulos Former Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in October 2017. He had lied about making contact with a professor who claimed that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. He was sentenced to 14 days in jail Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Flynn Former White House National Security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in December 2017. He had lied about conversations that he had with the Russian ambassador to the US during Trump's Presidential campaign. He was not given prison time due to his "significant assistance" to the Mueller investigation Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Rick Gates Deputy chairman of Trump's presidential campaign Gates pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in February 2018 AFP/Getty Stephanie Grisham, Ms Trumps representative, responded in an email to ABC it was sad the female presenters spend so much time attacking another woman, whose only goal is to help children. The unfounded rumour had echoes of another conspiracy involving Ms Trump last summer, after she failed to make a public appearance in more than three weeks. Her temporary disappearance sparked a deluge of rumours and theories, until the White House announced she had been recovering from surgery. The Fake News Media has been so unfair, and vicious, to my wife and our great First Lady, Melania, he tweeted at the time. During her recovery from surgery they reported everything from near death, to facelift, to left the W.H. (and me) for N.Y. or Virginia, to abuse. All Fake, she is doing really well! The downfall of Donald Trumps former campaign manager has been cemented after he was told he will spend seven years in jail and was then charged with fresh offences indictments beyond the scope of a presidential pardon. Minutes after a federal judge in Washington DC sentenced Paul Manafort to around three-and-a half years for money laundering and unregistered lobbying, officials in New York said they were bringing 16 fresh charges against the 69-year-old. The charges, brought by Manhattan County district attorney Cyrus Vance were interpreted as a means of ensuring Manafort serves prison time, even if he obtains a presidential pardon over his other convictions. A presidential pardon only extends to federal crimes. Following an investigation commenced by our Office in March 2017, a Manhattan grand jury has charged Mr Manafort with state criminal violations which strike at the heart of New Yorks sovereign interests, including the integrity of our residential mortgage market, Mr Vance said in a statement. I thank our prosecutors for their meticulous investigation, which has yielded serious criminal charges for which the defendant has not been held accountable. Criminals who worked for Trump Show all 5 1 /5 Criminals who worked for Trump Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Cohen Former lawyer for Donald Trump was sentenced to three years in prison on counts involving evading income tax, false disclosure of the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels and another hush money charge Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Paul Manafort Former campaign manager for Trump Manafort was found guilty in February 2018 of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The crimes occurred prior to his appointment in Trump's campaign Getty Criminals who worked for Trump George Papadopoulos Former Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in October 2017. He had lied about making contact with a professor who claimed that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. He was sentenced to 14 days in jail Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Flynn Former White House National Security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in December 2017. He had lied about conversations that he had with the Russian ambassador to the US during Trump's Presidential campaign. He was not given prison time due to his "significant assistance" to the Mueller investigation Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Rick Gates Deputy chairman of Trump's presidential campaign Gates pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in February 2018 AFP/Getty He added: No one is beyond the law in New York. The charge sheet lays out allegations that Manafort, who served as Trumps campaign manager for a brief but crucial period in 2016, committed a series of financial offences. The first count of residential mortgage fraud, claims the defendant in the county of New York and elsewhere, during the period from on or about 22 December 2015 to on or about 7 March 2016, knowingly and with intent to defraud, presented, caused to be presented, and prepared with knowledge and belief that it would be used in applying for, underwriting and closing a residential mortgage loan, a written statement which contained materially false information. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort sentenced to nearly four years in prison for tax and bank fraud The new charges came after Manafort attended his second federal sentencing, where a judge told him he would spend around seven years behind bars, as a result of two prosecutions. On Wednesday, he was sentenced over allegations arising out of special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into Russias alleged interference in the 2016 election. Last September, Manafort pleaded guilty to conspiracy counts related to money laundering, unregistered lobbying and attempted witness tampering. According to Reuters, judge Amy Berman Jackson told Manafort: It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved. Reading from a three-page statement, Manafort asked for mercy and said the criminal charges against him have taken everything from me already. He pleaded with the judge not to impose any additional time beyond the sentence he had received last week in a separate case in Virginia. I am sorry for what I have done and all the activities that have gotten us here today, he said. While I cannot undo the past, I will ensure that the future will be very different. In a separate case in Virginia last week, Manafort was sentenced to spend 47 months in jail after pleading guilty to tax and financial fraud in relation to his work for Ukraines former pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort told that court: To say I have been humiliated and ashamed would be a gross understatement. While Mr Trump has not stated whether he intends to pardon Manafort, the New York Times pointed out he has often spoken of his power to pardon and has frequently defended his former manager, calling him a brave man, after Manafort appeared to offer nothing incriminating about the president. In contrast, the president has been scathing about his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, who is to serve three years in jail after admitting paying hush money to two women on the eve of the election. He said he did so to protect Mr Trump, who he called a racist and a conman. On Wednesday, Trump told reporters he felt very bad for his former chairman. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says that she will not consider an bill to amend American presidential emergency powers that Republicans hope could avert an embarrassing vote for Donald Trump. With Republicans in the Senate considering legislation that would reign in presidential powers, Ms Pelosi said that the bill would only serve to give Mr Trump a pass for his emergency declaration to build his US-Mexico border wall. Republican Senators are proposing new legislation to allow the President to violate the Constitution just this once in order to give themselves cover, she said in a statement. The house will not take up this legislation to give President Trump a pass. The warning comes just as the Senate is set to vote on a resolution that would nullify Mr Trumps emergency declaration. It appears as though there are enough Republicans in that chamber who plan on voting with Democrats to put a halt on the declaration, which would force the first veto of the Trump presidency. Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California Show all 20 1 /20 Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California The prototypes for President Trumps border wall are being demolished. AP Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California The US Customs and Border protection had built the eight 30-foot tall steel and concrete models near San Diego on the US-Mexico border. Reuters Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office found that the construction challenges presented by the four concrete models would be extensive and those presented by two of the other models would be substantial. Reuters Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California It was intended that Mr Trump would choose his favourite of the designs after testing had been completed. AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California The President is yet to comment. AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California Each prototype cost $300,000 to $500,000 to build and they are being knocked down in order to make way for the San Diego Secondary Wall project which will see up to 14 miles of barrier being built to support the existing steel border fence. AP Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California The new barrier will not employ the design of any of the prototypes, instead being built of the favoured steel bollards which make up the current section of the wall at San Diego. Reuters Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California The new secondary barrier being built near San Diego. Reuters Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California The rubble of one of the demolished prototypes. Reuters Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A steel wall prototype AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A wall prototype made from a mix of steel and concrete AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A wall prototype made from a mix of steel and concrete AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A concrete wall prototype AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A steel wall prototype AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A concrete wall prototype AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A concrete wall prototype AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A concrete wall prototype AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A digger approaches the prototype wall AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California Aerial view of the wall prototypes at the US-Mexico border after they were torn down AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California An aerial view showing Tijuana, Mexico on the left and the demolished wall prototypes on the right AFP/Getty It does not appear as though Congress would have enough support for the resolution to override that veto, however. Democrats have argued that the emergency declaration violates the US Constitution, noting that Congress itself chose not to allocate funding for the wall earlier this year. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The bill faces several legal challenges across the country, too. Donald Trump doesnt know the massage parlour boss who offered to sell Chinese businessmen access to the president and members of his inner circle at his Mar-a-Lago resort, the White House has said. Li Yang, a US-based entrepreneur, made headlines last week when a picture emerged of her smiling alongside the president at his West Palm Beach country club during last months Super Bowl. The 45-year-old operates a number of spas that have been scrutinised by at least two police agencies for prostitution, the The Miami Herald reported. She is also the founder of a Floridian spa caught up in a high-profile sex work sting. It later emerged her investment firm, GY US Investments LLC, was offering clients the opportunity for a presidential roundtable and presidential dinner and to take photos with the president. The companys website, which has since been taken down, features Ms Yang in at least two different photos with Mr Trump and describes her as a member of the Presidential Fundraising Committee. Criminals who worked for Trump Show all 5 1 /5 Criminals who worked for Trump Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Cohen Former lawyer for Donald Trump was sentenced to three years in prison on counts involving evading income tax, false disclosure of the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels and another hush money charge Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Paul Manafort Former campaign manager for Trump Manafort was found guilty in February 2018 of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The crimes occurred prior to his appointment in Trump's campaign Getty Criminals who worked for Trump George Papadopoulos Former Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in October 2017. He had lied about making contact with a professor who claimed that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. He was sentenced to 14 days in jail Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Flynn Former White House National Security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in December 2017. He had lied about conversations that he had with the Russian ambassador to the US during Trump's Presidential campaign. He was not given prison time due to his "significant assistance" to the Mueller investigation Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Rick Gates Deputy chairman of Trump's presidential campaign Gates pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in February 2018 AFP/Getty The White House has insisted insists Mr Trump is unaware of Ms Yang. However, The Miami Herald reported that she has donated with relatives more than $42,000 (32,000) to a Trump political action committee, as well as $16,000 (12,000) to Mr Trumps presidential campaign. The president doesnt know this woman, spokesperson Judd Deere told magazine Mother Jones, which first reported Ms Yangs claims of access to the president. Li Yang takes a selfie with Donald Trump during Super Bowl party (Facebook/Li Yang) Last month Robert Kraft, owner of Super Bowl champions the New England Patriots, was charged with soliciting prostitution at Orchids of Asia Day - Ms Yang's former spa. Florida police said they caught him on video in January paying for oral sex. Mr Kraft has denied any wrongdoing. Ms Yang, 45, said she had sold the spa in question in 2013, and she had not been charged or implicated with crimes related to the sting. Ms Yang has recently appeared in pictures alongside Mr Trump, his adult sons, as well as other prominent Republicans such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. Ms Yang and the White House have both been contacted for comment. Close Trump calls Russia investigation a 'collusion witch hoax' outside White House Donald Trump denounced the Witch Hunt Hoax against him in a flurry of tweets on Wednesday, saying potential impeachment proceedings overlook the minor fact I never did anything wrong on the day his ex-campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was sentenced in a second federal hearing to 73 additional months in prison. The president tweeted thanks to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her opposition to impeachment, which she considers too divisive, and took aim at New Yorks states governor Andrew Cuomo, new attorney-general Letitia James and her predecessor, Eric Schneiderman for issuing subpoenas related to his business dealings. Manafort was last week given 47 months in jail by a court in Virginia after pleading guilty to bank and tax fraud and this time faces up to 10 years behind bars for conspiracy against the US and obstruction of justice. On Wednesday, a federal judge sentenced Manafort to more than three and a half additional years in prison. Thats on top of the roughly four-year sentence he received in a separate case in Virginia last week. The sentence followed a scathing assessment by the judge and a prosecutor of Manaforts crimes. After Manafort was sentenced in federal court Wednesday, an indictment was unsealed in New York charging him with state crimes, including a residential mortgage fraud scheme. Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures Show all 9 1 /9 Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures This picture taken on March 11, 2019, shows debris of the crashed airplane of Ethiopia Airlines, near Bishoftu, a town some 60 kilometres southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. - An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 crashed on March 10 morning en route from Addis Ababa to Nairobi with 149 passengers and eight crew believed to be on board, Ethiopian Airlines said. (Photo by Michael TEWELDE / AFP)MICHAEL TEWELDE/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures Family members mourn the victims at the crash site of the Ethiopian Airlines operated Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, at Hama Quntushele village in the Oromia region, on March 13, 2019. - A Nairobi-bound Ethiopian Airlines Boeing crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019, killing all eight crew and 149 passengers on board, including tourists, business travellers, and "at least a dozen" UN staff. Families of the victims were taken to the remote site on March 13, 2019, where the plane smashed into a field with 157 passengers and crew from 35 countries, leaving a deep black crater and tiny scraps of debris. (Photo by TONY KARUMBA / AFP)TONY KARUMBA/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures A page of a Boeing flight crew operations manual is seen at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia March 12, 2019. REUTERS/Baz Ratner REUTERS Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures epa07434278 Rescue workers search the site for pieces of the wreckage of an Ethiopia Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, 13 March 2019. Ethiopian Airlines flight ET 302 carrying 149 passengers and 8 crew was en route to Nairobi, Kenya, when it crashed on 10 March 2019 by yet undetermined reason. All passengers and crew aboard died in the crash. The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft has come under scrutiny after similar deadly crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia within a few months. Several countries have banned the plane type from their airspace and many airlines have grounded their 737 Max 8 planes for safety concerns after the Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed minutes after take-off on 10 March. EPA/STRINGER EPA Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures A grounded Boeing 737 MAX 8 passenger plane of the Norwegian low-cost airline Norwegian is parked at the tarmac at Vantaa airport in Vantaa near Helsinki, Finland on March 13, 2019. - A number of countries have banned Boeing's 737 MAX 8 medium-haul workhorse jet from their airspace in response to the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed all 157 people on board. (Photo by Heikki Saukkomaa / Lehtikuva / AFP) / Finland OUTHEIKKI SAUKKOMAA/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures Rescue workers search the site for pieces of the wreckage of an Ethiopia Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, 13 March 2019. Ethiopian Airlines flight ET 302 carrying 149 passengers and 8 crew was en route to Nairobi, Kenya, when it crashed on 10 March 2019 by yet undetermined reason. All passengers and crew aboard died in the crash. The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft has come under scrutiny after similar deadly crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia within a few months. Several countries have banned the plane type from their airspace and many airlines have grounded their 737 Max 8 planes for safety concerns after the Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed minutes after take-off on 10 March. EPA/STRINGER EPA Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures A heap of debris from the wreckage of an Ethiopia Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft are piled at the crash site near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, 13 March 2019. Ethiopian Airlines flight ET 302 carrying 149 passengers and 8 crew was en route to Nairobi, Kenya, when it crashed on 10 March 2019 by yet undetermined reason. All passengers and crew aboard died in the crash. The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft has come under scrutiny after similar deadly crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia within a few months. Several countries have banned the plane type from their airspace and many airlines have grounded their 737 Max 8 planes for safety concerns after the Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed minutes after take-off on 10 March. EPA/STR EPA Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures A crew working with an investigative team to clear the site after the Sunday crash of the Ethiopian Airlines operated Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, carry debris at Hama Quntushele village in the Oromia region, on March 13, 2019. - A Nairobi-bound Ethiopian Airlines Boeing crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, killing all eight crew and 149 passengers on board, including tourists, business travellers, and "at least a dozen" UN staff. Families of the victims were taken to the remote site on March 13, 2019, where the plane smashed into a field with 157 passengers and crew from 35 countries, leaving a deep black crater and tiny scraps of debris. (Photo by TONY KARUMBA / AFP)TONY KARUMBA/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Boeing 737 MAX grounding: Ethiopia Airlines Flight 302 in pictures FILE PHOTO: An American Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8, on a flight from Miami to New York City, comes in for landing at LaGuardia Airport in New York, U.S., March 12, 2019. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/File Photo REUTERS Mr Trump said he feels very badly for his former campaign chairman following the sentencing. On a human basis, its a very sad thing," the president said. Recommended Manafort sentenced to 73 months in prison Mr Trump also insisted hes not currently considering a Manafort pardon, saying, I have not even given it a thought as of this moment. The Manafort news arrived as Mr Trump was forced to announce an emergency order grounding a fleet of Boeing planes after a 737 MAX 8 plane was once again involved in a deadly crash. Additional reporting by AP. Read The Independent's live coverage from Wednesday below: Please allow a moment for our liveblog to load Donald Trump has claimed without providing evidence that people are leaving New York in record numbers because they are upset at the states investigations into his family business. New York State and its Governor, Andrew Cuomo, are now proud members of the group of PRESIDENTIAL HARASSERS, Mr Trump tweeted on Tuesday evening. No wonder people are fleeing the State in record numbers. The Witch Hunt continues! The presidents criticism of Mr Cuomo came in an apparent response to a New York Times report that New York attorney general Letitia James decision to issue subpoenas to two banks for documents related to a number of Trump hotel projects. The request to Deutsche Bank and Investors Bank was prompted by congressional testimony last month of Mr Trumps former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, who told lawmakers his ex-client fraudulently inflated his assets in financial statements. The civil probe adds to the growing number of legal dangers for the president, who is also under investigation for alleged campaign finance violations and possible links to Russia. Criminals who worked for Trump Show all 5 1 /5 Criminals who worked for Trump Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Cohen Former lawyer for Donald Trump was sentenced to three years in prison on counts involving evading income tax, false disclosure of the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels and another hush money charge Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Paul Manafort Former campaign manager for Trump Manafort was found guilty in February 2018 of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The crimes occurred prior to his appointment in Trump's campaign Getty Criminals who worked for Trump George Papadopoulos Former Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in October 2017. He had lied about making contact with a professor who claimed that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. He was sentenced to 14 days in jail Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Flynn Former White House National Security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in December 2017. He had lied about conversations that he had with the Russian ambassador to the US during Trump's Presidential campaign. He was not given prison time due to his "significant assistance" to the Mueller investigation Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Rick Gates Deputy chairman of Trump's presidential campaign Gates pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in February 2018 AFP/Getty Mr Trump later shared a tweet from the Republican National Committee, which claimed Ms James was proven to have a vendetta against the billionaire after she described him last year as an illegitimate president. All part of the Witch Hunt Hoax. Started by little Eric Schneiderman & Cuomo. So many leaving New York! Mr Trump added. Mr Schneiderman is the former New York attorney general. Although New York has seen small population decreases annually since 2016, according to the US Census Bureau, there is no evidence the fall is due to the states investigations into the president. The decrease is likely a result of a slower than average recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, which has seen private sector jobs grow at just one third the national rate, according to conservative think tank the Empire Center for Public Policy. Children in China could reportedly be banned from going to elite schools if the social credit system judges their family as untrustworthy. The Chinese government has used the technology to block passengers from buying plane and train tickets for up to a year as a punishment for offences. Those who fell foul of the system have been accused of committing financial or legal wrongdoings. They could also face limits on their childrens education choices, which would restrict them to ordinary state schools, according to Liu Guixiang, a member of the Supreme Peoples Courts judicial committee. If the schools fees are higher than those of normal schools, he said it is considered luxury spending, The Daily Mail reported. World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty The children would then be restricted from attending if their tuition fees were paid by the person who has been discredited. Mr Liu also claimed the system would not punish anyone incorrectly or penalise family members in order to put pressure upon them, and called the Chinese legal system very civilised. The move to put citizens on restricted lists is in line with Chinese president Xi Jinpings plan to construct a system based on the principle: Once untrustworthy, always restricted. Last year, US vice-president Mike Pence denounced it as an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life. Offences include committing acts such as spreading false information about terrorism and causing trouble on flights, as well as using expired tickets or smoking on trains. People could also be punished for failing to pay fines or other financial wrongdoings. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events It comes as China denied it is running concentration camps in the far-western region of Xinjiang and instead claimed they were boarding schools. Activists have claimed more than one million people, predominantly Muslim, are being held in mass detention camps in the region. Former Vatican treasurer Cardinal George Pell has been jailed for six years for sexually abusing two choirboys. In my view, your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance, Victoria state County Court chief judge Peter Kidd told the 77-year-old as he ordered that he serve a minimum of three years and 8 months before he is eligible for parole. Pell, who faced a 10-year maximum sentence for each of his crimes, is the most senior Catholic to be convicted for child sex offences. Pope Francis former finance minister was convicted by a unanimous jury verdict in December of orally raping a 13-year-old choirboy and indecently dealing with the boy and the boys 13-year-old friend in late 1996 and early 1997. The abuse took place in a room and a corridor at St Patricks Cathedral, in Melbourne, where Pell was archbishop. The senior Catholic was convicted in December, but the verdict was suppressed from being made public by a court order until 26 February when further child sex offence charges against Pell dating back to the 1970s were dropped. George Pell convicted of sex abuse Show all 5 1 /5 George Pell convicted of sex abuse George Pell convicted of sex abuse Cardinal George Pell makes his way to the court in Melbourne on 27 February Getty Images George Pell convicted of sex abuse Lawyer Robert Richter QC leaves the County court during a break in Cardinal Pell's trial EPA George Pell convicted of sex abuse The front pages of Australia's major newspapers reporting the conviction Getty Images George Pell convicted of sex abuse A Police van is seen as it leaves Melbourne County Court after Cardinal George Pell was remanded in custody Getty Images George Pell convicted of sex abuse A statue stands on the grounds of St Patrick's College, where Cardinal George Pell attended school, in Ballarat, Australia Reuters He maintained his innocence throughout and has filed an appeal, which is set to be heard in June. The judge also took pains to note that he was sentencing Pell for the offences on which the cardinal had been convicted and not for the sins of the Catholic Church. As I directed the jury who convicted you in this trial, you are not to be made a scapegoat for any failings or perceived failings of the Catholic Church, Mr Kidd said. However, he stressed that Pell had abused his position of power and had shown no remorse for the assaults, which he described as egregious, degrading and humiliating to the victims. The former Catholic cleric showed no emotion during the hearing, standing silently with his hands behind his back as the judge read his sentence. He later signed documents that registered him for life as a serious sexual offender before he was led from the dock by four prison officers. One of Pells victims called the judges sentence meticulous and considered. in a statement read outside court by his lawyer Vivian Waller. It is hard for me to allow myself to feel the gravity of this moment, the moment when the sentence is handed down, the moment when justice is done, the man said. It is hard for me, for the time being, to take comfort in this outcome. I appreciate that the court has acknowledged what was inflicted upon me as a child. However, there is no rest for me. Everything is overshadowed by the forthcoming appeal. Australian law prohibits the publication of sex crime victims identities. Another of Pells victims died of a heroin overdose in 2014 at the age of 31 without ever reporting the abuse. The survivor made a statement against Pell the following year to a police task force set up to investigate allegations that arose from a state parliamentary inquiry into handling of child abuse by religious and other non-government organisations. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Pell has been held in a maximum security prison since 27 February when his bail was revoked. Pells lawyer, Robert Richter, has argued for a light sentence, based on his clients age, heart problems, no prior history of offending, no physical injuries to the victims and the fact the duration of the offences was short. Mr Richter sparked a furore when, in seeking a light sentence, he called the offence a plain vanilla sexual penetration case. He later apologised. Mr Kidd, said he was not convinced by those arguments. Pells abuse was imbued with arrogance, aggression and impunity, Mr Kidd told the court. European newspapers have gone big on Theresa Mays failure to win a second Brexit vote, suggesting it opens the door to delaying Britains exit from the EU. The prime ministers defeat was covered extensively on the continent, with half of the front page of Frances Liberation newspaper given to a picture of Ms May with the caption: Back to square one. Is it the end? The end of Brexit but above all the end of Theresa May? the newspaper asked in its analysis. The Netherlands NRC said: Mays new defeat is so big that there is no negotiator left in Brussels who still believes that concessions to her will yield a majority in the House of Commons. Meanwhile, French newspaper Le Monde also featured Ms Mays defeat on its front page, and concluded: Metaphorical or not, Theresa Mays loss of voice on Tuesday symbolised the state of a country deemed pragmatic but remaining without a voice for failing to compromise with its neighbours. Papers react to the Brexit vote Show all 10 1 /10 Papers react to the Brexit vote Papers react to the Brexit vote The Guardian The Guardian highlights just how soon the Prime Minister's defeat has come Britain's scheduled date of departure Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Mail The Daily Mail takes aim at MPs who political editor Jason Groves claims have "plunged Britain into chaos" by rejecting the Prime Minister's deal Papers react to the Brexit vote The Independent Daily Edition The Independent calls for a second referendum as a way forward Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Express The Daily Express leads with exasperation, with political editor Macer Hall writing that "Brexit was hanging in the balance last night" Papers react to the Brexit vote The Sun The Sun take the Prime Minister's "croaky" voice into account as it reports on last night's "Brexit shambles" Papers react to the Brexit vote Financial Times The Financial Times claims that the Prime Minister's authority is "in shreds" and reports on the fall in the pound in the wake of the vote Papers react to the Brexit vote The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph calls the Prime Minister's defeat "humiliating" and claims that a delay to Brexit is likely Papers react to the Brexit vote The i The i claims that parliament is "out of control" Papers react to the Brexit vote The Times The Times claims that Britain is in crisis and that the Prime Minister "may face resignation calls" Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Mirror The Daily Mirror says that the Prime Minister "surrenders" in reference to the likelihood of Brexit being delayed after the vote The verdict from Belgiums De Standaards said: Going down fighting was the only thing that remained for May. How very British... It is unclear what this therapeutic stubbornness is supposed to bring. Spains El Mundo claimed Britain is perhaps the European state where populism has most corrosively affected traditional parties. While Labour has moved towards Jeremy Corbyns Eurosceptic, far-left position, the Tories have entered into a process of internal decomposition, it added. Germanys Sueddeutsche Zeitung said the prime minister had failed again with her Brexit deal. The backstop solution has become a kind of fetish for hardliners, it said. On the other hand, May has not even come up with with any good arguments. MPs cheer when Theresa May asks if they want another Brexit referendum Spains El Pais said the governments defeat opens the door to delaying Brexit, while Philippe Lamberts, a member of the European Parliaments Brexit steering group, told Germanys Der Spiegel only two realistic options remained: No deal or no Brexit. A fox has died in extraordinary circumstances after losing the ultimate game of chicken during a night-time raid on a henhouse. Students at Gros-Chene secondary school in Brittany were shocked to discover the dead body of the fox riddled with peck marks during their morning rounds last week. The school maintains their brood of free-range chickens ganged up on the animal, attacking it in large numbers and overcoming it. There, in the corner, we found this dead fox, Pascal Daniel, head of farming at the school, told news agency AFP. There was a herd instinct and they attacked him with their beaks. The animal was reportedly surrounded, then killed in a corner of the building home to 3,000 chickens. Sabotaging a fox hunt Show all 15 1 /15 Sabotaging a fox hunt Sabotaging a fox hunt A pack of hounds races past saboteurs. Hunting foxes with hounds is illegal in England. 2011 Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Sabotaging a fox hunt Saboteurs geared up in camouflage strategize and survey maps of the area. They follow hunting teams around the countryside in cars and on foot, spraying citronella around to throw off the scent of the fox for the dogs. They use the same whistle the hunters use to get their dogs to turn left and right and all the commands, etc., which throws off the dogs. England, 2011 Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Sabotaging a fox hunt Saboteurs travel on foot through miles of country fields during a fox hunt. England, 2011 Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Sabotaging a fox hunt A pack of dogs waits for commands from their mounted owners. England, 2011 Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Sabotaging a fox hunt In England, fox hunting with hounds is illegal. So is sabotaging a hunt. Yet the police are there only for the saboteurs. 2011 Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Sabotaging a fox hunt Saboteurs film the illegal practice of using dogs to hunt foxes. England, 2011 Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Sabotaging a fox hunt Saboteurs follow hunting team into the fields during a fox hunt. England, 2011 Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Sabotaging a fox hunt Saboteurs follow hunting team into the fields during an illegal fox hunt. England, 2011 Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Sabotaging a fox hunt A hunter angrily addresses a crowd of saboteurs. England, 2011 Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Sabotaging a fox hunt Things turn dangerous as hunters on horseback rush the line of saboteurs. England, 2011 Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Sabotaging a fox hunt A hunter and saboteur share the same space as one attempts to direct dogs towards fox trails while another tries to confuse them. England, 2011 Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Sabotaging a fox hunt Fox hunt saboteurs keep an eye over the horizon for signs of pursuit. England, 2011 Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Sabotaging a fox hunt Saboteurs block hunters from passing. England, 2011 Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Sabotaging a fox hunt A mounted hunter addresses the saboteurs. England, 2011 Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Sabotaging a fox hunt Mounted fox hunters, a pack of dogs, and saboteurs all converge before the hunt. Fox hunting with dogs is illegal and so is sabotaging the illegal hunt. England, 2011 Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals It was a juvenile of five or six months, about 60cm long. He did not seem sick and in any case, he did not have scabies, Mr Daniel said. He suggested in recent months the hens had learned how to deal with such a scenario. He said: The hens can arrive en masse and the fox, surprised, could panic in front of the number. The hens have been there since July, so for more than seven months, and have probably learned to defend themselves. Apparently no chickens were found to have been injured during the incident. It is thought the fox entered at dusk and then become trapped inside by light-controlled automatic doors that close when the sun goes down. Regional paper France Oest quoted a wildlife expert from Brittany who said they were surprised by the turn of events. They said: There may be a group effect, but also other reasons the fox was young so inexperienced. It could already be weakened, even injured, and we know that chickens will confront a weak animal with no vigour. Adolf Hitlers goddaughter, Edda Goering, has died at the age of 80 and been buried in an unmarked grave, it has been reported. Ms Goering was also the daughter of Hitlers deputy Hermann Goering, who played a key role in the Nazi regime, establishing the feared Gestapo secret police force. She died in December, although her death was not made public at the time, and has been buried in the Waldfriedhof Cemetery in Munich. The exact location of her grave has not been disclosed. She was born in 1938, the year before the Second World War started. After the Nazis were defeated in 1945, her father was sentenced to death for war crimes. He took his own life the night he was to be hanged. Hitler's holiday home now a restaurant Show all 5 1 /5 Hitler's holiday home now a restaurant Hitler's holiday home now a restaurant The Eagle's Nest, Hitler's holiday home in the Bavarian alps, is today a restaurant owned by a charitable trust Wolfgang Manousek Hitler's holiday home now a restaurant Sitting atop Kehlstein mountain, it was known in German as Kehlstenhaus Getty Hitler's holiday home now a restaurant The house was constructed in 1938, paid for by the Nazi party Getty Hitler's holiday home now a restaurant Photo taken in May 1945 shows a view of the eagle's nest, the octagonal main hall or reception room, in Obersalzberg of the Bavarian Alps AFP/Getty Hitler's holiday home now a restaurant Photo taken in May 1945 shows the entrance of the Eagle's Nest AFP/Getty Ms Goering had been battling with the authorities over a share of fathers estate, which was confiscated after the war. He had amassed a huge collection of art stolen from museums and private collections. In 2015 she asked for enough of the items back to live a subsistence livelihood, according to Fox News. Her pleas were rejected by German authorities. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Ms Goering rarely spoke of her parents publicly, but in 1989 she did say she had a "very nice early childhood" because of the "love and care of my parents," according to the Times of Israel. She added that she believed her father was doing what he thought was best for Germany at the time. She never married and worked in a hospital laboratory. Spanish investigators have reportedly linked the CIA to an attack on the North Korean embassy in Madrid last month. A group of 10 assailants broke into the embassy on 22 February, tying up eight members of staff before beating and interrogating them. The attackers also took computers and mobile phones from the embassy. Sources close to the investigation told Spanish newspaper El Pais they had identified at least two of the attackers as having connections with the CIA. The newspaper said the CIA had denied involvement but its sources in the government said they found the US intelligence agencys response unconvincing. North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary Show all 18 1 /18 North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary Participants wave flowers AFP/Getty North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un (R) waves with China's Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress Li Zhanshu (L) from a balcony AFP/Getty North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary Airplanes forming the number 70 fly in formation and fire flares AP North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary North Korean performers dance EPA North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary North Korean military officers applaud near portraits of late North Korean leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il AP North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary North Korean tanks roll past AP North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary AP North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary Korean People's Army (KPA) soldiers take part AFP/Getty North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary Korean People's Army (KPA) soldiers march AFP/Getty North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary Participants march during a mass rally on Kim Il Sung square in Pyongyang AFP/Getty North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary A girl reacts during a parade AP North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, right, reacts as he chats with China's third highest ranking official, Li Zhanshu AP North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary People carry flags in front of statues of North Korea founder Kim Il Sung (L) and late leader Kim Jong Il Reuters North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary Performers take part in a concert at the Pyongyang Indoor Stadium AFP/Getty North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary North Korean artillery roll past AP North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary Students perform Reuters North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary Soldiers march during a military parade Reuters North Korea military parade celebrating nation's 70th anniversary Participants wave flowers AFP/Getty During the break-in, one woman managed to get free and escaped through a second floor window and a neighbour who heard her screams contacted the police. But when they arrived on the scene they were turned away by a man at the door of the embassy who told them nothing was going on. Minutes later, the assailants sped away in two North Korean diplomatic vehicles which were later found abandoned nearby. Inside the embassy, officers found eight people who had been tied up with bags over their heads for two hours. Two needed medical attention. Sources told El Pais investigators from the Spanish police and secret service (CNI) believe the operation was planned perfectly, as if by a military cell. They reportedly suspect the attackers were hunting for information on Kim Hyok-chol, the former North Korean ambassador to Spain who has since played a role in organising North Korean leader Kim Jong-uns meeting with Donald Trump in Vietnam. North Korea's foreign minister disputes President Trump's explanation for summit collapse Kim Hyok-chol was expelled from Spain in September 2017 in retaliation for North Koreas nuclear missile tests. He has since led the North Korean delegation that negotiated with the US in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. A spokesperson for Spains Ministry of the Interior said they do not comment on ongoing investigations. The Independent has contacted the CIA for comment. Russia's parliament has approved new fines for people who insult the state or government online, sparking fierce criticism the move is an attempt to silence President Vladimir Putin's critics. The bill proposes fining people up to 100,000 roubles (1,150) for showing "blatant disrespect" for the authorities, Russian flag or constitution. Repeat offenders would face a prison sentence of up to 15 days. Human rights activists were among those calling for the law, which was approved by the upper house of parliament on Wednesday, to be thrown out. In an open letter, several prominent cultural figures warned that the bills were an "open declaration of the establishment of direct censorship". The Kremlin denied the legislation amounts to censorship. The second draft law would give authorities the power to block websites if they fail to comply with requests to remove information that the state deems to be factually inaccurate. Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Show all 22 1 /22 Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Russian police officers detain a protester in Moscow AFP/Getty Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny addresses supporters AFP/Getty Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Russian police push protesters back during Pushkin Square AP Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Pro-Kremlin activists and opposition supporters scuffle in Moscow AFP/Getty Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Alexei Navalny during the rally Rex Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Russian riot police officers detain opposition leader Alexei Navalny AFP/Getty Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Russian police arrest a participant of a liberal opposition rally EPA Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Alexei Navalny being carried away by police Rex Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Opposition supporters shout slogans AFP/Getty Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Russian police officers detain a participant AFP/Getty Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Demonstrator carries a poster depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin during a massive protest rally in St.Petersburg AP Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Russian police carrying struggling opposition leader Alexei Navalny AP Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Russian police detain a protester at a demonstration AP Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Policemen detain opposition supporters REUTERS Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia A fighter of National Liberation Movement, left, clashes with protesters AP Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Russian police officers detain a participant AFP/Getty Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Russian police arrest a participant of a liberal opposition rally EPA Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Policemen detain an opposition supporter Reuters Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Russian police officers detain a cossack during an unauthorized anti-Putin rally AFP/Getty Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Russian police detain a protester in Pushkin Square in Moscow AP Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Protesters attend a rally in St. Petersburg AP Anti-Putin protests: hundreds of demonstrators arrested in Russia Russian police officers run towards protesters AFP/Getty Individuals would be fined up to 400,000 roubles (4,600) for circulating false information online that leads to a "mass violation of public order". In cases where so-called fake news was found, Russia's media regulator could restrict access to the website and instruct it to delete the content. The bills - which now only need Mr Putin's signature before becoming law - received broad support in the upper house, days after thousands rallied to protest tightening internet restrictions. Those protests were in response to a bill in parliament that would route all internet traffic through servers in Russia, making virtual private networks (VPNs) ineffective. Andrei Klishas, from Putin's United Russia party and one of the authors of the latest "censorship" bills, said false reports that inflated the death toll at a fatal shopping centre fire in Siberia last year illustrated the need to tackle fake news. "This kind of thing must be screened by the law," he said. Council member Ekaterina Schulmann said the legislation, which the lower house of parliament approved in January, duplicated existing law and added that it could be applied arbitrarily because its wording was so vague. Putin's horse doesn't want to obey as the president joins women of 1st Operational Police Regiment in Moscow "The sphere of fake news, insults and so on, is under strict regulation in many countries of the world, even in European states," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. "This undoubtedly has to be done in our country, too." Tougher internet laws introduced over the past five years require search engines to delete some search results, messaging services to share encryption keys with security services and social networks to store users' personal data on servers within the country. Additional reporting by agencies Support for Spain's socialist party has grown sharply in recent months alongside a rise in popularity for the far-right, a poll of polls ahead of next month's snap election shows. According to the El Pais calculation, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's left-wing party is on course to win 27.3 per cent of the vote, giving the socialists a projected 113 seats. But with little more than six weeks to go, the poll of polls showed the far-right Vox party also gaining sharply with a 12.1 per cent vote share. Vox currently holds no seats in the Spanish parliament and an outcome similar to the poll projection would be regarded as a significant victory for the party, which stands on an anti-immigrant platform. The snap election was called in February after Mr Sanchezs budget was voted down. Protests as Catalan leaders face trial: in pictures Show all 13 1 /13 Protests as Catalan leaders face trial: in pictures Protests as Catalan leaders face trial: in pictures Pro-union protesters demonstrate outside the Supreme Court in Madrid Reuters Protests as Catalan leaders face trial: in pictures A separatist protester holds a sign reading "When injustice becomes law, rebellion is a must" outside the Supreme Court in Madrid AFP/Getty Protests as Catalan leaders face trial: in pictures Separatist protesters hold a banner reading "Nationalism is supremacy" outside the Supreme Court in Madrid EPA Protests as Catalan leaders face trial: in pictures A protester holds a Catalan pro-independence Estelada flag during a protest outside the Supreme Court in Madrid AFP/Getty Protests as Catalan leaders face trial: in pictures A separatist protester holds up a banner during a protest outside the Supreme Court in Madrid Reuters Protests as Catalan leaders face trial: in pictures Basque people hold a sign reading "you will never walk alone, we are with you. Basque Country is always with Catalonia" outside the Supreme Court in Madrid AFP/Getty Protests as Catalan leaders face trial: in pictures Protesters hold banners mocking the trial of jailed Catalan separatists outside the Supreme Court in Madrid AFP/Getty Protests as Catalan leaders face trial: in pictures Separatist protesters hold up signs and banners during a protest outside the Supreme Court in Madrid Reuters Protests as Catalan leaders face trial: in pictures Separatist protesters hold Catalan and Spanish Republican flags and a banner reading "deciding is not a crime" outside the Supreme Court in Madrid Reuters Protests as Catalan leaders face trial: in pictures Pro-union demonstrators hold a sign depicting former President of the Catalan Government Carles Puigdemont reading "Puigdemont not ours" outside the Supreme Court in Madrid Reuters Protests as Catalan leaders face trial: in pictures Pro-union demonstrators hold Spanish flags with the message "hooray for the unity of Spain" outside the Supreme Court in Madrid EPA Protests as Catalan leaders face trial: in pictures Catalan regional president Quim Torra (C-R) and Catalan regional parliament speaker Roger Torrent (C-L) take part in a protest against the trial of jailed Catalan separatists in Madrid AFP/Getty Protests as Catalan leaders face trial: in pictures The president of Catalonian Parliament, Roger Torrent, center, and the Catalan regional President Quim Torra walk with protesters holding a banner that reads "to choose is not a crime" outside the Supreme Court in Madrid AP The vote, the third in under four years, is a further sign of an increasingly fragmented political scene, with Catalonias independence push dominating recent debate. Mr Sanchez took office after ousting his predecessor, Mariano Rajoy, in June last year, when he won a no-confidence vote triggered by a damaging corruption conviction affecting the main conservative opposition Peoples Party (PP). But the simple majority of Socialists, anti-austerity and regional nationalist parties that united at the time against Mr Rajoy crumbled in February after Mr Sanchez refused to accept talks over Catalonias self-determination as part of the ongoing dialogue with separatists. To win an outright parliamentary majority on 28 April, any one party needs to secure at least 176 seats. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The projection taken as an average of dozens opinion polls - shows the socialists and the far-left platform Podemos (on 13.8 per cent, or 36 seats) together would reach 149 seats 27 seats short and leaving them to rely on the support of smaller, regional parties to form a majority government. The PP saw its support drop to 20 per cent, or roughly 75 seats, in the polls. And with the centre-right Ciudadanos also falling to 16.3 per cent, or 58 seats, even a coalition of the three right-wing parties would fall short of a majority in parliament. Additional reporting by agencies A leading Saudi womens rights campaigner who has allegedly been tortured and sexually harassed in prison stood trial on Wednesday. Loujain al-Hathloul, who defied the kingdoms recently overturned ban on female drivers, was arrested in May 2018 along with 10 other womens rights activists in Saudi Arabia. The other campaigners, who include Aziza al-Yousef, Eman al-Nafjan and Hatoon al-Fassi, will also appear before the Criminal Court in the capital, Riyadh. Court president Ibrahim al-Sayari told reporters and diplomats, who were barred from attending the session, that charges will be presented against the women although it is not clear what they are. Mr Sayari cited privacy concerns for not making the trial public. No formal charges have been published but the official Saudi Press Agency said the women were accused of suspicious contact with foreign entities to support their activities, recruiting some persons in charge of sensitive government positions, and providing financial support to hostile elements outside the country. Tunisians protest against Saudi Crown Prince's visit Show all 10 1 /10 Tunisians protest against Saudi Crown Prince's visit Tunisians protest against Saudi Crown Prince's visit Street protests greeted Mohammed Bin Salman during his visit to Tunisia AFP/Getty Tunisians protest against Saudi Crown Prince's visit A mural depicting Mohammed Bin Salman washing his hands of blood Simon Speakman Cordall Tunisians protest against Saudi Crown Prince's visit A protester holds a banner accusing Mohammed Bin Salman of being a war criminal AP Tunisians protest against Saudi Crown Prince's visit Protesters pass down Habib Bourguiba avenue in Tunis Simon Speakman Cordall Tunisians protest against Saudi Crown Prince's visit A Tunisian man holds up a cartoon that depicts Donald Trump assisting Mohammed Bin Salman in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi AP Tunisians protest against Saudi Crown Prince's visit A poster depicting a war ravaged Yemeni child Simon Speakman Cordall Tunisians protest against Saudi Crown Prince's visit Protesters hold up saws in reference to the reportedly gruesome manner in which Jamal Khashoggi was disposed of AFP/Getty Tunisians protest against Saudi Crown Prince's visit Protesters pass down Habib Bourguiba avenue in Tunis Simon Speakman Cordall Tunisians protest against Saudi Crown Prince's visit Protesters chant slogans as they move down Habib Bourguiba avenue in Tunis Reuters Tunisians protest against Saudi Crown Prince's visit Protesters pass down Habib Bourguiba avenue in Tunis Simon Speakman Cordall Other state-affiliated media reported the women were accused of violating Royal Decree 44a, under which dissidents can face terrorism charges punishable by between three and 20 years in prison. The arrests have been applauded in the countrys mainstream press and flyers have appeared on social media showing the activists with a traitor stamp over their faces. Government-aligned press have also published photos of the detained activists and branded them traitors. Some of the women appeared in the courtroom together on Wednesday, but their cases appeared to be separate, with relatives entering only for certain parts of the session. ALQST, a London-based Saudi rights group, said the women were charged under the kingdoms cybercrime law. Conviction could see prison sentences ranging from one to 10 years. The accusations are related to human rights work and communications with hostile entities, ALQST said on Twitter. Walid al-Hathloul, the 31-year-old brother of Loujain, has said his sister was made to sign a request to be pardoned. Ms Hathlouls family and Human Rights Watch have alleged in recent months that she and other female detainees have been tortured and sexually harassed in jail. Saudi officials have denied those allegations. The campaigner has told her parents she has been held in solitary confinement, beaten, waterboarded, given electric shocks, sexually harassed and threatened with rape and murder. They saw that her hands were shaking, they saw the signs of torture the burns and bruises on her legs, Mr Hathloul, her brother, told The Independent last month. One of the interrogators put his legs on my sisters legs like you would put your legs on the table. He was smoking and puffing in front of her face, he said. On Tuesday, Mr Hathloul tweeted she was not allowed to have a lawyer and had not been provided with the list of indictments. Recommended Rebel Saudi royal forms opposition calling for regime change Relatives of the womens rights campaigners said they were told at the last minute that the trial had been moved from the Specialised Criminal Court, which was set up to try terrorism cases but is often used for political offences. It was not clear what was behind the decision but diplomats said they were hopeful it indicated a more lenient handling of the cases after months of lobbying by western governments. Ms Hathloul, who appeared alongside the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, at the One Young World summit in Ottawa in 2016 for young leaders, peacefully campaigned alongside other activists for years to allow women the right to drive. The University of British Columbia graduate, who was ranked third in 2015s list of most powerful Arab women in the world, has been arrested and released several times for defying the driving ban. In 2014, she was detained when she attempted to drive across the border from the United Arab Emirates. Ms Hathloul served 73 days at a juvenile detention centre as a result and documented many of her experiences on Twitter. She was one of the first women to run for a seat on a municipal council in 2015, but lost. Saudi Arabia was rebuked at the United Nations Human Rights Council for the first time earlier this month when a statement signed by 36 countries called on the country to release human rights activists. The statement referred to Ms Hathloul, as well as other womens rights activists, as individuals detained for exercising their fundamental freedoms. The Gulf Centre for Human Rights has said it is deeply concerned about the wellbeing of the activists and is fearful they may not get a fair trial. Prosecutions in Saudi Arabia have long been characterised by breaches of fair trial standards, in particular, the use of torture, they said in a statement. Samah Hadid, Middle East director of campaigns at Amnesty International, said it was concerning that they are likely to be charged for simply defending womens rights. Saudi Arabia has faced extensive scrutiny and criticism over its human rights record in the wake of the case but also in its role in the ongoing war in Yemen and over the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the kingdoms Istanbul consulate last October. A representative for the Saudi authorities has not yet responded to a request for comment. After the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and European safety regulator grounded the Boeing 737 MAX plane involved in two fatal crashes, tens of thousands of passengers will be affected. These are the key questions and answers. Why are there concerns over this aircraft type? On 10 March 2019, all 157 passengers and crew aboard an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 died when it crashed shortly after take-off from Addis Ababa on a routine flight to Nairobi. It was the second fatal accident involving what is a very modern aircraft. Fluctuations in the vertical speed of the aircraft show some similarities with the performance of a Lion Air 737 MAX 8 which crashed shortly after take off from Jakarta airport in October 2018, with the loss of 189 lives. Concern has centred on some software installed to protect against a stall. Evidence from the Indonesian crash implicates this safety measure in the fatal accident. Why has the UK banned the aircraft now? It follows grounding orders issued by China, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia. The CAA does not feel it has sufficient information from the flight data recorder of the Ethiopian Airline aircraft. We have, as a precautionary measure, issued instructions to stop any commercial passenger flights from any operator arriving, departing or overflying UK airspace, said a spokesperson. Which airlines and passengers will it affect? Tui Airways has five of the aircraft based in the UK, mainly in Manchester, and uses them on a wide range of longer European and North African links on the day of the ban aircraft were in the sky on flights linking Manchester with Alicante and Marrakech. The airline said: Tui Airways can confirm that all 737 MAX 8 aircraft currently operating in the UK have been grounded following the decision from the UK regulatory authorities today. Any customers due to fly home today on a 737 MAX 8 from their holiday will be flown back on another aircraft. Customers due to travel in the coming days will also travel on holiday as planned on other aircraft. The safety and wellbeing of our customers and staff has remained our primary concern. Norwegian Air has 18 Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft and has said it will ground the entire fleet, even though many of them could avoid UK airspace. The carrier has 110 Boeing 737-800 aircraft, which are unaffected by the ban. The airline said: We are now working on re-allocating our fleet options with other aircraft types, re-bookings to other flights and combining flights to minimise inconvenience caused for our passengers. We would like to apologise to customers who are affected, but the safety and security of our customers and colleagues will never be compromised. Affected passengers will be informed via SMS and our web pages. Is there likely to be disruption? Initially some thousands of passengers will find themselves unable to reach their intended destination, as other aircraft are sought to operate the flights. Over the next three weeks there is likely to be a modest amount of disruption due to a significant slice of airlines fleets being grounded. The Independent has asked Tui Airways and Norwegian for guidance on what they should expect. March is an off-peak month, but once Easter and the main summer season begins the absence of these aircraft will be more seriously felt. In particular, Ryanair the biggest European customer for the jet is expecting to start flying the plane in May, on a busy network from Stansted. Airlines will seek to minimise disruption by sub-chartering capacity, using larger aircraft or keeping older planes flying beyond their intended replacement date. What are my rights if my flight is delayed or cancelled? European air passengers rights rules will apply. There is no compensation payable, because this grounding will count as a hidden manufacturing defect. But airlines must provide alternative flights and, if a wait is involved, source hotels and provide meals for disrupted passengers. What is the technical background? Boeings stall-protection measure is designed to respond when the angle-of-attack sensor indicates danger. The system works by measuring the angle of attack the angle between the wing and the airflow. If it increases beyond a certain point, then the lift produced by the wings is insufficient to keep the aircraft flying. It will automatically nudge the nose downwards, by operating an elevator in the tail, even if the pilots are flying manually rather than on autopilot. The pilots are then expected to take action to address the potential stall issue. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events But an Emergency Airworthiness Directive issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) shortly after the Lion Air crash warned: If an erroneously high single angle of attack sensor input is received by the flight control system, there is a potential for repeated nose-down trim commands of the horizontal stabilizer. This condition, if not addressed, could cause the flight crew to have difficulty controlling the airplane, and lead to excessive nose-down attitude, significant altitude loss, and possible impact with terrain. The directive ordered airlines to advise pilots about how to deal with the phenomenon should it arise. The FAA said the issue is likely to exist or develop in other products of the same type design. Many pilots have expressed concern that Boeing had failed to communicate what they see as a very significant change to the way the 737 flies. The USs aviation agency has doubled down on its decision not to ground the Boeing 737 MAX, leaving America and Canada the only major nations still flying the aircraft model involved in two crashes that killed more than 300 people. As officials around the world among them the European Unions aviation safety regulators said they were suspending flights involving the 737 MAX, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it had seen no reason to follow suit. Acting FAA Administrator Dan Elwell said its review showed no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. He added that no foreign civil aviation authorities had provided data to us that would warrant action. In the course of our urgent review of data on the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash, if any issues affecting the continued airworthiness of the aircraft are identified, the FAA will take immediate and appropriate action, said Mr Elwell. 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 comments, following Sundays crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that killed around 160 people, came as regulators around the globe moved to ground the Boeing 737 MAX. The CEO of Ethiopian Airlines, Tewolde GebreMariam, told CNN the doomed planes pilot had flight control problems shortly before the fatal crash. He was having difficulties with the flight control of the air plane, so he asked to return back to base, said Mr GebreMariam. He said the pilot was granted permission to return to ground; as he did so, the flight disappeared from the radar of air traffic control. The aircraft is made by Boeing Commercial Airplanes in Seattle. Boeing, which is headquartered in Chicago, has insisted there is no need for the jet to be grounded. How to tell if you're on a Boeing 737 Max Safety is Boeings number one priority and we have full confidence in the safety of the MAX, the company said in a statement. We understand that regulatory agencies and customers have made decisions that they believe are most appropriate for their home markets. It is also important to note that the Federal Aviation Administration is not mandating any further action at this time, and based on the information currently available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators. The decision by the FAA and authorities in Canada, mean they are the only two major nations still flying the jet, which was also the model involved in a Lion Air flight crash in Indonesia last October. Around 190 people were killed. In the US, the airlines using the model Southwest, United and American, have stood by it, though some have sought to offer customers alternative flights. Air Canada is also still operating the aircraft. The CEO of Boeing, Dennis Muilenburg, spoke to Donald Trump after the president tweeted that airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT, he added. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Boeing shares were down more than 6 per cent on Tuesday, having fallen by five per cent on Monday. When MPs vote tonight on whether to block a no-deal exit from the EU on 29 March, it will be a highly symbolic moment. Conservative MPs will enjoy a rare free vote, a telling sign of both Theresa Mays weakness and the transfer of power from the government to parliament. If she had tried to whip her MPs, May would have faced a wave of resignations by either Brexiteers or pro-EU ministers, further destabilising her administration and possibly forcing her out. She has lost control of events after last nights second crushing Commons defeat for her Brexit deal. She is in office just but no longer in power. She has lost the confidence of parliament and her cabinet. Westminster is awash with speculation that a delegation of senior ministers and Tory MPs will soon tell her that her time is up. If the UK is to take back control of its destiny, that will have to be done by MPs, rather than Mays ailing government. Inevitably, pro-Brexit newspapers are blaming MPs for rejecting Mays deal. Todays Daily Mail calls the Commons The House of Fools. A government of fools would be more accurate. MPs have refused to be blackmailed by the prime minister into backing a bad deal. However, they must now rise to the challenge of this perilous moment. They cannot continue to declare merely what they are against, and must face up to what May called unenviable choices. MPs with much in common should stop squabbling over small differences, such as those between supporters of a Final Say referendum and a Common Market 2.0 (or Norway Plus) agreement, which would keep the UK in the single market and a customs union. Both still want their favoured option to be the last one standing. Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Show all 15 1 /15 Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Pork There will be tariffs on pork in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cheese There will be tariffs in place on some cheeses including 22.10/100kg of cheddar, 19.10/100kg of processed cheese and 18.60/100kg on some blue cheeses Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Milk There will be no tariffs in place on milk Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Car Parts There will be no tariffs on car parts imported from Europe PA Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cars However finished cars will face tariffs of 10.6% Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Alcoholic drinks There will be no tariffs on alcoholic drinks - except on some rums due to ingredients used in their distilling process Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Beef There will be tariffs on beef in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fish There will be no tariffs on many types of fish including cod, haddock, salmon and sea bass Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fruit and vegetables There will be no tariffs on almost all fruit and vegetables Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Chocolate There will be no tariffs on chocolate or other cocoa products Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Poultry There will be tariffs on poultry in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ceramics There will be some tariffs in place on ceramis Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Steel There will be no tariffs on steel Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Coal There will be no tariffs on coal Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Lamb/Mutton There will be tariffs on the meat of sheep in order to protect British farmers Getty Referendum campaigners insist support among MPs for Common Market 2.0 and other Brexit options should be tested first, since a referendum is a solution if all of them are rejected. Although there is not yet a Commons majority for a Final Say vote, there is still a path to one. The Peoples Vote campaign insists the number of MPs backing a referendum has risen from 30 to somewhere between 250 and 280, so it is plausible that a continuing impasse could get it over the magic 320 mark. But to achieve that, Jeremy Corbyn will need to implement Labours democratically decided policy of a public vote when other options such as a general election have been exhausted. Noticeably, Corbyn did not mention a referendum in his Commons response to last nights defeat even after Theresa May did. The prime minister doesnt support a Final Say, or the general election that Corbyn wants. May won applause when she told a private meeting of Tory MPs yesterday she would not seek an election. Although some Tories now regard an election as inevitable, they certainly dont want May to lead them into one. In any case, an election would not necessarily resolve the Brexit crisis. Another hung parliament would be likely, so we might end up with another Tory-DUP pact or a Labour-SNP one. The two main parties, divided over Brexit, might offer more fantasy deals that would never fly with the EU. It would not automatically be a "Brexit election". May tried that in 2017, but Corbyn skilfully turned the spotlight onto austerity. So a referendum may now be the only way out of the Brexit maze. A supine cabinet should force May to come up with a Plan B, a soft Brexit based on a customs union, which might command a Commons majority. The cabinet should insist on a series of indicative free votes on Brexit options, before MPs take matters into their own hands. Incredibly, Mays Plan B is still Plan A, despite her humiliation last night. She still sees her deal as the only game in town. With a no-deal expected to be taken off the table tonight, the prime minister intends to use the threats of a long delay on the EUs terms and no Brexit at all to browbeat Eurosceptics into backing her agreement in a third Commons vote. May has ducked the "unenviable choices. She seems incapable of building a cross-party consensus. She could have tried to unite the country in 2016, instead of ignoring the 48 per cent. She should have reached across the Commons after losing her majority in 2017 but ploughed on, in denial about the parliamentary arithmetic. So MPs will have to do it by themselves. Over to our shadow government the likes of Labours Yvette Cooper and Hilary Benn, and the Tories Sir Oliver Letwin and Nick Boles. They may revive a bill to allow backbenchers to seize control of the Commons agenda, an unprecedented move and another crushing blow for May. May will resist this power grab, of course. But she has made such a mess of it that these senior MPs can hardly do any worse. The death of Catherine Shaw, the 23-year-old British backpacker whose body has been discovered on a mountainside in Guatemala, has received a lot of attention from the press and the public. The desire to find answers to explain and understand this terrible tragedy is strong. In lieu of concrete details about the case, theories started emerging on social media. After a picture of Catherines body was posted online, people began to conclude that her death had been caused by an attack of a violent, sexual nature. These assumptions prompted questions. Questions like, Why did she go out at 5am?, Why was she travelling in such a dangerous country? and Why was she travelling on her own? There was little consideration of the fact that Catherine wanted to wake up early to watch the sunrise, and that she had every right to explore the wonders of Central America solo. When people believed that Catherine had been attacked, the instinct was to highlight how she should have avoided danger. Following suggestions that her death might have been a tragic accident, people still feel the need to apportion blame. The Lucie Blackman Trust, which has been supporting the Shaw family, is encouraging the public not to jump to conclusions about Catherines death, and even suggested it may have been an accident. Its chief executive Matthew Searle has said that the kind of speculation weve seen about her fate is incredibly unhelpful, distressing and unnecessary. News reports focus on certain details, like the hotel managers insinuation that Catherine was taking drugs in the days preceding her death. Dont get me wrong: obviously this is a relevant fact for any investigation into what happened. But, that being said; the world is not a coroners court. We dont need to endlessly, publicly, and pruriently probe into this young womans behaviours. When something terrible happens something absolutely, gut-wrenchingly awful our reaction is often simple and self-preserving. We think, instinctively, How do I make sure this doesnt happen to me? Its why we try to blame the victim. Not because we genuinely think she brought this on herself, but because were terrified that the same thing will happen to us, or a loved one. We try to distance ourselves from the person affected, and note the ways through which we might avoid their fate. I find myself subconsciously sifting through news stories, looking for things I can interpret as incriminating details in a victims case. Was the boy who got stabbed involved in a feud? Did the rape victim know her attacker? Was the cancer patient a smoker? But we have to fight our instinct to blame the victim. We have to make sure that stories like Catherines are not weaponised and distorted in ways that could demonise the many important qualities that she displayed in life. Her brave, curious and intrepid instincts things that we should be nurturing in young girls must not be used to belittle the tragedy of her death. Murdered and missing indigenous women in US and Canada Show all 11 1 /11 Murdered and missing indigenous women in US and Canada Murdered and missing indigenous women in US and Canada Alaya McIvor Alaya McIvor lost two women close to her as well as experiencing human trafficking, and now speaks out about indigenous rights Alaya McIvor Murdered and missing indigenous women in US and Canada Roberta McIvor Roberta McIvor, cousin of Alaya, was killed in Manitoba, Canada, in 2012 Alaya McIvor Murdered and missing indigenous women in US and Canada Laney Ewenin memorial A memorial for Eleanor 'Laney' Ewenin who was found dead in 1982 Danielle Ewenin Murdered and missing indigenous women in US and Canada Canada inquiry Families at the National Inquiry in Canada Danielle Ewenin Murdered and missing indigenous women in US and Canada Canada inquiry Families at the National Inquiry in Canada Danielle Ewenin Murdered and missing indigenous women in US and Canada LA MMIW protest Activists march for missing and murdered indigenous women at the Women's March California 2019 Sarah Morris/Getty Murdered and missing indigenous women in US and Canada LA MMIW protest Activists march for missing and murdered indigenous women at the Women's March California 2019 Sarah Morris/Getty Murdered and missing indigenous women in US and Canada Seattle MMIW protest Erandi Flores and Nadia Bucio, both from Mexico and from a group raising awareness for missing and murdered indigenous women, join thousands at a rally at Cal Anderson Park prior to the Women's March on January 20, 2018 in Seattle, Washington. Karen Ducey/Getty Murdered and missing indigenous women in US and Canada LA MMIW protest Activists march for missing and murdered indigenous women at the Women's March California 2019 Getty Images Murdered and missing indigenous women in US and Canada Seattle MMIW protest Thousands listen to speakers raising awareness of missing and murdered indigenous women at a rally at Cal Anderson Park prior to the Women's March on January 20, 2018 in Seattle, Washington. Across the nation hundreds of thousands of people are marching on what is the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump's swearing-in Karen Ducey/Getty Murdered and missing indigenous women in US and Canada LA MMIW protest A young activist at the Women's March in California, 2019 Sarah Morris/Getty For the sake of her memory, and her family, we should be resisting the urge to make this devastating occurrence in some way Catherines own fault. Even if it brings us a morsel of comfort in the short term, because we think that wont happen to me, we shouldnt be trying to turn her misfortune into a cautionary tale. Whether her death was an accident or an attack, Catherine is a victim. If we dont fulfil our duty to discuss her death appropriately and accurately without scaremongering or victim blaming well be guilty of discouraging other young women from living their lives to the full. We are all responsible for our own safety; but we are not responsible for our own trauma. The nations capital is beside itself. TV crews are hunkered outside all the major locations the federal courthouse, the offices of the special counsel and even the home of attorney general William Barr. And of course, there are always plenty of television cameras waiting at the White House. Washington DC the self-obsessed, strangely inward-looking bubble that exists purely for the pursuit of politics and power frequently works itself up into a storm. And as it awaits the completion of Robert Muellers report into Russias alleged inference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign, it is doing so again. The city, according to the slightly verbose rendering of the New York Times, is jittery, full of rumour, like a becalmed ship in the dead air before a coming storm. But what if the special counsel doesnt have much to say? What if his report is a damp squib? What if its a great big nothingburger? One thing needs to be stressed from the start. Robert Mueller, himself a former FBI Director, has shown himself to be one of the rarest of creatures in Washington: a person who does not leak. We learned of his indictments against former national security advisor Michael Flynn, foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos, and 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities when he revealed them, and not before. It may be that we awake one day this month to find the 74-year-old Mueller has brought indictments against Trumps eldest son, his son-in-law, and perhaps even the president himself. A Department of Justice judgement from several decades ago holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted, but if Mueller were convinced Trump had committed something truly egregious, he may seek special permission to bring charges. Yet to date, we have none of that. The most senior member of Trumps team to be charged is Paul Manafort, who was campaign manager for a brief but crucial few months in the summer of 2016. Manafort learned today that he will spend seven years in prison after pleading guilty to charges of money-laundering and conspiracy; all of this emerged from Mullers probe. He has also been charged with 16 counts of mortgage fraud and similar offences by prosecutors in New Yorks Manhattan County, charges to which a presidential pardon cannot be applied. Criminals who worked for Trump Show all 5 1 /5 Criminals who worked for Trump Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Cohen Former lawyer for Donald Trump was sentenced to three years in prison on counts involving evading income tax, false disclosure of the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels and another hush money charge Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Paul Manafort Former campaign manager for Trump Manafort was found guilty in February 2018 of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The crimes occurred prior to his appointment in Trump's campaign Getty Criminals who worked for Trump George Papadopoulos Former Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in October 2017. He had lied about making contact with a professor who claimed that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. He was sentenced to 14 days in jail Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Flynn Former White House National Security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in December 2017. He had lied about conversations that he had with the Russian ambassador to the US during Trump's Presidential campaign. He was not given prison time due to his "significant assistance" to the Mueller investigation Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Rick Gates Deputy chairman of Trump's presidential campaign Gates pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in February 2018 AFP/Getty Trump has bragged that the trials of Manafort prove there was no collusion with Russia. They did not quite do that; the judge at the first trial, TS Ellis, said Manafort was not before this court for anything having to do with collusion with the Russian government. When Manaforts lawyers sought to bring that up with the judge at the second sentencing on Wednesday, she shot them down. The no collusion refrain that runs through the entire defence memorandum is unrelated to matters at hand, said judge Amy Berman Jackson. The no collusion mantra is simply a non-sequiturThe no collusion mantra is also not accurate, because the investigation is still ongoing. But there is a point worth reflecting on. Manafort was present at the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting involving Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr and a Russian lawyer linked to the Kremlin, an incident many have said is proof of collusion. Yet prosecutors who have all the evidence in front of them have charged him with offences that largely relate to his work for Ukraines former pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych. Had Manafort never joined Trumps campaign, or had he instead worked for Petro Poroshenko, the pro-Western politician who helped oust the elected Yanukovych from office, would he even have been in court? To date, no US citizen has been charged with colluding with Russia. There are other clues as to why Muellers report may not contain the smoking gun so many Democrats still smarting from the defeat of Hillary Clinton to a man they considered unqualified and unworthy are counting on. This week, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives told the Washington Post she did not support Trumps impeachment, something many of her progressive members are calling for. Impeachment is so divisive to the country that, unless theres something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I dont think we should go down that path, because it divides the country, she said. And hes just not worth it. Pelosi is smart and wily. It may be she is just laying the groundwork in case Mueller comes back with a report containing something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan that she cannot ignore it. Yet it may be she realises the report could well contain little damning evidence and that her party is better focused on trying to beat Trump in the 2020 presidential election, rather than by trying to impeach him something that would infuriate and energise Trump supporters. When Republicans sought to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998, they were badly punished in the midterms that year by voters who thought Newt Gingrich and others were overreaching. Pelosi wants to avoid that. If Muellers report were to contain nothing compelling, it would help her avoid pursuing impeachment. It may be that a great fat nothingburger would be to everybodys taste. In recent weeks, interns in United Nations offices around the world have been staging walk-outs, sit-ins, demonstrations and debates to reject exploitative and exclusionary unpaid internships. These events in Geneva, Bangkok, Brussels and Copenhagen are just the most recent of protests in years of campaigning calling for the UN to put its money where its mouth is. Every year, the UN plays host to thousands of interns around the world. Yet the majority receive no pay and have inadequate access to basic employment rights. Access to sufficient funds remains an unspoken requirement for internship eligibility at the UN, thus excluding many candidates based on their background. This shouldnt be happening in 2019. It should be a given that internships are awarded on merit, without contingency on financial status. This is a problem that extends far beyond the UN; its estimated that across Europe over 3 million young people a year work as unpaid interns (equivalent to the entire workforce of Denmark). 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 As work experience is now a focal point of CVs, young people who cant afford to work for free are left behind, perpetuating a cycle of disadvantage. It is for these reasons that around the globe, branches of the Fair Internship Initiative (which advocates for the rights of all interns within the UN body) have organised protests to send out a call to action on equality, fairness and quality of internships. Despite years of pressure to change, the UN is resisting these calls to practice what it preaches. Of course the rights of interns who are already working for the UN matter many face concerns about rent or food security, or are secretly working multiple jobs on the side to make ends meet. But ultimately, its not about those of us who already work here. Its about the young people who would work here, if only they could afford to. At the crux of the unpaid internship debate is the exclusion of those who would otherwise be deserving candidates for an internship, besides access to sufficient funds. It is the UN after all who should champion representation from around the world, yet there is a shocking lack of diversity in the pool of people who make it onto their internships. For instance, 87 per cent of respondents to the Fair Internship Initiatives 2017 Global UN Internships Report came from upper middle or high income countries. Unpaid internships make working at the UN inaccessible for the majority of the planet, who could otherwise contribute to projects that often directly affect them. Diversity among interns would improve representation of many of the communities the UN serves (refugees, for example) and deliver more effective policies and programmes. It is fundamentally wrong and deeply unfair that youths from developing countries or poorer backgrounds would not get the chance to work at the UN simply on the basis that they cant afford it. As a result of inaction on unpaid internships, the UN is being shaped by those who have the privilege to work here. The UN itself has recognised that unpaid internships are problematic. A report from the UN High Commission for Human Rights in December 2018 stated that unpaid internships exclude de facto the most marginalised and limit young peoples freedom to choose. Some agencies, such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), have vowed to take action. The WHO will pay its interns from 2020, in line with its own aims as of May 2018 of balanced geographical participation in its intern body. Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events Yet the majority of UN agencies still fail to provide their interns a monthly subsistence allowance and in cases where there is some remuneration, it is below the minimum wage. On top of this, most UN internships are offered in places where the cost of living is already extremely high: Geneva, New York and Copenhagen are some of the most expensive cities in the world. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. In many cases, interns are undertaking work that would otherwise be completed by staff or consultants. We must change the perception that interns are some kind of cheap or disposable workforce. They should be valued, and provided with stimulating projects. The UN exists to protect human rights, fight inequality and empower the marginalised. Employers and leaders must fight for quality intern opportunities that are paid and accessible to all, regardless of socioeconomic background. As different agencies stumble their way towards stipends, we await outcomes from the Joint Inspection Unit of the UN System, whose report last June recommended paying interns. It will be discussed at the UN General Assembly this year. All personnel are invited to stand in solidarity to demand paid internships around the world, for a fairer and more equal UN community. Eleanor Salter is a member of the Fair Internship Initiative in Copenhagen A letter sent to Scouting Ireland flagging concerns about child safety was never meant to be made public, a committee has heard. Tusla, the Child and Family Agency sent the letter in February raising serious concerns over child protection. Minister for Children Katharine Zappone published the letter, describing the contents as serious, and said she had been consulting the chief social worker and other senior officials in her department. Tusla representatives were invited to the Committee on Children and Youth Affairs on Wednesday. Fine Gaels Alan Farrell, chairman of the committee, asked them if the letter was intended to be published as there were concerns that individuals may have been identifiable in the examples provided. The letter sent to Scouting Ireland was addressed to them, and we expected they wouldve responded to Tusla, it was not our intention that the letter would make its way into the public domain, said Jim Gibson, chief operations officer of Tusla. The detail in the letter was especially for Scouting Irelands benefit, the matters in the cases were about the seriousness of the concerns of those involved. Labours Sean Sherlock pressed the officials on whether they had considered the effect such a letter would have on volunteers with Scouting Ireland. The explosive line in the letter is to do with the overnight stays. Did Tusla have any sense of the hurt and shock that they would cause when that letter went into the public domain? he asked. In respect of the thousands of volunteers and parents who went through vetting and children protection training, did you have sense of the magnitude of that statement? That couldve potentially shut down the organisation. Do you feel any regret about your statement in your letter on 18 February? The letter that was sent by Tusla was sent to Scouting Ireland, it wasn't to the publicPat Smyth Tusla chief executive Pat Smyth acknowledged the work of volunteers but said the agency expected a response from Scouting Ireland, not for the letter to go public. We need to ensure the best standards are met across all organisations, to ensure all children are protected as best we can, he said. Ultimately the response within the letter was about identifying practice issues, and improving those issues where children are involved. The letter that was sent by Tusla was sent to Scouting Ireland, it wasnt to the public. He added that he did not ask the minister to publish the letter or read it in the Dail, which caused considerable media attention and public debate. However, Mr Gibson admitted he was aware that it would be made public after the minister requested additional correspondence. Senator Joan Freeman said that although the letter was serious and critical, the mood among Tusla was different now. We are duty-bound to lay out concerns, our tone needs to lay out key issues that arise, but we want to assist Scouting Ireland to be compliant and now were in a good space with them, Mr Gibson added. There are differences of opinions but weve set out an action plan and we are on the right road. It demonstrates a collaborative approach and I am satisfied as COO that we will resolve any issues. Tusla also said it was very surprised that Scouting Ireland was shocked to get the letter. As chair of Scouting Ireland, I would like to confirm Scouting Ireland is a safe organisationAdrian Tennant Last week, Scouting Ireland agreed to an action plan with the child and family agency, including hiring a safeguarding manager, reviewing its child safeguarding statement and supporting the implementation of the statement throughout the organisation in co-operation with Tusla. It has also agreed to review risk assessment of overnight trips, and an independent evaluation of its helpline. Adrian Tennant, chairman of Scouting Irelands board of directors, said it is a safe organisation, and the letter shocked them to the core. I read this letter as a parent to three daughters, who all enjoy scouting, and the content of the letter concerned me greatly, he said. Many of the issues raised in the letter had not been brought to our attention previously. We have had a productive meeting with Tusla to understand their concerns. Scouting Ireland has worked hard at developing the relationship with Minister Zappone, and we are pleased to say we will submit a final progress report later this month. As chair of Scouting Ireland, I would like to confirm Scouting Ireland is a safe organisation. The letter came amid a major investigation into past cases of alleged child sex abuse in Scouting Ireland. Representatives have been meeting the Garda and Tusla officials regarding allegations. An internal review has so far identified 313 alleged victims and 237 alleged abusers. Scouting Ireland hailed its own team of professional staff who operate a helpline to victims of historical sexual abuse. At the time of this meeting, the most recent case that has come to our attention is 1998, Mr Tennant added. Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks to Parliament after the results of the vote on Brexit deal. Photo: REUTERS Clearing her throat: UK Prime Minister Theresa May at the start of the debate on the second meaningful vote on her governments Brexit deal in the House of Commons yesterday. Photo: AFP/Getty Images British politicians now face the stark choice of actively pursuing a no-deal Brexit or begging the EU to allow them to stall the process. The risk of the UK crashing out of the EU in 16 days' time increased dramatically last night on foot of Prime Minister Theresa May's revised Withdrawal deal, announced in Strasbourg on Monday, being roundly rejected by MPs, by 391 votes to 242. Irish hopes are now firmly pinned on the potential for an extension to Article 50 beyond March 29. But aware that many EU capitals are wary of prolonging the Brexit debacle, Mrs May has also raised the possibility of a second referendum. "The EU will want to know what use we mean to make of such an extension," the prime minister said. "This House will have to answer that question. Expand Close Jacob Rees Mogg: The Brexiteer has proposed a May 22 extension. Photo: REUTERS/Simon Dawson / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Jacob Rees Mogg: The Brexiteer has proposed a May 22 extension. Photo: REUTERS/Simon Dawson "Does it wish to revoke Article 50? Does it want to hold a second referendum? Or does it want to leave with a deal but not this deal?" A group of hardline Brexiteers, including Jacob Rees Mogg, last night joined forces with the DUP's Nigel Dodds to formally propose that Brexit be delayed until May 22 - the day before European elections. They have tabled an amendment to the motion planned by Mrs May which states this time period would allow businesses time to prepare for the operation of tariffs. EU leaders are not overly keen for a delay past the end of May. Sources in Dublin said the Government here will "help" the UK lobby other countries for an extension because "March 29 was always a UK deadline, not an EU one". However, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Tanaiste Simon Coveney are now increasingly aware of the need for a "clear logic" as to why a postponement should be granted. Expand Close Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks to Parliament after the results of the vote on Brexit deal. Photo: REUTERS / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks to Parliament after the results of the vote on Brexit deal. Photo: REUTERS Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who is considered an ally of the Taoiseach in the European Council, said last night that a request from the UK must have "credible and convincing justification". "The smooth functioning of the EU institutions needs to be ensured," he said. While open to the idea of an extension, EU chiefs moved swiftly to shutdown any suggestion Mrs May could seek more changes to the operation of the Irish backstop. European Council President Donald Tusk said the EU has "done all that is possible to reach an agreement". "Should there be a UK reasoned request for an extension, the EU27 will consider it and decide by unanimity," he said. The House of Commons will vote tonight on a motion to test whether MPs support leaving the EU without a deal. The idea is expected to be defeated. This will open the door to another vote tomorrow on a possible extension. But in a further complication it is understood the length of that delay would have to be agreed by politicians in London before a request goes to the EU. The first proposal to surface is from a group of lawmakers to delay the exit until May 22 and mitigate the consequence of leaving without a deal by seeking 'standstill arrangements' with the EU. The DUP-backed motion called for Brexit to be delayed until 10.59pm on May 22 and urges the government to offer "a further set of mutual standstill agreements with the EU and member states for an agreed period ending no later than December 30, 2021, during which period the UK would pay an agreed sum equivalent to its net EU contributions and satisfy its other public international law obligations". Mr Dodds said the best way to get a Brexit deal through parliament is for the government to maintain it would be willing to walk away from talks and leave without a deal. "The best way to get a good deal, the best way to get a deal you can actually vote for is to keep the threat of a no deal on the table," he said. "Once you take that threat off, you are bound to be offered terms which are less advantageous in the sure and certain knowledge that the other side have that you're not going to walk away." But Mrs May said last night that she "passionately" believes the best outcome for the UK is to agree a deal. In reference to Northern Ireland, she said she was acutely aware of the "potential damage to the Union that leaving without a deal could do when one part of our country is without devolved governance". She will today outline the reality of a hard Brexit so that MPs are "fully informed in making this historic decision". A real moment of truth will come when she reveals the UK government's plan for tariffs and their approach to the Northern Ireland Border. As the crisis grew last night, Michel Barnier, the EU's chief Brexit negotiator, warned: "The impasse can only be solved in the UK. Our 'no-deal' preparations are now more important than ever before." European Parliament Brexit co-ordinator Guy Verhofstadt was even more scathing, saying: "Brexit was about taking back control. Instead the UK spiralled out of control." Tanaiste Simon Coveney said he was "deeply disappointed" that the meaningful vote in Westminster failed. Avoiding a crash-out Brexit cannot be done without the UK parliament "agreeing something" he said, adding a no deal would be a "lose, lose, lose" scenario for everyone. "I think the prime minister outlined very clearly that parliament faces hard choices now. The focus is on London. That's where the problem is. That's where solutions must come from," he said. Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin told the Dail yesterday that a no-deal scenario "must be avoided". Tanaiste Simon Coveney (far right) with Michel Barnier, Joe Healy, Leo Varadkar and Christiane Lambert on Sunday Tanaiste Simon Coveney has hit back at criticism of his "strident walk" with EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier when they attended a Six Nations rugby game last Sunday. Mr Barnier watched his native France get badly beaten by Ireland in the company of the Tanaiste and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. Before going into the Aviva Stadium, he posed outside with the two politicians, IFA president Joe Healy and French farmers' union chief Christiane Lambert. The photograph, which was tweeted by Mr Coveney's spokesman, appeared widely in the media. The 'Financial Times' also carried a separate image of Mr Barnier inside the stadium which was captured by the news agency Reuters. But Fianna Fail's Brexit spokeswoman Lisa Chambers criticised the jovial images at such a sensitive time in the negotiators. Choreographed Speaking about how she believes the Irish Government has sought to antagonise the UK, Ms Chambers said: "Even look to Sunday when Michel Barnier arrived into Dublin and the strident walk of Michel Barnier and the Tanaiste down the street after the rugby match. That was choreographed." Ms Chambers said Irish politicians should be thinking about "the optics". Asked for a response to the criticism, a spokesperson for the Tanaiste told the Irish Independent: "Give me strength. There are important political matters on Brexit that we're focused on today and the deputy is being petty and is factually incorrect. "Michel Barnier is welcome in Dublin anytime and the Tanaiste was glad to take him to the match. "An RTE camera filmed Mr Barnier returning to his car and we believe in the freedom of the press to film in a public place, perhaps the deputy doesn't?" Ireland's greatest protection from a no-deal Brexit will be our continued membership of the European Union, the Seanad debate on emergency legislation has heard. European Affairs Minister Helen McEntee said the situation in London has served to reinforce Ireland's commitment to the EU. "Our membership of the EU is our greatest protection not just from Brexit, but from many of the challenges that we face today," she said. She said Irish people understood the EU was built on values that "can never be taken for granted and values that are ever more important in our turbulent world". "I belong to a generation that has always had the privilege of two identities: Irish and European. Like our values, it is a privilege we cannot take for granted," Ms McEntee added. Opposition: An anti-Brexit protester in the rain ahead of the meaningful vote in parliament yesterday which saw the UK prime ministers deal defeated. Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images We have now entered: 'Brexit Shambles: The Sequel'. There has never been a political drama quite like it. Cliff-hanger after cliff-hanger consumes the news agenda while we are repeatedly promised that clarity is in sight. Then a fresh twist emerges to turn the whole thing on its head. The only problem now is that the authors of Britain's 'great Brexit future' haven't actually figured out an ending. That shouldn't come as a surprise given the almost fictional line-up of characters put in this unbelievable scenario. There's a weak prime minister who believed she would be all powerful after calling a snap election. Instead she found herself bowing at the altar of the DUP, which quickly became a godsend to Jacob Rees Mogg's European Research Group (ERG). And all the while the total dysfunction at the heart of the UK government is allowed to survive because the only thing more unpredictable is the alternative: Labour's Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister. Expand Close Clearing her throat: UK Prime Minister Theresa May at the start of the debate on the second meaningful vote on her governments Brexit deal in the House of Commons yesterday. Photo: AFP/Getty Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Clearing her throat: UK Prime Minister Theresa May at the start of the debate on the second meaningful vote on her governments Brexit deal in the House of Commons yesterday. Photo: AFP/Getty Images The United Kingdom woke up punch-drunk in the centre of a crossroads yesterday, blinded by the lights blaring from all directions. The road leading to a deal appears closed. The no-deal route is getting closer. Another option is the great unknown: a second referendum or even a general election. And then there is the long road built on an extension to Article 50, which currently seems the most appealing, simply because it means the cliff is further away. It was hard not to feel some sympathy for Theresa May, but it's also impossible to ignore that she took the keys of the Brexit bus from Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage a long time ago. All the frantic scuttling around London and Strasbourg is clearly taking its toll. She could only get out the first two words of her afternoon speech out, saying "Mr Speaker" before coughing and clearing her throat. As Labour MPs heckled her about not being able to make her speech, the PM quipped: "OK, you may say that, but you should hear Jean-Claude Juncker's voice as a result of our conversation." The irony is that Mrs May, watched from the guests gallery by her husband Philip, was wasting her already depleted breath arguing for a deal that was never going to pass. The seeds of her defeat were sown in Brussels long ago, but they began to flower in Dublin yesterday morning. Leo Varadkar was up early and speaking fluently out of both sides of his mouth. I don't mean that as an insult, but he was clearly trying to address one audience in Dublin and another in London. He made a good attempt at it with a statement that lacked any tone. It was neither triumphalist nor defeatist. Here's what he wanted to reverberate in Westminster: "The further texts agreed yesterday provide the additional clarity, reassurance and guarantees sought by some to eliminate doubt or fears, however unreal, that the goal of some was to trap the UK indefinitely in the backstop. It is not." However, within minutes it was clear that they heard the message intended for the domestic audience which amounted to a categorical statement that the new measures given to Mrs May did not reopen the Withdrawal Agreement, "or undermine the backstop of its application". He quickly headed for the airport, safe in the knowledge that he could avoid any further comment simply by being 35,000ft above the Atlantic. But his comments came at the start of a constant flow of bad news for Mrs May. Her Attorney General Geoffrey Cox came next with his revised legal advice. He made it clear that the potential still remained for the UK to be trapped in a customs union in order to avoid a hard Border on this island. Despite this he later spoke in Parliament to urge MPs to vote in favour of the deal in order to allow the "entire continent of Europe" to move on. After so much weight being put in his legal opinion, he suggested it was actually a "political decision" that was needed. Perhaps if he had made his declarations in reverse it might have changed the narrative - but again the damage was done. By the time he was appearing in public, the DUP had made up its mind based on his written advice. The party's militant members concluded that "sufficient progress has not been achieved at this time". And with that Mrs May went on to lose by 149 votes. Down from the 230 majority against her deal first time around but still not enough for her to regain any credibility, either in London or Brussels. "This is an issue of grave importance for the future of our country," she croaked. But the show was already moving on. EU chiefs were quickly tweeting that they have done "all that is possible" to secure a deal. Donald Tusk and Michel Barnier were politely telling Mrs May not to come knocking on their doors again. And so Britain is staggering back to the crossroads again this morning, except this time the road to a deal has collapsed under the weight of the backstop. This evening, MPs will decide whether to block off the no-deal option. Everybody in Ireland should be watching this vote through their fingers as the wrong result will bring indescribable hardship to this island. Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin told the Dail yesterday that it would "essentially wipe out" our beef industry. Thankfully the more likely outcome is that the show rolls into tomorrow when the UK may vote to seek a Brexit delay. The EU is becoming increasing wary of this idea. "What is the point?" said one source. However, the Irish Government will help Mrs May kick that can as far down the road as she can. Sure, voting for an extension won't actually resolve the issues. It will only prove that the UK has wasted two years going nowhere. More than ever before, MPs now face what the prime minister has described as "unenviable choices". They simply cannot reconcile the irreconcilable objectives of leaving the single market and customs union while simultaneously keeping the Border on this island open and frictionless. All we can do is watch on from the sidelines now in the hope sense will prevail. THE road signs at the frictionless Irish border might as well say Welcome to Bandit Country if a no-deal Brexit goes ahead. On one level we should be grateful today that British Prime Minister Theresa May intends to live up to her promise not to introduce physical custom checks on this island. But at the same there are so many questions about her no-deal plan that we would be naive not to be deeply worried about the societal and economic impact. Officials in Dublin have been left somewhat gobsmacked by the keep calm and carry on message to businesses on this island. Theres no doubt that Mrs May proposals are filled with contradictions. For a start, Northern Ireland will be treated differently from the rest of the UK, where tariffs will be imposed on some EU goods if a Brexit deal fails to materialise. Irish Government sources have repeatedly argued the original backstop gives the North the best of both worlds. They would have unrivalled access to both the UK and EU markets. However, the DUP argued against this on the grounds that the region would be different from the rest of the UK. Todays proposals ensure the North will be UKs backdoor. There will be no import tariffs on goods entering Northern Ireland across the Irish border under Mays plans. However, businesses that sent products across the Irish Sea from Dublin or Rosslare will be hit with big taxes. So beef, lamb, pork, poultry and some dairy going North travels into the UK without tariffs but if it goes direct there will be a bill. A smugglers dream. There is an acknowledged risk in Whitehall of Northern Ireland becoming a "back door" for EU goods to enter the wider UK market tariff-free but the UK government says new laws will be introduced to crack down on anyone trying to exploit the system. But one senior source in Dublin couldnt contain their bamboozlement: Under these plans the UK market could be flooded via Northern Ireland and Ireland with tariff free Irish beef, Spanish oranges, French cheese and Polish honey. Expand Close British Prime Minister Theresa May. Photo: Christopher Furlong/PA Wire / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp British Prime Minister Theresa May. Photo: Christopher Furlong/PA Wire Meanwhile UK produce becomes too expensive to export. If they get overwhelmed through Northern Ireland the documents say theyll consider checks at ports. In other words, a customs border between Northern Ireland and mainland UK in Sammy Wilsons constituency. Its time to wake up, no one wants this. Then there is the possibility that the EU will demand its Single Market is protected from inferior goods travelling into the Republic. It is no longer beyond the bounds of reasonable logic to imagine a scenario whereby people and goods can move from the Republic into the North without checks but face them when travelling in the opposition direction. The UK says the arrangement can only be temporary until a new trading regime is negotiated with the EU. Ireland says they have already spent two years putting together the backstop which solves many of the issues being flung around like mud in Westminster. Nobody claimed the backstop perfect was better but anybody living in the real world can see its better than what theyve thrown into the mix today, an Irish source said. In Mays paperwork released today, she notes that a negotiated settlement is the only means of sustainably guaranteeing no hard border and protecting businesses in Northern Ireland. That is why we are, first and foremost, still committed to leaving the EU with a deal. In a no-deal scenario, the UK government is committed to entering into discussions urgently with the European Commission and the Irish Government to jointly agree long-term measures to avoid a hard border. In summary, after two years of negotiating on how to avoid a hard border her fresh plan is to negotiate on how to avoid a hard border. In the meantime, taking back control of their borders means leaving their only land border wide open. At least we know Brexit means Brexit. Leo Varadkar and his partner Matthew Barrett during the Montreal Pride parade in 2017 TAOISEACH Leo Varadkar's partner Matt Barrett will accompany him to breakfast with US Vice-President Mike Pence tomorrow morning. Mr Varadkar said: "he was able to get time off work and make the journey so he'll be taking up the invitation from Mike and Karen Pence to attend tomorrow." He confirmed Mr Barrett won't be taking part in the traditional shamrock ceremony in the White House. Karen Pence won't be present as she's in the Abu Dhabi for the Special Olympics. Mr Pence has previously faced criticism for his conservative views on LGBT issues. But last year he and his wife Karen did extend an invitation for both the Taoiseach and Mr Barrett to visit his Washington home at the Naval Observatory. Expand Close Taoiseach Leo Varadkar arriving at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC during his visit to the US. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday March 13, 2019.Credit: Brian Lawless/PA Wire / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Taoiseach Leo Varadkar arriving at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC during his visit to the US. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Wednesday March 13, 2019.Credit: Brian Lawless/PA Wire And unlike 2018, the event will be open to the media to attend tomorrow's event. Last year Mr Varadkar had a conversation with Mr Pence and Mrs Pence about issues of equality and LGBT rights in Ireland and America. He said afterwards that both were "very well briefed" and "knew about my personal story". "They said that both Matt and I would be very welcome to visit there in the future. It was a very nice gesture," Mr Varadkar added at the time. Mr Varadkar is one of very few openly gay world leaders. Mr Barrett is a cardiologist who has spent time working in the United States. Mr Varadkar has begun his St Patrick's Day promotional blitz in the United States highlighting the growing scale of Irish investment in America. He will meet US President Donald Trump in the White House tomorrow but this afternoon has a number of engagements with business figures from both sides of the Atlantic. Brexit and its impact on Ireland will be high on the agenda at all of Mr Varadkar's meetings in the coming days. Mr Varadkar has arrived at the US Chamber of Commerce headquarters for meetings and a 'fire-side chat' with Chamber president and chief executive Thomas Donohue. The event is entitled 'Ireland, Gateway of the Atlantic'. Mr Varadkar has highlighted how Irish investment in the United States is "at an all-time high". He said: "The scale and diversity of this investment is indicative of the strength of the partnership between our two countries." Enterprise Ireland has said there's more than 100,000 people employed by Irish companies in the United States. US companies employ around 155,000 in Ireland. Mr Varadkar is hosting a business development round-table with leading Irish companies that plan to invest in the US. Companies include security firm Netwatch Group, healthcare company RelateCare and IT company Wisetek. When he arrived Mr Varadkar Tweeted: "Here in Washington DC and starting a busy week by meeting some friends from home: the Dublin and Belfast Chambers of Commerce." Later this evening he is to attend the American Ireland Funds dinner. More to follow... Leading criminal suspects including alleged IRA terrorists who are being held in Ireland on European extradition warrants will have to be set free in the event of a no-deal Brexit, the UK home secretary has been warned. Sajid Javid has been told that there are "no legal fixes" to avoid the temporary release of prisoners being held in Ireland on European Arrest Warrants (EAWs) if the UK crashes out of the EU without a deal. Lawyers have also warned Mr Javid that it is highly likely that some suspects may use their release to flee the country, helped by the lack of immigration controls between the UK and Ireland. "The home secretary has been told there is no legal remedy to avoid the temporary release of suspects being held on EAWs in Ireland," UK government sources said. A number of suspects could benefit from the legal lacuna that would be caused by a no deal. Among those awaiting extradition is Hyde Park bombing suspect John Downey, who is in the process of being extradited to Northern Ireland to face charges over the alleged murder of two soldiers in 1972. The news of possible releases emerged just days before hundreds of ex-soldiers will learn tomorrow whether they will face murder charges for their role in Bloody Sunday. The nightmare scenario of suspects going free will come about because a no-deal Brexit will instantly remove the legal basis for the EAW, causing Irish authorities to fall back on the much more cumbersome 1957 European Convention on Extradition. British officials hope that in some cases, those released from EAWs could be rearrested quickly under the 1957 convention, perhaps even at the prison gates. But they accept that this is not going to be possible in all cases. No deal would not affect prisoners who are serving sentences for other crimes, as their detention is not reliant on the EAWs. THE UK government will not introduce any new checks or controls on goods moving across the land border into Northern Ireland if the UK leaves the European Union without a deal, it has been announced. Under a temporary and unilateral regime announced by Theresa May's government this morning, EU goods arriving from the Republic and remaining in Northern Ireland will not be subject to tariffs. However, tariffs will be payable on goods moving from the EU into the rest of the UK via Northern Ireland under a schedule of rates also released on Wednesday. The government insists that this will not create a border down the Irish Sea, as there will be no checks on goods moving between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Instead, "normal compliance and intelligence methods" will be used to detect any traders attempting to abuse the system. Expand Close Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks to Parliament after the results of the vote on Brexit deal. Photo: REUTERS / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May speaks to Parliament after the results of the vote on Brexit deal. Photo: REUTERS Read More UK ministers accepted that the new regime will cause "concerns" to Northern Irish businesses and farmers about the impact on their competitiveness. But they said these were the only steps that could be taken to deliver on the British government's commitment to avoiding a hard border in the case of no deal. Under the new regime for Northern Ireland, goods arriving from the Republic will still be subject to the same VAT and excise duty as at present. While 87pc of total imports to the UK by value would be eligible for tariff free access, crucially for Ireland tariffs would still apply to 13pc of goods imported into the UK which includes key products from our agri-food sector. Read More The UK government announced a mixture of tariffs and quotas on beef, lamb, pork, poultry and some dairy to support UK farmers. Tariffs on high-quality, boneless beef are 12.8pc plus 303.40/100kg. Tariffs on high-quality carcases are 12.80pc plus 177.80/100kg. IFA President Joe Healy said the tariff regime in the event of a no deal Brexit would be a disastrous scenario for Irish farmers. After last nights defeat in Westminster, the IFA President said the prospect of a no deal has moved closer. Our most exposed sectors, particularly beef, simply will not survive the kind of tariffs being talked about. This would have a devastating effect in the rural economy, he said. We export over 50pc of our beef to the UK. If this is subject to tariffs, it will be a direct hit of almost 800m on the sector, he said. Meanwhile, small businesses trading across the border will be able to report VAT online without any new processes at the border. To protect human, animal and plant health, animals and animal products from outside the EU would be required to enter Northern Ireland through a designated entry point, while regulated plant materials from outside the EU and high-risk plants from inside Europe will require certification and pre-notification. There will be new UK import requirements such as document checks and registration for a small number of goods such as endangered species and hazardous chemicals which are subject to international agreements. Minister for European Affairs Helen McEntee said that the no-deal tariffs are a "lose-lose scenario" for everyone. Speaking on RTE Morning Ireland Ms McEntee said the tariffs would be "absolutely disastrous" for Irish agriculture. She added that the new UK border plan "replicates what we already have in the Withdrawal Agreement" and re-iterated that the Irish Government's position has not changed on the border. "We have always said what our plan is, and that if it came to the stage where a no-deal was the only likely outcome, then we would need to engage with our colleagues in the UK but also with the UK. Not after a no-deal, this is when it has became apparent that a no-deal is the only likely option," McEntee told RTE. Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley said: "The Government has been clear that a deal with the European Union is the best outcome for Northern Ireland. "But we will do all we can to support people and businesses across Northern Ireland in the event that we leave without a deal. "The measures announced today recognise the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland. These arrangements can only be temporary and short term." In the case of no-deal, the UK government is committed to entering discussions urgently with Brussels and Dublin to agree long-term arrangements. More to follow... Taoiseach Leo Varadkar speaking at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC during his visit to the US Credit: Brian Lawless/PA Wire Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has hit out at UK Brexiteers saying they have been chasing unicorns "for a very long time" and warned that the UK crashing out of the EU without a deal is now a "growing possibility". He made the remarks in Washington as he responded for the first time to yesterday's Westminster vote rejecting British Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal with the EU. Mr Varadkar has said the Irish government has been preparing for a no-deal scenario and said that "as a result of the vote yesterday in the House of Commons it is now a growing possibility". He also raised concerns about UK proposals for tariff-free cross border trade in Ireland in a no-deal situation questioning if it would be workable. He suggested it could ultimately result in customs checks at ports in Northern Ireland. Mr Varadkar also took a swipe at hard-line Brexiteers. He said: "I think a lot of the people who advocated for Brexit have been chasing unicorns now for a very long time. "And as we head into the next few weeks it should be patently obvious to everyone that unicorns only exist in fairy tales. He added: "I would say to people who advocated Brexit - is this really what they wanted? - protectionism tariffs, borders, restrictions on trade? Is this really what Brexit was all about?" Responding to another chaotic night in Westminster, Mr Varadkar said: "Things are looking a little brighter today than they did yesterday. "The House of Commons has voted decisively against leaving the EU without a deal." He now anticipates the UK will seek an extension and the EU will want to know what the purpose of that extension is and for how long." Tariffs Mr Varadkar said of the UK's proposals for no tariffs across the Northern Ireland border that "European Law and European Customs code will apply so the common external tariff will apply to any goods exported from the United Kingdom to the European Union." He said he didn't think the UK's suggestions would be workable for very long. He said: "They propose to treat Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the United Kingdom in a few weeks time. "Let's not forget one of the big objections to the backstop was that that might happen in a few years time." He warned that the idea could see Northern Ireland become "a back door to the European Single Market". He added: "I think within a matter of months that would lead to the need for checks at Northern Ireland's ports. "So those who oppose the agreement may find that something very akin to the backstop is applied by the UK government in only a few weeks time." Mr Varadkar said he knows a lot of people in Ireland are very worried today about the prospect of a no-deal Brexit. He said: "I want to say to our exporters and our business people today, our farmers, our fishermen, the government has your back. "We have put in place a package of measures to support incomes, to support and assist business, to restructure and re-orientate to new markets. "There will be damage limitation, we will protect incomes, we will protect jobs and we will support businesses to overcome whatever happens in the next couple of weeks." He promised the broader public that the Common Travel Area between Ireland and the UK including free movement will continue and that this has already been agreed. Ireland prepared for no-deal He insisted Ireland is "well prepared for a no-deal. " Mr Varadkar added: "Unlike other countries we have a budget surplus, we can borrow if we have to and the NTMA has the cash on standby. "This is something we have been preparing for for many years now." Mr Varadkar was also asked about a possible extension to the UK's departure date from the EU. He said: "I think an extension has to have a purpose. "That's really what we need to hear from London in the next couple of days after they have their various votes today and tomorrow and perhaps if there are more votes too. "If there is an extension, what's the point to it? "We don't want a rolling cliff edge where tough decisions that they have to make get put off until the end of June, the end of July or September. "That is not going to work for anyone." Defending corporate tax rate Mr Varadkar also defended Ireland's corporate tax rate, saying that it gives investors "certainty". The Fine Gael leader said that Ireland's corporate tax has been at 12.5pc for decades and that "isn't going to change". "There are actually countries in the European Union that have a lower tax rate than us so we are not even the lowest," he added. "I think what we offer is certainty that even though there may be changes in Government, even though we may go through different economic cycles of recession or growth, that is a certainty and I think that gives investors or potential investors that certainty you need if you're making the 20 or 30-year multibillion-euro investment in an economy. You want to know the fundamentals of those of policies are going to stay the same." Following meetings with businesses leaders, community leaders and members of the Irish diaspora, Mr Varadkar addressed an audience as part of his engagements in the US capital. Speaking on stage, US Chamber of Commerce chief executive Tom Donohue said that Ireland was able to improve its economy and employment because "it stuck to its tax rates". "Now we are beginning to see in the EU there are a lot of discussions on digital taxes on big companies, which is the next discussion in how do we tax people more than they would like," he added. He asked the Taoiseach how Ireland was keeping to its tax commitments. "On (EU) proposals around digital tax, we didn't support them and they have largely been parked," Mr Varadkar added. "Some countries like France have gone ahead and done that unilaterally which is entirely their right to do that. But that has been parked as an EU proposal and we are now looking for a global solution from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and I think that is the right approach. "People across the EU and probably America see that they pay a lot of income tax and they wonder why some big companies don't and why some big companies don't pay their fair share of taxes, and that's not sustainable nor is it right. "I think there will be changes in global taxation and I want Ireland to be on the right side of history when it comes to those but we shouldn't do anything that creates a disadvantage for ourselves or hands an advantage to our competitors and that's why if we are going to change the way tax is structured, the best way to do it is on an international level and I think that is best done through the OECD." Trump has developed "an affection" for Varadkar - claim Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has developed "an affection" for Mr Varadkar because of how he has represented US interests during Brexit, it has been claimed. The remarks were made by Thomas Donohue, the president and chief executive of the US Chamber of Commerce, during a 'fireside chat' on how Ireland is the "Gateway of the Atlantic". Mr Varadkar had meetings with US and Irish business figures at the Chamber's Washington headquarters. Introducing the Taoiseach, Mr Donohue said: "The President of the United States and lots of people have developed an affection for this man because of the way he has represented our interests, the United States' interests, in a very challenging time due to Brexit." He added that Mr Varadkar has been "an excellent representative". Mr Varadkar didn't respond directly to the comments during the discussion this evening. He spoke about the Global Ireland initiative and how Ireland can be a bridge between the US and Europe, particularly as the UK leaves the EU. He pointed out that the US and Ireland speak the same language and have similar business cultures. He said Ireland is expanding its presence in the US planned consulates in Los Angeles and Miami and that there's a two-way economic relationship in relation to jobs and trade. More than 100,000 people are employed by Irish companies in the United States and American companies have around 155,000 workers in Ireland. Mr Varadkar told those gathered that Ireland and the EU regrets the UK Brexit decision. He added: "if they were ever to change their mind it would be like the prodigal son returning and we'd welcome them again with open arms. "But we have to respect the decision they have made which is to leave." He said: "Whatever happens Ireland, we made our decision a long time ago. British Prime Minister Theresa May during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons, London Credit: UK Parliament/Mark Duffy/PA Wire British MPs have rejected leaving the European Union without a deal, paving the way for a vote to delay Brexit to seek a way out of Britain's worst political crisis in generations. The House of Commons voted 312 to 308 - a majority of four - in favour of a cross-party amendment rejecting a no-deal Brexit. And the vote was later confirmed by a more emphatic 321 votes to 278, overriding a Government motion tabled by Theresa May which would have rejected no-deal on the scheduled date of March 29 but left it on the table for other times. Despite the MPs vote to reject a no-deal Brexit, Prime Minister Theresa May told the House of Commons that it remains the default option if no deal was reached. Theresa May said that MPs will vote tomorrow on an extension to Article 50, which could involve a short delay to implement a deal agreed in the next few days or a longer delay if no agreement is reached. "If the House finds a way in the coming days to support a deal, it would allow the government to seek a short, limited, technical extension to Article 50 ... Such a short technical extension is only likely to be on offer if we have a deal in place," Mrs May told parliament. "The House has to understand and accept that if it is not willing to support a deal in the coming days and - as it is not willing to support leaving without a deal on March 29 - then it is suggesting that there will need to be a much longer extension to Article 50." She added that the longer extension would mean Britain would undoubtedly have to take part in European Parliament elections in May. After two-and-a-half years of negotiations and two failed attempts to pass a Brexit deal proposed by May, the vote against a no-deal exit still leaves undecided how, when and on what terms Britain will leave the club it joined in 1973. After lawmakers crushed her deal for a second time on Tuesday, May said it was still the best option for leaving in an orderly fashion. Ahead of Wednesday's vote, the pound headed for its biggest daily rise in 2019 as investors bet on a vote against a no-deal Brexit. It rose again on the result of the vote. As the United Kingdom's three-year Brexit crisis spins towards its finale, diplomats and investors see four main options: a delay, May's deal passing at the last minute, an accidental no-deal exit or another referendum. DELAY UNTIL WHEN? Britain's government will propose on Thursday to seek a delay to Brexit until June 30 if parliament approves a deal to leave the European Union by March 20, the parliamentary Speaker said. The government will also say that if no agreement has been approved by parliament by March 20, it is unlikely that the European Union will approve any extension at its summit on March 21-22 without a specific reason to do so. If the deal is passed by March 20 "then the government will seek to agree with the European Union a one-off extension ... for a period ending 30 June 2019 for the purpose of passing the necessary EU exit legislation", the Speaker John Bercow told parliament. A delay will require the agreement of all the bloc's other 27 members. The EU would prefer only a short extension, with the deadline of EU-wide parliamentary elections due May 24-26, although it is unclear that this would be long enough to solve the impasse in London. EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said the bloc would need to know why Britain wanted to extend talks and that it was up to London to find a way out of the deadlock. The EU said there could be no more negotiations on the divorce terms. May's deal covers such things as citizens' rights, the status of the Irish border and Britain's divorce bill from the EU. It takes Britain out of the EU single market and customs union, common fisheries and farm policies and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. It also offers a status-quo transition period in which to negotiate trade arrangements. Under a no-deal exit, there would be no transition period to soften the disruption to trade and regulations. Britain would quit the EU's 500 million-strong single market and customs union and fall back on World Trade Organisation rules, which could mean tariffs on many imports and exports. Read More Sarah Newton has resigned as a minister at the Department for Work and Pensions over the Brexit vote, a DWP source said. Responding to another chaotic night in Westminster, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said: "Things are looking a little brighter today than they did yesterday. "The House of Commons has voted decisively against leaving the EU without a deal." He now anticipates the UK will seek an extension and the EU will want to know "what the purpose of that extension is and for how long." Major plan: An artists impression of the new Waterford North Quay development, which will offer opportunities for living, working and socialising The property company behind a major residential and retail plan for Waterford's North Quay has said work on the project is to start before the end of this year. Falcon Real Estate Development wants to build retail, hotel, office and residential buildings on an eight-hectare site that has strategic development zone status from the Government and is also due to get State funding. Total investment in the scheme is estimated to be 350m, over a three-year period, with 2,300 full-time jobs created during construction. According to a statement released by the Falcon Real Estate group, which is a major developer of retail and commercial projects internationally, Waterford's North Quay will become "one of Ireland's most modern transport hubs", with a new link-bridge to the city centre across the River Suir. Also part of the development will be a 200-room hotel and conference centre; 15,000 square metres of office space; 300 riverside apartments; and 49,600 square metres of retail, leisure and dining outlets. "It will blend carefully planned infrastructure investments with tourism, retail, business and living needs," the company said. Expand Close An artists impression of the new Waterford North Quay development / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp An artists impression of the new Waterford North Quay development "Falcon Real Estate Development's vision is to create a new focus for Waterford city and a destination that is firmly integrated with the local community, offering opportunities for living, working and socialising," it added. Britain will slash tariffs on a range of imports from outside the EU if MPs vote to leave without a deal (Andrew Matthews/PA) The UK government has published details of its temporary tariff regime that would be implemented in the case of a no-deal Brexit, which it says is designed to minimise costs to business and consumers while protecting vulnerable industries. This regime is temporary, and the UK government would closely monitor the effects of these tariffs on the UK economy. It would apply for up to 12 months while a full consultation and review on a permanent approach to tariffs is undertaken. What goods are to be hit with tariffs? British businesses would not pay customs duties on the majority of goods when importing into the UK if we leave the European Union without an agreement. Under the temporary tariff, 87pc of total imports to the UK by value would be eligible for tariff-free access. However, tariffs would still apply to 13pc of goods imported into the UK including key agriculture products. What are the main tariffs farmers need to be worried about? Beef The UK proposals suggest tariffs ranging from approx. 1,500 per tonne on manufacturing beef up to over 2,500 per tonne on steak exports. Expand Close Half the cheddar made in Ireland goes to the UK / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Half the cheddar made in Ireland goes to the UK This level of tariff would severely undermine trade. On top of this, the UK Government has proposed zero tariff import quotas, that on the one hand fall massively short of existing beef import volumes entering the UK market and on the other hand open these quotas to all global suppliers. Dairy The proposed tariff of 221/t on cheddar- will result in a possible 20m per year tariff cost for Irish cheddar going into the UK market. However, related factors such as customs costs, currency issues and an increase of international competition mean that the final bill for industry and farmers will be a multiple of this. The 22m proposed tariff on Irish butter would be similarly multiplied, with a 605/t tariff slapped on initially but a range of other costs could see that figure inflating. Expand Close 'A study of the impact of a no-deal Brexit on the EU's agri-food industry has claimed that beef and cheese exports from Ireland to the UK could collapse by up to 90pc with the loss of over 3,500 jobs.' Photo: Frank Cornfield / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp 'A study of the impact of a no-deal Brexit on the EU's agri-food industry has claimed that beef and cheese exports from Ireland to the UK could collapse by up to 90pc with the loss of over 3,500 jobs.' Photo: Frank Cornfield At the same time, tariffs on third country products, such as dairy products from New Zealand, would see their current tariff of 2,313/t on New Zealand butter reduced down to 605/t - making butter from Ireland and New Zealand carry the same level of tariff in the UK. What will it mean for the price of Irish beef in the UK? Tariffs on manufacturing beef, which would typically end up as burgers would see such products increase in price by 45pc. The tariffs on Irish steaks in the UK would see consumers hit with a 20-25pc price increase. The key issue for Irish meat exporters is how this increase in price would be passed on - whether it would be passed onto consumers at retail level, or back onto suppliers. The latter would mean a lower return from the market and lower cattle prices in turn for Irish farmers. What about the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic? Although tariffs will be payable on goods passing from the EU to mainland Britain, via Northern Ireland, customs officers will rely on intelligence and compliance work, rather than checks on cargoes, to impose the levies. Under a temporary and unilateral regime announced by Theresa May's government this morning, EU goods arriving from the Republic and remaining in Northern Ireland will not be subject to tariffs. The UK government insists that this will not create a border down the Irish Sea, as there will be no checks on goods moving between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Instead, "normal compliance and intelligence methods" will be used to detect any traders attempting to abuse the system. Already, commentators are saying this could lead to a smugglers dream as exporters could look to avoid tariffs that would be imposed on direct transport between mainland Britain and the Republic of Ireland, by transporting such goods through Northern Ireland. What are the Irish authorities saying? Plans by Britain to levy import tariffs on beef, lamb and dairy products if it crashes out of the EU without a deal would be potentially disastrous for Irish farmers, Agriculture Minister Michael Creed has said. "This is potentially a disaster, yes," Creed told national broadcaster RTE. "We're involved now in a very detailed analysis of what the implications are (and) ...it's not a pretty picture... But this is in the event of no deal and we're not there yet." Creed said officials from his department were in Brussels on Wednesday for further discussions on interventions that would be required in response. The Department of Agriculture said the document published by the UK Government in relation to the border, states the proposed arrangements would be temporary and they would need to engage with the EU. In other words, they would need to agree a deal on how to deal with the border long term. It also said the UK documents do not take account of WTO obligations. In a crash out scenario, the UK would have to comply with WTO rules. "We will continue to ensure that our support for companies evolve in line with changing circumstances, recognising in particular, the vulnerability of the Irish agri-food sector. "In the event of no deal, the government will look for further relaxation of state aid rules and for EU supports for business and agribusiness," it said. How have farmers reacted? IFA President Joe Healy said the tariff regime in the event of a no deal Brexit would be a disastrous scenario for Irish farmers. After last nights defeat in Westminster, the IFA President said the prospect of a no deal has moved closer. Our most exposed sectors, particularly beef, simply will not survive the kind of tariffs being talked about. This would have a devastating effect in the rural economy, he said. We export over 50pc of our beef to the UK. If this is subject to tariffs, it will be a direct hit of almost 800m on the sector, he said. The President of Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA) said that the impact of the tariffs would be catastrophic and would severely impact on a centuries-old and multi-billion euro food trade between Ireland and Great Britain. Pat McCormack said that the immediate effect would be on Irish beef and dairy products where UK consumers prices would have to rise substantially and, even then, the level of tariff would make the trade completely unviable. How has Ireland's meat and dairy industry reacted? Cormac Healy, Senior Director of Meat Industry Ireland (MII) said in a Hard Brexit scenario, Irish beef exports to the UK would now face tariffs that will undermine the viability of trade and is also being presented with a very restrictive import quota regime. "This level of tariff would severely undermine trade. On top of this, the UK Government has proposed zero tariff import quotas, that on the one hand fall massively short of existing beef import volumes entering the UK market and on the other hand open these quotas to all global suppliers. "Very quickly we can expect to see an erosion of our position in the UK market in both volume and value terms, due to stiff competition from lower-priced beef from other regions of the world, said Mr Healy. Meanwhile, Dairy Industry Ireland said the proposed tariff level would put Irish butter and cheddar under severe pressure in the UK markets at current consumer price rates and would necessitate increases at the consumer level in the UK- something that their government desperately wishes to avoid. "Worryingly, the British proposals again offer no solution for the Island of Ireland milk origin issue or the regulatory divergence threat. "In 2018, 804m litres of northern milk flowed south for use in a vast range of products in our integrated island of Ireland supply chain," it said. Calves after moved out after the sale at Kilkenny Mart. Photo: Roger Jones. Calves are being sold for just 50 cent as Irelands beef sector, already badly hit by low prices, now faces huge Brexit tariffs on its 1bn UK export market, the Fianna Fail leader has told the Dail. Micheal Martin said the Irish Government should now be actively seeking emergency EU aid for Irish farmers and food processors. He said the Government must also ensure that cheap South American meat exports are not allowed into the EU as he warned about the impact of potential UK tariffs unveiled today in event of a no-deal Brexit. The tariff regime would wipe out the beef industry, Mr Martin told the Dail. The Fianna Fail leader said EU provisions for emergency aid, under the so-called article 219, must now be sought by Ireland in Brussels. Replying for the Government, Tanaiste Simon Coveney, said the State was in close contact with the EU Commission on these issues. He said that just today a team from the Agriculture Department was in Brussels meeting EU officials. Mr Coveney said already the EU had raised the ceiling on permitted state aids to farmers from 15,000 to 25,000. He added that todays announcements on UK tariffs would only apply if there was a no-deal Brexit which could be averted. Read Also: Calves backlog rises as weather hits the trade The Tanaiste said in the next 48 hours following important votes in the British parliament things may become clearer about Brexit. Plans by Britain to levy import tariffs on beef, lamb and dairy products if it crashes out of the EU without a deal would be potentially disastrous for Irish farmers, Agriculture Minister Michael Creed said. "This is potentially a disaster, yes," Creed told national broadcaster RTE. "We're involved now in a very detailed analysis of what the implications are (and) ...it's not a pretty picture... But this is in the event of no deal and we're not there yet." Creed said officials from his department were in Brussels on Wednesday for further discussions on interventions that would be required in response. The Department of Agriculture said the document published by the UK Govt in relation to the border states the proposed arrangements would be temporary and they would need to engage with the EU. In other words, they would need to agree a deal on how to deal with the border long term. It also said the UK documents do not take account of WTO obligations. In a crash out scenario, the UK would have to comply with WTO rules. "We will continue to ensure that our support for companies evolve in line with changing circumstances, recognising in particular, the vulnerability of the Irish agri-food sector. "In the event of no deal, the government will look for further relaxation of state aid rules and for EU supports for business and agribusiness. A trial using digital cameras and LED lights as part of the mechanical grading system in meat factories is at an "advanced stage", it has been confirmed. It follows criticism of the machines as "outdated and obsolete", as TD Denis Naughten highlighted it is 14 years since their introduction - which predates the arrival of the iPhone. The ICMSA said very "serious questions" remain unanswered on the beef grading machines and the Department's record of inspecting them. Mr Naughten warned beef farmers could be losing 140 per animal due to grading machines operating outside of the recommended thresholds. However, Meat Industry Ireland (MII) said the automated carcase grading system that is in operation in Ireland is "by no means obsolete". MII's Cormac Healy said it was the most comprehensive approach to ensuring objective and consistent classification according to the European Commission's EUROP grading system in any member state. Expand Close Former Communications Minister Denis Naughten / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Former Communications Minister Denis Naughten Advanced stage The industry-led trial is being supervised by the Department of Agriculture, which said it was at an "advanced stage". "Subject to confirmation of effectiveness, the Department would expect the industry to move to implement this technology in due course," it stated. MII confirmed that a carcase classification expert from the Netherlands, who was formerly working with the European Commission, was also assisting in the trial. Mr Healy said it aimed to "future-proof the system with the latest camera and lighting technology" and once validated, the aim was to roll it out across all sites that have automated grading. The Department stated it was satisfied the existing system is compliant with all the relevant EU regulations. Mr Healy said the Department provided the independent checking of the performance of grading technology with announced and unannounced inspections. Over the past two years, inspectors found 21 cases of mechanical beef grading machines not correctly grading; they were replaced by manual grading while the problems were rectified. However, Mr Naughten said if a machine was out by at least two subcategories then it could see farmers getting a 140/hd less for their cattle. He claimed that in the UK grading machines have to be checked daily and inaccuracies must be specifically recorded and addressed. However, Irish machines have reports on a weekly basis. MII hit back, saying the checks in Ireland were "more comprehensive" than in the UK or any other member states. "The UK has far fewer automated grading systems in operation than here in Ireland as they continue to rely mainly on manual grading, which we moved on from years ago," Mr Healy said. The ICMSA's livestock chair Des Morrison said there were many pressing questions including whether farmers whose cattle were "incorrectly graded" by those machines were reimbursed and by what percentage were the machines out of line. MII rejects claims that factory machines are 'outdated and obsolete' The Ulster Farmers' Union has blasted proposals by the UK government to implement a free trade zone on Northern Ireland as giving no protection to the industry, potentially reducing food standards and providing no guarantee food will get cheaper. UK proposals - announced on Wednesday morning in a bid to "inform" MPs ahead of a no-deal vote in parliament - state there will be no checks and no tariffs imposed on goods moving from the Republic of Ireland across the border into Northern Ireland. However, tariffs will be payable on goods moving from the EU into the rest of the UK through Northern Ireland. The government insisted the approach would not create a border down the Irish Sea. Government said the approach would be temporary and in place for up to 12 months. The plan could see tariffs imposed on goods coming from Northern Ireland into the Republic with some suggesting the EU may force the Republic to erect border controls in order to protect the integrity of its single market and customs union. The Ulster Farmers Union said the governments import tariff plans for a no-deal Brexit would devastate Northern Irelands farming industry. UFU president, Ivor Ferguson, said it demonstrated how a deal was needed before splitting from the bloc. He said: We have very real concerns about the proposal for a zero per cent tariff on agricultural goods coming from the Republic of Ireland into Northern Ireland and the differential treatment with ROI and GB trade where tariffs will apply. "This would drive down prices and hit producers here. It could also potentially open the door to illegal trade which would seriously impact on the integrity of the NI agri-food industry. "It is unlikely the EU would offer the same zero tariff to Northern Ireland or the UK as a whole. This is why we have called for reciprocal tariffs. Whatever the EU applies, the UK should apply in return. The tariff plans emphasise why a no deal Brexit must be avoided." The UFU expressed shock the government had only published the tariff schedules on Wednesday, 16 days before the scheduled departure date. "Receiving them just over a fortnight before they could come into effect doesnt give farm or other businesses any time to prepare and is entirely unrealistic, said Mr Ferguson. The UFU president said there was a measure of comfort in the government heeding warnings and treating some agriculture sectors as sensitive. He continued: We are however concerned some sectors have been excluded and even sensitive sectors will see big reductions in tariff protection. In addition, lumping products together under the same tariff code, for example whole carcases and high value cuts of fresh beef, threatens market distortion and further problems. "While the UFU accepts the importance of ensuring food prices remain stable for consumers in a no deal situation, it says sacrificing the farming industry and increasing reliance on imports is not the way to do it. "These tariff proposals will not guarantee cheaper food. They would also reduce environmental and animal welfare standards for food sold in the UK. On that basis alone they are unacceptable." The UFU president said events this week further underlined why a no-deal Brexit must be avoided. This would be the worst possible outcome for family farm businesses in Northern Ireland," he added. "The UFU supported the Prime Ministers Withdrawal Agreement, while not perfect; it would have got us over the line to avoid a no deal. Politicians must sort out their differences and come up with solutions to deliver on their Brexit promises to protect the economy. "They must ensure we end up with a workable solution that allows for an orderly exit from the European Union. Walking off an economic cliff cannot be the answer." 50pc of Irish beef exports go to the UK, and 75pc of beef imported into the UK in November was from Ireland. Photo: Getty Images While the UK government will not introduce any new checks or controls on goods moving into Northern Ireland if the UK leaves the European Union without a deal, large tariffs will hit Ireland's agri-food trade with the rest of the UK. The tariffs will be payable on goods moving from the EU into the rest of the UK under a schedule of rates also released on Wednesday. While 87pc of total imports to the UK by value would be eligible for tariff free access, crucially for Ireland tariffs would still apply to 13pc of goods imported into the UK which includes key products from our agri-food sector. The UK Government announced a mixture of tariffs and quotas on beef, lamb, pork, poultry and some dairy to support UK farmers. Many agricultural tariffs are compound duties and include a fixed cost by weight e.g. 12.8pc on lamb, plus 171.30 per 100 kilos. The UK proposals suggest tariffs ranging from approx. 1,500 per tonne on manufacturing beef up to over 2,500 per tonne on steak exports. Expand Close Half the cheddar made in Ireland goes to the UK / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Half the cheddar made in Ireland goes to the UK The proposed tariff of 221 a tonne on cheddar- will result in a possible over 20 million per year in a tariff cost for Irish Cheddar. But related factors such as customs costs, currency issues and an increase of international competition mean that the final bill for industry and farmers will be a multiple of this. The roughly 22 million proposed tariff on Irish butter would be similarly multiplied with a 605 a tonne tariff slapped on initially but with a range of other costs inflating that figure. Cormac Healy, Senior Director of Meat Industry Ireland (MII) said in a Hard Brexit scenario, Irish beef exports to the UK would now face tariffs that will undermine the viability of trade and is also being presented with a very restrictive import quota regime. "This level of tariff would severely undermine trade. On top of this, the UK Government has proposed zero tariff import quotas, that on the one hand fall massively short of existing beef import volumes entering the UK market and on the other hand open these quotas to all global suppliers. "Very quickly we can expect to see erosion of our position in the UK market in both volume and value terms, due to stiff competition from lower priced beef from other regions of the world said Mr Healy. Expand Close MII warned that it is inevitable that producer prices will fall as a direct result of the loss of UK market share. Photo: Gerry Mooney / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp MII warned that it is inevitable that producer prices will fall as a direct result of the loss of UK market share. Photo: Gerry Mooney Meanwhile, Dairy Industry Ireland said the proposed tariff level would put Irish butter and cheddar under severe pressure in the UK markets at current consumer price rates and would necessitate increases at consumer level in the UK- something that their government desperately wishes to avoid. "Worryingly the British proposals again offer no solution for the Island of Ireland milk origin issue or the regulatory divergence threat. "In 2018, 804 million litres of northern milk flowed south for use in a vast range of products in our integrated island of Ireland supply chain," it said. Disastrous IFA President Joe Healy said the tariff regime in the event of a no deal Brexit would be a disastrous scenario for Irish farmers. After last nights defeat in Westminster, the IFA President said the prospect of a no deal has moved closer. Our most exposed sectors, particularly beef, simply will not survive the kind of tariffs being talked about. This would have a devastating effect in the rural economy, he said. We export over 50pc of our beef to the UK. If this is subject to tariffs, it will be a direct hit of almost 800m on the sector, he said. The President of Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA) said that the impact of the tariffs would be catastrophic and would severely impact on a centuries-old and multi-billion Euro food trade between Ireland and Great Britain. Pat McCormack said that the immediate effect would be on Irish beef and dairy products where UK consumers prices would have to rise substantially and, even then, the level of tariff would make the trade completely unviable. European Affairs Minister Helen McEntee said she agreed that the tariffs flagged on beef and dairy products would be absolutely disastrous for Irelands agriculture sector. Fianna Fail Spokesperson on Agriculture Charlie McConalogue, said the EU will obviously have to respond to the plans to allow goods to travel freely between the Republic and Northern Ireland in the short term and the Irish government will have to elaborate on their own plans to respond to this plan. "The uncertainty is causing massive anxiety with businesses both North and South and will cost jobs soon if not sorted out," he said. Northern Ireland Although tariffs will be payable on goods passing from the EU to Great Britain via Northern Ireland, customs officers will rely on intelligence and compliance work rather than checks on cargoes to impose the levies. Under a temporary and unilateral regime announced by Theresa May's government this morning, EU goods arriving from the Republic and remaining in Northern Ireland will not be subject to tariffs. The government insists that this will not create a border down the Irish Sea, as there will be no checks on goods moving between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Instead, "normal compliance and intelligence methods" will be used to detect any traders attempting to abuse the system. UK ministers accepted that the new regime will cause "concerns" to Northern Irish businesses and farmers about the impact on their competitiveness. But they said these were the only steps that could be taken to deliver on the British government's commitment to avoiding a hard border in the case of no deal. Under the new regime for Northern Ireland, goods arriving from the Republic will still be subject to the same VAT and excise duty as at present. Small businesses trading across the border will be able to report VAT online without any new processes at the border. To protect human, animal and plant health, animals and animal products from outside the EU would be required to enter Northern Ireland through a designated entry point, while regulated plant materials from outside the EU and high-risk plants from inside Europe will require certification and pre-notification. There will be new UK import requirements such as document checks and registration for a small number of goods such as endangered species and hazardous chemicals which are subject to international agreements. Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley said: "The Government has been clear that a deal with the European Union is the best outcome for Northern Ireland. "But we will do all we can to support people and businesses across Northern Ireland in the event that we leave without a deal. "The measures announced today recognise the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland. These arrangements can only be temporary and short term." In the case of no-deal, the UK government is committed to entering discussions urgently with Brussels and Dublin to agree long-term arrangements. Additional reporting Press Association Farmers are calling for the Data Commissioner to investigate the IFA system of collecting levies. Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers' Association (ICSA) president Patrick Kent has called for an investigation into whether the IFA levy collection process is GDPR compliant. The levy is collected by meat processors, marts and co-ops on the association's behalf - last year it was worth 3.2m to IFA. The system includes a process for identifying farmers who do not pay the levy. The IFA says the levy allows all farmers to contribute fairly and proportionately based on the scale of their enterprise to support the association's work on their behalf. However, the practice has been questioned by a leading data protection expert, who says the farmers who opt out of paying the levy should not be identified. Dr TJ McIntyre, a solicitor and law lecturer at UCD, said there must be a legal basis to provide information to third parties and this must normally be done on an 'opt-in' basis. According to Dr McIntyre, if the form does not allow farmers to opt out of the levy without their personal data being passed on to the IFA, then it is not valid consent for the purposes of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Mr Kent said many farmers have "extreme misgivings about the method of taking money off the without their prior consent. "At a very minimum, levies should only be collected from those who have opted in. "My legal advice is that levies should only ever be deducted on an opt-in basis. "There is no way that a farmer can be compelled to sign an opt-out of levies form in respect of livestock or produce supplied to a mart or processor, when it is clear that such confidential information will then be forwarded to IFA." The ICSA does not take levies, Mr Kent said: "I am therefore calling on the Data Protection Commissioner to pro-actively investigate what is going on here and explain to all farmers just what their rights are under GDPR." A spokesman for the Irish Grain Growers said malt barley growers contracts include a stipulation that a deduction is taken from the purchase price for the IFA. "All levies should be optional," he said. Fianna Fail's Eamon O Cuiv has called on the IFA to stop collecting the levies "except from farmers who have expressedly given permission". Independent TD Michael Fitzmaurice also said farm organisations should rely on membership subscriptions. "I'm not an admirer of taking any monies from farmers through marts or factories. Every farmer organisation should have a subscription every year and you go into it or you don't. "It's very hard for farming orgs to be fighting with a factory or a mart if they are collecting money for you." Claims: Joanna Sloan, wife of Simon Kelly, said the loan agreement was not signed by her The High Court has given summary judgment for 1.59m against a daughter-in-law of well-known developer Paddy Kelly over loans primarily related to the purchase of units in a commercial building in Sandyford, Dublin. AIB sought judgment against Joanna Sloan, wife of Simon Kelly, son of Laois-born Paddy Kelly who was one time one of the country's most successful developers. It related to loans advanced in 2007 for the purchase of units in Sandyford Apex Centre and for the release of equity in two of the units there. Mr Justice Seamus Noonan ruled Ms Sloan had not demonstrated a fair or reasonable probability that she had a bona fide defence to the bank's claim. The judge said that in 2006 Paddy Kelly and others were loaned 8m by AIB to buy 10 units in the Apex Centre, which was owned by a company called Daleridge Ltd, of which Mr Kelly and Simon Kelly were shareholders along with others. Daleridge was liquidated and shareholders subsequently acquired some of the individual units. After the liquidation of Daleridge, Ms Sloan bought two of the units with loans from AIB in 2007, including a sum for releasing equity. Security for the loans was a legal charge by Ms Sloan over the two units while her husband Simon provided a letter of guarantee for her obligations for 3.42m. The total amount of the loans was 3.42m. A receiver appointed over the units sold them off and the proceeds went to reduce her outstanding debt to 1.59m. There was default on the loans and the bank demanded repayment which was not made and judgment was sought. Mr Justice Noonan said there was no dispute the money was drawn down by Ms Sloan, that there was default and repayment demands were not met. Among her claims were that the loan agreement was not signed by her. The judge said the fact that the agreement was not executed did not mean there was no agreement. The monies were drawn down and this amounted to implicit acceptance of the terms, he said. She also claimed it was not her signature and that the loan was "for the full benefit of my husband rather than me". The judge said this was later contradicted when she claimed she had not received independent legal advice "at the point at which I executed the liabilities in question". She stopped short of alleging the signature was a forgery but, the judge said, no other inference could be drawn. Her assertion she knew nothing about the loan in question "is simply not credible in the light of the documentary evidence which in my view is all to the contrary", he said. A bare assertion that a signature was not hers did not amount to an arguable defence, he said. He also rejected her claim about not receiving independent legal advice and that AIB brought its case outside the six-year legal time limit. A 12-year time limit applied in this case and it was therefore not statute-barred, he said. Datalexs products help airlines to boost revenue by enabling them to offer additional services and products to passengers when theyre booking their tickets Dermot Desmond's International Investment and Underwriting (IIU) is in discussions to put 10m into Datalex, the troubled travel-software business where IIU is the biggest single investor. The 10m would be made up of a 6.1m secured-loan facility, and 3.9m in new shares. "While discussions are at an advanced stage, there can be no certainty that terms will be agreed with IIU. A further announcement is expected in the coming days," Datalex said. The software company's shares have plunged since it told the market in January that it may have mis-stated its half-year results. Shares had risen more than 25pc however between a low of 54.8c seen last week and Monday's close of 70c each. In yesterday's announcement Datalex's board said it confirmed the IIU discussions and had noted "recent share price movement". It's understood the new shares being issued to IIU will not take its stake above the 30pc threshold, whereby it would have to make an offer for the rest of the company unless given a waiver by regulators. In January Datalex said it expected to report a loss in adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (ebitda) for the full year, because of a shortfall in services revenue relating to a contract with a customer. It said the potential mis-statement of half-year results had been because of "accelerated recognition of revenue" from that contract. The customer in question is understood to be Lufthansa. The 10m in extra funding would provide the company with extra financial resources as it seeks to cope with the fallout from the profit warning. The shares have plunged from around 2.50 each earlier this year to below 55c at one stage last week. The stock soared after the announcement of the IIU discussions yesterday afternoon - closing up 15.71pc on the day at 81c each. After the January profit warning, Datalex told the market in February that it was looking to cut costs, including by reducing headcount. It also said capital expenditure would be lower in 2019. "The group's performance in 2018 was materially behind expectations. The group encountered significant difficulties in a number of areas relating to its services business including incurring exceptional delivery costs that are unlikely to be recovered and operating inefficiencies that are currently being addressed," Datalex said. However, it added that it "anticipates a strong recovery in services revenue in 2019, notwithstanding a continued anticipated shortfall in services revenue compared to deployment costs incurred." In a separate announcement last month the company said its chief financial officer was to step down in April. Donal Rooney, a former Nama executive, joined the company in December 2018. Field position: Greencoat Capital has been snapping up wind farms here since its IPO in 2017. Stock image Meeting a industry target to have 70pc of electricity coming from renewables by 2030 will require as much as 10bn of capital, according to Irish-focused wind farm investor Greencoat Renewables. Greencoat asset manager Patrick Maguire said meeting the target will require another 5,000 megawatts of renewable assets, which he said "equates to 8bn-10bn of investment". He said pension fund money will be an important source of capital for the transformation. "In order to deliver that cheaply and at a low cost to the consumer it's important that the right capital is used for that and the right money funds it. I think pension funds are a good fit for renewable-energy assets. Pension funds like long-term investments, they like to make relatively large investments, they like sustainable investments," Mr Maguire said. Greencoat Renewables is a listed entity managed by Greencoat Capital - a UK-based business with a number of funds operating in the renewables sector. It's been hoovering up wind farms here since its IPO in the summer of 2017. "While [switching to renewables] is something that we need to do, it's also going to create a huge business opportunity," Mr Maguire said. He said that until now the Irish-focused arm has been buying completed wind farms from developers, but that this might have to change as the model by which electricity is purchased for the grid changes. A new auction system that will pit electricity generators against each other is coming into being, and in addition the industry is expecting so-called corporate power-purchase arrangements could emerge. That's where a company would buy electricity directly from an electricity generator, rather than taking it from a utility company. This might mean Greencoat has to get involved in projects at an earlier stage, as competitive auctions might make it more difficult and therefore more financially risky for developers to get power on the grid. Mr Maguire said Greencoat would work with developers "to try and model in the most efficient way to build and own assets". Tomas O'Midheach, chief operating officer and deputy CEO of AIB, has been appointed to the banks board as executive director with immediate effect. Richard Pym, chairman of AIB, said: "I am delighted to welcome Tomas to the board as an executive director following his appointment as deputy CEO in October 2018. Tomas' role as chief operating officer and his substantial experience and knowledge of AIB group will complement and enhance the skills of our board." Colin Hunt, CEO said: "I am pleased that Tomas will join the board as an executive director and I have no doubt that he will make a valuable contribution. I look forward to working more closely with Tomas over the years ahead." Mr O'Midheach was appointed to the role of chief operating officer in February 2016 and designated deputy CEO in October 2018. He has over 22 years' experience in the financial services industry, with his banking experience spanning many areas of banking including finance, data, customer analytics, direct channels and digital. Mr O'Midheach spent 11 years with Citibank in the UK, Spain and Dublin where he held several senior positions in finance. He joined AIB in June 2006 to head up a finance operating model transformation and has since held a number of senior executive positions including head of direct channels & analytics and chief digital officer. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp Australia asked the country's regulators to push to break up or effective separation of Google's digital advertising business because of the damage it is inflicting on the nation's media industry. News Corp made the request in an 80-page filing with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission following a preliminary report from the regulator, recommending a new or existing watchdog should investigate and monitor how large digital platforms rank and display ads and news. In the document, Murdoch's company criticised the existing practices and power of Google-parent Alphabet and Facebook, calling for more regulatory oversight. "The market power that Google and Facebook occupy makes it difficult even for sophisticated and experienced businesses like News Corp. Australia to negotiate any terms of business," the company said in its filing. A Google spokesman didn't immediately have a comment on the filing. News Corp's suggested remedies include "requiring digital platforms to make certain divestments; specifically, that Alphabet, the parent company of Google, should divest Google Search or Google Ad Manager" and "requiring functional separation and access to data on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (Frand) terms: requiring the functional separation of each component of Google's ad tech functions, including Google Search, and access to the data Google holds on Frand terms." The ACCC, in its preliminary report, said Google and Facebook had become the "dominant gateways between news media businesses and audiences," leading to a loss of advertising revenue and ultimately cuts in the number of journalists who could play an important role in "exposing corruption and holding governments, companies, powerful individuals and institutions to account." While the ACCC will consider all submissions, it didn't recommend a breakup in its interim report late last year, said Rob Nicholls, a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales Business School in Sydney. Separation would be a "significant step" and a "pretty hefty remedy," said Nicholls, who researches competition law. There was "no indication that the ACCC will take that course." The regulator's December report contained 11 preliminary recommendations, including preventing Google's internet browser Chrome from being installed as a default app on mobile devices, computers and tablets and preventing Google's search engine from being installed as the default on internet browsers. The report also identified eight areas for further analysis as the inquiry continues. "The ACCC considers that the strong market position of digital platforms like Google and Facebook justifies a greater level of regulatory oversight," chairman Rod Sims said in a statement at the time. News Corp is the country's largest newspaper publisher with mastheads including the Australian national broadsheet as well as the most popular tabloids in Sydney and Melbourne. Bloomberg Troubled retailer Mothercare UK is to sell its Early Learning Centre business to the owner of toy chain The Entertainer for up to 13.5m (15.6m) as it seeks to cut its debt pile. It said it had agreed the deal with Teal Brands, which is the holding company of The Entertainer, but will retain around 6m (7m) of Early Learning Centre stock to offload. The net proceeds from the disposal and inventory sales will be used to reduce the group's bank debt by around 17.5m over the next year. The Early Learning Centre (ELC) is run within 80 Mothercare stores in the UK, 400 stores internationally via franchise partners, and online. In Ireland a separately-owned business has the right to trade under the Mothercare brand. Mothercare Ireland - a family-run business, started by David Ward in 1992 and now run by his two sons, Jonathan and Ben, and daughter Laura - said it remains a franchisee of the Early Learning Centre business and will therefore remain unaffected by the sale in the UK. Mothercare UK said its recovery plan was set to see 57 stores in the UK shut by the end of March to cut its estate to 80, which it said yesterday was ahead of schedule. CEO Mark Newton-Jones said: "We have made significant progress in recent months as we continue our strategic transformation to deliver a sustainable and profitable future for Mothercare. "This disposal of Early Learning Centre provides a further step towards eliminating our bank debt, and our new concession arrangements with The Entertainer will bring our customers an even stronger toys offer, both in stores and online." The group said the ELC deal comes as it lacks the scale and resources to develop the toy ranges, amid an "intensely competitive" market. Gary Grant, founder and executive chairman of The Entertainer, said the firm would look to "bring new life" to the ELC brand. He added: "By combining our experience with that of ELC's passionate and capable partners around the world we look forward to re-invigorating the brand for generations to come." Additional reporting PA The first acts for Electric Picnic 2019 have been revealed. Homegrown talent Hozier, whose second album Wasteland Baby! has just landed at number one on the Billboard Top 200 chart in the US, tops the bill alongside Florence and the Machine, The Strokes and The 1975. Also performing over the weekend will be Billie Eilish, Christine and the Queens, James Blake, Dermot Kennedy, The Streets, Jarvis Cocker introducing JARV IS, Jess Glynne, Four Tet, Years & Years, Roisin Murphy and more. "It's the most extraordinary line-up, way way beyond anything we've ever done, absolutely amazing," said Festival Director Melvin Benn. " Hozier is going to be really really special headlining the show." While previous line-ups may not have suited everyone, he believes there's something for everyone this time around; "There will always be people who are disappointed. How they'd be disappointed with this one is beyond me!" Taking place across three days from August 30 to September 1 at Stradbally Hall, Co Laois, the 2019 festival is the biggest in Ireland with a capacity this year of 55,000. It boasts not only multiple stages with different genres of music but spoken word, comedy, theatre, workshops, crafts, dance, lake swimming, gourmet food and a host of other treats. This year also sees the addition of a brand new area, Freetown, which sees an extra 30 acres added to the Electric Picnic site. It's an entirely new self-contained town which will be created (by the creatives behind Salty Dog, Berlinhaus, and Trailer Park) on the site formerly occupied by the Oscar Wilde campsite. Video of the Day It will centre around Terminus, a new 8,000 capacity stage for electronic and dance. The town will also boast Providencia with 'Latino life down every alley-way' and, on the outskirts, there will be Spike Island, The Oasis, and Cirque. Benn said he "pressed a real big refresh button with the festival" this year in creating Freetown, adding, "I'm not diluting anything in the existing festival - it's a whole new area." He added, "It's a place that will really move Electric Picnic on to another festival within itself." With a small number of tickets released for Thursday evening, Benn points out that the festival now effectively runs over four days. However, while he says the festival has scope to 'grow a little', it will never run to a week a la Glastonbury etc. "No, we'll never have a week long. I think that would test the patience of the people of Laois and Stradbally!" Such is the draw of Electric Picnic, which has grown in scale and ambition over the course of 15 years, this years event sold out before any acts had even been announced. Options are limited in terms of securing a ticket for this year's event and Benn warned punters to be aware of touts. "The reality is that the tickets are all gone," he said. "I believe Three have still got some which I believe they'll release nearer the festival but beyond that everything's gone. If you are trying to buy just be really really careful where you're buying from because it is the hottest ticket in town." The gamble on tickets has paid off for those who shelled out up to 250 for a weekend pass, but for those who failed to bag tickets, theres good news on the way from EP organisers Festival Republic. They will soon be announcing a brand new summer festival at a new location. In the meantime, the focus is on EP, which now faces a little competition from All Together Now, which arrived on the scene to rave reviews last August Bank Holiday weekend. There is room enough for everyone, however, according to Benn. "I've spent my entire life creating and producing festivals and I believe festivals are an incredible release for people's pressured lives. The fact that there are more and more of them is only reinforcing my belief that they are so important," he says. "I'm not looking at them from a point of view of worry or anything like that. I just think the more the better. The more people who are going to festivals the better it is." For more information check out www.electricpicnic.ie With the election of (Gov.) J.B. Pritzker, we have been all but guaranteed that cannabis will be legalized for adult use in the near future, she wrote. So, the question for the black community is not what are we going to do about marijuana legalization, but rather, what are we going to do with it? It's being described by 2FM insiders as "the biggest station shake-up in years", and certainly handing Jennifer Zamparelli her own mid-morning show is a reasonably bold move. But will this, and other changes, refloat the sinking ship - or is it holed irretrievably below the waterline? With Nicky Byrne quitting the gig to rejoin Westlife, and co-host Jenny Greene refusing a return to her old late-night slot and choosing to leave 2FM altogether, Zamparelli gets the 10am-1pm slot to call her own. Station chief Dan Healy has sounded an optimistic note, declaring: "I believe Jen will appeal to young audiences as she has that instant likeability and humour. Our audiences have reacted in an overwhelming positive way towards her." She's made a pretty decent success of radio since joining Breakfast Republic four years ago. That show, co-hosted with Keith Walsh and her 'Bridget and Eamon' sparring partner Bernard O'Shea, rose again in the latest JNLR figures to a respectable 189,000 listeners. Brand Zamparelli overall is hot right now, having taken on 'Dancing with the Stars' presenting duties on TV. 'Bridget and Eamon' is on its fourth season and continues to pull a crowd (not to mention still being the laugh-out-loud funniest comedy on Irish telly). It's good to see a woman getting such a plum job on 2FM too. That's not meant in a patronising way, and Zamparelli has earned the gig; but for too long, the station was a virtual wasteland for female voices. Now at least we have Tracey Clifford, Ciara King, Blathnaid Treacy, Louise McSharry - and Zamparelli in the key mid-morning slot. That, of course, was once the dominion of the late, great Gerry Ryan: a man who drew listenership figures which are not only unimaginable in the modern radio era, they're essentially impossible. Interestingly, Healy confessed to disappointment at those recent JNLR results. Despite rises for Byrne and Greene, Clifford and Eoghan McDermott, he said: "We thought we would move on a little further, but no panic." What hope, ultimately, has 2FM of returning to its place as the undisputed king of pop music broadcasting? When it launched in 1978, and for decades afterwards, it was a ratings-devouring giant. In this digital age, though, the medium has become ever-more fractured, with more stations easily accessible from around the world on our phones and other devices, and the competing charms of streaming and podcasts. Even Ryan himself, a bona fide legend, would probably struggle to command his old figures in the present climate. Video of the Day While the internet hasn't quite decimated radio to the extent that it has to other industries, broadcast radio is undeniably in a period of retrenchment and adjustment - some of it painful, and the process is by no means complete. We Irish still love radio - a daily listenership among the highest-per-capita in the world - but there are more choices now. 2FM does not, and cannot, command our attention as it used to, regardless of what moves Healy makes, or how well Zamparelli and others work out. Indeed, personally I feel that the national broadcaster has no business running a pop station anyway. I understand why it was established back in the day; but in 2019, the airwaves are crammed with music stations, alongside all those other alternative audio attractions. The world doesn't need another one. I'd sell off or shut down 2FM, and set up something along the lines of BBC Radio 2 instead. Some music, some talk, but not as newsy as Radio 1 et al and not as "youth"-driven as 2FM and their ilk. Healy has stressed how 2FM faces "challenges" in attracting their core 15- to 34-year-old demographic. If it was up to me, I'd leave the kids alone, and go after their older siblings instead. The school where killer Alan Hawe worked as a primary teacher has stated that he never accessed pornography online during the working day. At no stage was he subject to any disciplinary process at Castlerahan National School, Co Cavan, the school has confirmed. Hawe brutally murdered his wife Clodagh and their three sons, Liam, Niall and Ryan, in August 2016. His late wife's family said recently they had learned his counselling notes detailed that he had been viewing porn on a school laptop and for this, he'd been caught "red handed". But in a letter from solicitors representing Hawe's former employers it was stated: "The staff of Castlerahan NS, including the principal, only became aware when informed by gardai for the first time on Friday, December 2, 2016, of Hawe's online activity. "Present at this meeting, were senior members of the Garda and Tusla and the information was relayed by gardai to all in attendance. Senior members of HSE and NEPS were also informed that evening in the school. "In response to specific school management queries, gardai have confirmed that there was no access to pornographic websites by Hawe during the school day and further, no evidence has emerged of any inappropriate activity on the part of Hawe during school time. "Whilst there has been reference to Hawe being caught 'red handed' in relation to some of his activities, we can state categorically that this has absolutely nothing to do with this school and did not happen on school premises. "At no stage was there any disciplinary process or any other investigation instigated or threatened by the school in respect of Hawe." The school board of management asked for the clarification to be published, adding: "As I am sure you can appreciate, these reports have caused a great deal of stress in our school community and have reignited the emotions and trauma experienced at the time of this terrible tragedy." The letter continued: "The broadcasts have damaged the reputation of school personnel whom, as you will appreciate, are easily identifiable in a small rural community. Their privacy has also been compromised by these reports. "In conclusion, our clients again sincerely extend their heartfelt sympathies to the Coll and Hawe families as they continue to grieve and come to terms with their tragic loss." Jacqueline Connolly, Clodagh's sister, had told RTE's 'Claire Byrne Live' last month that the counselling notes showed Hawe had been "masturbating somewhere that he shouldn't have been". She added that a conflict had taken place with a colleague in the months before he killed his wife and children. The inquest in December 2017 revealed Hawe had been viewing pornography and that he had become anxious someone might discover his obsession. Gardai investigated the killer's online use but did not find anything that would be considered criminal. Clodagh's family have highlighted a number of concerns about the killings and the Garda investigation in recent weeks. A serious case review is being launched into the Garda response to the Hawe tragedy following pressure from the grieving family, while a stalled 10-year review of domestic homicides, initiated in 2016 after the murder of Ms Hawe and her sons, is to be revived. Andrea Geraghty, mother of Cillian, of Airpark Court, Stocking Lane, Rathfarnham, Dublin pictured at the Four Courts for a Circuit Civil Court action.Pic: Collins Courts A nine-year-old schoolboy, who broke a bone in his leg at a creche five years ago, was awarded 52,600 damages against the creche owners on Tuesday. Ms Andrea Geraghty told Circuit Court President, Mr Justice Raymond Groarke, that her son, Cillian, who was just four at the time, had been startled and fell in the washroom at the creche when a light was suddenly switched off and on. Barrister Ronan Quinn, counsel for Ms Geraghty and Cillian, who live at Airpark Court, Stocking Lane, Rathfarnham, Dublin 16, said Cillian was among a group taken to the washroom to use the facilities on September 17, 2013, just days after his fourth birthday, when the accident happened. Mr Quinn, who appeared with Joe Clancy Solicitors, told the court that Cillian had suffered a fracture to a thigh bone as a result of the fall and had been confined for some weeks at home in a right hip spica cast. Counsel said Cillian had been admitted to Crumlin Hospital on the day of the accident and detained overnight. He had undergone surgery the following day. Mr Quinn said that following initial treatment and care Dr Paula Kelly, consultant orthopaedic foot and ankle surgeon at the Beacon Consultants Clinic, Sandyford, Dublin, had noticed a .5 (point five) millimetre length discrepancy in Cillians right leg but had stated in follow-up reviews that this had resolved. Ms Geraghty told the court in an affidavit that the Personal Injuries Board had assessed compensation for Cillians injury at 32,000 but she had refused to accept this and, following talks between the legal teams on both sides, RSA Insurance, on behalf of the creche had made an offer of 50,000. Cillians mum, who had brought a 60,000 claim against the Knocklyon Lodge Creche and Montessori Limited, Old Knocklyon Road, Rathfarnham, told the court the family also had to repay 2,000 to their private health insurers. Negligence and breach of duty had been alleged against the creche owners. Judge Groarke, who said he was satisfied from Ms Geraghty assurances to the court that Cillian had fully recovered after the accident, approved settlement terms of 52,600. Trial: Patrick Quirke with his wife Imelda arriving at court as the case continued. Photo: Mark Condren A handwritten note detailing a series of questions about the disappearance of Bobby Ryan was found in the home of Patrick Quirke, the Tipperary murder trial has heard. The note speculated that the naked state of Bobby Ryan's body meant "he was either murdered and the clothes taken off or that he never left the house". Garda John Walsh told the trial that in a search of Mr Quirke's house at Breanshamore, Co Tipperary, on May 17, 2013, items recovered included a computer, an external hard drive, a photocopier and two memory sticks, two mobile phones and a Vodafone phone bill. Mr Quirke (50) of Breanshamore, Co Tipperary, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Mr Ryan (52), a part-time DJ known as 'Mr Moonlight', on a date between June 3, 2011, and April 2013. A handwritten note written on an A4 sheet of paper was also recovered and produced in court in a clear Garda evidence bag. Gda Walsh read this aloud. It was headed: "Mary last one to see him? Body naked, either murdered and clothes taken off or never left the house?" He said the words "never left the house" were underlined. The note continued: "How did she find his van so quickly? Why did she look for him in a place she knew he wouldn't have needed to go... "Very strange...Token search? Why wouldn't she act on leads of travelling salesman? "Why did she give varying accounts how long he was in the yard before he left for work - two minutes or 10 minutes? "Why was she so adamant of no activity took place in yard, eg, second car? "How would she hear? It wasn't always possible. Why did she rip down photos of Bobby after Ryan family put them up?" The note ended: "Why was she relieved when 'Crimecall' was a rubbish programme and got no help to jog anyone's memory." Gda Walsh said the document was found in the office of Mr Quirke's house but he could not recall whereabouts in the room. Also retrieved in the search was a brown envelope containing documentation in relation to the lease of the property at Fawnagowan. A pair of mud-stained green work overalls was also shown in court. Exhibits officer Kieran Keane confirmed during cross-examination that the overalls were forensically tested for blood and the results were negative. He also confirmed that a trailer seized from Mr Quirke's yard was also tested and nothing of significance found. Plumber Stephen O'Sullivan told the court that on May 22, 2013, he went to the farm at Fawnagowan when asked by gardai to find out whether there was a spillage in the dairy that would cause water to find its way across the yard into the milking parlour and if it went into the pit. Asked by David Humphries BL, for the prosecution, whether he could tell if there had been a leak in the milking parlour in March 2013, Mr O'Sullivan said he could not tell the exact date but said a leak would definitely have occurred "at some stage" because there were a lot of repairs carried out on the pipes. Mr O'Sullivan said he ran the water to see if it would flow from the old dairy to the milking parlour and into the run-off tank. Some 40 minutes to an hour later, he saw it flow from a pipe into the run-off tank. The jury heard that Mr Quirke told gardai he was drawing water from the tank to mix with slurry when he found the body of Mr Ryan. Under cross-examination, he said he was brought out because gardai wanted to see whether he could verify Mr Quirke's statement about a leak. Lorcan Staines SC, for the defence, asked Mr O'Sullivan what he had told them. "I said: 'You asked me to assess the situation and I actually said to him he told you the truth'," Mr O'Sullivan replied. The court was told details about a booking for a twin room at the Cliff House hotel at Ardmore, Co Waterford, in September 2011. Front of house manager Siobhan Phillips said hotel records showed the telephone booking was made for a 'gourmet package' on September 6 in the name of Mr Quirke with an email address for Mary Lowry. Put to her by Bernard Condon SC, for the defence, that Ms Lowry's Laser card statement showed a payment for 416.20, Ms Phillips said she did not have access to that. Meanwhile, Sgt Deborah Marsh, who headed the search at Fawnagowan, described how the run-off tank had been emptied of silt and liquid bucket by bucket and sieved for evidence, in a search that took three days. The trial continues. Cuts to legal aid actually makes the legal system more expensive, a leading family and child law expert has warned. Special rapporteur on child protection Dr Geoffrey Shannon described the situation as penny wise and pound foolish. Cuts to legal aid budgets have led to proceedings which are more drawn out and more difficult to resolve where adequate support is lacking, he told the Oireachtas Justice Committee. The comments came in the third of a series of hearings by the committee on the family law system. It plans to publish a report with recommendations for reforms. Dr Shannon said that while Ireland had a Rolls Royce commercial court system, its family law system was impoverished and did not really have the capacity to meet the needs of the most vulnerable members of our society. The Legal Aid Board has struggled to meet demand in recent years and the Government faced criticism for failing to significantly increase its funding in last years Budget. Stephanie Lord, a legal and policy officer with legal advice charity Flac, told the committee the limited nature of legal aid in Ireland and restrictions on the type of cases it can be granted for means many people end up representing themselves in the courts. This raises all sorts of difficulties for individuals because of how complex the processes are, she said. Flac chief executive Eilis Barry told the committee there were particular concerns in the area of family law. Anecdotally, we have been told by family law practitioners that up to 80pc of people in the district court arent represented, she said. I think that is a scandal. I dont think that is desirable for the parties involved or the children or for the early resolution of matters. I think it causes huge delays as the judges are trying to grapple with the unrepresented litigant appearing before them. Unlike criminal legal aid, where a qualifying persons costs are met in full, civil legal aid is usually not free and a person must make a contribution towards it. A means test and a merits test must be passed before it can be granted. To qualify, a person must have an annual disposable income of less than 18,000 and disposable assets of less than 100,000. Ms Barry said the means test hasnt been amended since 2008 and was leading to deserving cases not getting legal aid. She cited a case where the parents of a terminally ill child sought legal aid to be represented in the High Court when a hospital was intending to make an application in respect of the childs medical care. Despite having no money due to being out of work for a number of months while they took care of their child, the parents were refused legal aid. We would argue that the means tests needs to be poverty proofed and reviewed on an ongoing basis, said Mr Barry. We also argue that the Legal Aid Board should have a discretion to provide legal aid in certain circumstances where people have failed the means test. The committee also heard of cramped condition at Dolphin House, a venue for family law proceedings in Dublin. Ms Lord said it was cramped, dirty, poorly laid out and not equipped to deal with the high volume of people using it. Speaking of a recent visit to the courthouse, she said: I found the entire experience to be rather shocking. She said it was common practice for people to have to engage in consultations with their solicitors in the hallways and on the stairs because there are so few consultation rooms available. People are having consultations with their solicitors in full earshot of complete strangers where they discuss issues, very intimate details of their lives, she said. Ms Lord said the situation was particularly distressing for victims of domestic violence. It makes it especially difficult when there are women who have to have consultations with their solicitor and the respondent is in the same area, she said. A school has seen a huge increase in students applying for STEM-related courses since it started a Transition Year (TY) programme encouraging exploration of how to tackle real-world problems using maths and statistics. Clongowes Wood College, Co Kildare, has led the way on The Young Modellers project and such is its success that it is being opened up to more schools. It started when Clongowes maths and physics teacher Stephen O'Hara approached a college friend, Prof James Gleeson, Director of the Mathematics Applications Consortium for Science and Industry (MACSI), based at the University of Limerick (UL), about finding ways to challenge his students. Inspired by the Oxford Study Groups idea, which links academic mathematicians with industry, Prof Gleeson came back with a range of problems where mathematical modelling can be used to come up with solutions. Examples include locating the black box of a crashed aeroplane or forecasting the cost of cancer screening programmes. That was in 2011 and the programme has been a big hit. Typically, about 25-30 students volunteer to participate each year. O'Hara loves watching when they break into groups to tackle a problem and "when they start to think about it, and discuss it among themselves - there is no one right answer and different groups can come up with different solutions". MACSI's Dr Sinead Burke is seeking another 15 schools to get involved and wants a representative mix, including girls', mixed-gender and DEIS schools. Participating teachers will attend a three-day residential training workshop during the summer, as well as benefiting from ongoing online and offline support, including from O'Hara. Schools can apply at ul.ie/macsi/teachers-application-young-modellers. Deadline is April 5. The countries with the highest levels of young women binge drinking - with a prevalence of more than 55pc - were Denmark, Finland, Ireland and New Zealand, in that order. Ireland is a nation that continues to drink to excess, downing 11 litres of pure alcohol per person last year. That's the equivalent to nearly a bottle of vodka a week, or 482 pints of lager a year. A separate report warned that adolescent girls in Ireland have one of the highest levels of binge drinking in the world. As we face into the annual St Patrick's Day celebrations, the shock statistics were deplored by Alcohol Action Ireland - which also warned about a rise in the consumption of spirits. There has been a 21.4pc rise in spirit consumption over a five-year period, 2014-2018, amid a trend for greater consumption of gin and cocktails. "This data disappointingly indicates that alcohol consumption remains stubbornly high at 11 litres per capita. "Alcohol receipts for the year ended show a 1.78pc rise. "However when an estimated population data for 2018 is applied the figures for consumption as a per capita, stand at 11 litres. "This is indicative of essentially a status quo, year on year." At this rate the target to reduce our alcohol consumption to 9.1 litres per capita by next year - which was set in 2013 - will not be met unless there is a dramatic change in habits. Ireland's reputation as a country of heavy drinkers is not waning, and St Patrick's Day approaches with alcohol again at the centre of festivities. Separately, a study published in 'The Lancet' found the number of adolescents worldwide who are overweight or obese more than doubled between 1990 and 2016. The researchers tracked progress in 12 indicators of adolescent health in 195 countries, including risk factors such as smoking, obesity and binge drinking. It was discovered that Ireland was one of the countries which was near the top of the table when it came to binge drinking. The number of teenagers globally aged 15-19 years who binge drink changed little from 1990. It has gone from 41 million boys and 26 million girls in 1990 to 44 million boys and 27 million girls in 2016. The countries with the highest levels of young women binge drinking - with a prevalence of more than 55pc - were Denmark, Finland, Ireland and New Zealand, in that order. The report found that smoking has decreased by 38 million people compared with 1990. "This latest data demonstrates, yet again, the long way we, as a nation, have to travel to bring our drinking patterns down within a low-risk approach to alcohol consumption," said Alcohol Action Ireland spokesman Eunan McKinney. "Over 1,000 deaths per annum in Ireland are alcohol related and our public health services continue to spend in excess of 12pc of its budget on alcohol-related illnesses and incidences. "Over 200,000 children continue to live in family circumstances where alcohol is having a negative impact on their development and their lives," he warned. He called for the implementation of the Public Health Alcohol Act which was passed last year "after many years of debate". The legislation allows for the introduction of minimum pricing to outlaw cheap drink as well as more graphic labelling. The recently appointed chairman of the board overseeing the construction of the new 1.4bn national children's hospital will today describe how the project has the ability to be "transformational". Fred Barry, who is to take over the reins of the National Paediatric Development Board - blamed for contributing to a 450m overrun in the hospital cost - will appear before the Oireachtas health committee. He will say the new hospital is not just another big infrastructure project: "It is much more than that. It will be transformational for the care we give our children and young people who represent about a quarter of our population." Mr Barry was appointed after his predecessor Tom Costello stepped down last month amid criticism of the runaway cost of the hospital. Mr Barry, a chartered engineer, was chief executive of the National Roads Authority. Gardai and members of Dublin Fire Brigade are currently at the scene RED Line Luas services are facing major delays this morning after an incident near the Jervis stop. It is understood that a Luas and a car collided on the line near Jervis Street shopping centre. Gardai and Dublin Fire Brigade attended the scene. A Luas spokesperson said that Red Line services are "back on the move" after previously only operating between Tallaght/Saggart and Smithfield. Firefighter/Paramedics have responded to a collision involving a LUAS tram and a car on Jervis Street . There are no serious injuries. Crews from Phibsborough and HQ attended. #Ambulance120@aaroadwatch @DCCTraffic pic.twitter.com/WtzXU8b7fB Dublin Fire Brigade (@DubFireBrigade) March 13, 2019 "Red Line services are back on the move as emergency services have left the area of an earlier accident at Jervis. "Please expect heavy delays as service is regulating back to normal." Gardai said that it is unknown if there are any injuries as of yet. "Gardai are currently at the scene of a road traffic collision between a car and Luas. The incident occurred on Jervis St. Injuries if any are unknown at this stage," a garda spokesperson told Independent.ie. It is the second incident near Jervis this morning after an earlier medical emergency was reported this morning. Red Line services reported delays of up to 25 minutes shortly after 9am. The incident comes after a man was killed after being hit by a Luas tram in Tallaght on Monday. The incident happened on a bend in the track between the Red Cow stop and the Kingswood stop, around 30 metres from the Kingswood stop. She wants to see Jensen fired, she said. If hes allowed to return, it will send a message to younger police officers that they can use excessive force and get away with it, Shesgreen said. They may find a way to say technically he didnt commit a crime. He may even claim he didnt violate procedures (but) its not OK with us. Two men have been injured in a shooting incident in west Dublin late last night. It is thought the men were shot at with a shotgun at some stage late on Tuesday night at an unknown location and fled the scene. The pair then made their own way to Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown seeking treatment. Their injuries are not believed to be life threatening, but gardai are investigating the incident. Tensions have been high in areas of west Dublin in recent weeks after a number of shooting incidents, but it is not known if last night's attack is related to any particular feud or organised crime gang. Unemployed people in Social Protection Minister Regina Doherty's constituency were warned they would have their dole payments reduced unless they showed up at an event she was due to attend tomorrow. The 'Community Employment and Tus Information Event' is pitched as an opportunity for those without a job to get career guidance. But a notice sent out by the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection added: "Failure to attend will result in sanctions on your payment." Ms Doherty was scheduled to attend, but pulled out following queries to her department from the Irish Independent. Fianna Fail TD Thomas Byrne said he has been contacted by constituents who are "extremely concerned" about presenting themselves at the public information day. "This is unacceptable and a gross breach of the privacy of the individuals concerned, some of whom were extremely concerned that word would get out that they were unemployed, in view of the public nature of this event. "The Department of Social Protection has no office in South Meath, so having an event here in Ashbourne was a new departure for them," Mr Byrne said. Ms Doherty acknowledged that "some concerns" had been raised by local constituents about the decision to invite local councillors "and as this is distracting from the true focus of the day, the minister herself will not be attending the event". The invitation emailed to Mr Byrne said that Meath Partnership, a body set up to deliver a range of rural, social and economic programmes in the county, was inviting him on behalf of the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection. In a statement, the minister's office stressed it was not the department that issued invites to local politicians. "Other participants in the event may have invited local stakeholders. The minister believes these events should focus solely on the jobseekers, the opportunities available and take into account the sensitivities involved for attendees," a spokesperson said. The minister's office also described the invitation threatening a cut to entitlements as a "standard letter" which is issued to remind jobseekers of their "obligations". "Entitlement to a jobseeker's payment is conditional on a jobseeker being available for and genuinely seeking work," a spokesperson said. Mr Byrne received his invitation from Meath Partnership which outlined that the session would run from 10.30am until 1pm. Participants will be helped to re-enter the workforce, it said. The Fianna Fail TD, who shares the Meath East constituency with Ms Doherty, claimed the minister was trying to "burnish her credentials in relation to community employment". "But the department threatening to sanction individuals in the minister's constituency is utterly unacceptable and borderline illegal. "Our CE schemes do great work. If some of our jobseekers need to be encouraged to join, that can be done on the normal one-to-one basis," he said. However, Ms Doherty's office said it is normal that jobseekers commit to taking "reasonable steps to avail of opportunities to improve their prospects of employment". The Mayor of San Francisco has apologised for the "pain" caused by her city's posthumous award to former Northern Ireland deputy first minister Martin McGuinness, which cited his "courageous service in the military". The Certificate of Honour citation lauded Mr McGuinness's role as a "negotiator" who "helped cement and shape the Northern Ireland Peace Process and construct the Good Friday Agreement", but it sparked fury for also praising his "military" role. It was awarded as part of the city's annual St Patrick's Day festivities. San Francisco Mayor London Breed has now admitted that the "language on the Certificate of Honour should have taken more care" to apply her city's values. The apology came after widespread condemnation from politicians and IRA victims. "San Francisco values means respect for the democratic process and non-violent political actions," Ms Breed said. "The language on the Certificate of Honour should have taken more care to apply these values when reflecting the history of Mr McGuinness's life towards peacemaker and his role in the peace process that resulted in the Good Friday Agreement. "I apologise for the pain this certificate has caused." However, the statement did not clarify whether the honour granted to Mr McGuinness would now be withdrawn. More than 2,800 people have signed an online petition asking Ms Breed to rescind the honour. Prior to the apology, UUP MLA Doug Beattie released an open letter to Ms Breed in which he said the award is something that "spits in the faces" of IRA victims. He asked for Ms Breed to "reverse this despicable decision". DUP leader Arlene Foster acknowledged that Mr McGuinness had "undoubtedly played a very important role in the restoration of devolution", but added that "the earlier part of his life was one of violence". She said that Claudy and Coleraine had "suffered indiscriminate car bomb attacks" when Mr McGuinness was a commander of the Provisional IRA in Derry. "These were bomb attacks which murdered pensioners and young children, a reality of IRA terrorism which is likely to be unknown to the mayor of San Francisco," she said. "Neither is it likely she would be aware of the IRA's murder of Patsy Gillespie who was used as a human bomb by the Provisional IRA." Last year, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio was slammed for branding St Patrick's Day 2018 as 'Gerry Adams Day'. More and more people are choosing petrol The so-called 'swing from diesel' is put in further perspective today as a senior motoring executive insists the trend towards petrol is only 'right and proper'. Ciaran McMahon, Ford Ireland's managing director and chairman, says people bought diesels when they really should not have. They have since learned lessons and are changing back. Latest SIMI figures show more and more people are choosing petrol (and hybrids and electric vehicles) over diesel. Mr McMahon does not mention hybrids which are gaining substantial sales as people move away from diesel but are not taking the full step to an electric vehicle just yet. The Ford chief's comments are hardly outrageously provocative but they do serve to highlight why petrol buying has increased. Critically, they make an important distinction on the motives behind fewer people buying diesels. Mr McMahon recalls how many migrated to the now out-of-favour fuel after the emissions-based motor taxation system was introduced in 2008. He says that while a petrol model would have been the correct choice for many motorists, thousands bought diesel. They did so even though their annual mileage "was not enough to justify the extra cost of diesel". Critically, he distinguishes between two different reasons drivers are leaving diesel. There are those doing so on environmental and/or health grounds and those who realise they don't need one because they put up such low annual mileage (under 10,000kms for example). So there is a massive re-balancing afoot - back to pre-2008 days in many ways. Diesel still commands a substantial percentage of new-car buying even if it is much lower than in the distorted 'diesel tax era'. As such, it is still a long way from being dead in the eyes of many experts here. Mr McMahon also stresses how, historically, many new diesel-converts were not aware that particulate filters need an occasional long run at motorway speeds to burn off the particles of soot and carbon that are trapped in the filter. "If you don't do that, the filter becomes clogged and can lead to having to install a new one at considerable expense. "Our dealers have told us this was happening for a proportion of typically urban motorists who were not driving sufficient mileage in their diesel cars." Finally, it is also obvious, but important, to note that petrol technology has made it much easier to switch to petrol. Ford claim to be the first manufacturer to have developed a small modern, turbocharged petrol engine (the 1.0 litre EcoBoost). Nowadays virtually every manufacturer has its own equivalent. * Have you switched to petrol or hybrid? Why? Let us know: ecunningham@independent.ie Irish holidaymakers need to brace for delays to their flights this summer as Europe wrestles with a shortage of air traffic controllers and inevitable strike action. But Eamonn Brennan said he's hopeful there won't be as many strikes in France this year. The former head of the Irish Aviation Authority is now the director general of Brussels-based air traffic agency Eurocontrol. Speaking to journalists in Madrid, Mr Brennan also said flight delays in Europe cost the region's economy 17.6bn last year - including the cost of passenger compensation paid by airlines. Each minute of a delay costs about 100. Last year was the busiest ever for flights in Europe, but 26pc of all flights were delayed. The EU's 261 rule ensures passengers are entitled to sometimes quite significant compensation when flights are delayed or cancelled. Mr Brennan dismissed Ryanair chief Michael O'Leary's suggestion the shortage of air traffic controllers in Europe could be addressed by faster training. Mr O'Leary said it should only take six months. "That's not feasible," said Mr Brennan. "On average, it takes three years to train an air traffic controller - maybe even a little bit longer. It's not that easy." In 2015, 17pc of people living here were "foreign-born" (to use the term in the report). In Britain, the equivalent percentage is 13. Stock Image When we are debating issues like housing, schools, jobs, wages, hospital places or welfare spending, we never seem to factor immigration and its effects into the debate. On the 'Marian Finucane Show' on Sunday, pretender to the throne of Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, listed three of the things Fine Gael stands for, namely free markets, Europe and "managed migration". I'm all for managed migration as well, but it begs the question, what does "managed migration" mean? I presume it means the level of immigration we can successfully cope with. One thing this means is that the level of immigration cannot be such that it puts too much strain on our infrastructure, which is to say on housing, on schools, on hospitals and the other things listed above. It also means that immigrants are being successfully integrated into their new society and are not becoming alienated from it. It means that immigrants by and large accept the core values of their new society. An extremely important new report has been published this week by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) called 'Monitoring Report on Immigration 2016'. The report is big and takes time to absorb, but the authors believe that overall Ireland is doing a good job at integrating its immigrants, although "challenges" remain. For example, while the employment rate for immigrants is high overall, it is much lower for Africans. But what is clear from the report, or rather what it confirms, is that Ireland, proportionately speaking, has one of the biggest immigrant populations. In 2015, 17pc of people living here were "foreign-born" (to use the term in the report). In Britain, the equivalent percentage is 13. Aside from tiny Cyprus and Luxembourg, no country in the EU has a higher percentage of migrants from other EU countries (10pc). Now, think about this for a moment. In Britain, there is a very big debate about immigration. Many British people are concerned about their country's ability to absorb such a large number, to "manage" migration properly, as Mr Varadkar might put it. The debate is so big that even the Labour party at the last general election promised measures to curb immigration. Here, there is almost no debate about immigration whatever. In Ireland, any party expressing the sort of concern expressed by the British Labour party would be instantaneously condemned as 'racist' and that would be the end of the matter. This is incredibly unhealthy. If immigration is putting pressure on our housing stock, on rental property and prices, on school places and hospital places, then we ought to know about it because it is adversely affecting Irish-born people. A political system that won't even contemplate this possibility, that won't ask the questions, that doesn't even know what questions to ask, is quite literally delinquent in its duties. Last year, I decided to ask the Department of Social Protection what percentage of rent supplement was paid out to non-Irish EU nationals, and non-EU nationals. As at February of last year, the figure was 35pc. This is a remarkable total. Remember, 17pc of the population is "foreign-born", so immigrants are over-represented in the figures by two to one. More recently, I asked Fingal County Council what percentage of its social housing stock is occupied by non-Irish EU nationals and by non-EU nationals. The total comes to 15pc, but the great majority (86pc) of the 15pc come from outside the EU. I also asked what percentage of those waiting for social housing fell into these same categories. Some 61pc are Irish citizens (some might be naturalised immigrants), and the rest (39pc) are citizens of other countries, with 16pc from outside the EU. The ERSI report shows that 70pc of non-Irish are in the private rental sector, as distinct from being homeowners etc. That's a lot of people. So, what effect is that having on the cost of rent and the availability of rental property? Between 2012 and 2014, according to the same report, "the proportion of residents born in other EU member states decreased by one percentage point from 11pc to 10pc". But over the same period the proportion of residents from non-EU member states rose from 4pc of the population to 7pc. That is, it almost doubled in just two years. We had no debate about this. Short of leaving the EU, or the EU radically changing its rules (very unlikely), there is nothing we can do about immigration from other EU countries, but we can do more to control immigration from non-EU countries. Why aren't we doing that? Saying it is 'racist' to even ask such a question is patently absurd. If the entire population of Cork was to move to Dublin tomorrow it would be absolutely valid to worry about the pressure this would put on housing, schools, hospitals, jobs and so on in Dublin. It would be totally irresponsible not to allow these concerns to be aired. When Mr Varadkar says he is in favour of "managed migration", we need to hear exactly what he means and how he measures it and what policy changes, if any, he intends introducing, if given the chance. As the son of an Indian immigrant, he is well placed to answer these questions because he can hardly be accused of racism. But every Irish politician needs to answer the same questions, starting with the leaders of all the main parties. It's time for some honesty in this debate. In the end, even Theresa May's voice abandoned her. Her deal is now dead and buried, along with her political career. Mrs May was undone by her own intransigence, dogmatism and divisiveness. Having opted to pursue the hardest Brexit possible, she relied on the fanatical right wing of her party and the DUP for support. She should have done her research before she threw her lot in with zealots who believe compromise is a synonym for surrender. No deal except the delusion that was sold to voters during the referendum - leaving the EU yet enjoying the same benefits as members - will ever be good enough for them. Mrs May has lost, but she could never win. Nevertheless, her tactics have been deplorable. Having pulled the first, ironically named, "meaningful vote" before Christmas, Mrs May's deal was resoundingly defeated by 230 votes on January 15. Instead of reading the writing on the wall, and reaching out across the chamber, Mrs May instead doubled down. She made a pretence of listening to the views of opponents, summoning leaders of the Labour Party and the SNP to Downing Street for choreographed meetings, but refused to take any of their views on board. Her strategy? To run down the clock as close as possible to the March 29 deadline in the hope that MPs, fearful of the prospect of no deal or no Brexit, would have little option but to support her deal. In effect, she opted to play a game of chicken with the EU, driving straight towards it brandishing the lives and livelihoods of the British people as a weapon. She didn't care that among the collateral damage, if her plan went awry, would be lives and livelihoods in this country too. Then she got to work raising the public's expectations that she could somehow convince 27 EU countries to move from their red lines, when she steadfastly refused to budge from her own. After weeks of stalled talks, Mrs May left Strasbourg on Monday night triumphant, declaring she had obtained legally binding changes to the Brexit deal. So, when her Attorney General Geoffrey Cox announced yesterday that the "amplification and clarification" she had extracted from the EU were functionally useless, it sounded the death knell for her deal and her premiership. There was no ambiguity about the conclusion of Mr Cox's advice that "the legal risk remains unchanged [of] no internationally lawful means of exiting the protocol's arrangements, save by agreement". No room in which she could manoeuvre. When Mrs May rose to her feet in the House of Commons yesterday afternoon, in a last-ditch attempt to persuade MPs to support her, the Tory benches behind her were half empty. She couldn't even convince her own party members to turn up to hear her pitch, delivered in a strangled croak due to a serious case of laryngitis. As metaphors go, it was a devastatingly apposite one for the prime minister. For more than two years, she has been unable to find the words to convince parliament to support her deal. At the end, she couldn't even get the words out. Despite what Mrs May had promised, she could not secure a unilateral exit from the backstop for Britain. She can't say she wasn't warned. She was repeatedly told by the EU that the Withdrawal Agreement could not be reopened and that giving the British a one-sided escape route from the backstop would render it pointless. The irony is it is Brexiteers, who insisted that exiting the EU would be easy, who have baulked most at the backstop - which would become operational only if agreeing a trade deal were delayed. In one breath, they insisted that, in the words of Mrs May, Brexit would be "simples", but in the other opposed an insurance policy that would come into force only if their efforts to negotiate an exit proved more complicated than they thought. Yet another paradox is that it is DUP members who are most virulently opposed to the backstop - despite the fact a majority of the people of Northern Ireland are in favour of its inclusion in the deal. The results of an opinion poll at the weekend could not be clearer. Nearly 70pc want Northern Ireland to remain in the single market and the customs union, 60pc want Northern Ireland to have a special deal even if that results in a border on the Irish Sea, 67pc believe the DUP is doing a bad job and 77pc are dissatisfied with Theresa May's government. Now, the DUP could find that it has lost its leverage. Yesterday, it was an essential part of Mrs May's parliamentary infrastructure, with its votes propping up her government. Never before have 10 MPs from Northern Ireland wielded so much power in a British government. They have, with the help of a few score members of the ERG, torpedoed the efforts of the EU and the UK to reach an amicable deal. Mrs May was willing to debase and prostrate herself before her EU counterparts in the hopes of maintaining the DUP's support. By stabbing her in the back, the MPs may now find they have killed their own exalted position in Westminster along with Mrs May's deal. Before yesterday's vote, Theresa May was in office but not in power. Today, she clings to office, but she has neither power nor credibility. It is not tenable for Mrs May to continue the talks with the EU or to lead efforts to put flesh on the bones of the referendum result. Her deal has been rejected not once, but twice. It is now just two weeks to Brexit and no one is any clearer about the route forward - other than an extension beyond March 29 is a certainty. Tory MP Charles Walker put it best yesterday when he said that if this British government was a horse it would be taken outside and shot. It is time to put this government out of its misery. It is riven with rancour, incapable of making any difficult decisions and a serious liability not only to Britain, but to the rest of Europe. If politics in the UK were in any way normal or functional, Mrs May would have slunk from office when her first attempt at securing support for her deal with Europe went down in flames in January. Now that she has abjectly failed to obtain the support of parliament for her revised deal, she has no option but to go. Andrew Stephenson MP's tweet of his box of ghastly doughnuts for the 8am Downing Street whips' office meeting encapsulates Theresa 'Groundhog' May's whole disgusting 'new' Brexit deal and 'guarantees' from the EU: full of holes, half-baked, an extremely poor substitute for something more substantial, the more of it swallowed the more nausea it induces. Its ingredients are disastrous over the long term, and all the icing and sugar coating in the world won't disguise it. Mark Boyle Renfrewshire, Scotland The only solution is another vote - then we can all move on Theresa May has the solution within her grasp. After going through the motions of a deal not accepted by parliament, no deal also voted down and then seeking a further extension from the EU, the EU will probably only accede on the basis of a 'new' referendum. This new referendum should have three options - present deal, no-deal exit and remain. It should be voted on by PR (with a first and second preference) - least popular option eliminated and second preference transferred to give a greater than 50pc majority. I have a sense that despite a three-way split, the present deal would win. Hard-line Brexiteers would lose, but wouldn't complain because they had their say. We could all then get back to the rest of our lives. Tom O'Carroll Lisdowney, Co Kilkenny Let people in the North have their say over the backstop With the countdown continuing towards the Brexit deadline at the end of March, and the stop-gap conundrum, and the British government's decision to renege on the deal it signed with the EU, I would like to put forward a suggestion I put to the DUP and Arlene Foster through your newspaper last September. I asked her to be the hero for the sake of all the people of these islands and accept a backstop for Northern Ireland. I did not expect a positive response from the DUP. But in light of the impending doomsday scenario of a hard Brexit and the undoubted massive damage it would cause to this island both North and south, could I suggest that a plebiscite be held in Northern Ireland on the backstop? It has become apparent in recent months that there is massive cross-community support for such a vote. For the first time in its history, the people of the North could collectively decide to accept or reject the backstop as one community for the common good. Thus they would let the UK government off the hook. I am sure if all the parties in the currently defunct assembly gathered there to mandate such a plebiscite, then the DUP would be forced to accept such a decision. Peter Monahan Drogheda, Co Meath Question over hypocrisy is answered by Trump's antics Eric Conway, from Navan (Letters, Irish Independent, March 11), argues that people with a social conscience, like Barbra Streisand and George Clooney, are hypocrites because they condemn Donald Trump's wall while at the same time having walls around their homes. It hasn't yet dawned on Eric that Trump really has no interest in walls or so-called security. The only thing that interests Trump is himself and how he can continue to exploit so many of those who voted for him by playing on their hopelessness, while doing nothing to alleviate the pain of their poverty and their rejection by a society whose values are limited to individual success and have nothing in common with our values of compassion, or our understanding that in our Western European economic societies, the winners, and their minion cohorts, care only for themselves without thinking of how their actions intrinsically lead to the harm and impoverishment of others. If Jesus Christ came down to us today, within those 40 days before the anniversary of our rejection of him and our murder of him by crucifixion, Trump, with our help, would crucify him again without a moment's hesitation. So, Eric, who are the real hypocrites? George Dalzell Stillorgan, Co Dublin Taoiseach has got it horribly wrong over case of Isil bride Your editorial (March 11) concludes: "It's time to help Ms Smith come home." I am not going to argue the pros or cons of this stance, but I am simply going to state that as a taxpayer of 35 years I have never felt so angry as I currently do at the thought of a single cent being spent by our Government on repatriating this individual. Furthermore, I found the use of the word "compassionate" by our Taoiseach to be the most sickening use of language I can ever recall in Irish politics. Gerry Kelly Rathgar, Dublin One big issue is the debt the village has taken on. I know its all managed debt, which is scheduled to be paid, but it does affect our operating budget, he said. I think when the home rule issue came up last year the village did a great job explaining why it needed home rule to stay. But I think it was a surprise to a lot of people that the debt existed. One thing that got me interested in running was the lack of knowledge of that issue and wanting the village to be a little bit more transparent with its finances. The Prince of Wales speaks to Amal and George Clooney at the dinner (Chris Jackson/PA) Amal Clooney and George Clooney speak to Prince Charles, Prince of Wales as they attend a dinner to celebrate The Prince's Trust, hosted by Prince Charles, Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace on March 12, 2019 in London, England Josh Hartnett and Tamsin Egerton attend a dinner to celebrate The Prince's Trust, hosted by Prince Charles, Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace on March 12, 2019 in London, England Amal Clooney and George Clooney attend a dinner to celebrate The Prince's Trust, hosted by Prince Charles, Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace on March 12, 2019 in London (L-R) Chiwetel Ejiofor, Luke Evans, Tamsin Egerton, Josh Hartnett, Benedict Cumberbatch, Amal Clooney and George Clooney attend a dinner to celebrate The Prince's Trust, hosted by Prince Charles, Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace on March 12, 2019 in London, England Amal Clooney and George Clooney attend a dinner to celebrate The Prince's Trust, hosted by Prince Charles, Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace on March 12, 2019 in London, England Amal Clooney and George Clooney speak to Prince Charles, Prince of Wales as they attend a dinner to celebrate The Prince's Trust, hosted by Prince Charles, Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace on March 12, 2019 in London, England Amal Clooney and George Clooney attend a dinner to celebrate The Prince's Trust, hosted by Prince Charles, Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace on March 12, 2019 in London, England Amal Clooney's commitment to being the best dressed woman in every room is becoming more commonplace than ever. The human rights lawyer (41) and husband George Clooney (57) were among the celebrity guests of honour at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday night to attend a dinner hosted by Prince Charles for the Prince's Trust International. Clooney (nee Alamuddin) chose a white caped Grecian-style gown dating back to 2007 from Stephane Rolland's couture collection, and a close-up of the gown shows the non-draped side is a gold lace embellished arm sleeve. According to Vogue, the piece was acquired from William Vintage, a luxury boutique which specialises in souring rare high fashion items in Marylebone, London. Clooney is a long-standing customer of the store, having preciously worn a gown from Yves Saint Laurent's 1981 collection to the Hail, Caesar! premiere in 2016 and in 2017, chose a gold Versace dress from the '90s to a party honouring the retailer. Actor Josh Hartnett, in a burgundy velvet tuxedo, and wife Tamsin Egerton in a corduroy midi dress from The Vampire's Wife, were also present, as was Benedict Cumberbatch in a classic black tuxedo. The event attracted donors, supporters, and ambassadors invited into the palace, and was an acknowledgment of the celebrity support Charles has relied on to spread the word of the organisation over the years. Expand Close Amal Clooney and George Clooney attend a dinner to celebrate The Prince's Trust, hosted by Prince Charles, Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace on March 12, 2019 in London / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Amal Clooney and George Clooney attend a dinner to celebrate The Prince's Trust, hosted by Prince Charles, Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace on March 12, 2019 in London Charles founded the trust in 1976 to help vulnerable young people get their lives back on track. The charity has helped 870,000 young people since 1976 and supports over 100 more each day. Three in four of these young people move into work, training or education. Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge attends the 2019 Portrait Gala at the National Portrait Gallery on March 12, 2019 in London, England. (Photo by John Sibley-WPA Pool / Getty Images) Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge attends the 2019 Portrait Gala at the National Portrait Gallery on March 12, 2019 in London, England. (Photo by John Sibley-WPA Pool / Getty Images) Kate Middleton, the British royal family's reigning queen of recycling, recruiting a tailor to customise one of her most well-received looks to give it a new lease of life. The Duchess of Cambridge first wore the floral print black gown at the 2017 BAFTAs, which featured a strapless neckline the first time around, which has since been tailored into a more modest cap sleeve style for the a gala at the National Portrait Gallery in London on Tuesday night. The Alexander McQueen gown sent royal watchers into a frenzy, not only because it's regarded as one of her best looks, but the new twist showed her determination to at least appearing frugal with her lavish wardrobe budget. The first time around, she opted for a low, voluminous bun, but this time, it was back to her trademark bouncy blowdry, the same style she wore for a children's charity event earlier in the day. Last night, she spoke to young people about getting more youngsters visiting art galleries, and said she was thinking of taking her son Prince George to the National Portrait Gallery. Kate, who has a history of art degree, has been a patron of the organisation since 2012, and was at the event raising money to refurbish the gallery in central London. She was met by the gallery's director Dr Nicholas Cullinan before being introduced to dignitaries and members of its youth forum and viewing artwork produced by some of its outreach programmes. The black tie gala attracted an A-list guestlist, harnessing the power of the royal influence, including David and Victoria Beckham, who was dressed head-to-toe in her new season collection and a pair of hot pink pumps. Expand Close Britain's Duchess of Cambridge attends the Portrait Gala at National Portrait Gallery on March 12, 2019 in London, England. (Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Britain's Duchess of Cambridge attends the Portrait Gala at National Portrait Gallery on March 12, 2019 in London, England. (Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images) Supermodel Kate Moss also arrived to a frenzy of activity, in a burnt orange dress and black fur shrug, while model Jourdan Dunn chose a metallic Armani gown. Liam Payne are Bianca Jagger rounded off the well-known guestlist. Princess Beatrice arrived hand-in-hand with her new boyfriend Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi in her first red carpet appearance with the property tycoon. Youth forum member Isabella Titherington, 18, said she spoke to the duchess about how galleries can seem "inaccessible and intimidating" to young people. She added: "She did agree that sometimes galleries can seem inaccessible to younger generations and it is good to open them up to that demographic." Savanna Achampong said the duchess had told her she was thinking of bringing Prince George to the gallery. The 19-year-old youth forum member added: "She said she was thinking of bringing George here. She said that maybe she could speak to us so we could recommend what paintings they should come and see. She was really genuine and down to earth, really nice." Model Ashley Graham attends the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar Party following the 91st Academy Awards at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills on February 21, 2019. (Photo by JB Lacroix / AFP) Winnie Harlow attends the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 24, 2019 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images) Model Ashley Graham presents 'Violeta By Mango' new campaign at the ABD Museum on October 15, 2018 in Madrid, Spain. (Photo by Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images) Ashley Graham attends God's Love We Deliver 12th Annual Golden Heart Awards at Spring Studios on October 16, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Desiree Navarro/Getty Images) Ashley Graham attends the 91st Annual Academy Awards at Hollywood and Highland on February 24, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images) After Ashley Graham became the first ever plus-size model to appear on the cover of American Vogue and designers like Marc Jacobs and Jonathan Simkhai started making plus-size clothes for online retailer 11 Honore, youd be forgiven for thinking that the body positive movement was gaining momentum. These cultural shifts might even lead you to surmise that plus-size has gone mainstream and diversity has become the new normal ... well, until you take a closer look, that is. In a recent interview with the Telegraph, size 16 curve model Sonny Turner revealed some uncomfortable truths about the plus-size modelling industry. You can be fat, but not too fat, explained the 20-year-old. And you can be plus-size, but youve still got to have a flat stomach. Its annoying because plus-size is supposed to mean being whatever size you are but within that, there are still restraints. One of the biggest restraints, she added, is the pressure to have a certain body shape, and a preference to be hourglass. Expand Close Ashley Graham / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Ashley Graham Ive still got to be cautious and watch what I eat, and I still have to go to the gym, she said. I think the misconception is that were all unhealthy but if I was, I wouldnt be able to do this job. Turners comments shouldnt come as that much of a surprise. We only need to look at the plus-size models who are changing the face of beauty to see that rollercoaster curves are an essential requirement for the job along with breathtaking beauty, enviable chutzpah and an Instagram following of at least 20k. We often hear the word representation bandied about when brands purport to be championing inclusivity, but in reality, models like Turner dont represent the vast majority of plus-size women whose body shapes are more apple and pear than perfectly proportioned hourglass. Likewise, its wonderful to see older models in ad campaigns but lets not kid ourselves: its a rare woman who can pull off the feat of maintaining a balletic figure while rocking preternaturally silver hair. Brands would like us to believe that they are challenging beauty standards by representing women of every colour, shape and size. Look closer, however, and youll notice that theyre still idealising beauty standards that are out of reach to the average woman. Ashley Graham has the kind of hip-waist-ratio that evolutionary psychologists would have a field day with. Ninety-year-old model Daphne Selfe has the facial features of an Egyptian sculpture. Video of the Day Winnie Harlows vitiligo is as symmetrical as the rest of her perfect face and transgender model Valentina Sampaio is so beautiful it hurts. In other words, the women that the industry has chosen to represent inclusivity and diversity are in fact only representing a teeny-tiny group of women who have won the genetic lottery. Expand Close Winnie Harlow attends the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 24, 2019 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Winnie Harlow attends the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 24, 2019 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images) Every woke fashion brand likes to think that they are challenging beauty norms with their diverse choruses of models. Like a grown-up collection of Bratz dolls, theyll send out a token plus-size model, a token black model and a token transgender model. What they wont send out and may never send out is a token average-looking model or a token 54 model or a token unruly-hair-and-blotchy-skin model. Put simply, they use strikingly beautiful women to challenge beauty ideals. This is how fashion and beauty brands have done business since time immemorial. Captivating faces sell products and thats not going to change any time soon. Whats interesting, however, is that a new generation of consumers will demand diversity from these brands, all the while accepting that theyll get it through a soft focus lens. Representation is important that much is inarguable but its time we realised that brands are only representing a fantasy version of diversity, and thats an affront to diversity itself. A zebra foal made a dramatic entrance as the zoo unveiled the name chosen for him by the public. The foal, who had been nicknamed Baby Stripes since his birth on February 13, was named Obi after the zoo polled the public via Facebook. The name continues a Star Wars theme at the zoo, with previous baby zebras having taken the names Luke, Leia and Rey. Obi beat another Star Wars-themed name, Chewy, in the poll, as well as JJ, short for Jake Junior, and TJ, initials that referenced his parents Tori and Jake. As his name was revealed, Obi made the most of his moment in the spotlight, heightening the dramatic tension by initially remaining hidden behind his mum. Eventually he made his entrance, gambolling around his enclosure to the delight of his adoring fans. Oh my Obi is flipping adorable Manon | Bondi to Basic (@bonditobasic) March 13, 2019 Obi is a Grevys zebra, a species listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. They are primarily found in Kenya and Ethiopia, but the global population is only around 2,800 having decreased by around 70% in the last 30 years. Those wishing to get a good look at the zebra formerly known as Baby Stripes will have to be patient as he is not yet on display to the public. Disaster: Kebebew Legesse, the mother of Ethiopian Airlines cabin crew Ayantu Girmay, mourns at the scene of the crash. Photo: REUTERS/Baz Ratner All Boeing 737 Max aircraft have been suspended from flying within EU airspace, on the orders of the European Union Aviation Safety Agency. The rare move to ground all of Boeing's new flagship model follows the fatal crash of Ethiopian Airways flight ET302 shortly after taking off from Addis Ababa on Sunday morning. All 157 people on board were killed, including Irishman Micheal 'Mick' Ryan. European authorities yesterday followed airline safety regulators in China, Indonesia and in Ethiopia in grounding the Boeing planes. The crash in Ethiopia came five months after 189 people on board a Lion Air 737 Max flight in Indonesia died when it crashed into the Java Sea. The EASA said they were "taking every step necessary to ensure the safety of passengers". "The accident investigation is led by the Ethiopian Authorities with the support of the National Transportation Safety Board, as the aircraft was designed and built in the United States," an EASA spokesperson said. Earlier the Irish Aviation Authority had followed the UK in announcing the 737 Max has been temporarily banned from flying into or out of Irish airspace. There are 13 of the aircraft registered in Ireland, although they are understood to be owned mostly by leasing firms based here and deployed around the world. Neither Aer Lingus nor Ryanair currently uses the model. Norwegian Air, which flies from Dublin, Shannon and Cork airports to the US, does use the planes. It had temporarily suspends flights using its Boeing 737 Max planes before the EU ban came into force. "Following the decision by the relevant aviation regulatory bodies to temporarily suspend operations of Boeing 737 Max, Norwegian will not operate any flights with this aircraft type until further notice," the company said. "We remain in close dialogue with the aviation authorities and Boeing, and follow their instructions and recommendations." Norwegian has 18 737 Max models in a fleet that is mostly made up of 110 Boeing 737-800 aircraft. They said in a statement: "The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) has decided to temporarily suspend the operation of all variants of the Boeing 737 Max aircraft into and out of Irish airspace, in the light of the two fatal accidents involving the aircraft in recent months." There are 387 of the 737 Max aircraft in service around the world, including 74 in the United States and 55 in Europe. Hundreds more are on order, including 135 by Ryanair. Pressure to act is mounting on US air safety authorities - which are Seattle-based Boeing's domestic regulators. Late on Monday, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had issued a "continued airworthiness notification" to assure operators of the plane that it was safe to fly. It said it was collecting data on the crash and keeping in contact with international civil aviation authorities and would take immediate action if it identified any safety issues. The IAA said: "This decision has been taken based on ensuring the continued safety of passengers and flight crew, which is the IAA's number one priority." Its temporary suspension came into affect at 3pm yesterday regardless of the US assurances. "The IAA's decision has been made taking account of the unprecedented loss of two Boeing 737 Max in recent months," a spokesman said. "The IAA has been closely monitoring the situation, however, as we do not currently have sufficient information from the flight data recorder we have, as a precautionary measure, issued instructions to stop any flights on Boeing 737 Max from any operator arriving, departing or overflying Irish airspace. "During the temporary suspension, the IAA will continue to work closely with the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) and the manufacturer Boeing." The former nurse of Professor Stephen Hawking has been struck off the nursing register after a panel found she did not give appropriate care to the renowned physicist. The British Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) said yesterday that Patricia Dowdy "failed to provide the standards of good, professional care that we expect and Professor Hawking deserved". The 61-year-old, who worked for the scientist for 15 years, was handed an interim suspension in March 2016. She faced multiple misconduct charges in relation to the care she provided to the scientist, who died in March last year at the age of 76. The NMC said the charges included financial misconduct, dishonesty, not providing appropriate care, failing to co-operate with the nursing watchdog and not having the correct qualifications. 'The Mail on Sunday', which first reported the story, said the family of Prof Hawking had lodged a complaint which prompted the investigation into Ms Dowdy. A hearing into her professional conduct, which began in February, was held behind closed doors. "The panel has found Ms Dowdy failed to provide the standards of good, professional care that we expect and Professor Hawking deserved," said Matthew McClelland, director of fitness to practise at the NMC. "As a result, Ms Dowdy will no longer be able to practise as a nurse. "As the public rightly expects, in serious cases such as this - where a nurse has failed in their duty of care and has not been able to evidence to the panel that they have learned from their mistakes and be fit to practise - we will take action. "We have remained in close contact with the Hawking family throughout this case and I am grateful to them - as they approach the anniversary of Professor Hawking's death - and others for sharing their concerns with us. "My thoughts are with the family at this difficult time." Andrea Sutcliffe, CEO of the NMC, said this week that hearings were sometimes held in private to keep information confidential. "That is the basis upon which this particular hearing was conducted in private and I stand by that decision," she wrote in a blog post. "No public interest is served by exposing the details of the health or care of an individual whose anonymity may not be guaranteed in an open hearing." A spokesman for the Hawking family said in a statement issued by the NMC: "They had complete confidence in the NMC, and their thorough investigation, and trusted they would come to an independent conclusion based on the facts in the case." Prof Hawking, one of the most renowned scientists in his field, was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 1964 at the age of 22, and given just a few years to live. The father-of-three was later confined to a wheelchair and relied upon a computer to communicate, but continued to travel the world to present lectures and further scientific knowledge. A Police vehicle at the Nevis Range Mountain Resort with Ben Nevis behind where two climbers have died and another two have been injured after an avalanche on the mountain. Photo: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire Three climbers who died following an avalanche on the UKs highest mountain were part of a Swiss climbing group, it is understood. A fourth climber, a 30-year-old Swiss national, is in hospital with serious injuries after the avalanche wiped out the climbing party he was part of. Swiss media reported that the group were members of the Club Alpin Suisse de Sion (Swiss Alpine Club, Sion). Speaking from hospital, Mathieu Biselx told Swiss newspaper Le Nouvelliste: Its terrible, theyre not here anymore. They wont see their families again. Expand Close Hill walkers make their way along the Ben Nevis mountain path in Scotland. A young climber is being treated for serious injuries after an avalanche on the UK's highest mountain "wiped out" a climbing party, killing three of them.Photo: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Hill walkers make their way along the Ben Nevis mountain path in Scotland. A young climber is being treated for serious injuries after an avalanche on the UK's highest mountain "wiped out" a climbing party, killing three of them.Photo: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire One of the dead climbers, aged 43, was also Swiss and the others, aged 41 and 32, were French. Their next of kin have been informed. The group were caught by the river of snow and ice in a gully on Ben Nevis as Storm Gareth blew in with strong winds on Tuesday morning, triggering a huge search and recovery operation in brutal conditions, a rescuer said. Mr Biselx, father of a little girl, said the group arrived in Scotland on Sunday evening and the climb on Tuesday was their first excursion on the mountain. He told Le Nouvelliste: We werent very high up and suddenly we heard a noise. We looked round and two seconds later we were carried away by heavy, compact snow. When I regained consciousness only my head and an arm were sticking out of the snow. Mr Biselx, president of the Sion Swiss Alpine Club, has serious injuries to both legs, while his back, one shoulder and arm are also affected. He described his companions as wonderful people who were also fathers. One of the climbers died pretty instantaneously, while another could not be saved despite receiving CPR for half an hour, Donald Paterson, deputy team leader of Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team (MRT), said. A third climber died while being taken down the mountain, while the fourth was flown to Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow. Switzerlands Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) said: The FDFA confirms the death of a Swiss national during an avalanche in Scotland. Another Swiss national was injured. The Swiss representation in Great Britain is in contact with local authorities. The FDFA, in Central Office, is in contact with the victims relatives. Mr Paterson told the Daily Telegraph: We did all we possibly could we had every available person we could get hold of. There were four stretcher parties. We carried the bodies all the way down. It is a terrible tragedy. They just got wiped out by the avalanche. It was brutal conditions. Lochaber MRT said it received a call out from the Scottish Avalanche Information Service, which recorded a large avalanche at No 5 Gully at 11.45am. The team, along with Glencoe MRT and around 29 volunteer mountain rescuers who happened to be training in the area, raced to the scene. Police Scotland were also called to the incident and helped co-ordinate the rescue effort. Fort William Inspector Isla Campbell said it had been a challenging operation and thanked those involved. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said news of the fatalities was absolutely tragic, while Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch MSP Kate Forbes said it was heartbreaking. Ben Nevis, near Fort William in the western Highlands, is a popular destination for experienced climbers, attracting 125,000 visitors each year. Tuesdays incident follows two recent fatal accidents on the mountain, which at 1,345m is the UKs highest. On New Years Day, a 21-year-old German woman, who was a student at Bristol University, died after she fell from a ridge she had been climbing with three other people. She had been hiking on what is known as the ledge route when she fell around 500ft. In December, Patrick Boothroyd, 21, from West Yorkshire, died after falling in the Tower Gully area. A Police vehicle at the Nevis Range Mountain Resort with Ben Nevis behind. Photo: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire Three climbers have died and another two have been injured in an avalanche on Ben Nevis, the UK's highest mountain. Scottish police were alerted shortly after 11.50am and began co-ordinating a mountain rescue response. The avalanche occurred at Number 5 Gully on the 1,345-metre mountain. Volunteers from Lochaber and Glencoe Mountain Rescue Teams remain at the scene and were assisted by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency and Scottish Ambulance Service. Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it was "absolutely tragic news". Norwegian Air have said that they will temporarily deploy a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner to operate US flights from Dublin Airport to support affected customers, with many stranded last night. A growing number of airlines around the world have grounded their Boeing 737 Max 8 jets following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed 157 people on Sunday. Hundreds of passengers bound for Dublin were stranded last night in the U.S after their flights were cancelled due to concerns surrounding the Boeing 737 Max 8. Norwegian Air, which flies the Max 8 from Dublin and Shannon airports, cancelled routes from Dublin to Providence, Rhode Island, Newburgh and New York. Expand Close Boeing 737 MAX 8 factfile (PA Graphics) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Boeing 737 MAX 8 factfile (PA Graphics) A flight from Dublin to Providence at 2.55pm today has been cancelled, and another one from Dublin to New York Stewart has been delayed this evening. Customers were told that they will be re-booked onto the next available service or can rebook or refund their ticket free of charge online. A Norwegian Air spokesperson said that customers booked on affected transatlantic routes to and from Ireland serviced by the 737 Max will be re-booked onto flights using the 787-9 Dreamliner instead. The 787 Dreamliner, registered G-CKWF with Charles Lindbergh on the aircraft tail, will operate the Dublin-New York Stewart route. Boeing has already stated it has full confidence in the safety of the plane but the European Union Aviation Safety Agency issued an emergency airworthiness instruction after the Ethiopian air disaster in which Irish aid worker Micheal Ryan died alongside 156 others on Sunday. The airline said today that it will seek compensation from plane maker Boeing for costs and lost revenue . "We expect Boeing to take this bill," Norwegian said in an emailed statement. Here is a list of airlines and countries that have grounded the aircraft so far: Expand Close A Boeing 737 Max 8 being built for Oman Air (Ted S Warren/PA) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A Boeing 737 Max 8 being built for Oman Air (Ted S Warren/PA) Ireland Aviation authorities have suspended all variants of Boeing 737 Max aircraft into and out of Ireland's air space. Officials said they made the decision "based on ensuring the continued safety of passengers and flight crew". UK The Civil Aviation Authority said it had, as a precautionary measure, "issued instructions to stop any commercial passenger flights from any operator arriving, departing or overflying UK air space". Five 737 Max aircraft are registered and operational in the UK, while a sixth was due to come into service later this week. France The French Civil Aviation Authority has closed French air space to all Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft. Officials said France is "carefully following the progress of the inquiry" relating to the Ethiopian Airlines plane crash in Addis Ababa. It said French airlines do not have any Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, but as a precautionary measure authorities have decided to "forbid all commercial flights on a Boeing 737 Max departing from, travelling to, or flying across, France". Germany The transport ministry said the country is closing its air space to Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft. The ministry confirmed to news agency dpa comments made by transport minister Andreas Scheuer to n-tv television. The broadcaster quoted Mr Scheuer as saying safety is the priority, and "until all doubts are cleared up, I have ordered that German air space be closed for the Boeing 737 Max with immediate effect". Norway Norwegian Air Shuttle says it has grounded its Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft on a recommendation from European aviation authorities. The low-cost carrier has 18 of the planes. Acting chief operating officer Tomas Hesthammer said: "The safety and security of our customers and colleagues will never be compromised, and once authorities advise to cease operations we will of course comply." Australia Australia has suspended all flights into or out of the country by Boeing 737 Max aircraft. Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority says no Australian airlines operate the aircraft type, but two foreign airlines - SilkAir and Fiji Airways - fly them to Australia. Director of aviation safety, Shane Carmody, says that because of the two accidents, the temporary suspension of Boeing 737 Max operations is in the best interest of safety. Netherlands Infrastructure and water ministry spokesman Roel Vincken says the government decided to close its air space following advice from the Dutch aviation authority. Poland State carrier LOT said it is grounding its five Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft. LOT received its first Max 8 in December 2017. It had been planning to have 15 by January next year. Italy The Italian Civil Aviation Authority says the Max 8 cannot operate to and from airports in Italy until further notice. The authority said the measure is precautionary, given the lack of "reliable information" regarding the cause of the crash of the Ethiopian Airlines jet. Canada Canadian charter airline Sunwing is suspending use of its four Boeing 737 Max 8 planes. Expand Close A Lion Air jet crashed in October (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim, File) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A Lion Air jet crashed in October (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim, File) Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau said he had no plans to ground Canada's fleet of 737 Max aircraft, but that "all options are on the table". Ethiopia A spokesman for Ethiopian Airlines says it will ground its remaining four Max 8 jets as an "extra safety precaution" while it investigates Sunday's deadly crash. Asrat Begashaw said investigations and the search for bodies and aircraft debris will continue. The airline is awaiting the delivery of 25 more Max 8 jets. Brazil Brazil's Gol Airlines has suspended the use of 121 Max 8 jets. The airline said it is following the investigation of the Max 8 closely and hopes to return the aircraft to use as soon as possible. Gol said it has made nearly 3,000 flights with the Max 8, which went into service last June, with "total security and efficiency". Cayman Islands Cayman Airways, a Caribbean carrier, said it stopped using its two Max 8 jets starting on Monday. President and CEO Fabian Whorms said the airline is committed to "putting the safety of our passengers and crew first". Mr Whorms said the move will cause changes to flight schedules. Cayman is the flag carrier of Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory. It received its first Max 8 in November and its second earlier this month. China China has 96 Max 8 jets in service, belonging to carriers such as Air China, China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines. The civilian aviation authority directed the planes to be grounded indefinitely on Monday. It said the order was "taken in line with the management principle of zero tolerance for security risks". There were eight Chinese citizens on the Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed shortly after taking off on Sunday. The authority said it will consult the US Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing before deciding when to lift the ban. India India's Jet Airways says it is "in contact with the manufacturer" of Max 8 jets and has grounded five of them starting on Monday. Indian airline SpiceJet also uses the aircraft, but it is unclear if those planes are grounded. On Monday, India's aviation watchdog ordered a safety assessment of the aircraft. It also issued safety instructions for flying the Max 8 jet. Indonesia Indonesia says it will temporarily ground Max 8 jets to inspect their airworthiness. Director general of Air Transportation Polana B Pramesti said the move was made to ensure flight safety. A Lion Air model of the same plane crashed in Indonesia in October. Indonesian airlines operate 11 Max 8 jets. Lion Air, which owns 10 of them, said it will try to minimise the impact of the decision on operations. The other Max 8 jet belongs to national carrier Garuda. Mexico Mexican airline Aeromexico has suspended flights of its six Max 8 jets after the crash in Ethiopia. Aeromexico said it "fully" trusts the safety of its fleet but ordered the grounding to ensure "the safety of its operations and the peace of mind of its customers". It said other planes will take over the routes usually flown by the Max 8. Singapore Singapore has temporarily banned Max 8 jets - and other models in the Max range - from entering and leaving the country. The civil aviation authority said it was "closely monitoring the situation" and the ban will be "reviewed as relevant safety information becomes available". It added that it was in close communication with the FAA, Boeing and other aviation authorities. SilkAir, a regional carrier owned by Singapore Airlines, has six Max 8 jets. It said the ban "will have an impact on some of the airline's flight schedules". The authority said flights to Singapore by China Southern Airlines, Garuda Indonesia, Shandong Airlines and Thai Lion Air will also be affected. South Korea An Eastar Jet official said that the planes will be replaced by Boeing 737-800 planes from Wednesday on routes to Japan and Thailand. She said the airline has not found any problems, but is voluntarily grounding Boeing 737 Max 8s in a response to customer concerns. She says the planes will not be used until the completion of a government safety review on the aircraft. An official from South Korea's Transportation Ministry says it has yet to find any problems from safety reviews on Eastar's planes that started on Monday. Oman The sultanate's Public Authority for Civil Aviation announced it is "temporarily suspending" flights by Boeing 737 Max aircraft at its airports. State-owned Oman Air operates five Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft. Malaysia Authorities say all flights by Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft into and out of the country have been suspended. The Civil Aviation Authority said no Malaysian carriers operate the Max 8, but that foreign airlines are banned from flying the plane in Malaysia, and from transiting in the country, until further notice. Turkey Turkish Airlines said it is grounding all Boeing 737 Max aircraft in its fleet until further notice. Chief executive Bilal Eksi said all Boeing 737 Max flights are suspended until the "uncertainty affecting safety is cleared". He added that passenger safety is the company's priority. Vietnam Vietnam said it is banning Boeing 737 Max planes from flying into its airspace. Dinh Viet Thang, director of Vietnam's civil aviation authority, said that airlines flying those models of planes will have to change the aircraft for safety purposes. The ban lasts until further notice. None of Vietnam's four airlines uses the Max model planes in their fleets, but Korea's Eastar Jet, Thai Lion Air and Malaysia's Malindor Air fly those planes to Vietnamese destinations. South Africa Comair, the operator of British Airways and Kulula flights in South Africa, says it has grounded its Boeing 737 Max 8 while it consults with Boeing, other operators and technical experts. A statement did not say how many planes were affected. It said the decision was made without intervention from regulatory authorities. New Zealand New Zealand and Fiji have suspended Boeing 737 Max 8 flights in and out of the two countries. The decision only affects one operator, Fiji Airways. No New Zealand airlines use the Max 8 planes. UAE The UAE's General Civil Aviation Authority said its ban on the aircraft in its airspace was "a precautionary measure". The 737 Max is the workhorse of the Dubai government-owned budget carrier FlyDubai. It operates 11 Boeing 737 Max 8 and two Max 9 jetliners. Its total fleet is around 60 aircraft, including other models of the 737. Lebanon The 737 Max has reportedly been banned from Lebanese airports. He is one of 21 teens, known as the Climate Kids, who have filed a lawsuit against the federal government for violating their constitutional right to a livable climate by not keeping greenhouse gas emissions at a level needed to contain global warming, according to a story by Bloomberg News. They also argue the atmosphere is part of the public trust that the government must maintain for its citizens." Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian man after he ran at them with a knife in the Israeli-occupied West Bank yesterday, the military said. In the walled Old City of Jerusalem, Israeli police said a firebomb was thrown at a police post, damaging the structure in a sacred compound revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and by Jews as the Temple Mount. Scuffles broke out at the complex between Israeli police and Palestinians. No serious injuries or damage to holy sites were reported. The military said a Palestinian, armed with a knife, confronted troops in the West Bank city of Hebron and was shot and killed. It said no soldiers were injured. The Palestinian higher judicial council identified the dead man as Yasser al-Sweiki (40), and said he worked in a court in Hebron. The council denounced the shooting as "a despicable crime". Palestinians began a wave of knife and car-ramming attacks in the West Bank and in Israel in 2015, after peace talks with Israel collapsed. Tensions in the holy compound in Jerusalem have risen in recent weeks after the site's Muslim administrators reopened a mosque sealed by Israel during a Palestinian uprising in 2003. Work on his patience: Conor McGregor arrives in court yesterday over charges of strong-arm robbery and criminal mischief Conor McGregor faces up to 15 years in prison in the US after allegedly smashing a fan's phone in Miami. Police charged the MMA fighter with "strong-arm robbery and criminal mischief" after the alleged incident outside the Fontainebleau Hotel on Monday night. According to the police report, the incident occurred while McGregor and the complainant were exiting the hotel and the fan tried to take a photo with him. Strong-armed robbery, a theft involving violence, is a second-degree felony in the state of Miami. Conviction of the charge can lead to a heavy fine and a prison sentence not exceeding 15 years. The sentence depends on criminal history, especially history of violence, the value of what was stolen and whether the victim was injured. McGregor's lawyer said the Dublin man was giving his full co-operation in the case. "I believe at the end of the day that we will successfully defend this case," Sam Rabin told 'Newstalk Breakfast' yesterday. "I can't tell you what the outcome will be, but I certainly don't see him going to jail over something like this." McGregor thanked his fans on social media for their support. "Patience in this world is a virtue I continue to work on," he wrote. McGregor previously avoided a criminal record after he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct at a UFC event in New York last year. Several people were hurt when he hurled a trolley at a bus, smashing a window, as it left the Barclays Centre in Brooklyn in April. Fighters Michael Chiesa and Ray Borg were injured by shattered glass and unable to compete. McGregor avoided jail after he agreed to undertake community service. He also had to undertake anger management courses and pledged to keep the peace for a year. The case was before court in July 2018. Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has taken the unusual step of urging Donald Trump to tighten restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel production, instead of weakening them as planned. Breaking from a decades-old tradition of avoiding criticism of US government policies, Shell's US boss Gretchen Watkins called on the US Environmental Protection Agency to tighten rules to plug methane leaks, a potent greenhouse gas. "It is a big part of the climate problem and frankly we can do more," Ms Watkins said in an interview. "We don't usually tell governments how to do their job but we're ready to break with that and say, 'Actually, we want to tell you how to do your job.'" She urged the EPA "to put in a regulatory framework that will both regulate existing methane emissions but also future methane emissions." The Trump administration in September proposed weakening requirements for repairing leaks of the greenhouse gas in drilling operations in a step to roll back an Obama-era policy intended to combat climate change. Meanwhile, Mr Trump has repeated the false claim climate change is not real and the science demonstrating the crisis is "fake". He appeared to be tweeting a statement he heard from Fox News yesterday, writing, "Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: 'The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it's Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there's weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life." Mr Trump's tweet is misleading in more ways than one. Greenpeace has refuted Mr Moore's claims he is an environmental expert and has said he was not responsible for creating the group. "Patrick Moore often misrepresents himself in the media as an environmental 'expert' or even an 'environmentalist', while offering anti-environmental opinions on a wide range of issues and taking a distinctly anti-environmental stance," the group said. Send to Email Address Your Name Your Email Address Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Email check failed, please try again Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. I think during the school day there are opportunities for kids to use the computers at LT in the classes they need them in, Kelly said. But students who need computers at night who dont have access to their own should have access to the ones LT has. I would like to see a loaner program for the night, for the week or for the semester. Pavitra Rishta fame Puru Chibber is now officially married to his girlfriend Roshni Banthia. The two tied the knot on March 10 in Mount Abu and had the dream wedding they always wanted. After three days of pre-wedding ceremonies and a lot of post wedding ones too, the couple will soon jet off to their honeymoon. Since their wedding was a very intimate affair, the couple has now flown down to Mumbai and will now host a big lavish reception for their friends from the industry. Talking to Bombay Times about his wedding, Puru mentioned that his shaadi turned out to be beautiful. They had always wanted a destination wedding with just family and close friends in attendance. The feeling of being married is yet to sink in, though. He went on to say that Roshni is his best friend, and it feels as if nothing has changed. Having one's best friend as the life partner is the best thing to happen to anyone. Sheena Between Lodges was brutally beaten on Pine Ridge Reservation Attack was instigated by victim's boyfriend and his sister, prosecutors allege Federal prosecutors have charged a Lakota man for lying to an investigator and being an accessory to an assault on a woman who they say was severely beaten by her boyfriend and his sister in early November. Weldon Two Bulls is charged with two federal criminal violations being an accessory to the crime after the fact and making a false statement to a federal officer after authorities say he lied about what he witnessed when Sheena Between Lodges was beaten sometime between November 2 and November 4, 2018, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Authorities say Two Bulls allegedly lied to a Bureau of Indian Affairs special agent, saying he was too drunk to remember what happened to Between Lodges. In court documents filed last week, Assistant U.S. Attorney Cassandra DeCoste alleges Two Bulls told two other tribal citizens, including Between Lodges brother, that Between Lodges had been ganged and he told them details about how she was beaten and who beat her. In August 2017, Sheena Between Lodges shared a photo of herself and called attention to Savanna Marie Greywind, a Native woman who went missing and was found murdered in North Dakota. Between Lodges was later victimized on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, severely beaten by her boyfriend and his sisters, according to federal prosecutors. According to prosecutors, Two Bulls told Elgin Young Bear and his wife, Wylene Two Lance, that Between Lodges boyfriend, Gilbert Junior Lakota, and Lakotas sister, Lily Larvie, attacked Between Lodges. However, when he was interviewed by two BIA special agents on November 6, Lakota said between the night of November 2 and the morning of November 3 Between Lodges lost her prosthetic leg while drinking inside her Dodge Durango not far from her home. Lakota said another man, Oscar Saucedo, was with them that night. When the three people decided to return to Between Lodges home, they found the vehicle wouldnt start. Lakota said he and Saucedo then carried Between Lodges to her home, and that she was injured during the journey. When they got to Between Lodges home, Lakota said, he and Saucedo began helping Between Lodges up the stairs to the home but that she fell on her back in the process. He said he and Saucedo then carried her to her bed. He told the two BIA agents that Between Lodges also suffered a black eye after hitting her head on a vehicle door handle. Thank you to everyone who attended the prayer circle for Sheena Between Lodges...let's continue our prayers Posted by Oglala Sioux Tribe Victim Services on Wednesday, November 7, 2018 During a subsequent interview with one of the BIA agents, Saucedo said the events described by Lakota happened not on the night of November 2 but on the night of October 30. And he denied that Between Lodges fell from the stair into her home. Saucedo also denied being with Between Lodges and Lakota on the night of November 2. He told the BIA agent that a woman, Missy Goings, was with him, Lakota and Between Lodges on the night of October 30. In an interview with the BIA agent, Goings confirmed she was with the group on the night of October 30 and agreed with Saucedo that Between Lodges had not fallen while being helped into her home that night. She also said she wasnt with Between Lodges or Lakota on the night of November 2. In a follow-up interview on November 9, Lakota changed his story, saying Saucedo wasnt with him on November 2 but that someone else was, though he couldnt remember who it was. In that interview, he then stated that he was too intoxicated to remember what happened between November 2 and November 5. Between Lodges spent nearly a week in a coma after emergency personnel found her in her home. According to court records, she has no memory of the events that led to her injuries. After she was found, Oglala Sioux tribal police in Pine Ridge arrested Lakota for outstanding warrants, though he hasnt yet been charged with a crime related to Between Lodges injuries. In motions seeking to quash evidence against her client, Public Defender Jennifer Albertson argued prosecutors are attempting to convict Two Bulls of lying about an assault that the state has yet to prove even happened. In this prosecution, the United States has essentially placed the proverbial cart before the horse seeking to convict Mr. Two Bulls of being an accessory after the fact to an assault the United States has not proven occurred, Albertson said. She argued any testimony offered by Young Bear or Two Lance suggesting Two Bulls offered them a more accurate portrayal of the events that led to Between Lodges injuries was hearsay and inadmissible in court. Prosecutors argued testimony offered to prove someone lied about a crime was admissible and necessary to prove the defendant lied to investigators. Prosecutors said they plan to present evidence by way of expert witnesses, including doctors and neurosurgeons, to prove Between Lodges injuries were caused by being beaten with a blunt instrument and not caused by falling down a step. At least one of those expert witnesses also is expected to testify that injuries on Between Lodges neck were the result of strangulation. Two Bulls trial began Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Rapid City, South Dakota. Join the Conversation Related Stories Having a window to history By Native Sun News Today Editorial Board With freedom of the press under attack by Donald Trump and his minions nearly every day how was it for freedom of the press in 1982? Tim Giago, the then editor of the Lakota Times, wrote some scathing editorials condemning the violence and confrontational tactics of the American Indian Movement. For his honesty in speaking out against violence and for promoting communication and peaceful dialogue his newspaper had its windows blasted out by gunfire three times and in December of 1982 the newspaper was firebombed with Molotov cocktails. The first three attacks brought no outcries from the South Dakota Newspaper Association nor any editorial from any of the white-owned newspapers like the Argus Leader. It was only after the newspaper was firebombed that the managing editor of the Rapid City Journal, Jim Carrier, wrote a strong article in support of Giago and the Lakota Times. Carrier wrote, Can this really be happening in America? The rest of South Dakotas media remained silent. We bring this up because back in 1982 there were few newspapers on or near Indian reservations that practiced or even allowed freedom of the press. Most tribally owned newspapers were simply mouthpieces for the tribal government. Some newspapers have crossed editorial swords with tribal leaders and vanished. One such newspaper, the South Piegan Drum of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana, published an article critical of the tribal chairman and soon discovered his wrath. He shut the paper down by cutting off its funding. The editor of another paper published by the Spirit Lake Tribe in North Dakota, asked the tribal council to publish the minutes of its meetings. The council refused. The editor, a non-Indian named Randy Howell, rushed his last publication to the printer and beat it out of town one step ahead of the tar and feather brigade. The center of his last edition held two blank pages containing only the words, The Minutes of the Spirit Lake Tribal Council. Contact the Editorial Board of Native Sun News Today at editor@nativesunnews.today Join the Conversation Following the footsteps of a number of countries across the world, the Civil Aviation ministry has ordered all Boeing 737 Max 8 operating in the country to be grounded by 4 PM today. The decision was taken on Tuesday by the DGCA following the crash of the Ethiopian Airlines flight which killed all 157 onboard, including four Indian nationals. The ill-fated flight, a Boeing 737 Max 8 was on its way to Nairobi when it crashed. This was the second high profile mishap involving a Boeing 737 Max 8 in less than six months. REUTERS In October, a Lion Air plane crashed into the sea off the Indonesian capital of Jakarta 13 minutes after take-off, killing all 189 onboard. REUTERS/ File Following the second crash as many as 13 countries including China, Singapore, Oman, UAE and France have all grounded their Boeing 737 Max 8, one of the most popular aircrafts ever built by aviation major Boeing. REUTERS In India, only two private operators have Boeing 737 Max 8 in their fleet, SpiceJet which has 13 and Jet Airways which has five. Cash-strapped Jet Airways had already grounded its fleet well before the crash, due to the financial troubles. REUTERS SpiceJet which was operating its fleet till Tuesday, said in a statement that it "has suspended Boeing 737 Max operations following DGCA's decision to ground the aircraft." "Safety and security of our passengers, crew and operations are of utmost importance to us. We will be working with the regulator and the manufacturer to attain normalcy in our operations. We are confident of accommodating the vast majority of our passengers and minimise inconvenience," the statement added. bccl Meanwhile, Boeing the American aviation company issued a statement expressing confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX. The two major mishaps are likely to affect the sales of the 737 MAX, which according to Boeing is is the fastest-selling airplane in the company's history. As of January 31, 2019, Boeing had orders for 5,011 737 MAX from across the world. There are reports that some of the carriers are already reconsidering their orders. Despite having avenged the killings of 49 CRPF Jawans, India is still in deep sorrow due to the loss of brave sons of soil. Meanwhile, amid tight security in the state of Jammu and Kashmir terrorists have struck again and killed an Indian Army soldier outside his home in Pingleena village of Pulwama on Wednesday. According to reports, the deceased Ashiq Hussain, a soldier with the Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry had come home last month on vacation. AP/ REPRESENTATIONAL IMAGE The 25-year-old who was shot at was rushed to nearby by hospital where doctors declared him brought dead on arrival. There has been no immediate claim of responsibility of the act. This is not the first time terror outfits in Kashmir have targeted Kashmiris who have been serving in the Indian security force and Jammu and Kashmir Police. Last year another soldier from the JKLI was abducted and killed by terrorists. Rifleman Aurangzeb was on way to his home in Poonch to celebrate Eid when he was abducted by terrorists. Later his bullet-ridden body was recovered from Gusoo Pulwama, with fifteen bullet wounds. The Hizbul Mujahideen terrorists who abducted Aurangzeb, released a video in which the army man was seen being questioned by his captors. One of the terrorists was heard saying that they have abducted him to avenge the killing of their man Wasim Shah in October 2017. On the occasion of 72nd Independence Day in 2018, India honored the salin rifleman with the prestigious Shaurya Chakra for gallantry. In 2017, another young Kashmiri army officer, Lieutenant Ummer Fayaz was abducted and killed by Hizbul. Terror outfits including Hizbul have in the past issued warnings to Kashmiris against siding with India and joining the India Army and Police. For most people, buying a smartphone that costs Rs 10,000 is enough. But if you're looking for a device under Rs 8,000 that still delivers a capable experience, you still have a few options. So here are our picks for the best smartphones under Rs 8000, you can buy. Xiaomi Redmi 4A One of the cheapers smartphones on this list, the Xiaomi Redmi 4A really delivers a bang for your buck. Aside from 4G support, it also has a decent camera, polycarbonate body, and battery enough. The only problem is you won't get anything heavy done on its 2GB RAM with 16GB of storage. Also Read: Smartphones under 7000: The Best 9 Android Phones You Can Buy For Under Rs 7,000 in 2019 Lenovo K9 A full year since it's launch, this device is still a strong competitor in this price segment. Aside from dual front and rear cameras, it also features a premium-looking glass body. Performance isn't the greatest here either, but the battery optimisation is top-notch. Asus Zenfone Max M1 With 4G and dual SIM support, the Zenfone Max M1 is a capable phone, sporting a 5.45-inch display. Aside from the 13MP and 8MP cameras, it also has a large 4000mAh battery. Add to that the intriguing ZenUI and you have quite the match. Samsung Galaxy M10 The Galaxy M10 is one of the few on this list to feature the waterdrop notch, already elevating its class thanks to the larger screen size. Don't let the minimalist design fool you though, the cameras are stellar no matter the lighting conditions. Asus Zenfone Lite L1 Unlike its higher end companion model, the Zenfone Lite L1 doesn't feature a fingerprint scanner. It does however have a great camera, complete with bokeh mode, great specs, and a well-designed UI. Also Read: Smartphones Under 10,000: Here Are 10 Affordable Android Phones You Can Buy On A Tight Budget Xiaomi Redmi 6 Cheaper than the Redmi 6 Pro, this device still offers a dual selfie camera setup, and a taller than usual display. There's also a fingerprint scanner for fast unlocks, all powered by the battery-friendly Helio P22 chip. Xiaomi Redmi 6A This device is even cheaper than the Redmi 6, and is one of the most affordable Xiaomi devices available at the moment. It's also still got one of the nicest custom UIs on the market though, not to mention a 13MP rear and 5MP front camera. Realme C1 The Realme C1 is another device on this list to feature the notch. It also has the latest Snapdragon 450 processor, which brings great battery optimisation to the already large 4230mAh power pack, on top of a dual rear camera. Vivo Y81i Released last year, the Vivo Y81i features a notch yet still has a bit of a chin on the device. The build quality is sleek as always though, and it's at least capable enough in the performance department. We're halfway through March and we've already had a lot of good news! From Sanjana Singh becoming the first transgender to get a government job in MP, to a Mumbai artist bringing colours to the lives of people living in slums, there are a lot of good things to be happy about. On International Women's Day on March 8 too, there were numerous inspiring, positive and noteworthy stories . So here are some of the best things that happened this month, so far: 1. Sanjana Singh became the first transgender to get a government job in Madhya Pradesh. Read More ANI Sanjana Singh, a transgender woman, has been appointed the Personal Secretary (PS) to Krishna Gopal Tiwari, Director, Department of Social Justice and Disabled Welfare (DSJDW), Madhya Pradesh government. 2. Dipa Karmakar - India's first female gymnast to win a Commonwealth medal - got her own Barbie. Read More Twitter Indian gymnast Dipa Karmakar became the first Indian female gymnast to win a medal at the Commonwealth Games. At the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Karmakar did India proud by winning a bronze medal. So, this year on Barbie's 60th anniversary, Mattel in an effort to honour female role models in their respective fields, launched a Dipa Karmakar-inspired Barbie. 3. Bihar bride called off her wedding after the groom arrived drunk and misbehaved at the mandap. Read More Representational Image- Reuters A brave bride in Bihar called off her wedding as the groom allegedly turned up drunk to the wedding. Rinki Kumari told her family to ask the groom to leave as he was so unaware of their surrounding that he didnt even know why he was there. 4. 9-YO girl bought 30 CCTV cameras using her savings worth Rs 1.5 lakh and donated it to the Chennai police. Read More Facebook 9-year-old S Srihita, who is a student of class 3, got to know that CCTV cameras were very important and third eye of the police. So, she and her father bought 30 CCTV cameras with the money which her father had kept for her birthday celebrations, and donated it to the police. 5. Wife of soldier martyred in Jammu And Kashmir joined the Indian Army as an officer. Read More THE DARJEELING CHRONICLE Sangeeta Mall, the wife of a rifleman who was killed in action in Jammu and Kashmir while battling terrorists was recently commissioned into the Indian Army after passing from OTA (Officers Training Academy) in Chennai on March 9. 6. A Mumbai artist brought colours to Pune slums with the aim to change mindsets. Read More Slums in Pune being coloured under 'Misaal Mumbai', an initiative of Rouble Nagi- a Mumbai-based artist & founder of NGO Rouble Nagi Art Foundation; Nagi says,"I want to connect to these people through arts. Main aim is not to colour the walls but bring a change in their mindset" pic.twitter.com/snFRH6lFeD ANI (@ANI) March 7, 2019 A Mumbai-based artist started a unique initiative to help people living in the slum areas of Pune. Under the 'Misaal Mumbai' initiative, the artist came up with the idea to paint huts in slums in different colours. 7. Agra Railway Division celebrated Women's Day by operating an all-woman crew train to Delhi. Read More Representational Image- Twitter The Agra railway division celebrated International Women's Day in a unique way. On March 8, they handed over train operations to an all-woman crew for a day as a token of respect. 8. This video of a lost leopard cub reuniting with its mom in Nagpur moved everyone to happy tears. Read More In a heartwarming incident, a lost leopard cub and his mother reunited after it was separated from its mother. In a Nagpur village, the villagers spotted a tiny cub who was no larger than a kitten and estimated to be no more than two months old. They informed the forest officials of the same and the cub was reunited with its mom. 9. This dad turned his 4-YO dying son into a superhero and wrote a series of 10 books about him. Read More Facebook After his 4-year-old son was diagnosed with Krabbe disease, Darren Garwood turned him into a superhero in a series of books that are now available in book stores and also online. Jacksons parents, Darren Garwood and Rebecca Garwood were devastated after their boy was diagnosed with the disease. 10. Vistara became the first Indian airline to provide free sanitary napkins on-board. Read More This #InternationalWomensDay, Vistara is proud to be Indias first airline to provide sanitary pads aboard all domestic flights, starting 8th Mar 19. These pads are organic & bio-degradable. #PadsOnBoard #VistaraForWomen #VistaraWomanFlyer #WomensDay #NotJustAnotherAirline pic.twitter.com/A1jmmoYYky Vistara (@airvistara) March 6, 2019 Vistara announced a #PadsOnBoard initiative under which they will provide free sanitary napkins to women passengers on request and started this initiative on International Womens Day on March 8. 11 . Brave ITBP soldiers exercised in the snow without any warm clothing. Read More The Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) is called Himveer for a reason. A video on ITBP's official Twitter account shows the jawans exercising in the snow, that too without any warm clothing whatsoever. The jawans are seen exercising sans their shirts as snow continued to fall. While the rest of the country complained about the cold, these brave men are training themselves for the worst. Other new promotions include: Lt. William Thornton, who began his career with the Sheriffs Office in 2006 after a 20-year career with the U.S. Marine Corps, became the first African American to be promoted to deputy chief of the correctional facility; Sgt. Karen Serzynski, who joined the Sheriffs Office in 2005 from Deerfield, is the first female to be promoted to deputy chief of court security; and Lt. Robert Richards of the Criminal Investigations Division, who began his career in 1998 in court security before joining highway patrol and criminal investigations, was named deputy chief of that department. Do you remember, last month a rare African black leopard was photographed for the first time in 100 years? It seems that the British photographer Will Burrard-Lucas has a talent for spotting creatures like these. This time, he captured a tusker elephant, who are thought to be fewer than 20 left on earth. The much more surprising thing is that the elephant died soon after her images were taken and that means it was among her last photos. The name Tusker is given to them as their tusks grow long enough to reach the ground and weigh more than 100 pounds each. They are incredibly rare. Will Burrard-Lucas "Super tuskers are very rare these days, precisely because their big tusks makes them prime targets for trophy hunters," Mark Jones from the Born Free wildlife charity told BBC. "Because these animals are all-too-often taken out before they have reached their reproductive prime, super-tusker genes are being bred out of elephant populations, and we could very well be seeing the last of them," he added. Will Burrard-Lucas Two years ago, a 50-year-old tusker elephant living in the same area was also killed by the poachers. She had survived through periods of terrible poaching and it was a victory that her life was not ended prematurely by a snare, bullet, or poisoned arrow. If there were a Queen of Elephants, it would surely have been her, Burrard-Lucas wrote in a blog post. Will Burrard-Lucas In collaboration with the Tsavo Trust and Kenya Wildlife Service, Lucas was able to track her down and click her pictures. I looked down at the live view on my wireless monitor and had to pinch myself. It was a feeling of privilege and euphoria that will stay with me forever, he wrote. From getting caught dancing on duty to flinging cash on dancing girls and now clicking inappropriate selfies, we've heard Indian cops do an array of useless things. This UP cop thought it was a brilliant idea to ask a Sub-Inspector climb an electric pole to take down political posters and click a selfie. After the picture went viral the cop was brutally trolled for his baseless command: Take a look at how people reacted to it: #1 Of course, only in UP! Aisa sirf U.P. me hi ho sakta haiab line pe aaye..Incredible U.p. PRIYANKA MISHRA (@prisanya12) 11 March 2019 #2 True that! Aise logo ko bas nokia 1100 use karna chahiye. Aarohi Tripathy (@aarohi_vns) 12 March 2019 #3 Nailed it! Pic 1 :- before suspension Pic 2 :- after suspension (@HR20_) 12 March 2019 #4 LOL Apparently by the time he clicked the second pic, he knew what was coming. Can see on his face Amit (@leosamit) 11 March 2019 #5 Of course, the officer is in trouble for pulling this off Pehle usne selfie li, fir selfie ne uski li... Trippy Soul (@TheTrippy_Soul) 11 March 2019 #6 Touche! Hello @upcoprahul sir. It's high time a course on manners should be made mandatory for UP police personnels. Now and then our protectors come up with something weired. Shivam Shukla (@this_is_shivam) 11 March 2019 Apart from being put through investigation, the officer has been sent to district lines as well. With the model code of conduct coming into effect after the announcements of the Lok Sabha poll schedule, authorities have started to remove hoardings advertising central and state government schemes in various districts of Uttar Pradesh. The model code of conduct bars the government from announcing any policy move that may impact voters' decision, reports ANI. An Indian man rides amid heavy smog in Gurgaon on March 7, a day after the city was placed at the top of a report on the world's most polluted cities for 2018. India dominated the list of the world's most polluted cities in 2018, taking 22 of the top 30 spots, according to a Greenpeace report, with Gurgaon which has changed its official name to Gurugram topping the list. (Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty Images) We now offer lithium prices and coverage free for reference. Click here to read all about it. Join our growing community of participants who want to learn more about electrification and how this market is developing. Chinese imports of fluorspar trebled year-on-year in 2018 as the nation became a net importer of the material, according to the latest data from the countrys customs authorities. The data showed that 419,828 tonnes of fluorspar was imported into China during 2018, three times the 140,229 tonnes imported in 2017. Fluorspar exports from China grew to 202,000 tonnes in 2018, from 184,000 tonnes the year before. Because of the Chinese boom in steel production over 2018, the majority of this growth in fluorspar imports was likely to be metallurgical grade material, although the Customs data does not distinguish between acid and met grades. Fluorspar is used as a flux material in steel production. Exports were steady throughout 2018, peaking at 23,940 tonnes in January. The 12,315 tonnes shipped in March was the lowest single monthly value. Imports peaked at the end of the year, when 225,000 tonnes of fluorspar, 54% of the years total, was brought into China between September and December. Chinas crude steel output grew by 4.6% over the year, according to its National Bureau of Statistics. This means that Chinese steel producers would have produced an additional 41 million tonnes of steel in 2018 compared with the previous year. The total for 2018 was 894,000 tonnes. China accounts for roughly half the worlds output of crude steel but its growth in output will fall significantly in 2019, according to forecasts by Fastmarkets research. Chinas output of crude steel will grow by 0.8% this year, according to the research, adding around 7 million tonnes to the nations total. This could raise questions over whether China has permanently become a net importer of fluorspar. The increased output of steel was reflected in metspar prices. The weekly price assessment for metspar, 90% CaF2, fob China, was $430-460 per tonne on March 7. It was $390-410 per tonne one year earlier. The price for metspar, 85% CaF2, fob China, was $360-400 per tonne, also assessed on March 7. The price for 85% CaF2 material was narrowly lower one year ago at $350-370 per tonne, but it was $290-310 per tonne in November 2017. The last time both prices were as high as their current levels was in 2012. 2019 imports to dip Fastmarkets is aware of one fluorspar trading house which reported that it had imported around 100,000 tonnes of acid-grade fluorspar in 2018. But that traders outlook for 2019 was bleaker because international prices of acidspar had caught up with the high Chinese prices. The monthly price for acidspar, 97% CaF2, wet filtercake, fob Durban, South Africa, was $450-490 per tonne on February 28. This was up by 25% from $350-400 per tonne this time last year. By comparison, Chinese fluorspar averaged a price of $460-527 per tonne over 2018. The price for acidspar, 97% CaF2, wet filtercake, fob China, was $450-550 per tonne on March 7. The price started the year at $550-580 per tonne. There was no official data detailing how much aluminium fluoride (AlF3) or hydrofluoric acid (HF) is produced in China. But data presented at Fastmarkets latest fluorspar conference - in Johannesburg, South Africa, over September 25-27, 2018 - showed that there was plenty of unused AlF3 capacity in China. Only 72.5% of Chinas capacity for 943,000 tonnes per year was being used. Weaker demand for AlF3 has caused the price to drop, to around 11,000-11,500 yuan ($1,638-1,712) per tonne, according to sources. This price dropped by 5% in January. The HF price also recently dropped, to 10,775 yuan per tonne on March 13 from around 14,500 yuan per tonne on December 12, according to commodity data group Sunsirs. Again, this price was down because of lower demand for refrigerants in China, although demand is down at the moment because it is winter in China. Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, today announced it will be opening a new Digital Innovation Center in Bucharest, Romania at an event attended by local government officials and university representatives. The center will focus on developing offerings for clients based on cutting-edge digital technologies including Cloud, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Infosys will invest in training programs for both its current employees and new hires. These training programs will focus on several key competencies including user experience, Cloud, Big Data, digital offerings, core technology skills and computer science skills. The company has also announced that it is entering into an agreement with the University of Bucharest and the University Politehnica Bucharest to form a strategic partnership for technology innovation and Romanian workforce development; including joint training courses, scholarships and research. The training programs for Romania will leverage the learnings and best practices the company has developed through decades of experience running the Infosys Global Education Center, one of the worlds largest corporate universities, located in Mysore, India. Infosys also plans to open a new Cyber Defence Center in Bucharest this summer. The Center will provide end-to-end 24/7 cybersecurity services to help European and global clients progress on their digital transformation journey. Services include cyber forensics, ethical hacking, security analytics, threat detection and response. The center in Bucharest will be vital to delivering services across the European region, given GDPR and other country-specific data regulation requirements. Currently Infosys, which was recently recognised as a Top Employer in Europe, has operations across 15 European countries, employing more than 12,000 people. The company works with both European and global clients in a range of industries, including financial services, healthcare, life sciences, business process management, utilities, manufacturing and retail. Ravi Kumar S., President, Infosys, said, Our Digital Innovation Center in Bucharest marks an important step forward for Infosys as it further expands its presence across Europe, improving our ability to serve both our regional and global clients. By partnering with key local academic institutions, we are creating organic talent pools in Romania that do not exist in the market today. By training and developing a highly skilled workforce in Romania, we can help close the digital skills gap in the region and contribute to the Romanian and European economy. Mircea Dumitru, Rector of The University of Bucharest, said, Europe is a hotbed for innovation, and the next generation of workforce is keen to develop its skills and knowledge in the digital age, through the best training and hands-on experience. Weve partnered with Infosys so that young Romanian specialists can work and train with the best-in-class Infosys experts at the new center to become more skilled and better prepared to help shape Europes digital future. Ana Birchall, Vice Prime Minister of Romania, said, IT services is a huge growing industry in Romania and this new Digital Innovation Center offers a great opportunity for students and professionals alike to develop their skills, find new career prospects and enhance cutting-edge digital technologies across industries in Romania and Europe. From an economic perspective, I would like to underscore the rapid-paced growth patterns of both our countries, with India being the fastest growing economy in the world and Romania mirroring at an EU level. In this positive context we should take full stock of all opportunities to further consolidate the extended partnership between Romania and India. Moreover, the economic growth of our country in the last couple of years represents an open invitation to pre-eminent investors and companies like Infosys to bring added value and open new economic opportunities. For more information, please visit: https://www.infosys.com/romania-digital-innovation-center/ About Infosys Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. We enable clients in 45 countries to navigate their digital transformation. With over three decades of experience in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises, we expertly steer our clients through their digital journey. We do it by enabling the enterprise with an AI-powered core that helps prioritize the execution of change. We also empower the business with agile digital at scale to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and customer delight. Our always-on learning agenda drives their continuous improvement through building and transferring digital skills, expertise, and ideas from our innovation ecosystem. Visit www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise navigate your next. 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, 2018. These filings are available at 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. Cattle Fade on Thursday Barchart - Thu Dec 9, 4:55PM CST Thursdays fat cattle futures trading left prices 37 to 42 cents in the red. The special Thursday FCE auction sold 278 of the 1,708 head listed. One pen went for $140, with another having sold at $140.25.... LEZ21 : 136.725s (-0.60%) LEJ22 : 141.225s (-0.46%) GFF22 : 164.075s (+0.41%) GFH22 : 165.075s (-0.48%) Soybeans Close Report Day with Gains Barchart - Thu Dec 9, 4:55PM CST Beans were initially weaker going into the report, but after seeing the numbers they bounced 20 cents. At the bell, soybeans were 2 1/4 to 3 3/4 cents stronger. USDA had the average cash soybean price... ZSF22 : 1265-6 (+0.10%) ZSPAUS.CM : 12.3110 (+0.27%) ZSH22 : 1273-4 (+0.10%) ZSX21 : 1234-0s (+1.79%) ZSPX21US.CM : 12.3270 (+1.90%) Corn Markets Close Thursday with Gains Barchart - Thu Dec 9, 4:55PM CST Old crop corn prices were 3 to 4 1/2 cents higher on Thursday at the close. Futures were trading weaker going into the report, and immediately afterwards, before bouncing during the afternoon. The cash... ZCZ21 : 587-4 (-0.17%) ZCPAUS.CM : 5.7886 (+0.78%) ZCH22 : 589-6 (-0.34%) ZCZ21 : 587-4 (-0.17%) ZCPZ21US.CM : 5.7886 (+0.78%) Lee Enterprises rejects takeover bid from Alden hedge fund AP - Thu Dec 9, 3:35PM CST Newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises has rejected a takeover offer from the Alden Global Capital hedge fund that is one of the largest newspaper owners in the country with a reputation for intense cost... $SPX : 4,667.45 (-0.72%) $DOWI : 35,754.69 (unch) $IUXX : 16,149.57 (-1.49%) LEE : 27.70 (+11.02%) RFD-TV Interview: Grain and Livestock Markets Blue Line Futures - Thu Dec 9, 3:09PM CST We were on RFD-TV this afternoon, sharing our thoughts on today's WASDE report and the price action that followed. ArgoGlobal has appointed Alfredo Alonso as chief underwriting officer for Europe, Middle East and Asia, beginning March 2019. Based in London, he will report to Matt Harris, group head of international operations. Alonso has over 30 years of experience in the insurance industry. He joins ArgoGlobal from RSA, where he has served as chief underwriting officer for several emerging markets over the past seven years. He began his career at Winterthur Insurance (now a member of the AXA Group) in its claims department, before becoming senior casualty underwriter in its international arm. Later, he joined Zurich Financial Services, where he spent 12 years working in various underwriting roles, including head of technical centre for commercial lines in Switzerland, head of casualty for Europe, and chief underwriting officer for Middle East and Africa. If the families pursue legal claims, especially in the US court system, those payouts could be much higher, said Clive Garner, head of law firm Irwin Mitchells travel litigation group in London. If there were to be anything defective in terms of the plane or any of its components, then it would be possible to bring a claim against the manufacturer as well as the airline, he explained. Eight US citizens were killed in the Ethiopian Airlines crash, which increases the chances that litigation on behalf of all victims families could be heard by a US court, said Justin Green, a New York-based aviation lawyer who has represented families in cases against Boeing. Moreover, legal compensation payments for crash victims could run around US$2 million to US$3 million per person in the US. Calculations by Reuters are based on the Montreal convention estimate that initial compensation costs for all 157 passengers who died on the flight could be around US$25 million. The Montreal convention offers a maximum of 113,100 special drawing rights, worth $1.39 right now, for the death or injury of each passenger involved, but not all countries are part of the convention. Willis Towers Watson was the insurance broker for Ethiopian Airlines, and Chubb was the lead insurer, according to reports. Coined in the 1990s, the term allied health professionals refers to a wide variety of roles from acupuncturists and physiotherapists to hairdressers and beauticians however, it excludes doctors, nurses and dentists. Anita Lane, director at Solution Underwriting, said the number of professions welcomed under the umbrella of allied health had grown in recent years which had prompted the firms decision to launch a specific product. The Allied Health Association has documented that the demand for healthcare workers will grow nearly twice between now and 2020 so, yes, we have seen an increase in queries about healthcare in general, she told Insurance Business. There are many practitioners that fall outside established schemes and we are trying to accommodate for those clients. In fact, according to Allied Health Professions Australia, there are already 195,000 allied health professionals currently operating across the country, representing more than a quarter of the health workforce and delivering an estimated 200 million health services annually. Lane said the new product, which is backed by Chubb Australia, complements the underwriting agencys existing professional portfolio. We understand the dynamics of clients seeking advice from external consultants just like clients seek advice from their accountants and management consultants, clients in Australia also like to consult a wide myriad of health professions, she said. Medical malpractice is the PI for the medical world, and we understand how to structure products and terms for these professions. The policy features cover for libel and slander, dishonesty, loss of documents, good Samaritan act, PR expenses and bodily injury, including mental anguish and shock among others. The picture painted was beyond grim, and the author of the United Nations report is not optimistic about the chances of getting political unity to make any significant changes to ensure any progress is made. Similarly, the World Economic Forum (WEF) recently published its annual World Risks Report - and the number one risk listed was the failure of climate change mitigation and adaption, aka governments around the world not doing anything to stop it occurring. This all looks very doom and gloom, but there are organisations that are looking to do everything they can to try and help. Unfriend Coal is a campaign that lobbies the insurance industry to stop insuring coal-fired power plants and to divest from coal. Peter Bosshard, director of The Finance Project that runs the Unfriend Coal campaign, said that what his organisation is attempting to do is make up for lost time. Looking at what climate science tells us, including the latest report from the IPCC from October of last year, we know that were really running out of time in making the transition to a low carbon economy, Bosshard explained to Insurance Business. The basic premise of our campaign is that we cant just keep doing what weve done for such a long time, we cant rely on some divestment and things like that. We really need to ramp up action. The IPCC report shows we need action at an unprecedented scale. Without insurance, Bosshard explained, the coal industry simply cant operate. So, if the companies that state they want to do something about climate change, as many have, are approached, then maybe they will stop investing in it. Coal is still the biggest source of CO2 emissions, he said. Without insurance most factories, mines, power plants, buildings, anything within the coal economy wouldnt go forward or couldnt be upgraded. They were an actor who was clearly very well-aware of climate change but had been long neglected their own role, regarding their own responsibility. They had put out warnings, some of the reinsurers particularly, about climate risk since the 1970s yet they were still insuring coal and it just didnt make any sense. There was a gap between their rhetoric and their actions. So far, the campaign has helped as 20 major insurers have committed to divesting from coal, and nine major insurers and reinsurers have announced they will stop insuring coal-fired power plants. The nine insurers include big names such as Allianz, Munich Re, Swiss Re, AXA and Zurich. Alison Martin, group chief risk officer at Zurich, said that the companys climate change policy and move away from coal was very important, especially given that major weather events were cited as the number two risk in WEFs Global Risk Report. Increasingly, major weather events, combined with a lack of will and a lack of political unity to do anything are the top two risks, she said. But that doesnt mean we shouldnt do something. And what as insurance companies can we do? We published a thermal coal statement back at the end of 2017, where we talked about the basis under which we would provide underwriting or investment support into companies who were providing the majority of their revenues from thermal coal, more than 50%. We need to find a way as a society to manage a just transition to low carbon, and not have cliffs. I dont think cliffs are in anyones interest. And while only nine insurers doesnt seem like a lot, it is a big step from only two years of a campaign. A report by Willis Towers Watson on the power and energy market, published earlier this year, also reiterated the positive impacts. Having to factor this element into their bidding will put [coal companies] at a commercial disadvantage when competing with lower-cost greener generators, the report stated. This reduction in available capacity will invariably see upward pressure on rates and coverages as the competition for market share in this specific sector will be much more limited. Renewable [insurance] programs typically are cheaper than thermal programs, with significantly lower deductibles. This trend is expected to continue as traditional insurers look to promote renewable energy for public relations reasons, as well as replace premium lost by exiting the coal-generation space. Ultimately, Bosshard said, Unfriend Coal is hoping that they are working hard enough to do their part in helping to end coal as a power source. In practice what were hoping to see is that it just gets more and more complicated and more and expensive for coal companies to access insurance, he explained. And in combination with all the other problems that they are facing, increasing finance costs, court cases, we hope this will accelerate the end of coal. We are well on the way. The progress we are seeing in the insurance industry is very promising, but we are running out of time so we need to reach critical mass quickly. A key challenge when placing specialty property risks is keeping up-to-date with market fluctuations. Markets change all the time, explained Goldman, which means brokers are under pressure to keep on track of whos in and whos out. This has become even more challenging as the insurance merger and acquisition (M&A) market continues to heat up, meaning more insurance companies are getting new owners with new risk appetites. Significant catastrophe losses have also triggered movement in the specialty property insurance markets. The past two years have seen back-to-back active Atlantic Hurricane seasons, devastating wildfires in California and significant flooding in the US. As a result, the CAT property insurance markets have suffered two years of sizeable losses and many are now pushing for higher rates. It has been an extremely active two-years for CAT losses. I expect every wholesale market that writes primary business has lost money, which is why rates are going up, Goldman told . Some markets have actuaries coming in to reevaluate their books, and if they dont get their rate increases, theyre choosing to walk away completely. However, theres also a lot of new capacity out there. These markets did not pay those losses, so they can ease the pain of general rate increases. Cost of capital is a big deal too. For example, markets who used to offer a $5 million part of $25 million primary are now cutting their line back to $2.5 million because the cost of capital has gone up. It costs them money to put each million of capacity out there, so they want to reduce the size of their lines. Its not everyone, but there are a handful of markets who are trying to increase their rates and also cut their lines. This again is not the case across the board. Inadequate insurance-to-value (ITV) was another hot topic recently. Schedules were undervalued and, therefore, markets paid out on higher values than they collected premium for. As a result, some markets are becoming much stricter about ITV. This is just one of the numerous challenges causing movement in the CAT property markets. As a broker, its really important to keep talking to your colleagues, your underwriters and your markets. Dont assume the markets wont write something because they turned you down the last time you asked. Youve got to keep asking because the markets change week to week. Theyre in, theyre out its crazy. In that sort of environment, even the best broker is going to miss something, said Goldman. This industry is anything but vanilla. Ive been doing this for 21-years and I learn something new every single week. Dont be shy, ask around. A clean, loss free non-habitational account should come in with a very slight increase if you do your research. A press release said that Texas Mutuals board members represent a diverse mix of Texas industries and regions. The state governor appoints five of the nine directors including the boards chair with the advice and consent of the Texas Senate. Policyholders determine the remaining four directors. Governor Greg Abbott appointed Simmons to the workers compensation insurers board and Simmons appointment was confirmed by the Texas Senate on February 27. His board term is set to expire on July 01, 2023, a release said. Last month, Texas Mutual announced a strategic partnership with the Independent Insurance Agents of Texas (IIAT). Under the partnership, the IIAT will endorse Texas Mutual as the workers compensation carrier of choice for its 1,500 agency members. Read more: Texas Mutual partners with Independent Insurance Agents of Texas More than six months after natural gas explosions rocked Massachusetts Merrimack Valley, small business owners in the region say theyre still reeling. Convenience store, grocery and salon owners complained at a forum in Lawrence, Mass., on March 6 that the compensation theyve received from Columbia Gas, the utility company to blame for the Sept. 13 disaster, doesnt come close to covering their losses. Some said they havent been paid at all, despite filing their claims months ago. Whos going to pay for what I lost? asked Jose Santos, the owner of Popular Market in Lawrence, who, like many in attendance, said hes had to take thousands of dollars in loans to keep afloat through months of slow sales. Eusebio Junior Hernandez, owner of the Hernandez Market in Lawrence, said he received about $25,000 from the utility company to cover initial losses and damages. But business simply hasnt picked back up in the poor, overwhelmingly Latino city, he said. Hernandez estimates hes lost thousands of dollars more since December. And Luis Suazo, owner of Suazo Market in Lawrence, said he borrowed $10,000 to keep his storefront going these last few months, but Columbia Gas only reimbursed him about $3,000. Im out about $8,000, he said. Thats nothing for a company like Columbia Gas. But thats everything for my business. Columbia Gas, which didnt have a representative at the meeting, said after that it hopes to work with business owners who voiced concerns Wednesday. The company hosted community meetings in Lawrence, Andover and North Andover on March 9, where claims representatives were on hand to work individually with those impacted by the disaster, which has been blamed on over pressurization during a routine pipeline replacement project. One person died, about two dozen were injured, more than 100 structures were damaged and thousands were left without heat and hot water for weeks. Columbia Gas said just over 800 claims including about 200 businesses claims remained active as of March 6. The company has paid out nearly $95 million on more than 24,000 claims, of which businesses represented about 2,400 claims worth roughly $29 million. Part of the challenge is that many impacted businesses are mom-and-pop operations that lack the proper bookkeeping and accounting, making it hard for them to provide the documentation required in the claims process, said Derek Mitchell, head of the Lawrence Partnership, a nonprofit thats helping oversee a $10 million fund meant to help area businesses. Store owners questioned how Lawrence was spending its $2 million share. Democratic Mayor Dan Rivera, who wasnt in attendance at the meeting, said later that his administration is still developing its plan for the money and couldnt offer a timeline. Were trying to figure out how to put every dollar on the street, he said of the fund. We want to make sure this is done right. Other larger portions of the $10 million fund, meanwhile, are already paying for broader regional efforts, said Mitchell. Lowell-based nonprofit Entrepreneurship For All, for example, has been contracted to provide technical assistance to local businesses, like basic bookkeeping and accounting, developing marketing plans and navigating the claims process with Columbia Gas. And advertising firm CTP Boston has been tapped to develop a broader regional advertising campaign, Mitchell said. But Rivera, the Lawrence mayor, agreed with businesses owners that Columbia Gas claims process needs improvement. One solution, he suggested, is to make sure that all or most business owners go through the independent appeals process Columbia Gas has established to make sure theyre getting fairly compensated. The other option? They can just cut the checks, Rivera said. Every day that theyre not fully funding claims, theyre ruining the lives of business owners. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Claims Massachusetts PartnerRe announced the company will reorganize its Property & Casualty (P&C) business segment into a regional structure while making several changes to its executive leadership team. Effective April 1, 2019, PartnerRes P&C business will be reorganized into three distinct regional units: Americas, Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia-Pacific, reporting directly to PartnerRe President and CEO Emmanuel Clarke. As part of the reorganization, the company and Charles Goldie, CEO P&C, have agreed that he will leave the company. We are further evolving our P&C structure, commented Clarke. As a result of these changes, P&C will have a flatter organizational structure, further enabling us to increase agility in the way we run our P&C business and customize our approach to our clients and brokers around the world. Clarke said he will assume direct oversight of the P&C business, including the three P&C business regional units. Executive Leadership Team As a result of the restructuring, PartnerRe has made the following changes to its executive leadership team: Philippe Meyenhofer. Currently deputy CEO, P&C and head of P&C Europe, Meyenhofer will lead the companys EMEA regional unit. Meyenhofer has held several leadership positions since joining PartnerRe in August 2010. He has led P&C Europe since July 2016 and was appointed as deputy CEO, P&C in December 2018. Currently deputy CEO, P&C and head of P&C Europe, Meyenhofer will lead the companys EMEA regional unit. Meyenhofer has held several leadership positions since joining PartnerRe in August 2010. He has led P&C Europe since July 2016 and was appointed as deputy CEO, P&C in December 2018. James Beedle. Continuing his role as head of P&C Asia-Pacific and CEO of Partner Reinsurance Asia Pte. Ltd.., Beedle will assume executive responsibility for the Global Clients and Broker Management unit. Beedle joined PartnerRe in January 2017 in his current role. Previously, Beedle was senior managing director of Willis Re Asia-Pacific. Continuing his role as head of P&C Asia-Pacific and CEO of Partner Reinsurance Asia Pte. Ltd.., Beedle will assume executive responsibility for the Global Clients and Broker Management unit. Beedle joined PartnerRe in January 2017 in his current role. Previously, Beedle was senior managing director of Willis Re Asia-Pacific. Americas division. A search is currently underway for an executive who will lead this division. In the interim, Jon Schriber, head of Structured Risk North America, will assume responsibility for our P&C North America unit. A search is currently underway for an executive who will lead this division. In the interim, Jon Schriber, head of Structured Risk North America, will assume responsibility for our P&C North America unit. Greg Haft. Halt will be appointed CEO for Specialty Lines. Since January 2018, Haft has held the position of deputy CEO of Specialty Lines and has led its Property, Marine and Energy (PME) unit. Prior to that, Haft was head of Global Cat, and Property North America since 2016. He will retain the responsibility of the PME unit in addition to becoming CEO of Specialty. These four positions will be appointed to the executive leadership team. I am pleased to promote Philippe, James and Greg from within, all strong and capable leaders. Each has been successful in both leading their businesses as well as their teams and I look forward to working with them on the executive leadership team, commented Clarke. I would like to thank Charlie [Goldie] for his significant contribution to the organization over the past 17 years, said Clarke. Charlie has been an important part of PartnerRes success, particularly growing our Specialty business into one of the best portfolios and platforms in the industry. His strategic and intellectual capabilities have made him a valued member of the executive leadership team, and I wish him the very best in his next endeavors. Source: PartnerRe Related: Topics Mergers Europe Property Casualty Leadership Torres: The meatballs my mom made. I know how to make them myself, but the beef here and the beef in Mexico dont taste the same to me. I went to Mexico seven years ago and everything there tastes different, maybe because I was born there. RenaissanceRe Holdings Ltd. announced it has received all regulatory approvals required in connection with its planned acquisition of Tokio Marine Holdings reinsurance platform. The deal was first announced on Oct. 30, 2018, when RenRe said it had agreed to pay approximately $1.5 billion to buy Tokio Millennium Re AG and Tokio Millennium Re (UK) Ltd. (collectively known as TMR). RenaissanceRe anticipates closing the transaction as soon as possible, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions. Source: RenaissanceRe Related: RenaissanceRe to Acquire Tokio Millennium Re in $1.5 Billion Deal Topics Legislation Norwegian Air said on Wednesday it will seek compensation from plane maker Boeing for costs and lost revenue after grounding its fleet of 737 MAX 8 aircraft in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash. We expect Boeing to take this bill, Norwegian said in an emailed statement. The Oslo-based airline has 18 MAX passenger jets in its 163-aircraft fleet. European regulators on Tuesday grounded the aircraft following Sundays crash of a similar plane in Ethiopia, which killed 157 people and was the second crash involving that type of plane since October. Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg said on Monday that he was confident in the safety of the 737 MAX in an email to employees, which was seen by Reuters. Industry sources, however, said the planemaker faces big claims after the crash. Norwegian has bet heavily on the MAX to become its aircraft of choice for short- and medium-range flights in coming years as the low-cost carrier seeks to boost its fuel efficiency and cut the cost of flying. What happens next is in the hands of European aviation authorities. But we hope and expect that our MAXes will be airborne soon, Norwegian Airs founder and Chief Executive Bjoern Kjos said in a video recording released on social media. Many have asked questions about how this affects our financial situation. Its quite obvious that we will not take the cost related to the new aircraft that we have to park temporarily. We will send this bill to those who produce this aircraft, he added. Idle planes will add to pressures on the airline, which is making losses amid intense competition at a time when several smaller European competitors have gone out of business. The carrier has raised 3 billion Norwegian crowns ($348 million) from shareholders in recent months and said it would cut costs as it tries to regain profitability this year. If this situation gets solved within the next fortnight, this will not be very serious for Norwegian, said analyst Preben Rasch-Olsen at brokerage Carnegie, adding that seasonally low demand in March likely leaves spare capacity. The little extra costs they are incurring, they can probably get that covered by Boeing, Rasch-Olsen said. But if this situation continues into the Easter holidays, or May and June, then it is a problem. They (will) need to get in new planes. And then comes the costs. Europeans tend to book their summer holidays in May, so the grounding may not yet affect bookings for the peak season for the airline industry, the analyst said. Meanwhile, Norwegian was maintaining its order for more aircraft of the same type from Boeing, spokesman Lasse Sandaker-Nielsen said. Norwegian is expected to take delivery of dozens more of the MAX in coming years, raising the overall number to more than 70 by year-end 2021, according to recent company announcements. Shares in the airline have now dropped 6.8 percent this week as investors worried about the impact of the Ethiopian crash. They fell by 4.8 percent in early trade on Wednesday but later recovered to trade up 2.7 percent by 1246 GMT. Norwegian canceled some flights on Tuesday, and on Wednesday it canceled at least three dozen departures, its website showed, most of which were due to fly from airports in Oslo, Stockholm and other Nordic cities. The airline was booking passengers on to other flights and using other types of planes from its fleet to help fill the gaps. In a separate statement, Norwegian said it would deploy one of its larger Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft to operate its daily route from Dublin to Stewart airport north of New York City, replacing the grounded MAX. ($1 = 8.6093 Norwegian crowns) (Additional reporting by Lefteris Karagiannopoulos; editing by Susan Fenton and Louise Heavens) Related: Topics Talent Europe Aviation Aerospace A Philippine bank has filed a lawsuit accusing Bangladeshs central bank of defamation, hitting back at what it says are baseless claims of its complicity in the worlds biggest cyber heist. In February 2016, criminals used fraudulent orders on the SWIFT payments system to steal $81 million from the Bangladesh central banks account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The money was sent to accounts at Manila-based Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. (RCBC) and then vanished into the casino industry in the Philippines. RCBC said its reputation had come under a sustained vicious and public attack by Bangladesh Bank. It is seeking at least 100 million pesos ($1.9 million) in damages. Bangladesh Bank has embarked on a massive ploy and scheme to extort money from plaintiff RCBC by resorting to public defamation,harassment and threats geared towards destroying RCBCs good name, reputation, and image, it said in a statement on Tuesday, citing the civil court filing on March 6. It said the motive was to get RCBC to return money it neither had, nor owed. Bangladesh Bank declined to comment. Barbs and Blame The lawsuit is the latest in a slew of barbs and blame-trading between the two banks. Last month, the Federal Reserve said it had agreed to help Bangladesh as it sues to recoup losses from the heist, offering technical assistance. SWIFT also agreed to help the bank rebuild its infrastructure after the breach. Bangladesh Bank filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan earlier this year, accusing RCBC of involvement in a massive conspiracy to steal its money. A hunt for the culprits has made little progress and Bangladesh Bank has managed to get back roughly $15 million, mostly from a Manila gaming junket operator. In the first conviction in the case, a Philippine court in January found a former RCBC bank branch manager, Maia Deguito, guilty on eight counts of money laundering. Deguito was sentenced to between 32 years and 56 years in jail, and was ordered to pay a total fine of about $109 million, although she remains free on bail pending appeal. ($1=52.51 pesos) (Reporting by Martin Petty; Additional reporting by Ruma Paul in DHAKA; editing by Neil Fullick) Related: Topics Lawsuits Cyber Claims Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. has acquired Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based Hammerberg Insurance Services Inc., dba First Iowa Insurance Agency Inc. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Founded in 1912, First Iowa Insurance Agency offers commercial and personal property/casualty insurance, group and individual health, and individual life coverage and services to clients throughout Iowa and the Central United States. It also provides commercial safety, loss control and OSHA compliance consulting services. Ronald Hammerberg, Robert Hammerberg and their associates will continue to operate from their current location under the direction of Patrick M. Gallagher, head of Gallaghers Midwest region retail property/casualty brokerage operations, and Jerry Roberts, head of Gallaghers Heartland region employee benefits consulting and brokerage operations. Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., a global insurance brokerage, risk management and consulting services firm, is headquartered in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. Source: Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. Topics Mergers Iowa A.J. Gallagher A lawyer representing a man who claims Bayer AGs Roundup weed killer caused his cancer urged jurors to imagine the scales of justice ever so slightly tilted in his favor, as if weighted by a feather, and said that would be enough to advance his trial to the next and final phase. This isnt like those shows on TV where you have to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, Aimee Wagstaff, an attorney for Edwin Hardeman, told jurors during closing arguments Tuesday. Roundup, not hepatitis, caused Hardemans cancer, his lawyers argued at a critical juncture in the companys second U.S. trial over the popular herbicide. Hardemans exposure to Roundup was a real factor, it doesnt have to be the only cause of his cancer, Wagstaff said. It doesnt have to be the only cause of his harm, even if they determine hepatitis may have played a role, she added. The outcome of the trial under way in federal court in San Francisco has implications for thousands of similar cases filed across the U.S. Jurors started deliberating Tuesday in the first phase of a two-part trial after both sides presented their final arguments in the case. Jurors first duty will be to decide whether Hardemans exposure to Roundup was a substantial factor in causing his non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Bayer argues that the hepatitis Hardeman suffered for decades is the primary cause of his disease. If the jury agrees with the company, the trial is over. If not, the trial advances to a second phase to determine Bayers liability and damages. Brian Stekloff, a lawyer for Bayer, attacked Wagstaffs analogy that the jury could make a decision based on a feathers weight of difference. We didnt start at 50-50, we started at zero, Stekloff told jurors. They started at zero and have the burden of proof to demonstrate that Hardemans cancer was more likely than not caused by Roundup. Stekloff reminded jurors of Hardemans medical records showing he had cirrhosis of the liver caused by hepatitis C but added that they shouldnt view the case as Roundup versus hepatitis C. Theres no way to know what caused his non-Hodgkins lymphoma Stekloff said, highlighting the testimony of two doctors, one of them a cross-examined witness for Hardeman, to support his argument. Hardeman, 70, sprayed more than 6,000 gallons of Roundup, according to Wagstaff, some of it mixed from concentrated formulation, for 26 years on weeds growing over his large plot of land in Sonoma County, California, about 60 miles north of San Francisco. Thats a lot of Roundup, Wagstaff said. The decision will have ripple effects beyond Hardemans case. Bayer says 11,200 U.S. plaintiffs have sued the company in state and federal courts over claims Roundup caused their cancer. Hardemans suit is the second to go to trial and will be the first jury verdict in federal court, after Bayer last year lost what ended up being a $78.6 million verdict in state court in California. Hardemans case serves as a bellwether for 765 similar cases filed in federal courts across the U.S. and collected before U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco. The judges rulings will shape those cases as they go to trial, and the outcome of Hardemans trial is being watched by investors as an indication of whether the company will continue to fight the lawsuits or move closer to a settlement that analysts estimate could cost $5 billion. The jury, reduced to five women and one man after others had to quit, must reach a unanimous verdict for Hardeman to win. The case is In re: Roundup Products Liability Litigation, MDL 2741, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco). Related: Copyright 2021 Bloomberg. Topics California USA U.S. regulators reversed course Wednesday and announced they will ground Boeing Co.s top-selling 737 Max family of airliners amid safety concerns after a crash Sunday in Ethiopia five months after a similar tragedy off Indonesia. The safety of the American people and all people is our paramount concern, President Donald Trump said Wednesday at the White House. Hopefully they will very quickly come up with the answer but until they do the planes are grounded. The move is a major blow to Boeing, which has lost billions of dollars in value this week as nation after nation announced they were barring the aircraft from flying. The single-aisle Max family is the Chicago-based planemakers largest seller and accounts for almost one-third of the companys operating profit. Boeing dropped as much as 3.2 percent after Trumps announcement but recovered much of the days loss by 3:17 p.m. in New York. Affected planes will be grounded immediately upon reaching their destinations. The impact on travelers should be limited because there are only 72 Boeing 737 Max aircraft at three U.S. carriers: American Airlines Group Inc. Southwest Airlines Co. and United Continental Holdings Inc. Thats only about 3 percent of the mainline fleet at those carriers. More than 40 nations had announced the grounding of the jet and in some cases a ban on flyovers of the plane in recent days despite reassurances from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA made its decision as a result of unspecified new evidence collected at the site and analyzed today, the agency said in a tweet. It also reviewed satellite data it obtained earlier in the day. The grounding will remain in effect pending further investigation, including examination of information from the aircrafts flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders, the agency said. The Chicago-based manufacturer issued a statement saying it still has full confidence in the plane. We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution, Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg said in a statement. We are doing everything we can to understand the cause of the accidents in partnership with the investigators, deploy safety enhancements and help ensure this does not happen again. The U.S. action followed Canadas decision to halt Max flights earlier Wednesday. Canada Transport Minister Marc Garneau said in Ottawa that satellites tracked the Ethiopian Airlines flight and suggest possible similarities with a Lion Air crash on Oct 29. A Lion Air Max 8 crashed off the coast of Indonesia, killing all 189 people aboard, following a malfunction of a software feature on the plane that repeatedly forced it into a dive. Indonesia Crash The FAA and other aviation regulators around the world took several steps after the Indonesia crash to notify pilots of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, and to remind them how to overcome it in the event of a malfunction. However, a more formal fix to redesign it wont be mandated until April, the FAA said Monday. All 157 people aboard the Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 died when it plunged into the ground at high speed about six minutes after takeoff near Addis Ababa. Investigators have released no information about what caused the crash. Trump told reporters that he had spoken with Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Acting FAA Administrator Daniel Elwell and Muilenburg before making the call to ground 737 Max 8 and Max 9 model planes in the U.S. Any plane currently in the air will go to its destination and thereafter be grounded until further notice, Trump said. So planes that are in the air will be grounded if they are the 737 Max, will be grounded upon landing at the destination. Our hearts go out to all of those who lost loved ones, to their friends, to families, in both Ethiopian and Lion Airlines crashes that involved the 737 Max aircraft, Trump said. Its a terrible, terrible thing. Boeing is an incredible company. They are working very, very hard right now, and hopefully they will very quickly come up with the answer but until they do the planes are grounded and you will be hearing from the FAA directly in a little while. Southwest has 34 Max 8 aircraft among its more than 750 planes. In contrast, its fleet includes more than 500 of the older 737-700 model. The Dallas-based airline and United fly the Max across their route networks. A significant impact will be felt in Miami, where American has concentrated its initial Max deliveries for service to the Caribbean and to New Yorks LaGuardia airport. The carrier has 24 Max 8 jets in its fleet of more than 1,550 planes. The last fleet-wide grounding by the FAA occurred on Jan. 17, 2013, when it ordered a halt to revenue flights by Boeings then-new model, the mostly composite 787, after a lithium-ion batteries on the plane overheated. Prior to that, the last such action halting flights on a fleet occurred in 1979 on the Douglas DC-10. Copyright 2021 Bloomberg. Topics USA Aviation Aerospace Adam Glenn has joined Alliant Insurance Services in Dallas as vice president. A property/casualty insurance specialist, Glenn will provide a full range of diversified insurance products and services to clients across the Southwest as Alliant continues to expand its footprint in the region. Glenn joins Alliant with a multifaceted background that includes experience in insurance brokerage, risk management, sales, accounting, and owning and selling his own business. Prior to joining Alliant, Glenn was a commercial insurance agent with one of Texas largest independent insurance agencies servicing a diverse portfolio of middle market clients. Headquartered in Newport Beach, California, Alliant Insurance Services Inc. provides property/casualty, workers compensation, employee benefits, surety, and financial products and services to clients nationwide. Veterans applying for insurance licenses with the Louisiana Department of Insurance (LDI) are now eligible for reimbursement of the required exam fees. The Louisiana Department of Veterans Affairs recently approved the LDIs application to participate in the Veterans Federal Exam Reimbursement Program effective Nov. 1, 2018. Veterans will need to pay any fees upfront at the time they take a licensing exam. Upon completion of the exam, eligible veterans have one year to apply for reimbursement of the fees through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). There is no limit on the number of tests an individual may take, or the number of times the same test is taken. The following license types are eligible for fee reimbursement: automobile adjuster, bail bond, casualty, commercial lines adjuster, crop adjuster, health/ accident, industrial fire, life, life, health/ accident, property, property casualty adjuster, personal lines adjuster, personal lines producer, property/ casualty, public adjuster, surety, surplus lines, title and workers compensation adjuster. Source: Louisiana Department of Insurance Topics Louisiana Virginia The North Carolina Department of Insurance announced multiple fraud enforcement actions during the first two months of 2019. Insurance fraud costs American consumers approximately $80 billion dollars a year. According to North Carolina Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey, fraud costs North Carolinians between 15 and 20 cents of every dollar paid on insurance premiums and its getting worse. Insurance fraud affects our economy. Not only does it damage insurance companies, it cheats businesses and consumers too, Causey said. This kind of white-collar crime is unacceptable. Thats why Ive doubled the number of Special Agents to investigate insurance fraud. Cracking down on fraud will put more money in the pockets of businesses and consumers. Details of the incidents, as reported by NCDOI, are as follows: Durham Man Faces Charges Over Submitting Duplicate Claims Djuan Colby Mitchell, 29, of Durham, N.C., was arrested and charged with felony insurance fraud and felony obtaining property by false pretense, according to a Jan. 3, 2019 statement from Causey. According to the arrest warrant, Mitchell is accused of falsely obtaining $1,270 by submitting duplicate auto insurance claims to both Progressive Insurance and The General Insurance Company. The offenses occurred between March 29, 2018, and June 25, 2018. Durham police arrested Mitchel on Dec. 27 in Durham County. He was given a $5,000 unsecured bond. Winston-Salem Man Accused of Filing Fraudulent Claim with GEICO Nicholas McFarland, 25, of Winston-Salem, N.C. was arrested and charged with felony insurance fraud, NCDOI reported on Jan. 3. According to the arrest warrant, McFarland filed an auto policy claim on Aug. 31, 2017, for damages to a 2005 Mustang with GEICO knowing that he had previously filed damages for the vehicle with National General Insurance Co. on May 12, 2017. Special agents with the Department of Insurances Criminal Investigations Division say that McFarland switched from National General to GEICO after National General denied the initial claim. Winston-Salem police arrested McFarland on Dec. 28. He was given a $2,500 unsecured bond. Texas Man Arrested for Theft of $83K from Insurer Andrew Bryant Belk, 29, of Frisco, Texas was arrested on charges of embezzling $83,196 from the insurer he worked for between December 2015 and March 2016, according to an Jan. 30 statement from Causey. Bryant was charged with 16 counts of felony embezzlement and 16 counts of felony conspiracy to embezzle funds from IAT Insurance Group Inc. while working for the insurance company. Four others were also charged with felony conspiracy Duvontae Daquon Covington, 26, of 9301 Reedybrook Crossing, Apex; Devonte Montez Jackson, 26, of Americus, Ga.; Amara Matrell Sturkey, 25, of Marion, S.C.; and Jordan Anthony Reaves, 28, of Atlanta. Special Agents with the Department of Insurances Criminal Investigations Division, along with Wake County sheriffs deputies and Durham police, cooperated in making the arrests. Belk, Sturkey and Covington were arrested on Jan. 24. Jackson was arrested on Jan. 29. Reeves was arrested Jan. 30. Belk was placed under a $30,000 secured bond and given a Feb. 14 date in Wake County District Court. Sturkey was placed under a $3,000 secured bond pending a Feb. 14 court date. Covington was given a $5,000 unsecured bond and a Feb. 18 court date. Jackson was placed under a $2,000 secured bond and given a Feb. 19 court date. Reeves was placed under a $10,000 secured bond and given a Jan. 31 court date. The investigation is ongoing, and more arrests are expected. Goldsboro Woman Charged with Insurance Fraud Annie Darlene Bell, 49, of Goldsboro, N.C., was charged with felony insurance fraud and arrested, a Jan. 30 statement from NCDOI said. According to the arrest warrant, Bell added a 2008 Acura to a Progressive Insurance Co. auto policy knowing that damage to the car occurred before the addition was made. The offense occurred between Nov. 12, 2018, and Dec. 12, 2018. Special agents with the Department of Insurances Criminal Investigations Division arrested Bell on Jan. 15. She was given a $5,000 unsecured bond. Laurinburg Woman Accused of Filing False Claim with Progressive Amber Lashae Morrison, 31, of Laurinburg, N.C., was arrested and charged with insurance fraud and attempting to obtain property by false pretense, both felonies, according to a Feb. 5 statement from Causey. Special agents with the Department of Insurances Criminal Investigations Division accuse Morrison of falsely telling Progressive Casualty Insurance Co. that her 2015 Malibu was damaged by a tree during a hurricane. The damage had previously been reported to a different insurance company as the result of a 2017 hit-and-run crash, according to the arrest warrant. The previous company had already paid the claim. However, the damage had not been repaired, the warrant says. The offense occurred on Sept. 15, 2018. Morrison was arrested on Jan. 16 and released on a written promise to appear in court. Charlotte Man Accused of Filing Fraudulent Auto Claim Kahlisemon Da Aru Anwar Ortiz, 34, Charlotte, N.C., was arrested and charged with felony insurance fraud, according to a Feb. 6 statement from Causey. Special agents with the NCDOI Criminal Investigations Division accuse Ortiz of falsely claiming lost wages as a result of an automobile accident. Ortiz claimed he was employed by and lost wages from Get a Gryp Fitness in Brooklyn, N.Y., a company that does not exist, according to the arrest warrant. The offense occurred on Aug. 15, 2018. Ortiz was arrested on Jan. 24 and given a $1,000 unsecured bond pending a Feb. 14 court date in Mecklenburg County. Georgia Accused Man Accused of Conspiracy to Embezzle Christopher Shawn Brice, 27, of Marietta, Ga., was charged with two counts of felony conspiracy, NCDOI reported on Feb. 14. Special agents with the NCDOI Criminal Investigations Division accuse Brice of conspiring with Andrew Bryant Belk to embezzle funds from IAT Insurance Group. Belk was previously arrested. The offense occurred between Feb. 2, 2016, and March 14, 2016. Special agents and Wake County deputies arrested Brice on Feb. 5. He was given a $10,000 secured bond. Timberlake Man Accused of Providing False Info for Auto Claim Jimmy Edward Brown, 36, of Timberlake, N.C., was arrested and charged with felony insurance fraud, NCDOI reported on Feb. 14. Special agents with NCDOIs Criminal Investigations Division accuse Brown of giving Metropolitan Property and Casualty Insurance Co. false information when filing an automobile policy claim. According to the arrest warrant, Brown told the insurer that his car had been stolen at the time of an accident. Agents discovered Brown permitted an acquaintance to drive the car when the accident happened. The offense occurred between June 25-30, 2018. Garner Man Arrested for $79K in Renters Insurance Fraud Dwight Eugene Bell Jr., 30, of Garner, N.C., faces multiple charges involving renters insurance policies, according to a Feb. 19 statement from Causey. Bell is charged with five counts of felony insurance fraud, three counts of felony obtaining property by false pretense, two counts of felony attempting to obtain property by false pretense, felony possession of a card forgery device, felony conspiracy, and misdemeanor possession or manufacture of a fraudulent ID. According to the arrest warrants, Bell provided fraudulent receipts, falsely reported items as stolen, and conspired with others in an attempt to obtain $79,082 in renters insurance claims from State Farm Fire Casualty Insurance Co. The offenses occurred between Oct. 31, 2017, and Nov. 15, 2018. Special agents with the Department of Insurances Criminal Investigations Division, along with Johnston County deputies and Garner police, arrested Bell on Feb. 7. He was given a $75,000 secured bond. Further arrests are expected as the investigation continues. Georgia Man Charged with Conspiracy to Embezzle Sheldon James May, 27, of Columbus, Ga., was arrested and charged with felony conspiracy, according to a Feb. 20 statement from Causey. Special agents with the Department of Insurances Criminal Investigations Division accuse May of conspiring with Andrew Bryant Belk to embezzle money from IAT Insurance Group Inc. Belk was arrested earlier. The offense occurred between March 8-9, 2016. Special agents and Wake County deputies arrested May on Feb. 7. He was given a $3,000 secured bond. Saint Pauls Woman Accused of False Renters Insurance Claim Melissa Anne Oldfield, 25, of Saint Pauls N.C, was charged with insurance fraud and attempting to obtain property by false pretense, both felonies, NCDOI reported on Feb. 20. Special agents with the Department of Insurances Criminal Investigations Division accuse Oldfield of providing a misleading statement and a false handwritten diagnostic report to USAA Insurance to support a renters insurance claim that stated two television sets were damaged by an electrical surge after Hurricane Florence. The offense occurred on Sept. 13, 2018. Oldfield was served a criminal summons on Feb. 1 and ordered to appear in Robeson County District Court on Feb. 25. Kannapolis Woman Accused of Filing False Claims with Progressive Stephanie Blackwood, 34, of Kannapolis, N.C. was arrested and charged with two counts of insurance fraud and two counts of attempting to obtain property by false pretense, all felonies, Causey said in a statement on Feb. 20. According to the arrest warrants, Blackwood filed two false claims with Progressive Insurance Co. for damage to a vehicle. The first claim was filed before the policy went into effect. The second involved a claim that had previously been reported. The offenses occurred between Aug. 16, 2018, and Oct. 23, 2018. Special agents with the Department of Insurances Criminal Investigations Division and Kannapolis police arrested Blackwood on Feb. 11. She was given a $2,000 secured bond. Topics Carriers Trends Agencies Auto Fraud Abuse Molestation Law Enforcement Property North Carolina The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) will conduct a rate hearing to receive public comment on the proposed rate changes from Citizens Property Insurance Corp. for its business in the Coastal Account (CA), Commercial Lines Account, and Personal Lines Account (PLA). These accounts include, but are not limited to: commercial property, homeowners, mobile homeowners, and the dwelling fire lines of business. The rate hearing will be held Thursday, March 14, 2019 at 5:00 p.m. in the Kovens Conference Center, Bayview Ballroom North, Room 214B at Florida International University (Biscayne Bay Campus), located at 3000 N.E. 151st Street in North Miami. Citizens filed for a statewide average increase of an average statewide 8.2 percent for personal lines policyholders homeowners, condominium owners and renters in December. The Florida insurer of last resorts said the increase reflects the continued impact of runaway litigation costs that are driving up rates across the state. The proposed rate changes filed by Citizens are as follows: OIR said there are no proposed rate changes for sinkhole coverage and the requested rate increases in the chart above are not uniform. The effective date of the proposed rate changes for all three accounts (Coastal, Commercial Lines, and Personal Lines) is Sept. 1, 2019. The general public can submit comments about Citizens proposed rate filings by sending an email to: ratehearings@floir.com with Citizens in the subject line of the email. Comments will be accepted for consideration on rate filings until 5:00 p.m. (Eastern Time) on March 22, 2019. Under Florida law, written communications to the OIR are public record and subject to disclosure, including being available to the public and media. The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation has primary responsibility for regulation, compliance and enforcement of statutes related to the business of insurance and the monitoring of industry markets. Source: Florida Office of Insurance Regulation Topics Trends Legislation Florida Pricing Trends Homeowners DeSart, who is a Christian, first broached the topic in December when she suggested an end to the practice. However, she has said she would not push for a vote, believing the current board, which is controlled by a Republican majority, would not vote in her favor. March 13, 2019 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Brexit has failed and it must now be put back to the people - including to the 700,000 British expats who were denied the vote in 2016, says the CEO of one of the world's largest independent financial advisory organizations. Nigel Green, the founder and chief executive of deVere Group, is speaking out after UK Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal was savaged again in parliament, resoundingly rejecting it for the second time. Mr Green observes: "Politicians have spectacularly failed to reach a consensus to deliver Brexit. With just 16 days before the UK is due to leave the European Union, we now urgently need to find a way out of this impasse. "There are three steps that now need to be taken to end the chaos and move forward. "First, a no deal Brexit must be taken off the table which parliament is likely to do in this evening's vote, as a messy and disorderly Brexit on 29 March would be political, diplomatic and economic negligence in the extreme. "Second, the UK must then seek to extend Article 50 - the mechanism by which it leaves the EU. But the UK can't extend Article 50 alone. It would need to go to Brussels to get the unanimous agreement of all 27 other EU countries. "It is likely that the EU will only agree to this if political circumstances change - not just to give more time to renegotiate the existing failed deal. "Which leads us to the third step - a second Brexit referendum. This bold move should not only convince the EU into allowing the UK an extension, it now seems the only sensible way forward as there is no parliamentary majority in Britain for any single option. "Allowing the public to vote and giving them a final say is quite simply the only credible solution now available." He continues: "However, this time, the 700,000 British expats who were outrageously denied the right to vote on an issue that directly affects them must also be allowed to exercise their democratic right. "Unlike in most other major democracies, British citizens who choose to live, work or retire overseas for more than 15 years lose their voting rights in the UK - despite being liable for UK inheritance tax." Mr Green concludes: "From inaccurate and often misleading campaigns to ineffective negotiations, the Brexit omnishambles has gone on long enough. "Brexit will impact economic, security, diplomatic and foreign policy decisions for the UK for many decades. After MPs have tried but failed, this issue is too important not to now be put back to the people." e: george@priorconsultancy.co.uk t: +44 207 1220 925 Twitter: @PriorConsults deVere Group is one of the world's largest independent advisors of specialist global financial solutions to international, local mass affluent, and high-net-worth clients. It has a network of more than 70 offices across the world, over 80,000 clients and $12bn under advisement. More Info: This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leaders Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. 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Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp Anglo Irish Bank behaved in a morally reprehensible manner towards Sean Quinns children when they signed guarantees for loans of hundreds of millions of euro aimed at propping up its falling share price, the High Court has been told. These five young people were ignorant of the banks true financial position when signing guarantees in 2007 and 2008 and were never contacted by Anglo about the guarantees, Bernard Dunleavy SC said. The five were aged between 20 and 32 in 2007 but Anglo did not even know their ages, counsel outlined. Its conduct was such the court should find the children have no liability under the securities, he urged. Brenda Quinn, the youngest, was 20 when she signed a guarantee for a loan to a Cypriot company in the Quinn group, he said. She was then pursuing a college course in business and human resources. Aoife Quinn, aged 26 in 2007, had a BSc in health fitness and leisure, was attending the Law Society in 2007 and was an apprentice solicitor in 2008 on a salary of about 18,000. Sean Quinn Junior, aged 28 in 2007, had completed a Business Studies degree and was working in 2007 in middle management at Quinn Insurance. Ciara Quinn was aged 31 in 2007, had trained as a nurse and did voluntary nursing in Albania and Kosovo and agency nursing here before joining Quinn Insurance in 2005 where she was a claims manager in 2007. Colette Quinn, aged 32 in 2007, has a BA Commerce degree and was an assistant operations manager with Quinn Hotels in 2007. Mr Dunleavy, with Ciaran Lewis SC, is continuing his opening of the children's action against Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC), Anglos successor in title, and against receivers appointed over shares. In their action, the five contend the guarantees and share pledges signed by them are invalid and have no legal effect. Mr Dunleavy said the guarantees were required by Anglo for loans advanced by it to Quinn companies for the purpose of unwinding Contracts for Difference (CFD) held by their father in the bank. When the CFDs were unwound into Anglo shares, one portion was purchased by a group of investors known as the "Maple Ten" and the rest by the Quinn Group. The Quinn shares were transferred to six Quinn-owned Cypriot companies which ultimately received 498m from Anglo. The childrens core claim is the securities provided by them are invalid on grounds including the banks alleged knowledge of their fathers influence over them, "unconscionable bargain", negligence and breach of duty by the bank to them, especially to advise them. They dispute they have a liability of some 83m each under the guarantees or any liability in relation to their share pledges. Mr Dunleavy said that, in 2007, Anglos share price was tanking and it needed to unwind the CFDs agreements to exchange the difference between the current and future price of shares in Anglo - to protect itself. The bank was engaged in a complex exercise of presenting a picture of itself to the public which was entirely at odds with reality, he said. Between the time the lending was agreed and the drawdown of the loans, the value of Anglo shares had further fallen and no one would give a personal guarantee for such loans except in very extreme circumstances, he said. This situation was so at odds with normal common sense the banks conscience should have alerted it to need to make sure the Quinn children absolutely understood what they were doing. It was morally reprehensible of Anglo to take guarantees from the children when it never contacted them about those or advised them to take independent legal advice. Counsel agreed with Mr Justice Garrett Simons the guarantees stated that independent legal advice should be taken. Every guarantee says that, he said. When the judge asked why the children did not take independent legal advice, counsel said that did not arise because their relationship with their father was such they signed whatever they were asked to sign. The bank must also have concluded that was so because it never contacted them at all about the guarantees, he said. Sean Quinn Senior and two former Quinn group senior executives, Liam McCaffrey and Dara O'Reilly, are third parties to the case. IBRC contends, if it is found liable to the children, it is entitled to an indemnity against the third parties arising from how the guarantees and share pledges were allegedly obtained. The third parties deny its claims. Arising from Mr Quinns bankruptcy, which he has since exited, the bank previously got liberty to enter judgment, if applicable, against him. IBRC also previously got a judgement for 120m, from the childrens mother, Patricia Quinn, arising from a guarantee provided by her. She is bankrupt and no longer involved in the childrens case. The hearing continues on Thursday. Many asylum seekers living in direct provision centres have described the right to work as liberating. The Ombudsman Peter Tyndall noted 1,845 out of 2,662 asylum seekers (70%) were granted permission to access the labour market in the past year. The Supreme Court ruled in May 2017 that the blanket prohibition preventing asylum seekers from working was unconstitutional and the law was changed early last year. Mr Tyndall, who has today published a report on complaints from direct provision residents, said there were no complaints received from the 780 asylum seekers refused permission to work. My staff reported that in the course of their visits to accommodation centres, during the autumn of 2018, they received many comments from residents about how liberating they had found the ability to seek employment, he said. Staff at the centres also commented about how the right to work had led to a positive change in the atmosphere of many of the centres. Asylum seekers in paid employment will be asked to pay a proportion of their accommodation costs, calculated at 238 per week per resident. Mr Tyndall said he had no difficulty with the principle of people who are getting the benefit of a state service being asked to make a contribution towards the cost according to their means. The charges will be published by the Reception and Integration Agency (RIA) and any complaint about the calculation of the charges can be examined by the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman received 148 complaints from direct provision residents last year, compared to 115 over the nine-month period April to December 2017. However, allowing for the different time periods, there was proportionally very little difference in the level of complaints received in 2018 compared to 2017. Most of the 148 complaints during 2018 related to the refusal of requests to transfer to other centres (32), facilities at centres (20), accommodation (14) and refusal to readmit residents to centres (13). Mr Tyndall said the refusal of requests for readmission to a centre was a new subject of complaints against the RIA last year. While asylum seekers are entitled to avail of direct provision accommodation while their applications are processed, they are not obliged either to enter or remain in centres. Mr Tyndall said that, following engagement with his office, the RIA arranged for the re-admission of 10 people into direct provision. There was one complaint from a resident who had been removed from direct provision for consistent unacceptable behaviour. I did not uphold the complaint as I accepted that it was not unreasonable for RIA to have removed the person concerned from the service as a result of their persistent unacceptable behaviour, said Mr Tyndall. Of the 32 complaints about transfers, only two were upheld by the Ombudsman. Nine were not upheld and, in seven cases, assistance was provided. In 11 cases, the complaint was either withdrawn or considered outside the remit of the Ombudsman and three are continuing. In two cases not upheld by the Ombudsman, transfers were agreed by the RIA to reunite a person with family members and to allow another to avail of educational opportunities. A scan for Ruth Morrissey may have diagnosed a recurrence of her cancer but a chance of cure is extremely low, a leading consultant has told the High Court. Consultant obstetrician Donal Brennan, who examined the terminally ill mother's scan of February 2018 which diagnosed a recurrence of her cancer in the pelvic wall, said the cancer for this "unfortunate woman" was in a very unusual position. Professor Brennan was giving evidence on Day 28 of Ms Morrissey's long-running action against the HSE and two US laboratories over the alleged misreading of her CervicalCheck smear slides. He said the mass on Ms Morrissey's pelvic wall is invading into her hip bone and surgery is not an option. Asked by HSE counsel Patrick Hanratty SC about scanning patients after surgery, Prof. Brennan said there have not been great developments in scanning and routine imaging is not without potential risks. He said he disagreed that Ruth Morrissey was in the high-risk category after her trachelectomy in 2014. He agreed her recurrence was an aggressive cancer invading the bone and was probably a fast-growing tumour. The radiology features, he said, suggest the recurrence of cancer was an aggressive, fast-growing tumour which recurred six months previously. The tumour, he said, was enclosed and began pushing on the sciatic nerve. From his assessment, he said he couldnt confirm the recurrence was detectable before February 2017. Prof. Brennan said it was very unusual to see a tumour invade the hip bone as has happened in this case. It is extremely rare for cervical cancer to go into the bone. This is the first case I have seen of this degree of bone involvement. He added it means the recurring cancer is aggressively invading into the bone and it suggests it has got very aggressive. Cross-examined by Ruth Morrissey's counsel, Jeremy Maher SC, he said he disagreed with the suggestion the duty of care demanded that imaging be carried out on Ms Morrissey as part of her follow-up care after her 2014 surgery. Ruth Morrissey and her husband Paul. Pic: Collins In her action, Ms Morrissey and her husband Paul Morrissey, of Monaleen, Co Limerick have sued the HSE and two US laboratories, Quest Diagnostics Ireland Ltd with offices at Sir John Rogersons Quay, Dublin, along with Medlab Pathology Ltd with offices at Sandyford Business Park, Dublin 18. It is claimed there was an alleged failure to correctly report and diagnose and misinterpretation of her smear samples taken in 2009 and 2012 and her cancer spread unidentified, unmonitored and untreated until she was diagnosed with cervical cancer in June 2014. It is further claimed a review of the 2009 and 2012 smears took place in 2014 and 2015 with the results sent to Ms Morrisseys treating gynaecologist in 2016, but she was not told until May 2018 of those results which showed her smears were reported incorrectly. The HSE admitted it owed a duty of care to Ms Morrissey. The laboratories deny all claims. The case before Mr Justice Kevin Cross continues. Lifeboat taskings to rescue three women from the fast-flowing Corrib in Galway earlier this week have prompted the ports harbour master to call for safety railings on the citys riverbank. The Galway RNLI inshore lifeboat launched twice on Monday to rescue three women from the icy waters in operations involving Galway Fire Brigade and the Garda. Galway harbour master Capt Brian Sheridan said it was time to reconsider proposals for railings on exposed areas like the Spanish Arch. Railings installed in the dock area near the harbour marina had reduced the incidence of accidental drowning, he noted. The first alert was shortly after 2.30pm when a young woman was seen entering the river at OBriens Bridge. The Irish Coast Guard rescue 115 Shannon helicopter was tasked, along with the Galway lifeboat. After an extensive 40-minute search, a local vessel spotted the woman in the water just outside the harbour gates near Lough Atalia. The lifeboat crew recovered the woman, and administered CPR. She was transferred to the National Ambulance Service and taken to University Hospital, Galway, where she was pronounced dead. The second alert at 7.30pm followed a report that a woman had been seen in the water at Wolfe Tone Bridge. The Port of Galway pilot vessel was assisting a ship at the time, but joined the search with the Galway lifeboat crew. Another woman who had seen what had occurred deployed a lifebuoy ring and located the casualty in the river and kept her head above water. The two women, one of whom was unconscious, were rescued by the lifeboat crew and fire brigade staff within 20 minutes. Paramedics at the lifeboat station revived the unconscious woman and she was taken to hospital for treatment. The lifeboats actions followed the successful rescue of a man who had fallen into the canal accidentally and been swept down river in the early hours of last Friday morning. Three fire brigade staff were swept down river while trying to locate him, and all four were picked up by the lifeboat. We were waiting just below the bridge arch with spotlights on, Galway RNLI lifeboat operations manager Mike Swan said, paying tribute to the fire officers and lifeboat crew. We would like to remind the public to be alert and vigilant, and to phone 999 or 112 if they need to alert the emergency services. The faster they act, the better for everyone, Mr Swan said. Bad weather has hampered the water search on Lough Mask for an angler who has been missing since last week. The mans boat and lifejacket were located. The Corrib Mask Search and Rescue team, which was out on the lake all week, was forced to suspend the water search on Monday but shore searches have continued. A payment of 400 to the Garda Benevolent Fund could have spared a 41-year-old man his first conviction for assaulting gardai but it emerged yesterday in court the money was never paid. This resulted in Krzystof Kwatowski being convicted of assaulting a member of An Garda Siochana and fined 400 and being put on a peace bond in respect of two other counts of assaulting gardai that were taken into consideration. Inspector Gary McPolin said yesterday that if 400 had been paid to the Garda Benevolent Fund, the judge had indicated that the accused would give him the benefit of a dismissal under the Probation of Offenders Act on the charge of assault and all other charges would be taken into consideration. Oak Brooks Public Works Department will handle installation. That cost is not to exceed $30,000, but is expected to be less than $25,000, Kruger said, noting that only one pole needs to be installed. The rest of the equipment will be attached to existing traffic signal poles. The proposed introduction of tariffs by Britain on Irish exports would lead to 'Armageddon' in Irish farming, the Dail heard. Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin said the announcement of a tariff regime by the British Government would wipe out the beef industry. Many primary producers, including beef and suckler farmers, would go to the wall, he said. I refer to producers of cheddar cheese, poultry, lamb and pork. Such an outcome would devastate the rural Irish economy and sectors of our agricultural industry," he claimed during Leaders Questions. "The cost to the beef sector alone would be more than 800 million if these tariffs were ultimately to apply. Mr Martin said: It is time for everyone to stand back and reflect. I dont think Ireland is as prepared as the Government likes to think. He said it was important to have some shape fleshed out for an aid package for farmers and food producers fearful of market disruption because of tariffs. The meat and farming industries have known a threat (from tariffs and a no deal Brexit) was possible for some time, he said. A no deal would be devastating for rural Ireland, in particular, the border areas, he warned. This is nonsense, this carry-on. Mr Martin, on RTE Radio, said he would not get into a petty party political row". If a no deal Brexit happens then tariffs will apply. The Government knows this is the elephant in the room. He added that it was understandable that if negotiations are underway people are not going to show their hand. However, he called on the Government to face up to the challenges ahead and to be transparent. Tanaiste Simon Coveney, in response, said the tariffs will be very damaging to trade and businesses, farmers and consumers in Ireland and the UK. We will study the impact of these proposals carefully, together with our EU partners, he said. The imperative is to work together, and with our EU partners, to ensure we deliver on the shared goal of avoiding a hard border, deal or no deal, he added. Mr Coveney added that in the event of a no-deal Brexit, the Government will seek further relaxation of state aid rules and EU support for businesses and agribusiness. In its contingency action plan, the EU Commission noted the specific challenges faced by Irish businesses and committed to helping Ireland find specific solutions, he said. The Government, he said, is in close contact with the EU Commission on the matter of state aid supports. In February, the EU Commission announced a relaxation of state aid rules regarding supports for farmers. Aid limits per farm were increased from 15,000 to 25,000, he said. Mr Coveney said that should a no-deal Brexit occur, the Government will need to borrow money in that instance. We may well have to dip into a rainy day fund and we will have to work in partnership with the European Commission to protect vulnerable sectors that are exposed in the context of a no-deal Brexit and the type of tariff regime that could be imposed, as we saw this morning, he said. It will cost money and it may well result in Ireland going back into deficit rather than staying in surplus should that be necessary but it would be wrong at this stage to raise expectations in terms of the amount of money we are speaking about, he added. Coveney downbeat after Mays revised plan defeated in Commons Political Editor A disorderly Brexit is now closer than ever after British prime minister Theresa May suffered a second humiliating defeat over her revised Brexit plan, Tanaiste Simon Coveney has said. Ms May saw some of her MPs drop their opposition from January and opt to vote in favour, but not enough to prevent the deal being defeated in the House of Commons by 391 votes to 242, a majority 149. So weak has Ms Mays position become, she has been forced to allow a free vote today when MPs will decide whether they wish to leave the EU without a deal on March 29. In Dublin, Mr Coveney struck a downbeat note saying a no-deal Brexit looks closer now than it did only a few hours ago. The focus has to be on London, that is where the crisis is, that is where the problem is, and thats where the solutions have to come from. We here in Dublin will continue to plan for a no-deal Brexit, which of course looks closer now than it did a few hours ago. But we have a huge amount of work done. He said contingency plans here in Ireland for a no-deal are intensifying given the defeat in Westminster. Mr Coveneys comments were echoed by EU leaders in Brussels. The Commons second rejection of the EU-UK Brexit deal has significantly increased the risk of a damaging no-deal divorce, said a spokesman for European Council president Donald Tusk. We regret the outcome of tonights vote, said the spokesman. On the EU side, we have done all that is possible to reach an agreement... it is difficult to see what more we can do, he said. The EUs chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, responded to the result by saying: The EU has done everything it can to help get the withdrawal agreement over the line. The impasse can only be solved in the UK. Mr Barnier highlighted the need for the EU-wide contingency plans for a disorderly Brexit. Our no-deal preparations are now more important than ever before, he said. Ms Mays revised Brexit deal, agreed in Strasbourg on Monday, was doomed once her attorney general Geoffrey Cox said the legal risk remains unchanged from the original withdrawal agreement, despite the new additional concessions. Mr Cox told MPs that the changes reduce the risk that the UK could be trapped indefinitely in the backstop, but do not remove it altogether. Shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer said Mr Cox had confirmed that no significant changes had been secured in two months of negotiations and the governments strategy was in tatters. Shortly after, the DUP and leading hardline Brexiteer Tory MPs were quick to signal their intention to vote against the motion. DUP Westminster leader Nigel Dodds said: Our position is simple. The best way to get a deal you can actually vote for is to keep the threat of a no-deal on the table. Once you take that threat off you are bound to be offered terms which are less advantageous." Ultimately, some 75 Leave and Remain Conservative MPs united to rebel and condemn Ms Mays Brexit deal to another major defeat. Tanaiste Simon Coveney has said there are no changes to the text of the withdrawal agreement or the Irish protocol in the deal agreed between British prime minister Theresa May and EU President Jean Claude Juncker. He said it has never been the goal of the EU, or of Ireland for that matter, to trap the UK in a backstop indefinitely. This has never been the case and it is still not the case. The reason we were happy to support the wording last night is to try to provide more reassurance in a very real way by putting a legal obligation on the EU to put processes in place that are convincing, he said. Mr Coveney, speaking in the Dail during leaders questions, said Ireland will not be the obstacle to granting more time, should it be necessary, and if there is a plan to try to finalise arrangements during that period. What is being presented to Westminster this evening is different from the last meaningful vote. That being said, from an Irish perspective the text and content of the withdrawal agreement have not changed. What has changed is the extra language which commits the EU and the UK in a legal document to clear procedures ensuring they work together to try to avoid using the backstop and to ensure that it is temporary if it is ever required, he said. Mr Coveney said in a no-deal scenario everybody loses. It would be hugely damaging to the United Kingdom on many levels but also it would be hugely challenging for Ireland, he said. It is clear from the text agreed last night that the withdrawal agreement itself is not being changed. That is understood. There is a new legal instrument which requires of both the UK and the EU a series of processes that reassure everybody that there is good faith on both sides to work towards preventing the use of the backstop in the first place or, if it is ever triggered, that it is temporary." On the temporary nature of the backstop, he said it is an insurance mechanism nobody wants to use but if it is ever used both sides will use their best endeavours to ensure it is temporary. Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin said the incoherence of British politics has exacerbated the situation. It is important to point out, however, that a no-deal Brexit would be devastating for the United Kingdom, for Ireland and for the European Union. I am sure the Tanaiste will agree. It must be avoided. Its impact on livelihoods and businesses, particularly the agrifood industry, would be very damaging. That is particularly the case given the crisis in our beef industry. A no-deal Brexit, if it happened, would essentially wipe out that industry. A no-deal Brexit would also represent a monumental failure of politics on all sides. That is why it was important to compromise and agree to some changes." Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin said it is certain we will not have a comprehensive trade agreement by the end of next year. Even by the maximum end date of the end of 2022, it is quite likely that a future relationship agreement will not have been concluded and that the backstop will legally have to be triggered. On Monday night, Theresa May travelled to Strasbourg for last-ditch talks with European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. They agreed three points, namely: To not change the withdrawal agreement; To give further legal assurances to London, described by Ms May as binding, that the backstop can be sent to an independent arbitration panel if the EU acts in bad faith in the two-year post-Brexit period; Thirdly, Britain can say it can unilaterally leave the backstop if this happens, to end fears of being trapped in the deal. At an emergency Cabinet meeting, Ireland accepted the three-pronged deal after EU advice. What went wrong? In simple terms, reality raised its ugly head. As was quickly pointed out, the crucial third point only said the EU agreed Britain can say it can leave the backstop unilaterally, and did not say the EU agreed Britain can leave a subtle, but vital difference. In a statement to the House of Commons yesterday, Britains attorney general Geoffrey Cox dealt the deal a fatal blow, saying while the changes reduced the backstop trap risk, it did not remove it. In response, the DUP and the Conservative Partys hard-line Brexiteer think-tank, the European Research Group, said they will not back the deal. What does this mean for Britain? The drama in London has thrown Britain, never mind Brexit, into fresh chaos with Ms May facing growing calls to resign, rumours of a potential snap British election and the Brexit solution labelled a phantom by Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg. The House of Commons heavily rejected the deal last night. Today, MPs will vote on whether to rule out a no-deal crash-out Brexit, before voting tomorrow on whether to seek a March 29 deadline extension. What will it mean for Ireland and the EU? Despite a genuine scare, Irelands position remains unchanged. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said yesterday the withdrawal agreement and the backstop remains unchanged as Mondays developments are complementary and do not replace them. He also separated Britains unilateral declaration view by noting it does not change the backstop as the EU has simply noted the British move, not accepted it. And what does this mean for Brexit itself? Take your pick, and a deep breath, before choosing between a crash-out no-deal Brexit, a deadline extension potentially to May 24, Ms Mays resignation, a snap British election, a second referendum, or Brexit not happening at all. In the latter stages of his career in the saddle he may be but the joy of riding a winner at the Cheltenham Festival commands a broader-than-ever smile from Ruby Walsh, who didnt have to wait long to make that familiar walk back to the winners enclosure. In a sight weve become accustomed to, Walsh stood up in the saddle, turned to the crowd and waved his whip in the air in delight as he and Klassical Dream crossed the line clear of the field in the Sky Bet Supreme Novices Hurdle. Its a sight weve been treated to six times in this race. From Noland all the way back in 2006, to consecutive wins from 2011 with Al Ferof, Champagne Fever, Vautour and Douvan, its a race that has been good to Walsh and, conversely, one in which he has been particularly good to punters. But this one was special. Ruby, who would not want to talk himself up, may disagree, but this was poetry from the saddle. So keen was his mount that he almost didnt get to the start. An incident on the way out onto the course almost resulted in a parting of the ways, but Walsh held firm and the duo eventually made their way to the tape. And the drama didnt stop there. Keen to get on with proceedings, Klassical Dream jumped forward prematurely, resulting in a false start an occurrence which roused an ironic chorus of boos from an expectant crowd waiting to give the traditional Cheltenham roar which gets the meeting underway. At the second attempt, the race got underway without further ado, and Walsh and his mount jumped off prominently as outsider Brandon Castle set the pace. With head bowed low, Klassical Dream kept his rider busy, demanding his attention as he tried to go a stride quicker than his rider would like. But Walsh kept a lid on his mount and thereafter the two moved through the race always looking the likely winners. Still going best coming down the hill and into the straight, Klassical Dream moved easily clear in the closing stages to beat the running-on Thomas Derby, with Itchy Feet in fourth and four-year-old Fakir Doudairies snatching fourth place on the line. The winning ride was all the more special for the fact it was Walshs first since being side-lined after a fall from Harrie at Thurles almost three weeks ago. Eleven times the champion rider at the meeting, there have been moments over recent seasons in which we doubted we would see him in the saddle at another Festival, but the lure of the meeting means Ruby keeps bouncing back. Back to his best. It gets the monkey off the back its a relief, beamed Walsh. The last time I was here was a sad enough day so its great to be back, he added, referring to his early exit from the meeting in 2018, following a fall from Al Boum Photo. Its a wonderful place, we dont get to do this often enough as jockeys, running in front of this atmosphere its unique. He (Klassical Dream) was magic every step of the way. He was very professional, very accurate. Well have the usual row, the Arkle or the Champion Hurdle. I kind of thought Al Dancer and Angels Breath were easier to take on than the horses in the Ballymore on Wednesday so thats why we swung around. Al Dancers form was coming through handicaps and Angels Breath, to me, at Kempton he looked vulnerable. You make a call. Sometimes youre right, sometimes youre wrong, but thats what we decided. Referring to the pre-race drama, Walsh explained: He got his head under the railing going out and obviously his head went under his neck and he caught me on my knee and spun me on his back I was lucky to stay on him, but he was fine then. He caused the false start. He barged forward and that didnt help. I hate when they happen, and I hate being the cause of them. Winning trainer Willie Mullins, for whom it was a sixth win in the race, added: Its terrific. Hes a very, very good horse. We took a risk running him on goodish firm ground at home, but we thought he had a fair engine all along. His work last weekend at the Curragh, we came away thinking heres one who will take a lot of beating at Cheltenham, no matter what he came up against. As all national hunt participants are all too aware, if it can raise you up, it can bring you back down. And the vagaries of the sport were in unfortunate evidence just hours later. A day which had been going along swimmingly for Mullins and Walsh crashed back to earth with a bang when Benie Des Dieux fell at the last with the OLBG Mares Hurdle seemingly at her mercy. In an incident strikingly reminiscent to that of Annie Power in 2015, the odds-on favourite appeared to jump quite high, clip the top of the hurdle on the way down, and then crash to the turf. Whereas in 2015, when another Mullins-trained mare, Glens Melody, stepped in to claim a fortunate success after the fall of Annie Power, this time the Dan Skelton-trained Roksana spoiled the party, staying on to deny two Mullins-trained horses, Stormy Ireland and Good Thyne Tara. It has been a very difficult week, but the horse is great and Ruby is fine, which is the most important thing, said Benie Des Dieuxs owner, Rich Ricci, who also owned Annie Power. I dont want the trolls to attack Ruby. He is the best jockey in the world, and it happens. I just hope he is protected from the same nonsense he got the last day. Benie Des Dieux was going very well and she is a very good mare. We will mind her, bring her back and she will win again, but I am just so sorry and its just difficult. Her getting up is the most important thing and thats what we have to remember. This game is tough, and I take a lot and Im tough. The fact that she got up should make everybody happy. I am sorry for people who punted her and I know that I will get stick for that as well, but it just doesnt matter - if shes up, thats fine. Former Limerick star Andrew OShaughnessy says he cant afford to worry about his multiple sclerosis (MS). Diagnosed with the condition in 2009 which forced the 2007 All-Star to quit inter-county hurling, an emotional OShaughnessy opens up on the brain disease on Andrew OShaughnessy Shaughs Story in the TG4/Nemeton Laochra Gael series on TG4 to be screened this day week. He tells how he took some comfort from having it, rather than another member of his family. A young nurse came in I feel so sorry for her now, she must have just been starting her career All your tests are coming clear, trying to reassure me. And then the same one had to come in and tell me that she was a bit too hasty giving me the results, it wasnt accurate, it transpired. She came back in and said, you are showing signs of multiple sclerosis. My mother was very shocked. I was shocked myself. I broke down once inside in the hospital. Two team-mates came in Brian OSullivan, and my brother Gavin and for some reason, I dont know why but I did, but that was the only time. I said to (OShaughnessys wife) Eimear, Look, this is what happened, this is life, you have to accept what has happened. Its just how you react to it. I said, Id prefer, of anyone in my family, that I get it cause I feel I am the one that is strongest enough to deal with it. That seems to be the case. I am not letting it get to me. I think about it once a day when I take my medication. Thats it. Sin e. Thats life. Get on with it, there are a lot of people in worse circumstance. There are a lot of people in better circumstances. If you start feeling self-pity and feeling sorry for yourself, you are on the back foot straight away, the same as anything. The Kilmallock mans latest MRI revealed a dramatic decrease of lesions on his brain and his neurologist Peter Ward couldnt be happier with him. OShaughnessys positive attitude certainly helps. People think about MS and they associate it with bygone years and the worst-case scenario before medication developed and got better. Fortunately enough, I am not in that case. It might be in some time in the future, but I cannot worry about that." In part of the programme, OShaughnessy returns to the infamous Justin McCarthy era when he and eight others were dropped off the panel after a 2009 season when they lost an All-Ireland semi-final to Tipperary by 24 points. We were doing hurling drills you do with U12s, a bad U12 team, but I was still committed, as in, We are still going to beat Tipperary, we are still going to beat Tipperary. Going up, I could have said to a good friend of mine, or Eimear, Well either beat Tipp by a few points or we could get annihilated. And I was right, unfortunately. And we didnt beat them by two points. I think we werent called back because we questioned the decision-making. It wasnt. We just questioned the process to try and improve things, not trying to give out and critique, this and that. We didnt accuse anyone, we said, would you not consider this? Subsequently, as that year further developed for myself, the reason hes gone is because of whats (MS) after happened to him. That was only an excuse. That was a happy coincidence for them, not a happy coincidence for me. Andrew OShaughnessy Shaughs Story will be broadcast on TG4 at 9.30pm on Wednesday March 20. You can view previous episodes of the Laochra Gael series on tg4.ie. Lisa Smith, an Irish woman who was married to a fighter in Syria, will be allowed home and will be difficult to prosecute, but it is uncertain what returnee policy should be, says Sheelagh Brady. In January, an Irish citizen, Alexandr Ruzmatovich Bekmirzaev, was captured by Kurdish-led forces in Syria, on suspicion of having fought with Islamic State. Mr Bekmirzaev was originally from Belarus and came to Ireland in the early 2000s. He reportedly made his way to Syria in 2013. His case, and the arrest in Syria of Lisa Smith, an Irish woman and former member of the Irish Defence Forces, brings the debate to Ireland about how we are going to manage returnee, suspected foreign terrorist fighters and their families, both documented and undocumented. Other nations face similar situations, with no simple answers. The cases of Mr Bekmirzaev, Ms Smith, and the host of other European citizens wanting to return home, highlight the security, political, and legal difficulties facing governments. Alex Younger, head of MI6, Britains secret intelligence service, recently said that some of the returnees are likely to have acquired the skills and connections that make them potentially very dangerous. However, assessing the potential risk of such individuals is only one element of a complex equation. So, what other options are there? Can we leave our citizens in limbo, irrespective of what is alleged against them? Is it legally, morally, or ethically acceptable to expect Iraq, Syria, and nations that have refugee camps which contain families of suspected fighters, to deal with all these people? Revoking citizenship is not easy. According to International law, it cannot be revoked if doing so would make a person stateless. This might provide options for those who are nationalised citizens, as their citizenship can be revoked, under certain conditions. Nonetheless, this is also not clearcut. Take, for example, someone who obtained citizenship after having had refugee status. The reason for this status might have been that it was not safe for them to go home. If this is still the case, it is unlikely they would be sent back, irrespective of what they are alleged to have done. Furthermore, where someone has dual citizenship rights, because of their parents, can we truly expect a nation to take a person who has never previously exercised their right as a citizen of that country? We should have a primary duty of care to our own citizens and their security. Moreover, this approach may present challenges for Ireland. It could possibly motivate or radicalise other dual citizens. Where would the line be drawn? Could they be susceptible to the same treatment for more minor infractions? So, withdrawing citizenship is no silver bullet. Furthermore, not all those who may be entitled to return have alternative citizenship. Would we treat these differently? While we may have little choice, it raises questions about equality across citizens. An alternative is to ensure that all returnees are arrested, debriefed, prosecuted, and, if found guilty, imprisoned. However, even if individuals are allowed back, with the proviso of prosecution, prosecution may be difficult, if impossible, even for suspected fighters, given that the securing of evidence from conflict zones at the standards necessary for our legal system would not be easy. If they cannot be prosecuted, can they be integrated back into society? Will they be willing? Will the public be open to this? Repatriating such individuals is likely to be met with public anger. How will this be managed? They will require integration into society and thus will need social housing and resources, perhaps given to them ahead of other members of society. Politically, this may be unacceptable. However, if we dont, we face greater consequences down the road. Secondly, how can one be certain, beyond a reasonable doubt, who fought with IS and who fought against them. Are we willing to change a core feature of our legal system? Should there be a difference in how we treat those who travelled to conflict zones, irrespective of the side they supported? Are we content in our notion of right? Furthermore, are we confident in the knowledge that some citizens have fought against IS and have returned, yet may have the skills and connections to make them potentially very dangerous? Are we even asking the right questions to determine risk? Are our debriefing interviews fit for purpose and are we debriefing the right people? The Government should not put off developing a policy to manage such returnees, even if that means dealing with individuals on a case-by-case basis, just because the implications of any of the choices referred to above need to be properly considered. For example, failure to repatriate citizens could leave them in limbo, which is likely to push them further underground. That would make them difficult to monitor. While this may reduce the potential direct impact on Ireland, there may be indirect risks. For one, this approach is also likely to reinforce possible feelings of disillusionment with the West, for those who want to come home and are unable to do so. Even if citizens are brought home, the government must think through the options available to them, the resource implications, and procedures and policy, because prosecution may not be an option. One must carefully manage reintegration. For one, if this is not done properly, it may motivate growing right-wing sentiment, as is being witnessed in other places across Europe. Sheelagh Brady is SARs senior analyst. SAR Consultancy (Security Analysis and Research) features experts from international law enforcement and security, the non-governmental sector, academia, public relations, and international logistics and procurement. I have a scene set in Chicago where a drug kingpin is being tried, Black related. He is the son of a cartel bigwig. They have a rescue attempt when theyre taking him to and from the courtroom. I set it in Chicago because I wanted to use the subway tracks underneath the street to smuggle him out. I went down there with a friend of mine whos a Chicago police officer. He took me around and we plotted how it would go. A privately-funded rapid transport network is being proposed for Dublin. Jed van de Poll, Dublin Metro CEO, explains an alternative to the Government-supported project Metrolink Metro Dublin has a grand vision for the capital citys public transport. Metro Dublin has a grand vision for the capital citys public transport. It is possible to put our network underground forming a backbone for mobility in Dublin. Through a desire for a better quality of life and sheer frustration, Dubliners understand the need for a mass transit public transport system. A European Commission Report in 2016 warned a key weakness in Irelands economy is the lack of a Dublin mass transit system critical for competitiveness, environment, quality of life, housing and mandatory emission reduction targets. Why is Metro Dublin offering an extensive metro network for Dublin? Well here are just a few reasons: This year was scheduled to see the completion of Metro North. The genesis of that noble venture goes back to 1975 when CIEs general manager John Byrne announced the Dublin Rail Rapid Transit System (DRRTS) for the new towns of Ballymun, Blanchardstown, Tallaght and Clondalkin. In 1990, however, CIE dropped the proposal in favour of a tram system. Five years later, the Dublin Transportation Initiative (DTI) approved three tram lines on the basis that they best met the transport needs of the city in terms of capacity, long term passenger demands, and at a bargain basement price of 220m. Approved by Government, the plan was modified by Mary ORourke, then minister of transport in 1998 following submissions from Senators David Norris and Feargal Quinn together with Dr Maurice Roche and the Cormac Rabbitt, who is now chairman of Metro Dublin. Their metro plan, from Sandyford under the city centre to the Airport (Metro SouthNorth), was also passed by the Dail. Subsequently, together with a Japanese consortium, Metro Dublin proposed to build the proposed Metro SouthNorth and it was the then taoiseach Bertie Ahern who gave the go-ahead for the Metro North element at a cost estimate in 2002 of 3.8bn. A year later, it was extended to Swords and, in 2007, procurement began on a slimmed down version costing just 2.74bn. However, the then transport minister Leo Varadkar, cancelled the plans in 2011, stating the need for a cheaper solution. Last year, the National Transport Authority (NTA) announced a brand new plan, MetroLink from Sandyford under the city centre to the Airport and Swords sounds familiar to cost 3bn. As we can see, the cost of Metro North/Link is something of a moveable feast. A December 2014 article in the Irish Times quoted a figure of 3.7bn for Metro North alone and 4.1bn for a DART underground. We can have confidence in these figures as the NTA assured us at the time that they had been independently evaluated. Let me borrow the NTAs own words from the same source when referring to early costings of Metro Dublins plans - when I say that the NTAs figures for both the cost and completion dates for MetroLink are completely unreal and fantastical. So far 225 million has been spent on Metro/DART underground planning but not a single shovel of earth has been moved. By the time 2020 comes around, and a likely new date for planning application, the NTA and its progenitors will have spent over 45 years planning a metro for Dublin. Does the taxpayer, and the public, think it is about time someone else had a go? Metro Dublin has a grand vision for Dublin transport. The NTA, on the other hand, has a small vision. Dont get me wrong its not that the NTA cant think as big as anyone, it is just that their vision is limited by the size of the public purse. Exchequer borrowings are maxed out. With Irelands national debt standing at 198 billion in August 2018, the European Central Bank will not allow government to further increase the figure. Public infrastructure projects will have to be funded out of current earnings. Since MetroLink will cost somewhere between 3bn and 9bn, the cost will have to be spread over the next 10 years. The NTAs project methodology binds them to the iron law of mega projects over budget, over time, over and over again. So the public cannot expect any ribbon cutting on the proposed new transport system before 2030. In order to build any metro, a Railway Order must be secured and the progress of all applications is governed by the NTA. Naturally, being a government body the NTA would like full control over all that happens in transport infrastructure but this is not their function. Indeed the NTA establishment Act requires them to actively seek and co-operate with developments such as Metro Dublin which they have, so far, failed to do. At rush hour, Dublin is the ninth most-congested city in the world and we are on the verge of gridlock. At any moment, the right sort of incident in the wrong place could bring the city centre to a standstill. We need radical thinking to solve Dublins mobility problems we need a radical approach. Metro Dublin will build 94 kilometres of Metro (46 km underground), 62 station stops, creating 19 major transport hubs, delivering 250 million passenger journeys per year by 2025. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar may be reminded of his desire to see a less expensive solution and his written comment about Metro Dublin project in 2014: if we could build an underground system in Dublin for significantly less than the Metro North/Dart underground proposals, in a much quicker timeframe and without needing significant subvention then Id support it unequivocally. As I am sure Dublin City Councils members would as well. Metro Dublin wont cost the Irish taxpayer a red cent and our team whose chairman Mr Rabbitt is one of Irelands most experienced transport civil engineers is assisted by Prof Dr Manuel Melis Maynar who has completed a larger project, in less time and with a smaller budget. Prof Melis is the worlds number one metro builder whose achievements were described by the World Bank as superb and ... from which the whole world could learn from a veritable modern-day Brunel. Metro Dublin has already introduced Prof Melis to Minister of Transport Shane Ross. Imagine, for a moment, taking 250 million people off Dublins roads annually. And we have been deliberately conservative with our figures. Munich with a smaller population than Dublin delivers over 400 million passenger journeys per year with its modern 110-kilometre of metro. Contrary to what people might think, the efficiency of a mass public transport system lies not in population density but in geography. You have to feed the beast a central underground loop six radial lines from Ashbourne, Swords, Donaghmede, Rathfarnham, Adamstown and Blanchardstown will converge on the city centre feeding the underground loop line in the heart of the capital. As so much of the track is underground, no GAA pitch or apartment block or such will be demolished or disrupted in the building of the network. But the real beauty of such a system is the way in which it links Dublin communities together. Swords with Sandyford, Ashbourne with Adamstown, Blanchardstown with Bray. It is generally agreed that modern public transport infrastructure should not be seen as a social service for the underprivileged and others who dont have their own transport but rather as an economic stimulant protective of the environment and one of the necessities of civilised urban living. Dublin is the 20th richest city in Europe Munich, on the other hand, is number nine on the list due in no small part to its mass public transport network. The reaction from the authorities to Metro Dublins proposals has been, to say the least, tepid. Rather than asking Metro Dublin to explain how we are going to achieve our proposals, we are met with ridicule and dismissal by the very organisations that have presided over a 44-year hiatus in Dublins planning for transformative underground transportation. That level of cant do, inaction and obstruction are what typifies the establishment response to Dublins need for a joined-up mobility infrastructure. There are others in the political establishment who support Metro Dublin such as former lord mayor Andrew Montague who now chairs the Planning Policy Committee, Cllr Ciaran Cuffe chairman of the Transport Policy Committee and the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport stated that Metro Dublin has knowledge and many skills that are appropriate for the building of a Metro, and its knowledge could be harnessed for the development of the Dublin Metro system. In recent weeks, the announcement that the southern section of MetroLink is to be abandoned is just another example of the muddled thinking that has beset this project. If Dublin is to achieve its stated goal of becoming a smart city it needs to row in behind a can-do organisation like Metro Dublin. Dublin city and county will never be smart until all of its communities are linked by a mass rapid transit network. We are the only group offering a transformative solution to Dublin mobility problems by the mid-2020s, in stark contrast to other sclerotic, incremental and confused proposals slated for 2030! www.metrodublin.ie @MetroForDublin Leo Varadkar faces many challenges on this visit to Washington DC for the St Patricks Day festivities. But no task will be as crucial as ensuring that the peace process - threatened by a chaotic Brexit - is promoted on the world stage, writes Juno McEnroe in Washington DC In meetings with senior US political figures, including President Donald Trump and Republican and Democrats from Congress, he will need to rally support from America, whether that comes via a warning to British interests to protect the peace process or through subtle hints that any new US-UK trade deal would be in jeopardy if Britain crashed out of the EU. Ireland is one of the few countries globally to get such opportunity at self-promotion with the St Patrick's Day celebrations. Cabinet members were briefed ahead of jetting off around the world for celebrations that they must stress the importance of the peace process. At such a critical juncture in the fraught Brexit negotiations, the Taoiseach is likely to pull at the heartstrings of American leaders, both in politics and business, and remind them of the hard-earned success of Irelands peace process. There will be warnings about border issues too. This is especially so after Britain published a worrying scheme of trade tariffs today. It is imaginable that Donald Trump (with a little nudging from the White House administration) will recommit Americas support for Ireland. A major caveat is that Mr Trump favours Brexit and may back Brexit even if that comes without agreement. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar arriving at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC during his visit to the US. (Brian Lawless/PA Wire) That aside, congressmen have taken it upon themselves to intervene. Democrat Richard Neale and 19 others wrote to British prime minister Theresa May during the week, warning that a US-UK free trade deal could be delayed indefinitely and to at all costs avoid imposing a new border. That letter gives Mr Varadkar an opportunity to raise matters. The problem is, the pieces on the Brexit chessboard keep moving. By the time he meets Donald Trump in the Oval Office tomorrow and later returns to the White House for the shamrock bowl presentation, Westminster will have voted again. There will also be a renewed push to secure the E3 visa scheme for Irish citizens, with US envoy and TD John Deasy meeting Mr Trump too. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar arriving at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC during his visit to the US. (Brian Lawless/PA Wire) Other matters likely to dominate talks between Mr Varadkar and Donald Trump will include the US trade war with the EU and US taxation. Mr Varadkar also said he would raise human rights issues with Mr Trump. In truth, neither Donald Trump nor Leo Varadkar probably want to be in the Oval Office tomorrow. All Irelands attention is on London while Mr Trump has his hands full with plans to build a wall with Mexico and the scandal of alleged links with Russia during the US 2016 presidential election. But this is politics. And many figures, including from business, the arts and politics, gather in Washington DC in the lead up to March 17. Robert Watt, secretary general at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, made headlines last week when he appeared first before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and then the finance and public expenditure committee on the same day. The issue, of course, was the National Childrens Hospital. The headline was about the mandarin and the mob. Watt was too candid in private and overheard. Regrettably, the hospital overspend is spilt milk. Watts aside, if entertaining, is flotsam. The substantive issue, give or take a billion euro, is the fractious interface between senior civil servants and politicians, especially in Oireachtas committees. The underlying structural flaw isnt our public procurement systems. Its the enveloping architecture intended to enable civil servants support elected politicians, and then account to them. An untold joke of Irish politics amid constitutional conventions, citizens assemblies and endless conversations about constitutional referenda, many unsought, is that the single instrument of far greater importance than most constitutional clauses, the Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924 remains undisturbed. It is a haven of tranquillity, a refuge from accountability, and a bulwark against transparency. It transposes what in its theoretical origins is literally medieval mist, via 19th-century British parliamentary practice, into Irish law. It is, in essence, fully intact 95 years later. That legislation provides that ministers shall be a corporation sole and shall have perpetual succession and an official seal. T hey may sue and be sued under his style or name aforesaid. This is the kings minister, in persona majesty even to the extent of enjoying perpetual succession. In the medieval theory of the kings two bodies, one corporeal, dies. But another lives on, thence the king is dead, long live the king. Constant referencing of something called the department is fiction. Government departments, and their civil servants exist only as extensions of the person of the minister, the corporation sole, who as a legal entity enjoys kingly perpetuity. There is no basis for accountability of civil servants to the Oireachtas. It is ministers who account to the legislature. Civil servants account to the minister, and that was reiterated in the Public Service Management Act, 1997. For the avoidance of doubt that legislation states that ministers shall, in accordance with the Ministers and Secretaries Acts, 1924 to 1995, be responsible for the performance of functions that are assigned to the Department. Most of what is intended to be meant now when the words accountable and accountability are bandied about, have no legal basis. In accounting for the expenditure of money, which applies to secretaries general in their capacity as accounting officers, this far narrower responsibility for accountability on behalf of an organisation does not extend to personal accountability. Personal accountability for a secretary general is not to any organ of the Oireachtas, it is to the minister. The fact that it is almost indefinable, and almost unenforceable, is another matter. It is not simply as set out in the Supreme Court judgment in the Angela Kerins case, that committees, specifically the PAC, overreached their remit. It is that the whole commotion is based on a recent myth, that accounting is akin to accountability. It is not. The system was never designed and purposely never intended to deal with who did what, as distinct from what an organisation did. If this is unsatisfactory, and largely unsuspected by politicians, it is their own fault. While they have tinkered with window-dressing in the constitution, and here I think of nonsense proposals to reduce the age of eligibility of presidential candidates, they left intact the legislative basis of their own inadequacy. After the 2011 election, when so much of the State failed to one degree or another including its politics and civil service, there was an opportunity. But it was ignored. Instead, in 2014, a Report of the Independent Panel on Strengthening Civil Service Accountability was published. It made some improvements, but no fundamental change. The tranquillity of the Ministers and Secretaries Act was preserved. Lest the point be lost, the suggestion of appointing a head of the civil service was never acted on. The second missed opportunity has been since 2016. The Government no longer controls the Oireachtas. But Oireachtas members who rail against a lack of accountability, have totally failed in their responsibility to provide for it legislatively. Over decades politicians have pointedly refused to define responsibility administratively, primarily because it would clear the fog away, and reveal who precisely is responsible for what. And there is another unspoken reason. It is true from the first day in government, but it becomes a deeper truth with every passing day, namely that ministers are loath to take on fundamentally the officer class of the civil service, on whom they are critically dependent. There may certainly be unhappy relations among individuals and rows over specific issues, but a full frontal assault reminds both sides of the mutually assured destruction of nuclear war. Now, even as they up the ante in ever more aggressive questioning, opposition politicians doubled down by failing to grasp a once-in-a-century opportunity and push through legislation to fundamentally change the administrative landscape. It is ignorance of the environment in which they are operating, and ineptitude on a colossal scale. The irony is that we have a proliferation of committees, with little legislative work, because the Government cannot command a majority to pass bills. They are relatively idle hands, in a wider cultural context of increased coarseness overall. They mistake delivery of lasting change that works, with treating civil servants with the cruelty some little boys do snails and caterpillars. For all the umbrage of senior officers, they will have the last laugh, because they will still have jobs and nothing will have changed. Government ministers are relatively happy to have a stock of sandbags to soak up the canker at committees. It works for nearly everyone, except us. The consequence of change, and the extent it is resisted can be traced in very recent case histories. Legislation to enable multiannual funding of the Oireachtas, and effectively enable the legislature better pick it priorities, was doggedly slow-marched by the permanent government, long after the elected one had apparently agreed. Funding key posts at an appropriate level in the new Parliamentary Budget Office and the Office of Parliamentary Legal Advisers was a new era in guerrilla warfare. These institutional changes upscale the legislatures ability to hold the executive to account. They are likely effective, and almost certainly permanent. It means a civil service monopoly on budgetary arithmetic and legal advice are broken. It is given only to those who know precisely what that means. But watching Mr Watt suffer the assault of schoolboys, they didnt, as they imagine, have him. He had them. The whole commotion is based on a recent myth, that accounting is akin to accountability. It is not. A 32-year-old man has been arrested in Estonia over the death of a French film maker who was found buried in her garden in west London. The suspect was detained in Tallinn just before 12.30pm on Wednesday and is being held by police there ahead of extradition proceedings back to the UK. Laureline Garcia-Bertaux, 34, was reported missing on March 5 having failed to turn up for work at PR firm Golin, where she was an executive assistant. Her body was found the following day in a shallow grave in the back garden of her home in Darell Road, Kew, and a post-mortem examination found she had been strangled. Man arrested in Estonia following murder of woman in Richmond https://t.co/y4z6buygOe pic.twitter.com/V7ssQ6bX0L Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) March 13, 2019 In a statement on Monday, colleagues described Ms Garcia-Bertaux, who was originally from Aix-en-Provence and had been living in Kew since last April, as a wonderfully creative, caring and charismatic woman. As well as working as a personal assistant, she was involved in film and had worked with Dame Joan Collins on the 2018 short film Gerry. The actress has said she was shocked by the horrifying news of her death. Producer and actress friend Hester Ruoff described Ms Garcia-Bertaux as an amazing individual and said they had been due to start filming a new movie next month. Anyone with information can contact police on 101 or via Twitter @MetCC, quoting CAD 4439/March 5, or by calling the investigation team on 020 8721 4205 quoting Operation Ramah. Those wishing to remain anonymous can contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 or at crimestoppers-uk.org. - Press Association Burma On Anniversary of Students Deaths, Suu Kyi Says Democracy a Work in Progress A woman lays a flower at a commemoration ceremony at Yangon Technological University on March 13 to mark the 31st anniversary of the deaths of Ko Phone Maw and Ko Soe Naing. / Htet Wai / The Irrawaddy YANGONIn a message to a commemorative event honoring two university students who were killed during a bloody police crackdown 31 years ago Wednesday, State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said there are still many obstacles and challenges ahead to overcome in building a democratic federal country. Their deaths became one of the major factors that sparked the nationwide popular pro-democracy movement known as the 88 Uprising in 1988, the year Suu Kyi appeared on the political scene. The two students, Ko Phone Maw and Ko Soe Naing, were shot by riot police on the night of March 13, 1988 on the campus of the Rangoon Institute of Technology (now Yangon Technological University). Ko Phone Maw died the same day but Ko Soe Naing died 23 days later of injuries sustained at the scene. Three other university students who were wounded survived. On Wednesday, the Yangon Technological University Student Union remembered the duo at an event commemorating the 31st anniversary of their deaths. The ceremony was joined by former student activists including U Min Ko Naing, who was a prominent student leader during the 88 Uprising. In her message to the commemoration, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi described the deaths of Ko Phone Maw and Ko Soe Naing as a public call to struggle against single-party dictatorship. I would like to urge you all to work for a condition in which such sacrifices are no longer necessary, by taking lessons from those who have sacrificed [during the democracy movement] as well as appreciating those sacrifices, she said. She said that while Myanmar has yet to achieve genuine democracy, the country is in a democratic transition. Four months after the students deaths, the nationwide pro-democracy 88 Uprising broke out and the Ne Win regime was toppled. Daw Aung San Suu Kyis political career dates to that time. Despite the collapse of the regime, the military staged a coup and began its oppressive rule of the country, which lasted until it handed power to a quasi-military government in 2011. Daw Aung San Suu Kyis National League for Democracy won the general election in 2015, becoming the first democratically elected government in more than five decades. Since taking office, the NLD government has embarked on peace deals with the countrys diverse ethnic armed groups, but the effort has been in vain so far. The party is now trying to amend the military-drafted Constitution to pave the way for a democratic federal union. However, the attempt appears unlikely to bear fruit in the near future, as the military and the former ruling Union Solidarity and Development party object to the NLDs approach to reform as unconstitutional. Burma Dozens Interviewed in Tanintharyi Graft Case, Commission Says Tanintharyi Region Chief Minister Daw Lei Lei Maw poses for a photo in her office in Dawei, Tanintharyi Region, in 2018. / Zue Zue / The Irrawaddy YANGON The Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) says it interviewed more than 90 witnesses before filing corruption charges recently against Tanintharyi Region Chief Minister Daw Lei Lei Maw and three directors of the Global Grand Services (GGS) company. The four were arrested in the regional capital, Dawei, on Sunday. The Office of the President, which appoints chief ministers, announced Daw Lei Lei Maws dismissal the next day. We had to interview more than 90 witnesses, including businessmen. An important witness only arrived back in Myanmar from a trip abroad on Mar. 3, so we could only interview him the following day. We had to conduct detailed interviews, ACC spokesman U Kyaw Soe told The Irrawaddy. The commission says it found that Daw Lei Lei Maw had abused her position on a number of occasions since April 2016 just weeks after she was appointed chief minister in an announcement released late Sunday evening together with its findings. Those findings include details of the chief ministers alleged corruption in awarding contracts for the construction of a pavilion for a Myanmar New Year event in 2016 and for the removal of unwanted bushes from Dawei University and outside Dawei Airport in November 2016. It says, for example, that Daw Lei Lei Maw approved 400 million kyats ($263,000) for the removal of the bushes outside the airport. She allegedly asked a director with the regional Road Management Department in October 2018 to build a wall around two plots of land in Dawei owned by her husband but did not pay until the ACC started investigating her. The commission said she sold her house, which was valued at 32 million kyats ($21,000), for 200 million kyats ($131,000) to GGS. The company was subsequently awarded a number of contracts, including for electricity distribution in Dawei and the construction of a fish market, a city hall and low-cost housing. The commission said it also found that GGS broke a contract made with the regional government and owes 8 billion kyats ($5.2 million) to the Ministry of Electricity and Energy for natural gas. The ACC said it conducted a month-long investigation from Feb. 4 to Mar. 6 in Naypyitaw, Yangon and Dawei in response to complaints filed by regional lawmakers and local residents with both the commission and the Presidents Office. In addition to ACC staff, the investigating team included the director of the Union Auditor-Generals Office, the deputy director-general of the Construction Ministry and other experts. In response to the complaints, we found that four cases broke the Anti-Corruption Law, and we have therefore taken steps to prosecute the chief minister and three company officials, U Kyaw Soe said. Asked if the ACC will file more charges in connection with the complaints, he said the cases under investigation must be kept secret according to Article 20 (d) of the Anti-Corruption Law. The case against Daw Lei Lei Maw was filed under the Anti-Corruption Laws Article 55, which carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison. The cases against GGS directors U Thein Htwe, U Aung Myat and U Thura Ohn were filed under Article 63. It says that whoever instigates, abets, attempts, conspires or manages to commit any offense contained in the Anti-Corruption Law will be punished with the prescribed penalty for the offense. Translated from Burmese by Thet Ko Ko. Last year, the state-controlled district began selling some of its art works, equipment, and furniture to trim down its debt, estimated at $96 million. The district also has an $11 million budget deficit its trying to eliminate under an emergency manager who controls finances and academics. Burma Take Statue Down by March 17 or We Will, Activists Warn Kayah Govt A statue of General Aung San is put up in a park in Loikaw, the capital of Kayah State, in February 2019. / Khun Be Du / Facebook Karenni activists have given the Kayah State government until March 17 to remove a statue of General Aung San that was put up in a park in Loikaw over the objections of many residents, according to local sources. The activists sent a letter to the state government yesterday saying that if the government failed to remove it by that date, they would do it themselves with the help of local residents. The construction of the statue has hurt national reconciliation. Therefore, in order to solve the problem we ask the state government to remove it by the deadline we have provided, the letter reads. We will not let our Karenni history die because of the Gen. Aung San statue. We stand by our earlier request [to remove the statue], it continues. Rights activists specifically appealed to Kayah State Chief Minister U L Phaung Sho and Deputy Planning and Finance Minister U Maw Maw, who have been accused of masterminding the statue plan. The state government has not replied to the letter, the rights activists said. Following a major anti-statue protest in Loikaw on Feb. 12, the government agreed to activists request to meet with a committee of government supporters responsible for implementing the construction of the statue. The meeting was held the same day, but ended without any agreement being reached after the anti-statue contingent gave the committee a month to remove the statue. That was a month ago Tuesday, but the government has so far ignored the anti-statue activists demands. We cannot yet discuss our plans for removing the statue. We will issue a detailed plan after March 17, said Khun Thomas, a spokesperson for the local activists. The government is responsible for solving this problem, but they let a group of people do it instead. This is not a good way to solve the problem, he said. If they do not resolve this problem, any future problems will be the responsibility of the Union and state governments, Khun Thomas added. Activists have already begun recruiting local people to participate in future protests against the statue. Local authorities have responded by warning that they will take action against any protesters, he said. When asked for comment on the activists letter by The Irrawaddy, Kayah State Deputy Ministry of Planning and Finance U Maw Maw said he was in a meeting and was unable to comment. Burma U.S. Military Retrieves Possible World War Two Remains From Myanmar The U.S. Air Force prepares to laod the possible remains of service members who went missing in Myanmar during World War Two onto a plan for transport to the United States in Mandalay on Tuesday. / Zaw Zaw / The Irrawaddy MANDALAY The United States on Tuesday retrieved the possible remains of service members who went missing in Myanmar during the Second World War, marking the first such mission to Myanmar carried out by U.S. military aircraft, American officials said. After a brief ceremony, the remains were taken from Myanmars second-largest city, Mandalay, to a laboratory in the United States for further analysis and identification. We remember. You are not forgotten, said the U.S. ambassador to Myanmar, Scot Marciel, at the ceremony. He said the mission was meant to honor the memory of the fallen service members and to show appreciation for their service. From 1942 to 1945, the airspace over Myanmar, then called Burma, served as an important supply corridor from India to China after the Japanese captured the northern town of Lashio, severing the last major Allied supply route over land into China. During the period, American transport planes made daily flights over the eastern Himalayas, a perilous route called the Hump, according to the website of the U.S. Embassy in China. The remains are believed to be from a B-25G aircraft with seven crew members onboard that crashed in February 1944 in Myanmars northwestern Sagain Region, U.S. officials said. More than 82,000 Americans remain missing from past conflicts, and 632 U.S. service members, mostly air crews, disappeared in Myanmar during World War Two, U.S. government data show. Relations between the two countries have chilled after Washington last year sanctioned some Myanmar military and police commanders and army units, accusing them of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya Muslim minority. Myanmar has rejected the charges, saying it was fighting Rohingya terrorists. About 730,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar after August 2017 following what a U.S. government investigation described as a well-planned and coordinated campaign of mass killings, gang rapes and other atrocities against the Rohingya by the Myanmar military. Burma USDP Lawmaker Proposes Abolishing Charter Amendment Committee USDP officials participate in a party campaign event in Naypyitaw ahead of the 2015 general election. / Aung Kyaw Htet / The Irrawaddy YANGON A lawmaker for the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) on Tuesday proposed abolishing a joint committee recently formed to draft amendments to the Constitution, the latest challenge to efforts by the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) to change the military-drafted charter. During a debate in the Union Parliament on a report about a USDP amendment proposal, U Thaung Aye urged lawmakers to abolish the committee because it was a violation of the law. We all agree that the Constitution should be amended. But what sets us apart is whether it should be amended in accordance with the law or against the law, he said. The Bill Committee had suggested that an earlier proposal by the USDP to amend Article 261 of the Constitution be reviewed and considered by the new amendment-drafting committee instead of the full Parliament. The amendment-drafting committee is to submit a report on its review of the entire Constitution by July 17 and then draw up a bill with proposed changes. Military-appointed lawmakers supported the USDPs Article 261 proposal, and together with the military-backed USDP, a former ruling party made up of ex-generals, objected to the Bill Committees suggestion. They want Parliament to consider the Article 261 amendment, which would have region and state chief ministers elected by their local legislatures rather than appointed by the president, on its own. U Thaung Aye, a former lieutenant general, also asked on Tuesday that the original proposal from NLD lawmaker U Aung Kyi Nyunt to form the amendment-drafting committee be withdrawn. Parliament overwhelmingly approved U Aung Kyi Nyunts proposal on Feb. 6 and soon thereafter formed the 45-member body with lawmakers from all parties in the legislature in rough proportion to their number of seats. The committee has already reviewed the 48 Basic Principles of the Union in Chapter 1 and has started on Chapter 2. We need to remember that Article 433 of the Constitution says: Any provision of the Constitution may be amended. It says any provision, not that the whole book may be amended, U Thaung Aye said during Tuesdays session. More than 40 lawmakers, including some military appointees, have commented on the report on the USDPs amendment proposal. Another 15 lawmakers are scheduled to comment on Thursday. Editorial Urgent Political Action Needed to Solve Rakhines Problems AA chief Major-General Tun Myat Naing (second from right) arrives for peace talks in Mai Ja Yangin, Kachin State in July 2016. / The Irrawaddy On Jan. 4Myanmars Independence Daythe Arakan Army (AA), an ethnic Arakanese armed group, launched coordinated attacks on four police outposts in northern Rakhine State. The attacks killed several policemen and sent a signal to the central government and the military that the AA would launch a series of attacks in the following weeks and months. It did. This week, the AA announced it had occupied a temporary tactical command base and apprehended 11 prisoners of war during a clash with Myanmar Army (or Tatmadaw) troops near northern Rakhine States Buthidaung Township on March 9. The escalation of the conflict in Rakhine needs urgent attention. According to government spokesman U Zaw Htay, Union government leaders are concerned about the fighting between the military and the AA. It has become a cause for concern not only in terms of security and development, but also in terms of the democratic transition. Leaders will review it and do their best. They have been holding talks. There have been rumors that the government will soon announce a state of emergency in Rakhine State, as then-President U Thein Sein did in June 2012 when the government needed to restore stability. Indeed, the stability of Rakhine State is now in question. We have seen thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) flee the conflict amid reports of frequent ambushes and skirmishes between the AA and the Myanmar military. Tatmadaw leaders including commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, who recently visited Thailand, are hoping the government will call a top-level security meeting to discuss the situation in Rakhine. But declaring a state of emergency will not solve the conflict; the government will have to intervene using political means. Battle-hardened force The AA was founded in 2009 but was little known until 2014, having emerged gradually at its base near the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) headquarters in Laiza, northern Myanmar. The AA is known to receive military training and weapons from Kachin, and is also believed to receive support from allied ethnic groups in northern Myanmar. It has been several decades since ethnic Arakanese had an insurgent force devoted to fighting the central government. In the past, Arakanese insurgent forces were based at the former Karen headquarters known as Manerplaw. The best-known previous group was the Arakan Liberation Army, with which the AA has no affiliation. AA soldiers have more battleground experience than their predecessors, having fought alongside their allies in northern Myanmar. Additionally, the group now seems to have strong support from the Rakhine population and sympathy from politicians. It is financially strong, and according to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, is actively recruiting in Rakhine State. The large Rakhine communities in Kachin State and Yangon are another important source of fighters; the militia is quite openly using some Rakhine Buddhist monasteries and Rakhine-owned businesses in Yangon, for example, as recruiting offices, according to the ICG. Overseas Rakhine migrant workers are also sending money to the AA. Although the AA denies it, the grouplike nearly all armed groups in Myanmarappears to be profiting from the drug trade. This is hardly surprising, as several ethnic rebel groups in Myanmar are involved in the illicit trade. Terrorist designation In any case, the military has launched operations against the AA and declared it to be a terrorist group, actions that have only exacerbated the tensions. Right after the attacks in January, government spokesman U Zaw Htay made a threat, Do they want to see a cycle of violence lasting decades? I want to tell the Rakhine people who are supporting [the AA]: Dont think about yourself, but think about your next generation. He also accused the AA of having links to the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), and said the AA was operating inside Bangladesh. This comment, too, only served to exacerbate tensions in the state. In an exclusive interview with The Irrawaddy, AA chief Major-General Tun Myat Naing said the groups political objective is to obtain confederate status for Rakhine State. We prefer [a confederation of states] like Wa State, which has a larger share of power in line with the Constitution, he said, referring to the status of the AAs ally, the United Wa State Army (UWSA), adding that a confederation is better than federalism. Indeed, the goal of the AAs frequent attacks is to establish a foothold in northern Rakhine State and to strengthen its position in any future peace negotiations. But Rakhine State is facing a serious crisis. The ICG warned in its report in January, The state is already afflicted by the Rohingya mass flight; an escalated fight between ethnic Rakhine and the government would represent a blow to Myanmars political transition to civilian rule and be difficult to stop. Tatmadaw leaders are known to be upset that the AA did not assist its clearance operations following ARSA terrorists attacks on innocent villagers and police outposts in 2017. There were three groups involved in the conflictthe ARSA terrorists and villagers; the Tatmadaw; and Rakhine vigilantesbut the AA was nowhere to be found. In an attempt to discredit the AA, the military and the Presidents Office accused the AA of having ties to ARSA. AA spokesperson U Khaing Thukha denied the accusations, saying his organization had nothing to do with ARSA and was not involved in any illegal businesses, including drug trafficking. We have our own mission. The Myanmar government is trying to ruin our image by saying that we have an affiliation with ARSA. Its dirty politics by them to portray us as a terrorist organization, he said. The AA promotes The Way of the Rakhita, or the Arakan Dream, a unifying message among the Arakan people that seeks to evoke memories of the once-great Arakanese Kingdom of centuries past. Serious blunders Since the National League for Democracy came to power after winning the 2015 general election, its government has made several serious blunders in Rakhine State. First, State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi installed a minority NLD government in the state, even though the main ethnic Arakanese party, the Arakan National Party (ANP), prevailed in the state election in 2015. Since then, there have been political tensions between leading ethnic Rakhine figures and Daw Aung San Suu Kyis NLD-led government. Slowly, AA leaders have infiltrated Rakhine State, setting up camps and establishing connections with political groups. According to the ICG, Under President Thein Sein, the government made some effort to consult Rakhine political leaders and include them in decision-making. It also used economic concessions strategically to create alliances. In contrast, the NLD ignored demands from the Arakan National Partywhich won a clear majority of elected seats in the state in 2015 electionsto be given the chief minister position, instead appointing a relatively weak NLD member to the post. It added, Following the ARSA attacks in 2016-17 and subsequent flight of 800,000 Rohingya Muslims, the central government has moved to assert further control over executive functions in Rakhine, rendering the state government largely powerless and sidelining the legislature. Mrauk-U protest In January 2018, Dr. Aye Maunga firebrand Rakhine politician and former ANP chairman known for stoking ethno-nationalism and for the shrewd campaigning ahead of a by-election in 2017 that established him as a political brand among his peoplewas arrested after the police violently cracked down on a protest in Mrauk-U. He and some other activists had planned to hold a ceremony in the ancient Arakanese capital to mark the anniversary of the kingdoms fall to the Burmese centuries ago. Dr. Aye Maung has been jailed since then, facing charges of high treason and incitement. (He resigned from the ANP on Nov. 27, 2017 due to an internal dispute, but the party later announced that his membership had been suspended.) The military also angered AA leaders by ignoring their calls for a ceasefire and peace talks. Last December, the military announced a unilateral ceasefire covering five regional military commands in Kachin and Shan states. The ceasefire is due to end on April 30. Rakhine State was not included in the area covered by the ceasefire, ostensibly due to the Tatmadaws ongoing operations against ARSA. However, AA leaders suspect the Tatmadaw planned to use the ceasefire to bring Army troops from Shan and Kachin States down to Rakhine State to fight against the AA. So far little concrete action has been taken to ease the fighting; instability has only increased. Last February, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi made a rare visit to Ngapali, a beachside tourist hotspot in Rakhine, to attend a Japanese-sponsored investment fair. Addressing the fair, the State Counselor emphasized responsible business practices. For too long the international communitys attention has been focused narrowly on negative aspects related to problems in north Rakhine rather than on the panoramic picture that shows the immense potential of this state for peace and prosperity, she said. She is partly right, but if they truly want to increase investment, she and other government leaders must realize the need to address the widening conflict in Rakhine State. The government should open a direct dialogue with ANP leaders and consider releasing Dr. Aye Maung as a precursor to opening negotiations. How to stabilize Rakhine State? Rakhine is one of the poorest states in Myanmar. Past Union governments have ignored its deep-rooted troubles and the conflict there. International coverage of Rakhine has remained largely negative, and Western governments and China have both expressed concern over the expanding conflict. The narratives provided by both the government and the military do nothing but add fuel to the fire. They must refrain from making irresponsible statements if they are sincere about achieving stability and a political settlement in Rakhine State. U Oo Hla Saw, secretary of the ANP, blamed the fighting on government mismanagement, a lack of jobs and the stalled national peace process, and said civilians were bearing the brunt of the violence. There are no job opportunities in Rakhine and democratic reforms have failed. And because the Union government has failed to handle the Rakhine issue effectively, radicalism is on the rise, he told The Irrawaddy. An EU delegation to Myanmar issued a statement early this year acknowledging the deep-rooted historical grievances in Rakhine State [that] can only be solved through dialogue and an inclusive political process and urged the military to expand its unilateral ceasefire to Rakhine State. As far as the military leaders are concerned, this is likely to fall on deaf ears. The office of Snr-Gen. Min Aung Hlaing did not consult the government before initiating the unilateral ceasefire. The EU representatives called on the Tatmadaw to expand its unilateral ceasefire to Rakhine State. China said it supports the efforts by the Myanmar side to maintain peace and stability and called for restraint and the resolution of relevant issues through dialogue and consultation. Worryingly, the AA has shown a capacity to grow, and the ability to sustain a long conflict with the Myanmar Army. The government must resolve the Rakhine conflict through peaceful political means to bring all parties, including the AA, to the table. Releasing Dr. Aye Maung and other political prisoners and appointing influential Myanmar nationals with an understanding of Rakhine politics to serve as peace envoys would also be helpful. The conflict in Rakhine State should be resolved through dialogue. It is time for all sides to work together; if they do not, more innocent lives will be lost. On This Day A Death to Herald Change A photograph of the funeral fan handed out to mourners at Ko Phone Maws funeral. On this day 31 years ago, Ko Phone Maw, a student at the Rangoon Institute of Technology (RIT), was killed by riot police on the university campus. The 23-year-olds death is considered to be the one of the major factors which lead to the historic 1988 pro-democracy popular uprising four months later. The death of Ko Phone Maw brought students to the streets and they were soon joined by people from all walks of life who were plagued by the political and economic mismanagement of the Burma Socialist Program Partys government. This act of defiance led to the 1988 pro-democracy uprising in August and the fall of the one party-dictatorship, which paved the way for the ensuing political developments in Myanmar. On the night of March 12, 1988, drunken civilians beat three RIT students sitting at a teashop in west Gyogone Ward near their university. Instead of settling the issue through negotiation, the soldier-turned-riot police turned to violence, cracking down on students at the university campus with tear gas and guns. In violence which spilled over to the next day, many RIT students were injured and Ko Phone Maw was killed. Another injured student, Ko Soe Naing, died days later. An investigation commission which was formed to examine the incident concluded that the riot police did not act line with proper procedures. On This Day Post-Independent Myanmars Second President Takes Oath of Office U Ba U On this day in 1952, U Ba U took the oath of office as the second president of post-independence Myanmar after his predecessor, Sao Shwe Thaik, had served his four-year term. He served until Mar. 13, 1957. Before becoming president, the Cambridge-educated barrister spent the previous four years as Supreme Court chief justice. In 1947 he was knighted by the colonial government and advised the officials who drafted Myanmars first Constitution after independence. U Ba Us ancestors also served in the British government. His uncle U Pho Pe sentenced U Ottama, an Arakanese Buddhist monk considered one of Myanmars national heroes, to four years in prison for resisting British rule. U Ba U himself was a member of the special tribunal that tried Saya San the leader of a peasant revolt in 1930-1932 and sentenced him to death. He worked hard to organize a general election in 1949, with the country engulfed in a civil war that followed on the heels of independence. The parliament that ballot ushered in later elected him president. Based on DNA submitted by immediate family members of Grill and Lanham and DNA obtained from the deceased, authorities have confirmed the identities of the bodies to be matches for the missing teens, according to a release from Sgt. Jamie Erow, public information officer for the Porter County Sheriffs Department. Wednesday, March 13th, 2019 (1:52 pm) - Score 1,124 The co-founder and CEO of urban fibre optic broadband ISP Hyperoptic, Dana Tobak, has today won an award for her outstanding contribution to the acceleration of Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband technology in Europe as part of the annual FTTH Conference in Amsterdam. As most of our readers will know Hyperoptic have been bringing 1Gbps capable FTTB / FTTP broadband connections to large urban apartments and office buildings since around 2011, albeit with significantly fewer resources than bigger rivals and at a much lower price point. In fact until recently the ISP was the largest UK provider of full fibre style services to consumers, although Openreachs FTTP roll-out has since surpassed them. Today Hyperoptics network covers more than 500,000 premises (mostly homes) in around 39 UK cities and towns (rising to 50 this year). The ISP has also managed to create an investment pot of 500m, which will be used to help cover 2 million UK premises by 2021 and theres even an aspiration for 5 million by 2024 (here). Ronan Kelly, President of the FTTH Council Europe, said: Hyperoptics networks is expanding at an incredible speed. It has been growing its network reach by over 100% for the last three years in a row and as the driving force behind this, the FTTH Council Europe wanted to acknowledge Danas tremendous work in making FTTH more accessible. Pascal Koster, CTIO of Hyperoptic, said: To be recognised by her industry peers means a great deal to Dana. When she co-founded Hyperoptic it was with the aim to shake up the UK broadband sector, which had been neglected for too long with a compelling full fibre offering. With her team, Hyperoptic is delivering on this vision and we look forward to continue working with our partners in the industry to deliver the full fibre broadband the UK needs. End. Wednesday, March 13th, 2019 (3:15 pm) - Score 3,337 The FTTH Council Europe has today published a new report that examines what progress has been made across the UK and Europe on the transition from older copper broadband networks to new full fibre (FTTH / FTTP) infrastructure. Suffice to say that some big barriers remain in the UK. Pure fibre optic networks typically run their optical fibre cables all the way to your doorstep, which use laser light to deliver significantly faster speeds (e.g. multi-Gigabit) and a much more reliable service. At present a lot of countries are busy deploying FTTP networks like this and at some point that means the older, slower and less reliable copper lines will need to be switched off (too costly to keep both running side-by-side). The new study from WIK analyses the different stages of copper switch-off in 10 EU Member States and identifies benefits as well as enablers, incentives, challenges and barriers to switching from copper to fibre networks. Overall it notes that there has only been limited progress toward copper switch-off in Europe thus far, which isnt much of a surprise since many countries are still in the process of deploying FTTP. For example, in the United Kingdom only around 6%+ of premises can access an FTTP network today (Ofcom) and the Government doesnt expect to achieve nationwide coverage until 2033 (currently just an aspiration). By comparison a number of other EU states have been busy deploying the technology, at scale, for many years and are thus already approaching the finish line (here). The report correctly notes that the UK doesnt yet have a solid plan for switching off copper networks, although like many other countries it is making progress toward transitioning consumers to all-IP (e.g. VoIP) networks and disabling old analogue phone (voice) services by 2025 (here). This is often considered an important prerequisite to the eventual copper switch-off. Benefits of Copper Switch-Off (WIK Report) Reliability: fibre is 70%-80% more reliable than copper resulting is lower fault rates; Energy efficiency: copper switch results in 40-60% energy savings due to the lower power consumption of fibre; Cost efficiency: 40-60% lower maintenance costs; Better deal for consumers: surveyed consumers were more satisfied with fibre (82% happy vs 50% on DSL), quoted higher bandwidth, wider range of services and better value for money as key benefits. Better deal for investors: evidence suggests that clarity on copper switch off can improve the business case for fibre. The main factor delaying migration to FTTP in several countries, according to WIK, is the continued reliance by incumbent operators on copper rather than investing in or accessing FTTP networks. But this is an over simplification and the challenges often tend to be a lot deeper and more complicated. Openreach have previously indicated that theyd like the ability to migrate customers from copper to FTTP as the new network is deployed, which would cut their upkeep costs for the old legacy network and thus turn full fibre into a much more attractive investment. Consumers would obviously benefit from the significantly faster and more reliable broadband. As usual there are some big obstacles in terms of both regulation and competition. For example, FTTP is a more expensive service and not all customers will be happy about being forced to pay extra for something that they might not want. A lot of modern regulation is also based around copper infrastructure and will need to be overhauled. Several ISPs have also invested heavily in unbundled copper lines (e.g. Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Vodafone) and might be reluctant to let go, which is further complicated by the fact that some of those same providers have plans to build their own rival FTTP networks. Competitive interests and regulatory complexity are tricky areas to unpick, leaving plenty of scope for the odd legal challenge. Copper Switch-Off Overview of Barriers (WIK Report) * The leading country for copper switch-off to FTTH (Estonia with 70% of copper exchanges closed in 2018 and plans to remove copper access for 60% of broadband subscribers by 2020) benefits from incumbent FTTH deployment, absence of regulatory barriers and limited wholesale copper reliance. * The gradual pace of incumbent FTTH deployment and reliance on copper upgrade technologies is a core factor delaying switch-off in UK, DE and IT. * Strict conditions or a lack of precise guidance on conditions for exchange closure may be hampering switch-off in PT and FR. No rules have yet been established in the UK. * The reluctance of customers may be hampering switch-off in FR, PL. This was managed in EE through plug and play equipment and support for legacy equipment. * Transitioning of critical legacy equipment continues to be a concern in SE, PL, UK, NL. * Copper access obligations such as Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) persist in the UK. * Line powering obligations were a barrier to switch-off in some countries, but this issue has now been addressed in all the countries studied. Naturally those who arent reached by FTTP in the UK until 2033 will still need to use that copper network (e.g. FTTC, G.fast broadband), which means a complete switch-off would be unlikely to happen until after FTTP has reached all corners of the country. Lest we forget the tedious question of Virgin Medias hybrid fibre coax network, which doesnt strictly need to be switched-off as it will soon support Gigabit speeds via DOCSIS 3.1. The exception might be KCOM in Hull, which dominates the local market and will have achieved almost total FTTP coverage by March 2019. In other words, they have less competition to worry about and may be able to switch-off their copper lines far sooner than Openreach (they aim to be the first in the UK to do it). Ronan Kelly, President of the FTTH Council Europe, said: This study about copper switch-off is of tremendous importance for the FTTH Council Europe. The telecom market is in a transitional phase, it is moving from an old copper-based infrastructure to new fibre-based networks. There is a technology change and all eyes are on 5G but we should not forget that fibre is the foundation of all technologies for connectivity. Policy is lagging behind the market developments, and it is important that it catches up. The UK Government, Ofcom and Openreach have already begun discussing the challenge of transitioning away from copper networks and on to fibre optic lines. Inevitably this will be a gradual process and nobody has yet been so bold as to set a solid time-scale, although we suspect there will still be copper lines around even in 2033 and probably for a few years after that date. Hopefully by the end of 2019, once various industry consultations have run their course, then we might have a better idea of how this process will be handled in the UK. Wednesday, March 13th, 2019 (12:29 pm) - Score 877 The Scottish Government has today committed to invest up to 85m over 10 years in order to support a new Borderlands Inclusive Growth Deal (BIGD), which among other things will aim to improve fibre optic broadband and 4G mobile coverage in poorly served areas. The UK Government will also provide up to 260m. At this stage the details remain somewhat vague, but the investment is expected to help fund economic development activity across a range of themes, including digital connectivity, tourism, regeneration and skills. The primary focus for all this will be around cross-border areas including Dumfries and Galloway, the Scottish Borders, Carlisle City, Cumbria County and Northumberland. The specific projects and activities to be supported will be announced over the coming months, as part of a Heads of Terms agreement, although its already possible to find a rough outline of the deals ambitions on the Borders Partnership site. Digital Borderlands Investment Proposal The proposal for Digital Borderlands has three strands of direct investment: 1.Complete super-fast broadband to properties that dont yet have access The superfast strategy is for full fibre to future proof the network. Superfast cost rise exponentially which means innovative solutions will be required for the last 1%. 2. Deploy full-fibre broadband to critical strategic sites and market towns Designed to encourage the commercial provision of full fibre broadband, in particular to SMEs. Encourage innovative use of technology that takes advantage of 100Mbps + fibre services to increase productivity. 3.Extend 4G coverage further into remote rural areas Working with the Home Office to ensure the emergency service network extended area services are made commercially viable. On top of that theres also some general talk about supporting future 5G mobile pilots and fostering digital skills development, not least in order to help businesses and learners capitalise on the opportunities of the new infrastructure. Michael Matheson, Scottish Infrastructure Secretary, said: I am delighted to confirm that the Scottish Government is investing up to 85 million in the Borderlands Deal to support and develop the South of Scotland economy. Alongside the establishment of a new enterprise agency for the south of Scotland, and the activity being taken forward by the South of Scotland economic partnership, this investment will help to drive inclusive growth that delivers significant and lasting economic benefits for individuals, businesses and communities right across the region. I call on the UK Government to match our financial commitment, over the same timescale of ten years, to deliver a package of transformational investment that will harness the regions full economic potential. Its widely anticipated that the UKs Chancellor, Philip Hammond MP, will announce precisely how much funding Westminster will commit to the deal during todays imminent Spring Statement 2019 (weve seen various estimates between 200m and 300m). No doubt all of this will also help to support Scotlands Reaching 100% (R100) programme, which has so far committed 600m in order to get as close as possible to universal coverage of 30Mbps+ superfast broadband coverage by the end of 2021 (here and here); March 2022 as a financial year. Sadly we are still awaiting news of a supplier to deliver on the R100 pledge and there are already concerns that the Scottish Government may struggle, much like Wales recently did, in order to find an operator that can achieve their ambitions within such a short space of time. Either the roll-out will take longer, wont reach as far or theyll end up choosing a weaker technology in order to fill the hardest gaps. UPDATE 1:02pm The UK Government has just confirmed that it will commit 260m to the deal. Wednesday, March 13th, 2019 (8:13 am) - Score 883 The Northumberland County Council in England has approved a new voucher scheme, which is designed to help alternative network (AltNet) ISPs to Openreach (BT) to access public funding in order to roll-out superfast broadband (24Mbps+) to premises that have not been covered by the existing project (i.e. rural areas). Sadly the existing iNorthumberland project, which is working alongside Openreach (BT) and the Governments Broadband Delivery UK programme, is running behind schedule on their target to help make superfast broadband capable FTTC and a few ultrafast FTTP networks available to over 95% of the county by the end of 2018 (Thinkbroadbands database estimates theyre at 93.79% today). The local authority was also impacted after Virgin Medias decision last year to halt plans for extending their ultrafast cable broadband and TV network into the county (here). In fairness, this would have been focused more on urban areas and is thus unlikely to have made much of an impact upon overall coverage (i.e. deploying into areas where superfast speeds already exist). Meanwhile the council has made a further 2.2m available (mainly from savings within the first roll-out contract) to help bring superfast broadband to some of the most difficult to reach communities in the county. Some 2m of this has been allocated to help Openreach extend their network and there are currently over 50 communities being taken through the process to receive full fibre services which otherwise would have been excluded. (its hoped that this could push superfast coverage to 95-96% of premises). The remaining 200,000 has thus been earmarked for situations where Openreach cannot provide a quote under the fund criteria, which will instead make it available to alternative network providers as part of a voucher scheme. If necessary, this funding could also be boosted to 1m (depending upon demand). Council Statement It is recommended that this 200,000 allocation is allocated via a voucher scheme rather than via a single procurement, or series of small scale procurements. Further funds are available through the iNorthumberland programme from a range of sources including clawback from the first contract and further gainshare funding from high levels of take up. The terms of the contract mean some of this funding is ring fenced for use with Openreach, but some can be used with other suppliers. It is therefore recommended that if this scheme experiences high demand and the initial 200,000 is utilised that further funds be made available from one of these existing budgets to extend the voucher scheme up to a total maximum value of 1m. The new scheme has been designed to fit between the Governments existing Better Broadband Subsidy Scheme (up to 350 a pop) and their Gigabit Connection Vouchers (up to 2,500 a pop). As such it will aim to award vouchers worth up to 1,000 per property to individual residents or businesses in order to help them get a superfast (30Mbps+ capable EU definition) connection installed. The vouchers will be technology agnostic (i.e. can be delivered via any type of connection), although theyve made clear that wherever possible the aim should be to foster full fibre (FTTP) connectivity. This scheme would also be aimed at residents and businesses unable to access broadband speeds of 15Mbps or above. Areas that are already part of a future fibre-based roll-out plan will not be eligible. On top of that the council has said they wont just approve any old cowboy supplier or reseller for the scheme. As such theyve set a number of additional eligibility criteria for ISPs. For example, suppliers will need to be registered for current BDUK subsidies, have 5m of public liability insurance, support Ofcoms ADR dispute resolution scheme and be a UK limited company + VAT registered etc. Further Details Here. One obvious problem with all this is that 1m will not be even remotely enough to reach every property in the final 4-5% of premises. The forthcoming 10Mbps+ broadband USO might be of some help here, although the council has said that theyre continuing to lobby the Government for more funding. Industry leaders sign up to be a part of the only event they rely on to deliver a powerful MSP audience. Trumbull, CT March 13, 2019 TMC today announced the latest sponsors and exhibitors for MSP Expo held April 24-25, 2019, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. MSP Expo brings together telecom MSP professionals and thought leaders to network and explore the latest innovations and business practices. MSP Expo is co-located with ITEX, the largest and most extensive national trade show connecting vendors and resellers in the office technology space. Building off the buzz of the successful Florida event in January, MSP Expo is returning to Las Vegas with a powerful group of supporting companies, said Rich Tehrani, CEO of TMC and conference chairman. Were excited to see the latest solutions and hear valuable insight from Dell Expert Network, netsapiens and the rest of the exhibitors in April. MSP Expo Gold Sponsors Include Dell Expert Network is a new program for MSPs and IT Consultants. By being a part of the program, MSPs will have access to a platform of exclusive benefits that will boost their productivity such as 1) Dedicated Account Manager 2) Shortcut in Service and Support: access to Dell TechDirect, a tool for: Self-logging support tickets, Self-dispatching replacement parts, and Online reporting of all devices under management, 3) Rewards for referring Dell to their clients 4) Training and Certifications. is a new program for MSPs and IT Consultants. By being a part of the program, MSPs will have access to a platform of exclusive benefits that will boost their productivity such as 1) Dedicated Account Manager 2) Shortcut in Service and Support: access to Dell TechDirect, a tool for: Self-logging support tickets, Self-dispatching replacement parts, and Online reporting of all devices under management, 3) Rewards for referring Dell to their clients 4) Training and Certifications. netsapiens offers a comprehensive suite of unified communications (UC) services and feature-sets to serice providers and large enterprise customers with existing network infrastructure. This includes VoIP, Hosted PBX (UCaaS), SIP trunking, contact centers, device provisioning, multi-tenant user portals and much more. Custom-bilt to provide its partners with unprecedented levels of flexibility, customization and ease of use, the SNAPsolution-UC and Collaboration tools can be quickly deployed so that the companys service provider partners can realize their ROI just as quick. New MSP Expo Exhibitors Include: Concertium provides IT infrastructure, multi-cloud and business intelligence solutions. The company provides a unique blend of experience, domain and technical expertise and a solid understanding of each of the industries served for its clients across the globe who look for end-to-end business technology solutions. provides IT infrastructure, multi-cloud and business intelligence solutions. The company provides a unique blend of experience, domain and technical expertise and a solid understanding of each of the industries served for its clients across the globe who look for end-to-end business technology solutions. Interwork Technologies is a North American value-added specialty distributor of cyber security and certification training solutions. Established in 1991, it has more than 25 years of channel and distribution experience with sales resources in both Canada and the U.S. For its vendor partners, Interwork leverages its extensive network of Solution Provider partners to drive partner recruitment, enablement, and lead generation opportunities in the mid-market to enterprise segments. For thousands of its Solution Provider partners, Interwork has the technology expertise and support required to both educate and enable their selling efforts. Technologies is a North American value-added specialty distributor of cyber security and certification training solutions. Established in 1991, it has more than 25 years of channel and distribution experience with sales resources in both Canada and the U.S. For its vendor partners, Interwork leverages its extensive network of Solution Provider partners to drive partner recruitment, enablement, and lead generation opportunities in the mid-market to enterprise segments. For thousands of its Solution Provider partners, Interwork has the technology expertise and support required to both educate and enable their selling efforts. Stellar Cyber s Starlight platform is designed to be the SOC Command Center Platform to do pervasive data Collection, breach Detection, Investigation and Response (CDIR). Stellars partners are services providers building Managed Detection and Response and MSSP services for customer who need security and compliance help. s Starlight platform is designed to be the SOC Command Center Platform to do pervasive data Collection, breach Detection, Investigation and Response (CDIR). Stellars partners are services providers building Managed Detection and Response and MSSP services for customer who need security and compliance help. Untangle is an innovator in cybersecurity designed specifically for the below-enterprise market, safeguarding businesses, home offices, nonprofits, schools and governmental organizations. Untangles integrated suite of software and appliances provides enterprise-grade capabilities and consumer-oriented simplicity to organizations with limited IT resources. Untangles award-winning network security solutions are trusted by over 40,000 customers around the world. is an innovator in cybersecurity designed specifically for the below-enterprise market, safeguarding businesses, home offices, nonprofits, schools and governmental organizations. Untangles integrated suite of software and appliances provides enterprise-grade capabilities and consumer-oriented simplicity to organizations with limited IT resources. Untangles award-winning network security solutions are trusted by over 40,000 customers around the world. Webroot was the first to harness the cloud and artificial intelligence to protect businesses and individuals against cyber threats. They provide the number one security solution for managed service providers and SMBs, who rely on Webroot for endpoint protection, network protection and security awareness training. By partnering with Webroot, MSPs, resellers and distributors benefit from greater profitability, lower operational costs, improved productivity, stronger client trust and innovative resources for competitive advantage. With their streamlined management console and integration with leading RMM and PSA platforms, Webroot give you smarter protection that is easy to deploy and manage and uniquely addresses traditional challenges. View the full list of over 80 exhibitors here Registration is open. For more information on MSP Expo, email [email protected]. For media inquiries, contact Jessica Seabrook. Companies interested in exhibiting, sponsorship or advertising packages for ITEXPO should contact TMC's Joe Fabiano at 203-852-6800 x132 or Maureen Gambino at 203-852-6800 x109. For the latest MSP Expo news, updates and information follow the event on Twitter at @MSPExpo. About TMC Through education, industry news, live events and social influence, global buyers rely on TMC's content-driven marketplaces to make purchase decisions and navigate markets. As a result, leading technology vendors turn to TMC for unparalleled branding, thought leadership and lead generation opportunities. Our in-person and online events deliver unmatched visibility and sales prospects for all participants. Through our custom lead generation programs, we provide clients with an ongoing stream of leads that turn into sales opportunities and build databases. Additionally, we bolster brand reputations with the millions of impressions from display advertising on our news sites and newsletters. Making TMC a 360-degree marketing solution, we offer comprehensive event and road show management services and custom content creation with expertly ghost-crafted blogs, press releases, articles and marketing collateral to help with SEO, branding, and overall marketing efforts. For more information about TMC and to learn how we can help you reach your marketing goals, please visit www.tmcnet.com and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, @tmcnet . Media and Analyst Contact: Jessica Seabrook Marketing Director TMC 203-852-6800 x 170 [email protected] Share this Page Edited by Maurice Nagle In filings, Victim 1 recounted how federal agents showed up at his home late at night after the bomb partially detonated at the East Chicago post office, showing him a cellphone picture of the package that bore his name and home address. Authorities told Victim 1 that he was the intended target of the bomb and that the perpetrator had not yet been caught or identified. Digital transformation is largely being driven by CxOs because they see it as survival, according to Cisco APJC president Miyuki Suzuki. Suzuki told the recent Cisco Live 2019 conference in Melbourne that large consulting firms are pushing the idea that business transformation comes before technology transformation. Consequently, Cisco is working with various consultancies, including two large firms in Australia that she chose not to identify, as well as building its internal capability to address the needs of selected industries, including manufacturing and resources. Cisco senior vice-president of operations Irving Tan said the company had been through the process and was eating its own dog food even if he didn't actually use that phrase. Cisco was previously one of the largest functionally organised companies in the world, he said But it realised it needed to organise itself horizontally because different types of products hardware, software and services were increasingly being sold together. Digitalisation is a horizontal play, he observed, adding that Cisco had deployed its own technology to help change the mindset. Were not 100% there yet. Cisco senior vice-president of IT and international chief information officer V.C. Gopalratnam told iTWire that companies were rebranding themselves as technology organisations. For example, Dominos Pizza became Dominos and saw itself as a logistics technology company, he said. The trouble is that customers demanded new capabilities faster than ever, and they had the option to go elsewhere if a company did not deliver. This problem was exacerbated by a shortage of talent. Technologies change quickly, so many businesses competed for the small pool of employees who had knowledge and experience in whatever technology was of current interest. While it was possible to train existing staff, it was usually necessary to bring in at least some experienced people, said Gopalratnam. But there were two kinds of skill sets, he observed. The basics that bring people to the employment table were more the responsibility of the public sector, Gopalratnam suggested. Thats what wins elections. Beyond those basic skills, potential employers considered the key attributes of entry-level staff to be a willingness to learn, and having the right attitude towards working as part of a team. But the higher level skills required experiential learning, and were thus the responsibility of the private sector. Organisations, therefore, needed to develop an employee-centric culture and provide people with opportunities to move into new areas: if they dont, the people will move on, he said. The chief information officer needed to he the chief flexibility officer, suggested Gopalratnam: open-minded, ready to partner with other organisations, and prepared to change direction when necessary. Only three of the major cloud providers AWS, Alibaba and Microsoft will remain in the market after a few years, with AWS continuing to dominate during 2019, a veteran technology journalist says in his annual tech predictions. Robert X. Cringely, one of the first Apple employees and the author of Accidental Empires, the only history of the computer industry, also predicted that the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission would try to make Amazon spin off AWS. He said public cloud, hybrid cloud and private cloud would slowly fade away and be replaced by virtual private cloud, an AWS invention. "What has developed is that the VPC solution based on open source using Linux will change the Internet-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloudscape to VPC-only during 2019," Cringely asserted. Cringely issuesevery year, but has said this would be the last year he does so. He cited the technology analyst firm Gartner as viewing IBM, Oracle and Alibaba as losers in the cloud race, and agreed with the first two, but not that Alibaba would lose out. "[Alibaba] may well have whats right now an uncompetitive cloud offering, but as the only Chinese company in the chart they will not be allowed to fail," he said. "Political pressures are so high that Alibaba will push forward with its cloud offering no matter how much it costs or how little it earns." Of Google, he said: "Googles largest cloud customer will always be Google and that will inevitably lead to poorer service for outside customers. Thats why I think of Google Cloud as half of a player." As to the prediction that Amazon would be asked to spin off AWS, Cringely said there was not much to explain because AWS was moving towards having mono ply power in the cloud space. "Worse still, the larger customers of AWS (those not operating on a credit card) generally hate Amazon because of its ruthless business behaviour," he said. "They are sharks and proudly so. I explained this awhile back and got a very stern phone call from Seattle, but as you know I dont give two hoots about such things and simply explained that customers dont like being bullied. Amazon sounded surprised." He said if Donald Trump won re-election in 2020, he would be very please to see the splitting of AWS from Amazon - though he (Trump) would not be pleased at the end result: making Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, whom Trump dislikes, richer. Cringely said pressure for splitting AWS from Amazon would also come from IBM, Microsoft and Oracle who faced specific database issues competing with AWS. "Each of these companies sells their own database (DB2, SQL Server, and Oracle, respectively) that theyve rolled into their cloud services." he pointed out. "AWSs RDB, in contrast, is based on MySQL and costs Amazon almost nothing to support, giving the biggest cloud player a clear pricing advantage. Now its easy to argue that these companies could do the same as AWS and that theyve shot themselves in the foot, but dont expect their lawyers to see it that way." Given that, Cringely said it was likely that there would be a federal anti-trust case against AWS this year which would result in divestment, though it would take some years to conclude. It's not just Bendigo Bank that is down, but Gmail and Google Drive too, with digital outages a real world problem, not just virtual ones. UPDATE: At 5.13PM AEDT, Google reported the outage over and services restored, the Google Service Status links below have the full text. Original story continues: If you've been having issues with your Gmail and Google Drive accounts today, you're not alone. The Gmail outage map at Down Detector shows problems around the world, with big red marks over the east coast of Australia, in Malaysia, Japan, India and yellow marks out outage around many other parts of the world. Google Drive over at Down Detector also shows a major outage is in progress. Google itself has confirmed the details with almost identical messages with the same timestamp at the Gmail outage page and the Google Drive outage page , where we see Google note at 1.53pm AEDT that "We're investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior." The same message appears for Google Drive, with the word Gmail replaced with Google Drive. Personally, my Gmail account has been working for the most part, although there were instances where Gmail claimed it was offline, and some emails did take a while to appear, so the description Google has given is quite apt. Bendigo Bank has also been offline for me today, as my iTWire colleague Stephen Withers has reported in more detail about the entire Bendigo Bank network. For me, I noted earlier today that I couldn't log in, with a successful password entry showing a message about the network being down, and now showing the message "LOGIN UNAVAILABLE", with the follow-on statement that "Bendigo e-banking is currently unavailable". This is then followed with: "Apologies for the inconvenience, we are working as hard as possible to return the application to service", below which is a big "Try Again" button. You can try tapping this button, but as of publication, nothing is happening. Still, the old adage applies: if at first you don't success, try, try again unless you're doing skydiving or giving blood. Good luck with your Gmail, Google Drive and Bendigo Bank login efforts, and may the services be restored ASAP. An entirely paperless and AI-powered commercial lending platform, designed for both brokers and borrowers, has been launched in Australia, with several million dollars and three years invested in its development to date. The platform, named Lenflo, has been developed by commercial lender Global Capital Commercial and funded by its parent company, corporate adviser and lender Challis Capital Partners. The AI-powered lending platform claimed as Australias first-to-market is designed to give borrowers access to loans by investment banks, private lenders and high-net-worth investors, as well as banks and non-banks. And the platform manages commercial property loans, development finance, residential loans and SMSF loans for business borrowers, business loans and equipment finance. {loadposition peter]Global Capital Commercial says the platform, offering more than 450 lenders, has the capacity for $1 billion in settlements per month and in an era of tightening lending by the banks has predicted it will boost commercial loan approvals by 500%. For Global Capital Commercial, which says it has originated over $10 billion in commercial loans since 2001, with current monthly volumes over $300 million, the product has been the result of extensive years of searching the market for similar platforms. If we could find such a platform, we would have bought it even at a six-figure sum, says Global Capital Commercial spokesperson Andrew West. Most of what we found was dated access databases that could not incorporate emerging technologies that integrate and streamline the enquiry-to-settlement process. Global Capital Commercial says that, apart from the myriad borrower benefits, Lenflos AI technology will enable home loan brokers to now offer commercial and business loans. The company says that in light of the recommendations of the Banking Royal Commission final report which will make business tougher for brokers the platform will help brokers diversify and significantly grow their business. Feedback from Global Capital Commercials home loan brokers is their revenues had already dropped by up to 40-50% in the tightening residential market from peak 2017 levels and further drops will take place in 2020, when the Royal Commissions recommendations take place. Our platform will help brokers maintain their incomes in 2020 and beyond they are able to immediately moving into commercial loans, says West. Our AI-driven pricing engine identifies the optimum finance product for any requirement. Instead of painstakingly researching areas of business they are not familiar with, brokers are guided through the process required for a particular borrower category, from property developers, property purchase and loan refinancing, to self-employed borrowers, SMSFs, bridging finance and other business customers. As financial products become more sophisticated and niches grow, there are more specialist areas of lending dotting the landscape. Our platform will help brokers successfully navigate these areas. Australian employees grow increasingly frustrated with workplaces that expect them to work with outdated, slow and complex technology, according to one analyst firm which says organisations must find a way to address the needs of modern workers. According to Gartners Q4 2018 Global Talent Monitor, technology now ranks among the top 10 reasons why Australian employees change jobs. Gartner says the data reveals technology rose eight places from Q3 2018 to come in ninth on the list of key attrition drivers for Australian employees. People have become so used to advanced technology in their day-to-day lives, that they expect the same thing from their workplace. However, businesses are having a hard time matching the speed at which technology is adopted at home, says Aaron McEwan, HR advisory leader at Gartner. Its not surprising that employees are becoming frustrated when they find themselves wasting valuable time navigating complicated systems and processes that utilise slow and old technology. Its unproductive and inefficient for everyone involved. According to the Gartner talent monitor, compensation has also become increasingly important for Australian employees, rising four places to the No. 3 reason Australians cite for leaving their jobs. Alternatively, for the first time in five years, compensation is the third driver of attraction for Australian workers when considering a new position. The combination of expectations over compensation and the tools and tech employees are given to do their job often feel like a representation of an individuals value or worth to the company. Feeling valued by your employer is intrinsically linked to the employee experience and really impacts how a person feels about their job, McEwan said. Gartner says these factors may have already hit the willingness of Australian employees to go above and beyond at work, as discretionary effort levels fell 4.5% year over year from 21% in Q4 2017 to 16.5% in Q4 2018. According to McEwan, businesses can no longer ignore the needs of their employees, and must start thinking of their workers like they do their customers making it a priority to offer a personalised, seamless and efficient experience. For organisations, the answer doesnt lie in allowing staff to bring their own devices or offering more money. Its recognising that these are just a part of the broader employee experience, McEwan said. This means understanding and focusing on what employees value from their experiences with the company. Rather than waste time implementing policies, systems and processes that have no impact on how employees feel about their company, organisations need to talk to employees to determine how to retain current and attract new employees. Gartner says it advises organisations to tailor employee experiences to suit the needs, desires and goals of the individual rather than the collective. By understanding what employees value the most, HR leaders can positively impact the employee experience and lessen the desire for them to seek alternative employment opportunities, the company said. A shade over 400 million feature phones will be sold globally in 2019, the analyst firm Counterpoint Research has predicted, adding that shipments of this class of device are expected to cross a billion units by 2021. In a blog post, the company's research director Peter Richardson said the growth would take place in India and the Middle East/Africa region, with about 75% of the market being taken up. A feature phone is a candy bar or flip phone with basic features. It has a browser, Twitter and even Google Maps, but has no touchscreen and has physical buttons for the dial pad. India and the Middle East/Africa region will see cumulative shipments of around 800 million feature phones out of more than one billion global feature phone shipments over the next three years," Richardson said. "Globally, the feature phone segment is forecast to generate around US$16 billion cumulatively in wholesale hardware revenues over the next three years. He said a sizeable portion of the growth in India could be attributed to the revival of the Nokia-branded feature phones and the popularity of the Jio Phone which was able to support smartphone-like features in a traditional feature phone form-factor. The Jio Phone has been made available by Reliance, one of India's big companies, and claims to have the biggest 4G network based on mobile data use. Counterpoint said one of the main reasons for the rise of feature phone shipments was the affordability. There are more than three billion people across the world who live on an income of less than US$2.50 per day," said associate director Tarun Pathak. "This segment can neither afford a smartphone nor the data services demanded by the growing advancement in smartphone use-cases. "Thus, a feature phone, coupled with basic mobile services has been the go-to offering for these users to communicate and connect. Most of these users are prevalent across Africa, parts of Asia and Latin America. Pathak said network operators also had a business case to sell feature phones, as most of them were looking for people to upgrade from 2G or 3G to 4G. The problem is most of these users still cannot afford a 4G smartphone. Therefore, operators and the mobile industry players need to offer 4G VoLTE feature phones and move users to the more efficient 4G network, he added. The increase of 4G capability in feature phones would contribute to increased sales, Counterpoint said. Additional factors that were leading to the take-up of feature phones were that they were more resistant to breakage and used technologies like push-to-talk to cope with the environment. Battery life was another factor. Research analyst Varun Mishra said: The emerging markets of India and Nigeria have the greatest number of people without access to electricity. However, the phone remains an important part of peoples lives in these regions as well. "Amid the dearth of electricity, in some cases, the user is dependent on public charging stations (shops giving facilities to charge phones in return for a payment). Long battery life becomes crucial in such situations. Purdue Northwest (PNW) is celebrating Womens History Month throughout March with presentations, screenings, discussions and conversations. #WomensVoices: A Celebration of Womens History Month, a three-day festival focusing on political movements and personal perspectives central to the female experience in the 20th and 21st centuries, will kick off with Women in Sports: Julie DiCaro from 12:30-1:30 p.m. Tuesday in Room 002 of the Library-Student-Faculty Building on the Westville Campus, 1401 S. U.S. 421. The Chicago Feminist Film Festival will run from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Wednesday in Room 123 of the Donald S. Powers Computing Education Building on the Hammond Campus, 6937 Woodmar Ave. Chicago Women Take Action will be held from 5:30-7:30 p.m. March 21 in Room 130 of the Donald S. Powers Computing Education Building on the Hammond Campus. More information on all programs is at www.pnw.edu. The Debian GNU/Linux project may soon have to come up with a solution to the lack of any candidates for the post of project leader, with nobody having thrown their hat into the ring as yet after nominations opened on 3 March. Nominations close on 16 March, after which there is the usual campaigning period and finally the vote itself which takes place between 7 and 20 April. The incumbent leader, Chris Lamb, has held the post for two years. Australian Daniel Pocock, who is not a developer but who wished to contest for the post, told iTWire that he had been blocked from doing so. Pocock, who is from Melbourne but currently lives in Lausanne, said the Debian constitution did not require a candidate for the role of leader to be a developer. He claimed mail to the mailing lists for Debian-Vote were being censored and while mails supporting his candidature had been blocked, others that were against him standing had been published. "Everybody else sees me as a Debian Developer. When I go to conferences, people stop me in the corridor and ask 'are you Daniel Pocock from Debian?, he said. "Sometimes people even recognise me in the street. "I've been doing things with Debian for over 20 years, so the people who are trying to suggest that their little tricks, trying to quietly delete me, make me less of a developer are only making themselves look foolish and spiteful." On his website, he posted a screenshot of an email sent to him by Lamb which can be seen below. The lack of candidates could be tied to the fact that one developer has been demoted during the past year, for making statements that were deemed unsuitable. Norbert Preining was sent a notice on 17 December by the account manager team, citing a number of emails that he had sent to various Debian mailing lists. Debian developers are able to contribute their blog posts to a site called Debian Planet and the posts are aggregated on this site. Preining made a post on his blog on 21 September about the controversy around Linux creator Linus Torvalds last year and his blog was delinked from the Planet site by Lamb. iTWire contacted Lamb to ask for his take on the Preining issue, but he responded: "Debian's constitution implies that the leader has no direct control over membership status within the project rather, this is delegated to the account manager team." An email to the account manager team has gone unanswered. A teleco industry veteran, Bowen will primarily focus on the strategic expansion of Uniti (ASX: UWL) as it pursues its expansion strategy and mergers and acquisition. Bowen will also work closely with Uniti chief executive, Michael Simmons, on organic business expansion opportunities, including new products and markets. Ive had the good fortune to be a part of growing a business in a similar manner previously, with valuable learnings of what to do and what not to do, Bowen said. The M&A opportunities for UWL are plentiful and I look forward to helping to continue to build momentum on this front in the near term and beyond. I am pleased to be joining the Board of UWL and to have the opportunity to work with Michael, the board and team on taking advantage of the platform UWL has established, by getting stuck into a program of targeted, well executed M&A. I genuinely believe the potential exists for the company to materially grow earnings, free cash flow and income diversity, which in turn will be reflected in strong and growing shareholder returns and the elevation of UWL to a sizable, highly profitable company over the medium term. In 2012 Bowen founded, seeded and continues to serve as Chairman of the Telco Together Foundation, the Australian telco industrys only united charitable entity, endorsed by the Federal Governments Department of Communications. Security firm Resecurity, which was in the news recently when it claimed an Iran-linked group was behind both the breach of the Australian Parliament network and at multinational software company Citrix Systems, appears to be headed by a man who has been in the security industry previously but landed in controversy over some of his media comments, the researcher who discovered his identity claims. The man appears to be one Andrey Andreevich Komarov, aka Andrew Komarov, and he was identified by a researcher who uses the Twitter handle Deacon Blues. iTWire verified that Komarov is part of Resecurity by calling the company early this morning AEDT when it was about 11.30 am in Los Angeles, the city mentioned as its location on its website only to be told that Komarov was not available. The woman who answered the phone said a message could be passed on to Komarov. iTWire then asked if Resecurity researcher Jean-Jacques Goncalves, who has corresponded at length with this writer for two stories, was available, but was told that he wasn't there as well. But the woman said clearly that there was no individual named Charles Yoo or Chuck Yoo which is the name that Resecurity has given to news outlets likeandwhen providing information about the Citrix hack. iTWire has requested a call back and, if anyone does call, any additional information provided will be added to this story. On Tuesday night, Goncalves was sent an email, asking for his reaction to the claims made by Deacon Blues. He has not responded so far. Goncalves was swift to respond to all previous emails sent by this writer, regarding both the Australian Parliament incident and also the criticism levelled at the company. The email sent to Goncalves was forwarded to Resecurity's general media email address this morning, but there has been no reply to that either. After iTWire pointed out that Resecurity's claims on its website, of supplying services to several high-profile clients like Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase and Amazon, had no links, the company has now added links. The same has been done for a list of awards, the logos of which are now linked. Resecurity has also added a number of links to press releases under a new section called News on its website. But the company still has no About page which is found on practically all company websites. According to Deacon Blues' tweets, Komarov previously worked for a company known as InfoArmor. That company acquired another firm known as IntelCrawler which he set up. When Resecurity released a claim about the Citrix intrusion, some outlets like The Register and NBC News used it as source material. Deacon Blues captured a screenshot from a search for the NBC article which showed that it had changed attribution from Komarov to Yoo as seen below. NBC report by @dandeluce changes quotes from Andrew Komarov to Chuck Yoo in @resecurity_com article pic.twitter.com/Rp97mYrVHI Deacon Blues (@imdeaconblues) March 11, 2019 Deacon Blues outlined details of previous incidents involving claims made by Resecurity. "Seems like the issue of who is behind @resecurity_com issue is a lot more boring than expected," he/she commented in one tweet. "It's a news jacking attempt. Founder has a history of riding the wave of news stories. A few Twitter trolls are along for the ride." The researcher attached a screenshot of a document that he said was the initial filing made in California by Resecurity, giving the address of a rental mailbox. Resecurity's California initial filing, address if for a rental mailbox pic.twitter.com/hkrc8G3yur Deacon Blues (@imdeaconblues) March 11, 2019 He/she pointed out that Komarov had been quoted in "several media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, etc. These articles were mainly about the Target and Yahoo! hacks. In both of those cases, Komarov would land in controversy". Deacon Blues claimed in the case of the Target hack, Komarov had pointed the finger at a 17-year-old as the source behind the malware that was used. But this turned out to be incorrect and Komarov's former boss had to correct the record, Deacon Blues said. In the case of the Yahoo! breach, Komarov was said to have spotted the infiltration before it was made public. "The only problem: he never bothered to tell anyone until after it had been announced," Deacon Blues said. After the tweet thread by Deacon Blues, some researchers have poked a bit of fun at Resecurity as shown in the tweet below: Global outdoors apparel and equipment vendor Kathmandu Holdings has suffered a breach of its online trading sites and says it is carrying out an investigation to find out the nature of the hack. The company said in a notice to the Australian Stock Exchange that it became aware of the breach between 8 January and 12 February. Kathmandu uses the Magento e-commerce platform which has suffered numerous breaches over the years. Last year, the site of the smartphone company, OnePlus, which also runs Magento, was compromised. Magento is owned by Abobe which it bought for US$1.68 billion in 2018. A study by security firm Trustwave in 2016 said Magento was "the e-commerce target of choice for hackers, with Magento installations accounting for 85% of compromised e-commerce systems". The Kathmandu site is hosted in the US and uses the Cloudflare content delivery network which also protects against DDoS attacks. Butshows it has neither DMARC nor SPF records to guard against spoofed emails which appear to come from its domain. The company said in the statement that an unidentified third party had breached its website and may have stolen personal information of customers and credit card details. Kathmandu is notifying customers who are potentially affected and advised those who feared they had been affected to contact their banks or credit card providers for advice on what they should do. Chief executive Xavier Simonet said: "While the independent forensic investigation is ongoing, we are notifying customers and relevant authorities as soon as practicable. "As a company, Kathmandu takes the privacy of customer data extremely seriously and we unreservedly apologise to any customers who may have been impacted." New research on unsolicited calls in Australia shows that more than half the adults have received scam calls daily or weekly, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority. The ACMA, which undertook the research, released details on Wednesday, as the terms of reference for an Australian Government project to reduce harmful scam activity on telco networks were announced by the Australian Government. The Scam Technology Project, led by the ACMA with representation from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Australian Cyber Security Centre, will explore ways to disrupt scam activity on telco networks. The ACMA established the Scam Technology Project in December 2018, to explore practical technological solutions to address the rise in scam calls. The Federal Government has welcomed the release of the terms of reference for the project, with the Communications Minister Senator Mitch Fifield asking the ACMA to identify practical solutions for addressing the consumer harms caused by international scam callers. Fifield said the project was technically complex work and there were no quick fixes. Australians are sick of scam calls. This Government is taking action to combat the scammers, he said. Chair of the Scam Technology Project Reference Group, Fiona Cameron, said that the project represented a show of unity from Australian government agencies to minimise the scammer scourge. Scam activity is highly organised, increasingly sophisticated and undermines consumer confidence in communications services, Cameron said. This project will investigate what can be done to disrupt scam communications activity, including possible consumer or network-based solutions like call blocking and network traffic authentication protocols. Data shared by the ACCCs Scamwatch service shows that the number of scams being reported, and the amount of money lost to scams is increasing. Cameron said its important for government and industry to respond to consumer concerns and implement a strong action plan. Industry, especially telco service providers, has an important role to play as it is responsible for the delivery of frontline consumer safeguards. We need to be better informed and armed to slow down the scammer tide. We also need to be aware that scammers listen and learn, and adapt their behaviour to suit the environment. A discussion paper will be released by the ACMA in the coming weeks seeking views from consumers, industry and government. The ACMA says it will continue to engage with key stakeholders in the coming months, with a final report to be completed in December. Attorneys for Reyes, Loya, Luciano and Williams appeared in federal court Wednesday either in person and by telephone for a status conference in the case. Calvillos mother, Ollie Hubbard, attended the hearing with a handful of others, wearing pink shirts with Calvillos face on them. Two other spectators sat on the other side of the courtroom. Until testimony at trial, the defense did not know that the government instructed Garbutt to go to the township offices before they were open to take items from Sheltons desk at a time when no one was going to be there, Gambino said. Its one thing if Garbutt had done this on his own, but what makes it troubling is that the government directed him to do so, according to Gambino. Indiana is one of five states that has no bias crime on the books and we want to get off that list, Tom Long, vice chair of public policy for the chamber, said Wednesday during a news conference focusing on the chambers legislative priorities for this session. My telephone never stops ringing all day long scammers, telemarketers, Indiana State Police wanting money, veterans wanting money. All the while Im pinching pennies to pay the bills, with people on the other end of the phone who seem almost unwilling to take no for an answer like youre a bad person if you don't give them the money. They seem to think every American owes them for a service. How about everyday working Americans, who pay there taxes and keep this country moving forward? Should we spend the weekend at intersections with cups begging for money or would that be against the law? I think you know the answer to that. Not for distribution to U.S. news wire services or dissemination in the United States TORONTO, March 12, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Victoria Gold Corp. (TSX.V-VIT) (Victoria or the Company) has announced today that it has entered into an agreement with a syndicate of underwriters led by BMO Capital Markets, under which the underwriters have agreed to buy on a bought deal basis, a combination of common shares (the Common Shares) and flow-through common shares (the Flow-Through Common Shares and together with the Common Shares, the Securities) to provide the Company with gross proceeds of at least approximately C$30 million (the Offering). The Common Shares will be offered at a price of C$0.44 per Common Share, with minimum gross proceeds of C$30,008,000 and maximum gross proceeds of C$32,555,900. The Flow-Through Common Shares will be offered at a price of C$0.53 per Flow-Through Common Share with up to C$15,004,300 of gross proceeds. In the event that no Flow-Through Common Shares are subscribed for, the Underwriters have agreed to buy the number of Common Shares to provide the Company with gross proceeds of approximately $30 million. The Company has granted the Underwriters an option, exercisable at the offering price for a period of 30 days following the closing of the Offering, to purchase up to an additional 15% of the Common Shares to cover over-allotments, if any. The Offering is expected to close on or about April 2, 2019 and is subject to Victoria receiving all necessary regulatory approvals. The net proceeds from the sale of the Common Shares will be used for construction and operations of the Eagle Gold Mine and general corporate purposes. The gross proceeds from the sale of the Flow-Through Common Shares will be used for expenditures which qualify as Canadian Development Expenses ("CDE") within the meaning of the Income Tax Act (Canada)). The Company will renounce such CDE with an effective date of no later than December 31, 2019. The Securities will be offered by way of a short form prospectus in each of the provinces of Canada, excluding Quebec and may also be offered by way of private placement in the United States. The securities offered have not been registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of the securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. About the Dublin Gulch Property Victoria Gold's 100%-owned Dublin Gulch gold property is situated in central Yukon Territory, Canada, approximately 375 kilometers north of the capital city of Whitehorse, and approximately 85 kilometers from the town of Mayo. The Property is accessible by road year round, and is located within Yukon Energy's electrical grid. The Property covers an area of approximately 555 square kilometers, and is the site of the Company's Eagle Gold Deposit. The Eagle Gold Mine is under construction and is expected to be Yukon's next operating gold mine. The Eagle and Olive deposits, include Proven and Probable Reserves of 2.7 million ounces of gold from 123 million tonnes of ore with a grade of 0.67 grams of gold per tonne, as outlined in a National Instrument 43-101 feasibility study entitled Report for the Eagle Gold Project and dated October 26, 2016. The NI 43-101 Mineral Resource for the Eagle and Olive deposits has been estimated, as at December 5, 2018, to host 208 million tonnes averaging 0.66 grams of gold per tonne, containing 4.4 million ounces of gold in the "Measured and Indicated" category, inclusive of Proven and Probable Reserves, and a further 20 million tonnes averaging 0.64 grams of gold per tonne, containing 0.4 million ounces of gold in the "Inferred" category. Cautionary Language and Forward-Looking Statements Neither the TSX Venture Exchange, nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This press release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this discussion, other than statements of historical facts, that address future exploration drilling, exploration activities, anticipated completion of mine construction, anticipated metal production, internal rate of return, estimated ore grades, commencement of production estimates and projected exploration and capital expenditures (including costs and other estimates upon which such projections are based) and events or developments that the Company expects, are forward looking statements. 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 or developments may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include metal prices, exploration successes, continued availability of capital and financing (including the flow-through financing outlined above), unfavourable weather conditions, delays in the delivery of materials to the mine site, and general economic, market or business conditions. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Wealth Minerals Ltd. (the Company or Wealth) - (TSXV: WML; OTCQX: WMLLF; SSE: WMLCL; Frankfurt: EJZN), announces that it has signed an option agreement giving it the right (the Option) to acquire a 100% interest (subject to a 2% NSR royalty) in the Meductic vanadium properties (the Property) located approximately 79 km west northwest of Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Henk Van Alphen, Wealths CEO, commented: This acquisition was made to give Wealth shareholders increased exposure to metals tied to new battery technologies that are driving the global change in energy use. Lithium and vanadium are key metal inputs with favorable market dynamics in terms of demand and limited supply. Stefan Schauss, a Director of Wealth and a vanadium battery expert, stated: Vanadium is a new battery metal that is enjoying increased demand due to the growing popularity of flow batteries. Flow batteries are used in applications where long duration energy storage is prioritized over other characteristics of rechargeable batteries. Vanadium has historically only been used in the steel industry and new demand from battery manufacturers is expanding the demand landscape. Background The Property, which is comprised of the Wickham 1, Bright Eye Brook 1, 2 and 3, and Meductic 3, 4 and 5 mineral tenures consists of a total area of approximately 1,749 hectares (see Figure 1 and 2). The Property covers known areas of highly anomalous vanadium in outcrop. In addition, a 2018 sample results program confirmed that there is a vanadium enriched section within the Property. Sampling at both the Meductic and Bright Eye Brook mineral tenures area returned vanadium pentoxide values > 0.10% over lengths of between 30 and 64 meters. Acquisition Terms Wealth and the Property owners (the Owners) have entered into a formal option agreement dated November 28, 2018 (the Option Agreement). Under the terms of the Option Agreement, Wealth made a $20,000 cash payment upon signing and may exercise the Option by paying an aggregate of $720,000 in cash, and issuing an aggregate of 2.5 million common shares of Wealth, to the Owners, in accordance with the following schedule: Due Date Cash Wealth Shares Upon signing $20,000 -- March 15, 2019 $20,000 150,000 One year after signing $80,000 300,000 Two years after signing $120,000 450,000 Three years after signing $160,000 600,000 Four years after signing $320,000 1,000,000 Pursuant to the provisions of the Option Agreement, Wealth has agreed to pay the Owners a 2% NSR royalty on all mineral commodities sold from the claims comprising the Property. Wealth has the right to purchase from the Owners, at any time, half of the NSR royalty (1% of the 2%) for a lump sum payment of $1,000,000. Additionally, from the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Option Agreement until production, the Owners shall receive an advance royalty of $30,000 per year, which will be credited towards NSR royalty payments following the commencement of production on the Property. Option Cancellation Wealth also announces that, pursuant to the Companys 2004 Incentive Stock Option Plan, the Company has cancelled an aggregate of 3,550,000 incentive stock options which were previously granted to directors, officers, employees and consultants. Qualified Person John Drobe, P.Geo., a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects, has reviewed the scientific and technical information that forms the basis for this news release and has approved the disclosure herein. Mr. Drobe is not independent of the Company as he is a consultant and shareholder of Wealth, and holds incentive stock options in the Company. About Wealth Minerals Ltd. Wealth is a mineral resource company with interests in Canada, Mexico, Peru and Chile. The Companys main focus is the acquisition and development of lithium projects in South America. To date, the Company has positioned itself to develop the Quisquiro Salar in Chile (the Trinity Project), as well as to work alongside existing producers in the prolific Atacama Salar, where the Company has a substantial licenses package. The Company has also positioned itself to play a role in asset consolidation in Chile with various lithium properties throughout the country. Lithium market dynamics and a rapidly increasing metal price are the result of profound structural issues with the industry meeting anticipated future demand. Wealth is positioning itself to be a major beneficiary of this future mismatch of supply and demand. The Company also maintains and continues to evaluate a portfolio of precious and base metal exploration-stage projects. For further details on the Company readers are referred to the Companys website (www.wealthminerals.com) and its Canadian regulatory filings on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. On Behalf of the Board of Directors of WEALTH MINERALS LTD. "Hendrik van Alphen" Hendrik van Alphen Chief Executive Officer For further information, please contact: Marla Ritchie Phone: 604-331-0096 Ext. 3886 or 604-638-3886 E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 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 news release. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (collectively, forward-looking statements) within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities legislation, including the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation, statements regarding the exercise of the Option, the NSR royalty and advanced royalty payments, anticipated exploration program results from exploration activities, the Companys expectation that it will be able to enter into agreements to acquire interests in additional mineral properties, the discovery and delineation of mineral deposits/resources/reserves, the anticipated business plans and timing of future activities of the Company, are forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that such statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Forward-looking statements are typically identified by words such as: will, believe, expect, anticipate, intend, estimate, plans, may, should, scheduled, potential, postulate and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events or results that may, could, would, might or will occur or be taken or achieved. In making the forward-looking statements in this news release, the Company has applied several material assumptions, including without limitation, that market fundamentals will result in sustained lithium and vanadium demand and prices, the receipt of any necessary permits, licenses and regulatory approvals in connection with the future development of the Companys Chilean lithium projects in a timely manner, the availability of financing on suitable terms for the development, construction and continued operation of the Companys projects, and the Companys ability to comply with environmental, health and safety laws. The Company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements by the Company are not guarantees of future results or performance, and that actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including, operating and technical difficulties in connection with mineral exploration and development activities, actual results of exploration activities, the estimation or realization of mineral reserves and mineral resources, the timing and amount of estimated future production, the costs of production, capital expenditures, the costs and timing of the development of new deposits, requirements for additional capital, future prices of lithium and vanadium, changes in general economic conditions, changes in the financial markets and in the demand and market price for commodities, lack of investor interest in future financings, accidents, labour disputes and other risks of the mining industry, delays in obtaining governmental approvals, permits or financing or in the completion of development or construction activities, changes in laws, regulations and policies affecting mining operations, title disputes, the inability of the Company to obtain any necessary permits, consents, approvals or authorizations, including acceptance by the TSX Venture Exchange, required for the Option Agreement, the timing and possible outcome of any pending litigation, environmental issues and liabilities, and risks related to joint venture operations, and other risks and uncertainties disclosed in the Companys latest interim Managements Discussion and Analysis and filed with certain securities commissions in Canada. All of the Companys Canadian public disclosure filings may be accessed via www.sedar.com and readers are urged to review these materials, including the technical reports filed with respect to the Companys mineral properties. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements in this news release or incorporated by reference herein, except as otherwise required by law. Company Reports Results from AGM Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - March 13, 2019) - Carube Copper Corp. (TSXV: CUC) is pleased to report that it has received 500,000 common shares of Tocvan Ventures Corp. (Tocvan) and has also been paid $25,000 (Cdn.) pursuant to the terms of a property option agreement between the Corporation and Tocvan dated May 23, 2018, as amended (the "Option Agreement"). Tocvan has an option to acquire up to an 80% interest in the Rogers Creek Property which covers 212.34 km2 in the Cascade Magmatic Arc of British Columbia, about 90 km northeast of Vancouver, British Columbia, in the Lillooet Mining District. The Property consists of 47 mineral claims and is being explored for porphyry-style copper-gold mineralization. In order to maintain in force the option granted to it under the Option Agreement, and to exercise the option, Tocvan must incur the following expenditures on the Rogers Creek Property: Issue 200,000 common shares to Carube and complete a $200,000 work commitment within 30 days of the first anniversary of the listing date on the CSE; Issue 200,000 common shares to Carube and complete a $300,000 work commitment within 30 days of the second anniversary of the listing date on the CSE; and Issue 200,000 common shares to Carube and complete a $400,000 work commitment within 30 days of the third anniversary of the listing date. Issue 200,000 common shares to Carube and complete a $1,000,000 work commitment within 30 days of the fourth anniversary of the listing date. Stephen Hughes, Carube Copper's CEO and President remarks, "We are extremely pleased to see Tocvan go public and fulfill their commitment to explore at the Rogers Creek Copper Project. The company is anticipating a fruitful exploration season there this year with the Tocvan team funding and operating the program. This Joint Venture with Tocvan represents the first of several that the company expects to negotiate and complete on its non-core assets in the near term. Carube also intends to acquire new property assets for addition to its portfolio. A number of quality projects are currently under advanced review." AGM Results Carube would also like to announce the results from its Annual General and Special Meeting ("AGM") held in Toronto, Ontario, on March 2, 2019. More than 31% of the record date outstanding shares of the Company were represented at the meeting by proxy or in person. All of the matters submitted to the shareholders for approval set forth in the Company's Notice of Meeting and Information Circular dated January 16, 2019, were approved by more than 99% of votes cast; including the re-election of Tony Manini, Alar Soever, Zimi Meka, Stephen Hughes and Yale Simpson as directors. The appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as auditors was confirmed. The Stock Option Plan and the reservation for issuance of the maximum number of shares permitted under the plan was approved by in more than 99% of votes cast at the meeting. The officers of the company are: Mr. Antony Manini, B.Sc. (Hons), FAusIMM, FSEG, Chairman of the Board, Independent Director Mr. Stephen Hughes, B.Sc. (Geology), President and Chief Executive Officer Mr. Jeffrey Ackert, B.Sc. (Geology), VP Business Development Mr. John McNeice, CA, CPA, Chief Financial Officer Mr. Chris Irwin, B.A., LL.B., Corporate Secretary and Counsel About Carube Copper Carube is focused on the exploration and development of copper and gold projects in Jamaica and Canada. In Jamaica, Carube Copper holds a 100% interest in 11 licenses, totalling 535 square kilometres. In Canada, it holds a 100% interest in three porphyry copper-gold-molybdenum properties, totalling 492 square kilometres within the Tertiary-aged Cascade Magmatic Arc in southwestern British Columbia. Stephen Hughes, CEO and President +1 (647) 517-4574 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Jeff Ackert, Vice President, Business Development +1 (647) 957-2249 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. John McNeice. CFO +1 (613) 692-7704 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. www.carubecopper.com Neither the TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. DISCLAIMER & FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS This news release includes certain "forward-looking statements" which are not comprised of historical facts. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions and address future events and conditions, and by their very nature involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Although these statements are based on currently available information, Carube Copper Corp. provides no assurance that actual results will meet management's expectations. Factors which cause results to differ materially are set out in the Company's documents filed on SEDAR. Undue reliance should not be placed on "forward looking statements". IMPORTANT NOTICE: Carube Copper hereby incorporates the entire disclaimer set forth on its website at Click Here VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Irving Resources Inc. (CSE:IRV) (Irving or the Company) is pleased to announce all necessary work permits have been received for its drill crew, and it has commenced diamond drilling at its Omu Gold Project in Hokkaido, Japan. Drilling is being conducted by Mitsui Mineral Development Engineering Co., Ltd. (MINDECO) and Rodren Drilling International Ltd., Winnipeg, Manitoba. The first target that will be tested is the Omu Sinter, an 8-20 meter thick terrace of silica that was deposited within an ancient hot-spring pool. Irving discovered the Omu Sinter in late 2016, and subsequent prospecting resulted in collection of spot rock chip samples grading up to 14.6 gpt Au and 50.8 gpt Ag along with strongly elevated arsenic (676 ppm), mercury (>100 ppm), antimony (1,675 ppm) and selenium (93 ppm), all elements associated with hot spring mineralization (please refer to the Companys news release dated September 21, 2017 for further details). Geophysical data, including drone-based magnetics and gravity, collected in late 2017 revealed evidence of a prominent north-south structural zone under Omu Sinter, a potential conduit for hydrothermal fluids that once fed the hot spring (please refer to the Companys news release dated January 22, 2018 for further details). Irving has eight initial holes planned to test areas underneath the sinter terrace for feeder structures that could potentially host epithermal gold-silver veins. Holes will be inclined and drilled to depths of 300-425 meters to test the prospective boiling zone, the part of a hot spring system in which potentially high-grade mineralization can be deposited. Planned holes are staggered over approximately 1.2 km of strike along the targeted structural zone. Should results from these first eight holes prove promising, Irving has an additional 15 holes fully permitted to further test this important target. Omu Sinter (also known as Otoineppu mine), is the first target of Irvings 2019 Omu exploration program. Drilling at Omui mine site, where Irving has identified three robust drill targets (Honpi, Nanko and Sakinyama), will commence in approximately 2-3 months following completion of trench and bulk sample work at Omui. Irving also plans to expedite baseline work including soil sampling and geophysical surveys at its new Hokuryu West target so that drill targets can be outlined there later this year. We are delighted to commence drilling at our Omu Gold Project, commented Akiko Levinson, President and Director of Irving Resources. Drilling at Omu Sinter is just the beginning of a long list of exploration objectives Irving has at Omu this year. In a few months, we will be trenching, bulk sampling and diamond drilling our three high priority targets at the nearby Omui mine site. We also plan aggressive follow-up field-work at our newly discovered high-grade Hokuryu West target so that it can be readied for drilling. This year is shaping up to be a very busy one for Irving. Quinton Hennigh (Ph.D., P.Geo.) is the Qualified Person pursuant to National Instrument 43-101 responsible for, and having reviewed and approved, the technical information contained in this news release. Dr. Hennigh is a technical advisor and director of Irving Resources Inc. About Irving Resources Inc.: Irving is a junior exploration company with a focus on gold in Japan. Irving also holds, through a subsidiary, Project Venture Agreements with Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC) for joint regional exploration programs in the United Republic of Tanzania, the Republic of Malawi and the Republic of Madagascar. JOGMEC is a government organization established under the law of Japan, administrated by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan, and is responsible for stable supply of various resources to Japan through the discovery of sizable economic deposits of base, precious and rare metals. Additional information can be found on the Companys website: www.IRVresources.com. Akiko Levinson, President & Director Forward-looking information Some statements in this news release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements address future events and conditions and, as such, involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the statements. Such factors include, without limitation, customary risks of the mineral resource exploration industry as well as Irving having sufficient cash to fund any planned drilling and other exploration activities. THE CSE HAS NOT REVIEWED AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCURACY OR ADEQUACY OF THIS RELEASE. "I used to be very shy and had difficulties in reading and understanding things. I am now assertive because I can read and write," said Bisha Mwale, a sixth grader at Mutambe Primary School in the Zambian capital city of Lusaka. She owed her improvement to a literacy enrichment program called LitClubs, which is provided by GoYe Therefore (GYT) Zambia in partnership with non-profit literacy organization LitWorld. LitClubs are weekly sessions held after class for joyful learning, creative play and social interaction. The project started in Zambia in January 2017 and has been serving hundreds of children and adults in Lusaka and Zambia's southern city of Livingstone. Whenever the club members meet, they read aloud stories from children's storybooks, recite poems or act out sketches. Some parents pointed out that their children's reading and writing skills had made big headway. "Community reading sessions has helped my daughter to be more assertive and interested in school and her academic performance has improved tremendously." Emelda Banda, a mother of one club member in Lusaka, told Xinhua Saturday. "She is even able to understand news items and explain them to me," the mother said. Banda also mentioned that the reading sessions had helped reduce illiteracy levels in communities where they are carried out. Some adults have even been encouraged to go back to school because they have realized the importance of being able to read and write, she added. But what makes community reading sessions successful? Sanyambe Mutambezi Mweemba, a coordinator of GYT Zambia, has an idea. "Our curriculum does not teach the intricacies of reading and writing of phonetics and grammar. Instead, we create a space where members can reflect on their own stories and curiosities through the read aloud and discussions around literacy activities," said Mweemba. LitClubs and community read aloud sessions help communities to develop a love of learning that also help them improve their cognitive and academic performance in school or other informal learning settings, she said. She further suggested reading aloud at home, in workplaces, orphanages, seniors' homes, hospices and hospitals. Reading aloud have many benefits such as easing tensions, stress and pain, relaxation, as well as enhancing people's bond, according to Mweemba. A UNESCO global education monitoring report said if all students in low-income countries left school with elementary reading skills, 171 million people could be lifted out of poverty, which would be equivalent to a 12 percent cut in world poverty. VANCOUVER, March 12, 2019 /CNW/ - Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. (TSX: NDM; NYSE American: NAK) ("Northern Dynasty" or the "Company") announces that it has entered into an agreement dated March 12, 2019 with Cantor Fitzgerald Canada Corporation, as lead underwriter and sole bookrunner, on behalf of itself and a syndicate of underwriters including BMO Capital Markets, H.C. Wainwright & Co., LLC. and TD Securities Inc. (collectively, the "Underwriters") to purchase, on a bought deal basis, 15,625,000 common shares of the Company (the "Offered Shares") at the price of US$0.64 per Offered Share (the "Issue Price") for aggregate gross proceeds of US$10.0 million (the "Offering"). In addition, the Company has agreed to grant to the Underwriters an over-allotment option (the "Over-Allotment Option") exercisable, in whole or in part, in the sole discretion of the Underwriters to purchase up to an additional 2,343,750 Offered Shares at the Issue Price for a period of up to 30 days after the closing of the Offering for potential additional gross proceeds to the Company of up to US$1.5 million. The Company has agreed to pay the Underwriters a cash commission equal to 6% of the gross proceeds of the Offering, including proceeds received from the exercise of the Over-Allotment Option. The Offering is expected to close on or about March 18, 2019 and is subject to certain conditions including, but not limited to, the receipt of all necessary approvals including the approval of the Toronto Stock Exchange and the NYSE American. Proceeds of the Offering are anticipated to be used for (i) operational expenditures, including engineering, environmental, permitting and evaluation expenses associated with the Pebble Project and the advancement of completion of the United States Army Corps of Engineers Environmental Impact Study, (ii) enhanced outreach and engagement with political and regulatory offices in the Alaska state and U.S. federal government, Alaska Native partners and broader regional and state-wide stakeholder groups, and (iii) for general corporate purposes. It remains the Company's goal to partner the Pebble Project. The Offering will be made by way of a prospectus supplement (the "Prospectus Supplement") to the Company's existing Canadian base shelf prospectus (the "Base Shelf Prospectus") and related U.S. registration statement on Form F-10 (SEC File No. 333-229262) (the "Registration Statement"). The U.S. form of Base Shelf Prospectus is included in the Registration Statement. The Prospectus Supplement has been filed with the securities commissions in each of the provinces of Canada (other than Quebec) and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"). The Canadian Prospectus Supplement (together with the related Canadian Base Shelf Prospectus) is available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. The United States Prospectus Supplement (together with U.S. Base Shelf Prospectus and the Registration Statement) will be available on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Alternatively, the Prospectus Supplement may be obtained, when available, upon request by contacting the Company or Cantor Fitzgerald Canada Corporation in Canada, attention: Equity Capital Markets, 181 University Avenue, Suite 1500, Toronto, ON, M5H 3M7, email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ; Cantor Fitzgerald & Co., Attention: Equity Capital Markets, 499 Park Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, New York, 10022 or by email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy securities, nor will there be any sale of the securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. The securities being offered have not been approved or disapproved by any regulatory authority, nor has any such authority passed upon by the accuracy or adequacy of the Prospectus Supplement, the Base Shelf Prospectus or the Registration Statement. About Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. Northern Dynasty is a mineral exploration and development company based in Vancouver, Canada. Northern Dynasty's principal asset, owned through its wholly owned Alaska-based U.S. subsidiary, Pebble Limited Partnership ("PLP"), is a 100% interest in a contiguous block of 2,402 mineral claims in southwest Alaska, including the Pebble deposit. PLP is the proponent of the Pebble Project, an initiative to develop one of the world's most important mineral resources. Ronald W. Thiessen President & CEO Forward Looking Information and other Cautionary Factors This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation, and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (collectively referred to as "forward-looking information"). The use of any of the words "expect", "plan", "update" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking information or statements. These statements include expectations about the likelihood of completion of the Offering, the amount of funds to be raised, the use of proceeds of the Offering, the anticipated closing date of the Offering, the finalization by the United States Army Corps of Engineers of the Environmental Impact Study, the ability of the Company to proceed with permit applications for the development of the Pebble Project, the ability of the Company to obtain the necessary federal and state permits for the development of the Pebble Project and the ability of the Company to secure required Canadian and US regulatory and stock exchange acceptances for the Offering. Though the Company believes the expectations expressed in its forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are subject to future events and third party discretion such as regulatory personnel. For more information on the Company, and the risks and uncertainties connected with its business, Investors should review the Company's home jurisdiction filings at www.sedar.com and its filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission at www.sec.gov. Reporters Without Borders said Tuesday it had asked the International Criminal Court to investigate the murders of 102 journalists in Mexico from 2012 to 2018, calling the rash of killings a crime against humanity. Another 14 journalists have gone missing in the same period, the media-rights group said. It urged the Hague-based court, which handles the most serious international crimes, to investigate the killings and kidnappings as a targeted campaign against the press. These crimes against humanity (constitute) a generalized and systematic attack on a civilian population: journalists, the secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, Christophe Deloire, told a news conference. He accused authorities of evident complicity in the killings under the two presidents in question, Felipe Calderon (2006-2012) and Enrique Pena Nieto (2012-2018). Reporters Without Borders and Mexican rights group Propuesta Civica, which are jointly pushing the ICC to act, said they would ask Mexicos new President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to file a case before the court. Only the courts member states, prosecutor or the United Nations Security Council can bring cases before the ICC. Mexican officials are very positive about the initiative, and Lopez Obrador is open to the idea, said Emmanuel Colombie, Latin America representative for Reporters Without Borders. The watchdog group ranks Mexico as one of the deadliest countries in the world for journalists, behind only war-torn Afghanistan and Syria. The explosion of journalist murders in Mexico has coincided with a wave of violent crime driven by powerful drug cartels and fueled by political corruption. The vast majority of the murders have gone unpunished, as do more than 90 percent of violent crimes in Mexico. Sri Lankas president backed down Wednesday from a refusal to ask the UN rights body for more time to probe war crimes during the island nations brutal civil conflict. Sri Lankan government troops were accused of killing at least 40,000 ethnic Tamil civilians in the final months of the islands 37-year guerrilla war that ended in May 2009. A 2015 UN Human Rights Council resolution gave Sri Lanka 18 months to establish a credible investigation. Colombo secured a two-year extension in 2017 that expires this month. Maithripala Sirisena said last week that he did not want another extension, saying that he did not want to dig up the past and re-open old wounds. This triggered a rift with the government led by Sirisenas rival Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, which said it would send a separate delegation to a meeting of the UN rights body in Geneva next week. Legislator Mahinda Samarasinghe, a spokesman for Sirisena, said the president has now changed his mind. I told the President that we cant have two delegations and that was accepted, Samarasinghe said. A representative of the president will go to Geneva, but as a member of a delegation headed by the Foreign Minister. Top UN diplomats had expressed concern over worryingly slow progress by Colombo. Over 100,000 people were killed in Sri Lankas 37-year-old Tamil separatist war. The UN has acknowledged that Colombo made some positive advances on constitutional and legal reforms, limited land restitution and symbolic gestures towards reconciliation. But it has also cautioned that the measures taken under Sirisena were inadequate, lacked coordination and a sense of urgency. Oscar-winning screenwriter Kevin Willmott delivering keynote address for 'Art of Democracy' symposium Wednesday, March 13, 2019 Kevin Willmott, Oscar-winning screenwriter, acclaimed filmmaker and professor of film at the University of Kansas, will be the keynote speaker for Kansas State University's engagement symposium, "The Art of Democracy." | Download this photo. MANHATTAN Kansas State University's all-day engagement symposium, "The Art of Democracy," will wrap up with a public talk by Oscar-winning screenwriter and acclaimed filmmaker Kevin Willmott. Willmott will be the keynote speaker for the symposium, which is co-organized by the Office of the Provost and the Center for Engagement and Community Development. He will present "BlacKkKlansman: A Response to the Resurgence of Overt Racism in America Today" at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, March 21, in the Bluemont Room at the K-State Student Union. No tickets are required and the public is invited to attend. A professor of film at the University of Kansas, Willmott co-wrote the film "BlacKkKlansman" with director Spike Lee and other collaborators. The film earned the Oscar for best adapted screenplay at the recent 91st Academy Awards ceremony. In his keynote address for "The Art of Democracy," Willmott will discuss how "BlacKkKlansman" explores and exemplifies the rise of racism, Charlottesville, the Muslim travel ban and the government shutdown over funding for the wall. "BlacKkKlansman" is based on the true story of and book by Ron Stallworth, a young African-American police officer who infiltrated a cell of the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in the late 1970s. Willmott's talk is presented by the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University in partnership with the university's Dow Center for Multicultural and Community Studies, the Center for Engagement and Community Development, Department of Art, UFM Community Learning Center and Black Student Union. "BlacKkKlansman" was nominated for five other Academy Awards. The film has also received prestigious awards internationally, including the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, the award for best adapted screenplay from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and other honors. Livestreaming of this event is being made available to Kansas community college partners. Read more about "The Art of Democracy" symposium. For more information on Willmott's visit, contact Linda Duke, director of the Beach Museum of Art, at lduke@k-state.edu. A man checks the wreckage of the airplane of Ethiopian Airlines (ET) which crashed earlier near Bishoftu city, about 45 kms southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, March 10, 2019. All 149 passengers and eight crew members aboard ET 302, bound for Nairobi, Kenya, are confirmed killed, the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation (EBC) said. [Photo/Xinhua] Many European countries announced on Tuesday to ground Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft following an Ethiopian Airlines plane crash on Sunday. The Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 bound for Nairobi, Kenya, crashed shortly after taking off from the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board, drawing renewed scrutiny of the plane after an 2018 crash of the same model in Indonesia claimed 189 lives. British Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) announced to block the Boeing 737 MAX from any operator arriving, departing or overflying British airspace. A spokesperson for the CAA said on Tuesday that they have taken a "precautionary measure", as they do not currently have sufficient information from the flight data recorder. "The Civil Aviation Authority's safety directive will be in place until further notice," the spokesperson said. According to the CAA, there are currently five 737 MAX aircraft registered and operational in Britain. A sixth was planned to commence operations later this week. Following Britain's move, the Hannover-headquartered world's largest travel group TUI has stopped all flights with the aircraft type, including all airlines in the group, said a spokesman. Germany banned the flights by Boeing 737 MAX 8 in its airspace. German Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer told the broadcaster n-tv that "Security is absolute. Until all doubts have been cleared up, I have ordered that the German airspace is closed to all Boeing 737 MAX plane with immediate effect." The German Transport Ministry said on Monday that there are no Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes in operation by German airliners. The government of Netherlands, Belgium and France's DGAC civil aviation authority also ordered its airspace closed for Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft, while Austrian transport minister announced similar move until further notice. The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) has decided to temporarily suspend the operation of all variants of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft into and out of Irish airspace with immediate effect. The decision has been taken taking account of the unprecedented loss of two Boeing 737 MAX in recent months, and based on ensuring the continued safety of passengers and flight crew, which is the IAA's No.1 priority, IAA said in a statement. On Monday, Italy's Codacons consumer association urged the Italian Civil Aviation Authority (ENAC) to immediately ground all Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes in use in Italy. "In view of the preceding, wholly similar incident in Indonesia, and circulating reports on lack of pilot training in flight correction software, measures must be taken immediately to safeguard air transportation safety," said Codacons President Carlo Rienzi in a statement. "We urgently call on ENAC to categorically ground all Boeing 737 Max planes present in Italian airports," Rienzi wrote, adding that Sardinia-based airline Air Italy "already has the model in its fleet, and has ordered a total of 20." ENAC confirmed that Air Italy flies three Boeing 737 Max airplanes, which it "operates in full compliance" with Boeing and U.S. Federal Aviation Administration requirements "issued after a similar incident took place in Indonesia." Speaking to La Repubblica newspaper in an interview on Monday, veteran airline pilot Danilo Recine from the National Association of Civil Aviation Professionals (ANPAC) pointed out that, while the causes of the Ethiopian Airlines flight crash are still unknown, "it is possible" that the plane's sensors malfunctioned. "In the Lion Air crash (in Indonesia) last year, some of the parameters sent to the cockpit, such as speed and altitude, were wrong. The machine reacted with countermeasures to correct something that was not happening in reality...and the pilots could not override the system manually. We could be looking at something similar." Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 13) Fans of on- and off-screen partners Kathryn Bernardo and Daniel Padilla will no longer see them doing projects togetherat least this year. In an open letter published on Preview.ph, Bernardo revealed that they had decided to not pursue projects for 2019. "Some of you might already be aware of this, but late last year, we made a mutual decision to not accept projects together this 2019," she said in the letter published Tuesday. This comes after the announcement of Bernardo's upcoming project with actor Alden Richards. READ: Kathryn Bernardo, Alden Richards to star in Star Cinema film While the 22-year-old actress acknowledged that the decision is risky and scary, she said she is "excited to discover what kind of opportunities await us both in this journey." "We both know it's going to be tough for both of us and maybe even tougher for our fans, but we really gave it some thought, and while there's nothing we want more than to make you happy, we'd appreciate if you can give us this year to pursue our individual growth this time around," she said, appealing to their fans. Bernardo assured that they will still support each other behind the camera. "Needless to say, DJ and I will still be here; I will always have his back in the same way that I know he always has mine. It's just that, in the meantime, we want to support each other off-cam," she said. Bernardo and Padilla first worked together in 2011 on teen-oriented show "Growing Up." Since then, they had amassed a legion of fansmaking them arguably the most popular "love team" in the country. Their on-screen success also gave birth to "KathNiel," the portmanteau name of their tandem. In August last year, the two confirmed their romantic relationship of five years. The two were rumored to have parted ways last month, but Padilla vehemently denied the news. Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality launched a new freight train on Tuesday to better serve transportation along the land-sea trade corridor. The train left Guoyuan Port at 10 a.m. and will stop at Qinzhou port in southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on Thursday. Cargo such as auto parts and machinery equipment from Chengdu and Chongqing, will eventually be transported by sea to Saigon and Haiphong in Vietnam, and Jakarta, capital of Indonesia. "Rail transport takes about two days from Guoyuan to Qinzhou," said Hu Qiang, vice general manager with the Sinotrans Chongqing Co. Ltd. "The total shipping time to southeast Asian countries will shorten to less than 10 days from 22 days via the Yangtze River waterway." Zhang Guozhi, deputy head of the Liangjiang New Area Management Committee in Chongqing, said that as different international logistics channels interconnect at Guoyuan port, Chongqing has further strengthened its freight capacity and its role as a transport hub. Guoyuan is the largest port on the upper reaches of the Yangtze and a key point connecting the Yangtze River economic belt and Belt and Road regions, with 16 berths currently in use for 5,000-tonne vessels and an annual railway throughput capacity of 5 million tonnes. The European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) celebrated the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web (WWW) on Tuesday, with Tim Berners-Lee, designer of the WWW, together with other scientists calling for helping the other half global population who still has no access to the Internet to get online. The celebration kicked off with a short panel discussion involving Berners-Lee and a group of scientists and industry partners at CERN outside Geneva on Tuesday morning, which was part of a 30-hour trip by the father of the WWW who would then travel to London and later to Lagos, Nigeria, for a series of celebrating activities. Recalling the birth of the WWW, CERN Director General Fabiola Gianotti highlighted that the web showed the power of fundamental research to drive innovation. "Basic science, with its ambitious goals, brings cutting-edge technology and development in many areas, and can impact the society in a profound way," she said. Today, half of the world's population is online and close to 2 billion websites exist. The web has been an incredible and powerful tool to reach out to all humanity, to break down barriers, to bring education and information to all, and thus to reduce inequalities, the CERN chief concluded. Berners-Lee explained on CERN's role during the birth of the WWW, which he said was largely attributed to the diversity and freedom of research at the institution. "CERN allowed researchers to choose to use whatever computer and systems they like, which created a dire need for interoperability of information," he said. He believed that it's more urgent than ever to ensure the other half of the world are not left behind offline and that everyone contributes to a web that drives equality, opportunity and creativity. Boeing shares continued to decline on Tuesday, sending the stock to plunge more than 11 percent this week, as more aviation regulators and air carriers around the globe banned the aerospace giant's 737 Max jets after Sunday's deadly crash in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 bound for Nairobi, Kenya, crashed shortly after taking off from the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board, drawing renewed scrutiny of the plane after a 2018 crash of the same model in Indonesia claimed 189 lives. A wave of aviation authorities and airlines on Tuesday joined in the grounding of Boeing 737 Max jets. Europe's aviation safety regulator issued a continent-wide ban on flights of the aircraft model following the similar actions by Australia, Singapore and Malaysia. China was among the first to ban the 737 Max on Monday. Although it is too early to determine what caused Sunday's deadly crash, there was growing concern about the safety of the 737 Max aircraft as the two crashes that occurred in half a year involved the new model of the 737 Max family that were delivered not long ago. Boeing acknowledged the decision made by regulators but said Tuesday it has "full confidence in the safety of the MAX." "We understand that regulatory agencies and customers have made decisions that they believe are most appropriate for their home markets," the aircraft manufacturer said in a statement. The Chinese traditional medicine (TCM) evidence-based medical center, the world's first organization of such kind, was officially established Tuesday in the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences (CACMS). The center will pool together efforts of CACMS and other organizations like Beijing University of Chinese Medicine for TCM evidence-based research. Evidence-based medicine is a widely-used approach in medical practice that is intended to optimize decision-making in treating individual patients by emphasizing the use of evidence from well-designed and well conducted research. Under this approach, clinical evidence serves as the main basis for evaluating effectiveness and safety of treatment. Though increasingly recognized around the world, TCM still lacks evidence justifying its clinical effectiveness and safety, which according to experts hinders it from "going global." "Evidence-based medical studies evaluate the clinical verifiability and effectiveness of a medical theory with scientific examination and analysis," said Huang Luqi, academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering and head of CACMS, at a Tuesday event marking the center's establishment. Combining evidence-based medical studies and TCM's features will help enhance clinical effectiveness of TCM, as well as provide opportunities for TCM to prove its medical values to the world, Huang said. Former Director-General of World Health Organization Margaret Chan said TCM had served the health needs of people in China and beyond for several thousand years and its safety and effectiveness deserved to be recognized. There should not be barriers between TCM and western medicine, which both should join forces to serve people's health needs, she said. WASHINGTON, D. C. - An estimated 17,900 Oregon taxpayers are owed $19 million dollars from the federal government. These are people who did not file a 2015 federal income tax return. But time is running out for people to claim that money. To collect the money, these Oregon taxpayers must file their 2015 tax return with the IRS no later than this year's tax deadline, Monday, April 15, said IRS spokesman David Tucker II. Across the country, refunds of $1.4 billion are waiting to be claimed by people who have not filed federal income tax returns for 2015. An estimated 1.2 million taxpayers need to file a 2015 Form 1040 federal income tax return by this year's tax deadline, Monday, April 15th (taxpayers in Maine and Massachusetts have until April 17th.) The law requires taxpayers to properly address, mail and ensure the tax return is postmarked by that date. Who is most likely owed money? IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig says Students, part-time workers and many others may have overlooked filing for 2015. And theres no penalty for filing a late return if youre due a refund. The IRS estimates the midpoint for the potential refunds for 2015 to be $879 that is, half of the refunds are more than $879 and half are less. Anyone who doesn't file a tax return within three years forfeits the money. The money becomes the property of the U.S. Treasury. If you are among those owed money from a 2015 tax refund, your check may be held if you haven't filed tax returns for 2016 and 2017. Also, the refund will be applied to any amounts still owed to the IRS or a state tax agency and may be used to offset unpaid child support or past due federal debts, such as student loans. By failing to file a tax return, people stand to lose more than just their refund of taxes withheld or paid during 2015. Many low- and moderate-income workers may be eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). For 2015, the credit was worth as much as $6,242. The EITC helps individuals and families whose incomes are below certain thresholds. The thresholds for 2015 were: $47,747 ($53,267 if married filing jointly) for those with three or more qualifying children; $44,454 ($49,974 if married filing jointly) for people with two qualifying children; $39,131 ($44,651 if married filing jointly) for those with one qualifying child, and; $14,820 ($20,330 if married filing jointly) for people without qualifying children. Current and prior year tax forms (such as the tax year 2015 Form 1040, 1040A and 1040EZ) and instructions are available on the IRS.gov Forms and Publications page or by calling toll-free 800-TAX-FORM (800-829-3676). Taxpayers who are missing Forms W-2, 1098, 1099 or 5498 for the years 2015, 2016 or 2017 should request copies from their employer, bank or other payer. Taxpayers who are unable to get missing forms from their employer or other payer can order a free wage and income transcript at IRS.gov using the Get Transcript Online tool. Alternatively, they can file Form 4506-T to request a wage and income transcript. A wage and income transcript shows data from information returns received by the IRS, such as Forms W-2, 1099, 1098, Form 5498 and IRA contribution information. Taxpayers can use the information from the transcript to file their tax return. State-by-state estimates of individuals who may be due 2015 income tax refunds State or District Estimated # of People Median Potential Refund Total Potential Refund* Arizona 27,300 $780 $29,486,000 Arkansas 11,200 $824 $12,000,000 California 111,200 $832 $124,397,000 Colorado 23,500 $824 $26,173,000 Connecticut 12,700 $952 $15,981,000 Delaware 4,800 $886 $5,570,000 District of Columbia 3,400 $918 $4,219,000 Florida 84,000 $887 $95,697,000 Georgia 41,100 $799 $44,754,000 Hawaii 7,000 $935 $8,523,000 Idaho 5,200 $712 $5,209,000 Illinois 45,800 $924 $54,804,000 Indiana 26,900 $895 $30,670,000 Iowa 12,300 $913 $13,737,000 Kansas 12,700 $874 $14,283,000 Kentucky 15,700 $874 $17,246,000 Louisiana 22,600 $884 $26,759,000 Maine 4,700 $806 $4,820,000 Maryland 25,700 $897 $31,274,000 Massachusetts 26,100 $973 $32,579,000 Michigan 39,700 $873 $45,535,000 Minnesota 18,000 $813 $19,222,000 Mississippi 11,200 $814 $12,032,000 Missouri 27,000 $825 $29,008,000 Montana 4,100 $831 $4,521,000 Nebraska 6,300 $870 $6,923,000 Nevada 13,700 $867 $15,728,000 New Hampshire 5,500 $976 $6,859,000 New Jersey 33,100 $960 $41,353,000 New Mexico 8,600 $860 $9,950,000 New York 62,500 $964 $77,662,000 North Carolina 37,100 $831 $39,955,000 North Dakota 3,700 $980 $4,493,000 Ohio 43,600 $852 $47,428,000 Oklahoma 19,100 $886 $22,006,000 Oregon 17,900 $779 $19,118,000 Pennsylvania 46,000 $934 $53,541,000 Rhode Island 3,300 $949 $4,025,000 South Carolina 14,600 $777 $15,701,000 South Dakota 3,300 $928 $3,646,000 Tennessee 24,000 $853 $25,976,000 Texas 129,300 $929 $158,244,000 Utah 9,300 $791 $9,859,000 Vermont 2,200 $876 $2,388,000 Virginia 32,900 $867 $38,441,000 Washington 32,400 $939 $40,142,000 West Virginia 5,900 $948 $6,979,000 Wisconsin 16,100 $787 $16,532,000 Wyoming 3,300 $958 $3,964,000 Totals 1,197,600 $879 $1,379,412,000 * Excluding credits. SALEM, Ore. -- Legislation moving through the Oregon Capitol is focused on helping indigenous women who are victims of crime. Across the country, there were 5,712 cases of murdered and missing indigenous women and girls in 2016 according to the National Crime Information Center. Only 116 of those cases were logged into the Department of Justice database. Those statistics and others are outlined in a report by the Urban Indian Health Institute Report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls. That same report noted that murder is the third leading cause of death among indigenous women. Read the report on Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls by clicking here. That's why many Oregon legislators are supporting legislation aimed at increasing resources towards investigating cases of missing and murdered indigenous women. The bill passed the Oregon House of Representatives unanimously Wednesday. What we know and understand as indigenous people in this state is that if a criminal act happens on tribal lands, it is very likely that nothing will happen, said the bills chief sponsor Rep. Tawna Sanchez (D-Portland). We need to ensure that criminal investigations and the protections afforded off of tribal lands extend to those on tribal lands. This legislation is an important first step in ensuring that justice is available to everyone in our state no matter who they are or where they live. House Bill 2625 directs the Oregon State Police to study how to increase criminal justice and investigative resources toward past and future cases of missing and murdered indigenous women. Signed on as sponsors are a bipartisan group of 40 legislators. The legislation seeks to build an accurate picture of missing and murdered indigenous women in Oregon through research and data collection. Further, it serves as a first step to improving relationships between tribal communities and law enforcement. The legislation now moves to the Oregon Senate for consideration. UIHI has recorded 6 cases in Portland - 4 missing and 2 unkown. It's one of 71 cities included it the study. It was the only city in Oregon that was specifically studied. WASHINGTON, D.C. A sweeping legislative package signed into law by President Trump today includes key environmental provisions for which Oregon's U.S. Senators have long been pushing. Conserving our states iconic Devils Staircase, adding hundreds of miles of wild-and-scenic rivers, increasing wildfire protections and more totals up to a big win for Oregons recreation economy, Senator Ron Wyden said after the White House signing ceremony. This is the largest public lands package passed by Congress in a decade and I look forward to building on its gains for every corner of our state. The law creates the newly protected Devil's Staircase Wilderness, consisting of about 30,000 acres of land within the Oregon Coast Range tucked between the Smith and Umpqua rivers and named for an iconic waterfall in the region. Enjoyed talking with @Salem_Statesman outdoors editor @ZachUrness for his podcast about the new public lands law. Take a listen to our conversation about Devils Staircase, added wild-and-scenic rivers in Oregon & more:https://t.co/AeUstMcRLg Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) March 12, 2019 Much of the changes procured for Oregon are located directly in Southern Oregon, however. A number of Oregon lawmakers have long fought to obtain permanent protection for the Chetco River from mining and mineral extraction interests, something now galvanized with the passage of the public lands package. The bill also included an additional 250 miles of Oregon rivers known to be breeding grounds for salmon and steelhead as part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. This provision reportedly includes: Roughly 120 miles of Rogue River tributaries tributaries A 21-mile stretch of the Molalla River 18 miles of Jenny Creek , which flows through the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument , which flows through the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument 21 miles of Wasson Creek and Franklin Creek in the Siuslaw National Forest and in the Siuslaw National Forest Several important tributaries of the Elk River The bill also includes legislation introduced by Oregon lawmakers in honor of Frank and Jeanne Moore, "an Oregon couple with a distinguished legacy of conservation and habitat preservation," according to Wyden's office. This designates almost 100,000 acres of Forest Service land north of the North Umpqua River as the Frank and Jeanne Moore Wild Steelhead Special Management Area and adds protections for the river, and the surrounding area to preserve steelhead habitat and recreation opportunities. Also included is a provision to improve the efforts of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to protect Crooked River Ranch, a community in central Oregon, from wildfire. In this case, the law actually involves lifting protections for a wilderness study area in order to manage them in an effort to protect Crooked River Ranch instead. CLICK HERE for more about the bill and how it will impact lands across the U.S. The package, known as the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act (formerly known as the Natural Resources Management Act), also includes dozens of bills that affect lands in states across the U.S. President Trump knows that federal lands are meant to provide both peace and prosperity for the American people, and signing this bill allows us to continue managing public lands in a balanced way, said Acting Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt. This bill is extremely beneficial to the American people and I look forward to working with Congress and local communities to implement the many local conservation wins within the bill. SALEM, Ore. -- Today, Governor Kate Brown signed House Bill 2010 into law to provide more than $400 million for Medicaid and the state reinsurance program. Many of Oregon's health care providers, including Providence Health & Services, Asante, PrimaryHealth, Allcare Health, and others were featured on one letter of support for the legilsation. House Bill 2010 is a significant step forward in ensuring every single Oregon has access to affordable health coverage, said Governor Brown. But HB 2010 only covers a portion of what we need for our health care system. So, as we celebrate today, we need to immediately turn our focus to filling the rest of the Oregon Health Plan funding gap. This new law includes a Health Insurance Assesment & Managed Care Tax, to generate $344 million for the Oregon Health Plan and the Oregon Reinsurance Program, which helps stabilize insurance rates for people who buy coverage through the private market. PacificSource came out in support of the legislation. You can read the company's statement here. $98 million will be raised via hospital assessment tax, generating $98 million for the Oregon Health Plan (Oregon's Medicaid program). To provide the rest of the needed funding, Governor Brown has proposed an $2-per-pack increase in the cigarette tax, a tax on e-cigarettes, and the creation of an assessment on employers that do not provide affordable coverage to their workers. There are estimates that could result in $95 million dollars in revenue. Here is a look at the information presented by the Oregon Health Authority about the current funding of Medicaid. Securing this funding package will ensure Oregonians continue to get the health care coverage they need to thrive and will enable a balanced budget for the Oregon Health Plan for the next six years, Governor Brown said. KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. A Klamath Falls man is in custody following a stand-off with law enforcement after his girlfriend reported that he'd "severely beaten" her, according to the Klamath Falls Police Department (KFPD). Officers responded in the early morning hours on Tuesday to a house in the 800-block of Mt. Whitney Street after a reported domestic violence assault. Responders found the 43-year-old victim with severe facial injuries and signs of strangulation, and she was brought to Sky Lakes Medical Center. It was the victim who had called KFPD to report the assault. Meanwhile, KFPD said that 32-year-old Michael Donnel Wilson the boyfriend and roommate of the victim barricaded himself inside the house even as the officers established probable cause for an arrest. KFPD then called in its SWAT team. "Once deployed, SWAT operators, with the assistance of Klamath Falls Police Department patrol personnel and Oregon State Police Troopers, were able to apprehend Mr. Wilson without incident," the agency said. Officers lodged Wilson in the Klamath County Jail on charges of Assault II and Strangulation. "The Klamath Falls Police department extends its gratitude to the neighboring residents in the immediate area of the operation for their cooperation and police assistance. In addition, we urge anyone who is a victim, or knows a victim of domestic violence to please report the matter to their local police department, or seek other assistance to remove themselves or protect themselves from future abuse," KFPD said. You are here: China Chinese archaeologists have found traces of human activities dating back between 38,000 and 4,000 years ago in southwest China's Guizhou Province. A large number of pottery shards, stones, animal bones and horn tools used by ancient humans have been unearthed at an excavation site in Yankong village in Guizhou. The findings suggest that the ancient humans living in the area fished, hunted and collected fruits to make a living. No signs of planting have been found yet. The two tombs discovered at the site were also the earliest known signs of burying the dead in Guizhou, archaeologists said. The excavation has been carried out by Guizhou cultural relics and archaeological institute, Sichuan University and Chengdu cultural relics and archaeological institute since 2017. Archaeologists said the site, which is the earliest evidence of human activities in central Guizhou, is helpful to establish the development sequences of prehistoric culture in the area. The excavation is also significant in understanding how ancient humans in low-altitude plateaus survived and adapted to extreme climates, according to the archaeologists. Two giant pandas, Mao Er and Xing Er, are scheduled to travel to their new home in Copenhagen Zoo from the Panda Base in Chengdu at the beginning of April. The Ambassador of Denmark to China will escort the pair on their Scandinavian Airlines flight to Denmark. A new enclosure for Mao Er and Xing Er has been built at the zoo. Designed by the renowned Danish architects the Bjarke Ingels Group, its design was inspired by the Yin-Yang symbol. Th zoo's CEO Jorgen Nielsen described the arrival of the two pandas as one of the biggest events in the 160-year history of the institution. Members of the zoo's staff, including keepers, zoologists, and veterinarians have visited Chengdu several times since 2010 to become better acquainted with the iconic species. To meet the culinary need of two new inhabitants, a plantation of bamboo has been established on the island of Zealand in the country's south. Denmark's Queen Margrethe II and China's President Xi signed an agreement for the loan of the pandas when the queen visited Beijing in 2014. 1K Shares Share Are you or a loved one aging, perhaps with a chronic heart or lung condition that limits daily activities? Do you have an older parent in a nursing home or who needs assistance with daily living activities? If so, read on and make the pledge. As physicians, we see death every day. We see death made worse and more painful by poor advance care planning. Yet, despite the certainty of death in all our futures, it is astonishing how often families and loved ones have neither discussed nor planned for the inevitable. Discussing death is hard. But not having these crucial conversations is far worse. Over 50 percent of Canadians who die each year do so in hospitals. We no longer die quickly at home from acute illnesses like infections, but from chronic illnesses whose protracted course often ends in hospitals. Death has been removed from daily life and is managed for us in sanitized institutional environments. Perhaps because death is less familiar, it is easier to fear. It is certainly much easier to ignore. Consider older nursing home residents, most in their mid-80s, many of whom have some dementia, have daily pain, depressive symptoms and are affected by diabetes, heart and lung disease or stroke. Frailty is the term used to describe such persons, whose complex burden of age-associated conditions increases their risk of further decline. Their life expectancy is normally around 18 months shorter still if they lose weight, need more assistance or become short of breath. Because we do not have crucial discussions, as many as 30 percent of frail nursing home residents are admitted to an intensive care unit and 50 percent to hospitals in their last month of life. Because we have not normalized difficult conversations around death, we will never know whether this is what they would have wished. A key reason is fear. Fear of death, fear of the unknown, fear of dying in pain and alone. Fear of talking to doctors and nurses about death. Fear of being abandoned if they forego aggressive care options. Fear of dying in pain and alone in a community ill-equipped to address their needs. Doctors and nurses are also afraid. They have limited training with difficult conversations. They fear the sense of defeat from the sense that they are giving up on patients. Fear is why these discussions dont happen. So, this year, pledge to overcome your fear of death and have an end-of-life discussion with your frail loved ones and with your doctors and nurses. Reflect on what matters to you most, your values, your life goals and expectations and anything else you feel is important. Ask yourself: how do your wishes align with the specific and best-practice care choices that you might have to make, today, or in the future? Know that you can seek help from your doctor or nurse, or use one of many available toolkits. Once your wishes are clear, it is critical that they be honored. Write them down. Share them with your loved ones and powers of attorney, who need to know because they might have to speak on your behalf one day if you lose that ability. Share them with your doctors and nurses. Know that you are allowed to change your wishes, especially as your health changes. Our health care system must pledge to overcome its inertia and engage decision-makers and community stakeholders to ensure that all people have equitable access to quality services that support their wishes as they approach the end-of-life. Failure to do so is a pledge to continue with 3 a.m. do everything resuscitation attempts that prevent natural death and that many frail patients would never have wished for had that crucial discussion taken place. Paul Hebert is a professor of medicine, Universite de Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada. George Heckman is an assistant clinical professor of medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada. Both are researchers, Canadian Frailty Network. Image credit: Shutterstock.com The official English-language website of the Luohu district government of Shenzhen city, Guangdong province, was launched March 13, 2019. The Luohu Government Online covers both government affairs and local news, and provides essential information on doing business in the district. The site presents and explains the district's business environment, preferential policies for industrial transformation and economic upgrades, and potential investors can find tips on how to invest in the promising area. Information on accommodations and dining, tourism, healthcare, education, careers, visa, and even marriage can also be found on the website, enabling newcomers to settle in there and giving readers a peek into features of the district's modern lifestyle. People who need help related to visiting, living or working in Luohu can submit their questions to the Q&A column to get the specific information they need. Overlooking Hong Kong's New Territories over the Shenzhen River to the south, Luohu district is one of the six oldest areas of Shenzhen, and covers a total of 78.36 square kilometers of land, including 44.64 square kilometers of ecological reserves. The new English-language website for Luohu district can be found here. Gardai are reminding parents and young people of the potentially devastating impact of cyber bullying and its ability to destroy lives. Det Chief Superintendent Declan Daly, Garda National Protective Services Bureau, said cyber bullying can have a significant impact on peoples lives. "The Garda Online Child Exploitation Unit is committed to tackling it in an impactful way," he said. Cyber bullying is the use of technology to harass, threaten, embarrass, or target another person. Although more prevalent among young people, it can happen to anyone at any age. It is intended to inflict harm or discomfort to others. In Ireland, the Digital Age of Consent is 16. Young people under the age of 16 may not sign up for online services, such as social media sites, without the explicit approval of their parent or guardian. "If you do decide to give your child permission to use social media sites, the best online safety strategy is to talk with your child and engage with their use of the Internet, said Detective Chief Superintendent Daly. Tips for Parents and Guardians: 1. Know the sites your child visits, learn about the protections provided by these sites, apps and available on your childs device. 2. Teach your child that whatever information is posted or shared online, will stay online. 3. Encourage your child to tell you if they receive messages that they feel disturbed by or uncomfortable with. 4. Discuss ways the child can deal with disturbing material should they accidently come across it. 5. Implement the parental controls available on all IOS and android devices. 6. If you find out your child is being bullied, print out and keep evidence of bullying and block the culprit. Then report the problem. Detective Chief Superintendent Daly continued: "We wish to encourage victims of cyber bullying to report the bullies and provide us with the evidence to help ensure that other people do not become victims of this terrible behaviour. Reporting Cyber Bullying: Keep evidence, dont delete anything. Save the messages or take screenshots. Stop all communication and block the person. Tell An Garda Siochana. Dont delete the account as this evidence will help the Gardai. The Garda Online Child Exploitation Unit has these tips for young people: Cyber bullying destroys lives. Stop and think before you post, anyone may see, forward, or screenshot that post. Only post messages you wouldnt mind your parents or teachers seeing. Remember whatever you share online stays there. Contact your parent, guardian, teacher or an adult you trust if you are being bullied online. Do not respond to the bully, report it! Online manners matter. Always treat others how you want to be treated, with respect. Kilkenny's The Little Mill wholemeal flour, is amoung a number of Irish products making their way to Lebanon this St.Patricks day to celebrate in style at the world-famous Lebanese Eddesands Hotel & Wellness Resort. Irish-owned Mitzis Mezze will help cater this event which is hosted by Alice Edde. Mrs Edde, a renowned Irish-American hotelier living in Byblos, Lebanon, celebrates St. Patricks day every year in some form or another. Guests can expect to be treated to Irish gin, butter, cheese, breads, preserves, meats and chocolates which have all being sponsored by various Irish companies to introduce cuisine, beverages and products from the Emerald Isle to a select group of guests in Byblos. Mitzis Mezze is the brain child of Tipperary woman Mary Toomey, originally from the village of Killenaule. A graduate of Ballymaloe Cookery School with a strong interest in North-African and Middle Eastern food, Mary started Mitzis Mezze as a SupperClub in Galway during the recession. Now based in the Galway countryside, over the years Mary has carved out a niche catering service: Im think by any measure I am pretty well-travelled, but the Middle East and North Africa are my favourite regions to visit simply because the food is outstanding, unique and creative." "Ive visited Jordan, Egypt, Turley, Syria (before the civil war), Israel, Palestine and Morocco, but Lebanon is something special altogether she explains, the people are so friendly and warm, the countryside is beautiful, but the food is the reason I keep going back." "When the opportunity came to collaborate with Alice this year for St. Patricks day, I was more than delighted to be on board. Mitzis Mezze is bringing a few of Marys favourite foods from home to showcase at the event. Wherever I am in the world I love to promote the great produce we have here in Ireland. And when I am cooking Middle Eastern food in Ireland, I like to marry the two together. The Little Mill wholemeal flour will be made into traditional soda bread by Mitzi's Mezze at this event. Other foods also featured include Blackwater distillery, McCambridges, McGeoughs, Kellys Butchers, An Olivia chocolate, Glenilen farm, Glenstal foods, Aran Islands Goat cheese, Blath na Mara, Gran Gran foods and Kinvara Salmon. All these products are items I buy personally", Mary added, the quality of the products is of a very high standard. I am proud to show them off in Lebanon, especially on St. Patricks day. MASON CITY, Iowa I was wondering what was going on and the one guy told me they were going in after the cats, said Jack Newman of Mason City. Newman looked on as authorities executed a search warrant on his neighbors home in the 800 block of 5th street SW. Police, animal control and the department development services pulled dead and decomposing cats from the home. According to court records, Luella Duenow owns the rundown property. She always took care of them but I dont know what happened, he said. Police said they started to receive calls from the public around two months ago but havent been able to go in until Wednesday. Due to all the cold weather and snow weve had trouble doing anything, said Captain Mike McKelvey of the Mason City Police Department. Authorities pulled three dead cats from the property as well as two that were still alive but in poor health. Police believe there could still be more but couldnt get beyond the front door because of clutter and feces. To venture too far in to that place would be very dangerous, he said. The floor could give way or who else knows what other hazards are in there that could injure somebody. This isnt the first time Duenow has been in trouble with the city for similar reasons. A search in Iowa Courts online shows 76 charges between February 1997 and March of 99. 45 of those charges were dismissed or the court found her not guilty. She paid a fine for the other 26 and spent time in jail one time. The house has been white tagged and deemed unsafe to occupy. Captain McKelvey said the city will likely condemn the home. Thats just fine with Newman. I would buy the property and landscape it, he said. It would look nice and the neighborhood could use it. Police said they will continue to monitor the home and check traps that have been set to catch other animals that may still be alive. Flood Warning Areas Affected: Olmsted; Winona NWS LaCrosse (Southwestern Wisconsin, Southeastern Minnesota, and Northeast Iowa) .Snow melt paired with recent and forecast rainfall is expected to result in flooding along the Middle Fork Whitewater River near Whitewater Park. Some ice jamming is also possible which could lead to rapid fluctuations in river levels. Keep up to date with the latest river forecasts. River forecasts take into account both observed and forecast precipitation. The National Weather Service in La Crosse WI has issued a * Flood Warning for The Middle Fork Whitewater River Near Whitewater Park. * from late tonight to late Thursday night. * At 11:30 AM Wednesday the stage was 10.9 feet. * Flood stage is 13.5 feet. * Minor flooding is forecast. * Forecast...Rise above flood stage by Thursday morning and continue to rise to near 13.6 feet by Thursday morning. The river will fall below flood stage by Thursday morning. && If you live in a threatened area, be alert for high or rising water, and be ready to move to higher ground if necessary. Do not drive cars into flooded areas. Remember, it only takes two feet of water to float most automobiles, including sport utility vehicles. Turn Around, Don't Drown! Stay tuned to your favorite source of weather information, including NOAA Weather Radio, for later statements. Additional river and weather information is available at... http://www.weather.gov/lacrosse . CUSTOM FORECAST: Current Conditions MORE: Maps & Radars ROAD CONDITIONS: Click Here INTERACTIVE RADAR: Click Here LIVE EYE: Tower Cams SIGN UP: KIMT News 3 Email Newsletter ALERTS: WeatherWarn WEATHER APP: iOS | Android Flood Watch Areas Affected: Audubon; Boone; Butler; Calhoun; Carroll; Cass; Cerro Gordo; Crawford; Emmet; Franklin; Greene; Guthrie; Hamilton; Hancock; Humboldt; Kossuth; Palo Alto; Pocahontas; Sac; Webster; Winnebago; Worth; Wright NWS DesMoines (Central Iowa) ...River flooding and Significant Ponding Water Likely This Week Due to Snowmelt and Expected Rainfall... .The combination of warmer temperatures and forecast total rainfall amounts of one to near two inches is going to lead to a rapid snow melt across much of central Iowa. Significant ponding of water in low lying, poor drainage is likely, potentially impacting roads and travel. Periods of rainfall are likely today into Thursday, with the highest totals occurring today into this evening. The runoff from the snowmelt and rain will lead to significant rises on area streams. Ice jam flooding may occur, creating rapid rises upstream of the jams. Minor to moderate river flooding is possible by Thursday and into the weekend. ...FLOOD WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT THROUGH THURSDAY EVENING... The Flood Watch continues for * Portions of central Iowa, north central Iowa, northeast Iowa, northwest Iowa, south central Iowa, southeast Iowa, southwest Iowa, and west central Iowa, including the following areas, in central Iowa, Boone, Dallas, Grundy, Hamilton, Hardin, Jasper, Marshall, Polk, Poweshiek, Story, Tama, and Webster. In north central Iowa, Butler, Cerro Gordo, Franklin, Hancock, Humboldt, Kossuth, Winnebago, Worth, and Wright. In northeast Iowa, Black Hawk and Bremer. In northwest Iowa, Emmet, Palo Alto, and Pocahontas. In south central Iowa, Appanoose, Clarke, Decatur, Lucas, Madison, Mahaska, Marion, Monroe, Ringgold, Union, Warren, and Wayne. In southeast Iowa, Davis and Wapello. In southwest Iowa, Adair, Adams, Cass, and Taylor. In west central Iowa, Audubon, Calhoun, Carroll, Crawford, Greene, Guthrie, and Sac. * Through Thursday evening * Rapid snowmelt and rainfall is expected to lead to significant ponding of water in low lying, poor drainage areas. The added water and the potential for ice jams may lead to significant rises on rivers and streams. * Favored ice jam locations include the Des Moines River around Fort Dodge, the Raccoon River around Van Meter through Des Moines to the confluence of the Des Moines River, the Iowa River around Marshalltown and Tama, and the upper reaches of Cedar River north of Waterloo. Minor to moderate river flooding may occur. A Flood Watch means there is a potential for flooding based on current forecasts. If you live in ice jam flood prone areas, be aware of potential significant rises on area streams through Thursday. You should monitor later forecasts and be alert for possible Flood Warnings. Those living in areas prone to flooding should be prepared to take action should flooding develop. Flood Watch Areas Affected: Allamakee; Chickasaw; Clayton; Fayette; Floyd; Howard; Mitchell; Winneshiek NWS LaCrosse (Southwestern Wisconsin, Southeastern Minnesota, and Northeast Iowa) ...Increasing Flood Risk From Rain, Snow Melt... .Periods of rain will continue through Thursday with additional rainfall amounts of around half an inch possible. Runoff from rainfall and snow melt will result in rises on many rivers and streams over the next few days, along with an increased risk for ice jams. Flooding is anticipated on many waterways through late week, and potentially through portions of next week as well. In addition, urban and street flooding could occur from clogged storm sewers with additional hazards from debris on roads. Currently, major flooding is expected on the Turkey and Volga Rivers with moderate flooding on the Upper Iowa. In addition, minor flooding is likely along portions of the Kickapoo and Root Rivers, with other waterways also likely to experience flooding. At this time, the risk for flooding along the Mississippi River is low through the weekend, but will likely increase into next week. Those with interests along rivers and streams should remain alert for rising water levels and the threat for flooding. Now is the time to have a plan in place should flooding develop. ...FLOOD WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT THROUGH FRIDAY MORNING... The Flood Watch continues for * All of northeast Iowa and southeast Minnesota, and much of western, central, and southwestern Wisconsin. * Through Friday morning * Runoff from periodic rain along with snow melt will result in rises on many rivers and streams, along with an increased threat for ice jams. Flooding is anticipated on many of the waterways. In addition, urban and street flooding could occur from clogged storm sewers with additional hazards from debris on roads. * Those residing near waterways should closely monitor conditions this week, and be prepared to take action if flooding develops. A Flood Watch means there is a potential for flooding based on current forecasts. Please monitor conditions and forecasts, and be alert for possible Flood Warnings. Those living in areas prone to flooding should be prepared to take action should flooding develop. Flood Watch Areas Affected: Dodge; Fillmore; Houston; Mower; Olmsted; Wabasha; Winona NWS LaCrosse (Southwestern Wisconsin, Southeastern Minnesota, and Northeast Iowa) ...Increasing Flood Risk From Rain, Snow Melt... .Periods of rain will continue through Thursday with additional rainfall amounts of around half an inch possible. Runoff from rainfall and snow melt will result in rises on many rivers and streams over the next few days, along with an increased risk for ice jams. Flooding is anticipated on many waterways through late week, and potentially through portions of next week as well. In addition, urban and street flooding could occur from clogged storm sewers with additional hazards from debris on roads. Currently, major flooding is expected on the Turkey and Volga Rivers with moderate flooding on the Upper Iowa. In addition, minor flooding is likely along portions of the Kickapoo and Root Rivers, with other waterways also likely to experience flooding. At this time, the risk for flooding along the Mississippi River is low through the weekend, but will likely increase into next week. Those with interests along rivers and streams should remain alert for rising water levels and the threat for flooding. Now is the time to have a plan in place should flooding develop. ...FLOOD WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT THROUGH FRIDAY MORNING... The Flood Watch continues for * All of northeast Iowa and southeast Minnesota, and much of western, central, and southwestern Wisconsin. * Through Friday morning * Runoff from periodic rain along with snow melt will result in rises on many rivers and streams, along with an increased threat for ice jams. Flooding is anticipated on many of the waterways. In addition, urban and street flooding could occur from clogged storm sewers with additional hazards from debris on roads. * Those residing near waterways should closely monitor conditions this week, and be prepared to take action if flooding develops. A Flood Watch means there is a potential for flooding based on current forecasts. Please monitor conditions and forecasts, and be alert for possible Flood Warnings. Those living in areas prone to flooding should be prepared to take action should flooding develop. Flood Watch Areas Affected: Faribault; Freeborn; Martin; Steele; Waseca NWS Minneapolis (Southern Minnesota) ...RAIN AND SNOW MELT COULD LEAD TO STREET FLOODING AND PONDING OF WATER IN LOW LYING AREAS THROUGH THURSDAY... .Temperatures will remain mild through Thursday morning, with around an inch, up to an inch and a half of rain expected later today, and into tonight, especially in west central and central Minnesota. The heaviest rain will fall this afternoon and evening. This could lead to street flooding and standing water across low lying areas. Significant rises on the main stem rivers are not expected this week. Many of the the drainage systems are full of ice and snow, so any melting or runoff from the rain could lead to ponding of water in low lying areas. Temperatures will fall below freezing Friday, so any standing water will become ice. ...FLOOD WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT THROUGH THURSDAY EVENING... The Flood Watch continues for * A portion of south central Minnesota, including the following areas, Faribault, Freeborn, Martin, Steele, and Waseca. * Through Thursday evening * Snow melt and rainfall may result in flooding in poor drainage areas. A Flood Watch means there is a potential for flooding based on current forecasts. Clear the snow and ice away from your storm drains before Wednesday. You should monitor later forecasts and be alert for possible Flood Warnings. Those living in areas prone to flooding should be prepared to take action should flooding develop. ROCHESTER, Minn. - In the last week or two, insurance broker at Atlas Insurance Broker Bill Nystrom says a few people are calling him every day inquiring about flood insurance or how water damage is covered. He reminds homeowners that if you buy flood insurance right now, there is a 30 day waiting period until the policy kicks in. "Today is March 12th. Their coverage might not even start until april 11th or 12th of the next month and I would guess that 90% of the snow's going to be melted by then so if that's really what they're worried about, it doesn't pay," he explains. Nystrom explains flood insurance may cover some water damage from snow melt, depending on how severe it is, but flood policies are designed for a major catastrophic event, not necessarily snow runoff. "A flood policy is typically there for a catastrophic issue, not a minor issue and typically you can get it fixed or move the snow away from your house so it doesn't leak." He adds that if a sump pump or sewer fails to keep up with drainage, those issues are often covered in homeowners policies. State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi shed light on China's foreign policy priorities in a recent press conference. In an era where several Western politicians and analysts portray China as a "revisionist power," Wang gave a calm analysis and explained China's perspective on international affairs. As unpredictability and uncertainty across the globe are on the rise, Minister Wang said that China's approach is one of continuity, adding that "China can be said to be the world's most consistent and predictable country." Without looking to history, it is hard to fully understand Chinese foreign policy. As a result of traits such as patience, being systematic, conscientious and industrious, China is now becoming more powerful and having its voice increasingly heard on the international stage. It now stands up for its rights and is determined to defend them. This though does not mean that it has hegemonic ambitions, which Wang stressed when replying to a question during the press conference. China respects important principles such as multilateralism and advocates for problems to be solved under the umbrella of the UN. It values independence in foreign policy and refrains from interfering in the internal affairs of other countries. Wang gave two examples where such pronouncements are practiced Afghanistan and Venezuela. In its foreign policy towards the two countries, Beijing cannot be accused for attempting to play a role that is against the will of the Afghan or Venezuelan citizens. In recent years, China's foreign policy has been largely associated with its work on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Wang emphasized this integration mechanism in view of the second international forum that will take place this April in Beijing. In comparison to the first forum in 2017, participation is expected to be higher this year and there will also be thematic sessions to give opportunities for productive debates and possibly new win-win agreements. Although the second forum titled "Shaping a Brighter Shared Future" will take place in Beijing, participants will also be encouraged to explore collaboration opportunities with other regions in China as it is in the interest of the Chinese government to link foreign investment with domestic development across its provinces. This is happening via the planning of high-profile events in different cities, the strengthening of exchanges with partner countries and the opening of its central and western provinces to the world. Lecture tours will be organized, inter alia, to bring foreign affairs-related knowledge and share information with Party schools, universities and enterprises. The Chinese side as Minister Wang commented is open to constructive criticism in order to improve the efficiency of the BRI. Some delays in the implementation of infrastructure works have to be carefully discussed for solutions to be found. Despite those issues, the general sentiment for the BRI, he said, still remains positive. Quoting an example, Wang elaborated on the success of the initiative in Africa where people are benefiting from large scale projects such as the Mombasa-Nairobi railway. African leaders themselves have given clear responses to the skepticism and criticism of calling BRI as dangerous "debt trap" by praising China's contributions to their nations' infrastructure, job creation and economic activities. The BRI is not a vague project but a great opportunity for shared development which is improving livelihood of ordinary citizens in the countries where it passes through. Africa constitutes an example. In addition, Wang outlined China's positions vis-a-vis specific countries. As far as the U.S. is concerned, he said that upon examining the historical evolution of their bilateral relationship, he preferred to see the glass half-full. Wang said he considered some competition as "normal" and rejected scenarios of confrontation. On the EU, he reiterated Beijing's interest in the process of European integration and expressed his hope for deeper cooperation by upholding international rules and safeguarding world peace. Concerning Russia, he focused on the record trade volume in 2018, the energy parameter, and the common understanding of several international issues also at the UN level. Minister Wang also spoke about developments in Asia. He expressed optimism over developments in the Korean Peninsula and regarded the recent Hanoi summit as another step towards establishing stability and facilitating international mediation for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. He elaborated on the improvement of relations between China and India, the progress on negotiations of a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea and the challenges inherent in the Sino-Japanese relationship despite the positive momentum last year. To sum up, Wang's press conference offers a holistic overview of China's priorities in world affairs. Celebrating the 70th anniversary of its founding this year, China is steadily becoming a responsible global player. Its wise and prudent foreign policy not only strengthens its international presence but also serves its domestic development goals. George N. Tzogopoulos is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/GeorgeNTzogopoulos.htm Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn. If you would like to contribute and have specific expertise, please contact us at opinion@china.org.cn. FOREST CITY, Iowa - No doubt it, algebra can be mind-numbing. But two Forest City High School students say their teacher went above and beyond to teach them the subject. Kennedy Baker and Alyson Walker say Mrs. Jaralyn Pickar ensured the curriculum made sense. "She does a lot of problems with all the students, instead of just giving us the problem." While they're no longer in Pickar's classes, they say what she taught them has carried over to other math courses. "She really helps extend our learning to make sure we're prepared for other classes." Pickar attended Forest City High herself, and is now working side by side with some of the teachers that taught her. She's got a system for making a tough subject easier. "I try to break it down piece by piece, and show them here's a little positivity, you did this, now let's add a little more. You can do that too. I just try to change it up, and keep them going, keep them positive." She's seen improvement even among students who may have struggled with math. "I don't want math to be scary to them, so I try to take that tension off and show them that they could do it. Everybody when I see them in public is like, 'oh, I hate math,' but I want to change their minds on that. It's not so bad, everybody can do it." DECORAH, Iowa One of three people arrested after a lengthy drug investigation in northeast Iowa is pleading guilty. Lane Mitchell Breitsprecher, 27 of Fort Atkinson, has entered a guilty plea to possession with intent to deliver methamphetamine and been sentenced to two to five years of probation. Dominick Watson Dominick Watson Destiny Chambers Destiny Chambers Breitsprecher was arrested with Destiny Chambers, 38 of Calmar, and Dominick Watson, 21 of Decorah, after the search of a Calmar home on December 12, 2018. Chambers is pleading not guilty to possession with intent to deliver meth, gathering where controlled substances are used, possession of meth-2nd offense, and failure to use a drug tax stamp. Her next court hearing is set for May 7. Dominick Watson pleaded not guilty to possession of meth-3rd or subsequent offense and gathering where controlled substances are used. His trial is set to begin on April 24. FOREST CITY, Iowa A Lake Mills man is pleading not guilty to stealing a truck and thousands of dollars worth of tools. Andrew John Aukes, 31, is charged with 1st degree theft and operating a vehicle without the owners consent. Hes accused of stealing a truck belonging to Advanced Concrete from a rural location east of Thompson on January 27. The Winnebago County Sheriffs Office says the truck was recovered but missing $20,000 worth of tools inside. Deputies say some of the items stolen from the truck were found at Aukes home and his shoes match prints where the truck was found. Aukes trial is set to begin on May 8. He is also scheduled to stand trial beginning April 10 for his involvement in the kidnapping of a woman in Winnebago County. To learn more about that story, click here. FOREST CITY, Iowa A teen accused of hosting a drug party for Lake Mills students is pleading not guilty. Jose Raul DeLeon Jr., 18 of Lake Mills, is charged with use of a person under the age of 18 in the drug trade, possession of LSD with intent to deliver, possession of MDMA (molly) with intent to deliver, promoting a gather where drugs are used, and possession of marijuana with intent to deliver. DeLeon was arrested on February 20 after Lake Mills school officials reported many students not in attendance. Winnebago County law enforcement says they got a report of five juveniles smoking marijuana at an apartment in the 100 block of Iowa Street. Authorities say when the door was opened, a cloud of smoke was evident and minors who were hiding in the bedroom were told to come to the living room. According to court documents, LSD, molly, and marijuana were found at the apartment, as well as marked baggies indicating the sale of drugs. DeLeon is scheduled to stand trial beginning April 10. MASON CITY, Iowa A car chase that ended with a crash into a snow bank is now going to trial. Frederick Joseph Olson, 46 of Mason City, is accused of eluding and possession of methamphetamine-2nd offense. He was arrested on February 14 after law enforcement says Olson sped away from a traffic stop in Mason City, resulting in a chase where authorities used stop sticks at three different locations until Olson finally crashed into a snow bank. The Cerro Gordo County Sheriffs Office says Olson attempted to run into a deputys patrol vehicle during the pursuit. His trial is due to start on April 23. MASON CITY, Iowa - Storm drains that remain covered in snow and ice could lead to more flooding issues if we see heavy rain this week. Because of the number of drains that still need to be cleared, some communities are asking residents to help out. Kathy Hudson's son spent part of his spring break chopping away at a massive ice block in their driveway. She says clearing the drains does a favor not just for the city, but for neighbors as well. "That would be a tremendous help. That's something that I'm sure that we'll do this afternoon." Her and her neighbors' homes rest atop a natural stream, and as someone who's experienced flooding in their basement before, she's not looking forward to the flooding threat. "We take care of the basement and clear everything off downstairs. We don't really have a lot of flooding, as long as the drains stay open, it just flows into the drain. We're pretty lucky." Some cities including Albert Lea (through the Shell Rock River Watershed District) and Iowa City have initiated "Adopt a Drain" programs, which allow residents to sign up to clean a storm drain, keeping it free of leaves, snow and debris all year long. ROCHESTER, Minn. School districts are always looking for better ways to connect with parents. Rochester Public Schools already hosts District Family Engagement meetings, where parents can learn whats happening throughout the district. They happen the second Tuesday of every month during the school year, and the district wants people to know that all are welcome. Joanne Barkmeier has three kids in the district, and said the meetings have helped her feel connected. The goal and the purpose of this is how to engage families into the schools, and empower parents to feel like they are a part of the school, Barkmeier said. This year, the district is looking to have more place-based events where they go to speak with parents. Barkmeier thinks its important for parents to make an effort to attend. This is the feel good stuff, Barkmeier said. You really get to kind of see the warmer side of the school district and how connections are being made, and the community's being built. MASON CITY, Iowa Three people arrested after a search law enforcement says turned up more than 2.5 pounds of marijuana are pleading not guilty. Shavaughnta M. Carter, Michael Dennis Payton, and Maranda Jo Baseman were arrested after a January 30 search in the 1000 block of 12th Street NW. Mason City police say the location had been identified as a trafficking point for marijuana. Carter, 22 of Mason City, is charged with two counts of possession with intent to deliver marijuana and two counts of failing to use a drug tax stamp. Her trial is set to begin on May 14. Payton, 21 of Mason City, is facing three counts of possession with intent to deliver marijuana and two counts of failing to use a drug tax stamp. His trail is scheduled to begin May 21. Baseman, 22 of Mason City, is due to stand trial May 14 on one count of possession of marijuana. MASON CITY, Iowa A woman accused of having more than 800 grams of marijuana in her home is pleading not guilty. Brooke Loren Anthony, 22 of Mason City, was arrested about a month after law enforcement searched her home on January 10 and claimed it found the marijuana, along with drug packaging and a digital scale. Anthony is charged with a controlled substance violation, possession of drug paraphernalia, and failure to use a drug tax stamp. Her trial is set to start on May 7. The European Union's statistics office Eurostat said production in the 19 countries sharing the euro rose 1.4 percent month-on-month in January for a 1.1 percent year-on-year fall. Economists polled by Reuters had expected a 1.0 percent monthly increase and a 2.1 percent annual decline. The January result was mainly influenced by a 2.4 percent monthly and 4.0 percent year-on-year jump in energy output, which helped offset or mitigate the weaker results for intermediate and capital goods production. Output went up despite a drop in Germany, the bloc's largest economy. Eurostat estimated industrial production in Germany fell 0.9 percent on the month, a higher drop than the 0.8 percent fall estimated by the German statistics agency earlier this week. Large increases in France and Italy, the second and third biggest economies in the euro zone, more than offset the German data. Eurostat said output grew in France by 1.3 percent on the month, and in Italy by 1.7 percent. (Reporting By Jan Strupczewski; editing by Francesco Guarascio) Flash British Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal was rejected again on Tuesday by MPs in the second meaningful vote in the parliament since January, increasing uncertainty about how the country will leave the European Union. MPs voted against May's revised EU withdrawal agreement by 391 to 242, another heavy defeat since Jan. 15, when MPs rejected May's Brexit deal by a margin of 230. The voting started at around 1900 GMT, with the prime minister heading for a defeat. A hoarse prime minister, who was carrying on her last-ditch battle to save her Brexit deal just hours before the crunch vote, failed to win over the ERG, a major faction within her Conservative Party. The United Kingdom is scheduled to leave the European Union on March 29. May's Brexit deal was voted down on Jan. 15 in the heaviest parliamentary defeat of any British prime minister in the modern era. "I profoundly regret the decision this house has taken," May told lawmakers in a short speech right after the voting. She added that the choices facing Britain were "unenviable", but because of the rejection of her deal. "They are choices that must be faced," she said. May has secured legally binding changes to the deal on Monday night, but rebel lawmakers of her Conservative Party and those from the opposition Labour Party had said that these changes were not enough to persuade MPs to back the agreement reached by London and Brussels in November 2018 after years of painful negotiations. "The reality is that nothing has changed," Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Labour Party, said in the parliament. "Nothing has changed. Not one single word was changed." Corbyn said the Labour party put forward the idea of "remain and reform" in the referendum campaign. With her Brexit deal rejected again in the parliament, the prime minister then faces a possible defeat on a second vote on Wednesday to prevent a no-deal Brexit on March 29, and a third vote on Thursday to extend the Article 50 divorce process, likely until the end of June. No date has been set for when the environmental impact assessments (EIAs) will begin, but the resources ministry said on Wednesday that each one would take at least six months to complete. A slower-than-expected restart in bauxite exports from Malaysia would drag on global supply, potentially boosting prices for the commodity. Mine operators will need to fulfil strict requirements, some of which will be based on the findings of the EIAs, before they are granted licences to operate, the ministry said. "Even if the moratorium on bauxite mining and exports expires at the end of this month, it does not mean mining activities can immediately begin on April 1," resources minister Xavier Jayakumar said at a media briefing in parliament. The Southeast Asian nation was once the biggest bauxite supplier to top-buyer China, with shipments peaking at nearly 3.5 million tonnes a month around the end of 2015. But all bauxite mining was banned early in 2016 after unregulated mining and run-offs from unsecured stockpiles in the eastern state Pahang contaminated water sources, turning roads, rivers and coastal waters red. In February, Xavier announced the government would not extend the moratorium due to strong demand for bauxite. At that time, he said the resumption of mining would be subject to tighter regulations including the use of specific types of lorries to transport the mineral. Miners will also be barred from exporting unprocessed or unwashed bauxite. (Reporting by Liz Lee; Editing by Joseph Radford) By Drazen Jorgic ISLAMABAD, March 12 (Reuters) - Pakistan's military is taking a key role in the development of one of the world's biggest untapped copper and gold deposits, which is currently stalled by a multi-billion dollar legal wrangle with foreign mining firms, multiple sources familiar with the situation said. The Reko Diq mine has become a test case for Prime Minister Imran Khan's ability to attract serious foreign investment to Pakistan as it struggles to stave off an economic crisis that has forced it to seek an International Monetary Fund bailout. Ten current and former provincial and federal government officials and mining sources familiar with the project in the Baluchistan region say the military has become the most important voice on the future of Reko Diq, which it sees as a strategic national asset. The military will not only be in a position to decide which investors develop the deposit, but an army-controlled engineering firm, Frontier Works Organization (FWO), is positioning itself to be a member of any consortium involved, these people said. "This has been taken over by GHQ," said a senior Baluchistan government official, referring to the Pakistan army's General Headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. In a statement in response to Reuters' questions about its role in Reko Diq, the military spokesman's office said: "(The military) may only participate in government's plan of development of Reko Diq, as per national requirements." But it acknowledged that FWO, best known for building roads through Pakistan's rugged and lawless border regions, has developed "substantial" mining capability in recent years and would be interested in taking a role in the project. "If an opportunity arises of participating in developing Reko Diq, FWO may work at par with other competitors (or) companies provided the project is financially viable (or) suitable," the statement said. When asked, a spokesman declined to elaborate on the statement. Pakistan's Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry said civilian authorities in the insurgency-hit southwestern province of Baluchistan were in charge of Reko Diq and, along with Khan, would take a decision, but added that the military "and all other stakeholders are obviously important players". FWO referred questions to the military spokesman's office. Khan's spokesman Iftikhar Durrani said Baluchistan province was in charge of Reko Diq, and referred questions to the provincial government and the military spokesman's office. The manoeuvring behind the project shows how the military, which has historically dictated Pakistan's security and foreign policy, is leveraging its sway over the civilian government at federal and provincial level to carve a growing role in the nation's business affairs. The army has ruled the nuclear-armed nation for nearly half its history and is considered to have a major influence over Khan's recently elected government. A military spokesman declined to comment. "The military has taken a front seat," said Ayesha Siddiqa, author of the book "Military Inc.", which analyses the army's business interests and influence in Pakistan. "They've understood that the economy is important for having a strong military," she said. "Control of the economy also gives the military a handle over expanding their business interests." TALKS Buried at the foot of an extinct volcano near the frontier with Iran and Afghanistan, the mine's development has long been delayed by a dispute with previous investors in the project, Canada's Barrick Gold and Chile's Antofagasta. The government is urgently trying to settle the dispute as a World Bank arbitration tribunal, which ruled against Pakistan in 2017, is in the next few months expected to announce how much in damages the country must pay to the foreign firms, who are claiming more than $11 billion. The dispute relates to the withholding of a mining lease. Islamabad is also trying to find new partners to invest in the project. But any new investors will need the blessing of Pakistan's military, according to government officials and mining sources. State-run companies from resource-hungry China have long coveted Reko Diq and more recently Saudi Arabia has shown interest, according to Pakistani officials. Some Western diplomats say the Reko Diq dispute has been a significant foreign investment deterrent, with international businesses unnerved at how Pakistan dealt with the companies that had pledged to invest $3.3 billion to develop the country's then-biggest mining project. Barrick Gold and Antofagasta, whose joint venture Tethyan Copper Company (TCC) discovered vast mineral wealth in Reko Diq, say they had invested more than $220 million by the time the Baluchistan government, in 2011, unexpectedly refused to grant them the critical mining lease needed to keep operating. Pakistan argued its move was legitimate because TCC's feasibility study was incomplete and the country's Supreme Court voided the deal in 2013. But in 2017 the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) ruled against Pakistan. TCC did not respond to requests for comment and Antofagasta and Barrick Gold both declined to comment. Reuters could not determine whether either company would be willing to return to the project. FOREIGN INVESTORS The last serious attempt at settling the Reko Diq case was scuppered in 2016 by the military, which vetoed paying hundreds of millions of dollars to TCC, according to a senior Baluchistan official and two former senior officials in Islamabad. But the military has since changed its stance and is more open to a settlement with TCC, according to a lawmaker close to the military and a source close to Prime Minister Khan. The military was also involved in appointing Pakistan's current legal team. In response to a Reuters question about blocking the previous settlement effort, the military said: "Let's see how the case progresses." It did not elaborate or comment on whether it was playing any role in the latest negotiations. Some mining experts say a likely solution would be for a new investment consortium to pay the settlement fee on behalf of cash-strapped Pakistan in exchange for future royalty fees or mining rights. Information Minister Chaudhry said Pakistan was engaged in negotiations with "both" the current investors about a settlement and also potential new investors, with interest coming from the Middle East and Europe. He declined to name the potential investors. Pakistani Finance Minister Asad Umar said in October that Saudi Arabia has inquired about investing in Reko Diq and another government official confirmed talks were ongoing. Saudi Arabia did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on Reko Diq. During Crown Prince bin Salman's visit to Pakistan last month, the kingdom pledged to invest $2 billion in mineral development projects, though the provisional agreements were vague and did not mention any specific projects. China's state-owned miner China Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC), which operates the Saindak copper and gold mine close to Reko Diq, has been eyeing the bigger deposit for more than a decade, according to mining and MCC officials. A few years ago Chinese state giant Norinco also made an approach, according to two sources familiar with Norinco's offer. MCC and Norinco did not respond to requests for comment. When a mining company approached former general Abdul Quadir Baloch about Reko Diq around 2016, when he was federal minister for the frontier regions, he took their proposal not only to then-premier Nawaz Sharif, but also to the army chief. "The military has to give a (security) guarantee to any company coming in to explore or exploit this project, so they are a stakeholder," said Baloch. The military declined to comment on Baloch's assertions. Sharif, who has since been jailed on corruption charges, could not be reached for comment. The army-run FWO does not have the funds or the expertise to develop the Reko Diq project, which boasts 5.9 billion tons of ore. But it could be part of a consortium alongside global miners who have the know-how to mine such a gargantuan deposit. The military's role in developing natural resources in Baluchistan also carries risks, however, analysts say. Indigenous Baloch people view outsiders with suspicion, and their anger about Islamabad exploiting the province's vast natural resources has been one of the key themes fuelling a separatist insurgency that began around 2004. (Reporting by Drazen Jorgic; Editing by Alex Richardson) NEW YORK, March 13 (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday sold $16 billion in 30-year government bonds at a yield of 3.014 percent, the lowest yield at an auction of this debt maturity since July 2018, Treasury data showed. The ratio of bids to the amount of 30-year bonds offered was 2.25, below the 2.27 at the $19 billion 30-year bond sale in February. (Reporting by Richard Leong Editing by James Dalgleish) Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Kitco Metals Inc. nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Kitco Metals Inc. and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication. By Julien Ponthus and Josephine Mason LONDON, March 13 (Reuters) - European shares gradually edged up in morning trading on Wednesday on expectations that British lawmakers would vote to reject a disorderly no-deal Brexit. The pan-European STOXX 600 index was up 0.1 percent by 0957 GMT, as was London's FTSE 100, while the pound recouped some of its losses. Lawmakers resoundlingly voted against Prime Minister Theresa May's amended Brexit deal late on Tuesday, forcing parliament to decide whether to back a no-deal Brexit or seek a last-minute delay to the process. "I think the market can see that today Parliament is going to vote against no deal", said Duncan Weldon, cross asset allocation strategist at Legal & General Investment. "I think a lot of people who dont have to be invested in the UK are sitting this one out for the moment", he added. Among individual stocks, shares in Austria's Verbund posted the worst performance, falling 6.5 percent after the hydropower specialist said full-year core profit fell as it produced less electricity in a long dry summer period. Another big loser was cash-rich Zara owner Inditex which was down 4.8 percent after it published annual earnings slightly below analysts' expectations. Wirecard also sustained heavy losses with a 4.3 percent hit after it suspended an accounting employee in Singapore amid allegations of fraud and creative accounting. Germany's Adidas lost 3.1 percent after announcing that supply chain issues would hit its sales growth in the first half of 2019, particularly in North America. Shares in Norwegian Air dipped 0.6 percent after it said it would seek compensation from plane maker Boeing for lost revenue and extra costs after grounding its fleet of 737 MAX 8 aircraft in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash. Hikma Pharmaceuticals fell 4.3 percent as full-year core operating profit fell short of analysts expectations. (Reporting by Julien Ponthus; Editing by Catherine Evans and Andrew Heavens) Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 13) The Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) on Wednesday cautioned the public against drinking water that directly came from firetrucks. Portions of Metro Manila have been experiencing water shortage and many have relied on water rations from firetrucks of fire volunteers. Fire Chief Inspector Jude Delos Reyes, the BFP's spokesman, said based on design water tanks in firetrucks cannot be cleaned so they cannot assure the cleanliness of water stored there. "We do not recommend talaga water coming from the firetrucks, especially with our BFP firetrucks na gawin siyang pang-inumin ng tao [that it will be used for drinking]. Kung gagawin man nila [If they use this]for drinking, it should be bino-boil muna nila ito [boiled first]," Delos Reyes said. But Delos Reyes said they need to boil the water thoroughly before drinking if they do not have a choice. The BFP has no direct participation in providing water to residents affected by the water shortage thus far. Delos Reyes said affected local government units need to formally ask for their help before they may step in, since they are mandated to prioritize firefighting. With the rising number of fire incidents during dry season, the BFP said they need to ensure that they are always ready for emergency situations. "We will only act but on a very high protocol. So it should be 'yung mayor na mismo na ang nagsasabi na [the mayor who says] 'please help us, and we are requesting for your assistance.'" Delos Reyes said. Should the water crisis worsen, the BFP may also get water from swimming pools, deep wells and even rivers and streams. You are here: World Flash The United States will withdraw all remaining U.S. personnel from its embassy in Caracas, Venezuela, this week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Monday. The announcement was made in a statement released by the State Department late Monday night. "This decision reflects the deteriorating situation in Venezuela as well as the conclusion that the presence of U.S. diplomatic staff at the embassy has become a constraint on U.S. policy," said the top U.S. diplomat in the statement. The move followed the State Department's decision on Jan. 24 to recall all dependents and reduce embassy staff in Caracas to a minimum. The United States recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the nation's "interim president" on Jan. 23, days after Maduro was inaugurated for a second term as Venezuelan president. In response to Washington's support for Guaido, Maduro announced that he was severing "diplomatic and political" ties with the United States. The Trump administration recently has kept piling up pressure on Maduro. Venezuela's government on Monday announced four measures to deal with a blackout that has plunged the country into darkness since late Thursday. Flash Russia on Tuesday accused Ukraine of violating a treaty between the two countries that has been in place for more than two decades. Ukraine decided to withdraw from the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership, which was signed in 1997. "This was clearly not the fault of Moscow, which has always declared its readiness to negotiate and discuss specific proposals for the modernization of the legal framework, including the 1997 Friendship Treaty," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. On Dec. 10, Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko signed into law a bill passed by the Ukrainian parliament to terminate the treaty from April 1. Poroshenko said doing so was necessary given his country's reorientation toward Europe. According to Poroshenko, the agreement was not terminated earlier because Ukraine wanted to use its provisions to prove in international courts how Russia breached the treaty, particularly in relation to "territorial integrity, inviolability of borders, non-use of force, non-interference in internal affairs, faithful fulfillment of international commitments and norms of international law." The Russian ministry accused Ukraine of violating a clause in which the parties agree not to enter into any agreements with third countries against the other party. In violation of these provisions, Ukraine ratified in 2004 a memorandum in support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) operations and in 2005 amended its military doctrine declaring NATO membership as a strategic goal of the state. Ukraine later amended the constitution stating that the strategic course of the country was to acquire full NATO membership. Russia views these moves as violations of the treaty. Moscow also accused Kiev of "grossly and systematically" violating the treaty by "conducting a targeted offensive against the Russian language and the rights of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine." The Russian ministry said it had sent a note to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, listing the violations of the treaty by Kiev and urging it to "honor its bilateral and international obligations not in word but in deed." Rohingya refugees walk along an embankment next to paddy fields after fleeing from Myanmar into Palang Khali, near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, November 2, 2017. REUTERS-Yonhap By Ko Dong-hwan Ongoing media coverage of the plight of Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar (also known as Burma) has been heavy in condemning Myanmar military forces for allegedly attempting ethnic cleansing and forcing hundreds of thousands of them to flee across the border into Bangladesh. This resulted in the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) forming an international body to investigate the country's Rakhine State to collect evidence of the military's atrocities and possibly prosecute responsible Myanmar generals. But what Myanmar scholars fighting for democracy shared with The Korea Times about the issue was unlike the tone taken by various international media outlets, which focus on how military officials are close to being subpoenaed to the International Criminal Court, and why the country's ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) party leader Aung San Suu Kyi hasn't criticized her country's military force severely enough. The scholars, advocating human rights and political justice in a country governed for decades by a military junta, argued that the crisis cannot be simply wrapped up by prosecuting the culprits. Rather, the crisis resulted from an ethnically diverse country seeing conflict between the central military and minority groups in several regions, and the fledgling ruling party struggling to steer the country toward democracy. "What I learned from the Rohingya issue is that we have our own issues as well," said Seng Hkum Hpauna, a political activist and one of the co-founders of the Naushawng Development Institute, a democracy-promoting, nonprofit organization in Kachin State. "In Burma, what's also important is the majority of people's perception. They see the Rohingya community very differently (from how the international media have portrayed it). The NLD government cannot ignore these public opinions." Many Myanmar citizens, according to the activist, support the military authorities. This is reflected by local media outlets they "don't tend to" openly write about Rohingya issues while some even "tend to" support the government or military because they don't want to differ from the majority. "That's why the Burmese majority's perception about the Rohingyas is very different from international communities," Hpauna said. Fifteen Myanmar scholars who graduated from the George W. Bush Institute's Liberty and Leadership Program visited the National Assembly in Yeouido, Seoul, during their South Korean tour from Sept. 16 to 21. Accompanying them are Dr. Victor Cha, a Fellow at the Bush Center and a former candidate for U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, and Chris Walsh and Jieun Pyun, managers at the Bush Center. Courtesy of the Bush Center. The activist, with the other scholars, graduated from the Liberty and Leadership Program at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas, Texas, and visited Seoul in September to learn about the country's transition from militarism to democracy. Victor Cha, a Fellow at the institute and a former candidate for U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, told The Korea Times he was "impressed by the dedication, earnestness and commitment of these young men and women to building transparent and accountable institutions in their country." "The NLD government led by Suu Kyi must care about the majority's perspective, especially now close to the 2020 general elections," Hpauna said. "She doesn't want to upset the majority. That's why she cannot deny opinions." Hpauna's remarks shed light on the Southeast Asian country, where local media coverage of the crisis isn't as critical of the military as that of international outlets. In contrast, the activist said the military has enjoyed wide support mostly from older people since the country's independence from Britain. "That's what I see very dangerous for the country's democratization process and media coverage of the Rohingya issue," Hpauna said. "Extreme nationalism is growing bigger and bigger. It might stop the democratization process." Min Aung Ye Htut Tin, a senior program specialist at the United States Institute of Peace Myanmar program, offered a holistic view. The historically complex country with multiple layers of politics, the military, the ruling party, Rakhine State (where over 700,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees in Bangladesh are from) and other state bodies suffers from not having a government agency spearheading action to ease the crisis, he said. "In Rakhine, there are lots of different narratives regarding the issue," Htut Tin said. "Whenever rumors happen, it is very easy for communities to break up and fight each other. And there is no resilient mechanism to maintain cohesive community levels. We need common ground of infrastructure to mitigate this conflict." Aung San Suu Kyi, the State Counselor of Myanmar, gestures during a one-on-one discussion with Berge Brende at the World Economic Forum's meeting at the National Convention Center Thursday, Sept. 13, in Hanoi, Vietnam. Suu Kyi said the country's handling of its Rohingya Muslim minority crisis could have been better. Korea Times file Democratization process Myanmar's response to the Rohingya crisis has been short of meeting global expectations of acknowledging the refugees, displaced since August 2017, as victims of genocide. There are further allegations that militants burnt down the Rohingya people's villages, murdered many and raped women. When 1991 Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi on Sept. 13 defended the Myanmar judiciary that on Sept. 3 jailed two Reuters reporters who investigated the killing of 10 Rohingya villagers by Myanmar security forces, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley described the remark as "unbelievable." The democracy pioneer also drew Western criticism for failing to speak out against the military's treatment of the Rohingyas. Such "reluctance" of the Myanmar leader, from the international community's perspective, likely derives from the country's unique political state striving to strike a balance between the ruling NLD party and military authorities. Experts said Suu Kyi's democracy-geared government had tried to make a clean cut from the previous military regimes that ruled the country from the early 1960s, but this faced many problems. Local news outlet The Myanmar Times said the revolutionary two-year-old administration "should handle very carefully" the Rohingya and other military conflict issues in Rakhine State as strong international criticism is escalating. The report said business leaders are worried about how the government could prevent possible economic sanctions this year, adding "a blind denial from the capital Naypyidaw of international accusations will not work." There are other precursors to the country's internal jaundice: signs of the increasing role of the military, proven by escalating conflicts in Rakhine State; a fragile public morality unable to accept diversity and social change; and press freedom under pressure. "Burmese politics is like following the captain of a ship rather than the compass," the newspaper report said. A security officer attempts to control Rohingya refugees waiting to receive aid in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, September 21, 2017. REUTERS-Yonhap Resolving the Rohingya issue The scholars suggested one of the keys to solving the Rohingya issue is existing laws and how they are implemented, especially the citizenship law enacted in 1982. Despite the law, the Rohingyas have been denied Myanmar citizenship, even though some families have been in the country for three generations. "I think it's a matter of implementing the current law impartially and neutrally," said Aung Kyaw Moe, director of the Center for Social Integrity, an NGO promoting diversity and pluralism. "That would resolve a major root of the problem, being able to grant citizenship to about 60-70 percent of the Rohingya people. Just because they pray differently, they cannot be protected by the government from social dangers and cannot go to normal universities. These are not solutions. The government needs to ensure the rule of law exists at every level." For the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh to return, the scholars pointed out the need to repair damaged Myanmar-Bangladesh ties. At the U.N. General Assembly in September, Bangladesh President Sheikh Hasina accused Myanmar of not meeting its commitment to take back Rohingya refugees. Calling the military's crackdown on the minority group "tantamount to genocide" and "crimes against humanity," Hasina referred to U.N. reports that detailed the atrocities and appealed for international support for the 1.1 million refugees sheltering in her country. "In resolving the crisis, the Burmese government signed agreements with the Bangladesh government as well as the U.N. Refugee Agency and the U.N. Development Program," said Htet Htet Oo, a public information and communications expert in the humanitarian and development sectors at the U.N. "But the two governments blame each other and I don't know which side is telling the truth. Regardless, they must realize that the Rohingyas are human. The first step for their repatriation is that the Burmese government, holding the primary responsibility, makes sure these people have enough protection and help they need." "Bangladesh is a poor country with its own problems and resources are limited, so I don't know how long they can cope (with the refugees)," said Kyaw Moe, a Rohingya. He was concerned that there might be a clash between the host communities in Bangladesh and the Rohingyas because of differences in language and tradition. "There is a risk promoting the tolerance in Bangladesh, and supporting Bangladesh is not a universal solution," he said. "The problem is in Burma. The Burmese government, if repatriation is to be taken, must create conditions that everyone is safe there to live. " Rohingya refugee children fly improvised kites at the Kutupalong refugee camp near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, December 10, 2017. REUTERS-Yonhap Star Alliance customers travelling from the Dutch capital can look forward to a new premium lounge experience at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. The new Star Alliance Lounge will welcome eligible First and Business Class passengers and Star Alliance Gold Card holders as well as eligible paid lounge members of the Air Canada Maple Leaf Worldwide Club and United Club programmes as of March 8th onwards. The lounge is located airside in the Departures 2, Schengen Area on the Panorama terrace level. Easy access is provided to the departure gates for Alliance member carrier flights to European destinations in the Schengen Zone*. All Star Alliance branded lounges are designed to provide a unique local experience. Working with D-Dock, an Amsterdam-based architectural design firm, has allowed Star Alliance to infuse the local essence of Amsterdam into the new lounge. The elegant and contemporary design is inspired by the ever-changing Dutch skies and landscapes and features furniture creations and decoration pieces of original Dutch design. Free Wi-Fi is available throughout the lounge, and a mix of standard and USB power outlets ensure that customers can recharge their electronic devices. Facilities include a luggage storage area, individual work booths, communal work table, dining area, bar area, relaxation area and a wine bar. Amenities feature a serviced bar during afternoon hours, beer on tap, a complimentary buffet with hot and cold meal options, flight information, business services such as printing and scanning, complimentary reading material and personal care amenities upon request. The lounge can accommodate up to 150 guests and will open daily from 5.30am to 9.30pm, depending on the Star Alliance (Schengen) flight schedule. "Star Alliance has set itself the overall goal of improving the customer's travel experience. Offering a premium lounge product is an integral part of this strategy. Our new Amsterdam Lounge expands the network of Star Alliance branded lounges to eight and offers our customers flying from 'De Dam' a state-of-the-art lounge experience", said Christian Draeger, Vice President Customer Experience, Star Alliance. At Schiphol, Star Alliance has partnered with Aspire Netherlands (A Swissport company) who also developed and operates the adjacent common use Aspire Lounge, and Royal Schiphol Group, in creating the first dedicated alliance lounge at the airport. "We are delighted to partner with Star Alliance in bringing its latest addition of Star Alliance branded lounges to the Dutch capital, where customers will be able to enjoy ASPIRE's proclaimed hospitality and services. We believe that the combination of its intelligent design, comprehensive offering and local feel, the new Star Alliance Lounge will elevate customer experience to a whole new level." said Menno Biersma, CEO of Swissport. Andre van den Berg, Chief Commercial Officer of Royal Schiphol Group, adds: "We are committed to providing our passengers with a carefree and enjoyable travel experience. The Star Alliance Lounge is an attractive addition to the offering at Schiphol airport, which contributes positively to our customer proposition and allows passengers to take joy in their journey already before they board their flight." The lounge primarily serves eligible customers departing on flights operated by Adria Airways, Aegean Airlines, Austrian Airlines, LOT Polish Airlines, Lufthansa, SAS, Swiss, and TAP Air Portugal. Customers departing on other Star Alliance member carrier flights are also welcome but must take note that the lounge is located in the Schengen departures area before passport control. In total, 16 Star Alliance member carriers serve Amsterdam, providing non-stop service to 23 destinations in 18 countries. Star Alliance offers passengers travelling in First or Business Class on any of its 28 member carriers or those holding Star Alliance Gold status or Paid Lounge Membership from Air Canada Maple Leafe Worldwide or United Club access to more than 1.000 lounges across the entire global network. In addition to member airlines' own lounges and those operated by third parties, Star Alliance now offers eight Star Alliance branded lounges around the world located at Amsterdam Schiphol (AMS), Buenos Aires Ezeiza (EZE), Los Angeles (LAX), Paris Charles de Gaulle (CDG), Nagoya (NGO), Rio de Janeiro Galeao (GIG), Rome Fiumicino (FCO), and Sao Paulo Guarulhos (GRU). Star Alliance lounges give guests a uniquely local airport experience with personalised attention. The Star Alliance Lounge LAX has been awarded by Skytrax as world's best alliance lounge every year since 2015. Star Alliance was the first alliance to offer alliance lounges to better satisfy customer needs, primarily in major non-hub locations where it is adequate for member carriers to concentrate their lounge offering in order to offer a highly competitive product. Moreover, the existing Star Alliance branded lounge in Paris Charles-de-Gaulle Airport will be refurbished in the coming months. The renovation will deliver a fresh and relaxing atmosphere and further enhance the travel experience of customers travelling from the French capital. Contributed by Star Alliance Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 13) Local airlines have confirmed that they do not have in their fleets the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft model which has raised international scrutiny after two plane crashes that killed hundreds of people over the past five months. China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Indonesia and France were among those who recently ordered to prohibit Boeing 737 Max 8 planes from flying, after the latest crash involving the model from Ethiopian Airlines en route to Nairobi killed all 157 passengers on board Sunday. A representative from Cebu Pacific assured that they do not have that plane model. Meanwhile, Philippine Airlines Spokesperson Cielo Villaluna also said they do not have the Boeing 737 model, but they do use the Boeing 777 - 300 plane. "What we have among the Boeing variants is the B777 - 300, which is utilized on our long haul transpacific routes to the US mainland and which has served the route with efficiency and reliability," Villaluna told CNN Philippines in a text message. Officials are still investigating the cause of the accident on Sunday but mentioned that all contact with the aircraft was lost six minutes after departure. In October last year, a Lion Air flight using the Boeing 737 MAX 8 also crashed over the Java Sea killing all its 189 passengers. By Scott Reeves, China Daily | Mar. 13, 2019 More countries join in grounding jet model, US politicians call on FAA to follow suit Boeing said it will make a major software change to its 737 MAX 8 aircraft flight-control system as more countries on Tuesday grounded the jets following the crash of one in Ethiopia. The new software for the MAX 8 will enable the plane's stall-prevention system to use multiple data feeds rather than relying on the single sensor employed when the plane was delivered in 2017, Boeing said. Boeing's software change follows preliminary results from the crash of a MAX 8 in Indonesia last October, suggesting that bad data from a single sensor, which measures the angle of the plane's nose, caused the stall-prevention system to malfunction, perhaps sending the 737 MAX 8 into the dive that killed 189 people. The company said it developed the software change prior to Sunday's crash of the Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed all 157 people aboard. The software update will make an "already safe plane safer", the company said late Monday. On Tuesday, the European Aviation Safety Agency and the governments of the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and Germany barred 737 MAX 8 jets from their airspace. Australia, India and Singapore also grounded the MAX 8, as did Norwegian Airlines. Only two nations still fly a substantial number of Boeing 737 MAX 8s: the United States and Canada. US airlines Southwest has 34 and American 24. Both have said they have analyzed data from their thousands of flights with the planes and found no reason to ground them. Air Canada, which operates 24 Max 8s, has given no indication it intends to ground them. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it was sticking with its refusal to ground the jet model. "It's too soon to declare the plane unsafe to fly," the FAA said in a statement. "This investigation has just begun and to date we have not been provided data to draw any conclusions or take any actions." "The FAA should sit up and take notice in view of the European Aviation Safety Agency's decision to bar the plane from European airspace,' Scott Hamilton, managing director of Leeham Co, an aviation consultancy firm in Seattle, told China Daily. The cause of the Indonesian and Ethiopian crashes is unknown, but both planes appeared to have had trouble with their stall prevention system, he said. "This warrants grounding the plane until the cause of the crashes is known." Hamilton said he was puzzled by Boeing's decision to use a single sensor in the MAX 8's stall prevention system. "Redundancy is one of the basic philosophies of aviation so you don't have a single point of failure," he said. "You want back-up." "The FAA is between a rock and a hard place," said Keith Mackey, an aviation safety consultant and president of Mackey International in Ocala, Florida. "The FAA has certified the plane. Until investigators come up with something definitive making the plane un-airworthy, there's no reason to ground it. I think the recorders should tell a good portion of the story." American politicians on Tuesday demanded immediate grounding of the aircraft, and Boeing's stock was down on Tuesday for the second day. It closed on the New York Stock Exchange at $375.41 a share, down $24.60, or 6.15 percent from Monday's close. Boeing's stock has lost about $20 billion in two days. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said, "The FAA needs to get these planes out of the sky." She called for congressional hearings on "whether an administration that famously refused to stand up to Saudi Arabia to protect Boeing arms sales has once again put lives at risk for the same reason." Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah, joined Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut and Diane Feinstein from California, in demanding the grounding of the aircraft. The Transport Workers Union of American, representing about 150,000 aircraft mechanics, baggage handlers and flight attendants, said the Boeing MAX 8 planes should be grounded "in an abundance of caution". Boeing CEO Dennis A. Muilenburg spoke to US President Donald Trump on the phone Tuesday morning and argued that the MAX 8 shouldn't be grounded in the United States, according to two people briefed on the conversation, The New York Times reported. A Boeing official said that during the call, "Dennis reiterated our position that the Max is a safe aircraft," according to the newspaper. Nearly 40 percent of the in-service fleet of 371 Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets globally has been grounded, according to industry publication Flightglobal. Earlier, China, Malaysia and Oman had ordered the aircraft grounded. China, Boeing's biggest market for its MAX 8, has grounded 96 jets. The USA is the second largest MAX 8 market, with 72 aircraft in service, Flightglobal reported. US regulators are expected to require installation of Boeing's new software, which takes about an hour per airplane, by the end of April. By Scott Reeves, China Daily | Mar. 13, 2019 The US Federal Aviation Administration says it doesn't have sufficient data to order the grounding of Boeing's 737 MAX 8 aircraft that has been involved in two crashes and which has been grounded by 41 other countries this week, but US media reports say pilots of at least two of the Boeing planes reported problems last year. The Associated Press said on Tuesday that reports by two pilots said that soon after engaging the autopilot on Boeing 737 Max 8 planes, the nose tilted down sharply. In both cases, they recovered quickly after disconnecting the autopilot. The tilting problems are similar to the suspected causes of the crash on Sunday in Ethiopia of a MAX 8 that killed 157 aboard and the crash last October in Indonesia that killed 189. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that a third pilot complained that Boeing hadn't explained changes to the plane's automation to pilots. "I am left to wonder: what else don't I know?" the pilot wrote. "The Flight Manual is inadequate and almost criminally insufficient.' Other US media, including Politico and the Dallas Morning News, reported that pilots of the MAX 8 anonymously filed complaints about MAX 8 incidents. The Dallas Morning News reported that pilots cited issues with the aircraft's autopilot system and described the plane abruptly nosing down. The flights referenced took place in October and November, the newspaper reported. Politico reported that at least one complaint cited the anti-stall system. "The fact that this airplane requires such jury rigging to fly is a red flag," one pilot wrote.t the Dallas Morning News, also The FAA and two US airlines -- American Airlines and Southwest Airlines -- continue to permit the planes to fly. Both carriers vouched for the safety of the aircraft on Wednesday. The FAA has said, "This investigation has just begun and to date we have not been provided data to draw any conclusions or take any actions." The agency said it will take appropriate action if it determines otherwise. Boeing, the world's largest airplane manufacturer, on Tuesday expressed confidence in its aircraft. Citing safety concerns, Egypt, Kazakhstan and Vietnam closed their airspace to Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes on Wednesday. The European Union, China and India had previously banned all 737 Max 8 flights. The pilots' reports were filed last year in a data base compiled by NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, according to the AP. They are voluntary safety reports and don't publicly reveal the names of pilots, the airlines or the location of the incidents. The FAA declined to comment on the incidents that pilots reported, but said it wasn't aware of any verified reports of issues related to the anti-stall system, called MCAS for its acronym, according to the media reports. That anti-stall system only activates if the autopilot is turned off, according to documents Boeing has shared with airlines and the FAA. Boeing said on Monday that will make a major software change to its 737 MAX 8 aircraft flight-control system. The new software for the MAX 8 will enable the plane's stall-prevention system to use multiple data feeds rather than relying on the single sensor employed when the plane was delivered in 2017, Boeing said. China Daily | Mar. 13, 2019 Britain joined a growing wave of suspensions of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft around the world on Tuesday, escalating the global alarm after a crash in Ethiopia that killed 157 people in the second such disaster for the model in the past few months. The decision by one of the industry's most established regulators was the most serious setback yet for Boeing in the wake of Sunday's crash and put pressure on regulators in the rest of Europe and the United States to follow suit. At the same time as London's announcement, Norwegian Air said it too would temporarily ground its MAX 8 passenger jets on the advice of European regulators. Earlier, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia and Oman had also temporarily suspended the aircraft, following China, Indonesia and others the day before. "The UK, Singapore and Australia are independent professionals," said Teal Group analyst Richard Aboulafia. "I am sure the (US) Federal Aviation Administration will take their judgement into account." Sunday's disaster - after the fatal crash of a 737 MAX jet in Indonesia in October - has wiped billions of dollars off the market value of the world's biggest planemaker. But experts say it is too early to speculate on the reason for the crash or whether the two are linked. Most crashes are caused by a unique chain of human and technical factors. Given problems of identification at the charred disaster site, Ethiopian Airlines said it would take at least five days to start handing remains to families. The victims came from more than 30 different nations, and included nearly two dozen UN staff. "We are Muslim and have to bury our deceased immediately," Noordin Mohamed, a 27-year-old Kenyan businessman whose brother and mother died, told Reuters. "Losing a brother and mother in the same day and not having their bodies to bury is very painful," he said in the Kenyan capital Nairobi where the plane had been due. ALGIERS, Algeria - Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on Monday announced that he would not run for a fifth presidential term, but he indefinitely postponed presidential elections slated for April 18, the official APS news agency reported. Now in his 20th year of rule, Bouteflika, 82, said his withdrawal was in response to the mass rallies across the country. Since February 22, the Friday rallies have drawn tens of thousands calling for the ailing Bouteflika to step down. He returned to Algeria on Sunday after three weeks of medical care in Switzerland. Later on Monday, Bouteflika conducted a key cabinet reshuffle by appointing Noureddine Bedoui as the new prime minister and Ramtane Lamamra as deputy prime minister. L.A.s original traveling screening series is now a Los Angeles Times signature event. Eat See Hear, the original traveling outdoor cinema series, announced today its lineup of film screenings across greater Los Angeles for the summer of 2019. The series, presented by Showtime and now in its eighth year, will screen a movie accompanied by music performances and plenty of food trucks every Saturday for 20 consecutive weeks starting on May 4. Eat See Hear is now part of the Los Angeles Times joining a portfolio of nearly 100 signature events produced annually by The Times, including Envelope Live, Festival of Books, Food Bowl and The Taste. Outdoor movie screenings have become a beloved summertime tradition in Southern California and thats largely because of Eat See Hear, Times Chief Operating Officer Chris Argentieri said. We are delighted to partner with our presenting sponsor, Showtime, and bring The Times expertise in film, food and fun to L.A.s premier outdoor movies series. From timeless classics to current blockbusters, the diverse range of 2019s movie selection has a go-to pick for everyone, including Crazy Rich Asians, Get Out, The Greatest Showman, the 60th anniversary screening of North by Northwest, a special Christmas-in-July screening of Home Alone and many more. Advertisement Each film is projected onto the largest inflatable movie screen on the West Coast with the highest quality HD-projection, a 52-foot wide image and professional sound. Screenings take place at iconic venues all across the city, including The Autry Museum in Griffith Park, La Cienega Park in Beverly Hills, Centennial Square at Pasadena City Hall, North Hollywood Recreation Center, the Santa Monica High School Memorial Greek Amphitheater, and Los Angeles State Historic Park. Eat See Hear is also the largest dog-friendly event in Los Angeles, and partners annually with non-profit Best Friends Animal Society, Los Angeles to host adoption events before screenings which has resulted in $50,000 donated and more than 75 animals finding their forever homes. Furry friends attending the series are treated to water bowls and biscuits as well. Tickets for Eat See Hear are $14 for general admission with advance online purchase or $16 at the door, and $8 for kids aged 12 and under. Children under age 5 are welcome to join for free. The festival also offers tickets to its signature Fashionably Late section for $21 (advance purchase only) which gives ticketholders access to premium seating up front. As always, dogs are welcome to accompany their humans for free. The summer screening series is presented by Showtime, which provides goodies including free beach chairs and Roku Sticks to guests on a first-come, first-served basis. The full lineup of movies is on eatseehear.com, with musical performance and food truck details to be announced this summer. Eight writers, including California residents Rebecca Solnit and Young Jean Lee, were named winners of the annual Windham-Campbell Prizes, some of the richest and most prestigious literary awards in the world. The announcement was made Wednesday in London, at an event hosted by Damian Barr, the British columnist and memoirist. Like the six other writers, Solnit and Lee will each be awarded a cash prize of $165,000, an unusually high amount for an American literary prize. (By contrast, the Pulitzer Prize comes with a cash payment of $15,000, while National Book Award winners each get $10,000.) Other winners of this years awards, administered by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, were fiction authors Danielle McLaughlin and David Chariandy; nonfiction writer Raghu Karnad; poets Ishion Hutchinson and Kwame Dawes; and playwright Patricia Cornelius. Advertisement Solnit, a journalist and essayist, was praised by the judges (who remain anonymous) for her essays that range through subject matters that include politics, history, literature, art, and feminism in a manner at once provocative, erudite, and intensely engaging. Solnits books include The Faraway Nearby, Men Explain Things to Me and, most recently, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays). That book made the longlist for the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Solnit credited her victory to two things that have blessed and enriched my life: the love and generosity of gay men and the resources of libraries and archives. I was actually in Bogota, Colombia, doing another kind of research for a book when I heard from the prize director out of the blue, and after the sheer amazement settled, I felt so grateful to have this encouragement and support to do what Ive wanted to do all my life: just write books, she said. Playwright, director and Stanford University professor Lee was cited for exploring diverse theatrical styles, forms, and subjects with a dramaturgy that constantly takes risks and pushes the boundaries of what is possible. Lees plays include Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, The Sinophile and Untitled Feminist Show. She has previously won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award. Lee said she couldnt stop crying when she found out she won the award. It was so moving to me to imagine someone out there taking the time to write me a nomination letter, and all of the anonymous people who looked at my work and decided that I should get such a gigantic amount of support, she said. This prize will make such a difference for me. The Windham-Campbell Prizes were first awarded in 2013. They are endowed by the estate of the late novelist Donald Windham, in memory of Sandy Campbell, Windhams longtime life partner. Writers to have won the award in previous years include James Salter, Jim Crace, Tessa Hadley, Olivia Laing and Suzan-Lori Parks. The prizes are unusual in that the names of the judges arent revealed to the public, and because writers are unaware that theyre in contention for the awards they only learn theyve been nominated when they receive the phone call telling them theyve won. Also unusual this year was the location of the ceremony, which awards director Michael Kelleher explained in a news release. Even though we are based at Yale, this is an international prize, and we want to celebrate this in the heart of one of the great multicultural cities of the world, Kelleher said. Charlotte Kirk, the British actress whose leaked text messages have embroiled Warner Bros. Chairman Kevin Tsujihara in an affair scandal, is speaking out against her latest portrayal in the media, calling it conjecture and hearsay. Kirk has been mentioned in a series of investigations by the Hollywood Reporter and has been linked to a number of Hollywood heavyweights, whom she reportedly pressured to put her in their films. Her alleged affair with Tsujihara is believed to have led to her small roles in Warner Bros. Oceans 8 and How to Be Single. On Wednesday, hours after the Hollywood Reporter published a new article further investigating her connections to producer Brett Ratner, his ex-partner James Packer and Millennium Films founder and Chief Executive Avi Lerner, the actress released a statement defending herself. I have remained silent. I cant do that anymore, she said in a statement to The Times. Its bad enough to be defined by others, but when the person they put on the page has no relationship to who I am, I feel compelled to speak out. Advertisement Warner Bros. CEO entangled in scandal involving an actress, report alleges Kirks statement further appears designed for her to state, on the record, that she didnt leak her text messages and perhaps plug her latest projects with director Neil Marshall, whom she reportedly moved in with at one point. She also said that she was 19 in 2013 when she is believed to have described in text messages a sexual encounter with Tsujihara. Earlier accounts linking her to the married mogul suggested she was older than that. She said on Wednesday that she was possibly a little arrogant and definitely very naive at that time. I acknowledge I may have made some poor choices and Im sorry for that, but Ive learned from my mistakes since then and have grown a lot, as a person, as a woman, and as a professional actor, she said. Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times) Though Kirk previously denied that Tsujihara engaged in any inappropriate behavior, she didnt deny having a sexual relationship with Tsujihara in the new statement. Nor did she dispute the authenticity of the text messages that reportedly led to AT&T-owned WarnerMedia to investigate the salacious allegations against the head of its movie and TV studio. Read Kirks full statement below: A lot has been written about me over the past week, most of it conjecture and hearsay, and except for an initial statement made to The Hollywood Reporter, I have remained silent. I cant do that anymore. Its bad enough to be defined by others, but when the person they put on the page has no relationship to who I am, I feel compelled to speak out. Firstly, I want to make it absolutely clear that I had nothing to do with the publication of this story. There are assumptions being made that somehow I was responsible for the release of the texts, and that is simply not true. When I heard that THR might publish it, I implored them not to, but obviously to no avail. Secondly, these articles refer to events from 6 years ago, way back in 2013. I was a different person then; 19 years old, newly arrived in LA, possibly a little arrogant and definitely very naive. I acknowledge I may have made some poor choices and Im sorry for that, but Ive learned from my mistakes since then and have grown a lot, as a person, as a woman, and as a professional actor. As for these latest rumors surrounding the Hellboy movie, its nonsensical. Neil Marshall (Director/Producer), saw my audition and believed I was the best actor for the role, simple as that. The character of Alice was written as a 26 year old East End girl with strawberry blonde hair and an attitude - thats me in a nutshell! Avi Lerner (Executive Producer) supported Neils choice because he believed in the Directors vision for the movie. Unfortunately, they were both overruled by Larry Gordon (Producer) because he controlled the rights. At the end of the day, thats show business, and instead I went on to play the title role in the feature film Nicole & O.J. and starring in The Reckoning a feature now in pre-production that I also co-wrote. This is a speed bump and not a roadblock and will move beyond this. I will never stop fighting; fighting to define myself, fighting for the best roles and fighting for the career I love and was born to do. The Federal Aviation Administration doubled down on its support for the safety of Boeing Co.s 737 Max aircraft Tuesday, even as much of the world moved to ground the planes. On Tuesday, European and Indian aviation regulators joined a slew of others worldwide in suspending flights of 737 Max jetliners after Sundays deadly crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane, which had eerie similarities to a fatal accident involving the same model plane in Indonesia less than six months before. Acting FAA Administrator Daniel Elwell said the agencys review so far of all available data and aggregate safety performance from operators and pilots of the Boeing 737 Max shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action, he said in the statement, adding that if any issues affecting the continued airworthiness of the aircraft are identified, the agency will take immediate and appropriate action. Late Monday, aerospace giant Boeing said it would soon update the planes flight control system software that was implicated in last years deadly crash of a Lion Air flight shortly after takeoff. Advertisement The European Union Aviation Safety Agency announced it is grounding all 737 Max 8 and 737 Max 9 planes in Europe and issued a directive that suspends outside countries from flying the planes in and out of its airspace. The ban does not apply to other versions of the 737, including the NG, Max 7 and Max 10. Shortly afterward, Indias Ministry of Civil Aviation announced it was grounding 737 Max planes until appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations. China, Australia and Singapore had already grounded the 737 Max, according to Bloomberg. Such a broad repudiation of the U.S. aviation agency by foreign aviation authorities is highly unusual, aviation experts said. Historically, the U.S. has been viewed as a preeminent leader in air safety and accident investigation practices. As far as I can tell, the FAAs position seems to be that unless you can uncover some systemic flaw, that grounding is inappropriate, said Arnold Barnett, a professor of statistics at the MIT Sloan School of Management who focuses on aviation safety. But I find this a perplexing position because at the moment, its not known what caused the crash, he said. You could say if youre not sure if theres a systemic flaw, then the prudent course is to do what the rest of the countries are doing and say, Stop flying until you know. Barnett noted that countries such as Germany and Australia are among the safest in the world for aviation and they, at this moment, are not convinced. Aviation experts cautioned that it was too early to speculate about whether there is a connection between Sundays crash and the October fatal crash of a 737 Max operated by Lion Air, which plunged into the sea shortly after takeoff. Sundays accident is being investigated by the Ethiopian Civil Aviation Authority, with help from Boeing and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. An FAA team is also on site with the NTSB, the agency said. Yes, they are the same kind of aircraft, but potentially, these two accidents could have completely different causes, said James F. Rodriguez, senior counsel at law firm Holland & Knight. When he was assistant general counsel at the NTSB from 2011 to 2017, Rodriguez was responsible for advising investigators looking into transportation incidents, including aviation accidents such as the 2013 Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash in San Francisco that killed three people and injured 187. Accident investigation authorities around the world are usually cautious to draw conclusions early, he said. I think it seems a little early for them to be drawing the kind of conclusion to ground the aircraft given that the investigation is so early. (Los Angeles Times) Several U.S. airlines that fly 737 Max aircraft have expressed support for the plane, including Southwest Airlines, which is the largest domestic carrier and biggest operator of the 737 Max. The Dallas airline has 34 of the planes, with 219 more on order. Since the Lion Air crash in October, Boeing has reiterated that its 737 Max is safe. On Tuesday, the Chicago aerospace giant said, We understand that regulatory agencies and customers have made decisions that they believe are most appropriate for their home markets. Boeing added that it would stay in contact with those groups but that without more information, there was no basis to give new guidance to operators of the plane. Boeings shares fell 6.2% to $375.41 on Tuesday. As of last month, the company had delivered 376 of its 737 Max jetliners and had orders for an additional 5,012 from more than 80 airlines worldwide, Boeing said. The single-aisle, twin-engine plane has become a popular choice because of its fuel efficiency. The 737 Maxs flight control system includes something known as the maneuvering characteristics augmentation system, or MCAS. The FAA said Monday it would mandate that the software fix Boeing promised to make to MCAS be implemented on all 737 Max planes no later than next month. A preliminary report on the Lion Air crash suggested that a faulty reading from the planes angle of attack sensor may have triggered the MCAS system, which then sent the plane into a series of 26 dives at an altitude of less than 5,000 feet. Even President Trump weighed in on the question of aircraft automation, tweeting Tuesday that airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Trump spoke on the phone with Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg after that tweet, Boeing said, and Muilenburg reiterated to the president the companys position that the 737 Max is safe. The company declined to say who requested the call or provide any additional details. To ground the planes or take some sort of action, the FAA would probably need to find some common data between the two incidents, attorney Rodriguez said. I think thats what theyre waiting for, he said. Theyre waiting to see what kind of information comes out. Times staff writer Hugo Martin contributed to this report. Canada joined much of the world in grounding Boeing Co.s 737 Max jetliner Wednesday, leaving the United States virtually alone in allowing the aircraft to keep flying. The announcement by Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau came after aviation authorities in Europe, India, China and elsewhere grounded the plane in the aftermath of two fatal crashes in the last six months involving the 737 Max, the latest version of Boeings hugely popular twin-engine jetliner. Garneau told reporters that Canada banned the plane from operating in the country, or flying over it, because of inconclusive data suggesting similarities between the crashes. The second accident occurred Sunday when an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max crashed after takeoff, killing 157 people. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration so far has not grounded the aircraft, saying Tuesday that the agency had found no basis for taking such action. Advertisement Other aviation observers also have raised questions about the Max version of the 737, which is the most-produced aircraft in Boeings line of jetliners, with more than 5,000 on order worldwide. The FAA and Garneaus agency work closely on most aviation matters, but Garneau said, We make our own decisions in Canada and occasionally those decisions may be different from our colleagues south of the border. Theyre aware of it and the reasons for it, Garneau said of the FAAs and Canadas decisions, and similarly they let us know when they have a difference of opinion. When asked what would persuade Canada to lift the ban, Garneau replied, The smoking gun that will explain what happened with this particular flight in Ethiopia. Well find out, hopefully, in the coming days how that aircraft behaved after authorities review the doomed jetliners flight recordings, Garneau said. Meanwhile, the mounting concerns reportedly have prompted some airlines to reconsider their 737 Max orders. Kenya Airways is reevaluating plans to buy the plane and might switch to the rival Airbus A320 or upgrade to Boeings larger 787 Dreamliner, Bloomberg reported the carriers chairman, Michael Joseph, as saying. In addition, Indonesias Lion Air is moving to drop a $22-billion order for the 737 in favor of the Airbus model, Bloomberg reported an unidentified source as saying. It was the crash of a Lion Air 737 Max in October in Indonesia, which killed 189 people, that first raised questions about the aircraft, and analysts have focused on software in the new jetliner intended to stop the plane from stalling. But maintenance issues and possible pilot error related to the software also are being evaluated and the crash remains under investigation. The U.S. carriers flying the 737 Max are Southwest, American and United. The union for Americans pilots, the Allied Pilots Assn., said Tuesday that Americans 737 Max planes are unique because they are the only ones equipped with two displays, one for each pilot, related to the software in question. That provides an extra layer of awareness and warning, the union said. The union said it remains confident in the Boeing 737 Max and in our members ability to safely fly it. Regardless, the FAA has been criticized by some analysts, politicians and others for not joining Canada and other nations in grounding the 737 Max until there is more clarity about the cause of the crashes. But John Cox, a retired airline pilot and accident investigator, defended the agency. In an op-ed column in The Times, Cox wrote that the FAA is right to wait. While both accidents are tragic, its not at all clear that they have the same cause. The twin-engine 737 is Boeing Co.s most-produced jetliner and a workhorse of the aviation industry, with airlines worldwide piling up orders for more than 5,000 of its newest version, the 737 Max. Boeing delivered 580 of the 737s last year, including 256 of the Max versions, which amounted to 72% of its total airplane deliveries. One of the nations largest carriers, Southwest Airlines, flies only 737s. But with the 737 Max under intense global scrutiny after two fatal crashes since October, Boeing now faces a quickly escalating threat to its reputation and financial health. The pressure is ramping up and Boeings reputation is at risk, said Jim Corridore, an analyst at CFRA Research. How Boeing reacts to this, how long it takes to fix this problem and whether people feel safe flying in their planes are unknown at this time. Advertisement Many investors werent waiting to find out. As a growing number of aviation regulators grounded 737 Max flights, including flights across all of Europe, investors Tuesday continued dumping Boeings shares, which tumbled $24.60, or 6.2% to $375.41 after dropping 5.3% on Monday. The two-day losses wiped out $30 billion of the aerospace companys market value. The problems could intensity if the Federal Aviation Administration follows the overseas regulators and decides to halt 737 Max flights in the United States. But the agency said Tuesday that its review provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. Boeing also was steadfast, saying Tuesday, We do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators and that it has full confidence in the safety of the 737 Max. Southwest also said it had no changes planned for its 737 Max fleet. All of which drew criticism from some analysts. There is no upside for the airlines that operate that plane in this country, and for Boeing, and for the FAA for not stepping up to this immediately with a similar flying halt, said Kevin Mitchell, chief executive of the Business Travel Coalition, an advocacy group for business fliers. What the Europeans did raises everything to a whole new level, Mitchell said. Some Boeing analysts said that, so far, Boeing should not be hurt financially except for its share-price drop. Corridore sent a note to clients saying that although the news flow remains bad for Boeing, he thinks these issues will, over time, be overcome with the plane likely to resume service, and orders and backlog likely to remain intact for the most part. Foreign aviation authorities have taken precautions after an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max crashed Sunday shortly after takeoff in Ethiopia, killing 157 people. That followed a crash of a 2-month-old Lion Air 737 Max in October after it took off from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing 189 people. There have been cases in which an airplane and its manufacturer suffered a hit to their reputation from deadly accidents, such as the DC-10 wide-body jetliner that was built by McDonnell Douglas Corp. before the company merged with Boeing in 1997. An American Airlines DC-10 crashed shortly after takeoff in Chicago in 1979, killing 273 in what is still the deadliest crash in U.S. history and prompting the FAA to temporarily ground DC-10 flights. Within five years, orders for the plane had all but evaporated. But aviation journalist Seth Kaplan noted that the Chicago crash was only one reason why demand dried up for the DC-10. The plane also was becoming obsolete economically as smaller, more fuel-efficient aircraft emerged, he said. Conversely, the 737 is an extraordinarily popular airplane, Kaplan said, adding that over the long term, Boeings reputation and financial health shouldnt be badly hurt as long as they solve this, because the fundamental economics of the 737 program are so very good. Boeing said that, as of last month, it had delivered 376 of the 737 Max versions and had orders for an additional 5,012 from more than 80 airlines worldwide. The 737 Max 8 model has a list price of $110 million, but airlines often receive substantial discounts, Corridore said. Boeings entire commercial airplanes group contributed 60% of the Chicago companys $101 billion in revenue last year and 66% of Boeings $12 billion in operating earnings. Boeing also has a major aerospace and defense business. S&P Global Ratings said Monday it was not changing its ratings on Boeings debt despite the grounding of the plane by other countries, and S&P said its stance had not changed Tuesday even after regulators halted flights throughout Europe. If a design flaw or manufacturing defect is determined to be the likely cause and the planes are grounded by the FAA as well, Boeing may have to halt deliveries until any defect is fixed, resulting in possible delivery delay penalties and additional costs to repair the problem, S&P said. In the meantime, Kaplan said, were not going to see another Max order until theres some clarity. james.peltz@latimes.com Twitter: @PeltzLATimes The second fatal crash of a Boeing Co. 737 Max aircraft in less than five months is creating a new hierarchy in aviation safety thrusting to the top none other than U.S. rival China. Three days after an Ethiopian Airlines jet crashed, killing all 157 people on board, country after country ignored assessments by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration that the plane is safe to fly. Even close U.S. ally Canada agreed Wednesday to ground the plane and restrict it from its airspace. In doing so, Canada and other long-time American allies, including the U.K. and Australia, broke convention by snubbing an authority that has defined whats airworthy and whats not for decades. New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam also joined Wednesday in blocking the 737 Max, helping legitimize Chinas early verdict on Monday that the plane could be unsafe. The FAAs credibility is being tested, said Chad Ohlandt, a Rand Corp. senior engineer in Washington. The Chinese want their regulatory agency to be considered a similar gold standard. Advertisement One day after the Ethiopian Airlines flight plunged to the ground, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) drew a possible connection between the crash and Lion Airs in October. A preliminary report into the earlier disaster, which killed 189 passengers and crew, indicated pilots struggled to maintain control following an equipment malfunction. Both flights, on almost brand-new planes, ended minutes after takeoff. Ethiopian Airlines Chief Executive Tewolde GebreMariam told CNN that the latest crash and the Lion Air tragedy had substantial similarities. Separately, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ethiopia plans to send the flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders to the U.K., causing U.S. investigators to hold intense behind-the-scenes talks to bring the parts to America. Meanwhile, the CAAC asked domestic airlines to ground their 737 Max 8 fleets. There needs to be reason for us to change that decision, said CAACs deputy head Li Jian. Domestic carriers including China Southern Airlines Co. and Air China Ltd. account for about 20% of 737 Max deliveries worldwide through January, according to Boeings website. UPDATE: Trump grounds Boeing 737 Max models after crashes, following other nations lead Chinese aviation regulators do tend to be conservative. They banned the use of cellphones on aircraft until 2018, years after regulators in developed countries gave them the green light. But China is gaining influence. As an air travel market, its on track to surpass the U.S. as the worlds biggest around 2022. Its also seeking some degree of self-sufficiency through its national champion: Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China Ltd., which is known as Comac. As a regulator, recent events indicate China is on its way to attaining the level of authority enjoyed by the FAA and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, giving the country global recognition for its ability to determine when an aircraft is safe to fly. In a deal signed between CAAC and FAA in 2017, aviation regulators from China and U.S. agreed to recognize each others airworthiness standards, paving the way for Chinese-made aircraft to win FAA certifications to sell in the global market. A similar deal is also being finalized with their European counterpart. Chinas first homemade commercial aircraft C919, which state-owned Comac has developed to break the duopoly held by Airbus SEs A320 and Boeings 737 in the narrow-body market, is trying to get airworthiness certification from both CAAC and EASA. Ford Motor Co. said it will be hit twice by British tariffs to be imposed in the event of a no-deal Brexit. The U.S. company, which makes only engines in Britain, would be taxed on exporting them to assembly plants in mainland Europe and then face import duties for bringing finished vehicles back to Britain for sale, Ford said in a statement Wednesday. Competitors that manufacture engines elsewhere and then ship them to Britain for assembly, by contrast, would incur no charges thanks to a tariff-free regime that Prime Minister Theresa Mays government plans to offer for auto-component imports. And the same companies could then satisfy the demands of the local market direct from their British plants, also tariff-free. These tariffs would deal a devastating blow to much of the complex and integrated automotive industry, and would damage the competitiveness of Fords engine manufacturing in the U.K., the U.S. firm said, adding that the proposed levies were drawn up without detailed consultation with auto makers. Advertisement The British Parliament voted Wednesday to bar leaving the EU without a proper exit agreement, but it was left unclear what happens next. Britain will leave the union on March 29 without a legally binding deal. Dearborn, Mich.-based Ford stopped making passenger cars in Britain in 2002 after seven decades of production, but still employs more than 10,000 people in the country, many of them at plants in Bridgend, Wales, and Dagenham, near London, that make gasoline and diesel engines, respectively. The company, which last month said a hard Brexit would be catastrophic for the British auto industry and its own production facilities, also counts Britain as its biggest European market, representing 6% of global sales in 2017. The Ford Fiesta and Focus were the countrys two best selling models in the first two months this year, according to figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. Ford added that its imperative that a no-deal split is ruled out as soon as possible to avoid the imposition of such a draconian tariff regime. Parsons Corp. said Thursday its moving its headquarters from Pasadena to the Washington, D.C., area so that the engineering, construction and cybersecurity firm can support its sizable workforce in Washington and be closer to key customers. The privately held firm is not relocating California employees to its new headquarters at its existing facility in Centreville, Va., nor will there be any job cuts related to the move, said Virginia Grebbien, Parsons chief marketing officer. Parsons employs nearly 500 in Pasadena and 1,400 in California overall. The firm has about 2,400 employees in the Washington area and 16,000 worldwide. The company said the move would not involve a major shift of the executive suite because its senior management already mostly operates outside of Pasadena. Chief Executive Chuck Harrington and Grebbien work out of Charlotte, N.C., for instance, and its chief operating officer, Carey Smith, already works in Centreville, the company said. Advertisement Parsons, with annual revenue of $3.6 billion, focuses on the defense, intelligence and infrastructure sectors, and its strategic actions over the past 10 years, including acquisitions, have led to the Washington metropolitan area having Parsons largest concentration of employees worldwide, Harrington said in a statement. The move of our corporate headquarters to the Washington area will support this concentration of employees in the region, he said. The move also puts us in closer proximity to many of our existing and potential clients, as well as key decision makers who influence policy and funding initiatives across our markets, Harrington said. Parsons becomes the latest in a line of large corporations to move their headquarters out of California to other states for various reasons in the last decade while sometimes retaining a sizable workforce in Southern California. Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. shifted its headquarters to Dallas from its longtime home in Pasadena in 2016. One reason: The firm said it would benefit from a business friendly economic and cultural environment. Another major engineering firm, Aecom, remains headquartered in Century City. Toyota Motor Co. also picked Texas when it moved its North American headquarters from Torrance to the Dallas suburb of Plano in 2014. The automaker said the shift enabled Toyota to move the companys brainpower close to the companys manufacturing base, primarily in the South. Occidental Petroleum Corp. also chose Texas in 2014 when it relocated its headquarters from Los Angeles to Houston, a major center for the oil and gas industry. Other examples include Northrop Grumman Corp., which moved its headquarters to Falls Church, Va., from Century City in 2011 so the aerospace company could be closer to the Pentagon and other decision makers in Washington. Chris Thornberg, founder of Beacon Economics in Los Angeles, noted that Parsons and many of these other firms are maintaining employment in Southern California and their decision to shift their headquarters is more about corporations evolving than the idea that jobs are leaving. In no way, shape or form does any of this suggest that the Southern California economy isnt booming it is and having one of these firms headquarters leaving is such a drop in the bucket, he said. Parsons wants to be closer to D.C., thats where their bread and butter is, and this is a shift to get in front of power brokers in D.C., Thornberg said. Its no reflection on the health of the Southern California economy. james.peltz@latimes.com Twitter: @PeltzLATimes Purdue Pharmas chief executive said the company is considering bankruptcy as it faces a cascade of lawsuits alleging that the drugmaker played a key role in driving the nations opioid crisis, including aggressively and deceptively marketing the powerful painkiller OxyContin. Craig Landau, Purdues president and CEO, said his company has not yet decided whether to file for bankruptcy protection, but he said the company is weighing doing so as it considers the impact of potential legal settlements or jury verdicts that could cost tens of billions of dollars. It is an option, Landau said. We are considering it, but weve really made no decisions on what course of actions to pursue. A lot depends on what unfolds in the weeks and months ahead. Purdue has denied the allegations lodged against it in court and is mounting a vigorous defense. Most of the lawsuits are consolidated in a federal court in Cleveland, where settlement talks have been ongoing for more than a year as lawyers simultaneously prepare for two trials scheduled for the fall. Advertisement Declaring bankruptcy could halt litigation against the company, bankruptcy lawyers said, and it can be more difficult for plaintiffs to secure judgments in Bankruptcy Court than in civil court. Purdue is one of a number of defendants in a separate Oklahoma state trial scheduled to begin May 28. It will be the first trial at which a jury could decide whether drug companies bear responsibility for the opioid crisis; settlement talks are ongoing. People familiar with the case have said Oklahoma could seek more than $1 billion from the defendants. Purdue also is facing a lawsuit in Massachusetts that has made public numerous internal documents that the state attorney general argues are evidence the company disregarded safety and addiction as it pursued massive profits from patients who became dependent on its products. Purdue said the lawsuit amounts to oversimplified scapegoating that is not supported by the law. Landau declined to discuss the pending litigation. Purdue has argued that it controls just 2% to 3% of the market for opioid drugs. It also says it is not responsible for overdose deaths from heroin and illicit fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid made overseas that has killed tens of thousands of people in recent years and is now the leading driver of overdose deaths. Purdue announced Wednesday that it is developing a drug to reverse opioid overdoses that it claims is far more powerful than naloxone, the well-known opioid overdose antidote currently in use across the country. The company said the Food and Drug Administration has granted the drug an injection of nalmefene hydrochloride the agencys fast-track designation, which will speed up its pharmaceutical development and agency review. The FDA fast-tracked over-the-counter naloxone in January, and it is moving quickly on non-opioid drugs to treat pain. The FDA said Tuesday that it could not comment on the designation until Purdue announces it. The drug needs FDA approval before it can reach consumers. Landau said Purdue is making the drug as a pro bono effort to stem overdose fatalities. Were not looking to make money, nor do we intend to profit in any way from the development and availability of this hopefully lifesaving treatment, he said. Landau said the drug has been in the pipeline for about two years and is intended to serve as an antidote to fentanyl overdoses; first responders have said numerous doses of naloxone are needed to reverse some fentanyl overdoses because fentanyl is so potent. Despite the fast-track designation, it probably will take years for the new drug to reach consumers. Landau said the goal is to get it to people who need it as soon as possible. No other antidote of its strength is currently available in the United States, he said. Fentanyl is the third wave of the opioid epidemic, which started with prescription painkillers. After the government cracked down on illicit prescribers and tried to address the flow of pills to the black market, those addicted to the painkillers turned to heroin. Landau disputes claims that Purdue and its OxyContin pills were responsible for sparking the opioid crisis. I dont believe one company or one product was the cause of the opioid crisis. I and many others understand the opioid crisis to be very complicated, with many contributing factors, but this program that were discussing is very simple, Landau said. The motivation has really nothing to do with who did or who didnt cause an opioid crisis or litigation. Its really meant to save lives. Purdue has launched numerous programs to combat opioid abuse. Several came after the company paid $600 million in fines in 2007 as part of a federal case. Company executives also pleaded guilty to criminal charges after claiming the product was not as addictive as other opioids. The companys initiatives include providing millions of dollars to support the creation of an over-the-counter naloxone spray and training law enforcement to administer the drug; supporting education on the proper storage and disposal of prescription opioids; and conducting research into non-opioid painkillers. Landau said creating the overdose antidote is another way Purdue is working to fight the opioid crisis. We believe we have a responsibility as a pharmaceutical company to do what we can, and were leaning forward with what we believe could be a very meaningful solution and a very meaningful contribution to the public health, Landau said. Landau said hes sure his company, after being accused of sparking the opioid crisis, will be criticized for attempting to help solve it. I recognize everything we do will be criticized in this regard, but in the end were going to do whats right, he said. These are good things that could and should have a positive impact on public health and on patients. Californias largest county has banned the construction of large solar and wind farms on more than 1 million acres of private land, bending to the will of residents who say they dont want renewable energy projects industrializing their rural desert communities northeast of Los Angeles. Thursdays 4-1 vote by San Bernardino Countys Board of Supervisors highlighted a challenge California could face as it seeks to eliminate the burning of planet-warming fossil fuels. State lawmakers passed a bill last year requiring utility companies to get 60% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2030, and 100% from climate-friendly sources by 2045. But achieving those goals will require cooperation from local governments and big solar and wind farms, like many infrastructure projects, are often unpopular at the local level. Representatives of national solar developers including First Solar and Clearway Energy urged the supervisors to consider the economic benefits of solar projects, including jobs and tax revenues. They were joined by union members, who told the supervisors that solar farms create hundreds of high-paying construction jobs. Advertisement Theyre temporary construction jobs, but thats what we make our livelihood off of. And to put language in there that strictly prohibits these projects from going forward would be irresponsible, said Justin Lanford, president of the San Bernardino County chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Get up to speed: Why Californias biggest county is severely restricting solar energy projects Dozens of local residents spoke in support of the proposed ban, known as Renewable Energy Policy 4.10. They came from high desert communities such as Daggett, Joshua Tree and Lucerne Valley, where existing solar projects are seen by many as eyesores that destroy desert ecosystems and fuel larger dust storms. Sara Fairchild, a resident of Pioneertown, said shes been working with a group trying to get California Highway 247, which runs from Yucca Valley to Barstow, designated as a state scenic highway. Supporters say the designation would draw tourists and boost local economies. But Fairchild is worried that several solar projects proposed along or near the highway would ruin the pristine desert landscapes that make the area so attractive. These vast open areas are precious for their natural, historical and recreational qualities. But they are fragile, and no amount of mitigation can counter the damage that industrial-scale renewable energy projects would cause, Fairchild told the supervisors. Once destroyed, these landscapes can never be brought back. A view of Lucerne Dry Lake in Californias San Bernardino County, where a large solar project has been proposed. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The policy approved by the supervisors prohibits utility-oriented renewable energy projects defined as projects that would mostly serve out-of-town utility customers, rather than local power needs within the boundaries of Community Plans that have been adopted by more than a dozen unincorporated towns. Construction of utility-oriented solar and wind farms would also be banned in so-called Rural Living zones. Solar projects that are already going through the permitting process would still be allowed to proceed. Supervisor Robert Lovingood said residents spoke clearly about what they want to see. If we dont adopt this, thats just spitting in their face, he said, adding that the county has already designated several smaller areas where renewable energy projects could be approved. Curt Hagman was the only supervisor to vote against the restrictions. He said he doesnt want to preclude new renewable energy technologies that might have less of an impact on rural areas, while still bringing economic benefits to the county. And he said the supervisors already have the ability to reject bad projects. V. John White, a Sacramento lobbyist who leads the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies, said before Thursdays vote that theres still a lot of land where solar and wind projects can be built in California, including retired farmland in the Central Valley and Imperial County. But the backlash against big solar projects in San Bernardino County, he said, shows that state officials will have to involve local governments more directly than what weve done up through now as they work to achieve higher renewable energy targets. sammy.roth@latimes.com @Sammy_Roth Southwest Airlines chief executive said a surge in planes grounded by mechanics concerns is costing the carrier millions of dollars each week by causing more delayed and canceled flights. Gary Kelly didnt give a precise figure Tuesday, but said the financial damage prompted the airlines lawsuit last week against the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Assn., which Southwest says is aiding an illegal work slowdown. The company filed suit against AMFA last week to recover those damages and prevent more from occurring, Kelly said at a JPMorgan investor conference. Southwest says some workers are writing up minor mechanical problems such as missing seat-row numbers and grounding planes to gain leverage in negotiations over a new labor contract. Mechanics rejected a proposed deal last year, and the sides remain apart on wages and outsourcing. Advertisement The union denies that mechanics are conducting a work slowdown. It says they are simply doing their job and keeping aircraft safe. In a statement posted Tuesday, the union said Kelly and Southwest are trying to distract the public from Southwests own degrading safety standards. The union accuses Southwest managers of improperly pressuring mechanics to approve planes for flying. Southwest says the number of planes grounded for mechanical issues jumped to between 30 and 62 a day last month, from the usual 14 a day, forcing the Dallas-based airline to cancel some flights. On Tuesday, Southwest canceled more than 110 flights by midafternoon, far more than any other U.S. carrier, according to FlightAware. An airline spokeswoman estimated that at least half the cancellations were due to maintenance write-ups. When tech workers began rallying last year against their employers mandatory arbitration clauses, some of the industrys biggest companies changed their policies. Google dropped mandatory arbitration entirely. Uber Technologies Inc., however, opted to abolish forced arbitration in sexual misconduct cases, but not in other labor disputes. That decision proved significant Tuesday when Uber agreed to pay $20 million to settle lawsuits challenging the classification of drivers as independent contractors, rather than employees owed the benefits of traditional employment. The payout is a far cry from the $100 million Uber had agreed to pay to settle the suit in 2016, after a San Francisco judge granted 385,000 drivers in California and Massachusetts class-action status. Eventually, a judge determined $100 million was not sufficient given the original class size. But an appeals court ruling found Ubers mandatory arbitration agreements which obligate workers to settle their claims with the company one-on-one were largely valid and enforceable. Advertisement That ruling, and Ubers decision in May to maintain its policy of upholding its arbitration clause in cases unrelated to sexual misconduct, ultimately reduced the class to about 13,600 drivers, who had either opted not to agree to mandatory arbitration or drove for Uber before the company implemented such a policy. Drivers argued that Uber made it onerous for them to opt out of the arbitration provisions. Shannon Liss-Riordan, the attorney representing drivers in this case, said Uber rigorously enforces its arbitration clauses. Its a myth that these opt-out provisions in arbitration clauses really make these agreements voluntary. Liss-Riordan said. Shes seeking $5 million in attorneys fees and estimates that drivers will receive about $.37 per mile they have driven for Uber. Resolution of the long-standing fight over benefits and pay comes as Uber is preparing for its initial public offering later this year. The litigation attacked the ride-hailing companys business model of treating its drivers as contractors to avoid the costs of paying a minimum wage, overtime, sick leave and health insurance. Drivers will continue to be considered contractors as part of the settlement. Uber said it had worked to make the driver experience even better through improvements like in-app tipping, a redesigned driver app, and new rewards programs, according to an emailed statement from spokesman Matt Kallman. Well continue working hard to improve the quality, security and dignity of independent work. The settlement, which requires a judges approval, was filed late Monday in San Francisco federal court and confirmed by Liss-Riordan. Even before the appeals court ruling, prospects for the suits against Uber were dealt a blow by a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that bolstered the power of employers to force workers to use individual arbitration instead of class-action lawsuits. Bloomberg contributed to this report Now that Leslie Alexanders tenure as the Houston Rockets owner has come to a close, the businessman is looking to shed some real estate in the city. Hes listed a French manor-inspired home he owns in a trust for sale at $3.7 million, records show. The asking price is a drop in the bucket for Alexander, who sold the Rockets two years ago for a record $2.2 billion after 24 years of ownership. Custom built in 2011, the house sits on over half an acre with a swimming pool and spa out back. Trees and columns frame the stately double-door entry. 1 / 10 Leslie Alexanders Houston home (TK Images) 2 / 10 Leslie Alexanders Houston home (TK Images) 3 / 10 Leslie Alexanders Houston home (TK Images) 4 / 10 Leslie Alexanders Houston home (TK Images) 5 / 10 Leslie Alexanders Houston home (TK Images) 6 / 10 Leslie Alexanders Houston home (TK Images) 7 / 10 Leslie Alexanders Houston home (TK Images) 8 / 10 Leslie Alexanders Houston home (TK Images) 9 / 10 Leslie Alexanders Houston home (TK Images) 10 / 10 Leslie Alexanders Houston home (TK Images) Advertisement Floors of carpet and dark hardwood alternate in the nearly 5,000-square-foot interior, which holds four bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms across two stories. Theres a window-lined living room, a center-island kitchen, a dining room and an office with built-ins. The main level holds the master suite, and upstairs, theres a game room and front-facing balcony lined with wrought iron. Vikki Evans of Martha Turner Sothebys International Realty holds the listing. Alexander bought the Rockets for $85 million in 1993, and four years later, he also bought the now-defunct Houston Comets WNBA team. Forbes lists his net worth at $2.1 billion. jack.flemming@latimes.com | Twitter: @jflem94 For whatever reason a worry about looming dystopia, perhaps Germany is having its Babylonian moment. Major new opera productions here in Hamburg and in Berlin last weekend proved media sensations that put Babylon not only in the operatic spotlight but also on the evening news. In Verdis Nabucco at Hamburg State Opera on Sunday night, the biblical account of the Jews expulsion from Babylon was updated to the present-day Syrian immigrant crisis and filled with such Trumpian rhetoric as The people of Baal will be great again. The prominent Russian film, theater, dance and opera director Kirill Serebrennikov, who is under house arrest in Moscow, provided the staging, sets and costumes. Syrian immigrants recently arrived in Hamburg portrayed the exiled Jews. Director Kirill Serebrennikovs version of Nabucco uses a giant video screen to incorporate images of Syrian refugees. (Brinkhoff-Moegenburg) Meanwhile, Babylon took on the most immoderate overtones imaginable the night before in an extraordinary new Staatsoper Unter der Linden in Berlin production of Jorg Widmanns Babylon. The 2012 epic opera is of such wondrous aspiration that it makes room for dealing with issues of immigration, anti-Semitism, mysticism, ritual sacrifice, orgies, scorpion bestiality, the underworld and unspeakable more. It is, furthermore, the only opera I know of that contains genitalia septets. Advertisement But it was Nabucco that was in the news. The German press has dubbed Serebrennikov a rock star of Russian dissident artists. He has been charged with embezzling $2 million in state funds, an accusation he calls a farce. As he awaits trial, Serebrennikov has been allowed neither telephone nor internet. He may communicate only with his father, lawyer and investigators. But he was not prevented from a daily exchange by mail of USB data sticks of the Nabucco rehearsals, to which he returned his instructions to his Russian colleague and co-director in Hamburg, Evgeny Kulagin. In his production, Serebrennikov makes no allusions (other than a photo) to Russian President Vladimir Putin, of whom he appears to have run afoul. U.S. President Trump will do as a fill-in for Putin. Most of Hamburgs Nabucco has been set at the United Nations, where the Security Council debates the Syrian immigrant crisis. (Brinkhoff-Moegenburg) The setting for the production is the United Nations, where the desks for the Security Council are being set during the overture. A monitor in the background shows news clips, and over the stage is a scroll of headlines, such as The wall will work, I will get it built. The high priest, Zaccaria, who warns Jews of the advancing Babylonian army, looks like any nondescript diplomat. Most of the opera plays out in U.N. offices where the once-populist Nabucco Donoso, who campaigned with the motto Assyria First, is felled by a stroke after declaring himself God. He is deposed by the vehemently anti-immigrant Abigaille, who claims to be his daughter. During scene changes, Syrian musicians sing in front of a large video screen showing graphic clips of exiles on their flimsy boats, bedraggled and hungry at the border or killed in Aleppo. The great patriotic hymn Va Pensiero is sung once by the opera chorus facing the audience accusingly. It is then sung again by a chorus of Syrians. The first is shocking; the second, heart-wrenching. Only the second was needed. Serebrennikov has an excellent sense of theater that gets him around making historical or contemporary political sense. He also inspires a thrilling cast that includes Oksana Dyka as the ferociously believable Abigaille and Dimitri Platanias as a stout, formidable Nabucco. Paolo Carignanis vibrant conducting supplies the needed Italianate touch. But at times Serebrennikovs understandable bitterness weighs him down. He overdoes the political wisecracks, and his agitprop can be in danger of using Syrians as props. At least he has a sense of humor, and many little comic touches help. His Hamburg staging team members received a standing ovation for their curtain when they walked onstage holding a Free Kirill banner. Oksana Dyka as Abigaille and Dimitri Platanias as Nabucco. (Brinkhoff-Moegenburg) Although not as sensationalist politically, the Berlin Babylon proved a much greater sensation theatrically, thanks in great part to Andreas Kriegenburgs fabulous production, which provides a weirdness worthy of a latter-day Bruegel. But this is also an opera that includes every trick in the book. In a libretto by the fashionable Dutch philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, an exiled Jew and Babylonian have, as in Nabucco, an illicit romance. This time Tammu and the priestess Inanna are the central story and are patterned after Tamino and Pamina in Mozarts The Magic Flute. But what a world they behold! There is the Great Flood, in which a dramatic soprano provokes the raging seas. A New Year festival is like Mardi Gras on a massive dose of steroids. Although hes had plenty of competition over the years, Kriegenburg offers one an orgy for the ages. Susanne Elmark and chorus members of the Staatsoper Unter der Linden in Babylon. (Jens Schlueter / EPA-EFE / REX) To the horror and shame of Inanna, Tammu is sacrificed. She then goes to hell to retrieve him, where she endures gang rape, becomes a kind of Whore of Babylon and is enjoined by a double when three-way sex is required. In a twist from the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, the devil frees Tammu from death and love triumphs. Widmann the most performed living composer in Germany and, though still little known in the U.S., the composer-in-residence next season at Carnegie Hall is made delirious by the whole history of opera. His score is a distorted mix of Strauss, Monteverdi, Stockhausen, Mozart and much else, all made to sound dazzlingly new and original. Dont ask me why, but a beautiful transformation of We Three Kings in the style of Berio from the beyond works ecstatically. If this sounds over the top, forget about the top. You cant even find it, its so far down below this opera. Yet the most brilliant touch is the way everything is grounded by the chorus of Jewish exiles, which Kriegenburg has hover over a multilevel stage. They look like exiles from all over, sharing the same suffering. In his massive three-volume philosophical study, Spheres, Sloterdijks concern is with what he calls the spaces of coexistence, and the unforgettable production makes harrowing the sense of the extremes of apartness we are now enduring in modern society. An inspired cast highlighted by Susanne Elmark (Inanna), Charles Workman (Tammu), John Tomlinson (the Babylonian priest) and Marina Prudenskaya (electrifying the waters of the flood) does the rest. Susanne Elmark as Inanna, Otto Katzameier as Death in Babylon. (Jens Schlueter / EPA-EFE / REX) Daniel Barenboim, who is the music director of the Staatsoper and the vision behind this production, had to drop out during the final rehearsals for eye surgery. Christopher Ward, who had been the assistant to Kent Nagano at the Babylon premiere in Munich, triumphantly took over. In fact, Nagano strangely hovers over the background of both Babylon and Nabucco. He commissioned and premiered Widmanns opera when he was music director at Bavarian State Opera (where he also first enticed Kriegenburg, a noted theater director, to try his hand at opera). Now Nagano serves as the general music director of the Hamburg State Opera. You might also recall Nagano as the former music director of Los Angeles Opera. But thanks to him, even Hollywood Babylon can no longer hold a candle to Berlin. All mothers are superheroes, but what kind of strength could carry any parent through the sudden, violent loss of a child? Los Angeles playwright Inda Craig-Galvan spent a lot of time wrestling with that question, especially after Cleveland 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by a policeman who mistook the boys toy pellet gun for a real pistol a 2014 incident witnessed across America once surveillance video was released. Tamir had been hanging out in a park, alone a typical kid activity. My son was about that age at the time, the playwright says. Its terrifying. Tamir lingered with Craig-Galvan, as did others whove died in similar circumstances, as she wrote Black Super Hero Magic Mama, which the Geffen Playhouse is premiering in its small Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater. Advertisement A 14-year-old boy is central to the story, but the focus is on his mother and how she reacts to his shooting death. The boy has an imaginative streak; he spends his free time devising a comic book with a friend. The mothers reaction to his loss is creative in its own way. The play so captivated the Geffens new artistic director, Matt Shakman, that he chose it for his first season even though Craig-Galvan is a rookie. She graduated from a USC grad school program in dramatic writing less than two years ago, but in that time shes already had a play produced I Go Somewhere Else, presented by Playwrights Arena in Atwater Village last summer and shes just completed her first season in TV. Shes been a staff writer for the police drama The Rookie, which is winding down its first season on ABC. Life experience helps to explain the fast start. Craig-Galvan is a 51-year-old married mother of two who comes to playwriting from acting. She performed onstage in hometown Chicago and appeared in national television commercials. She also wrote and performed sketch comedy. Once I figured out what I wanted to do in life, then things started happening, she says. If I was going to pursue this, I was going to do it with everything I had. So I took grad school quite seriously. And I guess I had this buildup of stories inside of me. Begun in school, Magic Mama has already drawn a lot of attention, having been developed at the 2017 Eugene ONeill National Playwrights Conference and landing on that years Kilroys List of noteworthy unproduced plays by women. Sabrina attempts to protect her son from all of the everyday dangers. But for an African American mother in this country right now it feels futile. Inda Craig-Galvan, talking about her Black Super Hero Magic Mama title character The play makes time and place malleable as it zips in and out of the imaginations of 14-year-old Tramarion and his widowed mother, Sabrina. Funny and astonishing twists keep the mood buoyant, but the piece certainly doesnt shy from emotion. Such inventiveness is a backhanded blessing of a rough start in life. I had a really difficult childhood with a difficult mother, Craig-Galvan says, so my imagination saved me. She is thoughtful and open, with an easy sense of humor. She gets ruffled, though, when talking about black parents fears for their children, and her voice thickens with emotion. In Black Super Hero Magic Mama at the Geffen, Kimberly Hebert Gregory portrays the title character, a widowed mother raising a 14-year-old, played by Cedric Joe. (Chris Whitaker) In addition to devising a comic book, Tramarion enjoys memorizing African American history in preparation for a competitive quiz. Both activities please his mother, who is doing all she can to keep him safe while making him strong and proud. Sabrina attempts to protect her son from all of the everyday dangers, Craig-Galvan says. But for an African American mother in this country right now it feels futile, because no matter what we tell our sons, our daughters, there are still people outside of our home who are going to look at them as a target, as a criminal, as a threat. In Tramarions eyes, his mother has always been superhuman. She is the inspiration for his comic-book heroine. But after his death, she seems to lose her strength. She cant bring herself to face news cameras or appear at rallies things that, in Craig-Galvans view, are unfairly expected of African American women whove lost children so violently, when other mothers might be let alone. I remember watching one of the mothers at a press conference leading everyone in a prayer, and I thought, shes so brave, I wouldnt have it in me. I would just want to stay in bed. Does that make me not brave, just because I would want to be allowed to grieve? And is there a play in that, about the mother who refuses to do the things that are expected by the media and by society? Yet although Sabrina might seem shut down, she has leapt into a whole new dimension. In her mind, shes battling demons as the Maasia Angel of Tramarions comic book. Kevin Douglas, who is cast as a television news reporter in the Geffen production and who was Craig-Galvans sketch comedy partner back in Chicago, has long admired her tendency to zero in on topics were not talking about and address them with empathy and humor. She wants everything to be better people to be better, the world to be better and I think thats where her writing comes from, he says. Shes a social justice warrior. Shell never say that, but she is. Explaining why he was drawn to Magic Mama, the Geffens Shakman says: Inda has created a play that is ripped from the headlines but completely reconceived through her imagination and through her emotional connection to these characters. Its clear the story is written with a mothers voice, adds Kimberly Hebert Gregory, who portrays Sabrina. Shakman predicts well be hearing a lot from this playwright for a very long time. Craig-Galvan maps out her creative impetus on her way to telling a larger story in her play I Go Somewhere Else. The autobiographical piece looks back at a preteen girl trying to stay on the safe side of her mothers short-fused temper. Making life difficult for them both is Moms insistence that they adhere to the beauty and cultural standards of the day, which in the 1970s were overwhelmingly Anglo-focused. Craig-Galvan sends back two versions of herself to try to talk the girl through this difficult time: her early-30s self, when shes still angry about her upbringing but, as a young mother, becoming familiar with the stresses of being a parent, and at 50, when she has mellowed and learned to accept the past. My mother was harsh, Craig-Galvan says. She had some mental illness that wasnt diagnosed or defined, and she was overly medicating. And she had had a lot of hardship and heartache. To break free, young Craig-Galvan invented stories, including imagined radio pieces. I would record them on my little tape recorder, playing all the characters, she says. And I would spend hours in front of the TV, because that was the happiest place in my world. Thats whats always been my escape: stories, watching them, reading them. So its my desire to create more of them. Scripts in progress include Welcome to Matteson! about a culture clash that arises when black families are relocated from a rough Chicago housing project to the suburbs, and A Hit Dog Will Holla, about activism that shifts, eerily and surreally, from macro to micro. It all sounds so serious, but both of those plays are sort of comedies as is this one, Craig-Galvan says of Magic Mama, laughing. Thats just how my brain works: very sad, serious, very funny plays. Black Super Hero Magic Mama Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays; ends April 14 Tickets: $30-$120 Info: (310) 208-5454, geffenplayhouse.org Inda Craig-Galvan stands beside a banner for her play Black Super Hero Magic Mama, with Kimberly Hebert Gregory pictured as the title character. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) Support our coverage of local artists and the local arts scene by becoming a digital subscriber. See all of our latest arts news and reviews at latimes.com/arts. Any movie that begins with a Franz Kafka passage about torture isnt likely to have uplift on its mind. But Uruguayan filmmaker Alvaro Brechners A Twelve Year Night, about the debasing incarceration of three political prisoners during the countrys years under reactionary military dictatorship in the 1970s, isnt some superficial wallow in the art of cruelty. For one thing, its a true story, culled from the real-life experiences of the three featured prisoners, who at the time of their capture were members of Uruguays radical, trade union-affiliated Tupamaros movement, which was quashed during the militarys coup. With the success of the junta, a handful of Tupamaros were spirited away from their prison cells in 1973 and subjected to the kind of targeted, extended isolation that more resembled a hostage scenario by vengeful overseers than a law-dictated sentence. After democracy returned to Uruguay, one of the men, soft-spoken guerrilla Jose Mujica, who went by Pepe, would go on to become Uruguays president from 2010 to 2015. But also, in its subjective approach, A Twelve Year Night is driven less by the violence of its situation the mens captors best weapon was the steady drip of solitary confinement than how people endure such a disorienting assault to ones sense of time and self. Needless to say, even with fleeting moments of black humor and tenderness, the movie has a running time you feel in your bones as the years pass and the day count (provided onscreen throughout) increases. Its a different animal from Steve McQueens similarly body-conscious jail-protest drama Hunger, which turned IRA martyrdom under British captivity into something like a competitive sport, almost fetishized. Brechners message, rather, is how even in the most abused among us, the taste for survival is an abiding, nourishable quality. After a virtuosic 360-degree opening shot in which uniformed troops invade a prison to take away nine revolutionaries, we zero in on the experiences of three: Mujica (Antonio de la Torre), Eleuterio Nato Fernandez Huidobro (Alfonso Tort), and Mauricio Ruso Rosencof (Chino Darin). Initially deprived of sun, terrorized by gasoline dousing and manhandled by guards forbidden to talk to them, the men were clearly expected to be driven crazy by their treatment. We should have killed you when we could, snarls the mustachioed military officer (Cesar Troncoso) in charge of their captivity, suggesting the slightest word of a rescue/escape attempt is all the reasoning he and his troops need to finish the job. Advertisement Over the years, the prisoners are shuffled from remote cell to remote cell, the physical and mental toll doing its part although the effective lead actors are often similar enough in their degraded appearance to make distinguishing them difficult initially in certain scenes, the effect feels intended, as if to stress the rotted sameness sustained neglect does to all human forms. Flashbacks and hallucinations add context, whether fleshing out the circumstances of the trios arrests, or dramatizing what theyve lost in the way of contact with loved ones as their confinement threatens to define their very being. And though there are occasional glimmers of snatched dignity a secret system of communication via coded wall knocks, Rusos beneficial arrangement with a sergeant to ghost-write his love letters, the intervention of a compassionate doctor (Soledad Villamil) to help Mujicas fracturing mind this isnt one of those prison movies that builds a reservoir of hope in order to soften a nightmare. History (and the title) tells us theres an end point, but we know these men are being remade by their experience. While this story is more likely to have impact for those who lived through the horrors of this period and Mujicas eventual emergence as a political leader, A Twelve Year Night avoids the easy trappings of triumph-of-the-human-spirit narratives. Sometimes a human simply withstands what its subjected to, and thats enough to rivet us. ------------ A Twelve Year Night In Spanish with English subtitles Not rated Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes Playing: Starts Dec. 28 on Netflix See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour Movie Trailers calendar@latimes.com @LATimesMovies The dining room at Los Balcones, a new Peruvian restaurant in Studio City, is a welter of cheerful, cathartic noise salsa and cumbia rumble over the speakers, the throng of bearded dudes in the next booth gleefully toasts every fresh round of pisco sours, and youve got the sense youve stumbled into the best party north of the Hollywood Hills. Your server has spent the last five minutes rhapsodizing about a dish called costilla de short ribs. The beef short ribs are slow-cooked in a beer-infused tomato chile sauce for six hours. The meat is tender as bread pudding, he says. This is just a formality. You arent going to need it, he says as he lays a freshly sharpened steak knife on the table. Advertisement The dish arrives in a plain aluminum box that looks like something you might use to stow a first aid kit. Someone removes the lid to reveal a small parcel of bright red, chile-sluiced shredded beef. Your server was correct: a knife is useless here. The muddle of sauce and beef is served with fried plantains, a citrusy salsa criolla of shaved red onions and chopped tomatoes, and the hearty Peruvian lima-bean-and-rice mash called tacu tacu, which is draped in a thin, cakey fried egg. The chile sauce is smoky and deep, a marvelous foil for the pasty, eggy tacu tacu; the plantains and lime-splashed salsa supply gentle hits of sweetness and acid. Review: Tesse is a Sunset Strip charmer that deserves more attention A waiter pours Getariako Txakolina wine at Los Balcones, an upscale Peruvian restaurant in Studio City. (Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times) Los Balcones is technically the second location of the Hollywood Peruvian spot of the same name, but there is little overlap between the two restaurants. The Studio City location offers an entirely separate menu developed by lauded chef-restaurateur Ricardo Zarate of Rosaline, and Girasols former chef de cuisine, Polit Castillo, who now leads the kitchen at Los Balcones. Its a compelling collaboration that celebrates what the team calls mestizo cuisine highly regional and traditional Peruvian dishes spliced with modern Spanish and Asian flavors. The menu also reckons with the legacy of Girasol, a restaurant that became known for exalting native California flavors in familiar New American formats like shareable charcuterie boards and vegetable plates. So you get something like the popular pan de la chola board, a shareable spread of tender, sweet Peruvian potato bread served with seasonal apple jam; a clump of milky burrata; prosciutto and marinated olives; sweet-smoky butter infused with aji amarillo peppers; and a rough-chopped pesto made from huacatay, a minty, earthy herb native to the Andes. Its a fine start, but its a mere blip in your sense memory compared to the ceviche frito hunks of striped bass dredged in bread crumbs and cleanly fried into plump, juicy fish nuggets, served with an intensely tart leche de tigre sauce that nearly squeezes tears out of your eyes. The dish seems to aim for both pain and pleasure, but leans more toward the latter. The pan de la chola platter at Los Balcones includes Peruvian bread, aji amarillo butter, huacatay pesto, burrata, seasonal jam, prosciutto and marinated olives. (Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times) Review: Kasih in Little Tokyo is a shrine to fiery Indonesian sambals, curries and meats You could probably enjoy a long meal at Los Balcones without noticing the small but precise details that make so much of Castillos cooking work: A cornucopia of Japanese mushrooms is used to add a deep, musky quality to a dish called quinotto, which uses truffle-infused quinoa to approximate the richness of a traditional risotto. Seco de pato, a dish of roasted duck served with a fricassee of duck confit, is paired with a creamy, sweet-savory Peruvian huancaina feta sauce made with aji amarillo, the staple chile of Peruvian kitchen. The sauces subtle smokiness has the lilting sweetness of ripened summer berries, and the sauce galvanizes what would otherwise be a rote dish. Pan-seared sea bream, crisp yet fleshy, is served over a scattering of lentils resting on what looks like a small pond of emerald-green salsa verde. The flavors collide in delicious and almost imperceptible ways: the firm, crisp fish melts against the thin, acidic jolt of the salsa. Maybe surprisingly, the nutty, buttery perfume of the lentils is the most bliss-inducing thing on the plate. Pan-seared sea bream with lentils and cilantro salsa verde at Los Balcones. (Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times) There are big pasta dishes at Los Balcones. Locro pappardelle is a clever homage to the classic Peruvian pumpkin stew, the tangle of noodles lavished with shaved Parmesan and a delicately sweet roasted pumpkin ragu. The earthy and vaguely tangy huacatay pesto makes a reappearance in a bowl of sweet potato gnocchi, a shrewd pairing that invokes a wide constellation of rich, spicy autumnal flavors. By the time the check rolls around, your auditory senses have synced nicely with the elegant thrum of Willie Colon, Celia Cruz and Buena Vista Social Club charging over the house speakers. If youre lucky, you will have stumbled on a punch-red cocktail called Sangre de la Pacha, a smooth and earthy honey-bourbon concoction made with beets and habanero bitters. Or maybe you have discovered the majesty of a well-made pisco sour, which youll find at the bar. Drink or no drink, though, El Balcones is a party. Los Balcones Owners Ricardo Zarate (left) and Jorge Rodriguez (right) at Los Balcones. (Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times) Modern Peruvian mestizo cooking in Studio City. LOCATION 11334 Moorpark St., Studio City, (818) 924-2323, losbalconesperu.com PRICES Appetizers $16-$22; shareable plates $18-$26; entrees $28-$38 DETAILS Credit cards accepted. Valet parking. Full bar. Dining room and restrooms are wheelchair-accessible. RECOMMENDED DISHES Ceviche frito; quinotto; sweet potato gnocchi; pan-seared sea bream patricia.escarcega@latimes.com Twitter: @piescarcega Former Los Angeles Times staff writer Melissa Etehad is an Iranian American who enjoys writing about national and international issues. She received her masters in journalism from Columbia University and a bachelors in international affairs from UC San Diego and has reported from the Middle East and Europe. She previously worked at Al Jazeera English and the Washington Posts foreign desk, where she covered the intersections of politics, religion and gender. Shes a native Farsi speaker. Nabih Bulos is the Middle East bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. Since 2012, he has covered the aftermath of the Arab Spring revolution as well as the Islamic States resurgence and the campaign to defeat it. His work has taken him to Syria, Iraq, Libya, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Yemen as well as on the migrant trail through the Balkans and northern Europe. A Fulbright scholar, Bulos is also a concert violinist who has performed with Daniel Barenboim, Valeri Gergyev and Bono. Samantha Masunaga is a business reporter at the Los Angeles Times. She writes about whos left behind in the pandemic economic recovery and also covers the aerospace industry. Since joining The Times in 2014, she has covered local and national breaking news, the craft beer industry and Southern Californias Japanese American community. Masunaga has previously worked for the Oregonian, the Orange County Register and the Rafu Shimpo, among other publications. A Southern California native, she is an alumna of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and UCLA. The California rail authority delivered a sharp rebuttal Monday to the Trump administration, saying its threat to cancel and rescind $3.5 billion in grants for the state bullet train project is rash and unlawful. In two letters to the Federal Railroad Administration, state officials say they have not breached the terms and conditions of the grants and are making progress in building what would be a transformative passenger rail system. The federal agency issued notice two weeks ago that it intended to terminate a $929-million grant issued in 2010 for the high-speed rail system and was exploring options to seek recovery of a $2.5-billion grant in 2009 that the state already spent. The notice asserted that the state had violated the terms of the grants, was not making adequate progress and would fail to meet a 2022 deadline to complete 119 miles of construction in the Central Valley. The grants are critical to Gov. Gavin Newsoms plan to build a 171-mile partial bullet train segment from Bakersfield to Merced, a plan he unveiled after saying that a more ambitious Bay Area to Central Valley system would cost too much and take too long to complete. Even with the federal grants, the state will have a difficult time paying for the $16-billion to $18-billion partial system. Advertisement The action by the FRA, which is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, is unprecedented in federal grant history, according to grant experts. It is rare, they said, for the federal government to terminate a grant because a state or local agency has not met the precise terms of the agreement. And they could not recall any instance in which grants as large as those to the California bullet train were taken back. The High-Speed Rail Authority is right to say this was an unjustified action and to talk about the need for a collaborative relationship with our federal partners, said Sen. Jim Beall (D-San Jose), chairman of the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee. We want to have cooperation on all sides to see this project come to fruition for all Californians. The rebuttal letters, written by rail authority Chief Executive Brian Kelly, assert that Newsoms plan does not change the purpose of the project and in fact increases the amount of work that will be done in the Central Valley by extending construction south to Bakersfield and north to Merced. Kelly disputed the FRAs assertion that the authority was not making progress, and said the project now has 24 active bridge and roadbed construction sites and employs 2,600 workers. Kelly also noted that federal officials made 450 payments under the initial $2.5-billion grant to the state after determining it had met the conditions and that the second grant had the same terms. He disputed the allegation that the state would fail to meet a 2022 grant deadline to complete construction from Madera to Wasco, saying the federal agency did not document that claim and that the grant did not make such a failure a breach much less a material one. Finally, Kelly rejected the FRA claim that it was failing to meet requirements to match the federal grant. He argued that the termination letter identified only one instance of not meeting a projected payment, which occurred in the last quarter of 2018 when the California High-Speed Rail Authority missed about $90 million in matching funds. Kelly said the payment was an estimate and missing it does not represent a breach. Rather, the state is ahead of schedule in meeting its match requirements, he added. Kelly wrote a nine-page letter to a federal grant administrator that disputed in detail the federal notice and a second letter to FRA administrator Ronald Batory. In the second letter, Kelly said, Any clawback of federal funds already expended on this project would be disastrous policy. It is hard to imagine how your agency or the taxpayers might benefit from partially constructed assets sitting stranded in the Central Valley of California. Kelly asked Batory to restore the functional relationship between our agencies, in which challenges they are facing are the consequence of many past decisions by both agencies. He went on to charge that the federal agency is not participating in the projects environmental review process, which has negatively affected the project schedule. It is unclear whether the Kelly letters can change the plans of the Trump administration. Whole project is a green disaster! President Trump tweeted last month, and said that he would seek to get back the $3.5 billion. That assertion prompted Newsom to claim the action was political payback. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao last month criticized Newsoms plan for a Central Valley segment, calling it a classic political bait and switch. And, in a statement provided to The Times on Friday, the FRA said it does not plan administrative hearings on the grant termination and has no appeals process. If the FRA does terminate the grant and take action to recoup the $2.5-billion grant, it would leave the state with some difficult choices. It could sue in federal court, a lengthy process that would force the state to find an interim source of money to keep construction going. Or it could hope that Democrats take over the White House and Congress in 2020 and reverse the Trump actions. ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com Follow me on Twitter @rvartabedian Marine biologist Jacqueline Sones was strolling along a beach near this Northern California fishing village one foggy summer morning when she spotted an unfamiliar jellyfish bobbing in the surf. Her curiosity turned to shock, however, when she opened a field guide and identified the creature with a white bowl-shaped bell, vivid stripes and long tentacles. Id discovered something unprecedented, Sones recalled Monday. It was a purple-striped jellyfish. While the impressively hued Chrysaora colorata is no stranger to Southern California, or Monterey Bay for that matter, it had never been recorded venturing this far north, according to the researcher. Advertisement And that translucent visitor was just the first of dozens of nonnative species that started popping up here between 2014 and 2016, when an unusually intense and lengthy marine heat wave hugged Californias coast. Other marine immigrants included snails, dolphins, birds, crabs, fish, sea turtles and multi-colored slugs that typically inhabited warmer waters off the Baja California Peninsula. Sones, a research coordinator at UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory, and Eric Sanford, a professor of evolution and ecology at the lab, documented a total of 67 rare warm-water species. Of those, 37 had never been documented this far north. Among those species never before seen here were Venus girdle ctenophores, or comb jellies; striated sea butterflies; rabbit dorid nudibranchs; pink-striped barnacles; scarlet sea cucumbers; pacific sea eels; bottlenose dolphins and spiny lobsters. Sanford collects seawater for the collection of marine life at Horseshoe Cove next to the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times) In a study published Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers at UC Davis, the Farallon Institute and the Marine Science Institute at UC Santa Barbara suggest that the migrant species were drawn north by rising sea surface temperatures and changing currents during the marine heat wave also known as the warm-water blob. The authors findings may provide a glimpse into Californias aquatic future and the ecological disruptions researchers say a warming climate is likely to bring. Normally, the California coastline in summertime is characterized by winds that blow from the north, and these winds keep the entire West Coast cool, and ocean currents flowing southward, said John Largier, a professor of oceanography at UC Davis and member of the research team. However, when those winds weaken, or change direction, as they did during the marine heat wave, surface currents reverse direction, Largier said. So, marine life from southern waters moved north for two main reasons: It was warm and they were transported here. The researchers conducted coastal biological surveys from Point Reyes in Marin County to Point Arena and also consulted historical records of species northern range boundaries, searched museum collections, and monitored marine conditions above and beneath the waves. The biggest impacts were seen in areas off Point Conception and Monterey Bay vast underwater transition zones of deep canyons and climbing foothills. These regions are commonly swept by chilly south-flowing currents that block warmer southern waters. Sanford looks at a mole crab at Horseshoe Cove. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times) During a marine heat wave, it is a bit like temporarily opening a door between lower latitudes and the northern coast, Sanford said. The longer the door is held open, the greater the number of southern species that will step through. The marine heat wave which was accompanied by El Nino conditions was the longest ever recorded off the coast of California, according to researchers. When oceanic conditions finally returned to normal in late 2016, the influx of new species ended abruptly, the study said. However, the biological diversity of some coastal communities may never be the same. For example, a few tropical species including red-striped barnacles, and glass-spined brittle stars, which normally breed off Baja, established local colonies by attaching themselves to pebbles, crevices and the swaying fronds of kelp. In addition, some rarely seen local species such as owl limpets and volcano barnacles experienced population explosions during the marine heat wave. Some people will see the species expanding northward as invaders, Sanford said. Theyll say, They dont belong here. Sanford said he doesnt share that view, however. Thats because these species are native to the coastline. And with global warming, the only way these species will persist is to migrate forward. Sanford looks at a scarlet sea cucumber with a Leica M125 microscope in the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times) Some tropical specimens including chocolate porcelain crabs, scarlet sea cucumbers and red-striped barnacles are now carefully monitored tenants in UC Davis aquariums. Recently, Sanford placed a glass tray under a microscope. Using forceps, he gently tugged a red-striped barnacle with feather-like legs into view. We still have a lot to learn about what is behind the mechanisms that moved creatures like these farther north, he said. And their long-term impact here is an open question. Smaller surges of species from the Baja California coast have also been documented in Southern California in recent years. In Los Angeles and Orange counties, for example, blue-footed boobies, green sea turtles and venomous yellow-bellied sea snakes are now pursuing food sources including small fish and eels into warmer water that extends farther north than it has in the past. Theres a lot of good evidence that extreme heat-wave events are increasing in frequency and intensity, Sanford said, and over time will become more common and longer lasting. Sanford said that because of this, once creatures make it up to waters off the California coast, theres more of a chance they will survive. After documenting the effects of the warm-water blob, Sones and Sanford have now made a morning habit of walking along the nearby Bodega Marine Reserves rocky seashore, and looking more keenly than ever at its expanse of tide pools, sandy coves, cliffs and pounding surf. We havent seen a warm-water creature show up in the past year, Sones said, her eyes fixed on the surf line. But were looking for them all the time. Sanford holds a pelagic red crab at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times) Louis.Sahagun@latimes.com @LouisSahagun Steven Lopez was well known around the tight-knit Mid-City neighborhood where he grew up. Neighbors knew the struggles he endured. When Lopez was seven, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He had surgery to remove the tumor, but it came back. He had surgery again. His family thought he was finally in the clear. But last March, Lopez was shot and killed near his home in the 1700 block of West 17th Street in Mid-City. On Tuesday, authorities asked for the publics help in solving the case and publicized a $50,000 reward for information in the killing. His mother, Flavia Lopez, spoke through tears near the spot where her son collapsed and later died. Advertisement I ask you, my with heart, with all of my heart, to support me, she said. If you saw something. Speak up, dont stay silent, please Look at me, how Im suffering for my son, he was my son, he was my only boy, she pleaded. Lopez was home-schooled and couldnt work because of his numerous surgeries, family members said. He had speech and motor issues. He suffered from seizures. LAPD Lt. John Radtke said that Lopez, who frequently wore a beanie or hat to cover the scars on his head, was near his neighbors front lawn on his bike about 10 p.m. on March 18, 2018 when two people walked up and shot him multiple times. The assailants ran east and got into a dark sedan. There are gangs in this neighborhood, but this is a tight-knit community here in the Mid-City, Radtke said. There are people out there right now that know exactly what happened. Lopezs sister, Liana, 26, heard the shots. She ran outside to find her brother wounded. He died in her arms. On Tuesday during a press conference, she said it was still hard to talk about what happened last year. Tears streamed down her face. Detectives said that Lopez was likely not the target in the shooting, but rather, someone who may have been mistaken for a gang member. At the time, there was a gang conflict in the area, so gang members may have been looking for someone who looked like a rival. Lopez was not a gang member. Nadine Hijar, 26, grew up with Steven and his family and said she thinks the shooting was a result of mistaken identity. Sometimes were not safe just standing outside, she said. nicole.santacruz@latimes.com --Times staff writer Dorany Pineda contributed to this report. For more crime news, follow @nicolesantacruz on Twitter. Linda OKeefe was 11 years old when she vanished July 6, 1973, on her way home from summer school in Corona del Mar. Her body, still clad in the flowered white dress that her mother had sewn, was found the next day. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled and her body discarded in the brush. Her case remained unsolved for decades, frustrating detectives and leaving her family in anguish. Then, some scientific breakthroughs led to the arrest this week of a suspect, James Alan Neal. Heres how it happened: Advertisement A DNA profile of a possible suspect in the 1973 slaying of 11-year-old Linda Ann OKeefe was released in 2018. (Newport Beach Police Department) How did DNA help in the case? DNA testing wasnt available when Linda was killed. Instead, investigators tested bodily fluids and blood left at crime scenes for proteins that helped provide clues or narrow a list of suspects. The science eventually became key to the case. Newport Beach detectives in 2018 contacted Parabon NanoLabs, a Virginia-based medical lab, which used DNA from the crime scene to calculate a possible suspects facial composite, gender, ancestry, freckles and skin tone, and eye and hair color. But detectives still couldnt put a name with the computer sketch. They had checked the DNA against databases of convicted felons over the years but continued to come up empty-handed. Where did the genealogical database come in? That changed in January when investigators tapped FamilyTreeDNA.com, a genealogical database that the public can use to search for relatives and ancestors. Private companies that provide ancestry searches from DNA samples submitted by paying participants usually also guarantee privacy for their users. However, customers are alerted to potential matches and can then use the service to connect with possible relatives. Anybody who uploads DNA thinking, Maybe Ill discover a long-lost relative, is running the risk that the DNA will be used in a police investigation, said David Kaye, a lawyer and Pennsylvania State University professor who teaches the law of evidence and applications of forensic science. You also run the risk of finding out that one of your known relatives is a killer. An undated photo shows a young James Neal. (AP) As genealogical websites grow in popularity, so does their use as an investigative tool for law enforcement. Genealogical DNA made a major debut as a crime-solving tool last year after authorities announced they had used it to arrest Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., the suspected Golden State Killer, so named for a string of attacks that included more than 50 rapes and at least 13 slayings throughout California from 1974 to 1986. Through both traditional DNA and genealogical DNA, we have every opportunity in the world to solve so many of these cold cases that we never had hoped in the past of solving and thats a great thing for our community, Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer said this week. How does the case move forward now? Neal, 72, has been charged with special circumstances murder, kidnapping and lewd and lascivious acts on a minor under 14 in connection with Lindas death. He has not entered a plea. Authorities have released a decades-old photo of him to the public, hoping it will generate new witnesses and leads. Officials in Orange County said the photo may depict what Neal looked like around the time Linda was killed. Los Angeles prosecutors Wednesday declined to file criminal charges against a security guard who shot and wounded a YouTube personality during a bizarre clash outside a synagogue last month, an announcement that came just hours after the woman filed a civil lawsuit against the guard and his employers. Edduin Zelayagrunfeld, 44, was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon Feb. 14 after shooting 45-year-old Zhoie Perez while she was filming outside the Etz Jacob Congregation/Ohel Chana High School building in the Fairfax district. Prosecutors had asked the LAPD to conduct a deeper investigation into the incident before they made a filing decision, but they formally rejected the charges Wednesday. In a declination memorandum, Deputy Dist. Atty. John Harlan wrote that prosecutors ultimately would not be able to disprove Zelayagrunfeld was acting in self-defense. Videos that Perez posted to her YouTube channel, where she is better known as Furry Potato, show the guard repeatedly telling Perez to leave the area and constantly moving his hand toward his firearm, even though she is standing on a public sidewalk. Advertisement At one point in the video, Zelayagrunfeld threatens to shoot Perez if she does not move away from an entrance. The guard appears to have his weapon pointed toward the ground when a gunshot is heard in the video. Before the shooting, Zelayagrunfeld had asked school staff to move students to a safe location, triggering a lockdown, according to the memo filed by the district attorneys office. Taken together with recent surges in anti-Semitic hate crimes and the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh roughly four months earlier, prosecutors believed the guards perception of Perezs behavior as dangerous was reasonable. Perez went to a Jewish school, and place of worship, dressed in all black and with a backpack secured to her body by a harness, the document read. As Zelaya told detectives, Perezs backpack could have contained a bomb, and her attire could have concealed a firearm or other deadly weapon. In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, Perez accused the guard, the high school and the Etz Jacob Torah Center of assault, false imprisonment, negligence and discrimination. The suit repeatedly points out that Perez a self-described 1st Amendment auditor whose videos center on reaffirming her right to film in public, sometimes with confrontational results had remained peaceful and on a public sidewalk despite the guards hostile actions. Following plaintiffs lawful recording of the interaction, defendant [Zelayagrunfeld] became belligerent and without provocation, justification, or reason began to harass, intimidate, coerce, and threaten plaintiff with deadly force, including without limitation, repeatedly pointing his finger and gun at plaintiffs face, yelling at and threatening to shoot plaintiff, the suit read. Perez suffered what she described as a deep graze and was treated and released from a hospital within hours of the clash. The bullet that struck Perez ricocheted off the sidewalk, according to the district attorneys memo. Her attorney, John Carpenter, criticized prosecutors for failing to bring charges against the security guard. There is no reason for [Los Angeles County Dist. Atty.] Jackie Lacey not to be prosecuting this crime, he said. This crime is documented from beginning to end on video and audio tape. Carpenter also contended that the incident was driven, in part, by the fact that Perez is transgender. LAPD spokesman Josh Rubenstein said investigators did not consider the incident to be a bias crime. Attempts to contact Zelayagrunfeld have been unsuccessful. An employee who answered the phone at the synagogue referred questions to the Los Angeles Police Department and could not provide the name of an attorney for the congregation. A woman at the high school hung up the phone when contacted by a Times reporter Wednesday. On her YouTube channel, Perez seems to repeatedly prod at the edges of busy or popular locations around Los Angeles in her videos, sparking interactions that start out playfully confrontational but can sometimes grow tense. Late last year, Perez posted a video from outside the Islamic Center of Southern California in Koreatown. She was pepper-sprayed by a security guard. The LAPD also responded to that scene, and Perez said she was on a public sidewalk when the guard sprayed her. The February clash outside the synagogue stoked concern in the neighborhood in the wake of a rise in anti-Semitic crimes across the nation. Late last year, a Seattle man was accused of trying to run two men over outside another Los Angeles synagogue while yelling slurs in what prosecutors have termed a hate-motivated attack. Since the February incident, Perez has not produced any 1st Amendment audit videos, said Carpenter, who defended his clients decision to film outside a synagogue despite the recent surge in anti-Semitic incidents. Her shooting was 100% unprovoked and unjustified. This has nothing to do with Judaism, he said. It has everything to do with a security guard acting criminally. james.queally@latimes.com Follow @JamesQueallyLAT for crime and police news in California. A convicted child abuser has been charged with murder in the death of a 9-year-old girl whose body was found in a duffel bag on a Hacienda Heights trail a week ago, prosecutors said Tuesday. Emiel Hunt, 38, was arrested Saturday in San Diego and is accused of killing Trinity Love Jones on or about March 1, according to the criminal complaint. The girls mother, Taquesta Graham, was also taken into custody over the weekend, but no charges have been filed against her. Court records show she has a prior conviction for involvement with a minor in prostitution. Relatives identified Hunt as Grahams boyfriend. The girls body was discovered on an equestrian trail March 5. She was identified over the weekend after a public appeal by Los Angeles County Sheriffs investigators led to clues that revealed her identity and linked her to Hunt. Advertisement Hunt made a brief appearance in a Pomona courtroom Tuesday on the murder charge but did not enter a plea. Many of the girls relatives crowded the courtroom. Hunt said nothing, but a spectator in the court yelled: Youll get yours. Hunt is due back in court April 16. The girls remains were found inside the large bag with her head and part of her body protruding. The duffel bag had been abandoned in light brush a short distance from the Pomona Freeway. Court records show Hunt was convicted of felony child abuse in San Diego County in 2005 and sentenced to 12 years in state prison. The two felony counts carried an allegation of great bodily injury. A co-defendant Patecia Frazier pleaded guilty to child abuse and was sentenced to five years of probation and 180 days in custody. In an interview, Antonio Jones, the girls father, identified Hunt as Grahams boyfriend on a sheriffs website and on social media accounts. You killed my daughter, Jones yelled as he cried in court Tuesday. Barbara Jones, Trinitys grandmother, said family members were told that detectives think Hunt is responsible for the girls death. We are filled with rage at this monster, she said, asking how a man with such a criminal history was allowed near her grandchild. I want to do to him what he did to her. The family of Trinitys father said anyone responsible for putting her in danger should also be held accountable. If convicted, Hunt faces up to life in prison. Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore Tuesday vowed to modify a program that used data to identify individuals as chronic offenders, as scores of activists at a Police Commission meeting denounced the data use as racially biased. A shouting, overflow crowd of about 100 protesters called on the commission, the civilian panel that oversees the LAPD, to stop the agency from using the data-driven policing to reduce violence. Civil liberties groups argue that the statistics compiled by officers that fuel the computer models could be skewed by racial bias and result in unfair policing of blacks and Latinos. As chants of shut it down interrupted the meeting, Moore vowed to make changes to the controversial programs when he presents the agencys response on April 9. Advertisement In a long-awaited report presented to the commission Tuesday, Inspector General Mark Smith detailed how officers used inconsistent criteria to identify people with criminal histories who are most likely to commit violent crimes. The commission had asked Smith last summer to audit data programs. We were aware of the concerns, Moore said. Weve begun by making step-by-step adjustments. Im thankful that this report has come today. But Jamie Garcia, a coordinator with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, lambasted officials for not giving credit to residents who had for years raised concerns about the programs. This started by suing you, Garcia yelled. Now we are here. We claim the victory. We, the community, stopped you. The commission took no action Tuesday. Instead, it will gather public feedback for two weeks and await Moores announcement. At times, commission President Steve Soboroff warned he would take the meeting behind closed doors if people in the crowd didnt stop shouting or if they continued to hold up LASER KILLS signs, a reference to Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration a data-based program that maps out zones indicating where many crimes have occurred and suggesting where to focus more officers. The most contentious component allowed each of the departments 21 geographic areas to use data to compile lists or bulletins of people calculated to be among the top 12 chronic offenders. The program assigned people points based on prior criminal histories, such as arrest records, gang affiliation, probation and parole status and recent police contacts. The LAPD suspended the tool in August, after it created an uproar among civil liberties and privacy groups. The LAPD has a history of using data to help fight crime, Moore said at the meeting. Yeah, to kill us, a woman shouted. Smith called the chronic offender program one of his greatest concerns because officers didnt provide clear justification to make some stops. Moore and several commissioners praised Smith and the report. The programs need to come out to the daylight, Commissioner Shane Murphy Goldsmith said. The commission will be responsive to what we hear from the community. Commissioner Dale Bonner wanted to know who managed daily oversight of the programs. Moore stressed the coming changes and said he would provide answers next month. The agency, he said, is looking at best practices at other departments and checking with academics who study predictive policing. Several commissioners and activists noted irony in the LAPDs using expensive, data-driven programs that failed to provide sufficient data for Smith to draw solid conclusions about their overall impact. We are not your laboratory to test technology, the Rev. Stephen Cue Jn-Marie said of L.A. minorities. Gov. Gavin Newsom has full legal authority to spare the lives of death row inmates during his term in office, but he could be challenged for discarding the states death penalty protocol and shuttering the execution chamber, legal analysts said Wednesday. Newsom signed an executive order Wednesday granting reprieves to the 737 inmates on Californias death row. He also said he would withdraw a single-drug protocol for executions and shut down the execution chamber at San Quentin. UC Berkeley Law Professor Elisabeth Semel, who directs a death penalty clinic, said Newsom was legally entitled to grant the reprieves. Absolutely, without a doubt, she said. The governor of the state of California has the power to grant reprieves. Period. Full stop. Advertisement But she said it remains to be seen whether his decision to withdraw the protocol and shut down the execution chamber might be vulnerable in a lawsuit. The governor understands that may be a complicated legal question, but he is prepared if somebody wants to sue him, she said. He is prepared to face that lawsuit. She said there were serious problems with the protocol, and she believed Newsom had the right to say he was not prepared to defend it. Kent S. Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, agreed that Newsom could grant reprieves but said the state is required to maintain a protocol and a death chamber under Proposition 66, the successful 2016 ballot measure intended to speed up executions. He is just flagrantly violating the law, said Scheidegger, the primary author of Prop. 66. That measure requires the state to be ready to execute inmates, he said. We could challenge it, and I am pretty sure we would win, he said. But is there any point given that we cant challenge a reprieve? We have to think about that. Newsoms action leaves the death penalty law in place. Prosecutors may still seek death sentences, and appellate courts will continue to have to review them. These are the 737 inmates on Californias death row Scheidegger said a victim has the right under Prop. 66 to challenge Newsoms decision to discard the protocol and shut down the death chamber. Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra, who has said he supports the death penalty, also could challenge it, Scheidegger said, adding, But there is no chance in hell of that. He said Becerra has been dragging his feet in litigation to restart executions. So for the attorney general to take any positive action would astonish me, he said. Becerra, in a prepared statement, praised Newsom for his bold action. We must always strive to sustain a criminal justice system that reflects our values of fairness and equality, Becerra said. Governor Gavin Newsoms action today represents a bold, new direction in Californias march toward perfecting our search for justice. Death penalty prosecutions have been declining in California and in the nation as prosecutors have become more selective in charging, and homicide rates have declined. San Luis Obispo County Dist. Atty. Dan Dow said Newsoms executive order would not affect his decisions on whether to seek the death penalty in the future. This office will continue to look at it on a case-by-case basis, Dow said. The governor cannot strike the law, and death sentences are still valid. He said he expected litigation and would be prepared to join a fight against Newsoms action if it were legally feasible. Right now, it is so early, he said. We are all trying to analyze where we are where we might be able to go. Stanford Law Professor Robert Weisberg, an expert in criminal law, said Newsom obviously was carefully advised on the law. Weisberg said he doubted a challenge would succeed. As governor, Newsom oversees the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which is in charge of executions, Weisberg noted. Newsom is merely directing employees not to perform one of their assigned tasks, Weisberg said. He is acting as the boss of CDCR, he said. Santa Clara Law Professor Emeritus Gerald F. Uelmen said it made no sense to challenge the withdrawal of the protocol. If he has a reprieve in place, the protocol is moot, said Uelmen, who ran a state commission several years that examined the administration of the death penalty. The commissions report found the system was deeply dysfunctional and required a massive infusion of money. Uelmen said Newsom might be able to get the Legislature to put another measure on the ballot to end capital punishment entirely. Voters have narrowly rejected past measures to abolish it and narrowly supported Proposition 66. It is just a few holdout counties that are still using it, he said. Scheidegger said death penalty advocates are not prepared to give up. I wouldnt say it is over yet, he said. We have to decide what is feasible to do. maura.dolan@latimes.com Twitter: @mauradolan A Colorado man charged with sexually assaulting and killing an 11-year-old girl in Newport Beach in 1973 has been extradited and is due to be arraigned in an Orange County courtroom Wednesday, authorities said. James Alan Neal, 72, was booked into Orange County Jail about 10:20 p.m. Monday. He was arrested in Colorado Springs on Feb. 19 in connection with the strangulation death of Linda Ann OKeefe, who lived in Corona del Mar. The girl disappeared while walking home from summer school on July 6, 1973, and her body was recovered the following morning in a ditch in the Back Bay area. Police said she was last seen standing near a man in a blue or turquoise van. Newport Beach Police Chief Jon Lewis last month credited the latest in DNA technology for helping crack the case that stymied investigators for more than four decades. Advertisement We have never forgotten Linda or the tragic events of July 1973, Lewis said at a news conference announcing the arrest, noting that the victims photo had long been displayed in the offices of his departments detectives as a daily reminder of the unsolved case. He said the girls death changed the community, making parents think twice about letting their children outside alone. Neal is been charged with murder with a special circumstances allegation of kidnapping and lewd acts on a child. Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer said Neal could potentially face a death sentence if convicted, although there is some question about whether capital punishment could be applied in the case given the date of the killing and the laws that were on the books at the time. Newport Beach Police Chief Jon Lewis, left, and Councilman Brad Avery attend a news conference announcing the arrest of a man in the 1973 killing of Linda Ann OKeefe. (Don Leach / Daily Pilot) Newport Beach police in July mounted a Twitter campaign, releasing information about the killing to try to spur new leads, but that was not what led to Neals arrest. Investigators submitted the DNA collected from the victim to the Family Tree website, and it gave them leads pointing to Neal, Spitzer said. From there, police put the defendant under surveillance and collected his DNA and matched it to the evidence collected from the victim. The police tweets detailing the last hours of Lindas life included photographs from the crime scene and a newly created snapshot of the suspect that was put together by scientists at Parabon NanoLabs. The tweets concluded with a video that included interviews with the detectives who have worked on finding the girls killer through the years. Newport Beach police last year hired Parabon, a Virginia-based DNA technology company specializing in a process using genetic material, to build a sort of composite sketch of the suspect at 25 years old and how the killer might look today. Neal moved to Southern California with his family from Chicago, Spitzer said, and was a construction worker at the time of Lindas slaying. He moved to Florida soon after the killing, but after an unspecified criminal incident there, he changed his name from James Albert Layton Jr. to Neal, prosecutors said. It was a killing that haunted Newport Beach for years. In July 1973, 11-year-old Linda Ann OKeefe disappeared while walking home from school. The following day, her body was found among the cattails in Newport Beachs scenic Back Bay. The case remained cold until last year, when the police department tried a new tactic using social media. In a series of first-person tweets, detectives highlighted details of Lindas killing in hopes it would yield new clues. They called it Lindas Story. On Wednesday, a new chapter was added: the arrest of a Colorado man suspected in the girls slaying and identified through the use of genealogical DNA. Detectives said the break occurred after a snapshot profile of a possible suspect in the killing was generated from DNA evidence found at the crime scene. Advertisement Lindas death rocked the community and took root in the heart of the men and women of their police department, said Newport Beach Police Chief Jon Lewis. We never, ever forgot Lindas story. James Alan Neal, 72, has been charged with special circumstances murder, kidnapping and lewd and lascivious acts on a minor under 14 in connection with Lindas death. Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Matt Murphy stands next to picture of James Alan Neal, who was arrested in the cold case killing of Linda Ann OKeefe. (Don Leach / Daily Pilot) The girl vanished on July 6, 1973, on her way home from summer school at what was then Lincoln Intermediate now Lincoln Elementary in Corona del Mar. Her body, still clad in the white dress adorned with blue flowers that her mother had sewn, was found the next day. She had been strangled and her body discarded in the brush. This is a day that made parents in our community think twice before they let their children walk to school, walk out the front door, bike down the street or play with their friends, Lewis said. A girl and her mother who saw Linda walking the day she disappeared told detectives at the time that she had stopped near Marguerite Avenue and Inlet Drive, where a turquoise van was parked along the curb with its door ajar. The driver was described as a man in his mid-20s or early 30s with curly hair. It was the last time Linda was seen alive by family or friends. A woman who lived on the bluff above where Lindas body was found told detectives she heard a female scream, Stop, youre hurting me, shortly after 11 p.m. the day Linda disappeared. An autopsy determined that Linda likely had been killed around midnight. A sketch of a person of interest was circulated at the time, but generated no leads. But in their telling of Lindas story, detectives in 2018 used a Virginia-based medical lab known for its work with genealogical DNA. Parabon NanoLabs was able to calculate a possible suspects facial composite, gender, ancestry, freckles and skin tone, eye and hair color. A DNA profile of a possible suspect in the 1973 slaying of 11-year-old Linda Ann OKeefe in Newport Beach shows what the man might have looked like then, left, and what he might look like now. (Newport Beach Police Department) The lab provided two profiles one showing a man in his mid-20s and another detailing what he might look like today in his late 60s or early 70s. However, investigators still didnt have a name to put with the profile. They had checked the DNA against databases of convicted felons over the years but continuously came up empty-handed. Neal was identified as a potential suspect in January after investigators submitted a biological sample from the crime scene to a database that scours for DNA profiles for close relatives of crime suspects. Police and prosecutors declined to provide additional details about the investigative tactic, including what database was used. Once investigators located Neal in Colorado, they began watching him. Authorities said they collected additional DNA evidence from Neal during that time, though it is not clear how that was done. The DNA from that sample matched the one collected at the 1973 crime scene, officials said. Genealogical DNA made a major debut as a crime-solving tool last year after authorities announced they had used it to catch Joseph James DeAngelo, the suspected Golden State Killer, so named for a string of attacks that included more than 50 rapes and at least 13 slayings throughout California from 1974 to 1986. Through both traditional DNA and genealogical DNA, we have every opportunity in the world to solve so many of these cold cases that we never had hoped in the past of solving and thats a great thing for our community, Spitzer said. The district attorney said if convicted, Neal faces a minimum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Prosecutors have not yet decided whether to pursue the death penalty in the case. hannah.fry@latimes.com Twitter: @Hannahnfry The Los Angeles Department of Water and Powers reputation hit a low six years ago when the agencys new billing system sent out wildly inaccurate bills, overcharging hundreds of thousands of customers. The chaos prompted widespread outrage and promises by the DWP to fix the problems and reimburse ratepayers $67 million in overcharges. Now, the billing fiasco is sparking fresh controversy, this time centered on City Atty. Mike Feuers office and the role of an outside lawyer it hired to handle litigation stemming from the overcharges. Attorney Paul Paradis worked for the city as special counsel in its lawsuit against PricewaterhouseCoopers, the consulting giant that implemented the billing system. At the same time, Paradis represented a DWP customer who would become the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the city, according to testimony in the case. Advertisement Paradis also secured no-bid contracts from the DWP worth more than $30 million to help fix the utilitys billing problems. PricewaterhouseCoopers alleges in court records that Paradis actions represent a conflict of interest and were part of a larger scheme: The firm claims that Paradis and the city worked together to select the plaintiff and the attorney who handled the class-action lawsuit over the billing snafus in an effort to get a more favorable settlement for the DWP. What has been exposed through discovery is a deceptive scheme of stunning scope, PricewaterhouseCoopers attorney Daniel Thomasch wrote in a brief filed March 1 in Los Angeles Superior Court. At a court hearing last week in the citys ongoing lawsuit against PricewaterhouseCoopers, a judge ordered Paradis to sit for a deposition so he could be questioned under oath by the consulting firms lawyers. Days later, Paradis withdrew as one of the attorneys in the citys case against PricewaterhouseCoopers. His lawyer, David Scheper, decried what he called false allegations made by the consulting firms attorneys. Mr. Paradis stepped down as special counsel for the city to dedicate time and energy in his consulting practice on cybersecurity work hes doing for the DWP, which is critical to the citys interests, Scheper told The Times in an email last week. On Tuesday, however, the DWP board voted to cancel Paradis $30-million consulting contract to eliminate any potential conflict or the appearance of a conflict of interest, the utility said in a statement. Scheper didnt immediately respond to messages seeking comment. Paul Kiesel, a Beverly Hills attorney hired by the city as special counsel and working with Paradis on the PricewaterhouseCoopers lawsuit, also stepped down last week, saying he did not want to become a distraction to the litigation. He called PricewaterhouseCoopers allegations baseless and an attempt to draw attention away from the citys claims against the firm. Feuers office represents the DWP in litigation related to the billing errors. The two outside lawyers Kiesel and Paradis had been working under a contingency agreement that would have paid them nearly 20% of any settlement or damages award in the citys lawsuit against PricewaterhouseCoopers. A representative for Feuers office also denied the consulting firms allegations but said an ethics review is underway of DWP contracts and issues related to the settlement. I take any allegation of improper conduct by any attorney under our authority including outside counsel extremely seriously, Feuer said in a statement, adding that he will take decisive action if the review finds wrongdoing. The DWPs billing debacle occurred as the agency was rolling out a replacement for its antiquated system in 2013. Angry customers who called the department to complain found themselves on hold for half an hour or more. Among those overcharged was Antwon Jones, a Van Nuys resident who received a $1,374 electric bill from the utility far more than what he had been paying for service. On April 1, 2015, Jones filed a class-action lawsuit against the city. He was one of several ratepayers who sued over the billing errors. A settlement with Jones was announced a few months later and was blessed by a judge in 2017. It required the utility to fully compensate overcharged customers. Around the time Jones filed his lawsuit, the city sued PricewaterhouseCoopers, accusing the consulting firm of misrepresenting its ability to implement the billing system. It was while seeking records to defend that lawsuit that PricewaterhouseCoopers lawyers allege they caught wind of the scheme involving Paradis, whom they accuse of concealing his work for the city from his client Jones. Jones testified in a deposition last month that he was contacted by Paradis, a New York lawyer, in December 2014 after he filed an online complaint with what he thought was a consumer website about his inflated electric bill. I want to start a class action lawsuit ASAP. They cant get away with this, he wrote in his online complaint, in which he also expressed interest in speaking with a lawyer. Within a week of Paradis email reply, Jones said, he retained the attorney to represent him in potential legal proceedings against the DWP. By January 2015, Paradis was working as a special counsel for Feuers office, according to his city contract. He was hired to work on possible litigation against PricewaterhouseCoopers. PricewaterhouseCoopers attorney Thomasch alleged in his March 1 brief that city attorneys and Paradis discussed having Jones sue the firm. The city attorneys office confirmed in a court filing that such discussions had occurred and that top city attorneys requested the preparation of a draft complaint titled Jones vs. PricewaterhouseCoopers. But city attorneys denied there was a conflict of interest, saying that Jones had retained Paradis to represent him in a potential lawsuit against the consulting firm. These facts demonstrate that Mr. Jones and the city shared a common interest, namely bringing a lawsuit against PwC, to recover monies owed to both, the filing states. Because Mr. Jones and the city shared the desire to recover monies from the true alleged wrongdoer, Mr. Jones and the city were not at that time adverse parties. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle, who approved the class-action ratepayer settlement and is presiding over the citys case against PricewaterhouseCoopers, this week ordered the release of a draft Jones vs. PricewaterhouseCoopers complaint sought by the consulting firm. Berle said he was taking the action because PricewaterhouseCoopers has presented sufficient evidence to establish a prima facie case of fraud by the city and its counsel, fraud on Mr. Jones, possible fraud on the public, and possible fraud on the court, according to a court transcript. Jones, who is not accused of any wrongdoing, said in his deposition he sought out a lawyer to sue the DWP. At one point, Jones said he asked Paradis to investigate whether he had claims against PricewaterhouseCoopers, but ultimately proceeded with his plan to sue only the city. He also said that he was never informed that Paradis worked for the city. In late March 2015, Paradis sent an email to Jones, introducing him to Jack Landskroner, an Ohio consumer rights attorney. Landskroner filed Jones vs. City of Los Angeles less than a week later. But Paradis never formally withdrew as his lawyer, Jones said, testifying that he thought both Landskroner and Paradis were his attorneys up through the lawsuits final settlement in July 2017. Paradis attorney Scheper didnt respond to a Times email asking for the time period that Paradis represented Jones. Paradis participated in mediations in the Jones lawsuit, according to a city attorneys spokesman, who told The Times that Paradis was there to provide the citys attorneys with technical input on the billing system. PricewaterhouseCoopers contends that Landskroner and the citys special counsels, Paradis and Kiesel, worked together to clear the way for a settlement that was reached without a full public airing of the issues. At the time the settlement was announced, consumer advocates criticized the agreement for giving the DWP too much influence over deciding how much customers had been overcharged and how to fix the billing problems. The DWP, required under the settlement to improve its billing system, gave one of Paradis companies, Aventador Utility Solutions, a no-bid, $30-million contract in 2017 to do remediation work. His company was paid more than $20 million before the DWP board voted Tuesday to cancel the agreement, a DWP spokesman said. Paradis law firm had previously secured a similar contract with the utility worth about $6 million. For his part, Landskroner reaped a huge payday from attorney fees in the case. Landskroner, without taking or defending a single deposition, garnered the majority of $19 million in total fees divided among counsel a significant portion of which appears attributable to work apparently performed before he was even introduced to Jones, Thomasch wrote in his March 1 brief. At a hearing last week, Berle asked Landskroner if any referral fees had been paid to Paradis. Landskroner deferred to his lawyer, Mark Drooks, who cited his clients 5th Amendment protections against self-incrimination and declined to answer the judges question. Referral fees are common in California, allowing lawyers to receive a portion of fees earned in a case that they passed on to other attorneys to handle the work. In his email to The Times, Paradis lawyer, Scheper, denied that his client got any of the fees from the Jones case. Landskroner declined to comment through his attorney. At the hearing, a visibly agitated Berle ordered the city to stop all payments to Paradis and Landskroner. He set another hearing to determine whether an independent audit is needed. Berle also directed both attorneys to be deposed by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Everybody understood that Mr. Paradis was the hub, Thomasch told the court. Every spoke comes into him, and it has been that way from the fall of 2014 to today. UPDATES: March 16, 2019: This article was updated to include Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elihu Berles ruling on the release of a draft court complaint and his comments at that hearing. Pacific Gas & Electric Co. will not face criminal charges in the Northern California wildfires that killed more than 40 people in October 2017, authorities said. The Sonoma County district attorneys office said in a statement Tuesday that there was insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the utility acted with reckless disregard for human life in causing the fires. Prosecutors in Napa, Humboldt and Lake counties also declined to file charges after an extensive review of the cases, during which they consulted with the state attorney generals office, the statement said. In a court filing in December, Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerras office had said the utility could be charged with murder or involuntary manslaughter if authorities determine that recent deadly California wildfires ignited as a result of the reckless operation or maintenance of power lines. Advertisement The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection determined that the utilitys equipment caused many of the massive wine country wildfires and referred the cases to prosecutors in each county. Of the fires that originated in Sonoma, Cal Fire concluded that the utilitys equipment caused the Adobe, Norrbom, Pocket, and Pythian/Oakmont fires, but not the Nuns or Thirty Seven fires, nor the Tubbs fire that started in Napa. Prosecutors said they would have had to prove that the utility acted with criminal negligence in failing to remove dead and dying trees, which would have been particularly difficult because physical evidence in the case was burned in the fires, the statement said. The utility remains on probation in a criminal case stemming from the deadly San Bruno gas pipeline blast in 2010, which killed eight people. PG&E was sentenced to five years probation and ordered to pay a $3 million fine in that case. PG&E has faced intense criticism and at least 20 lawsuits on behalf of families, businesses and trusts that allege the utility allowed its equipment to spark last years Camp fire, the deadliest wildfire on record in California history. One lawsuit points to a small metal hook on an electrical transmission tower as the cause in the Camp fire, which killed 86 people and displaced up to 50,000 more in Butte County. When the hook failed, the suit alleges, an uninsulated wire touched the tower, caused sparks and ignited the blaze. Another lawsuit blasts a corporate culture that allegedly places reputation above public safety along with advertising that promotes a false and misleading picture of Northern Californias electricity supply. Other suits blame the general decay of the regions electrical infrastructure and the failure to trim trees and brush that grew too close to poles and power lines. alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com Twitter: @AleneTchek Southern Californias mountain ranges got between 8 and 20 inches of snow overnight and a new low pressure system Tuesday night could mean up to 4 inches of snow along the Grapevine stretch of the 5 Freeway. Wrightwood saw 12 inches of snow while Mountain High had between 18 and 20 inches overnight. Big Bear and Snow Summit had between 12 and 18 inches, said National Weather Service meteorologist Tom Fisher. A new cold front is expected to pass through California on Tuesday night into early Wednesday, the weather service said. 18-20 new snow. Chains or 4x4 req. Opening late today. Please hang tight while we clear the mtn. Check the snow report for details https://t.co/gfGSK2qwJc #mthigh pic.twitter.com/MhdtuUfXuX Mountain High (@mthigh) March 12, 2019 Advertisement Most of Southern California will miss out on moisture but the Grapevine and the mountains around it are expected to get between 2 and 4 inches of snow, according to the weather service, which issued a winter storm advisory for that area until Wednesday morning. Snow levels will drop to between 3,500 and 4,000 feet after midnight and gusts of up to 60 mph are possible over high peaks. A winter storm warning in the eastern San Gabriels has expired but the area will remain gusty through early Wednesday. Los Angeles got a nice break from the cold Tuesday. As the cold front that brought snow to the mountains moved into Arizona, it left behind a warmer air mass that raised temperatures the 70s for the first time in a month in some areas, the weather service said. Downtown Los Angeles reached 70 degrees Tuesday, the first high of 70 or more in the area since Jan. 29. That run of 41 consecutive days with a high below 70 makes is the fifth longest such streak since 1877 and the longest streak since the winter of 1936 and 1937. The top 5 consecutive streaks of highs less than 70 degrees at Downtown LA are 65 days (11/29/1889-2/1/1890); 55 days (12/24/1936-2/16/1937); 54 days (2/29/1912-4/22/1912); 49 days (12/26/1915-2/12/1916); and 41 days (1/30/2019-3/11/2019. #cawx #LAWeather #SoCal NWS Los Angeles (@NWSLosAngeles) March 12, 2019 It has been a wet winter so far for Southern California. Downtown Los Angeles has received 17.98 inches of rain since the water year began in October, surpassing the 14.93 inches the city gets on average annually. One storm after another has come through the region. Last week also saw spectacular lightning across the Southland. javier.panzar@latimes.com @jpanzar A Northern California high school special education teacher was arrested over the weekend after police said he created a fight club style atmosphere in his classroom, encouraging his students to fight one another while refereeing the brawls himself, authorities said. Federico Vargas, a 41-year-old special education teacher at Cloverdale High School in Sonoma County, was arrested Saturday on suspicion of five counts of endangering a child and 13 counts of contributing to the delinquency of minors, Cloverdale police said. Authorities were contacted by school officials last Thursday to investigate reports of a classroom fight, and after several interviews, learned that Vargas was letting students fight one another, police said in news release. Investigators said that multiple students sustained injuries and one student required medical treatment because of the fighting. Advertisement One of the fights refereed by Vargas was captured on a students cellphone, police said. Authorities think the fights occurred during a few class periods over two days last week, but the investigation is continuing, said Cloverdale Unified School District Supt. Jeremy Decker. Police said the fights appeared to be isolated to Vargas classroom. We have contacted the parents of students in the special education classroom to begin the process of gathering information essential to the investigation, Decker said in an email. Decker said school officials learned about the fights through an employee and said he encouraged all students and staff to speak up if they saw or heard anything. The case has not been sent to the Sonoma County district attorneys office, according to a spokeswoman for the office. Vargas, who has worked for the district for eight years, was immediately placed on leave pending the outcome of the investigation, Decker said. javier.panzar@latimes.com Twitter: @jpanzar Some carried signs reading A swastika is not a joke and Lets make the world a better place. Others wore stickers with the slogan No place for hate. On Friday evening, more than 100 people gathered in Costa Mesas TeWinkle Park to show solidarity with Orange Countys Jewish community after photographs posted on social media this week showing a group of local high school students in Nazi salute around a makeshift swastika went viral. The gathering was the latest response to the photos taken at an off-campus party last Saturday night in Costa Mesa that students and school officials have said included teenagers from Newport Harbor, Costa Mesa and Estancia high schools. Among the groups participating in Fridays event were March for our Lives OC, Orange County Equality Coalition, the Anti-Defamation League of Orange County/Long Beach, and Human Rights Campaign of Orange County/Long Beach/Palm Springs. The event also included a Jewish Shabbat service and a vigil illuminated by electric candlelights. Advertisement On Thursday night, Corona del Mar High School held a public forum on anti-Semitism and its origins. A similar meeting took place on Monday at Newport Harbor High. Also on Thursday, Eva Schloss stepsister and childhood friend of Holocaust diarist Anne Frank met with about 55 Newport Harbor students, staff members and parents to discuss her incarceration as a teenager at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and speak firsthand about the horrors Nazi Germany inflicted on millions of Jews and others during WWII. Newport-Mesa Unified School district officials have said they are investigating the incident and want to talk to all of those involved to determine appropriate disciplinary action. luke.money@sduniontribune.com A YouTube personality was shot during an argument with a security guard while filming outside a Los Angeles synagogue and Jewish high school Thursday afternoon, according to police and footage posted to social media. Police were responding to reports of a disturbance outside the Etz Jacob Congregation/Ohel Chana High School building in the 7600 block of Beverly Boulevard about 12:20 p.m. when they received reports of a shooting in the same area, said Sgt. Barry Montgomery, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department. The shooting victim, who identified herself as 45-year-old Zhoie Perez, was treated for a gunshot wound to the leg and released. Perez later limped out of the back of an LAPD cruiser and spoke with reporters near the scene, describing the injury as a deep graze. Perez is a self-described 1st Amendment auditor and posts videos to YouTube under the handle Furry Potato. The account, which has more than 17,000 subscribers, contains videos of Perez and others going to public places and testing the limits of their 1st Amendment rights. Perez, however, said she was not attempting to conduct an audit when the shooting took place. Advertisement I was just filming the exterior of the synagogue here, and getting a lot of like, the architecture, and all that, and the guard came out and just started freaking out, started putting his hand on his gun, Perez said. Perez said she began livestreaming the incident after the guard drew his weapon. Video she posted to YouTube shows her standing a few feet away from the synagogues gate when the gunshot is fired. The guard appeared to have his gun pointed toward the ground. The guard fired the shot from the synagogues property onto the public sidewalk, where Perez was standing, Montgomery said. Detectives arrested the guard, identified as Edduin Zelayagrunfeld, 44, on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, the LAPD said late Thursday. Perez has not been accused of a crime. Witnesses to the Fairfax neighborhood incident said they saw someone dressed in black and holding a camera arguing with a security guard who was standing behind a gated entrance to the synagogue. It just seemed like a situation that was escalating, said an employee at the Adante coffee shop across the street. After the shooting, a crowd started gathering and some helped the victim to wrap her leg, said the Adante employee, who would not give a name. In the video Perez posted to YouTube, the guard can be heard repeatedly yelling get away at Perez as passersby tend to her injury. The guard repeatedly yelled that he had fired only a warning shot. Perez said he threatened to kill her after the initial shot was fired. The security guard then points his finger at the victim and says, This is a warning shot you dont try to break inside. Witnesses can be seen in the video helping to wrap the victims leg. I got all these cops with hands on me and I got shot, she said. A woman was treated after being shot by a security guard outside a Los Angeles synagogue Thursday. (Los Angeles Times) A friend of Perez, who would identify herself only by her YouTube handle Kattila The Hun, said that the pair are activists just trying to protect our 1st Amendment right to free press. We simply stand and we go to various places whether they are law enforcement police departments, DEA, you name it. She came to the synagogue today, she said. The Furry Potato Live account has posted other livestream-style videos including one titled Cop Watch LAPD, where the camera person questions Los Angeles Police Department officers during what appears to be a traffic stop. Another video shows the YouTuber going inside the El Segundo Police Department and speaking with officers. The Furry Potato Live account links to one on the crowdfunding website Patreon belonging to a user named Zhoie Perez who also uses the name Furry Potato. On the website, Perez describes herself as a YouTube creator that is passionate about the rights that we have as American Citizens. I create internet content that will hopefully educate people about their rights while holding police and government officials accountable to us. I strive to do this in a fun and entertaining fashion. The goal is to help sustain our rights that were given to us by our founding fathers! The warnings have been ominous for motorists winding their way to and from San Diego along a busy stretch of Interstate 5 in South Orange County a future of crushing gridlock unless something drastic is done. Transportation planners have been trying to sell skeptical residents for more than a decade on an extension of the Highway 241 toll road to help ease traffic. To win public support for the extension or an alternative solution, the toll road agency has turned to consulting firms to wage a multimillion-dollar public outreach campaign. But that spending is sparking questions about how the public agency is using the money. Advertisement San Clemente officials, fierce opponents of a proposal to extend the toll road through the beach town, obtained the consultants billings through a public records lawsuit and have sharply criticized the payments to the high-priced, politically connected consultants. Billing records reviewed by The Times show a consultant at one firm was paid for working 28 hours in a single day. Another consulting firm received nearly $230,000 for more than 1,300 hours spent reading emails of news from transportation stories; evaluate reporter perspectives at up to $185 an hour, the records show. Meanwhile, the authority paid yet another consultant more than $3,000 a month to compile news stories at $90 an hour, according to the bills. Some digital media experts questioned a $380,000 budget in one year to produce content for two small websites and social media accounts for the tollway authority, as well as marketing to specific audiences, saying such work should cost far less. San Clemente City Manager James Makshanoff said some of the charges the lawsuit unearthed defy belief and called for an independent outside audit to determine how much these consultants have been overpaid and why there appears to have been little to no oversight of these bills by the management. Jeff Corless, chief executive and president of the firm that has received the most money, Venture Strategic Inc., said some costs were incurred from tracking and responding to misinformation put out by San Clemente and a flood of emails he said the city had encouraged people to send. Their method is to tear down and destroy and spread misinformation and create confusion, Corless said. His colleague, Alex Avetoom, said the source of the problem was an antagonizing campaign waged by San Clementes own consulting firm, Los Angeles-based Englander, Knabe & Allen, which had lost out to Venture Strategic in bidding for the tollway agencys contract. The firms strategic proposal to San Clemente invoked Sun Tzus The Art of War in explaining how it would battle the toll road extension, and mentioned filing public records requests for consultants fees as one of its weapons. City records show the firm in late 2017 was paid nearly $100,000. Adam Englander, a partner, said the firm didnt start working for the city until early 2018 so it cant be blamed for the tollways spending before then. He called it pathetic to point the finger at his firm for helping uncover lobbyists who appear to have been ripping off a public agency. Late last month, after The Times asked about the spending, the Transportation Corridor Agencies announced that a routine audit had identified some double-billings, but that the lead consultant had actually underbilled, leaving the agency owing more than $4,500. The joint authoritys chief strategy officer, Mike Chesney, defended the consultants work as essential to help us navigate the controversies that have plagued the project. He said the firms have been effective in engaging the public in the agencys planning. The spending, Chesney said, reflects a tremendous amount of work that were coordinating with them on. He said he reviews the invoices and has caught duplicate billings but couldnt recall specific examples. The tollway agency oversees the toll roads network that spans from South Orange County to Yorba Linda and the Riverside freeway. It is funded by a mix of housing developer fees and the roughly 325,000 daily tolls paid by the roads drivers. Its board of directors is made up of elected council members from more than half of Orange County cities, as well as a majority of county supervisors. A long-running proposal to build the extension through San Onofre State Beach was abandoned in 2016 after the agency settled lawsuits with a coalition that included the state attorney generals office. Alternative plans for the road to cut through San Clemente have drawn intense backlash from city leaders and residents. In 2015, the tollway agency approved a nearly $500,000 eight-month contract with Corless firm for public relations that include enhancing support for extending the 241. Corless was a political consultant to the successful 2014 election campaign of County Supervisor Lisa Bartlett, who sits on the authoritys board of directors. In 2016, the tollway contract with his business, Venture Strategic, grew to up to $1.8 million annually. The firm is subcontracting some of its strategic planning to Curt Pringle & Associates, which has a separate contract with the tollway agency for overall long-range visioning. Pringle, a Republican political consultant, served as assembly speaker and Anaheims mayor. It was his daughter, Katie Pringle, who was listed on a 2016 invoice from Venture Strategic charging for 28 hours she supposedly worked in a single day. Amy Potter, the tollway agencys chief financial officer, said the audit found that the firm had double-billed for 14 hours worked by Pringle that day. Curt Pringle said he was surprised to see the double-billing and that his firm had not been reviewing Venture Strategics invoices to make sure his staffs time was being reflected accurately, but would do so from now on. Proposals to extend the 241 toll road through San Clemente. (Transportation Corridor Agencies) Invoices reviewed by The Times cover December 2015 through December 2018. Venture Strategics fees start with a flat $21,000 a-month retainer for some general tasks, including strategy meetings and real time planning for specific stakeholder outreach. The firm charges between $100 and $185 an hour for additional tasks, though its general descriptions for many of those hours such as meetings about stakeholder outreach appear similar to the type of work covered by the retainer agreement. Corless and Chesney said the consultants conduct a lot of work under the agreement without seeking hourly payments. Pressed about specific bills, Chesney said he was unsure of the exact work that was described as review TCA emails of news from transportation stories; evaluate reporter perspectives. He disputed that consultants were being paid to read news stories under that billing entry. I know thats not what it is, Chesney said. But Venture Strategic consultant Nico Melendez said it was. He said he needed to keep abreast of transportation news from around the country. Still, he struggled to explain some of his own billing. In a single day in 2017, he worked seven hours reading news at $175 an hour, according to one invoice. But Melendez said in an interview that his time sheet showed he spent only two hours that day reading news. Corless later said the seven hours were for Melendez reading news all week. But the same invoice charged $1,050 for six hours of reading news on another day earlier that same week. Corless said he saw no problems with the invoices. Clearly [the Transportation Corridor Agencies] agrees as they approved the time, he said. Many of the bills submitted by his firm were for consultants talking to fellow consultants. One eight-hour meeting of 10 Venture Strategic consultants cost nearly $14,000. The firms contract allowed up to $380,000 in fiscal year 2017-18 for digital communications that includes micro targeting to specific audiences, maintaining social media pages on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and updating two existing websites affiliated with the tollway agency howsthedrive.com and getmovingoc.com. Nadeem Mazen, chief executive of a boutique digital content creation firm, said there can be wide variances in the industry but the contract price appeared to be highly inflated and that the only way to defend it would be billing many hours for tasks not specified in the budget. The most popular tollway social media account run by Venture Strategic has fewer than 7,800 followers. Mazen said a six-figure contract should buy social media pages that rise to social influencer status somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 followers. Unless youre just pouring money into the ocean, he said. Marcy Rye, founder of the Marina del Rey website design company Wire Media, said she reviewed the content on the two websites and their social media. She said it was all simple stuff. The price seems quite excessive to me, Rye said. Erik Brown, president of DMI Direct, the subcontractor that created the digital content, said a tremendous amount of planning went into designing the content and that numerous tasks were done beyond the two websites and social media. We have provided good value and good service, Brown said. Any claim to the contrary is unfounded. A toll roads spokesperson said more than 1,300 hours billed for digital work between August and November 2017 a total cost of more than $173,000 was spent writing responses to hundreds of people who commented at a public forum and posting answers to common questions online. Ultimately, spending on digital communications for the fiscal year totaled nearly $338,000, the records show, below the $380,000 budget cap. The current contract has a digital budget of $225,000, according to the bills. When the contract was up for renewal at the boards June meeting last year, San Juan Capistrano Mayor Brian Maryott, who also sits on the tollway agencys board of directors, said the team of consultants was being paid a pretty sizable sum but had failed to quell opposition to the 241 extension. Its an absolute failure, Maryott said. Irvine Councilwoman Christina Shea chastised Maryott and others for their criticism. I think its just inappropriate that were publicly trying to humiliate our consultants, Shea said. The contract was approved in a single voice vote, with no roll call. Adam.Elmahrek@latimes.com @adamelmahrek A key component of Sheriff Alex Villanuevas plans for revamping the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department will come under new scrutiny after the countys governing board moved Tuesday to examine the legality of a panel that approved the reinstatement of a fired deputy. The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to direct the countys lawyers to evaluate the legality of the sheriffs truth and reconciliation panel and instruct Villanueva to stop reevaluating discipline that was imposed by his predecessor, former Sheriff Jim McDonnell, until a full review of the panel is completed. The issue came into focus following an outcry over Villanuevas reinstatement of a deputy who was fired in connection with allegations of domestic abuse, harassment and stalking. The Times reported that a panel comprised of three members of Villanuevas command staff issued a report finding that Deputy Caren Carl Mandoyan brought discredit to himself and the department by repeatedly tapping on an ex-girlfriends patio door and opening her window. The group could not confirm the womans allegations of abuse. Advertisement The supervisors move is the latest rebuke of the countys new sheriff, whose fledgling term has been dominated by controversy over his attacks on the reforms of his predecessor and his efforts to bring back fired deputies. Last week, the county took the unusual step of seeking an injunction against Villanuevas reinstatement of Mandoyan. A judge declined to grant an emergency order to remove Mandoyan on Wednesday and said he would take up the case again at a hearing in June. Villanueva has argued that some deputies were subject to unjust punishment and that the panel would also consider complaints about the department from the public. McDonnell has said in the past he stands by his efforts at reforming the department and is not interested in engaging with individual claims against him by Villanueva. The panels report on Mandoyan obtained by The Times titled truth and reconciliation panel review is dated Dec 27. A video clip reviewed by The Times appeared to show Mandoyan using a metal tool to try to pry open the womans door. Mandoyans attorney, Greg Smith, has said his client got into an argument with the woman, a former deputy, but did not abuse her. Mandoyan volunteered on Villanuevas campaign and served as his personal driver. The supervisors have criticized Villanueva for apparently circumventing county rules and using a secretive process to reinstate Mandoyan after his 2016 discharge had been upheld by the county Civil Service Commission. Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who wrote the motion with Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, also questioned the sheriffs use of the term truth and reconciliation, which has roots in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established in post-apartheid South Africa to seek restorative justice for human rights abusers and give their victims a chance to speak in public forums. Ridley-Thomas said Villanuevas panel which could restore fired deputies to their jobs stands in contrast to that. Supervisor Janice Hahn said she found it problematic that the panel that reinstated Mandoyan was made up of three men who saw a video of the deputy appearing to break into his ex-girlfriends apartment and didnt think it merited more severe discipline. I dont think there is a woman anywhere who hasnt felt that kind of fear, Hahn told Villanueva at the meeting. Villanueva, joined by Assistant Sheriffs Maria Gutierrez and Tim Murakami, said deputies were happier and more energized since he took office. He said his review of unjust discipline was part of restoring morale within the ranks. When we ensure our employees are afforded the due process that is afforded to every single person that we detain, then the employees are going to come. I can recruit employees, said Villanueva, noting how tough it is to hire deputies in a tight job market. There are a lot more attractive career paths than law enforcement where you dont get beat up in public. Villanueva said the truth and reconciliation panel is still in the process of being formed, though an ad hoc committee has already done some work on reviewing disciplinary cases. There are as many as 400 cases that were wrongly adjudicated in the past, he said, though he did not specify how many of those may come under review. He said only one deputy Mandoyan had been reinstated. The Times reported that even before Villanueva took office and before any panel would have been formed, he was pushing for Mandoyan to be reinstated, emails show. Rod Castro-Silva, the countys interim inspector general, told the board his office was troubled by the Sheriffs Departments lack of communication about its effort to reinstate deputies. He said his staff had heard that internal investigations were being deactivated at a troubling rate. The departments leadership has essentially been playing a shell game of misinformation on this topic. At one point, we hear there is a truth and reconciliation commission. Then, that there isnt one yet. We read and see that there is an ad hoc committee performing the same function, but that that group isnt the truth and reconciliation commission, Castro-Silva said. Several current and former deputies and their family members praised Villanueva and his quest to rectify injustices against deputies, many of whom are breadwinners for their households. Industry Station Deputy Ramon Del Castillo said he was a victim of McDonnells and was fired over false allegations before winning his job back at the Civil Service Commission. Another deputy, Brianne Roberts, said too many of her colleagues were wrongfully terminated by the broken system of the last administration. We finally have a sheriff that cares, not only about personnel, but the community, said Roberts, who said she is the sole provider for her children. Morale is up. Deputies arent afraid to work. We know that we are supported and that we finally matter. Also Tuesday, the supervisors unanimously voted to move forward with a comprehensive inquiry started by McDonnell in July to study tattooed secret societies of deputies. Seven deputies filed a claim against the county last week alleging systemic hazing, including beatings, of young Latino deputies by members of the Banditos, a group of deputies with identical tattoos at the East Los Angeles Station. Villanueva said he replaced the leaders of that station, which came under scrutiny last year after an off-duty fight resulted in a sergeant and three deputies being placed on leave. The recent claim says the fight was perpetrated by the Banditos. maya.lau@latimes.com Twitter: @mayalau The Trump administration has agreed to temporarily halt the termination of humanitarian protections for more than 100,000 people from Honduras and Nepal, the American Civil Liberties Union announced Tuesday. The decision comes exactly one month after the ACLU and other immigrant rights advocates filed a class-action lawsuit against the administration over its decision to end temporary protected status for immigrants from those two countries. In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs alleged that the decision by the Department of Homeland Security to end TPS was motivated by racial animus. Protections were due to end in June for 15,000 people from Nepal and next January for 86,000 people from Honduras, leaving them vulnerable to deportation. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on behalf of six immigrants with TPS and two U.S. citizens who are children of beneficiaries. TPS is a form of humanitarian relief granted to residents of countries devastated by natural disasters or war that allows beneficiaries to work legally while they remain in the U.S. Advertisement The program, created in 1990, applies to people from 10 countries. But the Trump administration has announced the termination of TPS for 98% of those who have it. In October, a U.S. district judge in San Francisco temporarily blocked the administration from rescinding TPS for more than 300,000 immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan while their case plays out in court. The administration is appealing that ruling to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The Trump administration canceled TPS for Honduras and Nepal after the first lawsuit was filed last year. Tuesdays agreement essentially groups the fate of the two cases. The case of Ramos vs. Nielsen alleges that government officials illegally diverged from how all previous administrations had interpreted TPS law, as part of a broad effort to decrease the number of nonwhite immigrants in the U.S. Lawyers representing the plaintiffs in Bhattarai vs. Nielsen, the case filed last month, made the same legal arguments. Internal documents capture Trump administration debate about ending temporary immigrant protections Government lawyers said that those countries had sufficiently recovered from the original disasters, and that TPS was never meant to be permanent. A Department of Justice spokesman last month said the decision to terminate TPS for Honduras and Nepal was both lawful and reasonable. Under the agreement, TPS will remain in place for Honduran and Nepalese immigrants at least until the appeal in the Ramos case is decided. Lawyer Ahilan Arulanantham with the ACLU of Southern California said that oral arguments with the 9th Circuit probably will be set for this summer, giving TPS beneficiaries several months of reprieve. I feel like Ive been sick and this agreement is a few drops of medicine, lead plaintiff Keshav Bhattarai, a TPS holder from Nepal who lives in Sunnyvale, near San Jose, said in a statement. Also Tuesday, House Democrats unveiled a new version of the Dream Act, formally called the Dream and Promise Act, including a path to citizenship for beneficiaries of TPS. Arulanantham said immigrants with TPS, many of whom have lived in the U.S. for decades, deserve stability. Our lawsuit is not the solution to this its temporary relief, he said. andrea.castillo@latimes.com | Twitter: @andreamcastillo Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak on Friday signed into law a measure to require background checks on most private gun sales and transfers the fulfillment of an initiative passed by voters more than two years ago. In November 2016, the majority of Nevadans made it clear they wanted us to do more to address gun violence. But for the 829 days since then, theyve been ignored, the new Democratic governor said. That finally changes today. A ballot initiative narrowly passed by voters was never enacted by the previous Republican administration. The attorney general at the time Adam Laxalt said the measure was unenforceable and poorly written. But Democrats swept the governorship and control of both chambers of the state Legislature in November. Getting a law passed to require those background checks was a high priority for legislative leaders. Advertisement The law largely mirrors the ballot measure but removed language that would have required the FBI to conduct the background checks. Under the new law, which will take effect next year, the state will conduct them. It was debated in committees this week and was designed to be signed into law around the one-year anniversary of the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., where 14 high school students and three staff members were killed on Valentines Day. During the Assembly vote Friday, Assemblyman Howard Watts listed the names of those who died in the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The new law requires a background check on private sales and transfers through a licensed firearms dealer with a few exemptions that include antique gun transfers and temporary transfer of a firearm in cases where a person is in danger of being injured or killed. The signing of the bill marked a big moment in a state that has been undergoing somewhat of a political transformation over the last decade. Members of a Nevada chapter of Moms Demand Action attend a hearing for Senate Bill 143 at the Nevada Legislature in Carson City. (Jason Bean / Associated Press) Since 2008, Nevada has been blue on the presidential electoral map choosing President Obama twice and voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the last election cycle, the Senate incumbent, Republican Dean Heller, lost to Democrat Jacky Rosen giving the state two women Democratic senators. After the 2016 election, Nevada also became the first state to have an overall majority of women in its Legislature. The passage of the 2016 background check initiative, despite heavy spending against it by the National Rifle Assn., reflected that shift as well. Calls for more gun regulation came after the mass shooting in October 2017, when a gunman killed 58 people and wounded hundreds more at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. Prior to the state Assembly vote on Friday, where it passed 28 to 13, a handful of Republicans argued the law wouldnt stop criminals from obtaining guns. Assemblyman Glen Leavitt labeled the bill a publicity stunt. But Democrats disagreed and said the measure would help save lives. They say criminals are the ones who break the laws and will get guns anyway, Assemblyman Ozzie Fumo said. I say the logic of that argument is flawed. We might as well say that we might not have traffic laws on the books because only criminals will be the ones to break the traffic laws. However, Im here to tell you we need those laws on the books because we have to tell law-abiding citizens sometimes to give then direction as well. Sisolak, flanked by Democratic lawmakers when he signed the bill, said he hoped it would spur other states to tighten gun regulations. We have already lost too many lives across the country to guns, he said. With this bill, we are taking an important step to address the nationwide public health crisis that is gun violence, and we are making our children and families safer here at home by making it harder for potentially dangerous individuals to access a firearm. david.montero@latimes.com | Twitter: @davemontero Gov. Gavin Newsoms decision to suspend executions in California for as long as he is governor is, for the time being, a symbolic act. No one has been executed in San Quentins death chamber since Jan. 17, 2006, and few believe the next execution would have happened any time soon, given the array of legal hurdles embroiling the system. But Newsoms moratorium technically, he granted reprieves to each of the 737 people on death row at a minimum adds further delays to the resumption of the machinery of death, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun once described it. And thats a good thing. Newsom cited his familys connection with Peter Pianezzi, who was convicted in 1940 of a mob hit but later cleared and whose campaign for a pardon was championed by Newsoms father and grandfather. That led to the evolution of a personal rejection of the death penalty. I cant sign my name to that, he said. I cant be a part of that. Even before Newsom announced the moratorium Wednesday, critics were already complaining that his action thwarts the will of voters, something he promised during his campaign to respect. In 2016, Californians rejected a ballot measure to end the death penalty and convert existing sentences to life in prison without parole, narrowly approving instead a competing measure to speed up the process. Californias modern history reflects a population that recognizes that the criminal justice system has been too harsh on the poor and minorities. Advertisement The state Supreme Court later gutted a key element of the winning initiative, ruling that provisions that would have compelled the courts to adhere to a tight schedule for death penalty appeals were unenforceable. So things remain pretty much as they were before that 2016 vote, which offers clear evidence that the hurdles in crafting a constitutional, effective and reliable system to determine innocence or guilt in capital cases, and thus life or death, in a just manner are insurmountable regardless of the will of the people. Meanwhile, Assemblyman Marc Levine (D-San Rafael) on Wednesday introduced a measure that would put on the 2020 ballot yet another initiative to ban the death penalty. In the wake of Proposition 66s inability to deliver on it backers promises, the voters ought to have a chance to change their minds. Newsom also announced that he would close the death chamber at San Quentin and scrap the states proposed single-drug lethal injection protocol, leaving the state without any court-approved methods to carry out a death sentence. These steps, too, may be less significant than they seem. Shutting down a death chamber that isnt being used is easy, and the proposed injection protocol is still hung up in the courts. Nevertheless, death penalty advocates are likely to challenge the withdrawal of the proposed execution protocol. So be it. But note that for more than a decade since a federal judge ruled that Californias lethal-injection protocol was cruel and unusual punishment, the state has been unable to craft a constitutional method for killing people. That should tell us something. Meanwhile, the will of the people has been shifting. Last year, California juries imposed only five death sentences, down from 11 the year before and from a peak of 43 death sentences in 1999. As more capital punishment cases get deeper reviews by opponents of capital punishment, more and more people 164 since 1973 are being exonerated and released from death rows nationwide, including five in California. Newsom already had expanded DNA testing in the highly questionable 1985 conviction of Kevin Cooper that could lead to a sixth exoneration. And about half of the exonerated nationwide are African American, evidence that the system disproportionally affects minorities. Californias modern history reflects a population that recognizes that the criminal justice system has been too harsh on the poor and minorities. That recognition has led to landmark sentencing reforms under Propositions 47 and 57. In that regard, support for Proposition 66 was an outlier for California voters, and its perplexing why a populace that recognizes the unfairness in some portions of the criminal justice system still has faith in that part of a system that can lead to the executions of our fellow Californians. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute Death sentences imposed in California are no less arbitrary than elsewhere. A killing that would have led to a non-capital murder charge in Los Angeles would in the recent past have likely been a death penalty case in neighboring Riverside County, a measure of the unjustifiable geographic variation in the application of capital punishment. And that a change in district attorneys in Riverside County led to a significant decrease in capital cases is further evidence that the impulses of prosecutors have an inordinate influence on who gets a death sentence. You cant get much more arbitrary than that. Admittedly, a governor announcing he will not enforce specific aspects of certain laws leads us into uncomfortable territory too. But Newsom has unlimited authority to grant reprieves to death row inmates, so he appears to be on solid ground here. Its good that the governor has pulled the plug on executions, at least for the time being. Now we need to get on to the business of ending capital punishment here and in every other state once and for all. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook Consider this a note explaining why one of us will be absent from school on March 15 and why everyone else should applaud this truancy. Beginning last August, a Swedish schoolgirl named Greta Thunberg went on strike from her classes, choosing instead to spend the days on the steps of the Parliament building in Stockholm. Her reasoning: If her government couldnt be bothered to safeguard her future by taking action against climate change, it was a bit rich to demand that she spend her time preparing for a future that might not exist. Her protest soon spread across Scandinavia, Europe, Britain and Australia. Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren have now participated worldwide, and the protest has drawn some prominent support: German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on March 2, I very much welcome that young people, school students, demonstrate and tell us to do something fast about climate change. But of course others have been less understanding. During climate demonstrations in Australia, the Prime Minister Scott Morrison said, We do not support our schools being turned into parliaments. What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools. Lacking access to piles of cash, young people do what they can. And a strike is one such measure. Advertisement On Friday, many thousands of American students will be joining the school strike, so wed like to lay out the reasoning behind it in more detail, in the hopes that people will view these protests with the seriousness they deserve. It was 30 years ago that scientists first explained that burning fossil fuels was changing the composition of the atmosphere and driving the rapid warming of the Earth. That is enough time to educate a student all the way from preschool to a PhD, but it hasnt been time enough for our politicians to learn how serious a climate catastrophe we are facing. The American government, in particular, is a study in inaction. Our federal government has reversed course on every effort to change laws and regulations. Our current president has taken steps to drop out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the only international effort to combat global warming. Young people see that their future is on the line, which is why theyve been at the front fighting against oil companies, pipelines and fracking wells. You dont need to be much past first grade to know that when youre in a hole you should stop digging. Or, in this case, drilling. It is time to replace fossil fuel energy with power from the sun and wind and we have the cheap solar panels and turbines to do it. But America has become the largest producer of gas and oil in the world, and most politicians lack the courage to stand up to the industry. Both of us, for instance, worked last fall on a modest Colorado referendum that would have prohibited oil wells right next to homes and schools, only to watch fossil fuel companies outspend local activists 40 to 1 and narrowly defeat the measure. So, lacking access to piles of cash, young people do what they can. And a strike is one such measure. Its not a stunt. A stunt is Australias now-prime minister bringing a lump of coal to parliament to pass around to his colleagues. A stunt is former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper literally drinking a cup of fracking fluid. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion A school strike, instead, recalls some of the most pivotal moments in American history. In 1963, for instance, the Rev. Martin Luther King found that he had run out of adult volunteers to stand up to Bull Connor at the height of the civil rights battle in Birmingham. So, after much soul-searching, King asked the citys schoolchildren to leave class and face the police dogs and firehoses. Dont worry about your children, he told their frantic parents. Theyre gonna be all right. Dont hold them back if they want to go to jail. For they are doing a job not only for themselves but for all of America and for all mankind. No one striking for the climate on March 15 will confront the immediate perils those brave schoolchildren had to endure. But just as they anticipated a future blighted by segregation, so todays young people face a future blighted by environmental destruction. And so they must act. It would be better, of course, if adults had taken the lead. Stopping climate change is their responsibility. But they havent. Though pretty much every politician has made it out of college, their education seems to have done them little good. Maybe, at least for a day, theres more education to be found out in the street. Instead of studying history, its time to make it. Haven Coleman, a student in Denver, has been striking for the climate weekly since January. She is founder and co-director of US Youth Climate Strike. Bill McKibben wrote the first book on climate change in 1989, and helped found the global climate campaign 350.org. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinionand Facebook Update: Trump orders Max planes grounded; Boeing supports move out of an abundance of caution Pressure is mounting for the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S.-based airlines to ground all Boeing 737 Max 8 airliners after a deadly crash Sunday in Ethiopia that has some similarities to one in October in Indonesia. Already aviation regulators in Europe, Australia, Asia and elsewhere have done so, and some passengers are calling airlines nervously asking what type of plane they are booked to travel on. But the FAA is right to wait. While both accidents are tragic, its not at all clear that they have the same cause. After Lion Air Flight 610 crashed into the Java Sea in October, killing 189 passengers and crew, the 737 Max 8 came under increased scrutiny. It is one of Boeings newest models of jet and included a new automated safety system to prevent the aircraft from entering a stall. Indonesias National Transportation Safety Committee thoroughly investigated the accident, and its preliminary report pointed to this new system as causing the control problem those pilots had after takeoff. Advertisement We need to let the well-proven investigative process work. This process takes time, and we have to be patient. Boeing, working with the FAA, quickly issued new guidelines and information to all 737 Max 8 pilots, explaining in detail how the new system should operate and how to respond if it kicks in when it shouldnt. So early Sunday morning when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 went down shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 aboard, the 737 Max 8 was again at the center of a horrible accident, for the second time in five months. Could there be something wrong with the new jet? Boeing responded that it was confident in the jet, but some airlines and regulators were less convinced. Now a few politicians, too, are weighing in, telling the FAA how to do its job. Heres what the accidents have in common. Both occurred during the climb phase of the flights. There was good weather. In each, the pilots advised the air traffic controllers that they were experiencing technical problems. But the differences investigators already know about are also important to note. The Lion Air flight in Indonesia last year had been experiencing a technical problem four days leading up to the accident. The maintenance staff tried numerous repairs, but without success. Flight after flight, pilots experienced problems with the trim system, as well as the airspeed and altitude indications. These recurring issues pointed to a problem with a sensor that measures the angle of the air flowing over the wing, called the angle of attack sensor. It was replaced but that did not fix the problem. As soon as Lion Air Flight 610 lifted off, the problems returned. Nothing like this happened to Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. Investigators reviewed maintenance records right after the crash, and there were no reports of the airplane having technical issues. This is a very significant difference. Fortunately, the flight data recorders (wrongly called black boxes) were retrieved from both accident sites. The Lion Air recorders showed the crew fighting for control of a jet that was experiencing multiple system problems, similar to its previous flights. The recorders for the Ethiopian Airlines flight are being sent to a laboratory where experts will extract the data. Only that data can answer the pressing question: Is there truly a link between these two tragedies? Grounding all 737 Max 8s before that data is reviewed would be premature. Aviation is the safest form of public transportation because the industry and FAA carefully evaluate data and monitor risks, and then make sounds decisions based on facts not suspicions or panic. Or comments from politicians. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion Every U.S. airline with a 737 Max is carefully monitoring its fleet looking for any unusual or abnormal indications. None have been found. Until the data from the recorders are analyzed, the FAA cannot determine if an unsafe condition exists. And only if they determine that an unsafe condition exists can they ground the airplane. Unless the actions the FAA takes are consistently based on facts and data, then they arent actually enhancing safety. In the aftermath of an aviation catastrophe, everyone wants an immediate answer to ensure it doesnt happen again. The news media highlight the questions and fears in their daily (or hourly) updates. Anxiety mounts. In this case we need to let the well-proven investigative process work. This process takes time, and we have to be patient. We will know what happened to Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 soon, likely within days. Once we have that knowledge, then let us decide if the 737 Max 8 should be grounded. John Cox is an accident investigator and retired airline pilot. He has worked in aviation safety for over 35 years and is the CEO of Safety Operating Systems. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinionand Facebook JERUSALEMAirbnb recently announced that it is boycotting tiny Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The ostensible reason for the boycott is that these are contested territories. The Abkhazians and the South Ossetians, with Russian backing, have seceded from Georgia and declared their independence, moves rejected by the international community. But Airbnbs real motive for stigmatizing a forlorn corner of the world, with a population of under a quarter-million, is to prove that the house-sharing company has no special animus toward Israel. In November, Airbnb decided that residents in West Bank settlements could no longer list their homes on its website. It was only after the company faced strong criticism for stigmatizing the Jewish state or at the least fellow-traveling with the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement against Israel that Airbnb added two obscure slivers of Georgia to its list of taboo territories. In fact, Airbnb began its absurd action against Abkhazians and South Ossetians just as Florida was moving toward sanctions against the company for its selective boycott of Israel. Is our flawed democracy more morally offensive than the worlds many dictatorships? Advertisement Like many Israelis, I hope for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. I oppose West Bank settlement building and am prepared, as part of a peace agreement that would ensure Israels ability to remain a Jewish and democratic state, to cede territory that is the historic heart of the Jewish homeland. Ruling over another people is, morally and politically, a disaster for my country. The Palestinian tragedy has gone on too long, with one generation after another growing up under occupation. But boycotting Israel, even selectively, wont bring an end to the conflict or the tragedy. It will have the opposite effect. Israelis have developed an extraordinary resilience under pressure: Our nation was born in a war of attempted destruction and hasnt known a day of genuine peace ever since. Terrorist enclaves allied with Iran are ensconced along our borders. And we are no stranger to boycotts: For 70 years, we have been boycotted by most of the Arab and Muslim world, along with their allies. The movement to boycott, divest and sanction fundamentally misreads the Israeli temperament. When Israelis feel unfairly judged, they dont recoil but push back. And most Israelis are convinced that the call for boycotts is profoundly unfair. Partly thats because Israelis dont believe their country deserves unique opprobrium. The U.N. denounces Israel for its human rights violations, real and imagined, more often than it denounces violations in all other countries combined. Yet rather than eliciting contrition, the resolutions convince Israelis that the international community isnt motivated by genuine concern for the Palestinians plight but by hatred for the worlds only Jewish state. Israelis shrug: The Jews have been here before, and well survive this too. They respond in a similar way to calls to boycott, divest and sanction. Is our flawed democracy more morally offensive than the worlds many dictatorships? If Airbnb were truly committed to placing principle over business, Israelis argue, it could bar listings by property owners in Tibet, brutally occupied by China; or northern Cyprus, seized by Turkey; or the Western Sahara, occupied by Morocco. But Airbnb wont jeopardize its business interests in China, Turkey or Morocco by targeting those countries. Only Israel and those bits of Georgia get that treatment. Israelis vehemently reject the notion that their country is primarily responsible for the impasse with the Palestinians. To understand that position, consider how Israelis interpret two crucial dates. The first is December 2000, when President Clinton proposed a two-state solution. According to the mainstream Israeli narrative, the Israeli government said yes and Palestinian leaders rejected the offer, opting for four years of suicide bombings known as the second intifada. The second watershed is July 2005, when Israel unilaterally uprooted its settlements and army bases in the Gaza Strip and withdrew to the international border. That withdrawal was met by years of rocket attacks launched from Gaza on Israeli communities. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute Israelis believe that their country tried to end the occupation and the Palestinian leadership responded with terrorism. For that reason, the argument that Israel holds all the power gets nowhere here. Israelis believe the conflict isnt ultimately about occupation but the right of a Jewish-majority state to exist in any borders. Even a selective boycott reinforces the perception that Israel alone is responsible for the impasse. And such a one-sided condemnation empowers the xenophobic right in Israel, which insists that the world remains implacably hostile to the Jewish people and the only response is resistance. Rather than incite Jewish fears, the international community should hold Israeli and Palestinian leaders accountable for moves that undermine peace. Do not condemn Israel for settlement expansion without also condemning the Palestinian campaign, in media and schools, that denies Israels legitimacy and even the historical rootedness of Jews in the land we share with the Palestinians. Airbnb is embarrassing itself with its transparent boycott of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. It should not engage in efforts that drive Israelis and Palestinians further apart and alienate even Israeli liberals. Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute and author of Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. He is chairman of Open House, a coexistence project that brings together Arab and Jewish Israeli citizens. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinionand Facebook America would be more secure and stronger economically if we recognized that we have largely achieved our objectives in Afghanistan and moved aggressively to bring our troops and tax dollars home, Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Tom Udall (D-N.M.) write in an op-ed article. Today, despite vast investment in training and equipping Afghan forces, the countrys deep-seated instability, rampant corruption and, in some cases, compromised loyalties endure. Extending our commitment of combat troops will not remedy that situation. The senators are right, just as they were right eight years ago when they penned those words for the New York Times with Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) in 2011. In the near-decade since, the White House has gained a new occupant from a different party, congressional control has shifted and the United States 17-year Afghan war has been governed by ostensibly new strategies implemented by six different commanders. But the U.S. stalemate in Afghanistan remains fundamentally the same: The war is still a costly and futile project that does nothing to serve U.S. interests or move Afghanistan meaningfully toward political reconciliation or peace. So little has changed in eight years that Paul and Udall this week introduced legislation that nearly duplicates their 2011 push for withdrawal. The 2019 American Forces Going Home After Noble (AFGHAN) Service Act has updated numbers higher counts of U.S. troops killed or wounded, and a larger tally of borrowed tax dollars spent and often wasted but its core demand for a quick and responsible exit from the longest war in U.S. history is unaltered. A war undertaken right after 9/11 has devolved into a generational conflict. Advertisement All the senators arguments against the war in Afghanistan that it is a reckless strategic failure that benefits no one are no less applicable now than they were in 2011. Just as then, those against withdrawal show no sign of ever wanting this war to end. And once again, Paul and Udall are faced with a president who has promised to bring American forces home but refused to commit to any reasonably expeditious timeline. That stagnation is a telling indictment of what passes for foreign policy in Washington. Too many policymakers seem incapable, if not unwilling, of considering the big picture, of asking whether continuing this war is in any sense good, useful, or even in conformity with the will of the people they ostensibly represent. There is plenty of energy for fiddling with the details a few thousand more troops here, a new infrastructure project there, drone and other aerial strikes scaled up or down or back up again, with civilian casualty rates following suit. But in the task of adjusting anything more substantive than tactics in Afghanistan, Washington is generally content with stalemate or slow loss. A war undertaken right after 9/11 has devolved into a generational conflict; it is now being fought by soldiers born after the terrorist attack that precipitated it. And though, according to an October study from the Charles Koch Institute, 57% of Americans and seven in 10 veterans support a full U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, our government has no such clarity. Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute President Trump, like President Obama before him, campaigned on shuttering reckless wars of choice, lambasting mission creep and the ineffectual nation building it so often entails. Yet neither president has succeeded in pushing past the inertia of whats been called the foreign policy blob the Washington establishment who, as one pundit put it, whine ceaselessly about the collapse of the American security order. While the rest of the country is past ready to move on, the locus of Washingtons foreign policy conversation about Afghanistan (and our half a dozen other conflicts in the Mideast and North Africa) is about the scale at which military intervention should continue forever, not whether it should continue at all. A less narrow and more realistic assessment makes evident what Paul, Udall and other voices crying in Washingtons wilderness contend: There is no U.S.-imposed, militarily enforced solution to Afghanistans woes, and indefinitely prolonging our occupation cannot and will not change that. Our government is trying to bomb and spend Afghanistan into a political order that can only be achieved by those who must live with the outcomes, both through promising (if still uncertain) diplomatic efforts led by U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and through conversations among various factions of the Afghan people themselves. Whatever course and time frame those negotiations may take, the business at hand for Washington remains the same: U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan must come to an end. It would be an appalling if not exactly shocking state of affairs if this point must still be made another eight years hence. Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities and contributing editor at the Week. Her writing has also appeared in many publications, including CNN, Politico, and the American Conservative. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinionand Facebook To the editor: Reading about the parents who allegedly bribed and cheated to get their children into elite universities has been fascinating, not for what it revealed about wealthy and corrupt tiger parents, but as a reminder of how much wealth still determines educational opportunity in our society. I went to an Ivy League school. I got in partly because a client of my mothers skin care business decided to put me through eight years of an elite prep school in Cambridge, Mass. My benefactress bought me the scholastic intensity, resources and connections that increased my chances of admission. My friends from public school who were just as smart and hardworking didnt get in. Our system of underfunded, crumbling public schools with woefully underpaid teachers is paving the way to oligarchy. Until we devote reasonable funding to our childrens education, our society will never be a true meritocracy. Advertisement Alexander Rivkin, Los Angeles .. To the editor: Though unfair and probably illegal activities have likely been going on since the founding of elite universities, it is nevertheless good for them to be exposed. When wealthy parents give their children unfair advantages to gain admission to the nations best schools, we all suffer as it cheapens the value of an elite education. It also prevents truly talented and hardworking students from achieving their potential. For the sake of resurrecting faith in our nations elite institutions, I hope that all people suspected of being involved in this scandal are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Excellence cannot be bought; it must be earned. Michael Pravica, Henderson, Nev. .. To the editor: I keep hearing people say the purpose of an education is to get a good job. A commentator recently said that these rich kids dont need an education, because their parents can get them good jobs and they will be set for life. The reason K-12 schools are paid for by the government is because we need an educated electorate. Voters need to understand the issues that affect us all. Education helps us understand our world. Whether its science, math, English, social studies or the arts, learning is never wasted. Bribing your childs way into college, on the other hand, only teaches young people to lie and cheat. Lake Nofer, Woodland Hills .. To the editor: The rich and famous neednt worry for a moment about charges of rigging college entrance. They will feed on the publicity, get a Judge T.S. Ellis III and a slap on wrist, and all will be forgotten. Play it right and they may even get amnesty. Cary Adams, North Hollywood .. To the editor: You dont suppose that some of the people who allegedly participated in these schemes oppose affirmative action programs, do you? Tony Castanares, Hollywood .. To the editor: Wait a minute no one tried to bribe anyone to get into my alma mater, the Harvard of the west, San Diego State University? Im one outraged Aztec. Ronald O. Richards, Los Angeles Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook California loves to talk about itself in superlatives: The nations most populous state. The fifth-largest economy in the world. Producer of tech titans and Hollywood blockbusters and a whole lot of fruits and veggies. But even as it basks in its outsize economic and cultural influence, something has been gnawing at the states psyche. When it comes to presidential politics, were more backbencher than behemoth. The moving of Californias 2020 presidential primary to March 3 nipping at the heels of the four traditional early nominating states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina is the latest bid to play with the calendar in hopes of gaining more electoral relevance. This will be the fifth time since 1992 the state has moved its presidential primary. Its bounced around: June, March, February and back again. The perpetual tinkering underscores how California just cant seem to shake its political inferiority complex. Advertisement We have this impression that California is leading the nation, said Fabian Nunez, former Assembly speaker. On the other hand, its like who? Where? The portrayal of California as insignificant will certainly elicit laughter and eye-rolls beyond our borders. But across the Golden State, politicians, academics and voters tend to react to our second-rate status in visceral terms. When I see those voters in Iowa and New Hampshire getting that access [to candidates], it makes me mad, said Kim Alexander, president of California Voter Foundation, which champions election reforms. Theyre not California voters and they dont necessarily believe in the same priorities that California voters do. Kim Nalder, a political scientist at Cal State Sacramento, called Californias lack of impact on presidential elections patently absurd. It makes a lot of sense that we have a sense of resentment over that fact, Nalder said. It also makes sense our elected officials keep trying to find a way to make us relevant. 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidates: Whos in and whos on the fence? Californias recent history is lousy with lawmakers trying to time the states primary for maximum import. It rarely worked. For much of the modern primary system, the state held a traditional June nominating contest. Occasionally, it proved decisive. In 1964, Barry Goldwater, the conservative firebrand senator from Arizona, effectively clinched the GOP nomination when he won the partys primary in California. Eight years later, California Democrats sided with South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, handing him enough delegates to secure the nomination. But most cycles, Californias primary was inconsequential, prompting frustrated politicians to move the 1996 presidential primary to late March. Problem was, many other states followed Californias lead, leapfrogging to even earlier dates in the calendar. By the time the election rolled out, 31 states had already voted and Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, who was running to challenge President Clinton, had sewn up the GOP nomination. In 2008, the state shared its Feb. 5 primary with 22 other states and territories. California, the Super Tuesday crown jewel, showed mixed results in picking the eventual nominees. Republicans in the state favored Arizona Sen. John McCain, who later secured the nomination. Democrats sided with Hillary Clinton over Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who ultimately emerged the winner. While the states primaries may not have been determinative that year, they did prove successful in getting Californians to the polls. About 9 million people voted, marking the highest voter turnout rate in a primary in nearly three decades. In an effort to cut costs, the primaries were moved back to June for the next two election cycles, consolidating the presidential and statewide primary contests. When Ricardo Lara, then a Democratic state senator from Long Beach, wanted the rush of a competitive primary in 2016, he spent his time volunteering in neighboring Nevada. He found himself longing for similar action back home. I was like, why arent we in California? he said. Why is California continuing to be left out of this conversation until June? Reeling from Donald Trumps win in 2016, Lara introduced a bill to try yet again for a March primary. Gov. Jerry Brown signed the measure in 2017. I was quite honestly tired of sitting on the sidelines and seeing candidates whisk across the country and simply coming to California to raise money and leaving, said Lara, now the states insurance commissioner. Californias 2020 contest finds itself on somewhat even footing with Iowa with its storied first-in-the-nation caucuses. Because of Californias robust vote-by-mail program, balloting begins on Feb. 3, the same day Iowans caucus. Old, young, liberal, centrist: Democrats will have no end of choices for president in 2020 The Des Moines Register fretted that Californias early primary could pose an existential threat to Iowas caucuses. But Nalder said Iowans neednt worry too much about losing presidential aspirants attentions. The sort of campaign you have to run in California is different than the race youd run in Iowa and New Hampshire, Nalder said. California is far too big to campaign with book clubs and Rotary meetings. Proponents of the earlier California primary say the state doesnt necessarily have to back the eventual winner to show it has political prestige. They point to other metrics money spent on advertising, local campaign events, elevating issues dear to Californians such as climate change or homelessness to gauge success. So far, the presidential contenders have largely stuck with the standard playbook of frequent visits to Iowa coffeehouses, New Hampshire living rooms and South Carolina barbecue joints. But there have been exceptions: California Sen. Kamala Harris showed some West Coast love in launching her campaign with a massive Oakland rally, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts included a Glendale town hall in a recent multistate swing. Standing in line for the Warren event, Char Manley, a healthcare worker from Huntington Beach, nurtured a hope that maybe Warrens visit was a sign that this time, maybe, voters like her wouldnt be taken for granted. People think, Well, California is going to go blue its kind of a given, she said. We do have a diverse state. There are conservative parts of the state. Fellow attendee Ryan Perez, a speech therapist from Sylmar, commiserated with her, arguing that Californias economic might should afford it more political stature. We are the most populous state, he said, returning to Californians penchant for superlatives. We do need to have more influence. CALIFORNIA COUNTDOWN In Kamala Harris, a sequel to Ronald Reagan? Democrats, facing a big candidate field, ask: Who can beat Trump? Californias presidential primary: Heres what you need to know Christian Education Initiative Launch NEWS PROVIDED BY Exodus Mandate March 13, 2019 COLUMBIA, S.C., March 13, 2019 /Christian Newswire/ -- The Christian Education Initiative (CEI), with 18 member organizations, announces its formation for the purpose of advancing the cause of biblical Christian education in K-12 education, including college students and adults. Members of CEI include Dr. Gary House; Jay Jusino, Equipping Teachers International; Jeff Keaton (CEO), Ron Gordon (COO), Renewanation; Dr. Max Lyons & Dr. Carole Adams, Foundation of American Christian Education (F.A.C.E.); Stephen McDowell, The Providence Foundation; Chaplain E. Ray Moore (Chairman) and Gail Moore, Frontline Ministries, Inc. and Exodus Mandate; Kevin R. Novak, Deconstructing the Coliseum; Gary Porter, Constitution Leadership Initiative; Karl Priest, Exodus Mandate (West Virginia representative); Dr. Paul Michael Raymond, New Geneva Christian Leadership Academy and Reformed Bible Church; Roberto Rinaldi, Association of Principled Education Christian Schools (AECEP); Don and Chris Schanzenbach, Mission to Restore America; Mark Shepard, Planting Seeds to Renew America; Mr. Steven C. Smith, Henricus Colledge, 1619; Dan Smithwick, Nehemiah Institute; Paul and Gena Suarez, The Old Schoolhouse; Israel Wayne, Family Renewal Ministries, LLC; Pastor Travis Witt, American Transformation Company. E. Ray Moore, founder and president of Frontline Ministries, Inc., and Exodus Mandate and CEI chairman announced, "Now is the time for like-minded ministries to unite and promote a national movement to expand biblical worldview education. We are not government school reformers but are rather encouraging parents to provide a biblically based education for their churches and children. Christian children need Christian education." The Christian Education Initiative (CEI) is a Bible-based, evangelical alliance of member organizations whose purpose is to advance the Kingdom of God by growing Christian education, thus helping to fulfill the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20) and the cultural mandate (Genesis 1:28-29; Matthew 5:13-14). Dan Smithwick, president of the Nehemiah Institute, observes, "The Worldview Shift in America of the past 30 years is the greatest abandonment of the Judeo-Christian faith since our nation's founding. Results of Nehemiah Institute's unique worldview assessment, The PEERS Test, provides documented evidence that our nation's government-run educational system is systematically and intentionally erasing our roots to the Christian faith." Smithwick believes this is the single greatest threat to the future of our free Republic. He has stated in numerous conferences that, "It is time for the Church to make an unqualified decision that local churches will once again, in conjunction with parents, take on full responsibility for the education of their children." Smithwick argues that the Church must cease asking the secularized, de-Christianized school system to educate her children. CEI intends to enlighten Christians (pastors, parents, teachers, students) about the spiritual and academic failures of public education and encourage them to pursue Christian education, either Christian schools or Christian home schooling. CEI will mobilize parents and the church to reclaim its responsibility for the education of its children. Pastors who support K-12 Christian education say that there has been no "strong voice" advising them what to do. CEI is now that strong voice! CEI has the following six broad objectives: To facilitate a dramatic increase in the number of children exiting government schools and entering Christian education from a Christian school, Christian homeschool co-op model, or other Christian models. Rather than attempting to reform the unbiblical, unconstitutional government school model, we promote real reform the ideal of private biblical Christian education for their churches and children. To work for the complete privatization of all K-12 education, removing authority for education from civil governments, and returning it to parents. To establish, encourage and promote education based on a Biblical philosophy, curriculum and methodology. To encourage and promote all efforts that train parents, pastors, teachers, board members, and other educational leaders in a biblical philosophy, curriculum, and methodology of education. To promote efforts that assist parents of limited financial means to be able to afford biblical Christian education, without government entanglement, such as private scholarship programs. For more information, go to www.christianeducationinitiative.org or contact Chaplain E. Ray Moore, (Lt.Col.) USAR Ret., at the Frontline Ministries, Inc., (Exodus Mandate) ministry office, 803-714-1744, exodusmandate@gmail.com. CEI is under the auspices of Frontline Ministries, Inc. You may also contact any of the individual member organizations. SOURCE Exodus Mandate CONTACT: Chaplain E. Ray Moore, (Lt.Col.) USAR Ret., 803-714-1744, exodusmandate@gmail.com Related Links www.christianeducationinitiative.org exodusmandate.org/ Share Tweet With Californias 2020 presidential primary a year away, Democrats vying to challenge President Trump have started swinging through the Golden State. True, much of their time is spent behind closed doors, at cocktail parties and swanky dinners, where they hit up Hollywood and Silicon Valley types for money to spend in places like Iowa and New Hampshire. But the shift in the states primary from June to March has created at least some incentive for candidates to show their faces in public, as Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts did recently when she took questions before a full house at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. Another contender, former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, campaigned Friday in Anaheim and will speak to a Chicano studies class Monday at UCLA. In 2008, the Iowa Democratic caucuses set a record with nearly 240,000 participants. Compare that with California, where 14 million residents are eligible to vote in the Democratic primary: 8.6 million registered Democrats and 5.4 million voters who are unaffiliated with a party. Advertisement Where does California fit on the presidential calendar? It comes after Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, which continue to hold a privileged place at the start of the nominating process. California is the biggest of 10 states with contests on March 3, or Super Tuesday. With all those voters, I guess California will pretty much choose the nominee! Dont count on it. What?! The four opening contests dont involve as many voters or offer nearly as many delegates. Even so, they will have an enormous impact on fundraising, media coverage and the choice voters make in the contests that follow. If history is a guide, theyll drastically cull the field of candidates before California weighs in. Just like donors deciding where to send cash and television honchos assigning news coverage, voters quickly make distinctions between winners and losers, pushing at least some candidates into the campaign equivalent of a dead-end street. Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren campaigns recently in Glendale. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) Some names will remain on the ballot in California, but think of them as zombie candidates: Politically theyre dead, even if theyre going through the motions of campaigning. Iowa and New Hampshire could sort through a dozen or more contestants; Californians will be lucky to choose among three or four with a realistic shot at the nomination by the time the primary rolls around. Yes, but wont Californians start voting well before March 3? They can. Voting by mail will start on Feb. 3, the same day as the Iowa caucuses. But many Californians will probably wait to see the results in the earlier contests before casting their ballots, to make sure theyre not wasting their vote on a candidate with no chance of winning the nomination. Thus, Iowa, New Hampshire, and to a lesser extent Nevada and South Carolina, will be as important as ever in separating contenders from pretenders. Can I change my mail-in vote if my candidate drops out before the primary? Nope. Once you drop your ballot in the mail, youre out of luck. But doesnt California offer a ton of delegates? Yes, more than any other state. After the party sets the final rules later this year, the number will likely exceed 400, out of the roughly 1,885 needed to win the nomination. Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro, a former U.S. Housing secretary, plans to campaign Monday at UCLA. (Charles Krupa / Associated Press) That sounds like an awful lot and good reason to vigorously compete in California. It is a lot. But its super-expensive to compete in California, which has about a dozen media markets, especially compared with the earlier-voting states. If a candidate walked away with more than 400 delegates under a winner-take-all system, they would get a big boost toward the nomination, or potentially wield a good deal of influence at the Democrats national convention in July. But the allocation of delegates will likely produce something closer to a split decision, owing to the way theyre divvied up. Here it gets a bit technical: The largest number of delegates will be divvied in proportion to the vote in each of the states 53 congressional districts. Candidates who fall short of 15% of the popular vote get no delegates. Another big share of delegates will be allocated according to the statewide vote, but none will be awarded to candidates who fail to meet that 15% threshold. So California wont be decisive? Its highly doubtful, because no candidate is likely to walk away with a monster trove of delegates. Take, for instance, the last two Democratic primaries. In 2008 and 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, respectively, by 8 percentage points. Not exactly a squeaker. But she netted only 38 more delegates than Obama and 33 more than Sanders, which didnt turn the nominating contest upside down. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont campaigned for Hillary Clinton after she beat him in the 2016 race for the Democratic presidential nomination. (Andrew Harnik / Associated Press) That said, a Super Tuesday headline on election night Candidate X wins California could help some when it comes to bragging rights, which can translate into money and momentum even if the result changes once all the ballots are counted. Huh? Mail ballots can arrive as late as the Friday after the election and are counted if they are postmarked by March 3. Californias election officials then have a month to verify the eligibility of those ballots. That means, in a tight race, the outcome reported election night could end up being different a few weeks later. Well, at least Kamala Harris can count on carrying her home state! Not necessarily. Its true, Californias junior senator starts with an advantage, having three times won statewide elections. But history shows that voters dont want to waste their vote on a candidate going nowhere, even if they do have a local return address. In 1980, then-Gov. Jerry Brown finished third, far behind then-President Carter and Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. In 1992, as the states former governor, Brown finished a distant second behind Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. Thats why Harris campaign is placing a premium on South Carolinas primary, hoping a win there will launch her toward victory in the California primary three days later. Sen. Kamala Harris of California campaigns at an Iowa Democratic Party Black Caucus dinner in Des Moines. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) What about Republicans? For now, President Trump faces scant competition, although former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld has opened an exploratory committee. Do Republicans use the same system as Democrats? No. Only registered Republicans can vote in the GOP primary. Also, most of the Republican delegates are awarded on a winner-take-all basis 159 by congressional district and 13 more for the statewide winner. In 2016, Californias 172-member delegation to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland was the biggest of any state and they all went to Trump. So once again Iowa and New Hampshire will have all the fun? Well not all the fun. The average February temperature in those states is in the 30s. Kick back on the beach as they shiver through their contests. You might feel better. CALIFORNIA COUNTDOWN How Californias early primary illustrates the states political inferiority complex Democrats, facing a big candidate field, ask: Who can beat Trump? In Kamala Harris, a sequel to Ronald Reagan? Months after taking control of the House on a promise to hold President Trump accountable, Democrats are signaling that theyre unlikely to pursue impeachment, lowering expectations that the special counsels report will spur an immediate attempt to unseat the president. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said in an interview with the Washington Post released Monday that impeachment is too divisive to pursue unless theres something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan. On Tuesday, rank-and-file Democrats largely fell in line. Some said the House must first complete its own investigations to determine whether Trump committed impeachable offenses. Others said even if they determine he did, an impeachment process would be too harmful to the country unless the majority of Congress and the American people agreed. Pelosis remarks appear to be part of a larger strategy Democrats are pursuing to downplay special counsel Robert S. Mueller IIIs much-anticipated report and prevent Republicans from using the threat of impeachment to rally conservatives ahead of the 2020 presidential race. Advertisement The strategy a milder version of which was deployed during the 2018 midterm campaign is based partly on a fear that the Mueller report will not provide overwhelming proof of collusion with Russia or obstruction of justice, according to several Democrats who did not want to be identified discussing the partys game plan. Its also an acknowledgment that the risk of failure or backfire is huge. Even if an impeachment measure got through the Democratic-controlled House, the Republican-controlled Senate is unlikely to convict Trump. And pursuing a partisan kamikaze mission would give Trump a convenient political foil for the 2020 election, many Democrats fear. He has committed impeachable offenses, undoubtedly. That is a guarantee at this point, said Rep. Katie Hill (D-Agua Dulce). Really what its about is if were going to do anything with impeachment, we have to have Republican support. For Republicans to move, we have to get the American people to move, and I think thats what were seeing happen. Looming large in the minds of veteran Democrats is the impeachment of President Clinton. The Republican-controlled House voted to impeach him, but the GOP wasnt able to get two-thirds of the Senate to convict him. Clintons political contemporaries believed that the effort was viewed unsympathetically by the public and hurt Republicans in the next midterm. House Democrats are also trying to refocus public attention on their own investigations, which just got underway. The House Judiciary Committee recently asked 81 people or organizations for documents related to the president and the Trump organization. The Mueller report, expected in the coming weeks, is likely to dominate Washington, potentially blocking a laundry list of bills Democrats hope to approve this year. The House will vote this week on a resolution to require that the report be made public amid concern that the Justice Department may sit on it or release only a heavily redacted version. The American people have been waiting two years to hear what Bob Mueller has to say, and were going to fight to make sure they do get to hear that, said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank). By coming out against impeachment, Pelosi is putting herself between the partys more liberal voters and activists who are clamoring for impeachment and moderate Democrats many of whom were just elected to their first term who are more skeptical about impeachment. Those moderates, many of whom will go before voters next week at town hall meetings during the congressional recess, now can redirect some of that frustration to Pelosi, who has long been willing to take the heat for her rank-and-file lawmakers. But announcing her opposition to impeachment even before Mueller has released his report is unlikely to sit well with everyone in the progressive wing of the party. Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) still plans to pursue impeachment and potentially force a House vote. He forced a similar measure last year when the House was controlled by Republicans. Only 66 Democrats voted on a procedural measure in support of the articles of impeachment. But for the most part, most Democrats appear in alignment with Pelosis position. House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, Conference Chairman Hakeem Jeffries of New York and even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the highest-profile freshman and a progressive leader, said they are willing to tap on the brakes. Ive always been very clear that Im supportive and how I would vote in terms of impeachment, she said at a news conference in New York last week. I understand that leadership may want to build a stronger case and subpoena more records or figure out whats happening, perhaps in the Mueller investigation. She said she would defer to party leadership. The latest from Washington More stories from Jennifer Haberkorn In a day of bitter setbacks for President Trumps former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort was excoriated by a federal judge, sentenced to another 3 years in prison in the Russia investigation and then swiftly indicted for mortgage fraud in New York. The rapid-fire developments Wednesday boosted the time Manafort is slated to serve in prison for tax evasion, bank fraud and an illegal lobbying campaign on behalf of Ukraines former government, crimes prosecuted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. For the record: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Manafort had worked on the campaign that elected President Ford. Ford, who became president when Richard Nixon resigned, lost his 1976 election to Jimmy Carter. But the abrupt announcement of a 16-count indictment by the Manhattan district attorneys office, less than an hour after Manafort was sentenced in Washington, could pose a bigger danger to the former globetrotting political consultant. A presidential pardon cannot apply to state charges. Trump briefly weighed in on the fate of the veteran Republican operative who helmed his presidential campaign for several months in the summer of 2016, including the tumult preceding the Republican National Convention. Advertisement I feel very badly for Paul Manafort, Trump told reporters at the White House, calling it a very sad situation. The president said he had not thought about issuing a pardon, and he once again slammed the Mueller investigation as a hoax. Manaforts lawyers clearly hoped to appeal to the president, holding a brief news conference outside the federal courthouse after the sentencing. Echoing Trumps constant denials, Kevin Downing said several times that there was no collusion with Russia during the presidential campaign. Earlier, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson offered a scathing assessment of Manaforts crimes and career, and she largely dismissed his belated claims of remorse. During a nearly three-hour hearing, Jackson said a significant portion of Manaforts career appeared spent gaming the system. She added 3 years to the nearly four-year prison sentence he was given last week in a related case in Virginia. Manafort, 69, has been in jail since last June, when Jackson revoked his bail after prosecutors accused him of attempted witness tampering. With credit for nine months served, he now faces nearly seven more years in federal prison. He was sentenced twice first by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria, Va., where he was convicted of financial crimes, and then by Jackson in Washington, D.C., where he pleaded guilty to conspiracy because the cases were prosecuted separately. Kevin Downing, Paul Manaforts attorney, speaks to reporters after leaving the courthouse where President Trumps former campaign chairman was sentenced. (Cliff Owen / Associated Press) Whatever hopes Manafort had to escape prison through a presidential pardon were dampened when Manhattan Dist. Atty. Cyrus Vance announced he was accusing Manafort with a years-long mortgage fraud scheme. No one is beyond the law in New York, Vance said in a statement. Manafort was indicted on 16 charges of mortgage fraud, attempted fraud, conspiracy, falsifying business records and scheming to defraud. The most serious charges carry a maximum sentence of 25 years if he is convicted. Although the state indictment involves some of the properties and loans cited in Manaforts federal trial in Virginia, Vance is pursuing different charges in an attempt to avoid legal prohibitions on double jeopardy, which bars defendants from being put on trial for the same crime twice. Manaforts legal team did not have an immediate response to the new indictment. The latest indictment means Manafort who worked on campaigns for Presidents Reagan, Ford and George H.W. Bush as well as Trump will probably remain mired in courtroom battles for the foreseeable future. Mueller did not charge Manafort with crimes related to his leadership of Trumps campaign or any coordination with the Kremlin-backed operation during the 2016 campaign, the chief focus of the special counsel inquiry. But Manaforts legal problems have worsened since he was first indicted in October 2017. During his Virginia trial in August, prosecutors convinced a jury that he used offshore banks and phony companies to avoid paying $6 million in federal taxes, and then obtained fraudulent bank loans to support his lavish lifestyle. Manafort was convicted on eight counts. Manafort then pleaded guilty in September to two counts of conspiracy to avoid a second trial in Washington. Manafort wore a dark suit and purple tie to his sentencing Wednesday, not the green jail-issued jumpsuit he wore to his sentencing in Virginia last week. Reading a statement from his wheelchair his lawyers say hes suffered gout and other ailments behind bars, although Jackson noted they havent provided any proof he asked the judge for leniency and offered an emotional apology. This case has taken everything away from me already, he said, including his houses, financial assets, life insurance policy and trust fund accounts set aside for his children and grandchildren. He begged to be allowed to return to his 66-year-old wife as soon as possible. She needs me, and I need her, Manafort said. Chided last week by Ellis for not expressing more profound remorse for his crimes, Manafort sought to remove any doubt when addressing Jackson. Let me be very clear, I accept responsibility for the acts that have brought me here today, he said. But Jackson was not convinced, noting that he had not shown any regret until he faced sentencing. She also dismissed Downings argument that Manafort probably would not have faced charges but for his short stint running Trumps campaign, suggesting he was a victim. Saying Im sorry I got caught is not an inspiring plea for leniency, the judge said. While Ellis last week described Manafort as living an otherwise blameless life because he had no previous criminal record, Jackson offered a searing appraisal. She accused him of evading taxes to sustain a lifestyle at the most opulent and extravagant level possible, complete with more houses than a family can enjoy and more suits than a man can wear. And she said its hard to overstate the number of Manaforts lies and frauds. Jackson reserved her harshest comments for Manaforts conduct since his original indictment. She noted he had violating a gag order by ghost-writing a column for an English-language newspaper in Ukraine and sought to tamper with witnesses by asking them to lie about his lobbying operation. His actions showed ongoing contempt for, and his belief that he had the right to manipulate the court proceedings, she said. Jackson also said he squandered his shot at a lighter sentence by lying to prosecutors after cutting a plea deal in her court last September. Manafort lied about, among other topics, an incident in which he shared polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian-born business associate, while he was serving as Trumps campaign chairman. Muellers office later said Kilimnik had ties to Russian intelligence services. Manaforts two sentences will overlap. Ellis imposed a prison term of nearly four years, while Jackson gave Manafort a little more than seven years. However, part of Jacksons sentence will be served concurrently with Ellis because they involve some of the same crimes, meaning Manaforts total sentence is roughly 7 years. Manafort will receive credit for the nine months hes spent behind bars, bringing his prison term to under seven years. It is the longest sentence issued to anyone yet from Muellers investigation into Russian efforts to sway the 2016 election. The special counsels office has indicted or brought charges against 34 people, including several of Trumps former top aides. Michael Cohen, Trumps former personal lawyer, was sentenced to three years in prison for tax evasion, bank fraud, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress. He is scheduled to report to prison on May 6. Michael Flynn, Trumps former national security advisor, has pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition. He is continuing to cooperate with Justice Department and has not been sentenced. President Trumps pick for a California seat on the 9th Circuit apologized Wednesday for failing to disclose to the Senate dozens of articles he wrote in college, saying he regretted his youthful positions on sexual harassment, gays and AIDS. California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris had accused Los Angeles litigator Kenneth Kiyul Lee, 43, of hiding about 75 articles from the Senate Judiciary Committee, which heard testimony from Lee and another Trump nominee, Los Angeles appellate attorney Daniel P. Collins, 56. Many of Lees undisclosed writings touched on controversial topics, including affirmative action, politics on college campuses, abortion, gay rights and ebonics. Most were uncovered by journalists and the senators staff. In a Feb. 10, 1994, Cornell Review article, Lee decried Clinton-era ads promoting condom use to prevent the spread of HIV and asserted that a scientific explanation exists for the higher incidence of AIDS in the gay community. Homosexuals are more promiscuous than heterosexuals, and thus their risk factor increases exponentially. Advertisement Lee said Wednesday he regretted writing the article, which he said was an attempt to defend President Reagans legacy fighting AIDS. I absolutely would not write that today. I truly regret writing that. Frankly, as an 18-year-old, I didnt know anything, Lee said. Looking at that now 28 years later, frankly Im embarrassed by it. In a Feb. 8, 1996, Cornell Review article headlined Feminist Follies, Lee wrote, According to these radical feminists, an innocuous hug is tantamount to sexual assault a loaded term that sounds like rape. These wild accusations are consistent with gender feminist rhetoric: they exaggerate the charges to make them sound more alarming to win support for their political agenda. Lee said the college writings reflected a lack of understanding and maturity. Id like to think Ive matured as a person over the last two and a half decades, he said. Several of Lees writings that were not initially disclosed were from the same date and publication as articles he did produce. But Lee said Wednesday the omissions were inadvertent, noting that many were written before the spread of the internet. I made every good faith effort to collect everything that I had. I even went to my moms old house, went through the garage, Lee said. I apologize for this. I understand its caused inconvenience and is frustrating. It is frustrating for me as well. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) responded that Lee only initially provided 11 articles to the Judiciary Committee and that Senate staff easily found the missing articles in their routine background search. Lee has repeatedly supplemented his Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire in the last month as more articles have become public that he did not initially disclose, either when he first submitted the lengthy committee questionnaire that all nominees complete or when interviewed by a judicial review committee set up by Feinstein and Harris. Most were written while Lee was a student at Cornell University, but some were written in the last 10 years while he was a practicing attorney. The hearing was the first chance Californias senators had had to publicly grill Trumps 9th Circuit picks to fill vacancies in the state. They were nominated over the objections of both Feinstein and Harris. For nearly two years, the senators have appeared to have slowed Trumps ability to fill three California vacancies on the 9th Circuit, even as Trump raced to put conservatives judges in other circuits around the country. The president has filled a record 36 circuit court vacancies in just over two years, including flipping the 3rd Circuit from majority Democratic appointees to majority Republican appointees. The liberal 9th Circuit has been the source of most of Trumps court losses to date, and conservatives have been anxious to begin filling the vacancies. Late last year, the administration seemed to have given up on trying to find nominees acceptable to the California senators and plunged ahead without their approval. Lee, an immigrant from South Korea, attended Cornell as an undergraduate and earned a law degree at Harvard. He worked on Capitol Hill and as associate counsel in the George W. Bush White House before entering private practice. The committee didnt vote on either nominee Wednesday and wasnt expected to act before the end of the month. Pivotal GOP swing vote Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina told the State newspaper Wednesday that Lee had shown that he had evolved since college. Scott said he was leaning toward supporting Lees confirmation despite the writings, a move that leaves Feinstein and Harris with little chance of getting enough votes to block Lee. Feinstein said the California senators also had questions about Collins temperament and rigidity and said their judicial review commissions found he had a history of taking strong litigation positions for no reason other than attempting to overturn precedent and push legal boundaries. Trump has also nominated Daniel A. Bress, 39, a Washington, D.C.-area partner with Kirkland & Ellis, to the 9th Circuit in California. Bress, born in California, has not lived in the state since high school. The states senators have questioned whether he has sufficient ties to California. His confirmation hearing has not been scheduled. The American Bar Assn. rates both Collins and Lee as well-qualified to serve on the 9th Circuit. It has not yet rated Bress. The latest from Washington More stories from Sarah D. Wire He has demanded goddamned steam to power the Navys aircraft carriers and prefers a wall to drones and other technology to secure the countrys southern border. He has rejected the scientific consensus on climate change and repeatedly, wrongly, pointed to occasional wintry weather as proof that hes right. And this week, amid a safety scare involving Boeings 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 airplanes, President Trump complained that modern jets are too complex to fly. He added: I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. The president, a septuagenarian who tweets yet doesnt email, text or use computers, and openly marvels at the invention of the wheel, is not shy about his old-school attitude toward technology. That backward-looking approach is at the core of his nostalgia-based appeal to voters longing for a supposedly better, simpler era of American greatness. Advertisement Yet this worldview represents a break from the generally futuristic stance of Trumps predecessors in his lifetime. His most recent comments in a pair of tweets Tuesday morning alluding to the Boeing models involved in two calamitous crashes in six months cast into vivid relief the puzzling, even perilous mind-set of a 21st-century chief executive so stubbornly change-averse and all but indifferent to technological advancement in an era of intense global competition. It is profoundly concerning, and its not just about scientific evidence but evidence more broadly, said John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Obama administration. He just says and tweets whatever he thinks from his gut, not from data or evidence or facts. And thats extremely dangerous dangerous in terms of national security, foreign relations, all kinds of areas. There are 87,000 flights a day in the United States, Holdren added. We prove 87,000 times every day that planes are not too complex to fly. Whatever the cause of the latest crash Sunday in Ethiopia that killed everyone on board, following the catastrophic accident in Indonesia in October, Trump waited until Wednesday afternoon to order the MAX models to be grounded indefinitely pending investigation. Fifty-one nations, including the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, already had ordered the planes out of service, and members of Congress in both parties urged the administration to do so as well. Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who donated to Trumps inaugural committee and traveled with him to Hanoi last month to celebrate orders for MAX planes from three Vietnamese airlines, spoke with the president Tuesday after his tweets about the alleged danger of planes complexity. The company has been planning to update the flight control system in 737-MAX jets to fix issues with a stall prevention system. When Boeings 787 Dreamliner model had a battery fire problem in 2013, during the Obama administration, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded the aircraft for six weeks until a fix was in place. Yet fire incidents continued into 2014, prompting Trump to tweet in March of that year, Lithium ion batteries should not be allowed to be used in aircraft. I wont fly on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner it uses those batteries. In his tweet Tuesday, Trump complained that planes are so complicated they require computer scientists from MIT, and added, I dont know about you, but I dont want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. That provoked a parody from The Onion, a satirical website. President Donald Trump complained Tuesday about the overly complicated controls needed to operate modern-day doors, its purported news story said, quoting the president as having groused: The only Americans who know how to operate these complex doors are MIT engineers and rocket scientists, and regular people cant go inside or outside anymore. Trumps rivals arent amused. Evidence and science are not as popular in this administration, but our lives depend on this administrations ability to understand and process this information, said Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., who, at 37, is the youngest of about a dozen declared Democratic presidential candidates. Your crazy uncle can be amusing, but when you put him in charge it can really leave you at a disadvantage. Under Trump, the FAA hasnt had a permanent administrator for 14 months. The president, who owns a Boeing 757 and considered naming his private pilot to lead the regulatory agency, has long been fascinated with aviation and unabashed about sharing his opinions on air safety. Still, he has proposed cutting the funding for the agency each year. His just-released fiscal 2020 budget proposal would curb spending for the Department of Transportation by nearly a quarter. Trump is a real estate guy, not a technology person. His administration has been slow to react to many digital developments, said Darrell M. West, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. It wasnt until January that the Senate confirmed Kelvin Droegemeier, an extreme-weather expert, to serve as the presidents top science and technology advisor, leaving the job vacant for nearly two years. Trump didnt nominate anyone until last August. Droegemeiers job is to advise the president on federal research spending and policies in areas including artificial intelligence, climate, medicine and cybersecurity. His appointment came long after Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord in 2017 and ended a number of Obama administration regulations aimed at combating climate change. Congress has mostly ignored his proposed reductions in scientific research investments. In February, Trump signed an executive order outlining a national strategy on artificial intelligence that called for increasing access to federal data, providing financial support for research and development, enhancing digital infrastructures, and improving workforce development. The order did not include additional funding to accomplish those goals, however. Thats a dangerous mixed message the president is sending, said West, who noted that Chinas investment in artificial intelligence technology far exceeds that of the U.S. Trump seems slow to take advantage of the opportunities of technology and doesnt worry enough about the risks in terms of national security and economic competitiveness. Chinas president, Xi Jinping, has set a goal of surpassing the United States technologically by the year 2030. The core theme of this president and this campaign is the idea that you can turn back the clock, that you can make America great again, that the answer for people worried about change is were going to stop it and reverse it and thats just not true and its just not possible, said Buttigieg, whose generational appeal is part of his presidential pitch. Theres obviously a shallow appeal to leaders telling us we dont have to change, he said. But at a moment when automation and AI are deeply transforming our economy and our society, wed like to believe we have leaders who get it. On another defining issue, Trump proudly expresses his skepticism that humans are contributing to climate change. Asked last year whether hed seen his own administrations dire forecast on the potential impact of global warming, Trump replied, I dont believe it. During a rollicking, partisan address this month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump mocked Democrats for proposing a Green New Deal, joking that a shift to wind energy would impede his ability to watch television on breeze-less days. Anti-intellectualism has been quite common in American political culture for a very long time, said Emrys Westacott, a professor of philosophy at Alfred University in New York. Trump is probably the most extreme example of a president who consciously tries to manipulate and exploit the resentment felt by those who feel they are being left out or looked down upon by the elites. Noting that the president gets quite a lot of support from communities where traditional jobs have disappeared due to automation, Westcott said, Of course, Trump prefers to blame immigrants or unfair foreign competition, or companies that move operations overseas. He added: I suspect that people are somewhat aware that automation is actually a major factor bringing about the decline of certain sorts of work, and manage to suppress this awareness when Trump announces to cheers that he will revive industries like coal mining and steel. The latest from Washington More stories from Eli Stokols The Trump administration, the last major holdout worldwide to ground the Boeing 737 Max, joined dozens of other nations Wednesday in temporarily parking the planes, citing new data it says revealed similarities between two deadly crashes. The safety of the American people and all people is our paramount concern, President Trump said during a meeting at the White House only hours after Canada barred 737 Max flights. All of those planes are grounded, effective immediately. For the record: An earlier version of this story showed a photograph of a Boeing 737 that was not a Max 8. Following Trumps announcement, the Federal Aviation Administration said it made the decision as a result of the data-gathering process and new evidence collected at the site of an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max crash Sunday that killed all 157 people aboard. The three U.S. airlines that fly the 737 Max Southwest, American and United said they would comply with the order and were working to rebook passengers. Advertisement Southwest, with 34 of the affected planes, said customers booked on canceled 737 Max flights could rebook. There will be no additional fees or fare differences for travelers who rebook within 14 days of their original travel date between their original destinations, Southwest said. American, with 24 planes affected, and United, with 16, also said they would work with customers to minimize disruptions. American noted that it operates 85 flights with the 737 Max out of 6,700 total departures in its system. United said that since the 737 Max accounts for about only 40 of its flights daily, we do not anticipate a significant operational impact as a result of this order. Grounding the planes marked a reversal for the FAA, which said Tuesday it had found no basis for taking such action. Daniel K. Elwell, acting administrator of the FAA, told CNBC that the decision was made based on enhanced satellite data that showed the track of the Ethiopian Airlines flight was very close to that of a Lion Air 737 Max flight that crashed off Indonesia in October. We dont make decisions about grounding aircraft ... without actionable data. In this case the actionable data did not arrive until today, Elwell said. Initial data about the Ethiopian Airlines flight track were very incomplete and raw, he said. The flight took place in an area that is not served by radar, so the FAA used satellite data that had to be enhanced. Elwell said the decision to ground the Boeing 737 Max airliners was his, but because of the magnitude of this action, he consulted with Trump and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao along the way. They agreed with his decision, Elwell said. The FAA now is awaiting data from the black box of the Ethiopian Airlines plane as the agency decides how long to keep the 737 Max airliners grounded. Flightradar24, a website that tracks air traffic, tweeted a map showing the 737 Max planes in the air at the time of Trumps announcement. President Trump has stated all US #737MAX will be grounded. The FAA has informed airlines. Awaiting official statement and/or Airworthiness Directive from @FAANews. Currently active MAX flights shown below. pic.twitter.com/xk4XEdl1wa Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) March 13, 2019 Aviation observers have raised questions about the Max version of the 737, which is the most-produced aircraft in Boeings line of jetliners, with more than 5,000 on order worldwide. The Air Line Pilots Assn. said it supported the decision to ground the planes and called on investigative authorities responsible to expedite the investigation of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and identify any corrective action if necessary in order to return this aircraft to service. Trumps announcement came after he spoke on the phone Tuesday with Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg following the presidents tweet that airplanes were becoming far too complex to fly. Boeing confirmed that Muilenburg told the president the 737 Max was safe but declined to elaborate on the call. Aviation authorities in Europe, India, China and elsewhere grounded the plane in the aftermath of Sundays crash in Ethiopia and Indonesias Lion Air disaster, both of which involved the 737 Max. Full coverage: Boeing 737 Max planes grounded in U.S. and around the world following 2 deadly crashes (Los Angeles Times) Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau told reporters that Canada banned the plane from operating in the country, or flying over it, because of inconclusive data suggesting similarities between the crashes. Boeing said Wednesday it had full confidence in the safety of the 737 Max. However, after consultation with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and aviation authorities and its customers around the world, Boeing has determined out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircrafts safety to recommend to the FAA the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of 371 737 Max aircraft. Boeings stock, meanwhile, stabilized after dropping sharply Monday and Tuesday, wiping out $30 billion of its total market value. The stock edged up $1.73, or 0.5%, to $377.14 a share on Wednesday. The stock prices of U.S. carriers that rely on the 737 Max saw similar dips. The last time the FAA ordered a plane grounded was in 2013. The agency ordered airlines to cease operations of Boeings then-new 787 Dreamliner after five fires in five days originating in the planes lithium ion battery. None of the planes crashed, and Boeing implemented a fix for the battery overheating problem. The plane has gone on to be a mainstay of airlines worldwide. Mounting concerns about 737 Max aircraft have reportedly prompted some airlines to reconsider their pending orders. (Los Angeles Times) Kenya Airways is reevaluating plans to buy the plane and might switch to the rival Airbus A320 or upgrade to Boeings larger 787 Dreamliner, Bloomberg reported the carriers chairman, Michael Joseph, as saying. In addition, Indonesias Lion Air is moving to drop a $22-billion order for the 737 in favor of the Airbus model, Bloomberg reported an unidentified source as saying. It was the Lion Air crash on Oct. 29, which killed 189 people, that first raised questions about the aircraft, and analysts have focused on software in the new jetliner intended to stop the plane from stalling. But maintenance issues and possible pilot error related to the software also are being evaluated, and the crash remains under investigation. The union for American Airliness pilots, the Allied Pilots Assn., said Tuesday that Americans 737 Max planes were unique because they were the only ones equipped with two displays, one for each pilot, related to the software in question. That provides an extra layer of awareness and warning, the union said. The union said it remains confident in the Boeing 737 Max and in our members ability to safely fly it. The FAA also had been criticized by some analysts, politicians and others for not joining Canada and other nations initially in grounding the 737 Max while awaiting more clarity about the cause of the crashes. But John Cox, a retired airline pilot and accident investigator, had defended the agency. In an op-ed column in The Times, Cox wrote that the FAA is right to wait. While both accidents are tragic, its not at all clear that they have the same cause. Times staff writers Noah Bierman, Alexa Diaz and Jim Puzzanghera and contributed to this report. MORE ON BOEING The 737 Max fallout poses a risk to Boeings finances and its reputation Airlines rethink Boeing 737 orders after second crash in five months Chinese air safety regulators gain global influence as FAA refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max A landmark California law signed last year to enact the strongest privacy rules in the country and regulate the online marketplace of personal data is caught in a tug of war between industry lobbyists who want to weaken it and consumer groups that say it doesnt go far enough. The California Consumer Privacy Act, which takes effect in January, will grant people in the state new rights to control the information that businesses gather about them and sell at a time when tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon are facing pressure to change their data collection and advertising practices. But as state Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra puts together new regulations to implement the law, advocacy groups are seeking more protections for consumers and business groups are working to rein it in, arguing that it will stifle competition and burden companies struggling to comply with a much broader privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union. Legislative Republicans and Democrats have introduced at least eight bills that would build on Californias privacy rules or expand them, giving consumers the right to sue over abuses or requiring companies to obtain permission from customers before collecting data. Business and tech industry lobbyists are fighting some of the most sweeping proposals and asking the attorney general to narrow the scope of his rules, which must be written by July 2020. Advertisement While the debate plays out in California legislative committees and public forums, it has also filtered into discussions at tech conferences and in Congress about the creation of a federal privacy law and whether it should limit states in setting their own regulations. Industry lobbyists have counted at least 30 statewide proposals that they argue could create a patchwork of disparate rules nationwide. Testifying at a recent hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Roslyn Layton of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute said California had already set the bar. It isnt fair that one state gets to dictate for everyone else, she said. Amid the flurry of activity, Assemblyman Ed Chau, who co-authored the law, has met with congressional allies such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) in an attempt to prevent federal efforts from undermining the state law. Data is now our new oil no, it is more valuable than oil, Chau said, using a favorite expression of privacy advocates. I dont want to go backward because I think California will serve as a model for the rest of the nation, and I want to drive home that point. So far, he seems to have support for his cause. Pelosi wants a federal privacy bill to set nationwide standards. But Americans have benefited from state privacy and data breach laws, so their role as policy innovator and law enforcer must be respected, said her spokesman, Drew Hammill. As companies such as Facebook face pressure to change their data collection practices, California lawmakers are debating whether to expand on a new landmark privacy law. (Jeff Chiu / Associated Press) California lawmakers agree to new consumer privacy rules that would avert showdown on the November ballot An unlikely leader in the states resistance to the Trump administration on tech, immigration and climate change policies, Chau, a business-aligned Democrat from Arcadia, rarely wades into the limelight. But he first took on internet privacy in 2017 when he proposed that California embrace a set of federal regulations rolled back that year by President Trump and Congress. Like the federal rules, his initial bill would have required internet service providers such as Verizon, Comcast and AT&T to get permission from customers before using, selling or allowing access to their information. The bill sunk after a behind-the-scenes battle that pitted major telecom companies against state internet service providers and consumer privacy advocates. A trio of activists San Francisco real estate developer Alastair Mactaggart, former CIA analyst Mary Ross and finance industry executive Rick Arney then teamed up in an attempt to put their own proposal before voters with a 2018 ballot initiative. As their group, Californians for Consumer Privacy, collected signatures, support for new privacy rules grew among consumers. Equifax and Uber were hit by high-profile data breaches. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress in a federal probe into how data firm Cambridge Analytica obtained the information of tens of millions of the platforms users to help the Trump presidential campaign. The stars were somewhat aligned, said Chau, who along with other state legislators struck a deal with activists to enact major privacy rules and avoid a battle at the ballot box. The result was a state law that some saw as a good compromise, or GDPR light, Chau said, referencing the European Unions far-ranging General Data Protection Regulation, which took full effect in May. Unlike GDPR, which requires companies to ask consumers to opt in to having their data collected or sold and sets high fines for violations, Californias privacy law gives people the chance to opt out and have their data deleted, and sets smaller penalties for violators. Both laws allow people to ask companies what personal information is collected about them and why, and request that their data be deleted. They include some protections to prevent discrimination against customers and require companies to obtain permission from parents before gathering personal data from children under 16. Among those working to keep the California law intact is Mactaggart, who says it was crafted with business in mind. We drew on the work of experts who have been working on this for a decade, he said at a recent Senate hearing, pushing back against claims that the law was crafted in a rush. But businesses and trade associations say that some of the laws definitions are ambiguous and could lead to unintended consequences and inconsistent implementation. For example, critics say it is unclear whether the laws definition of personal information would allow anyone in a household to request someones data, potentially putting information in the hands of an estranged spouse or roommate. This is going to cause great consumer harm, and it puts businesses in a Catch-22, said Sarah Boot of the California Chamber of Commerce at a February public forum held by the attorney generals office. They could be liable if they dont respond to a request they find suspicious, but they can also be liable if they disclose specific pieces of sensitive information about a consumer to a fraudster. Owners of small and midsize businesses say the cost of hiring additional staff to comply with the law will be a burden. To head off the potential financial hit, some businesses are seeking exemptions, including publishers that rely on personal data for ad revenue, gaming companies that use the information to prevent harassment and nonprofits that analyze it to meet fundraising goals. Consumer advocacy groups want to ensure that people have a clear and easy way to globally opt out of having their personal data collected and sold, regardless of whether they can decide to opt out for certain types of data. It is critically important, they say, to close loopholes in the law that could create a pay for privacy model in California, giving companies permission to charge higher prices or offer lesser quality services to customers if they exercise their privacy rights. Alastair Mactaggart, left, the sponsor of a proposed internet privacy initiative, backed a similar bill by Assemblyman Ed Chau, right. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) Proposed California ballot initiative would give consumers more control over their personal information online Sweeping changes are being weighed at the Capitol, where Gov. Gavin Newsom has lauded state lawmakers for passing the privacy law and has earmarked $4.8 million for the attorney general to enact the rules. Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara), who has for years called for stricter regulation of tech companies, worked with Becerra to introduce legislation that would remove a provision permitting companies to avoid penalties if they notify consumers of data breaches within 30 days and allow consumers to seek legal remedies. At a Senate committee hearing Tuesday, she criticized large businesses that have argued that giving consumers the right to sue would lead to costly litigation, saying Facebook complaining of an $800,000 lawsuit was laughable. They spend $800,000 on their office Christmas party, she said. The most far-reaching proposal, the Privacy for All bill, was introduced by Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) with the support of more than 30 privacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union of California, Common Sense Kids Action, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It would bring the state law closer in line with GDPR, creating an opt-in option for consumers and stronger protections against pay for privacy practices that some say target black and Latino communities. Meanwhile, Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham (R-Templeton) has introduced a package of proposals with three fellow Republicans to require social media platforms to permanently delete data at the request of the user and ensure businesses notify consumers of a breach within 72 hours. We are in a world now that everyone is on social media, uses phones, has smart speakers, he said. There is a lot of cool tech evolving really rapidly, but somewhat lost on that is the needs of consumers. California bill aims to revive broadband privacy rules that were killed by Trump and Congress jazmine.ulloa@latimes.com Follow @jazmineulloa on Twitter. Gov. Gavin Newsom will sign an executive order on Wednesday to impose a moratorium on the death penalty in California, vowing that no prisoner in the state will be executed while he is in office because of a belief that capital punishment is discriminatory, unjust and inconsistent with our bedrock values. The order will prevent the state from putting prisoners to death by granting temporary reprieves to all 737 condemned inmates on Californias death row, the largest in the nation. It will immediately close the execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison and scuttle the states ongoing efforts to devise a constitutional method for lethal injection. No inmate will be released and no sentence or conviction will be altered, the order says. Newsom joins governors in Oregon, Colorado and Pennsylvania who have imposed moratoriums on executions in those states, all using executive powers. The action runs counter to the expressed will of California voters, who over the last six years rejected two statewide ballot measures to repeal the death penalty and favored fast-tracking the appeals process. Advertisement Our death penalty system has been by any measure a failure, Newsom says in prepared remarks he is expected to deliver at a Capitol news conference Wednesday morning. It has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or cant afford expensive legal representation. It has provided no public safety benefit or value as a deterrent. It has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars. Newsom also argues in his remarks that the criminal justice system is susceptible to error, citing a November Los Angeles Times editorial that reported 164 condemned prisoners nationwide who were wrongly convicted have been freed from death row since 1973. He also cites a 2005 Santa Clara University Law Review study that concluded people convicted of killing whites were more likely to be sentenced to death than people convicted of killing blacks and Latinos. The executive order is likely to trigger legal challenges by pro-death penalty organizations and county prosecutors who have been forceful advocates for capital punishment in California. In February, the association representing deputy district attorneys in Los Angeles County accused Californias elected officials of foot-dragging on enforcing the death penalty because they smugly substitute their own values over the ratified votes of the majority. Time served by the 24 inmates who have exhausted all appeals (Los Angeles Times) Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the pro-death penalty Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, called Newsoms actions an abuse of power. Although Newsom has the constitutional authority to grant reprieves to condemned inmates, he does not have the power to order the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to shutter the death chamber or halt efforts to establish a lethal injection protocol, Scheidegger said. California law requires corrections officials to maintain the ability to carry out executions, he added. Hes following in the footsteps of other governors who abused this power because they were frustrated by a law that they just personally disagreed with, Scheidegger said. The moratorium is just the latest of Newsoms efforts to deliver on the bold, liberal agenda that defined his successful 2018 gubernatorial campaign and helped him emerge as one of President Trumps main political foils. On his first day in office, the former lieutenant governor and San Francisco mayor outlined a dramatic Medi-Cal expansion that would cover young immigrant adults who are in the U.S. illegally and later promised a major expansion of paid family leave in California. Newsoms first proposed budget included a $1-billion working families tax credit, more than double the size of the states existing tax break for low-income workers, and set aside $500 million to help local governments build shelters and add services to help the homeless. California has not executed a prisoner since 2006 because of a series of legal challenges to its method of lethal injection. But Newsom said he believed those court cases would be resolved while he was in office, clearing the way for executions to resume. The governor promised to be as proactive on the death penalty as he was on the issue of gay marriage, when, as mayor of San Francisco, he ordered the city to issue same-sex marriage licenses in 2004, a catalyst in a legal battle that ended when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the right of LGBTQ people to marry in 2015. With 24 inmates on death row who have exhausted their appeals, Newsom in February said he feared California could potentially execute more prisoners than any other state in modern history if no action was taken. California has executed 13 people since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. During that same time, 79 death row inmates have died of natural causes and 26 have died by suicide, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. I do not believe that a civilized society can claim to be a leader in the world as long as its government continues to sanction the premeditated and discriminatory execution of its people, Newsom says in his prepared remarks. In short, the death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian. Though the death penalty never emerged as a major issue in the 2018 governors race, Newsom has been outspoken about his opposition to capital punishment. The governor endorsed failed ballot measures in 2012 and 2016 that would have abolished the death penalty in California. Newsom also opposed a separate statewide ballot measure in 2016, Proposition 66, to accelerate the appeals process in capital cases, which California voters narrowly approved. Shortly after his election in November, Newsom directed his legal advisors to assess his options as Californias chief executive, which include the constitutional power to commute death sentences and issue temporary reprieves. To impose a de facto moratorium on capital punishment in California, Newsom will grant reprieves to all death row inmates that will stay in place throughout his time as governor. But the reprieves will expire as soon as Newsom leaves office, pushing the life-and-death decisions to his successor. Newsom also has authority to commute sentences to life in prison for condemned inmates convicted of a single felony. But the governor cannot commute the sentences of prisoners convicted of two separate felonies a population that includes more than half the inmates on death row without the approval of the California Supreme Court. The court rejected 10 commutations handed out by Gov. Jerry Brown in his last full month in office all of which involved people convicted of multiple felonies and did not provide an explanation for the action. It was the first time in decades that Californias top court rejected a governors commutations, which should serve as a warning to Newsom, Scheidegger said. Scheideggers organization was one of the main proponents of the successful 2016 ballot measure to fast-track executions in California, which passed by a margin of just 2 percentage points. In that same election, a competing ballot measure to repeal the death penalty and commute sentences to life in prison, Proposition 62, failed by just over 6 percentage points. Newsom first signaled his possible intentions regarding the death penalty in February when he signed an executive order for new DNA tests in the quadruple-murder case of death row inmate Kevin Cooper, who was sentenced to death in 1985 after he was convicted of killing Doug and Peggy Ryen and their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, as well 11-year-old Christopher Hughes, who was unrelated to the family. They were found stabbed to death in a Chino Hills home. Newsoms executive order came after Coopers attorneys alleged that key pieces of evidence were not properly tested and needed to be analyzed with modern technology. Especially in cases where the government seeks to impose the ultimate punishment of death, I need to be satisfied that all relevant evidence is carefully and fairly examined, Newsom said. Death sentences plummet across California. Riverside County, which led the U.S. in 2017, has had zero this year phil.willon@latimes.com Twitter: @philwillon Civil rights groups in California want police and sheriffs departments to stop sending license plate scanner information to a national private database, saying new public documents show federal immigration agents are using the system in breach of sanctuary state and city laws. The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, which obtained the documents as part of an open records lawsuit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is calling on lawmakers to request a statewide audit to review the data-sharing practices. The collection of more than 1,000 pages of contracts, emails, manuals and other materials shows some California law enforcement departments have granted ICE unfettered access to the personal data of drivers and that federal officials are using it to track and locate immigrants in the country illegally who might not have criminal records and could be protected under the states sanctuary and privacy policies. We believe there has been a clear violation of the law and are calling for a proper investigation, ACLU staff lawyer Vasudha Talla said. The documents show a rogue [federal immigration] agency, and it has added mass surveillance to its toolbox. Advertisement The case is the latest to raise concern among Democratic lawmakers and privacy groups, who say Californias laws are failing to limit the amount of personal data that federal immigration agents can use as the Trump administration has sought to ramp up deportations. Police, sheriffs and ICE agents argue that sharing information and collaboration is vital to criminal investigations. The documents obtained by the ACLU provide the deepest look yet into the database run by Vigilant Solutions, one of the largest suppliers of data analysis software and equipment for police and sheriffs departments across the country. They show more than 9,000 ICE agents nationwide have access to the Vigilant system through a $6.1-million contract with Thomson Reuters Special Services that was signed in December 2017 and runs through September 2020. ICE officials in the agencys criminal investigations branch and its civil enforcement division including agents in sanctuary cities such as San Francisco and San Jose have access to the database, which agents began using last February. Called the Law Enforcement Archival Reporting Network, it hosts information collected from license plate readers by local law enforcement agencies and commercial sources, including insurance, towing and parking companies. The cameras can be installed atop police cars, road signs or bridges, function at high speeds and capture photographs of passing license plates, creating a detailed roadmap of the time, date and locations a person has traveled. The information can be stored for years, according to Vigilant. The documents released Wednesday list more than 80 local law enforcement agencies nationwide that have granted ICE ongoing access to the database, including police in Union City near San Francisco, the San Luis Obispo County Sheriffs Department and the Merced Police Department. Emails also show an ICE agent asking a La Habra police officer to run searches at an Orange County fusion center, where multiple law enforcement agencies work investigations. Will you please run AZ plate? the detective asked in an email. I am only able to pull from commercial databases for now. It is unclear how many people ICE searched in the system have criminal records. But ACLU lawyers said ICEs queries and privacy guidelines, which allow civil immigration enforcement officers to search the database for information up to five years old, show the agency circumvented internal privacy rules under the contract with Vigilant Solutions and state laws. Californias sanctuary state law, which went into effect last year, prevents local police and sheriffs departments from sharing information about the people they arrest, question and detain with federal law enforcement and immigration agencies unless a suspect has a prior criminal conviction from a list of more than 800 felony and misdemeanor crimes. Another state law signed in 2015 requires law enforcement agencies across the state to maintain public privacy policies and usage guidelines on license plate readers and to keep reports on their use. Calls and emails to Viglant, La Habra police and Orange County fusion center were not returned. Matthew Bourke, a spokesman with ICE, said the agency limited the number of agents who could use the database and did not track or locate people not tied to a criminal or civil immigration investigation. He said users underwent training offered by the agency and the vendor and could be disciplined if they used the system in an inappropriate manner. ICE does not take enforcement action against any individual based solely on the information obtained [the database], he added. ICE personnel check the information against other investigative information, including information from government systems, before taking any action against the individual. Talla said the records revealed how law enforcement agencies in sanctuary cities and counties, which also limit collaboration between local government and federal immigration agencies, have little control over the information they share into the private database. If it doesnt want to share with ICE, it might share with some other third parties that might give it to ICE, Talla said. The case comes amid broader battles in the California Legislature this year over a far-reaching consumer privacy law, the right of people to control their information and the role of tech companies in facilitating Trumps immigration policies. State legislators, city leaders and privacy advocates have sought to expand laws limiting the amount of personal information that flows to the federal government, saying Trumps calls for more deportations and vetting initiatives target the public data of Muslim Americans, ethnic minorities and immigrants in the country illegally who pose no threat to the public. Legislation introduced last month by Assemblyman Rob Bonta (D-Alameda) would prohibit cities and counties across the state from entering into new contracts with any company that sells, mines or analyzes personal information for ICE or U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In Southern California, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) said she is working with Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra and Gov. Gavin Newsom to investigate claims that federal immigration agents might have been able to locate immigrants in the country illegally by searching a state government drivers license database, even though they had no criminal history. More stories from Jazmine Ulloa jazmine.ulloa@latimes.com Follow @jazmineulloa on Twitter. California government auditors will begin accepting applications in June from citizens who would like to help redraw the states congressional and legislative maps, a task with enormous political consequences. The once-a-decade redistricting process will also offer a rare chance for the dwindling ranks of Republicans to get equal billing with Democrats. When complete, the maps will offer the GOP its best perhaps only chance at launching an electoral comeback. Not that independent redistricting was designed to favor any political group. It is instead meant to ensure districts arent divvied up by lawmakers in Sacramento in ways that make an elections outcome a foregone conclusion. Voters created an independent citizens commission to handle the task through ballot measures in 2008 and 2010, and the first panel drew maps that have been in use since 2012. The maps withstood an early court challenge and Californias process was praised as an innovation worth being copied by other states. Advertisement In California, legal gamblings bets dont produce big jackpots for state government The rules for selecting the commissions 14 members are quirky. The state Bureau of Audits does much of the work in whittling down hundreds of applications. Legislative leaders from both major parties are then given the power to reject a small number of hopefuls from the final pool, a small concession made by drafters of the 2008 ballot measure. From there, eight commissioners are picked at random and those men and women then choose six more colleagues to round out the panel. And heres where Republicans get their big break: The rules evenly split 10 of the panels 14 members between the two largest political parties in the state. That gives Democrats and Republicans an equal voice in the creation of the maps, even though there are almost 4 million more Democrats in California. (Independent or no party preference voters, who comprise the second largest part of the electorate, are eligible for up to four seats on the commission.) Perhaps not surprisingly, a number of prominent Democrats opposed the 2008 ballot measure that created the redistricting commission. Even then, the partys control of state government would almost certainly have led to the drawing of more Democratic-leaning districts for the Legislature and Congress. Imagine, though, what the traditional map-drawing maneuvers might have produced now as Democrats control 89 of 120 legislative seats in Sacramento and 46 of the states congressional seats in Washington. The five Republicans who will be picked to help draw the new maps after the 2020 census wont be able to dramatically reverse those numbers. But they will be able to hold their own or use a variety of data to shine a light on any proposed districts that they find unfair. That could include projections of political party registration in the newly drawn districts information that the 2011 commission refused to consider, choosing instead to use a broad interpretation of the laws ban on maps favoring or discriminating against an incumbent, political candidate, or political party. Republican commissioners will also have as much power as Democrats when it comes to approving the new district lines for the Legislature, Congress and the state Board of Equalization. Under the 2008 law enacted by voters, final adoption of the maps requires support from at least three of the panels five Republicans. And perhaps just as important will be the power of precedent. The 2011 redistricting commissions work could be the template for 2021 district lines some observers believe are so well thought out that they only need small adjustments. Republicans could breathe a sigh of relief. That may not be a victory, of course, but it would certainly beat the alternative. john.myers@latimes.com Follow @johnmyers on Twitter, sign up for our daily Essential Politics newsletter and listen to the weekly California Politics Podcast Hong Kong: Salaries advisor reappointed The Chief Executive has reappointed Pang Yiu-kai as Chairman of the Standing Committee on Directorate Salaries & Conditions of Service. Karen Chan was appointed as a member, while incumbent members Clement Chen and Ivan Sze were reappointed. They will serve for two years from April 1. The Government thanked retiring member Betty Yuen for her invaluable contributions to the committees work. This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Uh-oh! It could be you, or it could be us, but there's no page here. Scientists and ethicists from seven nations on Wednesday called for a moratorium on gene-editing experiments designed to alter heritable traits in human babies. Its the latest alarm sounded by researchers who have been both excited and unnerved by the powerful genetic engineering technique known as CRISPR, which can potentially prevent congenital diseases but also could lead to permanent changes in human DNA and possibly create a market for enhanced, augmented offspring, sometimes called designer babies. The call for the moratorium, published as a commentary in the journal Nature, came in direct response to the actions of a Chinese researcher who, disregarding a global consensus on the ethical boundaries of gene editing, altered embryos that were implanted and carried to term, resulting in the live birth of twin babies. The Chinese researcher, He Jiankui, said his experiment was intended to alter a gene to make the babies resistant to infection with HIV. He said he knew he would be criticized but defended it as an ethical form of gene therapy and not a steppingstone to making cosmetic genetic alterations. Advertisement Why geneticists say its wrong to edit the DNA of embryos to protect them against HIV But the scientific community was outraged, condemning Hes actions as rogue human experimentation. The new call for a moratorium is an acknowledgment that the many warnings emerging from conferences on the ethics of gene editing have not been sufficiently clear and emphatic, and, in the case of the Chinese twins, have failed to prevent an ethical violation. The authors of the Nature paper include two of the primary inventors of the CRISPR system Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin. In addition to calling for a moratorium, the authors argue for the creation of an international governing body that would oversee the application of the technology. Separately on Wednesday, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, issued a statement supporting the call for a moratorium and a governing body. In an interview, he made clear that this is the U.S. government position, discussed and cleared at the highest levels. What were talking about here is one of the most fundamental moments of decision about the application of science to something of enormous societal consequence. Are we going to cross the line toward redesigning ourselves? Collins said. The new Nature paper does not call for a permanent ban on gene editing of heritable traits. Its a call for a temporary stop, with no firm expiration of the moratorium. It focuses specifically on experiments involving sperm, eggs and embryos also known as germ line cells that are designed to result in pregnancy. The moratorium would not cover laboratory research not intended to result in a birth nor gene editing for therapeutic purposes in a patients nongerm-line cells called somatic cells because those changes wouldnt be passed down from generation to generation. The authors of the Nature paper call for an international framework supported by a coordinating body that could either be fully independent or part of the World Health Organization. The authors envision voluntary compliance by individual nations that would retain sovereignty over their scientific enterprises. One name is notably absent from the list of authors of the Nature paper, that of CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley. Doudna is a powerful voice on this issue, having not only invented much of the CRISPR technology but also warning early on that it could be used for malign purposes. Doudna said she declined a request by Zhang to join this new call for a moratorium and new governing body. She said she will continue, instead, to work with the national academies in the United States, the United Kingdom and China. My feeling is, this is effectively just rehashing whats been going on for several years, Doudna said. CRISPR provides a way to find and alter specific DNA sequences. The consensus among scientists and ethicists has been that CRISPR and other gene-editing techniques can have many desirable applications. That would include research on cells, including human embryos, so long as the modified cells werent used to establish a pregnancy. There is no objection to using gene editing in somatic cells to treat an individual patient in a way that does not pass along those changes. One example: editing the genes in blood cells to relieve sickle-cell anemia. But the consensus is that theres a bright line: No one should edit genes in a way that could become a permanent trait of the human species unless there is broad agreement that such a modification is safe, necessary and ethical. The United States has laws that prevent this kind of germ-line editing. Legislation requires that such experiments receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration, which in turn is prohibited by law from evaluating such proposals. The Nature paper states that about 30 nations have laws that directly or indirectly prevent this kind of genetic engineering. Eric Lander, lead author of the commentary in Nature and the head of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said the effort to keep CRISPR under international guidance could be a template for handling powerful new technologies more generally. I think it raises the question, how do we govern complex technology, Lander said. Powerful technologies, we just increasingly see they have upsides and downsides. We cant just throw up our hands and say theres no way to stop it. There is a way to guide it. Lander said that after the revelation of Hes experiment in China, he and Zhang discussed the need to make a new call for some way to halt rogue application of the technology. They recruited other prominent researchers in the field and collaborated on the article. CRISPR, which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, leverages a natural bacterial system that targets viruses that invade a cell. It has been described as molecular scissors. Technicians can use this system to alter an organisms genome, for example by deleting a genetic mutation associated with a disease. Invented early in this decade, this type of gene editing has become more precise, with fewer off-target edits. Some clinical trials with human patients are underway, but they do not involve germ-line cells. The authors of the Nature commentary make a distinction between genetic correction, for therapeutic medical purposes, and genetic enhancement, which might include incorporating new instructions into a persons genome to enhance, say, their memory or muscles, or even to confer entirely new biological functions, such as the ability to see infrared light or break down certain toxins. I think its a very powerful technology that has a lot of potential to improve our lives, improve our health, improve our environment, improve our agriculture, Zhang said of CRISPR. But he said that, like any powerful technology, we can get ahead of ourselves, and he raised the specter of what some people have called designer babies 3 genetic modifications that are meant to enhance or augment offspring and have no medical necessity. You can imagine a situation where parents will feel pressure to edit their children because other parents are, Zhang said. It could further exacerbate inequality. It could create a total mess in society. Some Burbank residents and people who work in the city told officials with the California Department of Transportation this week that it has taken the state too long to complete its 5 Freeway improvement project, which has taken about five years, so far, and stretches from Hollywood Way to the 134 Freeway. John Yang, Caltrans construction corridor manager for the project, said during an open house Wednesday that he understands the state transportation agency has well overstayed its welcome in Burbank, and Caltrans officials are working diligently with the contractor to get the project completed. Yang said work had stalled because of disputes with contractor Security Paving regarding the work schedule. After talks with the business and arriving at an agreement, Yang said he thinks the project is back on track and could be finished by 2020. Yang admitted that the contractors original proposal to finish the Hollywood Way-to-134 Freeway portion of the project by this year which includes widening the freeway and demolishing and rebuilding the Burbank Boulevard bridge was too ambitious. I wouldnt blame the contractor. Its just the nature of the beast. We have no complaints against them. They have to do what they have to do, but we also have to do what we have to do, Yang said. So sometimes the disagreements and disputes lead to delays, but most of the times we mitigate it. Now, we have a resolution, so hopefully they will finish by the date they gave us, he added. Confident about the status of the project, Yang told attendees that the Empire Avenue underpass, which will connect Empire to North San Fernando Boulevard, is slated to be partially open in January. He said motorists traveling northbound or southbound on the 5 Freeway will be able to exit at Empire. However, they will be limited to only making right turns from the off-ramp. The long-awaited underpass is scheduled to be completed and open by July, Yang said. Though the Empire underpass is a critical element of the project, the portion that has the most residents concerned is the demolition and reconstruction of the Burbank Boulevard bridge. Yang said the bridges demolition, which is scheduled for this coming July, will not be done until the Empire underpass is fully open. The underpass is expected to play a crucial role during that portion of the project by absorbing the traffic that would have been traveling across the Burbank Boulevard bridge. Due to the design of the bridge, Yang said crews cannot take it down in one day, but theyll work quickly over an estimated two-month period to remove the bridge. The schedule to complete this project is still 16 months, so if we start in July and factor in some rainy days and holidays, were targeting a completion date of December 2020, Yang said. Its a more realistic goal. Though Yang told attendees he could see the light at the end of this very long tunnel, several people, including resident John DiFatta, pressured the transportation agency to simply get the project done. DiFatta, who lives near the freeway, said hes been seeing and hearing the construction crews at night and witnessing the slow progress on the project for the past five years. DiFatta said that, after hearing so many broken promises, he doesnt believe the project will be finished by 2020. Itll probably finish by 2022, maybe, he said. By then, Ill be long gone retired up in San Luis Obispo. anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com Twitter: @acocarpio Hollywood Burbank Airport will soon offer passengers an alternative and possibly less-expensive option to travel to Las Vegas. Spirit Airlines officials announced on Tuesday the local airfield will be the latest airport they will serve to and from the destination known as Sin City. Starting June 20, Spirit will offer three daily flights from the Burbank airport to McCarran International Airport, said John Kirby, vice president of network planning for the airline. Weve been looking forward to this for a long time now, and we thought it was the right move for us, Kirby said during an announcement event at Hollywood Burbank on Tuesday. We think the [Las] Vegas market is big unto itself. We think it could be stimulated quite a bit more. Southwest Airlines is the only air carrier at Hollywood Burbank that currently offers flights 11 of them a day to the Nevada city, which are popular among passengers, said Denis Carvill, deputy executive director of operations for the airport. The addition of Spirits flights to Las Vegas, Carvill said, would provide those who are looking for a getaway weekend in Las Vegas with a cheaper alternative when flying out of Burbank. A one-way flight to Las Vegas on Southwest this month from the local airport can cost between $73 and $253. Meanwhile, a one-way flight on Spirit from Los Angeles International Airport costs an average of about $53. Kirby said Spirit is looking to bring similar low fares to Hollywood Burbank, which he described as more convenient than LAX. I think it will grow the number of people flying to Las Vegas from our airport, Carvill said. I dont think were going to see a dilution of what Southwest is doing. If anything, it will cause their service to grow going forward. Hollywood Burbank will be the 74th airport that Spirit flies into and out of in the country. It is also the local airports seventh air carrier, joining Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines Depending on how its services fare at Hollywood Burbank, Kirby said there is a possibility for Spirit to expand its offerings for passengers, but only time will tell. We tend to test the water with services like this, Kirby said. Like a lot of carriers, if you do well, you add more and, if you dont do as well, you kind of slow things down. I think the people of Burbank will determine if we add more service or not. anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com Twitter: @acocarpio The Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority took a somber look this week at the estimated costs of the replacement terminal project, coming in over $1 billion, which was higher than initially anticipated. An official from BuroHappold Engineering presented a report during an authority meeting on Monday regarding the feasibility of a 14-gate, 355,000-square-foot terminal on an area known as the B-6 site. Although it was determined that constructing the terminal in the northeast quadrant of the airfield which was formerly where Lockheed Corp. had its Skunk Works operation could be done, BuroHappold conservatively estimated the entire project will cost roughly $1.24 billion, said David Herd, the North America managing director of the consulting firm. BuroHappold estimated construction costs, which include building the new terminal and demolishing the existing facility, at about $844 million alone. Originally, the the terminal was expected to cost about $400 million, though the demolition was not part of that estimate. Herd added that soft costs some of which include designing the terminal, inspections and permitting came in at about $285 million. Being conservative about its estimates, the firm also factored in about $110 million as contingency. Herd said although the report determined that a terminal can be built on the B-6 site, it was merely an exercise to see if it could be done. The concept mocked up for the analysis was based on what was laid out in a development agreement and does not factor in the design of the facility. Airport officials are limited to designing up to 25% of the project until the review of an environmental impact study is completed by the Federal Aviation Administration, which is projected to be completed in about two years. The consultant noted that various parts of the project, some of which include the depth of the terminal, airport access, public parking structure and air-traffic control tower, will be addressed during the design phase, which is projected to occur during the third quarter of 2020, Herd said. Airport officials also presented their own cost estimate for the project, in which the overall costs would be about $1 billion. The airport estimated construction costs to be about $724 million, soft costs at about $210 million and the contingency to be about $70 million. John Hatanaka, the airports senior deputy executive director, told authority members their numbers are just as conservative as the recently released estimates. However, he added that its better to overestimate costs and work down rather than continuously add to the projects budget. To fund the project, Hatanaka said the authority will be contributing $100 million from its airport development fund. The airport will also be using about $137 million from federal grants. Hatanaka added that airport officials also plan to take out a bond with the U.S. Department of Transportation. Zareh Sinanyan, the authoritys president, said he was not completely shocked by the projects price tag, but he was concerned about how the high cost will affect airport operations. I hope this change is not going to have a material impact on the feasibility of this project, he said. anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com Twitter: @acocarpio The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in late February in a 1st Amendment case regarding a 40-foot cross erected in the 1920s as a memorial to 49 men from a Maryland County who lost their lives in World War I. In its 2014 lawsuit against the memorial, the American Humanist Assn. states the Peace Cross erected by the American Legion violates the Establishment Clause of the Constitution prohibiting government establishment of religion. The group claims the governments use of public funds to maintain the Latin cross supports Christianity because of its symbolism. A friend-of-the-court brief supporting the American Legion calls the cross a secular war memorial that does not endorse religion, and a federal district court agreed, but a panel of judges reversed that decision on appeal. An L.A. Times editorial written in favor of removing the cross states, At a time when America is becoming more religiously diverse, the court should recognize that exalting a symbol of a single faith on public property violates the 1st Amendment. Q. Does the Peace Cross violate the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment? How would you argue your position before the Supreme Court? The Peace Cross does not violate the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment. Its a longstanding, now historic memorial to people who gave their lives for our country. Its a heartfelt tribute to people who actually accomplished something good for humanity instead of embroiling it in pointless and partisan legal arguments, as the memorials opponents are doing. Its interesting the L.A. Times editorial declares that America is becoming more religiously diverse. If that were actually true, wouldnt we see more tolerance of the cross? Wouldnt people be more accepting of it? Recent events indicate that America is becoming more partisan against the cross. In Galatians 5:11 Paul calls it the stumbling block of the cross, something that people trip up over. Indeed, the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God (1 Corinthians 1:18). In court I would point out that the purpose of the memorial itself was to honor fallen soldiers, not to make people become Christians. I would underscore the fact that the cross has been an enduring memorial symbol of hope embraced by Christians and non-Christians alike. Additionally, numerous military graveyards including the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia are replete with cross tombstones as memorials for fallen soldiers. Should we desecrate their graves because of the partisan views of a minority that is attempting to foist its bias on the rest of the country? I wonder how many of the opponents actually have family members in those military cemeteries. I wonder how the descendants of those so honored feel about the idea of tearing down this monument that has such deep personal meaning just to satisfy the political ideology of a loud minority group? In their context the crosses mentioned above are symbols of respect and hope, not the governments establishment of Christianity. Pastor Jon Barta Burbank Another cross case could undermine our separation of church and state Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The complaint is that the Peace Cross is on public land and therefore goes against the 1st Amendment, which states Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. The cross, because it is a leading symbol of Christianity, should not be supported by public funds. I believe the complainants miss the point of the 1st Amendment. People are not being compelled to look at the monument or even go to its location. There is no compulsion. Further, the second part of the 1st Amendment dealing with Freedom of Religion states or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Perhaps a case could be made that if the specific service personnel who are being honored were not Christians then the cross is inappropriate as a symbol of honor for that persons service and sacrifice. Then we must add symbols important to them. If, in fact, there were avowed atheists among that group, we could have an area with no religious symbols for them, but instead, a drawing, sculpture, etc., representing all people. The one done by Norman Rockwell under the Four Freedoms title comes to mind. I might ask the Court, if they rule in favor of tearing down the monument, then must we tear down all the grave markers at Arlington National Cemetery because those graves are also serviced through public funds? Rabbi Mark H. Sobel, Temple Beth Emet of Burbank Im always going to favor keeping the Peace Cross in full view of every passerby possible. The cross doesnt simply represent a religion, it represents the literal crucifixion of the incarnate God by those who denied him in the first century. The same sort denies him now and they hate his followers. St. Paul wrote, the cross is foolish to those who are headed for destruction! But we who are being saved know it is the very power of God (1Co 1:18 NLT). That said, may I suggest some ways to keep it where its been for nearly a century? First, it represents a particular group of war dead. If it could be shown that those 49 men were unanimously Christian, then the cross would best represent them personally; it wouldnt be governmental endorsement, it would be historic acknowledgment. Another option would be to sell the footprint upon which the cross stands back to the American Legion for a dollar and let them return to caring for it on private land. It also seems that this monument should have been grandfathered into the transition from previous private ownership to public, since it was already there representing communal history. And why, when the state takes over a space, must it then destroy every religious vestige? One might imagine future Americas complete de-Christianization by such acts perpetrated via eminent domain! Look, if you want to argue that the cross is merely a secular symbol, thats fine I guess. The practical purpose of driving a marker into the ground and having a cross bar upon which to write the deceaseds identity has always been around, but then again, Western civilization is Christian civilization, and so the cross religious significance is hard to discount. One might also argue that the cross symbol is present in myriad world religions and doesnt necessarily point to any particularly, except that the cross is the primary message of Christianity (the whole point of upcoming Easter and its purported observance by three quarters of Americans). I dunno, I wouldnt personally want to deny the cross significance just to let a monument stand, but likewise Id hate to think that soon our One Nation Under God will no longer tolerate the truth or its visual reminders at all. Rev. Bryan A. Griem, MA, MDiv Tujunga Yes, I believe that a Christian cross, on public property and maintained with government funds, is a violation of the U.S. Constitutions Establishment Clause. The Supreme Courts 1971 decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman set forth a three-part test of religious establishment: 1.) that interaction of government and religion have a legitimate secular purpose; 2.) that it not endorse religion; and 3.) that it not create excessive entanglement between government and religion. The appeals court in the current case, American Legion v. American Humanist Assn., said the cross has a secular function in honoring war dead but fails the two other parts of the test. A reasonable observer would see that a giant Christian cross endorses religion as a primary effect, and that taxpayer money for maintenance constitutes excessive religious entanglement, the arguments I would repeat if arguing the case. But that and $5 will get me a cup of coffee. It appears the Supreme Court wont declare the cross unconstitutional, given their comments and questions during the Courts oral arguments on Feb. 27. To me their reasons range from irrelevant to ridiculous. Justices Kagan and Breyer seem OK with the cross on public land because it has been there a long time 93 years. Justice Alito worries that ruling against the cross will cause divisiveness, and Justice Gorsuch remarked, puzzlingly, that courts shouldnt weigh in on disputes over religious symbols. Justice Thomas and lawyers for the Trump administration lob in a fresh argument, without constitutional reference, that without coersion by government to believe a certain way, there is no violation of the Establishment Clause. This is a huge reach, and I join with the Baptist, Jewish, Islamic and other faith groups in opposing this weakening of church-state separation. Roberta Medford Atheist Montrose The kids always knew to use the side or back doors to get into the house. After helping out with the farm chores near the orange groves, they dared not walk through the front door and foyer in dirty clothes. Instead, theyd enter through the family parlor or the kitchen, both next to their fathers office, where hed run his business as a citrus rancher. More than 100 years later, the rotary phone he used to make calls and the burn marks on his desk from putting out cigarettes still remain. The 6,000-square-foot Placentia estate, built in 1902, was originally home to Albert Sumner Bradford, his wife, Fannie, their four children and Fannies sister Ellen. Today, the 15-room structure on 136 E. Palm Drive, known as the Bradford House, serves as a museum. It welcomes school tours, string quartet performances, weddings and those curious about north Orange Countys early history. A large wooden table for kneading dough, a butter churn and a rocking chair occupy the kitchen. The dining room has a long table adorned with candlesticks, and green drapes cascade down tall windows that once captured a view of Bradfords ranch. In the upstairs bedrooms are, among other items, a pan that would store hot coals to warm the bed and a metal pick used to unlace the tightly wound shoe strings of the Bradford familys boots. The home is cared for by the Placentia Founders Society, a group that fought for the propertys preservation in the mid-70s, when Placentias City Council contemplated demolishing it. Since the Founders Society was formed in 1974, its mission has been to maintain the historical contents of the home, host community events and offer docent-led tours of the estate. The family gave the house to the city in 1973, when preservation started to sound like a pretty good hedge against the shopping centers and other projects that were springing up in the area. The last family member to own the house was Bradfords son, Hartwell. Hartwells daughter Irene Rene Kamin, who lives in nearby Yorba Linda, said there was an interest in keeping the house, so it was donated to the city. During her childhood in Placentia, Kamin said, her father worked as a businessman mainly in Los Angeles, so she grew up in her uncle Warren Bradfords home up the road from the historic house. But Hartwell would return home once a week, which is when Kamin would see him and occasionally stay in the Bradford House. I dont think hed believe [the house] would ever become a museum, Kamin said of her father. Back then he was just living in it. Perhaps we dont know were a part of history, Founders Society member Kay Pfaffle said, until were gone. Irene Bradford Kamin, granddaughter of Albert Sumner Bradford, in her fathers bedroom on the second floor of the Bradford House in Placentia. (Kevin Chang / TimesOC) Albert Bradford is known fondly by the Founders Society as the Father of Placentia. Working alongside other members of the community, he became instrumental in supporting the opening of the local post office, Presbyterian church and newspaper and otherwise preparing the foundation of a city. Placentia was incorporated in 1926. Bradford was born in 1860 in Maine. He grew up poor on a little New England farm, according to archival sources. At age 27, he took a train to California because, according to some sources, the cold climate of Maine aggravated his asthma. He sought after sunshine and later a job in the booming citrus industry of Orange County. At the time of his move, he was married to Fannie and they had three kids: Elsie, Hartwell and Percy. Warren was born in 1893 in California. In 1890, Bradford had saved enough money to send for his family and purchase 20 acres on what is now Palm Drive. He named his land Tesoro Ranch, meaning Treasure Ranch. Twelve years later, his familys house was built. The property would someday land on the National Register of Historic Places. The forest-green, box-shaped house with attic windows peeking out of the roof has a porch that wraps around the front of the house. Basement windows can be seen wedged between the stacked stones that form the base of the house. Its more common for East Coast homes to have basements, but Bradford built what he was used to seeing, a Bradford House docent said. On a recent clear day, a line of pink could be seen across the foyer floor as the sunlight streamed through the stairways ruby red window, a fixture that museum docents believe Fannie Bradford wanted to rival that of Helena Modjeskas now-historic house in Modjeska Canyon, about 30 miles away. Modjeska was a renowned actress. An upstairs bedroom in the Bradford House is attached to a sunroom-type area, a space where Pfaffle suspects Bradfords daughter Elsie slept because of her tuberculosis. Early 20th century society believed that cold temperatures could kill the bacterial disease. But whether the family used the perceived remedy, it did not matter. Bradfords only daughter died of tuberculosis in 1908. Two years later, tragedy would strike the family again. Bradfords wife, Fannie, died of peritonitis, an inflammation of the lining in the abdominal walls. The Founders Society noted that Bradford threw himself into work after the deaths of his wife and daughter. Two years after Elsies death, he formed Placentia National Bank, took part in laying out the town site, and made efforts to get the Santa Fe railroad a track from Fullerton to Atwood, a neighborhood in Placentia, to encourage more business development. After Fannies death, Bradford had two water towers built on Chapman Avenue to allow water to be supplied to the town. We think of Bradford as having a lot of fortune, but he also had a lot of sadness, Pfaffle said. Its possible that we may be benefiting from his misfortunes. A piano in the living room at the Bradford House in Placentia. (Kevin Chang / TimesOC) When the property was no longer in the Bradford familys hands, a vote of the citys five-member council in January 1976 would determine if the house would be demolished and a park developed in its place. In a close call, two members voted aye while three voted no, according to city documents. A measure on the ballot for the April municipal election of 1976 then asked Placentia residents if tax revenues should be used to preserve the house. In pressing its case, the Founders Society held an open house at the Bradfords former home every weekend for the five weeks leading up to the vote. Almost 1,600 people toured the house, according to news articles. But the measure failed. Everyone was afraid it was going to be torn down, said Founders Society member Mary Castner, who was born and raised in Placentia. It had been there for so long and its a treasured piece. We always tell the children that if they live in Placentia, the house belongs to them. The city agreed to lease the house to the Founders Society in 1977 while the group of history enthusiasts offered to provide the funds for the upkeep and insurance costs of the house, according to news articles. Our heritage is rich . Theres a lot to be learned from history that could impart a better appreciation of what we have today, Placentia Mayor Craig Green said. Some people dont want to fly all the way to the Smithsonian to see what life was like back then. You come to the [Bradford] House and see how wide the porch is and how people would just sit out there and talk. It was simpler times. The Bradford Houses grand opening as a museum took place in 1978. Today, the houses upkeep is funded by Founders Society membership fees, fundraising activity and rent from tenants who stay in half of the upstairs level for $1,000 per month. A tour from Glenknoll Elementary School in Yorba Linda last month brought dozens of third-graders to the property as part of their social studies curriculum. Glenknoll teacher Judy Rees watched as her students observed the differences between early 20th century and modern-day technology. A typewriter rests on an office desk instead of a computer. A wooden box in the kitchen had to be filled with ice since there were no refrigerators. After 19 years of living in Placentia and driving through and around Bradford Avenue in the city, Rees finally found herself at the home of the streets namesake, a place that will teach her students the history of their local community, she said. A place that used to have horse-drawn carriages riding among the lines of palm trees now sees neighbors playing fetch with their dogs. A place that is no longer inhabited by orange groves, but still keeps a piece of Placentia history wedged right between the suburban homes and shopping centers. A place that Bradford purposefully built for his family, but unknowingly created to be enjoyed by the masses. The Bradford House holds public tours from 2 to 4 p.m. on the second Sunday of each month, except for May. To schedule group tours, call (714) 993-2470. alexandra.chan@latimes.com Twitter: @AlexandraChan10 Sometimes the glow of history reveals dark corners previously unknown. Thats certainly the case with the countless young women who suffered radiation poisoning after painting the dials of watches with radium in factories in the 1910s and 20s. D.W. Gregorys 1999 play Radium Girls, now in a new production at Orange Coast College, tells the story of five women behind the 1928 court case against the United States Radium Corp. for labor abuses. Naomi Buckley, director of OCCs new production, calls the story a compelling moment in history where female workers were able to sue and hold accountable a large corporation for work-related injuries that they had suffered. During the early 20th century, an estimated 4,000 workers were hired by corporations in the U.S. and Canada to work with the radioactive chemical. Women employees at factories in Connecticut, New Jersey and Illinois had been instructed by their employers to use their mouths to create a pointed tip to their camel-hair brushes. Some thought it was cool and chic to paint their fingernails and even their faces and teeth with the glowing substance, which they were told was harmless. The misinformation led them to ingest deadly amounts of radium. Many became sick, and the total number of deaths caused by radiation exposure is unknown. The play documents the plight of Grace Fryer, a worker at USRCs plant in Orange, N.J., starting with her two-year search for a lawyer willing to take on the corporate giant. Fryer eventually got four of her co-workers Edna Hussman, Katherine Schaub, and sisters Quinta McDonald and Albina Larice to join the lawsuit. When they first appeared in court in January 1928, two were bedridden, and all five were so ill they couldnt raise their arms to be sworn in. The five plaintiffs were dubbed the Radium Girls, a term that eventually came to be used to describe anyone who did the same kind of work and became exposed to the radium in the paint. Arthur Roeder (Zion Aguilar, center), manager of U.S.R.C.s New Jersey plant, and his vice-president, Charlie Lee (Saul Alcaraz), consult with lawyer Edward Markley (Maxwell Remington, left) to devise the best legal strategy following the death of one of his workers. (Photo by David Scaglione) Opposing them was their former employer, an idealist who couldnt bring himself to believe that the same chemical element that shrinks tumors could cause the rash of horrifying illnesses suffered by his workers. The court case was among the first of its kind to receive widespread media attention. As it proceeded, Fryer found herself locked not just in a legal battle but also in conflict with her friends and relatives, who feared her campaign for justice would backfire. Gregorys play premiered at Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey and has since been produced more than 800 times in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand and Germany. An ensemble of 10 actors enact some 38 roles, including the five Radium Girls and their friends, co-workers, relatives and lovers and the various attorneys, scientists, consumer advocates and interested bystanders in their orbit. The play follows the litigation and media sensation surrounding the case. [It] paved the way for many more class action lawsuits that would allow for greater workplace accountability and worker safety, said Buckley. [And the play raises] themes of class inequality, gender equality in the workplace and big ethical issues. The production is part of OCCs Social Justice Series, launched in 2016 in an effort to raise public awareness and to educate and engage audiences on issues related to societal injustice and human rights. Past shows in the series have delved into topics like immigration rights and social equity. Buckley said she hopes what audiences take away from Radium Girls is the courage that it took for these girls to come forward and persist in spite of being severely ill and disabled. Their story is one of heroism the real bravery that so many men and women show that then paves the way for others. Eric Marchese is a contributor to Times Community News. IF YOU GO What: Radium Girls Where: Drama Lab Theater, Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa When: March 15 through 24. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; March 24, 2:30 p.m. Cost: $10 advance, $15 at the door Information: (714) 432-5880, occtickets.com Planets capable of supporting life are in a star system not so far, far away, and astronomers will be able to study them closely with the Habitable Planet Finder, developed with help from a UC Irvine professor. The Habitable Planet Finder is a spectrograph that UCI assistant professor Paul Robertson said is like a digital camera that uses infrared light to amplify the light of small, cool stars called M-dwarfs that otherwise could not be seen. Weve learned from experiments like the Kepler space telescope that the galaxy is just full of planets, Robertson said. You can look out at night, pick your favorite star and, rest assured, it will be orbited by a planet. Theres one population of stars that still hasnt been studied in this way. These stars just arent bright enough for visible [light] wavelength. By moving into the infrared, we can pursue this last group of star and planet system. The Habitable Planet Finder, housed in the basement of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas, measures the movement of stars due to the gravity of their planets. It works in tandem with the telescope and a laser frequency comb, the latter developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to calibrate the HPF to look for planets in habitable zones, where surface water could occur. We are hoping to find not only more exoplanets but more Earth-like exoplanets, said Jack Lubin, a first-year graduate student working with Robertson. That is to say, more planets that are roughly the same mass as Earth that are orbiting their host star at just the right distance so the planet could exist in a liquid state. This has also been called the Goldilocks Zone, Lubin said not so far away that water might freeze and not so close that it would boil. Robertson and his graduate team are studying a collection of M-dwarfs near the Sun about 25 light years away but plan to also observe planets discovered by the Kepler telescope, which was retired in late October, and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which was launched in April. With the HPF, astronomers can survey stars for new planets as well as observe planets already revealed by Kepler and TESS. Scientists install fiber optic cable for the Habitable Planet Finder to connect to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas. (Courtesy of Gudmundur Stefansson) When Kepler or TESS finds a planet, we can use a spectrometer like HPF to get the mass, Robertson said. Then we have both the radius and mass and we can estimate the planets density. This gives a lot of information about the planet, such as its likely composition and the size of its atmosphere. Formal development of the instrument began in September 2011. In July 2013, Robertson joined a team at Penn State University, where he was a researcher, seeing it as an opportunity to continue the work he began as a graduate student. I was using a visible-light spectrometer to study some of these nearby, very cool stars. I was never able to push the limits of that the way I wanted to, said Robertson, who has been at UCI since January 2018. So this opportunity sort of came up where there was this team at Penn State developing this instrument. I didnt have a lot of experience, but they were like, Look, if youre really compelled by the science and want to use the instrument, you can learn on the job. The instrument was completed and in operation by November last year and began routine scientific operations in February. HPF opens a major new window by allowing astronomers to search for Earth-like planets around the most common stars in the galaxy, said professor James Bullock, chairman of UCIs physics and astronomy department. It will be exciting to see what Professor Robertson and his team discover with this amazing tool theyve helped to build. The long-term goal, Robertson said, is to find bio-signatures gases in a planets atmosphere, such as oxygen or methane, that could only be produced by living things. Despite opposition from UC Irvine student leaders who believe it will make finding housing more difficult for economically disadvantaged students, the Irvine City Council on Tuesday night approved tighter restrictions on boarding houses and short-term rentals. The zoning ordinance amendment, approved 4-1 with Councilwoman Melissa Fox dissenting, was in response to homeowners long-standing grievances about late-night parties, trash and parking shortages. Councilman Anthony Kuo said he was sympathetic to students who need roommates to afford a place to live, saying he and a group of friends rented rooms while they attended college. But he said the City Council must respond to residents complaints about empty alcohol bottles, crowded street parking and garbage cans left on the curb for days after trash is collected. I hate to throw them under the bus, because things have improved significantly. But the root problem is UCI wants to admit more and more students, and thats a great thing, but they dont plan for what happens afterward, Kuo said. Theyre really, really good at educating students. Theyre really not good at land use and planning and community building. Annie Le, president of the Associated Students of UC Irvine, shared with the council the results of a recent survey of 2,000 students who reported living in overcrowded conditions in which more than two students sleep in a room and/or one or more students sleep in common living areas. I think a lot of students are upset by this decision, Le said. Because theyre elected representatives of Irvine, they should be working with UCI and not playing the blame game. Irvine code enforcement staff members said they are struggling to police boarding houses and short-term rentals, partly because before filing lawsuits, they need to obtain copies of lease agreements to establish that operators are leasing on a per-room basis. Those arrangements are not allowed in Irvine. Some landlords use a loophole of putting all the tenants on a single lease. To close that loophole, City Attorney Jeffrey Melching proposed updating the zoning code to require that households be a single housekeeping unit. Under that definition, a household must consist of residents sharing living expenses, chores, meals and/or social, economic and psychological commitments. If the city finds a household doesnt fit those requirements, the property owner would be required to apply for a conditional use permit to operate a boarding house. Melching said he proposed that language because the California Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of Santa Barbara, which used similar wording to defend its regulation of boarding houses. But Fox voted against the proposed amendment, saying it would violate residents privacy. Im extremely concerned about the language in this ordinance, she said. For example, why would you put a city in the position of determining whether or not individuals living under one roof share expenses or chores? At the request of Mayor Pro Tem Christina Shea, the City Council agreed to establish a housing committee to include the mayor, a council member, the Irvine Co., Five Point Communities and leaders from UC Irvine. The goal would be to hash out a long-term plan for accommodating future student housing needs. UCI spokesman Tom Vasich said 13,968 students are currently housed on campus and an additional 2,400 live in the adjacent University Town Center. This fall, UCI will add 500 beds for first- and second-year students at Middle Earth towers and 1,400 at Plaza Verde. UCI is committed to providing under-market, on-campus housing opportunities for our students, he said. In fact, we are one of four UC campuses to house 40% or more of its student population on campus. Daniel Langhorne is a contributor to Times Community News. Attacker sought after shocking stabbing of UC Irvine student near campus apartments Amid community outrage after social media images appeared to show area high school students at a weekend party saluting a swastika assembled from red plastic cups, campus reactions Monday ranged from shock to unsurprised, though the actions were roundly condemned. A community meeting about the incident was held Monday evening at Newport Harbor High School, which many of the students at the party attend. The Newport-Mesa Unified School District said it is investigating the images, posted on various social media, which also show the teenagers smiling, laughing and toasting over the swastika, which appeared to be used in a drinking game. Students from Costa Mesa High and Estancia High, also in Costa Mesa, said Monday that students from both of those schools also were present. While these actions did not occur on any school campus or school function, we condemn all acts of anti-Semitism and hate in all their forms, Newport-Mesa Supt. Fred Navarro said in a statement. But Jocelyn Navarro, a junior at Newport Harbor in Newport Beach, said Monday that she wasnt surprised when the photos surfaced Sunday morning. At Newport Harbor, she said, students group themselves along racial lines: Hispanic students with other Hispanics, whites with whites. It is less intentional than unconscious, she said. White people stay together, Mexicans stay together. We naturally just do it because we know thats the way it is, she said. One student who posted a photo of the swastika surrounded by students told another student in an online conversation that you are stupid if you think we actually support what Hitler did. It was a joke. None of us are Nazi supporters. Parents of two students identified as being involved in the party declined to comment Monday. Bianca Lutz, a 16-year-old Newport Harbor student who was not at the gathering, said she was extremely disturbed by the ignorance of those at the party and said some of her Jewish friends felt threatened. An image from Twitter shows a swastika made from red plastic cups at a party said to involve high school students from the Newport-Mesa Unified School District. (Photo from Twitter) Newport-Mesa spokeswoman Adriana Angulo said the district is working with the Costa Mesa and Newport Beach police departments on the investigation but didnt provide details. She said district officials dont know what their next course of action might be or what punishments could be meted out. The party, which apparently took place over the weekend, occurred in Costa Mesa, according to Newport Beach police spokeswoman Heather Rangel. On Monday, Newport Harbor students poured out of school buildings wearing every shade of blue as an act of solidarity with the Jewish community. Im very glad that we are all making a statement that the vast majority of us believe that this is disgusting, senior Sam Quattrociocchi said during lunch. Some people at the party thought they were making an edgy joke, and they were completely wrong. Fellow senior Timothy Shannon said most people are trying to figure out ways to better ourselves out of it. In Costa Mesa, the mother of two students who went to the party said she was very upset about their presence. The woman, who declined to give her name, said she wasnt aware there was a planned gathering of teenagers and that alcohol would be served. The kids go out with their friends all the time. Ive never seen my kids drink. Ive never seen them drunk, she said Monday. Her children spent last weekend with her former husband and she did not hear about the party, where it was held or the swastika incident until Sunday, she said. She said her anger and sadness stem from the fact that she is Jewish, along with her family members. Antonio Fair, a junior at Costa Mesa High, said: I feel like they just did something stupid and sure it is offensive to a lot of people. But I feel that it shouldnt be as big of a deal only because were still young. I feel like if they didnt get drunk or if they didnt smoke, then they wouldnt have done something that stupid. I think there should still be consequences but that shouldnt stick with them for the rest of their life. It shouldnt define who they are, because were still in high school. Images from the party roiled social media users, who were quick to condemn them. As an organization dedicated to representing the students of Newport Harbor High School, we and the school administration denounce and condemn all acts of anti-Semitism and hate in any form, representatives of the schools Associated Student Body said in a statement on Instagram. Any negativity due to any type of persecution is utterly wrong, unacceptable and will not be tolerated. ... With all of the bad out there, we encourage everyone to turn to goodness, kindness and respect over hatred. Newport Harbor Principal Sean Boulton said in a statement that Mondays community meeting at the school was to include him, Costa Mesa High Principal Jacob Haley, Estancia High Principal Michael Halt and Rabbi Reuven Mintz of the Chabad Center for Jewish Life. The goal of the event is to start a significant conversation to take us to a place where this sort of behavior never happens again in our community, Boulton said. Over the past few years, all Newport-Mesa schools have worked tirelessly to eliminate prejudice, hate and bullying and continually work toward true tolerance and equality. We are obviously not there yet, but the journey continues. Diversity is the backbone of our schools, but in this social and social media climate, we are subject to hate, offensive acts/language and religious intolerance. We must and can do more. A group of Newport Harbor High School seniors wore blue to school on Monday, as did many other students, after a social media campaign urged students to wear blue in solidarity with the Jewish community and to denounce anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry. (Julia Sclafani) Rabbi Gersh Zylberman of Temple Bat Yahm in Newport Beach said in a statement that a town hall meeting is tentatively set for 6 p.m. Thursday at Corona del Mar High School to discuss the incident. This is a reminder that we must respond to all incidents of anti-Semitism and bigotry in all forms with the utmost seriousness and unequivocal condemnation, Zylberman said. It doesnt matter whether or not they thought it was funny. When we joke about Nazism, its history loses meaning and we cannot forget that history, U.S. Rep. Harley Rouda (D-Laguna Beach) said in a statement. These students must learn that hate has consequences, and their parents and our school district must redouble their efforts to teach them. Costa Mesa Mayor Katrina Foley, a former Newport-Mesa Unified trustee, said in a statement that we need to seriously address why teens in our community might think these types of hateful symbols are acceptable or funny and worthy of selfies. We must use this incident as an opportunity to work with our school district leaders to encourage schools to implement better anti-bias and anti-hate content in their curricula and extracurricular activities. Josdel Hernandez, a Newport Harbor junior, said students just last month studied the Holocaust in history class. They showed us graphic videos of the concentration camps, she said. Its not like our teachers need to show us any more about the Holocaust. They knew what it means. She said shes seen incidents of more casual racism at school: a student doodling a swastika on a desk, for example, or cracking a joke about Nazism. Quattrociocchi said the real problem is that a lot of real neo-Nazis and racists are coming away being emboldened by this. I think the most unfortunate thing is that people are suddenly feeling comfortable spewing racist garbage, he said. Josdel and Jocelyn said students who condemned the Nazi displays faced a backlash on social media from party-goers who questioned why people not of Jewish heritage were upset. They said, Youre not even Jewish why are you getting all offended? Jocelyn said. We dont have to be Jewish to be offended. Were offended because its wrong. On Monday morning at Costa Mesa High, Haley spoke to the school via the public address system, saying he was disappointed that some of his students were at the party. Freshman Maria Ramirez said she was kind of shocked that this happened because people need to take responsibility for their actions. Why would you get into that kind of stuff if you knew what these things mean? Kevin Sanchez, a sophomore who transferred to Costa Mesa High last month from Newport Harbor, said he worries about how much freedom teenagers are given today: Parents or adults cant tell them what to do basically, and they dont realize how they act reflects on the whole school. Newport Beach Mayor Diane Dixon and Mayor Pro Tem Will ONeill said in a joint statement that they were appalled and saddened by the incident and that it was not acceptable and not reflective of our communitys collective character. This behavior is not learned in our schools, the statement said. But once learned wherever and however it is anti-Semitism can and must be unlearned through education and dialogue. Navarro said district officials remain focused on educating students on all aspects of lifes challenges and are committed to holding students accountable, educating them on the consequences of their choices and the impact these actions have on our schools and community at large. We are asking that parents please partner with us in helping students make good decisions, be respectful of others and to always use good judgment. State Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris (D-Laguna Beach) announced Monday that she will convene an interfaith town hall from 1 to 3:30 p.m. March 30 at Christ Our Redeemer AME Church in Irvine for a conversation about how we can come together to battle hate and foster respect. State Sen. John Moorlach (R-Costa Mesa) also expressed condemnation of any and all anti-Semitic acts, and again emphasize my solidarity with the Jewish community in Orange County and elsewhere. Lilly Nguyen and Julia Sclafani are Daily Pilot staff writers. Matthew Ormseth and Anh Do write for the Los Angeles Times. UPDATES: This article was originally published at 2:50 p.m. March 3 and was later updated with additional information. New charges came to light Wednesday in the case against James Alan Neal, who is charged in the 1973 sexual assault and killing of 11-year-old Linda OKeefe of Newport Beach. Prosecutors have brought charges related to two other child sexual-assault victims in Riverside County, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said Wednesday after Neal appeared in a courtroom inside Orange County Jail. Neal is charged with one felony count of murder while committing or attempting to commit sexual assault upon a child, as well as five felony counts of sexual assault of a child younger than 14, the district attorneys office said. The charges carry possible sentencing enhancements for multiple victims. Prosecutors charged Neal with three counts of lewd acts on a child committed in Riverside County between July 1995 and July 2000. Two additional counts are related to crimes against another child between March 2002 and March 2004, according to court documents. The victims cities of residence are not in the documents. In light of the newly identified victims, Spitzer said, his office is absolutely looking for possible additional victims and charges against the defendant. Neal, 72, of Monument, Colo., was originally charged with special-circumstances murder, kidnapping and lewd and lascivious acts on a minor under 14 in connection with the strangulation death of Linda, who disappeared while walking home from summer school on July 6, 1973, in Corona del Mar. Her body was found the next day in a ditch off Back Bay Drive. Neal was arrested last month in Colorado after police matched him to evidence with DNA obtained via surveillance methods. The case, which was cold for more than four decades, was the subject of a social media campaign last summer for the anniversary of Lindas death. The arrest was due in part to the use of genealogical DNA data. Neal, previously known as James Albert Layton Jr., lived in the Newport Beach area at the time of Lindas slaying and left shortly afterward, the district attorneys office said. He moved to Florida and changed his name following an unspecified incident, the DAs office said. Neal later moved to Colorado. Neal was extradited to Orange County from Colorado on Monday and booked at Orange County Jail without bail. He could face a maximum sentence of 82 years to life in state prison if convicted of the charges in the latest complaint, the district attorneys office said. Neals arraignment was continued Wednesday, and he is now scheduled for arraignment and a bail hearing March 29. UPDATES: This article was originally published at 2:45 p.m. and was later updated with additional information. Hassan Haghani, who spent more than a decade serving at various planning capacities with the city of Glendale, died unexpectedly this week. He was 58. According to a city of Glendale biography, Haghani began his municipal career in 1989 with the Los Angeles Planning Department. He then spent seven years with the city of West Hollywood, where he became a senior planner. In 2003, he was hired by Glendale, where he was named community development director in 2010. Haghani oversaw a period of rapid growth in the downtown area during his 12-year tenure, tasked with developing multistory, mixed-use projects and directed to grow the San Fernando Road Corridor. However, he once told the News-Press that by 2014 he saw very little room left to develop in downtown Glendale. Shortly after announcing his resignation from Glendale to take on the role of executive director of Planning and Building Agency for the city of Santa Ana, Haghani also told the News-Press he was driven to take his experience from City Hall and serve a different community. I felt that I could stay and look at the slow growth, but there are so many other communities that want to have that kind of well orchestrated program, he said. Under Haghanis leadership, Glendales Community Development Department won the Urban Design Award of Merit, Award of Excellence and the Transportation Planning Award from the American Planning Assn. The department itself was named Department of the Year by California Building Officials, a nonprofit organization based in Sacramento, the year prior to Haghanis resignation from City Hall. At the time of his death, Haghani had left Santa Ana after serving there for two years and was only nine months into his role as Development Agency director with the city of Ontario. Former Glendale City Manager Scott Ochoa, now serving in the same role in Ontario, met Haghani 6 years ago when Ochoa assumed his Glendale job. [He] struck me as somebody who was very well grounded and loved the community but also was worldly, eloquent, witty, intelligent and visionary, Ochoa said. Along with all of that, he had a tremendous sense of humor. Ochoa said that about six months ago, it was Haghani who helped bring him to the top management job in Ontario. I guess you can say [he] recruited me, when you look at the opportunities [in Ontario], that was something that seemed like a lot of fun and [Haghani], as a visionary planner and facilitator of development, he seemed like he was having a lot of fun and that was more than just a little enticing. Tuesdays Glendale City Council meeting was adjourned in his memory. According to a statement issued by the city of Ontario, information on memorial services for Haghani is pending. jeff.landa@latimes.com Twitter: @JeffLanda A request made to the Glendale Unified school board has been followed up with changes in the hiring process for the districts next superintendent. Glenn Max McGee, president of the Illinois-based search firm Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, also known as HYA, arrived in Glendale Tuesday afternoon to personally lead the search, replacing two consultants the district voted for less than a month earlier. My understanding after talking to the board president [after the last board meeting on Feb. 26] was the majority of the board did not want Dr. [Dave] Cash and Rudy Castruita on the search for reasons related to a previous superintendent, McGee said. McGee is set to receive assistance from Maria Ott, a former Rowland Unified superintendent. I would be glad to meet with the board, go through the process and take a co-leadership role in the search because thats how important I think this Glendale search is, McGee said in a phone interview. With Marias local support, I thought we could do a good job and keep on schedule. Search for superintendents replacement begins for Glendale Unified McGee and Ott were expected to set a new timeline for the search during a board meeting Tuesday evening, which concluded after the News-Press deadline. Ultimately, the board is hoping to have a new superintendent in place by June 1. Taline Arsenian, president of the Glendale Teachers Assn., called on the board during a meeting on Feb. 26 to dump HYA and, if that were not possible, to at least replace Cash and Castruita. Doing due diligence is much more than what is in a presentation packet, she said. It is much more than what is presented during a 10-minute presentation to the public. Doing your due diligence is checking references and touching bases with people who have had experience with the people youre considering hiring. Arsenian did not elaborate on her issue with Cash or Castruita nor did any of the five board members respond to inquiries from the News-Press. Arsenian did say she had serious reservations about whether HYA which was chosen over the Cosca Group and Leadership Associates on Feb. 19 to conduct the superintendent search would be able to provide a candidate with integrity. Over the last five years, HYAs methods have been called into question on a handful of occasions nationwide, including in Des Plaines, Ill., when a superintendent with an alleged history of sexual harassment allegations was hired in 2016. There was also an issue in Minnesota in 2015, when the Minneapolis Public School District selected a candidate who allegedly abused special education students and in Tennessee in 2015, when a candidate who had twice resigned from previous posts and was accused of extravagant spending was a finalist for the Nashville school districts top job. Glendale Unified board dismisses superintendent None of the five Glendale Unified board members responded to emails asking whether they had conducted a Google search or any background searches prior to the Feb. 19 board meeting at which HYA, represented by Cash or Castruita, was selected. Also, neither Cash or Castruita were asked about any of those issues by board members on Feb. 19. McGee, who was hired less than two years ago, was not with the company during those scandals but said changes have been made to avoid similar scenarios. One adjustment was to hire a third-party search firm, Baker-Eubanks, to conduct an additional background search. We came in and made several process changes, and this will not happen again, whether its Des Plaines, Minneapolis or wherever, he said. andrew.campa@latimes.com Twitter @campadresports In only a weeks time, Glendale High School music instructor Amy Rangel proved shes no one-hit wonder. The Burbank resident was selected as one of 25 national semifinalists for a 2019 Music Educator Award granted by the Recording Academy, presenters of the Grammy Awards, and the Grammy Museum on Wednesday, Oct. 10. Fast forward one week and Rangel is at the Grammy Museum on Wednesday to accept another high honor. She and her music program were selected to receive a 2018 Grammy Signature Enterprise Award, which is a three-year grant that totals $22,500. The accolades and the possibilities created because of the grant money have been a bit overwhelming, contended Rangel. All this has been unexpected for me, honestly, Rangel said. Ive been nominated for the [teacher of the year award], but never got past the quarterfinals. Rangel added, Its been amazing and I really did it for the grant money and to be able to promote the program. I want people to send their kids to Glendale High School because we have great things going on here. Rangel handles around 250 students in a music program that requires many hats as she runs the marching band, which includes color guard and drumline, a concert band, string orchestra, full orchestra and two jazz bands. Rangel was one of 25 teachers from 24 cities and 16 states out of a pool of 2,800 hopefuls as the competition was open to instructors from kindergarten to college. She was also one of four educators from California, but the lone nominee from Los Angeles County. Rangel will find out if shes been selected in December as one of 10 finalists in the running for the grand prize. With the title of music educator of the year comes attendance and acknowledgement during the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles in February, where the winner will receive a $10,000 grant along with an additional $10,000 for the school. In being a semifinalist, Rangel has already secured a $500 grant. Should she be selected a semifinalist, she would receive a $1,000 grant, as would Glendale. I was excited for Ms. Rangel because shes a cool teacher, said Diego Garcia, a sophomore saxophone player in Rangels class. Its good for her to get recognition, and its really cool for our music department to get recognition because were underfunded. Rangel, a district 19-year veteran, applied for the Grammy Signature School contest and hoped for the best. They only pick four schools for the Grammys and I had to do some writing and submit audio tapes, Rangel said. They want to know that your program sounds decent. She added, The school district does what they can for us financially, but we have to fundraise tens of thousands of dollars to make sure every kid has a working instrument. Rangel has been part of a flurry of Glendale teachers and staff who have flourished of late. Rangel and her band played at the Glendale Educational Foundation breakfast on Oct. 4 during which Glendale High special needs instructor Betsy Astor was lauded as a Los Angeles County Teacher of the Year. A few months earlier, Glendale High custodial supervisor Krista Smiley was named a California School Employees Assn. Member of the Year. andrew.campa@latimes.com Twitter @campadresports A vote on whether or not to keep a healthcare workers union at USC Verdugo Hills Hospital in Glendale could come as early as the end of the month, according to an employee who filed for the action. Since October, surgical buyer Andrew Brown has been fighting to dissolve the union formed three years ago, when he filed a petition that was rejected by the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, because it arrived two days too late. A new petition was filed last Wednesday, Brown said. No date for a vote has been set yet. A hearing for the petition is scheduled for Jan. 11 at an NLRB regional office in West Los Angeles. Union representatives have filed several unfair labor-practice complaints against the hospital, including one that alleged the facilitys administration has helped Brown. He said those complaints must be resolved before a vote can proceed. A spokeswoman for USC Verdugo Hills did not respond to requests for comment. Filing a petition requires support from 30% of the union members, according to Grisell Rodriguez, who is leading the field campaign contract between the hospital and Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, known as SEIU-UHW. The current contract is set to expire Jan. 31. According to Brown, he has the support of the majority of the 230-member union, which includes patient services representatives, obstetrics technicians and phlebotomists. Grace Garcia Hurtado, a certified nursing assistant at the hospital, said the unionized employees are focused on bargaining for higher wages and better benefits. [We] arent going to be distracted by these attempts to divide us and weaken our voices, Hurtado said in a statement through SEIU spokesman Steve Trossman. Brown said in November that all he wants is a secret election, so employees can express their views about SEIU, but the union and NLRB are working overtime to prevent that from happening. According to Brown, SEIU has not delivered on its promises for pay raises and free healthcare. Late last month, dozens of healthcare employees and their SEIU union representatives picketed outside USC Verdugo Hills, as well as Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Burbank, claiming the two hospitals respective administrators were dragging their feet on contract negotiations. lila.seidman@latimes.com Twitter: @lila_seidman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) recently honored three women with local ties as Women of the Year for 2017. Glendale resident Phyllis Kim, a court interpreter in Korean in Los Angeles, received a bachelors degree and interpretation and translation certificate from UCLA. For years, Kim has been active with the Korean American Forum of California, which is dedicated to bringing attention and recognition to the comfort women of World War II. From 1932 until the end of World War II, more than 200,000 women and girls throughout Asia many of them kidnapped, threatened or lured from their homes under false pretenses were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Armed Forces of Japan. Kim continues to raise awareness about comfort women and also works toward receiving a formal recognition and an apology from Japan for its past war crimes of sexual slavery by its military, and to prevent wartime crimes against women as well as children. Through the dedicated efforts of Kim and the Korean American Forum of California, a comfort-women statue was installed in Glendale. Join the conversation on Facebook Lena Kortoshian of La Crescenta attended CSU Northridge, where she earned a bachelors degree in mathematics and a masters degree in leadership and policy studies. Her career in education began in 1986, when she was working as an instructional assistant at an elementary school and a middle school in the Glendale Unified School District. Since then, she has served in many capacities, including as a mathematics teacher at Glendale and Clark Magnet high schools, assistant principal of Herbert Hoover High School and a mathematics administrator at the Los Angeles County Office of Education. Kortoshian has also served as assistant principal and associate principal of Clark Magnet High School, and is currently the schools principal. Kortoshian served as a volunteer math tutor with the Committee for Armenian Students in Public Schools, a nonprofit organization that addresses both the educational and social needs of immigrant children in public schools, and she continues to tutor students after school. She is also a member of the board of regents of Prelacy Armenian Schools, a board which is appointed by the Prelate and Executive Council of the Western Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America. Over the years, Kortoshian has received recognition for her contributions to the community, such as the Armenian American Chamber of Commerces Friend of the Armenian Community Award. Betty Porto is co-owner of Portos Bakery & Cafe, which has locations in Burbank, Glendale, Downey and Buena Park. The success of the Porto family stems from humble beginnings in Manzanillo, Cuba. After Fidel Castros violent revolution erupted in Cuba in the 1950s, Raul Sr. and his wife, Rosa, requested permission to leave the country. As they waited for approval, both Raul Sr. and Rosa were dismissed from their jobs. To support their three children Betty, Raul Jr., and Margarita Rosa, a talented baker, refined her recipes and started selling her cakes to neighbors and friends. The Porto familys request to leave the country was eventually approved, and they entered the United States in the early 1970s. Once here, they opened a bakery in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles that quickly flourished, and Betty Porto, in addition to her siblings, was there to lend a helping hand. Betty Porto attended John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, and simultaneously worked at the familys bakery. Upon graduating from high school, Betty Porto earned a bachelors degree and a masters degree in political science from CSU Los Angeles, and UCLA, respectively. She said her goal was to attend law school, but she changed her mind after spending time with her family at the bakery, and she said she wanted to support her parents, who had sacrificed so much for their children. Over the years, Betty Porto and her siblings became increasingly involved in the community by supporting many organizations, including Glendale Healthy Kids, American Red Cross, Glendale police and fire departments, and the Alex Theatre. For the past seven years, Betty Porto, a La Canada Flintridge resident, has been a supporter of Union Rescue Mission, donating the remaining food from Portos Bakery & Cafe at the end of each day. mark.kellam@latimes.com Twitter: @lamarkkellam In a letter sent to La Canada High School parents last month, school officials announced a case of whooping cough was discovered and warned to take precautions: educate yourself and cover your mouth. Now, the district nurse says, theyre aware of 11 cases. That nurse, Chris Henry, said via an email the first case was discovered in early November, leading officials to send the letter to staff and parents just before the Thanksgiving break. Also in an email, Interim Principal Jim Cartnal clarified that the letter Henry sent out, from the L.A. County Public Health Department, addresses how families can get treatment. Janesri De Silva, the medical director at Kids and Teens Medical Group in La Canada, said she hasnt seen in her office any recent cases of whooping cough, also known as pertussis, which may be owed to the fact that her colleagues always try to immunize and protect our kids. While adolescents typically recover from whooping cough, De Silva said, infants are at a greater risk due to undeveloped immune systems. An infant in San Bernardino County died this summer after contracting the disease. Around the time of that death, officials warned that California could see an outbreak this year, according to the Los Angeles Times. Outbreaks are predicted to occur every three to five years and the most recent were in 2010 and 2014. In the latest outbreak four years ago, 1,231 confirmed cases of whooping cough were reported in L.A. County, said Michelle Parra, the director of the vaccine preventable disease control program at the L.A. County Department of Public Health. In comparison, there have been 237 confirmed cases in the county this year as of the end of October, Parra said. The student newspaper at Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles reported this week that eight students were diagnosed with pertussis. There, the school notified only the parents of students who share classes or activities with those affected, according to the Chronicle. A recent outbreak also surfaced in Marin County in Northern California. The Mercury News reported an outbreak this year hit hardest in local high schools one school had 56 cases in the spring while a school district reported this month all three of its schools had students affected by the illness. Pertussis is spread easily through the air when a person who has whooping cough breathes, coughs or sneezes, according to a county Public Health Department fact sheet. The most effective way to prevent whooping cough is to get the vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In La Canada, Henry said, officials are advising that families take precautions such as education and support. An online resource that tracks immunizations required for school entry shows the vaccination rate at LCHS 7/8 is within the safest range for herd immunity, at or above 95%. Ben Brazil is a features writer for TimesOC. He previously covered Huntington Beach for the Daily Pilot. Before joining the Daily Pilot in September 2016, he was a reporter for City News Service, a Southern California-based news service. Brazil earned his bachelors degree in anthropology at UC Berkeley. (714) 356-1396 Luke Money is a Metro reporter covering breaking news at the Los Angeles Times. He previously was a reporter and assistant city editor for the Daily Pilot, a Times Community News publication in Orange County, and before that covered education, politics and government for the Santa Clarita Valley Signal. He earned his bachelors degree in journalism from the University of Arizona, where he was the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, The Arizona Daily Wildcat. A spidery photo of the lava flow from Kilauea. The unfettered joy of children as they jump into the warm Pacific. An artistic photo of shave ice. These are among the winners of the Hawaii magazine 2019 photo contest, honoring the best images of the islands, shot by professionals and amateurs. A photo of a lava flow from Hawaii Islands Kilauea volcano took top honors in the 2019 contest. (Zeus Quijano Jr.) Zeus Quijano Jr. of Orange won the grand prize for his photo of red-hot lava from the Kilauea volcano on Hawaii Island flowing into the ocean. It was taken before last years devastating eruption that lasted more than three months. Zeus Quijano Jr. raises his camera on a beach near Laie during a February visit to Oahu. (Lisa Witzke) Advertisement That was just an amazing experience, Quijano said. He was on a boat tour around sunset when he snapped the winning photo of fiery lava clinging to hardened, black lava at Kupapau Point along the islands south coast. The more we contemplated it, the more it gave us what locals call chicken skin, the magazine wrote about the photo. Lava-viewing during a vacation to Hawaii Island had been on he and his wifes bucket list for a long time. Were looking to move to the Big Island, Quijano said. We both feel like we belong here. First place awards were given in several categories. An owl perched on a fence post near the Hawaii Island town of Kamuela, or Waimea, won first prize in the wildlife category. (Peter K. Tang) The winning Wildlife image of a pueo (Hawaiian short-eared owl) was taken by Peter K. Tang of Honolulu. He said it took patience to capture an owl sitting on a fence post near Kamuela on Hawaii Island. My friend ... and I would drive back and forth until we saw a pueo, he told the magazine. Some flew away, and some didnt mind [having their] picture taken. Beth Cagnoni of Kihei, Maui, snagged first place in the People category with her photo shot near the northwest corner of the island. Beth Cagnoni snapped a photo of her children as they jumped into the ocean near Kapalua, Maui. (Beth Cagnoni) My husband and three boys love jumping off cliffs here in Hawaii, and Kapalua Bay has some lower rocks with a ladder for the younger crowd, so my daughter got to jump too, Cagnoni told the magazine. The cliff jumping takes place near the Cliff House, a historic venue now used for weddings and other special occasions. A few miles down the coast near Lahaina is where Marie Frost captured the winning photo in the Food category. Marie Frost used her cellphone to snap this winning photo of shave ice. (Marie Frost) Frost, a resident of Dexter, Mich., who vacations in Hawaii every year, used an iPhone to take a shot of the lilikoi (passion fruit) shave ice at Ululanis Hawaiian Shave Ice. The peach-colored concoction, served in a blue bowl, stood out against the purple picnic table on which it sat before being devoured by Frost and her boyfriend. They use real fruit juice, she said. They leave the seeds in there which is kind of cool. In the Land category, Tou Thor of San Francisco found inspiration at one of bustling Waikikis lesser-known places: Magic Island, a man-made peninsula adjacent to Ala Moana Regional Park. A towering fan wave forms off the Napali Coast as waves rushing back from the cliffs collide with the next set coming in. (Jason ORourke) I always loved spending evenings watching the sunset at Magic Island, Thor told the magazine. Just like the name implies, this place is very magical and Im sure most people agree. Jason ORourke of Honolulu traveled to Kauais Napali Coast to take the first place ocean photo at Kee Beach. He said he shot the image as waves rushing back from the cliffs collide with the next set coming in. First prize winners received $100 gift certificates for their efforts. Quijano, the grand-prize winner, earned a $500 gift voucher, round-trip airfare to Hawaii for two, plus a stay in a Waikiki hotel. Submissions are judged by the magazines team of editors, designers and staff. Info: Hawaii Magazines 2019 Photo Contest travel@latimes.com @latimestravel When you say youre going to Fiji, you might want to be a little more specific. The South Pacific nation includes about 300 islands (and hundreds of islets) that spread across a million square miles. No matter where you fan out to, if youre flying internationally, youll probably land at Nadi airport on Viti Levu. Here is the lowdown on this weeks fare: Fare: From LAX, $726 round trip, including all taxes and fees, to Nadi on Fiji Airways Advertisement Restrictions: Subject to availability. For travel March 1-Dec. 11. Tickets must be purchased by Feb. 27. Info: Fiji Airways, (800) 227-4446, Source: Airfarewatchdog travel@latimes.com @latimestravel Halfway up a 50-foot pitch on the Cut Your Teeth crag at the edge of Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area outside Las Vegas, my forearms and calves began cramping. (Lou Spirito For The Times) Lean in, called Andy Stephen, the American Alpine Institute guide who was belaying me on the moderate sport climb in Calico Basin, so named because of its deep auburn and orange colors. Though his advice seemed counterintuitive to this novice climber, I leaned in and relaxed. (Even if I did slip, I would fall only a foot or two because I was protected by a harness that was connected to a rope that Stephen manned from the ground.) Advertisement After a few moments, the cramping subsided and I continued, carefully, up the vertical cliff that was studded with small, nubbin-like handholds and footholds known as crimps, which gave me a firm grip on my slow-but-steady ascent. Once at the top, I looked east and saw the Las Vegas strip 20 miles away. And to the west, gray mountains rose several thousand feet in the distance. Id met Stephen, fellow guide Sam Boyce and Stephens girlfriend, Vanessa Portillo, a fellow climber, earlier that morning in Summerlin. We drove to the Red Springs parking area in Calico Basin, gathered up ropes, harnesses, helmets, climbing shoes and other gear and trekked through a wash. At its end, we ascended a trail through huge, seemingly whimsical piles of sandstone speckled with iron deposits that sun, wind and rain had weathered to a cracked and blackened finish. Over the next few hours I tried to imitate Portillo, who seemed to defy gravity as she flowed smoothly up the Cut Your Teeth crag, before we moved on to climb the longer and more difficult Impacted Molar route. When its cold and snowy in places like Yosemite lots of people come here because the weather is mild in the winter and into the spring, Stephen told me over sandwiches. With temperatures in the 50s and sunny skies, its great for climbing and hiking a nice alternative to the gym. And there is everything here from novice routes to climbs that will challenge the best. We guide and instruct on them all. Climber on the difficult Rebel Without a Pause route in a side canyon at Red Rock called the Black Corridor. (Brian E. Clark) Hiking If rock climbing isnt your cup of tea, both the Alpine Institutes Stephen and Alan Gregax, a trip leader with VegasHikers, said Red Rock is filled with great trails for hikers of all abilities. Gregax, who moved to Las Vegas 30 years ago, works as a mail carrier but often leads several outings a week for VegasHikers. I didnt start hiking until adulthood, said Gregax. When I was a youngster, my parents would drive out to the Calico One overlook and let me scramble to my hearts content. When I got older, I found people to hike with through VegasHikers and thats what got me going on actual trails. Now I head out just about whenever I can from fall into spring, as long as the weather is comfortable, for the best hiking in this region. I deliver mail so I get acclimated to heat, but Id never lead people in Red Rock in the summer. Even this time of year, though, I always carry a liter of water for every hour Im going to be out there. Hikers head up into the Calico Hills in Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area to go climbing. They are part of an American Alpine Institute group. (Brian E. Clark) Here are five of Gregaxs favorite hikes, ranging from moderate to more difficult: Calico Tanks, which many consider the most popular hike in the area, is named after an ephemeral pool of water at the end of the trail. The loop is less than three miles round trip, isnt difficult and ascends about 600 feet. The trail head is at the Sandstone Quarry pullout, about three miles inside Red Rock on the scenic loop. Ice Box Canyon is about the same distance and gains about 500 feet. It begins with a well-maintained trail across open country and then drops into a cool, narrow canyon that seldom gets full sun. Once there, Gregax said it requires a bit of scrambling over boulders, making it more difficult than the Calico Tanks trail. The trailhead is at the Ice Box Canyon parking lot, about eight miles into the scenic loop. The Pine Creek trail also starts in the open and then descends into a canyon that requires some scrambling, Gregax said. At about eight-tenths of a mile, youll come to the remains of Horace Wilsons old homestead, which dates to the 1920s. The round trip is about 2.4 miles, but hikers can continue a few more miles from the end of the loop and climb several thousand feet. The trailhead is about nine miles in on the scenic loop. The La Madre Spring and Miners Cabin trail, which is four miles round trip and gains about 700 feet, is Gregaxs favorite. It begins at the Willow Springs trailhead and follows an old road to a spring that was dammed to water cattle. The trail crosses a creek at several points and passes two significant waterfalls before it arrives at a miners cabin built of native rock. For something more strenuous, Gregax recommends the Turtlehead Peak trail, which is 4.6 miles round trip, gains 2,000 feet and is steep in some places. Loose rock and shale make the hike even more challenging, so he recommends using trekking poles. But the reward is worth it, offering great views of Red Rock Canyon, southern Utah and Arizona. The trailhead is at the Sandstone Quarry pullout. If you go More info: Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area List of VegasHikers outings For ideas on other hikes in Red Rock, see birdandhike.com. The cost of climbs with American Alpine Institute guides starts at $365 per person, with lower rates for additional participants. Admission to Red Rock is $15 per car. We are way above average. You are nodding and smiling and saying, Who didnt know that? In this instance, the average is rain. L.A.s total before this most recent storm: about 17 inches since Oct. 1. Last year at this same time: less than 2 inches. As I write this, it looks like the apocalypse outside. My name is Catharine Hamm, and Im the travel editor for the Los Angeles Times. Maybe these gloomy skies have led to a deficiency of vitamin D, known as the Sunshine Vitamin. In the winter, its virtually impossible to produce Vitamin D from the sun if you live 37 degrees above the Equator (or north of Atlanta), because the sun never gets high enough in the sky for its ultraviolet B rays to penetrate the atmosphere, Lisa Esposito and Deborah Kotz write in U.S. News & World Report, quoting Harvard Womens Health Watch. A deficiency may lead to depression and insomnia, they write. Advertisement Vitamin D also is important in the fight against heart disease, cancer and asthma, among other ills, WebMD says. Consider taking a supplement, drinking milk, eating fish and beef liver and going to Belize. That last isnt a medical opinion, but how can you look at the photos and not want to be there? (Being in the sun helps, although you will, of course, practice safe sun.) Especially when were writing about a kind of summer camp for kids and adults. Other things to lift your spirits: the wildflower bloom in California; an Arizona cave tour thats both giggly fun and geologically interesting; a weekend-away suggestion for a Northern California town where the stunning setting is just the beginning; news about an update to an iconic California hotel; and more. Come on in. The waters fine. Being a kid (or a kid again) in Belize Katie Quirk has traveled all her life. When I was a kid, my parents took three months off from work, pulled me and my brother from school, and traveled with us around Spain, France, England and Ireland, she said in an email. I was 12 and had some basic French, so my parents assigned me to find housing each evening. That experience made language and exploring other cultures real to me. She wanted the same for her children, who often list travel among their favorite hobbies. My children occasionally comment that they wish our family were a little more normal, Quirk said. In particular, they wish they could go to Disneyland or Disney World at least once in their childhood. There are times when our style of travel certainly challenges them, which she has documented in articles for the L.A. Times on family trips to Nicaragua and Guatemala Her most recent article focuses on an idyll Belize that should be just what the weatherman ordered for soggy Southern Californians. Reid Quirk, son of writer Katie Quirk, sips on a freshly harvested coconut at sunset on Long Caye in Belize. (Katie Quirk) Were just wild about wildflowers Superbloom may not be a scientific term, Mary Forgione writes, but its definitely a phenomenon that creates super excitement. Wildflower watchers have their fingers crossed that carpets of poppies, yellow hillside daises, forget-me-nots and more will color the California landscape. Lake Elsinore has taken off, causing traffic jams. Its on, a chamber official said. California poppy blooms are drawing about 1,000 people per day to Walker Canyon in Lake Elsinore. (Lake Elsinore Chamber of Commerce) Delayed Half Dome permit lottery is on too A change in vendors handling the permit lottery for Yosemites Half Dome led to a delay, but park officials announced it would now open on March 13, Mary Forgione writes. Heres what you need to know about getting the much sought-after permits. The day hike up Half Dome in Yosemite National Park covers 14 to 16 miles round-trip, with the last steep pitch lined with cables. (Marc Martin / Los Angeles Times) The delight beneath your feet in Arizona Meanwhile, no permit is needed to visit Colossal Cave in Arizona, just a tolerance for enclosed spaces and, yes, some corny jokes, Bill Fink writes. And if you have a taste for a prickly pear margarita cocktail, so much the better. Exploring Colossal Cave Mountain Park in Vail, Ariz., can be a family outing. (Colossal Cave Mountain Park) From the world down under to the otherworldly You dont have to have any video game experience to enjoy shooting zombies, said 24-year-old Austin Wiley. Wiley works for Level Up gaming lounge at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Its one of two virtual reality experiences that will get your heart racing, Michael Hiller writes. Take over the world VR style at MGM Grands Level Up, a 30-minute adrenalin duel with zombies played with VR goggles, a headset and a computer backpack. (Virtual Reality Powered by Zero Latency) Whats up with the Hotel Del? Can you improve on a good thing? Hotel del Coronado thinks you can. Thats why the iconic hotel is adding 142 rooms plus new features outdoors. Its part of a $200-million redo for the 130-year-old hotel, Mary Forgione writes. Artists rendering of new rooms coming to Hotel del Coronado in 2021. (Hotel del Coronado) This will fuel some discussion about rental car returns Lets say you rent a car with a full tank and youre told to bring it back with a full tank. Not unusual. But what if your car has, say, five-eighths of a tank of gas and youre told to bring it back with five-eighths of a tank? This means three things: You better be good at fractions, you probably rented off-airport and your struggles with hitting the mark may be over one day soon, thanks to telematics, youll read in my most recent On the Spot column. (Jason Ford / For The Times) Sometimes, its the simple pleasures Hike, bike, shop, sightsee these are among the pleasures of a visit to Tiburon in the Bay Area, Dorothy ODonnell writes. Take the ferry and learn about Tiburons railroad history (who knew?) at the Railroad & Ferry Depot Museum. Railroad & Ferry Depot Museum, Tiburon, Calif. (Richard Cummins / Getty Images) Protecting yourself while traveling abroad In an article about why we often come home from vacation with some kind of head or stomach problem, I quoted Dr. Robert Winters, an infectious disease specialist and founder of Westside Travel Medicine and Immunizations in Santa Monica. He mentioned a patient had returned recently from Southeast Asia and was hospitalized with typhoid fever, and I told him I had forgotten to get that shot last time I was in Asia a couple of years ago. Here was his response, which he gave me permission to share: I always recommend the oral typhoid fever vaccine for those travelers with extended plans for international travel to the more exotic parts of the world, including Africa, Southeast Asia, South and Central America, he said in an email. The oral vaccine is good for five years and only requires you to take one capsule every other day times four doses. This is a live vaccine, which means anyone with known immune system weakness should avoid this product; otherwise, it is well-tolerated and quite effective. The alternative injectable vaccine has to be repeated every two years. What were reading Carnival in Rio de Janeiro is supposed to be a celebration thats a sort of last hurrah before Lent. Rios is said to be the largest in the world, attended by about 2 million people. That in itself is pretty scary, but heres something even scarier, Lucy Bryson reports in Atlas Obscura: Bate-bola, which is described as Rios Seductive, Scary Alternative Carnival. In the regular universe of Carnival, there are floats and scantily clad women. In this alternate universe, there are clowns that will give you coulrophobia, a fear of clowns, because these arent designed to make you laugh. For good measure, there are devils and witches, like a Halloween gone bad. But it is a thing, and a growing one at that. In its tastemakers issue, Conde Nast Travelers The Neighborhood Redux focuses on Chinatowns in Bangkok, Thailand; Honolulu; and Vancouver, Canada. It looks at pudding parlors, souvenir shops, chicken joints and more and offers its perspective on old school and new guard. The fried chicken wings at Cambodian-Vietnamese Phnom Penh are worthy of the hour plus wait, Chris Schalkx writes of the old guard chicken joint, bumping it up against Juke Fried chicken, a cool Southern-inspired spot on Keefer Street in Vancouver. A New York Times article by Tariro Mzezewa on Capt. Kate McCue, who soon will be captain of the new Celebrity Edge, led me to a more detailed article in Britains Telegraph by Emma Featherstone. Both talk about her career path to being at the helm of a billion-dollar ship, but the Telegraph contains details about how she makes her life work. Fascinating stuff, especially the part about how she travels with her elf sphynx cat. Aerial at night of the Celebrity, a billion-dollar cruise ship soon to be under the command of Capt. Kate McCue. (Michel Verdure / Celebrity Cruises) How to reach us, how to read us If you have comments or suggestions on this newsletter, send them to travel@latimes.com. Tell us what you like and what you dont broccoli, the What Were Reading Section, the fact that New Orleans Mardi Gras contained a reference to the bad call in the Saints/Rams playoff game, according to Pete Grathoff writing for the Kansas City Star. Or anything else. If you would like to subscribe to this newsletter or many others from the Los Angeles Times for your specific interest, go to membership.latimes.com/newsletters. As far as I know, there are none yet about hairless cats, but who knows? End paper Katie Quirk and I share something: parents who believe that travel is the best learning lab for their children. I smiled when I read her line about her kids longing to be normal, wanting to go to one of the Disney theme parks, maybe just to see, maybe so theyll have shared experiences to talk about when theyre around friends. When we are young, fitting in with friends is important, but as you age, fitting in with the world is even more so. Quirks parents had her use her rudimentary French to secure lodging while they were traveling. Since then, Ive lived in parts of Europe, Asia, Central America and Africa and have learned to speak a number of language (to varying degrees): Spanish, French, Swahili and Tamil. Language is one way to open the door to the kingdom of travel, but it is the confidence to find shared principles and values with strangers you encounter that swings the door wide. Those commonalities are your ticket to a travel life that is anything but common. Wherever you are, travel safely and well and know that we will be here to welcome you home. By the time we reached the chocolate factory at the end of the world, the light was beginning to fade. As we pulled off the narrow road at St. Finians Bay, savage gusts ripped across the sloping green fields of Irelands rugged west coast. Waves pummeled the black rocks on the beach. The air seemed to be one-third rain, one-third sea spray. On four previous visits, I had never encountered an Ireland quite as rugged, weather-beaten and lonely as this patch of County Kerry seemed on this winters day. Even under assault by the wind and rain, I was tempted to go charging up the wet green hill for a wide view. St. Finians Bay, Ballinskelligs, County Kerry, Ireland. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times) Advertisement But dessert was waiting inside the bright, weather-tight headquarters of Skelligs Chocolate, and we had only minutes until closing. So we stepped into the factory, a tourist favorite thats often packed in summer. It was nearly empty. We tasted, we bought, we tasted some more. Then we clambered down to the beach to take in all that dripping, rippling, roaring beauty without the distraction of encountering another living soul. The kids Instagrammed it. Taking the off-season challenge Timing is everything. Ireland gets fewer than 20% of its international visitors in the chilly months from January through March. So an off-season visit raises certain possibilities, like that almost solitary stop at St. Finians Bay, and forecloses others. Is it a worthwhile trade-off? All else being equal, I wouldnt have taken the chance. But my daughter, Grace, and I had another reason to be in Killarney in February. (She does Irish dance; there was a big competition.) So while my wife, Mary Frances, tended the home fires (and her classroom of second-graders) in Los Angeles, Grace and I and her friend and fellow dancer Sasha (both 14) flew across the Atlantic to do our off-season best in County Kerry. The path to Muckross Abbey, Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times) We spent most of a week wedging in tourism between bouts of dancing, and we often explored in a two-car caravan with another friend and dancer, Jonathan, 13, and his parents. We paid far less for air and lodging than this summers visitors will. We also did less waiting around, less fussing with traffic, less jostling with other tourists. Quite literally, we saw the landscape in a different light from what a summer visitor would. Ross Castle, Killarney, County Kerry. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times) But we also had to put up with more rain, fewer choices and a handful of other challenges. Heres a sampling of our wins and losses. Inspect prices, horses and sheep We paid about $570 each for our round-trip flights on Aer Lingus between LAX and Dublin (a route that will cost about twice as much in July). Then we grabbed a rental car and made a beeline for Killarney in County Kerry, about 190 miles southwest of Dublin. Before long, we were perched on a jaunting car (horse-drawn carriage) as a stoic Irish jarvey (driver) and stout Irish horse hauled us along the edge of Lough Leane toward the roofless remains of Muckross Abbey, built in the 15th century. Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times) Killarney (population about 13,000) drew about 1.2 million tourists in 2017, and Im guessing that on many summer days, the tourists outnumber the locals. Besides horse-drawn carriage, ruins, lough and lake, the city has a national park next door; a downtown full of brightly painted storefronts; a bevy of B&Bs; and about as many hotel beds as it has year-round residents. (Los Angeles Times) Its also the gateway to the Ring of Kerry, a 111-mile loop on the Iveragh Peninsula that contains about as much epic scenery as the Guinness storeroom contains barley and hops. If the Ring of Kerry were a clock face, Killarney would be at 2 oclock. The Skelligs Chocolates factory would be at 7. Scattered all around would be the backroads of Irelands Wild Atlantic Way, devised in 2014 by Irish tourism leaders to encourage roaming beyond the Ring of Kerry. A jaunting car (horse drawn carriage) works the road to Muckross Abbey, Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times) How much does Killarney slow down in winter? At Riverside Hotel Killarney on Muckross Road, where we stayed, a room for two (including breakfast) started as low as $79 in March, increasing to $200 and beyond in August. Down the street at the more stylish Victoria House Hotel, which I would like to try next time, rooms for two (including breakfast) started as low as $107 in March, increasing to $176 in August. At Hotel Brehon, also on Muckross Road, February rates started about $107 for a room in March, increasing to $200 in August. In winter, Hotel Brehon clerk Ciaran OGrady told me, the area is a lot easier to navigate. And you see the whole national park in a different way, OGrady said. The traffic in summer is crazy. A lot of bus tours. I drove about 700 miles in our week here, mostly on winding two-lane highways connected by traffic circles. We had rain and clouds and sun and rain again, and I had to drive on the left. But traffic was light. Im pretty sure I built up less stress covering all those country miles than I do in five days of navigating my usual 23-mile L.A. commute. Maybe it was the sheep. They outnumber people more than two to one in Kerry. Sheep dot the fields between the villages of Inch and Dingle, Dingle Peninsula, County Kerry, Ireland. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times) Leaping on empty beaches, poking around lonely ruins We had several landmarks and scenic sites largely to ourselves, including Muckross Abbey, Ross Castle on the shores of Lough Leane; Rossbeigh Beach on the Ring of Kerry; and Inch Beach on the Dingle Peninsula. Most afternoons the temperature would climb into the low 50s; most nights, it would sink to the low 40s. Three teens test their balance at Rossbeigh Beach, County Kerry. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times) Even when we were sharing a site with several other visitors, as we did at the Fahan Beehive Huts on Dingles Slea Head Drive, it was still a sufficiently uncrowded experience that I could linger alone in one of the stacked-rock structures and try to cast my imagination back a few hundred years. (The dome-shaped, stacked-rock huts could go back 800 years.) Waiting less, chatting more and meeting Dart and Sawel Another scenic spot we shared along the Ring of Kerry was the roadside turnout at Carah Bridge. And we were happy to share, because John and Jane Montgomery, visiting from Belfast, Northern Ireland, had brought Dart and Sawel, their black-and-white border collies. One of them flung itself at Graces feet to beg for a belly rub; the other circled round Sasha, herding her like a sheep. With plenty of room for other cars at the turnout, we were free to chat with the Montgomerys and play with their dogs. Maybe that would have been possible on a busier day, maybe not. I found myself thinking the same thing on the grounds of Adare Manor in County Limerick, where we signed up for an hour-long archery session. After the arrows and targets (and a chance to shoot an apple like William Tell), instructor Neil McInnes had time to give us a bonus glimpse of the neighboring falconry operation. Sasha takes aim at Adare Manor, a luxurious old estate in County Limerick, is now a fancy hotel with archery on its activity list. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times) This included a brief introduction to Caesar, a common buzzard with uncommon ferocity in his eyes. Neil McInnes, who teaches falconry at Adare Manor in County Limerick, shows off Caesar, a Common Buzzard. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times) Even at one of the busiest businesses in Dingle the first Murphys Ice Cream shop, beloved for its distinct flavors and reliance on milk from Derry cows we had the place to largely ourselves. Having arranged to meet with a few other visiting families, we wound up with more than a dozen people in an otherwise empty shop. Sales clerk Kirsten OBrien, stationed near the door to hand out free samples, told us about experiments with unique flavors (worst ever: smoked salmon) and seasonal traffic. Kirsten OBrien hands out samples at Murphys Ice Cream in Dingle. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times) In a town whose year-round population is barely 2,000, she said, a summer day can bring 1,000 customers in a day, occasionally 1,500. On a typical winter day, perhaps 125 to 200 customers turn up. It is possible to savor ice cream on a winter day in Ireland, especially if its Murphys caramel honeycomb and if youve worn enough layers. Remarkably, these three teens in Dingle have not yet noticed that the woman in the hat is handing out free ice cream. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times) Missing a few things All that said, many businesses and services close in winter. Traditional music sessions are harder to find. Boat tours on Lough Leane from the Ross Castle Pier traditionally start March 1 and end Oct. 31. Kate Kearneys Cottage, a popular stop for any visitor traveling through the Gap of Dunloe mountain pass just outside Killarney, closes every year from early January through late February. The bridge from Portmagee to Valentia island is open all year, but the quaint old car ferry from Reenard Point to Valentia Island shuts down between early October and Easter. ONeills the Point Bar, next to the ferry landing, was also locked up (due to reopen in mid-March) when we meandered past. So was the Blue Bay Cafe, which opened last summer in Ballinskelligs. When we did get our hearty lunch at the Moorings in Portmagee, our waiter turned out to be the owner of the Blue Bay Cafe, Kevin OShea, who takes other work between October and April to keep busy. This view of Valentia Island is from outside Portmagee, County Kerry. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times) But of all tourists who suffer winter disadvantages in County Kerry, surely its worst for monastic historians and movie geeks. From mid-May through late September, tour boats head out from Portmagee to the tiny, stony Skellig Islands, eight miles offshore. These include Skellig Michael, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that juts 714 feet from the sea like a maritime mirage. Despite its forbidding location and because of it the island is the site of an ancient monastery (probably 8th century) and was a shooting location for Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017). The stampede of Star Wars tourists, locals say, has reshaped the regions tourism industry. But not in winter. In winter, you stand on the largely idle waterfront at Portmagee and gaze upon the bright-colored boats. Give it another two months and its madness, OShea told us. Portmagee, Ivaragh Peninsula, County Kerry, Ireland. (Christopher Reynolds) Turning for the home stretch, clock ticking As a visitor circles the Ring of Kerry (and strays from the main road to sample sites listed on the Wild Atlantic Way), Skelligs Chocolate is just six miles south of Portmagee. Those are six dramatic miles, including the sharp turns as you descend the mountain toward the waters edge. And the drama continues. After our chocolate stop and moment on the beach, we pressed toward Waterville, Sneem and other scenic spots on the way back to Killarney. A ruin stands along the County Kerry coast near Ballinskelligs. (Christopher Reynolds) But the misty dusk got in the way. Because the sun sets so early in February and because we had dawdled so happily through the early hours of the day we ran out of light before we ran out of road and scenery. Im afraid well need another visit to complete the ring properly. Winter giveth and winter taketh away. WHERE TO EAT Victoria House Hotel, Muckross Road, Killarney; 353-64-663-5430; victoriahousehotel.com. Includes excellent dining at Sika Restaurant and Ivy Room bar. Dinner main dishes in the Ivy Room, $17-$29. The Laurels Pub, Main Street, Killarney; 353-64-663-1149; thelaurelspub.com. Run by the OLeary family for nearly a century. This is a traditional pub with a wine bar next door, drawing from the same kitchen. In summer, theres often live music and Irish dancing. $19-$33. Murphys Ice Cream, Strand Street, Dingle; 353-66-915-2644; murphysicecream.ie. About $5 for one scoop, $7 for two. (Murphys has other locations on the pier in Dingle and in Killarney, Dublin, Kilkenny and Galway.) Hotel Brehon, Muckross Road, Killarney; 353-64-663-0700; thebrehon.com. The hotel, next to Irelands National Event Centre, offers a well-stocked buffet breakfast at its signature restaurant, Danu, for about $17. Dinner main dishes about $15-$40. Afternoon tea is served from 2 p.m. daily, featuring sandwiches, scones and sweets, priced at $32 per person. (On weekends and holidays, the hotel offers a childrens tea, featuring smoothies and cupcakes for $21 per child.) WHERE TO STAY Victoria House Hotel, Muckross Road, Killarney; 353-64-663-5430; victoriahousehotel.com. Rooms for two (including breakfast) as low as $107 in March, $176 in August. Riverside Hotel Killarney, Muckross Road, Killarney; 353-64-663-9200; riversidehotelkillarney.com. Rooms for two (including breakfast) start as low as $79 in March, $200 and beyond in August. Ashley Park House, Nenagh, County Tipperary; 353-67-382-23; ashleypark.com. This is an 18th century Georgian country house on 76 acres of beech woodland, midway between Dublin and Killarney. Most of the seven rooms (no two alike) rent for $170, breakfast included. TO LEARN MORE Killarney Tourist Office, Beech Road, Killarney; 353-64-663-1633; killarney.ie Tourism Ireland, ireland.com christopher.reynolds@latimes.com Follow Reynolds on Twitter: @MrCSReynolds Palms casino-resort recently rolled out one of the priciest places to stay in Las Vegas: a two-story suite that costs $100,000 a night. The 9,000-square-foot jaw-dropper designed by British contemporary artist Damien Hirst requires a two-night stay. To start with, youll find plenty of Hirsts works, including ones featuring butterfly motifs, 12,500 diamond look-alikes (cubic zirconia) instead of pills inside a medicine cabinet, and two bull sharks suspended inside a tank filled with formaldehyde. With commanding views of the Strip, the suites curved bar features seating for 13. (Palms) Over the course of a few months, we explored with Damiens team every opportunity for the intersection of our work and Damiens, architect Peter Bentel said in a statement. Uncovering those opportunities together was the essence of play, with an added dose of Why not? Advertisement Perched atop a hotel tower, a private pool and hot tub, both decorated with artist Damien Hirsts iconic butterflies, overlook the Las Vegas Strip about one mile away. \ (Palms) The suite also features artwork by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Eric Haze, Felipe Pantone and Andy Warhol. Despite its whopping size, the suite has just two bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, both elegantly adorned with gray marble. The dining room table features seating for eight. Works by British artist Damien Hirst adorn the contemporary, custom chairs. (Palms) Other goodies include: a cantilevered pool and hot tub overlooking The Strip, suspended hundreds of feet in the air; two large lounges that also serve as media rooms, with seating for more than 50 guests; The suite has two bedrooms, both featuring king-sized beds, and 2 1/2 bathrooms. (Palms) a curved bar with seating for 13 (sealed within the bar is a collection of medical waste items such as rubber gloves, tubing, face masks, etc., totaling 175 pounds); and a salt room designed for therapeutic treatments, flanked by two private massage areas and a fitness room. The downstairs living room is just one of several gathering places in the sprawling Empathy Suite. (Palms) Guests also receive round-the-clock butler service, chauffeured car service, A-list access to the hotels nightclubs and the Pearl Theater and $10,000 resort credit. Elite high rollers, described as gamblers who spend $1 million or more, may be invited to stay in the suite for free. The suite was used for a private event March 1, but no one has yet stayed overnight. You can inquire about availability by calling (702) 942-1222. travel@latimes.com @latimestravel It was about 1:30 a.m. and the dance party was winding down. Dozens of teenagers and twenty-somethings had been celebrating for hours in late December at a church gathering in Kutura, a village in northern Nigerias Kaduna state. Somebody turned off the generator powering the party. As the kids started to wander out of the hall to go home, gunmen waiting outside opened fire. Haruna Dogara, 20, rushed to escape with a friend, who was shot in the head and killed. Dogara was shot in the arm, hand and leg but managed to limp into a house nearby and was taken to a hospital. More than six weeks later, in February, he was still there, recovering. I will go back to Kutura, Dogara said, speaking quietly and looking down at his hands. But Im scared. Advertisement Dogara said he didnt understand why the gunmen shot him and his friends that night, killing four. Haruna Dogara, 20, survived an attack on his village that local authorities blamed on Fulani herders. (Krista Mahr / For The Times) But other residents and local officials in Kafuna, the district thats home to Kutura, blame the attack on Fulani herders, a semi-nomadic, mostly Muslim ethnic group that herds cattle primarily in northern Nigeria. They say the group has staged deadly attacks in the last two years on Christian farmers in the district. Theres no action from the government, said Samuel Augustine, a 54-year-old English teacher whose 18-year-old son was killed that night in December. The police came once to take a report, and that was all. (Los Angeles Times Graphics) The fragile security in Nigeria, set to become the worlds third-most populous country by 2050, has been a central theme in the run-up to national elections scheduled for Feb. 23 after a weeklong delay. President Muhammadu Buhari, a Fulani former military leader who was elected in 2015, has failed to stop the violence in Nigerias so-called Middle Belt, a swath of states riven by the long-simmering conflict between farmers and herders. Nor has he stamped out the Islamist Boko Haram group that still stages regular attacks in the northeast a broken election promise that critics, including his chief opponent in the presidential race, Atiku Abubakar, often point out. In the farmer-herder conflict, nearly 2,000 people were killed last year alone in attacks and counter-attacks, according to Amnesty International. Farmer and teacher Samuel Augustine, 54, sells grain at a local market. His 18-year-old son was killed in a suspected attack by Fulani herders. (Krista Mahr / For The Times) Farmers and cattle herders have clashed over land for as long as most people can remember in Kaduna. But theyre coming into increased proximity due to climate change. As grasslands have been degraded in northern Nigeria, semi-nomadic herders have starting moving their herds into densely populated farming areas to the south. At the same time, as Nigerias population has boomed, farmers have expanded their fields, often into the herders traditional grazing routes. Disputes between the groups used to be resolved through traditional mediation, but violence has escalated as that system has broken down. Both sides have taken up arms, which have been easier to obtain as illegal firearms circulate more widely from conflict areas in the northeast and Niger Delta, according to the International Crisis Group, a global think tank that works to resolve conflict. In some places, like Kutura, the conflict has become detached from arguments over land altogether, taking on worrisome religious and ethnic dimensions. It has fanned local and national ethno-religious tensions in a country that is roughly half Christian and half Muslim, rendering the farmer-herder conflict Nigerias gravest security challenge, according to ICG. In the past, politicians did not exploit religious divisions, said Saleh Momale, permanent commissioner of the Kaduna State Peace Commission, a body created to encourage parties in the divided state to talk. The mindset today, he said, has become: You will eliminate me, or I will eliminate you, and the path to war is set. The political effect of the spiraling violence is already clear in Kafuna, where people think Buhari has been too soft on the herders because of his ties to the group. Before 2015, people were thinking Buhari would come and save the situation, said Titus Dauda, the district head. But its gotten worse. People have lost faith. Dauda sets a smartphone on his desk in the district headquarters and swipes through several recent photographs of the bodies of men, women and children laid on the floor in Ungwan Barde, a remote farming village. On Feb. 10, 11 people were killed there, he said. When asked who he thought was responsible, Dauda answers, without pause, Fulani herdsmen, of course. Dauda sees the bloodshed as inextricably wrapped up in religious prejudice. He is a Christian, a minority in the mostly Muslim Kaduna state. He said state authorities were more sympathetic to Muslims and didnt take firm action when Christian farming communities were attacked. Muslims always have the upper hand, he said. But Fulani herders say they are also vulnerable. After the Feb. 10 attack on Ungwan Barde, farmers in Kufana retaliated and attacked Fulanis living nearby, Dauda acknowledges. He said that after the retaliation started, he had to arrange security escorts for some Fulani who were too scared to move a corpse out of their village alone. Days later, Kadunas governor said more than 130 Fulanis had been killed in eight villages in that part of the state during that week. Members of the Fulani community in the area put the number closer to 60. There is no effort to protect our villagers, said Umar Gidado Abubakar, a Fulani herder. He said bandits were responsible for the deadly attack on Ungwan Barde, not herders. We dont know why [the farmers] blamed us. Momale of the peace commission said part of the intensifying political rhetoric had been making the Fulani community a scapegoat for a variety of crimes. Every sort of violence is ascribed to the Fulani, he said. This violence has claimed nearly 3,500 lives in more than 20 of Nigerias 36 states in the last three years, according to Amnesty, and presents a daunting challenge to whoever prevails in this weeks vote. Buharis administration has taken action. The federal government has increased the number of police and military in hot spots, launched three major military operations in the Middle Belt region, and consulted with leaders on both sides of the conflict. In 2018, the government released a National Livestock Transformation Plan, designed, among other things, to set up large ranches and modernize Nigerias livestock sector to take some of the pressure off arguments over land. But both Amnesty International and the International Crisis Group, which have released large reports on the conflict, say that scarce punishment for the perpetrators of crimes has contributed to the problem. We dont want to say this person is guilty, or that person is guilty, said Momale, the peace commissioner. In Kaduna, the peace commission has been visiting communities where attacks have occurred, sitting with farmers and herders to help the groups find a resolution. Momale said he tried to get both sides to understand that if they continued to fight, there will be never be a winner. The commissions interventions have worked, to some extent, in Godogodo, a village in the southern part of Kaduna state, where Muslim-Christian tensions have run high for years. A house burned out in an attack on Godogodo village in 2016 still hasnt been rebuilt. (Krista Mahr / For The Times) Along the two-lane road leading to the village, its easy to see how the worlds of the herders and farmers collide. Cattle wander across the paved road and spread out across the hilly agricultural area, walking among carefully planted fields. Three years ago, farmers who grow maize, beans, yams and potatoes on the outskirts of Godogodo were having regular arguments with local Fulani herders whose cows kept eating their crops. Were patient people, said Danboyi Dogo, one of the village leaders. When we tried to talk to the herdsmen when they were in our fields, it became violent. People were killed. Many residents stopped farming altogether, rather than risk a confrontation. Maybe the fact that farmers deserted their fields stoked the herdsmens confidence, Dogo suggested. One evening in the fall of 2016, Dogo was at home when he heard gunshots and people moving through Godogodos dirt streets. Fulani gunmen formed a ring around the large village in a coordinated attack that lasted 12 hours, he said. Some people stayed in their houses, watching as businesses were looted and homes burned. Some young men ventured out to defend the village but were overpowered and driven back. Others dived into the high grasses on the edge of the village and hid, praying not to be found. When it was over, at least 30 people were dead, according to Amnesty Internationals report, and hundreds of homes had been burned down. Military and police have been stationed nearby since then, and the warring groups have met and talked. Now residents agree that things are better, and people are rebuilding their homes and returning to farming. But the dispute that led to the violence hasnt totally disappeared. We had reconciliatory meetings with the Fulani leaders, Dogo said, but cattle are still eating the crops. Gambo Mobutu, pointing to his carefully tended yam crops growing under mounds of earth on the edge of town, says the herders will sometimes help the cows root out the yams from under the dirt. Their grass is gone, so they find it difficult, Mobutu explains. So they come to our farms and feed the cows. He agrees with Dogo that the conflict isnt over, but he understands why his Fulani neighbors are having a hard time. And that, at least, is a start. Mahr is a special correspondent. Investigators on Friday were still trying to determine what sparked an explosive fire in a densely packed historic section of the Bangladeshi capital that killed 67 people and injured as many as 41. Officials offered differing views, suggesting that an errant gas cylinder, a faulty transformer or flammable chemicals could have triggered the blaze that engulfed the warren-like streets of Dhakas Chawkbazar on Wednesday. We are still investigating the matter to find out the source of the fire, said Shamsul Alam, chief inspector for the Department of Explosives. Later, authorities said they were seeking up to a dozen suspects on suspicion of negligence but did not disclose details. Advertisement Many victims are still thought to be missing, and search teams could be seen carrying out the dead in body bags Friday afternoon. Authorities said most of the people who died had no chance of escape. Fire spread with rapid ferocity, trapping people inside buildings as well as pedestrians outside. The neighborhoods narrow streets made it impossible for fire engines to reach the blaze, authorities said. Helicopters had to be called in to douse the flames. The disaster has brought renewed attention to Bangladeshs poor safety record. Buildings in Chawkbazar are commonly used to store industrial ingredients such as chemicals to make toiletries. The district is known to produce knock-off shampoos and deodorants disguised as major brands. Fire officials had initially reported a death toll of 81, but later lowered the number to 67. Chemical warehouses were supposed to have been removed after a 2010 fire in the nearby Nimtoli district claimed 124 lives. That fire was blamed on flammable chemical materials. Khatibur Rahman, a resident of Chawkbazar, said that there was no enforcement of building codes after that fire and that chemical warehousing remained rampant. House owners are greedy, he said. They like to rent their houses to the businessmen for warehouses. They pay high rents for their business. He said inspectors were paid bribes to look the other way in Chawkbazar, a district in whats known as Old Dhaka, which dates back centuries. The government should strictly monitor and enforce the law and evict the chemical warehouses, said Rahman, who lives across the street from where the fire broke out in a building called Wahed Mansion. Eyewitnesses said a gas canister inside a car exploded and sparked the blaze outside the building. Vehicles in Bangladesh commonly run on compressed natural gas or liquified petroleum gas fed through gas cylinders installed in the trunk. Bangladeshis have increasingly turned to buying unlicensed cylinders to store gas amid a persistent shortage. Alam, the explosives inspector, said it was too soon to pin the blame on a gas cylinder. He said he had yet to find a car with an exploded cylinder or damage to surrounding cars indicative of a cylinder blowout. If a cylinder had exploded, all the cars [around there] would be broken into pieces, Alam said. But Nurul Majid Mahmud Humayun, head of the Industries Ministry, which oversees the use of chemicals, said the incident had nothing to do with chemicals. You have got a very wrong message, he told reporters. This is a gas cylinder blast. A resident who declined to give his name scoffed at the assessment, saying he was certain a gas cylinder started the fire. This is all nonsense, claiming a chemical warehouse was the main reason for this incident, he said. Times staff writer Pierson reported from Singapore and special correspondent Abedin from Dhaka. david.pierson@latimes.com Twitter: @dhpierson A strike by pilots of Taiwans flagship international airline has left some 20,000 passengers without flights toward the end of a major holiday week as bargaining has produced no results. About 600 of the 900 unionized China Airlines pilots have refused to work since Friday, grounding scores of scheduled flights. The pilots went on strike because their bargaining unit, Pilots Union Taoyuan, could not persuade the airline to ease workloads and raise pay, union board director Chen Pei-pei said. The strike had forced cancellation of 80 flights as of Monday and cost China Airlines $34 million in business, the company said in a statement to the Taiwan Stock Exchange. Some of the money has gone to compensating the passengers on cancelled flights, including on the Taipei-Los Angeles and Taipei-Vancouver routes. Labor strikes are rare in Taiwan compared to in Western countries because companies normally discourage unions, said John Brebeck, senior advisor at the Quantum International Corp. investment consultancy in Taiwan. My sense is that all the power lies with the corporates, Brebeck said. Advertisement But pilots can make more demands on employers in Taiwan because good ones are scarce, he said. The striking China Airlines pilots are demanding full rather than basic salaries for the equivalent of a 13th month each year, a threefold increase, Chen said. They have further asked the airline to ease on-the-job fatigue by allowing crews of four people on all flights of more than 12 hours and three people for all eight-hour journeys, Chen said. Safety was an issue for China Airlines after 18 crashes and other mishaps between 1969 and 2007, and airline spokesman Jason Liu said Tuesday the company was open to making adjustments to crew sizes. But the pilots keep adding demands, lengthening the negotiation process, Liu said. Their demands keep shifting, so we have to go back and see whether we have resources and ability to meet them, he said. The union and the airline suspended negotiations Monday. Were not optimistic, Chen said. Weve been talking to the company since 2017 when we first applied for adjustments. The company never made a deal with us. Some pilots have opted to keep working, allowing the airline to operate 90% of its normal number of flights, Liu said. But the union board director suspects China Airlines is using contract pilots or nonunionized foreign nationals. The strikes first three days hit the end of a nine-day Lunar New Year vacation, but the airline says it put a lot of bumped passengers onto flights of other carriers. Most China Airlines counters were deserted on an otherwise busy Tuesday morning at a departure hall in Taiwans chief airport in Taoyuan City. China Airlines, founded in 1959, normally runs about 1,400 flights weekly to more than 100 cities. Taiwans last memorable mass work stoppage took place in July 2017 when 500 flight attendants from Taiwans other major carrier, Eva Airways, asserted their right to take a day off due to a typhoon threat. Their action forced the cancellation of 50 flights, adding to those already spiked or delayed because of the weather. Jennings is a special correspondent. Late last August, 300 sub-Saharan migrants ran from the hills above this small Spanish enclave on the northern coast of Africa and stormed the 20-foot-high barbed-wire fence separating Spain from Morocco. When 118 of them reached the other side, they hugged and yelped in disbelief. After journeying thousands of miles, after months of lying in wait in the forest for the perfect moment to cross, they had made it to Europe. But the euphoria wouldnt last. A day later, 116 of the migrants were deported back to Morocco. After mass crossings into Ceuta, the 7-square-mile Spanish city of 85,000 on the Strait of Gibraltar and a stones throw from continental Europe, Spain has cracked down. Spain has put in place a policy of externalization of border control to the Moroccans. Virginia Alvarez, researcher at Amnesty International Spain. Advertisement Spains government, praised in the last year as more welcoming of immigrants than others in Europe, has partnered with Morocco to stop migrants from crossing its borders, or sometimes even approaching prompting outcry from human rights groups. Spain has put in place a policy of externalization of border control to the Moroccans, said Virginia Alvarez, a researcher at Amnesty International Spain. And Morocco does not comply with human rights standards. The forests outside Ceuta where migrants once waited to cross are quiet; those whove made it into the city are laying low for fear of deportation. And in the northern Moroccan city of Tangier, migrants waiting to cross the Strait of Gibraltar tell of police raiding homes and packing people on buses to the countrys south. Sub-Saharan migrants aiming to cross to Europe take shelter in a forest overlooking the neighborhood of Masnana, on the outskirts of Tangier, Morocco, in September 2018. (Mosaab Elshamy / Associated Press) As historically high-migrant destinations including Italy closed their borders to refugees, Spain became the most popular route into Europe. Last year, 57,000 people crossed illegally into Spain, according to Frontex, the European Unions border and coast guard agency surpassing 23,000 crossing into Italy and 56,000 into Greece and Cyprus. The surge in migration to Spain including a boat holding more than 600 immigrants turned away by Italy and Malta in June prompted the nation to open a temporary refugee camp in Cadiz. But human rights groups argue that Europe and especially Spain, which has struggled to accommodate the new arrivals, are outsourcing border policing to Morocco. Last year, the European Union pledged about $159 million to Morocco in order to contain migration into Spain. In 2018, Moroccan officials intercepted 89,000 attempts to illegally cross into Spain, according to the countrys interior ministry. A razor-wire-topped border fence separates the Spanish enclave of Ceuta from Morocco. (Meg Bernhard / For The Times) Morocco is building new encampments for officers patrolling its border with Ceuta, an autonomous city with its own government like Spanish regions such as Catalonia or Basque Country. The Moroccans work in tandem with the Spanish civil guard, which monitors the fences cameras and motion sensors to detect potential border crossers. And across the country last year, Moroccan police swept up thousands of immigrants in home raids, according to data collected by Amnesty International. In many cases, police send immigrants to the south of Morocco instead of back to their home countries. Theyre treating them like they are their owners, like [the immigrants] are sheep, said Santiago Agrelo Martinez, the archbishop of Tangier. They can put them and take them wherever they want. (Los Angeles Times) Thirty miles southwest of Ceuta, in Tangier, five Senegalese immigrants share the bottom floor of a building in the quiet neighborhood of Souani. Every month, they pool $460 for the two-bedroom flat tucked away in an alley off a street lined with orange trees and restaurants. Their living situation is unusual, said Cheikh Mbaye, who has lived in the flat for three years and plans to return to Senegal; many immigrants save their money to pay smugglers, and instead cram into smaller apartments with 20 or 30 other people. Mbaye and the others chose to live in Souani because the risk of a police raid is lower compared with other neighborhoods. Each day [the police] come to break into the houses of the migrants who are here, to catch them and take them away to Tiznit, a city in southern Morocco, said Mbaye, 30. Lamine Diop, 25, sat on a faded red cushion as he recounted the four times he had been detained and sent to Tiznit. One early morning, police broke down the door to an apartment where he had been staying with more than 25 other immigrants. He was handcuffed, taken to a detention center, then bused to Tiznit. Then he headed north again. Ndeye Marieme Diop, 28, who is not related to Lamine Diop, has also been deported several times. She lived in Saudi Arabia and Casablanca before paying smugglers 500 euros for a place to stay in Tangier while she waited to cross into Spain. Her father had died and she considered it her responsibility as the oldest child to find a way to earn money for her family, including her 7-year-old. In October, police broke down the door of her apartment, and she, too was sent to Tiznit, she said. When she returned to Tangier, she met Mbaye, who offered her a more stable place to stay. Both Marieme and Lamine Diop said they planned to pay smugglers for a boat trip across the Strait of Gibraltar, a nine-mile stretch where the meeting of the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea creates powerful and dangerous crosscurrents. Thousands attempted the crossing last year. Many didnt make it. On Jan. 12 alone, 53 migrants drowned when their boat capsized in the Alboran Sea. Immigrants are increasingly choosing a sea route to Spain, according to a government official in Ceuta not authorized to speak on the topic. Spain would not deport immigrants rescued at sea, the official said. But the country is quick to deport immigrants when they cross by land. For years officials have used a controversial practice known as pushbacks to immediately return immigrants to Morocco from the two historically Spanish-controlled cities in northern Africa, Melilla and Ceuta. In 2018, 1,977 immigrants arrived illegally in Ceuta, according to the Spanish governments delegation in the city, a decrease from previous years. Police watch over some of the hundreds of migrants that managed to get past the border fence in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave bordering Morocco, in July 2018. (Reduan/EPA/Shutterstock) But after 800 migrants stormed the border in July, Spain reactivated a 1992 agreement with Morocco allowing for express deportations of migrants to their point of entry effectively legalizing the rapid deportations already taking place. So when the 118 sub-Saharan migrants crossed the Ceuta fence in August, the policy was in place. They rarely have a genuine chance to apply for asylum, said Judith Sunderland, associate director for Human Rights Watchs Europe and Central Asia division. The whole point of these readmissions agreements is a quick agreement for returns. Spanish officials say the migrants were told of the opportunity to apply for asylum but declined. The central government in Madrid received 100 applications for asylum in Ceuta last year, the majority from Algerians. The Spanish government has defended its practices at the Moroccan border, saying the immigrants who tried to enter Ceuta in July and August were violent, throwing acid and quicklime at police at the border. Legally, its a very distinct situation from the migrants who we sometimes have to rescue, Spanish Vice President Carmen Calvo said in August, calling what happened at the Ceuta border unacceptable. Inside the citys fences, Spanish officials are grappling with a different immigration problem: More than 300 unaccompanied Moroccans younger than 18 are estimated to live in Ceuta. Some entered legally with their parents and stayed. Others hid under trucks or sneaked through the border with the thousands of Moroccans who cross into Ceuta each day to work. Though they can stay at a crowded center for minors, many sleep between the concrete blocks of a jetty near the port. A new proposal from the regional government of Melilla would give unaccompanied minors a deadline of three months before they are sent to their home countries or to other immigrant centers in Spain. One evening, standing on a curb near the ports western wall, a group of Moroccan immigrants discussed the proposal, worried a similar one could take effect in Ceuta. Taufek Liaduni, 17, said he wanted to get out of Ceuta as soon as possible. Taufek dropped out of school at 14 and was unable to find work in Tetouan, his hometown. Two months ago, he crossed into Ceuta underneath a trailer, clutching its metal underside and breathing in fumes for an hour as it idled in traffic. The border fence from the Ceuta side. (Meg Bernhard / For The Times) He sleeps under the jetty, braving the cold sea air and the occasional rat that scrambles into his sleeping space. During the day, he wanders the city center asking for food and money. By night, he stakes out the port, waiting for the perfect moment to clamber over into a boat bound for the Iberian Peninsula. Theres no other way, Taufek said. Some of the citys residents complain about the immigrants and unaccompanied minors. Posters on the 3,000-member Facebook group Citizen Insecurity Ceuta accuse immigrants of committing crime and call for tighter border security. But some in Ceuta are more sympathetic to the immigrants. Jose Berrocal lived on his familys farm at the border with Morocco until he moved into the city center five decades ago, when he was 15 years old. Back then there was no border fence, and people wishing to cross the border could do so easily. Now, he said from behind the counter of his tobacco shop, everything has changed. His cousins still live on the farm, near where the migrants stormed into Ceuta in August. Spanish civil guard members patrol the road leading to the farm, and no unauthorized visitors are allowed. Berrocal spoke of the migrants as he handed a customer change: Theyre just trying to find a way to make a living. I understand that. Bernhard is a special correspondent. The Catalans come in droves, carrying separatist flags and cameras to photograph the nondescript brick house on a quiet road in the town where Napoleon suffered his final defeat more than two centuries ago. Some come bearing gifts a painting, a bottle of wine. Others bring their children. They make the 650-mile trek to Belgium to visit the houses occupant: former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont, Spains best-known fugitive. Puigdemont has called Waterloo home for the better part of a year, after having declared Catalonia independent from Spain in the wake of a successful October 2017 secession referendum and then fleeing to avoid arrest. Advertisement He has since faced European Union warrants and spent 12 days in a German jail as Spain seeks to extradite him on charges of misuse of public funds and rebellion against the state for having organized the independence referendum, which drew 40% of eligible voters. The central government deemed the balloting unconstitutional and ordered it not be held. A German court rejected Spains extradition request, declaring that a crime of rebellion must include violence, and that Puigdemont did not incite such behavior by holding the vote on independence, which was approved by 90% of those who did cast ballots. Spain rescinded an arrest warrant for Puigdemont in Belgium before a judicial ruling. Consequently, Puigdemont and a growing group of colleagues have established what they call their government in exile in Waterloo and next door in Brussels to bring international attention to the cause of Catalan independence. And Puigdemont has converted the airy, six-bedroom house into an international headquarters of the separatist movement. If Europe doesnt come to Catalonia, then Ill go to Europe, Puigdemont said recently in an interview in his living room. For months after Puigdemont left Spain, his precise whereabouts were unknown. One day, he popped up buying candy in Ghent; another time, he was seen in a forest near Brussels. In February 2018, Belgian newspapers reported that he had rented the house, where he planned to reside full time and establish the Consell per la Republica, or Council for the Republic what he calls the international seat of the Catalan independence movement. The flight of the self-imposed exiles was thrown into stark relief last month as a contentious trial of 12 former leaders of the independence movement got underway in Spains Supreme Court. Several defendants, including former Catalan Vice President Oriol Junqueras, have been in detention for a year and face up to 25 years in prison if convicted. The trials outcome could determine whether Puigdemont can ever return to Catalonia without facing arrest. The Waterloo house, Puigdemont says, functions much like his old office at Catalans seat of government in downtown Barcelona. He spends his days videoconferencing with politicians in Catalonia and planning speeches across Europe. Each week, he receives journalists, diplomats and giddy Catalans eager to have him sign their Estelada, the blue, yellow and red Catalan separatist flag. Sometimes Spaniards opposed to Catalan independence protest on the lawn across the street. Puigdemont says his goal is to bring the issue of Catalan self-determination to what is considered the unofficial capital of Europe, where it is more likely than in Spain to find a sympathetic audience. I didnt want to hide, he said. I wanted a big spotlight. If I had wanted a more comfortable exile, I would not be here. Critics counter that Puigdemont is a coward for having not faced the music. If this man had a minimum iota of dignity, he would be showing his face in Spain before the court for all of the misdeeds he has done, said Ines Arrimadas, a member of the center-right party Ciudadanos, or Citizens, and leader of the opposition in the Catalan parliament, at a news conference in front of the Waterloo house recently. Puigdemont says he has tried to make the suburban digs feel like a Catalan enclave in the middle of Francophone Belgium. The home is decorated with Catalan flags and paintings depicting scenes from the referendum. He hosts calcotadas, typical southern Catalonia barbecues featuring grilled leeks dipped in romesco sauce. In November, he invited a team of castellers to visit, and they, in turn, asked him to form part of their human tower a Catalan tradition that dates back hundreds of years. We are here looking at Catalonia. We are not Belgium, Puigdemont said. This space is clearly Catalan. Some nearby residents appear bothered by the disruptions caused by their controversial out-of-town neighbor, saying his mere presence has changed the face of a tranquil neighborhood. There are a lot of people coming here, said Andre Troupee, 81. And Catalan independence is not our problem. We have enough with our own Flemish separatists, he said. Though Puigdemonts aim is to bring more attention to Catalan independence, European leaders have, for the most part, declined to comment, calling the referendum and the ongoing trial a domestic Spanish matter. We have no role in this debate and our position is known and stated for years, wrote a spokesperson for the European Commission in an email. The issue at stake pertains to the internal constitutional and legal order of Spain. Also in exile in Belgium are Catalonias former Culture Minister Lluis Puig, former Health Minister Antoni Comin and former Agriculture Minister Meritxell Serret. Like Puigdemont, they travel across Europe and keep in touch daily with Catalan politicians still in Spain. Comin remains a representative in Catalonias parliament but cannot set foot in Barcelona without facing arrest. There is no schedule when youre in exile, Puig said. You work 24 hours a day seven days a week to try to be able to return. Comin brought his daughter and partner to Belgium, but Puigdemont and the others left their families behind. Puigdemont says he is wary of establishing roots in Waterloo before the trial of his compatriots ends. Im in a provisional moment, Puigdemont said. My plan is to return tomorrow. If I could go back tomorrow, I would go back tomorrow. Other Catalans have fled to Switzerland or Scotland. Puigdemont is not the first Catalan president to seek refuge abroad. In 1939, when the Spanish Civil War ended, President Lluis Companys took flight to France to avoid arrest by dictator Francisco Francos police. He was eventually extradited and executed. Josep Tarradellas led a Catalan government in exile, based in Mexico, during Francos dictatorship. Separatism has divided Catalans for decades, but the referendum has served only to deepen the fractures. Snap elections for the Catalan parliament in December 2017 showed ongoing polarization over independence. Separatist parties won a plurality of seats, butCiudadanos, which favored Spanish unity, won the largest total number. The issue of Catalan independence is sure to be a major theme in Spains April 28 general elections. Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called for the elections after Congress rejected his 2019 budget. Catalan separatist lawmakers, frustrated at Sanchezs unwillingness to approve a legal independence referendum, joined the center-right opposition who accuse Sanchez of being too benign to separatists to vote down the plan. Meanwhile, thousands of people hold dueling protests for and against Catalan independence in Barcelona. Anti-independence protesters tear down separatist insignia across Catalonia; separatists do the same with pro-Spain flags and symbols. And in Waterloo, one of Puigdemonts neighbors, a Spaniard, has hung a Spanish flag over her front window in protest. Bernhard is a special correspondent. Seven British lawmakers quit the main opposition Labor Party on Monday over its approach to issues including Brexit and anti-Semitism the biggest shakeup in years for one of Britains major political parties. The announcement ripped open a long-simmering rift between socialists and centrists in the party, which sees itself as the representative of Britains working class. Its also the latest fallout from Britains decision to leave the European Union, which has split both of the countrys two main parties Conservatives and Labor into pro-Brexit and pro-EU camps. Many Labor lawmakers have been unhappy with the partys direction under leader Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran socialist who took charge in 2015 with strong grass-roots backing. They accuse Corbyn of mounting a weak opposition to plans by Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May for leaving the EU, and of failing to stamp out a vein of anti-Semitism in the party. The splitters who have between nine and 27 years experience in Parliament and represent constituencies across England make up a small fraction of Labors 256 lawmakers, or of the 650 total members of Parliament. But this is the biggest split in the Labor Party since four senior members quit in 1981 to form the Social Democratic Party. Advertisement Ann Coffey, Angela Smith, Chris Leslie, Mike Gapes, Luciana Berger, Gavin Shuker and Chuka Umunna have formed the Independent Group. (Kirsty Wigglesworth / Associated Press) Luciana Berger, one of those who quit Monday, said Labor had become institutionally anti-Semitic. I am leaving behind a culture of bullying, bigotry and intimidation, she said at a news conference alongside six colleagues. Labor leaders have admitted that Berger, who is Jewish, has been bullied by some members of her local party in northwest England. Labor has been riven by allegations that the party has become hostile to Jews under Corbyn, a longtime supporter of the Palestinians. Corbyns supporters accuse political opponents and right-wing media outlets of misrepresenting his views. There have long been signs that British voters 2016 decision to leave the EU could spark a major overhaul of British politics. Mays Conservatives are in the throes of a civil war between the partys pro-Brexit and pro-EU wings. Labour is also split. Many Labor members oppose Brexit which is due in less than six weeks, on March 29 and want the party to fight to hold a new referendum that could keep Britain in the 28-nation bloc. But Corbyn, who spent decades criticizing the EU before becoming a lukewarm convert to the remain cause in the 2016 referendum, is reluctant to do anything that could be seen as defying voters decision to leave. I am furious that the leadership is complicit in facilitating Brexit, which will cause great economic, social and political damage to our country, said Mike Gapes, one of the departing lawmakers. The seven members of Parliament leaving Labor said they would continue to sit in the House of Commons as the newly formed Independent Group. Corbyn said he was disappointed that these MPs have felt unable to continue to work together for the Labor policies that inspired millions at the last election and saw us increase our vote by the largest share since 1945. The Labor lawmakers who quit in 1981 eventually became todays Liberal Democrats, a centrist party that has failed to topple the dominance of the two bigger parties. The new group of seven stopped short of forming a new political party, but the seeds have been sown. The new group has a name, a website and a statement of principles, which argues for a mix of pro-businesses and social-welfare measures and a pro-Western foreign policy that is closer to the New Labor of former Prime Minister Tony Blair than to Corbyns old-school socialism. Their statement said the Labor Party now pursues policies that would weaken our national security; accepts the narratives of states hostile to our country; has failed to take a lead in addressing the challenge of Brexit and to provide a strong and coherent alternative to the Conservatives approach. The departing lawmakers said they would not be joining the Liberal Democrats, and urged members of other parties to help them create a new centrist force in British politics. We do not think any of the major parties is fit for power, said lawmaker Angela Smith. People feel politically homeless, and they are asking and begging for an alternative. Victoria Honeyman, a lecturer in politics at the University of Leeds, said history suggested the breakaway group would struggle to gain traction in British politics. Its very cold out there as an independent, she said. Its all well and good leaving because you believe the party has moved away from you, but you can often achieve more from being inside the tent. It was once considered the British party that stood up to racism and inequality. But today, the Labor Party is at risk of splitting over an anti-Semitism crisis with which it seems unable to come to grips. For several years now, the main British opposition party has faced a steady flow of allegations that some of its parliamentarians and other members were exhibiting openly anti-Semitic behavior. In February, eight lawmakers quit to form an independent group of parliamentarians, stating that the failure to bring this issue under control was one of their key concerns. Last week, Britains Equality and Human Rights Commission announced that the party may have unlawfully discriminated against people based on their ethnicity and religious beliefs. Advertisement It marked the first step in what could turn into a formal investigation of how the party has handled complaints about anti-Semitism. One anti-Semite in our party is one too many, a party spokesman said in response, promising to cooperate with the investigation fully. But many Jewish people remain critical of the speed and transparency with which complaints are being dealt with by the party and in the nation itself. I would say theres a link between whats happening within the [Labor] party and the rise of anti-Semitic crime in the country, said Gideon Falter, 35, who heads the Campaign Against Antisemitism. It emboldened anti-Semites outside the Labor Party, and within it. The number of hate crimes has risen dramatically in Britain in recent years, with the Muslim community still the greatest target. Anti-Semitic incidents, tracked for the past 35 years, reached a record high last year with 1,652 episodes reported, according to the Community Security Trust. It marked the third consecutive annual increase and a roughly threefold rise since 2013. One recent poll showed that nearly 40% of Britains more than 250,000 Jews would seriously consider leaving if Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn became prime minister. Rising anti-Semitism is not unique to Britain and has also cast a pall over U.S. politics. Soon after taking office in 2017, President Trump was faced with how to react to the deadly demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., at which neo-Nazis chanted, Jews will not replace us. Trumps response was that there were fine people, on both sides of the confrontation. Last week, Trump claimed that the Democratic Party was anti-Jewish and anti-Israel as he blasted a House-passed resolution, proposed by Democrats, to stem controversy over remarks by freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) that many criticized as anti-Semitic. Falter was born and raised in England and, until recently, never really questioned his future here. But as a Jewish man, he feels it is becoming an increasingly unsafe place for members of his faith and cites one reason above all others: The election of Corbyn as Labor Party leader in 2015. Falter is among a growing number of British people who allege that Corbyn has failed to adequately speak out on the issue and not only root out perpetrators, but swiftly expel them from the party. Corbyn, an internationally focused socialist and vocal supporter of Palestinian rights, has campaigned throughout his career against Western imperialism and aggression. His allegiances with militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas, whom he controversially referred to as friends, have led to accusations of being a terrorist sympathizer. Although Corbyn ordered an independent inquiry into anti-Semitism in his party in 2016, critics say it was ultimately compromised and contend that Corbyns reticence to speak up more forcefully against those who express anti-Zionist views is borne out of a desire not to alienate himself from those on the left whom he is ideologically aligned to. But this also makes him an easy target for those on the right who see his failure to lead on this issue as deeply troubling. Falter believes Corbyn is turning the Labor Party into a place where racists can be at home. I personally feel very worried about my future in this country. One of the two political parties is infected with anti-Semitism, he said. Its totally terrifying. Britains Labor Party has repeatedly said it is committed to tackling the issue, but complaints continue to mount. Records show that between April 2018 and January 2019, the party received 673 complaints alleging acts of anti-Semitism by its members. Luciana Berger, a young Jewish member of parliament who was one of those who recently quit the Labor Party and joined the independent group, said she has received a barrage of hate mail and verbal bullying. One online troll was sent to prison after calling her Jewish scum. Last month, video published of Labor lawmaker Chris Williamson added fuel to the fire for those who believe Corbyn is either complicit through complacency or privately anti-Semitic himself. The close ally of Corbyn was caught on camera telling local Labor activists that the party had given too much ground and been too apologetic over the anti-Semitism issue and that Labor was being demonized as a racist, bigoted party. He later said he deeply regretted his comments and was suspended from the party. It is impossible to overstate the damage that the anti-Semitism accusations are having on the Labor Party, said Matthew Flinders, director of the Sir Bernard Crick Center for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield. The Jewish Labor Movement, an organization that has long been affiliated with the party, recently held a lengthy debate over whether it should cut ties, and the leader of the Labor Party in the House of Lords, Toby Harris, said in an open letter to Corbyn published Friday that the human rights probe was a political failure. The last time that the watchdog organization took action against a political party was during an investigation of the far-right British National Party regarding its whites-only membership policy. For the Labor Party to be in this position is nothing short of humiliating and a matter of great shame, Harris said. Corbyn backers counter that the issue has been overblown and say it is an attempt by rival politicians and right-wing news organizations to discredit their leader, who has presided over a huge groundswell in party membership, especially among younger voters won over by his promise to prioritize education, welfare and healthcare. Supporters say Corbyn stands by his principles, but some have soured over what they see as a failure of leadership over anti-Semitism as well as the chief crisis facing the country: how to deal with Brexit as the March 29 deadline when Britain is due to formally leave the European Union looms. I dont think this is a major embedded problem that has polluted the whole of the party membership and ranks. Its a relatively tiny proportion of Labor Party members that hold some incredibly worrying views, Flinders said. What I dont understand is why Jeremy Corbyn hasnt made a very clear and strong public statement about his view and the Labor Partys view on the issue. Address this quickly and effectively -- basically show some leadership. Boyle is a special correspondent. 7 quit Britains Labor Party, citing Brexit and anti-Semitism Rafael Correa wanted to fast-track development projects when he was president of Ecuador, so he borrowed billions of dollars from China. But the loans have come back to haunt his successor, Lenin Moreno, who will go hat in hand to China this month to seek more flexible terms and breathing space. A onetime ally and now bitter enemy of Correa, Moreno and his government are straining under a huge budget deficit caused partly by obligations to the Chinese, whose loans financed roads, dams, schools and office buildings during Correas time in office from 2007 to 2017. Ecuador is one of several Latin American countries that in recent years benefited from Chinas lending spree. Like other loans China has made in the region, those to Ecuador are partially payable with shipments of natural resources oil, in Ecuadors case which China needs to stoke its fast-growing economy. Correa was a close ally of Venezuelas socialist, anti-U.S. President Hugo Chavez and saw Chinese loans as attractive because the Asian giant made no political or ideological demands, and the loans were a way of thumbing his nose at Uncle Sam, analysts say. Advertisement But terms of Ecuadors $6.5 billion in Chinese debt have become onerous with the global decline in the price of oil, Ecuadors main source of revenue from exports. Moreover, some developments financed by the loans, including hydroelectric plants, are not producing the revenue that was anticipated. Correa also made deals to sell the Chinese millions of barrels of oil in advance on favorable terms, committing the country to ship 90% of all its exportable crude to the Asian giant through 2024. Terms of the deals, by which he mortgaged to China much of the countrys future production of crude, its principal source of export dollars, remain shrouded in mystery. Ecuador is just the latest Third World borrower to have trouble making payments to China; the list includes Sri Lanka and the Maldives. In a radio interview Thursday from the presidential palace in Quito, Moreno acknowledged that he will travel soon to China to ask the government and banks there to cut Ecuador some slack because the previously made commitments are not the most suitable if the country is to go forward. ... We are trying by any means to secure financing. Finance Minister Richard Martinez used more stark language last month when he spoke before the National Assembly, describing Ecuadors $6-billlon spending deficit (not including $4 billion in debt payments due) for 2019 as unsustainable deriving from the implementation of a development model in which the state inevitably spent more money than it had, a reference to Correas presidency. Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno speaks to reporters at Carondelet Palace in Quito. (Rodrigo Buendia / AFP/Getty Images) Vicente Albornoz, dean of the economics department at the University of the Americas in Quito, said that even if China relaxes loan terms, Ecuador will still need a bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund of as much as $10 billion. (Ecuadors finance and energy ministries did not respond to requests for interviews.) Correa thought he was a genius and he has escaped accountability by giving the problem to someone else, Albornoz said. Moreno knew he was inheriting a country in bad shape but wasnt fully aware of the things he has to do to correct the problem. Jaime Carrera, director of the watchdog Fiscal Policy Observatory, said the IMF is sure to set conditions for any bailout, including a likely demand that Moreno cut at least 10% of the 450,000-strong central government workforce and end all or most of $4 billion in annual fuel subsidies for consumers. Meeting those preconditions will carry a political cost, he said. Those reductions will bring a lot of people out into the streets to protest, Carrera said. Making matters worse, said former energy minister Fernando Santos, is that some of the projects built with Chinese loans are overpriced and of poor quality, particularly the biggest, the $2.8-billion Coca Codo Sinclair dam. As is often their practice when making large-scale public works loans, the Chinese made the naming of a Chinese company as general contractor a condition of granting the financing. There was no bidding for the project, which made it vulnerable to overruns and corruption, said Maria de la Paz Vela, an analyst with the Multiplica economics consulting firm in Quito. The massive project located 90 miles east of Quito was inaugurated with much fanfare by Correa and Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2016. Designed as a 1,500-megawatt facility, the dam is operating at half that capacity since the discovery in March by a German inspection firm of serious structural problems that could require hundreds of millions of dollars to repair if they can be repaired at all. A report issued last month by the government controllers office said inspections had turned up 402 large and small cracks in the machine room that houses the dams eight turbines. The report made scathing comments about Sinohydro Corp., the Chinese company that built the dam, for the projects irresponsible and incomprehensible use of substandard building materials and construction methods including inferior welds. Part of the structure may have to be demolished and rebuilt, the report said. The report also said the Chinese contractor ignored a stipulation of the construction contract, that the dam be built according to rigid standards set by the American Society Of Mechanical Engineers. The Chinese used bad-quality steel and fired inspectors who said to change it, said ex-minister Santos. The Chinese had a party with us and took advantage, said Augusto Tandazo, an energy analyst in Quito. It was a case of a big country ripping off a small one. Ecuador is no stranger to financial crises. In 1999, several big banks failed and the country defaulted on $98 billion in foreign debt. While the debt load is lighter now than in 1999, Ecuador finds itself in an acute short-term cash squeeze, unable or unwilling to stem the flow of red ink by drastically cutting spending. The adoption of the U.S. dollar as the national currency in 2000 brought a measure of stability until the current debt squeeze. In addition to Chinese debt, Moreno is also confronting an enormous amount of domestic obligations left by Correa. He raided the $2.5-billion Social Security fund to finance his agenda and allowed the government-owned Petroamazonas oil firm, which produces 80% of the countrys oil, to run up $3 billion in debts to contractors including Texas-based oil field services firm Schlumberger, Tandazo said. Although Correa has been made the scapegoat for Ecuadors problems, economics dean Albornoz also blamed Moreno for not doing enough to reduce state budgets since he took office in May 2017. Government spending, which Correa nearly tripled over his decade in office, is still too high, he said. Has Moreno learned anything? Im afraid not. I dont see any austerity in the government and there should be a lot of it, Albornoz said. The IMF is a bank and it expects to be paid. But with no austerity plan, a huge deficit and public expenditures rising, its going to be difficult for Moreno to get a loan. Correa has his defenders, including economist Hugo Villacres, a professor at Catholic Pontifical University in Quito, who worked in his administration. When Correa came in, there was an enormous social debt and paying it down was paramount. There had been 20 years without much public investment in education, health, infrastructure, Villacres said. Could he have done it better? Yes. He should have gone after corruption more harshly. But he reduced poverty and inequality and were certainly no better off now than we were when he left office in May 2017. Among other Latin American countries benefiting from Chinese largesse are Panama, which is using loans to expand the port of Colon; Costa Rica, for the construction of a new freeway; and Argentina, to upgrade a dilapidated urban rail system, said Nashira Chavez a professor at FLACSO graduate studies center in Quito. Andres Paez, a former National Assembly member whose family was persecuted for its opposition to Correa, blamed the former presidents authoritarian actions, including the establishment of a network of state-run media, for keeping the nation in the dark about the extent of Ecuadors mounting debt. Every day, over five state-owned TV channels, 20 radio stations and three newspapers, we were told the revolution was going great, marvelous, Paez said. But he never explained how much it was all costing. Special correspondent Kraul is based in Bogota, Colombia. Special correspondent Pablo Jaramillo Viteri in Quito contributed to this report. Legislation that would grant amnesty to anyone convicted or accused of human rights violations during Guatemalas long-running civil war has raised fears that dozens of perpetrators of forced disappearance, torture and sexual violence could soon walk free. Backed by military elites and their allies, including members of the party of President Jimmy Morales, the proposed law passed the first of three congressional readings in January. A second discussion was scheduled for Wednesday. If enacted, the bill would mandate the release within 24 hours of dozens of officials and military officers convicted of crimes related to the 36-year armed conflict and a halt to ongoing or new investigations of internationally recognized rights violations connected to the civil war. During the fighting that lasted from 1960 to 1996 between leftists and the government, about 200,000 people were killed. Among the bloody actions was a military campaign against indigenous communities considered allies of Marxist guerrillas fighting the government. Advertisement A United Nations-backed truth commission in 1999 found security forces guilty of multiple acts of savagery and genocide against Maya communities, and held the government accountable for more than 90% of the killings, disappearances and other human rights violations. Hundreds of protesters marched from the Supreme Court to the Congress in Guatemala City on Monday. (Johan Ordonez / AFP/Getty Images) For more than a decade, the United Nations-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala has helped strengthen the capacity and autonomy of the attorney generals office and the judiciary in Guatemala, which was critical to the progress made in war crimes prosecutions in recent years, wrote Jo-Marie Burt, a Latin American Studies expert at George Mason University, in an email. Verdicts between 2008 and 2018 resulted in more than 30 convictions of military officials and state actors, as well as one of a guerrilla fighter, according to Burt. That included the 2013 sentencing of former dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity. (His conviction was later overturned and he died while he was being retried last year.) But those backing this bill have found support in the party of Morales, who was elected in 2015. They have recently stood by Morales in his clashes with institutions tasked with investigating crime and corruption. Its an attempt to undermine that, Eric Olson, an expert on Central America at the Seattle International Foundation, said of the bills supporters. Theyre under threat by the justice system in Guatemala. In January, the government said it was expelling the U.N.-backed commission, known by its Spanish acronym as CICIG, despite rulings from the countrys highest court to allow commission members to enter the country. The CICIG had brought fraud charges against Morales brother and his son, and had also opened an investigation into Morales related to illegal campaign donations. The sectors that have been hurt by the justice system are pushing back, said Viviana Krsticevic, the executive director of the Center for Justice and International Law, a Latin American human rights organization. The government has been willing to protect its social and economic base even at the cost of challenging international agreements and principles. Claudia Paz y Paz, a former attorney general of Guatemala during the prosecution of Rios Montt, said that previous attempts to gain amnesty have never advanced this far. The president, however, she said, has many supporters who have been implicated in human rights crimes who favor the legislation. They are committed to returning to the past and guaranteeing impunity, whether its for crimes from the war or cases of corruption, she said. Olson, who works at the Washington office of Seattle International, said that legislators may be empowered by what they see as support from the Trump administration. Although the U.S. released a statement expressing concern about the law, it did not strongly defend the CICIG against attacks from Morales government, which last May moved its embassy to Jerusalem shortly following the U.S. After Morales announced his plan to shut down the commission, U.S. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo sent a tweet praising Guatemalas relationship with Washington and thanking it for its efforts in counter-narcotics and security. I think theres this perception among these circles in Guatemala that they wont have a heavy price to pay if they move in this direction, said Olson. Theres a perception that they have succeeded in weakening the CICIG, and theres a perception that the U.S. has been less than vigorous and hard on them. Relatives hold a banner with images of victims of the Guatemalan civil war. A U.N. report in 1999 confirmed that more than 200,000 people died or disappeared during the 36-year civil war and held Guatemalas army responsible of 90% of the crimes. (Johan Ordonez / AFP/Getty Images) Juan Francisco Soto, the executive director of the Center for Human Rights Legal Action in Guatemala, said that reconciliation after the war means understanding that justice guarantees that these things wont happen again in Guatemala. These are processes that have taken years, and victims have pushed them forward, he said. It mocks victims after so much fight. Ana Lucrecia Molina Theissen spent decades trying to obtain justice for her sisters torture and her 14-year-old brothers forced disappearance in 1981. Marco Antonio was abducted after his sister, an activist, escaped from a military base where she had been sexually assaulted and tortured. In 2004, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that Guatemala was responsible for the forced disappearance, and last May, Guatemala convicted four military officers involved in either or both cases. In many ways, this was a situation that we expected because the people and sectors that support [the bill] arent passive they have a lot of power, she said. This is a return to the fight, as well as the realization that justice in Guatemala is still very fragile. Weve spent 36 years suffering, and seeing it [justice] fall in an illegitimate way turns us into victims again. The bill, introduced in November 2017, needs 80 votes from Congress 158 legislators to pass. On Feb. 20, those in opposition walked out of the session so that its supporters fell short of the quorum needed to discuss the bill. The proposal would reform Guatemalas 1996 National Reconciliation Law, which permits amnesty for crimes that could be considered political but excludes amnesty for international abuses like genocide, torture and other crimes against humanity. The proposal claims that the greater number of charges against military officials and state agents compared with guerrillas points toward judicial harassment of only one side of the conflict, the military, and says there was no genocide during the war. Fernando Linares Beltranena, the congressman who introduced the bill, holds that people cannot be convicted for crimes that were not stipulated in Guatemalas penal code at the time. All this law is doing is giving life to what was approved but not implemented 23 years ago, said Beltranena. It was better to have an amnesty than to have bloodshed. But we got an unequal, one-sided prosecution by judges and prosecuting attorneys who sided with one faction of the conflict and mostly those who are being prosecuted are military. The bill has received pushback from the U.N., the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and other human rights groups that say it violates Guatemalas international obligations to investigate human rights violations. Family members of those killed march in Guatemala City. (Johan Ordonez / AFP/Getty Images) The Inter-American Court has previously considered amnesty laws passed by Latin American countries invalid, and if the law passes, Krsticevic said, she expects the court to declare it void. Its decisions are considered legally binding by countries that have accepted its jurisdiction, such as Guatemala. In 2001, for example, it determined that the amnesty legislation Peru adopted in 1995 to shield those implicated in human rights violations did not have legal effect. Congresswoman Sandra Moran, who opposes the bill, has expressed concern that its only a matter of time until it passes. Many worry those convicted would seek retaliation if released. There is a lot of fear about the risk to the victims, the prosecutors, and the people that gave testimony or declarations to help shine light on the truth during the trials, she said. The mounting tension coincided with Mondays Day of Dignity for the victims of the internal armed conflict the anniversary of the 1999 U.N.-commissioned report on the war. This year, the amnesty bill was at the forefront of protests by human rights and victims groups. Edwin Canil, the leader of a victims group, joined hundreds of people who marched from the Supreme Court to the Congress. Many, he said, came from communities that bore the brunt of the violence during the war, and held handmade signs with photos of the disappeared. Canil was 6 years old when he survived a massacre in Guatemalas Ixcan region that killed members of his family. Theres been an enormous setback to democracy in the country, he said. Its outrageous. Once again, we feel completely unprotected as we felt during the armed conflict. Guatemalas political crisis deepened Thursday as efforts mounted to impeach several judges on the countrys highest court who have repeatedly ruled in favor of a controversial anti-corruption commission that the president has sought to expel. Guatemalas Congress, much of which is allied with President Jimmy Morales, will now decide whether three members of the Constitutional Court should be stripped of their judicial immunity. If that happens, the judges could be removed from the court altogether. Civil society groups quickly condemned what they described as an attack on the independence of Guatemalas judicial branch, with several describing recent political developments there as a soft coup. In countries with developed democracies, the decisions of the courts are obeyed, the Guatemalan human rights group Myrna Mack Foundation said in a statement.Their decisions are final and must be respected by all people, both leaders and civilians, without any objection. Advertisement The Constitutional Court has drawn the ire of Morales and other Guatemalan leaders for consistently ruling in favor of the United Nations-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala. It has blocked several attempts by Morales to undermine the commission, which was formed in 2006 to conduct independent investigations into corruption, drug trafficking and other crimes. For the last two years, the commission has been investigating Morales for possible illegal campaign financing. The commission, known as the CICIG, is also investigating the presidents brother and son as well as several members of Congress. A woman holds up a sign with an image of Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales that reads national shame during a rally in support of the countrys anti-corruption commission. (Moises Castillo / Associated Press) Last year, Morales sought to deny the head of the commission, Colombian jurist Ivan Velasquez, entry into Guatemala. His efforts were overturned by the Constitutional Court, which found that Velasquez had a right to be in the country and continue his work. On Wednesday, the court blocked a new effort by Morales to expel the commission altogether. Congress has made multiple requests to impeach the three members of the Constitutional Court who have consistently supported the CICIG. Guatemalas Supreme Court rejected several of those requests, but on late Wednesday accepted one that will allow Congress to move forward with impeachment hearings. The request relates to the Constitutional Courts ruling last year that Morales did not have the authority to expel the Swedish ambassador to Guatemala. The ambassador had championed Swedish investment in the CICIG. A spokesman for Guatemalas Supreme Court, Mario Siekavizza, said Thursday that the court had approved impeachment proceedings in that case because the Constitutional Court exceeded its functions. It was unclear exactly when Congress would begin the impeachment hearings. As the legal conflict played out in the courtroom, there were increasing fears that tensions could spill into the street. Protesters on both sides of the issue have gathered in Guatemala City in recent days, including outside the Constitutional Court. Guatemalas Rafael Landivar University is one of several institutions that has called for peace. We reject the polarization that, taken to its extreme, will result in violence, the university said in a statement. We deeply regret the open confrontation between the current government and legitimately constituted state agencies that endanger the already fragile rule of law in the country. In the United States, which played a key role in creating the anti-corruption commission, several members of Congress called on the Trump administration and international bodies to intervene. The international community must closely monitor [the] slow motion constitutional crisis, tweeted Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee. kate.linthicum@latimes.com Twitter: @katelinthicum The beat-up Hyundai station wagon turned onto the street, a signal that the party could begin. The women gathered at the door, ululating as children spilled past them to lob candy at the three boys who slowly disembarked from the vehicle. For a moment, the boys 11-year-old Ali Aoun and his two brothers, Khalil, 9, and Ahmad, 7 stood by the car, looking dazed as relative after relative came to kiss their shaved heads. Hours earlier, the three had boarded a bus along with 14 other children for the journey from eastern Syria to their families across the border in Iraq. It had been the last stop in a five-year ordeal. It was 2014 when Islamic State mounted its genocidal rampage against the religious minorities who had long made Tall Afar and the bucolic plains of northwestern Iraq their home. The militants slaughtered thousands of Yazidis and Shiite Turkmens, groups they considered infidels. But they also kidnapped their children, seeking to indoctrinate them and press them into service as future sex slaves or child soldiers. Advertisement Depleted and on the run, Islamic State loses Tall Afar without much of a fight That these boys had escaped five years later was little short of a miracle. They had fled the eastern Syrian hamlet of Baghouz, 150 miles away, where the extremists are mounting their last stand against a U.S.-backed militia known as the Syrian Democratic Forces. Yet they seemed drained of happiness as they sat in three plastic chairs arrayed in the familys courtyard. A woman brought out a table laden with bowls overflowing with candy. She placed it before the boys. The family gathered around them, some of them brandishing their smartphones to record the occasion. But the boys didnt move. They didnt eat. They didnt smile. They didnt even look up from the floor. Someone threw another handful of bonbons in a determined attempt to turn the mood festive. They smacked against the boys knees, but got no reaction. Four Shiite Turkmen children from the Iraqi city of Tall Afar, who were kidnapped more than four years ago by Islamic State, were rescued by U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. On Monday, they arrived home. A moment later, Ahmads face scrunched into a scowl before he began to cry. Khalil followed suit, while Ali buried his head in his hands, his body doubled over in the chair as if he were in pain. Around them, the adults looked helpless, their eyes filling with tears. One of the men came forward and scooped Ahmad in his arms, trying to get any response. Finally, two women peeled them off their chairs and took them inside. The boys homecoming should have been a moment of joy. But those who make it back from Islamic States clutches return to ravaged communities, and families ill-equipped to heal the scars of their time with the extremists. And perhaps the most remarkable aspect of their bittersweet story is how many others share the same fate: Up until last week, the Aoun boys had been among more than 120 Shiite Turkmens and hundreds of Yazidi children still missing. Its not clear how many remain or were killed. The Aoun brothers bondage began for the most quotidian of reasons: A car broke down. When the militants stormed Tall Afar in mid-2014, the boys family escaped along with hundreds of thousands of others to the town of Sinjar. But a week later, it was clear it too would soon fall into Islamic State hands. The boys crammed into a car with their uncles and mother, while their father, Shehab Aoun, took other members of the family in another car. They took the road leading to the top of nearby Sinjar mountain, where they hoped to evade Islamic State. The situation of these children is a crime. How will they be rehabilitated? There are no centers to help them, and the families themselves have been destroyed. Mohammad Nathem, a businessman and activist from Tall Afar But the road was too crowded. One car stopped in the middle of the road and blocked the path, and they couldnt get through, said Aoun, 55, who worked as a farmer before 2014 but now is part of the Shiite-dominated militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces. The militants caught up with them. The men were taken away and killed; the women, including Aouns wife, were dragged off to become sex slaves (she remains missing); the three boys were sent to an Islamic State orphanage in Mosul. There they found another Shiite Turkmen boy, Mahdi Ghazi Jolac, who was 6 at the time. Mahdi had been brought to the orphanage along with his 5-year-old sister Laila and 4-year-old brother Jamil. His two younger siblings, Ali, who was 10 months old, and Ramleh, just 2 weeks old, were placed with Islamic State families to be raised as their own. Mahdi, who had returned with the Aoun children on Monday, described his time with Islamic State as a series of moves, many of them mirroring the groups retreat before the U.S.-led coalitions offensives in Iraq and Syria. The children were made to wear Kandahari-style clothes, the long tunic and pants set worn by many Islamic State members, he recalled, and put in an intensive program of religious study, punctuated by beatings for any perceived bad behavior. They taught us Islamic doctrine, creed, Koran, Koranic recitation, he said. If we didnt do well, they would hit us. One poured gasoline on a kid with us because he made a hole in a mattress. A few years later, the kids in the orphanage were sent to an area near the Euphrates River. Those who were 8 and older were forced to join the so-called Cubs of the Caliphate, Islamic States training program that prepared children to become fighters under the groups banner. They were issued rifles, and taught to shoot. One emir (the groups name for commander), Mahdi remembered, took sadistic pleasure in mocking him and others from Tall Afar because they were Shiite Muslims. Islamic State adheres to an extreme version of Sunni Islam. Every time he saw us, he would beat us with a hose, he said. He beat Ali to force him into uttering a blasphemy and get punishment. He was imprisoned for 20 days. By the time they had reached Baghouz in December, Islamic State was besieged on all sides. Matters turned desperate, and Mahdi said the children were fed nothing but lentils. Then this month, he said, as a truce with the Syrian Democratic Forces ended, the head of the orphanage told the boys it was time for them to escape. The children made the trek across the desert, dodging gunfire as well as Islamic State members who would force them to turn back, Mahdi said. (Mahdis family said two of his four siblings have been returned, but one remains with Islamic State and one has been adopted by a family in Turkey, which is fighting his return.) The Aoun children and Mahdi made it to the Kurdish-led camps. There, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces filmed them and posted the video to Twitter. Five days later, they were in Tall Afar. Its too early to know whether the end of their captivity spelled the end of their suffering, said Mohammad Nathem, a 34-year-old businessman and activist from Tall Afar. The situation of these children is a crime. How will they be rehabilitated? There are no centers to help them, and the families themselves have been destroyed, he said. Tall Afar cant do anything for them. We dont even have good schools here, and who will know how to handle their needs? For their part, the Aoun children seemed unwilling to believe they were home. Around them, their family members spoke the Turkic language of their ethnic group. But the boys now could speak only Arabic. Members of the Aoun family gather for the first lunch theyve had together in almost five years. (Nabih Bulos / Los Angeles Times) As the family brought out trays of chicken and bulgur wheat, they ate silently. You were imprisoned? How did you escape from Daesh? asked one of the boys uncles, speaking to Ali in a loud voice as if he were hard of hearing. (The uncle referred to Islamic State by its Arabic acronym.) To this, Ali said nothing, staring at the ground as he curled up in a corner of the room. Finally his father pulled him to his side to have sugary tea, while one of his older brothers, 21-year-old Ibrahim, pulled the woolen hat from Alis head and rubbed his scalp. To his side, Ahmad kept eating, while Khalil, sitting in the lap of one of his relatives, stared at a cellphone. A moment later, Ali brought his arm to his face, as if he were rubbing his eye. He sobbed quietly as the family kept on talking. The migrants were kidnapped in broad daylight. At least 19 men believed to be from Central America were traveling on a bus in northern Mexico last week when masked gunmen stormed aboard, forced the migrants onto pickup trucks, then sped away, Mexican officials said. The violent incident Thursday, which took place just miles from the U.S. border, was not unique. A group of 25 migrants was pulled off another bus under similar circumstances in February, a top Mexican human rights officials said this week. The migrants whereabouts are unknown. The two cases highlight the risks faced by Central American migrants in Mexico, where criminal groups have diversified well beyond drug trafficking and now help smuggle migrants north and sometimes extort or kidnap them for ransom. Advertisement Conditions for migrants in Mexico have been under added scrutiny in recent months since U.S. officials began sending some Central Americans who have applied for political asylum in the United States to Mexico to await rulings in their cases. Since January, more than 200 migrants have been returned to the border city of Tijuana under the so-called Remain in Mexico program, which U.S. officials say they plan to expand to other parts of the border soon. Northern Mexico, and Tamaulipas in particular, is known for being dangerous territory for migrants. In 2010, 72 men and women seeking to reach the U.S. were kidnapped in Tamaulipas and then shot to death at a ranch near the city of San Fernando. Mexican officials blamed the massacre on the Zetas, a powerful criminal group, saying the kidnappers killed the migrants after they refused to join the gang. The migrants kidnapped last week were traveling on a bus route that traversed the roughly 90 miles from San Fernando to the border city of Reynosa, officials said. Mexican officials have offered different estimates of the number of victims ranging from 19 to 22 as well as various theories of possible motives. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador speculated that the migrants may have staged their own kidnapping as a way to deceive immigration officials. We are investigating to get to the bottom of this, because theres a theory that this could be a way to get into the United States, that they didnt actually disappear but rather crossed the border, he said at a news conference Tuesday. But human rights officials said other, more predatory scenarios were more likely. A statement from the National Human Rights Commission said the migrants are in a situation of vulnerability on various fronts that places them at extraordinary risk. On Wednesday, the countrys newly formed National Search Commission, working with state and federal police as well as the armed forces, officially launched an effort to locate the migrants. Lopez Obrador has repeatedly promised to protect migrants seeking to reach the United States. But he has been criticized by some migrant activists for allowing the U.S. to send asylum seekers back to Mexican territory, and his administration has been accused of denying entry into Mexico of several attorneys and journalists who worked with or covered a recent migrant caravan in Tijuana. Migrant kidnappings occur across Mexico, but a majority are concentrated in just three states: Tamaulipas, Coahuila and Veracruz, according to a report published last year by the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. The report, which analyzed cases involving nearly 8,000 victims over a 12-year period, found that kidnappings in the three states were likely to be carried out by organized criminal groups namely the Gulf cartel or the Zetas as opposed to individual actors. In Tamaulipas, in particular, kidnappings were likely to be carried out on buses, and ransom demands ranged from $500 to $10,000, according to the report. In the biblical book of Jonah, God wants to destroy the city of Nineveh because of its wickedness, but Jonah begs him to have mercy, and he relents. Today, what was once Nineveh is the eastern half of the Iraqi city of Mosul, where a version of the biblical story has played out again. In the siege that drove Islamic State militants from Mosul, the east side was largely spared. For the record: This article misstates the biblical story of Jonah, who did not beg God to have mercy, but rather delivered a warning that the inhabitants of Nineveh heeded, causing God to spare them. The west side is an entirely different story. If it were possible to stand at the center of the Tigris River where it bisects this ancient city, once the crown jewel of Islamic States conquests, the view might bring to mind an oft-repeated cliche: Mosul has become a tale of two cities. Advertisement Looking east, youd see crowded restaurants and casinos, the riverside cafes where men suck on water pipes as they play cards with gusto. The smoke of a dozen barbecue joints would waft over the area, and at night, cars would jostle for space on a brightly lighted thoroughfare. Look west at night, and youd see very little. The west lacks electricity, and even if there were power, there are no street lamps left standing. Sunlight unmasks this right bank of Mosul as a topography of rubble, the crushed remains of the thousands of buildings that once stood here. Its a cityscape scrubbed out with a gray-brown brush, where residents casually walk past a skull peering from a head-high mound of rocks, rebar and trash. It was in 2017 that more than 100,000 Iraqi troops and militiamen, backed by a U.S.-led coalition, routed the Islamic State fighters who had made Mosul their Iraqi capital. The riverfront neighborhood on the western side, a warren of alleyways and closely stacked buildings known as the Old City, was the site of the militants last stand. It was smashed. After 277 days of combat, culminating in what then-Defense Secretary James N. Mattis called the use of annihilation tactics by the U.S.-led coalition, Islamic States three-year reign was over. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed, the bulk of them in west Mosul, with tens of thousands of people dead, many buried under the ruins. For many, a year and a half later, the victory is still a Pyrrhic one, with authorities doing little to help those who had suffered under the extremists rule to rebuild their shattered lives. Its a scenario that is replicated throughout much of the country. But nowhere are the stakes higher than in Mosul, Iraqs third-largest city, and nowhere are they so viscerally illustrated. One of the many cafes reopened in Mosuls revitalized east side. (Nabih Bulos / Los Angeles Times) East Mosul represents one possible future, a city restoring its place among the countrys and the Arab worlds top metropolises. Old buildings are largely intact, and new buildings, including a more than 300,000-square-foot project called Golden Mall, are being built. At the University of Mosul campus, students crowd coffee sellers on the street for a quick caffeine shot before class. One of the regions top academic institutions, the university was under Islamic State control for two years before Iraqi forces took it back in January 2017; two months later, classes were already restarting. Now, more than 30,000 students have returned, professors say. Nearby stores flaunt clothing and advertise wares proscribed during Islamic States rule, when the militant groups harsh interpretation of Islam made even the most quotidian matters fraught with danger. Everything you see here, we couldnt sell, let alone wear, said Saad Mohammad, a university student and clothing store worker. He gestured toward stacks of Turkish-made stovepipe pants, colorful shirts and leather jackets. These pants, too long. Our beards were all wrong. They gave us trouble over everything. The sounds of traffic burble up outside the store in the upscale Zuhoor neighborhood, whose streets are lined with storefronts doing brisk business among throngs of pedestrians. Its the absence of pedestrians that is striking over on the west side, where many roads remain inaccessible. Those that were reopened were the work of activists, not the government, said Ahmad Ayoub, the mukhtar, or head, of one neighborhood in the Old City. The western side has its history too. The Old City was where Mosul was first established, sometime after the fall of Assyria around 6th century BC. By the time Islamic State came, it had become the home of Mosuls poorer residents, a worn-down warren of narrow alleyways snaking through creaking buildings. Much of the Iraqi citys west side was ravaged in the battle to oust the extremists. (Nabih Bulos / Los Angeles Times) It now represents the Iraqi states return to old habits: ineptitude, corruption and heavy-handed practices that in 2014 drove Mosul residents to welcome the extremists as liberators. Getting rid of the militants required the most intense urban fighting since World War II. More than a year and a half after the offensive, tasks as urgent as removing millions of tons of rubble (much of it containing improvised explosive devices and other unexploded ordnance, not to mention body parts) are still confounded by problems both practical and bureaucratic. One recent morning, a crew from the United Nations Mine Action Service and personnel from G4S, a private multinational security company, assembled at the Khaled bin Walid school in Mosuls Old City. One small mistake and youre dead: Defusing bombs in Mosul Inside the school playground, an armor-plated bulldozer scooped up debris, then strewed it over a space cleared in the center. Four uniformed men stood in a line, then walked in step over the detritus in an awkward dance. A moment later, one of them raised his hand, gave a curt shout and pointed at a small lump of shaped metal a piece of unexploded ordnance left over from the offensive. A demolitions expert came for a closer look, declared it safe and plucked it from the rubble. Belts, 155-mm artillery shells, canisters with [55 pounds] of explosives, fuses, small bomblets for drones, recited one member of the demining team, pointing to a pile of ordnance recovered from the neighborhood in the previous three days. A nearby church site, he added, contained 53 suicide vests. Though everyone moved quickly, it was torturously slow work; at the present pace, the group expects the Mosul cleanup to take 10 years. And although the citys home province doubled its share of the 2019 federal budget to 2%, the work is chronically underfunded. Mosul cleanup is slow and underfunded. On the west side, a resident uses a cart to clear a path. (Nabih Bulos / Los Angeles Times) A message on the side of a building in west Mosul. (Nabih Bulos / Los Angeles Times) The government also has not provided compensation to residents for war damage, leaving many unable to rebuild their homes, said Bashir Hussein Fathi, a onetime Old City resident and member of Iraqs Communist Party. We think theyll offer a small sum thats a fraction of the value. Its like the proverb: From the camel they give you an ear, he said in a phone interview. Like most others here, the neighborhood mukhtar Ayoub has nowhere else to go. He cant afford the average $250 rent for an apartment on the east side. Other members of his family refused to help, he said, forcing him to return to the Old City and sleep in the ravaged husk of what was once his house. Meanwhile, despite the presence of the U.N., donor countries and international organizations, the government has done little to rehabilitate the infrastructure. In spite of those conditions, about 160 families have returned to Ayoubs Old City neighborhood. Still, he said, hundreds more would follow once schools such as Khaled bin Walid were reopened. Schoolgirls in the Old City quarter of Mosul learn how to deal with mines and other unexploded ordnance peppered throughout their neighborhood. (Nabih Bulos / Los Angeles Times) Many families that have come back send their daughters to the Hafsa Girls School, where 25-year-old Nuha Samir Mohammad, who works with the demining service, plays a game to teach the children to not play with things they find on the street. The children of Mosul talk about life under Islamic State. They saw things no child should see She lifts a laminated card with a picture of a goat. Goat! the class dutifully recites. Mohammad nods and says, We can touch a goat, in a singsong voice. She flips the card to a picture of an unexploded canister. Canister! shout the students. Again, Mohammad nods. This we shouldnt touch. Many parties blame the lack of progress on the governor of Nineveh province, Nofal Akoub; he is accused of obstructing aid efforts while facilitating the sale of millions of tons of scrap metal at rock-bottom prices for the benefit of the Popular Mobilization Forces, the Shiite-dominated militias that took part in ridding the city of Islamic State. A parliamentary investigative committee questioned Akoub about that deal, as well as real-estate repossession and the parceling off of state land. It has yet to release its findings. Meanwhile, Mosuls hard-won security after Islamic State is showing signs of fraying. On Friday evening, a car bomb detonated in east Mosul as the head of the citys National Security Service drove past. Two people were killed, including a 13-year-old girl, according to a police statement, and at least 10 others were wounded. It was the second car bomb in as many weeks, after a string of attacks in rural areas outside the city attributed to Islamic State. Hours later, civil defense crews had already cleaned up the site and the streets rhythm was returning. Another explosion will happen and life will go on again. We insist on living our lives, tweeted Bilal Mosuli, a nurse from the city. But he wondered how those who had placed the bomb knew of the security personnels movements. Till when will this joke continue? Till when do we keep on getting killed and our blood spilled? Taiwan, which counts Nicaragua as one of just 17 formal diplomatic allies, has given the similarly isolated Central American nation a $100-million-loan to help it ease a stubborn deficit on the heels of nearly a year of protests and riots. As it hopes to persuade President Daniel Ortega from switching recognition to China as five other countries have done since mid-1916, Taiwan is providing the cash to rebuild infrastructure wrecked by the ongoing street violence. For the record: In the Feb. 24 Section A, an article about a Taiwanese loan to Nicaragua said five countries had switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China since 1916. The correct year was 2016. Nicaragua faces a $320-million deficit caused by the civil unrest because at least two normally helpful countries in Europe are no longer pitching in. U.S. officials, for their part, believe Ortega has cracked down too hard on protesters, some of whom have demanded the longtime leader resign. China, backed by a $12 trillion-plus economy, frequently outbids Taiwan on development aid to make nations switch allegiance, the foreign ministry in Taipei has said. China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and believes the self-ruled island has no right to conduct foreign relations. Taiwan rejects that view. Advertisement In a way, the two countries have no choice, said Jonathan Vasquez, 27, a Nicaraguan national studying for a masters degree in Taiwan. Taiwan has fewer allies, and it could lose Nicaragua to China. In Managua, protests began last spring to urge changes in Nicaraguas Social Security system and a speedier government response to a wildfire in a biological reserve. Nicaraguan soldiers, police and other government-affiliated agents have reportedly killed more than 300 protesters and injured thousands more. Last July, the White House announced it had confiscated U.S.-donated vehicles and suspended future donations in response to Ortegas crackdown. The U.S. also accused the onetime revolutionary hero for the leftist Sandinista Front, and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, of having brutalized their own people. Luxembourg and the Netherlands also suspended assistance last year and a European Parliament delegation urged Ortega last month to release political prisoners. Taiwan normally aids its allies with smaller dollar amounts compared to China and allocates it for more specific uses, such as loans for highway construction or medical system upgrades. The Taiwan government seldom discloses aid amounts, with experts saying that citizens might otherwise accuse their government of checkbook diplomacy to vie against China. A lot of people will have their suspicions, especially as our own economy isnt so strong, said Gratiana Jung, a political science PhD candidate at National Taiwan University. You cant vie with China on money or quantity of aid, but you can on quality. Still, Taiwanese voters have said they expect their government to foster foreign relations to the degree that some countries will speak on its behalf in the United Nations. China has effectively barred Taiwan from U.N. agencies since the 1970s. The U. S. also wants other countries to recognize Taiwan, said William Sharp, an Asia-specialized lecturer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Washington does not formally recognize Taiwan but counts it as one of several Asian democracies that can help it check the expansion of China. The White House pledged a reevaluation of our relationship with El Salvador after that Central American country dropped ties with Taipei in favor of Beijing in August. Washington will probably stay quiet about the $100 million loan if it helps Ortega remain allied with Taiwan, Sharp said. Whos he going to be replaced by? he asked. That person could be even more nefarious than Ortega. Ortega himself hasnt always been close with Taiwan. A year after he first became president in 1984, the left-leaning leader cut ties and recognized China. After he lost a reelection bid in 1990,his successors resumed relations with Taiwan. Jennings is a special correspondent. People who work for the United Nations and its many agencies know what they are getting into, especially in the field. From all over the world, they distribute food and water, teach farming techniques, supply medicines and healthcare, and advocate for the human rights of the marginalized. They face hardships. Disease. Even death. When Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed in rural Ethiopia on Sunday, killing all 157 passengers and crew aboard, the U.N. was among those groups that took a significant hit 21 of its employees died. Though devastating, it was not the single largest death toll for the U.N. community. In 2010, a catastrophic earthquake in Haiti flattened the hotel where many U.N. officials lived, killing 102. Twenty-three were killed when insurgents bombed the organizations offices in Baghdad in 2003, shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein. Among the dead was the chief of mission, veteran diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello. Advertisement And hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers have been killed in conflicts through the years. The flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, Kenya, however, was routine, with ostensibly no cause for fear. The route is so frequently traveled the U.N. has its headquarters for Africa in Nairobi that the flight is sometimes called the U.N. shuttle. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres held a minute of silence at the New York headquarters Monday and ordered flags flown at half-staff at many of the organizations offices and installations. A global tragedy has hit close to home, and the United Nations is united in grief, Guterres said, extending his deepest condolences to the relatives and loved ones of all those who died. Let us honor the memory of our colleagues, by keeping their spirit of service alive, he said. The U.N. dead included two Italian women in their 20s, Virginia Chimenti and Maria Pilar Buzzetti, who worked at the World Food Programs headquarters in Rome. Victor Tsang, who was from Hong Kong and specialized in gender issues, according to his agencys website, had left the WFP to join the U.N. Environmental Program. As we mourn, let us reflect that each of these WFP colleagues were willing to travel and work far from their homes and loved ones to help make the world a better place to live. That was their calling, said WFP director David Beasley. Many travelers were flying to Nairobi for a major meeting of the U.N. Environment Assembly. Another WFP employee who was killed was Michael Ryan of Ireland. His work included the creation of safe ground for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, according to the Associated Press. Michael was doing life-changing work in Africa, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said. Workers for other humanitarian agencies, including Catholic Relief Services and Save the Children, were also among the dead, officials said. U.N. workers face unbelievable risks to help people all over the world, Peter Yeo, senior vice president of the U.N. Foundation, which works to improve relations between the U.N. and Washington, said in an interview. This is a reminder of the exposure U.N. workers have, with so much travel in high-risk areas. What a loss of talent, Yeo said. A tragic loss for the families, for the people they were serving and for the institution. For more on international affairs, follow @TracyKWilkinson on Twitter One year after the killings of Rio de Janeiro city councilor Marielle Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes, police have arrested two former military police officers suspected of being involved in the shootings, but have yet to discover who ordered the assassination of the outspoken politician. Ronnie Lessa, a retired officer suspected of pulling the trigger, and Elcio Vieira de Queiroz, who was ousted from the police force and is accused of driving the vehicle used in the drive-by shooting, were arrested Tuesday. Prosecutors from the organized crime unit investigating the case said in a statement that both men were arrested in their homes around 4 a.m., earlier than initially planned because there were suspicions they may have been tipped off. Thirty-four search warrants led to the seizure of laptops, cellphones, documents, weapons and ammunition, as well as other items. The first phase of the investigation, which lasted a year, involved 5,700 pages of documents, 760 gigabytes of data and 318 wiretaps. The use of metal detectors helped police find a gun in Lessas home. Officers also found pieces of 117 unmounted rifles, three silencers and 500 rounds of ammunition in the home of a childhood friend of the suspected shooter. It was the biggest gun bust in Rios history. Advertisement An additional 16 search warrants were carried out Wednesday and three people were brought in for questioning. Prosecutors also noted that there was evidence the shooting was methodically planned for three months before it was carried out. It is incontestable that Marielle Franco was summarily executed for her political activity in the defense of the causes she defended, the statement said. Outspoken Rio de Janeiro councilwoman who fought for the marginalized is shot to death Franco, a vocal defender of human rights since a stray bullet killed a friend during a shootout between police and drug traffickers in 2005, was known for standing up for the marginalized. Franco, who grew up in the Mare complex of slums known as favelas, where police violence is persistent, defied the odds and won the fifth-highest vote count of any city councilor when she was elected in 2016. The day before her death Franco took to Twitter to question the involvement of police in the killing of a young man in the Acari favela. Another homicide of a young man that could be credited to the police. Matheus Melo was leaving church when he was killed. How many others will have to die for this war to end? she wrote. Franco also took part a decade earlier in a state legislature inquiry into paramilitary groups, often made up of police officers and known for controlling large portions of Rio state. The month before her death, she was named rapporteur of a special commission that was to serve as a watchdog over a controversial federal intervention in Rios public security. Investigating officer Giniton Lages said during a news conference related to the arrests of Lessa and Queiroz that the investigation would now enter its second phase and continue in its search for those responsible for ordering Francos assassination and the reason for the crime, which is suspected to be politically motivated. The details of the massive operation, he said, would be kept under wraps, but no lines of investigation have been discarded yet. Executive Director of Amnesty International USA Margaret Huang, left, director of Amnesty International Brazil Jurema Werneck and mother of Marielle Franco, Marinete Silva, hold signs that read Who killed Marielle? (Antonio Lacerda / EPA/Shutterstock) Soon after Tuesdays arrests, a photograph was shared on social media supposedly showing Brazils President Jair Bolsonaro with Queiroz, suspected of driving the car during the killings. That same afternoon, Bolsonaro brushed off the photo as a coincidence. There are photos of me with thousands of police officers, the former army captain said. Police also confirmed that one of Bolsonaros sons once dated the daughter of the alleged shooter, Lessa, who owns a home on the same street as the presidents inside a gated condominium complex, but said they didnt suspect the relationship had any link to the killings. Bolsonaro denied knowing Lessa, saying he doesnt socialize with his neighbors. Francos assassination led to outrage across Brazil and around the world, creating an international outpouring of support for the family and friends of the slain politician. Marielle Franco (Renan Olaz / AFP/Getty Images) Organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International condemned the killings of Franco and Gomes, and protests demanding those responsible for their deaths be brought to justice were held in cities around the world, including New York, Paris, London and Lisbon. Francos photo is still displayed in front of Paris City Hall and the city is currently considering naming a street after her. Images of Franco some showing her wide smile, others reminiscent of an incident where she insisted she would be heard during a City Council meeting can also still be seen on every corner of Brazil. During this years Carnival celebrations, samba schools Mangueira and Unidos da Vila Isabel paid tribute to the politician, and cries of Who killed Marielle and Anderson? could be heard at International Womens Day marches. On Thursday the one-year observance of their deaths thousands are set to protest again. Marielle showed us that if we come together and raise our voices, we can do anything, said Thalita Sousa, a 23-year-old cashier who plans to attend Sao Paulos march. She did that for us and we need to keep doing it for her and Anderson. We need to get justice for them both. For the last 12 years, a radical experiment has been playing out in Guatemala. A United Nations-backed commission has investigated hundreds of cases of corruption, drug trafficking and even genocide, probing the misconduct of political leaders, drug lords and others who had long been viewed as above the law. It has been a radical shift for a country long known for its weak institutions and still scarred by civil war. The group, known as the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, has been hailed as one of the most effective anti-crime efforts in Latin America, a region where corruption and violence often go unpunished. It has also been criticized as violating Guatemalan sovereignty and failing to stay above the fray of politics. Advertisement One of those critics is Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales, who is the target of a commission investigation into illegal campaign financing. Last week he announced plans to end the commissions mandate, and on Tuesday said its head, Ivan Velasquez, would not be allowed to return to Guatemala from Washington, where he has been meeting with American lawmakers. Morales efforts have drawn widespread condemnation and sparked fears that Guatemala could face a constitutional crisis. What happens now may affect not only Guatemalas justice system but also the rest of Central America, where the commission was long held up as a model, and even the flow of migrants and drugs to the United States. The commission More than 200,000 people died during Guatemalas 35-year civil war, which pitted left-wing guerrilla groups against a series of right-wing governments backed by the United States. A truth commission launched after the war ended in 1996 exposed atrocities committed during the conflict, but Guatemalas weak justice system meant perpetrators were rarely brought to trial. At the same time, criminal groups operated with abandon, engaging in extortion, kidnappings and drug smuggling. Guatemalas judicial and political systems were widely believed to be corrupt. The country was no longer at war but was still beset by one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Immigrants left for the United States in droves. After appeals from civil society groups, the U.N. stepped in, forming the commission in 2006. It would work with Guatemalas attorney generals office to build criminal cases. The effect was immediate if controversial. The commissions work The commission has helped jail three ex-presidents, as well as dozens of lawmakers, hit men and drug traffickers. Its investigation into Otto Perez Molina, whom it accused of running an elaborate corruption scheme after he became president in 2012, sparked massive street protests three years later that forced Perez and his vice president to resign. Morales was elected president after Perez stepped down. A former television comedian, he ran on an anti-corruption platform, posting the slogan Ni corrupto, ni ladron not corrupt, not a thief on his campaign billboards. But Morales turned against the commission after it brought fraud charges against his brother and his son and later began investigating whether Morales accepted about $1 million in illicit campaign funds. Last year, Morales sought to expel Velasquez, a jurist from Colombia, and pressed for a law that would allow government officials to avoid prison. Anti-corruption advocates, with the help of the U.S. government, foiled those efforts. But after the commission and Guatemalas attorney general asked Congress to strip Morales of his immunity from prosecution last month, the president sought once again to get rid of the commission. His efforts have been buoyed somewhat by criticism of the commission from abroad. After the commission helped prosecute a Russian family that had used false passports obtained from a Guatemalan crime ring, a prominent critic of the Russian government questioned whether it had acted at the behest of Russian President Vladimir Putin. This year, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) announced a hold on $6 million in funding for the commission until questions about the incident were addressed. The announcement The optics were startling. Last Friday, Morales stood flanked by dozens of camouflage-clad soldiers and said that he would not renew the mandate of the U.N.-backed commission. Outside, armored military vehicles massed in Guatemala Citys main plaza and others circled the commissions headquarters scenes that brought back not-so-distant memories of the civil war. In the days since, Morales has escalated his efforts. Not only has Velasquez been barred from the country, but a spokesman for the commission said Thursday that its employees also have not received expected renewals of their visas. Guatemalan Foreign Minister Sandra Jovel said Thursday that the commission had overstepped its bounds and become a clandestine and parallel apparatus that had begun to resemble the groups it was designed to fight. International reaction Criticism from inside and outside Guatemala has been swift. Guatemalan human rights prosecutor Jordan Rodas called attacks on the commission a great mistake, while Human Rights Watch accused Morales of casting his lot with the forces of corruption and impunity. A letter signed by 11 nations including Spain, Canada and the United Kingdom implored Morales to reconsider his decision, which it described as a step backward for Guatemala and its institutions. The United States was instrumental in creating the commission and provides about half of its $15-million annual budget. Though some members of Congress have called for sanctions against Guatemala, with Rep. Norma Torres, a Democrat from Pomona, asking the State Department to withhold U.S. assistance to Guatemala and to block visas and freeze assets of some Guatemalan officials, the Trump administration initially refrained from commenting publicly on the matter. Some observers speculated that the silence might be tied to Guatemalas support for President Trumps controversial decision to move the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Guatemala was one of a handful of countries that also moved their embassies. But on Thursday, the State Department said Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo has offered a degree of support for the commission. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Pompeo called Morales on Thursday to discuss the importance of continuing our cooperation in the fight against corruption and impunity and the Guatemalan governments efforts working with the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala. Pompeo told Morales that the United States is open to some reforms to the commission, although Nauert did not detail what those would be. kate.linthicum@latimes.com Twitter: @katelinthicum tracy.wilkinson@latimes.com Twitter: @TracyKWilkinson The last time a Guatemalan president tried to cut off a United Nations-backed anti-corruption commission that was investigating him, the United States quickly intervened. In 2015, Vice President Joe Biden flew to Guatemala to meet with then-President Otto Perez Molina, who was accused of being part of a customs corruption scheme. Biden threatened to withdraw U.S. aid from Guatemala if Perez refused to extend the two-year mandate of the commission, which the U.S. funded and viewed as a successful crime-reduction model that could be replicated around the world. But this week, when current President Jimmy Morales abruptly expelled the commission while it was in the middle of investigating him for illicit campaign financing, the Trump administration wavered. While Canada, Germany and the European Union have fiercely condemned the commissions expulsion, an act that defied rulings from the countrys highest court, the U.S. offered a four-sentence statement from the State Department that expressed vague support for Guatemalas anti-corruption efforts but didnt mention the commission at all. Advertisement The U.S. has maintained an ambivalent attitude, said Helen Mack, a Guatemalan human rights advocate who supports the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, known as CICIG. The whole world is asking: Where are they? The feeble U.S. response may be linked to multiple factors. For one, Guatemala has gone to lengths to curry favor among Washington conservatives in recent years. The Central American nation was one of only a handful of countries worldwide to follow the U.S. in moving its Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem last year. Since 2017, the year the CICIG opened its investigation into Morales, Guatemalas government and business leaders had contracts worth at least $2 million with D.C. lobbyists, according to U.S. government documents. At the same time, criticism of the CICIG has been growing among Republican lawmakers who are angry about its investigation into a Russian family that obtained false passports from a Guatemalan crime ring. After a prominent critic of the Russian government questioned whether the CICIG had acted at the behest of Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) announced a hold on $6 million in funding for the commission until questions about the incident were addressed, helping strengthen claims by President Morales that the commission was politically motivated and violated Guatemalan sovereignty. Demonstrators opposing the government of Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales show their support for the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG. (Esteban Biba / EPA-EFE/REX) On Tuesday, Rubio tweeted his support for the Guatemalan governments decision to expel the CICIG. Ive had concerns about CICIGs abuse of power and its role in the mistreatment of the Bitkof family, he said. Guatemala, a strong ally of the US, has every right to terminate this agreement with the UN. In a letter sent to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday, Ivan Velasquez, the Colombian jurist who heads the CICIG, defended the commissions handling of that case and others. The CICIG has never strayed from its mandate of providing information from its investigations to local prosecutors, he said. It was a Guatemalan judge, not associated with the CICIG, who had convicted and sentenced members of the Bitkof family, he pointed out. Velasquez said the commission had, since 2007, exposed 60 criminal organizations and had helped send 300 people to jail. One of them was the ex-president, Perez, who eventually resigned under pressure and was imprisoned. Still, pro-democracy activists say the recent political developments in Guatemala concern much more than just the controversial commission. In recent days, allies of Morales in Guatemalas Congress have sought to impeach several judges on the countrys highest court who have in the past ruled in favor of the commission. Were talking about this crisis at the border without talking about what is causing it Jo-Marie Burt, George Mason University professor Jo-Marie Burt, a Latin American studies professor at George Mason University, said such actions call into question the Guatemalan governments respect for the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary. This is a slow-motion coup, Burt said. What youre seeing is a systematic attack against every individual institution that is trying to defend the rule of law and the constitution. She said the Trump administration is short-sighted if it doesnt appreciate how political instability in Guatemala could spark more migration northward. Were talking about this crisis at the border without talking about what is causing it, which is crises like the one that is playing out in Guatemala, Burt said. U.S. Rep. Norma Torres (D-Pomona), one of several Democrats in Congress who have called for a reduction in U.S. funding to Guatemala unless the anti-corruption commission is revived, agreed. The real crisis that is causing people to come to our southern border is in the Northern Triangle, she said, referring to the northern Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. We are looking at another Venezuela or Nicaragua. Torres knows first-hand how political unrest can fuel migration. She was a child in rural Guatemala in 1970 when her family sent her to California to escape the countrys violent civil war. They didnt see a future for me in Guatemala, she said. A similar phenomenon has happened more recently in other neighboring countries rocked by political conflict, such as Honduras, where a contested presidential election sparked massive street protests and helped fuel outward migration last year. The Trump administration supported the results in that vote, in which President Juan Orlando Hernandez declared victory, even as the head of the Organization of American States called for new elections. Political drama in Guatemala is likely to hurt the economy, which pushes people out, said Claudia Escobar, a legal scholar and former Guatemalan judge. The countrys main airport in Guatemala City was temporarily shut down last weekend after the government refused entry to an investigator who worked with the CICIG who was returning from winter vacations. The credit rating agency Moodys released a statement warning about the potential impact of the expulsion of the CICIG on the economy, though it has not downgraded the countrys rating. Investors wont invest in the country that doesnt respect the rule of law, Escobar said. kate.linthicum@latimes.com Twitter: @katelinthicum Members of a widely respected anti-corruption commission began leaving Guatemala on Tuesday, one day after being ordered out by President Jimmy Morales, who was among its many powerful targets. Given the risks ... international personnel have been asked to leave the country until further notice, said Matias Ponce, a spokesman for the U.N.-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, which has worked with local prosecutors to jail dozens of legislators and three ex-presidents and has been lauded as a model for fighting crime. The commission is investigating Morales campaign financing and has pursued corruption investigations against two members of his family and several current members of Congress. Guatemalas abrupt announcement that it was expelling the group drew international condemnation and sparked fears that the countrys democracy was at risk. The expulsion order defies rulings from the Constitutional Court the countrys highest judicial body that guarantee commission members the right to work in Guatemala. Advertisement Defenders of the commission say the expulsion also violates the terms of the Vienna Convention, which governs international agreements. On Tuesday, the Constitutional Court considered several legal challenges to the expulsion by civil society groups. As the court deliberated, it requested that the government provide more information about why it decided to expel the commission. Morales has complained that the commission which was formed in 2006 to conduct independent investigations into graft, drug trafficking and genocide in the war-scarred Central American nation violates Guatemalan sovereignty and is politically motivated. He has spent months trying to dismantle it, despite coming to office on an anti-corruption platform. Morales had previously attempted to bar the head of the commission from entering Guatemala, and this fall said he would not extend the commissions current two-year mandate, which is set to expire in September. His government has helped organize protests in recent days of people who oppose the commission, and it earned the support of one of the countrys largest business groups, which said in a statement that the commission helped foment polarization and divide political opinion on the efforts to fight corruption. Critics of Morales said the president is expelling the commission to protect himself. The objective here is to prevent corruption cases from moving forward and ensuring impunity for the people in power, said Adriana Beltran, an analyst with the Washington Office on Latin America think tank. The rule of law and the future of the country are at stake. It is unclear whether the government will comply if the high court decides, as it has in the past, that the commission, known as the CICIG, has the right to continue doing its work. Several members of Congress have proposed removing judges on the court who have supported the commission, or dissolving the Constitutional Court altogether. Claudia Escobar, a legal scholar and former Guatemalan Appeals Court judge, said she believes Morales and the Congress are looking to create complete control ahead of national elections scheduled for June. To destroy and attack the CICIG, they have to destroy the countrys institutions, she said. The United States was instrumental in creating the commission, part of a wider effort to fight corruption in a region where political instability and economic inequality have contributed to large-scale migration north. The U.S. provides about half of the commissions $15-million annual budget. On Tuesday, the State Department released a statement saying the United States is concerned about the future of anti-corruption efforts in Guatemala, though it failed to mention the ouster of the commission explicitly. Rule of law, reduced corruption, and an end to impunity are key to security, stability, and prosperity, not only in Guatemala, but throughout the region, the statement said. The U.S. government remains committed to supporting Guatemalan institutions and the Guatemalan people in their ongoing fight against corruption and impunity. kate.linthicum@latimes.com Twitter: @katelinthicum Staff writer Tracy Wilkinson contributed to this report from Amman, Jordan. Fleeing a gang, Pedro Cordova joined thousands traveling north last fall from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He endured tear gas and days without food, trekking thousands of miles to Tijuana in November. But it wasnt the complicated U.S. immigration policy or active-duty troops deployed to the border that slowed Cordovas northward journey. It was Linda Romero Sanchez, a 29-year-old from Ensenada. Shes the coordinator of the Movimiento Juventud 2000 shelter in Tijuana and a mother to three children. From the moment he laid eyes on her, right there on Avenida Constitucion, less than a block from the U.S.-Mexico border, his journey norte was forgotten. I started passing by every day just to catch a glimpse of her, Cordova said. Her smile just fixed everything for me. Advertisement Romero works long hours, sometimes 15 hours a day, helping thousands of migrants a year. There have been times when shes had to put her body in between domestic violence victims and their abusers, and when shes had to show cartel members the door, as she puts it. One morning last week, she apologized for nearly dozing off between intakes. We didnt get to sleep last night until after midnight, Romero said with a yawn. I didnt even feed my own kids until after 10 p.m. Tijuana shelters are once again crowded to the brink of crisis, and shelter workers are bracing for more arrivals as people are sent back under the new U.S. Remain in Mexico policy. OK, breakfast is at 8:30 a.m. There is a schedule to charge your phones. At 7 p.m., its bedtime for all the kids, Romero explained to a new arrival a young woman with long, curly hair and a toddler on her lap. Do not leave your child here and go somewhere. They must be taken care of by you at all times. When you take a shower, they go with you to bathe. Once the paperwork was done, Romero slumped back down toward her desk, nearly drifting off, until something caught her eye from clear across the building. It was Cordova, her new husband. As the 32-year-old Honduran navigated his way through rows of bright-colored tents where the migrants slept, Romero came back to life, sitting up straight at her desk and flashing a smile. When I see him, she said, its like I have all my strength back with me. Cordova arrived with the caravan of Central Americans in November, and the two had a whirlwind romance, quickly falling in love. They arent the only ones to have found love in the time of caravans. News reports document at least a dozen marriages between people who have met amid a migration movement that has garnered international news attention and prompted angry tweets from President Trump. The pair celebrated their wedding Dec. 28, 2018, at Movimiento Juventud.(Romero didnt want to leave the shelter for the whole day.) It happened very fast. Everything happened so fast with our wedding, she said. I called my mom, and it was a big surprise. They tell their love story over the laughter of about a dozen children watching a movie in the shelter. I told her I would take care of her and I just wanted her by my side, said Cordova, who now works in a partner shelter around the block to be closer to Romero. Between the two of them, they have five children. Two are in Honduras, and Cordova doesnt know when or if he will ever see them again. He cries about that sometimes, Romero said. Cordova said he had not yet applied for permanent legal status in Mexico. He keeps his feelings guarded, but its easy to see how proud he is of her, a woman who has dedicated her life to welcoming those who walk a similar path he has as a migrant. When the movie is interrupted by a fight over pan dulce (pastry), Cordova steps in to back up Romero, sending the offending youth to his tent while she wraps her arms around and comforts the other. Romero said they thought about getting regular jobs to have more time with her kids and more money. But I like working with people who need me, she said. Someone has to have a heart or nothing will change. They both know how it feels to be desperate. Cordova said he fled gang violence, leaving everything he had behind even his children and that he would never return to Honduras. About 10 years ago, Romeros family fell on hard times, and she came to Tijuana with her children looking for work. They struggled to find shelter. I knocked on door after door after door and no one would accept me, she said. Before that, she spent parts of her childhood begging in the streets for change. My mom never said to me, How are you feeling today? Do you want me to play with you? Do you want me to help you with your homework? she tearfully recalled. Here, shes able to make sure children get the love and comfort they all deserve, she said. They say love can conquer all. For Pedro and Linda, overcoming the past may be their biggest obstacle. The two are grappling with how to blend their very different families, now stretched thousands of miles apart. The future looks challenging too. Recently, Linda didnt have money to buy her 11-year-old daughter a birthday present. The migrants at Movimiento Juventud chipped in to buy a birthday cake. Their family shares a one-room apartment; the kids sleep on blankets on the floor, and theres a baby on the way. Linda said before she met Pedro she never liked her own name because in Spanish linda meant pretty. When I was in grade school, kids would tease me that it wasnt for me, she explained. The truth is, Pedro countered, shes a beautiful woman with a wonderful heart. All Pedro knows is, when he looks at Linda, he sees the most beautiful woman hes ever laid eyes on. And in Pedro, Linda found what was missing all her life. She finally has someone on her side. Fry writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune - The quick response of soldiers on patrol prevented suspected armed robbers from robbing motorists along the Benin-Lagos expressway - The armed robbers who barricaded the road, fled into the bush on sighting the army patrol team Troops of the 4 Brigade, Nigerian Army, Benin, on Friday, March 8, foiled a suspected robbery attempt on the Benin-Lagos expressway. Capt Mohammed Maidawa, the assistant director, army public relations, who confirmed this to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Benin, said that the troops on operation safe conduct, were on a routine patrol when they received a distress call on the development. READ ALSO: Elections: Atiku cant prove his case at tribunal - Bolori He said the troops immediately reacted to the distress call and foiled the robbery attempt at the general area of Okada Junction. Maidawa further said that the action of the troops, who mobilised to the scene, denied the men of the underworld opportunity to unleash terror on commuters plying the busy road. The armed robbers who barricaded the road, fled into the bush on sighting the army patrol team. PAY ATTENTION: Download our mobile app to enjoy the latest news update Troops cleared the barricade for commuters to continue their journey, while the troops continued with their patrol to prevent all forms of criminality within the general area, he said. Meanwhile, the Nigerian Army, late Thursday, March 7, announced new postings and appointments of some of its senior officers in a statement released by its acting director in charge of public relations, Colonel Sagir Musa. According to the released postings, those affected include, Major General ECN OBI who has been drafted to the Defence headquarters as Chief of Defence Standard and Evaluation.A total of 13 senior officers are affected by the postings and appointments. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng upgrades to serve you better. Robbers Return Firearms to Nigerian Police (Crime News in Nigeria) | Legit TV Source: Legit - Joseph Karanja lost his wife, daughter and three grandchildren in the Ethiopian Airline crash that happened on March 10 - He said his wife had traveled to visit their daughter in Canada and was returning home after six months - The five who perished were traveling back to Kenya for Easter holidays - Karanja said his daughter called him saying she was excited to come back home but had an unexplained fear within - The crestfallen man said he would ask God for an explanation of the unfortunate happenings when judgement day comes A Kenyan man is in deep pain after losing five members of his family in the ill-fated Ethiopian Airlines' crash which occurred on Sunday, March 10. John Karanja lost his wife, Anne Wangoi, daughter Caroline Nduta, and three grandsons among them Kelly and Ruby in the accident which left 157 dead. In a candid interview at the JKIA, on Monday, March 11, Karanja who was yet to come to terms with the unfortunate incident, said he would one day question God why his loved ones would disappear not to be seen again within a blink of an eye. READ ALSO: Emeka Ike reacts to video of woman selling mystic container for bottling irresponsible husbands The crestfallen man who mustered courage to narrate the grief, said his daughter had joyfully spoken to him about two hours before the plane's takeoff. According to him, Nduta was excited she about coming back home but expressed a feeling of unexplained fear. ''I communicated to them two hours before the flight. My daughter sent me a message. It was like she was expecting something. She said she was excited but she had fear in her and she did not know why. I did not know what message she was conveying to me. I lost three grandsons, a daughter and my wife,'' he said. vAccording to him, his pain was so intense and that though he was unable to question God at that moment, his creator would have to explain it at the end of time. ''I am not even able to tell you what kind of a wife she was. She was not only a wife, she was a friend to the entire family, a mentor and a very supportive person. She has helped me a lot and the only gift I could give to her was to go and visit our daughter for three months because I had never taken her out." "I don't know what will happen or who I will question. People say it is God's will, one day I will go and see God and he will have to explain to me why he took the family like, but now I have nothing to say,'' he added. PAY ATTENTION: Get your daily relationship tips and advice on Africa Love Aid group He wrapped up by asking people to pray for his family and others who lost their loved ones in the crash. The plane crash that claimed the five members of the family also left families and friends of 156 other victims equally in deep pain and tears. The total of 157 people, 149 passengers and eight crew members who were on board the Ethiopian flight which had just taken off from Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, en-route to Nairobi, Kenya, perished. Preliminary reports released by the airline revealed 32 Kenyans and two notable Nigerians died in the Sunday morning tragedy. Did you know? NAIJ.com (naija.ng) is now-> Legit.ng We have updated to serve you better. PAY ATTENTION: Read best news on Nigeria's #1 news app My life after the plane crash Nigerian plane crash survivor Kechi Okwuchi speaks to Legit TV Source: Legit.ng News - No fewer than 1000 women have staged a protest at the Sokoto office of INEC, demanding the declaration of Aminu Tambuwal as the duly elected governor of the state - The women who include young ladies were seen displaying placards with diverse inscriptions - According to them, the commission's declaration of the election in the state as inconclusive was injustice and unacceptable Hundreds of women on Tuesday, March 12, embarked on peaceful demonstration demanding the release of the March 9 governorship election result in Sokoto state by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The group led by three serving commissioners in the state, Aisha Madawaki, Kulu Abubakar and Hajiya Kulu Sifawa said INEC declaration of the election in the state as inconclusive was injustice and unacceptable. News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that they called on the electoral body to declare Governor Aminu Tambuwal as the winner of the election without further delay. READ ALSO: NNPC commences recruitment exercise days after presidential election Sifawa, who is the commissioner for women affairs, said Tambuwal was duly elected by majority of the votes and run a women friendly government more than any government in the history of the state. She said they embarked on the peaceful protest to tell the world the position of women in the state and enjoined INEC to declared peoples choice for peaceful coexistence in the state. The state commissioner for Science and Technology, Kulu Abubakar, said women from the 23 local government areas of the state decided to embark on the protest against injustice. Abubakar said: All we need is justice, which is declaration of Tambuwal as the Governor-elect in the interest of peace in the state." Speaking at the demonstration rally, state PDP women leader, Hajiya Rabi Iyawa, criticised INEC treatment of PDP candidates in the concluded governorship election. READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda Iyawa alleged that the INEC pronouncement of the election as inconclusive portrayed insincerity of the present government and its agencies and clear abuse of constitutional provisions. Among the demonstrators were wife of former Sokoto state governor and presidential candidate, Hajiya Jamila Bafarawa, permanent commissioner in Sokoto State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Hajiya Fatima Illo, among others. The policemen barricaded the road going to INEC to prevent the demonstrators from gaining entrance into the INEC office. However, none of the INEC officials responded to the protesters. Meanwhile, Legit.ng had reported that the INEC early Monday morning, March 11, declared the governorship election in Sokoto state inconclusive. The returning officer of INEC, Professor Fatima Batul Mukhtar, the Vice Chancellor of the Federal University, Dutse, who declared the election inconclusive said that the number of cancelled votes in the state exceeded the winning margin. Mukthar said the number of registered voters was 1,887,767 while the number of accredited voters was 1,033,081. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng We have upgraded to serve you better Woman who returned millions found at the airport speaks | Legit TV: Source: Legit - The federal government has debunked claims that there are plans to privatise Nigeria's dams - Suleiman Adamu, the minister of water resources said what FG was doing is hydropower concessioning - Adamu said the FG is giving up partial ownership to beneficiaries to develop the hydro power component for the overall benefit of Nigerian The Minister of Water Resources, Suleiman Adamu on Tuesday, March 12, denied claims that it was privatising the nations dams, saying what was being done was hydropower concessioning. Adamu said this at the opening of a media water sector workshop in Abuja. According to him, what is being done is to give partial ownership to beneficiaries to develop the hydro power component for the overall benefit of Nigerians. We are not concessioning dams, when we concession, we are concessioning the hydro power component of the dam but the dam itself will still be owned by the Federal Government. What we do is to provide some leasing arrangement for cage fish farming and all others, we concession hydro-power for aquaculture. Adamu said the concessioning model, being facilitated by the Infrastructure Concessioning and Regulatory Commission and Bureau of Public Enterprises allows a concessionaire to take custody of the project for a period of time as determined by the financial analysis. READ ALSO: Just in: Ganduje allegedly arrives Abuja, seeks removal of Kano CP He added that the concessionaire would be responsible for generating hydro power and connecting it to the transmission network made available by the Transmission Company of Nigeria for distribution. On Gurara Dam, Adamu said the ministry was negotiating with the preferred and reserved bidder in line with the guidelines of the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC), to drive the processes to benefit Nigerians. He said that the rule in the guidelines of ICRC stipulated that a Transaction Adviser be involved in the processes. We have concluded that of Gurara where we have 30 megawatts of hydro power plant, all the processes leading to the concessioning have been done, what is left is for us to present it to the Federal Executive Council for approval. We still have to wait because the transmission line is not working and it is not within the purview of the ministry, it is taken by Transmission Company of Nigeria A lot of progress has been made, we hope that by the end of this year, something will happen. The minister stressed that shortlisted firms had been given their request for proposal and analysed in choosing the preferred and reserved bidder. He expressed hope that successive administration would ride on what was being done, saying with the coming in of the private sector operators in irrigation, through the Graduate and Youth Empowerment Scheme, more hectares would be achieved. Benson Ajisegiri, the Director, Water Supply, with the ministry, said efforts in improving access to water and sanitation led to the inauguration of the Partnership for Expanded Water, Sanitation and Hygiene programme (PEWASH). Ajisegiri, represented by Abdulhamid Gwaram, said so far, 22 states had indicated interest and signed the PEWASH Protocol, noting that implementation had started in Kano and Ogun states. Oyeronke Oluniyi, the deputy director, irrigation and drainage department, said that the ministry was working to see that irrigated agriculture was promoted in parts of the country. According to her, so far, part of the intervention is the Bakolori Irrigation Scheme in Zamafara which has reached 40% completion and has been able to cultivate no fewer than 528,000 tonnes of rice and other cereals. Oluniyi called for support from stakeholders to enable the ministry meet its target of irrigation for national development. Earlier, the director, press and public relations with the ministry, Kenechukwu Offie, said the aim of the workshop was to educate the media on better reportage of the ministry and its activities. She said this was also an opportunity to equip the media with the modern styles and dynamics of quality water reporting. PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that the federal ministry of water resources, on Wednesday, December 19, said that the federal government has approved N700 million to complete the Farin Ruwa Hydro power project in Nasarawa state to boost power generation in the country. Musa Ibrahim, the permanent secretary of the ministry disclosed this the end of tour to the Farin Ruwa dam site in Wamba local government area. The federal government had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Nasarawa state government to enable it takeover and complete the dam project. NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng upgrades to serve you better. Election not a do or die affair - Sanwoolu | Legit TV Source: Legit We finally know just what Wind Creek Hospitality is buying from Las Vegas Sands Corp. Last March, the affiliate of an Alabama-based Indian tribe and the Sands announced theyd reached a $1.3 billion deal to sell the Bethlehem casino. But just what was at stake in the sale was not disclosed. Was it just the casino and outlet mall? What about the No. 2 Machine Shop and the Steel General Office building? How about the annex and satellite parking lots, which the SteelStacks complex depends on? On Feb. 21, the Sands and Wind Creeks PCI Gaming Authority filed an official change of ownership petition with the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board that details how this sale will go down. The board has not yet scheduled a hearing on the request. Today, Las Vegas Sands is the majority owner of Sands BethWorks Gaming LLC, which owns the events center, casino and surrounding land totaling about 56 acres. Local attorney and developer Michael Perrucci, New York real estate developer Barry Gosin and their business partners have about a 10 percent share in BethWorks Gaming. The rest of the land, almost 61 acres, is owned by Sands BethWorks Retail LLC, and ownership is split 50/50 between the Sands and Perrucci and his partners. BethWorks Retails holdings include the outlet mall, the blast furnaces, the Steel General Office building, No. 2 Machine Shop and several parking lots. If it all shakes out as planned, the Sands will sell Wind Creek the casino, outlet mall, events center, hotel and some parking lots. Perrucci and his investment partners will sell off their stake but retain ownership of the property and execute a ground lease with Wind Creek, according to the filing. Perrucci declined to comment on the details of the ground lease, citing a nondisclosure agreement preventing him from commenting on the deal. We will retain the SGO and the annex and certain parts of parking lots, he said. We are working closely with Wind Creek and the Sands. Sands spokeswoman Julia Corwin, who will stay on the Wind Creek team after the sale, did not respond to messages seeking comment. Once the sale is finalized, Wind Creek plans to immediately invest $190 million into a 300-room hotel expansion and development of the No. 2 Machine Shop, possibly into an indoor water park. Well control the site, Arthur Mothershed, vice president of business development for Wind Creek, said during a January interview with lehighvalleylive.com. Bethlehem officials are quite optimistic about Wind Creeks plans to immediately reinvest in a property thats sat in limbo for years, said Alicia Miller Karner, director of community and economic development. It would seem to be a good sign if Perrucci and his investment partners retain ownership of the deteriorating 13-story, Steel General Office building and annex. Perruccis Peron Development has invested $22 million into developing Five10Flats, a 95-unit luxury apartment building with first-floor restaurants and retail spaces, across the street. Two more buildings are planned and the city sees the projects as vital lynchpins in the ongoing revitalization of East Third Street. We finally feel like we are on the cusp of the redevelopment of the site, Karner said. We are so optimistic. The massive 103-year-old SGO building was headquarters for Bethlehem Steel Corp. until it moved its executives to Martin Tower in 1972. It has sat vacant since the mid-1990s, but various plans have been floated to reuse the building, like apartments, a hotel and office space. It is such a critical, important building, Karner said. Mayor Bob Donchez feels that the history of the Steel is really encapsulated in the SGO building, not Martin Tower, and hes made it clear he wants it to be preserved, Karner said. Donchez did not return a phone call seeking comment. The SGO has sat empty for decades and it in particular is such a unique building," Karner said. "I am looking forward to seeing his plans. The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Boards investigative and legal teams have 30 days to respond to the petition unless they ask for an extension, which has not happened, said Richard McGarvey, board spokesman. The report is then forwarded to the board to assist them in making their final decision. The next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, April 17, and then Wednesday, May 15. The petition asks the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board to impose a $3.75 million change of ownership fee on the sale, which is what two similar casinos -- Meadows and Presque Isle -- recently paid in sale fees. Ultimately, it is up to the board to decide what change of ownership fee to charge, McGarvey said, but he confirmed the two casinos are quite similar to the Sands. The only major difference is that both Meadows and Presque Isle operate racetrack. In the filing, Wind Creek discloses that it plans to obtain up to $1.4 billion of senior secured first lien credit facilities from Credit Suisse AG and Credit Suisse Securities LLC. Thats a $1.3 billion first lien term loan facility and a $100 million first lien revolving credit facility. PCI Gaming will use the proceeds to buy the Sands; refinance existing debt of PCI and the existing owners and pay some fees and costs. Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarasatullo and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. A North Carolina man is accused of smuggling cigarettes across state lines, after being stopped on Interstate 78 in Northampton County with more than 1,700 cartons in his pick up truck. Raid Nageeb Alsaeidi of Fayetteville, North Carolina, who was also listed in court paperwork as Riad Nageeb Alsaeidi, was arrested early Tuesday morning and charged with two counts of possessing unstamped cigarettes and two summary traffic violations. He was released on $20,000 unsecured bail. Troopers at the Belfast barracks said they saw Alsaeidis truck traveling east on I-78, and the truck crossed into the fog line twice. The truck had aftermarket tires and an aftermarket turn signal light on top of the cap, according to state police. Alsaeidi was stopped in the Williams Township portion of the highway, and police said they found 1,765 cartons of cigarettes without the Pennsylvania tax stamp in the bed of the truck: 920 Newports, 725 Marlboros, and 120 American Spirit. Pennsylvania law forbids possession of 1,000 or more unstamped cigarettes unless the person is licensed to sell cigarettes or part of a group specifically exempt under the law. The state Department of Revenue collects the seized cigarettes, Trooper Nathan Branosky said. Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. The 8th annual Celtic Classic Parade of Shamrocks is Saturday on West Broad and Main streets in Bethlehem, marking the St. Patricks Day celebrations return to Center City. Last years Parade of Shamrocks was canceled due to a lack of volunteers, prompting the SouthSide Arts District to team up with Mollys Irish Grille & Spots Pub to hold a parade past the ArtsQuest Center at SteelStacks. Check out photos from the 2018 parade here and the 2017 parade here. For 2019, the parade returns to its traditional route, stepping off at 1 p.m. from 10th Avenue and ending beneath the Hill-to-Hill Bridge at Main and Spring streets. Itll feature local high school and middle school marching bands, community groups, pipe bands, dancers, local dignitaries and participating businesses, according to the Celtic Cultural Alliance. The same group also organizes the Celtic Classic in Bethlehem, set for Sept. 27-29, 2019. The SouthSide Arts District is celebrating St. Paddy's Day with two days of family friendly events at Color Me Mine, 25 E. Third St. The schedule includes "Leprechaun Paint Me a Story" from 9:30 to 11 a.m. Saturday and a "Sham-ROCK Kids Night Party" from 6 to 9 p.m., followed by artistic fun noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Visit southsideartsdistrict.com for all the details. On Friday, Mayor Bob Donchez invites the public to Payrow Plaza outside City Hall, 10 E. Church St., for the annual St. Patricks Day flag-raising at 10 a.m., followed by refreshments in the Town Hall rotunda. Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. As a growing list of foreign countries and airlines choose to ground an airplane model involved in two major crashes in the last six months, the United States continues to allow the planes to fly. That means that three U.S.-based airlines including Newarks flagship tenant United Airlines can continue to use the controversial planes. The model in question is the Boeing 737 MAX 8, which was involved in the Sunday crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 that killed 157 people, including a New Jersey native. In October, 189 people died in the crash of Lion Air Flight 610, which was the same aircraft model. At least 10 nations, led by China and including the United Kingdom and Australia, have banned the operation of the jets, according to the Washington Post. But that has yet to happen in the United States. The Federal Aviation Administration on Monday issued a Continued Airworthiness Notification to the International Community, in which the agency said it was investigating the Ethiopia crash but has not yet recommended any action. The FAA continuously assesses and oversees the safety performance of U.S. commercial aircraft, the agency said in a statement Monday. If we identify an issue that affects safety, the FAA will take immediate and appropriate action. Boeing maintains that the 737 MAX models are safe. Safety is Boeings number one priority and we have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX, the company said in a statement on Tuesday morning. We understand that regulatory agencies and customers have made decisions that they believe are most appropriate for their home markets. Well continue to engage with them to ensure they have the information needed to have confidence in operating their fleets. The [FAA] is not mandating any further action at this time, and based on the information currently available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators. According to the FAA, there are 74 737 MAXs registered to U.S.-based airlines and a total of 387 of the planes in the worldwide fleet. There are 59 airlines around the world that fly 737 MAX jets, according to the FAA, including United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines. Rachael Rivas, a spokeswoman for United, said the airline has 14 of the 737 MAX 9 jets in its fleet. The jets involved in the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air accidents were 737 MAX 8 models, but the FAA included both the models in its Monday notice. United continues to operate its 737 MAX jets, which make up a fraction of the airlines 343 total aircraft in the 737 series. United does not use 737 MAX aircraft for routes to and from Newark. We are proud to say that we have the best pilots in the industry, and we have complete confidence in their ability to fly this aircraft safely, Rivas said. Southwest has more of the planes than any other U.S.-based airline, with 34 of the 737 MAX aircraft currently in its fleet. The airline said that it uses the 737 MAX jets interchangeably with other aircraft in its fleet, meaning they can serve a variety of airports and they are not based with any particular city or region. We remain confident in the safety and airworthiness of the (737 MAX) Southwest said in a statement. We dont have any changes planned to our (737 MAX) operations. American Airlines said that it continues to operate all 24 of its 737 MAXs, but none are used for flights to or from Newark. We have full confidence in the aircraft and our crew members, who are the best and most experienced in the industry, American Airlines said in a statement. Flyers can visit SeatGuru with their flight number to look up whether or not their flight is on a 737 MAX. Michael Sol Warren may be reached at mwarren@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MSolDub. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters. Unemployment in the Lehigh Valley dipped to 4 percent in January, the lowest rate since May 2001, according to preliminary data released Tuesday from the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry. The department tracks seasonally adjusted unemployment in 18 Metropolitan Statistical Areas, with the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton MSA covering Carbon, Lehigh and Northampton counties and extending into Warren County, New Jersey. With a labor force of 437,700 people, there were 17,500 out of work in January, according to the preliminary seasonally adjusted figures. That gave the A-B-E MSA the 12th lowest unemployment rate rate statewide in January, with the Gettysburg MSA seeing the lowest rate at 2.8 percent while the East Stroudsburg MSA had the highest at 4.8 percent. The January seasonally adjusted unemployment rates for Pennsylvania and the United States were 4.1 percent and 4.0 percent, respectively. Looking back over the last 20 years, the Lehigh Valley, statewide and national rates weren't always so closely aligned, according to data from the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry Center for Workforce Information & Analysis. The difference between local, state and national unemployment rates was widest during the Great Recession, which officially ran from December 2007 through June 2009. In the Lehigh Valley, Januarys preliminary unemployment rate was 0.8 of a percentage point lower than at the outside of the recession. Labor & Industry notes its A-B-E unemployment data are subject to revision. Januarys rate could change with revisions expected to be completed by the release of March data on April 30, according to Steven Zellers, a statistician and analyst with the Center for Workforce Information & Analysis. The numbers can be revised because, preliminarily, they are estimates or based on sample surveys, and are later compared against tax data, he explained. Over the past year, the region added 3,800 jobs for a growth rate of 1 percent, besting the statewide rate of 0.8 percent, according to the state data. Lehigh Valley educational services and local government educational services saw drops induced by winter break, according to Labor & Industry. Seasonal declines also affected mining, logging, construction, trade, transportation, utilities, and professional and business services. Over the year, among the biggest sectors, leisure and hospitality had the largest increase, up 1,000 jobs, while professional and business services had the largest employment decline, down 1,900 jobs. So what's in store for Lehigh Valley employment? Economist Kamran Afshar, in his weekly Economic Pulse that premieres at 5:44 p.m. Fridays on WDIY-FM 88.1, says that 2018 gross-domestic product payroll employment in the Lehigh Valley grew by 6,800 jobs, or 1.9 percent, compared to a national expansion of 1.8 percent, again citing preliminary data. Transportation and warehousing grew at a rate five times that of the national average, a sector that gives Afshar pause, he said. "The transportation and warehousing sector will continue to expand and increase employment most probably for the next five years," he says in the WDIY piece. "It is very likely that self-driving vehicles and drones will start to take over product delivery globally as well as locally and fully automated warehousing systems will run themselves. And while production will continue to go up, employment in this sector will drop. Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. An Easton man charged with shooting three people last summer in Eastons West Ward was arrested Tuesday in Petersburg, Virginia, city police report. A constant investigation first focused on drug charges and later led to 34-year-old Oris Alvin Barner Jr. being named a suspect in the early morning Aug. 9 shooting. Barner allegedly shot women ages 19 and 20 years old and a 23-year-old man. The investigation was wrapped up after new information was developed locally in the past few days and a U.S. marshals task force based in Virginia made the arrest at 5 p.m. Tuesday in a home, Lt. Matthew Gerould said. The marshals handed off Barner to Virginia State police, Gerould added. No one was hurt during the arrest, Gerould said. The three people who were wounded in August near 13th and Washington streets have recovered. Easton police detectives have been working around the clock on this since the shooting and have gotten a tremendous amount of assistance from the marshals violent fugitive task force (in the Lehigh Valley), Pennsylvania State Police and the marshals task force in Virginia, Gerould said. This violent offender wouldnt be in custody with the safe outcome without the hard work and cooperation among these agencies. Barner was also the target of a subsequent shooting on the citys South Side, police said. That incident led to a police pursuit of Barner and a crash near the Wilson Borough border that yielded two weapons: a Glock G26 handgun with a 30-round magazine inserted and a Cobray M-11 9mm pistol, police said previously. Both weapons were operable, Gerould has said. Barner was being held Tuesday night in the Riverside Regional Jail in North Price George, Virginia, awaiting extradition to the Lehigh Valley with three counts of attempted homicide headlining a long list of charges against him. Three people were shot early in the morning of Aug. 9, 2018, at 13th and Washington streets in Easton. (Tony Rhodin | lehighvalleylive.com file photo) The warrant that including three counts of aggravated assault and four counts of recklessly endangering another person was approved Feb. 20 by District Judge Richard Yetter III and court papers outlining the case were sealed by a Northampton County judge, Gerould said. That was done to not compromise the current investigation, Gerould added. Previous charges involving drugs from March and April 2018 and firearms and fleeing counts from the Sept. 2 chase are awaiting Barners arraignment once he returns to the Lehigh Valley. City police worked many months with the marshals violent fugitive task force in the Lehigh Valley and Pennsylvania State Police pursing Barner as he bounced between Virginia, where he had family and associates, and the Easton area, Gerould said. There were various times, including during two drug raids, that police were publicly and aggressively seeking Barner or evidence he may have left behind. A Chevrolet SUV that police say was driven by Oris Barner and fled a shots-fired incident early in the morning of Sept. 2, 2018, on Easton's South Side crashed several minutes later at Wood and Hackett avenues near the city border with Wilson Borough. (Tim Wynkoop | lehighvalleylive.com file photo) On Sept. 7, the citys Vice and Special Response units entered a home in the 200 block of Forest Street in Wilson Borough looking for Barner, but didnt find him. They were serving a felony drug warrant sworn out in the spring, police said. Evidence of the Washington Street shooting was found during a search of the home where Barner frequently stayed, police said. On Oct. 5, the same units went into a South Side home during a drug raid around the block from the second shooting with a focus on looking for evidence of the Aug. 9 shooting, police said. It wasnt clear what, if anything, was discovered. Barner was allegedly behind the wheel of a Chevrolet Tahoe that fled a shooting where he was targeted just after 1 a.m. Sept. 2 near Davis and Wirebach streets on the citys South Side. He crashed near the Route 22 overpass at Wood and Hackett avenues and ran off into the night. Throughout the investigation we obtained a lot of information that he made multiple threats to commit other crimes of violence toward law enforcement if taken into custody or attempted to be taken into custody. Obviously that didnt occur here and the best outcome was reached, Gerould said. The culmination of this investigation took a violent fugitive off the streets without any injury to the public, police or the suspect. Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. A threatening message was found in a Pen Argyl Area HIgh School bathroom stall on Tuesday, according to a note sent to parents. The message prompted a police investigation, according to the note sent from Superintendent Wally Schlegel Jr. The note was posted on Facebook. It reads: "Today the high school administration discovered writing of an unspecified threatening nature in one of the bathroom stalls. The district administration and the Slate Belt Regional Police Department have determined the writing not to be credible and student safety is not in question. The administration and the SBRPD are confident that students are safe and school will continue as scheduled. The Pen Argyl Area School District takes all threats seriously and the District Administration, as well as, the SBRPD will continue its investigation into the source of this misconduct. Lt. Jonathan Hoadley verified the incident remains under investigation by Slate Belt Regional Police. The high school is at 501 W. Laurel Ave. in Pen Argyl. On March 7, Bangor Area Middle School in Upper Mount Bethel Township was briefly locked down due an anonymous tip concerning an active shooter at the school, according to a notice on the school district website. The notice from Bangor Area School District Superintendent William Haws says police found no evidence of a shooter. Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook. The Florida massage parlor founder involved in the human sex trafficking scandal that has Patriots owner Robert Kraft under fire might also have a connection to Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie. Sort of. Talking Points Memo published an article on Tuesday that Li Cindy Yang, the aforementioned founder of the massage parlor in Jupiter, Fl., has been in the headlines recently after photos surfaced of her spending time with prominent politicians, including Donald Trump. Per TPM, Yang was involved with a company used to provide immigration investment projects. This is where Lurie comes in. Or, at least, the mention of a property that he owns. Heres what the article says, with Luries portion bolded: Along with extensive offers of access to Trump and American politicians including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Yangs company also claimed to provide immigration investment projects, according to a translation of cached versions of the companys website. Those services included independent investments and those done via immigration investment project centers, according to the now shuttered website ... Yangs companys website listed a few examples of properties that foreigners can invest in as part of an investment immigration project. The first is described as high-end luxury real estate and features a photo of the Palm Beach home of billionaire Jeffrey Lurie, whose Philadelphia Eagles faced off against Krafts New England Patriots in the Super Bowl last year. That home is located a quarter-mile south of Mar-a-Lago a fact that the company promotes as part of the investment, saying its near Trump Manor. An attorney for Lurie did not reply to requests for comment. Later in the article, it is written that its not clear whether the two mansions pictured on the website were actual projects or merely illustrations" in reference to the Lurie-owned mansion and one other. Zack Rosenblatt may be reached at zrosenblatt@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ZackBlatt. Find NJ.com on Facebook. The clock is counting down rapidly to the closing date for applications for Laois' Best Young Entrepreneur 2019 where young people in business can be in with a chance to boost their ambitions in a practical way. The Laois Local Enterprise Office is running the awards. It says the awards are open to young people in business aged 18-35 years old in Laois with a business idea or is running a business. Local Enterprise Office Laois is searching for entrepreneurs to enter in three categories: Best Business Idea Best Start-up (trading less than 18 months) Best Established Business (trading for more than 18 months). Applicants are in with a chance to win a share of the 50,000 investment fund for Laois. All applications will be assessed and 15 applicants (five in each category) will be shortlisted and partake in the IBYE Bootcamp. They will then go forward to the County Final on May 2. Entry deadline is is this Friday,15th March. Application form on www.ibye.ie The IBYE programme run by the 31 Local Enterprise Offices (LEOs) with the support of the Department of Enterprise and Innovation and Enterprise Ireland. With an IBYE investment fund of 50,000 each, every LEO will award up to six investments to three category winners and three runners-up at county level. The local winners in the Best Start-Up and Best Established Business categories at county level will receive investments of up to 15,000 each and the two runners-up will each receive up to 5,000. The report of an inquiry into allegations that tracking devices were used on prison officers' private cars and conversations between solicitors and prisoners were monitored as part of a surveillance operation to crack down on drug smuggling into jail is complete. The Department of Justice and Equaltiy confirmed that Laois TD and Minister Charlie Flanagan has received the report of the Inspector of Prisons, under section 31 of the Prisons Act 2007, into allegations of surveillance and other wrongdoing in the Irish Prison Service. "The Minister will now consider the report in accordance with the legal provisions and consult with the Attorney General in line with standard practice," said the statement. The Minister appointed the Inspector of Prisons, Patricia Gilheaney, to carry out a preliminary investigation into the allegations to determine as far as possible the facts in November 2018. He set up the inquiry after it was reported that the allegations are contained in a sworn statement to the Minister who has a large prison complex in his constituency in Portlaoise While the location of the operation is not identified, the Irish Examiner reports that officers were unaware that their private cars were being tracked or that the prison vehicles they were driving were being monitored using such devices. It was claimed that some of the devices were in place over an extended period with information reportedly passed to the Gardai. It was also claimed that devices were placed in the visiting area of a prison and were active when prisoners met solicitors. Cameras were also allegedly installed to facilitate covert surveillance. A private company was reported as having installed the devices. It was claimed that security personnel were given false identifications when entering prison. The allegations were through a solicitor and not via the whistleblowers Protected Disclosures Act. The way has been cleared for the construction of a new Glanbia Cheese EU Limited factory near Portlaoise, following the withdrawal of an appeal made to An Bord Pleanala against the plans. Laois County Council granted permission at the end of last September to Glanbia to develop a cheese manufacturing facility within the Togher National Enterprise Park, at Togher, Portlaoise. The development will comprise a main building which will facilitate a cheese blending process, an office block for administrative and technical support staff and external buildings to service the proposed facility. Also included is a car park for staff and visitors with 94 spaces and a trailer parking area of six spaces. However, during the planning process, two submissions were made to the council objecting to the plans. One of these was made by Mr D. Phelan, Ardilaun, Abbeyleix Road, Portlaoise, who said he wished to be kept informed of any decision made by the council. In the wake of the councils grant of permission to Glanbia, Mr Phelan lodged an appeal with An Bord Pleanala against the plans. It has now been confirmed that Mr Phelan has withdrawn his appeal, meaning the plans can now progress. Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan welcomed the news. I trust that arrangements to commence immediately, he stated. Welcoming the news in the same week that Laois County Council also granted planning permission to Greenfield Global LFS Ireland for their new facility in the IDA Business Park, Sean Fleming TD said these plants will provide significant employment in the county and will be a tremendous boost for the local economy. As a Laois TD, I have been working hard to promote Laois as location for inward investment. Last year I brought the Chief Executives of both the IDA and Enterprise Ireland to Laois to impress on them the suitability of Laois for investment. This meeting was also attended by Laois County Council, he continued. I want to thank all of these agencies for their work, over recent times, which I hope is the start of many more announcements to come. I am very pleased with the progress in relation to these two investments which I hope will bring substantial employment to the county in the immediate future. Ireland will be represented in the New York St Patrick's Day Parade by the Laois TD Minister for Justice and Equality Charlie Flanagan. The Mountmellick native will undertake a hectic programme of events as part of the Governments St Patricks Day programme in the Big Apple. Top of the agenda for the Minister is the St Patricks Day Parade in the oldest and largest St Patricks Day parade in the world which takes place on Saturday, March 16. Minister Flanagan will join members of An Garda Siochana. In advance, he will meet with New York City Mayor, Bill de Blasio, at his official residence, Gracie Mansion. Both the Minister and the Mayor will address invited guests at a special event hosted by the Mayor. The Minister will also attend a special St Patricks Day mass at St Patricks Cathedral. On March 17 itself the Minister will take part in the 44th annual Brooklyn Parade, including speaking at a special 9/11 memorial event. The Department of Justice says Minister Flanagans programme has a range of economic elements. He will meet with a number of Enterprise Ireland and IDA clients and address invited guests at the US launch of the American Chamber of Commerce in Irelands Annual Report. He will also address the Ireland Chamber of Commerce USA and give the keynote address at a special conference, Understanding Brexit. He will also undertake a number of policing engagements. He will meet with the NYPD Commissioner, James ONeill and with other NYPD senior officers regarding organized crime. The Minister will speak at a special event to mark the 21st anniversary of the Detective Garda Jerry McCabe scholarship programme at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The Minister will also address influential friends of the Consulate, including senior legal figures, on developments in Ireland, including Brexit and on initiatives including the new Brexit Legal Services Initiative. The Fine Gael TD will also undertake a wide range of engagements at the United Nations. Ireland currently holds the chair of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and Minister Flanagan will participate in an event to promote gender equality in Public Institutions and Sustaining Peace. He will also address a UN audience at the premiere film screening of Women, Peace and Power a film which focuses on the important role of women in peace building in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and Liberia. He will also undertake a number of bilateral meetings and engagements to promote Irelands candidature for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for the 2020-2021 term. He will address guests at an event to mark St Patricks Day hosted by Irelands Permanent Representative (Ambassador) to the UN. Minister Flanagan will also participate in events to promote Irish culture, including an Irish Arts Center celebration of Irish / Appalachian Connections. Laois needs more one and two bedroom homes so people can downsize, and Laois County Council is planning to acquire them. Speaking at the February council meeting, Housing Officer Michael Rainey said they need more smaller homes in their stock. It is great that we overreached our target of homes in Laois in 2018, but the problem we have is that we have an ageing population, the number of people in Ireland aged over 65 will hit 1.4million by 2040. A recent report found that 100,000 would downsize if the opportunity arose, he said. We need more one and two bedroom homes. A lot of our stock of 2,200 houses are three bedroom two storey. The challenge is to build one and two bedroom units. That will in turn release a three bedroom supply. It is a big challenge but we will keep focusing on it, he said. He listed the advantages of downsizing. Property tax would be lower, and heating costs would be lower, he said. Laois delivered 141 council homes in 2018, a mix of building, buying and leasing, ahead of its government set target of 76 units, and the second highest delivery rate by a local authority in Ireland. The only estate they built and opened in Portlaoise in 2018 was Conniberry Way, where 10 of the 33 homes have two bedrooms. Please allow ads as they help fund our trusted local news content. Kindly add us to your ad blocker whitelist. If you want further access to Ireland's best local journalism, consider subscribing to our ePaper and/or free daily Newsletter . Support our mission and join our community now. St Paul's students and a staff member have described their frustration and anger regarding the lack of facilities and the current delays in getting their new school in a new online video. Another public meeting was held on Monday night, February 11, 2019 at the school to cite concerns over ongoing delays with the new build. WATCH: A Teacher and two students talk of cramped conditions, inadequate facilities at the current school, health and safety issues, freezing prefabs, fewer subject choices and the ongoing delays with the new build. The conditions we have are not good enough, said Ms Walton a teacher at the school for the past 12 years. Storage rooms are currently being used as classrooms. The building work on the new school was due to begin this autumn at the latest with talks of facilitating an earlier build. However last November the Department of Education responded to concerns that the tendering for the new building for St Pauls in Monasterevin has been postponed due to a legal case against the Department of Education and Skills. A Department of Education and Skills spokesperson confirmed that there is an ongoing legal challenge in relation to the process. St Paul's students and parents will take part in the St Patrick's Day parade to highlight the delays in the new school build. We would appreciate as much support as possible in the parade. We'd like to take the opportunity of thanking the parade committee for the opportunity to highlight the plight of our community. Monasterevin parade will be part of the RTE TV coverage. SEE ALSO: Kildare man launches book of poetry Behind the Walls: The Curragh Camp - a one-hour radio documentary on life at the Kildare army base will be broadcast on KFM Radio next week. Funded by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland with the television licence fee the programme is one of five one-hour documentaries being broadcast on local radio stations across the country that explore the history of Defence Forces barracks situated within the region. It follows on from the recent documentary for LMFM Radio in Louth/Meath on Aiken Barracks and will be followed by future documentaries on Collins Barracks Cork and the recently closed Columb Barracks (Mullingar) and Connolly Barracks (Longford). "This radio documentary series seeks to travel behind the walls of Defence Forces barracks and camps across Ireland in doing so, offer listeners a chance to aurally explore what lies behind them, with the stories of the history they encompass told by those who know them best. Through interviews with defence force members, local historians and key members of the local community, we explore the history of these places through the stories associated with key buildings, artefacts and places throughout their campuses," said the producers. "The Curragh is synonymous with the military dating back to prehistoric times when it was famed as the practice ground for the warriors of Na Fianna, along with having links to Henry II in the late 1100s and the Jacobite Army in the late 1600s, but its status as a permanent military post dates back over 160 years to 1855 when established by the British Army. Its earliest uses by the British included the setting up of a training camp to train soldiers for the Crimean War at that time, followed by the Boer War from 1899 onwards and not long afterwards, World War 1." The programme makers said that before its hand-over from the British Army to the Irish Free State on May 6 1922, the camp had become a thriving community with approximately 6,000 British Army troops and 4,000 civilians living and working in the camp. "Following its handover, it evolved into a far more joyless place of internment and detention during the ensuing Civil War, and again during The Emergency in World War 2, when it also housed both allied and German internees in an unusual arrangement for the time. Gaining the name of Tin Town during this period, it is estimated that approximately 2,000 men passed away in the camp during this period. Over the years, the camp boasted many facilities including a swimming pool, a gymnasium, many shops and a cinema and was considered to be a great place to grow up," they added. 'Behind the Walls: The Curragh Camp' takes the format of a guided walking tour around the camp, intercut with recordings looking at important historical artefacts from the museum, and an interview with the current Chief of Operations and Training in the Curragh Camp. The guided tour is expertly led by Reggie Darling, member of the Curragh Local History Group, who worked as a barber all his life on the Curragh, having been born and bred there. The museum segments are led by retired army officer Ray Stewart, again an expert on the Curragh having grown up on the camp, along with spending most of his army career stationed there. "With Rays assistance, we explore and visually describe the many wonders the museum has to offer, including the Brown Bess Musket and the Sliabh na mBan Rolls Royce Armoured Car, part of the convoy that accompanied Michael Collins during his ambush and death in 1922, amongst many other historical treasures," said the programme makers. "The Curragh is now well-known as the main Training Centre of the Irish Defence Forces with the Command and Staff School, the Cadet School, the Infantry School, the Combat Support College, the Combat Services Support College, the Equitation School, a logistics base, a supply and services unit, and the United Nations School. With the help of Lt Col Shane Bradley (Chief of Operations and Training Oversight in the Defence Forces Training Centre in the Curragh Camp), we explore the current training activities at the camp." "These interviews and tours, along with music and sound effects, allow the listener to experience the rich and varied history of the Curragh Camp, including the many historical objects and places of interest behind its walls, along with its historical and social impact on the locality and the wider Kildare community." The documentary was funded by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland with the Television Licence Fee and produced by Little Road Productions Ltd, based in Co. Louth A public meeting is expected to be held in Celbridge next month aimed at creating a sustainable energy community. Read also: Kildare family set to appear on TV series Doctor in The House Architect, Jay Stuart, whose work includes the retrofitting of homes to save energy, is planning the meeting to promote sustainable energy. The Celbridge resident says that increasing energy efficiency is both financially rewarding and essential to ward off climate change and, ultimately, preserve, human existence. He and others in Kildare, including Naas, Maynooth, Clane, Johnstown, Leixlip and Celbridge are working on a business model for a Kildare energy agency, which would need people with skills including electricians, plumbers and other experts, whose participation could lead to a retrofitting cooperative. Speaking at the recent local election launch of Cllr Brendan Young in Celbridge Manor, Mr Stuart said that there are 2,500 sustainable energy communities across Europe. There are a number of elements to self sustaining energy use including reshaping or retrofitting current residences to make them more energy efficient. Retrofitting would make Celbridge more resilient. Energy prices are going up. You can generate income and build a bulwark against rising prices, he said. Mr Stuart said 45 towns in Sweden are self sustaining energy wise. Energy efficiency has a number of elements. Not only can it reduce future bills but it can also give communities control of their own sustainable energy systems. Mr Stuart points to projects in Europe, including one at Gussing, Austria. That town has had self sustaining energy for the last 20 years, he said. Mr Stuart said that energy heating from geothermal is very possible, especially in north Kildare, which is close to underground geothermal water sources. These are available four kilometres underground and could cost in the region of 35 million to bring into use. The plan would pay for itself in ten years, possibly less, he says. Boreholes in Newcastle, four kilometres from Celbridge, were drilled in 2010. This is right next door in geothermal terms, he says. Mr Stuart plans to call a public meeting, mostly likely next month, with a view to getting support for a sustainable energy community which would work through Sustainable Energy Ireland, the State body which grant aids many projects. The European Parliament has today (Wednesday, March 13) voted to continue EU funding for cross-border projects on the island of Ireland, even in the case of a no-deal Brexit. It involves Peace and INTERREG programmes, fisheries, transport and Erasmus. Speaking following the decision MEP, Mairead McGuinness, said while Ireland and the EU want the UK to leave with the Withdrawal Agreement, yesterday's (Tuesday's) vote in the House of Commons demonstrates again the urgent need to prepare for all outcomes. "Today in the European Parliament we have voted to maintain funding for EU cross-border programmes, including the PEACE IV Programme and INTERREG UK-Ireland (Ireland-Northern Ireland-Scotland). This will apply to the current EU funding period until the end of 2020, she said. These programmes have been an essential support for ensuring a lasting peace in Northern Ireland and enabling cooperation across the border a task that is made more urgent and more difficult arising from Brexit. Maintaining these programmes provides certainty that EU support for peace on the island of Ireland will continue regardless of the outcome of Brexit. The MEP said fisheries is one of the areas where the UK wants to take back full control as soon as possible. The measures we have adopted today will help to mitigate the impact for Irish and EU fishers. They will be eligible for compensation under the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund to off-set some of the impact if UK waters are closed to EU fishermen in a no-deal scenario. Up to 1.1bn would be available in the 8 worst-affected member states. "We have also voted to amend the Regulation on the Sustainable Management of the External Fleets which offers to extend current arrangements with the UK until the end of 2019, based on fishing quotas agreed in December. This is dependent on the UK offering reciprocal arrangements. Member states would also be able to negotiate quota exchanges with the UK, and about 1000 of these side deals currently exist between the UK and member states." Ms McGuinness said today's votes are also important to maintain some transport links with the UK, which will be so important to many businesses and people in Ireland. We have measures on basic air connectivity, basic road freight connectivity, and basic cross-border rail connectivity." She said students who are currently completing Erasmus programmes in the UK and UK students on Erasmus in the EU will be able to complete their studies. Contingency measures for social security coordination will enable those who exercised their right to free movement within the Union before the withdrawal date, maintain their social security entitlements based on facts and events that occurred and periods of insurance, (self) employment or residence that were completed before the withdrawal date, when the UK was a member state of the EU. In relation to Peace and INTERREG funding in November 2017 Mairead McGuinness co-hosted a showcase for the PEACE and INTERREG programmes in Brussels, attended by representatives from Counties Monaghan and Donegal and also from Northern Ireland. They had the opportunity to meet with EU Commissioner for Regional Policy, Corina Cretu, and other policymakers in Brussels and tell them about the projects in the border region, and they underlined the importance of the work continuing. Border county citizens are very aware of the positive impact that EU funding has had on the region in terms of peace, reconciliation, rebuilding infrastructure and supporting communities, the MEP said today. There have been many wonderful local projects, funded under the EU PEACE and INTERREG programmes. Yet there is more to do. The need to continue peace and reconciliation work is even more acute in the context of Brexit. The MEP said there remains a need for deeper reconciliation work between divided communities, programmes to increase tolerance and respect for one another and reduce sectarianism and racism. EU funding has, and will continue to be, an essential support in ensuring lasting peace in Northern Ireland, the Midlands North West MEP said. Loose tea Theatre Company are bringing their latest production Two, to the Dock Arts Centre tonight, Wednesday, March 13 at 8pm. They play entitled Two, takes place in a local pub over the course of one evening and features fourteen diverse characters brought to life by just two actors. Written by Jim Cartwright in 1989 but still astonishingly real today, this much loved two hander by the celebrated Lancastrian playwright waltzes the audience through a spectrum of human emotion, weaving a rich tapestry of life through intimate insights into the lives of the colourful pub regulars. Often funny, sometimes poignant, yet always incredibly human, each character or couple acts like a fragment of shattered glass reflecting back at us as the play mines the depths of human experience. Niamh McGrath is a professional actress, playwright, director and drama teacher. Her play Sarahs Comfort was nominated for the Stewart Parker Award. She was part of the original cast of Alone It Stands, touring to Tasmania, Glasgow, the Edinburgh Festival and Londons West End. Niamh works as facilitator to Mayo Youth Theatre, and also regularly devises work with groups such as The Ridgepool Training Centre in Ballina. She also featured as drama mentor in RTE's young peoples series Primary School Musical. Niamh is the artistic director of Mayo Youth Theatre. She has previously performed at the Dock with play Looking Deadly. Tickets are available on (071)9650828. Pilgrim Street at The Dock The Dock will be filled with sounds of bluegrass, old time country and folk music, fused with traditional folk songs from this side of the Atlantic on March 22. Pilgrim St bring a warm and lively atmosphere to their music and have garnered a glowing word of mouth endorsement from venues around the country with their powerhouse live performances. Drawing from fellow luminaries such as Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, The Pogues and Bruce Springsteens Seeger Sessions outfit, Pilgrim St are about to bring their infectious melodies, harmonies and songs to venues all around the country. Book now to save your seat for this show visit www.thedock.ie Also read: Carrick gets ready to celebrate our national day We're sorry that the ministry you were looking for is no longer available on LightSource.com. However, below are some great ministries that offer related content. Enjoy the inspiration, encouragement, and Biblical challenge from these LightSource.com ministry partners! GARDAI are investigating a number of break-ins to parked cars over the past week. In one case, a make-up bag was stolen from a car which was parked outside a house in Castletroy. A lady parked her car and when she came out an hour later to get something from the car she discovered that it was unlocked and her make-up bag was gone, said Sergeant Ber Leetch. In another incident, computer parts were stolen from a car which was parked at William Street. The owner thought he had locked his car but when he returned he discovered it was open, said Sgt Leetch. "We have said already that people may believe that they are locking their car because they hear a click and see the lights flashing but they could have pressed the unlock button by mistake. You can never be certain that your car is locked unless you actually try the handle of the car door," she added. A JUDGE has referred a gambling addict to the Probation Services after gardai seized a substantial quantity of cocaine at his home, Limerick District Court has heard. Jamie Kelly, 29, of Carriglawn, Ballysimon, appeared before Judge Marian OLeary on Friday, charged with sale and supply of drugs under Section 15 of the Misuse of Drugs Act. Prosecuting sergeant Sean Murray told the court that a search was carried out at the home of Mr Kelly, on foot of a search warrant, on June 23, 2017. During this search, a substantial quantity of cocaine was found and seized, worth 4,437.16, Sgt Murray said on Friday afternoon. The court heard that Mr Kelly, who has no previous convictions, made certain admissions. Defending solicitor Sarah Ryan said that a full explanation was given. She said that Mr Kelly, who was suffering from a gambling addiction, owed money and didnt know how to deal with it. It is so easy to get caught in a gambling addiction, Ms Ryan said, adding that it falls further down the line among addictions. Its up there, the judge replied. Ms Ryan said Mr Kelly has dealt with his gambling addiction, and has been attending gamblers anonymous meetings for a very long time. Ms Ryan said there was a sinister element to this, as there were very few people who would have known he was in possession of the large quantity of cocaine. Mr Kelly was well and truly tied up, she told the judge. Boxed in, the judge added. Yes, exactly. Accepting jurisdiction, Judge OLeary said: Only for what you said, he would be going elsewhere. Ms Ryan said her client was recommended the New York Times bestseller The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg which has been a great source to him in tackling addiction. The judge ordered a pre-sanction report from the Probation Services, adjourning the matter to May 15. In an algorithmic world, it is but natural to get overwhelmed by Artificial Intelligence or AI-powered automated systems, whether in planes, cars or our homes. However, the crash of a Boeing 737 Max and the subsequent grounding of this aircraft model in India, China and many European countries, including Britain, Germany and France, has made many people wonder if we are adopting newfangled technologies a bit too prematurely or relying too much on computer software to keep us safe. Can automation backfire in cockpits, cars or daily-use devices for that matter? The Ethiopian Airlines disaster of 10 March was preceded by a similar Lion Air crash in October 2018 that involved an aircraft of the same make, and while it may be too early to identify the exact reason for the latest one, its worth recalling that Indias Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) had asked local carriers to check the Boeing 737 Maxs sensors back then. A November 2018 article in The Air Current noted that Boeing had quietly added" a new Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) to help pilots bring the planes nose down in the event the planes angle of attack drifted too high when flying manually, putting the aircraft at risk of stalling". However, the article added that the system could be deactivated if pilots trim the aircraft manually to override the MCASs attempt to automatically pitch the jets nose down". This system is at the core of the current anxiety over these planes. There is also speculation that Beijing swiftly grounded the 737 Max because Boeing did not respond to its demand for a full disclosure of the MCASs technical innards; given that China too is trying to strengthen its aviation industry and market its C919 aircraft globally, this could be a case of point-scoring in an image battle of safety. But that does little to soothe the nerves of flyers. Boeing, on its part, has acknowledged that it has been enhancing the flight control software of the 737 Max, an exercise that includes updates to the MCAS flight control law, pilot displays, operation manuals and crew training. The company claims, though, that MCAS does not control the aeroplane in normal flight but improves its behaviour in extraordinary circumstances. Worries of ghost control by bits and bytes go back a long while. Even a decade ago, when an Air France plane crashed into the Atlantic, questions arose over whether its cockpits fly-by-wire" systems were to blame. Relevant in this context is a phenomenon dubbed the paradox of totally safe systems": what makes us safer might also make us careless. An academic paper published in June 2017 by three researchers from the University of Edinburgh Business SchoolNick Oliver, Thomas Calvard and Kristina Potocnikargues that the very same measures that make a system safe and predictable may introduce restrictions on cognition, which over time, inhibit or erode the disturbance-handling capability of the actors involved". Pilots, thus, may find it difficult to foresee complex interactions and not know how to deal with computer failures. While software could in theory eliminate accidents of human error by taking charge of steering wheels and cockpit controls, we might need to keep good old human cognition in the loopand fully alertto avoid the pitfalls of automation. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Never miss a story! Stay connected and informed with Mint. Download our App Now!! Beginning about 541 million years ago, life on Earth exploded. Over a 53-million-year period, gigantic sea creatures, armored worms and bizarre-looking filter feeders filled the primordial seas. Nearly all the animal body plans that exist today first appeared in primitive form during that time. Or so scientists thought. In fact, a new analysis suggests that the Cambrian explosion may not have been a true explosion at all, but rather a series of waves and those waves began millions of years earlier than previously believed. [These Bizarre Sea Monsters Once Ruled the Ocean] Since the days of Charles Darwin, scientists have found Cambrian-era rocks that were chock-full of fossils. Those fossils seemingly appear in the geologic record "in an abrupt way and with great diversity," said lead study author Rachel Wood, a professor of carbonate geoscience at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. "There's no doubt that in the Cambrian there was an explosion of bilaterian forms [bodies with two symmetrical sides] that's all the animals except the sponges, corals, jellyfish and so on," Wood told Live Science. But recent fossil discoveries dating to the Ediacaran period (635 million to 542 million years ago) suggest that many new soft-bodied species first arose long before creatures with skeletons showed up during the Cambrian, Wood told Live Science. Fossils of hyoliths small marine creatures with cone-shaped shells from the early Cambrian, found in Siberia. (Image credit: Rachel Wood) For the study, the researchers conducted a sweeping evaluation of existing research in fields such as geochemistry, stratigraphy and paleontology, Wood said. They also analyzed fossil finds from both the Ediacaran and the Cambrian, creating the first integrated picture of what happened before, during and after the Cambrian explosion. They discovered that some physical features found in Cambrian creatures were also present in organisms from older rocks. These collections of creatures form a transitional bridge "between what was thought to be typically Ediacaran and what is typically Cambrian," Wood said. The scientists also noted that changes swept through early animal life in waves, beginning as early as 571 million years ago and producing multiple surges in animal diversity during the Cambrian. "It begs the question: Is it sensible to isolate the Cambrian explosion as one event, or should it simply be seen as one event amongst many?" Wood said. Fieldwork conducted in Namibia for a prior study provided valuable clues about early animal evolution. (Image credit: Rachel Wood) Their conclusions, while "not shocking news," were absent from prior studies because most researchers tended to focus on "the abruptness, explosiveness, and uniqueness of the Cambrian explosion," Shuhai Xiao, a professor of geobiology in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech, told Live Science in an email. Xiao, who was not involved in the study, said that paleontologists will now need to untangle the evolutionary relationships between Ediacaran and Cambrian fossils to determine how big the extinctions were before the Cambrian explosion. The new study will help scientists to study early animal diversity as a continuous process, "rather than just thinking it all happened in a very short period of time in the Cambrian," Wood said. "We'll start to be able to really understand the pace and the dynamics of evolution, and the origin of animal complexity," she added. The findings were published online March 11 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Originally published on Live Science. One fox learned the hard way that it's unwise to mess with a flock of dinosaurs. The young fox, just about 6 months old, probably thought it had struck gold when it snuck into a chicken coop at dusk last week at a farm school in Brittany, in northwestern France. But chickens, like all birds, are the descendants of dinosaurs. And this particular coop held 3,000 hens. As soon as the sun set and the light-controlled, automatic hatch door closed behind the fox, the birds channeled their inner Tyrannosaurus rex and attacked the fox. [Photos: Birds Evolved from Dinosaurs, Museum Exhibit Shows] "There was a herd instinct, and they attacked him with their beaks," Pascal Daniel, head of farming at the agricultural school Le Gros Chene ("The Big Oak"), told the AFP news agency. "It had blows to its neck, blows from beaks." The following day, the school's students found the fox's dead body in a corner of the coop. It's no secret among chicken farmers that these birds can be vicious. Chicken flocks have a clear hierarchy, sometimes referred to as the pecking order, with the biggest, strongest and most aggressive bird ruling the roost. As the "pecking order" name implies, these top birds bully their way to the top by intimidating and pecking weaker birds into submission, according to Modern Farmer, a news outlet for food producers and consumers. Birds at the top of the hierarchy get better access to food, water and dust-bathing areas, as well as the best spots in the coop, Modern Farmer reported. But these boss birds also bear a special responsibility; they have to keep a constant lookout for predators and guide the other birds to safety if danger is near. In this case, the chickens didn't flee, but instead banded together to ambush the fox. "They can be quite tenacious when they are in a pack," Daniel told the regional newspaper Ouest-France (translated from French). Genetics may be the reason, in part, that some chickens lord over their fellow fowl (and, in this instance, a juvenile fox). According to a 2016 study in the journal Scientific Reports, Chinese scientists found a number of regions on the chicken genome that were associated with aggressive behavior traits. However, chickens usually don't win the battle against larger predators. The last time a fox got inside the henhouse, more than a year ago, the encounter didn't end so well for the chickens, Daniel said. Originally published on Live Science. The Last Act By Brad Parks Dutton. 384 pp. $26 --- Brad Parks started his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and later worked for the Newark Star-Ledger. He has now written nine novels and won the Shamus, Nero and Lefty crime-fiction awards. His thriller "Say Nothing," published in 2017, was delightfully suspenseful, but his latest, "The Last Act," may be his best yet. The book relates the improbable but unputdownable story of a law-abiding young man who goes to prison to bring down a drug lord. Tommy Jump won success as a child actor, but at 27 he's too old and too short to win good roles. He urgently needs a job, in part because his girlfriend, the lovely Amanda, is pregnant. What to do? Unexpectedly, a friend from high school, Danny Ruiz, now an FBI agent, makes a strange but tempting offer. He explains that a banker named Mitchell Dupree is in prison for laundering millions of dollars for a Mexican drug cartel. Dupree has documents that could bring down the cartel but refuses to surrender them to the FBI. The agent offers Tommy $100,000 if he'll pose as a convict for no more than six months, befriend the banker and find out where the documents are hidden. Danny insists that Tommy, being an actor, is perfect for this deception. Tommy can't resist the money. After a fake trial is staged, he's sent to a federal prison in Morgantown, W.Va., with an eight-year sentence for bank robbery. He's assured that it's a minimum-security prison for nonviolent, white-collar offenders, where he (and we) will be spared the unpleasant realities in less favored prisons. They call it Club Fed. No one works very hard - maybe a few hours each day in the kitchen or laundry; otherwise inmates read, watch TV, play poker and enjoy the marijuana that's readily available, thanks to guards happy to make a buck. Tommy talks his way into the nightly poker game with the banker he's supposed to befriend, but their budding friendship inspires no disclosures. He frequently calls Danny at the FBI to report his progress - or lack thereof. (They speak in code lest prison officials are listening, which they are.) We're fearful the cartel may have its own man inside the prison who will eliminate Tommy if he becomes a problem. We meet the murderous cartel boss, El Vio, who is said to be "the richest, most feared man in Mexico" and ships tons of methamphetamine to the United States each year. He suggests El Chapo, the real-life drug lord who was recently given a life sentence in a U.S. prison. Meanwhile, Amanda is living with Tommy's domineering mother in New Jersey. Amanda hails from a tiny town in Mississippi that's notable only for being near Elvis Presley's hometown of Tupelo. She's a talented artist, but when she takes her paintings to the head of New York's finest art gallery, he demands sex for showing her work. She of course refuses and flees but wishes Tommy were there to support and console her. When she visits Tommy, we're given this glimpse of prison life: "I embraced her. Correctional institute regulations permit one hug and one kiss at the start and end of a visit - yes, the Bureau of Prisons even rations how much affection an inmate can receive. I was going to make the most of mine." That visit aside, things don't go well. The man with the documents stays mum. It develops that Tommy, rather than being freed after the promised six months, may have to serve the full eight years he was sentenced on the phony charges. (Never trust the FBI.) "The Last Act" possesses two notable virtues. One is excellent characterizations. Parks not only makes Tommy believable but does the same for numerous others, including his admirable girlfriend, his difficult mother, his huge, possibly dangerous cellmate, the poker-playing convict who has the secrets and the slippery FBI agent he trusts, perhaps unwisely. The other is a roller-coaster plot that serves up endless surprises. Whatever you think is coming next probably isn't. --- Anderson reviews thrillers and mysteries regularly for The Washington Post. Authorities arrested 46 people on DWI charges last month in Laredo, according to records released by the Laredo Police Department. Only one of those was a felony charge, the data shows. Hello Toni, In May, my retiree benefits will be changing, and my husband and I will no longer be covered because we both will be 65. I am afraid that my husband and I will not be medically taken care of since we were forced to make this change and enroll in the retirement plans Medicare Advantage plan. Can you please explain a few rumors I have heard? Many doctors are not accepting Medicare due to low Medicare reimbursements and that if you are over 75 and need care for cancer, that it will be denied. Please tell me what is true and what is a rumor? Thanks, Anne from Atlanta, Georgia Hello Anne: Never have I seen the Medicare community as concerned about their retirement Medicare benefits as they are now since corporations have let their retirees go to search for a Medicare option with no direction regarding how to personalize their plan. One thing that Healthcare Reform affected is how your Medicare dollars are being spent. Below are some of the rumors that are circling around in the forms of bogus emails and scams that we all are receiving. Doctors will not be accepting Medicare because of the amount of reimbursement and the overwhelming paperwork. This is NOT a rumor. Many of your smaller family clinics that do not specialize in the 65 or older community, are not processing Medicare claims and thus not accepting Medicare assignment but there are plenty of primary care physicians or PCPs that are still accepting Medicare patients. Larger clinics are generally still accepting Medicare as well as Medicare Advantage plans. For those turning 65, make sure to establish a relationship with a primary care physician as well as a specialist prior to turning 65. Do not wait past 65 to start going to the doctor because it may be hard to find one that is accepting NEW patients. Many doctors are accepting current patients for Medicare with no problems but have what is called a closed panel for new patients. If you are over 75 and on Medicare, you will be denied cancer treatment! This is a rumor. Medicare does not distinguish what age you are as to what treatment you will receive. If it is medically necessary then Medicare will pay for it. Medicare does not ration care because of age. Last week, I wrote about Medicare clinical trials which is vital when one has a serious illness. A patient must be admitted in the hospital by their primary care physician not an ER doctor for Medicare to pay: Big Rumor. Medicare will pay, but the claim must be classified as formally admitted for Medicare Part A, in-patient hospital care, to pay; not filed as under observation which is under Medicare Part B, outpatient care. Generally, your ER doctor will not follow your care, but turn it over to a hospitalist. Toni Says: Many retirees are losing retiree benefits and the companies are using Medicare Advantage plans as an option. Always check with your doctor when this happens and discover which Medicare Advantage plans that specific office accepts. Email the Toni Says Medicare team at info@tonisays.com for your specific situation. Is the maze of Medicare confusing you? Visit www.abbs4u.com and attend ABBS (American Baby Boomer Society) Medicare courses for more Medicare education. Cypress/290 Area Confused about Medicare Workshop, Thursday, March 28: 6-8 p.m. at Sundance Memory Care Facility, 9051 Greenhouse Road, Cypress, Texas, 77433. RSVP 832-519-8664. Two family members and a family spokesperson have confirmed that missing 2-year-old Noelani Robinson has been found dead in Minnesota. WISN-TV spoke with the family members and a family spokesperson early Saturday morning in Milwaukee. A girl's body was found wrapped in blankets along the side of a Minnesota highway and investigators believe it is Noelani Robinson, Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales said. An autopsy is scheduled to determine the time and cause of death. Morales said it appeared the death did not occur within the last 24 hours. The Milwaukee Police Department asked for help nationwide to find Noelani, the subject of an Amber Alert issued Monday night. Her father, who is accused of killing her mother and abducting her, was arrested Wednesday afternoon at a Milwaukee motel. "The suspect is a cold-blooded killer," Morales said of Dariaz Higgins. Morales said Higgins had given police false information regarding the girl's whereabouts. "The search to find Noelani has become a game to him," Morales said. Morales said Higgins has connections to Miami, Las Vegas and Kansas City. The FBI offered a $5,000 reward for information leading them to Noelani. The situation started Monday in Milwaukee, when police said Higgins shot and killed Sierra Robinson, Noelani's mother, and injured her friend. A few hours later, police issued an Amber Alert for Noelani Robinson. WISN reported investigators caught up with Higgins on Wednesday at the Midpoint Motel less than 2 miles away from the shooting scene, but there was no sign of the girl. There are multiple cameras on the property, but managers would not say whether police took any video with them or whether Higgins may have been with a little girl. Police also arrested a man they believe was helping Higgins while he was on the run. They found him at the Timmerman Terrace Apartments on West Villard Avenue about an hour after finding Higgins. So far, that man has not been charged, but he does have a criminal history. A divided federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld an Ohio law that strips Planned Parenthood of government funding for a wide variety of health services for women solely because it also provides access to abortion. Among those services are cervical and breast cancer screening, prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, HIV/AIDS treatment and education of teens on how to avoid pregnancy. Overturning two lower court decisions and bolstered by four new appointees of President Donald Trump, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, by a vote of 11 to 6, rejected arguments that the 2016 Ohio law imposed unconstitutional conditions on the state's distribution of federal funds. The opinion written by Judge Jeffrey Sutton overturned a district court ruling and a decision by a three-judge appeals court panel holding that the law violated Planned Parenthood's First Amendment right of advocacy as well as constitutional protections for abortion rights. The lower courts' opinions cited Supreme Court precedent against placing unconstitutional conditions on the receipt of federal funds, but the appeals court majority said the law did not impose such conditions because private organizations, such as Planned Parenthood, had no guaranteed right to funds for anything, including to perform or advocate abortion. "Governments generally may do what they wish with public funds, a principle that allows them to subsidize some organizations but not others," the majority said. While women have a right to abortion, third parties like Planned Parenthood have no guaranteed right to perform them, wrote Sutton, an appointee of President George W. Bush. Trump appointees Amul Thapar, John Bush, Joan Larsen and John Nalbandian were in the majority. Judge Helene White, appointed by George W. Bush, wrote in dissent, arguing that the law did amount to an "unconstitutional condition," which she said includes "indirect" burdens on the right to abortion. Plus, she noted, the other health services defunded in Ohio have nothing to do with abortion. The 6th Circuit's jurisdiction covers Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit issued a similar ruling in 2012, upholding an Indiana law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit went the other way in a challenge to a Utah law in 2016, over the objection of then-Judge Neil Gorsuch, who was on that appeals court. The conflicts will make it hard for the Supreme Court to avoid the issue as it's tried to do recently, to the consternation of Gorsuch and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Federal law has long denied funding to organizations for the purpose of performing or promoting abortions. But groups such as Planned Parenthood have separated abortion-related activity from other medical services for women, which have continued to receive federal funds. Ohio's 2016 law, signed by then-Gov. John Kasich, was enacted in the wake of secretly filmed videos purporting to show Texas Planned Parenthood employees discussing the illegal sale of fetal tissue, which the organization denied doing. The videos were later found by government agencies and judges to have been manipulated. While Planned Parenthood has been a political, legislative and legal target of the right for decades, the unsubstantiated charges spurred additional punitive legislation across the country. In a friend-of-the-court brief, the Trump administration urged the judges to rule as they did Tuesday. Coincidentally, the Justice Department official who signed that brief, then-acting Assistant Attorney General Chad Readler, joined the 6th Circuit after being confirmed by the Senate last Wednesday. The case was closely watched, with friend-of-the-court briefs filed not only by the Trump administration but by 14 states saying they had similar laws or prospective laws that would be jeopardized. The American Public Health Association filed in opposition to Ohio's law. In a statement, Planned Parenthood of Ohio called the decision a "shameful" and "direct attack on health care access for Ohio's most at-risk communities." Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said in a statement that he was "pleased" by the ruling "as he has long believed that the people of Ohio, through its state legislature, have the right to decide what it funds and what it doesn't fund." Beto O'Rourke is youthful and has little political record to run on. Joe Biden is older and has a decades-long history, featuring both successes and mistakes. O'Rourke brings a viral energy to his campaigns, while Biden, still figuring out how to harness social media, specializes in the traditional stemwinder. Both men are sending increasingly strong signals they will soon enter the presidential race - additions that would instantly reshape the Democratic primary debate. While left-leaning candidates have drawn the bulk of the attention so far, the popular former vice president and the charismatic former Texas congressman share one key characteristic - a more centrist brand of politics that could appeal to an untapped portion of the party electorate. In targeting many of the same voters, O'Rourke and Biden could be on something of a collision course. They would present the party with the sharpest test yet of whether it wants an exciting but untested face or a more traditional, experienced standard-bearer to take on President Donald Trump. And both would be trying to lay claim to the Obama legacy, with Biden touting his eight-year partnership in the White House and O'Rourke attempting to tap into the cultural and generational zeitgeist as Barack Obama did more than a decade ago. Biden, speaking Tuesday to the International Association of Fire Fighters, was greeted with chants of "Run, Joe, run!" He told the union members he appreciated their energy and urged them to "save it a little longer - I may need it in a few weeks." He added jokingly, "Be careful what you wish for." O'Rourke plans a trip to Iowa later this week, suggesting he is laying plans for that early caucus state in the aftermath of an attention-grabbing appearance at the South by Southwest festival in Texas. The potential candidacies hardly mean the other Democrats - many of them with strong followings and campaign skills - will fade. But Biden's long history in the party and O'Rourke's recent challenge to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, which electrified many Democrats, mean they are likely to be major forces. And their messages would differ notably from candidates such as Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Kamala Harris, D-Calif., who have presented forceful liberal platforms. They are three decades apart, but Biden, 76, and O'Rourke, 46, are Irish American white men who would be entering a field that is the most diverse in history in a party now energized by minorities and women. The argument put forth by supporters of each of them is that they would appeal to white working-class voters who were attracted to Trump. Even before their candidacies are official, Biden and O'Rourke have been honing messages that stress optimism and unity. "We seem to be at each other's throats. Extremism is on the rise in this country," Biden said in Tuesday's speech. "Mean pettiness has overtaken our politics. Sometimes it seems like we can't govern ourselves or even talk to one another. . . . Folks, it's not who we are." O'Rourke has distanced himself from Democrats who have offered sweeping liberal policies, and he bristled when asked whether he considered himself progressive, saying he doesn't know and dislikes labels. O'Rourke could announce a presidential bid any day and has been running hundreds of variations of an ad on Facebook, encouraging users to sign up to learn about his decision on whether to run. "People in communities across the country have been reaching out and asking me if I'm planning on running in 2020," one ad says. "Sign up today to be first to know what's next. I'd like for you to be a part of it." The challenge they present to each other is clear. Biden's experience and fluency with policy could make O'Rourke seem insubstantial and shallow. O'Rourke's youthful charisma could highlight Biden's age, making him seem like a disconnected figure past his prime. In his appearances, Biden's references skew older, and he likes to tell war stories about his long tenure in the Senate. On Tuesday, Biden started his speech by quoting Adlai Stevenson - "He said, 'Flattery is fine as long as you don't inhale' " - while jokingly stressing that he did not actually know the longtime pol, who died nearly 54 years ago. Biden also recalled battling alongside the firefighters in a dispute from 1986, when O'Rourke was in middle school. O'Rourke likens his campaign to the punk bands he used to tour with, and he has been riding around El Paso, Texas, on a hip Surly bike. When he visited the South by Southwest festival, some on Twitter captured him on a street corner around midnight. The next morning he was in a T-shirt, posing for photos at an airport terminal. While O'Rourke inspired legions of supporters during his 2018 Senate race, he lacks a signature accomplishment during his six years in Congress. And as candidates such as Warren churn out policy proposals, he would have a lot of catching up to do in outlining his own plans. Biden has a different and in some ways opposite problem. He has been in public life for longer than O'Rourke has been alive, and he was elected to the Senate six weeks after O'Rourke was born. The Democratic Party has shifted dramatically even in the two years since Biden left office, with a surge of confrontational liberal activism. Biden's challenges were on display last week, in the wake of a Washington Post report that resurfaced comments he made in 1975. In those remarks, Biden argued against busing children for desegregation - in colorful, vehement terms. Harris, the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, took a different view in talking recently to reporters in South Carolina. "I will just speak on behalf of myself - and this is not a reaction to statements he made decades ago - but there is no question we need still to integrate the schools of our country," she said. Biden leads in most national Democratic polls. In Iowa, a recent poll showed him narrowly ahead of Sanders. Almost as important, Biden was the second choice for more voters than anyone else, which could be a critical factor in the state's caucuses. But while other candidates have begun building organizations, Biden has been slow to do so. His supporters say his stature would enable him to move quickly. "The big question is whether he can catch up on staff and whether he's going to focus on Iowa or not," said Sean Bagniewski, the chairman of the Polk County Democrats. Still, he added, the 2016 race showed that staff and fundraising matter only to a point. "Bernie Sanders wasn't the most fundraised and most staffed candidate. Donald Trump wasn't the most fundraised and most staffed candidate," Bagniewski said. "Money and good staff are important, but having a charismatic superstar candidate or a national message and stature matter more." Biden won't inherit Obama's political network - or even get his blessing. Obama has been telling the presidential candidates he does not plan to endorse in the primaries, and he wrote on Facebook last week that it would help the party to have a long primary that could improve the ultimate candidate. That message differs from what Biden says Obama told him four years ago. "In January 2015 the president was convinced I could not beat Hillary, and he worried that a long primary fight would split the party and leave the Democratic nominee vulnerable in the general election," Biden wrote in his recent book. During O'Rourke's 2018 Senate campaign, Obama several times offered to help, saying he would go to Texas for a rally or to record robo-calls. He even recorded a video, though O'Rourke's campaign ultimately did not use it. O'Rourke said in an interview with Oprah Winfrey that after the campaign, Obama gave him advice on how to decide on a presidential bid. "He said, 'Look, just be very clear that this is one of the most intense' - I don't know if he used this word, but I took this from it - 'one of most brutal things you can go through,' " O'Rourke recounted. Notably, O'Rourke and Biden are arguably best known for campaigns they lost. O'Rourke fell short in his 2018 challenge to Cruz, though Democrats were excited that he came within a few points. And Biden has twice run for president, garnering little support either time. New Hampshire House Speaker Steve Shurtleff, D, who worked on Biden's 2008 presidential campaign, noted that Biden dropped out after getting less than 1 percent of the vote in Iowa, never even making it to New Hampshire. "We never found out how he'd do," Shurtleff said. "Maybe now we'll find out." WASHINGTON - Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page defended herself and the bureau last year against accusations that anti-Trump bias affected federal investigations of the Trump campaign's suspected Russia ties and Hillary Clinton's emails, according to a transcript released Tuesday by the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee. Page, who came to prominence over anti-Trump texts she exchanged with former FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok while both were assigned to the Clinton and Trump investigations, stressed that senior bureau officials were also expressing anti-Clinton animus - but that neither affected how agents working those cases carried out their jobs. "Many of us in law enforcement dislike the subject of our investigations. We are not keen on pedophiles and fraudsters and spies and human traffickers," Page said. "That is fine. What would be impermissible is to take that harsh language and to act in some way that was illegal or against the rules. And we don't do it." A representative for Page did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Page's transcript is the second in the last week that judiciary panel ranking member Douglas Collins, R-Ga., has released, in an effort to make public the record of the now-completed GOP-led probe of how federal law enforcement agencies conducted their Trump and Clinton probes. The first, from a session that the Judiciary and Oversight committees held last year with Bruce Ohr, was derided by Democrats as an attempt to resurrect old political talking points in an effort to distract from current congressional investigations of Donald Trump and an expected report from special counsel Robert Mueller III. Page, who worked as special counsel to former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, admitted to the House Judiciary and Oversight committees that much of what she knew about the hierarchy of orders and decision-making in the Clinton probe was secondhand. In particular, her anecdote about former senior counterintelligence officials Sandy Kable and Randy Coleman telling investigators on the Clinton probe "that they were counting on us to get her" came via Strzok, Page said. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment from Kable. A message left with an assistant for Coleman, who now works for Caterpillar, was not immediately returned. Last year, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz criticized individual FBI officials for exhibiting signs of bias about their investigations, even as he concluded that bias did not affect the outcome of the Clinton email probe. Page and Strzok's texts featured heavily in that review - and in the GOP-led investigations that seized upon it. During Page's July 2018 interview, Republicans brought up several of the texts she and Strzok had exchanged, including a 2016 message in which Strzok suggested that Trump wouldn't win and compared the investigations of him to an "insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40." Members of the GOP have alleged that this could mean the investigation might serve as a means to take down Trump in the event he won the election. Strzok has denied to lawmakers that his personal messages ever affected the integrity of his work. Like Strzok, Page also testified that their intentions were not nefarious, but reflected that investigators considered a Trump win to be an unlikely scenario. She explained that the thrust of the texts was more, "Let's not, you know, throw the kitchen sink at this because he's probably not going to be elected, and so then we don't have quite as horrific a national security threat than we do if he gets elected." Page said that she and other FBI officials pushed back against the Justice Department at several points during the Clinton investigation, objecting when David Laufman, for example, asked to sit in on the interview of Clinton. That would have been a break with standard protocol, Page explained. Laufman, a former senior official at the department, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. She added that "we all at FBI" also disagreed with the decision to let "fact witnesses" - in this case, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson - sit in on Clinton's interview about her use of a private email server, a decision that was made by the Justice Department, Page said, not the FBI. "It is not typically appropriate or operationally necessary to have fact witnesses attend an interview," Page said in the transcript, noting that no other witness was allowed to bring such an entourage. She pushed back against the suggestion that the FBI "blew over" potentially charging Clinton with gross negligence under the Espionage Act, saying officials did consider it - but decided that the move would be too "constitutionally vague," unprecedented, and "that they did not feel that they could sustain a charge." Page also said Richard Scott, the Justice Department official in charge of overseeing the Clinton probe, had advised against making the harsher charge. Scott did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Ultimately, then-FBI director James Comey stepped ahead of then-attorney general Loretta Lynch to announce in mid-2016 that Clinton would not be charged with any crimes, but that she had been "extremely careless" - a move that was intended to lend more credibility to the result, though Page acknowledged that "the intent backfired." Comey's central role in both the Clinton and Trump investigations is a running theme throughout Page's testimony, but one she often references obliquely in the transcript, often deferring to the advice of an FBI lawyer present not to divulge details about matters concerning him. In one exchange pertaining to Comey, Page appears to stop just short of acknowledging that the FBI was looking into opening a counterintelligence investigation against Trump after Comey's firing. Though the FBI was looking into alleged ties between Trump's campaign and Russians previously, Page said, they had no reason at that point to suspect that Trump himself was involved. Former representative Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who was chairman of the Oversight Committee at the time of Page's interview, pressed her on what she was referring to in a text reading: "we need to open the case we've been waiting on now while Andy [McCabe] is acting [FBI director]." After speaking with the FBI's lawyer, Page insisted she couldn't say what it was - but did confirm that Comey's firing was the "precipitating event." McCabe confirmed recently that he rushed to open an investigation into whether Trump was working on behalf of the Russians shortly after Comey's firing - and before Trump could install a handpicked replacement. Page also avoided discussing certain other topics that other figures in the probe would later detail, including a set of meetings in the fall of 2016 she participated in with Ohr, Page's first boss at the Justice Department. Page declined to offer specifics to respond to lawmakers' questions about what she knew of how Ohr passed information to the FBI in 2016 that he received from former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele regarding alleged ties between Trump and Russian officials. Ohr later disclosed that he had met with Page at least twice in the fall of 2016 to describe what he was learning from Steele - and that they eventually connected him with Joe Pientka, who was leading the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. WASHINGTON - One of the feel-good stories of 2018 actually didn't conclude until well into 2019. On Tuesday, six months after the initial approval, a congressional committee gave the final sign-off on a program that will allow Capitol Hill interns to be paid. The amounts may seem small, a maximum of $1,800 a month for each intern, but that can be the make-or-break difference for people like Beatriz Reynoso, 30, who is interning on the House side during the spring semester while studying at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Reynoso is the epitome of the burgeoning movement on Capitol Hill to ensure that spots in the workforce are not reserved for the privileged few who can afford to intern for free and then take low-paying jobs in Congress while relying on family financial support. Reynoso spent eight years in the Air Force, including two tours abroad as a machine-gunner, one in Bagram, Afghanistan. A disabled veteran, she does not enjoy being in the large, loud, crowded cafeterias and hearing rooms of the Capitol complex. But she couldn't be more proud to work under the Capitol dome. "I believe in service. I enjoy my internship and the work I'm doing," she said in a recent interview. Paying interns used to be common practice - Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., had a paid internship on Capitol Hill in 1969 - but it turned into an office-by-office decision when funds were cut for deficit reduction. The nonprofit Pay Our Interns, with just two staff members and two interns (yes, paid), set out to shine the light on Congress. Its 2017 survey showed that more than 90 percent of House offices did not pay interns, while in the Senate, 51 percent of GOP offices and 31 percent of Democratic ones paid their interns. Want Congress to look more like the people it serves? Provide member housing, pay staff more. A year later, sufficiently shamed as cheapskates, Congress bowed to the pressure, approving $14 million as an initial down payment for interns. Each House office has a pool of $20,000 annually, and Senate office funds depend on state size. "Working for free isn't cheap," Rep. Susan Davis, D-Calif., said, in an intentional understatement, at Tuesday's hearing of the House Administration Committee. The Senate has already taken care of its portion. Carlos Mark Vera, one of the founders of Pay Our Interns, attended the hearing not to see the culmination of his work but instead to launch the next big chapter. His group has lined up a handful of younger lawmakers who started their careers as congressional interns to make tribute videos to get the word out on college campuses around the country: The Hill is no longer just for the well-off. Those lawmakers include freshman Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., a rising liberal star from Boston, and Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, a moderate from the Mahoning Valley who is considering running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Despite their different backgrounds, their stories are quite similar: From working-class roots, Pressley and Ryan landed critical congressional internships during college, followed by full-time jobs in Congress, before running for office themselves. Vera is also asking offices to extend, or in some cases reopen, their summer intern application process so that the broadest possible crop can apply for these unique positions. Until this week, House offices were unable to pay their current interns, such as Reynoso, and were not allowed to advertise the upcoming summer internships as paid stints. Reynoso, who said that her dream is to one day serve in Congress, considers herself lucky, financially, to have the GI Bill for tuition and some expenses. But those funds are based on the cost of living in Edinburg, Texas, about 20 miles north of the Mexican border - nothing like Washington and its surging rental apartment market. She has been waiting for the committee to give its final approval so that the intern pay could supplement the money from the GI Bill. "I know I'm not the only one in this situation; there are other interns currently on the Hill that have it worse than I do," Reynoso said. Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois, the ranking Republican on the Administration Committee, bemoaned the limitation of the intern stipend to just those who work in Washington, calling for the pilot program's expansion. In a different hearing Tuesday, members of a special committee tasked with modernizing Congress heard from lawmakers who want a larger pot of money for interns. This particular panel has the chance to push even bigger ideas, such as providing more funds for full-time staff members. 43 percent of internships at for-profit companies don't pay. This man is helping to change that. Budget cuts to staff, enacted in 2011, have left the overall pot of money for personnel well below where it was a decade ago, creating a crunch in salaries. Lawmakers and their chiefs of staff have been left to look for places to skimp on funds. One of the easiest places to go cheap? Interns. That explains why, by 2017, 9 out of 10 House offices were not offering any money to their interns. Davis called Tuesday's action "only a start" in the effort to make sure lower-income students have a chance to intern in Congress. But Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., the chairwoman of the Administration Committee, cautioned her colleagues against going overboard on college-age interns who perform basic tasks and are really here to absorb the legislative process. "They're not jobs, they're educational opportunities," Lofgren said. But then she recalled her own journey. In May 1970, after graduating from Stanford University, she interned for Rep. Don Edwards, D-Calif., returning a few years later to a full-time job in that office and eventually running for local office. Then Edwards retired from Congress in 1994. On Tuesday, the daughter of a truck driver said it all began with that internship - paid - in Edwards's congressional office. "It made all the difference for me, and now I am his successor," Lofgren said. Reynoso hopes to tell a similar story in the years to come. The year is 1989, and Im seated in the capacious Third Avenue law office of Raymond B. Harding, the leader of the New York state Liberal Party. Harding is chain-smoking and vigorously trying to convince me of his partys progressive labor credentials, in the context of his choice in that years heated mayoral election. Harding knows that my readership in the northwest Bronx where Im the deputy editor and political beat writer for The Riverdale Press mostly leans left, so hes arguing that his minor party line on the state election ballot is where to find a truly liberal endorsement. The story I was there to report was headlined: Will Ray Harding make NYs mayor? Four years later, he did: The mayor he made was Rudy Giuliani. Hardings power stemmed from fusion voting, which allows minor parties in New York to cross endorse candidates on their ballot line. The practice can be used by parties on the political fringe to influence the major party, as the Working Families Party tries to act as a progressive check on the Democrats much to the irritation of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, with whom the WFP has feuded. But ballot line bosses like Harding have used it for other, less high-minded purposes. Hardings argument that Giuliani was the heir to the labor-based parties that provided an alternative to Tammany Hall in the New Deal era was absurd. It falsely painted Giuliani as a liberal successor to progressive Republicans like Fiorello LaGuardia even as the former prosecutor (and future Trump lawyer) pushed the citys politics decidedly to the right. Years of aggressive policing, censorship battles, cuts to homeless services and deeply frayed race relations were the direct result. Last week, the New York state Democratic Committee recommended ending fusion voting as part of the package of election reforms winding their way through the state Legislature. In a moment of decided irony, progressive activists and elected officials are urging the party to preserve the states corrupted fusion voting system, even as they work for election reforms on the table in Albany. Last month, in collaboration with the WFP, Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and 17 other Democratic members of the states congressional delegation signed a letter arguing that cross-endorsements expand democracy and help Democrats. And leaders of 19 liberal organizations, including Indivisible and MoveOn, sent a letter maintaining that the WFP is a vital piece of progressive organizational infrastructure in New York and the nation. I share the progressive coalitions policy goals and cheered its success in defeating the break-away bosses of the now-defunct Independent Democratic Conference in the state Senate. But I also think the history of fusion voting in this state is deeply flawed, is biased toward conservatives, and has more often worked to stymie good government than to support it. During that interview in his office 30 years ago, Harding was exultant about the fusion vote without saying it in explicitly racial terms, he laid out nonetheless how putting the Republican Giuliani on the line of the Liberal Party (which was founded in 1944 by union leaders)would give permission for white liberal Democrats to vote for Giuliani against David Dinkins. He was right. His blessing instantly solidified Giuliani as a viable candidate. Our endorsement boosts any candidacy, said Harding. It guarantees a presence in November. Giuliani won his second race against Dinkins. Harding couldnt resist showing off his power to a reporter. With a finger to his lips to shush me, he put in a call on speakerphone to a major Democratic elected official and asked for a favor. He got it immediately. Harding didnt always choose wisely, however. In 1998, he backed a conservative, Republican Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey Ross, for governor and she was shellacked. Four years later, the Liberal Party lost its automatic ballot line in 2002 when its gubernatorial candidate dropped out early and the party failed to get 50,000 votes in the race. That candidate was Andrew Cuomo. Harding died in 2012, three years after pleading guilty to accepting more than $800,000 in exchange for doing favors for Alan Hevesi, the former state comptroller, after an investigation by the office of (you guessed it) then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who said: We see New Yorks state pension fund looted to reward a political boss. Harding was right that, in his heyday, a Liberal Party endorsementguaranteed a presence in November. What it didnt guarantee was better democracy and a stronger system of government for New Yorkers. It didnt even necessarily help the most liberal major candidate win. Now fusion voting is front and center in the endless New York political battle between our elbow-throwing three-term Democratic governor who many progressives believe is behind the Democrats recent measure against fusion voting and the left wing of his party. Ironically, given the contrary view held by progressive activists who often have butted heads with Cuomo, the Progressive Caucus of the state Democratic Committee has called for the end of fusion voting. It complains that minor parties such as the Independence Party overtly manipulate fusion voting to enact their transactional pay-to-play politics and points out that local chapters of statewide minor parties often go against the politics of the parent party. The caucus cited the 2017 election for Rockland County executive, in which Republican Ed Day tried to claim the support of the Rockland County Working Families Party over the formal endorsement of the actual WFP, which led to a confusing squabble over flyers (and did nothing to stop a GOP win). It also derides the Womens Equality Party, created by Cuomo himself, ostensibly to promote female candidates; but that minor party passed over womens rights champion Liuba Grechen Shirley in favor of a more conservative male candidate in her primary to oppose right-wing congressman Peter King last year. The Progressive Caucus also points to the political machinations necessary to remove a candidate from the third party ballot when a gambit to win a Democratic primary falls short. That objection brings to mind the political game of Twister necessary this past fall, after Cuomo easily defeated progressive challenger Cynthia Nixon in the Democratic primary. The Nixon Two-Step involved moving Nixon over to the WFP line in the contest for Manhattan's 66th state Assembly seat, held by a longtime progressive Democrat, Deborah Glick, who was not pleased with a backroom decision that she had no say in, even though Nixon didnt campaign. Then, the WFP which had wagered all in its quixotic support for the television actor had to go, hat in hand, to its arch-enemy and beg him to take their ballot line. Why? Because keeping a third party line for the next four years requires 50,000 votes in the gubernatorial election. And the WFP is understandably loathe to be seen as taking votes away from Democrats in general elections and thus empowering Republicans; its main value proposition is using its line to promote progressive policy and force wavering Democrats to support more leftward positions. Since fusion voting enables that approach, at least in theory, progressive activists worry that giving up fusion voting will lead lefty voters to instead back the Green Party candidate and cost Democrats elections, as Greens have nationally and as the Liberal Party did in New Yorks U.S. Senate election in 1980 when it backed liberal Republican Sen. Jacob Javits, who had lost his partys primary. (Conservative Republican Al DAmato won the general election, in a result widely attributed to Javits pulling votes from Democrat Elizabeth Holtzman.) But, in practice, does fusion voting work the way they think it does? Another episode from last falls blue wave season shows the pitfalls pretty clearly. After losing his June primary to upstart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, incumbent Democratic then-Rep. Joe Crowley baulked at executing his own version of the Nixon Two-Step, declining to either change his registration or address to get off the WFP line, even as Joe Lieberman (the conservative former Democratic senator from Connecticut generally hated by progressives) urged him in The Wall Street Journal to use the line to fight it out with Ocasio-Cortez in November. Liebermans advice was particularly enervating to liberals because thats exactly how he retained his Senate seat after progressive challenger Ned Lamont defeated him in the 2006 Democratic primary. Lieberman went out and ran as the standard-bearer of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party, and won. Meanwhile, the irony of the progressive WFP failing to endorse rising left-side superstar Ocasio-Cortez and then asking Crowley to vacate its line could hardly be thicker. Then theres the right side of the equation, where minor parties can also use fusion voting to pull a party away from the center. Home base of conservative movement godfather William F. Buckley, Jr. and long dedicated to dragging moderate New York Republicans firmly to the right, the Conservative Party is a fusion success story par excellence. In 1970, it elected Buckleys younger brother Jim to the Senate when two more liberal candidates, Democratic Rep. Richard Ottinger and incumbent Republican Sen. Charles Goodell, split the vote. New Yorks Republicans learned their lesson, setting out on a right-wing path theyve never wavered from, as theyve nominated candidates who could win the Conservative nod. No wonder that Conservative stalwart George Marlin, writing in the New York Post on the 50th anniversary of its founding, called the Conservative Party the nations most successful third party. If progressive policies are your goal, then considering the impact of fusion voting should include a clear-eyed look at the numbers in New York. There are 485,000 registered members of the Independence Party, which thrice endorsed businessman Tom Golisano, one of its founders, for governor. Over the years, it has backed a bizarre ideological range of candidates: Pat Buchanan, Natural Law Party candidate John Hagelin, and Ralph Nader. Famous for its internal squabbles, the partys line has nonetheless remained valuable billionaire Michael Bloomberg essentially took it over for his 2001 run for mayor. And guess what? The votes he received on his fusion lines exceeded the margin of his win over Democrat Mark Green. By contrast, there are 157,000 registered members of the Conservative Party in the state and just 46,000 registered WFP members. In arguing for the retention of fusion voting at the behest of the WFP, progressives from Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren have extolled the virtue of more democratic choices. Tweeted Sanders (later deleted): We should be for more democracy, not less. Dont you agree @NYGovCuomo? The current battle over the fusion system is clearly rooted in the politics of the moment, the epic political struggle that defines left-wing Democratic politics under Cuomo. But given the history, those calls to preserve fusion voting may be short-sighted. Just ask Ray Harding. Or Michael Long. WASHINGTON - Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie, whose career has long gravitated to military matters, has promoted himself to the White House to be President Trump's next secretary of defense, according to people familiar with his efforts. His internal campaign comes as Trump has yet to formally nominate a candidate to replace Jim Mattis, the retired Marine general who quit last December over differences with the president. Mattis's deputy, former Boeing executive Patrick Shanahan, has been auditioning for the role as acting secretary since early January. Shanahan is widely expected at the Pentagon to be nominated as permanent secretary, but officials have said there's no certainty about his elevation until a White House announcement. The president has been known to change his mind on personnel decisions. Shanahan's limited foreign policy experience, particularly with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has prompted some uneasiness on Capitol Hill. A few Senate Republicans have openly criticized his unwavering loyalty to the president, particularly on Trump's controversial announcement that he was withdrawing troops from Syria, and questioned whether he could disagree with Trump in private when appropriate. He did not serve in the military. Wilkie is in only his eighth month leading Veterans Affairs, which he took over following a tour as undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness at the Pentagon. He has pitched himself to top White House officials as an experienced hand in defense policy and running large bureaucracies, according to an administration official and another person close to the administration who requested anonymity to discuss personnel matters. Wilkie, 56, often says he was born in "khaki diapers." He is a former Navy reservist and lieutenant colonel in the Air Force reserve and son of a soldier severely wounded during the Vietnam War. His career has taken him from Senate staffer to the National Security Council and the Pentagon, where he was assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs from 2006 to 2009. It's unclear whether Trump has considered him as a serious candidate for defense secretary, although the president is said to hold him in high regard. VA spokesman Curt Cashour said in an email that Wilkie "remains 100 percent focused on his job as VA secretary." "He is proud to serve the Veterans of this country and is honored to be a part of the record pace of reform at the department under President Trump's leadership," Cashour wrote. Wilkie is still working to restore morale at the second-largest federal agency after a long period of turmoil under Trump, when a gap in leadership and political infighting led to an exodus of top career staff. Veterans will continue to be a key constituency for the president as he seeks reelection, and VA is one of the few corners of the government where the proposed budget the White House released Monday included a spending increase. Wilkie is tackling major challenges for veterans as he balances an administration priority to increase veterans' access to private doctors outside VA. Democratic lawmakers have criticized him for a lack of transparency in the process. Wilkie also is overseeing an expensive overhaul to VA's antiquated medical-records system and an expansion in assistance provided to caregivers for military families. His staff stumbled last fall when computer problems resulted in delayed or miscalculated housing allowances to veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan under the Forever GI Bill. But his reviews overall have been largely positive. "I think he's a very qualified man," said Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee. "I would hate for us to lose him under any circumstance." The committee's top Democrat, Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, was more blunt, saying that Wilkie's departure would return VA to a state of turmoil. "That's a problem because you need continuity within the VA," Tester said. He said he understood why Wilkie might be attracted to the defense position, but "we make a commitment to our veterans, and that VA secretary is an important position. If we don't have a good person there, good things don't happen to our vets. I get it, but I'm very concerned if that's the case." Shanahan is scheduled to give his first congressional testimony as acting secretary this week, when he is sure to face tough questions about Trump's defense policies. The appearance promises to be a key test for an official whose career has been spent in aviation rather than foreign policy and who would become one of the administration's most visible Cabinet members. - - - The Washington Post's Missy Ryan and Paul Sonne contributed to this story. I dont really know much about magazines but, if you would partner with me, maybe we could buy it together, Jared Kushner, the new owner of the New York Observer, told me. It was the spring of 2008, and we were having an informal meeting to catch up as two friendly publishers in the same cut-throat New York media market. I had innocently asked him if there were any deals he had heard about that might be appropriate for my company. He brought up a Harvard alumni magazine, 02138, that was looking for a buyer. I was intrigued by the publication and thought it would be a strategic way to build a network of magazines geared to Ivy League graduates. As a Harvard alumnus, Kushner had a personal interest in this glossy quarterly and his suggestion of partnering piqued my interest. A few days later he told me to go it alone, that he was bidding to buy Long Islands daily newspaper, Newsday, and he didnt have the bandwidth to pursue both deals. The end of that story is not a pleasant one: My company ended up buying 02138 without Kushner, just a month before Lehman Brothers and the rest of the economy imploded. It was not a good time to relaunch a luxury magazine as the economy teetered on the brink of collapse. That acquisition is perhaps the biggest failure of my 30-year career as a publisher. I dont blame Jared. The timing was disastrous and he was well-intentioned. But it was his idea and, coupled with his spotty record in publishing and overpaying for the most expensive building in America, it might raise some questions about his ability to manage U.S. relations with Israel, the Palestinians and Saudi Arabia. Going from real estate dealmaker to newspaper publisher is like a dentist trying his hand at architecture. Going from that to negotiating highly sensitive diplomatic agreements is an even bigger, and far more dangerous, leap. I was reminded of 02138 when I was reading Nicholas Kristofs recent column in The New York Times about Kushners relationship with his new pal, Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Kristof blasted the administrations idea of selling nuclear reactors to the Saudis, a prelude to becoming a nuclear power just the thing that our country is working hard to prevent in North Korea and Iran. Kushner ran his familys New Jersey-based empire at a very young age after his father Charles pleaded guilty in 2004 to counts of tax evasion, filing illegal campaign finance reports and retaliating against a witness who happened to be his brother-in-law. Jared made one really disastrous move by buying 666 Fifth Avenue for a record $1.8 billion, but the family wriggled out of that calamity last year when Brookfield Properties pre-paid $1.1 billion to lease the building for 99 years. At the time, the Times reported, The building was 30 percent vacant and only generated about half the annual mortgage payments. The New York City elite first heard about Kushner in 2007, when he swooped in to buy the Observer, a then-exalted pink weekly newspaper. I say swooped because my company had what I thought was a verbal agreement with Observer owner Arthur Carter to acquire the perennially money-losing business. But Kushners 11th hour bid for a reported $10 million dwarfed ours, so Carter decided to sell to the scion of a New Jersey real estate mogul. Kushner liked owning a respected newspaper and the power it afforded him even though recently, his ally bin Salman reportedly ordered the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Washington Post journalist. (Asked in December about Khashoggis death, Kushner didnt mention the crown prince, saying only that intelligence agencies were making their assessments and that we're hoping to make sure that there's justice brought where that should be.) I remember visiting him at his office in 2009, the same day the Observer published its annual Real Estate Power 100 List. As I waited for him in the reception area I perused the issue, noting with surprise that Donald Trump had dropped off the list entirely that year, when he had been No. 38 the year before. I recalled that a few months earlier, Jared and Ivanka had broken up. When I got to Jareds office, we chatted a bit and then we were interrupted by his secretary: Donald Trump is on line 1. I assumed Trump was calling to complain. Jareds face beamed ear to ear as he said, very dismissively, Please tell him that Ill call him back later. Ah, the power of the press. Like many fans in the publishing world, I watched the Observer shrink in size (literally, as the broadsheet became a tabloid) and in stature, as the paper that was a must-read among the New York City elite and a training ground for a generation of star reporters became pedestrian and underwhelming. Under Kushners ownership, the steady hand of longtime editor Peter Kaplan, a revered figure in the New York journalism world, was replaced by a rapid churn of editors, some of whom have written unflatteringly about Kushners management. Eventually, the paper died as a print product and became a pariah among serious journalists for its blatant servility to Kushner and his father-in-law Trumps business, personal and political interests. (Buzzfeed reported last year that when he was publisher of the Observer, Kushner personally ordered a software developer at his newspaper to remove stories that were critical of his friends and real estate peers.) He bought a publication whose previous owner could never get the pink paper out of the red, and he tried to innovate its business model, with limited results. His only real success was creating a real estate weekly, the Commercial Observer, which is still running strong. But Jared was ambitious as a publisher: He started a society magazine, Scene, which folded within a few years. He started a parenting publication, Scooter, which also ceased publication after a handful of issues. At the time, I was co-owner of a society magazine, Avenue, and a parenting magazine, New York Family. The incursion into our space put a crimp in our professional friendship. I did not shed too many tears at the demise of these ephemeral competitors. Which is why Im quite worried that Jared has moved out of his lane once again. Kushners primary mandate in the Middle East is to strike a permanent peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, a dream that has humbled prime ministers and career diplomats for the past six decades. In the coming weeks there is an expectation that he will unveil a master plan for peace. I hope that, like the time he asked me to partner with him on a magazine acquisition, he realizes his limitations as a dealmaker, especially in a region that is a powder keg. There is much more at stake here than running a media icon into the ground or wildly overpaying for a skyscraper. Oh, and by the way, the company that would benefit financially from the nuclear reactor deal with the Saudis: that same Brookfield Properties that bailed out the Kushner family from its ill-advised investment in 666 Fifth Avenue. As Kristof noted, Brookfield owns Westinghouse Electric, the nuclear services business that wants to sell reactors to Saudi Arabia. A nine-year-old murder case came back to life Tuesday when state prosecutors started the retrial of Vanessa Cameron, the daughter of a former San Antonio police officer, who was convicted in 2012 of soliciting her brother-in-law to kill the father of her child. Cameron, 38, was already serving her 70-year sentence in state prison when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered a new trial in the case of the January 2010 killing of Samuel Allen Johnson Jr., 26. She has been out on bond pending the retrial. Camerons conviction was overturned on the rare claim that due to an overflow crowd during jury selection, her family wasnt able to sit in the courtroom, thus denying her a public trial. FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox Prosecutors argued in Camerons first trial that she was jealous of Johnson having a new girlfriend and sought his murder so she could claim a $750,000 life insurance policy. That girlfriend, Eric Hinton, testified Tuesday that she first met Johnson in 2004 at an H-E-B where he worked, started dating and eventually became engaged in 2009. She became aware of other women Johnson was dating but thought his affairs had more to do with a lack of self-confidence than just infidelity or sex addiction, she told the jury. Hinton got Johnson to go to church and sing in the choir, she testified. But she agreed under questioning by defense attorney John Hunter that Johnson became suicidal and at one point locked himself in a house with a shotgun and his young child, though she did not witness the incident. Neither side gave an opening statement Tuesday, an unusual courtroom maneuver by prosecutor Karl Alexander. If the prosecution doesnt give an opening state, the defense cant give one, either. Its trial strategy, said a member of the defense team during a break. RELATED: Affidavit: Couple paid hitman $500 to kill drug dealer over diluted drugs Camerons conviction was overturned on appeal when her attorney at that time, Joseph Esparza, argued that her relatives werent allowed in the courtroom because all seats were taken by potential jurors, thus violating her Sixth Amendment right to a public trial. Court officials at the time noted it was an overcrowding issue, as bailiffs had no room to seat more people in the 65-seat courtroom and thus the judge opened all the courtroom doors so that those who ended up outside could hear. Whatever the reason, the appeals court decided it effectively denied Cameron the right to have her family present in the courtroom. It is rare, I will concede, said defense attorney Chad Van Brunt, but it is not a technicality when you are denied a public trial. Camerons brother-in-law, Bernard Brown, was acquitted in 2013 of murder in Johnsons death. His attorneys successfully argued that he had been framed. The case is being heard before 226th State District Court Judge Velia Meza. The first trial judge was 379th State District Court Judge Ron Rangel. Testimony continued in the afternoon with crime scene investigators and a medical examiner. What if you were walking down the street late at night when police officers appear and say youre under arrest for robbery? Before long, youre behind bars at a police precinct not knowing when this ordeal will end. Hours go by and you finally appear before a judge. What if you cant get bail? In that case, Rikers Island could be your next stop. Now begins the difficult process of getting out whether or not you are guilty. Many Americans particularly white people assume that they would have a fighting chance to defend their presumed innocence. The U.S. Constitution, after all, guarantees the right to an attorney and a speedy trial, as well as protections against excessive bail. However, individual states have leeway in how those rights play out in practice. In New York, prosecutors and a jammed court system can make cases drag on for years while withholding evidence until just before a trial begins. That whole time, many defendants, especially poor ones, have to sit in pretrial detention wondering whether the prosecutor really has a case or is simply holding out for a plea deal. In such a predicament, many inmates ask themselves whether the criminal justice system really lives up to its name. Could that change this year in New York? With strong majorities in the state Senate and Assembly, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Democratic legislators say so. The governor included in his state budget measures to abolish cash bail for many crimes, reform discovery laws and speed up trials, but with an April 1 deadline to finalize the spending plan, they might not get done in time. However, these reforms have a real chance of passing, even if its later in the session, along with dozens of other bills that aim to redefine the criminal justice system with more emphasis on correction than punishment. Many Americans particularly white people assume that they would have a fighting chance to defend their presumed innocence. Advocates will have to overcome significant obstacles to pass these three high-profile reforms. For starters, the governor has to hash out the differences in his proposals with bills favored by lawmakers. There is also significant opposition from prosecutors and crime victims to some elements of these reform efforts. Plus the sheer scope of the Democrats legislative ambitions mean that advocates have to overcome significant political noise in order to keep the state Legislature focused on accomplishing the biggest overhaul of the criminal justice system in decades. The first step lawmakers want to take is a package of three bills that would make the trial process more favorable to defendants, who are overwhelmingly people of color. New York state is in (the) Stone Age when it comes to criminal justice laws, said state Sen. Jamaal Bailey, the sponsor of bills to reform discovery (which has 26 co-sponsors) and accelerate the trial process (which has 14 co-sponsors). Mass incarceration is a scourge not only on New York, but also on our country as well, (so) we want to make sure what we are doing is stepping in the right direction to end mass incarceration. Advocates argue that abolishing bail has to go hand in hand with changing discovery laws and making trials happen faster. Given the notorious violence and deprivations at jails like Rikers, pretrial detention makes defendants more desperate to plead guilty as time goes by, giving key leverage to prosecutors. New York does require that felony trials take place within six months after an arrest, but a technicality in that law allows prosecutors to easily delay trials past that deadline. Prosecutors may ask a judge for a one-week delay, but clogged court calendars mean a trial is typically postponed even longer. Prosecutors only have to divulge the evidence they have just before the trial begins. If a person is out on bail, but does not know the evidence against them, or the trial is postponed for months or years on end, there may still be a strong incentive to take a deal. New York state is in (the) Stone Age when it comes to criminal justice laws. - said state Sen. Jamaal Bailey A few weeks ago, the state Legislature appeared ready to pass bills that would abolish cash bail, reform discovery laws and speed up trials, but it was not to be. A key reason why bail reform stalled, lawmakers say, is the idea of dangerousness basically, who should be released pretrial and who should not. Advocates of abolishing cash bail say it is important to note that its primary purpose is to ensure that a defendant shows up to court. I think the big issue with bail is how people conceptualize how bail is supposed to be, said state Sen. Luis Sepulveda. Ongoing discussions are totally about the exceptions to pretrial release, he added, such as detaining a suspect in a mass shooting. As for discovery and speedy trial legislation, there is broad agreement between the governor and legislators on passing reforms, though some details have to be worked out. One outstanding issue on discovery, for example, is how many days a prosecutor has to turn over evidence to the defense. Were not saying 15 (days) and the governor says 45, Bailey said as a demonstration of how minor the disagreements are. Getting all this done by April 1, however, is not guaranteed, lawmakers say. Some believe they might have to wait until later in the spring to get it done. I think that would be the intelligent thing to do, said Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, the Assembly sponsor of the discovery reform bill, which has 23 co-sponsors. Taking more time could allow lawmakers to tweak the legislative language to address the concerns of district attorneys, who say that the bills as written would put undue burdens on them and on law enforcement. Making the wheels of justice turn quicker requires staffing and financial resources that are not currently available to prosecutors, cops or courts, according to Albany County District Attorney David Soares, who is also president of the state District Attorneys Association. While a string of witnesses at a Jan. 29 state budget hearing on public protection expressed support for the reforms, Soares had some reservations. He said the legislation needs to adequately fund pretrial services that would help track defendants and make sure they show up to court. Requiring that prosecutors turn over evidence quicker might also be counterproductive, he added, because legal fights could erupt and thus delay cases over what can be withheld in order to protect witnesses from intimidation. Given the long-term stakes of criminal justice reform, more time is needed to prevent unintended consequences, according to Soares. You have the opportunity to craft some of the most innovative changes and improvements to public safety and criminal justice in a generation, he said in his testimony. These are important matters to our state that will have profound benefits and consequences for years to come. Some advocates of domestic violence survivors including Sonia Ossorio, president of National Organization for Women New York City argue that sharing evidence earlier could lead to witness intimidation and ultimately discourage reports of abuse or violence. However, the discovery proposal includes a provision whereby a prosecutor could request that information, such as the identity of witnesses, be withheld from public disclosure if a judge agrees there is a danger. I have a hard time believing that, Lentol said in response to the concerns. They dont know that other states have been able to handle that situation really well? These three bills might be getting the most attention, but they only represent one facet of efforts to reform the criminal justice system. Other bills aim to emphasize rehabilitation in the prison system in order to reduce recidivism and lower prison populations. These include proposals to provide free legal counsel to inmates at parole hearings, new treatments for inmates struggling with mental illness, and increasing and expanding access to substance abuse programs for non-native English speakers. One bill sponsored by Sepulveda would require automatic parole for inmates who complete two years of a temporary release program where they leave prison for a certain part of the day to work or attend vocational classes. These individuals are demonstrating work ethic, he said. They are staying out of trouble and they do everything thats required to complete their work release and yet because of the nature of their crimes they get denied. Whats the incentive to participate? If that bill is passed, along with the litany of others, then New York might just get about 85 percent of the way to an ideal criminal justice system, according to Sepulveda. Such a system could have resulted in a different outcome for Kalief Browder, the teenager whose incarceration and death drew attention to the conditions at Rikers Island and the challenges facing people who are accused of crimes. Such a system likely would not have kept Browder on Rikers for three years for allegedly stealing a backpack. The prosecutor would not have been able to delay his trial again and again. Browders attorney would have been able to better scrutinize the flimsy evidence that the prosecution had against Browder, who refused to take a plea deal. He might have even avoided spending any time on Rikers Island at all. No one will ever know how things could have ended differently for Browder, who endured 700 days of solitary confinement and then killed himself after being released. But at the very least, New York lawmakers are now pushing for new laws that would make sure what happened to Browder, and many others, will no longer be the norm in New York state. Cookie Preferences Cookie List Do Not Sell My Personal Information When you visit our website, we store cookies on your browser to collect information. The information collected might relate to you, your preferences or your device, and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to and to provide a more personalized web experience. However, you can choose not to allow certain types of cookies, which may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer. 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They are capable of tracking your browser across other sites and building up a profile of your interests. This may impact the content and messages you see on other websites you visit. If you do not allow these cookies you may not be able to use or see these sharing tools. If you want to opt out of all of our lead reports and lists, please submit a privacy request at our Do Not Sell page. Recently, I met with the presiding judges of the Bexar County Misdemeanor Criminal Court At Law. I asked them to rethink how we use misdemeanor bail in Bexar County. Misdemeanors in Texas are often nonviolent offenses such as trespassing, possession of marijuana, criminal mischief and minor theft. When one of these nonviolent individuals are arrested, he or she appears before a magistrate or judge to set bail, a set dollar amount that a person is required to pay in order to be released from jail or be released on a personal recognizance bond. I asked the judges to look at the actions taken by Harris County. In Harris County, misdemeanor court judges now release individuals arrested for non-violent offenses on personal recognizance (PR) bonds at no cost to the individual arrested. Money bail is not used and poor people who are innocent until proven guilty are not left to languish in jail before they even have their day in court. Harris County learned this lesson the hard way. It was sued in federal court precisely because the use of money bail left hundreds of non-violent individuals in jail since they did not have the financial resources to pay a bondsman. To date, Harris County has spent more than $10 million trying to defend a broken, unconstitutional system similar to ours. The Bexar County bail bond industry posted an outdoor sign near the BCSO Jail that stated, Say No to P.R.!!! Why Take Weekly Drug Tests, Pay Weekly Fees Plus Check-In Person. But, as a result of less supervision by the bail bond industry, the rates of re-arrest are higher for individuals released on money bonds rather than PR bonds. The reason why is that individuals released under Bexar Countys PR bond program are required to report to a Pretrial Bond Officer, take drug tests, participate in treatment if clinically indicated, and in some cases be placed on GPS tracking. The cost to the taxpayer for an individual in the PR bond program is $1.20 per day compared to the cost of jail which is $48 per day. Moreover, the opportunity to remain in the community allows these individuals to work, pay rent, support their family, and pay child support. If a person is in jail; the person cannot do any of this. A bipartisan bill sponsored by Gov. Greg Abbott and introduced by Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, and Rep. Andrew Murr, R-Juncton, would allow the magistrate to utilize a risk assessment based on criminal history and community stability so that PR bonds are the norm, not the exception, for nonviolent individuals. On Feb. 12 the Commissioners Court, with the support of District Attorney Joe Gonzales, passed a resolution that stated that we support the efforts of the Texas Legislature to further reform the states pretrial justice system while ensuring the communitys safety, and treating arrested people in a fair and objective manner. We have an opportunity to stop punishing poor people for being poor; stop gouging taxpayers with criminal justice practices that do not work; and stop sending nonviolent criminals to jail. We can do all of this voluntarily and proactively or we can get sued like Harris County and be forced to do the right thing, which is what we should have been doing all along. The District Courts and the County Courts have taken a step in the right direction by agreeing to allow the District Attorney and the Public Defender to be present at magistration hearings. While the Criminal County Court at Law Judges are not adopting the Harris County plan, under the leadership of Judge Tommy Stolhandske, they are working on a plan to assure low level misdemeanor arrestees that they will not be held in jail just because they cannot afford a cash bond. We need to work together to assure that our criminal justice system is for the benefit of all citizens and that the jail is primarily for arrestees who are a threat to the public. Nelson Wolff is Bexar County Judge. Bexar Countys misdemeanor judges are newly elected but already have been put on notice. This is because the county court-at-law judges have refused to endorse bail reform, even as bipartisan change is sweeping the nation. Texas Organizing Project and Color of Change, a national nonprofit focused on racial injustice and civil rights, recently submitted more than 20,000 signatures to county judges calling for the end of cash bail here. The signatures were local, statewide and national, organizers said. The push is an ethical one focused on nonviolent offenses. Two people can be charged with the same crimes and pose the same risks to the public. But a wealthier defendant can post bond and be released pretrial while a poor defendant will remain incarcerated. This split can make all the difference. Experts have said staying locked up pretrial leads to greater recidivism rates, separates people from their families and jobs, and can compel people to plead guilty even if innocent. We know such inequalities exist in Bexar County because officials have identified roughly 130 people in jail for nonviolent misdemeanor charges who could not pay a cash bond. We know Janice Dotson-Stephens, a schizophrenic grandmother, died in jail this December after languishing for five months on a trespassing charge. Her bond was $300. Harris Countys misdemeanor judges have eliminated cash bail for nonviolent misdemeanors, and Bexar Countys judges should do the same. Nothing is stopping them except a lack of political will. Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales, who was backed by TOP this election, supports bail reform. So do Sheriff Javier Salazar and County Judge Nelson Wolff. Nationally, groups from the right and left support doing away with cash bail because of the obvious constitutional and ethical problems. The Eighth Amendment says: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. It should not be so hard for Bexars judges to do the right thing. Bill Powers loved the University of Texas at Austin, and the campus community loved him back because he fought for academic freedom and integrity and championed excellence. Powers was the 28th UT president, serving from 2006 through 2015. He died Sunday at the Dell Seton Medical Center in Austin due to complications from a fall several months ago and a rare muscular disorder. He was 72. Powers was a Southern Californian who joined the university in 1977 as a law professor. Powers understood the University of Texas at Austin isnt just the states top-ranked public university, it is a global leader in research and higher education. His accomplishments include a $3 billion capital campaign, creating the Dell Medical School and launching the Engineering Education and Research Center, among other capital projects. He also focused on improving the universitys graduation rate, a priority that has continued with UT President Greg Fenves. Powers often found himself at odds with former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who wanted to reshape UT into something more like a business, dramatically increasing enrollment and dividing teaching and research budgets. Powers argued, effectively, that a universitys contributions cannot simply be measured in losses and profits. Elite universities drive innovation and expand knowledge and understanding. Because Powers clashed with Perry and his appointments to the UT Board of Regents, his job was often at risk. One regent, in particular, Wallace Hall, filed voluminous records requests. These requests were controversial because they were so blatantly political. But the inquiry also led to an investigation of admissions practices, finding that over several years, 73 students, some with political connections, had gained acceptance to the university despite objections from admissions officers. It all came to a head in 2014 when Powers announced his planned resignation. It was a move that put the university before politics. By any measure, Powers lived a full and successful life. His legacy is secure. The university and this state are better for his public service and commitment to excellence. The Grand Marshal of this years parade in Longford town is a man who has significant history in the formation of the parade, Pat Lynch. Cavan native Pat only first moved to Longford county in the late 1950s, but has since made a lasting impact on the area and the history of St Patrick's day celebrations in the county. Ever since his arrival in the county over sixty years ago, Pat has become increasingly involved in the local community and the many events taking place in the area, no more so than the St Patricks day parade. After opening the doors to his first Longford-based furniture store in the 1960's, Longford House Furnitures, Pat soon became involved with the Longford Chamber of Commerce, becoming a member of the chambers management committee. Pats dedication to and passion for the local community didnt go unnoticed and he then took on the role of chamber vice president. Throughout the years, Pat continued his vital work for the vicinity and he is actually the man responsible for the foundation of the first-ever parade in the town over 50 years ago. At the time, Dublin was the only county in Ireland to host an annual parade and Pat wanted Longford to follow suit. After some extensive planning, Pat finally realised his goal and Longford town held its first ever St Patrick's day parade. In the parades maiden year, there were a total of 26 floats and 11 bands involved. By year two, this had increased to in excess of 40 floats and 18 bands in total. If that were not enough, Pat was also responsible for the implementation of the first set of Christmas lights in the town after he saw lights advertised for sale in Co Kerry. Such was his dedication, Pat took the long journey down to the Kingdom to retrieve the lights himself. The parade committee wished to thank Pat for all of his dedication to both the parade and Longford in the past six decades. Pat spoke of his honour at serving as Grand Marshal this year. Longford town from 1pm, Sunday March 17, is the place to be. Be sure not to miss it! Also read: Road closures and traffic management for Longford St Patrick's Day parade The partner of a drug dealer on trial charged with murder has testified that the deceased had attacked him with a knuckle duster months earlier, and had smashed in their windows a number of times over a drug debt. Inita Rozkalna also identified the knife with which the accused is believed to have stabbed the deceased outside a shopping centre in broad daylight. However, she told his trial that she couldnt call him a bad person. Also read: Longford man accused of murder told gardai he would sort out the deceased She was giving evidence yesterday (Tuesday) on the second day of the 26-year-olds murder trial at the Central Criminal Court. Rihards Lavickis, originally from Latvia, but with an address at Annaly court, Longford is charged with the murder of Polish man Akadiusz Arik Czajkowski on November 1, 2016 at Rue Noyal Chatillon, Townspark in the town. Both men were known to the gardai and had convictions. The father-of-one has pleaded not (NOT) guilty to murder, but guilty to manslaughter. The State has not accepted this plea. Ms Rozkalna told Patrick McGrath SC, prosecuting, that she and her partner had shared an apartment with their child and a number of other people. She said that she had first met the deceased, known to her as Archie or Arthur, a number of months earlier. He and another man had called to their home to ask her partner for 300, saying that he owed him this money for drugs. She said that her partner was speaking to these men outside, when she heard her housemate scream. The witness opened the door and saw these two men punching her partner, who was bleeding. She agreed that the accused had sold the drugs involved but hadnt given the money back. He got no more drugs off the deceased after that. She said that he arrived drunk another night and smashed their window. Although she hadnt seen the deceased do it, she said that her partner had told her that it was the deceased. She said that the night before the stabbing was Halloween, and that her partner had gone uptown. When he returned, he told her that Archie had asked him for the 300 while there, but the accused had told him that he would not give it back. Her sisters screams alerted her to another broken window in their living room the following morning. The court earlier heard from a garda, who attended the scene and took a complaint from the family about the criminal damage that morning. The witness said that her partner left to meet another drug dealer after 11am, but returned 10 minutes later. She said he looked very different and had blood on his tracksuit bottoms. He told her: I fight with this Arthur guy I did with a knife. He said that he had stabbed this man twice. She told him that the man might be dying, but he said: No, he is alright. She said that the gardai soon arrived and took her partner away, and that she became stressed and started to clean the house. While cleaning her bedroom, something got stuck in the vacuum cleaner and she saw that it was a knife. Mr McGrath then showed her what he said was believed to be the knife. She identified it as the one she had found in her bedroom. Under cross examination by John Shortt SC, defending, she said that she and the accused had had a good relationship. In fact I cannot call him a bad person. He was trying. He was taking care of our child, she said. Yes, he was dealing drugs. He was selling them, but he didnt do anything bad in his life. Mr Shortt asked her if the deceased had any weapon when hed attacked him outside their apartment in April 2016. He had a metal thing in his hand, on his fingers, she replied, confirming that it was a knuckle duster. I was afraid of him. I was afraid for the children and I didnt know what was going to happen next, she said. All that was in the house were we two women and kids. She said that, altogether, the window in their apartment had been smashed three or four times by the time of the stabbing. Earlier, the court heard that the accused told gardai hed get the fella whod smashed his front window a couple of hours before the stabbing. Gda Daniel Lynch testified that he responded to a 999 call of criminal damage at the accused mans home at 9.10am that day. He saw a broken window in the living room and a chair underneath. Ms Rozkalna informed him that the chair wasnt hers and had been used to break the window during the night. Mr Lavickis then indicated that he knew who had broken the window. He nominated a male known as Arik to him, testified Gda Lynch. He said he was always at him, he always wanted to fight with him, and he would sort him out. Gda Lynch told him not to, that gardai would look into the matter for him. He informed Ms Rozkalna that a scenes of crime team would come to examine the apartment. Just over two hours after leaving the property, Gda Lynch received a call to a stabbing at Longford Shopping Centre. He arrived and found the deceased lying on the ground being tended to by a nurse. The court heard that he died on arrival at hospital. Gda Lynch was cross examined by Mr Shortt. He said hed get the fella who did it, he testified, reading from the notes he made at the time. He was annoyed. Mr Shortt noted that both men had previous convictions and were known to the gardai in the town. The trial continues before Mr Justice Michael White and a jury of eight men and four women. Sky News journalist Enda Brady has well known Longford connections and was delighted recently when he had the honour of launching his uncle PJ McGovern's book, Stand Up, Speak Out, in County Wexford recently. PJ himself is a Longford man, hailing from Dring. He is a member of the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland and the launch of his memoir also marked his retirement from his 37-year career as a secondary school teacher. Among the Longford people at the launch in Enniscorthy were solicitor Fergus Feeney, Fr Paddy Madden and Fr Paddy's brother Tom. John Keegan, chairman, and Paddy Brady, a selector from the Mullinalaghta, St. Columba's team, were also among more than 230 people who attended the launch. James McGoverns public speaking and debating teams have done what many regarded as the impossible. They defeated more than 350 school teams to win All-Ireland public speaking and debating finals in the MHAI project, the Forum on Europe, the Maynooth Aoife Begley, Knights of Columbanus competitions and repeatedly defeated the elite Dublin private schools entering the prestigious Phil Speaks university competition at Trinity College and won. The book, which is subtitled Memoir of a Public Speaking and Debating tutor, chronicles James McGoverns 32 years as a tutor during his 36 years as a history and religious education teacher at St Marys CBS Enniscorthy. He is a graduate of St Mels College, St Patricks College, Maynooth and of the Gregorian University in Rome, where he studied for the priesthood before opting for a career as a lay teacher of history and religion. The attendance included the president of the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland, Breda Lynch. A guest speaker at the launch was John White, President of the ASTI in 1986 and General Secretary, 2004 to 2010. He said: James McGoverns book, Stand Up, Speak Out is at one and the same time a persuasive call for the recognition of the important role public speaking and debating can play in education. It is a piquant memoir of one teachers involvement with public speaking and debating over 32 years and an affectionate portrait of the camaraderie, excitement and stress and enjoyment involved in the preparation for the various public speaking and debating competitions. One hundred years after the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which set the terms for the end of World War I, the conflicting views that were at the heart of the Syrian and Lebanese visions for national liberation continue to cause controversies and misunderstandings. Against a Hashemite project of pan-Arab unification led by Prince Faisal and a rival project driven by the Syrian National Committee (SNC) - which was based, as we have covered in earlier columns, on a misperception of the historical continuity between the Roman province of Syria and post-Ottoman Syria - two Lebanese delegations successively pleaded the case for the creation of the State of Great Lebanon under a French mandate. In his speech before the victorious Allied Powers, Patriarch Elias Hoyek, who led the second Lebanese delegation to the Paris conference, positioned the emerging Lebanon as the continuance of an entity dating back from pre-Christian and pre-Roman Phoenician times, echoing ideas promoted by la Revue Phenicienne, founded the same year in Beirut by Charles Corm. However, without questioning the ideological merits of such a political claim, this millenarian distinction between a "Phoenician" Lebanon and an "Arab" Syria anachronistically conflates the rewritten history of the coastal city-states of the Eastern Mediterranean with the geography of the Roman world. Collective awareness Phoenicia, as a defined political-administrative entity, was created by the Romans and did not exist before the annexation of the Levant by Rome in 64 BC. As demonstrated by Josephine Quinn in her book In Search of the Phoenicians (2017), the term Phoenicia emerged in the writings of the great authors of the classical Greek era. 800 years before the Christian era, Homer used the term "Phoinix" to refer to both sailors from the eastern Mediterranean and the purple dyes of Tyre. These "Phoenicians" were an integral part of Greek mythology, and it was they who brought the alphabet to mainland Greece. They are also found in the writings of Herodotus and then in playwrights tragedies, such as The Phoenician Women of Euripides (410 BC). Nevertheless, this reference remains exclusively Hellenic: "Phoenicia did not exist elsewhere, not even in Phoenicia itself. Those we call Phoenicians were probably not aware of having a collective identity that constituted a form of union. They lived in city-states that were separate from each other and never formed a political union within a state, as Egypt did, for example. Their affiliations as well as their allegiance went to their city-states. They recognized themselves as Tyrians, Sidonians, Giblites, Aradians, etc. Biblical sources sometimes identify them in terms of one city-state or the other, other times by the generic term "Canaanites". Even later, under the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires, these city-states continued to have relative autonomy, ruled by local dynasties, and the generic term "Phoenicia" was not found anywhere other than in Greek texts. Following the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC), the "Phoenician" coastline became an area of conflict between two rival Macedonian dynasties: The Seleucids, ruling from Antioch, and the Lagids, ruling from Alexandria in Egypt. During this period, later called Hellenistic, the city-states were Hellenized and almost completely integrated into the Greek world. Interestingly, it is during this period that we see a collective awareness of "Phoenicianism" emerging among the inhabitants of the coast of the Levant, marked by the adoption of the "koine" language (the form of Greek used as lingua franca) to replace their local dialects. The coastline was placed under the hegemony of the Roman Republic by Pompey (64 BC) and became part of the Roman province of Syria whose capital was in Antioch. Several cities on the Phoenician coast received tax exemptions, and their citizens were granted Roman citizenship. Around the year 200, a thousand years after the appearance of the word "Phoenicia" in Greek texts, this name was used to refer to a political, official and concrete geographical division. Emperor Septimius Severus and his Senate decided to divide the province of Syria into two: Hollow Syria ("Coele-Syria") in the North and Syrian Phoenicia in the South. Under Emperor Arcadius in the late fourth century, Syrian Phoenicia was divided into two new provinces: Maritime Phoenicia (Tyre), extending along the coast between the present-day towns of Tartous and Acre; and Lebanese Phoenicia (between Homs and Damascus), covering the Anti-Lebanon mountain chain and the territories to the east all the way to Palmyra. Furthermore, the Tabula Peutingeriana (also known as Peutinger Table), a medieval copy of a Roman map dating most probably from the fourth century, shows the name "Syria Phoenix" on the coast. However, the official existence of all these Phoenicias ends in the 630s with the Arab conquest. A rediscovery It was in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the restored passion for Hellenism led to the "rediscovery" of "Phoenicia". This rediscovery was certainly linked to the biblical synonymy between "Canaanite" and "Syrophenician" in the Gospels. In 1860, Ernest Renan headed off on his Mission to Phoenicia under the reign of Napoleon III. He created a collective "Phoenician" archeology which extended between the island of Arwad to the north and Upper Galilee in the south. Conscious of the "significant difference between Syrian and maritime Phoenicia on the one hand and primitive Phoenicia on the other", Renan used the Greco-Roman administrative division to describe a civilization that had supposedly vanished "with the conquests of Alexander", while considering Phoenician art as imitating that of the classical Greek world. Modern Phoenicia, or the imaginary pre-Alexander Phoenicia, is thus born from an erroneous projection of the city-states of the ancient Levant into a toponymy borrowed from the past political geography of the Roman world. Hence, Phoenicia, as envisioned by the Phoenician nationalists, is therefore a creation of the nineteenth century, just like French Gaul or German Germania. If a united historical Phoenicia with defined borders ever existed, it was under the Roman Empire and in the Hellenic historical context, and no other (except in terms of ecclesiastical titles). Jack Keilo holds a PhD in political geography and planning from Sorbonne University. This week marks the 30th anniversary of the web, or at least the date that Tim Berners-Lee made a proposal at the Swiss particle physics lab CERN involving the creation of a hypertextual system that would end up becoming the web as we know it today. The history of web browsers on Apple devices takes a lot of twists and turns. Fortunately, Ive been around for most of them. In fact, my first magazine cover story ever was in July 1996 about the first big browser war. You might be surprised just how much impact Apple has had on the development of the web itself. Prehistory: The first era Perhaps most importantly, the first web browser was created on a product that, while not labeled with an Apple logo, is now the intellectual property of Apple. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first browser, itself called WorldWideWeb, on a NeXT computer in 1990. NeXT, a company founded by Steve Jobs, was purchased by Apple in 1997, and its NextStep operating system became the foundation of Mac OS X, which itself became the foundation for iOS. Thousands of iOS developers work with foundational frameworks with names that start with NS, like NSText, without ever realizing that the NS stands for NextStep. Jason Snell NextStep running the OmniWeb browser, which arrived on the scene much later. Berners-Lee ended up rewriting his browser engine in a cross-platform language, which was useful since almost nobody in the world had a NeXT computer. The next big step was the appearance on the scene of NCSA Mosaic, which was the first web browser I ever saw. It seems so pedestrian today, but in 1993 the web browser was a revelation. The internet back then, for the few of us who were on it, was basically a wash of text. Services like Gopher let you move around the internet with hyperlinks, but it was basically plain text and arrow keys and long menus of options. Then all of a sudden, Im sitting on my couch in an apartment at UC Berkeley and there are pictures coming up on the screen of my PowerBook 160. (They were in grayscale because the PowerBooks screen didnt support color, but stillthey were pictures.) There were underlined hyperlinks you could click on to go to other pages. It was, even by the standards of a couple years later, unbelievably primitivebut also fundamentally recognizable as the web. The internet was never, ever the same. The first browser war Mark Andreessen, who helped create NCSA Mosaic, famously decamped to the Bay Area and co-founded Netscape Communications in an attempt to commercialize the web browser. In short order, Netscape Navigator was created as a follow-on projectthe first widely popular web browser. Netscape was a revelation, in that it was developed by a team of paid professionals rather than a much smaller team at the University of Illinois. It was big and ambitious and set the standard for what a real browser should be. Macintosh Repository Nescape Navigator 1.0N for Mac Netscape came to the Mac and eventually became the default browser, bundled with the classic Mac OS. But then came the earth-shaking day in 1995 when Microsoft, which dominated the entire computer industry with its Windows operating system, decided that it was going to embrace (read: take over) the web. In 1996, Internet Explorer came to the Macand something weird happened. Microsoft, the archenemy of Apple (at a time when Apple was struggling to survive), had made a better browser than Netscape. It was faster, supported all the same browser plug-ins as Netscape (this was an era where browser plug-ins were considered an asset, not a liability), and even supported fancy formatting features such as custom fonts. I wrote my Web War cover story for MacUser endorsing it over Netscape, and boy did I hear from a lot of Apple fans who were apoplectic that I could promote anything created by our common enemy, Microsoft. But the thing was, IE for Mac was betterand when Steve Jobs cut his famous deal with Bill Gates in the summer of 1997 to help keep Apple alive, IE became the default browser on the Mac. The rise of Safari and WebKit Lets skip forward to the early 2000s. Apples doing a lot better than it was in 1997, but one of the Macs greatest liabilities is its perceived speed compared to Windows PCs. The numbers didnt lieInternet Explorer on Windows was dramatically faster than IE on the Mac. Its not hard to imagine how that played in Steve Jobss mind: the Macs biggest liability against Microsoft was a browser made by Microsoft. So what motivation did Microsoft have to make IE for Mac better? The result (as described in some detail in Ken Kociendas book Creative Selection) was a project to build a new browser for the Mac, designed to be as fast as possible. Out of that project came the WebKit open-source project and the Safari web browser, which debuted in 2003 and kicked IE out of its place as the default browser on the Mac. Safari was a breath of fresh airand it allowed Apple to control its own destiny when it came to being judged versus Microsoft. Apple Safari is at the core of the browsing experience on the Mac and iOS, and thats important. But the WebKit rendering engine was also taken by Google and used to create Chrome, now the top browser in the world. Google later went its own way with WebKit, forking it into a different project called Chromium. And in a shocking turn of events for those of us watching the web for ages, Microsoft announced that its browserEdge, the replacement for Internet Explorerwas going to adopt Chromium. This all means that Apples early-2000s need to improve Mac performance in comparison tests with Windows PCs led to the technology that is now used in the majority of web browsers. Still, there is danger in allowing a web monoculture to develop, because as any Mac user of the 1990s will tell you, theres nothing worse than being told that a website you want to visit is only compatible with Internet Explorer. Works only with Chrome is that same song with slightly different lyrics. I hope the web hasnt reached the endpoint of its evolution; if the last three decades have taught me anything, its that theres another surprising twist waiting just around the corner. Caramello is one of Cadbury's most popular flavours, but it's generally considered a bit extra if you have it for breakfast. But now you can enjoy all the sugary goodness on your toast with the new Cadbury's caramel breakfast spread. First released in Aussie, which sent our mates from over the ditch into an absolute frenzy, the high demand spread has now made it's debut on Kiwi shelves. The catch is that it will only be available for a limited time, with only a handful of Warehouse stores across the country stocking the chocolate spread. At $5 for a 400g jar, the spread is a fair price, but it's likely not going to be around for long with Cadbury confirming they aren't the ones who are selling the product. Cadbury stated that the spread was being imported by retailers from Aussie and New Zealand. However they did also mention that depending on the success of the launch, they may look into making the global product more readily available for Kiwis. We're unsure where exactly it's being sold but as soon as we do we will let you know whanau! This content is from: United States The nominee for USPTO director got the most attention from the Senate Judiciary Committee panel aside from New York judge nominee Dale Ho Bikesharing company Lime is launching a new fleet of electric scooters in Brookline this spring. One hundred scooters will hit the streets beginning April 1, with the possibility of more being added based on demand, Lime said. Brooklines Board of Selectman recently voted in favor of a launching a scooter pilot program that will complement pending state legislation authorizing e-scooters. "Lime is thrilled to be bringing scooters to Brookline, and applauds Brookline Selectboard in taking the lead to expand micro-mobility options in Massachusetts. Shared dock-free scooters will make transportation reliable, affordable, and green for Brookline residents. This pilot will go a long way to solving the regions growing transit needs, Scott Mullen, Lime director for Northeast Expansion, said in a statement. Transportation Board Chairman Chris Dempsey added that the pilot program is an important way for town leaders to better understand whether dockless e-scooters should be a permanent option in Brookline. Limes dock-free system uses GPS and 3G to allow users to find and unlock nearby scooters using their smartphones. Rides start at $1 and the scooters, meant to be ridden on the street, travel up to 15 miles per hour. Users end the ride on Limes mobile app and are asked to park the scooters by a street curb or bike rack. E-scooters caused controversy in surrounding communities over the summer when the company Bird dropped a fleet in Cambridge and Somerville without notice. City officials ordered the company to leave, and state officials are in the process of clarifying laws around the scooters. In the meantime, cities and towns can decide how they would like to handle to vehicles. Boston police came together with managers of Boston bars and clubs to discuss safety following the recent kidnappings of young women from Boston bars. Boston Police Commissioner William Gross joined hundreds of law enforcement officers and bar owners at the Ironworkers Local 7 Union to discuss safety surrounding nightlife in the city on Tuesday, according to reports. The meeting followed the recent kidnappings of two 23-year-old women in the city of Boston. Dorchester native Jassy Correia was out celebrating her 23rd birthday at Venu nightclub in the Theater District on Feb. 23-24 when authorities say she was kidnapped. She was found dead days later in the trunk of a car in Delaware. Wenham native Olivia Ambrose, also 23, was out with friends on Jan. 19 at Hennessys, on Union Street near Faneuil Hall, when she was kidnapped, authorities said. Days later, police found Ambrose being held against her will inside the Charlestown apartment of the man charged with her kidnapping. On Tuesday, meeting members posed increasing the number of security cameras around bars and nightclubs in Boston, according to WBUR. Gross also spoke of a proposal to create a joint committee made up of city officials and liquor license owners who would discuss best safety practices, according to reports. There are predators out there. There are hunters out there," Gross said after the meeting, according to reporting by WBUR. We wanna show people that we are working together collaboratively." Palmer - The Board of Directors of the Baystate Wing Hospital Corporation are pleased to announce the newest member to its Board, Robert Logan. Robert Bob Logan is the president of Palmer Foundry; a Palmer based manufacturing business that produces performance aluminum components for a vast array of industries. Logan earned a Mechanical Engineering degree from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and his Masters of Business Administration from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. CHICOPEE The union local representing about 1,300 Western Massachusetts Stop & Shop workers will host a rally next week in hopes of spurring negotiations for a new contract. The United Food & Commercial Workers Local 1459 rally will be from noon to 3 p.m. Wednesday, March 20 at the Chicopee Stop & Shop at 672 Memorial Drive. The event is cosponsored by the local AFL-CIO and other organized labor groups, according to a Facebook post from the union. Wednesday's event is not a strike. Springfield's Local 1459 membership voted Sunday to authorize union leaders to call a strike, but those leaders have not done so. If they decide to strike, the locals could pull workers from one store or a few stores at a time. They dont have to strike at all Stop & Shop locations. Five New England UFCW Locals representing over 30,000 Stop & Shop workers have been without a contract since late February. All five locals have voted to authorize a strike. UFCW says Stop & Shop has proposed a bad deal for workers that would cut current benefits, including health and welfare and pension plans, replace Sunday time-and-a-half pay with a smaller wage premium, and cut paid holidays, vacations and sick days for new hires. The union says the company has proposed bonuses in lieu of cost-of-living wage increases. Stop & Shop management said it wants a deal that will allow it to grow its business in a competitive environment. Stop & Shop is the only large fully unionized food retailer left in New England. Company officials say it must have a deal that allows it to compete with nonunion employers like Big Y, Market Basket, Walmart, Whole Foods/Amazon, Costco and Aldi. Massachusetts is doing away with Sunday pay requirements through a grand bargain of labor reforms passed into law last year. Stop & Shop said keeping its Sunday pay premiums would put it at a disadvantage compared with nonunion stores. Stop & Shop says it is committed to reaching a new agreement. Contracts between Stop & Shop and its unions typically run three years. The Union says Stop & Shop hurts customers by reducing staff at its stores and introducing technologies like self-service scanners and a roving robot called Marty that monitors stores activity and cleanliness. Encore Boston Harbor is adding an upscale steakhouse with locally sourced produce, craft beer and the only real, certified Kobe beef in New England. The term Kobe gets thrown around a lot in restaurants, but only a handful of U.S. restaurants offer certified or real Kobe beef, including SW Steakhouse at Wynn Las Vegas. Rare Steakhouse, one of 15 restaurants and lounges at Encore Boston Harbor, will be open seven days a week for dinner. Executives touted the restaurants authentic Japanese Wagyu and Sanuki Olive Beef from Japans Seto Inland Sea, as well as locally farmed produce, dairy and fresh seafood. For more than 10 years, we have worked closely with international and domestic partners to develop the steak programs at our resorts in Las Vegas and Macau, said Warren Richards, executive director of food and beverage at Encore Boston Harbor. These efforts today will result in the most unique steak program in New England." Encore Boston Harbor is just under over three months from its highly anticipated opening. Wynn Resorts is looking to fill 5,800 jobs at the luxury casino and resort. Yet the casino giant still awaits the results of the Massachusetts Gaming Commissions investigation following sexual harassment allegations against co-founder and chief executive officer Steve Wynn. Wynn, who denies the allegations, stepped down last year, along with several members of the board of directors. SPRINGFIELD A local, family-run, minority-owned business is proposing to open a marijuana store at a Gasoline Alley building, and gained initial support from the McKnight Neighborhood Council board on Tuesday night. Representatives of 6 Bricks, LLC, of Springfield, is proposing the shop at 250 Albany St., and was having its second meeting with the McKnight Neighborhood Council to discuss its plans. The board voted unanimously to support the companys submission of its formal proposal to the city, as requested by the company. Payton Shubrick, chief executive officer of 6 Bricks, said that her roots in Springfield are "truly important" as she and her family pursue the new business. So, we are not trying to be a good neighbor we are a good neighbor, Shubrick said after the meeting. I think its very interesting that as I think about so many outsiders coming in to the city of Springfield attempting to run these businesses, that there is no one coming to the forefront thats young, a woman, a person of color that is attempting to do this. Shubrick also introduced the company's a security team that will be led by John Delaney, a retired Springfield police officer, who will service as chief of security. Delaney will be aided by retired Springfield officers Richard Soto as his deputy director of security, and Carlos Landrau as surveillance technician, Delaney said. The store will be the "best guarded" in Springfield, with the lead security people live in Springfield, Delaney said. 6 Bricks has not yet scheduled a state-required community outreach meeting, choosing to meet with the neighborhood first, Shubrick said. Other family members involved in the business are her father, Fred Shubrick and mother Dawn Shubrick. During the neighborhood meeting, Payton Shubrick said the company will focus on hiring local residents and on helping with community causes. Bryan J. McFarland, a member of the neighborhood council board, praised the plans. "There is no better place in McKnight for a cannabis dispensary than Albany Street," McFarland said. "The main reason being that it is not near any homes or schools." He praised the security team, saying it "alleviates any concerns of security or underage purchase that I or any reasonably minded person would have." There were some concerns raised at the meeting about parking. A resident and a nearby business owner said they were concerned that parking would be insufficient, and that traffic could back up on Albany Street where there is heavy trucks and equipment. Shubrick said that in addition to 10 parking spots on site, which meets regulations, the company is also seeking to secure additional parking at an adjacent business for employee and overflow parking. Delaney said that the security team, to include other retired police, will prohibit loitering and aid with preventing parking issues. McFarland said he believes there is more than adequate parking and any issues of foreseeable traffic problems are greatly exaggerated. There will be a number of dispensaries in Springfield, to avoid over-saturation of the Albany Street site, he said. Damian Phillips, a neighborhood resident, said McFarland, who served as chairman of the meeting, should have recused himself from that role and the vote, due to having a business at the Gasoline Alley property, and a friendship with one of the property owners. McFarland "should be removed immediately from the board of directors for not exercising proper procedures for a meeting and influencing the decision of others to sway and his friends behalf. McFarland denied any conflict of interest. He said that while it is true that he has a rental agreement in place at Gasoline Alley, he would not gain anything financially by supporting the project. He said he could even lose by voting yes, if he needs to find a new location for his business. I had nothing to gain, McFarland said. I also discussed this during an Executive Committee Meeting with several of the board members to get their feedback and as a group we decided there was no conflict. The City Council approved a zoning ordinance in September that allows up to 15 recreational marijuana shops in Springfield in business or industrial zones. The council designated 58 streets where the shops could be located within those zones. Betty Betsy Ford Crane, 89, fell 20 times while she was a resident at Beaumont Rehabilitation and Skilled Nursing Center of Westborough. The 20th fall came after a caretaker failed to turn on her chair alarm during a shift change. The nurse on duty was not notified of the fall, and Crane was not taken to the hospital for two days. She died 10 days after the fall from bleeding in her brain. She died an unnecessarily painful death, said Cranes daughter, Candi Hitchcock. The nursing home settled a wrongful death lawsuit for $1 million, according to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. On Wednesday, Attorney General Maura Healey announced that Beaumont Rehabilitation and Skilled Nursing Center was one of seven nursing homes to pay a fine and develop new policies and procedures to settle allegations of substandard care that endangered residents. The nursing homes will together pay approximately $500,000 in penalties. They will agree to strict compliance programs and will make improvements related to safety and quality of care. This could include things like increasing staffing, submitting to external audits and improving training. The Westborough nursing home will pay $37,500. We turn over loved ones to skilled nursing centers because we dont have the training or skill set to care for them at home, Hitchcock said at a press conference announcing the settlements. We expect them to be safe. When this doesnt happen, the leadership top to bottom has violated public trust. The other nursing homes that agreed to settlements are: Jewish Nursing Home of Longmeadow, Oxford Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in Haverhill, Woodbriar Health Center in Wilmington, Braemoor Health Center in Brockton, Wakefield Center in Wakefield and The Rehabilitation and Nursing Center at Everett. Our investigation revealed these facilities had systemic failures that led to serious harm and in some cases death of residents, Healey said. Jewish Nursing Home of Longmeadow and its owners will pay $85,000 to resolve allegations that staff knowing failed to install proper bed side rails, which led to the death of one resident and serious injury to another. The nursing home will update its policies, procedures and training programs and implement yearly audits. The Republican reported in 2017 that two residents of the Longmeadow home were found with their heads stuck in the side rails of their beds, and their bodies hanging off their mattresses. One died and one was injured. The state imposed a temporary freeze on admissions to the home. Some of the most serious allegations were leveled against Synergy Health Center, which owns Woodbriar Health Center and Braemoor Health Center. Synergy will pay between $100,000 and $200,000 to resolve allegations at both those homes. The companys owners, Avi Lipschutz and Dov Newmark, will be barred from operating health care facilities in Massachusetts for seven years. Woodbriar Health Center is being sold, and Braemoor Health Center has closed. At Woodbriar Health Center, Healey alleged that a resident died as the result of injuries sustained when she fell from a mechanical lift while being transferred by only one nurse aide. Staff miscommunicated regarding the residents x-ray results, so her doctor was not notified of her serious injuries in a timely fashion. At Braemoor Health Center, Healey said staff failed to attempt to resuscitate a resident who became unresponsive during feeding, then failed to report the death in a timely manner to the Department of Public Health. The facility did not properly train its staff in resuscitation. The Boston Globe has reported extensively on the financial and management problems involving the New Jersey-based Synergy Health Centers. Other Synergy facilities in Massachusetts are under receivership. The human toll Synergy and other facilities impose on residents and their families is unconscionable, said Wynn Gerhard, managing attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services. Other settlements include: Oxford Rehabilitation and Health Care will pay $180,000 for failing to adequately train staff on how to treat residents with substance use disorder. The facility did not have the anti-overdose drug naloxone available when a resident overdosed. The Rehabilitation and Nursing Center at Everett will pay $40,000 for allowing a resident in a secure unit to escape through multiple unlocked doors, and for failing to properly maintain the residents medical records. Wakefield Center will pay $30,000 over allegations that a nurse failed to transcribe a medication order for a resident due to inadequate training. The error led to the patients death from a blood clot related to the medication error. These stories are heartbreaking and demonstrate systemic breakdowns and issues that put lives at risk, Healey said. Healeys office was alerted to the problems at these nursing homes by the Department of Public Health, which inspects and receives complaints about nursing home care. The settlement money will be split between the states general fund and a DPH fund that pays for improvements to safety and quality of care at long-term care facilities. Public Health Commissioner Monica Bharel said the state revamped its licensing review system for nursing homes three years ago to increase the number of inspections, fine deficient nursing homes and improve its regulations. Nothing is more important to any one of us than ensuring the health and safety of our loved ones no matter where they reside, Bharel said. But Gerhard said the fine for violating state codes now capped at $50 a day under state law is inadequate to deter nursing homes from providing substandard care. There are 40,000 residents in 400 Massachusetts nursing homes, a number that is expected to rise as baby boomers age. Ernie Corrigan of the Massachusetts Senior Care Association, which represents long-term care facilities, said one problem facing nursing homes is inadequate pay by government insurance programs, which leads to inadequate staffing and little money for training. He said there are 4,400 unfilled direct care positions in Massachusetts long-term care facilities. SPRINGFIELD The lead sponsor of an ordinance that would ban single-use plastic bags at local stores told city councilors Wednesday that it was drafted and amended to address concerns and any hardships faced by businesses and the public. But one councilor, Kateri B. Walsh, said she is concerned about the sweeping impact of the ordinance and that some residents have raised concerns about the ban. How aggravated are our constituents going to be, Walsh said. Councilor Jesse Lederman, who reintroduced the plastic bag reduction ordinance in October, said Wednesday that multiple meetings, public input, and the experiences of many communities that already ban single-use plastic bags, has helped Springfield tailor its ordinance. Lederman and other councilors discussed the ordinance at a General Government Committee meeting, as the council is slated to consider final passage at its next meeting Monday night at City Hall, beginning 6:30 p.m. Under the proposed ordinance, checkout bags provided by retail stores must be either "a recyclable paper bag, a compostable and marine-degradable plastic bag, or a reusable checkout bag. Lederman said councilors have attempted to address "as many concerns as possible in recent months. He remains open to further amendments, he said. I think public education is going to be key," Lederman said. "We need resident engagement on this issue, and I think that folks understand the need to reduce single-use plastic going into the waste stream. I think weve worked hard to craft an ordinance that will have as little disruption on commerce and as little disruption on convenience as possible. To ease the change, the program will not be implemented for one year after passage for retail stores of 10,000 square feet or larger, and 18 months from final passage for stores less than 10,000 square feet, rather than six months as first proposed. Walsh, attending the meeting, said she has some concerns, including that some residents want to continue using them for groceries and other purposes. It doesnt seem very business-user friendly, Walsh said. Lederman said he believes there is a lot of community support for the ban on stores providing the so-called single use plastic bags. Council President Justin Hurst, also in attendance, said he does support passage of the ban, and believes Springfield has lagged behind many communities. Approximately 70 communities have passed similar legislation in Massachusetts, officials said. I think there is a lot of research that my colleagues have done that show there are other municipalities that have implemented this, Hurst said. I think at the very least we are just following in step with in terms of what other communities have already done. Councilor Melvin Edwards, chairman of the committee, said about 90 communities in Massachusetts have passed similar bans,"and were a little behind, comparing it to the tail of a dog. While any change causes inconvenience, the citys Department of Public Works will appreciate the change as it reduces the amount of plastic in the citys trash stream, Edwards said. All bags distributed by stores will be sold to customers for no less than 5 cents to be retained by the store, under the ordinance. That eased a prior proposal of 10 cents, Lederman said. In addition, residents could continue to bring bags from home, and not purchase store bags, he said. PITTSFIELD - A 40-year-old man from the Bronx entered an innocent plea at his arraignment Wednesday on a murder charge in the shooting death of David Green of Pittsfield in November. Lance Burke is charged with first-degree murder, carrying a firearm without a license and carrying a loaded firearm. He is accused of shooting Green in the neck as Green sat in a truck near Spring and Willow streets at around 9 a.m. Green died 5 days later on Nov. 7 at Berkshire Medical Center. No possible motives for the shooting have been disclosed to the press. Burke was arrested in Nov. 20 in the Bronx by New York City police, agents with the FBI and Pittsfield police. He has been in custody since. Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington said the arrest was the result of a rigorous investigation by the Pittsfield Police Department and strong teamwork between law enforcement and prosecutors. At his arraignment, he was ordered held without the right to bail while he awaits trial. A grand jury indicted him for murder on March 6. The Massachusetts public defender agency has been unable to access its IT network for weeks, following a cyber attack that forced the shutdown of its email service. The Committee for Public Counsel Services suffered both a ransomware attack, in which hackers demand money to restore access to data, and a Trojan horse attack in which malicious software is installed on a network, CPCS Chief Information Officer Daniel Saroff told MassLive. The committee, which employs staff attorneys but also manages the bar advocate program that assigns private lawyers to represent indigent criminal defendants, immediately shut down its servers to prevent further damage, Saroff said. That has left CPCS unable to pay the bar advocates who handle 80 percent of the public defender caseload in Massachusetts, CPCS told MassLive. CPCS has since cleared the ransomware off its network and is gradually restoring its systems from backup data. The comptroller and the courts and executive branch and the legislature have all been extremely supportive of us," CPCS General Counsel Lisa Hewitt said. CPCS refused to meet the payment demands made by the hackers, both because the committee had backups of its data and because complying with hackers can leave agencies vulnerable to future attacks, Saroff said. The agency posted a notice on its website on Feb. 28 saying that its email service was down, but at that time did not publicly disclose the hack. Saroff said that the organization has hired two consulting firms to assist in the recovery and harden its security. CPCS has not identified any data that was stolen, though that remains under investigation. CPCS has contacted the Massachusetts Attorney Generals Office and the Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation, as is standard protocol following a cyberattack, the committee told MassLive. CPCS is working with the state comptrollers office to speed payment to bar advocates, who have so far missed one payday. Our office is aware of this and we are reaching out to gather more information," a spokesperson for the Office of Attorney General Maura Healey said in a statement. A federal court case that had threatened to upend Massachusetts marijuana industry has been settled out of court. The case was essentially a neighborhood dispute over a Cambridge medical marijuana dispensary. Neighbors of the Harvard Square medical marijuana dispensary Healthy Pharms, who were led by Crimson Galeria, sued the dispensary. They used the RICO statute, a law crafted to address mob-related racketeering, to argue that Healthy Pharms and the businesses that support it are involved in marijuana crimes, because marijuana is still federally illegal. They argued that those crimes decreased neighborhood property values. The case had high stakes because if a judge agreed that the RICO statute could be used to prosecute businesses allowed by the state, it could force Massachusetts to rethink its medical and recreational marijuana laws. Similar cases are pending elsewhere in the country, and experts say the question could eventually end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. The neighbors also brought a separate case, a zoning appeal, in state court. However, the neighbors agreed to dismiss both cases in November, according to court documents. The dispensary is currently open, with branches in Cambridge and Georgetown. The notice of dismissal filed with the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts did not contain a reason, but earlier court documents indicated that the two sides were engaged in mediation. Scott Schlager, lead counsel for Crimson Galeria and an attorney with Nathanson and Goldberg, said the mediation led to a confidential settlement that involved a substantial payment to our client. Crimson Galeria and the neighbors agreed to drop both the federal case and the zoning appeal in exchange for a significant monetary payment, Schlager said. He said the amount of the payment is confidential under the terms of the settlement. Emma Quinn-Judge, a partner at Zalkind, Duncan and Bernstein who represents Healthy Pharms, said she could not comment due to the confidentiality of the settlement. The settlement was reached soon before the zoning dispute was set to go to trial. With the legal challenges settled, last month 4Front Holdings, LLC purchased Healthy Pharms. 4Front Holdings is a multi-state marijuana company that operates medical marijuana dispensaries in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Illinois. It purchased an Arizona dispensary at the same time as it bought Healthy Pharms. The company intends to apply for a license to grow and sell marijuana for the Massachusetts recreational market. According to 4Front, the company wants to expand Healthy Pharms Georgetown cultivation facility from 8,000 square feet of flowering canopy to 35,000 square feet. It will relaunch in the adult use market under another brand it owns, called Mission. Albert Corn, a 95-year-old veteran who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, was laid to rest in Methuen on Wednesday in front of a crowd of mostly strangers, including many fellow American veterans. He was an icon, Don Silva, an 82-year-old Lawrence man and Korean and Vietnam War veteran, said of Corn. Were going to miss him. His face was very present every Memorial Day. Great guy. Corn was born in Bialstal, Poland, but immigrated to the United States and grew up in the area of Waterbury, Connecticut. More recently, he lived in the area at a rehabilitation center in Methuen. Though he is survived by a sister and brother, they were unable to attend his funeral due to distance and health issues. His wife died before him. With no immediate relatives to mourn his death, the Pollard Funeral Home in Methuen invited the public to attend Corns burial. Dozens of veterans and community members came out to show their respect for a man who took part in the bloodiest war in history. A ceremony took place under a red tent in Elms Cemetery, where service members offered salutes and draped Corns Chestnut-colored casket with an American flag. It is very hard for all of us to understand a battle against 400,000 soldiers with tanks, and what it would be like mentally and spiritually to prepare oneself for such a battle, State Rep. Linda Dean Campbell said during the ceremony. Campbell described the death and suffering Corn witnessed at the Battle of the Bulge, the largest battle fought in the history of the U.S. army, and the biggest battle fought on the Western Front in Europe during WWII. Troops engaged in this battle were, at the time, living on the very air they breathed, and likely very little else, as there was no time to eat or sleep, the representative said. Corn was just 19 when he enlisted in the Army in February 1943, and he would later become wounded in battle. In a photo of Corn from the time of his service, Campbell described his eyes as looking weary. Indeed, Al Corns eyes in this picture tell us that he had endured more than we could ever understand while over there, in the crucible of the European Theater, Campbell said. She ended her speech with a blessing: He and his fellow soldiers gave a gift to the world that will never end. He was there for us, our way of life, from the very beginning, through to the end of Adolf Hitlers Reich. God bless you, sir. Rest in peace. Corn is likely the last World War II veteran in the Jewish War Veterans chapter of Lawrence, according to Silva. The fellow veteran said Corn lived alone and worked as a supervisor of a parking lot in Lawrence, a duty he always fulfilled, no matter how cold the weather was. The 95-year-old rarely discussed his time fighting German forces in Europe, according to those who knew him. World War II veterans, they dont talk much, Silva said. Us guys from other eras, like Korea, Vietnam...[World War II veterans] say You never won the war, we won the war! That was the camaraderie all the time. But [Corn], he would never say that. He would go with us, all the time. Growing hemp is now legal in Massachusetts, and in the United States. But many Massachusetts farmers still cannot grow hemp due to a barrier posed by state law relating to the definition of agricultural land. Lawmakers are considering whether to change that law through a provision that could emerge soon for a final vote. We see farmers very interested in trying to diversify their crops, said Sen. Adam Hinds, D-Pittsfield, who introduced a bill to change the law. This stands to be a profitable crop as well. Its useful for the commonwealth and for farmers trying to make a living. Hemp is made from the cannabis plant. But unlike another of the plants products marijuana hemp cannot get someone high. It is used to make fabrics and fibers and to extract CBD oil, which has therapeutic qualities. Massachusetts legalized hemp in the same 2016 law that legalized recreational marijuana. The state set up a permitting process in 2018, and issued 13 licenses that year to grow hemp. The federal government then made it federally legal to grow hemp as part of a farm bill that passed in December 2018. The problem for many farmers is that state law has a specific definition for what can be grown on agricultural, or horticultural, land. The law includes fruit, vegetables, flowers, tobacco and Christmas trees but not hemp. Land designated as agricultural is taxed at a lower rate. So a farmer who grows hemp would jeopardize that lower tax rate. In addition, the state has an agricultural preservation restriction program, in which the state pays the farmer the difference between the fair market value and the agricultural value of their land in exchange for a permanent restriction on the land, which forbids any use that would hurt the lands agricultural viability. The goal is to preserve land for agriculture and restrict development when farmers are faced with financial pressures. Today, more than 73,000 acres of Massachusetts land fall under an agricultural preservation restriction. The Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources says it cannot allow hemp to be grown on agricultural preservation restriction land until the Legislature clarifies whether hemp-related activities fall within the definition of horticultural land. A bill sponsored by Hinds and Rep. Smitty Pignatelli, D-Lenox, would add hemp to the states definition of horticultural use. That would allow farmers to grow hemp on land with an agricultural preservation restriction and to pay the agricultural tax rate on land where hemp is grown. Ted Dobson, who owns Equinox Farm in Sheffield, is interested in growing both marijuana and hemp and been advocating for the change. Dobson said farmers like him, who have land with an agricultural preservation restriction, are thinking weve done the right thing in preserving land for agriculture and trying to make a living growing crops. But they are then left out of the potential hemp market. Hemps a brand new legal crop with great cash value potential per acre, Dobson said. Mark Amato, president of the Massachusetts Farm Bureau, said changing the law could affect a pretty wide swath of the agricultural community. Amato said there are very few farmers in Massachusetts who do not have some land registered as horticultural. Amato said there is a lot of buzz among farmers about the potential for growing hemp. Overnight, a new crop has been legalized, Amato said. Because it was illegal for so long, its a very new marketplace thats not well developed. Its the first time a new opportunity like this has been presented to our industry in a very long time, Amato said. Hinds and Pignatelli introduce their proposal as a standalone bill. It was also included in a supplemental budget bill proposed by the governor, and in the version passed by the Senate. It was not in a version passed by the House, so it will be up to a committee of House-Senate negotiators to decide whether to include it in the final version of the budget bill. Rep. Tricia Farley-Bouvier, D-Pittsfield, who cosponsored Pignatellis bill, said sponsors are talking to House leadership about how important the policy is for Western Massachusetts farmers. It will make a difference for farmers, and if we do it now, they can take advantage of this growing season, Farley-Bouvier said. Shortly after his second sentencing in federal court in recent days, Paul J. Manafort, President Donald Trumps former campaign chairman, found himself on Wednesday facing 16 charges in New York, including mortgage fraud and more than a dozen other state felonies. No one is beyond the law in New York, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. said in a statement. Following an investigation commenced by our Office in March 2017, a Manhattan grand jury has charged Mr. Manafort with state criminal violations which strike at the heart of New Yorks sovereign interests, including the integrity of our residential mortgage market. I thank our prosecutors for their meticulous investigation, which has yielded serious criminal charges for which the defendant has not been held accountable. The charges were detailed in an 11-page indictment. If convicted in New York, Manafort, 69, could not hope for a presidential pardon on those state charges -- which are separate from the federal cases for which Manafort has already been sentenced to more than seven years in prison. Presidential pardons extend to federal, not state, crimes. News of the indictment came shortly after Manafort was sentenced to his second federal prison term in two weeks; he now faces a combined sentence of more than seven years for tax and bank fraud and conspiracy in two cases brought by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller. While Trump has not said he intends to pardon his former campaign chairman, he has often spoken of his power to pardon and has defended Manafort on a number of occasions, calling him a brave man. A South Hadley man sentenced to probation in connection with the bullying-related suicide of high school student Phoebe Prince in 2010 is now accused of sexually assaulting a Mount Holyoke College student. The Boston Globe reports that Sean Mulveyhill, 26, has emerged as a suspect but has not been charged in a rape investigation filed by a 21-year-old student at the womens college. Mary Carey, communications director for Northwestern District Attorney David E. Sullivan, said Wednesday there are currently no criminal charges pending in court involving Mulveyhill. The Globe reports that Mulveyhill was served with a protection order on March 4, and that on Friday a judge extended it for 10 more days. The woman told police she gave Mulveyhill a ride to his home, where he sexually assaulted her, The Globe reports. She filed an affidavit with Eastern Hampshire District Court in Belchertown naming Mulveyhill as her attacker. Mulveyhill is an employee at the college, working as a bartender, but was put on administrative leave in the wake of the allegations, according to The Globe. Mulveyhill was one of six South Hadley teens involved in the Phoebe Prince case, a story that generated headlines around the world. Prince, a native of Ireland who moved to South Hadley with her family, was relentlessly bullied by a group of students and killed herself in 2010. Mulveyhill pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of criminal harassment in Hampshire Superior Court in the case. He was sentenced to a year of probation. Three other charges statutory rape, disturbing a school assembly and violation of civil rights resulting in bodily injury were dropped. Two years later in 2013, he was arrested in South Hadley and charged with nighttime breaking and entering and underage possession of liquor. He was placed on probation for another year. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey has reached settlements with seven nursing homes in Massachusetts, including Jewish Nursing Home of Longmeadow, over allegations of substandard care that endangered nursing home residents, Healey announced Wednesday. The nursing homes will pay approximately $500,000 in penalties. They will agree to strict compliance programs and will make improvements related to safety and quality of care. The other nursing homes include: Oxford Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in Haverhill, Woodbriar Health Center in Wilmington, Beaumont Rehabilitation and Skilled Nursing Center in Westborough, Braemoor Health Center in Brockton, Wakefield Center in Wakefield and The Rehabilitation and Nursing Center at Everett. Our investigation revealed these facilities had systemic failures that led to serious harm and in some cases death of residents, Healey said at a press conference announcing the settlements. Jewish Nursing Home of Longmeadow and its owners will pay $85,000 to resolve allegations that staff knowing failed to install proper bed side rails, which led to the death of one resident and serious injury to another. The nursing home will update its policies, procedures and training programs and implement yearly audits. Some of the most serious allegations were leveled against Synergy Health Center, which owns Woodbriar Health Center and Braemoor Health Center. Synergy will pay between $100,000 and $200,000 to resolve allegations at both those homes. The companys owners, Avi Lipschutz and Dov Newmark, will be barred from operating a health care facility in Massachusetts for seven years. This is a breaking news story that will be updated. WORTHINGTON - A man on a snowmobile was seriously injured Tuesday night after driving into a parked helicopter at a private airfield in Worthington, state police said. The man, a 43-year-old Worthington resident, needed to be transported by a Lifeflight helicopter to Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, according to state police Lt. Thomas Ryan. The mans name was not disclosed to the press. Ryan said his injuries were serious. The crash was reported at about 7:40 p.m. at Albert Farms, off Huntington Road, or Route 112, and and Radiker Road. Albert Farms maintains a private airfield on the property, roughly 15 miles west of Northampton. Ryan said the initial investigation showed the helicopter was parked when the man on the snowmobile drove into it. The operators of the helicopter were said to be in the vicinity of the aircraft at the time. Ryan said he was not sure how long the helicopter was at the airfield, whether it it had just landed or if it had been there for a longer period. The Massachusetts Environmental Police are investigating the crash. Worthington Fire and Rescue assisted at the scene. This story was updated at 8:55 p.m. to add more information about the search, which has been completed. HADLEY - Police conducted an intensive search Tuesday for a man who failed to show up for work. Patrick Kroll, 57, who lives on West Street, was reported missing by co-workers at his job at the Williamsburg Pharmacy on Tuesday, Hadley Police Lt. Mitchell Kuc said. Police canvassed door-to-door, contacted local hospitals, clinics and doctors offices and reported Kroll as missing to the National Crime Information Center. So far he has not been located, Kuc said. Officers searching for his cell phone found it in his home, he said. Massachusetts State Police also assisted by conducting an aerial search of woods, fields and the river and used a K9 officer and dog to search the area, Kuc said. Nearby police departments have also been alerted to Krolls disappearance. Anyone who has seen Kroll or has any information about his whereabouts is asked to call police at 413-584-0883. #BREAKING Berkshire County D.A. five found deceased after a fire in Sheffield, MA. https://t.co/UROtVBZ8Rr pic.twitter.com/i5IZKqwDXI CBS 6 Albany - WRGB (@CBS6Albany) March 13, 2019 Five people were found dead in a house fire Wednesday in the town of Sheffield. Firefighters responded to reports of a fire at about 7:50 a.m. at 1343 Home Road. After extinguishing the blaze they searched the home and found the victims, Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington said in a press release. Multiple fire departments from Berkshire County and towns in Connecticut responded to the blaze at the two-story home, she said. When it was safe to enter the home, firefighters found one person dead in the home in a primary search. A secondary search revealed four more people who were also dead, she said. This is an ongoing, extensive investigation with multiple local and state agencies, including the State Police assigned to the Office of the State Fire Marshal and detectives from the State Police Detective Unit assigned to the Berkshire District Attorneys Office, said Harrington, who spoke at a news conference on Wednesday in Sheffield Town Hall. She did not say how the victims died and said their identities will not be released until Thursday at the earliest. Departments which assisted at the scene of the fire on Wednesday were the Massachusetts State Police Crime Scene Services Section, forensic scientists assigned to the Massachusetts State Police Crime Laboratory, the Massachusetts State Police Collision Analysis and Reconstruction Section, Sheffield and Great Barrington police, and fire department crews from Sheffield, Great Barrington, Monterey, Egremont, Richmond, New Marlborough, Canaan, Connecticut, and Norfolk, Connecticut, she said. Sheffield is in the southwest corner of Berkshire County, roughly four miles south of Great Barrington. It has a population of about 3,100. This is a developing story and more information will be posted as it is known. SPRINGFIELD - A 2 a.m. traffic stop on Interstate 91 in Springfield led to the arrest of two men after state troopers found a gun and more than 1,800 pills in the car, state police said. Arrested were Eivan Santiago, 19, of Chicopee, and Jose Rivera, 41, of Holyoke. Each was charged with illegal possession of a firearm, a large capacity feeding device, and ammunition without an FID card, improper storage of a firearm, possession of a Class E substance, and possession of a Class E substance with intent to distribute, and carrying a loaded firearm. According to state police, Trooper Daniel Dziminski pulled over a Nissan Altima after determining it had a suspended license. The car belonged to Rivera, but Santiago was driving. Rivera was taken into custody because a records check showed he had an outstanding warrant out of Holyoke District Court. Because Rivera owned the car, troopers told Santiago that he would not be allowed to drive it from the scene, and it would need to be towed, police said. When troopers inspected the car interior prior to it being towed, they found a loaded Glock 19 pistol equipped with a 22-round magazine. Massachusetts law limits magazines to 10 rounds. They also found a bag containing 1,800 by-prescription pills of various kinds, and neither man could produce a prescription for troopers. Santiago and Rivera were taken into custody and were due to be arraigned Tuesday in Springfield District Court. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, will embark on a three-state campaign swing next week as she looks to drum up support for her 2020 White House bid, officials announced Wednesday. The senator, who is among several Democrats looking to win the partys presidential nomination, is scheduled to make several stops in Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama beginning Sunday, according to her campaign. Warren will begin her three-day tour with a March 17 organizing event at Douglass High School in Memphis. Doors for the afternoon event will open at 3:45 p.m., officials noted. On Monday, the 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful will make morning stops in Cleveland and Greenville, Mississippi before taking part in an evening CNN town hall at Jackson State University. Warren will round out her trip Tuesday with a campaign stop in Selma, Alabama and evening organizing event at Boutwell Auditorium in Birmingham, officials said. The senators southern swing came days after she added to her campaign team in South Carolina and shortly after she held organizing events in Texas and New York. U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, a Salem Democrat and possible 2020 White House contender, called Tuesday for scrapping the electoral college and Senate filibuster, arguing that they have hurt Americas political system. Moulton made his case for abolishing the use of the electoral college in determining the outcome of presidential elections, as well as the Senate filibuster -- a parliamentary tactic that can prevent votes on certain bills -- in an afternoon Washington Post op-ed. The congressman, a Marine who served four tours in Iraq, contended that while the most fundamental requirement of democracies is that all votes should count and matter, the uncomfortable truth is those rights have never been guaranteed here in the United States. Moulton offered that its time to fix whats broken" by getting rid of practices that undermine the countrys democracy. Pointing to the filibuster, the Democrat argued that the U.S. Senate should require a simple majority to pass legislation -- not the arbitrary 60 votes required by the rule. With the 26 smallest states home to just 17 percent of the U.S. population, he contended, the filibuster allows lawmakers elected by less than 17 percent of the voters to exercise veto power over any and all law. This is a monstrously anti-democratic institution with no parallel in any other advanced democracy, he wrote, noting that the Senate originally had a rule allowing a simple majority to end debate on a measure. Moulton argued that if the United States doesnt scrap the filibuster the changes that most Americans want, and the promises 2020 candidates are making, will likely never come to pass -- something which he said is unacceptable. The congressman further called for replacing the current electoral college system for electing presidents with a popular vote model. Moulton pointed to the outcome of the 2016 election -- in which 3 million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump who went on to become president -- as one example why such a change should occur. This is not wrong because Trump is a bad president; its wrong because its unfair to have some Americans votes count more than others just like it was wrong in when a similar thing happened in 2000, 1888 and 1876, he wrote. The Democrat added that although defenders of the electoral college often argue that it prevents candidates from paying attention to just a handful of states, thats already occurring under the current system. If the electoral college were abolished through either a constitutional amendment or national popular vote compacts, he argued, presidential contenders would be more likely to campaign everywhere as they could earn votes anywhere they travel. Then, no matter where you live or how your neighbors vote, your vote would matter. As it should, Moulton said. The congressman acknowledged that the electoral college and filibuster are not the only problems with the electoral system, but argued that any efforts to address voting system issues -- like those included in recent Democrat-backed legislation -- will never pass the Senate as long as we have the filibuster. And, even if it did, it would be vetoed by a president who lost by 3 million votes, he said. But, it doesnt have to be that way. America has never been a country that has gotten it all right. Were a work in progress. And these reforms are the next step. Moulton is not the first Massachusetts political figure to voice concerns about the electoral college. Former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis also called for scrapping the controversial system in wake of the 2016 election. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 13) Economic managers of the Duterte administration lowered their growth target for the year because of the delay in the proposed 2019 budget The Development Budget Coordinating Committee (DBCC), in a media briefing Wednesday, said the government is targeting a 6 to 7 percent gross domestic product (GDP) for 2019 from the original 7 to 8 percent. Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez, Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ernesto Pernia, and Budget Acting Secretary Janet Abuel attended the meeting. "The 6-7 percent is an adjustment from the 7-8 percent for every year until 2022, and that is because it seems to be a foregone conclusion that the budget will be reenacted until April," Pernia said. The National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) had estimated that the reenacted budget could result in a 6.1 to 6.3 percent growth rate if the budget is passed as early as April. But if the budget isn't passed by yearend, the economy is expected to grow by a mere 4.2 to 4.9 percent. READ: NEDA: Full-year reenacted budget can stunt economic growth Dominguez said the government missed out on construction opportunities in January to March due to lack of proper funding. "The first part of the year is the best period to do construction. That delay in starting new projects will impact the infrastructure program," he said. He reiterated that the government, on a reenacted budget, had P46 billion less to spend during the first three months of the year. Still, the Finance Secretary shrugged off the revised target, as it still puts the Philippines as one of the fastest growing economies in Asia. "This growth rate of 6-7 percent, we're still the highest in the region," he said. CNN Philippines correspondent Rex Remitio contributed to this report. David Price made his 2019 spring training debut vs. the Tigers on Tuesday. He hurled 3 innings, allowing two runs, both earned, two hits and two walks while striking out four. Jordy Mercer blasted a fastball from Price for a two-run home run in the third. It came after Price walked Josh Harrison with two outs. The Tigers won 4-3. To be honest, that homer is not what bothers me the most, Price told reporters in Fort Myers. Its the two two-out walks that I had. Gave up that homer and then went 2-0 on the next hitter and then was able to bounce back and throw quality strikes and get that third out. First time back out there in however many months, Im OK with it. The lefty had such a strong second half in 2018 because of excellent command. He went 6-1 with a 2.25 ERA, 0.97 WHIP, 68 strikeouts and 16 walks in 11 starts (68 innings). Ive felt good all spring training this year, Price said. Thats new for me. So I enjoy that. Price won the clincher in the ALCS and World Series. He posted a 3-0 record with a 2.59 ERA, 1.03 WHIP, 23 strikeouts and 10 walks in five outings (four starts) during the ALCS and World Series after a loss in Game 2 of the ALDS to the Yankees. I didnt think of anything negative (in the offseason), Price said. Just to be able to end on a good note the way that we did, that was different than every other offseason that Ive ever had. Dustin Pedroia played four innings at second, his third game of the spring. He went 1-for-2 with a single. Blake Swihart went 1-for-2 with a double. He stroked Bostons only extra-base hit. SPRINGFIELD Boston Bud Factory of Holyoke, which wants to open a marijuana store in East Forest Park, has postponed a community outreach meeting slated for next week. The state-mandated community meeting was initially scheduled for March 20, but is now expected to be re-scheduled to April in order to allow sufficient time to work with the community to address concerns, the Holyoke-based company said, Boston Bud Factory is proposing a marijuana store at 78 Island Pond Road in a building that also includes Murphys Pop Shop. We have delayed the meeting to ensure adequate time to meet with neighbors and ensure that any concerns are fully addressed prior to having the official Public Outreach Meeting, said Frank Dailey, a neighborhood resident who co-owns the business with Carlo Sarno of Longmeadow. Notices of the new date and time will be sent out in advance of that meeting, as required, the company said. Dailey said he believes the marijuana store will have nothing but a positive impact on the neighborhood. There is a meeting of the East Forest Park Civic Association scheduled for Wednesday night, March 13, in which neighborhood concerns about the marijuana store could be discussed, the company said. The regular neighborhood meeting is slated 6:30 p.m., at St. Michaels Academy. The Global Advanced Wound Therapy Devices Market is anticipated to touch a value of USD 2,804.53 million by 2023, asserts Market Research Future (MRFR). The market can showcase 6.70% CAGR from 2018 to 2023 (forecast period). Increasing incidence of diabetes is the primary driver of the market. Patients with diabetes have a slower healing rate and poor blood circulation which can negatively affect the immunity system. According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), nearly 30.3 million in the U.S. suffer from diabetes. The advanced wound therapy devices market can expand by capitalizing on this trend and offering precise solutions. The growing numbers of the geriatric populace will be highly beneficial to the market. This is buttressed by the estimation by the World Health Organization (WHO) which pegs the elderly populace at 1.2 billion by 2025. Furthermore, development of novel products and rapid approval by regulatory bodies is projected to propel the advanced wound therapy devices market. For instance, ConvaTec got approval for its negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) system by the U.S. FDA in 2018. The hydrofiber gels in the system lock the exudates and bacteria and offer a separate channel for the them to flow away from the wounded region. To Get Sample Report visit https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/7421 Key Players for Global Advanced Wound Therapy Devices Market Notable player names in the advanced wound therapy devices market are Cardinal Health (U.S.), ConvaTec Inc. (U.K.), Smith & Nephew plc (U.K.), Triage Meditech Pvt. Ltd. (India), Medela AG (Switzerland), Sechrist (U.S.), Molnlycke Health Care AB (Sweden), B. Braun Melsungen AG (Germany), DeRoyal Industries, Inc. (U.S.), Lohmann & Rauscher GmbH & Co. KG (Germany), Perry Baromedical (U.S.), and KCI Licensing, Inc. (U.S.). Segments for Global Advanced Wound Therapy Devices Market The advanced wound therapy devices market is segmented by type and end-user. By type, negative pressure wound therapy systems accounted for 42.9% share in 2017, followed by pressure relief devices (28.2%), hyperbaric oxygen equipment (15.2%), electric stimulation devices (7.9%), and others (5.8%). Negative pressure wound therapy systems can attain revenue close to USD 1,217.41 million by 2023 at 6.91% CAGR over the forecast period. But pressure relief devices are projected to experience the highest CAGR of 7.03% during the assessment period to accrue close to USD 805.35 million by 2023. Among end-users, hospitals & clinics accounted for 73.7% share in 2017, followed by home care settings (14.5%), and others (11.8%). Hospitals & clinics can register close to 6.95% CAGR during the forecast period to generate close to USD 2,095.66 million by 2023. On the other hand, the home care settings segment is expected to exhibit 6.78% CAGR to touch a size of USD 408.50 million by the end of the forecast period. Regional Analysis for Global Advanced Wound Therapy Devices Market Region-wise, the advanced wound therapy devices market is segmented into Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), Americas, and the Middle East & Africa (MEA). The Americas are anticipated to reign as the leading region of the market owing to a mix of attractive reimbursement schemes, numerous treatment options, and prevalence of diabetes and chronic wounds. The region can accumulate close to USD 993.07 million by 2023 at 6.11% CAGR over the forecast period. The European region is touted to register a notable growth rate owing to awareness of chronic wounds, rise in government initiatives, and awareness among healthcare providers. Presence of reputed companies such as Lohmann & Rauscher and technological advances of products can drive the regional advanced wound therapy devices market growth. The region can accrue close to USD 924.85 million by 2023 at 7.02% CAGR over the forecast period. The APAC region is expected to be extremely lucrative for the advanced wound therapy devices market. This can be credited to high number of burn injury cases and awareness of NPWT devices. It can attain a size of USD 676.27 million by 2023 at 7.16% CAGR over the assessment period. To Browse Complete Report visit https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/advanced-wound-therapy-devices-market-7421 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), Statistical Report, Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services. Contact Us: Market Research Future Hadapsar, Pune 411028 Maharashtra, India Phone: +1 646 845 9312 Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com The Globalgrowth is deemed to be impressive atover the forecast period of 2017-2023, growing fromin 2017 toby the end of 2023, proclaims Market Research Future (MRFR) in a minutely analyzed research report. The global healthcare BPO market derives much of its growth from the increasing incidences of errors in medical billing and errors in patient medical record which has led to the adoption of BPO services by healthcare organizations. A princely sum of dollars is lost each year due to poor billing practices which has a direct impact on healthcare organizations bottom line. Outsourcing in the healthcare sector has picked up in the past few years to minimize critical mistakes and ensure smooth operational performance. Additionally, healthcare institutions save a kings ransom by outsourcing tasks, which, otherwise would require hiring of in-house employees. Healthcare BPO professional are highly skilled and help in the reduction of errors. Get Sample Copy @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1335 Imperious need to curb mounting healthcare costs has forced healthcare organizations to outsource non-core processes to third party service providers; it helps to save 30-60% of costs. Moreover, outsourcing has become a compulsion as there has been an ample push from healthcare organizations to focus on core business activities in the healthcare ecosystem. It reduces costs involved in staff training, hiring and human resource management. Service quality of BPO can act as a deterrent to the growth of the global healthcare BPO market. In the developing regions, service quality is a significant issue. For instance, in 2015, British Telecom announced its plan to shut down its call centers in India due to poor customer service. Healthcare providers are more attracted towards outsourcing from well-known brands which makes it difficult for other developing companies to expand. Despite the existing roadblocks in the developing regions, healthcare BPO market is apprehended to experience enormous growth opportunities in the developing countries. As BPO service providers in developing regions continue to acquire greater capabilities in the healthcare vertical, the global healthcare BPO market is likely to see robust growth in the coming years. The global healthcare BPO market has been segmented on the basis of services which comprises of Pharmaceutical services, payer services, and provider services. The pharmaceutical segment has been further segmented into Research and Development, Manufacturing, and Non-clinical Services. Similarly, the payer services segment has been further segmented into Claim management, Member management, Provider management, Care management, and Product development & business acquisition. The provider services segment has been further segmented into Medical Billing, Medical Coding, Medical Transcription, and Finance & Accounts. Pharmaceutical services commanded the largest market share in 2016 and was valued at USD 125,849.8 million in 2016 and are expected to reach USD 329,000.3 million by 2023. The payer services segment is projected to be the fastest growing segment and capture a CAGR of 12.4% over the forecast period. Competitive Tracking The notable players operating in the global healthcare BPO market include Sykes, IBM, Accenture, HCL, Cognizant, Infosys, Quintiles, and others. The major six companies, namely, Sykes, IBM, Accenture, HCL, Cognizant, and Infosys account for more than 11.12% share of the global healthcare BPO market. Browse Full Reports @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/healthcare-bpo-market-1335 Regional Analysis The Americas represent the largest market for healthcare BPO. In 2016, the Americas accounted for the largest share of 57.3 % of the global healthcare BPO market. The Americas market has been segmented into two regions, namely, North America and South America. North America has been further segmented into the US and Canada. A robust economy and massive development in the healthcare domain support the growth of the market in the Americas. Moreover, high healthcare expenditure, the concentration of leading players and the high adoption rate of advanced technology in the region drives the growth of the market. Broadening support from the government for the development of the healthcare sector is a significant driver. Furthermore, the demand for niche services and increasing cost savings will boost the market growth over the corresponding period. Europe accounts for the second largest share of the healthcare BPO market and has been segmented into Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Western Europe holds the maximum share of the Europe market, Germany, U.K., and France being the key contributors to the market. The OCED reported the healthcare expenditure in Germany to be EUR 321 Billion in 2014 and the the healthcare expenditure in France to be EUR 237 Billion, while the healthcare expenditure of the U.K. in 2014 was EUR 223 Billion. Increasing healthcare revenue is the major driving factor for the market growth. Additionally, increasing government support and funding for the development of the facilities have added fuel to the growth of the market. Asia Pacific is expected to continue on a robust growth trajectory over the forecast period. The market in Asia Pacific comprises Japan, China, India, Australia, the Republic of Korea, and the Rest of Asia Pacific. Rapidly advancing healthcare sector, high health care spending, developing healthcare industries & organizations and improving technology are factors igniting pockets of growth in the Asia Pacific market. The market in China is projected to capture a CAGR of 8.8% over the forecast period. Allied Market Research announces an upcoming report, titled, by Types (Acylases, Hydratases, Humulin, Oxidase, Lyases, Restriction enzymes, Ligases, Polymerases, Lipases, Amylases, Proteases, Dehydrogenases, Glucouronidse) and By Source (Microorganisms, Plants, Animals) Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2014 2020. The report states that the global specialty enzymes market is expected to grow at the CAGR of 9.4% from 2015-2020. The growing applications of enzymes in therapies for chronic diseases, rising demand for effective therapeutics and growing incidences of digestive enzyme disorders are some of the key factors that drive the growth of the global specialty enzymes market for pharmaceuticals, biotechnology research and diagnostics. Factors restraining the market growth are restriction concerning the chemical properties and safety issues arising due to the contamination of enzymes. Download Sample: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/703 The global specialty enzymes for pharmaceuticals, biotechnology R&D and diagnostics market is classified into application, source, type and geography. Based on Applications, the market is further divided into biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, and R&D. By Source, the market is categorized into three types, namely plants and animals, plants and microorganisms. The microorganisms segment accounted for dominant market share in 2014 owing to its easy availability, cost-effectiveness and feasibility for large scale production. Microorganisms are easier to produce and this way, the quantity of enzyme production can be properly measured and assessed. Based on product type, the report fragments the market into acylases, hydratases, humulin, oxidase, lyases, restriction enzymes, ligases, polymerases, lipases, amylases, proteases, dehydrogenases, glucuronidase and others. Acylases contributed to a dominant share in 2014. This was due to its wide and varied application in pharmaceutical drug formulations. Based on region, the specialty enzyme market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and LAMEA. Europe and North America collectively contributed to around 2/3rd of the global pharmaceutical specialty enzymes market in 2014, and are expected to maintain their dominance throughout the analysis period. Increase in geriatric population in the dominions leads to high demand for therapeutic enzymes. Moreover, increased expenditure in healthcare has led to adoption of advanced enzymes such as immobilized enzymes. This, in turn, has made these regions dominate the global specialty enzymes market. Nevertheless, Asia-Pacific region exhibits the highest growth potential in future. This is due to rising per capita healthcare expenditure, increasing awareness about enzyme therapy and rapidly growing pharmaceutical manufacturing base. Learn More at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/press-release/specialty-enzymes.html The report also profiles key players involved in the global rehabilitation equipment market, such as Novozymes, Codexis, Inc., F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Life technologies, Advance enzyme Technologies Ltd, DuPont, BASF, and Affymetrix, Inc. They have adopted various strategies such as mergers & acquisitions, collaborations, partnerships, and others to gain a strong position in the industry. About us Allied Market Research, a market research and advisory company of Allied Analytics LLP, provides business insights and market research reports to large as well as small & medium enterprises. The company assists its clients to strategize business policies and achieve sustainable growth in their respective market domain. Allied Market Research provides one stop solution from the beginning of data collection to investment advice. The analysts at Allied Market Research dig out factors that help clients to understand the significance and impact of market dynamics. The company amplies clients insight on the factors, such as strategies, future estimations, growth or fall forecasting, opportunity analysis, and consumer surveys among others. As follows, the company offers consistent business intelligent support to aid the clients to turn into prominent business firm. Contact: David Correa 5933 NE Win Sivers Drive #205, Portland, OR 97220 United States Toll Free: +1-800-792-5285 UK: +44-845-528-1300 Hong Kong: +852-301-84916 India (Pune): +91-20-66346060 Fax: +1(855)550-5975 help@alliedmarketresearch.com Web: www.alliedmarketresearch.com Additional factors positively impacting the market growth include increasing cancer cases, the rising prevalence of chronic diseases, and growing uses of biologics. Also, technological advancements, improving outcomes and patients experience, beneficial reimbursement policies, and increasing awareness towards healthcare are some of the major driving forces pushing up the market growth. On the other hand, factors such as the stringent government regulation and the time consuming, lengthy process for product approvals alongside the preference for traditional methods of drug delivery are negatively impacting the market growth. Nevertheless, factors such as the significant growth in the home healthcare are expected to support the market growth throughout the forecast period, pushing push up the demand for wearable injectors. Wearable Injectors Market Key Players Some of the key players in the Global Wearable Injectors Market are West Pharmaceutical Services, Inc., Valeritas, Inc., Eli Lilly and Company, YPSOMED, Amgen Inc., Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD), CeQur SA, SteadyMed Therapeutics, Inc., BioSpace, Enable Injections, and Sensile Medical AG. Get Free Sample Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/6491 Industry/Innovation/Related News: February 08, 2019 West Pharmaceutical Services, Inc. (the US), one of the worlds largest manufacturers and sellers of containment and delivery systems for injectable drugs and healthcare products announced its plans of partnering with Swissfillon AG (Switzerland), a provider of aseptic fill and finish services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies for Clinical Filling of SmartDose Drug Delivery Platform. The partnership that is intended to lead to a non-exclusive global collaboration to provide fill-finish capabilities to customers using Wests proprietary SmartDose drug delivery platform for complex molecules. Through the collaboration, it is anticipated that West will be able to deliver an integrated solution with filled Daikyo Crystal Zenith cartridges for the SmartDose wearable injector. January 29, 2019 scPharmaceuticals Inc. (the US), a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company, engages in the development and commercialization of various pharmaceutical products announced its partnership with West Pharmaceutical Services, Inc. (the US), one of the worlds largest manufacturers and sellers of containment and delivery systems for injectable drugs and healthcare products to incorporate Wests SmartDose Drug Delivery System with the its (SCs) lead drug FUROSCIX (furosemide), in development for treating edema in heart failure patients. Wearable Injectors Market Segmentation For enhanced understanding, the report has been segmented into six key dynamics. By Type: On-body, Off-body, and Hand-held Wearable Injectors. By Usage: Disposable and Semi-reusable. By Mechanism of Injection: Spring-based, Motor Driven, Rotary Pump, Expanding Battery, Pressurized Gas, and Collapsible Reservoir among others. By Therapeutic Area: Oncology, Infectious Diseases, Cardiovascular Diseases, Autoimmune Diseases, and Diabetes among others. By End-user: Hospitals, Clinics, Homecare, and Ambulatory Surgery Centers among others. By Regions: Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, and the Rest-of-the-World. Wearable Injectors Market Regional Analysis The market in the Americas is expected to dominate the global wearable injectors Market during the forecast period owing to the presence of well-established healthcare infrastructure and advanced technologies to administer drugs for the treatment of chronic diseases like diabetes. According to the National Diabetes Statistics Report 2017, an estimated 30.3 million people of all ages had diabetes in the US in 2015. The European market is expected to be the second-largest due to the growing medical devices industry in France, Germany & the UK and the rising opportunities for the market players. Moreover, the market in Asia-Pacific is anticipated to be the fastest-growing during the assessment period owing to favorable government initiatives for the medical devices industry. The market in the Middle East & Africa is likely to account for the smallest share of the global wearable injectors market. The market growth in this region can be attributed to the rising research and development activities in the region. Browse Complete 100 Pages Premium Research Report Enabled with Tables and Figures @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/wearable-injectors-market-6491 About Market Research Future: At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services. In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members. Contact: Market Research Future Office No. 528, Amanora Chambers Magarpatta Road, Hadapsar Pune 411028 Maharashtra, India +1 646 845 9312 Email: salesteam@marketresearchfuture.com LIS plays a crucial role in generating high-quality data and streamlining the process in order to support clinical decisions. It offers information which helps the hospitals to prevent, diagnose, manage, and treat diseases, and also acts as an indicator for the public health. Laboratory Information Systems Market Key Players The key players that are involved in Global Laboratory Information Systems market are Cerner Corporation, Recent Developments, Eclipsys Corporation, LabVantage Solutions Inc, LabWare Inc, McKesson Corporation, Medical Information Technology Inc., Merge Healthcare Inc, STARLIMS Corporation, Sunquest Corporation and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. Industry Updates: February 20, 2019: XIFIN, Inc. has recently announced that they have expanded their physician and patient engagement capabilities. The new capabilities comprise a patient responsibility estimator and a strategic partnership with Glidian which incorporates automated prior authorization capabilities with XIFINs laboratory information system solutions and revenue cycle management. The Cerner EHR project is thriving as the U.S. Department of Defense increases its budget by about USD 1.2 billion. The additional funds will support the added services to maintain a standard EHR between the Department of Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Coast Guard. The EHR when integrated with laboratory information system, turns highly efficient, which leads to increased productivity and also reduced probability of errors. Cerner is an established company in the global LIS market that understands this fact and makes use of every opportunity to enhance its products to cater to various customer needs. Nov 2014 Thermo Fisher launched a new ultracentrifuge which combines speed with safety and ergonomics, allowing researchers to easily protect samples while achieving reliable and consistent results. Get Free Sample Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/852 Sept 2014 Cerner announced a strategic agreement with Intermountain Healthcare to provide clinical governance of solutions and workflow to be proposed for the Department of Defenses Healthcare Management System Modernization (DHMSM) initiative. Aug 2014 Cerner Corporation and Siemens AG signed a definitive agreement for Cerner to acquire the assets of Siemens health information technology business unit, Siemens Health Services, for $1.3 billion in cash. As part of the agreement, Cerner and Siemens will form a strategic alliance to bring new solutions to market that combine Cerners health IT leadership and Siemens strengths in medical devices and imaging services. March 2014 LabVantage launched a new product known as LabVantage 7 Express for quality controlled smaller labs. Laboratory Information Systems Market Segments The Global Laboratory Information Systems Market has been segmented on the basis of application, component, and delivery. By mode of application, the global laboratory information systems market has been segmented into industrial, clinical, and drug discovery. Among these, the clinical diagnostics occupies the major share and is anticipated to retain its dominance in the coming years. By mode of components, the global laboratory information systems market has been segmented into hardware, software, and services. By mode of delivery, the global laboratory information systems market has been segmented into on-premise, web-based, and cloud-based. Among these, the on-premise segment is predicted to occupy the largest share of the LIS market owing to the enhanced data security coupled with customization of such systems based on the healthcare provider. Laboratory Information Systems Market Regional Analysis Geographically, the regional market is segmented into America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East & Africa. The North America dominated the global Laboratory Information Systems market. The adoption of cloud computing is expected to rise in the U.S. healthcare sector due to continuous pressure to lower cost for customized healthcare services. According to clauses of the HIPAA, the healthcare industry in the U.S. has to adopt new systems that support electronic medical records (EMR) and share data in an efficient and secure manner with other healthcare providers and government agencies. This will lead to higher adoption of cloud-based LIS, which allow laboratories to share real-time information with hospitals and patients. In terms of LIS usage, North American and Western European markets are witnessing penetration, due to early adoption of healthcare technologies. The European LIS market is expected to grow moderately, driven by higher incidence rate of diseases and increasing patient awareness about new technologies. In addition, various government initiatives also helped in promoting the usage of LIS. Increasing demand for better healthcare facilities and rising need for integrated healthcare systems in the two regions are some of the key driving factors for these markets. Browse Complete 83 Pages Premium Research Report Enabled with Tables and Figures @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/laboratory-information-systems-market-852 The LIS market is expected to grow in Asia-Pacific (APAC) due to increase in the incidences of diseases. Asia and Latin America are among the fastest growing markets for LIS; rising investments from healthcare IT players and government initiatives are some of the key driving factors for LIS in these regions. Many international LIS firms have started investing in developing regions of the world, such as Asia and Latin America, in order to increase their presence in high potential markets. About Market Research Future: At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services. In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members. Contact: Market Research Future Office No. 528, Amanora Chambers Magarpatta Road, Hadapsar Pune 411028 Maharashtra, India +1 646 845 9312 Email: salesteam@marketresearchfuture.com by Sara Guaglione , March 12, 2019 TV station group Tegna Inc. is launching VAULT Studios, its first, in-house digital content studio that will draw from the companys television stations investigative reporting to create new content offerings. Starting with podcasts, VAULTs initial slate of programming focuses on true crime, cold cases and unsolved mysteries covered by Tegnas 49 TV stations in 41 markets. When we look at podcasts specifically, true crime is one of the most popular genres with listeners. About one-third of the top 50 podcasts on the charts right now are true crime, Adam Ostrow, Tegnas Chief Digital Officer, told Publishers Daily. And when we look at our archives, there are countless truly fascinating true-crime stories weve covered over the years. So we see a big opportunity to bring that content back to life for a new audience in new formats. Ostrow added that engaging with Tegnas audiences in new ways and across multiple platforms is essential to our growth. advertisement advertisement Podcasts are a good place to start because they can be accessed from anywhere, whereas Tegnas TV stations cover one-third of the country. The stories we are going to tell will have appeal well beyond the markets where they originally took place, Ostrow said. Listeners are often consuming podcasts during their commute, so Tegna can reach them "during a time when the audience isnt necessarily going to be thinking local TV. Were expanding the audience geographically as well as the hours available to us during the day," he said. The first podcast developed by VAULT is called Bomber, which looks at how law enforcement hunted down the 2018 Austin serial bomber - who planted homemade bombs in neighborhoods and killed two people - before SWAT officers closed in on the suspect, Mark Anthony Conditt. Hosted by Tegna journalist Jason Puckett, the first episode, A Loud Boom, is set to debut on Friday, March 15. It will launch ad-free. 'Bomber' provides an inside look at the fear, panic and frantic hunt for the Austin bomber, including the harrowing twists and turns, the dead ends and the shocking end to a case that Austin residents will never forget, stated Puckett. A sneak peek of Bomber was released in tandem with the March 8 premiere of a half-hour special, Stopping the Austin Bomber, on KVUE, Tegnas ABC-affiliated station in Austin, Texas. A feature article on the bomber was also published in the Austin American Statesman. Bomber will be available on major podcast platforms, as well as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play and Tegna's owned-and-operated digital platforms. New episodes will be released every Friday from March 15 April 19. In the future, Ostrow wants projects coming out of VAULT to be developed for other formats, like television and OTT. Weve started to see this in the last couple years with podcasts like Homecoming and Dirty John being adapted for television, he said, referring to two popular podcasts picked up for TV deals. Tegna claims to reach 50 million adults on-air and about 30 million across its digital platforms. Tegna Marketing Solutions (TMS) also offers Premion, an OTT advertising service. by Ray Schultz , March 13, 2019 Gmail users are suffering a service disruption that began Monday evening around 10:20 p.m. and is continuing Tuesday morning. Service was most heavily disrupted in the Northeastern U.S. and Japan, with lesser outages in Georgia, the UK and parts of the Asia-Pacific region, according to the downdetector map. Google Drive has also been affected to a degree. "We're investigating reports of an issue with Gmail," Google says in a service message."We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior." This mornings issues include login (36%), receive messages (32%) and attachments (30%), according to downdetector. Still getting: Address not found, when emailing to eastern USA usual addresses, writes one Gmail user on downdetector. This is the second day. advertisement advertisement Unable to send emails, preview attachments, move emails from inbox to other folders and mark emails unread, say another. Engineer Dave Webster writes: "We're still getting intermittent issues with gmail when sending via smtp.gmail.com for certain customers. The issue is related to DNS though googles public servers 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4 refuse to resolve the address. even cloud flares 1.0.0.1 servers not providing DNS resolution but 1.1.1.1 does. So somethings still not 100% OpenDNS seems to be the only one that's 100% everywhere. Do consumers have the appetite (and extra cash) for another premium video subscription service? If that service is Disney+, new research suggests the answer is Yes. Asked about a Netflix-like service from Disney, 43% of adult broadband users said they would consider signing up for such a service, according to The Diffusion Group (TDG). Among that share, 27% of respondents said they were moderately or highly likely to subscribe to such a service. Based on our research, Disney+ will enjoy strong early demand, Michael Greeson, president of TDG Research, notes in a new report. The amount of high-quality content being packed into the offering will make it not only appealing, but very sticky. Consumer interest is piqued by the idea that Disney+ will carry Disneys vast movie and TV library, including titles from Disney, National Geographic, Pixar and Marvel. advertisement advertisement For its findings, TDG randomly assigned respondents to one of three price points for the service, which ranged from $5.99 to $9.99 per month. More broadly, the media research consultancy considers the launch of Disney+ as a major test for the direct-to-consumer model. The forthcoming service differs from subscription aggregators like Netflix and streaming channels like HBO Now. This is a major studio pooling what is arguably the largest library of high-value content on the planet to populate a single branded subscription service, said Greeson. To give its offering a competitive edge, Disney is pulling select content from third-party platforms like Netflix. As such, Disney+ will be under a microscope, Greeson added, calling it a running case study of what [direct-to-consumer] can be, and a real-time measure of what impact, if any, such tribalism may have on the value chain. Although Disney+ appeals to a wide range of consumers, interest varies within several key segments. For example, legacy pay-TV subscribers are more strongly interested in Disney+ than what TDG calls cord-nevers and cord-cutters. Hulu subscribers say they are more likely to sign up for Disney+ than are Prime Video and Netflix subscribers. Additionally, those under 35 are twice as likely as their older counterparts to be strongly interested in Disney+. The same goes for folks with children under 18 living in the home. As an easy way to save time and words, this weeks column is about Donald J. Russia. Specifically, its about how he constantly distorts reality, even over seemingly innocuous things -- like a simple verbal gaffe referring to Apple CEO Tim Cook as Tim Apple. Instead, he turns it into something far more insidious, and I would argue, dangerous for democracy. You can see and hear it for yourself (below), but despite photographic evidence to the contrary, the President once again lied about an easily provable fact. Rather than owning up, he blamed The Fake News for disparaging him, adding: It became yet another bad Trump story! The reason the Presidents constant assault on the truth is so dangerous is that it is part of an ongoing media campaign to sabotage reality. advertisement advertisement Who else wages active campaigns in the media to sabotage reality? According to U.S. intelligence agencies, it is the chief weapon -- or active measure -- in Russias hybrid warfare against Western democracies, including the U.S. It was also those active measures, especially the social-media disinformation campaign waged by Russias Internet Research Agency, that our intel agencies say helped get Donald J. Russia elected in the first place. A midday nap may be just what you need, not just to boost your energy levels but also to lower high blood pressure. This, at least, is what new research from Greece suggests. Share on Pinterest Napping could effectively help lower your blood pressure, new findings reveal. When the afternoon slump hits in the middle of a busy workday, many of us may feel tempted to catch some shut-eye in a quiet corner. Daytime napping can definitely help boost our energy levels and productivity for the rest of the workday, but does it bring any other health benefits? A new study that investigators from the Asklepieion General Hospital in Voula, Greece conducted now suggests that taking a nap at midday can effectively help people lower their blood pressure levels. One of the study researchers, Dr. Manolis Kallistratos, is due to present the findings at the American College of Cardiologys 68th Annual Scientific Session in New Orleans, LA next Monday. Midday sleep appears to lower blood pressure levels at the same magnitude as other lifestyle changes. For example, salt and alcohol reduction can bring blood pressure levels down by 3 to 5 [millimeters of mercury (mmHg)], reports Dr. Kallistratos. In this study, the investigators worked with 212 participants who had a mean blood pressure of 129.9 mm Hg. According to guidelines from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, a person has high blood pressure if their readings of systolic blood pressure (pressure during a heartbeat) are 140 mm Hg or higher, and their readings of diastolic blood pressure (pressure between heartbeats) are 90 mm Hg or higher. The participants were, on average, 62 years old, and close to one in four of them smoked, had a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, or both. Laboratory and animal studies have suggested that the leukemia drug nilotinib could alleviate symptoms of Parkinsons disease. Now, using early results from a clinical trial in humans, scientists have worked out how the drug reduces toxic protein and raises dopamine levels in the brain. Share on Pinterest New research explains how a cancer drug increases levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in a brain with Parkinsons disease. Loss of dopamine, a brain chemical that helps to control movement, is one of the main hallmarks of Parkinsons disease. Another is the presence in the brain of Lewy bodies containing toxic clumps of the protein alpha-synuclein. The toxic alpha-synuclein clumps interfere with the brains ability to use dopamine from the little pockets, or vesicles, that store it. Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) in Washington, DC, examined the effects of a single dose of nilotinib on the volunteers taking part in the trial. They found that it reduced the toxic alpha-synuclein that stops the brain from utilizing the dopamine in the vesicles. They report their findings in a paper that now features in the journal Pharmacology Research & Perspectives. Senior study author Dr. Charbel Moussa, who is scientific and clinical research director of GUMCs Translational Neurotherapeutics Program, says that their findings are unprecedented for any drug now used to treat Parkinsons disease. We detect the drug in the brain producing multiple effects, he adds, including improving dopamine metabolism reducing both inflammation and toxic alpha-synuclein. The phase II clinical trial is not due to complete for another year, so it is too early to say how safe or effective the drug might be for people with Parkinsons disease. The purpose of this early study was to find out how a single dose of the drug alters the biochemistry of the brain and its mechanisms. Parkinsons disease and dopamine Parkinsons disease is a brain condition that primarily affects movement and worsens over time. The main symptoms are stiffness, shaking, impaired coordination and balance, and difficulty with walking and talking. People with Parkinsons disease may also experience changes in thinking and behavior, fatigue, depression, disrupted sleep and memory, emotional changes, constipation, skin complaints, and urinary problems. According to the Parkinsons Foundation, almost 1 million people in the United States will have Parkinsons disease by 2020. The disease most often strikes after the age of 60, but it can also affect younger people. No two individuals with Parkinsons disease will have the same pattern and progression of symptoms. Detecting or diagnosing the disease is often difficult because people can attribute some of the changes to aging. Dr. Moussa explains that, in the absence of Parkinsons disease, dopamine-producing cells in the brain release the compound into vesicles. Alpha-synuclein helps to maintain the brains supply of dopamine in these pockets. Toxic alpha-synuclein However, in Parkinsons disease, the dopamine-producing cells start to make a toxic form of alpha-synuclein that cannot do the job. Eventually, this leads to the malfunction and then death of the dopamine cells. In their investigation, Dr. Moussa and his team found that the effect of nilotinib was to promote immune cells to deal with the toxic alpha-synuclein, allowing the healthy form to get on with its job. They tested samples of blood and cerebrospinal fluid from the volunteers in the trial after they had received a single dose of treatment. The volunteers, who all had Parkinsons disease, were in five groups. Four of the groups received different doses of nilotinib, and the fifth group received a harmless placebo. In the cerebrospinal fluid samples, the researchers checked the levels of dopamine metabolites (compounds that dopamine breaks down into), as well as indicators of inflammation response. Higher levels of dopamine metabolites suggest that the brain is using more dopamine. The tests found higher levels of dopamine metabolites in those who received the nilotinib compared with those who received the placebo. When the drug is used, Dr. Moussa explains, levels of these breakdown molecules quickly rise. The researchers found that the optimum dose of nilotinib for increasing use of dopamine was 200 milligrams (mg), which was also the dose that significantly increased the immune response to inflammation. This could be because the immune system is more actively targeting and removing the toxic form of alpha-synuclein. 'Rehna Hai Tere Dil Mein' was the movie that gave us a bashful but talented actor R Madhavan, and he is all set to start his directorial debut, finally. After a successful stint in Bollywood with films like 'Tanu Weds Manu' and '3 Idiots', the Tamil movie actor has decided to venture in to direction and will be churning out a multi-lingual film soon, in which he'll be acting too. Pinterest 'Rocketry: The Nambi Effect', which will be based on the life story of Nambi Narayan, the space scientist and aerospace engineer will be Madhavan's directorial debut film and we're really looking forward to knowing how good the actor is with his directing skills. But that's not all. We hear that Bollywood's Baadshah- Shah Rukh Khan is playing a cameo in the hind version of the film, while the Tamil star Suriya will be playing a cameo in the Tamil version of the film. Pinterest Though we aren't sure of the rest of the cast just yet, all we know is Madhavan has roped in SRK to have a small surprise stint in the film, which will probably give it the edge it needs. And apart from that, he himself is donning the role of the scientist Nambi Narayan. So far, the look that Madhavan's working on, for the film, bears an uncanny resemblance to the Indian scientist and we can't wait to watch how he portrays him in the film, as well. Instagram The film will be released in English, Hindi and Tamil and is shot all across India, Scotland, Russia and France and its release date is set for the second half of 2019. Well, we hope the film is out sooner than anticipated because this one's going to be a good watch for 2019 and with SRK and Suriya giving a special appearance, we're sure the movie will be worth the wait. A Boeing 737 MAX 8 operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed just a few minutes after take-off on Sunday, killing all 157 onboard. Just five months back, another 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by Lion Air crashed off the shore of Java and all 189 onboard lost their lives. Two crashes of the same jetliner within a span of five months has shocked everyone and the Ethiopian Airlines immediately grounded their MAX 8 fleet. This was soon followed by China declaring a complete ban on the aircraft in its air space. Britain, France and Germany joined a growing list of countries to ban 737 MAX planes from their airspace as airlines around the world grounded the jets. Utkarsh Thakkar / @vimanspotter India's DGCA (Directorate General of Civil Aviation) has finally decided to ground the aircraft as well. The Ministry of Civil Aviation said the planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure safe operations. Spicejet operates 13 MAX 8's and has 200 of them on order. Yesterday, the airline defended the plane saying "The Boeing 737 MAX is a highly sophisticated aircraft". It further added, "It has flown hundreds of thousands of hours globally and some of the world's largest airlines are flying this aircraft." Wikimedia Even Jet Airways has 5 of them in fleet currently, but they have been grounded for weeks since the airline is undergoing payment issues with lessors. We expect Spicejet flights to be affected massively in the coming days since the MAX 8 contributes heavily to their network. It's evident the local regulator came under immense scrutiny from the press and aviation experts after it released a statement yesterday that didn't warrant an immediate ban on the plane. In fact, the DGCA asked airlines to roster pilots with more than 1,000 hours of flying experience for the MAX 8. In comparison, the Ethiopian Airlines pilot had more than 8,000 hours of flying on record. Reuters Flying the MAX 8 isn't about crew expertise and preliminary reports from the Lion Air crash have suggested a major software design flaw on Boeing's end. It is too early to say whether the two crashes are related, but we also cannot ignore the fact that the plane could have a serious design flaw. Boeing said it understood the countries' actions but retained "full confidence" in the 737 MAX and had safety as its priority. The MAX series is its fastest-selling family of planes, with more than 5,000 orders placed to date from about 100 customers. Utkarsh Thakkar / @vimanspotter (Boeing 737-800 NG) Please keep in mind, the affected plane is Boeing 737 MAX 8 and is different from 737 NG Family (737-700/800/900). The latter has been flying for more than two decades and has a spotless track record. The 737-800 is the primary workhorse of Jet Airways and Spicejet in India. Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs Sia Anagnostopoulou will co-chair, along with Kuwait's Minister of Finance, Dr. Nayef F. Al-Hajraf, the 1st Greece-Kuwait Joint Interministerial Committee (JIC), which will be held in Athens on 13-15 March 2019. Proceedings are expected to cover the full range of bilateral economic relations and, in the same context, the processing of a large number of legal texts which will serve as the basis for further developing relations between the two countries, in new areas of economic and commercial activity will take place. Upon conclusion of the proceedings of the JIC, on 15 March, at approximately 14:00, brief statements will be made to the Press. Minister of Foreign Affairs Giorgos Katrougalos will travel to Brussels on Wednesday, 13 March, where he will participate in the proceedings of the 3rd Brussels Conference entitled Supporting the future of Syria and the region, which will be co-chaired by the EU and the United Nations. The Conference will examine the crucial humanitarian issues that Syrians face, as do the communities that host Syrian refugees, both within and outside the country, while the political support of the international community is expected to be confirmed, to Syria itself as well as to its bordering countries. Greece fully supports the need for continuation and intensification of humanitarian diplomacy and improvement of the conditions for providing humanitarian aid, the protection of non-combatants, and especially of vulnerable population groups such as women and children, as well as of the operation of humanitarian organisations active in Syria. In this context, the Minister of Foreign Affairs is also due to announce Greeces contribution, which will be made available through OCHA. On the margins of the Conference, the Minister of Foreign Affairs will meet with his Turkish Counterpart, Mevlut Cavusoglu. JOURNALIST: Good morning and a healthy Easter Lent period to everybody. Lets now welcome the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Giorgos Katrougalos. Good morning, Minister. G. KATROUGALOS: Good morning and a healthy Easter Lent period to you, and to our audience. JOURNALIST: I shall begin by asking for you to briefly state your view, a brief comment, on certain political issues, beginning with the fact that yesterday we did not manage to make the disbursement of the 1 billion which we have received from our bonds, from the profit on our bonds, and I would like to ask you: Are things difficult? Do we have significant disagreement on the law on the protection of the first residence, or do you believe that these differences will manage to be bridged by the time the next Eurogroup comes around. G. KATROUGALOS: You are correct in pointing out the protection of the first residence, which was the sole difference that existed. I dont think that the slightest reason for concern exists, not because I say it, but because these were also the statements of Mr Centeno and Mr Moskovici, who referred to the great progress that our country has made, and to the existing need for aspects of the new law to be clarified, which will protect the first residence. JOURNALIST: Therefore, you are saying that it is a matter of time until an agreement is reached. G. KATROUGALOS: We see that there is a clear improvement in financial indicators, which is confirmed by objective observers who have no reason to be friendly towards the Government: the upgrading by two levels, for example, by Moody's, which is something wonderful. In this context, we can also examine the statements by the officials that I mentioned earlier, and the objectively positive impression which seems to exist everywhere abroad with regard to the Greek economy's progress. So we must be optimistic and not concerned. JOURNALIST: Minister, when do you think the Prime Minister and the Government will make the final decision on the timing of national elections. Is this something that will occur in the coming weeks? In the coming month? G. KATROUGALOS: Again, for reasons that pertain to the economy, as well as for reasons that pertain to constitutional order, the Prime Minister has made it clear that we will hold elections at the conclusion of the four-year period, in October. JOURNALIST: You know, that is not too believable. In the sense that the timing of elections - and in the past we would also say the devaluation of the currency when we had a national currency - are never announced. G. KATROUGALOS: You would be correct in this, and this would render the question useless, but I am telling you that I am convinced of this. Because precisely during a period that the economy is trying to improve, when it is doing much better than many would have thought, this is not the moment to hinder, with elections, any growth it may have. I believe that for this reason only, even if we did not have the issues of constitutional order, the nationally responsible stance would be for the four-year period to be completed. I believe that the Prime Minister also believes this. JOURNALIST: Doesn't the danger exist for a negative result in a relaxed election such as the European elections to create a problem for you going forward? I am asking because Mr Theodorikakos who is a strategic planning consultant for Mr Mitsotakis, yesterday said that it is very doubtful - I am reading it verbatim - that SYRIZA will be able to govern, even formally, after the outcome of 26 May. G. KATROUGALOS: That is the motto that is continuously repeated, which we hear coming from New Democracy, essentially since 2016, in light of the various negative predictions which at the time did not have to do with the performance of the party in power but with the progress of the economy, that the first review will not come to an end, the second review will not come to an end. I would like to tell you that, in my opinion, there are two factors that, this time also, will not justify similar negative scenarios. The first is that the result of the election will not be what Mr Theodorikakos thinks, but let's overlook this. The second, which I am convinced of - I am not making a prediction - is that the Prime Minister either way always gives precedence to the countrys national interest. Something that was, above all, obvious with the Prespa Agreement, and I will tell you the reason for this: the Prime Minister thinks in terms of prospects. He thinks of the benefit of the country, and he knows that he will win many elections in the future, in the decades to come, when he will be present on the political scene. Under no circumstances would he jeopardise the countrys national interest in light of a prediction strictly along party lines. JOURNALIST: The reference to the Prespa Agreement and national interest, I speculate - because that is the job of the journalist, to always look for the negative aspects - is being made because one feels that it has harmed you politically in light of the elections. G. KATROUGALOS: But it is undeniable that an emotional reaction exists, which is greatly due to the wounded national pride of the MoU period. We see this in many Greeks. I am not referring to the five or ten animated individuals or bullies that shout in the streets. They may well have been put there. I am talking about average people, with whom we speak, and we see that they do not agree with the Agreement. I have reiterated numerous times that, in my opinion, when the positive effects of the Agreement become clear and when, mainly, all the Cassandras have been proven wrong, who predict that supposedly national dangers are fostered by the Agreement, emotion will no longer prevail, but rather logic will. And these people will be in favour of the Agreement. But there is a short period of time which may extend to the European elections, which may even extend to the parliamentary elections in October, when this change will not yet have taken place. This danger, of having a short-term political cost in the face of long-term national interest, I accept it. JOURNALIST: Let's review things, as students say, with regard to what is going on on our national fronts. How is implementation of the Agreement progressing with the neighbouring country? Let me begin with that. Is it being implemented? I am asking because we also had one or two events that led to doubts. G. KATROUGALOS: But precisely these events and the redress of the temporary violations of the Agreement are, in my opinion, the best proof that it is indeed being implemented. At the same time as the more than 160, if I am not mistaken, public institutions, buildings, and Organisations which changed their name on the basis of a decision by the Government of North Macedonia. Recently, there is a great battle, there too, of course. You saw that the President continues, even today, to refuse to sign laws with the new constitutional name of North Macedonia. There is a bras de fer in that country. There, too, there are many more hot-headed nationalists than in our country. Therefore, implementation of the Agreement is no easy thing. But we see good will on the part of the other side. We will not leave implementation of the Agreement to good will. We are monitoring its implementation through a committee that we have at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an interministerial committee that has been established. And we base ourselves on an action plan that does not only include execution of the terms of the Agreement, but mainly the promotion of these positive measures on an economic level, on a cultural level, which will create the climate which will not permit it to be overturned in the future. JOURNALIST: Now, how are things on the Turkish front? Did the last meeting between the Prime Minister and the Turkish President lead to any results? Have the corners been smoothed over, and the tension, or are we at the same place as before? G. KATROUGALOS: The first goal, which was to reduce tension, has been achieved to a great extent. A meeting has taken place between the Ministers of Defence, talks are taking place on a technical level for the promotion of measures of trust. I am going to meet tomorrow with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Cavusoglu, in Brussels. We will hold talks during a working dinner, and am I going to visit Antalya in person on the 21st of the month, with a programme that includes additional examination of the trust-building measures for reducing tension, and a discussion to see what the Turkish sides thoughts are on the Cyprus issue, since our views are well-known and have been expressed at Crans-Montana, with the well-known clarity and transparency that you are familiar with. Therefore, without wishing to create an especially optimistic climate, we have not strayed from what was discussed between the Prime Minister and President Erdogan. JOURNALIST: Minister, can we possibly have developments on the Cyprus issue in the near future? G. KATROUGALOS: Our sides wishes to resolve the Cyprus issue, wishes to have resolved the Cyprus issue yesterday. It does not depend on us whether developments will exist on the Cyprus issue, it depends on whether the other side is going to exhibit greater creativity, and mainly to show that it wishes to respond to the obligations arising from the Decisions of the UN. You know, for the Greek side, the Cyprus issue is not a bilateral one, it is an issue that pertains to the enforcement of International Law. It is an international issue. JOURNALIST: Now, what is going on with our neighbour Albania? Dialogue had been announced on various issues. Subsequently, there were inflammatory statements by the other side. Has the process been halted? And what is going on with the Greek EEZ in the Ionian. G. KATROUGALOS: You are correct in saying that a relative delay exists there, precisely because there is both political upheaval, which we are taking into consideration, and because we had to get answers from the other side with regard to the issues that pertain to our minority: the two major laws that pertain to the protection of their property with regard to the Himare coast and with regard to self-identification, with regard to their ability to state that they belong to the minority. We have received some answers from the Albanian side. Talks have thawed somewhat. There too, it is premature to say if we will have a positive outcome or not. But again, our side has the will to proceed so that we have improvement of our bilateral issues and, through the thawing of these bilateral issues, for Albanias European prospect to open up. JOURNALIST: I would like to insist a bit on the issue of the EEZ. An announcement has been made by the Greek government. Will it be actualized? When and how? It was made by Mr Kotzias during the handover ceremony. G. KATROUGALOS: Yes, and it was confirmed after that also, by the Prime Minister and by myself. We are indeed going to expand our territorial waters, because this is included in our effort to delineate the EEZ with Albania and Italy and, if negotiations continue, potentially also with Egypt. It is therefore a foregone political decision which the Prime Minister has said will be actualised through a formal law. JOURNALIST: Do we know when? Are there any thoughts as to the timing? G. KATROUGALOS: Precisely because the negotiations on the EEZ must proceed, and this is one of the factors we take into consideration, the timing has not yet been determined. But we are not going to put this issue on the back burner. JOURNALIST: I would like to conclude with Greek-American relations. How are these developing during Trump's Presidency? Do you feel that we are at a phase of improvement? Are they at a standstill, are they regressing? What exactly would you say about these? G. KATROUGALOS: Greek-American relations have never been at a better level. And it is not us who are saying this, nor just the American Ambassador in Athens. We have continuous statements by American officials, because they are responding to something real, to the fact that there is alignment of the interests of both sides in the need to stabilise the particularly unstable region in which our country is located. JOURNALIST: Does a certain concern perhaps play a role on the part of the Americans, about the manner in which Erdogan is reacting next door? G. KATROUGALOS: But it is obvious that one of the factors of the instability is this ambivalence on the part of Turkey as to the extent to which it will remain a loyal ally of the West, or if it is going to proceed with new choices. But that is not the sole factor. Our country has proven that it is not simply a pillar of stability; it is an exporter of stability. Not only through the Prespa Agreement - above all through the Prespa Agreement - but also through the trilateral cooperation schemes we have developed in the East Mediterranean. This is not something that began during Trumps Presidency. There were similarly very good relations during the Obama Presidency, and the fact that President Obama chose our country to send his final message about Democracy and the way in which he sees things to the whole world, from Pnyx, was not a coincidence. It also shows that one of the factors that have led to Greek-American relations being at this high level is that it is perhaps one of the few times that these relations are at a balanced level. I am not claiming that Greece has the same political weight as the US, but I am claiming that the strategy of both sides is forged, taking into account first and foremost their own national interests and their concurrence in our region. JOURNALIST: Turkey, with the stance it has exhibited recently, both introduces a restlessness in its relations with America but, also due to the fact that messages are sent by Europe along the lines that accession negotiations will be halted, that Turkey will never join the European Union, like the one sent by Mr Manfred Weber recently, could Turkey perhaps develop into a mad variable in the region in the near future? G. KATROUGALOS: It is in the favour of our country, and that of Europe, for the institutional paths for Turkey's European perspective to continue to remain open. Statements similar to those of Mr Weber constitute partisan adventurism, in my opinion, which is included in the surge in nationalism. Our country therefore feels that in order for our neighbour to have a European future, it must respect the European Acquis, human rights, and, on the other hand, we dont wish to exclude it from its European perspective, precisely because this would be to the detriment of the people of Turkey, to the detriment of the European Union, which does not wish to have an Islamic Turkey at its Eastern border, as well as in our national interest. We, too, want a European Turkey. JOURNALIST: And a Turkey, I imagine, Minister that does not use the migration problem to the detriment of Europe. G. KATROUGALOS: Much more so for that reason. And for that reason, we are in favour, for example, of talks on the customs union with Turkey recommencing, but conditionalities exist there, in the event that Turkey should decide that it does not wish to implement its responsibilities. Therefore, we indeed want to be open to the European prospects, but not without conditions, with those conditions that, as I said, will lead, if Turkey indeed decides to follow the European perspective, to a win-win situation. Otherwise, we possess the institutional means to be able to control behaviours to the contrary. JOURNALIST: I wholeheartedly thank the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Mr Giorgos Katrougalos. Have a good day, Minister. G. KATROUGALOS: Have a good day. JOURNALIST: Minister, Greece has settled the dispute on the name issue that simmered for decades with the neighbouring country of North Macedonia. Are you pleased about this? G. KATROUGALOS: I think that every Greek citizen can see how much Greeces international standing has been upgraded recently. We have not only established ourselves as a stable democracy, but as a country that exports stability. Following the Prespa Agreement for resolution of the naming dispute, we possess as great diplomatic capital as ever. JOURNALIST: You met this week with your counterpart from North Macedonia, Nikola Dimitrov. Is this the sign of a new era? G. KATROUGALOS: Out of a bitter dispute that divided our two countries for nearly 30 years, a relationship was created in which we consider our problems to be common problems. We both wish for the letter and the spirit of the Agreement to be truly implemented. In addition, we would like to build a strategic partnership between our two countries, and more generally in the Balkans. JOURNALIST: Greek Prime Minister Tsipras and the Prime Minister of North Macedonia, Zaev, are candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. Are they worthy of this? G. KATROUGALOS: This shall be decided by the Nobel Prize Committee. But I believe that the Prespa Agreement truly is a ground-breaking Agreement. A Nobel Prize would be appropriate recognition of this. JOURNALIST: North Macedonias joining NATO looms ahead. What are the other specific effects of the Agreement? G. KATROUGALOS: The Balkans are considered to be an unstable region, and a potential hotspot for Europe. Now the trend to the contrary exists: a trend towards stability and cooperation. And this is something that is positive both for the region as well as for Greece. Our goal is to promote a single economic space in our region, a large market of almost 50 million people. JOURNALIST: Many Greeks are once again concerned that Alexander the Great and ancient Macedonia will no longer be considered Greek. A well-liked example: On a British quiz, at some point, the question was posed: What was Alexander the Great's nationality? The response Greek was false. G. KATROUGALOS: Of course nobody believes that Alexander the Great was a Slav. Mistakes are always made. I remember the Hollywood blockbuster about Alexander the Great: When he would enter into battle, he would shout out: For Greece! Even in a Hollywood film, which reflects the views of the average citizen, it is clear what Greece was, and what Macedonia was. JOURNALIST: A problem arose recently when pictures appeared at a North Macedonian kiosk at the International Tourism Expo in Berlin, where the country was advertised simply as Macedonia. Following Greek protests, the signs disappeared. G. KATROUGALOS: Their desire in wishing to implement the Agreement is obvious. Violations of the agreement, either due to oversight or habit, shall be immediately recorded and resolved. JOURNALIST: What role do Russia, the US, and Turkey play in the talks on North Macedonia. G. KATROUGALOS: Those three countries have interests in the region, and they are all trying to impose their own will. JOURNALIST: What does Russia want? G. KATROUGALOS: Russia is against the expansion of NATO. But in our talks with North Macedonia, the issue was our own interests. JOURNALIST: Did Moscow pressure you to withdraw from the talks? G. KATROUGALOS: There was no pressure whatsoever. Either way, we dont allow ourselves to be pressured. JOURNALIST: Greece expelled Russian diplomats. It is said that they tried to incite protests against the Agreement by bribing politicians and entrepreneurs. G. KATROUGALOS: Listen, when we determined events were contrary to the manner in which a country should respect the sovereignty of another country, we reacted. But formally, no pressure was applied by Moscow, beyond an exchange of views. As I said, we dont allow ourselves to be pressured. JOURNALIST: Did Germany apply pressure in order to promote the Agreement? G. KATROUGALOS: The situation as regards our relations with Germany greatly improved, and especially Tsipras cooperation with Chancellor Merkel. We both fought together to tackle the migration issue. And this contributed substantially to mutual recognition between the two government leaders. The yellow press used many cliches at the beginning of the economic crisis, but these have now been greatly weakened. JOURNALIST: Up to 70% of Greek citizens reject the agreement with North Macedonia. This is a problem for Prime Minister Tsipras. G. KATROUGALOS: The exact percentage differs according to the poll. I think that this has to do with an emotional reaction, which can be explained above all by the fact that the national pride of a large portion of our people was wounded during the years of the economic crisis. The crisis for the average Greek not only meant great poverty, but weakening of our national sovereignty as well. But I have no doubt that our citizens will change their mind when they come to understand the true meaning of the Prespa Agreement; when they think logically and not emotionally. JOURNALIST: Elections for a new Parliament are expected in autumn. Do you still have time to persuade citizens? G. KATROUGALOS: Voters wont just decide based on the Agreement. For example, the fact that Greece has exited the bailout programme also counts. JOURNALIST: What is the next priority in your work? G. KATROUGALOS: We discuss tension-reducing measures with Turkey. This month, I will meet with my Turkish counterpart. We want to see if talks can recommence on Cyprus, in order for the island to be reunified according to the resolutions of the UN. We wish to exhaust every possibility of achieving this. JOURNALIST: Greece is making claims for German reparations for damages suffered during World War II. Tsipras had promised that, by the end of 2018, the issue would be discussed in Parliament. Since then, this has continuously been postponed. G. KATROUGALOS: I cant state a specific date. I was present when Tsipras broached this issue with Chancellor Merkel. For us, this continues to be a pending issue - ethically, historically, politically, and legally. We shall continue to insist on discussing this. JOURNALIST: In the immediate future? G. KATROUGALOS: In the near future, the issue will come before the Hellenic Parliament; in March or in April. JOURNALIST: And when will elections be held? Some expect early elections in May. G. KATROUGALOS: Elections will be held in October. This is what the Constitution stipulates. Besides, our economic situation has just started to improve. We have no reason to change anything with regard to the date. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 13) Senator Panfilo "Ping" Lacson warned that Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo can be charged for signing the House's version of the budget bill, on which congressmen had made changes after the 2019 budget was ratified by Congress. Lacson said any taxpayer can file a complaint against Arroyo for falsification before the Office of the Ombudsman. "Since Speaker Arroyo already signed the [House] version of the enrolled bill, she's already prone to being charged for falsification because she's already certified something that did not take place," he said Wednesday. Lacson explained that amending a bill after it has been ratified is equal to falsification of records of the legislative process. Article 170 of the Revised Penal Code punishes falsification of legislative documents with a jail term of six months and one day to six years and a 1.2-million fine. Congressmen said that they itemized lump sums in the 2019 budget after its ratification by Congress. Senators have said that this is illegal and unconstitutional. House leaders, however, said otherwise. "Pwede pa mag-amend [You can still amend,] provided you don't alter what has been agreed upon and the amount in lump sum appropriation contained in the bicam report," House Majority Leader Fredenil Castro said in a media briefing. Senate President Vicente "Tito" Sotto III said he would not sign the budget bill if the House made changes to it after its ratification, adding that he would be charged with falsification effectively blocking its transmittal to Malacanang for President Rodrigo Duterte's signature. Sotto and Arroyo, along with the secretaries-general of the House and the Senate, would have to sign the enrolled copy of a bill before it is sent for Duterte's signature. Duterte himself said in a speech that he would not sign into law an "illegal" budget bill. But House leaders have been insisting that there is nothing illegal in their post-bicam action. They have said that the 2013 Supreme Court ruling outlawing the interference of lawmakers in the execution of the budget after its passage, which is often cited by Lacson, is inapplicable because the budget bill has not yet been passed into law. University of the Philippines College of Law professor Dan Gatmaitan told CNN Philippines' Newsroom Ngayon that lawmakers' itemization of the budget after its ratification might be their way of complying with the high court's ruling. "Apparently, that's what they are doing para [so that] they don't have to play a role after the law is enacted, they are not just itemizing, they are certifying the uses of the fund to get around the Supreme Court decision," Gatmaitan said. Despite meeting before Duterte last night, lawmakers are still on a deadlock on how to proceed with the budget. The Senate wants the House to stick to what was approved by the bicameral conference committee, but the House wants to proceed with their itemized budget. With this development, Lacson sees the government continuing to operate under a reenacted budget until August when Arroyo and House Appropriations committee chair Rolando Andaya would have stepped down. Senators said congressmen have come to them alleging that Arroyo was behind the realignment of funds after the budget's ratification. They said this favored the Speaker's allies and left others with less funding for their districts. House leaders said this was to ensure that allocations for congressmen were "equitable," noting that some of them received no budget for their districts under previous leaders of the chamber. Andaya was Arroyo's Budget Secretary when she was president. Also under the Arroyo presidency, Lacson was tagged as the suspect in the double murder of publicist Salvador "Bubby" Dacer and his driver Emmanuel Corbito. Lacson then led exposes against Arroyo. Lacson said he has forgiven everyone who has wronged him and has denied that his crusade against "pork" or discretionary funding in the budget is about Arroyo. CNN Philippines Correspondent Joyce Ilas contributed to this report. The average wholesale electricity price in 2018 rose over the previous year, New Englands regional grid operator reported Tuesday, an indicator that could mean higher electric bills for Connecticut next winter, according to state officials. The preliminary total value of New Englands wholesale electric energy market in 2018 was $6 billion, up 34 percent compared to previous years near-record low value of $4.5 billion, according to officials with Holyoke. Mass. based ISO-NE, which runs the regional electric grid and oversees the wholesale energy auctions require for electric power procurement. The energy market value in 2017 was the second-lowest since the current wholesale markets were implemented 16 years ago, according ISO-NE. OLD SAYBROOK The Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center welcomes Cyrille Aimee performing the music of Stephen Sondheim, March 28 at 7:30 p.m. Improvisation is not just a technique for vocalist Cyrille Aimee. Its a way of life, one that has not only allowed her to share her engaging voice and sparkling creativity with the world, but has led her on an unexpected journey. By opening herself to the whim of the moment, Aimee has ventured from singing on street corners in Europe to dazzling audiences at some of the worlds most prestigious jazz festivals. Growing up in the town of Samois-sur-Seine in France, Aimee would sneak out of her bedroom window to join the gypsy caravans gathered for the annual Django Reinhardt Festival. She would carry that spirit to the Montreux Jazz Festival, where she won the 2007 vocal competition and recorded her debut album with the prize money. It was the first of many such accolades, including winning the Sarah Vaughn International Jazz Vocal Competition and becoming a finalist in the Thelonious Monk Jazz Vocal Competition as well as the TV5MONDE series Talent Acoustic. As an actress, Aimee was hand-picked by musical theater icon Stephen Sondheim to star alongside Bernadette Peters in a tribute performance backed by Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. She is now touring in support of her latest album, Move On: A Sondheim Adventure, released in February 2019, and featuring fourteen gems from the Sondheim songbook, including Marry Me a Little, Not While Im Around, and With So Little to Be Sure Of. For information and tickets for all shows at the Kate, visit www.thekate.org or call 860-510-0453. Students at the states four regional universities will likely pay 5 percent more in tuition next year, but its still unclear how much more students at the states community colleges will be charged. The Board of Regents for Higher Educations finance committee voted Wednesday in favor of a proposal to increase tuition at the state universities, but held off making a decision about the community colleges in case additional state funds become available. I want to take a little more time to gauge the legislative interest in additional funding, for the community colleges, said Mark Ojakian, president of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities. The community colleges are in a much more precarious position financially. The full board will vote on the proposed increase for the state universities at its March 28 meeting. Ojakian said the state universities need to know their tuition rates for next year because they are assembling financial aid packages for the 2019-2010 school year now, but he can hold off on the community colleges because students generally enroll later in the year. Ojakian expects that his staff will have a proposed tuition increase for the community colleges next month. Community college students paid 2.5 percent more in tuition this year compared to last year. The regents also voted for a 2.9 percent tuition increase for the states on-line college, Charter Oak State College. With a tuition increase proposed for the state universities, coupled with increases in fees, room and board, an in-state student who lives in a dorm at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain would pay $804 more next year to attend college. This year, that student pays $22,791 in tuition, fees and room and board. A commuting student who lives in Connecticut would pay $452 more next year to attend Central. The costs are a bit higher at the other three universities, with the highest at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, where in-state residential students will pay $899 more next year, including fees and room and board. It continues to be the mission of this board and of myself that we ensure that the university remain the most affordable and accessible option to obtaining a four-year degree in the state of Connecticut, Ojakian said. Ive always said tuition (increases) needed to be considered as a last resort and that I want to assure everyone that weve done everything possible to make sure the increase is as manageable as possible for our students. The financially troubled Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, which includes the four state universities and 12 community colleges, would face a $57 million shortfall next year if tuition and the state investment in the system stays flat. Last month, Gov. Ned Lamont proposed a budget that included essentially flat-funding for the CSCU system. If CSCU were to attempt to balance the budget just on the backs of the students, Ojakian said, its state university students would be facing a tuition increase of 12 percent. We are asking students to invest a little more in their education, Ojakian said. He estimates its about $40 more a month for in-state commuter students and a little more than $70 extra a month for residential students. The percentage increase for state university students is less than the increase that will be paid by UConn students. As part of the last year of a four-year schedule of tuition increases, UConn students will face a 7.3 percent increase in tuition next year. However, if fees are included, that percentage increase jumps to 9.5 percent. Thats because students next year have to pay a $500 fee for the schools $100 million recreation center, which is scheduled to open in September. Students are expected to pay that fee each year for the next 30 years. MIDDLETOWN Formally announcing the citys Pride celebration to be on June 15, officials said they are sending a real message not just to the city and the state but beyond about the benefits of being inclusive to all residents. Middlesex County Chamber of Commerce President Larry McHugh joined Mayor Daniel T. Drew and councilors Gerald E. Daley, Sebastian N. Giuliano and Philip J. Pessina on Tuesday to tout the citys celebration of its LGBTQ residents. Wesleyan University is also involved in sponsoring the event. But no one from the university could be available to attend the mid-afternoon announcement in the council chambers in City hall. This will be a landmark event, Drew said, not just for the city or the region but across the state. A parade will step off from St. Johns Square at 2 p.m. and move down Main Street to Union Street. It is believed that it will be the only Pride parade held in the state June 15. A festival will commence on South Green following the conclusion of the parade, officials said. The council last week voted to approve allocating $60,000 for the event. The councils vote was unanimous, a fact Drew said thrilled him and led to congratulations and expressions of interest from all over Connecticut. June 15 will be a red-letter day for the city, Drew said. Were in this totally, McHugh said of the chambers involvement. When Drew asked the chamber to get involved, McHugh said the decision was an easy one to make. If its good for the city of Middletown and its good for the business community, then thats where we should be, he said. While the event will be an economic generator, McHugh said equally importantly, Middletowns embrace of the event also demonstrates it is a welcoming and inclusive community. Pessina was the co-sponsor of the proposal to hold the event in the city, and said he was humbly honored to be asked to do so. Too often, members of the LGBTQ community may feel they are not welcome as part of the fabric of our community, he said. The councils unanimous vote to support to Pride event has given a positive message to negative perceptions and will prevent those who may suffer psychologically by being affected by hate and discrimination, he said. The idea of a Pride event is a personal one for Pessina. He and his wife are supportive parents to my daughter Kristys loving marriage to her wife and best friend, and they have witnessed the atmosphere of nurturing love they are giving to our three beautiful grandchildren. Meeting his daughters friends and members of the LGBTQ community has only strengthened my strong belief that love has no boundaries only human reactions do, Pessina said. He closed by quoting from the lyrics of Luke Bryant: I believe you love who you love. Aint nothing you should ever be ashamed of. Giuliano, the councils minority leader, said supporting the motion was a pretty easy call for me. He was brought up believing that we are all created in the image and likeness of God. There are no qualifications to that statement. Describing the city as an almost a perfect fit for the event, Giuliano added, In Middletown, were always up for a party. Daley said his son had moved with his family to Toledo, Ohio. Daley went to visit the city, and found it a good city even though it doesnt have a chamber of commerce like ours and certainly not pizza like those to be had in Middletown. But it has a Pride event, Daley said. It really showed me how a Pride event can bring communities together, he said. Middletowns decision to hold a similar event really affirmed our commitment that every member of community should be treated with dignity, Daley said. jmill@middltownpress.com 3 1 of 3 Contributed photo Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Contributed photo Show More Show Less 3 of 3 EAST HADDAM - State Rep. Irene Haines, R-East Haddam, marked Read Across America Day March 1 by reading the New York Times bestselling childrens book, Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin to children. Students in Celina Nelans, Maryann Carons and Jessica Lowerys classes at East Haddam Elementary School dressed in green to celebrate school spirit week, according to a press release. Beginning April 12, transgender individuals with gender dysphoria or who have initiated treatment or swapped genders will no longer be able to join the U.S. military, in most cases. The Defense Department released a policy Tuesday that allows the roughly 1,000 existing transgender troops who have gender dysphoria or have transitioned to remain in the military and continue seeking career opportunities, such as promotions, advanced training, transfers and officer accessions. About 9,000 individuals identified themselves as transgender in a recent survey of active-duty troops, yet just 1,000 personnel have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, Pentagon officials said Wednesday during a call with reporters. Anyone with a history of gender dysphoria who wants to join the military will have to show they have been comfortable with the gender they had at birth for at least the past three years, have not undertaken any medical treatments to transition and are willing to adhere to the standards associated with their biological sex. Individuals who currently have a contract with the military services but have not yet entered enlisted training or taken a commission are grandfathered under the 2016 policy, which means they will be allowed to serve regardless of a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and can pursue medical care for gender transition while serving. DoD officials insisted Wednesday that the new policy does not bar transgender people from serving, adding that it only restricts individuals diagnosed with gender dysphoria. The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines gender dysphoria as experiencing "significant distress and/or problems functioning associated with being uncomfortable with the gender they were assigned" at birth. The U.S. military does not discriminate against transgender persons, one official insisted. "This is not a ban on transgender individuals serving in the military. In fact, the policy actually prohibits the denial of accessions or involuntary separation solely on the basis of gender identity," the official said. "We realize not all transgender individuals have gender dysphoria." Activists for the LGBTQ community, however, say the new policy will restrict troops' human rights and is comparable to the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy introduced under President Bill Clinton that allowed gay and lesbian personnel to serve as long as they didn't openly reveal their sexual preferences. Before "Don't Ask Don't Tell" was implemented, homosexual troops were completely barred from military service. "Today, the Trump administration has chosen prejudice and politics over the truth of open service. ... Even leaders who supported 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' at the time later came to believe that it had failed, harming readiness rather improving it. That will be the fate of this bigoted policy on transgender service as well," Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center, an advocacy group, said in a statement. Speaking against the policy, Rep. Jackie Speier, D-California, chairwoman of the House Armed Services personnel subcommittee, referenced President Donald Trump's medical condition that supported his deferment for the draft. "These tough, brave service members have never used bone spurs as an excuse to dodge their duty and service to our country," Speier said. "We owe them our gratitude, not government-sanctioned discrimination. This policy is malicious, demeaning and destructive, and it does not serve our country's interests." In July 2017 via Twitter, Trump announced that he planned to ban all transgender individuals from serving in the military. In response, then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis drafted a policy in February 2018 that limited the ban to those with gender dysphoria who need "substantial medical treatment." The proposed policy remained on hold pending litigation and associated injunctions placed by courts to delay implementation. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court decided against hearing three cases filed over the policy, allowing several decisions by different U.S. Courts of Appeals to vacate the injunctions to stand. In February, five transgender service members testified before Congress to protest the proposed policy, calling it discriminatory. They added that their military service should be considered on its merit, not on the basis of gender. "All we are asking for is the opportunity to meet and be held to those exact same [military] standards," Army Capt. Jennifer Peace said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing. DoD officials say they are simply adding gender dysphoria to the list of hundreds of medical conditions considered disqualifying for military service. The conditions include physical disabilities and illnesses such as childhood asthma, diabetes and cancer, and mental health conditions including autism spectrum disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, eating disorders, depression and schizophrenia. "Our accessions manual has 35 pages of conditions that presumptively disqualify people from military service. Gender dysphoria is no different," the official said, adding that those interested in serving can still apply for a waiver. Roughly 7 percent to 8 percent of medical waivers are approved for new recruits each year, according to the DoD. The policy also applies to U.S. Coast Guard personnel. According to the document, Directive-type Memorandum 19-004, Military Service by Transgender Persons and Persons with Gender Dysphoria, signed by Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist, the military services and the Coast Guard are allowed to grant waivers in individual cases and under no circumstances can a person who is exempt from the policy have their status revoked. -- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @patriciakime. A government ethics organization has filed a formal complaint asking the Defense Department Inspector General's Office to investigate Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan's ties to his former employer, Boeing Co. The group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), claims Shanahan violated ethics rules by promoting the company's interests at the Pentagon. The complaint comes the same day President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. will ground all Boeing 737 MAX-8 jets effective immediately after two crashes involving foreign airlines in less than six months killed nearly 350 people. "We're gonna be issuing an emergency order of prohibition to ground all flights of the 737 MAX-8 and the 737 MAX-9 and planes associated with that line," Trump told reporters at the White House. "Shanahan worked at Boeing for more than 30 years, where he directly oversaw military contract programs including Boeing Missile Defense Systems and Boeing Rotorcraft Systems, as well as commercial production including the 737 MAX-8 and 787 Dreamliner," CREW said. Related content: On Tuesday, reporters asked Shanahan about his 737 MAX-8 ties and whether he could vouch for the plane's safety. "Let's let the FAA and others take command of the situation," he said. CREW said it doesn't matter whether Shanahan, who worked for Boeing for more than 30 years, had direct involvement with the defense programs. "We don't know whether Shanahan had direct involvement in decisions affecting Boeing, but even the appearance of bias raises serious concerns and potential ethics violations," said CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder in a release. "Boeing has been particularly successful in winning government contracts, including multiple multibillion-dollar contracts for major aircraft programs," the release said. It is rumored that Trump plans to nominate Shanahan for the permanent defense secretary position in coming weeks. "Secretary Shanahan has at all times remained committed to complying with his Ethics Agreement, which screens Boeing matters to another DoD official and ensures no potential for a conflict of interest with Boeing on any matter," Army Lt. Col. Joe Buccino, Shanahan's spokesman, said in a statement to Military.com. "Secretary Shanahan remains focused on increasing lethality across the military and aligning the Department along the National Defense Strategy." After Shanahan was named interim secretary following former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis' departure, the Pentagon announced that he would not be involved in future dealings with Boeing, including acquisition decisions. In January, Shanahan downplayed reports that he had shown favoritism toward Boeing. "I think that's just noise," he told reporters during his first off-camera briefing at the Pentagon. Earlier that month, Politico reported that Shanahan had been promoting the company in meetings while heavily criticizing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, manufactured by Boeing's direct competitor Lockheed Martin Corp. Shanahan reportedly called the F-35 "f---ed up" and said Lockheed, unlike Boeing, "doesn't know how to run a program," according to Politico. Responding to the report, Shanahan didn't dispute he had been critical of the F-35 program, which is set to cost a trillion dollars over its lifetime. "I am biased toward performance; I am biased toward giving the taxpayer their money's worth," he said. "And the F-35 unequivocally, I can say, has a lot of opportunity for more performance." As deputy defense secretary, Shanahan joined other top leaders to promote the F-15X fourth-generation fighter proposal, Bloomberg said in December. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson confirmed to reporters last month that, while the service needs to boost its fighter inventory, it had not expected to do so with a Boeing-made F-15X variant, apparently confirming speculation that the decision was forced upon it. Boeing won a variety of contracts in 2018, including the Air Force's T-X trainer, which will replace the current T-38 Talon fleet. The T-X announcement in September marked the third major contract that year for Boeing, the U.S.' largest aerospace firm. The Air Force that month also selected the company to build the replacement for its UH-1N Huey helicopter, at a cost of approximately $2.38 billion. In August, the Navy selected it to build its first operational carrier-based MQ-25 tanker drone. However, those contract negotiations -- some years in the making -- had already been well underway before Shanahan took his new post. -- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214. The under secretary of the Army said Wednesday that the service plans to buy fewer of the brand-new Joint Light Tactical Vehicles in fiscal 2020 to free up money for future modernization, and is considering reducing its overall requirement for the high-performance combat vehicle. The service just began fielding its new vehicle in January, but it plans to buy only 2,530 JLTVs in the fiscal 2020 budget request, a significant reduction from last year's purchase of 3,393. Under Secretary Ryan McCarthy confirmed Wednesday that the JLTV is one of the 93 programs selected to have its funding cut over the next five years to find more than $30 billion for the service's ambitious modernization strategy. Army leaders also terminated another 93 programs across the service's investment portfolio in the name of modernization. The JLTV became a modernization priority for the Army and Marine Corps after the Humvee proved unable to protect troops from deadly improvised explosive devices, mainly during Operation Iraqi Freedom. It took almost a decade to develop but, in August 2015, Oshkosh Corp. was selected over Lockheed Martin Corp. and AM General LLC to build the JLTV for the services. "We had to be ruthless in the prioritization," McCarthy said, said speaking at the 10th Annual Defense Programs conference hosted by McAleese and Associates. "We had to look at how could you finance this ambition in a flat or declining fiscal environment." Army officials have said it will take the service until the mid-2030s to complete JLTV fielding, which means that most soldiers will go into combat in Humvees if war breaks out in the near term. McCarthy said the service is considering lowering its requirement for 49,000 JLTVs since it already has 55,000 Humvees and 800 infantry squad vehicles. "We clearly have more capability than we need," he said. "We are locking in on that number and will publish it soon." McCarthy would not go into details about the 93 programs the Army terminated but said that the Bradley fighting vehicle and the CH-47 Chinook are among the 93 programs to have funding cut over the next five years to finance modernization programs such as the next-generation combat vehicle and future vertical lift. The Army plans to equip only five brigade combat teams with the modernized Bradley A4 and move the rest of the program's funding to the next-generation combat vehicle program in 2023, he said. The service also plans to stop buying Chinooks for the conventional force after fiscal 2020 to fund efforts for a next-generation helicopter as part of the future vertical lift program, McCarthy said. "We went through and did a full, thorough exercise on the aviation portfolio, and we have 10 percent more Chinooks on today than we need," he said. "So we continue through the buy [in fiscal 2020] for the conventional force, but we will only be buying [Special Operations Command] Chinooks in the outyears." The Army began laying the groundwork for modernization in its fiscal 2018 and 2019 budgets, realigning about 80 percent of science and technology funding toward its six modernization priorities, which include long-range precision fires, the next-generation combat vehicle, future vertical lift, a mobile network, air and missile defense, and soldier lethality. In the end, the Army hopes to field a new fleet of combat systems by 2028, replacing the Big 5 -- the M1 tank, Bradley Fighting Vehicle, UH-60 Black Hawk, AH-64 Apache and the Patriot air defense system. "From a modernization standpoint, our systems -- the Big 5 weapons systems -- are old, in most cases over 40 years old," McCarthy said. "There is only so much more you can engineer out of these systems and still be able to maintain that technological overmatch in the years to come." -- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com. Two days after the president's 2020 budget proposal was released, an influential congressman is hitting back against the Navy's plan to move an aircraft carrier into retirement decades early. Rep. Rob Wittman, a Virginia Republican and ranking member of the House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee, called the decision to retire the Harry S. Truman "not a good thing." "They're looking at taking a carrier that's 20 years old and saying, 'We're no longer going to use that one,'" Wittman said at the annual McAleese Defense Programs Conference in Washington, D.C. "... If you get rid of Truman early, you're taking a very valuable asset out of Navy inventory." Wittman's district abuts Hampton Roads, where the Norfolk-based Truman would have undergone mid-life refueling. The service made official its plans to forgo the Truman's scheduled 2024 refueling complex overhaul in its 2020 budget documents, released Tuesday. The money the Navy would have spent refueling the carrier's nuclear reactor core will now be used on investments for the next-generation fight, including unmanned vessels. But Wittman said aircraft carriers are going to be "a key part of the future." "You can go back and forth in the debate about the utility of aircraft carriers, but the bottom line is this: If aircraft carriers weren't critical in being able to project power, then why are the Chinese and the Russians building them at breakneck pace?" he said. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson told reporters Wednesday that the decision to retire the Truman is about "balancing capabilities." There are new security challenges, he said, and the Navy must carefully weigh the capabilities it invests in to take on near-peer adversaries. Richardson also said the decision to retire the Truman could be revisited. The Navy will complete another force-structure assessment this year, he said, which could change the service's 355-ship goal. Combatant commanders are also studying their security environments this year, he added, including how they might need each service to respond to crises in those regions. "This budget entails the flexibility to respond to what those studies tell us," Richardson said. "If we continue to see a need for more aircraft carriers, we have the flexibility to revisit that decision." The Navy has 11 aircraft carriers, and the 355-ship plan calls for a dozen. Retiring the Truman in 2024 would bring the total number down to 10, years before the Navy expects to get any replacements, Wittman said. "I would argue that it is not wise to take away funding for the refueling and complex overhaul for the Truman," he said. -- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins. Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs officials are meeting this week in Arlington, Virginia, for a two-day symposium on burn pits and airborne pollutants but, as with previous Joint VA/DoD Airborne Hazard Symposia, the meeting is closed to the public and press. The symposium's purpose, according to documents from the first meeting in 2012, is to "provide an opportunity to discuss what we know, what we need to know and what can be done to study and improve care" for veterans and troops who "might have suffered adverse health effects related to exposure to airborne hazards, including burn pit smoke and other pollutants." Attendance is tightly controlled, with Pentagon and VA officials convening to discuss topics such as a joint action plan to address potential health conditions related to exposure, the VA's Airborne Hazards and Burn Pit Registry, monitoring deployment environments and the impact of exposures on the Veterans Benefits Administration, according to a copy of the first day's agenda obtained by Military.com. Members of several veterans service organizations and advocacy groups have been invited to speak, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Disabled American Veterans, American Legion, Burn Pits 360 and the Sgt. Sullivan Circle. But those veterans' representatives are allowed to attend only a handful of sessions on the first day, March 14, including opening remarks and segments on outreach and education, as well as a brown-bag lunch during which they can discuss concerns and issues. All events scheduled for March 15 remain unpublished. Neither the VA nor the DoD responded to requests for information on the event. Veterans advocates also declined to discuss the meeting or their participation, with some expressing concern that they would be prevented from receiving future invites. Thousands of troops serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere were exposed to airborne pollutants while working and living near burn pits used to dispose of trash, medical waste and other types of refuse at area military bases. Some have developed a chronic lung disease, constrictive bronchiolitis, while others have developed skin rashes, autoimmune disorders and various types of cancer, including glioblastoma, a brain cancer rarely seen in young adults, that they believe are related to burn pit exposure. Veterans and advocates have pressed the VA for years to recognize these illnesses as related to burn pit exposure and want them to be considered "presumptive" conditions, a designation that would automatically qualify them for disability compensation and health services. The VA says it lacks the scientific evidence to directly tie burn pit exposure to certain diseases but has granted service connection for several conditions associated with burn pits, deciding each claim on a case-by-case basis. In 2011, the Institute of Medicine reviewed all available studies, reports and monitoring data on burn pit utilization and combustibles exposure and concluded that there was not enough evidence or data to draw conclusions about the long-term consequences of exposure. More than 140,000 veterans have enrolled in the VA Burn Pit and Airborne Hazards Registry. From June 2007 through Nov. 30, 2018, the VA received 11,581 claims applications for disability compensation with at least one condition related to burn pit exposure. Of those, 2,318 had a burn pit-related condition granted, according to VA Press Secretary Curt Cashour. During the same time frame, the VA processed nearly 13.5 million claims; burn pit-related claims made up less than a tenth of a percent of those claims. "VA encourages all veterans who feel their military service has affected their health to submit a claim, which will be adjudicated using the latest scientific and medical evidence available," Cashour said. The Pentagon and VA are developing a way to track environmental exposures in service members starting with the day they enlist. The Individual Longitudinal Exposure Record, or ILER, will record potential and known exposures throughout a service member's time on active duty. A pilot program is set to begin Sept. 30. But those who have suffered exposures in the past 30 years will need to rely on Congress to pass legislation to assist them, the Defense Department to continue researching the issues, and the VA to approve their claims. Veterans of Foreign Wars, Vietnam Veterans of America, Wounded Warrior Project, IAVA, Disabled American Veterans, the Fleet Reserve Association, the Military Order of the Purple Heart and Military Officers Association of America all have made burn pit and toxic exposure issues a top legislative priority this year. Several lawmakers, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, have introduced legislation that would require the DoD and VA to share information on troops' exposure to airborne chemicals and provide periodic health assessments for those who were exposed. The meeting is to take place at the Veterans Health Administration National Conference Center in Crystal City, Virginia. -- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Military.com. Follow her on Twitter @patricia.kime. Airmen Have Five Days to Get Immunized After Vaccine Exemption Is Denied or They Face Punishment, Air Force Says The service required all active-duty troops to become fully vaccinated by Nov. 2 after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in... President Donald Trump will nominate a new commandant of the Marine Corps this year as Gen. Robert Neller finishes out his four-year tenure as the service's top officer. Neller, who became commandant in September 2015, is closing in on his final months leading the Marine Corps. Who will replace him remains to be seen, though multiple general officers may be well placed for consideration for the post. In the last four years, Neller has ushered in a host of innovative efforts. He's pushed to get more high-tech gear into Marines' hands, encouraged "disruptive thinkers" to share their ideas about how to improve the Corps, and restructured the Marine rifle squad. Those are efforts the next commandant must continue as Marines gear up for future conflicts that will look a lot different than what they grew used to in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Dakota Wood, a retired Marine officer and senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. That's all happening at a time when Marines are already stretched thin, he added, stressing families, equipment and training. "The next commandant will have a full plate of challenges, ranging from end strength and operational tempo, to budgeting for a broad range of acquisition initiatives, to working with the Navy in its efforts to grow the size of the fleet," Wood said. Neller is one of just four active-duty four-star Marine generals. The others include Gen. Joe Dunford, the former commandant who's serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. Gary Thomas, who became assistant commandant in October; and Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, head of U.S. Africa Command who's expected to retire this year. There are a handful of three-star generals likely also under consideration. (Neller was a lieutenant general when he was named the next top officer.) Here's a look at who might get the nomination to be 38th commandant of the Marine Corps. Gen. Gary Thomas Current assignment: Assistant commandant of the Marine Corps Thomas, a naval aviator, was named assistant commandant when Gen. Glenn Walters retired last year. He previously served as deputy commandant for Programs and Resources and commanding general of 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. He has served for 35 years. Thomas has commanded several F/A-18 Hornet squadrons and led troops on combat deployments. He led 2nd MAW through a deployment to Afghanistan and was commanding officer of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 323 when it deployed to Iraq. Thomas wouldn't be the first assistant commandant to be tapped to lead the Marine Corps. Dunford served as assistant commandant to Gen. Jim Amos before becoming the 36th commandant in 2014. Historically, though, commandants have come from the infantry community; Amos was the first Marine Corps aviator ever to serve as commandant. Lt. Gen. Joseph Osterman Current assignment: Commanding general of I Marine Expeditionary Force A career infantry officer, Osterman has led grunts in Somalia, Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan. He now oversees all West Coast Marines as commanding general of I MEF. Osterman led Marine Corps Special Operations Command for two years, during which the three Marine Raider battalions were organized. He also served as commanding general of Marine Corps Recruiting Command in Quantico, Virginia, after commanding a recruiting station in New York years prior. With the Marine Corps special operations community poised to grow in the fiscal 2020 budget request and operators taking on an increasingly significant role in recent conflicts, Osterman's MARSOC experience may recommend him for the job. He also has command experience deployed in two major conflicts. Osterman deployed to Iraq in 2004 as commander of 25th Marine Regiment. He also deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 as commanding general of 1st Marine Division. Lt. Gen. David Berger Current assignment: Commanding general of Marine Corps Combat Development Command and deputy commandant for Combat Development and Integration Berger, another career infantry officer, currently oversees the command that develops warfighting concepts and training doctrine. He recently spoke with Military.com about a new force-on-force training effort designed to prepare Marines for a near-peer fight. In an interview with Military.com, Berger said the Marine Corps must teach its leaders to "think on their feet." Berger led Regimental Combat Team 8 in Fallujah, Iraq, and was commanding general of 1st Marine Division during a deployment to Afghanistan. He has also led troops in Japan, Haiti and Kosovo. And he was head of Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms in California, where Marines train to deploy. Berger's career has also given him experience that dovetails with top Marine Corps priorities and cutting-edge technology, including operations in the Pacific region and the new F-35B Joint Strike Fighter. Like Osterman, Berger has also served as commanding general of I MEF. He then served as the head of Marine Corps Forces Pacific, where he oversaw all Marines and the Corps' missions in the Asia-Pacific region, including the first operational deployment of the F-35 in the region. Lt. Gen. George Smith Jr. Current assignment: Senior military assistant to the defense secretary Smith, then a two-star, was nominated by former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in September 2018 to serve as his senior military assistant. He was quickly confirmed by the Senate, arriving at the post before Mattis resigned in December. It wasn't Smith's first role in the Pentagon. He also served as principal assistant, senior adviser and task manager for former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Jim Amos. Smith's proximity to Mattis could be seen as a boon -- he was hand-selected by one of the most revered former Marine Corps generals still living. It could also have his drawbacks; Trump, who officially will nominate the next commandant, claimed following Mattis' resignation that he "essentially" fired the former defense secretary for lack of results. Smith served as the commanding general at Twentynine Palms before Berger took command of the training base in 2013. He was also the director of strategy, plans and policies at U.S. Central Command. Lt. Gen. Brian Beaudreault Current assignment: Deputy commandant of Plans, Policies and Operations Beaudreault currently oversees the Marine Corps' plans for structure and deployments. Another career infantry officer, he has served for nearly four decades and has commanded Marines in perhaps more deployed operating environments than any other officer on this list. Beaudreault has led troops in Somalia, Iraq, Bahrain, Puerto Rico and Pakistan. He was commander of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit for three years during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and later deputy commander for Marine Forces Central Command. His current role has put him at the center of key discussions about how to position and prepare Marines for the future high-end fight, including modernization decisions and the future of amphibious warfare. He also served as commanding general of the North Carolina-based 2nd Marine Division. -- Hope Hodge Seck contributed to this report. -- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins. The U.S. Air Force intends to buy a small fleet of turboprop aircraft as part of its light attack effort, putting some at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, and some with Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field, Florida, the service's top general said Wednesday. "What you'll see in this [2020] budget [request] is money we are going to use to procure a small number of aircraft," Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein told members of the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee. The Air Force will begin by purchasing up to three each of Textron Aviation's AT-6 Wolverine and Sierra Nevada/Embraer's A-29 Super Tucano. "We're going to place a detachment with those at Nellis Air Force Base where we do conventional training, and a detachment with those that do special operations at Hurlburt," Goldfein said. Related content: He added that the Marine Corps is joining the light attack effort, and "we're going to invite allies and partners" into the program to expand and experiment in order to build an "interoperable network." Goldfein said procurement funds for the full program will be laid out in the 2022 to 2024 budget cycles. His announcement comes a day after the Air Force asked for an additional $35 million for light attack aircraft in its 2020 budget request, though it is not yet a Defense Department program of record. Last month, the service said it will attempt another light attack experiment, possibly involving helicopters and drones and participation by allies who already have light attack aircraft. That plan is still on the table, Goldfein said. Lawmakers have been eager to back a program proposal. In November 2017, key legislators agreed to provide the Air Force $400 million to continue experimenting with the light attack concept. The Senate Armed Services Committee, in its fiscal 2019 proposal, added an additional $300 million to procure a future light attack aircraft. "Congress has appropriated approximately $200 million for Light Attack experimentation so far," Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek told Military.com Wednesday. "There is approximately $60 million left in fiscal year 2018 research, development, test and evaluation funds and $100 million in fiscal year 2019 procurement funds. The Air Force plans to use these funds to purchase two to three of each aircraft." Goldfein said the service kept three core principles in mind as it conducted past experiments: Keeping allies and partners who cannot afford fourth- or fifth-generation aircraft in the loop as they look to procure new planes; finding a mix of capabilities to make the planes interoperable; and realizing that these planes are not meant to be a replacement for anything in the service's inventory, but rather to provide additional capabilities. In the past, Goldfein has described light attack as a "network approach" to share intelligence between partners. Further experimentation will allow the Air Force to make "a smarter acquisition decision" with allies going forward, he said. "We're two years into this" already, Goldfein said, pointing out that programs typically take five to 10 years just to get through research and development and testing and evaluation, among other milestones. "How much and what we buy depends on how the [next] experiment goes." Speaking with reporters after the hearing, he said the service is exploring a conventional use for some of the aircraft at Nellis, as well as unconventional uses with special operations forces. The Air Force has the opportunity "to invite international partners to these bases to take a look at what we're doing and flesh out this network and increase interoperability," Goldfein said. "And that's the next step of this." The news comes after months of uncertainty surrounding the effort. The Air Force was supposed to publish a final request for proposal in December for a light attack aircraft, but it never happened. A draft RFP was first issued last August. The service first held a series of light attack experimental fly-offs and maneuvers at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico. In 2016, it announced plans to hold flight demonstrations with a handful of aircraft to test whether lighter, less expensive off-the-shelf planes might be suitable for lower-risk missions in places such as Afghanistan. The second phase of the experiment was canceled last July following a fatal crash. Even with the second phase cut short, Air Force officials have said the best fits for light attack are the Textron Aviation AT-6 Wolverine and Sierra Nevada/Embraer A-29 Super Tucano. "The two companies that have been with us have been spectacular," Goldfein said Wednesday. -- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214. New Rays right-hander Charlie Morton has been open in the past about his uncertainty surrounding how long he aims to continue playing, and he told MLB Networks Jon Morosi that he is fully expecting to retire once his current contract with the Rays expires (Twitter link). The 35-year-old signed a two-year, $30MM contract with Tampa Bay this offseason, allowing him to pitch closer to his Florida home. Mortons contract also contains a vesting option for the 2021 season, which leaves open the possibility that hell pitch through his age-37 season, though thats far from a certainty at this point. Signed by the Astros to a two-year contract prior to the 2017 season, Morton broke out as an unexpected star in Houston, not only giving the Stros 313 2/3 innings of 3.36 ERA ball but also providing some memorable postseason moments. The righty fired five shoutout innings against the Yankees in the decisive Game 7 of the 2017 ALCS, pitched six innings of one-run ball against the Dodgers in Game 4 of the 2017 World Series and closed out that same World Series in Game 7 with four innings of relief. Hell now join an upstart Rays club that carries similar postseason aspirations after surprising many onlookers with a 90-win season in 2018. Tampa Bay reportedly plans to only utilize three traditional starters 2018 Cy Young winner Blake Snell, Morton and young Tyler Glasnow with the other two would-be rotation spots being occupied by openers. Ryne Stanek, Emilio Pagan, Colin Poche, Wilmer Font and Hunter Wood are all reportedly in the mix for that role (Stanek was the teams most frequent option in 2018), while lefties Ryan Yarbrough and Jalen Beeks and right-hander Yonny Chirinos are currently the lead followup options. The Mariners have outrighted utilityman Kristopher Negron after he cleared waivers, per Ryan Divish of the Seattle Times (via Twitter). That leaves the team with a 40-man roster opening. Veteran outfield Ichiro Suzuki will ultimately need a roster spot to play in the clubs season-opening series in Japan. As Divish notes, todays decision clears the way for Dylan Moore to make the team as a bench piece. He had been battling with Negron for the honors. Negron, acquired in late August, has taken only 334 career plate appearances in the majors. The 33-year-old has torn up Triple-A pitching over the past two seasons, however. The Michigan House voted unanimously this week to put $10 million into a fund meant to compensate people wrongfully convicted of crimes thats currently running low. Under the Wrongful Imprisonment Compensation Act, exonerated former inmates are entitled to $50,000 per year they spent in prison if their claim is approved by the Court of Claims. As of March 4, the Wrongful Imprisonment Compensation Fund had $323,800 in it, according to the House Fiscal Agency, but currently the pending outstanding claims on the fund exceed $20 million. House Bill 4286 would put $10 million into the fund for this fiscal year. Clearly, the state of Michigan needed to right that wrong, said Rep. Steven Johnson of Wayland, the bills sponsor. It is a law...its incumbent upon us as lawmakers to fulfill our obligations. Johnsons bill would also require the Attorney Generals office to file quarterly reports to the legislature, fiscal agencies and state budget office on any payments made from the fund, payments that have been ordered but not made and any outstanding claims awaiting settlement. Johnsons legislation was in part inspired by Richard Phillips, a Michigan resident who is the longest serving exoneree in the United States. He was convicted of the 1971 murder of Gregory Harris and was exonerated in 2018 after new evidence emerged. Phillips could be eligible to receive more than $2 million under the act. He was present in the House Tuesday to witness the vote, and the entire room applauded when his name was announced. He said no amount of money could fully relieve the pain of what he went through - it pretty much destroyed my family, he said of his lengthy prison sentence - but he said he hoped keeping enough money in the fund could help get fellow exonerees the money theyre owed so they can live normal lives. Those people are struggling, and they need to get the money thats owed to them so that they can live lives just as normal as anybody else, he said. The people here wont have to suffer when they get out of prison and resort to things that they might not want to do. The legislation now heads to the Senate for further review. Johnson said hes spoken with Senate Appropriations Chair Jim Stamas, R-Midland, about the issue and is optimistic the bill will succeed. Before Michigan native Christina Hammock Koch can take part in the first-ever all-women spacewalk later this month, she first has to launch Thursday, March 14 to the International Space Station. Koch, NASAs Nick Hague and Alexey Ovchinin of the Russian space agency launch to the orbiting laboratory at 3:14 p.m. Thursday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The launch using a Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft will be broadcast live on NASA TV, its YouTube channel with recaps coming on several of its social media channels. See below for a live stream to NASA TV: The trip from Kazakhstan to the space station takes about six hours, and NASA estimates they will dock and officially start Expedition 59 at 9:07 p.m. Thursday. NASAs live coverage starts at 2 p.m., with docking coverage starting at 8:45 p.m., and the hatch opening and welcoming ceremony coverage set for 10:30 p.m. Related: Breaking down NASAs $21B 2020 budget that will take it from Moon to Mars About two hours later, hatches between the Soyuz and the station will open and the new residents will be greeted by NASA astronaut Anne McClain, station commander Oleg Kononenko of Roscosmos, and David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency," the space agency writes on its website. "The current three-person crew just welcomed the first American commercial crew vehicle as it docked to the station on March 3, amidst a busy schedule of scientific research and operations since arriving in December. Once aboard the orbiting laboratory, Expeditions 59 and 60 will continue work on experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science. As for the all-women spacewalk, that will take place on March 29 with Koch, Mcclain, lead flight director Mary Lawrence and lead flight controller Jackie Kagey. NASA will provide coverage of the spacewalk starting 6:30 a.m. March 29, on its website, social media channels and on NASA TV. McClain, will also take part in a seven-hour spacewalk on March 22 with fellow NASA astronaut Hague. As currently scheduled, the March 29 spacewalk will be the first with only women, a spokesperson with the space agency confirmed to CNN. It is the second in a series of three planned spacewalks. Anne also will join Nick Hague for the March 22 spacewalks. And, of course, assignments and schedules could always change." The spokesperson added that this all-women spacewalk was not orchestrated to be this way. Related: Making NASA history: Grand Rapids native is 3rd from West Michigan to become astronaut, 1st Michigan woman The crew aboard the @Space_Station is about to double in size! Thursday, astronauts @Astro_Christina and @AstroHague and Cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin will launch for a six-and-a-half month mission. Find out how to watch their March 14 launch to space: https://t.co/CD9RPkG7Zn pic.twitter.com/HaPTuWeFkG NASA (@NASA) March 13, 2019 Koch graduated from the NASA Academy at Goddard Space Flight Center back in 2001, and was selected as part of the 2013 astronaut class. She will serve as the flight engineer for Expeditions 59 and 60 once she arrives to the orbiting laboratory. While she is a Grand Rapids native, she now calls Jacksonville, North Carolina home. This will be Ovchinins third flight into space, the second for Hague and the first for Koch. Hague, Koch, and McClain are from NASAs 2013 astronaut class, half of which were women -- the highest percentage of female astronaut candidates ever selected for a class, NASA writes on its website Wednesday. TRAVERSE CITY, MI Police are looking for a man who allegedly walked into a Michigan Subway, made his own sandwich, rang up orders for other customers and took $20 from the cash register before leaving. According to the Associated Press, the peculiar incident occurred at the Subway restaurant inside a Traverse City Walmart on March 9. The Grand Traverse County sheriff's office said the man told workers at the Subway that he was an employee at another area Subway and asked to make his own sandwich. The workers told him no, but he allegedly walked behind the counter and made the sandwich anyway before taking several other customers orders and taking the $20, according to the Associated Press. Police are hoping surveillance footage may help identify the man. Theyre asking anyone who might know his identity to contact investigators in Grand Traverse County. Democratic presidential hopeful U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-New York, will visit Michigan for a televised town hall interview with MSNBC. Gillibrand will travel to Rochester Mills Production Brewery and Taproom in Auburn Hills on Monday, March 18. MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes is scheduled to lead an interactive discussion about her vision for the future of the country at 8 p.m., according to the network. The New York senator is expected to explain how her positions and beliefs stand in comparison to the other Democratic candidates hoping to unseat President Donald Trump in 2020, according to MSNBC. Michigan is expected to play a key role during the 2020 presidential election. The state helped elect Trump after supporting President Obama in 2008 and 2012, then elected Democratic candidates to statewide offices during the 2018 midterm elections. Gillibrand announced her exploratory committee on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in January. She has served in the U.S. Senate since 2009, replacing 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, and served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives. A crowded field of elected officials and public figures have entered the race so far, including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, who won Michigans 2016 Michigan primary election. Former Vice President Joe Biden is also facing pressure to run for president and may make an announcement soon. An early poll of Michigan voters by Emerson College found Biden leading the pack with the backing of 40 percent of voters surveyed. Democratic candidates from states in the Midwest include Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Earlier this week, it was announced that the Democratic National Convention will be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer invited all 2020 presidential candidates to Michigan, specifically naming Gillibrand, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Sanders; Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kamala Harris of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts; Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii; former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland; Julian Castro, former U.S. Secretary of House and Urban Development; entrepreneur Andrew Yang and author Marianne Williamson. Americans will elect the next president of the United States on Nov. 3, 2020. The first two of 12 Democratic primary presidential debates will be held in June and July, according to the DNC. WYANDOTTE, MI - Twin brothers from West Michigan have been stripped of their fishing licenses for surpassing the legal limit of walleye by 65 fish. Benjamin Schrouder of Ada and Steven Schrouder of Lowell, both 54, pleaded guilty in 27th District Court in Wyandotte for poaching the fish from the Detroit River in May 2018. The twins violations were discovered when a group of Department of Natural Resources conservation officers approached them following a complaint from a concerned angler who was fishing nearby. A search of the Schrouders coolers revealed multiple bags containing 75 fillets of fresh, unfrozen walleye, along with undersized walleye carcasses. The legal walleye limit on the Detroit River is five 15-inch walleye per day. COs David Schaumburger, Adam Beuthin, Keven Luther and Danielle Zubek seized the fish and issued citations to the poachers. This is a great example of how our officers and citizens work together to protect our natural resources, said Gary Hagler, chief of the DNRs Law Enforcement Division. The DNRs Report All Poaching hotline is a critical source for people to anonymously report poachers, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Conservation officers are always available and ready to respond. After failing to appear for their court date, a bench warrant was issued for both men. Conservation officers located and arrested the two brothers last week. They were arraigned in court and each was ordered to pay $2,070, including $700 in reimbursement for the over-limit of fish and $20 in conservation fees, along with having their fishing licenses revoked for one year. Reimbursement is calculated by weighing each individual fish, assessed at $10 per pound, according to the DNR. With the walleye river run approaching at the end of the month, we want to remind anglers to stay within their daily limits, Schaumburger, who was the first to approach the brothers, said. We also want to encourage others to report crimes such as this one. This caller saved countless fish for other anglers to legally pursue. Anyone who witnesses or suspects a natural resource violation is encouraged to call or text the Report All Poaching hotline at 800-292-7800. ANN ARBOR, MI - Anonymous supporters of an upcoming climate strike in Washtenaw County worked on getting the word out by hanging a large banner. The banner was draped down the east side of one of the smokestacks on the University of Michigans Central Power Plant on Wednesday, March 13. Washtenaw County Climate Strike Spokesman Matt Harmon said strike organizers were notified it was spotted early Wednesday. The strike takes place at 11:11 a.m. on Friday, March 15, when some Ann Arbor-area K-12 students will walk out of class. A noon rally marking the event also is scheduled on the UM Diag. Scheduled in conjunction with the Global Climate Strikes at the same time throughout the country, the event on the Diag will feature speeches from regional politicians and students from area schools and UM. Speakers confirmed on the UM Diag include former Michigan Gubernatorial candidate Abdul El Sayed; We the People of Detroit President Monica Lewis Patrick; Washtenaw County Environmental Council Chairwoman Michelle Deatrick; State Rep. Yousef Rabhi, D-Ann Arbor, several UM students; high school students Zaynab Elkolaly, Khadija Khokhar, and Paige Duff, and some Summers Knoll elementary and middle school students. The strike is part of a youth-led global movement called Fridays For Future started by Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old climate activist from Sweden. Students are walking out of class at 11:11 a.m. as a reference to the 11 years reported in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, advocating for the transition away from fossil fuels. We recognize that climate change is an ecological and humanitarian crisis on a massive scale that disproportionately causes the most harm to those who have done the least to cause it, namely low income and working class communities, communities of color, indigenous people, women and LGBTQ individuals and non-humans, strike organizers have said. Global scientific consensus tells us we have only 11 years remaining to curb the worst impacts of climate change and combat the causal systems of oppression that channel its effects to our most at-risk communities. Strike organizers have made a list of both national and local demands for the Ann Arbor City Council and UM. They are: Re-entry of the United States to the Paris Agreement End all extraction and burning of fossil fuels Commit resources to enact rapid and just energy transitions Create ambitious climate goals, including committing publicly to a goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2030 Pass proposed policy changes including a commitment to the Green New Deal, while allocating funding for the Ann Arbor Office of Sustainability and Innovations and establishing green revolving funds at the university, city, county and state levels Protect the right of all people by ensuring a healthy living environment, including eliminating the source and the presence of PFAS and 1,4-dioxane in water systems A complete breakdown of the groups demands can be found here. ANN ARBOR, MI -- Two lines of people stretched down the steps of Rackham Auditorium: One for people with tickets, waiting to get inside, and another for fans hoping for a standing-room-only spot. Alongside them stood protesters, who described the gathering as a setting for preaching hate." Tickets to see conservative commentator Ben Shapiro speak at the University of Michigan sold out in minutes, according to UMs chapter of Young Americas Foundation, a conservative youth group that organized the event. High school senior Janelle Selou said she waited with fingers hovering over her keyboard to buy tickets as soon as they went on sale. The bigger the government, the less freedom we have. Im excited to see Ben Shapiro and hear him talk about solutions to this issue, Janelle Selou said. UM student Nicole Hocott got her tickets from the Students for Life, an anti-abortion group at UM. She said several student organization set aside tickets for members. Hocott and fellow student Daniel Stanton expressed excitement as they waited in line to hear Shapiro speak, eager for the Q and A session. Im here to listen and hear different points of view. I think the Q and A session will go well and I hope people with differing points of view speak and Shapiro can have the chance to address them, Stanton said. Alongside those standing in line with tickets, demonstrators supporting and protesting Shapiro interacted outside the auditorium. Members of the Proud Boys, who describe themselves as western chauvinists," stood opposite protesters advocating for transgender rights. Demonstrators carried flags displaying the words Trans women are women and Trans men are men." After the doors opened, protesters chanted, Im pro-Trans, how 'bout you? Michael Knowles, writer for The Daily Wire, a conservative commentary website whose editor-in-chief is Shapiro, bounced between the groups, asking people questions about their beliefs. He got into a heated discussion with Ann Arbor resident and activist Jessica Prozinski, who said she was there in opposition to Ben Shapiro. Knowles asked Prozinski to describe the difference between sex and gender. Prozinski explained sex involves the biological anatomy of a human being, while gender is about social constructs and the expression of identity. The tense exchange ended with Prozinski walking away in exasperation. The speech began at 7 p.m. More coverage from Shapiros appearance to come. Update: Ben Shapiro talks Trump, Ocasio-Cortez and socialism in University of Michigan speech ANN ARBOR, MI - After poking fun at protesters outside Rackham Auditorium and deriding an alternative event held across campus in opposition to his appearance, Ben Shapiro zeroed in on his targets for the evening: Liberals and socialism. The popular conservative commentator covered a lot of ground Tuesday, March 12 during his speech at the University of Michigan, sounding off on political figures and ideologies ranging from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Donald Trump. One primary topic: The Government is the Bully. When government is acting to invade the rights of other people, even for the purported good of the many - thats when the government is the bully, Shapiro said. "The call for socialism, in essence, is a call to invade the rights of others on behalf of ourselves or on behalf of the greater good. Folks who portray socialism as inherently altruistic are full of it, he added. Socialism is not inherently altruistic. Socialism is about sticking your hand in somebody elses pocket because you voted to do so. There werent any bullies in Shapiros path during his speech, which was hosted by UM chapter of Young Americas Foundation. Past speeches by controversial conservative figures at UM have been interrupted by protesters, but Tuesday nights capacity crowd was filled with Shapiro supporters who gave The Daily Wire editor-in-chief a standing ovation and applauded after many of the answers he gave during a question and answer session. Shapiro spoke for about 30 minutes, before taking questions for another 30 minutes. Despite scant protests in opposition to Shapiro outside the venue, he was encouraged by the campus climate that greeted him. There is obviously a market for conservatism here at the University of Michigan Shapiro said, referring to the more than 6,000 people on the waiting list to see his speech Tuesday. Shapiro entertained with his takes on a variety of political figures and topics. On Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: She really does simplify all of the most complex aspects of the left that remain on bumper stickers ... and also she dances. On President Donald Trump: I didnt know where he came down on any positions. ... That fear has been mitigated. He passed tax cuts, hes cut regulations, hes rebuilt the American military. While Shapiro said hed be more likely to vote for Trump in 2020 than he was in 2016, he also spoke negatively about the presidents influence. There was a feeling (before the 2016 election) that he would poison the Republican brand for young people. I think thats basically true. On intellectual conservatives: Would I like to see a more intellectual conservatism that is not focused on slogans and is much more focused on underlying principles? Of course. I think a well-read, well-informed conservatism is more convincing. On less government intervention: Im not in favor of giving government the power to do things. I like when they can use the same power to do stuff that I dont like." On the current political climate: I think we were moving in the direction of simplistic, stupid politics before Trump and I think that has exacerbated under Trump, and that is largely the effect of the media. ANN ARBOR, MI - U.S. Reps. Debbie Dingell, D-Dearborn, and Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, are pressing immigration officials to halt the deportation of University of Michigan Knight-Wallace journalism fellow Emilio Gutierrez Soto and to approve his request for asylum. U.S. Immigration Judge Robert Hough ordered that Gutierrez and his son be removed from the United States in a Feb. 28 decision. The ruling came after Gutierrez and his son, Oscar, were freed on July 26, 2018 from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Texas. Dingell and Upton urged ICE in a letter Wednesday, March 13 to halt Gutierrez Sotos deportation and take action to decide his asylum case. Dingell introduced what is known as a private bill - one that applies specifically to Gutierrez Sotos case and - if passed, would provide him and his son relief. The University of Michigan community, members of the media, advocates for press freedom around the country, and many Americans continue to share our deep concerns about Mr. Gutierrez Sotos safety should he return to Mexico, wrote Dingell and Upton. Mexico remains the deadliest country for journalists worldwide that is not engaged in armed conflict, and two journalists have already been murdered in the country this year. Given this set of facts, along with the legitimate documented concerns surrounding Mr. Gutierrez Sotos safety, we strongly supports his request for asylum." In 2017, an immigration judge in El Paso, Texas, denied Gutierrezs asylum request and he was scheduled for deportation. The deportation was halted after protests from numerous journalism organizations, including The National Press Club, Reporters Without Borders and the American Society of News Editors. Gutierrez entered the country 11 years ago seeking asylum after his reporting on corruption in his home country. As a result of his reporting, Gutierrez Soto received multiple death threats from figures connected to the Mexican military. In his ruling, Hough said Gutierrez Soto failed to demonstrate he suffered past persecution or has a well-founded fear of future persecution if he were forced to return to Mexico. On March 7, Gutierrezs attorney Eduardo Beckett filed an appeal to the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals. A 2018 letter from the U.S. Department of State submitted to Hough advocating for Gutierrez referred to Mexico as the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist outside of war zones, with 51 journalists killed there since 2010, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The full letter is available here. ANN ARBOR, MI -- Washtenaw County sheriffs deputies were stationed at Honey Creek Community School in Ann Arbor Wednesday, after a threat to shoot up the building was found written on a wall of the girls bathroom on Tuesday, spokesman Derrick Jackson said. Its not believed to be a credible threat," Jackson said. As a precaution, deputies were on scene March 13 checking backpacks as students arrived in the morning, according to Washtenaw Intermediate School District spokeswoman Ashley Kryscynski. Its an ongoing investigation and, at this time, theyre still looking for the suspect, she said. Honey Creek Community School has nearly 250 enrolled students and is located at 1735 S. Wagner Road. It shares a campus with High Point School, a public school for special-needs and disabled students. President Donald Trump has signed into law the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management and Recreation Act. U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Dearborn, stood beside Trump during a bill signing ceremony in the Oval Office on Tuesday, March 12, along with several other members of Congress. The new law honors her late husband, the nations longest-serving Congress member, who died last month at 92. John would have been so proud to see Democrats and Republicans come together to sign into law a landmark public lands bill to conserve and protect Americas wild plants, fish, animals, and their habitats, Debbie Dingell wrote on Facebook. Smiles and tears all at once. The White House described it as a bipartisan package of more than 100 public lands, natural resources and water bills, the result of months of negotiations, providing federal protections to millions of acres of federal lands. It also includes a permanent reauthorization for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, something for which John Dingell advocated during his time in office. The bills, sent to the president last week, promote conservation, recreation, historic preservation and cultural resource protection in Michigan and across the country. Included in the package are designations for 1.3 million acres of new wilderness and protections for more than 1 million acres of public lands from future mining operations, including a sensitive area at the gateway of Yellowstone National Park. See a summary of the new law The MotorCities National Heritage Area also will see an authorization increase of $2 million, Debbie Dingells office said, noting the LWCF already has invested more than $329 million to protect Michigan lands and increase recreational opportunities. LWCF funding has protected some of this countrys most treasured natural resources, while creating jobs, supporting local economies, and providing countless opportunities for recreation, Debbie Dingell said in a statement last week. Since 1965, LWCF has provided over $3.9 billion for over 40,000 projects in every county across the country with every $1 invested returning $4 in economic value. Debbie Dingell said her late husbands life was driven by his love of hunting and fishing, his passion for the outdoors and protecting the nations natural resources. Had he never been a park ranger as a young man, she said, he might never have run for Congress. The provisions in the new law honoring him will safeguard the nations conservation legacy for decades to come, she said. MARYSVILLE, MI -- A 16-year-old Marysville High School student is facing domestic terrorism charges after a video surfaced in which a threat was made to the building. In a statement addressed to parents and community members on Tuesday, March 12, Marysville schools Superintendent Shawn Wightman said the correspondence went out due to an inappropriate video made by one of our high school students rapping about shooting up the school." Marysville police Deputy Chief Ron Buckmaster said the video, which has been taken down, clearly showed the student rapping about how he would be on a local TV station for shooting up the school. Building-level administrators learned of the video shortly after 2 p.m. Tuesday afternoon. The Marysville Police Department was immediately notified of the issue, Wightman said. He noted the student was not at school on Tuesday, but the building-level administration contacted the students parents about the video. Our highest priority during a serious incident or a crisis in the district is the safety and well-being of our students, staff and visitors, said Wightman. Consequently the ... incident will be fully investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Wightman told MLive-The Flint Journal Tuesday night that the student was arrested by Marysville police and is indefinitely prohibited from being present on school grounds. The student has been suspended, pending the outcome of the investigation by the department, he added. Upon conclusion of this process, the student may be given a long-term suspension or expelled by the district. He pointed out in the statement that the district performs routine safety drills including lockdown, fire, tornado and active shooter drills with staff and students, as well as having secure entries in all buildings and a recently hired school and security campus specialist. We will also continue to speak with our students and ask them to keep the lines of communication open; if they see, hear, or know something -- say something," Wightman said. The student is in being held in a Juvenile Detention Facility in Macomb County, Buckmaster said. He will be transported back to St. Clair County Wednesday afternoon for arraignment on charges. GRAND RAPIDS TOWNSHIP, MI -- Court documents detail the sexual assault allegations that two separate women made against a former Spectrum Health Blodgett Hospital worker. Francisco Muniz, 39, is charged with third-degree criminal sexual conduct and fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct. He is expected in a Grand Rapids Township courtroom Wednesday, March 20 for a hearing. Court documents show that a woman alleged she was assaulted July 22 after seeking treatment at the hospital emergency department, 1840 Wealthy St. SE. She alleged she was in a patient room when Muniz put his hand under her gown and assaulted her. The woman later told East Grand Rapids police detectives that he commented this would help with the victims pain. The woman said Muniz stopped what he was doing when she told him a friend was coming back to her room. In the second alleged assault, on Jan. 30, another woman told police she also sought treatment from the emergency department. She told police she was getting X-rays and that Muniz cupped his hand over her genitals four different times. The touching was over her gown. Spectrum Health, who said Muniz no longer works for Spectrum, issued a statement about the incidents: "We are deeply saddened about the allegations made against a former Spectrum Health radiology employee and his arrest. The care and safety of our patients is of great importance to Spectrum Health. Patients should feel safe when under the care of their health care provider. We will take this opportunity to strengthen our practices and ensure that our patients are safe in our care. We are fully cooperating with law enforcement and will do whatever we can to support the legal process. With this being a criminal and emerging matter, we will not be commenting further at this time. Muniz, of Greenville, is free on bond. GRAND RAPIDS, MI Cheryl Schuch beamed with satisfaction Tuesday as she watched a mother shower her two young children with love and affection inside a playroom at the newly opened Fulton Manor Emergency Family Shelter in Grand Rapids. Schuch, executive director of Family Promise of Grand Rapids, the nonprofit that operates the shelter, said it wasnt long ago that the mother and her children came face-to-face with one of lifes biggest challenges: homelessness. But thanks to the new shelter, which has helped Family Promise serve families that were previously on a waiting list, the mother and her five children now have a safe place to call home while they work to get back on their feet. For us to be able to see families in a warm space, a great space like this with great staff, great volunteers and getting warm meals thats why we do the work we do, said Schuch, who asked that the name of the mother using the shelter not be used. Family Promise opened the Fulton Manor shelter, 1450 Fulton St. E, in February. Its now serving 31 families, who receive food, clothing and diapers, and help from staff finding permanent housing. The average family stay is expected to be about 20 days. Schuch says the shelter, which can house 75 families, is helping address a growing crisis surrounding homelessness in Kent County. Families are being hurt by rising rent. And because theres a shortage of family shelters many serve men or women only a lot of families who lose their home or can no longer make rent are forced to stay with friends or family, she said. Others end up in hotels or, even worse, on the street sleeping in cars, tents or unheated garages, Schuch said. Thats just a dangerous situation, she said. You dont have the things you need to have your basic needs met. Pinpointing the exact number of homeless people in Kent County is a challenge. Last year, there were 723 people living in emergency shelter, transitional housing or without shelter, according to the Grand Rapids Area Coalition to End Homelessness annual point in time survey. The total was 912 in 2017. In the 2017-18 school year, the Kent Intermediate School District a regional education service agency that provides services to districts within Kent County counted 2,392 students as homeless. Students are counted homeless when they lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence. While the new shelter is having a big impact, Schuch says it wont be around for long. Fulton Manor is owned by Holland Home, and for decades served as an assisted living center for the elderly. Holland Home announced in 2017 that it was closing the facility, saying it had become obsolete. It struck a deal to let Family Promise lease the building this year, after which Holland Home intends to redevelop or sell the structure, Schuch said. And while discussions are ongoing with various organizations in West Michigan about how to better tackle homelessness, Schuch said shes nervous about the prospect of losing the space it gained at Fulton Manor. Because we live in this space and we see these families every day, we have an incredible sense of urgency about this, she said. This isnt a lets wait and see how things pan out. These families need help now. Theyre in danger now. Launching Fulton Manor cost about $950,000, a figure that includes client services, food and other basic needs for tenants, Schuch said. Its having a significant impact on Family Promises ability to serve the area. There were 110 families on organizations wait list when it launched the shelter, a number the nonprofit expects to drop to zero by next week, Schuch said. For the first time in almost three years, we wont have a wait list, she said. Thats huge. Thats a big change for our community. The shelter is housing 31 families now, but because families come and go in a regular fashion it has served about 50 since opening. Fulton Manor was launched with the help of several community partners, including Kids Food Basket and the United Way. It also received support from Degage Ministries, the Inner City Christian Federation and the Coalition to End Homelessness. Afton DeVos, chief operating officer at Kids Food Basket, said Fulton Manor is an important project because a strong West Michigan depends on strong kids and families. This partnership is a tremendous opportunity to provide the most basic necessities for any family; food and shelter, further expanding our mission of nourishing children to thrive, DeVos said in a statement. Schuch echoed that statement, pointing out that 70 percent of the people served by Family Promise are children, many of whom are younger than 10. Knowing that those kids are coming in and safe now, thats what this is all about." GRAND RAPIDS, MI North Park Montessori parents met with representatives from Grand Rapids schools, the health department, and state agencies Tuesday, March 12, about potential asbestos exposure at the school during a construction project. The school, located at 3375 Cheney Ave. NE, closed Friday, Feb. 15, when the district announced, plaster possibly containing asbestos was breached due to the cutting, drilling, and construction work.'' As of Feb. 20, the 364 students were relocated to GRPS University. John Helmholdt, communications director for Grand Rapids schools, told families that the first- through eighth-graders should be prepared to complete the remainder of the school year at the new building. We still dont have all the answers, Helmholdt told parents in the first of two meetings Tuesday. There are ongoing investigations, both the internal investigation that the district is doing, the investigation that our friends at MIOSHA (Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration) are doing, and that the DEQ (Department of Environmental Quality) is doing. Helmholdt said they are hopeful they will be able to provide more information from those investigations, particularly around the sampling that needs to occur to test for asbestos, lead, and silica. There was a delay in the process because the district had to replace MicroAir Consulting in February as the project designer. Some parents wanted a different company that had not been involved with the building previously. Families attending the meeting at City High Middle School were told Tuesday that Ann Arbor-based NOVA Environmental is the new project designer and would be in Grand Rapids Wednesday, March 13. The company is required to develop a project design plan for the following: Determining the scope of potential contamination Cleaning and decontamination Clearance air monitoring The plan will be submitted to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services and the Kent County Health Department, who have been in consultation with the Environmental Protection Agency. Representatives from both agencies addressed the crowd, as well as MIOSHA. The 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. meetings were closed to the media by the district to communicate directly with our parents and staff. However, the event was videotaped and on Youtube. Approximately 40 people attended the morning meeting. Questions from parents ran the gamut, including questions about oversight over the construction project to replace heating and cooling in the 1924 building. Who makes sure that protocols are followed? asked one parent. Is OSHA made aware of our construction schedule? The Christman Company is the districts construction management company for the project. There is an asbestos management plan that lays out procedures to be followed for handling suspected asbestos-containing materials. The first plaster work at North Park started in November, not in January, as Helmholdt said the district previously thought. This timeline was revealed by Christman at the first meeting with parents on Feb. 16. Another parent asked about the likelihood students would return to the building for the 2019-20 school year. She said her child was already upset about being in the new building. Helmholdt said its premature to answer, but the district anticipates things could be addressed by August for students to return to their home school. Still, another parent inquired about students being able to fully immerse themselves in the Montessori methods and practices again. We all chose Montessori for a reason, said parent Marie-Claire Camp. The Montessori method of education is a child-centered educational approach that has been practiced over 100 years in diverse cultures throughout the world. The basic tenet of Montessori education is that a student learns best in an enriched, supportive environment through exploration, creativity and discovery with the guidance and encouragement of teachers trained in the method. We are continuing to work toward that and what more do they (teachers) need to support teaching and learning in the Montessori method, Helmholdt said. "We want to make it as authentic Montessori method as it can be.'' North Park Principal Maureen Capillo said Montessori is happening and teachers are working with what they have and kids are learning. She said she is very proud of how her staff has handled the transition as well as the district. "I am not sure I agree with the idea that we need to reproduce a fully functional Montessori environment at GRPS U for all 20 classrooms for all 20 months,'' she said, noting there are enough resources and materials to finish the school year. "I would rather that we focused our attention and resources looking a little bit longer out in terms of that higher fidelity Montessori programming that I know GRPS is committed to at all three Montessori schools going forward.'' Parents also raised questions about books, since the new building has no library. But Capillo said they have books in every classroom. She said they also are working on putting books on a cart that would go to the different classrooms. We cant replicate the library at big North Park, she said, noting that large donations of books have come in to support students. Parents also expressed frustration about having to file requests under the Freedom of Information Act to get information that should be in included in district files, for example, in the asbestos management plans. Helmholdt said the district is committed to being responsive to all the concerns of parents. JACKSON, MI James Lee Powell maintained his innocence during his sentencing Wednesday morning, claiming the court violated due process when he was convicted of drug and firearm charges nearly two months ago. This was a miscarriage of justice, Powell said during his March 13 sentencing before Circuit Judge John McBain. McBain sentenced Powell, 32, to 18 to 40 years in prison for one count of possession with intent to deliver more than 50 grams but less than 449 grams of cocaine. Additionally, he was sentenced to serve three to 10 years for one count of felon in possession of a firearm, one count of felon in possession of ammunition and two years each for three counts of felony firearms. Powell was found guilty by a jury after a two-day trial, Jan. 16. He says his conviction was unjustly obtained. Alibi witnesses on my behalf were not called during the trial who would have testified who the drugs there belonged to and how many people were living in the house, Powell said. Powell additionally accused police of warrant shopping where police went looking for a judge who would sign a search warrant without issue. Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Kelsey McKinnie called the accusation absurd, saying he can take it up with the appellate court. The Jackson Special Response Team was called at about 5 p.m., Oct. 10, 2017, when Michigan State Police received a tip a suspected armed parole absconder, later identified at Powell, was hiding out in a home in the 800 block of Helena Avenue, police said. Police entered the home and found Powell hiding under a mattress. He was arrested without further incident, they said. Officers searched the home and found a 40-caliber semi-automatic handgun, several boxes of ammunition and cocaine. The gun, which was reported stolen in 2013, had traces of Powells DNA on it but not his finger prints, police said. Powell and his attorney, Brian Hilderley, challenged the DNA evidence, stating his DNA was not the only DNA found on the gun. (Police) took a mouth swab and they found my saliva on the gun. I didnt lick this gun, Powell said. Powell was listed as a parole absconder at the time of his arrest, records show. He was paroled in 2015 on an armed robbery charge in Kent County. He has been incarcerated at the Muskegon Correctional Facility since his arrest. Powell is eligible to appeal his case to the Michigan Court of Appeals. BLACKMAN TWP., MI Dollar General is considering closing a store on the east side of Jackson and building a new one a half-mile down the street. Jackson County has approved a brownfield plan for redevelopment at 2400 E. Michigan Ave. to build a new Dollar General, which would lead to the closure of the 3025 E. Michigan Ave. store, Dollar General spokeswoman Angela Petkovic said in an email. The company hasnt finalized the project yet, Petkovic said, but is expected to sometime this month. The new building is scheduled to be built and open by August, according to the brownfield plan. Midwest V is the developer looking to build a 9,100-square-foot building on the site. The property was home to Stone Lumber from the late 1800s to 1980s, per the brownfield plan and Jackson County Board of Commissioners Chairman James Steve Shotwell Jr. The brownfield plan allows developers to use increases in local property taxes for environmental testing and contaminant mitigation during the 23-year plan. The current taxable value is $68,000, but is expected to increase to $350,000 after construction, per the plan. Contaminants found at the site include arsenic, trichloroethylene, chromium, copper, lead, mercury and selenium. The groundwater contamination is believed to be caused by an industrial facility to the west, said Amy Guerriero, Jackson County Brownfield Redevelopment Authority executive director. The project will take a $1.35 million investment, the plan states. "It's kind of an eyesore site," Guerriero said. "There's not a lot of groceries or even convenience foods out that way. So it's a bit of a tiny food desert, I think." Daniel Mahoney was the lone county commissioner voting against the brownfield plan. Nobody gets groceries at Dollar General unless its an absolute emergency, he said. "Dollar General doesn't serve anything fresh," Mahoney said. "No fresh fruits, no fresh vegetables, no fresh meat. Everything that Dollar General would sell is in a box. So I don't know how that would necessarily be helping with that area being a food desert." Dollar General has 21 locations in Jackson County, with no current plans to open more besides the East Michigan Avenue location, Petkovic said. KALAMAZOO, MI A former firefighter and ambulance employee was killed in a shootout with police that also injured an officer, according to a Parchment city official. Brandon Stacey, 31, was killed in an exchange of gunfire with Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety officers on Tuesday, March 12, Parchment City Manager Nancy Stoddard said. Stacey was a paid, on-call firefighter in Parchment, Stoddard said, from June 26, 2013, until Aug. 7, 2017. Stacey also worked at Life EMS Ambulance service from February 2016 until he resigned in August 2017, according to a statement made on behalf of the company by public relations firm Seyferth PR. A Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety officer was also shot Tuesday after he and another officer responded to the Biomat USA donor center in downtown Kalamazoo for a report of a shooting and exchanged gunfire with Stacey. Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety Chief Karianne Thomas said at a press conference Tuesday afternoon the first two officers arriving to the report of a shooting at the business were confronted by a gunman standing just inside the door armed with a handgun. The gunman shot at the officers, Thomas said, striking the bulletproof vest of one. The officers shot and killed the suspect, police said. KDPS has not confirmed Staceys identity and has not named the two officers involved in the incident, though Thomas said the officer whose bulletproof vest was struck was released from the hospital Tuesday. The incident is under investigation. Stacey was employed at the plasma donation center at the time of the shooting, and had been an employee for less than a year, Grifols Public Affairs Director Vlasta Hakes said in a prepared statement. Our number one priority is always the health and safety of our employees and donors. We are especially grateful to the first responders and in particular, the police officer who was injured in the line of duty. Additionally, we thank our employees for acting quickly to help prevent any additional injuries, Hakes said. The company company fully cooperated with the KDPS investigation of the incident, Hakes said. Stacey lived at an address north of Parchment, according to court records. On Wednesday afternoon, March 13, childrens toys were seen in the front yard of the home. A barking dog was the only activity at the house. Ray Key, who lives across from the Stacey home, said Brandon Stacey was a friendly neighbor who took care of his child really well. There were multiple Michigan State Police vehicles and detectives at the home Tuesday, he said. The couple had one young daughter, Key said. Theyre average people," the neighbor said. Real likable people." Immediate family members could not be reached for comment at the home Wednesday. Stacey and his wife, Kristina Stacey, filed for bankruptcy in October 2018. A court filing shows a Chapter 13 plan that they signed, agreeing to pay creditor Amerifirst Financial Corporation $19,619.92, and other terms. Family and friends were stunned to learn he shot a police officer before police returned fire and killed him, a friend said. Those closest to him think he wanted to commit suicide by cop. They could not imagine he would shoot a police officer and speculated that he shot at the officers chest, knowing it was protected by a bulletproof vest. He wasnt a cop killer, he was looking to hurt himself, the friend said, asking his name not be used. After Stacey allegedly tried to kill himself last year, he underwent mental-health treatment and his wife removed guns from their home, the friend said. The friend said Stacey spent time in foster homes growing up. He worried if he could be a good father to his young daughter. He appeared to be a good dad, the friend said. Stacey was happy and smiling the last time the friend saw him. A lot of people who knew him wondered how he could shoot a police officer. He had worked jobs helping others. I dont think they saw it coming at all, the friend said. The incident Tuesday was the first time a Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety was shot in the line of duty since the fatal shooting of officer Eric Zapata in 2011. Zapata, 35 and a 10-year veteran of the force, was shot after he and other officers were dispatched on a report of shots fired on April 9, 2011, in the 1400 block of Hays Park Avenue in Kalamazoos Edison neighborhood. Tuesdays shooting was also the first fatal shooting by police in the city of Kalamazoo in more than five years. -- MLive Reporter John Agar contributed to this report. KALAMAZOO, MI Police in Kalamazoo are using grant funding for traffic enforcement downtown beginning this week in an effort to increase pedestrian safety. Grants were awarded to police in three Michigan cities,including Kalamazoo, for the week from Sunday, March 10, through Saturday, March 16, to help reduce pedestrian injuries and fatalities. Based on traffic crash data, the grant directs the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety to focus enforcement efforts on the downtown area and along West Michigan Avenue west of Western Michigan Universitys campus, KDPS Captain Matt Huber said. KDPS received $78,416, and the grant allows outside law enforcement agencies to assist with the enforcement, Huber said. The grant will pay for about 1,160 hours of enforcement and only covers personnel costs, Huber said. The city is required to provide a 20 percent local match, he said. The goal of this enforcement is to reduce pedestrian and bicyclists accidents through enforcement and education, Huber said in an email to MLive. Not only will officers be addressing the unsafe habits of pedestrians and bicyclists, they will also be addressing unsafe driving habits of motorists whos actions are endangering both pedestrians and bicyclists. Citations can be issued during the stops, however it is the officers discretion based on the violation they observed. Officers will be on the lookout for violations by drivers including speeding, illegal turns, failing to stop at a signal or stop sign before a crosswalk, failing to yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk at a signalized intersection, and blocking a roadway that interferes with the normal flow of traffic, the Office of Highway Safety Planning (OHSP) said. Officers will be looking for violations by pedestrians including not following traffic control signals, not walking on a sidewalk where provided, not walking facing traffic when on a roadway, and failing to yield to drivers with the right-of-way. The enforcement will focus on behaviors of vehicle drivers and pedestrians, but police will also look out for bicyclists, Office of Highway Safety Planning Communications Strategist Kari Arend said. The OHSP identified Kalamazoo, as well as Detroit and Warren, as having some of the highest numbers of pedestrian crashes over a five-year period. Kalamazoo had a total of 264 pedestrian crashes and 195 bicyclist crashes during a five-year period from 2013 to 2017. Kalamazoo is the 13th most populous Michigan city, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. But crash statistics show Kalamazoo as the fourth highest for pedestrian crashes and the sixth highest for bicyclist crashes over the five-year period, the OHSP said. Kalamazoo resident Matthew Lechel said downtown Kalamazoo is a dangerous place for pedestrians and that major streets downtown are car-dominated and unsafe for pedestrians. He disagrees with the enforcement against pedestrians and said if police are ticketing them in downtown Kalamazoo, his advice to stay away during the enforcement period. He thinks changes are needed to make downtown safer for everyone. In a downtown completely dominated by cars, ticketing the most vulnerable road users is inequitable and ineffective, he said. The enforcement began Sunday, March 10, the same day a pedestrian was struck by an Amtrak train in Kalamazoo. The start of daylight saving time on Sunday, March 10, also marked the beginning of the grant-funded enforcement period. The time change is critical for pedestrian safety as roadway users adjust to a shift in daylight hours, the OHSP said, advising pedestrians and motorists to take extra caution to be aware of each other, avoid distractions and follow traffic signals. State, regional, and local organizations are working hard to reduce pedestrian fatalities and injuries in Michigan, but there is still a lot more we can do, said Michael L. Prince, Michigan Office of Highway Safety Planning (OHSP) director. This enforcement period aims to educate community members about the importance of pedestrian safety and the traffic laws designed to protect them. The enforcement campaign is supported with federal traffic safety funds provided by the U.S. Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and coordinated by the OHSP. MUSKEGON COUNTY, MI Sheriff deputies swarmed the courtroom as an evil man was sentenced for murder Wednesday a day earlier than expected due to security concerns. Previous outbursts and altercations surrounding Kahlek McPhersons trial prompted the Muskegon County court to switch his sentencing date. McPherson, who defiantly and briefly addressed his victims family, will never leave prison for the July 4, 2017, murder of Corey Thompson. Thompson, 44, was ambushed as he sat drinking a beer on a front porch retribution, according to the prosecutor, for a perceived disrespect committed by Thompsons brother. Thompson, who went by the street name Dirty, was the father of four. Corey Thompson and his nephew Two other men who were with McPherson the night of Thompsons murder and were captured on video surveillance lurking around the murder scene remain under investigation for the murder, Muskegon County Senior Assistant Prosecutor Benjamin Medema told MLive/Muskegon Chronicle. This was an evil act, Medema told Muskegon County Circuit Judge Annette Smedley before she handed down the mandatory life-without-parole sentence. It was cold. It was calculated. It was premeditated. He is an evil person, Medema continued. He deserves the sentence you are required to hand out. Thompson was murdered because McPherson felt disrespected by Thompsons brother earlier in the day, Medema argued at trial. Keith Thompson testified that Corey Thompson told him about a dispute with a group of individuals at a local store that day, and that Keith Thompson then confronted about 100 people in a nearby park. He said he told them to leave Corey alone. Instead, McPherson armed himself with a long-barrel silver revolver, and approached the home where Thompson was sitting alone and in the dark, Medema said at trial. McPherson later admitted to his then girlfriend that he killed Thompson and instructed her in a letter from jail to retrieve the gun where he had hidden it, clean his fingerprints from it and try to sell it, she testified. McPhersons trial was marred by physical and verbal altercations. Another of Thompsons brothers ended up getting into a physical fight with a supporter of McPherson in a courthouse hallway. When the guilty verdict against him was read on Feb. 11, McPherson stood up in court, turned and yelled out to Thompsons family that If he wasnt such a bitch, I wouldnt have shot him! That was after he proclaimed his innocence from the witness stand. McPhersons verdict outburst prompted a woman Thompson had been dating to stand up in court and hurl insults at McPherson. She was removed by bailiffs who placed her in handcuffs. All of that prompted the court to quietly reschedule McPhersons sentencing, which had been set for Thursday, March 14. Even though no one showed up to support McPherson at his sentencing Wednesday, a half dozen deputies were present to keep the peace. Medema read a letter from Thompsons mother, Linda Thompson, prior to sentencing. In it, she noted that after her son was shot, McPherson had posted RIP Dirty on Facebook an action she suggested was an effort to deflect suspicion of his involvement. This person who took him from us is a monster, she wrote. Medema noted that McPherson has a lengthy juvenile record as well as adult convictions and was on parole when he murdered Thompson. In addition, he was facing charges of armed robbery and criminal sexual assault of a woman who had befriended him and given him rides. He also was charged with resisting and obstructing an officer causing injury for an alleged incident in the Muskegon County Jail during which, the officer testified, McPherson violently assaulted him and tried to throw him off a catwalk. Charges in both cases have been dismissed. At sentencing Wednesday, the prosecution requested the judge order McPherson to pay $4,000 in restitution to Thompsons family to cover the cost of his funeral. McPhersons attorney, Kevin Wistrom, objected, saying he hadnt seen an actual bill proving the charges, and so Smedley said the issue would be dealt with later. Medema objected to the delay. He said while its obvious McPherson would never have the money to pay the restitution, Thompsons family could seek payment from other avenues, including Crime Victims Compensation from the state of Michigan. Just prior to being sentenced, McPherson declared his innocence, saying I didnt kill that man. I restate my innocence. As he was being led from the courtroom, McPherson turned to his victims mother and tauntingly told her shed never get a dime of restitution. MIDLAND, MI The U.S. Humane Society says it did an undercover investigation at a Michigan laboratory hired by a DowDuPont division where the group alleges three dozen beagles were being fed fungicides. The animal rights organization is calling on the public to sign a petition and demand DowDuPont stop the tests and release the dogs. Corteva Agriscience, the agriculture division of DowDuPont, plans to continue the study until it is no longer needed, Corteva said in a statement. Corteva said the testing is required by regulators in Brazil and it has discussed the issue with the Humane Society. Officials with Corteva Agriscience said the company cares about the welfare of the animals and agrees that there are better ways to attain data for the study and have been working with the Humane Society to encourage Brazils Agencia Nacional de Vigilancia Sanitaria (ANVISA) to amend its animal test requirements for pesticides. Please read our statement in response to the report published today by the Humane Society of the United States. pic.twitter.com/WO5mEpKTri Corteva Agriscience (@corteva) March 12, 2019 Dow Chemical, which formerly oversaw a fungicide business now under Corteva and DowDuPont, also responded to the Humane Societys statements. Dow has a strong commitment to ensuring the safety of our products, and the care and well-being of animals. Specifically, Corteva Agriscience, the Agriculture Division of DowDuPont, which includes Dows former fungicide business, has been working closely with the Humane Society of the U.S. for many months to encourage Brazils Agencia Nacional de Vigilancia Sanitaria (ANVISA) to amend its animal test requirements for pesticides. Once Corteva is given certainty that the study is no longer required, they will stop the study immediately, Dow said in an email on Wednesday, March 13. The testing has taken place at Charles Rivers Laboratories, 54943 N. Main St. in Mattawan, Michigan, located near Kalamazoo, said Kitty Block, CEO and president of the Humane Society of the United States. Charles River Laboratories released a statement in an email that reads: "Charles River Laboratories operates our facilities in a way that is consistent with our commitment to the welfare and ethical treatment of the animals in our care and in compliance with all federal regulations and international standards. As animal caregivers and scientific researchers, we are responsible to our clients and the public for the health and well-being of the animals under our stewardship, and we strive to fulfill that responsibility on a daily basis. Please read our statement in response to the report published today by the Humane Society of the United States. pic.twitter.com/kyNsPlSPzR Dow (@DowChemical) March 12, 2019 Block said the organization notified Dow about its findings and engaged in a dialogue about ending the test and releasing the dogs. But the Humane Society was told that that testing wont end until their specific product is approved, she said. We worked to secure information from the Brazilian government to confirm that the one-year test on beagles that they are carrying out isnt necessary but, despite this confirmation, the company said it will not end the test until their specific product is approved, Block said. That is when our discussions hit an impasse and we are now asking the public to join us in calling for Dow to end the test and release the dogs. Block said if the dogs get released they would be adopted into homes following a comprehensive veterinary exam to ensure that they are suitable for adoption. Dow said in its statement that once Corteva is given certainty the study is no longer required, they will stop the study immediately. It also commented on its own animal testing policy. Animal testing is not something Dow undertakes lightly, but neither is it something the company can discontinue when it is reqired by regulatory authorities. Dow keeps its use of animal testing to an absolute minimum. Dow is committed to finding alternatives to animal testing and has established a Predictive Toxicology team dedicated to this goal. Dow scientists actively advocate for alternative methods by engaging global regulatory agencies, and collaborates with governments, animal welfare organizations and researchers, Dow said in the statement. In theory, Title X is not about abortion. In reality, the federal health-care program is the new and explosive battleground in the decades-long war over abortion access. The Trump administration last month announced changes in Title X funding that would cut Planned Parenthood out of the program. It also would impose a so-called gag rule restricting other participants from discussing abortion with patients. At stake in Michigan is the ability of tens of thousands women to obtain subsidized reproductive health care, including well-woman exams, contraceptives, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and screenings and treatment for sexually transmitted disease. And medical professionals say the change limits their ability to have open conversations with those women about abortion. Michigan gets about $7.4 million a year in Title X funding. Last year, the program served about 62,700 Michigan residents, two-thirds of whom received those services through Planned Parenthood. Right to Life of Michigan says its a welcomed change to ensure taxpayer dollars will not indirectly subsidize organizations that provide abortions. This doesnt cut one penny of Title X funding, said Genevieve Marnon, spokeswoman and legislative director for Right to Life of Michigan. What will change, she said, is who gets the money. And as it is now, she added, Title X shores up companies that provide abortions." Others -- including a long list of medical associations -- have denounced the rule changes in scathing terms. They say a new gag rule violates the rights of patients and physicians. They also say the new rules defund organizations with a track record of success in Title X services and could shift the money to less qualified organizations. The new rules put doctors in an untenable situation and are "antithetical to quality care and undermines the patient-physician relationship, said a statement from the American Medical Association, which filed a lawsuit challenging the rule changes. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists accuses the Trump administration of political interference at its worst. Michigan state officials also are unhappy with the new rules. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said the White House is undermining" Title X, and Attorney General Dana Nessel has joined 20 other states in suing the Trump administration. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Title X implement in the state, said the new rules present challenges for all the providers in our network." Planned Parenthood and Title X About a third of abortions in the United States are obtained through Planned Parenthood, making it the nations single largest abortion provider. But Planned Parenthood also takes credit for contributing to the dramatic drops in unwanted pregnancies. Teen pregnancies are at their lowest rate ever, and the number of pregnancies among women under age 25 has dropped sharply. Even the number of unmarried women giving birth is inching down. Among the factors driving those trends: The growing popularity of long-term, more effective contraceptives such as IUDs; the availability of emergency contraceptives; and teens are waiting longer to become sexually active. Fewer unwanted pregnancies means fewer abortions: The number of U.S. abortions is at its lowest point since the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973. If people really want to limit abortions, they would link arms with us," said Lori Carpentier, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Michigan, pointing to Planned Parenthoods role in promoting and providing effective contraceptives. Planned Parenthoods participation in the Title X program is a key part of that mission, and Carpentier said the Michigan organization takes pride in maximizing federal dollars. Planned Parenthood received a $4.3 million grant from Title X in 2018-19, about 21 percent of the organizations revenues. The grant required the organization to serve a minimum of 20,072 patients. It actually served 42,300, thanks to supplementing the federal dollars with private fundraising and, where available, insurance reimbursements, Carpentier said. Indeed, Planned Parenthood of Michigan served 68 percent of Michigans Title X patients in 2018-19, and obtained 59 percent of Title X funding even though Planned Parenthood operates only 20 of the 93 Title X clinics throughout the state. The other 73 clinics were operated by county or regional health departments. (Below is an interactive map showing Title X clinics as of November 2018. The blue dots indicate clinics run by county health departments and the red dots are Planned Parenthood clinics. You can click on a dot to see underlying information.) Because Planned Parenthood provides abortions, the new rules would prohibit the organization from receiving future Title X dollars. Planned Parenthood could reorganize its abortion services in a different organization in different facilities, but Carpentier said that would be pretty untenable. And even more problematic, she said, is the restriction on discussing abortions with patients unless they raise the subject. Clinicians arent allowed to give information, and thats a line we will not cross, she said. Also problematic, she said, is replacing Title X dollars through fundraising. Im not sure what will happen," Carpentier said. "I think our supporters would step up, but the idea that we would raise another $4.3 million a year is unrealistic. A client stream Title X strictly forbids use of its dollars for abortion and Planned Parenthood is regularly audited to ensure that, said state officials. But from the perspective of Marnon, of Right to Life of Michigan, Title X indirectly subsidizes abortion by providing a revenue base that helps fund the buildings and clinicians who also provide abortions. Its a client stream for them, she said. As for the gag rule, Marnon says Title X is a family-planning program for women who arent pregnant, and questioned why discussions of abortion would even be necessary in that setting. Moreover, she said, organizations who feel constrained by the new rules dont have to participate. Title X is a voluntary program, she said. Others say Title X is the only federal program aimed specifically at family planning for low-income patients, and agencies such as Planned Parenthood now have to choose between the rules and their desire to serve underserved populations. In addition, Title X services include pregnancy testing, which means clinicians may work with women when they first discover they are pregnant. The rule changes mean clinicians cannot mention abortion as an option unless the patient mentions it first. By forcing providers to omit critical information about health care and resources available, the final regulation directly undermines patients confidence in their care," the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said in a statement. Who could fill the void Marnon said the rule change offers the opportunity "to expand the provider list for Title X services. But right now, there is not a lot of competition for those dollars. In the most recent funding cycle, all those who applied for Title X dollars were given money, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. If the provider list is expanded, Carpentier and others worry the uptick could come from faith-based clinics that stress the rhythm method and abstinence over evidence-based best-practices for family planning. Its a concern raised by American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which says the changes will steer patients to organizations "singularly focused on abstinence and fertility awareness methods, and could limit access to the most effective contraceptives, such the IUDs. We do this better than anybody," Carpentier said. "We do it more cost efficiently. We are the experts. And yet we would be prohibited. Impact of Obamacare Theres no question the rule changes would negatively impact Planned Parenthood. Less clear is the negative impact on Title X patients. One reason is the Affordable Care Act, which mandates insurance coverage of contraceptives and well-women annual exams without deductibles or co-pays. The ACA means that many patients who relied on Title X in the past now use their insurance to get birth control and annual physicals through their family doctor. Between the ACA and stagnant Title X funding, the number of Michigan residents served by Title X has dropped by 32 percent since 2013. But even with the ACA , Title X remains a safety net for many women, especially teenagers who dont want to use their parents insurance to get birth control, said Lisa Morrill, clinical manager for Michigan Health Department 10. The regional public health department serves 10 counties in northwest Michigan. Teens can feel free to come here, and were not going to notify their parents or their insurance companies, Morrill said. Morrill said the Title X rule changes will have minimal impact on her agency, saying they already operate family planning clinics in each county they serve and they already have a rule in place that says clinicians wont make an abortion referral unless asked. I dont anticipate a big change, Morrill said. Our current guidelines already say were not supposed to be talking about abortion. In Kalamazoo County, the only provider of Title X services is Planned Parenthood. They provide a valuable service," said Jim Rutherford, health office for the Kalamazoo County Health Department. If Planned Parenthood goes away, its going to be a burden on other entities." Carpentier, the head of Planned Parenthood of Michigan, is frustrated to even be having this conversation. This is not about abortion, she said. Its a basic health issue. A nearly $1 billion Soo Locks expansion project would stay on track with funding included in President Donald Trumps budget proposal for the next fiscal year. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced Tuesday that $75.3 million included in Trumps 2020 budget outline would allow the project to be finished within seven to 10 years of its start date. Two older locks will be replaced with a new 1,200-foot-long lock to allow large vessels to travel between Lake Superior and the lower Great Lakes. U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Midland, said more progress has been made toward building a new Lock since Trump met with several Republican Congressmen than there has been in decades. Trump said the aging locks are going to hell and are going to be fixed up during an April 2018 rally in Washington Township, shortly after discussing the project with Congressmen Jack Bergman, R-Watersmeet, and Paul Mitchell, R-Dryden. Bergman said construction of a new lock has been a failed endeavor by politicians for decades." The project stalled without funding despite being authorized by Congress in 1986. Im thankful President Trump has followed through on his promise to build a new lock and included a request of $75.3 million to continue Lock construction in FY2020," Bergman said. Less than a year ago I had the chance to ride with @realDonaldTrump to a rally in Washington Twp., Michigan and talk Soo Locks. Today, the President included over $75 million in his proposed budget to #BuildTheLock! Promises Made - Promises Kept. https://t.co/633QAAdldg Jack Bergman (@JackBergman_MI1) March 12, 2019 Approximately 80 million tons of commercial commodities, including iron, coal, grain and other materials, pass through the Soo Locks annually. The locks are considered nationally critical infrastructure and essential to U.S. manufacturing and national security, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. Mitchell said further funding for upgrades to the lock is welcome news. Any failure at the locks would have a devastating ripple effect on our nations economy and national security, Mitchell said. Construction of the new lock officially began after an allocation of $32 million from the fiscal year 2019 Army Corps work plan. Trump signed into law Americas Water Infrastructure Act last year, which allowed the project to compete with other construction projects throughout the country for funding. A bulk of funding in Trumps 2020 budget, $62 million, would go toward construction of upstream approach wall to allow modern vessels to tie up while waiting to pass through the new Soo Lock. The remaining funds would pay for continued design of the new Soo Lock chamber and complete construction to deepen an upstream channel. Design work will likely be finished in late 2019 and the construction contract will be awarded in summer 2020. U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township, said Trumps funding proposal is a good first step. Theres a lot of work ahead to ensure this project is finished," Peters said in a statement. 'I am committed to continuing to partner with my colleagues in the Michigan congressional delegation and the Administration to advance this project, because the Soo Locks are critical not only to Michigans economy but to our entire country. The odd connections between Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and two former military police suspected of murdering activist Marielle Franco are coincidences, cops have claimed after taking nearly a year to arrest the men. A photo of Bolsonaro with murder suspect Elcio Vieira de Queiroz dating back to 2011 went viral on social media after it was published on de Queiroz's Facebook account, which has since been deleted. While only the bottom half of his face is visible, Bolsonaro didn't claim it wasn't him in the photo, instead merely stating, "I've had my picture taken with thousands of soldiers all over Brazil." The fact that suspect #2 Ronnie Lessa lives in the same condo complex as Bolsonaro in the upscale Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Barra de Tijuca is also a coincidence, the police said, claiming it has "little to do with the Marielle affair." "There is no direct relationship with the Bolsonaro family, we've discovered nothing," police said, before a journalist's question prompted them to acknowledge a romantic relationship between Lessa's daughter and one of Bolsonaro's sons. However, they said, "that's not important for us at the moment." De Queiroz and Lessa, both former military policemen, were arrested on Tuesday on suspicion of the murder of Franco, a black gay rights activist and councilwoman who spoke out against police brutality and on behalf of the poor. She was killed along with her chauffeur, Anderson Gomes, in a drive-by shooting prosecutors say was planned three months in advance. Bolsonaro himself sees no significance in any connections between himself and the alleged killers, saying "the most important thing is to know who ordered this murder." Also on rt.com Protests as Brazilian court doubles ex-president Lulas jail term (PHOTOS, VIDEO) De Queiroz was fired from the military police in 2011 (around the same time he was photographed with Bolsonaro) after he was arrested as part of Operation Guillotine, a sting operation probing police involvement with drug traffickers and militia groups. Lessa retired after he was injured in a bomb explosion. China says it is ready to help Venezuela to restore its power grid. The South American country suffered a five-day blackout, with Caracas accusing Washington of cyber sabotage. Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Beijing had noted reports that the power grid had gone down due to a hacking attack. China is deeply concerned about this, Lu said, adding that Beijing hopes that the Venezuelan side can discover the reason for this issue as soon as possible and resume normal power supply and social order. Also on rt.com Blackout shuts down Venezuelas oil exports China is willing to provide help and technical support to restore Venezuelas power grid, said the spokesman. Venezuelan Minister of Communication and Information Jorge Rodriguez said on Tuesday that operations of the countrys power grid have almost fully resumed nationwide. The blackout hit Venezuela on March 7, as national electricity supplier Corpoelec reported sabotage at a major hydroelectric power plant called Guri. Power outages have been reported in 21 of the 23 Venezuelan states. Also on rt.com Cyberattacks & insider sabotage: Venezuelas power grid still under attack Maduro Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has blamed the United States for waging an energy war against his country, denouncing opposition leader Juan Guaido as Washingtons puppet. The US has denied any role in the crisis. Maduro said he would ask China, Russia, Cuba and Iran, as well as the United Nations, to probe the attack on the countrys power grid. For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section The upper house of the French parliament has greenlighted a bill giving police broad powers to quell unrest. It comes as a rights watchdog warned of civil liberties being undermined in France due to crackdowns on protest. Following hours of tense debate on Tuesday, the French Senate approved an anti-hooligan ('anti-casseurs') bill by a margin of 210 votes to 115. The bill has courted widespread controversy, having been denounced as "liberticide" by the left, and hailed as a "the law of protections" by the French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner. Also on rt.com French MPs back anti-riot law, forbidding protesters from hiding faces & barring troublemakers The government insists that the legislation will allow to distinguish between law-abiding protesters and violent rioters, while providing protection for both law enforcement and Yellow Vest demonstrators. Speaking ahead of the vote on Tuesday, Castaner defended the bill, saying that it "safeguards the right to demonstrate," while brushing off concerns that it encroaches on civil freedoms. "This text does not include an ounce of arbitrariness," he said. His view has not been shared by many among the opposition. Senator Jerome Durain of the center-left Socialist Party (PS) slammed the draft as "useless, imprecise and dangerous," arguing that it will only foment the unrest. "The dramatization of the situation does not serve anyone," Durain said. The bill, which was first introduced in parliament last year, has already received backing from the National Assembly, France's lower house. While the National Assembly overwhelmingly supported the bill in February, the vote saw an unprecedented number of abstentions within French President Emmanuel Macron's own La Republique En Marche (LREM) party. Some 50 LREM lawmakers chose not to approve the bill and one MP, Matthieu Orphelin, went as far as to desert the party ranks altogether in the wake of the vote. Many took issue with the provisions of the bill that prohibit protesters from wearing masks at rallies and allow police to single out and ban certain "troublemakers" from attending the 'acts.' The Yellow Vest protests have been marred by violence from both sides. While the French authorities blame radicals for inciting violence, protesters accuse the police of disproportionate use of force that has resulted in limbs getting torn off, eyes lost and other life-changing injuries for demonstrators who were caught up in the clashes. In the run-up to the bill's adoption, the head of the Defenseur des Droits de l'Homme (Defender of Human Rights) body, Jacques Toubon, called for change to the ham-fisted policing methods employed by the state, which he said was a legacy of the state of emergency imposed after a spate of Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks in November 2015. The state of emergency was lifted in 2017, but it has weakened the French legal system by giving police more leeway to crack down on rights and freedoms under the pretext of protecting national security, Toubon argued. It "helped lay the foundations for a new legal order, based on suspicion, in which fundamental rights and liberties have been somewhat weakened," Toubon said, calling it a "poisoned pill" that "gradually contaminated our common law, undermining the rule of law as well as the rights and freedoms." The law will now be referred to the Constitutional Council, which will ensure none of its points violate the constitution. Some lawmakers said they are placing hope on the Council to erase or modify the most troubling provisions. "We are now relying on the Council to purge this text of all its unconstitutionality," Maryse Carrere of the social-liberal The Radical Movement (MR) said. Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! Hungarys media publish more anti-EU ads Hungarys media publish more anti-EU ads Hungarys pro-government media continued to publish anti-EU messages on Wednesday. The previous day, a government official promised to halt the campaign during talks with a center-right European grouping. Government billboards against an EU chief and the US-Hungarian billionaire George Soros were criticized by members of the European Peoples Party (EPP), which is seeking to expel Prime Minister Viktor Orbans Fidesz party. On Wednesday, full-page adverts were in several pro-government dailies and continued on state television. The adverts, which depict a smiling Soros behind a grinning EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, say You have a right to know what Brussels is planning the same as the billboards that sprung up across the country, Reuters said.Source : RT - Daily news Indias aviation regulator has banned Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft from its airspace and grounded the nations entire fleet of the bestselling jet amid concerns over its safety in the wake of the recent crash in Ethiopia. The DGCA, the Indian aviation authority, announced the decision to ground all 737 MAX 8 single-aisle aircraft on Tuesday evening, following in the footsteps of numerous regulatory bodies in other countries and certain airlines. The planes will stay in hangars "till appropriate modification and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations," India's Ministry of Civil Aviation stated on Twitter. "As always, passenger safety remains our top priority. We continue to consult closely with regulators around the world, airlines, and aircraft manufacturers to ensure passenger safety," the ministry added. The order will affect two major Indian airlines, the low-cost SpiceJet, which lists 13 model MAX 8 jets among its fleet, and Jet Airways, which has five. SpiceJet echoed the aviation authority in its own statement, stressing that the safety of crew and passengers is of preeminent importance to the carrier. On Monday, the airline sought to defend the jet amid a wave of groundings, calling it a "highly sophisticated aircraft." The suspension comes a day after the DGCA ordered additional maintenance checks on the planes and instructed the airlines to ensure that the aircraft are flown only by experienced pilots and co-pilots that have clocked in at least 1,000 hours and 500 hours on 737 MAX 8 jets, respectively. Early on Wednesday, India closed its airspace to the troubled Boeing model completely. No B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit Indian airspace effective 1600hrs IST or 1030 UTC, the ministry tweeted. Also on rt.com Europe bans Boeing 737 MAX: Planes grounded, diverted as nations shut airspace over Ethiopia crash Planes had to be diverted and grounded when the EU announced that its airspace was off-limits for the aircraft on Tuesday, citing safety concerns. An array of other countries have suspended flights while the investigation into the crash of the Ethiopian Airlines jet on Sunday, which killed 157 people on board, is underway. Four Indians were among the victims. China, Indonesia, Mongolia, Norway, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Singapore and Oman placed a temporary ban on flying the jets. Several European countries, including the UK, France, Germany, Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway and Belgium suspended flights in a separate move from the EU. Several individual airlines followed suit of their own will. Boeing shares continued sliding on Tuesday, tanking by a further six percent, which amounts to a roughly an 11-percent drop in two days. Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! The Indian arms developer DRDO has test-fired the guided version of Indias indigenous rocket artillery system, Pinaka, just as its rival Pakistan successfully tested new air-to-surface munitions. Pinaka was originally developed by India as a domestic replacement for Russian multiple rocket launchers. Pinaka Mark II, or Guided Pinaka, is a different kind of weapon meant to deliver precise strikes at a long distance thanks to a guidance system installed on its rocket. On Monday, Indias Defense Research and Defense Organization (DRDO) conducted its latest test of the guided projectile at the Pokhran test range in the western state of Rajasthan, firing two projectiles. A third test took place on Tuesday. The guided surface-to-surface missile has been in development for years, with the first successful test reported in January 2013. It has the same 100kg warhead as the older MRL rocket with a greater reported range of up to 75km. The Indian test coincides with Pakistan showing off a new domestically produced smart, extended-range munition deployed by a JF-17 Thunder, a Chinese-Pakistani fighter jet. Also on rt.com Pakistan tests new homegrown smart weapon amid tensions with India (VIDEO) Last month, the two regional rivals saw the biggest flare-up of tensions in years after the Indian Air Force launched an air raid in Pakistani territory to target a suspected militant camp. Pakistan retaliated the next day with an air mission on its own, during which one Indian MiG-21 jet was shot down. The period of escalation seems to have quietened down a bit, but both nations seem to be in the mood for some flexing of their military muscles in the aftermath. Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! Iran to respond firmly if Israel acts against its oil shipments defense minister Iran to respond firmly if Israel acts against its oil shipments defense minister Tehran will respond firmly to any Israeli naval action against its oil shipments, Irans Defense Minister Amir Hatami said on Wednesday. The comments came a week after Israels prime minister said its navy could act against Iranian oil smuggling to enforce US sanctions, Reuters said. Tehran has the military capabilities to confront any Israeli intervention, Hatami said, adding that the international community would also not accept such action. Hatami said such confrontation would be considered piracy and warned that if it happens, we will firmly respond. The Iranian armed forces have certainly the capabilities to protect the countrys shipping lines in the best way against any possible threat, according to Hatami.Source : RT - Daily news The UK has revealed they will unilaterally apply no tariffs and introduce no new checks or controls on goods at the Irish border in the event of no-deal Brexit, with critics warning such a system could be exploited by smugglers. The British government published their plans on Tuesday, ahead of a critical vote in parliament, where MPs will decide whether to rule out a no-deal Brexit. They insist that such measures will be temporary and claim it is the only way to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland something Dublin has been trying to ensure with the EUs backing. Also on rt.com No-deal Brexit is survivable but EU is irresponsible in not reopening talks UK trade secretary Some believe a hard border would derail the processes set in motion by the Good Friday Agreement. Goods will move tariff free between the Republic and Northern Ireland, but the British government will slap on tariffs for goods travelling to the rest of the UK. British and Irish officials have warned that such a scenario could lead to smugglers using Northern Ireland as a backdoor to get goods into Britain tariff free. Products that would see up to 60-80% spike in tariffs include beef, lamb, pork and poultry as well as some dairy products, which the UK government says is needed in order to protect UK farmers and producers from cheap imports. Alan Sked from the London School of Economics, told RT that he predicts there could be a small amount of smuggling, but that fundamentally it would depend on what the Irish did as an EU member, as Brussels wants controls on goods at the border. David Sterling, the head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, warned in December of an upsurge in smuggling. He argued that businesses may not comply with new legal obligations in a no-deal scenario leading to the likelihood of a step change in the scale and significance of smuggling and organised crime. The Irish governments no-deal contingency document, published last month, refrained from stating what might happen at the border in a no-deal scenario. Also on rt.com Brexit chaos: UK MPs reject Theresa Mays deal AGAIN (VIDEOS) Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! Tourist agencies and travel websites have started to adjust search options allowing their clientele to choose the jet type on which they fly amid safety concerns over two deadly crashes involving Boeing planes in recent months. Kayak, a fare aggregator and travel metasearch engine operated by Booking Holdings, has become the first travel service to announce plans to modify search filters to let their customers to block unpreferable models of aircraft in their queries. The step was reportedly taken amid growing concerns shared by travelers via social media. Weve recently received feedback to make Kayaks filters more granular in order to exclude particular aircraft models from search queries, a spokeswoman for the website told Reuters. We are releasing that enhancement this week and are committed to providing our customers with all the information they need to travel with confidence, the firm added. The unrest among travelers was evoked by the latest crash of Boeings newest aircraft in Ethiopia, which forced aviation regulators worldwide to ground Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets. Amid dozens of flight cancelations, air carriers had to deal with their clients fears. Norwegian travel agent Berg-Hansen told Reuters that most of its customers were worried whether their flights were still scheduled to fly and the need to re-book if so. We have increased our staff from last night, through the night and now. Remarkably we have less phone calls than we expected, although they are more than usual. We had around 100 phone calls from midnight to 7am this morning and they keep coming, Berg-Hansen Chief Executive Officer Per-Arne Villadsen said. Boeings bestseller crashed on Sunday not far from the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa six minutes after takeoff on the way to Nairobi, Kenya. The tragedy, which killed 157 people, marked the second crash involving the same jet model in less than five months. In October, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 operated by Indonesias Lion Air crashed in the Java Sea shortly after takeoff, claiming the lives of 189 people. For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 13) The House of Representatives is standing pat on itemizing lump sums in the 2019 budget. This is even after a meeting with President Rodrigo Duterte at Malacanang to break the impasse over the legality of the itemization of the budget after its ratification. House Majority Leader Fredenil Castro said Wednesday the House will stick to its itemization of lump sums "because it is not unconstitutional and it is not illegal." This after Senate President Vicente "Tito" Sotto III said that the House appeared to concede to the suggestion that they recall the budget bill which they transmitted to the Senate and the Malacanang and revert to the bill approved by the bicameral conference committee and ratified by Congress. But in a media briefing the morning after their meeting with other lawmakers and Duterte over the budget, House leaders were combative, even saying that the Senate should not meddle with the lower house. "Kapag kami nag-aayos ng bahay namin, 'wag niyo kaming pakialaman dahil hindi namin kayo pinapakialaman kung inaayos niyo ang bahay niyo," Castro said. [Translation: When we are fixing our house, don't interfere with us because we are not meddling with you when you fix your house.] With the Senate and the House still not meeting eye-to-eye, Senator Panfilo "Ping" Lacson said the government may continue to operate on a re-enacted budget until August. He added that the Senate will just wait until Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and House Appropriations committee chair Rolando Andaya step down from their posts before pushing again for the budget's enactment. However, House leaders are still pushing for the budget to be enacted into law, with House Senior Deputy Majority Leader Rodante Marcoleta warning that the country's economy will be impacted and unemployment will widen if the government continues to operate under a reenacted budget. "'Wag na nating galawin kung ano ang panuntunan nung una pa, ano ang tradisyon na nagpapabilis sa pag-apruba ng national budget," Castro said. [Translation: Let's not change the process which has been followed long before, what is the tradition which speeds up the approval of the national budget.] The Malacanang is calling on senators and congressmen to break the stalemate and deliver a fresh budget. "The Executive has performed its constitutional task to submit its proposed budget, we await Congress to comply with its constitutional mandate to pass the same," Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said. Congressmen and senators have long been trading allegations that they realigned funds from government agencies into pet projects for select congressional districts. This tamed down following the passage of the budget bill in Congress, but has since been reignited following the admission of House Appropriations committee chair Rolando Andaya that lawmakers itemized lump sums in the budget. Marcoleta said the Senate has no business questioning the House's realignment of funds and the itemization of the budget even after its ratification as the lower chamber did not raise questions when senators supposedly shaved off billions from the Environment department, the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority, foreign assistance projects and right of way acquisitions. Meanwhile, Lacson said the House slashed 72.319 billion from the budget of the Public Works department for its first and second major final outputs which he said would negatively impact the government's ambitious infrastructure program. He and Sotto also denied Castro's statement that Duterte was not receptive to his idea of transmitting the budget to him with the lump sums intact and having him itemize it. "What was obvious last night is that the suggestion didn't sit well with the congressmen because they cannot be sure if all their realignments will be adopted. It's all about their pork, not mindful if they will be derailing the flagship projects of the government," Lacson said. But Castro said their realignments are not "pork," or discretionary funds which the Supreme Court has already outlawed in 2013. "These are projects. These are not for the individual benefits of the congressmen," he said. The budget has been delayed for three months, with Congress failing to pass it before the end of 2018. The budget bill faced bottlenecks in the House over allegations of anomalous insertions. Economic managers have warned that if a fresh budget is not passed, government projects will be delayed and the economy will slow down. The Palace, however, assured that the government is prepared to cushion the impact of a reenacted budget. CNN Philippines' Joyce Ilas, Xianne Arcangel and Ina Andolong contributed to this report. Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 1 anno fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. The Global Marketing Attribution Software Market was valued at over USD XX billion in 2017, and is expected to grow at CAGR of over 14% by 2025. The demand is primarily observed in North America and Asia Pacific. For Sample Copy of this Report @ https://www.orianresearch.com/request-sample/851437 Increasing applications of cloud basedservices require Marketing Attribution Software in order to manage operations. Key players are exploringcapabilitiesof various applications to increase consumer reach. This project is a major driving factor in the adoption of Marketing Attribution Software. CAGR during the forecast period from 2018 to 2025. The global Marketing Attribution Software Market has been segmented based on end use, component, and region. Global Marketing Attribution Software Industry 2019 Market Research Report is spread across 121 pages and provides exclusive vital statistics, data, information, trends and competitive landscape details in this niche sector. Order Copy of this Report 2019 @ https://www.orianresearch.com/checkout/851437 Report Covers Market Segment by Manufacturers: Adobe, Oracle, Google, Analytic Partners, and Others. Key Benefits of the Report: Global, Regional, Country, Application Type, and Types Market Size and Forecast from 2014-2025 Detailed market dynamics, industry outlook with market specific PESTLE, Value Chain, Supply Chain, and SWOT Analysis to better understand the market and build strategies market specific Identification of key companies that can influence this market on a global and regional scale Expert interviews and their insights on market shift, current and future outlooks and factors impacting vendors short term and long term strategies Detailed insights on emerging regions, types & applications Type, and competitive landscape with qualitative and quantitative information and facts Target Audience: Marketing Attribution Software providers Research and consulting firms Government and research organizations Associations and industry bodies Inquire more about Marketing Attribution Software Market report @ https://www.orianresearch.com/enquiry-before-buying/851437 Research Methodology The market is derived through extensive use of secondary, primary, in-house research followed by expert validation and third party perspective like analyst report of investment banks. Secondary technical research, technical journals, trade magazines, and paid data sources. For forecasting, regional demand and supply factor, investment, market dynamics including technical scenario, consumer behavior, and end use industry trends and dynamics, capacity types, spending are taken into consideration. We have assigned weights to these parameters and quantified their market impacts. The market estimates and forecasts have been verified through exhaustive primary research with the Key Industry Participants (KIPs) which typically includes: Original Equipment Manufacturer Component Supplier Distributors Government Body & Associations Research Institute Table of Content 1 Executive Summary 2 Methodology And Market Scope 3 Marketing Attribution Software Market - Industry Outlook 4 Marketing Attribution Software Market By End User 5 Marketing Attribution Software Market Type 6 Marketing Attribution Software Market Regional Outlook 7 Competitive Landscape End of the report Disclaimer About Us Orian Research is one of the most comprehensive collections of market intelligence reports on the World Wide Web. Our repository reports of over 500000+ industry and country research reports from over 100 top publishers. We are constantly updating our repository so as to provide our clients with the most complete and current database of expert insights on global industries, companies, and products. We specialize in custom research in situations where our syndicate research offerings do not meet the specific requirements of our clients. Contact Us: Ruwin Mendez Vice President - Global Sales & Partner Relations Orian Research Consultants US: +1 (415) 830-3727 | UK: +44 020 8144-71-27 Email: info@orianresearch.com Website: www.orianresearch.com/ Follow Us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/13281002/ Car alarm system | Of course, most cars get this straight out of the box, but if you were on a tight budget and skipped out on the alarm system, maybe you shouldnt have. Alarm systems are the first line of defence against theft as they start ringing as soon as something untoward happens with the car. To 'support' the automobile industry, the government has come out with a policy where organisations and researchers can buy bulk data pertaining to vehicle registrations on an annual basis. Eligible bodies can purchase the data for Rs 3 crore from the next fiscal and would be required to ensure strict security steps to prevent its theft or transfer, according to the policy approved by the government. Violation of data, the policy warns, will result in action under the IT Act and other applicable laws besides debarring the agency from access to this data for a period of three years. As per the 'Bulk Data Sharing Policy & Procedure' issued earlier this month, sharing of vehicle registration data in a "controlled manner, can support the transport and automobile industry". "The sharing of data will also help in service improvements and wider benefits to citizens & Government," the policy said. The prime focus is on delivering simpler, better and safer services to citizens and sharing of data "will also benefit the country economy", the policy said. "There have been continuous advances in technology and the range of purposes for which individuals and organizations want access to the DL&RC data. There has been growing demand to share the data for wider benefits." The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways collects and holds data as part of issuance of Vehicle Registration Certificates (RC) and Driver Licence (DL). The ministry currently shares complete data with specified agencies such as enforcement agencies. The data is also shared with automobile industries, banks, finance companies etc at specified rates for each data set. Earlier this month, the Road Transport and Highways Ministry has also announced going paperless and said driving licences and vehicle registration certificates will now be issued as plastic cards in a standard format across the country. Under the new norms notified by the ministry, states would have an option to issue the two documents in the form of cards, which would be either made of PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride) or of Poly Carbonate. "A QR code has been prescribed on the cards. This would enable easy linking and access and validation of the information on the cards with the SARATHI or VAHAN database," the Ministry has said. Recently, the ministry amended the Central Motor Vehicles Rules 1989, enabling issuance and use of transport-related documents in an electronic form. In the bulk data sharing policy the government has said that "Capture of old data on RC&DL (registration certificate & driving license) before the implementation of SARATHI and VAHAN has still not taken place. The possibility of a number of Vehicles having been transferred from one person to another or one location to another and the Driving License holders having relocated themselves without updating the database cannot be ruled out." The policy makes it clear that under the circumstance, the Ministry is not in a position to ensure the sanctity of the data, which would be made available on "as-is-where-is" basis. The policy said that free access to the vehicle's basic data available to all the registered users through mParivahan App or through the web portal of the Ministry shall be restricted to the basic details regarding statutory compliances and the owner's name. On the eligibility for accessing Bulk Data, it said such organizations requesting for data should be registered in India with at least 50 per cent ownership by an Indian resident or an Indian company. "All bulk data accessed by the organisation shall be processed/ stored in servers/ Data Centre residing in India. The data at any point shall not be transferred/ processed/ stored in a server outside India," it said. For data safety it said "Monitor, control and block any sensitive data being transferred from the data processing organization network. This includes e-mails, files, browser any application etc. This is to be achieved through content & context aware protection." Besides it stipulated "Cross Platform security" for ensuring that sensitive data is not residing in desktops running over Windows, Linux or Mac OS. It said all sensitive data should be in encrypted format while stored in disk and only to be decrypted while accessed through proper mechanism. About the cost, the policy said the organisations can purchase the data for one calendar year at any time. "The commercial organisations and individuals seeking bulk data will have to pay an amount of Rs 3 crore for the FY 2019-20. Educational institutions can use this data only for research purposes for internal use only and would be provided the bulk data one time on payment of an amount of Rs 5 lakh only for the FY 2019-20," the policy said adding that there shall be an annual increase of 5 per cent from the FY 2020-21 onwards. The government made it clear that the data in bulk will be released in encrypted format. "Wherever it comes to the notice of the Ministry through Audit or any other source that the protocol of use of data as prescribed herein has not been followed or has been violated, the person/ agency concerned shall be liable for any action permissible under the IT Act/ any other applicable law besides debarring of such agency from access to this data for a period of three years," the policy said. File image of the Boeing 737 MAX Moneycontrol News With over 20 countries, including India, grounding Boeing's 737 Max planes after the Ethiopia Airlines flight crashed, clamour for the aircraft's inspection and better training of pilots has gained momentum. Boeing's upgraded next-gen 737 MAX aircraft has been at the centre of this entire episode as the aircraft has been involved in two fatal accidents within a span of five months. Even as investigation for the first accident, involving Indonesia-based Lion Air was underway, the second accident involving Ethiopian Airlines took place. Experts feel the accidents should be an eye-opener for people in charge of training pilots. "Indian pilots are more conservative than western pilots with respect to training... But that's not the only reason. Pilots are being given good enough training," Harsh Vardhan, a senior aviation expert, told Moneycontrol. He, however, said that the way pilots are being inducted "is a cause of concern". "Earlier, they would first work on smaller aircraft for some time till they understand the behaviour of the machine and then they would be put on bigger aircraft. But now, a 20-year-old pilot is directly being put in 737 aircraft and in five to six years, they become captains..." he said. Vardhan said that the airlines must understand the "learning curve for the aircraft" and must respect the gestation period for the same. "Once the aircraft becomes a regularly used machine, then its faults are noticed," he added. Boeing 737 Max series is a narrow body aircraft that can carry up to 230 passengers. These were launched in 2011 and were first flown in 2016. When the aircraft was launched, Boeing had claimed that the aircraft was similar to its predecessor B737 next generation aircraft. Since 2017, Boeing has delivered 387 Max 8s and 9s and has taken orders to deliver 4,400 more planes for 100 customers. "It, however, turned out that the aircraft is all together different, especially in terms of engine parameters (engine design) and automated cockpit control system. Now ,the cockpit system that was controlled manually, is being controlled by a software," Vardhan said adding that the pilots, initially didn't know how to control it or how to give overriding command. According to a report by news agency AP, two pilots in the US have registered their complaints against the autopilot system of B737 Max8. The pilots said that "soon after engaging the autopilot on B737 Max 8, the nose tilted downwards sharply". The planes could be recovered by disconnecting the autopilot. "In both the crashes, the pilots became aware of the malfunctioning of the aircraft and they immediately wanted to get back to the runway. Even with permissions to do so, they couldn't land safely because they wanted to take over the control of the aircraft which they couldn't get due to the new system of the aircraft. Sometimes, the crash happens because the pilot wasn't aware of the functions, but here, he was aware...The pilot is conscious, he is aware but somewhere the machine is not responding to his commands which is a cause of concern," said Vardhan. Sridhar Krishna, Managing Director and Chairman, Sankhya InfoTech, a private firm providing evidence based training solutions to airlines, told Moneycontrol that training levels among Indian pilots was among the lowest in the world. "While the western airlines do pilot training of level four, Indians are at level one," he said. There are four levels of training for pilots, each advancing with every level. Level one is an Index based training which guides pilots about mal-functioning of engines. Level two is a Qualification based training where pilots are taught to "qualify advanced aircraft technology". Level three and four focus on evidence based training which collects various evidences to improve individual areas of concerns. "Under the EBT, pilots are closely monitored by inspectors and are graded on a scale of 1 to 5 in areas of communication, aircraft management, aircraft knowledge, leadership, situational awareness, etc," said Krishna. He said that pilots need this advanced training in India to avoid mishaps. "So, even if we gave benefit of doubt to Boeing in the first (Lion Air) crash case, we can't do that with second crash. Even before Lion Air crash happened, the pilots association was complaining that pilots have not been trained on this (aircraft) and there is no simulation training for this... Boeing had maintained that there were no variations in Max series. But after Lion Air, they have accepted that limited training is required," Vardhan explained. An instructor at a private pilot training institute told Moneycontrol that "pilot training methods are not good in India". "Teachers hardly care whether students have learnt anything or not. They are only concerned with completing the course," he said, on condition of anonymity. He said that airlines require "pilots with advanced skills, something which isn't taught at regular training institutes". Krishna said that airlines need to install EBT system at their own end. "But even at that cost, an airline can save about $20 - 25 million annually as insurance premiums due to low accidents," he said. The instructor at the training institute said that Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) must provide well worded guidelines for pilot training in India. "While we are continuously reviewing our pilot training guidelines, we are not adopting EBT level training anytime soon," BS Bhullar, head, DGCA had told Moneycontrol. In a late night direction, DGCA had ordered grounding of B737Max planes in India and has restricted flying of such planes in Indian airspace from 4 pm on March 13. This came after almost 20 countries, including China, Ethiopia, South Africa, Morocco, the UK, France, Malaysia, Germany, Indonesia and Singapore decided to ground the planes. "Nobody takes these kind of decisions on impulse because if you ground an aircraft wrongly, Boeing too has the right to sue the government for taking wrong decisions against them," said Vardhan. He, however, said that the grounding is "only temporary" and that the planes will be flying once the matter is fixed. "These planes should be grounded for few days and be put under thorough inspection. We might not know the exact cause of crash but we can surely zero in on one of the possible causes... We can examine the machine for all the causes," he said. DGCA had initially issued advisory to airlines operating B737Max planes to thoroughly check the maintenance and only allow pilots with 1,000 hours of flying to operate such planes. State-run telecom company Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) did not pay salaries to nearly 1.76 lakh employees in February due to financial constraints, The Financial Express reported. This is the first time the firm has defaulted on its salary payments. BSNL has been incurring losses for the past five years. This default could indicate stormy times ahead for the telecom firm as competition in the sector rises. The company's employee union approached Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha asking him to release funds for employee salaries and to support BSNL financially. There have also been some cases of demonstrations by workers for the same. "A financial crisis is being faced by other operators also, but they are managing the situation by infusing huge amounts," All Unions and Associations of BSNL (AUAB) wrote to Sinha. Nearly 55 percent of BSNL's revenue are dedicated to paying salaries, which increase by eight percent annually. However, its revenue remains stagnant. Sources told the paper that BSNL has started disbursing wages to staff in Jammu & Kashmir, Odisha, Kerala and Delhi. "As and when the income is generated, salaries will be paid to the staff. As the government has not given any financial support, the salaries are being delayed," an official said. The person added that employees should expect a delay in their March salaries as well even though cash flows in this particular month are higher due to billing from the enterprise business. The company is reportedly looking to avail a loan, but the Department of Telecommunications has not approved the move yet. BSNL reported a loss of Rs 8,000 crore in FY18, significantly up from a loss of Rs 4,786 crore in FY17. Losses in FY19 are expected to rise even further. Aviation regulator DGCA has decided to ground Boeing 737 Max aircraft in operation in India, following a similar move to remove the model from service in several other countries. The aircraft was involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash on March 10, killing nearly 160 passengers and crew dead. The same model was also involved in the Lion Air crash in October last year. The twin crashes have led to suspicion over design fault in the plane. "DGCA has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately. These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations," the civil aviation ministry tweeted late night on March 12. In continuation to the decision of DGCA to ground the B737 Max operations, further clarification follows. B737Max operations Will stop from/to all Indian airport's. (1/2) Ministry of Civil Aviation (@MoCA_GoI) March 13, 2019 The Ministry of Civil Aviation has stated that no Boeing 737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit Indian airspace effective 1600 hours IST or 1030 UTC, March 13. Additionally no B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit Indian airspace effective 1600hrs IST or 1030 UTC. The time line is to cater to situations where aircraft can be positioned at maintenance facilities & international flights can reach their destinations.(2/2) Ministry of Civil Aviation (@MoCA_GoI) March 13, 2019 Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu said that he has directed officials of DGCA to undertake safety assessment of Boeing 737-MAX (being flown by domestic carriers). "Safety of the passengers is our utmost concern. Directed Secretary and DGCA to take appropriate action immediately," he said. The grounding comes after the DGCA had issued guidelines on Monday that asked for more checks and maintenance of Max 8 aircraft, and stipulated that only pilots with over 1,000 flying hours can operate the plane. In India, Jet Airways and SpiceJet operate the aircraft. While Jet has grounded all the five Max planes in its fleet, owing to the ongoing financial distress, SpiceJet said it has also taken the aircraft out of its service. India joins a list of at least 15 countries who have grounded the aircraft. "It is better late, than to be sorry," said a senior executive from the industry. Boeing is said to be investigating the incident. After Hindustan Unilever product Brook Bond teas Kumbh Mela advertisement irked many, ad for another product Surf Excel detergent also drew flak. Centred around Hindu festival of colours Holithe ad film shows a girl dropping her Muslim friend off at a mosque on the occasion to save his pristine white kurta from getting stained. While it was lauded by many, a host of netizens found it offensive, anti-Hindu, and claimed it promotes love jihad. Not only did they vent out their displeasure on various social media platforms but also took to Google Play to admonish the app. Yes, app. Poor guys mixed up Surf Excel with Microsoft Excel and bombarded it with negative reviews on Play Store. And, this is not the first time that the self-righteous lot used app ratings to vent out their anger and ended up reviewing the wrong app. In 2017, after Snapchat CEO had said the company doesnt plan to expand into India as the country is poor many enraged Indians downrated desi e-commerce company Snapdeal by mistake. Someone sent this to me just now href="https://t.co/54mJ0JmVlR">pic.twitter.com/54mJ0JmVlR Kunal Bahl (@1kunalbahl) March 12, 2019 This incident probably took the Snapdeal CEO Kunal Bahl down memory lane, who shared a hilarious meme stating he understands what the head of Microsoft Excel must be going through right now. While the number of poor reviews are pretty low, it amounts to huge embarrassment nonetheless. The latest review given by a user reads: I used to like this app, until they partnered with Surf and made such a disgusting anti religious ad. Now where ever I read the word Excel I can only think of anti Hindu propaganda. Shame on you for doing this. Another user review read: Worst product ever... and it also has a religious issue in advertisements... it devide [sic] communities in India so dnt use it. Another person who gave the app one-star rating wrote: Boykot sarf excel. hindu birodh hai. pakisthan me ja kar business kar. (Boycott Surf Excel. It hurts Hindu sentiments. Continue your operations in Pakistan) Yet another reviewer wrote in Malayalam: You traitors, if we want, we can make you shut your Surf Excel business and flee the country. You dont know the might of Sangh workers. Jai Gaumata. Some stakeholders of the e-commerce industry have asked the Centre to relax data storage rules to allow firms to share data at least with its group companies, The Financial Express reported. This request was raised in a meeting held by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) weeks after it released its draft e-commerce policy. The government bars companies from sharing users' data with third-party entities even if they consent, in the new policy. This can mean that Amazon's Indian arm cannot share data with Amazon Inc. This could impediment potential acquisitions and investments from foreign companies in Indian startups. Some firms suggested that the government should only access data stored by companies abroad in cases of law and order cases. At present, the draft policy allows Indian authorities to access the data whenever they want. The stakeholders argued that this could lead to potential misuse. "We have suggested DPIIT that the e-commerce policy be split into an e-commerce policy and a business data policy and the business data section should cover all businesses including telecom, banks, offline trade etc. and not just e-commerce, social media and technology," said Sachin Taparia, founder and chairman of LocalCircles, who attended the meeting. Industry giants including Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Uber, Ola, Reliance and traders' organisations had no issues with the government's demand to store data locally. The new policy released by the government on February 23 proposes new regulations for cross-border data flows, ensuring data storage facilities locally and setting up a data authority to devise a framework for sharing data. The DPIIT is accepting feedback on the draft policy till March 29. The government does not allow companies to collect data in India and store it overseas to share it with foreign oganisations or any third party, saying that India has a 'sovereign right' over its data. Foreign companies operating in India have been granted three years to set up their storage units in India. File image The Reserve Bank on Wednesday said it will inject long-term liquidity worth $5 billion into the system through foreign exchange swap arrangement with banks for three years. The swap will be in the nature of a simple buy/sell foreign exchange swap from the Reserve Bank side. Under the swap, a bank would sell US dollars to the RBI and simultaneously agree to buy the same amount of US dollars at the end of the swap period. "In order to meet the durable liquidity needs of the system, the Reserve Bank has decided to augment its liquidity management toolkit and inject rupee liquidity for longer duration through long-term foreign exchange Buy/Sell swap...," the RBI said. The US Dollar amount mobilised through the auction, to be conducted on March 26, would also reflect in RBI's foreign exchange reserves for the tenor of the swap while also reflecting in RBI's forward liabilities. The market participants, it said, would be required to place their bids in terms of the premium that they are willing to pay to the RBI for the tenor of the swap, expressed in paisa terms up to two decimal places. Under the swap auction, minimum bid size would be $25 million and in multiples of $1 million thereafter. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Indian IT services company HCL Technologies on Wednesday announced acquisition of US-based digital transformation consulting firm Strong-Bridge Envision. "With this acquisition, SBE (Strong-Bridge Envision) will become part of HCL's global digital and analytics business," HCL Technologies said in a statement. HCL Tech did not divulge the size of the deal but sources said it is about $45 million. SBE has offices in Seattle, Denver, Atlanta, and New York City. The firm, headquartered in Seattle, is a digital consulting firm specialising in customer experience strategy, business transformation, and change management. "Serving Fortune 1000 clients since its founding, Strong-Bridge Consulting merged with Envision in 2017 to extend its consultancy and digital transformation capabilities and further establish its footprint across North America," it said. Highlights: - Paper sector benefits from positive demand-supply scenario- Realisations likely to hold up- Significant capacity additions lined up- Integrated players with self-sufficiency in major inputs best placed- JK Paper best positioned within the sector ------------------------------------------------- India is the fastest growing market for paper globally and is expected to grow at more than six percent per annum over the next few years. This opens up an opportunity for investors. Paper companies turned around sharply in FY17 and the sustained improvement in their financials continued in the third quarter of FY19 as well. Their superior financial performance was reflected in the stock prices which have seen a strong rally in past few years. For instance, the JK Paper stock has generated a compounded annual return (CAGR) of around 50 percent in the last 3 years. The moot question is: will the superior performance of paper companies and their stock prices continue? Lets look at the factors that will determine the future profitability of the sector. Indias paper sector has grown to 17.1 million tonne in FY18 from 9.3 MT in FY08, a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.3 percent. Paper demand is likely to remain buoyant due to increased demand from the FMCG and packaged food segment as well as rapidly growing e-commerce (the likes of Amazon and Flipkart). At the same time, supply remains constrained following the closure of stressed domestic capacities such as Ballarpur Industries (BILT). In short, the demand-supply gap is likely to remain favourable in the near to medium term. Could the recent news of the paper sector attracting the highest ever FDI of around Rs 24,000 crore significantly alter demand-supply dynamics in future? Read: Paper sector gets largest FDI ever; should the Street cheer? Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), an Indonesian paper company, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with The Andhra Pradesh Economic Development Board (APEDB) for setting up Indias largest paper mill in a single site with a staggering 5 MT per annum (mtpa) capacity in Andhra Pradesh. However, it will take a long time for the capacity to come on stream. The improved performance of paper companies is also due to better realisations, driven by high input cost. International pulp prices, a key raw material continued to inch up till September-end, pushing up paper prices in turn. While there has been a mild moderation in the third quarter of FY19, global pulp prices are expected to remain firm in the medium term. Environmental restrictions by the Chinese government on imports of low grade recovered paper are expected to keep global pulp prices elevated. China, the largest importer of waste paper globally, announced a ban on certain grades of waste paper in July 2017, which came into force in January 2018. The move led to increased demand for pulp, pushing up global pulp prices and consequently global paper prices. Companies that can quickly expand their existing capacity and have well integrated operations stand to benefit from the current upcycle. These two factors are the key differentiators that will drive the future profitability of paper companies.The paper sector in India has not added any significant capacities over the last three to four years. As a result, most paper companies are currently operating at around 85-90 percent levels of capacity utilisation, while the larger companies are operating at over 100 percent. Source: Care Ratings Consequently, significant investments have been lined up for expansion in production capacity, the bulk of which are in the packaging paper & board segment, as a high growth rate is anticipated in this segment. The majority of recently announced capacity expenditure (capex) plans are scheduled for completion after April 2020.An integrated player with sufficiency in all major inputs raw material (pulp), water and power will be able to sustain and improve margin. Paper stocks have outperformed on the back of improving financials and strong earnings growth. While some part of the valuation re-rating seems to have played out, tailwinds in the sector provide strong earnings visibility. Tamil Nadu Newsprint & Papers (TNPL), the second largest player in the paper sector, has ample scope of margin improvement as it is operating at 16 percent EBITDA margin, compared to over 25 percent for most large peers. However, TNPLs input costs are extremely volatile as it has sizeable dependence on imported pulp for its newly commissioned unit. In the past, water availability has been an issue for TNPL. Another interesting paper company is International Paper APPM (IPAPPM) which enjoys strong global parentage and a track record of more than five decades in the Indian paper industry. Its diversified product-mix and various initiatives ensuring raw material self-sufficiency are comforting. However, despite operating at around 95 percent utilisation level, IPAPPM has not announced significant capacity expansion plans. JK Paper is best positioned within the sector due to its strong market position and presence in high quality paper segments, established brand name, cost leadership and integrated production capacities. JK Paper stands out as it sources more than 80 percent of its wood requirements from captive farm forestry. Additionally, adequate water is available at both of its units in Gujarat and Odisha and it has also achieved self-sufficiency in power. Moreover, JK Paper is expected to see meaningful increase in production resulting from its acquisition of Sirpur Paper Mills. Part of Sirpurs total capacity of around 1,38,000 tonne per annum (tpa) is expected to come on stream in the first quarter of FY20 on completion of refurbishment of the existing plant. This will give JK Paper a relative advantage vis-a-vis peers. That could translate into more upside for its stock. Follow @nehadave01 For more research articles, visit our Moneycontrol Research page Moneycontrol Research analysts do not hold positions in the companies discussed here The initial public offering (IPO) of Embassy Office Parks REIT, the first ever by a Real Estate Investment Trust in India (REIT), will open on March 18 in the price band Rs 299-300, the company said in a statement. Embassy REIT is issuing units aggregating up to Rs 4,750 crore and will constitute at least 10 percent of the issued and paid-up units on a post-issue basis. The issue, made through the book-building process, will close on March 20, the statement said. The units are proposed to be listed on the National Stock Exchange and BSE. The minimum bid size is 800 units and in multiples of 400 units thereafter. Proceeds from the same will be used for: i) Partial or full repayment of bank/ financial institution debt, ii) Payment for acquisition of the Embassy One Assets currently held by Embassy One Developers Pvt, and iii) For general purposes. Not more than 75 percent of the issue, excluding the strategic investor portion, will be available for allocation on a proportionate basis to institutional investors, it said. However, the company may choose to allocate up to 60 percent of the institutional investor portion to anchor investors. For non-institutional investors, the same stands at not less than 25 percent. The book running lead managers to the issue are: Axis Capital, Credit Suisse Securities (India), Deutsche Equities India, Goldman Sachs (India) Securities, HSBC Securities and Capital Markets (India), IIFL Holdings , JM Financial and Nomura Financial Advisory & Securities (India). Embassy Office Parks, a joint venture between the Bengaluru-based property developer and private equity firm Blackstone, has placed 33 million square feet of office and hospitality assets under its proposed REIT, which comprises seven business parks and four city-centric buildings spread across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune and Noida. Of the 33 million sq ft, about 24 million sq ft is operational with 95 percent occupancy, yielding a rental income of over Rs 2,000 crore annually. Another 3 million sq ft area is under construction and 6 million sq ft is in the pipeline. The JV has top MNC clients in its commercial projects. Over 50 percent rent comes from Fortune 500 companies such as Microsoft, Google, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan. REIT is an investment tool that owns and operates rent-yielding real estate assets. It allows individual investors to invest using this platform and earn income. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) had notified REIT's regulations in 2014, allowing setting up and listing of such trusts, which are popular in some advanced markets. REITs are listed entities that invest in income-generating properties and distribute at least 90 percent of their income proceeds to unit-holders through dividends. After registration with SEBI, units of REITs will have to be mandatorily listed on exchanges and traded like securities. Properties listed through a REIT are typically commercial assets that can generate steady and lucrative rental income. . Even government-run buildings can be placed under REITs. REITs offer investors, with Rs 2 lakh in capital, an opportunity to invest in the commercial real estate market. Like listed shares, small investors can buy units of REITs from both primary and secondary markets. This is a historical event for the real estate sector as it shows the market is maturing and that we too can transact as per international standards. At present, only mature economies have a REIT structure in place, Anshuman Magazine, Chairman India and South East Asia, CBRE. He expects additional institutional inflows from insurance companies and even pension funds. According to a CBRE- CII report, a successful REIT listing would prompt other prominent asset holding companies such as Xander, Brookefield and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board to issue their own offerings, thereby widening the real estate investment scenario in the country. REIT listings are likely to substantially move from offices to retail and logistics sectors, thereby resulting in a creation of quality assets across segments, the report added. Sanjay Dutt, Managing Director of Tata Housing, sees a shift from capital appreciation to rental income going forward. Instead of buying hard assets, retail investors are likely to choose this alternative model. As the sector matures over over the next four-to-five years, you will see another five-to-six companies getting listed with a combined market capitalisation of $4-5 million, he said. For the industry, the Blackstone Embassy REIT opens an exit avenue for institutional office assets investments as well as offers developers more liquidity. Considering the buoyancy in the India office leasing market and the forecasted growth, it seems to be very well timed both for the existing investors as well as for the market, said Joe Verghese, Managing Director, Colliers International India. According to Shobhit Agarwal, MD and CEO, ANAROCK Capital, "Being realistic in one's returns expectations from REITs is important. A realistic RoI (expectation would be 7-8 percent annually, post adjustment of the fund management fee," he said, adding that this instrument is ideal for investors who want a steady income with minimum risks.While the first listing is an an important day for Indian institutional real estate, globally whoever has invested or is considering the possibility of investing in India would want to see how this listing fares. The only alternative as of now for investors was sell to another fund or opt for an offshore REIT listing, says Anckur Srivasttava of GenReal Advisers. While initial REITs could be for income-generating commercial assets, eventually one may see REITs getting listed for hospitals, schools, warehousing, retail malls, leased out residential properties, student accommodation, industrial facilities and companies owning cinema halls. "It is also an excellent avenue for corporates and PSUs to liquidate their assets and using the proceeds productively for their core businesses," he added. vandana.ramnani@nw18.com Representative image Non-life insurance company Acko has raised $65 million in its Series C financing round from Binny Bansal, co-founder of Flipkart; RPS Ventures, led by Kabir Misra, ex-managing partner at SoftBank; and Intact Ventures Inc. corporate venture arm of Canada's largest property and casualty insurer. The round also saw participation from existing investors such as Amazon, Accel, SAIF and TechPro Ventures. Founded by Varun Dua in 2016, Acko General Insurance, it is among the first digital-only insurance company. It is among the newest entrants to the general insurance sector. Acko uses a direct-to-consumer approach for distributing motor insurance, to enable favourable risk selection. It also offers small ticket insurance products such as rider insurance, mobile and appliance protection, ticket cancellation etc in partnership with more than 15 players in the internet ecosystem such as Ola, Amazon, redBus, Zomato and UrbanClap. The insurer, that has completed 12 months of operations, has distributed insurance policies to over 20 million customers. The current round of funding demonstrates the confidence investors have in us and in our ability to transform how insurance will be delivered. We are excited to put the company on a rapid growth trajectory with this round of funding. Insurance is a capital intensive sector and as we grow, we will be raising more capital in compliance with the guidelines of the regulator said Varun Dua, Founder and CEO, Acko. Talking about this investment, Binny Bansal said, "Technology led insurance is expected to play a significant role in growth of the underpenetrated insurance sector in India." He further added, Acko is the pioneer of digital-native insurance and I am delighted to partner in its exciting growth journey With this latest round of Series C funding, Ackos total funds raised stands at $107 million. Avendus Capital was the advisor to Acko on this fundraise. Previously, Acko raised $30 million in seed funding, one of the largest seed rounds in the Indian startup ecosystem, and later raised Series B funding of $12 million led by Amazon. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Shares of CMI rose 3.6 percent in the early trade on March 13 after the company executed its maiden export order from Mauritius. The company in its exchange filing on BSE said that it has executed maiden export order from Mauritius for the supply of XLPE LV/HV underground power cables from the company's plant located at Baddi- Himachal Pradesh. With the successful execution of this order, the company products are getting better recognition from other countries as well. The company is quite confident of procuring more export orders soon, it added. Amit Jain, Chairman and Managing Director at CMI said, "We are feeling so proud to execute this prestigious order and now we are totally geared up to enter overseas in a big way." At 0926 hours, CMI was quoting at Rs 152.80, up Rs 3.20, or 2.14 percent on the BSE. Representative image live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Share price of Hindustan Fluorocarbons gained 5 percent intraday Wednesday after board approved sale of surplus land. It touched an intraday high of Rs 21.72 and an intraday low of Rs 20.01. The company board in its meeting held on March 11 approved the valuation report and sale of the 66 Acres 13 Gunthas of vacant surplus land of the company subject to the approval of the shareholders, Govt of India and Govt of Telangana/TSIIC, as per company release. At 13:26 hrs, Hindustan Flurocarbons was quoting at Rs 21.50, up Rs 0.81, or 3.91 percent on the BSE. The share touched its 52-week high of Rs 27.00 on November 12, 2018, and 52-week low of Rs 8.72 on March 22, 2018. Currently, it is trading 20.37 percent below its 52-week high and 146.56 percent above its 52-week low. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More SpiceJet and Jet Airways stocks are under pressure on March 13 after grounding Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft in India. All Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft would be grounded in India by 4 pm on March 13, said a senior official of Indian aviation watchdog DGCA. The decision came days after a 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by the Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa killing 157 people, including four Indians. "We will ground all Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, which are currently in use by Indian airlines, by 4 pm today," the DGCA official told PTI. Also, Jet Airways has grounded additional four aircraft due to non-payment of amounts outstanding to lessors under their respective lease agreements, Jet Airways said in its March 12 exchange filing. At 1052 hours, SpiceJet was quoting at Rs 76.20, down Rs 2.60, or 3.30 percent and Jet Airways was quoting at Rs 240.40, down Rs 5.25, or 2.14 percent on the BSE. (With inputs from PTI) live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Share price of Ramco System added 5 percent intraday on March 13 after Australia-based Opteon Solutions selected the company to digitise its payroll operations. Ramco stock touched an intraday high of Rs 275.00 after the news. Ramco Systems will digitize Payroll operations of staff spread across 75 offices in Australia and New Zealand, Company said in a release. Virender Aggarwal, CEO, Ramco Systems, said, While Payroll is seen as an operational task, it is one of the most complex and highly error-prone activity which significantly impacts employee morale. We are glad to add yet another leading business - Opteon Solutions as our client. In both these organizations as well as many others across Asia and Australia, the combination of Workday HR and Ramco Payroll is being seen as a beneficial technology stack by clients. At 1102 hours Ramco System was quoting at Rs 275, up Rs 13.25, or 5.06 percent on the BSE. The Centre gave an all clear to Tata-Singapore Airlines' joint venture Vistara to fly international routes, in one of its last decisions before the Election Commission announced dates for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Vistara is now the fifth Indian carrier to be granted approval for flying on international routes, "following suggestions from the Group of Ministers formed to look into the issue", a senior official told Business Standard. After receiving the approval, the airline has asked to operate daily flights between New Delhi and Colombo. The report quoted a source as saying the company had sought bilateral rights to Sri Lanka and New Delhi slots for flights which operate with Airbus A320 aircraft. Vistara received this nod after a long delay due to an ongoing investigation into AirAsia India on allegations of bribery to secure international flight approvals. In a first, five Cabinet ministers had been raked in to constitute a committee led by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to decide whether Vistara should be granted the permit. The authority for this rests usually with the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA). The carrier has been recording losses for the past three years. This delay also forced the company to tweak its business model. It was already struggling in India due to the extreme competition in the domestic aviation sector from low-budget carriers like IndiGo (InterGlobe Aviation) and GoAir. Vistara tried to expand its network, announcing as many as 16 new daily flights to destinations like Raipur and Dibrugarh. After the airline added 20 planes to its fleet, it approached the government to secure an international flights permit and sought to start flights to Bangkok, Phuket and Male by the winter of 2018. But policy logjam disturbed these plans. "When India's third full-service carrier launched, it did so with its eye on the opportunities in the international market. More than three years later, Vistara remains a solely domestic carrier, thanks to Indian regulations," aviation consultancy firm CAPA had said. In a scathing attack on the Congress party's first family, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday said if a forensic audit of their "capital creation" is conducted, the facts will speak for themselves. Referring to a report on a web portal on "unjust enrichment of the extended Gandhi family", Jaitley said while conventionally many may have relied on straightway corruption through bribery, a new methodology has now been established. "Wheeler-dealers and fly-by-night operators give you the privilege of 'sweetheart deals'. With very little investment, windfall profits are thrust on a few privileged ones to enable them to create a capital. " 'Political equity' results in buying goodwill. It enables you to influence decisions," said Jaitley who heads the BJP's publicity committee for the ensuing general elections. Without elaborating, Jaitley in his blog said, "When exposed", the beneficiaries hide behind the shield of 'clever business decisions'. "If the 'capital creation' of the Congress Party's first family is subjected to a forensic audit, facts will speak for themselves. Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones," the senior BJP leader wrote. He made these remarks in a blog titled 'Is Prime Minister Modi's First Five-Year Tenure a Turning Point on Corruption?'. This was his third blog in the series 'Agenda 2019'. Endorsing Jaitley's blog, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a tweet said, "No place for middlemen. No tolerance for corruption. No fake beneficiaries swindling away recourses. This is a New India. We have worked hard to remove corruption and punish the corrupt." Earlier in the day, the BJP dragged Congress president Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra into alleged corruption involving land deals, claiming the opposition party known for "institutionalising" graft, has now come to define "family corruption". Citing a media report, Union minister Smriti Irani told reporters that Robert Vadra is "merely a mask" in the controversial land deals and his brother-in-law Rahul Gandhi is the "real face". Dismissing the allegations, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said, "Facing imminent defeat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his favourites are resorting to levelling completely baseless and fake allegations". At a press conference, Irani said, "The country has come to know that the brother-in-law (Rahul) is also involved with his 'jija' (Robert Vadra) in this family package of corruption". Referring to the online report, Irani claimed that Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra purchased land in a deal involving H L Pahwa, who was raided by the Enforcement Directorate, and Mahesh Kumar Nagar, who also had a role in land transaction involving Robert Vadra. The five-year term of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Jaitley said, will be regarded by future political historians as a turning point where a movement to free India from corruption began. He said that during the Congress-led UPA regime India was considered, by both domestic and international investors, as one of the most corrupt nations in the world. "The government (led by Modi) and its ministers have conclusively proved that it is possible to run an honest government in India. Not a single charge of any substance has been made against the government," Jaitley said. He further said India has understood that corruption follows the law of Newton's gravitational pull. "It travels from top to bottom and not the other way round. If the leader at the top is honest and has the capacity to ensure similar ethical standards from his colleagues, the moral authority of the Government to ensure integrity travels through the system," he said. The message today to those who operated improperly in the system are getting to realise that it is safer to be clean, he said while adding that is the difference between Modi's NDA government and its predecessor UPA. Also in sharp contrast to the Commonwealth Games held here in 2010, which were marred by allegation of corruptions, the just concluded Kumbh in Prayagraj is an "excellent illustration" of how public funds can be effectively and honestly used, Jaitley remarked. The Madras High Court Wednesday made it clear that claiming compensation against the insurance company for an accident and also from the employer under the Workers Compensation Act did not amount to double compensation. Justice MV Muralidharan made the observation while dismissing two appeals from the National Insurance Company Limited, Tiruchengode, against the award of compensation by Commissioner for Employees Compensation at Coonoor, in two accident cases. Referring to various Supreme Court judgements, he said "awarding of compensation to claimants is only for the sake of giving solace to the claimants who lost their breadwinner due to the accident. "If their tears are not wiped off by the courts of law, there will be little meaning in awarding compensation," he added. The case relates to the death of two people, both drivers, in an accident in June 2014. The legal heirs of the victims filed two different claim petitions before the Commissioner for Employees Compensation at Coonoor and awards of Rs 8,15,400 for one of the victims and Rs 5,42,240 for the other was passed by the Tribunal with interest at the rate of 12 per cent per annum from the 31st day of the accident till the date of deposit under Workers Compensation. Cases were filed before the Motor Accident Claims Tribunal, which awarded Rs 8,50,000 and Rs 5,53,000, respectively, to the two victims. The insurance company filed appeals contending that the claimants had claimed two sets of compensation, for one and the same cause of action, one before MACT Tribunal and another before Commissioner for Employees Compensation at Coonoor, which was impermissible in law. Justice Muralidharan, who dismissed the appeals by the insurance company, in his order said, "In my considered view, the action of the claimants would not amount to double compensation or double jeopardy to the employer." Subir Roy The announcement of the dates for the 2019 parliamentary elections across the country has immediately created a controversy in West Bengal where Mamata Banerjee at the head of Trinamool Congress is waging an aggressive and strident battle against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The schedule put out by the Election Commission of India has singled out three states Bihar, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh for a dubious distinction. They will have elections in bits and pieces on all the seven polling days. This brackets West Bengal with two states which have a reputation for poor governance and violence in public life. As opposed to this, southern states such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, known for high standards of governance, will vote on single days. What is most galling is that Gujarat, the prime ministers home state, and Haryana, known for a high level of social oppression and related violence, will also go to the polls on single days. Trinamool Congress leader and Kolkata mayor Firhad Hakim has protested that being put in the same bracket with BJP-ruled states like Bihar and UP with their track record of violence and crime, is an insult to this state and its people. However, the Trinamool Congress has another more serious objection. The entire election schedule will overlap with the holy month of Ramzan, through which many devout Muslims fast. This clearly indicates an effort to make it difficult for Muslims to exercise their right to vote, he added. Banerjee, who has taken pains not to criticise the election commission, said that bracketing West Bengal with Bihar and spreading out the election in this manner indicates that the BJP is planning to disturb Bengal. This has interestingly drawn a sharp retort from two prominent Muslim personalities. Asaduddin Owaisi, the leader of the Hyderabad based All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, said the controversy was uncalled for. Muslims on fast stick to their regular work schedule. Another Muslim, progressive and lettered to the core, Javed Aktar, lyricist and poet, found the whole idea of Ramzan clashing with the election schedule totally disgusting and urged the Election Commission to ignore it. He called it a distorted convoluted version of secularism which was repulsive and revolting. Violence in public life has over the years become endemic at the grassroots level in West Bengal. It began with the way party cadre ruled with an iron hand during the Left Front years and consolidated during the years of the Trinamool Congress in power, centred not just on political allegiances but battle over rent seeking turf. Political violence has particularly erupted in and around election time. In May last year, during the panchayat elections, according to one count, at least 10 people died. In December last year a BJP worker was stabbed to death. As recently as last month, Satyajit Biswas, a Trinamool MLA, was shot dead. This is an illustrative, not exhaustive, list. The recent emergence of the BJP as a powerful force, with party President Amit Shah declaring that the partys seat count would go up from two to 23 in the next Parliament, has turned the state into a political tinder box. Flash points are created by processions sought to be taken out by the party seeking to further communal polarisation and attempts by the state government to ban them in order to prevent trouble. The most recent instance was the government not allowing rath yatras to be taken out across the state by the BJP. In such a situation, it is logical for the Election Commission to spread out polling over as many days as possible so that adequate security forces can be deployed. With the impartiality of the state police being openly compromised by the Kolkata police commissioner recently sitting beside the chief minister when she went on dharna before the place where CBI officials were holed up in the city, the BJP has sought additional deployment of central armed police forces. Between the BJPs single point agenda of furthering communal polarisation and Banerjees not always rational harangues against the Modi government, policy issues have taken a back seat during the election campaign. In this atmosphere, preventing violence before, during and after the elections will be an achievement. Subir Roy is a senior journalist and author. Views are personal. For more Opinion pieces, click here Representative image The Tamil Nadu government on March 12 decided to hand over the investigation into the sex abuse cases of over 60 women at Pollachi, to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Tightening the screws on a gang that allegedly sexually harassed and blackmailed a 19-year-old woman in Coimbatore district, police also booked four accused under the Goondas Act. The four, already under judicial custody, were booked under various sections of the IPC and Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Harassment of Women Act. What is the case about? The four men had on February 12 allegedly tried to strip the woman inside a car near Pollachi and had shot a video of the act and blackmailed her using the visuals. Media reports, which claimed that the same gang had molested and blackmailed several other women, prompted political parties to demand a through probe and tough punishment for the accused. The case involves gang members, who used to befriend women on social media, would lure them to meet and then forcefully shoot obscene videos. One such video, allegedly uploaded by one of the accused, had gone viral on social media. Political overtones Seeking to up the ante on the issue, the states principal Opposition party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) led a demonstration at Pollachi. Led by its Rajya Sabha MP Kanimozhi, the outfit's cadres, including women, demanded tough action in the case. Addressing the cadres, Kanimozhi said the case and violence against the victim has brought shame and demanded action. She alleged the same network of criminals who had harassed the woman was involved in molesting over 250 women in the past seven years. Kanimozhi also lauded the victim's courage for lodging a complaint. Actor-politician Kamal Haasan had earlier met with Director General of Police TK Rajendran and sought his intervention to ensure justice for the victim. Haasan's party, Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM), also took out a procession in Pollachi on March 12 demanding justice and tough action against the perpetrators. AIADMK sacks party functionary According to police, the 19-year-old woman who managed to free herself, lodged a complaint on February 24. Subsequently, the victim's brother was assaulted by members of the gang and ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK)'s local level functionary was also allegedly involved in it. Four men, including the functionary, were arrested separately for the assault on the woman's brother, police said. After the political reaction and the emergence of a leaked video, the AIADMK expelled the functionary, a ward secretary from the primary membership of the party on March 12. (With inputs from PTI) June 02, 2019 / 09:01 AM IST Welcome to the Lok Sabha election 2019 coverage. This blog tracks the latest developments from the general election. The BJP reacted with jubilation at the exit polls, which forecast a return of the NDA government, saying that they show a huge positive vote for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but opposition parties rejected the forecast. Narendra Modi is returning to power with a bang, AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal on March 13 appealed to the Congress to join the proposed alliance between his party and JJP but his offer was snubbed by his Haryana-ally, which said it can "never have any truck" with the Congress. Kejriwal earlier on March 13 told reporters that an alliance between AAP, Congress and Jannayak Janata Party would defeat the BJP in the state. "Let's come together in Haryana to defeat the BJP," Kejriwal said. However, within minutes after Kejriwal's comments, the JJP issued a strong-worded statement, saying it can "never have any truck" with the Congress. "The JJP has been formed on the ideology of late Choudhary Devi Lal who has always fought against Congress so JJP will never enter into any alliance with the Congress and will not be part of any alliance which includes Congress," JJP's national general secretary KC Bangar said. The JJP can enter into an alliance with only like-minded parties whereas the ideology of Congress does not match with its views, he said. However, Bangar said the party is strengthening its organisation in all 10 Lok Sabha and 90 assembly seats. "It is capable of fighting elections in all these seats," he said. On March 11, Congress President Rahul Gandhi ruled out any alliance with AAP in Delhi and asked his party workers in the capital to win all seven Lok Sabha seats following which Kejriwal said his party would win all seven parliamentary seats in Delhi "on its own". AAP had supported JJP in the recent Jind By-poll in Haryana and both parties have been in talks to ally for the Assembly elections scheduled later this year. File image The BJP-Shiv Sena coalition will kick-start its Lok Sabha poll campaign from Kolhapur district in Maharashtra on March 24, a leader said on Wednesday. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and his cabinet colleagues visited Sena president Uddhav Thackeray's residence here on Tuesday night to finalise their poll campaign plans, according to a source. "The state-level leaders will launch the election campaign from Kolhapur on March 24," a BJP leader said. Leaders and workers of both the parties from Vidarbha, Marathwada, Mumbai and North Maharashtra would hold three to four meetings in their respective regions before the first rally, a Sena leader said. Maharashtra has 48 Lok Sabha seats, the second highest in the country after Uttar Pradesh which has 80 seats. The BJP and Shiv Sena have agreed to fight 25 and 23 seats, respectively, in the state. Lok Sabha elections for total 543 seats in the country will be held over seven phases, beginning April 11 and ending May 19, and results would be announced on May 23. The BJP on March 13 dragged Congress president Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra into alleged corruption involving land deals, claiming the opposition party has come to define "family corruption" by "institutionalising" graft. Citing a media report, Union Minister and BJP leader Smriti Irani told reporters that Robert Vadra is "merely a mask" in the controversial land deals and his brother-in-law Rahul Gandhi is the "real face". Dismissing the allegations, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said, "Facing imminent defeat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his favourites are resorting to levelling completely baseless and fake allegations". At a press conference, Irani said, "The country has come to know that the brother-in-law (Rahul) is also involved with his 'jija' (Robert Vadra) in this family package of corruption". Referring to the report, Irani claimed that Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra purchased land in a deal involving H L Pahwa, who was raided by the Enforcement Directorate, and Mahesh Kumar Nagar, who also had a role in land transaction involving Robert Vadra. Pahwa, she said, was lent money by C C Thampi who is "friends" with controversial arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari. The BJP leader claimed that Gandhi's opposition to a defence deal, an apparent reference to the Rafale transaction, was due to his "financial and family" interests as he wanted a rival company to bag the contract. The Congress president should answer about his relations with Pahwa in these land transactions, Irani said. To a question about Union minister Ananth Hegde's controversial comments against the Gandhi family, including Sonia Gandhi, Irani parried the query saying she had not heard his statement but added that she was at the receiving end of the "same team Rahul Gandhi" when it comes to commenting against women. A delegation of the BJP met Election Commission officials on March 13, urging them to declare West Bengal a super sensitive state to ensure Lok Sabha elections are conducted in a free and fair manner. After meeting EC officials, Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said the delegation has demanded that central forces be deployed at all polling booths and freedom of press be ensured. A high-powered delegation of the BJP, including Mukul Roy, JP Nadda, Nirmala Sitharaman and Ravi Shankar Prasad met with the EC today. On behalf of the party, we told the EC that Bengal is that state of the country where at least 100 people have died during local body and panchayat polls. The winning candidates arent allowed to enter the state, officers sit on a dharna with the chief minister, the helicopter of BJP president Amit Shah isnt allowed to land, other CM helicopters are also not allowed to land. That is why we have demanded that the state be declared super sensitive, Prasad said. Prasad said the delegation also asked EC officials to remove police officers whose electoral impartiality is questionable. Most importantly, central forces must be deployed at all polling booths as the local police act as TMC workers, he added. The delegation even asked the polling body to have a central media observer as it accused the media in the state of being partisan. West Bengal held panchayat polls in May last year in which the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) swept the state. Widespread violence was reported during the polls and at least 12 people were killed. Out of a total 58,692 posts for gram panchayat, zilla parishad and panchayat samiti, 20,159 of them had remained uncontested in the violence-marred local polls. As per the BJP and the CPI(M), this had led to about 34 percent of TMCs candidates winning unopposed. Even the Supreme Court had expressed "shock" over the large number of uncontested seats. The BJP, which came a close second to the TMC during the panchayat polls, is expediting its efforts to make inroads in the eastern state where it had won a dismal two out of the total 42 parliamentary constituencies in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. Congress president Rahul Gandhi said on March 13 he harboured no hatred towards the convicts of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case and asserted that it was for the courts to decide on their release. The Congress chief, who is touring Tamil Nadu for a day to launch the United Progressive Alliance's campaign, said the assassination of his father and former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 had two aspects. "While one was personal, which we have dealt with, the other was the legal issue, which has to take its course. Whatever course the legal issue takes, we are happy with it," Rahul Gandhi said. "We are quite forgiving people, we do not have animosity or hatred towards anybody and it is for the courts to decide (on their release)," he told reporters. "You need a conversation to start with stakeholders, that is the type of things we excelled at," the Congress president added. Exuding confidence that a Congress-led Opposition would emerge victorious in the Lok Sabha election, Rahul Gandhi promised initiatives such as reforms in the goods and services tax, encompassing its simplest form and a "phenomenal and revolutionary idea" of a minimum income guarantee scheme. On the Rafale deal, he said while there was no question about its capability, the issue was about corruption and the need was for a probe into it. The Congress chief did not answer if his party would scrap the deal if voted to power. "The Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) is a 'corrupt' man, bypassed negotiations, ran parallel negotiations on the Rafale deal." Hitting out at Modi, Rahul Gandhi asked as to why the prime minister was not addressing the media and interacting with students like he did. "Why are you (Modi) hiding?" he asked, adding that the prime minister should have the guts to face the media. Lashing out at the BJP, he said the saffron party's idea was to capture every institution of the country and run it from Nagpur, the RSS headquarters. The EC has issued a show-cause notice to Delhi BJP MLA Om Prakash Sharma for putting up two posters featuring him, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and IAF Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman on Facebook. The Election Commission (EC) has asked him to take down the post and give a reply by Thursday. The Lok Sabha elections is scheduled to begin on April 11 and will continue till May 19. Polling in Delhi will be held in two phases. The posters, shared on social media on March 1, feature Modi, BJP chief Amit Shah, the IAF officer, and Sharma, who represents the Vishwas Nagar seat in the Delhi Assembly. "Pakistan has bowed down. Our brave soldier has returned. It's a big diplomatic victory that Modiji has brought Abhinandan back in very little time," the posters read. District Magistrate, Shahdara, K M Mahesh, told PTI, "We issued a show-cause notice to Sharma on March 11 for posting posters featuring Abhinandan Varthaman on Facebook." "He (Sharma) has been asked to furnish a reply by 11 am Thursday. It's a violation of the Model Code of Conduct and appropriate action will be taken," Mahesh, who is also the returning officer, said. Referring to its December 2013 letter to all political parties, the poll panel had recently asked them to refrain from making references to the armed forces while canvassing for elections. The directive had come against the backdrop of a picture showing a hoarding with images of Varthaman and leaders of a party. Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh said that former prime minister Manmohan Singh was "never in the reckoning", rejecting reports that the Congress may field him from Amritsar in the Lok Sabha polls. He also denied any alliance talks with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) or any other party for the polls in the state. "The Congress did not need any alliance in Punjab, nor was it in talks with any party on the same," he said. Earlier in the day, AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal said in Delhi that his party and a breakaway outfit of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) are in talks for an alliance in Punjab for the Lok Sabha polls. Amarinder Singh, who turned 77 on Monday, described his meeting with the former prime minister in Delhi as a courtesy call, during which he briefed him about Congress' plans in Punjab. "Former prime minister Manmohan Singh was never in the reckoning for candidature as he had made it clear that he was not interested in contesting elections," the chief minister said here. He along with party's in-charge for Punjab affairs Asha Kumari and state Congress chief Sunil Jakhar had met Manmohan Singh in New Delhi on Sunday and according to some reports, they urged him to contest the Lok Sabha elections from Amritsar. Although some reports suggested that Manmohan Singh was not inclined to contest polls because of his age. Exuding confidence about the Congress prospects in the parliamentary elections, Amarinder Singh said the party was gung-ho about these polls, as was evident from the fact that it had chosen Ahmedabad -- the home turf of Prime Minister Narendra Modi -- for the CWC meeting. In response to a question on the Punjab Congress candidates, Amarinder Singh said the next meeting was likely to be held in Delhi around the end of this week. Asked about the party's star campaigner in the state, the chief minister said it was up to the Congress high command to decide the names of the key campaigners for the party in these elections. On whether the IAF air strike across the LoC would prove beneficial to the ruling BJP at the Centre, Amarinder Singh, who was an Army captain, said with Indian soldiers continuing to be killed every day, the air strike had clearly not proved to be a deterrent so far against Pak-backed attacks on India. He reiterated that no attempts should be made to politicise the Indian forces. "The armed forces are apolitical and are above the petty considerations of caste, religion and political affiliations," the chief minister said. Amarinder Singh expressed happiness at the fact that the Kartarpur Corridor project had remained on track despite the recent tensions at the border. Islamabad had also clarified that the latest events will not have any adverse effect on the project, he said, adding that the corridor was something that people on both sides wanted. Moneycontrol News The Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular) have finalised the seat-sharing arrangement for Karnataka. The Congress will contest on 20 seats while the JD(S) will contest on eight, CNN News 18 has reported. Karnataka has 28 Lok Sabha seats. According to reports, the JD(S) will field candidates from the Tumkur, Hasan, Mandya, Shimoga and Bengaluru North seats. Earlier, there were reports of disagreements between Congress and JD(S) over the Tumkur Lok Sabha constituency. JD(S) supremo and former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda had earlier in the day said that the seat-sharing arrangement is yet to be finalised and that Congress president Rahul Gandhi will decide on the arrangement on March 15. The Congress and JD(S) have run a ten-month-old coalition government in Karnataka headed by HD Kumaraswamy. Earlier in January, the Congress-JD(S) alliance had alleged that the BJP is poaching its MLAs to destabilise the government . The BJP, on its part, had alleged that their MLAs are being poached. Representative image The Election Commission announced the dates for the Lok Sabha polls on March 10. But, what happened in the 100 days before this crucial announcement will end up shaping the narrative of the upcoming polls. From rolling out of policies to lapsing of bills, from pacifying bickering allies to burying hatchets with arch enemies, these last 100 days have been extremely eventful and stimulating. Lets take a look: Farmer is the nucleus After their tri-state victory in the Assembly elections, which concluded in December last year, the Congress waived off farmer loans in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. Such must have been the efficacy of the measure that it compelled the Centre to rethink and roll out the KISAN Yojana in the interim budget. The scheme promises direct transfer of Rs 6,000 annually to farmers accounts. Reservation for the economically backward The NDA government introduced the 103rd Constitution Amendment Bill to roll out 10 percent reservation for the economically backward upper caste with an annual income of Rs 8 lakh. The scheme checkmated the Opposition completely, leaving them no scope to come back at the ruling government. Congress promise of minimum income Congress President Rahul Gandhi, at a rally in Raipur on January 28, promised direct cash transfer to ensure minimum income for every poor family in the country. The scheme is also said to feature in the partys manifesto. Race for reservations The states werent far behind when it came to giving reservations, even if it meant breaching the 50 percent ceiling earmarked by the Supreme Court. For instance, the newly formed Congress government in Rajasthan introduced a bill giving 5 percent reservation to Gujjars and four other communities above the existing OBC quota. Similarly, Andhra Pradesh gave 5 percent quota to upper caste Kapus, who form close to 27 percent of the states population. Madhya Pradesh issued an ordinance to raise the state OBC quota to 27 percent from the existing 14 percent. Meanwhile, the Centre overturned the Supreme Courts verdict and recalled the 200-point roster system for faculty reservation in universities. CBI crisis The Narendra Modi-led NDA government benched CBI director Alok Verma. However, the Supreme Court overruled that decision, despite which Verma quit after being shunted out of the investigation agency. In another case, CBI officials reached Kolkata Commissioner Rajeev Kumars residence to interrogate him about the Saradha scam, but they were detained by the Kolkata Police. The fiasco led to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee staging a dharna, which eventually became a platform for show of strength for the United Opposition, against the ruling government for allegedly corrupting the institutions of this country. The CBI was also successful in extraditing alleded middleman in the AgustaWestland Chopper Scam Christian Michel from Dubai. Priyanka finally makes political debut Priyanka Gandhi finally joined active politics on January 23 after she was made the Congress general secretary for eastern Uttar Pradesh ahead of the Lok Sabha election. Her debut is purported to re-energise the Grand Old Party and give an impetus to the partys campaign. Pulwama terror attack and its aftermath On February 14, Pakistan-backed terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) attacked a CRPF convoy near Pulwama, killing 40 jawans. The incident led to a public duel between the two countries, with India taking diplomatic as well as muscular action against Pakistan. India conducted a pre-emptive non-military air strike on a terror camp in Balakot, deep inside of Pakistan. Pakistan retaliated the next day and an Indian pilot Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman was taken captive by the neighbouring country in the aerial engagement that ensued. He was later released by Pakistan. Political observers believe that the incident changed the discourse of Indian politics, in particular, the BJPs agenda. Party insiders have even admitted that national security has now superseded development in their agenda for the upcoming elections. The Rafale expose The Opposition, which has been consistent in lambasting the Narendra Modi-led NDA government for alleged corruption in the Rafale deal, got a shot in the arm when The Hindu revealed documents saying the Defence Ministry had firmly protested against the Prime Minister holding parallel parleys with the French government. Besides, the Supreme Court agreed to hear review petitions against their previous ruling in the Rafale matter, allaying apprehensions of the Balakot air strike erasing the discourse on Rafale. The Mandir Mediation The Supreme Court ruled that the Ram Janmabhoomi Babri Masjid land dispute case will be sent for court-monitored mediation. The three-member panel, headed by retired SC judge FMI Kalifullah and comprising Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and senior advocate Sriram Panchu, has been given eight weeks to resolve the matter and find a permanent solution. Enemy of enemy, a friend? On the one hand, Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party and Mayawatis Bahujan Samaj Party buried the hatchet and announced to contest Lok Sabha Polls together with the common goal of defeating Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Read Also | Taking stock of alliances across states On the other hand, BJP supremo Amit Shah wooed a sulking Shiv Sena with his infallible charm. The BJP even sealed an alliance with the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu. Introduced, stalled, lapsed Two bills the Citizenship Amendment Bill and the Triple Talaq Bill faced a lot of heat from the Opposition in Parliament, so much so, they lapsed after no consensus could be reached on them. However, on February 19, ordinance for banning instant triple talaq was re-promulgated by the Union cabinet. Disclaimer: Reliance Defence has denied any wrongdoing in the Rafale deal. Launching a frontal attack on the AIADMK-BJP alliance in Tamil Nadu, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi on March 13 alleged the state government was controlled by the Prime Minister's Office, something that has never happened before. In his first public rally to launch the UPA poll campaign in the southern state, Gandhi said "today, the government in Tamil Nadu is controlled by the Prime Minister's Office." The accusation has been often repeated by the DMK to target the ruling AIADMK. "Never was a government in Tamil Nadu controlled from Delhi," he said. The Congress president said Prime Minister Narendra Modi felt he could "capture" any Indian institution and control any state by "blackmail" and that he can pressure different states from Delhi. In his first rally after his party inked a poll pact with the DMK, he said Modi had stated that he wanted to be "chowkidar and not Prime Minister." "After saying that, the chowkidar gave Rs 30,000 crore to Ambani," he alleged. The Prime Minister's "entire foundation is built on lies," he said and quoted Tamil saint poet Tiruvalluvar's verse on truth in Tamil, which meant that truth would triumph (apparently referring to the Rafale deal). "And the truth will put Narendra Modi in jail," he alleged. Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra tweeted for the first time on Tuesday, over a month after joining Twitter. She put out two tweets in quick succession -- one on Mahatma Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram and the other quoting the Father of the Nation against violence. In the simple dignity of Sabarmati, the truth lives on. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra (@priyankagandhi) March 12, 2019 "In the simple dignity of Sabarmati, the truth lives on," she said in her first tweet posted over a month after she joined Twitter on February 11. Her second tweet was a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, "I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent." Priyanka Gandhi, who was appointed AICC general secretary in-charge Uttar Pradesh East, had garnered a massive response on joining Twitter, attracting over one lakh followers on the social media platform within 10 hours. Comparing her first-day popularity on the micro-blogging website to that of Tamil superstar Rajinikanth, senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor had hailed her as a "new superstar on social media". Currently, she has over 2,33,000 followers. As of now, she follows seven accounts, including the Congress' official handle and those of her brother and party chief Rahul Gandhi, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot, Ashok Gehlot, Randeep Singh Surjewala and Ahmed Patel. Exuding confidence that the voters of Uttar Pradesh would deliver their "final strike" in favour of the BJP in the Lok Sabha election, Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya said on Wednesday the saffron party would win more than 300 seats across the country. "Not only the voters of Amethi and Rae Bareli (the Congress bastions in UP), but voters of Uttar Pradesh will deliver a their final strike in favour of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in all the 80 Lok Sabha seats and give an overwhelming majority to him," Maurya told PTI in an interview here. The main issues in this election will be development, nationalism, eradicating poverty, wiping out corruption, ending terrorism and making the country number one in the world, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader said in an interview. Describing the alliance stitched by the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal as "opportunistic", Marya said: "It is an alliance with vested interests. It has become redundant for the people as the public has made up its mind that instead of voting for the SP and the BSP on caste lines, it will vote for the BJP, which is toeing the line of development, nationalism and working to eradicate terrorism." The deputy chief minister also made light of the formal entry of Priyanka Gandhi Vadra in politics. "I don't feel that her entry into UP's electoral politics will have any impact on us. She was earlier also a leader of Congress." "I am of the opinion that SP, BSP and Congress are all one entity. If not, then the SP and BSP should clarify that as to why have they left two seats for Congress in Amethi and Rae Bareli. And the Congress, on its part, should tell why it has taken their (SP and BSP) support in these two seats," Maurya said. Asked whether the issue of construction of a grand Ram temple in Ayodhya had taken a backseat as a poll issue, Maurya asserted: "There is no question of it being on the backfoot. As for the BJP, the issue of Ram temple is not an electoral one, but is a matter of faith and devotion. We do not make issues pertaining to our faith and devotion poll-related." Bala Murali Krishna Social medias future changed recently, just as a parliamentary panel led by Anurag Thakur was urging Joel Kaplan, Facebooks chief policy officer, to fight fake new by essentially break encryption on platforms such as WhatsApp, and allowing authorities to spy on content and users. At about the same time, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was readying a privacy-focused vision for the platform one in which messages will always be encrypted, encryption keys will never be stored, most data will expire in short periods of time, and authorities, much less anybody else, will have no access to others content. people increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room, Zuckerberg asserted in a 3,237-word post, outlining a new vision for social media. As I think about the future of the Internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today's open platforms. Zuckerbergs sharp shift is not a defiance of demands for backdoors from countries such as Australia or India. Even though his platforms have sold users data at will, his commitment to encryption has not been in question. Zuckerbergs response is to existential threats, notably to Facebook, the worlds largest social media platform with more than two billion users. Over the past year, Facebook has been weighed down by privacy scandals, the biggest of which involved a political consultancy called Cambridge Analytica walking away with the personal data of hundreds of millions of users. Consequently, Zuckerberg expects more regulation to emerge and increasingly limit the personal data he can aggregate or sell for lucrative targeted advertising. He also recognises a likely greater threat posed by younger users simply shunning Facebook and its model of social sharing. Hence, the deep thinking and sharp change that some liken to the turning of a battleship. What does Zuckerbergs shift mean for India? For the past several months, India has engaged with WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging platform, as well as Twitter in its quest to fight fake news and other social media abuse. It has focused on tracking messages that distribute fake news to deal with law and order, but raised fears of government spying. India has fancied its chances of extracting some concessions because it forms the largest user base on WhatsApp and Facebook 300 million and 200 million respectively and is the fastest-growing user base on Twitter. Still, backdoors to trace and access WhatsApp messages were never really on the cards and appear even more remote under Zuckerbergs new vision. Zuckerberg has set out the broad contours of a privacy-focused platform extension of WhatsApps end-to-end encryption to Facebook Messenger and Instagram and made clear an intent to fight unlawful demands for data by governments. while we push back and fight these requests in court, there's always a risk we'll lose a case and if the information isn't encrypted we'd either have to turn over the data or risk our employees being arrested, he wrote. However, encryption, as well as periodic automatic expunging of data, would be the perfect solution because it will negate any demands for data. In such a scenario, its not clear how India can then enforce two provisions it seeks. In amendments to the IT Act of 2000, India plans to require all Internet companies to proactively detect and delete within 24 hours any content impacting the sovereignty and integrity of India or even decency or morality. With total encryption, Facebook and others would simply not be able to comply. Separately, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is considering if Internet messaging platforms so-called Over the Top, or OTT, operators should be regulated just like SMS. In a clear split, cellular service providers back the move while broader Internet groups oppose it for the damage it could cause to Internet freedom. Should TRAI, and then the Department of Telecom, seek to regulate WhatsApp and other messaging platforms like SMS, Zuckerberg may have no option but to pull out of India. Zuckerberg has already announced plans to integrate messaging on the three platforms WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. This is primarily to complicate things for regulators should breakup of the company ever be considered, say, in Europe. In fact, he has been ordered to hold off on the move by at least one country, Germany. However if Zuckerberg succeeds in integrating the three messaging platforms, it would be difficult, probably impossible, to break encryption in any to accommodate the needs of an individual countries. The new vision Zuckerberg has set out for Facebook from social media to private messaging suggests he is prepared to take a hit in some markets, even the biggest ones like India, in order to secure its future. The question is: Can India live without WhatsApp or Facebook? Bala Murali Krishna works for a New York-based startup. Views are personal. For more Opinion pieces, click here Source: Twitter Indian Air Force pilot Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthamans heroics have not only been lauded in India but also in Pakistan. A photo of a tea stall somewhere in Pakistan with the pilots picture on the banner has gone viral on social media. Whats more special is the message on the banner that is winning hearts across social media platforms. This Pakistani uncle has got some serious marketing skills. The small roadside tea stall has a banner with the following text: 'Khan's Tea Stall - A tea that makes foes turn into friends' with the image of Indian Air Force pilot #Abhinandan - #IAF pic.twitter.com/ldQVG6brI7 Wajahat Kazmi (@KazmiWajahat) March 12, 2019 A tea seller in a bid to boost his business put up a banner with Varthamans photo on it. The photo has a special message which reads Aisi chai ki dushman ko bhi dost banaye written in Urdu. The text translates to 'A Tea so fine, it makes even an enemy a friend.' The photo has gone viral on social media and garnered a lot of attention to the tea sellers marketing skills. This advertisement has beaten all the memes about abinandhan Black Omamba (@12pointO) March 12, 2019 The picture on the banner is from one of the videos released after the Indian pilot was held captive in Pakistan. Varthaman was flying a MiG-21 Bison when the jet was shot down and he landed on the other side of the border during the aerial combat on February 27. The Wing Commander was released after two days and since then has inspired people to create fan arts and poems on his heroics. Varthaman continues to be a sensation in India and political parties have been using his picture on party banners. The Election Commission has asked Facebook to remove such political posters with the pilots face and even warned political parties to stop referencing armed forces for political gains. Hindustan Unilever product Surf Excel was the latest brand to face backlash on Twitter. The reason? An ad film talking about communal harmony. Like every year and like every other detergent brand, cashing in on Holi the festival of colours the detergent brand decided to advertise their product. Instead of harping on the usual topics, Surf Excel decided to give it a communal harmony spin. However, many Twitter users were irked by this ad campaign, saying it is a tendency of foreign companies to shove ideals of partial secularity down our throat. The backlash soon gained momentum and in no time, there were calls for boycotting the product. #BoycottSurfExcel also started trending. In case you are wondering what was so seditious, let us briefly explain the content of the one-minute ad titled Rang Laaye Sang (colours bring us together). It features two kids, a Hindu girl and a Muslim boy. The girl in question dares other kids to throw water balloons at her on Holi and happily takes all the hits while she enjoys the splash of colours. Eventually, it turns out that she chose to stain herself so that the kids run out of their resources and her Muslim friend can offer namaaz at a mosque without ruining his pristine whites. The ad ends with the jubilant boy promising to play Holi with the girl right after he is done offering his prayers. Within minutes of its release, the ad film got rave reviews, with many showering love and praise for the beautiful message it conveyed on unity in diversity. However, it wasnt long before negative comments started pouring in. While some claimed the ad promotes love jihad others said it promotes Hindu phobia. Some others pointed out that namaaz can be offered at home too, and the Hindu child need not have stepped out on Holi at all. Another bunch of people were angry over the colours of Holi being compared to daag (stain). To @HUL_News, #Masjid is not required to offer Namaz as per Quran so this Holi read Namaz at home. No need to step out. Regarding #lovejihad propoganda start making reverse advertisement now. Lets see their tolerance when a burqa clad girl is playing holi href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/BoycottSurfExcel?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#BoycottSurfExcel pic.twitter.com/sMjOOFl8jI PAYAL ROHATGI & Team (@Payal_Rohatgi) March 9, 2019 Would like to say sorry, on behalf of these two kids, to all the people getting offended by the surf excel ad. Bachein hena abhi, Nafratein seekhi nahi hongi shayad.#SurfExcel #Surf_Excel_India #surfexcelad pic.twitter.com/t0bUEsWZMP Ayush (@Aa_u_sh) March 12, 2019 People who are finding that #SurfExcel ad Offensive are just Dangerous for the Humanity, Society and this world. They are just Threat. SUNIL (@ImSGaraka) March 12, 2019 One of the best ad ever I seen.I am going to buy a couple of #SurfExcel EXTRA after watching this ad. The #SurfExcel ad is injurious to the Health of #Religious_Hatred. Advance HAPPY HOLI..... pic.twitter.com/7nRgRsa8K9 Samim Mondal (@AsnSami) March 12, 2019 #SurfExcel how nicely the ad reflects the most unique ethos of India, harmony in diversity and mutual coexistence. India needs more uniting ideas like this in times like this when people want to creat divide.#lovetheSurfExceladd aarish nawaz (@AarishNawaz) March 12, 2019 @surfexcel @hinduunilever Guys I loved the recent advertising. It was absolutely brilliant and to the point. Please do not take down the ad due to pressure. I believe for every 10 people standing against, there are 100s that are standing for it. Kudos to you on a job well done. JAIDEEP SINGH (@LogicalBee) March 12, 2019 Well done #SurfExcel for promoting religious harmony in these times! Great ad too. Ignore the haters. https://t.co/TnjUUAr8Tz Konkona Sensharma (@konkonas) March 10, 2019 I have a better suggestion. Bhakts should be washed properly with Surf Excel. Kyunki Surf ki dhulai daag ko karain saaf. https://t.co/YiYrW4AM2j Mehbooba Mufti (@MehboobaMufti) March 10, 2019 I am buying 2 extra 2 kilo pack of #SurfExcel for reminding us that we are nice people. And live naturally in relative harmony. And, kids know no barriers, until they are taught. It will last me 6 months. but it is worth it to defeat haters. Harini Calamur (@calamur) March 10, 2019 Me- "Surf Excel ad promotes communal harmony. Which part of it offends you?" Bhakt- "Harmony" Punster (@Pun_Starr) March 10, 2019 This ad of #SurfExcel can only make communal people angry. Not anyone who likes to live in peace and harmony. pic.twitter.com/ICCJLtdqtZ Fahad Shah (@pzfahad) March 10, 2019 To the Bhakts. You have no idea how much Surf your outrage helped sell....congrats You're practically the new brand ambassadors. Vir Das (@thevirdas) March 11, 2019 Thankfully, scores of people came forward again to debunk these claims saying Holi has always been a festival for all and that the ad reflects the real essence of India. They slammed the trolls for promoting hate online.Recently, Hindustan Unilever was criticised by netizens for a Brook Bond Tea ad that presented figures on elderly citizens being abandoned at Hindu religious gathering -- Kumbh Mela . This too triggered calls for boycotting HULs products. Moneycontrol News The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government on March 12 gave out important posts to key functionaries of its bickering allies in Uttar Pradesh, according to a report by The Economic Times. The report states that the move was to placate its allies in Uttar Pradesh, the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) and Apna Dal. SBSP chief OP Rajbhar's son Arvind Rajbhar was made the chairperson of the UP Small Industries Corporation Limited, while SBSP general secretary Rana Ajit Pratap Singh was made chairperson of UP Beej Vikas Nigam. UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, according to the report, signed an order elevating eight SBSP office-bearers to various boards and corporations in the state. Rajbhar senior, who had offered his resignation as Welfare Minister in February, has been a cribbing partner of the NDA in the state and has threatened to quit the alliance before. Similarly, the report states that nine office-bearers of the Apna Dal, including the party's national treasurer OP Katiyar and former president JL Patel, have been offered similar posts. According to the report, BJP national president Amit Shah had assured the allies of granting the posts during his meeting with them. "There is a wave of happiness in our party's cadre after this," Patel said in a statement. A report on OBC sub-categorisation, a point of contention between SBSP and Apna Dal since Patel was against its implementation and Rajbhar wanted it to be implemented, has also been shunted aside, according to the report. The report states that the parties, however, are still awaiting an agreement on seat-sharing arrangement. While the SBSP has demanded two seats in Eastern UP, Apna Dal has been demanding five seats from the same region. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More India has joined other countries in grounding Boeing 737 Max aircraft after the Ministry of Civil Aviation clarified that no such aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit Indian airspace effective 1600 hours IST or 1030 UTC, March 13. Additionally no B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit Indian airspace effective 1600hrs IST or 1030 UTC. The time line is to cater to situations where aircraft can be positioned at maintenance facilities & international flights can reach their destinations.(2/2) March 13, 2019 While the number of countries grounding Boeing 737 Max aircraft on the rise, here's everything that you need to know about this burning topic: What triggered the grounding of Boeing 737 MAX? Instances of Boeing 737 MAX being grounded were reported after the Ethiopian Airlines crashed on March 10, which involved the said Boeing aircraft, killing nearly 160 passengers and crew dead. In October last year, the same model was also involved in the Lion Air crash. Twelve minutes after taking off from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta, the plane crashed into the Java Sea, killing all 189 on board. Read: Boeing under scanner as Ethiopian Airlines crash comes 4 months after a similar Lion Air tragedy In the Lion Air crash, investigations showed that a malfunction in one of the sensors led to the aircraft computer to automatically initiated a dive. There were concerns that pilots weren't trained for this. The twin crashes have led to suspicion over design fault in the plane. Thus, taking into account the safety of passengers on this aircraft, countries across the globe including China, UK, Singapore and Malaysia have grounded Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. According to a tweet by Flightradar24, the popular flight tracker, there were 145 of the 737 Max 8 active in the air. Boeing's response In its first comment after the crash, Boeing said it is 'ready to support' the Ethiopian Airlines team. "A Boeing technical team is prepared to provide technical assistance at the request and under the direction of the US National Transportation Safety Board," the company said in a statement. Is the grounding going to affect Indian airlines? The grounding of the aircraft may impact two Indian airlines -- SpiceJet and cash-strapped Jet Airways -- that have Boeing 737 MAX in their fleet. In India, Jet Airways and SpiceJet have ordered 225 and 100 of these planes, respectively, which promise to be fuel efficient and less polluting. Jet has already ground 5 B737 MAX in its fleet. "Jet Airways has 5 B737 MAX in its fleet but is currently not flying any of these aircraft. The airline is in contact with the manufacturer and the regulator in context of this development and remains committed to implementing all directives or advisories that may be published by those authorized," a spokesperson told Moneycontrol. SpiceJet earlier told The Economic Times that it is following DGCA rules and talking to Boeing to sort out the issues. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah, during the announcement of the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance, had called the Sena and Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) the BJP's "oldest allies". Sena and SAD have been BJP's regional allies in Maharashtra and Punjab respectively. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had called BJP's alliance with SAD the "most durable and time-tested alliance" in 2018, while despite Sena's continued jibes at the BJP government in the Centre as well as in Maharashtra, the BJP leadership kept mum. Sweet turned sour But apart from being the oldest BJP allies, there is one more similarity between the SAD and Sena: both of them were unhappy with the BJP, and continued to express their displeasure. While the Sena criticised BJP over a number of its policies, including demonetisation and the BJP's inability to build a Ram temple in Ayodhya, SAD made a combination of subtle and overt comments against the BJP. For instance, in February last year, SAD had asked the BJP to "treat its allies better", and had even hinted at reasons why the Shiv Sena might be unhappy with BJP. SAD supremo Parkash Singh Badal had told Shah during his visit to Chandigarh that the BJP should "remove insecurity among minorities". The Akali Dal had also skipped a National Democratic Alliance (NDA) meet ahead of the budget session, threatening to walk out of the alliance. Interestingly, the reason SAD was miffed lay in Maharashtra: the party had reportedly stated that the BJP government in Maharashtra was trying to gain control of the Takht Huzur Sahib in Nanded through an amendment in Section 11 of the Takht Sri Nanded Board Act. The amendment was done in 2015, but a political controversy erupted in 2019, in the run-up to seat-sharing talks. Retaining the alliances However, despite these setbacks with its allies, BJP has managed to retain both within the NDA fold for the forthcoming elections. The politics differ in both states, so naturally do reasons. In Punjab, according to a report by The Indian Express, BJP wanted to have an alliance with SAD in order to dispel its anti-minority image, and both parties complement each other, in that urban votes go to BJP while the Jat Sikhs vote for SAD, the report states. The report states that Parkash Badal's equation with BJP leaders is also one of the reasons why BJP has managed to keep the alliance together. The SAD-BJP combine will fight on 10 and three seats respectively in the state, which has 13 Parliamentary seats. In Maharashtra, despite reluctance of the Sena cadre, an alliance was sealed between the two saffron parties. "They had no other choice. Their alliances elsewhere were falling apart, issues such as Citizenship Bill had put them on backfoot," a Sena leader told Moneycontrol. BJP sources, however, have dismissed the idea that it was the BJP that needed Sena. "Remember, we have the larger share of seats in the alliance," a BJP leader said. Out of the 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra, the Sena will fight on 23 seats while the BJP will fight on 25 seats. However, experts suggest that things weren't as simple as they seem for the combine: in 2014, the BJP contested in 24 seats and won 23, while the Shiv Sena contested in 20 and won 18, but their individual vote shares (27 percent and 20.82 percent respectively) were close to those of Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in Maharashtra (18.29 percent and 16.12 percent respectively). A Congress-NCP combine, therefore, would have the ability to dethrone BJP and Sena going it alone. Another reason why Sena agreed to an alliance, according to Sena leaders, was the BJP agreeing to give away the Palghar seat. BJP cadre in Palghar was quick to react by tendering resignations, and a BJP source in the region had told Moneycontrol that the party could not be seen as just "giving away" the seat, especially to Sena which they had fought less than a year ago in a bypoll. Sena, the source said, only wanted to "rub it in our face", which is why they were adamant on the demand. SAD and BJP entered into the first pre-poll coalition in 1997, during the Assembly elections in Punjab. The BJP and Sena alliance go further eight years back, in 1989, and the combo had formed a government in 1995 in Maharashtra. Image for representation An Atlanta-based sales management solutions company SalesLoft recently deconstructed millions of emails to find out why some content of their emails turned out to be more productive than a basic "hi, I hope you're well." Study results showed that subject lines with just one word outperformed the rest by 87 percent, while the mention of numbers reduced the response rate by 32 per cent. Whats stranger? They found that if one writes the word "referred" in the subject line, it got 536 percent greater response! An Inc.com report, which detailed the results of the study, mentioned that e-mails with lesser than 50 words also got more response than the rest. The study also found that if one signs off their e-mails with "cheers", the response rate increased by 8 percent. Now, one must note here, that the company that conducted the study had a typically American database, and it just may be so that cheers got greater response owing to its British lineage. As the Inc.com article decodes, many Americans believe that talking like a British would be cooler and thats why prefer an email that ends with a cheers instead of the usual thank you or regards. A Vision.com article that states over 8.5 billion emails are shared across the world per day, however, disagrees. According to them, gratitude wins. A study published on FastCompany found that mails that close with a variation of gratitude saw higher responses than ones with popular sign-offs like cheers and kind regards. It states that sign-offs with some expression of gratitude saw 30 percent higher response rate than ones with neutral closings. Britain will slash import tariffs in case of a no-deal Brexit and will not apply customs checks on the border with Ireland, the government said on Wednesday. Under the new system, which would come into force if Britain leaves the EU on March 29 without an agreement, tariffs would be retained but reduced for some agricultural products to protect British producers. The new regime is aimed at avoiding a jump in prices of EU imports for consumers and a disruption of supply chains, and is intended to be temporary for up to 12 months pending negotiations on a more permanent system. "If we leave without a deal, we will set the majority of our import tariffs to zero, whilst maintaining tariffs for the most sensitive industries," Trade Policy Minister George Hollingbery said. "This balanced approach will help to support British jobs and avoid potential price spikes that would hit the poorest households the hardest," he said. Tariffs on beef, lamb, pork, poultry and some dairy would be reduced but retained in most cases. In the auto sector, the government said carmakers reliant on European Union supply chains would not face additional tariffs for car parts imported from the EU but tariffs would apply on imported cars. The new regime would not apply to countries with which Britain already has a free trade agreement and to around 70 developing countries that have preferential access to the British market. The government said it would not apply a tariff regime and customs border on goods transiting across the land border from Ireland to Northern Ireland but admitted that this created a "potential for exploitation" if those goods are then transported across the sea to mainland Britain for sale. "This regime is only temporary as we recognise that there are challenges associated with this approach, including the unmonitored flow of goods into the UK and the potential for exploitation of any new system," the government said in a statement. "The government is committed to entering into discussions with the European Commission and the Irish government as a matter of urgency," it said. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani Iran is discreetly scouring the globe for second-hand oil tankers to replace its ageing fleet and keep crucial crude exports flowing as US sanctions start to bite, Iranian and Western sources said. Since US President Donald Trump reimposed sanctions in November, exploratory talks with South Korea for up to 10 new supertankers have stalled, Panama has removed at least 21 Iranian tankers from its registry and Tehran is now looking for extra vessels in places such as Vietnam, the sources said. Washington has put restrictions on Iran's port, energy and shipping sectors but it has given waivers to the country's eight biggest oil customers, which include China, India and Japan, so they can keep buying Iranian crude. With oil exports accounting for an estimated 70 percent of Iran's revenues, maintaining an effective fleet of tankers to store and move that oil is crucial for Tehran. But potential sellers of used vessels are more wary this time round after a Greek network that helped Iran buy tankers under previous sanctions was blacklisted. Western insurers are also steering clear, complicating Iran's attempts to export crude to US-approved buyers. If Iran runs into difficulties exporting its oil it could have a significant impact. Besides the importance of oil for its budget, Iran is estimated to produce about 2.8 million barrels a day, more than 9 percent of OPEC's output. "Whatever sector you look at, companies will keep in mind being cut off from the US financial system when deciding whether to trade with Iran," said Mehdi Varzi, an independent oil consultant who has previously worked at the state-run National Iranian Oil Co. 'HAPPY TO DO BUSINESS' Israel warned this month that its navy could take action against Iran, which it said was smuggling oil using clandestine measures similar to those employed during the previous round of sanctions. According to maritime specialists, methods used for skirting sanctions in the past have included changing the names of ships, switching off AIS (Automatic Identification System) location transponders and conducting ship-to-ship transfers of oil. Since the previous round of sanctions in 2012, ship tracking has become more sophisticated and more available. Washington has also cracked down on more Iranian networks, making it riskier to get involved with Iran, according to bankers. Iran reached an agreement with world powers in 2015 over its nuclear programme which led to the lifting of sanctions in 2016 but Trump pulled out of the deal in May last year and reimposed US restrictions in November. "Many big oil traders are very worried about going into Iran due to Trump, and even the Chinese are trying to comply with what the Americans want," said Varzi, who is based in Britain. A senior Iranian official played down the threat to its oil exports because of pressure on its fleet. "Plenty of countries are happy to do business with Iran," the official said. "As we have done in the past, there are several ways to overcome the shortage, including using tankers of other countries." MORE SCRUTINY A second Iranian official said discussions with South Korea over the possibility of ordering as many as 10 supertankers, each able to carry up to 2 million barrels of oil, had been delayed by US sanctions. "We are working on it," the official said. A South Korean government official had no comment on the matter. After Western sanctions were lifted, Iran also started talks with South Korea's Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering Co. about forming a joint venture to establish a shipyard in Iran. A spokesman for Daewoo said it signed a preliminary agreement with Iran in December 2016 to cooperate on developing the shipyard, but said no progress had been made since then. A third Iranian official said talks were still ongoing. According to one shipping source, Iran has been searching for more ships in places such as Vietnam and two sources said it had also been looking for middlemen in the Greek market, one of the main hubs for second-hand ship deals. "Iran has been looking for ships, but this time round it is going to be harder - there is so much more scrutiny now. It is going to take them longer," one of the shipping sources said. When asked about Iran's efforts to secure ships, a third Iranian source said they were looking at all options. Vietnamese officials did not respond to requests for comment. Iran has more than 50 tankers, but needs them for both transporting oil and storing unsold stocks in its territorial waters - given its limited onshore storage capacity. Data based on AIS tracking by shipping intelligence platform MarineTraffic showed 12 Iranian tankers, or more than a fifth of its fleet, were being used for floating storage in March. 'FLOATING LIABILITY' Iran is struggling to keep its ships flagged to foreign registries too. All commercial ships have to be registered - flagged in a particular country - partly to comply with safety and environmental laws. Following the reimposition of sanctions, Panama, the world's leading flag state for commercial shipping, decided to de-flag Iran's ships, a fourth Iranian official said. Shipping data shows nearly all Iran's tankers had been registered with Panama. A source at Panama's flag registry said the cancellation, "affects approximately 60 Panama registered ships that are related to Iranian and Syrian owners". The source did not provide further details. A US Treasury spokesperson said: "We intend to fully enforce these sanctions and we encourage the cooperation and compliance of our allies and partners." Renewed US sanctions have also meant Iran has been unable to secure vital certification services from foreign providers to ensure its ships remain seaworthy, shipping officials said. Shipping records show that 16 of Iran's tankers are at least 19 years old - and three of those vessels have been in service since 1996. Iranian tanker Sanchi sank off China in 2018 after colliding with another vessel while five of the eight tankers Iran bought via the Greek network under previous sanctions have since been scrapped, adding to the need for more ships to fill the gaps. US Special Representative for Iran, Brian Hook, described Iran's tanker sector as a "floating liability" in November. IRANIAN FLAG Shipping data showed at least two Panama flagged tankers - the Sarak and the Sobar - were re-flagged to Iran on January 1. The owners of the vessels, who were listed in the British Virgin Islands, could not be contacted. More than 20 other tankers in Iran's fleet have been reflagged to Iran this year. Having its tankers flagged in Iran rather than a third country such as Panama presents further problems for Tehran, even if it can secure more vessels and approved buyers for its oil, shipping experts say. Besides China, India and Japan, Washington also gave South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Italy and Greece the green light to keep buying Iranian oil, although it's unclear whether these waivers will be renewed when they expire in May. Dealing with Iran's flag registry raises compliance issues for counterparties as there is a risk they might interact with individuals or entities blacklisted under US sanctions. And with few buyers now willing to take all the commercial risks involved in oil sales, Iran is also having to cover the shipment of cargoes, including securing insurance in most instances, shipping sources said. Mike Salthouse with the International Group, which represents companies that insure about 90 percent of the world's commercial shipping, said Western insurers were very unlikely to do business with Iranian shipping companies. "The biggest problem for insurers these days is finding a bank willing to handle a payment for goods or services where the beneficiary is designated by the US," said Salthouse, chairman of the International Group's sanctions sub-committee. "Banks will not engage when you mention the Iran word." Hours before the UN Security Council is to take up a resolution on listing Jaish-e-Muhammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, China on Wednesday hinted that it may once again block the move, saying only "the solution that is acceptable to all sides" is conducive to resolve the issue. The fate of the proposal to designate Pakistan-based Azhar as a global terrorist by the UN Security Council will be known in less than 24 hours when the deadline to raise objections to the bid expires. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, UK and the US on February 27. "I could reiterate that China will continue to adopt responsible attitude and participate in the deliberations in the UNSC 1267 Committee," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing here. China, a veto-wielding member of the UNSC, has blocked the move by India and other member nations three times in the past to designate Azhar. China has been insisting that the solution should be acceptable to all. Asked to clarify whether the issue has been listed for discussion for March 13 and China is in talks with all the parties concerned, Lu said, "First I want to clarify that I don't recall saying anything about the deadline about the UNSC committee and other UN subsidiary bodies". On the issue of listing Azhar, he said, "I want to say that China always adopts a responsible attitude, engage in consultations with various parties and properly deal with this issue." "The discussions, I want to say must follow the rules and procedures of the relevant bodies and only the solution that is acceptable to all sides is conducive for resolving the issue," he said. Recently, China's Vice Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou travelled to Pakistan and held talks with Prime Minister Imran Khan and Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa and other officials. India on Saturday said all UNSC members were aware about the JeM training camps and the presence of terror group's chief Masood Azhar in Pakistan, and urged them to designate him as a global terrorist. The JeM, headed by the 50-year-old Azhar, carried out many terror strikes in India and was involved in the attack on Parliament, the Pathankot air force base, army camps in Jammu and Uri. It also claimed responsibility for the February 14 Pulwama suicide attack which left 40 CRPF personnel dead. Representative image A Kuala Lumpur-bound flight was forced to turn back to Saudi Arabia on Monday after a mother forgot her baby at the airport terminal. Saudia flight SV832 had taken off from King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, but the pilot had to seek permission to turn back after the panic-stricken passenger informed the crew that she left her baby in the boarding area of the terminal. The flight then returned to its gate. There is no information yet on how or why the mother forgot her child. It is also unknown if the plane was already in the air when the woman alerted the crew or if it was yet to take off. However, a video of the pilot seeking permission to turn back from Air Traffic Control went viral on social media. It was first uploaded on YouTube and has more than 50,000 views now. He can be heard saying: May God be with us. Can we come back or what? An ATC operative can be heard saying over the radio: This flight is requesting to come backa passenger forgot her baby in the waiting area, the poor thing. After the staff asks the pilot to repeat the request, he says: We told you, a passenger left her baby in the terminal and refuses to continue the flight. To this, the ATC operative says: Ok, head back to the gate This is totally a new one for us! However, as per an Independent report, this is not the first time women have bee caught in air travel-related acts. Two years ago, the photo of a woman captioned idiot had gone viral. She forgot her baby on the floor of the airport while using her phone. Illinois resident Molly Lensing, the woman in question, defending her actions, said that a technical snag had left her stranded in Colorado for almost a whole day with her infant daughter. Anastasia (the baby) had been held or in her carrier for many hours, Lensing had said. "My arms were tired. She needed to stretch. And I had to communicate with all the family members wondering where the heck we were." Lensing also hit out at the trolls for shaming and judging strangers parenting techniques online without knowing the back story. British Prime Minister Theresa May on Tuesday suffered yet another massive Parliament defeat over Brexit when MPs overwhelmingly rejected her withdrawal agreement by 149 votes, leaving the March 29 deadline for the deal hanging in the balance. MPs voted in the House of Commons against the terms of Britain's so-called divorce from the European Union (EU) by 391 to 242. While this marked a smaller defeat than the 230-vote margin with which they rejected her deal back in January, it was a decisive rejection of government strategy even after May had claimed significant changes to the controversial Irish backstop clause had been achieved. The British PM made a statement to the Commons soon after the bruising result was announced to confirm that Parliament will vote on a new motion on Wednesday to decide if the UK should leave the EU within the March 29 deadline without any deal in place. In an unusual move, she revealed that all Conservative Party MPs will be given a free vote on the issue instead of being made to vote in a particular way by the government. She said: "This is an issue of grave importance for the future of our country. Just like the referendum, there are strongly held and equally legitimate views on both sides." "For that reason, I can confirm that this will be a free vote on this side of the House," she said. There is unlikely to be a majority in favour of a no-deal chaotic Brexit, which would then give way to a third parliamentary motion on Thursday to determine if the Brexit deadline of March 29 needs to be extended, which would then have to be ratified by the EU. May, visibly tired and struggling to speak as a result of a sore throat, admitted that Tuesday's vote confirms that there is no support for "this deal" and how the Brexit process moves forward remains all the more uncertain. Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn called for a general election to allow the British public to decide who should lead them into the next phase of Brexit. The EU's Chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, said in a Twitter statement: "The EU has done everything it can to help get the Withdrawal Agreement over the line. The impasse can only be solved in the UK. Our 'no-deal' preparations are now more important than ever before." Earlier on Tuesday, PM May had made a final push for the UK Parliament to back her Brexit withdrawal agreement in the vote after she claimed to have secured "legally binding" changes to the draft rejected by the Home of Commons earlier this year. She had called on the Commons to get behind her enhanced agreement setting out the UK's exit strategy from the EU or risk going against the will of the majority that voted for Brexit in the June 2016 referendum. "This is the moment and this is the time. Back this motion and get the deal done... We cannot serve our country by overturning a democratic decision of the British people," she said, hours after she had claimed a breakthrough in negotiations with the EU to secure changes to the controversial Irish backstop to make it more acceptable to all sides of Parliament. Corbyn countered that it was the same "bad deal" MPs had rejected in January and that his party would be voting against it again because it risks people's living standards and jobs. The clash came soon after UK Attorney General Geoffrey Cox confirmed that the legal risk from the controversial Irish backstop "remains unchanged", leading to hard-Brexiteers from within May's own Conservative Party refusing to back the so-called "improved" divorce arrangement. In his official advice as the country's chief legal adviser, Cox said the extra assurances won by May do "reduce the risk that the United Kingdom could be indefinitely and involuntarily detained" in the backstop if talks on the two sides' future relationship broke down due to "bad faith" by the EU. However, he reiterated that the "legal risk remains unchanged" that if no such agreement can be reached due to "intractable differences", the UK would have "no internationally lawful means" of leaving the backstop without EU agreement. The Brexit-backing European Research Group (ERG) within the Tory Party declared soon after that it will not be voting for the withdrawal agreement in the Commons later, in a major blow to May's leadership. In a statement, the ERG said: "In the light of our own legal analysis and others we do not recommend accepting the government's motion today." The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which provides May's government its majority, also declared they would vote against the deal as the changes did not alleviate their concerns over the backstop. The Irish backstop, an insurance policy designed to maintain an open border on the island of Ireland between UK territory Northern Ireland and EU member-state the Republic of Ireland has been the biggest sticking point for many MPs in the UK who voted against the withdrawal agreement tabled by Theresa May in January, by a massive margin of 230 votes. The historic bruising for May had led her to seek changes to the agreement in order to table a second "meaningful vote" before Parliament that she hoped would stand a better chance of being voted through. The March-end deadline had kicked in when the UK triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty following a referendum in favour of Brexit by nearly 52 per cent to 48 per cent in June 2016. Ride-hailing startup Uber Technologies Inc has hired a string of investment banks to its syndicate of initial public offering underwriters, as it ramps up preparations for a stock market debut, people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday. Smaller rival Lyft Inc is racing to list in the stock market at the end of March. While Uber will not beat Lyft to an IPO, the preparations are aimed at giving it the flexibility to go public as early as the first half of 2019, the sources said. Uber has added more than half a dozen investment banks, including Bank of America Corp, Barclays Plc, Citigroup Inc, Allen & Company, Deutsche Bank AG and JMP Securities, to its IPO underwriting lineup, the sources said. These banks will support Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc, which Uber hired late last year to lead its public offering, the sources added. Uber will make additional bank hires in the coming weeks to complete the IPO syndicate, the sources said. The sources asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential. Representatives for Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup and JMP Securities declined to comment. Uber, Allen & Company and Deutsche Bank did not immediately return requests for comment. Several investment banks held off pitching Lyft for an IPO role in order to be hired by Uber, a more lucrative and high-profile assignment given its size and status. However, JMP Securities managed to get on both Uber and Lyft's IPO syndicates, showing that such overlap is possible, albeit mainly with more junior underwriting roles. Lending relationships between the companies and the banks have also proved important in winning IPO roles. Lyft's top-tier of seven underwriters was responsible for around a quarter of capital raised through last year, compared to more than 40 percent for the six top-tier banks that Uber has hired so far, according to Dealogic. Like Lyft, Uber filed confidentially for an IPO with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in December. Its bankers have indicated it could be valued at as much as $120 billion, though some analysts have pegged its value closer to $100 billion based on the earning figures it discloses. Lyft could be valued close to $25 billion in its IPO, according to the sources. Earlier on Tuesday, Uber agreed to pay $20 million to settle a lawsuit brought nearly six years ago by drivers who claimed they are employees, not independent contractors. Uber still faces thousands of arbitration claims from drivers who are not covered by the settlement. Britain needs to overhaul its competition rules to tackle the dominance of tech giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon, and increase consumer choice, a government review said on Wednesday. A new competition unit with expertise in the sector should be set up, the independent review said, and innovation should be encouraged by giving people control over their own data so they could switch between rival services and platforms easily. Smaller companies should also have access to the data that social media platforms hold on their users, it recommended. Big tech has been criticised by politicians in the United States and in Europe in recent years over issues ranging from Facebook losing track of users' data to how Google ranks the results of searches. France, Italy, Britain and Spain have also proposed new digital taxes to narrow loopholes that allow large multinational firms to cut tax bills. Harvard professor Jason Furman, who chaired the British government review, said the digital sector had created substantial benefits but they had come at the cost of the increasing dominance of a few companies. "My panel is outlining a balanced proposal to give people more control over their data, give small businesses more of a chance to enter and thrive, and create more predictability for the large digital companies," he said on Wednesday. "These recommendations will deliver an economic boost driven by UK tech start-ups and innovation that will give consumers greater choice and protection." UK finance minister Philip Hammond, who will deliver a half-yearly update on the budget later on Wednesday, said he would set out government measures to ensure digital markets are competitive later this year. TechUK, which represents more than 900 tech companies that collectively employ 700,000 people, said the report contained some positive suggestions, but it needed further detail on what any proposed code of conduct for big tech might look like. It also said there had to be a full assessment of the risks and benefits of opening up data sets. "Bad regulation can be as big a barrier to competition and innovation as monopolistic activities," TechUK CEO Julian David said. "The UK must remain a welcoming place for digital business from around the world, and ensure that the UK competition and wider regulatory framework is not in conflict with the other leading digital economies with which we must compete." Properties within Rs40 lakh budget see 23% fall in average sizesfrom 750sq ft (square feet) in 2014 to 580sq ft in 2018 Average property sizes in top-7 cities decline by 17% in 5 years; from 1,390sq ft in 2014 to 1,100sq ft in 2018 Bangalore sees least size reduction at 12%, Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) tops with 27% average decrease When it comes to housing, size matters, for all kinds of reasons. The added floor space of larger homes definitely spells comfort, convenience and family scalability, every additional square foot either comes at a higher price or pushes available options further away from the central regions of a city. Millennial homebuyers have already made it clear that they prefer affordability, coupled with good location, over larger-sized homes in the far-flung suburbs. Simultaneously, developers are intent on making their housing projects more pocket-friendly for a higher customer base. As a result, the top seven Indian cities collectively saw average apartment sizes shrink by nearly 17% between 2014 and 2018. However, this has not been a uniform phenomenon. Among the top cities, MMR topped the list with a 27% average decrease in apartment sizesfrom 960sq ft in 2014 to 7 00sq ft in 2018. topped the list with a in apartment sizesfrom in 2014 to 7 in 2018. Bengaluru saw least decline in average property size at around 12% in five years. The current average apartment size in Bengaluru is 1,260sq ft. Interestingly, prior to 2017, the average sizes in Bengaluru fluctuated by merely 1%-2% y-o-y (year-on-year); in 2018, they dropped by over 12% against the preceding year. saw in average property size at around 12% in five years. The current average apartment size in Bengaluru is Interestingly, prior to 2017, the average sizes in Bengaluru fluctuated by merely 1%-2% y-o-y (year-on-year); in 2018, they dropped by over 12% against the preceding year. Hyderabad currently has the highest average property sizes about 1,600 sqft, Property buyers in Hyderabad have traditionally preferred large-sized homes, which dovetails favourably with the fact that property prices here have been more realistic than in most other cities. A major factor contributing to the shrinking apartment sizes across most metros is the rising demand for budget-friendly housing. With property prices going overboard in most metros, developers have been reducing sizes to align their offerings more with the actual homebuyer demand. The Millennial Connection Another reason for shrinking apartment sizes is that most millennial homebuyers are averse to investing in both the higher maintenance costs and extra efforts that larger properties entail. However, this is not their only reasonmillennials actually prefer to own smaller homes. Millennials attribute high value on location flexibility and do not get 'tied to' neighbourhoods the way the previous generations did. Frequent 'switching' of cities is rapidly becoming the new normal for millennials on the lookout for faster career growth. Also, they're in no hurry to marry and start families. Live-in relationships are becoming more popular and socially acceptable, and more and more young people give high priority to career growth before deciding to marry and settle down. The average age of marriage in India has increased from age 21-25 in previous years to age 30-35 in recent years. Compact housing is the fastest seller on the resale market, so such homes gives millennials both locational and financial flexibility while simultaneously allowing them the security and investment advantages of homeownership. The increasing preference for smaller homes by what is arguably India's most solvent age demographic contrasts sharply with the onus on larger flats in previous years. It took developers quite a while to understand and accept itone of the main reasons why there is so much unsold mid-range housing inventory on the market today. Segment-wise Apartment Reduction The maximum reduction in average property sizes was seen in the budget housing segment priced less than Rs40 lakh . The average size of homes priced below Rs40 lakh was 750 sqft in 2014, and it reduced by 23% in 2018. in average property sizes was seen in the . The average size of homes priced below Rs40 lakh was 750 sqft in 2014, and it reduced by 23% in 2018. Interestingly, apartment sizes in the luxury-housing segment (priced above Rs80 lakh) also saw a 2 0% reduction over the past five years. The average size of properties in this segment was 1,830 sqft in 2014, which came down to 1,460 sqft in 2018. (priced above Rs80 lakh) also saw a 2 over the past five years. The average size of properties in this segment was 1,830 sqft in 2014, which came down to 1,460 sqft in 2018. Mid-segment housing priced between Rs40 lakh to Rs80 lakh saw the least size reduction of 17% - from 1,150 sqft in 2014 to around 950 sqft in 2018. The reduction in flat size has invariably been achieved by the elimination of extra balconies - and in many cases all balconiesand better apartment designs that allow more efficient use of smaller spaces. (Anuj Puri is chairman of ANAROCK Property Consultants Pvt Ltd) The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has not accepted the attempt of bankers to let of the Sandesara group of Sterling Biotech by accepting a sharp haircut and a one time settlement (OTS). Instead, the Mumbai division bench of the NCLT slammed Andhra Bank and other lenders for not sharing details of the proposal with the resolution professional (RP), or the source of funds, time frame for payment to each lender, compliance with Reserve Bank norms and whether interests of all stakeholders /creditors had been provided for. Further, it has issued notices to the government and all regulators in case they would like to make any representations in the matter, which has now been posted for hearing on 26 March 2019. In a strongly-worded order, the Mumbai bench of VP Singh and Ravikumar Duraisamy says, "...OTS proposal is from Mr Farhad Daruwalla, who has signed on behalf of Sandesara group. It is not mentioned in the OTS proposal whether Farhad Daruwalla has been authorised by the corporate debtor to submit OTS proposal. It is also important to point out that the corporate debtor is Sterling Biotech and no proceedings under Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) has been initiated against Sandesara group. How the proposal submitted by Sandesara group is accepted by the financial creditors creates suspicion when the promoter and director is absconder and Enforcement Directorate (ED) and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is searching them." "In this background, before passing any further order, we would like to issue notice to the central government through regional director of ministry of corporate affairs (MCA), Enforcement Directorate, Income Tax Department, CBI, Securities & Exchange Board of India and RBI, so that if they want to make any representation, they can make the same before passing any further order on the miscellaneous application for withdrawal," it added. The OTS proposal was widely publicised in newspapers with Business Standard stating that lenders have agreed for a 65% haircut. Quoting bankers, the report said, The promoters, bankers said, have made an offer that entails a haircut of close to 65% for the lenders. The promoter has already deposited 5 per cent of the OTS offer to banks In a regulatory filing, Sterling Biotech had stated, The committee of creditors has approved the withdrawal of the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process- CIRP of the company with requisite majority. According to the order, the resolution professional (RP) appointed in this matter, put up a resolution before the committee of creditors (CoC) for liquidation of Sterling Biotech after resolutions for withdrawal of corporate insolvency resolution process (CIRP) and approval of resolution plan from ACG Associated Capsules Pvt Ltd (ACG) failed. However, the CoC rejected the resolution submitted by the RP. When the RP asked the CoC for further directions, during the 14th meeting, it was revealed that Andhra Bank on 5 March 2019 had submitted a fresh proposal for withdrawal of CIRP of Sterling Biotech. When asked to share details of its proposal, a representative of Andhra Bank asked the RP to refer to the documents submitted to NCLT on 26 February 2019. "A representative of Andhra Bank further informed the RP that should the NCLT seek information pertaining to the OTS offer including sources of funds, timeframe for payments to each lender, compliance with RBI norms and whether the interest of all stakeholders and CoC members have been provided for under the OTS offer, the applicant Andhra Bank and CoC will address all such queries posed by the NCLT directly and not with the RP," the NCLT bench observed. NCLT said, "It is pertinent to mention that the promoters of Sterling Biotech are absconder and we often get the news from the newspaper that various government agencies like ED, CBI and other agencies are unable to trach the promoters of Sterling Biotech." The next hearing in this case is scheduled on 26 March 2019. Last year in October, the ED had filed a charge sheet under the anti-money laundering law against Sandesara brothers and their Gujarat-based pharmaceuticals company Sterling Biotech in the fraudulent Rs8,100-crore loan from domestic as well as offshore branches of Indian banks during 2004-2012. The ED had named 191 accused and 184 companies of the Sterling Biotech group in the charge sheet filed in a special court. The group includes Sterling Biotech, PMT Machines Ltd, Sterling SEZ and Infra Ltd, Sterling Port Ltd, Sterling Oil Resources Ltd and 179 shell companies. Some individuals named in the charge sheet include the main promoters of Sterling Biotech groupChetan Jayantilal Sandesara and Nitin Jayantilal SandesaraDipti Sandesara, Rajbhushan Dixit, Hitesh Patel, their chartered accountant Hemant Hathi and middleman Gagan Dhawan. The agency had stated that the investigation in this case is still on as Sandesara brothers are learnt to be abroad. Investigations by ED revealed that Sandesara brothers and others hatched a criminal conspiracy for cheating banks by manipulating figures in the balance sheets of their flagship companies and induced banks to sanction higher loans. "After obtaining loans, the accused diverted the loan funds to non-mandated purposes through a web of shell companies. Thus, the loan funds were diverted, layered and laundered by the promoters for their personal purposes. Total amount of loan fraud as on date is Rs 8,100 crore. The loan fraud pertains to domestic as well as offshore branches of Indian banks," the ED had said in statement. Loans worth Rs5,700 crore was disbursed by various banks during the years 2004-2012 and look out circulars were issued against the accused in August 2017, said the statement. "To fulfil their criminal motive of defrauding banks, the promoters devised a multi layered strategy of cheating. They not only cheated banks but also revenue department as well as the share-holders. Their strategy included incorporation of shell companies, conducting circular transactions to artificially inflate turnover of flagship companies, claiming higher depreciations on non-existing machinery, artificial share trading with the use shell companies, layering and laundering of proceeds of crime within India and abroad through the web of shell companies." The promoters used their employees' names and got incorporated 249 shell companies, said the ED, adding the ill gotten money was knowingly rotated, layered and finally integrated into the financial system and projected as untainted. "The amount was further invested in the form of immovable properties. The loan funds were diverted for non-mandated purposes to shell companies and were withdrawn as cash. An amount of Rs140 crore was withdrawn from shell companies and were used for the personal purposes of the promoters which also includes bribing of public officials," said the statement. The ED said the promoters created a web of corporate and accounting structure abroad and they incorporated more than 100 entities in various countries including United Arab Emirates, the US, the UK, British Virgin Island, Mauritius, Barbados and Nigeria. "Their main entities outside India includes Richmond Overseas, Sunshine Trust Corporation, SEEPCO BVI, SEEPCO Nigeria and Atlantic Blue Water Services Pvt Ltd. It is revealed during investigation that the funds were rotated through various structures and ultimately carried to Nigeria to finance their oil business," said the ED. The banks have also found that the sanctioned loans were not used for the laid down purposes but were diverted for non-mandated purposes. The ED said the banks have also declared the loans to the tune of Rs8,100 crore as fraud, including domestic loans of Rs3,675 crore and foreign loans of Rs4,425 crore. Last month, according to reports, promoters of Sterling BiotechChetan, Chetans wife and Nitin Sandesara as well as Hiteshkumar Patel moved a Delhi court seeking cancellation of open-ended non-bailable warrants issued against them. The matter will be heard on 2 April 2019. The share price of Altura Mining Ltd [ASX:AJM] has been on the slide for approximately the past 12 months. Since March 2018, the share price has dropped nearly 63%. Source: marketindex.com.au Now the lithium mining company could be set to see its share price rebound. Since trade began this morning, the share price is up 5.19%, trading at $0.14. Commercial production declared Today, the company announced the completion of commissioning for stage 1 of its lithium project located in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The announcement marks a significant milestone for the company and formally signifies its transition to commercial lithium production. Although operations began in July 2018, Altura has steadily ramped up production at its Pilgangoora mine, with its first shipment being delivered in October 2018. What todays announcement signifies is the achievement of commercially viable production. Stage 1 has a sustained output capacity of 220,000 tonnes per annum of lithium, or 645 tonnes per day. This includes the possibility of planned maintenance shutdowns and an overall lithium metal recovery of 80%. Production leading up to todays announcement has delivered an average of 541 tonnes per day, which represents 84% of the companys estimated output capacity. Free investor report reveals how to get started investing in lithium. Download now to find out more. Production in March to date has averaged 612 tonnes per day, or 95% of capacity with a maximum of 705 tonnes produced within a 24-hour period. The plants efficiency is only slightly behind the optimal recovery rate of 80%, and is currently sitting at 78%. Alturas managing director James Brown said he was extremely pleased with the companys milestone. In less than two years we have taken this project from the first sod-turning to full production, which is a monumental achievement and testament of the hard work and efforts of the entire Altura team. Shouldnt the Altura Mining share price have moved more? Todays announcement is good news for Altura shareholders, as it is no easy task developing a commercially viable mine. But if the movement in todays price has made you a bit sceptical, then your intuition has served you well. Now that Altura has formally announced it has become a commercial lithium producer, veteran investors are likely waiting to see what the cashflows from the company look like before getting back in. A bearish looking lithium price has probably weighed down the price today too and should be something to watch as Altura begins looking for more buyers. Source: tradingeconomics.com Regards, Ryan Clarkson-Ledward, For Money Morning PS: Dont buy Altura or any other lithium stock until youve read this free report. Download our free guide to learn more. March 12, 2019 Boeing, The FAA, And Why Two 737 MAX Planes Crashed On Sunday an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed, killing all on board. Five month earlier an Indonesian Lion Air jet crashed near Jakarta. All crew and passengers died. Both airplanes were Boeing 737-8 MAX. Both incidents happened shortly after take off. Boeing 737 MAX aircraft are now grounded about everywhere except in the United States. That this move follows only now is sad. After the first crash it was already obvious that the plane is not safe to fly. The Boeing 737 and the Airbus 320 types are single aisle planes with some 150 seats. Both are bread and butter planes sold by the hundreds with a good profit. In 2010 Airbus decided to offer its A-320 with a New Engine Option (NEO) which uses less fuel. To counter the Airbus move Boeing had to follow up. The 737 would also get new engines for a more efficient flight and longer range. The new engines on the 737 MAX are bigger and needed to be placed a bit different than on the older version. That again changed the flight characteristics of the plane by giving it a nose up attitude. The new flight characteristic of the 737 MAX would have require a retraining of the pilots. But Boeing's marketing people had told their customers all along that the 737 MAX would not require extensive new training. Instead of expensive simulator training for the new type experienced 737 pilots would only have to read some documentation about the changes between the old and the new versions. To make that viable Boeing's engineers had to use a little trick. They added a 'maneuver characteristics augmentation system' (MCAS) that pitches the nose of the plane down if a sensor detects a too high angle of attack (AoA) that might lead to a stall. That made the flight characteristic of the new 737 version similar to the old one. But the engineers screwed up. The 737 MAX has two flight control computers. Each is connected to only one of the two angle of attack sensors. During a flight only one of two computer runs the MCAS control. If it detects a too high angle of attack it trims the horizontal stabilizer down for some 10 seconds. It then waits for 5 seconds and reads the sensor again. If the sensor continues to show a too high angle of attack it again trims the stabilizer to pitch the plane's nose done. MCSA is independent of the autopilot. It is even active in manual flight. There is a procedure to deactivate it but it takes some time. One of the angle of attack sensors on the Indonesian flight was faulty. Unfortunately it was the one connected to the computer that ran the MCAS on that flight. Shortly after take off the sensor signaled a too high angle of attack even as the plane was flying in a normal climb. The MCAS engaged and put the planes nose down. The pilots reacted by disabling the autopilot and pulling the control stick back. The MCAS engaged again pitching the plane further down. The pilots again pulled the stick. This happened some 12 times in a row before the plane crashed into the sea. To implement a security relevant automatism that depends on only one sensor is extremely bad design. To have a flight control automatism engaged even when the pilot flies manually is also a bad choice. But the real criminality was that Boeing hid the feature. Neither the airlines that bought the planes nor the pilots who flew it were told about MCAS. They did not know that it exists. They were not aware of an automatic system that controlled the stabilizer even when the autopilot was off. They had no idea how it could be deactivated. Nine days after the Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610 ended in a deadly crash, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive. The 737 MAX pilots were aghast. The APA pilot union sent a letter to its members: This is the first description you, as 737 pilots, have seen. It is not in the AA 737 Flight Manual Part 2, nor is there a description in the Boeing FCOM (flight crew operations manual), says the letter from the pilots union safety committee. Awareness is the key with all safety issues. The Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed went down in a similar flight profile as the Indonesian plane. It is highly likely that MCAS is the cause of both incidents. While the pilots of the Ethiopian plane were aware of the MCAS system they might have had too little time to turn it off. The flight recorders have been recovered and will tell the full story. Boeing has sold nearly 5,000 of the 737 MAX. So far some 380 have been delivered. Most of these are now grounded. Some family members of people who died on the Indonesian flight are suing Boeing. Others will follow. But Boeing is not the only one who is at fault. The FAA certifies all new planes and their documentation. I was for some time marginally involved in Airbus certification issues. It is an extremely detailed process that has to be followed by the letter. Hundreds of people are full time engaged for years to certify a modern jet. Every tiny screw and even the smallest design details of the hardware and software have to be documented and certified. How or why did the FAA agree to accept the 737 MAX with the badly designed MCAS? How could the FAA allow that MCAS was left out of the documentation? What steps were taken after the Indonesian flight crashed into the sea? Up to now the FAA was a highly regarded certification agency. Other countries followed its judgment and accepted the certifications the FAA issued. That most of the world now grounded the 737 MAX while it still flies in the States is a sign that this view is changing. The FAA's certifications of Boeing airplanes are now in doubt. Today Boeing's share price dropped some 7.5%. I doubt that it is enough to reflect the liability issues at hand. Every airline that now had to ground its planes will ask for compensation. More than 330 people died and their families deserve redress. Orders for 737 MAX will be canceled as passengers will avoid that type. Boeing will fix the MCAS problem by using more sensors or by otherwise changing the procedures. But the bigger issue for the U.S. aircraft industry might be the damage done to the FAA's reputation. If the FAA is internationally seen as a lobbying agency for the U.S. airline industry it will no longer be trusted and the industry will suffer from it. It will have to run future certification processes through a jungle of foreign agencies. Congress should take up the FAA issue and ask why it failed. Posted by b on March 12, 2019 at 20:39 UTC | Permalink Comments next page March 13, 2019 Who Ordered The CIA To Assault North Korea's Embassy In Spain? Did John Bolton, President Trump's national security advisor, order an assault on the North Korean embassy in Spain to get an advantage in the nuclear talks? On February 22 the embassy of the DPRK in Madrid was raided by a gang of thugs: A group of men entered North Korea's embassy in Madrid, bound and gagged staff, before driving off with stolen mobile phones and computers, Spanish media has reported. ... Spanish police are investigating after El Confidencial reported a woman escaped the embassy last Friday screaming in Korean, prompting residents nearby to call police. After she reportedly revealed staff were tied up and gagged, officers knocked on the door to investigate, but were met by a man who told them everything was fine. Soon after, two cars left the compound at high speed, one of them carrying the man who had answered the door. Police did not enter the building, but staff walked out soon after the incident. ... Kim Hyok Chol was ambassador to Spain until September 2017, when the Spanish government expelled him and another diplomat following Pyongyang's round of nuclear tests and missile launches over neighbouring Japan. The name Kim Hyok Chol sounds familiar. He recently was in the news when he led the North Korean delegation in the nuclear talks: Kim Hyok Chol, a career diplomat from an elite North Korean family, made his international debut just a few weeks ago as Pyongyangs new point man for nuclear negotiations. In the run-up to the Feb. 27-28 summit, he has been in talks with U.S. counterpart Stephen Biegun to lay the groundwork for the meeting, taking diplomats by surprise. ... [H]is appointment left a few people flipping through their files of cadres to find out more. Channel A News, a South Korean TV outlet, drew a circle around him in a video from a White House meeting between Trump and North Korean officials in January, asking who he was. bigger People knew little about Kim Hyok Chol. The Bloomberg portrait of him appeared on February 22, the same day the embassy in Madrid was raided. The failed summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un in Hanoi was on February 27-28. Kim Hyok Chol was a core person in the 'denuclearization' talks but little was known of him. The embassy raid was no normal thievery. There were eight people in the embassy when it was raided at 3:00 PM local time. They were bound, bags were put over their heads and some were interrogated. The thieves left with computer hardware and the cellphones of the personnel. It now appears that the CIA was involved in the embassy raid. El Pais reports: Investigators from the Spanish police and National Intelligence Center (CNI) have linked an attack on the North Korean embassy in Madrid on February 22 to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). At least two of the 10 assailants who broke into the embassy and interrogated diplomatic staff have been identified and have connections to the US secret service. The CIA has denied any involvement but government sources say their response was unconvincing. ... Investigators from the General Information Office (CGI) and CNI ruled out the idea that the attack was the work of common criminals. The operation was perfectly planned as if it were carried out by a military cell, said sources close to the investigation. The assailants knew what they were looking for, taking only computers and mobile phones. ... Sources believe that the goal of the attack on the North Korean embassy was to get information on Kim Hyok Chol, the former North Korean ambassador to Spain. The Spanish language version of the El Pais report has additional details (machine translated): After analyzing the recordings of the security cameras in the area, questioning the hostages and analyzing the diplomatic vehicles used in the flight, it has been possible to identify some of the assailants. Although the majority were Koreans, at least two of them have been recognized by the Spanish information services for their links with the American CIA. The indications that point to the US espionage service, in probable cooperation with that of South Korea, are so strong that Spanish interlocutors have contacted the CIA to ask for explanations. The response was negative, but "unconvincing", according to Government sources. The Spanish version also includes a side-box with further details of the raid: One of the darkest aspects of the assault on the North Korean Embassy in Madrid is the interrogation to which the head of the command, who called himself The Entrepreneur, subjected the charge of business, leading the diplomatic delegation since the ambassador was expelled. The head of the commando separated the diplomat from the rest of the hostages and locked himself alone with him. It is not known what he intended, but the current head of the Pyongyang delegation in Madrid probably knows a lot about Kim Hyok Chol, head of the North Korean delegation in the nuclear negotiations before the US, with whom he coincided when the latter was ambassador in Madrid, between 2014 and 2017. A U.S. raid of a foreign embassy in a third country is a diplomatic affront that will have consequences. The government in Madrid can not let this go by. Other important embassies in Spain - think China - will urge the Spanish government to take further steps to guarantee their security. CIA personnel is not immune. In 2005 a court in Italy ordered the arrest of 18 CIA agents who abducted an Imam off the streets of Milan to torture him in Egypt and elsewhere. The Spanish services seem to suspect that the sole point was to get information on Kim Hyok Chol. That may well be though I suspect that an attempt to find North Korea's diplomatic encryption codes was part of the task. It is not unusual that a country will try to gain such information. What is very unusual is the brute force way in which this was done. Was this thought to intimidate North Korea? Whatever. I can only think of one person in Washington DC who disregards diplomacy enough to task the CIA with a military style raid on a foreign embassy in a third country. His name is John Bolton. Posted by b on March 13, 2019 at 12:30 UTC | Permalink Comments A Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation poll last year revealed 68% of Vancouverites believe foreign buyers are inflating housing prices, and a new report from the government agency suggests they could be right. Nearly a fifth (19.2%) of Vancouver condominiums constructed in 2016-17 have at least one non-resident owner. Of total properties constructed in the city during the same period, 15.3% are owned by at least one non-resident. Juxtaposed with condos built in Vancouver between 2011 and 2015, only 11.2% had at least one non-resident owner. The CMHC study also revealed that 10.4% of condos in British Columbia have non-resident ownership. Aggregated, however, the number drops considerably: Only 4.9% of Metro Vancouver homes are owned by non-residents, according to a CMHC study of 2016 Census data. Properties with at least one non-resident owner increase to 7.6% in the City of Vancouver and 6.2% across British Columbia. Wells Fargo CEO faced a withering barrage of criticism from both Democrats and Republicans Tuesday when he testified before the House Financial Services Committee. The lending giant has been plagued by scandal after scandal over the last two years, from opening millions of unauthorized customer accounts to charging mortgage borrowers fees they didnt owe and mistakenly foreclosing on hundreds of homeowners. At Tuesdays hearing, legislators from both sides of the aisle demanded answers as Sloan struggled to defend the bank. Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) rattled off a list of Wells Fargos recent offenses, beginning with its fake-accounts scandal. In that case, bank employees opened customer accounts without those customers knowledge in order to meet unrealistically high sales metrics. Waters also accused the bank of being a recidivist institution. Moments after being sentenced in federal court today, former trump campaign chief Paul Manafort was charged by New York state prosecutors with 16 counts including mortgage fraud. Manafort was sentenced today to serve a total of 7 years in federal prison, a judge adding 43 months to a 47-month sentence he received in another case last week, according to a USA Today report. Manafort had pleaded guilty to two felonies in connection with the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and was convicted of tax and bank fraud charges in a related case, USA Today reported. Shortly after Manaforts federal sentence was handed down, the state of New York hit him with a 16-count indictment that alleges he received more than $1 million by falsifying financial statements when applying for residential mortgages. The charges include mortgage fraud, conspiracy, falsifying business records, and participating in a scheme to defraud, according to USA Today. Google Maps The driver responsible for hitting a bridge on Interstate 20 in Midland fled the scene, according to the Texas Department of Transportation. TxDOT officials in Odessa reported Tuesday that the bridge strike forced a lane closure on westbound I-20 at County Road 1150 (Tank Farm Road) as officials inspected damage from the bridge hit. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 13) Days before the Philippines effectively withdraws from the International Criminal Court, President Rodrigo Duterte said he is ready to face a death sentence from the court. "For the things that I have said, ordered and done, I am willing to put my neck dito sa mga bagay na ito [for these things]," Duterte said at the campaign of PDP-Laban candidates in Isabela Wednesday. "Eh baka balang araw itong ICC na itong mga bugok na ito [Maybe one day the ICC, these idiots], if they decide to hang me, I would be very glad to go and ako pa ang maglagay [I will place the noose]." The Philippines' withdrawal of membership from the international court will take effect on March 17. It will be the second country to exit from the tribunal since Burundi in 2017. Duterte pulled the country out of the ICC in February 2018, a month after it announced a preliminary examination on alleged extrajudicial killings in the country prompted by two communications filed in connection with the drug war. But the court may decide to launch an investigation into Duterte's drug war, according to Jude Sabio. Sabio submitted to the ICC a 77-page document on the killings, followed by supplemental information from opposition lawmakers Senator Antonio Trillanes and Magdalo party-list Rep. Gary Alejano. They said over a thousand were killed by the so-called Davao Death Squad, while thousands more were killed in the war on drugs since Duterte became president. Two petitions are also pending before the Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of the Philippines' withdrawal from the international tribunal. Dylan Buell | Getty Images Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has joined several other Midwestern governors to oppose President Donald Trumps proposed cuts to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. Trump has proposed a 90 percent funding cut for the project working to clean up the Great Lakes. The shortage of teachers in Illinois has gotten more serious over the past year, reaching into virtually every subject area and region of the state, and forcing schools to either cancel programs, enlarge class sizes or use teachers who are not fully licensed in a particular subject area. Those are the conclusions of a new report released Monday from the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools, which was based on survey responses from 527 of the 858 district superintendents in Illinois. Of those, the report said, 85 percent reported experiencing some level of teacher shortage this year, up from 78 percent in a similar survey conducted in 2017. Nearly one-third (32 percent) reported a serious shortage. Nearly two-thirds of those responding (63 percent) also reported having a serious shortage of substitute teachers. As a result, the report stated, the superintendents who responded to the survey reported a total of 1,032 vacant positions that still had not been filled by the time classes started last fall, or were filled by people who were not fully qualified for the position. Ultimately, whats not really stated in there, is that there are about 120,000 kids who are being impacted directly by positions that are going unfilled this year, said Kelton Davis, the regional superintendent for Monroe and Randolph counties, and chairman of the regional superintendents association. The report said shortages were reported in almost every subject area, with foreign languages, various special education fields and computer science leading the list of classroom subjects. There were also significant shortages of school psychologists and library and media specialists. Shortages were also reported in every region of the state, although they were more severe in southern and central Illinois than in the suburban districts around Chicago. In southern Illinois, 94 districts reported seeing significantly fewer qualified applicants than they did five years ago. That compares with 90 percent of the districts in central Illinois; 78 percent in northwest Illinois; and only 42 percent in the Cook County and surrounding suburbs. As a result of those shortages, the report said 99 districts reported canceling a total of 225 course offerings due to a lack of qualified teachers, while 86 districts reported converting more than 200 classes to online learning because they lacked a qualified teacher for the subject. Davis, however, said he knows of many districts that have resorted to putting more students into a classroom, or using teachers who are working with a temporary license or an emergency substitute license to fill in gaps. Nancy Latham, executive director of the Council on Teacher Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said its difficult to pinpoint all of the causes of the growing teacher shortage. One of the factors, she said, is that there are more teachers from the baby boom generation now retiring than there are young people graduating from schools of education. And a big part of that, she said, is about money. She noted that more than 90 percent of the vacancies reported in 2017 were in schools that received below-adequate funding and which had been reducing their staff in recent years. But another factor, she said, is that the teaching profession no longer has the same kind of allure it once enjoyed. If you look at the national media reports over the last five years, the profession has taken a hit, she said. In fact, the report referenced a 2018 poll by Phi Delta Kappa, a nationwide professional organization for educators, which found that 54 percent of the adults it surveyed said they would not want their children taking up teaching as a career the first time a majority of respondents said that in the 50-year history of the survey. Democratic state Sen. Andy Manar, of Bunker Hill, commented about the report on Twitter, saying the report bolsters his argument in favor of a bill he is sponsoring to phase in an increase in the minimum wage for full-time teachers to $40,000 by the 2023-24 school year. Davis, however, said there are many districts that could not afford to do that without significantly more state funding, or raising local property taxes. The report recommends the state take at least three steps to address the shortages: streamlining the process for obtaining substitute teacher licenses, especially for retired teachers who want to go back to work in their old districts; expanding programs for developing new teachers, such as the Grow Your Own Teacher program; and gathering more data to more accurately predict, by district, where shortages will occur and to identify unique challenges facing each district. Sonora, CA Faltering plans for a special veterans memorial are now steaming ahead because of a high school senior, who fired up a fundraising furnace that recently drove the project to its financial goal. On her lunch break Tuesday, Candace Olsen, who attends Summerville High, appeared at the Sonora Area Foundation offices to present a check for $71,577.57 to the Project Saluting Freedom. Among those on hand to receive the monies were Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 4748 Commander Aaron Rasmussen, an Iraq veteran, and Project Chair Frank Smart, who served during the Vietnam War. Just over two years ago, the Tuolumne County Supervisors approved plans for the proposed 9/11 Global War on Terrorism Memorial to be located on the east lawn of the Tuolumne Veterans Memorial Hall. By design it is intended to be a multi-use memorial forum for ceremonies and other events; honoring all veterans and those who lost their lives in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, including law enforcement, EMT/medics and firefighters. An Idea Percolated Over Lunch Smart recounted that he and Rasmussen came up with idea over lunch one afternoon at Perkos three years back to honor veterans of the Iraq, Afghanistan and 9/11. We decided to put the two together because they belong together one was colored by the other, Smart explained. Fundraising efforts for the project faltered and raised just over $4,000 towards the original goal of $40,000. The readjusted budget total later rose to $86,000. Addressing Olsen, Smart emoted, You saved the projectit was just not moving the way it should move. The brick sales just were not going the way we thought they would, like they did for the last project we did at the VA clinic. It just wasnt happening then you came along. Olsen shared that after coming up with the idea to support the memorial as part of her senior project last fall, her calendar rapidly filled to the point that every day between December and March listed related activities to do. Besides selling t-shirts, soliciting donations of various amounts from businesses and appearing before community service clubs and other groups, Olsen and her mother Kathleen worked to organize a Feb. 22 community gala at Sonora Opera Hall that netted over $20,000 after expenses. Olsen credited her mom for providing significant assistance with logistics and other support. Fundraising Went Locally Viral Originally, we thought we only had to raise $40,000, she confided. As to how that number grew to well over $70,000, she replied, I think the word just got out there and a lot of the bigger community members that are always there supporting everythingthey really just kind of helped out and told their friends and their friends told their friends and everything just blew up. With regard to lessons learned, she admitted, I definitely had to get used to public speaking, that was for sure. I had to go out to these local businessesand learn how to talk to them appropriately and how tospeak to them in more of a business manner instead of as a teenager asking for money. Sonora Area Foundation Executive Director Darrell Slocum called Candace a catalyst and credited her ability to share the story of the memorial with the community. He stated, I think by having Candace bring the project here to set up a fund, that helped. But what is missingin what she is saying and talking about things blowing uphow did all these people get involved? It is all because of Candaces effort. Mission Complete? Not So Fast Smart chuckled after hearing Olsen affirm that her senior project was now officially wrapped. One more thing, you will be on the agenda when we dedicate this memorial to get up and talk, Smart told her. Well, that will be the last thing, she agreed. He cracked, And maybe we will have you lay a few bricks for us! With the project nearly 100 percent funded, Smart stated it is tracking forward with plans to break ground in June and perhaps to have the memorial finished in time for a dedication on perhaps 9/11 and/or the following weekend. As he and Rasmussen see 9/11 as this generations Pearl Harbor, they hope it will become a place for school fieldtrips. Designed by landscape architect Michael Wharton, the memorial will feature a brick walkway leading to an elevated platform with a flagpole and stone plaques honoring those who served and lost their lives. It will also house artifacts from the Twin Towers, Pentagon, and Shanksville Museum. A side project to the memorial is a time capsule that will be onsite for 50 years; instructions left with the Tuolumne County government offices as to its unsealing. The VFW is currently seeking community ideas and input as to the information and items to seal therein. For more details about the memorial and time capsule plans, click here. Sacramento, CA A bi-partisan bill that could fix a state law that currently benefit DUI drivers who flee the scene of a crash, will be heard in the Assembly Public Safety committee on Tuesday, March 19th. Under current California law, the maximum punishment for a hit-and-run collision causing permanent, serious injuries or death is four years behind bars. State law enforcement agencies say hit-and-run drivers often leave the scene, allowing them to sober up and avoid felony DUI charges and possibly a longer sentence if convicted of wrong doing. AB 582 will increase penalties for these types of crashes and bring them in line with penalties for vehicular manslaughter sentences indicated below: 4-6 years for accidents resulting in great bodily injury 6-8 years for accidents resulting in death. Dubbed Gavins Law, the new bill has been named after Gavin Gladding a beloved Central Valley vice principal. Gladding was killed in a hit-and-run accident last year. The driver who was believed to have been drinking shortly before at the crash was not arrested until weeks later. With no way to prove they were intoxicated the driver will only serve 18 months behind bars. Governor Gavin Newsom View Photos Update at 1:30 p.m.: While President Donald Trump is opposed to Governor Gavin Newsoms halting of the states death penalty executions, another law maker is calling for abolishing it. Assemblymember Marc Levine (D- Marin County) with a statewide coalition of lawmakers behind him announced Assembly Constitutional Amendment (ACA) 12, which would do just that. The amendment would end Californias death penalty in 2020 by prohibiting the issuances of the death sentence. Additionally, it would require the re-sentencing of all inmates currently on death row to a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Levine argues, While the governors action will temporarily halt executions in California, now is the time for the Legislature and the voters of the state to end the failed death penalty once and for all by supporting ACA 12. This is a conversation that must include all Californians. At his press conference earlier today, Newsom elaborated on his reason for implementing his executive order, stating, We have 737 people on death row today. 120 people have died of either suicide or natural causes. Just 13 have been executed. You as tax payers have spent $5 billion since the death penalty was reinstated in the state. What have we gotten for that? The constitutional amendment is co-authored by 23 members of the Legislature. Nineteen states have abolished the death penalty across the nation. Read President Trumps opposition to the executive order below. Original post at 7:30 a.m.: Sacramento, CA President Donald Trump is speaking out against Governor Gavin Newsoms planned Executive Order to halt the states death penalty executions. Newsom has scheduled a press conference for 10 oclock this morning to discuss his planned Executive Order. President Trump went on Twitter this morning, writing, Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers. Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I! The Associated Press reports that Newsom will argue today that the system is broken, and that innocent people have sometimes been wrongly convicted and put to death. Calaveras County Board of Supervisors 2019 View Photos San Andreas, CA With board members pointing out that it is a temporary moratorium, as opposed to a ban, Calaveras County is putting the brakes on hemp farming over the short term. The issue came up after the 2018 US Farm Bill legalized the commercial production of hemp, as previously it was outlawed, and lumped in with cannabis cultivation. Calaveras Ag Commissioner Kevin Wright urged the board of supervisors to pass a moratorium, at least until an ordinance is adopted related to local hemp cultivation. Things need to be determined related to zoning, buffer zones, and limiting the impacts of odor to neighbors. It was noted that this matter is completely separate from the commercial cannabis cultivation ban in place in Calaveras County. The board has stated a plan to reassess that issue (cannabis ban) later this year. There was uncertainty about whether a hemp moratorium would pass. At the end of the boards discussion, Supervisor Merita Callaway stated, I didnt go into this meeting wanting to support it (moratorium), but I think there are some red flags there that we need to deal with. This is not a ban, this is just a moratorium. Im hoping that well have a new cannabis ordinance this year, and Im hoping that well have a hemp (ordinance) this year. The vote to approve the industrial hemp moratorium was 5-0. The story of an enormous wolfdog named Yuki is taking the internet by storm and bringing awareness to a great cause. According to Shy Wolf Sanctuary, it was 2008 when they got a call from a man saying his 8-month-old pup "was much larger than he had anticipated it growing, and that he couldnt handle the dog." Just one day later, the owner dumped Yuki at a kill shelter, which in turned reached out to Shy Wolf. "We stepped in and provided a home for him and he has been with us ever since," volunteer Brittany Allen told Bored Panda. "His DNA testing came back as 87.5 percent gray wolf, 8.6 percent Siberian husky, and 3.9 percent German shepherd." Yuki's story began to go viral in February of this year after a picture of him looking particularly huge was posted on Reddit. Allen said while she is 5-foot, 4-inches tall, Yuki is not quite as large in person as he appears in the picture, weighing about 120 pounds. However, she insists the viral image is not photoshopped. She recently shared a picture captioned: The face we make when people say Yukis picture is photoshopped Its just his fat angle guys. We all have one." "Yuki is very much a 'ham' and loves to be the center of attention," according to the Shy Wolf Sanctuary website. "He has shown us that he doesnt like to hear 'NO,' doesnt like to be restrained or controlled in any way and does have a number of triggers. Volunteers need to be able to read his body language and react quickly as he doesnt always give a warning when 'Mr. Hyde' is going to appear." Now 12 years old, Shy Wolf recently learned Yuki has terminal blood cancer. "Yuki has been fighting it for quite a while now and is persevering, so it is business as usual while we enjoy our time with Yuki. When the day comes that he starts showing symptoms we will, as we always do, make the right decisions for Yukis quality of life, Jeremy Albrecht said. Yuki and lots of other animals have been given a loving home by Shy Wolf Sanctuary, which was founded in 2001. The center provides sanctuary and rehabilitation to wild and captive bred wolves, and other exotic animals on a 2.5-acre property in Naples, Florida. They take in 60 captive-bred or rescued animals every year. Click here to follow Shy Wolf on Facebook and here to visit their website. An Atlanta teen has pleaded guilty in the 2017 deaths of three pedestrians in Georgia, where two of them were trying to escape Hurricane Irma in Florida. News outlets reported 19-year-old Zoe Reardon was placed on probation for three years and ordered to complete 240 hours of community service after the crash in Woodstock, northwest of Atlanta. WSB reports Reardon's attorney said the girl did not want to put the victims families through a trial. She could have faced 36 months behind bars. NO CHARGES: Texas grand jury clears deputies who fatally shot suspected car thief, 6-year-old boy Twenty-eight-year-old Kaitlin Hunt, 3-month-old Riley Hunt of Port St. Lucie, Florida, and 61-year-old family friend Kathy Deming died after they were hit by Reardons Jeep. Riley Hunt died the night of the Sept. 9, 2017, crash. The adults died several days later in a hospital. Reardon has maintained she never saw the group crossing the road and her defense insisted it was not a case of distracted driving. Still, victims' loved ones asked the judge to hand down the harshest sentence possible. Its ridiculous to say they walked out in front of you. That didnt happen, and you know it didnt happen, said Kathys widow, Mike Deming, during an impact statement. ARRESTED: Graphic video shows local assault suspect strip naked on car Shes a student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Judge Alan Jordan is allowing her to check in with her probation officer from Texas. Youre pretty young, Jordan told Reardon during sentencing. Youve got a lifetime ahead of you. I expect this is something youre going to have a hard time dealing with the rest of your life. Reardon apologized in court Monday. I want to take this opportunity to say how truly sorry I am, she cried. Monday, March 4 Police arrested a 29-year-old man at the 800 block of W. 11th St. on March 4 just after 2:20 p.m. for active warrants. Both warrants are for out-of-county misdemeanors. An individual reported an electronic scam at the 1300 block of Fresno St. on March 4 at 8:40 a.m. Police responded to the 2600 block of Dimmitt Road on March 4 just after 3:30 p.m. in reference to a call about indecency with a child. A theft was reported at the 900 block of N. Broadway on March 4 just after 8:10 p.m. Tuesday, March 5 Police arrested a 28-year-old woman for active misdemeanor warrants at the 3300 block of Quincy St. last Tuesday just after 10:40 p.m. A 33-year-old woman was arrested at the 400 block of Quincy St. last Tuesday for possession of marijuana. Officers were called to the location just before 8:40 a.m. A 39-year-old man was arrested at the 500 block of Oakland St. just after 1:50 a.m. for an active out-of-county misdemeanor warrant. Officers responded to the 1500 block of Yonkers St. last Tuesday just after 8:05 a.m. in reference to burglary of vehicles. An assault was reported at the 2000 block of W. 24th St. last Tuesday just after 11:20 a.m. A vehicle crash with vehicle damage was reported at the 4100 block of Olton Road last Tuesday around 12:30 p.m. Identity theft was reported last Tuesday at the 1200 block of Utica St. just after 11:30 a.m. A theft was reported at the 1600 block of Kermit St. just after 11 a.m. last Tuesday. A theft was reported at the 3300 block of Quincy St. last Tuesday just after 10:20 p.m. Credit/debit card abuse was reported at the 1500 block of W. 11th St. last Tuesday around 6:15 p.m. Wednesday, March 6 Laura Soliz was arrested last Wednesday at the 500 block of Raleigh St. just after 8:15 p.m. She was charged with possession of a controlled substance, which is a felony and with possession/delivery of drug paraphernalia. Responding officers recovered 0.93 grams of methamphetamine and a glass pipe during the arrest. Officers arrested a woman at the 3000 block of Olton Road last Wednesday just after 8:15 p.m. for a misdemeanor warrant. Police arrested a man at the 400 block of W. 10th St. last Wednesday just after 9:30 p.m. The individual was arrested for an active warrant. Officers arrested a woman last Wednesday at the 600 block of N. Columbia St. just before 11 p.m. for an active misdemeanor warrant. A theft was reported last Wednesday at the 900 block of N. Interstate 27 just before 9 p.m. The victim reported a missing iPhone. An assault was reported at the 2500 block of W. 26th St. last Wednesday just after 12:15 p.m. Thursday, March 7 Police arrested a 42-year-old woman on Thursday at the 2300 block of Portland St. just after 11:20 p.m. The individual was charged with driving with an invalid license with previous conviction/suspension without financial resolution. Officers arrested 34-year-old Tanner Ryan Favila on Thursday at the 400 block of W. Eighth St. just before 3 p.m. Favila was charged with burglary of a building, which is a state jail felony. Hunter Riley Givens, 23, was arrested Thursday at the 1200 block of Joliet St. The individual is charged with burglary of a building, which is a state jail felony. Officers arrested a 34-year-old man Thursday at the 2400 block of N. Columbia St. just after midnight during a traffic stop. The individual was arrested for an outstanding misdemeanor warrant and for driving with an invalid license with a previous conviction/suspension without financial resolution. Criminal mischief was reported at the 2000 block of W. Fifth St. Thursday just after noon. An assault was reported at the 2500 block of Joliet St. just after 10:15 a.m. on Thursday. A theft was reported at the 400 block of W. Fifth St. Thursday just after 5:15 p.m. Harassment was reported at the 100 block of W. Ninth St. Thursday just after 6:30 p.m. The victim reported harassing/suspicious phone calls. A hit and run was reported at the 200 block of E. Crestway St. just before midnight Thursday. A driver struck a structure, fixture or highway landscape and fled. The report was initially called out as an individual driving while intoxicated. Friday, March 8 Police arrested Israel Maysonet at the 900 block of Ash St. Friday just after 9:30 a.m. for possession of a controlled substance, which is a felony. Officers recovered 13.4 grams of marijuana and another substance during the arrest. Police responded to a reported theft at the 700 block of N. Interstate 27 on Friday just after 4:30 p.m. A burglary was reported at the 1900 block of W. 11th St. Friday around 9:15 p.m. A theft was reported at the 00 block of Milwee St. just after 7 p.m. The victim reported 2 stolen pit bull puppies. Police responded to the 600 block of N. Broadway just after 8:50 p.m. in reference to a stolen vehicle. Saturday, March 9 Police arrested Hector Lee Gloria at the 200 block of W. Sixth St. Saturday just after 10:30 p.m. He was charged with resisting arrest, search or transport, evading arrest or detention a felony and manufacturing/delivery of a controlled substance, which is also a felony. Responding officers seized 72.29 grams of methamphetamine, an iPhone, a digital scale and a taser cartridge with leads. Police arrested a man at the 500 block of W. Fifth St. just after 10:10 p.m. for driving with no driver license. Damage to a vehicle was reported at the 1100 block of Lexington St. just after 10 p.m. Saturday. Theft from a vehicle was reported at the 300 block of N. Date St. Saturday just after 3 p.m. The victim reported a stolen iPhone. An assault was reported at the 900 block of W. 27th St. Saturday just before 10:40 p.m. Damaged property was also reported. A theft was reported at the 1500 block of W. Fifth St. just before 7:40 p.m. Saturday. A vehicle crash resulting in vehicle damage was reported at the 4000 block of W. 15th St. Saturday just after 2 p.m. A burglary was reported at the 1300 block of Nassau St. at 5:50 p.m. Saturday. Two individuals were arrested for disorderly conduct Saturday at the 1100 block of Denver St. just after 1:15 a.m. Sunday, March 10 Police arrested Manuel Julio Galvan-Guzman Sunday at the 3600 block of SW Third St. just before 1:30 a.m. and charged him with driving while intoxicated, third or more offense, which is a felony. A man was arrested at the 1300 block of W. 24th St. Sunday just after 4:15 a.m. for public intoxication. A man was arrested at the 100 block of W. Fifth St. Sunday just before 2 a.m. for public intoxication. Damaged property was reported at the 2500 block of Rochelle St. just before noon Sunday. A theft was reported at the 100 block of W. Ninth St. Sunday just after midnight. Argentinian energy company YPF is moving forward with plans to couple the development of the Vaca Muerta shale play with offshore liquefied natural gas technology to allow the South American nation to go from being a seasonal importer of natural gas to becoming an exporter. During a Wednesday morning panel discussion at CERAWeek by IHS Markit, YPF Executive Vice President Marco Browne said Argentina's Vaca Muerta has become the largest shale play outside of the United States. Stretching more than 5 million acres along the border with Chile, the Vaca Muerta holds large reserves and will be able to produce more natural gas than the South American nation consumes, meaning that it will have a surplus for export. "If we were only to develop the reserves that we had under the ground to take care of the domestic market, we wouldn't have the demand and no price would make that feasible," Browne said. "Complementing the demand we can get abroad selling the LNG in the international market along with the domestic demand in Argentina, we can start walking along the path until the total development starts to happen." Service Sector: Supplying frac sand to Argentina's Vaca Muerta shale play Facing seasonal natural gas shortages during the South American winter months of June, July and August, Argentina uses an offshore liquefied natural gas terminal to import natural gas. Over the next few years, Browne said the development of the Vaca Muerta shale play will ultimately eliminate those imports and allow for exports via pipeline to the neighboring nations of Chile, Uruguay and Brazil. The next step, Brownse said, will be build LNG export terminals to sell shale gas from the Vaca Muerta on the global market. Instead of building a multi-billion dollar liquefaction plant onshore, YPF is going to use an floating LNG plant that will be docked or buoyed offshore. Fuel Fix: Get daily energy news headlines in your inbox YPF recently bought an offshore liquefaction plant known in the industry as a floating liquefied natural gas tanker from the Belgian shipmaker Exmar. Delivered earlier this year, the floating LNG barge has been named "Tango" and stationed offshore southwest of Buenos Aires in Bahia Blanca. The specialized LNG tanker will be able to receive natural gas and supercool it until it becomes a liquid that can be easily shipped. Although it is considerably cheaper than building an onshore plant, the floating LNG plant produces far less liquefied natural gas. Capable of producing 500,000 metric tons of LNG per year, Tango is expected to begin production during the second quarter of 2019. Green beer, shamrock decorations and all the other celebratory trappings of St. Patricks Day are upon us. So whats to eat? Head over to Luthers Cafe at 1503 N. Main Ave. in the Tobin Hill neighborhood. Luthers has been part of the citys dining landscape since 1949, and is well known for an outstanding bowl of chili. They also have a rich and savory Irish stew on the menu. Were talking pure comfort stuff here, tender chunks of beef, carrots and potatoes. A man accused of threatening a government witness who testified during the trial of two leaders of the Bandidos Outlaw Motorcycle Organization was denied bail Tuesday. Albert DeLeon, a 45-year-old Bandidos member, was arrested Thursday and charged with retaliating against an informant, according to the Department of Justice. A motorcyclist who died Saturday in a Northwest Side accident lost control after braking, police said. Carlos Garcia 55, died from multiple blunt force injuries at 2:31 p.m., according to the Bexar County Medical Examiners Office. According to preliminary information from a San Antonio Police Department report, Garcia was riding his Buell Lightning motorcycle at about 2 p.m. north on Callaghan Road and passed the Viva Max Drive intersection. FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox Garcia braked for an unknown reason, and lost control of the motorcycle, investigators said. He was then ejected from the motorcycle and crashed into the poles that divide the north and south lanes. Garcia was not wearing a helmet and received severe head trauma, the report states. EMS took Garcia to University Hospital where he was pronounced dead, authorities said. An SAPD detective initially said Saturday that a driver lost control of their car near Callaghan Road and Bennington Drive and hit the motorcyclist, but no mention of another motorist was made in SAPDs subsequent report. A former Bexar County Emergency Services District administrator was sentenced to 10 years of probation and ordered to repay almost $150,000 Wednesday for a scheme that defrauded taxpayers of thousands of dollars, according to the district attorney's office. Gilbert Muniz Perez, 62, pleaded guilty in district court to a second-degree felony charge of theft by public servant $30,000-$150,000 and received his sentence from Judge Stephanie Boyd. FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox Perez was a former administrator for Districts 1, 2, 10, 11 and 12, and he was also the former board president for Districts 4 and 8. According to law enforcement officials, he was able to siphon off thousands of dollars through expense reports he made for mileage, meals and office supplies that were submitted without any supporting documentation. Additionally, almost 400 checks were found to be out of sequence for Districts 10, 11 and 12 in 2015, a red flag for investigators that points to an attempt to conceal misappropriated payments. "Perez abused his positions by misapplying and misusing government funds entrusted to him by the ESDs, the County Commissioners, and the taxpayers of Bexar County," Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales said in a written statement. "Perez devised a variety of overpayment schemes in the form of reimbursement and payment irregularities, to include duplicate payments, fictitious and disallowable expenditures, credit card payments for personal use, and other unauthorized purchases and expenses." In addition to the district attorney's office, the Bexar County Auditor's Office and the Texas Rangers investigated Perez's financial misdeeds. Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com Caleb Downs covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County. Read him on our breaking news site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | cdowns@mysa.com | @calebjdowns A Bexar County grand jury on Tuesday declined to indict four deputies involved in the fatal shooting of a suspected car thief that also resulted in the death of a 6-year-old boy, according to the district attorney's office. The deputies, who ranged from 2- to 27-year veterans, opened fire on Amanda Jones, 30, in Schertz, Texas, on Dec. 21, 2017, as she stood on the front porch of a mobile home and threatened to shoot them, officials said. She was shot multiple times and killed. Inside the mobile home Jones had been trying to break into was 6-year-old Kameron Prescott, a student at Wiederstein Elementary School, and his family. One of the bullets the deputies fired at Jones pierced the home, fragmented and struck Kameron, who was walking in a front hallway at the time. FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox The shooting followed an hours-long chase through Northeast Bexar County, during which Jones pointed what deputies "feared was a firearm" at them, threatening to shoot. Investigators later determined she was not armed after an exhaustive search of the area did not turn up a firearm. "Jones verbally stated to these deputies that she had a gun and that she was going to shoot them," according to a report of the incident from the sheriff's office. "All four deputies saw an object in Jones' hand as she pointed it at them. All four deputies then fired at Jones, causing ballistic injuries that resulted in her death at the scene." Paramedics rushed Kameron to a nearby hospital, where he was later pronounced dead. FROM OUR SUBSCRIBER SITE: Little boy accidentally killed by sheriff's deputies takes his last ride "After carefully reviewing and considering the evidence, the grand jury concluded that criminal charges were not appropriate against the Bexar County Sheriff's deputies involved," reads a statement from the district attorney's office. Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales said he thinks the panel made the right decision. "I respect and agree with the decision of the grand jury in this case," he said. The DA's office had provided the Bexar County Sheriff's Department with "preliminary clearance letters" in June, prompting Salazar said the deputies John Aguillon, 27 years of service; George Herrera, 16 years; Jesse Arias, seven years; and Reserve Deputy Johnny Longoria, two years would return to patrol. Learn more about the investigations of the shootings on the Express-News. Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com Caleb Downs covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County. Read him on our breaking news site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | cdowns@mysa.com | @calebjdowns A San Antonio man told police he was acting in self-defense when he killed another man outside his East Side home. His surveillance system showed something else, police said. David Medina, 30, was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of murder. He's accused of fatally shooting Bernardo Sandoval, 25, on Feb. 18 in the 200 block of Leonidas Drive. FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox Medina told police that he killed Sandoval after Sandoval and another man showed up armed at Medina's home and attacked him. He fired the shot that killed Sandoval during the fight, Medina said. Investigators discovered Medina recently had video cameras installed in his front yard, according to his arrest affidavit. But when they tried to review the video, they discovered the DVR system was unplugged and missing, police said. While executing a search warrant, officers found the DVR system, along with Eva Sanchez, 23, in a back bedroom under the bed covers, the affidavit says. Police arrested her on suspicion of tampering with evidence. RELATED: SAPD: Man fatally shot during fight in front yard of East Side home The surveillance system had captured footage of the shooting, according to the affidavit, which showed it was not justified. "(Medina) exited his residence with his gun drawn, he rapidly approached the victim and shot him twice in the chest," investigators wrote in the affidavit. Medina's bail was set at $250,000, while Sanchez' bail was set at $5,000, jail records showed. Fares Sabawi covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County. Read him on our breaking news site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com | fsabawi@mysa.com|@FaresInSA Bexar County law enforcement arrested or indicted 34 people on child sex crime charges in February, according to records obtained by mySA.com. The suspects were charged with a an array of crimes, including indecency with a child, possession of child pornography, sexual assault of a child, aggravated sexual assault of a child and super aggravated sexual assault of a child. A man was struck and dragged to death by a suspected drunk driver Wednesday afternoon, according to San Antonio police. Officers responded to the reported accident in the 800 block of Enrique Barrera Parkway around 12:38 p.m. MDC Harare West MP Joana Mamombe was Tuesday targeted for sexual harrassment by some unidentified Zanu PF legislators who shouted hure when she entered the legislative chamber following her recent release on bail over subversion charges. Mamombe was seized by some detectives from a Nyanga hotel over a week ago and driven to Harare to face charges of subverting a constitutional government. She was later admitted to $3 000 bail after spending days in remand prison. The countrys youngest MP returned to parliament to heckling from some MPs who labelled her a prostitute. While her MDC colleagues gave her a joyous welcome, some Zanu PF MPs screamed hure at her. The Zanu PF MPs behaviour invited strong rebuke from their erstwhile colleague and now independent MP for Norton, Temba Mliswa who accused them of lack of a humane face. It is important for us to have human face and I think lack of human face talks about our inhumane attributes in us. I think the issue of one having been incarcerated and being freed is something that I think is human. For some of you (Zanu PF MPs), you are the ones who incarcerate, so we also understand. Some of us have been incarcerated. He added, My point of order is that there is no smoke without fire. So when you see them heckling, they are the biggest human rights violators. NewZimbabwe Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News PRESIDENT Emmerson Mnangagwa has described his political arch-rival and opposition MDC leader Nelson Chamisa as a rebel, just like the biblical Satan who could not co-exist with God in heaven. Addressing journalists at the closing ceremony of the Zimbabwe-South Africa Bi-National Commission Summit attended by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in Harare yesterday, Mnangagwa said his Zanu PF administration would not be pushed around by the opposition leader because he had already begun talks with patriotic opposition parties. We will not be swayed by negative forces because even the Lord upstairs was not able to keep his house in order; he had Satan. These things happen. He still remains there, Mnangagwa said. Chamisa and five other opposition party leaders have stayed away from the Mnangagwa-initiated national dialogue, arguing that the process was flawed. The MDC leader has, instead, challenged Mnangagwa to swallow his pride and start real talks with him to resolve the countrys crisis. But Mnangagwa, who won the disputed 2018 election by a slim margin, said Chamisa could go hang, since he was already talking to those who were willing and patriotic to Zimbabwes cause. However, in a democracy, it is not a crime to move away from progress by those who are not willing to come to the table with the rest of the parties and organisations in the country who are determined to work for the way forward of our country, to better the lives of our people. We cannot compel everybody to come to the table, he said. Mnangagwa said it was Chamisas democratic right to walk away from progress. But those who have the need and desire and who are patriotic to their country will always come together and contribute to the constructive ideas, to move forward. As a result of this endeavour, I have created the Presidential Advisory Council (PAC), which puts together the top brains of our people in Zimbabwe as well as top brains outside Zimbabwe, he said. The Zanu PF leader said from his PAC and the on-going dialogue, he was expecting to get the much-needed global acceptance for a better Zimbabwe. We need to leapfrog in terms of development to catch up with other developing countries, he said. Contacted for comment, Chamisa yesterday referred questions to his spokesperson, Nkululeko Sibanda. Talk to my spokesperson, I dont want to be drawn into such issues, he said. Sibanda said Mnangagwa was mischaracterising Chamisa. I think the real Satan is the one who has blood in his hands, the blood of more than 20 000 people in Matabeleland, the blood of people in DRC [the Democratic Republic of Congo], he said. But president Chamisa would not want to engage himself in this kind of politics. We hope that Mnangagwa will grow up one day and show maturity. He must be a Statesman and show maturity and not this kind of insults and demeaning statements. It is unfortunate. NewsDay Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News Now it is double trouble for the Mnangagwa led government, senior doctors at Parirenyatwa Hospital have downed their tools in protests against shortage of basic essential drugs and equipment while, the Amalgamated Rural Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (Artuz) has resolved to embark on fresh protests to push for the reversal of deductions made on leave days for its members who participated in a recent job action. In a letter to Health Minister Obadiah Moyo and copied to permanent secretary retired Major General Gerald Gwinji as well as other senior officials, consultants at the hospital said they had, had enough. As the consultants of Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals, we have decided to rationalize use of the limited and very finite resources that are currently available. We are now forced with immediate effect to further scale down the services which we are offering, to deal with dire emergencies only until the situation normalizes, said the doctors. The letter added: We feel that these compounding factors have compromised patient care, putting patients health and lives at risk at the very institution which is supposed to restore health and life. The doctors are also arguing that since the beginning of the year they have been unable to resume normal service, especially in the areas of anesthesia, surgery and critical care due to the constraints. On the teachers side, Artuz president Obert Masaraure said the protests have been necessitated by the failure by the PSC to meet the March 4 deadline to reverse the government position on deducting leave days for 10 200 teachers who participated in past job strikes to push for better wages and working conditions. We agreed with the PSC to have the position on leave days that were deducted on 10 200 teachers, who participated in our past job action, to be reversed by March 4. Now that the PSC has failed to meet that deadline, we are going to protest at their district offices countrywide, starting on a date to be advised very soon. That was the resolution made at the March 10 Nec meeting of Artuz, he said. Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News The body of a Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party supporter kidnapped days after fuel protests shut down the country in January has turned up at a mortuary in Chitungwiza, his devastated family said on Wednesday. Blessing Toronga had not been seen since January 24 when witnesses reported seeing him being abducted from Glen Norah C Shopping Centre in Harare by suspected state security agents driving in a white Foton Tunland without number plates. Abel Toronga, his uncle, said after more than a month of searching, Blessings body had been found badly decomposed at the Chitungizwa Hospital mortuary on Monday this week. Blessings body was delivered to the hospital on January 27, three days after his abduction, Toronga said. We dont know who killed my brothers son, but we have been all over looking for him. It really consumed our lives. We are now preparing to bury him, Toronga said. MDC News Alert: MDC member Blessing Toronga was yesterday afternoon abducted near Masimbi in Glen Norah by people riding an unmarked white Foton,his whereabouts are unknown.Any information leading to his location is priceless. MDC Zimbabwe (@mdczimbabwe) January 25, 2019 https://twitter.com/mdczimbabwe/status/1088718305861476353 Confirmation of Blessings death brings to 18 the number of documented deaths after the military and police launched a brutal crackdown following a three-day job boycott called by trade unions over steep fuel price increases which ended in street protests on January 14. Human rights groups say over 80 people, most of them young men, were treated for gunshot wounds and over 1,000 others, including trade unionists and opposition MPs, were rounded up and charged with crimes ranging from looting to treason. ZimLive Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News Ideal Zimbabwe President Tinashe Jonas who was arrested for allegedly undermining the authority of President Emmerson Mnangagwa has been remanded in custody by Harare Magistrate Mrs Rumbidzayi Mugwagwa. Jonasi through his lawyer Mrs Nontokozo Dube Tachiona had challenged his placement on remand arguing he had been over-detained and the state had no authority from the Prosecutor General to prosecute him. The 42-year olds charges stem from an incident which occurred sometime in 2018 in South Africa on DSTV Channel 405 whilst being interviewed and he insulted President Mnangagwa. Jonasi allegedly said it was on record that the President had killed more than 30 000 people and he went on to say he was warning the President and Vice President Retired General Constantino Chiwenga to resign within 6 months or he would face them in the sea or in the mountains and they would both regret among other utterances. ZBC Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News A church service for the late ZBC veteran broadcaster, Judith Makwanya has been held at a local funeral parlour in Harare, with the fellow journalists describing her as a hardworking professional. Makwanya has been in the newsroom for the past 29 years and she has touched many hearts not only at the national broadcaster where her absence is being greatly felt, but the entire nation. Government officials and media practitioners came in numbers to attend a church service and body viewing ceremony in honour of the veteran broadcaster. Makwanyas colleagues described the late journalist as a hardworking person who loved her job with a passion and was always willing to mentor others. Makwanya will be buried at the Warren Hills Cemetery in Harare tomorrow. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade has sent a message of condolences to the Makwanya family. In a statement, the ministrys spokesperson, Mr Gideon Gapare said the Minister, Retired Lieutenant General Dr Sibusiso Moyo, the Secretary Ambassador James Manzou and the entire staff, learnt with profound grief, shock and sadness of the death of Makwanya. He described Makwanya as a true patriot, who served her country with distinction. Judith Makwanya was a true patriot, accomplished and seasoned journalist whose dedicated service to her profession and country was unquestionable. As the ZBC Diplomatic Correspondent, Makwanya was the Ministrys focal point and diligently handled most of the Ministrys press and media requirements including coverage of the Ministerd interviews.she was a humble and yet capable communicator who livened the ZBC presentations both at home and abroad, while covering presidential visits, Mr Gapare said. He urged the family to take strength, courage and solace in that their loss is shared by the entire media fraternity and the nation at large. ZBC Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News Nature has manufactured the perfect machines. Only the fastest, toughest, and most cunning creatures have endured. We examine how animals have evolved and how we can benefit from their evolution. Sundays from 8:30pm AEDT. On Thursday, 14 March 2019, the NATO Deputy Secretary General, Ms. Rose Gottemoeller will meet the European Commissioner for the Security Union, Sir Julian King. The Secretary General, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg will also meet with Sir Julian. During his visit to NATO Headquarters, Sir Julian will also meet the North Atlantic Council. Still images will be available on the NATO website after the event. Follow us on Twitter (@NATOPress and @jensstoltenberg) (As prepared) Thank you, Jakub Landovsky for that kind introduction. It is such a pleasure to be here with you all to celebrate the 15th and 20th anniversaries of the Visegrad Countries joining NATO. 15 years for Slovakia, which joined in 2004, and 20 years for the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, which joined in 1999. After decades of oppression, you were determined to forge a better, freer, more prosperous future for your citizens, and membership of NATO and the European Union were major milestones on the way to that brighter future. While the countries of Central and Eastern Europe had been forced to join the Warsaw Pact, these same countries voluntarily sought membership in NATO. NATO believes that every country must be free to choose its own path, including with regard to its security agreements. This is a sovereign decision for sovereign nations to take and no one has the right to interfere. When NATO was founded 70 years ago it had just 12 members. Today it has 29, with a 30th the Republic of North Macedonia - already sitting at the table at NATO Headquarters as an invitee. This is testament to the deep and fundamental attraction of an Alliance that exists to protect and defend its members; that promotes the shared values of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law; and that respects national sovereignty. Seventy years of NATO has brought 70 years of peace and stability among its members, almost unprecedented in the history of the European continent. For most of Europes history, a state of war was the norm, with countries great and small seeking to gain power and influence through violence and conquest. NATO has provided the unifying mechanism to channel the political and military strength of its members to bring an end to that terrible cycle, and to create the conditions for security and stability throughout the continent. It has also helped to pave the way, through a stable security environment, for wider European integration and enlargement of the European Union. *** But that is not to say that we have overcome all challenges. We all know how unpredictable and unstable the world has become in recent years. We face a wide range of challenges. Russias pattern of aggressive actions, including the illegal annexation of Crimea, a major military build-up from the High North to the Middle East, the use of a military grade nerve agent in Salisbury, and attempts to undermine our democratic institutions, all portray the challenge that unfortunately Russia has become. Russias breach of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty is part of this pattern of behavior. Russia has developed and deployed of a new intermediate range nuclear missile, the SSC-8. Allies have been raising concerns over this for the last 6 years, starting with the Obama administration. But our concerns have been ignored. This missile is mobile, easy to hide and can strike cities such as Prague in a matter of minutes. This development is incredibly dangerous, and all Allies call on Russia to destroy these missiles and associated technologies and to return to compliance with the INF Treaty. Russias development, testing and deployment of the SSC-8 has prompted the United States, with the full support of all NATO Allies, to notify its intent to withdraw from the INF Treaty. There is still a window of opportunity for Russia to come back into compliance with the treaty. The withdrawal process will last until August and we very much hope that Russia will return to compliance in that time. In this context, it is regrettable that Russia has suspended its obligations under the Treaty. So we have to prepare for a world without the INF Treaty, and with new Russian intermediate-range missiles deployed on our borders. Indeed, they are already there. Its important to remember this. This is one of the many reasons why ongoing dialogue with Russia is so important. Ensuring that we have open lines of communication reduces the risk of actions on either side being misinterpreted and of events spiralling out of control. That is why we hold regular meetings of the NATO-Russia Council, where we can discuss important issues with Russia, such as Ukraine, the INF Treaty, transparency and risk reduction. We will continue to pursue dialogue, while we keep our defences strong: not to provoke a conflict but to prevent a conflict and to preserve the peace. *** While we face a number of challenges with Russia, it is not our only concern. Instability in the Middle East and North Africa represents a challenge to our security. As many people flee for their lives, there is a vacuum that can be exploited by terrorist groups. The US-led Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS/Daesh, of which NATO is a part, has made significant progress. We must ensure that ISIS does not return. That is why we have launched a new mission to train Iraqi forces and help them build their security institutions, particularly to help them establish a network of educational institutions. We also continue to train, advise and assist Afghan security forces so that they can fight terrorism and create the conditions for peace. Let me pay tribute to those soldiers from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia and all others - who are serving or have served with such commitment and professionalism in Afghanistan, and to those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. They served their countries, the Alliance, and the cause of peace with bravery and honour. *** There are yet more challenges, and they are varied and unpredictable. This means we must be prepared for any threat coming from any direction. And to do that, we must invest in our defence. I am pleased the discussion this morning focused on this. We are working to improve burden sharing across our Alliance. This includes cash, capabilities, and contributions to NATO missions and operations. And we are making good progress. In the last two years, European Allies and Canada have spent an additional $41 billion on defence and by the end of 2020, that figure will rise to $100 billion. That money is strengthening our armed forces with more new equipment. We have increased the readiness of our forces and modernised our command structure. And we are doing far more to combat hybrid and cyber threats. But there is still a long way to go. I know that there are always competing demands on national budgets. But our prosperity and our freedom are based on our security. Investing in the armed forces and security are the foundation of prosperity. And countries in this region know very well that we can never take our freedom or security for granted. So we must all continue to invest in our defence and keep our Alliance strong. *** When the Visegrad 4 countries joined NATO in 1999 and 2004, it was on a wave of optimism. The Soviet Union had collapsed, and freedom and democracy were on the rise around the world. Today, we face the most significant challenges in a generation. And some question the strength of our transatlantic Alliance. Democracies will always have differences and engage open debates. This is a strength, not a weakness. Open debate is at the heart of what makes a democracy strong. And the reality is, that despite our differences, NATO Allies have always come together to defend and protect each other. We have understood that this commitment to each other is in each of our national interests. Today, we are doing more together than ever before. *** The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia joined NATO because they saw NATO as a family to which they rightfully belong. And you do. This family is stronger thanks to you. Our strength comes from our unity. If we remain united, we can meet new challenges from wherever they may come. I started my career during the Cold War. I recall, as I know many of you do, how different this continent was when divided by the Iron Curtain. And so it is a particular honor for me to stand here with you today, in Prague, to celebrate the European family reunited. Our unity truly is our greatest strength, and it is thanks to so many people in this room today that we have such a strong foundation on which to build our future. We are here today in celebration of freedom and security and in recognition of unity and progress. It is our duty to build on this progress to ensure that we are able to enjoy continued stability and prosperity for the years to come. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 13) President Rodrigo Duterte will sack another set of government officials over corruption issues. "I will be firing another set of officials. I'm sorry. Mahirap talaga. 'Yan lang ang ano ko [It's hard. That's my only issue, if you want to help me run the government and 'yung programa ko... [and my programs]," Duterte said at the campaign rally of Partido Demokratiko Pilipino - Lakas ng Bayan (PDP-Laban) in Isabela. The President, however, did not name these officials. Duterte had ranted about the multi-billion shabu (methampetamine hydrochloride) shipments which slipped through the Bureau of Customs before his statement, and explained why he appointed former Armed Forces of the Philippines chief Rey Guerrero to head the agency. Two BOC Commissioners, Isidro Lapena and Nicanor Faeldon, left the post following the shabu mess. The latest public official to leave the Duterte administration was Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office General Manager Alexander Balutan. Earlier statements from Malacanang said Duterte fired him on allegations of corruption, but it later clarified that Balutan resigned "out of delicadeza." Balutan is a former Marine general who availed of early retirement in anticipation of an appointment to the Bureau of Corrections. Duterte instead appointed him to the PCSO in 2016. (Natural News) Researchers from the Middle East found that a species of hawthorn can be used to manage blood sugar levels. In their study, which was published in the journal BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, they identified Crete hawthorn (Crataegus azarolus), a plant native to the Mediterranean Basin, to have anti-hyperglycemic properties that is, the ability to lower elevated levels of glucose in the blood. The team looked not only at the plants anti-hyperglycemic properties but also its ability to protect the body against increased levels of fats such as cholesterol in the bloodstream. The condition referred to as hyperlipidemia is a typical complication in people with diabetes and can lead to cardiovascular disease. In the study, they used mice treated with alloxan to induce hyperglycemia. The mice were then divided into groups, with some receiving an ethanol extract from Crete hawthorn leaves while others were given glibenclamide for positive control. Another animal model was also used by the team, this time, to determine its anti-hyperlipidemic effects. They also obtained isolated compounds and extracts from Crete hawthorn and used these to measure its antioxidant and antimicrobial properties, as well as its phytochemical components. Based on the findings, the team found that Crete hawthorn had potent antioxidant properties; in particular, the ethanol extract from the leaf exhibited the highest antioxidant activity, compared with other derivatives. They also found that the plant contained phenols and flavonoids that have known health benefits. For instance, ursolic acid one of the plants active ingredients has been studied for its anti-hyperlipidemic, anti-cancer, and anti-inflammatory properties, among others. Other bioactive ingredients, such as quercetin, rutin, ellagic acid, and salicylic acid, were also found to be potent antioxidants. The team also found that Crete hawthorn can protect against a number of pathogenic microorganisms, including Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, and Candida albicans. According to researchers, this is because of the plants ability to support the immune system in fighting the infection. The current study demonstrates the efficiency of the leaves extract of C. azarolus var. eu-azarolus Maire [or Crete hawthorn] in controlling hyperglycemia with its associated complications such as infection and dyslipidemia, the researchers concluded in their report. More medicinal plants that can help in treating diabetes Medicinal plants, for the most part, arent just limited to plants that grow in remote regions. Surprisingly, some of the most potent medicinal plants for treating diabetes are those which have been used for a long time. Okra In a 2013 study, researchers found that both aqueous and dried powdered okra extracts were able to reduce blood glucose level after two weeks, based on an animal study of alloxan-induced rats. In a 2013 study, researchers found that both aqueous and dried powdered okra extracts were able to reduce blood glucose level after two weeks, based on an animal study of alloxan-induced rats. Onions Studies have shown that quercetin, a flavonoid present in onions, can reduce blood sugar, lipid peroxidation, and even oxidative stress. Studies have shown that quercetin, a flavonoid present in onions, can reduce blood sugar, lipid peroxidation, and even oxidative stress. Milk thistle Silymarin, the active ingredient in milk thistle, has been shown to have anti-hyperglycemic properties. A clinical trial involving diabetic patients showed that those who took silymarin supplements for four months had significant improvements in their glycemic profile. Silymarin, the active ingredient in milk thistle, has been shown to have anti-hyperglycemic properties. A clinical trial involving diabetic patients showed that those who took silymarin supplements for four months had significant improvements in their glycemic profile. Guggul A tree native to the Indian Subcontinent, guggul has been widely used in traditional medicine for treating diabetes. A tree native to the Indian Subcontinent, guggul has been widely used in traditional medicine for treating diabetes. Banaba The medicinal plant, found in Southeast Asia, is known for its ability to reduce blood sugar levels, which is comparable to that of insulin. The medicinal plant, found in Southeast Asia, is known for its ability to reduce blood sugar levels, which is comparable to that of insulin. Garlic The plant is known for its many health benefits. In particular, studies have shown that aqueous extracts from garlic can improve insulin resistance in diabetic patients. Find out more herbs that help manage elevated sugar levels at Herbs.news today. Sources include: Health.news BMCComplementAlternMed.BioMedCentral.com GlobalFoodBook.com (Natural News) Liberty-minded tech startups and independent media publishers have been pleading with President Donald Trump to take on the conservative bias and potential anti-trust violations by the Big Tech giants and hes finally done it. During an exclusive interview with Breitbart News this week, the president accused big tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, and Google of colluding with Democrats to censor his conservative supporters to gain a political advantage. Actually its incredible that I won the election because you know it was so rigged against me, he said Monday. It wasnt Russians. Russia collusion was a delusion. But what there is, is there was collusion between the Democrats and these tech companies. POTUS said that any Republican candidate running in 2020 (and beyond if nothing is done) is going to face a tremendous disadvantage on social media thanks to its pervasive nature throughout our culture and society because the tech giants are run by raging Leftists. He also noted that he surprised those who run the large social media platforms when he handily defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. Its totally steered, which has been proven now, totally steered toward the Democrats, and yet I won, he told Breitbart. The president is spot-on with his assessment. Several studies including analyses of social media referral data prove that conservative, pro-Trump media and voices have suffered from bias in the form of censorship, shadow bans, and outright bans. As NewsTarget reported almost a year ago: [A] major new study by the Media Research Center provides evidence galore that the social media behemoths are doing all they can to censor and downgrade content which does not promote Alt-Left social, cultural, and political views. War is being declared on the conservative movement in this space and conservatives are losing badly. If the right is silenced, billions of people will be cut off from conservative ideas and conservative media, said an executive summary of the study. In the presidents interview, Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow said he would not only be running against Democrats and the media but also the big tech social media platforms as he gears up for his 2020 reelection. Google is abusing its dominant position to the detriment of consumers Oddly, POTUS pointed to a call by a potential Democratic nominee, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), whose campaign recently proposed breaking up the big tech companies because theyve gotten so big and powerful. Isnt it funny? Elizabeth Warren called for their total breakup, POTUS Trump said. I do smile though, theyre so protective of her. (Related: New alternatives to Twitter, Google, Facebook rapidly emerging: These sites wont censor you.) Warren and the president are not the only ones who support a big tech breakup. NewsCorps, owned and operated by Rupert Murdoch, called for Google to be broken up in a petition to Australian regulators. Google enjoys overwhelming market power in both online search and ad tech services, the petition said, as reported by Phys.org. Google is abusing its dominant position to the detriment of consumers, advertisers and publishers. For his part, the president was sympathetic to critics of the big tech platforms who are now pushing to regulate them. I understand a lot of people wanting to look into it, POTUS Trump said. I mean, normally Id like to say let it be free, let it all be free, but its not free. Its really run by a small number of people. Trump also cited reports from Breitbart that recently exposed conservative bias demonstrated by Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Now weve seen it, now weve caught them. Weve seen the speeches, weve seen the in-house little videos that somehow got released. To men, thats a very big scandal, said the president. The president did not say anything about whether his administration was gearing up to challenge the dominance of the big tech companies, but just the fact that hes talking about their bias on a national podium will go along way towards educating millions of Americans. And voters. Read more about the social media bias aligned against POTUS Trump and conservatives at Trump.news and Biased.news. Sources include: Breitbart.com NewsTarget.com (Natural News) The Vatican now supports the use of puberty blocker drugs for kids who want to halt and suppress their natural development into a man or woman. The Vaticans new position on the issue raises red flags. Suppressing a childs hormones is a form of chemical child abuse. Those who are confused or curious about their gender should not be encouraged to destroy their innate biology. In the spirit of moral relativism, the Vatican no longer believes objectively in right or wrong, even when it comes to human biology. The Catholic Church knows its losing members. By loosening their moral standards they hope to attract new members. The Vatican essentially believes that Catholics should tolerate the behavior of others even when they disagree about the morality. Taking it a step further, Catholics are now told to tolerate a childs sex change using puberty-blocking drugs even if they disagree with it. As a matter of fact, Laura Palazzani, a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life and of the National Bioethics Committee recently endorsed the wide-scale funding of these drugs in the Italian National Health Services. Vatican support youth with gender dysphoria to get puberty-blocking drugs from the National Health Services Thats right: The Vaticans Laura Palazzani endorsed the decision of the Italian Medicines Agency (AIFA) to make the drug triptorelin (Trp) available through taxpayer funding in the National Health Services. According to Palazzani, the drug should be used only in very circumscribed cases, with caution, with a case by case evaluation. The comments were published in the March 2nd issue of the Official Journal. Now teens with gender dysphoria can claim they want to kill themselves in order to get the drug that allows their innate biology to be suppressed. In some cases, adolescents who want to change their gender will inflict self harm if they dont get the hormone blocking drugs that are designed to make them feel more like a male or female. (Related: However you identify there are only two types of brains: male and female.) Children who are confused about their gender who have been encouraged to question it and change it are now being encouraged by the Vatican to block their hormones when they hit 10 to 12 years old. Several doctors and lawyers, including the Scienza & Vita and Rosario Livatino Study Center warn against the unknown risks of the drug and the psychological issues that come after adolescents are allowed to go down this life path. There are serious underlying endocrine and psychological issues that would make a child want to use drugs to experiment with their gender expression. By making this anti-puberty drug available to them, society is telling these confused adolescents to commit self harm to their endocrine system, their mind, and their innate biology. The consequences that come from these changes can be life long, perpetuating mental illness and heightening the risk of further self harm in the future. When adolescents are drugged to induce biological changes, there becomes a misalignment between the physical and cognitive development of the child. As the Vatican endorses this gender-bending ideology, there will be global repercussions for the Catholic Church, as members are forced to tolerate the biological and hormonal mutilation of children. Now encouraged to choose against their innate gender, more youth will face mass confusion and mental illness. This will cause a breakdown in the family structure and decadent departure from healthy child upbringing. For more on this issue, check out Gender.News. Sources include: InfoWars.com VaticanNews.va NaturalNews.com (Natural News) Last week, Sergeant Isaac Lambert filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the city of Chicago over his treatment within the police department after refusing to cover up a police shooting involving a developmentally disabled young man. Its one of many incidents in recent years that has cast a negative light over the Chicago Police Department and the conduct of its officers. The victim of the shooting was 18-year-old Ricardo Hayes, who was shot by an off-duty police sergeant, Khalil Muhammad, in 2017. The autistic man had somehow left his house that evening and gotten lost; his caretaker had reported him missing a few hours prior to the incident. Because of his limited mental capacity, his behavior might have seemed odd to the officer, but video footage shows it wasnt threatening. Muhammad told a dispatcher in a 911 recording: The guy pulled, like he was about to pull a gun on me, walked up to the car and I had to shoot. However, the surveillance video taken from a nearby home tells a different story. Hayes can be seen stopping in front of a home and standing there as he is approached by Muhammad in an unmarked personal vehicle. When he starts to move again, the off-duty officer fires on him from inside his truck. Hayes never had a gun and appeared to be shot by Muhammad in drive-by fashion. An attorney for the victim said that the young man, who was unarmed, didnt do anything wrong and hadnt broken any laws, nor had he initiated contact with the officer. Moreover, he said that his disabilities are immediately recognizable and that he appears much younger than his actual age. Hayes was shot in the chest and arm, and when he was later brought to the police station after being released from the hospital, the situation became even worse. According to Lamberts lawsuit, detectives working on the case disagreed about what to do with the victim. Some detectives wanted to charge him with aggravated assault on a police officer to corroborate Muhammads claim that Hayes had threatened him. Lambert disagreed, based on the facts of the case and an assessment of the victims disability, and ordered Hayes to be released without charges. He said Muhammad did not give him a coherent or believable explanation for shooting Hayes. Lambert said the department pressured him to classify the shooting as an aggravated assault to a police officer and change labels in the police report calling Hayes the person reporting offense, which he believes was an attempt on their part to make the shooting appear justified. Refusing to take part in the cover-up, he submitted the report without making the changes. Days after submitting the final report, he was reassigned to the patrol division in what appears to be retaliation for not participating in the cover-up. The lawsuit alleges the police departments actions were a violation of the Illinois Whistleblower Act. The suit claims that high-ranking officials tried to mischaracterize the investigations findings and conclusion. Lambert is asking to be reinstated as a detective and requesting $50,000 in damages. In a press conference, he said: They wanted me to have some reports changed to fit the narrative that they wanted. They wanted this kid to be charged with aggravated assault, and the elements just werent there. Corruption rampant in Chicago Police Department This type of story is all too common in the Chicago Police Department. In 2015, a pair of officers were retaliated against by fellow officers after uncovering massive corruption in their departments, which led to other officers being arrested. They were given dead-end roles and were threatened with going home in a casket; others in their department said they were told that no one should back them up should they find themselves in danger and call for backup. One of the officers involved, Shannon Spalding, said: The code of silence is so strong, the fear of what will happen to you is so strong, that nobody wants to come forward. The department is also dealing with a huge corruption scandal in which officers regularly shook down residents of a housing project and framed dozens of people for crimes they didnt commit. Sources for this article include: TheFreeThoughtProject.com Chicago.SunTimes.com (Natural News) When a family is thinking about moving into a new neighborhood, they will scope out the area first and see if it is any good. In a similar vein, the larvae of coral pick a place to call home based on the sounds made by the animals there, said American researchers. Once a larva decides to settle down on the surface of a reef, it will permanently lose its ability to move. So it has to pick a very good spot that is safe, has plenty of food, and contains other corals of the same species. A study conducted by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) figured out the means by which coral larvae make that important decision. The animals apparently listen to the soundscape of a reef to determine if the formation is a good home. The soundscape is the sum of all the sounds made by the animals in the area. A healthy reef enjoys a very diverse soundscape, while a barren one is either as silent as the grave or filled with the ominous sounds of whatever it is that rendered it lifeless. (Related: Be sure to buy biodegradable sunscreen to protect coral reefs.) Coral larvae judge a potential home by the quality of its soundscape Sound is a sensory cue that a lot of marine animals rely on to communicate and navigate, explained WHOI researcher Amy Apprill. But it hasnt been well studied on coral reefs. The co-lead author of the study, Apprill specializes in the ecology of coral reefs. Her partner, Ashlee Lillis, is an expert on the soundscape of an ecosystem. They noted that a healthy coral reef is filled with all kinds of animals, each of which makes unique noises. In their study, the WHOI research team acquired larvae from mustard hill coral (Porites astreoides) that is commonly found in the Caribbean Sea. The microscopic animals were placed inside sealed containers along with a ceramic layer that mimics the surface of a reef. Apprill and Lillis set up clusters of these containers in three locations off the coast of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Each site was distinct: One was a bare patch of sand, another was a sick coral reef on the verge of death, and the last one was a healthy reef with a large and growing population of animals. In addition to the containers with larvae, the researchers also set up a hydrophone that can analyze underwater sounds. The microphone recorded the sounds in each site for 60 hours. The right kind of background noise gets coral to settle down on a healthy reef The researchers evaluated the number of coral larvae in each container that settled down on the substrate. They compared these results with the recorded soundscape of the test sites and identified particular animals that made the most common sounds. Their results showed that coral larvae recognized the rich and loud sounds made by a thriving coral reef. Twice as many larvae settled down in the healthy site when compared to the unhealthy or barren areas. The soundscape of such reefs are filled with the low-frequency noises made by snapping shrimp and fish that live in coral reefs. These low but constant background sounds are likely to attract coral larvae to settle down. This study has big implications for coral restoration efforts, Apprill noted. Could you take a concrete slab in the ocean, play the sounds of a healthy reef nearby, and start attracting new coral? Likewise, she believes that decreasing human noise pollution in marine areas could encourage coral larvae to settle down there by encouraging the return of important marine organisms. Sources include: Newswise.com RSJ-Prod.LiteratumOnline.com (Natural News) In the latest example of law enforcement resources being ridiculously misused, police raided the hospital room of a man dying from cancer in search of marijuana. The incident took place at Citizens Memorial Hospital in Bolivar, Missouri, where Nolan Sousley was receiving treatment for pancreatic cancer. The Stage 4 cancer patient has been taking capsules of THC oil on his own to help manage pain as a safer alternative to opioids. A medical marijuana bill recently passed in Missouri, but the new regulations are not yet in place. Unfortunately, when youre facing pancreatic cancer, time is not on your side, so Sousley decided not to wait for formalities. He says the pills also help with his nausea and appetite. According to Sousley, his doctors are aware that he takes the pills, but he does not smoke marijuana. Yet somehow, a hospital security guard reported smelling marijuana in his room and called the police, who responded by coming to his small hospital room and rifling through all of his bags as they searched for marijuana that they never found. The incident was videotaped and the footage has now gone viral. Many people have expressed outrage over the incident given the police officers attitude toward the dying man. After telling the officers its been legalized in the state, Sousley asks the officer what hed do if he were in his shoes. The officer replied: Im not in that situation, so Im not gonna play these what-if games. When Sousley responds, You wouldnt do anything to save your life?, the officer replies in a sarcastic tone, Marijuana is saving your life? Its a frustrating exchange to say the least, especially when you consider the fact that had he been taking opioids, which kill 150 Americans each day, he wouldnt have attracted this kind of attention. Thankfully, a doctor intervened and asked the police if they had probable cause and whether they needed a search warrant. They claimed they smelled marijuana, which is virtually impossible when you consider the oil is taken in capsules. After searching all the bags, they came up empty-handed. Public outraged over polices treatment of dying man The public outrage over the incident was so severe that the police department reportedly deleted its Facebook page after being inundated with negative feedback, and a representative answering their phone said people had called her every name in the book over the way the police treated the man. Sousley told the Bolivar Herald-Free Press: Im sick of our country, the way it is right now. I dont support the rules they have written. I use cannabis to save my life. I have the right to try anything. How can they say I cant? I have the right to live. He also told the paper that he didnt really blame the police for doing their jobs and that he hoped the controversy could lead to positive change. He said hed like to see politicians stop trying to limit peoples rights to use cannabis and related products and instead focus on more pressing issues. The hospital apologized to Sousley and his family and said that they plan to re-train their employees on the importance of treating patients with dignity and respect. Its not surprising this story has stirred up so much public ire. Sousley should be applauded for trying a safer and potentially more effective approach to his medical problems than deadly opioids. Why are the police harassing dying cancer patients in their hospital rooms when they could be out on the streets trying to put an end to the opioid crisis? Sources for this article include: TheFreeThoughtProject.com BostonGlobe.com BolivarMONews.com What to Know California last conducted an execution in 2006 More than 700 inmates are on the nation's largest death row California voters have consistently rejected repeal efforts, voting in 2016 to speed up the appeals process California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday that he is taking executive action to halt the use of the death penalty in California. Newsom signed the order Wednesday, granting a reprieve for the state's more than 730 condemned inmates for as long as he is governor. The order doesn't change existing convictions or sentences and no one will be released as a result of the action. At a Wednesday news conference, the first-term governor said his views on capital punishment were shaped 40 years ago by his grandfather and father, who advocated on behalf of wrongly convicted prisoners. 12:45pm: The death chamber at San Quentin. Closed. pic.twitter.com/0zK4UUItBG Office of the Governor of California (@CAgovernor) March 13, 2019 "It's a very emotional place that I stand," Newsom said Wednesday. "This is about who I am as a human being, this is about what I can or cannot do; to me this was the right thing to do. "I was a young man learning that life story. I've gotten a sense over a course of many, many years over the disparities in our criminal justice system." In a statement issued earlier, Newsom said a civilized society can't claim to be a world leader as long as its government "continues to sanction the premediated and discriminatory execution of its people." Newsom had been calling elected officials around the state to share some information, but the official announcement was made Wednesday morning in Sacramento. Two sources familiar with the governor's plans confirmed plans Tuesday to NBC4's I-Team. California, which has 737 condemned inmates and the nation's largest death row, has not executed anyone since 2006. Newsom has been openly advocating for a moratorium on the death penalty and told the LA Times this week that he has asked his legal advisers to research his options as governor. "It doesn't necessarily square with the values... and the hearts and minds of tens of millions of Californians," Newsom said at a Wednesday news conference. Newsom's action is temporary, and a repeal of capital punishment would be up to California voters, who have consistently rejected statewide ballot measures to repeal the death penalty. In 2016, voters narrowly passed a ballot measure to speed up executions in California by fast-tracking appeals, but no condemned inmate was facing imminent execution. Current death row inmates include Scott Peterson, convicted in the death of his wife Laci, and Richard Davis, sentenced for kidnapping and strangling 12-year-old Polly Klaas. The last inmate to be executed in California was Clarence Ray Allen, killed Jan. 17, 2006 at age 76. Allen, sentenced to death on three counts of first-degree murder, was on death row for more than two decades before a lethal injection was administered. California now houses one of every four condemned inmates in the country. Early Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted his disagreement with Newsom. He said "friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!." Newsom "is usurping the express will of California voters and substituting his personal preferences via this hasty and ill-considered moratorium on the death penalty," said Michele Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy (Los Angeles County) District Attorneys. The governor's office sent emails that included the phrase, "...will announce a death penalty moratorium via executive action." An administration source in the governor's office said the order does the following: Puts in place an executive moratorium on the death penalty in the form of a reprieve for all individuals sentenced to death in California. Withdrawals California's lethal injection protocol. Immediately closes the execution chamber at San Quentin. States clearly the directive does not provide for the release of any individual from prison or otherwise alter any current conviction or sentence. Newsom's action is likely to face a court challenge, but aides said he is not changing any convictions or allowing for early release. A governor needs approval from the state Supreme Court to pardon or commute the sentence of anyone twice convicted of a felony. Last year, justices lblocked several clemency requests by former Gov. Jerry Brown that did not involve condemned inmates. Other governors also have enacted moratoriums. Republican Illinois Gov. George Ryan was the first in 2000 and later was followed by Pennsylvania, Washington and Oregon. Illinois ultimately outlawed executions, as did Washington. U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, applauded Newsom's decision. "As a career law enforcement official, I have opposed the death penalty because it is immoral, discriminatory, ineffective, and a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars," she said in a statement. The California Innocence Project, which works to exonerate people on death row in the state, lauded the upcoming announcement. "It has been my dream for many years that we would end the human rights violation known as the death penalty in California," Justin Brooks, Director of the California Innocence Project and a Professor at California Western School of Law, said in a statement. "It is certain that as long as there is the death penalty there is the risk of executing innocent people. I am proud of our new Governor for taking this bold step." The District Attorney's Association also responded to the planned announcement: "The voters of the State of California support the death penalty," Michele Hanisee, President of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys said in a statement. "That is powerfully demonstrated by their approval of Proposition 66 in 2016 to ensure the death penalty is implemented, and their rejection of measures to end the death penalty in 2016 and 2006. Governor Newsom, who supported the failed initiative to end the death penalty in 2006, is usurping the express will of California voters and substituting his personal preferences via this hasty and ill-considered moratorium on the death penalty." Equality California, the nation's largest statewide LGBTQ civil rights organization, also responded to the planned action: "Equality California applauds Governor Newsom for the principled leadership he has demonstrated through this decision," Rick Zbur, executive director of the organization, said in a statement. "Fairness and equality are fundamental California values. But these core values are not reflected in our state's broken death penalty system. We cannot accept a system in which certain communities especially communities of color and the LGBTQ community are disproportionately vulnerable simply because of our race, our sexual orientation or gender identity, how much money we have or where we are from." Reality TV star Kim Kardashian West, who has previously worked with Trump on criminal justice reform, tweeted her support for Newsom's moratorium. NBC4's Jonathan Lloyd contributed to this report. A group of Cambodian refugees living in the Bay Area, many who spent their entire lives in the United States, are facing deportation. The group received a summons to show up to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in San Francisco where they will likely be detained. Hay Hov has been in the country for over 30 years and will have to report to the immigration office Wednesday morning where he should be prepared to be detained, according to his attorney. "Ive been checking in once a year for the past six, seven years," he said. Last month, Hov got a letter telling him to report to ICE. "My world has been shattered," Hov said. He could be deported back to Cambodia, a country he hasnt set foot in since he was 6 years old. "Its a world I dont know anything about," he said. The Trump Administration has been pressing Cambodia and a few other countries to take back their deportees. In this case, Hov is a refugee with a record. He served five years in prison for shooting a man when he was 19 years old. "Im not here to commit a crime," he said. "I was young and stupid, Im a changed man." Hov works as a truck driver for Pet Food Express, and the owner of the company is fighting for him. "This is a person we have vetted. Its someone wed sit down and have a meal with this is a person that deserves to stay in this country," said Mark Witriol, CEO of Pet Food Express. Hov has reached out to Governor Gavin Newsoms office, asking for a pardon so he can stay in this country. Hes also met with the staff of both California senators. "I paid my time," Hov said. "I got a wife and kid I just need to be there for them. Without me what else they going to do?" President Donald Trump has issued an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircrafts in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that killed 157 people, including two brothers from California. There are a combined total of 387 Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircrafts registered worldwide, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, but there are only three U.S.-based airlines which operate 72 of those aircrafts. Southwest Airlines, American Airlines and United Airlines operate thousands of daily flights and dozens will be effected. Here are the routes that the Max 8 and Max 9 jets make to and from the Bay Area: Southwest Airlines Los Angeles-Oakland Orlando-Oakland Phoenix-San Francisco United Airlines San Francisco-Maui San Francisco-Houston Click here for more information on how to find out if you're flying on a Boeing 737 Max 8 or Max 9. CORRECTION (March 13, 2019, 2:39 p.m. PST): An earlier version of this story mischaracterized how many daily flights by Max 8 and Max 9 are operated. San Francisco Mayor London Breed has apologized after signing a certificate of honor for a controversial figure in Irish history ahead of this weekend's St. Patrick's Day Parade in the city. Martin McGuinness was chosen by the United Irish Societies of San Francisco as one of five honorary grand marshals for the parade, which is happening on Saturday. McGuinness is known for his work with the Provisional Irish Republican Army, a paramilitary organization that sought to end British rule in Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom had previously considered the IRA a terrorist organization, with the organization being linked to bombings in Northern Ireland between the 1970s and 1990s. "San Francisco values means respect for the democratic process and non-violent political actions. The language on the Certificate of Honor should have taken more care to apply these values when reflecting the history of Mr. McGuinness' life toward peacemaker and his role in the peace process that resulted in the Good Friday Agreement," Breed said in a statement. "I apologize for the pain this certificate has caused." The certificate caused outrage online, with many within the Irish community referring to McGuinness as a murderer. An online petition signed by nearly 3,000 people as of Tuesday is demanding that Breed rescind the certificate. According to the Irish Societies of San Francisco's website, McGuinness was the chief negotiator of the Northern Ireland political party Sinn Fein during talks that led to the 1998 Good Friday agreement, which recognized Northern Ireland as a sovereign territory of the U.K. McGuinness died in 2017. The United Irish Societies of San Francisco was not immediately available for comment. Breed is set to lead Saturday's parade as Grand Marshal. There's an agreement in place for the Raiders to play the 2019 season at Oakland Coliseum. The team has been working on one for weeks with the Coliseum Authority, and we're finally ready for an approval vote. The Coliseum Authority board will meet on Friday and vote on the lease agreement, which also includes an option for 2020 and the resolution of a parking revenue dispute between the sides. Major terms have been agreed upon for some time, before the Raiders abandoned negotiations following Oakland's lawsuit against them alleging antitrust violations and breach of contract. That gave sides a head start, but details and last minute changes had to be hammered out before reaching this final stage. The goal was to present an agreement easily approved by the board. There's no drama expected in Friday's vote, which should result in approval from the Authority board. The Oakland City Council and the Alameda County Board of Supervisors must also approve the deal, but those bodies have been informed of the agreement's details and should approve the deal without resistance. NFL owners must also vote on the matter, though that approval's considered a slam dunk. That should happen during the league's owners meetings in late March. [RELATED: Las Vegas move already playing role in contracts] The Raiders have been looking for a place to play 2019 for some time. They explored options inside and outside the Bay Area market after Oakland's lawsuit was filed in December, and really pushed to play at Oracle Park in San Francisco. They ended up back at the table to play at Oakland Coliseum, the most logical place to call home in the last year before a scheduled move to Las Vegas. San Francisco Mayor London Breed on Tuesday announced the appointment of San Francisco's first LGBT fire chief. Breed named Jeanine Nicholson, a deputy chief of the San Francisco Fire Department, as the replacement for current San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White, who announced she was retiring last year. "San Francisco is an incredible city with unique challenges resulting from our dense urban environment and our ever-present earthquake risk. I am committed to meeting these challenges and continuing the work to make our City safer for all residents," Nicholson said. Nicholson, a 25-year veteran in the department, is also only the second woman to hold the position. The first was Hayes-White. "Her experience and her resiliency have prepared her to lead the men and women who are out there every day protecting our residents, and I am confident she will be ready to lead the Department on day one," Breed said in a statement. Breed was also grateful to Hayes-White for staying on after announcing her retirement. "I also want to thank Chief Joanne Hayes-White for her service and her support as we go through this transition process," she said. Hayes-White was first appointed as fire chief by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2004. "The City will be in very capable hands with Chief Nicholson leading the San Francisco Fire Department and were both committed to a smooth transition," Hayes-White said. Before Nicholson moved into a leadership position, she was a firefighter in the South of Market and the Western Addition areas, a firefighter paramedic in the Ingleside and Richmond, a lieutenant in Bernal Heights, a captain in the Financial District, and a battalion chief in the Sunset and in Chinatown, according to the city. The Embarcadero, San Francisco's venerable jewel on the waterfront that boasts some of the city's most charming features, was at the center of a passionate debate Tuesday night over how and where to shelter the homeless. Mayor London Breed wants to turn an Embarcadero parking lot into a navigation center, and during a crowded Port Commission meeting Tuesday, many in the community pushed back. No one questioned the need for homeless services. But many residents questioned the decision of locating a homeless navigation center near high-profile public places such as the San Francisco Ferry Building and Oracle Park. Seawall Lot 330, owned by the Port of San Francisco, sits just down the road from those landmarks and could be the city's next navigation center. A show of hands at Tuesday's meeting quickly revealed who came to speak out against the proposal. One opponent was a mother of young children. "Theres feces, sometimes theres needles!" the concerned mom said. "I had to call Public Works to pick up the needles. Its just very overwhelming!" Attorney Robert Arns said he is currently prosecuting two wrongful death cases in which homeless people killed family members "This will be a disaster," he said. Breed proposed the location last week and said the site fills a need: helping homeless residents nearby and offering certain amenities. Neighborhood politics, she said, shouldnt play a role. "Every part of the city has to share in on what we need to do in terms of providing shelters, providing affordable housing, providing more housing in general," Breed said. "You know, we gotta start looking at things differently." Dane Ince, vice president of the homeowners association at a nearby condominium building, said safety and the success of navigation centers headlines his reservations. He said it's not about property values. "Thats not a concern at all. That has nothing to do with it," Ince said. "Were building stuff, rather than addressing, directly, the problems that this population faces head on." Ince also said police response in the area can be a little shoddy, though the city vows a good neighbor environment with precautions for safety. Only about half of the lot would be dedicated to the navigation center, which would likely be there for up to four years. A full vote by the Port Commission is expected April 23. A U.S. appeals court appeared inclined Wednesday to reject a request by the Trump administration to block a California law that limits police cooperation with federal immigration officials. But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals raised concerns about another state law extending protections to people in the country illegally. The Trump administration has sued California over three laws, saying they obstruct federal immigration efforts and urging the 9th Circuit to block them. Judge Milan Smith said at a hearing that U.S. officials might find it frustrating that local authorities can't help them take custody of people in the country illegally. But "because it's an obstacle doesn't mean it's illegal, right?" he asked an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. Judge Andrew Hurwitz said the state law doesn't allow local officials to interfere with federal efforts to take immigrants into custody, it just forbids them from "affirmatively helping." "They're not required to be helpful, are they?" he asked. Smith and another judge on the three-judge panel, however, expressed concerns about another state law requiring inspections of facilities where immigrants are detained. The panel did not immediately issue a ruling. More than 50 immigrant advocates protested outside the federal courthouse during the hearing, some holding signs saying "ICE out of California," referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Trump administration's 2018 lawsuit was part of its broader efforts to crack down on so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that it says allow criminals to stay on the streets. California officials say their policies promote trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement and encourage witnesses and victims to report crime. The Justice Department argued in court documents that the Constitution gives the federal government pre-eminent power to regulate immigration, and the three laws obstruct those efforts. "The bills, individually and collectively, mark an extraordinary and intentional assault on the federal government's enforcement of the immigration laws," Justice Department attorneys said in a filing. U.S. Judge John Mendez in Sacramento kept two of the laws in place in July but blocked part of a third. He ruled that California could limit police cooperation with immigration officials and require inspections of detention facilities where immigrants are held, but the state could not bar private employers from allowing immigration officials on their premises without a warrant. The three laws were aimed at preserving "state resources for state priorities and to safeguard the health and welfare of state residents," the California attorney general's office said in a brief to the 9th Circuit. "Nothing in the Constitution or federal immigration law divests the state of the authority to make those choices." President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized the 9th Circuit for ruling against several of his policies. California has sued his administration dozens of times, mostly over immigration, the environment and health care. Governors of five states oppose President Donald Trump's call for a 90 percent spending cut for a Great Lakes cleanup program. The president's 2020 budget offers $30 million for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which gets $300 million most years. It removes toxic pollution, prevents algae blooms and species invasions, and restores wildlife habitat. The governors said Wednesday the cut would cost jobs, hurt tourism and jeopardize public health. They urged Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, a former Indiana governor, to fully fund the program. Issuing the statement were Democratic Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, along with Republican Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio. The Trump administration has said state and local governments should fund the program. Family, friends and fellow officers were among the thousands of people who mourned fallen McHenry County Sheriff's Deputy Jacob Keltner at his funeral Wednesday, sharing memories of the veteran officer and joining together in their grief. Keltner was fatally shot Thursday as U.S. Marshals attempted to serve an arrest warrant at the Extended Stay Hotel in Rockford. The suspect, identified as 39-year-old Floyd Brown, fled the scene after the shooting and was later apprehended after a lengthy stand-off on Interstate 55 in central Illinois. [[507084002, C]] An estimated 3,000 people attended Keltner's funeral on Wednesday morning at Woodstock North High School. Some of his fellow officers, emotional at times, honored Keltner in speeches that centered on his dedication to law enforcement and even more so, to the people he loved. "Four years, five separate attempts and dozens of sheets of paper worth of background checks and you finally got your Marshal creds. You couldn't wait for that day to happen," Officer Mike Urgo said, recalling the February 2014 day Keltner was assigned to be his partner in the apprehension unit of the U.S. Marshals Great Lakes Regional Task Force. "You left the ones you loved and made the ultimate sacrifice for your partners, your team, your brothers and sisters in blue and innocent lives everywhere," he continued. "I wish this day had never happened." [[507092872, C]] "Jake, we are forever indebted to you for your sacrifice and will carry your spirit on with us forever," Urgo said. "You may rest easy now assured that your loved ones are in the most careful and capable hands. We only ask that you save a briefing spot for us all for that one day we will meet again. And I cannot wait for that day to happen." Fellow Officer Tony Penna praised Keltner, saying, "there was no better fugitive investigator or police officer in this nation than Jake. There was simply none better than Jake." [[507092882, C]] "Jake was skillfully brilliant, tenacious, tactical and just as important had the most wonderful sense of humor for a police officer I've ever been around," Penna added. McHenry County Sheriff Bill Prim echoed that sentiment, highlighting the impact he said Keltner had on those around him. [[507092452, C]] "All our lives, whether we like it or not, have a ripple effect on the lives around us," Prim said. "Jake Keltner created, over his too-short span of life, not just a ripple but a mighty wave of goodness and light and there is nothing wasted about that. It is, in fact, all we can hope to achieve in this world. He just did it quicker than most." Keltner was a 13-year veteran of the force and a father of two young sons, a family that his fellow officers vowed to care for in his absense. His wife Becki Keltner penned an emotional letter Monday to share with the world the kind of man her husband was, calling him the love of her life, a "cop's cop" and "an amazing dad." Her letter can be read in its entirety here. Following the funeral, police asked the public to line the streets for a procession to "show their support and honor Deputy Keltner." Dozens of residents could be seen standing along the route, bididng their final goodbyes with salutes, signs and a massive show of support. Chicago police temporarily shuttered Sound-Bar Tuesday after the popular River North nightclub was deemed a public safety threat following a shooting early Friday morning that left an employee dead and another man wounded. CPD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi tweeted that owners were working with police and city leaders to develop an appropriate public safety plan as dictated by Summary Closure ordinance. Under the ordinance, a business that is deemed a public safety threat is ordered to remain closed until the business owner takes reasonable steps to protect its employees, patrons and members of the public from future harm, according to the citys website. Just after mighnight Friday, a group of about 15 people started fighting near an alley in the 600 block of North Franklin, according to police. A male in the crowd then pulled out a handgun and fired off several shots, striking 28-year-old Thurman Bailey and a 58-year-old man, police and the medical examiners office said. Bailey was rushed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital and pronounced dead about an hour after the fight broke out, authorities said. He lived in Bronzeville. The older man was also taken to Northwestern and treated for bullet fragments in his leg and arm, police said. Police spokesman Hector Alfaro said Bailey worked at the nightclub, while the 58-year-old was associated with the business. No one has been arrested in connection with the shooting, police said. The suspected shooter was seen wearing a green puffy jacket and a black hat. On Friday afternoon, the nightclub announced on social media that it was voluntarily closing for the weekend. The Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency order Wednesday grounding all Boeing 737 Max aircraft in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian airliner that killed 157 people, a reversal for the U.S. after federal aviation regulators had maintained it had no data to show the jets are unsafe. The decision came hours after Canada joined some 40 other countries in barring the Max 8 from its airspace, saying satellite tracking data showed possible but unproven similarities between the Ethiopian Airlines crash and a previous crash involving the model five months ago. The U.S., one of the last holdouts, also grounded a larger version of the plane, the Max 9. Daniel Elwell, acting head of the FAA, said enhanced satellite images and new evidence gathered on the ground led his agency to order the jets out of the air. The data, he said, linked the behavior and flight path of the Ethiopian Airlines Max 8 to data from the crash of a Lion Air jet that plunged into the Java Sea and killed 187 people in October. "Evidence we found on the ground made it even more likely that the flight path was very close to Lion Air's," Elwell told reporters on a conference call Wednesday. Satellite data right after the crash wasn't refined enough to give the FAA what it needed to make the decision to ground planes, Elwell said. But on Wednesday, global air traffic surveillance company Aireon and Boeing were able to enhance the initial data to make it more precise "to create a description of the flight that made it similar enough to Lion Air," Elwell said. The Ethiopian plane's flight data and voice recorders will be sent to France for analysis, Elwell said. Some aviation experts have warned that finding answers in the crash could take months. Officials at Lion Air in Indonesia have said sensors on their plane produced erroneous information on its last four flights, triggering an automatic nose-down command that the pilots were unable to overcome. President Donald Trump, who announced the grounding, was briefed Wednesday on new developments in the investigation by Elwell and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, and they determined the planes should be grounded, the White House said. Trump spoke afterward with Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenberg and Boeing signed on. "At the end of the day, it is a decision that has the full support of the secretary, the president and the FAA as an agency," Elwell said. Airlines, mainly Southwest, American and United, should be able to swap out planes pretty quickly, and passengers shouldn't be terribly inconvenienced, said Paul Hudson, president of flyersrights.org, which represents passengers. The Max, he said, makes up only a small percentage of the U.S. passenger jet fleet, he said. "I think any disruptions will be very minor," he said. "The first quarter of the year is the slow quarter, generally for air travel,"adding that the airlines have planes on the ground that aren't being used on trans-Atlantic flights that could be diverted to domestic routes. Boeing issued a statement saying it supported the FAA's decision even though it "continues to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX." The company also said it had itself recommended the suspension of the Max fleet after consultations with the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board. "We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution," Boeing said. The groundings will have a far-reaching financial impact on Boeing, at least in the short term, said John Cox, a veteran pilot and CEO of Safety Operating Systems. In addition to those that have already been grounded, there are more than 4,600 Boeing 737 Max 8 planes on backlog that are not yet delivered to airlines. "There are delivery dates that aren't being met, there's usage of the aircraft that's not being met, and all the supply chain things that Boeing so carefully crafted," Cox said. "If they can't deliver the airplanes, where do they put the extra engines and the extra fuselage and the extra electrical components" Even so, Cox thinks Boeing will recover, because the planes typically fly for 30 to 40 years, and any needed fix will be made quickly, he said. Boeing's shares have plummeted almost 11 percent since Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines crash. On Wednesday, the stock sank to $363.36 after the FAA announcement but then recovered to close at $377.14, up 0.5 percent for the day. It rose slightly in after-hours trading to $378. In making the decision to ground the Max 8s in Canada, Transport Minister Marc Garneau said a comparison of vertical fluctuations found a "similar profile" between the Ethiopian Airlines crash and the Lion Air crash. Garneau, a former astronaut who flew in the space shuttle, emphasized that the data is not conclusive but crossed a threshold that prompted Canada to bar the Max 8. "This is not the proof that is the same root problem," he said. "It could be something else." Canada lost 18 of its citizens in Sunday's crash, the second highest number after Kenya. A Canadian family of six were among the dead. Lebanon and Kosovo also barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 from their airspace Wednesday, and Norwegian Air Shuttles said it would seek compensation from Boeing after grounding its fleet. Egypt banned the operation of the aircraft. Thailand ordered budget airline Thai Lion Air to suspend flying the planes for risk assessments. Lion Air confirmed reports it has put on hold the scheduled delivery of four of the jets. Ethiopian Airlines, widely seen as Africa's best-managed airline, grounded its remaining four models. The growing number of countries joining the ban put the FAA in a difficult position, said Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the NTSB who is now an aviation consultant. He said the FAA, which certified the 737 Max as airworthy and has been the lead regulatory body for the airplane, prides itself on making data-driven decisions and not based on "anecdotes or political pressures." Goelz said Trump likely was feeling pressure from Congress and the public to step in. "There's probably nobody in the administration who's got more of a sensitive ear to cable television," said Goelz. The FAA is also certain to be looking into anonymous reports from at pilots of at least two U.S. flights who wrote about problems last year in a NASA database, Goelz said. The pilots reported that an automated system seemed to cause their Boeing 737 Max 8 planes to tilt down suddenly. The pilots said that soon after engaging the autopilot, the nose tilted down sharply. In both cases, they recovered quickly after disconnecting the autopilot. After Trump's announcement, American Airlines said its "teams will make every effort to rebook customers as quickly as possible." United Airlines, which grounded its 14 Max planes, said the aircraft account for roughly 40 flights per day. Through a combination of spare aircraft and rebooking customers, the airline did not anticipate a significant operational impact. Southwest Airlines said it immediately complied with the order and removed its 34 Max 8 from scheduled service. The airline said the Max 8 planes account for less than 5 percent of the airline's daily flights, adding that it remains confident in the airliner after completing more than 88,000 flight hours over 41,000 flights, but that it supports the FAA's decision. Boeing's technical team joined U.S., Israeli, Kenyan and other aviation experts in the investigation of the Ethiopian Airline crash, led by Ethiopian authorities. An Ethiopian pilot who saw the crash site minutes after the disaster told AP that the plane appeared to have "slid directly into the ground." Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde Gebremariam said their pilots had received special training. "In addition to the basic trainings given for 737 aircraft types, an additional training was given for the Max version," Tewolde told state news reporters. "After the Lion Air crash, questions were raised, so Boeing sent further instructions that it said pilots should know." Tewolde said he is confident the "investigation will reveal that the crash is not related to Ethiopian Airlines' safety record." Forensic DNA work for identifications of the remains recovered so far has not yet begun, Asrat said. The dead came from 35 countries. AP writers Elias Meseret and Yidnek Kirubel in Hejere, Ethiopia, Tom Krisher in Detroit and Cathy Bussewitz and Alexandra Olson in New York contributed to the story. Police in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, say a man went to extreme lengths to avoid capture. Shawn Rich, 40, allegedly hid inside a covert compartment in a home which a tenant claimed was once a stop on the Underground Railroad, according to police. Theres three levels, a large basement, multiple little closet spaces and hidey holesso there was a lot of places inside the residence that he couldve been in, Sgt. Mark Bickford of the St. Johnsbury Police Department said of the house on Spring Street. Bickford told necn and NBC 10 Boston that a warrant was recently issued for Rich after the state said he didnt complete his time on a court-ordered work crew. Rich was convicted last year of a misdemeanor charge of disturbing the peace. According to a late-2018 report in the Caledonian Record newspaper, Rich pleaded no contest to accusations he sent threatening messages when he felt he was owed money from a construction job. Bickford said when the police investigation brought them to Spring Street, at first it didnt seem their guy was around until another tenant of the multi-unit residence told them a local rumor: that the 1840s home used to be a stop on the Underground Railroad, hiding escaped slaves. After about 25 minutes of searching, Bickford said investigators discovered the suspect inside a disguised nook built into a closet. You cant hide forever, the sergeant noted, smiling. According to the initial press release from police, they also found a sleeping bag in the secret crawl space, along with a jar Rich apparently used as a bathroom. Bickford said the front of the home was equipped with a camera that might have given Rich a heads-up to hide when the investigators arrived with a search warrant. Peggy Pearl at the St. Johnsbury History & Heritage Center said she cant be sure if the home really was on the Underground Railroad, though others across Vermont certainly were. They were lots of times, in the basement, Pearl said of known hiding spaces in properties on the Underground Railroad. Pearl said she knew of another home in St. Johnsbury which was long rumored to have been a safe space for runaway slaves, but said the work wouldve been so top secret, it wasnt always documentedso questions remain. Once anybody was onto that, if it got to the wrong person and you were exposedthat was it, Pearl said of the work by people who were a part of the Underground Railroad. As for Rich, police said he is due in court in late April, along with a woman accused of helping him hide. Another suspect acquainted with Rich was also taken into custody on a warrant, Bickford said, adding that work on the case is ongoing. It is unclear if the subjects of the investigation have secured attorneys ahead of the April 29 court dates. Investigators are working to determine what caused a two-alarm fire at a vacant building in New London late Tuesday night. Firefighters said they responded to a fire at a vacant, three-story brick building on Trumbull Street in Fort Trumbull shortly after 11 p.m. Crews were able to knock down the main body of the fire, but remained on scene until early Wednesday morning. BREAKING: #NewLondon Fire Marshal confirms second alarm fire in vacant 3-story brick building at 100 Trumbull Street in #FortTrumbull. Main body of fire knocked down but firefighters will spend night overhauling. Investigation underway. Video: Steven Frischling #nbcct @Local1522 pic.twitter.com/SSwuL6EY9W Heather Burian (@HeatherBurian) March 13, 2019 A fire boat was called in because one side of the building abutted the water, but firefighters did not need to use it, fire officials said. No injuries were reported, but one boat was damaged. The cause of the fire is under investigation. Norwich police have made an arrest in what they call a case of severe abuse of a 3-year-old boy. Police arrested 27-year-old Edward T. Quinones Jr., of Taftville, on Saturday and charged him with risk of injury to a minor and cruelty to persons. Police started investigating when the Connecticut Department of Children and Families CareLine contacted them early on the morning of Sept. 17 to report the possible physical abuse of a 3-year-old child. They said an emergency room doctor at Pequot Medical Center contacted the CareLine to report that the little boys mother had brought him in hours earlier to be treated for bruises and other injuries that were at varying stages of healing. The victim was subsequently transferred to Yale-New Haven Norwich police said the child had been staying with Quinones and his girlfriend in Taftville and the victims mother had paid them both to care for her son while she was working from Friday evening on Sept. 14 to Sunday evening, Sept. 16. It was during that weekend when the child sustained serious injuries to his head, face, arms, torso, genitals and legs, police said. Quinones was released after posting a $50,000 bond and hes due in Norwich Superior Court on March 21. Police said they do not expect any other arrests. The owner of an unusual business in Dallas found his hydroponic hops growing facility destroyed. He said vandals left behind an estimated $60,000 worth of damage. "There's no recovering from this," said Corey Rickman, the owner of Dallas Hopworks. The company grows hops, which are a key ingredient used to brew beer. Rickman discovered the damage when he opened on Monday and noticed an air conditioning unit damanged and dumped on the floor. "They trashed the place, ripped out every single plant from every single basket," he said. "The roots of them have all dried out to the point where they're dead." He said the vandals ripped lights out of the ceiling, threw tools in tanks of water and tore apart desks. Rickman said Dallas Hopworks is one of about six hydroponic hops farms in the country. The operations can provide local brewers with fresh, wet hops year-round. It can be hard for smaller brewers to get wet hops, Rickman said, because the majority of hops in the United States are grown in Eastern Washington and are only harvested once a year. Hops begin to lose the oils that contribute to a beer's taste after 36 hours. "We're able to get a much more flavorful beer," he said. Rickman suspected the vandals might have mistakenly believed marijuana was being grown inside the building. Dallas Hopworks often leaves its garage door open during business hours, leading to questions from people passing by the business. "One of the questions they always ask is, 'Where is there marijuana? Where are you growing it?' Rickman said, pointing out, "We don't." Rickman estimated he had 4,000 hops plants in his facility, and each would have sold for around $10. He said local brewers have offered to help Dallas Hopworks clean up or create beers on their behalf. "We love beer. We love the beer community. I can't say how great they've been through this entire thing," he said. "We're not going to give up. We're going to rebuild." NBC 5's Jack Highberger contributed to this report. What to Know California last conducted an execution in 2006 More than 700 inmates are on the nation's largest death row California voters have consistently rejected repeal efforts, voting in 2016 to speed up the appeals process California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday that he is taking executive action to halt the use of the death penalty in California. Newsom signed the order Wednesday, granting a reprieve for the state's more than 730 condemned inmates for as long as he is governor. The order doesn't change existing convictions or sentences and no one will be released as a result of the action. At a Wednesday news conference, the first-term governor said his views on capital punishment were shaped 40 years ago by his grandfather and father, who advocated on behalf of wrongly convicted prisoners. 12:45pm: The death chamber at San Quentin. Closed. pic.twitter.com/0zK4UUItBG Office of the Governor of California (@CAgovernor) March 13, 2019 "It's a very emotional place that I stand," Newsom said Wednesday. "This is about who I am as a human being, this is about what I can or cannot do; to me this was the right thing to do. Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers. Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2019 "I was a young man learning that life story. I've gotten a sense over a course of many, many years over the disparities in our criminal justice system." In a statement issued earlier, Newsom said a civilized society can't claim to be a world leader as long as its government "continues to sanction the premediated and discriminatory execution of its people." Newsom had been calling elected officials around the state to share some information, but the official announcement was made Wednesday morning in Sacramento. Two sources familiar with the governor's plans confirmed plans Tuesday to NBC4's I-Team. California, which has 737 condemned inmates and the nation's largest death row, has not executed anyone since 2006. Newsom has been openly advocating for a moratorium on the death penalty and told the LA Times this week that he has asked his legal advisers to research his options as governor. "It doesn't necessarily square with the values... and the hearts and minds of tens of millions of Californians," Newsom said at a Wednesday news conference. Newsom's action is temporary, and a repeal of capital punishment would be up to California voters, who have consistently rejected statewide ballot measures to repeal the death penalty. In 2016, voters narrowly passed a ballot measure to speed up executions in California by fast-tracking appeals, but no condemned inmate was facing imminent execution. Current death row inmates include Scott Peterson, convicted in the death of his wife Laci, and Richard Davis, sentenced for kidnapping and strangling 12-year-old Polly Klaas. The last inmate to be executed in California was Clarence Ray Allen, killed Jan. 17, 2006 at age 76. Allen, sentenced to death on three counts of first-degree murder, was on death row for more than two decades before a lethal injection was administered. California now houses one of every four condemned inmates in the country. Early Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted his disagreement with Newsom. He said "friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!." Newsom "is usurping the express will of California voters and substituting his personal preferences via this hasty and ill-considered moratorium on the death penalty," said Michele Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy (Los Angeles County) District Attorneys. The governor's office sent emails that included the phrase, "...will announce a death penalty moratorium via executive action." An administration source in the governor's office said the order does the following: Puts in place an executive moratorium on the death penalty in the form of a reprieve for all individuals sentenced to death in California. Withdrawals California's lethal injection protocol. Immediately closes the execution chamber at San Quentin. States clearly the directive does not provide for the release of any individual from prison or otherwise alter any current conviction or sentence. Newsom's action is likely to face a court challenge, but aides said he is not changing any convictions or allowing for early release. A governor needs approval from the state Supreme Court to pardon or commute the sentence of anyone twice convicted of a felony. Last year, justices lblocked several clemency requests by former Gov. Jerry Brown that did not involve condemned inmates. Other governors also have enacted moratoriums. Republican Illinois Gov. George Ryan was the first in 2000 and later was followed by Pennsylvania, Washington and Oregon. Illinois ultimately outlawed executions, as did Washington. U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, applauded Newsom's decision. "As a career law enforcement official, I have opposed the death penalty because it is immoral, discriminatory, ineffective, and a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars," she said in a statement. The California Innocence Project, which works to exonerate people on death row in the state, lauded the upcoming announcement. "It has been my dream for many years that we would end the human rights violation known as the death penalty in California," Justin Brooks, Director of the California Innocence Project and a Professor at California Western School of Law, said in a statement. "It is certain that as long as there is the death penalty there is the risk of executing innocent people. I am proud of our new Governor for taking this bold step." The District Attorney's Association also responded to the planned announcement: "The voters of the State of California support the death penalty," Michele Hanisee, President of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys said in a statement. "That is powerfully demonstrated by their approval of Proposition 66 in 2016 to ensure the death penalty is implemented, and their rejection of measures to end the death penalty in 2016 and 2006. Governor Newsom, who supported the failed initiative to end the death penalty in 2006, is usurping the express will of California voters and substituting his personal preferences via this hasty and ill-considered moratorium on the death penalty." Equality California, the nation's largest statewide LGBTQ civil rights organization, also responded to the planned action: "Equality California applauds Governor Newsom for the principled leadership he has demonstrated through this decision," Rick Zbur, executive director of the organization, said in a statement. "Fairness and equality are fundamental California values. But these core values are not reflected in our state's broken death penalty system. We cannot accept a system in which certain communities especially communities of color and the LGBTQ community are disproportionately vulnerable simply because of our race, our sexual orientation or gender identity, how much money we have or where we are from." Reality TV star Kim Kardashian West, who has previously worked with Trump on criminal justice reform, tweeted her support for Newsom's moratorium. NBC4's Jonathan Lloyd contributed to this report. This article was originally published March 11, 2019. In March 1928, the worst civil engineering failure in California history killed more than 450 people when a wall of water carved a path of staggering destruction from a canyon north of Los Angeles to the coast. Click here for historic photos of the St. Francis Dam and the aftermath of its collapse. The St. Francis Dam in San Francisquito Canyon, about 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles, collapsed just before midnight on March 12, 1928. The breach unleashed 12 billion gallons of water that spread across the region, carrying mud and debris through towns and farming communities. The terrifying rampage of water and debris lasted more than five hours and stretched to the Pacific Ocean in Oxnard. Photos: A Look Back at the 1928 St. Francis Dam Disaster The man-made flood marks the second-largest loss of life in a single disaster in California. Only the 1906 San Francisco earthquake accounted for more fatalities. St. Francis dam construction began in 1924 at a location that is upstream from what is now the Six Flags Magic Mountain theme park in Valencia. The dam reached a height of 205 feet and a width of 1,300 feet when the concrete barrier, a key piece of Los Angeles chief water engineer William Mulholland's water system that transformed the city into what it is today, was completed two years later. Water supplied from the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which allowed water to flow south from reservoirs in the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains to the dry southern part of the the state, entered the dam in May 1926, giving Los Angeles a reserve system that could last at least a year. A look back at the St. Francis Dam disaster of March 1928. More than 400 people were killed when water burst through the leaky dam and roared across a widespread part of the area northwest of Los Angeles. Conan Nolan reports for NBC4 in November 1999. It appeared Mulholland had achieved governance over nature -- but there were early signs that was only a fantasy. Residents and workers near the dam, including damkeeper Tony Harnischfeger, noticed problems from the start. Harnischfeger, who lived below the dam with his family in a small cottage, called Mulholland to the site to inspect a muddy leak, according to the Los Angeles Times. Mulholland's chief assistant declared there was no threat from the leak following the inspection. A few hours later at about midnight, the Harnischfegers were among the first to die when a wall of water roared down on the canyon. The water carried debris, boulders, mud, trees and anything else in its path away in an unrelenting wave. Hundreds of houses, bridges, roads and other buildings were destroyed, according to the California Department of Water Resources. The force of the water and debris was so powerful, it twisted a stretch of railroad track between Castaic Junction and Piru. This aerial view shows the broken water barrier of San Francisquito Canyon after the St. Francis Dam burst just before midnight on March 12, 1928. The dam's reservoir of 12.5 billion gallons of water poured down the narrow canyon, carrying hundreds to their deaths. (AP Photo) An estimated 37.5 square of farmland was swept away. The avalache of water flowed into the Santa Clara Riverbed and followed it through several towns, including Filmore, Santa Paula and Castaic. There was nothing resembling an advanced warning system, which might have provided residents downstream from the rush of water with time to evacuate. Instead, telephone operators called communities in the water's path and motorcycle officers raced ahead to communities in jeopardy, the Los Angeles Times reported. The water continued on its deadly path until around 5:30 a.m. a day later. All that remained of the dam was a single column, standing like a tombstone among the devastation. That section, featured in a front-page photo in the March 14, 1928 Los Angeles Times, was later blasted to pieces. The death toll was estimated at more than 450, but experts say that figure could be much higher. Bodies were discovered years after the collapse, others were washed out to sea. The construction of a municipal dam should never be left to the sole judgment of one man, no matter how eminent. Jury Statement The saga marked what was effectively the end of Mulholland's storied career, one that forever left its mark on Los Angeles' water infrastructure. When he testified at the coroner's inquest, Mulholland said, "I envy the dead." The inquest jury did not recommend prosecution, but heaped blame on Mulholland for the disaster. "The construction of a municipal dam should never be left to the sole judgment of one man, no matter how eminent," the jury said. A state commission later determined that the dam was poorly built in a geologically unstable site. A year after the disaster, lawmakers created what would become the Division of Safety of Dams under the California Department of Water Resources. The division's geologists and engineers review and approve dam construction plans and conduct regular inspections. A memorial next to San Francisquito Power Plant No. 2 on San Francisquito Road is dedicated to the victims. California Historical Landmark No. 919 is about a half-mile south of the site of the dam, which can be located by looking for mostly buried strips of concrete. In February 2019, the U.S. Senate approved the creation of a new national monument for the site. Designs for a memorial managed by the U.S. Forest Service in honor of the St. Francis Dam disaster victims are being considered. Designs for a memorial in honor of the St. Francis Dam disaster victims are being considered. Video broadcast Tuesday Feb. 1, 2021 on the NBC4 News. What to Know Sunday, March 17 Several eats will be available on St. Patrick's Day, though some may be available now; check with the eatery Sprinkles Cupcakes and 25 Degrees in Hollywood both have holiday-fun goodies Luck may dance blithely through the middle of March, and a spirited sense of shamrock-sweet celebration, and more than a few festivities boasting tin whistles, fiddles, and Uileann pipes. But our holiday-style hankerings are also of paramount importance come St. Patrick's Day. And while the Guinness, the Jameson, and other libations will be on the pour, and you can count on finding classic corned beef meals across Southern California on March 17, there are some spins on seasonal suppings to keep in mind. Ready for your St. Patrick's dining, Eire-admiring festive folk of SoCal? Dance for... 25 Degrees, at the Hollywood Roosevelt, is all about a burger with some distinctive toppings: corned beef, Dijon aioli, braised cabbage, and a fried egg. Fries and a Breckenridge Nitro Irish Stout are also part of the $28 meal (name: The Mad Irishman). Sprinkles Cupcakes, where a pretty green treat is the thing to nosh upon. It's a Shamrock cupcake, it is a chocolate cake "studded" with mint candy, and the frosting is green mint. Get yours through March 17. Nixo Patio Lounge, at Luxe City Center Hotel, has the Irish nachos, and corned beef sliders, plus a number of other choices, including steak and Guinness pie. Also, for sure, banger and mash will be on the St. Patrick's Day roster. Umami Burger knows that eggs + burgers are quite the rage, but, come St. Patrick's Day, don't you prefer for that egg to be green? Of course you do. There's a green Angel City Pilsner, too, if that's your fancy. The green-egg'd Sunny Side Burger is available from March 15 through 17. Chez Melange: The Redondo Beach eatery is going the five-course dinner route on March 17, with a number of traditional and whimsical dishes, like cider-steamed cockles, soda bread, "corned beef-style" lamb osso busco, and Irish Cream trifle, plus more. It's $55, plus tax and gratuity. Knead Pasta, at Grand Central Market, has the Italian Irishman on the menu, which includes "arugula campanelle, pesto, corned beef hash, and a fried egg." The featured dish is priced at thirteen dollars. The Pie Hole, which is offering St. Patrick's Day pie holes, those newly introduced two-bite pies, with a green apple filling. On top? It's Irish Cream whip and sprinkles that rock a four-leaf clover vibe. Baldoria, in Little Tokyo, is going the super-savory route on March 17 with Chef Duke's Corned Beef Hash Pizza. You can imagine what a tum-filler this might be, so there shall be libations, including Irish Old Fashioneds for $8. PORTSIDE, at TRADE Food Hall in Irvine, will have green mac 'n cheese for St. Patrick's Day, oh yes. In fact, "games, family fun," and more lively haps'll take place at the public market on March 17, during the daytime, stop by. Brack Shop Tavern not only will rock the bagpipes from 1 to 3 p.m. on March 17, but a menu, too, that includes holiday-delish fare. Shepherd's Pie, Irish nachos, and corned beef sliders are three of the goodies available all weekend long (as well as Guinness wings, too). Salt & Straw has brought back the ever-popular Pots of Gold & Rainbows ice cream, which does indeed rock the Lucky Charms. It's a Vault flavor, just back for a bit, so don't wait to swing by your local shop for a scoop. What to Know Michael Phuong Minh Nguyen was arrested by Vietnamese authorities on July 7 while visiting family members. The Vietnamese government has not charged Nguyen, but they are investigating him for violating Article 109 of their Penal Code. Article 109 is often used by Vietnamese officials in arbitrary arrests and carries a maximum punishment of death. Picking up where her predecessor left off, Rep. Katie Porter, D-Irvine, sent a letter signed by the Orange County congressional delegation and multiple other representatives appealing for help from President Donald Trump in freeing an Orange County printing owner jailed in Vietnam. Last summer, former Rep. Mimi Walters, who Porter defeated in November, also appealed for the release of Michael Phuong Minh Nguyen. Signers of the latest letter to Trump, who is poised to hold talks in Vietnam with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, include Reps. Brad Sherman, D-Sherman Oaks, who chairs the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and Nonproliferation, and Ted Yoho, the Republican leader of the subcommittee. "We write to you today to ask that you take additional action to secure Mr. Nguyen's release during your visit to Vietnam later this month," the letter states. "Given your successful track record of releasing U.S. citizens detained overseas in Egypt, Turkey and North Korea, we hope you can capitalize on the opportunity to safely return Mr. Nguyen to his family in the United States." Nguyen was locked up by Vietnamese authorities on July 7 while visiting elderly family members there. Nguyen is being held at the Phan Dang Luu Detention Center in Ho Chi Minh City. "Although he has not been charged with a crime, the Vietnamese government has confirmed that they are investigating Mr. Nguyen for allegedly violating Article 109 of Vietnam's Penal Code, engaging in activity against the government," the letter says. "Article 109 is often used by Vietnamese officials in arbitrary arrests and carries a maximum punishment of death." Nguyen is described in the letter as a "loving husband and father, a small business owner, and an active member of his community and church. As a primary caregiver for his four young daughters, his prolonged absence has imposed extreme hardship and emotional trauma on his family." Nguyen "is a law-abiding American citizen with no criminal record in the United States," the letter reads. "It is unacceptable that Mr. Nguyen, or any American citizen, he detained indefinitely without formal charge and under unsubstantiated circumstances." Porter invited Nguyen's wife, Helen, as her guest during Trump's State of the Union address. Perhaps Lori Loughlin should have asked her daughter if she even wanted to go to college. Olivia Jade Giannulli, the 19-year-old daughter of the Full House star who is facing arrest as part of a college admissions scheme, came under fire just last year for dismissive comments she made showing indifference toward attending the University of Southern California, where she is a freshman. The comments, which Giannulli later apologized for, resurfaced as Loughlin faces charges for participating in a college admissions cheating scam. In a YouTube video answering fan questions, the teen who has her own popular YouTube channel pondered how she would juggle academic life while flying to Fiji, New York, and other locations for work. I dont know how much of school Im gonna attend but Im gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone, and hope that I can try and balance it all, Giannulli said near the five-minute mark. But I do want the experience of like game days, partyingI dont really care about school, as you guys all know. Users immediately took to the comment section to vent their frustration with the current University of Southern California students statements. This video shows how shallow this girl is, one commenter wrote. There are legit kids having to work and sacrifice their entire childhood without an education, and here she is stealing spots in college from people who actually who want an education and benefit their future...so disappointed. Other users called her spoiled and undeserving. Many described their own struggles to get into and succeed in college, Wow, so many people cant even afford college, and youre going to a UC and paying 50K a year for "parties" and "game days, another user wrote, referring to the University of California campuses. Something like that may sound completely normal to you, but for most people, they can't even imagine it. After two days, Giannulli posted an apology video, where she calls comments the comments super ignorant and stupid. It totally came across that Im not grateful for college Im going to a really nice school. And it just kind of made it seem like I dont care, I just want to brush it off, Im just gonna be successful at YouTube and not have to worry about school, Giannulli said in the black-and-white video. Im just really disappointed in myself. On Tuesday, commenters have returned to point out the irony in the video in light of the charges against Loughlin, who is among 50 people charged in a $25 million college entrance exam cheating scheme. Loughlin and husband Mossimo Giannulli allegedly agreed to pay $500,000 in bribes to increase their two daughters chances of being accepted into the University of Southern California. The family allegedly faked photos of one of her daughters to falsely claim that she was on the L.A. Marine clubs rowing team, according to the NBC News report. A spokesperson for Loughlin refused to comment on the charges when contacted by NBC News. Loughlin has already been made the subject of memes on social media, with many based on Loughlins role as Aunt Becky in the ABC sitcom Full House. If you squint, you can see Alcatraz. pic.twitter.com/InxC8mKmCo Archbishop Deshaies (@HouCounterplot) March 12, 2019 Another familiar celebrity face, Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman, paid $15,000 to get one of their daughters unlimited time for her SAT test, NBC News reported. Both Loughlin and Huffman were charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services fraud. People are signing up for medical marijuana in Florida in record numbers about 3,000 new patients a week. More than 180,000 people have registered in the state to take the drug, as of March 2019. The NBC6 Investigators found more patients are taking medical marijuana for chronic pain than anything else. A report, issued by the Physician Certification Pattern Review Panel, shows from January through September of last year - more than 48,000 people were certified to take the drug for pain-related conditions. The second most diagnosed condition in Florida was post-traumatic stress disorder. It took the NBC6 Investigators months to obtain the information. The Florida Department of Health, the agency that runs the program, first said it couldnt release the information. A spokesperson said it was protected information under the law even though more than 20 medical marijuana states across the country release the information. It quite frankly doesnt make any sense, Jorge Silva, a medical attorney and professor at Florida International University, told us at the time. There really is no legitimate reason for the state to withhold this information. The information was withheld until the NBC6 Investigators reached out to State Representative Rene Plasencia, R-Titusville, who wrote a medical marijuana bill related to public records. He told us that the Department of Health has a mandate to collect the data and provide it to state legislators annually. After the conversation with Rep. Plasencia, a spokesperson with the Health Department called their initial denial of our request a misunderstanding. They provided us with a newly released report that shows of the 11,796 people who are certified to take the drug in Miami Dade, 4,176 take it for pain. Michelle Weiner, a pain management doctor, said she isnt surprised by the results. I think its a great alternative for a lot of people, Dr. Weiner said. She believes marijuana is a less addictive alternative to opioids. Its a better choice because the patient isnt going to abuse it to the point that theyre dying or theyre going through life-threatening withdrawal, she said. Broward County leads the state in the number of people taking marijuana for post-traumatic stress disorder. More than 4,500 people are certified to use the drug in the county for PTSD over the past year. Veteran Jose Belen has been taking the drug ever since he returned home from the front lines of Iraq. It allows me to have this conversation without having intrusive thoughts or anger and having scatterbrain, Belen said. As of now, registered patients can take medical marijuana in a variety of ways that include vaping or orally ingesting marijuana oil and using patches to place on their skin. Currently, its against the law to smoke marijuana in Florida but that could soon change. Lawmakers could take final votes on two separate bills by March 15th that would make smoking medical marijuana legal. Plus, access to the drug could soon be expanding. Florida voters could decide if everyone should have access to the plant legally, not just those who have medical marijuana ID cards. Mike Minardi, an attorney with Regulate Florida, said his organization is on track to getting the use of recreational marijuana put on next years ballot. We have to keep pushing on the state, local, and federal level to make sure that they know this isnt just about stereotypical people using cannabis but this is everyday people, Minardi said. What to Know UCF placed third overall in total number of students, behind New York University and Georgia State University. Several of Floridas biggest universities found themselves placed in the top five of a list that students may not exactly end up bragging to their parents about being on. A study from the website Seeking Arrangements, which brags about setting up so called Sugar Daddies and Mommas with students in need of financial help to pay for school, places the University of Central Florida as having the second highest increase in number of students who registered on the site last year. The Orlando based school had nearly 300 students, or sugar babies, register in 2018 alone as part of their nearly 1070 students currently listed on the site that attend classes there. UCF placed third overall in total number of students, behind New York University and Georgia State University. Florida State University and the University of Florida placed fourth and fifth respectively in the number of new students on the site last year, with FSU having the seventh highest number of total students registered. The site, which promotes what they call relationships on your terms between members, released the latest numbers in an effort to showcase the issues of rising tuition prices and student loan debt. The U.S. government said Tuesday it has expanded a program requiring asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases proceed through immigration court. They also reported that 240 migrants seeking asylum have been returned to Mexico under the program. Homeland Security officials said the program is now at the Calexico port, about 120 miles east of the San Ysidro port near San Diego, where the program began in late January. The Trump administration's program marks a major shift in how the U.S. handles the cases of immigrants seeking asylum and fleeing persecution in their homeland. It is being implemented as border arrests soared in February to a 12-year-high and more than half of those stopped arrived as families, many of them asylum seekers who generally surrender instead of trying to elude capture. Asylum-seeking families have typically been released from U.S. custody and allowed to settle with family or friends while their cases wind through immigration courts, which often takes years. Critics, including Trump, have said that amounts to "catch-and-release," which administration officials want to limit with the new program. The program is also meant to deter those who make false claims; the number of asylum cases has skyrocketed and there is now a backlog of nearly 700,000 immigration court cases. A lawsuit challenging the program was filed in California last month, though a federal judge hasn't yet ruled on whether to halt the program while the legal case progresses. According to memos obtained last week by The Associated Press, Mexican officials insist that no more than 20 asylum seekers are to be returned each day from San Diego to Tijuana, Mexico, on Monday through Saturday, underscoring the challenges the U.S. is facing in trying to quickly ramp up the border enforcement priority. U.S. officials must check if the asylum seeker has any felony convictions and notify Mexico at least 12 hours before they are returned. Those who cross illegally must have come as single adults, though the administration is in talks with the Mexican government to include families. What to Know Nancy Salzman pleaded guilty to conspiracy during a hearing in federal court in Brooklyn on Wednesday Salzman was a co-founder of NXIVM, a cult-like group based near Albany Prosecutors say a secret society within the group branded women with a spiritual leader's initials and forced them to have sex with him A case featuring sensational claims that followers of a New York self-help organization were forced to become sex slaves took a new turn on Wednesday with one key defendant pleading guilty and another being hit with child pornography charges. Nancy Salzman, who once ran the group NXIVM, told a judge in federal court in Brooklyn that she teamed up with self-styled spiritual leader Keith Raniere, because she wanted to help people improve their lives. But she admitted that she later lost her way when she joined efforts to spy on perceived enemies seeking to expose the Albany-based group as a cross between a pyramid scheme and a cult. "It has taken some time and soul searching to come to this place," said Salzman, choking back tears. "I accept that some of what I did was not just wrong, but criminal. ... If I could go back and do it all over again, I would. But I can't." About two hours after the guilty plea, prosecutors unsealed an indictment against Raniere accusing him of twice inducing a minor to "engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing one or more visual depictions of such conduct" in 2005. In a statement on Wednesday, defense attorney Marc Agnifilo denied the new allegations and questioned the timing with his client nearing trial on other charges. The new charges "serve only to taint the jury pool," Agnifilo said. "If the charges were legitimate, they would have brought them a year ago." Salzman, a registered nurse who was known as "Prefect" within NXIVM, was involved in stealing identities of the group's critics and hacking into their email accounts from 2003 to 2008, prosecutors said. They also alleged that she conspired to doctor videotapes showing her teaching NXIVM's lessons before the tapes were turned over to plaintiffs in a New Jersey lawsuit against the group. The plea comes about six weeks before Raniere's trial, expected to detail allegations that a master-slave society within NXIVM brainwashed women into having unwanted sex with him and had them branded with his initials in initiation ceremonies. Among those also charged along with Raniere are Salzman's daughter as well as Seagram liquor fortune heiress Clare Bronfman and actress Allison Mack, best known for playing a teenage friend of Superman on the "Smallville" TV series. They have all denied the charges. Salzman apparently won't testify for the government: There was no agreement to cooperate as part of the guilty plea to a conspiracy charge that carries an estimated maximum term of 41 months in prison under sentencing guidelines. Raniere, 58, was arrested in Mexico in 2018 and is being held without bail in Brooklyn on sex-trafficking charges. At the time of his capture, Mack was living with him at a luxury villa in Puerto Vallarta, according to court papers. An NXIVM bio of Salzman posted on the internet says she was a consultant to New York state and major corporations "until she met Keith Raniere and discovered an approach to personal growth that yielded powerful and permanent results." Sentencing for Salzman was set for July 10. What to Know Federal prosecutors in New York have charged a 20-year-old Georgia woman with conspiring to support the Islamic State Kim Anh Vo, 20, was arrested in Hephzibah, Georgia, on charges of conspiring to provide material support to terrorist organization If convicted, Vo faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison; It was not immediately clear if Vo retained an attorney Federal prosecutors in New York announced charges Tuesday against a woman accused of recruiting cyber supporters to an online group that published "kill lists" on behalf of the Islamic State. Kim Anh Vo was arrested in Georgia Tuesday and scheduled to appear in federal court in Augusta, Georgia, on charges of conspiring to provide material support to the designated foreign terrorist organization Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, commonly referred to as ISIS. According to a criminal complaint, Vo joined an online group called the United Cyber Caliphate that pledged allegiance to Islamic State Group and spread propaganda on its behalf and committed to carrying out online attacks and cyber intrusions against Americans. The criminal complaint says Vo recruited members to the group to assist in hacking efforts and published "kill lists," which list the names of individuals for example, soldiers in the United States Armed Forces and members of the State Department and instruct their followers to kill the listed individuals. Additionally, according to the complaint, on or about April 21, 2016, the United Cyber Caliphate group posted online the names, addresses and other identifying information of about 3,602 people in the New York City area, including residents. The list was posted along with the message: List of most important citizens of #New York and #Brooklyn and some other cities MORE THAN #3000 NAME We Want them #Dead. Prosecutors also accuse Vo of recruiting others to join the groups hacking efforts between April 2016 and May 2017, including a minor in Norway who was allegedly recruited to create online content in support of ISIS, including a video threatening a non-profit organization based in New York, New York, which was formed to find and combat the online promotion of extremist ideologies. Vo is charged with one count of conspiring to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, according to prosecutors. It was not immediately clear whether Vo had an attorney. What to Know Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort faces his second sentencing hearing in his many weeks More than 2,200 people exposed to the mumps virus in at least two immigration detention facilities have been quarantined, authorities said Olivia Jade Giannulli, the daughter of Lori Loughlin, came under fire just for comments she made showing indifference toward college Get the top headlines of the day in your morning briefing from NBC 4 New York, Monday through Friday. Sign up for our newsletter here. Ex-Trump Campaign Head Paul Manafort Faces 2nd Sentencing Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort faces his second sentencing hearing in his many weeks, with a judge expected to tack on additional prison time beyond the roughly four-year punishment he has already received. Manafort faces up to 10 additional years in prison when he is sentenced in Washington in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. A judge in Virginia last week sentenced Manafort to 47 months in prison, departing far below sentencing guidelines that allowed for more than two decades in prison and prompting national debate about disparities in how rich and poor defendants are treated by the criminal justice system. As U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington decides whether the sentences should run consecutively or at the same time, she is likely to take into account allegations by prosecutors that Manafort tampered with witnesses after he was charged and that he lied to investigators even after he pleaded guilty and pledged to cooperate. The hearing may offer a window into tantalizing allegations that aren't part of the criminal cases against him but have nonetheless surfaced in recent court filings. Cardinal George Pell Sent to Prison for Abusing 2 Boys in Australia The most senior Catholic convicted of child sex abuse was sentenced to six years in prison for molesting two choirboys in an Australian cathedral in a crime the judge said showed "staggering arrogance." Cardinal George Pell must serve a minimum of 3 years and 8 months before he is eligible for parole, according to the judge's order. The five convictions against Pell carried a maximum possible sentence of 10 years each. "In my view, your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance," Victoria state County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd said in handing down the sentence. Pope Francis' former finance minister was convicted by a unanimous jury verdict in December of orally raping a 13-year-old choirboy and indecently dealing with the boy and the boy's 13-year-old friend in the late 1990s, months after Pell became archbishop of Melbourne. A court order had suppressed media reporting the news until last month. The 77-year-old denies the allegations and will appeal his convictions in the Victoria Court of Appeal on June 5. It was not immediately clear if he will also appeal the sentence. Boeing Jet Grounded in Much of World After Africa Crash Much of the world, including the entire European Union, grounded the Boeing jetliner involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash or banned it from their airspace, leaving the United States as one of the few remaining operators of the plane involved in two deadly accidents in just five months. The European Aviation Safety Agency took steps to keep the Boeing 737 Max 8 out of the air, joining Asian and Middle Eastern governments and carriers that also gave in to safety concerns in the aftermath of Sunday's crash, which killed all 157 people on board. Referring to the Lion Air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 people last year, European regulators said "similar causes may have contributed to both events." British regulators indicated possible trouble with a reportedly damaged flight data recorder, saying they based their decision on the fact that they did not have "sufficient information" from the recorder. 2,200 Quarantined Over Mumps Outbreak at Immigration Centers More than 2,200 people exposed to the mumps virus in at least two immigration detention facilities have been quarantined, authorities said. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say the 25-day quarantine began March 7 at facilities in Pine Prairie, Louisiana, and Aurora, Colorado. The outbreak has renewed long-held concerns over access to medical care at immigration facilities, especially at a time when more immigrants who are crossing the border are being held and for longer periods of time. There are nearly 47,000 immigrants currently detained around the country, according to an ICE spokesman. ICE says 236 detainees have had confirmed or probable cases of mumps in 51 facilities in the past year. There were no reported cases between 2016 and 2018 at any ICE facilities. Mumps is extremely rare, and infections have dropped by 99 percent since vaccinations began in the late 1960s. It can spread quickly through coughing, sneezing or even talking, and symptoms include swollen glands, fever, headache, muscle aches and pain while chewing or swallowing. 'Dont Care About School': Lori Loughlins Kid Dismissed College Life Perhaps Lori Loughlin should have asked her daughter if she even wanted to go to college. Olivia Jade Giannulli, the 19-year-old daughter of the Full House star who is facing arrest as part of a college admissions scheme, came under fire just last year for dismissive comments she made showing indifference toward attending the University of Southern California, where she is a freshman. The comments, which Giannulli later apologized for, resurfaced as Loughlin faces charges for participating in a college admissions cheating scam. In a YouTube video answering fan questions, the teen who has her own popular YouTube channel pondered how she would juggle academic life while flying to Fiji, New York, and other locations for work. I dont know how much of school Im gonna attend but Im gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone, and hope that I can try and balance it all, Giannulli said near the five-minute mark. But I do want the experience of like game days, partyingI dont really care about school, as you guys all know. Users immediately took to the comment section to vent their frustration with the current University of Southern California students statements. Judge Allows Cameras in Jussie Smollett Courtroom A judge ruled cameras will be allowed inside the courtroom during a hearing for "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett. A spokeswoman for his attorneys said Smollett wanted to "show up and show respect to the court," though his appearance wasn't required. "He wants to hold his head up high, show confidence in his innocence," Anne Kavanagh said, adding that he plans to "go the extra mile" to prove his innocence. "He's not hiding from anything," she said. "He will do everything he needs to do." Smollett's defense attorneys did not argue with the decision to allow cameras in court, saying there has been a lot of "misinformation" in the case and they welcome cameras during the hearing and all future proceedings. Prosecutors also did not object to the decision. A Cook County grand jury indicted Smollett on 16 felony counts in connection with his reporting of the alleged attack he claimed to have suffered in Chicago's Streeterville neighborhood on Jan. 29. Police alleged Smollett staged the attack, hiring two brothers who worked on "Empire" to execute it, because he was unhappy with his salary. The lawyer for the brothers, Obabinjo Osundairo and Abimbola Osundairo, said the pair has evidence backing their claim that he orchestrated the assault. The most senior Catholic convicted of child sex abuse was sentenced Wednesday to six years in prison for molesting two choirboys in an Australian cathedral in a crime the judge said showed "staggering arrogance." Cardinal George Pell must serve a minimum of 3 years and 8 months before he is eligible for parole, according to the judge's order. The five convictions against Pell carried a maximum possible sentence of 10 years each. "In my view, your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance," Victoria state County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd said in handing down the sentence. Pope Francis' former finance minister was convicted by a unanimous jury verdict in December of orally raping a 13-year-old choirboy and indecently dealing with the boy and the boy's 13-year-old friend in the late 1990s, months after Pell became archbishop of Melbourne. A court order had suppressed media reporting the news until last month. The 77-year-old denies the allegations and will appeal his convictions in the Victoria Court of Appeal on June 5. It was not immediately clear if he will also appeal the sentence. For the first time in Pell's many court appearances since he returned to Australia from the Vatican to face abuse charges, Pell wore an open-necked shirt without a cleric's collar. He was also not wearing a cardinal's gold ring, which might reflect strict rules on jewelry in the state penal system. In explaining his sentencing decision, the judge said Pell had led an "otherwise blameless life." Kidd said he believed given Pell's age and lack of any other criminal record, the cardinal posed no risk of re-offending. The judge also took pains to note that he was sentencing Pell for the offenses on which the cardinal had been convicted and not for the sins of the Catholic Church. "As I directed the jury who convicted you in this trial, you are not to be made a scapegoat for any failings or perceived failings of the Catholic Church," Kidd said. But the judge also said that Pell had abused his position of power and had shown no remorse for his crimes. Kidd described the assaults as egregious, degrading and humiliating to the victims. Pell showed no emotion during the hourlong hearing and barely moved throughout. He stood silently with his hands behind his back as the judge read his sentence. Pell signed documents that registered him for life as a serious sexual offender before he was led from the dock by four prison officers. In a statement, one of Pell's victims called the judge's sentence "meticulous and considered." "It is hard for me to allow myself to feel the gravity of this moment, the moment when the sentence is handed down, the moment when justice is done," the man said in a statement read outside court by one of his lawyers, Vivian Waller. "It is hard for me, for the time being, to take comfort in this outcome. I appreciate that the court has acknowledged what was inflicted upon me as a child. However, there is no rest for me. Everything is overshadowed by the forthcoming appeal." The father of one of Pell's victims who died of a heroin overdose in 2014 at the age of 31 paid tribute to his son's childhood friend for speaking out. "I commend the young fellow who has come forward," the father said. "He kept it in for a long time and that would've been hell for him. Absolute hell." The father said he was "really appreciative and thankful that he did come forward." "I want to give him a hug. He was a fabulous little kid. He's a fabulous man now," the father said. The father also described the sentence as "a disappointment." The father is considering suing Pell and the church over the abuse. Australian law prohibits the publication of sex crime victims' identities, so the father also cannot be identified. Abuse victims' groups also expressed disappointment that the punishment was not harsher. The sentence "makes a mockery of the concept of true accountability and is not a sentence commensurate with the crimes committed and the harm reaped," Blue Knot Foundation president Cathy Kezelman said in a statement. SNAP, a U.S. support group for victim of clergy abuse, described the sentences as "comparatively light." "We hope that the sentence imposed on Cardinal George Pell will provide some measure of healing to the living survivor of his abuse and comfort and closure for the family of Pell's non-surviving victim," SNAP said in a statement. The judge said Pell's age was a significant factor in determining his sentence. Pell suffers from hypertension that is exacerbated by stress and has a dual-chamber pacemaker, the judge said. Pell used a cane to leave the court, after having both knees surgically replaced in December. Pell's sentencing comes on the sixth anniversary of Francis' election as pope. Pell was in the conclave that elected him and remains eligible for any potential future conclave until age 80 or unless he is removed. Asked by a reporter outside court after the sentencing whether the case against Pell amounted to a witch hunt, his lawyer Robert Richter gave a rueful smile. "No comment you be the judge," Richter replied. After centuries of impunity, cardinals from Australia to Chile and points in between are facing justice in both the Vatican and government courts for their own sexual misdeeds or for having shielded abusers under their watch. Last week, France's senior Catholic cleric, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, was convicted of failing to report a known pedophile priest to police. Barbarin was given a six-month suspended sentence. Pope Francis last month defrocked the onetime leader of the American church after an internal investigation determined Cardinal Theodore McCarrick sexually molested children and adult men. It was the first time a cardinal had been defrocked over the child abuse scandal. The surviving victim made a statement against Pell in 2015 a year after the other victim's death to a police task force set up to investigate allegations that arose from a state parliamentary inquiry into handling of child abuse by religious and other nongovernment organizations. The task force also investigates allegations made to a similar national inquiry, called the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Pell gave evidence by video link from Rome to the royal commission, the nations' highest level of inquiry, in 2016 about his time as a church leader in Melbourne and in his hometown of Ballarat. The four-year royal commission found in its 2017 report that the Melbourne Archdiocese had ignored or covered up allegations of child abuse by seven priests in a bid to protect the church's reputation and avoid scandal. The royal commission was critical of Pell's predecessor in Melbourne, Archbishop Frank Little, who died in 2008. It made no findings against Pell, saying in a redacted report that it would not publish information that could "prejudice current or future criminal or civil proceedings." Australian police interviewed Pell about the survivor's allegations in a Rome hotel in 2016. Pell described the allegations at the time as "vile and disgusting conduct" that went against everything he believed in. Pell voluntarily returned to Australia in 2017 to face an array of child abuse charges, most of which have since been dropped. The full details of those allegations were suppressed by court orders. Pell was once the highest-ranking Catholic in Australia's second-largest city, where he is now a prisoner held in protective security. Pedophiles such as Pell are typically separated from the main prison populations in Australia. Pell was 55 years old and had recently established a compensation plan for Melbourne's victims of clergy abuse when he abused the two boys at St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1996. The survivor testified that Pell had walked in on the boys swigging altar wine in a back room after a Sunday Mass. The judge rejected Richter's submission that no person thinking rationally would molest two 13-year-old boys in a cathedral sacristy after a Mass with the doors open. "To offend in such a risky and brazen manner, I infer that, for whatever reason, you were in fact prepared to take on such risks. I conclude that your decision to offend was a reasoned, albeit perverted one," Kidd said. More than a month later, Pell abused the survivor again, squeezing the boy's genitals as they passed in a cathedral corridor after a Mass. The judge said the assault was committed with "a degree of physical aggression and venom." What to Know Authorities are warning residents in Delaware County about a new phone scam that affecting people in the area. The sheriff's office also said that they will never contact anyone by telephone or ask them for personal information. Anyone targeted by the scam is being asked to call the sheriff's office at 610-891-4296 Authorities are warning residents in Delaware County about a new phone scam affecting people in the area. The Delaware County Sheriff's Office said it has received several reports about fraudulent phone calls from people claiming to be employees and deputies at the sheriff's office. "The scammers tell the target there is a warrant for their arrest, or they are subject to arrest for failing to appear for jury duty," the Delaware County Sheriff's Office said. However, the sheriff's office clarified that they do not contact by telephone to ask people for personal information or payment to avoid jury duty and arrest. Victims of the phone scam say the scammers are calling from unknown phone numbers and requesting payment or personal information, such as social security and bank information. Police are encouraging anyone who receives one of these phone calls to hang up immediately without giving away any valuable information and call the sheriff's office at 610-891-4296. What to Know Delaware lawmakers are taking initial legislative action on bills calling for early voting and same-day registration. One bill would allow registered voters to cast ballots at least 10 days before an election. Another bill up for discussion allows for same-day registration for primary, special and general elections. State lawmakers are taking initial legislative action on bills calling for early voting and same-day registration in Delaware. One bill to be considered by a House committee Wednesday establishes in-person early voting in Delaware, starting on Jan. 1, 2022. The bill would allow registered voters to cast ballots at least 10 days before an election at locations determined by the state election commissioner. Another bill up for discussion allows for same-day registration for primary, special and general elections. The committee also will take up a bill passed by the Senate last week that would have Delaware join other states wanting to pool their Electoral College votes for the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. Philadelphia residents could elect a female sheriff for the first time in city history, thanks to two Democratic women vying for the job. Retired police officer Rochelle Bilal and former deputy sheriff detective Malika Rahman are taking on embattled Philadelphia Sheriff Jewell Williams, who was accused by at least three women of sexual harassment. Also running for sheriff is the Rev. Larry King Sr., who describes himself as a "preacher, pastor and public servant." The four Democrats face off May 21 in the Democratic primary for the office charged with protecting Philadelphia courts, ferrying incarcerated to courts and jail and overseeing property forclosures. There is no Republican challenger. A former state representative, Williams tenure as sheriff has been mired with controversy almost from the beginning. Rumors of sexual misconduct began to surface in 2013, just one year after he took office. In January 2019, the Philadelphia Sheriffs Office settled with one of the victims for $127,500. Williams was not listed as a defendant in the complaint and has maintained his innocence. A lawyer for Williams said in a statement that the pay-out did "not mean the allegations are true." But in 2017, Mayor Jim Kenney said Williams should resign from office. Instead, hes running for a third term and the lawsuit could play a part in the upcoming May 21 election with two women running against Williams. "That's what elections are for - to allow voters to judge not just the accomplishments and the track record and the vision of the candidate, but that person's character," David Thornburgh, CEO and president of Philadelphia's Committee of 70, said. Bilal, 27-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department, was the first woman appointed Director of Public Safety in the Colwyn borough of Delaware County, where she managed the police department and the volunteer fire department. She is also secretary of the Philadelphia NAACP chapter and president of the Guardian Civic League, a local offshoot of the National Black Police Association. According to her campaign website, Bilal "believes that elected officials are responsible to each and every citizen and she is deliberate in making sure that everyone has a voice at the table." Rahman, meanwhile, started her career in law enforcement 10 years ago as a correctional officer in the Philadelphia Prison system. During an interview with NBC10, Rahman said that one of her biggest priorities is creating transparency and accountability within the Philadelphia Sheriffs Office. Malika Rahman has spent 10 years in law enforcement, most recently as a detective at the Philadelphia Sheriffs Office, and now shes eyeing the department top job. With the race shaping up to be one of the most historic in the city, Rahman discusses running on behalf of the people and being one of two women of color vying for... "Before you can go outside and sweep the front porch, you have to make sure the inside is clean," she said. Her inspiration to run for sheriff was not necessarily driven by the wave of women who ran for office last year, but "it did help," she said. It was more of a need and necessity for the people, Rahman said. As women, [Bilal and I] are both concerned for the need for change- providing adequate services the public can feel comfortable with and trust in. Bilal echoed a similar intention during her interview with NBC10. Rochelle Bilal is part of whats shaping up to be one of the most historic elections in Philadelphia as one of two women have announced their candidacy for the top job at the Philadelphia Sheriff's Office. Bilal, who spent 27 years in the Philadelphia Police Department and 15 years as the secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, says she wants to be sheriff so she can help reform the agency and transform it into one that represents the people of the city. "I want to be the change agent," she said. "I want to see [the sheriffs office] represent the people of this city." One way of doing that, Bilal said, would be to help keep residents in their homes rather than foreclosing on houses for sheriffs sale. Last year in Philadelphia, more than 18,000 people lost their homes. Like Bilal and Rahman, King is running on a platform of restoring trust and rebuilding confidence. He is a retired Army veteran and former Philadelphia prisons correctional officer turned internal affairs investigator. CORRECTION (March 13, 2019, 2:30 p.m.): This story has been updated to reflect that Bilal or Rahman would be the first woman elected sheriff in Philadelphia. Barbara Deeley served as acting sheriff for a year in 2011. What to Know A 350-mile natural gas liquids pipeline project across southern Pennsylvania has been blamed for polluting waterways in dozens of places. Energy Transfer LP's projects have drawn more than $13 million in fines in Pennsylvania Energy Transfer reported $54.1 billion in revenue in 2018, with net income of $3.4 billion. Pennsylvania's attorney general said Tuesday that his office has opened an investigation into construction on a 350-mile natural gas liquids pipeline project across southern Pennsylvania that has been blamed for polluting waterways in dozens of places and causing sinkholes near homes. Attorney General Josh Shapiro took the investigation on a referral from Delaware County's district attorney, which said it will work with the state to investigate the Mariner East 1, 2 and 2x pipeline projects. Shapiro's office received the referral around March 1. A spokesman declined to say more about the investigation, including what prompted it. "We will leave no stone unturned in this case," Shapiro said in a brief statement. The Mariner East pipelines run alongside each other and are owned by Texas-based Energy Transfer LP, a multibillion-dollar firm that owns sprawling interests in oil and gas pipelines and storage and processing facilities. The company's projects have drawn more than $13 million in fines in Pennsylvania primarily for polluting waterways from spills of drilling fluid and construction methods not approved by state regulators and several temporary shutdown orders by state agencies. Sinkholes on the lawns of homes in Chester County have highlighted the lack of state authority to regulate the routes and safety features of intrastate pipelines, and prompted the county's district attorney to start a criminal investigation. The pipelines are the subject of various lawsuits and challenges in front of state regulators. At one point, the state Department of Environmental Protection accused an Energy Transfer subsidiary of "egregious and willful violations" of state law. Last month, Gov. Tom Wolf criticized the company, saying "there has been a failure by Energy Transfer and its subsidiaries to respect our laws and our communities." Energy Transfer said Tuesday there is no legitimate basis for a criminal investigation. It said it is confident that it hasn't violated any criminal laws and intends to defend itself. It also said it has worked closely with state officials and inspectors, and hopes to speak to prosecutors' offices to bring the matter "to an appropriate resolution." "The safety of all those who live and work along our pipeline is our first priority, and this project was planned and implemented based on that fact," the company said. Energy Transfer reported $54.1 billion in revenue in 2018, with net income of $3.4 billion. Its $2.5 billion, 20-inch Mariner East 2 pipeline began operating in late December, ferrying propane, butane and ethane from Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling fields in southwestern Pennsylvania to its export terminal near Philadelphia, the Marcus Hook Industrial Complex. The 16-inch Mariner East 2X is almost complete. A January shutdown of Mariner East 1 a nearly 90-year-old oil pipeline recently overhauled to carry natural gas liquids is still in effect after another sinkhole opened alongside it in Chester County. A February order halting construction permits for Energy Transfer pipelines also is still in effect after state officials accused the company of failing for months to fix erosions problems blamed for an explosion on a methane pipeline that destroyed a home in western Pennsylvania. While Energy Transfer has denied criminal wrongdoing, the chief executive and chairman of its general partner, Kelcy Warren, told analysts in a conference call last month that the company had made mistakes in Pennsylvania. "We're going to take our medicine and fix those mistakes and complete good projects from this point forward, not to insinuate that everything we've done has been bad," Warren said. "It's just we've made some mistakes that we're not proud of. So you'll see that improve, and when we don't make those mistakes again that our costs are going to improve and the predictability of those costs are likewise going to improve." Sao Paulo state authorities say two gunmen opened fire inside a school in southern Brazil, killing at least six students and two teachers before taking their own lives. The shooting at the state school Professor Raul Brasil in Suzano, a suburb about 20 miles east of the city of Sao Paulo, happened around 8:30 a.m. ET Wednesday morning during a break between classes. Authorities said the two youths armed with guns and wearing hoods entered the school and began shooting at students. They then killed themselves. Sao Paulo Governor Joao Doria said 10 people have died, including the shooters, and at least 16 others were wounded. TV Globol reported that a police spokesman said officers were responding to reports of gunfire near the school when they heard screams coming from the school building and ran inside. It was not clear if the two incidents were related, officials said. Police said the shooters were former students at the school, TV Globo reported. Police identified them Wednesday afternoon as 17-year-old Guilherme Taucci Monteiro and 25-year-old Luiz Henrique de Castro. Sao Paulo's secretary of public safety, Joap Camilo Pires de Campos said Monteiro left the school last year due to "problems," but did not provide additional information. It was not known if Monteiro was expelled or withrew from the school. The school has about 1,000 students between the ages of 11 and 18 enrolled and 105 employees, according to 2017 census data. Latin America's largest nation has the largest number of annual homicides in the world, but school shootings are rare. Brazil's new President Jair Bolsonaro recently announced that gun ownership controls would be loosened. What to Know Ex-NJ priest and teacher who was credibly accused of sexual abuse was found shot to death in his Nevada home Saturday, authorities said Clark County Coroners Office confirmed John M. Capparelli, 70, was found dead when Henderson Police Department conducted a welfare check He is among the clergy listed by Archdiocese of Newark who were credibly accused of sexual abuse of minors in the Archdiocese of Newark." A former New Jersey priest and teacher who was credibly accused of sexual abuse was found shot to death in his Nevada home over the weekend, authorities said. The Clark County Coroners Office confirmed that John M. Capparelli, 70, was found dead Saturday when the Henderson Police Department conducted a welfare check in a residence around 9:30 a.m. A preliminary investigation indicates the victim died in suspicious circumstances, and the incident is being investigated as a homicide, police say. They added that a suspect has not been identified at this time and police are following up on developed leads. Capparelli is among the clergy listed by the Archdiocese of Newark who were credibly accused of sexual abuse of minors in the Archdiocese of Newark. Last month, the five dioceses in New Jersey released names of priests who were credibly accused of sexually abusing minors in incidents that dated back to 1940. The Archdiocese of Newarks list reports Capparelli as having had multiple victims. He was ordained in 1980 and was assigned to churches around New Jersey, including: Our Lady of Fatima, North Bergen; Oratory Prep, Summit; Holy Trinity, Westfield; and St. Theresa, Kenilworth. He was also a temporary chaplain at Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, according to the archdiocese. Capparelli was permanently removed from ministry and laicized, according to the archdiocese. According to NJ.com, Capparelli was accused of groping teenage boys in the 1970s and 1980s when he was active in ministry as a Roman Catholic priest. After he stopped working as a priest, Capparelli began working as a math teacher in Newark public schools in 1993 until allegations surfaced against him in 2011, NJ.com reported. The state ultimately revoked his teaching certificates. In a statement Tuesday, the Archdiocese of Newark said: The Archdiocese of Newark has no information concerning Mr. Capparellis death or any investigation related to his death. Much of the world, including the entire European Union, grounded the Boeing jetliner involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash or banned it from their airspace, leaving the United States on Tuesday as one of the few remaining operators of the plane involved in two deadly accidents in just five months. The Federal Aviation Administration's acting head Daniel K. Elwell said in a statement Tuesday that it is still reviewing "extensively" data and safety performance reports. "Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action," the statement said. He echoed the agency's previous statements that if issues are found in its investigation the "FAA will take immediate and appropriate action." The European Aviation Safety Agency took steps to keep the Boeing 737 Max 8 out of the air, joining Asian and Middle Eastern governments and carriers that also gave in to safety concerns in the aftermath of Sunday's crash, which killed all 157 people on board. Referring to the Lion Air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 people last year, European regulators said that "similar causes may have contributed to both events." British regulators indicated possible trouble with a reportedly damaged flight data recorder, saying they based their decision on the fact that they did not "sufficient information" from the recorder. Turkish Airlines, Oman Air, Norwegian Air Shuttle and South Korean airline Eastar Jet were among the latest carriers to halt use of the Boeing model. Ireland, the Netherlands, Malaysia, Australia and Singapore suspended all flights into or out of their cities. A Turkish Airlines official said two Britain-bound planes returned to Istanbul after British airspace was closed to the aircraft. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. U.S.-based Boeing has said it has no reason to pull the popular aircraft from the skies. It does not intend to issue new recommendations about the aircraft to customers. Boeing's CEO Dennis Muilenburg also spoke with President Donald Trump and reiterated that the 737 Max 8 is safe, the company said. Its technical team, meanwhile, joined American, Israeli, Kenyan and other aviation experts in the investigation led by Ethiopian authorities. The Federal Aviation Administration said it expects Boeing will soon complete improvements to an automated anti-stall system suspected of contributing to the deadly crash of another new Boeing 737 Max 8 in October. Some U.S. airlines expressed support for the Boeing model, and American Airlines and Southwest continued flying them. A vice president for American, the world's biggest carrier, which has 24 Max 8s, said they had "full confidence in the aircraft." Safety experts cautioned against drawing too many comparisons too soon with the Lion Air crash in October. But others in the U.S. began pressing for action. Former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says the U.S. should ground the Boeing 737 Max aircraft, just as his agency halted flights of another Boeing plane six years ago because of safety concerns. LaHood was transportation secretary in 2013 when the department grounded the Boeing 787 because of overheating lithium-ion battery packs. The planes were idled for less than a month, until Boeing crafted new fire-resistant compartments around the batteries. LaHood says current Secretary Elaine Chao should do the same thing, even if it means overruling the FAA, which has taken no action despite dozens of other countries banning the plane from their skies. He says that Chao has the authority to suspend the 737 Max and require inspections by both FAA and Boeing personnel. The Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which represents more than 26,000 flight attendants at American Airlines, called on CEO Doug Parker to "strongly consider grounding these planes until an investigation can be performed." Consumer Reports called on airlines and the FAA to ground the jets until a thorough safety investigation is complete. Even President Donald Trump weighed in, tweeting that additional "complexity creates danger" in modern aircraft and hinders pilots from making "split second decisions" to ensure passengers' safety. He did not specifically mention the crashes but said, "I don't know about you, but I don't want Albert Einstein to be my pilot." The Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed six minutes after taking off for Nairobi, killing people from 35 countries. A pilot who saw the crash site minutes after the disaster told the AP that the plane appeared to have "slid directly into the ground." Capt. Solomon Gizaw was among the first people dispatched to find the plane. The wreckage was discovered by Ethiopia's air force. "There was nothing to see," he said. "It looked like the earth had swallowed the aircraft. ... We were surprised!" He said it explained why rescue officials quickly sent bulldozers to begin digging out large pieces of debris. Ethiopian Airlines, widely seen as Africa's best-managed airline, grounded its remaining four 737 Max 8s until further notice. The carrier had been using five of the planes and was awaiting delivery of 25 more. As night fell, the airline offered no new updates on the investigation. An airline spokesman said victims' remains should be identified in about five days. Some insights into the disaster and its cause could take months, aviation experts said. "The conclusions that will come out of its probe will be beneficial to the rest of the world," Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said Tuesday at a news conference with visiting French President Emmanuel Macron. "These types of accidents break everyone's heart. I hope we will learn from this crash." On Tuesday a group of officials from China, which also grounded planes, paused in their work at the scene to reflect with an offering of incense, fruit, bread rolls and a plastic container of the Ethiopian flatbread injera. As the global team searched for answers, a woman stood near the crash site, wailing. Kebebew Legess said she was the mother of a young Ethiopian Airlines crew member among the dead. "She would have been 25 years old but God would not allow her," she wept. "My daughter, my little one." The British ambassador to Ethiopia, Alastair McPhail, visited the scene where at least nine of his countrymen died. "We owe it to the families to understand what happened," he said. Meseret reported from Addis Ababa. Associated Press writers David Koenig in Houston and Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report. What to Know Verizon had a major network issue Tuesday that left many East Coast users unable to send or receive text messages Down Detector's outage map showed virtually the entire East Coast a blazing red, though it wasn't clear exactly how many were affected Outage reports vastly ebbed after 10 a.m., and Verizon confirmed the problem had been resolved by 11 a.m. A widespread Verizon wireless network issue left "a ton" of East Coast users unable to send or receive text messages early Tuesday, the company confirmed via Twitter as it responded to a series of frustrated messages. It wasn't immediately clear when the outage started or exactly how many customers were affected. Down Detector's outage map showed virtually the entire East Coast a blazing red. While Verizon did not confirm the scope of the outage beyond the Eastern seaboard, parts of the midwest, including Illinois, Ohio and Indiana, also reported service outages. It appeared to peak around 4,350 outages reported at 9 a.m. -- yet many customers still reported issues. Verizon Wireless' verified customer service Twitter account appeared to be responding to a half-dozen tweets a minute for at least two hours. One of the responses: "Verizon is currently experiencing a wireless network issue in many eastern areas. Our technicians are aware of this issue and are working to resolve it quickly. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes. *NXS" Another: "We know how important it is to have working service, and we're on it! We have confirmed there is a texting outage on the east coast. Our technicians are fully aware we have a ton of customers that are being effected (sic), and we're working non-stop to get this matter resolved. *IXR" At one point, Verizon was suggesting people fully power down their phones and turn them back on a few seconds later. It wasn't clear if that fix was working, but a handful of users who did have their issues resolved were sprinkled in with the complaining tweets. Outage reports vastly ebbed after 10 a.m., and Verizon confirmed the problem had been resolved by 11 a.m. It wasn't clear what caused the network issue. As Democratic lawmakers try to turn the page after freshman legislator Ilhan Omar's controversial tweets ignited an embarrassing, intra-party fight, President Trump is trying to prolong and weaponize the issue for his 2020 campaign, asserting during a private weekend fundraiser that Democrats "hate" Jews. While Trump publicly muses about winning over Jewish voters for his re-election, his motivations are more complicated and expansive. The president's rhetorical escalation also is designed to unsettle the Democratic primary debate, exploit an issue that can energize his supporters and move past his own history of toying in anti-Semitic motifs. Trump on Tuesday promoted comments by former model and 2016 campaign staffer Elizabeth Pipko, who said on Fox & Friends that "Jewish people are leaving the Democratic Party." Pipko, who serves as spokesperson for the group "Jexodus," which bills itself as speaking for "Jewish Millennials tired of living in bondage to leftist politics," saw her comments amplified by Trump on Twitter. "There is anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party," she continued. "They don't care about Israel or the Jewish people." Her comments mirrored Trump's charge on Friday that Democrats had become an "anti-Israel" and "anti-Jewish" party, responding to the House voted a day before to disapprove of all prejudice in response to Omar's invocation of "dual-loyalty" charges against American supporters of Israel earlier this month. Speaking later that evening, Trump went even further in an appearance before Republican National Committee donors, charging that Democrats "hate" Jewish people, according to a person who heard the remarks but spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the president's comments at a private event. Omar had sparked a political firestorm that derailed the Democrats' focus on investigations of the Trump administration, including a public back-and-forth over how, or even if, her party should condemn her comments. The ultimate resolution, which passed the House overwhelmingly, didn't call out Omar by name. As a small percentage of the nation, American Jews are not a particularly significant voting bloc, nor is Israel their decisive issue of concern. And both parties acknowledge the controversy is unlikely to alter dramatically the electoral votes of the American Jewish community, which has skewed decisively toward Democrats for more than a generation. Even a small shift, though, can be significant. "We're slicing the salami very thin, and an incremental shift in traditional Democratic blocs to the other side can have a profound impact," said Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He said his group plans to make "the largest investment that we've ever had in the 2020 race in terms of outreach, advocacy and independent expenditures on behalf of the president." Stoking the fight also gives Trump an opportunity to deflect criticism of his own rhetoric, invigorate evangelical Christians for whom the Israel issue is a powerful motivator and paint Democrats into a radical corner. It also plays into Trump's attempt to cast Democrats as radicals ahead of the 2020 campaign, said conservative commentator Seth Mandel, executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine. He noted that Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders pushed back against efforts to condemn Omar's comments. "It makes it very easy to say they're just adopting whatever the socialist says." White House press secretary Sarah Sanders kept the controversy alive on Monday by criticizing Democrats for failing to explicitly repudiate Omar. "It's something that should be called by name," she said. "It shouldn't be put in a watered-down resolution." Sanders pointed to Republican condemnation of Rep. Steve King earlier this year, including stripping the Iowa Republican of his committee memberships, after he made remarks defending white supremacy. But King had long espoused racially charged ideas, and the GOP only took action after it lost its majority in the chamber. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, warned that Trump's politicization of the issue "threatens the bipartisan support for Israel." "The problem is that the president sees it somehow as a way to make some kind of political hay and a wedge," she said. "And he keeps addressing it that way. And I just think it's a mistake, as someone that's a strong supporter of Israel, that he keeps doing it." Hallie Soifer, the executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said her group welcomes Trump's focus on the issue of anti-Semitism. "He himself has emboldened anti-Semites in our country by both repeating anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories," she said. "He has no credibility with Jewish voters." Trump has been among the loudest critics of Omar, including last month when he called on her to resign from the House, or at least resign her post on the Foreign Affairs Committee over her suggestion that Jewish money drove support for Israel. But Trump himself has repeatedly deployed some of the same tropes that sent fire toward Omar. He was slow to condemn white supremacists who marched violently in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. In 2016 he circulated an image of a six-pointed star alongside a photo of Hillary Clinton, a pile of money and the words "most corrupt candidate ever." And he told a group of Republican Jewish donors he didn't expect to earn their support because he wouldn't take their money. "You want to control your politicians, that's fine," he told the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2015. Ultimately, the group and many of its donors backed Trump. Brooks said Trump's comments were meant obviously in jest and any suggestion otherwise is "unfair and ridiculous." "Jexodus" is hardly the first time Trump has tried to peel away minority voters from the Democratic coalition. He has pushed the "WalkAway" and "Blexit" movements to win over black voters to the GOP, but those efforts proved to have limited, if any impact. According to AP Votecast, a survey of more than 115,000 midterm voters and 3,500 Jewish voters nationwide, voters who identified as Jewish broke for Democrats over Republicans by a wide margin, 72 percent to 26 percent, in 2016. Over the last decade, Jewish voters have shown stability in their partisanship, according to data from Pew Research Center. Jewish voters identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party over the Republican Party by a roughly 2-to-1 margin. It took detectives more than a decade to find the man who killed a Prince George's County high school student. But after less than nine years in prison, he's a free man. Nia Owens was found dead in a wooded area in Hyattsville, Maryland, more than 20 years ago. Police said she was sexually assaulted and strangled near Northwestern High School in 1996. Years later, Matthew Bethea was convicted and sentenced to serve 15 years in prison after DNA linked him to the crime. Recently, Bethea was able to reduce his sentence through diminution credits, which allow inmates time off their sentences for showing good behavior in prison. He was released from prison on March 5. "To know that he's out and he's around this metropolitan area, only makes me want to move to another area," Owens' mother, Angela Wood, said Tuesday. Wood joined other women in Annapolis to push for legislation to have diminution credits eliminated for convicted murderers. "If there's any type of good time credit, then it needs to be something that they earn in the prison to affect them in the prison - not coming home to society," Wood said. The credit system was set up as an incentive to prisoners. If they work, take classes and have good behavior that can get an early release. Gale Seaton's teenage daugther Stacy was killed in Bowie. She said the man convicted of hiring someone to killer her is set to get out in one year. "Somebody who's a cold-blooded killer, you're not going to rehabilitate them," Seaton said. "We are so busy trying to busy trying to work on justice reinvestment and cutting everybody breaks, we've got to realize that when they are serious crimes, and we don't have the death penalty anymore, that we really need to make sure that justice is done," Maryland Del. Susan McComas said. Another person's DNA was found on Owens at the time of her death. That DNA was placed in a national database, but has not been identified. North Korea leader Kim Jong Un was on a train Sunday to Vietnam for his second summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, state media confirmed. Kim was accompanied by Kim Yong Chol, who has been a key negotiator in talks with the U.S., and Kim Yo Jong, the leader's sister, the North's official Korean Central News Agency reported. Late Saturday, an Associated Press reporter saw a green and yellow train similar to one used in the past by Kim cross into the Chinese border city of Dandong via a bridge. The Trump-Kim meeting is slated for Wednesday and Thursday in Hanoi. Their first summit last June in Singapore ended without substantive agreements on the North's nuclear disarmament and triggered a months-long stalemate in negotiations as Washington and Pyongyang struggled with the sequencing of North Korea's nuclear disarmament and the removal of U.S.-led sanctions against the North. Kim's overseas travel plans are routinely kept secret. It could take more than two days for the train to travel thousands of miles through China to Vietnam. Vietnam's Foreign Ministry announced Saturday that Kim would pay an official goodwill visit to the country "in the coming days" in response to an invitation by President Nguyen Phu Trong, who is also the general secretary of Vietnam's ruling Communist Party. In his upcoming meeting with Trump, experts say Kim will seek a U.S. commitment for improved bilateral relations and partial sanctions relief while trying to minimize any concessions on his nuclear facilities and weapons. While Kim wants to leverage his nuclear and missile program for economic and security benefits, there continue to be doubts on whether he's ready to fully deal away an arsenal that he may see as his strongest guarantee of survival. Last year, North Korea suspended its nuclear and long-range missile tests and unilaterally dismantled its nuclear testing ground and parts of a rocket launch facility without the presence of outside experts, but none of those steps were seen as meaningful cutbacks to the North's weapons capability. While North Korea has repeatedly demanded that the United States take corresponding measures, including sanctions relief, Washington has called for more concrete steps from Pyongyang toward denuclearization. Hanoi has been gearing up for the summit with beefed-up security. Officials say the colonial-era Government Guest House in central Hanoi is expected to be the venue for the Trump-Kim meeting, with the nearby Metropole Hotel as a backup. Streets around the two places have been beautified with flowers and the flags of North Korea, the U.S and Vietnam. Workers were also putting final touches on the International Media Center. Vietnam's Foreign Ministry says some 2,600 members of the foreign press have registered for the event. Meanwhile, Vietnam has announced a traffic ban along Kim's possible arrival route. The Communist Party's mouthpiece Nhan Dan newspaper late Friday quoted the Department of Roads as saying the ban will first apply to trucks 10 tons or bigger, and vehicles with nine seats or more on the 170-kilometer (105-mile) stretch of Highway One from Dong Dang, the border town with China, to Hanoi from 7 p.m. Monday to 2 p.m. Tuesday, followed by a complete ban Tuesday on all vehicles from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. The People's Committee in Lang Son province, where the Dong Dang railway station is located, issued a statement Friday instructing the road operator to clean the highway stretch and suspend road works, among other things, on Feb. 24-28 as "a political task." Massachusetts officials have announced settlements with seven nursing homes after a state investigation into complaints of unsafe conditions and substandard care. Attorney General Maura Healey said Wednesday "systemic failures" at the facilities led to injuries and deaths of residents. The seven homes combined will pay more than $500,000 in fines and have agreed to update their procedures and improve staff training. Among cases cited by Healey was that of Candi Hitchcock and Sammi Dawley's mother, who fell 20 separate times at Beaumont Rehabilitation and Skilled Nursing Center in Westborough and eventually died from internal bleeding. "Our family had to watch her bleed out for 10 days," recalled Hitchcock, who attended the news conference with her sister. She said that her mother had fallen at the facility, but that no one noticed or cared for her until Hitchcock arrived hours later. Two days later, when Dawley came for a visit, their mother was worse. "She just was sitting there and her brain was bleeding," recalled Dawley. Their mother, Betsy, never got to celebrate her anniversary with their father. "She died an unnecessarily painful death. She was so looking forward for big celebration for their 70th wedding anniversary," recalled Hitchcock. "Our father stayed with her till the end. He was broken man." The owners of Beaumont Rehabilitation and Skilled Nursing Center said Wednesday that the fine by the attorney general's office was based on something that occurred more than three years ago, and that at that time, they "took extraordinary measures to improve upon the factors surrounding it." According to the attorney general's office, the Westborough facility failed to implement necessary interventions after a patient fell 19 times. As a result, the facility must pay $37,500 and implement a three-year compliance program, which will include updated policies and procedures, annual training programs, and yearly audits. "The inspiration to deliver a healthier, richer life for those we serve runs three generations deep in the Salmon family and is something we believe our entire team strives for each day as it cares for and serves each of our residents with dignity and respect," read a statement from Salmon Health. Synergy Health Centers, which owns two of the nursing homes mentioned in the investigation, has also agreed not to participate in state-run health care programs for seven years. Healey says every senior has the right to quality care and every family deserves peace of mind about their loved ones. "These settlements hold facilities accountable and will help restore the trust families need when making critical decisions about the care of their loved ones," said Healey. In addition to Beaumont Rehabilitation and Skilled Nursing Center and Synergy Health Centers, other nursing home facilities that have agreed to settlements with the attorney general's office include: What to Know Paul Genest ordered DNA kits from Ancestry and 23andMe. Both test results found that Genest is more than 60 percent Irish and British, but the rest of the results varied. NBC10 Boston Responds found that genetics companies use different algorithms and reference population data. Millions of people have done it and you may be one of them sent off a saliva sample to figure out your DNA ancestry. But one Massachusetts man is questioning how accurate these tests really are after getting different results from two genetics companies. Paul Genest, of Swampscott, knows a lot about his family history, and he considers himself to be predominately of French descent. From chit chat within the family, and given the fact that everyone spoke French, we were pretty certain we were French, said Genest. But he got a surprise when the results came in after he ordered DNA kits from Ancestry and 23andMe. If you look at the difference between the two, there are discrepancies in every major group, and it turns out Im not as French as I thought I was, said Genest. Both test results found that Genest is more than 60 percent Irish and British, but the rest of the results varied. There were things that matched and things that didnt match, said Genest. The biggest thing was that Ancestry left out 11 percent and between 23andMe and Ancestry there was well over 20 percent disagreement in their information. So which one of them do you believe? NBC10 Boston Responds turned to Dr. Lindsay Farrer, the Chief of Biomedical Genetics at Boston University School of Medicine to get some answers. Some of it is accurate. Some of it is less accurate, said Farrer. He said the DNA tests are very good at determining your close relatives who have also submitted samples, but when it comes to where you come from, Farrer says the results are dependent on the reference sample that the company is using to determine genetic make-up. There are some populations that are unique genetically, so if they tell you have Icelandic heritage or Finnish heritage, thats probably accurate, said Farrer. Once you start getting into populations that are currently defined geographically by national boundaries, such as in many places in Europe, that info can vary in its accuracy. Farrer adds, even if the two companies were using the same reference sample, there may still be discrepancies. The algorithms they apply to correlate the signatures derived from one population may be different from the way another company does it. One isnt necessarily wrong or less reliable than the other, but just shows the limits of the precision in some of the estimates, said Farrer. NBC10 Boston Responds reached out to 23andMe and Ancestry about Genests tests. 23andMe told NBC10 Boston, Each testing company uses a different algorithm and different reference populations to identify where in the world your DNA is from. 23andMe is extremely confident in our results, and are consistently ranked the most accurate DNA testing service by industry trade groups. Ancestry told NBC10 Boston Responds: In September 2018, we introduced our newly developed Ancestry DNA algorithm that leverages improvements in science and a larger reference panel that gives customers more precise results. So you may want to think about your DNA test results as different components of your background, rather than fixating on the exact percentages. As for Genest, if someone asks him where his ancestors come from hes going to say France! If you did a DNA test in the past and recently received a revised report, its because the companies regularly update their algorithms and reference population data in order to achieve more precise results. The lawyer for a Massachusetts special education teacher charged with assaulting students says the allegations were made up by a disgruntled teacher's aide. Attorney Peter Pasciucco said Monday the police investigation into his client, 52-year-old Tricia Rossman, was "woefully inadequate." Rossman, who taught at John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Randolph, pleaded not guilty Monday to multiple charges of assault and battery on a disabled person. Authorities say a teacher's aide told police Rossman ``manhandled'' students and yelled at them. One staffer said she had seen Rossman drag a child and believed she hit the student in the face. Rossman has been placed on administrative leave. Interim Superintendent Thea Stovell says the school department is investigating. Massachusetts House lawmakers have overwhelmingly approved legislation that would ban so-called "gay conversion therapy" for minors. Ban supporters say the practice -- which aims to alter a person's sexual orientation -- is widely discredited by medical and mental health associations and can lead to depression and suicide. Opponents, including the Massachusetts Family Institute, say the legislation would impose criminal liability on health professionals who counsel children struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction or gender confusion. The bill would allow non-licensed religious or faith-based counselors providing pastoral counseling. The House passed the bill Wednesday by a 147-8 vote. Lawmakers passed a similar bill last summer but it stalled in the session's final hours. Republican Gov. Charlie Baker says he's inclined to sign it. Massachusetts would become the 16th state to adopt a ban. A woman who grew up in Massachusetts was one of the 157 people who died in an Ethiopian Airlines crash last weekend. Family members say 24-year-old Samya Stumo was aboard the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft that crashed Sunday minutes after takeoff. Stumo grew up in Sheffield and graduated from Mount Everett High School in 2010. She graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2015 and had just taken a job with ThinkWell, a global health organization. Her grandmother, Laura Nader, an anthropology professor at the University of California Berkeley, tells The Boston Globe that Stumo was heading to Uganda for her first project for the group. UMass Executive Director of Strategic Communications and Special Assistant to the Vice Chancellor, Ed Blaguszewski, released a statement on behalf of the University: "The UMass Amherst community is deeply saddened by the loss of Samya Stumo, who tragically died in the Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday. Samya cared deeply about the welfare of others throughout her life and across the world. While at UMass Amherst, she was honored with a special Salute to Service Scholarship for her commitment to public service. She was especially known for engaging others by earning their respect, friendship and trust, demonstrating a remarkable ability to relate to people in their communities. Our thoughts and prayers are with her family and friends." Stumo was the grand-niece of consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Police in Falmouth, Massachusetts are searching for a 16-year-old girl believed to have run away. Savannah Wall was reported missing by her dad on Sunday, according to officials. She is about 5 feet tall and has brown eyes and black hair. Anyone who has seen Wall or who knows of her whereabouts is encouraged to call the Falmouth Police Department at 774-255-4527. As more and more communities in New England and across the country debate bans on single-use plastic bags, lawmakers in Vermont are considering nixing them state-wide. A key panel of the Vermont Senate took testimony Wednesday on a proposal that could change the way people shop or get take-out meals across Vermont. Single-use plastic bags are evil, said Sage Lalor, a high school senior at Manchesters Burr and Burton Academy, who testified before the Vermont Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy. The bill would ban single-use plastic carryout bags, drinking straws, coffee stirrers, and polystyrene foam food containers starting in July 2020. It would also create a special committee to study plastic bag bans and make recommendations to ensure goals are met. The proposal aims to promote durable reusable bags and reduce what ends up in landfills or the environment. The Chittenden Solid Waste District said its sorting-center machinery is often clogged with improperly-recycled bags. As you can imagine, thats dangerous, Jen Holliday of CSWD told the senators on the committee. Holliday urged the senators to advance the proposal. Other states look to our models when theyre looking at legislation, so in that respect, I think it would be great for Vermont to move forward, she told the committee. The proposal for state-wide rules follows a local ban already in place in Brattleboro, and other pushes in several individual Vermont communities. Plastic bags are very harmful to the environment because they are so plentiful and they are so light, so they are very easily littered, Evelyn Seidner, a Burr and Burton junior, testified Wednesday. Industry groups are pushing back. A manufacturer of foam egg cartons testified Wednesday that some alternatives to his products, such as heavier plastic containers, are actually worse for the planet in terms of how much material and energy are used in the manufacturing. A lobbyist for New England movie theaters suggested in testimony that a ban could be hard on consumers, saying that many movie-goers would likely prefer a lid and straw for their soda, to reduce spills in a dark and crowded theater. Every place thats called it a success deems it a success because they implemented a ban, Phil Rozenski of the American Progressive Bag Alliance, which represents plastic retail bag manufacturers, said of bag bans elsewhere around the country. Theres a lot of unintended consequences, or because of a lack of terminology, the marks were missed. The senate panel acknowledged the issue is complicated, so its members will consider certain exemptionslike allowing straws by request. Committee chair Sen. Christopher Bray, D-Addison County, said his group plans to continue its discussions Thursday, with the expectation of a vote by the end of the week on whether to advance the bill. Police in Westwood, Massachusetts, are looking for a driver they say hit a bicyclist and took off. The crash took place overnight between Thursday and Friday of last week. Authorities say the passenger side mirror of a black sedan was left at the scene after a cyclist was hit. Police did not say exactly where the crash took place, but they released surveillance photos on Twitter Tuesday. No information about injuries to the cyclist was immediately available. Anyone with information is asked to call 781-320-1000. Increasing the capacity of fiber-optic cables might one day be possible through the exploitation of a part of the signal commonly thought of as substandard. That imperfect element in a carrier, called noise is usually something one tries to avoidit can muddy the accurate reading of the data. However, scientists now suggest that one could, in fact, embrace the rubbishy, and thus far unusable, part of the signal to hold data and allow it to be decoded. The ordinarily data-obscuring hubbub could potentially be harnessed and used to increase data capacity in light waves. Information is encoded in the correlated noise between spatially separated light waves, writes Oliver Morsch in an article on the website of ETH Zurich, a technical and scientific university. The new coding technology, developed by ETH researchers, makes it possible to make better use of the transmission capacity of optical fibers. Noise occurs when signals are sent. Its a kind of unwanted fluctuation adjacent to the signal. Its not actually part of the signal, but its present in varying degrees nonetheless. In this case, the developers argue that noise should be capitalized on and considered just another multiplex. Multiplexing is where more signals are cleverly sent than the number of transmission channels available. In other words, they say one should look at noise simply as a channeljust like frequencies in a radio broadcast. All you have to do, then, is figure out how to encode and decode data in that noise. The key to it is figuring interference. Shawn Divitt, an American Ph.D. student, came up with the schools direction in the work. He used a traditional double-split experiment concept. Thats where splitting waves creates phase shifts, revealing an interference pattern (Wikipdia). Divitt experimented with identifying the extent that predictions can be made about those phase shifts, based on the correlations between the light waves in the two splits. Correlations indicate how well one can predict, for instance, the oscillatory phase of one light wave if one knows the phase of the other wave, Morsch writes. Even if both phases are noisy, meaning their values fluctuate, they can still do so in a more or less synchronized fashion. The academics exploited the fact that strong correlations create visibly apparent interference and that weak ones cause the patterns to wash out. The idea was to generalize that principle and to use it to encode information, Divitt says in the ETH Zurich article. Security and cost benefits Interestingly, security ended up being a bi-product. The researchers explain that not only do they potentially increase the capacity of fiber through the use of the noise channels building on the data-encoded interference patterns, but that intrusions, where if someone tried to record the interference pattern, would be highly obvious. The subterfuge would obviously grab too much diverted optical power attempting it, and the hacker would be fingered. Cost is also an advantage, they say. The channel doesnt actually require extra resources, like light, to be produced, unlike a traditional capacity-increasing methods. Their method does not require coherent laser light. It should be cheaper than conventional technologies, Morsch says. She hopes to 'achieve its ambitions for development' The Great Western Society Limited has appointed Emma Jhita as its first chief executive. She will join the management team at Didcot Railway Centre, the living museum of the Great Western Railway. She has recently been director of development at the Jewish Museum London, where she led a number of successful initiatives to secure funding, as well as developing and implementing the business plan. Before this, she was campaign director at The Postal Museum in London, during which time it implemented its Mail Rail project. She said: I have long admired the development of the Great Western Societys museum at Didcot Railway Centre, and look forward to working with the board and all the staff and dedicated volunteers who work hard to preserve the history of the Great Western Railway through Didcots unrivalled collection of locomotives, rolling stock and artefacts. I recognise that the society needs to ensure it can raise funds to continue with the conservation and restoration of its collection, and achieve its ambitions for development of Didcot Railway Centre. As an innovative heritage attraction and one of the most vital museums in our area, the centre offers a truly unique experience for all visitors from young children to those who can remember the great days of the GWR. The appointment follows a reorganisation of the board of directors over the past six months, with four new directors starting in September, the retirement of Richard Croucher as chairman in January and the appointment of Richard Preston as his successor. Mr Preston said: My colleagues and I are delighted that Emma is joining us. I believe that her management expertise, her people skills and her fundraising talents will help us achieve the longer-term plans that we have been developing over the past few years. 'This is a better deal than the one we voted on in January and should have been passed last night' NEWBURY MP Richard Benyon has expressed his disappointment that Theresa May's amended Brexit deal was defeated last night. He also ruled out the possibility of a second referendum and said that the majority of his constituents wanted the Government to get on with Brexit. The Prime Minister's revised deal was defeated by 149 votes. Mr Benyon, who backed the Prime Minister's deal last night, told Newburytoday: "I'm very disappointed. I supported the deal a few weeks ago and I supported it last night. "I thought it was an improvement on the deal with the legal text that the Prime Minister had agreed, but some of my Conservative colleagues and in the Labour Party and others chose to vote against it. "This will probably mean, regardless of what happens, a softer Brexit and we will certainly not leave without a deal, which I think is a very good thing. "The deal the Prime Minister had negotiated was what to most people who voted leave was Brexit and to most people like me who voted remain but accept that our side lost was a sensible way forward. "Parliament is a dysfunctional place at the moment. I don't blame people for being frustrated. "I have got tech companies in Newbury pulling their hair out saying what the hell should they do. I replied that I would not be exposing them to the vagaries of no deal." Reading West MP Alok Sharma and North West Hampshire MP Kit Malthouse backed the Government. Wokingham MP John Redwood voted against the deal. MPs will have a free vote today on whether to leave with no deal in place. If that is rejected, a vote on delaying Article 50 will be held tomorrow. Mr Benyon said he would vote against no deal and vote to extend Article 50 tomorrow, if necessary. Ahead of the crunch votes Mr Benyon said: "I think Parliament, by a fair margin, will reject no deal on March 29. I think tomorrow the Government will seek, and get, a short delay. "What happens then is anyone's guess." Mr Benyon has previously backed a deal and been opposed to a no deal Brexit said: "I think no deal would be different from what most people expect but it would still be a very bad situation indeed." The MP said that some areas of the economy would be mitigated if no deal came to pass but others, such as farming, "that we have not considered or are unprepared for would be damaging indeed". When asked how long Article 50 should be delayed for, Mr Benyon said it would be a "terrible mistake" to delay longer than the upcoming European elections in May and negotiating with the new commission in November. He said: "The majority of people in West Berkshire want and expect us to get on with it. That's why I have been constantly voting for a deal, which is a compromise. "This is a better deal than the one we voted on in January and should have been passed last night." And when asked whether he thought that a second referendum should be held, Mr Benyon warned proponents that they had to be clear what they were asking for. He said: "The further you get away from London the more anger there is from the public about a second referendum. "Those who call for it need to be absolutely clear what they are asking for. It will take many months to chose the question, how much money each side can spend and conduct a campaign, and after all that I suspect it will be 52/48 or something similar... and in some areas a larger vote to leave. "It would unleash demons of nationalism and extremism the likes of which we have not seen in this country. That's the risk they have to consider. "What we need is to unite this country, move on from this talk about other things and our potential in the world." Hundreds of acres in the Litchfield Hills are protected from development through the efforts of area land trusts. A key part of that success is accreditation, a process many in the area are renewing now, including the Housatonic Valley Association. Accreditation builds confidence in land trusts and opens up grants, allowing for more land to be protected with conservation easements. Tim Abbott, HVAs regional conservation and greenprint director, said accreditation has helped the association with its capital efforts. HVA has raised $1 million since it was accredited in 2014. The accreditation leveraged another $6 million to help land trusts in the Litchfield Hills protect 1,600 acres of land. Abbott said he doesnt know if its a direct correlation for all of the $1 million or if its HVAs expanded scope, but said there is one donor who wouldnt donate if they arent accredited. Accreditation has helped land trusts across the country raise more money. An independent external evaluation of the Land Trust Accreditation Commission showed accredited land trusts have significantly bigger budgets, more staff and volunteers, have three times more land and eight times more money invested into their protected lands than their peers of similar size. HVA was one of the first organizations in the state to become accredited. The Land Trust Accreditation Commission, an independent program of the Land Trust Alliance, will use the renewal process to ensure HVA is following its policies and procedures, as well as improving in certain areas. HVA has always been a land trust as well as a watershed organization, Abbott said. Its in our DNA to protect throughout the watershed. How to comment on the plan Comments can be submitted online at Landtrustaccreditation.org, emailed to info@landtrustaccreditation.org, faxed to 518-587-3183, or mailed to Land Trust Accreditation Commission Attn: Public Comments Mail: 36 Philadelphia Street, suite 2 Saratoga Springs, NY 12866. See More Collapse Abbott said HVA is different from many of the other land trusts because it doesnt generally acquire land on its own, but instead helps local land trusts do so. He said they decided to invest in becoming accredited so they could better help those groups and continue to be a leader in conservation. The Land Trust Accreditation Commission will now review all of HVAs documents. The public can also comment until April 21. A decision is expected to be announced in the fall. Connecticut is no stranger to the accreditation process, especially Litchfield County. More than half of the states 30 or so accredited land trusts are in the northwest corner and belong to the Litchfield Hills Greenprint Collaborative, a program overseen by the HVA. Several other groups are also renewing, or just about to start the process, including Sharon, Norfolk, Warren and Weantinoge. I think our collaborative approach helped, Abbott said. Connie Manes, HVAs greenprint manager, serves as a consultant, helping land trusts all over New England become accredited. She also helped draft the new standards, looking at the meaningful parts of the program, culling the risks and studying the strengths. The creation of that code was instrumental in getting us to speak the same language, she said, adding accreditation takes it a step further. It brought us together in a way we hadnt been before. She said land trusts protect land in perpetuity and this code allows that to happen because it requires that records are maintained appropriately. Abbott said creating the accreditation process resulted in good changes, including ensuring protected properties were appraised correctly and the trusts were looking at the deeds. He said within HVA, the board was able to get a better understanding of these practices through the accreditation process. Organizationally, its helped us tighten our ship, Abbott said. kkoerting@newstimes.com; 203-731-3345 Following are some of the scholarship funds currently accepting applications from students in Greater New Milford this year. Harris Family Scholarship at Connecticut Community Foundation: Deadline: March 15. Open to high school seniors or current or returning college students pursuing college study in an agricultural field. Now open to students in any of the 21 towns in the foundations service area in Greater Waterbury and the Litchfield Hills. Scholarship established by the Harris children and the New Milford Farmland and Forest Preservation Committee from donations given in memory of Vivian and George G. Harris, longtime New Milford farmers and agriculture proponents. Apply by using the special scholarship form at www.conncf.org/apply-for-scholarships/. Gaylordsville Fire Department Ladies Auxiliary scholarship: Deadline: April 1. Open to graduating high school seniors residing in the Gaylordsville fire district. Applications available at New Milford High School or by calling 860-355-9390. Bridgewater Grange Scholarship: Deadline, April 8. Open to full-time residents of Bridgewater, Roxbury, Washington, New Milford or Woodbury and have a plan to attend, or are currently attending, a recognized program of study to further their agriculture-related education. Award will be made to a student who demonstrates hands-on knowledge of and interest in farming through extra-curricular activities, work experience, family background, or other, and who embodies the Grange values of character, citizenship, and community service. Applications available at www.bridgewatergrange.org. Completed applications, including reference letters, must be received by April 8. For more information, email info@bridgewatergrange.org, attention Peggy Zottola. Greater New Milford Board of Realtors Jay Solomon Memorial Scholarship: Deadline: April 10. Open to high school seniors who reside in New Milford, Sherman, Kent, Roxbury, Bridgewater, Washington and Warren. Applications available at guidance offices and at www.gnmbr.com. Washington Environmental Council scholarship -- the Ken Williams Memorial Scholarship: Deadline: April 12. Grants of up to $1,000 to middle, high school and college students who live in Washington, Roxbury and Bridgewater, provided they attend or attended school in Washington, and who would like to attend environmentally oriented programs during the summer. Washington residents will have preference, but all other application factors will be equal. For more information, visit www.wec-ct.org/scholarships. Applicants will be notified by May 1. Washington Environmental Council scholarship -- Mary Anne Erichsen Memorial Scholarship (college scholarships): Deadline: April 12. Grants of up to $2,000 available to students from Washington, Roxbury or Bridgewater who are in sound scholastic standing, provided the student attended or has attended high school in Washington, and are interested in pursuing environmental studies in college. Residents of Washington will have preference, all other application factors being equal. Applications available at www.wec-ct.org/scholarships. Applicants will be notified by May 1. Roxbury scholarships: Deadline: April 22. Open to those who are Roxbury who have been accepted into an undergraduate or graduate program at an accredited two- or four-year college, university or state approved school for trade instruction or special occupational training that offers a degree or certification. Part-time students with extenuating circumstances will be considered. Applications available at town hall, Minor Memorial Library, the guidance office at SVS and online at www.roxburyscholarshipfoundation.com. For more information, email roxburyscholarshipfoundation@gmail.com. Applications must be returned to Roxbury Scholarship Foundation, P.O. Box 106, Roxbury, CT 06783. To have a scholarship listed, mail or drop the information off to Deborah Rose at The Greater New Milford Spectrum, 45B Main St., New Milford, CT 06776; fax it to 860-350-6794; or email drose@newstimes.com. Kent Memorial Library is presenting A Collection of Stuff: Photographs Ranging from Insects to Ireland and a Lot of Stuff in Between, an exhibit featuring works by photographer Kent Chase, through April 30. A reception with the Kent resident will be held March 16 from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Main Street library. Chase is an award-winning photographer, writer, poet and retired photojournalist whose articles and photographs have appeared in the Kent Good Times Dispatch, the Litchfield County Times, the LCT and Passport Magazines and the online newspaper KentTribune.com. Her photographs have also appeared in the Waterbury Republican, the Lakeville Journal and The Spectrum. She has exhibited at the Gallery at Noble Horizons, the Northern Exposure Gallery, the former New Mil Bank in Kent, the Merwinsville Hotel, the Kent Memorial Library, N.M. Watson Wild Bird Supply, Kent Land Trust Annual Meeting, 2014 and 2015, and at the Trinity Church Gallery in Salisbury. Chase is a member of the board of directors of the Kent Art Association, where she exhibits on a regular basis ans has won numerous awards for her photography, including most recently the Peoples Choice Award at the 2018 KAA Photography show. In November 2015, she held a one-woman show at the Kent Art Association Gallery and her work has been included in three major photography exhibitions held in New York City, Miami and Paris. Five of her photographs were part of an innovative photography show that was displayed on the largest billboard in Times Square in July 2014. In December 2015, her photograph Winter Flood was included in the SCOPE Art Miami Art Fair, one of the largest art fairs in the world and on July 13 of 2015 her photograph White Jonquil was included in a major international photography exhibit held at the Louvre Museum in Paris. For more information, call the library at 860-927-3761. The town of Washington has for the fourth time since 2001 earned the Democracy Cup. The cup, co-sponsored by the East Haddam Civic Association, recognizes high voter turnout on Election Day and is presented in four categories based on town size. This is great, said First Selectman Mark E. Lyon. It shows civic involvement of our citizens and citizenship involvement is what makes Washington such a great place to live. The 2018 Democracy Cup was presented by Secretary of the State Denise Merrill Monday afternoon at Bryan Memorial Town Hall, where a gathering of town officials and residents met for the ceremony. Washington won the title in the small town category, followed by Granby in the mid-size category, Guilford in the large town category and West Hartford in the city category. The cup recognizes Washingtons 87.66 percent voter turnout for the November 2018 election. The percentage is the highest overall voter turnout in the state, Merrill said. Statewide, turnout was 65.19 percent. Washington earned the cup in 2001 with 66.2 percent voter turnout, 2003 with 66.10 voter turnout and 2004 with 93.08 voter turnout. Bridgewater won the cup in 2009. This is quite an honor, said Liddy Adams, Democratic Registrar of Voters, moments before she introduced Merrill. After the ceremony, two Shepaug Valley School students, Erin McGrath, 18, and Owen Moore, 17, accompanied by their principal, Kim Gallo, held the cup. From a student perspective, its important to be engaged in the community, Erin said of the reason she and her classmate attended the event. Leading Estates of the World, the original publication dedicated to showcasing the worlds most extraordinary residential estates, recently celebrated its 50th anniversary with the publication of Golden Horizons. A listing with Klemm Real Estate, which serves the Litchfield Hills, including the Greater New Milford area, was featured in Highlights from the publications estate properties valued in excess of $860 million. NEW MILFORD A vehicle that recently collided with a building in New Milford caused only minor damage, according to police. A Chevy Colorado truck rolled into the Midway Market & Deli at 88 Park Lane Road on March 6, two days after an SUV crashed through Kings Breakfast & Lunch in Newtown. Store employees were just hanging out when they suddenly heard a noise, said Midway Market employee James Thompson. It didnt even sound like a car hitting the building. Turns out that a truck left in the wrong gear rolled over a cement wheel-stop and into the storefront, shattering the markets front window and leaving an indent in the buildings brick exterior facade. The guy was just running in to buy a bag of chips, said Thompson. Its not something you expect to happen. First responders were at the scene within minutes and no injuries were reported, he said, adding that employees were away from the window at the time and there were no customers inside the store. Thompson said the truck didnt appear to have any dents just a lot of scratches and that the building inspector was going to come by to assess the damage. Police Lt. Lawrence Ash said the crash caused only minor damage, and there was no enforcement since the incident took place in a parking lot. The crash may have brought some added excitement to an otherwise ordinary day at the market, said Thompson, but it didnt slow down business. Not long after first responders cleared the scene, customers were in and out of the market. Were still selling sandwiches, said Thompson. kendra.baker@hearst.com Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 13) President Rodrigo Duterte on Wednesday condemned the rape incidents in the country, but said such crime "goes with humanity." "Binabalatan ang mga mukha ng mga [The victims' faces are skinned].. that is.. sa aming panahon ha (during our time).. may nire-rape (there was rape) that's a crime that goes with humanity, biology 'yan eh," Duterte said in his speech during the campaign rally of Partido Demokratiko Pilipino-Lakas ng Bayan's senatorial bets in Cauayan City, Isabela. He was making reference to the slay and skinning of a 16-year-old girl in Lapu Lapu City, Cebu. The Grade 9 student, whose skull was exposed, was also believed to have been raped. READ: 100,000 bounty up for men behind skinning, slay of Cebu student "'Yung magaganda [The beautiful ones] and I would like to say sorry to Maggie dela Riva, 'yung rape noon (rape before) at binabantayan pa namin [we were monitoring it], if you know Maggie dela Riva, maaano 'yung utak mo na [you'll think] how could you endure that brutality pero ngayon tignan mo naman bata ni-rape [but now even a child gets raped]," he said. The woman Duterte was referring to actress Maggie dela Riva who was abducted and raped in 1967. The President made the remarks as he touted anew his campaign against illegal drugs in the country. "Araw araw 'yan droga pati violence kung droga lang okay lang 'yan sa'kin [Everyday there news about drugs and violence. Using illegal drugs is okay with me]. If you want to eat drugs, fine, I could volunteer government fund 'wag ka lang gumalaw pakainin kita d'yan [just don't rape anyone]. Ang problema sa drug, law and order ngayon [The problem with drugs, they affect law and order]," he said. Duterte has been drawing ire for his controversial crackdown on illegal drugs which he launched when he assumed office in 2016. Government data shows that at least 5,000 Filipinos have died since the beginning of the illegal-drug drive. Today, in a late-breaking featured clinical research session at the American College of Cardiology Scientific Sessions 2018, researchers from Penn Medicine present first-of-its-kind data on the impact of real-time CYP2C19 genotype results when prescribing antiplatelet drugs in the clinic. Following percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI)-;a minimally invasive procedure for the treatment of narrowing arteries inside the heart-;patients are often prescribed aspirin and antiplatelet medications, which keep stents open by preventing blood platelets from sticking together. However, existing research suggests that some patients-;specifically those who carry a mutation of the CYP2C19 gene, which impact the liver's ability to process the antiplatelet drug, clopidogrel-;may not benefit from this drug, but instead would require different antiplatelet medications, such as prasugrel or ticagrelor, to prevent heart attack and stroke. "One of the main things we aimed to do in this study was integrate a clinical trial protocol into the physicians' daily practice, in order to provide the most beneficial medication regimens to patients based on their specific genetic needs, while also identifying what drives physician behavior when prescribing," said senior author Jay Giri, MD, associate director of the Penn Cardiovascular Outcomes, Quality, & Evaluative Research Center and an assistant professor of Cardiovascular Medicine. "Clinicians were provided with a real-time, rapid response genetic test and an appropriate level of education for using said test, which would identify patients' genetic mutation, CYP2C19 Loss-of-Function (LOF) alleles. We thought this precision medicine approach would impact the medications being prescribed to patients following PCI." As Giri and his colleagues suspected, access to the genotype data in an everyday clinical setting did, in fact, influence prescriber behavior. In the study, 504 participants from two Penn Medicine hospitals-;the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center-;were randomized into two groups: one group received a rapid point-of-care genotyping of CYP2C19, and the other did not receive any genotyping, which is the current standard of care. 249 participants were genotyped and 255 received the standard care. The participants in the genotyped group received a cheek swab within one day after PCI to determine CYP2C19 genotype, and results were available to clinicians within 90 minutes of the test being done. Physicians were verbally provided genotype results along with decision support, a one page summary of the treatment recommendations by genotype according to the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Guidelines (CPIC). Ultimately, the treating physician was the sole decision maker in the prescribing. Researchers found that in the genotyped group, the use of prasugrel or ticagrelor was significantly higher and the use of clopidogrel was lower as compared to the usual care group. In fact, genotype-guided drug recommendations were followed in 71 percent of cases, whereas in 29 percent of cases, physicians did not follow the recommendations. "This implies that physicians consider factors beyond the genotype when deciding the most appropriate antiplatelet medication for their patients, which is the premise of precision medicine." said lead author Sony Tuteja, PharmD, MS, a research assistant professor of Translational Medicine and Human Genetics, who presented the results of the study today in a late-breaking featured clinical research session at ACC 2018. "Ultimately we concluded that access to pharmacogenetic test results significantly impacted antiplatelet prescribing behaviors. It remains to be seen whether a reduction in important clinical outcomes like heart attack, stroke, and cardiovascular-related death follow what is predicted by the genetics." Researchers noted that this study raised more questions for the field, specifically, how do physician behave in an era of precision medicine, and will the availability of patient-specific genetic information impact the standard of care? "Often times we have a situation where the data in large clinical trials will say one thing, but precision medicine data will say another, so we need to figure out what the physician will do in those situations and what drives their decisions," Giri said. "Are clinicians influenced more by a patients' genetic make-up, or by the population-based research they have access to? Ultimately more research is needed to really identify the impact and usefulness of real-time genetic testing for making clinical decisions, which we intend to evaluate for interventional patients. As it turns out, Precision Medicine is a lot more than just precise genetics." insights from industry Dr. Richard Eglen Vice President and General Manager Corning Life Sciences In this interview, News-Medical speaks to Dr. Richard Eglen from Corning Life Sciences about the use of organoids in the drug discovery workflow, including the screening of candidate compounds for efficacy, toxicity, and pharmacokinetics. What are organoids and how are they used in drug discovery and preclinical development? Organoids are complex 3D cell structures that mimic an organ within the human body. A major benefit of organoids is that they allow scientists to study cells in a more physiologically relevant context. This is particularly useful for pre-clinical research, as organoids provide a better model of the human body than 2D cell cultures. For example, organoids can be used to screen for toxicities and study the metabolic effects of a candidate drug prior to human trials. motorolka | Shutterstock Organoids can also be generated from cells that have been removed from patients, making them a great model for human disease. There are several types of organoids currently available, including ones that mimic the brain, liver, and kidney; those that mimic the brain can be used to develop models of diseases such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons. What benefits do organoids offer over 2D cell culture? As mentioned previously, the main benefit is that you can obtain more predictive results for drugs before they enter clinical trials. In addition to this, cells in organoids are architecturally arranged to mimic human organs, meaning that the cells communicate in the same way as they would inside the human body. This allows scientists to study the signals and responses of cells from healthy tissue and compare this to specific disease states. You can't really do any of this with traditional 2D cell culture, because the cells are arranged on a flat surface, causing their behavior to be far removed from authentic physiology. Do you think that 2D cell culture will become outdated? Is there still a role for this traditional model? 2D cell culture has been around for decades. It remains a very powerful method for drug discovery because it is compatible with many of the high throughput screening instrumentation and robotics that are routinely used. 2D cultures do produce results; there have been many successful drugs that have been identified using 2D culture. However, it is possible that some promising leads have been missed, or conversely, have translated poorly to the clinically situation. This is where 3D cell culture comes in. What 3D culture is doing is adding another layer of understanding in the drug development process. I dont think 2D is going to go away, but I do think it will start to be used in combination with 3D cultures to allow people to compare the effects of their compounds in different models, and so develop a better understanding of their potential clinical activity. The major goal is to make 3D cell culture technologies as simple and easy to use as 2D culture, and thats where Corning comes in. What does the phrase fail fast, but more confidently mean in the context of drug discovery and development and how is Corning Life Sciences working to deliver technologies that support this message? Drug discovery is a long and expensive process. One of the biggest expenditures is patient trials you want to make sure that any drug that reaches this stage has a good chance of success, as you will be studying these compounds for years and spending millions to evaluate their effects. The idea behind fail fast, but more confidently is that you try to identify toxic or inactive drugs early on before they reach clinical trials. You want to do this quickly, and feel confident that the results are accurate. Then, you can work with a chemist to modify the drug or move on to the next compound. The earlier you can identify compounds that are active with low toxicities, and vice versa, the more likely the clinical trial will be a success. Corning has a 50-year history in developing technologies for cell culture. In fact, weve been developing technologies for the life sciences in general for over one hundred years, and many of our products are used by both academic researchers as well as pharmaceutical scientists working in drug discovery laboratories. Corning Matrigel is one of our flagship products that scientists can use to support and organoid growth. In addition, weve been focusing on developing products that enable people to do 3D cell culture simply and quickly. Weve also developed products such as a spheroid microplate with 1536 wells for high throughput screening of up to 1 million compounds per day. We have a very powerful product portfolio thats making 3D cell culture more accessible and easier for laboratories to adopt into their processes. Giovanni Cancemi | Shutterstock At SLAS 2019, one of the Corning scientists presented a poster on liver spheroids and the detection of hepatotoxins. Please can you tell us about the research and its importance in the context of drug development? It turns out that one of the best cell types for producing organoids are liver cells, or hepatocytes. At Corning, weve developed a liver cell line that can be used to create a very good 3D model of the human liver. Research Insights from SLAS 2019: 3D High Content Screening of Liver Spheroids In the study we presented at SLAS 2019, we looked at the ability of liver spheroids to predict the metabolic effects of new compounds. We found that the spheroids were three times more sensitive than cells grown in 2D culture and were accurately able to predict any toxic effects that arose after the compounds had been metabolized by the cells. Many drugs fail due to liver toxicity, so being able to predict this in real-time and obtain highly sensitive data was a huge step forward for us. This all ties into that theme of, fail fast, but more confidently. What advice would you give to scientists who are thinking of working with organoids for the first time? When it comes to working with organoids, one of the major barriers is the different protocols that you need for each cell type. For example, the growth factors that promote the differentiation of brain organoids are going to be very different from those that you need to grow a liver organoid. Using a matrix such as Matrigel within a spheroid microplate to grow organoids is a good option, or you may prefer to start with a simpler system such as a 3D spheroid to learn about the behavior of cells in 3D culture before moving onto a more complex organoid model. What do you think the future looks like for the use of organoids in drug discovery and development? How do you think Corning Life Sciences will play a role in this? For sure, organoids are going to provide powerful disease models, particularly in the neuroscience field where scientists are trying to understand the fundamental changes that lead to diseases such as dementia and Parkinsons disease. These diseases develop over a long time period, so its critical to have a 3D model that you can study for many weeks. This may be termed 4D cell culture! In addition to increasing our understanding of human disease, organoids will allow people to study the chronic effects of drugs, as well as carrying out complex analyses of the mechanism of action for these compounds. In the future, most of these organoids will be grown from pluripotent stem cells taken from patients. This means that the organoids will have the same genetics and physiology from that particular patient population and thus, be used to stratify patient cohorts for the development of personalized medicines. As a company, Corning will continue to develop new technologies to support scientists working in this field. Our strengths lie in materials science, so well likely be contributing new surfaces, new media and new applications that take organoids into a whole new era. Well also be continuing our work on liver spheroids and other cell types, so we can get to a stage where we are mass producing 3D models for use in high throughput laboratories. If you want to study a million compounds per day, you need a lot of spheroids. Where can readers find more information? 3D Cell Culture Solutions by Corning Life Sciences About Dr. Richard Eglen Dr. Richard M. Eglen is the current Vice President and General Manager of Corning Life Sciences, an operating division of Corning Incorporated based outside of Boston, Massachusetts (USA). Dr. Eglen is responsible for the management and strategic direction of the organization. Richard has over 40 years experience in the Life Sciences industry. Prior to joining Corning in 2011, he was president of bio-discovery at PerkinElmer and held other executive management positions in the pharmaceutical, diagnostic, and biotech industries. Dr. Eglen has worked and published extensively in key drug targets, including GPCRs, kinases, and ion channels, as well as in assay and instrument technology development for high-throughput screening, imaging, and biomarker detection. He has authored more than 325 publications, book chapters, and patents, and serves on numerous industry, academic advisory, and journal editorial boards. He was most recently president of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS). About Corning Life Sciences Corning Life Sciences continues to bring new and innovative laboratory technologies to researchers worldwide. The companys high-quality, innovative products and services for life science applications enable people around the world to make and deliver life-changing discoveries At the upcoming USCAP 2019 conference in Maryland, March 18-20, Huron Digital Pathology will debut its new Scan Index Search platform, which connects pathologists, researchers and educators with the expertise of their colleagues to help speed up diagnosis and accelerate disease research. Every year, pathologists collectively diagnose millions of cases, using their expertise to review biopsy slides and generate knowledge-rich, pathology reports. By embedding intelligence into Hurons scanning hardware and combining it with our image search engine, we believe we can transform how pathologists, researchers and educators around the world capture and share knowledge. Image search is a fundamental capability that can make virtual peer review a reality, providing access to the knowledge of multiple experts, virtually, through their pathology reports. Equally significant, image search can establish a reliable framework for building computational consensus, which will have a great and lasting benefit to the practice of pathology and society in general. Patrick Myles, CEO of Huron Digital Pathology At the USCAP 2019 conference, Huron will showcase the three main components of its Scan Index Search platform for pathology: Scan. The company is debuting a new 400-slide capacity scanner, TissueScope iQ. In addition to standard slides, the scanner accommodates up to 200 double-wide slides. Each of the scanners five standard or double-wide cartridges can be mixed and matched for greater scanning flexibility. TissueScope iQ features industry-first, real-time, native slide indexing. As slides are digitized, the intelligent scanner indexes the images, representing each slide as a series of compact and easily-searchable barcodes. Native indexing on the scanner will enable valuable, real-world applications for quality control and laboratory automation. The company is debuting a new 400-slide capacity scanner, TissueScope iQ. In addition to standard slides, the scanner accommodates up to 200 double-wide slides. Each of the scanners five standard or double-wide cartridges can be mixed and matched for greater scanning flexibility. TissueScope iQ features industry-first, real-time, native slide indexing. As slides are digitized, the intelligent scanner indexes the images, representing each slide as a series of compact and easily-searchable barcodes. Native indexing on the scanner will enable valuable, real-world applications for quality control and laboratory automation. Index. Huron has developed a scanner-agnostic and IT-friendly method for indexing large archives of whole slide images so they can be quickly and easily searched. The technique is designed to batch-index existing digital slide archives and index new slides as they are added to the archive. The digital slides can either originate from Huron scanners, where they are indexed natively, or from third party scanners. Huron has developed a scanner-agnostic and IT-friendly method for indexing large archives of whole slide images so they can be quickly and easily searched. The technique is designed to batch-index existing digital slide archives and index new slides as they are added to the archive. The digital slides can either originate from Huron scanners, where they are indexed natively, or from third party scanners. Search. Huron offers an easy-to-use search tool that pathologists, researchers and educators can use to retrieve images that are anatomically similar to the biopsy samples they are reviewing. After highlighting a region of interest on a digital slide, the search engine returns images with similar content along with the corresponding diagnoses. This search capability can be deployed within a single institution or across multiple networks. Reference Architecture Huron has co-developed a reference architecture for pathology in collaboration with Dell EMC, which enables its Scan Index Search Solution. Patients who live close to the hospital at which they have undergone total hip or total knee replacement are much more likely to visit the emergency room for follow-up care of pain, inflammation and other complaints than those who live farther away, according to a new study by researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) in New York City and The Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans. On the other hand, patients who live far from the hospital are much more likely to call their surgeon with questions--a more efficient use of health care resources. "Intuition would say that they came to the ER because it's available," said Bradford Waddell, MD, a hip and knee surgeon at HSS, who led the study. "Everybody is hurting after knee and hip surgery, but if you have easy access to the ER you're just going to pop on in." The impetus for the research was a relatively recent change in the demographics of surgery. A growing number of patients who require specialty procedures, such as knee and hip replacements, are referred by their local physicians to centers of excellence far from where they live. The result is that they may travel hundreds of miles for an operation but be unable conveniently to seek follow-up care at the same institution. Dr. Waddell and colleagues set out to evaluate how these patients were following up and communicating with the surgeon after their procedure. As Dr. Waddell and his colleagues found by reviewing medical records that included addresses, these patients are far less likely to show up at the hospital where they underwent their joint procedures than those who live in the general area. Instead, they turned to the telephone, calling in with questions and, if necessary, scheduling appointments to come see their surgeons--which is ideal, he said. "They should be calling us and coming to the clinic. We should try to avoid them showing up to the ER, which can be very expensive," Dr. Waddell said. The findings point to a need for better communication with patients who undergo orthopedic surgeries, Dr. Waddell said. Surgeons should emphasize that pain and swelling after these operations are normal and rarely require urgent care. "They should be calling us and coming to the clinic rather than using the ER," he said. The HSS researchers presented their findings at AAOS 2019, the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. The Detroit Cardiovascular Training Program at Wayne State University received notice that funding from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will continue for the next five years with additional funding of $1.29 million. In addition, NIH has approved raising the trainee slots from four to six, strengthening the university's ability to attract the most talented candidates searching for a cardiovascular graduate program. The program, led by Jian-Ping Jin, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of physiology in Wayne State's School of Medicine, began in 2014 to offer multidisciplinary and collaborative training efforts in educating a new generation of scientists who will pursue careers in cardiovascular research. Trainees will focus on improving health care and contribute to economic growth by creating innovations that will translate into medical practices. "The program is the only pre-doctoral cardiovascular training T32 program in the state of Michigan, and this award affirms the strength of the cardiovascular research and education at Wayne State University," said Phil Levy, M.D., M.P.H., F.A.C.E.P., F.A.H.A., F.A.C.C., assistant vice president of translational science and clinical research innovation at Wayne State. "Cardiovascular disease claims more lives than all forms of cancer combined every year, so programs such as this one are critical for training the next generation of scientists to improve heart health for generations to come." "This program provides rigorous formal research training for pre-doctoral graduate students," said Jin. "Our team of 19 faculty members in four schools and colleges at Wayne State will offer broad and complementary scientific expertise in cardiovascular biology and diseases, preparing our trainees with strong backgrounds in molecular mechanisms of cardiovascular health and diseases using integrative and translational approaches to scientific investigation." Trainees in the program are selected from a high-quality pool of candidates, including under-represented minorities from various institutional programs such as NIH's Initiative for Maximizing Student Diversity in Wayne State University's Department of Physiology. Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of mortality in the United States and around the world. Understanding the biology, physiology and pathology of the heart and circulation is critical to improving treatment and prevention. Wayne State's competitive renewal of the project will contribute a major role in research education that will offer a new generation of scientists focused on improving healthcare outcomes in the Detroit region and around the world. The grant number for this National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health is 2T32HL120822. Promega Corporation's new Promega Water-Glo System, launched this week, offers a highly sensitive and flexible measurement tool for monitoring microbial contamination in freshwater, process water, seawater or wastewater samples using bioluminescent technology to measure adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Even the slightest change in ATP levels acts as an early warning system to quickly assess the presence of live microbes and possible dangerous pathogens in water. Image credit: Promega Water-Glo reagents were used in recent research by scientists at the world-renowned IHE Delft Institute for Water Education based in Delft, the Netherlands demonstrating the first direct method of measuring ATP in seawater. The paper ATP measurement in seawater reverse osmosis systems: Eliminating seawater matrix effects using a filtration-based method is published in the March 2019 issue of the international journal Desalination. ATP detection provides technicians a number of advantages compared to other methods for detecting microbes in water such as heterotrophic plate count (HPC), flow cytometry and indirect methods such as turbidity or pressure drop. Benefits include: Sensitivity to directly assess living cells from any type of microbe even in samples with low microbial load, facilitating early intervention, or high biomass load, allowing technicians to monitor the effectiveness of biocide treatments or biological filtration processes. to directly assess living cells from any type of microbe even in samples with low microbial load, facilitating early intervention, or high biomass load, allowing technicians to monitor the effectiveness of biocide treatments or biological filtration processes. Rapid results from ATP detection provides an immediate indication of microbial contamination that does not require waiting for microbes to grow in media. from ATP detection provides an immediate indication of microbial contamination that does not require waiting for microbes to grow in media. Flexibility to use in the field, floor or lab since the reagent is stable for six months at 4 C or two weeks at room temperature. to use in the field, floor or lab since the reagent is stable for six months at 4 C or two weeks at room temperature. Higher throughput to measure up to 96 samples at once using the large format option. Promega, a leading manufacturer of reagents, leveraged the companys expertise in bioluminescence technology developed over the last 25 years to develop the Water-Glo System, one of the most sensitive tools in ATP detection in the environmental and water testing industry. Water-Glo Chemistry is also available as part of a fully automated system. The AppliTek EZ-ATP Analyzer with the Water-Glo Chemistry provides a total solution for online microbial analysis of water samples. Autistic children lack essential social and communication skills, and the type and severity of the symptoms experienced are wide-ranging. Because they have such diverse ways of expressing their emotions, it is difficult for therapists to gauge how engaged they are with the therapy. To track their progress, many therapists film their sessions and spend hours watching the footage and analyzing the childs reactions to determine how effective a particular approach was. This is laborious and time-consuming work. In response, the EU-funded ENGAGEME project is developing state-of-the-art software to enable the robots used as assistive tools in autism therapy to perceive a childs emotions and level of engagement. With this information, the robot can respond to the child more naturally and effectively, and also document the therapy progress automatically. The technology being developed can enable personalized interactions with an autistic child, helping the therapist to keep the childs attention, which improves their ability to learn the content, says project researcher Ognjen Rudovic, a postdoctoral Marie Curie Fellow in the Affective Computing group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT Media Lab), US. It also allows the therapist to more quickly determine which learning approach works best for each child. We are currently working on a prototype, the goal of which is to enable the use of our personalized machine-learning algorithms within everyday autism therapy, says Rudovic. These computing tools can significantly reduce the therapists efforts, allowing them to focus on the design of more effective therapy content that will have better learning outcomes for children with autism. Personalized deep learning Capturing an autistic childs attention, even for a few seconds, is challenging. A non-threatening-looking NAO robot, of the type used in this project, makes doing so easier. ENGAGEME is equipping the robots with a type of software that is based on areas of artificial intelligence (AI) that employs machine learning, computer vision, affective computing and human-robot interactions. More precisely, the researchers use the type of computer algorithms known as deep learning for a more personalized analysis of the childs behavior using data recorded by cameras and microphones facial expressions, head pose, body language and voice. In addition, a wrist monitor monitors heart rate and skin conductivity. The algorithm analyses these data to determine the childs level of engagement and emotional state. Rosalind Picard, the director of Affective Computing Group at MIT Media Lab, and Rudovics research advisor, says the challenge of creating machine learning and AI that works in autism is particularly vexing. This is because the usual AI methods require a lot of data that are similar for each category that is learned. In autism, where heterogeneity reigns, the normal AI approaches fail, says Picard. ENGAGEME is also unique in that it is the first project to analyse behavioural cues from autistic children with different cultural backgrounds Japan and Europe. A group of 35 children from Japan and Serbia, aged 3 to 13, took part in a study as part of the project. The results showed that the robots are more consistent than human therapists at estimating a childs emotion and engagement states. The researchers noticed that the children from the two cultural backgrounds communicated different states using similar body movements. The Japanese children communicated low levels of engagement, including disengagement during the therapy, using large body movements. On the other hand, the European children showed more bodily movements when they were highly engaged. This is an important finding for the design of future child-robot interactions as part of the therapy, as it may allow a robot to easily adapt its interpretations of children's behaviors based on their cultural background, says Rudovic. Working with industry In more recent work, the researchers showed that with their image analysis system they could enable humanoid robots to successfully read the facial expressions of children with autism. This can help the robots to better gauge facial expressions of autistic children and teach them to recognize facial expressions of their typically developing peers, leading to better social communication, which is one of the main challenges for autistic children, he says. Currently, the researchers are trying to deploy their technology in schools with autistic children in the UK, in collaboration with the DE-ENIGMA project, one of the biggest European projects designing assistive tools for autism therapy. Another important aspect is the projects close collaboration with businesses that produce robots for use as assistive tools in autism therapy. We have received lots of interest from institutions, and parents of autistic children, from Japan, Europe and USA to use our technology, Rudovic says. Our next step is to team up with robotics companies to scale-up our software and implement large clinical trials that would allow us to make a real impact with our technology. It is important for Europe to be one of the frontiers in doing the research on autism and deliver the state-of-the-art therapy for children with autism, to reduce the later cost of this condition, which is in the range of billions of euros. ENGAGEME received funding through the EUs Marie Skodowska-Curie fellowship program. Rudovic, originally from Serbia and a UK national, is the main recipient of the Marie Curie grant. It has enabled him to position himself as one of the top researchers in the field of affective computing and machine learning. This advanced my career prospects currently there is a lot of interest from academic and industry sector in my research, and I am very excited about continuing it, says Rudovic. The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) will launch a new program aimed at boosting student engagement and retention. The Biomedical Engineering Research for Active military and Veterans (BRAVe) program will target undergraduate students, including those at two-year colleges or who haven't declared majors, and place them in a 10-week summer research lab program to work on projects including: regeneration of damaged tissue, non-invasive tissue recovery, and/or treating soldiers in the battlefield. To make this possible, the federal government awarded a $352,414 National Science Foundation award to UTSA with support from U.S. Congressman Joaquin Castro (TX-20). "I welcome the National Science Foundation (NSF) funding awarded to the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) to aid in student retention while providing additional resources for undergraduates, active duty military and veterans," said Rep. Castro. "UTSA remains at the forefront of scientific research while continuing to push community engagement, making them an ideal candidate to receive this grant. San Antonio is home to Military City USA, and UTSA undoubtedly contributes to efforts that improve the lives of students, active duty military and veterans alike." The program will fund a total of 30 undergraduates over three years. It will also pair participants with faculty members and graduate mentors. At the end of each program cycle, undergraduates will present their research work to the National Biomedical Engineering Society--a once in a lifetime opportunity to showcase work to leaders in the field while making networking connections. BRAVe is lead by Eric Brey, chair of the UTSA Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Amina Qutub, associate professor in the same department. "San Antonio is a city with incredible opportunities for research working on medical challenges vital to the solider or veteran," said Brey. "This program will expose more people throughout the country to the opportunities at UTSA and in San Antonio, and it's an opportunity to work with students on important research at a critical time in their educational path." The program will include collaboration with partners throughout our community, such as the South Texas Veterans Health Care System, the City of San Antonio's Veterans and Military Affairs Office, Trinity University and the University of the Incarnate Word. UTSA's military community includes nearly 5,000 veterans, active duty military members, guard, reserves, ROTC members and their spouses and dependents. The university was recently recognized as the No. 6 most Military Friendly School by Victory Media. Wireless earphones could be releasing potentially carcinogenic radiation into the heads of the users, finds a new study. Mohd Syis Zulkipl | Shutterstock A group of 250 experts and researchers have signed a petition to the United Nations and World Health Organisation to stop the use of these and other wireless devices. The researchers explain that these wireless ear pieces use a type of electromagnetic frequency (EMF) radiowave via Bluetooth technology to transmit data. The closeness of this radiation to the brains of the users is cause for concern, say the researchers. Jerry Phillips, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Colorado said, My concern for AirPods is that their placement in the ear canal exposes tissues in the head to relatively high levels of radio-frequency radiation. Phillips is one of the many scientists who have called for a restriction on use of such devices. The petition reads, Based upon peer-reviewed, published research, we have serious concerns regarding the ubiquitous and increasing exposure to EMF generated by electric and wireless devices. It goes on to say that the risk of cancer, neurological disorders, and DNA damage that have been associated with EMF exposure cannot be ignored. The International Agency for Research on Cancer too recently agreed that these EMF waves could be possibly carcinogenic to humans. These waves are similar to UV rays or X raysbut are not as powerful. They can cause burns at high concentration but are generally of less impact. The debate about whether they are carcinogenic is still ongoing. The World Health Organisation developed guidelines that regulate the amount of EMF the devices are allowed to emit. The petition adds, The various agencies setting safety standards have failed to impose sufficient guidelines to protect the general public, particularly children who are more vulnerable to the effects of EMF. By not taking action, the WHO is failing to fulfil its role as the preeminent international public health agency. The guidelines insist that phones should be kept away from the body when not in use. Sleeping with the phone is not a good practice and usage of headsets or headphones to conduct phone calls is suggested as a good option. Women should be at the same level as men. Frankly, I don't see enough women in leadership positions. We are going to pass the Women's Reservation Bill in the Parliament and we are going to reserve 33% of govt jobs to women: CP @RahulGandhi #VanakkamRahulGandhi pic.twitter.com/m43D6UUmVo PRC Issue Won't Hurt Party's Poll Prospects, Says Arunchal BJP | The ruling BJP in Arunachal Pradesh on Wednesday exuded confidence that the controversy surrounding the issuance of permanent resident certificate (PRC) will not have any impact on the party's poll prospects. The state is set to go for simultaneous polling to the Lok Sabha and the Assembly on April 11. Addressing a press meet here, BJP state unit president Tapir Gao said some vested interests had fomented trouble in the state over a 'non-issue'. "PRC is a cooked-up issue. Whatever hues and cries occurred last month was the handiwork of vested interests. It will have no impact on the masses," Gao told reporters. Priyanka Gandhi, Scindia to Meet Bhim Army Chief in Meerut | Congress General Secretary for UP (East) Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and Congress General Secretary for UP (West) Jyotiraditya Scindia on their way to Meerut to meet Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar who is undergoing treatment at a hospital. Declare West Bengal 'Super Sensitive' State: BJP to EC | A BJP delegation including Union ministers Ravi Shankar Prasad, Nirmala Sitharaman, J P Nadda and party's general secretaries Bhupender Yadav and Kailash Vijayvargiya met top officials of the poll body and apprised them of their demands. Briefing the media after the meeting, Prasad said, "We have requested the Election Commission that the state of West Bengal should be declared as super-sensitive. And have also demanded that central forces should be deployed at all polling booths in the state." He said the party has also requested the poll panel to transfer those police officers whose electoral impartiality is questionable as well as the withdrawal of former Kolkata Police Commissioner Rajeev Kumar from election duty. Modi takes time out of his busy campaigning schedule to make an appeal to young voters on the same day @RahulGandhi is speaking at a college in TN - Coincidence? We think not. To the people of India, we've said it before & we say it again #RegisterToVote https://t.co/BtnMJS3BGo Prime Minister Narendra Modi urging Rahul Gandhi and other leaders to encourage voting in 2019 Lok Sabha elections is not a coincidence, says Congress in its Twitter handle. Allegations of 'Selling' RLSP Tickets are Absurd: Kushwaha | Stung by allegations that he was "selling" tickets for Lok Sabha polls, Rashtriya Lok Samata Party chief Upendra Kushwaha on Wednesday said the charge was 'absurd' as the seats that his party would be contesting were yet to be finalized. The former Union minister also challenged expelled RLSP leaders Pradeep Mishra and Nagmani, who made the allegations at a press meet here on Tuesday, to prove the charges and remarked, "I know who is their sutradhar (puppeteer)," in an oblique reference to Bihar Chief Minister and JD(U) president Nitish Kumar. Kejriwal Appeals to Congress on Alliance between AAP and JJP | AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal Wednesday appealed to the Congress to join the proposed alliance between his party and Jannayak Janata Party (JJP) but his offer was snubbed by his Haryana-ally, which said it can never have any truck with the Congress. "Let's come together in Haryana to defeat the BJP," Kejriwal said. However, within minutes after Kejriwal's comments, the JJP issued a strong-worded statement, saying it can "never have any truck" with the Congress. Kejriwal earlier on Wednesday told reporters that an alliance between AAP, Congress and JJP would defeat the BJP in the state. Former Prime Minister and national president of JD(S) HD Deve Gowda HAS has officially declared his grandson Prajwal Revanna as the party's candidate for Hassan Lok Sabha seat. Gowda made this announcement in a party workers' meeting held at Mudalahippe village in Holenarsipur taluk. I want you to bless him (to win) this election, an emotional Gowda said as he broke down. His grandson was wiping his tears. I have brought many people into politics and supported them. But, I don't know why find fault with me for bringing my family members into politics, Mr. Gowda said. The name of Prajwal Revanna, son of State Public Works Minister HD Revanna, was doing rounds for the candidature for some time. He is likely to face rebel Congress leader and former minister A Manju. DMK chief MK Stalin says Congress chief Rahul Gandhi will be the prime minister. Sharing the stage with Gandhi at a grand UPA poll rally here, Stalin declared that the coming Lok Sabha election was a war to dislodge Prime Minister Narendra Modi and asserted the UPA would repeat its 2004 success by winning all 40 seats. Stalin had proposed Gandhi as the Prime Ministerial candidate of the opposition alliance at a function in Chennai in December last year where Karunanidhi's statue was unveiled. Today, the government in Tamil Nadu is controlled by Prime Minister's Office, says Rahul Gandhi at Nagercoil rally. Prime Minister feels he can capture any Indian institution, control any state by blackmailing and pressurising states from Delhi: Rahul Gandhi Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has said that he is elated to see more and more seats are being allocated to women in the upcoming elections in the country. Patnaik's reaction came a day after the Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee allocated 17 of the state's 42 Lok Sabha seats to women. Immensely happy to see All India Trinamool Congress led by Mamata nominate over one-third women candidates for ensuing Lok Sabha Elections 2019. With the gathering momentum, India could see a sea change in electoral & development domain, Patnaik tweeted. Bihar Mahagathbandhan leaders meeting underway at senior Congress leader KC Venugopal's residence. The 'mahagathbandhan', as the grand alliance is called in local parlance, comprises old allies like the Congress and the RJD, besides new entrants such as Upendra Kushwaha's RLSP, Jitan Ram Manjhi's Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM), Sharad Yadav's Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) and the Vikashsheel Insaan Party (VIP), a fledgling outfit floated by former Bollywood set designer Mukesh Sahni. Total 12011 posters, hoardings, banners removed within 24 hours from date of announcement of elections; 50 in New Delhi Municipal Council, 1020 in East Delhi Municipal Council, 1350 in South Delhi Municipal Council and 9591 in North. All posters in Delhi Cantonment Board removed, ANI reported. He is a young man who is struggling and raising his voice, but this government is trying to suppress his voice. I am here because I like his energy and the way he raises voice for youth: Congress Gen Secy for UP (East) Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on meeting Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar in Meerut. Andhra Pradesh CM Chandrababu Naidu in Amaravati: If YSRCP wins even one seat, Andhra people will become slaves to TRS. Modi, K Chandrashekar Rao & YS Jaganmohan Reddy are hatching mega conspiracy against Andhra. They are using Guerrilla warfare. pic.twitter.com/lc7wykrDot BJP Will Release 1st List of Candidates for Karnataka Poll on March 16 | Karnataka BJP President BS Yeddyurappa on Wednesday said the party would finalise its first list of candidates for the Lok Sabha polls on March 16 and that virtually all the 16 sitting party MPs were likely to get tickets to contest. "I'm confident that because of the state government's failures and achievements of the central government, we will win at least 22 Lok Sabha seats. I have this confidence and we are all working unitedly in that direction," he said. Speaking to reporters here, he said the state BJP Core Committee would meet on March 15-16 after which he would travel to Delhi with state leaders and "the first list of about 20-22 seats out of 28 will be cleared." Kalaignar ji lives with us today. I had the honour to meet him on a few occasions. Frankly, it was one of my regrets that I did not spend more time listening to him. This is not simply an alliance, it is a meeting of hearts and minds. We are here because we see a threat to Tamil culture, history and language from Narendra Modi and RSS. Thousands of Tamils have given their lives for the truth. Great Tamil poets have written about the truth. All Mr. Modi does is speak lies. We are going to put special provisions in our manifesto for young entrepreneurs who want to start a business. We want to honour all those fishermen. We have decided that the best way to honour them is to have a dedicated ministry for fishermen in Delhi: Rahul Gandhi while addressing the public meeting in Kanyakumari. Karnataka Congress Chief Dinesh Gundu Rao writes to Election Commission of India requesting legal action against Union Minster Ananth Hegde for his remark on Rahul Gandhi 'Does he have proof that he is a Hindu?', ANI reported. In the nearly dozen speeches the PM has given this month, economic issues and his government's alleged success in turning around the economy have not been at the forefront of his pitch for re-election. CLICK TO READ | As India's Economy Hits Bumps in the Road, Here's How it May Help Modi Govt in Elections JD(S) settles for eight Lok Sabha seats while Congress to contest from 20 seats in Karnataka. The eight seats from where JD(S) will field candidates are Uttara Kannadam, Chikkamagaluru, Shimogga, Tumkur, Hassan, Mandya, Bengaluru and Vijayapura. RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav after Bihar Mahagathbandhan leaders' meeting in Delhi: All the leaders of the mahagathbandhan today came here for a meeting, we discussed seat sharing. There isn't any confusion between us, we are all clear. AICC Shortlisted Names of 15 LS, 105 Assembly Candidates: Patnaik | Odisha Congress president Niranjan Patnaik on Wednesday said the AICC Central Election Committee (CEC) has shortlisted the names of 15 candidates for Lok Sabha and 105 nominees for state Assembly elections. The candidates list for the remaining six Lok Sabha seats and 42 Assembly constituencies will be finalised by the CEC at its meeting on March 16, Patnaik said on his arrival from the national capital. He said the AICC will most probably release its candidate list for the first phase of polls on April 11 in four Lok Sabha seats and 28 assembly segments in Odisha by March 18. AICC Shortlisted Names of 15 LS, 105 Assembly Candidates: Patnaik | Odisha Congress president Niranjan Patnaik on Wednesday said the AICC Central Election Committee (CEC) has shortlisted the names of 15 candidates for Lok Sabha and 105 nominees for state Assembly elections. The candidates list for the remaining six Lok Sabha seats and 42 Assembly constituencies will be finalised by the CEC at its meeting on March 16, Patnaik said on his arrival from the national capital. He said the AICC will most probably release its candidate list for the first phase of polls on April 11 in four Lok Sabha seats and 28 assembly segments in Odisha by March 18. Former Congress MP Priya Dutt, who had earlier written to Congress president Rahul Gandhi against contesting elections, has been fielded from Mumbai-North Central seat. I am in the race. I am fighting this election. I am fighting for the future of my children. It is a fight to save our democracy, ANI quoted her as saying. The Congress and the JD(S) have agreed on a seat sharing formula for the Lok Sabha elections in Karnataka, with the grand old party sparing eight seats for its junior partner in the state. According to the formula agreed to by the two partners JD(S) will contest from Uttara Kannada, Chikkamagaluru, Shimoga, Tumkur, Hassan, Mandya, Bengaluru North, and Vijayapura constituencies. The Congress has fielded several former MPs in the list, who can potentially damage the prospects of the SP-BSP alliance in the state. Of the 16 candidates, six are former MPs. UP Congress chief Raj Babbar has been fielded from Moradabad, Zafar Ali Naqvi will contest from Kheri, Kaisar Jahan from Sitapur and Ratna Singh from Pratapgarh. The Congress has also named former BJP MP Savitri Bai Phule from reserved seat of Bahraich and former SP leader Rakesh Sachan from Fatehpur. Both Phule and Sachan had joined the Congress earlier this month. Election Tracker LIVE: The Congress has released its second list of candidates for the Lok Sabha elections, fielding 16 candidates from Uttar Pradesh and five from Maharashtra. The Congress, in its first list, had named 11 candidates for UP. The JD(S) had initially demanded 12 seats from the Congress, which only wanted to part with six. Party patriarch HD Deve Gowda had signalled that the number of seats is not as important, and agreed to contest from 10. Party sources initially said the JD(S) was willing to settle for nine seats, but the figure dropped to eight after HD Kumaraswamys meeting with Rahul Gandhi. Sticking to his Rahul Gandhi for PM pitch, DMK President M K Stalin Wednesday said the Congress chief will assume the top office within a few weeks. Sharing the stage with Gandhi at a grand UPA poll rally here, Stalin declared that the coming Lok Sabha election was a war to dislodge Prime Minister Narenda Modi and asserted the UPA would repeat its 2004 success by winning all 40 seats. Within a few weeks, Rahul Gandhi will become the Prime Minister. In your (Gandhis) hands the country will be safe we believe, he said. Stalin had proposed Gandhi as the Prime Ministerial candidate of the opposition alliance at a function in Chennai in December last year where Karunanidhis statue was unveiled. Former Prime Minister and national president of JD(S) HD Deve Gowda has officially declared his grandson Prajwal Revanna as the partys candidate for Hassan Lok Sabha seat. Gowda made this announcement in a party workers meeting held at Mudalahippe village in Holenarsipur taluk. I want you to bless him (to win) this election, an emotional Gowda said as he broke down. His grandson was wiping his tears. Congress chief Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said unemployment was the biggest issue for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections as he criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for failing to create employment. Earlier, when quizzed about his brother-in-law Robert Vadra, Gandhi said the law must apply to everyone equally. Addressing students at the Stella Maris College in Chennai, Gandhi said while he had the courage to take questions, Prime Minister Narendra Modi lacked the same. There is currently an ideological battle going in India. Its sharply divided between two ideologies. One ideology is a unifying ideology which says that all people of the country should live together & shouldnt be dominated by one idea, he said. Meanwhile, leaders of a prospective Bihar Mahagathbandhan will meet in the Capital today to finalise a seat-sharing formula for the Lok Sabha elections. On the other hand, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will meet the Election Commission to request that polls in West Bengal be held under the supervision of central forces as they do not trust the police in the state. Political parties have begun their campaigning and preparations for the elections in full swing after the Election Commission on Sunday announced the schedule for the Lok Sabha and state polls. The Lok Sabha elections will begin on April 11 and continue for over a month till May 19 across seven phases, followed by counting of votes on May 23, the Election Commission announced on Sunday, kick-starting a mega electoral battle where the BJP will pitch for a re-election of the Narendra Modi government amid the oppositions efforts for a united fight to unseat it. The polling will be held on April 11, April 18, April 23, April 29, May 6, May 12 and May 19 for 543 Lok Sabha seats across the country in which nearly 90 crore voters would be eligible to vote, Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora said. Assembly elections will also be held in Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and Odisha simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls, the CEC said. Elections for Jammu and Kashmir assembly have been deferred, the EC said citing security reasons. The state has been under Presidents Rule after the ruling alliance between the BJP and Peoples Democratic Party fell apart last year. Read all the Latest News, Breaking News and Coronavirus News here All the new Star Wars comics, graphic novels, and collections arriving in 2021 and beyond Feature Every single new Star Wars comic books arriving in the next few months that you need to get excited about GamesRadar+ is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more Sorry! This content is not available in your region New Delhi: Maruti Suzuki has now decided to discontinue the base variants of both petrol and diesel variants of its popular MPV Ertiga. The dealerships across the country has stopped accepting pre-orders for the LXI and LDI models. As per a report by CarsAndBike, the reason for such move is still unknown and the company has also declined to comment on the topic. However, inventories for the LXI and LDI variants is still in abundance in many cities. Since the launch of Maruti Suzuki Ertiga, 30 per cent of the sales figures has been for the VXI and VDI variants while the ZXI and ZDI variants along with the V variants constitute almost 50 per cent of the sales. Maruti Suzuki Ertiga comes with a 1462cc petrol engine with 77kW of power @ 6000rpm and 138 Nm of torque @ 4400rpm and 1248cc diesel engine with 66kW of power @ 4000rpm and 200 Nm of 1750rpm. The engine is mated with a 5-speed manual transmission, however, the petrol variant comes with an automatic transmission option. The front brakes of Maruti Suzuki Ertiga comes with ventilated disc brakes while at the rear it has leading and trailing drum. On safety front, Ertiga comes with dual airbag, ABS with EBD and brake assist, seat belt reminder, central locking, rear parking sensors, speed sensitive auto door lock, high speed alert system, ISOFIX child seat anchorages and front fog lamps. Prices of Maruti Ertiga will now begin from Rs 816,000 to Rs 995,000 for the petrol variants and Rs 956,000 to Rs 1090,000 for the diesel variants. All prices are ex-showroom, Delhi. New Delhi: Nissan will stop production of Infiniti cars at its factory in Sunderland, northeast England, the Japanese carmaker said Tuesday, one month after cancelling the plant's plans for the X-Trail SUV. Infiniti Motor Company, a division of Nissan, said in a statement that it would stop production of Q30 and QX30 crossover models in Sunderland by mid-2019 as part of a global restructuring, amid sector-wide turbulence partially attributed to Brexit. "Plant management will discuss any impact on the plant with employees and their representatives," the statement said. It said Infiniti cars would be electrified from 2021, while high-polluting diesel-powered models will be discontinued in response to strong consumer and regulatory demand for cleaner transport. The group will place more emphasis on growing market share in the United States and China, whilst also pooling resources more with parent group Nissan. "The company will place more focus on its SUV lineup in North America, bring five new vehicles to China over the next five years, work to improve quality of sales and residual value, and realise more synergies with Nissan Motor Company," the statement said. The Nissan division added that it aimed to transform Infiniti into a "top challenger brand" in the premium sector of the world car marketplace. The restructuring plan "will focus the brand on its largest growth markets, specifically North America and China, while withdrawing from Western Europe," the statement said. "This restructuring plan will have no impact on Infiniti's ongoing operations in Eastern Europe, Middle East and Asia, which continue to grow," it added. Infiniti aims to withdraw from Western Europe by early 2020. Carmakers are facing fallout from Britain's decision to leave the European Union, a Chinese economic slowdown and from Beijing's ongoing trade row with the United States. Japanese peer Honda has also curbed investment in Britain, and plans to close its UK car plant in southwest England in 2022 with 3,500 job losses. Britain is scheduled to leave the EU on March 29, but the nature of its exit remains shrouded in uncertainty. National industry body the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders recently revealed that the number of cars built in Britain tumbled by a fifth in January, in part due to the threat of a no-deal Brexit. New Delhi: DGCA, the aviation watchdog in India, has announce that all Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft in the country would be grounded by 4 pm. This is to cater to situations where aircraft are to fly back to India or go to maintenance facility for parking, a DGCA official was quoted as saying by ANI. The Civil Aviation Secretary has called an emergency meeting of all airlines at 4 pm today in Delhi. Boeing 737 MAX operations will stop from/to all Indian airports. Additionally no Boeing 737 MAX aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600 hrs Indian time or 1030 UTC. The time line is to cater to situations where aircraft can be positioned at maintenance facilities and international flights can reach their destinations, the DGCA statement said. The statement comes after late-night decision by the Director General of Civil Aviation to ground all Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes following the Ethiopian plane crash that killed 157 people on Sunday. "DGCA has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately. These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations," the Ministry of Civil Aviation said in a tweet. "As always, passenger safety remains our top priority. We continue to consult closely with regulators around the world, airlines, and aircraft manufacturers to ensure passenger safety," it added. Meanwhile, Boeing has said in a statement that it continues to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX 8 aircraft. Boeing boss Dennis Muilenburg also had a telephonic conversation with US President Donald Trump. Dennis reiterated to the President our position that the MAX aircraft is safe, a company spokesperson said. After the call, Trump took to Twitter and said, Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are.... ....needed, and the complexity creates danger. All of this for great cost yet very little gain. I dont know about you, but I dont want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane! The worldwide suspension of Boing 737 MAX aircraft is followed by two crashes in less than six months. A new Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 flight went down over the Java Sea last October, killing 189 people. On Sunday, another Boeing aircraft crashed in Nairobi killing 157 people. For all the Latest Business News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Two days after Ethiopian plane crash that killed 157 people onboard, India has finally banned the operations of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. This decision has directly affected SpiceJet and Jet Airways, two major airlines that have the Boeing aircraft it its fleet. Following the DGCA order, SpiceJet has also banned the Boeing aircraft. With 13 such planes in its fleet, SpiceJet may see some trouble in todays operations. In case you are also flying with SpiceJet today, you must check the status of your flight. How to check status of your SpiceJet flight? Contact SpiceJets 24x7 Customer Care Helpline Number +919871803333 /+919654003333 for urgent assistance. You can also refer to https://spicejet.com for flight status. SpiceJets Twitter team is quick to respond on Twitter. You can check with them on their official Twitter handle @flyspicejet for any doubts or concerns. The Indian aviation watchdog had banned the Boeing operations on Tuesday. "DGCA has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately. These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations," the Ministry of Civil Aviation said in a tweet. "As always, passenger safety remains our top priority. We continue to consult closely with regulators around the world, airlines, and aircraft manufacturers to ensure passenger safety," it added. However, the US aviation regulator has said that there is "no basis" for grounding Boeing's 737 MAX aircraft, one of which was involved in a crash in Ethiopia that killed 157 people. "Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft," Federal Aviation Administration chief Daniel Elwell said in a statement. "Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action." A new Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. That followed the October crash of a new Lion Air jet of the same model in Indonesia, which killed 189 people shortly after takeoff from Jakarta. Despite Boeing's assurances that the plane is safe and reliable, the European Union, Britain and India joined China and other countries that either grounded the best-selling plane or banned it from their airspace as they await the investigation into the crash. (With agency inputs) For all the Latest Business News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: SpiceJet Airlines, one of the major private players in India aviation sector, has decided to suspend the Boeing 737 MAX operations with immediate effect. The development comes after the aviation watchdog -DGCA- banned use of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. Safety and security of our passengers, crew and operations are of utmost importance to us, SpiceJet said in a brief statement on Wednesday. We are abiding by the guidelines of DGCA and suspending Boeing 737 Max flights from today onwards, the airlines said on Twitter. The Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) on Tuesday decided to ban the use of Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft by the country's airline companies, official sources confirmed to News Nation. "DGCA has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately. These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations," the Ministry of Civil Aviation said in a tweet. "As always, passenger safety remains our top priority. We continue to consult closely with regulators around the world, airlines, and aircraft manufacturers to ensure passenger safety," it added. Meanwhile, Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu said that he has directed DGCA Secretary to hold an emergency meeting with all the airlines to ensure that no inconvenience is caused to passenger. "Directed Secy to hold an emergency meeting with all Airlines to prepare a contingency plan to avoid inconvenience to passengers. While passenger safety is a zero tolerance issue, efforts are already on to minimise the impact on passenger movement as their convenience is important," he tweeted. The order basically means SpiceJet will have to immediately ground the 12-13 B 737 Max planes it has. The five such planes of Jet Airways are anyways grounded for quite some time now, from before the Ethiopian plane crash on Sunday, due to non-payment of lease rentals. In a tweet on Monday, Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu had said that he directed the DGCA to undertake safety assessment of Boeing 737-MAX planes being flown by domestic carriers. The moves follows the growing number of countries and carriers grounding the Boeing 737 MAX 8, with some of them even banning the aircraft from their airspace following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that claimed 157 lives on Sunday. Countries other than India which have banned Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft European Union, France, Germany, UK, Australia, Malaysia, China, Indonesia, Ireland, Mexico, Singapore, South, Turkey and others. The crash of Ethiopian Airlines plane came five months after another Boeing 737 MAX 8 of Lion Air crashed in Indonesia that killed 189 passengers and crew. Reports said there were similarities between the Ethiopian and Indonesian air crashes as they both occurred during take-off, involving new aircraft that had just been delivered. On the other hand, despite a wave of countries grounding the Boeing aircraft involved in another deadly crash, US authorities on Tuesday said it would not make any decision until it has more evidence. For all the Latest Business News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Washington: The top US trade negotiator suggests that the US and China are nearing an agreement that would end their trade conflict, but wouldn't commit to a specific time frame. "Our hope is that we are in the final weeks of having an agreement," US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday. But there are still major issues that need to be resolved, he said. "I can't predict success at this point." Lighthizer also said the agreement would have to include an enforcement provision that would enable the US to restore tariffs on Chinese imports if it violated provisions of the pact. That is seen as a major sticking point for Chinese officials. "We are going to have an enforceable agreement, or the president won't agree to the agreement," Lighthizer said. There have been conflicting signals from the administration about progress in the negotiations. President Trump said Friday he was confident that US could reach a deal with China, which would presumably remove all or most of the tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese imports that the Trump administration imposed last year. China retaliated by slapping duties on about $110 billion of US goods. But Trump also said Friday, "If this isn't a great deal, I won't make a deal." Sen Robert Portman, Republican from Ohio, asked Lighthizer if a deal would be reached by the end of this month. Chinese president Xi Jingping is scheduled to travel to Europe at that time and officials have hinted that he could tack on a trip to Trump's Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, to sign a pact by the end of March. Lighthizer said, "I don't know when it is going to happen." The timetable is up to President Trump, he added, and China. Lighthizer also told the senators that he and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin spoke with Chinese officials Monday night on the phone. The two sides regularly exchange drafts of a 110-120 page agreement, he said. For all the Latest Business News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: The Central University of Rajasthan has commenced the registration process for the CUCET 2019 examinations. The students who are preparing for the examination can now apply on the official website of the varsity. The candidates fulfilling the various eligibility criteria for UG / Integrated Programs, PG / B.Ed. / Integrated M.Sc B.Ed / PG Diploma Programs and MPhil /Ph.D. Programs can start applying. This year, in CUCET 2019, 04 new Central Universities have been added which are Central Universities of Gujarat, Central Universities of Andhra Pradesh, Mahatma Gandhi Central University, Bihar, Assam University, Silchar. Earlier, Central Universities Common Entrance Test (CUCET) was conducted for admission to the 10 central universities, namely of Haryana, Jammu, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kashmir, Kerala, Punjab, Rajasthan, South Bihar, Tamil Nadu, and Dr. B R Ambedkar School of Economics, Bengaluru. There are 8 stages to the CUCET 2019 Application process, namely New Registration and Login, Filling the registration form, providing academic qualification related details, upload photo & signature, provide test center preference, provide university & course details, preview the application form and final submission and fee payment. CUCET 2019 Application fee, for this year, is Rs. 800 for General/OBC candidates and Rs. 350 for SC/ST candidates. New Delhi : After days of negotiations, the Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) on Wednesday sealed a seat-sharing deal in Karnataka for the upcoming Lok Sabha Elections. According to the deal, Congress will contest on 20 seats and JD(S) field its candidates on 8 seats. There are 28 Lok Sabha seats in the state. As per the deal, JD(S) gets Hassan, Mandya, Bengaluru North, Udupi-Chikamagalur, Bijapur, Shivamogga, Tumakuru and Uttara Kannada. Currently, Tumakuru seat is represented by Congress leader SP Muddahanume Gowda. Congress will field its candidates from the remaining 20 seats -- Chikkodi, Belagavi, Bagalkot, Haveri, Raichur, Kalaburagi, Bidar, Koppal, Ballari, Davanagere, Chitradurga, Dharwad, Dakshina Kannada, Mysuru, Chamarajanagar, Bengaluru Central, Bengaluru South, Bengaluru Rural, Kolar and Chikkaballapura. The seat-sharing agreement was finalised after a meeting between Congress President Rahul Gandhi and JD-S Secretary General Danish Ali in Kochi on Wednesday evening. According to reports, the JD(S) had initially demanded 12 seats and was not willing to settle for anything less than that. On the other hand, Congress only wanted to part with six. JD(S) was keen on contesting from Mandya, Hassan, Bangalore North, Mysuru, Chikkaballapur, Tumakuru, Chitradurga, Raichur, Bidar, Bijapur, Uttara Kannada and Shivamogga. Congress was opposed to this and maintained that sharing of seats will be based on 'merit'. JD(S) supporters wanted that the party supremo HD Deve Gowda to contest from Mysore-Kodagu constituency, however, reports suggested that Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy's son Nikhil Kumaraswamy was likely to be the candidate from Mandya. There were reports earlier that the veteran leader will contest from Mandya, a long time bastion of the party, after deciding to vacate his current constituency Hassan to other grandson Prajewal Revanna, son of minister HD Revanna. Dehradun: In a major setback to the BJP, former Chief Minister BC Khanduris son Manish Khanduri is likely to join the Congress during a mega rally in Dehradun on March 16. News Nation has learnt that Khanduri junior has reached out to several BJP lawmakers in the state in a bid to solicit support for his crucial move. Manish Khanduri is known to be a close friend of Rahul Gandhi. At present, Manish Khanduri is the 'Head of News Partnerships' at Facebook, India. A graduate of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Manish Khanduri helped CNNs digital properties (CNN.com and CNN Mobile) strategize and execute a number of growth initiatives including the launch of one of the first citizen reporting tools developed by a news media company. He has worked in leadership positions in the media industry in India and the United States in the online, mobile, television and print platforms. This move is seen as Congress' way of revamping its Brahmin game plane in the hill state. Khanduri Junior will not only bring the Brahmin votes to the party, it will also help Congress in appealing the elite class as well. Interestingly, BC Khanduris daughter Ritu Khanduri Bhushan had won on BJP ticket in 2017 Assembly Elections. Some sources say that Manish joining the Congress highlights the tussle within the family. When contacted, Ritu Khanduri Bhushan simply said, Bhaiya se poochungi. She neither confirmed nor denied the speculation over her brother joining the Congress. The Uttarakhand BJP tried to downplay the news. State party president Ajay Bhatt told News Nation that, Manish Khanduri was never a BJP member. As per the News Nation poll survey in the state, the BJP is projected to win 4 seats whereas the Congress may bag 1. The other parties may win one seat each in 2019 General Elections. As far as the vote share is concerned, the BJP is likely to get 42 per cent of vote share, the Congress may get 34 per cent of votes, and the other parties may get 7 per cent of vote share, predicted News Nation Opinion Poll. New Delhi: Former chief minister and National Conference vice-president Omar Abdullah on Wednesday said the Modi government had "consciously disenfranchised" the people in Jammu and Kashmir by not holding the Assembly election on time. "Dear @narendramodi Sahib, it is good to see you appealing to famous people to increase voter turnout however at the same time your government has consciously disenfranchised people in J&K by not holding Assembly elections on time (sic)," Abdullah posted on Twitter. The former chief minister was referring to Modi's appeal to several personalities to help increase the voter turnout in the general election. "The right to choose an elected government, as opposed to being governed by a handpicked nominee of the central government, is the hallmark of the sort of democracy you are tweeting about," the NC leader said, appealing to the prime minister to give the people of the state an opportunity to exercise their democratic right by way of holding the Assembly polls. The EC announced the schedule for Lok Sabha polls to be held in seven phases across the country, including in J-K (five phases), but cited security grounds for not holding the assembly polls simultaneously. In Anantnag Lok Sabha seat, polling will be held in three phases due to security reasons. Earlier, Omar had said, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has "surrendered" before Pakistan, militants and separatists by not holding simultaneous assembly and Lok Sabha polls in Jammu and Kashmir. Omar said in 2014, J-K had Lok Sabha elections on time and assembly elections on the schedule even after the most devastating floods, but delaying them now "shows how badly the BJP & earlier the BJP-PDP mishandled J&K. "What happened to (Union Home Minister) @rajnathsingh's assurance to Lok Sabha & Rajya Sabha as well as to the all party meeting recently in Delhi that all forces would be made available for simultaneous polls, he asked in another tweet. The first phase will be held on April 11, second on April 18, third on April 23 and fourth on April 29, fifth on May 6, sixth on May 12 and seventh phase on May 19. Counting of votes for all seven phases would be done on May 23. New Delhi: Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday interacted with the students of Stella Maris College in Chennai. During his address, Rahul Gandhi touch upon various issues starting from Pulwama attack to economic policies of the Modi government. However, Rahul also sparked a major row when he said that the policies of then Atal Bihari Vajpayee government set the valley on fire. When asked about how Congress will solve the Kashmir problem if voted to power? Rahul Gandhi said that the UPA government between 2004- 2014 managed to curb terrorism. He went on to say that there was almost no problem in Kashmir when UPA was in power. Addressing women students at the Stella Maris College, Rahul Gandhi said the Congress will change the mood of the country and make people feel happy and empowered. Gandhi, who asked students to refer to him as Rahul, said the law must apply to everybody and not be applied selectively. He said this in response to a question on his brother-in-law Robert Vadra. In his informal interaction with the students, he also brought up the issue of the Rafale deal and reiterated his allegations about the pricing of the aircraft and the process. "I will be the first person to say it... investigate Robert Vadra but also investigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi," he said. Gandhi said the Congress would pass the women's reservation bill it if it comes to power. "Don't see enough women in leadership positions. You cannot have women in power in India until attitude towards them changes," he told the cheering crowd. In response to a question, he said he had learnt the lessons of humility and love from his mother Sonia Gandhi. He asked the gathering, "Did you like demonetisaton?" When the audience answered, "No", he said, "I think it's pretty clear the damage demonetisaton did. PM should have taken your advice." Gandhi, who asked the students to challenge him and "make him uncomfortable", also questioned whether the prime minister could stand in a large audience and answer people's questions. Here are the highlights of Rahul Gandhi's interaction with the students: 12:44 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Crony capatilism is the biggest hinderence for the growth of India, says Rahul Gandhi. 12:43 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In P Chidambaram determined the economic future of this country for 10 years: Congress president Rahul Gandhi. 12:41 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Modi governent has North centric view, says Congress president Rahul Gandhi. 12:41 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Today's government has North India specific focus, says PM Modi. 12:35 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In We are convinced that India is spending very little money on education. We will increase the allocation to education to 6 per cent: Rahul Gandhi. 12:33 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In There is an ideological battle in the country today and they are sharply divided. One ideology is a unifying one that believes, the country should not be dominated by any one idea. No state should feel oppressed: Congress President Rahul Gandhi. 12:26 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Government has every right to investigate every person. Law should apply to everybody equally,not selectively. PM Modi has his name in govt documents that say he is directly responsible for negotiating parallelly with Dassault on Rafale. Investigate everybody, be it Mr Vadra or PM: Rahul Gandhi. 12:25 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In How many of you have had the opportunity to ask him 'Mr Prime Minister what do you think about education? What do you think about this? What do you think about that?' Why doesn't Prime Minister have the guts to stand in front of 3000 women & be questioned by them?: Rahul Gandhi. 12:23 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In How many times have you seen the Prime Minister of India standing in the middle of 3000 women like this? How many times have you seen him standing here like this being open to any question from anybody?: Rahul Gandhi. 12:23 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In The policies of Atal Bihari Vajpayee set Jammu and Kashmir on fire, says Rahul Gandhi. 12:21 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Everybody is the asset of India, says Rahul Gandhi at Stella Maris College. 12:21 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In The other ideology represented by the current govt and PM where they believe that one idea should be imposed on our country. They have a particular view about role of women in our society, different languages and cultures are inferior to one centralising culture and idea, says Rahul Gandhi. New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday lodged a complaint to Election Commission against the West Bengal government alleging that Mamata Banerjee is misusing state machinery. We have demanded that the state of West Bengal should be declared as super-sensitive state. We've also demanded that central forces should be deployed at all polling booths, senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad said after meeting poll panel. The BJP delegation also requested the Election Commission to take action against Rahul Gandhi for levelling unverified allegations against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. We've requested EC to take action against Rahul Gandhi for levelling unverified allegations against PM yesterday in Ahmedabad, when the Model Code of Conduct is already in effect, Ravi Shankar added. While speaking to the media, Ravi Shankar Prasad said that Bengal is the only state in the country where over 100 people were killed in the local elections so deployment of central police forces at all booths is a must. We have conveyed to the EC that Bengals track record in free & fair election is very very deplorable, Prasad said. He also alleged that the state policemen act like Trinamool cadre. The BJP said officers who are close to the Mamata Banerjee government should be kept away during the general elections. Officers sit on demonstration with the chief minister. Such officers should be removed. Need an impartial election, said Ravi Shankar Prasad. New Delhi: Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday interacted with the students of Stella Maris College in Chennai. During the session, the Congress scion launched a scathing attack against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said that the central government is practicing divisive politics. But what became the highlight of the event was the faux-paus Rahul Gandhi made while talking about fugitive jeweler Nirav Modi.While speaking Congress president said "Narendra" instead of "Nirav" while talking about corrupt businessmen looting taxpayers' money. "These people ran away with thousands of crores of rupees," said Rahul Gandhi, naming Nirav Modi, accused in the Rs. 13,000 crore bank scam - and Anil Ambani."How many jobs did Mr Nirav Modi create for India? I can bet that you would be able to create more jobs with say Rs. 30 lakh the government gives you to start business." "What we want to do is we want to take the money that is going to 15-17 corrupt business people like Narendra...Not Narendra, Nirav Modi..." He paused and grinned, interrupted by huge laughter."Nirav Modi," he repeated, continuing: "... and open the banking system to entrepreneurs like yourselves so that young women and men can go to banks, take loans and create businesses. Gandhi, in his informal interaction with the students also brought up the issue of the Rafale deal and repeated his allegations about the pricing of the aircraft and the process. "I will be the first person to say it... investigate Robert Vadra but also investigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi," he said.Rahul Gandhi also added that the Congress would pass the women's reservation bill it if it comes to power. "Don't see enough women in leadership positions. You cannot have women in power in India until attitude towards them changes," he told the cheering crowd. Meerut (UP): Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Wednesday met Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad at a hospital where the Dalit leader was admitted a day earlier. Chandrashekhar Azad was taken into custody by police on Tuesday for violating the model code of conduct, officials said. Azad was detained while leading a procession that included cars and motorcycles, but was shifted to the hospital when he took ill. The code violation was allegedly over the number of vehicles in the political rally. aHe is a young man who is struggling and raising his voice, but this government is trying to suppress his voice. I am here because I like his energy and the way he raises voice for youth,a said Gandhi. Congress Gen Secy for UP (East) Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on meeting Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar in Meerut: He is a young man who is struggling & raising his voice, but this govt is trying to suppress his voice. I am here because I like his energy&the way he raises voice for youth pic.twitter.com/Sykprk3MRy a ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) March 13, 2019 Ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, the Congress has given Priyanka Gandhi the charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh. Senior Superintendent of Police Dinesh Kumar said Chandrashekhar and his supporters were detained by police at Deoband in Shaharanpur district. Chandrashekhar had told reporters in a news conference in New Delhi on Saturday that if the opposition's amahagathbandhana fails to field strong candidates against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Minister Smriti Irani,A Bhim Army would field its own strong candidates against them. New Delhi: Not designating Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as global terrorist is against the regional stability and peace, the US said on Tuesday ahead of the UN Security Council making a crucial decision in this regard. Masood has been considered as the man behind terror strikes in India. He was involved in the attack on Parliament, the Pathankot air force base, army camps in Jammu and Uri, and the latest suicide attack on CRPF in Pulwama. On February 14, at least 42 CRPF personnel were killed in one of the deadliest terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district when a Jaish suicide bomber rammed a vehicle carrying over 30 kg of explosives into their bus in Pulwama district that also left many critically wounded. More than 2,500 Central Reserve Police Force personnel, many of them returning from leave to rejoin duty in the Valley, were travelling in the convoy of 78 vehicles when they were ambushed on the Srinagar-Jammu highway at Latoomode in Awantipora in south Kashmir. Following the attack, the United States, Britain and France - have moved a resolution to designate Azhar as a global terrorist. Several previous attempts by these three countries inside the UN Security Council were blocked by China, the all-weather ally of Pakistan. China, which is one of the five veto-powered members of the Security Council, so far has been asserting that there is not enough evidence against Azhar to designate him as a global terrorist. Amidst a mounting global outrage in the wake of the Pulwama attack that led to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan, US, Britain and France hope that Beijing would act wisely and would not oppose their move this time to designate Azhar as a global terrorist. On the eve of the crucial decision by the UN Security Council, the Trump Administration on Tuesday made it clear that there is enough evidence against Azhar to designate him as a global terrorist. "Azhar is the founder and the leader of the JeM, and he meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations," State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino told reporters at his daily news conference. The JeM, he said, has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability and peace. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: All Indian air defences and radar systems are on high alert after defence radars on Tuesday night detected two Pakistani Air Force jets go supersonic 10 kilometres from the Line of Control (LoC) (within their territory) in the Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch sector, news agency ANI quoted government sources as saying. The sources said loud bangs were also heard in the area due to sonic booms. The incident came days after Pakistan violated the Indian airspace in Jammu and Kashmirs Pooch area. on February 28, two fighter jets of the Pakistan Air Force were intercepted over Poonch and Krishna Ghati sector. While there are no reports of any aerial combat, news agency ANI had reported that Pakistan also violated the ceasefire in the area. This was the second time in less than 24 hours that the PAF had crossed into the Indian airspace. Tensions between India and Pakistan flared up after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terror group killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force personnel in Kashmir's Pulwama district on February 14. India launched a counter-terror operation in Balakot on February 26. The next day, Pakistan Air Force retaliated and downed a MiG-21 and captured Indian Air Force pilot Abhinandan Varthaman. However, in the air fight, the Air Force pilot had also shot down Pakistan's F-16 fighter jet. After his capture and subsequent release, the Air Force pilot became an overnight sensation across the country. On March 10, two drones crossed over the Indian territory of Rajasthans Sri Ganganagar area. On March 9, the Indian Army shot down an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), also known as drone, Sri Ganganagar sector around 7.30 pm. This was the second such incident of the day that took place in Sri Ganganagar. Hours before that, India had shot down a Pakistani drone along the international border (IB) in Sri Ganganagar after it violated Indian airspace. This is the fifth time Pakistani drone destroyed by India along the IB since February 26 air strike on Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terror camp in Balakot inside Pakistani territory. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi : Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister and PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti has countered Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday for his remarks that the policies of the then Atal Bihari Vajpayee government set the Kashmir Valley on fire. The Congress president made this remark while interacting with the students of Stella Maris College in Chennai. "On the contrary, it was Vajpayee ji's visionary leadership and political largesse that steered Jammu and Kashmir from falling into an abyss. He left an indelible mark in people's hearts. Sad that political compulsions forceA leaders to misinform the masses for electoral gains," Mufti said while quoting News Nation's story. On the contrary, it was Vajpayee jias visionary leadership & political largesse that steered J&K from falling into an abyss. He left an indelible mark in peopleas hearts. Sad that political compulsions forces leaders to misinform the masses for electoral gains. https://t.co/8T6U8bcj9x a Mehbooba Mufti (@MehboobaMufti) March 13, 2019 Referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's policies on Jammu and Kashmir, Gandhi said these were setting fire to the state and blamed the Centre for not strategically and systematically handling terrorism. As soon as PM Modi assumed power, he made a 'huge mistake' of forging an alliance with the PDP just for the sake of power. Gandhi underscored the need to engage the people of Kashmir and bring them 'on our side.' The prime minister's policies "pushes the people away so you cannot fight terrorism with one off gestures," he said. Noting that it was "our responsibility" to stop the neighbouring country from carrying out terror strikes and save our people, Gandhi said, "It is not good enough to say that 45 CRPF men died and now we will do something." He sought to know why the attack (in Pulwama) was not stopped in the first place. Claiming that the Congress pursued a policy of systematic and strategic approach in Jammu and Kashmir, he said the NDA government had not followed a similar policy. "We actually crushed terrorism," he said and referred to the "drastic fall" in the number of soldiers and people killed during UPA's tenure. The Congress followed a multi-pronged approach when it came to power in 2004 and toed both systematic and strategic lines, he said. "And it was successful," he said adding it led to diplomatic isolation of Pakistan. Gandhi also called his party's minimum income guarantee scheme a revolutionary idea. With PTI Inputs For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: A joint party of police and security forces on Tuesday busted a hide-out in a residential house in Yaripora area of Jammu and Kashmirs Kulgam district. Police claims to have recovered arms and ammunition including grenades and live rounds. Police has registered a case in the matter and investigation has been initiated. One person Mohammad Ayoub Rather of Yaripora has been arrested in this connection, news agency ANI reported. Earlier, a major attack was averted by the Army in Poonch district of Jammu and Kashmir after a person namely Rajinder Singh was arrested with two grenades. Army handed him over to the Jammu and Kashmir for further investigation. A person who had come to attend recruitment rally in Surankote organised by Territorial Army namely Rajinder Singh Krishan (33), resident of village Dhalyote, Tehsil Kalakot, district Rajouri was apprehended near Army town gate Surankote and during search C- 90 grenade, UBGL grenade and detonators were recovered from his possession, official had said. At least 18 terrorists, including eight from Pakistan, have been neutralised in the last 21 days since the terror attack in Pulwama which had claimed the lives of 40 CRPF jawans, the Indian Army said on Monday. The Indian Army and Jammu and Kashmir Police, addressing a joint press conference, said that Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist Mudasir Ahmed Khan alias 'Mohd Bhai' the mastermind of the Pulwama attack was also killed in the encounter in Tral's Pinglish area in Pulwama district. The presser was addressed by Indian Army Lieutenant General Kanwal Jeet Singh Dhillon, IG Kashmir S P Pani and IG CRPF Zulfiqar Hussain. IG Kashmir S P Pani said that the killing of Mudasir has caused a major dent to the Jaish leadership in the Valley. He added that one of the militants killed has been identified as 'Code Khalid', believed to be Pakistani. Mudasir was among two militants killed in the encounter which lasted past midnight. Khan and an JeM operative, who officials believe is Sajjad Bhat, whose vehicle was used in the Pulwama attack, were killed in the gunfight with security forces. "In first 70 days of 2019, security forces have been successful in eliminating 44 terrorists, mainly from Jaish-e-Mohammed. Against 1629 ceasefire violations along Line of Control in 2018, this year 478 ceasefire violations have already taken place along LoC," Indian Army sources were quoted by ANI as saying. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. London: The UK's Royal Mint Tuesday unveiled a new commemorative 50 pence coin inspired by the late legendary British physicist Stephen Hawking's seminal work on black holes. Hawking, one of the world's best-known theoretical physicists who died aged 76 last year, joins the ranks of other eminent scientists such Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin to have a commemorative coin in honour of one of his greatest discoveries that black holes should not be all black. "This work, which used a tentative unification of Einstein's theory of general relativity with quantum mechanics, reported that black holes should not be completely black, instead emitting radiation, meaning they evaporate and eventually disappear," Royal Mint said in a statement. The coin, on sale in silver and gold forms for a price range between 55 and 795 pounds on the Royal Mint's website, is a nod to Hawking's research into black holes and his ability to make science accessible for all. "We are very pleased to honour Stephen Hawking on his own coin. As one of the world's most brilliant physicists he was a great ambassador for science. His popularisation of science and breakthrough work on black holes stand as great achievements and significant contributions to humanity," said Nicola Howell, director of consumer at the Royal Mint. Edwina Ellis, who designed the unusual coins, explained her inspiration behind it. "Stephen Hawking made difficult subjects accessible, engaging and relatable and this is what I wanted to portray in my design, which is inspired by a lecture he gave in Chile in 2008," Ellis said. "Hawking, at his playful best, invites the audience to contemplate peering into a black hole before diving in. I wanted to fit a big black hole on the tiny coin and wish he was still here chortling at the thought," she said. The cosmologist and author of 'A Brief History of Time' had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease in his 20s and went on to defy all predictions of his life-span as he made numerous discoveries as a wheelchair-bound scientist being able to speak only through a voice synthesiser. Hawking's daughter Lucy, who recently visited the Royal Mint with her brother Tim to see the coins, said, "It is a great privilege to be featured on a coin and I hope my father would be pleased to be alongside Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin as scientists who have made it on to money". Hawking, who died on March 14 last year, had once said that he thought his discovery that black holes were not entirely black would be his "greatest achievement". For all the Latest Science News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Islamabad: Amid ongoing tension with India following Pulwama terror attack, Pakistan on Tuesday announced that it has successfully test-fired an indigenously developed extended range "smart weapon" from JF-17 Thunder fighter jet to provide it a very potent day and night capability to engage variety of targets with pinpoint accuracy. The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) also said that experiment marked a great milestone for the country as the weapon has been developed, integrated and qualified solely through indigenous efforts of Pakistani scientists and engineers. "The successful trial has provided JF-17 Thunder a very potent and assured day and night capability to engage variety of targets with pinpoint accuracy," the PAF said on the Chinese-made aircraft. Chief of the Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Mujahid Anwar Khan lauded the efforts of scientists and engineers. He also congratulated the PAF personnel on the achievement of this monumental indigenous capability. "Pakistan is a peace loving nation but if subjected to aggression by adversary, we would respond with full force," the PAF statement quoted Anwar as saying. The exact technical details of the weapons test-fired were not shared by the PAF. The JF-17, which was previously referred as FC-1 Xiaolong, a single-engine multi-role light fighter was being jointly produced by Pakistan with China for several years with engines supplied by Russia. The trial comes amid tensions between India and Pakistan after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammed (JeM) killed 40 CRPF personnel in Kashmir's Pulwama district on February 14. Amid mounting outrage, the Indian Air Force carried out a counter-terror operation, hitting the biggest JeM training camp in Balakot, deep inside Pakistan on February 26. The next day, Pakistan Air Force retaliated and downed a MiG-21 in an aerial combat and captured Indian pilot, who was handed over to India on March 1. For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi : In yet another setback to India's bid to designate Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed's chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, China on Wednesday put a technical hold on a proposal in the UN Security Council to ban him following the Pulwama terror attack. China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, has already blocked the move thrice since 2009. Reacting on the development, Ministry of External Affairs said awe are disappointed by the outcomea and will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that terrorists involved in attacks on Indian citizens are brought to justice.A aThis has prevented action by the international community to designate the leader of (Jaish), a proscribed and active terrorist organization which has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on 14 February 2019,a MEA said. Ministry of External Affairs: We are grateful for the efforts of the Member States who moved the designation proposal and the unprecedented number of all other Security Council members as well as non-members who joined as co-sponsors. https://t.co/riSegaure5 a ANI (@ANI) March 13, 2019 MEA also said that India is grateful to all countries who supported the bid to designate Azhar as a global terrorist. aWe are grateful for the efforts of the Member States who moved the designation proposal and the unprecedented number of all other Security Council members as well as non-members who joined as co-sponsors,a tweeted ANI. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, the UK and the US on February 27, days after the Pulwama terror attack carried out by a suicide bomber belonging to the Jaish terror group that led to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan. The Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee members have 10 working days to raise any objections to the proposal moved by France, the UK, and the US. The no-objection period deadline was supposed toA end at 3 pm local time (New York) on Wednesday (12:30 am IST Thursday). China, an aall-weather allya of Pakistan, has blocked India's proposal from being adopted by the Sanctions Committee in 2009 and 2016. In 2017, Beijing also blocked a move by the US, the UK and France to designate Azhar as a global terrorist by the UN. According to the listing rules of the Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee, if no objection is received by the end of the no-objection period, the decision will be deemed adopted, meaning that Azhar will become a UN-designated global terrorist. A UNSC designation would have subjected Azhar to an assets freeze, travel ban and an arms embargo. An assets freeze under the Sanctions Committee requires that all states freeze without delay the funds and other financial assets or economic resources of designated individuals and entities. The travel ban entails preventing the entry into or transit by all states through their territories by designated individuals. Under the arms embargo, all states are required to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale and transfer from their territories or by their nationals outside their territories, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, of arms and related material of all types, spare parts, and technical advice, assistance, or training related to military activities, to designated individuals and entities. Hectic diplomatic and political parleys preceded before the closely-watched March 13 deadline as New Delhi reached out to member countries of the 15-member UNSC. In the wake of the terror attack in Pulwama, India launched a major diplomatic offensive against Islamabad, holding briefing for envoys of 25 countries, including from the five permanent UNSC members - the US, China, Russia, the UK and France - to highlight Pakistan's role in using terrorism as an instrument of state policy. India also handed over to Pakistan a dossier on aspecific detailsa of involvement of the JeM in the Pulwama terror attack. Days before the March 13 deadline on Azhar's possible listing, Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale met Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in New Delhi said in a statement that Pompeo expressed his "understanding" of India's concerns on cross-border terrorism. "They agreed that Pakistan needs to take concerted action to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure and to deny safe haven to all terrorist groups in its territory. They also agreed that those who support or abet terrorism in any form should be held accountable," the MEA said. Earlier on Wednesday, the US said Azhar meets the criteria to brand him as a "global terrorist" by the UN and China's opposition to the move to "update" the designation list went against the interests of Washington and Beijing in achieving regional stability and peace. With PTI Inputs For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Islamabad: Amidst tensions with India, Pakistan Air Force has announced successfully test-firing an indigenously developed "smart weapon" from a JF-17 Thunder fighter jet to provide it a very potent day and night capability to engage a variety of targets with pinpoint accuracy. The PAF also said experiment marked a great milestone for the country as the weapon has been developed, integrated and qualified solely through indigenous efforts of Pakistani scientists and engineers. "The successful trial has provided JF-17 Thunder a very potent and assured day and night capability to engage variety of targets with pinpoint accuracy," the PAF said on Tuesday on the fighter jet jointly manufactured by China and Pakistan. Chief of the Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Mujahid Anwar Khan lauded the efforts of scientists and engineers. He also congratulated the PAF personnel on the achievement of this monumental indigenous capability. "Pakistan is a peace-loving nation but if subjected to aggression by an adversary, we would respond with full force," the PAF statement quoted Anwar as saying. The exact technical details of the weapon test-fired were not shared by the PAF. The JF-17, which was previously referred as FC-1 Xiaolong, a single-engine multi-role light fighter was being jointly produced by Pakistan with China for several years with engines supplied by Russia. The trial comes amid tensions between India and Pakistan after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammed (JeM) killed 40 CRPF personnel in Kashmir's Pulwama district on February 14. Amid mounting global outrage, the Indian Air Force carried out a counter-terror operation, hitting the biggest JeM training camp in Balakot, deep inside Pakistan on February 26. The next day, Pakistan Air Force retaliated and downed a MiG-21 in an aerial combat and captured Indian pilot, who was handed over to India on March 1. For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Just hours before the crucial UN vote, China has hinted that it will block the resolution declaring Masood Azhar as a global terrorist. Spokesperson of Chinese foreign ministry reportedly said that "the solution that is acceptable to all sides" is necessary to find a resolution to UNSC Masood Azhar issue. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, UK and the US on February 27. "I could reiterate that China will continue to adopt responsible attitude and participate in the deliberations in the UNSC 1267 Committee," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang was quoted as saying by Press Trust of India in Beijing. "The discussions, I want to say must follow the rules and procedures of the relevant bodies and only the solution that is acceptable to all sides is conducive for resolving the issue," he added. The latest statement shows Beijing has not changed its position on Jaish-e-Mohammed chief. China, which is one of the five veto-powered members of the Security Council, so far has been asserting that there is not enough evidence against Azhar to designate him as a global terrorist. Amidst a mounting global outrage in the wake of the Pulwama attack that led to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan, US, Britain and France hope that Beijing would act wisely and would not oppose their move this time to designate Azhar as a global terrorist. On the eve of the crucial decision by the UN Security Council, the Trump Administration on Tuesday made it clear that there is enough evidence against Azhar to designate him as a global terrorist. "Azhar is the founder and the leader of the JeM, and he meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations," State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino told reporters at his daily news conference. For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Days after losing an F-16 in the aerial dogfight against India, Pakistan and China are jointly upgrading the JF-17 Thunder combat jets. According to an HT report, the development was confirmed by Yang Wei, a Chinese legislator and chief designer of the China-Pakistan co-developed fighter jet. The development and production of the JF-17 Block 3 are underway, he said. All related work is being carried out, Yang was quoted as saying by the Global Times. The JF-17 is a single-engine multi-role light fighter jet jointly developed by China and Pakistan for export. JF-17 was one of the fighter jets that was used by Pakistan during February 27 Indian airspace violation. On March 1st, addressing media, Air Vice Marshal Ravi Kapoor had said that, at around 1000 hrs IAF radars detected a large package of PAF aircraft heading towards the Indian territory towards general area Jhangar. Various media reports had that the large package of the Pakistan Air Force consisted as many as 24 fighter jets. According to an NDTV report, that Pakistans strike squad included eight F-16s, four Mirage-3 aircraft, four Chinese made JF-17 "Thunder" fighter. The development comes a day after Pakistan announced that it had successfully test-fired an indigenously developed extended range "smart weapon" from JF-17 Thunder fighter jet to provide it a very potent day and night capability to engage variety of targets with pinpoint accuracy. The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) also said that experiment marked a great milestone for the country as the weapon has been developed, integrated and qualified solely through indigenous efforts of Pakistani scientists and engineers. "The successful trial has provided JF-17 Thunder a very potent and assured day and night capability to engage variety of targets with pinpoint accuracy," the PAF said on the Chinese-made aircraft. Chief of the Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Mujahid Anwar Khan lauded the efforts of scientists and engineers. He also congratulated the PAF personnel on the achievement of this monumental indigenous capability. For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. The Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs affirmed that abidance with moderate discourse; behavior and amicable, peaceful coexistence among the peoples ensure security and stability. The Supreme Council praised all the efforts exerted to boost social security, civic peace and unity among Muslims. This came during the regular session of the council held on Tuesday chaired by Shaikh Abdulrahman bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Khalifa, President of the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs. Ural Airlines flight from the Kingdom to Moscow was forced to make an emergency landing in Baku following suspicions of an explosive device on board, it is learnt. The Russian carriers aircraft landed safely at Heydar Aliyev International Airport on Monday, according to a statement by the airport. A Ural Airlines Airbus A321 aircraft, flying from Bahrain to Moscow, made a safe landing at Heydar Aliyev International Airport on Monday at 14:56 Baku time. The reason for the emergency landing is the commander of the aircrafts suspicion of a bomb on board the plane, the statement said. Russian media said a male passenger had handed the crew a note stating the plane had an explosive device. However, the Russian Embassy said examination showed the plane, which was carrying at least 225 passengers, did not carry a bomb. Ural Airlines is based in Yekaterinburg, Russia, and operates scheduled and chartered domestic and international flights out of Koltsovo International Airport. Marouane Mahamid thought long and hard before he applied to come to the University of Bridgeport to study analytics intelligence. The U.S. was not on my map, Mahamid admitted recently. He thought about Europe so much closer to his home in Morocco. His parents worried about their son coming to the Unites States. It was such a big investment. But the one-year MBA program he was offered at UB was too good to pass up. Mahamid arrived five months ago, and said he has no regrets. He is not alone in thinking long and hard about taking the plunge and studying in America. Overall, international enrollment at U.S. colleges and universities was still higher in 2018 than it was in 2017, with more than one million students from abroad studying here. But the number of first-time undergraduates nationwide has declined by 6.6 percent, according to the Institute of International Education, which keeps track. It is not one factor its a mixture of things, Allan Goodman, president and CEO of the institute, said in releasing the latest statistics last fall. A survey conducted at 500 U.S. universities found some students were hampered from coming to America by delayed visas, some had concerns about the social and political climate and worried they would feel unwelcome. For others, cost and growing competition from other countries were things to consider. International students have more choices than ever before, Goodman said. The drop-off of international students at U.S. colleges is not universal, Goodman added. For every institution that saw a decline last year, another had an increase. Some universities have stepped up recruitment efforts, worked to boost visibility, provided more scholarships and more outreach. Others are turning to domestic students to fill the void. Bucking the trend In Connecticut, the overall number of international students slipped, according to state figures, although top institutions like Yale and the University of Connecticut continue to see solid gains. There were 11,215 international students studying at Connecticut colleges and universities in 2018, compared to 11,438 in 2017, according to state figures. At Yale, according to the state Office of Higher Education, there were 2,775 students enrolled as of the fall of 2018 up from 2,639 the year before. Those fall 2018 figures represent the largest international student enrollment in Yales history, representing 123 countries and more than 22 percent of the universitys overall population, according to the Ivy League schools website. International students continue to want to experience the extraordinary education and support they receive at the Ivy campus, said Tom Conroy, a Yale spokesman. At Yale, Ph.D. students are fully supported, receiving a full tuition scholarship, stipend, and health insurance, Conroy said. International undergraduates are eligible for the same need-based financial aid as students from the United States. The University of Connecticut, meanwhile, had 4,030 international students in the Fall of 2018, according to the state. In 2017, there were 3,851. UConns growth in international students is driven by a strong increase in new undergraduates from China, according to Stephanie Reitz, a spokeswoman for the university. Of 1,788 undergraduate students from other countries, 1,607 are from China. That includes about 400 Chinese students who came to UConn in the fall of 2018 as freshmen. Weve found that those from China have usually become interested in UConn through word of mouth, Reitz said. A decade ago, UConns total international enrollment was at 1,585. Decline at UB Contrasting those gains were dips at UB, Sacred Heart University in Fairfield and Quinnipiac University in Hamden. UB, which for decades has relied on international students as it worked to rebuild after nearly closing in 1991, still has the third highest number of student from other countries in Connecticut with 841. That, however, is 32 percent less than the 1,235 it had in the fall of 2017. The biggest decline is among international graduate students at UB. The universitys overall fall enrollment for all students, foreign and domestic, stood at 5,485 or 51 more students than it had in fall 2017. Jason Rivera, UBs new vice president for University Systems, Effectiveness and Planning, said competition from other institutions more than Trump era international rules are to blame for the international shift on his campus. Everyone is realizing (international students) benefit everyone else on campus, said Rivera. With domestic college-age students still on the decline, more universities are recruiting international students who generally have a higher ability to pay he said. Likewise, UB is focusing more aggressively on domestic students by adding programs in nursing and other fields. Our recruitment policies are the same, Rivera said. We want to keep international enrollment as strong as we can, but we are starting to look at how and where we recruit more carefully. For Mahamid, coming to study in the U.S., even for a year, was a big investment. But he said it will pay off with a good job when he returns to his country in July. I would encourage friends to come, definitely, yes, Mahamid said. So would Yasmine Bouziane, another student from Morocco, who has been at UB since August 2017. She called it the best decision of her life. An accounting major, Bouzaine said she chose the U.S. for three reasons: its cultural diversity, the reputation of a U.S. education, and the exposure she hoped to get to professional leaders. Choosing to study in the U.S. wasnt a hard decision, she said. Even getting a visa, she said, wasnt all that complicated. OK, a little overwhelming, she added. Well, nothing is easy to get you should work hard to get it, Neither UB student said they pay too much attention to what is going on in Washington. When Donald Trump became president two years ago, the warning bells were sounded at UB and other institutions that rely heavily on international students. Students have received reassuring letters from university officials ever since, telling them they will be OK. When the U.S. Supreme Court denied the constitutional challenge to the Trump travel ban in June, Yale issued a statement saying it could hurt the universitys ability to recruit the worlds most talented individuals and carry out its teaching, research and scholarship mission. Yales international student population has increased by more than 50 percent over the past decade. At Sacred Heart, where overall enrollment was up 4.9 percent last fall, spokeswoman Deborah Noack said the university doesnt consider the decline in international student population an issue. We had an uptick for a couple years, because of an influx of students from two countries (Saudi Arabia and India) and now are numbers have settled back to where they usually are, she said. DANBURY Police will discuss emerging drug trends among youth during a parent presentation on March 20. The presentation will take place in the police departments community room at 375 Main Street beginning at 6:30 p.m. Discussion topics will include vaping toxicity, the use of vaping devices for THC and marijuana, synthetic drugs, how teens are ingesting alcohol and whether cocaine and LSD are popular again. School teachers, administrators, guidance counselors and other school staff are also invited to attend. The presentation is sponsored by Stand Together Make a Difference, and a Spanish interpreter will be available. kendra.baker@hearst.com It is time for the Connecticut General Assembly and individual legislators to stand up for public safety. The legislatures Transportation Committee needs to approve and the General Assembly needs to pass a requirement for all motorcyclists in Connecticut to wear a helmet. It is supported by the majority of state residents and legislators must stop being intimidated by a vocal minority of bikers claiming personal freedom to ride without a helmet. Personal freedom to avoid wearing a helmet costs dozens of lives and millions of taxpayer dollars each year. This fact is ignored by opponents to a universal helmet law, which Gov. Ned Lamonts transition committee on public safety wisely and unanimously endorsed. We call on the governor to publicly declare his support for this law and to ask legislators to stand up for safety by approving it. Legislators stop relying on excuses, such as a crowded legislative agenda and other more important priorities. What legislative priorities could possibly be more important? This is a proposed law proven to save lives, prevent Connecticut taxpayers from footing costly medical bills and keep motorcycle crash victims suffering traumatic brain injuries that can warehouse them for a lifetime in nursing homes. A legislative body in a democratic society has both a right and obligation to speak up for safety. That time is now in Connecticut. Heres the common-sense case for saving lives of motorcycle riders. The average annual number of deaths involving motorcycle crashes in Connecticut is about 50; hospital admissions, 250; and emergency department visits, 1,700. About half of motorcyclists who crash are not wearing helmets. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, motorcycle crashes resulting in death or serious injury cost Connecticut taxpayers $157 million last year in lost productivity and health care costs. Add to this the trauma for families and others. A motorcyclists freedom to choose should not come at everyone elses expense in this state. After Louisiana reinstated its universal helmet law in 2004, helmet use soared from 42 percent to 87 percent. In California, helmet use jumped from about 50 percent before the law to 99 percent after a requirement passed along with a 37-percent decrease in motorcyclist fatalities. In states repealing laws, the obvious occurs more injuries, trauma, costs and deaths. The logic here is so very clear, yet we often hear similar comments like this one from Sen. Tony Hwang, R-Fairfield. Where do we get to a point where we (politicians) know whats better for you when you are over the age of 21, the Connecticut Post reported him saying during a hearing on the helmet bill. We, too, believe in personal liberty, but not at the cost of $157 million per year to Connecticut taxpayers. Hwang compared not wearing a helmet to other personal decisions that invite danger and he questioned the proposed exception for motorcycle riders. I dont ride. I would encourage you to wear it, the facts are indisputable that its safer to wear a helmet. But ultimately it should be your own choice, he said. This last part signals, we believe, that legislators know their argument is weak and can readily see the need for a helmet. What really steers them away, many have told us, is the fear of roaring bikers reverberating at the polls and causing them to lose an election. However, an AAA poll done just last month shows nearly 75 percent of Connecticuts citizens support a universal helmet law. Legislators have less to worry about than they think with regard to passing the universal helmet law. Lets see lawmakers stand up and be counted this session for safety. Passing this law may save a loved one of theirs someday. Without the law, will they dismiss that loved ones death as a personal freedom to die, especially if the husband, wife, child, mother, father or other person could have been saved? This is a time when courage is needed to prevent deaths. The states residents are depending on you. Dr. Brendan Campbell was vice chairman of Gov. Lamonts transition policy committee on Public Safety and also is a trauma surgeon at Hartford Hospital and Connecticut Childrens Medical Center. Garry Lapidus is director of the Injury Prevention Center at Hartford Hospital and Connecticut Childrens Medical Center. Bill Seymour is a volunteer at the Injury Prevention Center at Hartford Hospital and Connecticut Childrens Medical Center. Even in an IMAX theater, it wouldnt be easy to see the big picture when it comes to assessing the tradeoffs of luring moviemakers to Connecticut. Back when he was still mayor of Stamford and the likes of John Travolta and Uma Thurman were drawing crowds to the citys streets, former Gov. Dannel Malloy was dubious about whether generous tax credits produced a hit or a misfire for the state. More than a decade later, Connecticut has been focusing on investments in digital and television productions, as related projects can become business anchors while big screen shoots vanish faster than Robin Hood did from multiplexes in November. Some lawmakers, though, seem to believe the 2006 tax credits are due for a reboot. H.B. No. 6267 , An Act Restoring the Film and Digital Tax Media Program, has been introduced by Representatives Joseph Gresko (D-Stratford), Joe de la Cruz (D-Groton, New London), Alphonse Paolillo (D-New Haven) and Christopher Rosario (D-Bridgeport). Heres a plot twist: It has bipartisan support from lawmakers in Greenwich, which has been a primary beneficiary with the presence of Blue Sky Studios. Blue Sky is Connecticuts star, producing hits such as Ice Age, Rio, The Peanuts Movie and Dr. Seuss Horton Hears a Who! and enticing young wannabe filmmakers into the digital animation industry. Its doubtful Blue Sky would have moved from White Plains, N.Y., in 2009 without the 30-percent credits, and its massive success was unpredictable. Thats the kind of gamble that makes the credits irresistible to some lawmakers. Back when the state was promoting the cause in 2007, Jim Amann was speaker of the House of Representatives. He moved on to become a lobbyist representing hundreds of filmmakers in hopes one would become the next James Cameron and open a studio in the Nutmeg State. Theres a lot to like about reviving this franchise. Connecticut could do with some starry-eyed residents and tourists, and we support the notion that using towns and cities as temporary sets can boost several local businesses, including housing, dining and hardware stores. But Connecticut has to rewrite the script. The original initiative was polarizing for a few reasons. It didnt help that most of the films were duds (three from Robert DeNiro alone). The bigger issue is whether the state gets a return on its investment. Its impossible to do precise accounting, given the potential for trickle-down benefits. More concerning was that the original 30-percent credit was sometimes enough to offset a productions tax liability. There was also a provision that permitted producers to sell unused credits to other entities. Lawmakers need to read such fine print. We like the idea of promoting the growth of the film industry in Connecticut. It would be naive not to recognize film as one of Americas most successful exports. Connecticut colleges have launched film-making programs, and the state should nurture career pathways that dont lead elsewhere. That would be a Hollywood ending. In response to Red Jahnckes column on climate change published March 10, I think its time Mr. Jahncke and his fellow feet-draggers reviewed a little history. Last August, Nathaniel Rich published an article in The New York Times Magazine documenting 40 years of denial, ignorance and inaction on climate change. This inaction has led to a special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) written not by a few crazy politicians, but authored by 74 top scientists from around the world, and featuring contributions from 133 additional scientists. The report states that we face extreme disruption from climate change unless we begin now not a few years down the road but now to lower the runaway emissions of carbon dioxide down to zero by 2050. Even though President Trump will undoubtedly continue to deny the obvious on climate change until he has to use scuba gear to get to Mar-a-Lago, there are a few right wingers like Jahncke who appear willing to admit climate disruption. And what are they willing to do about it? Well, read through Jahnckes commentary. Do you see any proposal for action? Neither do I. Not one. Its just another excuse to score political points by bashing the Green New Deal and its authors and supporters. So what is this Green New Deal they fear so much? It is not a proposal for Communist takeover, as so many would have us believe, but a translation of the recommendations of the IPCC scientific report into real policies. The IPCC states a pathway limiting global warming to 1.5-degrees C with no or limited overshoot would require rapid and far reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and buildings), and industrial systems. These systems transitions are unprecedented in terms of scale, but not necessarily in terms of speed Back in the 1990s, I might have agreed with conservatives that moderate plans like carbon taxes could halt climate change. However, now, we see fires in California destroying whole towns and unprecedented flooding from hurricanes. Even our own state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection says on its web page on statewide tree damage in Connecticut that several years of severe storms and drought, resulting from our changing climate, and major insect infestations have left many damaged or dead trees in forests and residential areas. Climate disruption is here now, and baby steps are no longer enough to cure 40 years of denial and inaction. Of course, Jahncke will argue that we dont need to do much of anything because China is pretty much responsible for carbon dioxide pollution. Really? According to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance article In January, 2018, just over half of the entire worlds 2017 investment in solar power was made by China. Chinese investment in all the clean energy technologies was up 24 percent setting a new record. Meanwhile, Climate Action Tracker has reported that China is overachieving its target for reduction in coal burning. China is a large and developing country that still has substantial emissions and a long way to go, but its government is implementing significant policies to fight climate change, unlike, say, the Trump Administration. People have compared the Green New Deal to the moon landing goal. Lets remember that moon landing a second. In 1962, President Kennedy went to even-then red state Texas to announce that, at a time when US astronauts had completed only six orbits around the earth, we would land men on the moon in only a little more than seven years. The howls of criticism were tremendous. The setbacks including loss of astronaut life were daunting. And yet, to borrow a phrase from the current womens movement, we persisted, and did so quite boldly. Now, I think the lack of spirit and boldness over the ensuing six decades is one of our most serious problems in the US. Well, I can only applaud Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Markey, who introduced the policy statement; I also salute all the Green New Deal co-sponsors, including Rep. Hayes and our two senators, for standing up and reviving that spirit to fight one of the biggest challenges we have ever faced. As for Mr. Jahncke I suggest he go deeper into his 60s record collection and find Joni Mitchells A Big Yellow Taxi: Dont it always seem to go That you dont know what youve got Till its gone They paved paradise Put up a parking lot. James Hilbert is a resident of Bethel. In an executive order last week, President Donald Trump ended a requirement for the government to tell the public its official count of civilians killed by U.S. military and CIA lethal strikes in countries where we are not at war. The effect is that our government will continue killing people abroad with less oversight and no accountability. The reporting requirement, put in place by President Barack Obama, had many shortcomings, but it was still valuable. We know, for example, that the government says 64 to 116 civilians were killed by strikes in noncombat zones between 2011 and 2015, though credible media and human rights groups say the actual number is likely much higher. Trump has now also ended the government's commitment to explaining these discrepancies. The Trump administration justified its decision to end such reporting by arguing that transparency reports are duplicative because the military is required to issue similar reports. But that's not completely true, as military figures won't include civilian deaths from CIA strikes. Some in Congress reacted with alarm to Trump's order, and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., announced that he will seek to reimpose the transparency requirement with legislation. This is a necessary step but only an initial one, because this country desperately needs to reckon with and seek an end to the president's claimed unilateral authority to kill terrorism suspects in parts of the world where we are not at war. Proponents argue that these airstrikes reduce risk to U.S. forces and keep the United States from being drawn into actual or worsening wars. But without public accountability about the costs and consequences of the program, we can't take that at face value. Nor can we accept an equation that minimizes the deaths of civilians or ignores perspectives from people in affected countries. It's encouraging that some former government officials and policymakers of both parties recognize that the U.S. lethal program is morally and legally fraught. Yet virtually all policy proposals to fix it start with a desire to maintain the president's authority to order the killings, and they are always defined by counterterrorism, even though what's happening on the ground is often domestic or regional conflicts unrelated to terrorism against the United States. When the U.S. drone program began with a 2002 strike in Yemen, it was supposed to be exceptional and limited, with "kill lists" targeting alleged high-level militants. But as lethal strikes expanded in intensity and geographic scope, so, too, did the categories of people who could be killed. Our government's desire to maintain the option of lethal force resulted in more killings based on suspicion and without any judicial process. And the CIA essentially morphed into a paramilitary killing organization, without even the imperfect oversight that is in place for the military. Those affected by these strikes may be faceless to the American public, but they are not to the victims and their families. Most of them reside in majority-Muslim countries, where the programs are understandably resented and contribute to destabilization. Any reckoning for a lethal program must focus on such costs in human life, taxpayer money and the rule of law. But the government intentionally makes this difficult by limiting information to the public. We know lethal strikes have taken place in Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Niger and elsewhere - all without congressional authorization or adequate oversight. But we do not know exactly how many civilians and terrorism suspects have been killed since 2002, though independent groups estimate that many thousands have died, including many hundreds of civilians - at least. Nor do we know the secret rules Trump uses to determine who will die. By the end of the Obama administration, which vastly expanded the lethal program, lawsuits forced the government to disclose the legal and bureaucratic infrastructure that it created to justify killings in "outside areas of active hostilities." International law prohibits the use of lethal force against civilians outside of armed conflict, except in very narrow circumstances: as a last resort to prevent an imminent attack. And the Constitution prohibits killing citizens without due process. But the Obama administration expanded its lethal program under a cherry-picked mishmash of legal frameworks with a gloss of policy safeguards aimed at limiting harm to civilians. The Trump era has made clear just how vulnerable policy limits are and how dangerous it is when a president claims legal authority to kill in secret. In 2017, Trump lifted a key policy constraint limiting lethal strikes to "high-level militants" who pose "a continuing and imminent threat to Americans." He also reportedly declared that parts of Yemen and Somalia were exempt from the meager remaining limits. The result? The United States is killing more low-level suspects, regardless of whether the government has reason to believe they pose a threat to the United States. The president also gave the CIA more authority to carry out strikes, and the agency embraced it by building a new base for drones in Niger. This is exactly the opposite of what should be happening. Trump may have pledged to end "endless wars," but he and other politicians have instead doubled down on armed actions and have repudiated diplomatic solutions. As a result, more civilians will die, and the instability and violence our government claims to abhor will continue. Now, more than ever, we need Congress to act. Only with greater pressure can we end our nation's deadly addiction to a war-based foreign policy. - - - Shamsi is director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 13) After the Commission on Elections (Comelec) junked the Otso Diretso's request for it to officiate a debate between them and the administration-aligned Hugpong ng Pagbabago (HNP), one of their candidates is calling on the poll body to require candidates to attend an upcoming debate hosted by CNN Philippines. "Comelec, you're a partner of CNN, April 27, motu proprio. Exercise your powers to ask these candidates to attend or else," former Bangsamoro Transition Commission member Samira Gutoc told CNN Philippines' The Source on Wednesday. Gutoc said the Comelec should no longer be concerned about resources for the senatorial debate as the TV network will be shouldering it. The Comelec en banc rejected Otso Diretso's request for a debate against HNP as they said it will be equivalent to giving preferential treatment to some senatorial candidates and that it is "practically impossible" for the poll body to hold a meaningful debate involving all 62 Senate bets. Comelec chair Sheriff Abas earlier told CNN Philippines' The Source that the poll body is unlikely to hold an official debate for the senatorial elections as they no longer have time and resources for it. Abas, however, said they would support TV networks which would host their own debates. Under the Fair Elections Act, it is only optional for the Comelec to require national television and radio networks to sponsor at least three national debates for presidential candidates and at least one national debate for vice presidential candidates. CNN Philippines Multi-platform Writer Xave Gregorio contributed to this report. "The recent escalation of conflict in the area has already displaced thousands of families, including children, who lack food and medicine. "Since the beginning of March, in Hajjah alone, more than 37,000 people have been displaced within the governorate an estimated half are children. Families are sleeping rough or seeking shelter in public buildings. "The violence has further deteriorated the health system and sanitation services in the area, increasing the risk of cholera/acute watery diarrhoea spreading. Since January, 6,322 suspected cases have already been reported. "The active fighting is shrinking humanitarian access in the region, cutting off access for weeks at a time. Despite these challenges, UNICEF continues to deliver assistance to displaced communities and nutrition treatment for children suffering from severe acute malnutrition. "No matter what measures are in place, no matter how much assistance is delivered, the situation will only change for children when the conflict stops. Every day, more children die in Yemen because of this senseless war. "UNICEF reiterates its plea to all parties to the conflict to abide by their obligations under international humanitarian law and avoid indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks in highly populated areas. "UNICEF urges all parties to put an immediate end to violence and allow humanitarian access to children and their families wherever they are, and first and foremost, to keep children out of harm's way!" About UNICEF UNICEF has saved more children's lives than any other humanitarian organization. We work tirelessly to help children and their families, doing whatever it takes to ensure children survive. We provide children with healthcare and immunization, clean water, nutrition and food security, education, emergency relief and more. UNICEF is supported entirely by voluntary donations and helps children regardless of race, religion or politics. As part of the UN, we are active in over 190 countries - more than any other organization. Our determination and our reach are unparalleled. Because nowhere is too far to go to help a child survive. For more information about UNICEF, please visit unicef.ca. For updates, follow us on Twitter and Facebook or visit unicef.ca. SOURCE UNICEF Canada For further information: To arrange interviews or for more information please contact: Marie-Helene Bachand, Communications Manager, UNICEF Canada, (416) 482-4444 ext. 8425/mobile: 514 232-4510, [email protected] Related Links http://www.unicef.ca OTTAWA, March 12, 2019 /CNW/ - As Canada's Chief Public Health Officer, I am very concerned to see vaccine-preventable diseases, particularly those as serious and highly contagious as measles, making a comeback in Canada and around the globe. From my perspective, even one child dying of measles is unacceptable. In an era where, thanks to the success of vaccines, we are no longer familiar with these dangerous illnesses, some parents have come to fear the prevention more than the disease. Seeds of doubt are often planted by misleading, or worse, entirely false information being spread in campaigns that target parents on social media and the internet. It is no wonder some parents are confused and concerned. Parents want only the best for their children, always. Some parents may question, hesitate or delay vaccinating their children for a variety of reasons, but they all want to protect their children from harm. Yet over the past few weeks, we have heard Canadian parents speak to the media about watching their children suffer through a vaccine-preventable disease. Some have spoken of difficult recoveries that have taken weeks or months, sometimes leaving permanent disabilities, and heartbreakingly, some have spoken about losing their children. Sadly, as a paediatric infectious disease specialist, I have witnessed the devastating effects of vaccine preventable diseases on the lives of children and their families. Healthcare providers are on the front lines of this battle between truth and misinformation. We must support parents as they tease apart fact from fiction. How we talk to parents who have questions about vaccines can have a direct effect on improving their confidence and supporting them in getting their children vaccinated. I urge my fellow healthcare provider colleagues to take the time to answer the questions of concerned parents, and in turn, I urge parents and guardians to ask questions and seek out trusted and reliable sources of information to help guide them. To that end, I am including links to some top Canadian websites providing credible information on vaccines. Keeping Canadians, especially our children, healthy and free from disease is our shared priority. In the weeks and months ahead, I will work with partners and stakeholders to continue to address the misinformation around vaccines. The health of our children and of our country deserves nothing less. Dr. Theresa Tam Chief Public Health Officer of Canada Associated links The Public Health Agency of Canada Immunize Canada Canadian Paediatric Society SOURCE Public Health Agency of Canada For further information: Contacts: Media Relations, Public Health Agency of Canada, 613-957-2983, [email protected]; Public Inquiries: 613-957-2991, 1-866-225-0709 ANSONIA One of the states smallest cities will honor Martin Luther King Jr. with a large bust outside its city hall. Thats the location the Board of Aldermen unanimously approved Tuesday night on a motion made by Chicago Rivers, a fifth ward black aldermen. This is a high profile spot, said Mayor David Cassetti. We get about 14,000 people coming into City Hall every year and another three and a half million driving and walking down Main Street. Its going to be seen. The nearly three-foot high bust set on a six-foot black granite base in front of City Hall is a testament to cooperation, said David Gatison, chairman of the Deacons Ministry at Macedonia Baptist Church and one of the MLK Bust committee members. In a world with so much confusion, diversity and hatred, this shows a community can put aside its differences and work together respecting each other for the betterment of all, he said. The bust was created by Vasil Rakaj, a sculptor with the Valley Arts Council. Rakajs works have been displayed in the White House, Buckingham Palace and the Vatican. His Martin Luther King Jr. bust is housed in the Ansonia Armory until its formal unveiling later this spring so he can build the concrete base and footings for the finished likeness. The last thing we want to do is rush the project and have it turn into a leaning tower, Gatison said. The concrete will need time to cure and harden in warmer weather than we have been having. Cassetti commended the MLK Bust Committee members, the Ansonia Veterans Committee and the Ansonia Fire Department for working together to select an appropriate site. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the type of leader that we should all strive to be, Cassetti told the Aldermen Tuesday night. I am ecstatic to know his face will meet visitors at the doors of Ansonia City Hall now and for generations. A suggestion to place the bust in Veterans Memorial Park adjacent to City Hall was met with opposition from Veterans groups last year. At that time, Jack Granatie, commander of Gordon-Visselli American Legion Post 50, explained his organization opposed the location of the bust in a park set aside to honor the memory of fallen veterans. The addition of a non-veteran, non-military commemoration will pave the way for future non-veteran monuments, Granatie explained to the aldermen last November. We contend that Veterans Park was not intended as a catch-all park for well-deserving people, organizations and causes, and that the only new monuments should be veteran-related. Several committee members on hand for the event included the Rev. Alfred Smith Jr., pastor , and Bruce Goldson, a minister of Macedonia Baptist Church; the Rev. Edward Young, pastor of St. Peter and St. Paul Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church; and Diane Stroman and David Morgan, executive director of TEAM Inc., the Valleys community action agency. Cassetti said there will be an annual ceremony honoring King every April 4, the anniversary of his assassination in Memphis, Tenn. We want to get all the Valley schools involved in this, said Morgan, who heads TEAM. In the meantime, he said, the bust committee is hoping to raise about $27,000 in preservation funds for the monuments upkeep. Weve got about $10,000 to start it, he said. NEW HAVEN The Board of Education voted to revive its dormant school change initiative Tuesday, with a priority on evaluating the merits of adopting a portfolio model, giving school-based leaders a greater measure of autonomy. The motion to resume the work of the Joint Reform Committee was coupled with a request that the committee study the feasibility of portfolio schools to report to the board, as well as the formation of a special committee to review the Joint Reform Committees recommendations. I think its paramount that we do it in a thoughtful and strategic way, said Superintendent of Schools Carol Birks, who said she had been discussing the portfolio model since she interviewed for the job in 2017. Although four of five members present were on board with the resolution, member Ed Joyner initiated multiple exchanges expressing his disapproval. The rollout of the resolution, he said, appeared rushed, and he fears the system has been fractured since the initial departure of former schools chief Reginald Mayo in 2013. Its really a top-of-the-system reform, when really we need to start at the bottom and move up, he said. Im sure there are good intentions behind this, but were going through some really chaotic territory now and I think all that does is add more to a very difficult set of tasks we have to overcome in the next couple years. Board President Darnell Goldson said the Joint Reform Committee is mentioned in the collective bargaining agreement between the school board and the teachers union. Its something were supposed to be doing in the first place, he said. Mayor Toni Harp added the district had already adopted a portfolio mindset in theory during the initial thrust of the school reform initiative from 2009. Several members of the community expressed their discontent with the resolution. Connecticut College Assistant Professor of Education Lauren Anderson, who lives in the city, said the portfolio model has historically led to the inclusion of private interests into public education, as schools move away from central, democratic governance. It puts schools in competition with each other, she said, and the advisory committee is a committee at risk of doing everything and hence accomplishing nothing. Parent Sarah Miller also emailed concerns to board members, adding that the teaching and learning committee where the resolution originated was being treated as ancillary to the districts work, and the resolution itself is better suited to the committee for governance. If we are to gather diverse stakeholders around a focus subject, why not choose the teaching and learning of our kids, which is at the heart of the districts mission, rather than portfolio strategy? she wrote. After the meeting, Birks who will be chairwoman of the Joint Reform Committee and will develop a pilot program at a handful of schools to assess the viability of the portfolio model said she expects the first phase of the strategic planning process will take at least six months. Despite community concerns the resolution was rushed, she assured the role would be handled methodically and intentionally. brian.zahn@hearstmediact.com The Defense Department has approved a new policy that will largely bar transgender troops and military recruits from transitioning to another sex, and require most individuals to serve in their birth gender. The memo outlining the new policy was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, and it comes after a lengthy and complicated legal battle. It falls short of the all-out transgender ban that was initially ordered by President Donald Trump. But it will likely force the military to eventually discharge transgender individuals who need hormone treatments or surgery and can't or won't serve in their birth gender. The order says the military services must implement the new policy in 30 days, giving some individuals a short window of time to qualify for gender transition if needed. And it allows service secretaries to waive the policy on a case-by-case basis. Under the new rules, currently serving transgender troops and anyone who has signed an enlistment contract by April 12 may continue with plans for hormone treatments and gender transition if they have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. But after April 12, no one with gender dysphoria who is taking hormones or has transitioned to another gender will be allowed to enlist. And any currently serving troops diagnosed with gender dysphoria after April 12 will have to serve in their birth gender and will be barred from taking hormones or getting transition surgery. The memo lays out guidelines for discharging service members based on the new policy. It says a service member can be discharged based on a diagnosis of gender dysphoria if he or she is "unable or unwilling to adhere to all applicable standards, including the standards associated with his or her biological sex, or seeks transition to another gender." It adds that troops must be formally counseled and given a chance to change their decision before the discharge is finalized. In a statement Tuesday night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the ban "cowardly." "The President's revival of his bigoted, disgusting ban on transgender service members is a stunning attack on the patriots who keep us safe and on the most fundamental ideals of our nation," Pelosi said. "The President's years-long insistence on his cowardly ban makes clear that prejudice, not patriotism, guides his decisions." Palm Center, a California research institute, protested the new policy Tuesday. Director Aaron Belkin said, "The Trump administration is determined to bring back 'don't ask, don't tell,' a policy that forced service members to choose between serving their country and telling the truth about who they were." The final legal injunction blocking the new policy was lifted last week, allowing the Pentagon to move forward. But restrictions on transgender troops are likely to face ongoing legal challenges and have been slammed by members of Congress as discriminatory and self-defeating. The memo was signed by David L. Norquist, who is currently serving as the deputy defense secretary. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., said in February that barring service by transgender individuals "would cost us recruits at a time when so few Americans are willing to serve." She spoke at a hearing in which transgender troops testified that transitioning to another sex made them stronger and more effective members of the military. Until a few years ago service members could be discharged from the military for being transgender, but that changed under the Obama administration. Then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced in 2016 that transgender people already serving in the military would be allowed to serve openly. And the military set July 1, 2017, as the date when transgender individuals would be allowed to enlist. After Trump took office, however, his administration delayed the enlistment date and called for additional study to determine if allowing transgender individuals to serve would affect military readiness or effectiveness. A few weeks later, Trump caught military leaders by surprise, tweeting that the government won't accept or allow transgender individuals to serve "in any capacity" in the military. "Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail," he wrote. His demand for a ban triggered a legal and moral quagmire, as the Pentagon faced the prospect of throwing out service members who had willingly come forward as transgender after being promised they would be protected and allowed to serve. And as legal battles blocked the ban from taking effect, the Obama-era policy continued and transgender individuals were allowed to begin enlisting in the military a little more than a year ago. An estimated 14,700 troops on active duty and in the Reserves identify as transgender, but not all seek treatment. Since July 2016, more than 1,500 service members were diagnosed with gender dysphoria; as of Feb. 1, there were 1,071 currently serving. According to the Pentagon, the department has spent about $8 million on transgender care since 2016. The military's annual health care budget tops $50 billion. Last year, all four service chiefs told Congress that they had seen no discipline, morale or unit readiness problems with transgender troops serving openly in the military. But they also acknowledged that some commanders were spending a lot of time with transgender individuals who were working through medical requirements and other transition issues. The five transgender troops who testified in February said their medical transitions took anywhere from four weeks to four months and they did most of it on their own time. All said they were fit to return to deploying afterward. ANSONIA Now that spring has nearly sprung, Mayor David Cassetti has hit the downtown streets to kick off another round of daily walks with the public. Cassetti began his Walk and Talk with Mayor Cassetti this week as a way to continue his exercise routine and to interact with residents to discuss whatevers on their minds. The 58-year old Cassetti kicked off the public walks in spring 2018 as a way to help him kick the habit. A smoker for 20 years, the father of five wanted to find a healthy way to keep his mind off smoking. He decided to let residents in on his journey to better health and wellness. To date, Cassetti has managed to quit cigarettes altogether, and hasnt had one since summer of 2017, he said. This weeks spring-like temperatures actually prompted Cassetti to get started on his winter thaw a bit early. On Monday, Cassetti took a stroll downtown with resident Jose Navarette and Aldermanic President Lorie Vaccaro. I like to be out and about with our residents, said Cassetti. I think its important for them to see me exercising and also talking to them about what we can do together to improve our city. I feel like Im doing my job best when I connect with our residents. There is a real sense of accomplishment when I can talk to them one on one. Cassetti said many of last years walks were quite memorable, with residents raising various issues like how they like the idea of a new police headquarters coming to Main Street, inquiring about what other restaurants or stores might be moving in and what the budget season looks like. Its the residents I enjoy hearing from the most, but I will tell you, I was very grateful for a walk and talk with Deputy Commissioner David Kooris and his staffs visit from the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, Cassetti noted. Its not until you get a chance to walk in a community that you can fully understand the challenges we face, especially with respect to our Brownfield properties. He (Kooris) seemed to really understand and care about our city and that has helped us secure grant funds for assessment, roads, design, remediation and other things vital to downtown redevelopment. I would love to have him (Kooris) join my staff and I for another walk and talk. Cassetti is encouraging residents to join him on these walks. Anyone interested in joining Cassetti for a walk and talk can contact his office at 203-736-5900 for available times. Analysis How inflation will upend business models Countries around the world are seeing rising inflation for some at historic highs. Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands and retailers want to strategize and advance in this disruptive environment. A Union City man is facing multiple charges related to him threatening people with violence in New Jersey and across the country via anonymous calls where he referenced people of Jewish and African-American descent, authorities said. Between December and February, officials from prosecutors office investigated a pattern of phone calls placed to government officials and a private business in Edgewater, the Bergen County Prosecutors Office said in a release. Steve Ortiz The unknown caller was actually Steve Ortiz, 45, of Union City, according to prosecutors, and he is charged with bias Intimidation, false public alarm, terroristic threats and stalking. An investigation by the prosecutors office Cyber Crimes Unit determined that Ortiz made the calls to victims in River Edge and West New York, as well as New York, North Carolina and New Mexico. Detectives determined that Ortiz drove across the United States making about 25 such calls to victims in and around Bergen County from December through February. Ortiz was arrested in Hicksville, N.Y., on Feb. 27, and transported to Bergen County jail on Tuesday. He will be held until a pending detention hearing. The F.B.I., U.S. Marshals, and multiple police departments across New York, North Carolina and Montana assisted with the investigation. Taylor Tiamoyo Harris may be reached at tharris@njadvancemedia.com. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters. When Gov. Phil Murphy proposed his 2020 budget last week it revealed Lakewood School District would get a massive 63 percent hike in state funding, by far the largest of any district in the state. But what state officials didnt make clear is that the additional $14.9 million proposed for Lakewood is special treatment for the controversial district that isnt called for in the states school funding formula. An NJ Advance Media analysis of state data found Murphys administration wants to give Lakewood more money than the district technically qualifies for, while slashing funding to nearly 200 other districts. The state pumped extra money into Lakewoods preliminary funding for special education and transportation without increasing that aid for most other districts. And it proposed giving millions in new taxpayer money to a district long criticized for enormous public costs tied to private school students, primarily in Jewish yeshivas. As much as the extra money might be necessary in cash-starved Lakewood, which has relied on state loans to buoy its local school budget, the way Murphys administration quietly added it to the states budget raised concerns. The (state) really needs to explain publicly whats going on here, said David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center, a nonprofit that closely monitors school funding. I would hope that the Legislature examines this in detail and gets answers. Murphys office referred comment to the state Department of Education, which confirmed its proposing Lakewood receives supplemental aid for transportation and special education because of the large number of private school students getting those public services. (The states main funding formula considers enrollment, demographics and a communitys ability to pay taxes.) But the department declined further comment, citing an ongoing court case over funding for the district. Michael Inzelbuch, Lakewoods school board attorney, applauded the decision, which he said should help the district avoid needing another loan. Lakewoods state funding would increase from $23.5 million to $38.4 million. This is the first time in many years that there appears to be a realization that Lakewood, in fact, does not fit the funding formula, Inzelbuch said. There is a recognition and a proactive position that, 'lets get these people money before they go broke." Lakewood, an Ocean County township now defined by its booming Orthodox Jewish population, has about 6,000 public school students compared to more than 30,000 students in private schools, mostly Jewish yeshivas. State law requires districts to provide busing to private schools, within certain parameters, and more than 20,000 Lakewood children qualify, Inzelbuch said. The district has also controversially labeled hundreds of students as special education and placed them in private schools, leading to skyrocketing special education costs for the district. In recent years, Lakewoods school budget has been decimated by escalating state-mandated costs for transportation and special education of private school students that tally more than $50 million. A series of state loans totaling more than $40 million have kept the district afloat. The states newest budget maneuver is undoubtedly better for Lakewood than giving it another loan, which could take years to repay. And it comes amid a legal challenge filed by a district teacher claiming Lakewood cant provide students a quality education without more money. The state asked a judge to dismiss that case, but the judge has allowed it to move forward. But the states inclusion of extra money still leaves some observers questioning why, especially given how much of that money eventually goes to benefit privately educated students. At the same time when New Jersey is reducing funding to nearly 200 districts, saying they were previously getting money they weret actually owed according to the formula, Murphys administration low-key proposed giving Lakewood millions in extra funding without any public discussion. Thats the style of school funding that has historically left school districts with unfair aid, said Jeffrey Bennett, a representative of the Fair Funding Action Committee, which fought to get more money for underfunded districts. Continuing that pattern now jeopardizes the equity of the states school funding moving forward, he said. Whats also troubling is the diversion of more public money to Lakewoods private school students without any explanation for how the funding increases were calculated, Sciarra said. The (education) department needs to explain to the public how it came up with these increases, Sciarra said. What are they designed to accomplish? And how is this going to benefit, over the long haul, the districts budget for pubic school students? Regardless of the method, the money is desperately needed, Inzelbuch said. Lakewood is still in the early stages of paying back its state loans and cant sustain taking on a new loan every year, he argued. The extra state money proposed in Murphys budget will allow the district to preserve programs for public school students that could have been cut to pay for mandatory costs associated with private school students, he said. This is a big win for Lakewood, Inzelbuch said. So big, in fact, that the proposed increases for Lakewood dwarf all other school districts. Only two other districts, Atlantic City and Woodbridge, are set to gain more than 20 percent in state aid. Lakewood, however, would actually be seeing a slight decrease in aid if not for the extra special education and transportation funding, two categories in which many districts were flat funded. Lakewood accounts for nearly 100 percent of the Murphy administrations proposed $6.1 million increase in transportation aid. Loch Arbour got $275 more and every other district was flat funded. Of the $31.4 million increase in special education aid, more than quarter would go to Lakewood ($8.9 million). No other districts would see more than a $800,000 increase. Adam Clark may be reached at adam_clark@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on twitter at @realAdamClark. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters. UPDATE: Joe Giudice of RHONJ transferred from prison to ICE facility to await deportation appeal Joe Giudice, husband of Real Housewives of New Jersey star Teresa Giudice, is set to complete his 41-month sentence in federal prison on Thursday. But that doesnt mean hes a free man. Giudice wont get to go home to his family because he is facing deportation to Italy. In October, a judge decided that Giudice, who is in a federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, should be deported to his native country after the completion of his sentence. Giudice was born Giuseppe Giudice in Saronno, Italy, outside Milan. He moved to the United States when he was 1 but never became a citizen. Permanent residents who commit crimes of moral turpitude are eligible for deportation. In 2014, the Giudices, who live in the Towaco section of Montville in Morris County, were sentenced in federal court after pleading guilty to bankruptcy fraud and conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud. Teresa was sentenced to 15 months in prison and was ordered to serve her time first so their daughters could have one parent at home. Teresa served just shy of a year in 2015, while Joe reported to prison to start his sentence of more than three years in 2016. Giudice, 46, has appealed his deportation order, but he does not get to wait at home while the appeal is pending. Intead, he will likely be transferred to the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, says Derek DeCosmo, an immigration lawyer in Camden. Whats on appeal is whether or not his conviction is an aggravated felony for immigration purposes," DeCosmo says. If Giudices crimes are determined to constitute an aggravated felony under federal immigration law, deportation is all but a certainty, he says. On Monday, Joe Gorga, Teresas brother, who also has a home in Montville, told Good Day New York" that Joe would be transferred to ICE custody upon his release from prison. He is getting out, but ICE is picking him up, said Gorga, 39, whose wife, Melissa, is another main cast member on the show. Lawyers for Giudice have not said when such a transfer might happen. While DeCosmo says it normally takes anywhere from three to five months or more for an update on such an appeal, he says the outcome of Giudices appeal may arrive sooner because he will already be in custody. As of Monday, the website for the Bureau of Prisons listed Giudices release date as unknown." Just days prior, his release date was listed as March 14. Once in ICE custody, Giudice could be transferred to other facilities such as an ICE detention center in Elizabeth, DeCosmo says. Jerald Gonzales, Joe Giudices immigration lawyer, did not respond to requests for comment. The Giudices, who were first introduced to the public on RHONJ in 2009, have four daughters, ages 10 to 18 Audriana, Milania, Gabriella and Gia. Teresa Giudice has said it would be difficult for the family to move to Italy, with her daughters not knowing how to speak Italian and her eldest, Gia, heading to college. The reality star has also decided that she will not pursue a long-distance relationship with her husband, meaning they will split up if he is deported. Teresa, 46, made her feelings known about the matter during a recent episode of RHONJ. Im not doing a long-distance relationship," she told Bravos Andy Cohen during a reunion episode of the show. You know, I want somebody with me every day and I know exactly what happens," Giudice said. Like, you know, Im sure hell be with other women. You know, it happens. We do the long distance thing, its not going to work. Like, Ill be like, bye-bye.'" What are Joe Giudices chances for returning to the U.S. if he is deported, barring a pardon from the president? Not good. The only way for his family to see him in person would be to make trips to Italy, DeCosmo says. Its an almost insurmountable bar for him to come back," he says. For him to come back and join his family as a lawful permanent resident, that is extremely unlikely or not even possible, really, for at least 20 years." As for the possibility of a pardon, Teresa Giudice has already floated that idea with Andy Cohen during an episode of Watch What Happens Live" in 2018. Giudice interacted with Trump when she was a cast member on Celebrity Apprentice in 2012 and supported his bid for president in 2016, though she couldnt vote because she was on supervised release from prison. I would love to speak to him if he would like to call me, she said during an appearance on the talk show last year. I havent, but I said if he wants to speak to me, I would love it. In October, Joe and Teresas daughters posted about their fathers deportation order on social media. My father is no threat to society he is one of the most warm hearted people I know, he would never harm a soul," wrote Gia Giudice, 18, as part of an Instagram post, sharing an old photo with Joe alongside the hashtag #bringjoehome. He puts everyone else before himself. I know who my father is and I think many of you do too. My father did his time and learned from his mistakes. Isnt being in there supposed to make you realize your mistakes so you can become a better person? And thats exactly what my father did. Have a tip? Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook. Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters. As Newark Mayor Ras Baraka readied to deliver his state of the city address Tuesday night, about a dozen residents gathered outside the New Jersey Performing Arts Center Tuesday to send him a clear message: We want clean water. Lead levels in Newarks drinking water samples have exceeded the federal standard for more than two years. The latest results from the state show the last six-month monitoring period recorded the highest levels of lead in the drinking water in 17 years. Its a problem Baraka says his administration is addressing, but protesters Tuesday were not satisfied. The administration is not doing everything it can to educate the citizens of Newark about the lead crisis, said Anthony Diaz, a member of the newly-formed Newark Water Coalition that aims to inform residents about safe water. If this was happening in Montclair, in South Orange, in Bergen County, they would not stand for this. (A water system that serves about 800,000 residents in Bergen and Hudson counties separately reported elevated lead levels earlier this year). Holding some signs that explained the health effects of lead, and others that demanded safe water, residents marched from Military Park to NJPAC chanting, safe water for Newark. While no level of lead is safe, the state requires additional action from water systems if more than 10 percent of water samples exceed the federal action level of 15 parts per billion. From July to December last year, more than 100 of 240 samples exceeded the federal standard. Newark on Wednesday will break ground on its $75 million lead service line replacement program that aims to replace 15,000-18,000 lead pipes that connect underground water mains to homes. The city is also working on changing the way it treats the water at the Pequannock Water Treatment Plant, one of two plants that service the city. About a dozen residents gathered at Military Park on Tuesday before Mayor Ras Baraka's State of the City address to demand clean water. (Karen Yi | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) Last October, the city said the corrosion control treatment at the Pequannock plant stopped working and was causing lead from the lead service lines to dissolve into the water. In the meantime, the city has rolled out a filter program and said its distributed 33,000 filters to residents. It plans to hand out 40,000 filters. But resident Zaire Ruffin, 20, who lives in the South Ward, said he was denied a filter at one of the recreation centers when he went to pick one up. It didnt make any sense ... I live in a three-family home and there are children there, Ruffin told NJ Advance Media as he held a sign that read: Boiling Water will not remove lead. Ruffin said he wants residents to get more involved in learning about their water and demanding city officials take more responsibility. During Barakas address, the mayor made reference to the protest while thanking the citys Water and Sewer Utilities Department. When faced with a problem involving corroding service lines, they acted with professionalism and dedication, he said. So do me a favor when you leave here today and you go outside: Tell people we need more than them just walking in circles telling us to do things weve already done. About a dozen residents protesting for clean water outside Newark mayor @rasjbaraka state of the city address pic.twitter.com/GBnWz7Q7UT Karen Yi (@karen_yi) March 12, 2019 Karen Yi may be reached at kyi@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at @karen_yi or on Facebook. Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters. Every summer, Trish Morris-Yamba made sure Newark kids were away from the city for weeks at a time. Theyd get on buses headed for summer camp, an outdoor experience she needed them to have through the Greater Newark Fresh Air Fund, a program she passionately led as executive director of the Newark Day Center, the oldest social service agency in New Jersey. She led the multifaceted organization for 32 years with a holistic approach that served children, adults and seniors. But the Fresh Air Fund, which has sent kids to camp since 1882, is the one program that is synonymous with her name. That was her baby," said A. Zachary Yamba, her husband, and former president of Essex County College. She nurtured the program child, raising funding year-round so Newark kids could be outdoors with nature. Many had never jumped into in a lake or saw a frog leap from lily pad or gazed at a deer in the woods while hiking. She was the face of the Fresh Air Fund," said Donna Johnson-Thompson, the current executive director. And, her presence will be missed. After a long illness, Morris-Yamba, 80, died Friday at home in South Orange surrounded by family and friends. It was a source of comfort for us," said her husband. The couple was married for 32 years. There was a certain peace that came across her face." Morris-Yamba, who was born in Binghamton, New York, made her mark on many fronts to improve the lives of children and families. When she led the agency, Morris-Yamba expanded its outreach with enrichment programs, mentoring services and workforce initiatives. She was suited for this work even before coming to Newark. While attending Livingston College at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, Yamba said his wife started a campus childcare center for adult students. After earning her undergraduate degree and a masters from Rutgers in education, Morris-Yamba continued her advocacy as the first principal of the CHEN School, a collaborative preschool sponsored by the Council of Higher Education in Newark. She moved on from there, and in 1981, Morris-Yamba began her tenure at the Newark Day Center, which set up an early childhood education program on Saturdays at Essex County College. Considered a visionary in the field, Morris-Yamba made sure para-professionals received their certifications, knowing that the state of New Jersey would be requiring credentials. It only made sense that she would be the founding president of the Early Childhood Coalition of Newark, an advocacy organization which helped develop procedures to address the New Jersey Supreme Courts Abbott mandate for early childhood providers. There wasnt much that Morris-Yamba was not a part of in Newark. Community involvement was natural, a civic responsibility Yamba said his wife inherited from her family growing up in Burlington County. She was president of the Board of Trustees of the Newark Public Library and a trustee of the New Jersey Performing Arts Centers Womens Board Association. She was also a board member of Newark Emergency Services for Families and the Community Advisory Board of Thirteen/WNET. And, she found time to be the host of Black Spectrum, which aired on a local NBC-TV affiliate. A long-time member of Bethany Baptist Church in Newark, Morris-Yamba was an active member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority and an officer with the National Congress of Black Women, chairing its metro-Newark chapters. Wherever she went, though, Morris-Yamba always talked about the Greater Fresh Air Fund and what the camping experience did for Newark children. She knew the families intimately, following up with them to see how young people enjoyed the summer. For those who were unable to go to camp, Johnson-Thompson said Morris-Yamba organized special day trips for the kids to go to an amusement park or horseback riding. Once, she even got enough funding from the donors to take the kids to the Bahamas for one day. Most of them had never flown before," Johnson-Thompson said. Everything Morris-Yamba did was for the kids, and she spent time with them at the camp. Shed visit, eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and go swimming with the campers. When she wasnt talking about the fund, Morris-Yamba was known around the state in political circles. News of her death touched many who spoke of her commitment to children. Trish Morris-Yamba was an incredible part of this community and her impact can be felt across this county," said Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. She distinguished herself as an advocate for children for the health and welfare of our families and for the uplifting of our community." Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo added, As Director of the Newark Day Center and Fresh Air Fund, she had a tremendous influence on the development of youth and created a lasting legacy by providing generations the opportunity for enrichment, education and the chance of summertime fun." Morris-Yamba retired from the Newark Day Center in 2013, but she stayed close to the organization located on Hill Street. She will always be a part of the Newark Day Center," Johnson-Thompson said. She will always be the face of the Greater Newark Fresh Air Fund, too. Her life will be celebrated starting Friday with a viewing from 5 to 8 p.m. at Bethany Baptist Church in Newark. Funeral services will be at 11 a.m. Saturday at the church. Read More Barry Carter may be reached at bcarter@njadvancemedia.com . Follow him on Twitter @BarryCarterSL . Find NJ.com on Facebook . Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters. It could be the biggest mystery in West New York since the image of the Virgin Mary appeared in a tree on Bergenline Avenue. Are three municipal surface parking lots on 51st and 52nd streets, near Bergenline Avenue, being sold to NR Living, a Secaucus-based developer? The company had posted generous descriptions of two 14-story projects it said were slated for the lots, at 508 51st St. and 511-513 52nd St., West New York Parking Authority lots that are used by both residents, workers and shoppers. After receiving calls from The Jersey Journal, NR Living removed the posts touting the projects from its website. Numerous calls to NR Living representatives were not returned. When asked about the possible sale, Parking Authority Executive Director Amiris Perez and other city officials seemed stunned, claiming they have not negotiated the sale of the properties and know nothing about NR Livings plans. 11 51st Street municipal parking lot in West New York The lots ... have not been listed for sale, nor has any sale been made, Perez said in an email. "There has been discussions in town regarding redevelopment, and I understand some redevelopment plans include WNYPA lots." The lots were declared a non-condemnation redevelopment area in 2016 and rights to negotiate with the town were given to Culver Development in February 2018. The rights expired last month and Mayor Felix Roque and Commissioner Gabriel Rodriguez said they were unaware of any new developments regarding the properties, even though the commissioners approved a 120-day extension for Culver in October. According to the initial post on the NR Living website, the towers would each be 14 stories tall have 162 units. The buildings would include covered parking and a roof deck for entertaining, as well as a gym and meeting rooms. The initial information on proposed projects did not say if municipal parking would be available on those properties. But Perez and Roque said that no project would be considered for Parking Authority lots unless there was a plan to make up for the loss of public parking. EDITORS NOTE: On April 3, NJ Cannabis Insider will host an all-day live event, featuring industry leaders and the key voices who will shape the industry. Tickets are limited. More information. The news came on Tuesday well, actually, Monday night. Gov. Phil Murphy and New Jerseys top two state lawmakers, state Senate President Stephen Sweeney and state Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, had reached a deal that would bring the issue of marijuana legalization back to the state Legislature. For more discussion and debate. Again. More news about legalization without, you know, actually legalizing weed. For those whose biggest question is When can I legally smoke weed in New Jersey? the news of more legislative debate is only slightly more welcome than that one friend who always wants to smoke but never wants to match. So, were here to help answer that question. What if legalization happens soon? Both Sweeney, D-Gloucester, and Coughlin, D-Middlesex, have their sights set on having the Legislature vote March 25 on legislation that would legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana for those over 21 in New Jersey. Thats less than two weeks away, and we havent even seen the new bill yet. That means a lot of bill-reading and vote-wrangling in the coming days. If those efforts pay off and the Legislature is able to pass the bill, and Murphy signs it, the possession and personal use of marijuana would be allowed in New Jersey once regulators have adopted rules and regulations for legalization. Thats expected to happen within six months of the bill passing. This timeline is based on previous legalization language, which we expect to be similar in the new bill. It would still be illegal to smoke marijuana before the regulations are adopted and retail sales begin. If the bill were to pass this month, people in New Jersey would likely be able to legally smoke by September, assuming some of the existing medical marijuana alternative treatment centers in the state are selling to the public by then. But they can only sell to the public if they have enough marijuana for patients and if theyve been approved to do so by the state. No recreational dispensaries would be open by this September. On Tuesday morning, Murphy said his best guess for when retail sales would start is early next year, though that seems optimistic. What if theres another delay? Lawmakers are facing a shrinking window to legalize marijuana. If they cant get something done in the next few weeks, legalization could get lost in the buzzsaw that is state budget negotiations, like what happened last year. State lawmakers have to pass a budget by June 30, or they shut down the state government. So if Murphy hasnt signed a bill by May, were probably looking until much later this year for legalization. Several people close to the debate have said if legal weed isnt passed by the budget deadline, voters would get to decide on legalization on the ballot this November. If that happens or if legalization were to happen after the summer or the existing medical marijuana dispensaries are unable to sell to the public, you likely wouldnt be able to legally smoke weed in New Jersey until 2020 at the earliest. Whether youll have to wait that long will become clearer in the next couple of weeks. Payton Guion may be reached at PGuion@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @PaytonGuion. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips Are you interested in the N.J. cannabis industry? Subscribe here for exclusive insider information from NJ Cannabis Insider. The Morris County jail may be looking to fill up some empty cells with inmates from Sussex County. Officials in the two counties are discussing a possible shared-services agreement in which inmates who are currently housed in the Sussex jail in Newton would be brought to the county jail in Morris Township, about 36 miles away. Morris County Sheriff James Gannon oversees the jail, formally known as the Morris County Correctional Facility. This has the potential to be financially beneficial to both counties," Gannon said in an written statement provided Tuesday to NJ Advance Media on Tuesday. New Jerseys bail reform law has dramatically decreased the number of inmates at county jails throughout the state since taking effect in January 2017. Gannon said the Morris jail, built to hold up to 524 inmates when it opened in 2000, currently has a daily population of about 200. In his statement, Gannon alluded to the impact of the 2017 law, which has resulted in lower-risk defendants being released pending trial. He also noted the infrastructure challenges facing the Sussex jail, formally known as the Keough-Dwyer Correctional Facility. We recognize that the Sussex County jail may require costly renovations to upgrade its deteriorating condition. Morris County can offer a modern, secure, sophisticated operation that is accredited by the American Corrections Association and the National Commission on Corrections Healthcare, Gannon said. A phone call to Sussex County Sheriff Mike Stradas office was not immediately returned. Strada is a former police detective in Mount Olive, in Morris County, and was elected sheriff in 2010. The Sussex jail opened in 1978 and has a capacity of up to 225 inmates, according to its website. Greg Mueller, the first assistant prosecutor in Sussex County, said any decision in the matter is up to the county freeholders, in consultation with the sheriffs office. We take no position on it, Mueller said. The Morris jail is a 6-story building, with eight housing pods and 277 cells. In 2017, the Morris jail opened a drug/alcohol recovery unit amid a rise in opioid overdoses in the region. Rob Jennings may be reached at rjennings@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter@RobJenningsNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips. Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters Its not unusual for victims of clergy sex abuse to wait decades to report what happened to them. But a lawsuit filed Friday claims a boy abused by a Vineland priest in 1962 was in a car within minutes of the abuse, being driven in the middle of the night to report it to the then-bishop of the Diocese of Camden. Never speak of this again, was the response he received from the late bishop Celestine Damiano, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit filed by a 73-year-old Ocean County man describes abuse at age 16 by Father Richard Gerbino, then a priest at the St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Vineland. He is among the credibly-accused priests the New Jersey dioceses released publicly in February. And in a twist, the priest the boy immediately reported the abuse to and who drove him to meet with the bishop also ended up being outed as a child abuser decades later. The driver, John P. Jack Connor was named in the Pennsylvania clergy abuse grand jury investigation report. The report alleged bishops in Camden, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh shuffled him from diocese to diocese, even after he admitted to abusing a boy in 1984, until he was removed from ministry in 2002. Gerbino, who has previously been accused of abuse, and Damiano are both dead, but Connor and another boy who were in the Vineland house that night in 1962 will be called to testify as witnesses in the case, said Toms River Attorney Robert R. Fuggi Jr. Fuggi said that in all his years of representing survivors of clergy sex abuse, he has never heard of an incident of abuse that was reported as swiftly and as high-up as this. He drives them right to the bishops house, Fuggi said Wednesday. Ive never seen that before. Michael Walsh, a spokesman for the Camden Diocese, said the first time the diocese heard anything about these allegations was on March 1. He said it was reported to law enforcement, as are all reports of abuse under diocesan policy. The lawsuit, filed in Superior Court in Ocean County, says the plaintiff grew up in Pennsylvania and became friends with Connor, then a seminarian known then as Father Jack, while the plaintiff was a student at Sacred Heart Elementary in Havertown. The plaintiff, identified in court documents by the initials A.S., kept in touch with Connor after the latter left to become a priest at St. Francis of Assisi Parish, now known as Divine Mercy Parish. In the summer of 1962, when he was 16, A.S. and his friend decided to go visit Connor at the parish in Vineland. They spent the evening eating, talking and playing games with Connor and his superior, Rev. Gerbino, who also lived in the parish house, the suit said. When it came time for bed, the suit said, the other teen slept in Connors bed, Connor slept on the couch and Gerbino suggested that A.S. could share his bed with him as it was big enough. The lawsuit said that A.S. was raised to trust clergy and so he didnt think anything sinister of the offer. But as soon as the lights were out, Fuggi wrote in the suit, Gerbino put his hand in A.S.s underwear, grabbed his penis and forced the boys hand onto his own penis. A.S. was stunned and, after Gerbino tried to take his underwear off, fled from the room, Fuggi wrote. He started banging on the door of his friends room and Connor asked him what had happened and if Gerbino had touched his jewels. After A.S. replied that he had, Connor immediately drove both boys to Bishop Damianos residence in Camden to report it, despite the distance and the late hour, the suit said. After A.S. told Damiano what happened, according to the lawsuit, the Bishop swore A.S., [his friend] and Father Jack to secrecy and that they should, Never speak of this again.' Fuggi said it wasnt until last summer, when A.S. read articles in the newspaper about another victim of Gerbinos, that he realized that what happened to him more than 50 years ago had caused him suffering and emotional damage his whole life. Given the two-year statute of limitations, he will have to prove A.S. didnt realize he was damaged by the abuse until that time. Fuggi said his client is a successful professional but the lawsuit said he has also suffered from depression, anxiety, emotional distress and an inability to trust others as a result of the abuse. Walsh acknowledged that this is not the first allegations against Gerbino, but he did not answer a question about how many had come forward with accusations. He did confirm the church paid a settlement in the last year to Annette Nestler, the daughter of the late Mike Kissell. Kissell was abused repeatedly by Gerbino and then killed himself in front of her when she was 7 in 1970, she told NJ.com in a past interview. Gerbino resigned from St. Francis of Assisi in 1980 after allegations he had a drinking problem, the Daily Journal reported at the time. According to the diocese, the other parishes where he was assigned include Our Lady of Mt. Carmel (Camden), St. Rose of Lima (Haddon Heights), Our Lady Star of the Sea (Cape May), Corpus Christi (Carneys Point), Assumption (Atco), and St. Patrick (Woodbury). He served as chaplain at the Newman Club at Rutgers-Camden and the Air National Guard Headquarters in Camden. The Press of Atlantic City reported he was removed from ministry in 1985 for mental-health reasons, but Walsh declined to confirm that. The lawsuit claims Damiano, St. Francis of Assisi Parish and the Camden Diocese conspired to cover up the abuse and endangered the welfare of children by failing to report the abuse as required by law. Walsh said the Diocese denies this. Damiano was 55 when he died in 1967 from a pulmonary embolism, according to his New York Times obituary. The diocese website says he was named a bishop, though he was referred to as Archbishop Damiano, in 1960. He devoted his efforts to improving Catholic education in South Jersey and helping Puerto Ricans and other Hispanic parishioners, the website said. The suit seeks compensatory and punitive damages, as well as an injunction ordering the diocese to take steps to prevent, investigate and respond to sexual abuse or harassment within its educational programs. Rebecca Everett may be reached at reverett@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @rebeccajeverett. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters. Speaker Nancy Pelosi irritated the more extreme members of her caucus this week by announcing that she opposes the impeachment of President Trump, for now. Take note of the for now part. Pelosi is not giving Trump a free pass, and supports the many investigations launched by the House since the mid-term elections. When it comes to building a case for impeachment, she is not tapping the brakes one bit. What she is doing is clever. As it stands now, the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose impeachment. That may change after Robert Mueller issues his report. And it may change as Democrats in the House expose more grotesque misdeeds from our Grifter in Chief. But Pelosi saw what happened to Republicans when they impeached President Clinton in 1998, when most Americans opposed it. It was a pointless exercise, given the Senates refusal to remove Clinton from office. And it backfired politically: Clintons poll numbers rose, and Speaker Newt Gingrich was dismissed as a hysterical partisan. Pelosi is smart enough to learn from Gingrichs mistake. She knows that if Democrats look overzealous if they try to overturn the results of a national election without solid public support the effort could backfire in the same way. It would be especially dangerous for Democrats in swing districts, including the four seats in New Jersey that flipped to Democrats last year. Instead, Pelosi is striking a judicious pose. Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless theres something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I dont think we should go down that path, she told the Washington Post. Take note: This sounds like a concession, but it isnt, really. Without bipartisan support, no effort to remove Trump from office can succeed, given that Republicans control the Senate and conviction requires a two-thirds vote. Pelosi is only acknowledging reality. The predicament we face, of course, is that Republican lawmakers in the Trump era have been reduced to squeaky little gerbils. They are afraid to challenge a president who still commands overwhelming support within the party, more even than Ronald Reagan did in his time. So, what will happen if the Mueller report finds that Trump and his team did indeed collude with the Russians? What if it shows that he engaged in money-laundering with Russian oligarchs? What if it shows he deliberately sabotaged the investigations? And what if Republican ignore all that? At some point, Pelosi may have no choice but to launch impeachment hearings, with or without Republican support, and to use those hearings to make the case to the public. It would be a huge political risk, but at some point, Democrats may have to go all in. For now, General Pelosi is positioning her troops in just the right formation as Mueller prepares to release his report. She is reassuring the public that she will treat this moment with the gravity it deserves and do her best to build bipartisan consensus. Consider, too, that removing Trump would elevate Vice-President Mike Pence, while beating Trump at the polls in 2020 would remove them both. Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, and a Democratic candidate for president, suggests that would be more cleansing. I would like to see this president and the style of politics that he representsdecisively beaten at the ballot box, he says. Because I just dont think thats what America is. Either way, the first step towards removing Trump is to convince more Americans that he is not fit to serve. During her interview with the Post, Pelosi picked up a plaque, etched with a quote from Abraham Lincoln: Public sentiment is everything, it read. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed. It was true in Lincolns time. And it remains true today. More: Tom Moran columns Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com or call (973) 836-4909. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook. WASHINGTON President Donald Trumps decision to exclude funding for the Gateway Tunnel project from his proposed budget wont be the last word. Lawmakers from New Jersey and New York met with representatives of the Gateway Development Corp., Amtrak, NJ Transit and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey here on Tuesday to figure out their next move. The meeting was arranged in the face of White House opposition to sharing the costs of replacing the Portal Bridge over the Hackensack River and building a new tunnel under the Hudson River. U.S. Sen. Cory Booker even quipped that he would support putting the presidents name on the project if thats what was needed to gain his support. Whatever it takes," said Booker, D-N.J. Well name this the Trump Tunnel if necesary. I dont care. This is not about ego. This is about the people of the region. It is about the economy of the region. It is about the people as a whole. Its about our nation as a whole. Trumps budget for the 12 months beginning Oct. 1 does not include any money for Gateway, and U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., said the presidents proposal also guts federal transportation programs that could be used to fund the project. The presidents budget, as far as were concerned, especially it related to transportation, is dead on arrival, Menendez said outside the Capitol after the meeting. Similar thoughts were sounded on the other side of the Capitol, where House members from both states and both parties met with the transportation officials. Regardless of what Trumps absurd budget says, Gateway remains the most critical project for our nation and the top transportation priority of our delegation, said Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-9th Dist., who set up the meeting. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York is proposing legislation that would let the states advance the federal share of the project, and get paid back once the U.S. government signs off on it, either under the current administration or the next president. He said Trump was trying to use the Gateway Tunnel for political ransom and at one point wanted to trade the wall for the tunnel, referring to the presidents southern border wall that he initially promised Mexico would pay for. Rep. Chris Smith, R-4th Dist., said he wouldnt be surprised if Trump was reacting to Schumers opposition to the wall. Theres very high probability but he hasnt said it, Smith said. You could maybe imply that. Schumer said he hoped to put his provision in the next transportation spending bill. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, a member of the House Appropriations transportation subcommittee, said there would have to be a guarantee that the money would be paid back. The chairwoman of the full House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Nita Lowey, said Gateway funding should be part of the transportation spending bill. Im a supporter of this project and Id like to get it funded as effectively as we can, said Lowey, D-N.Y. Deputy Transportation Secretary Jeffrey Rosen said Monday that there was no Gateway funding because those transit projects are local responsibilities, even though the current tunnels are owned by Amtrak the federal passenger railroad company. Rosen said New Jersey and New York have not come up with funding for the project, even though they have publicly committed more than $5 billion. And he insisted that Congress never specifically set aside any money for Gateway. That may be true, but lawmakers made it very clear that they were putting federal funding in certain accounts to be spent on the project. As far as Amtrak and NJ Transit are concerned, money has ben appropriated that they intend to spend on the Gateway project, said Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-7th Dist., a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. It is not being spent on anything else. That is what is there for. That is the understanding of the United States Congress. That is the understanding of the people who are going to be building this thing. The secretary of transportation knows that full well. Rosen was nominated as deputy attorney general to succeed Rod Rosenstein and Menendez said he expected him to be grilled on this at his upcoming Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing by Booker, a member of the panel. I dont know how this guy is going to be deputy attorney general with lies like that, Menendez said. He is totally off base. We have to push back on those statements. Its simply not true. Transportation Department spokesman Stephen Bradford did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Gov. Phil Murphy has agreed to pay the states $600 million share of replacing the Portal Bridge with existing funds, rather than use a federal loan program to come up with the money. The governor is fully invested as a partner in this urgently needed infrastructure project, and is prepared to work with the Trump administration to ensure its completion, Murphy spokesman Matthew Saidel said. Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant or on Facebook. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters. (UPDATE: The note offering the Phillipsburg mayor a raise? He says its a record of someone elses inappropriate communication.) A handwritten note added to a printed email and left in a personnel file is the source of new allegations against the mayor of Phillipsburg. During a roughly half-hour news conference Tuesday evening that rehashed many of the conflicts between the Republican-majority town council and Democratic mayor, council leadership called for a new law enforcement investigation into Mayor Stephen Ellis, this time for an alleged payroll scheme with a former elected official. They allege that Ellis, a Democrat, and former town council Vice President Bernie Fey Jr., a Republican, may have arranged a quid pro quo: Ellis would provide raises for Feys wife, Gina, while Fey would support a raise for Ellis. They stopped short of accusing anyone of a crime, but said they want county and state law enforcement to investigate. Council President Bobby Fulper proposed forming a council committee to conduct its own probe -- similar to one conducted last year -- but later Tuesday night said the council unanimously decided to leave it to authorities. "Perhaps we can eradicate corruption from our local government by exposing it at its very core," Fulper said at the conclusion of his statement. He was flanked by fellow Republican and council Vice resident Frank McVey during the news conference in front of two media cameras. A small group of residents recorded it on their phones. Phillipsburg Council President Bobby Fulper is flanked by Vice President Frank McVey during a news conference calling for a new law enforcement investigation into the town's mayor on March 12, 2019. (Steve Novak | For lehighvalleylive.com)Steve Novak | For lehighvalleylive.com Reached by phone shortly afterward, Ellis said he is not worried about an investigation. "I have received no benefit from anyone," the mayor said. "All I get is grief." Bernie Fey, a maintenance worker with the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission, lost a primary election in 2017 and left council at the conclusion of his term. He did not return requests for comment. Gina Fey is a housing technician in the Phillipsburgs Section 8 program and makes about $74,000 a year, according to a New Jersey pension database. She declined to comment. Fulper said he suspected something was amiss in February when he submitted a records request for public content in public officials personnel file folders. Within one for former Council President Todd Tersigni, Fulper said he found a printed copy of a January 2017 email from Bernie Fey to the mayors aide, Sherry Corcoran, congratulating her on her work. At the bottom, a short handwritten note mentions Ellis, the Feys and the town's open business administrator position. It says, in part: "Bernie offered the mayor a raise if he gave Gina the BA position and a raise." There is no indication who wrote it or when. This handwritten note added to a printed email from 2017 and left in a personnel file is the source of new allegations against Phillipsburg's mayor. It says: "Time period of 12-26 to 1-1-16. Bernie offer the mayor a raise if he gave Gina the BA position and a raise."Steve Novak | For lehighvalleylive.com Ellis said his aide jotted it down after Bernie Fey called her. We dont know if he was joking or not, the mayor said. He added that Gina Fey was not qualified or interviewed for the business administrator role, and that its possible she never even formally applied. The mayor also questioned if council members should be looking at confidential personnel files. "I hope they're not doing anything illegal here," he said. This is the second time that council considered launching an investigation into the mayors actions. A committee formed last spring to review the administrations hiring practices from when Ellis took office in 2016. Information from the committee was sent to the county prosecutors office, and nothing public has come of it since. The new allegations also come as Ellis faces criminal charges from a resident for alleged harassment. A first-appearance in an out-of-county municipal court has been scheduled for April 2. Despite those allegations and two failed recall attempts, Ellis on Tuesday said theres about a 90-percent chance hell run for a second term this year. Steve Novak may be reached at snovak@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveNovakLVL and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. A Pennsylvania woman has been sentenced to three years in prison for stealing nearly $78,000 from her 86-year-old great aunt, who suffers from dementia and resides in a long-term care facility in Warren County, authorities said. Deanna Attinello, 26, who lives in Bethlehem Township, Pa., with an Easton mailing address, pleaded guilty in November to stealing from her great aunt while she was her legal guardian, according to the state Office of the Attorney General. The theft occurred after January 2017, when Attinello was appointed to be her great aunts legal guardian and gained access to her assets. Attinello was also ordered to pay back $48,000 in restitution. Attinello withdrew large amounts of cash from her great aunts account by writing checks to herself, her boyfriend and her father days after she was placed in control, authorities. After just four months, she had taken more than $77,000, leaving only $26,000 in the account. Financial abuse of the elderly is even more egregious when it deprives a victim of funds needed to provide for proper care in an institutional setting, Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said in a statement. The prison sentence handed down to this defendant sends a clear message that those who cruelly prey on New Jerseys vulnerable senior citizens will be held accountable. Amanda Hoover can be reached at ahoover@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @amandahoovernj. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters. TAMPA, Fla. Like plenty of spring breakers, the Yankees are looking for ways to trim fat. They did it Tuesday, jettisoning several valued prospects from major-league spring training to minor-league camp across the street. Get tickets to see the 2019 Yankees: StubHub, SeatGeek, PrimeSport, Ticketmaster The latest cuts: RHP Chance Adams MLB.coms No. 12 Yankees prospect Adams, who gave up five runs, struck out two and walked one in 2 1/3 innings over two games, will wait for his shot from the Triple-A rotation. INF Thairo Estrada MLB.coms No. 15 Yankees prospect Estrada will be an everyday player at Triple-A, likely manning shortstop while also seeing time at second base and third base. Estrada will try to recover for lost time: He missed last spring training after getting shot in the hip during a robbery attempt in his native Venezuela in the offseason, and then suffering various injuries. He could play a role in the majors as a utility option. RHP Joe Harvey Harvey, who gave up four runs in 4 1/3 innings, struck out seven and walked none but allowed seven hits. He could play a role at some point in the majors, considering hes on the 40-man roster. He was a lights-out closer at Triple-A last year. RHP Cale Coshow Coshow made five appearances, surrendering two earned runs. He'll likely head back to the Triple-A bullpen, where he pitched 38 games last year. RHP Danny Farquhar Farquhar, whos recovering from a brain hemorrhage caused by a ruptured aneurysm suffered last year, had a rough spring. Though hes inspired plenty, the results were rough. Manager Aaron Boone said Farquhar could help in the majors at some point. Farquhar has pitched parts of seven seasons in the bigs. OF Trey Amburgey The 24-year-old could be ticketed for Triple-A after playing 125 games at Double-A last year. INF Mike Ford Ford, a Princeton product, would be third on the first base depth chart, behind Luke Voit and Greg Bird. But it seems likely that if the Yankees needed a first baseman in the bigs with neither Voit or Bird available they might turn outside the organization. C Kellin Deglan Organizational depth. Brendan Kuty may be reached at bkuty@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @BrendanKutyNJ. Find NJ.com Yankees on Facebook. Beauty Plus, a near 20-year fixture on Elysian Fields and St. Claude avenues, is closing. The beauty supply retailer first told customers it was moving out of its long-time storefront in a Facebook note posted on Ash Wednesday (March 6). The store is currently selling off its inventory at steep discounts. The original Beauty Plus location on Toledano Avenue near Broad Street will remain open. The decision to close the Elysian Fields Avenue store has not been easy, but the store cannot afford to stay at the location anymore, according to a statement Beauty Plus shared with NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. The retailer learned early this year its rent would nearly triple, the statement said. The owners dont have an official closing date set at this time, but know they have to leave the building by May or June. The statement said the owners would like to keep the business running at a different location, but havent had time to look for real estate. The store has been overwhelmed with customers since the moving out sale was announced. We hope to see every one of our customers in our new location when we find a new location, the statement said. Until then, Beauty Plus loves and thanks everybody for the care and support! Beauty Plus was founded in 1999 by two South Korean immigrants known to customers as Mr. Kim and Ms. Lee. (They preferred to be identified only by their last names for privacy reasons.) The first location, which is still open, opened at 3609 Toledano St. They opened a second store at 1101 Elysian Fields Ave. in 2001. The stores are known for their wide range of affordable beauty supplies, from cosmetics and hair products to wigs. The Beauty Plus closure comes during a period of rapid change for the intersection at Elysian Fields and St. Claude. Genes Po-Boys and Daiquiri Shop has operated out of the bright pink building catty-corner from the beauty supply store for decades. The family behind the business now intends to sell the eatery and its iconic building. It went on the market in late February for nearly $5 million. Hes just tired': Owner of Genes Po-Boys opts to sell after decades of serving sandwiches, listing agent says Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up In addition, a $9.5 million development directly across St. Claude from Beauty Plus replaced the deteriorating former Schwegmanns building with a Robert Fresh Market with adjacent businesses, including a new Starbucks. The St. Claude-Rampart streetcar extension, completed in 2016, has also made the area easier for visitors to access. The whole areas changing, Damon Gerrets of EZ Realty, the listing agent for Genes, told NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Beauty Plus is currently selling all items at steep discounts, ranging from 30 percent to 50 percent. The owners hope to sell off most if not all items by the time they have to move out, according to the statement. Beauty Plus thanked its long-time customers as well as dedicated employees, including Ms. Sake, Ms. Genie, and Ms. Naima. Mr. Kim and Ms. Lee were two minorities who started from having nothing to being blessed with so much love from our New Orleans community, the statement said. The past 18 years created many friendships, including watching customers and employees get married, have kids and start families, the statement said. Beauty Plus on Elysian and St. Claude will always be in our hearts, it said. Jennifer Larino covers residential real estate, retail, tourism and other consumer and business news for NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Reach her at jlarino@nola.com or 504-239-1424. Follow her on Twitter @jenlarino. New Orleans police are seeking the publics help in identifying and locating a man suspected of raping a woman in the Central Business District last month. The man, seen in the photos above, allegedly sexually assaulted a woman in an alley, around 4:30 a.m. on Feb. 18, police said. Police did not give a specific location for the crime but said the woman told police it occurred approximately three blocks away from the intersection of Poydras and South Peters streets. Anyone with any information regarding the pictured subjects identity or whereabouts should notify Sex Crimes Investigation Unit detectives at 504-658-5522. Citizens with information that can help solve crimes are asked to call Crimestoppers at 504-822-1111 or toll-free at 1-877-903-STOP. A new teachers group says a $1,000 across-the-board pay raise for educators is a great start, but it will take more than that to effectively recruit and retain people who can serve students across Louisiana. Several educators this year have launched the Raise Up Teachers initiative to call for better pay for teachers as well as better professional development, more resources for classrooms, and better incentives for highly effective teachers to work at struggling schools. Lauren Trahan, a Vermilion Parish English teacher who mentors and trains others in the teaching profession, said by phone Monday the initiative is about supporting the next generation of teachers and students. The standards of our students are continuing to rise, and we really need to be able to attract high quality educators to lift Louisiana, Trahan said. Gov. Edwards asks state education board to support school staff pay raises Salary data from 1989 to 2016 from the Southern Regional Education Board showed an average Louisiana teachers average salary was as high as $51,381 in 2012-13. However, their average pay dropped to $49,745 by 2015-16. The average for teachers in the South that year was $50,955, and the national average was $58,363. The average K-12 Louisiana teacher currently makes anywhere between $40,180 to $49,220 per year, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Bureau of Statistics in May 2017. Trahan stressed a pay raise would retain teachers so they can train new teachers as opposed to spending their time working second jobs. Nearly one in five, or 18 percent, of teachers nationwide work outside the classroom to earn additional income, according to a National Center for Education Statistics report released in June 2018. The Louisiana Association of Educators, Louisiana Federation of Teachers, and the Associated Professional Educators of Louisiana already serve as advocacy groups for teachers. However, Meredith McGovern, a Bossier Parish social studies teacher, stressed on Monday this initiative is about empowering teachers to use their voice without being tied to a national organization that may or may not represent what you want them to represent. When you look at the decision-making table, there are no teachers that are making these types of decisions or advising anybody on it, McGovern said. New Louisiana budget fights emerge in 2019 Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up The new group is speaking out as lawmakers mull what educators call long overdue increases in school funding. On Wednesday (March 13), the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education unanimously approved an increase in the statess per pupil funding by 1.375 percent under Louisianas Minimum Foundation Program, or MFP, to fund K-12 public school raises for the 2019-20 school year. The funding formula will now move to the state Legislature for approval. However, the $1,000 pay hike cant even help teachers take their family to the movies for $45 a month, which is what McGovern said the raise is going to equate to. Her concerns were echoed Monday by Joni Smith, an administrative school assistant in Livingston Parish. Thats just not enough and quite disrespectful in my opinion, just because these are the hardest working individuals in our state, Smith said. Smith, the 2017 Louisiana State Teacher of the Year, expressed gratitude and confidence that lawmakers will approve the funding increase, but she also hopes lawmakers will take some of the excess funds in Louisiana this fiscal year and allocate it to teacher pay beyond the $1,000 raise. Smith and McGovern also stressed the group isnt calling for strikes in any shape or form should lawmakers fail to provide more funding to teachers. Smith said shes not speaking negatively toward anyone who performs those actions, but she and McGovern both said teacher voices are powerful enough. A strike doesnt help anybody. A teachers strike is going to hurt families, McGovern said. We want to be heard because we are teachers, not because of an action we had to take to get attention. John White says the governor left early childhood care out of budget proposal Wilborn P. Nobles III is an education reporter based in New Orleans. He can be reached at wnobles@nola.com or on Twitter at @WilNobles. History was made in the St. Bernard Parish Hospital recently when Dr. Thomas Delahoussaye performed the first LINX Procedure, a permanent, drug-free treatment for gastroesophageal reflux disease. The treatment is designed to help patients suffering from GERD experience a better quality of life and get relief without needing daily medication. What made the procedure even more significant is that it was the first of its kind to be performed in the metro area. Approximately 60 million Americans experience heartburn once a month, and the symptoms of GERD are similar a burning sensation in the chest, a sour or bitter taste in the throat, difficulty swallowing, and chest pain after lying down. However, GERD is more a severe condition because it is a chronic one. To alleviate this acid reflux, LINX uses a small band of magnetized titanium beads wrapped around the lower esophageal sphincter, preventing gastric acids from pushing back up into the esophagus from the stomach. It also allows the LES to open safely when required to allow for easy swallowing. Dr. Delahoussaye, who joined SBPH as a general surgeon last year, referred to the procedure as a game changer. This procedure offers an alternative to daily medication, while providing relief for patients suffering from the chronic symptoms associated with acid reflux, he said. Its truly a game changer for patients suffering from acid reflux. St. Bernard Parish Hospital is proud to bring this innovative treatment to our area. Delahoussaye started his medical career at Tulane Emergency Department as a paramedic. After obtaining his Medical Degree from LSUHSC-New Orleans, he continued to the institutions General Surgery Residency Program where he served as Chief Resident. Then, in 2018, he completed the Minimally Invasive/Bariatric Surgery Fellowship program from Jackson South Community Hospital in Miami. He said his work focuses on minimally invasive approaches to abdominal procedures and that he is proud of the work taking place in St. Bernard like the LINX procedure. My experience so far has been great at St. Bernard Parish Hospital, Delahoussaye said. I have been allowed to offer new and innovative procedures to patients with the full support of the hospital. Kim Keene, the CEO of the hospital, said introducing the LINX procedure in St. Bernard underscores how dedicated the hospital is to advancing local healthcare options. This is just one of the many innovative ways we are providing treatment for chronic conditions close to home. Keene said the hospital will continue to add health services to its offerings, including psychology, diabetes management, and orthopedics, but the goal is the same to provide quality healthcare to the people of the parish. This is a community that needs and deserves quality healthcare, and I feel very privileged to serve the people of St. Bernard, Keene said. Our hospital has expanded services, added new jobs and introduced innovative technology to ensure that the community can receive specialty healthcare close to home. She said providing health-care services locally is a priority. Im very proud of the fact that weve been able to provide our neighbors with healthcare services that previously required travel to New Orleans or the North Shore. We see this growth and investment in the people of St. Bernard Parish as just the beginning. Barry Lemoine writes about people and events in St. Bernard Parish. To reach him, email barrylemoine@gmail.com. Fifteen candidates for the Sewerage & Water Board are now on the desk of Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who has 60 days to decide who will oversee the utility. A selection committee tasked with nominating new directors vetted applications Tuesday (March 12) for seven seats on the 11-member board. Six current directors are up for consideration, although the boards recently changed composition requirements could force some to give up their seats. A new state law opened the board to nominations this year. It requires the mayor to: make sure all five City Council districts are represented; pick two consumer/community advocates; and place a retired civil engineer on the board. The other four seats on the board are held by the mayor, who serves as president, a New Orleans City Council member or appointee, and two mayoral appointees from the Board of Liquidation, City Debt, which forwards its own recommendations. The mayor must also meet diversity objectives outlined in state law. The statute calls for Sewerage & Water Board directors to reflect the citys gender and racial mix while also including professionals with backgrounds applicable to utility oversight. The selection committee was required to advance three nominations for each seat to the mayor, along with three retired engineers. Only three applications for the retired engineers seat were submitted; all three are white men. The other 12 nominees include four men and eight women, chosen from a total of 22 applications the selection committee considered. Only one application came from District E and two from District B. Of the other 12 nominees, six are white, four are black, one is Hispanic and another Native American. Sewerage & Water Board shifts money, borrows from itself to pay millions in vendor bills Current board members who were nominated are Nicole Barnes, Robin Barnes (not related), Tamika Duplessis, Alejandra Guzman, Joseph Peychaud and Lewis Stirling III. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Duplessis, a chemistry professor at Delgado Community College who leads its water management department, will continue as S&WB director as the only nominee from District E. The District C nominees are Dr. Maurice Sholas, a psychiatrist with deep community ties, and Mary Louise Bonney, owner of Gallery Ario. The lone current board member who was not advanced to the mayor was Andrew Amacker, a civil engineer from District B who had reapplied for his seat. Instead, the selection committees picks from the district were Charles Meade, a civil engineer who works in the financial sector, Robin Barnes, chief operating officer of Greater New Orleans Inc., and Janet Howard, former leader of the Bureau of Governmental Research, a nonprofit watchdog group. Howard was also nominated for the consumer/community advocate seats along with Guzman and Peychaud, who currently hold the seats. Guzman is the New Orleans Business Alliances vice president of performance management and strategy, and Peychaud is a veteran educator who is principal of St. Katherine Drexel Preparatory School. Guzman was also a nominee for District A with current board member Lewis Stirling, whose background is in development and real estate, and hydrogeologist Williams Steinkampf. Nicole Barnes, head of the Jericho Road Episcopal Housing Initiative, was nominated from District D, where the other two candidates are Magdalena Merrill, asset management director for the Housing Authority of New Orleans, and Danielle Burrell, an entrepreneur and business consultant with a background in public health. The retired civil engineer applicants were Glen Pilie, Kevin Martin and Harley Winer. Designating a directors seat for a retired civil engineer was part of the requirement that returned a City Council member to the Sewerage & Water Board. The changes came after damaging floods in summer 2017 revealed the condition of Sewerage & Water Board drainage and power infrastructure was not what leadership conveyed. Utility leaders were forced to resign. Calls for accountability included seating new board members. A 2014 reconfiguration had removed three City Council seats from the board and added the pertinent experience requirement. The selection committee comprises the leaders of New Orleans seven universities and colleges, or their designees, and representatives of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, the New Orleans Regional Black Chamber of Commerce and the Urban League of Greater New Orleans. The mayor cannot reject the selection committees nominations, but the City Council can vote any of them down. Bill to add City Council representation back to Sewerage & Water Board heads to governor's desk Gov. John Bel Edwards went through a laundry list of his achievements as he accepted the Louisiana Democratic Partys endorsement for his 2019 reelection campaign Saturday (March 9). Standing before dozens of members of his own party, Edwards highlighted what he considered his first-term successes: Medicaid expansion, state budget stabilization, economic projects, coastal restoration projects, higher education scholarships and lowering Louisianas sky-high incarceration rate. He did not mention abortion. Though by the standards of the pro-life movement, the governor has had success in that realm, too. Edwards signed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country last year; it would ban abortion in Louisiana after 15 weeks. In 2016, He also approved laws to require women to wait 72 hours to get an abortion and that ban abortion facilities from receiving taxpayer dollars. The measures arent in effect in Louisiana right now because they are being challenged in federal court. But if the U.S. Supreme Court backs them in the coming years, Edwards will have contributed to limiting access to abortion as much as any other state. He has a good record with us, said Ben Clapper, executive director of Louisiana Right to Life, the states largest antiabortion interest group. Edwards is the only one of 23 Democratic governors who opposes abortion. He actively wooed pro-life voters during his 2015 campaign, but its a view that puts him increasingly out of line with the Democratic Party, which has become more reluctant to support anti-abortion candidates. Louisiana abortion case shows John Roberts firmly at Supreme Courts center Edwards stance could make out-of-state fundraising tougher, though theres some debate about how much that matters. Major Democratic donors, who are concentrated in liberal states like New York and California, are reluctant to give to candidates who oppose abortion, said Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America, a national group that supports party members who oppose abortion. Pro-life groups are unlikely to step in to fill that gap either, she said, as theyve backed Republican candidates over anti-abortion Democrats in recent races. Both of Edwards GOP opponents also oppose abortion. The (Democratic) Party doesnt really want to support them, and neither does the pro-life movement, Day said of anti-abortion Democrats. Former Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Wisc., who is on the national Democrats for Life board, put it more bluntly. If youre trying to raise money on the national level, it gets very, very difficult, he told Politico last summer. There will be no money. There will be no help. The Edwards campaign didnt answer a question about whether its more difficult to raise money from national Democratic donors, instead offering a statement that mentions the governors been clear about his pro-life position since long before he ran for higher office. People and organizations know he is pro-life when deciding to support him. The governor, a Catholic, considers his views on abortion and his push for Medicaid expansion to be part of a larger pro-life agenda, one in which families are given the resources to thrive. Shoring up foster care services in Louisiana also falls under the pro-life umbrella in Edwards mind. Louisiana Democrats - no surprise - endorse John Bel Edwards When Edwards joined the Louisiana House of Representatives in 2008, anti-abortion Democrats werent quite the endangered species at the national level that they are now. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up About 40 Democrats in Congress opposed abortion then. Eleven years later, that number is down to just six four in the House and two in the Senate -- according to Democrats for Life. In 2016, the national Democratic Party also adopted a stronger stance on abortion in its official party platform. It states that Democrats will seek to overturn state restrictions on abortion, the very types of statutes Edwards has championed and signed into law. Louisiana is a holdout when it comes to anti-abortion Democrats. Edwards may be the most prominent officeholder opposed to abortion, but he is hardly alone. Several Democrats in the Legislature oppose abortion as well. State Rep. Katrina Jackson, D-Monroe, is a leader in the House Democratic Caucus and one of the Legislatures most fervent abortion opponents. She was a featured speaker at the annual antiabortion March for Life in Washington, D.C., earlier this year. Even Louisiana Democrats who favor abortion rights think the party would do well not to make the issue a litmus test for candidates. We are a big tent party and we have to live up to it, Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-New Orleans, said in an interview. 'He's been a real disappointment': Planned Parenthood CEO on Gov. Edwards Some analysts argue gubernatorial candidates are not as dependent on out-of-state fundraising and national groups to support their campaigns as congressional candidates are. Edwards also had far more cash on hand than either of his two Republican opponents at the end of 2018, making his fundraising ability less of a concern. When Im in national Democratic circles, it doesnt come up, said James Carville, a Louisiana native and architect of Bill Clintons first presidential campaign, regarding Edwards views on abortion. Maybe they wouldnt bring it up to me, he said, because party members know Carville supports Edwards. The Democratic Governors Association, which is expected to get involved in this falls election, is also all in on Edwards. There are only three gubernatorial races in the country in 2019, and Edwards is the only Democrat running for reelection. Winning his race is the organizations top priority. The association views governors races as local matters, and it is less concerned that a candidate like Edwards has conservative views on abortion, according to David Turner, communications director for the group. Contributors are also excited that Edwards adopted Medicaid expansion in Louisiana, leading to the states lowest rate of uninsured residents in decades, he said. Yes, it is true that base donors dont like this position, but it doesnt mean that he wont get all the help he needs from the DGA, said Jennifer Duffy, a political analyst and prognosticator with The Cook Political Report. Edwards abortion views likely help him with conservative Louisiana voters, even if turns off national party leaders. Coordinated polls in 2016 by LSU and the Pew Research Center for People and the Press found that most Louisiana residents think abortion should be illegal, even though most people nationally support abortion. About 55 percent of Louisiana residents told pollsters abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. Meanwhile, about 56 percent of Americans surveyed said abortion should be available in all or most cases. A boil-water advisory issued Tuesday (March 12) for the Alton area near Slidell has been rescinded, the parish said Wednesday. St. Tammany Parish government on Tuesday said an electrical problem at the Alton well site caused a brief drop in pressure throughout the water system, and that Tammany Utilities issued the boil advisory out of an abundance of caution. The parish said Wednesday that Tammany Utilities had received confirmation from the Louisiana Department of Health that water samples are clear. When Rachel Hudson and her husband Will Preble began the renovation plans for the Abita Springs Hotel, they designated its lobby as a gallery and named it after Prebles late mother, Ann OBrien. This weekend its inaugural exhibition will feature paintings by OBrien, an artist known for her jewelry. Ann OBrien: Process + Paintings will open with a reception March 17 from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Abita Springs Hotel, 22088 Ann OBrien Lane. It will feature about 15 of OBriens watercolor paintings, as well as a case of original jewelry and a case of for-sale contemporary jewelry produced in her Abita Springs studio. In addition, a selection of ephemeral materials including exhibition announcements and press releases, tools, and sketches will be displayed. It is the first time OBriens early watercolor paintings and her Art Nouveau-style silver jewelry are being shown together. The expressive shapes and strong linear qualities apparent in both media suggest a career-long exploration of the tension between organic and geometric forms, according the exhibitions statement. The couple made the decision to feature OBriens work when they discovered some of her paintings in Prebles family home. We were surprised to find these expressive paintings of figures, landscapes, and other natural forms since we were only familiar with her jewelry, Hudson said. OBrien, who passed away in 2006, was known primarily as a jewelry artist in the north shore arts community. Yet, she also was a prolific painter and studied painting at LSU in the early 1970s. While pursuing her fine arts degree, she relied on jewelry making a skill shed learned in high school to support herself. She moved to Abita Springs in the mid-1970s and, during the next 30 years, continued to hone her jewelry artistry. She was a president of the Louisiana Crafts Council, a member of the Rhino Gallery in New Orleans, as well as the Mississippi Craftsmens Guild and a host of other organizations. Her work has appeared in national publications and has been exhibited in fine crafts shops around the country. OBrien also was a community leader throughout her life. She taught art to a generation of children through summer art camps and artist residencies in the St. Tammany public school system. She and her husband, John Preble, started the Abita Mystery House and many festivals in Abita Springs that continue to this day, including the Krewe of Push Mow parade and the Whole Town Garage Sale. We named the gallery space after her to honor this cultural legacy, Hudson said. St. Tammany top stories in your inbox A weekly guide to the biggest news in St. Tammany. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Since the hotel opened a year ago, its gallery has been used to host private and community events, such as the annual Wacky Wreath Holiday Party, and temporarily has showcased original paintings by Claude Ellender, Robin Hamaker, John Preble, and Ray Buck. Abita is home to many talented working artists, and we felt like this space would be a great opportunity to showcase their work as well as the work of artists from New Orleans and the surrounding region, Hudson said. After the inaugural exhibition of OBriens work, we plan to have rotating exhibitions with approximately six openings per year, she added. The hotel has set the remaining exhibitions for the year, but is taking submissions from artists who would like to show with us, Hudson said. Interested artists should submit a portfolio of jpegs of their work and an artist statement to events@abitaspringshotel.com. Ann OBrien: Process + Paintings will continue until May 11. The gallery will be open March 24 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. during the Abita Springs Busker Festival and March 30 from 8 a.m. 2 p.m. during the Abita Springs Whole Town Garage Sale. Additional gallery viewings can be made by appointment by contacting the Abita Springs Hotel at 985.951.4200. For more information, visit https://www.facebook.com/events/337388080216893/?notif_t=plan_user_invitedif_id=1551446746207760 Intermediate Drawing: Introduction to Figure Drawing with instructor Caroline Poehler, Wednesdays March 13 to April 3 (four sessions), 6 to 8 p.m., STAA, 320 N. Columbia St., Covington. Cost is $150 for members or $200 for non-members. www.sttammany.art Sarah Bonnette is a freelance writer on Louisiana arts and culture. She may be contacted at sgbonnette@gmail.com. A popular Mandeville barbecue restaurant has lost part of its name but gained a second location. Sticks BBQ, formerly Sticks-N-Bones, opened a new location this month at 4638 Louisiana 22. It joins Sticks original restaurant at 1770 Louisiana 59. Brent Sparkman, who with his wife, Deanna, owns Sticks, said business at the new location has been brisk. Theres just been an outpouring of support, he said. The Sparkmans purchased Sticks-N-Bones in early 2017, about a year after it had opened. Brent Sparkman, who had worked for Copelands and several other New Orleans area restaurants, said the couple had always dreamed of owning their own restaurant and moved with their four daughters from the south shore when they purchased Sticks. Since opening, Sticks has developed a loyal following across western St. Tammany Parish. We sell a ton of pulled pork, Sparkman said. The opening of second Sticks location comes on the heels of the closure of the well-known Smoke BBQ restaurant in Covington. Smokes owners cited impending highway work as a big factor in their decision to close their restaurant on U.S. 190. That notwithstanding, Sparkman said barbecue on the North Shore is alive and well. St. Tammany top stories in your inbox A weekly guide to the biggest news in St. Tammany. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Sparkman, who grew up in Houston, describes the Sticks style as more of a Texas-style barbecue. The expansion represents a move to bring the restaurant closer to many of its customers in the western Mandeville and Madisonville areas. In New Orleans, and even here, people kind of live in their bubbles, Sparkman said. The menus and operating hours are the same at both locations. The menu includes pork, ribs, chicken, sausage, sandwiches, wings and numerous appetizers and sides. There are daily specials. At some point in the coming months, Sparkman said, the Louisiana 59 location will be closed for a week or so for refurbishing to make it more like the new location. Sparkman said the opening of a second restaurant was the perfect time for the name change and rebranding. The new name keeps a piece of the old, he said, but is more Deanna and Brent. Sticks BBQ: 4638 Louisiana 22, Mandeville; 1770 Louisiana 59. Hours: Mon-Sat 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. The restaurants are closed on Tuesday. (See menu here.) For the third time, the Trump administration is trying to zero out federal funding for after-school programs nationwide. Congress has stopped that move twice and should do it again this year. Louisianas congressional delegation ought to understand the importance of these education programs to the states children. Sydni Dunn, press secretary for the Louisiana Department of Education, put it simply: We oppose cuts to education opportunities for Louisianas children. She said the department is reviewing President Donald Trumps proposed budget to understand its implications on a range of issues. The impact of the loss of federal after-school funding is clear. This year, 25,529 children are enrolled in a 21st Century Community Learning Center program, according to the nonprofit Afterschool Alliance. Those are the federally funded before-school, after-school and summer learning programs for low-income students. The state is getting $25.5 million for those children, Afterschool Alliance says on its website. Nationwide, 1.7 million children are in federally funded after-school programs. Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance, said in a statement Monday: If Congress agrees to the Presidents FY2020 budget proposal to eliminate federal funding for after-school, programs will close. Young children will be left without supervision. Working families will face untenable choices about how to ensure the safety of their children in the afternoon hours and over the summer. Learning opportunities will be squandered. Children, families and our economy will lose out. In Louisiana, this money provides after-school care for low income families. Those after-school programs give kids help with academics, keep them safe and fed and help their parents manage childcare and their jobs. There are scant resources here that do all of that. The Afterschool Alliance says 115,540 Louisiana students are enrolled in after-school programs, but another 256,040 are waiting for services. Louisiana is already struggling to find money to provide preschool to children age 3 and under. Preschool advocates are asking for $86 million per year to create seats for low income children. It would be difficult to try to replace the $25 million in federal after-school funding as well. After-school programs are important to Louisianas effort to improve students academic performance. SEDL, which formerly was known as the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, did a study of the Louisiana Department of Educations after-school offerings. Researchers found that students in the programs which include the federally funded 21st Century Community Learning Centers scored higher on math and English language arts. They also had fewer absences from school and fewer disciplinary problems than students who werent in after-school programs, the study found. A nationwide study of students at 21st Century Community Learning Centers found similar results: most students did better in class and in finishing their homework and their behavior improved, according to Afterschool Alliance. Nearly half had better math and English grades. The Trump budget proposal claims the U.S. Department of Education programs that are targeted either do not address national needs, duplicate other programs, are ineffective, are poorly targeted, or should be paid for by state, local, or private funds. That isnt true of after-school programs. There is a need nationwide, there is already a shortage of programs and, at least in Louisiana, there is no other money available for them. Congress hasnt bought into the administrations attempts to do away with after-school programs. In fact, theyve increased funding. Louisianas delegation should help make sure these services arent lost this year either. During a Monday night panel discussion at the Carver Theater about the costuming tradition of the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club, Angela Kinlaw, a leader in Take Em Down NOLA, told David Belfield, a former Zulu president and king, that Take Em Down NOLA isnt generally opposed to face paint. But the group does object, Kinlaw said, to the specific configuration of face paint that suggests minstrelsy. To indicate her organizations seriousness, Kinlaw presented Belfield with some local artists renderings showing other things Zulu could do with face paint that dont bear such a strong resemblance to vaudeville and its blackface performers. Belfield told the audience that he actually liked the drawings Kinlaw presented. He called it the best thing Ive heard yet. And just like that maybe the 110-year-club and the four-year-old activist group could reach an agreement that each found satisfactory. But in an exchange that must have struck the audience members as strange, Kinlaw asked Belfield to take the drawings to his club so Zulu members could consider them. Belfield reflexively pulled his hands back and said Kinlaw would have to present them to Zulu officials herself. He said he wasnt there in an official capacity and couldnt submit documents to the Zulu. Then, throwing cold water on any hopes building in the audience, Belfield expressed doubt that Zulu would take very kindly to us being forced to do something. Belfield explained that hed arrived at the Carver planning to sit in the audience, but, he said, when no officers from Zulu showed up, the events organizers asked him to speak on Zulus behalf. But Belfield, as prominent as he once was in Zulu, is no longer a member. He acknowledged Tuesday that he was expelled in 2013 after being accused wrongly, he says of theft. Thus, what was promoted as a debate between officials from Zulu and leaders of Take Em Down NOLA was essentially a one-sided affair with no real participation from Zulus side. Even before it was clear that it was one-sided, it was already clearly lopsided. Belfield, who repeatedly used we and us when talking about Zulu, was by himself. There were three leaders of Take Em Down NOLA, a journalist who has often sent out press releases on behalf of Take Em Down NOLA, another journalist who expressed opposition to Zulus costuming and a local historian who said he didnt understand how members of the Zulu club decided to blacken their faces to celebrate the Zulus of South Africa, who do not. In addition to being grossly outnumbered, Belfield also seemed unprepared to debate. Some of his arguments raised eyebrows: like his assertion that Zulus face-painting tradition isnt blackface because they dont paint on red lips. He also argued that people taking issue with Zulus look are similar to people who take issue with black women who chemically straighten their hair to look like European women, a grooming practice that Belfield paternalistically explained is acceptable with him. His arguments were bad. And then to find out that he isnt even a member of the club? What gives? Though Belfield said Tuesday that he was open with moderator Jeff Thomas about his status as a non-member, Thomas said he didnt know Belfields relationship with Zulu had ended. He said, He told me last night he was an active member. Thomas also said that Elroy James, Zulus current president, confirmed his participation in the forum and then didnt show up. Why was Zulu a no-show at a forum to discuss blackface? James acknowledged Tuesday that hed said hed be there, but he said he did not think the forum would serve a useful purpose. He appears not to have told the Nola Black-Owned Media Collaborative, the organizers of Mondays event, that he wasnt planning on attending or sending an official representative. After Mondays event ended, there were a lot of people asking why they had seen flyers promising that Zulu officials would be there if Zulu officials werent going to be there. They felt cheated, bamboozled. Through numerous conversations with President Elroy James, his verbal commitment to participate had been secured, Susan Henry, the general manager of WBOK-1230 AM wrote in a Tuesday afternoon statement. The planning of the panel discussion would have ceased without confirmation of official representation from the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club. She said it was James decision not to participate but that, even so, he told her that he would. There were some people who expressed excitement after Mondays forum that Take Em Down NOLA had come prepared to negotiate and that the person arguing Zulus position expressed an openness to their proposal. But none of that matters now that its clear that the person arguing Zulus side isnt a member. A person whos defended Zulus traditions forwarded me a social media post Sunday that suggests that people opposed to the costuming were trying to pack the room with likeminded people. The post implies that its author would have been OK if few people supporting Zulus practice appeared. I dont know how widely that post was spread, but the room felt as unbalanced as the stage looked. Far more people seemed to want Zulu to change than stay the same. But in defending his discourteous decision to confirm his attendance and not appear, Zulus president said his organization had already issued a statement, and we arent changing it. Then, at minimum, he should have never pretended that he was willing to discuss the topic with the public. Jarvis DeBerry is a columnist on the Latitude team at NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Latitude is a place to share opinions about the challenges facing Louisiana. Follow @LatitudeNOLA on Facebook and Twitter. Write Jarvis at jdeberry@nola.com or @jarvisdeberry. Whatever your question, we want to answer it. Welcome to Louisianswers, where you do the asking and we do the digging. Together, well learn more about this funky, fun and sometimes frustrating place we call home. Chef Paul Prudhomme is credited with bringing Cajun food to the masses, highlighting these Louisiana flavors and finding them a brand new audience. But how about the way we talk about one of its most distinct ingredients? Historically, weve referred to the little crustaceans at big boils as crayfish and crawfish, but in the past two decades or so, those in south Louisiana have all but settled on crawfish. So, how did that happen? For starters, lets take a look at how it all began. In a deep mudbug dive, Southern Kitchen describes the terms origin as possibly the French word ecrevisse, which itself likely comes from krebiz, the Old German word for crab. While the New York-published 1848 Dictionary of Americanisms refers to crawfish as the popular name of the fresh-water lobster, it has no entry for crayfish. Googles Ngram Viewer, which searches the popularity of words and phrases in print sources, suggests that, in about 1875, crayfish became distinctly more popular than crawfish, and remained so through 2000. Search for crawfish specifically, though, and something curious pops up: Use of that term takes a jump through the 1970s and into the early 1980s, which is when group boils of the little crustaceans and the popularity of Cajun cooking really began to take off. Got a question? We've got your Louisianswer For much of the past two centuries in south Louisiana, crawfish and crayfish did seem to be fairly interchangeable for local English speakers. (As food researcher and Louisiana Crawfish: A Succulent History of the Cajun Crustacean author Sam Irwin told Southern Kitchen, there were still about 1 million Acadians who spoke French as their primary language in Louisiana, and they used ecrevisse.) Take, for example, the 1912 front page of The New Orleans Item, which in a single story uses both terms, according to a search by University of New Orleans associate professor and food anthropologist David Beriss. A further review of our own archives of The Times-Picayune and The States-Item show stories, recipes and advertisements using both terms for decades. As a reference to the creature and not the Wisconsin river, crawfish first appears in print in 1840. A 1904 paper makes reference to crayfish parties. A 1922 column suggests housewives save money by comparison shopping on iced crayfish. Notably, in a 1963 column, then-New Orleans States-Item writer Charles Pie DuFour replied to a letter asking which was preferable, crawfish or crayfish? DuFours reply: Well, the answer is that such a crustacean by any name will taste as delicious. As for myself, Im a crawfish man. Ive called em that and eaten them under that name all my life and will continue to do so. And though its not likely because of him, its DuFours preference that seems to have stuck. Maps created by a North Carolina State University doctoral student using data from a recent online dialect survey by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder show this clearly: The use of crawfish is now firmly embedded in south Louisiana. An ugly fight over an audit that found the city of Zachary paid two vendors $3.5 million without having contracts in place has died down some, but the city councilman most upset about the matter has made clear he is not giving up on his quest for Colin Demarest is the government and Savannah River Site reporter with the Aiken Standard. Follow him on Twitter: @demarest_colin U.S. Reps. Joe Wilson from South Carolina and Rick Allen from Georgia held a joint press conference Thursday morning near the riverfront to talk about the fish passage project and the New Savannah Bluff Lock and Dam and what needs to be done to maintain the rivers pool level. The Cupertino-based company has now confirmed its latest launch event, which it will host in the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park on March 25. The event will run from 10:00 Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) or 17:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Apple is expected to announce its streaming service to rival Amazon Prime Video and Netflix along with possibly a new iPad, AirPods and the long-delayed AirPower. 4 Reviews , News , CPU , GPU , Articles , Columns , Other "or" search relation. 3D Printing , 5G , Accessory , AI , Alder Lake , AMD , Android , Apple , ARM , Audio , Business , Camera , Cannon Lake , Cezanne (Zen 3) , Charts , Chinese Tech , Chromebook , Coffee Lake , Comet Lake , Console , Convertible / 2-in-1 , Cryptocurrency , Cyberlaw , Deal , Desktop , E-Mobility , Education , Exclusive , Fail , Foldable , Gadget , Galaxy Note , Galaxy S , Gamecheck , Gaming , Geforce , Google Pixel , GPU , How To , Human 2.0 , Ice Lake , Intel Evo / Project Athena , Internet of Things (IoT) , iOS , iPad Pro , iPhone , Jasper Lake , Lakefield , Laptop , Launch , Linux / Unix , Lucienne (Zen 2) , MacBook , Mini PC , Monitor , MSI , OnePlus , Opinion , Phablet , Radeon , Renoir , Review Snippet , Rocket Lake , Rumor , Ryzen (Zen) , Science , Security , Single-Board Computer (SBC) , Smart Home , Smartphone , Smartwatch , Software , Storage , Tablet , ThinkPad , Thunderbolt , Tiger Lake , Touchscreen , Ultrabook , Virtual Reality (VR) / Augmented Reality (AR) , Wearable , Windows , Workstation , XPS , Zen 3 (Vermeer) Ticker Put March 25 in your diary, as Apple has finally confirmed the date of its first launch event of 2019 after weeks of speculation. We suspect that Tim Cook and his team will focus on Apple's growing service offerings like Apple Music, especially in light of declining year-on-year iPhone sales. As previously speculated, we suspect that Apple will use its March launch event to announce its new video streaming service to rival Amazon, HBO and Netflix. The company has hinted as much in its corresponding teaser, in which it reuses the "It's show time" tagline that it used before announcing the Apple TV in 2006. There is also speculation that Apple plans to announce a premium news service, having launched Apple News in Canada earlier this year. The service may feature digitised versions of the New York Times or the Washington Post among others. Moreover, the company could announce two new budget iPads, particularly as the iPad 6 is now over a year old. We may also see second generation AirPods, along with the long overdue AirPower, a wireless charging mat that combines proprietary wireless charging technology with the Qi open standard. You can watch the March 25 launch event on Apple from 10:00 PDT or 17:00 UTC. Google looks to be cutting back on its computing hardware efforts reports Business Insider. According to the report, dozens of engineers and program managers working on the Pixelbook and Pixel Slate have been told to seek other roles within the Alphabet parent company. 4 Reviews , News , CPU , GPU , Articles , Columns , Other "or" search relation. 3D Printing , 5G , Accessory , AI , Alder Lake , AMD , Android , Apple , ARM , Audio , Business , Camera , Cannon Lake , Cezanne (Zen 3) , Charts , Chinese Tech , Chromebook , Coffee Lake , Comet Lake , Console , Convertible / 2-in-1 , Cryptocurrency , Cyberlaw , Deal , Desktop , E-Mobility , Education , Exclusive , Fail , Foldable , Gadget , Galaxy Note , Galaxy S , Gamecheck , Gaming , Geforce , Google Pixel , GPU , How To , Human 2.0 , Ice Lake , Intel Evo / Project Athena , Internet of Things (IoT) , iOS , iPad Pro , iPhone , Jasper Lake , Lakefield , Laptop , Launch , Linux / Unix , Lucienne (Zen 2) , MacBook , Mini PC , Monitor , MSI , OnePlus , Opinion , Phablet , Radeon , Renoir , Review Snippet , Rocket Lake , Rumor , Ryzen (Zen) , Science , Security , Single-Board Computer (SBC) , Smart Home , Smartphone , Smartwatch , Software , Storage , Tablet , ThinkPad , Thunderbolt , Tiger Lake , Touchscreen , Ultrabook , Virtual Reality (VR) / Augmented Reality (AR) , Wearable , Windows , Workstation , XPS , Zen 3 (Vermeer) Ticker In a blow to fans of Googles high-end ChromeOS-based hardware, Business Insider reports that Google has made substantial cutbacks to the team that develops its Pixelbook and Pixel Slate devices. According to sources familiar with the matter, a restructure of the Create division has seen dozens of engineers and program managers to seek employment in other areas of Googles parent company Alphabet. Google hasnt offered any official comment on the matter or indicated that there are any plans to end either the Pixelbook or Pixel Slate product lines. However, at least once source said that there was a bunch of stuff in the works that may now no longer see the light of day. It is possible that Google may have been working on other related hardware initiatives to fill out its previous product roadmap and may have decided to concentrate solely on a more limited hardware program. Sources have indicated that roadmap cutbacks have been made, but there is no indication that the team will completely wound down. The restructure does not affect the Pixel team, which is focused on developing Googles smartphone efforts. In fact, some of the staff working on Googles other hardware efforts in the Create team have now joined the Pixel team, according to company insiders. The Pixelbook has been well-received by reviewers, however, many have questioned the value of having such high-performance hardware dedicated to running Chrome OS. Similarly, the Pixel Slate has also been greeted with raised eyebrows along with complaints that its tablet-optimized interface wasnt ready for the prime time at launch. The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 received the Pie update in certain regions last month and Samsung is also now sending the March security to those models. Note 9 users in certain markets are also getting the security patch, interestingly, even ahead of the new Galaxy S10 phones. 4 Reviews , News , CPU , GPU , Articles , Columns , Other "or" search relation. 3D Printing , 5G , Accessory , AI , Alder Lake , AMD , Android , Apple , ARM , Audio , Business , Camera , Cannon Lake , Cezanne (Zen 3) , Charts , Chinese Tech , Chromebook , Coffee Lake , Comet Lake , Console , Convertible / 2-in-1 , Cryptocurrency , Cyberlaw , Deal , Desktop , E-Mobility , Education , Exclusive , Fail , Foldable , Gadget , Galaxy Note , Galaxy S , Gamecheck , Gaming , Geforce , Google Pixel , GPU , How To , Human 2.0 , Ice Lake , Intel Evo / Project Athena , Internet of Things (IoT) , iOS , iPad Pro , iPhone , Jasper Lake , Lakefield , Laptop , Launch , Linux / Unix , Lucienne (Zen 2) , MacBook , Mini PC , Monitor , MSI , OnePlus , Opinion , Phablet , Radeon , Renoir , Review Snippet , Rocket Lake , Rumor , Ryzen (Zen) , Science , Security , Single-Board Computer (SBC) , Smart Home , Smartphone , Smartwatch , Software , Storage , Tablet , ThinkPad , Thunderbolt , Tiger Lake , Touchscreen , Ultrabook , Virtual Reality (VR) / Augmented Reality (AR) , Wearable , Windows , Workstation , XPS , Zen 3 (Vermeer) Ticker Samsung looks to be getting better with software updates over the past six months or so. The company has released the stable Pie update to most of its phones, and users of the Galaxy Note 8 across Europe received the OTA last month. The last-gen flagship is now also receiving the March security patch in those regions. The security update is reportedly available in Taiwan, Romania, Switzerland, Bulgaria, and a host of other European countries with the software version N950FXXS5DSB4. As usual, European Samsung models get updates way before US models, so we dont expect users of the Note 8 in the United States to get this update for a while yet, especially since they havent even received the stable Pie update. News Release: NRELs Economic Impact Tops $1 Billion March 13, 2019 In fiscal year (FY) 2017, the economic impact of the U.S. Department of Energys (DOEs) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) amounted to more than $1.1 billion nationwide, according to a study by the University of Colorado Boulder's Leeds School of Business. The new study estimates NREL's impact on Colorado's economy at nearly $748 million. NRELs work in Colorado has far-reaching impact and benefits the country through our award-winning research and advanced energy solutions, said Martin Keller, NREL director and president of the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC (Alliance). Researcher Elisa Miller works with a photo electron spectrometer in the surface analysis lab at NREL. She is studying perovskite materials and mapping out energy diagrams. Photo by Dennis Schroeder / NREL The report was funded by the Alliance, which manages and operates NREL for DOE. With the goal of transforming energy through science, NREL links its world-renowned researchers, unique capabilities, and state-of-the-art facilities with partners throughout the country. The laboratory develops advanced energy solutions to integrate energy into systems of every scale. The study, conducted by Richard Wobbekind and Brian Lewandowski of the Business Research Division at the Leeds School of Business, found that during FY 2017: NREL employed 1,745 full-time and part-time employees Approximately 60 percent of employees were involved in core research and development More than 95 percent of NREL employees hold at least a bachelor's degree, and nearly 64 percent have advanced degrees, with 31.7 percent holding doctoral degrees and 31.9 percent holding masters degrees NREL employees contributed $478,052 to local nonprofits while logging 1,529 volunteer hours The laboratory welcomed more than 28,000 visitors to its campus and Education Center, and connected with more than 43,000 people through community outreach events. A significant element of NRELs impact is tied to jobs, with the greatest number of the laboratorys employees located in Jefferson County, which saw a $413 million economic impact in FY 2017. The research team notes that more than 95 percent of NRELs employees live in the Denver and Boulder metropolitan statistical areas, and that the Golden-based research laboratory is a top 10 employer in Jefferson County. NREL positions Jefferson County and metro Denver as a leader in the energy industry, said Kristi Pollard, president and chief executive officer of the Jefferson County Economic Development Corporation. The labs highly skilled workforce, innovative facilities, and business partnerships are key to the regions economic vitality. NREL also is focused on workforce development and, according to the study, the laboratory hosted 122 science, technology, engineering, and math outreach events in FY 2017, directly impacting 11,123 students and 330 teachers. NREL employed 175 student workers during the same fiscal year, further contributing to the science and technology workforce of the future. NREL continually seeks to expand its impact by working with academia, as well as the public and private sectors. In FY 2017, NREL had 739 active partnership agreements with 513 partners. During the same fiscal year, NREL signed $80 million in new partnership agreements. 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. Boeing reiterated in a statement late Tuesday that it had full confidence in the 737 Max 8. It noted that the F.A.A. had taken no action and based on the information currently available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators. Two United States airlines fly the 737 Max 8 aircraft and both said they planned to keep flying. Southwest Airlines has 34 of the planes and American Airlines has 24. The airlines have said they have analyzed data from their thousands of flights with the jets and found no reason to ground them. We dont have any changes planned, Southwest said in a statement. We have full confidence in the aircraft, American said. The growing pressure left Boeing in an increasingly unfamiliar position. The company, a major military contractor, has close ties with the American government, and the F.A.A. in particular. [Three generations of a Canadian family died in the Ethiopian plane crash.] Boeing is a major lobbying force in the nations capital. Its top government relations official is a veteran of the Clinton White House, and last year, the company employed more than a dozen lobbying firms to advocate for its interests and spent $15 million in total on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The company, through its political action committee, funnels millions of dollars into the campaign accounts of lawmakers from both political parties. A list of a years worth of political spending on Boeings website stretches on for 14 pages, listing campaign contributions to lawmakers ranging from a city councilman in South Carolina to Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who is now the House speaker. [What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.] Nancy Salzman was known to her followers as Prefect. She was a co-founder of Nxivm, a cultlike group near Albany in which women were branded with the leaders initials and forced to have sex with him, federal prosecutors say. On Wednesday, Ms. Salzman pleaded guilty to charges in a federal racketeering indictment filed last year against six people in the group, including the former leader, Keith Raniere. Mr. Raniere was additionally charged on Wednesday with having a sexual relationship with two underage girls, one of them who was 15 years old when the abuse began. Ms. Salzman, a former psychiatric nurse, helped Mr. Raniere found the group in the 1990s. In addition to being accused of being part of a criminal enterprise, she was specifically charged with identity theft and altering records to influence the outcome of a lawsuit against the organization. [What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.] By February 2017, Maisha Sudbeck had made peace with the idea she would never get justice. It had been five years since she was raped in Tucson by a man she had met online. The police had brushed the case off as a he-said-she-said standoff. For years, her rape evidence kit had sat untested. With two children and a new marriage, she had moved on with her life. Then a detective knocked on her door. The detective said a grant from the Manhattan district attorneys office had helped the Tucson authorities clear a backlog of untested rape kits, which preserve the DNA evidence left by an attacker. After five years, Ms. Sudbecks kit had finally been tested, the detective said. And the police had found a match in a database of people with criminal records: a man named Nathan Loebe. My chapter was reopened, Ms. Sudbeck said. Having my kit finally tested was a catalyst for hope. In February, Mr. Loebe was convicted of sexually assaulting Ms. Sudbeck and six other women. Ms. Sudbeck testified against him at trial. The girl in long braids and lavender pants was in striking contrast to the rich and powerful adults gathered in Davos in January for the World Economic Forum , and her brief address lacked the usual niceties. Adults keep saying, We owe it to the young people to give them hope, she said. But I dont want your hope. I dont want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. The applause was tepid. Hers was not a tone grown-ups welcome from a 16-year-old . But Greta Thunberg is someone they should listen to. In fact, must listen to. Not because the catastrophe she sees coming is news: The warnings of impending climatic catastrophe are already deafening in the 2018 report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warns that we are less than 12 years away from the point of no return ; in the findings of 13 United States federal agencies that describe the grave threats posed by climate change to the nation; in the extremes of weather reported daily; in the vanishing Arctic ice, raging wildfires, violent tornadoes and other consequences of an overheating planet that appear with ever increasing frequency. FRONT PAGE A chart in an article on Monday about American airstrikes in Somalia excluded some estimates of the number of people killed in airstrikes in 2015 and 2016. More than an estimated 150 people were killed in that period, not 14. An article on Tuesday about Costa Ricas efforts to reduce its carbon footprint misidentified the site of a reception where the governments decarbonization plan was announced. It was the Museum of Costa Rican Art, not the National Museum. INTERNATIONAL An article on Tuesday about comments from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in which he accused Cuba and Russia of propping up President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela misspelled the name of a hydropower plant. It is Macagua, not Matagua. An article on Thursday about a restructuring of the World Health Organization misstated the number of trips taken to the Democratic Republic of Congo by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization. He was preparing to make his fourth trip, not his third. During online booking, travelers can see the model of the aircraft assigned to their flight when they select their seat. Several websites dedicated to frequent travelers also provide this information, including FlightStats.com and SeatGuru.com. Beware of canceling a ticket because you dont want to fly on the Max 8. The airline probably wont refund your money or let you rebook without a penalty. Is the new technology associated with the Lion Air crash new to only the Max 8 series of aircraft? If it is found that the same technology also had a role in the Ethiopian Airlines crash, what sort of repercussions would Boeing be subject to? Marcus Bierbaum, Cleveland The technology that is under scrutiny is the maneuvering characteristics augmentation system, or MCAS. It is part of the flight control software on both the Max 8 and the Max 9. If information from the Ethiopian Airlines crash suggests the software might have been a factor in the disaster, the consequences for Boeing could be severe. It has already begun a costly and complex redesign of the flight control software. It has been sued by families of the victims and suffered a blow to its reputation. Boeings customers have also suffered consequences, as the majority of airlines that fly the Max 8 have grounded their planes or have been told to by their governments regulators. Additionally, on Tuesday, the European Union and other countries around the world banned Max models from flying in their airspace. What training is required for 737 pilots to transition to flying the 737 Max 8? Have the requirements changed? Don Griffin, Houston With capital punishment, Mr. Newsom is not at the vanguard of the opposition movement. The death penalty has been on the decline in America for two decades. But it has become a defining issue for him, widening the dividing line between California and the policies of President Trump, who has spoken out in favor of the death penalty, even for drug dealers. After the news of Mr. Newsoms decision broke, Mr. Trump said on Twitter: Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers. Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I! Speaking several hours later, Mr. Newsom said he had met with families of victims and they had expressed passionate but conflicting views on capital punishment. But the governor made it clear that his decision came down to his own conscience, prodded by impending decisions such as whether to support the states lethal injection protocol. An executive order Mr. Newsom signed on Wednesday does three things: grants reprieves to the inmates currently on death row they will still be under a death sentence, but not at risk of execution; closes the execution chamber at San Quentin prison; and withdraws the states lethal injection protocol, the formally approved procedure for carrying out executions. Three out of four nations in the world know better and are doing better, Mr. Newsom said. Theyve abolished the death penalty. Its time California join those ranks. Supporters of the death penalty predicted legal challenges to any moratorium. Michele Hanisee, the president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys in Los Angeles said that reprieves for condemned inmates would be, in effect, invalidating the law that California voters have repeatedly affirmed, despite the liberal values that dominate the state. I think it surprises me too, sometimes, she said. California is liberal, I think we all know that. We have Hollywood, and the music industry, which I think affects peoples thinking. I think with the death penalty it comes down to specifics of cases. We have serial killers and lots of bad people in California. A detective with the Police Department in Columbus, Ohio, has been arrested on charges that he kidnapped two women under the guise of arrest and forced them to have sex with him to gain their freedom, prosecutors said this week. The detective, Andrew K. Mitchell, a 31-year veteran of the Columbus Division of Police, kidnapped one woman in July 2017 and forced her to perform oral sex on him, federal prosecutors said in an indictment that was unsealed on Monday. On two separate occasions in September 2017 and in the summer of 2018 he forced a second victim to have sex with him, they said. When Detective Mitchell learned he was being investigated, he tried to tamper with witnesses, obstruct the investigation and lied to federal prosecutors about having sex with prostitutes, according to the indictment. Detective Mitchell, 55, was charged with three counts of deprivation of rights under color of law (the term for a crime committed by a police officer on duty), two counts of witness tampering, one count of obstructing justice and one of providing a false statement to federal agents. If convicted, he could face up to life in prison. WASHINGTON If President Trump allows states to convert Medicaid into a block grant with a limit on health care spending for low-income people, he will face a firestorm of opposition in Congress, House Democrats told the nations top health official on Tuesday. The official, Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, endured more than four hours of bipartisan criticism over the presidents budget for 2020, which would substantially reduce projected spending on Medicaid, Medicare and biomedical research. Democrats, confronting Mr. Azar for the first time with a House majority, scorned most of the presidents proposals. But few drew as much heat as Mr. Trumps proposed overhaul of Medicaid. His budget envisions replacing the current open-ended federal commitment to the program with a lump sum of federal money for each state in the form of a block grant, a measure that would essentially cap payments and would not keep pace with rising health care costs. Congress rejected a similar Republican plan in 2017, but in his testimony on Tuesday before the Health Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Mr. Azar refused to rule out the possibility that he could grant waivers to states that wanted to move in that direction. Mr. Trump chose on Wednesday morning to take Ms. Pelosis remarks as validation, never mind that she said that he was unfit for office even though she did not plan to seek to throw him out of power. I greatly appreciate Nancy Pelosis statement against impeachment, but everyone must remember the minor fact that I never did anything wrong, the Economy and Unemployment are the best ever, Military and Vets are great - and many other successes! he wrote on Twitter. How do you impeach a man who is considered by many to be the President with the most successful first two years in history, especially when he has done nothing wrong and impeachment is for high crimes and misdemeanors? In her comments to The Washington Post published this week, Ms. Pelosi did not entirely close the door, but she said that she was not for impeachment because it was so divisive and declared that the House should not head down that road unless there was something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan. Many critics, especially on the left, argue that the first two of those standards have already been met or likely will be, but the third clearly has not, at least not yet. While Democrats could impeach Mr. Trump by themselves on a majority vote in the House, they would need at least 20 Republican senators to reach the two-thirds supermajority needed in the Senate to convict and remove him from office. Not even a single Republican senator has signaled openness to that at the moment. Ms. Pelosis calculation reflects the lessons of history. No president has been removed or forced from office on a partisan basis. The only two presidents ever impeached, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, were each put on trial by opposition Republicans only to be acquitted in the Senate. President Richard M. Nixon, on the other hand, resigned amid impeachment proceedings only after it became clear his fellow Republicans were abandoning him. MELBOURNE, Australia The sentencing of Cardinal George Pell for molesting boys more than two decades ago comes just weeks after a Vatican summit in which Pope Francis called for all-out battle against the abuse of minors. Cardinal Pell is the most senior cleric in the Roman Catholic Church ever to receive jail time for child sexual abuse. But for decades, it has been victims, journalists and civil authorities who have forced abusers into the open and called them to account when church leaders failed to do so. Law enforcement officials in some countries have become more willing in recent years to prosecute priest perpetrators, according to observers of the scandals. Here is how countries other than Australia with varying historic and societal ties to the Catholic church have dealt with abusive clergy: United States While thousands of priests have faced civil lawsuits for sexual abuse in the United States, and some have faced criminal trials, no one of Cardinal Pells stature has been convicted. In February, the Vatican found former cardinal and archbishop of Washington Theodore McCarrick guilty of abuse, and defrocked him. Mr. McCarrick is unlikely to face criminal prosecution, however, because the alleged abuse took place well beyond the statutes of limitations. The Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin has made a powerful and positive impact on the world of contemporary dance. His works have given American repertory companies something of value to perform, and thats been a game-changer, which is particularly true for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Last week, the company presented its sixth work by the choreographer at the Joyce Theater. The companys artistic director, Glenn Edgerton, previously directed Nederlands Dans Theater. Sometimes Hubbard Street can seem, to its detriment, like a Midwest branch of Nederlands, a contemporary troupe whose repertory can seem an indistinguishable blend of swishing, swirling bodies in socks. But Hubbard Streets two-week run, which continues with a program of dances by the Canadian Crystal Pite an associate choreographer with the Nederlands Dans Theater opened strongly with Mr. Naharins Decadance/Chicago, created from excerpts from his previous works. Its not the first Decadance that has come to town, but thats no matter. Mr. Naharin makes each iteration new and relevant, even though in this version, arranged for Hubbard Street and seen Sunday, there was some unevenness in the dancing. Mr. Naharins movement language, Gaga, is as much sensorial as it is a physical act, requiring muscular strength and suppleness in the joints to suddenly spring into the air, wilt in a backbend or crash to the floor. LOS ANGELES The great mystery of who stole the Willem de Kooning painting Woman-Ochre by cutting the canvas out of its frame at the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 1985 has still not been solved. But the issue of where the painting has been and why its been out of public view since its 2017 discovery by a New Mexico antiques dealer, has become clearer. It turns out that the work, said to be worth at least $100 million, has been in museum storage for months, awaiting approval from the F.B.I. to send it for restoration. The F.B.I. has kept this an open case, Olivia Miller, the Arizona museums curator of exhibitions, explained. The painting has been at the museum but it was still considered evidence, so it wasnt allowed to leave until this past November. Now, the museum, in Tucson, is staging a coming-out-of-storage cocktail party on Sunday, with the first public viewing of the painting since 1985, before sending it to the Getty Center in Los Angeles in April for conservation. The Getty plans to exhibit the painting during the summer of 2020, after treatment, before returning it to the Arizona institution. Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous nights highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If youre interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Stephen Colbert Thinks Youre Right to Be Jaded Stephen Colbert made light of the college admissions bribery scandal that dominated headlines on Tuesday. Fifty people were charged in a scheme to buy high school students admission to Yale, Stanford and other elite schools; they included celebrities and prominent business leaders. Colbert said that if the scandal made you feel jaded, well, it probably should. FIGURING By Maria Popova In Maria Popovas strange and lovely new book, Figuring, we learn about the precocious Maria Mitchell. In 1831, at the age of 12, she was peering through a telescope to count out the seconds of an eclipse. Night after night, as Popova tells it, the young girl would point her steadfast instrument at the nocturne and sweep the skies with quiet systematic passion, searching for a new celestial object against the backdrop of familiar bodies. Sixteen years later Mitchell became the first person to sight a new comet passing through our solar system. She went on to become Americas first professional woman astronomer, the first woman to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and, along with other firsts, a figure of immense power and genuine modesty. Mitchell also contributed poetry to her local literary club: Theres a deal to be learned in a midnight walk When you take it all alone. If a gentlemans with you, its talk talk talk. Youve no eyes and mind of your own. Mitchell, Popova writes, was probably in love with her friend Ida Russell, a famous beauty and Boston intellectual. (Take me, lady, spurn me not; this blessing grant me, Mitchell wrote. To mingle yet my life with thine, and een be one with thee.) Tragically, Russell died at 36, and though Mitchell lived long, she mingled her life with that of no one in particular. Despite its sorrows, her story is a pleasure to read. Popova uses the astronomers letters, essays and other writing to bring her strength of being and drive for knowledge to life in lyrical prose. Mitchell, though, is only one of the extraordinary characters in this ambitious, challenging and somewhat category-defying book. China has broad ambitions to compete with the United States and Europe in the business of flying airliners. The country is building its own jets, with long-term ambitions to compete with Boeing and with Airbus, the European aerospace giant. China makes airliner electronics equipment and is developing its own jet engines. And its executives now play major roles in international air transport organizations. That increased global participation includes airline safety. The International Civil Aviation Organization, the United Nations specialized agency that coordinates global aviation regulations, chose a Chinese regulator as its secretary general for the first time in 2015. The regulator, Fang Liu, an aviation law expert who long worked for Chinas main flight regulatory agency, was reappointed last year to a second three-year term. Some of these ambitions have raised concerns within the Trump administration because the line between civil and military technology can blur quickly in the aviation business. For example, the China Aviation Industry Corporation, a state-owned enterprise better known as AVIC, has become a big producer of commercial aircraft components for Boeing. It also makes some of the worlds most advanced stealth fighter jets for the Chinese Air Force. The Trump administration put some kinds of aircraft equipment, like jet engines, in the initial 25 percent tariffs that it imposed last summer on $50 billion a year of goods imported from China. China has not always been so self-confident in international aviation. A spate of deadly crashes in the 1990s, including seven from 1992 to 1994 that killed a total of 492 people, prompted China to turn to the F.A.A. for help. The F.A.A. sent advisers and provided voluminous information on how it regulated practically every detail of aircraft operations in the United States. Chinese regulators successfully adopted the same procedures. While other fast-growing economies in middle-income countries have had periodic crashes, China has not had a major crash since 2010. That was when an Embraer ERJ-190LR, imported from Brazil and operated by Henan Airlines, crashed and burned while trying to land on a foggy runway in northeastern China. The crash killed 44 of the 96 people aboard. Some of the ways China keeps its skies safe are familiar sometimes, annoyingly so to frequent fliers. Even in good weather, Chinese airports do not let planes take off or land as quickly in succession as many airports in the West. When thunderstorms threaten, they space out the takeoffs and landings even more. Sometimes air traffic controllers tell pilots to land somewhere else. Long delays lead to frequent stories in the Chinese media of frustrated passengers who start fights or open an emergency door for fresh air. But the measures help keep fliers safe. They continue to give themselves an unfair advantage at every turn, Daniel Ek, Spotifys chief executive, said in a message posted on the companys website. He said Apple was acting as both "player and referee to deliberately disadvantage other app developers. Apple did not respond to a request for comment. The company has said the fees are reasonable given that it must maintain the App Store and is providing access to millions of potential customers who own Apple devices. Apples introduction of the App Store in 2008 revolutionized the mobile-phone industry, creating a new marketplace for consumers to download games, productivity tools and social networking services. There are now more than two million apps available on the App Store. Companies like Spotify have thrived on Apples platform, which typically generates more money for app developers than Googles Play Store. Spotifys overall sales last year rose 29 percent to 5.3 billion euros, or about $6 billion, but the company is not profitable and is under pressure from investors to improve its margins. The company paid about 74 percent of its revenue to cover music rights and related costs. Spotify has been a formidable competitor to Apple in attracting customers for music streaming. Spotify said that it ended 2018 with 207 million active users around the world, including 96 million who were signed up for a paid subscription that did not include ads. In January, Apple said that its Apple Music service had 50 million paying users. Apples control over the App Store has been an increasing source of tension as the company has focused more on online services that compete with many of the apps sold on its platform. As iPhone sales have leveled off, Apple has relied more on sales of software and services. The largest driver of that sort of revenue is the App Store. Back at the turn of the millennium, in the northern Chinese industrial city of Datong, Qiao and Bin are an underworld power couple. Not quite Bonnie and Clyde too disciplined, too businesslike but with more than a hint of old Hollywood gangster style. In the provincial dance halls and gambling parlors where Bin holds court in the first chapter of Ash Is Purest White, he and Qiao carry themselves with glamour and authority. Bin (Liao Fan) gazes through a permanent haze of cigarette smoke, his handsome poker face occasionally betraying a hint of amusement or surprise. Qiao (Zhao Tao), from a more respectable background, amplifies her lovers charisma with her own. They are the brightest stars in a constellation of hustlers, sycophants, tough guys and wannabes, whose admiration is streaked with envy and fear. Nobody is cooler. Packets of money change hands, and eventually a gun is fired, but Ash Is Purest White, Jia Zhangkes enthralling new feature, isnt really a crime drama. The aura of romantic, outlaw chic that hovers around Bin and Qiao soon dissipates, replaced by the clearer, grimmer air of reality. Jia, an essential figure in Chinas sixth generation of filmmakers and one the most inventive and engaged directors of the 21st century, has long concerned himself with the effect of enormous social and economic forces on the intimate experiences of individuals. His movies, fictional and nonfictional alike, document the transformation of cities, landscapes and ways of life as those upheavals affect families, couples and groups of friends. [What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.] With New York State facing one of its most severe measles outbreaks in decades, public health officials in a suburban community took the extraordinary step in December of banning unvaccinated students from attending school, regardless of whether they had received religious or medical exemptions for the vaccine. The parents of 42 children affected by the ban at the school, the Green Meadow Waldorf School, sued the Rockland County health department, asking a federal judge to issue an injunction to allow the children to return. On Tuesday, the request was denied. In a hearing at Federal District Court in White Plains, Judge Vincent Bricetti said the parents failed to prove that public interest weighs in favor of granting an injunction, according to The Journal News. While no one enjoys the fact that these kids are out of school these orders have worked, the countys attorney, Thomas E. Humbach, said in a statement about the decision. They have helped prevent the measles outbreak from spreading to this school population. [What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.] The road to the nations first tax on superluxury second homes may well have begun at 220 Central Park South, where a four-story, 24,000 square-foot penthouse, unfinished and unfurnished, recently sold for $238 million. That deal the most expensive residential sale in United States history seemingly set the stage for New Yorks sudden embrace of a so-called pied-a-terre tax, a potential windfall for the citys subway system and a small, subtle victory for those who believe Manhattan has become an unfettered playground for the rich. If the measure is passed and signed into law, New York would join cosmopolitan hubs like Paris, Singapore and Vancouver, which already charge fees on secondary or part-time homes. It would also be a prime example of how headlines and hard times can sometimes intersect with a political moment, giving an outre idea a chance to become policy. When over six million New Yorkers are dealing with a crumbling and dysfunctional subway and the crisis in public housing, to see this opulence in the sky by someone who doesnt even live here, struck a chord, the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, said. In New York, there is widespread support among lawmakers to legalize marijuana, but there is a complex debate over how exactly to do it. In New Jersey, lawmakers may vote on the issue this month, according to a deal announced Tuesday. Whats the status of marijuana? New York: Marijuana possession was decriminalized in 1977, but arrests for having small amounts of it continued for decades. Medical marijuana has been legal since 2014. New Jersey: The state has not decriminalized the drug. Medical marijuana has been legal since 2010. When could things change? New York: Not in the next few months. Governor Cuomo wanted to include legalization in the state budget in April but recently acknowledged that he was likely to miss that deadline. [What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.] Many New York City detectives take great care in selecting their professional wardrobes, from the necktie and pocket square to the wingtips. They buy specially tailored coats to conceal a sidearm on the hip, with a little extra give in the sleeves to accommodate a shooting stance. But one part of the uniform is seemingly optional, worn only on certain occasions and yet, it is the one that is intended to save a detectives life. A bulletproof vest. The Police Departments Patrol Guide dictates that detectives must wear the vest when performing enforcement duty, such as making an arrest. Other times, it is up to the detective. The stakes behind that decision came tragically to the forefront last month, when Detective Brian Simonsen, responding to a call of a robbery at a cellphone store, was fatally shot in the chest in police crossfire. He had sped to the scene from an unrelated surveillance operation, dressed in business attire, and had not been wearing a bulletproof vest. Barbara Low, who was among a core of female scientists whose research in the 1940s unleashed a bonanza of lifesaving antibiotics, and whose gumption gained her followers a foothold in a male-dominated field, died on Jan. 10 at her home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. She was 98. Her death was confirmed by Lucky Tran, a spokesman for the Irving Medical Center of Columbia University, where Dr. Low taught for nearly 60 years and was professor emeritus of biochemistry and molecular biophysics. Her death was announced belatedly because it took time for the university to gather biographical details, Dr. Tran said. Dr. Lows role in identifying the structure of penicillin was something of a fluke. As a student at Oxford University in England, she was a protegee of the future Nobel laureate Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, who, having been barred from teaching men, taught at Oxfords Somerville College, a womens school at the time. Edda Goering was practically a princess of the Third Reich. As the only daughter of Hermann Goering, the leader of the Luftwaffe and Adolf Hitlers right-hand man and potential successor, Ms. Goering was a national celebrity from the day she was born. Her early childhood resembled a fairy tale. She grew up in Carinhall, an estate in the countryside replete with priceless works of art and a child-size play palace. Hitler was her godfather, and her birthday inspired national celebrations. Her youthful idyll ended when the Allies defeated Germany in 1945. Goering, who had been convicted of war crimes and other charges at Nuremberg, committed suicide with a cyanide capsule in his cell hours before he was to be executed in 1946. Edda was 8 at the time. A giant in modern political science, Sid Verbas passion was to understand and further participatory democratic citizenship, said Theda R. Skocpol, a professor of sociology and government at Harvard. Professor Verba taught at Harvard for more than 30 years, until 2007, when he retired as university professor emeritus of government. He was the director of the Harvard University Library from 1984 to 2007 longer than anyone since Thaddeus William Harris, who ran it for about 25 years in the mid-19th century. Sidney Verba excelled at not just one career but two, said Professor Schlozman, who teaches political science at Boston College. Sidney Verba was born on May 26, 1932, in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn to Morris and Recci (Salman) Verba, Jewish immigrants from what is now Moldova in Eastern Europe. They ran a curtain store but were always worried about money. His parents also worshiped Franklin D. Roosevelt. I did not meet a Republican until college, Professor Verba once said. He enrolled at Harvard after graduating from James Madison High School in Brooklyn. It took me six months to realize that perhaps I did not belong there, he said of the Cambridge campus, by which time I felt I belonged. He graduated in 1953 with a degree in history and literature, having taken only one government course. He then enrolled in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, where he earned a masters degree and his doctorate in politics. He married Cynthia Winston, a fellow counselor he had met at a summer camp. She became a musicology scholar and director of fellowships for Harvards Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the president of Algeria, on Monday announced in a letter that he would not seek a fifth term as president and called off the presidential elections scheduled on April 18. He explained that a national conference on political and constitutional reform would be held and a new Constitution written and approved by referendum. The stunning development came after mass protests by Algerians since Feb. 22 opposing Mr. Bouteflikas attempt at re-election. Mr. Bouteflika, who is 82, had a stroke in 2013 and hasnt addressed his nation in six years. Algerians found his desire to hold on to power absurd and insulting. On Feb. 22 and March 1, I joined the protests in Algiers. I was surrounded by people from every socio-economic background: men and women, seniors in wheelchairs, fathers carrying children on their shoulders. Many carried signs with sharp, subtle and funny catchphrases. Many brought garbage bags to collect the water bottles protesters were carrying; others organized the cleaning of the streets after the demonstrations ended. As we passed by a hospital, the protesters stopped the chanting to avoid disturbing the patients. A little later, they went quiet as we passed a funeral. Each time the procession reached a police barricade, the protesters chanted, silmiya, silmiya (peaceful, peaceful) or chab w chorta khawa khawa! (the police and the people are brothers). I saw police officers bursting into tears and protesters hugging them. It was exhilarating to witness the awakening of the Algerian people. ATHENS It was time to take a journey into the Underworld. Long before I arrived here in January, I was curious about the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most important ritual site in ancient Athens, whose fame spread around the ancient world. What is so intriguing about Eleusis is that, despite the fact that many thousands of initiates took part in the ritual over so many centuries, no one ever divulged the secrets of what took place. Thats surprising because the ancient city was, to say the least, a very chatty place everything seems to have been up for discussion, dissection, polemic and comic ridicule. One reason for the silence is obvious: Speaking about the ritual was a crime punishable by death. There is a story that the dramatist Aeschylus was prosecuted for revealing truths about the Mysteries in his plays but was found innocent. Alcibiades, Socrates beloved student and double-crossing political opportunist, is said to have played out scenes from the Mysteries in his home in Athens. But we in fact know little. So what really happened at Eleusis? I set off to try to find out. My good friend Nadja Agyropoulou arranged for the chief archaeologist of the site, Kalliope Papangeli, or Poppy as she is known, to be our guide. Poppy has spent her entire career at Eleusis and has been working there for over 30 years out of sheer love for the place. Though every Democratic candidate is against President Trump and in favor of working Americans, antitrust is an issue over which the candidates have real disagreement. There are stark differences between, say, Senator Bernie Sanderss calls to break them up (usually a reference to banks), and former Vice President Joe Bidens cooperative approach. Mr. Biden (still undeclared), has taken the position that big corporations should not be singled out and that their chief executives can be persuaded to shoulder their responsibilities toward workers and communities. (In the late 1970s, Mr. Biden resisted efforts to strengthen the antitrust laws, though his views may have changed as the law has grown weaker.) Antitrust law is not an instrument of socialism or of unfettered capitalism; it seeks to protect markets from abuse by their participants. Ms. Warren and Senator Amy Klobuchar seem to have the deepest understanding of this. Ms. Klobuchar is not as aggressive on the issue as Ms. Warren, but she has cast herself as an antitrust reformer, introducing thoughtful new laws for merger reform. Senator Cory Booker, for his part, has over the last year staked out a trustbusting position centered on labor markets, with particular emphasis on the worrisome effects of corporate consolidation on workers and their salaries. The largest question mark among the major candidates is Senator Kamala Harris of California, who represents the state where the largest tech monopolies are headquartered. She was tough in her questioning of Facebooks chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, during congressional hearings last year, but she has been silent on the questions raised by tech monopolies. Ms. Harris attracted some attention last month when she declined to register opposition to the proposed merger of the wireless carriers Sprint and T-Mobile in stark contrast to the rest of the senators running for president. It may be that she is relatively open to approving mergers; it is also possible that her positions are just undeveloped. The variety of antitrust positions in the emerging Democratic field means that it will no longer be enough for a candidate to mutter a few platitudes about big corporations and let the partys technocrats decide what the nations approach to monopoly power ought to be. Such questions of economic policy affect us all and therefore should sit at the core of a majoritarian democratic process. They take that responsibility very seriously, and grounding an aircraft is an extreme step rarely taken. Most accidents today do not result from systematic aircraft flaws that would justify grounding an entire fleet. I recommended grounding an airliner model only once in my seven years as chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, following a commuter airliner crash in Indiana. Since this new regulatory scheme took effect, the aviation industry has introduced two new aircraft types, both of which have encountered serious problems. In 2013, Boeings 787 Dreamliner was grounded because of fires caused by lithium batteries. In that case, the agency quickly recertified the safety of the aircraft, even before the exact cause of the Dreamliner problems had been determined. And now, we have the troubled flight management systems of the 737 Max 8, which made its first commercial flight in May 2017. In this case, there have been two catastrophic accidents within five months of each other, involving a relatively new model of aircraft . Boeing itself acknowledges that it is developing a revision to its flight management system. In the end, grounding this aircraft is the right thing to do. It will allow regulators and Boeings engineers to determine what exactly caused this crash. The Boeing 737 has been the most successful jet transport ever, with thousands of them serving as the workhorses of the worlds airline industry for half a century. This was thanks to some of the finest aeronautical engineers of their generation, along with a superior aviation safety regulatory system that identified and corrected flaws in technology or operations. The Federal Aviation Administration should do likewise; this jet hasnt been proved safe to fly. Instead, the agency is allowing Southwest, American Airlines and United to continue to operate the 74 737 Max jets now in service. The agency has noted corrective actions taken by Boeing since the Lion Air crash. The company is developing a software patch for the jets anti-stall system; it is also revising the operating manual to tell pilots how to disengage the autopilot and fly the plane themselves if the system goes haywire. But why should the F.A.A. continue to permit a system prone to going haywire aboard an aircraft? The airlines had a cozy relationship with the F.A.A. for years. Under the Trump administration, regulators certainly havent become tougher. And during the government shutdown, the F.A.A. stopped working on the 737 Max issue for five weeks. Theres no one in charge, either. The job of F.A.A. administrator is one of the many crucial but unoccupied positions in this administration although Mr. Trump proposed to put his personal pilot at the agencys controls. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump tweeted that airliners today are too complex to fly, which would be news to airline pilots. That prompted a call from Boeings chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg. Boeing, long among the nations largest defense contractors, has always been close with Republican administrations, and the Boeing boss has renewed acquaintances. Although the conversation was not made public, its reasonable to assume that Mr. Muilenburg made the case that the 737 Max was both flyable and safe. With these moves, the United States may be hoping to protect the interests of American tech companies, but that doesnt mean its wrong about the threat of Chinese spying. Thats real, and laid out in the open: Just look at Chinas 2017 National Intelligence Law. The N.I.L. is no standard security and spying legislation, concerned principally with preventing the leak of state secrets. Its main thrust isnt protective; its proactive. All organizations and citizens shall support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence efforts according to the Law, it says. (I know of no official English version; this is my translation, based partly on several others.) Another provision is even more explicit: The state institutions tasked with enforcing the N.I.L. which also oversee all intelligence and espionage activities, civilian and military may demand that relevant organs, organizations and citizens provide necessary support, assistance and cooperation. Spying for the state is a duty of the citizens and corporations of China under the law, much like paying taxes. The N.I.L. offers enticements for compliance: The state gives commendations and rewards to individuals and organizations that make major contributions to national intelligence efforts. In its January indictment against Huawei, the United States claims that the company systematically gives bonuses to employees who pilfer intellectual property from foreign companies. The N.I.L. leaves little room for opting out. Obstructing the work of Chinas intelligence institutions is punishable and may be a criminal offense. Those institutions are entitled to have priority use of, or can lawfully requisition the transportation or communications tools, premises and buildings of state organs, organizations or individuals and when necessary, set up relevant work sites and equipment within them. In other words, installing a back door in Huawei hardware to collect foreign intelligence would have a firm basis under Chinese law. During an interview with CBS last month, Ren Zhengfei, the founder and chief executive officer of Huawei, was asked if he had ever given any information to the Chinese government, in any way, shape or form? Mr. Ren who is also Ms. Mengs father, as well as a veteran C.C.P. member and a former officer of the Peoples Liberation Army answered: For the past 30 years, we have never done that, and the next 30 years to come, we will never do that. Basically, a high crime committed by a Republican wont be prosecuted because a Democrat was persecuted over a misdemeanor. There are many reasons for Democrats to contemplate impeachment today that go beyond politics. Substantial evidence has already emerged showing that the president has abused his office to the detriment of the American public. That evidence deserves a thorough and transparent airing in Congress, arguably the only venue available for trying a sitting president. Still, as pundits never tire of saying, impeachment is a political process, not a legal one and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Senator Chuck Schumer are right to wonder whether it makes sense to seek impeachment, especially given the unlikelihood of enough Republicans breaking ranks in the Senate. On Monday, Ms. Pelosi said that, for now, Mr. Trump was not worth the cost of impeachment to the country. But impeachment is worth it, politically, and not just because of what history shows us. If anything, Democrats are in an even better position than Republicans were in 1998 to benefit, or at worst not suffer, politically. For one thing, 22 Republican senators are up for re-election in 2020, against just 12 Democrats. Especially if the public support for impeachment continues to grow, a Republican vote to acquit the president could tip at least a few vulnerable Republican seats. Also, one reason people think the Republicans suffered for 1998 is that everyone knew, then and later, that it was a crassly political move Mr. Clintons lapses, however you judge them, were personal, not the sort of high crimes and misdemeanors that impeachment is intended to address. Most voters today, whether they support Mr. Trump or not, will probably see a potential impeachment against him differently. Especially as the evidence mounts, reasonable people will more and more conclude that the Democrats are doing their civic duty by pursuing impeachment (and those who disagree probably wouldnt vote Democratic anyway). This willingness to adopt a policy position not out of conviction but out of a desire to conform to partisan priorities reflects an urge, they write, to bolster and protect valued political identities by expressing and rationalizing the viewpoints cued to be consistent with these identities. In an email, Lelkes wrote that he and his co-authors felt it important to be careful about causal reasoning. They concluded their article with this commentary: Ironically, reflective citizens, who are sometimes seen as ideal citizens, might be the subset of strong partisan identifiers most likely to fall in line with the party. Since higher levels of cognitive resources and partisan social identity are associated with higher levels of political activism, the effect may be self-reinforcing, wherein political elites polarize the strongly identified and cognitively reflective, who then elect more polarized elites. The democratic dilemma may not be whether low information citizens can learn what they need to know, but whether high information citizens can set aside their partisan predispositions. These two papers raise a set of basic questions about group identity: Why are partisan divisions sharpening now and are these conflicts likely to become more aggravated? Robert Kurzban, the author of The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind, argues that domestic politics have taken on a moralistic, judgmental cast: There is a rise in purity tests for politicians, such that if they do not adopt the line of the party on core issues especially those to do with identity politics they are subject to round condemnation. Any deviation, Kurzban continued in an email, is likely to be severely punished: Being just a tiny bit out of step is seen as grievous a sin as being completely out of step. People are seeing others positions as categorical rather than continuous. Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, argues that it is the activation of group identity of the friend-enemy type, about which I have written before that is driving hostile polarization: Certainly there is a tribal flavor to political polarization. Mens testosterone rises or falls on election night, depending on whether their side wins, just as it does on Super Bowl Sunday. But, he continued, the coalitions clustering at the poles are not tribes in the classical anthropological sense. Todays left- and right-wingers for the most part arent inventing myths of shared blood and common ancestry, or binding together in ritual ordeals, or blending in appearance with a common uniform. Instead, Pinker argued, I think were seeing a somewhat different psychological phenomenon: dynamically sorting ourselves into coalitions defined by moralistic condemnation of designated enemies. Pinker cited the questions raised in the work of Kurzban and Peter DeScioli, a political scientist at Stony Brook, wondering why so much of our moralizing does not consist in pondering how to universalize the maxim of our actions or to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number, but rather of condemning, demonizing, or scapegoating a designated sinner. DeScioli provided some answers to the question in his replies to my queries: Our coalitional psychology goes far beyond a simple distinction between us and them. We form coalitions nested within coalitions, and our loyalties can suddenly shift. Our minds keep track of other individuals allies and enemies in an ornate network of loyalties. Conflicts routinely occur within a group, and generally more often than against outgroups. We use aggression as a tactic both within and between groups, and we do so cautiously, weighing the costs and benefits. Our coalitional psychology is more like a Machiavellian playbook of strategies than a simple reflex of hostility toward an outgroup. Partisan hostility is certainly a form of coalitional aggression rooted in evolved strategies, but so are the prudent strategies of peace and compromise. Moral condemnation, DeScioli wrote, is a prime suspect behind partisan hostility. Moral judgment inspires outrage and a desire to punish wrongdoers, forming a potent source of aggression. I have argued that moral judgment is an evolved strategy for choosing sides in conflicts. We seek retribution not only to deter harmful behavior but also to show which side we are on in a dispute. Moral condemnation and approbation can both be useful to encourage productive cooperation within a group, but they can also be deeply destructive when used to demonize and humiliate outsiders. John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska, makes the case that polarization has intensified because the central political issues of the day revolve around in-group versus out-group, the definition of the in-group, and the unity and security of the in-group. While as recently as 30 years ago, there were a fair number of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans who held views contrary to the majority of their respective parties, Hibbing wrote, the problem today is that there are so few cross-cutting cleavages. There is only one cleavage and it is the most evolutionarily primal cleavage of them all. Hibbing dismissed the argument that people have become tribal because of changes in the media environment. Instead, he wrote, people became tribal because the fundamental substantive issues today are about tribe. We are a group-based species. Kevin Smith, who is also a political scientist at the University of Nebraska, argues that humans are incredibly groupish creatures as a species were pretty hard wired to make us v them categorizations. For much of the twentieth century, according to this line of thinking, the first world war, the Great Depression, the second world war and the Cold War filled much of the need for an in-group versus out-group configuration. During this period, Smith said, there were consensual sources of information and political parties that were relatively nonideological with many members willing to cross the aisle to cut deals. In recent years, a lot of that has gone, Smith told me. Political parties are now deeply ideological, which makes it easier to appeal to our us versus them instinct. Indeed, it makes it more and more likely that we emotionally attach ourselves to a particularly political group, remain reflexively loyal to it, and automatically denigrate anyone who disagrees with it we are indeed hard-wired for this sort of thing and political parties have, in effect, organized themselves around, and are now appealing directly to, that part of our psychology which is, and always has been, more emotional than rational. When, if ever, will things improve? Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at N.Y.U., is not optimistic. He emailed: I am expecting that Americas political dysfunction and anger will worsen, and will continue to worsen even after Donald Trump leaves the White House. Why? The reasons for my pessimism are that 1) social media gets ever more effective at drowning us in outrage; 2) overall trust in institutions continues to decline, which makes it seem ever more urgent that our side take total control; 3) the younger generations have not seen effective political institutions or norms during their lives, and also seem less adept at handling political disagreements; and 4) the norms of campus regarding call-out culture seem to be spreading quickly into business and many other institutions. Two of the most insightful people on evolved human behavior are Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, professors of psychology and anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Cosmides and Tooby explore the complexities and ambiguities of moral reasoning in their seminal essay Groups in Mind: The Coalitional Roots of War and Morality, which concludes on an appropriately ambiguous note: The set of evolved programs that enable and drive warfare and politics strongly overlap with the set of evolved programs that drive human morality. The mapping of these evolved programs and their embedded circuit logic is only in its infancy, and we have only sketched out some of the known or predicted features of our coalitional and moral psychologies. However, progress in this enterprise holds out the possibility of gradually throwing light on some of the darkest areas of human life. In a lengthy email that I cannot fully do justice to in this column, Tooby wrote that everybody benefits from participating in groups of alliances and factions on different scales, and people also benefit by fractionating solidarity in such a way that those on the far side of the boundary seem undesirable, worth spurning, contemptible, deplorable. This, in turn, encourages evolved mental programs that support self-advantageous information warfare: Of all the signals an individual hears, and out of all the spontaneous thoughts that teem in our minds, each individual filters, remembers, and broadcasts what benefits her in building up herself and her allies, and downgrades those who are her rivals. Tooby added: I think we cannot begin to appreciate how immense and all-encompassing this process is. Tooby pointed to group pressure to adopt down the line agreement on issues when there is, in fact, much room for dissent and disagreement: There is no necessary reason why someones position on abortion should predict their position on global warming should predict their position on welfare should predict their position on school choice should predict their position on illegal immigration. These are all entirely logically independent, yet there is a natural tendency for alliance gravitation to pull people into sets often binary sets because issues are more often flags of identity, and it creates in-group dissension to have a multiplicity of views inside the group. Even more important, he writes, Honest reasoning about issues is inconsistent with group loyalty. To be a good group member, I should adhere to a position because it is the groups position, while believing that the facts justify it. Leda Cosmides expressed some of her ideas about the connection between us-and-them thinking and evil, the topic with which I began this column, in an interview that was originally published in a Chilean newspaper in 2001 and still resonates: The world has many people with evil motives, who will twist whatever ideas are around them to their own ends. Hitler, for example, was more influenced by folk notions about blood (found everywhere) than by any real biological knowledge. She went on: Since the Enlightenment, people have been trying to build bridges between disciplines, and when they do, new insights are achieved and humanity benefits. Should the healing arts have been kept separate from biology? If they had, we would not have antibiotics and modern medicine. Should psychology be kept separate from biology? If it is, we will never understand how the mind works. As a result, we will never understand how to make war less likely, how to cure autism, how to help people understand risk, or how to prevent racism, to name just a few problems on which evolutionary psychologists are making progress. Indeed, if we keep psychology separate from biology, people will continue to believe that race is a sensible concept; in contrast, human population biology tells us that humanity is not divided into distinct races. This work is far from done. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. But the suppression order complicated everything. I talked with our editors in Hong Kong, then began an email chain with a group of senior editors in New York. Though wed all been dealing with the Pell trial for a while by that point, we were still unsure about whether to just publish or find some way to abide by the order. We explored having the story written from Rome, but even then, our lawyers in Australia told us, the judge would likely hold us the local reporters in contempt. Any detail reported from the court would make us vulnerable. Next, with help from software developers in the newsroom, we considered geo-blocking keeping an online story out of Australia. Thats what at least one outlet, The Daily Beast, did. But it wasnt clear whether that would work for us; the ubiquity of The Times and our broader readership made it hard to imagine a scenario in which someone in Australia didnt see the online version and start sharing it on social media, making us subject to the courts suppression order. Our lawyers also made clear to us that the judge would be looking for someone to make an example of. The court had already asked us once before to take down an article published before the suppression order mentioning that there were two trials for Pell. We had refused, but clearly we were on the judges radar. I told our editors I was willing to go to jail if they decided we wanted to test the suppression order, but in the end, after discussions that reached the highest levels of The Times, we ran a story in print only on Dec. 14. It carried a New York Times byline under the headline: Australia Cardinal Found Guilty of Abusing Boys in 1996. Later this year, NASA will reveal never-before-seen morsels of the moon, the agency announced on Monday. The astronauts of the Apollo missions that landed on the moon from 1969 to 1972 collected 842 pounds worth of lunar rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand and dust. Many of those samples were later opened on the ground. But three have remained sealed their contents stashed away for nearly 50 years. They were intentionally saved for a time when more advanced technology would allow planetary scientists on Earth to delve deeper into the moons mysteries. The technology available in the 60s and 70s wasnt able to do what we can do now, said Jessica Barnes, an astronomer soon to join the University of Arizonas Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Now we can go to a mineral and we can look at the very fine details, down to almost the width of a human hair. The largest rockets currently built by private companies are smaller than the Space Launch System, so if NASA decides on this approach, the payload for the mission would need to be split between two rockets. The Orion capsule and its service module, a component built by the European Space Agency to provide power and propulsion, would ride to orbit on one rocket. A fueled rocket stage for propelling Orion to the moon would go up separately. The two pieces would then rendezvous and dock in orbit before heading to the moon. Mr. Bridenstine noted that Orion currently lacks the ability to dock with another spacecraft in orbit. Between now and June of 2020, we would have to make that a reality, Mr. Bridenstine said. Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi and chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, noted: This is 2019. A commercially launched mission would allow extended testing of Orion and the service module, one of the main goals, but it would push the first flight of the Space Launch System further into the future. Mr. Bridenstine did not name which commercial rockets might be used, but the two that are powerful enough are the Delta 4 Heavy from the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and the Falcon Heavy from SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk. The Orion has been launched once already on top of a Delta 4 Heavy, in 2014, for a crewless test flight, but that did not go to the moon. The Falcon Heavy has only flown on its February 2018 test launch. At the hearing, Mr. Bridenstine continued to describe the big NASA rocket as a core component of the space agencys plans. But if the commercial approach works for the test flight, some space watchers wonder why the same strategy would not work for missions carrying astronauts. The disparity between what designers tout as their sources of inspiration and what turns up on the runway can be either comical or grim. Take the case of Virgil Ablohs sophomore collection as the creative director of mens wear for Louis Vuitton. Interviewed at his studio before his January show in Paris, Mr. Abloh spoke of his childhood idol Michael Jackson as something far more than a great entertainer. He was, he said, the most important innovator in mens wear history. Though that point is debatable, it was one Mr. Abloh underscored by sending out white rhinestone gloves as show invitations and transforming a tent in the Jardins des Tuileries into a likeness of the sidewalk set from Jacksons Billie Jean" video. That the show itself had scant literal connection to the entertainer was, in the end, fortunate for Mr. Abloh considering the attention trained on Jacksons alleged history of sexually abusing children, in the documentary Leaving Neverland. Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into data deals Facebook struck with some of the worlds largest technology companies, intensifying scrutiny of the social media giants business practices as it seeks to rebound from a year of scandal and setbacks. A grand jury in New York has subpoenaed records from at least two prominent makers of smartphones and other devices, according to two people who were familiar with the requests and who insisted on anonymity to discuss confidential legal matters. Both companies had entered into partnerships with Facebook, gaining broad access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users. The companies were among more than 150, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Sony, that had cut sharing deals with the worlds dominant social media platform. The agreements, previously reported in The New York Times, let the companies see users friends, contact information and other data, sometimes without consent. Facebook has phased out most of the partnerships over the past two years. We are cooperating with investigators and take those probes seriously, a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. Weve provided public testimony, answered questions and pledged that we will continue to do so. SAN FRANCISCO Riley Newman, a former head of data science at Airbnb, set out in mid-2017 to raise a venture capital fund that would invest in a multitude of tech trends. But he quickly realized that potential investors were not interested in that kind of fund. Instead, all they wanted to hear about were his former Airbnb colleagues and whether they might start their own companies. It was, Yeah, all that stuff is fine, but Airbnb, right? Mr. Newman, 36, said. Airbnb was where we had a competitive edge on the market. So Mr. Newman and his partners at Wave Capital adjusted their pitch: They said they were creating a fund to invest specifically in Airbnb employees who were planning to leave the company to become entrepreneurs. It worked. He and his partners quickly secured $55 million and now are preparing to make a flood of investments after the $31 billion home rental start-up goes public sometime in the next year and employees cash out their shares. You can see it in Ars Nova hits that lately have gone off into the wider world like Bess Wohls Small Mouth Sounds, born in Play Group; Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R. Sheppards Underground Railroad Game, which in January toured to Australia; and the groundbreaking Comet, whose lauded transfer to Broadway in 2016 was a glittering but bittersweet triumph. And you could see it one evening this month, when Mr. Miranda also part of that first Play Group took the stage of the Greenwich House Theater with his hip-hop improv group, Freestyle Love Supreme. With tickets priced at $1,000 to $2,500, it was a sold-out benefit for Ars Nova, celebrating its expansion to the former Barrow Street Theater in Greenwich Village. (The Mad Ones latest show, Mrs. Murrays Menagerie, starts performances there on March 26.) [Whats new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter] When Mr. Eagan first saw Freestyle Love Supreme, in 2004, they were performing in the basement of the Drama Book Shop. Their eight-week Ars Nova run that fall was Mr. Mirandas first professional New York show, sharing a bill with a trapeze act. In 2005, Mr. Eagan took the troupe to the HBO Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., to put them in front of an industry audience. Mr. Miranda was his roommate on the trip, and when he suggested watching a movie, he handed Mr. Eagan a case of DVDs hed brought. I started flipping through, and its all musicals, said Mr. Eagan. It was this penny-drop moment for me, where I was like, Right: If you want to break the form, you have to know the form that youre breaking. For his part, Mr. Miranda doesnt recall the DVDs, or that (as Mr. Eagan says) they settled on the TV version of Stephen Sondheims Passion. What I remember from the Aspen trip, he said, was actually getting very sick, and Jason was kind of the one who took care of me. He was getting me soup so that I could then rap at high altitudes. Read more live coverage on the crash and its aftermath here. The A and B groups had already boarded Jesse Damianis Southwest Airlines flight, to New Orleans from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, when President Trump announced that Boeings 737 Max plane was grounded. We were waiting for groups C and D to board when we got news, he said in a phone interview. The United States had been one of the few nations to allow the aircraft to fly after two planes of the same model were involved in deadly crashes in the past five months, including an Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday. Forty-two other nations had grounded the planes, as well as airlines around the world. In a statement issued shortly after Mr. Trumps announcement, the Federal Aviation Administration said that the decision was made using evidence found at the site of Sundays plane crash, as well as satellite data that was refined on Wednesday. Domestically, travelers on specific routes offered by Southwest Airlines, American Airlines and United Airlines will be affected by this change. Air Canada and WestJet also fly Max 8 planes but had grounded them earlier on Wednesday. Seouls first feminist cafe and library The library, gallery, cafe and counseling center called Doing is the realization of a decades-long dream for its founder, Ryeoil Kim. Ms. Kim, 52, was inspired by a Korean feminism wave of the 1980s and is unique in todays community of activists, who are much younger. In the wake of the murder in 2016, when a young woman was killed in the Seoul neighborhood of Gangnam, Ms. Kim believed that an environment was needed for women to have a chance to gather and speak safely. She opened Doing in 2017, and welcomes everyone in the community. Once you become a feminist, everything is exhausting, she said. I want to make sure people can rest here. Events at Doing range from serious to lighthearted. The v enue hosts weekly debate clubs, monthly seminars and film screenings and the occasional party. Doing, located in Samseong-dong, is open Monday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Image Americanos and debate are available at the Woolf Social Club. Credit... Hahna Yoon A social club inspired by Virginia Woolf At the Woolf Social Club, coffee drinks and nicoise sandwiches are served and lively debate is welcomed. The owner Jina Kim said she first read Virginia Woolfs A Room of Ones Own as a student, but it resonated differently after the death in Gangnam. When I was younger, I never truly understood what Woolf meant by a womans need for 500 pounds and a personal space, she said. Rereading the novel, I realized how necessary it is for a woman to have her own space. One example is Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind. On Sunday night, he got an opportunity that hasnt existed in every primary cycle: a nationally televised town hall on CNN. His performance was well received, and pundits seemed newly bullish on his chance of being a player in the race. Twitter was still abuzz the next morning. This kind of opportunity for early attention simply didnt exist before cable news and the internet, particularly for long-shot candidates with few traditional qualifications and virtually no support in the polls. Image Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., is a Rhodes Scholar and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. Credit... Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press Technological change has also made it easier for factional candidates to thrive without elite support. There have always been factional candidates, like Pat Robertson or Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, but now they can raise the money to endure through the whole primary season. The factional candidates also seem to benefit from larger bases of support, because the parties have become better sorted ideologically over the last 20 years. Now the voting records of longtime establishment-backed politicians are out of sync with the increasingly ideologically consistent preferences and composition of their parties. This leaves them more vulnerable to the factional candidates who find it easier to thrive without establishment support. Mr. Biden, who is expected to join the race soon, faces all of these challenges in 2020. He has a nearly 50-year record in Washington, with many votes that lag behind the modern Democratic Partys increasingly progressive outlook. He faces a strong factional candidate in Bernie Sanders, who is well positioned to appeal to many of Mr. Bidens natural skeptics. And beyond Mr. Sanders, hell face some charismatic but largely unknown candidates who will have far greater opportunities to break through than they would have a few decades ago. Mr. Biden is still thought to have a significant chance to win the nomination. He just isnt considered a clear front-runner, or even the front-runner at all. PredictWise, based on betting markets, has it essentially as a three-way tie between him, Mr. Sanders and Kamala Harris. Data-driven political analysts also seem skeptical of Mr. Biden; several make Ms. Harris the favorite. NORFOLK, Va. It looked like any other Southwest Airlines flight: free pretzels, conspicuously cheery flight attendants, a mad dash for aisle seats. Despite the business-as-usual veneer, many passengers who boarded a Boeing 737 Max 8 on Tuesday brought qualms aboard with their suitcases. But in contrast to the full-volume debate about the planes airworthiness playing out on the ground, the scene in the sky was a mix of blissful ignorance and quiet anxiety. I didnt want to say it and get anybody nervous, said Candice Neenan, 67, a community college instructor who flew home to Virginia on the Max 8, and who said she had checked on the model of her plane before departure. Over the weekend, the Max 8 went from a prized new addition to airlines fleets to a source of international anxiety after a deadly crash in Ethiopia, the second wreck involving the model in only months. By Tuesday, a day before President Trump announced the grounding of Boeings 737 Max aircraft, United States regulators stood nearly alone in allowing the model to continue flying. And so, with as little discussion of the plane types as possible, passengers and flight crews booked on the Max 8 mostly forged ahead with travel plans and hoped for the best. A Southern California high school that has sought to quell outrage after photographs surfaced of students giving a Nazi salute at a party is reeling again after officials say fliers with Nazi swastikas were found on campus over the weekend. Late Saturday night or early Sunday morning Nazi posters were placed on the campus of the school, Newport Harbor High, a spokeswoman for the school district, Adriana Angulo, said Wednesday. School officials immediately called the Newport Beach police department to report them, Ms. Angulo said. She described the act as vandalism. Officers responded to the school on Sunday morning and discovered about 10 fliers, some with Nazi symbols on them, said Heather Rangel, a spokeswoman for the police department. Nobody is claiming responsibility, Ms. Rangel said Wednesday. There was no photo or video evidence for the police to review, she added. It was not clear whether the appearance of the fliers was connected to the previous episode, she said, which involved students at a party giving a Nazi salute in front of dozens of red cups arranged in the shape of a swastika. The United States traditionally selects the banks president, who serves a five-year term that can be renewed once. Other nations can submit their own candidates, and countries have until Thursday to offer a nominee. So far, no foreign leader has publicly opposed Mr. Malpass or thrown support behind a different candidate. While Mr. Malpass hails from the Trump administration, those who know him said they did not expect him to parrot the presidents views. I was kind of surprised that Trump nominated him for the job, because while he supported Trump and worked at Treasury under Mnuchin, he is not what you would call a Trumpite, said Steve Bell, a former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee who hired Mr. Malpass in the 1980s. Hes not going to go in there and do crazy things. The bank was conceived in 1944 to help with postwar reconstruction in Europe. It later shifted its attention to eradicating poverty in developing countries, education and public health. While the bank has received less attention in recent years, its lending has continued to grow. Over the last decade, addressing climate change has become a major part of the World Banks portfolio as scientific evidence of the impact of rising global temperatures mounted and vulnerable nations sought new sources of funding to protect themselves from rising sea levels and fierce storms. Under Jim Yong Kim, who stepped down in January after serving six years as president, the World Bank became a global leader on environmental matters. Last year, the bank provided $20.5 billion in financing for climate change efforts, which amounted to just over one-third of the institutions overall support to developing countries. Much of that money went toward renewable energy development, agriculture investments to help farmers increase crop yields amid changing weather patterns and efforts to help countries meet the pledges they made to cut planet-warming emissions under the Paris Agreement on climate change. The World Bank has also developed a vast body of research devoted to understanding how the rise in global temperatures could keep millions of people worldwide trapped in poverty. In 2013, after a bruising battle between rich and poor nations over addressing one of the main causes of climate change, the bank drastically restricted lending for coal-fired power plants. But a close read of the document requests suggests they arent exactly tiptoeing around the first daughter, either. Of the 81 document requests sent, 52 individuals and organizations were asked to turn over documents related to Ms. Trump or her business interests. White House officials are viewing the document requests as an attempt by the House Judiciary Committee to set the stage for potentially impeaching the president. But the inquiries related to Ms. Trump follow a side track: They ask for documents related to any financial benefit that Ms. Trump or her businesses reaped from foreign and domestic governments after the 2016 election. And they provide a hint of how Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, may be planning to look into potential financial conflicts of interest from Ms. Trump. Shed be in violation of the Constitution if she was getting any business deals from foreign governments, said Richard W. Painter, who served as chief ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush. Mr. Painter was referring to the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which prohibits government officials from accepting payments or gifts from foreign governments. Theyre also going after other payments that arent emoluments clause violations that we ought to know about that could be creating financial conflicts of interest for her, Mr. Painter said. The idea here is to get an awful lot of information we would have had if there had been more detailed disclosures about the entities the Trump family controls. The United States Senate voted on Wednesday to confirm Neomi Rao, President Trumps nominee to replace Brett M. Kavanaugh on a key appeals court, bringing the president closer to his goal of putting his stamp firmly on the federal judiciary. Ms. Rao, the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, was confirmed by a vote of 53 to 46 for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a frequent steppingstone to the Supreme Court. A former law professor and clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, Ms. Rao was seen as an ally in the presidents push for deregulation and had the backing of the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative legal group. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, praised Ms. Rao when the committee moved her nomination forward earlier this month. She said that Mr. Manafort had used his many talents as a strategist to evade taxes, deceive banks, subvert lobbying laws and obstruct justice all so he could sustain an ostentatiously opulent lifestyle with more houses than a family can enjoy, more suits than one man can wear. Ever since his initial bail hearing, she said, he had misled her and the prosecutors, part of what she called his determined efforts to obscure the facts. Even on his sentencing day, she implied, he appeared to be making a play for a presidential pardon by wrongly suggesting that he was merely the victim of overzealous prosecutors who had hoped to prove that the Trump campaign had conspired with the Russian government to tilt the 2016 election. The defendant is not public enemy No. 1, but he is also not a victim either, Judge Jackson said. She stopped short of giving Mr. Manafort the maximum 10-year term that she could have imposed, adding three and a half years to the nearly four-year term Mr. Manafort received last week in a related prosecution in Alexandria, Va. Explaining why she was not harsher, she cited guidelines intended to limit punishment in overlapping cases and the fact that Mr. Manaforts effort to tamper with witnesses who could testify against him had been nipped in the bud. Her attitude stood in stark contrast to that of Judge T. S. Ellis III of United States District Court in Northern Virginia, who said last week that Mr. Manafort had led an otherwise blameless life in sentencing him to 47 months for eight felonies, a punishment that some legal experts described as startlingly low. In an apparent reference to Judge Ellis, Judge Jackson noted that she was bound strictly by the case in front of her. What is happening today is not and cannot be a review and a revision by a sentence imposed by another court, she said. WASHINGTON Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared on Wednesday that China is in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations, and one of his top officials compared Beijings roundup of Muslim minorities to movements into camps not seen since the 1930s. The official, Michael Kozak, who heads the State Departments human rights bureau, did not explicitly mention Nazi Germany or the creation of concentration camps, but that was clearly the comparison he was making. Taken together, the statements amounted to the most direct condemnation the United States has made to the roundup of millions of Uighurs and other minorities. The charge is bound to inflame the government in Beijing at a moment of high tension in trade talks and the standoff over Huawei, the Chinese communications giant seeking to operate in many Western markets. The detention camps in Chinas western Xinjiang region have expanded since 2017 to include an estimated one million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in a program that tries to turn them into loyal supporters of the Chinese government. The camps have been broadly condemned, including by the United Nations, but China has brushed off the criticism; one official as recently as Tuesday likened them to boarding schools where the students eat and live for free. WASHINGTON The Senate on Wednesday again rebuked President Trump for his continued defense of Saudi Arabia after the killing of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, voting for a second time to end American military assistance for the kingdoms war in Yemen and to curtail presidential war powers. The 54-to-46 vote, condemning a nearly four-year conflict in Yemen that has killed thousands of civilians and inflicted a devastating famine, sets the foundation for what could become Mr. Trumps first presidential veto, with the House expected to overwhelmingly pass the measure, possibly this month. The vote also might be the opening salvo in a week where Senate Republicans have the opportunity to hit back at the presidents aggressive use of executive power. On Thursday, the chamber will vote on a resolution that would overturn Mr. Trumps declaration of a national emergency to secure funding for his border wall. The United States Congress is going to reassert its constitutional responsibility over issues of war that have been abdicated for presidents, Democrats and Republicans, for too many years, said Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, encouraged lawmakers on Wednesday to oppose the Yemen resolution, calling it inappropriate and counterproductive and warning them not to conflate their displeasure with the administrations response to Mr. Khashoggis death with the broader issue of the conflict in Yemen. But in a show of defiance, seven Republican senators broke ranks to join the resolution: Mike Lee, of Utah; Susan Collins of Maine; Steve Daines of Montana; Jerry Moran of Kansas; Lisa Murkowski of Alaska; Rand Paul of Kentucky; and Todd Young of Indiana. When Algerians filled their countrys streets to demand political change, it looked at first like a familiar story of hopes for democracy bound to turn to despair. A few weeks earlier, in another corner of the Arabic-speaking world, Sudanese protesters had been met with violent crackdowns and tightening government control. It was typical of rising repression and stalling democracy worldwide. On Monday, though, Algeria took a different direction. Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the president for 20 years, announced he would not seek a fifth term after all. Instead, a convention would be called to draft a new constitution and oversee a peaceful transition of power. Algerias power brokers, particularly in the military, are all but certain to continue pulling strings from the shadows indeed, Mr. Bouteflika, 82, is so debilitated by illness that many view him as little more than a figurehead. It was sold as a next generation aircraft. But it has now been involved in two fatal crashes in just five months. The Boeing 737 Max 8 entered the market in 2017, a part of the 737 Max class, and became an instant hit. Within the first six months, more than 4,000 Boeing 737 Max 8 planes had been ordered. It quickly became the companys best-selling plane ever. The new model was advertised as a rare win-win for both airlines and passengers. Its going to give them max efficiency, which leads to profitability; max reliability, and to the flying public: max passenger appeal. The demand for something new. Boeing debuted the new planes in response to market pressures. In late 2010, Boeings archrival, Airbus, had just announced a new fuel-efficient version of its best selling A320. Boeing countered with the introduction of the 737 Max The Max uses 14 percent less fuel than current 737s its own version of fuel- and cost- efficient aircrafts. Their message to customers was: These are new planes that arent that new. Boeing 737 Newest arrival in the Boeing family of airliners, the 737 attracts a crowd. Boeings first 737 model took off in 1967. A new queen of the sky. For the Max class, Boeing upgraded the engine and design. They added more cabin space, bigger windows and multicolored ceiling lights to help modernize the planes. But the company kept the 737 name because it evoked a legacy of reliability and built trust. Ill tell you what, its just a beautiful, beautiful airplane. Not only were they able to modernize the airplane with new engines, and new winglets, but they were able to keep that classic iconic 737 look. But that isnt the whole story. The new model was also designed to help carriers save money. Which means CEOs like the Max. Really like the Max. Major changes to the plane would have required pilots to be retrained. But Boeings position was that the new models handled enough like the old ones. Though the 737 Max 8 planes did actually have a number of changes, including the size and location of the engines. The higher and more forward position of the larger engines can cause the planes nose to pitch up, a potential danger. To compensate for this, Boeing added a computerized system called MCAS to prevent the planes nose from getting too high and causing a stall. But the F.A.A. initially said pilots did not need to be informed of this system update. Experts say that the lack of training for the new system may have helped cause a deadly crash with a Max 8 off the coast of Indonesia in October, killing 189 people. All of the Boeing 737 Max 8s in the world are believed to have been grounded, while a second crash in Ethiopia is investigated. Boeing said it supported the decision to ground the planes and is cooperating with investigators. LAGOS, Nigeria Sunday Adeyemo left his home on crowded Lagos Island early Wednesday as he always does, only to receive devastating news just hours later: The three-story building that housed not just his familys apartment, but a primary and nursery school, had collapsed. His 7-year-old daughter was inside. She did not survive. At least eight people have died, Nigerian officials said by late Wednesday evening. Im totally devastated, said a badly shaken Mr. Adeyemo, who was on the way to the hospital to collect the body of his daughter, Taiwo, a second-grader. Scenes of horror and grief surrounded the building that had housed the Ohel Nursery and Primary School on Wednesday, as terrified parents and hundreds of onlookers hoped for the best. At least 70 people were inside the building at 10 a.m. when it fell, and possibly many more, neighbors said. SAO PAULO, Brazil At least five students were killed in Brazil on Wednesday when two assailants, both former students, broke into a school and opened fire, police officials said. The attackers also killed two employees at the Professor Raul Brasil school in Suzano, a satellite city of Sao Paulo, and injured at least nine other students. The police said the assailants fatally shot the owner of a nearby car rental outlet on their way to the school. The attackers killed themselves after their rampage. The police said the students killed were all about 15 years old. Its the saddest scene Ive witnessed in my whole life, the Sao Paulo governor, Joao Doria, said after visiting the school. He declared three days of mourning. KABUL, Afghanistan For the second time in a few days, an Afghan Army base was destroyed on Wednesday but this time by American airstrikes that followed a firefight between the Afghans and Americans, Afghan officials said. A local Afghan official said six soldiers were killed and nine others badly wounded, out of 17 soldiers at the base. Qais Mangal, a spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry, confirmed that the airstrikes had taken place after another Afghan unit attacked a joint convoy of Afghan Special Forces and American troops. He put the death toll at five soldiers, with 10 wounded. An American military spokeswoman said personnel at the Afghan Army post, which she described as a checkpoint, had opened fire on the convoy first. This is an example of the fog of war, said Sgt. First Class Debra Richardson. The U.S. conducted a precision self-defense airstrike on people who were firing at a partnered U.S.-Afghan force. BEIJING One proposal would end financial penalties for babies born out of wedlock. Another would lower the legal age of marriage. Others would ban discrimination against mothers and mothers-to-be in the workplace and would expand or extend parental leave to fathers. Chinas annual legislative session the National Peoples Congress is typically a staid affair to aggrandize Communist Party rule, but this year it has produced a flurry of proposals to address what experts and officials now acknowledge is a looming demographic crisis caused by the countrys sharply declining birthrate. The ideas now being floated by regional officials, businesspeople and others reflect the depth of the concern over the issue but also the fact that there is not yet a clear consensus on what the government should do about it. One deputy, Huang Xihua, went so far as to propose amending the Constitution to remove all limits on family planning, which until 2016 notoriously forbade most Chinese families from having more than one child. HONG KONG For six days a week, every week, in a crowded office in Kazakhstans largest city, Serikzhan Bilash had been ringmaster of one of the most influential efforts detailing Chinas internment of Muslim minorities. Clad in a suit and tie, he would bounce from room to room, consoling distraught relatives of people held in Chinese indoctrination camps in the region of Xinjiang and arranging supplies and housing for those who had recently arrived in Kazakhstan from China. He would also record hours and hours of videos describing the extent of Chinas crackdown speaking in English, Chinese and Kazakh. This week, however, Mr. Bilash went uncharacteristically quiet. The police detained him early Sunday in Almaty, the city in southeastern Kazakhstan where his organization is, and flew him to the capital, Astana, where he was placed under house arrest. He is under investigation on accusations of inciting ethnic hatred, said his lawyer, Aiman Umarova. A conviction carries a punishment of up to 10 years in prison. On two short videos sent to his family by the police, Mr. Bilash said that he was physically safe. He urged the members of the group he leads, Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights, to continue their work while he contested the allegations against him. Even though many Vietnamese have low opinions of the Communist Party, its members generally avoid criticizing it for fear of repercussions that would affect their livelihoods, said Mai Thanh Son, a senior researcher at the state-affiliated Institute of Social Sciences in central Vietnam. The expulsion of Tran Duc Anh Son is a thoughtless decision, he said. Its like releasing a tiger into the forest, and it contributes to stripping away the cowardly face of the ruling apparatus that the party represents. In January, a cybersecurity law took effect in Vietnam that requires technology companies with users there to set up offices and store data in the country, and disclose user data to the authorities without a court order. Human rights advocates say Vietnams new cybersecurity law was meant to let the government better surveil its critics on Facebook, the countrys most popular social media platform. Facebook declined to comment on the record about Dr. Sons account. The Foreign Ministry did not respond to emailed questions about Dr. Sons expulsion from the party, including whether his criticism of Vietnams South China Sea policies had played a role. Vietnam has clashed repeatedly at sea with China, which claims most of the waterway as its own. Notably, in 2014 a state-owned Chinese oil company towed an oil rig to waters near Danang, provoking a tense maritime standoff and anti-Chinese riots at several Vietnamese industrial parks. The Communist Party likely fears a repeat of such anti-China-fueled Vietnamese nationalism, partly because some critics question why the government does not take a harder line against Beijing. Chinese officials and scholars seek to justify Beijings claim to sovereignty over South China Sea waters that encircle the disputed Paracel and Spratly archipelagos by citing maps and other evidence from the 1940s and 50s. But Dr. Son and other Vietnamese historians argue that the Nguyen dynasty, which ruled present-day Vietnam from 1802 to 1945, wielded clear administrative control over the Paracels, decades before imperial or post-revolutionary China showed any interest in them. OTTAWA Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada has been trying for weeks to shift the countrys attention from accusations by his former justice minister that his government improperly pressured her on a criminal case. On Wednesday, members of his party helped him do that by blocking the minister from testifying again about the matter before a parliamentary committee. Mr. Trudeaus opponents immediately cried foul. What does this say to Canadians? said Tracey Ramsey, a member of the New Democratic Party. That they have something to hide. The committee is controlled by Mr. Trudeaus Liberal party. Liberal committee members did not speak with reporters. The families of ethnic Roma, sometimes referred to as the Romany or Gypsies, were forced in 1999 to live in camps built by the United Nations after war broke out a year earlier between Serbia and ethnic Albanian separatists seeking an independent Kosovo. The camps were built on land that was affected by waste from a former lead-smelting factory. Children under 14 particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning, which can cause permanent damage to the nervous system and affect brain development made up approximately half the population of the camps, Mr. Tuncak said. Families complained over many years that the toxic waste was sometimes causing disabilities and possibly fatal illness. Mr. Tuncaks criticism came three years after a United Nations human rights panel reviewed the case, and found that the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo had acted negligently. The panel ruled in a 2016 report that the United Nations agency, known as Unmik, was responsible for compromising irreversibly the life, health and development potential of the complainants that were born and grew as children in the camps. Unmik took action to protect United Nations peacekeepers from exposure to lead waste in 2000 but did not take action on behalf of the Roma families in the camps until 2006, Mr. Tuncak said Wednesday. LONDON Having twice thrown out Prime Minister Theresa Mays plan for Britains withdrawal from the European Union, the fractious British Parliament defied her again on Wednesday, worsening the power vacuum atop British politics just 16 days before the exit is scheduled to take place. Parliament voted to oppose the prospect of a disorderly no-deal exit from the bloc, doing it in a dramatic and unexpected fashion that undercut the already-battered Mrs. Mays dwindling authority and negotiating leverage. And the breakdown of discipline in her own Conservative Party renewed speculation that her own cabinet could try to force her from power. No other prime minister in recent British history has been so unable, repeatedly, to work her will in Parliament. Nor have the backbench members of a ruling party felt so free to rebel openly against their leader. The husband, Reza Khandan, described the sentences in a Facebook post on Monday, saying that she had received a five-year prison term in one case and a sentence of 33 years in another. She was also sentenced to 148 lashes, he said. A report the same day from a state-funded news outlet, the Iranian Students News Agency, quoted a hard-line judge, Mohammad Moghiseh, as saying that he had sentenced Ms. Sotoudeh to a total of seven years in prison and mentioning two charges, of taking part in an illegal assembly and collusion against the state. According to the Center for Human Rights statement, however, the first case in which Ms. Sotoudeh had been sentenced appeared to relate to a 2015 trial conducted in her absence. Her husband told the center that she had faced at least seven charges in the second case, among them propaganda against the state, disturbing public peace and order, appearing in court without a head scarf, and encouraging corruption and prostitution. I dont know how many years she got for each of the charges because my conversation with Nasrin only lasted a few minutes and we didnt get to the details, the center quoted Mr. Khandan as saying. I only know that the biggest sentence was 12 years, he said, for the charge of encouraging corruption and prostitution. This verdict shows that making statements in our country comes with such a high price that an attorney can be sentenced to 44 years for it, he told the center. One hundred percent, yeah, man, America First, bro, he said in a telephone interview from the Washington area. His father, Dr. Fitaihi, 54, had founded a private hospital in Jidda and became a well-known motivational speaker. He was among more than 200 wealthy Saudis arrested in November 2017 in a roundup that was portrayed as a crackdown on corruption. But Mr. Fitaihi said his father had told the family he did not know of any allegations or evidence against him. There is no reason whatsoever, the son said. Most of the others detained at the same time as Dr. Fitaihi have since been released. But his son said the former detainees and their families are afraid to talk to one another, and his family believes the government has warned them to avoid contact with one another as a condition of their release. Everybody is in a bubble, he said. Mr. Fitaihi said he had been visiting his fathers medical office in Jidda when a group of plainclothes security officers came for the doctor. The son said he received special permission from the Saudi authorities to leave the kingdom last year in order to look after the familys assets abroad, since their wealth inside the kingdom had been frozen. Much of the information that the family has learned about Dr. Fitaihi since his arrest including the account of his torture came from a few days in January 2018 when he was allowed out of prison to visit a son in a hospital after surgery. Dr. Fitaihi was half his size and very emotional, Mr. Fitaihi said. The family initially hoped that the Saudi authorities would quickly release Dr. Fitaihi on their own, or that quiet appeals behind the scenes would secure his release. Not many people decide to pursue nursing in their 40s, which is what Susan Smith Daniels did. Even fewer people give up potential careers in nursing to become novelists, which is precisely what Daniels is doing. While the Rancho Santa Fe resident did achieve her bachelors degree in nursing, she was bit by the writing bug and pursued a masters in creative writing at Fairfield University in Connecticut. The fruit of that effort is The Genuine Stories, for which she won the Fairfield Book Prize from Fairfield in 2017. In addition to a $1,000 check, the honor led to the publication of the book in November by New Rivers Press from Minnesota State University Moorhead. "The Genuine Stories" by Susan Smith Daniels Courtesy Getting published is very serendipitous, Daniels said in a recent interview at a Rancho coffee shop. Its a little of luck persistence and luck and you just never know. Im sure theres lots of good work out there thats never sat on a bookshelf. She is scheduled to do a reading, book signing and talk about her life and writing from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, March 26, at the Rancho Santa Fe Library, 17040 Avenida de Acacias. Information on Daniels books and events is available at susan daniels.com. The Genuine Stories is a collection of 16 short pieces about or related to the life of Genevieve Genuine Eriksson. While a girl, Genuine and her family discover she has the ability to heal the sick and injured. The gift enables her to perform miraculous acts of compassion, but also saddles her and her intimates with a tremendous burden and results in complications and crises. While each of the stories stand by themselves, they are synchronized through the central character of Genuine and follow a clearly delineated chronology. It works like a novel, Daniels said. In the settings for her tales, Daniels calls upon her experiences living in Southern California, Iowa (where she still lives part of the year) and the East Coast. The Genuine Stories is (191) pages of sheer wonder and amazing story-telling ... Its one of those rare books that leaves you pondering for days after reading it how you personally would react to situations (Daniels) describes, said Executive Editor Ed Pierce in his review of the book for the Journal Tribune in Maine. Though The Genuine Stories is Daniels debut novel, she already has a book to her credit. That explains in part why the womans vocational direction took a sharp turn. While Daniels pursued her nursing degree in the 2000s, she was also accompanying her equestrian daughter to show horse events around the country, including local venues in Del Mar and the Rancho Santa Fe area. That prompted Daniels to compose a regular column for an equestrian magazine, and then a book: The Horse Show Moms Survival Guide. Published by Lyons Press in 2005, the book provides a humorous look at the horse show world, with advice and anecdotes from personal experience. I loved nursing, Daniels said. It just didnt work out. I started writing and one thing led to another. ... I never took the time to pursue (writing), but it was in the back of my mind. Fiction, however, was Daniels true love and she began dabbling with her first short story in 2009. Back in the Midwest, she began attending events associated with the University of Iowas celebrated Writers Workshop. Ive been an avid fiction reader all my life, she said. Thats what I really wanted to do, so I had to take some time to learn that. Now, having obtained her masters degree and having an award-winning volume of fiction on her shelf, she is pursuing a doctorate degree in creative writing at Bath Spa University in Bath, England. Im writing a novel as part of my PHD, Daniels said. Im on my third re-write, but I think its going well now. But thats not atypical for any novelist. ... Hong Kong: HK bans B737 MAX from airspace The Civil Aviation Department has prohibited the operation of all Boeing B737 MAX aircraft into, out of and over Hong Kong from 6pm today until further notice. The department noted there were two serious accidents involving B737 MAX aircraft in less than five months, and the decision was made having regard to the latest situation. It added that the Federation Aviation Administration of the United States (FAA) has affirmed the airworthiness of B737 MAX aircraft and the investigation into the two accidents is ongoing. The temporary prohibition of the aircraft is solely a precautionary measure to ensure aviation safety and protect the public, the department said. Over the past few days, the department has been in close contact with the FAA and relevant organisations, including SpiceJet of India and Globus Airlines of Russia which use B737 MAX aircraft to operate flights into and out of Hong Kong International Airport. The two airline companies said they would fully co-operate with the temporary prohibition and maintain their services with other aircraft types to reduce the impact on passengers. The department said it will closely monitor the developments and the information of relevant aviation authorities, and review the temporary prohibition arrangement in due course. This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 13) At least 20 members of the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) were killed in a series of clashes with government troops in Maguindanao. The members of the BIFF as well as the Daesh-inspired terror group were neutralized Tuesday following an intensive operation of military on ground in Salibu, Pagatin, Mamasapano, and Shariff Aguak. Major General Cirilito Sobejana, commander of the Army's 6th Infantry Division, said troops will continue to go after bandits "to safeguard the civilians and put an end to this menace of society." "Soldiers of the 6ID have been vigilantly guarding the entire Central Mindanao in order to constrict the firefight in specific engagement areas and continue to pursue the remnants of the terror group," he added. Aside from the BIFF members, a foreigner-- suspected to be an Arab- -was also killed in the clash. The government side meanwhile reported one casualty, while 11 soldiers were wounded. In February, five soldiers were killed in a clash with a hundred Abu Sayyaf members in Patikul, Sulu. Last Friday, the government forces in the area launched attacks, including aerial bombings, in the area to combat Abu Sayyaf fighters. CNN Philippines has not been able to independently verify these numbers. Andrew Sean Greers fifth novel, Less, marks a departure for the author in a number of ways - he used more autobiographical detail than in his other books, he infused the story with humor in a way he hadnt done before, and the books main character is gay, another first for his novels. One more first: Less, the story of an unlikely round-the-world trip taken by Arthur Less, a failed novelist, proudly displays a gold circle on its front cover, in recognition of the novel receiving the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Greer, who has also won numerous other honors, was the featured speaker at the March 7 meeting of the Rancho Santa Fe Literary Society, held at the Fairmont Grand Del Mar Resort, said he struggled with the book early on in his writing. Initially, the book was meant to be a more serious contemplation of the loss of love and youth as the protagonist approached middle age. I couldnt stand it, and I couldnt stand the main characters self pity, said Greer. Instead, he decided to take a different approach and make fun of his central character. Along with his fiction-writing, said Greer, he has long held what he called a series of odd jobs, to make ends meet as he wrote fiction and tried to get it published. Those jobs have ranged from teaching at a community college to running a writers retreat in Italy, to working as a reservations clerk at a restaurant and as a television extra. He also worked as a travel and food writer for magazines. It was during his travels for his magazine-writing gig that Less began to take shape, said Greer. Struck by inspiration, he quickly wrote a chapter about Arthur Less in Italy. I just knew this was it, he said. The pages came so easily. Once I figured out the novel, it was great fun. The book follows Arthur as he receives a wedding invitation from his boyfriend of nine years, who was about to marry someone else. Arthur was torn because he felt as if he could neither gracefully accept nor decline the invitation. Instead, he cobbled together a world trip by accepting a number of invitations to literary events that had come his way. Arthurs travels would take him to New York, Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, Morocco, India and Japan. The invitations to a conference, a writers retreat and an assignment for a travel magazine, among others, gave him cover to bow out from attendance at the dreaded nuptials. My apologies, he wrote on the RSVP, but I will be out of the country. My love to Freddy and Tom. He would accept them all, Greer wrote of Arthurs decision to skip town to attend the various literary events. Along with avoiding the wedding, the trip would allow Arthur to celebrate his 50th birthday in an exotic destination. Greer, who grew up in Washington, D.C., an identical twin and the son of two scientists, has held some interesting jobs as he honed his craft as a writer. Early on, he wrote several novels which were eventually relegated to a dusty cardboard box. His writing career began to catch on after he published a short story in Esquire magazine, an experience he called both thrilling and other worldly. Later, he published a book of short stories before he began to publish novels. As mentioned, along the way he paid the bills by, among other jobs, working as a reservation clerk at a restaurant. He recalled coming in to work one morning, only to have the chef come after him with a cleaver, because he had booked too many diners at one time. In the early 90s, he worked as a chauffeur for writers on staff at Saturday Night Live, which he said was his favorite job, and he also worked as an extra on SNL, earning $100 per episode, which he said was decent money at the time. (Greer said he can be seen in the background of SNL skits on videos of that time period.) Being a novelist in the era of social media has both its positives and negatives, said Greer, a San Francisco resident. He has left Facebook entirely, due to the disinformation spread on the platform. The only time he regrets his decision, he said, is when he misses a party invitation. But social media also allows for positive feedback from readers. Playwrights get to sit in the theater and hear the applause, he said. On Twitter, we (novelists) get the applause. For more on Greer and his work, visit www.andrewgreer.com. SELAMAT DATANG DI MESINSLOT. SITUS JUDI CASINO DAN SLOT TERBAIK DI iNDONESIA - Pemeliharaan Terjadwal: Global Gaming pada 2021-02-26 dari 10:00 AM sampai 2031-02-26 10:00 AM (GMT + 7). Selama waktu ini, Global Gaming permainan tidak akan tersedia. Kami memohon maaf atas ketidaknyamanan yang mungkin ditimbulkan. - Pemeliharaan Terjadwal: Asia Gaming pada 2021-04-07 dari 1:00 PM sampai 2021-04-08 11:00 PM (GMT + 7). Selama waktu ini, Asia Gaming permainan tidak akan tersedia. Kami memohon maaf atas ketidaknyamanan yang mungkin ditimbulkan. - Pemeliharaan Terjadwal: S128 Cockfight pada 2021-02-26 dari 12:00 PM sampai 2031-02-26 12:00 PM (GMT + 7). Selama waktu ini, S128 Cockfight permainan tidak akan tersedia. Kami memohon maaf atas ketidaknyamanan yang mungkin ditimbulkan. Members of the Aetherius Society, a fringe religious movement founded in the 1950s, believe that spiritual power is a tangible type of energy, like electricity, so they store it in special spiritual power batteries for release in case of global catastrophes. The Aetherius Society claims to have prevented several international crises by releasing the concentrated spiritual energy stored in these special batteries. Founded in 1954 by a former taxi driver called David King the Aetherius Society is one of the earliest UFO-based religious movements in the world. Its members believe that some of the most famous religious figures in human history come from different planets. The Hindu god Krishna, for example, apparently comes from Saturn, which also happens to be home to a Cosmic Hierarchy or Interplanetary Council, while Jesus and Buddha are from Venus. The main goal of the Aetherius Society is to work with these Cosmic Masters to help humanity solve and prevent its problems so it can advance into the New Age. One of the ways it does this is with the help of spiritual power, which can be stored in special batteries indefinitely. Photo: ambroo/Pixabay There are many interesting aspects to the Aetherius Society, but the one that always seems to draw the most attention is Operation Prayer Power. Designed by Dr. George King in 1973, this cosmic mission involves the direction of spiritual energy by praying members of the religious movement at a trained leader which mentally directs it into a spiritual power battery, where it can be stored indefinitely. Qualifying to pray at the battery can take literally years of practice and is a great skill, the Aetherius Society website states. The energy invoked has to be of a certain quality which is not easy to achieve. Each prayer is assessed by a qualified prayer assessor, and this assessment, along with careful timing of each blessing and prayer, then determines how much energy is calculated to have been put into the battery. The spiritual power battery is made out of certain materials which conduct spiritual energies and was designed by Dr. King to quickly release the energy within in concentrated form with the help of something called a spiritual energy radiator. This concentrated energy is then directed by the Cosmic Masters at a specific target where it is needed the most, such as a crucial peace negotiation, or a denuclearization summit. The Aetherius Society lists a number of instances in which its spiritual energy batteries have saved the world from the brink of disaster. For example, in 1974, when a war between Greece and Turkey was fought over the island of Cyprus, a spiritual power battery was discharged in London and directed at the peacemakers gathered in the United Nations in New York, as well as at Cyprus itself. Within hours, a ceasefire was accepted by both sides and peace followed soon after. On April 23rd, 1981, hundreds of hours worth of spiritual energy was released and directed to Poland, which determined the Soviet Union not to invade the central European country, despite the growing anti-communist sentiment there. Poland went on to become the catalyst for the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe. In January of 1993, following the oil spill of the Braer tanker in the Shetlands, Scotland, two separate batteries of over 550 prayer hours each were discharged, which resulted in the registered deaths of only 1,542 birds, six otters and no whales. This was apparently much less of a disaster than similar incidents which had resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead animals. I bet you never imagined that a battery, let alone a spiritual one, could thwart global disasters or at least mitigate the damage they cause. Well, you live and you learn. Nobuaki Kurumatani Abernathy MacGregor is helping King Street as the New York hedge fund eyes a proxy fight with Japanese industrial giant Toshiba, which has been in a tailspin since its Westinghouse Electric nuclear unit declared bankruptcy in 2017. King Street, which is one of Toshibas largest investors with a 5.4 percent stake, plans to nominate a slate of directors, including co-founder Brian Higgins, to replace the majority of Toshibas board. In a letter to Toshiba CEO Nobuaki Kurumatani, who took over in April, King Street describes its objectives as instlling accountability, improving efficiency, focusing on disciplined capital allocation, maximizing value of assets/businesses and renewing the focus of the corporate portfolio. Our goal is return Toshiba to its rightful place as a crown jewel of corporate Japan, it says. While King Street credits the directors for doing a commendable job, the hedge fund believes Toshiba needs a different type of board... to lead its turnaround plan. Founded in 1992, King Street is a $20B investment management firm with offices in London, Singapore, Tokyo and Charlottesville. AbMacs Shawn Pattison and Will Braun represent King St. France's Havas owns AbMac. A meeting of the Offaly Housing Strategic Policy Committee (SPC) has been told that there is now a 'new reality' from banks and other lenders when it came to dealing with distressed mortgage holders. Stephen Curtis, Head of Operations, at the mortgage to rent company, Home For Life, told the councillors that 576 mortgages in Offaly have been in arrears for more than two years but noted that those who qualified under the Mortgage To Rent Scheme could be helped stay in their homes under the governments scheme. He stated, "The government has prioritised solutions for families unable to pay back and we are finding that lenders now are engaging with the scheme as they realise its a good outcome because they find when they seek repossession orders that the courts are often unwilling to grant them. In his presentation to the council committee in Tullamore, Mr Curtis added, Previously, there wasnt a great awareness about the scheme but that is now changing. He agreed that it had not worked as well as it should have in the past but stressed that with new operators in the field, there was now a greater dynamism around individual cases. In our time operating since last autumn, we have reduced the timeline in dealing with all documentation and agencies so that a case can be completed within six months where before that it was taking twice or three times as long, he explained. Figures from the Central Banks Long-Term Mortgage Arrears in Ireland Report (Q3 2018) state that 576 households in Offaly are in mortgage arrears for over two years. Cllr John Leahy said mortgage to rent was a great scheme. He said it could provide a solution for many people and he would be very happy to push it forward to help people in stressed situations. It is badly needed, he said. The Chairman of the Committee, Cllr Declan Harvey, said it was important for people to know that their arrears would be part of the mortgage to rent agreement package that they ended up with. Cllr Peter Ormond said it was a pity that the income threshold was pitched so low as he knew 10 people who could avail of a mortgage to rent solution if the bands were higher. Cllr Noel Cribbin questioned the eligibility for houses in Offaly, which he was informed was up to 280,000. He said it was a 'no brainer' for people in mortgage trouble who fitted inside the limit to pursue such a course of action. Offaly councillor and RENUA Ireland Party Leader John Leahy has urged the government toadd ISIS and other extremist Islamic terror groups to the list of proscribed Irish Organizations. Cllr Leahy said it is time for the government to act pro-actively on this issue noting that the country has sufficient experience of combating terrorism to be able to act far more swiftly to deal with the issue of Lisa Smith. We should in this regard use the precedent set where the IRA continues to be an unlawful organisation in the Republic of Ireland under the Offences Against the State Acts," he commented adding that the government should convene the Dail to pass emergency legislation to add ISIS and other extremist terror organizations to this grouping. He also said that a clause should be added denying bail to any-one arrested on suspicion of such membership. Cllr Leahy said he agreed with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar when he said Ireland could not avoid its responsibilities but Cllr Leahy added that the Taoiseach also has a responsibility to ensure known and self-confessed terrorists are not allowed 'swan around the talk-show circuit' when they return to our shores. "Treason is treason and must be dealt with accordingly. Those who swan away on foreign adventures with ISIS need to know the price of return is prolonged incarceration. It is also obvious that going to Syria or going to live in what was called Islamic State, is not in itself an offence or a crime," said Cllr Leahy. He concluded, "we disagree fundamentally with his claim that a compassionate response is required. There is no space in responsible politics for compassionate responses to terrorists of any ilk. That is taking a risk with the safety of Irish citizens and our communities." Many people are making surprising smartphone trade-offs. Most respondents consider being connected by their smartphone to be much more important than dating except for the French. In fact, a majority of participants would rather spend money on a smartphone than on joining a gym, eating out with friends or shopping for new clothes. Nearly half prefer to spend their money on smartphones than to travel, buy presents for their family or save for the future. In the United States, slightly more than half of respondents said they would prefer to invest in their smartphones rather than engage in any of these pursuits. While only a small portion of German and Spanish participants felt the same way. In Brazil, nearly 70% of respondents under the age of 35 were willing to sacrifice one or more of the recreations above. This dependence looks set to continue to grow. While only about one-fifth of respondents have tried using their smartphones for smart home devices or connected security systems, more than 40% plan to try these services in the future. A majority also want to use their smartphones as voice-controlled assistants, virtual-reality devices and online educational tools. Naturally enough, as peoples lives become increasingly mediated by smartphones, the issue of trust is growing in importance as more attention is paid to the collection of personal data. People trust banks more than other kinds of organizations to protect their data, with 37% of our respondents giving positive replies. Just 14%, however, trust their telecom services provider and they trust big technology companies even less. That said, both operators and technology firms are increasingly aware of the problem and the stakes involved. The chief executives of both Microsoft and Apple have called for greater privacy regulation recently. In July, Microsofts chief executive Satya Nadella and its president Brad Smith called for public regulation and corporate responsibility regarding the collection of peoples images. Before that, Apples chief executive Tim Cook called for greater privacy regulation, saying consumers should have more visibility into not only what personal information they share online but how companies use that information to better understand their users. Some telecom operators are starting to be increasingly vocal, too. If the result is growing levels of trust in big tech companies and mobile phone operators, it could mean big opportunities for them. For example, companies could operate privacy management services that would show their customers data to trusted providers and only to them and carry out administrative tasks, such as supplying payment details to selected platforms and apps. Bolstered by increased customer trust and armed with better datasets, they could also take on a larger role in providing additional products and services. In order to assess this prospect, we asked our respondents how they felt about these companies storing their data to personalize services. Only one-quarter said they were reluctant and scared. In spite of having only a low level of trust in technology and telecom companies at present, they are at least keen on the idea of such services: Nearly half 44% were open and excited. Are you a current print subscriber? You qualify for online access to the Omak Chronicle. To receive your access, create a website account and then verify your print subscription or e-edition subscription with your subscriber number, which may be found on your bill or mailing label. Bhopal hospital fire: 4 infants killed even before parents could name them What caused the fire in Bhopal hospital that killed 4 infants? Digvijaya Singh on BJP MLA's call to break legs of Congressmen: I'll go to his house to recite Ramdhun Madhya Pradesh: BJP MP's son arrested with Heroin Bhopal oi-Vikas SV Bhopal, Mar 13: BJP Rajya Sabha MP Sampatiya Uike's son Satendra is among the three persons arrested on Wednesday with contraband substance Heroin, said reports. Uike is a Rajya Sabha MP from Mandla in Madhya Pradesh. 3.380 grams of Heroin was seized from them, reported ANI. Sampatiya Uike is a tribal leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party from Madhya Pradesh's Mandla. Earlier today, police seized huge quantity of heroin and arrested a woman from Nagaon district in Assam. Earlier this month, the Punjab police's Special Task Force (STF) has reportedly seized 97 grams of contraband substance heroin worth Rs 50 lakh. In January this year, Delhi Police's Special Cell seized 20 kilograms of contraband substance Heroin and arrested six people in connection with it. The value of of the seized narcotic was said to be around Rs 80 crore. In the same month, the Delhi Police's crime branch busted a drug trafficking syndicate that imported drugs online via dark web from the US and other countries, to distribute them in the city. [Delhi: Heroin worth Rs 80 Cr seized, 6 arrested] In November last year (2018), the Narcotics Control Bureau seized Rs 200 crore worth heroin. The contraband substance was being brought from Jammu and Kashmir's Kupwara in apple cartons. The heroin laden apple cartons were intercepted and seized from a highway toll plaza. In July 2018, four alleged drug peddlers were arrested in three separate incidents in Jammu and Kashmir and more than 450 grams of heroin and 250 intoxicant capsules were seized from them. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 23:15 [IST] Hyderabad rape case: The rapist will be caught and killed in encounter, Telangana minister GST officials detect tax fraud of Rs 224 cr by 8 companies in Hyderabad Hyderabad pti-PTI Hyderabad, Mar 13: Officials of the Central GST have unearthed an alleged tax fraud of Rs 224 crore by a group of eight companies, which generated fake invoices worth Rs 1,289 crore. A key suspect involved in the racket has been arrested and Rs 19.75 crore was recovered from him, a press release from the Hyderabad Central GST Commissionerate said Tuesday night. Several documents were recovered during the simultaneous searches on Tuesday night at the residential and business premises of these companies, which are involved in the trade of iron and steel products. The companies have been generating fake invoices without actual supply of TMT bars, MS bars, MS flat products among others, and were passing on the input tax credit to other tax payers within the same group, besides some other taxpayers since July, 2017, it said. The fake invoices generated by them involved about Rs 1,289 crore of value and input tax credit of about Rs 224 crore. Delhi court to frame charges in Muzaffarpur shelter homes case on Mar 18 "Five out of these taxpayers are operating from the same address and many of the Directors/Partners/Proprietors of these firms/companies,are common," the release said. These companies were also found to be indulging in circular fake trading to inflate their turnover, besides supplying such fake invoices and e-way bills to some others, the GST officials said. "Investigation also, prima facie, reveals that the above modus operandi is also being adopted to defraud the Banks for claiming ineligible credit facilities or Letters of Credit (LCs), without any collateral securities," it added. PTI A Governor note that led to EC announcing 7 phase polling in Bengal India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Mar 13: The Election Commission of India was criticised by a certain section after it announced that the polls in West Bengal would be conducted in seven phases. The decision to conduct the 7 phase poll was taken after the Governor of West Bengal wrote in a letter to the Prime Minister and Home Minister about the potential violence. This was the main reason why the ECI decided to conduct the polls in 7 phases. During the meeting of the EC and Home Secretary, one of the key issues that cropped up was relating to the availability of security forces. Would the paramilitary forces be able to move from one constituency to another was another issue that came up for discussion. Lok Sabha election 2019: Central forces to start reaching West Bengal from March 15 In the report the Governor, K N Tripathi cited the violence that took place during the panchayat polls that were held last year. There have been increased incidents of clashes between the BJP and Trinamool Congress workers. The Governor also pointed out towards the possibility of attempts to prevent a free and fair election. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 8:02 [IST] BJP stands for Jandhan, Aadhaar and Mobile but SP is for Jinnah, Azam and Mukhtar: Amit Shah Akhilesh, Yogi trade barbs over Modi's tweet spree India oi-Deepika S Lucknow, March 13: Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said that he was happy that the PM too, is appealing the Mahagathbandhan (Grand Alliance) for a Mahaparivartan (Absolute change). "I also appeal to the citizens to vote in high numbers and choose a new Prime Minister," Yadav wrote on Twitter attaching Modi's tweet in which he tagged leaders of the Opposition's Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance). Yadav has been attacking the BJP and Prime Minister Modi almost on a daily basis, raising a myriad of issues like farmer distress, growing unemployment, failed economy and poor law and order in Uttar Pradesh. Modi writes blog, lists 4 requests for a stronger democracy ahead of 2019 elections Adityanath hit back at his predecessor with a series of tweets listing his government's achievements in the past two years. He said all the criminals had vanished from Uttar Pradesh and not a single riot has happened in the state during his tenure. "If SP chief Akhilesh Yadav steps out of his house then only he shall know the reality of villages. If I would tell the truth then he would not be able to show his face," he wrote. The prime minister tagged Opposition leaders including Akhilesh Yadav. He then went on to tag iconic names from sports, business, cinema and more such speed. The PM began by making four genuine requests to the voters and asked them to first get themselves registered for polling, check all facts before the polling in their area, plan their schedule carefully so that they don't fail to cast their vote and encourage others to vote. Making his first appeal, Modi went to bitter opponents - Rahul Gandhi, Mamata Banerjee, Sharad Pawar, Mayawati, Akhilesh Yadav, Tejashwi Yadav and MK Stalin. Tagging all these leaders, PM Modi said he appealed to them to "encourage increased voter participation in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. A high turnout augurs well for our democratic fabric." PM Modi tweeted 29 times in an hour on Wednesday morning. In his tweets, he tagged India's biggest names from all walks of life. In all of his tweets PM Narendra Modi asked those tagged to work for voter awareness in order that they come out in large numbers to cast their vote in upcoming Lok Sabha elections. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 14:21 [IST] All Boeing 737 Max aircraft grounded, tomorrow is challenging day: Aviation Ministry India oi-Chennabasaveshwar P New Delhi, Mar 13: All airlines have grounded flights of Boeing 737 Max before the deadline of 4 pm issued by the Civil Aviation Ministry on Tuesday. The Ministry has discussed with the airlines plans to reduce inconvenience to the passengers. Ministry of Civil Aviation Secretary Pradeep Singh Kharola, said, "We had a discussion with the airlines as to how they plan to reduce inconvenience to the passengers." SpiceJet has cancelled 14 flights, it operates 500 flights daily and of that 14 were cancelled. Know about Boeing 737 MAX aircraft series "They've been able to accommodate all passengers on their own. Tomorrow is going to be a real challenging day, as today grounding came into effect in the second half of the day," said Kharola. "About 30-35 flights will get affected tomorrow. They've assured that no airport that has SpiceJet service will go unserviced. They'll be setting up a special cell to monitor the passengers' complaints, further said Kharola. All sitting MPs to get ticket, wait and watch for Mandya seat: Yeddyurappa India oi-Chennabasaveshwar P Bengaluru, Mar 13: Karnataka BJP President BS Yeddyurappa said all the 16 sitting BJP MPs will get ticket to contest the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. In a press conference held by the state leadership in Bengaluru, BS Yeddyurappa said he would take part in the BJP core committee on March 15 and the first list likely to be released on March 16. He said the the saffron party will got to people of the state with achievements of the Modi government, failure of the Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) alliance and achievements the previous BJP government in the state. Almost half of BJP MPs unlikely to get party ticket Asked about chances of the BJP getting 22 seats in the state after Congress-JDS forging pre-poll alliance, he said that, in fact, the coalition would help the BJP get more seats. He further said that the Congress-JDS alliance has waived-off only Rs 4,500 Crore farm loans in nine months. "Around 160 taluks are severely drought-hit. No minister is available to address the matter. This is the sorry state of governance, " he added. BJP candidate from Mandya : BJP candidate from Mandya Parliamentary seat, a Vokkaliga bastion, depends on Sumalatha Ambaresh's move, said Yeddyurappa. Also, he condemned HD Revanna's derogatory remarks against Sumalatha, saying people of Mandya will teach a lesson to JDS. Yeddyurappa denied that BJP is behind Sumalatha's political moves in the district. Mandya Lok seat has received a lot of attention JDS has fielded Nikhil Kumaraswamy, son of Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy, from Mandya amid opposition by supporters of late Congress leader MH Ambareesh. Be present in Lok Sabha, RS says BJP in 3 line whip to its MPs Election expenditure: How much did BJP, Congress, DMK, CPI, TMC, AIADMK receive funds and spent during polls? BJP-Shiv Sena to hold six mega rallies together; PM Modi, CM Yogi on star campaigners list India oi-Deepika S Mumbai, Mar 13: With Lok Sabha Elections round the corner, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena have decided to launch a joint campaign across the state. According to the reports, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Union minister Nitin Gadkari and UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath will be star campaigners in BJP and Shiv Sena's joint rallies to be held across the states from March 24. Besides the campaign schedule, issues pertaining to Jalna and Northeast Mumbai Lok Sabha seats were also discussed. Why Shiv Sena agreed for an alliance with BJP BJP and Shiv Sena announced their pre-poll alliance in February with a consensus on the seat-sharing for Maharashtra Lok Sabha polls. The two parties will fight in an equal number of seats when it comes to the state elections. As for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, the BJP will contest from 25 seats and Shiv Sena will contest from 23 seats. In 2014, the two parties, along with their allies, had won 42 out of 48 seats. While the BJP had bagged 23 seats, the Shiv Sena had emerged winners in 18 constituencies. Shiv Sena and BJP are allies both in Centre and in Maharashtra, but in early 2018, the Sena had announced that it would contest the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and the Maharashtra Assembly elections separately over disagreements with the BJP. Maharashtra will vote in four phases beginning from April 11 - Mumbai will be casting their votes in 4th phase of Lok Sabha 2019 elections on April 29. Be present in Lok Sabha, RS says BJP in 3 line whip to its MPs Election expenditure: How much did BJP, Congress, DMK, CPI, TMC, AIADMK receive funds and spent during polls? Citizenship bill not an issue, BJP stitches alliance in North East India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Mar 13: Keeping aside all speculations over the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 aside, the BJP has managed to forge an alliance in the Northeast for the upcoming elections. In a Facebook post early on Wednesday, party general secretary and Northeast incharge Ram Madhav announced that after a "hectic day of parlays" on Tuesday, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had reached an electoral understanding with the major parties in the region - NPP, NDPP, AGP and BPF. "Sustained negotiations at Dimapur and Guwahati with different senior leaders like N Rio, CM, Nagaland; Sarbananda Sonowal, CM, Assam; Conrad Sangma, CM, Meghalaya, Sh Biren Singh, CM, Manipur; Pema Khandu, CM, Arunachal Pradesh and Himanta Biswa Sarma, Convenor, NEDA in the company of other leaders have finally sealed the alliance and electoral understanding between the BJP and all major parties in the North East," Madhav said. Lok Sabha polls: Bihar Mahagathbandhan to meet today to discuss seat-sharing "The BJP, NPP, NDPP, AGP and BPF will fight together in Assam, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh with the mission of defeating Congress party at the hustings.," he said. In Tripura, the BJP will fight the elections together with IPFT, our alliance partner. In Sikkim, our alliance will be with SKM, the main Opposition party. While the Opposition is still talking and talking about Mahagatbandhan, we already have ours in place in the North East and the rest of the country. The NDA is a much stronger coalition today than before. This alliance has the potential of winning not less than 22 out of 25 seats in the region and playing an important role in seeing Modiji as the PM once again. In the Northeast, the BJP is in power in Assam, Manipur, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh, and a coalition partner in the National Peoples' Party-led government in Meghalaya and the National Democratic Progressive Party-led government in Nagaland. The BJP has been facing opposition in the Northeast over the Citizenship Bill, with the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) walking out of the alliance over the issue. The AGP had expressed reservations over the Bill, saying it would make the Assam Accord "meaningless". The BJP and it's allies had won 11 seats out of 25 in the region in 2014 Lok Sabha polls. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 9:29 [IST] Coal scam case: Naveen Jindal granted exemption from personal appearance till Jun 30 India oi-Vikas SV New Delhi, Mar 13: Congress leader and industrialist Naveen Jindal, an accused in a coal scam case, was on Wednesday granted exemption from personal appearance in the court till June 30, 2019, as he has to contest the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. The case pertains to money laundering in relation to the alleged irregularities in the allocation of Amarkonda Murgadangal coal block in Jharkhand to Jindal Steel and Power Ltd and Gagan Sponge Iron Private Ltd. A Delhi court had in October last year granted bail to Naveen Jindal and 13 others, accused of money laundering in a case pertaining to alleged irregularities in allocation of a Jharkhand-based coal block. Coal scam case: Bail granted to Naveen Jindal, 3 other accused The Enforcement Directorate had in July last year filed a chargesheet against Jindal, his company JSPL, Gagan Infra and others for allegedly influencing the screening committee to allot Amarkonda Murgadangal coal block by investing more than Rs 2 crore in illegal gratification. Jindal was also later allowed by a special court to travel abroad for business purposes. The court, however, imposed certain conditions on him after the application was opposed by special public prosecutor N K Matta and advocate Samvedna Verma on behalf of the Enforcement Directorate (ED). Who was MP Abani Roy? The senior RSP leader who passed away at 84 Declare Bengal 'super sensitive state' for fair polls: BJP tells EC India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Mar 13: The Bharatiya Janata Party has urged the Election Commission to declare West Bengal, a sensitive state during the upcoming general election. Addressing media outside the EC office in Delhi, Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that the delegation put forth certain demands, including freedom of press and deployment of central forces in the state. "We have demanded that the state of West Bengal should be declared as super-sensitive state. We've also demanded that central forces should be deployed at all polling booths," said Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said. "The 1986 circular which disallows loudspeakers schools and religious places. This is not right. We have requested the EC to ensure fair elections to be conduct," he added. Lok Sabha Elections 2019: TMC list of candidates is out; gives 41% seats to women The delegation including Prasad, Nirmala Sitharaman, Kailash Vijaywargiyya, Mukul Roy and JP Nadda has asked Election Commission to appoint a media observer at every polling booth in West Bengal. Slamming Trinamool Congress' rule in West Bengal, Prasad said, "This is a state where ballot papers were stamped even during counting, and victorious candidates were not allowed to enter the state. Where officers sit in dharnas with the chief minister of the state' helicopters are also not allowed to land," he added. The BJP delegation told the Election Commission that Rahul violated the Model Code of Conduct by making unverified claims against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "The model code of conduct clearly states that one cannot make unverified allegations against any political leader. But Rahul Gandhi said on Tuesday in Ahmedabad made a scurrilous, shameful and false allegation against the prime minister about 'picking money out of the air force's pockets and put it in the pockets of certain industrialists.'" The BJP and Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress have been at loggerheads since the appointment of Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister. The saffron party has also managed to make inroads into the state which was formerly a Left bastion. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 15:24 [IST] Complete probe in Muzaffarpur shelter home case in three months: SC to CBI No girl murdered in Bihar shelter home, bones found were of some other adults: CBI tells SC Delhi court to frame charges in Muzaffarpur shelter homes case on Mar 18 India oi-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Mar 13: A Delhi court on Wednesday fixed March 18 for the framing of charges in the Muzaffarpur shelter home sexual assault case. Additional Sessions Judge Saurabh Kulshreshtha passed the order after completion of the arguments of all the accused. Five people accused in the case had earlier denied allegations levelled against them by the CBI and said there was not enough evidence to prosecute them. Muzaffarpur shelter home case: CBI probe ordered against Bihar CM Nitish Kumar Other accused in the case too had denied allegations against them previously. There are 21 people chargesheeted in the case. On Feb 7, the Supreme Court ordered authorities to transfer the case from Bihar to a Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) court in Saket District Court complex in Delhi, which would conclude the trial within six months by holding preferably day-to-day hearing. Several girls were allegedly raped and sexually abused at an NGO-run shelter home in Muzaffarpur, Bihar. The issue had come to light following a report by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 16:23 [IST] Despite Congress' snub in Delhi, Kejriwal reaches out to Rahul for alliance in Haryana India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Mar 13: After failing to forge an alliance with Congress in Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday appealed to Rahul Gandhi to form an alliance for defeating the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Haryana in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. "I want to give a proposal to Rahul Gandhi that if JJP, Aam Aadmi Party and Congress will fight the election together in Haryana, we can defeat BJP on all the 10 seats in the state. In Delhi, we are winning without Congress, so people don't have to worry about that," he told the media. He further described Prime Minister Narendra Modi-BJP chief Amit Shah jodi (combination) as "very dangerous for the country". Congress being arrogant; its candidates will lose deposits: Kejriwal "It's important to defeat them. The number of people who want to defeat Prime Minister is very large, but they are divided amongst themselves. They all need to come together. The jodi of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah wins because these people are divided," he said. Rahul Gandhi on Monday ruled out any alliance with the AAP in Delhi and asked party workers in the capital to win all 7 Lok Sabha seats. Amid speculation over Congress tying up with Arvind Kejriwal's AAP to take on the BJP in Delhi, former CM Sheila Dikshit further fuelled the rumours after her recent meeting with Sonia Gandhi. However, at a party workers' meet in Delhi on Monday, Rahul Gandhi asked them to win all Lok Sabha seats in the Union Territory, thus ruling out any talks of an alliance ahead of the elections that start on April 11. Earlier, Kejriwal and other AAP leaders had sounded hopeful of an alliance to defeat the BJP, however, after being snubbed by Sheila Dikshit's Congress, they also ruled out the tie-up. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Congress had won zero seats in Delhi while even the ruling AAP had also not won anything. BJP swept the Lok Sabha elections and won all seven seats. Delhi goes to polls in the sixth phase of the seven-phase Lok Sabha elections. Polling in Delhi will take place on May 12 and votes will be counted on May 23. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 15:58 [IST] DGCA will take 'some time' before deciding on Boeing 737 MAX planes DGCA wants all Boeing 737 Max aircraft to be grounded before 4 pm today India oi-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Mar 13: The Directorate General of Civil Aviation or DGCA on Wednesday said that all Boeing 737 Max aircraft should be grounded before 4 pm. This is to cater to situations where aircraft are to fly back to India or go to maintenance facility for parking. India joined late Tuesday a global ban on flying the Boeing 737 MAX plane after this week's crash of this aircraft type in the African skies, increasing the likelihood of a further rise in domestic fares that remain high due to unrelated flight cancellations by some carriers. The ban comes a day after the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) had allowed the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft to fly under stricter conditions. [India grounds Boeing 737-MAX planes] The DGCA had earlier issued additional safety guidelines for Indian airlines operating Boeing 7373 Max 8 aircraft, it has finally decided to ground the particular model immediately. In India, SpiceJet and Jet Airways are the two airlines that operate the Boeing 737 Max 8 jets. SpiceJet has around 12 '737 Max 8' planes in its fleet, while Jet Airways has five. Both the flights have grounded its fleet due to financial issues. SpiceJet on Wednesday cancelled 14 flights after the DGCA issued an order to ground all Boeing 737-MAX planes and banned the planes from the Indian airspace from 4pm onwards till further decision. In a statement, SpiceJet said that it had already initiated grounding of its Max fleet. The civil aviation ministry has called an emergency meeting of all the airlines at 4 pm to discuss the situation where the Boeing 737-MAX aircraft are to fly back to India or to go to the maintenance facility for parking. Singapore bans use of Boeing 737 MAX in its airspace On March 10, a 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa killing 157 people, including four Indians. This was second such crash involving the 737 MAX 8 aircraft in less than five months. On October 29 last year, 189 passengers and crew died when a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed into the Java Sea in Indonesia shortly after takeoff. M GATE 2019 result to be out on Mar 16 India oi-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Mar 13: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras has released the final answer key of GATE 2019 for all the 24 papers. The final answer keys have been released after the process of contesting the official answer key released by IIT Madras on February 19. Students who were in quest of mistaken answers were allowed to contest the answer key with proper justification from February 20 to 22 in online mode by paying fee of Rs.500 per question. IIT Madras will soon be releasing the GATE 2019 result on March 16 in online mode. Candidates can follow step by step guide given below on how to download the final answer key GATE 2019 Steps to download GATE 2019 Final Answer Key Go to the official portal of GATE 2019 Click on the Final Answer Key link Subject wise answer key will be displayed Click on the particular subject Answer key in pdf format will be displayed Download the answer key GATE 2019 was held on February 2,3 and 9,10 across various test centres in India and abroad. As many as 8 lakh students have appeared for GATE 2019 which was held in complete online mode for all the 24 subjects. Going slow on Hafiz Saeed, looking up to Azhar, Pak is only worsening its case at FATF From plotting a hijack to creating the JeM, why Pakistan guards Masood Azhar so much Hours before UN listing, China hints it may block Azhar ban again India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Mar 13: Hours before the UN can take up resolution to list Masood Azhar, China has hinted it may block the ban again. China on Wednesday hinted that it may once again block the move, saying only "the solution that is acceptable to all sides" is conducive to resolve the issue. New Delhi has reached out to key players ahead of listing of Masood Azhar by the United Nations Security Council. Will UNSC listed Masood Azhar? D-day today India reached out to Saudi Arabia, the US, UAE and Turkey to gain support to list the Jaish-e-Mohammad chief as a global terrorist. Foreign secretary, Vijay Gokhale met with US secretary of state Mike Pompeo in Washington and discussed the issue. On the other hand, Saudi minister, Adel al-Jubeir concluded his trip to India after meeting with Prime Minister, Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister, Sushma Swaraj. The US in fact would play a crucial role in shaping China's position on the issue. China has time and again blocked the ban on Azhar. The US would reach out to Saudi, Turkey and UAE. All are partners of Pakistan and the stand taken by these countries would be crucial. China on the other hand has said that it has adopted a responsible attitude and followed the rules and procedures of the UNSC Resolution 1267 sanctions committee. China's position on the designation of a terrorist by the 1267 committee is consistent and clear. China adopted responsible attitudes, follows rules and procedures of this committee and takes part in these discussions in a responsible manner, China had also said. Will Azhar be listed: He meets the criteria says US On being asked at a press conference, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Lu Kang said that China has engaged in mediation efforts on both sides and helped talks to promote easing of tensions. China has in the past said that it did not have enough information to list Azhar. The country has proved to be a major stumbling block in India's efforts in getting the terrorist listed. If China does not stand in the way today, then it would be a major from the past two decades. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 14:40 [IST] Alert along LoC after ISI uses drones to drop weapons for terrorists Indias air defence on high alert after two Pak fighters go supersonic near LoC: Reports India oi-Vikas SV Srinagar, Mar 13: India's air defence system has been put on high alert after radars detected two Pakistani Air Force jets go supersonic near the Line of Control (LoC). The jets, however, remained within Pakistani controlled territory. This development took place near Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch Sector, said reports while quoting government sources. The residents of the nearby areas also heard loud noises last night which now being attributed to sonic boom, a phenomenon associated with the shock waves created whenever an object travelling through the air travels faster than the speed of sound. Sonic booms due to large supersonic aircraft can be particularly loud and startling, tend to awaken people, and may cause minor damage to some structures. They led to prohibition of routine supersonic flight over land. How IAF shot down Pakistan's F-16 in an aerial dogfight All Indian air defences and radar systems are on high alert, news agency ANI reported while quoting government sources. A day after the Indian Air Force carried out air strikes on the terror camps of Jaish-e-Mohammed in Pakistan's Balakot on February 26, Pakistan Air Force's F-16 fighter entered the Indian airspace, but was shot down by an IAF's MiG 21 Bison. In an aerial dogfight over the skies of Nowshera in Rajouri district of the Jammu province, India shot down a US made F-16 fighter of the Pakistan Air Force on February 27. Pakistan wanted to target a military installation in the Nangi Tekri area and the Naria area. The Pakistani fighters, however, missed the target. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 19:17 [IST] Till when does a father have to take responsibility of his child: SC clarifies You have 24 hours, SC to Delhi Govt on rising pollution Air Pollution: You want to ban industries in Pakistan? Court asks UP govt IPS with tenure of 6 months to be appointed DGP: SC India oi-Chennabasaveshwar P New Delhi, Mar 13: In an order on a PIL regarding police reforms, the Supreme Court revised norms for appointment of DGP's in states. Officers with residual period of retirement of at least 6 months to be considered to the post of DGPs. The apex court also fixed minimum tenure for officers eligible for appointment. The top court said the selection to the post of police chief in states should be "purely on merit". Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi pronounced the order that modified its July 3, 2018 directions passed in a PIL filed by retired officer Prakash Singh. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 11:31 [IST] India reports 8,895 new Covid infections, 2,796 deaths in last 24 hours as Bihar, Kerala clear 'backlog' List of 28 agreements/MoUs signed during the 21st India-Russia Annual Summit in New Delhi India among most unequal nations; top 1 pc of population holds 22 pc of national income Is the threat of further escalation between India and Pakistan over? India oi-Oneindia Staff By Anuj Cariappa New Delhi, Mar 13: The threat of further escalation between India and Pakistan after the Pulwama terror attack is over, an internal assessment of the Pakistan government has concluded. The Express Tribune reported that the assessment was shared by a senior official on Monday in a background briefing on the current state of relations between the two neighbouring countries. "There is a visible de-escalation in tension," the official said. The official told journalists that Pakistan did not foresee any further "aggressive action" from India, the report said. Tensions flared up between India and Pakistan after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammed (JeM) killed 40 CRPF personnel in Kashmir's Pulwama district on February 14. Amid mounting outrage, the Indian Air Force carried out a counter-terror operation, hitting the biggest JeM training camp in Balakot, deep inside Pakistan on February 26. The next day, Pakistan Air Force retaliated and downed a MiG-21 in an aerial combat and captured Indian pilot, who was handed over to India on March 1. Reciprocal visit by Indian officials to Pak cancelled There was fear that India may launch more strikes or escalate the situation to end the crisis on a high note, the paper said. When asked whether Pakistan feared another possible 'misadventure' by India before the elections in the country, the official confidently replied: "There is no room for such aggressive action from India". The upbeat assessment of the government is apparently linked to hectic diplomacy involving many regional and international players, seeking de-escalation in tensions between the two countries, the paper said. In a first sign of easing of tensions, Pakistani and Indian high commissioners resumed their diplomatic work in Islamabad and New Delhi on Saturday. Both countries called back their envoys for consultations soon after the Pulwama attack. India handed over to Pakistan a dossier on "specific details" of involvement of the JeM in the attack. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 9:48 [IST] Drone from Pak side of border fired at by BSF Stuck at Attari border for 70 days, Pakistani couple name their newborn 'Border' Is China the reason why Pakistan opted to skip Summit for Democracy hosted by Biden? J&K: Pakistan violates ceasefire along LoC in Poonch sector India oi-Madhuri Adnal Srinagar, Mar 13: Pakistani troops violated ceasefire in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch sector on Wednesday. At about 11:30am, Pakistani Army initiated unprovoked ceasefire violation by shelling with mortars and firing of small arms in Poonch sector. Violation also took place in Chakkan da Bagh area where the LoC trade centre is located. There has been a spurt in ceasefire violations by Pakistan after India's preemptive air strike on a Jaish-e-Mohammad terror camp in Balakot on February 26 following the February 14 Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed. J&K: Pakistan violates ceasefire in Nowshera sector Four civilians, including three members of a family, were killed and several others injured as Pakistan targeted over 80 villages in over 100 incidents of ceasefire violations along the LoC in the state since then. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 13:33 [IST] After Pak allows access, India says yet to decide on opening Kartarpur Corridor Kartarpur corridor: India-Pak talks today, Islamabad disappointed over denial of visas to scribes India oi-Vikas SV Amritsar, Mar 13: Pakistan's Deputy High Commissioner to India, Syed Haider Shah, on Wednesday arrived in Amritsar for talks on the Kartarpur Corridor between the two sides slated to be held on Thursday (March 14). The other members of the Pakistani delegation, which would be headed by their director general, South Asia, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will arrive tomorrow. "It is an initiative of Pakistan. We want to open Kartarpur Corridor so that Sikh people from here can visit it in Pakistan. The meeting will be held tomorrow," Syed Haider Shah told ANI today. When asked about the issue regarding visa modalities, he said, " It will be discussed tomorrow." Does opening of Kartarpur Corridor pose a security risk? Defence expert explains Indian and Pakistani officials will meet at Attari, near Amritsar, on Thursday. This will be followed by a visit to Islamabad of an Indian delegation on March 28. The scheduled bilateral meeting will see both the sides finalising the draft agreement for Kartarpur Corridor, which will link Baba Nanak village in Punjab to Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Narowal in Pakistan. Both sides are yet to finalise the modalities of travel of the Indian pilgrims to the Gurudwara. India has shared a draft memorandum of agreement with the Pakistani side. The sole purpose of the meeting would be to align infrastructure and security requirements between both sides to ensure smooth passage of pilgrims, said reports. Meanwhile, Islamabad has expressed disappointment over India allegedly denying visas to Pakistani journalists for the meeting. Support Modi for Kartarpur corridor, justice for 1984 riots: Harsimrat Badal "Regrettable that India has not given visas to Pakistani journalists for the Kartarpur meeting tomorrow," said Mohammad Faisal, spokesperson of the Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on Wednesday via Twitter. Gurdwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur is 120 km from Lahore. It is built on the historic site where Guru Nanak settled and assembled a Sikh community after his missionary travels. The present gurdwara is built on the site where Guru Nanak died, on 22 September 1539. The gurdwara is also notable for its location near the border between Pakistan and India. The shrine is visible from the Indian side of the border as Pakistani authorities generally trim the tall Elephant grass that would otherwise obstruct the view. Kashmir to Delhi, ED set to attach properties of Separatists worth Rs 9 crore India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Mar 13: The Enforcement Directorate will continue to attach properties of Kashmir separatists, in connection with the terror funding probe. Earlier this week, the ED attached a property belonging to Zahoor Watali, a fund manager for the separatists. The property in question is based at Gurugram, Haryana and is worth around Rs 1.3 crore. An ED official tells OneIndia that they have identified more such properties and are in the process of attaching them as well. Terror funding: ED attaches plush property of Kashmir separatist's fund manager The properties, the official added were estimated at around 9 crore. All the attachments would take place under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. Watali was arrested in August 2017 by the National Investigation Agency. He has been accused of being the fund manager to several persons who parked their funds which were received from across the border. The money was being used to cause unrest in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The ED has identified properties that are based in Kashmir and New Delhi. In Delhi, the properties identified are at Vasant Kunj, ED sources said. NIA sources say that during the raids, they had seized incriminating material. The NIA had questioned two maternal uncles of the Mirwaiz - Maulvi Manzoor and Maulvi Shafat - and his close aides last year. Both of them are retired senior government officers. The NIA probe seeks to identify the chain of players behind the financing of terrorist activities, including those who pelted stones on security forces, burnt down schools and damaged government establishments. " title="Between 2009-2011, Separatists got highest funding to tune of Rs 34 billion " />Between 2009-2011, Separatists got highest funding to tune of Rs 34 billion The case names Hafeez Saeed, Pakistan-based chief of Jamaat-ud Dawah, the front for banned Lashker-e-Taiba, as an accused, besides organisations such as the Hurriyat Conference (factions led by Geelani and Mirwaiz Umer Farooq), Hizbul Mujahideen and Dukhtaran-e-Millat. The ED on the other hand is in the process of verifying these properties. Some are directly linked while some indirectly, the ED official said. Once the verification is completed, the properties would be attached, the official also added. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 7:31 [IST] Five more travellers from 'at risk' countries test COVID-19 positive in Mumbai; nine so far Omicron 1st case in Maharashtra: What we know about it so, far? 12 facts Koregaon-Bhima: Activists were mobilising Dalits to overthrow govt, says police India pti-PTI Mumbai, Mar 13: Maharashtra Police Wednesday told the Bombay High Court that activists arrested in connection with the Koregaon-Bhima violence and Maoist links were mobilising Dalits to achieve the motive of the CPI (Maoist) to "overthrow the government". Pune's assistant commissioner of police Shivaji Pawar said this in an affidavit filed before the court to oppose the bail plea filed by one of the accused, Arun Ferriera. Apart from Ferriera, the police earlier arrested eight other activists, including Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj, P Varavara Rao, Gautam Navlakha and Anand Teltumbde. Ferriera and Gonsalves later filed bail petitions which came up for hearing on Wednesday before Justice P N Deshmukh, who posted the matter for April 5. The police are yet to submit the affidavit over Gonsalves's petition. In their affidavit, Pune Police claimed that Ferriera and the other accused were senior members of the banned terrorist organisation, Communist Party of India (Maoist). I like his energy, the way he raises voice for youth,' says Priyanka after meeting Bhim Army chief They were "actively supporting and propagating the banned outfit's unlawful activities to overthrow the government established by law", the police said. During investigation, it was revealed that the motive of the CPI (Maoist) was "seizure of political power," the affidavit said further. "With a view to attain this motive, the organisation is waging not the old type of conventional war but a people's war by mobilising public on a massive scale both military and politically," it said. "The CPI (Maoist) is undertaking special efforts to build the party among Dalit masses. They try to rally Dalit masses extensively by taking up struggles for their self- respect and against discrimination, oppression, degradation and physical attacks by the upper caste feudal forces in order to achieve their motive," the police said in the affidavit. The Elgar Parishad meeting held on December 31, 2017, during which Ferreira and the other accused gave "inflammatory, provocative and rebellious" speeches, saw significant participation of Dalit organisations, they said. "These Dalit organisations were systematically brought together by some active members of CPI (Maoist), which had also funded this meeting," the affidavit said. The police claimed Ferreira and another accused Vernon Gonsalves were senior cadres of CPI (Maoist) and engaged in recruiting cadres for the banned outfit. "The intention of Ferreira and other accused persons along with the banned terrorist organisation CPI (Maoist) is to topple the democratically elected governments (Centre and state) by violent means, that is by creating mayhem, spreading terror and hatred," the affidavit said. "The objective is to assassinate important public functionaries and strike terror in the public," it said. Ferriera and other accused distributed pamphlets and booklets with an intention to incite, abet and promote enmity between different groups on the ground of religion, caste and community, it said. "They created disharmony and a feeling of enmity, hatred and ill-will between different religious groups, castes and communities and therefore, disturbed public tranquillity," the affidavit said. "Net result of the meeting and speeches was riots that erupted at Koregaon-Bhima on January 1, 2018," it said. It was found from certain documents and evidence collected from the accused persons' residences that they were part of a criminal conspiracy and their role was not merely peripheral, but they were found to be playing a vital role in the offences committed, the police said in the affidavit. PTI Agree with Indian govt on need to safeguard citizens' privacy: WhatsApp State vs national issues: Key lessons for the BJP to learn in Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Haryana Lok Sabha elections 2019: NPP denies pre-poll alliance with BJP India oi-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Mar 13: Barely few months left for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections 2019, National Peoples' Party on Wednesday refrained from forging any pre-poll alliance with BJP. According to reports, National People's Party (NPP) president and Meghalaya chief minister Conrad Sangma said that NPP will not engage in any kind of coalition with BJP this upcoming General Election. He however, also suggested that if necessary, considerations can be thought of after declaration of results. Almost half of BJP MPs unlikely to get party ticket NPP will put forth candidates for all 25 northeast seats. The party likely to contest in all the Assam's seats. Formed in 2012, the NPP leads the Meghalaya government and is part of governments in Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Nagaland. Meanwhile, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) has renewed its ties with the BJP to jointly fight the Lok Sabha elections barely two months after it pulled out of the ruling alliance in the state. BJP national general secretary Ram Madhav announced that AGP, Bodoland People's Front (BPF)and BJP has decided to jointly fight the Lok Sabha election and defeat the Congress in all the 14 Lok sabha seats. The AGP and BJP parted ways after the Centre went ahead and introduced the controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill in the Lok Sabha. However, after a wave of massive protests disrupted the social fabric of the North East, the Narendra Modi-led government decided against tabling the Bill in Rajya Sabha. The bill, which was passed in the Lok Sabha on January 8, sought to allow non-Muslim "persecuted minorities" who had migrated from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan till December 2014 to apply for Indian citizenship, after a stay of six years. Modi writes blog, lists 4 requests for a stronger democracy ahead of 2019 elections The AGP is currently bargaining for two Lok Sabha tickets, one Rajya Sabha seat and one Governor's position. Assam has 14 Lok Sabha seats, seven of which were won by the BJP in 2014, three each by Congress and AIUDF, while one seat was bagged by an independent candidate. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 16:18 [IST] Explainer: All you need to know about vote counting Maharashtra: 96,000 VVPAT machines to be used for polling India oi-Oneindia Staff By Anuj Cariappa New Delhi, Mar 13: Former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan has warned that capitalism is under "serious threat" of a "revolt" as the economic and political system has stopped providing for the people, especially after the 2008 global financial meltdown. Rajan, now a professor at the University of Chicago, told BBC Radio 4's Today Programme that governments across the world cannot afford to ignore social inequality when considering the economy. "I think capitalism is under serious threat because it's stopped providing for the many, and when that happens, the many revolt against capitalism," the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said. Rajan said he believes that capitalism is breaking down because it is not providing equal opportunities. "It's not providing equal opportunity and in fact the people who are falling off are in a much worse situation," he said. Match 50 per cent of EVM results with VVPAT: Opposition urges EC He said authoritarian regimes arise "when you socialise all the means of production". "A balance is needed, you can't pick and choose - what you need to do is improve opportunity," he said. Rajan, tipped by some as a possible successor to take over from Mark Carney as governor of the Bank of England, said it was possible in the past to obtain a middle class job with "modest education". But the landscape has changed in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and the resulting austerity. "Now, if you really want to succeed, you need a really good education," he said. "Unfortunately, the very communities that are hit by the forces of global trade and global information tend to be communities which have deteriorating schools, rising crime, rising social illnesses and are unable to prepare their members for the global economy," he said. A recent report from S&P Global Ratings suggests another global credit downturn is possible, with a 50 per cent surge in worldwide debt since the global financial crisis. It said since 2008, government debt has risen 77 per cent while corporate debt is up 51 per cent. However, the analysts said the next downturn is unlikely to be as severe as the 2008 financial crisis. In discussing the state of the global economy, Rajan also pointed to the challenges of putting limits on the trade of goods. "If you put up those barriers, then down the line they'll put up barriers to our goods. How are you going to keep the goods flowing across those borders when we need to send them?" he asked. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 6:16 [IST] Modi writes blog, lists 4 requests for a stronger democracy ahead of 2019 elections India oi-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Mar 13: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday reached out to the young voters of India with a blog on his website about how to register their names ahead of the polls. Modi shared 'Four requests for Democracy' from appealing to the eligible young voter to register for voting to encouraging the people to spread awareness about the importance to vote in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. The PM recalled that in the last few elections, various states and at the Centre, had witnessed record a turnout. M Modi targets Congress on the anniversary of Dandi march Here's the blog: Four Requests For Democracy In less than a month, the voting for the first phase of the 2019 Lok Sabha election will commence. Voting is among our prime duties. A vote signifies the willingness to contribute to the development trajectory of the nation. By voting, people connect themselves with the country's dreams and aspirations. Let us create an environment where getting one's voter card and casting a vote, especially for the first time, become occasions for celebration. There should also be an environment where not voting causes great anguish. Would you want a situation where something happens in the country that you disapprove of and you are forced to think - because I did not go vote that day, this unfortunate situation has arisen and the nation is suffering. Spare yourself from that regret and go vote! Today, I have the following requests to you all- (1) Register now: Give your voter card a place of pride in your life. Get registered as voters, (if you have not already) at the earliest. You can apply either online, on www.nvsp.in, or through the BLOs of your respective polling stations or at the electoral registration office. The 2019 elections are special because for the first time those born in the 21st century will be able to cast their votes. I hope all eligible youngsters who have not registered to vote will do so and enrich our democracy by voting. (2) Check thoroughly: Revisit the electoral rolls and check whether your name is there. Visit the websites of your respective state election offices and check the electoral rolls. If your name is missing, raise it with the relevant authorities and if you have shifted residence, ensure that your name shifts to the voter rolls of your new place of stay. Updating of rolls will continue till the last day of filing of nominations in your particular constituency. However, do not wait for the last moments and so, the earlier, the better. (3) Plan well: The poll schedule is already out, giving you ample time to plan your summer schedule. Try to be there on the day of voting. If you are planning a summer holiday, plan it before or after the polling date. If for some reason, your place of work and place of vote differ, make the effort to go and vote. Take that one day off for the future of our nation! (4) Mobilise others: Call upon your family, friends and colleagues to vote. Motivate and, if need be, force them to venture out and exercise their franchise on polling day. Higher voting means a stronger democracy and a stronger democracy means a developed India! The last few elections, in various states and at the Centre, have witnessed record turnout. Continuing this encouraging trend, I urge my fellow Indians to vote in record numbers in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. I particularly call upon influencers from all fields, including politics, industry, sports, films and other walks of life to take the lead in spreading voter awareness and value of high voting. May these elections witness the highest ever turnout in the history of Indian elections! For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 10:59 [IST] NYAY: The Congress slogan for the Lok Sabha elections India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Mar 13: The minimum income guarantee scheme of the Congress would be called NYAY. The name was given by Congress president, Rahul Gandhi, during the meeting of the Congress Working Committee that was held on Tuesday at Ahmedabad. Rahul Gandhi had first made a mention about NYAY (Nyunatam Aamdani Yojana) during a meeting in Chhattisgarh. The Congress would use NYAY as its main campaign point during the Lok Sabha election. Defence personnel, Congress workers censure Rahul over 'Masood Azhar Ji' This would focus on highlighting the rising unemployment during the NDA regime. During his speech in Gujarat on Tuesday, he specifically made a mention about the lack of employment opportunities and said that this has been the highest in the past 45 years. He went on to add that the high rate of unemployment was owing to demonetisation and the faulty implementation of GST. On Tuesday Priyanka Gandhi Vadra who addressed her maiden election rally asked what happened to the Rs 15 lakh that was promised to every Indian. Addressing the Jan Sankalp rally at Gandhinagar, Narendra Modi's home turf, she said you have to think what this election means. You have to ask what is your role. You are deciding the future. What is important here is how are we going to progress. Who will work for the farmers and who will work for the safety of women, she asked. While remembering Mahatma Gandhi, she said whatever is happening in the country is sad. The upcoming election would be an important poll for the country. She further asked where are the two crore jobs that were promised by the BJP. She further said that every voter's vote is their weapon. She also said that there was no need to raise unimportant issues. 'No sacrifice too big to win battle', says Rahul Gandhi after key Congress meet The country was made on the foundation of love, but what is happening today is sad. The country was made on the foundation of love, brotherhood and harmony, she also added. I am saddened by what is happening in India today, she further said. She said that issues that need to be raised are those which are important for you and how you can move forward. How will the youth get jobs and how will women feel safe. What is being done for the farmers. These are the issues that need to be raised during the elections, she also added. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 10:43 [IST] Former ISI chief Durrani files contempt case for not removing his name from no-fly list How chat2hire, xTrust and q-Whisper elicited information from the BrahMos techie How Israeli spyware Pegasus used to spy on Indian Journalists, activists before LS elections Pak spy arrested for collecting information on Indian Army India oi-Oneindia Staff By Anuj Cariappa Jaipur, Mar 13: A 36-year-old man, who was detained near the International Border on suspicion of spying for Pakistan, has been arrested, officials said. Nawab Khan, a resident of Sam area near the India-Pakistan border in Rajasthan's Jaisalmer district, was detained on Sunday, an official said. Khan was involved in espionage activities and was working as a jeep driver, Additional Director General of Intelligence Umesh Mishra said. Pakistan dismantled major foreign spy network, say local media reports Khan used to share information to his handlers based in Pakistan through WhatsApp in code language in exchange for money, Mr Mishra said. Khan visited Pakistan last year where he came in touch with an agent of that country's intelligence agency ISI. The ISI agent trained him and gave him tasks of collecting and sharing information related to Army movement, the officer said. He was arrested after being interrogated by a joint team of security agencies. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 7:20 [IST] Pollachi sex scandal: CB-CID begins inquiry; Goondas Act slapped on accused India oi-Madhuri Adnal Chennai, Mar 13: In the latest development of Pollachi mass sexual assault case, CB-CID (Crime Branch-Criminal Investigation Department) began an inquiry into the matter. Investigating team has 1 SP, 1 DSP and 5 Inspectors. Till Tuesday, the police had arrested four accused in the case and slapped the Goondas Act on them. The four accused - K. Thirunavukkarasu, 27; N. Sabarirajan, aka Rishwanth, 25; N. Sathish, 29; and T. Vasanthakumar, 24 - who were arrested on charges of sexual harassment, use of criminal force and other Sections were also detained under the Goondas Act. Pollachi sex scandal: 4 arrested, case transferred to CB-CID A special team, led by Superintendent of Police Nisha Parthiban, landed in Coimbatore late on Tuesday to commence investigations in the case that has sent shock waves across the State. The case involved the victims who are working women, college female students of an age group 18-35. The gang members used to befriend these women from across Tamil Nadu on various social media platforms and they would lure them to meet and then forcibly record their private pictures and videos. One of the victims filed an official complaint based on which three people were arrested on April 24. While the main accused was arrested on March 6. Two FIRs were filed with the police in this case after which the gang members confessed to the crime. However, further investigation in the case is underway. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 13:42 [IST] Proactively pursuing Nirav Modi says Enforcement Directorate India oi-Oneindia Staff By Anuj Cariappa New Delhi, Mar 13: The ED has said it was "proactively" pursuing all issues pertaining to the extradition of Nirav Modi, the main accused in the $2 billion PNB scam, from the UK as it dismissed media reports that Indian agencies "did not respond" in time when British investigators extended help. The central agency, which is probing Nirav Modi under the criminal sections of the anti-money laundering law, issued a two-page clarification, saying the media reports in this context "have been distorted with speculative writing and wrong conclusions have been drawn". A British daily recently published a report and video showing Modi walking on the streets of London and said the fugitive diamantaire was living in a swanky 8-million pounds apartment in the city's West End and that he was involved in a new diamond business. Nirav Modi will be brought back to India, all steps being taken says MEA Calling the reports of inaction on part of the agency "insinuating", the Enforcement Directorate (ED) said, "It has been wrongly reported in the news item that the UK SFO had confirmed to Indian authorities by March, 2018 that Nirav Modi was in the UK. "In this connection, it is submitted that no such formal or informal communication was received by the ED from UK authorities in March, 2018 or at a later date, informing that Nirav Modi was in the UK." The ED added that the National Central Bureau of Manchester, the nodal agency of the UK for dealing with Interpol notices and cooperating with other countries, had instead asked Indian agencies to "provide it" with intelligence inputs that suggested Modi was in the UK. It said the UK government's "consistent stand" had been that a non-bailable warrant (NBW) against an accused could only be executed through an "extradition request" and not through letters rogatory (LR) or the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT). Hence, it said, the extradition request for Modi could only be sent after a chargesheet was filed against him, which was done by the agency in May last year. "An extradition request cannot be sent at the stage of investigation. Accordingly, upon initiation of investigations by the ED under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act in February last year against Nirav Modi and others, the first NBW was issued on March 5, 2018 and that was not acted upon by the UK government," the agency said. The ED obtained a fresh NBW against Modi from a Mumbai court after filing the chargesheet and sent it to the Interpol, which notified the "red warrant" for arrest against the fugitive diamantaire on June 29 last year, and subsequently, a fresh request for extradition was sent to the UK government, the agency said. It added that it had also sent a supplementary MLAT request in October last year for execution of an order of attachment of the UK-based assets of Modi. "In response to these MLAT requests, the UK authorities had raised queries from time-to-time, which were promptly examined, and detailed replies were sent by the ED. These MLAT requests are yet to be executed by the UK authorities," the central probe agency said. "It is reiterated that the ED has been proactively following up all the issues relating to the Nirav Modi case with authorities of various countries, including the UK. The directorate has also been making necessary efforts for successful extradition of Nirav Modi," it said. On Nirav Modi's extradition, CBI says willing to extend all help The agency said the latest media reports reflected that the "understanding regarding the legal issues is contrary to the facts and established international protocols and procedures". "This kind of misreporting and speculative news may create a wrong impression to the public at large," it said. On March 9, the ED had said the UK home secretary had recently referred India's request for extraditing the tainted businessman to a court for initiating legal proceedings against him. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 5:58 [IST] Three more Rafale jets to land in India from France in non-stop flight Rafale review: Docs photocopied minus consent affects security of nation says MoD affidavit India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Mar 13: The petitioners are guilty of leakage of sensitive information in the Rafale case, the Ministry of Defence has told the Supreme Court in an affidavit. The envisaged in the various agreements Central Government had entered into with the concerned Foreign Government and others concerning are matters of National Security, the Centre also said. The documents attached in the review relates to the war capacity of the aircraft. Since Review Petition has been widely circulated and is available in public domain, the same is available to the enemy/our adversaries. This puts National Security in jeopardy, the affidavit also said. The photcopies of the documents was done without consent. Hence it amounts to theft and this has affected the security, sovereignty and friendly relations with foreign countries, the affidavit also said. Rafale review: SC permits MoD to file affidavit The SC had earlier allowed the Defence Ministry to file an affidavit in connection with the case. The ministry had sought permission of the court to file the affidavit, following which it was granted. The court it may be recalled is hearing a review plea against it order on the deal. The review was filed after the SC had given its thumbs up to the deal, while stating that there were no irregularities. It may be recalled that attorney general K K Venugopal had said at an open court hearing that the "documents relied on by the petitioners in their review petitions were stolen from the ministry and should not be relied on". "It's a criminal act on the part of petitioners to bring these documents with them. They have come with unclean hands," Venugopal had said. "Defence is the most important matter of state and national security. They have been illegally obtained and the source is not disclosed by the petitioners. It's a privileged document. These documents have made the cost of weapons public and has been taken from notes and has been put in the petition." He however later clarified that the documents were not stolen, but photo copied. As Mamata Banerjee takes swipe at Rahul Gandhi, Cong says such posturing for personal ambition will help BJP Probe Robert Vadra, but investigate, Modi too says Rahul Gandhi in Tamil Nadu India oi-Deepika S Chennai, Mar 13: Congress chief Rahul Gandhi, who is in Chennai today as part of his campaign for next month's national election, addressed hundreds of students at Stella Maris College in Tamil Nadu's Chennai on Wednesday. Addressing women students at the Stella Maris College here, he said the Congress will change the mood of the country and make people feel happy and empowered. 'No sacrifice too big to win battle', says Rahul Gandhi after key Congress meet He asked the gathering, "Did you like demonetisaton?" When the audience answered, "No", he said, "I think it's pretty clear the damage demonetisaton did. PM should have taken your advice." Gandhi, who asked the students to challenge him and "make him uncomfortable", also questioned whether the prime minister could stand in a large audience and answer people's questions. On Kahmiri policy "The moment PM Modi came to power he made a big mistake...he allied with the PDP which has ideologies that are opposite to India...Kashmir is burning today because of PM Modi's policies...you can't fight terror with on off-policy we need a strategy...42 jawans lost their lives in Pulwama, its the govt's job to protect its people," Gandhi said over the Kashmir issue. On Robert Vadra Gandhi, who asked students to refer to him as Rahul, said the law must apply to everybody and not be applied selectively. "Law must apply to everybody, not be applied selectively. Probe Robert Vadra but investigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi as well," he said. "I will be the first person to say it... investigate Robert Vadra but also investigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi," he said. In response to a question, he said he had learnt the lessons of humility and love from his mother Sonia Gandhi. On Economic growth "You can't have a fearful atmosphere and expect economic growth, which is directly related to the mood of the country," Rahul Gandhi told Chennai students. On PM Modi's hug Rahul Gandhi when asked why he hugged PM Modi said, "I was watching the PM giving the speech. I don't have any animosity towards him. I could see the PM was very angry and was speaking against the Congress party. But, inside me I was feeling affection for him. This man is not able to see the beauty of the world. So I thought that atleast my part my side I should show affection. I genuinely feel love for the man." On Education and women empowerment "We are convinced India is spending less on education, our target is 6 per cent. It is not only about spending money on education, but also independence on education. All our educational institutions should be able to challenge us...I want you all to make me uncomfortable," Rahul Gandhi's replied to a question on education in India. To another question related to women's empowerment, he declared, "In 2019, we are going to pass the Women's Reservation bill, they will receive 33% reservation in jobs." Later in the day, Gandhi will hold a press conference at Hotel Le Meridien in Chennai and is scheduled to address a public rally at Scott Christian College ground in Kanyakumari's Nagercoil. Besides Rahul Gandhi, DMK president M K Stalin, MDMK chief Vaiko and Left party leaders would participate in the meeting. The Congress will fight the elections as part of DMK-led front that includes MDMK, CPI, CPI-M, VCK, IUML, IJK and KDMK. On Tuesday, the Congress Working Committee (CWC) met in Ahmedabad and resolved to "defeat the RSS/BJP ideology of fascism, hatred, anger and divisiveness". Members agreed that "no sacrifice is too great in this endeavour to defeat the ideology of RSS/BJP, no effort too little; this battle will be won". The meeting, chaired by Rahul Gandhi, was held two days after the Election Commission announced that Lok Sabha polls will be held in seven phases from April 11 to May 19 and counting on May 23. SP's Abu Azmi wants to be a part of Congress-NCP alliance India oi-Madhuri Adnal Mumbai, Mar 13: Samajwadi Party Maharashtra president Abu Asim Azmi on Wednesday said that wants to be a part of Congress-NCP alliance. According to reports, Abu Asim Azmi had earlier issued an ultimatum to Congress on Tuesday to cement an alliance with his party in the state and give it one of five selected seats or the party will field candidates in several constituencies. The SP wants one from among Mumbai South, South Central, Mumbai North, North Central and Bhiwandi. At a meeting attended by several senior clerics and community leaders at Nagpada, Azmi, the party's lone MLA, sought the community's opinion on whether he should blindly support the Congress-NCP alliance or fight elections even if it helps the BJP-Sena. The SP has been trying for a 'secular' alliance with the Congress-NCP in Maharashtra, though the SP and BSP have rebuffed Congress in UP while joining hands against all odds. [Lok Sabha polls 2019: Prakash Ambedkar to fight elections in Maharashtra independently] Currently, Azmi is an MLA from Govandi, and the party has six corporators in the BMC. Though it has lost much of its ground in the city over the years, SP enjoys the support of a sizeable number of Muslim voters and a section of north Indians. Earlier on Tuesday, Dalit leader Prakash Ambedkar on Tuesday said that talks of alliance with Congress for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections had ended with no conclusive results and that he would be announcing candidates from all 48 Lok Sabha seats in the state on March 15 (Friday). The Congress and NCP combine is likely to win between 18 and 20 seats in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, an internal survey conducted by the Opposition alliance has indicated. On Sunday, the Election Commission had announced the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections schedule. The dates for the seven phases are April 11, April 18, April 23, April 29, May 6, May 12 and May 19. Counting of votes will take place on May 23. This Chennai student didn't miss a single class in 17 years, irrespective of fever or cyclone India oi-Shubham Ghosh Chennai, March 13: Some people love to be such perfectionists that they leave the entire world startled by their feats. G V Vinoth Kumar is one such man. The man is a bright name in Indian education who proudly holds almost 20 'perfection' certificates in his school and college lives. The perfection lies in the fact that he Kumar hasn't missed a single class in his entire school and college years. "After completing class 12, my school gave me a certificate for perfect attendance all through my schooling at Kalaimagal Vidyalaya Matriculation Higher Secondary School. That was when I got the idea to set a record because the current record is only 14 years, which is from LKG to class 12," The New Indian Express quoted Kumar as saying. "I have completed three years of undergraduate without missing a class. It puts my current record at 17 years," he added. Pollachi sex scandal: 4 arrested, case transferred to CB-CID However, it was not easy for Kumar to maintain the record. He had to travel two-and-half hours from Royapuram to Padur to attend his classes at Hindustan College of Arts and Sciences (40 kms). Kumar thanks his parents for his achievement. "My parents motivated me a lot. They were the ones who told me that I should go to school every day. My father, who is also a teacher, used to drop me at school every day," Kumar told the newspaper. Kumar, a student of Master of Computer Application now, even attended the class in his third year with 102 degree fever and in times of cyclone. The man aims to clear Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission examination in future. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 11:24 [IST] UP voters will deliver 'final strike' in BJP's favour in LS polls: Deputy CM India pti-PTI Lucknow, Mar 13: Exuding confidence that the voters of Uttar Pradesh would deliver their "final strike" in favour of the BJP in the Lok Sabha election, Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya said Wednesday the saffron party would win more than 300 seats across the country. "Not only the voters of Amethi and Rae Bareli (the Congress bastions in UP), but voters of Uttar Pradesh will deliver a their final strike in favour of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in all the 80 Lok Sabha seats and give an overwhelming majority to him," Maurya told PTI in an interview. The main issues in this election will be development, nationalism, eradicating poverty, wiping out corruption, ending terrorism and making the country number one in the world, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader said in an interview. What's new in Purvanchal in 2019: Development board, Priyanka Gandhi and SP-BSP alliance Describing the alliance stitched by the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal as "opportunistic", Marya said: "It is an alliance with vested interests. It has become redundant for the people as the public has made up its mind that instead of voting for the SP and the BSP on caste lines, it will vote for the BJP, which is toeing the line of development, nationalism and working to eradicate terrorism." The deputy chief minister also made light of the formal entry of Priyanka Gandhi Vadra in politics. "I don't feel that her entry into UP's electoral politics will have any impact on us. She was earlier also a leader of Congress. I am of the opinion that SP, BSP and Congress are all one entity. If not, then the SP and BSP should clarify that as to why have they left two seats for Congress in Amethi and Rae Bareli. And the Congress, on its part, should tell why it has taken their (SP and BSP) support in these two seats," Maurya said. Asked whether the issue of construction of a grand Ram temple in Ayodhya had taken a backseat as a poll issue, Maurya asserted: "There is no question of it being on the backfoot. As for the BJP, the issue of Ram temple is not an electoral one, but is a matter of faith and devotion. We do not make issues pertaining to our faith and devotion poll-related." COVID-19: Will stop schools in Karnataka if need be says minister Karnataka MLC elections 2021: Result date, candidates, seats & all you need to know about the poll Will form govt in Karnataka within 24 hours if we win 22 Lok Sabha seats: BS Yeddyurappa India oi-Deepika S Bengaluru, Mar 13: Karnataka BJP president BS Yeddyurappa has claimed that if the saffron party manages to win 22 seats in the state, he will form the government in Karnataka within 24 hours. Addressing a rally at Yaragatti village, Yeddyurappa said, "If the people of Karnataka give us 22 seats in the coming Lok Sabha elections, we will form the government in Karnataka within 24 hours." Yeddyurappa further added, "The 6.5 crore citizens of Karnataka are cursing this current government to fall apart." Recently, the former chief minister had said that the pre-emptive air strike carried out by the Indian Air Force targetting terror launch pads in Pakistan's Balakot on February 26 would help the BJP win 22 seats in Karnataka in the impending elections. It's about 22 seats, Pakistan ruling party PTI slams BS Yeddyurappa's controversial remark This has come nearly two months after the intense political drama over the stability of Congress-JDS-government rocked the state. Two independent MLAs withdrew support from the ruling Congress-JDS alliance with the latter accusing the former of indulging in poaching of its MLAs and undertaking what has come to be known as 'Operation Lotus' in the state. There are 28 Lok Sabha seats at stake in Karnataka, out of which the BJP currently holds 16 seats while the Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular) hold 10 and 2 Lok Sabha seats, respectively. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 8:27 [IST] Going slow on Hafiz Saeed, looking up to Azhar, Pak is only worsening its case at FATF Did Pakistan ever act against Azhar? Intel reports show, he remained protected always From plotting a hijack to creating the JeM, why Pakistan guards Masood Azhar so much Will UNSC listed Masood Azhar? D-day today India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Mar 13: Will Maulana Masood Azhar be listed by the United Nations Security Council, which meets today? New Delhi has reached out to key players ahead of listing of Masood Azhar by the United Nations Security Council. India reached out to Saudi Arabia, the US, UAE and Turkey to gain support to list the Jaish-e-Mohammad chief as a global terrorist. Foreign secretary, Vijay Gokhale met with US secretary of state Mike Pompeo in Washington and discussed the issue. With hours to go before Masood Azhar's listing, China keeps all guessing On the other hand, Saudi minister, Adel al-Jubeir concluded his trip to India after meeting with Prime Minister, Narendra Modi and External Affairs Minister, Sushma Swaraj. The US in fact would play a crucial role in shaping China's position on the issue. China has time and again blocked the ban on Azhar. The US would reach out to Saudi, Turkey and UAE. All are partners of Pakistan and the stand taken by these countries would be crucial. China on the other hand has said that it has adopted a responsible attitude and followed the rules and procedures of the UNSC Resolution 1267 sanctions committee. China's position on the designation of a terrorist by the 1267 committee is consistent and clear. China adopted responsible attitudes, follows rules and procedures of this committee and takes part in these discussions in a responsible manner, China had also said. Not just Balakot, IAF was ready to hit JeM chief's home at Bahawalpur too On being asked at a press conference, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Lu Kang said that China has engaged in mediation efforts on both sides and helped talks to promote easing of tensions. China has in the past said that it did not have enough information to list Azhar. The country has proved to be a major stumbling block in India's efforts in getting the terrorist listed. If China does not stand in the way today, then it would be a major from the past two decades. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 6:22 [IST] BJP-ruled states slashes petrol, diesel rates further: New price to come into effect from today Wont withdraw Central forces deployed in Assam for NRC work: Centre to SC India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Mar 13: Centre on Wednesday told the Supreme Court that the Central forces deployed in Assam for National Register of Citizens (NRC) work will not be withdrawn, in view of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Appearing for the Centre, the Attorney General K K Venugopal, said that the government has directed that the 167 companies deployed in Assam will continue to remain in the state. Earlier, SC came down heavily on the Centre over the Assam National Register of Citizens (NRC) process and said it is hell bent on not allowing the work to continue. The top court rapped Ministry of Home Affairs for its plea seeking to stall the NRC work for two weeks keeping in mind the role of Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) in the election duty. Reiterating that July 31 deadline for the completion of NRC exercise will not be extended, a bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi said the Centre is not cooperating in the NRC process and it seems the entire effort of the MHA is to destroy the NRC process. The apex court asked the Election Commission to consider exempting certain state officers from election duty to ensure that NRC process continues. Foreigners' tribunal: SC pulls up centre, Assam govt The top court had said on January 24 that the July 31, 2019 deadline to finalise the NRC for Assam cannot be extended. It had asked the state government, the NRC co-ordinator and the EC to ensure that the upcoming general elections did not slow down the process. The draft National Register of Citizens for Assam was published on July 30, 2018 in which the names of 2.89 crore of the 3.29 crore people were included. The names of 40,70,707 people did not figure in the list. Of these, 37,59,630 names have been rejected and the remaining 2,48,077 are on hold. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 16:14 [IST] Is China the reason why Pakistan opted to skip Summit for Democracy hosted by Biden? China blocks ban on Maulana Masood Azhar for fourth time, MEA says "disappointed by outcome" International oi-Vikas SV New York, Mar 13: China has yet again blocked the proposal to designate Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed's chief Maulana Masood Azhar as a "global terrorist" by the UN Security Council. China has reportedly put a technical hold on the resolution. The proposal was moved by France, the US and the UK to designate Azhar a global terrorist. China has blocked such a move thrice since 2009. "The 1267 Sanctions Committee, upon completion of the no-objection period on 13 March 2019, wasn't able to come to a decision on the proposal for listing Mohammed Masood Azhar under the UN Sanctions regime, on account of a member placing the proposal on hold," the Ministry of External (MEA) said today. "We are disappointed by this outcome. This has prevented action by the international community to designate the leader of (JeM), a proscribed and active terrorist organization which has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on 14 February 2019," it added. The MEA further said India will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on Indian citizens are brought to justice. "We are grateful for the efforts of the Member States who moved the designation proposal and the unprecedented number of all other Security Council members as well as non-members who joined as co-sponsors," the MEA statement added. China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, and an "all-weather ally" of Pakistan had blocked India's proposal from being adopted by the Sanctions Committee even in 2009 and 2016. In 2017, Beijing also blocked a move by the US, the UK and France to designate Azhar as a global terrorist by the UN. China had on Wednesday hinted that it may once again block the move, saying only "the solution that is acceptable to all sides" is conducive to resolve the issue. [Will Azhar be listed: He meets the criteria says US] New Delhi had reached out to key players ahead of listing of Masood Azhar by the United Nations Security Council. Had the JeM chief been designated a terrorist by the UN body, Azhar would have been subjected to global sanctions that require UN member countries to not host, arm or finance him. The fresh move to list Azhar came in the backdrop of the JeM claiming responsibility for the suicide attack in Kashmir's Pulwama on February 14. Kamala Harris to become first woman with Presidential power: Here's why What we know about first case of Omicron reported in the US Watch: 'If you're on this call...' Indian-origin CEO fires over 900 employees over 3-minute Zoom webinar in US US orders immediate grounding of all Boeing 737 Max planes International oi-Vikas SV Washington, Mar 14: United States President Donald Trump has issued an order to immediately ground all Boeing 737 Max planes, said reports. While many countries banned the aircraft from flying over their airspace after Ethiopia air crash on Sunday, the US' Federal Aviation Administration had refrained from it. Earlier today, Canada grounded the world's third largest fleet of Boeing 737 MAX 8 jetliners, or 41 planes operated by three Canadian carriers, and banned the aircraft from its airspace. According to BBC, President Trump said the planes will not fly until Boeing "comes up with a solution". On Tuesday, India grounded Boeing 737-MAX planes, days after a similar model of the aircraft crashed in Ethiopia killing all 157 on board. [India grounds Boeing 737-MAX planes] Sunday's crash near Adis Ababa was the second fatal accident involving the 737 Max 8 model in less than five months - the previous crash involving a Lion Air aircraft in Indonesia in October last year when it crashed into the sea off Indonesia and killed all 189 on board. "As a result of new data that we received this morning, and had the chance to analyze, and on the advice of my experts and as a precautionary measure, I issued a safety notice," Canada's Transport Minister March Garneau told a press conference on March 13. "This safety notice restricts commercial passenger flights from any operator of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 or MAX 9 variant aircraft, whether domestic or foreign, from arriving, departing or overflying Canadian air space. This safety notice is effective immediately and will remain in place until further notice," Garneau further said. [DGCA reviews safety norms in existing Boeing 737 Max fleet, issues list of dos and dont's] France and the United Kingdom have also banned 737 MAX aircraft from operating in their airspace today. The French civil aviation authority said on Tuesday it had banned Boeing 737 MAX aircraft from France's airspace after a deadly crash of an Ethiopian plane of the same model. The Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) said in a statement earlier on Tuesday (March 14) that it was "temporarily suspending operation of all variants of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft into and out of Singapore in light of two fatal accidents involving Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in less than five months." ]" title="[Know about Boeing 737 MAX aircraft series]" />[Know about Boeing 737 MAX aircraft series] The Boeing 737 Max fleet of aircraft are the latest in the company's successful 737 line. The group includes the Max 7, 8, 9 and 10 models. By the end of January, Boeing had delivered 350 of the Max 8 model out of 5,011 orders. A small number of Max 9s are also operating, a BBC report said. The 737 MAX 8 was launched in 2017. Boeing has delivered more than 370 MAX planes to 47 customers, including leasing firms that place the jets with airlines around the world. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, March 14, 2019, 1:19 [IST] Going slow on Hafiz Saeed, looking up to Azhar, Pak is only worsening its case at FATF Did Pakistan ever act against Azhar? Intel reports show, he remained protected always From plotting a hijack to creating the JeM, why Pakistan guards Masood Azhar so much Will Azhar be listed: He meets the criteria says US International oi-Oneindia Staff By Anuj Cariappa Washington, Mar 13: Masood Azhar meets the criteria to be designated as a global terrorist and not doing so is against regional stability and peace, the US said on Tuesday, a day ahead of the crucial meeting at UN Security Council on the Jaish-e-Mohammed chief. Masood Azhar heads the Jaish-e-Mohammed or JeM, which had carried out many terror strikes in India and was also involved in the attack on Parliament, the Pathankot air force base, army camps in Jammu and Uri. Pulwama attack staged to avenge killing of Masood Azhar's kin says Indian evidence to Pak The Pak-based terror outfit had also claimed responsibility for the suicide attack on Central Reserve Police Force or CRPF in Pulwama which claimed the lives of 40 personnel. Three permanent members of the UNSC -- the United States, Britain and France -- have moved a resolution to designate Azhar as a global terrorist. Several previous attempts by these three countries inside the UN Security Council were blocked by China, the all-weather ally of Pakistan. China, which is one of the five veto-powered members of the Security Council, so far has vetoed proposals to ban Azhar, claiming lack of evidence to designate him as a global terrorist. Amidst a mounting global outrage in the wake of the Pulwama attack that led to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan, US, Britain and France hope that Beijing would act wisely and would not oppose their move against Azhar. On the eve of the crucial decision by the UN Security Council, the Trump Administration on Tuesday made it clear that there is enough evidence against Azhar to designate him as a global terrorist. "Azhar is the founder and the leader of the JeM, and he meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations," State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino told reporters at his daily news conference. The JeM, he said, has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability and peace. The US and India work closely together on counterterrorism efforts, and that includes at the United Nations, he added, noting that their views on the Jaish-e-Mohammed and its founder are well known. Will UNSC listed Masood Azhar? D-day today However, he refrained from making a direct comment on the deliberations inside the UN on this issue. "The United Nations Sanctions Committee, their deliberations, are confidential, and as such we don't comment on specific matters, but we'll continue to work with the Sanctions Committee to ensure that the designation list is updated and accurate," Palladino said. "The United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal," Palladino said in response to a question on previous successful attempts by China to block the UN designation of Azhar. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 10:10 [IST] Priyanka Gandhi Vadra to reach Lucknow on July 16; Key meetings scheduled in Delhi before visit UP Board Class 10th, 12th Result 2021 Declared: How to check Members of farmers' body detained in Lucknow for trying to burn effigies of PM Modi, Shah Section 144 CrPC invoked in Lucknow in view of Christmas, New Year UP Police Constable 2018 final answer key released Lucknow oi-Madhuri Adnal New Delhi, Mar 13: Uttar Pradesh Police Recruitment and Promotion Board (UPPRPB) has issued the final answer keys of Police Constable Exam 2018 held on January 27 and January 28. All those who appeared for the exam can check the answer keys through the official website. The recruitment board had earlier announced more than 49,000 Constable posts with Reserve Civil Police and Reserve Armed Constabulary services in October last year. Tripura Police Recruitment Alert 2019: Now, apply for 1488 Riflemen posts The preliminary answer key for UP Police constable written exam was released on February 4, 2019 and the board had invited objection on the same till February 7, 2019. UPRPB Up Police constable answer key: How to download Step 1: Visit the official website, uppbpb.gov.in Visit the official website, uppbpb.gov.in Step 2: On the homepage, click on the link of slot you appeared for On the homepage, click on the link of slot you appeared for step 3: A PDF will open UPPRPB had announced another Constable recruitment process in January 2018 which was completed recently. Join Indian Army: Apply for 40 Technical Graduate Course, salary up to Rs 2.25 lakh Delhi: 24-yr-old shot at in Shastri Park New Delhi pti-PTI New Delhi, Mar 13: A 24-year-old man was shot at in northeast Delhi's Shastri Park area on Wednesday, police said. The victim, Akash, a resident of Bhajanpura area, was safe barring a bullet wound on his leg, officials said. [Hyderabad man shot dead in US] According to Deputy Commissioner of Police (northeast) Atul Kumar Thakur, "The incident took place on Wednesday evening at Shastri Park area. The victim and the accused known each other and there seems to be personal enmity among them." A case was registered and the police are looking to nab the accused, the DCP said. PTI Join Indian Army: Apply for 40 Technical Graduate Course, salary up to Rs 2.25 lakh Google 2021 Year in Search: Neeraj Chopra most searched personality in India Man sentenced to 10 years for sexually assaulting girl New Delhi oi-Oneindia Staff By Anuj Cariappa New Delhi, Mar 13: A man was awarded 10 years imprisonment by a court here for sexually assaulting a girl three years ago, a police official said. The court also imposed a fine of Rs 25,000 on Mithlesh Chaudhary who was convicted under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, he said. Pollachi sex scandal: 4 arrested, case transferred to CB-CID "A case was registered against Mithlesh Chaudhary in 2016 at the Sadar Police Station. He was later arrested," Gurgaon Police PRO Subhash Bokan said. A charge sheet was also submitted before the court in this connection. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 7:43 [IST] Market Report: Global Market for IVD Services is Growing Rapidly | prominent industry players-Dexcom,Nova Biomedical,Phenomenex,Qiagen,Roche diagnostics IVD Services Market https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/2889 https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/2889 https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/in-vitro-diagnostic-services-market https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/ent-devices-market-will-surge-at-8-cagr-from-2019-to-2025-2019-03-12 www.gminsights.com Germany market was valued at USD 1.4 billion in 2017. Business growth in the country will be triggered by rising adoption of technologically advanced diagnostic devices. Also, availability of improvised quality diagnostic devices used in blood, urine and other infectious diseases diagnosis coupled with development of reimbursement scenario will stimulate industry growth over the coming years.Some of the prominent industry players operating in the BioRad, DexCom, Nova Biomedical, OraSure, Pearl Pathways, Phenomenex, Qiagen, Roche diagnostics, Siemens, Sysmex and Thermofisher. The key industry leaders will assure maximum profits by introducing innovative technology & devices into the industry. For instance, in October 2017, Roche Diagnostics received approval for Cobas, a Zika test used for accurate diagnosis of diseases. Development of such new tests will ensure profits for the firm.Request for a sample copy of this report @In-vitro Diagnostic Services Market size is set to exceed USD 63 billion by 2024; according to a new research report by Global Market Insights.Developments in diagnostic tests will enhance in-vitro diagnostic services industry growth over the coming years. Integration of advanced technology within the diagnostic devices should propel in-vitro diagnostic services market growth in the upcoming years. For instance, Phenomenex, a leader in developing diagnostic tests has added improvisations in the HPLC columns that enables free chiral screening service proving beneficial for performing diagnostic tests. Increase in technological advancements will enable automations in testing equipment utilized in the diagnostic procedures.Growing prevalence of chronic diseases such as cancer should have positive impact on the demand for in-vitro diagnostic (IVD) services. According to WHO, in 2015, there were around 8.8 million deaths globally due to cancer that will augment demand for IVD services. Also, as reported by World Cancer Research Fund International, there were around 1.4 million cases of colorectal cancer globally that will assure inflated demand for diagnostic services in forthcoming years. However, excessive cost of the diagnostic services and software utilized will restrain the industry growth.Make an inquiry for purchasing this report @Testing services segment will grow at 5.7% over the forecast timeline and the high segmental growth will be attributed to the availability of superior quality in-vitro diagnostic services. Moreover, increasing mortality rates due to cancer and other viral infections should augment the business growth over forecast timeframe.Laboratories segment held an enormous market share of 29.3% in 2017 and is anticipated to follow high growth trends in upcoming years. Increase in rate of detection of diabetes cases in South African and Asian countries will augment the segmental growth and escalate the demand for in-vitro diagnostic services. Additionally, growing incidence of chronic infections such as HIV and others will ensure high demand for laboratory diagnostic services. According to U.S. Statistics, around 1.1 million people in the U.S. were infected with AIDS that will positively influence business growth.U.S. market accounted for 89.7% regional revenue share in 2017 and high business growth can be attributed to the increasing geriatric population suffering from chronic disease such as diabetes. As per CDC in 2015, around 30.3 million Americans were detected with diabetes that should upsurge the demand for diagnostic services in near future. Also, developments in healthcare infrastructure will positively impact the business growth.Browse Complete Summary of this report @IVD Services Market, By Service Type (USD Million) Software Standalone Software Software Update Others Testing Services Infectious Testing Diabetes Testing Molecular Testing Tissue Testing OthersRelated Report:ENT Devices Market will surge at 8% CAGR from 2019 to 2025About Global Market Insights:Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb: Single-Use Medical Device Reprocessing Market SWOT Analysis and Major Players Midwest Reprocessing Center, SterilMed , Vanguard AG and Hygia Health Services Single-Use Medical Device Reprocessing https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-pdf/364 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-customization/364 Hospitals across the globe are facing cost pressures due to rise in price of original medical equipment. In the U.S., Obamacare and its associated guidelines might get repealed with the change in government. This could lead to low third-party reimbursement for hospitals, in turn influencing them to adopt cost saving initiatives such as single-use medical device reprocessing. The biggest advantage is that hospitals can reduce the cost associated with medical device to 50%, which becomes a crucial factor when dealing with expensive devices such as catheter and cardiac ablation devices. At present, 250 medical devices are already being processed with 10% of medical devices eligible for single-use medical device reprocessing. In terms of environmental protection, hospitals are able to reduce the medical waste to an estimated 50% by the use of single-use medical device reprocessing. Medical waste treatment not only puts enormous cost pressure on hospitals, but in countries such as U.S., China and Japan, it has become a full-fledged industry. For instance, Ascent, a subsidiary of Stryker Corporation, was able to eliminate 1,684 tons of medical waste from landfills during 2007, with the help of reprocessing. The market penetration for single-use medical device processing is poised to increase in small and mid-sized hospitals due to environmental sustainability and immense cost savings related to reprocessing.North America is estimated to be the growth pocket for single-use medical device reprocessing marketAccess PDF Template Copy of this Report at:U.S. has the biggest healthcare system in the world with government spending an estimated 30% of annual budget on healthcare. U.S. is also home to large-sized hospitals such as Cleveland Clinic, Mount Sinai Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre and Johns Hopkins Hospital. These hospitals are subject to meeting sustainability goals and contain costs at the back of recession. For instance, in 2007, 45% of U.S. hospitals entered into an agreement with third-party processing companies and this number increased to 70% in 2008 due to severe economic crisis. Single-use medical device reprocessing is subject to FDA and required third-party processing companies to maintain quality standards in accordance with the original equipment. FDA formulated stringent regulation to create standardization and avoid infections related to the reuse of single-use devices. FDA has set up a grievance mechanism for reporting of adverse events related to use of single-use device which in turn reinforces accountability.In regions such as Asia Pacific, Europe and South America, there is a lack of regulatory standards is a restraining factor for the growth of single-use medical device reprocessing market. European Union has not mandated guidelines regarding the reprocessing. Individual countries such as Spain, England and France are not in favor of reprocessing. With respect to Asia Pacific, the reuse of single-use medical devices is prevalent with no set of regulations. In countries such as India, Japan and South Korea, there are no government regulations pertaining to single-use medical device reprocessing.Single-use medical device reprocessing market is in nascent stage with few players dominating the marketThe key players in the single-use medical device reprocessing market are Stryker Corporation, Medline ReNewal, Centurion Medical Products Corporation, Midwest Reprocessing Center, SterilMed Inc., Vanguard AG and Hygia Health Services Inc, among others. These players have successfully demonstrated the impact of single-use medical device reprocessing on cost savings and environmental protection. These companies will benefit in a large manner as the regulatory scenario becomes established in Europe and Asia Pacific.Get Customized Report in your Inbox within 24 hours @Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr.ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email:sales@coherentmarketinsights.com North American Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Technological Innovation by Leading Key Players Up To 2023 - Infineon Technologies, Intel Corp. and Symantec ResearchMoz https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1998437 https://www.researchmoz.us/internet-of-things-iot-security-north-american-markets-to-2023-report.html/toc http://www.researchmoz.us/ http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG http://summaryofmarketresearchreports.blogspot.in/ Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "North American Internet of Things (IoT) Security Market Technological Innovation by Leading Key Players Up To 2023 - Infineon Technologies, Intel Corp. and Symantec" to its huge collection of research reports.The North American IoT security markets are experiencing good market growth rate, which is creating intense competition. Consequently, many cloud and managed service providers are facing intense competition from in-house IT teams for IoT security solution deployment.Many upcoming IoT projects intend to implement in-house security systems to implement various security solutions. This may work well in the proof-of-concept stage, but in the longer term, many in-house solutions cannot scale to meet the demands of IoT projects. IoT solution providers who can benefit such companies with purpose built, modular solutions are using SaaS model. This is expected to be best prepared to meet the demand for IoT security as the IoT market matures and the need for security increases.In recent years, the IoT security markets in the U.S. has benefitted solution developers, which should drive the development and penetration of new technologies and solutions. Solution and service providers should be attuned to new developments and identify which new solutions would fit their IoT portfolio. During the forecast period, a considerable amount of this activity is expected in the U.S. market.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Surging demand for cloud-based enterprise applications is a key driver of the North American IoT security markets. Cloud-based solutions depend on internet connectivity to function in a hosted environment. As a result, the risks of cyberattacks and other threats are constant, which is a growth factor for cyber security providers. Other growth factors include the growth in digitalization and IoT security spending, and the increasing demand for security solutions for connected cars and connected healthcare services.Moreover, the industry has been seeing various partnerships and new product launches in IoT security field in the region. Some of the major players who are involved in these strategic developments are Sophos, Thales eSecurity, Infineon, BAE Systems, and CENTRI Technology.""Report Scope:This report provides an in-depth analysis of the North American Internet of Things (IoT) security markets and its segments, including solution, type, end-user application and country. It discusses the different segments of IoT security solutions to derive specific market estimations. The type segment includes hardware and software components. Type of securities includes device layer security, network layer security, application and cloud layer security, threat detection and management solutions and security platforms.Browse TOC @In end-user application segment, commercial end-user applications include automotive, healthcare and smart cities. Consumer applications include smart homes and smart wearables. The report also discusses strategies adopted by major players in the North American Internet of Things (IoT) security markets.Market size is provided for 2017 (considered as base year), 2018 and 2023. Estimated values are based on manufacturers total revenues.Report Includes:- 12 data tables- An in-depth overview and industry analysis of North American markets for security technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT)- Analyses of global market trends, with data from 2017 to 2018, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) through 2023- Quantification of the market potential for North American markets for security technologies for the IoT applications by solution, type, end user, application industry, and country- A look at key trends in the market, including industry trends, fast growth in vulnerability, IT security, and adoption of managed security service providers- Descriptive study with focus on various organizations and inorganic market development strategies for developing advanced security solutions and client networks through product innovation, business expansion, partnerships, and mergers and acquisitions strategies- Technological assessment of the competitive landscape and company profiles of major IoT security solution providers, including BAE Systems Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Infineon Technologies, Intel Corp., Symantec, Corp. and Thales e-Security Inc."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 Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Industry 2019: Market Analysis, Revenue, Opportunities, Growth, Trends, Top Manufacturers (Bosch, Denso, Fujitsu, Continental, Autoliv, and Delphi etc.), & Forecast 2014-2025 Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Market https://www.orianresearch.com/request-sample/848816 https://www.orianresearch.com/enquiry-before-buying/848816 https://www.orianresearch.com/checkout/848816 www.orianresearch.com/ Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Market 2019- Through the statistical analysis, the report depicts the global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar industry definitions including capacity, production, production value, cost/profit, supply/demand and import/export. The report then estimates, market development trends of the Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar industry till forecast to 2025.Get Sample Copy of this Report @This market report provides historical data along with future forecast and detailed analysis and also expected opportunities for Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Market on a global and regional level. This research study helps the purchaser to understand the various manufacturers and the restraints impacting Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar and a comprehensive study on production capacity, consumption, import and export for all major regions across the globe during the forecast period.The Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Industry research report covers an in-depth description, competitive scenario, and business strategy adopted by competitors along with their SWOT analysis. The study encompasses a market analysis, wherein each segment is benchmarked based on its market size, growth rate, share, demand, trends, and general attractiveness.This market report provides historical data along with future forecast and detailed analysis and also expected opportunities for Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar on a global and regional level. This research study helps the purchaser to understand the various manufacturers and the restraints impacting Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar and a comprehensive study on production capacity, consumption, import and export for all major regions across the globe during the forecast period. The Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar research report covers an in-depth description, competitive scenario, and business strategy adopted by competitors along with their SWOT analysis. The study encompasses a market analysis, wherein each segment is benchmarked based on its market size, growth rate, share, demand, trends, and general attractiveness.Inquire more or share questions if any before the purchase on this report @The Top Companies AnalyzedBoschDensoFujitsuContinentalAutolivDelphiZFValeoNo. of Report Pages: 113Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Market report displays the production, revenue, price, market share, and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoOEMAftermarketCommercial Vehicle ACC Radar Market report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales), market share and growth rate for each application, LargeLight Commercial VehicleHeavy Commercial VehicleOrder a copy of the Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar of Construction Market Report 2019 @Major Points of Table and Content1 Study Coverage1.1 Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Product1.2 Key Market Segments in This Study2 Executive Summary2.1 Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Market Size2.1.1 Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Revenue 2014-20253 Market Size by Manufacturers3.1 Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Production by Manufacturers3.1.1 Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Production by Manufacturers4 Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Production by Regions4.1 Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Production by Regions4.1.1 Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Production Market Share by Regions5 Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Consumption by Regions5.1 Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Consumption by Regions5.1.1 Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Consumption by Regions6 Market Size by Type6.1 Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Production by Type6.2 Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Revenue by Type7 Market Size by Application7.1 Overview7.2 Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Breakdown Dada by Application8 Key Industry Players8.1 Bosch8.1.1 Bosch Company Details9 Entry Strategy for Key Countries9.1 Entry Strategy for United States Market9.2 Entry Strategy for China Market10 Production Forecasts10.1 Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Production and Revenue Forecast10.1.1 Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Production Forecast 2019-202511 Consumption Forecast11.1 Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Consumption Forecast by Application11.2 Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Consumption Forecast by Regions12 Opportunities & Challenges, Threat and Affecting Factors12.1 Market Opportunities12.2 Market Challenges13 Key Findings in the Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Study14 Appendix14.1 Research Methodology14.1.1 Methodology/Research ApproachSome List of Tables and Figures1. Figure Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Product Picture2. Table Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Key Market Segments in This Study3. Table Key Manufacturers Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Covered in This Study4. Table Major Manufacturers Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Sales to top 10 OEMs in 2018 (Supply Relationship)5. Table Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Market Size Growth Rate by Type 2019-2025 (K Units) & (Million US$)6. Figure Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Production Market Share 2014-20257. Figure OEM Product Picture8. Table Major Manufacturers of OEM9. Figure Aftermarket Product Picture10. Table Major Manufacturers of Aftermarket11. Table Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Market Size Growth Rate by Application 2019-2025 (K Units)12. Figure Light Commercial Vehicle13. Figure Heavy Commercial Vehicle14. Figure Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Report Years Considered15. Figure Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Revenue 2014-2025 (Million US$)16. Figure Global Commercial Vehicle ACC Radar Production 2014-2025 (K Units)17. About UsOrian Research is one of the most comprehensive collections of market intelligence reports on the World Wide Web. Our reports repository boasts of over 500000+ industries and country research reports from over 100 top publishers. We continuously update our repository so as to provide our clients with easy access to the world's most complete and current database of expert insights on global industries, companies, and products. We also specialize in custom research in situations where our syndicated research offerings do not meet the specific requirements of our esteemed clients.Contact UsRuwin MendezVice President Global Sales & Partner RelationsOrian Research ConsultantsUS: +1 (832) 380-8827 | UK: +44 0161-818-8027Email: info@orianresearch.comWebsite: Pemetrexed Market 2018 Sales, Business Opportunities, Proctuion, Regional Analysis 2026 Appraised By Global Players Eli Lilly and Company, Stada Arzneimittel AG, Eagle Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Global Pemetrexed Market https://bit.ly/2XqLfJr https://bit.ly/2SxECRP https://bit.ly/2NwV83S https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/phase-xs/ Pemetrexed is a chemotherapy drug indicated for the treatment of pleural mesothelioma and non-small cell lung cancer. Pemetrexed is a patented drug of Eli Lilly and Company and sold under brand name Alimta. In 2004, Alimta (Pemetrexed injection) was approved by FDA in combination with cisplatin as an initial treatment for patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma. In 2008, ALIMTA, in combination with cisplatin, was approved as an initial chemotherapy treatment for locally advanced or metastatic NSCLC for patients with nonsquamous histology, and in 2009, ALIMTA was approved as a maintenance therapy for locally advanced or metastatic nonsquamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).For In depth Information Get Sample Copy of this Report at:Global Key Players:Key players operating in the global pemetrexed market include Eli Lilly and Company, Stada Arzneimittel AG, Eagle Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and others.Detailed Segmentation:Global Pemetrexed Market, By Strength :100 mg, 500 mgGlobal Pemetrexed Market, By Distribution Channel:Hospital Pharmacies, Retail Pharmacies, Online PharmaciesGlobal Pemetrexed Market, By Region:North America,Europe,Asia Pacific,Latin America,Middle East,AfricaNorth America Is Expected To Hold Dominant Position, Owing To High Prevalence Of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer And Its High Treatment Rate In The U.S.According to Eli Lilly and Companys annual report 2017, Alimta (pemetrexed) generated around 50% of its revenue from the U.S. Hence, North America is expected to be most conducive region for growth of the pemetrexed market, due to high prevalence of non-small cell lung cancer and high cost for its treatment.For instance, according to the data published by the American Cancer Society in 2017, lung cancer (both small cell and non-small cell) is the second most common type of cancer in U.S and around 13% of all new cancers are lung cancer.American Cancer Society also estimated that in 2019, around 228,150 new cases of lung cancer (116,440 in men and 111,710 in women) would be diagnosed in the U.S. and survival rate for non-small cell lung cancer in stage IA1 NSCLC is about 92%, stage IB NSCLC (68%), stage IIIA NSCLC (36%), stage IIIC cancers (13%), and for stage IIIC cancers (13%).Browse Research Report At:Market Dynamics:Launch of generic version of pemetrexed in key region is expected to increase affordability of pemetrexed, which in turn is expected to support global pemetrexed market growth over the forecast period.For instance, in July 2018, STADAPHARM GmbH, the subsidiary of STADA Arzneimittel AG launched Pemetrexed STADA generic version of Alimta in Europe.High prevalence of non-small cell lung cancer and pleural mesothelioma is expected to rise the demand for Pemetrexed for its treatment and support global pemetrexed market growth over the forecast period.For instance, according to the data published by American Society of Clinical Oncology, in January 2018, in the U.S. around 234,030 adults (121,680 men and 112,350 women) were diagnosed with lung cancer among which non-small cell lung cancer is the most common type of lung cancer, accounting for 80% to 85% of all lung cancer diagnose.Inquire Here Before Purchase of Research Report @Also, Coherent Market Insights has a proprietary database of pipeline biologics and biosimilars, called PHASE-XS. This database provides analytical data in addition to the clinical information of ongoing trials for biologics and biosimilars. An amalgamation of more than 30 parameters, PHASE-XS helps biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to analyze the market trend, competition, and market potential. For more information or to access this database, kindly click on the below link or contact at sales@coherentmarketinsights.comAbout Coherent Market InsightsCoherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact UsMr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave, #3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.com Artificial Saliva Market Key Player Analysis - GlaxoSmithKline, Cipla Limited, Fresenius Kabi, Parnell Pharmaceuticals Artificial Saliva Market https://www.upmarketresearch.com/home/requested_sample/80567 https://www.upmarketresearch.com/home/enquiry_before_buying/80567 https://www.upmarketresearch.com/reports/artificial-saliva-market-2019 https://www.upmarketresearch.com/home/request_for_discount/80567 www.upmarketresearch.com UpMarketResearch.com adds a new Artificial Saliva Market research report for the period of 2019 - 2025 focuses on the major drivers and restraints providing analysis of the market share, segmentation, revenue forecasts and geographic regions of the market.Request Sample Copy Of this Report @Artificial Saliva Market research report delivers a close watch on leading competitors with strategic analysis, micro and macro market trend and scenarios, pricing analysis and a holistic overview of the market situations in the forecast period.It is a professional and a detailed report focusing on primary and secondary drivers, market share, leading segments and geographical analysis. Further, key players, major collaborations, merger & acquisitions along with trending innovation and business policies are reviewed in the report. The report contains basic, secondary and advanced information pertaining to the Artificial Saliva Market global status and trend, market size, share, growth, trends analysis, segment and forecasts from 2019 2025.The scope of the report extends from market scenarios to comparative pricing between major players, cost and profit of the specified market regions. The numerical data is backed up by statistical tools such as SWOT analysis, BCG matrix, SCOT analysis, PESTLE analysis and so on. The statistics are represented in graphical format for a clear understanding on facts and figures.The generated report is firmly based on primary research, interviews with top executives, news sources and information insiders. Secondary research techniques are implemented for better understanding and clarity for data analysis.The report for Artificial Saliva Market analysis & forecast 2019- 2025 is segmented into Product Segment, Application Segment & Major players.For More Information On This Report, Please Visit @Artificial Saliva Market Segmentation covers:Region- wise Analysis: North America, Europe, China, Japan, India, Southeast Asia, Other regions (Central & South America, Middle East & Africa)Major Players Reported Are:GlaxoSmithKlineCipla LimitedFresenius KabiParnell PharmaceuticalsEntod InternationalForward ScienceBiocosmetics LaboratoriesIcpa Health Products LTD.PerrigoLaboratorios KinProduct Segment Analysis:Oral SprayOral SolutionOral LiquidGelPowderApplication Segment Analysis:AdultPaediatricRead More details Artificial Saliva Market Analysis and Forecast 2019- 2025 report helps the clients to take business decisions and to understand strategies of major players in the industry. The report also calls for market- driven results deriving feasibility studies for client needs. UpMarketResearch ensures qualified and verifiable aspects of market data operating in the real- time scenario. The analytical studies are conducted ensuring client needs with a thorough understanding of market capacities in the real- time scenario.Key Reasons to Purchase:- To gain insightful analyses of the market and have a comprehensive understanding of the Artificial Saliva Market and its commercial landscape.- Learn about the market strategies that are being adopted by your competitors and leading organizations.- To understand the future outlook and prospects for Artificial Saliva Market analysis and forecast 2019- 2025.If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Avail Discount On this Report @Customization of the Report:Up Market Research provides free customization of reports as per your need. This report can be personalized to meet your requirements. Get in touch with our sales team, who will guarantee you to get a report that suits your necessities.About UpMarketResearch:The UpMarketResearch () is a leading distributor of market research report with more than 800+ global clients. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well- defined we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Contact Info:Name: Alex MathewsEmail: Alex@upmarketresearch.comOrganization: UpMarketResearchAddress: 500 East E Street, Ontario, CA 91764, United States. Global beta-Methallyl Chloride (3-Chloro-2-methyl-1-propene, CAS 563-47-3) Market 2018 | Jiangsu Dynamic Chemical Co., Ltd., Ningbo Yide Fine Chemical Co., Ltd., Zibo Honors Chemical Co., Ltd., Market Research Hub https://www.marketresearchhub.com/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=2168345 https://www.marketresearchhub.com/report/global-beta-methallyl-chloride-3-chloro-2-methyl-1-propene-cas-563-47-3-market-outlook-2018-2023-report.html This research study added to the broad database of Market Research Hub (MRH) focusing on the Global beta-Methallyl Chloride (3-Chloro-2-methyl-1-propene, CAS 563-47-3) Market Outlook 2018-2023 delivers an in-depth outlook to present information about executive summary and key performance indicators. Furthermore, readers can gather knowledge about the economic status, demographics and competitive landscape which is prevailing in the concerned industry during the review period, 2018-2023. Overall, the purpose of this assessment is to present a clear picture highlighting the transformations expected to occur in the beta-Methallyl Chloride (3-Chloro-2-methyl-1-propene, CAS 563-47-3) driven by major trends and opportunities.Get Sample Copy of This Report @The 'Global beta-Methallyl Chloride (3-Chloro-2-methyl-1-propene, CAS 563-47-3) Market Outlook 2018-2023' offers detailed coverage of beta-methallyl chloride industry and presents main market trends. The market research gives historical and forecast market size, demand, end-use details, price trends, and company shares of the leading beta-methallyl chloride producers to provide exhaustive coverage of the market for beta-methallyl chloride. The report segments the market and forecasts its size, by volume and value, on the basis of application, by products, and by geography.The report has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from key industry participants. The global beta-methallyl chloride market has been segmented into five major regions, namely, North America (U.S., Canada, and others), Europe (U.K., France, Germany, Russia, and others), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, India, Australia, and others), South America (Brazil, Argentina, and others), and Middle East & Africa (South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and others). Furthermore, the report also includes an in-depth competitive analysis of the key vendors operating in this market.Key Regions- North America- Europe- Asia Pacific- Middle East & Africa- South AmericaKey Vendors- Jiangsu Dynamic Chemical Co., Ltd.- Ningbo Yide Fine Chemical Co., Ltd.- Zibo Honors Chemical Co., Ltd.- Xiangyang King Success Chemical Co., Ltd.- request free sample to get a complete list of companiesBROWSE Full Report NOW @Part 1. SummaryPart 2. Report Methodology2.1 Methodology2.2 Data SourcePart 3. IntroductionPart 4. Industry Value Chain4.1 beta-Methallyl Chloride Industry Value Chain Analysis4.2 Upstream4.3 End-uses4.4 DistributorsPart 5. Competitive Landscape5.1 Global beta-Methallyl Chloride Sales & Share by Company (2013-2018)5.2 Global beta-Methallyl Chloride Revenue & Share by Company (2013-2018)5.3 Pricing Trends5.4 Competitive TrendsPart 6. Segmentation by Type6.1 Global beta-Methallyl Chloride Sales Volume by Type (2013-2018)6.2 Global beta-Methallyl Chloride Revenue by Type (2013-2018)6.3 Global beta-Methallyl Chloride Price by Type (2013-2018)Part 7. Segmentation by Application7.1 Global beta-Methallyl Chloride Sales Volume by Application (2013-2018)7.2 Global beta-Methallyl Chloride Revenue by Application (2013-2018)7.3 Global beta-Methallyl Chloride Price by Application (2013-2018)Part 8. Regional Perspectives8.1 Overview8.2 North America8.2.1 Market Size (Volume & Value)8.2.2 by Application8.2.3 by Country (U.S., Canada, Mexico, etc.)More Information@@@About Market Research HubMarket Research Hub (MRH) is a next-generation reseller of research reports of different sector like chemicals market research and analysis. MRHs expansive collection of industry reports has been carefully curated to help key personnel and decision makers across industry verticals to clearly visualize their operating environment and take strategic steps.MRH functions as an integrated platform for the following products and services: Objective and sound market forecasts, qualitative and quantitative analysis, incisive insight into defining industry trends, and market share estimates. Our reputation lies in delivering value and world-class capabilities to our clients.Contact Us90 State Street,Albany, NY 12207,United StatesToll Free: 800-998-4852 (US-Canada)Email: press@marketresearchhub.com Microgrid Market in United States to reach over 2 GW by 2024 | Key Industry Players include Honeywell, Alstom Grid, Lockheed Martin, Exelon, Hitachi, Emerson, Advanced Microgrid Solutions, HOMER Energy Microgrid Market https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/1187 https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/1187 www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/microgrid-market https://www.openpr.com/news/1644359/U-S-Municipal-Solid-Waste-Management-Market-Trends-Evolution-By-Key-Venders-Clean-Harbors-Veolia-Covanta-Xcel-Energy-Recology-Hitachi-Zosen-Corporation-Wheelabrator-Group-Sims-Metal-Management-Limited-SUEZ-Waste-Connections.html www.gminsights.com www.industry-source.org Microgrid Market in U.S. is predicted to grow pertaining to ongoing adoption of self-power generation plants along with enhancing distributed power generation technologies. Increasing investments across infrastructure and energy sector in the country will further propel the business outlook. In 2016, USD 712.5 billion were spent to boost infrastructure sector in the nation.Japan microgrid market is set to witness strong growth on account of favourable measures to promote the adoption of renewable technology along with rising energy security concern. Increasing government funding towards several R&D projects coupled with deployment of virtual private network to reduce energy crisis will propel the industry growth. In 2017, Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry collaborated with Panasonic to construct solar PV powered microgrid network to supply electricity to more than 100 houses in western Japan.Request for a sample copy of this research report @Other than Europe, China is also claimed to hold a strong ground in the global microgrid industry share. The exponential increase in power consumption in tandem with the growing investment by the regional government in rural electrification development can be primarily credited for the regional market demand. For the record, presently there are over 20 large-scale microgrid projects operational in China. Looking at the promising microgrid sector, big shot investors are betting big on the regional microgrid market. For instance, recently, Capstone Turbine, the renowned California based gas turbine manufacturer has inked a deal with the Chinese Government to supply microturbine for the countrys 10 MW microgrid network. With a strong pipeline of such encouraging initiatives, China microgrid market is slated to exceed a power generation capacity of 1 GW by the end of 2024.Company profiled in this report based on Business overview, Financial data, Product landscape, Strategic outlook & SWOT analysis:1. ABB2. GE3. Eaton4. Siemens5. Schneider Electric6. Caterpillar Inc.7. Honeywell8. Alstom Grid9. Lockheed Martin10. Exelon11. Hitachi12. Emerson13. Advanced Microgrid Solutions14. HOMER EnergyMicrogrid Market is expected to surpass USD 19 billion by 2024.Growing government regulations and policies concerning with integration of renewable energy technologies along with increasing demand to electrify urban and rural areas will propel the industry growth. Low power cost along with reduced transmission and distribution losses, economic competitiveness and power reliability are some of the key underlined parameters which will further positively impact the product penetration. Moreover, development of off grid network across developing countries will augment the industry landscape.Make an inquiry for buying this report @Installation of captive power generation facilities with an aim to maintain continuous electricity supply across industrial sector will stimulate the microgrid market. Favourable government measures to maintain central grid stability along with measures toward power security concern will propel the industry growth. Advancement in technology in development of control distribution unit and energy efficient storage system will further complement the business landscape.Increasing investment toward industrial sector along with rapid urbanization across developing nation will positively impact the Utility microgrid market. Increasing demand for electricity across commercial & industrial sectors along with increasing adoption of heavy load machinery and HVAC system in industrial sector will further fuel the industry growth.Flow battery microgrid market will witness growth owing to its ability to offer higher efficiency and longer life cycle features. Growing spending to promote the development and deployment of renewable energy technologies coupled with ongoing innovation to improve design of energy storage solution to enhance efficiency and reduce cost will further enhance the product penetration.Natural gas microgrid market share will grow owing to increasing investment toward drilling of unconventional resource across Russia, China and the U.S. Ability to offer less environmental impact over other conventional sources will make its adoption preferable. In August 2016, Government of China signed agreement with Capstone turbine to supply microturbine for 10 MW project.Browse key industry insights spread across 300 pages with 798 market data tables & 12 figures & charts from the report, Microgrid Market in detail along with the table of contents:Rising concerns toward energy security coupled with increasing adoption of sustainable energy sources will stimulate the Japan microgrid market. Government backed extensive research and development projects along with implementation of virtual private networks (VPPs) to mitigate emergency crisis will further embellish the business outlook. In 2017, Panasonic in collaboration with Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry planned to build Solar PV powered microgrid to provide electricity to 117 homes in western Japan.The microgrid concept is aptly providing a platform that is proliferating distributed electricity generation and efficient power delivery with least compromise on environmental viability. However, in this regard, it is imperative to mention that microgrid market giants have been lately facing a wide array of daunting challenges such as establishing standards for microgrid design and extensive R&D requirement. Nonetheless, in the face of the severe energy crisis that has led to a subsequent penetration of renewable energy sources, microgrid market is set to amass exceeding proceeds from both industrial and commercial applications. In terms of commercialization, Global Market Insights Inc., forecasts overall microgrid industry to exceed a valuation of USD 19 billion by 2024.In an era where distributed energy sources are continually promulgated in power networks, microgrid market stands to gain remarkable prominence, given the systems exceptional credibility of ensuring reliable operation in distributed grids with robustness and high flexibility. As the energy demand in conjunction with the environmental concerns have increased dramatically since the past decade, experts believe, decentralized electricity supply through LT lines might not be an optimal solution to address the requirement, especially across remote areas. In fact, with the increasing penetration of renewable energy sources in mainstream electricity supply, the operational reliability of the grid network has become an intricate issue for the power giants. In a bid to address this critical aspect, eminent companies are highly banking on microgrids for a seamless integration of distributed generation systems into the network, ensuring highly efficient and reliable power delivery. Therefore, it goes without saying that the changing trend along with the dire necessity of reducing reliance on fossil fuels has provided a significant impetus to microgrid market.Eminent players across the microgrid market include ABB, GE, Eaton, Siemens, Schneider Electric, Caterpillar Inc., Honeywell, Alstom Grid, HOMER Energy, Power Analytics Corporation, Advanced Microgrid Solutions, EnSync Energy Systems, Viridity Energy Solutions, Inc., Lockheed Martin, Exelon, Hitachi, and Emerson.Browse Related Reports:About Global Market InsightsGlobal Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.4 North Main StreetSellbyvilleContact UsArun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Blog: Electric Handpieces Market Profitable Key Business Trends Growth Rate and Forecasts to 2024 Danaher, SciCan, Dentsply Sirona, Bien-Air Electric Handpieces Market https://www.advancemarketanalytics.com/sample-report/6621-global-north-america-europe-and-asia-pacific-south-america-middle-east-and-africa-electric-handpieces-market https://www.advancemarketanalytics.com/enquiry-before-buy/6621-global-north-america-europe-and-asia-pacific-south-america-middle-east-and-africa-electric-handpieces-market https://www.advancemarketanalytics.com/reports/6621-global-north-america-europe-and-asia-pacific-south-america-middle-east-and-africa-electric-handpieces-market https://www.advancemarketanalytics.com/buy-now?format=1&report=6621 https://www.linkedin.com/company/advance-market-analytics https://www.facebook.com/AMA-Research-Media-LLP-344722399585916 https://twitter.com/amareport Advance Market Analytics published a new research publication on "Global Electric Handpieces Market Insights, to 2025" with pages and enriched with self-explained Tables and charts in presentable format. In the Study you will find new evolving Trends, Drivers, Restraints, Opportunities generated by targeting market stakeholders. The growth of the Electric Handpieces market is mainly driven by the increasing R&D spending across the world. Some of the key players profiled in the study are Bien-Air (Switzerland), Danaher (United States), Dentsply Sirona (United States), J. MORITA (Japan), NSK (Japan), A-Dec Inc. (United States), W&H (Austria), SciCan (Canada), NOUVAG (Switzerland) and Foshan CAN Dental Equipment Co (China).Scope of the Report of Electric HandpiecesElectric dental handpieces are used in cleaning and polishing of teeth. It is a smart and less time consuming tool which is replacing conventional air-driven and high-speed handpieces. The Electric Handpieces is an instrument that uses electricity to generate a rotary cutting motion, similar to how a drill operates.Get Free Exclusive PDF Sample Copy of This Research @Market Drivers High prevalence of oral diseasesMarket Trend The presence of online salesRestraints The High Cost of Electric HandpieceOpportunities Increasing number of dental practitioners in developed countriesChallenges Adoption of substitutesThe Electric Handpieces Market report provides a basic overview of the industry including its definition, geography segment, end use/application segment and competitor segment and manufacturing technology. Then, the report explores the international major industry players in detail.According to the Regional Segmentation the Electric Handpieces Market provides the Information covers following regions:*North America*South America*Asia & Pacific*Europe*MEA (Middle East and Africa)The key countries in each region are taken into consideration as well, such as United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, South Africa, Nigeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Germany, United Kingdom (UK), the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Turkey, Russia, France, Poland, Israel, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, India, Australia and New Zealand etc.Have Any Questions Regarding Global Electric Handpieces Market Report, Ask Our Experts@The titled segments and sub-section of the market are illuminated below:The Study Explore the Product Types of Electric Handpieces Market: High-Speed Electric Handpieces, Low-Speed Electric HandpiecesKey Applications/end-users of Global Electric Handpieces Market: Hospital, Dental ClinicTop Players in the Market are: Bien-Air (Switzerland), Danaher (United States), Dentsply Sirona (United States), J. MORITA (Japan), NSK (Japan), A-Dec Inc. (United States), W&H (Austria), SciCan (Canada), NOUVAG (Switzerland) and Foshan CAN Dental Equipment Co (China)List of players also available in Coverage: TTBIO (Taiwan) , MICRO-MEGA (France) , COLTENE (Switzerland)Read Detailed Index of full Research Study at @Strategic Points Covered in Table of Content of Global Electric Handpieces Market:Chapter 1: Introduction, market driving force product Objective of Study and Research Scope the Electric Handpieces marketChapter 2: Exclusive Summary the basic information of the Electric Handpieces Market.Chapter 3: Displaying the Market Dynamics- Drivers, Trends and Challenges of the Electric HandpiecesChapter 4: Presenting the Electric Handpieces Market Factor Analysis Porters Five Forces, Supply/Value Chain, PESTEL analysis, Market Entropy, Patent/Trademark Analysis.Chapter 5: Displaying the by Type, End User and Region 2013-2018Chapter 6: Evaluating the leading manufacturers of the Electric Handpieces market which consists of its Competitive Landscape, Peer Group Analysis, BCG Matrix & Company ProfileChapter 7: To evaluate the market by segments, by countries and by manufacturers with revenue share and sales by key countries in these various regions.Chapter 8 & 9: Displaying the Appendix, Methodology and Data SourceFinally, Electric Handpieces Market is a valuable source of guidance for individuals and companies.Research Methodology: The top-down and bottom-up approaches are used to estimate and validate the size of the global Electric Handpieces market. In order to reach an exhaustive list of functional and relevant players who offer Electric Handpieces various industry classification standards are closely followed such as NAICS, ICB, SIC to penetrate deep in important geographies. Thereafter, a thorough validation test is conducted to reach most relevant players specifically having product line i.e. Electric Handpieces. In order to make priority list sorting is done based on revenue generation as per latest reporting with the help of paid databases such as Factiva, Bloomberg etc. Finally the questionnaire is set and specifically designed to address all the necessities for primary data collection after getting prior appointment. This helps us to gather the data for the players revenue, profit, products, growth etc. Almost 80% of data is collected through primary medium and further validation is done through various secondary sources that includes Regulators, World Bank, Association, Company Website, Annual reports, press releases etc.Buy the Latest Detailed Report @Key questions answered Who are the Leading key players and what are their Key Business plans in the Electric Handpieces market? What are the key concerns of the five forces analysis of the Electric Handpieces market? What are different prospects and threats faced by the dealers in the Electric Handpieces market? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?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:Advance Market Analytics is Global leaders of Market Research Industry provides the quantified B2B research to Fortune 500 companies on high growth emerging opportunities which will impact more than 80% of worldwide companies' revenues.Our Analyst is tracking high growth study with detailed statistical and in-depth analysis of market trends & dynamics that provide a complete overview of the industry. We follow an extensive research methodology coupled with critical insights related industry factors and market forces to generate the best value for our clients. We Provides reliable primary and secondary data sources, our analysts and consultants derive informative and usable data suited for our clients business needs. The research study enable clients to meet varied market objectives a from global footprint expansion to supply chain optimization and from competitor profiling to M&As.Contact Us:Craig Francis (PR & Marketing Manager)AMA Research & Media LLPUnit No. 429, Parsonage Road Edison, NJNew Jersey USA 08837Phone: +1 (206) 317 1218sales@advancemarketanalytics.comConnect with us at Brain Monitoring Market Boost the Industry Growth With USD 6,595 Million By 2025: Global Players Compumedics, Advanced Brain Monitoring & Siemens AG https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/2822?utm_source=openpr&utm_medium=ss https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/2822?utm_source=openpr&utm_medium=ss https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com According to the report, the global brain monitoring market was pegged at $3.85 billion and is projected to reach $6.59 billion by 2025, registering CAGR of 6.9% during the period 20182025.The global brain monitoring devices market has witnessed exceptional growth in the past few years. The increase in the geriatric population and rise in the prevalence of chronic diseases contribute toward market growth. In addition, advancements in technology is another factor expected to boost market growth during the forecast period.However, stringent government regulations and unfavourable reimbursement policies are projected to hamper market growth during the forecast period. Conversely, untapped markets in the developing countries are expected to offer remunerative opportunities for the market players in the near future.Request Sample Available @Major Companies: Advanced Brain Monitoring Inc. Siemens AG CAS Medical Systems Inc. General Electric Company (GE Healthcare) Medtronic Plc. Neural Analytics Inc.Non-invasive procedures segment to manifest the fastest growth by 2025The non-invasive procedures segment is projected to portray the fastest CAGR of 6.9% during the study period. Moreover, the segment held the largest share, contributing about 90% of the total market in 2017. The report analyzes the segment of invasive procedure.Traumatic brain injuries segment dominates the marketThe traumatic brain injuries segment dominated the market in terms of market share, contributing about one-fifth of the total market in 2017. However, Parkinson's disease segment is estimated to portray the fastest CAGR of 8.8% during the forecast period. The report includes other segments such as epilepsy, dementia, Huntington's disease, headache disorders, stroke, sleep disorders, and other diseases.Key Findings of the Brain Monitoring Market: Based on product type, the electromyography devices segment is expected to experience rapid growth in the market, and is projected to grow at a highest CAGR of 8.0% from 2018 to 2025. Depending on procedure, the invasive segment holds the highest share in 2017, and is anticipated to continue this trend during the forecast period. By application, the traumatic brain injuries segment was the major revenue contributor in 2017, and is anticipated to continue this trend during the forecast period. U.S. generated the highest revenue in the global brain monitoring market in 2017, accounting for more than two-fifths of the global market in 2017.Click For Enquiry @About Us:Allied Market Research, a market research and advisory company of Allied Analytics LLP, provides business insights and market research reports to large as well as small & medium enterprises. The company assists its clients to strategize business policies and achieve sustainable growth in their respective market domain.Allied Market Research provides one stop solution from the beginning of data collection to investment advice. The analysts at Allied Market Research dig out factors that help clients to understand the significance and impact of market dynamics. The company amplies clients insight on the factors, such as strategies, future estimations, growth or fall forecasting, opportunity analysis, and consumer surveys among others. As follows, the company offers consistent business intelligent support to aid the clients to turn into prominent business firm.Contact:David Correa5933 NE Win Sivers Drive#205, Portland, OR 97220United StatesToll Free (USA/Canada):+1-800-792-5285, +1-503-894-6022, +1-503-446-1141UK: +44-845-528-1300Hong Kong: +852-301-84916India (Pune): +91-20-66346060Fax: +1855550-5975help@alliedmarketresearch.comWeb: Global Skin Cooling Systems Market Prime Economies Expected to Deliver Major Growth until 2028 https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=T&rep_id=2186 https://www.factmr.com/report/2186/skin-cooling-systems-market https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=B&rep_id=2186 https://www.factmr.com/ https://factmrblog.com/ http://westminsternewsonline.com FACTMR has been actively involved in offering comprehensive research data concerning various topics which are associated to industrial reference and investor utility. This particular research report titled Global Skin Cooling Systems Market Prime Economies Expected to Deliver Major Growth until 2028 has been added to the wide online database of FACTMR which discusses the present as well as future market scenario. Readers can access knowledge related to market volume, regional expanse as well as competitive landscape prevailing in the Global Skin Cooling Systems Market. In order to study development patterns, this smart assessment also focuses on market dynamics, which talks about drivers, restraints and opportunities estimated to influence the concerned market during the period until 2028Request TOC of this Report-Skin cooling systems are devices primarily used to relieve pain caused due to laser treatments or cosmetic surgeries. Laser surgery is used for plethora of medical treatments ranging from plastic surgery, dentistry treatments, reconstructive and rejuvenation surgery, dermatology, otorhinolaryngology, podiatry, anti-aging therapies, lipolysis, pre-cancerous skin conditions, treatment of varicose veins, hair and tattoo removal, Telangiectasia treatment, removing skin lesions, etc. Laser treatment causes pain, swelling, inflammation, disturbed pigmentation and erythema.Skin cooling systems work by chilling the skin layer, thereby minimizing the pain at the injury or pain point. This application in which the skin is exposed to cold air or liquid that constricts the blood flow to the target site, decreases pain and inflammation and helps recover faster. Skin cooling systems apply cold treatment to the areas of trauma and decrease the demand for oxygen and reduce muscle spasms. Traditional methods of cooling treatment such as ice packs, cooling creams, painkillers, etc. are being replaced by the skin cooling systems, as they are drug and chemical free, safe and increase the efficacy of laser therapy. There are two types of skin cooling systems used with laser surgeries, namely contact and non-contact. Contact skin cooling systems include ice packs, dynamic cooling systems (cryogen spray/cryotherapy) and non-contact skin cooling system, which introduces cool air directly on the site where the laser beam interaction occurs. The skin cooling system can be used pre-treatment, parallel treatment or post-treatment of laser therapy. The burst of cool air on the skin layer numbs the epidermis allowing professionals to use higher levels of laser for treatment and yet making the patient pain free and comfortableAnother type of skin cooling system is cooling vest which is an apparel worn to maintain the body temperature. Heat stress is a major issue in medical science as it contributes to possibilities to impaired judgment, confusion, seizures and even to strokes. Cooling vests absorb heat and lower the body temperature. Moreover, cooling vests have also been a great influence on the market and are certain to be the potential product in the skin cooling systems. Cooling vests also help the patients of multiple sclerosis to maintain their body temperature and remain calm. Skin cooling systems in the form of cooling vests also aid athletes in body heat catastrophes. These cooling vests have also been used for firefighters and army officers. Contagious disease care experts are also using skin cooling systems to enhance performance and work duration and reduce heat stress, dehydration and rest.To know more about the Skin Cooling Systems Market Visit the link-Skin Cooling Systems Market: Drivers and RestraintsSkin cooling systems are highly recommended in laser and dermatology clinics because of the vital part in patient comfort and ease after treatment. Confidence in laser treatments after accidents and traumas is attributed to high adoption of laser treatments and in turn demands adjuvants such as skin cooling. Skin cooling systems are thus exponentially being utilized in health and skin spas. Economic growth of the country, stability, and demand from the aesthetic industry are some other factors driving the demand for skin cooling systems due to penetration of cosmetic surgeries and anti-aging treatments. Adoption of the skin cooling systems by these clinics result in higher demand for the cooling systems over the period. However, skin cooling systems are expensive which restricts the widespread adoption of skin cooling systems across the globe. Moreover these skin cooling systems must be handled by medical experts only and lack of trained professionals to handle skin cooling systems also limits their use in specialized clinics and hospitals. Technological advances in skin cooling systems would bring the revolution and provide cheaper, compact and easy-to-use skin cooling systems. For instance, transition from trolley mounted to table top skin cooling systems is a step towards this revolution.Skin Cooling System Market: OverviewThe skin cooling system market is expected to register high growth over the forecast period primarily due to the increase in aesthetic surgeries and growing dependency on laser surgeries for disorders or accidents. Skin cooling systems are greatly recommended in clinics and hospitals. Non-contact skin cooling systems are in more demand than contact skin cooling system, primarily because non-contact skin cooling systems are chemical free, extremely fast and safe to use. It is estimated that the demand for non-contact skin cooling systems will exponentially rise and will hold a prominent market in the upcoming years.Skin Cooling Systems Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, the global custom nucleic acid market is segmented into North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), Japan and the Middle East and Africa (MEA). Among these, North America is expected to be the dominant regional market for custom skin cooling systems owing to presence of high number of dermatology and laser treatment clinics. Also, highly established healthcare infrastructure would contribute to adoption of such costly devices by hospitals and clinics in the U.S. The climatic conditions in the southern part of America demand for skin cooling systems in the form of cooling vests. Europe is expected to contribute second large share in the global skin cooling system market throughout the forecast period, because of adaptation of advance technology and economic growth. The skin cooling system market in Asia Pacific excluding Japan is expected to expand at a high CAGR due to presence of a large number of regional and local manufacturers in China and South Korea.Request Brochure of this Report-About FactMRFactMR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market insights 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 UsFactMR11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852United StatesEmail: sales@factmr.comWeb:Blog:Read Industry News at - Global Female Masturbator Market Research Report 2019 | Industry Analysis, Share, Growth, Trend and Top Key Players Doc Johnson Enterprises, TOMAX, Pipedream Products, California Exotics, Nalone Forecast to 2025 Female Masturbator , Female Masturbator Market, Female Masturbator Market Trends, Female Masturbator Manufacturing https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3799303-global-female-masturbator-market-insights-forecast-to-2025 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3799303-global-female-masturbator-market-insights-forecast-to-2025 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/checkout?currency=one_user-USD&report_id=3799303 Global Female Masturbator Market Insights, Forecast to 2025Wiseguyreports.Com Adds Female Masturbator - Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Manufacturers and Analysis of Top Key Players to 2025 To Its Research DatabaseFeale masturbator is a device designed to imitate the male sex organ. To achieve this, it will generally be made of a soft material, lubricated, and sometimes heated.The global Female Masturbator market is valued at xx million US$ in 2018 and will reach xx million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of xx% during 2019-2025. The objectives of this study are to define, segment, and project the size of the Female Masturbator market based on company, product type, end user and key regions.This report studies the global market size of Female Masturbator in key regions like North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Central & South America and Middle East & Africa, focuses on the consumption of Female Masturbator in these regions.This research report categorizes the global Female Masturbator market by top players/brands, region, type and end user. This report also studies the global Female Masturbator market status, competition landscape, market share, growth rate, future trends, market drivers, opportunities and challenges, sales channels and distributors.The following manufacturers are covered in this report, with sales, revenue, market share for each company:Doc Johnson EnterprisesNPGTOMAXPipedream ProductsCalifornia ExoticsLiaoyang BaileNaloneLover HealthLETENGet Free Sample Report of Female Masturbator Market@Market size by ProductTPR/TPEPVCMarket size by End UserOffline SalesOnline SalesMarket size by RegionNorth AmericaUnited StatesCanadaMexicoAsia-PacificChinaIndiaJapanSouth KoreaAustraliaIndonesiaSingaporeMalaysiaPhilippinesThailandVietnamEuropeGermanyFranceUKItalySpainRussiaCentral & South AmericaBrazilRest of Central & South AmericaMiddle East & AfricaGCC CountriesTurkeyEgyptSouth AfricaThe study objectives of this report are:To study and analyze the global Female Masturbator market size (value & volume) by company, key regions, products and end user, breakdown data from 2014 to 2018, and forecast to 2025.To understand the structure of Female Masturbator market by identifying its various subsegments.To share detailed information about the key factors influencing the growth of the market (growth potential, opportunities, drivers, industry-specific challenges and risks).Focuses on the key global Female Masturbator companies, to define, describe and analyze the sales volume, value, market share, market competition landscape and recent development.To project the value and sales volume of Female Masturbator submarkets, with respect to key regions.To analyze competitive developments such as expansions, agreements, new product launches, and acquisitions in the market.In this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of Female Masturbator are as follows:History Year: 2014-2018Base Year: 2018Estimated Year: 2019Forecast Year 2019 to 2025This report includes the estimation of market size for value (million US$) and volume (K Units). Both top-down and bottom-up approaches have been used to estimate and validate the market size of Female Masturbator market, to estimate the size of various other dependent submarkets in the overall market. Key players in the market have been identified through secondary research, and their market shares have been determined through primary and secondary research. All percentage shares, splits, and breakdowns have been determined using secondary sources and verified primary sources.For the data information by region, company, type and application, 2018 is considered as the base year. Whenever data information was unavailable for the base year, the prior year has been considered.Complete report with Comprehensive table of contents@Major Key Points in Table of Content1 Study Coverage1.1 Female Masturbator Product1.2 Market Segments1.3 Key Manufacturers Covered1.4 Market by Type1.4.1 Global Female Masturbator Market Size Growth Rate by Product1.4.2 TPR/TPE1.4.3 PVC1.5 Market by End User1.5.1 Global Female Masturbator Market Size Growth Rate by End User1.5.2 Offline Sales1.5.3 Online Sales1.6 Study Objectives1.7 Years Considered11 Company Profiles11.1 Doc Johnson Enterprises11.1.1 Doc Johnson Enterprises Company Details11.1.2 Company Business Overview11.1.3 Doc Johnson Enterprises Female Masturbator Sales, Revenue and Gross Margin (2014-2019)11.1.4 Doc Johnson Enterprises Female Masturbator Products Offered11.1.5 Doc Johnson Enterprises Recent Development11.2 NPG11.2.1 NPG Company Details11.2.2 Company Business Overview11.2.3 NPG Female Masturbator Sales, Revenue and Gross Margin (2014-2019)11.2.4 NPG Female Masturbator Products Offered11.2.5 NPG Recent Development11.3 TOMAX11.3.1 TOMAX Company Details11.3.2 Company Business Overview11.3.3 TOMAX Female Masturbator Sales, Revenue and Gross Margin (2014-2019)11.3.4 TOMAX Female Masturbator Products Offered11.3.5 TOMAX Recent Development.12 Future Forecast12.1 Female Masturbator Market Forecast by Regions12.1.1 Global Female Masturbator Sales Forecast by Regions 2019-202512.1.2 Global Female Masturbator Revenue Forecast by Regions 2019-202512.2 Female Masturbator Market Forecast by Product12.2.1 Global Female Masturbator Sales Forecast by Product 2019-202512.2.2 Global Female Masturbator Revenue Forecast by Product 2019-202512.3 Female Masturbator Market Forecast by End User12.4 North America Female Masturbator Forecast12.5 Europe Female Masturbator Forecast12.6 Asia Pacific Female Masturbator Forecast12.7 Central & South America Female Masturbator Forecast12.8 Middle East and Africa Female Masturbator ForecastContinued................Buy Female Masturbator Market Report Now@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 Calcium fortified juice Market- Key Players |Novartis AG, Roche, Glaxosmithkline Plc., Boehringer Ingelheim International GmbH, Genentech, Amgen, Inc., Gilead, and Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=1518 https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=B&rep_id=1518 https://www.factmr.com/report/1518/calcium-fortified-juice-market www.factmr.com/ http://insiderstribune.com/ Calcium fortified juice Market Outlook:Calcium fortified products have added calcium in them. Recent studies show that people live high pressure and busy lives these days, which leaves them with no time to cook. Due to this particular factor, a hike in the demand for enriched and fortified food and beverages in the market is being witnessed, which in turn, is boosting the demand for calcium fortified juices. Consumers obsession with health risks backed by health benefits of calcium fortified juices has been a key reason responsible for the considerable increase in spending on these products.Customers non-tolerance for dairy products is further driving the demand for calcium fortified juices in the market. Customers, these days, are moving towards healthier and wellness related products, which is leading to key market players diversifying into production and introduction of new products, such as calcium fortified juices. Calcium fortified juices have gained popularity in the fortified juice category in recent years owing to the fact that there are very limited food choices that serve as a good source of calcium, which is another major reason responsible for the increase in demand for calcium fortified juices.Request For Sample @Growth of Beverages Industry And Increasing health risks is driving the Calcium fortified Juices Market:In the current market scenario, fortified juices are witnessing strong traction. Since calcium fortified juices are one of few limited sources of calcium, this particular factor is further boosting the demand for calcium fortified juices. The North America market is dominating the calcium fortified juice market and is anticipated to retain its dominance during the forecast period as well. Increasing awareness about the health benefits of calcium fortified juices is expected to be the key driving factor for fuelling the demand for calcium fortified juices in European and Asia-Pacific regions.Furthermore, increased demand for functional beverages in emerging economies, such as China and Japan, is likely to push the growth of the calcium fortified juices market over the assessment period. The rate at which the beverage industry is growing is a clear indication of consumers inclination towards the new trends in the market and calcium fortified juices will witness enormous growth opportunities owing to their versatile nature and health benefits.Global Calcium fortified juice Market: Market Participants:The key market participants identified across the value chain of the global calcium fortified juice market are Welchs, Del Monte, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola Co., Land OLakes, USA, Campbell Soup Company, USA and Citrus World, among others.Request For Brochure @Opportunities for Calcium fortified juice Market participants:Globally, the calcium fortified juice market is likely to witness strong growth owing to the growing consumer inclination towards calcium-fortified juices. For the global calcium-fortified juice market, the leading driver is the increase in demand for healthy foods and beverage products from fitness and diet conscious consumers. Manufacturers of calcium fortified juices are expected to witness lucrative growth opportunities in developed countries due to the growing consumption of fortified juices in these regions.To meet the requirements of customers, the manufacturers of fortified juice products are focusing on the introduction of new flavours of calcium-fortified juices along with innovative packing and new product developments. Increasing health and dietary concerns are leading to rise in demand for calcium fortified juices in the market. Manufacturers of calcium fortified juices are trying their best to capitalize on the opportunities arising owing to the advent of new products in the market. Since the calcium fortified juice market is in its growth phase, numerous other players are anticipated to enter the calcium fortified juice market in near future.Brief Approach to Research for Calcium Fortified Juice Market:The company will follow a modelling-based approach and triangulation methodology to estimate data covered in this report. A detailed market understanding and assessment of the flavours, source, and distribution channel of the product segments covered in the study is followed by carrying out a demand-side approach to estimate the sales of target product segments, which is then cross-referenced with a supply-side assessment of value generated over a pre-defined period. The statistics and data are collected at a regional level and consolidated and synthesized at a global level to estimate overall market sizes.This analytical research study imparts an all-inclusive assessment on the market, while propounding historical intelligence, actionable insights, and industry-validated & statistically-upheld market forecast. Verified and suitable set of assumptions and methodology has been leveraged for developing this comprehensive study. Information and analysis on key market segments incorporated in the report has been delivered in weighted chapters. A thorough analysis has been offered by the report onReport Analysis @Compilation of authentic and first-hand intelligence, insights offered in the report are based on quantitative and qualitative assessment by leading industry experts, and inputs from opinion leaders & industry participants around the value chain. Growth determinants, macroeconomic indicators, and parent market trends have been scrutinized and delivered, coupled with the market attractiveness for each market segment encompassed. Qualitative impact of growth influencers on the market segments across regions has also been mapped by the report.About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; that's why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFactMR11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852United StatesEmail: sales@factmr.comWeb:Read Industrial News : AS Interface Market Latest research With top key players Bihl+Wiedemann, Pepperl+Fuchs, Siemens, ABB, Emerson Electric, IFM Electronic AS Interface Market https://www.upmarketresearch.com/home/requested_sample/80569 https://www.upmarketresearch.com/home/enquiry_before_buying/80569 https://www.upmarketresearch.com/reports/as-interface-market-2019 https://www.upmarketresearch.com/home/request_for_discount/80569 www.upmarketresearch.com The newly released research at Up Market Research titled 2019 - 2025 Global AS Interface Market Report provides data, information, brief analysis, company profiles, statistics for past years and forecasts for next few years. This report presents a comprehensive overview, market shares, and growth opportunities of AS Interface Market by product type, application, key manufacturers and key regions.Request Sample Copy Of this Report @AS Interface Market research report delivers a close watch on leading competitors with strategic analysis, micro and macro market trend and scenarios, pricing analysis and a holistic overview of the market situations in the forecast period.It is a professional and a detailed report focusing on primary and secondary drivers, market share, leading segments and geographical analysis. Further, key players, major collaborations, merger & acquisitions along with trending innovation and business policies are reviewed in the report. The report contains basic, secondary and advanced information pertaining to the AS Interface Market global status and trend, market size, share, growth, trends analysis, segment and forecasts from 2019 2025.The scope of the report extends from market scenarios to comparative pricing between major players, cost and profit of the specified market regions. The numerical data is backed up by statistical tools such as SWOT analysis, BCG matrix, SCOT analysis, PESTLE analysis and so on. The statistics are represented in graphical format for a clear understanding on facts and figures.The generated report is firmly based on primary research, interviews with top executives, news sources and information insiders. Secondary research techniques are implemented for better understanding and clarity for data analysis.The report for AS Interface Market analysis & forecast 2019- 2025 is segmented into Product Segment, Application Segment & Major players.For More Information On This Report, Please Visit @AS Interface Market Segmentation covers:Region- wise Analysis: North America, Europe, China, Japan, India, Southeast Asia, Other regions (Central & South America, Middle East & Africa)Major Players Reported Are:Bihl+WiedemannPepperl+FuchsSiemensABBEmerson ElectricIFM ElectronicValmet CorporationSchneider ElectricPHOENIX CONTACTProduct Segment Analysis:AS-i Master/GatewayAS-i Power SupplyAS-i CableAs-i SlaveApplication Segment Analysis:Material HandlingBuilding AutomationDrive ControlOthersRead More details AS Interface Market Analysis and Forecast 2019- 2025 report helps the clients to take business decisions and to understand strategies of major players in the industry. The report also calls for market- driven results deriving feasibility studies for client needs. UpMarketResearch ensures qualified and verifiable aspects of market data operating in the real- time scenario. The analytical studies are conducted ensuring client needs with a thorough understanding of market capacities in the real- time scenario.Key Reasons to Purchase:- To gain insightful analyses of the market and have a comprehensive understanding of the AS Interface Market and its commercial landscape.- Learn about the market strategies that are being adopted by your competitors and leading organizations.- To understand the future outlook and prospects for AS Interface Market analysis and forecast 2019- 2025.If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Avail Discount On this Report @Customization of the Report:Up Market Research provides free customization of reports as per your need. This report can be personalized to meet your requirements. Get in touch with our sales team, who will guarantee you to get a report that suits your necessities.About UpMarketResearch:The UpMarketResearch () is a leading distributor of market research report with more than 800+ global clients. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well- defined we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Contact Info:Name: Alex MathewsEmail: Alex@upmarketresearch.comOrganization: UpMarketResearchAddress: 500 East E Street, Ontario, CA 91764, United States. Visual Project Management Tools Industry Analysis, Global Market Overview, Top Companies, Growth Factors and Forecast 2019 To 2024 Visual Project Management Tools Industry https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3788496-global-visual-project-management-tools-market-size-status-and-forecast-2019-2025 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/checkout?currency=one_user-USD&report_id=3788496 SummaryWiseGuyReports.com adds Visual Project Management Tools Market 2019 Global Analysis, Growth, Trends and Opportunities Research Report Forecasting to 2024 reports to its database.This report focuses on the global Visual Project Management Tools status, future forecast, growth opportunity, key market and key players. The study objectives are to present the Visual Project Management Tools development in United States, Europe and China.The key players covered in this studyWrikeMonday.comProjectManagerZohoWorkamajig PlatinumAsanaSmartsheetMeisterTaskTaskworldJiraGantterOrnaviMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoCloud-BasedOn-PremiseMarket segment by Application, split intoLarge EnterpriseSMBsMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaCentral & South AmericaThe study objectives of this report are:To analyze global Visual Project Management Tools status, future forecast, growth opportunity, key market and key players.To present the Visual Project Management Tools development in United States, Europe and China.To strategically profile the key players and comprehensively analyze their development plan and strategies.To define, describe and forecast the market by product type, market and key regions.Request Free Sample Report @Major Key Points in Table of Content1 Report Overview1.1 Study Scope1.2 Key Market Segments1.3 Players Covered1.4 Market Analysis by Type1.4.1 Global Visual Project Management Tools Market Size Growth Rate by Type (2014-2025)1.4.2 Cloud-Based1.4.3 On-Premise1.5 Market by Application1.5.1 Global Visual Project Management Tools Market Share by Application (2014-2025)1.5.2 Large Enterprise1.5.3 SMBs1.6 Study Objectives1.7 Years Considered2 Global Growth Trends2.1 Visual Project Management Tools Market Size2.2 Visual Project Management Tools Growth Trends by Regions2.2.1 Visual Project Management Tools Market Size by Regions (2014-2025)2.2.2 Visual Project Management Tools Market Share by Regions (2014-2019)2.3 Industry Trends2.3.1 Market Top Trends2.3.2 Market Drivers2.3.3 Market Opportunities.12 International Players Profiles12.1 Wrike12.1.1 Wrike Company Details12.1.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.1.3 Visual Project Management Tools Introduction12.1.4 Wrike Revenue in Visual Project Management Tools Business (2014-2019)12.1.5 Wrike Recent Development12.2 Monday.com12.2.1 Monday.com Company Details12.2.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.2.3 Visual Project Management Tools Introduction12.2.4 Monday.com Revenue in Visual Project Management Tools Business (2014-2019)12.2.5 Monday.com Recent Development12.3 ProjectManager12.3.1 ProjectManager Company Details12.3.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.3.3 Visual Project Management Tools Introduction12.3.4 ProjectManager Revenue in Visual Project Management Tools Business (2014-2019)12.3.5 ProjectManager Recent Development12.4 Zoho12.4.1 Zoho Company Details12.4.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.4.3 Visual Project Management Tools Introduction12.4.4 Zoho Revenue in Visual Project Management Tools Business (2014-2019)12.4.5 Zoho Recent Development12.5 Workamajig Platinum12.5.1 Workamajig Platinum Company Details12.5.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.5.3 Visual Project Management Tools Introduction12.5.4 Workamajig Platinum Revenue in Visual Project Management Tools Business (2014-2019)12.5.5 Workamajig Platinum Recent Development12.6 Asana12.6.1 Asana Company Details12.6.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.6.3 Visual Project Management Tools Introduction12.6.4 Asana Revenue in Visual Project Management Tools Business (2014-2019)12.6.5 Asana Recent Development12.7 Smartsheet12.7.1 Smartsheet Company Details12.7.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.7.3 Visual Project Management Tools Introduction12.7.4 Smartsheet Revenue in Visual Project Management Tools Business (2014-2019)12.7.5 Smartsheet Recent Development12.8 MeisterTask12.8.1 MeisterTask Company Details12.8.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.8.3 Visual Project Management Tools Introduction12.8.4 MeisterTask Revenue in Visual Project Management Tools Business (2014-2019)12.8.5 MeisterTask Recent Development12.9 Taskworld12.9.1 Taskworld Company Details12.9.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.9.3 Visual Project Management Tools Introduction12.9.4 Taskworld Revenue in Visual Project Management Tools Business (2014-2019)12.9.5 Taskworld Recent Development12.10 Jira12.10.1 Jira Company Details12.10.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.10.3 Visual Project Management Tools Introduction12.10.4 Jira Revenue in Visual Project Management Tools Business (2014-2019)12.10.5 Jira Recent Development12.11 Gantter12.12 OrnaviBuy NOW @Continued....Contact Us: sales@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.Address:Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt LtdPune 411028Maharashtra,+91 841 198 5042 Global TFT LCD Display Modules Market Outlook 2018-2023 Global TFT LCD Display Modules Market https://franknraf.com/reports/global-tft-lcd-display-modules-market-outlook-2018-2023/ https://franknraf.com/sample-report/?rpt_id=6374 https://franknraf.com/reports/photonics-market-size-forecast-report-2015-2024/ This report presents the TFT LCD display market size (value, product, and consumption) worldwide, breaks through producers, regions, types and applications (data position predictions 2013-2018 and up to 2025)This study also analyzes market conditions, market status, markets, growth rates, market future trends, market drivers and opportunities and challenges, risks and access restrictions, sales channels, distributors, and Porter's five-next analysis.TFT LCD is a type of LCD that provides optical properties such as picture contrast. TFT LCDs in the display panel for LCD TVs, desktop PCs and mobile computing devices. The LCD panel contains many components, which include various components like a polarizer, color filter and LCD glass substrate. The LCD glass substrates used in display devices are very thin (0.3-0.7 mm). The LCD thickness of glass substrates focuses on the seller to make slimmer and lightweight devices. Previously, the production of thin LCD glass was expensive.However, currently, thin TFT LCDs are easily available in the market, which enables the production of thin LCD glass substrates. Corning presented its EAGLE XG glass substrate, which includes heavy metals like barium, arsenic, Halloween compounds and antimony which makes it eco-friendly and economical. Reducing thickness reduces LCD module by up to 10%. LCDs have gained market popularity since it is more expensive than conventional CRT displays. Features such as their light weight, low panels, mounting capabilities and low power consumption make them more user-friendly than conventional display systems. On the arrival of the flat panel, many new devices like LCD TVs, LED Backlit LCD TVs and OLD TV TVs have been introduced. LCD display from these display devices is the highest penetration rate, which is expected to increase market growth.The TFT LCD display market was priced at XX million US dollars in 2017 and is estimated to reach XX million US dollars by 2025, during the period XX CAGR. In this study, 2017 has been considered as the base year and 2018 - 2025 as the forecast period to approximate the market size for TFT LCD Display.The following manufacturers are covered in this report: AU Optronics Innolux LG Display Samsung DisplayTFT LCD Display Breakdown Data by Type Twisted Nematic (TN) In-Plane Switching (IPS) Advanced Fringe Field Switching (AFFS) Multi-Domain Vertical Alignment (MVA) Patterned Vertical Alignment (PVA) Advanced Super View (ASV) Plane Line Switching (PLS) OthersTFT LCD Display Breakdown Data by Application Consumer Electronics Automotive Aerospace & Defense Medical OthersTFT LCD Display Production by Region United States Europe China Japan South Korea OtherTFT LCD Display Consumption by RegionNorth America United States Canada MexicoAsia-Pacific China India Japan South Korea Australia Indonesia Malaysia Philippines Thailand Vietnam Europe Germany France UK Italy Russia Rest of EuropeCentral & South America Brazil Rest of South AmericaMiddle East & Africa GCC Countries Turkey Egypt South Africa Rest of Middle East & AfricaThe study objectives are: Global TFT LCD display status and analysis and analysis of future forecasts? Investments, production, earnings, usage, historical and forecasts. To present the key TFT LCD Display manufacturers, production, revenue, market share, and recent development. To divide into the breakdown information by regions, type, manufacturers and applications. To analyze the worldwide and key regions market potential and advantage, opportunity and challenge, restraints and risks. To identify important influences, drivers, impact factors in global and regions. To analyzing competitive developments like market expansion, agreement, new product launches and acquisitions.In this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of TFT LCD Display: History Year: 2013 - 2017 Base Year: 2017 Estimated Year: 2018 Forecast Year: 2018 - 2025This report includes the approximation of market size for value (million USD) and volume (K Units). Top-down and bottom-up approaches have been used to approximate and validate the market size of TFT LCD Display market, to approximate the size of various other dependent submarkets in the overall market. Major market players have been identified by secondary research and their market share has been determined primarily by primary and secondary research. Sharing all percentages has been broken by using secondary sources and verified primary sources.Enquire about Report atTable of Content Study Coverage Executive Summary Market Size by Manufacturers TFT LCD Display Production by Regions TFT LCD Display Consumption by Regions Market Size by Type Market Size by Application Manufacturers Profiles Production Forecasts Consumption Forecast Value Chain and Sales Channels Analysis Market Opportunities and Challenges, Risks and Analysis of Results Elements Key Findings in the Global TFT LCD Display Study AppendixGet a Sample copy of this Report atRelated Report:Photonics Market Size & Forecast Report, 2015 2024The global photonics market was valued at over USD 600 billion in 2015 and Expect to reach $ 9.99 billion by 2024. Recently, photonics technology has undergone radical changes based on this research.For More Detail -About Us:Frank n Raf is one of the eminent companies in Market Research and Consulting Services headquartered in Pane, India and soon will be in The United States. In terms of market research and consulting services, we give our customers more choices. We provide deep and transparent industry insights, syndicated search reports, customized search reports, and excellence in the services we consult.Contact Us:Frank n Raf Market Research LLP401 A Wing, Amar Synergy,Sadhu Vaswani Chowk, Pune Station,Pune 411014Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 347-321-6773E-mail: info@franknraf.com Mobile Mapping Market Technological Advancement, Competitive Strategies And Forecast 2026 | Growth By Top Key Players - Google Inc., Foursquare Labs, Inc., Tomtom NV, Mapquest, Inc., Trimble Navigation Ltd., Apple Inc. and other. Mobile Mapping Market https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/mobile-mapping-market/request-for-free-sample https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/mobile-mapping-market https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/mobile-mapping-market/inquire-before-buying www.polarismarketresearch.com The global mobile mapping market generated USD 13.5 billion in 2017 according to a new report by Polaris Market Research. The report Mobile Mapping Market [By Type (Location Based Services, 3D Mapping, Location Based Search, Indoor Mapping, Licensing, Others) By Component (Hardware, Software, Services) By Application (GIS Data Collection, Asset management, Land Survey, Imaging Services, Emergency Response Planning, Others) By End-User (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance, Transportation and Logistics, Telecommunication, Agriculture, Mining, Defense, Public Sector, Others) By Region]: Market Size & Forecast, 2018 2026 indicates that the global mobile mapping market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 17.2% during the forecast period.Mobile Mapping is the process of collecting geospatial data from a mobile vehicle such as car, quad, boat, or train among others. Mobile vehicles are typically fitted with a range of 360 and HR video, photos and other remote sensing systems, which generate output in the form of GIS data, digital maps and georeferenced images and video. Some applications of mobile mapping include roads, grade separations and design, infrastructure and maintenance, construction and mining, power line mapping, railways and utilities among others.Request for sample report of mobile mapping market:The Leading Companies Profiled in The Mobile Mapping Market Report:1. Microsoft Corporation2. Foursquare Labs, Inc.3. Tomtom NV4. Mapquest, Inc.5. Trimble Navigation Ltd.6. Apple Inc.7. Google Inc.8. Leica Geosystems Inc.9. Garmin International10. EveryScape, Inc.The demand for mobile mapping has increased over the years owing to rising applications, and, increasing demand of location-based services. The penetration of mobile devices has increased across the globe, supporting the growth of the mobile mapping industry. Increasing demand from telecommunication and transportation sectors, improved network connectivity, and growing applications in city planning and development of smart cities are expected to accelerate the adoption of mobile mapping solutions. Technological advancements, growing demand from defense and automotive sectors, and increasing use in emerging economies further support the growth of the global mobile mapping industry.The report provides an extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis of the market trends and growth prospects of the Global Mobile Mapping Market, 2018-2026. This report comprises a detailed geographic distribution of the market across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and MEA. North America is further segmented into U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Europe is divided into Germany, UK, Italy, France, and Rest of Europe. Asia-Pacific is bifurcated into China, India, Japan, and Rest of Asia-Pacific.North America generated the highest revenue in the global mobile mapping industry in 2018 owing to increasing applications, and growing demand from the commercial sector. Market players are significantly investing in technological innovation in terms of miniaturization & improvement of components along with advancements in mapping software and mapping analytics. Increasing investments by vendors in technological advancements coupled with partnerships and expansion strategies would support the mobile mapping market growth in the coming years.Browse report summary of mobile mapping market report:Competitive Landscape and Key VendorsThe global Mobile Mapping market is characterized by the presence of well-diversified international and small and medium-sized vendors. These companies are consistently launching new products to enhance their offerings in the mobile mapping industry. With the advancement of technologies, companies are innovating and introducing new customized products to cater the growing needs of the customers. Leading companies are also acquiring other companies, and enhancing their product offerings to improve their market reach. Acquisitions enable key players to increase their market potential in terms of geographic expansion and expansion of customer base.Key SegmentsType Location Based Services 3D Mapping Location Based Search Indoor Mapping Licensing OthersComponent Hardware Software ServicesApplication GIS Data Collection Asset management Land Survey Imaging Services Emergency Response Planning OthersEnd-User Banking, Financial Services and Insurance Transportation and Logistics Telecommunication Agriculture Mining Defense Public Sector OthersMake an inquiry of mobile mapping market report:Region North Americao U.S.o Canadao Mexico Europeo Germanyo UKo Franceo Italyo Rest of Europe Asia-Pacifico Chinao Indiao Japano Rest of Asia-Pacific Latin Americao Brazilo Rest of Latin America Middle East and AfricaAbout Polaris Market ResearchPolaris Market Research is a global market research and consulting company. The company specializes in providing exceptional market intelligence and in-depth business research services for our clientele spread across different enterprises. We at Polaris are obliged to serve our diverse customer base present across the industries of healthcare, technology, semi-conductors and chemicals among various other industries present around the world. We strive to provide our customers with updated information on innovative technologies, high growth markets, emerging business environments and latest business-centric applications, thereby helping them always to make informed decisions and leverage new opportunities. Adept with a highly competent, experienced and extremely qualified team of experts comprising SMEs, analysts and consultants, we at Polaris endeavor to deliver value-added business solutions to our customers.Contact usMr. RohitCorporate Sales, USAPolaris Market ResearchPhone: 1-646-568-9980Email: sales@polarismarketresearch.comWeb: Investment Consulting Market 2019-2025 | Bain & Company, Mercer, Aon Hewitt Investment, Callan Associates, Cambridge Associates Investment Consulting market https://www.theresearchinsights.com/request_sample.php?id=8195 https://www.theresearchinsights.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=8195 https://www.theresearchinsights.com/enquiry_before_buying.php?id=8195 https://www.theresearchinsights.com Report titled Global Investment Consulting Market 2025 has been shaped by The Research Insights. Report defines what technology would suit the best, business strategies that work for the influencers and the tradeoff patterns that will ultimately bring in profit into their scope of investments. The important factors that have displayed some influential effects over the changing dynamics have been well-scrutinized and determined so as to make it persuasive for its players to recognize what the market holds in for them.Investment Consulting provide self-governing advice, customized solutions irrespective of size or market segment, and a full collection of balancing consulting amenities. It deals expert and advanced consulting services as well as measurable and qualitative examines for institutional and reserved stakeholders. The consultant's role is to advise the plan sponsor on virtually all features of the investment management process.An investment consultant offers financiers with investment products, guidance or scheduling. Assist to organizational investors on significant and summit their investment ideas and focus on the key resolutions and risks which define outcomes and take a real-world approach to directing the network of difficulty and product select.Request a Sample Copy of this Report @:Top Key Players:Bain & Company, Mercer, Aon Hewitt Investment, Callan Associates, Cambridge Associates, Russell Investments, and othersThe major approaches adopted by the reputable players for a better penetration in the global Investment Consulting market also form a key section of this study. These strategies can be engaged by the future vendors for an improved penetration in the market. The global market on Incinerator has also been studied in terms of revenue. The Investment Consulting market dynamics such as market drivers, challenges, opportunities, and trends have been offered coupled with their respective impact analysis.By region, the global Investment Consulting market is alienated into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East & Africa, and Latin America. Key companies are focusing on increasing their products and services across various regions.Ask for Upto 40% Discount:The exploration also includes the examination of the data collected through a variability of primary and secondary research. The numerical data has been a source of an evenhanded comprehension of the state of drivers, threats, major opportunities, and the prime principles, rules, plans, and strategies affecting the Investment Consulting market.Strategic Questions answered in Investment Consulting Market report:- What are the global growth opportunities?- What is the current size as well as the potential size of the global Investment Consulting market?- What are the major global competitors?- Who are the top key players of the global Investment Consulting market?- What are the technological advancements in last few years?Global Investment Consulting market analysis according to the following parameters: Base Year: 2018 Historical year: 2014-2018 Forecast Year: 2019-2025To Get More Information, Enquiry @:About usThe Research Insights A global leader in analytics, research and advisory that can assist you to renovate your business and modify your approach. With us, you will learn to take decisions intrepidly. We make sense of drawbacks, opportunities, circumstances, estimations and information using our experienced skills and verified methodologies. Our research reports will give you an exceptional experience of innovative solutions and outcomes. We have effectively steered businesses all over the world with our market research reports and are outstandingly positioned to lead digital transformations. Thus, we craft greater value for clients by presenting advanced opportunities in the global market.Contact usRobinSales managerContact number: +91-996-067-0000sales@theresearchinsights.com Car Rental Services Market Overview: Type and Applications, Trends, Industry Analysis & Forecast, 2018-2028 Car Rental Services Market https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-5086 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ask-the-analyst/rep-gb-5086 Future Market Insights (FMI) presents a revised forecast of the global car rental market for the period 2017-2027 in its published report titled Car Rental Services Market: Global Industry Analysis (2012 2016) and Opportunity Assessment (20172027). In terms of revenue, the global car rental market is estimated to expand at a CAGR of 6.6% over the forecast period, owing to numerous factors, about which FMI offers thorough insights and forecasts in this informative report. The market is segmented on the basis of end use, customer type, sector, booking type and car type.Increased Global Affluence to Make Leisure Travellers Demand Car Rental ServicesBy customer type, the global car rental market is segmented into business and leisure customers. The leisure segment is expected to dominate over the forecast period due to expansion of global tourism market, increasing disposable income, and improved infrastructure for rental service. The leisure segment is anticipated to record a high CAGR growth rate of 7.8% over the forecast period with the total market valued at US$ 51,734.7 in 2017. On the other hand, the business segment has low growth rate of 4.3% CAGR with market valued at US$ 52,365.3 in 2017.Get Sample Copy of Report @Online Booking Unlikely to Outpace Offline Booking in the Car Rental MarketBy booking type, the market is segmented into offline access, mobile application, and other internet access. Offline booking is projected to be the higher revenue generator compared to online bookings and mobile apps. The offline booking segments is estimated to account for approximately 68% of the car rental market i.e. a value of US $ 44,871.6 Mn in 2016. Online bookings for car rentals have increased globally with the development of mobile applications and IT infrastructure advancements making it easy to book car rental services online or via mobile apps. Therefore, the car rental market is thriving. An updated report of the International Telecommunication Union, 2015 WSIS Forum states that Internet users have increased rapidly worldwide on account of continuous developments in Information & Communication Technologies. This is estimated to further increase the demand for car rental services. The proportion of households with the internet access at home increased from 18% in 2005 to 46% in 2015; whereas in 2000 the penetration rate was 6.3%.On-Airport End Use has Maximum Potential in the Car Rental MarketOn the basis of end use, global Car Rental Services is segmented into Intercity, Intracity, On-Airport, and others. On Airport segment has highest growth rate of 7.3% CAGR followed by intercity with a CAGR of 5.3% in the forecast period. Air travel has skyrocketed mainly because of the plummeting prices of airline tickets, leading to a substantial increase in air travelers across the globe. The increasing air trips for business and leisure purpose is fuelling the growth of car rentals to airports.Booming Economic Growth makes APEJ Car Rental Market Critical in the Long TermThe North America market has been estimated to dominate the Global car rental market, accounting for maximum revenue share of 45.9% by 2027 end. In terms of value, North America and Western Europe collectively accounted for more than 57% share in the global market in 2027. Although APEJ has a relatively lower market share of 17.5%, all the stars are in its favor making it likely to witness high growth rate in the medium term. Latin America, Japan and Middle East are also anticipated to show substantial amount of growth over the forecast period.If You Have Any Query, Ask The Analyst @Competition Dashboard in the Global Car Rental MarketSome of the key players in the global car rental market include Enterprise Holdings Inc., The Hertz Corporation, Avis Budget Group Inc., Europcar S.A., Carzonrent India Pvt Ltd., Sixt Rent a Car, Al-Futtaim, Localiza Rent a Car S / A, Eco Rent a Car, and GlobalCARS.For more insights on the car rental market, get in touch with our analysts at press@futuremarketinsights.comABOUT 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: +1-845-579-5705 Healthcare Predictive Analytics Market Outlook to 2024 by Leading Companies - IBM, Verisk Analytics Inc, McKesson Corporation, SAS, Oracle, Cerner Corporation, MEDai, MedeAnalytics Inc, Allscripts, Optum Health Inc ReportsWeb https://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00012530432/sample https://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00012530432/discount https://www.reportsweb.com/buy&RW00012530432/buy/4500 Reducing unnecessary costs to curtail healthcare expenditure, increasing efficiency in the healthcare sector, and increasing use of personalized and evidence-based medicine drive the growth of the market. However, lack of robust infrastructure for effective functionality and dearth of skilled IT professionals in healthcare hamper the market growth. On the other hand, rise in importance of healthcare in the emerging economies is expected to create new opportunities for the market players.This report focuses on the Healthcare Predictive Analytics 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.Top Companies Covered in this Report:IBM, Verisk Analytics Inc, McKesson Corporation, SAS, Oracle, Cerner Corporation, MEDai, MedeAnalytics Inc, Allscripts, Optum Health IncGet sample copy of Healthcare Predictive Analytics Market at:Healthcare Predictive Analytics Market Segment by Type, coversDiet HabitsPhysiological ParametersVital SignsHealthcare Predictive Analytics Market Segment by Applications, can be divided intoHealthcare PayersHealthcare ProvidersThe study objectives are:To analyze and research the global Health Self-monitoring status and future forecast,involving, production, revenue, consumption, historical and forecast.To present the key Health Self-monitoring manufacturers, production, revenue, market share, and recent development.To split the breakdown data by regions, type, manufacturers and applications.To analyze the global and key regions market potential and advantage, opportunity and challenge, restraints and risks.To identify significant trends, drivers, influence factors in global and regions.To analyze competitive developments such as expansions, agreements, new product launches, and acquisitions in the market.Have any query? Enquire about report at:Fundamentals of Table of Content:1 Report Overview1.1 Study Scope1.2 Key Market Segments1.3 Players Covered1.4 Market Analysis by Type1.5 Market by Application1.6 Study Objectives1.7 Years Considered2 Global Growth Trends2.1 Healthcare Predictive Analytics Market Size2.2 Healthcare Predictive Analytics Growth Trends by Regions2.3 Industry Trends3 Market Share by Key Players3.1 Healthcare Predictive Analytics Market Size by Manufacturers3.2 Healthcare Predictive Analytics Key Players Head office and Area Served3.3 Key Players Healthcare Predictive Analytics Product/Solution/Service3.4 Date of Enter into Healthcare Predictive Analytics Market3.5 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion Plans4 Breakdown Data by Product4.1 Global Healthcare Predictive Analytics Sales by Product4.2 Global Healthcare Predictive Analytics Revenue by Product4.3 Healthcare Predictive Analytics Price by Product5 Breakdown Data by End User5.1 Overview5.2 Global Healthcare Predictive Analytics Breakdown Data by End UserGet Complete Report at: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 Global In Vitro Fertilization Market Business Development Hacking Strategies - Key manufacturers are Groupe Clinique Ambroise Pare, amedes MVZ Cologne GmbH, AMP Center St Roch, AVA International Clinic Scanfert Global In Vitro Fertilization Market Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025 https://databridgemarketresearch.com/request-a-sample/?dbmr=global-in-vitro-fertilization-market https://databridgemarketresearch.com/inquire-before-buying/?dbmr=global-in-vitro-fertilization-market The In Vitro Fertilization market report provides an in-depth overview of Product Specification, technology, product type and production analysis considering major factors such as Revenue, Cost, Gross and Gross Margin. The In Vitro Fertilization market report provides with CAGR value fluctuation during the forecast period of 2018-2025 for the market. This study also analyzes the market status, market share, growth rate, future trends, market drivers, opportunities and challenges, risks and entry barriers, sales channels, distributors and Porter's Five Forces Analysis. The data and the information regarding the In Vitro Fertilization industry are taken from reliable sources such as websites, annual reports of the companies, journals, and others and were checked and validated by the market experts.The Global In Vitro Fertilization Market is expected to reach USD 847.8 billion by 2025, from USD 465.2 billion in 2017 growing at a CAGR of 10.0 % during the forecast period of 2018 to 2025. The upcoming market report contains data for the historic year 2016, the base year of calculation is 2017 and the forecast period is 2018 to 2025.Download Free PDF Sample Copy of Report@Global In Vitro Fertilization Market, By Product (Reagents, Equipment),Type of Cycle (Fresh Non-Donor IVF Cycles,Frozen Non-Donor IVF Cycles, Frozen Donor IVF Cycles, Fresh Donor IVF Cycles), End User (Hospitals & Research Laboratories, Cryobanks ),Geography (North America, South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa) Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025Major Market Competitors/Players: Global In Vitro Fertilization MarketSome of the major players operating in global in- vitro fertilization market are Groupe Clinique Ambroise Pare, amedesMVZ Cologne GmbH, AMP Center St Roch, AVA International Clinic Scanfert, Bangkok IVF center, Betamedics, Biofertility Center, Bloom Healthcare, Bourn Hall Fertility Center, , Cardone & Associates Reproductive Medicine & Infertility, The Center for Advanced Reproductive Services, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Cloudnine Fertility, Conceptions Reproductive Associates of Colorado, Cyprus IVF Centre, Dansk Fertilitetsklinik, EUVITRO S.L.U., , Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP, Fertility First, IVF Centers Prof. Zech, Flinders Reproductive Medicine Pty Ltd, Genea Oxford Fertility Limited, IVF Spain, IVI Panama, KL Fertility & Gynaecology Centre, Lifesure Fertility and Gynaecology centre, Manipal Fertility, , Medfem Fertility Clinic, Monash IVF, OVA IVF Clinic Zurich, Procrea, RAPRUI S.r.l., SAFE FERTILITY CENTER, SANNO HOSPITAL, SIRM Fertility Clinics, Stork IVF Klinik, ARC-STER S.r.l., The Montreal Fertility Center, Thomson Medical Centre, TRIO Fertility, Virtus Health, VivaNeo, Die Kinderwunsch and among others.Competitive Analysis:The global In- Vitro Fertilization market is highly fragmented and the major players have used various strategies such as new product launches, expansions, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, acquisitions, and others to increase their footprints in this market. The report includes market shares of In- Vitro Fertilization market for global, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and South America.According to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in 2016, approximately 263,577 ART (Assisted ReproductiveTechnology) cycle was performed in US. As per the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority in 2016, more than 68,000 IVF treatments were provided in U.K. In 2016 Birth rate from IVF has been increased to 85.0% in U.K. In 2016 around 20000 childrens were born by IVF. As per the published news IVF Success Rates For Fertility Clinics in the United States in 2016 and around 263,577 ART cycle was performed in U.S. Due to the increasing rate of infertility amongst the population, patients are opting the IVF Fertilization which is fuelling the growth of market.To Avail 10% Discount On This Report Mail Us on: - sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.comMajor Market Drivers and Restraints: Rising rate of infertility Increasing in delayed pregnancies and rising awareness on personalized medicine. Surge in IVF success rate Unfavourable Reimbursement Scenario. Rise in disposable income worldwide. High cost of treatment which is restraining this market. Less awareness level for IVF in developing countries which is another restrain of this market.Market Segmentation:The global In vitro fertilization market is segmented based on product, type of cycle, end user and geographical segments.Based on product, the market is segmented into reagents, equipment.Based on reagents, the market is further segmented into embryo culture media, cryopreservation media, spermprocessing media, OVUM processing media.Based on equipment, the market is further segmented into imaging systems, sperm separation systems, cabinets, OVUMaspiration pumps, incubators, micromanipulator systems, gas analysers, laser systems, accessories, cryo systems, anti-vibration tables, witness systems.Based on type of cycle, the market is segmented into fresh non-donor IVF cycles, frozen non-donor IVF cycles, frozen donor IVF cycles, fresh donor IVF cycles.Based on end user, the market is segmented into fertility clinics & surgical centers, hospitals & research laboratories, cryobanks.Based on geography, the market report covers data points for 28 countries across multiple geographies namely North America & South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and, Middle East & Africa.Key Developments in the Market: In July 2018, Merck launched new products QBOX IVF. This product useful in data transfer between lab instrument and electronic medical record provider. It is provide support healthcare professionals in fertility. In February 2016, Adelaide biotech company, a reproductive health science company expanded IVF expertise into other DNA testing area by the launch of new product. This screening kits count the number of chromosomes in embryo to transfer in an IVFcycle.Inquire Regarding This Report @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:Data Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.com South African Open hosted by the City of Johannesburg Randpark GC, Johannesburg, South Africa Global Hologram Market 2019 Feature Growth - Lyncee Tec, zSpace, Inc, HoloTech Switzerland AG, Vision Optics GmbH, Eon Reality, Inc https://www.fiormarkets.com/report-detail/365539/request-sample https://www.fiormarkets.com/report/global-hologram-market-2019-by-manufacturers-regions-type-365539.html www.fiormarkets.com Fior Markets latest presentation named Global Hologram Market 2019 by Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application, Forecast to 2024 centers around the progress of this market, focusing on its development status and trends. The report concentrates on the business strategies of the key vendors, market fundamental dynamics including compound annual growth rate, drivers and trends dynamics during the forecast period (2019-2024). An in-depth analysis of Hologram enfolds market drivers, challenges, standardization, opportunities, limitations, ecosystem player profiles, and strategies.For the competitive landscape of the worldwide market, this report evaluates various industry participants, production capacity, production chain, SWOT analysis, and the revenue generated by each manufacturer in the global Hologram market. The methodical outlook of this report has covered key aspects such as market growth, market demands, business strategies, consumption volume, and industry cost structure during the forecast period 2019-2024. The report gives a study of the historical growth of the most dominant region to help the reader plan powerful long-term investment judgments.DOWNLOAD FREE SAMPLE REPORT:Global Hologram market rivalry by leading manufacturers, together using production, cost, earnings (value) and market share for every producer; the best players as Lyncee Tec, zSpace, Inc, HoloTech Switzerland AG, Vision Optics GmbH, Eon Reality, Inc, Holoxica Limited, 4Deep inwater imaging, Geola, Leia, Inc, Ovizio Imaging Systems NV/SA, RealView Imaging, Phase Holographic Imaging, Mach7 Technologies, Fraunhofer IPM, Nanolive SA, FoVI 3D, Jasper Display Corporation, Kino-mo,Geographical segmentation of market: North America (United States, Canada and Mexico), Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia), South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia etc.), Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Further, the researchers have done the industry analysis to see the impact of numerous factors and understand the whole attractiveness of the industry. The market review helps to summaries the industrial and financial development within the industry through expert analysis. Later on, the report analyzes gross sales (volume & value), market share, market growth rate, market size on the basis of a variety of applications.Breakdown data by product type with consumption (sales), market share and growth rate for each application, covering:Breakdown data by application with consumption (sales), market share and growth rate for each application, covering: Entertainment, Healthcare, Automotive, Retail Sector, OthersThe report will also help organizations acquire new customers, discover high-value customers, and lessen the gap between churning and maintaining new clients. The market is assessed on the basis of revenue and volume as well as it includes the average revenue generated per user from the market. It serves all data with easily digestible information to help every businessmans future innovation and move the business forward.ACCESS FULL REPORT:Key Questions Covered And Answered By The Report Include:Which end-user businesses will give continuous profitable results in the Hologram market?Which are the fast developing regions in the market?Which tendencies and factors will impact industry economy development?Which are many product inventions helping manufacturers in promote to catch market share?What plans are organizations functioning in the global market holding to get a competitive advantage over their competitors?Customization of the Report:This report can be customized to meet the clients requirements. Please connect with our sales team (sales@fiormarkets.com), who will ensure that you get a report that suits your needs.ABOUT USFior Markets is a futuristic market intelligence company, helping customers flourish their business strategies and make better decisions using actionable intelligence. With transparent information pool, we meet clients objectives, commitments on high standard and targeting possible prospects for SWOT analysis and market research reports.We sell market research reports obtained from major publishers from various industries, in which a comprehensive overview of the market is provided along with statistical forecasts, strategic recommendations, detailed segmentation, current market scenario, competitive landscape and key trends.Contact UsMark StoneSales ManagerOffice-102, Sanskriti AspirationsBaner Road, Pune,MH 411045IndiaPhone: (201) 465-4211Email: sales@fiormarkets.comWeb: Lingerie Market Growth by Top Key Players - LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, L Brands, Inc., Hanesbrands Inc., Jockey International Inc., Nike Inc., Phillips-Van Heusen Corporation, Groupe Chantelle Lingerie https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-pdf/1460 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-customization/1460 Lingerie is the inner clothing worn by women comprising one of the most basic needs and providing comfort as well as fashion. The common materials used to manufacture lingerie include cotton, silk, lace, polyester, and nylon among others. Women are increasingly being inclined toward wearing lingerie with precise look and measurements. Therefore, companies are focusing on launching comfortable and aesthetic products. For instance, in 2017, Nike Inc., launched a hyper-adaptive bra to support an athletes needs called the Nike Motion Adapt bra, this bra provides enhanced support and comfort.Download PDF Brochure :The growth of this market is attributed to the growing e-commerce sector, which includes shopping websites. This in turn, is influencing major players to focus on enhancing their business via online stores and sites. For instance, in 2017, Phillips-Van Heusen Corporation, entered into an agreement to acquire True&Co., an online lingerie retailer. The online retailer uses a fit quiz to recommend bras and other intimates that will best fit the responding consumer.Global Lingerie Market Outlook:North America exhibited prominent growth in the global lingerie market in 2016. The growth is attributed to the presence of major players in the region and increasing number of initiatives to enhance sales. For instance, in 2018, Hanesbrands Inc., an apparel retailer company, acquired Bras N Things, Australia-based lingerie brand for around US$ 400 million. Bras N Things Pty. Ltd. has over 172 retail stores across New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. Moreover, in 2018, Victorias Secret launched a new line of lingerie in Miami, to expand its brands product portfolio. Similarly, in 2017, the brand began the production of a new line of underwear designed for women.Europe accounted for a largest share in the global lingerie market in 2016, owing to the increasing number of initiatives by major players to meet the growing demand for lingerie by consumers. For instance, in 2018, European Lingerie Group acquired Avangard, a Russian distributor of medical textiles and lingerie materials. Through the acquisition, the company aims to enhance the sales of fabrics to their lingerie customers in Russia.Asia Pacific is expected to hold the fastest-growing market for lingerie over the forecast period. This is owing to the increasing purchasing power and rising influence of the western culture are the major factors driving growth of the lingerie market in this region. Major players are focusing on expanding their business in this region to obtain higher revenue and strengthen their market presence. For instance, La Senza Corporation, a Canada-based fashion retailer and subsidiary of L Brands Inc., launched its e-store in 2011, to increase their presence mainly in the Australia. Moreover, in 2017, MAS Holdings which, sells products under Amante label, planned to acquire lingerie brands in India and also planned to hold 100 stores in following 3 to 5 years.Key Players:Major players operating in the global lingerie market include LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, L Brands, Inc., Hanesbrands Inc., Jockey International Inc., Nike Inc., Phillips-Van Heusen Corporation, Groupe Chantelle, MAS Holdings Limited, GGI Holdings Ltd., and Marks and Spencer Plc.Request For Customization of Research Report :Global Lingerie Market Taxonomy:Global Lingerie market is segmented into:By Product Type:BrasKnickers & PantiesLounge WearShape WearOthersBy Distribution Channel:Online StoresHypermarketSupermarketSpecialty StoresOthersAbout Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.com Human Chorionic Gonadotropin Market By Worldwide Analysis, Estimation, Key Growths 2018 To 2026 | Merck & Co., EMD Sereno, Fresenius Kabi, Bristol Myers Squibb Company Human Chorionic Gonadotropin www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-pdf/1011 www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-sample/1011 Human chorionic gonadotropin hormone (HCG) is a hormone secreted by the placenta after implantation of a fertilized zygote in the uterus. The hormone also supports normal development of an egg and helps in the stimulation of egg release from the ovary. The HCG is mainly used to induce ovulation in the women under infertility treatment. It is also used among males mostly to increase the sperm count and in young boys, due to pituitary gland disorders and other diseases, due to which the testicles of the young males does not drop down naturally into the scrotum. The HCG is usually administered as an injection under the skin into a muscle. The HCG can also be administered at home under the advice of a gynecologist or a pharmacist. The HCG levels can be determined with the help of urine or blood test. Result of specific test helps in the determining accurate measurement of the levels. These tests are mostly used to identify and confirm pregnancy or as a screening test to determine birth defects.Download The Pdf Brochure:Rising incidence of infertility are expected to drive the growth of human gonadotropin market across the globeAccording to Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2016, approximately 7.3 million women aged 15 - 44 have used infertility services. Moreover, 6.7% of the married women aged 15 - 44 were reported infertile. According to Azura Vascular Care, around 17% of the couples in the U.S. deal with infertility out of which 30% cases are a result of male infertility. These numbers suggests significant demand for infertility treatments, such as HCG in order for females to conceive a child. According to a statistical survey conducted by HealthGrove, pituitary gland disorders resulted into the death of around 205 people in 2015, out of which highest percentage belonged to white men.The global human chorionic gonadotropin by Coherent Market Insights is segmented on the basis of Technology, Therapeutic area, and end user.On the basis of technology, the global human chorionic gonadotropin is segmented as:Natural Source Extraction, Recombinant DNA TechnologyOn the basis of therapeutic area, the global human chorionic gonadotropin market is segmented as:Female infertility treatment, Oligospermic Treatment, Cryptorchidism Treatment, OthersNorth America to dominate global human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) market, owing to rising frequency of infertility casesOn the basis of geography, the global human chorionic gonadotropin market is segmented into North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa. North America is the highest regional contributor to the market and is expected to continue as a regional dominator over the forecast years. This primarily owes to the rising number of infertility cases as well as hormonal dysfunction among young males and females as a result of changing lifestyle. According to Mayo Clinic, around 25% of women fertility problems in the U.S. are a result of ovulation issues that are mostly caused due to dysfunction of human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) hormone.Request For A Sample Copy Of This Research Report:About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Mr.ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email:sales@coherentmarketinsights.com Antibody Drug Conjugate Market by 2023 Outlook With Top Key Players Analysis (Seattle Genetics/Takeda, Roche, ImmunoGen, Pfizer, Celldex Therapeutics, Bayer, Heidelberg Pharma) Antibody Drug Conjugate Market https://www.businessindustryreports.com/sample-request/94151 https://www.businessindustryreports.com/buy-now/94151/single https://www.businessindustryreports.com/check-discount/94151 Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Market Report 2019 report provides the newest industry data and industry future trends, allowing you to identify the products and end users driving Revenue growth and profitability. The industry report lists the leading competitors and provides the insights strategic industry Analysis of the key factors influencing the market.Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Market Overview:This report studies the Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Market over the forecast period of 2019 to 2023. The Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Market is growing continuously and expected to grow healthy CAGR by Forecast year 2023.According to the market report analysis, Antibody Drug Conjugates comprise three parts, mainly a specific antibody for binding, a cytotoxic agent designed to kill target cancer cells, and a chemical linker for attaching the cytotoxic agent to the antibody. These drug conjugates are regarded to be the new age of therapeutic agents. The combine effect of targeting specific types of cells and the killing ability of cytotoxic drugs make this drug conjugate the ideal one for treatment of various cancers. The success of this technology has become possible only with increasing technological advancements.Available Exclusive Sample Copy of this Report @One of the major factor drives the growth of the Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Market is advancement in the medical technology. Moreover, the increasing cases of cancer, risein obese population, and growing ageing population are some of the key driving factors for the market. Further over, preclinical research, the rising research activities on antibody therapies, more research on advanced drug discoveries, rising research on oncology diseases, the growing collaboration between research institutes, and biopharmaceuticals and biotechnology companies are acting as a fuel to the market and are expected to drive the Antibody Drug Conjugate Market within the forecast period.The Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Market is segmented based on Type, Product, Technology, Application, End-User and Region. On the basis of Type, the market is sub-segmented into monoclonal antibodies, linker, drug/toxin and others. Based on Application, the market is classified into leukemia, prostate cancer, kidney cancer, pancreas cancer, ovary cancer, glioblastoma, lung cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, skin cancer, solid tumors, multiple myeloma, lymphoma, and other cancers. On the basis of Product, the market is sub-segmented into Adcertis, Kadcyla, and others. By Technology, the market is classified into ImmunoGen technology, Seattle Genetics technology, Immunomedics technology and others.As per the regional analysis, Americas dominated the Antibody Drug Conjugate Market owing to the technological innovation, advancement in manufacturing processes, contribution of nanotechnology for developing Antibody Drug Conjugates (ADC). There are only three antibody drug conjugates that have received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The U.S. is the largest market among other countries such as Mexico, Canada, and others. The European Antibody Drug Conjugate Market is the second largest market followed by the APAC regions. APAC is the emerging market in the Antibody Drug Conjugate Market. The rising awareness among consumers along with growing government initiatives are driving the Antibody Drug Conjugate Market in this region.Purchase this report online with 125 Pages, List of Tables & Figures and in-depth Table of Contents on Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Market Report 2019 @Major Key Players:1 Seattle Genetics / Takeda2 Roche3 ImmunoGen4 Immunomedics5 Pfizer6 Celldex Therapeutics7 Millennium Pharmaceuticals8 Bayer HealthCare9 Mersana Therapeutics and MoreMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report covers1 North America2 Europe3 China4 Japan5 Southeast Asia6 IndiaGrab Your Report at an Impressive Discount @This study answers to the below key questions:1 What will the market size be in 2023 and what will the growth rate be?2 What are the key market trends?3 What are the challenges to market growth?4 Who are the key players in this market?5 What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key players?In the end, this report covers data and information on capacity and production overview, production, market share analysis, sales overview, supply, sales, and shortage, import, export and consumption as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin of Antibody Drug Conjugate Market.Major Points in Table of Contents:Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Market Report 20191 Antibody Drug Conjugate Market Overview2 Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2019)4 Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2019)5 Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Market Analysis by Application7 Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis8 Antibody Drug Conjugate Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global Antibody Drug Conjugate Market Forecast (2019-2023)13 Research Findings and Conclusion14 AppendixAbout usBusinessindustryReports.com is digital database of comprehensive market reports for global industries. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well-defined we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Media ContactBusiness Industry ReportsPune Indiasales@businessindustryreports.com+19376349940 UK Travel Insurance - Distribution & Marketing 2018 | Aviva, Insure & Go, AXA, Direct Line, LV=, Admiral, Columbus, Alpha, AllClear, Coverwise, Nationwide, Lloyds Bank, Barclays, NatWest UK Travel Insurance Market https://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00012540614/sample https://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00012540614/discount https://www.reportsweb.com/buy&RW00012540614/buy/1295 "UK Travel Insurance: Distribution & Marketing 2018", report examines consumer purchasing behavior and how consumer preferences are changing over time. It explores what is most influential to customers when purchasing a policy and also reveals the most popular providers in the market. New trends and innovations are highlighted, as well as the key factors that will influence the travel market over the next few years.UK Travel Insurance Market research report is being presented with a motive to enrich readers by offering an extensive and explicit analysis of UK Travel Insurance industry. The report covers each characteristic of the UK Travel Insurance industry including market growth.Top Key Players:Aviva, Insure & Go, AXA, Direct Line, LV=, Admiral, Columbus, Alpha, AllClear, Coverwise, Nationwide, Lloyds Bank, Barclays, NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Halifax, HSBC, Virgin Money, First Direct, Santander, Staysure, Saga, Holidaysafe, Goodtogoinsurance.com, Avanti, Go Travel Insurance, AGE UK, Direct Travel Insurance, Comparethemarket.com, Confused.com, GoCompare.com, Moneysupermarket.com, Post Office, Thomas Cook, American Express.Get Sample Copy of this Report atCompetition is high within the travel insurance market, with the top five players accounting for 30.1%. There has been a significant shift to purchasing via a smartphone or tablet, demonstrating the need for all providers to offer digital solutions. The banking channel has also seen a resurgence, potentially utilizing its cross-selling capabilities alongside the purchase of travel money.Scope- 87.3% of consumers purchased travel insurance prior to traveling.- The travel insurance market is becoming increasingly competitive, with consumers purchasing through a greater variety of channels.- 23% of consumers undertook no pre-purchase activity.Get discount on Purchase report @Reasons to buy- Understand consumer purchasing decisions and how these will influence the market over the next few years.- Improve customer engagement by recognizing what is most important to them and how insurers can adapt their products and services to meet their needs.- Discover which providers lead the way in the travel insurance space, and how providers are revolutionizing the market through new innovations.- Adapt your distribution strategy to ensure it still meets customer purchasing behaviors.Table of Contents:Executive SummaryThe Purchasing JourneyProvider EngagementChannel ViewMarketing ExpenditureFuture MarketAppendixPurchase a Copy of Report atAbout UsReportsWeb 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.The market research industry has changed in last decade. As corporate focus has shifted to niche markets and emerging countries, a number of publishers have stepped in to fulfil these information needs. We have experienced and trained staff that helps you navigate different options and lets you choose best research solution at most effective cost.Contact UsPhone : +1-646-491-9876E-Mail : sales@reportsweb.com Craft Beer Market 2019 Global Analysis By Key Players D.G. Yuengling and Son, Gambrinus Company, Heineken N.V, Boston Beer Company, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co Craft Beer Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3819114-global-craft-beer-market-by-product-type-lager https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3819114-global-craft-beer-market-by-product-type-lager Craft Beer Market 2019Wiseguyreports.Com adds Craft Beer Market Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Analysis of Top Key Players and Forecast to 2025 To Its Research Database.Report Details:This report provides in depth study of Craft Beer Market using SWOT analysis i.e. Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat to the organization. The Craft Beer Market report also provides an in-depth survey of key players in the market which is based on the various objectives of an organization such as profiling, the product outline, the quantity of production, required raw material, and the financial health of the organization.Global Craft Beer Market: OverviewThe global craft beer market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 22.76%, in value terms, during the forecast period 2018-2025. Craft Beers are produced in small breweries, using traditional methods and ingredients inspired by local taste, texture, and flavors. Moreover, it is produced in small quantity. The rising number of microbreweries across the globe produces a small amount of beer but emphasize on the quality, taste and new product innovation according to the changing palate of beer drinkers. Increasing government support for microbreweries via start-up will boost the production of craft beers in the coming years. Shifting consumers preferences towards a healthy lifestyle has influenced the younger population to adopt healthier beverages with low alcohol content like craft beer.Lager is projected to be the leading segment of the overall Craft Beer Product Market during the forecast period.On the basis of product type, the craft beer market has been segmented into Lager, Ale, Stout & Porter and Others. Lager segment dominates the global craft beer with 68.21% market share of the total craft beer market and projected to lead the market over the forecast period 2018-2025. Due to the increase in preference for lower but value based product consumption of alcohol. Moreover, the carbohydrates present in lager are beneficial for health along with other health benefits. Ale is projected to be the fastest growing craft beer market in terms of value with a CAGR over 25% for the forecast period, 2018-2025.North America accounts for the largest share of the Global Craft Beer Market during the forecast period.On the basis of region, the craft beer market has been segmental into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, and Latin America. North America dominates the world craft beer with 36.26% market share of the entire craft beer market and projected to lead the market over the forecast period, 2018-2025. Africa is projected to be the fastest growing market with a CAGR over 28% throughout the forecast period due to the increasing penetration in South Africa. The growing consumer awareness regarding the wide selection of flavors and styles of the product is expected to be a crucial factor for market growth in the country.Request a Sample Report @Global Craft Beer Market Competitive LandscapeCompanies, such as D.G. Yuengling and Son, Gambrinus Company, Heineken N.V, Boston Beer Company, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., and Belgium Brewing Company are the key players in manufacturing craft beer. In terms of product offerings, Boston Beer Company and D.G. Yuengling and Son are the major players in the market, providing various tastes and flavors of craft beer.Strategic Outlook for major Industry Player In March 2018, D.G. Yuengling and Son have added a new beer to its craft beer product portfolio, known as Golden Pilsner, a modern pilsner crafted with the perfect balance of malt and hop for crisp, smooth refreshment. In May 2017, Heineken N.V acquired the 100% stake in Lagunitas, a craft beer maker (having entered a 50/50 partnership in 2015), allowing the company to accelerate the expansion of the brand to many markets around the world In Aug 2017, New Belgium Brewing has entered into a licensing agreement with Mohegan Sun, to feature New Belgium brand in Mohegans gaming area. The company Taproom within the gaming area, will feature 12 craft beer lines, including sour and seasonal releases, expanding its presence in the east coastKey StakeholdersCraft Beer ManufacturersCraft Beer Distributors/Traders/WholesalersCraft Beer Subcomponent ManufacturersIndustry AssociationDownstream VendorsIf you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Complete Report Details@Major Key Points in Table of Content:Research Framework1.1. Research overview1.2. Product Overview1.3. Market SegmentationResearch MethodologyExecutive SummaryIndustry Insights4.1. Industry Value Chain Analysis4.1.1. Vendor Matrix4.2. Pricing Analysis4.3. Industry Impact and Forces4.3.1. Growth Drivers4.3.2. Challenges4.4. Technological Landscape4.5. Regulatory Framework4.6. Company market share analysis,20174.7. Growth Potential analysis,20174.8. Porters Five forces analysis4.8.1. Bargaining Power of Suppliers4.8.2. Bargaining Power of Buyers4.8.3. Threat of New Entrants4.8.4. Threat of Substitutes4.8.5. Intensity of Rivalry4.9. PESTEL Analysis4.10. Strategic OutlookContinued.Contact Us:NORAH TRENTPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Sales@Wiseguyreports.ComPh: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)ABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.ADDRESS:WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Hyperspectral Imaging Market 2019: New Market Opportunities Explored by 2023 and Top Key Vendors (Applied Spectral Imaging, Brandywine Photonics, Chemimage, Corning Incorporated, Cubert-Gmbh, Bayspec, Merrick & Company) https://marketprognosis.com/sample-request/16247 https://marketprognosis.com/discount-request/16247 https://marketprognosis.com/enquiry/16247 The global hyperspectral imaging market was valued at USD 61.9 million in 2017, and is expected to reach a value of USD 108.5 million by 2023, at a CAGR of 9.79%, during the forecast period (2018 - 2023). The scope of the report is limited to products offered by major players for various purposes, which include Surveillance, Remote Sensing, Machine Vision/Optical, and Medical Diagnostics. While the end-users considered in the scope of the report include Food & Agriculture, Healthcare, Defense, Mining, and Meteorology.Detailed Sample Copy of Updated Analysis @Hyperspectral imaging is a powerful technology that adds a new dimension to optical imaging. The adoption of hyperspectral imaging is still at an early stage, but it has found traction in the agriculture, chemical analysis, and defense sectors. Hyperspectral imaging technology is widely used in a diverse range of applications. One major application is food surface inspection, in which reflectance imaging is used on various products to check for bruises and other damages. Similarly, it is widely used in military surveillance to monitor potential targets and avoid major calamities.Technological advancements, such as the development of micro-hyperspectral imaging technology, have led to improvements in data acquisition and analysis. Micro-hyperspectral technology addresses the need for small, lightweight, and efficient hyperspectral imaging instruments that are capable of being deployed in harsh environments. Additionally, there has been an increasing demand for data accuracy and consistency among end-users and the government, as the hyperspectral imaging technology is highly accurate.Key Developments In The Market February 2018 - collaboration between Centre national d'u00e9tudes spatiales (CNES) and United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA) to develop a joint hyperspectral imaging satellite to keep track of the climatic changes January 2018 - Developments in Hyperspectral imaging has been used to find out the borders for various tumours that exist in body. Using various imaging techniques healthy tissues have been distinguished from the cancerous tissues which helps in better diagnosis and treatment October 2017 - Applied Spectral Imaging Inc. launched two new products pathFusion and HiPath Pro, innovative FISH imaging and analysis solutions for pathology. The PathFusion system is a work-flow solution that bridges gap brightfield pathology and FISH. The HiPath Pro is a brightfield imaging and analysis system for a wide range of histopathology needs, which includes whole slide imaging. These products use GenASIs algorithm that addresses needs of modern pathology labs. These are expected to improve labor efficiency and data accessibilityThe major players include APPLIED SPECTRAL IMAGING, INC., BRANDYWINE PHOTONICS LLC, CHEMIMAGE CORPORATION, CORNING INCORPORATED, CUBERT-GMBH, GILDEN PHOTONICS LTD, UTC AEROSPACE SYSTEMS, BAYSPEC, INC., MERRICK & COMPANY INC., CORESCAN PTY LTD, SURFACE OPTICS CORPORATION, XIMEA, GILDEN PHOTONICS LTD, HEADWALL PHOTONICS INC., IMEC VZW, NORSK ELEKTRO OPTIKK A/S, SPECIM SPECTRAL IMAGING LTD, TELOPS INC., HANSA LUFTBILD GROUP, GALILEO GROUP, INC., HEADWALL PHOTONICS INC., amongst other.Request Discount on this report @Increasing Demand for Data Accuracy and Consistency Have Led to the Growth of Hyperspectral ImagingIn environmental studies, the fusion of HSI sensor and Airborne LiDAR Scanner (ALS) data provides significant potential for applications. In these applications, standard fusion approaches use information obtained from HSI and distance measurements, gathered from the ALS, to increase data dimensionality and accuracy. The cross-calibration approach is followed for the rigorous illumination correction of HSI data, based on the radiometric cross-calibrated return intensity information of ALS data. Further, this method is capable of compensating for the drawbacks of passive HSI systems, such as illumination changes over time, across track illumination, cast and cloud shadowing effects, and partly, anisotropy effects.PCA will be used for both feature extraction and dimensionality reduction, making it a common technique to be used in HSI analysis, and to make the decision based on captured data ANNs and SVM methods will be utilized. It is also further used to diagnose diseases in the areas of ophthalmology, oncology, and cardiology, as it accurately depicts molecular activity in the body. It is a non-invasive test that helps in the early diagnosis and treatment of retinal diseases, oral cancer, and disorders of the central nervous system. Doctors use HSI devices to gauge a patient's responses to a therapy and determine the best course of treatment.Remote Sensing is Expected to be one of the Most Widely Used Applications for Hyperspectral ImagingThe recent advancements in remote sensing and geographic information have offered new opportunities for the development of hyperspectral sensors. Hyperspectral imaging is currently being investigated by researchers and scientists, for the detection and identification of vegetation, minerals, different objects, and backgrounds. The primary applications of hyperspectral remote sensing comprise of agriculture and forestry, geology and mineral exploration, ecology, and coastal zone management.Furthermore, hyperspectral sensors have revolutionized IR remote sensing systems, significantly improving spectral performance. Different from multispectral sensors that capture data in distinct spectral bands, hyperspectral sensors can capture a near-continuous spectral range, by collecting data in many very narrow spectral bands (typically 10 to 20 nm) over a broad, continuous range, such as from the visible to 2.5 u03bcm. As a result, the quantity of data captured is significantly larger, than that of multispectral systemsNorth America had the Largest Market Share, with the US Emerging as the Major ContributorThe medical device companies in the United States hold high regard across the globe, for their innovations, superior technology, and high investments in R&D. According to the Department of Commerce (DOC), the US medical device market was valued at USD 148 billion in 2015, accounting for 43% of the global market. Further, the emphasis by the US government on healthcare and special initiatives, like u2018Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have aided the growth of the medical device market. The food industry accounts for around 5% of the countrys GDP, and is growing owing to a greater demand for packaged food. The growing availability of packaged dairy products through various retailing channels, along with increasing consumer preference towards protein-based products, such as yogurt, cheese, and butter are expected to drive the adoption of dairy-based packaging in the United States. Owing to the growth of such industries in the region there has been an increased use of hyperspectral imaging in the country.Enquiry Before Buying@About Market PrognosisWe at Market Prognosis believe in giving a crystal clear view of market dynamics for achieving success in todays complex and competitive marketplace through our quantitative & qualitative research methods.We help our clients identify the best market insights and analysis required for their business thus enabling them to take strategic and intelligent decision.We believe in delivering actionable insights for your business growth and success.Contact us:ProgMarkPvt Ltd,Thane - 421501India.Contact No: +1 973 241 5193Email: sales@marketprognosis.com Cancer/Tumor Profiling Market with New Principle and Updated Strategies 2027 Illumina, Inc., Qiagen N.V., NeoGenomics Laboratories, Inc., HTG Molecular Diagnostics, Inc., Genomic Health, Caris Life Sciences, Helomics Corp Cancer/Tumor Profiling Market http://bit.ly/2INTonV http://bit.ly/2XDC4p6 http://www.theinsightpartners.com/ Tumor profiling services use a variety of methods for the examination of patient's tumor. Some utilize next generation DNA sequencing or RNA sequencing, while others analyze protein expression. Multiple technologies are used to provide very specific information about the molecular and genetic makeup of the tumor. Tumor profiling companies utilize various methods to examine the biopsy sample, and return information about the genes altered in the cancer cells.The cancer/tumor profiling market is expected to grow in the forecast period owing to key factors such as growing number of new cancer cases, rising utility of biomarkers in tumor profiling, and availability of funding for cancer research. The market is likely to experience the growth opportunities in the emerging nations and the technological advancements, increasing demand for point-of-care diagnostic tests are likely to develop innovative products.Get PDF sample copy of research report:The "Global Cancer/Tumor Profiling Market Analysis to 2027" is a specialized and in-depth study of the biotechnology industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global cancer/tumor profiling market with detailed market segmentation by technology, cancer type, application, and geography. The global Cancer/Tumor Profiling market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the leading Cancer/Tumor Profiling 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 cancer/tumor profiling market based on technology, cancer type and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2027 for overall market with respect to five major regions, namely; North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South & Central America. The cancer/tumor profiling market by each region is later sub-segmented by respective countries and segments. The report covers analysis and forecast of 18 countries globally along with current trend and opportunities prevailing in the region.North America is expected to contribute to the largest share in the cancer/tumor profiling market in the forecast period due to presence of major players and rapid advances in technology, high prevalence of cancer and increased research in oncology to identify and discover innovative therapy for cancer treatment. Asia Pacific is anticipated to be the fastest growing region due to the increasing incidence of cancer, rising demand for better healthcare services in developing economies such as India and China, growing number of contract research organizations (CROs), and increasing focus of international players on emerging markets.The report analyzes factors affecting cancer/tumor profiling 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 & Central America after evaluating political, economic, social and technological factors effecting the cancer/tumor profiling market in these regions.Top Key Players: Illumina, Inc. QIAGEN NeoGenomics Laboratories, Inc. HTG Molecular Diagnostics, Inc. Genomic Health Caris Life Sciences Helomics Corp. NanoString Technologies, Inc. Oxford Gene Technology Ribomed Biotechnologies, Inc.Cancer/Tumor Profiling Market Key Points Covered Key Facts Business Description Financial Overview Product Portfolio SWOT Analysis Key DevelopmentsReason to buy:Save and reduce time carrying out entry-level research by identifying the market growth, size, leading players and segments in the global Cancer/Tumor Profiling markethighlights key business priorities in order to assist companies to realign their business strategies The key findings and recommendations highlight crucial progressive industry trends in the Cancer/Tumor Profiling market, thereby allowing players across the value chain to develop effective long term strategies Develop/modify business expansion plans by using substantial growth offering developed and emerging market Scrutinize in-depth global market trends and outlook coupled with the factors driving the market, as well as those hindering it Enhance the decision-making process by understanding the strategies that underpin commercial interest with respect to client products, segmentation, pricing and distribution Examine the political, economic, social and technology impact of the five regions namely: north america, europe, asia pacific, middle east & africa and south & central america.For More Statistical and Numerical ResearchGet discount on this report@The global cancer/tumor profiling market is segmented on the basis of technology, cancer type and application. Based on technology, the market is segmented as immunoassays, hybridization, sequencing techniques, mass spectrometry, and others. On the basis of cancer type, the cancer/tumor profiling market segmentation is classified as lung cancer, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, prostate cancer, melanoma cancer, and others. Based on the application the market is segmented as clinical application and research application.Global Cancer/Tumor Profiling market - by geography NORTH AMERICA U.S. CANADA MEXICO EUROPE UK GERMANY FRANCE ASIA PACIFIC (APAC) JAPAN CHINA INDIA MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA (MEA) U.A.E SAUDI ARABIA SOUTH AFRICA SOUTH AND CENTRAL AMERICA (SCAM) BRAZILAbout usThe insight partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services.We are committed to providing highest quality research and consulting services to our customers. We help our clients understand key market trends, identify opportunities, and make informed decisions by providing market research solutions at an affordable cost.The insight partners,Call: +1-646-491-9876email: sales@theinsightpartners.comWebsite: Cloud MFT Services Market 2019 to Grow at a CAGR of 10.54% by 2023: Top Key Vendors - IBM, Axway Software, Citrix Sharefile, Ipswitch File Transfer, Tibco Software, You Sendit, Saison Information System, Oracle https://marketprognosis.com/sample-request/16266 https://marketprognosis.com/discount-request/16266 https://marketprognosis.com/enquiry/16266 The cloud MFT services market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.54% over the forecast period (2018 - 2023). The regions considered in the scope of the report include North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa.Detailed Sample Copy of Updated Analysis @Many factors such as globalization, virtualization, and digitalization are creating huge chunks of business data that needs to be exchanged or shared within or outside an organization. This sharing of information is becoming more complex, with the sizes of the files also increasing. Therefore, there is a need for secure and efficient file transfer solutions. The cloud-based MFT has been proven to be the mature solution for safe and secure file transfer, catering to the needs of businesses today. High information leaks, rising need to reduce costs of data exchange, increased awareness of risks associated with FTP, need for stronger governance and security, and the need for new financial reporting requirements are the key factors boosting the demand for cloud-based MFT services.North America to account for a Major ShareNorth America is expected to account for a significant market share, with the United States contributing most to it. The market in the United States is growing because it is home to some of the largest players in the market and is a pioneer in the adoption of advanced technologies like 3D printing, IoT, and Big data technologies. The deployment of cloud systems in every industry vertical has increased the end user need for solutions that let them easily and securely transfer files, without constraints regarding file size. There is an increased spending in the region on cloud MFT for B2B integration.Key Developments in the Market June 2017 - IBM Corporation and Zain collaborated to launch a new cloud disaster recovery service that provided both the companies customers with cloud-based business continuity capabilities and faster disaster recovery of their critical IT systems, without incurring the infrastructure expense of a second physical site. This new service was aimed at benefitting customers with the added flexibility of keeping their data in-country on IBM Cloud. February 2017 - Axway Software acquired Syncplicity, a leading enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) solution. With its acquisition of Syncplicity, Axway enhanced its Axway AMPLIFY platform to transform the way modern enterprises collaborate and innovate across digital ecosystems and further heighten engagement with customers, employees, and partners. Syncplicitys EFSS expertise and product excellence complemented Axway MFT solutions perfectly by encouraging and supporting greater collaboration among employees, partners, and customers.The major players include IBM CORPORATION, AXWAY SOFTWARE, CITRIX SHAREFILE, IPSWITCH FILE TRANSFER, TIBCO SOFTWARE, YOU SENDIT, SAISON INFORMATION SYSTEM CO., LTD, CA TECHNOLOGIES, INC., ORACLE CORPORATION, ACCELLION, INC., SOFTWARE AG, and COVIANT SOFTWARE CORPORATION, amongst others.Request Discount on this report @Increasing Need for Secure File Transfer to Primarily Drive the MarketSecure file transfer includes services such as enterprise file sync and share solutions, with the focus on security, compliance, integration, and ease of use. The complexity of enterprise operational environment and the growing need for additional security to follow regulatory compliance are encouraging companies to opt for these services. The introduction of cloud computing and increasing number of data breaches and cyber-attacks is driving the need for secure file transfer. The United States faces the highest number of data breaches and hence, organizations increasingly demand secure file transfer software.Moreover, the incorporation of technologies, such as Big Data and IoT, will drive the demand for these solutions among large enterprise customers in the global market during the forecast period. The need for efficient transfer of documents of all sizes represents the core of any integration strategy. Cloud MFT provides highly secure data transfer channels for enterprises and addresses all the security vulnerabilities associated with Old FTP and HTTP systems.Retail Sector to Significantly Drive the Market GrowthThe retail sector is one of the major sectors using internet and mobile devices for their business operations and choosing cloud MFT to ensure changes in prices of products and connect to the customers across multiple channels. The enterprises in the retail sector engage with their customers mainly through advertisements. With increasing digital technological trends, penetration in the sector is growing, as are privacy and security concerns. The ever-changing customer needs are being met by multi-channel retail systems, and hence, secured file transfer has become very critical to have a competitive edge. PoS systems, back-end support systems, and customer support systems are very important touch points in multi-channel retailing. There has been a lot of data collected at these touch points, which needs to be kept confidential. These concerns are being addressed by cloud MFT services, and hence, retailers are emphasizing on the integration of these systems in their business operations.Enquiry Before Buying@About Market PrognosisWe at Market Prognosis believe in giving a crystal clear view of market dynamics for achieving success in todays complex and competitive marketplace through our quantitative & qualitative research methods.We help our clients identify the best market insights and analysis required for their business thus enabling them to take strategic and intelligent decision.We believe in delivering actionable insights for your business growth and success.Contact us:ProgMarkPvt Ltd,Thane - 421501India.Contact No: +1 973 241 5193Email: sales@marketprognosis.com Glucaric Acid Market Analysis by top key players: including Alfa Chemistry, Rennovia, Cayman Chemicals, Haihang Industry, Kalion Inc., and Haihang Industry https://www.marketstudyreport.com/request-a-sample/1339654/?utm_source=openpr.com&utm_medium=RV https://www.marketstudyreport.com/check-for-discount/1339654/?utm_source=openpr.com&utm_medium=RV https://www.marketstudyreport.com/reports/glucaric-acid-market/?utm_source=openpr.com&utm_medium=RV https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/global-turbine-oils-market-2019-by-manufacturers-regions-type-and-application-forecast-to-2024-2019-01-22 https://www.marketstudyreport.com https://www.marketstudyreport.com/blog This report focuses on the Glucaric Acid 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.UK potassium sodium D Glucarate industry is anticipated to surpass 1 kilo tons at the end of 2024 due to its utilization in deicing applications. The product is used for development of high-performance anti-ice inventions, ensuing decreased environmental impact, and lower corrosion impacts & costs. It has also been recognized for assistance in reducing degeneration of cement concrete in the presence of anti-ice solutions and thaw cycles escalating glucaric acid market growth.Request a sample of this premium report at:The product block deposition of limescale & dust on saucers along with its utilization as a substitute to phosphate detergents, which are being banned owing to ecological concerns. It can also be used as food ingredients, owing to its nontoxic nature, thereby propelling product demand.Growing utilization of safe chemical in manufacturing of food ingredients and detergents in order to minimize health effects is anticipated to boost glucaric acid demand. Supplementing glucaric acid intake may inhibit cancer growth cells, and enrich female hormone levels, which is anticipated to fuel product demand.Glucaric acid market from corrosion inhibitors may witness strong gains up to 9% by 2024. It is a significant corrosion inhibitor and can be used in applications where water contacts metallic exteriors often. Producers have found saccharic acid valuable in diverse products from residential cleaning to cooling tower treatment programs thus, escalating industry growth.Beneficial government policies supporting utilization of organic chemicals in detergents, food ingredients and deicing agents is likely to encourage product demand. Initiatives from FDA & EU pertaining to use of safe chemicals will develop glucaric acid industry in the projected timeframe.Rising prices of organic raw material may affect market price trends, hence hindering glucaric acid industry profitability. The catalytic agent essential for its commercial manufacturing are expensive and does not encounter economies of scale if not produced in large scale, hence saccharic acid is high priced.Glucaric acid market demand in food application is anticipated to surpass USD 110 million up to 2024 owing to its optimistic influences on liver along with its potential to evade diseases like colon, ovarian and hormone-dependent tumors. Its influence in detoxification of unnecessary estrogenic activity in human body and its application as an alternate to tamoxifen is likely to foster industry growth.China glucaric acid market from detergent application may observe significant gains up to 9% by 2024. Companies are substituting synthetic elements including phosphate with safer and effective products including potassium sodium glucaric, calcium D glucarate, and 4-lactone. Prohibition of phosphate compounds, consumers are purchasing detergents which are non-toxic in nature, which may favor regional saccharic acid growth.Request a discount on standard prices of this premium report at:Glucaric acid market is consolidated and competitive with major industry players including Alfa Chemistry, Rennovia, Cayman Chemicals, Haihang Industry, Kalion Inc., and Haihang Industry. Growing demand of organic components has stimulated producers to strongly invest in R&D for manufacturing efficient products. Manufacturers are capitalizing on product innovation & design and production capacities.Glucaric Acid Market is set to surpass USD 440 million by 2024; according to a new research report.Growing consumer conscience towards healthy lifestyle is propelling glucaric acid market growth. It is important for human health owing to preserving levels of essential nutrients and producing enzyme. It is also used in detergents, corrosion inhibitors, and de-icing applications. Thus, stimulating product demand.Table of Contents:Chapter 1 Methodology & ScopeChapter 2 Executive SummaryChapter 3 Glucaric Acid Industry InsightsChapter 4 Glucaric Acid Market, By Downstream PotentialChapter 5 Glucaric Acid Market, By RegionChapter 6 Company ProfilesFor more details about this report:Related Report:About Us:Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Contact Us:Market Study Report LLC4 North Main Street,Selbyville, Delaware 19975USAPhone: 1-302-273-0910US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email: sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:Blog: Containerized Data Center Market Outlook 2019 Global Overview by Top Brands - IBM, HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE, CISCO SYSTEMS, DELL, RITTAL GMBH & CO. KG https://marketprognosis.com/sample-request/16277 https://marketprognosis.com/discount-request/16277 https://marketprognosis.com/enquiry/16277 The global containerized data center market was valued at USD 4.78 billion in 2017, and is expected to reach a value of USD 18.64 billion by 2023 at a CAGR of 25.46%, during the forecast period (2018 - 2023). With the growing adoption of cloud and increasing data generation, the demand for data centers has spiked drastically over the past few years. Many companies were looking for immediate and reliable scaling solutions. Containerized data center thus offers flexibility to these users. These data centers can be shipped directly to the end-user location and can be set up immediately. With the plug and play functionalities, end-users can accommodate multiple containerized data centers and increase the capacity, depending on the requirements. The containerized data center has found applications in many sectors catering to different consumer needs. The disaster recovery remains one of the primary revenue-generating sectors, with many organizations deploying data center containers to deploy computing power in areas struck with disasters. Temporary capacity elevation and high-performance computing are also major applications for these data centers, with many users utilizing these systems to handle additional loads without interrupting core systems. Easy scalability and high power efficiency are supporting the deployment of this technology.Detailed Sample Copy of Updated Analysis @High mobility and scalability offered by these systems remain one of the major driving factors for the market growth. The increasing demand for data centers and growing investments in the market are also expected to support the industry growth. With the demand for data center capacity growing, many companies are opting reliable and scalable data center solutions to cater to immediate needs. With containerized data centers offering suitable features to meet the requirements, the demand for these systems is expected to grow. However, the high flexibility offered by modular data centers is restraining the market growth. With industries inclining toward the deployment of modular data centers, the industry is struggling to expand. The limited flexibility and lack of expertise are also challenging the market growth.Key Developments in the MarketMarch 2018 - Bahrain Airport Company (BAC), the operator and managing body of Bahrain International Airport (BIA) inaugurated its next-generation Containerised Data Centre (CDC) a portable and inherently scalable facility to host critical airport information systems. The CDC was designed, supplied and implemented by Gulf Business Machines (GBM)The major players include IBM CORPORATION, HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE, CISCO SYSTEMS INC., DELL INC., RITTAL GMBH & CO. KG, and HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES CO., LTD., amongst others.Request Discount on this report @Growing Demand for Mobility and Scalability Solutions is Driving the Market GrowthFor more than 40% organizations, scalability was one of the top challenges faced. Scalability provides the users with the building blocks to add capacity to their systems in timely intervals and pay-as-you-grow. This capacity-on-demand approach allows organizations to meet the fluctuating demands quickly. It also helps manage the capital expenditure costs and maintain higher operating efficiencies. This enables organizations to adopt new technologies with a forecast of very few months in advance, instead of years of planning. Building a data center environment doesnt just depend on the scaling ability. Better results will be obtained when the data center is agile and scalable. Many new companies deploying data center strategies are starting with these systems to experiment and explore the potential. Easy scalability provided by adding additional blocks and easy plugin capabilities is supporting the growth. The markets, such as Brazil and India, which are experiencing high growth and penetration, are looking for scalable solutions.North America to Hold the Largest Share in 2018North America remained the largest market for these systems in 2017, with 38.2% market share. North America is one of the first regions to adopt these systems, with many companies in the region deploying these data centers in the United States. Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which were the first companies to deploy this technology, established containerized data centers in the United States. Many major players in the market, including IBM, HPE and Cisco have served the market, with the United States as the focused market. Thus, the penetration of containerized data centers in North America has been strong over the past few years. The high technology awareness and focus on cost-effective scaling have driven the market growth in the United States. Many companies in the data center industry have entered the US containerized data center market and expanded globally. However, the North American market is retreating, with many consumers moving toward modular data centers. The North American consumers are demanding higher flexibility and increased customization. With the containerized data centers offering limited flexibility, the demand for modular data centers has been high.Enquiry Before Buying@About Market PrognosisWe at Market Prognosis believe in giving a crystal clear view of market dynamics for achieving success in todays complex and competitive marketplace through our quantitative & qualitative research methods.We help our clients identify the best market insights and analysis required for their business thus enabling them to take strategic and intelligent decision.We believe in delivering actionable insights for your business growth and success.Contact us:ProgMarkPvt Ltd,Thane - 421501India.Contact No: +1 973 241 5193Email: sales@marketprognosis.com Latest Research Study on APP Store Monetisation Market with overall analysis including future growth insight Top key players - Apple, Tencent, Alibaba, 360, Google, Xiaomi, Baidu, Wandoujia https://www.itintelligencemarkets.com/request_sample.php?id=270 https://www.itintelligencemarkets.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=270 https://www.itintelligencemarkets.com/enquiry_before_buying.php?id=270 There is a steep path for popular mobile app growth among mobile users. Again in 2012, people spent about 1.5 hours on mobile apps on smartphones and tablets accessing the mobile Internet. Now this number has doubled. Nowadays, people spend three and a half hours a day with their favorite apps. In the meantime, spending on mobile browsers has increased from 38 minutes in 2012 to 51 minutes in 2018. People spend more time on the mobile web than on the mobile web, giving app developers the opportunity to monetize their mobile apps.It Intelligence Markets has included a statistical surveying report the Worldwide APP Store Monetisation Market to its source, which covers the different development factors and key limitations affecting the market's trail somewhere in the range of 2019 and 2026. The report is titled "Worldwide APP Store Monetisation Market 2019 Industry Floats, Exchanges, Supply, Request, Investigation and Estimate to 2026," and is available to be purchased on the organization site.Get sample copy of this report at:Real Key Players in this report are: Apple, Tencent, Alibaba, 360, Google, Xiaomi, Baidu, Wandoujia, HiMarket, 91 Mobile Assistant, Anzhi MarketThe different variables supporting the market's development and those posturing threat are contemplated in the report in detail. Moreover, the market ponder fragments the Worldwide APP Store Monetisation Market in view of end-client, vertical, and size. In these areas, it shields different components inducing the market's direction over the fragments. Moreover, it perceives the most lucrative of all to enable financial specialists to take the very much educated choice.Get discount at:In any case, strict outflow models and surprising expense related with helicopters can go about as difficulties for the advancement of APP Store Monetisation Market. Most of the nations' force impose on business helicopters, therefore hampering the improvement to a certain extent.The business divisions in North America and Europe have a basic bit of the pie. Regardless, attributable to the quick moving toward drenching, these areas are not anticipated to enroll critical improvement in their market measure in the midst of the figure time allotment. Creating markets of Asia Pacific and the Center East are predicted to observe elevated advancement prospects attributable to the giant potential in nations, for instance, China, India, Japan, Australia, UAE, and Qatar. Latin America is another district that is required to show a forceful interest for the helicopters, which can be attributed to the strong monetary development in the nations, for example, Mexico and Brazil.For Enquiry OR Any Query? Ask to our Expert @:Major highlights of the global research report: In-depth analysis of the degree of competition across the globe Estimation of global market values and volumes Global market analysis through industry analysis tools such as SWOT and Porters five analysis Business profiling of prominent companies across the global regions like North America, Latin America, Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Europe Detailed elaboration on global market value, volume, and penetration Global market growth projections Detailed description on development policies and plans Analytical study on drivers, restraints, opportunities, hindrances, inadequacies, challenges and strengthsAbout IT Intelligence Markets :At IT Intelligence Markets, we model all our work on our core philosophy that believes in customer satisfaction. We serve a global clientele by supplying market intelligence research reports after conducting exhaustive research. Our reports are replete with productive insights & recent market dynamics as the healthcare industry is constantly undergoing changes like ever-changing consumer preferences, supply channels and latest technologies. Our market research analysts not only investigate the market for drivers, restraints & challenges but also gauge the overall progress of the market by comparing chief market players. Our report forms a crucial piece of intelligence using which our clients can unleash their potential & tap their capacity to harness the correct technologies & surpass their competitors.Erika ThomasPhone no : +1 (888) 312-3102Address: US 76 AT US 19 & HWY 129 Murphy Highway, Blairsville, GA, USAsales@itintelligencemarkets.com Digital Encoders Market 2019 Is Thriving Worldwide Key Players are Cisco, Broadcom, BEI Sensors, Renishaw, Hengstler, Dynapar, Baumer Group, Tokyo Sokuteikizai, CTS, Etc. Digital Encoders Market 2019 https://www.upmarketresearch.com/home/requested_sample/71529 https://www.upmarketresearch.com/home/enquiry_before_buying/71529 https://www.upmarketresearch.com/reports/digital-encoders-market-2019 https://www.upmarketresearch.com/home/request_for_discount/71529 www.upmarketresearch.com The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the Digital Encoders Market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to categories such as market segments, geographies, type of product and deal landscapes.Request Sample Copy Of this Report @Digital Encoders Market research report delivers a close watch on leading competitors with strategic analysis, micro and macro market trend and scenarios, pricing analysis and a holistic overview of the market situations in the forecast period.It is a professional and a detailed report focusing on primary and secondary drivers, market share, leading segments and geographical analysis. Further, key players, major collaborations, merger & acquisitions along with trending innovation and business policies are reviewed in the report. The report contains basic, secondary and advanced information pertaining to the Digital Encoders Market global status and trend, market size, share, growth, trends analysis, segment and forecasts from 2019 2025.The scope of the report extends from market scenarios to comparative pricing between major players, cost and profit of the specified market regions. The numerical data is backed up by statistical tools such as SWOT analysis, BCG matrix, SCOT analysis, PESTLE analysis and so on. The statistics are represented in graphical format for a clear understanding on facts and figures.The generated report is firmly based on primary research, interviews with top executives, news sources and information insiders. Secondary research techniques are implemented for better understanding and clarity for data analysis.The report for Digital Encoders Market analysis & forecast 2019- 2025 is segmented into Product Segment, Application Segment & Major players.For More Information On This Report, Please Visit @Digital Encoders Market Segmentation covers:Region- wise Analysis: North America, Europe, China, Japan, India, Southeast Asia, Other regions (Central & South America, Middle East & Africa)Major Players Reported Are:CiscoBroadcomBEI SensorsRenishawHengstlerDynaparBaumer GroupTokyo SokuteikizaiCTSAllied MotionEPCUS DigitalCUIOmronHeidenhainBournsGrayhillGurleyHoneywellHonest Sensor CorporationHONTKOProduct Segment Analysis:Optical TypeMagnetic TypeApplication Segment Analysis:HealthcareMachine ToolConsumer ElectronicsAssembly EquipmentOtherRead More details Digital Encoders Market Analysis and Forecast 2019- 2025 report helps the clients to take business decisions and to understand strategies of major players in the industry. The report also calls for market- driven results deriving feasibility studies for client needs. UpMarketResearch ensures qualified and verifiable aspects of market data operating in the real- time scenario. The analytical studies are conducted ensuring client needs with a thorough understanding of market capacities in the real- time scenario.Key Reasons to Purchase:- To gain insightful analyses of the market and have a comprehensive understanding of the Digital Encoders Market and its commercial landscape.- Learn about the market strategies that are being adopted by your competitors and leading organizations.- To understand the future outlook and prospects for Digital Encoders Market analysis and forecast 2019- 2025.If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Avail Discount On this Report @Customization of the Report:Up Market Research provides free customization of reports as per your need. This report can be personalized to meet your requirements. Get in touch with our sales team, who will guarantee you to get a report that suits your necessities.About UpMarketResearch:The UpMarketResearch () is a leading distributor of market research report with more than 800+ global clients. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well- defined we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Contact Info:Name: Alex MathewsEmail: Alex@upmarketresearch.comOrganization: UpMarketResearchAddress: 500 East E Street, Ontario, CA 91764, United States. Aerospace Coatings Market by Regional Outlook, key players AkzoNobel, PPG Industries, Argosy International Inc, Sherwin-Williams, BASF, Zodiac Aerospace, Henkel, International Aerospace Coatings, Mapaero https://bit.ly/2n1mGl2 https://bit.ly/2TEl6bh https://bit.ly/2kprPVP www.gminsights.com Aerospace coatings market has been forecast to surpass a revenue collection of USD 1 billion by the end of 2024, owing to the surging use of coatings in commercial, military, and space aircrafts. The rise in international trading opportunities have further had a significant impact on the growing requirement of commercial aircrafts.Request for Sample Copy of This Report @The product segment of aerospace coatings market mainly includes epoxy and polyurethane resins. Currently, polyurethane resins are extensively used in the next-generation aircrafts such as Boeing 787, pertaining to the advantages they provide, such as high resistance to UV rays and ability to prohibit abrasion, chemical, and staining damages. Polyurethane resins will hold 55% of the overall aerospace coatings market share by 2024, driven by its excessive sales and growing popularity.Company profiled in this report based on Business overview, Financial data, Product landscape, Strategic outlook & SWOT analysis: Akzo Nobel NV BASF Mankiewicz Argosy International Heinkel PPG Industries Merck Performance Materials IHI International Aerospace Coatings Holdings Asahi Brycoat.The shifting trends toward the usage of composite materials for manufacturing integral parts of next-generation aircraft may hamper the future growth of aerospace coatings market size. In consequence, players in aerospace coatings industry are looking forward to developing effective coating technologies.Make an Inquiry for purchasing this Report @Regionally, North America aerospace coatings industry is predicted to collect a revenue of more than USD 350 million by 2024, because the region houses some of the biggest players. Moreover, increasing development of next-generation aircrafts such as Airbus A350, Boeing 737, and Boeing 787, mainly for commercial applications, will also push the product demand across North America.Asia Pacific will exhibit highest CAGR with high demand coming from China, India, Vietnam, Singapore and South Korea. Singapore and Malaysia are the major countries providing MRO services to regional and international airlines. Increasing commercial aircraft demand and aircraft producers establishing manufacturing facilities in the region will stimulate aerospace coatings market share from 2017 to 2024.Browse Full Report @Demand from exterior application in aerospace coatings market crossed 9 kilo tones in 2016. The growth is supported by need for substrate to handle extreme weather conditions and exposure to light. Companies manufacturing high quality exterior coatings for improved durability, long colour & gloss retention, faster dry time and lower weight will fuel the demand for exterior applications during the forecast timeframe.Meanwhile, renowned biggies in aerospace coatings market are substantially investing in technology developments and R&D activities to introduce products with an improved service life. This business sphere encompasses some of the most notable players such as BASF SE, PPG Industries, AkzoNobel, Sherwin-Williams, Mankiewicz Gebr. & Co, and Zodiac Aerospace.About Global Market Insights:Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone:1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb: Automotive Gesture Recognition Market for Touch-based segment will witness over 43% CAGR over the forecast period | Profiled Apple, Delphi, HARMAN International, Intel Corporation, Jabil, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments https://bit.ly/2IytlNQ https://bit.ly/2OwY8A1 https://bit.ly/2Fj10bQ www.gminsights.com Automotive Gesture Recognition Market for Multimedia, Navigation, and Infotainment systems showcased a significant growth rate at around 44% over the study timeframe. Increasing trend towards providing customer comfort along with the requirement for advanced navigation facilities supports the industry expansion. Further, the proliferation of advanced connectivity applications including Android Auto and Apple CarPlay offering higher quality multimedia and navigation content within the vehicle, further accelerates the segment penetration till 2024.Get Sample Copy of This Report @Europe accounted for over 43% revenue share in 2017 owing to the presence of major automobile companies focusing on introducing advanced infotainment systems in their products for improving the driving experience. Further, supporting government regulations for introducing multiple safety standards for vehicles as standard is further supporting the industry expansion till 2024.Hand or fingerprint authentication was valued at over USD 1,400 Million in 2017. This dominance is credited to the proliferating usage of these systems owing to easier operation and incorporation of IR sensors and cameras supporting the segment share. For instance, in 2015, BMW launched the 7-Series model line-up with improved hand and fingerprint sensing technologies for controlling multiple car operations, thereby contributing to the overall automotive gesture recognition market expansion.Company profiled in this report based on Business overview, Financial data, Product landscape, Strategic outlook & SWOT analysis: Apple Continental AG Delphi Harman International Intel Jabil Melexis NXP Semiconductors Qualcomm, Inc. Renesas Electronics Corporation Synaptics Incorporated Texas Instruments Visteon CorporationMake an Inquiry for purchasing this Report @Automotive gesture recognition market share form touch-based systems accounted for the highest volume share at around 69% in 2017. This dominance is attributed to the increasing usage of such systems in multiple models across various price range. Proliferating usage of capacitive touch screens for controlling multiple car features including music control, phone connectivity, and HVAC controls further strengthens the business expansion.Increasing vehicles demand with technologically advanced features including enhanced navigation and gesture-based infotainment systems are expanding the automotive gesture recognition market over the forecast timeframe. Incorporation of advanced sensors and electronics into the vehicles for improving the overall driving experience will further expand the business penetration till 2024.Increasing adoption of electronic components in vehicles for complying to stringent government norms associated with vehicle safety and emission are supporting the industry expansion. Usage of gestures for controlling various operations within vehicles including changing music, answering phone calls, and control the navigation are further strengthening the industry growth.Browse Report Summery @Few of the players in the automotive gesture recognition market place include Harman International, Delphi Automotive PLC, Sony Depthsensing Solutions, Melexis, Continental AG, and eyeSight Technologies Ltd. Other notable players include Texas Instruments, Intel, Visteon Corporation, and Synaptics Incorporated.About Global Market Insights:Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone:1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb: Peptide Cancer Vaccine market Comprehensive Growth With Top Players TapImmune, BrightPath Biotherapeutics, Ultimovacs, Sellas, Boston Biomedical, Imugene, VAXON Biotech, Generex Biotechnology, ISA Pharmaceuticals https://www.marketstudyreport.com/request-a-sample/1709519 https://www.marketstudyreport.com/check-for-discount/1709519 https://www.marketstudyreport.com/reports/global-peptide-cancer-vaccine-market-insights-forecast-to-2025?utm_source=marketwatch.com&utm_medium=dc www.marketstudyreport.com www.marketstudyreport.com/blog Market Study Report recently introduced new title on 2019-2025 Global Peptide Cancer Vaccine Market Report that provides an in-depth overview of industry and competitive landscape, covering multiple market segments and elaborates market outlook and status to 2025.Cancer peptide vaccination, as an immunotherapeutic approach against solid tumors, is currently employed in several clinical research protocols. The underlying mechanism of peptide-based vaccines involves the generation of a T-cell immune response against tumor or enhancement of an endogenous antitumor immunity pre-existing in the host.Request a sample of this premium report atThe global Peptide Cancer Vaccine market is valued at 280 million US$ in 2018 and will reach 1120 million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of 22.2% during 2019-2025. The objectives of this study are to define, segment, and project the size of the Peptide Cancer Vaccine market based on company, product type, end user and key regions.The following manufacturers are covered in this report, with sales, revenue, market share for each company:TapImmuneBrightPath BiotherapeuticsUltimovacsSellasBoston BiomedicalImugeneVAXON BiotechGenerex BiotechnologyISA PharmaceuticalsOncoTherapy ScienceImmaticsCancer peptide vaccination, as an immunotherapeutic approach against solid tumors, is currently employed in several clinical research protocols. The underlying mechanism of peptide-based vaccines involves the generation of a T-cell immune response against tumor or enhancement of an endogenous antitumor immunity pre-existing in the host.With the ever increasing new cancer cases across the globe and the conventional treatment methods unable to cope up with the challenges posed by the tumor and their immune response evading techniques, cancer immunotherapy brings a ray of hope. Cancer immunotherapy allows the host's immune cells to get sensitized with the tumor-associated antigens which in turn elicits B cell and T cell mediated immune response to target and eliminate tumor cells. This is the underlying principle of cancer immunotherapy.Peptide Cancer Vaccine can be used for Breast Cancer, Lung Cancer, Melanoma, Prostate Cancer and Others cancers. The most proportion research of Peptide Cancer Vaccine is about Melanoma, and the proportion in 2025 is about 40%.This report includes the estimation of market size for value (million US$) and volume (K Doses). Both top-down and bottom-up approaches have been used to estimate and validate the market size of Peptide Cancer Vaccine market, to estimate the size of various other dependent submarkets in the overall market. Key players in the market have been identified through secondary research, and their market shares have been determined through primary and secondary research. All percentage shares, splits, and breakdowns have been determined using secondary sources and verified primary sources.This report studies the global market size of Peptide Cancer Vaccine in key regions like North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Central & South America and Middle East & Africa, focuses on the consumption of Peptide Cancer Vaccine in these regions.Request a discount on standard prices of this premium report atThis research report categorizes the global Peptide Cancer Vaccine market by top players/brands, region, type and end user. This report also studies the global Peptide Cancer Vaccine market status, competition landscape, market share, growth rate, future trends, market drivers, opportunities and challenges, sales channels and distributors.Market size by ProductType IType IIMarket size by End UserBreast CancerLung CancerMelanomaProstate CancerOthersThe study objectives of this report are:To study and analyze the global Peptide Cancer Vaccine market size (value & volume) by company, key regions, products and end user, breakdown data from 2014 to 2018, and forecast to 2025.To understand the structure of Peptide Cancer Vaccine market by identifying its various subsegments.To share detailed information about the key factors influencing the growth of the market (growth potential, opportunities, drivers, industry-specific challenges and risks).Focuses on the key global Peptide Cancer Vaccine companies, to define, describe and analyze the sales volume, value, market share, market competition landscape and recent development.To project the value and sales volume of Peptide Cancer Vaccine submarkets, with respect to key regions.To analyze competitive developments such as expansions, agreements, new product launches, and acquisitions in the market.In this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of Peptide Cancer Vaccine are as follows:History Year: 2014-2018Base Year: 2018Estimated Year: 2019Forecast Year 2019 to 2025For the data information by region, company, type and application, 2018 is considered as the base year. Whenever data information was unavailable for the base year, the prior year has been considered.Complete report titled Global Peptide Cancer Vaccine Market Insights, Forecast to 2025 of 117 pages and published in March, 2019 is now available atAbout Us:Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Contact Us:Market Study Report LLC.4 North Main Street,Selbyville, Delaware 19975USAPhone: 1-302-273-0910US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email: sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:Blog: Clinical Trial Management System Market - Substantial Rise in Industrial Sectors to Offer Growth Prospects by 2025 Oracle Corporation, Medidata Solutions Inc., Parexel International Corporation, Bioclinica Inc. Clinical Trial Management System Market https://www.worldwidemarketreports.com/sample/235641 https://www.worldwidemarketreports.com/quiry/235641 www.worldwidemarketreports.com/ This Global Clinical Trial Management System report 2025 focus on global and regional market, providing information on major players like manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, traders, customers, investors and etc., major types, major applications from global and major regions such as Europe, North America, China, Japan, Southeast Asia 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.Clinical Trial Management, a subset of eClinical. A clinical trial management system (CTMS) is a software system used by biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries to manage clinical trials in clinical research. The system maintains and manages planning, performing and reporting functions, along with participant contact information, tracking deadlines and milestones.Major Players operating in market: This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, covering: Bio-Optronics, Inc. , Merge Healthcare Incorporated (An IBM Company) , Datatrak International, Inc. , Veeva Systems, Inc. , DSG Inc. (Document Solutions Group) , Eclinforce, Inc. , ERT , Forte Research Systems, Inc. , Mednet Solutions, Inc.Get Sample Report Here @: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.The Global Clinical Trial Management Market was valued at USD 547.01 million in 2016 and is projected to reach USD 1,387.17 million by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 10.9% from 2017 to 2025.Market Segmentation:1. The Clinical Trial Management Market, by Type:1.1 Enterprise1.2 On site2. The Clinical Trial Management Market, by Delivery Mode:2.1 Web-Based (Hosted) CTMS2.2 Licensed Enterprise (On Premise) CTMS2.3 Cloud-Based (SaaS) CTMS3. The Clinical Trial Management Market, by Component:3.1 Software3.2 Services4. The Clinical Trial Management Market, by End User:4.1 Pharmaceutical and Biopharmaceutical Companies4.2 Contract Research Organizations4.3 Medical Device Companies4.4 OthersMarket Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)What will you find in this Clinical Trial Management System 2025 Report? What are the challenges to market growth? Who are the key vendors in this market space? What will the market size be in 2025 and what will the growth rate be? What are the key market trends? What is driving this market? What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?Table of ContentsChapter 1 Industry OverviewChapter 2 Manufacturing Cost Structure AnalysisChapter 3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants AnalysisChapter 4 Overall Market OverviewChapter 5 Regional Market AnalysisChapter 6 Segment Market Analysis (by Type)Chapter 7 Segment Market Analysis (by Application)Chapter 8 Major Manufacturers AnalysisChapter 9 Development Trend of AnalysisChapter 10 Marketing Type Analysis*If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Place an Inquire before Purchase:About WMRWorldwide Market Reports is your one-stop repository of detailed and in-depth market research reports compiled by an extensive list of publishers from across the globe. We offer reports across virtually all domains and an exhaustive list of sub-domains under the sun. The in-depth market analysis by some of the most vastly experienced analysts provide our diverse range of clients from across all industries with vital decision making insights to plan and align their market strategies in line with current market trends. Worldwide Market Researchs well-researched inputs that encompass domains ranging from IT to healthcare enable our prized clients to capitalize upon key growth opportunities and shield against credible threats prevalent in the market in the current scenario and those expected in the near future.Contact Us:Mr. ShahWorldwide Market Reports1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154,U.STel: +1 415 871 0703Email:sales@worldwidemarketreports.comWEBSITE : Four Oregon breweries again landed among the 50 largest craft-beer producers in the United States, and theyre ones youve seen on your grocery store shelves for years. Deschutes Brewery of Bend continues to produce the most among Oregon breweries by sales volume, holding its 10th place nationally, the same as 2017, according to data released Tuesday by the Brewers Association, the group that tracks the industry. Ninkasi Brewing of Eugene moves up to the 35th spot, becoming Oregons second-largest brewery. It passed Rogue Ales of Newport, which is next at 36th. Ninkasi in 2017 was 38th, and Rogue was 32nd. Full Sail Brewing of Hood River joined Rogue in dropping down the list this year, but far more dramatically, plunging from 29th largest in 2017 to 44th in 2018. The highest sales volume craft-beer producer in the nation continues to be Yuengling & Son of Pennsylvania. It is followed by, in order, Boston Beer (Samuel Adams) of Massachusetts, Sierra Nevada of California, New Belgium Brewing of Colorado, and Duvel Moortgat, the parent company for craft breweries Brewery Ommegang of New York, Boulevard Brewing of Missouri and Firestone Walker Brewing of California. The Brewers Association also released numbers for breweries overall, with Anheuser-Busch (Budweiser, 10 Barrel Brewing, Goose Island) the largest. It was followed by MillerCoors (Miller, Coors, Henry Weinhards, Hop Valley), Constellation (Ballast Point, Corona, Modelo, Pacifico), Heinekin (Heinekin, Lagunitas) and Pabst Brewing (Pabst Blue Ribbon, Olympia, Rainier). The Craft Brew Alliance, a group of breweries that includes Widmer Brothers Brewing of Portland but is dominated by Kona Brewing of Hawaii, was the nations 12th largest brewery overall by sales volume. The CBA is minority owned by AB InBev. The Brewers Association in May will release each brewerys total barrels produced, but in December the Oregon Liquor Control Commission released total barrels sold in Oregon. Of the four breweries that landed in the national rankings, Deschutes was first in Oregon sales with over 66,000 barrels, followed by Ninkasi (3rd, at 50,227 barrels), Full Sail (7th, 22,505) then Rogue (12th, at 17,939). Other craft-beer breweries in the states top 12 producers include Pelican Brewing (5th, at 25,255), Boneyard Beer (6th at 24,928), Portland Brewing (9th at 21,804), Breakside Brewery (10th at 20,348) and Fort George Brewery (11th at 18,042). -- Andre Meunier More beer coverage: Oregon Senator Ron Wyden took the Senate floor today to enlighten his colleagues and make a plea to the U.S. state department about the ongoing retribution Portland Trail Blazers center Enes Kanter has experienced as a result of his speaking out against the Turkish government and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In the video above, watch as Wyden calls on President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to protect Kanter and advocate on his behalf. The United States cannot and must not stand idly by while Enes and his family are subject to this autocratic torment, said Wyden. The Oregon Senator then called on Pompeo and the state department to make it clear to President Erdogan and his government that they will actively resist the contrived red notices or extradition requests targeting Kanter. The fact is, our state department should be taking all necessary steps to ensure that Mr. Kanter can travel safely with the Trail Blazers or to advocate for the freedom of his people. Kanter, a Turkish national, has made international headlines over the past couple years for being a prominent and outspoken critic of Erdogan and his government. As a follower of a U.S.-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who the Turkish government accuses of masterminding a failed military coup in 2016, Kanter has become a political target. While Gulen has denied the allegations, thousands of people suspected of ties to his network have been arrested, fired or become targets in Turkey, including Kanter. In 2017, the Turkish government revoked Kanters passport and he was detained in a Bucharest airport while traveling in Romania. In January, Turkish prosecutors also issued an international arrest warrant or red notice for Kanter saying the center belongs to a terrorist organization and requested his extradition to Turkey to stand trial. Kanter believes this was done as retaliation for his political views and no longer travels internationally. As a result, Kanter recently missed a Trail Blazers game in Toronto, Canada, due to the immigration issues stemming from the red notice. A second Oregon measles outbreak has started after an infected person from Illinois visited the Salem area. Marion County public health officials confirmed Tuesday that one person has been diagnosed with measles. Another person is suspected of having measles, but officials are waiting on lab tests to confirm. This case is unrelated to the Vancouver-area outbreak that has infected 76 people as of Wednesday -- four in Multnomah County, one in King County and the rest in Clark County. The unvaccinated person who brought the virus to Oregon traveled abroad in countries where measles is common and then brought the virus back to the U.S. The person landed in Portland International Airport, jumped on trampolines in Salem and ate at a Red Robin, casting a large net where people might have been exposed to the virus. People who have received two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine are 97 percent immunized and will likely not get measles even if exposed. However, nine out of 10 unvaccinated people who are exposed to the virus will contract it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For every 1,000 people who get measles, one to two die. Multnomah and Marion county public health departments have already started to notify people who might have been exposed of the risk. Anyone who was in these locations at the specified times might have also been exposed: Youth With a Mission, 7085 Battle Creek Road SE, Salem, Feb. 18, 7 a.m. through March 11, 5 p.m. Get Air Trampoline Park, 3910 Rickey St. SE, Salem, Feb. 21, 1:45-5 p.m. Red Robin, 831 Lancaster Dr. NE, Salem, Feb. 21, 12:30-3:30 p.m. Portland International Airport: Southwest Airlines check-in area and Concourse C, Feb. 22, 12:30-5 p.m. Measles travels through the air and can linger in an enclosed space for up to two hours. Unvaccinated people who think they might have been exposed can reduce the risk of infection if they get one dose of the shot within 72 hours after exposure to the virus. To help prevent further spreading of the disease, health officials ask that people who think they might have measles call their doctor or health care provider before going to a hospital or doctors office. If you have questions about measles or exposure risk, call: Marion County Public Health Division: 503-588-5621. Multnomah County Public Health: 503-988-3406. A burglar was caught on video busting into a Vancouver video game shop, smashing a pair of display cases and making off with merchandise earlier this month. His haul? A Nintendo Game Boy Pocket and four Pokemon games. Cooper Bates, owner of Double Jump Video Games, said his business sustained about $2,500 worth of damage in the March 2 hit. The burglar used a large rock to break through the door and damage two glass cases one of which he also toppled and tried to access by repeatedly slamming the glass with his elbow. He clearly just wanted a Game Boy and thought that was the easiest way to get one, I suppose, Bates, a 28-year-old Vancouver resident, said of the burglary. Bates said surveillance footage shows the burglar had come into the retro video game store the morning before. It was clear hed been in the store before then, Bates said, because he already knew where everything was. The overnight burglary lasted about 90 seconds not including a failed first attempt to smash the door with the rock. Bates said his business, which also sells VHS tapes and toys, is looking to improve its security. He said people should contact Vancouver police if they have information about the burglary. KPTV previously reported about the incident. -- Jim Ryan; jryan@oregonian.com; 503-221-8005; @Jimryan015 Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox. More than 100 people at OHSU Hospital worked to help an unvaccinated Oregon boy survive when he contracted life-threatening tetanus on the family farm. Not one of them had ever seen a child with the bacterial disease before. An OHSU doctor offered more details this week about how the medical team dealt with the case that drew national attention after federal health officials revealed the boy spent 57 days in the hospital at a cost of nearly $1 million and whose parents declined to vaccinate him after the ordeal. Dr. Carl Eriksson, who works in OHSUs pediatric intensive care unit, couldnt reveal any more about the family but offered insight into the rarity of the disease and the challenges in treating it. OHSU doctors and nurses had nearly no hands-on knowledge on what to do, he said, because tetanus cases have dropped to about 30 per year in the U.S. since a vaccine became available to prevent it. And the cases that do develop are often in adults because children are most likely to be fully vaccinated against the disease. Eriksson and others had to consult medical literature from countries where vaccines arent prevalent and tetanus is a common health risk, he said. The boys tetanus was severe from his earliest symptoms, he said. And it is absolutely life-threatening, he said. During the boys eight weeks at OHSUs Doernbecher Childrens Hospital, he stayed in a dark room with ear plugs and other ways to block stimulation, connected to a long-term ventilator to help him breathe through a tube. With as many procedures and interventions the boy received, he could have easily had complications that killed him. Eriksson said thats partly why he and his colleagues chose to publish the case study last week for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its always hard to watch a child suffer, Eriksson said. It is harder when we know they are suffering from something thats preventable and obviously we do everything we can to try to avoid those situations. The boy, then 6, cut his forehead while playing, according to the case study. The wound was cleaned and sutured at home. Tetanus lives in the soil and apparently was too deeply embedded in the wound to be cleared out in time. Once the bacteria that causes tetanus is in the blood system, the toxin circulates throughout the body and binds to certain locations in the nervous system. Thats what causes the lockjaw and neck and back muscle spasms commonly seen in tetanus cases. Within days, the boy couldnt open his mouth and was constantly arching backward with involuntary spasms. The muscles in his airway also started to spasm, which required doctors to give him a tracheostomy and breathing tube. Because of the extreme pain he was in, the boy also dealt with anxiety, Eriksson said. He was given large suffusions of medications through an IV system to help with the symptoms and side effects. Several respiratory specialists were involved because of his trouble breathing, Eriksson said, in addition to the nurses and doctors who cared for him. They also had to reopen the home-administered suture to re-clean the wound. Eriksson that is standard care for these types of infections they want to rid the wound of as much bacteria as possible because even a little bit could make it impossible to stop the infection. Eriksson said he and others tried to talk the parents into fully vaccinating the boy because a tetanus infection doesnt make someone immune to it for life. The vaccine also wanes after a decade or so, which is why even adults who received all five doses of the DTaP -- diptheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine -- as children are encouraged to get booster shots every decade or so. The family declined. If the boy had been on a federally recommended vaccination schedule, he would have been fully immunized to tetanus by the time he was infected. He received one dose in the hospital, as is common for treating many vaccine-preventable diseases, but the parents refused a second dose or any other vaccinations, according to the case study. According to the Oregon Health Authority, just under 93 percent of teenagers were vaccinated against tetanus, diptheria and whooping cough -- one of the lowest in the country. Eriksson said he and other doctors often will try to convince parents about the risks of not vaccinating a child -- especially in cases where the risk is so apparent. The family also faced nearly $1 million in hospital bills, as well as having to pay for air transportation to the hospital and 17 days in a rehabilitation facility. An OHSU spokeswoman said she couldnt comment on how the family plans to pay, but said there are a number of grants and organizations that help defray medical costs for people who cant afford them. The case study came in the midst of the largest measles outbreak in Washington since the measles vaccine was widely adopted. Seventy-five people between Oregon and Washington have caught measles, bringing attention to some of the countrys lowest vaccination rates. Inquiries about tetanus boosters have increased at OHSU since the case study was published, said the spokeswoman. She also said that people have come to get measles shots in far greater numbers. Multnomah and Clark counties have both reported higher than usual measles vaccination rates. Clark County doctors have reported more than 400 times the amount given out in a typical year. It reminds us that vaccine-preventable illnesses are terrible disease that are often life-threatening and were not used to seeing them so when a case like this does come along its definitely eye-opening to a lot of people, Eriksson said. For more than two hours Tuesday, dozens of critics of a proposed $500 million project aimed at addressing a key bottleneck on Interstate 5 through the heart of Portlands Rose Quarter blasted the states transportation department on virtually every aspect of its plan. The estimated $500 million proposal to add merging wider shoulders in both directions on the freeway for a roughly one-mile stretch, while adding lanes for merging between the bunched up I-84 and I-405 interchanges, represents climate denialism, freeway opposition leader Aaron Brown said. A St. Johns man sang a folk song about induced demand, the phenomenon where adding lanes to a freeway encourages more drivers to use it. Others spoke of the majority minority student population at Harriet Tubman Middle School adjacent to the freeway and the air pollution they are already exposed to due to the nearby interstate. Several speakers directly appealed to Portland Commissioner Chloe Eudaly to intervene and block the project, harkening back to the citys history of killing freeway expansions - like the Mt. Hood Expressway -- and shutting down others like Harbor Drive. We will have your back, Sarah Iannarone, a former Portland State University staffer and 2016 candidate for mayor, said to Eudaly, who sat at the front of the room throughout. To ODOT, its not going to happen. Well lie on that highway before we let you build this. The hearing is just about over. Logging off. I will have a writeup on @Oregonian tomorrow. Andrew Theen (@andrewtheen) March 13, 2019 At the end of the hearing, which drew a crowd of about 200 people, Eudaly gave her own emotional account of family tragedy coping with traffic fatalities and her fears about the future. I feel your desperation about climate change and about air pollution, she added. But the transportation commissioner then threw a curveball, and she warned the largely partisan crowd that remained that they may not like what she has to say. I dont necessarily think fixing this poorly designed exchange on I-5 is a terrible idea, she said. Were not adding capacity at either end of it, she said, seeming to disagree with a principal criticism of opponents who call the project a freeway-widening effort, were trying to clear up a bottleneck. Eudaly closed by saying that while she believes the money dedicated by the state must go to the freeway project, shes convinced we can come up with something better, that will better serve our whole community. Oregons Legislature in 2017 dedicated funding to the Rose Quarter freeway project, a key component of the $5.3 billion statewide transportation package. The costs are still not finalized, but the state lawmakers approved $30 million per year toward the freeway beginning in 2022. That money, according to state statute, will be dedicated until the project is finished or bonds issued to pay for construction have been repaid. The agency expects to issue anywhere from $420 million to $450 million in bonds for the project over a 20- or 25-year period, paying back that debt through gas tax revenue. Construction could last four to five years, with the freeway completed perhaps by 2027. Not all of the more than 70 people who spoke at the Oregon Convention Center meeting Tuesday opposed the project. A handful supported the plan, including a Lloyd District transportation association official and several trade workers who said the project would bring much-needed jobs. Representatives from the city of Hillsboro and freight advocates also testified in support of the project, citing the bottleneck as a critical component to the metro area and the regions broader economy in need of fixing. Michael Fyffe, who said he was a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, said stopping this project would not serve the region. He said while no project is perfect, the Rose Quarter proposal is a start. You cant fix everything at once anyway, he said of the regions traffic woes. The public hearing came amid a 45-day public comment period on the states recently released 108-page environmental assessment on the project. Oregon Department of Transportation officials say if the Rose Quarter project is built it would slightly reduce emissions by 2045 compared with building nothing on that stretch of roadway. It would also slightly improve travel times for some commuters, the state said. Megan Channell, the states major projects manager heading the effort, told the crowd the current proposal comes after an analysis of some 70 options dating back nearly a decade. She said the area of the freeway has "highest crash rate of any urban freeway in the state. She touted the above-the-freeway project components like a 36-foot-wide bike and pedestrian path on North Williams and a new overpass connecting Hancock and Dixon streets and a separate bike and pedestrian bridge at Clackamas Street as improvements. The project also calls for capping a section of the freeway. That plan doesnt currently allow for building on those freeway caps, a chief criticism from a group of architects and community leaders who are calling for a broader Albina Vision to bring housing, development and activity to the historically black neighborhood. But none of those surface street projects appeared to have support from the vast majority of the public who attended. The state is proposing eliminating Flint Avenues overpass, which today serves as a popular connector for bike commuters traveling from North Portland to the Broadway Bridge. Jillian Detweiler, executive director of the nonprofit transportation advocacy group The Street Trust, said the bike components didnt cut it: They dont rise to the level and quality that we really need to make a transition away from automobiles. Throughout the hearing, Portland residents criticized the state for its claim that the stretch of freeway is crash-prone in particular. One man asked for a moment of silence to recognize a Madison High School student who was struck and seriously injured this month on 82nd Avenue, a state-owned and -operated highway. What the project would mean for Tubman school in particular was a top priority Tuesday, with a handful of students in attendance. Bryan Chu, an eighth-grade language arts teacher at Tubman Middle School, said its unclear if the school would be shuttered during construction or what the project might mean for the majority students of color who attend it. Chu said he can only assume there is no plan for Tubman. We have always been made to pay the price for Portlands progress, he said, before adding, Black lives matter, black students matter, black schools matter, black lung matters. Others criticized the state for its recently released environmental assessment for failing to include data showing how it concluded building the project would result in a slight reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Rian Windsheimer, the states top transportation official overseeing the metro area, told the crowd the project Portlanders see today is very different than the one proposed three decades ago. And he said the state isnt finished hearing from the public. Windsheimer added that the state plans to release the data that led it to conclude its travel times, emissions reductions and congestion data as soon as possible. The state will continue to accept public comment on the project until 5 p.m. April 1. -- Andrew Theen atheen@oregonian.com 503-294-4026 @andrewtheen Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox. One of two Proud Boys members charged in a June assault of a man in Northeast Portland was arrested Tuesday and booked into the downtown Portland jail. Donovon Lyle Flippo, 23, of Vancouver is charged with third-degree assault, a felony, and fourth-degree assault, a misdemeanor. He was transferred to Multnomah County from Clark County and booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center on the arrest warrant at 7:45 a.m., according to jail records. He had been arrested on the warrant in Clark County on March 6, according to a clerk at Clark County Superior Court. Timothy Ledwith, 35, said he was punched June 8 by Flippo and Proud Boys member Tusitala John Tiny Toese after they exchanged words near Northeast 12th Avenue and Broadway. Toese punched him in the face, Ledwith said. Ledwith fell to the ground, hit his head and when he came to, noticed Flippo standing over him. Another witness reported that Flippo had struck Ledwith next, according to Ledwith. Ledwith said he later missed a call from a deputy district attorney, and when he called back twice, didnt hear back from a prosecutor until late February when another deputy district attorney contacted him about an hour before Willamette Week ran a story about Toeses alleged assault and the lack of a prosecution. March 5 Facebook post on Tusitala "Tiny" Toese's page. In early March, Toese posted on his Facebook page that hes in his homeland, Samoa, and "will be back to stand court in Portland,'' but didnt indicate when that would be. Bail was set at $7,500 for Flippo, and he posted 10 percent, or $750, and was released from custody about 9 p.m. Hes set to be arraigned on the indictment at 9:45 a.m. Wednesday in the Justice Center, Courtroom 3. Shortly after he was arrested in Clark County last week on the Multnomah County arrest warrant, he posted on his Facebook page a link to a Gofundme.com page, seeking support for his legal fees. Lindsay Schubiner, a program director for Western States Center, which works to counter white nationalism and promote inclusive democracy, said the center had encouraged Ledwith to file a report after the alleged assault. "I think this development today is overdue but its encouraging because it means local authorities are taking Proud Boy violence seriously,'' she said. -- Maxine Bernstein Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian Proud Boy member Donovon Flippo entered not guilty pleas Wednesday morning to third-degree assault and fourth-degree assault charges stemming from an alleged unprovoked attack on a man in Northeast Portland on June 8. Multnomah County Circuit Judge Karin Immergut ordered Flippo, 23, to have no contact with the allegedvictim or with his codefendant, Tusitala Tiny Toese, while the case is pending. The judge also ordered Flippo, of Vancouver, to report to pretrial supervision. When asked if he had any comment about his arrest and indictment as he left court with three other men, Flippo said, No maam, and walked off. Flippo was arrested on a Multnomah County warrant in Clark County and transported Tuesday to the Multnomah County Detention Center. By about 9 p.m. Tuesday, another Vancouver man had posted 10 percent of Flippos $7,500 bail, and Flippo was released from custody, according to court and jail records. He told court officials hes lived with a friend for the past year in Vancouver and works for Pacific Response. He said he didnt know the alleged victim, according to court records. His next court date is April 30. Timothy Ledwith, 35, said he was punched in the face by Flippo and Toese in the area of Northeast 12th Avenue and Broadway. Ledwith was waiting to cross the street at a stoplight when he saw Toese, Flippo and a third man in a truck stopped at the light. They were yelling things about Trump, and shouting Build the Wall! Ledwith said he motioned at them with his hand or arm, trying to dismiss them. As Ledwith crossed the street, they yelled homophobic slurs at him, he said, so he shouted an expletive back at Toese, calling him by his nickname Tiny. When Ledwith got to the other corner, he said he saw Toese and Flippo get out of the truck and rush toward him. Ledwith said he suffered a minor concussion and went to the hospital, where he received stitches for a split lip. Toese hasnt been arrested yet on the indictment. His Facebook posts from early March say hes in Samoa, but plans to "be back to stand court in Portland.'' Toese and Flippo appear together in many social media posts, citing their allegiance to the right-wing Proud Boys group and often appear at right-wing demonstrations in Portland. -- Maxine Bernstein Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox. The Oregon Senate overwhelmingly approved a measure requiring schools to teach students about the Holocaust and other acts of genocide. Senators voted 27-0 on Tuesday to include the Holocaust as part of the statewide social studies curriculum. A recent poll found that two-thirds of American millennials surveyed could not identify what Auschwitz is. Only 10 states require some level of Holocaust and genocide education in the classroom. Chief sponsor of the bill Sen. Rob Wagner, D-Lake Oswego, said that more education is needed to combat the "recent increase in anti-Semitic violence and hate speech" across the country. The measure now goes to the House for approval. -- The Associated Press Portland schools Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero spent much of Monday evening consoling the family of a man who was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he told attendees of the school board meeting Tuesday. In addressing the reported arrest, Guerrero had a message for immigrant parents throughout the district: We have your back. The superintendent did not offer information about the reported arrest beyond the fact that it occurred within the last couple of weeks and that the man detained has children enrolled in Portland Public Schools. Guerrero said the arrest was one of many immigration-related detentions hes recently heard of in the area. Im horrified. Im angered that one of these detainees is a PPS parent, who like so many of us was on their way to drop off their children at school," he said. This is unforgivable and its inhumane. An ICE spokeswoman said she could only confirm an arrest if provided specific information, such as a name and date of birth or alien registration number, which were not available at the time of publishing. She did, however, say the agency typically doesnt arrest anyone near schools. Current ICE guidance directs agency personnel to avoid conducting enforcement activities at sensitive locations unless they have prior approval from an appropriate supervisory official or in the event of exigent circumstances, ICE spokeswoman Tanya Roman wrote in a statement. The locations specified in the guidance include schools, places of worship and hospitals. Agency records show that, during the period of stepped-up immigration arrests during the past fiscal year, 90 percent of those detained had criminal convictions, were facing pending criminal charges or had been previously issued a final deportation order by an immigration judge, the New York Times reported. The agency has found itself in hot water with local activists over the last couple of years, beginning when news broke of a mistaken arrest in Hillsboro in 2017. In November of that year, agents mistakenly picked up a Latino county employee near the Washington County Courthouse. U.S. Reps. Suzanne Bonamici and Earl Blumenauer called for an investigation into the incident. Last February, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against ICE in the wake of rumors agents were walking the halls of state courthouses, which public officials said was having a chilling effect on local immigrant communities. Guerrero told the audience he was especially disturbed by the reported arrest because of his upbringing as the son of immigrants whose education through public schools opened many doors. He also referenced news reports about families impacted by immigration-related detentions over the last year. Students shouldnt have to come to school anxious that their parent their mom or their father wont be home after school, he said. Parents shouldnt fear of not being able to take or pick up their kids from school because of the potential to be detained. Guerrero closed his remarks by pledging support for immigrant parents and thanking the board for passing a resolution last year requiring immigration officers to notify the district superintendent and general counsel before making an arrest on school grounds. While its not within my purview to control immigration issues or policies beyond our campus boundaries, I want to publicly reaffirm our commitment that our schools will serve as beacons of learning for every student, regardless of immigration status for themselves or their families," he said. Gov. Kate Brown is working to make good on her campaign pledge to extend Oregons notoriously short school year to the national benchmark of 180 days, the single most expensive item on her list of school upgrades shed bankroll with a promised $2 billion corporate tax hike. But a panel composed largely of school district superintendents, assembled at Browns request to guide the state in making the switch to a longer school year, came back with a different take: Think long and hard before you force districts to lengthen the school year and, whatever you do, do not mandate 180 days. Browns spokeswoman said Tuesday that the governor is undaunted in her drive to ensure that all Oregon students get a longer school year. Browns takeaway from the work group report, spokeswoman Lisa Morawski said, is that its members feel strongly that extending the school year alone wont improve results a position the governor agrees with. Thats why shes also working to come up with money for more preschool, smaller class sizes, additional career-technical courses and improved teacher effectiveness, Morawski said. In their report, work group members spell out numerous objections to lengthening the school year. Small rural districts are doing well financially and academically with four-day weeks that will never add up to 180 days of class. Adding plentiful extra instruction such as summer school or after-school tutoring for students who need it most would yield a bigger payoff than adding two weeks for everyone. Making students school experiences better, not longer, should take priority. But their report, issued earlier this month, also contains faulty or misleading information. It casts doubts on whether Washington students get, on average, two more weeks of school each year than Oregon students do. The report says Washington schools count activities toward instruction time that Oregon schools dont, including all the time that teachers spend undergoing on-the-job training. In actuality, Washington schools arent allowed to count any teacher professional development time as instruction, whereas Oregon schools can count 30 hours of it toward the required hours of instruction. Washington schools are allowed to count recess and the passing time between classes as part of the instructional day but Washingtons much higher requirements for the number of hours of instruction mean Washington students do receive the equivalent of weeks more education each year. The report also indicated there is no research that shows the value of lengthening the school year, saying there has been only one extensive empirical review and its author concluded its mostly a theoretical debate based on personal beliefs. In fact, that studys official summary says extending school time can be an effective way to support student learning, particularly for students more at risk of school failure and the strongest research designs (of studies examining the effect of a longer school year) produced the most consistent positive results. Oregon Department of Education spokesman Marc Siegel did not respond to questions Tuesday about the reports characterization of the studys findings. The typical Oregon student was offered 170 days of school during the 2017-18 academic year. Only two students in the state had an 180-day year, state records show. Trailing national norms Oregon has long had one of the shortest school years in the nation, and some parents feel strongly that their children should have as much school time as those in other states, said Oregon PTA President Scott Overton. But the work group, which included just two parents, found almost nothing it liked about a longer school year. The group also included 22 superintendents or other high-level district administrators, two students, representatives from two employee unions and five student advocacy groups and a few other people. Extending the school year to 180 days or the instructional hour equivalent (1,080 hours) across all school districts will do little to improve student achievement, their report asserts. The typical Oregon student was offered 170 days of class last school year, an analysis by the Oregon Department of Education found. About 5 percent of students, mostly in remote rural school districts where the school week consists of four extra-long days instead of five to save money and time used on transportation, had school years of about 140 to 150 school days. Oregon doesnt mandate how many school days districts must offer. Instead, the state requires at least a certain number of hours of instruction 900 for elementary and middle school students and 990 for high schoolers. Parent-teacher conferences, up to 30 hours of teacher training, time spent on academically related field trips and up to 60 hours of recess for students in third grade and younger all count as instructional hours. Many other states that define the school year in hours not days, including Washington, require 1,080 hours of instruction either in all grades or just in high school. Washington requires 1,000 hours of instruction in kindergarten through eighth grade. Opinions vary in Portland In Portland Public Schools, the states largest school district, a coalition of parents made a concerted push several years ago to get more instructional time for high school students by granting students full academic schedules. The coalition succeeded in ending the districts practice of requiring most students to have part-time schedules or to take part in large study halls not led by certified teachers. The Portland parents also persuaded the state Board of Education to enact a requirement, from which it has since backpedaled, that more than 80 percent of every high schools students be scheduled for a full academic day. Lisa Zuniga, a parent who was active in the push to get Portland students more instructional time, said she likes the idea of adding instructional time. The district currently offers students 173 class days. Adding a week could be a game-changer, even more so if all students (by this I mean high schoolers) maximize their time in the classroom, she said. But, she added, that could be a challenge given the past culture of PPS. Zuniga said shed like to see the district adopt policies and curricula that set students up for success in college, such as requiring four years of math for high schoolers across the board. But the leader of Portlands teachers union says lobbying for a 180-day calendar or requiring a minimum of 1,080 of instructional hours isnt anywhere near a top priority. Our general position is that we want a better year before a longer year, so its not at all that were not interested in a longer school year, but we do not want more days the way were experiencing them now, Portland Association of Teachers President Suzanne Cohen said. And the school board chair, Rita Moore, goes even further, saying she would oppose a state directive to add days or hours to the school year even with the state paying hundreds of millions more dollars to fund it. She called lawmakers unqualified to make those decisions because they know so little about the realities in Oregon schools these days. But fellow board member Julia Brim-Edwards is on board with lengthening Oregons school year to match the national benchmark. Cohen, the union president, said Portland teachers would prefer to invest in mental health supports, bolster arts offerings in schools, reduce class sizes and minimize the number of classrooms that blend fourth- and fifth-graders in the district. Do we want a longer school year? Of course. But not in isolation, she said. Cohen also said increasing minimums for instructional hours or classroom days would lead to squabbling over definitions. Do advisory periods count? What about passing periods? I would want to caution against penny-pinching hours, she said. Cohen said she regularly hears from parents who remember school years complete with arts offerings in elementary school and myriad electives during their middle- and high-school years who want their kids to have the same. Every Portland school currently has at least a part-time art teacher thanks to the citys voter-approved arts tax. Lets have a school day that reflects what Oregonians expect, Cohen said. Moore, the school board chair, said that a 180-day school calendar isnt just a low priority for her. It isnt even a proposal she said shes willing to entertain until legislators staff schools with counselors and teachers aides, among other things. She bristled at carrying out mandates from Salem when, she said, legislators havent been paying attention to conditions on the ground for years. I would say a) theyre unqualified to make those decisions and b) 198 school districts across the state are not going to have the same needs, she said. Moore regularly brings up a 2018 education department study that found the states K-12 schools would need about $1 billion more per year to get nearly all students to meet state academic benchmarks and raise graduation rates to 95 percent. She legislators should focus on shoring up funding for 170-day school years before they mandate more hours or days. We have needs across the board that have gone unfulfilled for 30 years, she said. We need to buy books. We need more librarians and specialists. We have 100-year-old buildings we need to upgrade. We have needs all over the place. Brim-Edwards, who helped lead the push to increase instructional time for the districts high school students, said she doesnt see a reason the state cant take both approaches. If were truly going to prepare students for college, career and life, we need to optimize the current time they now have in the classroom and add to it, she said. Its not a zero-sum game at all. Brim-Edwards said shes heard from teachers and students who say they dont have time to cover all the material during a given term. Thats why she supports the governors plan, regardless of the price tag that comes with adding another two weeks to the calendar. Members of the Joint Interim Committee on Student Success, shown here at a student safety roundtable in Bend, toured the state in spring, are now grappling with questions about whether to award school district hundreds of millions of dollars to lengthen the school year and how to ensure the money is used as lawmakers wish. High costs District spokesman Harry Esteve said every additional instructional day would cost Portland schools $2.3 million. That puts the price of adding seven days to the current calendar at about $16 million. Statewide, legislative staffers have estimated paying for a 180-day year would take another $560 million in the states two year budget to cover the costs, primarily salary increases for teachers and other district employees. Yes, its expensive but its an investment that needs to be made, Brim-Edwards said. Were so far behind. Lawmakers have yet to take any votes on whether they favor a longer school year nor how they will pay for it. Subcommittees of the Joint Committee on Student Success are grappling with those topics, however. In their report, members of the governors task force on instructional time were clear in their conclusion: Local school district leaders should be given wide latitude to choose what is best for their students and communities, and lengthening Oregons short school year should not be a priority. There are higher leverage and more cost-effective strategies to improve student achievement and close opportunity gaps, they wrote. -- Betsy Hammond betsyhammond@oregonian.com -- Eder Campuzano ecampuzano@oregonian.com Dear Amy: I'm a recent college graduate working in my first "adult" job. I work very closely every day with an older co-worker who essentially oversees all of my work activities. Recently, while trying to connect with him on LinkedIn (with no success, because he isn't a user), I Googled his name and the state he lives in. The first result was an article from several years ago with his mugshot, saying he had been arrested a decade ago for an alleged sexual assault on a minor. The article didn't give details on how the case ended (but I assume he was found not guilty, otherwise I assume he would be in jail). Still, I looked into his background a little more with free online tools and discovered that he has many other crimes on his record, including burglary and domestic assault. Basically, I don't know how to handle this information. I feel incredibly disturbed and uncomfortable since learning this, and I'm dreading continuing to work with him. I'm not sure if I should bring it up with HR, or try to let it go. What should I do? -- Concerned in Colorado Dear Concerned: It is never wise to override your own instincts if you don't feel safe. Many states have passed "ban the box" laws, making it illegal for an employer to ask about criminal convictions on a job application (although they can ask and should also do a background check before making an employment offer). It's possible that your workplace has not done its due diligence -- or that this person has been arrested, but never convicted, of a crime (it's not quite clear). Because these crimes involve violence against people and property, you should take your concerns to HR. Most likely, your HR representative wouldn't comment to you, or reveal any aspect of your co-worker's criminal history. But if your HR rep told you, "Yes, we are aware of all of this. We hired Mr. Smith eight years ago as part of a parole work-release program and we are very happy with his rehabilitation," would this mollify your concerns? Obviously, your workplace should never knowingly put you in proximity to a violent criminal. You have the right and the responsibility to attend to your own concerns and safety -- in and out of the workplace. After your own investigation, you will have to make an informed decision regarding what to do about what you have learned. Dear Amy: My sister took her family to the beach and had a professional photographer take a picture of the whole family. It is framed and hangs in the hall of her home. One granddaughter asked to have the photographer also take her picture with my sister by herself. This picture is framed and on an end table in the living room. I think this shows favoritism and probably hurts the other grandkids. My sister says this granddaughter is the only one who asked for a separate picture, so she is going to display it. What do you think? -- Auntie M Dear Auntie: Mainly, I think this is really none of your business. Unless your sister explicitly asks you about this, you needn't weigh in. If your sister conveys open favoritism toward this one granddaughter in other ways (aside from displaying the photograph), then the photo will indeed remind other grandchildren that they don't have star status with their gran. Many grandparents do have special relationships with one grandchild (often the firstborn). But smart grandparents work very hard to appreciate their individual grandchildren as individuals -- not as supporting satellites in the favored child's constellation. Children are very quick to perceive even subtle favoritism, and I agree with you that it is hurtful. Dear Amy: I admit I enjoyed your "best of" columns from 10 years ago. I was surprised to see a question from "Closed Minded," a politically liberal person who expressed disdain for politically conservative -- as well as religious -- people. Wow. Talk about a real lesson from the archives. Thank you especially for this thought: "The most gracious and socially adept people I know always find a way "in" as a way to get to know someone. They dip beneath the surface, ask questions and listen to the answers. If you do this, you'll learn that even zealots have hometowns and favorite movies." -- A Fan Dear Fan: I was interested to run across that question, too. The main takeaway for me was that our current political discord seems to have been percolating for some time. (You can contact Amy Dickinson via email: ASKAMY@amydickinson.com. Readers may send postal mail to Ask Amy, P.O. Box 194, Freeville, NY 13068. You can also follow her on Twitter @askingamy or like her on Facebook.) Viewers of Portlands KGW-TV newscasts may have noticed some new faces, some absent ones, and should be on the lookout for some other changes scheduled to begin this Saturday. As Nina Mehlhaf, a reporter for the Portland NBC affiliate, posted on Facebook on March 10, shes leaving her weekend evening news anchor role, and joining the weekday morning KGW News at Sunrise crew. BIG NEWS This is my last WEEKEND shift KGW-TV. Huh?! Come wake up early with me and the team on Sunrise starting March 18th! Cant wait to bring you a new format of morning news that digs deeper and engages with you so much better, going to your community with topics youre passionate about with Brenda Braxton Ashley Korslien Drew Carney (KGW-TV) KGW Rod Hill Chris McGinness Posted by Nina Mehlhaf on Sunday, March 10, 2019 No ones leaving, Im joining, Mehlhaf said of the Sunrise show, joking, Were going to have 20 anchors. Mehlhaf said shell be waking up at 2 a.m. to join the weekday morning news team, including Brenda Braxton, Ashley Korslien, Drew Carney, Rod Hill and Chris McGinnis. Mehlhaf also said that theyll be working on changes to the morning show format, with more information and fewer talking heads who robotically repeat headlines. Rick Jacobs, KGW executive news director, confirms Mehlhafs announcement. Mehlhaf leaves the weekend news anchor chair to join the sunrise team on Monday, March 18. Filling Mehlhafs weekend evening anchor spot will be Maggie Vespa, a reporter who had previously been anchor of the weekend morning news on KGW. And filling Vespas role as the weekend morning anchor will be the recently hired Brittany Falkers, who had been a morning anchor at WFRV-TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Shes been on the air reporting already, Jacobs says of Falkers, who takes over the KGW weekend morning anchor shift this Saturday. Another new face is also a somewhat familiar one. Meteorologist Joe Raineri, who had most recently worked at KIRO-TV in Seattle, joined KGW at the beginning of the year as weekend evening meteorologist and weekday reporter. He replaced Brian Brennan, who moved to Tucson to be closer to family, says Jacobs. Brennan now works for KGUN 9, in Tucson, as a weather anchor and reporter. Raineri has worked in the Portland market before, including at KATU-TV. Also joining the KGW team is Morgan Romero, who came from Boises KTVB-TV, where she was known as Morgan Boydston, and was an anchor and investigative reporter. Romero joined KGW in late February. Shes a reporter, and she loves investigative reporting, says Jacobs, adding that Romeros skills will be an asset to the investigative team that includes Kyle Iboshi and Cristin Severance. Severance came to KGW with her husband, Dan Haggerty, who was hired to replace Joe Donlon -- after Donlon left to work for WGN-TV in Chicago -- as a main anchor of weeknight news. Haggerty and Severance arrived at KGW after working for the CBS affiliate in Dallas, Texas. Haggerty and Laural Porter co-anchor weekday evening newscasts. Im really excited about these hires, says Jacobs. While he says he doesnt want to go into too many details about what changes might be coming to the weekday morning newscast, Jacobs says the show has been doing well for KGW. Change is inevitable in this business, Jacobs says. And Im fortunate to have found some really good journalists. -- Kristi Turnquist kturnquist@oregonian.com 503-221-8227 @Kristiturnquist Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox. Rwandas renewed commitment to fighting corruption has led to the enactment of many laws covering anti-corruption, whistleblower protection, asset recovery, money laundering, and terrorism financing. The Office of the Ombudsman of Rwanda was established as the coordinating organ in the fight against graft, with investigation and prosecution powers and specialized chambers dealing with corruption at Intermediate Court. A national-level advisory council against corruption and injustice was created to direct strategies and improve the sharing of information related to corrupt activity. Rwanda is also a member of several international and regional organizations, such as the East African Association of Anti-Corruption Authorities and its asset recovery subgroup, as well as the Commonwealth Africa Anti-Corruption Center, the African Union Advisory Board on Corruption, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and others. The 2018 Rwanda Governance Scorecard issued by the Rwanda Governance Board showed that 83 percent of citizens support the governments anti-corruption, transparency, and accountability efforts. World Bank rankings show Rwanda has made considerable progress, rising from a 26 percent score in 1996 to 71 percent in 2017. Transparency Internationals 2018 Corruption Perceptions Index ranked Rwanda 48, up from 83 in 2005 and 121 in 2006. Rwanda currently ranks 29th worldwide in doing business, and is second in Sub Saharan Africa only to Mauritius. In September 2018, Rwanda enacted a new law (n 54/2018 of 13/08/2018) to fight corruption. It expanded the definition of corruption to include bribery, sexual corruption, embezzlement, making decisions based on favoritism, friendship or hatred, influence peddling, illicit enrichment, use of public property for unintended purposes, abuse of power, and demanding or receiving undue or excessive money. The new law includes a provision to encourage reporting corruption and to discourage both giving and taking bribes: A person who gives or receives an illegal benefit with the aim of helping justice organs to get evidences for the offence of corruption is not considered as having committed an offense, if he or she informs the judicial organs before the occurrence of the act. There is no criminal liability for a person who gives or receives an illegal benefit and informs the justice organs before the commencement of criminal investigations by providing information and evidence. Importantly, corruption offenses in Rwanda are imprescriptible that is, they are not subject to any statute of limitations. Specialized chambers at intermediate court level were established to prosecute corruption. The court system in Rwanda is headed by the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court with its four chambers, twelve Intermediate Courts, and forty-one Primary Courts. Each intermediate court now has specialized chambers for corruption in criminal matters. Public and private institutions, civil society members, and international organizations are required to implement mechanisms for the prevention of corruption. The Office of the Ombudsman has the power to request administrative sanctions against the leader of an organization that fails to comply with Rwandas corruption prevention measures. Concerning asset recovery, if the defendant is found guilty of corruption, the court is required to order the confiscation of property or proceeds resulting from the offense even if the prosecutor does not request a prosecution. There is also vicarious liability for companies, cooperatives, institutions or any organizations with legal person status. _____ Patrick Bizimana, pictured above, is a student of IACA Masters in Anti-Corruption Studies, and holder of Masters in Business Law. He has worked with the Office of the Ombudsman Rwanda (the Anti-Corruption Agency) for nine years and is an Assistant Lecturer at Adventist University of Central Africa. He can be contacted here. Some advertisers are backing away from Tucker Carlson and Jeanine Pirros Fox News shows after the two high-profile hosts were accused of making bigoted statements, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Carlson is under fire for misogynistic, homophobic and racist comments unearthed from past radio appearances. Pirro came under scrutiny for comments she made about Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who is Muslim. This week, at least five companies have pulled their support. Beginning Sunday, Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group that monitors conservative media, released several waves of audio of Carlson's 2006-to 2011 appearances on the "Bubba the Love Sponge Show," a Tampa, Florida-based radio show. In one set of recordings, Carlson made statements about child rape and comments that could be construed as misogynist. "If you're talking to a feminist and she's giving you, 'Well, you know men really need to be more sensitive,' no actually, men don't need to be more sensitive. You just need to be quiet and do what you're told," he is heard saying in one recording. In another release of Carlson's appearances compiled by Media Matters, Carlson is heard calling Iraq a "crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys" and jokingly using a homophobic slur. SHEEX, a bedding company, told The Hollywood Reporter that "due to the inappropriate statements of Tucker Carlson that have recently come to light, SHEEX has made the decision to cease advertising on his television program, Tucker Carlson Tonight." Pharmaceutical company Astra Zeneca tweeted on Monday that it had ceased advertising on his show and would not do so in the future. In a statement to The Washington Post this week, Carlson was defiant. "Media Matters caught me saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago," he said. "Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, how about this: I'm on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch. Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why." Pirro, meanwhile, has earned condemnation - including a rebuke from Fox News - for insinuating on Saturday's edition of her show that Omar, who has criticized Israel, did not support the Constitution because she was Muslim and wore a hijab. "She's not getting this anti-Israel sentiment doctrine from the Democrat Party," Pirro said on Saturday. "So if it's not rooted in the party, where is she getting it from? Think about it. Omar wears a hijab, which according to the Koran 33:59, tells women to cover so they won't get molested. Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?" Pirro's remarks were condemned as Islamophobic. "We absolutely condemn Ms. Pirro's comments, which are offensive and completely contrary to our values," a spokesperson for Letgo, a website for buying and selling used goods, told THR. "We are in the process of ensuring our ads will no longer run during her show." NerdWallet also told THR that "we're no longer advertising on this show and don't have plans to in the future". Novo Nordisk, another pharmaceutical company, told The Post it was "re-evaluating" its ads on Pirro's show. "We advertise across many cable networks to raise awareness of our medicines and the disease they treat," company spokesman Ken Inchausti said in a statement. "We respect each person's right to express their thinking and beliefs, however, we are re-evaluating our advertising on this program at this time." He confirmed that Novo Nordisk will continue to advertise elsewhere on Fox News. A spokeswoman for Fox News did not immediately respond to requests for comment. After Saturday's remarks caused a firestorm, Pirro responded in a statement. "I've seen a lot of comments about my opening statement from Saturday night's show and I did not call Rep. Omar un-American," she said. 'My intention was to ask a question and start a debate, but of course because one is Muslim does not mean you don't support the Constitution. I invite Rep. Omar to come on my show any time to discuss all of the important issues facing America today." Media Matters planned a protest outside Fox News's Manhattan headquarters on Wednesday morning to pressure advertisers into abandoning the network. CNN reports that network executives were attempting to woo prospective advertisers that same day. The Women's March and Ultra Violet, as well as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said on Twitter that their organizations would join the protest in New York. Some protesters held signs saying "Drop Fox" or "Fox News is Bad for Business" as a group walked in front of Fox News's building. Media Matters also has begun an activist hashtag campaign, #DropFox, that aims to convince advertisers through social media to pull their money from Fox News. Subscribe to get the Morning Briefing newsletter delivered to your email inbox weekdays at 7 a.m. Todays stories TETANUS CASE: An Oregon boys rare case of tetanus required the care of 100 doctors and nurses. Read more. MEASLES OUTBREAK: The Vancouver-area measles outbreak count rises to 76. Read more. SECOND OUTBREAK: An Oregonian has been diagnosed with measles in a second outbreak. Read more. JOHN CANZANO: The view from the Pac-12 Conferences Imperial Palace lacks visibility. Read more. PORTLAND LIFE: Four intriguing things about this anonymous Portland womans $60,000-a-year lifestyle (commentary). Read more. SKIER DIES: A Nordic skier rescued after a night in the cold near Bend has died. Read more. OREGON CLIMATE: Oregons snowpack makes a remarkable recovery, improving the states water supply outlook. Read more. TAX DEDUCTIONS: A bill would cut Oregons mortgage interest deduction for second homes and high earners. Read more. BUS CRASH: Portland middle-schoolers suffer minor injuries in a bus crash near Sandy. Read more. SEX ASSAULT KITS: 882 DNA profiles have been identified after testing old sexual assault kits from three Oregon counties. Read more. HOMELESS POPULATION: A floating homeless shelter? A Portland entrepreneur asks why not? Read more. OREGON BEER: Four Oregon breweries are among the nations biggest craft producers. Read more. VOTING IN OREGON: Gov. Kate Brown pushes for prepaid mail-in ballots. Read more. IRISH FOOD: 23 favorite St. Patricks Day recipes, including Irish soda bread, corned beef, and Guinness cake. Read more. SPRING BREAK: 12 Oregon spring break adventures for any kind of weather. Read more. OREGON WILDERNESS: President Donald Trump signs a bill to create Oregons Devils Staircase Wilderness. Read more. HEALTH CARE: Oregon health insurance giant Cambia enters into a cross-country merger. Read more. CASHLESS CONFECTIONS: Voodoo Doughnut starts taking credit cards. Read more. PORTLAND HOUSING: A controversial Portland infill plan narrowly advances. Read more. END OF THE RAINBOW: A rainbow dazzled the Portland area Tuesday afternoon. Read more. More news Proud Boy member Donovan Flippo arrested, charged with assault in June 8 attack in NE Portland Liz Weston: What to do about friend who lost his job and has $10,000 in credit card debt but is still spending like crazy Ask Amy: He looks like 'the guy who cant commit after a decade. But heres the whole story Dear Abby: Wifes animals have overtaken the house and husband doesnt like it one bit Carolyn Hax: Tortured by visions of boyfriends 50 former lovers Find more at oregonlive.com Todays comics Click here to see today's comics Todays obituaries Click here to find area deaths reported recently Today in history AROUND THE WORLD: On March 13, 1954, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu began during the First Indochina War as Viet Minh forces attacked French troops, who were defeated nearly two months later. A psychiatric patient accused of killing a Eugene man never should have been let out of a secure treatment center on a holiday pass, a $6.5 million lawsuit claims. The lawsuit lists as a defendant the states Psychiatric Security Review Board and Springfield police. The state board was overseeing the care of Joshua Jaschke when he failed to return after getting the pass to stay with his mother in southern Oregon in December 2016, according to the suit filed Monday. Police later let Jaschke walk free after an encounter, the suit says. Then in March 2017, 37-year-old Jaschke repeatedly stabbed Spiros Ghenatos in the face and body in a Eugene apartment, the lawsuit says. The bedridden Ghenatos, 49, was a frail and ill man, the suit says. The suit doesnt indicate how the two men knew each other. Officials from the state and the psychiatric board didnt return a request for comment. Springfield police also didnt immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. According to media reports and criminal charging papers, Jaschke was visibly coated in blood when he left the apartment and tried to carjack South Eugene High Schools principal before stripping off his clothes in a nearby creek. Police took Jaschke into custody while he was wearing only underwear and boots, according to news accounts. Jaschke has been charged with murder and other crimes and is scheduled to go to trial in Lane County Circuit Court in April. The lawsuit claims Jaschke never should have been allowed out on a holiday pass because he had a history of acting dangerously and erratically, including stabbing, robbing, menacing, thieving from, and assaulting human beings in Oregon. Jaschke had been sentenced in 2006 to 20 years of supervision under the psychiatric board for first-degree assault, court records show. He was about 10 years into that sentence when he was granted the pass, according to the suit. Jaschke didnt visit his mother as expected and he didnt return to the psychiatric facility as required, the suit says. Springfield police detained and handcuffed him because he was involved in a domestic disturbance and was acting erratically, the suit states. News reports said that happened shortly after he got the holiday pass. Police phoned state officials about what should be done with Jaschke, according to the suit. Police ended up releasing him. After the telephone discussion between all defendants concluded, Jaschke was released from his handcuffs and walked off into the Oregon night, the lawsuit states. On March 27, 2017, Jaschke fatally stabbed Ghenatos, the suit says. Court papers list Ghenatos mother as the only heir to his estate. Eugene lawyers Travis Eiva and Erin Zemper are representing Ghenatos estate. The suit was filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court. Read the suit here. -- Aimee Green agreen@oregonian.com o_aimee Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox. Former Seattle Seahawk and free agent safety Earl Thomas is expected to sign with the Baltimore Ravens, according to reports Wednesday morning. Thomas will sign a four-year, $55 million contract with $32 million guaranteed as the NFLs official free agency period started today. Former Seahawks S Earl Thomas intends to sign a four-year, $55 million deal that includes $32 million fully guaranteed at signing with the Baltimore Ravens, league source tells ESPN. Deal includes $22 million in first nine months. Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) March 13, 2019 Thomas, 29, the Seahawks anchor in the secondary, will leave after spending the first nine years of his career in Seattle. He was looking for a lucrative, long-term contract extension and the Ravens were interested after they released Eric Weddle last week. Yeaaaaaaaa !! Earl Thomas (@Earl_Thomas) March 13, 2019 Thomas held out of the Seahawks training camp as he attempted to force the Seahawks to giving him a contract extension. He returned before regular season started and posted three interceptions in the first four games before suffering a season-ending broken leg. Thomas had been connected to the Dallas Cowboys and his home state of Texas, but the Cowboys reportedly did not want to meet Thomas contract demands. The Cleveland Browns were also reportedly interested after trading safety Jabrill Peppers to the New York Giants as part of the Odell Beckham, Jr. trade. -- Geoffrey C. Arnold | @geoffreyCarnold By Robyn H. Smith Smith is communications director for the Oregon Cattlemens Association. Last month, freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., introduced a Green New Deal resolution highlighting hopes and dreams for accomplishing net-zero greenhouse gas emissions within a 10-year time frame. It sounds pretty good on paper an idealized conception of creating millions of high-wage jobs, investing in infrastructure and industry and promoting justice for vulnerable communities all while meeting 100 percent power demand through zero-emission energy sources. But the Green New Deal fails to state how the government will realistically enact, enforce or accomplish those goals. Agricultural communities are in alarm. Similar to Oregons proposed cap and trade bill, family-owned farms and ranches would be negatively and disproportionately impacted by the Green New Deal. In regard to agriculture, the resolution outlines removing greenhouse gases completely from the sector, creating soil carbon reduction, furthering land preservation and decreasing wildfires. Has anyone asked agricultural communities to weigh in on these topics? Proponents of this resolution, including Oregon Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, who both signed on in support, must recognize agricultural communities have been tackling these issues and are champions of environmental stewardship. Cattle in particular, should be seen as an answer and not the enemy when it comes to climate change. Results from a beef life-cycle analysis published in January in the journal Agricultural Systems showed only 3.3 percent of the nations greenhouse gases are emitted from cattle. The total of all agricultural emissions amounts to 9 percent. Colin Woodall, National Cattlemens Beef Association Vice President, notes beef producers have made substantial progress in environmental concerns over the years, such as producing the same amount of beef with 33 percent fewer cattle, compared to 1970. Yet, a document from Ocasio-Cortezs office said, We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions in 10 years because we arent sure that well be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast. Though humorous, make no mistake, this is a glimpse of the attack on this nations cattle industry. Cattle are natural stewards of the land. Grazing cattle, when appropriately managed, can help grass regrowth, capturing carbon from the atmosphere and keeping it stored in the soil, researchers at Michigan State University have found. Environmental activists searching for soil carbon storage to reduce greenhouse gas emissions should look no further than a herd of cattle. Grazing cattle produce food and fiber for healthy soil, provide nutrient storage, erosion prevention and improved water quality. The resolution mentions the concern of wildfires. Ranchers own grazing allotments and obtain permits to graze their cattle on public lands, and in doing so, cattle reduce fire fuels. When rangelands are overgrown or mismanaged there is an increase in fires and the rate at which they spread; cattle grazing can help suppress wildfire growth. Last year, wildfires devastated over 800,000 acres of land in Oregon. The 2018 wildfire season in California alone emitted 68 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Decreasing carbon emissions should start with improved forest management and fire-fuel suppression to reduce wildfires. Think of how increased taxes and regulations on agriculture will impact the everyday citizen grocery bills will skyrocket. Food scarcity and job loss may be an inevitable result if the cost of farming and ranching outweighs the benefit. Each farmer in the state on average produces enough food in a year for 130 people, allowing 98% of the population to do something other than worry about food production. The Oregon Cattlemens Association does not support the Green New Deal. We believe that those who research the economic and social impact that this resolution would have on American citizens, farmers, ranchers and rural communities will come to the same conclusion. Ed Rogers The Washington Post Which is it? Is President Donald Trump an unfit character potentially implicated in multiple crimes? Or is the evidence against him so thin that the future of his presidency properly should be determined in the next election? As it is on a lot of things, the Democrats message is jumbled on the question of impeachment. Leaders within the Democratic Party, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler of New York and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff of California, have suggested that the evidence against Trump is so obvious and strong that impeachment proceedings will just be a formality. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told The Washington Post that impeaching the president is "just not worth it." Does Pelosi think going forward with impeachment is elective? There are either high crimes and misdemeanors, or there are not high crimes and misdemeanors. Impeachment is not optional. I am against impeachment. But the Democrats are so rattled by the president that they do not see the hypocrisy in their position. They have a constitutional responsibility to act if they believe they have the evidence. Aren't there supposed to be mounds and mounds of evidence against Trump? Democrats should follow the evidence, follow procedure, meet the burden of proof and respect that everyone, including the president, is innocent until proven guilty. What's keeping them? Now is their time. Do the Democrats think that forgoing impeachment will prove to be a shrewd political maneuver? Is being shrewd really in the country's best interest if they think the president is guilty? Do the voters who elected them want them to finesse impeachment? Do Democrats in Congress really think it will be better for them politically not to impeach if they think the case for Trump's guilt is strong? Today, most Americans - 54 percent, according to a Monmouth University poll - do not support impeachment. Nonetheless, in the weeks ahead, I suspect we will see all the wannabe Democratic nominees for president declare that Trump is an unfit, grotesque criminal who needs to be impeached. How is it their colleagues in Congress won't say the same? Again, the Democrats are obsessed with Trump. But in their mad rush to exclaim not just disgust for the president but also zeal for removing him from office, they have stumbled at the impeachment choke point. So which is it? You cannot have it both ways. They took an oath to defend the Constitution, and the Constitution is clear regarding what to do with a president who is alleged to have committed high crimes and misdemeanors. -- Ed Rogers is a contributor to Post Opinions, a political consultant and a veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush White Houses and several national campaigns. He is the chairman of the lobbying and communications firm BGR Group, which he founded with former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour in 1991. I am a second-year medical student attending Western University of Health Sciences in Lebanon. I recently spent a day at the Capitol, listening to medical professionals from around the state urge Oregon legislators to vote yes on House Bill 3063. I hope these politicians took to heart what these medical professionals had to say. As a medical student and future physician, I am dedicating my life to serve and help others. I do not enjoy studying all day, hardly seeing my wife, but I know the education I am receiving will one day save lives. A vital part of medical training is the study of immunology, learning how the body fights off infection and how vaccines are a safe and effective way to prevent deadly diseases. These diseases are only preventable if a large majority of the community is vaccinated against them. I understand the views of those who oppose this bill. Please also understand these medical professionals, who took a day out of their busy schedules, do not want to harm your children. They are educated and caring. If you approach them and are willing to listen, they can address your concerns and answer your questions. Please support HB 3063 for the children who dont have a choice, for the children with true medical exemptions, for the children who are at greatest risk for deadly diseases that are completely preventable. Bobby Cannon, Lebanon Eugene police shot at a man who tried to steal a patrol car early Wednesday. The man wasnt hit, and he was later taken into custody, according to Eugene police. A second man was also detained. Eugene police said an officer stopped a pair of suspicious males" at East 15th Avenue and Pearl Alley about 4 a.m. One of the men fled, and the officer chased him on foot. Police said a second officer arrived to find the other man stealing the first officers patrol vehicle. The second officer shot at the man, police said. He got away, but the patrol vehicle was found unoccupied a few blocks away shortly thereafter. The man who stole the patrol car was found during a police dog search, police said, and he was taken into custody after a short struggle. No one was hurt. Police estimated roads will be closed until at least mid-morning and asked travelers to avoid the area. -- Jim Ryan; jryan@oregonian.com; 503-221-8005; @Jimryan015 Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox. SALEM Lawmakers who set out to bring more attention to educational outcomes for foster children are scrapping much of the proposal, after acknowledging the plan would pile too much work on state caseworkers. It wasnt practical, Sen. Sara Gelser, D-Corvallis, who initially proposed requirements for caseworkers to track foster childrens school progress in monthly meetings and ensure they receive the support they need in order to graduate from high school. Gelser spoke in an interview following a hearing on the bill Tuesday. Gelser said Senate Bill 475 was borne out of frustration that no individual or government agency is currently tasked with keeping tabs on how children in the states care are doing in school. To her knowledge, the state does not track graduation rates for teenagers in foster care. Key questions include whether a student who is moving between homes and schools has received a special needs assessment, whether a teenager is on track to graduate and even something as basic as whether a child is regularly showing up for class, she said. Gelser said it doesnt make sense to place the responsibility on foster parents, when children might stay only briefly in their home, and schools do not necessarily know which students are in foster care due to privacy protections. As introduced, Senate Bill 475 would have required state caseworkers to check on the academic status and progress of foster children during monthly in-person meetings. Rep. Duane Stark, R-Grants Pass, is a co-sponsor on the bill. I think the issue for the (Department of Human Services) case workers, which is fair, is every time we introduce a bill here that changes policy, it increases workload, Gelser said. Courtney Graham, a political strategist and registered lobbyist for SEIU Local 503, said some child welfare workers in the union expressed interest in helping children in foster care succeed academically, but they also need training on how to do so. We should be talking about how to provide (state workers) the additional support they need to help foster children succeed in school, Graham said during the hearing on Senate Bill 475 on Tuesday. Gelser said that after Senate Bill 475 is amended, it will still contain two important policies. One is a new requirement for the state to conduct exit interviews with foster children about the quality of a foster family or program within 30 days of the child leaving the placement. The other is a provision to make it more difficult for schools to restrict foster children to partial school days, by requiring the sign-off of both the foster parents and a representative from the Department of Human Services. The bill is scheduled for a work session, when it will likely be amended and could receive a vote, on March 21. Hillary Borrud | hborrud@oregonian.com | 503-294-4034 | @hborrud Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox. An armed duo tried to rob a student of her purse near her Southeast Portland high school in one of two associated incidents early Wednesday, police say. The student got away unscathed and with her purse, according to the Portland Police Bureau. The agency said the attempted robbery is related to an armed carjacking nearby less than an hour prior. Officers initially responded about 6:10 a.m. to a call from a woman who had been robbed of her car and some belongings in the area of Southeast Clinton Street and 38th Avenue, according to police. The woman, who wasnt hurt, was approached by two men wearing ski masks. One of them had a handgun. They took some of her property, including her keys, and left in her red 2002 Mazda Protege. Police said a female Franklin High School student then called authorities about 7 a.m. to report two men pulled up to her near Southeast 51st Avenue and Woodward Street, showed a handgun and demanded she give them her purse. The student ran to Franklin High School. She wasnt hurt, and the men didnt get her purse. Officers found the stolen car from the first incident during an area check, according to police. One of its Oregon license plates, 952BDR, remains missing. Police urged anyone who sees it on a vehicle to call 911. Detectives are investigating both incidents. They encouraged anyone who saw the incidents or has relevant video footage to contact Robbery Detective Brett Hawkinson at 503-823-1080 or at brett.hawkinson@portlandoregon.gov. -- Jim Ryan; jryan@oregonian.com; 503-221-8005; @Jimryan015 Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox. CryptoNumerics, a Toronto, Canada-based enterprise software company, raised $2.5m in seed financing. The round was led by 11.2 Capital with participation from Lux Capital, and Silicon Valley Data Capital. In conjunction with the funding, Shelley Zhuang, MD 11.2 Capital, is joining CryptoNumerics board of directors. Led by Monica Holboke, Co-founder & CEO, and and Ashfaq Munshi, Co-founder & Executive Chairman, CryptoNumerics enables organizations to use data to gain insights while overcoming privacy and data residency issues. Its offerings include: CN-Protect enables enterprises to create a privacy-protected dataset where privacy risk has been balanced with data quality using AI and differential privacy. CN-Insight allows companies to build statistical and machine learning models without re-locating data using Secure Multiparty Computation and Private Set Intersection. The company has also announced a free downloadable version of CN-Protect, which allows companies to comply with HIPAA, GDPR and CCPA privacy regulations while maintaining data quality for analytics. In addition, by using the de-identification techniques, such as Differential Privacy and Optimal k-Anonymity, companies reduce the risk of exposing consumer data. FinSMEs 13/03/2019 Flir Systems, one of the few big technology companies that still calls Oregon home, said Wednesday it will open a new headquarters near Washington, D.C. The defense contractor said it will still refer to its Wilsonville campus as a headquarters and will retain the 350 employees who work there. But the companys top leadership, including its chief executive and chief financial officer, will work at the new, 65-person office in Arlington, Virginia. That continues a worrisome trend for Oregons tech sector, which has shed scores of locally based companies over the past decade. The logic behind Flirs new Virginia site is analogous to Amazons decision last year to put a second headquarters near the nations capital -- like Flir, it picked Arlington. Both companies are seeking closer ties to federal agencies and a greater share of government contracts. Having a greater presence in Washington D.C. is critical to helping us grow our business, as it creates better proximity for FLIR to support key customers, investors, regulators, and the more than 4,000 FLIR team members around the world, CEO Jim Cannon said in a written statement. Cannon lives in Indiana, not Oregon, and will move to the Washington, D.C., area. Flir makes thermal imaging cameras and similar equipment to help soldiers, police and other security forces see at night or in other low-visibility conditions. Its also made a series of acquisitions to add military drones and similar equipment. Last month, Flir spent $385 million on its biggest acquisition ever, buying a company called Endeavor Robotic Holdings that makes robots and other autonomous gear for combat operations. Technology remains Oregons most vital economic sector and tech employment grew by 2.6 percent last year by one key measure. And with an average wage approaching $110,000 annually, the jobs pay more than double the state average. But the Silicon Forest has been losing tech companies for years. Thats in part because established Oregon companies, including Tektronix, TriQuint Semiconductor, Mentor Graphics and FEI Co., have been snapped up by larger corporations based elsewhere. The $1 billion sale of Electro Scientific Industries last fall left just three publicly traded tech companies with headquarters in Oregon: Flir, Digimarc and Lattice Semiconductor. The decline in Oregon-based tech companies also reflects increased geographic concentration across the technology sector and Oregon entrepreneurs inability to produce new, homegrown businesses to replace the aging hardware businesses that sold out. The Silicon Forest consists of outposts for bigger tech companies based elsewhere Intel, eBay, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, HP and Apple among them. The outpost phenomenon has long concerned economists, who fear the lack of key corporate facilities make Oregon more vulnerable in a downturn, when executives based elsewhere have to make tough decisions about where to cut. Fundamentally, the issues impeding local tech entrepreneurship remain the same today as they were in the aftermath of the dot-com bust: Oregon lacks readily available venture capital and a reservoir of senior executives to grow big companies; the states heritage in hardware technology havent adapted to a leaner era of software and web services; and Oregon doesnt have nationally renowned research universities that fuel innovation in tech hubs such as Seattle, the Bay Area and Boston. On Wednesday, Flir sought to address concerns about the future of its Wilsonville site. The company said its controller and the head of its commercial business will continue working in Oregon and Flir said it plans to renovate its campus beginning this spring. The company said its reconfiguring the Wilsonville site to accommodate recent growth. -- Mike Rogoway | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699 The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) has announced a national report that "exposed" and criticized Coreteva Agriscience, a division of DowDuPont, for testing pesticides on dogs in a Michigan lab. The HSUS report stated that 36 beagles were being used to test a new fungicide called Adavelt, which is being developed by Corteva Agriscience. The fungicide, which is expected to be launched in 2023, is meant to be used by farmers to control diseases in crops. The lab in question is the Charles River lab in Mattawan, according to HSUS, which it said conducted a 100-day undercover investigation into the treatment of the animals there. Corteva responded to HSUS's report, stating that testing products on animals is required by regulatory authorities and a practice it keeps to a minimum. "At Corteva Agriscience, we care deeply about the welfare of animals," Corteva said in a Tuesday, March 12, statement on Twitter. "Consistent with industry practice, we conduct animal testing only when such testing is required by regulatory authorities, and we proactively engage with government officials to minimize or cease animal studies, where possible." At the lab, the beagles were given pesticides in gelatin capsules. They are scheduled to be euthanized in July, at the end of a one-year study, HSUS said. This cruel and unnecessary testing includes the force-feeding of pesticides to the dogs, who are otherwise held in practically barren cages, the Humane Society stated. The year-long testing in being scrutinized by HSUS because U.S. law only requires a 90-day test. However, Brazilian regulations still require one-year testing for certain products. HSUS stated that Brazils pesticide authority, Agencia Nacional de Vigilancia Sanitaria (ANVISA), provided confirmation via email that it is readily granting waiver requests from companies to forego the one-year dog test. At Dows urging, we also sent a joint letter to ANVISA requesting a more formal, written communication of this policy, which the agency supplied within days to the entire Brazilian pesticide industry, HSUS stated However, Dows regulatory affairs division decided that they still need additional confirmation on their specific product from the agency. Corteva said in its statement that they have been working with HSUS to amend Brazils regulations. We agree that there are better ways to attain the data needed for this study and have been working closely with the Humane Society in the U.S. for many months to encourage Brazils (ANVISA) to amend its animal test requirements for pesticides, the statement read. Guillame Artois, corporate media relations for Dow, said it is important to note that Dow is the Materials Science Division of DowDuPont and as such, has not been operating the fungicide business for two years. Rather, the fungicide business is aligned with Corteva Agriscience, the agriculture division of DowDuPont. Corteva will become a separate company this year after DowDuPont splits into three separate entities one for each of its agriculture, materials science and specialty products businesses. Corteva Agriscience and Dow both released formal statements via Twitter on Tuesday regarding HSUSs investigation. Animal testing is not something Dow undertakes lightly, but neither is it something the company can discontinue when it is required by regulatory authorities, Dow stated. Corteva Agriscience released a similar statement that said once the industry receives confirmation that animal testing is no longer required, it will cease testing immediately and make every effort to re-home the animals. However, HSUS is now asking the public to sign an online petition demanding that Dow AgroScience immediately stop the testing and release the dogs to the HSUS. As of Wednesday mid-afternoon, more than 105,000 people had signed the petition, according to the HSUS website. While being questioned by police after the disappearance of his great-aunt, the Reese man now standing trial for her murder gave what prosecutors are calling conflicting information. Joel Brandon Wallace, 34, appeared in court Tuesday, March 12, before Judge Stephen Carras of the 42nd Circuit Court for the sixth day of his trial, which is scheduled to conclude March 21. He stands accused of the murder of Victoria Kilbourne, 74, a Midland hair stylist who was reported missing on June 26, 2018. Kilbourne's remains were found on June 30 in a shallow grave on Wallace's hunting property near Onaway. Wallace faces five counts, including homicide-murder first degree premeditated, homicide-felony murder, unlawful imprisonment, forgery and uttering and publishing. If he is convicted on all counts, he could face life in prison without the possibility of parole. Representing the people as prosecutor is Midland County Prosecuting Attorney J. Dee Brooks. Wallace is represented by attorney Dan Duke. Jeremy Davis, a detective with the Midland Police Department who has been involved with case since the initial investigation into Kilbourne's disappearance, testimony on Monday and Tuesday. Recounting the timeline of his involvement in the investigation, Davis said he began to doubt Wallace's side of the story when he was questioned by police after Kilbourne's disappearance. Prosecutor's played the video recording of Wallace's interview at the Midland County Law Enforcement Center. In the recording, Davis challenges aspects of the story Wallace told police, including Wallace's assertion that his last contact with Kilbourne was when he called her at about 9 p.m. the night of her disappearance, which was not supported by data taken from either Wallace or Kilbourne's phones. Before turning his phone over, Wallace had also mentioned having the Life360 application on his phone, which allows members within a circle to located each other using GPS, though the app was allegedly not working properly when he turned his phone over. Davis also said the app did not contain information about Wallace's whereabouts over the previous five days like it was supposed to, indicating the information could have been deleted, Davis said. Also testifying on Tuesday was Dr. Dennis Wagner, a medical doctor licensed in Michigan, who serves as the chief deputy medical examiner for Midland County. Warner said he was told by detectives at the scene where Kilbourne's body was found that they believed she was killed somewhere else and then transported to the site were she was buried. "In this case, there was some discrepancy about what to put down for the 'location of death' (on the report)," Warner said. "There was a great deal of discussion about whether she died at her home in Midland, or if she died somewhere else or whether she died in the grave she was buried in." Echoing statements made by forensic pathologist Kanu Virani, who performed the autopsy on Kilbourne's remains along with Warner on July 1, 2018, at the MidMichigan Medical Center, Warner said the official cause of Kilbourne's death was asphyxiation brought about while she was unconscious due to a closed-head injury. Warner said the source of the asphyxiation was the black tape wrapped around Kilbourne's mouth. While the tape did not cover Kilbourne's nose, the way in which it had been applied -- being wrapped completely around her head -- led to her jawbone being pushed back, preventing her from breathing at all while unconscious. The Michigan Press Association is honoring two legislators as this year's Peter Pettalia Memorial Sunshine Award recipients: Sen. Jim Stamas, R-Midland, who is also serving his second term in the State Senate and has been a proponent of open records, government accountability and available citizen information throughout his years in the House and the Senate. Rep. Triston Cole, R-Antrim County, a third term Representative who serves as Majority Floor Leader in the House and has been a strong supporter of open government throughout his career. Both Stamas and Cole consistently show support for improving transparency in government and are strong supporters of Sunshine in government, the MPA stated. The association chose these legislators for this award based on their continuing efforts to improve the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in Michigan, and their leadership in promoting the importance of available and accessible public notices in keeping Michigan's citizens informed about government activity. These actions directly support MPA's mission of defending free speech, promoting an open and responsive government and fostering an informed citizenry. "Elected officials like Sen. Stamas and Rep. Cole show that they believe in a government of the people." said MPA Public Policy Committee Chairman Dirk Milliman. "Through the years and in their current work for open, accessible government for the people of our state, they reach the standard that Rep. Peter Pettalia, in who's honor this award is named, set for all legislators who follow. We congratulate and thank them for their efforts." The awards will be presented to Cole and Stamas at the April MPA Board meeting. Midland Public Schools Superintendent Michael Sharrow said an internal investigation into an incident involving a racist video and a few Midland High School students is complete, as he addressed the issue again in another communique. "I hope we continue to turn our anger and emotion into sustaining positive inclusion and diversity momentum," the communique stated late last week. "Over the last week, we have all gone through the full range of emotions, and now we must take action to stop racism, separation and 'exclusion' actions and behaviors. As educators, we sincerely believe education and awareness are our best strategies as we move forward." He also stated that the Midland High school administrative team, in conjunction with "district leaders," concentrated their efforts on "investigation, interviewing those possibly involved with the video, providing comfort and care for the victims and support for all MHS students and staff." The statement comes in response to a video that was posted on social media late last month. The video was supposedly made by a high school student and was regarded as "racist" and "vile." The 32-second video begins with a newscast music sequence and a headline containing a racial slur. A photo flashes of an African American male and a white female, alleged to be a couple at Midland High School. A voice narrates, stating that the relationship could possibly lead to "rape, drug abuse or even murder." Response from parents, students and other community members blew up across social media regarding the incident. There was speculation that the student(s) involved were not punished harshly enough while others complained that racism was a serious issue in the community. "We are not allowed to discuss the specifics of student discipline without violating The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)," Sharrow said in his statement last week. "But we can say discipline, counseling and reformative practices are occurring." The communique went on to lay out future goals for Midland High School, including plans to begin an "awareness campaign," expand inclusion and diversity training to all MPS staff and explore a classroom grant structure that would encourage students and staff to "develop and implement ideas for inclusion and diversity projects." It also stated that last week a small group of students who were "deeply affected" by the video met with staff and Amy Beasley from Dow Chemical's inclusion team. A military veteran who retired as the highest-ranking African-American woman in U.S. Navy history will talk about her career as a trailblazer during a visit to Saginaw Valley State University. Gail Harris, a retired U.S. Navy captain, will deliver her address, titled "Take Command and Win," at 5 p.m. Thursday in Curtiss Hall Banquet Room A at SVSU. The event is free and open to the public. Harris was the first woman in U.S. Navy history to serve as an intelligence officer in a Navy aviation squadron. Harris, who served from 1973-2001, made groundbreaking strides for women and persons of color in the Navy, often serving as the "first" of every post she accepted in the military. "We are extremely honored to welcome the highly-decorated Capt. Harris to SVSU," said Bethany Alford, director of the university's Military Student Affairs office. "She is a true pioneer in the naval community. We are very fortunate to hear about her experiences firsthand." Harris earned honors of distinction during her career in the military. She received the Meritorious Service Medal, National Defense Service Medal, as well as the Navy Commendation Medal three times. Harris' story has been profiled by international TV networks including BBC and Fox News. During Harris' visit to SVSU, she also will meet with student groups including individuals affiliated with the military. Her visit to SVSU is sponsored by SVSU's offices of Multicultural Student Affairs, Military Student Affairs, Residential Life, and Student Life. For more information on the event, contact SVSU's Multicultural Student Affairs office at 989-964-7090. Keensight Capital, a Paris, France-based private equity firm dedicated to pan-European Growth Buyout investments, held the final close of its new fund, at 1 billion. Keensight V was oversubscribed with support from existing LPs, as well as new investors from Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia. The globally diverse LP base for the fund comprises c. 90% of subscriptions from institutional investors (asset managers, pension funds, insurance companies, banks and sovereign wealth funds), and c.10% from former portfolio company CEOs and family offices. With its new Growth Buyout fund, Keensight Capital will continue to pursue its investment strategy partnering with entrepreneurs on growth investments, while targeting profitable companies across Western Europe with revenues between 15 million and 250 million. The firms team of 30 people, which comprises 11 different nationalities, will pursue investments across Western Europe between 20 million and 200 million. The teams expertise is particularly strong in the Information Technology and Healthcare sectors. Led by Jean-Michel Beghin, Managing Partner, Keensight Capital has invested in 52 companies and completed 37 exits, generating an overall gross IRR of 39% and an average gross multiple of 2.8x, since its creation 20 years ago. FinSMEs 13/03/2019 Balaclava, Mauritius (PANA) Mauritius and Madagascar on Wednesday signed two Memoranda of Understanding (MoU), aiming to promote economic exchanges and facilitate investments between the two countries during a business forum attended by some 400 economic operators in Balaclava, northern Mauritius Abuja, Nigeria (PANA) The Nigerian Army says that its troops have killed 55 bandits and rescued about 760 villagers in a continuation of an exercise to end banditry in Zamfara, northwest Nigeria Oh, CNN. Oh, Washington. There you go again. SHOCKER! The woman who asked @TulsiGabbard Assad question at @cnn's #TulsiTownHall worked for Obama For America in 2008. Maybe @cnn should be disclosing the political connections of people asking questionsespecially on this being that Obama began U.S' involvement in Syria?? pic.twitter.com/OIWNNiT2tG Jordan (@JordanChariton) March 11, 2019 Tulsi Gabbard got asked a lot of questions during her CNN Town Hall. Some of them were reasonable, given Gabbards record: Given your family history, whats the deal with you and LGBTQ rights? and You fought in the wars of regime change, and how youre against them? Explain. But many of the questions were odd, deliberate traps. Are you a capitalist? Is socialism evil? Is Assad a war criminal? They were gotcha-style queries, based around a central, unspoken premise: Youre not taking this changing the world business seriously, right? Many different mouths were opened. But perspective was the same. Gabbards Town Hall took place in Austin, but it might as well have been near the Potomac. The questions were asked in the classic Washington voice, the voice of Consensus, wailing the same old sweet song weve heard in times gone by: Change cant happen. If this seems familiar, it should. The Washington Consensus asked the same questions during Bernie Sanders town hall. It was the same tone, asked by ostensible independent citizens ... who turned out to be employees for various D.C. institutions. CNN apparently did not vet their question-askers. Jacob Weindling broke down the story here at Paste. The phrasing of the Consensus questions was a predictable drumbeat: dont you think that your policies are unreal? Dont you think we cant afford this dont you think Its the phrasing and wording youd use when speaking to a deluded adult, or an oblivious child. The Consensus questioners used this tone with Bernie, and they used it with Gabbard. I dont believe that CNN sat down and tried to make progressives look foolish. But I do believe in the manufacturing of consent by groupthink. I believe that elitism means endless scrutiny and suspicion for new ideas, and blank checks for established ones. I believe that CNN doesnt take its vetting details seriously because they dont think they should, especially where progressives are concerned. But this isnt a tale about the news. Rather, this story is about why some people choose to wear blinders, and how those blinders work. Its a story about three related stories: the Sanders town hall, the Gabbard town hall, and the attempted smearing of Rep. Ilhan Omar. But this could have been taken from any week in the past three years. My question is, why? Why would the Consensus make itself look so openly foolish and vulnerable? I expect people that have power to fight for it. But to react so irrationally, with such terror, suggests there is something else at work. Something besides self-interest. What are they afraid of? What psychological tic could make the Consensus abase itself so shamefully? The Consensus does not object to the facts surrounding progressive policies. Nothing that Sanders or Gabbard or Omar suggested is unreal, impossible, or unethical. There is no law of nature that says Americans must fight in endless wars. We know many other countries have progressive policies. We know such programs can and do work. We know that we enough money for progressive policiesthe war in Iraq has cost us trillions. We know there is nothing in American law or natural law that makes criticizing our allies wrong. We know that progressive policies are politically viable. The public wants them, by super-majorities. If the policies are realistic, popular, and affordable, then what gives? Why do they react to these ideas with such violence? The offense exists in raising the public possibility of there being a different way. Like that passage in Matthew where Jesus says a man who even looks with lust at another woman commits adultery in his heart. The very suggestion of bringing up alternative modes of living, governing, or thinking appalls the Consensus. Their reaction is based in real, unfeigned emotion. But America was built on novelty. For instance, the blogger Seth Godin recently wrote about concept cars. Every year, Godin wrote, Audi, Ford, GM and the rest of the auto companies bring concept cars to the big shows. These swooping, modern, magical cars are in stark contrast to the cars that are actually for sale. At first glance, this doesnt make much sense. Concept cars arent a form of market research. Why would the automakers ever bother? Several reasons, Godin writes. One, the car companies are afraid of not innovating. Second, concept cars make the old cars look datedand makes the new cars look, surprise surprise, new. Third, automakers understand that cars are big purchases. Buyers are risking a lot of money when they purchase a new car. What if next years model is out of style? So, Godin says, Concept cars, then, are an assertion by the company: heres where we think were going, thanks for paying attention, car nerds! Tell the others. Were here to entertain you, have fun. We know its outlandish today, but by exposing you to these features over and over for five or ten years, by the time the cars actually arrive, youll say of course, not, whats that? Theyre normalizing design progress. Making it safe over time. As youve probably guessed, this doesnt only work for cars. Most American industries have an analogue to concept cars. And yet theres one place where concept cars are forbidden: Washington. When Gabbard called Iraq a war based on lies, the public nodded. But I guarantee you, the silence in the District was deafening. American politics is an industry rigged to prevent concept cars from being shown. Theres a reason for that. A man named Edward Bernays explained it, ninety-one years ago. Bernays was the father of American public relations. He said that America was largely governed through manipulation of opinion, and that the shapers of opinion were the true rulers of our society. He wrote: We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ... In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time. Bernays was wrong about the public. But he was right about how America worked. Bernays uses the phrase invisible government, but theres nothing conspiratorial about it. Hes just talking about people who mold opinion: opinion-makers, thought leaders, lobbyists, people in the media, think tanks. To use Bernays term, opinion-makers decide on the demarcation of issues bearing upon public opinion. Heres an example. In most Presidential elections, if a candidate said, Lets get out of every foreign country. Lets bring our military home, they would be treated as a lunatic. Lets bring them home is a perfectly rational answer. Its easily explained. Easily understood. But it is never brought up. That is demarcation of public opinion in America. This is how the mainstream politics functions. Thats why the beliefs of the government seem so disconnected from the experiences of ordinary people. Theres no secret, smoky room filled with billionaires and cigars. Theres no soldier with a bayonet making Dana Bash ask bad questions. Theres just a set of powerful people in influential positions. These people have been socialized into believing some ideas cannot be raised. Ever. Some of my readers grew up in small towns, religious circles, or very sheltered families. Some of you may remember how surprising the outside world was to you, when you got outside your upbringing. Multiply that by a thousand, and you have an idea of how the American elite think and believe. In their world, concept cars simply do not exist. When Secretary Clinton said single-payer healthcare will never, ever happen, she believed it. In 2003, when British Prime Minister Tony Blair told President Bush over a private phone call that Weve got to make people understand we are not going to war because we want to but because there is no alternative, he believed it. When President Obama said, in his Nobel Prize speech, defended Americas long history of military intervention, saying, We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will, he believed it. In 1992, when Bill Clinton let the state of Arkansas execute a mentally-impaired African-American man named Ricky Ray Rector, and said I can be nicked on a lot, but no one can say Im soft on crime, he believed it. When Trump said, No child of God should ever suffer such horror before he bombed Syria and the children of God inside Syria, he probably believed it. What did all of these leaders believe? Essentially, There is no alternative. We do what we must do. And more to the point, none of these leaders ruled or believed alone. It is not just important that the leaders believe. In fact, it is more important the many people who actually run the governmentthe officials and advisers and the functionaries below the leadersbelieve there is no alternative too. Thats how you get a town hall full of people asking strange questions. What we are fighting for now is for concept cars. We are fighting for the idea that new models can, in fact, exist. Medicare For All does not yet exist in fact. But it exists as a public ideaa very popular one. That is a victory. The Washington Consensus, the town hall denizens who do most of the heavy lifting in D.C., object to the existence of the concept car. Politics is the art of the possible. And whats possible, in the most literal sense, amounts to what we think of as being politically feasible. What is demarcated. Millions of people want universal health care, not to be crushed by debt, and not to have their children and friends and neighbors sent to fight strange wars in impoverished lands. These are good and wise beliefs. But these beliefs can be ignored as long as nobody brings them up. As long as they dont get off the drawing board. As long as they are not This Years Model. But thats changing. The Washington Consensus understands whats on the menu for 2019 and 2020, and beyond. And it scares them. And it should. This Years Model is built to last. Apple has marked the first graduation of students from its Developer Academy in Jakarta, celebrating their accomplishments and creativity in a ceremony attended by Apples Lisa Jackson and Indonesias Minister of Industry, Airlangga Hartarto. Im always inspired to see students using our technology to address challenges they see in the world around them, said Jackson. The students in our Developer Academy in Jakarta are demonstrating the critical skills and strong ideas needed to thrive in the growing app economy. Im proud to extend my heartfelt congratulations to all of todays graduates. This year Apple is growing its Developer Academies in Indonesia with the opening of a second Academy in Surabaya while the Jakarta Academy has expanded from 75 to 200 students. Today the App Store is available in 155 countries, which has created a new industry of jobs and opportunities. Since its launch in 2008, Apple has paid out over $120 billion to developers around the world, making the App Store the most vibrant software marketplace in the world. Apple today increased its commitment to coding and education in Southeast Asia with the expansion of its App Development with Swift curriculum at partner schools in Singapore and the opening of Indonesias second Apple Developer Academy in Surabaya, offering aspiring developers the skills they need to thrive in today's app economy. For more on this, read the full Apple press release here. About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments. Those using abusive language or negative behavior will result in being blacklisted on Disqus. In an interesting Korean tech report posted today we learn that Apple "plans to adopt Samsungs touch-integrated OLED displays into its high-end iPhones. The company has stuck to a display installed with a separate TSP on top since the first iPhone in 2007. In recent months, however, the iPhone maker has been mulling to deploy Samsungs OLED display featuring the TSP inside, which can make a mobile device thinner and lighter." Over the past few years there have been a number of rumors of Apple considering China's BOE for future OLED display orders (01, 02, 03 & 04). Getting into Apple's supply chain for something as important as iPhone displays takes time because it requires a series of tests to be completed before Apple can be assured that deliverable quality can be shipped on time. So far Samsung has had a lock on Apple's OLED supply and it's probably why Samsung has been attempting to lure Apple to choose their new touch-integrated displays as a way to retain Apple's business. Yet the Korean report suggests that BOE is capable of delivering a similar type of OLED display to Apple so as to at least be considered as a secondary OLED supplier. The report further added that "BOE, which ran what is called an L6 project to become a supplier for Apple last year, is now proceeding with its L7 project to provide displays for the US firm." BOE's L6 project landed Huawei as a customer and they became the supplier for the foldable OLED displays found in Huawei's Mate X smartphone unveiled last month at MWC 2019. About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments. Those using abusive language or negative behavior will result in being blacklisted on Disqus. Ranchi: In yet another setback for the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief and his vast political family, former Chief Minister of Bihar Lalu Prasad Yadav was convicted in a fourth case related to the multi-crore rupees fodder scam by a special CBI judge in Ranchi on Monday. Shiv Pal Singh, the CBI judge, found the RJD chief and 18 others guilty in the fraudulent withdrawal of Rs. 3.13 crore from Dumka Treasury in the early parts of the '90s. The judge, however, acquitted another former Bihar Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra, who has already been convicted in two other cases related to fodder scam, and 12 others in this case. Yadav and 18 others were convicted under various sections of the criminal law including 120 B (Criminal Conspiracy), 409 (Misappropriation), 420 (Cheating), 467 (Forgery), 468 (Forgery with Intent to Cheat), 471 (using Forged Documents), and a host of other charges. The RJD chief, who has been in prison for nearly three months now, was earlier hospitalized after his blood pressure shot up along with his sugar level. While he was present in the court today for the hearing, he was escorted back to the hospital where he remains under treatment. The punishment phase begins on March 21 when the judge will hear arguments from both sides. Earlier, he was sentenced to 13.5 years in prison. Yadav and other accused in the case face two more cases related to the Fodder Scam. His family members have accused the NDA government at the Center of launching a witch-hunt against the party chief and other members of his family. Cebu City (CNN Philippines, March 13) Water levels of two major dams in Cebu City have dropped due to the El Nino in the country, prompting agencies to ration water supply, according to the Metro Cebu Water District (MCWD). MCWD spokesperson Charmaine Rodriguez-Kara said the Buhisan Dam has dropped water production from 6,000 to only 2,500 cubic meters per day. On the other hand, the Jaclupan dam dropped production from 33,000 cubic meters to only 27,500 cubic meters per day. City Disaster Risk Reduction Management operations head Wesley Santos said they will recommend a declaration of a "State of Preparedness" as the El Nino effects are looming. As early as now, MCWD will be rationing water supply to provide all its consumers in the entire service area. City agriculturist Apple Tribunalo added that 70 percent of the water sources in the mountain barangays of Cebu City have been depleted. The MCWD water supply is composed of mostly ground water, amounting to 69 percent or 74,000 cubic meters out of 238,000 cubic meters per day of water production. Residents and the farmers are now sourcing their water from villages in low-lying areas where there is still enough water supply. The rivers and the springs have also started to deplete. This comes after Zamboanga Sibugay and the city of Pagadian in Zamboanga del Sur were placed under a state of calamity Tuesday due to the impact of El Nino on agricultural production. Last week, the City of Zamboanga was also placed under a state of calamity due to the effects of drought on the irrigation of rice fields. Weather officials earlier predicted 10 provinces may experience drought and 41 others may experience a dry spell by the end of March. These numbers are expected to rise by the end of April with 22 areas to experience drought, and 42 to have dry spells. Cebu-based journalist Dale Israel contributed to this report. Lenovos IdeaPad 730S is made for people who are tired of paying extra for touchscreens, convertible designs, and other fancy laptop features. By trimming away fancy gimmicks, Lenovo has delivered a lightweight laptop that looks great and performs well for a reasonable price. The Lenovo IdeaPad 730S is notable not just for what it offers, but for what it doesnt. Unlike many other laptops in the $900-and-up price range, the IdeaPad 730S doesnt transform into a tablet and doesnt even have a touchscreen. It uses a modest 1080p display instead of a battery-chewing QHD or 4K panel, and its wildest flourish is a Dolby Atmos speaker system, which for a laptop actually sounds pretty good. By trimming away fancy gimmicks, Lenovo has delivered a lightweight laptop that looks great and performs well for a reasonable price. One word of caution, though: Weve tested two of these laptops, and both had constant Wi-Fi connectivity issues across multiple networks. Lenovos suggested fix involved installing a newer Wi-Fi driver for a different laptop. This solved the problem, but the company hasnt said when it will officially release those drivers for the 730S. Price and specifications Lenovo sent us the $1000 version of the 730S, which includes an 8th-generation Intel Core i5-8265U (1.6GHz) processor, Intel UHD 620 graphics, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 256GB solid state drive. You can save $100 by opting for 128GB of storage, and you can upgrade to a Core i7-8565U (1.8 GHz) processorin either storage configurationfor $200 more. In all cases, youll get a non-touch IPS display with a resolution of 19201080. The maximum brightness we measured of 317 nits is surprisingly good for the price: not far behind the 337 nits we measured for Microsofts Surface Laptop 2, and well above the 250-260 nits that we consider to be average. The viewing angles are great. Design Unlike some rival thin-and-light laptops, the 730S doesnt stamp a logo in the middle of the lid or underneath the display. The only sign that youre using a Lenovo laptoponce you remove the obligatory stickers, of courseis a tiny embedded logo on the lids upper-left corner. Jared Newman / PCWorld The lack of a large logo in the middle of the lid is a refreshing change from the showy stamps on other laptops. Combine that tasteful approach with edge-to-edge display glass, narrow bezels around the screen, some distinctive shield-shaped keycaps, and a dark-gray aluminum frame, and you end up with a pretty slick-looking laptop. Lenovo even shaved a millimeter off last years IdeaPad 720S design, so the new model measures just 0.47-inch thick, and a very portable 2.4 pounds. Given the absence of a touchscreen, the IdeaPad 730Ss lack of a 360-degree hinge makes sense. Still, the display does fold back 180 degrees to lay flat on a table. Im not sure why youd want to do this, but in theory you could prop up the laptop on a stand, plug in a mouse and keyboard, and use it on a desk without straining your neck. (If only Lenovo offered a docking station specifically for this purpose.) Jared Newman / PCWorld The Lenovo IdeaPad 730S can fold flat, though were not sure why wed use it that way. A couple of gripes: The laptops hinge isnt stiff enough once it bends past about 120 degrees. As a compulsive leg shaker, I often found that the IdeaPad 730S display would gradually tip back with the computer on my lap. The 16:9 widescreen display is also a little too cramped vertically, at least with the 150% default display scaling. Dialing it down to 125% helped, but Id love to see a taller version of this laptop altogether. Keyboard and trackpad Despite the laptops thinness, the IdeaPad 730S keyboard offers a lot of travel, along with two levels of backlighting when you press the Function key and space bar. In a typing test, I averaged 90 words per minute, versus 96 words per minute on my usual mechanical keyboard. The 730S keyboards frame does bend easily under pressure toward the center, and I wouldve liked the keys to be a little less rigid, but its a solid keyboard overall. The trackpad, meanwhile, provides a large, practically frictionless surface that supports Microsofts Precision Touchpad drivers. This allows you to tweak the trackpads sensitivity and assign actions to three- and four-finger swipes. The only thing holding this trackpad back from excellence is the increasing pressure required to click on it as you move further up the surface. Folks who prefer tapping over clicking should have no complaints. Ports, camera, security, speakers Buying the Lenovo IdeaPad 730S means fully committing to USB-C and abandoning legacy USB-A. The two ports on the right side support Thunderbolt 3 for data transfer and external displays, and one of those ports offers always-on charging as well. The USB-C port on the left side is primarily for charging the laptop with the included power brick, though you could technically power up the laptop through any port. (I was even able to charge the laptop with a smartphone charger, albeit slowly.) Jared Newman / PCWorld The IdeaPad 730S has only USB-C ports, but at least you get a headphone jack. Lenovo did have the good grace to include to include a headphone jack, but if you want built-in ports for USB-A, MicroSD, or HDMI, youll have to look elsewhere. The camera is your typical cheap laptop webcam, supporting up to 720p resolution. At least its mounted along the laptops top bezel, so youll avoid the unflattering camera angles that plagued some of last years thin-and-lights. The IdeaPad 730S does have a fingerprint reader just beneath the right arrow key, so you can log in without a password even though the camera lacks Windows Hello facial recognition. As for the aforementioned Dolby Atmos speaker system, it combines Dolby-designed hardware with some fancy equalization settings for louder dialogue and better-sounding music. This still a laptop speaker, so its not going to fill your room with rich audio, but YouTube videos came out sounding crisp even at full blast. Its certainly a step up over most laptop speakers, especially when its on a flat surface, where the audio can project outward. Performance Jared Newman / PCWorld The gaps underneath the keys double as air intake sources. The Lenovo IdeaPad 730S is among the first batch of notebooks with Intels Whiskey Lake CPUs, which should give it a modest performance boost under peak loads. We compared it to a group of recent mainstream laptops with similar CPU, RAM, and integrated graphics. Lenovo talks up the 730Ss thermal design, which pulls in cool air through vents in the keyboard and pushes it out through the back and bottom of the notebook. Supposedly this allows for both the slim design and a smaller fan. Although the 730S can become uncomfortably warm on the lap under the heaviest loads, it ran cool and quiet most of the time. Melissa Riofrio/IDG Any laptop that scores over 2,000 in PCMark 8 Work Conventional can handle mainstream applications handily. The Lenovo IdeaPad 730S excelled within its group, posting a very healthy score well over 3,000. We can certainly see the benefits of Whiskey Lakeand, perhaps, that thermal designin the PCMark 8 Work benchmark. The IdeaPad 730S edged out every other thin-and-light laptop weve tested in the last six months, including some Intel Core-i7 U-Series notebooks and Dells rival XPS 13 (which has the same Intel Core i5-8265U processor). That said, the XPS 13 pulled ahead in CPU-intensive tests, including Cinebench, which tests how the CPU renders 3D graphics, and HandBrake, which encodes a lengthy video file for Android tablet use. Melissa Riofrio/IDG Cinebench is a synthetic CPU test that shows how a PC handles a brief burst of activity. The Lenovo IdeaPad 730S posts a good score here. Its possible that Lenovo is dialing down the IdeaPad 730Ss CPU performance under heavy workloads to maintain the laptops slim profile and cool, quiet operation. If your goal is to get work done, that seems like a reasonable trade-off. Melissa Riofrio/IDG HandBrake stresses the CPU over a long period, often causing laptops to keep things cool by throttling performance. The Lenovo IdeaPad 730S erred on the side of thermals, posting a slower time as a result. As for GPU performance, dont expect anything out of the ordinary for a thin-and-light laptop. 2D indie games like Shovel Knight and Mercenary Kings will work fine, and you might be able to scrape by in a Borderlands 2 session at 720p resolution and 30 frames per second, but this isnt a gaming machine. The 730S posts a decent score compared to similar competition. Melissa Riofrio/IDG The Lenovo IdeaPad 730S has integrated graphics, so its 3DMark Sky Diver score is modestand right in line with that of similarly configured competition. Battery life, on the other hand, was a pleasant surprise. Although it has lower capacity than many other laptops in its class, it still wound up on the higher end of our video rundown test. Melissa Riofrio/IDG DO NOT USE The Lenovo IdeaPad 730S lasted over 10.5 hours in our video rundown test, a very good score for a mainstream laptop. Lenovo says its using a more efficient display than last years IdeaPad 720S, which along with the non-touch 1080p panel likely contributed to the respectable score. The inclusion of rapid charging, which fills the battery up to 80 percent in an hour, is also a nice touch. Should you buy the Lenovo IdeaPad 730S? Its always nice to see a laptop that knows what its trying to accomplish. Instead of attempting to be all things to all people, the Lenovo IdeaPad 730S is content to be a solid thin-and-light laptop with a strong sense of style. Its ideal for people who want to perform office or other productivity tasks from anywhere, and dont aspire to use their laptop like a tablet or turn it into a gaming rig. As long as the Wi-Fi issue I experienced doesnt prove widespreador gets patched in the near futurethis laptop succeeds at cutting away the cruft. Late last year Virginia EMT Alex McNabb made national news after news broke that he operated a white nationalist podcast called The Daily Shoah. Following an investigation by the state, his employer just terminated his employment. Background The Huffington Post first reported on McNabbs original suspension last year. They noted: McNabb, 35, is a frequent co-host of The Daily Shoah, a popular neo-Nazi podcast. On the show he regularly tells stories about being an EMT, often referring to patients by racist slurs and comparing black patients to animals. An anonymous complaint was made on Nov. 26 against McNabb, who works as an EMT in Patrick County, according to Marian Hunter, public relations coordinator for the Virginia Department of Healths Office of Emergency Medical Services. Because its an open and active investigation, Hunter did not describe the nature of the complaint. They added: In a recurring segment on The Daily Shoah, McNabb assumes a persona he calls Dr. Narcan. In these segments, he tells his co-hosts stories about being an EMT. He regularly refers to black patients as dindus, a deeply racist slur common among the alt-right. During a Nov. 8, 2016, episode, McNabb compared black patients to animals. The heat brings out the wild in the dindu, he said, adding that, as winter approaches, the animals go into hibernation and the ridiculousness of the [911] calls goes down. In an Oct. 4, 2016, episode, during a Dr. Narcan segment, McNabb referenced an apartment complex that houses people from all over Africa and West Africa. He said emergency workers called it Ebola Alley. He then called a black woman a Dinduisha and compared her to a shaved Harambe, referring to the famous gorilla. Its hard to find a dindu vein anyway, because theyre black, he said during the episode. He then told another story of an unruly young African-American male child running around an emergency room. As it turned out, this young African-American male was there to get blood drawn, so guess who volunteered to take his blood? he told his co-hosts, who laughed in response. Dr. Narcan enjoyed great, immense satisfaction as he terrorized this youngster with a needle and stabbed him thusly in the arm with a large-gauge IV catheter. In addition to his podcast, McNabb is an active white nationalist advocate participating in direct action events such as the neo-Nazi and white supremacist rally in Charlottesville that turned deadly when a woman was murdered. Reviewing McNabbs advocacy, we noted last year: After his advocacy became public knowledge, McNabbs employer suspended him pending a review. Reporting on the suspension, we wrote: McNabb is on unpaid leave as The Virginia Department of Health investigates a complaint filed last month against him. That investigation will focus on whether any alleged violations of Virginias EMS regulations have occurred, the agency said in a statement to CNN. The regulations say EMS personnel may not discriminate based on race, gender, religion, age, national origin, medical condition or any other reason. Commenting on McNabbs online behavior, Lock Boyce board of supervisors chairman of Patrick County said, This individual should never be involved in patient care at any level. He added, Not as a physician, a nurse, an EMT. Not anywhere. Speaking with CNN, Keegan Hankes senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) said, He is making life-or-death medical decisions for residents of a variety of ethnicities, many of which do not fit his criteria for a white ethno-state. Hankesadded, Whether drawn from his experiences as an EMT or fiction, (McNabbs statements) are tremendous cause for concern. Recently that state investigation came to a close finding no actual wrongdoing connected with his white nationalist advocacy. That wasnt the end of McNabbs ordeal, however. Termination Following being cleared by the state as no evidence could be found linking his racist claims to actual violations of state regulations, McNabb remained on unpaid suspension from his employer. At a meeting on March 10, the board of JEB Stuart Rescue Squad met to determine McNabbs fate. They decided that although no evidence could be found linking McNabbs claims to real life actions on the job, the risk he presented was not worth keeping him on staff. In a statement following the meeting, board attorney Wren Williams released a statement via email. The board had already scheduled a meeting for March 10 to discuss its budget audit, so we added this item to the agenda for discussion in executive session, Williams said. In executive session, the board members discussed their views on the situation, pros and cons, and discussed the legal opinion obtained from outside counsel. Outside of executive session, the board voted unanimously to terminate Mr. McNabbs employment, Williams added. The board felt that this was in the best interest of the squad, which must continue to provide quality care to our residents. The decision to terminate McNabbs employment follows a contentious Patrick County Board of Supervisors meeting in January where the companys government funding was put to a vote after they did not immediately take action against McNabb. The majority of the board ultimately decided against removing JEB Stuart Volunteer Rescue Squad as they too wanted to wait for the results of the state investigation. The termination demonstrates succinctly that while speech may be free, free speech does not mean freedom from consequences. PREVIOUSLY Peacock Panache readers: Tim Peacock is the Managing Editor and founder of Peacock Panache and has worked as a civil rights advocate for over twenty years. During that time hes worn several hats including leading on campus LGBTQ advocacy in the University of Missouri campus system, interning with the Colorado Civil Rights Division, and volunteering at advocacy organizations. You can learn more about him at his personal website. Like this: Like Loading... Related We hope you enjoyed reading this article! If you would like to support our ongoing work, please consider buying us a cup of coffee. It's not much, but we don't do this for the money. We do, however, need caffeine to keep going some days!If you do donate, send us a message through our Contact Us page or via social media so we can thank you! Trout fishing in Pennsylvania 2019 will be pretty much the same as in 2018, except for changes to a couple dozen trout waters this year. The 2019 trout-fishing season will open Saturday, March 23 with the Mentored Youth Trout Fishing Day in 18 southeastern counties, including Adams, Berks, Bucks, Chester, Cumberland, Dauphin, Delaware, Franklin, Juniata, Lancaster, Lebanon, Lehigh, Montgomery, Northampton, Perry, Philadelphia, Schuylkill and York. To participate in the Mentored Youth Trout Fishing Day, youth must have a free, commission-issued license or a $2.90, voluntary, youth fishing license, and adults (16 years or older) must have a fishing license and trout permit and be accompanied by a youth. The youth licenses are available at the commissions Gone Fishing Pennsylvania website or at more than 700 licensing agents across the state. The following weekend Saturday, March 30 kicks off the regional opening day of trout season in the same 18 southeastern counties. A second Mentored Youth Trout Fishing Day is set for Saturday, April 6, and the statewide opening day for trout season for Saturday, April 13. The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commissions Great White Fleet of stocking trucks is in the process of delivering about 3.2 million trout to 707 streams and 127 lakes across the state. That will include about 2.1 million rainbow trout, 640,000 brown trout and 440,000 brook trout. They will average 11 inches in length. The commission also will stock 9,600 trophy golden rainbow trout that weigh an average of 1.5 pounds and measure at least 14 inches long. And, thousands of trophy-size brood trout, which used to provide eggs for the production of other trout in the commissions hatcheries. In the 21 stream sections designated as Keystone Select Stocked Trout Waters, about 6,500 trout 14-20 inches in length will be stocked at a rate of 175-225 fish per mile of stream, which is close to the numbers of similarly sized fish in Pennsylvanias best wild trout waters. Our hatcheries are bustling with activity every day of the year, but especially in those last few weeks leading up to trout season, said Brian Wisner, director of the commissions Bureau of Hatcheries. We know how important opening days are to Pennsylvanians, especially for families who will be making lifelong memories. As we grow these trout from eggs to adults, we not only aim to produce the quantity that anglers expect, but we take great pride in stocking high quality fish. In addition to trout raised at state hatcheries, cooperative nurseries operated by sportsmens clubs across the state will add another 1 million trout to waters open to public angling. In addition to all those factors, which are close to the same conditions as in 2018, the commission will make the following changes for 2019: Furnace Creek, Berks County - Due to an increase in accessibility, the stocking limits have been extended 1 mile upstream and 0.2 miles downstream. The revised stocking limits will extend for 3.1 miles from Robesonia Reservoir Dam downstream to the mouth. Brown and rainbow Trout will be stocked during the preseason period, and rainbow trout will be stocked during the in-season stocking period. Little Juniata River, Blair County - Based on the presence of a Class A wild Brown Trout population, stocking will be terminated on the 0.7-mile section of stream extending from the first bridge on Route 220 Business just northeast from Bellwood downstream to the first unnamed tributary entering from the west just south of Fostoria. The water had been stocked in both the preseason and in-season stocking periods. Fish previously stocked in this stream will now be stocked in Canoe Creek Lake, Blair County. Unami Creek, Bucks County - Due to an increase in accessibility, the stocking limits have been extended 0.2 miles downstream. The revised stocking limits will extend for 3.5 miles from 0.1 miles downstream of Township Road 477 in Milford Township Park downstream to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Rainbow trout will be stocked during the preseason period, and brown and rainbow trout will be stocked during the in-season stocking period. Little Killbuck Run, Cambria County - Based on the presence of a Class A wild brook trout population, stocking will be terminated on the entre 2.3-mile stream. The water had been stocked on a preseason only basis. Fish previously stocked in the stream will be distributed to stocked trout waters in surrounding counties. A replacement stream in the immediate vicinity was not available as none meet the criteria for addition to the stocked trout program. Upper Jerry Run, Cameron County - Based on the presence of a Class A mixed wild brook and brown trout population, stocking will be terminated on the 3.8-mile section of stream extending from Jerry Lick Draft downstream to the mouth. The water had been stocked on a preseason only basis. Fish previously stocked in the stream will now be stocked in the following Cameron County waters: Wykoff Run and Mix Run. East Branch Hicks Run, Cameron and Elk counties - Based on the presence of a Class A mixed wild brook and brown trout population, trout stocking will be terminated on the 6.8-mile section of stream extending from Hicks Run Road downstream to the mouth. The water had been stocked in both the preseason and in-season stocking periods. Fish previously stocked in the stream will be stocked in the following waters located in Cameron and Elk counties: West Branch Hicks Run, Bennet Branch Sinnemahoning Creek and Dents Run. West Branch Hicks Run, Cameron and Elk counties - Based on the presence of a Class A wild brown trout population, stocking will be terminated on the 3.1-mile section of stream extending from the Middle Branch Hicks Run downstream to Shaffer Draft Road. The water had been stocked on a preseason only basis. Fish previously stocked in the stream will now be stocked in the downstream reaches of West Branch Hicks Run (Shaffer Draft Road to the mouth), Elk County. Moose Creek, Clearfield County - Located near the city of Clearfield, a 2.2-mile section of stream extending from the first unnamed tributary 0.4 miles downstream of Moose Creek Reservoir downstream to the mouth will be added to the trout stocking program. Rainbow trout will be stocked during the preseason stocking period. Shaggers Inn Pond, Clearfield County - Located in Moshannon State Forest, on the headwaters of Little Medix Run, trout stocking will be initiated on this 27.9-acre impoundment. Rainbow trout will be stocked during the preseason, in-season and fall stocking periods. Dents Run, Elk County - Located near the town of Grant, a 2.6-mile section of stream extending from Hodag Trail Crossing downstream to the mouth will be added to the trout stocking program. Rainbow trout will be stocked during the preseason period, and Brown and rainbow trout will be stocked during the in-season stocking period. West Branch Hicks Run, Elk County - Located near the villages of Dents Run and Hicks Run, a 2.9-mile section of stream extending from Shafer Draft Road downstream to the mouth will be added to the trout stocking program. Brown and rainbow trout will be stocked during the preseason and in-season stocking periods. Lackawanna River, Lackawanna, Susquehanna and Wayne counties Following the completion of construction along the rails to trails access road, stocking will be reinstated in a 6.4-mile section of stream extending from Old Stillwater Dam downstream to the first unnamed tributary upstream of Simpson. Rainbow trout will be stocked during the preseason period, and brown and rainbow trout will be stocked during the in-season stocking period. Wright Creek, Luzerne County - An increase in landowner posting has led to the removal of trout stocking from a 1.5-mile section of stream extending from Penn Lake downstream to the Ice Pond and Bear Creek junction. The water had been stocked on a preseason only basis. Fish previously stocked in this stream will be distributed to stocked trout waters in surrounding counties. A replacement stream in the immediate vicinity was not available as none meet the criteria for addition to the stocked trout program. Nearby streams could be stocked as part of the commissions Cooperative Nursery Program. Sartwell Creek, McKean and Potter counties - An increase in landowner posting has led to the removal of trout stocking from a 3.8-mile section of stream extending from Bear Creek downstream to the mouth. The water had been stocked on a preseason only basis. Fish previously stocked in the stream will now be stocked in Potato Creek, McKean County. Lake Creek, Monroe County - An increase in landowner posting has led to the removal of trout stocking from a 3.7-mile section of stream extending from Route 3017 downstream to the mouth. The water had been stocked in both the preseason and in-season stocking periods. Fish previously stocked in the stream will be distributed to stocked trout waters in surrounding counties. A replacement stream in the immediate vicinity was not available as none meet the criteria for additions to the stocked trout program. Nearby streams could potentially be stocked as part of the commissions Cooperative Nursery Program. Fishing Creek, Perry County - Due to an increase in accessibility, the stocking limits have been extended 0.3 miles downstream. The revised stocking limits will extend for 6 miles from Trout Run downstream to State Route 11/15. Brown and rainbow trout will be stocked during the preseason and in-season stocking periods. Crooked Creek, Tioga County - Located near the town of Crooked Creek, a 2.5-mile section of stream extending from Hills Creek Road downstream to Ives Run Lane will be added to the trout stocking program. Brown and rainbow trout will be stocked during the preseason and in-season stocking periods. Penns Creek, Union County - Due to stream re-sectioning, the stocking limits have been extended 0.8 miles upstream. The revised stocking limits will extend for 7.2 miles from the downstream extent of the island near end of Jolly Grove Lane downstream to the Route 235 bridge in Glen Iron. Brown and rainbow trout will be stocked during the preseason and in-season stocking periods. Also, near Millmont, a 4.3-mile section of stream extending from the Route 235 bridge in Glen Iron downstream to Creek Road Bridge near Libby Road will be added to the trout stocking program. Brown and rainbow trout will be stocked during the preseason and in-season stocking periods. Penns Creek, Union County - Based on the presence of a Class A wild brown trout population, stocking will be terminated on the 3.8-mile section of stream extending from 0.3 miles downstream of Cherry Run downstream to the downstream extent of island near the end of Jolly Grove Lane. The water had been stocked in both the preseason and in-season stocking periods. Fish previously stocked in the stream will now be stocked in Penns Creek downstream extent of the island near the end of Jolly Grove Lane downstream to Creek Road Bridge near Libby Road. That will result in more fish stocked in Penns Creek in 2019 than in previous years. Rapid Run, Union County - Due to unsafe stocking conditions, trout stocking will be terminated on the 3.1-mile section of stream extending from the outflow of Halfway Lake downstream to the Buffalo Path trail. The water had been stocked on a preseason only basis. Fish previously stocked in the stream will now be stocked in Buffalo Creek, Union County. Chapman Dam Reservoir, Warren County - Adult trout stocking will be reinstated on the 68-acre impoundment following the completion of maintenance and repairs to the dam and spillway. Brown and rainbow trout will be stocked during the preseason, in-season and winter stocking periods. Hollister Creek, Wayne County - An increase in landowner posting has led to the removal of trout stocking from a 1.8-mile section of stream extending from the Stone House Road bridge downstream to the Boyce Road bridge. Formerly, the water had been stocked on an in-season only basis. Fish previously stocked in the stream will be distributed to stocked trout waters in surrounding counties. A replacement stream in the immediate vicinity was not available as none meet the criteria for addition to the stocked trout program. Nearby streams could potentially be stocked as part of the commissions Cooperative Nursery Program. Leibs Creek, York County - Based on the presence of a Class A wild brown trout population, stocking will be terminated on the 2.1-mile section of stream extending from Kilgore Road downstream to the mouth. The water had been stocked on a preseason only basis. Fish previously stocked in the stream will be distributed to stocked trout waters in surrounding counties. A replacement stream in the immediate vicinity was not available as none meet the criteria for addition to the stocked trout program. All the news you need to start your day. Sign up for Good Morning, Pennsylvania. While PennLives hard-copy photo archives has primarily photos from the 1980s and 1990s, there are a few gems. Do you remember the Amoco station just off the West Shore side of the Walnut Street bridge in the 1950s? Did you know that the covered bridge on the campus of Messiah College was moved there and rebuilt by students? A WAVE officer greets the first group of enlisted WAVES to report for duty at the former Naval Supply Depot, Mechanicsburg, September 1944. Official U.S. Navy photograph. The WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) were the womens branch of the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II. Some of them served right here in central Pa. at the former Naval Supply Depot, Mechanicsburg in Hampden Twp. The WAVES were created by a law that was signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on July 30, 1942. By the end of World War II, more than 80,000 women had served their country through WAVES. A covered bridge west of Carlisle, March 5, 1960. Pa. Department of Highways photo. Entering Wormleysburg on the old Camp Hill bypass, Sept. 2, 1959. The borough of Wormleysburg in Cumberland County was founded by John Wormley in 1815, according to the borough website. It was incorporated as a borough in 1908. According to the Census, in 1880 there were 297 residents of Wormleysburg. By the 1950s that number increased to 1,511 and now has more than 3,000 residents. The west shore side of the Walnut Street bridge, 1950s. The Walnut Street Bridge also known as Old Shakey and the Peoples Bridge - opened in 1890 as an alternative to the tolled Market Street Bridge (previously the Camelback Bridge). The bridge connected Harrisburg to City Island and City Island to Wormleysburg. The bridge was heavily damaged during Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972. As a result, the bridge was closed to vehicular traffic and was designated for use by bicycles and pedestrians only. The bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. In 1996 central Pa. was hit first with a blizzard then increasing temperatures and rain that caused flooding and a build-up of ice on the Susquehanna River. Swift flood waters propelled the ice, which crashed into the bridge. Two spans of the bridge broke free and floated down the river - disconnecting it from the West Shore. The portion of the bridge to the West Shore has never been replaced. West Fairview, date unknown. West Fairview was a borough in Cumberland County until 1998 when it merged into East Pennsboro Twp. Prior to the merger, West Fairview, established in 1910, had a population of 1,525 people and was one of the three smallest municipalities in the county. The borough was struggling to pay its bills there was no room to grow and no money to pay increasing expenses. The proposed merger was placed on the ballot in the Nov. 4, 1997, election. The merger was supported by a vote of 257 to 66 in West Fairview and 2,494 to 1,012 in East Pennsboro Twp. On Jan. 1, 1998, West Fairview became a village within East Pennsboro Twp. A covered bridge over the Yellow Breeches in Bowmansdale, Upper Allen Twp., March 5, 1960. The Bowmansdale covered bridge built in 1867 - crosses the Yellow Breeches Creek on the campus of Messiah College in Upper Allen Twp. It was moved to the campus and rebuilt by students in 1973. The Pennsylvania Railroad building yard east of Shiremanstown, March or April 1964. An aerial view of the lower end of New Cumberland shows how the Yellow Breeches Creek inundated a large part of the borough during the 1936 flood. The photo was taken by Sam Kunnert. The St. Patricks Day floods of 1936 affected all areas of Pennsylvania, March 18-20. More than 100 people in Pennsylvania died and the damage estimate was $300 million. That winter had been severe in Pa. with huge amounts of snow. In late February, the weather turned warm and rainy. Snow and ice melted rapidly. According to the book, Great Floods of Pennsylvania by William H. Shank, "An early effect of the warm spell was the thawing of the heavy layers of ice, fifteen to twenty (or more) inches thick, formed on the rivers during the intense cold period. As this ice melted, and as the rivers raised, the ice 'gorged'or jammed at various points, forming temporary dams, with resulting high 'back-up' water. The heavy ice cakes, borne in-shore by the high water, resulted in great damage to properties or communities where the jams occurred." This photo was taken by Samuel W. Kuhnert, a photographer who operated his business from his home in Camp Hill and later on North Third Street in Harrisburg. He had an interested in aerial photography. He took his first aerial photographers of Harrisburg in 1920 from Curtiss JN-4 (Jenny) biplane. After he died, his collection of more than 6,000 photographs and negatives were donated to the Pennsylvania State Archives. The Lemoyne bottleneck at the time of the flood of 1936. The Lemoyne bottleneck, date unknown. The Lemoyne bottleneck, date unknown. cumberland county's new courthouse in Carlisle, April 7, 1961. The Cumberland County Courthouse in Carlisle opened in 1961. The old courthouse was built in 1846 and is still used to house some county offices. Carlisle airport in New Kingstown, Aug. 2, 1961. Fentanyl, a powerful painkiller developed nearly 60 years ago, has triggered the deadliest drug epidemic in American history. Between 2013 and 2017, more than 67,000 people died of synthetic-opioid-related overdoses exceeding the number of U.S. military personnel killed during the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. One of the greatest dangers of fentanyl is its potency. A few grains of the drug can cause an overdose. Deaths from the drug began to climb in 2013, when drug traffickers began to mix street heroin with illicit fentanyl. In just a few years, fentanyl began to rival heroin as the deadliest opioid in the United States, prompting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue a nationwide public health advisory. The alert received little national attention. Here is what you need to know: In this Friday, June 1, 2018, photo, small vials of fentanyl are shown in the inpatient pharmacy at the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)AP Q: What is fentanyl? A. Fentanyl is a man-made opioid used to manage severe pain. It is typically administered to cancer or surgery patients. The drug was created by a Belgian physician in 1960 and approved for use as an anesthetic in 1972. Pharmaceutical fentanyl is reserved for patients who experience powerful pain that requires a stronger opioid dosage, and most patients who receive fentanyl have already been taking some type of opioid. Fentanyl is up to 100 times more powerful than morphine and up to 50 times more powerful than heroin. Fentanyl can produce feelings of euphoria similar to heroin. The drug can also cause reduced blood pressure, sedation, dizziness and respiratory depression, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Pharmaceutical fentanyl comes in patches, sprays and lollipop-like lozenges. Illicit fentanyl is a white powdery substance and can also be pressed into counterfeit prescription pills. Q: What makes fentanyl so dangerous? A. It takes about 2 milligrams of fentanyl to overdose. Fentanyl also can be combined with street drugs such as heroin or cocaine. In some instances, drug users have no idea that fentanyl has been added. More recently, drug dealers have been selling straight fentanyl, which is more profitable for them. Fentanyl analogues - or chemical variations of the drug - pose a major problem to law enforcement. Chemists can tweak the analogues to make versions of fentanyl that are not banned by law. Thus begins a game of cat and mouse: Federal officials race to identify and ban the new analogues while chemists continue to make new ones. Q: What is being done to combat the crisis? A. Many police officers and paramedics carry naloxone, a drug that can help reverse an overdose. Naloxone can be injected into the body or used as a nasal spray. It works as an antidote, blocking the effects of opioids and helping restore breathing. Pharmacies are now stocking the nasal spray. Naloxone is available for purchase without a prescription in 46 states. Public health departments, including the CDC, have encouraged more access to naloxone for first responders. In one study, opioid deaths in 19 Massachusetts communities dropped by 11 percent after the state implemented a naloxone distribution and education program. Yet municipalities still have trouble accessing the drug, partly because of the cost. Narcan, the commercial name for naloxone as a nasal spray, can cost between $70 to $150. But the injectable version, known as Evzio, can cost around $4,000. In December 2018, 6,105 kits containing the overdose reversal drug naloxone were given away at about 80 locations across Pennsylvania. A Narcan training event was held at Living Water Counseling Center in Holyoke, Mass., in February 2019. This is the Narcan kit. (Hoang 'Leon' Nguyen / The Republican) Q: What do you do if you come into contact with someone who is overdosing on fentanyl? A: If you suspect someone is experiencing an overdose, the CDC recommends the following: Call 911 immediately. Administer naloxone, if available. Try to keep the person awake and breathing. Lay the person on their side to prevent choking. Stay with him or her until emergency workers arrive. Read more: Drug test strips that could prevent fatal overdoses are illegal in Pa. Dauphin County Coroner Graham Hetrick released his 2018 report on March 1, 2019. Q: How many people have died as a result of fentanyl overdoses? A: The United States has experienced three major waves of opioid deaths. They began in the late 1990s, when Americans increasingly began to overdose on prescription painkillers, such as OxyContin and Vicodin. The next wave began in 2010 when addicts turned to heroin as supplies of prescription opioids dried up. Beginning in 2013, fentanyl overdoses started to skyrocket. In 2016, fentanyl surpassed heroin as the opioid most responsible for overdose deaths. That year, 19,720 people died of overdoses related to synthetic opioids, most of which involved fentanyl. In 2017, synthetic-opioid overdoses rose to 28,869. In Dauphin County in 2018, Coroner Graham Hetrick says there were 128 overdose deaths, up from 104 in 2017, representing a 23-percent increase. Prosecutors in Pennsylvania last year slapped first-degree felonies on more than 200 people after police accused them of providing fatal doses of illegal drugs. Its part of a new effort to reduce fatal drug overdoses in the commonwealth by prosecuting drug suppliers with the most serious felony criminal charge available in Pennsylvania. Fentanyl overdoses by state Q: Which parts of the country are most affected? A: Most of the deaths are concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest. Some of the highest death tolls have been recorded in New Hampshire, West Virginia, Massachusetts, Ohio, Maryland, Rhode Island, Maine, Connecticut, Kentucky and Washington, D.C. The first signs were detected in the spring of 2013 in Rhode Island with a sudden increase in overdose deaths at the state morgue. Lancaster County Drug Task Force's K9 Bear sits near a large amount of fentanyl seized in February 2019. Q: Where does illicit fentanyl come from? A: Fentanyl manufactured in clandestine labs has been traced to Mexico and China, according to the DEA. In January, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Arizona reported their agencys largest fentanyl bust ever: 254 pounds seized at a checkpoint on the Southwest border. The drug, along with 395 pounds of methamphetamine, was hidden in false-floor compartment of a truck carrying cucumbers. The driver was a 26-year-old Mexican national, according to authorities. Some of the illicit fentanyl made in Chinese labs is sent to the United States in small packages through the U.S. postal system or overnight shipping companies, making it difficult to detect. The Department of Justice announced its first-ever indictment against Chinese fentanyl manufacturers in October 2017, when officials in North Dakota charged two Chinese nationals with selling fentanyl over the internet. The DOJ alleged that one of the suspects operated at least two chemical plants capable of producing tons of fentanyl and fentanyl analogues. (c) 2019, The Washington Post Julie Vitkovskaya WASHINGTON - The Trump administration is preparing to shutter all international offices of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a move that could slow the processing of family visa applications, foreign adoptions and citizenship petitions from members of the military stationed abroad. USCIS Director Francis Cissna said in an email to staffers Tuesday that he is working to transfer those duties- now performed by employees worldwide - to domestic offices and the State Department's embassies and consulates. He wrote that if the State Department agrees, the agency would move to close its international field offices in coming months "in an effort to maximize our agency's finite resources." "I believe by doing so, we will better leverage our funds to address backlogs in the United States while also leveraging existing Department of State resources at post," he wrote. "Change can be difficult and can cause consternation. I want to assure you we will work to make this as smooth a transition as possible for each of our USCIS staff while also ensuring that those utilizing our services may continue to do so and our agency operations continue undisrupted." The shift will ripple to offices in New Delhi; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Rome; and numerous other foreign cities where the agency has offices that handle emergencies, alleviate backlogs in immigration petitions and provide direct information in foreign languages. USCIS international offices also investigate fraud. Officials said there are more than 20 offices, including several in Mexico, two in China, and one that was set to open in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Administration officials say the move will allow them to shift resources to slash backlogs in the United States, and they estimate the government will save millions of dollars each year by phasing out USCIS international offices. But immigration advocates worry it is another Trump administration effort to discourage foreigners from attempting to come to the United States, and experts say closing the offices will shrink the nation's engagement with the rest of the world. "It is a pullback from the international presence of USCIS," said Leon Rodriguez, a USCIS director during the Obama administration who has hosted naturalization ceremonies for military families in Frankfurt, Germany, and Rome. "It's in keeping with this isolationist bent that this administration has had more broadly." The State Department issued a statement Tuesday to say that it has long worked in close cooperation with USCIS at home and abroad and that it will coordinate closely with USCIS if it reaches an interagency agreement to take on the roles the offices have played. "Consular Affairs proudly provides services on USCIS' behalf at more than 200 posts worldwide," the State Department statement said. "Should USCIS overseas offices be phased out, we anticipate a smooth transition and continued efficient processing of USCIS-related work at all of our missions overseas." Generally, the offices in other countries facilitate applications from potential U.S. immigrants. Closing the offices would reassign about 70 USCIS staffers across the world who the agency's website says provide "valuable information services" and solve a wide array of problems, such as aiding someone who lost a green card and helping widows of American citizens and members of the military obtain legal documents. Advocates for families attempting to adopt internationally say the immigration agency added expertise and a collaborative approach they did not always find in the consular corps. "These are services that U.S. citizens are paying for," said Ryan Hanlon, vice president of the Virginia-based National Council For Adoption, noting that USCIS runs on fees from immigrants and U.S. citizens. "It shouldn't be more complex." But Jessica Vaughan, a former consular officer and current policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors stricter immigration controls, said State Department officers are well-equipped to handle those duties. "It's really a better fit for the State Department to be performing this very critical function, and it's very expensive for CIS because they've got to send an employee overseas," she said. "The State Department is already there." The move comes as the Trump administration is pressing to tighten the nation's immigration controls and shift from family reunification to merit-based immigration. Department of Homeland Security officials say it is part of an overall effort to streamline U.S. immigration operations. A senior DHS official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a decision that has yet to be publicly announced said it was primarily a cost-saving measure that will hand off responsibilities to State Department and DHS personnel working abroad. The USCIS International Operations Division, created under the Refugee, Asylum, and International Operations Directorate, has about 240 employees in the United States and in two dozen field offices in more than 20 countries. It is "charged with advancing the USCIS mission in the international arena," according to materials on the agency's website. "Reuniting families, enabling adoptive children to come to join permanent families in the U.S., considering parole requests from individuals outside the U.S. for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit, and providing information services and travel documents to people around the world - all with unique needs and circumstances - are just a few of the responsibilities our officers assume on a daily basis," USCIS says. The agency also investigates fraud, aids asylees and refugees, and provides public information in local foreign languages. More than half of the overseas USCIS staff members are foreign nationals, and the local contract employees who perform many of the applicant screenings are likely to continue doing so under State Department supervision, a DHS officials said. If the State Department agrees to take over those duties, American employees in international offices would transfer back to the United States. Officials said USCIS would still provide services from U.S.-based offices and visits abroad. Refugee processing would not be affected because a different unit handles that function, officials said. But immigration lawyers and others were skeptical, saying the Trump administration has delayed application processing and heightened scrutiny of applications that used to clear quickly, keeping foreigners from being able to work, study and join their families in the United States. "This is not an immigration-friendly administration," said George Bruno, a Manchester, New Hampshire, immigration lawyer and former ambassador to Belize. "The service currently being provided is awful, and I can only imagine it's going to deteriorate further with these office closures." In his email, Cissna said in his message to staff that he also would consolidate regional, district, and field offices in the United States in coming weeks "to streamline management structures, balance resources, and improve our overall mission performance and service delivery." - - - The Washington Posts Carol Morello contributed to this report. PHILADELPHIA (AP) The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and several criminal justice reform groups filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Philadelphia court magistrates over what they say are unfair bail practices that dont follow rules and unfairly target poor people of color. "The system of bail in Philadelphia is clearly quite broken," said Reggie Shuford, executive director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, saying it only works for the "wealthiest individuals who can buy their way out of jail." The lawsuit was filed with the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania as a complaint against six Philadelphia arraignment court magistrates who the ACLU claims routinely violates the high court's rules. It alleges the magistrates rely too heavily on cash bail and are effectively punishing people for being poor. The ACLU observed more than 2,000 bail hearings in recent months and found that magistrates "were regularly violating rules intended to prevent the criminalization of poverty," he said. "Philadelphia must do better." The ACLU has filed other lawsuits challenging unfair bail practices in Alabama, Texas, Florida, Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, New York and California. The group described the hearings in Philadelphia as video conferences that typically last about two minutes, where clients don't get a chance to speak, often can't hear the proceedings and their financial situation is not taken into consideration, with bail even imposed on people receiving food stamps. "They're making decisions about people lives that will cost them their jobs, apartments and custody of their children in the time it takes to brush your teeth," said Mary Catherine Roper, of the ACLU of Pennsylvania. Candace McKinley, an organizer with the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund which is a party to the suit, described how her group has raised over $300,000 since 2017 to bail out about 100 people who couldn't afford their bail. "We've had people who have given birth while they were locked up and had their kid taken away from them," she said. "We had to scramble to post bail so they could show up at family court to try to get their child back." Gabe Roberts, the director of communications for the First Judicial District of Pennsylvania, said the court can't comment on pending cases or filings. A city spokesman said they had not yet reviewed the litigation and so have no comment at this time. About a year ago, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner announced his office would no longer seek bail for minor criminal cases. During an update on the effects of the reform last month, his office announced that 1,750 defendants were released without bail during 2018, with no increase in recidivism. According to the First Judicial District, defendants' court-appearance rate in 2018 was the highest it has been in a decade, nearly 97 percent in Common Pleas Court and 87.5 percent in Municipal Court, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported . Krasner's office said it didn't have any comment on the lawsuit at this time. The problem the ACLU lawsuit is seeking to address is that the magistrates are not following the rules, and in some cases they are setting bail deliberately too high, said Mary Catherine Roper, of the ACLU of Pennsylvania. That is not anything the DA can fix, that is not something the public defender can fix, that is not something the city administration can fix, she said. Honestly, these judges are not following orders and the only authority that can tell them to do that is the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Be the first to know when local news happens. Sign up for breaking news alerts. The attorney for former Penn State counsel Cynthia Baldwin is promising a vigorous defense against a recommendation for public censure against his client. The Disciplinary Board of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania - the state panel in charge of adjudicating lawyers adherence to rules of professional conduct - called for Baldwins public censure because of what it saw as gross violation of attorney-client privilege in her management of Penn States response to the unfolding Sandusky probe. Baldwins actions, the board found, led to critical breakdowns in the representation of former Penn State President Graham Spanier and two of his top managers that were so egregious that a Superior Court panel would ultimately dismissed the heart of a cover-up case against them. Baldwin, herself a former state Supreme Court justice, has maintained that she acted appropriately in the case - including in offering testimony about Penn States cooperation with the investigation - after recognizing that she was duped by the former Penn State administrators. Some review panels have found no wrongdoing on her part; some, like the Disciplinary Board, have. Heres what Baldwins attorney, Charles De Monaco said in a statement Wednesday as the professional conduct case heads to the Supreme Court, which will have the final word: We are shocked and take exception to the Report and Recommendation of the Disciplinary Board and are disappointed that it did not adopt the diligent work of the Disciplinary Board Hearing Committee as set forth in its detailed October 2018 Report and Recommendation. "The Hearing Committee considered all of the evidence and heard the testimony presented and unanimously concluded that Cynthia Baldwins conduct was at all times diligent, proper and in compliance with her professional responsibilities. We look forward to the review of this matter by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. SUNBURY Two individuals who say that are not bound to any laws continue to sit in Northumberland County Prison, refusing to be fingerprinted or sign paperwork that would allow their release. Identified as John and Jane Doe, the two individuals have reached six months in prison, prompting county Judge Charles H. Saylor to ask the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts for assistance on how to proceed. The two individuals, believed to be Kevin Gilgeours of Queens, New York, and Kathleen Claxton of Brooklyn, New York, claim they are sovereign citizens who are immune to any local, state or federal laws. They are taking it to the extreme, court administrator Kevin OHearn said Tuesday. What to do next is the million-dollar question. No one really knows. Saylor canceled jury selection scheduled Monday for the two, who are charged with criminal trespass, endangering the welfare of a child, resisting arrest and causing a public nuisance. His order for each, issued after they refused to cooperate Friday at a pretrial conference, states: "Defendants are themselves being obstructive in court and this court finds it is futile to conduct any rational colloquy with either defendant. Under the circumstances, jurors will not, at this time, be exposed to the defendants present attempt to make a mockery of the authority of this court, the rules of procedure and the applicable law. The two individuals have been in jail since Aug. 29 when Mount Carmel Twp. police forced their way into the home in the village of Connorsville. They initially were jailed in lieu of $20,000 bail each, but in October it was reduced to unsecured, meaning they could be released on their signature if they agreed to be fingerprinted. Still, they have chosen to remain under the care of the prison. It is uncertain if the two are married but their 4-year-old daughter also was found in the house, township Chief Brian Hollenbush said. She initially was placed in the custody of county Children and Youth Services but is now with family in New York, he said. Family members have identified the female as Claxton, but Hollenbush said until they are fingerprinted that cannot be confirmed. According to the chief and arrest documents, the two bought the property in 2015 at a tax sale and lost it at a tax sale in July. We thought they had left, Hollenbush said, explaining water and power had been turned off. Neighbors reported activity there including people taking showers in the nude outside in the rain, he said. The Wayne County man who bought the West Fifth Street property in July sought their eviction once he obtained the deed. When officers went to the house in August to evict them, the male refused to open the door and Claxton is alleged to have yelled police had no grounds to enter the structure, the charges state. Additional police units were summoned, a ram was used to make entry and officers had to use pepper spray and a stun gun to take the two into custody. The final plans for a proposed Chick-fil-A restaurant in Camp Hill have been submitted to borough officials for review and, along with those plans, a traffic impact study that shows an increase in traffic volume once the restaurant is in operation. At its busiest, midday Saturdays, the restaurant is likely to generate an additional 253 vehicle-trips" at the intersection, which already is traveled by thousands of vehicles each day. Against many local residents wishes, developers are planning to convert existing alleyways to provide access to the restaurant. This photo of plans for a Chick-fil-A restaurant at the corner of 32nd and Chestnut Streets was taken Tuesday at the Camp Hill Borough Office, where they were on display. Consolidated Properties, a Wormleysburg-based development company, plans to build a Chick-fil-A restaurant at the southeastern corner of 32nd and Chestnut streets. The 1.4-acre site is made up of seven individual lots on the 3100 block of Chestnut Street, where six buildings now stand. Those buildings would have to be demolished to allow restaurant construction, developers said. The plans for the site show a 5,031-square-foot building with space for 106 seats and a double-lane drive-thru. The restaurant would be surrounded by a parking lot with 57 spots for vehicles and 12 spots for bicycles, as well as landscaping buffers and a 6-foot vinyl fence at the eastern property line. The plans displayed in the borough office show that motorists will be able to access the restaurant by turning from Chestnut Street onto a north-south alleyway on the eastern side of the property. To accommodate expected restaurant traffic, developers plan to widen the alleyway, borough Manager Pat Dennis said. That widening could only take place after the eastern-most building on the site is demolished, he said. The widening would allow for one southbound lane and two northbound lanes in the alleyway, the plans show. This home on the 3100 block of Chestnut Street would be demolished to allow for the widening of an alleyway, which would be used to access the proposed restaurant. In their summary of the traffic impact study, developers explained that left turns from the alleyway will be prohibited during peak hours. An east-west alleyway at the propertys southern border also will be used in the restaurants development, according to the plans, which show a parking spot and at least one drivable lane in the right of way. The study didnt only look at added traffic expected from the Chick-fil-A, but also existing conditions at the intersection. On an average day, about 5,650 vehicles travel Chestnut Street in the study area, with about 34,524 traveling 32nd street. According to an executive summary attached to the study, those totals likely would increase with the opening of the restaurant. In the study, developers highlighted peak hours. Morning peak hours refer to the period of 7 to 9 a.m., midday peak hours refer to the period from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and evening peak hours refer to a period from 4 to 6 p.m. The study report shows that about 46 vehicle-trips will be added in the area during the weekday morning peak, and 142 additional trips are expected during the weekday evening peak. The most new vehicle-trips are expected at midday Saturday, when an additional 253 vehicle-trips could be generated. Developers noted in the summary that the traffic impact study was conducted in line with both PennDOT and Camp Hill borough regulations. Existing conditions, as well as other ongoing development efforts, including the nearby Quattro site at the former Veterans Affairs building along 32nd street, were taken into consideration during the planning process, developers said. In a separate document, developers described the proposed Chick-fil-A as a quick service restaurant, which will be open from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday. The restaurant is expected to employ about 80 people, not all of them full-time. In addition to customer traffic, the proposed business will receive regular visits from delivery trucks and garbage collection vehicles, developers said. According to the documents, tractor-trailer deliveries will be made about three to four times a week, and those deliveries will be made outside of normal business hours to avoid conflicts with customer traffic. The tractor-trailers likely will remain on site for about an hour as they are unloaded. Daily deliveries will be made by smaller box trucks, and trash collection is expected about four times a week. Developers also addressed issues regarding odors, noise, light pollution and trash issues that have been concerns among community members, who have spoken out at numerous public meetings. Along with trash concerns, developers addressed litter. Chick-fil-A will have an employee police the site at various times of the day to pick up any trash that may have been dropped on the site, their documents read, also referencing the 6-foot fence that is intended to provide a buffer between the proposed business and the neighboring residential community. Another ongoing point of concern has been stormwater, with community members worrying how fallen rain will flow across the proposed restaurants paved lot. Developers said they are planning to install an underground detention system capable of holding at least some of the sites stormwater, which can then be released slowly into an existing channel to the south. The stormwater design will be in compliance with all state and local regulations, developers said. Since developers announced their intention to construct a Chick-fil-A within borough limits, local residents chief concern has been the added traffic. The area already is busy with both vehicle and pedestrian traffic, both residents and officials have agreed. Late last year, just the idea of added traffic at the site was enough to bring local mother Tiffany Bransteitter to tears. My kids learned to ride bikes on those streets, she said. I have grave concerns for their safety. That concern has been exacerbated because the local Camp Hill School District does not use buses to transport its students to and from its schools. Superintendent Patricia Craig said the districts 1,339 students are considered technically all walkers, adding that some of them are required to cross 32nd Street, which is also known as Route 15. In the planning process, developers also explored those concerns, looking into traffic calming measures for the area including raised crosswalks and raised intersections, which would effectively act as speed bumps. On Tuesday, Dennis said borough experts and engineers are now reviewing Consolidated Properties plans, which likely will appear before the local planning commission for a recommendation later this month. If the planning commission recommends the plans, Camp Hill Borough Council members could vote on whether to approve them at a following meeting. If approval is granted, steps toward construction could then begin. Construction of the restaurant will take about six months, said Charlie Courtney, the developers land-use attorney with McNees, Wallace & Nurick LLC. The local planning commission is scheduled to meet for a workshop at 6 p.m. today at the Camp Hill Fire Department at 2198 Walnut St. The Chick-fil-A will not be on the workshop agenda, borough officials said. The planning commission is scheduled to meet for its regular meeting at 6 p.m. March 19 at the borough office, where action on the restaurant plans could be taken. Harrisburg residents will have to wait another month and a half before they find out who will replace the late Melvin Wilson Jr. on the Harrisburg school board. Wilson passed away in December, and his seat has been vacant since. Dauphin County Judge John McNally III will decide among four Harrisburg residents, according to court documents. A hearing to appoint one of them has been scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on April 23 in Courtroom 6 of the Dauphin County Courthouse. Five votes were required to appoint a candidate to the vacant seat; however, school board directors were unable to tally the votes. Instead, they voted 5 to 3 earlier this year to pass the responsibility on to the Dauphin County Court of Common Pleas. That meant, in order to be considered, candidates were required to collect a minimum of 10 signatures from Harrisburg residents, district solicitor Samuel Cooper had said. Petitions had to be filed at the courthouse. Ralph Rodriguez was the first to file a petition. Rodriguez, at a special meeting earlier this year, had asked the board to consider him as a replacement. His petition shows that he has partnered with Marva Brown, who also wanted to be considered. Unlike Rodriguez, Brown missed the special meeting in January due to an unexpected professional conflict. If Rodriguez isnt appointed to the vacancy, he asked the court to consider Brown as an alternate choice, according to his petition. I would still like to be considered, Brown said in a phone interview. Concerned About the Children of Harrisburg, a group otherwise known as C.A.T.C.H., filed a response to Rodriguezs petition. The group is supporting Cornelius Chachere. The grassroots group formed with the stated purpose of holding local leaders accountable, empowering families and ensuring quality education for Harrisburgs children. Chachere also asked school directors to consider him as a replacement, and attended the special meeting in January. Neither Chachere nor Rodriguez were able to secure five votes, which is how the case ended up in court. A fourth option is former school board director James Thompson. Thompson submitted the required residents signatures needed to support his efforts. Dauphin County elections officials have released a list of candidates seeking their partys nomination in this years municipal primary, which looks to have a number of contested races. The unofficial list, which is published below, was posted to the Dauphin County elections and voter registration webpage as of 4:30 p.m. Tuesday. Tuesday was the deadline by which candidates were required to submit their elections petitions, securing them a spot on the springtime ballot. Pennsylvanias municipal primary is slated for May 21, when voters will have a chance to take to the polls to choose which of the below candidates they feel can best fill local leadership roles. Notable contested races include, five candidates competing for seats on the Dauphin County Commissioners board. Democratic candidates Diane Bowman, Tom Connolly and Geroge P. Hartwick III are in the running, as are Republican candidates Jeff Haste and Mike Pries. All off the candidates are of Harrisburg, except for Pries, who is of Hershey. In Derry Township, two supervisors seats are up for grabs, with a total of six candidates four Democrats and two Republicans in the running. In Steelton, eight candidates six Democrats and four Republicans are seeking election to four seats on the local borough council. And there are nine candidates, all cross-filed, seeking election to five open seats on the Halifax Area School District Board of Directors. Information on other contested races, including Harrisburg City Council and Harrisburg School District can be seen below. Lancaster County elections officials have released a list of candidates seeking their partys nomination in this years municipal primary, which looks to have a number of contested races. The unofficial list, which is published below, was posted to the Lancaster County elections webpage as of 5 p.m. Tuesday. Tuesday was the deadline by which candidates were required to submit their elections petitions, securing them a spot on the springtime ballot. Pennsylvanias municipal primary is slated for May 21, when voters will have a chance to take to the polls to choose which of the below candidates they feel can best fill local leadership roles. In Lancaster County, four candidates are seeking election to the board of county commissioners. Among the candidates are Democrat Craig Lehman and Republicans Josh Parsons, Douglas Brubaker and Ray DAgostino. The county also has two contested magisterial district judge races. And there are two candidates running for Lancaster County District Attorney Democrat Hobie Crystle and Republican Heather L. Adams. Information on other Lancaster County election races can be seen below. Attorneys finished jury selection Wednesday morning in the case of a Pittsburgh-area officer charged with homicide, picking seven additional Dauphin County residents within 90 minutes. Added to the jury were three white men, and added as alternates were three white men and one white woman. The resulting jury of 12 members is split evenly between men and women, and includes three African Americans. The jury will be bused to Pittsburgh for the trial on Monday, because a judge previously ruled a fair and impartial jury would be hard to find in Allegheny County. The murder trial is set to begin Tuesday March 19 against former East Pittsburgh Officer Michael Rosfeld, 30, after he fatally shot Antwon Rose, 17, as the teen fled a traffic stop last year. The officer is white and Antwon was black. The shooting sparked weeks of protests in the Pittsburgh area. Attorneys previously selected nine jurors Tuesday. A black woman who was the subject of a Batson challenge, Tuesday was confirmed to stay on the jury Wednesday over the objections of the defense attorney who had wanted to use a peremptory strike to remove her. Prosecutors, however, said they believed the defense team was removing the Allison Hill resident solely for her skin color, which is not allowed under law. Allegheny County Judge Alexander P. Bicket agreed with prosecutors that the woman should stay on the jury, triggering continued objections from defense attorney Patrick Thomassey, who said the ruling violated his clients Constitutional rights by refusing him his peremptory strikes. Each side gets seven peremptory strikes to remove potential jurors from the pool without public explanation. In this jury selection process, prosecutors used five of their strikes and the defense team used two strikes. One of the potential jurors removed Wednesday by prosecutors was an older woman who said she had been traumatized by a purse snatching on Cameron Street in the 1980s. She also said her nephew worked as a police officer in Palmyra and that she would like to think that police officers dont lie, but were all human. Heres a look at the jurors added to the panel on Wednesday: A white man in his 50s who has worked as an equipment operator for 25 years, with two adult children. His wife is a homemaker, he said. While the man originally said he was less likely to believe a police officer, he clarified under questioning that he only meant that everyone has the potential to lie at times. The man said he had observed some unethical behavior in the past from police officers but it was about 30 years ago. A 26-year-old white man who works for the state as a budget analyst. Hes married with a 2-year-old daughter and said he grew up in Steelton. He studied accounting at a Christian college in Florida. He said he hadnt read anything about the case and had no prior bad experiences with police officers. A 41-year-old white man who said he was unemployed but working part-time as a bar back at a downtown Harrisburg bar. Hes unmarried with no kids. He said he hadnt read anything about the case. The man said his former stepfather worked as a police officer but retired in 1999 and then his parents divorced in 2001 so he had little contact with his former stepfather after that. The first alternate juror is a 45-year-old white man who works as a distributor for Dollar General, and is married to a woman who works for the Central Dauphin School District. They have two teenagers. The man said he had served as a juror in a criminal case before and that it was a fair experience. The defense attorney asked if he understand that officers can use force in certain circumstances and the man answered, yes. The second alternate juror is a 50-year-old man who works as a service writer for an auto dealership. He said he was not married, with no kids and had not previously served on a jury. He said he had no negative experiences with police and was unfamiliar with the case at hand. The third alternate juror is a 27-year-old white woman who works in a long-term care facility where she does payroll and nurse scheduling. Her husband works for a power washing company and they have one son. She said she had no prior fixed opinions about policing and no knowledge of this case. The fourth alternate juror is a 47-year-old white man who is an architect by training and works as a site surveyor for a solar company. He said he worked for his college campus security service as a civilian in the 1990s in Chicago and had broad experience with all walks of life while living in Chicago. Hes originally from the San Diego area. Hes married with no children. All of the jurors were selected from the first 33 prospects out of an original jury pool of 145 people. After jury selection was completed just before 10 a.m., the attorneys discussed the instructions that jurors would receive next week about the various criminal charges that could be available to jurors. They also are planning a hearing Friday to decide the perimeters of an expert witness that the defense team would like to have testify. Soon after his wife was found dead in April 1983, Carl Rodgers told investigators she had come home from work distraught the night before she disappeared, a retired state trooper testified Tuesday. Rodgers said his 23-year-old wife Debra was upset over her job, ex-Trooper Michael Brennan told the Perry County jury. He said Rodgers even claimed his wife had said, Just let me die in peace. Brennan is one of the investigators who came out of retirement to take the witness stand during Carl Rodgers trial in the 36-year-old cold case. He was essentially standing in for the original lead investigator, who died a decade ago. Senior Deputy Attorneys General Heather Castellino and Kelly Sekula are contending that Rodgers, now 63, of Shermans Dale, beat his 23-year-old wife to death, slit her wrists to simulate a suicide and dumped her corpse in Tuscarora State Forest. Defense attorney Geoffrey McInroy is claiming Debra Rodgers did indeed kill herself. Rodgers was charged with murder in November 2017 after the AGs office revisited the case. Debra Rodgers Brennan, a prosecution witness, interviewed Carl Rodgers on May 2, 1983, eight days after Debra Rodgers body was found. The ex-trooper said Rodgers at first said he tried to comfort his wife when she came home distraught on April 22, 1983. However, when pressed, Rodgers told investigators they had hollered at each other after his wife said she wanted to quit her job, Brennan said, reading from his official report on that long-ago interrogation. When told his wife had been murdered, Rodgers insisted he never intentionally struck her, the former trooper said. He said Rodgers became emotionally upset when shown photos of Debras corpse. The trial is to resume Wednesday in President Judge Kathy A. Moyers courtroom. Lawyers representing state Rep. Brian Ellis, a Republican from Butler County, responded to a womans claims made in a complaint filed on Tuesday with the House Republicans, accusing the eight-term lawmaker of sexually assaulting her in 2015. In a statement, Myers, Brier & Kelly LLP, a law firm representing Ellis, said, This anonymous complaint was prepared by the accusers hired agents and instantly given to numerous media outlets for one cynical reason: to generate sensational press coverage. The accusers latest self-serving repackaging of the 2015 allegations are just plain false. The woman filed the formal complaint against Ellis with the House Republican lawyers to trigger an internal investigation. PennLive does not release the identify individuals making allegations of sexual assault. A separate criminal investigation is ongoing into the matter by the Dauphin County District Attorneys office. Ellis has not been charged with a crime. Ellis has not responded to repeated messages left in his Harrisburg and district offices as well as his cell phone. Jan Murphy may be reached at jmurphy@pennlive.com. Follow her on Twitter at @JanMurphy. Get breaking news before daybreak. Sign up for Good Morning, Pennsylvania. A Philadelphia man is in custody Wednesday after police said he was involved in a hit and run crash in Harrisburg, then led police on a high speed chase. Swatara Township police said Nasir Anthony Grant is being charged on multiple counts related to the crash and chase occurring Wednesday morning. Online court documents list a misdemeanor charge of accidents involving damage to an attended vehicle or property along with three summary traffic violations. Police were notified of a hit-and-run crash involving a white Ford SUV, occurring in Harrisburg but near the Swatara Township line. At the time, police believed the vehicle fled into Swatara Township. As township officers arrived in the area around 11:20 a.m. to search for the vehicle, one officer saw a SUV matching the description in the 3500 block of Paxton Street, according to police. An officer tried to conduct a traffic stop, but the SUV fled on Eisenhower Boulevard and eventually got on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, police said. State police joined the Swatara Township police officer in the pursuit, and all parties crossed into Lebanon County, police said. Shortly after, the SUVs car began to slow down, and the driver, identified as Grant, began to flee on foot. Officers chased Grant for a short time before detaining him, police said. Once police identified him, they learned he was a 19-year-old Philadelphia resident, police said. When police took him into custody, they found he was in possession of multiple narcotics and a loaded handgun. The gun was reported stolen out of South Carolina. Grant was wanted by Philadelphias Office of Probation, according to police. He was transported to the Dauphin County Booking Center. He was arraigned and is being held at Dauphin County prison on $10,000 bail. Accused of sharing child pronography over an online video communication app, a 19-year-old man faces two felonies. According to authorities at the Berks County District Attorneys office, Brendan Geier of Madison, N.J. stored the child pornography on electronic devices in his room at Kutztown University. Investigators said they were first notified about the reported sharing of child pronography Sept. 21, when officials at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children submitted a complaint. Berks County detectives investigated, learning that the center had received information about someone using the video messaging app Skype to upload seven images of child pornography, according to the district attorneys office. Investigators were able to track an I.P. address used to upload the images and determine that it was associated with Geier, authorities said. According to the district attorneys office, law enforcement officers then served a search warrant at Geiers home a room in Kutztown Universitys Lehigh Hall. A laptop and iPhone were seized during the search, and a forensic examination of the electronics showed they contained numerous digital images of suspected child pornography, authorities said. Online court documents show Geier faces felony charges of child pornography and disseminating photos or film of child sex acts. The charges were filed Tuesday, and, according to the district attorneys office, Geier surrendered himself to Berks County detectives Wednesday. He is to be arraigned before Magisterial District Judge Gail Greth. The states top prosecutor has opened an investigation into Sunoco Pipeline and its parent company, Energy Transfer Partners, into their pipeline that spans the state. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said on Twitter Tuesday his office is investigating the liquid natural gas pipeline project known as Mariner East II. We will leave no stone unturned in this case, he said in the post. #NEW My Office has opened an investigation into the Pennsylvania pipeline project known as *Mariner East II*. We will leave no stone unturned in this case - referred to us by @DaKATCopeland - as we fight to protect PAns. #MarinerEastII AG Josh Shapiro (@PAAttorneyGen) March 12, 2019 It is a join investigation with Delaware County District Attorney Katayoun M. Copeland into allegations of criminal misconduct, Philly.com reports. This follows Chester County District Attorney Thomas Hogan starting his own investigation in December and, according to the Delaware County Daily Times, empaneling a grand jury last month. Energy Transfer Partners officials told Philly.com there is no legitimate basis for conducting a criminal investigation, and they have worked closely with the state and inspectors to respond to citizen concerns. The nature of the accusations of criminal misconduct that are the focus of Copelands investigation were unclear, but according to reports, she said many residents have directly expressed concerns over the operations of the pipeline and have made formal complaints and allegations of potential misconduct. In Chester County in December, Hogan said We expected the state regulators and the governor to step in and assure the safety of Pennsylvanians. They have not So now the Chester County District Attorneys Office will demand that every aspect of these pipelines be conducted safely, or we will bring into play all of the tools of the criminal justice system. In Cumberland County, Lower Frankford Township resident Wilmer Baker has a hearing scheduled for March 28 before the Public Utilities Commission over safety concerns with the Mariner East 2 pipeline, which runs near his home. Last month, the state Department of Environmental Protection halted construction permits for the companys pipelines, saying they have not fixed problems related to an explosion last year. "There has been a failure by Energy Transfer and its subsidiaries to respect our laws and our communities," Gov. Tom Wolf said in a statement last month. "This is not how we strive to do business in Pennsylvania, and it will not be tolerated." In August, state officials had levied a $148,000 fine against the company for harming private wells while building the Mariner East 2 pipeline in Lebanon, Berks and Chester counties. And in April, the company agreed to pay a $355,622 penalty for allowing materials from drilling for the natural gas products pipeline to flow into streams and wetlands in Cumberland, Dauphin, Blair, Cambria, Huntingdon, Indiana, Lancaster, Washington, Allegheny and Westmoreland counties. Upper Frankford Resident Rolfe Blume, who fought and ultimately lost an eminent domain battle with the pipeline, said construction has left his well contaminated. According to the company, the 350-mile pipeline transports domestically-produced ethane, propane and butane east from processing plants in Ohio, across West Virginia and Pennsylvania to Energy Transfers Marcus Hook Industrial Complex in Delaware County, where its stored for distribution locally, domestically and overseas. The pipeline went online in December. President Trump says he is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft after a crash in Ethiopia killing everyone aboard. The Associated Press and other outlets published the news. Dozens of other countries had already grounded the aircraft after Sundays crash, the second fatal crash in five months involving the planes. Canada grounded the jets Wednesday. An Ethiopian Airlines jet crashed shortly after taking off for Nairobi on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. The same type of plane crashed in Indonesia five months ago, killing 189 people. The Federal Aviation Administration had previously said the jet is safe. Boeing has said there is no issue with the jet, a popular plane used across the world. Boeing issued a statement Wednesday saying that it supported the federal governments action out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircrafts safety. Several lawmakers from both parties, including U.S. Sens. Mitt Romney, Ted Cruz, Elizabeth Warren, Dianne Feinstein, and Richard Blumenthal had called on the FAA to ground the planes. About 370 Max jets had been in service worldwide, according to the Associated Press. At least two U.S. airline pilots reported that the jets automated system caused the plane to tilt down unexpectedly, the AP reported, but both pilots were able to recover quickly. Get all the news you need to start your day. Sign up for Good Morning, Pennsylvania Following the announcement that Walmarts greeter positions are being transitioned into customer hosts, Sen. Bob Casey and five other U.S. senators called on the company to make a commitment to staff with disabilities. Walmart announced Tuesday that one of the new duties their hosts would handle will include returns and refunds. The change is one of many, and other changes to the role could impact staff members with physical disabilities and whether theyre able to fulfill the duties of the job. Casey and the others wrote to Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, asking about the decision to eliminate the greeter positions, and what efforts are being made to make reasonable accommodations," per the American Disabilities Act, for employees hurt by the decision. We believe Walmart should make it a priority to help any greeter who wants to - particularly those with long tenures at your company - to transition into a new opportunity at Walmart, the letter reads. We understand that businesses may make changes to the job requirements of certain positions, but we are concerned that the elimination of the greeter position may preclude individuals with disabilities from working at Walmart, the letter reads. The senators outline eight main questions for McMillon, including when the greeter position will be phased out, company guidelines for the best way to make the transition, whether the company consulted with disability employment specialists, and where else in the Walmart company and stores employees with disabilities may work. We know you share our goal of ensuring that workers of all abilities are able to find gainful, competitive integrated employment, the letter states, before ending saying they look forward to receiving a response from the company. Along with Casey, senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) signed the letter. Everything you need to know to start your day. Sign up for Good Morning, Pa. Nearly 36 years have passed since Pamela Barkleys friend Debra Rodgers was found dead along a ridge in the Tuscarora State Forest. Yet that memory was all too fresh when Barkley took the witness stand Wednesday afternoon during the Perry County homicide trial of Rodgers husband, Carl. The rawness of the emotion was evident when Senior Deputy Attorney General Heather Castellino asked Barkley how she felt when told of Debra Rodgers death in April 1983. The same way I feel right now, Barkley replied. Very upset. Shocked. The person told me they believed she killed herself. I couldnt believe it. She never seemed depressed, Barkley added. Castellino and fellow prosecutor Kelly Sekula are contending the 23-year-olds death wasnt a suicide, even though both of her wrists were slashed. They claim those cuts were inflicted by Carl Rodgers to try to conceal the fact that he had beaten his 105-pound wife to death. Geoffrey McInroy, the attorney for the now 63-year-old defendant, is arguing that Debra Rodgers did commit suicide. Her other injuries, including a fractured skull, occurred when she collapsed on the rocky forest floor after slitting her wrists, McInroy claims. Carl Rodgers, a Shermans Dale resident, was charged with homicide in November 2017 after the state attorney generals office revisited the cold case. Debra Rodgers Barkley was among several witnesses the prosecutors called in an effort to refute Carl Rodgers statements to police that his wife was depressed about work and suicidal before she disappeared on April 23, 1983. Barkley said she got to know Debra Rodgers when the 1977 Newport High School graduate worked as a temp in the Department of Public Welfare office in the county. Debra was an exceptional worker, she said, and often spoke about how much she loved her 5-year-old daughter. Under McInroys questioning, Barkley said she couldnt recall who informed her of Debras death and who told her it was a suicide. It wasnt Carl Rodgers, she said. Robert Gaffron, a retired teacher who once taught Debra, recalled talking with her on the afternoon of April 22, 1983, right after she started a temporary clerk job at Little Buffalo State Park. Gaffron was a park ranger. He said he was making his rounds when he saw Debra sitting on a bench by the side of the road. When he asked what she was doing, she replied, She just needed to get some fresh air and clear her head, Gaffron said. She asked him if the park director would be mad if she took a new full-time state job, he said. Gaffron said he assured her there would be no hard feelings. Did she seem depressed at all? Castellino asked. No. You could tell she had something on her mind, Gaffron replied. He described Debra as a really super person. Harold Weibley, a school friend of Carl Rodgers, said Debra was quiet, easy-going. He said he was involved in Bible study with Carl Rodgers soon after Debras death. Carl did talk about the death, Weibley said. He just said that she had come home late and they had gotten into an argument about it, Weibley said. He said he was irritated, upset, maybe a little angry. He said Carl told him his wife was gone when he awoke on the morning of April 23, 1983. Castellino asked if Carl Rodgers ever said how his wife had died. He just made a gesture, like a cut across the wrist, Weibley said. The trial is to resume Thursday in President Judge Kathy A. Morrows courtroom. SUNBURY Intentionally conceiving a child out of wedlock and refusing to marry constitutes serious and public immorality, public scandal and rejection of the official teaching, doctrine or laws of the Catholic church. That is part of the response by the Diocese of Harrisburg and the individual defendants to the breach of contract lawsuit filed by Naiad Reich, an unwed, pregnant teacher fired from a Shamokin area Catholic school. She sued the district, Bishop Ronald W. Gainer and Sister Mary Anne Bednar, principal of Our Lady of Lourdes Regional School on Feb. 1 in Northumberland County. She's seeking unspecified damages plus reinstatement to her teaching job. Reich was fired Nov. 30 after informing Bednar she and her boyfriend, Matt Graboski, with whom she lives, were expecting a baby in June but had no immediate plans to marry. For the court to reinstate Reich would abridge the rights of church entities and officials, the defendants claim. Reich wants to put the court a role that would necessarily entangle it in the "determination of religious and ecclesiastical issues," they contend. Granting her relief would be unconstitutional, they also say. Our Lady of Lourdes is operated as an integral part of the religious mission of its sponsoring parishes and the diocese, the response to the suit states, adding: "It would not exist but for its role in imparting the doctrine and tenets of the Catholic faith to those enrolled therein. "It has been established as a community of faith, operated on religious principles in which all who minister therein are expected to share the accomplishment of its religious goals and religious mission. The defendants cite a diocesan policy that states in part that a Catholic school employee "respects the dignity of marriage and Catholic moral doctrine on human sexuality... "They do not engage in...procreation outside of marriage. This includes activities such as cohabitation..." Responding to specific claims in Reich's suit, the defendants: Say they were unaware of any cohabitation until Reich told Bednar. Deny Bednar told Reich her pregnancy was going to be a "huge problem." Confirm Reich was given the opportunity resign from her $27,775-a-year job teaching English in the 8th, 10th and 11th grades to avoid dismissal. Deny the school board members voted to reinstate Reich. Point out Reich did not have tenure. Claim Bednar discussed the proposed termination with the Rev. Andrew J. Stahmer, chairman of the school board, before the formal letter of termination was sent Dec. 4. Reich contends her firing did not follow diocese policy because the board of education was not consulted. Board member Tony Varano says the non-clergy members support the fired teacher. Reich appealed her dismissal to Gainer, but he denied the appeal in a Dec. 19 letter in which he wrote all employees are bound by their contracts to exhibit respect for the teachings and disciplines of the church. While upholding her termination, he commented the birth of a child is a blessed event and directed that her health insurance remain paid through July 31 and she be paid according to the terms of her contract. A woman whose body was found in the Tuscarora State Forest nearly 36 years ago was killed by a very powerful impact that fractured her skull, a pathologist told a Perry County jury Wednesday. Dr. Duckkyu Chang had to peer back in time to give that testimony. He was the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy hours after the body of 23-year-old Debra Rodgers was recovered on April 24, 1983. Rodgers husband Carl, now 63, of Shermans Dale, is belatedly on trial for what prosecutors Kelly Sekula and Heather Castellino contend was his wifes murder. He was arrested in November 2017 after the state attorney generals office took another look at the evidence in the long-dormant case. Sekula and Castellino claim Carl Rodgers beat his wife to death, slit her wrists to simulate a suicide, and then dumped her body about 4 miles from his familys Loysville-area farm. Defense attorney Geoffrey McInroy is insisting Debra Rodgers did commit suicide because she was depressed about work. Her head injury and other wounds Chang cited occurred when she fell onto rocks on the forest floor after slitting her wrists, McInroy contends. The Rodgers case is one of the oldest, if not the oldest cold case homicide ever brought to trial in central Pennsylvania. Carl Rogers Chang was on the witness stand for most of the morning, testifying in detail about the injuries he found during that long-ago autopsy. In addition to a fractured skull and the cuts on her wrist, Debra Rodgers had lacerations to her liver and spleen and a broken rib, he said under questioning by Sekula. On cross-examination by McInroy, Chang said the impact from a fall can under certain circumstances cause fatal blunt force. The pathologist said Debra Rodgers died probably within minutes of the impact on her skull. The time of death was harder to pinpoint, Chang said. He said his best estimate is that she died 12 to 48 hours before the autopsy. A woman who is accusing a state legislator from Butler County of sexually assaulting her in October 2015 filed a formal complaint with House Republican lawyers on Tuesday calling for an internal investigation. In the five-page complaint obtained by PennLive, the woman, who works at the state Capitol, details events that led up to the alleged assault by Republican Rep. Brian Ellis. She claims the assault occurred while she was incapacitated, and shares in the document what she has been able to piece together afterward from others she spoke with about the encounter. In the complaint, the woman said she woke up in pain, injured and naked in Ellis bed, with no memory of what happened. The woman said she believed she was raped, according to the complaint. She is asking for the House Ethics Committee to use the newly minted sections of its House rules that permit the committee to investigate sexual harassment claims, to look into the matter. PennLive does not identify individuals making allegations of sexual assault. The Dauphin County District Attorneys office is investigating the womans claims. Ellis, who is in his eighth two-year term of office, has not been charged with any crime. Speaking on the womans behalf, state Victims Advocate Jennifer Storm said, We always said that were going to pursue multiple paths because we want to make sure at the end of the day Representative Ellis is held accountable. Messages seeking comment from Ellis left on his cellphone and Harrisburg office were not returned. Ellis has been unreachable for over a month since media accounts first reported on Jan. 24 about the criminal investigation that is ongoing. A law firm representing Ellis subsequently issued a statement calling the womans claims just plain false. House Republican spokesman Mike Straub said, I cant offer any comment on any complaint, and I cant confirm if one has been filed or not in keeping with House rules. In the complaint, the woman indicates she didnt immediately report the assault fearing professional and personal repercussions if she came forward but over time, has come to appreciate the Houses ability to hold Ellis accountable. Prior to the alleged assault, the woman describes her relationship with Ellis as mostly professional and the times she found herself socializing with Ellis were frequently, if not exclusively when a mutual friend was with her. In her conversations with Ellis, she said the lawmaker made it known to her that he was interested in her sexually. Each time this occurred, I made it abundantly clear to Ellis that I was not interested in him in any capacity unrelated to my job and rebuked his comments, she said in the complaint. On the evening of Oct. 27, 2015, the complaint indicates she was with a friend at Carleys, a Harrisburg restaurant, and had finished a hard cider. She asked her friend to order her another drink before her friend left to go to McGraths Pub for a fundraiser. The two were planning to meet again that evening. I remember starting to drink what [her friend] had handed me before she left, but I do not remember finishing the drink. After casually drinking that cider at Carleys, I have scant memories of the next 10 hours and was in a state of black out. I woke up in pain, injured and naked the next morning in the bed of Representative Brian Ellis," the complaint states. She asked Ellis what happened and why she was in bed with him, the complaint states. Ellis told me, we had sex, she said in the complaint. The woman states in the complaint he tried to have sex with her again. When she refused, he told her to leave. After she made it home, she shared what happened with friends and tried to put the events of the preceding night together, the complaint states. It was then that she learned the friend she was with at Carleys said she showed up at McGraths. According to the complaint, it was there she encountered Ellis. Because the woman appeared to be in an intoxicated state, she stayed with her for a short time before leaving her with Ellis who told her he would make sure [the woman] got an Uber home, the complaint states. Ellis later told her friend that she was too drunk to get in a car so he walked her to his house in Harrisburg where she came on to him, the complaint states. The woman went to the hospital a couple days later for treatment of injuries to her ankles, back and head. She told the hospital staff about her encounter, including the alleged rape, as well as several friends named in the complaint. She then tried to put the events behind her but had trouble doing so. In the complaint, the woman said Ellis and a mutual friend had multiple conversations about what happened on that night. On one occasion, the woman said the mutual friend told her that Ellis admitted she was incapacitated and if she told anyone, it would ruin his life, the complaint states. The woman sought therapy after her anxiety grew worse, according to the complaint. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and has taken steps to recover. She said in the complaint that with the Houses commitment to the "process to work through complaints of this nature, I realize I am strong enough to help ensure that the House of Representatives rids itself of a member who is not deserving of the publics trust, and remediate the impact of his presence in the workplace. After the allegation emerged in January, House Republican leaders called on Ellis to resign and stripped him of his chairmanship of the commerce committee as well as his other committee assignments based on the media accounts about the criminal investigation into the womans claims. Ellis requested to be placed on leave from the House for this week as well as the three prior session weeks that have been held this year. Although he has not been on the House floor since Jan. 1 when he took the oath of office for his current term, he continues to receive his $88,610 salary. With the womans complaint now in the hands of the House Ethics Committee, House rules give that committee, which has subpoena power, up to 30 days to decide whether to dismiss the complaint if it is not found to be credible or initiate a preliminary investigation. If a preliminary investigation ensues, Ellis would be notified and given 15 days to respond. The committee can then decide whether or not to pursue a formal investigation. *This story was updated to include a statement from a law firm representing Ellis. Jan Murphy may be reached at jmurphy@pennlive.com. Follow her on Twitter at @JanMurphy. Get breaking news before daybreak. Sign up for Good Morning, Pennsylvania. Now that three new Democratic Socialists have joined Bernie Sanders in Congress and several more elected to various state legislatures, isn't it time we dropped socialism as a campaign issue? Republicans have already raised the specter of socialists like Stalin and Castro gaining control of the US government so that they can control the lives of all Americans. This leads to despair of the US government for fear of that potential tightening control. Those named above were never socialists. They were heads of criminal gangs who call themselves socialists because socialism is so popular elsewhere in the world. America is already moving from capitalism to socialism, even as China is creeping from socialism to capitalism. Are these two countries, with the largest economies in the world, bound to meet somewhere in the middle with a similar mixture of social systems? Shouldn't we be thinking about the issues that these two social systems raise, rather than using the name of one to frighten ourselves in some second-grade playground name-calling contest? China has one socialists party, the Communist Party, which allows considerable private enterprise, ownership and wealth, permitting classes to arise as in capitalist countries. Since China has a one-party government, the main problem with the US government, gridlock, is impossible. China has the perfect government for capitalism. The US already has a mixed economy. The most extreme form of 19th century socialism was expressed in the Communist Manifesto (1848). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto) Four of the ten central principles of that manifesto have already been adopted in the US: (1) a progressive graduated income tax, (2) the establishment of a "national bank" centralizing credit in the hands of the state (the Federal Reserve System), (3) free education for all children in public schools, and (4) the abolition of child factory labor. We should be talking about the morality of issues that both systems raise. All countries on Earth are now mixed societies. The Scandinavian countries represent the best balance, but all European countries have universal healthcare, debt-free if not free education through the doctorate level, paid 5-week vacations, paid family leave, and so onall socialist issues. These are the issues we should be examining. Is healthcare a right or a privilege for those who can afford it? How can we maintain a strong economy in a society that cannot educate is children to reach their full potential without long-term debt? The focus of capitalism is increasing wealth so we can afford to sustain socialist programs. How do we best do that? Raise the minimum wage? Allow wealthy people lower taxes? Infuse the economy with tax funding? Allow, expand or close tax loopholes? These are the essential issues of capitalism which must be discussed in the context of the issues that socialism raises. We should ignore the superficial distraction like the how "socialist" politicians are. This is an issue that belongs in the catalog of distractions like the (legal) sex lives of politicians, the political correctness of what they say, how they dress and look, who they associate with, which the US media corporations feast on. Let's get down to the issues that both these theories raise without using their names as bogus threats. It is time to stop comparing 19th century capitalism and socialism. Such comparisons are irrelevant to political discussions of the 21st centurys hodge-podge of mixed economies. Robert Beard is Professor Emeritus,Linguistics & Russian Studies Programs at Bucknell University Omicron COVID-19 variant identified in Michigan: What you need to know Gabriel Weinberg, founder and boss at Paoli-based DuckDuckGo, testified Tuesday before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, saying that his company could be profitable and protect consumer privacy at the same time. DuckDuckGo, which bills itself as the search engine that never tracks you," boasts search-triggered contextual instant-ad sales of more than $25 million a year, and Weinberg says it has been profitable since 2014. Customers use DuckDuckGos search a billion times a month -- thats 1 percent of the U.S. search market, compared with 89 percent for Google, says StatCounter. Google advertising and other sales last year topped $136 billion, with after-tax profits of $31 billion. Weinbergs testimony was, as you might expect, self-serving and promotional for DuckDuckGo. But Weinberg scored points with senators of both parties, according to their public comments, when he said his business turns a profit on mere contextual advertising -- without collecting customer data. Weinberg said Americans would be happier if Congress banned or at least made it easier for consumers to block corporate data collection, adding that privacy is so popular it would also prove good for business. Some highlights: "The American people are tired of being watched everywhere they go online. They are fed up with all the intended and unintended consequences this online tracking creates, including data breaches, invasive ads, identity theft, discrimination, and manipulation. Have you ever searched for something, only to see an ad for that very thing pop up in a mobile app, or on a different website? ... "In many ways, I come to you from the future: I run a business that is already [European and California privacy-law] compliant. Our privacy policy is straightforward and doesnt require a law degree to decipher: We simply do not collect or share any personal information at all. ... "DuckDuckGo ... allows you to search the web without being tracked. We are the fourth largest search engine in the U.S., serving over one billion searches a month globally. We also offer a mobile privacy browser [that competes with Google Chrome]. [DuckDuckGo also pays for journalism and research on privacy issues, posted at SpreadPrivacy.com.] "I founded DuckDuckGo in 2008, far outside of Silicon Valley, in Valley Forge, Pa. We now have a distributed workforce spread across the nation in 12 states, the District of Columbia, and in 10 other countries. ... [At DuckDuckGo] we do not even have the concept of a search history. ... Many companies run sophisticated tracker networks that lurk on the websites you visit. DuckDuckGos browser technology blocks such hidden trackers. "We nonetheless are able to make money through advertising. "When you type in a search on DuckDuckGo, we simply show you ads related to that search. If you search for car, we show you car ads. But those ads wont follow you around because we dont know who you are, where youve been, or where you go. Its contextual advertising versus behavioral advertising. ... "And we are not alone. ... In response to GDPR [European privacy law], when the New York Times in Europe switched from behavioral advertising to contextual advertising, it reported an increase in revenue. And just last week, Business Insider reported the Washington Post was looking into making a similar change. "Well-drafted legislation can actually spur competition... in the online ad market, the central market in the Internet. ... Right now its a [Google-Facebook] duopoly and its hurting all kinds of businesses. ... To restore competition in the Internet, these core monopolies need to be addressed. ... Weinberg gave three suggestions: "Consumers should be given a real robust mechanism to opt out of data tracking. ... "Monopoly platforms should be prohibited from combining data across their different business units. ... "Acquisitions that strengthen the data monopoly should be prohibited. ... The internet shouldnt feel so creepy. During the question-and-answer session, senators led by committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) badgered Google general counsel Will DeVries and other corporate representatives about their data capabilities, while urging Weinberg and consumer advocates to provide their wish lists of privacy protections and corporate limits. Defending big-Internet practices was David Hoffman, associate general counsel and global privacy officer for chipmaker Intel. He argued that many consumers would like more invasive behavioral advertising because it helps them find products they want to buy. Weinberg said consumers need an easier mechanism for opt out, noting that an estimated 75 million users have turned on Do Not Track options embedded in common Internet browsers -- but hardly any company in the world respects Do Not Track. U.S. Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.) complained that big media companies tell Americans how we vote, what we buy. He mock-congratulated DeVries on Googles achieving the power of a country, not just a company. U.S. Sen Chris Coons (D., Del.) tried to chart a middle course between the benefits of social media and the huge risks both of privacy lost and hurting competitiveness and innovation. Your model sounds like the way, U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) told Weinberg. Weinbergs own takeaway, after the senators were done: It seems there is wide bipartisan support for federal privacy legislation. Sam Weissman with his HIV project at the prestigious Regeneron Science Talent Search in Washington, DC, where he won second place and $175,000 in prize money. Read more It would be hard to top Harriton High School senior Samuel Weissman in a what I did on my summer vacation essay: working in a lab at the University of Pennsylvania, looking for new ways to rid the body of the HIV virus. The Merion 17-year-olds work ethic and an obsessive curiosity about biology that started in third grade paid huge dividends this week as he took second place, and a $175,000 prize, at the Regeneron Science Talent Search, the nations most prestigious science and math contest for high school seniors. Weissman who on Tuesday received the award, formerly sponsored by Westinghouse, at a ceremony in Washington said he was awed just to be on stage with the other finalists, including $250,000, first-place winner Ana Humphrey of Alexandria, Va., who studied planets outside the solar system. When I got called, it dawned on me how amazing it was to be on the same stage as all these really brilliant people, Weissman said Wednesday. He said hes so excited about his research that he plans to spend a gap year working full time at the Penn lab before entering college. I think my research is on a hot track right now, Weissman said. His preliminary discoveries on how the HIV virus interacts with cancer genes were just published in the journal, Nature Communications, [with two researchers] and I think theres a lot more to be found, he added. Each year, about 2,000 students submit original research to the nations oldest math and science contest, with40 selected to be honored and a total of $1.8 million in prize money awarded. Una ODoherty, the Penn professor of pathology and laboratory medicine who runs the lab, said that it was Weissman who pushed to continue a nearly abandoned research project and that without his efforts, I dont think we would have made that discovery. For Weissman, the big science prize was another milestone on the odyssey that began in grade school when his mother a behavioral psychologist, as is his father was inspired by his curiosity to hand him the biology textbook that shed used in college. I loved it, he recalled. I didnt understand it all back then, but I came to really be interested in how the immune system works, and how we are able to fight off bacteria and viruses and everything that is trying to hurt us in the environment. Hes very self-effacing [and] self-motivated, said his mother, Beth Rosenwasser.. I am not a tiger mom at all; he loves what he does. In seventh grade, Weissman had a chance encounter with ODoherty because his brother played Dungeons and Dragons with her son. The precocious middle schooler asked to visit her Penn lab for a day. By that summer, he was working there, although at first it was mostly just getting coffee. But he absorbed enough from a postdoctoral researcher that when the researcher left Penn, Weissman asked to continue his project. For the next three years while attending school, the teenager worked at Penn two days a week one afternoon after school and one day on the weekend, and eventually for pay. Weissmans research centered on how HIV-infected cells despite huge medical advances since the 1980s still form a reservoir that remains in the body and resists treatment. Using state-of-the-art equipment at the Penn lab, the budding scientist was able to better study HIVs DNA by assembling an entire genome, and in doing so gained insights into the persistence of the virus. His research showed that through the process known as clonal expansion, the reservoirs of HIV in the body were able to grow even as infected cells were being killed a discovery that could lead to better treatment. Indeed, Weissmans excitement over what comes next studying how the virus interacts directly with cancer genes helped him persuade his parents, who were initially hesitant, to agree to his working in the lab full time for a year before he begins college. He said he ultimately wants to become a physician as well as a researcher because I want to be able to not just develop stuff in the lab, but to touch the lives of everyday patients. There are, of course, other things besides science in the teenagers life. After his grandfather learned to play the saxophone at age 65, Weissman learned it, too, and joined Harritons jazz band. He has a twin brother, Ben, who likes politics more than science, and he also has a sense of humor. I can buy seven cars for $25,000 each, Weissman said of the Regeneron prize, or save it for college which is what Im going to do. On Pi Day, Crust Vegan Bakery is offering mini and full-size peanut butter cup pies for pickup (10 a.m. to 2 p.m.) at its kitchen in Manayunk. Read more Thursday, March 14, marks Pi Day, a math lovers holiday honoring , the ratio of a circles circumference to its diameter. Nerds all over the world will join together to celebrate, eating lots and lots of pi(e) and reciting as many digits of the mathematical constant as possible. And the Philadelphia region brimming with schools, pizza shops, and pun aficionados has plenty of creative ways to enjoy the day. Perhaps the most elaborate of those will take place in Princeton, where Pi Day is a beloved, decade-long tradition. Its an incredible coincidence that one of the smartest men in history Albert Einstein was born on March 14, says Princeton Tour Co. founder Mimi Omiecinski. Princeton was his hometown and is also home to a host of prize-winning mathematicians. The unusual combination makes the town the ultimate Pi Day headquarters. Princeton businesses put on an irrational number of events around Palmer Square, according to the Princeton Tour Co. site, including pie-decorating challenges, Einstein lookalike contests, and a pi-rade. Some activities unfolded last Saturday, but plenty await this Thursday, most of which are free. One of the most eye-catching is a pop-up wedding/vow-renewal ceremony, set to begin promptly at 3:14 p.m. inside Princeton Pi pizzeria. Simone and James, when I saw you today, you reminded me of a circles circumference and diameter. You are forever connected, your bond eternal. Without one, the other is finite, reads Omiecinski, practicing her lines for Thursdays ceremony. Let your union continue on without end, just like our unique number, pi. Omiecinski, an ordained minister, says she weds and renews vows for about two dozen couples at the event each year. Afterward, newlyweds share complimentary heart-shaped pizzas. Even if youre not ready to say, I do, you can take part in the Pi Day cheesiness. At SliCEs Italian Market locations in Fishtown and South Jersey, you can score two slices of any kind for $3.14. Fishtowns Pizza Brain will serve special dessert pizzas. And in University City and Center City, &Pizza is discounting all pies by $3.14. (The Center City &Pizza is also throwing a Pi Day wedding bash; a ceremony for two lucky couples will close the shop until 2 p.m.) Trattoria Carina in Fitler Square will transform its standard menu of pasta and Italian dishes into that of a pop-up pizza shop. Find six Roman-style options available by the slice. Of course, pie in sweet form ranks among the most popular ways to celebrate Pi Day. Ice cream shop Weckerlys plans to serve a chocolate sundae pie, layering chocolate and sweet cream ice cream with peanut caramel on a homemade-Oreo crust. Its the Kensington spots first ice cream pie to debut to the public. What we do in the baking side of production is very formula- and number-heavy," says Weckerly co-owner Andy Satinsky. So this felt like a great way to celebrate that and participate in this silly way. Stop by the Girard Avenue shop on Thursday for a $6 slice or preorder a whole pie online. Nearby, Cake Life Bake Shop is mixing ice cream and pie, too, for its apple pie milk shake. In Manayunk, Crust Vegan Bakery will sell mini and full-size peanut butter cup pies stamped with a cocoa powder from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. And for classic pie, head to Lil Pop Shop in West Philly or Rittenhouse; slices will cost $3.14. To earn free pie and work off some of those calories in advance join the folks at Philadelphia Runner for a 3.14-mile run, heading out from the shops Center City location at 6 p.m. A feast of sweet and savory pies will follow. Local schools and universities are also taking advantage of the offbeat holiday. Members of Cabrini Universitys math club will have the chance to pie select professors as part of a fund-raising campaign. At the University of Pennsylvania, a Pi Day career panel is scheduled for students and alumni of the Graduate School of Education. Well have people from all different career paths, with a good mix of both male and females so that we can break down the stereotype that only men are good at math, says Amy Benedict, director of career and professional development at the Graduate School of Education. Many grade-school math teachers use the day as an opportunity to celebrate with special activities and lesson plans on the circumference of a circle. At Greene Street Friends School, a schoolwide celebration has become an annual tradition. In past years, students have made paper chains, gone on circle scavenger hunts, and measured the diameters of various cookies. For its Pi Day celebration, the Franklin Institute invites visitors to partake in a memorization challenge. After looking at a card listing 100-plus pi digits, participants will recite as many consecutive numbers as they can remember. Neuroscientists will be available to talk about the exercise, explaining how short-term memory works. The ridiculously infinite number called pi a mathematical constant, no matter the size of the circle is at the heart of all this pomp, according to the Franklin Institute assistant director of public programs Mickey Maley. For a lot of people, thinking about everyday circles, whether its pizza or pie or bike tires and coins, is a fun way to learn about this concept." Philadelphia Distilling, the company best known for Bluecoat Gin, has released its own amaro, an herbal liqueur that can be sipped as an after-dinner digestif or added to cocktails. Vigo Amaro is Philadelphia Distillings first new product in almost a year, and its first foray into the world of amaro, an Italian digestif that can taste bitter, sweet, or even minty, depending on its ingredients. Made from botanicals, amaros are known for their stomach-settling qualities, but their flavors can also blend with everything from prosecco to Campari to club soda. Philadelphia Distillings version is made with California dried plums, nutmeg, rose, elderflower, cinnamon, cinchona bark, kola nuts and muscavado sugar. It has smooth flavors of dark fruit, a rich molasses sweetness and a savory edge. Our purpose was to deliver depth of flavor: well-rounded and yet with enough earthy roots to ground your taste buds," head distiller Aaron Selya said in a statement. Vigo Amaro sells for $31.99 and is available at Philadelphia Distillings bottle shop at 25 E. Allen St. in Fishtown. The company is also offering several cocktails made with the amaro on the drink menu in its tasting room. Tomorrow is "Pi Day." March 14, or 3.14, has become an excuse to eat pies of all kinds, and we've got lots of suggestions. Our other stops include a vegan cafe in South Philly, and a neighborhood French bistro all great destinations to share with friends. Speaking of which: I'm relying on friends and colleagues to help with "Let's Eat" since I had surgery to fix a ruptured quad tendon. Im still in the loop, if not loopy. If you need food news, click here and follow me on Twitter and Instagram. Email tips, suggestions, and questions here. If someone forwarded you this newsletter and you like what youre reading, sign up here to get it free every week. Michael Klein Pizza is our favorite constant March 14 is an opportunity for math geeks to celebrate 3.14, the numerical constant known as pi, and for foodies to honor edible pies, from pizzas to desserts. As you mark the occasion Thursday, here are some places around the region to sample pies of all kinds. Rione, 102 S. 21st St. in Center City, specializes in Roman-style pizza al taglio, the rectangular pie sold by the slice or tray. At Angelos Pizza at 736 S. Ninth St. in South Philly, owner Danny DiGiampietro slings square, upside-down, and round pies to a devoted following. Cake Life Bake Shop, at 1306 Frankford Ave. in Fishtown, offers a regular selection of breakfast hand pies, plus baked poppin tarts with berry filling. Stargazy, at 1838 East Passyunk Ave., is a traditional British shop that sells savory pies filled with ingredients like ground beef. Whole Foods Market locations are offering $3.14 off full-size bakery pies on Thursday only. Vecchia Pizza, at 249 Bridge St. in Phoenixville, makes simple Neapolitan-style pies in a wood-fired oven. Pizza Shackamaxon sells slices and whole pies out of the former Pizzeria Beddia location at 115 E. Girard Ave. The Flying Monkey Bakery in Reading Terminal Market features a wide selection of pies and mini-pies, as well as whoopie pies in a range of flavors. At the Melrose Diner, at 1501 Snyder Ave., customers can choose from classic pies like apple and coconut custard. Metropolitan Pizza & Cafe, at 264 S. 19th St., offers pizzas as well as chicken pot pies, shepherds pie, and seasonal pies for dessert. Day by Day, the lunch and brunch spot at 2101 Sansom St., offers a selection of homemade pies in flavors like fudge brownie. Allison Steele This Weeks Openings The Burger Shop | Souderton Comp burgers will greet customers on the first day of this shop (162 N. Main St.), starting at noon. Regular hours resume March 18. Nom Nom Bowl | Rittenhouse Alan Su's Japanese bowl/ramen specialty shop is new at 1608 Sansom St. 20th Street Pizza | Rittenhouse Mark "Blackbird" Mebus says March 20 for his vegan slice destination at 108 S. 20th St. Rouge | Rittenhouse The Rittenhouse fixture reopens March 21 at 205 S. 18th St. Tannery Run Brew Works | Ambler Brewpubs ribbon-cutting is 11:30 a.m. March 15 at 131 E. Butler Ave. This Weeks Closing Midtown | Washington Square West Short-lived bar-restaurant at 114 S. 12th St. will get a new concept. Where were drinking The Erin Express Noon to 6 p.m. on Saturday, March 16; erinexpress-philly.com The Erin Express the grandfather of Philadelphia bar crawls is celebrating roughly its 40th anniversary this year, and you've got one more chance to catch it this weekend. What should you expect? Bar columnist Samantha Melamed says it's "a mess, but an exceedingly well-run mess." There are half a dozen school buses, more than a dozen bars, and lots of shamrock-green tutus. Order a pint of Guinness, Melamed says, and bring a friend who will get you home safely. Read her full column I rode the Erin Express, and I will never get that day back here. Where were eating Good King Tavern 614 S. Seventh St., 215-625 3700; thegoodkingtavern.com The Good King Tavern has settled into a fine Gallic groove over its five years at the corner of Seventh and Kater Streets and has grown into a cozy, intimate neighborhood French bistro for Bella Vista. The steak-frites are superb (especially the frites). Theres a duck du jour that alternates between variations on duck confit and a spontaneous riff on perfectly roasted juicy breast from Keisers Pheasantry in York County (lentils, bacon, and dates on our visit). There are the irresistible socca pancakes made from chickpea flour that signal the Provencal roots of father-daughter owners Bernard and Chloe Grigri. Chloe also has curated a somewhat under-the-radar but very worthwhile wine list that focuses on natural winemaking from France and delivers a selection served with fair value, from both good, better, best glass options to Keep Wine Weird Sundays, which offer pours of hard-to-find oddities like Tim Wildmans Astro Bunny pet-nat and a vermentino-nero dAvola-zibbibo blend from Australia. Sundays, it turns out, are an all-around good night to visit the Good King. The showstopper at our recent meal was the hot steel crock of Sunday Raclette, billed by manager Patrick Bruning as the bistros Savoyard reply to Italian Sunday Gravy. That means potatoes, melted cheese, and spicy mustard on a board at the center of the table for sharing. But what made it especially good were all the details. The Yukon potatoes were carefully salt-roasted before they were crisped up with olive oil, shallots, and garlic. The raclette, a classic French alpine oozer, was broiled to a crispy brown. There was spicy Dijon for dipping and peppery greens of frisee salad in a bright vinaigrette to help cut through all that richness. As a bonus, a generous portion of jambon de Bayonne was mounded on the side, the salty pink folds of this cured ham from Southwest France (slightly thicker cut and moister than Italian prosciutto), pushed this snack board closer to light meal status. The Sunday night-only status of these specials is the kind of thing, of course, that lures regulars to a great neighborhood restaurant. But, thankfully, this usually cold-weather indulgence has been so popular its now a year-round fixture. As Bruning said: Theres no bad time for cheese and potatoes and ham. Craig LaBan Grindcore House 1515 S. Fourth St.; grindcorehouse.com Ten years ago, mainstreamers might arch an eyebrow at Grindcore House, a coffeehouse set up in a onetime butcher shop in Pennsport. All-vegan menu. Edgy grind/metal soundtrack. Radical library in the back, stocked with titles about communism and anarchism. A decade in, Mike Barone and Dave Anthems cozy corner cafe has matured into a neighborhood gem while retaining its social magnetism. (The mainstream, as it always seems to, is catching up. One recent Yelp reviewer, having stopped in unawares of the theme, felt charmed, though she couldnt quite place the funky music: Hard rock? Gothic? Well, something along those lines.) Cafes everywhere now make lattes with milk substitutes and sell vegan foods, but Grindcore goes the distance. Its counter is stocked with pastries from local partners, some of whom (Dotties Donuts) are former employees. Get the Italian hoagie, assembled on a crusty roll from Philly Baking Co., which tastes astoundingly like a regulation South Philly hoagie with Herbivorous Butcher ham and capicola and Uptons natural provolone cheese. The Kropotkin stuffs a ciabatta with Field Roast faux-meat slices, greens, roasted red peppers, onion, and a swipe of pesto vegenaise. Theres the Treehugger salad, with greens, cucumber, avocado, tomato, red onion, olives, seed mix and choice of goddess or (our pick) shiitake & sesame vinaigrette. Hours: 6:30 a.m.-8 p.m. weekdays, 8 a.m.-8 p.m. weekends. Dining Notes Baker Dan Langan is the host of Dan Can Bake It. Here's how he got to the Food Network from his Havertown home kitchen. Irish potatoes are a Philadelphia tradition. Here's how to make them, according to an old-school Philly candymaker. Punk Burger is making Girl Scout cookie milkshakes. (Yes, they bought the cookies from local Scouts.) Craig LaBan is on assignment. Email him here. Ongoing construction of the future Loveluck restaurant in the LOVE Park Welcome Center Read more LOVE Parks Welcome Center, the spaceship-shaped building with dark windows that for decades has occupied a concrete corner of the plaza, will transform into a modern, light-filled restaurant surrounded by patrons sipping wine and eating on an outdoor terrace, city officials said Wednesday. The site at 16th and JFK Boulevard is the future home of Loveluck, the newest project by Valerie Safran and chef Marcie Turney, the team responsible for the Washington Square West restaurants Bud & Marilyns, Barbuzzo, and Lolita. The couple on Wednesday were joined by city officials, architects, and others who gathered at the building to formally announce the project, which Mayor Jim Kenney said would turn the park into a fine-dining destination. Its great for our city, its great for employment, Kenney said. Its great for the buzz our city is currently experiencing." Representatives from the citys Parks and Recreation Department also unveiled the buildings new windows, floor-to-ceiling panes crafted by the building materials company Saint-Gobain, which has provided specialty glass for projects including the World Trade Center, the Kimmel Center, and the pyramid outside Pariss Louvre museum. Saint-Gobain is donating $700,000 to the project, which is being overseen by the architecture firm KieranTimberlake. Loveluck will accommodate about 180 patrons: 60 inside, 40 on the balcony in warmer months, and 80 on the terrace. Those seated on the east side of the terrace will have a view of City Hall. Officials said they hope the restaurant will open this fall. Were so excited for this, Turney said. Safran and Turney are known for turning a few blocks of 13th Street into a thriving corridor populated with restaurants, bars, and quaint boutique shops. Loveluck will be their sixth Center City restaurant, and they are partnering with Terence Lewis, a longtime manager and beverage director for their company, Safran Turney Hospitality. Built in the 1960s, the Welcome Center has in recent years been undergoing extensive renovations as part of the recent multimillion-dollar LOVE Park revitalization. City Council President Darrell Clarke said Wednesday that an important part of the park rehabilitation was ensuring that it wasnt designed to replicate other popular urban plazas. Philadelphia is unique, and this should be unique, he said. Like most new mothers, Lisa Treilman really wanted to breastfeed. But like many women, Treilman had difficulty. After two months, her nipple pain was intense, despite wearing a protective silicone nipple shield while nursing. Each feeding took an hour, yet Treilman often supplemented it with a bottle of pumped milk because daughter Shoshana still seemed hungry. What happened next is also increasingly common and part of a medical controversy that Treilman couldnt have imagined. Shoshana was diagnosed with a tongue tie: The tissue tethering the infants tongue to the floor of her mouth was too tight, so she couldnt properly latch on and suck. A pediatric dentist used a laser to clip the thin membrane, called the lingual frenulum, enabling freer tongue movement. A few weeks later, Treilman recalls, breastfeeding became a breeze, efficient and effective. The procedure took under a minute. She cried for under a minute, said Treilman, who lives in Fishtown with her husband, Mark, and their daughter, who is now 6 months old. Until I went through it, I had no idea tongue tie was even a thing. Tongue tie, or ankyloglossia, is actually an ancient condition (for a biblical mention, see Mark 7:31-37) that has become a hot international debate in neonatal medicine. On one hand, cutting an infants frenulum with a laser or sterile scissors a frenotomy is a minor procedure, done without anesthesia, that very rarely causes any complications. Studies find it facilitates breastfeeding in many cases. Freeing "Tongue Tie" Helps Breastfeeding With tongue-tie, an unusually short, thick or tight fold of tissue (lingual frenulum) tethers the tongue to the floor of the mouth, which may cause problems with breastfeeding. A minor surgical procedure, using scissors or a laser, snips the frenulum to make the tongue more mobile. SOURCE: The Mayo Clinic Staff Graphic On the other hand, tongue tie is an ill-defined concept with no universally accepted grading system or treatment guidelines. The frenulum may be too tight, or short, or thick. Based on the research, which is mostly of low quality, a tongue tie does not always complicate breastfeeding, releasing it does not always improve breastfeeding, and improvement is sometimes due to wishful thinking the placebo effect. Frenotomies are being done by dentists, pediatricians, otolaryngologists (ear-nose-throat doctors) and other specialists. Some say more procedures are needed to spare women and babies from unnecessary frustration and discomfort. Others say too many surgeries are already being done because of the view that it cant hurt and might help. Paul Bahn, who treated Shoshana and devotes 40 percent of his Philadelphia pediatric dentistry practice to tongue ties, said, Unfortunately, I would agree they are probably being overdiagnosed and overtreated. An epidemic of tongue ties Jonathan Walsh, a pediatric otolaryngologist-head and neck surgeon at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, quantified the boom in tongue ties by using a national hospital database. Between 1997 and 2012, the number of newborns diagnosed in the hospital with the condition jumped eightfold to nearly 33,000, while the number treated with frenotomy rose almost tenfold to 12,400, according to the study, published in 2017. Thats just the tip of the tongue tie trend because many babies are diagnosed and treated after going home. Whats driving this apparent epidemic of troublesome tongues? Primarily, experts say, it reflects successful worldwide efforts to convince women that the breast is best. In the U.S., more than 80 percent of mothers start nursing after giving birth, and more than half stick with it for six months, federal data show. Nipple tenderness is normal when women begin breastfeeding, but as the weeks go on, it should get better, not worse. Lactation consultants, now a standard part of maternity care, are on the lookout for tongue ties when breastfeeding is a struggle. Todays moms, meanwhile, are reluctant to resort to the fix of previous generations switch to a bottle of formula. I wanted to push through it, said Treilman, a health insurance appeals coordinator. If I needed to stop, I would have. But I just believe its healthier for babies and I wanted us to have that experience. Like many families, the Treilmans wound up paying out of pocket for the frenotomy. Medical and dental insurance coverage varies. And parents who turn to a pediatric dentist may not have any dental insurance, or they have it but didnt think to add their toothless newborn to the policy, or the provider, like Bahn, doesnt accept insurance for the procedure. Altogether, it cost $530 not a terrible price for something thats going to improve my breastfeeding experience, Treilman said. Moms are more willing to do anything they can to make that breastfeeding relationship work, said Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) otolaryngologist Adva Buzi. She has performed hundreds of scissors frenotomies and only once needed blood-clotting powder to stop an infants bleeding. Buzi added a disclosure. Although she tells parents that the surgery is not guaranteed to help with breastfeeding, it helped her: My daughter had a tongue tie and [frenotomy] made a huge difference. For parents, finding unbiased, unvarnished information can be tough. CHOPs website, for example, says that when tongue tie is corrected, the related breastfeeding problems are eliminated a claim Buzi acknowledged is too strong. Depending on the severity, ankyloglossia can affect speech in later life. But tongue tie support groups that have formed online in recent years may make parents worry that any tie is a bad tie. Even though no studies have followed untreated babies as they grew up, support groups warn that forgoing treatment can cause speech, dental, eating and emotional problems in children, while adults are at risk of all that plus migraine, apnea, and jaws that click. Adding to the confusion, said Walsh at Hopkins, there is no standard definition of ankyloglossia no scientific consensus on what constitutes a pathological condition. Tongue tie prevalence estimates vary from 1 to 16 percent of newborns. In the classic, most obvious type of tie, the frenulum is attached near the tongue tip, so the tongue cant lift much or stick out. But some years ago, posterior and submucosal tongue ties which involve attachments in the middle or back of the tongue were linked to breastfeeding problems. Even more recently, practitioners have been snipping lip ties, the membrane attaching the upper lip to the gum. Its all about patient selection, and we dont have good selection criteria, Walsh said. So you get these camps of believers and non-believers. Bahn and other practitioners recommend that parents do stretching exercises to keep the babys frenulum from tightening after surgery. The parent is instructed to swipe a finger back and forth under the tongue several times a day for several weeks. After the revision of the lip or tongue, the need for active wound care and stretching is mandatory, Bahns website says. He conceded that advice is based on his experience, not solid research. Adjust the mothers position In the Canterbury region of New Zealand, doctors, midwives and other neonatal care providers noticed that demand for frenotomies was soaring for no logical reason. In 2013, 7.5 percent of infants had procedures. Just two years later, the rate jumped to 11.3 percent more than one in 10 babies. Breastfeeding rates, in contrast, remained unchanged; about 72 percent of women were nursing a month after giving birth. The remedy possible because New Zealand has well-coordinated national health care was as ambitious as it was effective. First, a standardized tongue tie referral and assessment process was developed. Then, a massive educational campaign for health-care providers and the general public was launched. By mid-2017, the frenotomy rate was down to 3.5 percent, according to the paper published last year in the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology. The surgical release of a lingual frenulum is only one of many treatment or support options, the authors concluded. Interventions such as adjusting the mothers positioning and attachment technique may resolve breastfeeding difficulties. Jason Han, far right, and his fellow residents last year. When you work as hard as residents do, perspective can be slip away at times. Read more On a weekend morning I was scheduled to work, I slept through the alarm. By nearly two hours. Jumping out of bed and throwing water on my face, my mind scanned through a myriad of terrible scenarios for which I would be responsible. What if one of my patients had an emergency or there was no one to check in patients for their surgeries? I finally made it to the ICU at 7 a.m., too late to hear the report from the night team. I ran up to a nurse practitioner sitting at the computer, and poured out all of my fears. "I am SO sorry that I'm late. I dont know how I could have overslept. I feel terrible. Is everything okay?" She smiled, then looked a little perplexed. "Hi! You must have been so tired. Everything is fine. Were you concerned about something specific? Why wouldn't everything be okay?" First came my immense relief to learn nothing bad happened. Then my colleagues reaction sank in. She was right. Why wouldn't everything be okay just because I was late? Two years of residency have instilled in me a highly structured way of living. Every morning we go on patient rounds at the break of dawn. The first operation starts at 7:30 AM. Part of the reason I dreaded being late was that this had become my circadian rhythm, a stable routine from which I could not imagine deviating. What would happen if there were unanswered calls, or if medication orders were placed even a few hours later. As residents, we perform many tasks each day, with constant calls adding to the basic list. Feeling responsible for patients is good. Thinking things would fall apart without me? That does sound a bit outlandish. I used to think that being good at my job and being valued was to be indispensable. I used to take it as a compliment if things could not progress without me. But there is an important distinction between being valuable and being indispensable. One morning, I asked the attending surgeon if I could attend an upcoming conference. He smiled and said, Jason, go ahead. We like having you, but we dont need you. His comment reminded me of the reality that I am a part of a supportive team designed to function without relying on any one member. My attendings easily granted permission reminded me being dispensable is not an insult to worth, but a compliment to the team. I attended the conference without a single worry. Since then, I have had to miss days to attend other important events in my life. But my team has been there to care for our patients when I am not. I no longer operate based on fear of what might happen, but rather on trust in my team to handle everything in my absence, just as I would do for them when they need it. It is human to make errors and assumptions, even small ones like sleeping through an alarm or thinking you are the only one who can do something. But being a team member is to be reminded that we are all human and all working together. Jason Han, M.D., is a resident in cardiothoracic surgery in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The opinions expressed in this article do not represent those of the University of Pennsylvania Health System or the Perelman School of Medicine. The Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation announced last weekend it was exploring creating a business improvement district that would collect a tax from property owners to fund services like street cleaning and marketing for the area. It would be a way for the neighborhood to control its own destiny at a time when Chinatowns are struggling to keep their identities, Lamei Zhang, the corporations projects manager, said at the meeting as her colleague Yue Wu translated. But as the group and some other Chinatown community members see it, something needs to be killed before Chinatown can have its own business district: a proposal for a Callowhill business district, which would cover what some think of as Chinatown North," north of the Vine Street Expressway. Maria Yuen, a Chinatown North resident who spoke with the passion and anger of an experienced community activist, said she supported the development corporations district but unless that [Callowhill] BID is defeated, this conversation is irrelevant. Yuen told the crowd of roughly 70 at Good Good Comedy Theatre in Chinatown on Saturday afternoon that she had worked to snuff a similar Callowhill proposal about eight years before. Its inevitable that outside people will come into our neighborhood and demand our money and spend it the way they want to spend it," she said. "Lets kill the BID and move forward with the Chinatown BID. The two business districts, to be clear, could coexist, but only if Chinatowns proposed business district were cut in half. Its not just about boundaries, though, or a debate about taxing property owners for more services. Its a struggle over a neighborhood with a traumatic history, a question of who owns Chinatown North, or Callowhill, and the complications that come with the perceptions of so-called New Philadelphia and Old Philadelphia. A difficult history In 2011, a group of Chinatown North community members, led in part by Maria Yuen and her husband, John Yuen, organized neighbors against a proposal for a neighborhood improvement district in Callowhill, saying it did not represent their interests. It was thought to be the first time a group of neighbors defeated such a proposal in Philadelphia, according to a Daily News article from 2012. The group behind the Callowhill proposal, spearheaded by current Callowhill Neighborhood Association president Sarah McEneaney, hoped the improvement district would clean up the trash in the area, add lighting to the many dark corridors under abandoned railroad trestles, and help support the creation of a Rail Park. Opponents saw that as code for gentrification; to them, the mostly white, newer entrants to the neighborhood didnt seem to think about who might be pushed out as a result of these changes. For example, John Chin, executive director of Chinatowns development corporation, pointed out the lack of emphasis on developing affordable housing. >> READ MORE: The first piece of the Reading Viaduct rail park opens in June. Then what? There are longer-running dynamics at play, too: The construction of the Vine Street Expressway in the late 60s fiercely opposed by the neighborhoods groups split Chinatown in two. The Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation rose out of this fight, and Kathryn Wilson, a Georgia State University history professor who wrote the 2015 Ethnic Renewal in Philadelphias Chinatown, said the neighborhood has tried to bridge the divide created by the highway, like with its Eastern Tower mixed-use building project, ever since. It was with that baggage as the backdrop that the proponents of a Callowhill business district, this time led by developer Craig Grossmans company Arts + Crafts Holdings, embarked on a second try. Were not building million-dollar condos Nearly a decade later, in Callowhill, condos have risen in place of abandoned buildings. New bars have opened. The Rail Park has become a reality. Kelly Edwards, 31, an urban planner who works in community relations for Arts + Crafts Holdings and is spearheading the Callowhill district, said her experience talking about the proposal to community members over the last two years has been positive: People who live and work there are excited the idea was being revitalized, she said. Wynne Kwan, a member of the districts steering committee who moved to the neighborhood last fall from Washington, D.C., believes the district would make Callowhill cleaner, safer, and more inviting. Commercial property owners would pay a .12 percent tax on their property assessment, while residential owners would pay a .06 percent tax. Renters would not be charged, though landlords could pass the charge onto them. >> READ MORE: Office district rising north of Center City, built of beer, barbecue, and exposed brick However, Edwards said, the folks at the Chinatown Development Corporation seem intent on not working with the Callowhill people. They arent interested in joining the board and are telling others the proposal is being spearheaded by outside developers. Grossman has lived in Philadelphia for 20 years, and Aaron Cohen, Grossmans partner at Arts + Crafts, is a lifelong Philadelphian, she said. Edwards, who lives in Bella Vista, said Arts + Crafts was investing in the neighborhood. In the last four years, the company has spent nearly $325 million on more than 20 buildings, most of them industrial, in what it has sought to brand as the Spring Arts district. Were not building million-dollar condos, were not looking to raise anyones rents, we hardly do any residential work, she said. (Some Arts + Crafts tenants at 1217 Spring Garden St. said last year their rents had gone up by 50 percent with minimal renovations done to justify the new cost. Edwards said that building, which is not in the improvement district boundary, needed many improvements to get it up to code.) A lack of language access and outreach, some say The Chinatown Development Corporation, as well as another nonprofit serving Chinatown called Asian Americans United, said they were most concerned about how the Callowhill district engaged with the Chinatown community. The Callowhill group did not have an interpreter at their two public meetings. They sent out a postcard with a link to a neighborhood survey, and while the postcard was translated into Chinese, the survey was not. Officials from the Chinatown Development Corporation said it was not interested in joining the Callowhill district board because it saw the offer as solely for the sake of appearances, and didnt like that Chinatown representatives would make up only a minority of the nine-member board. Kim Ling, who owns condos at Buttonwood and Ridge, said he never received any mailings about the district, although his tenants did. Edwards said they used property records supplied by the city. Any lack of transparency was troubling to property owners because of the way that business improvement district voting works: It must be approved by 66 percent of property owners within 45 days of its official public meeting, but not voting at all counts as a yes. Alix Webb, executive director of Asian Americans United, which rents a space in Chinatown North, said of the Callowhill communication practices: Its just been disrespectful. Edwards noted that the business districts website is now translated into Chinese and that the public meeting that starts the voting period, set for March 27 at Cafe Lift from 6 to 8 p.m., will have an interpreter. The survey not being translated was an oversight, she said. Community members, she added, did not ask for translators ahead of the two previous public meetings about the district. Ultimately, the Chinatown Development Corporation envisions a Chinatown that includes the neighborhood north of Vine. McEneaney, of the Callowhill Neighborhood Association, acknowledged there are many identities of the neighborhood where she lives, but maybe theres no going back. It is Chinatown North, she said. But its also Callowhill. Katie Ingersoll, representing South Jersey Women for Progressive Change, commends Haddonfield's mayor and commission Tuesday for approving an agreement to boost the number of affordable housing units in the borough. Read more Before approving a tenfold increase in Haddonfields supply of affordable housing from four to 42 units Mayor Neal Rochford and the two other members of the borough commission offered a few words. I think this is ... achievable, said the mayor. Very reasonable, Commissioner John Moscatelli said. Its what we need to do, said Commissioner Jeff Kasko. We dont have much of a choice. With that, Haddonfields governing body on Tuesday concluded a 15-year struggle, including court-ordered negotiations, and voted 3-0 to approve a legally binding settlement with the Fair Share Housing Center. The agreement will dramatically increase the affordable-housing opportunities in a stylishly quaint town of leafy streets, well-tended homes, and well-regarded schools. Haddonfield is one of the most iconic communities in South Jersey, said Fair Share spokesperson Anthony Campisi. But if the words from the dais at Tuesdays commission meeting were about acceptance, if not resignation, there were notes of jubilation among the affordable-housing advocates I spoke to earlier in the day. And its worth noting that the commission tabled a related and even more contentious issue the financial agreement involving the redevelopment of the former Bancroft school property until April 30. As part of the Fair Share settlement, the Bancroft site on East Kings Highway would include 10 affordable townhouses for moderate-, lower-, and low-income families and individuals. An additional 28 similarly affordable apartments would be built behind the borough hall in the heart of downtown. What this does is give the opportunity for lower-income families, including families living in Camden, to access, if they choose, one of the highest opportunity places in New Jersey, Kevin Walsh, counsel to the Fair Share Housing Center, said. Haddonfield has good schools, safe streets, access to transportation, and a walkable downtown," said Walsh. "Building these units is entirely consistent with the states [planning principles]. And we know that when lower-income households have these opportunities, it has transformative effects, such as breaking generational cycles of poverty. He also said the agreement with Haddonfield embodies what the Mount Laurel doctrine emerging from successive New Jersey court decisions since 1975 is, in its purest form, all about enabling economically, historically, and intentionally excluded people to have the same housing opportunities available to others. Fair housing is a key issue for us, said Katie Ingersoll, a Collingswood resident active with South Jersey Women for Progressive Change, who congratulated the commission for its vote. The organization, founded days after the 2016 presidential election, has thousands of followers on its Facebook page. We believe it is a moral imperative for Haddonfield and other towns like it in the region to take positive, aggressive action, Ingersoll said. Several Haddonfield residents at the meeting also had positive things to say about the agreement. Among them was Chris Maynes, who nevertheless also said the settlement may make it more difficult to amend plans for the townhouse complex proposed by Bancroft developer Brian ONeill, who initially sought to build an addiction treatment center on the property. Maynes, a fierce opponent of the now-defunct rehab plan, said the developer ought to shift the mix among the 80 proposed units toward a greater number of smaller, less expensive townhouses attractive to seniors, and reduce the number of larger ones appealing to families. Im sure we could work that out and still honor [the] agreement, said Moscatelli. The Bancroft site has been eyed for years as an ideal spot to build an age-targeted or age-restricted development where empty nesters and other seniors especially those in the borough could continue to live. Others continue to be troubled by the likelihood that developments with larger units, conventional as well as affordable, will generate higher school enrollments. The district is often described as near or at capacity, and the borough school boards opposition to one aspect of the proposed Bancroft plan is one reason the measure was tabled. The board issued a statement Feb. 28 criticizing a proposed a payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) arrangement for the developer. Unlike conventional property taxes, a PILOT enables a municipality and county to split the annual payment, rather than also sharing it with the school district. The PILOT would mean that residents of the Bancroft development will not be contributing [money] to our school districts needs for 30 years, the statement said. Weve heard loud and clear the concerns of any tax break being given over there at all, Moscatelli said. We will not be bringing that same plan back. The borough also needs to bear in mind that "the fourth round [of Fair Share obligations] will begin in 2025, said borough administrator Sharon McCullough. Its 2019. It wont be long before were back at this. A North Philadelphia man who fatally shot a Rite Aid store manager during a robbery 16 years ago was resentenced Wednesday to life in prison after the Philadelphia District Attorneys Office said it would no longer pursue the death penalty in his case. Common Pleas Court Judge M. Teresa Sarmina imposed the life sentence on Christopher Kennedy, 36. Kennedy was 20 on Jan. 19, 2003, when he shot Michael Richardson, 35, who managed the Rite Aid on Girard Avenue near 12th Street in North Philadelphia, in the head execution-style. A jury in 2004 convicted Kennedy of first-degree murder, robbery, and gun offenses, and sentenced him to death. On Monday, Sarmina granted Kennedy a new penalty-phase hearing after conducting an evidentiary hearing. Kennedys attorney, Karl Schwartz, had argued in a Post Conviction Relief Act filing that his client deserved a new penalty-phase hearing because a prosecutor at trial had referenced a biblical passage, and because instructions given to jurors during the penalty phase likely precluded consideration of relevant mitigation evidence. Schwartz and Assistant District Attorney Paul George, assistant supervisor of the DAs law division, did not reply to calls for comment Wednesday afternoon. When asked why the DAs Office did not pursue the death penalty, Ben Waxman, DA Larry Krasners spokesperson, said by email that we consider every capital case on a case by case basis. He said the victims family was notified in advance of the hearing today and the prior days which stretched into last week. They were notified and they were aware of the proceedings and what occurred today. Kennedys accomplices in the robbery, Jamaar Richardson, now 37; his brother James Richardson, now 38; and Lavar Brown, now 41, were convicted of second-degree murder, robbery, and related offenses and received mandatory sentences of life in prison. The Richardson brothers are not related to the victim. Brown wasnt arrested in this case until February 2004, more than a year after the Rite Aid robbery. In December 2003, he committed a murder for which he was convicted and sentenced to death in 2005. Krasners office last April filed a motion saying Brown should leave death row and be resentenced to life without parole. The state Supreme Court disagreed. Brown next has an April 18 hearing before Sarmina. Former Traffic Court judge Willie Singletary, left, and his lawyer William J. Brennan, right, speak with reporters outside the federal courthouse at Sixth and Market Streets after a resentencing hearing in Philadelphia on Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Read more A day after he filed petitions to run for an at-large seat on Philadelphia City Council, former Traffic Court Judge Willie Singletary went to federal court Wednesday seeking to get an already-served prison term reduced. Singletary, 38, had been sentenced in March 2015 by U.S. District Judge Lawrence F. Stengel to 20 months in prison, followed by a year of supervised release, after a jury in 2014 convicted him of lying to the FBI during an investigation of rampant ticket-fixing in Traffic Court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit last year ordered a resentencing hearing because an erroneous guideline range had been applied. But on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Robert F. Kelly resentenced Singletary to the same 20-month term. Kelly acknowledged that the advisory guideline range for Singletary should have been zero to six months in prison, but accepted the governments recommendation to go above those guidelines. Among the reasons for doing so, Kelly said, was to avoid sentencing disparities among other defendants in the ticket-fixing scandal and to make the sentence be seen as a deterrent to others. This entire incident was so pervasive, so destructive, to an arm of Philadelphia government that it was wiped out, disintegrated, Kelly said, referring to Traffic Courts being abolished in 2013 and its duties folded into the newly created Traffic Division of Municipal Court. Singletary said after the hearing that he had served a year behind bars and six months in a halfway house, and now runs a limousine company and serves as a pastor at a West Philadelphia Baptist church. His attorney, William J. Brennan, said Singletary had gotten two months credit for good behavior. Brennan told the judge that even before the March 2015 sentencing, he had realized that the applicable guideline range for Singletary was zero to six months behind bars, but said a chief supervisor in the U.S. Probation Office used a higher guideline range of 15 to 21 months. Brennan added that he had tried to argue the matter with Stengel, but Stengel did not see it my way. Brennan said that although Singletary already had served his sentence, they were in court so that this wrong [could] be righted." After Singletarys appeal, the government agreed that the higher guideline range that was used was wrong. Nonetheless, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Denise Wolf, chief of the Criminal Division, and Anthony Wzorek both argued that Singletary deserved the original 20-month sentence. In a resentencing memorandum filed this month, Wolf wrote that although Singletary and other Traffic Court judges were acquitted by the jury on conspiracy and fraud charges, witness testimony at the two-month trial established that Singletary participated in this riot of ticket-fixing. She also noted that Stengel, after speaking to jurors, had indicated that jurors believed the Traffic Court judges fixed tickets and that the system was corrupt, but that it was difficult for the government to prove all the elements of mail and wire fraud. Other Traffic Court judges who were convicted by the jury of perjury, or lying to a grand jury, received sentences similar to Singletarys, Wolf wrote. Former Traffic Court Judge Thomasine Tynes was sentenced to 24 months in prison; Michael Lowry to 20 months in prison; and Robert Mulgrew to 18 months in prison. (Stengel ordered that Mulgrews sentence be consecutive to a 2-year sentence he already was serving in an unrelated case, in which he pleaded guilty to fraudulently using about $200,000 in state grant money given to a South Philly nonprofit he had helped run.) Brennan argued before Kelly that lying under oath to a grand jury, as the other convicted Traffic Court judges had done, was different from lying to the FBI. Before he was resentenced, Singletary told the judge that he accepts responsibility for his crimes. I have made corrections to my lifestyle, he said. Kelly said that Singletary is a divorced father of two children and remains active in their lives. In imposing his sentence, Kelly said of Singletary: I doubt he will, but we never know ... find himself in a position of power again. It was not clear if Kelly knew that Singletary is running for City Council. It was not mentioned during the court hearing. The Pennsylvania Constitution bars people convicted of embezzlement of public moneys, bribery, perjury, or other infamous crime from holding any office of trust or profit in the state. Singletary has said his felony conviction does not bar him from holding a city office. He told reporters after the hearing: Yes, I made a mistake. But Im not a mistake. I think what I went through made me a better person, he said, adding that it would be up to city residents whether to vote for him in the May 21 primary. Men working on Lock 69 in the 1970s when the tow path was built along Manayunk Canal. Read more By the late 60s, the debate had been raging for years over what to do with the Manayunk Canal, which lowered its last coal barge downriver nearly half a century earlier and had stagnated ever since, a sorry, smelly, scum-encrusted two-mile stretch of yuck. There was a camp, desperate for relief from the already traffic-clogged artery of I-76, that cast an opportunistic eye toward the channel. It could be covered and paved, they argued, making way for a roaring Manayunk Expressway that would whisk cars into the heart of Center City along the Schuylkills eastern banks. Then because not much has changed in Philadelphia in half a century there were those who wanted to talk parking. Fill in the debris-laden canal, they said: Create acres of abundant parking. Today, the Manayunk Canal marks its bicentennial as an integral part of Philadelphias industrial history part of a 32-dam system that made the shallow, rocky Schuylkill navigable and later the backdrop for a boutique- and bar-lined retail district and recreation area. The Fairmount Water Works is commemorating the day the first toll (6 cents) was collected, March 15, 1819, with an exhibition of archival photographs and hand-painted maps from 1827, tours of the locks, and other events. Its also a pivotal moment for another reason: The Philadelphia Water Department is poised to move forward on a project to restore water flow to the canal for the first time in half a century (improving water quality at the Queens Lane intake just downstream). The city Parks and Recreation Department announced it has grant funding to restore the canals lower locks, chambers used to adjust water levels so that boats can travel up and downriver. And Manayunk boosters have a $600,000 grant to improve connections to the businesses that line the canal including more access points to the towpath and facade improvements that will make it feel less like a back alley and more like a destination. The story of how the canal went from trash heap to tourist destination pivots on one of Philadelphias great human bullhorns of the 20th century, Harry Olson. Olson, now 94, recalled attending a community meeting in 1969 and being shocked to learn of the canals tenuous state. The general consensus was fill it in and make it a bypass for Main Street. I said, Well, jeez.' He believes that was the turning point. If they hadnt had the meeting, the canal wouldnt be there. Over the years, Olson, a longtime Manayunk resident and a flight-test mechanic by trade, was a relentless advocate of numerous causes, some fated to materialize, others to evaporate (among the former, the Philadelphia-to-Valley Forge bike trail, which he began lobbying for with the Sierra Club in 1973; among the latter, a whitewater canoe training course on the Schuylkill, and a historical site at Leverings Ford, where George Washington and his troops crossed on their way from a camp in East Falls). Olsons Depression-era childhood, on a dairy farm in Gladwyne, instilled in him a love of nature, a self-reliant streak, deep-seeded frugality, and determination. He brought all of that to bear on the canal. Where others saw a ditch filled with tires and trash, Olson saw something more: the centerpiece of a bicycle trail linking Center City and Valley Forge and a tourist draw like the canal that had anchored the development of New Hope in Bucks County into a lively tourist town. It seemed like a fantasy at the time, given the state of the neighborhood, a gloomy mix of janitorial stores, warehouses, and beer distributors. Movita Johnson-Harrell, supervisor of victim services, looks on during a press conference at the District Attorney's Office in January. Read more Democrat Movita Johnson-Harrell handily won a special election Tuesday to represent West Philadelphias 190th District in the state House, replacing longtime State Rep. Vanessa Lowery Brown, who was driven from office by a bribery scandal. The 190th District has long been a reliable win for Democrats, since 87 percent of the districts registered voters belong to that party. Brown won reelection in November, after a jury in Dauphin County convicted her on bribery charges in October. She resigned from the state House in December after being sentenced to 23 months of probation. Johnson-Harrell, 52, was supervisor of victim services for the Philadelphia District Attorneys Office and formerly owned a personal-care home. With 94 percent of precincts reporting, Johnson-Harrell had an insurmountable lead with more than 2,900 votes, or 66 percent of those cast. She did not immediately return a request for comment. Reducing gun violence was the dominant campaign for Johnson-Harrell, whose father, brother and 18-year-old son were shot to death at different times in her life. She established the Charles Foundation, named for her son, to advocate legislation aimed at reducing access to guns. Last year, we saw unprecedented numbers of Moms Demand Action volunteers run for office and win, Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, said in a statement. I am delighted that Movita Johnson-Harrell has joined their ranks and is adding lawmaker to her portfolio of gun safety activism. Members of the state chapter of the Moms group did door-to-door canvassing for Johnson-Harrell. Rep. Leanne Kruger of Delaware County, head of the House Democratic Campaign Committee, congratulated Johnson-Harrell on her victory in a statement, calling it our first step to get ready to fight for the majority in 2020. Two Democrats who did not win their partys nod, Amen Brown and Pastor Pat Williams, were on the ballot as independents. Brown was running second with about 20 percent of the vote. Michael Harvey, the Republican nominee, finished in last place with less than 3 percent of the vote. Replacing Vanessa Lowery Brown had developed into a new kind of headache for Philadelphias Democratic City Committee. Lawyer Sonte Reavis was the front-runner for the nomination among the Democratic leaders of the seven wards in the district. But a Clout column in The Inquirer in January noted Water Revenue Bureau bills showed zero water usage for two years at the home where Reavis was registered to vote. The ward leaders regrouped behind Daryl Thomas, a barbershop owner. But another Clout column reported that Thomas had been registered to vote in Delaware from 2001 to 2017. Thomas withdrew from the race. The Democratic nomination fell to Johnson-Harrell. But that required a 90-minute meeting at the Democratic City Committee headquarters, where her recent financial woes were discussed. Johnson-Harrell last year closed the personal-care home she operated, and she filed for bankruptcy in November, citing $607,429 in liabilities. That includes a $465,000 default judgment from a loan secured by the properties where she ran her business. She also has been the subject of several liens for unpaid Philadelphia property taxes, including three more filed by the city last week. More cases of the mumps at Temple University were reported Tuesday, with the number of confirmed and probable cases rising to 23, officials said. Temple reported that there were 11 confirmed cases and 12 probable cases. The Philadelphia Department of Public Health said it was now counting the two categories as one because the outbreak of the highly infectious disease is established and the agency has stopped recommending that people get tested for confirmation. If someone reports to Student Health with symptoms consistent with mumps we are counting them as a case, said agency spokesperson James Garrow. On Feb. 28, the university announced that four students had tested positive for mumps and issued a warning to 40,000 students and several thousand faculty on the eve of spring break. Mumps is a contagious viral disease. Common symptoms include swollen salivary glands, fever, headache, muscle aches, and loss of appetite. While serious complications are rare, especially in people who were vaccinated as children, mumps can cause inflammation of the brain, deafness, or sterility. Similarly to the flu, there is no treatment. But for most people, symptoms fade after 10 days. A man crosses Crow Creek during a blizzard on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Cheyenne, Wyo. Heavy snow hit Cheyenne about mid-morning Wednesday and was spreading into Colorado and Nebraska. Read more CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) A vast, window-rattling late winter storm brought blizzards, high winds, rain and the threat of tornadoes to more than 25 states Wednesday, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond. "This is a very epic cyclone," said Greg Carbin, chief of forecast operations for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Weather Prediction Center. "We're looking at something that will go down in the history books." It could develop into the worst storm of its type in 35 or 40 years, he said. Blowing snow forced major highways to close in Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming, and about 1,000 flights were canceled at the Denver airport. A wind gust of 92 mph (148 kph) was recorded in the mountains northwest of Denver. Many schools and government offices closed for the day. Rural roads were swamped by high water in Nebraska and Iowa, and forecasters said more flooding was on the way. Severe thunderstorms in North Texas damaged buildings and flipped over small planes parked at an airport. Parts of seven states were under blizzard warnings, and 20 states were under some level of high wind alert, Carbin said. Tornadoes were possible on the storm's eastern edge. The storm was expected to drop up to 22 inches (56 centimeters) of snow in Wyoming, 14 inches (36 centimeters) in South Dakota and a foot (31 centimeters) in Colorado. Forecasters in Iowa warned that rain and melting snow could worsen flooding already underway in low-lying areas. Nebraska was bracing for heavy rains. Forecasters said the winds could pile up snow into deep drifts. The storm could last through Friday. The culprit was a sudden and severe drop in ground-level air pressure in Colorado, the most pronounced dive since 1950, Carbin said. It was caused by a combination of the jet stream and normal conditions in the wind shadow of the Rockies. Air rushed into the low-pressure area and then rose into the atmosphere. "It's like a vacuum cleaner, really," Carbin said. And when that much air rushes higher into the atmosphere, it causes severe weather. ___ Elliott reported from Longmont, Colorado. Nyzia Easterling (right) embraces a friend after hearing Camden City Council decide to take no action on the proposed ordinance to regulate makeshift memorials at a Council meeting on Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Read more The Camden City Council on Tuesday night put off a decision on a controversial proposed ordinance that would have forced makeshift memorials to homicide and traffic victims to be removed after 15 days. In a Council chamber packed with residents, police officers, and activists, the councilman who proposed the law, Angel Fuentes, recommended to his colleagues a delay in voting, saying they needed to hear more input before considering it. Council agreed, voting to take no action. It also approved a public meeting, to be hosted by Fuentes, at 4 p.m. March 21 at City Hall to discuss possible courses of action. If we want to do this right, lets do this right from the get-go, Fuentes said. In the month since he introduced the proposed ordinance, citing a decline in property values and the effect these tributes can have on Camdens youth, he said, he has heard from many members of the community opposed to it. At Fuentes behest, Council heard from an opponent of the proposal, Nyzia Easterling, whose Saving Grace Ministries was formed to assist children in Camden who have lost a parent to violence. You need to get to the root of the issue, Easterling said, and focus on violence instead of the symbols associated with it. We dont want to bring problems, we want to bring solutions, Easterling said in an interview. Next week, she said, she will advise Council to look at ways to keep community centers open longer, and to build a trauma community center to help people in need. When Easterlings husband was shot and killed outside of a now-closed bar at Viola Street and Broadway in 2004, she said, her daughter Jennah was traumatized by the loss of her father. To pay for the then-12-year-old to get therapy and the resources needed to cope, Easterling had to take a second job. No places in Camden offered these services, she said, so she drove her daughter to Cherry Hill and Collingswood. Last year, there were 22 homicides and 13 vehicular deaths in Camden, the kind of tragedies that families typically recognize with a memorial. In 2019, there have been 6 homicides and 2 vehicular deaths. Some Council members have said that for many reasons such as the steep cost of a funeral families need to honor their loved one in nontraditional ways, including temporary memorials. Fuentes and others, however, say the memorials are an unnecessary reminder of the violence occurring in the community. Residents opposed to the measure believe that Council is largely trying to paint a new narrative of the city to bring in new commercial development and homeowners. Although makeshift and roadside memorials have been regulated through other measures like litter laws and highway safety policies, this ordinance would be the first to officially regulate such displays in New Jersey. Vida Niel, a political blogger and member of the Camden County chapter of the NAACP, says Council shouldnt be discussing the ordinance, but should concentrate on cutting crime. City Council is worried about the wrong thing, Niel said. Why arent these [police] officers on the street protecting our citizens? Thats the question that needs to be answered." LAS VEGAS A defrocked Roman Catholic priest named as one of more than 180 New Jersey priests facing credible accusations of sexual abuse was fatally shot in a house in a suburb of Las Vegas, authorities said Tuesday. John Capparelli, 70, was found dead Saturday morning in his kitchen in Henderson with a gunshot wound to his neck, said Nicole Charlton of the Clark County Coroners Office. Capparelli died amid suspicious circumstances, but Police Officer Katrina Rothmeyer declined to comment on whether police have a suspect or whether someone broke into the home. He was on the list of 180 priests named by five New Jersey dioceses last month. Capparelli bought the home in August 2016 for $319,000, according to county property records. Joann DAngelo, who lives two doors from Capparellis residence, said he lived alone and occasionally waved hello. His past was not well-known in the retiree community, she said. "He was a very quiet man," D'Angelo said. "He minded his own business." DAngelo said police told her they believed Capparelli was killed Wednesday because he failed to show up for dinner plans with a friend that night. She said the friend came by on Saturday morning to check on Capparelli and called police, who broke in and found his body. DAngelo said she was home all day Wednesday and told police she never heard a gunshot. Capparelli worked as a math tutor for high school and college students, so it wasn't unusual to see different cars parked in front of his house. "Things like that don't happen up here," D'Angelo said. "It's a safe neighborhood." Capparelli, who was assigned to churches around North Jersey, was accused of groping and brutalizing teenage boys in the 1970s and 1980s, and was defrocked in 1992, according to the Newark Star-Ledger. Capparelli later worked as a public school math teacher in the Newark School District but agreed to the revocation of his teaching license in 2011 after allegations against him emerged. The Star-Ledger reported that Capparelli also ran a website featuring young men wrestling in revealing bathing suits. Richard Fitter, a New Jersey man who was among those who accused Capparelli of abuse, told the newspaper after learning of the former priest's death that the world is safer without him. "It's karma," Fitter said. This story contains information from the Associated Press. HARRISBURG Late last week, Pennsylvania Senate officials had police escort out of the Capitol a security officer who is suing them for allegedly tolerating a culture of sexual harassment at work. The officer, Sue Salov, was told March 7 to pack her belongings, turn in her badge, and not report back until she heard from someone in the chambers administration, according to two sources familiar with the incident. She has been waiting ever since. Over the last six days, top Senate officials did not respond to repeated questions about Salovs employment status. Late Wednesday, Senate Secretary Megan Martin, who oversees the security force, would say only that Salov remains a paid employee, but provided no further information about her status, including whether Salov still has the same job title and duties. The handling of Salovs case has raised questions about the Senates treatment of employees who bring sexual harassment claims. It is also bound to raise the stakes in a lawsuit that is already rancorous. Everything that youre describing being told to take your personal belongings, turning in your badge, being cut off from work email those are all common things that happen when someone is being fired, said Jennifer Storm, the states victim advocate, whose office works with crime victims. What is not common: the vagueness of them not telling an employee whats happening, or handing them something in writing. Salov, the deputy director of Senate security, declined to comment. Her lawyer, Wayne Ely, also declined to discuss the matter. Salov, employed for more than 25 years with the Senate, alleges that Senate officials began retaliating against her after she reported in late 2017 that her then-supervisor, Justin Ferrante, had sexually harassed her. Ferrante at the time was the Senates director of security. Last fall, she sued Ferrante, the Senate, and the commonwealth in federal court, alleging that they illegally subjected her to sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliation." In court papers and other documents, Salov has alleged that Ferrante texted her inappropriate graphics and cartoons, as well as a picture of male genitalia. Around the same time, Ferrante also was accused of harassing another Senate employee, Keah Tingler. Tingler was a veteran receptionist in the security office; she alleged that Ferrante had on multiple occasions sent her photos of feces after visiting the bathroom during work hours. Amid an investigation into the matter, Ferrante resigned. In court papers, he has denied the allegations. The Senate, too, has denied any wrongdoing. And in a move that sparked controversy, Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnatis office quietly agreed last year to pay Ferrantes legal bills. According to sources familiar with Salovs and Tinglers cases, both women feel as if their professional lives were derailed after they reported Ferrantes behavior. Tingler ended up retiring from the Senate on disability last fall. Salov remained on staff, but sources familiar with her case have said that over the last year, she has been marginalized, stripped of some duties and access, and given a poor evaluation for the first time in her decades-long career. She was also placed on a performance improvement plan" for 90 days. Last Thursday, on the final day of that 90-day period, a top aide to Martin visited Salov in her office, and told her that she had not improved her behavior, the sources said. Salov was stripped of her badge, her radio, and her building access card, and told to gather her personal belongings. Within minutes she was escorted out of the building by a Capitol Police sergeant, but was not told whether she was being fired or suspended. Instead, Senate officials told her they would contact her Monday to update her on her employment status. As of the end of the day Wednesday, they had not. Hazel Edwards, 21, of West Philadelphia, helped craft Policy 252 for the Philadelphia School District, regarding transgender and gender non-conforming youth. Read more Meet Hazel Edwards, a 21-year-old trans advocate who helped craft the Philadelphia School Districts policy on transgender and gender-nonconforming youth. Telltale art: Edwards, an artist, came out to her mother as trans in a painting: It was a male silhouette looking into a mirror with a female silhouette looking back," Edwards said. All my mom could say was, Nice texture.' I said, OK, she doesnt get the hint.'" On her strength: I think I was forced to have it. Living every day in a society that was not meant for you to succeed inherently makes you strong and powerful. Hazel Edwards was four months away from graduation at Boys Latin of Philadelphia Charter School in 2015 when the principal called Edwards into his office to discuss ongoing tardiness and absence issues. What the principal didnt know is that Edwards had been missing classes at the all-boys school because she identified as a girl and didnt feel comfortable there. I told the principal I was trans, Edwards said. The principal was like, Whoa. I was not expecting this." Edwards said the principal, a sweet person who didnt know what to do," brought in another staff member who told Edwards she was a boy and couldnt come to school with her hair or nails done. She said she wasnt kicked out but did feel pushed out. I packed up my stuff and never went back to that school as a student, Edwards said. But later that year, Edwards did go back to Boys Latin not as a student, but as an educator with the Attic Youth Center to help train 86 teachers on the best practices for working with LGBTQ students. That was the first time that I walked into that school as Hazel, said Edwards, who continues to lead training at Boys Latin. I got so much good feedback from former teachers, and the principal came up to me, started crying, and said, The student is now the teacher. Noah Tennant, then principal and now CEO of Boys Latin, said he doesnt remember the details of Edwards departure but confirmed the comment he made at the training. It really added a whole extra layer of relevance for us that Hazel walked our corridors and classrooms," Tennant said. "The firsthand knowledge she had was invaluable to us as we thought about how we can grow. MORE WE THE PEOPLE: Slam poetry league founder: Teachers cant afford to be quiet about race Edwards grew up in Overbrook Park with her mother, brother, and sister. Her father was incarcerated when she was 9, she said. For many years, Edwards didnt have the language of trans to express herself. She said it wasnt until she met a trans woman her own age when she was 17 that she fully realized what shed always felt. I was fighting it in mental hospitals and behavioral hospitals," she said. After meeting that trans person and seeing how happy they were and how unhappy I felt, I said OK, now this is a time of life or death.' After she came out, Edwards relationship with her mother became rocky, and for a time, she experienced homelessness. The Attic, a center for LGBTQ youth, gave Edwards a paid internship during that tough period. Since 2017, shes worked full time as an educator and outreach specialist there. In 2016, Edwards helped University of Pennsylvania professor Amy Hillier, whose daughter is trans, develop a policy for the Philadelphia School District on protecting transgender and gender-nonconforming youth. MORE WE THE PEOPLE: What happens when a surrealist decorates a South Philly rowhome Hillier said she was impressed by Edwards ability to navigate institutions and inspire other young people. For someone who has a tough story, shes just so full of love and optimism and energy," Hillier said. Its remarkable that somebody whos had as challenging a journey as she could be so gracious. Edwards has even become a mentor for Hilliers 10-year-old trans daughter. My daughter said, Hazel is fancy! which is high praise, Hillier said. Outside of Edwards advocacy work for which shes won local and national awards Edwards is also a member of the Black and Brown Workers Cooperative and enjoys performing and painting, particularly around themes of black love, queer and trans love and liberation, and the universe. Edwards, who now has her GED, plans to attend college to become an art therapist and community organizer for the queer and trans communities. I want to be an art therapist because all of the things I wasnt able to vocalize when I was young, I was still able to get out through my art, she said. Want more We the People? A police car drives with its lights flashing in Philadelphia, Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2019. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) Read more A man allegedly armed with a butcher knife was fatally shot by a security guard at a cell phone store Tuesday afternoon in North Philadelphia, police said. Just after 12:30 p.m., the man ran behind the counter of the store in the 2700 block on North Broad Street and was shot in the chest by the guard, police said. Police rushed the man to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 1:36 p.m. Police did not provide further details. SEPTA police officers Baron (left) and McLaughlin (right) emerge wth Sgt. Steve Richards (center) from the Transit Police Station in Suburban Station after the union officers return to work at 11 p.m. March 12, 2019, after reaching a tentative agreement with management on a new contract. Read more SEPTAs transit police strike ended Tuesday night after the agency and police union reached a tentative contract agreement. Officers are expected to begin returning to duty for the shift that begins at 11 p.m. tonight, said agency spokesman Andrew Busch in a statement. "Details on the terms of the tentative contract will be announced at a later date, after the [Fraternal Order of Transit Police] has the opportunity to discuss the agreement with its members. SEPTA looks forward to having its police officers back on duty to serve riders throughout the system, Busch added. Omari Bervine, president of FOTP Local 109, said Tuesday night that he did not wish to discuss the agreement until it was ratified by members. Earlier that afternoon he said a meeting was being held to iron out the language in SEPTAs body camera policy. SEPTAs policy bars officers, who are all equipped with cameras, from reviewing video before writing an incident report. Bervine has said the policy puts officers in the position of inadvertently making statements that are contradicted by camera video and thus risk of losing their jobs even if there was no intent to deceive. SEPTAs standards are stricter than those of the Philadelphia Police Department, which allows officers to review video except in cases when a person is hospitalized or there is use of force, officials said. >>READ MORE: SEPTA cops strike touches on a national issue: Who should see body camera footage? Civil rights advocates say allowing officers to see the video can distort and taint memory, and cause them to shift their accounts to match the footage. Union representatives were also concerned about wages, which they say are significantly lower than officers with comparable experience make at other departments. The disparity contributes to officers quickly leaving the department for better-paying jobs elsewhere, Bervine has said. The union went on strike last Wednesday. It represents nearly 200 officers. During the strike, SEPTA used supervisors and city officers to fill the gap. One day after the strike started, a 30-year-old man was fatally stabbed during an altercation at a Center City subway station. Men working on Lock 69 during a 1978-79 project to restore the canal, stabilize the lock and build a new towpath along Manayunk Canal. Read more How would you feel if your local waterway was suddenly paved over for the use of cars and trucks? Not great? Then youll want to read all about how that almost happened to the Manayunk Canal, and how it was saved. It was a close one. This morning, we also have updates for you on the ACLUs suing of Philadelphia court officials over its bail system. At issue is whether courts are evaluating defendants ability to pay before setting bail, as court guidelines require. Reading this online? Sign up here to get this newsletter delivered to your inbox every morning. Aubrey Nagle (@aubsn, morningnewsletter@philly.com) Now the Philadelphia Water Department is ready to restore water flow to the canal for the first time in a half century and Parks and Recreation plans to restore its lower locks. But the landmarks fate wasnt always so rosy. At one point it was nearly paved over for an expressway or a parking lot. The Pennsylvania ACLU announced Tuesday it is suing Philadelphia court officials over its bail system, claiming they do not follow court guidelines for evaluating defendants ability to pay. Last fall the organization sent a warning letter to court administrators claiming their bail practices are unconstitutional. A year ago, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner announced his office would no longer seek money bail for low-level crimes. Last month he said he believes the policy makes Philly safer in the long term. Al Alvarez, the former Gov. Phil Murphy administration official accused of sexual assault, appeared in public to address the controversy for the first time Tuesday. He told New Jersey lawmakers he had been falsely accused by Katie Brennan, a Murphy campaign volunteer who now works in the administration. Brennan told lawmakers in December that top Murphy aides failed to act when she told them that she had been sexually assaulted by Alvarez during the 2017 campaign. One question that wasnt answered Tuesday: who hired Alvarez? What you need to know today Through Your Eyes | #OurPhilly Definitely worth the early wake-up call, @valer1ej. Tag your Instagram posts or tweets with #OurPhilly and well pick our favorite each day to feature in this newsletter and give you a shout out! Thats Interesting Opinions Fuentes has said that the idea was driven by residents concerns about quality of life, property values, and traumatizing children. It is also the latest attempt by city leaders to make Camden more palatable to outsiders at any cost. Camden photojournalist April Saul on the city sanitizing the truth by removing memorials for murder victims. Its time to talk about an unspoken reason black women are more likely to die in childbirth: unconscious bias in physicians, writes Eve J. Higginbotham, M.D., vice dean for diversity and inclusion at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. As fans deal with the ramifications of allegations of sexual abuse in the new documentary Leaving Neverland, columnist Elizabeth Wellington asks whether Philadelphia will or even can cancel Michael Jackson. What were reading A Daily Dose of | Mystery An empty West Philly lot has suddenly found itself filled with lifelike bronze sculptures of a man reading a book, a woman sunbathing, and a hotdog vendor. But ... why? Sister Pauline McShain is seen sitting in the garden of her parents' former estate, Killarney House, in Kerry County, Ireland. The estate is now a national park. Read more Sister Pauline McShain, 90, of Rosemont, the daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia contractor who could have led a life of luxury at her familys estate in Ireland but chose to become a nun, an educator, and, later, a philanthropist, died Friday, March 8, of complications from pneumonia at Bryn Mawr Hospital. Born in Philadelphia, Sister Pauline, known as Polly, was the only child of Mary Horstmann and John McShain. Her father owned one of Americas leading construction companies, John McShain Inc. From the 1930s to the 1960s, he was the prime contractor for 100 buildings in Washington, including the Pentagon, Jefferson Memorial, and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He funneled his wealth into the John McShain Charities, which underwrote many Catholic causes. Sister Pauline graduated in 1946 from the Academy of the Holy Child in Suffern, N.Y., and that year entered the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. She made her first vows in 1949 and her final vows in 1954. Sister Pauline inherited the giving spirit of her parents, said Sister Mary Ann Buckley, a friend in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. Sister Polly loved both her extended family and her Holy Child community with great affection and loyalty; she dedicated her life to the service of others in diverse ways, both nationally and internationally. Sister Pauline taught elementary school at Oak Knoll School of the Holy Child in Summit, N.J., in the early 1950s. She taught English and religion at the Holy Child School in Rosemont starting in 1952 and served as the first principal of Holy Childs senior school from 1956 to 1966. Former Inquirer reporter Sally A. Downey remembered Sister Pauline as a gifted English teacher. She loved diagramming sentences all over the blackboard, and it drove me crazy, but I learned, Downey said. Sister Pauline trained new members of the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus in the late 1960s before going to Lagos, Nigeria, where she lectured from 1971 to 1973 at the National Institute of Religious Education. She got what she told us was her dearest wish when she briefly became a missionary in Africa, Downey said. The religious society sent Sister Pauline to Catholic dioceses in White Plains, N.Y., Bridgeport, Conn., and Newark, N.J., where she worked in various roles from 1976 to 1986. She was elected to the Society of the Holy Child Jesus General Council, and lived in Rome for six years ending in 1992. While she was serving on the council, her father died in 1989. Her mother was living in Killarney House, County Kerry, Ireland, an estate with 25,000 acres that the McShains had acquired in 1956. As her mothers health declined, Sister Pauline spent time at the home, supervising her mothers care and managing the property. After her mother died in 1998, Sister Pauline moved to Rosemont, where she served as president of the John McShain Charities before closing the organization in 2000. The Killarney House and grounds were sold to Ireland for a nominal fee and have become a national park. In the 2000s, Sister Pauline volunteered at Siloam, a nonprofit in Philadelphia that serves people living with HIV/AIDS. In 2013, she moved to Holy Child Center in Rosemont, a retirement facility. She read and followed world and church events. Sister Pauline earned a bachelor of arts degree in English from Rosemont College in 1958; a master of arts in secondary education from Villanova University in 1959; a master of arts in religious studies from Catholic University of America in 1971; and a master of science in pastoral counseling from Iona College in 1980. She served on the boards of Rosemont College, Irelands Heritage Preservation Foundation, St. Josephs Preparatory School, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Hagley Museum and Library. She is survived by many cousins. A viewing starting at 9:45 a.m. Saturday, March 16, will be followed by an 11 a.m. Mass of Christian Burial at St. Thomas of Villanova, the Rosemont Chapel, 1229 E. Lancaster Ave., Bryn Mawr. Burial will be at Calvary Cemetery, West Conshohocken. Memorial donations may be made to the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, American Province, 1341 Montgomery Ave., Rosemont, Pa. 19010, or via www.shcj.org/american/donate/. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, listens as the panel holds a hearing about prevention and response to sexual assault in the military, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 6, 2019. A staffer recently resigned from Gillibrand's own office due to its handling of her sexual harassment claims. Read more WASHINGTON In April 2018, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand urged Senate leaders to pass her bipartisan Congressional Harassment Reform Act. Congress has a sexual harassment problem and isnt taking it seriously, Gillibrand wrote in Fortune magazine. If we cant clean up our own act, how can anyone expect Congress to do the right thing for victims and survivors in the rest of the country? Congress has to do better. I believe that elected officials should be held to the highest ethical standard not the lowest. Just a few months later, when a woman in her own office reported that a married male staffer was making repeated, unwanted and increasingly aggressive sexual advances toward her, Gillibrand did not do the right thing and fire him. Politico reported that Less than three weeks after reporting the alleged harassment and subsequently claiming that the man retaliated against her for doing so, the woman told chief of staff Jess Fassler that she was resigning because of the offices handling of the matter. Gillibrands office defended her inaction, saying in a statement that the senators office had conducted a full and thorough investigation that included multiple interviews with relevant current employees who could potentially corroborate the claims but did not find cause to fire the male staffer. They could not "corroborate" her claims? Gillibrand was willing to destroy Brett Kavanaugh's career, and derail his Supreme Court nomination, over uncorroborated allegations, but when a female employee alleged that she was sexually harassed by one of Gillibrand's closest aides, the senator hid behind a supposed lack of corroboration. Why was her office unable to corroborate the allegations? Maybe it's because they never contacted two former employees the woman said could corroborate her story? Politico had no problem doing that. The news organization interviewed more than 20 former Gillibrand staffers who alleged a pattern of harassment by aide Abbas Malik. One former staffer said that Malik often called her fat and unattractive to her face and made light of sexual abuse. Others said Malik regularly made misogynistic jokes, frequently appraised what they wore, disparaged the looks of other female staffers and rated the attractiveness of women who came in for interviews. If a reporter could dig this information up, then her office could have done so, too. Only after Politico contacted Gillibrands office about the additional allegations against Malik did the senator finally fire him. The fact is, while publicly positioning herself as a champion of harassment victims, Gillibrand apparently allowed a serial harasser to torment her female staff. And when a woman on her staff risked her own career to report the abusive conduct, I was belittled by her office and treated like an inconvenience, the woman told Politico. She kept a harasser on her staff until it proved politically untenable for her to do so. Why did Gillibrand fail to act? Politico reported that Malik had spent years by Gillibrands side as her driver the senator officiated at his wedding while the woman was a more recent hire and had significantly less stature in the office. She apparently did not take action because she liked him personally. The hypocrisy is rank. Gillibrand is pushing legislation, the Military Justice Improvement Act, that would make independent prosecutors, rather than military commanders, responsible for handling allegations of sexual misconduct in the military, because of the bias and inherent conflicts of interest posed by the military chain of commands sole decision-making power. Yet when faced with such allegations in her own office, she had no concern about bias and inherent conflicts of interest. Gillibrand is a political opportunist who has seized on the #MeToo movement to advance her political career. In 2017, she shocked many Democrats by declaring that President Bill Clinton should have resigned during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But she said nothing about Clintons misconduct when he campaigned for her in 2006 or when he headlined a fundraiser for her in 2009, and she was happy to accept the help of the Clinton political machine to raise an estimated $70 million for her. It was only after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, and the Clinton political machine was finally defunct, that Gillibrand finally stepped forward to condemn him. What a profile in courage. Gillibrands idea of congressional harassment reform is that high-profile men such as Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., must go, but her driver is allowed to stay at least until the media got wind of it. As Gillibrand put it in her Fortune op-ed, Congress needs to show leadership and make it clear that we wont tolerate sexual harassment anymore. She can start in her own office. Marc Thiessen writes a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post on foreign and domestic policy. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush. @marcthiessen President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has a strategy to cope with Central American caravans as well as President Trumps push for a border wall and aversion to migrants. That was the message from Mexicos first female ambassador to the United States, Martha Barcena Coqui, a highly experienced diplomat who was once a Fulbright scholar at the University of Delaware. She recently spoke at a global business conference held by the World Trade Center of Greater Philadelphia. Known at home as AMLO, the leftist Mexican president (in office since December) has surprised U.S. observers who expected him to quickly ignite fireworks with Trump. Instead, Mexican authorities have blocked groups of migrants at border towns. They also have permitted the Trump administration to send back several dozen migrants awaiting U.S. court decisions on their asylum applications. But, Barcena told me, AMLOs stance is part of a much broader Mexican approach on immigration. Mexican officials are discussing their views with top U.S. officials, members of Congress, governors, and relevant city mayors. Any debate on immigration, Barcena insists, should be based on facts and realities. So here are some facts on the immigration dispute the Mexican government wants you to know. 1. When it comes to immigration, study the demographic profile of the United States, Mexico, and Central America as one region. The United States has aged more slowly than Europe because of immigration, which has helped keep the economy buoyant, notes Barcena. However, the U.S. is now aging fast, while Mexico is still youthful (although the birthrate is dropping). Central America is even more so. The youth bulge south of the border feeds migration north for jobs. 2. Circular migration meaning some kind of legal guest-worker program is crucial to meeting migration demand. From 1942-1964, the bracero program (despite its lack of worker rights) permitted Mexican laborers to enter the United States for seasonal work, and then return home. When circular migration ended with the program, Mexicans continued to come because there were job opportunities, says Barcena. Many stayed illegally and later brought their families. At present, H2A visas permit seasonal agricultural workers to enter and H2B visas (capped at 66,000) allow nonagricultural workers in when needed. But these programs are not always reliable, and need updating, especially now. For example, last year nearly half the Eastern Shore of Marylands crab houses had no workers to pick the meat for restaurants and supermarkets, because they couldnt secure H2B visas for their longtime seasonal employees from Mexico. Similarly, mushroom growers in Chester County were short 1,000 longtime Mexican seasonal workers, because they couldnt obtain H2A visas for temporary work. Fewer and fewer illegal Mexican workers are entering the U.S. (in fact, there has been net out-migration), but longtime seasonal workers may not go home if their return becomes uncertain. If there is no reliability for visas, people will stay, Barcena says. 3. Central America will remain the main source of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers from south of the border unless root causes are addressed. People mostly migrate because they have no options, the ambassador says. Sixty percent from Central America come from rural areas suffering huge drought. Others are fleeing gang violence. If we can change the economy of the poorest areas of the region from southern Mexico through Central America and achieve sustained economic growth, then people will stay, argues Barcena. That will require joint U.S.-Mexican efforts. Police measures to contain or deter can be useful in the short-term, but not the medium- or long-term. 4. AMLO is cooperating with Trump on migrants for pragmatic reasons. We had three options, says Barcena. We could have refused to accept returnees, meaning direct confrontation with the United States. But, she adds, A fight doesnt help either country." Alternatively, Mexico could have accepted the returnees and sent them back to their home countries, which is not in line with humanitarian principles. Mexico chose the third option, taking back some asylum seekers and limiting the numbers who cross the border. We want an orderly process, says Barcena. However, this cannot be a long-term, or expanded, solution. Mexican facilities are already strained by the dozens they accepted while awaiting U.S. court decisions. Instead, AMLO would like to see the number of legal ports of entry increased, and measures to speed up the legal flow, such as the use of huge security scanners. When I asked Barcena her opinion on the wall, she replied, Is a concrete wall helpful anywhere? When I pressed Barcena on why Mexican-U. S. relations have improved, she said: I think there has been more respect from the White House. President Trump understands that President Lopez Obrador has 86 percent support in our country and won 53 percent of the vote. Beyond that, she is on a mission to convey Mexicos point of view to the public and to officials around the country. Next stops: Phoenix and San Antonio, closer to the southern border. Sometimes governors and mayors understand the issues better [than officials in D.C.], she noted. Too true. Tom Marino (R-PA) participates in the House GOP leadership press conference after the House Republican Conference meeting in the Capitol on Tuesday, September 27, 2016 in Washington. Marino's resignation this January triggered a special election to fill his spot, for Pennsylvania's 12th Congressional District, in May. Read more On March 2, 2019, 202 votes decided Fred Keller was the Republican nominee and thus likely the next congressman from Pennsylvanias 12th District (PA12). Sounds like a close race, right? Well, when I said 202 people decided a race, I wasnt talking about the margin, but rather the total voter pool. Two hundred and two people all of them party insiders were the only people allowed to pick their partys nominee in this ruby red district. Rep. Tom Marinos January resignation from Congress triggered a May special election to replace him. Like all other states, Pennsylvania holds special elections open to all voters to choose among a Democrat, Republican, and others to represent them in Congress. However, unlike most other states, the nominees arent chosen in an election open to all. Rather the parties hold nominating conventions open only to select party insiders with minuscule voter pools. In contrast, 59,629 people voted in the 2018 PA12 Republican primary. That means for every one delegate who got to vote in 2019, there were 294 additional people who joined them to vote in the 2018 primary. Party nominating conventions are a vestige of a more undemocratic time. They have survived because they operate out of sight when most voters arent paying attention to elections. However, these contests are more common than youd think. Once Keller, or his Democratic opponent, Marc Friedenberg, is sworn into the 116th Congress, 20 members will owe their initial election to this kind of contest. That number might sound small in a body of 435, but if these 20 were a state delegation, they would be the fifth largest. Most of these members are people who played by the rules of their state governments and parties. They are not the ones to blame. Its the system that needs fixing. Many of them won special elections to clean up after a truly corrupt predecessor. But some things stand out from the list of convention-nominated members. One glaring thing is that party nominating conventions appear to be heavily biased to men. The current House is about 24 percent women, but of the members nominated by convention, only one is a woman. Also, most of these members dont face competitive general elections. Only one Conor Lamb flipped a district. Of the 19 who are already in office, the average margin of victory was 28 points. Only six had single-digit races. Therefore in most of these contests, the party nominating convention is basically a ticket to the House floor. This is a huge problem to allow such a small segment of the population the ability to choose a member of Congress. But there is a solution. Special elections to fill a vacancy can be done quick, cheap, and fair. Once a seat becomes vacant, states should be required to hold a jungle general (all the parties together) with ranked choice voting. This would require some form of majority support from their constituents, but eliminate time- and money-consuming runoffs. It also means members are seated as quickly as possible after a vacancy occurs as only one election is required. This system of election should also apply when a nomination in a regularly scheduled election becomes void due to death, conviction, or choice. It would ensure the primary process isnt rigged by outgoing members who wish to handpick their successor. And filing should open up again for all parties in those circumstances, to ensure the party in power cant game the system to help their new candidate in an open seat. As the House of Representatives works to improve our democracy through the For the People Act, it is imperative that we also address these party nominating conventions, as they are some of the most restrictive voting processes in the country. We must call on state governments, alongside the federal government and our parties, to relegate these antidemocratic processes to the history books. David de la Fuente is a political analyst with Third Way, a center-left think tank. Dear American Legion Post: A century ago, The American Legion was founded by veterans who had a post-war mission. Their mission, one that continues today, was to care for veterans, provide patriotic programs for our nation's youth, advocate for a strong national defense and instill a societal pride in what it means to be American. It is our posts, however, that people see every day. Whether your post is 100 years or 100 days old, this birthday our 100th is about you. The fact is that no program, no fundraising initiative and no legislative achievement of The American Legion could ever succeed without the hardworking men and women who comprise our American Legion Family. From the drafting of the original GI Bill to the creation of the VA, The American Legion has had an unparalleled record of success. I know that I can count on all of you to continue your dedicated service to our country and our American Legion. And if, like me, you believe the Legion will continue to accomplish great things in its second century, let's all commit to recruiting and especially renewing past members so we can continue to be a strong American Legion for a strong America. For now, happy birthday, Legionnaires! WE ARE TEAM 100! Sincerely Brett P. Reistad, National Commander The American Legion The American Legion was founded on March 15, 1919, at the American Club near Place de la Concorde in Paris, France, by members of the American Expeditionary Forces, and it was chartered on September 16, 1919, by the U.S. Congress. It is dedicated to the four pillars of service and advocacy: Veterans, Defense, Youth and Americanism. The growth of this Veteran based organization has reached all fifty states, as well as departments in: District of Columbia, France, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Phillippines. There are more than 12,500 American Legion Posts worldwide. Membership has risen to nearly two million making it one of the largest veteran service organizations in in the United States. It is associated with the American Legion Auxiliary and the Sons of the American Legion programs. Veterans is it's first and foremost duty, as it is of Veterans, and for Veterans. It also has been instrumental in the creation of many American societys, it helped form the Department of Veteran Affairs, creation of the U. S. Flag Code, passage of the G.I. Bill just to name a few. Service to the our Veterans is the bloodline of the American Legion. Collectively, the Posts provide annually almost four million hours of volunteer service in their communities, donate more than 80,000 pints of blood nationwide, sponsor Boy Scout programs, award scholarships totally more than four million dollars and most of all, their service officers assist more than 750,000 Veterans cases throughout the world. We at the American Legion are the leading organization to honor, to remember, to assist our country's military sacrifices, through Honor Guard services at Fallen Veterans funerals, memorials and monuments. We are there still serving those who serve and/or have served. Happy 100th Birthday American Legion. CHEYENNE Cheyenne Urban Forestry Division along with local arborists are continuing to observe an uptick in the number of dead and dying spruce trees in Cheyenne. This is the result of the spruce ips beetle. This current beetle infestation was first identified in Cheyenne about two and a half years ago and has shown no signs of slowing down. This beetle only infests spruce, such as Colorado Blue Spruce, Black Hills Spruce and Engelmann Spruce. Other evergreens, such as pines, junipers and firs are not affected. Homeowners should be on the lookout for the tell-tale signs and symptoms of a beetle attack, which include red needles or loss of needles in the top of the tree, small round holes in the branches and trunk and tunneling galleries beneath the bark. Once ips beetles are detected, damage to the tree is usually too extensive to warrant efforts to save the tree. Instead, tree removal is generally the best option. After removal, care must be taken to prevent the spread of beetles from the infested wood to living trees. Infested spruce wood with ips beetle larvae have the potential to infest live trees in the spring. Therefore, infested wood which can include larger branches and trunk sections should be chipped, debarked, burned over the winter, hauled to a remote location that is at least one mile from any living spruce trees or hauled to the City Compost Facility (trunk sections larger than 12 inches in diameter are not accepted). Homeowners with spruce trees, especially older or stressed trees, may consider hiring an arborist to spray a preventative insecticide to the trunk and larger branches to prevent ips infestations. Be sure the arborist has the proper equipment to apply the insecticide to the very top of the tree. Two insecticide treatments, one in early spring and one in mid-summer, is generally recommended since ips beetles have multiple generations per year. Trunk injections may be considered, although research to support their effectiveness is still ongoing. There are also steps homeowners can take to maintain healthy trees, which are less likely to be attacked by beetles, these include: Slowly water the area from the trunk out to the end of the branches once per month during the winter and every 7-10 days during the summer and fall at a rate of 10 gallons per inch of stem diameter. Mulch around the base of trees with wood chips or bark to a depth of 2 inches (especially important for young trees). For more information or to download the list of licensed arborists for Cheyenne go to http://www.cheyennetrees.com. With a $1,000 donation from the Panhandle Shrine Club, Regional West Community Health is able to continue to provide free books for every child who gets a vaccination at the Immunization Clinic. SCOTTSBLUFF, Neb., Because the staff at Regional West Community Health believes reading is as important as staying healthy, they've gone the extra mile to provide free books for children when they get vaccinations. "We work closely with many families throughout the county that don't have the money to buy books for their children, so when I learned of an organization that provides free books for infants to teens, I decided this was a special benefit we could offer our pediatric patients," said Community Health Director Paulette Schnell, RN, MSN. For the second year in a row, Community Health is giving a free book to every child and student age 18 and under that receives a vaccination at the weekly Immunization Clinic. The program has been welcomed by children and their families. "One child was afraid to go into the exam room for her vaccination, so we let her choose a book and a staff member read to her. She was so interested in hearing the story that she didn't even know she got the shot," said Teresa Thomas, RN, BSN, Community Health immunization clinic coordinator. Although the books are free, the department was required to pay the cost of shipping them to Scottsbluff. This year, they found a partner that was happy to cover the shipping costs for them. The Panhandle Shrine Club offered to pay the shipping expense through a fund established by the Baltes family for the benefit of children. The $1,000 contribution will cover the cost of shipping hundreds of books that will be given away throughout the year. The Immunization Clinic is held on the first, second, and third Tuesdays of the month from 3 to 7 p.m. at the Regional West Community Health office, St. Mary Plaza, 3700 Avenue B, Scottsbluff. To schedule an appointment, call 308-630-1580. No child will be turned away due to inability to pay. Regional West Health Services in Scottsbluff, Neb., is the parent company of Regional West Medical Center, a 188-bed regional referral center and one of three Level II Trauma Centers in the state. As the region's only tertiary referral medical center, Regional West offers care that spans more than 32 medical specialties provided by over 28 physician clinics. With nearly 300 in-network providers, and 2,000 employees, Regional West provides comprehensive and innovative health care services for the people of western Nebraska and the neighboring states of Colorado, South Dakota, and Wyoming. CHEYENNE- The Wyoming FFA Association has announced the recipients of the 2019 Wyoming State FFA Degree, the highest award the state can bestow on its members. A total of 184 members representing 49 Wyoming FFA chapters earned the degree. These members will receive their degrees on April 12, 2019, as part of the Wyoming FFA Convention, held in Cheyenne each year. "The State FFA Degree is awarded to FFA members who have demonstrated the highest level of commitment to FFA and made significant accomplishments in their supervised agriculture experiences or SAEs," explained State FFA Advisor Stacy Broda. When students enroll in agriculture education and FFA, they select a hands-on program of work, known as a SAE. These programs help solidify concepts learned in the classroom or through FFA experiences, and incorporate the student's individual interests and goals. SAEs can include animal production, agribusiness experience or placement in an agriculture business or company. "The state degree is given to the top FFA members in the Wyoming FFA. Less than 10 percent of our members earn the degree each year, marking it as a significant accomplishment, "said Broda. "Each recipient has shown growth in their SAE as well as demonstrated leadership, scholastic achievement and participation in community service activities." The Wyoming FFA Association is part of the National FFA Organization, formerly known as Future Farmers of America. This youth organization has more than half a million student members nationwide, and more than 3,000 members in 55 chapters in Wyoming. The FFA mission is to make a positive difference in the lives of students by developing their potential for premier leadership, personal growth and career success through agricultural education. Courtesy of Shelly Humphrey, Burns High School Burns High School FFA Members seniors - Cassidy Wiebel,left, and Mackenzie Faircloth, right. Receiving the 2019 Wyoming State Degree in the Pine Bluffs/Burns High Schools are: Mackenzie Faircloth, Burns; Cassidy Weibel, Burns; Bauner Borgman, Pine Bluffs; Karla De La Cruz, Pine Bluffs; Kelby Eastman, Pine Bluffs; Doug Fornstrom, Pine Bluffs. Wyatt Miles, Pine Bluffs Beau Scarborough, Pine Bluffs "I am very proud of Cassidy Weibel and Mackenzie Faircloth for obtaining their State FFA Degrees. As the highest degree offered by the Wyoming FFA Association, the girls have had to meet several qualifications and have worked very hard the past six years to do so. As the only two seniors in our chapter this year, they have both played a vital role as leaders in our chapter, school, and community. In addition to their very active roles in our chapter, they also both have very strong and diversified Supervised Agricultural Experience Programs, a major component of earning the State FFA Degree. Congratulations to Cassidy and Mackenzie." stated Craig Spatz Burns High School FFA sponsor. St. Louis, March 7, 2019: Pine Bluffs farmer Travis Freeburg earned a first-place state yield award in the 2018 National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) National Corn Yield Contest. Freeburg, representing R & K Farms was recognized as one of the top-yielding corn producers in the nation with DEKALB DKC39-28RIB Brand Blend corn yielding an impressive 258.22 bushels per acre in the Irrigated category. "We are proud to partner with innovative farmers who have a passion for success and a focus on high performance," said Pete Uitenbroek, U.S. DEKALB, Asgrow and Deltapine Market Lead. "DEKALB continues to provide superior products with exclusive genetics, developed by our industry-leading breeding program, to help farmers across America maximize yield and profit potential." The NCGA contest, currently in its 53rd year, challenges farmers to achieve record-setting yields as part of its search for methods that will help farmers everywhere. It's NCGA's most popular program with this year's event producing 7,258 entries. Freeburg was among DEKALB winners who were recently recognized at the 2019 Commodity Classic held Feb. 28 to March 2 in Orlando, Florida, with an awards banquet and private concert featuring country music duo Brothers Osborne. In the 2018 NCGA yield contest, DEKALB farmers captured 9 of the 18 national awards and 164 first, second and third place awards at the state level, with 32 yielding more than 300 bushels per acre. Freeburg attributes their success to all their employees and their dedication to the farm and crop production; to Frenchman Valley Coop, Steve Girmus - agronomy Production Advisor a special thank you. Also to Dan Marostica, and Ryan Gompert, local Agronomists from DEKALB. R & K Farms is a second generation farm in the Pine Bluffs area. "My dad started our farm, and I joined the farm after college." said Travis Freeburg. R & K Farms grows alfalfa, soybeans, millet and pinto beans in addition corn, wheat and our cow/calf operation. To learn more about maximizing yield performance and see a full list of DEKALB winners, visit DEKALB.com/YieldWinner or contact your local DEKALB Asgrow dealer. Students in the picture from left to right standing: Kelsie Bymer, KiyEllen Lanning, Jason Mickelson, Kaylea Bymer, Kailen Martinez, Natalee Smalley, Hannah Wallowing Bull, Mrs. Jacobsen. Sitting in front: Abby Gray, Alexa Sanchez, Hayden Hoffman. The Middle Level Future Business Leaders of America Chapter at Pine Bluffs High School traveled to Casper, WY on March 5 to participate in the FBLA Wyoming State Leadership Conference. Chapters from around the state gathered for the annual event and over 50 members competed for bragging rights. Ten of the fourteen chapter members from Pine Bluffs competed in testing events with everything from Digital Citizenship and Computer Science to Introduction to Financial Math and Business Etiquette. Students also listened to speeches made in the Public Speaking contest. Placers were as foll... The Wyoming FFA Chapter Award Program is designed to recognize FFA chapters actively implementing the mission and strategies of the organization. Our chapter award program focuses on chapters that are engaged in growing leaders, building communities and strengthening agriculture, said Stacy Broda, Wyoming FFA State Advisor. Chapters are evaluated on and recognized for providing valuable educational experiences for the entire membership. Chapters participate in an on-site evaluation by the Wyoming State FFA officers and submit a written application. The applications are evalua... Wyoming will become the third state in the nation to celebrate its own Public Lands Day! Today, Gov. Mark Gordon will sign HB 99, Wyoming Public Lands Day, into law, establishing the fourth Saturday each September as Wyoming Public Lands Day, corresponding with National Public Lands Day. The bill affirms Wyomings support for keeping public lands in public hands, and celebrates the benefits they provide to all Wyomingites. As an annual event, Wyoming Public Lands Day will serve as a reminder of these values as well as an opportunity to highlight outdoor opportunities and public lands serv... 909 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard Rep. Al Green (D-TX) broke with House Democratic leadership by arguing that those who love America should embrace the impeachment of Donald Trump. Rep. Green said on MSNBCs The Beat with Ari Melber, This has been the position Ive held now for some time. Many, many weeks. I went to the floor much earlier and I explained that I thought the president should be impeached. A good many people agree. Those who differ with me, I I love my country. Because I love my country, I believe that we must not allow political expediency to trump the moral imperative to do the right thing. I dont think we should allow an unfit president to remain in office. Many people will talk about his unfitness and go so far as to say he should be impeached but not want to take that final step forward. The constitution allows it. Its something that it demands. Video: Rep. Al Green, I dont think we should allow an unfit president to remain in office.: https://t.co/mavmbMbZBC pic.twitter.com/mDE3rUcROc Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) March 12, 2019 Rep. Green makes the case for impeaching Trump now Rep. Green makes a compelling argument for impeaching Trump now, but the problem is that the Republican-controlled Senate is unlikely to convict Trump. In fact, Republicans might use impeachment to rally their voters to victory in 2020. If Trump wins a second term and Democrats have already tried impeachment, what remedy would they have left? Morally, Trump should be impeached, but there is more to consider than the investigation and vote in the House. If the evidence takes them there, Democrats should impeach Trump, but if they dont have the evidence, impeachment could backfire and cost Democrats in 2020. Impeachment is coming. The debate among Democrats is down to when it will begin. For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group. Follow Jason Easley on Facebook 1.8k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives reintroduced a new version of the Dream Act on Tuesday, which would put roughly 2.5 million people on a path to U.S. citizenship. According to The Hill, The proposal includes a path to citizenship for many Dreamers undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as minors and beneficiaries of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) programs, but it does not include any provisions on border security or immigration enforcement funding. As Vox pointed out on Monday, the two groups protected under the new Democratic legislation stand to lose protections after Donald Trump moved to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects many DREAMers from deportation, and has declined to renew temporary protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants under the Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Enforced Departure humanitarian programs. The legislation is also a stark contrast to the Trump-Republican immigration policy, which has been defined by walls and children in cages at the southern border. The Democratic proposal isnt just good policy its good politics The Democratic legislation the Dream and Promise Act isnt just a sensible policy proposal, but its also good politics. It solves a crisis Trump created in a way that avoids the divisive and ridiculous argument over the presidents fantasy border wall. And, as The Hill report noted on Tuesday, roughly 80 percent of the country supports protections for Dreamers. In other words, the American people dont believe in tossing people out of the country who were brought here through no fault of their own, especially when many of these undocumented immigrants continue to positively contribute to communities all across the country. Going into 2020, Donald Trump and Republicans have a choice: They can continue to align themselves with the cruel and inhumane immigration policies that have defined the past two years, or they can embrace a practical plan that has bipartisan support. Follow Sean Colarossi on Facebook and Twitter 3.4k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard A lot of people have been wondering how an average guy like Jared Kushner ever got admitted to Harvard. And now we know the answer: it was because his felon-father (legally) bribed the renowned institution so he could go there. Yesterday the news broke about a massive college admissions bribery investigation, involving children of CEOs and Hollywood celebrities. This has resulted in a renewed focus on how Donald Trumps son-in-law got into the highly selective school in Cambridge, MA. Kushner works for the United States as a top aide to his daddy-in-law the president, even though he has zero qualifications for the job he was given. It turns out that Kushners acceptance to the Ivy League school has previously been investigated as part of the 2006 book The Price of Admission written by ProPublica editor Daniel Golden. The book examined how wealthy people buy their children into prestigious schools with donations. One such donation was made by Kushners father, real estate developer Charles Kushner. Golden wrote a follow up story about the presidents son-in-law in 2016 after Trump won the presidency. He described in detail how Jared was admitted to Harvard after a $2.5 million donation that Charles Kushner pledged to Harvard in 1998. (Note: the donation was fully tax-deductible by Kushner.) Soon after the donation, according to Golden, Jared was accepted to the prestigious school. Golden said at the time that Kushners high-school teachers didnt think he was Harvard material, writing: There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard, a former official at The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, told me. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not. Golden also disclosed how he uncovered a pervasive scheme in which the rich buy their under-achieving childrens way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations. One odd thing uncovered about the Kushner donation was that unlike other large gifts to the school, Harvard hadnt sent out press releases announcing the $2.5 million gift. The donations from Kushner were discovered only after subpoenas from federal authorities made them public. Jared Kushner Has No Qualifications and Is A Danger to the United States Nobody is saying that what the Kushners did to get Jared into Harvard was illegal. But it does point out that the man in charge of Middle East peace negotiations for the United States has greatly benefited from nepotism. There is no evidence that Jared Kushner is qualified for what he does, but there is plenty of evidence that he has been using his position in the U.S. government to further his own financial interests, and is possibly selling out his country in order to make money. Jared Kushner got where he is through family connections, and that is a very bad thing for the United States of America. Greetings, No doubt, there is a lot to be concerned about this year; however, 2020 has also been quite a year for recorded music. Let u... 3.4k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard The sham bill that Senate Republicans are considering that would limit future emergency powers wont get a vote in the House according to Speaker Pelosi. The bill which is part of a con cooked up by Vice President Pence and some Republican Senators would see Trump agreeing to limit any future national emergency powers in exchange for getting Republican support for his wall national emergency declaration. In a statement provided to PoliticusUSA, Speaker Pelosi said, Republican Senators are proposing new legislation to allow the President to violate the Constitution just this once in order to give themselves cover. The House will not take up this legislation to give President Trump a pass. The Bill Would Give Trump A Pass On His Wall National Emergency The White House is worried about the optics of how it will look to the country and press if Senate Republicans join with Democrats to block Trumps national emergency, but there is another component in play as well. When Trumps national emergency declaration goes to court, judges in the cases are going to examine the legislative intent of Congress. A bipartisan Senate rejection of Trumps emergency hurts the administrations case. Pence and some Senate Republicans are trying to buy support for an unconstitutional action with what amounts to a promise from the president that has told the most lies in history that he will never do it again. Republicans are trying to cover their backsides, but beneath their cowardice is the reality that a group of GOP Senators is willing to stand with Trump as he tramples the Constitution. Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats are the only check and safeguard the nation has to protect democracy and our system of governance. For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group. Follow Jason Easley on Facebook 193 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard Senate Republicans have just 24 hours to come up with a workable solution to stop a Democratic-backed resolution that chastises President Donald Trump for declaring a national emergency. Not helping their plight is the fact that by a wide majority American voters continue to oppose his declaration of a national emergency at the southern border, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll. Poll: Majority still opposes Trump emergency declaration https://t.co/I9yEzTCkPY POLITICO (@politico) March 13, 2019 The Senate is scheduled to vote on the disapproval resolution Thursday, and at least four Republicans have announced they will join all 47 Democrats to pass the House measure that blocks Trumps emergency declaration to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Republicans are scrambling and looking for an eleventh-hour solution. They are very near to being forced into an unwanted showdown with the president, who has threatened to veto the resolution of disapproval if it passes the Senate and is brought to him for signature. The new poll shows that Trump has failed to build support for his declaration in the face of congressional opposition. Only 38 percent of voters support the declaration, the poll shows, one percentage point less than three weeks ago. In the new poll, 52 percent of voters oppose Trumps emergency declaration, up 1 percentage point from last months poll. The House already approved a resolution to terminate Trumps emergency declaration. And even though the Senate is expected to do the same on Thursday, both chambers do not have sufficient votes to override a Trump veto. And the president has said in very clear terms that he will veto the resolution. American voters opinions with respect to Trumps national emergency declaration fall along party lines: just ten percent of Democrats are in favor of it, while 83 percent oppose it. Among Republicans, 80 percent support the national emergency declaration and just 13 percent oppose it. Among the crucial block of independent voters, there is bad news for Trump and the Republicans: Independents oppose the declaration by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, with just 30 percent supporting it and 57 percent opposing it. Overall, 33 percent of voters said they would be more likely to vote for their senators or representatives if they supported Trumps emergency declaration. But a significantly larger number, 45 percent, said they would be less likely to support any member of Congress who backed the declaration. Just 11 percent said it wouldnt make a difference, showing that most people have an opinion on the matter. Paul Manafort will serve a total of seven and a half years in federal prison, but this doesnt include the criminal charges that are expected to be filed in New York, Illinois, and Rhode Island. Paul Manafort is likely to face state criminal charges Manafort got an additional 73 months, with 30 months being served concurrently from Judge Amy Berman Jackson. Harry Litman said on MSNBC, Hes looking at being out, perhaps, 77, a little younger, thats if, of course, none of the states that are waiting here, Rhode Island, New York, Illinois impose additional timeI think thats a real possibility. I wouldnt say its light, she gave 7 1/2 years, 2 1/2 of them were concurrent as they had to be with the guidelines. So that amounts to the extra 43 months. But overall for a 10 year maximum, 7-year sentence, thats down the middle. So far thats whats shes been a down the middle, by the book judge. Thats gratifying for the system. Video: Judge Jackson imposes a 7-year sentence, and Manafort could be facing state charges in New York, Rhode Island, and Illinois. pic.twitter.com/QDEljhA5QS Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) March 13, 2019 Paul Manafort is likely going to spend the rest of his life in prison Even if Trump pardons Paul Manafort either after he loses the 2020 election or wins a second term, there are at least three states preparing to charge Trumps former campaign chairman with felonies. The sentence on Wednesday is only the end of the federal phase of Paul Manaforts legal problems. Manafort is likely going to spend the rest of his life in prison. The sentence wasnt a victory for Trump or a criticism of the Mueller investigation, but a step in putting a man who was at the top of Trumps campaign behind bars for years to come. The men who basked in chants of lock her up are one by one being locked up themselves. For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group. Follow Jason Easley on Facebook By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) The emails, tweets and blog posts in the abuse folder that Michael Sharpe keeps on his computer continue to pile up. Eight years after he published results of a clinical trial that found some patients with chronic fatigue syndrome can get a little better with the right talking and exercise therapies, the Oxford University professor is subjected to almost daily, often anonymous, intimidation. A Twitter user who identifies himself as a patient called Paul Watton (@thegodofpleasur) wrote: I really am looking forward to his professional demise and his much-deserved public humiliation. Another, Anton Mayer (@MECFSNews), likened Sharpes behavior to that of an abuser. Watton and Mayer have never been treated by Sharpe for their chronic fatigue syndrome, a little-understood condition that can bring crushing tiredness and pain. Nor have they met him, they told Reuters. They object to his work, they said, because they think it suggests their illness is psychological. Sharpe, a professor of psychological medicine, says that isnt the case. He believes that chronic fatigue syndrome is a biological condition that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors. Sharpe is one of around a dozen researchers in this field worldwide who are on the receiving end of a campaign to discredit their work. For many scientists, its a new normal: From climate change to vaccines, activism and science are fighting it out online. Social media platforms are supercharging the battle. Reuters contacted a dozen professors, doctors and researchers with experience of analyzing or testing potential treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome. All said they had been the target of online harassment because activists objected to their findings. Only two had definite plans to continue researching treatments. With as many as 17 million people worldwide suffering this disabling illness, scientific research into possible therapies should be growing, these experts said, not dwindling. What concerns them most, they said, is that patients could lose out if treatment research stalls. A spokesperson for Twitter said the platform exists to serve the public conversation. Its strength lies in providing people with a diversity of perspectives into critical issues all in real-time. Where someone used anonymity for bad purposes, Twitter would take immediate action, the spokesperson added. Chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, or CFS/ME, is described by specialists as a complex, multisystem, and often devastating disorder. Symptoms include overwhelming fatigue, joint pain, headaches, sleep problems and isolation. It can render patients bed- or house-bound for years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, estimates the illness costs the U.S. economy $17 billion to $24 billion annually in medical bills and lost incomes. It is thought to affect as many as 2.5 million people in the United States. No cause has been identified, no formal diagnosis established and no cure developed. Many researchers cite evidence that talking therapies and behavioral approaches can help in some cases. Yet some patients and their advocates say this amounts to a suggestion that the syndrome might be a mental illness or psychosomatic, a notion that enrages them. They would prefer that research efforts focus on identifying a biological cause or diagnosis. One of those leading the campaign against research into psychological therapies for CFS/ME is David Tuller, a former journalist with a doctor of public health degree from University of California, Berkeley. Tuller, who describes himself as an investigator, not a campaigner, told Reuters he wants to help CFS/ME patients. Crowdfunded by a global band of CFS/ME sufferers, their families and patient activists, Tuller has since October 2015 published more than 140 blog posts amounting to tens of thousands of words attacking studies of psychological treatments and conferences that have showcased them. Hes recently complained to the CDC, New Yorks Columbia University and Netflix. In 2018, Netflix ran a docu-series about CFS/ME patients. It said it wanted to show the difficulties of patients suffering from elusive and misunderstood illnesses. Tuller refers to researchers who explore and test treatments for CFS/ME that feature a psychological element as insane and a cabal suffering from mass delusion. They are bent on pursuing bogus and really terrible research, he told Reuters. Sharpe no longer conducts research into CFS/ME treatments, focusing instead on helping severely ill cancer patients. Its just too toxic, he explained. Of more than 20 leading research groups who were publishing treatment studies in high-quality journals 10 years ago, Sharpe said, only one or two continue to do so. The worlds largest trials registry, clinicaltrials.gov, indicates that over the past decade there has been a decline in the number of new CFS/ME treatment trials being launched. From 2010 to 2014, 33 such trials started. From 2015 until the present, the figure dropped to around 20. This decline comes at a time when research into ways to help patients should be growing, not falling, because the condition is more widely recognized, scientists interviewed by Reuters said. Reuters spoke to three specialists in CFS/ME in Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands who have reported receiving online abuse but continue to work in the field. The specialist in the Netherlands, a psychologist who works at a chronic fatigue treatment center, said that a few years ago, research teams there had five treatment studies looking at cognitive behavioral therapies for CFS/ME patients. Now, they have no treatment studies at all. Junior researchers are wary of entering the field because of the abuse theyve seen others suffer, said the specialist in Britain, a doctor who spoke on condition of anonymity. Per Fink, a professor at the Research Clinic for Functional Disorders at Denmarks Aarhus University Hospital, said he kept going because he didnt want to let down patients, some severely ill, who are open to any treatment that may help them. UNCERTAINTY The term myalgic encephalomyelitis was first used in 1956 to describe a condition associated with post-illness fatigue among patients at Londons Royal Free Hospital. Thirty years later, the name chronic fatigue syndrome was coined. Now, the combination term CFS/ME is used by most people, patients, doctors and researchers, and by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The trigger for the condition is not known, although it can follow a bout of severe illness or extreme physical endurance, or a viral infection such as glandular fever. There is no biomarker or blood test to establish diagnosis, and patients often face misunderstanding from family, friends and doctors. Patient advocates say the condition has a history of being dismissed as yuppie flu or plain indolence. With no pharmacological or physiological treatments on the horizon, scientists and doctors explored psychiatry and psychology for ways to ease the symptoms. Some patients and campaigners say that diverted attention and funding away from scientific efforts to define what causes CFS/ME and how it can be properly diagnosed. Simon Wessely, a professor of psychological medicine at Kings College London and former president of Britains Royal College of Psychiatrists, said he decided to stop conducting research into treatment approaches for CFS/ME several years ago because he felt the online abuse was detracting from his work with patients. But he is still the subject of what he calls relentless internet stalking. Recent tweets directed at Wessely include one accusing him of playing pathetic ego driven games with the lives of people with CFS/ME, another saying Wessely is a dangerous and evil individual and another saying We die, b/c of u. Wesselys employers at Kings College London have taken advice on the potential risk and have instituted X-ray scans of his mail, he says. Everything I say and do in public, and sometimes even in private, is pored over and scrutinized, he said. Wesselys experiences are echoed by Aarhus University Hospitals Per Fink, who runs a clinic that offers patients exercise and talking therapies. Fink said he and the organizers of a conference he addressed at Columbia University in New York in October 2018 were hounded by complaints and protests from CFS/ME activists. A petition calling for Fink to be disinvited was signed by 10,000 people. Tuller, who in his blog wrote that the person who invited Per Fink to speak at the conference must be uninformed or stupid or both & called Fink a scary guy whose methods had destroyed families. Tuller urged readers of his blog to go to the Columbia conference and demonstrate. Describing himself as a doctor and researcher who just does my job in an attempt to help people, Fink told Reuters his trip to New York was worse than anything hes experienced before. They are scaring people away, he said. Doctors dont want to speak about it, they try to keep a low profile. And many researchers and clinicians say they wont go into this area of therapy because its so difficult. SOCIAL MEDIA SUPERCHARGE The idea of critics or activists challenging researchers and seeking to hold science to account isnt new. Most researchers say they are happy to engage in discussion. But with social media, email and internet now accessible from almost every home, mass communication gives online activists a voice with unprecedented power. In the field of CFS/ME research, its often personal. Those at the center of it say its gotten out of control. The toxicity of it permeates everything, Sharpe told Reuters. The campaign to have evidence-backed treatments discredited was doing a terrible disservice to sufferers from this condition, said Wessely. Patients are the losers here. At the heart of the attacks on Sharpe, Wessely and other chronic fatigue treatment researchers is a study known as the PACE trial, which sought to evaluate the effectiveness of different types of therapy in CFS/ME patients. Published in The Lancet medical journal in 2011, the results found that cognitive behavioral therapy, designed to help patients change their thinking, and behavior and graded exercise therapy, in which patients are encouraged to start from very low levels of daily activity and then incrementally raise them, are safe and moderately effective treatments for some people. Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, said his journal had received emails and letters about PACE but has no plans to retract it. He said what is needed to allow for progress in any field of medical research is an open and respectful approach by all parties to one another. In April last year, Tuller secured $87,500 in online crowdfunding to debunk the PACE trial findings. He refers to the study as a piece of crap and garbage and says he is determined to see it discredited. At speaking events filmed and shown on YouTube, he has ripped up copies of the study to show his feelings about it. Tuller has also posted a 15,000 word review of it via the website of a Berkeley colleague. Tuller cut his teeth as an AIDS activist in the 1980s. Now 62, he blogs, sends hundreds of letters and emails, and travels the world giving speeches and holding meetings as supporters send him donations and praise for his CFS/ME campaign. Tuller himself hasnt conducted or published any peer-reviewed clinical trials on CFS/ME. He has co-authored a critique of PACE. His argument is that the therapies evaluated in the PACE trial are based on a misguided hypothesis that CFS/ME patients suffer from unhelpful beliefs that they have a biological disease, and that their symptoms of fatigue are made worse by deconditioning due to inactivity. He also says he thinks the trials methodology was flawed. The scientists involved reject those arguments. My goal is to completely discredit the PACE trial, Tuller told Reuters. And if they have moved out of the research field, then thats great, he said of the CFS/ME researchers hes targeting. They shouldnt be in the field. They shouldnt be doing research at all. Tuller disputes that his campaigning amounts to harassment. In comments to Reuters in an interview and in emails, he said his criticisms are valid. And he added: I refuse to act in the normal bounds of academia. Asked about his motivation, he said he does not have the condition. He said he had a long-time friend who was diagnosed with CFS/ME in the early 1990s but has no other personal stake. He said his work is helping patients by clearing out the bad science to make way for some good science, such as research into the conditions biological basis. Another campaign, which goes by the acronym MAIMES, or Medical Abuse in ME Sufferers, operates from Britain. It has a standard letter for people to send to their local member of parliament demanding a public inquiry into the PACE trial. Theres also a Facebook page called Abuse of ME Patients by Health Care Professionals which has some 680 followers. The page runs stories from unnamed patients who accuse Sharpe and others of harming sufferers by calling them lazy and forcing them to exercise when they cant. The campaigner and doctor behind MAIMES, Sarah Myhill, has posted YouTube videos setting out her views: I liken it to child abuse, she says in one that has been viewed more than 8,000 times. This amounts to a form of abuse, because these people CFS/ME patients do not have the energy to defend themselves. Myhill has published several books advocating what she calls a naturopaths approach to treating symptoms of CFS/ME one using a tailored combination of nutrition, rest and medicines. She hasnt published peer-reviewed research on the efficacy of her approach. Myhill told Reuters that she had complained to the General Medical Council the body that maintains the official register of medical practitioners in the UK about Sharpe and other scientists involved in the PACE trial, but her complaint was rejected. Myhill showed Reuters the letter she received from the General Medical Council. It said it was not able to identify any issues which would require us to open an investigation into the researchers. Contacted by Reuters, the Council did not elaborate. As well as dissuading researchers from working in the CFS/ME field, scientists fear that pressure from campaigners has also begun to show in the wording of guidance for patients and doctors from national health authorities. In the United States, the CDC has removed references to cognitive behavioral therapy and graded exercise therapy from its website. The head of the CDCs chronic viral diseases branch, Elizabeth Unger, told Reuters this was done to remove jargon and medical terms that are not widely understood by the public. We received feedback that the terms were confusing and too frequently misinterpreted, she said in an email response to questions. Unger said the CDCs advice stresses that each CFS/ME patients needs are different. For some, carefully managing exercise and activities can be helpful, she said. Likewise, some patients may find that talking with a therapist helps them. In Britain, government guidelines on treating CFS/ME published by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), currently recommend cognitive behavioral therapy and graded exercise. But these too are under review, due to be revised and republished by 2020. A source close to NICE told Reuters the agency had been subjected to a lot of lobbying aimed at getting it to review the guidelines and in particular to change recommendations around graded exercise therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. The source declined to go into detail about who was behind the lobbying. Publishers, too, are feeling the heat. In a move described as disproportionate and poorly justified by the researchers involved, editors of the Cochrane Reviews science journals said in October that they would be temporarily withdrawing a review that analyzed evidence from eight studies on exercise therapy for CFS/ME patients. Cochrane Reviews evaluate the best science on a given subject and are considered a gold standard in scientific literature. The review in question, led by a Norwegian research team and published by Cochrane in April 2017, had concluded there was moderate quality evidence to show that exercise therapy had a positive effect on peoples daily physical functioning, sleep and self-ratings of overall health. Tuller told Reuters in emails in October that he considered the Cochrane Review to be fraught with bias and said its authors have bought into delusions that these studies (the ones they reviewed) represent good science. After hearing news of the reviews temporary withdrawal, Tuller said hed had a long meeting with Cochrane editors in Britain last summer, and had pressed them hard. So did others, he said. Cochranes editor in chief, David Tovey, confirmed that he had met with Tuller, but said the meeting had nothing to do with his decision to temporarily withdraw the review. He said complaints about the review from patients and campaigners had raised important questions about how the review was conducted and reported which he and his fellow editors felt needed to be addressed. Lillebeth Larun, a scientist at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health who led the Cochrane Review, is one of several scientists who vociferously disagreed with Toveys decision to withdraw it. For her, the move is a sign that the activists who have plagued her for years have now got to her editors. In the decade or so that shes been conducting research in this area, she told Reuters, shes endured online attacks and abusive emails, and at various points had to take a break from working due to the pressure. Returning to a CFS/ME project would make her feel physically sick with anxiety. Attempts to limit, undermine or manipulate evidence based results, pressure or intimidate researchers into or away from any given conclusions, will ultimately have a negative effect, she told Reuters. It will only lead to those researchers choosing to work in other areas and reduce the resources dedicated to providing the help patients so desperately need. Some CFS/ME patients disagree. Reuters contacted the Twitter user who identifies himself as Paul Watton to ask him about his online attacks. Speaking by phone, Watton said he has been ill with CFS/ME and unable to work in his former job as a builder for 15 years, and feels let down by the medical establishment. Reuters was unable to independently verify his account. I agree entirely with what David Tuller says, Watton told Reuters. This is a chronic illness for which there is, currently, no curative treatment. In Britain there are at least 50 specialist chronic fatigue syndrome services that treat around 8,000 adults each year under government guidelines, offering behavioral and psychological therapies. Research published in July 2017 showed around a third of adults affected by the illness who attended these specialist clinics reported substantial improvement in their health. In the survey, more than 1,000 patients were asked about fatigue, physical function, general function, mood, pain and sleep problems before and after getting the services. Colin Barton, chairman of the Sussex and Kent CFS/ME Society, a patient group in southern England, said talking therapies and graded exercise helped him recover to the point that he can lead an almost normal life. He told Reuters that in his experience, patients who talk about having been helped by psychological or graded exercise therapies come in for abuse just like the researchers. They face accusations that they were never ill in the first place; that their condition was misdiagnosed; and that their recovery is therefore fake, he said. As a result, he said, many recovering or recovered CFS/ME patients feel forced to withdraw from the debate. [ngg src=galleries ids=34 display=basic_thumbnail] (reporting by Kate Kelland; editing by Janet McBride and John Blanton) 425 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard Trump is losing it because Senate Republicans are going to pass a resolution blocking his national emergency. Trump tweeted: Republican Senators are overthinking tomorrows vote on National Emergency. It is very simply Border Security/No Crime Should not be thought of any other way. We have a MAJOR NATIONAL EMERGENCY at our Border and the People of our Country know it very well! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2019 Trump schooling Senate Republicans on how to think is priceless Trumps tweet is the first clear signal that the sham deal that he tried to cut with Senate Republicans in which he would promise not to abuse his national emergency powers later if they gave him his national emergency wall today is dead in the water. The president was correct about one thing. What he is asking for is simple if one doesnt think about laws, the Constitution, separation of powers, of government functions. If one takes all of those critical points out of the discussion and boils it down to Trump wants a wall. Republicans give him a wall. Its easy. Donald Trump is ignoring the unprecedented and unconstitutional expansion of power that he is asking the Senate to sign off on. Typing national emergency in all caps doesnt make it true. Just as creating an imaginary crisis on the border doesnt equal a national emergency. Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats have already vowed that Mike Pences attempt a sham deal with Senate Republicans wont see the light of day in the House. Trump is trying to save face because his national emergency is looking like it is heading for defeat in the Senate. For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group. Follow Jason Easley on Facebook Donald Trump this morning tweeted his strong opposition to California Gov. Gavin Newsoms plans to suspend the death penalty in the state. Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers, Trump tweeted. Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I! Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers. Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2019 The president chimed in amid numerous reports that Newsom will announce the suspension of the death penalty on Wednesday. Newsom will cite the financial costs, the finality of the practice and its racial imbalance in announcing his decision. In a statement released late yesterday he said: I do not believe that a civilized society can claim to be a leader in the world as long as its government continues to sanction the premeditated and discriminatory execution of its people. The death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian. The governor will use an executive order to spare the states death row inmates from execution, but the individuals will remain incarcerated. The Washington Post reported that Californias 737 death row inmates make up roughly a quarter of the nations prisoners awaiting execution. Newsom plans to order the closing of a death chamber at San Quentin State Prison and withdraw the states procedures for lethal injection executions, according to the newspaper. The Post also reported that no executions are currently scheduled in California, and the state last carried one out in 2006. Voters in California rejected a 2016 measure that would have abolished the death penalty in the state. California will join Maryland, Connecticut, Illinois and Washington, among other states, in doing away with the death penalty. Trump has in recent months feuded with Newsom over the states high-speed rail plan, use of national guard troops, and government aid for wildfire victims. Newsom took office in January and is now considered one of the national leaders of the Democratic Party. The Russian government has developed new rules to control the Northern Sea Route, which passes along the countrys northern coast in the Arctic, the newspaper Izvestia reported on March 6. Russia is taking the Northern Sea Route under protection, wrote Izvestia, in a piece headlined A Cold Wave an apparent reference to the Cold War. Russian officials claim the new regulations are designed to protect the environment and commercial shipping, in lieu of Article 234 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. In reality, Russias new rules concern foreign military ships and military vessels, which are sovereign immune vessels and exempt from Article 234 of the Law of the Sea. Nevertheless, Russia requires foreign military ships and naval auxiliaries to give 45 days advance notice and obtain permission to use the passage. The document must include the vessels name, purpose, route, timetable, and technical specifications, as well as the military rank and identity of its captain. The new Russian rules require that foreign military ships take on board Russian pilots while sailing through the Arctic. Even if the foreign vessels meet all Russias requirements, the Russian authorities still can reject their request for passage without explanation. In the event of an unsanctioned passage, the foreign naval vessels could be arrested and even destroyed. Russia uses the term Northern Sea Route (NSR) to describe the area from the Barents Sea in the west to the Bering Strait in the east. It is part of a larger transoceanic route the Northeast Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Like the other Arctic nations, Russia is granted an exclusive economic zone of 200 nautical miles adjacent to its shores. But the scope of the NSR as described by Moscow has been disputed by other Arctic states, which say that Russia considers the route to extend beyond its exclusive economic zone and to include the Bering Strait. Provisions of the Law of the Sea regard international straits as passages that are too narrow for the high sea or exclusive economic zone regimes to apply. Transit passages and innocent passages are fully guaranteed for vessels of other states. Indeed, the NSR passes not only within Russias territorial waters, nevertheless, our country has the legal right to regulate navigation along the entire route, said Kamil Bekyashev, vice president of the Russian Maritime Law Association. Does Russia indeed have the right to impose a permission regime on commercial ships and sovereign immune vessels passing through the Northern Sea Route? This statement appears to be out of sync with the Law of the Sea treaty, Heather Conley, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, told Polygraph.info. The Northern Sea Route is an international passage and this suggested wider interpretation may even call into question international use of a portion of the high seas of the Central Arctic Ocean. Russia has already heavily regulated commercial traffic through the Northern Sea Route, and in May 2015, the U.S. State Department sent a strongly-worded diplomatic note to Moscow warning that some aspects of Russias regulatory scheme were inconsistent with international law. The State Department cited requirements to obtain Russias permission to enter and transit the exclusive economic zone and territorial sea; persistent characterization of international straits that form part of the Northern Sea Route as internal waters; and the lack of any express exemption for sovereign immune vessels. Moscow justifies its regulation of commercial traffic by pointing to Article 234 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which allows coastal states to adopt and enforce non-discriminatory laws and regulations for the prevention, reduction and control of marine pollution from vessels in ice-covered areas within the limits of the exclusive economic zone. However, Washington insists that Article 234 does not justify Russias requirement for prior notification or permission to exercise navigation rights and freedoms. U.S. policy has long prioritized ensuring freedom of the seas globally as a central component of U.S. national security policy and a key strategic goal in the U.S. National Strategy for the Arctic Region. In the same May 2015 diplomatic note, the U.S. State Department asked Russia to confirm that the Northern Sea Route scheme shall not apply to sovereign immune vessels. Sovereign immune vessels are any warship, naval auxiliary, other vessels or aircraft owned or operated by a State and used, for the time being, only on government non-commercial service. Less than four years later, Moscow has come up with new rules for sovereign immune vessels. The new rules were supposedly developed because of the intensification of naval activities by different states in the Arctic, writes Izvestia, saying it has a copy of the new rule. According to Alexey Chepa, deputy chairman of the Russian State Dumas international affairs committee, control of the Northern Sea Route is simply necessary in the current international situation. Russian officials refer to an incident last year when a French navy support vessel passed through the Northern Sea Route without prior notice. Russian military expert Vladislav Shurigin says this case proves that NATO and the U.S. could try to create another hotbed of tension along Russias northern borders. Izvestia quotes a comment made by General Curtis Scaparrotti, Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO Allied Command Operations, in testimony to the U.S. Senate Arms Services Committee on March 5, that the United States is ready to contain Russia in the Arctic. However, Scaparrotti was referring to Russias militarization along the Northern Sea Route, which he said had caused the U.S. European Command to respond with corresponding deterrence measures. During his testimony, Scaparrotti noted that, with the increasing opening of the Northern Sea Route due to global warming, Russia has reopened 10 airports along its northern borders, put up radar systems and periodically moved in different weapons systems to control the area. Weve had to change the posture of some of our forces. Weve changed our operational patterns, so that we in fact deter and we send the signal of the importance of the Arctic to us, Scaparrotti said. As global warming has caused the ice in the Arctic to melt at higher rates, the area has remained open for navigation for longer periods during the year. The Northern Sea Route may become a busier commercial passage, because it is the shortest water route between the Far East and Europe. It is almost half the length of other sea routes from Europe to the Far East: the distance between St. Petersburg and Vladivostok via the Northern Sea Route is 8,873 miles, compared to 14,415 miles via the Suez Canal and 18,268 miles round the Cape of Good Hope. But Sean Fahey, a United States Coast Guard commander and professor of international law, cautioned in an article published by the Harvard National Security Journal: Although much of the attention in the Arctic surrounds the potential for natural resource exploitation, preserving freedom of the seasthe rights and freedoms all States enjoy to operate ships and aircraft in the maritime domain may become the most important strategic issue in the region. According to Fahey, this includes the rights and freedoms that ships and aircraftincluding warships and military aircraftenjoy globally on, under, and over the seas in accordance with the Law of the Sea. Before Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines crash, most travelers did not give much thought to the type of aircraft they were flying to their destination. All that mattered was the departure time, seat assignment and fare. That's no longer the case. And if it's a Boeing 737 Max 8, they might wonder: How can I get off that aircraft and onto one with a more comforting safety record? "Ninety-nine percent of the flying public doesn't pay attention to the kind of aircraft," said Madhu Unnikrishnan, editor of Skift, an airline industry publication. "Only a subset of people are interested." The interest has grown significantly since the second of two crashes involving the 737 Max 8. In October, a Lion Air flight crashed after takeoff in Jakarta, Indonesia. Five months later, the Ethiopian Airlines disaster occurred. The aircraft, which has been in service for less than two years, has completed a quarter-million trips, according to Seth Kaplan, an aviation expert who analyzed information from aviation data provider Diio Mi. But it took only two accidents to rattle the world. In response to the crashes, a growing number of countries have received directives from their aviation regulatory agencies to ground the fleets of Boeing 737 Max 8s. The list includes the European Union, China, Singapore, Indonesia, Oman, India, the United Arab Emirates, Australia and Malaysia. Individual airlines have also suspended operations, such as Cayman Airways, Royal Air Maroc and Icelandair. The United States and Canada have not issued grounding orders, and American Airlines, Southwest and Air Canada continue to board and book passengers on their 737 Max 8s. "The FAA will issue a Continued Airworthiness Notification to the International Community (CANIC) for Boeing 737 MAX operators," the FAA wrote in a statement. "The FAA continuously assesses and oversees the safety performance of U.S. commercial aircraft. If we identify an issue that affects safety, the FAA will take immediate and appropriate action." Unless the situation changes in North America, the decision to travel on a Boeing 737 Max 8 rests in the hands of the passenger. Before you book a flight online, check the aircraft type scheduled for your desired route. The grid of results usually displays the model along with the departure time, flight number, layover city and other details. For example, passengers on a Southwest flight from Washington Dulles to Las Vegas via Denver fly on a Boeing 737 Max 8 for both legs. However, a later flight through Atlanta uses a Boeing 737-800. Unnikrishnan said the airlines also share this information on their apps. Even if you have booked yourself on a different aircraft, the airline could swap out planes last minute because of a mechanical or weather-related issue. To learn about a possible aircraft change, call the carrier before your departure. Then double-check at the airport. Ask an airline employee at the check-in counter or gate. Unnikrishnan said many carriers also post the aircraft type on the airport flight monitors. If you suddenly find yourself on a 737 Max 8 or maybe you just discovered that a future flight is on one reach out to the airline by phone or social media. (For the latter scenario, don't forget that you can cancel or change your reservation without penalty within 24 hours of booking.) Carriers are handling requests to switch aircraft differently. Southwest, for one, will waive the difference in fares. "We are working with customers individually who wish to rebook their flight to another aircraft type," The Dallas-based carrier said in a statement. "While we don't charge change fees as it is, we will be waiving any potential fare differences there might be in this particular situation." American Airlines has not altered its policy change fee plus difference in fare but is reassuring travelers of the safety of its aircraft. An Air Canada reservationist said passengers who booked a flight before March 12 can change their ticket to the same destination without paying the ticket difference. However, the change fee, which varies from $75 to $100, will still apply. Tracy Stewart, content editor at Airfarewatchdog.com, says that airline employees may be flexible, especially considering the sensitive circumstances. "Even if it's not the official policy," he said, "they might work with you to change flights." Your travel insurance policy could cover your new plans if you opted for the Cancel for Any Reason upgrade. With this benefit, travelers receive up to 75 percent of their trip costs. However, the policy is restrictive: You must have purchased it within 21 days of your initial trip payment and must cancel at least two to three days before your departure, according to Jenna Hummer, a spokeswoman with Squaremouth, which compares travel insurance plans. "There is no to very limited travel insurance coverage for wanting to change carriers due to the recent Boeing Max 8 crash," she said. "Standard travel insurance policies typically don't provide cancellation coverage for situations such as this, including travel warnings and other national or international government-issued advisories." As a last resort, Kaplan reminds travelers about the "flat tire rule." If you narrowly miss a flight, the airline will typically place you on the next available flight free of charge. Proof of the extenuating circumstances is not required. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 13) Marawi City Vice Mayor Arafat Salic was arrested Wednesday morning at the city hall over rebellion charges. "Salic is included in the Office of the Martial Law Administrator Arrest Order dated September 4, 2017 for rebellion case," said Col. Romeo Brawner, 103rd Infantry Brigade Commander in a statement from the Philippine Army Wednesday. The vice mayor's arrest is in relation to his involvement with the Maute-ISIS takeover of Marawi City in May 2017. His brother, former Marawi Mayor Fajad "Pre" Salic, was also arrested in 2017 for rebellion in line with the order issued by Defense Secretary and martial law administrator Delfin Lorenzana. For better or worse, Nintendo is intent on boldly going where no hardware maker has gone before. Consoles like the Wii and Switch prove that innovation is sometimes the way to our hearts, while others such as the Wii U highlight the inherent risks of trying to break new ground. According to veteran Nintendo developers Shinya Takahashi and Hisashi Nogami, speaking during a recent interview with The Guardian, the Japanese outfit is always looking for that next 'wow' moment, but it's a quest that can sometimes leave Nintendo's own employees confounded. When it comes to hardware, for instance, creating something that'll leave jaws on the floor isn't exactly straightforward. Just look at the Wii. The remote-waving system was a huge hit with consumers, who took to motion controls like ducks to water, but it was actually a tough sell internally. "Even among our developers there are often doubts. When the Wii remote was first introduced as a concept, the reaction was: what is that? Is it real? Will it actually work? But once we'd all tried it, we were surprised and delighted by it, and that made us realize that it was going to work out," said Takahashi, recalling what happened when Nintendo's wider dev team were first shown a prototype Wiimote controller. "With the Nintendo Switch, we all knew the concept, but when we picked up the prototype for the first time and saw Mario Kart running perfectly on the smaller screen, we were flabbergasted. Even people who are well aware of the concept and design cant always tell if somethings going to work." Nogami agrees with Takahasi, and claims that putting hardware into hands is the only sure-fire way to know if it'll click. You can talk all day about how something works, but hardware is all about the feel. "Its not good enough to put your idea into words; you have to give people a concrete example to show them how it works, chimes Nogami. Its on us to create things that allow players to experience that wow moment." To hear more from the pair, be sure to check out the full interview over on The Guardian. Get the SC business stories that matter. Our newsletter catches you up with all the business stories that are shaping Charleston and South Carolina every Monday and Thursday at noon. Get ahead with us - it's free. Meat clerk John Hooker walked past the local products section in Charleston's newest grocery store and made a point of singling it out. "A lot of people will ask where that is," he said. "When they travel to see friends, they want to take something local from Charleston." Local products such as Benne Wafers and jars of vegetable soup are among the Lowcountry specialties and thousands of other items neatly stocked at the new Publix supermarket on the peninsula. Opening at 7 a.m. Wednesday, the full-service grocer will offer much more as well. Located in the ground floor of the new 10 WestEdge building at Spring Street and Lockwood Drive, the 50,000-square-foot store has a small cafe for coffee and shakes, online ordering for prepared meal pickups and delivery trucks bringing fresh produce seven days a week. "The large square footage also allows us to carry a wider selection of products, including a nice variety of local items," said Publix spokeswman Kim Reynolds. With 110 employees, the expansive store includes a pharmacy, deli, bakery and all the other departments found in a traditional Publix supermarket, including a large wine selection and floral offerings. The deli is set up with more than 200 varieties of artisan cheeses from around the globe. The store also includes daily-made sushi and gourmet soups along with a seating area with free Wi-Fi service. Customers also will find the company's Aprons cooking demonstration station, eight check-out stations and four self check-outs along with two check-out counters at the customer service desk and one each in the cafe and pharmacy. The biggest thing that sets the store apart from any other Publix or its competitors across the Charleston region is parking. Customers with cars will have to drive up the building's ramp off Horizon Street to the second floor parking deck and take the elevator to the ground level to enter the supermarket. When exiting the garage, drivers can only turn left toward the new WestEdge street in front of the Publix entrance and then onto Lockwood Drive. Until two weeks ago, the store was still empty except for its shelving, said district manager Charles Gainer. "We have a tremendous group of people," he said. "They worked extremely hard with a lot of passion to get us ready for the opening." With some employees putting last-minute items on shelves, assistant manager Natasha Emmerth showed firefighters around the store Tuesday so they could acclimate themselves with emergency exits and other safety features. And, for the first time in three years, the new supermarket will become the peninsula's third full-service grocery store. The downtown area is now served by Harris Teeter on East Bay Street and Food Lion on upper King Street. The middle peninsula was served by Bi-Lo, formerly Piggly Wiggly on Meeting Street, until it closed in 2016. The store will become the Florida-based grocery chain's 13th in the Charleston region. Its first GreenWise organic store in South Carolina will open this summer in Mount Pleasant. Three other Publix supermarkets are in the works around Charleston. They include two under development in Cainhoy Plantation off Clements Ferry Road in Berkeley County and another on Folly Road on James Island. A third is planned for the Summers Corner area south of Summerville. For those wanting delivery service, Shipt shoppers pick up items for customers in the store, but Instacart is the official delivery agency for Publix, Reynolds said. After a brief ribbon-cutting ceremony Wednesday, shoppers will receive free reusable bags while supplies last and find lots of food samples throughout the store. A booth will even be set up to instruct customers about ways to save money. Niko Stahley, who has 13 years with Publix, is the new store manager. He comes to Charleston after serving as assistant manager in Simpsonville near Greenville. While the new supermarket is ready to open, the 350 apartments under construction above it in the nine-story building are not. The first units will be ready for move-in in May, said Michael Maher, CEO of the WestEdge Foundation. "We hope to be finished in August if there are no hurricanes," he said. Of the new Publix, Maher called it "more than a grocery store. It's an anchor. This side of the peninsula was a food desert, so it becomes a synergistic component of the community." Publix, the largest employee-owned company in the nation, has more than 200,000 workers. Its sales last year at 1,214 stores came in at $36.1 billion. U.S. Rep. Joe Cunningham, gave a blast from an air horn Thursday to demonstrate how loud offshore seismic testing can be. U.S. House Water, Oceans and Wildlife subcommittee. You are the owner of this article. Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort, began to advance a bill to legalize medical marijuana in South Carolina through the legislature on Wednesday. Assistant Columbia bureau chief Adcox returned to The Post and Courier in October 2017 after 12 years covering the Statehouse for The Associated Press. She previously covered education for The P&C. She has also worked for The AP in Albany, N.Y., and for The Herald in Rock Hill. All that snow might seem like a hassle right now, but wait until it melts. The National Weather Service in La Crosse released its second hydrologic outlook of the spring based on current snow totals. That outlook shows that a chance of minor flooding along the Mississippi River from Lake City to La Crescent and down into Iowa is very likely. The chance of moderate flooding across the same region is also much more likely than historical norms, the NWS noted. Six spots from Lake City to La Crescent along the Mississippi River have a greater than 50 percent likelihood of moderate flooding. And while none of those locations have a higher than 50 percent likelihood of flooding, all locations along the river are more likely than historical norms. Furthermore, there is a 44 percent chance of major flooding in Winona. Other rivers that are more likely to flood than historical norms include the Zumbro at Zumbro Falls, which has a 34 percent chance of minor flooding and a 10 percent chance of major flooding; and the Root River in Houston, which has a 55 percent chance of minor flooding and an 11 percent chance of moderate flooding, the NWS reported. Even the South Fork of the Zumbro River in Rochester has an elevated chance of minor flooding, according to the NWS. All these estimates are based on current snow accumulations and do not take into account the 6-plus inches of snow expected across Southeast Minnesota on Saturday or the rain expected to fall early Saturday. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources noted that the snowfall depth across Southeast Minnesota with the exception of most of Houston County, the southeast corner of Winona County and a sliver of Fillmore County ranks in the 99th percentile of historical snow depth for the date of Feb. 28. With the threat of flooding greater than normal, the Minnesota Department of Commerce advised Minnesotans last week to consider purchasing flood insurance. The DOC noted that in recent years, floods have caused many Minnesotans to suffer major property damage and serious financial losses due to a lack of flood insurance protection. "Flood damage is not covered by a standard homeowners insurance policy," the DOC warned. "There is a 30-day waiting period after purchasing a flood insurance policy before it takes effect." Starting Monday and continuing to next Thursday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Paul District, will conduct snow surveys throughout the region, Patrick Loch, a spokesman with the Corps, said survey crews will work counterclockwise around the region beginning at Forest Lake and continuing around the Mississippi River basin. Other crews are taking surveys along the Canadian border and in the Red River basin in northwest Minnesota. "The snow survey process involves going to a predetermined location, collecting snow through a tube and weighing the melted snow to determine water content," Loch said. Across the state in southwestern Minnesota, things aren't any better. The Redwood River has a greater than 95 percent chance of minor flooding, according to the NWS in Minneapolis, as does the Cottonwood River in New Ulm. Along the Minnesota River, the chances of minor flooding from Montevideo to Savage are almost universally at greater than 95 percent. However, even the chances of major flooding along that stretch are greater than 50 percent in many places with Savage and Montevideo both still clearing 90 percent and the chances of major flooding near Henderson and Jordan near 50 percent. All these predictions came before more snow buried parts of western and southern Minnesota over the weekend. For example, more than 11 inches fell in areas around Appleton that feed into the Minnesota River near Montevideo, and just under 5 inches fell near Savage and Henderson closer to the Twin Cities. Stay fit in a revolutionary way as you work out in VR, together with your own virtual personal trainer. WABASHA The expansion of a Wabasha County dairy farm is one step closer to reality. Recent farm expansion plans in southeastern Minnesota have run into all sorts of roadblocks. While some plans have been scrapped by owners and others stopped by various regulators, the Wabasha County Board of Commissioners voted 3-0 on March 5 to grant a conditional use permit to Scotch Prairie Farms. "I dont think anyone on this board is not concerned with water quality," said Commissioner Don Springer, the board chairman. "The Yotters followed the law as written today. Moving forward, we should be looking at our ordinance again. But if we stop this one, why didnt we stop the other four (CUP requests) before this?" Scotch Prairie Farms is owned and operated by Brian and Ashly Yotter, who applied for a CUP to expand from 600 mature dairy cows, 141 dairy heifers and 300 dairy calves (998.7 animal units) to an additional 1,385 mature dairy cows, 159 dairy heifers, and 500 dairy calves (2,150.3 AUs), for a combined total of 3,149 AUs, according to the environmental assessment worksheet for the proposal. The additional animals would produce roughly 13.8 million gallons of manure annually, enough to fertilize an additional 1,602 acres under the required manure management plan. The project, which received Minnesota Pollution Control Agency approval in January, was recommended by the countys planning commission Feb. 25. However, several neighbors to the dairy have expressed their concern, particularly with regard to how the manure generated by the feedlot would affect groundwater in the area. Connie Moran, who lives in the valley below the dairy, said she was concerned about the 26 million gallon manure storage lagoon and what would happen if the ground underneath gave way. "Im asking the Wabasha County Board to put a pause on this," she said, deferring to a requested generic environmental impact statement that was requested by previous MPCA Commissioner John Linc Stine. Another neighbor, George Meyer, who lives east of the dairy, said he tries to live in harmony with his neighbors, but the dairy expansion has made him fear for his health. "Ive never felt in jeopardy like I do here," he said. "Whats best for all the people should be the presiding factor behind this." Meyers brother, Brad Meyer, who lives in Wisconsin but was born in Wabasha County, said while the Yotters are following the rules that are in place, those rules arent working. However, Wabasha County Planning Director Kevin Krause said it is not the countys place to question the state regulations on feedlots nor the engineers and environmental scientists at the MPCA. "Nitrates are a complex issue," he said. "Theyre not simply a function of feedlots or feedlot size." Other factors, he said, include how and when nitrates are applied in the field, soil texture, rainfall, cover crops and more. And while row crop farmers are not regulated as how much nitrogen they put on their fields, feedlots larger than 1,000 animal units are heavily regulated. For example, a licensed applicator will oversee the spread of manure from the Yotters dairy into farm fields. The Yotters will only spread manure when the temperature is right, and manure will be knifed or injected into the land. Springer asked about the expanded feedlot being a "zero runoff facility." Krause explained there would be zero discharge of water from Scotch Prairie Farms. "When you look at feedlots less than 1,000 animal units, there is a lack of those requirements," he said. "Here, when youre over 1,000, youre in a whole new ballgame." In the end, Springer and Commissioners Mike Wobbe and Cheryl Key voted in favor of the CUP. Commissioner Brian Goihl, who said he has business ties to the Yotters, recused himself. Commissioner Rich Hall was not present due to a health concern. NORRISTOWN A Stowe man whose lies to a judge were revealed with the help of some quick-thinking sheriffs deputies with cellphone cameras is on his way to jail for a perjury conviction. Grant Epps Royster, 48, of the 200 block of Jay Street, was sentenced in Montgomery County Court to 9-to-18-months in the county jail, to be followed by two years probation, on a felony charge of perjury in connection with lies he told to a judge during an April 2016 court hearing. A jury convicted Royster of the perjury charge during a trial last October. Judge Steven C. Tolliver ordered Royster to report to the county jail on March 15 to begin serving the sentence. Tolliver said Royster is eligible for the jails work release program during his incarceration. Prosecutors alleged Royster committed perjury while in court to address summary traffic charges, including driving under suspension, during April 2016 court proceedings. On April 18, then President Judge William J. Furber Jr. advised Royster that as part of bail conditions he was not permitted to operate a motor vehicle, pending the resolution of the summary traffic violations at a hearing scheduled for the following day, April 19. The defendant, who was represented by counsel, acknowledged this bail condition, county Detective Michael Shade alleged in the arrest affidavit. However, a county deputy sheriff observed Royster depart the courthouse, cross Main Street to a parking lot and get into the drivers seat of a white Cadillac Escalade and drive away. The sheriffs deputy used his cellphone to videotape Royster, court papers indicate. The following morning, on April 19, a second deputy sheriff witnessed Royster arrive at the courthouse for his scheduled hearing in the same Cadillac vehicle and park it in a lot across the street from the courthouse. That deputy also used his cellphone to videotape Roysters conduct. The defendant is seen exiting the drivers side door of the Cadillac, Shade alleged, adding both deputies later testified at a bail revocation hearing for Royster. They both presented the videos they had taken with their cellphones. They identified the subject entering or exiting the vehicle as the defendant. Royster elected to testify at the court hearing, took an oath to provide sworn testimony and was permitted to view the cellphone videos, according to the criminal complaint. He denied he drove the Cadillac on either date, Shade alleged. Royster, according to court documents, claimed friends or relatives drove him from and to the courthouse on April 18 and April 19. However, when police interviewed the relative identified by Royster she said that at no time did she operate the vehicle during the commute from Pottstown to Norristown. Prosecutors subsequently charged Royster with perjury. During a separate hearing in April 2016, Judge Furber sentenced Royster to 2-to-6 months in the county jail after convicting Royster of a charge of driving while operating privileges are suspended or revoked in connection with a January 2015 incident in Pottstown, according to court records. PERKIOMEN Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman made a stop in Montgomery County Tuesday to listen to resident opinions on the legalization of recreational marijuana. The town hall event at Perkiomen Valley High School was the 19th stop of a statewide listening tour to gather input from Pennsylvanians about the possibility of legalizing recreational use of marijuana. Fetterman was joined by several other state and county elected officials, including state Rep. Steven Malagari, state Rep. Joe Webster, state Rep. Joe Ciresi, Sen. Katie Muth and Sen. Maria Collett. Also in attendance were Montgomery County Commissioners Valerie Arkoosh and Ken Lawrence. And the event was met with plenty of interested attendees as well. Over 200 people, ranging in age from high school students to senior citizens, showed up to discuss the topic. Comments covered a variety of viewpoints from how marijuana helps those with post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety to its reputation as a gateway drug. Speakers were given 90 seconds to speak about their opinions on the topic. Lines to step up to the podium at times reached out the door of the auditorium. I think without cannabis I wouldnt be here to speak to you, said one attendee who identified himself only as Ron. I went to war when I was 20 years old, came back expecting to know what I was supposed to do but I had no idea. They just started piling on pharmaceuticals and time after time I thought about taking my life and watched my friends take their lives. I was miserable and finally someone told me about cannabis. Also among those in favor of legalizing recreational marijuana was Dean Beer, Montgomery Countys chief public defender. The criminalization of marijuana disproportionately affects poor people and people of color every day, said Beer. So many times well have people charged with possession of marijuana and it ends up getting changed to disorderly conduct. So they say, Well give you a break, were only going to charge you $300. By those lines they only get $600 for social security. So they wind up paying 50 percent of their monthly income for a fine of possession of marijuana. I dont believe its fair. There were some in attendance, however, who opposed making recreational marijuana legal, citing personal family experiences with the drug or noting concerns about its effects on teens. Im a ninth-grader at this high school and as a ninth grader, Im extremely concerned about the youth of this country, said one of the speakers. Just a few months ago I was debating a piece of legislation about marijuana legalization. I came upon an article that stated that while users of recreational marijuana may affect some parts of their brain, it can also affect their offspring as well and impair your brain health. My major concern is how are we going to ensure the health and safety of the future of America by expanding the availability of marijuana to the public? Of the more than 50 individuals who had a chance to speak Tuesday evening, more than 40 expressed support for the legalization of recreational marijuana while six opposed it. To date, Fetterman has held 18 recreational marijuana listening tours in 17 Pennsylvania counties with another 50-plus stops planned through June. The response to the lieutenant governors listening tours has been tremendous, with people across the state making their voices heard, Gov. Tom Wolf said in a press release issued Tuesday afternoon. This is exactly the type of discussion I had hoped John would get for, against, not sure. Everyones opinion is important and valued. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to attend an event or respond online. I appreciate your time and input, which are invaluable as we study this issue. In addition to the thousands of people who have attended a listening tour session, more than 21,000 have responded to the online feedback form, offering their opinions on the topic, according to the governors office. The governors correspondence office, which tracks the online form, noted that no other topic has received this level of response or interaction since the governor took office in 2015. I want to thank the people of Pennsylvania for coming and participating in this important conversation we are having in the commonwealth, Fetterman said. The stops have been cordial, engaging, and thoughtful. I look forward to continuing this tour and hearing from everyone. Im pleased that Pennsylvanians are taking the time to let us know their thoughts on the topic of legalizing adult-use marijuana, Wolf said. Its my hope that this level of interaction becomes the norm on issues important to Pennsylvanians. Its how we can best develop policy and programs by listening to our everyones perspectives. Marijuana for medical use was legalized in Pennsylvania two years ago. Proponents of legalizing the drug for recreational use say it would be a new source of revenue for state government. Jessie Liu is President Trumps nominee for Associate Attorney General. This job is prestigious but usually not highly consequential. Liu likely has more impact in her current position as U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C. Liu is well qualified to be Associate Attorney General. However, in this post I raised a concern over her role as Vice President of the National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) at a time that NAWL opposed the nomination of Samuel Alito the the Supreme Court. NAWL sent a letter to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee expressing its opposition. The letter, with Lius name prominent on the masthead, pronounced Alito not qualified to serve on the Court from the perspective of laws and decisions regarding womens rights or that have a special impact on women. Liu had to have known about the letter. I therefore asked whether she disagreed with the contents; if so, whether she opposed sending it; and if so whether she left NAWL in protest. After reading my post, David French of NRO put these questions to Liu. Here is Frenchs report: In addition to its Supreme Court evaluation committee, [NAWL] also had an amicus committee that took left-wing legal positions. Liu didnt serve on either committee and disagreed with the decisions of both. And so, in 2006 when she took a new job in the Bush administration she decided it was time for a clean break. She resigned from the group before she became president and never rejoined. I take Liu at her word that she left NAWL due to ideological disagreement, as opposed to careerism. The fact that she did not rejoin the group during the Obama years can be viewed as reinforcing this view. There are, though, conservative alumni of the Bush administrations Civil Rights Division, where Liu served, who considered her, for lack of a better word, squishy. These alums complain that Liu was often more in tune with career staff a left-liberal cohort than with conservatives. However, no one I communicated with compared Liu to Alex Acosta, the ultimate Civil Rights Division squish (and worse) of the Bush years. Such a comparison would be genuine cause for alarm. My view is that Liu is not an optimal nominee from a conservative perspective maybe far from it. However, she is the Trump administrations nominee and she is well-qualified for the position. With the NAWL-Alito matter cleared up, I think she should be confirmed, absent any new adverse evidence or developments. During Ronald Reagans second term, some Democrats became excited about the prospect of impeaching the president over the Iran-Contra matter. At a meeting in his office, Speaker Tip ONeil put an end to this possibility with six words. Were not going to do that, he stated. Flash forward almost 30 years, and we find Speaker Nancy Pelosi uttering words that fall short of what ONeill said. On the possibility of impeaching President Trump, Pelosi stated: Im not for impeachment. Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless theres something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I dont think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And [Trumps] just not worth it. Unlike ONeill, Pelosi did not rule out impeaching Trump. Arguably, she put herself in a better position to yield to impeachment demands from her caucus down the road. She can now say she was disinclined to impeach Trump until she learned (from Mueller or from one of the House committees investigating Trump) about this or that alleged outrage. I suspect this was one of Pelosis motives in making her statement to come across as a fair arbiter on impeachment. The other motive, I assume, was to cause frisky members of her caucus to focus on other matters for the time being. The only words from Pelosi that might give comfort to President Trump is her statement that there needs to be bipartisan[ship] before impeachment is pursued. Here, though, Pelosi set the bar lower than Rep. Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, had set it. Nadler spoke of the need for a case that would have the backing of some Trump supporters. Pelosi spoke only of bipartisanship. These days, bipartisan support sometimes is claimed when a single member of the opposing caucus supports a measure. And Pelosi didnt even specify that Republican support for impeachment had to come from a member of Congress. What if, after scandalous (or allegedly scandalous) matter is publicized, a poll finds that 5-10 percent of Republicans, along with half of independents, favor impeachment? Would that satisfy the bipartisan standard? I think Pelosi, shrewdly, has kept her options open. In any event, an impeachment vote is in the cards whether Pelosi wants one or not. With all the committee investigations that are underway, not to mention Muellers, it seems almost inevitable that left-wing members of Pelosis left-liberal caucus will bring impeachment to a vote. If these leftists are smart, they will wait until they have more to work with. At that point, Pelosi will be in a tough spot. Will she take the position that her compelling, overwhelming, and bipartisan standard hasnt been met if a sizable portion of her caucus thinks theres enough evidence with which to proceed? To do so would be terribly divisive. Pelosi might easily conclude that protecting Trump from impeachment isnt worth it. Thus, while Pelosis statement lowers the odds that the House will impeach Trump, the possibility of impeachment remains considerable, it seems to me. Acrylic Lenses Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 04:39:05 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 630 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 The increasing prevalence of vision problems such as myopia, hypermetropia, cataract, and astigmatism has triggered the demand for acrylic lenses. Acrylic lenses are increasingly preferred over glass lenses due to various advantages, such as lightweight, high break resistance and spark resistance, it offers. As per World Health Organization (WHO), there are 285 million visually impaired people across the globe. Moreover, WHO lists that the major reasons for visual impairment are glaucoma, refractive errors and cataract. Growing safety concerns among people to prevent these problems is expected to upsurge the demand for acrylic lenses market. Additionally, improvement in the healthcare facilities and shifting focus towards acrylic lenses over glass lenses are further estimated to influence the growth of the global acrylic lenses market.Based on application, corrective acrylic lenses are expected to dominate the global acrylic lenses market. However, therapeutic lenses are projected to witness significant growth during the forecast period. Based on design type, toric lenses and accommodative acrylic lenses are expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. Based on product type, hydrophilic lens is expected to dominate the global acrylic lens market owing to their ease of implantation during surgery.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3762 Acrylic Lenses Market: DriversIncreasing demand for acrylic lens due to its advantages over glass lens is projected to drive the growth of the global acrylic lenses market. Moreover, rise in the count of diabetic patients coupled with increasing risk of cataract among the diabetic patients are two main factors estimated to escalate the demand for acrylic lenses during the forecast period. Additionally, increase in incidences of ocular and ophthalmic conditions is further expected to drive the growth of global acrylic lenses market. Moreover, continuous innovations in the field of accommodative and toric lenses will also fuel the demand for acrylic lenses in the near future.Acrylic Lenses Market: RestraintsOne of the major factors affecting the growth of the global acrylic lens market is the high initial cost of the acrylic lens. Moreover, lack of reimbursement is further expected to hamper the growth of the global acrylic lenses market. Additionally, problems such as photophobia, corneal allergy and perilimbal infection due to continuous use of lenses are expected to restrict the growth of the global acrylic lenses market.Acrylic Lenses Market: SegmentationThe global acrylic lenses market can be segmented on the basis of product type, design type, and applications. On the basis of product type, the market can be further segmented into hydrophilic acrylic lenses and hydrophobic acrylic lenses. On the basis of design type, the global acrylic lenses market can be further segmented into spherical acrylic lenses, aspherical lenses, toric lenses, multifocal lenses and toric multifocal lenses and accommodative lenses. On the basis of application, the global acrylic lenses market can be further segmented into therapeutic lenses, lifestyle, corrective lenses and cosmetic lenses.Acrylic Lenses Market: Regional OutlookOn the basis of region, North America is expected to be a promising revenue generating region owing to increasing adoption of technologically advanced products. Asia Pacific, led by China and India, is projected to grow at a significant rate during the forecast period. Increasing ophthalmic cases in Asia Pacific is expected to fuel the demand for acrylic lenses during the forecast period. Latin America is expected to witness substantial growth in the near future. Europe and Middle East & Africa are expected to witness positive growth during the forecast period.Request Report for TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3762 Acrylic Lenses Market: Market ParticipantsExamples of some of the market participants identified in the global acrylic lenses market are as mentioned below:Polyoptics GmbHLensOpticEyeKon Medical, Inc.Bausch & Lomb, Inc.American HydronBarnes HindCooperVisionWesely-JessenAmerican OpticalSyntexHoya CorporationAbbott Medical Optics, Inc. Research Report Insights PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 03:21:33 Press Information Research Report Insights Research Report Insights 42 joseph street, Portcarling P0B 1J0, Muskoka, Ontario T: +1-631-721-4201 Vikas Bahurupi Manager 6317214201 email https://www.researchreportinsights.com # 470 Words Research Report Insights42 joseph street,Portcarling P0B 1J0,Muskoka, OntarioT: +1-631-721-4201Manager6317214201 Linear Motion Systems are the mechanical constructions or arrangements which facilitate linear motion of the loads to and fro or as per required. These are designed for a wide range of applications running from materials handling technology to light-duty machining jobs in the aluminum, wood and plastics sectors. Further these systems find application in palletizing, packaging, pick and place, sorting, and the transportation of goods. These systems consist of linear rail, rail tables, guides, and actuators, sliders. These are used to continuously transfer products in a conveyor belt, or push it across for packaging. The deployment of linear motion systems in this application delivers agility and seamless processing, thereby reducing maintenance requirements.As the manufacturers are looking towards automation in material handling in the industrial sector is one of the key factors expected to propel the markets growth in the forthcoming years. In the areas of transportation and positioning of workpieces and materials, they are finding rise in applications as these are more efficient than their conventional counterparts including belt systems, rollers, and chains. Attributes such as accuracy, speed, and ability to carry out synchronized and individual movements in a variety of environments.Request For Report Sample with Table of Contents@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upsample/120124888/Linear-Motion-Systems-Market The restraints of these market has been the chances of manufacturing slowdown due to any global financial crisis. Further fall in exports from the manufacturing hub due to fall in global demand of manufacturing goods or the trade restrictions has the potential to restrict the market growth. Opportunities lies in finding penetration to the lower tiers of manufacturing sector and finding areas of deployment which are more resilient to geopolitical an economic situation.Linear Motion Systems Market is classified on the basis of type: Single-axis Linear Motion System, Multi-axis Linear Motion System; by application: Packaging, Palletizing, Robotics, Machine Tools, Material Handling Equipment and Others; on the basis of Region: North America; The U.S., Canada, and Mexico, Europe; France, Italy, Germany, the U.K., and Rest of Europe, Asia Pacific; China, India, Japan, South Korea, Rest of Asia Pacific, Rest-of-the-World; Latin America and The Middle East & Africa.Request For Report Discount@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/updiscount/120124888/Linear-Motion-Systems-Market By geography, Asia Pacific is expected to grow at a significant rate due to rise in industrialization in the emerging countries like China, India, Taiwan and South Korea. The multi-axis linear motion system segment is the largest segment as it is given preference over single-axis system due to low cost and capacity to handle multiple tasks such as de-stacking, palletizing, and pick-and-place.Some of the key players in the Linear Motion Systems market include Schneider Electric Motion, PBC Linear, Nippon Bearing, Lintech, HepcoMotion, Tectra Automation, Bishop-Wisecarver, THK, SKF, Thomson, Schneeberger, Rollon and Bosch Rexroth.Report Analysis@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upcomming/120124888/Linear-Motion-Systems-Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 10:34:43 Press Information Future Market Insights 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,, Abhishek Budholiya Manager 3479183531 email https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 685 Words 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,,Manager3479183531Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Aerospace coupler is a mechanical device, which is mainly utilized to connect the shafts end to end for the effective transmission of power. The couplers are designed to provide safe and accurate connection during refuelling of aircraft. Aerospace couplers aid the mechanical connection between the onboard systems such as terrain following radar and flight control system. Aerospace couplers and its dynamics can produce beneficial or adverse controllability and stability, depending on the characteristics of the aerospace. With the increase in speed, aircrafts are experiencing various strange instabilities, including violent motion about all three axes. At times, severity of these motions have resulted in loss of lives and aircraft. There are various kinds of coupling modes, which include inertia-roll coupling, control coupling, dutch roll coupling and so on. Aerospace couplers are majorly employed in military aircraft, commercial aircraft, rockets, satellites and missiles. Aerospace couplers are designed to transform power from the engine to various gearboxes on fixed wing and rotor craft alike. There are various types of couplers available in the market, which perform different functions such as pressure coupler, hydrant coupler and emergency breakaway coupler. Pressure coupler protects the aircrafts from damages caused by surges and excess pressure and are connected to the hydrant pit adapter in order to allow the flow of pressurized fuel from pipeline to the receiving aircraft. Hydrant couplers are made up of aluminium and high strength stainless steel. Based on the various couplers, there are numerous coupling techniques adopted for the effective fuelling of the aircrafts, which include threadless cramshell couplings, positivelok couplings and metal seal flexible couplings.Request For Report Sample @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3745 Global Aerospace Couplers Market: SegmentationThe global aerospace couplers market can be segmented mainly on the basis of product type and application.Based on the product type, the global aerospace couplers market can be segmented into;Pressure CouplerHydrant CouplerEmergency Breakaway CouplerBased on the application, the global aerospace couplers market can be segmented into;Commercial AircraftsMilitary AircraftGlobal Aerospace Couplers Market: DynamicsWith the advancement of aerospace industry, the competition among the aerospace coupler manufacturers has been increasing. Currently, a large number of people prefer aeroplanes as a convenient mode of transportation owing to the affordable charges and comfort in commuting, along with the shorter travel time required to reach the destination compared to other modes of transportation. Various governments are globally establishing their aerospace sector and there is a rising demand for aircrafts as well as aerospace couplers in commercial as well as military sectors. With the increasing demand for the aircrafts, the demand for aerospace couplers is expected to witness substantial growth in the near future. Growth of the air traffic in last 20 years has been spectacular and there is an indication that it will continue to expand over the forecast period, which in turn, is projected to propel the demand for aerospace couplers.On the other hand, the growth in demand will bring forth number of challenges for dealing with mass transportation and congestion of ATM and airport infrastructure.Manufacturers of aerospace couplers are focussing on merger and acquisition related activities in order to expand their business in various regions & enhance their market share.Global Aerospace Couplers Market: Region-wise OutlookThe aerospace industry is matured in developed regions such as Europe and North America and represent a large share in the global aerospace couplers market. Aerospace couplers contribute a substantial share to the economy of the U.S., since aerospace industry is one of the major contributors to the GDP of the country. On the other hand, developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region such as India and China are expected to grow at a solid CAGR in the near future owing to the increased infrastructural activities.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC): https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3745 Global Aerospace Couplers Market: Market ParticipantsSome of the examples of the market participants in the Aerospace Couplers market identified across the value chain include Eaton, Coupling Corporation of America, Senior Aerospace Metal Bellows, Intrex Aerospace, Cla-Val, Parker Hannifin Corp. and UTC Aerospace Systems, among others. PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 10:34:51 Press Information Future Market Insights 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,, Abhishek Budholiya Manager 3479183531 email https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 665 Words 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,,Manager3479183531Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Aircraft fluid power is the technology that deals with the control, generation and transmission of forces and movements of mechanical systems with the use of pressurized fluids in a confined system. Aircraft fluid power components are utilized in the aircraft to move and actuate the flaps, landing gear and brakes. Aircraft fluid power components system complexity varies from small aircrafts that require the fluid only for normal operation of wheel brakes to large aircrafts where the system is complex and large. In order to achieve the necessary reliability and redundancy, the system may consist of various subsystems. Aircraft fluid power components are generally utilized in the hydraulic as well as pneumatic systems. The pneumatic system and hydraulic system provide a means for the efficient operation of aircraft fluid power components. However, it is observed that majority of aircrafts that consists of pneumatic system utilize them only as a backup system for the operation of aircraft hydraulic power components when the hydraulic system fails. There are various components utilized in the aircraft fluid power system for the efficient operation of the aircrafts, such as pumps, valves and reservoir. Various types of reservoirs are used depending upon the requirements, which include pressurized and non-pressurized reservoirs. Numerous kinds of pumps are available in the market based on the application, which include power-driven pumps, constant-displacement pumps, gear-type power pump, gerotor pump, piston pump and vane pump.Request For Report Sample @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3746 Global Aircraft Fluid Power Components Market: SegmentationGlobally, the aircraft fluid power components market can be segmented on the basis of product type and application.Based on the product type, the global aircraft fluid power components market can be segmented intoReservoirFiltersPumpsValvesAccumulatorsElectric motorTankBased on the application, the global aircraft fluid power components market can be segmented intoCommercial AircraftsMilitary AircraftsGlobal Aircraft Fluid Power Components Market: DynamicsThe expansion of aviation industry and competition among the aircraft manufacturers have been intensified. At present, travelling in an aircraft is not merely a luxury option, large number of people prefer the aircraft as a convenient mode of transportation. Various Governments across the globe are strengthening their air-defence sector and there is an ever-increasing demand for aircrafts as well as aircraft fluid power components both in military and commercial sectors. With growing demand for aircrafts, market for aircraft fluid power components is expected to witness significant growth over the coming years.On the other hand, for the efficient operation of aircrafts and effective utilization of aircraft fluid power components, trained workforce is a prerequisite. Hence, the lack of skilled labour is projected to hinder the growth of the market.The main challenges identified in the global aircraft fluid power components market include various factors such as accuracy and speed of operation, atmospheric condition, economic conditions, operating temperature range, pressure level and many others.Most of the aircraft fluid power components manufacturers involve in contracts and merger & acquisition activities in order to expand their reach in developing nations. Providing quality and cost effective components is one of the main strategies followed by the key manufacturers in order to gain high market share.Global Aircraft Fluid Power Components Market: Region-wise OutlookConsidering regions, the global aircraft fluid power components market is dominated by developed regions such as Europe and North America owing to the presence of developed aerospace industry, which represent major market share in the global market. Asia-Pacific is expected to gain a major market share in the near future owing to the rising infrastructural activities in developing countries such as China and India.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC): https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3746 Global Aircraft Fluid Power Components Market: Market ParticipantsSome of the examples of the market participants in the Aircraft Fluid Power Components market identified across the value chain include Eaton, United Technologies, Parker Hannifin Corp., Liebherr Group, American Micro Products, Inc., Woodward, Inc., Triumph Group, Inc. and Moog Inc. among others. PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 10:35:22 Press Information Future Market Insights 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,, Abhishek Budholiya Manager 3479183531 email https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 663 Words 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,,Manager3479183531Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Aircraft tube and duct assemblies are important parts of the aircraft fluid lines. Aircraft tube and duct assemblies provide fluid conveyance solutions for systems in the aircraft. Various types of materials are utilized for the manufacturing of tube and ducts, which include copper, aluminium alloy, steel, titanium, etc. Earlier, copper tubing was extensively utilized in the aviation fluid applications but nowadays in modern aircrafts, aluminium alloy, nickel alloy and corrosion resistant steel or titanium tubes have replaced copper tubing. Aircraft tube and duct assemblies are designed in such a way that they can withstand high water and air pressure, extreme hot and cold temperatures and corrosive chemicals.Global Aircraft Tube and Duct Assemblies Market: SegmentationThe Aircraft Tube and Duct Assemblies market can be segmented on the basis of material type and application.Request For Report Sample @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3716 Based on the material type, the global aircraft tube and duct assemblies market can be segmented intoNickel alloysStainless SteelTitaniumAluminiumOthers (Inconel, etc.)Based on the application, the global aircraft tube and duct assemblies market can be segmented intoCivil AircraftMilitary AircraftGlobal Aircraft Tube and Duct Assemblies Market: DynamicsOwing to the fast paced developments taking place in the aircraft industry, competition among the aircraft tube and duct assemblies manufacturers has been increasing. At present, a large number of people prefer aircraft as a more convenient mode of commutation owing to the shorter travel time as compared to other transportation modes and comfort as well. Governments across the globe are expanding their aircraft sector and also there is an ever increasing demand for aircraft tube and duct assemblies in military as well as civil aircrafts. With growing demand for aircrafts, demand for the aircraft tube and duct assemblies is expected to witness significant growth in the near future. Growth of the aerospace industry has been significant in the last two decades and it is estimated to continue to expand over the next decade as well, which in turn is projected to boost the demand for aircraft tube and duct assemblies.On the other hand, nowadays, tube and duct assemblies are manufactured mostly by using titanium. But, titanium is expensive and also it can be corroded and attacked by exposure to hydraulic liquids used in the aircraft. As the aircrafts have many ducts, there are chances that drops of the hydraulic fluid fall in them and corrode the ducts and cause severe damage. The aforementioned reason is expected to be the major challenge for the growth of global aircraft tube and duct assemblies market.The key trend identified in the global aircraft tube and duct assemblies market include the utilization of high performance materials that provides strength and durability to the assemblies. Manufacturers are focussing on utilization of corrosion resistant and high strength materials such as Titanium, Nickel-alloys and Steel, which offer strength to the aircraft tube and duct assemblies.Global Aircraft Tube and Duct Assemblies Market: Region-wise OutlookThe aircraft industry is matured in the developed regions such as North America and Europe and also they represent a large share in the global aircraft tube and duct assemblies market. Aircraft tube and duct assemblies contribute a significant share to the economy of the United States, since aircraft industry is one of the major contributors to the GDP of the country. On the other hand, demand for aircraft tube and duct assemblies is expected to grow at a substantial pace in the developing countries such as India and China owing to the rising infrastructural activities in the countries.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC): https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3716 Global Aircraft Tube and Duct Assemblies Market: Market ParticipantsSome of the examples of the market participants in the Aircraft Tube and Duct Assemblies market identified across the value chain include Eaton, Leggett & Platt, STEICO Industries Inc., Larom Manufacturing Corporation, WOOLF AIRCRAFT PRODUCTS, INC., Unison Industries, LLC and RSA Engineered Products LLC, among others. On the basis of regional presence, global anti-neoplastic pharmaceutical agents market is segmented into five key regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), and Middle East & Africa (MEA) Anti-Neoplastic Pharmaceutical Agents Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 14:02:20 Press Information Future Market Insights Future Market Insights U.S. Office 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018, Valley Cottage, NY 10989, United States T: +1-347-918-3531 F: +1-845-579-5705 Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.com Web: https://www.futuremarketinsights.com Umesh SEO Manager 3479183531 email https://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 418 Words Future Market InsightsU.S. Office616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWeb: https://www.futuremarketinsights.comSEO Manager3479183531 Anti-neoplastic pharmaceutical agents are the drugs which prevent or inhibit the maturation and proliferation of neoplasms and thus helps in the management of cancer. These agents are also known as cytotoxic agents. Anti-neoplastic agents do not get stabilized in one part of the body, however they travel through body and help in destruction of cancerous cells. Anti-Neoplastic pharmaceutical agents are used in combination with surgery, immunotherapy, radiotherapy, hormone therapy, targeted therapy for many solid tumors, especially metastatic. The risk related to cancer increases with age and it is now becoming more prevalent across the globe due to rapidly changing lifestyle of people. Thus, growing demand for anti-neoplastic pharmaceutical agents has captured the attention of pharmaceutical companies to enter into anti-neoplastic pharmaceutical agents market and develop more efficient drugs against several cancer conditions.Increasing prevalence of cancer cases, technological advancements, increasing funding from government bodies, and favorable reimbursement policies are the major factors driving the growth of global anti-neoplastic pharmaceutical agents market. However, factors such as lack of awareness about cancer condition in developing regions and technical complexities associated with the existing diagnostic tests would hinder the growth of anti-neoplastic pharmaceutical agents market.Request Sample Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-1472 The global anti-neoplastic pharmaceutical agents market is segmented based on type of cancer, anti-neoplastic pharmaceutical agents, and regional presence.Segmentation by type of cancer,Breast CancerBladder CancerCervical CancerGynecological CancerLung CancerLeukemiaOther Cancer Types (Anal Cancer, Bone Marrow Cancer, Colon Cancer, Eye Cancer, Osteo Sarcoma, Wilms Tumour, Larynx Cancer, Testicular Cancer and Rectal Cancer)Segmentation by type of anti-neoplastic pharmaceutical agents,Alkylating AgentsAntimetabolitesAntitumor AntibioticsNatural ProductsPlant ProductsMicroorganism ProductsHormones and AntagonistsOn the basis of regional presence, global anti-neoplastic pharmaceutical agents market is segmented into five key regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), and Middle East & Africa (MEA)Geographically, North America followed by Europe dominates the global anti-neoplastic pharmaceutical agents owing high prevalence of cancer cases and increasing demand of drugs for cancer treatment. However, APAC is expected to show high growth rate over the forecasted period due to increase in awareness about cancer condition and its side effects.Request to View TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-1472 Anti-Neoplastic Pharmaceutical Agents Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players in manufacturing of anti-neoplastic pharmaceutical agents market include GlaxoSmithKline plc, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd, Eli Lilly and Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Pfizer Inc., Novartis AG, AstraZeneca, Gilead, Accord Healthcare, and many others. Chromatography Silica Resins Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 04:30:15 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 729 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Chromatography is the technique used for the separation of components of a mixture. The separation technique uses the principle that different amounts of each solute are distributed in different proportions between a moving fluid stream, and an adjoining stationary phase. The moving stream is called the mobile phase. The mixture to be separated is dissolved in a fluid known as the mobile phase, which carries the mixture through a structure containing another material known as the stationary phase, where chromatography silica resins come into use. Different constituents of a mixture travel at different speeds and this information is used to separate the constituents. The separation is brought about using differential partitioning between mobile and stationary phases. In column chromatography, chromatography silica resins are used as adsorbents and are generally packed in a glass column.Chromatography silica resins find application during the stationary phase. They are also used in normal phase chromatography. Chromatography silica resins come in a range of shapes and sizes. The most common grades of chromatography silica resins are mesh 70 230 (63 200 m) for gravity column chromatography and mesh 230 400 (40 63 m) for flash column chromatography.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3697 Considering the vital applications of chromatography silica resins, the study of the global chromatography silica resin market becomes an important read.Chromatography Silica Resins Market: SegmentationOn the basis of purity, the global chromatography silica resin market is segmented as follows:Pure silica (min 97%)Ultrapure silica (Upto 99%)On the basis of application, the global chromatography silica resin market is segmented as follows:Analytical chromatographyProcess chromatographyPreparative chromatographyGravity chromatographyOn the basis of particle size, the global chromatography silica resin market is segmented as follows:1 to 10 m10 to 20 m20 to 50 mAbove 50 mOn the basis of mesh size, the global chromatography silica resin market is segmented as follows:30 6060 100100 200Above 200On the basis of end use, the global chromatography silica resin market is segmented as follows:Pharmacy & biotechnologyFoodChromatography Silica Resins Market: Key Trends, DriversSpecific features of chromatography silica resins prove to be quite useful during the separation process. For instance, it has been found that high purity chromatography silica resins provide consistency, reliability and reproducibility vis-a-vis other chromatography resins. Chromatography silica resins make it possible to eliminate contamination, lower back pressure and facilitate superior separation. Consistency in the manufactured lots of chromatography silica resins, along with their narrow particle and pore-size distribution enhances the process of chromatography. Also, chromatography silica resins provide reliable chromatography for optimal separation and resolution. As chromatography silica resins display desired characteristics for chromatography applications such as symmetrical peaks with no tailing, low metal content, neutral pH & controlled water content, high surface area and density and possess superior loading capacity which enables added silica quantity for the same volume along with solvent economy (smaller dead volume), they have been gaining increasing preference over other chromatography resins. These factors, combined together, are expected to drive the market demand for chromatography silica resins across the globe.The steady growth of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry is expected to fuel the growth of global chromatographic silica resin market over the forecast period as these resins find large scale applications in the pharmaceutical industry where they are used to segregate and collect different components of drugs. Some of the antibiotics produced using this method of purification include rosarimicin, coloradocin and benzanthrins, among others. These resins are also employed in the study of medicines such as hypnotics, sedatives, analgesics, local anaesthetics and steroids.However, end-users have been finding attractive substitutes for chromatography silica resins. For instance, activated alumina is known for relatively superior separation and purification characteristics. Unlike chromatography silica resins, the atmospheric properties of alumina makes it workable with neutral, acidic and basic compounds. Similarly, silica gel can also be used in limited end use industries. Alumina, however, being a superior ingredient is used in many environmental cleanup procedures. These factors are expected to restrain the market growth of chromatography silica resins in the next few years.Request Report for TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3697 Chromatography Silica Resins Market: Market ParticipantsExamples of the market participants in the global chromatography silica resin market are as follows:Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC.Sorbead IndiaSorbent Technologies, Inc.Sisco Research Laboratories Pvt. Ltd.Material HarvestShimadzu CorporationSiliCycle Inc.Fuji Silysia Chemical Ltd.Alfa Aesar, Thermo Fisher Scientific.Osaka Soda Depending on geographic regions, the global Dental services Market is segmented into seven key regions: North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Japan and Middle East & Africa. PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 13:59:30 Press Information Future Market Insights Future Market Insights U.S. Office 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018, Valley Cottage, NY 10989, United States T: +1-347-918-3531 F: +1-845-579-5705 Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.com Web: https://www.futuremarketinsights.com Umesh SEO Manager 3479183531 email https://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 721 Words Future Market InsightsU.S. Office616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWeb: https://www.futuremarketinsights.comSEO Manager3479183531 Rapidly increasing dental awareness campaigns has been witnessed as a trend gaining significant traction in dental services market since the recent past. Tie-ups between print media and visual media for supporting promotion of importance of dental health checkup is expected to create significant growth avenues for dental services market. Growing incidences of dental diseases, rising geriatric population and availability of well-established healthcare infrastructure is expected to augment the demand and supply of dental services. However, increasing focus on development of the dental vaccines that helps in prevention of dental diseases has been significantly restraining the growth of dental services market.Laser dentistry is likely to gain significant traction in dental services market owing to the benefit this service offers by eliminating the need for usage of surgical instruments. Dental clinics is anticipated to be the end-user holding lions share in dental services market. Rising mergers and collaborations between insurance companies and dental clinics is expected to create positive growth aspects for dental services market.Large population base and rising government initiatives is expected to offer favorable growth prospects for dental services market in developing countries. Dental services market is anticipated to experience a transformation in their delivery model with the help of dental support organizations that are leading to rising group or corporate practices.Dental services is one of the fastest growing market in the healthcare industry. Dental services include diagnosis, prevention and treatment of diseases of oral cavity. Dental services include dental implants, root canal endodontic, cosmetic dentistry, oral surgery, laser dentistry, dentures and smile makeover.Request Sample Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-1440 General oral cavity diseases include, dental caries also known as tooth decay and pyorrhea are expected to boost the Dental services market. Dental services treatments include, extraction or surgical removal of teeth, restoration of teeth, scaling and root planning and endodontic root canal treatment.In the U.S. around 90% of young population have dental caries, while out of all dentate adults almost 94% have evidence of coronal caries. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report 47.2% of the total population in the U.S. who are above 30 years suffers from periodontal disease.Dental Services Market: Drivers and RestraintsRising number of people suffering from periodontal disease, growing private health insurance coverageis and escalating demand for cosmetic and elective dentistry are factors driving the growth of dental services market.Factors contributing in the growth of dental services market are increased proportion of sugar based medication and existing life style factors. Additionally, the increasing population in the Asia Pacific region is also the major factor to drive the growth of global dental services market. However, according to WHO, it was observed that the cases with dental caries are declining due to the number of public health measures and improved self-care practices in the developed countries. These are the major restraints for the dental services market.Dental Services Market: SegmentationDental services market is segmented into following typesBy ServiceDental ImplantsOrthodonticsPeriodonticsRoot Canal EndodonticsCosmetic DentistryLaser DentistryDenturesOral and Maxillofacial SurgerySmile MakeoverEnd UserHospitalsDental ClinicsDental Services Market: OverviewIncreasing healthcare awareness among mass population along with rise in prevalence rate of oral cavity diseases expected to propel the overall demand for dental services worldwide. Increased focus on personal appearance and improvements in technology, materials, and methods are spurring demand for cosmetic and elective dental services. The market is expected to witness a healthy growth over the forecast period (2016-2026)Dental Services Market: Region- wise OutlookDepending on geographic regions, the global Dental services Market is segmented into seven key regions: North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Japan and Middle East & Africa.North America dominates the global market for dental services market due to high prevalence rate of dental caries, followed by Europe. According to WHO, 90% people are diagnosed with dental caries in North America. Asia & pacific regions is expected to record a healthy growth rate in a CAGR due to people adopting to smile makeover treatment.Request to View TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-1440 Dental Services Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players in this market areApollo White DentalDental Services GroupPacific Dental ServicesGreat Expressions Dental CentersGentle Dentistry, LLCCoast Dental Services, LLC Fact.MR PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 13:37:57 Press Information FactMR 11140 Rockville Pike Suite 400 Rockville, MD 20852 United States Abhishek Budholiya Marketing Manager 353-1-4434-232 email https://www.factmr.com/ # 697 Words 11140 Rockville Pike Suite 400 Rockville, MD 20852 United StatesMarketing Manager353-1-4434-232 Though the drone technology has been around for a few years, their capabilities are yet to be fully utilized. The use of drone technology has not merely been confined to defense organizations as the benefits of the unmanned aerial vehicle extends beyond this sector. Drones have begun to play a bigger role in framing a holistic picture built from number of data sources which is anticipated to continue in 2019. Unsurprisingly, companies are harnessing drone technology for commercial use across industries.The use of drones in fight against terrorism and military targets soared ever since the infamous 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Terrorism has plagued the world for decades killing millions of people. Given drones are comparatively cheaper than traditional aircraft and it does not require human cargo on board of the plane which becomes financially viable and negates pilot deaths, countries such as the U.S., U.K, and Israel have embraced drone to combat terrorism.Get Free Sample Report Here:Military UseBomb Detection & Surveillance and Air StrikesGiven the efficacious cameras and small size of the drones, it has been effective for bomb detection. The defense sector of any country regularly conducts surveys to ensure the protection of its people, place and protect its sovereignty.The use of drones for air strikes has been monumental as once, the then President of America, Barack Obama confirmed the use of drones to attack militants and amorphous terrorist outfits in Pakistans tribal regions.Non-Military UseShipping & Delivery, Filming & Journalism, AgricultureThough the use of drones in shipping is at nascent stage, the idea could be revolutionary through reducing human labor and delivery time.Several movies are being shot with the help of drones giving the film industry a new look. Meanwhile, the drones have leveraged reporters to reach unimaginable places. Besides, aerial footage for live feed has become prevalent.Drones have found its use in the field of agriculture, especially for large scale farmers who witnessed considerable improvements in crop yields with the use of drones. Aerial monitoring of agriculture lands can offer farmers with actionable insights of crop performance. Moreover, with the help of infrared sensors, farmers can assess the health of the crops.Browse Full Report with ToC Here:These is not the exhaustive list as the uses of drones expand to disaster management, geographic mapping, wildlife monitoring, safety instruction, namely. As such, these offer a lucrative opportunity for players in drone market.Drone Market: OverviewThe report offers a thorough analysis on the drone market with the aid of quantitative and qualitative analysis. The report focuses on the major drivers, trends, opportunities and restraints that have significant influence in the growth of the drone market. In order to provide readers with the holistic picture of the drone, the market has been segmented.The report includes executive summary which gives insights on market overview and market analysis. The report also includes macro-economic factors, opportunity analysis and global economic outlook. The report further gives delineates value chain analysis and forecast factors, the former offering suppliers end users, profit margins while the latter gives insights on relevance and impact. The report also incorporates pricing analysis and market volume projections. The report delves into consumer behavior analysis and major distributors lists and at the same time gives insights on insurance coverage in drone products.The information in the report is backed up by primary research, incorporating interactions in person, a reliable and authentic views of seasoned analyst, surveys, interviews and actionable insights of experts. Besides, the report is underpinned by secondary research encompassing resourceful database, trade journals and verified paid sources. The report is furthered by absolute dollar opportunity analysis which is an instrumental aspect in determining the growth of the drone market.Drone Market: Competitive LandscapeThe report also offers analysis on competition scenario, including competition dashboard and deep dive and also actionable insights on mergers and acquisitions. The report delineates overview, production footprint, product portfolio, sales footprint, channel footprint and strategy overview.Have Any Query?? Ask Our Industry Expert: https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=AE&rep_id=62 PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 10:49:32 Press Information Future Market Insights 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,, Abhishek Budholiya Manager 3479183531 email https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 619 Words 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,,Manager3479183531Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Eitelite is a type of carbonate mineral which is rarely found in a natural way in North America. The eitelite is grouped as carbonates in the mineral classification. Carbonates are primarily sedimentary rocks formed in the biological form and are complex in structure. The name eitelite was given after the scientist Wilhelm Hermann Julius Eitel first synthesised the mineral. Eitelite is a combination sodium and magnesium carbonate with a trigonal crystal system which is considered to be of major interest. The eitelite constitutes a major proportion of sodium than magnesium and found from igneous pluton, bituminous and dolomitic shale. The eitelite crystals species vary according to their origin and differ in colour. Eitelite is most closely associated with other minerals such as trona, northupite, searlesite leucosphenite etc. Eitelite is a type of carbonate material and hence finds application in the manufacturing of soaps, detergents, paper, glass & ceramics. Owing to the high proportion of sodium content in the eitelite, it finds usage in the casting where it acts as a bonding agent.Request For Report Sample @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3946 Global Eitelite Market: Drivers and RestraintsEitelite mineral is found majorly from the dolomites and limestone type of carbonate rocks. The eitelite mineral is available in rare quantity, and is useful in a variety of end-use industries, the increasing demand for it drives the global eitelite market. The eitelite mineral processors possess high demand owing to the demand for a variety of grades and technical specifications required for specific applications. Growth in the end-use industries such as dyes & pigments, paper and pulp, detergent etc. aids in driving the global eitelite market. Also, increasing demand for glass and ceramic is expected to drive the global eitelite market during the forecast period.However, the economic slowdown in some of the major countries such as China, U.S. restricts the growth of eitelite market to some extent.Global Eitelite Market: SegmentationOn the basis of planar type, eitelite market can be segmented as follows:-Planar-sPlaner-eNon-planarOn the basis of end-use industry, eitelite market can be segmented as follows:-Glass & CeramicsDetergent & CleanersDyes & PigmentsPaperOthersGlobal Eitelite Market: Region wise OutlookThe global eitelite market is divided into seven regions, namely North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Japan and the Middle East and Africa (MEA). The North America, is expected to hold major market share during the forecast period, in terms of consumption. Utah State in the North America has major occurrence of eitelite, also the demand from paper and pulp industry drives the eitelite market. Furthermore, advanced technology for mining boosts the eitelite market in the region. Western Europe eitelite market is expected to grow at relatively high CAGR during the forecast period. The countries such as Spain, France, and Germany among others are expected to contribute majorly in terms of consumption owing to the factor such as robust mining industry. The weak economic conditions in Eastern Europe is expected to affect the eitelite market to some extent. In APEJ eitelite market, the countries such as China, India, Taiwan is expected to hold major share in the market owing to the vast development of end-users industries in the region. In the MEA region, the carbonate rocks are vastly found and presence of oil in the carbonates is of major interest.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC): https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3946 Global Eitelite Market: Country PresenceSome of the prominent countries identified having presence of eitelite, are Utah, U.SKhibiny Massif, RussiaSome of the prominent players for carbonate manufacturing are-Schaefar Kalk GmbH & Co. KGHuber Engineering MaterialsFranklin MineralsExcalibar Minerals LLC Hexamethylenediamine Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 04:35:57 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 675 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Hexamethylenediamine, abbreviated as HMDA, is a colorless solid with a prominent amine odor. Hexamethylenediamine is synthesized from adiponitrile and is useful in a wide range of applications in the chemical industry. Hexamethylenediamine is used as a chemical intermediate monomer in the production of polymers such as nylon 6-6. In addition to this, it is also used in the manufacturing of coatings, curing agents, additives in petrochemical industry, inks and in scale and corrosion inhibitors used in water treatment chemicals. Moreover, hexamethylenediamine is used in combination with dicarboxylic acids for the production of other nylons such as nylon 69, nylon 610, and nylon 612. It is also used as a hardener for epoxy resins. In recent years, the demand for bio-based hexamethylenediamine needed for manufacturing nylon 66 has increased immensely. The overall market for hexamethylenediamine is anticipated to grow at a moderate CAGR over the forecast period.Global Hexamethylenediamin Market DynamicsGlobal Hexamethylenediamin Market DriversOne of the major consumption areas for hexamethylenediamine is the manufacturing process of nylon 66 fiber and resins. Hence, the increase in demand for nylon 66 fibers has largely impacted the global hexamethylenediamine market in a positive way. With the growth of nylon as a major substitute for a number of applications, especially in the automotive industry where nylon has substituted metals in a number of applications, it is expected that the hexamethylenediamine market will grow at a fast pace. During the past few years, there has been a significant rise in demand for hexamethylenediamine which is used for the manufacturing of nylon 6-6 resins.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3721 Global Hexamethylenediamin Market RestraintsThe increasing research and development focused on the development of a better substitute to replace the use of hexamethylenediamine during the manufacturing of nylon 66 is a major restraint for the market. Additionally, hexamthylenediamine is a highly corrosive substance and hence, there are regulations governing the manufacturing, packing and transport of this chemical.Global Hexamethylenediamin Market TrendsThere has been a significant increase in demand for bio-based nylon resins and hence, companies are focusing on creating a bio-based production technology for the manufacturing hexamethylenediamine and adipic acid (the other component used in the manufacture of nylon 66 along with hexamthylenediamine). The major factors differentiating the conventional hexamethylenediamine from bio-based hexamethylenediamine include cost effectiveness, raw material prices and the production process.Yet another major trend observed in the global hexamethylenediamine market is that major manufacturers are focusing on the expansion of their production capacity to gain an edge over other players in the market. Many of the manufacturers have expanded their footprints in the emerging markets of China, India and other Asian Countries. The manufacturers are also making significant investments on acquisitions in the global hexamethylenediamine market.Global Hexamethylenediamine Market SegmentationThe global Hexamethylenediamine market can be segmented on the basis of application and region.On the basis of application, the global hexamethylenediamine market can be segmented into:Water treatment chemicalsPaints, inks and CoatingsAdhesives and SealantsChemical synthesisLubricantsTextile IndustryConsumer goodsMedical applicationsPaper and Pulp IndustryGlobal Hexamethylenediamine Market Regional OutlookThe global hexamethylenediamine market is dominated by North America and Western Europe. Both the regions are a major consumer of hexamethylenediamine, which is majorly used in the manufacturing of nylon 66 resins. However, the regions will show steady growth over the forecast period as they have relatively mature markets. Japan also holds a significant share in the global hexamethylenediamine market. The market for hexamethylenediamine is projected to shift towards Asia Pacific with China expected to be a dominant player. Asia Pacific region is projected to register a relatively higher CAGR as compared to other regions. Middle East and Africa is estimated to show sluggish growth over the outlook period.Request Report for TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3721 Global Hexamethylenediamine Market ParticipantsSome of the market participants identified across the value chain of the global hexamethylenediamine market are:BASF SE, Toray Industries, Inc., Solvay S.A., Asahi Kasei Corporation, Evonik Industries AG, Invista, Rennovia, Eastman Chemical Company, Genomatica, Ascend Performance Materials, Ashland Inc. The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, application and industry. Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Vehicles PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 08:32:31 Press Information Fact.MR Office: Dublin 2 Suite 9884 27 Upper Pembroke Street, Dublin 2, Ireland Sudip Saha Head of Marketing +353-1-4434-232 email http://www.factmr.com # 711 Words Office: Dublin 2Suite 988427 Upper Pembroke Street,Dublin 2, IrelandHead of Marketing+353-1-4434-232 Emergency medical services are the lifeline of any economy and the provision of prompt and timely medical care is the foundation of global healthcare services. An integral part of medical care are EMS vehicles that provide emergency medical aid to people in need by transporting patients to hospitals in advanced vehicles fitted with the basic medical equipment. Over the years, EMS vehicles have witnessed a surge of technological advancements that have brought in more sophistication in emergency critical care.Request Sample Report @ https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=837 Some of the recent innovations incorporate smart technology that extends the life of EMS vehicles, reduces unexpected downtime, and facilitates remote repairs and maintenance of EMS vehicles in real time. These advanced EMS vehicles come with enhanced functionality and ease of use; and are designed to provide optimal emergency medical aid in a speedy and timely manner, while adhering to patient safety and comfort. Cloud services underpin the backend functionality of these superior EMS vehicles and enable medical staff to continuously monitor vehicle performance on a daily basis.In-vehicle Equipment to Acquire a Facelift with Increasing Technological InnovationSome of the recent EMS vehicles launched in the global market come with features such as hands-free decontamination solutions and equipment that facilitates more sophisticated and deep disinfection. Advanced processes used to disinfect these new-age EMS vehicles also ensure that no harmful substances are released into the environment thereby bringing in more biodegradability into EMS vehicles.EMS technology is also undergoing rapid transformation in the wake of smart devices and cloud computing. Besides autonomous EMS vehicles, technical advances in emergency medical services vehicles include wireless communications, operator assisted navigation technology, vehicle collision prevention technology, etc.Browse Full Report @ https://www.factmr.com/report/837/emergency-medical-services-vehicles-market EMS Vehicles Play a Crucial Role in Protecting Public Health and SafetyOver the years, emergency medical services have emerged as an integral facet of the healthcare ecosystem of every nation. In this context, the provision of mobile critical medical aid has acquired a deeper significance. EMS vehicles are being deployed more than ever not only to address the emergency medical issues of people the world over, but are also used to safeguard the general health and wellbeing of citizens. For instance, in the recent opioid crisis, data collected by EMS vehicles was used by public health officials to study the rate of occurrence of specific overdoses and predict the next possible occurrence. Medical institutions work closely with paramedics to connect survivors to rehabilitation centers, and EMS vehicles play an important role in the provision of these services.Emergency medical services also play a critical role in trauma care. Every year, thousands die in road mishaps and accidents throughout the world. Trained EMS professionals assist the transportation of patients to pre-designated trauma centers through EMS vehicles fitted with the latest emergency medical equipment.EMS vehicles are also used in preventive care. EMS organizations are involved in creating public awareness of injuries and illnesses for instance, the dangers of heatstroke that have resulted in the deaths of infants and toddlers being left unattended in cars. Logistics has a major role to play here and EMS vehicles are kept on alert with the latest life-saving equipment to respond to critical medical emergencies as well as to facilitate preventive care programs organized by community organizations. Speak To Research Analyst for Detailed Insights @ https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=AE&rep_id=837 Use of EMS Vehicles Extends Far Beyond Basic Emergency Medical Services and This is Just the Tip of the IcebergEMS vehicles are no longer mere ambulances with blaring sirens that rush to the assistance of patients in need. EMS vehicles are used in road accident rescue operations; to facilitate home births; and to transport stroke and heart attack patients to hospitals quickly. EMS vehicles also facilitate advanced critical life support and are used in mobile blood donation units. The use of EMS vehicles as advanced critical life support ambulances is witnessing rising adoption across the global healthcare industry. A recent study on the EMS vehicles market by Fact .MR reveals the steadily rising demand for EMS vehicles in advanced critical life support as evinced by a robust growth rate of 7.2% in terms of value during the period 2018 2028. PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 14:27:10 Press Information RESEARCH REPORT INSIGHTS 42 joseph street, Portcarling P0B 1J0 , Muskoka, Ontario, Canada bishu T L 6317214201 email http://www.researchreportinsights.com # 627 Words 42 joseph street, Portcarling P0B 1J0 , Muskoka, Ontario, CanadaT L6317214201 The food sector is considered to represent a noteworthy share as far as utilization in the worldwide industrial starch market. They are utilized in producing different products in the food sector, for example, confectionaries, bakery products, canned fruits and jams, monosodium glutamate (MSG) and commercial caramel. The food and beverages market was reported to lead the worldwide industrial starch market in 2015. The product is utilized in desserts, in the form of a thickening agent with the expansion of milk or chilly water. So also, gravy granules or cheese sauce granules might be thickened with boiling water without the product going knotty.The rising utilization of industrial starch in the form of adhesives in customer products and packaging sector is likely to enhance the expansion of the worldwide industrial starch market. The rising trend of biomaterials and biofuels, as well as the utilization of starch in this sector, is considered to fuel the market growth. A high requirement from a variety of end-use sectors comprising pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, drilling and oil, as well as paper is imagined to bode on form for market growth.Request For Report Sample: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upsample/120124654/Industrial-Starch-Market On the other hand, the use of resin glue as a substitute for starch in textile and paper sector is anticipated to impede the development of the worldwide market for industrial starch.Starch is anticipated to foresee considerable development over the years to come. Little factories located near farms for starch making from root crops has aided in decreasing overheads, logistics costs and transportation and enhancing effectiveness. India is one of the main manufacturers of textile raw material in the Asia Pacific region.APEJ is gaining traction in the market for industrial starch on the basis of consumption. This is because of the expansion of end-use sectors for instance food, paper and textile sector in the growing clustering of the region. North America as well is gaining traction in the industrial starch market, as a result of the fast expansion of the industrial packaging in the region. On the other hand, Latin America is considered to gain higher revenues over the years to come, owing to the rising requirement for processed food. Brazil is also considered as the foremost producer of corn as well as thus accounts for noteworthy in starch production. The rising industrial packaging sector and end-use sectors in Western Europe are probable to grow the industrial starch market share in the region.Request For Report Toc: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/TOC/120124654/Industrial-Starch-Market Industrial starches are in general made from wheat and maize on account of low cost along with their easiness of processing and availability. Small-scale mill proprietors act a critical role by adding collaboration with big-scale producers as contract producers. Companies are centering on r&d to employ fresh processing technologies to increase production capabilities and properties. A few of the foremost players in the worldwide industrial starch market are Tate & Lyle, Archer Daniels Midland Company, Cargill, Incorporated, Grain Processing Corporation, Universal Starch Chem Allied Ltd., Manildra Group, GreenTech Industries Ltd., EVEREST STARCH (IND) PVT.LTD ., Bangkok Starch Industrial Co., Ltd. and Karandikars Cashell Private Limited.In 2015, Cargill Inc. was amongst the top market players. The company caters products for beverages, personal care, confectionery, food, and snacks. In July 2015, Cargill presented an instantaneous modified starch named C PulpTex 12931. This item could stand firm inconsiderate processing conditions as well as could improve the texture of soups, condiments, and sauces. Moreover, Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) extends starch products extensively employed to widen the shelf life of food products. During August 2015, the ADM opened merchandizing and distribution offices in Guatemala and El Salvador to increase its footprint in Central America.Report Analysis: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upcomming/120124654/Industrial-Starch-Market he popular Christmas tradition features 16 nativity scenes telling the birth of the King of Kings across five different Long Beach churches. PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 13:15:06 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 726 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Lactic acid forms an important industrial product, which is used in the formation of various small or large compounds. Lactic acid is formed through the breakdown of glucose and its oxidation. Lactic acid can be processed both naturally and synthetically. The naturally obtained lactic acid is formed by the fermentation process through bacterial reaction, the prominent bacteria involved in the process are lactobacillus, bifidobacterium, pediococcus among others. Moreover, lactic acid is also naturally present in human body obtained from glycogen through muscles cells to support energy production when oxygen supply is inadequate in the body. However, chemically lactic acid is derived through the hydrolysis of lacto nitrile. Lactic acid finds extensive application in food industry as it helps to regulate micro flora in the food and act as food preservatives. It is formed by the natural fermentation process in food products such as cheese, soy sauce, pickled vegetables among others. Apart from food industry, it is widely used in pharmaceutical and chemical industry. The polymers of lactic acid are widely used as labelling and packaging material as they are biodegradable and being biocompatible in nature, they are being used in manufacturing of sutures, drugs and prosthetic devices.Request Report Sample@ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3895 Global Lactic Acid Market: Drivers and Restraints The widespread applicability of lactic acid across various sectors is driving the demand for lactic acid market. Lactic acid possess various peculiar characteristics, which has different roles to be played in various food segments. . In meat poultry and fish products lactic acid helps to prolong their shelf life along with preventing the growth of pathogenic bacteria. In pickled vegetables and salad dressings, lactic acid helps to prevent their spoilage and enhances the product safety, whereas in dairy products certain bacteria breakdown the sugar of milk into lactic acid which provides a creamy texture and savoury flavour to the products such as yogurt whose flavour and texture is dependent upon the presence of lactic acid. Hence broad spectrum of applicability in food industry is spurring the growth of lactic acid market. Owing to antimicrobial, moisturizing property of lactic acid, it has a revitalising effect on the skin. Hence, is gaining popularity among cosmetics manufacturers. In other non-food application lactic acid is available as myriad which is extensively used in various industrial applications such as pharmaceuticals, chemical and textile industry Thereby, propelling the growth of lactic acid market.The major challenge faced by the lactic acid market is to fermentation process of the lactic acid which requires technological optimization and product purification. Moreover, this biotechnological production requires optimization of nutrients thus, leading to high manufacturing cost. Thereby, restraining the growth of lactic acid market.Global Lactic Acid Market: Segmentation On the basis of application, lactic acid market is segmented into:-Dairy ProductsMeat poultry and fishPickled vegetablesBaked productsSavoury flavoursSalad dressingOn the basis of end user industries, lactic acid market is segmented into:-Food & BeveragesChemicalPharmaceuticalCosmeticsTextilesOn the basis of functionality, lactic acid market is segmented into:-Flavouring AgentEmulsifierph RegulatorAnti-forming agentAnti-microbial agentGlobal Lactic Acid Market: Region wise OutlookThe global lactic acid market is categorised into seven regions, namely, Western Europe, Eastern Europe Middle East and Africa (MEA), Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), Japan Latin America and, North America. North America accounts for largest share of the lactic acid market. The food industry accounts for the majority of the lactic acid market and rest is contributed by non-food application in North America region. Asia Pacific accounts for potential region which is expected to record significant growth during the forecast period. Increasing demand for versatility in the food products among consumers, is contributing to the growth of lactic acid market as it prolongs the shelf life of the food products and make them perishable. Europe also holds significant share in the market. Increasing demand for processed and functional food among consumers, is propelling the demand for lactic acid in the food products.Global Lactic Acid Market: Key Players Some of the prominent players identified in the global lactic acid market includes:NatureWorks LLCCorbionGalactic s.a.Archer Daniels Midland CompanyMusashino Chemical (China) Co.,Ltd Palsgaard A/SHenan Jindan Lactic Acid Technology Co., LtdSigma-Aldrich Co. LLC.FuterroRequest Report Sample@ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3895 PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 10:50:58 Press Information Future Market Insights 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,, Abhishek Budholiya Manager 3479183531 email https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 655 Words 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,,Manager3479183531Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Fatty alcohols are artificially prepared with chemical compounds derived from plant and animal fats. Fatty alcohols are oily liquids named as oleochemicals as they produce from natural oil and fats like vegetable oils and waxes. Fatty alcohol is likewise derived from petrochemicals by synthetically processing ethylene. Lauryl myristyl alcohol is originated from South Africa. Lauryl myristyl alcohol is a type of fatty alcohol which is a form of the combination of C12 and C14 that is lauryl and myristyl. Lauryl myristyl alcohol is also known as DodecanolTetradecanol. The chemical formula of lauryl myristyl alcohol is C26H54O, and the molecular weight is 186.3368. Laurel myristyl alcohol is colorless liquid and has a mild odor and decomposes when subjected to excessive heat. The life span of Laurel myristyl alcohol is one year from its date of manufacturing. The Lauryl myristyl alcohol has extensive uses in several industries including food, cosmetic, automotive, textile, and chemical industries. Moreover, Lauryl Alcohol is used as an intermediate in the manufacture of surfactants.Request For Report Sample @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3930 Global Lauryl myristyl alcohol: Market Dynamics:Global lauryl myristyl market alcohol is driven by rising chemical and manufacturing industries. The wide range of application in various industries leads to increase the demand for lauryl myristyl alcohol. The consumers are using more of personal care products which further leads to increase in usage lauryl myristyl alcohol in cosmetics. Macroeconomic factors such as increasing disposable income, literacy rate, the rapid rate of urbanization, and change in lifestyle also lead to the growth of lauryl myristyl alcohol market. The lauryl myristyl alcohol causes corrosive of ingestion, irritation to skin and eye contact, inhalation problem. Severe overexposure can cause death leads to restraining the growth of the market.Global Lauryl myristyl alcohol: Segmentation:Based on uses, the global Lauryl myristyl alcohol market is segmented into:Surfactants and EastersLubricants and GreasesPersonal CareSoaps and DetergentsMetal cleanersPulp and Paper ProcessingBased on packaging, the global Lauryl myristyl alcohol market is segmented into:DrumsLiquid BulksBagsBased on grades and forms, the global Lauryl myristyl alcohol market is segmented into:KosherNFPastillesBased on end-use industry, the global Lauryl myristyl alcohol market is segmented into:Cosmetics IndustryChemical IndustryAutomotive IndustryTextile IndustryPetrochemical IndustryCeramics industryPharmaceuticals IndustryConstruction IndustryBased on Product type, the global Lauryl myristyl alcohol market is segmented into:AdditivesChemicalsMetallic StearatesOleochemicalsPigmentsPolymersPVC Heat StabilizersTitanium DioxideBased on Agent, the global Lauryl myristyl alcohol is segmented intoEmulsionStabilizerThickenerBased on the region, the global Lauryl myristyl alcohol market is segmented intoNorth AmericaLatin AmericaEastern EuropeWestern EuropeAsia Pacific excluding JapanJapanThe Middle East and AfricaGlobal Lauryl myristyl alcohol: Regional Outlook:The global Lauryl myristyl alcohol is segmented into seven regions includes North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific excluding Japan, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Japan and The Middle East and Africa. Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing Lauryl myristyl alcohol regional market. Moreover, the Asia Pacific and Japan has shown the growth in Lauryl myristyl alcohol market owing to rise in demand for the food and cosmetic industry in the region. European Lauryl myristyl alcohols market is expected to decline share to high growth in areas such as Asia Pacific and Latin America. The uncertain economic circumstance in the region combined with declining growth in the main downstream industries is relied upon to have an adversely affect the Lauryl myristyl alcohols market. North America Lauryl myristyl alcohols market is foreseen to witness average growth over the anticipated period due to expanding the bio-based product.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC): https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3930 Global Lauryl myristyl alcohol: Key Players:The prominent key players of the global Lauryl myristyl alcohol areVVF L.L.CP&G ChemicalsLubrizol CorporationThe Dow Chemical CompanyEco green Oleochemicals PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 23:28:00 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 524 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 PITTSBURGH, PA / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / Liberated Syndication, Inc. (OTCQB: LSYN) (''Libsyn'') announced today that Chris Spencer, CEO, and John Busshaus, CFO, will host a conference call on Friday, March 15th, at 12:00 p.m. ET to discuss 2018 financial results and provide a general business update.Shareholders and other interested parties may participate in the conference call by dialing 844-602-0380 (U.S. callers); 862-298-0970 (international callers) a few minutes before the start time.Questions for consideration for the call can be emailed to investor@ libsyn.com prior to 5:00 p.m. ET, on March 14th, 2019. A replay of the conference call will be accessible two hours afterwards and available for three weeks at https://investor.libsyn.com About Liberated SyndicationLiberated Syndication is based in Pittsburgh, PA and owns and operates two hosting businesses, Libsyn and Pair Networks. You can learn more about Liberated Syndication at: https://investor.libsyn.com Libsyn is one of the world's leading podcast hosting networks and has been providing publishers with distribution and monetization services since 2004. In 2017 Libsyn delivered over 7.2 Billion download requests. We host over 3.96 Million media files for more than 44,000 podcasts, including, currently, around 35% of the top 200 podcasts in iTunes. Podcast producers choose Libsyn to measure their audience, deliver popular audio and video episodes, distribute their content through smartphone Apps (iOS, and Android), and monetize via premium subscription services and advertising. We are a Pittsburgh based company with a world-class team. Visit us on the web at www.libsyn.com Pair Networks, founded in 1996, is one of the oldest and most experienced Internet hosting company providing a full range of fast, powerful and reliable Web hosting services. Pair offers a suite of Internet services from shared hosting to virtual private servers to customized solutions with world-class 24x7 customer support. Based in Pittsburgh, Pair serves businesses, bloggers, artists, musicians, educational institutions and non-profit organizations around the world. Visit us on the web at www.pair.com Investor Relations ContactArt BatsonArthur Douglas & Associates, Inc.407-478-1120Legal Notice''Forward-looking Statements'' as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 may be included in some of the information or materials made available on this website. These statements relate to future events or our future financial performance. These statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future results or events. We disclaim any intention or obligation to revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise, except as required by law. There are important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from those contained in forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, risks associated with our change in business strategy towards more heavy reliance upon on our new talent segment and wholesale channels, actions of regulators concerning our business operations or trading markets for our securities, the extent to which we are able to develop new services and markets for our services, our significant reliance on third parties to distribute our content, the level of demand and market acceptance of our services and the "Risk Factors" set forth in our most recent SEC filings.SOURCE: Liberated Syndication, Inc. Future Market Insights has announced the addition of the Linear Actuators Market " report to their offering Future Market insights PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 14:34:29 Press Information Future Market insight Future Market Insights 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018, Valley Cottage, NY 10989, United States T: +1-347-918-3531 F: +1-845-579-5705 Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.com Website: www.futuremarketinsights.com Abhishek Bhudholia MANAGER 8455795705 email https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ # 714 Words 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: www.futuremarketinsights.comMANAGER8455795705 Linear actuators assist in converting energy into straight line motions, generally for positioning applications. Most of the linear actuators are either mechanical or electro-mechanical devices that provide controlled movement and positioning. These actuators are primarily used in industrial machinery, computer peripherals, valves, and many other places where linear motion is required. A typical linear actuator generally produces push and pull action. As most processes across a variegated range of industries gets automated, the global linear actuators market is expected to expand with an impressive CAGR throughout the forecast period.Linear ActuatorsMarket: Drivers & RestraintsThe major factors boosting the growth of linear actuators market is rising automation across manufacturing industry. Industrial objectives such as achieving complete factory automation, and integrating Industrial Internet of Things are some of the prime reasons that will drive more demand for linear actuators. While, rising industrialization particularly in the third world countries is another factor that will drive the demand in the global linear actuators market, on the backdrop of increasing number of factories. As the number of research studies conducted increases, demand for telescopic actuators is expected to increase significantly. Also as companies overcome their legacy systems to achieve higher efficiency, and replace existing actuators with new ones, demand for linear actuators is expected to rise. Furthermore, as an increasing number of industrial process adopt self-control and positioning demand in the linear actuators market is expected to continuously rise.However, as concerns regarding employment rises among most countries on the backdrop of increasing automation in factories, demand for linear actuators might get sluggish over the end years of the forecast period. Adoption of 3D printing in many industries is another factor that will restrain the demand for linear actuators, as usage of machines will decrease.Request Sample Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3778 Linear ActuatorsMarket: Market SegmentationThe Linear Actuators Market is segmented into two parts based on operation type and end use industry:Based on operation mechanism, the linear actuator market is segmented into:MechanicalHydraulicPneumaticPiezoelectricElectro-mechanical actuatorsBased on End Use Industry, the linear actuator market is segmented into:AutomotiveMedical/HealthcareEnergy and Mining,SteelConstructionMilitaryChemicalOthersLinear Actuators Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, linear actuators market has been categorized into seven key regions including North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, APEJ, Japan, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa.A prominent share of the demand for linear actuators comes from North America, and the region is expected to maintain its dominance throughout the forecast period. Furthermore, with more inclination towards shifting manufacturing in US from China and other ASEAN countries, demand for linear actuators will further rise in the region. Asia Pacific Exc. Japan is another prominent shareholder in terms of demand for linear actuators, amid, large manufacturing sector of China. Moreover, with India and Indonesia picking up at a fast pace, demand for linear actuators is expected to expand with a bullish growth rate over the forecast period. Being home to large automotive and research base companies, Western Europe is another prominent region generating huge demand for linear actuators. Eastern Europe is also expected to generate descent demand for linear actuators, particularly from energy and defense sector. Rising industrialization and the already dominant oil and gas industry of Middle East and Africa is the prime reason driving automation in the Middle Eastern region. Thus driving more demand for linear actuators. Japan is another prominent industrial nation, which drives demand for linear actuators, due to high automation penetration in their industries coupled with growing semiconductor industry of the region.Linear Actuators Market: Key PlayersSome of the players identified in Global Linear Actuators market are:-Duff-NortonHelix Linear Technologies, Inc.Altra Industrial MotionTolomatic, Inc.Fabco-Air, Inc.Actuonix Motion DevicesTusk Direct, Inc.Bishop-Wisecarver CorporationBEI Kimco MagneticsBurr Engineering & Development CompanyDel-Tron Precision, Inc.Rollon India Pvt. Ltd.The global woodworking machines market is highly fragmented due to the presence of large number of regional and global players. Regional players choose quality service and competitive pricing as their winning strategy over global players. In response to this, global players are largely involved in merger & acquisition and partnership activities in order to enhance their profitability margin and market share.Request to View TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3778 Research Report Insights PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 03:21:46 Press Information Research Report Insights Research Report Insights 42 joseph street, Portcarling P0B 1J0, Muskoka, Ontario T: +1-631-721-4201 Vikas Bahurupi Manager 6317214201 email https://www.researchreportinsights.com # 443 Words Research Report Insights42 joseph street,Portcarling P0B 1J0,Muskoka, OntarioT: +1-631-721-4201Manager6317214201 The Linerless Labels are being used for a long time in the market. They come on the products we buy from the grocery stores having a sticky tape with a logo or name on it. They are used for the purpose of tracing and tracking of the product. They provides high quality printing which is good for brands to print their name and logo. Linerless Labels are considered to be environment friendly and they dont create any waste and are available in various types of adhesive options.Linerless Labels Market are segmented On the basis of Composition: Facestock, Adhesives, Others; on the basis of Printing ink: Water-based ink, Solvent-based ink, Holt melt-based ink, UV curable ink; on the basis of Printing technology: Digital printing, Flexographic printing, Gravure printing, Lithography printing, Screen printing, Letterpress printing; on the basis of Application: Food & beverage, Pharmaceuticals, Personal care, Consumer products, Retail, ; Others (apparels & textiles, industrial lubricant & paints, gifts); on the basis of region; North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, RoW.Request For Report Sample with Table of Contents@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upsample/120124898/Linerless-Label-Market Being easily printable, cost effective and providing high quality printing are the main key drivers for Linerless Labels Market for which it becomes the preferred type of labelling for food and beverage sector. Food and beverages market is never ending thus it will drive the Linerless Labels Market to peak heights and open new prospects for growth.The Linerless Labels are proved to be the suitable labels for the high definition printings for the growing packaging industry. These labels require a special printer to get printed thus adding another machinery and the cost. This is the major downside of Linerless Labels.Request For Report Discount@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/updiscount/120124898/Linerless-Label-Market On the basis of the market segment by application, Food and Beverages industry has the largest market share. With the growing packaging industry, it has now became necessary for the products to be hygienic but also to look attractive. Thus, Food & Beverages sector are focusing more on the packaging these days.Geographically, Asia Pacific is has the leading market in the world followed by European Market. The rapidly growing industrialization in the developing countries of Asia Pacific region like India, China etc. are encouraging the markets of food & beverages, Dairy, pharmaceuticals to grow. Thus adding growth to the market of Linerless Labels to expand with itself to a higher level.Report Analysis@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upcomming/120124898/Linerless-Label-Market The major key players include: 3M Company, Coveris Holdings S.A., CCL Industries Inc., Constantia Flexible Group GMBH, RR Donnelley & Sons Company, Innovia films, Reflex Labels limited, R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company. PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 06:23:25 Press Information Research Report Insights Research Report Insights (RRI 42 Joseph Street Port carling P0B 1J0 Muskoka, Ontario1 Phone - +1-631-721-4201 Website: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/ Email: sales@researchreportinsights.com BISHU CEO 6317214201 email http://www.. # 1002 Words Research Report Insights (RRI42 Joseph StreetPort carling P0B 1J0Muskoka, Ontario1Phone - +1-631-721-4201Website: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/Email: sales@researchreportinsights.comCEO6317214201http://www.. researchreportinsights.com Lingerie market has occupied a significant position in the apparel industry in recent years as it not only serves its functional benefits but also is considered as an basic necessity to every woman. The the global lingerie market has been bifurcated on the basis of product types into bras, knickers and panties, lounge wear, shape wear and others which includes baby doll, corsets, chemises and chemisoles among others. Bra as an essential necessity and also a fashion accessory to every women and it has captured the largest market share in 2015. Knickers and panties also occupied a significant position in the same year, thus contributing significantly to the overall market size of the lingerie industry.The market is further segmented on the basis of distribution channel into online stores and storefront. Online stores captured the largest market in 2015 due to high penetration of internet services and rapid advancements in the field of technology, thus creating a strong platform for the manufacturers of lingerie Further, the e-commerce giants are engaged in strong promotional activities due to which they provide with continuous discount options and various other offers which attract both consumers and manufacturers to avail this platform.Females in the developing countries are experiencing latest trends towards carrying themselves in public. They are changing their outlook towards accepting innerwear as a casual affair and take time to choose and make a purchase. The outerwear of women has undergone a dramatic change and due to this women prefer selecting inner wear, especially bras that can match with their attire. They try to purchase lingerie depending on the occasion or event, such as there are special sport wear bras for gymnasium purpose. It can be demonstrated from the product differentiation brought by the lingerie manufacturers over online and retail stores. Thus this is a key factor complementing the growth of the global lingerie market.Request For Report Sample: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/sample/110114599/Lingerie-Market Lingerie has witnessed a rapid acceptance in the fashion industry. Women from all backgrounds want to try out the latest trends in the inner wear segment. Most of the large brands have exclusive stores in shopping malls or independent stores. In developing countries like India and China, brands like Jockey try to reach out to customers through small roadside innerwear shops. Additionally, lingerie is available at stores as well as online. Brands like Victoria Secret have country specific websites for easier transactions and shipment.However, the lingerie wear maintains high cost for advertisement and other marketing promotions. This is due to the cost of celebrities or models that are hired for being featured in the photo shoots. Moreover, the destination or location cost of the photo shoot depends and therefore larger brands do not compromise in keeping high cost for their lingerie wear. Therefore, this factor is majorly hindering the growth of the market and the impact of the same is likely to reduce by the end of the forecast period.Moreover, the global lingerie market is experiencing moderate growth in the apparel segment as nowadays individuals are more inclined towards branded items, most of which are usually priced on the higher end. People from all backgrounds and income group want to avail a comfortable and lasting inner wear that can be fashionable as well as skin-friendly. There are many local brands or companies that manufacture cheap quality products to cater to the wide population in the under developed or developing countries. Mergers and acquisitions are a strategic way of entering the market and understanding the current needs and preferences of the population. Through this, the large companies will benefit in capturing the market and at the same time, will enable the small companies to fight for a better position in the market..Request For Reprot discount: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/discount/110114599/Lingerie-Market Moreover, in this report the study provides different countries included in different regions such as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Middle East and Africa. North America includes U.S. and Rest of North America. Europe includes U.K., Germany, France, Russia, Italy and Rest of Europe. Asia Pacific includes countries such as India, China, Japan and Rest of Asia Pacific. In addition, Middle East and Africa includes country such as UAE, South Africa and Rest of Middle East and Africa. Latin America comprise of countries such as Brazil and Rest of Latin AmericaAsia Pacific is anticipated to witness the fastest growth during the forecast period. Transition in the lifestyle of the consumers which is backed by rapid urbanization and increasing purchasing power is a major factor behind the high growth of this market in Asia Pacific. Further, consumer exposure to the same by way of advertisements through televisions, and print media among others is another key factor responsible for the growth of the Lingerie Market in this region.Some of the major key players operating in the global contact lens market are, Jockey International Inc. (Kenosha, Wisconsin, U.S), Hanes (North Carolina U.S.), Groupe Chantelle (Cachan, France), LVMH (Boise U.S), L Brands Inc. (Columbus, Ohio), MAS Holdings Limited (Colombo, Srilanka), Ann Summers (London, U.K.), Marks and Spencer (London U.K), PVH Corporation (New York, U.S) among others.The report analyzes the factors that are driving and restraining the growth of the lingerie market. This report will help manufacturers, distributors and suppliers to understand the present and future trends in this market and formulate strategies accordingly.The global lingerie market can be segmented as follows;-Global Lingerie Market, by Type Bra Knickers and Panties Lounge wear Shape wear OthersGlobal Lingerie Market, by Distribution Channel Online Stores Store FrontGlobal Lingerie Market, by Geography North America U.S. Rest of North America Europe U.K. Germany France Italy Rest of Europe Asia Pacific China Japan India Rest of Asia Pacific Latin America Brazil Rest of Latin America Middle East and Africa UAE South Africa Rest of Middle East & AfricaReport Analysis: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/rd/110114599/Lingerie-Market Lithium Bromide Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 04:39:52 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 673 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Lithium bromide is a hygroscopic white crystalline organic compound. It is manufactured by the reaction between hydrobromic acid and lithium carbonate. Being hygroscopic in nature, lithium bromide is mainly used as a desiccant for air-conditioning and also, in industrial drying systems. Lithium bromide has a strong affinity towards water, owing to which a water-lithium bromide solution is used in vapour absorption refrigeration systems. In the pharmaceutical industry, lithium bromide is used as a hypnotic and sedative in medicine, and it is used in the manufacturing of various pharmaceutical products. Furthermore, lithium bromide finds application in metal working, such as in brazing and welding fluxes, among others.Lithium Bromide Market: DynamicsWith the growth of the chemical industry across the globe, the demand for materials involved in manufacturing processes is also increasing. Increasing demand for lithium bromide in refrigeration and drying applications is expected to in turn drive growth of global lithium bromide market over the forecast period. Along with this, the increasing use of lithium bromide in chemical synthesis is another factor that is anticipated to drive the market growth. Furthermore, owing to the growing automotive industry and infrastructure development, the demand for metal working fluids and auxiliary materials is expected to register steady growth, this in turn is expected to result in an increase in the demand for lithium bromide for brazing and welding fluxes. On the other hand, the corrosive nature of lithium bromide limits its use for various applications, and this is likely to act as an impediment to growth of global lithium bromide market during forecast period.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3763 Lithium Bromide Market: SegmentationOn the basis of type of compound, the global lithium bromide market is segmented into solid and aqueous type. Further, on the basis of application, the global lithium bromide market is segmented into pharmaceuticals, air-conditioning, industrial drying, metal working, chemical synthesis, and others.Lithium Bromide Market: Regional OutlookIn terms of consumption, the global lithium bromide market is mainly dominated by the Asia Pacific region. Steady growth in chemicals and pharmaceuticals industries in the APAC region and the increasing demand for medicines is expected to translate into an increase in demand for lithium bromide. In APAC region, China, followed by India is a major market for lithium bromide in terms of value and volume. The APAC lithium bromide market is expected to register a healthy CAGR over the forecast period. North America and Europe collectively hold the second spot in terms of market volume share.Rising demand for air conditioning, industrial drying and chemical synthesis applications in North America and Europe are expected to drive the increase in demand for lithium bromide over the forecast period. In Europe, Western Europe dominates the lithium bromide market in terms of consumption. North America and Europe lithium bromide markets are expected to register steady growth over the forecast period. In the Middle East & Africa region, Israel is a major producer of bromine compounds, owing to the presence of the Dead Sea a major reserve of bromine. The MEA lithium bromide market is expected to register steady growth over the forecast period. Latin America is projected to register slow growth over the forecast period.Request Report for TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3763 Lithium Bromide Market: Market ParticipantsExamples of some of the market participants in the global lithium bromide market, identified across the value chain includeAlbemarle Corporation, FMC Corporation, Nanjing Taiye Chemical Industry Co. Ltd.,Honjo Chemicals, Leverton-Clarke Speciality Chemicals, ICL Industrial Products, Shanghai China Lithium Industrial Co. Ltd. (SCL), Westman Chemicals Pvt. Ltd., Shreenivas Chemicals Pvt. Ltd., Deep Pharm-Chem Pvt. Ltd., and Axiom Chemicals Pvt. Ltd., among others. The market of lithium bromide is a highly consolidated market. Manufacturers of lithium bromide are adopting the strategy of backward integration as a few key players account for a major share of bromine reserves. The limited availability of bromine reserves helps these players cater to the increasing demand for lithium bromide and increase their footprint in the global market. PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 13:06:23 Press Information Research Solution Insights (RSI) Research Report Insights 42 joseph street, Portcarling P0B 1J0, Muskoka, Ontario, Canada T: +1-631-721-4201 Email: admin@researchreportinsights.com Web Site: http://www.researchreportinsights.com Phone - (+91) 7875758555 email Published by Ethan Taylor +44-631-787-4201 e-mail https://www.trendsmarketresearch.com # 620 Words Research Report Insights42 joseph street,Portcarling P0B 1J0,Muskoka, Ontario, CanadaT: +1-631-721-4201Email: admin@researchreportinsights.comWeb Site: http://www.researchreportinsights.comPhone - (+91) 7875758555Ethan Taylor+44-631-787-4201 The worldwide luxury market comprises of nine sectors including personal luxury goods, personal cars, luxury hospitality, fine food, luxury cruises, fine wine and spirits, private jet, yachts and luxury furniture. Out of these sectors, luxury furniture has exhibited huge market attractiveness everywhere throughout the world. Luxury furniture raises the artistic value of hotels, restaurants, offices and homes notwithstanding different indoor and outdoor spaces. In the course of recent years, the noteworthy development in real estate industry encouraged the expansion of luxury furniture market. Development of individuals from rural to urban territories and tendency in the individual disposable income is fortifying the development of the worldwide luxury furniture market. Rising ecological awareness among individuals is considered to prompt individuals rising interest for eco-friendly luxury furniture everywhere throughout the world till 2025. Other than this, increasing infiltration of online retailing all over the world is anticipated to additionally boost the worldwide luxury furniture market. Transform in the way of life alongside increasing disposable income would give remarkable prospects in the worldwide luxury furniture market over the years to come.Report For Sample with Table of Contents@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upsample/120124653/Luxury-Furniture-Market Higher media infiltration, organized retailing, increasing the effect of globalization and vigorous development in the real estate sector are a few of the main considerations foreseen to encourage the development of luxury furniture market. Aside from this, increasing trend of modular kitchen is moreover fortifying the requirement for luxury furniture market as well as is anticipated to prompt the market.Among every one of the regions, Europe was conceived to gain the most in the worldwide luxury furniture market during 2014. China is anticipated to be the quickly developing furniture market in the future that will drive the overall Asia market for luxury furniture. Latin America market is likewise foreseen to exhibit quick development throughout the following couple of years. The prerequisite of luxury furniture particularly in the hospitality segment in the African region as well as the Middle East region is anticipated to drive the market of this region in future.The prominent market players identified all over the value chain of worldwide luxury furniture market comprise Valderamobili, Muebles Pico, Laura Ashley Folding Plc, Scavolini, Henredon Furniture Industries Inc., Nella Vetrina, along with others. It has been discovered that furniture producers are implicated in relation to the diminution in carbon footprints as well as initiated contributing to eco-friendly furniture. The worldwide market for luxury furniture is extremely competitive with a huge number of market players (both big and small) leading the industry. In the approaching few years, several furniture makers are anticipated to come into in this market.Request For Report Discount@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/updiscount/120124653/Luxury-Furniture-Market The luxury furniture market is probably going to foresee a firm growth in the approaching years because of higher customer awareness. The market has been experiencing a noteworthy change as distribution channels are extending. Enhancing visibility of luxury furniture brands in shopping centers, malls as well as through online mediums has additionally profited the worldwide market. Besides, the enhancing disposable incomes and the growing need to coordinate a higher expectation for lifestyle conjointly impelled the requirement for luxury furniture products in the worldwide market. The requirement for luxury furniture is likewise slated to ascend as the economies limp back to commonality.The extension of the real estate market is likewise anticipated to positively affect the general market. The requirement for luxury furniture in the hospitality segment, for example, restaurants along with hotels is anticipated to boost the market. Furthermore, renovation and restoration of residential market are likewise going to win the market players in the worldwide market a range of new buyersReport Analysis@ https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upcomming/120124653/Luxury-Furniture-Market The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, application and industry. Marine Shaft Power Meter PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 08:29:58 Press Information Fact.MR Office: Dublin 2 Suite 9884 27 Upper Pembroke Street, Dublin 2, Ireland Sudip Saha Head of Marketing +353-1-4434-232 email http://www.factmr.com # 673 Words Office: Dublin 2Suite 988427 Upper Pembroke Street,Dublin 2, IrelandHead of Marketing+353-1-4434-232 According to a recent Fact.MR study, over 1,900 units of marine shaft power meter are likely to be sold in 2019. Growth of the marine shaft power meter market can be attributed to various factors includingGrowing seaborne trade that relies heavily on cargo carriersDevelopment of technically advanced and cost-effective solution and increasing demand for new marine shaft power meter to optimize fuel savingImposition of new regulations on the shipping industry to reduce greenhouse gas emissionRequest Sample Report @ https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=1504 The study opines that cargo carriers hold relatively larger share of the marine shaft power meter market, than passenger vessels. More than 50% volume sales of the marine shaft power meter were held by cargo carriers in 2018. This can be attributed to efforts of ship owners in Germany, China, and Canada, toward strengthening their hold in the container space, in line with the upward trend of container-based shipping services in sea-borne trade..Seaborne trade will continue to expand worldwide on the back of competitive freight cost, as carriers increasingly invest in large container vessels for realizing the supply and demand balance. Freight carriers are also making significant investments in green technologies, to comply with new regulations, and meet logistics demands of companies that seek sustainable transport solution.Browse Full Report @ https://www.factmr.com/report/1504/marine-shaft-power-meter-market The Fact.MR study estimates robust sales of the marine shaft power meter in cargo ships and tankers, along with steady demand from passenger vessels, including high-speed crafts, fishing vessels, and cruise liners. Adoption of marine shaft power meters in passenger vessels is underpinned by the requirement of optimum fuel consumption, and investigating engine performance, and shaft power measurement solutions..APEJ to Retain its Hegemony in Marine Shaft Power Meter MarketAPEJ is expected to hold pole position in the marine shaft power meter market in 2019, with volume sales envisaged to surpass 1,000 units. Revenues from the marine shaft power meter market in Japan are expected to be relatively lower than APEJ. These regions with their flourishing shipping industry and increasing marine trade offer potential growth opportunities for marine shaft power meter manufacturers.Developing countries in APEJ such as China and South Korea are highly lucrative markets for marine shaft power meter collectively accounting for over four-fifth volume share, finds Fact.MR study. Ongoing recovery of shipbuilding activities is a key factor driving demand for marine shaft power meter in these APEJ countries.Speak To Research Analyst for Detailed Insights @ https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=AE&rep_id=1504 Technological advances in the shipping industry including autonomous ships and blockchain application, hold considerable promise for the supply side of shipping. Combining on-board system and digital platforms is also on a rise in vessels and cargo. The volume of world trade by sea has started to gradually increase in recent years, with growing demand for goods and raw materials by emerging economies, reveals Fact.MR study.The study further states, Complementing efforts by the shipping industry to address greenhouse gas emission, International Maritime Organization (IMO) has set an emission reduction target. These targets have been introduced in form of mandatory energy-efficiency requirements. This is resulting in the growing demand for marine shaft power meter system by the shipping companies to improve efficiency and reduce fuel consumption. Meanwhile, recently released MRV regulation in Europe has made it mandatory to shipping companies to get their emission report verified and receive Document of Compliance (DOC) to prevent any penalty. In a bid to meet the demand for significant sustainability and optimize fuel consumption, the shipping industrys reliance on technically advanced marine shaft power meter has substantially increased in recent years. Fact.MR expects that sales of marine shaft power meter through OEM will register significant growth, with sales projected to exceed 1,800 units in 2019.The Fact.MR report offers key insights on the marine shaft power meter market for the period 2018-2028. According to the report, marine shaft power meter market is expected to register 3.0% CAGR in terms of volume between 2018 and 2028. PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 01:56:43 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 946 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 'We Are Shocked And Outraged... [By These] Reprehensible Anti-Jewish Remarks'; Imam Abouhatab Says ' What Was Attributed To Me Is Completely False' And 'Taken Out Of Context'; No Response From Mayor's Office, City And State Officials, Or Local Law Enforcement, Who Have Worked Closely With MosqueWASHINGTON, DC / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / Following MEMRI's March 6, 2019 publication of a report on antisemitic sermons delivered by Imam Abdelmohsen Abouhatab at the Al-Aqsa Islamic Society in Philadelphia, PA between November 2018 and February 2019, Al-Aqsa Islamic Society officials issued an apology.On March 8, 2019, Board of Trustees secretary Chukri Khorchid and Imam Mohamed Shehata posted on the Al-Aqsa Islamic Society website: "Al Aqsa Islamic Society rejects anti-Semitism in any form. We are shocked and outraged to learn that one of our guest speakers said reprehensible anti-Jewish remarks on the floor of Al Aqsa. This in no way represents our beliefs or policies. We condemn this action and will make sure that this never happens again. We expect that all guest speakers will respect and uphold our policy that hatred against any group of people or religion will not be tolerated." While the mosque statement noted "We are shocked and outraged to learn that one of our guest speakers" had made these statements, at the conclusion of Abouhatab's January 11, 2019 sermon, as worshipers prepared to leave, a mosque leader, likely Imam Mohamed Shehata himself, took the microphone and said: "On behalf of all of you, I would like to extend our gratitude to Sheikh Abdelmohsen Abouhattab for this good sermon." Similar expressions of gratitude by the same mosque leader were repeated after each of Abouhatab's sermons.On March 9, Imam Abouhatab issued a "Public Statement" on his website, English and Arabic, denying that his statements were antisemitic, citing Quran verses and stating, in English: "I am not against any religion and what was attributed to me is completely false. I do not promote hate, nor do I insight [sic] violence. The religion of Islam calls me to living peacefully alongside others who share different faiths, and to never transgress against the rights of others, while always speaking the words of truth when need be and under the shade of the law." As highlighted in the MEMRI report, the Al-Aqsa Islamic Society is known for interfaith activity and for working with Philadelphia mayors Michael Nutter (D) and Jim Kenney (D), the ADL and other Jewish organizations, the FBI, law enforcement, and more, including participation in a November 2018 "Securing Sacred Spaces and Places" summit in Philadelphia hosted by the ADL, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (USAO), and the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center (DVIC), at which ChukriKorchid spoke.To date, only the ADL has spoken out about Imam Abouhatab's statements, the mosque's apology, and Abouhatab's subsequent denial. Following Abouhatab's denial, the ADL issued a statement calling it "flying in the face of multiple expert translations" and said he was "shamefully unrepentant for spouting anti-Jewish hate." It added that the organization had conferred with the city's Commission on Human Relations about the incident and that it would continue its interfaith work with Al-Aqsa as the mosque investigates the sermons. Additionally, as of this writing, the videos of Abouhatab's sermons that MEMRI translated remain on the mosque's YouTube channel.MEMRI Lantos Project Mission To Expose Antisemitism And To EducateThe Lantos Antisemitism Documentation Project documents antisemitic themes in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu-Pashtu, and Turkish newspaper reports, editorials, and other media sources. This project maintains the Lantos Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial Archives, which is the largest archive in the world of translated antisemitic content from the Middle East from the past decade.MEMRI's objective in highlighting the work of the Lantos Project is to bring the issue of antisemitism to media, to present evidence so that legal countermeasures can be taken, and to inform policy makers in order to provide the informational infrastructure for policies, strategies and legislative initiatives to counter antisemitism. It also seeks to enhance academic research of antisemitism.The Lantos Project distributes all its content reports, analysis, and videos through a blog and all its videos through the LantosMEMRI TV page. The Lantos Project YouTubepage includes videos from annual events held in the Speaker's Dining Room of the U.S. Capitol marking the establishment of the Lantos Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial Archives.No other organization does this vital work; all major organizations that focus on antisemitism depend upon the research from this project.MEMRI research and translation efforts on exposing antisemitism in the Arab and Muslim world have provided crucial resources to educate policymakers, media organizations, the public, and others. MEMRI asks for your help to continue this important work through tax-deductible donations.Please visit the Sermons By Imams In The West project page.About MEMRI:Exploring the Middle East and South Asia through their media, MEMRI bridges the language gap between the West and the Middle East and South Asia, providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, Urdu-Pashtu, Dari, and Turkish media, as well as original analysis of political, ideological, intellectual, social, cultural, and religious trends.Founded in February 1998 to inform the debate over U.S. policy in the Middle East, MEMRI is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit, 501(c)3 organization. MEMRI's main office is located in Washington, DC, with branch offices in various world capitals. MEMRI research is translated into English, French, Polish, Japanese, Spanish and Hebrew.MEMRI - Middle East Media Research Institute: https://www.memri.org MEMRI In The Media: https://memriinthemedia.org MEMRI TV - MEMRI: https://www.memri.org/tv Contact Information:MEMRImedia@ memri.org 202-955-9070SOURCE: MEMRI NRW government makes move in Berlin : Center of Biodiversity to come to Bonn Bonn The NRW state government wants to bring a new research centre for quantitative research into biodiversity to Bonn. The Koenig Museum is already planning to set up a research centre for biodiversity monitoring on its own initiative. Teilen Teilen Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Tweeten Tweeten Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Drucken North Rhine-Westphalia's state government wants to bring a new, government-funded research centre for quantitative research into biodiversity to Bonn. Environment Minister Ursula Heinen-Esser (CDU) has officially promoted the federal city in letters to her federal colleague, Svenja Schulze (SPD), and Federal Research Minister Anja Karliczek (CDU), according to press officer Tanja Albrecht on GA demand. As reported, the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig, a member of the Leibniz Association, is planning its own initiative to establish a research centre for biodiversity monitoring that has not yet been established worldwide. Museum director Wolfgang Wagele can create up to nine professorial positions with around 50 scientific staff in Bonn. "The news of the death of insects has shocked the research landscape and shown that we need something like this," Wagele told the GA. Politicians, too, have now woken up. After almost 1.8 million citizens in Bavaria had voted in a referendum for more species protection of animals and plants, the state governments of Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia discussed the topic yesterday at a joint cabinet meeting. Heinen-Esser took the concept of the research museum in Bonn with him. The federal government had already agreed in 2018 in the coalition agreement on the establishment of a corresponding research center. Albrecht reports that the decision as to where the research centre is to be established will be made in early summer. Other cities such as Frankfurt/Main, Berlin or Leipzig are also under discussion. From Berlin political circles it can be heard that a decentralised combined solution is also conceivable. Wagele - on his way from a business trip to Saxony-Anhalt - is nevertheless pleased with the news from Dusseldorf: "We would be very pleased if our concept found support in Dusseldorf. Hopefully a decision will be made quickly. The problem is pressing. We need innovative research, for which we have done a lot of preparatory work, and an accompanying education at the university, which has the same significance as climate research". If the two most populous federal states agree on Bonn, this will have a considerable impact on the Federal Government and the Bundesrat. In addition, the people of Bonn are open to joining the Hamburg Centre for Natural History, which is currently run as an institute of the University of Hamburg. It could cover the marine part of biodiversity research and at the same time enable the desired decentralised solution. At Museum Koenig, the conditions are favourable for a rapid start to work. Here, monitoring methods have already been developed that can automatically collect and make available large amounts of data on the numbers of animals and plants. For example, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research has received an application for the construction of a robot that catches insects in the field at regular intervals. "This enables us to monitor the development of the populations over the course of the year and over longer periods of time," explains Wagele. In this way, a white patch of previous research could be removed: There is currently a lack of reliable figures on the number of individuals, especially small and microorganisms. Together with the University of Osnabruck, the State Office for Nature, the Environment and Consumer Protection is therefore planning its own survey on insect decline in North Rhine-Westphalia. First, the occurrence of butterflies and grasshoppers is to be investigated, reports Albrecht. Microcrystalline Wax Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 04:41:53 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 658 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Paraffin, petrolatums and microcrystalline wax are the natural waxes obtained from the petroleum sources. Microcrystalline wax is a refined mixture of solid, saturated hydrocarbons with long branched chain and is produced by de-oiling few fractions from petroleum refining process. Microcrystalline wax is tougher, flexible and possesses high melting point than paraffin wax. Unlike paraffin, microcrystalline wax is darker, denser, more elastic, soft, opaque and amorphous in nature. Microcrystalline wax is used in various applications such as rubber, candles, and jewelry making. The properties of the microcrystalline wax depend on the crude oil source, refining method, and degree of refining.Global Microcrystalline Wax: Market DynamicsIncreasing demand for the decorative, scented, designer candles, packaging and cosmetics use, growing percent of tires and rubber related products contributes to the growth of microcrystalline wax. Moreover, the increasing inclination towards the natural waxes, highly preferable wax properties such as elasticity, melting point, and flexibility favor the growth of microcrystalline wax. The cosmetic industry is a rapidly growing market facilitating the growth of the microcrystalline wax market as people are more conscious and concern about their looks and appearances. The macroeconomic factors such as growing trend for the scented and designer candles, per capita income and increasing spending power ratio facilitate the market to gain traction in the forecast period.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3935 However, the availability of substitutes for the waxes, fluctuating petroleum prices stagnant the growth and can affect the market in the forecast period.Global Microcrystalline Wax: SegmentationGlobal microcrystalline wax market is segmented intoBased on Applications,Rubber IndustryExplosive IndustryFood IndustryCosmetic IndustryResin IndustryElectronics IndustryPharmaceutical IndustryOtherCustom JewelryPackagingBased on Functional Uses,AdhesiveSealantProtective shieldSurface glosserCorrosion inhibitorWater repellentInsulatorCoatingBased on wax type, covers70#80#90#OtherGlobal Microcrystalline Wax: Segment OverviewThe microcrystalline wax market is segmented based on the applications in which the segments include rubber industry, cosmetics industry in which it is used in personal care products, such as creams, gels, ointments. In the food industry, chewing gums uses microcrystalline waxes. Also, it is highly utilized in rubber and explosive industries. It is used in tires and rubber finishing products. It is also used in pharmaceutical and resin industries. Microcrystalline wax is used in printing inks and packaging too.Based on its functional use, microcrystalline wax is segmented into the adhesive agent, protective layer for the metals and materials, as a sealant and also to add gloss to the surface. It is also used as water repellent as it resists water molecules to came in contact with the surface material by having the wax layer over it. It functions as insulators in various electronic and electrical products. By wax types, it is also segmented into 70#, 80# and 90# as per the properties.Global Microcrystalline Wax: Regional OverviewHigh demand in the industrial use of the microcrystalline wax has gained significant growth in the contribution of the market growth. Moreover, increasing demand for natural waxes, cars and improving the standard of living in developing economies including Brazil, and India has triggered the microcrystalline wax market growth. Asia Pacific is owing to the higher number of wax producers, increasing demand from the industrial applications such as candles, textile finishing, and cosmetics, is expected to grow with the significant CAGR in the forecast period. China leads the market in the petroleum based waxes. North America and Europe also contribute higher share after Asia-Pacific regarding revenue and market growth. The microcrystalline wax market is expected to show positive outlook in the forecast period.Request Report for TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3935 Global Microcrystalline Wax: Market PlayersSome of the prominent players for the microcrystalline wax market are Koster Keunen, Inc., Strahl & Pitsch Inc, Sonneborn, Alfa Chemical Ltd., The International Group, Inc. (IGI), Paramelt B.V, The Frank B. Ross Co, ShellGroup, Nippon Seiro Co. Ltd, Blended Waxes, Inc., TER HELL & Co.Ltd PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 13:26:35 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 660 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / Mongolia Growth Group Ltd. (the "Company") (TSX-V: YAK), announced today that TSX Venture Exchange (the "Exchange") has accepted a Notice of Intention to renews its normal course issuer bid to purchase outstanding common shares of the Company on the open market in accordance with the policies of the TSXV.Pursuant to the NCIB, (the "Bid") the Company may acquire up to 2,550,000 common shares (representing up to approximately 7.7 % of the 33,136,999 common shares of the Company currently issued and outstanding, or approximately 9.9% of the 25,860,049 common shares constituting the Company's current Public Float (as that term is defined in the policies of the Exchange) from time to time during the next 12 months. In accordance with the Policies of the Exchange, the maximum number of common shares that may be purchased under the Bid in any 30-day period may not exceed 2% of the issued and outstanding common shares of the Company when aggregated with all other common shares purchased under the Bid in the preceding 30 days.The Company is undertaking the Bid because, in the opinion of its board of directors, the market price of its common shares, from time to time, may not fully reflect the underlying value of its operations and future growth prospects. The Company believes that in such circumstances, the purchase of the common shares of the Company may represent an appropriate and desirable use of the Company's funds and further enhance market stability.The Company may, subject to market conditions, sell one or more of its investment properties to finance purchases under the Bid from time to time.From March 12, 2018 to March 11, 2019, the Company purchased 408,000 of its shares at an average price of $0.30 under its most recently expired NCIB.The Company has retained M Partners Inc. of Toronto, Ontario as its broker Member for the purposes of conducting the bid. The Bid will commence on or about March 13, 2019 and the Bid will end no later than March 12, 2020. The common shares will be purchased for cancellation on the open market through the facilities of the Exchange, at market price.For further information please contact:Mrs. Genevieve Walkden, Corporate Secretary877-644-1186GWalkden@ MongoliaGrowthGroup.com This news release includes forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. All statements within, other than statements of historical fact, are to be considered forward looking. 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 or developments may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include general economic, market and business conditions, the regulatory process and actions, regulator and corporate approvals, technical issues, new legislation, competitive and general economic factors and conditions, the uncertainties resulting from potential delays or changes in plans, the occurrence of unexpected events, and the Company's capability to execute and implement its future plans. Actual results may differ materially from those projected by management. There can be no assurances that such statements will prove accurate and, therefore, readers are advised to rely on their own evaluation of such uncertainties. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to sell any securities in the United States. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the ''U.S. Securities Act'') or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to U.S. Persons unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available.We seek safe harbour.The TSXV has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this Press release.SOURCE: Mongolia Growth Group Ltd. Natural Fragrance Chemicals Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 04:26:33 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 654 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Natural fragrance chemicals are aroma compounds physically obtained from plants, spices and fruits through distillation, extraction and expression. In general, fragrance chemicals that are produced from natural sources are termed as natural fragrance chemicals. These chemicals do not contain any traces of toxicity in it and is highly preferred over synthetic fragrance chemicals, especially by health conscious people. Owing to the non-toxic characteristic of the compound, the prices are relatively high. The costs depend upon the aroma as well.Natural fragrances can also be defined as the complex compositions of pure aromatic raw materials such as isolates, essential oils, exudates including extracts, resins, distillates, volatile concentrates and so on. Natural fragrance chemicals are used in the formation of essences utilized in beverages industry. It is also used in hair oils, deodorants, perfumes and many other products in cosmetic industry. Other than this, the natural fragrance chemicals find applications in the production of soap, detergent and home care products, among others. The application in home care products includes in products such as room fresheners, floor cleaners and incense sticks. Natural fragrance chemicals are preferred over synthetic fragrance chemicals in many household products since they do not cause any side effects. Since it is obtained from natural sources, it also possesses some medicinal properties and can be used for treatment of illnesses such as body pain, stress and skin problems.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3658 Natural Fragrance Chemicals Market:Market DynamicsThe demand for natural fragrance chemicals is predominantly driven by the rising awareness among people on hazardous effects of synthetic fragrance chemicals present in the daily use products. Other than this, some of the factors that boost the demand for natural fragrance chemicals are the surge in use of natural fragrance chemicals in several end use industries such as food and beverages industry and cosmetic industry and their promotions through various media prompting people to choose sustainable and healthy products. Increasing disposable income is a noteworthy factor that bolsters the growth of the natural fragrance chemicals market over the forecast period.However, the products with natural fragrance chemicals are relatively costly, which remains as a key factor slowing down the growth of the natural fragrance chemicals market. Also, the availability of substitutes restrain the market growth to a great extent. The extensive exploitation of natural resources for manufacturing natural fragrance chemicals will adversely affect the environment as well.Natural Fragrance Chemicals Market:Market SegmentationSegmentation of natural fragrance chemicals market can be doneon the basis of product type as:Wood based natural fragrance chemicalsFlower based natural fragrance chemicalsFruit based natural fragrance chemicalsMusk based natural fragrance chemicalsSpices based natural fragrance chemicalsOthersSegmentation of natural fragrance chemicals market can be doneon the basis of application as follows:BeverageCosmeticsDetergentRoom freshenersFloor cleanersMedicineOthersSegmentation of natural fragrance chemicals market can be doneon the basis of end use industry as follows:Cosmetics industryFood and beverage industryHome and health care industriesPharmaceutical IndustryOthersNatural Fragrance Chemicals Market: Regional OutlookEurope is estimated to hold a major share in the global natural fragrance chemicals market, followed by Asia-Pacific and North America. In Europe, the consumption as well as production of natural fragrance chemicals is significant due to the high demand for products containing natural fragrance chemicals and presence of several leading players in this region. Asia-Pacific is projected to witness a rapid growth over the forecast period as a result of rising popularity of natural fragrance chemicals in countries such as China and India.Request Report for TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3658 Natural Fragrance Chemicals Market: Market ParticipantsSome of the examples of the market participants in the global natural fragrance chemicals market, identified across the value chain are:GivaudanFirmenich SASensient Technologies CorporationParis Fragrances USAInternational Flavors & Fragrances IncTakasago International CorporationSymriseFrutaromKerry Group plc PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 19:25:32 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 707 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 FORT WALTON BEACH, FL / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / With graduation just around the corner and millions of Americans turning 18, Gresham Foster with ASG Legal in Fort Walton Beach, Florida has some advice for these soon to be adults. Foster recommends that anyone who is soon to turn 18 should seriously consider signing a Durable Power of Attorney."If someone is injured in an accident and is no longer able to make decisions for themselves, they need to provide a release for someone else to make those decisions," says Foster.Forbes recently published an article that claims that every year nearly a quarter of a million Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 are hospitalized for injuries sustained in accidents. Many of these injured young people are not able to make their own medical decisions, which leaves their parents often to take their case to court in order to gain approval to act on the behalf of the injured. Those interested in learning more can read more in this article from Forbes."The gist is this," says Foster. "Young people are injured in an accident and they may become disabled. Anyone who is turning 18 or has turned 18 recently needs to understand that because they are officially declared as an adult when they turn 18, their parents do not automatically have control over their medical care. This means that the parents often have to gain court approval to get the care that the patient needs, and this is often a lengthy process." Foster says that in order for anyone else to make decisions for those who have turned 18, if they are unable to make their own decisions, a Durable Power of Attorney and a Health Care Directive need to be in place. He says that these are simple forms that need to be completed by the recently turned adult and the forms are used by the parents or another adult who will be acting on the behalf of the injured.Foster says that these two forms will allow whomever the newly turned adult elects, which is typically the parents, to make financial and health care decisions for them, access any health records, deal with anyone at their school, and access their bank accounts if necessary. Without these documents, their parents will not have access. Those who are interested in learning more about this process and the benefits that it offers can contact Gresham Foster.The attorney states that without these signed and notarized documents, those who have recently turned 18 could face difficulties in obtaining certain needed medical procedures. At the very least, he states that parents or someone else that the adult deems worthy will have the ability to access the adult's bank accounts to make car payments, pay rent and even pay for needed medical care. The attorney says that anyone who is officially deemed as an adult who does not have these documents in place will find it difficult, or their family will find it difficult, to deal with certain legal situations.Foster says that this is important for those who are turning 18 particularly. Those married will have a spouse that is legally allowed to make certain financial and medical decisions. Those who are not married need these forms in order to allow someone else to make these decisions for them if and when the time comes that they are not able to make them for themselves. Foster says that the courts are filled with families every year that are fighting to make the simplest medical decisions for their children because those children failed to realize the importance of having a Durable Power of Attorney on hand.Parents of, and those who are turning 18 soon, can learn more about this process by contacting Gresham Foster. The attorney is located in Fort Walton Beach and offers legal representation for these and other needs. Foster states that those in need of these documents can contact him at Anchors Smith Grimsley, PLC, to schedule an appointment, or visit the firm online to learn more.For more information about ASG - Gresham Foster, contact the company here:ASG - Gresham FosterGresham Foster(850) 863-4064gfoster@ asglegal.com 909 Mar Walt Drive, Suite 1014Fort Walton Beach, Florida 32547SOURCE: ASG - Gresham Foster Olefinic Thermoplastic Elastomers Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 04:38:14 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 759 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Olefinic thermoplastic elastomers are emerging as one of the fastest growing class of synthetic polymers substituting a number of traditional polymeric compounds such as ethylene propylene polymers, ethylene vinyl acetate and Poly Vinyl Chloride (PVC) in numerous applications including automotive, medical, etc. The Olefinic thermoplastic elastomers are widely being used as an alternative to rubber. Olefinic thermoplastic elastomers offer good impact resistance and can be recycled (unlike rubber). These polymers are also known by alternative names such as alkene based thermoplastic elastomers. The olefinic thermoplastic elastomers are made of two components mainly, one being an elastomer, which is dispersed in thermoplastic polyolefin such as propylene. The olefinic thermoplastic elastomers possess excellent impact resistance and are lightweight and light density materials, hence used in a number of industries. Moreover, olefinic thermoplastic elastomers can be moulded into any shape such as cast, wire or film. Olefinic thermoplastic elastomers also provide chemical resistance and electrical insulation. Olefinic thermoplastic elastomers are tough and resilient and at the same time offer flexibility.Global Olefinic Thermoplastic Elastomers Market DynamicsGlobal Olefinic Thermoplastic Elastomers Market DriversThe global olefinic thermoplastic elastomers market is driven by the increasing demand from various end use industries, especially from the automotive industry. There has been an increasing demand for the use of lightweight materials in the automotive manufacturing in order to improve the fuel economy, thus driving the global olefinic thermoplastic elastomers market. Olefinic thermoplastic elastomers has also been utilized for the manufacture of bumpers, interior and exterior trims and floor mats and also for grips and seals.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3759 Moreover, the global olefinic thermoplastic elastomers market is driven by increasing usage as films in the packaging industry due to the versatility of compound to get moulded into different forms.Global Olefinic Thermoplastic Elastomers Market RestraintsIn some extreme temperature and environmental conditions, olefinic thermoplastic elastomers undergo deformation and are not easily recovered. Hence, under such conditions, conventional materials are preferred over olefinic thermoplastic elastomers, which act as a restraint for the market growth.One of the major factors restraining the growth of the olefinic thermoplastic elastomers market is the volatility in the raw material prices that in turn creating price pressure on manufacturers.Global Olefinic Thermoplastic Elastomers Market TrendsProduct InnovationThe trend driving the global olefinic thermoplastic elastomers industry is product innovation by the major market participants. The chemical market is mainly consolidated with a few of the major players dominating the market. There has been constant investment on research and development activities by the manufacturers, for the development of materials such as advanced olefinic thermoplastic elastomers to substitute traditional elastomers such as rubber and thermoplastics in a wide variety of applications.Global Olefinic Thermoplastic Elastomers Market SegmentationThe global olefinic thermoplastic elastomers market can be segmented on the basis of application, product type and region.On the basis of application, the global olefinic thermoplastic elastomers market can be segmented into the following categories:Automotive IndustryBuilding and constructionElectrical and electronicsPharmaceuticalFood and beverageConsumer ProductsPackagingOn the basis of product type, the global olefinic thermoplastic elastomers can be segmented as:Thermoplastic polyolefinThermoplastic vulcanizatesGlobal Olefinic Thermoplastic Elastomers Market Regional OutlookNorth America is projected to hold dominant share in the global olefinic thermoplastic elastomers market. This is attributed to the large automotive OEM base in the region. The U.S. is expected to dominate the North America olefinic thermoplastic elastomers market. Asia Pacific and Latin America are identified to be the high growth regions in the global olefinic thermoplastic elastomers market and are expected to exhibit increasing adoption of olefinic thermoplastic elastomers over the conventional materials, thus expanding at a relatively high CAGR over the forecast period, 2017-2027. Asia Pacific has also exhibited a substantial increase in automotive production over the past few years, which in turn is driving the Asian olefinic thermoplastic elastomers market. Europe is estimated to remain as a lucrative region in the global olefinic thermoplastic elastomers market throughout the forecast period. The olefinic thermoplastic elastomers market in Japan is also projected to exhibit positive growth over the forecast period. However, Middle East and Africa is estimated to register sluggish growth.Request Report for TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3759 Global Olefinic Thermoplastic Elastomers Market ParticipantsExamples of some of the market participants identified across the value chain of the global olefinic thermoplastic elastomers market are: The Dow Chemical Company, BASF SE, DuPont, Evonik Industries AG, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Mitsui Chemicals Inc., Preferred Plastics, Inc. and Hallstar among others. The major key pillars of the global Order Takeaway Online market are also described to understand the possible reasons behind the progress of the market. Order Takeaway Online Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 22:39:43 Press Information QYReports Miami, Florida Jones John Sales Manager +(1) 786-292-8164 email https://www.qyreports.com # 441 Words Miami, FloridaSales Manager+(1) 786-292-8164 The global Order Takeaway Online market size is anticipated to grow at $26 billion by 2026, progressing CAGR of +14% during the forecast period. The company recently announced increased investments into building out its own delivery services in an effort to entice more restaurants onto the platform and thereby grow its market.A customer will search for a favorite restaurant, usually filtered via type of cuisine and choose from available items, and choose delivery or pick-up. Payment can be amongst others either by credit card or cash, with the restaurant returning a percentage to the online food company. Looking ahead, we can see that investors are expecting significant growth in many key metrics including 22% customer growth and 26% order growth.Request for Sample Copy @ https://www.qyreports.com/request-sample?report-id=105742 The Key Companies include: McDonalds, KFC, Subway, Pizzahut, Starbucks, Burger King, Dominos Pizza, Dunkin Donuts, Dairy Queen, Papa, etc.The major key pillars of the global Order Takeaway Online market are also described to understand the possible reasons behind the progress of the market. During the examination of the market, researchers studies about factors of the global market that are boosting the performance of the market. Different enterprises are profiled to get a better insight into various effective strategies carried out by them.What the research report offers: Analysis of different market segments and sub-segments to understand the market clearly Identification of global key players operating in most developing and developed regions Statistical analysis of different economic aspects such as Order Takeaway Online market. Global market elaboration using effective info-graphics Descriptive analysis of demand-supply chain analysis Technological advancements and strategies analyzed in the global market Global market opportunities and recommendations from new startupsAvail Discount on this report@ https://www.qyreports.com/ask-for-discount?report-id=105742 This report explores the potential for Order Takeaway Online market in global regions, such as Latin America, North America, Japan, China, Asia-Pacific, Africa, and India. The base year considered to examine different aspects of businesses is Order Takeaway Online and the forecast period is Order Takeaway Online.Recent updates of different government rules, industry policies have been mentioned to give proper insights to business owners, investors as well as various industry experts. Finally, it provides an extensive study of sales strategies, such as Order Takeaway Online to increase customers rapidly. It focuses on feedback from different industry experts to support the existing as well as upcoming key players. It enlists the driving and restraining factors to understand the ups and downs of the businesses, which gives a deep and widespread vision to face the significant challenges and helps in understanding the opportunities that will hype the market in the forthcoming days. Osmium Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 04:33:48 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 654 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Osmium belongs to platinum group family and is obtained when platinum metal is extracted from its ores. Osmium is found in nature alloyed with iridium and as a trace component of many ores such as copper and nickel. Hence, osmium is mainly produced as a byproduct of platinum extraction. It is one of the densest elements found in nature and is blue grey in colour. Osmium is represented by the symbol Os and its atomic number is 76. The metal is hard and brittle, which remains lustrous even at very high temperature. Osmium is generally produced in the form of powder since it is difficult to shape owing to its hardness. The amount of osmium produced per year is trivial, which is less than a ton.Osmium exhibits low compressibility and has high bulk modulus. Osmium is toxic in nature when it is exposed to air and undergo chemical reaction to form osmium tetroxide. Osmium is highly volatile as well as water soluble in nature and the metal has very low vapour pressure and exhibits high melting point. There are numerous regulations on the use of osmium owing to the aforementioned properties it possess.Osmium is used in many alloys, which find significant applications in end use industries due to the quality osmium can impose on end products such as corrosion resistance and hardness. For instance, osmium alloys are used to manufacture pen nibs, compass needles, and electrical contacts, among others. Osmium-tungsten was used in filaments of light bulb as well.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3719 Apart from these osmium can be used as a catalyst at industrial levels that increments the market value of osmium considerably. Osmium tetroxide is popularly utilized in chemical industry since it is strongly oxidising and volatile. However, proper precautions need to be taken while using osmium tetroxide in laboratories. The reflectivity of osmium makes it desirable in space based UV spectrophotometer applications as well. The alloys of osmium are used in manufacturing several surgical implants and instruments, due to its inert nature.Osmium Market: Market DynamicsThe sustainable development in the global chemical industry is expected to boost the demand for osmium over the forecast period. Growing applications of osmium in fingerprint detection, optical and electron microscopy and also in staining fatty tissues in various research institutes are the drivers, which can bolster the market growth in the upcoming years. The growing trend of using osmium for innovative medical technologies is expected to boost the overall demand for the osmium market.Furthermore , stagnant price of osmium makes it more popular in end use industries. However, the toxic nature of osmium necessitates optimum storage facilities, which may act as a low impact restraint for the market growth.Osmium Market: Market SegmentationOsmium market is segmented on the basis of form, application and grade mainly.On the basis of form, the global osmium market can be segmented into;PelletsRodGranulesOn the basis of grade, the global osmium market can be segmented into;Technical GradeAnalytical GradeOn the basis of application, the global osmium market can be segmented into;Electrical ContactsInstrumental PivotsFountain Pen NibsOthers (clock bearings, compass needles, gramophone, etc.)Osmium Market: Regional OutlookThe increasing preference for sustainable technology augments the production of osmium significantly. The global osmium market is projected to grow with a substantial CAGR over the forecast period. In terms of consumption, North America is expected to be the prominent market for osmium, followed by Europe. Moreover, Asia Pacific is expected to be a substantial producer of osmium. China, being the major exporter of osmium, contributes significantly to the global market share.Request Report for TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3719 Osmium Market: Market ParticipantsExamples of some of the market participants in the global osmium market, identified across the value chain include, American Elements, Ceimig Limited, Cleantech and Reade International Corp, among others. Oven Bag Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 08:34:06 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 684 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Packaging products specifically addressed to consumer usage are inculcating convenience and high performance into their functioning. Oven bag is a high heat resistant bag made up of polyester or nylon meant for single usage. Oven bag is used for cooking of food in the microwave oven. Oven bags provide moisture retention utility to food cooked in microwave ovens which is a common issue faced by consumers using microwave ovens. Oven bag is extensively used in western countries primarily for its ability to keep the food moist even while cooking. Oven bag is preferred by the consumers as it saves the efforts for cleaning the microwave after cooking.Oven Bag Market: Market Drivers & OpportunitiesFlexible packaging is a rapidly growing segment in the packaging industry driving its growth through various innovations to fit for wide range of applications in packaging. The flexible packaging is estimated to be about US$ 230 billion and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 3% over the forecast period. The change in the consumer lifestyle in the APEJ region is the key factor for driving the demand for oven bag market. The increasing western culture influence and rapid urbanization the people are shifting from traditional method to modern method of cooking hence contributing to the growth of oven bag market. The increase in meat consumption in the Asian region is another factor supporting the demand for oven bag market. The safety offered by using microwave against the traditional cooking methods from burn injuries is an aspect influencing the growth of oven bag market. The fossil fuels like LPG are neither endless nor completely environment-friendly, so the increased use of electric oven can provide new opportunities for growth for oven bag market over the forecast period. Consumer has preference for the oven bag not only because it is cheap and easily available but also for the convenience that oven bag offer to their users and their property of preserving the flavor of the foodRequest to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3571 Oven Bag Market: Market RestraintsHowever, oven bag being a onetime use product is not a sustainable form of packaging which may hinder the growth of the oven bag market. The concern of the authorities over the increasing plastic waste may hamper the growth of the oven bag market. The misconception of food becoming radioactive after being prepared in a microwave can resist the growth of oven bag market. The complexity involved with the electric oven for which type of material to use inside the oven is another factor countering the growth of the oven bag market as markets in APEJ region are not aligned with the use of a microwave.Oven Bag Market: Market SegmentationOven bag market is segmented by the type of material used and by the end use.Based on the type of material used, Oven bag market is segmented into:PolyesterNylonBased on the end use, Oven bag market is segmented into:Roasting meatsWhole chickensPorkBeefLambFishSeafoodOven Bag Market: Regional OutlookRegionally global oven bag market is segmented intoNorth AmericaLatin AmericaEastern EuropeWestern EuropeAsia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ)Middle East & Africa (MEA)JapanNorth America is expected to lead the oven bag market owing to the extensive use of the oven and the cultural activities like roasting a turkey on thanks giving day. Eastern and Western Europe is also expected to hold a major portion of oven bag market attributed to the high consumption of the meat in the region. APEJ region can experience strong growth over the forecast period due to rapid urbanization and increasing urban influence in the region.Request Report for TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3571 Oven Bag Market: Key Players:Some key players of oven bag market are Flexipol Packaging Limited, Extra Packaging Corp, Sunkey Plastic Packaging Co., Ltd, Sirane Ltd, Terinex LTD, Yin Tian Industrial Co., Ltd, M&Q Packaging Ltd, Xiong Xian Xinhuarui Plastic Co Ltd, Huangshan Sinoflex Packaging Co. Ltd, Reynolds Consumer Products, Xiamen Threestone Packing Material Co. Ltd, and Sealed Air Corp. PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 10:48:14 Press Information Future Market Insights 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,, Abhishek Budholiya Manager 3479183531 email https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 665 Words 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,,Manager3479183531Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Paper machines are paper making machinery developed on the principle of Fourdrinier Machine. The paper machine primarily consists of three sectional systems namely forming section, press section, drying section and lastly the calendar section. Paper machines systems are the drive systems which increases the performance of the machine and delivers improved quality of the paper. The paper machine systems provide the required specifications to ensure efficient production of paper. For instance, the paper drying system functions in providing correct pressure to the every drier present in the paper making machine and ensures evacuation of condensate from the dryers. Thus, the paper drying system attains desired dryer surface temperature with a minimum level of steam consumption and drive load on the machine. The paper vacuum system is also one of the important systems employed on machines, as it enhances the competitiveness of the production processes. The vacuum systems achieve three main functions at various sections of the paper making machine. For instance, in a forming section of the paper machine, its helps to dewater the pulp stock as the paper sheet forms whereas in press section it dewaters the section and cleans the press felts which in turns removes the water from the paper sheets. Thirdly it functions to transfer the sheets between various paper machine sections and helps the recovered water to be reused again the process. The global trend in the shift from plastic use to paper use is expected to drive the global paper machine system market to a great extent.Request For Report Sample @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3910 Global Paper Machine Systems Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe growing consumption of paper and paperboard is one of the prime factor driving the global paper machine systems market. The pulp and paper production is growing with the extreme demand for drive technology or systems. As the paper machine systems ensure smooth interaction between the various forces involved in the manufacture of paper. The superior operational benefits further drive the global paper machine system market. The increasing demand for economic and ecological advantages by the paper and pulp manufacturers further fuels the paper machine systems market.Global Paper Machine Systems Market: SegmentationOn the basis of machine type, paper machine systems market can be segmented as follows:-FourdrinierTwin-wireMulti-plyOn the basis of system type, paper machine systems market can be segmented as follows:-Paper drying systemBlow through systemsTrap based systemsPocket and hood ventilation systemPaper vacuum systemQuality control systemsOthersGlobal Paper Machine Systems Market: Region wise OutlookThe global paper machine systems market is divided into seven regions, namely North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Japan and the Middle East and Africa (MEA). The paper machine systems market in Western Europe is robust with the presence of established players such as MAN Diesel & Turbo Schweiz AG, ABB Ltd, Popp Maschinenbau GmbH etc. Also, the countries such as Sweden, Germany, Italy and Finland are among the top in the production of paper and paperboard. The availability of advanced machinery for paper production influences the manufacturers to increase their yield ratio also. APEJ paper machine systems market is expected to grow at significant CGAR during the forecast period owing to the increasing consumption of paper and pulp products. Also, the availability of skilled labour force at a below average cost rate further drives the consumption of paper machine systems market in the region. The paper machine systems North America is matured with the consolidation of the market by the prominent players. For instance, in 2015 BW Papersystems acquired the BW Bielomatik Machines, a Germany-based machinery manufacturer to enhance its global position.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC): https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3910 Global Paper Machine Systems Market: Key PlayersSome of the prominent players identified in the global paper machine systems market include:ABB LtdSeiko Epson CorporationForbes MarshallMAN Diesel & Turbo Schweiz AGVoith GmbH Post-Consumer Recycled Plastic Packaging Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 08:29:21 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 681 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Packaging products made of eco-friendly material are gaining popularity as market players are adapting to sustainable packaging methods. Products and materials sold in the consumer markets, which have served their intended purpose or completed their life cycle are sent to material recovery facilities (MRFs). Packaging products made of plastic materials recovered from MRFs contribute to the category of post-consumer recycled plastic packaging. One of the prominent material which is being recycled is the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic. PET plastic is the most widely used and accepted plastic, as it is quite easy to recycle and can be recycled more than once, thus promoting the post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market. Recycled products have many environmental benefits and are being preferred by the manufacturers adopting sustainable principles. The increased demand for packaging products produced using recycled content has also propelled the post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market.Post-Consumer Recycled Plastic Packaging Market- Market Dynamics:A major factor supporting the growth of post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market is the improved material sorting infrastructure across many significant regions like U.S., Canada and Western Europe. The global market for post-consumer recycled plastic packaging is witnessing the incorporation of new material processing technologies for manufacturing of post-consumer recycled products and materials.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3527 Light weight nature of recycled plastic is another factor fuelling the growth of post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market. The growth of post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market is propelled by certain properties of recycled plastic such as strength and crack-resistance. Another prominent factor promoting the growth of post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market is the environmental friendly property of the plastic. However, the shortfall in supply has restricted the growth prospects for post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market. FDA regulations applicable to packaging of food products across geographic regions are a matter of concern for market players operating in the global post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market.Manufacturers are identifying new infrastructure for segregating and collecting mixed plastics at the recovery facilities in order to implement appropriate sorting mechanism. Effectiveness of the selection process plays a vital role in the amount of materials recovered in these facilities.Post-Consumer Recycled Plastic Packaging Market- Market Segmentation:The post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market can be segmented on the basis of product type, material type, process type and end use. On the basis of product type, the post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market can be segmented into bottles, cups, containers (jars and tubs), bags, clamshells and blister packs. Mostly all the recycled plastic packaging products are thermoformed and the FDA approved products are even safe for direct food contact. On the basis of material type, the post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market can be segmented into PET (polyethylene terephthalate), HDPE (high density polyethylene) and PP (polypropylene). PET plastic is expected to be the major contributor due to its abundance availability and ease in processing technology. On the basis of process type, the post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market can be segmented into mechanical (melting and refining) process and chemical process. On the basis of end use, the post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market can be segmented into beverage (bottle and dairy products), electronics, home care, pharmaceuticals, and personal care.Post-Consumer Recycled Plastic Packaging Market- Regional Outlook:Geographically, the post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market is segmented into five key regions: North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America and Middle East and Africa (MEA). North America is the leading manufacturer of post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market as U.S. and Canada have taken major steps to initiate material sorting infrastructures in the regions and is anticipated to witness a healthy growth. Asia-Pacific is expected to witness a significant growth over the forecast period driven by the developments in China and India.Request Report for TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3527 Post-Consumer Recycled Plastic Packaging Market- Key Players:Some of the key players of post-consumer recycled plastic packaging market are Placon Corporation Inc., Seventh Generation Inc., Amcor Rigid Plastics USA Inc., Genpak, LLC, Papier-Mettler, Inhaber Michael Mettler e.K., Tray-Pak Corporation, Alpha Packaging, Inc., and Eco-Products, Inc. Higher Administrative Court decision : More freedom for dog "Kalle" from Sankt Augustin MUNSTER/SANKT AUGUSTIN The city Sankt Augustin assumes that "Kalle" belongs to a dangerous dog breed. The dog owner from Sankt Augustin complained about it. Now the Higher Administrative Court in Munster has decided. Teilen Teilen Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Tweeten Tweeten Weiterleiten Weiterleiten Drucken In regard to audible snoring, North Rhine-Westphalia's highest administrative court does not usually tolerate it. But the tired court visitor is a dog - and on this day the subject of dispute. The question in question actually is, which potential danger comes from "Kalle", the four-year-old Bulldog male, who has rolled himself up panting at the feet of his owner and sleeps through most of the trial. For plaintiff and dog owner Sandra E. from Sankt Augustin in the Rhein-Sieg district, this day is about nothing less than the "freedom for Kalle" - and all his fellow dogs, who, as she thinks, would have to wear the stigma of being listed by the country as "dogs of a certain breed". The North Rhine-Westphalian Dog Law provides for certain restrictions in the keeping of different breeds: The rules for dangerous dogs such as Pittbull Terriers are particularly strict. They may not be bred and traded - in the public debate there is also often talk about fighting dogs. From the point of view of the authorities, "Kalle" belongs to a further category: Dogs like the American Bulldog or Rottweiler have a certain danger potential according to the legislator, as the judge explains. Their owners must apply for a permit and prove that they know their way around and have their animal under control. There is also an extended line obligation and possibly a muzzle obligation. Also in some municipalities higher dog taxes are demanded. "Kalles" case to become a landmark decision The city Sankt Augustin and with it the district veterinary office represented with "Kalles" first appraisal three years ago the opinion emerged that it has characteristics of an American Bulldog. He was thus categorized as subject to conditions. "I am stamped. The dog is stamped", Sandra E. explains why she went to court. Her animal is harmless. "He's totally sweet and humane," she says, patting the brawny head with the wrinkled snout. He is simply a typical "Old English Bulldog" - a cross, but lacking recognition in Europe as an independent breed. "It depends on the other end of the leash whether a dog is dangerous or not", she explains, why she considers the listing of the legislator basically superfluous. Mathias Deutsch, chairman of the Club fur Olde Bulldogges in Germany, also emphasises this. He had hoped that the "Kalle" case would become a landmark decision and that the breed would now be recognised as such by the court. There are more than a thousand "Old English Bulldogs" in Germany, according to him, far more in the USA. But the question of race recognition will not be decided in principle by the judges on Tuesday. They merely make it clear: Whether a cross of different dogs ends up on the list of dogs subject to conditions or not depends less on the gene pool than on the phenotypic characteristics. Only when the breed in question is clearly recognisable as problematic can the stricter conditions also apply to the animal, emphasises the Senate. Fortunately for "Kalle": A veterinarian who testifies as an expert leaves no doubt that the 53 centimetre high and almost 37 kilo heavy dog is a borderline case, but still too unlike an American Bulldog. He is muscular, has a slender hip and a prominent skull. But in the end it is his comparatively compact stature and his short legs that change things: "'Kalle' is only a big dog", not one with a particular potential for danger, the presiding judge announces in the afternoon. "He can be kept like a shepherd dog, Labrador or any other family dog." PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 02:33:20 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 591 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 GREAT FALLS, VA / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / The rise of the internet in the 1990s led to the radical transformation of trade and democratized entrepreneurship, making it possible for every person to start a business with minimal initial investment. At the same time, digital stores revolutionized the consumer experience and triggered an irreversible shift in buying habits and service expectations. According to reports from Statista, nearly 1.7 billion people shopped online in 2017, and the number is projected to exceed 2.1 billion by 2021. Over the same period, global revenues from e-sales are forecast to rise from $2.3 trillion to almost$4.9 trillion. With mobile devices taking connectivity and convenience to a whole new level, e-commerce will only continue to expand its share of retail, which makes it a highly attractive sector for business endeavors. However, launching an online company may be relatively easier, but it is no different from starting a traditional enterprise when it comes to ensuring its success, comments Rick Rahim, president of BusinessVentures.com Many entrepreneurs fail to realize that a digital operation requires a solid business strategy, as is the case with every for-profit organization. This will involve research into the market and the competition, a cost analysis, profit projections, and a marketing plan, among others. Notably, research needs to be a constant consideration since it will reveal areas that need improvement, be it with regard to the brand image, product mix, customer service, price, or engagement. As Rick Rahim points out, the digital commerce sector is characterized by swift changes and staying abreast of the latest trends is critical for success.Since the website is the heart of an online business, no effort should be spared to ensure it is as attractive and functional as possible. While an appealing design is important, other factors are far more essential, specifically optimization, security, and ease of navigation. Given the expanding share of mobile purchases, e-commerce operators should have a site that functions properly across all digital platforms. Creating a seamless user experience across all platforms is vital for any e-commerce business. Mobile optimization, in particular, is essential, Wayfair storefront engineering director Arthur Thompson noted in an interview for CIO.com . Credibility and trustworthiness are also paramount in digital commerce, meaning that an online store without the proper certificates has little chance of survival, much less success. In addition, many entrepreneurs overlook search engine optimization (SEO) and social media outreach, which have become crucial for page ranking, brand building, and user engagement elements that many experts consider fundamental for business growth and profitability in the age of e-commerce.A serial entrepreneur for over two decades, Rick Rahim has launched and operated companies that have collectively generated more than $1 billion in retail sale to consumers. As the founder and president of BusinessVentures.com , the Virginia native oversees a diverse group of enterprises, with investments across manufacturing, e-commerce, apparel, pet care, and consulting. Recognized for his business and marketing acumen, he sits on the boards of multiple organizations and frequently shares his insights and expertise at national conventions. The highly successful entrepreneur is also an accomplished helicopter pilot, often lending his skills to the Make-A-Wish Foundation and Animal Rescue Flights. Through his companies, he supports numerous youth groups, charities, teen and homeless shelters, elementary schools, and religious organizations.Rick Rahim - Founder and President of BusinessVentures.com: Rick Rahim - President - BusinessVentures.com - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickrahim/ Rick Rahim - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/rickrahim Contact Information: RickRahimBusinessVentures.com contact@ rickrahimbusinessventures.com SOURCE: BusinessVentures.com Skin Glossing Pencil Packaging Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 08:30:18 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 696 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Cosmetics have become an integral part of urban population and particularly among working women. Skin glossing pencil packaging market has emerged as a niche market segment in the global cosmetics packaging market. Skin glossing pencils are used by women to make their skin look more shiny and younger. The global skin glossing pencil packaging market can account for major portion of the cosmetic packaging market owing to growing cosmetics consumption across the world. The skin glossing pencil packaging not only helps in differentiating the product from its substitutes but also helps in creating a brand image of the product in the minds of consumers by communicating information about the brand. The skin glossing pencil packaging improves the durability of the product by increasing its shelf life. Skin glossing pencil packaging is essential to attract the customers through the product appearance in order to improve the turnover ratio and profit margin. Skin glossing pencil packaging allows manufacturers to manufacture skin glossing pencils of various sizes while increasing its portability. Due to abundance in availability and low procurement cost, plastics such as acrylic and polypropylene (PP) are common material used in skin glossing pencil packaging.Skin Glossing Pencil Packaging Market: Market DynamicsThe skin glossing pencil packaging market is related with cosmetic packaging market. The cosmetic packaging market is estimated to be around US$ 30 billion, which is expected to grow at a CAGR of 4% over the forecast period. Skin glossing pencil, which is a luxury product, is expected to witness rise in demand with increase in disposable income of consumers, influencing the growth of skin glossing pencil packaging market.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3558 Nowadays people are getting more conscious about their image so with the use of skin glossing pencil they can reduce their skin complexion which is an important factor contributing to the increased consumption of the skin glossing pencil while boosting the growth for the skin glossing pencil packaging market. In the backdrop of rapid urbanization along with increasing influence of western culture especially in the Asian countries like India and China, the demand for the skin glossing pencil packaging is expected to move upward over the forecast period. However, the use of chemical composition of skin glossing pencil may hamper the growth of skin glossing packaging market. The globalization has made the world smaller as a skin glossing pencil of American brand can be easily found in the stores of Asian countries.Skin Glossing Pencil Packaging Market: Market SegmentationThe skin glossing pencil packaging market can be segmented by the type of material used, type of product, by application, by formulation.Based on the type of material used, skin glossing pencil packaging market can be segmented into:PlasticMetalBased on the type of product, skin glossing pencil packaging market can be segmented into:Gel polymerWet glossBased on the application, skin glossing pencil packaging market can be segmented into:FaceLipsEye LidsBased on the formulation, skin glossing pencil packaging market can be segmented into:Bis behenylIsostearylPhytosteryl dimer dilinoleyl dimer dilinoleate,Isocetyl stearateSynthetic beeswaxSkin Glossing Pencil Packaging Market: Regional OutlookRegionally global skin glossing pencil packaging market is segmented intoNorth AmericaLatin AmericaEastern EuropeWestern EuropeAsia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ)Middle East and Africa (MEA)JapanNorth America and Eastern and Western Europe is expected lead the global skin glossing pencil packaging market owing to high consumption of cosmetics products. Skin glossing packaging market in Latin America and APEJ region is expected to register the highest growth over the forecast period attributing to the influence of the western culture over the growing urban population. While the growth for skin glossing pencil packaging market in MEA is expected to be sluggish over the forecast period.Request Report for TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3558 Skin Glossing Pencil Packaging Market: Key PlayersSome key players of skin glossing pencil packaging market are Amcor Limited, HCP Packaging, Cosmopak, International Cosmetic Suppliers Ltd, 3C Inc, Alpha Packaging, Color Carton Corporation, ChingFon Industrial Co., LTD, Anomatic, Arcade Beauty, APC Packaging, EPOPACK Co., Ltd, AptarGroup, Libo Cosmetics Co., Ltd and Quadpack Group, etc. Slider Pouches Market PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 08:33:19 Press Information Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 657 Words Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 Modernization goes hand in hand with the process of urbanization, wherein people seek convenience in the complexity of modern life to make it easy. Slider pouches fulfill various requirements of fast paced modern life by providing quick transportation and easy packaging solutions for fast food needs. Globally, slider bags are utilized in different forms and for different uses varying from containing items to storing goods. Slider bags retain the freshness without the requirement of any secondary storage or packaging. Slider pouches ensures anti-tampering and anti-counterfeiting through their numerous customization options, allowing a pouch to have all the feature of a zipper pouches along with the slider which is made available to the consumers according to their requirements.Slider Pouches Market- Market Dynamics:Convenient and easy to open slider pouches are the new trend in the packaging industry. Slider pouches market growth is prominently driven by the tamper proof properties of slider bags. Alternative bags systems requires secondary packaging in order to maintain the freshness of food products, whereas slider bags discards the necessity of such secondary storage and packaging needs.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3529 Primary factor fueling the slider pouches market is the wide variety of sliders available in the market to provide selection options to the consumers. Incorporation of laser membrane under the slider to ensure anti-counterfeiting is one of the key factor driving the slider pouches market. Slider pouches are quite versatile and offer a long life span, making it an affordable consumer packaging solution. To counteract against the anti-tampering feature, the slider pouches are integrated with a visible tear-away seal just above the slider in order to provide more security in packaging. Slider pouches also provide an additional press-to-seal (PTS) child resistance re-sealable sliders to the pouches.However, manufacturers operating in the slider pouches market face the additional cost of adding special parts and material to slider pouches. Further the restricted scope of recyclability restrains the global market for slider pouches.Slider Pouches Market- Market Segmentation:The slider pouches market can be segmented on the basis of material type, slider type, layer type and application. On the basis of material type, the slider pouches is segmented into plastics (polypropylene, HDPE and LDPE) and aluminum foil. The pouches mostly come with a combination of plastic and aluminum layering to provide a longer shelf life to the product. On the basis of slider type, the slider pouches market is segmented into ergonomic sliders, low profile sliders, particle-proof sliders and sliders with or without end clips and others. On the basis of layer type, the slider pouches market is segmented into monolayer and multilayer. Lastly, on the basis of application, the slider pouches market can be segmented into pet food, cereals, snacks, bakery, confectionary and others.Slider Pouches Market- Regional Outlook:Geographically, the slider pouches market has a global presence including the local and international manufacturers and is segmented into five prime regions namely, North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America and Middle East and Africa (MEA). Flexible packaging market in the Asia Pacific region is dominated by flexible packaging products in pouches form. Ease of usage and convenience of slider bags make them a popular packaging option in the Asia Pacific region, especially in countries with strong food and beverages market including India, China, Indonesia, Philippines and Malaysia. North America market for slider bags is expected to contribute considerably to the global demand for slider pouches market. The Middle East and Africa (MEA) market is also expected to show healthy CAGR over the forecast period, 2017-2025, due to growth prospects in South Africa and GCC counties.Request Report for TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3529 Slider Pouches Market- Key Players:Some of the key players in the slider pouches market are Glenroy, Inc., Diamond Flexible Packaging Co., Zip-Pak, Inc., ABC Packaging Direct LLC, Pactech Packaging LLC, Pentaflex Packaging Ltd, Western Packaging Inc., and Montage Enterprises Pvt Ltd. Future Market Insights has announced the addition of the Soil Treatment Chemicals Market " report to their offering Future Market insights PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 14:15:03 Press Information Future Market insight Future Market Insights 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018, Valley Cottage, NY 10989, United States T: +1-347-918-3531 F: +1-845-579-5705 Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.com Website: www.futuremarketinsights.com NISHANT MISHRA MANAGER 8455795705 email https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ # 623 Words 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: www.futuremarketinsights.comMANAGER8455795705 Soil treatment is a process by means of which the quality of soil can be improved. Increasing industrialisation coupled with increasing water and soil pollution, have resulted in lower productivity of agricultural land and have rendered it infertile. This negative impact of industrial pollution on fertility soil and productivity has increased the need for soil treatment chemicals. Soil treatment processes and the chemicals used therein have become an integral part of farming and agriculture. If chemical fertilisers are used in excess amounts, it could make the soil acidic. Acidic and basic soil not only affect the plants growth but also affects the productivity, thus, it needs to be treated with pH adjusters in order to neutralise the soil. Depending upon the desired soil treatment, soil treatment chemicals are selected to improve the quality of the soil.Global Soil Treatment Chemicals Market: DynamicsThe demand for soil treatment products is directly proportional to the increasing demand for high-quality food grains. Increasing population coupled with increasing demand for food products is expected to boost the demand for the soil treatment chemicals during the forecast period. Surge in demand for the soil treatment chemicals has resulted in rise in the productivity of agriculture lands in the past few years. Since the soil treatment products improve soil quality such as physical, biological and nutritional values, it will help to drive the demand for the soil treatment chemicals. Furthermore, these products help in maintaining ideal soil conditions and help in balancing pH, increasing moisture retention, restoring microbial activity and reducing compaction for proper growth of the crop. The increasing use of soil treatment chemicals owing to their versatility is expected to drive the growth of soil treatment chemicals market. Apart from these, the lack of awareness and technical knowledge related to soil treatment and chemicals usage is likely to hamper the growth of soil treatment chemicals market. Moreover, the increasing bio-agriculture market and the government initiatives to support the growth of agriculture industry in various region such as APAC and North America is likely to create new opportunities for the growth of the soil treatment chemicals market.Request Sample Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3953 Global Soil Treatment Chemicals Market: SegmentationOn the basis of type, the global soil treatment chemicals market is segmented into;Organic amendmentsCompostCrop residueOthers (Sewage sludge, etc.)Soil protectionWeed ProtectionPest ControlOtherspH adjustersOthersOn the basis of technology, the global soil treatment chemicals market is segmented into;BiologicalThermalPhysiochemicalGlobal Soil Treatment Chemicals Market: Regional outlookThe global soil treatment chemicals market is mainly dominated by North America and Europe owing to rising concerns about arable land in these regions. Moreover, growing demand for improved soil fertility and soil aeration along with the government regulations over agricultural products in North America and Europe will fuel the market growth during the forecast period. The soil treatment chemicals market in this region is expected to witness a significant growth and is expected to register healthy CAGR over the forecast period. Furthermore, government initiatives to support the growth of agriculture industry, for instance, subsidies on agricultural products, will propel the demand for the soil treatment chemicals in Asia-Pacific region. The Asia-Pacific soil treatment chemicals market is projected to experience steady growth and is expected to register a robust CAGR over the forecast period.Request to View TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3953 Global Soil Treatment Chemicals Market: Market ParticipantsSome of the examples of market participants in the global soil treatment chemicals market identified across the value chain are: BASF SE, Arkema S.A., China Shenghua Group Agrochemical Company, Certis USA Llc., Bayer AG., Camson Bio Technologies Ltd, Chemtura Corporation. and Amvac Chemical Corporation, among others. PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 10:35:29 Press Information Future Market Insights 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,, Abhishek Budholiya Manager 3479183531 email https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ Published by Abhishek Budholiya +1-347-918-3531 e-mail http://www.futuremarketinsights.com # 659 Words 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,,Manager3479183531Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531 A steam jet ejector is a device that has no moving parts and is used for pumping; the motive force it uses is a fluid or a gas, and the motive fluid is steam. The components of a steam jet ejector include the steam chest, nozzle, suction, throat, diffuser and discharger.Steam jet ejectors are simple in operation, reliable in functioning, and incur low operational costs to produce vacuum. They find numerous applications in the chemical industry, and are found to be of high utility where supply of high-pressure motive gas is available on the site. They possess several advantages over mechanical vacuum pumps. For instance, no source of power is required other than the motive gas, unlike that in mechanical vacuum pumps. Steam jet ejectors are also dependable producers of vacuum as they do not possess moving parts, and offer ease in installation, operation and maintenance.Considering the high utility of steam jet ejectors in vital applications, the study of the steam jet ejector global market becomes an important read.Request For Report Sample @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3708 Steam Jet Ejector Market: SegmentationOn the basis of product type, the global steam jet ejector market is segmented as follows:Single-stage steam jet ejectorsMulti-stage steam jet ejectorsOn the basis of application type, the global steam jet ejector market is segmented as follows:Crude oil distillationPetrochemical processesEdible oil deodorizationOrganic motivated systemsFertilizer plant operationsThermal compressorsHybrid vacuum systemsMetals vacuum degassingSpace simulationSteam Jet Ejector Market: Key Trends, DriversSince contemporary energy-efficient steam jet ejector systems have been offering many advantages over other vacuum producing systems and as they can utilize motive steam, which is already available on site and that would otherwise be wasted, steam jet ejectors have been finding increasing industrial applications in recent times, thereby driving their market growth.Besides, steam jet ejectors have been found to be extremely reliable among all high vacuum systems, and are simple in design and have low noise levels during operation vis-a-vis other vacuum equipment. Further, steam jet ejectors are found to be ideal for large load applications. They require negligible maintenance as they do not have moving parts, and could be custom designed for specific applications. Steam jet ejectors are easy to retrofit as well as upgrade, and are available in any workable material of construction. Such advantages have been significantly driving the global demand for steam jet ejectors in the recent past, and it is expected that these benefits will further propel their market growth for the next few years.However, steam jet ejectors display a few limitations. For instance, during operation, it is essential to maintain the design quality of steam. If the steam quality reduces, there is a decline in suction pressure and capacity, especially in multi stage steam jet ejector designs. Also, excessive superheating of steam can unfavorably affect the suction capacity of steam jet ejectors. It can reduce the ratio of energy levels, and subsequently, the rise in specific volume has a tendency to to choke the diffuser.The application of steam jet ejectors in a varied number of processes depends on appropriate process conditions. For instance, it is vital that the motive fluid pressure drop is significant enough to develop high nozzle velocities, and that the difference between suction and discharge pressures is not extreme and the suction fluid flow is relatively small compared to the motive fluid.Such factors are expected to dampen the market growth rate of steam jet ejectors at a global level, as end users tend to look for suitable substitutes.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC): https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3708 Steam Jet Ejector Market: Market ParticipantsExamples of some of the market participants in the global steam jet ejector market are as follows:Croll ReynoldsVenturi Jet Pumps Ltd.Gardner Denver NashGraham CorporationKorting Hannover AGChem Process SystemsUnique SystemsMazda Limited PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 11:32:05 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 1006 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 13, 2019 / Sunniva Inc. ("Sunniva", the "Company", "we", "our" or "us") (CSE: SNN) (OTCQB:SNNVF), is pleased to announce the launch of their first three Sunniva brands in California. Sun Fire and KYNDNESS will hit shelves on March 15 and March 22, respectively and will initially be launched at select Harborside dispensaries in Oakland and San Jose and the Mankind dispensary in San Diego. The Herbella brand is anticipated to be in stores in Q2 2019, and all three brands will soon be available in dispensaries through-out the state of California.With the introduction of the first two brands in the series, Sun Fire and KYNDNESS, Sunniva is making good on its promise to deliver safe, full-spectrum, sun-grown products, truly living up to the Sunniva name, which means "Gift of the Sun." The Herbella brand will provide a truly exceptional experience with its line of ultra-pure extracts and select artisanal indoor cannabis flower.These wholly owned brands are made possible due to Sunniva's strategic relationships with industry-leading cultivators, each of whom have been carefully selected for their ability to produce top-quality flower and deliver extraction biomass on a consistent basis, along with their ability to meet Sunniva's standards. Through these unique partnerships and exclusive procurement arrangements, Sunniva is launching a series of highly-curated cannabis brands that cater to a variety of consumer tastes as the Company ramps up production within our state-of-the-art greenhouse."Sunniva's vision to enhance the lives of consumers with products that preserve the health and wellbeing of our community is supported by a house of brands approach to marketing. Every brand released under this model will offer a unique marketing mix to provide a diverse array of choices at various price points which appeal to individual consumer preferences. The first three brands in this series represent Sunniva's spirit of collaboration and steadfast commitment to developing products which offer the highest level of safety and quality, while never compromising on our promise to adhere to the highest standards of sustainability and responsible growth," said Mary Patton, VP, Marketing, Sunniva.Patton continued, "We are very proud to release some of the best sun grown and indoor cannabis products that can be found in today's California marketplace. However true to our core belief that Better is PossibleTM, Sunniva plans to unveil super premium brands with multiple product lines, which will showcase our own signature genetics, proprietary cultivation techniques crafted within our state of the art glasshouse." About Sun FireThe pride of the central California coast, every Sun Fire product starts with terpene-rich, sun grown cannabis expertly cultivated from our partners in the idyllic Monterey County. Bathed in pure, natural sunlight, offering rich, full-spectrum flavor profiles, Sun Fire's flower and extracts represent some of the hottest products under the California sun. Affordably priced and responsibly packaged for maximum safety and minimal waste, Sun Fire delivers incredible flavor, quality and value for every budget. The initial rollout of the Sun Fire label on March 15 will consist of flower products in 3.5, 7, 14, and 28 gram bags, vape cartridges (0.5 and 1.0 gram), disposable pens (0.5 grams), with shatter concentrate (1 gram) to follow later in the month. Sun Fire will initially be launched at Harborside dispensaries in Oakland and San Jose and the Mankind dispensary in San Diego.About KYNDNESSDriven by a deep desire to brighten lives with a little KYNDNESS, Sunniva teamed up with Harborside's FLRish Farms, to develop a line of personal and sharable sun-grown cannabis products, developed with budget-friendly price points. The KYNDNESS brand aims to embody the spirit of connection with cultivars, consumers and the community at large by collaborating with like-minded businesses that share our values in order to be a shining example of how coming together for the greater good benefits the entire eco-system. Generously packed, recyclable jars of KYNDNESS flower will initially be sold in 5 gram and 10 gram packages featuring both smalls' and select' bud sizes. By mid Q2 2019, the KYNDNESS brand will be expanded to include distillate product lines (vape pens and cartridges) and select concentrates. Harborside will be the first to launch the KYNDNESS brand at select locations on March 15, and the entire line will begin hitting shelves at other key dispensaries, such as the Mankind dispensary in San Diego, in late March.About HerbellaHerbella is set to launch in Q2 2019, offering more upscale, boutique-quality product lines at a slightly higher price point that will provide the consumer with affordable luxury. Herbellaproducts will include select artisanal indoor cannabis flower packaged in recyclable jars of 3.5, 7, 14 and 28 grams and will also include premium live resin extracts, manufactured within Sunniva's state of the art manufacturing laboratory and available in 1 gram jars of live resin extracts as well as terpene-rich vaporizer pens and cartridges."As a physician, safety and providing a consistent experience to the consumer is of paramount importance to me and for Sunniva, as many of our customers are looking for relief from insomnia, pain, anxiety and a variety of other symptoms," said Dr. Anthony Holler, CEO and Chairman of Sunniva.Dr. Holler continued, "This is accomplished through rigorous standards within cultivation, extraction and testing of our branded products. Sunniva's world-class greenhouse and extraction facility were designed to adhere to Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) which will support the production of safe, reproducible cannabis products. Our in-house distribution and delivery services will complete our control of products from seed to sale." 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.About SunnivaSunniva, through its subsidiaries, is a vertically integrated cannabis company operating in the world's two largest cannabis markets - California and Canada. Sunniva is focused on creating sustainable premium cannabis brands supported by our large-scale, purpose-built cGMP designed greenhouse and extraction facilities. We offer a steadfast commitment to safety and quality assurance providing cannabis products free from pesticides, which uniquely position PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 10:59:30 Press Information RESEARCH REPORT INSIGHTS 42 joseph street, Portcarling P0B 1J0 , Muskoka, BISHU TL 6317214201 email https://www.researchreportinsights.com # 516 Words 42 joseph street, Portcarling P0B 1J0 , Muskoka,TL6317214201 The global theodolite market is expected to register a healthy growth attributed to the growing need for making accurate measurements during the construction process. Apart from making accurate measurements in the construction industry, application of the theodolite also contributes during the study of orology. Growing need to re-measure the mountain ranges by the survey department of countries such as China and India continues to fuel growth of the global theodolite market. Integration of advanced technological features that enable laser tracking and GPS monitoring for high precision measurement has further contribute towards growth of the global theodolite market.Growth of the global theodolite market is mainly bound to various macro-economic and micro-economic factors. The report reveals that the increasing demand for making precise measurements in various industries such as construction and transportation industry has led to an upsurge in demand for theodolite market. Emerging technology will continue to transform and redefine the application of theodolite globally. With the emerging technology, manufacturers are focusing on integrating the advanced technological features in theodolite devices in order to equip them with enhanced GPS and laser tracking attributes. Bound to these factors, adoption of the theodolite devices will continue to increase in the global market.Request For Report Sample: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/sample/110114643/Theodolite-Market The report provides an in-depth insight on the crucial aspects of the global theodolite market while offering related information on the important segments, factor fuelling growth of the global market, competitive landscape and growth patterns. Research Report Insights states that the global theodolite market is expected to represent a value of over US$ 300 Mn by the end of 2022.On the other hand, various factors are expected to inhibit growth of the global theodolite market. Bound to lack of raw materials due to imposition of restrictions on use of the arsenic oxide by the European Union is likely to inhibit growth of the global market positively. As arsenic oxide is increasingly used to manufacture telescope, microscope and optical lens. With increasing impositions by the government on the use of arsenic oxide, the global theodolite market is expected to witness an inhibiting growth.Request Report Discount: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/discount/110114643/Theodolite-Market Theodolite devices will further continue to witness significant demand during the survey procedures. Increasing demand to re-measure the mountain ranges in various countries such as China and India is likely to rev up adoption of the global theodolite market.Key market players operating in the global theodolite market include EIE Instruments, South Surveying & Mapping Instrument Co Ltd, Survey Instruments Services Pte Ltd., Hexagon AB, Trimble, Suzhou FOIF Co., Hilti Group and Topcon Corporation.In the next section, the report reveals that the global theodolite market is segmented on the basis of product type, application and region. On the basis of product type, the global market is segmented as optical, electronic and vernier product. Based on application, the global market is segmented in terms of industrial, construction and other applications. By region, the global theodolite market is segmented as North America, Latin America, Europe and Japan.Report Analysis: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/rd/110114643/Theodolite-Market The report offers an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis on vocal biomarker market taking qualitative and quantitative assessment into consideration. The report also elucidates the dynamics of the market such as drivers, restraints, trend and opportunities which have significant impact in the growth of the market. The report peruses into the segregation of market to present a holistic picture of vocal biomarker. Fact.MR PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-13 14:18:08 Press Information FactMR 11140 Rockville Pike Suite 400 Rockville, MD 20852 United States Abhishek Budholiya Marketing Manager 353-1-4434-232 email https://www.factmr.com/ # 551 Words 11140 Rockville Pike Suite 400 Rockville, MD 20852 United StatesMarketing Manager353-1-4434-232 Quantification and detection of imperceptible characteristics and subtle changes in the voice can precisely decipher essential aspects of a persons changing health, including depression, stress and cardiovascular diseases. Accordingly, clinical psychologists and psychoanalysts have been using vocal patterns of patients to assess their personality traits and move further in leaps and bounds in medical and clinical investigations.An Israeli company, Beyond Verbal is developing much anticipated voice-enabled AI solutions, aimed at creating proprietary vocal biomarkers for relentless remote monitoring and personalized healthcare screening of health and emotions. Beyond Verbal infers that clinical data delineated with the help of AI, deep learning and machine learning techniques can assist in predicting and monitoring chronic diseases with initial successful results in alluding the presence of sleep apnea, COPD, CHF and detecting coronary artery disease through the voice.Get Free Sample Report Here:Another pertinent company, Sonde Health Inc. joined hands with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to introduce voice-based technology platform, enabling diagnosis and monitoring of various conditions and diseases.Embracing the future by leveraging technology, psychiatrists or psychologists could use biomarkers to instantaneously diagnose postpartum depression in new mothers, PTSD, specific cancers, Parkinsons disease and even senile dementia.However, there are underlying inhibitors such as unpredictability hovering around the results of tests. Besides, making biomarker ubiquitous through technology which can accommodate the sophisticated AI in smart devices is also a major challenge.To address the issues, innovative companies are taking fascinating new directionas suchAmazons Alexa has gained grounds which can recognize emotions.Vocal Biomarker Market: OverviewThe report offers an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis on vocal biomarker market taking qualitative and quantitative assessment into consideration. The report also elucidates the dynamics of the market such as drivers, restraints, trend and opportunities which have significant impact in the growth of the market. The report peruses into the segregation of market to present a holistic picture of vocal biomarker.Browse Full Report with ToC Here:The report encompasses comprehensive executive summary along with market overview section. The report also delineates economic outlook and profitability of enterprises. The report depicts investment feasibility matrix and PEST analysis to offer an in-depth view of the vocal biomarker landscape. The report also includes competition footprint matrix and product life cycle analysis. The report also incorporates mergers and acquisitions in the vocal biomarker market.The information in the report is backed up by primary research, incorporating interactions in person, a reliable and authentic views of seasoned analyst, surveys, interviews and actionable insights of experts. Besides, the report is underpinned by secondary research encompassing resourceful database, trade journals and verified paid sources. The report is furthered by absolute dollar opportunity analysis which is an instrumental aspect in determining the growth of the vocal biomarker market. Vocal Biomarker Market: Competitive ScenarioThe report also includes Porters Five Force Analysis which serves as basis for delineating competitive landscape of vocal biomarker market. Assessing competitiveness becomes imperative to comprehend and anticipate the moves by competitors, for instance. The report includes deep dive analysis with a dashboard view, including product portfolio, financial overview, recent developments and strategies.Have Any Query?? Ask Our Industry Expert: The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has insisted there was no basis to suspend commercial flights on Boeing 737 MAX 8, the model that crashed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Sunday. The U.S. aviation authorities defiance lingers despite several countries grounding the plane amidst fresh revelations that several American pilots had for months lodged complaints that the MAX 8s manual was insufficient for their understanding, according to the Dallas Morning News in Texas. The pilots complaints, which included a lack of adequate information on how to handle MAX 8s autopilot during a sudden nosedive, were logged in a public database for in-flight concerns. The pilots concerns were similar to the sudden nosing down the preliminary findings blamed for the crash of a MAX 8 operated by Indonesias Lion Air last October. The fact that this airplane requires such jury-rigging to fly is a red flag. Now we know the systems employed are error-prone even if the pilots arent sure what those systems are, what redundancies are in place and failure modes. I am left to wonder: what else dont I know? the Dallas Morning News quoted a pilot as logging in the database. Countries across the world were alarmed and quickly grounded the plane from their airspace after all the 157 people on the flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, Kenya, were killed on Sunday morning. The accident occurred about six minutes after the flight took off. The European Union, the United Kingdom, India, Australia, China, South Africa, Morocco, and Ethiopia are amongst at least 30 countries that have grounded the MAX 8 in a wave of safety regulations. Many of the countries said they took the step as a precaution until actual findings about the crashes are released. Nigerias Air Peace placed an order for 10 MAX 8s in 2018, but the company has not taken any deliveries yet. It, however, disclosed earlier this week that it was not in a hurry to cancel the purchase. Nigeria lost two citizens in the crash, including Pius Adesanmi, a newspaper columnist and professor. The Boeing 737 MAX 8 was completed and first tested in 2016 as part of a modern generation of signature 737s built by Boeing, amongst the worlds largest aircraft manufacturers. The company expressed absolute confidence in the safety of its MAX 8, saying there was no need to ground the plane before final investigations had been concluded. But it showed understanding for the countries that have suspended usage of the plane as a pre-emptive measure against mishaps. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and Boeing have since dispatched experts to the crash site for investigations. The planes black box has since been recovered, and experts have taken it out of Ethiopia to download and read data it collected prior to the crash. But several U.S. lawmakers have sided with foreign countries placing a temporary ban on MAX 8. Senators Mitt Romney, Richard Blumenthal and Ted Cruz have all called on the U.S. aviation authorities to ground MAX 8 pending investigation. President Donald Trump sent out condolences to victims of the crash, but did not openly join calls for suspension of MAX 8 jets. American media reports said the president spoke with the CEO of Boeing on Tuesday morning, during which the company reiterated its confidence in its product because there was no evidence to suggest factory defects. Although the FAA has not grounded MAX 8 from American airspace, the agency said it had recommended an urgent software upgrade to Boeing, which the company is expected to deliver in the next few weeks. The upgrade was not to correct any defect but to strengthen safety mechanisms, it said. The FAA was the first aviation regulator to grant permit of airworthiness for MAX 8, but there are claims the agency was trying to protect its integrity and that of Boeing as an American company to maximise profits. Both FAA and Boeing rejected the insinuations. The Dallas Morning News reported that a transport workers union recommended grounding of MAX 8, but pilots under Southwest Airlines, which has the highest number of MAX 8 planes in the world, said the model remained safe and no angle of attack or other errors were observed even in manual operation. South African lawmakers on Tuesday castigated the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) for its decision to grant VFS Global a further two years extension of their agreement to administer the issuing of visas. The decision to extend the contract is in direct violation of the Public Finance Management Act and relevant regulations on procurement within competitive bidding processes, Parliaments Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs said in a statement. The committee said it would write a letter to the Minister of Home Affairs, Siyabonga Cwele, to review the contract with the Dubai-based VFS Global. VFS Global manages visa and passport issuance-related administrative and non-discretionary tasks for a number of governments. Parliamentary spokesperson, Malatswa Molepo, said South African lawmakers would like to hear from Cwele about the possibility of going out on an open tender process. Also his plans to build capacity within his department to quickly process visa applications. The minister will be expected to respond to the committee within a week to ensure that the matter is dealt with before Parliament rises. The initial contract was entered into in 2010 and nine years down the line, the department continues to renew a contract with only one company, said Molepo. South African lawmakers have over the past year raised concerns about the VFS contract, calling the contract a systematic and deliberate creation to support a monopoly. Monopoly, that is surely not good for broadening of economic participation and impede entry for smaller companies within the field. It is even more concerning that the department has extended the scope of work of VFS to establish services in countries it did not have previously, said Committee Chairperson, Hlomani Chauke. It also raises concerns about the legitimacy and bona fides of the contract, Chauke added. The monopoly in the issuing of visas has drawn wide criticism from home and abroad. Such monopoly has led to few processed visa applications in key tourism markets such as China, Nigeria and India, seriously impacting the numbers of tourists coming into South Africa. The lack of capacity at the DHA to process visa applications is also a matter of concern as it hampers the actualisation of President Cyril Ramaphosas stated intention to grow South African economy through tourism, Chauke said. (Xinhua/NAN) An infant died under unclear circumstances at a hospital in Tunisia, bringing the number of unexplained baby deaths at a hospital in the country to 15 since last week, a judicial official said on Wednesday. Recently, the Tunisian health minister, Abderraouf Cherif, resigned over the deaths at the Rabta hospital in Tunis after 11 newborns were initially reported dead. Judicial spokesman Sofiene Selliti said that prosecutors were investigating the 15 deaths. Investigations will uncover the circumstances, Selliti added without further details. On Monday, acting Health Minister Sonia Ben Cheikh said samples taken from the maternity section at the hospital were being analysed at three laboratories to ascertain the cause of death. Tunisia has struggled with an economic slowdown, public unrest unleashed by the 2011 revolt that toppled long-time dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and ensuing attacks by militant insurgents. (dpa/NAN) Heavy battles raged on Wednesday between U.S.-backed Syrian forces and Islamic State in the militant groups last pocket in Eastern Syria, a Kurdish commander said. On March 10, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a rebel Kurdish-led group, resumed a campaign supported by a U.S.-led air coalition with the aim of capturing the village of Baghuz in energy-rich eastern Syria after evacuating thousands of civilians from the enclave. Fighting is fierce. There are a lot of casualties among the Daesh fighters, Adnan Afrin, an SDF commander, told dpa, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State. He did not give specific figures. The U.S.-led alliance meanwhile mounted a series of airstrikes against Islamic State positions in the area, a dpa reporter at the scene reported. Heavy and mid-sized weapons were used in the clashes between the SDF forces and Islamic State extremists in Baghuz, the reporter added. Islamic States mouthpiece, the Amaaq News Agency, said at least seven SDF fighters were killed or injured in the fighting on Wednesday. Baghuz, located on the Euphrates river in eastern Syria near the border with Iraq, is the last significant territory still in the hands of Islamic State, which for years controlled swathes of both countries. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, said a blast hit SDF premises in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, killing and injuring an unspecified number of SDF fighters. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack and said two SDF militiamen were killed. Syrias Kurds have played a major role in fighting the Islamic State in the war-torn country. (dpa/NAN) The U.S. military will effectively bar most transgender people and force people to serve under their birth gender, according to a memo from the Department of Defence. The new rules will go into effect on April 12. While they do not fully conform with President Donald Trumps attempt to ban transgender people from serving in the military, the new policy takes a large step in that direction. People currently undergoing treatment for gender dysphoria may continue to serve. However, from April, those in the process of transition will not be allowed to join the military. The Trump administration is once again cruelly and unfairly targeting transgender people who have been serving this country for years, said GLAAD, a legal advocacy group. Adam Smith, the chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, came out against the new rules and called for the Department of Defence to refrain from implementing them. Anyone who is qualified and willing should be allowed to serve their country openly. Make no mistake, this is a discriminatory ban on transgender people, not a ban on a medical condition and we will continue to fight against this bigoted policy, said Mr Smith. Transgender people were allowed to openly serve in the army from 2016 in a policy implemented by a former president, Barack Obama. The candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Seyi Makinde, was declared the winner of the Oyo State governorship election that held on March 9. Mr Makinde won 28 out of the 33 local governments in the state, leaving the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Adebayo Adelabu, with only five. The governor-elect received 515, 621 votes to defeat his closest rival from the APC, Mr Adelabu, who polled 357, 982 votes. The margin of defeat is 157,639 votes. Forty-two political parties contested the governorship election, even though many of them dropped their ambition at the last minute to align with either the PDP or the APC. Their names remained on the ballot, notwithstanding and they received votes. The defeat of the APC by the opposition was however not shocking for many Nigerians as the PDP earlier won the state in the February 23 presidential election. PREMIUM TIMES in this analysis reviews how the activities of the incumbent governor, Abiola Ajimobi, helped his party lose the polls. Background Mr Ajimobi contested in 2011 under the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and was elected in a keenly contested election as the governor of the Oyo State. After his four-year first term, he contested for a second term in an election that took place on April 11, 2015, under the APC for re-election against two of his predecessors in office, Alao Akala and Rashidi Ladoja. He was re-elected and became the first person to occupy the seat twice in the state. This fetched Mr Ajimobi the nickname: Kosheleri (It has not happened before). After his re-election, many believed that Mr Ajimobi relaxed and felt too fulfilled to have broken a jinx. He allowed his re-election to enter his head. He believed he has done what no man can do again. He neglected pensioners and talked to elders anyhow. He left some projects abandoned and allowed school children to even dislike him, an octogenarian, Isiaka Alimi told PREMIUM TIMES. Also, Mr Ajimobi enjoyed the confidence of the partys national leadership to the extent of being entrusted with the reconciliation of members in other states. However, he failed in reconciling the crisis of APC within his state. This included the crisis between himself and the Ministry of Communications, Adebayo Shittu. Having noticed that Mr Ajimobi was losing his grip in the state, after the presidential election,a national leader of the party, Bola Tinubu, made efforts to bring back those that left the party, including Alao-Akala, to strengthen APCs chances at the governorship election, but all efforts failed. The battle with Olubadan One of the straws that perhaps broke the camels back was the review of Olubadan Chieftaincy declaration by Mr Ajimobi. This pitched the Olubadan of Ibadan, Oba Saliu Adetunji, against the governor and the royal family alongside with some core Ibadan indigenes are yet to forget the embarrassment. The throne is bigger than anybody. If the Governor believes he has constituted authority, we have seen now. The relationship between the palace and Ajimobi is like cat and mouse. He spoke recklessly, and now, he finds himself in the pit, a chief in the palace of Olubadan, who does not want his name on print said. This move was a plan to render Olubadan useless. The steps by Ajimobi was for a political reason, using the new kings to his advantage rather than having to rely on just the Olubadan. He also told our correspondent that Mr Adelabu did not offend anyone, but the fact that he was the anointed candidate of Mr Ajimobi made people withdraw their support for him. Adelabu did not offend anyone. He fought a good fight, and we are proud of how the race went. But you know that cattle that walk with the dog will eat faeces, he said in Yoruba. Battles on all fronts Mr Ajimobis perceived poor approach to issues affecting the state also affected the party. In 2018, the Oyo State chapter of the Nigeria Union of Pensioners filed a suit against Mr Ajimobi and others over unpaid N42.3 billion pensions and gratuities to its members. The first term of this government was rosy in term of the fund and 13th month was paid to workers. Such largesse was never extended to the pensioners. The alleged sin of these retired primary school teachers and council retirees is that they did not vote for this government in 2011 and 2015. Another election is coming in 2019, how do you persuade more than 16,000 retired primary school teachers and council retirees, and their dependants to vote for a government that had turned them into nonentities?, Gbadegesin Akande, the head of Oyo pensioners had said then. Also, workers of Oyo-owned schools and students have clashed with the APC led government in the state. For several months, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (a school co-owned Oyo and Osun) was shut due to the inability of the government to fund the school. This was also obtainable in the states colleges of education and polytechnics. In 2016, secondary school students in Oyo state protested over the new educational policy in the state which aimed at privatising school ownership. Some protesting students destroyed a billboard of the state governor. Also, LAUTECH students played a major role in the fall of APC in Oyo State, many opined. In 2017 while LAUTECH was shut, a video of Mr Ajimobi went viral where he rudely addressed protesting students. Ajimobis arrogance is so disturbing. You will recall how he displayed a lack of empathy when students protested eight months of closure of their school. Ajimobi said the students did not respect constituted authority and told us to do our worst. Now, we have done our worst, and APC government is out of the state, Kazeem Adefarati, a student leader in LAUTECH told PREMIUM TIMES. How can a governor say to protesters, Go and do your worst. Am I the person that closed your school? The state lacks responsible and responsive leadership in Oyo, and if APC continues, there may be more problems. After the protest, Mr Ajimobi demanded an apology from the students saying they were rude to him. The example of what happened in Oyo is fast happening everywhere even in Kwara, Mr Adefarati said. Battle with Ayefele, others The demolition of Yinka Ayefele fresh FM also ignited the fire of hatred people have for APC government. You could remember that Seyi Makinde went to music house, consoled Ayefele over the incident, Ajayi Aliu said. Even though they later reconciled and built the music house, his arrogance and approach to issues did not save him and his party. Another voter, Funke Ogunrounmu who spoke with PREMIUM TIMES said: You dare not talk to him while seated except he asked you to do so. There are lots of issues that left to his defeat. Imagine, asking parents of protesting pupils in 2016 to apologise before opening their school. He is no God. I can tell you for free that Ajimobi attitude of Imperial Majesty-ship brought the APC in Oyo to where they are today. More reactions Funsho Soremekun, a public affairs analyst, told PREMIUM TIMES that the Oyo State election shows that strength belongs to the people. What happened in Oyo shows that strength belongs to the people. They maintain the right to elect and remove. That should send a signal to other government officials that they are being examined by people and if they fail, they will be removed, he said. Also, another, Sodiya Waheed said: Not just Oyo but in all parts of the country. People have spoken, and failed leaders are being thrown out. It is, however, a shame that they use their failure to affect that of their party candidates, he said. Possibly his most enduring role was that of the inconvenient man of letters who kept sentry to public morality and ethics, hovering the fringes of the errant moment, then swiftly rising to caution, needle or upbraid (baring and deploying his koboko on the aberrant body, as he was wont to say). Words were his weapon of choice, apparently compelled by a conscience stitched to truth, and regularly giving wings to his angst. This was, conceivably, his bequeathed responsibility as a son of a headmaster, who was a custodian of communal propriety. Certainly, no less an indication of the impact of Pius Adesanmi the highly renowned essayist, academic and public intellectual has been the great outpouring of emotions attendant upon his recent demise, in the ill-fated Ethiopian Airlines Airbus 737 crash of Sunday, March 10, from friends, colleagues, professional co-travellers and other fellow journeymen. Even those at the abrasive end of his lacerating social commentary and many who, though in frequent or fervent disagreement with him, yet feel the significant shrinking of the public sphere by his unfortunate departure. Born in Isanlu, in Yagba East Local Government Area of Kogi State, Nigeria on February 27, 1972, the late Pius Adesanmi took a First Class Honours Bachelors of Art degree in French from the University of Ilorin in 1992, after which he obtained a Masters of Art in the same discipline from the University of Ibadan in 1998. Finally, he obtained a PhD in French Studies from the University of British Columbia in 2002 before proceeding to become an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University, USA between 2002 and 2005. Mr. Adesanmi was to subsequently join the Faculty in Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, in 2006, where he went on to distinguish himself in a precocious manner as full Professor of Literature and African Studies, and Director of the Universitys Institute of African Studies. These were positions he held till his untimely passage on March 10, when he was bound for a meeting of the African Unions Economic, Social and Cultural Council (AU-ECOSSOC) meeting in Nairobi, Kenya. Also, he was previously a Fellow of the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA) from 1993 to 1997, and a Fellow of the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS) in 1998 and 2000. His life constituted a bridge that built communities of meaning and held diverse knowledge forms in communion: from the Francophone to the Anglophone; between theory and practice; and unfolding a raft between the rarefied and arcane world of the academy with the high/side streets of popular culture. This latter role found huge expressions in his relentless activities and activism across the various communities he fellowshipped with in the social media. A quintessential man of letters, he weaponised words and pressed them to a social regenerative service, and his public interventions against a dysfunctional nationhood as an essayist and public intellectual, saw to his being appositely referred to as the Nigerian God of Satire. Mr Adesanmis intellectual engagements not only witnessed his uncovering of layers of social and political atrophy, more significantly he perfected the response of seeking to laugh these twisted if not bizarre manifestations of reality into correction. Satire was a surgeons scalpel in his practice. Perhaps larger than Mr Adesanmis academic acknowledgement was his humungous following as a public intellectual, particularly on social media. For upwards of two decades, he was a prominent feature on opinion pages in the Nigerian media. He maintained a highly followed column in the PREMIUM TIMES, through which he ran commentaries imbued with a satirical verve, x-raying the absurdity of much of our national condition. In largely irreverent swipes, nothing was too sacred to be poked fun at from the kleptocratic orgies of the power elite, to the unconscionable feats of wily religious operatives, and the habitual self-abuse of the regular citizen, disconcertingly resigned to dysfunction, etc. More so, he was a prized member of the Editorial Board of PREMIUM TIMES and acclaimed author of the best-selling Naija No Dey Carry Last, a collection of satirical nuggets described as relating a freewheeling anarchic witblending cultural infusions and the Nigerian street language, published by Premium Times Books, in collaboration with Parresia Publishers. Mr Adesanmis practice embodied the near-spiritual obligation of the modernist writer, who was not only diviner and interpreter of social malaise, but also one with the regenerative capability of the burden-bearer. And Nigeria, alongside the larger African continent (in service to with he unfortunately lost his life), was the throbbing crucible and extended theatre of angst, whose alarming slide into murkier dysfunction exerted much of his efforts. Hes is a body of incisive work a most remarkable oeuvre speaking to the African condition, while advocating ways of rolling back its turmoil and reinventing the continent, towards a renaissance. Building the capacity to power that African renaissance was, no doubt, salient to Mr Adesanmis cross-generational endeavours, seeing him take on crucial roles in training and mentorship in a number of institutions and programmes. These included efforts in the setting up and running of the Pan-African Doctoral Academy (PADA) at the University of Ghana; the social media based African Doctoral Lounge; and Kwara State University (KWASU)s Abiola Irele School of Theory and Criticism, which ran every summer, and of which he was deputy director. Of a related trajectory was his abiding engagement with the youth, who he laboured to counsel and mentor, as a way of setting them on the right paths. He was the high priest of the Nigerian, and say African, millennial generation, seeking to educate them out of a seemingly congenital dysfunction inherited from society. He simply bent over backwards to engage them in their natural points of convergence on social media, which he considered as crucial sites of cultural interaction and meaning-making. The quality of the response of many in the generation to Mr Adesanmis evangelical zeal could only have been a measure of the inspiration he exuded. An award winning author, his laurels included a 2017 Canada Bureau of International Education Leadership Award; the unique Penguin Prize for African Writing in the Non-Fiction category for his book Youre Not a Country, Africa; the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry prize for his collection, The Wayfarer and Other Poems, etc. Burial arrangements would to be announced by his family in due course. A principal suspect in the controversial Malabu oil scandal on Wednesday appeared as a witness before an Italian court in Milan. Abubakar Aliyu is alleged to have acted as a middleman for top officials of former President Goodluck Jonathans administration in the long-running controversy. Mr Abubakar is being questioned in Italy over his role in what has been described as one of Africas most controversial corrupt oil deal. The Malabu scandal involved the transfer of about $1.1 billion by Shell and ENI through the Nigerian government to accounts controlled by a former Nigerian petroleum minister, Dan Etete. From accounts controlled by Mr Etete, about half the money ($520 million) went to accounts of companies controlled by Mr Aliyu, popularly known in Nigeria as the owner of AA oil. Anti-corruption investigators and activists suspect he fronted for top officials of the Jonathan administration as well of officials of Shell and ENI. The transaction was authorised in 2011 by Mr Jonathan through some of his cabinet ministers and the money was payment for OPL 245, one of Nigerias richest oil blocks. Although Shell and ENI initially claimed they did not know the money would end up with Mr Etete and his cronies, evidence has shown that claim to be false. Shell, Eni, Mr Etete, Mr Aliyu and several officials of the oil firms are being prosecuted in Italy for their roles in the scandal. During the trial in Italy Wednesday morning, the prosecutors announced that an Italian lawyer who claimed to be acting for Mr Aliyu visited them yesterday asking for a new delay. An anti-corruption campaigner who covered the trial, Barnaby Pace of UK Global Witness, however, said that the lawyer was not present at the court Wednesday morning and no written request was submitted. But as proceedings commenced, Mr Aliyu confirmed that he received the information regarding the charges against him. He was however reminded he could choose not to answer questions as he could incriminate himself in the process. PREMIUM TIMES understands that the lawyer representing him later turned up in the Milan court. The Nigerian government also has a law observing the case in court. Mr Aliyu later asked for a delay in giving his testimony. He was supported by lawyers to some other defendants who claimed that he is an important witness and his new lawyers have not had time to review all the evidence. Although Mr Aliyu is was due to face charges in Italy for his roles in the Malabu oil deal, PREMIUM TIMES gathered that prosecutors were not able to serve the papers on him until recently. In their ruling Wednesday morning, the judges noted that given the seriousness and complexity of the charges against Mr Aliyu, a delay should be granted. Given the scope of the charges and evidence against him, his new lawyers were subsequently given time to digest it. The judges will offer a new date for the resumption of the trial. Mr Aliyus trial in Nigeria is being stalled because Nigerias anti-graft agency said he and other principal suspects have been on the run. In March 2017, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, filed fresh charges against him, along with Mohammed Adoke, a former Attorney General and Minister of Justice, and Dan Etete, a former Minister of Petroleum, for involvement in the $1.1 billion Malabu oil scandal. They are being prosecuted alongside two international oil giants Shell Nigeria Exploration Production Company, and ENI, as well as Malabu Oil & Gas Ltd, Rocky Top Resource Ltd, Imperial Union Ltd, Novel Properties & Dev. Co. Ltd, Group Construction Ltd, and Megatech Engineering Ltd. Although Mr Adoke has consistently claimed that he is being persecuted, he has declined to show up in Nigeria and face trial. Last year, the EFCC said it had begun moves to extradite the former attorney general. Although Mr Jonathans government brokered the deal in 2011, the former president is not facing trial over the case. The Senate was thrown into rowdy session on Wednesday following the request of Dino Melaye (PDP, Kogi West) to present a motion at the next plenary session. Mr Melaye, who raised a point of order, asked his colleagues to let him bring a motion to debate the militarisation of the just concluded general elections. Nigeria conducted her presidential and National Assembly elections on February 23 and the governorship and state houses of assembly elections on March 9. Mr Melaye who said his point of order was not political, said the motion will help curb electoral malpractices in future elections. What I am raising this morning has nothing to do with political parties. I want to bring before this Senate, the elections both on the 9th and 23rd in this country and I believe that the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria shall not close our eyes to the happenings of those elections. I want that election to be debated on this floor. I want to bring a motion to be addressed by this Senate in the next legislative day so that the militarisation of the process, the abuses of this election, will not go undiscussed in this parliament for posterity sake. And so that solutions can be given and the president can also be properly advised and the electoral act be signed into law as we begin to prepare for future elections. This is my prayer. Let it be discussed as a Senate. We will debate and give accounts of what happened in our various senatorial districts with the vision of correcting electoral malpractices, he said. The Senate President, Bukola Saraki, thereafter, put the question for a voice vote. There was loud echo of ayes and nays. Mr Saraki, however, ruled that the prayer be adopted. He said according to the Senates Standing Order, only one-fifth of the lawmakers is required to support the prayer before it can be adopted. Distinguished colleagues, by the order, you only need one-fifth of the senators to support the motion. It will be taken in the next legislative day, he said, Arguments ensued. The Senate Leader, Ahmed Lawan, stood up to question Mr Sarakis ruling. A non-partisan motion was on the floor. You ruled. We didnt hear the ruling. What was your ruling, he asked amidst increasing noise. For Bala NaAllah, there was no motion. He said Mr Melaye introduced himself as a senator-elect. He was not speaking as a senator, he added. In a bid to calm the seemingly angry lawmaker, the senate president, again, explained his ruling. He said the motion, when brought, will not be partisan. He also said legal action will be taken where necessary and the motion will be debated at the leadership before it is placed on the order paper. In the midst of the rowdiness, Barau Jibrin (APC, Kano) also stood up to question Mr Sarakis ruling again. He quoted the order of the Senate which permits a lawmaker to challenge the opinion of the Senate president/the chairman. I dont know your ruling on the motion. Again, more noise. Mr Saraki pleaded with his colleagues not to abuse the process of the plenary and move on to other important business of the day. Mr Melaye is, therefore, expected to lead a motion on the alleged militarisation of the just concluded general elections on Thursday. The Nigerian government has banned Boeings 737 Max 8 aircraft from operating in its airspace. The decision was announced by the Minister of Aviation (State), Hadi Sirika, at the end of the weekly meeting of the Federal Executive Council (FEC), which held Wednesday in Abuja. The meeting was chaired by President the Muhammadu Buhari. Addressing journalists at the end of the meeting, Mr Sirika said the decision follows the recent crash involving the aircraft type owned by Ethiopian Airline. The crash killed all 157 persons on board on Sunday morning. The flight was heading for Nairobi, Kenya. The Ethiopian crash occurred about five months after Indonesias Lion Air-operated Boeing 737 Max also crashed into sea killing all on board after taking off. Mr Sirika said he had earlier tweeted that there was no cause for alarm as no operator in Nigeria was using the type of airplane. He said the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority has already issued an advisory statement saying that nobody should fly out of Nigeria or into Nigeria using the 737 Max pending the determination of the actual cause of the crash in Ethiopia and also pending the outcome of the response of the manufacturer themselves which is Messrs Boeing. The minister said regardless of the enormous safety records of the 737, it has caused concern for the world of aviation. We have issued directives that no operators with 737 (8) or (9) should operate into or out of our airports, he said. The decision by Nigerian government follows a similar decision taken by several other countries. A video has gone viral showing the Kano State chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Abdullahi Abbas, describing the supplementary governorship election in the state as a do or die. In the short video, the party chairman also assures supporters his party would provide maximum protection for its members even if it means ensuring the dismissal of police officers who try to restore order. Dressed in a white Kaftan and a white cap, Mr Abbas sat on a plastic chair in a house presumed to be his residence. Surrounding him were youth applauding his remarks. Speaking in Hausa, he said his listeners should stand against any opposition that comes their way during the elections. There is every possibility that you can be arrested. But let me tell you; before you get to the police station we will make sure you are released and the police that arrested you will likely lose his job. We are going to give you every protection that is required. This election is a matter of do or die for us. We must win this election, Mr Abbas said. The video was not shot by PREMIUM TIMES but a check revealed that it was uploaded on the internet on March 13. Kano State is among the six states where the governorship elections were declared inconclusive. Others are Plateau, Adamawa, Sokoto and Bauchi states. Before the declaration in Kano, the PDP was leading the APC in the governorship election in the state. Before the announcement of the election result, the deputy governor of Kano State, Nasir Gawuna, and the commissioner in charge of local government and chieftaincy affairs, Sule Garo, were arrested for trying to disrupt the announcement of the results. The two officials were arrested some minutes after 2 a.m. Monday after they arrived at the venue of the state collation centre and began to disrupt the process. Their action led to a halt in the announcement of results at the centre after some youth suspected to be supporters of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) tried to attack the two officials. The police later released Mr Gawuna without charges as he enjoys constitutional immunity from prosecution based on the office he holds. The Kano police spokesperson later claimed the deputy governor was not arrested and was only rescued from the mob. Six more people were recovered from the accident scene in Lagos where a three-storey building housing a childrens school collapsed on Wednesday morning. Only one of the bodies was confirmed dead at the point of recovery with the fate of the five others uncertain. More than 100 people, mostly pupils of Ohen Nursery and Primary School, were trapped in the rubble, witnesses said. Ohen Nursery and Primary School occupied the first and second floors of the collapsed building while residents live on the ground floor. At least 40 pupils, including 10 dead bodies, had been pulled out as at Wednesday afternoon, according to the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency (LASEMA). Between 2.15 p.m. and 6 p.m., a PREMIUM TIMES reporter counted six more bodies three adults and three children (one of them dead) removed from the rubble and taken to the Lagos Island General Hospital. Heavy machines including an excavator work to remove the debris while anxious parents and relatives waited. A woman in the crowd raised an alarm that she had just received a call from her relative trapped in the building who said shes still there with some pupils. But when a LASEMA official tried to call back the number, it was switched off. Earlier, Governor Akinwunmi Ambode visited the scene and blamed the owner of the building for the mishap. Nigerian authorities should lift the ban on Jay FM radio station in the city of Jos in Plateau state and stop trying to intimidate its staff, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. On March 1, the Nigeria Broadcasting Commission (NBC) instructed the privately owned Jay FM radio station to shut down indefinitely for alleged violations of the Nigeria Broadcasting Code and National Broadcasting Commission Act, according to Jay FM staff that spoke to CPJ and an NBC order seen by CPJ. The shutdown order, which followed questioning of three Jay FM staff by the Department of State Security (DSS), claimed that continued inciting broadcasts would lead to breakdown of law and order in the state. Nigerias broadcasting regulator should immediately permit Jay FM to resume broadcasting and intelligence services should cease harassing journalists, Angela Quintal, CPJ Africa program coordinator, said in New York. Political broadcasts are not grounds for the complete shutdown of a news outlet. On February 28, DSS agents entered Jay FM and arrested Orji Ojingwa, the stations head of engineering, because he was the most senior staff member present, Ojingwa told CPJ. They drove in through the gate with two trucks filled with heavily armed officers and they took me away, Mr Ojingwa said. The DSS took Mr Ojingwa to their office in Jos, questioned him about Jay FM programming, and released him after Mangna Yusuf, Jay FMs station manager, promised to submit himself to the DSS office the next morning at 10 a.m., according to Messrs Ojingwa and Yusuf. After arriving at the DSS office on the morning of March 1, Mr Yusuf was questioned by someone who identified himself as Mr Hassan about Jay FMs programming, he said. They started asking me questions about our stations coverage of [Nigerias February 23] general elections, Mr Yusuf told CPJ. I told him it was news. We are doing our job. Yusuf said he spent about three hours with the DSS, during which time they told him they felt Jay FMs coverage could serve to heighten political tensions in the area. Clinton Garuba, managing director and chief executive officer of Jay FM, told CPJ that the DSS also summoned him later on March 1 and questioned him about the stations coverage of the February 23 general elections, particularly its reporting on Jos North/Bassa local government districts. The shutdown order came just after he left the DSS office, Mr Garuba said. Nigeria also held gubernatorial and state assembly elections on March 9. When contracted by CPJ, Mr Hassan confirmed himself as head of DSS investigations in Jos, but declined to speak about the case. Peter Afunanya, public relations officer for the DSS, told CPJ over WhatsApp that no journalist was arrested in Jos by the DSS but that agents did invite the managing director of Jay FM and drew his attention to the negative activities of his station. Mr Afunanya said he was aware that the station had been shut down and said he was not able to speak for the NBC. Afunanya did not respond to a follow-up message on March 9 asking specifically if Mr Ojingwa had been taken from the station on February 28. When asked what was behind NBCs order to shut down the station, Armstrong Aduku Idachaba, director of broadcast monitoring at NBC, told CPJ that Jay FM had broadcast a sermon in which the pastor was making hateful and inciting comments saying people in Plateau should not vote for a particular candidate and that the NBC had reason to believe the station would not change its broadcast. Mr Idachaba said that Nigerian law allows for a shutdown based on established pattern of breaches of the broadcast code and that breaches earlier committed are enough to execute a shutdown order. Mr Idachaba said the NBC may cooperate with the DSS in cases related to security or the breakdown of law and order. Jay FM was fined and warned by the NBC over political broadcasts in mid-February 2019, including one by a bishop referenced as David Abioye that the NBC defined as inflammatory, according to NBC sanction letters seen by CPJ. Mr Garuba told CPJ that Jay FM stopped broadcasting David Abioye after the NBC sanction in mid-February. When asked by CPJ, Mr Idachaba declined to comment on whether the NBC had identified instances of Jay FMs continued broadcast of Mr Abioye. When CPJ called NBC Director General Ishaq Modibbo Kawu, he picked up briefly before the line cut. CPJs WhatsApp message to his number, which was marked as delivered, went unanswered. Antia Ekanem, acting public relations officer at NBC, told CPJ that only the NBC director general and head of broadcast monitoring could speak on Jay FMs case, but that he was not aware that the DSS was involved because in cases like this you dont bring in the DSS. Mr Idachaba told CPJ on March 11 that NBC sent a letter to Jay FM inviting the staff to a meeting on March 18, during which they would discuss possible reopening of the station. The European Union and India have banned the Boeing 737 Max 8 from flying over their airspaces to ensure passenger safety. This came after last Sundays ill-fated crash that killed 157 people on board. Ethiopian Airlines, widely recognised as Africas most successful airline, promptly ordered the rest of the aircraft model in its fleet to be grounded immediately after the incident. The BBC reports that Indias Ministry of Civil Aviation announced its decision to ground the Boeing 737-Max planes immediately. It said, These planes will be grounded until appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations. EU moves swiftly Also, the EU Aviation Safety Agency said it is suspending the aircraft as a precautionary measure. Countries like Ethiopia, Singapore, China, France, Ireland, Germany, Australia, Indonesia, and Malaysia had on Monday suspended the 737 Max brand. On Tuesday, the UKs Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said it will join other countries who have banned the plane. The 737 MAX 8, the latest version of Boeings workhorse narrow-body jets, was introduced in 2017. Not the first In October 2018, a 737 MAX 8 operated by Indonesian budget carrier, Lion Air, crashed 13 minutes after take-off from Jakarta on a domestic flight, killing all 189 passengers and crew on board. Despite a growing precautionary response from countries around the world, the United States, where Boeing is based, says the aircraft is still safe to fly. The U.S. Association of Flight Attendants is now calling for the countrys Federal Aviation Administration to temporarily ground the 737 Max fleet in the US out of an abundance of caution. Members of the U.S. Congress and ordinary Americans are also piling pressure on the FAA to reverse its decision immediately and ban the aircraft model. No show in Nigeria In Nigeria, authorities have said no airline is currently using the 737 Max. Nigerian carrier, Air Peace, said it had no immediate plan to cancel its order for 10 of the aircrafts model for its fleet. Other countries and airlines that have announced a ban on the 737 Max so far are: Argentina (Aerolineas Argentinas), Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Cayman Islands (Cayman Airways), EASA member states, Italy, Mexico (Aeromexico), Mongolia (MIAT Mongolian Airlines), Morocco (Royal Air Maroc), Netherlands Norway (Norwegian), Oman, Poland, South Africa (Comair), South Korea (Eastar Jet) and Turkey. The pilot of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET 302 had flight control problems shortly before the fatal crash, the companys chief executive has told CNN. CEO Tewolde GebreMariam told CNNs Richard Quest on Tuesday that a recorded conversation with air traffic control detailed the final moments of the flight. He was having difficulties with the flight control of the airplane, so he asked to return back to base, Mr GebreMariam said. A Boeing 737 MAX 8 operated by Ethiopia Airlines crashed en route to Nairobi from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 persons on board. A 737 MAX 8 was also involved when a Lion Air flight from Indonesia went down in October 2018. Mr GebreMariam told CNN his airlines pilots had received additional training on the flight procedures involving the 737 MA after the Lion Air crash. He said Ethiopian Airlines has grounded its fleet of MAX 8s, along with several other countries, including China, Australia and the United Kingdom. We dont yet know the exact cause of the accident, and speculation is not helpful in either way, Mr GebreMariam said, but I think there are questions without answers on the airplane. The minister of science and technology, Ogbonnaya Onu, has inaugurated the National Steering Committee to implement Nigerias leather products policy. A statement signed by AbdulGaniyu Aminu, Head of Public Relations Unit in the ministry, quoted Mr Onu as saying that all efforts would be deployed to ensure effective implementation of the policy. He said that the widely acclaimed Moroccan leather products are actually sourced from Nigeria. The leather industry is very critical to national growth and development because it will boost our Gross Development Product (GDP) and increase our foreign exchange earnings The policy will solve most of the problems hindering the growth of the leather sector and will enable Nigeria to produce shoes, belts and other leather products similar to what is obtained in other developed countries of the world. The committee is expected to set up working plan and budget for the effective implementation exercise of the policy within two months. It is also expected to coordinate and monitor the optimal implementation of the policy in conjunction with the relevant stakeholders, the minister said. The committee was expected to provide related feedback and submit report to the ministry from time to time. The permanent secretary of the ministry, Bitru Nabasu, told the committee to ensure actualisation of the strategic implementation plan to enable Nigeria to realise the gains in the leather sector. The chairman of the committee, Eucharia Oparah, said the leather industry had a lot of potentials, which need to be harnessed. According to Mr Oparah, the implementation of the leather policy is the beginning of the revitalisation of the leather sector. (NAN) The Senate on Wednesday swore in Isaac Alfa, as the substantive senator representing Kogi East district. Oath taking for the new senator was the first activity of the Senate for the day. The development follows a Supreme Court judgment which affirms Mr Alfa as the senator representing the district. With this, Atai Aidoko Ali, who has been representing the district until the oath-taking, ceases to be a senator. Mr Alfa, at different times, accused Mr Saraki of partiality in his refusal to obey court order affirming him. Addressing journalists in February, the former Chief of Air Staff made public his plight. I will like to explain the behavioural relationship of the Nigeria Senate with the judiciary to let the whole world know the embarrassing and selective obedience of court orders in the National Assembly by the Senate President, Dr Bukola Saraki and the Clerk of the National Assembly, Mr Alfa had said. The Senate President, Dr Bukola Saraki, decides which Court orders to obey and which ones to disobey. In my case, the Federal High Court ordered on the 13th June, 2018 that I should be sworn in as Senator representing Kogi East Senatorial District. This order was affirmed by the Supreme Court, yet the leadership of the National Assembly refused to obey. A Lagos Division of the Federal High Court, on Wednesday, fixed April 12 to hear oral evidence in a suit by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) seeking final forfeiture of about $8.4 million and N7.4 billion linked to former first lady, Patience Jonathan. The judge, Mojisola Olatoregun, had in a ruling delivered on February 28, on the motion for final forfeiture, held that there were conflicting affidavit evidences, which could be best resolved if respective parties were called upon to give oral evidence. The case was consequently, adjourned until March 13 (today) for oral evidences. On Wednesday, the case could not proceed as earlier scheduled, while April 12 has been fixed as a return date. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the EFCC had secured an interim order for forfeiture of the sums on April 20, 2018, before Ms Olatoregun, following a motion ex parte. It joined as respondents: Patience Jonathan, Globus Integrated Services Ltd, Finchley Top Homes Ltd., Am-Pm Global Network Ltd, Pagmat Oil, and Gas Ltd and Magel Resort Ltd and Esther Oba. NAN reports that on October 29, 2018, EFCC counsel, Rotimi Oyedepo, had moved his motion for final forfeiture of the sums, urging that same be finally forfeited to the federal government. Meanwhile, defence counsel, Messrs Ifedayo Adedipe (SAN), Chief Mike Ozekhome (SAN), and Mr Ige Asemudara had respectively moved their processes in opposition to the motion for final forfeiture. On January 15, the court had admitted electronic evidences presented by respondent counsel, which depicted video exhibits showing various business outfits of the third and sixth respondents The court had then adjourned for judgment. In a ruling on February 28, the judge had first dismissed an application by counsel to the respondents, seeking to set aside the interim forfeiture orders made on April 20, 2018. The court had held that it was satisfied that the requirement for the grant of the interim orders was met by the EFCC, adding that it was clear that at the time the interim order was made, there was no pending suit elsewhere. Meanwhile, giving its ratio on the motion for final forfeiture, the court held that it finds the affidavit evidences conflicting, adding that same can only be resolved, if the parties concerned were called upon to give oral evidences. The court had held: The applicant relied on two grounds (1) That the court has the statutory power under section 17, to grant the reliefs sought and (2) That the monies are suspected to be proceeds of an unlawful activity or unlawful activities, diverted from the Federal Government of Nigeria. The court had asked if having regards to the provisions of sections 17 of the Advance Fee Fraud and Other Fraud Related Offences Act, as well as the available facts before the court, the applicant has made out a case for final forfeiture of the sums. The judge noted the various processes filed by parties to the suit which includes, affidavits, counter affidavits, further affidavits, reply affidavits written addresses, as well as exhibits. The court had then held: I have examined the issues raised on both sides and i came to the conclusion after exhaustively going through the affidavits filed by parties, and i found the affidavits conflicting on material facts. I believe in the circumstance that the court cannot rely on its own opinion alone; the conflict must only be determined or resolved by the evidences of parties themselves, particularly as it relates to the source of the funds. I believe parties should be heard and cross-examined on this issue. Parties are accordingly called upon to give oral testimonies in support of the case presented, the court held. (NAN) A 32 -year-old housewife, Ruth Emehelu, on Wednesday appeared before an Ikeja Magistrates Court for allegedly stabbing a 15-year-old domestic staff with a knife for coming home late from an errand. The police charged Ms Emehelu, who resides at Papa Ashafa, Agege, Lagos, with assault. The prosecutor, Ezekiel Ayorinde, said the defendant committed the offence in January at her residence. He said the defendant assaulted the girl who was kept in her custody with a knife for coming home late after being sent on an errand. The prosecutor alleged that the defendant, who always maltreats the girl, beat and inflicted injuries on her head with a knife. The offence, he added, contravened the provisions of Section 173 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the Section carries three years imprisonment for assault. The magistrate, B.O Osunsanmi, admitted the defendant to bail in the sum of N50, 000 with one surety in like sum. Mrs Osunsanmi ordered that the surety must be gainfully employed and show evidence of two years tax payment to the Lagos State Government. She adjourned the case until April 1 for mention. (NAN) The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on Wednesday re-arraigned a former Managing Director of the defunct Intercontinental Bank PLC, Erastus Akingbola in a Federal High Court in Lagos, for alleged Money Laundering charges. He is charged by the EFCC with amended 22 count charge bordering on the offence. He had pleaded not guilty to the charges. The prosecution had opened its case and its second witness, Abdulraheem Jimoh is still been led in evidence. When the case was called on Wednesday, the prosecutor Rotimi Jacobs (SAN) informed the court of an amended charge filed by prosecution. He urged the court to accept the charge and cause the plea of the defendant to be taken afresh. Mr Akingbola was re-arraigned on the charge written Further Amended Charge, and marked FHC/L/443C/2009. In the charge, he was alleged to have between November 2007 and July 2008, while being the MD of Intercontinental Bank, caused to be created a misleading appearance of active trading in the shares of the bank on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE). He was alleged to have been connected with the utilisation of an aggregate sum of N179.4 billion of the banks fund, for the purchase of the banks shares, thereby inflating the rate of the banks shares on the NSE. He pleaded not guilty to the charges, on his re-arraignment, and after his plea was taken, trial continued. The witness an Investigator, who had earlier given evidence before the court, was cross examined by defence counsel, Wole Olanipekun (SAN). When asked by defence if he recalls that in his statement before an Ikeja High Court he had testified writing the statement at the EFCC office, the witness replied I cant recall. The Court has adjourned until March 14 for continuation of trial. In the charge, the defendant was also accused of converting an aggregate sum of 1.3 million dollars and 8.5 million dollars, which sum was taken from the banks GBP NOSTRO account at Deutsche Bank in London. The sum was said to have been remitted into the account of Fuglers Solicitors with the Royal Bank of Scotland in London, to purchase property in the name of Life Boat Settlement Trust, set up by the defendant. According to the prosecution, the defendant knew that the sums represented proceeds of crime which includes stealing. The offences contravene the provisions of sections 105(1) and 105(a), of the Investment and Securities Act, 2007. It also contravenes the provisions of sections 13 (1), 15(1) (a), and 28(3) of the Banks and Other Financial Institutions Act, Cap B3, Laws of the Federation 2004. The offence also contravene the provisions of sections 14(1) of the Money Laundering Prohibition Act, 2004. (NAN) A Lagos trader and mother of three, Rafiat Okunola, on Wednesday told an Ile-Tuntun Customary Court in Ibadan, that her ex-husband, Kasali Adeleke, allegedly killed her daughter for ritual. President of the Court, Henry Agbaje, had in 2016 dissolved the union between Rafiat and Adeleke on grounds of battery, attempted sale of child and lack of care. The court in that judgment awarded custody of the three children to the husband because they were already grown-up and directed the wife to approach the court anytime she desired seeing the children. Testifying in the Court, Rafiat, prayed the court to give her custody of the two children left with her ex-husband because she was scared that Adeleke might expose their lives to danger I was shocked when our first child informed me that their father, Adeleke buried his younger sister after she died in 2018. After our separation, I went to work in Lagos State and when I returned to Ibadan in December 2018, I went to visit my children. My first child told me that his younger sister had died and had been buried by his father. Then, I asked my relatives who also live in Ibadan whether Adeleke carried them along concerning how the girl died or not. They informed me that they were not aware of anything. I suspected that he may have used her for ritual, Rofiat said. Denying the allegation, the defendant, who is a trader, accused his ex-wife, Rafiat, of being a child trafficker. He prayed the court to dismiss Rafiats request to take custody of the remaining two children based on her insincerity and dubious character. My lord, there is nothing strange about the circumstances that led to our daughters death. When I was burying the girl, Rafiats mother, three sisters and a man married to one of the sisters were present. Before Rafiat and I separated, the girl had been nursing a leg injury which she also took care. The leg injury developed some complications and she was hospitalised, where she later died. Rafiat is in fact responsible for the girls death through her misbehaviour which the daughter was unhappy about. One of the reasons why I called it quits with Rafiat then was due to her dubious character and the attempt she made at selling our last child. I was called from Ibadan while on a business trip to Abeokuta that Rafiat had concluded plans to sell our last child at a camp,Adeleke stated. The courts president, however, requested them to provide more evidence to substantiate their arguments, asking them to bring along their family members. He adjourned the case until April 4, for judgment. (NAN) President Muhammadu Buhari says the federal government is doing its best to correct and reverse the terrible mismanagement the country had experienced, and with some luck, our best will be good enough. The president stated this when he received a delegation of non-career Ambassadors, who came to State House, Abuja, to congratulate him on his re-election. He said Nigeria was trying to live within her means, so we can improve our lot. He said the government was determined to upgrade the countrys profile, both locally and internationally. President Buhari said it would be inexcusable for the government not to take care of its Ambassadors in their various stations, hence the special attention being paid to the countrys foreign missions. Ashimiyu Olaniyi, who spoke on behalf of the delegation, said President Buharis election in 2015, and his recent re-election, are divine interventions in the affairs of the country. You are God-sent. You have always come on stage at the critical moments of our national history to right the wrongs of the past. He added that the President would be remembered as an astute political leader who does not interfere in the political affairs of states, noting that the singular quality had given credibility to all elections conducted since 2015. The delegation said apart from records of achievements in the three focal areas of securing the country, reviving the economy, and fighting corruption, your integrity is responsible for your victory, which we are privileged to celebrate with you today. The Ambassadors appreciated the intervention funds that were released to various missions abroad, and pledged continued loyalty and support to the Buhari administration.(NAN) A three-storey building believed to be housing a private school at 36 Massey Street in Lagos Island Local Government Area collapsed around 10 a.m on Wednesday According to reports, a lot of persons are believed to be trapped in the building, including pupils whose school is believed to be on the third floor of the building. The Punch newspaper reports that 10 pupils have, so far, been pulled out of the rubble. As at the time of filing this report, the casualty figure is unknown as the agency in charge of emergency in the state, the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency (LASEMA) was just arriving the scene. According to the agency, once a proper assessment of the situation had been done and the disaster put under control, LASEMA would have more information to share with the public on the incident. Details later An International Election Observer group, Pan African Women (PAN) project, that monitored the general elections in Nigeria has appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari to assent to the amended Electoral Act. The Publicity Secretary of PAN project 2019, Mphoentle Keitseng, who monitored Governorship and House of Assembly elections in Akwa Ibom made the appeal during an interactive session with journalists in Uyo on Wednesday. According to her, the electoral bill will help to facilitate and regulate proper conduct of subsequent elections in the country. She noted with dismay that the just concluded governorship and House of Assembly elections were marred with irregularities such as vote buying, ballot box snatching, intimidation, thuggery and disruption of voting process. Ms Keitseng harped on the need to review the electoral act in order to help strengthen the electoral process. She called on the federal government to create an election tribunal in order to prosecute offenders of the electoral processes. Ms Keitseng decried the heavy presence of military personnel in polling units which, she observed, was scaring voters. She advised the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to improve on the arrival of materials and election kick off at the gubernatorial and state of assembly elections. We commend the transparent and credibility exhibited by INEC in Akwa Ibom in conducting free, fair Presidential/National Assembly and Gubernatorial/State House of Assembly elections, she said. Ms Keitseng also advised INEC to recruit ad-hoc staff who are above 30 years of age for sensitive positions as polling officers because many polling officials who were young lacked the maturity to take decisions on time, especially where violence erupted. (NAN) A new lawyer, Abel Ozioko, on Wednesday announced his appearance before a division of the Federal High Court in Abuja as the new counsel for a former spokesperson of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Olisa Metuh. Mr Metuh is facing a seven-count charge of diversion of N400 million from the office of the former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki. The court had earlier on Wednesday discharged the counsel who was representing the defendant in the trial, Onyechi Ikpeazu. The court decision to discharge Mr Ikpeazu was as a result of a letter by Mr Metuh dated March 6 and filed March 12, informing the court of his intention to disengage the senior advocate from representing him in the trial. During the session on Wednesday, Mr Ikpeazu told the court that Mr Metuh had debriefed them. The first defendant wrote a letter debriefing us. According to him, Mr Metuh said he no longer wanted them as the legal team representing him, noting that he has the right to choose his counsel. He said he believes we can no longer effectively represent him and that he has a right to choosing, Mr Ikpeazu told the court. If it pleases the court to grant him his constitutional right and discharge me and other counsel in our chambers from further appearing. I apply that we be allowed to withdraw the application. Responding, the second defendants counsel, Tochukwu Onwubufor, said: In my opinion, he should move the application and affidavit of facts, section 349(7 and 8) which ought to be complied with. Mr Onwubufor is the lawyer for Dextra Investment Ltd, the company charged with Mr Metuh in the trial. I do not think a counsel is allowed to withdraw by mere affidavits of facts which were filed by counsel to the first defendant. Before a court ceases to act, it must be an order of the court. I urge the court to hear the application alongside the affidavits of facts filed. The prosecution has filed a counter affidavit and the second defendant (we have also filed a reply. So the issue has been joined. In his part, the prosecution counsel, Sylvanus Tahir, said they were on the same page with the second defendants counsel. Again, Mr Ikpeazu said a party cannot be forced to move an application which he has withdrawn. Following argument from both counsel, the presiding judge, Abang Okon, made a short ruling. The moment a defendant debriefs his counsel, there is nothing a court of law can do. He has a right to engage and disengage counsel as he so wishes because it is his fundamental human right to do so. He cited section 36(6c) of the 1999 Constitution as amended, which states that: Every person who is charged with a criminal offence shall be entitled to (c) Defend himself in person or by legal practitioners of his own choice. Therefore the application filed by Ikpeazu has been overtaken by an event. Asking Ikpeazu to argue the motion is no longer of use, Mr Abang added. The court wondered why the legal strategy by Mr Metuh but held that it cannot question the defendants decision. In any event, I cannot stop the first defendant from presenting who would defend him in court, the judge said. After the ruling, the new lawyer, Mr Ozioko asked for two weeks to enable him to acquaint himself with the matter. With the prosecution not objecting to Mr Oziokos request, Mr Abang adjourned to March 28 for the continuation of trial on a day-to-day basis. Frivolous application for adjournment will not be entertained, Mr Abang added. Against the backdrop of the projection that it will become the third largest country in the world by 2050, Nigeria has been told to improve its capacity to feed its people on a sustainable basis. The Director-General of the Nigerian Agricultural Quarantine Service (NAQS), Vincent Isegbe, gave the advice in Abuja on Wednesday. He spoke at the launch of activities leading to the International Year of Plant Health 2020. The United Nations (UN) declared 2020 the International Year of Plant Health (IYPH) in order to increase awareness of the importance of plant health. NAQS as a regulatory organisation helps to prevent entry and spread of exotic pests of all agricultural products associated with international trade. It also ensures that Nigerian agricultural produce conforms to the international standards for export in line with the requirements of the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC). The global population is projected to reach nine billion by the year 2050. Plant health is the key to meeting the tremendous challenge of feeding that large population, Mr Isegbe said. He said Nigeria which is projected to be the third largest country in the world by 2050, has to improve its capacity to feed its people on a sustainable basis. We cannot afford to leave plant health in the back burner, we need to rethink our scant regard for plant health and make it a priority, Mr Isegbe said. He said an investment plan on plant health will enable Nigeria combat hunger, malnutrition and poverty. Mr Isegbe said the prospect of multiple pest outbreaks is capable of altering the very stability of plant health. We have established Plant Health Clinics in all the six geopolitical of the country, he said. He said the clinics are functional and helping farmers to identify pests and prescribe potent remedies. The treatments are analogous to the services rendered by human hospitals. Mr Isegbe said the United Nations General Assembly adopted the resolution to proclaim 2020 as the International Year of Plant Health on December 20, 2018. Nigeria voted in support of the UN resolution to recognise and protect plant health. This is a token of the commitment of the government to promote plant health policy at all levels in Nigeria, he said. Plant health is on the top of global agenda because it is a critical subject which impacts all aspects of food security, Mr Isegbe said. December 6, 2021 will be declared for the observance of International Year of Plant, he also said. Presenting the International Year of Plant Health 2020, an official of the agency, John Abah, said the international community has the objective to sustain plants. He said the NAQS is recognised by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations to organise activities that support Plant Health policies at all levels in Nigeria. Plants pests and diseases damage crops, reduce the availability of food and increase food prices. The highlights of the event include goodwill messages from partners and stakeholders, questions and answers and meeting of the National Steering Committee of IYPH. Tragedy struck in Lagos on Wednesday when a three-storey building housing a childrens school collapsed at Massey Street, Lagos Island. In addition to the pupils of Ohen Nursery and Primary School, the building also accommodated tenants before it caved in at about 10 a.m., witnesses said. At least 40 pupils, including 10 dead bodies, had been pulled out of the rubble as at Wednesday afternoon, according to the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency (LASEMA). We were in the market, when we heard gboom,' said Yemisi Bankole, the deputy head of Itafaaji market. Ohen Nursery and Primary School occupied the first and second floors of the collapsed building while residents live on the ground floor. Upon the collapse of the building, many men in the neighborhood rushed to the scene and were able rescue few pupils before the arrival of LASEMA officials and other rescue teams. Many pupils and teachers, however, are still trapped in the rubble as at Wednesday afternoon. Casualties and corpses have been taken to nearby private and government hospitals, witnesses said. As 2.19 p.m. when a PREMIUM TIMES reporter was at the scene, three children were rescued, one them unscathed. The second child was lifeless while the third one was struggling to remain conscious. Akinwumi Ambode, the governor of Lagos state who visited the scene some minutes past 3 p.m. said it was unfortunate thing that such a school existed in the building. He said the government would provide maximum support to the victims which includes paying the hospital bills. It is evident that Lagos state is not aware of such school, it is illegal and the culprits will face the law, Mr Ambode said. Adesina Tiamiyu, the general manager of LASEMA who was present at the scene told journalists that people living in the area had been very helpful as they had begun rescue operations before his teams arrival. He said they are still working to ensure that those that are still trapped get rescued. Parents will be allowed to identify their children, well not stop until we are sure that there is no one left in the building. He further said once the rescue mission has ended, the actual figure will be revealed. Many parents were seen crying in front of Massey Children Hospital situated on the same street. A resident who identified herself simply as Shekinah, said she never knew there was a school in the collapsed building because the government had marked the building more than three times. Government has marked it several times but theyll only patch it and put tiles after bribing the officials, another woman who declined to say her name added. Ayinke Busari, a friend to a parent at the school, said that she is there in place of her friend, Taiwo, who had been taken home to take care of her baby. She has seven children in the school, two have been found but they are yet to locate the remaining ones. Weve sent her home because she has a baby, Mrs Busari said. Quite unfortunate While commiserating with families of those who had lost their loved ones, Mr Ambode described the incident as quite unfortunate. He said there are two floors sunked into the ground. The first observation is that the foundation of this building is an old one. Like what you have seen , two floors have gone under the ground. It is only the pent house and the other floor that children have been rescued, the governor said. So far what we have been briefed is that they have rescued about 35 pupils, some already dead. But we were earlier informed it was a school. It is not technically a school but a residential building that is actually accommodating an illegal school so to speak. All we are trying to do is to continue this operation. Our response team are already here. We have gotten another crane to be able to go deeper down and rescue more children. President Muhammadu Buhari says he is extremely saddened by the collapse of a building housing a school in Itafaaji area of Lagos, which left fatalities, particularly of small children. The President via a press statement on Wednesday sympathised with the parents and relations of the deceased, wishing them Gods comfort. He also wished the injured speedy and complete recovery. He commiserated with the government and people of Lagos State and pledged assistance of the Federal Government as may be required by the state. It touches one to lose precious lives in any kind of mishap, particularly those so young and tender. May God grant everyone affected by this sad incident fortitude and succour, the President said. He charged the Lagos State government to do all that is needful, so that such tragic developments do not recur in future. Governor Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State on Wednesday blamed the landlord of the collapsed building for the tragedy. Mr Ambode, who visited the scene of the collapsed three-storeyed building on Mercy Street, Ita-Faji, Lagos, said many buildings were marked for demolition, but the landlords resisted the plan. He expressed sadness over the incident, stressing that the marked building for demolition would be pulled down. He said the collapsed building was a residential house with a school operating illegally. The governor also said the state government would take care of the hospital bills of those injured in the incident. Also, the General Manager of LASEMA, Adesina Tiamiyu said many persons had been rescued, while some deaths recorded. I cant say how many persons rescued or dead. We met the local people in operation when we came in. Some had been rescued. The operation is still on, he said. NAN earlier reported that a teacher, trapped with about 15 pupils under the rubble, called to seek for help, while Julius Berger and other emergency services were on ground to assist in the rescue operation as at 2.48 p.m. The House of Representatives has urged the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) not to subvert the will of Nigerians by declaring elections inconclusive. The house made this call while adopting a motion of urgent national Importance brought before it by Sunday Karimi (PDP Kogi) at the plenary on Wednesday. While adopting the motion, the lawmakers urged the commission to adhere to the Nigerian constitution by allowing aggrieved parties to proceed to relevant tribunals in order to ensure peace, security and promote the credibility of the process. INEC had declared elections in six states inconclusive following cancellation of results in some polling units in the states. The commission subsequently fixed March 23 for supplementary elections in the states. They are Benue, Sokoto, Plateau, Adamawa, Kano and Bauchi states. Mr Karimi while moving the motion said prior to the 2015 governorship election in Kogi, there were very few cases of inconclusive elections and reruns. He said the frequent cases of inconclusive elections in the last four years had made some Nigerians refer to the electoral umpire as Inconclusive National Electoral Commission. Mr Karimi said that though the constitution empowers INEC to come up with guidelines, some sections of the electoral guidelines were causing apprehension. He said that the governorship election was declared inconclusive in the six states in spite of the fact that the leading candidates met the provisions of the constitution in Section 179(2). Steer clear of Kano, Rep member warns Tinubu Contributing to the debate, Aliyu Madaki (Kano, PDP) accused the national leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu, of trying to meddle in the political affairs of Kano. Mr Madaki, who is also the leader of the Kwankwasiya Caucus in the house, accused President Muhammadu Buhari of not acting in the face of irregularities carried out by INEC. If he (Buhari) has any integrity, it should be questioned seriously. We will not take it; we will not allow it. It will not happen. He said while his party (the PDP) will not rig elections or support electoral violence, nobody will rig us out in Kano. Nobody will come to Kano and say this must be done. Kano is not Lagos, he added. Also contributing, Muhammad Soba from Kaduna State, said INEC has no powers to declare elections inconclusive after results have been collated at the poll. Regarding any result announced at the polling unit, nobody has the power to cancel such results. Once the result has been declared at the polling unit, no one can interfere at even the ward level let alone the state collation centre, he said. Femi Gbajabiamila, majority leader of the house, however, suggested an electoral amendment to address the issue. inconclusiveness should be something of the past but how do we get there? Amending the electoral law to limit the powers of INEC. The supreme court already ruled on this and said INEC has such powers; so the only way to change the supreme court ruling is to amend our law, Mr Gbajabiamila said. The House resolved to set up a committee to advise it on the next line of action. The Nigerian Air Force (NAF) says troops of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) has neutralised the Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP) terrorists in Borno State. NAFs spokesperson, Ibikunle Daramola, an air commodore, who disclosed this in a statement on Wednesday, in Abuja, said the operation was carried out on Tuesday at Tumbun Rego Area, on the Lake Chad fringes of northern Borno. The Nigerian Air Force has continued to provide active support to ensure success of Operation YANCIN TAFKI, the joint multi-national operation aimed at routing remnants of ISWAP terrorists in the Lake Chad Basin area, Mr Daramola said. He explained that NAF Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) platforms and Alpha Jet attack aircraft, working in synergy with ISR platforms and attack aircraft from the NAF supported surface troops of the MNJTF. The spokesperson said the operation aimed at pursuing and decimating fleeing ISWAP fighters around the Rego Area on March 12. The effectiveness of interdiction and close air support missions conducted by the attack aircraft of the two countries facilitated the routing of the terrorists at Arege. It resulted in the killing of 33 fighters, destruction of some terrorists equipment as well as the recovery of an array of weapons and equipment, he said. Mr Daramola also disclosed that the Air Task Force (ATF) of Operation LAFIYA DOLE had continued to provide airlift support to troops of participating national contingents of Operation YANCIN TAFKI. He said this had enhanced liaison between the various Commanders and facilitated visits to forward locations. NAF ISR platforms and helicopters are also providing aerial command posts for enhanced coordination of close air support missions, as well as fire control support for ground artillery bombardment of terrorists positions, he said. Mr Daramola said the NAF, operating in concert with allied air and surface forces, would continue to sustain its efforts to support all operations in the North East. (NAN) The Kaduna State Government has imposed a dusk to dawn curfew on the troubled Kajuru Local Government Area. The government said this in a statement by Governor Nasir El-Rufais spokesperson, Samuel Aruwan. PREMIUM TIMES has reported how scores of people have been killed in the past month in different communities in Kajuru. The latest killings happened last weekend. Mr Aruwan said the curfew also affects some communities in nearby Chikun Local Government Area. Security assessments have necessitated the imposition of a dusk to dawn curfew in all parts of Kajuru Local Government Area, effective from today, Wednesday, 13th March 2019. The dusk to dawn curfew is also extended to Kujama and Maraban Rido, which are in Chikun local government. The curfew in the affected areas will be in effect from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. daily, until further notice, he said. Security agencies have been directed to ensure strict enforcement of the curfew. The Kaduna State Government appeals to all residents and communities in the affected areas to bear the inconvenience of the curfew and cooperate with the security agencies, Mr Aruwan said. Governor Ifeanyi Okowa of Delta State said he dedicated his re-election victory to the people of the state. The governor said this on Wednesday in Asaba, the state capital in a state broadcast on his re-election for another four years. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Mr Okowa, candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) defeated Great Ogboru of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the March 9, governorship election in the state. He said: First, I enjoin all the people of Delta to thank God for what was largely a peaceful and hitch-free election, except for one or two skirmishes that were quickly brought under control. At about 12 noon on Monday, March 11, 2019, I was officially declared winner of the March 9, 2019 Governorship election in Delta by the Independent National Electoral Commission. With over 81 per cent of the total valid votes cast and having won in 23 out of the 25 local government areas in the state. My renewed four-year mandate is as resounding as it is unprecedented in our beloved state. But most importantly, it is very humbling and comes with an even weightier responsibility. I dedicate this victory to you, the good people of Delta. You are the true winners in this election. You are the true winners for standing firm and unyielding in your support of my administration. You are the true winners for refusing to succumb to threats, intimidation and for not allowing yourselves to be blackmailed or manipulated by lies, deceit and propaganda. He commended the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the law enforcement agencies for standing firm and resolute to deliver a free, fair and credible election. He said the actions of the umpire were pathways to sustainable democracy in Nigeria. Mr Okowa assured the people that the next four years would witness greater development and transformation and a vote for unity in the state. This mandate you have given me is very comforting, reassuring and liberating. It is a massive vote of confidence in the work we have done together in the last three years and nine months. There is no gainsaying the fact that under my leadership, Delta has witnessed huge developmental strides in road and physical infrastructure, health, education, rural-urban integration, human capital development and sports. This renewed mandate is also a vote for unity. I won in all three senatorial districts with overwhelming majority, a clear indication that the people of Delta have recognised the oneness in us as well as our shared values and aspirations. He urged all to forget their differences and political affinity but cooperate to build a better, stronger and more peaceful Delta. I solicit your cooperation to make this a reality. Elections come and go but our state remains, and belongs to all of us. By divine guidance, we are building a state where equity, justice, peace and progress reign supreme; a state that we can all be proud of. It is, therefore, time we reconcile, forget the things of the past and contribute our individual quota to the development of the state, irrespective of our political inclinations. (NAN) (CNN) -- Cardinal George Pell, the most senior Vatican official to be convicted of sex abuse to date, has been sentenced to six years in prison for the "callous" assault of two choirboys in the late 1990s. A former senior adviser to Pope Francis, Pell showed no reaction when Chief Judge Peter Kidd handed down his sentence in a hearing broadcast live worldwide on Wednesday from Victoria's County Court in central Melbourne. Pell, 77, was found guilty of one count of sexual penetration of a child and four counts of committing an indecent act with a child last December after a secret five-week trial. Reporting of the trial and verdict was suppressed by the court to avoid prejudicing a second trial, which crown prosecutors abandoned in February after the judge ruled some prosecution evidence couldn't be submitted. On Wednesday, Judge Kidd said Pell's attack on the victims was "breathtakingly arrogant." But the judge said Pell was "not to be made a scapegoat for any failings or perceived failings of the Catholic Church." Pell's legal team has previously announced it will appeal his conviction on three grounds, including that the jury's verdict on all five charges was unreasonable, based on the evidence submitted. The Court of Appeal is due to hear submissions in early June. The sentencing Pell has spent the past two weeks in custody and was brought into the court from the Melbourne Assessment Prison (MAP) via an internal entrance, avoiding rows of cameras set up outside the court in central Melbourne. More than 150 people crammed into the courtroom, which had been fitted with extra seats to cope with the demand from those who wanted to be there in person to hear how he'd be punished. Pell sat in the back of the courtroom, surrounded by security officers but uncuffed, as Judge Kidd delivered a detailed explanation of the crimes the cardinal had committed and the reasons for the sentence. After mass one Sunday in the late 1990s, Judge Kidd recounted, Pell caught two choirboys drinking communion wine in the priest's sacristy and one by one forced them to engage in sex acts, despite their sobs and pleas for him to let them go. The first choirboy told how he was forced to perform oral sex on the cardinal, who at the time was Archbishop of Melbourne and a revered figure within the Catholic Church. The boy didn't tell anyone what had happened for years, before finally approached Victoria Police in 2015, almost 20 years after the crime. His statement led to an investigation and a number of historical sex abuse charges being filed against the then-Vatican treasurer. After his conviction, the Vatican launched its own investigation into Pell, which could lead to the cardinal losing his clerical status or being "defrocked," a severe punishment imposed by the Pope and not subject to appeal. The victims In his ruling, Judge Kidd was careful not to name the two victims, one of whom gave taped evidence against Pell on a video that was seen only by the jury during the trial. Under Australian law it's illegal to identify sex abuse victims or reveal information that could expose who they are. The first victim has declined to comment publicly but said in a statement released by his lawyer after the ruling that since the attack he had experienced "shame, loneliness (and) depression." He asked that he be left alone and given time to cope with the ongoing criminal process. "The process has been stressful and is not over yet," he said. The second victim died of a heroin overdose a few years ago. The deceased victim's father told CNN that his son had been an outgoing child who played sport and liked singing, a talent that earned him a scholarship to the prestigious boys' school and ultimately an invitation to sing in St. Patrick's Cathedral where the attack took place. Around one year after the assault, he said his son was kicked out of the choir, lost his scholarship and started injecting heroin. "He was trying to mask something that had happened to him. He was trying to cover up something that had happened to him, so heinous and so horrible," said his father, who is considering filing a civil case against the church. Pell's supporters Pell's defense team had submitted 10 references that attested to Pell's good character. They included one from former Prime Minister John Howard who wrote that Pell, his friend for approximately 30 years, was a person of "high intelligence and exemplary character." Howard said he was aware of Pell's conviction and pending appeal but that "none of these matters alter my opinion of the Cardinal." Several of Pell's other high-profile friends in Australia have leaped to his defense, questioning the jury's verdict and predicting the cardinal would be exonerated on appeal. The depiction of Pell as a man wronged has infuriated survivors of church sex abuse who say that casting victims as liars and priests as beyond reproach perpetuates a culture that allowed abuse to thrive within the Catholic Church for decades. Statistics released in 2017 by Australia's Royal Commission into Responses to Institutional Child Sex Abuse stated that 7% of all Catholic priests in the country had abused children over the past six decades. Judge Kidd addressed the current climate of anger with the Catholic Church at Pell's February hearing when he said, "The Catholic Church is not on trial and I'm not imposing a sentence on the Catholic Church. I'm imposing a sentence on Cardinal Pell for what he did." This story was first published on CNN.com "Cardinal George Pell to be sentenced over 'callous' child sex attack" The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is set to issue a certificate of return to Orji Kalu, a former governor of Abia State, who was controversially declared winner of a senatorial election in the state last month. The commission listed Mr Kalu as one of the 100 senators-elect from the February 23 election who would be issued return certificates at a ceremony scheduled for Thursday morning in Abuja. But the results released by INEC for the Abia North Senatorial District showed that Mr Kalu did not win the election outright and should not have been declared winner by the returning officer. Mr Kalu polled 31,201 votes, according to Charles Anumudu, the INEC returning officer for the district, while incumbent senator, Mao Ohuabunwa of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), scored 20,801 votes in the election. However, 38,526 votes were cancelled during the exercise, a number significantly greater than the margin of 10,400 between Messrs Kalu and Ohuabunwa. INEC guidelines A key guideline for electoral officers required that no winner can be declared in an election in which number of cancelled votes is greater than the margin between the first-two highest votes scorers. INEC has widely applied the guideline in this years cycle, using cancelled results to trigger dozens of re-runs, including in six governorship polls. The Ondo South Senatorial District election was declared inconclusive because the margin of victory was 27,036 against cancelled votes of 28,047. The PDPs candidate, Nicholas Tofowomo, had scored 79,029 against APCs Yele Omogunwa who scored 51,993 votes. Even though it did not make any difference, since only 1,011 votes were at play, INEC, nonetheless followed through on its guideline and held a re-run before declaring Mr Tofowomo winner. But the 38,526 cancelled votes in Abia North could decide the winner between Messrs Kalu Ohuabunwa in a re-run. INEC reacts Festus Okoye, a spokesperson for INEC, told PREMIUM TIMES the commission was helpless because a winner had already been declared. Mr Okoye said when results are erroneously declared, the commission cannot exercise a discretion, but a victim could approach the court for urgent redress. When reminded that INEC withheld issuance of return certificate to Rochas Okorocha after the returning officer alleged duress, Mr Okoye said the situation was different. He said INEC exercised discretion in Mr Okorochas case even though the returning officer had declared the outgoing Imo State governor winner because the official alleged compromise of his safety. But in the case of Abia North election, the returning officer did not say he declared the result under duress or his life was threatened in any way, and changes cannot be made even though it was obvious an error had been committed. Joseph Iloh, the resident electoral commissioner for Abia State, echoed Mr Okoyes position to PREMIUM TIMES. He added that all the party agents signed the erroneous sheet. Mr Ohuabunwa said his agent is a lawyer and could not have signed the sheet, challenging the electoral chief to present evidence of his claim. The Electoral Act empowers only the court to overturn a declaration by an electoral officer in an election. It was unclear whether Mr Okorocha had approached the court to challenge INECs decision on his matter. Mr Ohuabunwa said on Wednesday he approached the Federal High Court for an order to prevent INEC from issuing a certificate to Mr Kalu on Thursday, but instead conduct a re-run election for the cancelled polling units. Election and civic engagement expert, Samson Itodo of YIAGA, has expressed concerns about arbitrary application of the law, warning that any fragment of inconsistency could threaten the credibility of the 2019 election on which chief umpire Mahmood Yakubu hopes to build a legacy. The Imo governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress(APC), Hope Uzodinma, has denied he felicitated with Emeka Ihedioha over his declaration as winner of the state governorship election. Mr Uzodinma, who made this known in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Wednesday in Abuja, said the video of him and Mr Ihedioha trending on social media was at a different occasion, way before the election. He called on his supporters to disregard the report, saying it is the handiwork of mischief makers. He vowed to challenge the outcome of the election in court to reclaim his mandate. Mr Uzodinma said there were irregularities in the March 9, governorship election that produced Mr Ihedioha. NAN reports that a video of Mr Uzodinma allegedly celebrating Mr Ihediohas emergence has been trending on social media.(NAN) The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has explained why it will not issue a certificate of return to any candidate in the February 23 Imo West senatorial election. After a controversial results collation process, the outgoing governor of Imo, Rochas Okorocha, was declared winner of the Senate seat by the returning officer, Innocent Ibeabuchi, who clearly noted he did so under duress. I have been held hostage here for days so Im trying to ease off and take my life home back to my children and for the sake of that I am calling these results under duress, Mr Ibeabuchi had said before reading out the results. The commission said it will not recognise the governor as a senator-elect because of the controversy during the collation process. In INECs list of senators-elect published Monday on the commissions website, Mr Okorochas name was omitted. Declaration made under duress, was boldly written instead. INEC spokesperson, Festus Okoye, during Channels TVs Lunchtime Politics Program on Tuesday explained reasons behind the commissions decision. The commission has decided that we will not reward bad behavior in the electoral process and we recorded bad behavior in result collations in Imo West Senatorial District, Mr Okoye told Millicent Nnwoka, the anchor of the programme. Investigation by the commission revealed that the returning officer for Imo West made a return under suspicious circumstances. He was put under too much pressure. He was forced to make a declaration and a return and we made determination that that particular return was not made out of the free will of the returning officer. Mr Okoye explained that in such circumstance where a valid return has not been made, we are not going to bend the arm of the INEC to (accept) such a return. So therefore, we decided not to issue certificate of return to any candidate of the Imo West senatorial elections until the commission takes a more critical look and take a decision on where to go from here, the official noted. PREMIUM TIMES reported how Mr Ibeabuchi, a professor, said he was forced to declare the Imo West result under duress. The commission in the post on its official website said it will issue certificates of return to all successful candidates in 2019 National Assembly elections on Thursday at the International Conference Centre in Abuja. INEC noted that only senators-elect as listed on the commissions website are invited for the ceremony. The bereaved family of the late lawmaker representing Oyo State at the House of Representatives, Temitope Olatoye (Sugar), who was shot dead last Saturday, has said the killing was politically motivated. The brother of the deceased, Olajide Olatoye, made the allegation on behalf of the family on Tuesday. He was reacting to the statement credited to the Assistant Inspector General of Police, Zone 11, Leye Oyebade, and the Commissioner of Police in Oyo State, Shina Olukolu, who said the killing of the lawmaker representing Lagelu/Akinyele Federal Constituency was not politically motivated but a case of murder. The family in an interview with journalists in Ibadan insisted that their breadwinners assassination had a political undertone. They also asked the police to conduct proper investigation into the matter. With due respect, I think that incident has a political undertone at the time Sugar was killed. Did Sugar go to Ojaba to buy yam? Or did he go to Bodija to buy beans? It was during election, and he was coming back from where he went to perform his civic responsibility as a good citizen of this country and as a federal legislator. His killing has much importance to his political murderers, Mr Olatoye said. Mr Olatoye however commended the police for their efforts so far. I am debunking the statement with due respect, made by the police AIG that his killing was not politically motivated, he added. He asked the All Progressives Congress (APC) led government to steer clear of the case, so that those behind his brothers murder would be fished out. I want to say categorically that Sugar was the breadwinner of this Olatoye family and they have taken him away. What is now our gain? If this incident is not curbed, they will still do it to (kill) other members of the family, he added. The National Assembly Election Petition Tribunal sitting in Ibadan, on Wednesday, granted an ex parte application filed by Saheed Fijabi requesting to inspect election materials used in February 23, National Assembly election. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had declared Olajide Stanley of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) the winner of the House of Representatives of Ibadan South West/North West Federal Constituency of Oyo State. Mr Fijabi and the All Progressives Congress (APC) are challenging the declaration of Stanley by INEC as the winner of the election. NAN reports that other respondents in the case are INEC and PDP. The applicants counsel, P. Fakoya, filed a motion ex parte urging the court to order INEC to allow them inspect the election materials used in the February 23 election for the House of Representatives in Oyo State. In his ruling, the chairman of the tribunal, Dennis Igyuse, ordered INEC to, without delay, allow the applicants inspect the election materials. Mr Igyuse, a judge, said INEC should allow the applicants, their agents, counsel to inspect, photocopy or be issued copies of all electoral materials relating to the conduct of the election held on February 23 for Ibadan South West and North West Federal Constituency of Oyo State. (NAN) Governor Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State on Wednesday blamed the landlord of the collapsed building on Lagos Island which claimed lives for resisting government demolition plan. Mr Ambode, who visited the scene of the collapsed three-storeyed building on Mercy Street, Ita-Faji, Lagos, said many buildings were marked for demolition, but the landlords resisted the plan. He expressed sadness over the incident, stressing that the marked building for demolition would be pulled down. He said the collapsed building was a residential house with a school operating illegally. The governor said the state government would take care of the hospital bills of those injured in the incident. The governor said the state would investigate the building collapse while ensuring that those marked were pulled down to save lives. He said integrity test would also be carried out on other buildings in the area. As I speak, the deputy governor is now at the General Hospital, Marina, to see all the victims. The state government will take care of the hospital bills. I commiserate with families that lost their dear ones in the building. I learnt about 25 persons had been rescued. I appeal to the residents to allow the rescue operators to carry out their work so that more lives can be rescued, he said. The General Manager of LASEMA, Adesina Tiamiyu, told NAN that many had been rescued, while some deaths recorded. I cant say how many persons rescued or dead. We met the local people in operation when we came in. Some had been rescued. The operation is still on, he said. NAN reports that a teacher, trapped with about 15 pupils under the rubble, called to seek for help, while Julius Berger and other emergency services were on ground to assist in the rescue operation as at 2.48 p.m. (NAN) Excellencies, Honourable Mr Prime Minister, Honourable Speakers, All Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen! I will never forget the extraordinary feeling I had back in 2016 when, as the host - in the sense of the venue of the NATO Summit in Warsaw, in the evening of the first day of the Summit, I was receiving the Heads of State of the North Atlantic Alliance member states in the Presidential Palace in the Column Hall at the so-called working dinner. Do you know where this feeling came from? Well, in 1955, exactly on 14 May, in the very same room - the Column Hall of the Presidential Palace - the Warsaw Pact was signed. For everyone present here today the implications thereof are obvious. Whereas in 2016, less than three years ago, the leaders of the North Atlantic Alliance - the largest defence alliance of the free world, which safeguards security of the democratic countries of the transatlantic community, the Western community, were sitting in the Column Hall. As you can guess, it was an extraordinary experience and a source of pride for me to be seated amongst them, representing the Republic of Poland - the country that has aspired to be one of them ever since 1939, since it was torn apart by the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Russia in September of that year in a treacherous attack. Why do I mention this? For one thing, to make us understand how todays Poles look at their country's membership in the North Atlantic Alliance, the largest defence alliance in the world, the most effective one, at least so far, of all alliances that have ever been made. Admittedly, back in 1939 Poland was also part of an alliance, it had two allies - it was bound by allied pacts with France and Britain. But when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, these two countries, having declared war on Germany as they did, they did not attacke Germany, none of them actively starting war operations, nor did they come to Polands aid. Sometimes a question pops up: why is it that ever since 2015, when you were still President-Elect of your country, you kept reiterating the need to have NATO troops deployed in Poland, on your soil, and this starting from the first meetings with your NATO allies and, above all, with the Secretary General of the Alliance, Mr Jens Stoltenberg? Well, the reason was to make Poles place their confidence in the Alliance. Looking back at their historical experience, I am convinced that they must feel the presence of this Alliance. And the geopolitical situation that was evolving around us from 2008 through 2014, when Russia first attacked Georgia and then assaulted Ukraine, unequivocally brought back those previous associations: Russia's imperialist policy, drive to the West, the expansion of the sphere of influence, the occupation of new states and, above all, the desire to return to its former sphere of influence, to which needless to say here in Prague - none of our countries wants to return any more. This is why we value the North Atlantic Alliance in Poland, we value Allied presence in our country, and we take very seriously the obligations arising therefrom. We firmly believe that the presence of allied forces on our territory, in particular the United States army, has always been a guarantee of Europe's security. Because when Europe was really in a very serious danger - I would say that in a dire situation, as it was the case during World War I and then World War II - it was the arrival of American troops that made it possible to restore peace and order in Europe. This is how we look at it in Poland. Above all, however, we believe in the Alliance, which, as I said, is worlds largest military alliance and is the alliance in which brotherhood of arms means brotherhood of arms, support means support, and Article 5 means Article 5, and not the so-called brotherly help, of which I do not even need to speak here in Prague. I can assure you that we are learning historys lessons well and taking our Allied commitments extremely seriously. We are proud to be today a member of the North Atlantic Alliance, which guarantees security in our part of Europe and of the world and through which we, too, can guarantee the security of those who want to live in free, democratic, sovereign countries, who want to develop and build peace in the world. Our host, President Milos Zeman, spoke about the Czech soldiers who fell while defending peace in Afghanistan within the framework of the North Atlantic Alliance, as part of the tasks that the Czech Republic is carrying out as an Allied member - a responsible ally. Mr President, Polish soldiers are also dying, and we also have suffered losses in the missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places where Polish soldiers are still present in the North Atlantic Alliance - and there are several such places in the world today. Our soldiers are part of the coalition against the Islamic state, they are in Afghanistan - moreover, we have recently increased their number to 400 - our pilots are currently carrying out the Air Policing mission over the Baltic states, they are still in the Balkans, they serve as part of the Tailored Forward Presence in Romania. We are present there! Our soldiers are also in Africa. Why? Because we believe that a responsible North Atlantic Alliance is guided by the principle of NATO 360 degrees. We believe that, just the way we expect the Allied nations are going to pay attention to the situation in NATOs Eastern flank, where we, as a state, are also going to pay attention to the others - this is precisely the Allied responsibility, taking care of security of the free world. I wish to thank my friends, fellow Presidents, for approaching this the same way. Our soldiers are dying in defence of the free world, but also in defence of our respective countries and our citizens - I would like to stress this point most emphatically. For it was not for their presence there, in those places that are potentially hot spots, who knows, what our destinies would be, what fate of our countries and societies? Who knows, if it was not for the soldiers, and if it was not for the posture of the North Atlantic Alliance, especially in recent years, wouldnt we be running into a very serious security threat in our part of Europe today? It is precisely this preparedness that NATO has demonstrated in recent years - especially from the Wales Summit to the Warsaw Summit, where these extremely important decisions were taken to establish an advanced forward presence on the Eastern flank - who knows what Europe and its security architecture would look like today? Unfortunately, the threats to which we have fallen prey for more than 40 years are returning now, albeit returning in a slightly different form. But without any doubt they are coming back. Is our readiness needed when we are already part of a truly free world? Not only mentally - as I believe we have always been part of it - but also politically and geopolitically? Should we respond to them? Yes, we should - and it is good that our allies perceive them. Also, those who are so far from NATOs Eastern flank. Thank you for awareness. Above all, however, I would like to thank the citizens of the Republic of Poland, Polish officials and politicians, as well as all the officials, politicians and citizens of our respective countries for their effort taken at that time - 20 years ago, and then 15 years ago - as they tried to make our countries part of this great community of security and the community of the free world. I remember how in 2008 or 2009, when we discussed security in the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland, the then President, Professor Lech Kaczynski, in whose office I had the honour of serving as undersecretary of state; a minister in his Chancellery, said then: "We have joined NATO and we are part of a free world. However, the whole world will only realize there is absolutely no longer any shadow of the Russian sphere of influence here, when NATO troops are here. They will be real. And there will be NATO military installations, especially the American ones. Today they are in place, and for this we are very grateful to the free world and to all my fellow citizens who have worked so hard all those years to achieve this. As I was saying, we take seriously our Allied commitments. We also take seriously this great joy and this great commitment, as it is on the one hand, but likewise a great gift on the other hand: the fact that we can be a member of the North Atlantic Alliance. That is why we fulfil our obligations in line the NATO 360 degree principle, by sending our soldiers wherever they are needed, but also by fulfilling our obligations: spending 2% of our GDP on defence purposes, modernizing our army, the purchases that we make there - from new tanks through the Patriot anti-missile defence system or state-of-the-art artillery and missile systems, HIMARS, for which we have recently signed a contract for purchase. I believe that we will also be able to modernise our Navy and strengthen our air force by purchasing 5th generation aircraft for Poland. We want to spend more on defence, because Polish society appreciates it is necessary. We want to do it because we know that the best situation imaginable is one where a state is self-sufficient in terms of security, i.e. when it is able to defend itself as much as possible. For us, this is a great guideline of a kind for the future: to build an army that will command respect. We would like for Poland to have such an army. But we are happy and very proud to be among our allies today. I am very proud and moved to be standing here today in Prague, towards which - looking back at those dark years of our history when we were behind the Iron Curtain - Poland also has a commitment. Thank you for being here together. Mr President, thank you for inviting me to this meeting. I would like to say that the Republic of Poland will always stand shoulder to shoulder alongside the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia - alongside all those who are aligned with the free world, on the side of freedom, independence, sovereignty, democracy and the self-determination of states. And true freedom - without the so-called brotherly help. Thank you. For the New World Order, a world government is just the beginning. Once in place they can engage their plan to exterminate 80% of the world's population, while enabling the "elites" to live forever with the aid of advanced technology. For the first time, crusading filmmaker ALEX JONES reveals their secret plan for humanity's extermination: Operation ENDGAME. Jones chronicles the history of the global elite's bloody rise to power and reveals how they have funded dictators and financed the bloodiest warscreating order out of chaos to pave the way for the first true world empire. Watch as Jones and his team track the elusive Bilderberg Group to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III. to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III. Learn about the formation of the North America transportation control grid, which will end U.S. sovereignty forever. Discover how the practitioners of the pseudo-science eugenics have taken control of governments worldwide as a means to carry out depopulation. View the progress of the coming collapse of the United States and the formation of the North American Union. Never before has a documentary assembled all the pieces of the globalists' dark agenda. Endgame's compelling look at past atrocities committed by those attempting to steer the future delivers information that the controlling media has meticulously censored for over 60 years. It fully reveals the elite's program to dominate the earth and carry out the wicked plan in all of human history. Endgame is not conspiracy theory, it is documented fact in the elite's own words. WASHINGTON, March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, AARP announced the launch of 'Stop Rx Greed,' a nationwide campaign aimed at lowering prescription drug prices. The goal of AARP's sustained campaign is to help drive down drug prices for all Americans by advocating for a variety of legislative, executive, and regulatory actions at both the federal and state level. "Americans are paying the highest prescription drug prices in the world," said Executive Vice President and Chief Advocacy & Engagement Officer Nancy LeaMond. "It's time for pharmaceutical companies to stop deflecting blame and acknowledge that the root cause is the price they set for their products." As part of the campaign, AARP Research conducted a national survey of likely voters ages 50 and older. The survey found that significant majorities of self-identified Republican, Democrat, and independent voters shared concerns about the high price of drugs, and support common-sense policies that will lower prices. Survey findings include: 72 percent say they are concerned about the cost of their medications. 63 percent say the cost of prescription drugs is unreasonable. 90 percent support allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. 80 percent report taking at least one prescription medication. Nearly 40 percent say they did not fill a prescription provided by their doctor with cost being the most common reason. The Stop Rx Greed campaign will include national television, radio and digital ads, editorial content, emails to members, social media posts, ongoing advocacy and grassroots activity in D.C. and the states, and a petition calling on Congress and the Administration to take action now. As part of the campaign, AARP will push for support of a number of policy solutions at the national and state level to help lower drug prices, including: Allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices. Allowing states to negotiate lower prices with drug companies. Giving state Attorneys General authority to crack down on outrageous price increases. Clamping down on pay-for-delay and other loopholes that keep lower cost generic drugs off the market. Capping consumers' prescription drug out-of-pocket costs. Preserving state pharmacy assistance programs. "There's no one solution that's going to solve this issue," said John Hishta, AARP Senior Vice President of Campaigns. "Success will be when consumers are no longer price gouged by the drug industry and can afford the drugs they need." Below are the campaign materials: For more about Stop Rx Greed, visit www.aarp.org/rx. About AARP AARP is the nation's largest nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to empowering people 50 and older to choose how they live as they age. With a nationwide presence and nearly 38 million members, AARP strengthens communities and advocates for what matters most to families: health security, financial stability and personal fulfillment. AARP also produces the nation's largest circulation publications: AARP The Magazine and AARP Bulletin. To learn more, visit www.aarp.org or follow @AARP and @AARPadvocates on social media. SOURCE AARP Related Links https://www.aarp.org BARRINGTON, Ill., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Margarita Geleske, Chief Evangelist of Uncharted Learning , NFP, will lead a panel discussion entitled "How I Learned By Failing" at ASCD Empower 19: The Conference for Every Educator, in Chicago, Illinois, March 16, 2019. Uncharted Learning has developed experiential learning programs, for students at the grade school, middle school and high school level, offered throughout the U.S., Mexico and Japan. As a recognized leader in advancing student entrepreneurship programs, Margarita will be joined by INCubatoredu student alumni Martin Dimitrov, founder of SnapClips. The panel will be rounded out by two current Barrington High School INCubatoredu students and co-founders of PowerPod, Maddie Connors and Thomas Colella. Martin Dimitrov, CEO of SnapClips and ABC's Shark Tank winner, will share his INCubatoredu high school entrepreneurship experience and how he learned through failure at the ASCD Empower 19 Conference. The panel discussion will take place on Saturday, March 16th from 4:15-5:15 pm at McCormick Place, West, Chicago, Illinois. The panel discussion will focus on how high school entrepreneurship programs are ideally suited to teach students how to "get to failure fast," to identify areas for improvement in their business model, pivot, and move forward with confidence and resilience. Connors, Colella and Dimitrov will share their respective challenges and the benefits gained from their INCubatoredu experiences, and their accomplishments are impressive. Connors and Colella were motivated to create PowerPod, a disposable, biodegradable power source for Android or iPhones, out of a need for an emergency power source when Connors found herself at a large venue concert with no cellphone power, no way to reach friends or family and no train ticket for home. Dimitrov began SnapClips, an innovative device to secure weights, while attending Wheeling High School four years ago. Despite multiple setbacks, SnapClips succeeded, most notably on ABC's Shark Tank, and are being used by athletes all over the world. Both PowerPod and SnapClips achieved success through perseverance and hard work, hallmarks of the INCubatoredu program. "When you fail in regular classes, you're failing within a simulation but when you fail within an INCubatoredu class, you're failing within the realm of real life," Connors said. "Being able to recover, using skills that you will need for the rest of your life, has greater impact then forgetting the name of the 18th president." This panel, session SPR1691, is open to all ASCD Empower 19 program participants March 16, from 4:15-5:15 p.m., McCormick Place, West, 2301 S. Prairie Ave., Chicago, Illinois. In addition, Uncharted Learning will be exhibiting at Booth 1564. For more information on the program, contact http://empower.ascd.org/general-information.aspx . Margarita Geleske Uncharted Learning Phone: 847 508 2635 [email protected] http://incubatoredu.org/ SOURCE Uncharted Learning Related Links http://incubatoredu.org CHARLOTTE, N.C., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- AvidXchange , a leading fintech provider of accounts payable (AP) and payment automation solutions for midsize companies, was named a Global Unicorn by CB Insights in its latest Market Map highlighting private companies around the world valued at $1 billion or more. AvidXchange is one of only 24 U.S.-based fintech companies to make the list. "This designation is an incredible honor and testament to our work here at AvidXchange," said Michael Praeger, CEO and Co-Founder of AvidXchange. "Customers know the value of our products, and investors and partners recognize the value of our business. We're in good company on this list and look forward to what the future holds for us as the fintech industry continues to evolve." The CB Insights Market Map is comprised of 310 organizations from around the world, with the U.S. leading in share at 49 percent of the directory. In addition to fintech, categories range from internet software services and e-commerce to healthcare and data analytics. According to CB Insights' 2019 Fintech Trends to Watch , which delves deeper into the industry landscape: Fintech is growing: 2018 venture capital-backed fintech deals set an annual record with 15 percent more deals year-over-year and investment topping $39 billion . AvidXchange is also growing, having made 9.5 million payments in 2018 versus 8.9 million payments the previous year. 2018 venture capital-backed fintech deals set an annual record with 15 percent more deals year-over-year and investment topping . AvidXchange is also growing, having made 9.5 million payments in 2018 versus 8.9 million payments the previous year. Fintech unicorns are a sizeable force: The 39 fintech unicorns globally are worth around $147 billion combined. AvidXchange is sizeable and thriving, with plans to double headcount at its corporate headquarters and invest $35 million in its Greater Salt Lake City operations. The 39 fintech unicorns globally are worth around combined. AvidXchange is sizeable and thriving, with plans to double headcount at its corporate headquarters and invest in its operations. Fintech is increasing its intersection with real estate: Noted as a trend to watch in 2019, AvidXchange is ahead of the curve with its established presence in real estate and solutions designed specifically to help companies automate accounts payable processes, eliminate paper and realize more strategic value from their workforce. Since initially joining the unicorn club in 2017, AvidXchange continues to allocate more resources toward advancing its products and talent to capitalize on market trends and think innovatively about the shifting role of finance. CB Insights is a technology market intelligence platform that relies on big data, analysts and a global network of executives to evaluate investors, companies and industries. View the complete list of CB Insight's Global Unicorns here . About AvidXchange Founded in the year 2000, AvidXchange transforms the way companies pay their bills. Trusted by more than 5,500 customers throughout North America, AvidXchange is the industry leader in automating invoice and payment processes across the real estate, HOA, construction, and healthcare industries. AvidXchange is distinguished as a global fintech unicorn and one of the fastest growing technology companies in the U.S., offering a complete solution designed to help mid-market businesses modernize operations and embrace the future of finance. For more information, visit www.AvidXchange.com . SOURCE AvidXchange Related Links http://www.avidxchange.com DALLAS, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Braemar Hotels & Resorts Inc. (NYSE: BHR) ("Braemar" or the "Company") announced today that its Board of Directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.16 per diluted share for the Company's common stock for the first quarter ending March 31, 2019. The dividend, which equates to an annual rate of $0.64 per share, is payable on April 15, 2019, to shareholders of record as of March 29, 2019. The Board declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.3438 per diluted share for the Company's 5.5% Series B Cumulative Convertible Preferred Stock for the first quarter ending March 31, 2019. The dividend, which equates to an annual rate of $1.375 per share, is payable on April 15, 2019, to shareholders of record as of March 29, 2019. The Board declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.5156 per diluted share for the Company's 8.25% Series D Cumulative Preferred Stock for the first quarter ending March 31, 2019. The dividend, which equates to an annual rate of $2.0625 per share, is payable on April 15, 2019, to shareholders of record as of March 29, 2019. Braemar Hotels & Resorts is a real estate investment trust (REIT) focused on investing in luxury hotels and resorts. Ashford has created an Ashford App for the hospitality REIT investor community. The Ashford App is available for free download at Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store by searching "Ashford." Certain statements and assumptions in this press release contain or are based upon "forward-looking" information and are being made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. When we use the words "will likely result," "may," "anticipate," "estimate," "should," "expect," "believe," "intend," or similar expressions, we intend to identify forward-looking statements. Such statements are subject to numerous assumptions and uncertainties, many of which are outside Braemar's control. These forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated, including, without limitation: general volatility of the capital markets and the market price of our common stock; changes in our business or investment strategy; availability, terms and deployment of capital; availability of qualified personnel; changes in our industry and the market in which we operate, interest rates or the general economy; and the degree and nature of our competition. These and other risk factors are more fully discussed in Braemar's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this press release are only made as of the date of this press release. Investors should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. We are not obligated to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or circumstances, changes in expectations or otherwise. SOURCE Braemar Hotels & Resorts, Inc. MELVILLE, N.Y., March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Canon Solutions America, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Canon U.S.A., Inc., today announced the launch of the new Oce PrintSight software developed by Canon Solutions America to provide print-for-pay businesses an effective tool to monitor their Oce Arizona, Oce Colorado, and Oce ColorWave printers. The Oce PrintSight software will enable print-for-pay business owners and their production staff to closely monitor many important aspects of their Oce Arizona, Oce Colorado, and Oce ColorWave printer fleet from anywhere on their network. Oce PrintSight displays a range of data in an intuitive user interface, allowing for real time reporting on ink usage, media type printed, square footage, print time, machine status, and more. Help Increase Visibility, Increase Profitability To help better determine production schedules, machine utilization, and identify the printers that still have capacity should print volumes increase, Oce PrintSight provides the amount of time it takes to print an image. Furthermore, it can instantly calculate the cost of a job by enabling print providers to enter their ink cost per liter and media cost. Overall, the combination of Oce printers and the Oce PrintSight software makes for a valuable addition for print providers interested in quickly and easily knowing exactly what is going on in their production environment. Oce PrintSight gives print shop owners details to make informed decisions, allowing them to better utilize their printers and improve profitability while maintaining competitive pricing. "What the Oce PrintSight software has now brought to our customers is more control over their printing environment to better support the dynamic applications they are producing on their Oce devices," said Robert Reddy, Senior Vice President, Large Format Solutions, Operations, Canon Solutions America. "We have amazed our customers with the incredible Oce technology, and decided to take it one step further by developing a software that would help take productivity to the next level." Centralized Monitoring Oce PrintSight connects to Oce devices via customers' ethernet networks, allowing them to quickly identify the printer by name, IP address, and even see individual serial numbers and current status. The Oce PrintSight software can be installed on one or more connected PCs, so all internal stakeholders can readily see the data that's most important to them. To learn more about Oce PrintSight software, please visit the Canon Solutions America website here. About Canon Solutions America, Inc. Canon Solutions America provides industry leading enterprise, production, and large format printing solutions, supported by exceptional professional service offerings. With the technology offerings of the Canon and Oce brands, Canon Solutions America helps companies of all sizes find ways to: improve sustainability, increase efficiency, and control costs in conjunction with high volume, continuous feed, digital and traditional printing, and document management solutions. A wholly owned subsidiary of Canon U.S.A., Inc., Canon Solutions America is headquartered in Melville, N.Y. and has sales and service locations across the U.S. For more information on Canon Solutions America, please visit csa.canon.com. Editorial Contact: Canon Solutions America, Inc. Website: Tara Vetro http://csa.canon.com 631-330-2681 For sales info/customer support: [email protected] 1-844-443-INFO(4636) Canon is a registered trademark of Canon Inc. in the United States and elsewhere. Oce is a registered trademark of Oce-Technologies B.V. in the United States and elsewhere. All other referenced product names and marks are trademarks of their respective owners and are hereby acknowledged. Availability, prices and specifications are subject to change without notice. 2019 Canon Solutions America, Inc. All rights reserved. SOURCE Canon Solutions America, Inc. Related Links https://csa.canon.com "Cannabis has made a difference in my life, in the lives of my friends and people who have been reintroduced to it. Working with Civilized, I've seen how passionate they are about smashing outdated cannabis stereotypes while keeping people entertained, and it's been a real inspiration," says Handler. "It's more than just a media company, it's a movement. And one I'm proud to be a part of." Civilized's history with Chelsea Handler dates back to mid 2018 when she was a keynote speaker at the exclusive World Cannabis Congress and joined Riedle for an on-stage conversation for attendees. That conversation inspired a successful cross-Canada speaking tour: "A Civilized Conversation with Chelsea Handler", just weeks ahead of cannabis legalization in Canada. The tour made national headlines for its fresh approach to transforming the cannabis narrative and challenging outdated stereotypes. "We've had a great relationship with Chelsea over the short time we've known her. She's been an enthusiastic supporter of our mission to reimagine cannabis culture through smart content and meaningful events," says Derek Riedle, Publisher of Civilized. "She's a true friend to the Civilized brand and we're thrilled to have her on board as an investor." About Civilized Worldwide Inc.: Civilized is the leading lifestyle brand that connects millions of cannabis consumers, influencers and the canna-curious with both niche and mainstream content, events and experiences, and fashion. With operations in both Canada and the United States, Civilized makes original, premium digital content, television and podcasts; builds brands, and creates and produces world-class events and experiences for B2B and B2C audiences. Founded by Derek Riedle, Civilized is fast becoming the partner of choice for mainstream brands, and the cultural authority on the exploding global cannabis space. For more information, visit civilized.life. SOURCE Civilized Worldwide Inc. (Civilized) Related Links https://www.civilized.life/ RISHON LEZION, Israel, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Cymulate, a leading SaaS-based BAS platform, today announced an A funding round of $7.5M led by Vertex Ventures and Dell Technologies Capital, the investment arm of Dell Technologies; additional funds came from Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE) and Eyal Gruner, who previously led the Seed rounds. The company has now raised $11M total. Cymulate's BAS platform enables organizations to automatically assess their overall security posture, continuously validating that security measures and controls are working as expected. The Cymulate platform is deployable within minutes and the simulated attacks provide immediate results that include vulnerabilities and mitigation procedures to close each gap. The platform offers the largest range of attack vectors in the industry covering pre-exploitation, exploitation and post-exploitation stages of an attack kill-chain: Email, Web Gateway, Web Application, Phishing, Endpoint, Lateral Movement, Data Exfiltration and Immediate Threats. Cymulate will use the funding for expanding its operations in the United States, adding key leadership positions and investing further in the research team to enhance the platform's functionality. "The fast adoption of our platform by organizations optimizing their protection against attacks has enabled Cymulate to consistently surpass revenue and sales targets with triple growth which permits us now to focus on innovation and outreach," said Eyal Wachsman, Co-Founder and CEO of Cymulate. "We've been very strategic about the amount of funding we've raised in this round. This new funding will ensure that we remain ahead of the curve with the best Breach and Attack Simulation platform in the industry, while broadening strategic partnerships as we scale up research and operations to increase market share in 2019 and beyond." "We're impressed with Cymulate's technology and product market fit which has already resulted in a large customer base," said Emanuel Timor, General Partner at Vertex Ventures. "Their easy to use SaaS platform is proving invaluable to CISOs by providing insight that helps maximize security investments whilst minimizing security gaps. As cyber attacks such as data exfiltration, email attacks and phishing continue to be of prime concern to companies, we believe Cymulate has the potential to be the leading BAS company." "Enabling data-driven decisions for cyber security implementations and investments is critical for organizations of all sizes. We believe Cymulate is taking the right approach and has built the right end-to-end platform to enable this vision at scale." said Alon Weinberg, Director at Dell Technologies Capital. "Looking ahead, we are very pleased to be able to support Cymulate and help build the company wider vision." Cymulate was founded in June 2016 by cyber security veterans Avihai Ben-Yossef and Eyal Wachsman, alongside Eyal Gruner, a serial entrepreneur and investor in cybersecurity startups. In less than three years, Cymulate has successfully launched its technology in key markets across all industry verticals, with customers in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. In 2018, Cymulate was recognized as a Cool Vendor in Application and Data Security by Gartner.* In addition, Cymulate was distinguished in 2018 with the Gold Global Excellence Award from Info Security Products Guide, the Fortress Cyber Security Award, and Winner of the InfoSec Awards from the Cyber Defense Magazine. About Cymulate Cymulate helps companies to stay one step ahead of cyber attackers with a unique breach and attack simulation platform that empowers organizations with complex security solutions to safeguard their business-critical assets. By mimicking the myriad of strategies hackers deploy, the system allows businesses to assess their true preparedness to handle cyber security threats effectively. For more information, visit www.cymulate.com and register for a Free Trial . About Dell Technologies Capital Dell Technologies Capital is the investment arm for Dell Technologies. We've invested in over 100 companies that push the envelope on digital technology for enterprises and consumers. We are a team of world-class investors who help our companies succeed. We focus on early-stage investments with passionate founders and often lead rounds. Our companies gain unique access to the go-to-market capabilities of Dell Technologies. Dell Technologies is the parent company of Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks, Virtustream, and VMWare. Dell Technologies is a unique family of businesses that provides the essential infrastructure for organizations to build their digital future, transform IT and protect their most important asset, information. About Vertex Ventures Vertex Ventures is a leading global venture capital group supporting entrepreneurs to transform their innovative ideas into world-class businesses. With cumulative committed capital in excess of $2.5 billion, Vertex invests in early-stage IT and healthcare opportunities in Silicon Valley, China, India, Israel, and Southeast Asia. Since 1988, Vertex is honored to have partnered with the founders of global leaders such as Waze, 91, Grab, IGG, CyberArk, Reebonz, SolarEdge, Force10, FirstCry, Yatra and Changba. Vertex Ventures Israel is one of the pillars of the Vertex Group's network of Funds focusing on early stage opportunities in the Information Technology sector in Israel. Learn more here. *Gartner, Cool Vendors in Application and Data Security, 4 May 2018 NOTE: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. SOURCE Cymulate Related Links http://www.cymulate.com MAUMEE, Ohio, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Dana Incorporated (NYSE: DAN) today announced the release of Rhombus TireAnalytics Version 3.0 with new capabilities to help large fleets reduce tire costs. The third generation of the technology provides new cost-per-mile (CPM) analysis capabilities and best practice solutions that enable commercial-truck owners and fleet maintenance managers to make better data driven decisions for each application. Rhombus TireAnalytics, introduced in 2017 and adopted by a broad range of North American fleets, is a cloud-based platform that allows fleets to establish best practices for their tire maintenance programs and ensure these practices are adhered to by tracking compliance across all terminals. Additionally, the platform allows fleet managers to identify and predict maintenance issues to minimize downtime and maximize the life of their tires. The CPM tire comparisons, which can be determined by application or by axle type using the fleet's actual miles-per-tire (MPT) data and tire cost, provide situational analyses utilizing a fleet's real-life data. The new release also includes enhanced user authentication for stronger security and more flexibility in how users secure access to the platform. In direct response to customer feedback, Rhombus TireAnalytics 3.0 also includes a new install and rotate capability for the mobile application, which is quickly accessible for technicians servicing a vehicle anywhere in the terminal. This feature saves technicians significant time recording more complex patterns that involve, for example, rotating a set of tires while matching pairs of dual tires at the same time. "Rhombus TireAnalytics directly addresses one of the top expenses for a fleet, and this latest version continues our mission to provide data-driven solutions, allowing fleets and truck owners to predict and optimize tire spend in order to maximize a vehicle's operational effectiveness," said Mark Wallace, president of Dana Commercial Vehicle Driveline Technologies. "This enhancement also takes into consideration critical customer feedback, allowing maintenance professionals to better assess their tire management strategies and ensure operational efficiency for this critical area of maintenance." Dana will present Rhombus TireAnalytics 3.0, as well as a comprehensive lineup of Spicer Electrified systems, traditional driveline technologies, and other solutions for commercial vehicles, in booth 2801 at the upcoming TMC Annual Meeting March 18 21, 2019. About Dana Incorporated Dana is a world leader in highly engineered solutions for improving the efficiency, performance, and sustainability of powered vehicles and machinery. Dana supports the passenger vehicle, commercial truck, and off-highway markets, as well as industrial and stationary equipment applications. Founded in 1904, Dana employs nearly 36,000 people in 33 countries on six continents who are committed to delivering long-term value to customers. The company reported sales of $8.1 billion in 2018. Based in Maumee, Ohio, USA, it is a people-centric organization and has been named a top employer of choice around the world, including significant honors in Asia, India, Italy, Mexico, and the United States. For more information, please visit www.dana.com. SOURCE Dana Incorporated Related Links http://www.dana.com NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- According to a new Deloitte survey, organizations are significantly accelerating their investment in digital transformation efforts in 2019 but the majority still have a long way to go. Average digital transformation budgets increased by 25 percent this year, from $11 million to $13.6 million, with more than half of mid- and large-sized companies spending more than $10 million on these efforts. Meanwhile, 19 percent of respondents plan to invest at least $20 million in 2019, which is twice as many as those who invested at that level in 2018 (10 percent). The survey also quantified a substantial incentive for digitally mature organizations. About 50 percent of higher-maturity organizations reported that their net profit margin and revenues were significantly above average for their industry, compared to 17 and 19 percent respectively of lower-maturity organizations. Aggressive investment numbers aside, transformation initiatives are only as valuable as their business impacts and maximized business impact depends on effective execution. "This year companies are redoubling their efforts on digital transformation as results from early investments are positive and the potential value of transformation is clearer," said Ragu Gurumurthy, chief innovation officer and chief digital officer, Deloitte LLP. "Our survey and experience with clients reveal that digital transformation requires more than investments in technology: It is not just a tech upgrade. Transformation entails reimagining entire business processes and enabling change across the 'business system.' This is best done by investing in foundational capabilities and working to transform of specific functions holistically." Deloitte CEO Cathy Engelbert added, "The role of leadership in digital transformation is crucial. This isn't just about investing in the new and emerging technologies but also the future of work and talent transformation too." In its journey to uncover the factors that drive digital transformation success, Deloitte surveyed 1,200 U.S.-based senior executives knowledgeable about their organizations' digital transformation efforts. Digital transformation is about becoming a digital enterprise: an organization that uses data and technology to evolve continuously all aspects of its business models. Digital maturity in this survey is defined as the extent to which respondents said an organization's digital transformation efforts are delivering business benefit. Digital transformation is a continuous process, and digital maturity is a moving target; for this analysis levels of digital maturity are presented as relative rather than absolute classifications. Prioritizing seven tech capabilities and beyond To bridge the gap between investment and impact, Deloitte identified seven tech-related capabilities or "digital pivots" required to propel an organization to digital maturity. Specifically, the digital pivots are: flexible, secure infrastructure; data mastery; digitally savvy, open talent network; ecosystem engagement; intelligent workflows; unified customer experience; and business model adaptability. While each pivot is explored in greater detail in the full report, the survey found that higher-maturity organizations execute an average of 40 total pivot applications efforts to apply pivots to specific business functions compared to lower-maturity organizations that execute an average of 19. As essential as the digital pivots are, 59 percent of the organizations who have put the most effort behind them have still reached only median digital maturity. This signals that additional, "soft" factors play a key role in digital transformation success. Barriers to adoption: Legacy operating structures and lack of focus Per the survey, half (49 percent) of respondents cited legacy operating models and structures as a top challenge, followed by a lack of prioritization (45 percent). Additionally, approximately one-third of survey respondents noted a talent skills deficit (36 percent) and culture resistant to change (32 percent) among the top challenges impacting digital ambitions. To overcome these challenges, higher-maturity organizations tend to be distinguished by the presence of complementary "soft" factors beyond the tech-driven pivots. Respondents at higher-maturity organizations were much more likely than those at lower-maturity organizations to cite strong leadership as a top tactic for overcoming digital transformation challenges (62 percent versus 45 percent). Similarly, higher-maturity organizations were nearly four times more likely than lower-maturity companies to strongly agree that their organization and incentives encourage smart risk-taking to innovate and grow. Transformation by industry: technology/media/telecommunications lead the digital pack Deloitte's study found that a greater percentage of respondents in technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) companies hail from median- and higher-maturity organizations than those from other industries. Specifically, 34 percent of TMT respondents came from companies classified as higher maturity, while respondents in life sciences and health care were three times as likely to work at lower-maturity organizations than those of higher maturity (40 percent versus 13 percent). A third (33 percent) of respondents at TMT companies say their company is planning to invest $20 million or more on digital transformation this year. Just 13 percent of life sciences and health care company respondents say their company is planning to spend at that level. Also, at that level: 17 percent of respondents from financial services and insurance companies and consumer products companies; and 18 percent of respondents at energy resources, and industrials companies. About the survey This survey, conducted in November 2018, asked 1,200 U.S.-based executives to assess their organization's approach to digital transformation. The respondents included in the analysis were those who reported that they were somewhat or highly knowledgeable about their organization's efforts, and who were from organizations of at least 500 people and US$250 million in annual global revenue. This sample included an equal number of respondents from key industries. About Deloitte Deloitte provides industry-leading audit, consulting, tax and advisory services to many of the world's most admired brands, including nearly 90 percent of the Fortune 500 and more than 5,000 private and middle market companies. Our people work across the industry sectors that drive and shape today's marketplace to make an impact that matters delivering measurable and lasting results that help reinforce public trust in our capital markets, inspire clients to see challenges as opportunities to transform and thrive, and help lead the way toward a stronger economy and a healthy society. Deloitte is proud to be part of the largest global professional services network serving our clients in the markets that are most important to them. Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a UK private company limited by guarantee ("DTTL"), its network of member firms, and their related entities. DTTL and each of its member firms are legally separate and independent entities. DTTL (also referred to as "Deloitte Global") does not provide services to clients. In the United States, Deloitte refers to one or more of the US member firms of DTTL, their related entities that operate using the "Deloitte" name in the United States and their respective affiliates. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting. Please see www.deloitte.com/about to learn more about our global network of member firms. SOURCE Deloitte Related Links https://www.deloitte.com NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- ERISA service provider, Clarity Benefit Solutions, lists four common ERISA pitfalls to avoid. The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) establishes minimum standards for a majority of benefits plans as well as voluntarily established pension programs. This law, designed to protect plan participants, requires plans to disclose important information in a timely manner. ERISA regulations can be complex to navigate. The following are common ERISA pitfalls companies should avoid. Know the acronyms. A summary plan description (SPD) defines terms and conditions of a plan and includes benefits, obligations, and rights. SPDs need to be shared with plan participants and beneficiaries in a specific time frame. A summary of benefits and coverage (SBC) gives participants and beneficiaries customary information along with a standard wordlist so participants are easily able to compare plans and choose the best one to fit their needs. Companies who fail to provide both these documents will find themselves in violation of ERISA. Assign administrator responsibility. Employers must designate an ERISA plan administrator that is clearly defined in the SPD. Since maintaining compliance can be a slippery slope, this person should not delegate important compliance responsibilities to another colleague. Again, failure to comply with ERISA regulations results in financial and legal liabilities. Recognize which plans are subject to ERISA. Nearly all ERISA group health plans (GHPs) must have an SPDincluding medical benefits in conjunction with Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRAs) and Flexible Savings Accounts (FSAs), vision, dental, and a variety of wellness initiatives. Certain voluntary programs, cafeteria plans, and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) are not subject to ERISA compliance. Properly deliver COBRA notices. Employees who are no longer eligible for employer-funded health insurance have the option to continue their coverage under COBRA. Plan administrators must provide employees with the proper notifications, including: a General Notice, which is distributed to the eligible employee by the employer within 30 days after the qualifying event or by the health plan administrator 60 days or more after the event; an Election Notice that describes the employee's rights and information regarding filing an election within 14 days; a Notice of Unavailability of Continuation Coverage to inform and employee that he or she is not eligible for COBRA coverage; and a Notice of Early Termination of Continuation Coverage that notifies an employee that health coverage is being terminated earlier than expected. About Clarity Benefit Solutions: Clarity Benefit Solutions provides technology that makes the health insurance plan selection process fast, easy, and straightforward. For over two decades, we have provided clients with industry-leading technology, compliance, and exceptional customer service. Our offering is designed to save time and lower the costs of managing benefits while also promoting employee self-service and automated ACA compliance. SOURCE Clarity Benefit Solutions Related Links https://claritybenefitsolutions.com IRVINE, Calif., March 1, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Taxpayers that get behind on their taxes commonly feel like they are at the bottom of a large financial hole. A common course of action is to ignore the problem and fall behind on their tax payments or tax return filings. Such inaction can make your problems exponentially worse especially where the federal and state taxing authorities looks for prosecution targets to make an example out of this time of year tax filing season. As an example, earlier this month, a Denver businessman was sentenced to a year and a day in prison for failing to pay his taxes. According to a Department of Justice press release, Douglas A. Wieland, an owner of an asphalt company in the Denver area, failed to pay his taxes from 1999 through 2017. Prosecutors alleged that Wieland did not dispute that he owed the IRS for his taxes each year, he simply didn't make his payments. When the IRS attempted to collect on Wieland's severely overdue tax debt, he took steps to thwart their efforts. Wieland utilized a warehouse bank account, instead of using his personal bank account that the IRS was aware of in an effort to conceal the true owner of the account by commingling funds with others in the same account. He cashed checks from customers in a manner that did not alert to the IRS to his financial activity and admitted he was trying to stop the IRS from "stealing" his money even though by law federal and state agencies are well within their rights to levy funds in your bank accounts if you ignore their efforts to collect. Wieland pleaded guilty to two counts of failing to pay his taxes in violation of 26 U.S.C. 7203. ordered to pay $166,000 in restitution to the IRS and serve a period of supervised release. The IRS and Department of Justice will eventually catch up to taxpayers if they have failed to pay their taxes. The longer that a taxpayer waits to remedy their tax noncompliance, the more severe the outcome could be. Tax evasion criminal prosecutions come in two flavors, evasion of assessment and evasion of payment. See the full version of this article HERE. Contact: Dave Klasing Esq. CPA, [email protected]. SOURCE Tax Law Offices of David W. Klasing Related Links https://klasing-associates.com NEW YORK and TARTU, Estonia and TALLINN, Estonia, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Glia (formerly SaleMove), a leading digital customer service platform for financial services companies, today announced that it has raised $20 million in additional funding led by Insight Venture Partners, and joined by existing investors. This brings Glia's total fundraising to $29 million as Insight Venture Partners joins current investors Tola Capital, Wildcat Capital Management, Grassy Creek, and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. As part of the investment, Lonne Jaffe, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners, will join Glia's board of directors. "We are proud to partner with Glia to transform how businesses connect with customers," said Lonne Jaffe, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners. "Glia's innovative technology includes an elegant blend of CoBrowsing, video chat, voice communications, and a machine learning-powered chatbot chassis that works across Amazon Lex, Google Dialogflow, IBM Watson and more. Glia is one of the shining stars of the New York City technology ecosystem, and we're excited to get the chance to provide the fantastic team at Glia with the capital and scaling support needed to continue their rapid growth in 2019 and beyond." Glia plans to expand its product development, sales, solutions, and marketing organizations, growing the employee headcount and infrastructure to further accelerate Glia's mission to transform how financial institutions connect with their customers using Messaging, Video, Voice, CoBrowsing, and Artificial Intelligence. "Insight has a long history and excellent track record of working with best-in-class SaaS companies," said Dan Michaeli, Co-Founder and CEO at Glia. "By adding an investor as strong and experienced as Insight, we are poised to rapidly expand Glia's market reach. Almost every interaction between businesses and customers today involves a screen, yet the main method of getting in touch is still an old-school phone call. Over the next 3-5 years, the move from phone-first to digital-first communication will define the businesses that win customer experience in their category. Insight's successes in the enterprise technology space gives us great confidence in their deep understanding of these trends and we are energized to partner with them." This round of funding builds on a 2018 in which Glia had substantial success and growth across the entire enterprise as well as recognition by industry leaders. >100% ARR growth year over year . For the third straight year, Glia saw a more than doubling in annual recurring revenue across its customer base. Supported by both additions of new logos in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. . For the third straight year, Glia saw a more than doubling in annual recurring revenue across its customer base. Supported by both additions of new logos in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. Product. Glia launched many product features and enhancements to increase functionality and performance in 2018, with two major product additions: Glia's Voice Platform embraces a future where customers will connect with businesses using digital voice rather than legacy phone numbers. The platform seamlessly integrates with Glia's Video, CoBrowsing , Messaging and AI solution to create a holistic System of Engagement. With companies struggling to provide cohesion for the large number of chatbot deployments across multiple use cases, Glia created the first ever AI Management Platform that enables companies to integrate and manage chatbots from multiple partners (Amazon Lex, Google Dialogflow, IBM Watson, etc.). This management layer allows businesses to treat chatbots like human agents by easily evaluating performance with standard metrics/data and creating chatbot teams. Glia launched many product features and enhancements to increase functionality and performance in 2018, with two major product additions: Industry Recognition. Glia was highlighted by Forrester in Kate Leggett's recent report, How To Build A Modern Agent Desktop And Transform Customer Service Experiences . Glia was highlighted by Forrester in recent report, . Hiring . Glia saw 50% employee growth globally across the United States and Estonia , and expanded the executive team with key hires including industry veteran John Fernandez who joins the company as Senior Vice President of Marketing. . Glia saw 50% employee growth globally across and , and expanded the executive team with key hires including industry veteran who joins the company as Senior Vice President of Marketing. Awards . Glia continued its track record of winning key industry awards and recognition at events in the Americas and EMEA, including several best in show awards: Best In Show, Orion Ascent/FUSE Conference ( Miami Beach , September 2018 ) Best in Show, Dig-In Insure Analytics and AI ( New York , November 2018 ) Best in Show, Finovate Europe ( London , February 2019 ), marking the 5th time Glia has won Best in Show at a Finovate event Best in Show, Credit Union National Association Governmental Affairs Conference ( Washington D.C. , March 2019 ) . Glia continued its track record of winning key industry awards and recognition at events in the Americas and EMEA, including several best in show awards: Re-Brand. Formerly known as SaleMove, the company re-branded as Glia in February. From the ancient Greek for "glue", Glia are the most numerous cells in the brain that provide physical and nutritional support for neurons. In short, your glia are the infrastructure which allows for all of the communication to take place in the nervous system. Just like the glia in the brain, Glia the company provides the infrastructure for companies to connect with their customers using Messaging, Video, CoBrowsing and AI. Speaking about the re-brand, Glia Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Dan Michaeli stated "When we first started the company, we believed that we could build a platform in order to facilitate more sales, hence SaleMove. As we've built on this initial vision, our customers have found many ingenious uses for our functionality that we didn't imagine at the time. We realize now that the platform does so much more than move sales, so we've made the decision to build a brand which supports that wider vision of the value our customers are achieving." About Glia Glia creates digital-first moments that simplify and transform communications between financial institutions and their customers using Messaging, Video, Voice, CoBrowsing, and Artificial Intelligence. Fortune 500 companies that have high-consideration sales and support experiences need to deliver choice, continuity, and speed to their customers. Glia transcends the channel discussion to focus on what matters - customers. Glia is backed by leading venture capital investors including Insight Venture Partners, Tola Capital, Wildcat Capital Management, Grassy Creek, and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. Glia is headquartered in New York City and has additional offices in Tartu and Tallinn, Estonia. For more information, visit www.glia.com . 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 currently has over $20 billion of assets under management and has cumulatively invested in more than 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 Glia Related Links https://www.glia.com DUBLIN, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Medical Tourism Market - Growth, Trends, and Forecast (2019 - 2024)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The global medical tourism market was valued at USD 16,761 million in 2018, and it is expected to reach USD 27,247.6 million by 2024, while registering a CAGR of 8.5% during the forecast period, 2019-2023. The factors associated with the growth of the market include higher treatment cost in developed countries, availability of the latest medical technologies, growing compliance on international quality standards, high quality of service, health insurance portability, and advertising and marketing of the medical tourism. The cost of undergoing medical treatment in a developed country is very high. It is estimated that although the treatments are of reliable quality, the procedures tend to be on the expensive side. Along with this, the major healthcare products are also quite extravagantly priced. This scenario places a big burden on the healthcare systems, worldwide, accompanied by the additional rising costs of litigation during recent times. Healthcare practitioners need to be aware of both the direct and indirect costs and consider how the implementation of prevention protocols may offer cost savings in the longer term. People in developed countries cannot afford the huge expenditure associated with medical treatments. Not all medical bills are covered by insurance companies, which makes the patients turn to countries abroad. Countries in Asia, the Middle East, and South America provide high-quality medical services at a much lower rate, as compared to the developed economies. There are companies that cater to all the medical and non-medical needs of the tourist during their travel. Key Market Trends Fertility Treatments Segment Expected to Have Highest CAGR The fertility treatments segment of the medical tourism market is believed to show the fastest growth over the forecast period. The segment is expected to record a CAGR of 9.7% over the forecast period. Fertility treatment is one of the most common treatments for which medical tourists elect to travel across international borders. Fertility tourism or reproductive tourism is one of the fastest-growing areas. About 20,000 to 25,000 couples annually seek assisted reproductive technology services abroad. An estimated 4.0% of European Union citizens receive treatment in other countries. Fertility treatment procedures are regulated in most European countries. Asia-Pacific Currently Dominates the Market The Asia-Pacific region currently dominates the medical tourism market and it is expected to continue its stronghold for a few more years. This region is expected to increase its market share in the future, owing to the raised preference of medical tourism across the developing countries of this region. China holds the majority of the market in the Asia-Pacific region. This is due to the lower cost of the treatment in China and the better healthcare services provided. Competitive Landscape The global medical tourism market is moderately competitive and consists of several major players. In terms of market share, few of the major players currently dominate the market. However, with technological advancement and quality service provision, mid-size to smaller companies are increasing their market presence by introducing new products with fewer prices. Companies, like Health Base, Apollo Hospitals, KPJ Healthcare, and Klinikum Medical Link hold the significant market share in the medical tourism market. Topics Covered 1 Introduction 1.1 Study Deliverables 1.2 Study Assumptions 1.3 Scope of the Study 2 Research Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Market Dynamics 4.1 Market Overview 4.2 Market Drivers 4.2.1 High Treatment Cost in Developed Countries 4.2.2 Availability of Latest Medical Technologies 4.2.3 Growing Compliance on International Quality Standards 4.2.4 High Quality of Service 4.2.5 Health Insurance Portability 4.2.6 Advertising and Marketing 4.3 Market Restraints 4.3.1 Ethical Concerns 4.3.2 Epidemic Outbreaks 4.3.3 Issues with Patient Follow Up and Post-procedure Complications 4.3.4 Medical Record Transfer Issues 4.4 Industry Attractiveness of Porter's Five Forces Analysis 5 Market Segmentation 5.1 By Treatment Type 5.1.1 Cosmetic Treatment 5.1.2 Dental Treatment 5.1.3 Cardiovascular Treatment 5.1.4 Orthopedics Treatment 5.1.5 Bariatric Surgery 5.1.6 Fertility Treatment 5.1.7 Ophthalmic Treatment 5.1.8 Other Treatments 5.2 Geography 5.2.1 North America 5.2.2 Europe 5.2.3 Asia-Pacific 5.2.4 Middle East & Africa 5.2.5 South America 6 Competitive Landscape 6.1 Company Profiles 6.1.1 MedRetreat 6.1.2 Health Base 6.1.3 Apollo Hospitals 6.1.4 KPJ Healthcare Behard 6.1.5 Klinikum Medical Link 6.1.6 Euromedical Tours 6.1.7 BB Health Solutions 6.1.8 Cosmedic Travel 7 Market Opportunities and Future Trends For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/256kw7/global_medical?w=5 Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Related Links http://www.researchandmarkets.com "WFF is celebrating 30 years in 2019, and I will stay on to celebrate with them and pass the baton to the next president and CEO," Hill continued. "I will always advocate for the success of this organization and am confident our next leader will make significant strides in her tenure." Denny Marie Post, president and CEO of Red Robin Gourmet Burgers and Brews and current WFF Board Executive Committee Chair, considers Hill an industry icon. "Without Hattie, WFF wouldn't be where it is today," Post said. "She pushes the industry to participate in seminal research which showed that while we've made progress, progress isn't parity. That work is helping us create a roadmap for action. I thank Hattie for leading WFF and for advancing women in our industry." Prior to joining WFF, Hill was founder and CEO of Hattie Hill Enterprises, a management consultancy. She's a professional speaker and the author of several corporate books, including "Smart Women, Smart Choices." Her accolades span her entire career, including being named one of the "40 under 40" top business and community leaders by the Dallas Business Journal and being recognized by Working Women magazine for "Entrepreneurial Excellence." Hill is active in several industry organizations and her current and past board memberships include: the Federal Reserve, Emory University Goizueta Business School, National Restaurant Association, Dallas Regional Chamber of Commerce, and past chair of VisitDallas. She previously served on the boards of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, the Goizueta Business School at Emory University and the Society of International Business Fellows. Hill holds bachelors and masters degrees from Arkansas State University. ABOUT WOMEN'S FOODSERVICE FORUM: WFF is the industry's premier leadership development organization, working since 1989 to advance women in the food industry. Based in Dallas, WFF serves thousands of women and men, as well as hundreds of employers across the United States in all segments of the industry including operations, manufacturing, distribution, publishing, consulting and more. For more information, visit wff.org. SOURCE Womens Foodservice Forum Related Links https://www.wff.org HealthTrackRx and the new joint venture are committed to providing services that support safe medication prescribing and help to identify patients at risk of substance misuse for referral to further treatment. The joint venture will include a new laboratory in Huntington, West Virginia that will provide drug testing services for physicians and hospitals and support HealthTrackRx's GuideMed clinical solution. GuideMed enables physicians and hospitals to provide new resources for safe prescribing and monitoring medication use in people being treated with opioids and other controlled substances. The program has been used by more than 30,000 people and initial results have shown improved patient compliance and medication use. "We are eager to bring these services to our region and believe they will be vital in providing support to those recovering from substance use disorder," stated, Michael Mullins, President and CEO, Mountain Health Network. "The GuideMed program will provide a framework to assist in return-to-work programs and assure employers in hiring recovery patients. It also will assist physicians with safely prescribing and monitoring medications for those requiring treatment for pain management." The GuideMed program and its patent pending technology can help providers meet new legislative requirements for prescribing opioids. It provides customized patient reports to physicians, compiles data on risk and compliance, allows for centralization of patient education, and testing. The service will allow physicians to delegate the monitoring activities and reporting requirements to the joint venture, to help relieve the burden on them and their staff. "Research and preliminary data from our program show that comprehensive monitoring yields greater success for our patients to achieve long-term recoverythat's the most important part," said Beth L. Hammers, chief executive officer of Marshall Health. "This new service is a means to that end, taking the burden of continuous monitoring off the physicians and their staff while still allowing them to chart progress and make adjustments throughout the process." "GuideMed originated from the goal of supporting physicians in monitoring their patients and properly prescribing pain medications. Our objective is to provide a turnkey program that helps ensure safe prescribing, while also supporting improved pain treatment outcomes," said Dr. Doug Brenner, President and CEO of HealthTrackRx. Visit www.guidemed.com for additional information. About HealthTrackRx HealthTrackRx is an integrated clinical solutions company that helps clinicians with appropriate medication prescribing and monitoring. The company provides cost-effective programs, testing and data analytics to support appropriate opioid and antibiotic stewardship. For more information visit www.healthtrackrx.com. About Mountain Health Mountain Health Network, Inc., is a West Virginia-based not-for-profit health delivery system comprised of Cabell Huntington Hospital, a 303-bed teaching hospital for Marshall University Schools of Medicine, Pharmacy and Nursing; St. Mary's Medical Center, a 393-bed teaching hospital which operates St. Mary's Schools of Nursing, Respiratory Care and Medical Imaging; Hoops Family Children's Hospital, a 72-bed pediatric specialty hospital within Cabell Huntington Hospital; and a management agreement with Pleasant Valley Hospital, a 201-bed facility with 101 licensed acute beds and 100 long term care beds. Mountain Health is committed to improving the health and well-being of over one million children and adults in 23 counties in West Virginia, southern Ohio and eastern Kentucky through understanding, respecting and meeting their needs. About Marshall Health Marshall Health is the faculty practice plan of the Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine, making it the region's only academic health system. With more than 300 physicians, 70 areas of primary and advanced care and 40 outpatient clinic locations, Marshall Health is also the largest, most comprehensive health care provider in the tri-state region. For more information, please visit www.marshallhealth.org. CONTACT: Jennifer Armstrong Vice President, Marketing 940-300-8715 [email protected] SOURCE HealthTrackRx Related Links http://www.healthtrackrx.com WASHINGTON, March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Recall Summary Name of Product: Lithium-ion batteries for HP commercial notebook computers and mobile workstations Hazard: The lithium-ion batteries can overheat, posing fire and burn hazards. Remedy: Replace Consumers should immediately visit www.HP.com/go/batteryprogram2018 to see if their battery is included in the recall and for instructions on how to enable "Battery Safety Mode" if their battery is included in the recall. The website provides consumers instructions on how to initiate the validation utility to check their battery and what to download if their battery is included in the recall. These batteries are not customer-replaceable. HP will provide free battery replacement services by an authorized technician. Consumer Contact: HP toll-free at 866-671-7362 from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. CT Monday through Friday or online at www.HP.com/go/batteryprogram2018 or www.hp.com and click "Recalls" for more information. Recall Details Units: About 78,500 (In addition 50,000 were previously recalled in the U.S. in January 2018.) Description: The recall expansion involves lithium-ion batteries for HP commercial notebook computers and mobile workstations were sold to businesses and other organizations. The batteries were shipped with or sold as accessories for HP ProBooks (64x G2 and G3 series, 65x G2 and G3 series, 4xx G4 series), HPx360 (310 G2), HP Pavilion x360 11inch Notebook PC, HP 11 Notebook PC, HP ZBook (17 G3, and Studio G3) mobile workstations. The batteries were also sold as accessories or replacement batteries for the HP ZBook Studio G4 mobile workstation, HP ProBook 4xx G5 series, HP ENVY 15, HP Mobile Thin Clients (mt21, mt22, and mt31), or for any of the products listed above. Incidents/Injuries: HP has received eight new reports of battery packs in the U.S. overheating, melting, or charring, including one report of minor injury and two reports of property damage totaling $1,100. Sold At: HP and authorized dealers nationwide and online at www.hp.com. The batteries were shipped in notebook computers and mobile workstations sold from December 2015 through April 2018 for between $300 and $4,000 and were also sold separately between December 2015 and December 2018 for between $50 and $90. Importer: HP Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif. Manufactured in: China This recall was conducted voluntarily by the company under CPSC's Fast Track Recall process. Fast Track recalls are initiated by firms, who commit to work with CPSC to quickly announce the recall and remedy to protect consumers. About U.S. CPSC: The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is charged with protecting the public from unreasonable risks of injury or death associated with the use of thousands of types of consumer products under the agency's jurisdiction. Deaths, injuries, and property damage from consumer product incidents cost the nation more than $1 trillion annually. CPSC is committed to protecting consumers and families from products that pose a fire, electrical, chemical or mechanical hazard. CPSC's work to ensure the safety of consumer products - such as toys, cribs, power tools, cigarette lighters and household chemicals contributed to a decline in the rate of deaths and injuries associated with consumer products over the past 40 years. Federal law bars any person from selling products subject to a publicly-announced voluntary recall by a manufacturer or a mandatory recall ordered by the Commission. For more lifesaving information, follow us on Facebook, Instagram @USCPSC and Twitter @USCPSC or sign up to receive our e-mail alerts. To report a dangerous product or a product-related injury go online to www.SaferProducts.gov or call CPSC's Hotline at 800-638-2772 or teletypewriter at 301-595-7054 for the hearing impaired. CPSC Consumer Information Hotline Contact us at this toll-free number if you have questions about a recall: 800-638-2772 (TTY 301-595-7054) Times: 8 a.m. 5:30 p.m. ET; Messages can be left anytime Call to get product safety and other agency information and to report unsafe products. Media Contact Please use the phone numbers below for all media requests. Phone: 301-504-7908 Spanish: 301-504-7800 Recall Date: March 12, 2019 Recall Number: 19-079 SOURCE U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission Related Links http://www.cpsc.gov MADISON HEIGHTS, Mich., March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Detroit chapter is helping communicators reveal their awards potential by offering a single application for two award programs. IABC Detroit is again partnering with its accomplice, Heritage Region, to give communicators a chance to compete at the local level (IABC Detroit's 2019 Renaissance Awards) as well as the regional level (Heritage Region Silver Quill) at the same time, using a single entry. This year's mysterious Clue game-themed competition is designed to showcase the communication management skills, and problem-solving creativity of Michigan's finest companies, agencies and professionals. Early bird call for entries will open soon. "Communicators are challenged daily to search for authenticity and solve multiple communication "cases" at a time,'" said Ed Walters, co-chair of the IABC Detroit Renaissance Awards program. "Our IABC chapter provides a fun, unique and interactive opportunity to have their work recognized at the local and regional levels." Anna Cangialosi, co-chair, IABC Detroit Renaissance Awards, agreed: "Entrants will save time, money and gain the recognition of peers and other communications professionals who will be inspired by their abilities to decode communication challenges." Don't let your well-played strategic communications moves go unnoticed. Get ready to enter your outstanding communications work in IABC Detroit's 2019 Renaissance Awards program and give your peers a clue to how it's done. Look for a call-for-entries coming soon! ABOUT IABC DETROIT'S RENAISSANCE AWARDS IABC Detroit's Renaissance Awards debuted nearly 40 years ago to recognize excellence in communications in southeast Michigan. Today, it is the premiere communications awards program in the state. ABOUT THE HERITAGE REGION SILVER QUILL AWARDS The IABC Heritage Region Silver Quill awards have been a hallmark of communications excellence for more than 15 years. Silver Quill recognizes outstanding accomplishments within its geographic area: Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, D.C. and West Virginia. SOURCE IABC Detroit Related Links http://www.iabcdetroit.com ATLANTA, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Ideas United, LLC, a creative studio changing the way stories are told, announced today that Kayne Partners, the growth equity group of Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors, L.P., has committed $15 million in equity funding to support Ideas United's growth and expansion leveraging its model to produce authentic, high-quality content and events for premier brands, universities, nonprofits, and networks. "After more than a decade of profitably building Ideas United, we're thrilled to now benefit from the support of Kayne Partners to take advantage of the exceptional growth opportunities in front of us," said David Roemer, Co-Founder and CEO of Ideas United. "Brands and original content platforms are now seeking new models to tell unforgettable stories, and we've developed an ideal solution to make an unforgettable impact." Ideas United began over 15 years ago with the creation of Campus Movie Fest, a leading student film festival with more than a million students who've created short movies for free thanks to premier brand partners. Ideas United provides its partners with multiple months of deep engagement on more than 60 college campuses each year, resulting in industry-leading experiential opportunities and college access as well as special culminating events with industry luminaries. Campus Movie Fest additionally serves as a talent discovery model for Ideas United year after year, enabling Ideas United to find and nurture top emerging storytellers who are invited into its exclusive community of creative, authentic, diverse, and talented creators located around the globe. Ideas United leverages this community to bring to life the stories of its clients which have included over 30 Fortune 500 brands and 150 universities and manages all productions from start to finish. Ideas United's full-time team provides the expertise, consistency, and highest level quality that clients demand for a wide variety of services ranging from capturing content in dozens of countries in one day to serving as a marketing agency of record for premier brands to developing campaigns for leading institutions to fundraise billions of dollars. Most recently, Ideas United expanded its infrastructure to develop original content, including five television pilots based on the top concepts submitted from nearly 1,000 of its top emerging creators worldwide. Now, Ideas United is in development on multiple feature films and series as streaming platforms and brands demand more high-quality content than ever before. "With the support of Kayne Partners, we can rapidly scale to efficiently deliver content globally that's unmatched by traditional models," stated Dan Costa, Co-Founder and President of Ideas United. "We're excited to build depth in our sales and marketing team to help showcase our solutions to potential partners worldwide while we continue to shape our creative and production team, discover the best of the next generation, and produce inspiring content and experiences." "We are excited to be partnering with the Ideas United team as we believe that their unique content production model has the potential to dramatically shift how brands approach storytelling and connecting with their audiences. This is a team that is not constrained by industry standards and takes a novel approach to content that we believe is unique in the marketplace. We look forward to working with the Ideas United team as they continue to innovate in their next phase of growth," added Rob Shilton, Vice President at Kayne Partners. About Kayne Partners: Kayne Partners, the dedicated growth private equity group of Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors, L.P., is a leading provider of capital and connections to privately held, high growth, enterprise software and tech-enabled service businesses in North America. The Kayne Partners team has invested approximately $460 million in platform investments and add-on acquisitions together across four funds. Kayne Partners seeks to partner with driven entrepreneurs and provide capital to high growth companies at a transformative point in their life cycle in the following industries: security & compliance, supply chain & logistics, financials, industrials, healthcare, and media & telecom. For more information, visit www.kaynecapital.com About Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors, L.P. Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors, L.P., founded in 1984, is a leading alternative investment management firm focused on niche investing in upstream oil and gas companies, energy and infrastructure, specialized real estate, growth equity and both private credit and diversified liquid credit. Kayne Anderson manages $30 billion in assets (as of January 2019) and employs over 350 professionals in five core offices across the U.S. For more information, please visit www.kaynecapital.com About Ideas United, LLC Ideas United is a creative studio changing the way stories are told. Our in-house team works alongside a global talent network to shape experiences, rethink conventions, and speak to new audiences across four key disciplines: college, branded content, capital campaigns, and original content. Founded in 2001, Ideas United created a more progressive model to tell stories, built on partnerships and diverse perspectives. Connect with us at ideasunited.com Contact: Holland Baird Ideas United 404-748-0012 [email protected] Related Links Ideas United Kayne Partners SOURCE Ideas United Related Links http://ideasunited.com NEW YORK, March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- In terms of revenue, the global building analytics market is expected to grow to US$ 19,655.7 million by 2027 from US$ 6,181.4 million in 2018. Factors such as growing energy prices, increasingly stringent building energy guidelines, and achieving maximum operational efficiency for building and facility management is expected to be the major market driving forces for building analytics market in the coming years. Moreover, growing demand for interoperable and robust building analytics solution facilitating effective monitoring and managing of various facility assets is also expected to gain major traction in the coming years and provide numerous profitable business opportunities for the market players in global building analytics market. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05751923 Currently, the companies offer a mix of solution and services to their clients such as signal malls, airports, manufacturing & production plant residential complexes, hotels, offices, and government buildings among others for their seamless facility management. Further, the companies also offer insights and reports to relate to fault detection, monitoring, and risk assessment analytic reports for making informed decisions and framing policies for improved infrastructure management. On the basis of building type, commercial building segment is the leading segment of the global building analytics market.Presently, more than of the world's population lives in urban areas, and the trend is expected to move rapidly to around 80% over the next couple of decades. More than half of the built space in the urban areas and the majority of their resources are utilized by commercial buildings.A major portion of these resources consumed by these buildings is wasted, which has created a need to build or adopt new and advanced measures for sustainable growth. In US itself, commercial buildings consume around 20% of country's total energy and 40% of electricity.The new as well as existing buildings in the country can substantially enhance their energy efficiency and performance through integration of building analytics solution into their operations. Thus, the building analytics market is anticipated to gain significant traction in the coming years and yield numerous profitable opportunities for the market players in the coming years. The overall building analytics market size has been derived using both primary and secondary source.The research process begins with exhaustive secondary research using internal and external sources to obtain qualitative and quantitative information related to the building analytics market. It also provides the overview and forecast for the global building analytics market based on all the segmentation provided with respect to five major reasons such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, and South America.Also, primary interviews were conducted with industry participants and commentators in order to validate data and analysis. The participants who typically take part in such a process include industry expert such as VPs, business development managers, market intelligence managers, and national sales managers, and external consultant such as valuation experts, research analysts, and key opinion leaders specializing in the building analytics industry. Reasons to Buy Save and reduce time carrying out entry-level research by identifying the growth, size, leading players and segments in the global building analytics market. - Highlights key business priorities in order to assist companies to realign their business strategies. - The key findings and recommendations highlight crucial progressive industry trends in the global building analytics market, thereby allowing players across the value chain to develop effective long-term strategies. - Develop/modify business expansion plans by using substantial growth offering developed and emerging markets. - Scrutinize in-depth global market trends and outlook coupled with the factors driving the market, as well as those hindering it. - Enhance the decision-making process by understanding the strategies that underpin commercial interest with respect to client products, segmentation, pricing and distribution. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05751923 About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place. __________________________ Contact Clare: [email protected] US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001 SOURCE Reportlinker Related Links http://www.reportlinker.com PLAINFIELD, Ind., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- MD Logistics, a third-party logistics firm headquartered in Plainfield, announced its expansion, creating up to 50 new jobs by the end of 2023. "Indiana-born companies like MD Logistics are providing continued and sustainable growth in our communities, creating quality career opportunities for Hoosiers," said Elaine Bedel, president of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC). "As the Crossroads of America, Indiana is the ideal destination for growing logistics providers to help companies deliver products to customers across the country and around the world. With a top-ranked business climate and unprecedented investments being made to increase and enhance connectivity, I'm confident that Indiana will help support MD Logistics' success for many years to come." MD Logistics is expanding in order to meet demand for quality compliant storage environments in the life sciences and retail goods industries and to fulfill increased needs from current customers. Now operational, this is the fourth facility on their Plainfield campus. MD Logistics has invested more than $1 million in building improvements to enhance the space, which consists of 180,000 square feet of temperature controlled storage. "With 23 years of business in Indiana, we continue to experience double digit growth while maintaining a quality of service our customers have come to expect from us," says Mark Sell, President & CEO of MD Logistics. "This expansion, along with the focus on customers, technology, automation and people, has us well positioned to continue to evolve and be prepared to meet the challenges the logistics industry poses." MD Logistics was named a 2018 Top 3PL Provider by Inbound Logistics for the seventh consecutive year and was also recognized as a 2018 Top 3PL, for the sixth consecutive year, by Global Trade Magazine within the temperature controlled warehousing category. In addition, President & CEO, Mark Sell was named a 2018 Pro to Know by Supply & Demand Chain Executive for his ability to remain agile to the needs of his customers and the industry and for leading the entire MD Logistics team to do the same. The Indiana Economic Development Corporation offered MD Logistics Inc. up to $350,000 in conditional tax credits based on the company's job creation plans. MD Logistics has committed to creating at least 50 new Hoosier jobs through this expansion. As these tax credits are conditional, all hiring requirements need to be met before they are awarded. MD Logistics is hiring for key operational positions. Interested applicants are encouraged to visit www.mdlogistics.com/jobs or send an email to [email protected]. About MD Logistics MD Logistics is a third party logistics 3PL company specializing in customized supply chain solutions. Each opportunity represents unique, client-specific challenges that are evaluated utilizing proven strategic methodologies to deliver turnkey solutions. Our vertical markets include Life Sciences and Pharmaceuticals, Retail and Consumer Goods, as well as Transportation Services. About IEDC The Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) leads the state of Indiana's economic development efforts, helping businesses launch, grow and locate in the state. Governed by a 15-member board chaired by Governor Eric J. Holcomb, the IEDC manages many initiatives, including performance-based tax credits, workforce training grants, innovation and entrepreneurship resources, public infrastructure assistance, and talent attraction and retention efforts. For more information about the IEDC, visit www.iedc.in.gov. Media Contacts: Megan Eggers (MD Logistics) [email protected] Erin Sweitzer (IEDC) [email protected] SOURCE MD Logistics Related Links http://www.mdlogistics.com JERSEY CITY, N.J., March 11, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- A recent Jackson Hewitt Tax Service survey, conducted by Research Now, shows that the government shutdown might have had a larger impact on tax filing behavior than expected. The survey found that taxpayers are expecting delayed refunds and more time to file past April 15, Tax Day, due to the recent shutdown. Jackson Hewitt reminds taxpayers that taxes are still due on April 15, and refunds are still expected to arrive on time. Key findings: 40% of respondents think they will be given more time, past April 15 , to file their taxes since the government was shut down. , to file their taxes since the government was shut down. 73% of millennials believe their tax refund will be delayed due to the government shutdown. 74% of Gen Z, the youngest taxpaying generation, reported that they ask questions before filing their taxes: 32% talk to a tax pro, 28% ask a friend or relative, and 14% contact the IRS. 63.8% of millennials feel capable of filing taxes themselves this year given the recent tax law changes, which is slightly more than any other generation reported. 45% of respondents think their refund will be the same this year, despite tax reform. 20% of millennials have postponed filing their taxes since the government was shut down. "Not only are we experiencing the largest change to tax law in over 30 years this filing season, but the government shutdown appears to have added to the confusion," said Shara Abrams, Senior VP of Operations at Jackson Hewitt. "Our recent survey found that the government shutdown may have led to some common misconceptions, with some groups postponing getting their taxes done, including 40% of people thinking they will have more time to file past April 15." Visit jacksonhewitt.com/officelocator to locate the nearest Jackson Hewitt office or schedule an appointment with a Tax Pro. About Jackson Hewitt Tax Service Inc. Jackson Hewitt Tax Service Inc. is an innovator in the tax industry, with a mission to provide its hard-working clients access to simple, low-cost solutions to manage their taxes and tax refunds. Jackson Hewitt is devoted to helping clients get ahead with Maximum Refund and 100% Accuracy Guarantees. With close to 6,000 franchised and company-owned locations, including 3,000 in Walmart stores, and online and mobile tax solutions, Jackson Hewitt makes it convenient for clients to file their taxes. For more information about products, services, and offers, or to locate a Jackson Hewitt office, visit www.jacksonhewitt.com or call 1 (800) 234-1040. Methodology: The Jackson Hewitt survey was conducted online by ResearchNow from January 28-30, 2019, among 1,233 American adults aged 18 and older. Respondents to the survey were selected from those who volunteered to participate in online surveys. One thousand two hundred thirty-three complete surveys were collected using the sample framework based on U.S. Census data for age, ethnicity, gender, region, and income. SOURCE Jackson Hewitt Tax Service Inc. Related Links https://www.jacksonhewitt.com VANCOUVER, Wash., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Perfect Company, the leading developer of connected kitchen products, emerges victorious yet again after another challenge of their patents by Adaptics Limited, makers of the Drop Scale, the Drop Recipes app and Kitchen OS platform. Adaptics Ltd. is funded by Alsop Louie Partners. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued a decision regarding Adaptics Ltd.'s August 28, 2018 petition for inter partes review (IPR) of Perfect Company's U.S. Patent 9,772,217 (the '217 Patent). The decision, issued on March 6, 2019, denies inter partes review for failure to identify its grounds for alleged unpatentability with particularity. This ruling follows Perfect's previous prevail against Adaptics Ltd.'s reexamination challenge of another of its key patents, U.S. Patent 8,829,365 (the '365 Patent), which upheld the validity of the Patent with no changes. "This was essentially Adaptics Limited's last chance to invalidate our patents, and we are happy that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office decision maintains our patent validity and IP for a second time," said Michael Wallace, CEO, Perfect Company. "It's encouraging to see the USPTO continue to side with us as the patent originator, upholding the value and meaningfulness of our patents and giving us indisputable protection in this emerging, competitive smart kitchen space." The '365 and '217 Patents protect Perfect Company's system that connects a smart scale to a smart device equipped with a recipe app wirelessly or wired allowing for communication between the scale and the device to ensure the perfect combination of ingredients every time. On December 12, 2014, Perfect Company filed its first suit against Adaptics Ltd. for infringement of its '365 Patent. On November 8, 2017, Perfect Company filed a second suit against Adaptics Ltd. for infringement of its '217 Patent. Perfect's suit against Adaptics Ltd. moves to trial at the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Tacoma, Washington on June 3-6, 2019. Recently, in February 2019, the Federal Court in Washington hearing the case also issued a claim construction ruling on the '217 Patent terms, agreeing with most of Perfect's proposed constructions. Previously, in November 2017, the Court had issued a claim construction on the '365 Patent terms, agreeing with nearly all of Perfect's proposed constructions. Challenged a second time, Perfect's construct for "real-time" remains unaltered: "relating to a system in which input data is processed within milliseconds so that it is available virtually immediately as feedback." Current products in the marketplace covered by Perfect Company's patents include the Perfect Drink app-controlled smart bartending system; Perfect Bake app-controlled smart baking system; Perfect Blend, Vitamix Perfect Blend and NutriBullet Balance app-controlled smart blending systems; as well as the Perfect Kitchen PRO app-controlled smart kitchen system. The '365 Patent and '217 Patent are part of Perfect Company's extensive worldwide patent portfolio protecting its key technology. Timeline of Key Events Leading up to Trial: September 9, 2014 USPTO issues U.S. Patent No. 8,829,365 ('365 Patent) to Perfect Company for its system that connects a smart scale to a smart device equipped with a recipe app wirelessly or wired allowing for communication between the scale and the device to ensure the perfect combination of ingredients every time. USPTO issues U.S. Patent No. 8,829,365 ('365 Patent) to Perfect Company for its system that connects a smart scale to a smart device equipped with a recipe app wirelessly or wired allowing for communication between the scale and the device to ensure the perfect combination of ingredients every time. December 12, 2014 Perfect Company files its first suit against Adaptics Ltd. for infringement of its '365 Patent. Perfect Company files its first suit against Adaptics Ltd. for infringement of its '365 Patent. December 2, 2016 USPTO agrees to reexamine Perfect Company's '365 Patent based on arguments filed by Adaptics Ltd. USPTO agrees to reexamine Perfect Company's '365 Patent based on arguments filed by Adaptics Ltd. July 10, 2017 USPTO upholds the validity of Perfect Company's '365 Patent with no changes and allows new claims after patent reexamination. USPTO upholds the validity of Perfect Company's '365 Patent with no changes and allows new claims after patent reexamination. September 26, 2017 USPTO issues U.S. Patent No. 9,772,217 ('217 Patent), granting Perfect Company's scale and recipe app platform further intellectual property rights. USPTO issues U.S. Patent No. 9,772,217 ('217 Patent), granting Perfect Company's scale and recipe app platform further intellectual property rights. November 2, 2017 Court issues a claim construction on the '365 Patent terms, agreeing with nearly all of Perfect's proposed constructions. Court issues a claim construction on the '365 Patent terms, agreeing with nearly all of Perfect's proposed constructions. November 8, 2017 Perfect Company files a second suit against Adaptics Ltd. for infringement of its '217 Patent. Perfect Company files a second suit against Adaptics Ltd. for infringement of its '217 Patent. August 28, 2018 Adaptics Ltd. files a petition for inter partes review of Perfect's '217 Patent. Adaptics Ltd. files a petition for inter partes review of Perfect's '217 Patent. February 20, 2019 Court issues a claim construction ruling on the '217 Patent terms, agreeing with most of Perfect's proposed constructions. Court issues a claim construction ruling on the '217 Patent terms, agreeing with most of Perfect's proposed constructions. March 6, 2019 USPTO denies inter partes review for failure to identify its grounds for alleged unpatentability with particularity. USPTO denies inter partes review for failure to identify its grounds for alleged unpatentability with particularity. June 3 6, 2019 Perfect Company's suit against Adaptics Ltd. goes to trial in Federal court in Tacoma, WA. About Perfect Company Perfect Company designs, develops and manufactures connected products to help consumers succeed in the kitchen. Perfect Drink, Perfect Bake, Perfect Blend and Perfect Kitchen Smart Scales + Recipe Apps guide anyone, regardless of experience, through each recipe to make cocktails, treats, smoothies, soups, dips and more consistently perfect each time. It also licenses its core patented technology to other brands, powering kitchen appliances with Perfect technology. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. For more information, visit www.makeitperfectly.com. Media Contact: Linda Krebs LKPR, Inc. [email protected] 646-484-4539/646-824-5186 (cell) SOURCE Perfect Company Related Links http://www.makeitperfectly.com DUBLIN, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Protein Engineering Market- Growth, Trends, and Forecast (2019 - 2024)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The propelling factors for the growth of the global protein engineering market include the increasing prevalence of protein deficient diseases, increase in adoption of protein drugs over non-protein drugs, increased demand for alternatives to chemical processes, and rising government funding for protein engineering. Protein-energy malnutrition (PEM) is increasing in the rural areas of emerging economies. It refers to a group of disorders that includes marasmus, kwashiorkor and intermediate states of marasmus-kwashiorkor. Therefore the prevalence of kwashiorkor varies from geography to geography. It is rare in the United States; however most affected regions include Southeast Asia, Central America, Congo, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and South Africa. Thus, the increasing prevalence of protein-deficient diseases is driving the overall market. There is a rising number of government initiatives, such as funding R&D for protein engineering and awareness programs, which have influenced the healthcare industry. The government is thus proactively investing in many of the research studies. For instance, Protein Technologies Ltd (PTL) has received funding from the UK government's Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK) for its innovative research in protein engineering. Hence the increasing number of government initiatives for the efficient protein engineering research helps in driving the overall growth of the market. Protein engineering also holds immense opportunity in the agrochemical industry as engineering in proteins may lead to the generation of enzymes with improved function that may increase the crop yield or facilitate the biofuel production. It is also likely to play an important role as a tool to attain increased crop yield needed to meet future demands. Key Market Trends Monoclonal Antibodies by Protein Type is the Largest Segment that is Expected to Grow Fastest During the Forecast Period Monoclonal antibodies are anticipated to hold the largest market share in the future, owing to their high adoption for numerous therapies, such as cancer and autoimmune diseases. They also have tremendous applications in the fields of therapeutics, diagnostics, and targeted drug delivery systems, for infectious diseases caused by viruses, bacteria, and protozoa, as well as for cancer, and metabolic and hormonal disorders. Hence, recombinant deoxyribonucleic acid technology through genetic engineering has successfully led to the possibility of reconstruction of monoclonal antibodies, thus fueling the growth of the segment. Asia-Pacific Holds the Fastest Growth and is Expected to Follow the Same Trend Over the Forecast Period The Asia-Pacific market is expected to witness the fastest CAGR during the forecast period, owing to the growing presence of contract research organizations, rising healthcare IT spending, and unprecedented evolution of the healthcare infrastructure and standards across this region. Growing demand for personalized medicine and strong R&D investments in proteomics-based drug discovery projects are also supplementing the growth of the protein engineering market. Competitive Landscape The global protein engineering market players are highly focused on strategies, such as mergers and acquisitions, new product development initiatives, and geographical expansion. As the cost of R&D is high and requires high-end infrastructure, most of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are moving toward CROs. Most of the players in the CRO industry are joining forces in order to create a market position. Topics Covered 1 Introduction 1.1 Study Deliverables 1.2 Study Assumptions 1.3 Scope of the Study 2 Research Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Market Dynamics 4.1 Market Overview 4.2 Market Drivers 4.2.1 Increasing Prevalence of Protein-deficient Diseases 4.2.2 Increased Demand for Alternatives to Chemical Processes 4.2.3 Increase in Adoption of Protein Drugs over Non-protein Drugs 4.2.4 Rising Government Funding for Protein Engineering 4.3 Market Restraints 4.3.1 Lack of Experts to Strategize the Process 4.3.2 High Costs 4.4 Porter's Five Forces Analysis 5 Market Segmentation 5.1 By Product Type 5.1.1 Modified Enzymes 5.1.2 Insulin 5.1.3 Monoclonal Antibodies 5.1.4 Coagulation Factors (Blood factors + Tissue plasminogen) 5.1.5 Vaccines 5.1.6 Growth Factors (Hormones + Cytokine) 5.1.7 Other Product Types 5.2 By Technology 5.2.1 Irrational Protein Design 5.2.2 Rational Protein Design 5.3 By End User 5.3.1 Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Companies 5.3.2 Academic Institutions 5.3.3 Contract Research Organizations (CROs) 5.4 Geography 5.4.1 North America 5.4.2 Europe 5.4.3 Asia-Pacific 5.4.4 Middle East & Africa 5.4.5 South America 6 Competitive Landscape 6.1 Company Profiles 6.1.1 Agilent Technologies Inc. 6.1.2 Amgen Inc. 6.1.3 Bruker Corporation 6.1.4 Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc. 6.1.5 Eli Lilly and Company 6.1.6 Merck KGaA 6.1.7 Novo Nordisk AS 6.1.8 PerkinElmer Inc. 6.1.9 Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. 6.1.10 Waters Corporation 7 Market Opportunities and Future Trends For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/vz3gtq/protein?w=5 Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Related Links http://www.researchandmarkets.com ATLANTA, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Pure Wellness, the pioneer and leader in hotel guest room wellness solutions, has installed 20 Pure Rooms at two Marriott properties (10 rooms each) in Manchester, Connecticut. Wellness-minded travelers visiting the Residence Inn Hartford Manchester or the Courtyard Hartford Manchester can now book and experience a Pure Room to wake up to their best. "Whatever the day holds an important business meeting, a 26.2-mile run, or a day at the park with the family we understand that wellness-minded travelers want to be their best," notes Larry Hall, CEO of Pure Wellness. "At Pure Wellness, our experience and research confirm for us that a hypoallergenic environment, purified air, and allergy-friendly bedding can change lives by giving people more energy, vitality, and peace of mind. Our patented process treats every surface and 100 percent of the air in a guest room, creating a truly hypoallergenic environment where guests report they enjoy the best sleep ever in a hotel room. Our ten-year history of guest comments and satisfaction surveys confirm this statement." A Certified Pure Room Pure Rooms offer the wellness-minded traveler a guest room experience that promotes well-being. Through a comprehensive and patented seven-step process that includes deep-cleaning and treating all surfaces and equipment and installing a medical-grade air purifier and other filters, a Pure Room delivers purified air, establishes a hypoallergic environment, and provides allergy-friendly bedding. For hospitality partners, Pure Rooms provide a means to better serve a distinct, affluent, and growing market segment with ease the wellness-minded traveler. The Pure Room program creates, certifies, and maintains a property's Pure Rooms, which places the property in a much stronger position to meet the preferences of the wellness-minded traveler. Pure Rooms represent the guest room of choice for the wellness-minded traveler. Pure Wellness maintains over 3,100 Pure Rooms in leading hotel brands across the country, including many Hilton, Marriott, The Ritz-Carlton, and Embassy Suites locations. "When a guest enters a Pure Room, they not only feel the difference, but they see the Pure Room inspection certificate and enjoy unparalleled peace of mind," adds Hall. To find a Pure Room, lean more about the company or contact Pure Wellness, visit Pureroom.com. About Pure Wellness Pure Wellness represents the thought and practice leader in hotel guest room programs for hotels. The company's Pure Room offering offers the wellness-minded traveler a guest room experience that promotes well-being, so they can "be their best.". With over 3,100 rooms, leading hotel brands including Hilton, Marriott, The Ritz-Carlton, Embassy Suites and others trust Pure Wellness solutions to provide purified air, a hypoallergenic environment and allergy-friendly bedding in their rooms. To learn more, visit Pureroom.com. Brenda Becker Trevelino/Keller 404-214-0722 x 115 [email protected] SOURCE Pure Wellness Marketing and media misuse of the term 'probiotics', and even misunderstanding within the scientific community, has contributed to growing global skepticism about the legitimacy of microbial therapies and the associated probiotic applications to improve human health. Reid authored this paper in an effort to ensure hype doesn't limit scientific and medical advancements. "Too many microbiome studies oversell limited findings or make broad generalizations that attribute the results of a single study on a single product across our entire field. Adherence by scientists, publications, and reporters to precise definitions and guidelines will ensure more accurate communications," said Reid. "Stewardship of the term 'probiotic' is critical to curb its misuse and misattribution and to protect the future of a field that has incredible promise." Summary of Paper Within the field of microbiome science, the rate of discovery of novel organisms with potentially therapeutic benefit is progressing rapidly and gaining prominence. More than ever, it is imperative that guidelines are followed to determine the validity of a probiotic. As indicated in the original FAO/WHO (2002) report1, there are certain expectations required to call an organism 'probiotic'. These have been further clarified in 20142, and must include: That microbes be alive in an adequate number when administered. Strains must be identified genetically, classified using the latest terminology, and designated by numbers, letters, or names. Appropriately sized and designed studies must be performed to designate a strain as probiotic and use the strain(s) on the host to which the probiotics are intended (human, livestock, companion animal, etc). Strains shown to confer a benefit for one condition may not be probiotic for another application. Strains that are probiotic for humans but are being used in animal studies should be clearly designated as human probiotics under experimental testing. For the complete paper, visit https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2019.00424/full As part of the authors' commitment to further transparency and accountability in science communication, they have included their conflict of interest statement below. They encourage the scientific community to do the same on press releases. Raja Dhir is a Co-Founder of Seed Health, Inc., a biotechnology company developing microbial therapies not discussed in this paper. Gregor Reid is a scientific advisor to Seed. Azza A.Gadir is involved in research and development at Seed, and is developing intellectual property related to microbial regulation of immune mechanisms underlying food allergies, which is not discussed in this paper. ____________ References 1 FAO/WHO. (2002). Guidelines for the evaluation of probiotics in food. http://www.fao.org/food/food-safety-quality/a-z-index/probiotics/en/ 2 Hill, C., Guarner, F., Reid, G., Gibson, G. R., Merenstein, D., Pot, B., and Morelli, L. et al. (2014). The International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics consensus statement on the scope and appropriate use of the term probiotics. Nat. Reviews Gastroenterol. Hepatol. 11(8):506-14. Authors Dr. Gregor Reid, BSc (Hons), PhD, MBA, ARM CCM, Dr HS, FCAHS, FRSC is the Director of the Canadian R&D Centre for Human Microbiome and Probiotics at Lawson Health Research Institute, an inductee into the Royal Society of Canada, and previously served as the President of the International Scientific Association of Probiotics and Prebiotics (ISAPP). He is perhaps best known as the Chair of the United Nations World Health Organization Expert Panel on Probiotics, leading the group that authored the globally accepted definition of 'probiotics'. Dr. Reid has authored over 520 peer-reviewed papers published in scientific and medical journals, has been a reviewer for 48 international agencies (including the National Institute of Health) and 112 scientific journals; he has been awarded 28 patents and cited over 27,000 times. He also serves as Chief Scientist to Seed. * Dr. Azza A. Gadir, PhD completed her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Talal Chatila at Harvard Medical School/Boston Children's Hospital, where her published research focuses on the immunological mechanisms that underlie food allergy. She is specifically interested in understanding the role of the gut microbiome in conferring protection to diseases early in life. For this work, she is co-inventor of a patent for microbial consortia that can reduce and/or eliminate food allergy and has collaborated with industry partners to accelerate the discovery of microbiome-related immunotherapies for food allergy. She is Director of R+D at Seed. * Raja Dhir is a life sciences entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Seed, where he leads R+D, academic collaborations, technology development, clinical trial design, supply chain, and intellectual property strategy. Raja serves on the Editorial Board for the scientific journal, Microbiome. He is a member of the Microbiome Think Tank at Mass. General Hospital (MGH) and is a member of the Advisory Committee for the International Scientific Association of Probiotics and Prebiotics (ISAPP). About Seed Seed is a life science and consumer health company pioneering the inquiry and application of microbiome science to improve human and planetary health. In collaboration with leading scientists and a global network of partners and experts in biofermentation, stabilization and testing, Seed is setting a new standard in bacteria. Its environmental R+D arm, SeedLabs , also develops novel applications for bacteria to solve some of our biggest ecological challenges. Contact: Erin Allweiss [email protected] 202-446-8265 SOURCE Seed NEW YORK, March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- KEY FINDINGS The global biochips market is expected to grow considerably over the forecast years of 2019-2027. Factors like growing investments for R&D, government funding and increasing demand for personalized medicines is expected to lead to a 20.63% CAGR for this market by the end of 2027. Extensive diagnostic application and the major integration of biochips for analytical studies of effectors triggering changes in the environment are influential for the uptake of biochips in the current market. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05313315 MARKET INSIGHTS The global biochip market is very dynamic with respect to the presence of many international players.Most of these companies are engaged for the determination of new varieties of biochip research and development. They are trying to compete with each other by providing the same characteristics at similar prices or by similar features at competitive prices. The progress in the technology and innovations of the biochips, biotechnology, and biosensors have resulted in several new applications of biomedical devices, thereby, providing several opportunities for the biochips market to expand. Segmentation of the global biochip market is done according to the substrates, types, and end users. REGIONAL INSIGHTS The geographical segmentation of the global biochips market is carried out over North America, Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Rest of World.The Asia Pacific biochips market is expected to rise with the highest CAGR over the forecast period of 2019-2027, driven by the emerging economies of countries like Japan, India, and China. The increasing investment in the biochips R&D, supportive incentives from the governments and the solidifying presence of CROs in the region are propagating the market expansion. Conversely, North America leads the market by capturing the largest market share of xx% in the year 2018. Large-scale research projects in biosciences coupled with the advancements in the pharmaceutical & biotechnology sector of North America are presenting lucrative opportunities to the regional market for further developments. COMPETITIVE INSIGHTS Collaboration, partnerships, acquisition, & product launch are some of the key strategies followed by several enterprises within the global biochips market. Eminent companies like the IMGENEX, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., Illumina Inc., Samsung Electronics Inc., Cepheid Inc., Fluidigm Corporation, Biochain Institute Inc., Agilent Technology Inc., Gamida for Life Group, Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc., Merck GmbH, OriGene Technologies Inc., Cybrdi Inc., PerkinElmer Inc. and bioMerieux SA are competitively operating in the global biochips market. Companies mentioned 1. AGILENT TECHNOLOGY INC. 2. BIOCHAIN INSTITUTE INC. 3. BIOMERIEUX SA 4. BIO-RAD LABORATORIES INC. 5. CEPHEID INC. 6. CYBRDI INC. 7. FLUIDIGM CORPORATION 8. GAMIDA FOR LIFE GROUP 9. ILLUMINA INC. 10. IMGENEX 11. MERCK GMBH 12. ORIGENE TECHNOLOGIES INC. 13. PERKINELMER INC. 14. SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS INC. 15. THERMO FISHER SCIENTIFIC INC. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05313315 About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place. __________________________ Contact Clare: [email protected] US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001 SOURCE Reportlinker Related Links http://www.reportlinker.com NEW YORK, March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The global embolization coils market is expected to reach US$ 1,131.24 Mn in 2025 from US$ 784.60 Mn in 2017. The embolization coils market is estimated to grow with a CAGR of 4.8% from 2018-2025. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05751926 Driving factors such as, increase in the demand for minimally invasive procedures, rise in the prevalence of the cardiac aneurysm, and growing aging population & rise in associated chronic diseases are expected to boost the market growth over the years.However, high cost of embolization coils and numerous product recalls are likely to have a negative impact on the growth of the market in the coming years. Growing ageing & rise in associated chronic diseases are likely to grow market significantly. For instance as per the report of American College of Cardiology Foundation, in 2018, coronary heart disease (CHD) was the leading cause of deaths attributable to cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the US, which is followed by stroke (16.8%), high BP (9.4%), heart failure (HF) (9.0%), and other CVDs (17.9%). By 2035, approximately 130 million adults in the US population are projected to have some form of CVD. Thus, increasing geriatric population and related chronic diseases are expected to drive the sales of embolization coils. Hence, owing to the above mentioned factors the market for the embolization coils market are likely to grow in the forecast period. Global embolization coils market, based on material was segmented into platinum, platinum tungsten alloy and platinum & hydrogel.In 2018, platinum segment held the largest share of the market, by filling material. This segment is also expected to dominate the market in 2027, owing to the properties of the material for the making the embolization coils. Furthermore, the segment is also anticipated to witness the fastest growth rate during the forecast period, 2018 to 2027. Some of the major primary and secondary sources included in the report for the embolization coils market are Association of Population-Based Cancer Registries, Canadian Cardiovascular Society, Society Of American American College of Cardiology Foundation, British Heart Foundation, Medical Journals, and others. Reasons to Buy Save and reduce time carrying out entry-level research by identifying the growth, size, leading players and segments in the embolization coils market. Highlights key business priorities in order to assist companies to realign their business strategies. The key findings and recommendations highlight crucial progressive industry trends in the global embolization coils market, thereby allowing players across the value chain to develop effective long-term strategies. Develop/modify business expansion plans by using substantial growth offering developed and emerging markets. Scrutinize in-depth global market trends and outlook coupled with the factors driving the market, as well as those hindering it. Enhance the decision-making process by understanding the strategies that underpin security interest with respect to client products, segmentation, pricing and distribution. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05751926 About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place. __________________________ Contact Clare: [email protected] US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001 SOURCE Reportlinker Related Links http://www.reportlinker.com NEW YORK, March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The global flight tracking system market accounted for US$ 342.0Mn in 2018 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.6% over the forecast period 2019-2027, to account for US$ 549.7 Mn by 2027. The demand for flight tracking system is largely influenced by the rise in the deployments by the commercial sector across the globe. The rising number of incidences where planes have got off-radar have proliferated the demands for installations of tracking systems and drive the flight tracking system market. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05751927 The normal flight tracking SARPs were applicable in late 2018, these SARPs established the duties of an air operator in regards to the tracking of its aircraft across its zone of operation.Whereas the SARP associated with tracking of aircraft in distress is anticipated to be implied in January 2021. These SARPs focus on the requirements for automatically tracking the flight in distress with respect to its position updates once or more in a minute.Furthermore, as the ICAO integrated the amendment 39 and annex 6 of normal aircraft tracking in their guidance, they aren't inevitably the same in airspace mandate employed by a civil aviation regulatory agency. The mandate was implacable only by the individual civil aviation agencies having regulatory authority on their corresponding FIRs (Flight Information Regions), just as the CASA (Civil Aviation Safety Authority) in Australia and FAA in the United States are some of the agencies who can enact these mandates. Such mandates augur in the favor of growth of the flight tracking system market. The exponentially burgeoning working group in the developing region has resulted in increased disposable income and freight traffic.Majority of the rising middle class was witnessed in China and India (as described by the United Nations). Furthermore, as the world continues to recover from previous economic contractions, the demand for air travel is projected to vary widely.The rise in air travel demand has subsequently resulted in increased production of commercial aircraft, which in response have significantly contributed to the growth of flight tracking system market which would have a significant impact on the flight tracking system market. In addition, the rising trade in South America, Asia, and Africa have also significantly driven the need for enhanced connectivity, owing to this the IATA estimated production of nearly 6,250 new jets valued at US $ 300 Bn to be delivered in coming 20 years. This factor is anticipated to drive the flight tracking system market. The overall flight tracking system market size has been derived using both primary and secondary source.The research process begins with exhaustive secondary research using internal and external sources to obtain qualitative and quantitative information related to the flight tracking system market. It also provides the overview and forecast for the global flight tracking system market based on all the segmentation provided with respect to five major reasons such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, and South America.Also, primary interviews were conducted with industry participants and commentators in order to validate data and analysis. The participants who typically take part in such a process include industry expert such as VPs, business development managers, market intelligence managers, and national sales managers, and external consultants such as valuation experts, research analysts, and key opinion leaders specializing in the flight tracking system industry. Some of the players present in the flight tracking system market are Honeywell International Inc., Aireon LLC, Rockwell Collins (United Technology Corporation), Garmin, Ltd., Flyht Aerospace Solutions Ltd., Spider Tracks Limited, Skytrac Systems Ltd., and Blue Sky Network. among others. Reasons to Buy Highlights key business priorities in order to assist companies to realign their business strategies. - The key findings and recommendations highlight crucial progressive industry trends in the flight tracking system market, thereby allowing players to develop effective long term strategies. - Develop/modify business expansion plans by using substantial growth offering developed and emerging markets. - Scrutinize in-depth global market trends and outlook coupled with the factors driving the market, as well as those hindering it. - Enhance the decision-making process by understanding the strategies that underpin commercial interest with respect to products, segmentation and industry verticals. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05751927 About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place. __________________________ Contact Clare: [email protected] US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001 SOURCE Reportlinker Related Links http://www.reportlinker.com DUBLIN, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Airborne ISR Market (2019 - 2024)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The airborne ISR market is likely to grow moderately, due to the increasing use of airborne ISR and more countries adopting this technology for securing the borders. Terrorism and cyber-attacks are the two top risks that are continuously hampering stabilizing actions, along with unstable geopolitics, like deteriorating relations between the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Iran and border issues between India, China, and Pakistan, among others, which are majorly driving the demand for advanced border surveillance solutions that are impacting the airborne ISR market. Advanced data integration with multi-level comparative analysis to provide data accuracy and management may provide new market opportunities for the airborne ISR market. Key Market Trends Segment Trends The unmanned segment of the airborne ISR market is expected to grow rapidly during the forecast period. Nowadays, the many ISR missions and border control missions are made easy due to the development of advanced UAVs. With the integration of electro-optic sensors, UAVs can be used for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions, along with a simultaneous transfer of data to the ground station. Recently, in February 2019, Kratos Defense & Security Solutions has received USD 14 million contract to develop a new UAV, Aethon that is to be designed for tactical, as well as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. Though they have been used for over a decade, due to advancements in technology and ease of usage, the unmanned segment is expected to witness a rapid growth during the forecast period. Geography Trends The North American region of the airborne ISR market currently has the highest market share in 2018. With the on-going conflicts at the border with Mexico, the United States is in plans to increase its ISR capabilities to prevent drug trafficking organizations and illegal migration. In 2017, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) completed 635 drone missions with 5,625 hours of flight. CBP used unarmed MQ-9 Predator B drones that are equipped with cameras and sensors to monitor border crossers, drug trafficking, and other issues within 100 miles of the US borders. With such prevailing tensions between the United States and Mexico, the market of North America is expected to grow significantly during the forecast period. Competitive Landscape The airborne ISR market is highly fragmented, with multiple players dominating the market, owing to various geographical locations favoring sales. General Dynamics Corporation, The Boeing Company, L3 Technologies Inc., BAE Systems PLC, and Elbit Systems Ltd, are the few prominent firms benefited from the geographical advantage. Majority of the geographic regions have local players who are equally strong and provide smaller sub-systems of a larger network/project in partnership with the global leaders. Local players in North America, Middle East, and Asia are particularly threatening the global leaders, as they aim to provide all-round solutions at a fraction of the cost quoted by these global leaders, without compromising on quality or reliability. Topics Covered 1 Introduction 1.1 Study Deliverables 1.2 Study Assumptions 1.3 Scope of the Study 2 Research Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Market Dynamics 4.1 Market Overview 4.2 Market Drivers 4.3 Market Restraints 4.4 Porter's Five Forces Analysis 5 Market Segmentation 5.1 Purpose 5.1.1 Intelligence 5.1.2 Surveillance 5.1.3 Reconnaissance 5.2 Sub-market 5.2.1 Maritime Patrol 5.2.2 Airborne Ground Surveillance (AGS) 5.2.3 Airborne Early Warnings (AEW) 5.2.4 Signals Intelligence (SIGNIT) 5.3 Type 5.3.1 Manned 5.3.2 Unmanned 5.4 Geography 5.4.1 North America 5.4.2 Europe 5.4.3 Asia-Pacific 5.4.4 South America 5.4.5 Middle East & Africa 6 Competitive Landscape 6.1 Market Share Analysis 6.2 Company Profiles 6.2.1 Lockheed Martin Corporation 6.2.2 L3 Technologies Inc. 6.2.3 BAE Systems PLC 6.2.4 Raytheon Company 6.2.5 Northrop Grumman Corporation 6.2.6 United Technologies Corporation 6.2.7 The Boeing Company 6.2.8 Saab AB 6.2.9 Harris Corporation 6.2.10 Airbus SE 6.2.11 General Dynamics Corporation 6.2.12 Elbit Systems Ltd. 7 Market Opportunities and Future Trends For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/dcnrpq/the_worldwide?w=5 Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Related Links http://www.researchandmarkets.com SILICON VALLEY, Calif., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Accelor.io, the first hardware accelerator bridging the blockchain and cloud industries, today emerged from stealth to unveil its Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) frameworks to optimize computing performance and decentralized security. Realizing that software patching and updates have a limited capacity to fundamentally solve Blockchain's "impossible triangle," Accelor's first two products, Accelor Performance Engine (APE) and Accelor Security Architecture (ASA), furnish the underlying hardware to effectively overcome these tradeoffs between security, performance, and decentralization. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, California, Accelor is founded by a stellar team of hardware engineers who have spent more than two decades developing semiconductors for industry heavyweights Qualcomm, Nvidia and AMD. The company is backed by $2M in seed funding from Chengwei Capital, a $3B evergreen investment fund. Under development for more than a year, Accelor has performed successful live testing, and holds one approved US patent, five patent-pending, and six more ready to be filed. "Blockchain has introduced valuable new techniques for how we share and secure private data, but the industry's software has run up against an impossible triangle between decentralization, security, and performance," said GJ Chu, Co-founder, Accelor. "Blockchain applications currently operate on top of retrofitted legacy hardware that relies on a 'security by patch' process and is unsuited to the rigorous computation demanded by decentralized protocols. Commodity CPUs are not friendly to the cryptographic, network, and database operations necessary for these systems to scale without sacrificing security and it is paramount for the industry to move these intensive computing functions onto dedicated hardware. We are excited to release a crucial part of the data center infrastructure that will help Blockchain deliver on its enormous potential." Accelor Performance Engine (APE), overcomes barriers to scalability by providing dedicated hardware infrastructure to optimize the computation of intensive cryptography, storage of distributed ledger data, and transaction relays over networks. APE has been tested using Hyperledger Fabric in a live real-world environment to sustain 10x greater end-to-end throughput against software-only implementations, and has a theoretical limit upwards of 200,000 TPS. Accelor Security Architecture (ASA) removes the most harmful threats endemic to CPU-based networking. These threats, known as Spectre, Meltdown, and Foreshadow, have been reported as critical in all the latest Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) of commercial processors, and enable malicious actors to read the most sensitive information, such as private cryptographic keys, which is detrimental to the development of blockchains and secure cloud computing environments. ASA leverages an FPGA-based confidential computing model that gives users ultimate authority over their hardware, affording each individual the flexibility to choose where to place their root of trust, thereby achieving a more decentralized hardware solution. "While speculators have loudly focussed on blockchain's volatile boom and bust cycles according to its market buy/sell prices, Accelor's team is looking forward with a deeper understanding of the necessary requirements and corresponding changes that blockchain and cryptographic messaging presents for the future of network data management," said Pei Kang, Managing Director, Chengwei Capital, lead investor of Accelor. " Accelor's FPGAs are a technical testament to the soundness of their technological vision, and of the team's proven ability to address the gaps plaguing the Blockchain industry's adoption and growth." When running blockchain applications through CPUs, the processors in charge of managing not only our personal computers but network servers as well, the CPU is forced to juggle more than it is designed to handle which presents a tradeoff between security and performance. Accelor's philosophy addresses this underlying problem by pioneering hardware architecture that caters to blockchain's specific computing paradigm, tailored to fit each protocol's unique requirements. "Accelor's confidential computing architecture has three key advantages to deliver a higher standard in trusted computing. Clients have more freedom to manage their devices, such as setting up their own identity management systems to authenticate each device under their control. FPGAs are faster and have greater power efficiency than general purpose processors for computationally intensive tasks such as expensive zero-knowledge proof related operations. Lastly, FPGAs are already widely used in the IoT and embedded systems market." - Dr. Larry Shi, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Head of the Blockchain Research Team at at University of Houston (UH), and Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Accelor's FPGA will furnish a full suite of techniques to optimize performance throughput, privacy preservation, database management, network latency and smart-contract execution, removing roadblocks currently holding back Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) providers that service the DApps being developed in the industry. The rollout of Accelor's performance and security optimized architectures for blockchain networking are initial products that set in motion the company's larger vision to address the spectrum of operations required by decentralized protocols. For more information, visit www.accelor.io . About Accelor: Accelor develops pioneering Blockchain-specific hardware infrastructure to overcome fundamental software trade-offs between security, performance and decentralizationthe impossible triangle. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, California, with a production office in Nanjing, China, Accelor is founded by a team of hardware engineers who have spent more than two decades developing semiconductors for Qualcomm, Nvidia and AMD. Press contact: William McCormick Pure Knot for Accelor William at pureknot dot com www.pureknot.com SOURCE Accelor.io Related Links http://www.accelor.io NEWPORT NEWS, Va., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Aery participated in a Career Night at John B. Dey Elementary School in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The event, entitled "Passport to Your Future" educated students on different careers and what subjects and backgrounds are required to be successful in those careers. Aery focused on the technical aspect of its business, displaying images of CAD design drawings of various aircraft modifications, as well as models of aircraft that had been built and modified by the Aery team. Aery recognizes the youth recruitment challenges in the aviation business and is pleased to participate in educating children on the career potential in the aviation industry. Aery is looking forward to participating in the Fort Belvoir Procurement and Technology Plus Expo event which will be held April 11, 2019, at the Fort Belvoir Officers Club. Few other Army installations in the world can compare with Fort Belvoir's singular mission of providing both logistical and administrative support to 90 diverse tenant and satellite organizations. Fort Belvoir is home to two Army major command headquarters, as well as 10 different Army major commands, 19 different agencies of the Department of Army, eight elements of the U.S. Army Reserve and the Army National Guard, and 26 DoD agencies. Also located on site are a U.S. Navy construction battalion, a Marine Corps detachment, a U.S. Air Force activity, and an agency from the Department of the Treasury. Aery looks forward to seeing you there! On April 22 and 23, 2019, Aery will be participating as an exhibitor at the Ohio Business Matchmaker at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. This annual event is one of the largest business-to-government matchmaking events in the state and offers a unique opportunity for businesses to meet with representatives from federal, state, and local governments to market and sell their goods and services. The event brings opportunities for billions of dollars in upcoming contracts. Many of Aery's customers will be represented, and Aery looks forward to continuing its partnership with all DoD branches of the US Government and Prime Contractors. Aery takes to the air to attend the Columbia/Cessna 400 annual owners' convention, which will be held on May 10, 11, and 12 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Aery will be participating in the static display with its Columbia 400 showing off its new Enhanced Vision System (EVS) installation and STC and looks forward to seeing other aviators for training and networking! If you are a Columbia 300, 400, 450 or Cessna TTX owner, this new EVS safety enhancement system is a must see! Aery Aviation provides design, engineering, systems integration, modifications, certification, maintenance, and flight operations solutions that support critical aviation mission requirements for domestic and foreign governments and select corporations and individuals in the private sector. Aery's experienced team of professionals provides efficient, economical, and flexible services that respond to the most challenging demands facing the aerospace industry today. The company's commitment to safety, compliance, and security has earned it a reputation as one of the most forward-thinking aviation companies worldwide. Aery is headquartered in Newport News, Virginia and is deployed globally to meet clients' needs. Founded in 2016 by a team with over 100 hundred years of combined aviation experience, Aery's drive to dream, innovate, and inspire has fueled its rapid growth and diversity. Aery is a full-service aerospace company providing fixed and rotary wing engineering, modifications, integrations, and certifications. In addition, Aery offers a line of boutique manufactured parts and avionics through Interad, Ltd. Together, the Aery Team has developed over 100 Supplemental Type Certificates (STCs) with over 200 projects, and more than 500 airworthiness releases. FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS: This communication contains forward-looking statements that involve several judgments, risks, and uncertainties concerning Aery Aviation, LLC., its subsidiaries and their expected financial and operating performance and plans. Actual events or results could differ materially from those described or implied herein, including as a result of risks described in reports filed with various entities, and other risks and uncertainties. Aery does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or results after the date they were made, whether as a result of new information, new circumstances or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable laws. For questions or additional information, contact [email protected] SOURCE Aery Aviation, LLC PHILADELPHIA, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- AppBus, an enterprise digital business software company that accelerates the pace of digital transformation announced the addition of Andrew Mallaband to the AppBus Advisory Board. Mallaband is a respected executive and consultant in the technology industry in the US and abroad. Andrew began his career with Logical Networks (acquired by Datatec) a pioneer in Network Systems Integration where he played a key role in its growth and establishment of customers and vendors in the UK market. Mallaband continued with high-level executive roles with Datatec, SMARTS, Opalis (acquired by Microsoft 2009) and VMTurbo (now Turbonomic). In all of his positions Andrew was instrumental in each companies' explosive growth securing multi-million dollar contracts, product development, and international expansion. Recently, Mallaband launched Breakthrough Moments Ltd., a consulting business for early-stage tech companies. "We are honored to have Andrew on our advisory board," said Bill Conners, AppBus CEO. "Our game changing solution maps perfectly with his experience and understanding of customer personas. Every company is looking to amplify intelligence and productivity, and AppBus turns that vision into reality." "AppBus has developed a unique software solution that enables organizations to bring digital user experiences to employees and business partners that support front and back office business processes, without the need for wholesale re-engineering of existing application assets. In doing so AppBus accelerates business productivity and improves organizations customer experiences with less risk," stated Andrew. "By coming at the digital transformation process with a singular focus on streamlining user experiences, in settings where today's end to end business process execution relies on multiple disjointed applications, AppBus has carved out a very significant business opportunity for themselves in the market." About AppBus AppBus provides the only digital business platform that fast-tracks integration to generate end-to-end process automation while enabling secure application delivery to any device. The AppBus eXperience Platform (AXP) combines the power of RPA, API management, and Endpoint management to seamlessly meet the rising expectations of employees, customers, and partners. With AppBus, embracing change is easy and fast. AppBus leverages existing enterprise assets, enables automation and process transparency, all designed to accelerate the delivery of optimized user experiences. Visit us at AppBus.com SOURCE AppBus Related Links https://appbus.com MONTREAL, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - Arton Capital, one of the world's leading citizenship and residency advisory firms, has been appointed Authorized Partner for Montenegro's new Citizenship by Investment Program (CIP). After a thorough and transparent tender process, which saw applications by 22 different entities, the government today has announced the final 3 winners. "We are honored to have been appointed as one of the Authorized Partners in Montenegro's Citizenship by Investment Program," said Armand Arton, Founder and President of Arton Capital. "Montenegro has raised the industry standard through the transparency of their process in line with the latest recommendations of the European Union, which suggested greater regulation of industry stakeholders. The CIP will stimulate the construction of a number of luxury developments within Montenegro, particularly in the north of the country, a region with a higher than average unemployment rate." Montenegro's CIP, which launched at the beginning of this year, is one of the most sought after in the industry, available for up to 2,000 applicants from non-EU countries, for an initial period of three years. The investment requirements for Montenegro's CIP are as follows: 100,000 in the form of a Government Fund Donation, and 250,000 investment in approved real estate in an undeveloped region (north of the country), or 450,000 investment in approved real estate in a developed region (south of the country). With a starting investment of 350,000, Montenegro's program will prove to be one of the most competitive in Europe. What makes the program even more attractive is its application efficiency, which allows permanent residence status first, and then citizenship granted within a period of six months as permanent residents. The Montenegrin passport is currently ranked 36th in the world by The Passport Index, allowing citizens visa-free travel to 118 countries, and is expected to grow significantly following EU accession. A NATO member, Montenegro is on the agenda for future enlargement of the European Union by 2025. It already uses the euro as its currency and is in the process of integrating EU legislation into national law. According to the World Bank, Montenegro is one of the fastest growing economies in Europe and is quickly becoming a key destination for some of the most important industries around the world due to its strategic position. As a young state, it truly offers a unique potential for investors seeking mobility, safety, security, opportunity, and increased quality of life. With this mandate from Montenegro Arton Capital becomes the most trusted partner in the industry to 11 governments, including Canada, Bulgaria, Hungary, Cyprus, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Anguilla, Armenia, and the Solomon Islands. About Arton Capital Arton Capital empowers individuals and families to become Global Citizens by investing in a second residency or citizenship around the world. As a global financial advisory firm, specializing in investor programs for residence and citizenship Arton plays a critical role in helping governments, industry professionals and investors meet their goals quickly, efficiently and more effectively. Arton's global operations are spread in over 15 offices around the world and have helped attract over US $4 billion in foreign direct investment to countries. Arton Capital is a member of The Arton Group, which comprises of fully licensed international banking, financial advisory and investment consulting companies tailored to the needs of Global Citizens. SOURCE Arton Capital Related Links www.artoncapital.com Vince Steckler will step down from the board and as CEO on 30 June 2019. Mr. Steckler will remain available in an advisory capacity to the company until 30 June 2020 to ensure a smooth transition process. Ondrej Vlcek was unanimously elected and appointed by the Board following a succession process led by the Chairman and the Nomination Committee, with advice from Russell Reynolds, a leading international executive search firm. Avast Chairman, John Schwarz, said: "Vince has been the architect of the company's success over 10 years. As Chief Executive, he has guided Avast's tremendous growth, from a company with under $20 million in revenue to over $800 million as reported today. He has also led the Group through a major acquisition and successful IPO. We are grateful for his contribution and commitment to ensure a smooth leadership transition. I am very pleased to announce Ondrej as his successor, following a review of potential candidates both internally and externally. With a background of more than 20 years of innovation and growth at Avast, Ondrej can lead the business better than anyone." Ondrej Vlcek has most recently served as President of the Consumer business, the largest unit of Avast. He was part of the executive team that took the company public on the London Stock Exchange in May 2018, and also led the successful integration of the consumer business after the acquisition of AVG in 2016. In this role, he has created dramatic growth through his strategy and vision, re-inventing how Avast protects people online. In his prior role as CTO, Ondrej Vlcek architected Avast's cloud-based security network for the newly announced Internet of Things (IoT) security solutions and led a technology transformation of Avast from a traditional PC antivirus vendor into the leading global provider of AI-based security solutions. Ondrej Vlcek started at Avast in 1995 as a developer and through his ingenuity and passion, has risen through the organisation, making a significant impact on the company's results. He holds an MS in Mathematics from Czech Technical University in Prague. Vince Steckler said: "I am immensely proud of the business and vibrant culture we have built together. I'm delighted that the board has chosen Ondrej to succeed me. Ondrej's vision and track record of delivery puts him in great stead to lead the company, and I look forward to watching it prosper." Ondrej Vlcek said: "I'm honoured to have worked alongside Vince and wish him well in his retirement. I feel privileged to lead Avast having seen it grow from a small local player to one of the world's leading cybersecurity companies and am optimistic about what lies ahead for the business. The need for security in our digital lives is more important than ever." There is nothing further to disclose in relation to the appointment under paragraph 9.6.13 of the FCA Listing Rules. About Avast Avast (LSE:AVST) is the global leader in digital security products. With over 400 million users online, Avast offers products under the Avast and AVG brands that protect people from threats on the internet and the evolving IoT threat landscape. The company's threat detection network is among the most advanced in the world, using machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to detect and stop threats in real time. Avast digital security products for Mobile, PC or Mac are top-ranked and certified by VB100, AV-Comparatives, AV-Test, OPSWAT, West Coast Labs and others. Visit: www.avast.com. Contacts Peter Russell, Director of Investor Relations, [email protected] Stephanie Kane, VP PR & Corporate Communications, [email protected] SOURCE Avast Related Links http://www.avast.com WELLESLEY, Mass., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Babson College's Boston Women Innovating Now (WIN) Lab -- a venture accelerator specifically for women entrepreneurs -- will host its finale event for the 2018-2019 cohort on March 13, 2019, 6 pm, Babson Boston campus, 100 High Street, Boston. The finale will involve a VIP reception, networking event, and a pitch competition where three of the WINners will pitch their businesses for a chance to win cash prizes: $5000 first place, $2500 second place $1000 third place. Each entrepreneur will pitch their startup: three will compete for the prize with a five-minute pitch; the rest will present a two-minute pitch and partake in networking opportunities. "We are thrilled with the growth seen by the entrepreneurs in our sixth Boston cohort," says Babson's Boston WIN Lab Director, Kara Miller . "Each year our finale event is meant to showcase the entrepreneurs in the WIN Lab program, while celebrating the traction, success, and impact each of the businesses have made since the beginning of the accelerator last fall." The three finalists pitching for a share of the $8,500 include: Thero LLC / CEO & Co-Founder: Ruohan Yang MSEL '17 Thero brings space-grade materials to consumer goods with its coffee mug that cools down scalding hot coffee to the perfect drinking temperature in one minute and keeps it there for hours. Gentreo / Co-Founders: Renee Fry and Mary Kate D'Souza Gentreo is the web-enabled software solution that makes the financial and legal aspects of eldercare planning easy, affordable, and accessible for the over 45M American seniors and their 60M children who need eldercare planning tools today. Artemis Design Company / CEO & Founder: Milicent Armstrong Artemis Design Company is best known for charming, one-of-a-kind, Kilim Shoes handmade from Turkish Kilim carpets. About Women Innovating Now (WIN) Lab at Babson Created by the Center for Women's Entrepreneurial Leadership (CWEL) at Babson College, the Women Innovating Now (WIN) Lab provides women entrepreneurs with an inspiring community and a rigorous, experiential process that catalyzes innovative thinking and enables them to successfully scale their businesses. Now in its fifth year, the WIN Lab has been designated as one of the top two specialty programs for Excellence in Entrepreneurship Education by the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship; earned BostInno's designation as one of Boston's "50 on Fire" innovators and visionaries; and was honored by the prestigious Rosoff Awards for diversity. Women entrepreneurs in both Boston and Miami can apply to become a member of the next cohort as applications go live in April. About Babson College Babson College is the educator, convener, and thought leader for Entrepreneurship of All Kinds . The top-ranked college for entrepreneurship education, Babson is a dynamic living and learning laboratory where students, faculty, and staff work together to address the real-world problems of business and society. We prepare the entrepreneurial leaders our world needs most: those with strong functional knowledge and the skills and vision to navigate change, accommodate ambiguity, surmount complexity, and motivate teams in a common purpose to make a difference in the world, and have an impact on organizations of all sizes and types. As we have for nearly a half-century, Babson continues to advance Entrepreneurial Thought & Action as the most positive force on the planet for generating sustainable economic and social value. Media Contacts: Michael Chmura Public Relations Director [email protected] Phone: 781-239-4549 Provided by Newswise, online resource for knowledge-based news at www.newswise.com SOURCE Babson College Related Links http://www.babson.edu WASHINGTON, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Bloomberg Government today announced the launch of its free newsletter, What to Know In Washington, a dose of need-to-know information for public policy professionals. The daily newsletter provides a comprehensive snapshot of in-depth reporting from Bloomberg Government, as well as stories from Bloomberg journalists and outlets around the world. To receive What to Know In Washington visit https://about.bgov.com/subscribe-what-to-know/. "What to Know In Washington has always been a highlight for Bloomberg Government subscribers, in this interesting political climate, we're excited to offer this newsletter to a broader audience curious and more engaged about the important issues facing our country," said Heather Rothman, news director, Bloomberg Government. "Our news team will offer insights and analysis on the most pressing issues of the day being debated on Capitol Hill." Newsletter topics include: Politics & Policy: Timely coverage of the divided Congress and the White House Administration. Timely coverage of the divided Congress and the White House Administration. Legislation & Regulation: A review of bills on the floor and the major changes impacting government operations. A review of bills on the floor and the major changes impacting government operations. World News: An update on news abroad and the way the U.S. is viewed on the global stage. About Bloomberg Government Bloomberg Government is a premium, subscription-based service that provides comprehensive information and analytics for policy professionals who interact with or are affected by the government. Delivering news, analytics, and data-driven decision tools, Bloomberg Government's digital workspace gives an intelligent edge to government affairs, federal, and contracting professionals. For more information or a demo, visit www.bgov.com. SOURCE Bloomberg Government Related Links http://www.bgov.com ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Following the second deadly Boeing 737 Max 8 crash in five months, international flight groundings and aircraft bans have many travelers concerned about flight safety. Travel insurance comparison site, Squaremouth, answers the three most asked questions about travel insurance coverage relating to Boeing 737 Max 8 flights. What if I'm too scared to fly? While airplane safety concerns may leave travelers fearful of flying, being too scared to travel is never a covered reason to cancel a trip under standard travel insurance policies. There are still some options available for travelers who want to change or cancel due to fear, such as the Cancel For Any Reason upgrade , but they come at a price. The Cancel For Any Reason benefit typically adds 40% to a policy premium and can refund travelers up to 75% of their trip costs if they cancel at least 2-3 days before their departure. To be eligible for this benefit, a traveler must buy their policy within 21 days of their initial trip payment and insure their entire trip cost. What if I want to change aircraft? Choosing to change a scheduled flight due to aircraft safety concerns is not covered by travel insurance. Squaremouth recommends travelers check with their airline, as many are offering to cover change fees and fare increases specifically for those scheduled to fly on Boeing 737 Max 8 aircrafts. What if my flight is canceled or delayed? Travel insurance policies likely will not provide coverage for flight cancellations due to the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max 8 planes. In order for a grounded flight to be covered by travel insurance, it must be due to a mechanical failure of the aircraft or inclement weather. There are some cases where the Travel Delay benefit could provide coverage for additional meals and accommodations incurred during a common carrier delay. This varies by policy, and typically requires a delay of 6 hours or more. Squaremouth launched the Boeing Airplane Crash Travel Insurance Information Center . This online resource is updated with official provider position statements, answers to frequently asked questions, and current government travel alerts and notices related to the crash. ABOUT SQUAREMOUTH Squaremouth is an online company that compares travel insurance products from virtually every major travel insurance provider in the United States. Using Squaremouth's comparison engine and third party customer reviews, travelers can research and compare insurance products side-by-side. More information can be found at www.squaremouth.com . SOURCE Squaremouth Related Links http://www.squaremouth.com DUBLIN, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Brain Monitoring Market - Growth, Trends, and Forecast (2019 - 2024)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The global brain monitoring market was valued at USD 1,514.52 million in 2018, and is estimated to be valued at USD 2,430.18 million in 2024, witnessing a CAGR of 8.2%. The key factors propelling the growth of this market are ageing demographic, rising incidence of brain disorders, and ease of use and portability of devices. The initial models of EEG monitors were loaded with wires and electrodes, and even in current practice, a vast majority of devices are based on this conventional architecture. But with the advent of wireless technology, the size and clumsiness of EEG monitors and other related devices have been drastically reduced. Wireless monitors are devices that do not require wired connections or cords for diagnosis. Nowadays, wireless headsets allow readings to be done completely in a non-invasive way, and in some cases, assess patients from the comfort of their homes. Wireless technology mainly allows the recording device to be detached from the computer and communicate through wireless signals to the computer from a distance of up to 10 or 20 meters. These devices are simple, affordable, and comfortable to wear and are powered by a single AAA battery. Portable brain monitoring devices are lightweight, easy to carry, and can be held in the hand. Thus, the portability of such devices is propelling the growth of the market, as people are moving toward handier and easy-to-access types of devices. Key Market Trends Electroencephalograph is Expected to hold its Highest Market Share in the Product Type Segment Under the product type segmentation of the market, electroencephalograph is believed to have the largest market size and is expected to witness a CAGR of 8.25%, during the forecast period. In neurology, the main diagnostic application of EEG is in the case of epilepsy, as epileptic activity can create clear abnormalities on a standard EEG study. A secondary clinical use of EEG is in the diagnosis of coma, encephalopathy, and brain death. Recently, Masimo got FDA clearance for next-generation SedLine brain function monitoring. SedLine helps clinicians monitor the state of the brain under anesthesia, with bilateral acquisition and processing of four leads of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Increasing brain disorders and increasing technological advancements are driving the EEG market and are expected to further increase in the coming years. North America Dominates the Market and Expected to do Same in the Forecast Period North America currently dominates the market for brain monitoring and is expected to continue its stronghold for a few more years. The United States holds the largest share of the global brain monitoring market. According to the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), it has been estimated that one in four American adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in any given year, and nearly 6% suffer from serious disabilities. The same source has also stated that the total cost of serious mental illness in the United States exceeds USD 317 billion, per year. Factors, such as favorable reimbursement policies, increasing technological advancements (including the development of mobile EEG machines, real-time monitoring, and alerts) have driven the growth of the market in the United States. Competitive Landscape The brain monitoring market is moderately competitive and consists of several major and small industry players. In terms of market share, few of the major players currently dominate the market in specific segments. However, with technological advancements and product innovations, mid-size to smaller companies are increasing their market presence by introducing new technologies with better usability. Companies, like Medtronic PLC, Integra LifeSciences Corporation, Nihon Kohden Corporation, Masimo Corporation, and Natus Medical Incorporated, hold a substantial market share in the brain monitoring market. Topics Covered 1 Introduction 1.1 Study Deliverables 1.2 Study Assumptions 1.3 Scope of the Study 2 Research Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Market Dynamics 4.1 Market Overview 4.2 Market Drivers 4.2.1 Aging Demographic 4.2.2 Rise in Incidences of Brain Disorders 4.2.3 Ease of Use and Portability of Devices 4.3 Market Restraints 4.3.1 Regulatory Approval Costs 4.3.2 Lack of Skilled Personnel to Handle Devices 4.3.3 Intra-operative Awareness 4.4 Porter's Five Forces Analysis 5 Market Segmentation 5.1 By Product Type 5.1.1 Magnetoencephalograph 5.1.2 Electroencephalograph 5.1.3 Oximeters 5.1.4 Doppler Devices 5.1.5 Pressure Monitors 5.1.6 Other Product Types 5.2 By Modality 5.2.1 Portable Devices 5.2.2 Fixed Devices 5.3 By End User 5.3.1 Hospitals 5.3.2 Diagnostic Centers 5.4 Geography 5.4.1 North America 5.4.2 Europe 5.4.3 Asia-Pacific 5.4.4 Middle East & Africa 5.4.5 South America 6 Competitive Landscape 6.1 Company Profiles 6.1.1 Natus Medical Incorporated 6.1.2 Medtronic PLC 6.1.3 Integra Lifesciences Holding Corporation 6.1.4 Compumedics 6.1.5 Nihon Kohden Corporation 6.1.6 Masimo Corporation 6.1.7 Elekta AB 6.1.8 Advanced Brain Monitoring Inc. 6.1.9 Cadwell Laboratories 7 Market Opportunities and Future Trends For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/mgmhkt/brain_monitoring?w=5 Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Related Links http://www.researchandmarkets.com EMERYVILLE, Calif., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Experts from global consulting firm BRG were recognized among top global digital forensic experts and forensic accountants in Who's Who Legal's (WWL) Investigations 2019 guide. BRG received four nominations among the world's foremost Digital Forensic Experts for investigations involving e-discovery, asset tracing and corporate investigations. Recognized as the top Global Elite Thought Leader for North America in the field, Managing Director Robert DeCicco "has a top-quality practice, covering such matters as data breaches and electronic evidence verification." Also recognized for North America are Managing Directors Peggy Daley and Michael Bandemer. Daley is described as "a prominent figure who commands an excellent reputation for her deep knowledge of fraud and data analytics as well as investigations into theft of trade secrets." Bandemer is "renowned by observers for his superb understanding of digital forensics and excels on internal investigations, fraud investigations and trade secret misappropriations." London-based Director Michael Jelen "is a go-to name whose expertise comes in for high praise from market players this year. He especially excels when providing evidence as an expert witness on matters relating to the integrity of complex datasets." London-based Managing Director Kevin Hamilton is recognized at the top of the Digital Forensics Experts - Future Leaders "Most Highly Regarded" list. He has "a stellar reputation in the market and is commended by peers in the market for his standout knowledge of the healthcare sector." In Investigations - Forensic Accountants, Ben Johnson is recognized globally as a top forensic accountant with "numerous international sources recommending him highly." As the top Global Elite Thought Leader for EMEA, Johnson "provides clients with first-class expertise on fraud and bribery investigations and asset tracing." About Who's Who Legal Investigations 2019 WWL partners with Global Investigations Review to provide an in-depth report into leading experts who stand out for exceptional work assisting companies and individuals on both external and internal investigations, as well as external enforcement proceedings. The guide highlights global digital forensic experts for their work spanning e-discovery, asset tracing and corporate investigations; and leading forensic accountants in the investigations market for their market-leading work on issues ranging from accounting irregularities to regulatory compliance. About BRG Berkeley Research Group, LLC (BRG) is a global consulting firm that helps leading organizations advance in three key areas: disputes and investigations, corporate finance, and strategy and operations. Headquartered in California with offices around the world, we are an integrated group of experts, industry leaders, academics, data scientists, and professionals working beyond borders and disciplines. We harness our collective expertise to deliver the inspired insights and practical strategies our clients need to stay ahead of what's next. Visit thinkbrg.com to learn more. SOURCE Berkeley Research Group, LLC Related Links https://www.thinkbrg.com/ Craig Kruckeberg, owner of the Bandit Big Rig Series and driver of the #55 Bandit truck said, "We raced this beast last year at the Halloween Monster Truck Mash and the crowd loved it! It wasn't a points race, but we held nothing back and it showed to the fans. We're going to chase lightning again and bring all the Bandits to Thunder Valley on Oct. 12 th , close our year out in Bandit Style and crown our 2019 points champion. The Bandit Bristol Battle is in the making and we look forward to continuing the tradition with this storied track." Tickets for this event are on sale now and fans can purchase online at www.banditseries.com/bristol. This exciting and affordable family event has activities for the kids and events going on all day - including a Fan Series Truck Show and, of course, the thrill of big rig racing with the Iron Giants of The Asphalt. Race gates open at 12:30pm. Fans are invited to meet the drivers of the Bandit Big Rig Series on the back stretch at Bristol Motor Speedway starting at 1:45pm, and the green flag will drop at 3:30pm. About Bandit Big Rig Series The Bandit Big Rig Series brings back big rig truck racing to the short track in the United States. The series was designed to be affordable and accessible for anyone wishing to put together a race team, and something new and exciting for the average fan. News Contact: Jason Johnson, General Manager of Bandit Big Rig Series 507.676.1987 [email protected] SOURCE Bandit Big Rig Series Related Links https://www.banditseries.com The Burns & McDonnell Integration and Automation Lab, at firm's world headquarters in Kansas City, serves as a technology testing and demonstration center available to utilities and other clients free of charge. Utilities can use this lab to develop use cases and projected returns on investments for new power grid technologies to be incorporated in a wide array of power delivery systems. "Utilities are faced with an onslaught of data from sensors and other devices that are necessary to manage power delivery systems today," says Matt Olson, director of the Network Integration and Automation Group at Burns & McDonnell. "This is requiring utilities to overhaul their core communications infrastructure. The equipment we have available in our lab will enable our clients to test different communications and other equipment under a variety of usage scenarios before they make large capital investment decisions." Today's demand for a smarter and more resilient power grid requires a leap forward in planning, analysis and assessment of load flows, reliability, operational efficiency, standards compliance and total lifecycle costs. Data speeds up to 100G are quickly becoming the standard for a modern power grid that can accommodate two-way power flows, increases in electric vehicle charging, and data center interconnect. The Fujitsu 1FINITY platform is modular with compact one rack unit (1RU) devices that provide optical or electrical switching and multiplexing, allowing growth from a regen facility with a single rack unit design up to a large facility offering hundreds of service ports. The scalable 1FINITY platform is designed for use in metropolitan and regional power grids as well as long-length, high-voltage power lines and related equipment. The 100G transponder and switch equipment significantly expands network capacity, improves spectral efficiency, and lowers the cost-per-bit of optical transport networks. The Fujitsu platform is the latest addition to the lab, which also features 100G equipment from four other prominent vendors. "We're pleased to make our 1FINITY platform available to Burns & McDonnell clients and their engineers as they test configurations and demonstrate solutions," says Christine Podraza, VP Optical Solutions Delivery, Fujitsu Network Communications, Inc. "As utilities consider the investments they need to make in their communications networks, these ultra-fast speeds will become the standard. If a utility is looking at 10G, I encourage them to evaluate 100G as a possible alternative. The economics are definitely worth considering." As part of an effort to assist the transmission-and-distribution industry in meeting today's demands, Burns & McDonnell developed the Integration and Automation Lab for use by clients who need to assess equipment required by the upsurge in distributed generation resources, renewable energy sources, and new storage systems as they are integrated into the grid. In addition to offering diagnostics and testing, the facility includes an Asset Health Center dedicated to data collection, analytics and predictive modeling of utility assets. For photos and support materials, please visit our MEDIA KIT. About Burns & McDonnell Burns & McDonnell is a family of companies made up of 7,000 engineers, architects, construction professionals, scientists, consultants and entrepreneurs with offices across the country and throughout the world. We strive to create amazing success for our clients and amazing careers for our employee-owners. Burns & McDonnell is 100 percent employee-owned and is proud to be on Fortune's 2019 list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. For more information, visit burnsmcd.com . Contact: Mary Young, Burns & McDonnell 816-822-4369 [email protected] SOURCE Burns & McDonnell Related Links http://www.burnsmcd.com WASHINGTON, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today released transcripts of CAIR's depositions of high-ranking government officials with the FBI, DHS, CBP, and TSA documenting a previously-undisclosed traveler surveillance program and a body that oversees the terror watchlist. CAIR says the transcripts, along with dozens of documents CAIR obtained in the case Elhady v. Kable, "reveal a terror watchlist system run amok." [NOTE: CAIR filed the transcripts in connection with Plaintiffs' Motion for Summary Judgment in Elhady v. Kable, a leading constitutional challenge to the watchlist. The transcripts are part of more than 4,000 pages of public documents regarding the watchlist unearthed in the case. Judge Trenga has set a hearing on the challenge on April 4, 2019, at the Eastern District of Virginia courthouse in Alexandria, Va.] The deposition transcripts document in detail for the first time a TSA program called "Silent Partner" that appears to be an invasive traveler-surveillance program. They document DHS efforts to screen private sector employees against the terror watchlist in order to compel employers to fire listees. Also, for the first time, these documents identify the Watchlisting Advisory Council, a supra-agency body that oversees the terror watchlist. On Monday, CAIR lawyers provided a federal court in Alexandria, Va., with information collected during the lawsuit as part of a move to end the ability of federal officials to put innocent Muslims -- Americans who have not been arrested, charged, or convicted of a terrorism-related offense -- on their watchlist. The court filing asserts that the Watchlisting System imposes "a kind of second-class citizenship on the Plaintiffs and thousands of American Muslims throughout the country." SEE: CAIR MEMORANDUM https://tinyurl.com/CAIRMemorandum The transcripts that are described in the brief were of depositions CAIR took over the past 13 months. LINK TO FBI DEPOSITION https://tinyurl.com/CAIRFBIDeposition LINK TO FBI-TSC DEPOSITION https://tinyurl.com/CAIRTSCDeposition LINK TO TSA DEPOSITION https://tinyurl.com/CAIRTSADeposition LINK TO TSA DEPOSITION 2 https://tinyurl.com/CAIRTSADeposition2 LINK TO CBP DEPOSITION https://tinyurl.com/CAIRCBPDeposition LINK TO DHS DEPOSITION https://tinyurl.com/CAIRDHSDeposition "Things like the extra-judicial watchlisting system, unprecedented in our nation's history, are incompatible with liberty and due process," said CAIR Litigation Director Lena Masri. "We are optimistic that the evidence CAIR has compiled for the better part of a decade makes this incompatibility clear to the court, to the public, to Congress, and most importantly, to the thousands of innocent Muslims targeted by the federal government's watchlisting system." "The depositions of the government's representatives reveal a terror watchlist system run amok," said CAIR Senior Litigation Attorney Gadeir Abbas. "This is a fight we can win." A judge in the case recently ordered the government to let CAIR's attorneys see the list of private entities that had access to the watchlist, but they were not allowed to take notes or make copies of that list. The judge, however, unsealed CAIR filings that indicate the terror watchlist is shared with animal shelters, private investigative firms, a megachurch, as well as individual people who appear to be able to access watchlist information from their own personal devices. Rights Group CAIR: Terror Watchlist Shared with Animal Shelters https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-terror-watchlist-animal-shelters-20190311-story.html CAIR called on the government to cease dissemination of the list to private entities. SEE: CAIR Calls on FBI to Cease Dissemination of Government Watchlist to Animal Shelters, Private Investigators, Megachurch, Others https://www.cair.com/cair_calls_on_fbi_to_cease_dissemination_of_government_watchlist_to_animal_shelters_private_investigators_megachurch_others For years, CAIR has represented innocent Muslims -- people who have not been charged, arrested, or convicted of a violent offense -- who have been targeted by the watchlisting system. Some have lost jobs, been separated from their families, and all have been stigmatized by being treated as "terrorists" by their own government. SEE: Detroit Mother Calls Out Feds for Breaking Up Family, Files Lawsuit https://www.wxyz.com/news/metro-detroit-father-calls-out-us-government-for-breaking-up-family-files-lawsuit CAIR is America's largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization. Its mission is to enhance understanding of Islam, protect civil rights, promote justice, and empower American Muslims. La mision de CAIR es proteger las libertades civiles, mejorar la comprension del Islam, promover la justicia, y empoderar a los musulmanes en los Estados Unidos. CONTACT: CAIR National Litigation Director Lena Masri, 202-742-6420, [email protected], CAIR Senior Litigation Attorney Gadeir Abbas, 720-251-0425, [email protected]; CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-744-7726, [email protected]; CAIR Government Affairs Director Robert McCaw, 202-742-6448, [email protected] SOURCE Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Related Links http://www.cair.com DOWNERS GROVE, IL., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Celegence, a global regulatory affairs services and solution provider, today announced a strategic partnership with Performance Development Group (PDG), a managed learning solution company providing end-to-end learning solutions. The partnership combines Celegence's regulatory business process expertise with PDG's learning solution knowledge, delivering clients the skills, quality and commitment to innovation needed to train global users on RIMS (regulatory information management systems). Celegence's in-depth knowledge of regulatory business processes and expertise in managing data in RIMS on behalf of clients combined with PDG's unique tailored learning methodology creates a unique and winning combination. The expertise of both companies was underscored recently when a top-five global pharmaceutical company selected Celegence and PDG to design, develop, and deliver RIMS training to more than 5000 global users. "Celegence's expertise in regulatory affairs make them an obvious choice for a partnership with Performance Development Group," says PDG's Managing Partner David Manning. "They have a strong and proven record in both solution and business operations expertise, and our capabilities will complement theirs in providing RIMS training." Celegence and PDG will work with life sciences companies to help them maximize the ROI of their RIMS investment by ensuring that users are fully prepared to leverage their systems' benefits. Through the partnership, the companies will also help clients to harmonize the data in their systems so can be leveraged for reporting and analytics. In addition, the global RIMS training program helps clients clarify roles and responsibilities to multiple user communities. "Celegence and PDG are partnering with the long-term objective to support both mid and large life sciences companies to achieve continuous process improvement for regulatory affairs throughout their global RIMS journey," says Sonia Veluchamy, CEO of Celegence. "We are confident in our ability to support the industry by combining our subject matter expertise and investment in technology innovations." Learn More: Celegence Learning Management About Celegence Celegence helps life sciences companies navigate complex global regulatory requirements by providing consulting services and solutions dedicated to regulatory affairs. Celegence supports life sciences customers in the areas of regulatory intelligence, RIMS, publishing, labelling, medical writing and compliance toward new regulations for different product portfolios. Celegence's depth of experience and extensive delivery capability allows regulatory affairs teams to operate more efficiently, reduce cost, and improve compliance. For more information, visit www.celegence.com or follow Celegence on LinkedIn and Twitter. About Performance Development Group PDG accelerates achievement of client business goals through the design, implementation, and ongoing management of services and solutions to create lasting improvement in the performance of each company's people. With more than 16 years of proven experience, PDG is a recognized industry leader in addressing the difficult challenges associated with executing business strategy by improving human behavior. For more information, visit https://www.performdev.com/ , or follow PDG on LinkedIn and Twitter. Media Contact: [email protected] SOURCE Celegence NETANYA, Israel, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Cellcom Israel Ltd. (NYSE: CEL) (TASE: CEL) (hereinafter: the "Company") announced today that following the Company's previous reports regarding MOUs for a possible co-investment of the Company and the Israel Infrastructure Fund ("IIF"), through a jointly and equally owned limited partnership (to be formed), ("the Purchaser"), in IBC Israel Broadband Company (2013) Ltd. ("IBC"), the Purchaser, the Israeli Electric Company ("IEC"), IBC and the other shareholders and main creditors of IBC have entered into the following definitive agreements (together "the Transaction"): The Company and IIF entered partnership agreements for the purchase of 70% of IBC's share capital by the Purchaser, through equal co-investment in the Purchaser (together "the Purchaser Agreements"); The Purchaser, IBC, IEC and the other shareholders and main creditors of IBC entered a share purchase agreement for the purchase of 70% of IBC's share capital, through investment of the Purchaser in IBC (the "SPA"). The Purchaser and IEC (holding 70% and 30% of IBC's share capital, respectively) entered into a shareholders agreement (the "Shareholders Agreement"); the Company and IBC entered into an agreement granting the Company certain indefeasible right of use in IBC's fiber optic infrastructure (the "IRU Agreement"); and IBC and IEC entered into an agreement updating IBC's existing right of use and services agreement for IBC's fiber-optic network when deployed over IEC's infrastructure (the "IEC Services Agreement"). In addition, the Company and IIF further entered a term sheet for the sale of the Company's independent fiber-optic infrastructure in residential areas to IBC (the "Fiber-optic sale TS"). The Fiber-optic sale TS is not part of the Transaction. In addition to standard and customary conditions, the definitive agreements include the following: The Purchaser Agreements contain an undertaking for an additional investment of up to NIS 200 million by both the Company and IIF, pro rata to their holdings in the Purchaser, over a period of 3 years and certain arrangements regarding a party's failure to make its share of the committed investment and regarding dead lock situations. contain an undertaking for an additional investment of up to by both the Company and IIF, pro rata to their holdings in the Purchaser, over a period of 3 years and certain arrangements regarding a party's failure to make its share of the committed investment and regarding dead lock situations. The SPA As previously disclosed, for a total amount of NIS 103 .5 million (subject to certain consideration adjustment mechanism, with respect to IBC's net working capital at closing) (the "Consideration"), to be provided partly as investment and partly as shareholders' loan, the Purchaser will own 70% of IBC's issued and outstanding share capital and the other 30% of IBC's issued and outstanding share capital will be owned by IEC. .5 million (subject to certain consideration adjustment mechanism, with respect to IBC's net working capital at closing) (the "Consideration"), to be provided partly as investment and partly as shareholders' loan, the Purchaser will own 70% of IBC's issued and outstanding share capital and the other 30% of IBC's issued and outstanding share capital will be owned by IEC. The Consideration shall be used to settle generally all of IBC's debts (other than a certain amount to IEC). The SPA contains certain precedent conditions to the closing of the transaction, including regulatory approvals, the receipt of updated licenses with reduced deployment obligations, as well as the effectiveness of the other agreements. The Shareholders Agreement regulates the management of IBC, including certain arrangements regarding funding of IBC and dilution (and anti-dilution in certain circumstances) of non-participating shareholders. regulates the management of IBC, including certain arrangements regarding funding of IBC and dilution (and anti-dilution in certain circumstances) of non-participating shareholders. The IRU Agreement - The Company undertakes to purchase from IBC and IBC undertakes to provide the Company, indefeasible right of use to a 10-15% percentage of IBC's fiber optics 'home pass' (i.e. fiber-optic actually reaching / connected to the building), as shall be deployed by IBC in the next 15 years (and may be extended to additional periods with no additional consideration other than annual maintenance payments). The undertaking is subject to certain conditions which should be satisfied at the closing of the SPA and certain amount is available immediately. - The Company undertakes to purchase from IBC and IBC undertakes to provide the Company, indefeasible right of use to a 10-15% percentage of IBC's fiber optics 'home pass' (i.e. fiber-optic actually reaching / connected to the building), as shall be deployed by IBC in the next 15 years (and may be extended to additional periods with no additional consideration other than annual maintenance payments). The undertaking is subject to certain conditions which should be satisfied at the closing of the SPA and certain amount is available immediately. The IRU consideration is subject to actual IBC's 'home pass' deployment, and is expected to increase each quarter based on the actual addition of 'home passes' deployed during such quarter and shall be paid in 40 quarterly installations (10 years), in addition to annual maintenance payments. The IRU Agreement is expected to decrease the Company's expenses for usage of Bezeq's and Hot's (the Israeli broadband incumbents)' infrastructure and the Company's independent investments in fiber-optic deployment to residential areas, thereby the IRU Agreement is expected to have a gradual positive effect on the Company's results of operations and the company's free cash flow in the coming years as of next year, depending on the rate of IBC's deployment and the Company's discretion as to infrastructure. The IEC Services Agreement includes updated and improved pricing and arrangements for IBC's exclusive right to deploy its fiber-optics over the IEC's electricity network and other services provided by IEC to IBC in relation thereof. The Shareholders Agreement and the IEC Services Agreement shall become effective at and are subject to the completion of the SPA. The Purchaser Agreements and the IRU Agreement became effective upon signing. The completion of the Transaction is not expected to have a material effect on the Company's results of operations. The execution of the Transaction will be subject to the said conditions precendent, including regulatory approvals. IBC has already filed a request with the Ministry of Communications for an updated license with reduced deployment obligations. There is no assurance that the Transaction will be approved and executed, nor as to its timing and terms. The Fiber-optic Sale TS - The Company and IIF agreed on the sale of the Company's independent fiber-optic infrastructure in residential areas as shall be at the end of 2019, to IBC, for the sum of NIS180-200 million (subject to the rate of the fiber-optic deployment and the number of actual 'home pass' connected at the end of 2019 and certain adjustments). The consideration for the sale is expected to be partly financed by IBC's shareholders' loans, including by the Company. Once the sale is completed, the IRU Agreement, including the Company's obligation to purchase percentage of IBC's fiber optics 'home pass' (as detailed below), shall apply to the infrastructure purchased from Cellcom (the combined amount of fiber-optic deployed at street level, is expected to surpass 400,000 potential customers, at the end of 2019). The transaction is conditioned on the parties entering a definitive agreement, further agreement with the IEC, closing of the SPA and regulatory approvals. There is no assurance that the parties will reach a definitive agreement, that the sale will be approved and executed, nor as to its timing and terms. The fiber-optic sale is expected to benefit the Company's cash flow, improve financial ratios, and reduce its level of Capex in the coming years, and provide IBC with a substantial asset, substantial advance on its deployment and business plans and immediate revenues stream. Nir Sztern, the Company's CEO said "Signing the definitive agreements for Cellcom and IIF's investment in IBC is a giant step toward a new age in Israel's internet infrastructure. Once the necessary approvals are received and the transaction is completed, IBC, under its new ownership of Cellcom, IIF and IEC, would have the ability to bring the fiber-optic message of a up to 1 gigabyte per second, to over 1 million Israeli households in 5 years, allow the Company to offer fast internet service which shall improve the Israeli customer's internet and TV experience and is also expected to result in substantial savings over time in the Company's expenses and consequently have a positive effect on the Company's results of operations and free cash flow. The sale of Cellcom's independent fiber-optic infrastructure in residential areas to IBC is expected to benefit Cellcom's cash flow, improve financial ratios, and reduce its level of Capex in the coming years, and provide IBC with a substantial asset and a substantial advance on its deployment and business plans. I wish to thank our partners from IEC, IIF and the team at IBC for their efforts and dedication. Special thanks to Guez Partners for their important role in making the deal happen." For additional details see the Company's annual report for the year ended December 31, 2017 on Form 20-F dated March 26, 2018 under "Item 3. Key Information D. Risk factors Risks related to our business - We face intense competition in all aspects of our business", "- Our investment in new businesses involves many risks" and "Item 4. Information on the Company B. Business Overview Competition Fixed-Line Segment- Fixed-Line Infrastructure" and the and the Company's current reports on form 6-K dated August 8, 2018 and August 16, 2018 under "-Other developments during the second quarter of 2018 and subsequent to the end of the reporting period - Investment in IBC" and November 22, 2018 and the second report dated November 22, 2018 under "-Other developments during the third quarter of 2018 and subsequent to the end of the reporting period IBC". Forward looking statement The information included in this press release contains, or may be deemed to contain, forward-looking statements (as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and the Israeli Securities Law, 1968). Said forward-looking statements, relating to the potential transaction and execution thereof and the benefits therefrom, are subject to uncertainties and assumptions about the completion of the precedent conditions including the receipt of the necessary approvals, the ability to carry out future plans as to IBC and Cellcom Israel, IBC's deployment, customers' acceptance of IBC's service, and the Israeli telecommunication regulation and market condition. The actual conditions the Company may face could lead to materially different outcome than that set forth above. tel About Cellcom Israel Cellcom Israel Ltd., established in 1994, is a leading Israeli communications group, providing a wide range of communications services. Cellcom Israel is the largest Israeli cellular provider, providing its approximately 2.825 million cellular subscribers (as at September 30, 2018) with a broad range of services including cellular telephony, roaming services for tourists in Israel and for its subscribers abroad, text and multimedia messaging, advanced cellular content and data services and other value-added 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. Cellcom Israel further provides OTT TV services, internet infrastructure and connectivity services and international calling services, as well as landline telephone services in Israel. 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 9735 Investor Relations Contact Ehud Helft GK Investor & Public Relations In partnership with LHA [email protected] Tel: +1 617 418 3096 SOURCE Cellcom Israel Ltd. DUBAI, UAE, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The UK's Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL) in cooperation with the UAE's TGMC, language service provider since 1997, is offering interpreters in the region the chance to acquire the internationally recognised Diploma in Public Service Interpreting (DPSI). The diploma is awarded by awarding body, CIOL Qualifications, and is suitable for interpreters in the fields of: Law, including courts, solicitors and immigration. Healthcare, including hospitals, clinics and GP practices. Local government, including housing, social work and education. For the first time in the Middle East, DPSI students can take their oral exams from June 17 to 21 and written exams from June 25. Both exams will be held in the UAE. Sahar Moussly, Executive Director of TGMC, said: "The DPSI qualification will help improve and regulate the profession of interpretation in the UAE, and the region. This diploma offers hardworking interpreters the chance to obtain a professional and vocational qualification that is widely recognised around the world." "CIOL is about supporting and developing language professionals worldwide, so facilitating the DPSI exam in the UAE enables more interpreters to be qualified and meet the ever-increasing need for professional interpreting. Holders of the DPSI qualification are eligible for CIOL membership and have a direct route to Chartership," said Dom Hebblethwaite, CIOL's Business Development Manager. The exam will be held in the UAE in June for Arabic-English-Arabic and for Chinese-English-Chinese. Preparation workshops for the exam are also available. About CIOL: The Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL) is the pre-eminent UK-based professional membership body for language practitioners. Founded in 1910, CIOL has over 7,000 members, provides nationally-accredited, professional qualifications and sets standards for language practitioners. About TGMC: Trans Gulf Management Consultants (TGMC), established in 1997 in the UAE, offers a full suite of sophisticated and trusted language solutions, including translation, simultaneous interpreting, language training, content production, Video Remote Interpreting and communications consultancy. For more information, please call tollfree on 800-INTERPRET or visit www.transgulfme.com or www.ciol.org.uk/dpsi E: [email protected] T: +971 6 568 0171 SOURCE TGMC Related Links http://www.transgulfme.com BEIJING, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- CreditEase, a Beijing-based leading FinTech conglomerate in China, announced today that its direct investment arm, CreditEase FinTech Investment Fund (CEFIF), participated in wefox Group's $125 million USD Series B, a fast-growing Berlin-based insurtech firm together with Mubadala's newly created European Ventures Fund. The investment is the largest Series B round for a European insurtech and Goldman Sachs International is acting as the private placement adviser to wefox Group in connection with the transaction. The investment will help spearhead the company's expansion into the European broker market. It also paves the way for wefox Group to accelerate growth and create the world's most innovative product and engineering team applying advanced data analytics to create an all-in-one insurance platform in which all interactions are personalized. The company, which was founded in 2014, has grown its revenue to around $40 million USD, while serving more than 1500 brokers and over 400,000 customers, making it Europe's number one insurtech platform. wefox Group founder and CEO, Julian Teicke, said, "Insurance is up for the most radical change, which presents a huge opportunity for us to connect all insurers globally through our platform and become the largest insurance company in the world." "This investment enables us to continue developing our core technology, which includes AI capabilities that will connect customers with the right insurance and automatically process claims all in near real-time making the whole process easier, simpler and safer for our customers," added Teicke. Dennis Cong, PhD, Managing Director of CEFIF, said, "We are very excited to have the opportunity to become a partner of wefox, a leading insurtech platform in Europe. wefox Group is a proven insurtech innovator with visionary management leadership and strong technology and AI capabilities to provide consumers with more seamless and personalized insurance policy experience. And we are looking forward to partnering with wefox Group further in the insurtech field through collaboration on the globe scale." CEFIF continues to expand its global investment pace through locking FinTech companies with huge potential. Up to now, its four portfolio companies include wefox Group, ShieldPay, Onfido and Funding Circle. Funding Circle filed an IPO application and raised 300 million pounds, which is the largest FinTech IPO in London. About CreditEase CreditEase is a Beijing-based leading FinTech conglomerate in China, specializing in inclusive finance and wealth management, in addition to payment technology, marketplace lending, crowdfunding, robo-advisory, insurance technology and blockchain products and services. CreditEase actively engages with global FinTech innovators through business incubation, commercial co-operation, and investment. Better tech, better finance, better world. About CreditEase FinTech Investment Fund Founded in February 2016, CreditEase FinTech Investment Fund ("CEFIF") is a venture fund investing in FinTech companies globally. CEFIF has an equivalent of USD 1 billion in the total committed capital. The Fund was recently ranked the 2nd "Most Active Fintech VC Fund" globally by CB Insights and also nominated for "Top Fintech Equity Investor" Award at LendIt USA Annual Conference. www.cefintechfund.com About wefox Group wefox Group was founded by CEO Julian Teicke, Fabian Wesemann, Dario Fazlic and Teo Martino. wefox Group is the parent company of ONE Insurance and wefox. SOURCE CreditEase Related Links http://www.cefintechfund.com/ SUZHOU, China, March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- CStone Pharmaceuticals (Suzhou) Co., Ltd. ("CStone", stock code: 2616.HK) announced that the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) recently approved company's histone deacetylase 6 (HDAC6) selective inhibitor CS3003 for Phase I clinical trial in China. This is a multi-center, Phase I dose escalation study synchronously conducted in China and Australia in patients with advanced solid tumors and relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. Dr. Frank Jiang, Chairman and CEO, commented: "CS3003 is the ninth drug candidate of CStone with Investigational New Drug approval obtained in China. At present, there are no similar domestic and foreign products approved. We believe that CS3003 has the potential to become the first-in-class HDAC6-selective inhibitor in the world. We look forward to bringing a novel and effective treatment option to cancer patients." "The selective inhibition of HDAC6 has the potential to produce better efficacy in multiple myeloma either as monotherapy or in combination with current standard of cares. Furthermore, preclinical data and early clinical studies of similar products in the same class have indicated that CS3003 has better safety profile than pan-HDAC inhibitors and the potential to develop combination therapies with immune checkpoint inhibitors for the treatment multiple types of solid tumors," said Dr. Jon Wang, Chief Scientific Officer of CStone. About CS3003 CS3003 is a small molecule inhibitor that selectively targets histone deacetylase 6 (HDAC6). Unlike the other HDAC family members, HDAC6 is mainly located in the cytoplasm and has little effect on DNA histone acetylation. HDAC6 inhibition can enhance acetylation of cytoplasmic tubulin and lose the capability to clear unfolded or misfolded proteins, thereby promoting cell apoptosis. Selective inhibition of HDAC6 produces better efficacy in multiple myeloma and has improved safety profile over pan-HDAC inhibitors. CS3003 also has the potential to be combined with PD-(L)1 antibody drugs in solid tumors to expand the clinical efficacy of immunological checkpoint inhibitors. About CStone CStone Pharmaceuticals is a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing innovative immuno-oncology and molecularly-targeted drugs to address unmet medical needs for cancer patients in China and worldwide. On February 26, 2019, CStone was listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, stock code: 2616. Since the Company's inception in 2015, CStone has assembled a world-class management team that has a full spectrum of complementary skillsets from preclinical research to clinical development and commercialization. Through dual sources of innovation, comprised of internal research and external partnership, the Company has built a rich oncology pipeline of 14 oncology drug candidates with significant mono- and combination-therapy potential and synergies, including 4 assets exclusively in-licensed in Greater China from Agios and Blueprint Medicines. Among CStone's portfolio, 4 late-stage drug candidates are at or near pivotal trials. CStone's business model has a clear focus on clinical development, while at the same time, the Company is rapidly developing its commercial and manufacturing capabilities. The Company is backed by prestigious VC and PE funds with record-breaking amounts of equity investment, raising a combined total of approximately USD 412 million in two financing rounds to date. With an experienced team, a rich pipeline, a robust clinical development-driven business model, and substantial funding, CStone's vision is to become globally recognized as a leading Chinese biopharmaceutical company by bringing innovative and differentiated oncology therapies to cancer patients worldwide. Forward-looking Statement The forward-looking statements made in this article relate only to the events or information as of the date on which the statements are made in this article. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, after the date on which the statements are made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. You should read this article completely and with the understanding that our actual future results or performance may be materially different from what we expect. In this article, statements of, or references to, our intentions or those of any of our Directors or our Company are made as of the date of this article. Any of these intentions may alter in light of future development. For more information about CStone Pharmaceuticals, please visit: www.cstonepharma.com. SOURCE CStone Pharmaceuticals Related Links http://www.cstonepharma.com TORONTO, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - Denison Mines Corp. ("Denison" or the "Company") (DML: TSX; DNN: NYSE American) is pleased to announce that it has filed its 2018 annual report on Form 40-F with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"). Denison's Form 40-F incorporates by reference the management discussion and analysis and audited financial statements of the Corporation for the year ended December 31, 2018, as furnished to the Commission on Denison's Form 6-K dated March 8, 2019. Denison's Form 40-F is available on Denison's website at www.denisonmines.com, and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml. View PDF version. Filed concurrently with the filing of the Form 40-F is Denison's Annual Information Form, which has also been filed with Canadian regulatory authorities and is available on Denison's website at www.denisonmines.com and under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Holders of Denison's securities may receive a free printed copy of the Company's most recent Form 40-F and Annual Report, including the audited financial statements, by sending an email request to [email protected], by submitting a request online at www.denisonmines.com, or by writing to Denison Mines Corp., 1100 - 40 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5J 1T1. About Denison Denison is a uranium exploration and development company with interests focused in the Athabasca Basin region of northern Saskatchewan, Canada. In addition to its 90% owned Wheeler River project, which hosts the high grade Phoenix and Gryphon uranium deposits, Denison's exploration portfolio consists of numerous projects covering approximately 320,000 hectares in the Athabasca Basin region. Denison's interests in Saskatchewan also include a 22.5% ownership interest in the MLJV, which includes several uranium deposits and the McClean Lake uranium mill, which is currently processing ore from the Cigar Lake mine under a toll milling agreement, plus a 25.17% interest in the Midwest deposits and a 65.92% interest in the J Zone and Huskie deposits on the Waterbury Lake property. The Midwest, J Zone and Huskie deposits are located within 20 kilometres of the McClean Lake mill. Denison is engaged in mine decommissioning, environmental and other consulting services through its Denison Environmental Services division and is the manager of Uranium Participation Corp., a publicly traded company which invests in uranium oxide in concentrates and uranium hexafluoride. Follow Denison on Twitter @DenisonMinesCo SOURCE Denison Mines Corp. Related Links http://denisonmines.com/s/Home.asp CHICAGO, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- This has been a busy few weeks for the social media giant Facebook. In two separate articles Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and COO, Sheryl Sandberg, expressly offered solutions and a plan to combat Facebook's safety concerns. DKS: Reinventing Internet Security Diamond Key's mission is bringing to market affordable and open cryptographic technologies to enhance the growth of secure communications for all Internet users. Since its inception, Facebook has been "first" in just about everything dealing with the Internet and social media. It has garnered some of the largest social media audiences and users. In fact, Facebook has transformed the way we communicate; but with availability comes responsibilitywithout better more trusted security, FB will continue to be vulnerable to hacking and cyber theft. Diamond Key Security (DKS), a 501(c)(3) organization, was founded because every second of every day, sensitive informationfrom credit card numbers and health care information to classified military intelligenceis transmitted online. Data breaches are becoming increasingly widespread, every Internet-enabled device and network is at risk, and the average person is defenseless against these tremendous online threats. At DKS we believe that when one person's data is at risk; all our data is at risk. Diamond Key Security, is the leading nonprofit innovator and provider of transparent, auditable, and open-source cryptographic solutions that can address cyber threats head-on. DKS was founded to make open and assured security available to users across the globe, regardless of the ability to pay. Diamond Key Security is putting a human face to cryptographic technology and working to ensure everyone is protected! W. Stuart Jones, Managing Director, states, "DKS is laying the foundation for a new era in online security by establishing open-source encryption technologies that will enable companies like Facebook to dramatically improve privacy and security for their users." So far, DKS' successes have been numerous, the organization is pleased to announce that the CrypTech Project has created open-source technology and CrypTech has enlisted interest and support from such noted organizations as the Internet Society (ISOC), Google, Comcast, and other innovative companies. With substantial seed funding from the Internet Society, DKS has been founded to make open and assured security available globally by productizing and delivering solutions based on the CrypTech technology. Why Is Diamond Key Security important? "We believe that Diamond Key's cybersecurity presence represents a paradigm shift. Their cryptographic technology will change how people around the globe will be able to trust and afford fundamental components for secure communication," says Olaf Kolkman, Board Member, Diamond Key Security and Chief Internet Technology Officer, The Internet Society. About Diamond Key Security Diamond Key Security, headquartered in Palatine, Illinois, was formed in March 2017 as a not-for-profit corporation described under Section 501(c)(3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code. Its educational, charitable, and scientific purposes include conducting scientific research in the development, enhancement, and deployment of transparent, auditable cryptographic technologieshelping to safeguard the internet for the public good. For more information, visit http://www.dkey.org/http://www.dkey.org/http://www.dkey.org/http://www.dkey.org/dkey.orghttp://www.dkey.org/. Contact: Sylvia R. Hampton, MSM Hampton Bates Public Relations O 603.570.4816 M 617.413.6764 E [email protected] SOURCE Diamond Key Security NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- In an amended complaint filed on March 12, plaintiffs in the Dolan vs. Altice lawsuit have asked the court to require Altice USA ("Altice") to perform on its promise to the Dolan Family by restoring staffing levels at News 12 to 462 for a five-year period and to appoint a third-party monitor to oversee compliance. This request comes following a court order dated February 13, 2019, in which the Honorable Joseph R. Slights III, Vice Chancellor, Court of Chancery, State of Delaware, ordered Altice USA to maintain "Status Quo" staffing levels at News 12 for the remainder of the lawsuit and scheduled trial for September 4 6. That ruling prohibits Altice from cutting further staff positions at News 12 until the matter is resolved by the Court. The order states, "During the pendency of this Action in this Court, Altice shall not terminate any News 12 employee other than (i) for actual, bona fide cause or (ii) after first obtaining prior permission from the Court." Comments by Patrick Dolan Patrick Dolan, who was president of News 12 at the time of its sale to Altice USA, commented, "Altice made a solemn promise to my family that it would protect News 12's amazing staff for five years after closing the Merger Agreement." "Today's request for court intervention is the next logical step in our efforts to protect News 12's staff jobs and the quality of local programming they deliver. Altice failed to maintain staffing levels of 462 full-time equivalent employees, which they agreed to do in their contract when Altice acquired Cablevision in 2016." "Altice should be required to restore staffing to what it was at the time of the merger. In addition, due to Altice's prior disregard of its commitments, we are also asking the court to appoint a third-party monitor to oversee Altice's compliance over a cumulative five-year period." Documents A website www.dolanalticelawsuit.com includes a link to today's amended complaint, prior legal filings and court orders, news releases as well as major media coverage on the lawsuit, a Facebook message from Patrick Dolan to News 12 employees, and a letter of support from Long Island's Fair Media Council. Background on Lawsuit Filed September 4 Altice is no stranger to lawsuits. Records show Altice as a party to 235 lawsuits worldwide from 2016 to 2018. A lawsuit and request to permanently enjoin Altice USA was filed September 4 in the Court of Chancery, State of Delaware by the Dolan Family against Altice USA (NYSE: ATUS) for failure to abide by promises Altice made in a 2016 Merger Agreement and for equitable fraud, among other claims. The lawsuit targets Altice USA and alleges that the company ignored commitments made as part of its merger with Cablevision Systems Corporation ("Cablevision"). The merger of Altice and Cablevision closed in June 2016 for a value of $17.7 billion in cash consideration. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit originally included: Charles Dolan, founder and former CEO, Cablevision; Helen Dolan; James Dolan, former CEO of Cablevision; Patrick Dolan, president of News 12 at the time of the sale; and Colleen McVey, current employee of and news anchor with News 12 Networks. The lawsuit was subsequently amended to include a second long-serving anchor, Danielle Campbell. This lawsuit was filed to protect employee jobs and programming quality at News 12, which operates a cohesive group of local news television channels throughout New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. 2016 Agreement Conditions In order to induce the sale of News 12 in 2016, Altice USA unambiguously agreed to operate News 12 substantially in accordance with the News 12 Business Plan for five years. The business plan provided News 12 would employ full-time equivalent headcount of 462 people throughout this period. Altice expressly recognized, accepted and agreed, in adhering to the News 12 Business Plan, to incur cumulative losses of up to $60 million, which has not occurred, in the operation of News 12 over the period to maintain the network's existing employee base, as well as the quality and legacy of News 12. 2016 Merger Agreement A key provision of the 2016 Merger Agreement was the requirement for Altice to operate News 12 in accordance with News 12's Business Plan for a five-year period and financially support News 12 employees who were responsible for making the network special among local television stations. Altice agreed to these nonstandard provisions in a transaction of this type, because Altice knew that continuing the rich legacy of News 12 was an important consideration for the Dolan Family and a necessary inducement for the Dolan Family to agree to the merger. These covenants were of such importance to the merger, Cablevision highlighted these protections to its public shareholders. Altice Breached Merger Agreement Turning its back on its prior representations and promises, in 2017 Altice eliminated approximately 70 News 12 positions in direct violation of News 12's agreed-upon business plan incorporated into the Merger Agreement. In 2018, Altice informed the Dolans that Altice was on the verge of terminating dozens more News 12 employees, including Ms. McVey and Ms. Campbell, threatening to irreparably harm the quality of the local news content that News 12 creates, the livelihoods of News 12's employees, and the legacy that the Dolan Family negotiated to protect through explicit Merger Agreement provisions. In targeting two women anchors, both dedicated 30-year veterans of News 12 Altice may be engaging in age and/or gender bias as well as thinning News 12 staff. Lawsuit Overview Plaintiffs' lawsuit requests, in sum, that the Court enter judgment in favor of plaintiffs, enjoining Altice USA from: Terminating employment of any current employee of News 12, other than in the ordinary course of business to replace such individual for obvious cause with another person with equivalent qualifications; Taking any action that would cause News 12 to cease to operate in substantial compliance with the News 12 Business Plan; and Taking any action that would, in any way, violate or breach the Merger Agreement. The lawsuit further requests ordering Altice USA to operate News 12 in substantial compliance with the News 12 Business Plan for five cumulative years. The plea for injunctive relief targets Altice USA because Altice ignored the commitments it made to obtain News 12 as part of its merger with Cablevision. The purpose of the lawsuit is to protect News 12 employees, consistent with the promises made by Altice in the Merger Agreement, and to continue News 12's storied legacy as one of the foremost local television stations in the U.S. About News 12 News 12 is a group of cohesive, regional cable news television channels serving nearly 3 million households in New York State, Connecticut, and New Jersey including two boroughs of New York City and most of Long Island. News 12 provides news coverage 24 hours a day, and focuses on providing award-winning, hyper-local, in-depth news coverage that is rare in the United States, particularly with respect to the region it serves. The Dolan Family deliberately and methodically built News 12 as the foremost hyper-local news source for the edification of Long Island, Bronx, Brooklyn, and other communities. Due to the pre-merger journalistic freedom provided by Cablevision's ongoing financial support, the employees of News 12 could robustly pursue important stories addressing significant local issues relevant to millions of individuals residing in the coverage area. No news station would have otherwise had the resources to uncover and report these vital stories. News 12 was and is of singular importance to the Dolan Family, News 12's employees, and the viewers within News 12's coverage community. About Altice Altice USA (NYSE: ATUS) is a Delaware corporation. Altice Europe is a Dutch company. Altice Europe is successor in interest to Altice N.V., and thereby bound to the terms of the 2016 Merger Agreement. Altice USA is one of the largest broadband communications and video service providers in the United States, delivering broadband, pay television, telephony services, proprietary content and advertising services to approximately 4.9 million residential and business customers across 21 states through its Optimum and Suddenlink brands. SOURCE The Dolan Family Related Links http://www.dolanalticelawsuit.com MILAN and SAN BRUNO, Calif., March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Dompe Farmaceutici S.p.A and Dompe U.S. Inc., (collectively Dompe), announced today that the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD) has awarded them the 2019 Industry Innovation Award for Oxervate. The Rare Impact Awards celebrate people, organizations, and innovators making exceptional contributions benefitting rare disease patients and caregivers. Oxervate (cenegermin-bkbj) ophthalmic solution 0.002% was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in August 2018 as the first therapy specifically indicated to treat neurotrophic keratitis (NK), a rare and progressive eye disease that can impact the cornea, leading to scarring and reduced visual acuity.1,3 "At NORD, we remain committed to increasing attention on rare diseases that impact day-to-day living for those who suffer from them," said Peter L. Saltonstall, President and CEO of NORD. "We are proud to honor Dompe with an Industry Innovation Award and to thank them for the work they are doing on behalf of the rare disease community." Dompe supports the rare disease community through continued research and development activity in rare diseases, support of NORD's RareCare program, and membership on NORD's corporate council. "Dompe is extremely proud of the development program that resulted in the FDA approval of Oxervate. In neurotrophic keratitis, we saw a devastating disease without any approved pharmacologic treatments targeting the root pathogenesis. We are honored to be able to offer this breakthrough therapy to patients who have been waiting for an effective and non-invasive option," said Sergio Dompe, Chairman of Dompe. "We would like to thank NORD for the Industry Innovation Award. We are inspired by our patients and their caregivers, and we remain committed to innovation for the benefit of patients facing even the rarest of conditions." The Rare Impact Awards will take place on Saturday, June 22 at Space Center Houston, the Official Visitor Center of NASA Johnson Space Center and a Smithsonian Affiliate. About NORD The National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD) is the leading independent advocacy organization representing all patients and families affected by rare diseases. NORD is committed to the identification, treatment, and cure of the more than 7,000 rare diseases, of which approximately 90% are still without an FDA-approved treatment or therapy. Rare diseases affect 25-30 million Americans. More than half of those affected are children. NORD began as a small group of patient advocates that formed a coalition to unify and mobilize support to pass the Orphan Drug Act of 1983. For more than 35 years, NORD has led the way in voicing the needs of the rare disease community, driving supportive policies and education, advancing medical research, and providing patient and family services for those who need them most. NORD represents more than 280 disease-specific member organizations and their communities and collaborates with many other organizations in specific causes of importance to the rare disease patient community. Oxervate: Safety and Efficacy Data The efficacy and safety of Oxervate in Neurotrophic Keratitis (NK) was established in two independent, double-masked, randomized, multi-center, controlled clinical trials.2,4 This program represents the largest combined population of patients with NK ever examined in randomized controlled trials. Both trials studied Oxervate (20 mcg/mL) as compared to vehicle among patients with moderate (Stage 2) or severe (Stage 3) NK. Study NGF0212 (REPARO), which was conducted in Europe, randomized 52 patients to each group. REPARO also tested 10mcg/ml as compared to vehicle. After eight weeks, 72.0 percent of patients in the 20mcg/mL group were completely healed vs 33.3 percent in the vehicle group after 8 weeks. Study NGF0214, conducted in the U.S., randomized 24 patients to each group, and 65.2 percent in the 20mcg/mL group were completely healed vs 16.7 percent in the vehicle group after 8 weeks. Both studies included a follow-up period, in REPARO it was 48 weeks, and in Study NGF0214 it was 24 weeks. In REPARO, the study with the longer follow-up, approximately 80 percent of patients who healed during the eight-week treatment period remained healed after one year.1,2 Oxervate was well tolerated in clinical trials, adverse effects were mostly local, mild, and transient.1,2 Eye pain was the most frequent adverse reaction reported in 16% of patients.1 Investigators reported that restoring corneal innervation and sensitivity (which, in turn, will promote corneal healing) can be associated with increased ocular surface symptoms.3 Other adverse events reported in 1-10% of patients included corneal deposits, foreign body sensation, ocular hyperemia, ocular inflammation and tearing.1 Patients should remove contact lenses before applying Oxervate and wait 15 minutes after instillation of the dose before reinsertion.1 Findings from the REPARO trial program are published in the September 2018 issue of Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Topline data from the confirmatory NGF0214 study were presented at the 2017 Congress of the European Society of Ophthalmology, and trial results are in preparation for publication. About Neurotrophic Keratitis Neurotrophic keratitis, also known as neurotrophic keratopathy, is a rare disease that can be caused by damage to any level of the fifth cranial (trigeminal) nerve. Causes of impaired corneal sensation include herpetic or other infections, ocular or neurologic surgeries, physical injury to the ocular surface, and some systemic conditions that impair sensation. Diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment are based on disease severity, which is classified into three stages. Stage 1 (mild) exhibits ocular surface irregularity and blurred vision, stage 2 (moderate) exhibits a recurrent persistent epithelial defect (PED), and stage 3 (severe) exhibits corneal ulceration involving subepithelial (stromal) tissue, which may progress to corneal melting and perforation. Neurotrophic keratitis affects fewer than 65,000 individuals in the U.S. based on epidemiological data on conditions associated with NK.3 Patients with advanced stages of neurotropic keratitis are typically treated by cornea specialists. The cornea is the most densely innervated tissue in humans, with approximately 7,000 nerve endings per square millimeter. These nerves are unique in providing support to the cornea, which is crucial to help maintain transparency in this tissue that is normally devoid of blood vessels. In fact, corneal nerves help maintain ocular surface health by producing soluble factors called neurotrophins and facilitating sensory-dependent blinking and tearing reflexes.5 About Oxervate (Cenegermin-bkbj) Ophthalmic Solution Oxervate is a topical solution 0.002% of cenegermin-bkbj (20 mcg/mL) administered every two hours, six times per day, for eight weeks for the treatment of neurotrophic keratitis. Its active ingredient is cenegermin, a recombinant form of human nerve growth factor. Nerve growth factor (NGF) acts through specific high-affinity and low-affinity nerve growth factor receptors in the anterior segment of the eye to support corneal innervation and integrity. More information about Oxervate can be found in the full prescribing information on the product: www.oxervate.com. Oxervate is now commercially available in the U.S. and can be ordered through Accredo Specialty Pharmacy by calling 1-877-831-8112. Important Safety Information The most common adverse reaction in clinical trials that occurred more frequently with Oxervate was eye pain (16% of patients). Adverse reactions included corneal deposits, foreign body sensations in the eye, ocular hyperemia (enlarged blood vessels in the white of the eyes), swelling (inflammation) of the eye, and increase of tears (1-10% of patients). Contact lenses should be removed before applying Oxervate because the presence of a contact lens (either therapeutic or corrective) could theoretically limit the distribution of cenegermin-bkbj onto the area of the corneal lesion. Lenses may be reinserted 15 minutes after administration. Oxervate may cause mild to moderate eye discomfort such as eye pain during treatment. The patient should be advised to contact their doctor if a more serious eye reaction occurs. About Dompe Dompe is a private, rapidly scaling global biopharmaceutical company founded in Milan, Italy, with a 165-year legacy of medical innovation. Today, Dompe employs 700 employees worldwide and is growing as we enter new markets. In the United States, the commercial operations hub is located in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the company maintains an R&D presence in Boston. Forward Looking Statements This press release makes reference to certain information that may not coincide with expected future results. Dompe firmly believes in the soundness and reasonableness of the concepts expressed. However, some of the information is subject to a certain degree of indetermination in relation to its research and development activities and the necessary verifications to be performed by regulatory bodies. Therefore, as of today, Dompe cannot guarantee that the expected results will be consistent with the information provided above. 1 U.S. Prescribing Information. 2 Bonini S, Lambiase A, Rama P, Sinigaglia F, Allegretti M, Chao W, Mantelli F, for the REPARO Study Group. Phase II Randomized, Double-Masked, Vehicle-Controlled Trial of Recombinant Human Nerve Growth Factor for Neurotrophic Keratitis. Ophthalmology. 2018;125:1332-43. 3 Sacchetti M, Lambiase A. Diagnosis and Management of Neurotrophic Keratitis. Clinical Ophthalmology. 2014;8:571-9. 4 Chao W, Benitez Del Castillo JM, Dana R, Geerling G, Mantelli F, Massaro-Giordano G, Rama P. Healing of Persistent Epithelial Defects or Corneal Ulcer by Recombinant Human Nerve Growth Factor Eye Drops in Patients with Stage 2 or 3 Neurotrophic Keratitis. Presented at the Congress of the European Society of Ophthalmology (SOE), Barcelona, Spain, June, 1013, 2017. 5 Mastropasqua L, Massaro-Giordano G, Nubile M, Sacchetti M. Understanding the Pathogenesis of Neurotrophic Keratitis: The Role of Corneal Nerves. Journal of Cellular Physiology. 2017;232(4):717-24. US-NK20190312 SOURCE Dompe CHERRY HILL, N.J. and NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- For the second consecutive year, family conflict was identified as the leading threat to estate planning. According to a recent survey conducted by TD Wealth at the 53rd Annual Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning, nearly half (46 percent) of respondents identified family conflict as the biggest threat to estate planning in 2019, followed by market volatility (24 percent) and tax reform (14 percent). The survey also explored the various causes of family conflict when engaging in estate planning, citing the designation of beneficiaries (30 percent) as the most common cause of conflict. Other leading factors included not communicating the plan with family members (25 percent) and working with blended families (21 percent). "Family dynamics have always played a critical role in estate planning. As we start to see more blended families, we expect these conversations to become even more prevalent and challenging," said Ray Radigan, Head of Private Trust at TD Wealth. "Estate planning comes with the responsibility of motivating families to communicate through difficult times, which requires regular dialogue and complete transparency. To minimize risk, we encourage families to invite everyone to the table to participate in open and honest conversation about their shared goals and objectives." Keeping an Eye on the Markets Market volatility was top of mind for respondents in 2019, with nearly a quarter of respondents identifying volatile markets as the biggest threat to estate planning this year, up from 12 percent in 2018. "It's not surprising that more planning professionals are keeping a close eye on volatility this year because many clients view lifetime gifting as an important component to their estate plan. These gifts, however, should only be made if enough assets are retained to provide support during retirement years. While market fluctuations are certainly worth watching and can cause concern for potential gift givers, we encourage our clients to keep a long-term view when investing and remember that short-term market movements are no match for a robust estate plan and a well-balanced portfolio," continued Radigan. Giving the Gift of Trusts The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act continues to have large-scale impact on estate planning. Following the increase in the federal gift and estate tax exemption, estate planners are introducing various strategies to allow clients to take advantage of the exemption. About one third of respondents (31 percent) propose clients consider creating trusts to protect assets, while 26 percent suggest clients plan to minimize future capital gains tax consequences and 21 percent agree to gift now while the exemption is high. "Estate planners are now emphasizing the importance of creating trusts for the benefit of their loved ones so that assets can be protected from future claims," added Radigan. "For example, rather than provide a child with an outright gift or bequest, many parents are creating trusts as a means of protecting assets from future divorce claims. Additionally, these trusts can be used to ultimately protect loved ones from themselves or other loved ones." Additionally, 40 percent of planners believe clients will continue to give the same amount to charities as they did in 2018, and 21 percent expect clients to donate more. Survey Methodology The total sample includes 105 survey respondents who attended the 53rd Annual Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning, including attorneys, trust officers, accountants, charitable giving professionals, insurance advisors, elder law specialists, wealth management professionals, educators and non-profit advisors. The survey was fielded January 16-17, 2019. About TD Wealth Through TD Bank N.A.,TD Wealth's Private Client Group and its affiliates work with mass affluent and high net worth individuals and institutions to help build, preserve and transition wealth. TD Wealth is committed to helping personal investors, institutional and non-profit organizations gather and potentially grow their assets by building long-lasting relationships, and is affiliated with one of the 10 largest financial institutions in the U.S., TD Bank, America's Most Convenient Bank. From private banking, securities, investment advisory services, private trust, and estate planning, to institutional trust, including retirement planning, captive insurance and trustee services, TD Wealth creates and delivers customized and integrated wealth management solutions. Banking, investment and trust services are available through TD Bank. Securities and investment advisory products are available through TD Private Client Wealth LLC, member FINRA/SIPC (TDPCW).TD Wealth is a service mark of The Toronto-Dominion Bank. For more information, visit http://www.tdbank.com/investments. TD Wealth is not a tax or legal advisor. You must consult with your own tax and legal advisors for specific advice pertaining to your estate planning needs. About TD Bank, America's Most Convenient Bank TD Bank, America's Most Convenient Bank, is one of the 10 largest banks in the U.S., providing more than 9 million customers with a full range of retail, small business and commercial banking products and services at more than 1,200 convenient locations throughout the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Metro D.C., the Carolinas and Florida. In addition, TD Bank and its subsidiaries offer customized private banking and wealth management services through TD Wealth, and vehicle financing and dealer commercial services through TD Auto Finance. TD Bank is headquartered in Cherry Hill, N.J. To learn more, visit www.td.com/us. Find TD Bank on Facebook at www.facebook.com/TDBank and on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TDBank_US. TD Bank, America's Most Convenient Bank, is a member of TD Bank Group and a subsidiary of The Toronto-Dominion Bank of Toronto, Canada, a top 10 financial services company in North America. The Toronto-Dominion Bank trades on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges under the ticker symbol "TD". To learn more, visit www.td.com/us. SOURCE TD Bank Related Links http://www.TDBank.com CANNES, France, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Florida Realtors and the Dubai Land Department today signed a joint Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) during MIPIM 2019, the international real estate and property investors conference held March 12-15, 2019, in Cannes, France. The MoU establishes the parties' cooperation in developing a mutually beneficial relationship in the general field of real estate, building a foundation for future business opportunities. "As professionals in the real estate industry, we take pride in providing our knowledge and expertise to clients in Florida, Dubai and throughout the world," said 2019 Florida Realtors President Eric Sain. "Florida Realtors and the Dubai Land Department share mutual goals for future success. We look forward to strengthening our cooperative efforts and building more connections to enhance business opportunities for all of our members." As part of the agreement, Florida Realtors and the Dubai Land Department "affirm the value of international collaboration and agree to exchange information in the general field of real estate, promote professionalism in the real estate industry and engage in other activities that offer mutual benefits." According to Her Excellency Ms. Majida Ali Rashed, CEO of the real estate investment promotion and management sector of the Dubai Land Department, establishing this relationship with Florida Realtors enables the parties to develop a greater mutual understanding and more mutually beneficial opportunities. The MoU signing took place today at the Dubai Pavilion. Florida Realtors 2019 President-Elect Barry Grooms attended the signing along with President Sain; Her Excellency Ms. Majida Ali Rashed, CEO of the real estate investment promotion and management sector of the Dubai Land Department; Mr. Shadi Bteddini, CEO of AQARI Global, the USA Trustee of the Dubai Land Department; and Florida Realtors Director of Global Business Maria Grulich. Also in attendance: Spanish International Realty Alliance CEO Francis Fernandez Ariza, representing another global partner with Florida Realtors; Andre Perrissel, president of FNAIM Provence International Committee, FNAIM Aix Marseille Provence; Michel Platero, president of FNAIM Grand Paris; Ingrid Damoiseau, president of World Property Business Club; and Adam Scott, an international delegate also representing the last three groups, all highly regarded real estate organizations in France that also are global partners with Florida Realtors.. Representatives of several sponsors and partners with Florida Realtors for this year's MIPIM were present as well, including: Enterprise Florida, Florida Power & Light, the Orlando Regional Realtor Association (ORRA) and the Pinellas Realtors Organization (PRO). Florida Realtors serves as the voice for real estate in Florida. It provides programs, services, continuing education, research and legislative representation to its 187,000 members in 52 boards/associations. Florida Realtors Media Center website is available at http://media.floridarealtors.org. SOURCE Florida Realtors Related Links https://www.floridarealtors.org SALT LAKE CITY, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- FramesDirect, an Austin-based retailer, is expanding internationally through a partnership with Global Access, a leading provider of international commerce technologies and global logistics solutions. Using Global Access' Intelligent Global Network, FramesDirect will be able to provide international customers with a seamless, fully-branded international shopping experience. "International markets present retailers like FramesDirect with enormous opportunities to gain loyal customers and build their global brand," said Chris Boyle, Global Access Founder and President. "Our Intelligent Global Network, with guaranteed landed cost, customs clearance technology and international logistics network will enable FramesDirect to continue to expand its business around the world without compromising customer care." Specifically, Global Access will provide FramesDirect with: Duty and Tax Calculation in real-time at checkout on FramesDirect.com with a guaranteed landed cost in real-time at checkout on FramesDirect.com with a guaranteed landed cost Access to Global Access' international logistics network , including customs clearance and 'final-mile' package delivery , including Real-time package tracking via FramesDirect's order number via FramesDirect's order number Harmonization Codes for FramesDirect's entire product catalog "Superior customer service is the cornerstone of our business, and Global Access will enable us to provide that same high-level of service everywhere in the world," said Brad Berbette, CEO of FramesDirect. About FramesDirect Founded in 1996 by two Houston optometrists, Austin-based FramesDirect.com was one of the first online retailers of eyewear. The company has grown to provide the largest selection of designer eyewear anywhere, serving more than 1 million customers in more than 140 countries. About Global Access Founded in 2002, Global Access has shipped more than $1 billion in gross merchandise value to more than 200 countries. Over nearly 20 years, Global Access has built an Intelligent Global Network for direct sales and ecommerce clients that seamlessly reaches international distributors and customers. We provide a localized checkout and payment experience, guaranteed landed cost, automated customs clearance and fully trackable final mile delivery. Our Intelligent Global Network takes what used to be complex cross-border challenges and transforms them into opportunities for our clients to gain loyal customers and build a growing global brand. Contact: Connie Spencer-Adams 801-420-9221 SOURCE Global Access FRANKFURT, Germany, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- FRA/gk-rap In February 2019, Frankfurt Airport (FRA) welcomed more than 4.5 million passengers an increase of 4.3 percent year-on-year. During the first two months of the year, FRA achieved passenger growth of 3.3 percent. Aircraft movements climbed by 4.7 percent to 36,849 takeoffs and landings in in the reporting month. Accumulated maximum takeoff weights (MTOWs) rose by 4.6 percent to almost 2.3 million metric tons. Reflecting the ongoing slowdown in global trade, cargo throughput (airfreight + airmail) contracted by 3.4 percent to 161,366 metric tons. Group airports in Fraport's international portfolio continued their positive performance in February 2019. Ljubljana Airport (LJU) in Slovenia served 105,470 passengers, a gain of 6.3 percent. In Brazil, combined traffic at Fortaleza (FOR) and Porto Alegre (POA) airports increased by 15.8 percent to 1.2 million passengers. Fraport's Greek regional airports recorded overall growth of 13.6 percent to 588,433 passengers. The busiest airports included Thessaloniki (SKG) with 368,119 passengers (up 24.2 percent), Chania (CHQ) on the island of Crete with 47,661 passengers (up 19.6 percent), and Rhodes (RHO) with 46,331 passengers (down 13.0 percent). In Peru, Lima Airport (LIM) saw traffic grow by 4.6 percent to some 1.8 million passengers. The two Bulgarian airports of Varna (VAR) and Burgas (BOJ), combined, recorded a slight gain of 0.9 percent to 61,580 passengers. Antalya Airport (AYT) in Turkey served 766,068 passengers, up 10.4 percent. Pulkovo Airport (LED) in St. Petersburg, Russia, grew by 13.5 percent to about 1.1 million passengers. Traffic at Xi'an Airport (XIY) in China advanced by 6.8 percent to 3.7 million passengers. Print-quality photos of Fraport AG and Frankfurt Airport are available for free downloading via the photo library on the Fraport Web site. For TV news and information broadcasting purposes only, we also offer free footage material for downloading. If you wish to meet a member of our Media Relations team when at Frankfurt Airport, please do not hesitate to contact us. Our contact details are available here. For further information about Fraport AG please click here. Fraport Traffic Figures February 2019 Fraport Group Airports1 February 2019 Year to Date (YTD) 2019 Fraport Passengers Cargo* Movements Passengers Cargo Movements Fully-consolidated airports share (%) Month % Month % Month % YTD % YTD % YTD % FRA Frankfurt Germany 100.00 4,554,060 4.3 158,862 -2.6 36,849 4.7 9,206,012 3.3 320,328 -2.8 74,525 3.5 LJU Ljubljana Slovenia 100.00 105,470 6.3 922 -0.9 2,417 9.2 208,995 4.7 1,899 -2.4 4,926 5.3 Fraport Brasil 100.00 1,223,980 15.8 6,267 5.2 10,744 6.6 2,697,480 13.4 12,784 8.6 23,394 7.0 FOR Fortaleza Brazil 100.00 562,510 27.5 3,332 7.6 4,619 17.5 1,307,815 24.0 6,961 11.2 10,784 21.3 POA Porto Alegre Brazil 100.00 661,470 7.3 2,935 2.6 6,125 -0.4 1,389,665 4.9 5,823 5.5 12,610 -2.8 Fraport Regional Airports of Greece A+B 73.40 588,433 13.6 550 0.3 6,119 13.3 1,206,362 12.9 1,121 10.5 12,948 14.0 Fraport Regional Airports of Greece A 73.40 446,598 15.8 425 0.2 4,172 13.6 919,952 15.6 873 26.8 8,838 14.2 CFU Kerkyra (Corfu) Greece 73.40 19,930 9.0 14 -6.7 320 -8.0 40,503 6.9 28 79.7 649 -11.3 CHQ Chania (Crete) Greece 73.40 47,661 19.6 43 48.6 428 44.6 98,610 18.7 70 30.3 927 53.5 EFL Kefalonia Greece 73.40 3,108 52.7 0 -100.0 92 22.7 6,201 57.9 0 -1.6 200 28.2 KVA Kavala Greece 73.40 4,651 -82.4 7 > 100.0 94 -67.4 12,322 -79.1 15 > 100.0 227 -66.1 PVK Aktion/Preveza Greece 73.40 265 33.2 0 n.a. 56 -17.6 535 1.3 0 n.a. 114 -14.9 SKG Thessaloniki Greece 73.40 368,119 24.2 360 -4.5 3,090 24.4 756,427 24.8 757 23.4 6,531 25.4 ZTH Zakynthos Greece 73.40 2,864 7.8 2 > 100.0 92 -19.3 5,354 -1.8 3 > 100.0 190 -18.1 Fraport Regional Airports of Greece B 73.40 141,835 7.4 125 0.6 1,947 12.8 286,410 5.1 248 -23.9 4,110 13.6 JMK Mykonos Greece 73.40 6,902 24.3 4 > 100.0 121 0.8 13,468 58.0 6 > 100.0 266 34.3 JSI Skiathos Greece 73.40 915 -0.9 0 n.a. 38 -5.0 1,754 -2.3 0 n.a. 78 -4.9 JTR Santorini (Thira) Greece 73.40 38,324 25.8 11 12.7 375 38.9 72,252 18.7 21 4.8 729 27.4 KGS Kos Greece 73.40 16,995 22.4 21 3.7 296 3.5 34,828 11.5 40 6.4 650 7.4 MJT Mytilene (Lesvos) Greece 73.40 21,987 15.0 26 -8.4 417 48.9 45,453 15.6 56 -12.7 893 47.4 RHO Rhodes Greece 73.40 46,331 -13.0 47 4.7 446 -14.4 97,168 -13.2 92 -43.9 962 -13.4 SMI Samos Greece 73.40 10,381 16.9 17 -16.1 254 21.5 21,487 14.3 34 -15.7 532 19.6 LIM Lima Peru 70.01 1,789,855 4.6 17,726 0.7 14,623 -0.6 3,701,067 4.5 41,582 -2.2 30,350 -2.8 Fraport Twin Star 60.00 61,580 0.9 465 -38.7 630 -5.4 129,504 -3.3 956 -41.0 1,310 -10.7 BOJ Burgas Bulgaria 60.00 10,565 7.8 453 -39.7 161 9.5 21,622 -5.4 937 -41.7 328 -4.1 VAR Varna Bulgaria 60.00 51,015 -0.4 12 67.3 469 -9.6 107,882 -2.9 19 59.4 982 -12.7 At equity consolidated airports AYT Antalya Turkey 51.00 766,068 10.4 n.a. n.a. 5,583 14.1 1,643,229 10.0 n.a. n.a. 12,109 17.2 LED St. Petersburg Russia 25.00 1,082,934 13.5 n.a. n.a. 11,054 10.0 2,313,084 13.8 n.a. n.a. 23,464 9.8 XIY Xi'an China 24.50 3,735,357 6.8 15,327 -10.1 26,259 3.9 7,503,006 10.3 44,585 4.7 54,602 7.4 Frankfurt Airport2 February 2019 Month % YTD 2019 % Passengers 4,554,345 4.3 9,206,532 3.3 Cargo (freight & mail) 161,366 -3.4 324,698 -3.8 Aircraft movements 36,849 4.7 74,525 3.5 MTOW (in metric tons)3 2,281,460 4.6 4,654,285 3.0 PAX/PAX-flight4 132.6 -0.5 132.5 -0.3 Seat load factor (%) 72.9 72.6 Punctuality rate (%) 83.1 79.3 Frankfurt Airport PAX share %5 PAX share %5 Regional Split Month YTD Continental 62.5 4.5 61.1 3.3 Germany 11.8 3.5 11.2 1.7 Europe (excl. GER) 50.7 4.7 49.9 3.6 Western Europe 42.1 3.9 41.2 2.8 Eastern Europe 8.7 9.0 8.7 7.5 Intercontinental 37.5 4.0 38.9 3.3 Africa 5.0 8.2 5.1 8.4 Middle East 5.9 -3.2 6.0 -3.2 North America 10.3 4.9 11.0 2.6 Central & South Amer. 4.6 8.6 4.8 7.1 Far East 11.7 3.7 12.1 4.0 Australia 0.0 n.a. 0.0 n.a. Definitions: 1 According to ACI definition: Passengers: commercial traffic only (arr+dep+transit counted once), Cargo: commercial and non-commercial traffic (arr+dep excluding transit, in metric tons), Movements: commercial and non-commercial traffic (arr+dep), preliminary figures; 2 Commercial and non-commercial traffic: Passengers (arr+dep+transit counted once, incl. general aviation), Cargo (arr+dep+transit counted once, in metric tons), Movements (arr+dep); 3 Inbound traffic only; 4 Scheduled and charter traffic; 5 absolute change vs. previous year in % ; *Cargo = Freight + mail Fraport AG Torben Beckmann Telephone: +49 69 690-70553 Corporate Communications E-mail: [email protected] Media Relations Internet: www.fraport.com 60547 Frankfurt, Germany Facebook: www.facebook.com/FrankfurtAirport SOURCE Fraport AG Related Links fraport.com NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- With the increasingly serious problems like atmospheric pollution and high dependence on crude oil, energy conservation and emission reduction need to be implemented urgently. The automobile industry undoubtedly becomes one of target industries, and energy-saving and new energy vehicles will be the future development trend. The market size of automotive turbocharger, one of the most important technologies for energy saving and emission reduction of automobiles thanks to its energy efficiency and technology maturity, has been ballooning accordingly. In 2018, the demand for automotive turbochargers in China rose 7.1% year on year to 8.045 million units, and the installation rate reached 33.29%. With the continuous upgrading and implementation of China's emission standards, automotive energy conservation and emission reduction will remain a major concern in the near future. Countries have set the timetable for phasing out internal combustion engines, but most of them are not legally effective. What's more, the supportive projects for new energy vehicle will still take time. In short, the upgrade of traditional power technology will still be the mainstream in the next decade, and the turbocharged market will show enormous development potentials. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p02853855 From the perspective of market segments, Chinese automotive turbochargers are mainly divided into gasoline turbochargers and diesel turbochargers. Due to different fuel combustion efficiency, the installation rate of diesel turbochargers has been much higher than that of gasoline turbochargers, for instance, the former hit 76.3% while the latter was only 27.7% in 2018. In future, gasoline turbocharger will see a fleetly growing installation rate, expectedly reaching 62.4% in 2023 given stricter environmental requirements. In competition, international turbocharger giants Garrett Motion (a spin-off from Honeywell in 2018), BorgWarner, MHI and IHI have almost monopolized Chinese gasoline turbocharger market as the operating speed and temperature of gasoline turbochargers require high-quality materials and processing technology. It is difficult for Chinese players to break the foreign monopoly in the short run, because they lack high-end innovation in the design and development of core turbocharger components (such as compressors and turbines), the reliability of their products desires to be much improved, and they forayed into the field late. Only Ningbo Vofonturbo and Hunan Tyen Machinery can support low-end vehicle models of Chinese automakers. As for diesel turbochargers, the world-renowned suppliers of commercial vehicle turbocharger consist mainly of Garrett Motion and Cummins, both of which seize handsome shares in the Chinese market, especially for high-end vehicle models. Chinese competitors such as Hunan Tyen Machinery, Kangyue Technology, FuYuan Turbochargers and Weifu Tianli target the medium & low-end commercial vehicle market and the construction machinery market. Global and China Automotive Turbocharger Industry Report, 2019-2025 highlights the following: Overview of the automotive turbocharger industry (including definition and classification, technical characteristics, development trends, industrial policies, etc.); Overview of global and China automotive industry (automobile output, etc.); automotive industry (automobile output, etc.); Market size, competitive landscape, etc. of global turbochargers; Market size, demand structure, automaker layout, etc. of Chinese turbochargers, especially automotive turbochargers; Demand for diesel and gasoline engine turbochargers in China ; ; Operation, turbocharger business, development in China , etc. of eight global turbocharger manufacturers; , etc. of eight global turbocharger manufacturers; Operation, turbocharger business, R&D, development strategy, etc. of eight Chinese turbocharger manufacturers. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p02853855 About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place. __________________________ Contact Clare: [email protected] US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001 SOURCE Reportlinker Related Links http://www.reportlinker.com DUBLIN, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Industrial Valves Market - Growth, Trends, and Forecast (2019 - 2024)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The global industrial valves market is expected to record a CAGR of 5.33% during the forecast period of 2019 and 2024. The major factor driving the market studied is the growing demand from the power and chemical industries. Stagnant industrial growth in developed countries is expected to hinder the growth of the market studied. The oil and gas industry dominated the market in 2017, and it is expected to experience growth during the forecast period, owing to the increasing oil and gas activities across the world. Increasing demand for automatic valves is likely to act as an opportunity in the future. Asia-Pacific dominated the market across the world, with the largest consumption from countries, such as China and India . Key Market Trends Increasing Demand from Power Industry In the power industry, valves are used for various applications, such as boiler startups, feed pump recirculation, steam conditioning, and turbine bypass. For instance, valves in the condensate system are used to control and regulate the additional flow required for a fluid recirculation condensate pump. Furthermore, valves are also used to control the deaerator level for the feedwater heater. For the food water system in the power industry, valves are used for boiler feed pump recirculation and the valve plays a key role in this scenario, as it should be operated in on-off and modulating service. Additionally, in mainstream systems, the valves are used for superheaters, turbine bypass, superheater bypass, etc. A modulating valve is used for controlling pressure. As of December 2017, 61 nuclear power plants, with 99 nuclear reactors were operating commercially in the United States. The government is planning for a number of new reactor installations, in order to increase nuclear-based power generation. Hence, the country is expected to witness four new units, which are expected to come online by 2021. Additionally, the government's focus on increasing the capacity additions of power plants across the country is the factor that is boosting the demand for cooling water treatment chemicals. Such aforementioned factors are boosting the demand for valves in the power industry. Asia-Pacific Region to Dominate the Market The Asia-Pacific region dominated the global market share in 2017. With growing oil and gas industrial activities and the increasing need for water treatment in countries, such as China, India, and Japan, the usage of industrial valves is increasing in the region. The consumption of industrial valves is high in oil and gas, and downstream production has increased in the country. This is further increasing the production capacities of petrochemicals, thus augmenting the consumption of industrial valves in the country. Chemical plants are another prominent end-user industry in China. Many major companies in the market have their chemical plants in China. These companies increased their production capacities, in order to increase the consumption of industrial valves. The other major industry in the country is the water treatment facility, which is used in different industries. The growing fuel demand is augmenting the demand to increase the refining capacity, due to increased sales of passenger cars, replacement of LPG as a cooking fuel, increasing urbanization, along with the demand for infrastructure and consumer goods. The aforementioned factors, coupled with government support, are contributing to the increasing demand for industrial valves consumption in the region during the forecast period. Competitive Landscape The global industrial valves market is highly fragmented, with the top 10 players accounting for 15% of the total market share. The major companies include Schlumberger Limited (previously Cameron International), Emerson Electric Co., Flowserve Corporation, IMI PLC, and Crane Co. Topics Covered 1 Introduction 1.1 Study Deliverables 1.2 Study Assumptions 1.3 Scope of the Study 2 Research Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Market Dynamics 4.1 Market Drivers 4.1.1 Growing Demand from the Power Industry 4.1.2 Increase in Demand for Desalination Activity 4.1.3 Increase in Demand from the Chemical Industry 4.2 Market Restraints 4.2.1 Stagnant Industrial Growth in Developed Countries 4.3 Value Chain / Supply Chain Analysis 4.4 Porter's Five Forces Analysis 5 Market Segmentation 5.1 Type 5.1.1 Butterfly Valve 5.1.2 Ball Valve 5.1.3 Globe Valve 5.1.4 Gate Valve 5.1.5 Plug Valve 5.1.6 Other Types 5.2 Product 5.2.1 Quarter-turn Valve 5.2.2 Multi-turn Valve 5.2.3 Other Products (Control Valves) 5.3 Application 5.3.1 Power 5.3.2 Water and Wastewater Management (Including Desalination) 5.3.3 Chemicals 5.3.4 Oil and Gas 5.3.4.1 Upstream 5.3.4.2 Mid-stream 5.3.4.3 Downstream 5.3.5 Food Processing 5.3.6 Other Applications 5.4 Geography 5.4.1 Asia-Pacific 5.4.2 North America 5.4.3 Europe 5.4.4 South America 5.4.5 Middle East & Africa 6 Competitive Landscape 6.1 Mergers and Acquisitions, Joint Ventures, Collaborations and Agreements 6.2 Market Share Analysis 6.3 Strategies Adopted by Leading Players 6.4 Company Profiles 6.4.1 Alfa Laval 6.4.2 AVK Holding AS 6.4.3 Broer Group 6.4.4 CIRCOR International Inc. 6.4.5 Crane Co. 6.4.6 Curtiss-Wright Corporation 6.4.7 Danfoss AS 6.4.8 Emerson Electric Co. 6.4.9 Georg Fischer Ltd. 6.4.10 Flowserve Corporation 6.4.11 General Electric (Baker Hughes) 6.4.12 Hitachi Metals Ltd. 6.4.13 Honeywell International Inc. 6.4.14 IMI PLC 6.4.15 ITT Inc. 6.4.16 KITZ Corporation 6.4.17 Mueller Water Products Inc. 6.4.18 NIBCO INC. 6.4.19 Okano Valve Mfg. Co. Ltd. 6.4.20 Saint-Gobain 6.4.21 Schlumberger Limited 6.4.22 TechnipFMC PLC 6.4.23 The Weir Group PLC 6.4.24 Valvitalia S.p.A 6.4.25 Xylem 6.4.26 DUNAN 7 Market Opportunities and Future Trends 7.1 Increase in Demand for Automatic Valves For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/6p66zf/global_industrial?w=5 Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Related Links http://www.researchandmarkets.com ST. LOUIS, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Graybar, a leading distributor of electrical, communications and data networking products and provider of related supply chain management and logistics services, reported today that the company finished 2018 with its seventh consecutive year of record net sales. In 2018, net sales totaled $7.2 billion, an 8.6 percent increase compared to the previous year. Graybar also achieved record net income of $143.3 million, a 100.1 percent increase compared to 2017. The company saw positive organic sales growth across all markets, and its net income was favorably impacted by a lower corporate income tax rate combined with ongoing tax planning initiatives. "Graybar achieved breakthrough results in 2018 thanks to the outstanding efforts of our employees," said Graybar's Chairman, President and CEO Kathleen M. Mazzarella. "As a company, we have raised the bar on our performance for seven consecutive years by relentlessly working to create an exceptional customer experience and pursuing new opportunities for growth and innovation. I am proud of everything we accomplished last year, and I look forward to sustaining our momentum as we celebrate Graybar's 150th anniversary and 90 years of employee ownership in 2019." Graybar, a Fortune 500 corporation and one of the largest employee-owned companies in North America, is a leader in the distribution of high quality electrical, communications and data networking products, and specializes in related supply chain management and logistics services. Through its network of 289 North American distribution facilities, it stocks and sells products from thousands of manufacturers, helping its customers power, network and secure their facilities with speed, intelligence and efficiency. For more information, visit www.graybar.com or call 1-800-GRAYBAR. Media Contact: Tim Sommer (314) 578-7672 [email protected] SOURCE Graybar Related Links http://www.Graybar.com CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Harvard University and Deerfield Management, a healthcare investment firm, have established a major strategic R&D alliance to speed the development and translation of biomedical and life-science innovations into transformative treatments that can improve life, health, and medical care. Through a newly launched company called Lab1636, Deerfield has committed an unprecedented $100 million in initial funding to support the alliance. Spearheaded by Harvard Office of Technology Development (OTD), the alliance is expected to catalyze the development of novel therapeutics and rapidly drive innovations toward clinical validation. "We envision the Harvard-Deerfield collaboration as a powerful means to fuel translational research across the University, enabling promising innovations to advance beyond their laboratory roots," said Harvard Provost Alan M. Garber. "By working with an alliance partner who is prepared to support early-stage research and to invest in the success of pre-clinical and clinical-stage commercial development, we're enhancing the opportunities for Harvard's life-changing innovations to reach patients in need," added Isaac T. Kohlberg, Senior Associate Provost and Chief Technology Development Officer at Harvard. "Success in a research alliance requires a partner with a long vision and operational and development expertise, as well as the financial resources, and we're delighted to launch this initiative with Deerfield." A private company wholly owned by affiliates of Deerfield, Lab1636 will support Harvard R&D projects throughout various stages of drug discovery and development, for example enabling studies to explicate the biology of disease, validate therapeutic targets, or achieve a proof-of-concept necessary for filing an Investigational New Drug (IND) application. "Harvard is an outstanding partner for an alliance," said James E. Flynn, Managing Partner at Deerfield. "The University's outstanding science, breadth of technologies, and mix of esteemed junior and senior faculty constitute a fertile environment for the continuous generation of novel insights. This, in combination with its experience advancing potential therapeutics, makes it the perfect place to establish an impactful translational partnership." At any research university, the most commercially promising innovations eventually outgrow the lab bench, requiring greater resources or more focused development than an academic setting can provide. In addition to funding research on campus, Lab1636 may facilitate licenses to outside companies and is equipped to provide substantial support to the launch and growth of new startups dedicated to developing Harvard technologies. "The sheer scope of this collaboration with Deerfield may prove transformative for Harvard research," said Vivian Berlin, Managing Director, Strategic Partnerships in OTD. "This alliance has immense potential to bridge the development gap, ensure continuity of resources, and complement our other major translational programs, such as the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator." Kohlberg added, "We hope that our R&D alliance with Deerfield will further sustain and speed the commercialization of innovations from across the University toward societal impact." Harvard's R&D projects to be funded by Lab1636 will be selected by a joint advisory committee, and the projects will be initiated by principal investigators from labs across the University. The projects will generally focus on the development of novel therapeutics, ideally advancing many to a stage that would enable the filing of an IND application and, if successful, the commencement of clinical trials in patients. About Harvard Office of Technology Development Harvard's Office of Technology Development (OTD) promotes the public good by fostering innovation and translating new inventions made at Harvard University into useful products that are available and beneficial to society. Our integrated approach to technology development comprises sponsored research and corporate alliances, intellectual property management, and technology commercialization through venture creation and licensing. More than 70 startups have launched to commercialize Harvard technologies in the past 5 years, collectively raising more than a billion dollars in financing. To further bridge the academic-industry development gap, Harvard OTD manages the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator and the Physical Sciences & Engineering Accelerator. For more information, please visit https://otd.harvard.edu. About Deerfield Management Deerfield is a healthcare investment management firm committed to advancing healthcare through investment, information and philanthropy. Contacts Harvard Office of Technology Development Caroline Perry, 617-495-4157 [email protected] Deerfield Management Company Karen Heidelberger, 212-551-1600 [email protected] SOURCE Deerfield Management WASHINGTON, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- American Conference Institute (ACI) will host a two-day country specific analysis on the most pressing issues affecting financial services and global exporters on RUSSIA, IRAN, and VENEZUELA economic sanctions. 3 Keynote Address from: Andrea Gacki Director Office of Foreign Assets Control U.S. Department of the Treasury Sigal P. Mandelker Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence U.S. Department of the Treasury David Peyman Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Counter Threat Finance and Sanctions U.S. Department of State Hear Compliance Best Practices from Senior In-House Speakers from AIG Allianz SE American Express Bank of America BB&T Bank Barclays BNP Paribas Deutsche Bank General Electric General Motors HSBC JP Morgan Chase LyondellBasell Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc. Medtronic Raytheon Societe Generale Stripe Uber Technologies PayPal Walmart Weatherford Wells Fargo More information about the conference, including full agendas, faculty lists, and brochures can be accessed at AmericanConference.com/EconomicSanctionsDC. REGISTER HERE >> A unique organization, American Conference Institute is devoted to providing the business intelligence that senior decision-makers need to respond to challenges both here in the US, and around the world. Staffed by industry specialists, lawyers and other professionals, American Conference Institute operates as a think tank, monitoring trends and developments in all major industry sectors, the law, and public policy, with a view to providing information on the leading edge. Headquartered in New York, ACI has grown to produce more than 100 events each year, attended by thousands of senior delegates from across the world. Photo(s): https://www.prlog.org/12759010 Press release distributed by PRLog SOURCE American Conference Institute Related Links https://www.americanconference.com/ CHICAGO, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Hispanic Information Technology Executive Council (HITEC), the premier global executive leadership organization of senior level business and technology executives, announced today the award recipients of the 2019 HITEC 50 . "HITEC is proud to showcase HITEC's global reach and network by highlighting the top 50 Hispanic leaders in technology from Ibero-America," shared Juan Carlos Gutierrez, HITEC Board Member and Chair of the HITEC Awards Committee. The HITEC 50 list, highlighted since 2011, is a compilation of the top Hispanic Professionals in Technology across Latin America, Spain and Portugal to celebrate their leadership and achievements. Honorees are evaluated on their accomplishments in the ever-changing global landscape of technology and for their mentoring and professional development activities. And for the first time, 46 percent of those recognized are Latinas. Click here to view the full list of the HITEC 50 . "One of HITEC's 2019 priorities is to ensure that we drive and recognize gender parity across all programs and we are proud to be making significant strides in that direction," said Guillermo Diaz, Jr., HITEC Chairman and Senior Vice President, Customer Transformation - Cisco Systems, Inc. "This year the HITEC 50 is recognizing 23 Latinas in technology for their leadership and achievements among their peers across Ibero-American countries." The 2019 HITEC 50 Awards ceremony will take place on April 10, 2019 at the 2019 HITEC Spring Leadership Summit hosted by Bank of America in Charlotte, North Carolina. HITEC 50 - Latin America/Ibero-America Objectives: Recognize talented individuals and highlight their achievements. Foster business and professional growth for our members. Build and develop strategic business relationships that will encourage growth within the industry globally. About HITEC: Founded to increase Hispanic representation in the diversity-challenged technology industry, HITEC (Hispanic Information Technology Executive Council) is a premier global executive leadership organization of senior business and technology executives who have built outstanding careers in information technology. HITEC's premiere network spans the Americas and is focused on building stronger technology and executive leaders, leadership teams, corporations, and role models in a rapidly changing, flatter, and information technology centric world. These global leaders include executives leading Global 1000 corporations while others lead some of the largest Hispanic-owned technology firms across the Americas. HITEC enables business and professional growth for its members and fills the executive pipeline with the next generation of Hispanic IT leaders. SOURCE Hispanic Information Technology Executive Council Related Links http://www.hitecglobal.org JACKSONVILLE, Fla., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- HTL Hospitality Advisors, www.htlha.com, is pleased to announce the sale of the SpringHill Suites by Marriott Jacksonville Airport located at 13550 Airport Court, Jacksonville, Florida. This sale was part of HTLHA's growing off-market practice and the fifth off market Marriott franchised hotel HTL has recently sold. The SpringHill Suites Jacksonville Airport was not listed for sale nor was it exposed to the open market. "This buyer was running out of time to complete a 1031 exchange. He was under mounting pressure to find a suitable property and purchase. We identified his specific acquisition criteria and were able to quickly find an asset that met both his needs and the requirements of his 1031 exchange," said Bryan L. Gipson, Director for HTL Hospitality Advisors, who represented both parties in this transaction. The new owners plan to extensively renovate the 104 room hotel, built in 2007, to meet the new SpringHill Suites brand standards. A b ou t HTL HTL Hospitality Advisors is a national hotel real estate firm that specializes in full and select-service hotels including portfolios and individual assets. For more information on how HTL Hospitality Advisors can assist you in purchasing or selling your hotel please visit https://www.htlha.com/. Contact: Bryan L. Gipson, Director of Hotel Brokerage HTL Hospitality Advisors (228) 327-1729 or [email protected] SOURCE HTL Hospitality Advisors Related Links https://www.htlha.com/ FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- iBASEt, a leading provider of digital manufacturing, MRO and quality software solutions, today announced its Solumina G8 product has achieved SAP certification as powered by the SAP NetWeaver technology platform. The solution integrates with SAP NetWeaver and for iBASEt customers, combines the business suite with functionality tailored to meet the unique demands of complex discrete manufacturing. Solumina is at the core of iBASEt's Digital Manufacturing suite, an integrated set of products and solutions that provide the digital technologies needed to deliver velocity, visibility and control of manufacturing and sustainment operations. The SAP Integration and Certification Center (SAP ICC) has certified that iBASEt's Solumina G8, version 12276 is powered by SAP NetWeaver. Solutions that are powered by SAP NetWeaver can be more quickly and easily integrated into SAP solution environments. Customers can benefit from improved interoperability with SAP applications and with the large ecosystem of solutions that run on SAP NetWeaver. Choosing an SAP-certified solution can also help reduce overall IT investment costs and risks. "We are glad to announce that Solumina G8 has been recertified as powered by SAP NetWeaver," said John Fishell, Vice President of Products at iBASEt. "The ability of Solumina G8 to run on SAP NetWeaver and interoperate with other SAP NetWeaver-based solutions has helped our customers collaborate with their partners, manage global operations, and effectively plan ahead." Being powered by SAP NetWeaver helps iBASEt to deliver an enhanced set of process and configuration management tools and allows for cross functional collaboration for companies in the manufacturing industry. About iBASEt iBASEt is a leading provider of software solutions for complex, highly regulated industries, like Aerospace and Defense, Medical Devices, Nuclear, Industrial Equipment, Electronics, and Shipbuilding. iBASEt's Digital Manufacturing software streamlines and integrates Manufacturing Execution System and Operations Management (MES/MOM), Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) and Enterprise Quality Management Systems (EQMS) for operations and supplier quality management. iBASEt's software is implemented by many leading industrial organizations as part of their enterprise Digital Thread initiatives. SAP, SAP NetWeaver and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other countries. See http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/legal/copyright/index.epx for additional trademark information and notices. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. For more information, press only: Marketing Contact Tom Hennessey, Vice President of Marketing 949-958-5200 [email protected] Related Links http://www.ibaset.com SOURCE iBASEt NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Over 200 commercial real estate industry executives with interest in the national Net Lease sector will gather at The Roosevelt in New York City, NY, on April 3-4, 2019 for the GlobeSt. Net Lease Conference formerly a RealShare event. Focused on the theme 'Cyclical or Fundamental: What Will the Market Bring' GlobeSt. Net Lease will bring together senior leaders representing the industry's top owners, investors, developers, brokers, financiers and more to gain insights from thought-leaders. A day before the conference begins, an industry networking cocktail reception will be held on April 3rd at the Bryant Park Grill. With more than 25 speakers, representing the brightest minds in the Net Lease community, the conference program on April 4th includes five interactive panel discussions, structured networking opportunities, and an exclusive online networking app 'GlobeSt. EXCHANGE'- all offering unmatched insights and opportunities to the conference attendees. The opening keynote session on 'Forecasting the US Economy' will feature two leading economists, Dr. Sam Chandan, Chair and Associate Dean, NYU Schack Institute & Founder Chandan Economics and Heidi Learner, Chief Economist, Savills Studley. "The 2019 GlobeSt. Net Lease conference will offer a unique mix of new speakers, session topics that reflect market trends that are of interest to our audience, and a dedicated networking app to help attendees identify their future business partners and pre-arrange meetings while at the event," said Scott Thompson, Vice President of ALM's Real Estate Division, Events. To learn more about GlobeSt. Net Lease Conference and to register, visit: https://www.event.globest.com/netlease For more information about GlobeSt's events, please visit www.globest.com/events. Follow us on Twitter @RealShare and engage with #RealShare to be a part of the conversation and receive the latest updates on the event. About GlobeSt. Conference Series The GlobeSt. Conference Series (formerly RealShare) is the industry choice for exposure to the most relevant topics delivered and discussed by the top minds in commercial real estate. GlobeSt. conference attendees have invaluable access to the critical thinking of noted speakers and industry leaders, as well as the ability to forge new business partnerships with hundreds of leading owners, lenders, investors, developers, brokers, and service providers from across the nation. https://www.event.globest.com/netlease About ALM ALM, an information and intelligence company, provides customers with critical news, data, analysis, marketing solutions and events to successfully manage the business of business. ALM serves a community of over 6 million business professionals seeking to discover, connect and compete in highly complex industries. Please visit www.alm.com for more information, and visit www.alm.com/events/ to learn about our upcoming events. Please follow us on Twitter @ALMMedia. ALM Media Contact: Rachael Wolensky [email protected] SOURCE ALM Related Links http://www.alm.com KERRVILLE, Texas, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- James Avery Artisan Jewelry, a family-owned jewelry retailer based in Texas, announces the opening of its new store today at Brazos Town Center in Rosenberg. "As Texas cities grow, we look for opportunities to serve our Customers in more convenient ways including this new store location. We're excited to bring the jewelry our Customers know and love even closer to home,"says James Avery Manager of Strategic Initiatives Lindsey Avery Tognietti. In addition to featuring James Avery's newest designs, this store is offering special-edition, out-of- retirement Designs from our Archives for a limited time. This collection features pieces made in small batches and designed by Mr. Avery as well as several of our other designers throughout the years. Beginning today, Guests are invited to register for a gift card drawing for $50, $100 or $500 to be held during the grand opening celebration Saturday, March 23. The first 100 Guests to make a purchase during grand opening day will receive a special gift. The Brazos Town Center James Avery Artisan Jewelry store is under the direction of Manager Kiersten Carter and is located at 24701 Southwest Freeway, Suite #100. Store hours are 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and 12 to 6 p.m. Sunday. About James Avery Artisan Jewelry James Avery is a vertically integrated, family-owned company located in the heart of the Texas Hill Country. We offer finely crafted jewelry designs for men and women in sterling silver, 14K and 18K gold, gemstones and leather wallets designed by our own skilled artisans in Kerrville, Texas. We are a multi-channel retailer with 87 James Avery stores in five states. Our jewelry is also available in more than 215 Dillard's stores in Texas and 28 additional states, and nationwide through JamesAvery.com. James Avery crafts jewelry in four Texas workshops one each in Comfort, Fredericksburg, Hondo and Kerrville. For more information, visit JamesAvery.com or facebook.com/JamesAvery. About the Drawings Odds of winning depend on total number of entries received. Thirty James Avery gift cards will be awarded: twenty-four $50 gift cards, three $100 gift cards and three $500 gift cards. Entries accepted March 13- March 23. Hourly drawings held March 23 between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. during the grand opening celebration. No purchase necessary. Must be at least 13 years old to enter. Only one entry per person per day. Winners not eligible to win a subsequent gift card in the same promotion. Winners need not be present to win; however, if prize is not claimed within 14 days of drawing, prize will be awarded to an alternate winner. Associates and immediate family members not eligible for this gift card promotion. SOURCE James Avery Artisan Jewelry "Talking to people, listening to their concerns, and working to find solutions to help make Phoenix a better place for their families has been the focus of this campaign," Gallego said. "As Mayor, I will continue to work closely and collaboratively with my city council colleagues to create a great American city that improves people's lives by focusing on innovation, inclusiveness, and sustainability." Fighting for a Phoenix that works for everyone has been the backbone of Gallego's campaign values and will remain her vision as mayor. As the mother of a young son, Gallego also has a clear focus on Phoenix's future. Gallego is committed to preserving and building the kind of city where our children will be able to obtain a world-class education, high-wage jobs and great quality of life. With a focus on Phoenix's present and future, Gallego will work tirelessly to grow our economy, create jobs and stand up for these values as Mayor. Gallego looks forward to working with Phoenix's business community and non-profit sector to continue advancing our economy and ensuring that Phoenicians have opportunities to thrive. "People from all across Phoenix delivered a message tonight -- they want a city that works for them. They want a mayor who will put them first, one they can trust, and one who is held accountable to them and not special interests," Gallego said. "The journey to tonight was long and challenging, and I did not walk it alone. For the countless individuals who have made personal sacrifices to support me in this race, I thank you and I am honored to continue to advocate for you and for our city every day as the Mayor of Phoenix." Gallego is an alumna of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, where she earned her M.B.A. Before being elected as Mayor, Gallego served on the Phoenix City Council for five years, having previously held a leading position in Strategic Planning and Economic Development for Salt River Project, the electricity and water provider. In that role, she worked to attract new companies and bring high-paying jobs to Phoenix, a focus she will continue as part of her commitment to serve the people of Phoenix. SOURCE Kate Gallego for Phoenix Mayor Related Links https://kategallego.com/ As part of a cohort of 125 new YGL members, Dr. Huang was selected from thousands of candidates from all over the world after a public nomination process, evaluations and interviews led by selection committees within the WEF. The Forum of Young Global Leaders has more than 1,300 members and alumni representing more than 100 nationalities. Young Global Leaders include CEOs of startups and Fortune 500 companies, heads of government, recipients of the Nobel Prize, Academy Award winners and United Nations Goodwill Ambassadors. "Every year, the Forum of Young Global Leaders recognizes the world's leading changemakers under 40. Our role is to further cultivate their ability and influence to improve the state of the world," said Mariah Levin, Head of the Forum of Young Global Leaders at the World Economic Forum. "It's a great honor to join the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders 2019 cohort, which I accept on behalf of my colleagues at Malong and the global AI research community," said Dr. Huang. "My colleagues and I know we need to build and sustain new relationships all over the world to show how AI can contribute to solving society's greatest challenges. The World Economic Forum has enabled a much deeper level of engagement with other stakeholders. I'm excited to serve as a YGL." Malong Technologies is also a member of the WEF's Technology Pioneers. Dr. Huang participated in the WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China in September 2018, and at the Annual Meeting in Davos in January 2019. Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, launched the Forum of Young Global Leaders in 2004 as a way of helping the world meet increasingly complex and interrelated challenges. Today, the Forum of Young Global Leaders is an independent non-profit foundation recognized by Swiss law that forms an integral part of the World Economic Forum, with YGLs playing visible roles in Forum meetings, initiatives and projects. The Forum of Young Global Leaders is a five-year leadership program, bringing together diverse, dynamic and globally representative leaders with the mission to create a community with the vision, courage and influence to drive positive change in the world. About Malong Technologies: Malong Technologies is an artificial intelligence company that provides state-of-the-art computer vision technology for the enterprise. Founded in 2014, the company develops products and solutions for businesses worldwide based on award-winning scientific research. Malong Technologies is on a mission to help enterprises transform with AI to increase efficiency and quality across industries such as retail and healthcare. The company's headquarters are in Shenzhen, China, with teams in Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo and Bentonville, USA. For more information, visit https://www.malong.com. About World Economic Forum: The World Economic Forum, committed to improving the state of the world, is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost political, business and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. (www.weforum.org). Contact in USA/ROW: Kevin Kutz +1 425 984 4777 [email protected] Contact in China: Pearl Peng +86 186 0040 5738 [email protected] SOURCE Malong Technologies Related Links http://www.malong.com VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Netcents Technology Inc. ("NetCents" or the "Company") (CSE: NC) (Frankfurt: 26N) (OTCQB: NTTCF), is pleased to announce that it has entered into an agreement allowing processing of cryptocurrency payments for ILO Crypto ("ILOCX", part of ILOCX Limited, London, England.) Edward Fitzpatrick, CEO of ILOCX, said, "The significance of this transaction is enormous for crypto holders everywhere, this partnership is giving them high quality alternative options for utilizing their capital currently locked in Bitcoin, ETH and various other altcoins. Hundreds of billions of dollars are sitting in crypto looking for new ways to put this capital to work, thanks to this partnership NetCents and ILOCX we can say with confidence that the era of utilization is here." ILOCX is a platform which raises non-equity capital for companies in a unique way by selling Initial License Offerings ("ILO's"). ILO's are a revenue-based method of raising capital, giving buyers the right to promote and or sell an underlying product or service and receive royalties based on the gross revenue of the company. ILOCX's first exchange platform allows its companies to list and sell an ILO to raise capital and enhance sales. ILOCX has signed 54 companies with 20+ already listed on the exchange. Additionally, ILOCX will be approving the listing of 30+ more companies over the coming weeks and has over 40 companies in the immediate pipeline. As part of this exclusive agreement with NetCents, ILOCX has launched www.ILOcrypto.com a specialist exchange focused on allowing anyone holding Bitcoin, ETH, and various other altcoins to use that cryptocurrency to buy ILO's. Through the merchant agreement, ILOCX will use the NetCents Merchant Gateway to power cryptocurrency transactions for its capital raising services. With $300 million in deals on the exchange to date, this platform demonstrates another way the NetCents and ILOCX partnership can tap into the hundreds of billions in crypto capital, giving crypto-holders alternative options for utilizing their capital and giving companies listing on ILOCX access to the capital they need. If your company or organization wishes to integrate the NetCents platform into your website, visit http://net-cents.com/business/register and sign up for a business account to complete the online form to get the digital integration and application processes started. About ILO Crypto ILOCX is a platform that allows companies to raise non-equity capital through the sale of ILO's and gives interested buyers the ability to earn revenue by purchasing a license to socially promote and or sell a product or service. ILOCX has mixed together a real market need with a matching tech solution by eliminating the dependency on equity as funding grows sparse, providing companies with the benefits of boosted awareness and sales which in turn boosts revenues, royalties and the trading price of the ILO, resulting in putting a sustainable business on the map. To learn more about how ILO's work visit www.ILOcrypto.com/how-it-works/ To view the exchange visit www.ILOexchange.com About NetCents NetCents Technology Inc, the transactional hub for all cryptocurrency payments, equips forward-thinking businesses with the technology to seamlessly integrate cryptocurrency processing into their payment model without taking on the risk or volatility of the crypto market. NetCents Technology is registered as a Money Services Business (MSB) with FINTRAC, which ensures our consumer's security and privacy. For more information, please visit the corporate website at www.net-cents.com or contact Investor Relations at [email protected] On Behalf of the Board of Directors NetCents Technology Inc. "Clayton Moore" Clayton Moore, CEO, Founder and Director NetCents Technology Inc. 1000 1021 West Hastings Street Vancouver, BC, V6E 0C3 Cautionary Note Regarding Forward Looking Information This release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address events or developments that the Company expects to occur, are 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 the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include regulatory actions, market prices, and continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions. Investors are cautioned that any such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, estimates and opinions of the Company's management on the date the statements are made. Except as required by applicable securities laws, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements in the event that management's beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change. The CSE has not reviewed, approved or disapproved the content of this press release. For more information, please visit the corporate website at www.net-cents.com or contact : Investor Relations [email protected] +1-604-676-5249 SOURCE NetCents Technology Inc. REDWOOD CITY, Calif., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, OpenGov - the leader in cloud software for government Budgeting and Performance - announced that former Chief Revenue Officer David Reeves has been appointed President and that Karen White and Maury Blackman have also been appointed as advisors. Appointment of David Reeves to President As former Chief Revenue Officer, Reeves led all of OpenGov's go-to-market efforts, responsible for sales, customer success, and marketing. Since David joined OpenGov, company revenue has grown 10X. "I am thrilled to recognize David as President of our company," said OpenGov CEO Zac Bookman. "David is an incredible partner to me and the executive team, and his appointment comes on the heels of a record-breaking 2018, in which the company surpassed 2,000 governments using our software." Reeves shared, "I am proud to help lead a company that is driving innovation in the Public Sector. Our mission to help governments become more effective and accountable ultimately impacts the lives of all of our nation's residents. OpenGov's mission is special and this is one of the most rewarding roles of my career." OpenGov's flagship technology The OpenGov Cloud is the only integrated cloud solution for budgeting, performance, communications, and reporting. This modern, multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service ("SaaS") solution connects stakeholders to the budget process, aligns budget dollars to strategic objectives, accurately forecasts personnel costs, and integrates with key government systems, resulting in improved outcomes and enhanced internal efficiencies for the public sector. Governments are adopting The OpenGov Cloud in record numbers. In recent months, Suffolk County, NY, the City of Minneapolis, MN, Maryland Department of Transportation, West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, the City of Clearlake, CA, the City of Tallahassee, FL, Louisiana Treasurer's Office, and California Department of Child Support Services, among many others, have selected OpenGov to streamline budgeting, performance, communications and reporting for their jurisdictions. Appointment of Karen White and Maury Blackman as Company Advisors OpenGov adds industry veterans Karen White and Maury Blackman as company advisors. Karen White is the Chief Executive Officer for RMS and an accomplished leader in the technology industry, with a 25-year track record of leading, innovating, and scaling global technology businesses. Karen started her career in Silicon Valley in 1993 as a senior executive at Oracle reporting to CEO Larry Ellison. She served as President and COO at Addepar, and CEO and Chairman of the Board at Syncplicity. Karen is an expert at bringing technology, innovation, data, and operations together to help drive digital transformation. Maury Blackman is President and CEO at Premise Data. He is a technology executive with 25 years of experience in leading high growth enterprise software companies. He previously served as President and CEO at the civic tech startup, Accela. Prior to joining Accela, Maury worked for Investools where he served in several executive positions. He has been recognized by Government Technology as one of its "Top 25 Doers, Dreamers, and Drivers" in 2015 and Ernst and Young awarded him 'Northern California's Entrepreneur of the Year 2016' becoming the first civic tech entrepreneur to win the award. "We are thrilled to welcome Karen and Maury as advisors to OpenGov," shared Bookman. "Their accomplishments and track records in scaling technology companies speak for themselves and we look forward to joining with them to drive OpenGov's leadership in government Budgeting and Performance." About OpenGov OpenGov is the leader in cloud-based solutions for government. The OpenGov Cloud is the only integrated cloud solution for budgeting, performance, communications and reporting. This multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service ("SaaS") solution connects stakeholders to the budget process, engages them for real-time feedback, accurately forecasts personnel costs, and integrates with key government systems, resulting in improved outcomes, enhanced internal efficiencies, and more time for strategic planning. Over 2,000 public agencies use OpenGov -- including the State of Ohio; the City of Richmond, VA; Flagstaff, AZ; and Washington, DC. OpenGov was founded in 2012, and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Emerson Collective, 8VC, and Thrive Capital. SOURCE OpenGov Related Links http://www.opengov.com (CNN) A prominent human rights activist and China critic based in Kazakhstan, has been arrested by Kazakh police and charged with inciting ethnic strife, according to his lawyer. Serikzhan Bilash is the co-founder of Atajurt, an Almaty-based organization that brings attention to the crackdown on Muslims in China's western region of Xinjiang. Aiman Umarova, Bilash's lawyer, said that her client was arrested on Saturday night in Almaty and transferred to Astana, the Kazakhstan capital. Umarova added that Bilash was "roughed up" during his arrest. If convicted, he could face up to 10 years in prison. Kazakhstan authorities could not be reached for comment. According to the US State Department, citing reports from international rights groups, scholars, and media organizations, as many as 800,000 to 1.1 million individuals have been detained in camps in Xinjiang since around April 2017. Bilash and other critics argue the facilities are re-education camps for political indoctrination and are an attempt to erase any Islamic presence from the region under a so-called policy of sinicization -- a process that attempts to assimilate minority cultures into the majority Han Chinese culture. Muslim minorities Atajurt has publicly lobbied for the closure of the Xinjiang camps and published accounts of those who had been detained and released. The group's YouTube channel is populated by stories of people in Kazakhstan who say their family members are missing in Xinjiang, locked in camps and unable to leave. Though the vast majority of those detained are Uyghur, the State Department says ethnic Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities living in China have also been detained. Over the past year, Bilash has repeatedly told CNN about what he called an ongoing campaign of harassment by the Kazakhstan authorities. Bilash says Astana has failed to oppose the camps because of the billions of dollars of investment Beijing has poured into Kazakhstan infrastructure projects in recent years, as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. Centers 'essentially boarding schools' The arrest comes as Xinjiang's most senior Uyghur official, chairman Shohrat Zakir, defended the detention centers on the sidelines of a meeting of China's National People's Congress in Beijing Tuesday. Zakir reiterated the Chinese government's long-held stance that the camps are "vocational training centers" where residents are taught voluntarily as part of an anti-radicalization program. "Claims that the trainees are abused and their freedom is restricted in the centers are wrong. The centers are essentially boarding schools. And food and lodging are all free," Zakir said at an open session of Xinjiang's delegates to the Congress. The official added that the centers had been "effective" in stopping religious extremism in Xinjiang, claiming the facilities protected detainees' dignity and human rights. Zakir denied there were more than a million people in the camps, and said as more Uyghurs "graduated" from the Xinjiang centers the number of inmates would decrease. "Generally speaking, there will be fewer and fewer trainees in these vocational training centers. If one day, the society doesn't need them anymore, vocational training centers will disappear gradually," he said. This story was first published on CNN.com, "Xinjiang human rights activist Serikzhan Bilash arrested by Kazakhstan police, lawyer says." TUALATIN, Ore., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Powin Energy Corporation has contracted to purchase 1.85 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of battery cells with Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL). CATL will be supplying lithium-ion cells, specifically lithium-iron-phosphate, for integration into Powin's battery energy storage systems (BESS). This supply agreement secures competitive pricing for Powin and substantial supply with a Tier 1 vendor through 2022. Powin's Stack modular battery systems have been deployed for use in numerous utility-scale, commercial and industrial, and microgrid applications including the largest batteries in both Canada and Mexico. Powin's Stack utilizes the advanced Battery Pack Operating System (Powin bp-OS) which allows for flexibility in selecting cell specifications and suppliers to ensure that Powin is offering the most competitive and best fit BESS in the market. The Powin bp-OS features industry leading battery system monitoring, balancing and controls. "This partnership is exciting for Powin and our customers because CATL is a highly respected name in the industry as the highest volume, most financially sound, and largest revenue battery manufacturer in the world," says Danny Lu, SVP at Powin. "CATL is known for cooperating with best-in-class EV customers including BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover and Daimler Benz. As the storage industry matures, we believe shortages of top-quality lithium-ion batteries for BESS will become a challenge to the industry, Powin is taking proactive steps to mitigate that risk by securing strategic supply agreements to meet the demand of our growing project backlog and pipeline." With Powin locking in Tier 1 battery cells from a top global supplier like CATL the cell that will power Powin's new Stack225 is secured for at least the next 1.85GWh of sales. Powin also has contracts with other suppliers for cells used in its Stack140 product. By adding CATL to its product mix Powin is not only securing Tier 1 cells, it is diversifying both its supply chain and product offerings. About Powin Energy Corporation Powin Energy has developed an advanced, safe and scalable battery energy storage system that is purpose-built for the demands of utility-scale, commercial and industrial, and microgrid applications. The company's Stack140 and Stack225 modular battery systems feature its patented Battery Pack Operating System (bp-OS) that provides critical insight into system functions and lifespan via the proprietary Battery Odometer and Warranty Tracker. Powin was incorporated in Oregon in 1990 and has spent almost three decades perfecting supply chain management, a key for success in this industry. Combined with the management team's decades of successful leadership experience in the energy, storage and utility industries, Powin Energy is able to deliver exceptional value to large-scale energy projects. For more information, visit http://PowinEnergy.com/ . SOURCE Powin Energy Related Links http://powinenergy.com PITTSBURGH, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Primanti Bros. Restaurant and Bar the 86-year-old, Pittsburgh-based casual purveyor of sandwiches topped with French fries has more than doubled the number of restaurants it operates since 2013. After two years of regional expansion in five states, Primanti Bros. returned home to open the concept's first in-airport location on March 13, 2019. The location at Pittsburgh International Airport will be the concept's 42nd. "We've been able to grow quickly because we know who we are," said David Head, Primanti Bros.' President and CEO. "Our fans crave authenticity, and after 86 years, we've been lucky to earn their trust and we're fortunate that endorsement has translated into new markets." Carrying on tradition Primanti Bros. remains steadfast in a commitment to its origins now using fresh, modern ingredients to build on the recipe of its classic sandwich. The restaurant earned a James Beard award in 2007 with the designation as an American Classic. The expansion to the airport represents the continued growth of the Primanti Bros. brand. The location allows the concept to test not only a new real estate segment but also new menu items and a new segment of consumers who may not experience the brand at its traditional locations. The 2,700 square foot airport location will serve the iconic Primanti Bros. sandwich Italian bread piled high with grilled meat, cheese, French fries, coleslaw and tomato. In addition, the new location will feature a full menu of American classics, its signature stainless steel bar and, for the first time breakfast. "We've experienced exceptional growth since 2013," said Head. "We're proud to have expanded our footprint across five states and hundreds of miles but we're honored to be coming home to the Pittsburgh Airport." Primanti Bros. continues its expansion in 2019 opening a location in summer in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania just outside Harrisburg. This location will be the fourth in the greater Harrisburg area. About Primanti Brothers In 1933, Joe Primanti opened a lunch cart in Pittsburgh's Strip District selling sandwiches to the hungry truckers who were coming and going at all times of the night. Encouraged by sales and positive feedback, Joe expanded to a small storefront where he was joined by his brothers Dick and Stanley and their nephew John DePriter. And that's how the very first Primanti Bros. location was born - Primanti Bros. currently has 43 locations, all dedicated to that early notion that folks deserve great food, with no pretense, for a good price. SOURCE Primanti Bros. Restaurant and Bar NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Below are experts from the ProfNet network who are available to discuss timely issues in your coverage area. You can also submit a query to the hundreds of thousands of experts in our network it's easy and free. Just fill out the query form to get started: http://prn.to/queryform EXPERT ALERTS Veteran Suicide Historical Perspective on Mueller Report Ancient Stained-Glass Windows Bridge Two Cultures New Poll Reveals Majority of American Millennials Embracing Socialism MEDIA JOBS OTHER NEWS & RESOURCES The Death of Guest Blogging: Did We Learn Anything? Media Insider: What's Making News This Week Blog Profiles: Dog Agility Blogs EXPERT ALERTS: Veteran Suicide US (Ret.) Army Col. David Dodd Director Point 27 "I was happy to hear about the Executive Order signed by President Trump to create a Cabinet-level task force bringing in local and state resources to combat veteran suicide. Veteran Suicide is a topic close to my heart, and I long to help make a difference. A battle buddy's suicide rocked my world. I wish, more than anything, I would have seen it coming and done something. He was one of the toughest Soldiers I knew, and I took him everywhere I went in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. If you had told me one of my Soldiers was going to commit suicide, I would have never guessed it would be Andy. To this day, I don't understand it. It has been a struggle to make peace with it. Many veterans carry physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental wounds so intensely painful they can't carry them alone, but they are not able to share them or ask for help. I believe letting Jesus reach down in that dark hole and pull them out is the best answer to veteran suicide." Dodd is director of Point 27, a global nonprofit based in Atlanta. He commanded a battalion of the first troops deployed to Afghanistan following 9/11, and served four deployments and a post at The Pentagon. ProfNet Profile: http://www.profnetconnect.com/daviddodd Website: https://point27.org/ Contact: Marcia Davis, [email protected] Historical Perspective on Mueller Report Thomas Alan Schwartz Professor of Political Science; Professor of European Studies Vanderbilt University Schwartz can provide a unique and historical perspective on the forthcoming Mueller report, including: details into historical efforts by the U.S. to influence elections abroad (including Russia); a look into U.S.-Russia relations over the past 20 years, and how our role in Ukraine influenced its coming to a head in 2016; parallels to evidence of past Russian election influence in 1968, depending on the Mueller report; additional context specific to the report findings. Says Schwartz: "Some of the context I would supply might be a little different from most. For one, there is some historical evidence of the Russians trying to influence past U.S. elections, especially in 1968. The efforts tended to be rather crude compared to some of their recent cyber approaches, but there might be parallels, depending on what Mueller reports." Note: Schwartz is available via phone and/or satellite TV interview via an on-campus studio, open 24/7. Bio: https://as.vanderbilt.edu/history/bio/thomas-schwartz Contact: Spencer Turney, [email protected] Ancient Stained-Glass Windows Bridge Two Cultures Brian W. Smith Program Director, Treasurer American Friends for the Preservation of Saint Germain des Pres "In the mid-13th century, Paris was a leading force in expressive glass painting. Much of the beautiful stained glass from Paris' oldest church in Saint Germain des Pres was destroyed over the years, particularly during the French Revolution, but amazingly some panels remain intact. Stained-glass aficionados and lovers of historical artwork, architecture, and iconic religious works have been fortunate enough to see two of the ancient French church's stained-glass windows right here in the United States, at the Met and the Walters museums French or American, these ancient pieces of our shared human history are nothing less than inspiring." Smith is an acknowledged expert in bank regulation and regulatory transactions involving complex, interindustry, or first impression issues as well as payment systems/products and financial product development and distribution. He serves as director and treasurer of American Friends for the Preservation of Saint Germain des Pres and has over 45 years of experience as a senior executive in an international financial services company, as a senior federal bank regulator, and as a senior partner in a multinational law firm. During this period, he has been associated with many of the major developments in financial services. He is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Business and St. John's University (BA and JD). He resides in Gulfstream, Fla. Online Press Kit: http://preservesaintgermain.onlinepresskit247.com Website: www.PreserveSaintGermain.org Contact: Klaudia Simon, [email protected] New Poll Reveals Majority of American Millennials Embracing Socialism Dr. John Huber Chairman Mainstream Mental Health Generation Z has a more positive view of the word "socialism" than previous generations, and -- along with Millennials -- are more likely to embrace socialistic policies and principles than past generations, according to a new Harris Poll given exclusively to Axios. Dr. Huber says, "Socialism, communism, and fascism are all common bonded by the idea of the collective being more important than the individual. All three 'isms' are against the fundamental principals for which America was founded upon. How did things get to this point? Speculation aside, we should examine how ideals and beliefs have sustained their longevity in other cultures. Normally, one or more elders are entrusted to teach the principles, ideals, history and skills of their tribe to the youth. These elders are often highly regarded and are seen as wise. It's not just teaching the youth and others about the cultural identity of the tribe, it's getting individuals excited and passion about the cultural identity of the tribe. Who are some of the key American elders that we have entrusted to teach the youth about our cultural ideals and identity? If you didn't have an immediate answer to that question, then you can imagine that American Millennials don't have one either. People are impacted by and learn from their parents, teachers, peers, and the media they consume. If a person is not deeply rooted in individualism and a freedom-conscious mindset, and if the majority of their spheres of influence are extolling the virtues of communism, fascism, and socialism, how can we truly fault a person for developing an acceptance or affinity for these ideas?" Dr. Huber is the chairman of Mainstream Mental Health, a non-profit organization that brings lasting and positive change to the lives of individuals that suffer from mental health issues. A mental health professional for more than 20 years, Dr. Huber is a clinical forensic psychologist and a practitioner with privileges at two long-term, acute-care hospitals. He has appeared on more than 300 top-tier radio shows and 30 national television programs, and is the host of "Mainstream Mental Health Radio," which is heard nationwide and features interviews with today's top mental health professionals. TV clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE5d3daJnAQ Contact: Ryan McCormick, [email protected] MEDIA JOBS: Following are links to job listings for staff and freelance writers, editors and producers. You can view these and more job listings on our Job Board: https://www.cisionjobs.com/jobs/united-states/ OTHER NEWS & RESOURCES: Following are links to other news and resources we think you might find useful. If you have an item you think other reporters would be interested in and would like us to include in a future alert, please drop us a line at [email protected] 21ST CENTURY HUSTLE: FREELANCING IN THE FAST-MOVING GIG ECONOMY. Just last year, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its first freelance economy research in over a decade, finding that 10.7 percent of US workers -- more than 16 million people -- are employed through either contingent jobs or alternative employment. This is the rise of what we now call the gig economy. But freelancing comes with a steep learning curve: https://prn.to/2H4UslN MEDIA INSIDER: WHAT'S MAKING NEWS THIS WEEK. Media Insider is a weekly roundup of media stories from the week. In this week's edition includes a look at The Atlantic's metered paywall, The New York Times' audio ambitions, Google's ban on political ads, and more: https://prn.to/2XTkxJN audio ambitions, Google's ban on ads, and more: https://prn.to/2XTkxJN BLOG PROFILES: DOG AGILITY BLOGS. Each week, PR Newswire's Audience Relations team selects an industry/subject and profiles a handful of sites that do a good job with promoting and contributing to the conversation. This week, they look at a few dog agility blogs: https://prn.to/2VIYK5O PROFNET is an exclusive service of PR Newswire. To contact ProfNet: [email protected] or 800-776-3638, ext. 1 SOURCE ProfNet Related Links http://www.profnet.com SAN JOSE, Calif., March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the San Jose Police Department announced the arrest of Carlos Eduardo Arevalo Carranza, a Salvadorian national with a long history of committing violent crimes, for the brutal murder of a 59-year-old woman in San Jose, California. Federal immigration agents filed at least six detainer requests in the past for Carranza in Los Angeles and Santa Clara Counties. A recent news account of this case can be viewed here. The San Jose Police Officers' Association issued this statement in response to this vile act: "First, we as a society must strengthen our laws surrounding the sexual assault and victimization of women. The perpetrator that violently killed 59-year-old Bambi Larson should have been held accountable for his previous crimes against women, served his jail sentence and been deported. Our legal system is broken. When it comes to policing, there's a distinct difference between a Dreamer who commits a victimless crime and a violent serial sexual predator with multiple offenses. Our society must recognize there's a difference between someone who is trying to make ends meet for their family, and a self-admitted gang member, a monster who brutally murders an innocent woman in her own home. While trying to protect the Dreamers and law-abiding immigrants who have come to America to improve their lives, our current jigsaw puzzle of immigration laws has let too many violent offenders go free. If you are an undocumented violent criminal, you do not deserve any legal protection that allows you to continue breaking laws and harming women, police officers and others. There is no moral justification to protect someone this vile from serving their jail time and being deported. We must work to fix these laws now, so that public safety officers can protect everyone who lives in our communities, regardless of their immigration status." Paul Kelly, President San Jose Police Officers' Association The San Jose Police Officers' Association represents the men and women of the San Jose Police Department from the ranks of police officer up to Deputy Chief. SOURCE San Jose Police Officers' Association Mr. John Cai, CEO of SCI, briefed on the mission and business perspectives of SCI during the opening speech. Mr. Cai believes China's oil and gas industries development may bring both opportunities and challenges to all global & local market participants. Michael Mao presented the outstanding performance of China LNG industry in 2018, and conducted an in-depth analysis on future industry entrants and import potentials. He believes with the continuous market-orientation reforms in China natural gas industry, an increasing number of participants will get involved in import businesses. Though facing great challenges from natural gas and other substitutes, China's LPG industry will have a notable supply gap to be fulfilled by imports in the future, which is expected to bring opportunities for China alkane deep-processing players. James Gao then shared his insights on China's oil refining and bunker industries. He said the emerging of private refining projects in China in recent years stimulated the diversification of supply pattern in China's oil refining industry. China's oil refining industry may experience a shuffle and integration in the next five years. Meanwhile, the low-sulfur trend of the global bunker market will bring opportunities for China's bunker industry. James Gao reckons China has enough ability to achieve self-sufficiency in the low-sulfur bunker supply in the near future, and even may export to key global markets with central government's policy support. Recently, SCI has provided information and consulting services, covering basic data, high-end reports, market studies, customized reports, etc. for various leading enterprises from over 30 countries including the U.S., the U.K., Russia, Singapore, etc. Focusing on China and serving global customers, SCI has been recognized as the one to trust for the Chinese commodity market. SCI gains in-depth insights into China energy, chemical, agricultural and metal industry performance, policies and industry trends. SOURCE SCI SEATTLE, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Seabourn, the world's finest ultra-luxury travel experience, announced today that it will name its first new ultra-luxury purpose-built expedition ship Seabourn Venture, paying tribute to the remote destinations visited by the brand's highly successful expedition and Ventures by Seabourn excursion programs and the fascinating places yet to be explored in the future. Seabourn began offering expedition experiences during its first sailing to Antarctica in 2013 led by a highly qualified, world-class expedition team and those itineraries have been offered every season since. The success of the Antarctica program opened the door for similar optional experiences under the name Ventures by Seabourn featuring Zodiacs, kayaks, and guided hikes offered on Seabourn ships in a number of desirable destinations around the world, including Alaska, Australia & New Zealand, South America, and Northern European destinations such as Norway and Greenland. "The name Seabourn Venture is an exciting step in the process of launching even more immersive voyages designed specifically for the expedition traveler who dares to go beyond the norm in terms of destinations and experiences they seek," said Richard Meadows, president of Seabourn. "Combined with the team of 26 experts that will bring the expedition experience to life, we are going to draw on our pedigree to deliver breathtaking experiences and I know Seabourn Venture is going to create lifetime memories for the adventurer that wants to go farther, into more remote destinations than they may have ever seen before, in true Seabourn ultra-luxury." Seabourn Venture is scheduled to launch in June 2021, with a second yet-to-be-named sister ship slated to launch in May 2022. Both ships will be designed and built for diverse environments to PC6 Polar Class standards and will include a plethora of modern hardware and technology that will extend the ships global deployment and capabilities. The new ships, which are being built by T. Mariotti, will be a brand new innovative design, created specifically for the ultra-luxury expedition traveler, and will include many features that have made Seabourn ships so successful. A new and exciting offering will be two custom-built submarines carried onboard, providing an unforgettable view of the world beneath the ocean's surface. The ships will also be designed to carry a complement of kayaks and 24 Zodiacs that can accommodate all onboard guests at once, which will allow for a truly immersive experience. Each ship will feature 132 luxurious oceanfront veranda suites. More details and full-color renderings of the ship and its interior spaces will be released in the months ahead. Specific details about itineraries and booking availability will be released in Spring 2019. The first ship is currently planned to sail in the Arctic in late summer 2021, with a full summer season in Antarctica to follow. Both expedition vessels will feature an onboard crew that will include outstanding and well-traveled expedition teams comprised of highly regarded wilderness experts, scientists, historians and naturalists. During each sailing, team members regularly interact with guests, providing keen insight to deliver a rich holistic travel experience. These fascinating, accomplished experts are also part of the Seabourn Conversations program, providing in-depth insights into the history, ecology and culture of the places they visit. Their valuable insights are offered both in formal presentations on a variety of topics and in more casual conversations over meals or at leisure. Seabourn continues to represent the pinnacle of ultra-luxury travel with intimate ships offering key elements that set the line apart: spacious, thoughtfully appointed suites, many with verandas and all 100% ocean front; superb dining in a choice of venues; complimentary premium spirits and fine wines available on board at all times; award-winning service and a relaxed, sociable atmosphere that makes guests feel right at home on board. The ships travel the globe to many of the world's most desirable destinations, including marquee cities, more than 170 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and lesser-known ports and hideaways. To learn more about Seabourn or to request a brochure, contact a travel professional, call Seabourn at 1-800-929-9391, or visit www.seabourn.com About Seabourn: Seabourn currently operates a fleet of five modern ultra-luxury ships and is a proud member of World's Leading Cruise Lines. The exclusive alliance also includes Carnival Cruise Lines, Holland America Line, Princess Cruises, Cunard Line, Costa Cruises, AIDA, P&O Cruises UK, P&O Cruises Australia and fathom. Seabourn is a brand of Carnival Corporation and plc (NYSE/LSE: CCL andNYSE: CUK). Seabourn is the official cruise partner of UNESCO World Heritage under a multi-year agreement to help promote sustainable tourism at World Heritage sites around the world. Find Seabourn on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest. Notes to Editors: Seabourn is consistently ranked among the world's top travel choices by professional critics and the discerning readers of prestigious travel publications such as Departures, Travel + Leisure and Conde Nast Traveler. Its stylish, distinctive expedition cruising vacations are known for: Intimate ships with a private club atmosphere Intuitive, personalized service provided by staff passionate about exceeding guests expectations Complimentary premium spirits and fine wines available on board at all times Welcome Champagne and complimentary in-suite bar stocked with your preferences Tipping is neither required, nor expected Ventures by Seabourn, optional shore excursions, enhance and extend your experience in select destinations Spa & Wellness by Dr. Andrew Weil, featuring an exclusive mindful living program World-class dining venues are all complimentary, dine where, when and with whom you wish Purpose-built expedition ships, PC6 ice-strengthened hull, with advanced maneuvering technology for superior stability, safety and comfort World-class Expedition Team, delivering immersive experiences Handcrafted itineraries developed for the expedition traveler to the most coveted and familiar remote destinations in the world Two custom-built 6-guest submarines giving the option to extend your expedition further for greater ocean exploration Enhanced expedition experiences with Zodiacs, mountain and ebikes, scuba diving, snorkeling and optional kayaks Open bridge policy*, hosted by members of the Expedition Team providing firsthand access to the ship's command center and officers navigating your journey Meticulous and purposeful adventurers' resort at sea designed for the luxury traveler with unique attributes and spaces to enhance your experience All veranda, all ocean-front suites luxuriously appointed Committed to environmental stewardship and sustainability Click to Tweet: [email protected] has named its first ultra-luxury, purpose-built expedition ship "Seabourn Venture," drawing on its heritage in providing expedition experiences. Learn more: http://bit.ly/2HuA78M #ExtraordinaryWorlds SOURCE Seabourn Related Links http://www.seabourn.com PORT ST. JOE, Fla., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Skyborne Technology, Inc., a developer, manufacturer and integrator of next generation manned and automated first responder communication, unmanned airship and drone aviation systems has acquired Costin Airport in Gulf County, FL for flight operations, manufacturing and unmanned aircraft systems training. Unmanned Systems, Inc., a manufacturer of unmanned systems and drones will be moving part of its manufacturing and training to Gulf County, Costin Airport to further enhance the joint effort between Skyborne Technology and Unmanned Systems. "Skyborne Technology and Unmanned Systems will help build employment in Gulf County, Florida to further develop the educational needs in high tech manned and unmanned systems," stated Don Bintz, President of Unmanned Systems, Inc. Jim McKnight, Director of Economic Development for Gulf County, Florida, said, "Skyborne Technology has become the good news people for our county, first they open a plant in the County's Wewahitchka Industrial Building, then make an offer on the Costin Airport, then hire their first three Gulf County staff and have now closed on the purchase of the Costin Airport, which will be used for assembly training and flight operations. Skyborne Technology staying the course of developing facilities and operations on both ends of the County has been a beacon of hope during our community's response to and recovery from Hurricane Michael." "We are looking forward to the upcoming airship and drone test flights at Costin Airport as this is strategic for our customer base in Central America and the Caribbean as a one stop shop for inspection of the technologies," stated Dr. Carlos Arzu, President of Skyborne Central America. "The co-location in our community of these two manufacturing leaders in the unmanned aerial vehicle arena provides an unprecedented opportunity for the citizens of Gulf County! In conjunction with the related training opportunities under development in the local high schools, and underway at Gulf Coast, these companies are poised to fully develop and deploy these transformational technologies, becoming a magnet for high tech opportunity in the region," said Dr. John Holdnak, President of Gulf Coast State College. "Skyborne chose Gulf County for both the political support and local assets that will insure Skyborne's growth and opportunities. We are planning a press conference in the next two weeks to display several of our air assets at the recently acquired Costin airport," stated Mike Lawson CEO of Skyborne Technology, Inc. About Gulf County Gulf County, FL is a place where both businesses and families thrive. Innovative companies are rethinking their strategies and exploring new frontiers. Based on the assets in our community, Gulf County is positioned to respond to these demands and help businesses and industries secure strong market positions for future growth. About Skyborne Technology Skyborne Technology, FL is a next generation manufacturer and developer of manned and unmanned aircraft, airships and sea systems worldwide with offices in Central America, South America and the United States. About Unmanned Systems, Inc. Unmanned Systems Incorporated is a Small, Women Owned, Native America Business involved in Training, Testing and Developing Unmanned Aircraft. USI has been conducting Unmanned Aerial Vehicle operations globally since 2003. For further information visit our website at www.usi.aero. About Gulf Coast College Gulf Coast State College (GCSC) is an educational leader in Northwest Florida, meeting the workforce development needs of Florida's central panhandle. As a comprehensive educational provider, GCSC delivers high quality certificate, associate, and baccalaureate degrees, as well as an exceptional non- credit programing in the professional development and industry certification arenas. GCSC also provides an extensive set of business/product development tools and opportunities to support our business and industry partners. Cautionary note: This report contains forward-looking statements, particularly those regarding cash flow, capital expenditures and investment plans. Resource estimates, unless specifically noted, are considered speculative. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainties because they relate to events and depend on factors that will or may occur in the future. Actual results may vary depending upon exploration activities, industry production, commodity demand and pricing, currency exchange rates, and, but not limited to, general economic factors. Cautionary Note to U.S. investors: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission specifically prohibits the use of certain terms, such as "reserves" unless such figures are based upon actual production or formation tests and can be shown to be economically and legally producible under existing economic and operating conditions. Contacts: Gulf County Jim McKnight 1 (850) 832-0227 [email protected] Skyborne Technology, Inc. Deborah Cheek 1 (850) 588-1747 [email protected] Unmanned Systems Incorporated Donald G. Bintz 1 (702) 324-9966 [email protected] www.usi.aero Gulf Coast State College Loretta Costin [email protected] SOURCE Skyborne Technology, Inc. LONDON, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/-- On Monday, a delegation from the regional Caribbean Airline LIAT attended a Cabinet meeting with the Government of St Kitts and Nevis to discuss several proposals to salvage the cash-strapped Antigua-based company. The Government confirmed that it is seriously considering LIAT's propositions and that it has established a special committee that would analyse the best way to move forward. St Kitts and Nevis is a known advocate for increased international mobility. Ever since it established its pioneering Citizenship by Investment (CBI) Programme in 1984, it has been investing consistently in expanding its diplomatic relations. The country's passport holders can access approximately 150 countries and territories on a visa-free or visa-on-arrival basis. Initiatives like the Sustainable Growth Fund (SGF) under the country's Platinum Standard CBI Programme aim to support and promote the islands' prosperous tourist industry. Foreign investors who seek to acquire second citizenship can do so by contributing to the SGF and passing all due diligence checks required under the Programme. Since it is the most straightforward and secure way to St Kitts and Nevis' citizenship, SGF is often perceived as the reliable choice for global individuals and their families looking to secure their future in a country that is ranked highly for rule of law, as scored in the latest World Justice Project index. As tourism in St Kitts and Nevis is well established, better interconnectivity between the islands is key to the development and diversification of the sector. According to a press release issued by the Office of the Prime Minister, "Dr. the Honourable Timothy Harris-led Team Unity Cabinet of St Kitts and Nevis has established a high-level advisory committee to thoroughly consider a number of proposals put forward by regional airline, LIAT, and to advise it on the possible way forward." Four regional governments already hold shares in LIAT and, last week, news emerged of another four governments being encouraged to further invest in it. LIAT operates 491 weekly flights and is crucial for regional mobility, thus countries in the Caribbean have a vested interest to find a non-disruptive, sensible solution. As St Kitts and Nevis confirms looking into how it can support LIAT, other neighbouring countries that are not currently shareholders have been fast to respond, some of them holding dedicated Cabinet meetings this week. Contact: [email protected] SOURCE CS Global Partners Related Links https://csglobalpartners.com Sully, a two and a half-year-old Labrador Retriever, is a highly trained service dog who was paired with the former President and Navy veteran in June 2018, and was specifically matched to provide assistance and companionship to President Bush in his daily activities. America's VetDogs , a national not-for-profit service dog provider based in Smithtown, New York, was recommended to the former President through VetDogs' relationship with Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, MD. The Bush family worked with America's VetDogs to find a dog that would meet the President's needs. Sully assisted with everyday tasks such as retrieving items, summoning help, and most importantly providing companionship to President Bush in his daily activities. In February 2019, Sully joined the Walter Reed Bethesda Facility Dog Program as a Navy Hospital Corpsman Second Class (HM2), where he will provide interactive care for patients and staff using innovative Animal Assisted Interventions (AAI) during their road to recovery. "The devotion and comfort that dogs provide their owners goes unmatched," said AKC President and CEO Dennis Sprung. "Sully served the late President George H.W. Bush honorably; providing him support and assistance, but even more importantly, love and companionship. The 2019 AKC Paw of Courage gives us an opportunity to pay tribute to the devotion that Sully brought to the late President in the final months of his life." The Labrador Retriever even has an Instagram account (@SullyHWBush) where he has grown his following to more than 250,000. Sully will be honored with a 2019 AKC Paw of Courage medallion and an engraved plaque in honor of his notable service to the late President George H.W. Bush. "It's an honor for America's VetDogs to accept the AKC's Paw of Courage Award on behalf of Sully," says President & CEO John Miller, America's VetDogs. "America's VetDogs is very proud of Sully and his service to President Bush. Sully is a wonderful example of all of the service dogs that we provide to our nations veterans and we look forward to him continuing his mission at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center." Any working dog is eligible to receive an AKC Paw of Courage; the award is not specific to purebred dogs. To nominate a dog for a Paw of Courage award, click here. About the American Kennel Club Founded in 1884, the American Kennel Club is a not-for-profit organization, which maintains the largest registry of purebred dogs in the world and oversees the sport of purebred dogs in the United States. The AKC is dedicated to upholding the integrity of its registry, promoting the sport of purebred dogs and breeding for type and function. Along with its more than 5,000 licensed and member clubs and its affiliated organizations, the AKC advocates for the purebred dog as a family companion, advances canine health and well-being, works to protect the rights of all dog owners and promotes responsible dog ownership. More than 22,000 competitions for AKC-registered purebred dogs are held under AKC rules and regulations each year including conformation, agility, obedience, rally, tracking, herding, lure coursing, coonhound events, hunt tests, field and earthdog tests. Affiliate AKC organizations include the AKC Humane Fund, AKC Canine Health Foundation, AKC Reunite and the AKC Museum of the Dog. For more information, visit www.akc.org. AKC, American Kennel Club, the American Kennel Club seal and design, and all associated marks and logos are trademarks, registered trademarks and service marks of The American Kennel Club, Inc. Become a fan of the American Kennel Club on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @AKCDogLovers About America's VetDogs Since 2003, America's VetDogs (www.VetDogs.org) has trained and placed guide and service dogs to provide independence, enhanced mobility, and companionship to veterans with disabilities from all eras. In 2015, VetDogs opened its programs to first responders, including fire, police, and emergency medical personnel. America's VetDogs is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization founded by the Guide Dog Foundation and serves clients from across the United States. VetDogs relies on contributions from generous individuals, corporations, service clubs, and foundations to fund its mission to help those who have served our country live with dignity and independence. It costs over $50,000 to breed, raise, train, and place one assistance dog, but America's VetDogs provides its services completely free of charge to the individual. Be sure to watch Sunny on NBC's TODAY, and follow our other "Puppies with a Purpose" on NBC stations in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Boston, and on social media. America's VetDogs has been accredited by both the International Guide Dog Federation and Assistance Dogs International. SOURCE American Kennel Club Related Links http://www.akc.org GREENSBORO, N.C., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Tanger Factory Outlet Centers, Inc. (NYSE: SKT) announced today that its financial results for the quarter will be released Monday, May 6, 2019 after the market close. The Company will host its conference call for analysts, investors and other interested parties on Tuesday, May 7, 2019 at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time. To access the conference call on Tuesday, May 7, 2019, listeners should dial 1-877-277-5113, conference ID # 6486093. Alternatively, a live audio webcast of this call will be available to the public on Tanger's Investor Relations website investors.tangeroutlets.com , hosted by S&P Global Market Intelligence. Market Intelligence subscribers may also access the webcast via the database at https://marketintelligence.spglobal.com . A telephone replay of the call will be available from May 7 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time through 11:59 p.m. on May 14, 2019, by dialing 1-855-859-2056, conference ID # 6486093. An online archive of the webcast will also be available through May 14, 2019. About Tanger Factory Outlet Centers Tanger Factory Outlet Centers, Inc. (NYSE:SKT), is a publicly-traded REIT headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina that presently operates and owns, or has an ownership interest in, a portfolio of 44 upscale outlet shopping centers. Tanger's operating properties are located in 22 states coast to coast and in Canada, totaling approximately 15.3 million square feet, leased to over 3,100 stores which are operated by more than 530 different brand name companies. The Company has more than 38 years of experience in the outlet industry. Tanger Outlet Centers continue to attract more than 189 million shoppers annually. For more information on Tanger Outlet Centers, call 1-800-4TANGER or visit the Company's website at www.tangeroutlets.com . Contact: Jim Williams EVP and CFO (336) 834-6800 [email protected] Cyndi Holt Vice President of Investor Relations (336) 834-6892 [email protected] SOURCE Tanger Factory Outlet Centers, Inc. Related Links http://www.tangeroutlet.com INDIANAPOLIS, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The nation's largest and most respected veterans organization turns 100 this weekend. Founded by a group of World War I veterans during a three-day meeting in Paris, France, which occurred March 15-17, 1919, The American Legion today is comprised of nearly two million veterans in approximately 13,000 posts throughout the United States and in military communities overseas. "The story of The American Legion is one of amazing accomplishments over the last century," current National Commander Brett P. Reistad said. "From the creation of the original GI Bill to a system of health care for veterans, The American Legion has its fingerprints on every meaningful piece of veterans legislation that has passed since World War I. But it is what we do at the community level that defines who we are. The volunteers at our posts are providing honor guards at veterans' funerals, conducting welcome-home events for returning troops, feeding the homeless and operating as emergency shelters during natural disasters. Veterans all served our country in uniform. But Legionnaires keep serving America, even after we have taken our uniforms off." Prominent Legionnaires over the years have included Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., World War I Ace Eddie Rickenbacker, legendary movie star Jimmy Stewart and Gen. Colin Powell just to name a few. The organization will be celebrating its centennial through Veterans Day. The American Legion's 101st National Convention will be held Aug. 23-29 in its national headquarter's city of Indianapolis. The theme will be centered around the organization's vision for its second century. To learn more about The American Legion's centennial and history, visit www.legion.org/centennial Media contacts: John Raughter, [email protected], (317) 441-8847 SOURCE The American Legion Related Links http://www.legion.org PORTLAND, Ore., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Umpqua Bank, a subsidiary of Umpqua Holdings Corporation (UMPQ), has committed $1 million to four Portland Metro-based nonprofits to expand economic education and empowerment opportunities for underserved populations. As part of the Economic Empowerment Cohort formed and led by Umpqua, Bienestar and African American Alliance for Homeownership, Metropolitan Family Service, Self Enhancement, Inc., and Gateway to College National Network will advance initiatives that expand access to job and financial support services, affordable housing, post-secondary education and career readiness opportunities. In addition to its $1 million financial investment, Umpqua is leading a multi-year collaborative partnership with the nonprofit cohort that includes significant investment of company resources and expertise to establish and sustain innovative economic empowerment and equality programs. According to Umpqua Bank President & CEO Cort O'Haver, this new program is guided by a larger vision to create an approach to corporate philanthropy that's more holistic and impactful for communities. "Umpqua is aligning our business and philanthropic goals and mobilizing our financial resources, executive leadership, community investment initiatives, and deep bench of expertise to help these outstanding organizations work together and build a stronger, more equitable region," said O'Haver. "For the next three years, we're making their work our work in ways that create value and achieve results. Together, our goal is to accelerate progress on this important issue at a time when economic disparity in Portland Metro continues to grow." Umpqua's Economic Empowerment Cohort includes the following nonprofits: Bienestar and African American Alliance for Homeownership (AAAH). Bienestar provides affordable housing to Latino farm workers and other low-income families in Washington County. AAAH is a community-based HUD-approved housing counseling agency serving African American and other future homeowners in Portland. As part of the Umpqua cohort, Bienestar and AAAH will combine resources, and culturally-specific expertise and programs to expand affordable home purchase in Washington County for low-income populations, including families displaced by lack of affordability throughout the region. Umpqua is providing seed funding and expertise to establish and sustain the partnership. Metropolitan Family Service (MFS). MFS is a Portland-based nonprofit committed to strengthening early childhood development and youth success, advancing individual and family economic prosperity, and building effective approaches to community-based health and wellness across the entire lifespan. Partnering with Umpqua and organizations within the cohort will enable MFS to advance key financial health initiatives, including programs that connect low-income women to new jobs and career education. It will also help expand education and access to the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is significantly underutilized by low-income families for a variety of reasons. Self Enhancement, Inc. (SEI). For over 38 years, SEI has been a change agent in the City of Portland, striving to meet the complex needs of youth and their families by helping them to overcome cultural, educational and economic barriers. SEI is the second largest minority-owned organization in the state of Oregon and serves over 16,000 youth and families annually. SEI's mission is to guide youth from historically underserved backgrounds to realize their full potential. The Umpqua cohort will support a new Post High Leadership Academy to help African American and other underserved students attain financial self-sufficiency by supporting their transition through post-secondary education into a chosen career path. Gateway to College National Network. Headquartered in Portland, Gateway to College supports communities in creating pathways for students who have dropped out, or are educationally off track, to complete their high school education and work towards a post-secondary degree. Through the cohort, Gateway to College will expand its program in the Portland region, opening educational and economic success for roughly 29,000 local youth ages 16-24 not currently in school or working. About Umpqua Bank Umpqua Bank , headquartered in Roseburg, Ore., is a subsidiary of Umpqua Holdings Corporation, and has locations across Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada. Umpqua Bank has been recognized for its innovative customer experience and banking strategy by national publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Fast Company and CNBC. The company has been recognized for eight years in a row on FORTUNE magazine's list of the country's "100 Best Companies to Work For," and was recently named by The Portland Business Journal the Most Admired Financial Services Company in Oregon for the fourteenth consecutive year. In addition to its retail banking presence, Umpqua Bank also owns Financial Pacific Leasing, Inc., a nationally recognized commercial finance company that provides equipment leases to businesses. A subsidiary of Umpqua Holdings Corporation, Umpqua Investments, Inc., provides retail brokerage and investment advisory services in offices throughout Washington, Oregon, and California. About Umpqua Bank Charitable Foundation The Umpqua Bank Charitable Foundation recognizes the fundamental connection between education and economic prosperity. It works to strengthen the communities Umpqua Bank serves by investing in organizations and initiatives that expand access to education and create economic opportunity for children and families. The foundation was formed in April 2014 to demonstrate the company's deep commitment to the communities it serves. SOURCE Umpqua Holdings Corporation Related Links http://www.umpquabank.com RESTON, Va., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Leidos (NYSE: LDOS), a FORTUNE 500 science and technology leader, has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Navy's Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) to provide flexible, ready, and rapidly deployable capabilities for aviation systems worldwide. The multiple award, hybrid contract has a five-year base period of performance with five optional years, and a total potential value of $12.6 billion. Leidos specializes in the development, operations, and maintenance of both manned and unmanned airborne systems. Under the Contracted Maintenance, Modification, Aircrew, and Related Services contract, Leidos will provide aviation logistical services for fixed-wing, rotary-wing, unmanned aircraft vehicles, and lighter than air vehicles, as well as integrally related systems and weapon systems. The company will bring enterprise perspective, best-in-industry capability and the engineering discipline, which maximizes its technical expertise as a full spectrum global aviation services provider. Services will help increase aircraft readiness and provide speed to U.S. Navy initiatives. "We have decades of operational and integration expertise that has provided rapid solutions for our customers when they need them the most," said Senior Vice President Kevin Lansdowne, Leidos Airborne Solutions. "Our systems have successfully flown thousands of hours supporting the warfighter in combat zones as well as on the ground processing and exploiting mission-critical information." NAVAIR provides full life-cycle support of naval aviation aircraft, weapons and systems operated by Sailors and Marines. About Leidos Leidos is a Fortune 500 information technology, engineering, and science solutions and services leader working to solve the world's toughest challenges in the defense, intelligence, homeland security, civil, and health markets. The company's 32,000 employees support vital missions for government and commercial customers. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Leidos reported annual revenues of approximately $10.19 billion for the fiscal year ended December 28, 2018. For more information, visit www.Leidos.com. Statements in this announcement, other than historical data and information, constitute forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause our actual results, performance, achievements, or industry results to be very different from the results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Some of these factors include, but are not limited to, the risk factors set forth in the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the period ended December 28, 2018, and other such filings that Leidos makes with the SEC from time to time. Due to such uncertainties and risks, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. SOURCE Leidos Related Links http://www.leidos.com NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Wines of Germany is marking March 13th as the official birthday of Riesling, giving wine lovers an annual occasion to celebrate this popular varietal. The date was selected in honor of the first documented evidence of the grape, from the cellar log of Count Katzenelnbogen near the Rheingau region on March 13, 1435. Wines of Germany is encouraging Riesling fans around the world to celebrate the versatility and unique characteristics of the variety with a Riesling toast, and by sharing photos, tasting notes, and favorite Riesling memories with the hashtag #RieslingBirthday on social media. The Riesling Birthday designation aims to broaden awareness of German Riesling as a must-try for its food-pairing affinity, expression of terroir, aging potential, electric acidity, and balance of bright fruit flavors. Germany has a deep history of winemaking, dating back before 50 BC, and Riesling has long been considered Germany's most celebrated grape. Winegrowers in the Rheingau and the Mosel have the longest tradition of growing Riesling, with historical records from the early 15th century. Evidence of the spread to today's Rheinhessen and the Pfalz regions date back to the end of the 15th and the first half of the 16th century. As climate and viticulture evolved, the 19th century was seen as a golden age of German wine. In 1995, Riesling started again to be seen as the king of German wines, and is associated with a change in the quality-oriented thinking and patterns of consumption in the country. Today, with about 23,800 hectares, Germany is home of the world's largest vineyard area dedicated to Riesling and grows 45% of the world's Riesling grapes. The variety is predestined for northerly regions and is planted in all 13 official German wine-growing regions. Depending on type of soil and microclimate, it yields grapes that produce wines with extremely diverse nuances, ranging from bone dry to lusciously sweet. A "typical" German Riesling is reminiscent of peach or apple on the nose, and has pronounced acidity. It is fantastic for food pairing and sparkling wine production. "There has never been a better time to celebrate German Riesling," says Steffen Schindler, Head of Marketing of the Deutsches Weininstut (DWI). "This is a historic day to celebrate the birth of the world's most versatile grape." Festivities for Riesling Birthday will take place on a global scale this year, from North America to the Netherlands to China and Japan. With a mix of influencer events, dinners, master classes, and digital campaigns, all 14 Wines of Germany information offices will be participating. To learn more about Wines of Germany, visit www.germanwineusa.com. Contact: Eliana Nash, (212) 994-7558 SOURCE Wines of Germany USA Related Links http://www.germanwineusa.com Washington, March 13 : US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it saw "no basis" to ground Boeing 737 MAX planes, despite two recent similar crashes involving aircraft in the series. "Thus far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action," the statement said on Tuesday. The statement came amid mounting safety concerns following two crashes involving Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes in a short span of five months, Xinhua reported. An Ethiopian Airlines plane en route from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, Kenya crashed on Sunday, killing all 157 people aboard. A Lion Air crash in October last year in Indonesia killed all 189 people on board. A growing list of countries and airlines have terminated the operation of the model, while US lawmakers, experts and industry associations are calling for its grounding in the US. According to the FAA, currently 74 Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes are operated by US carriers. Moscow, March 13 : Russia is willing to re-establish parliamentary contacts with the US in order to promote bilateral relations of the two countries, the Russian Federation Council, or the upper house of Parliament, said. Russian Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko met with US Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman on Tuesday and the two sides discussed bilateral relations of the two countries, the Federation Council was quoted as stating by Xinhua news agency. "The resumption of dialogue at all levels, including through parliaments, is very important ... Russia is ready to resume parliamentary contacts at various levels," the statement said. Matviyenko noted that further deterioration of Russia-US relations contradicts national interests of the two countries and creates threats to international stability and security. It added that improving Russia-US relations is only possible if it is based on the principles of equality and respect of the interests of the two countries. The idea of possible meetings of the respective delegations within the framework of international parliamentary forums with the participation of the two countries was discussed, according to the statement. New York, March 13 : China's opposition to designate Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar as an international terrorist by the UN runs counter to its mutual goal with the US on regional stability, according to a State Department official. As the founder and leader of the Pakistan-based JeM, Azhar "meets the criteria for the designation by the UN" as a global terrorist subject to its sanctions, Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino said on Tuesday. He leads the JeM, which has been designated by the UN as a terrorist organisation and "has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability and peace", Palladino said during a news briefing in Washington. China has placed Azhar under its protection and vetoed moves to declare him a global terrorist that would subject him to UN sanctions. "The US and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and ... a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal," Palladino added. After the Pulwama suicide car-bombing by the JeM that killed more than 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) troopers on February 14, France is spearheading a renewed effort with British and the US backing to put sanctions on Azhar. About these efforts, Palladino said: "The US and India work closely together on counter-terrorism efforts, and that includes at the UN." (Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter @arulouis) New Delhi, March 13 : Software giant Microsoft has become an unexpected victim of hate messages directed at a Surf Excel detergent commercial that has raked up a huge controversy in India over the past few days. The latest commercial, part of Surf Excel's "Daag Achche Hai Campaign", shows a Hindu girl saving a Muslim boy from colours on Holi. However, it has offended some people, who are venting their anger on the social media. Some un-informed folks, who joined the hate parade, confused Surf Excel with Microsoft Excel. Soon #BoycottSurfExcel, #BoycottExcel, #MicrosoftExcel and more such hashtags involving Microsoft were trending on the social media. "Going to request Sundar Pichai to throw you away from the Playstore. And ofcourse Satya Nadella as well to remove you from Microsoft Office. As a data scientist, it was tough to say this but country over profession anytime," wrote Aditya Bhandari, who claims to be a data scientist, on PlayStore. Senior journalist Raju Narisetti posted a screenshot of Bhandari's comment on Twitter, expressing his shock at the ignorance. San Francisco, March 13 : After pausing investments in its "Allo" mobile messaging app, Google has finally bid goodbye to the platform that was launched with much fanfare in 2016. A banner across the official Allo website confirmed that March 12 was its last day in operation, The Verge reported on Monday. "During our time together, we brought you a smarter way to chat, with features like the Google Assistant, 'Allo' for web and selfie stickers but now the app is signing off," the banner on Allo's page read. Last year in April, Anil Sabharwal, the head of the communications group at Google told the media that "Allo" as a product did not achieve the level of traction the company had hoped for. Even though the app's successor is not quite ready yet, Google has incorporated some of Allo's features like smart replies and desktop support into the Android Messaging app. "We're working to bring your favorite features to the Messages app so you can have richer conversations with all your friends. If you have an Android phone, we hope you'll try Messages!" the banner said. "Allo" was launched as an instant messaging mobile app for the Android and iOS mobile Operating Systems (OS), with a web client available on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera browsers. After Allo's exit, Google is going all in on Rich Communication Services (RCS) -- the successor to SMS that's been a long time coming -- to give Android a successful messaging app. "It's far from universal, but now that Google is focused on just a single messaging app, it has a better chance of gaining some momentum," The Verge said. New Delhi/Mumbai, March 13 : The government on Wednesday made it clear that operations of all Boeing 737-800 MAX aircraft will be suspended at 4 p.m. Late on Tuesday, the Ministry of Civil Aviation tweeted: "DGCA (Directorate General of Civil Aviation) has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately. In a continuation to its Tuesday's call to ground the B737 Max operations, the Ministry on Wednesday added: "B737Max operations will stop from or to all Indian airports. "Additionally no B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600 hours Indian time or 1030 UTC." In India, SpiceJet and Jet Airways operate 17 Boeing 737-800 MAX aircraft. While SpiceJet has 12 aircraft, Jet has five planes of this type. On Tuesday the DGCA tweeted: "These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations." "The time line is to cater to situations where aircraft can be positioned at maintenance facilities and international flights can reach their destinations." The suspension came after several countries including the UK, Australia, Italy, Singapore restrained their airlines from operating the aircraft type. Globally many countries have banned the operations of the aircraft after an Ethiopian Airlines' Boeing 737-800 MAX flight crashed on Sunday killing all 157 people on board. It came just months after an Indonesian flight met with the same fate. On Tuesday, the EU, joined a number of other countries in banning Boeing 737 Max planes from operating in or over its airspace. Bengaluru, March 13 : The second chapter of upcoming Kannada action-drama "KGF", starring Yash in the lead, had its official launch here on Wednesday at a ceremony in the presence of the film's cast and crew. The launch was attended by Yash, Srinidhi Shetty, director Prashant Neel and producer Vijay Kiragandur. Following the runaway success of "KGF", which emerged as the first Kannada film to breach the Rs 200 crore club worldwide, the hype for "KGF: Chapter 2" has reached unprecedented heights. In a recent interview to IANS, Yash said the second chapter will be "bigger" and "better" than the first part. "When we made "KGF: Chapter 1", we had our own inhibitions and restricted ourselves in some way. But with this kind of success in our side, we are going all out to make the second part. We now know people are keenly looking forward to the second part and we can deliver it without any reservations. We have reserved the best for chapter 2," he added. Yash confirmed that the makers are in talks with Sanjay Dutt for a crucial role in the second chapter. "We had approached him with a role in the first part. He couldn't take up as he was busy with other commitments. We've approached him again with a very important role. He's yet to give his final nod," Yash said. The regular shooting of "KGF: Chapter 2" will commence from April. The makers are eyeing a December release. New Delhi, March 13 : India and the US have called on Pakistan to address terrorism, including cross-border terrorism, the Ministry of External Affairs said on Wednesday. Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale and US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale held consultations on March 12 in Washington D.C., the Ministry said in a statement. They reaffirmed their commitment to an Indo-US strategic partnership, reviewed the progress made since the Ministerial 2+2 meet, and discussed ways to further expand cooperation. The countries also exchanged views on building convergences in the Indo-Pacific region and agreed to promote inclusivity, stability, peace and prosperity in the region. Canberra, March 13 : Australian Cardinal George Pell, once the Vatican's number three, was sentenced to six years in prison for sexually abusing two choirboys in the late 1990s. The former Vatican treasurer is the most senior Catholic figure ever to be found guilty of sexual offences against children, CNN reported. A former senior adviser to Pope Francis, Pell showed no reaction when Chief Judge Peter Kidd handed down his sentence in a hearing broadcast live worldwide from Victoria's County Court in central Melbourne. The judge said that Pell will have to serve three years and eight months of his sentence before being able to ask for parole, which he could do as of October 2022. Pell, 77, was found guilty in December of one count of sexual penetration of a child and four counts of committing an indecent act with a child after a secret five-week trial. A jury that time had ruled that Pell abused the 13-year-old choir boys in a Melbourne cathedral in 1996. He was arrested on February 27. The cardinal maintains his innocence and has lodged an appeal. On Wednesday, Judge Kidd said Pell's attack on the victims was "breathtakingly arrogant" adding that the cardinal had assaulted the boys with "callous indifference to the victims' distress". But the judge said Pell was "not to be made a scapegoat for any failings or perceived failings of the Catholic Church". Among other elements, the judge ordered that the cardinal will be placed on a register of sexual offenders for the rest of his life. Outside the court, survivors of Catholic sex abuse who had attended the hearing were divided on the sentence, according to CNN. Some felt it was too light, while others were happy to see justice being done. "I would have been happy with one month, one week," one said. In a statement after the sentencing, the surviving victim said it was hard for him "to take comfort in this outcome". "There is no rest for me," he said through his lawyer Vivian Waller. "I'm doing my best to hold myself and my family together." Pell's defence has already appealed the sentence, through an application that will be addressed in June to decide whether or not to proceed. Chennai, March 13 : Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said the UPA will reserve 33 per cent government jobs for women and pass the Women's Reservation Bill giving 33 per cent of seats in the Lok Sabha if it wins the Lok Sabha battle. Interacting with students of Stella Maris College for Women here, Gandhi also said that the UPA government would simplify the procedures in the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and have a low single tax rate. Wearing a jeans and T-shirt, Gandhi faced a range of questions from the students about the Congress-led UPA's plans for economic growth, bringing peace in Jammu and Kashmir, on charges against his brother-in-law Robert Vadra, views about the Modi government and the reason for hugging Modi in Parliament. To a question on the status of women in the country, he said the situation was better in south India than in north India. There was the cultural aspect, he said. "There is still a lot needed to be done in Tamil Nadu," he quickly added. He said that if the UPA formed a government, the Women's Reservation Bill would be passed and 33 per cent of jobs in central and state governments would be reserved for women. The Congress leader said he had no hatred towards Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "Love is the foundation of every religion whether it is Hinduism, Islam or Christianity. I was watching the Prime Minister speech in Parliament where he was criticizing my father, grandmother, great grandfather and the Congress," he said. "Inside me, I was feeling affection for him. He was so angry that he was not able to see the beauty of the world." Gandhi said he felt that Modi didn't have the love he wanted. "I wanted to show affection and hugged him." He said the UPA defeat in 2014 taught him several lessons. "I learn from Modi. I don't hate him. Do you hate the person who teaches you?" Gandhi asked to students and got a big "No" as the answer. "The biggest teacher are the people who attack. The more you are attacked, the more you give love and affection back." On bringing peace back in Jammu and Kashmir, he said the first step was to build the bridge to the people there. It was built between 2004 and 2014 during the UPA government. As a result, terror attacks came down drastically and power was given to the people by holding elections. Pakistan will carry out terror attacks, he said. "But we have to engage with the people of Jammu and Kashmir." He criticized the central government for facilitating businessmen like Nirav Modi, Vijay Mallya and others to leave the country after defrauding the banks. "The money deposited in the banks by people during demonetization was given to these businessmen," he said. When a student queried why he did not mention the name of Robert Vadra along with these businessmen, Gandhi said: "The government has the right to investigate. The law must not be applied selectively. I am the first person to say investigate Vadra." He asked the students how many times they had seen Modi taking any question. According to him, the current central government was North India centric and he believed that all parts of India should have an equal say. Gandhi said the world was moving from being US centric to US-China-Russia centric and India should not lean right or left but should stand straight. The Congress President said that the biggest hindrance for economic growth was crony capitalism and corruption. On the education system, Gandhi said there should be space for the government and everything cannot be left to the hands of the private sector. There were lighter moments during the interaction with Gandhi asking the students to address him as Rahul and not as Sir -- which was applauded by the students. Gandhi maintained that he was still a young politician. New Delhi/Mumbai, March 13 : India announced that all Boeing 737 aircraft will stop operating in the country from 4 p.m. on Wednesday but the US aviation regulator questioned the global grounding of the fleet after an Ethiopian Airlines crash. "No B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600 hours," the Ministry of Civil Aviation tweeted. This came as a clarification and in continuation to its late Tuesday decision when the Ministry had tweeted: "DGCA (Directorate General of Civil Aviation) has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately." The Ministry added on Wednesday: "B737Max operations will stop from or to all Indian airports. Additionally, no B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600 hours Indian time or 1030 UTC." The directive came close on the heels of a global grounding of the Boeing fleet following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines' Boeing 737-800 MAX flight on Sunday killing all 157 people on board. India joined the UK, Singapore, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Italy, Australia and the EU nations in the grounding. On Tuesday, the US aviation regulator Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said that no systematic performance issues have been found with the Boeing 737-Max aircraft to justify the global grounding. "The FAA continues to review extensively all available data and aggregate safety performance from operators and pilots of the Boeing 737 Max. Thus far, our review shows no systematic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft," the regulator said. "Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action. In the course of our urgent review of data on the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash, if any issues affecting the continued airworthiness of the aircraft are identified, the FAA will take immediate and appropriate action." In India, SpiceJet and Jet Airways operate 17 Boeing 737-800 MAX aircraft -- Spice (12) and Jet (5). On its part, SpiceJet said: "Consequent to the regulatory directive on the Boeing 737 MAX, SpiceJet has already initiated grounding of its MAX fleet. "In order to cause least inconvenience to its passengers and also bring these aircraft to its maintenance base, we expect to complete this exercise on or before 4 p.m. today." SpiceJet has announced cancellation of 14 flights. "Of the 76 planes in our fleet, 64 aircraft are in operation and we are confident of minimizing the inconvenience to our passengers and attain normalcy in our operations," the airline said. Washington, March 13 : California Governor Gavin Newsom will impose on Wednesday a moratorium on state executions and a temporary reprieve for all 737 inmates on death row in the state, the media reported. According to the Washington Post, Newsom will sign an executive order later in the day, describing the death penalty as "inconsistent with our bedrock values". California has not carried out any executions since 2006, as a series of court battles over execution methods have been waged. The order will give a reprieve from execution - though not release - to California's 737 death row inmates, about a quarter of the nation's population awaiting capital punishment. It will also annul California's lethal injection protocol and close the execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison, where the state's most notorious criminals have been put to death. The Governor took office in January and a death penalty moratorium was one of his campaign pledges. "I do not believe that a civilized society can claim to be a leader in the world as long as its government continues to sanction the premeditated and discriminatory execution of its people," he said in a statement issued with the executive order. "In short, the death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian." Two voter initiatives to end the death penalty in California narrowly failed to gain a majority in recent years, with 48 per cent support in 2012 and 47 per cent support in 2016. Governor Newsom supported both initiatives. But a separate proposition voted on in 2016 won support for its demand to speed up executions in California. The Governor does not have the power to abolish the state's 1978 death penalty legislation permanently. A repeal would require a popular vote in favour of the change. The next opportunity for such a ballot would be at the 2020 elections. The reprieves Governor Newsom issues now will expire when he leaves office. His current term lasts until January 2023. More than 900 people have been sentenced to death in California since 1978, but only 13 have been executed. Another 79 died of natural causes and a further 26 took their own lives, according to figures from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The death penalty is a legal punishment in 30 US states. Since 1976, Texas carried out the most executions (560), followed by Virginia (113) and Oklahoma (112). There are 2,738 inmates on death row in the US. Seoul, March 13 : South Korea and the US will on Thursday hold a first meeting of a bilateral working group weeks after the failed Hanoi summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump. According to Yonhap news agency, Rhee Dong-yeol, who heads the South Korean Foreign Ministry's bureau of peace in the peninsula, on Wednesday left for Washington to meet US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for North Korea Alex Wong. This will be the first meeting of the so-called working group which was set up by the US and South Korea in November to give impetus to denuclearization talks with North Korea. The Vietnam summit between Kim and Trump towards the end of February ended abruptly without a consensus or a joint declaration between the two countries on possible denuclearization and sanction wavering. Seoul had acted as an important mediator between Washington and Pyongyang. Yonhap said the two sides in their meeting on Thursday are expected to discuss ways to revitalize the denuclearization process after the Hanoi failure. Seoul is also likely to seek waiver of sanctions for a planned video reunions of families separated by the Korean War (1950-53), the news agency said. For these video reunions to happen, it will be necessary to transfer to North Korea some equipment that comes within the ambit of sanctions against North Korea. South Korea and the US are also expected to discuss two projects of economic cooperation between the two Koreas that Seoul and Pyongyang want to resume, but are again subject of UN sanctions imposed on Pyongyang for nuclear weapon tests. However, the possibility of making advances in this regard remain slim following the failure to reach an agreement at the Hanoi summit, the report said. Although Washington and Pyongyang give different versions of what transpired at the negotiating table at Hanoi, the disagreement between the two parties hovered around the number of North Korean nuclear assets that would be dismantled and the amount of international sanctions that would be lifted as a corresponding measure. US National Security Advisor John Bolton, who was with Trump in Hanoi, said that Washington had called for North Korea to do away with chemical and biological weapons from its arsenal, besides dismantling its nuclear programme. Hong Kong, March 13 : Hong Kong on Wednesday banned Boeing's 737 MAX jet from its airspace until further notice after several other countries restrained their airlines from operating the aircraft type. The move came amid mounting safety concerns following two crashes involving Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes in a short span of five months. "The Civil Aviation Department (CAD) has been closely monitoring the developments, the investigation progress and the information from relevant aviation authorities. Having regard to the latest situation, the CAD has decided to temporarily prohibit operation of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft into, out of and over Hong Kong," said a spokesman of the city's aviation regulator in a statement. "The temporary prohibition will take effect at 6 p.m. Hong Kong time on (Wednesday) and continue until further notice. (It) is solely a precautionary measure to ensure aviation safety and protect the public." Thiruvananthapuram, March 13 : The Chief Electoral Officer in Kerala on Wednesday told political parties that under no circumstances should votes be solicited in the name of the Sabarimala temple. Tikka Ram Meena, who on Monday faced the BJP's ire after he issued a statement to this effect, on Wednesday briefed the media that it had been made clear to all political parties that under no cost should the name of Lord Ayyappa be used in election campaign. "It's because it has a religious connotation," said Meena. State BJP President P.S. Sreedharan Pillai had another account of the meeting. "Just as the Babri Masjid, Ayodhya and Gandhiji's death have been discussed, the Sabarimala issue can be discussed. However, there must not be any flare up and votes cannot be solicited in the name of Ayyappa," he said. There have been protests by Hindu groups since a September 28 Supreme Court verdict that allowed women of all ages to enter the temple, including those from the hitherto banned group of 10 to 50 years. The matter is sub judice. New Delhi, March 13 : In a move to boost foreign investor confidence in relation to protection of intellectual property (IP) in India, the Cabinet on Wednesday approved the proposal for Accession to the Nice, Vienna and Locarno Agreements, which will allow India an opportunity to include Indian designs, figurative elements and goods in the international classification systems. An official statement said the proposals approved are for India's accession to The Nice Agreement concerning the International Classification of Goods and Services for the purposes of registration of marks; The Vienna Agreement establishing an International Classification of the figurative elements of marks; and The Locarno Agreement establishing an international classification for industrial designs. These agreements will help the Intellectual Property Office in India to harmonise the classification systems for examination of trademark and design applications, in line with the classification systems followed globally. The accession would also facilitate in exercising rights in decision-making processes regarding review and revision of the classifications under the agreement. New Delhi, March 13 : Shraddha Srinath will be making her Bollywood debut with "Milan Talkies", but she is not "star-struck" about the glitz and glamour of the Hindi film industry. The actress says she has good work in the southern film industry, and would tread the path in Bollywood very cautiously. Shraddha has worked in Kannada and Tamil films, with projects like "U Turn", "Kaatru Veliyidai" and "The Villain" to her credit. "The first step is to wait till 'Milan Talkies' is out. Some calls have come but I can't take that too seriously. I want people to watch me perform, and see how I look on the big screen and then call me," Shraddha told IANS. "I am in no rush. There is enough work down south. I am going to take it easy. I am not someone who is star-struck about Bollywood and think 'ke abhi 'Milan...' release ho jaegi toh main yeh karungi Bollywood mein'... There is very good work down south for me. "There is good work in Bollywood also. For me, the idea is to pick wisely regardless of the language. My stories mean the world to me. Bollywood maybe Bollywood, but I will tread very cautiously," added the actress, who is working on the Tamil remake of Amitabh Bachchan and Taapsee Pannu starrer "Pink". Getting into films was never a part of Shraddha's plan. She rejected the idea because of her looks and went on to study law. "The only reason why I rejected the idea of films was because I thought I was not fit for films. I was like this chubby girl with curly hair and dusky. And I was happy eating my food and not doing any exercise. "Films were not in the pipeline. I was like 'I am not glamorous enough. I am not beautiful enough to be an actor'. This was the only reason why I never considered films," she said. Looking back, the actress said: "Before I joined college, I was into acting and for me the most obvious medium to act was on stage. I took up acting in plays in college. By the end of college, I knew that law is not for me and my heart belongs to acting. "Since I have studied law for five years and my parents paid the fees, I took up work as a lawyer. I forced myself to take up a job and got a good job as a lawyer. I was balancing acting in plays with my job. Sometimes I had to beg my boss to give me extra leave for rehearsal." The actress said the transition into acting from the law world might seem drastic, but she believes it was pre-written at "some cosmic level". At the moment, she is looking forward to the release of "Milan Talkies", which is helmed by National Award-winning filmmaker Tigmanshu Dhulia. It also stars Ali Fazal, Ashutosh Rana and Sikander Kher. The film, releasing on Friday, tells a love story set in Uttar Pradesh around 2010-2013. (Sugandha Rawal can be contacted at sugandha.r@ians.in) Srinagar, March 13 : Militants shot dead a soldier on Wednesday in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district. Police said the militants shot 25-year old Ashiq Hussain of the Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry in his Penglina village. "He was shifted to hospital where he succumbed to critical injuries," a police officer said. The security forces have launched a hunt to track down the assailants. Ranchi, March 13 : Three Maoist guerrillas were arrested in Jharkhand's Gumla district on Wednesday, police said. "The guerrillas belonged to the banned Maoist group, People's Liberation Front of India (PLFI). Weapons have also been seized from them," Gumla Superintendent of Police, Anjani Kumar Jha told reporters. Police said on receiving information about the presence of Maoist guerrillas, a team was constituted and a search operation was launched. Police have seized one double barrel gun, one country made pistol, live cartridges and other material from the arrested Maoists. Jerusalem, March 13 : The Israeli military on Wednesday said a terror network of the Shia Islamist movement Hezbollah was emerging in the Syrian Golan Heights and alleged that it had equipment that could be used to attack Israel. Israel alleged the network was created upon the orders of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who relied on dozens of activists from nearby towns. "The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) is exposing a Hezbollah terror network on the Syrian Golan Heights aimed at striking Israel," Head of Israeli military media branch Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said in a video published on the official Twitter account of the military. The Israeli colonel said that Ali Musa Daqduq, a well-known extremist who was held accountable for the killing of five American soldiers who served in Iraq in 2007, was responsible for the formation of the network, Efe news reported. According to Lt Conricus, Daqduq was imprisoned in Iraq and then released as part of a prison swap. "Now what we have today is an infrastructure masterminded and operated by Hezbollah from Lebanon but on Syrian soil, using the local civilian infrastructure as observation points collecting intelligence against Israeli targets," he added. The report said that Israeli military immediately responded by intensifying security at the border in the occupied part of the Golan Heights by increasing troops in the area and establishing transportation routes. "We have a clear message: We are not going to allow Hezbollah to establish a terror infrastructure on the Golan capable of striking Israeli civilians," Conricus said. Meanwhile, Israel demanded that the Syrian government must honour the 1974 agreement, which was signed by the two parties in Geneva and aimed at the disengagement of forces after the 1973 war between the two countries and to prevent any hostile activity against Israel. "We hold the Syrian regime responsible for anything that happens inside Syria aimed at Israel. We expect the Syrian regime to implement the 1974 agreement just as we are doing," Conricus said. "Anybody who cares about regional stability should be concerned about the fact that Hezbollah is trying to build a terror network on our doorstep." Earlier this month, the UK announced it would include Hezbollah on a list of terrorist organisations, banning membership of or support for the group. New Delhi, March 13 : The government on Tuesday granted Rs 1,000 crore to Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) to help them clear their February wage bills. A senior official of the Department of Telecom (DoT) said BSNL will clear about Rs 850 crore dues of its employees before Holi (March 21). MTNL was given Rs 171 crore on Monday and instructed to pay salaries by Wednesday. IANS had on Tuesday reported about Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha's meeting with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to seek over Rs 1,000 crore for the two telecom PSUs. The meeting was also attended by Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan and MTNL CMD P.K. Purwar. Due to stiff competition in a low-tariff market and crippled by lack of services due to no 4G spectrum, a huge work force of 1.76 lakh and without Delhi and Mumbai as operational bases, BSNL's profitability has suffered heavily in recent years. It's losses widened to Rs 7,992 crore in 2017-18. According to financial data shared by the Telecom Minister in the Lok Sabha, the company posted a loss of Rs 4,793 crore in 2016-17. MTNL too has been on the decline. Its Q3FY19 losses widened to Rs 833 crore. The government has been footing the bill for monthly salaries of its 23,000 employees since November 2018. While BSNL's annual wage bill is Rs 15,000 crore, which is 85 per cent of its revenue, MTNL's yearly wage bill is Rs 2,500 crore, 95 per cent of its revenue. In contrast, the salary bills of private operators are less than 10 per cent of their revenues. MTNL has a debt of around Rs 19,000 crore. BSNL has the lowest debt of Rs 14,000 crore among all the telecom operators. MTNL also has a negative market share, while BSNL's holds 11 per cent share in mobile market, mostly comprising 3G and 2G services. The DoT is preparing a revival plan for both the state-run telcos. Both have sought permissions to monetise their land assets as well as implement the Gujarat model of voluntary retirement scheme (VRS) for employees. Under the Gujarat model, an amount equivalent to 35-day salary for each completed year of service and 25-day salary for each year of service left till retirement is offered. Implementing the VRS scheme will have a revenue impact of Rs 6,365 crore and Rs 2,120 crore at BSNL and MTNL, respectively. Both the companies have also sought spectrum for 4G services through equity infusion from the government. They have also been ailing because of high revenue-to-debt ratio due to the large number of government employees the DoT transferred to them at the time of their formation. It is estimated that 16,000 MTNL employees and 50 per cent staff of BSNL will retire in 5-6 years. Riyadh, March 13 : Several women's rights activists were to appear in a Saudi court on Wednesday, nearly a year after they were detained for "undermining national security", according to human rights groups and a relative of one detainee. The first group of activists were detained in May 2018, shortly before the lifting of a ban on women driving, for which many of them had campaigned. The charges they face include supporting "hostile elements" and could carry long prison sentences, the BBC reported. As many as 10 women were expected to appear at the criminal court in Riyadh on Wednesday, including prominent campaigners Loujain al-Hathloul, Aziza al-Yousef, Eman al-Nafjan and Hatoon al-Fassi. Journalists and diplomats are not allowed to attend the hearing. According to reports citing rights groups and relatives of these women, some of the activists said in custody they were tortured, received beatings and electric shocks and they were headed to court despite complaints of not been given access to lawyers. Detained activist Loujain al-Hathloul's sister Alia al-Hathloul said the activist informed the family in a phone call last week that her first trial session would be held in a specialised criminal court used to try terrorism cases, the Washington Post reported. Loujain al-Hathloul, leading activist of the campaign to lift female driving ban in Saudi Arabia, was not notified of charges in the indictment, her sister said in a text message, according to the Post. Also due in court, according to Amnesty International and other people briefed on the cases, were Eman al-Nafjan, who wrote a widely read feminist blog before her arrest; Aziza al-Yousef, a retired professor and veteran of the Saudi women's rights movement; and Amal al-Harbi, who fought for political prisoners, including her husband, Fowzan al-Harbi, a jailed human rights activist. Last week, more than 30 countries at the UN Human Rights Council criticised Saudi Arabia for detaining the women. The arrest of female activists was part of a broader campaign of arrests spearheaded by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the past two years, moves that analysts say were part of his effort to consolidate power. The Public Prosecutor's office didn't specify the charges against these activists, but said they were suspected of undertaking "co-ordinated and organised activities that aim to undermine the Kingdom's security, stability and national unity". The Gulf Centre for Human Rights said on Tuesday it feared the women might not get a fair trial. Also among the detained women is the Saudi-American human rights campaigner Samar Badawi, sister of jailed blogger Raif Badawi. Badawi, a receipient of the US International Women of Courage Award in 2012, is known for challenging Saudi Arabia's male guardianship system. Raif Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for "insulting Islam" online in 2014. His wife, Ensaf Haidar, lives in Canada and has become a Canadian citizen. Colombo, March 13 : Sri Lanka looks forward to benefiting more from the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative and is ready to welcome more Chinese investment into the country, Sri Lankan Minister of Tourism Development, Wildlife and Christian Religious Affairs John Amaratunga has said. The Minister told Xinhua news agency in an interview on Tuesday that Sri Lanka and China shared strong relations and Sri Lanka was one of the first countries to pledge support for the Belt and Road Initiative. "To start with, Sri Lanka is fully supportive of the Belt and Road Initiative of China. We have no debate on that. We look forward to benefiting more from this policy that China has adopted. "We hope more investments will come into Sri Lanka from China. There are a lot of Chinese companies who are looking to invest here, particularly in the tourism industry. We will gladly welcome all of them and give them all the support and assistance to start their projects here which will help our economy," Amaratunga said. A key project of the Belt and Road Initiative, the Colombo Port City being constructed close to the Colombo Harbour by the China Harbour Engineering Company Ltd. has generated employment for hundreds of locals and will attract millions of dollars in investments. According to Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, the Port City will transform Colombo into a financial and trading hub. Amaratunga said a joint venture between Sri Lanka and China to develop the Hambantota Port in southern Sri Lanka had also brought in many benefits to the local economy, boosting Sri Lanka's image as a maritime hub and lifting the livelihood of many locals. "We have received much assistance from China for the development of these projects and they are now in the process of being further developed. "Besides that there are so many other areas in which China has helped us. For example in irrigation, road development and other infrastructural development. We warmly welcome all these projects and we are grateful to the Chinese government and its people for the assistance they are rendering to Sri Lanka for its development," the Minister said. He added that Sri Lanka looks forward to submitting new proposals at the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation which will be held in China next month. "We look forward to engaging more with the Chinese government under the Belt and Road Initiative." London, March 13 : Britain will remove tariffs on most imported goods in the event of no-deal Brexit, the government announced here on Wednesday. As a temporary measure, there will be zero tariffs on 87 per cent of imports, but tariffs will be kept on farm goods like meat and some dairy products, the UK media reported. The UK government said the plan was temporary and it would apply for up to 12 months. Meanwhile, consultation on a permanent approach to tariffs is underway. "If we leave without a deal, we will set the majority of our import tariffs to zero, while maintaining tariffs for the most sensitive industries," Trade Minister George Hollingbery was quoted as saying by Sky News. "This balanced approach will help to support British jobs and avoid potential price spikes that would hit the poorest households the hardest," Hollingbery said. Adam Marshall, Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce, said on Twitter: "Liberalising trade is a good thing over time, but overnight changes to tariffs would create real problems for some UK firms and communities." "Westminster must avoid this unwanted shock by rejecting a messy and disorderly exit on March 29," he said. Carolyn Fairbairn, Director General of the Confederation of British Industry, said on a BBC radio programme it was the biggest change in terms of trade in the UK since the mid-19th century, "no consultation with business, no time to prepare". "What we potentially are going to see is this imposition of new terms of trade at the same time as business is blocked out of its closest trading partner. This is a sledgehammer for our economy," Fairbairn said. Mike Hawes, Chief Executive of SMMT, said: "Today's announcement does not resolve the devastating effect a 'no deal' Brexit would have on the automotive industry." "No policy on tariffs can come close to compensating for the disruption, cost and job losses that would result from 'no deal'," Hawes said, adding "no deal" must be "taken off the table immediately and permanently". Regarding the border checks between Ireland and Northern Ireland, the government announced "it will take a temporary approach to avoid new checks and controls on goods at the Northern Ireland land border if the UK leaves the EU without a deal". British Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley said: "The measures announced recognise the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland. These arrangements can only be temporary and short-term." Kolkata, March 13 : The Purulia Lok Sabha seat has now emerged as the bone of contention in the seat adjustment talks between the Left Front and the Congress for the upcoming polls in West Bengal, though a senior Congress leader on Wednesday hoped the LF-spearheaded CPI-M would not be averse to his party fighting from the constituency. To facilitate the talks, the LF partners on Wednesday decided to keep on hold their earlier decision to declare their candidates. "Discussions are on. Nothing has been finalised yet. But we are hopeful that the talks will be fruitful," Congress MP and former state party President Pradip Bhattacharya told IANS. Earlier, the discussions had stalled over the Congress insistence to put up candidates in Raiganj and Murshidabad, the only two seats won by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) in the 2014 Lok Sabha election. The deadlock was resolved after Congress President Rahul Gandhi intervened and persuaded the state leadership to leave the two seats to the CPI-M. The CPI-M, which has advocated a no-contest policy in the six seats -- Congress four, CPI-M two -- won by the two parties in the 2014 polls, has already announced that the LF would not be in fray in Baharampur, Jangipur, North Malda and South Malda constituencies that went to the Congress then. However, Purulia presents a far more complex problem. The seat is contested by the LF partner All India Forward Bloc (AIFB) -- a party rooted in anti-Congressism -- which has refused to even sit with the Congress for any talks on seat adjustments for any constituency in the state. But a senior Congress leader pooh-poohed the AIFB's objection. "We will contest from Purulia. We are not bothered with what the AIFB says. It will be absolutely ok for us if the CPI-M is on the same page with us," he said. In such a case, the Congress is hopeful of the CPI-M supporters casting their votes for its candidate, leaving AIFB in the lurch. Sources said on Tuesday, state CPI-M Secretary Surjya Kanta Mishra and party's state secretariat member Rabin Deb went to Bhattacharya's house for a fresh round of discussions. Earlier, state Congress President Somen Mitra had also taken part in the talks. On Wednesday, the LF partners held detailed discussions on the emerging scenario, with only five days to go for issue of notification for the first phase of polls. "The Congress is keen on fighting 17 seats, leaving 25 to the LF. But we have our compulsions. The LF partners RSP, AIFB and CPI are for contesting three seats each. We are for an independent candidate in Darjeeling. Also, a couple of other parties have sought seats from us. "If we have to accommodate all of them, we need more seats. In such a scenario, we will propose to the Congress leadership that they settle for 13-15 seats," said a CPI-M source. There was speculation that Congress leader Deepa Dasmunsi, peeved over the Congress agreeing to leave her old constituency Raiganj to the CPI-M, may be asked to fight from Malda North, but Bhattacharya denied any discussions on those lines. "I don't know of any such discussions," he said. Mumbai, March 13 : Aiming a tally of a whopping 45 of the 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra, the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party-Shiv Sena combine will formally kick-start their election campaign from the temple town of Kolhapur on March 24. Coming three days after the Holi festivities (March 20-21), the campaign rally will be addressed by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, Sena President Uddhav Thackeray, state BJP chief Raosaheb Danve-Patil and other senior leaders from both parties, said a BJP leader here on Wednesday. Later, as the election season warms up, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah will also address rallies in the state with Thackeray, and other meetings are planned with several Union Ministers, BJP Chief Ministers and top party functionaries. The March 24 mega-rally - in which over 300,000 people are expected to attend - was finalized after a meet between Fadnavis and Thackeray and their senior aides on Tuesday night. On March 24, Thackeray will offer prayers at the famed Mahalaxmi Temple in Kolhapur before the campaign programmes. Prior to the March 24 mega-rally, the two parties have also planned meetings of elected representatives and party office-bearers on March 15 for the regions which will go to polls in the first phase, on April 11. The two parties sealed their alliance on February 18 with the BJP and the Sena contesting 25 and 23 seats, respectively. Subsequently in Pune, Shah and Fadnavis declared that they had set a target of bagging at least 45 out of the state's 48 parliamentary seats and ensure a return of the Modi government with increased majority at the centre. Maharashtra will vote on April 11, 18, 23 and 29, in the first four phases of the seven-phase Lok Sabha elections. New Delhi, March 13 : Days after it cleared a policy to share vehicle registration data collected by the Road Transport Ministry, the government on Wednesday said all checks and balances would be put in place to ensure that the data shared under the policy is not misused. The "bulk data sharing" policy, which would enable the government to monetise the vehicle registration certificate database, was approved by the government last week. As per the new policy, vehicle registration data could be shared "in a controlled manner", and in encrypted form, with organisations registered in India, and with Indian residents or companies as the majority stakeholders. Such organisations would be able to purchase access to bulk data after paying prescribed charges. While the data is already being shared with some agencies like the police, banks and vehicle insurance companies, a top government official told IANS that the policy would only streamline this process and standardise it. "If someone wants to use this data, now there is a standard policy. Pay the charges and use it. Data that has been collected would be used for specific purposes like vehicle theft, cross-verification and so on... For instance, currently it is shared with car-sale portals where it is important to do cross-verification," the official said. On privacy concerns arising out of this move, he said all necessary measures are being taken to ensure there is no misuse of data. "Checks and balances are being put in place to ensure there is no misuse of data. Technology will always throw new challenges and we will do whatever is required to counter those challenges," the official said. While this access to bulk data would cost Rs 3 crore for commercial organisations for the current year, educational institutions would be able to get access for "research purposes" by paying Rs 5 lakh. The charges would be revised every year accommodating an increase of 5 per cent annually, as per the policy. According to the government, the move to streamline sharing of vehicles registration data would benefit the transport and automobile industries. New Delhi, March 13 : A Delhi court hearing the coal block allocation case on Wednesday granted exemption from personal appearance to industrialist and Congress leader Naveen Jindal till June 30 to contest the general election. Jindal told Special Judge Bharat Parashar that he wished to contest from Kurukshetra in Haryana and sought exemption from personal appearance during the election period. Jindal is a former MP from Kurukshetra. The court was hearing the case related to the allocation of Jharkhand's Amarkonda Murgadangal coal block to Jindal Steel and Gagan Sponge. Patna, March 13 : Bihar's ruling BJP-led NDA has requested its ally and LJP chief and Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan to reconsider his decision not to contest the Lok Sabha polls from Hajipur. "There is pressure from NDA to change the decision of Paswan. The BJP as well as JD-U want him to re-think," a senior LJP leader said on Wednesday. In January, Paswan announced that he will not contest the Lok Sabha polls from Hajipur, ending days of speculation in political circles. Hajipur is considered Paswan's stronghold. According to LJP leaders, Paswan's younger brother Pasupati Kumar Paras, the state President of the party and a Bihar Minister, would contest from Hajipur. Party leaders have cited Paswan's ill-health for his decision not to contest the Lok Sabha polls. New Delhi: Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) chief B.S. Bhullar along with Civil Aviation Secretary Pradeep Singh Kharola, addresses a press conference in New Delhi, on March 13, 2019. The DGCA late on Tuesday ordered "grounding the Boeing Image Source: IANS News New Delhi: Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) chief B.S. Bhullar along with Civil Aviation Secretary Pradeep Singh Kharola, addresses a press conference in New Delhi, on March 13, 2019. The DGCA late on Tuesday ordered "grounding the Boeing Image Source: IANS News New Delhi/Mumbai, March 13 : India grounded all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft on Wednesday evening, affecting hundreds in airports, but the US aviation regulator questioned the global grounding of the fleet after an Ethiopian Airlines crash. "No B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600 hours," the Ministry of Civil Aviation tweeted. The Ministry said these aircraft will stop flying from and to all Indian airports. "Additionally, no B737 MAX aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600 hours Indian time." The directive came close on the heels of a global grounding of the Boeing fleet following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines' Boeing 737-800 MAX flight on Sunday killing all 157 people on board. India joined the UK, Singapore, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Australia and the EU nations in the grounding. On Tuesday, the US aviation regulator Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said that no systematic performance issues have been found with the Boeing 737-MAX aircraft to justify the global grounding. "The FAA continues to review extensively all available data and aggregate safety performance from operators and pilots of the Boeing 737 MAX. Thus far, our review shows no systematic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft," the regulator said. In India, SpiceJet and Jet Airways operate 17 Boeing 737-800 MAX aircraft -- Spice (12) and Jet (5). Both grounded all their Boeing aircraft in this variety. SpiceJet announced cancellation of 14 flights. "Of the 76 planes in our fleet, 64 aircraft are in operation and we are confident of minimizing the inconvenience to our passengers and attain normalcy in our operations," the airline said. Kabul, March 13 : As many as 31 Al Qaeda militants were killed in pre-dawn air attacks by Afghan and foreign troops in Afghanistan's Ghazni province on Wednesday, the Defence Ministry said. The air strikes were launched at a base of the militant group in the Giro district of Ghazni, Efe news reported citing a Defence Ministry statement. "Thirty-one terrorists, including nine suicide bombers and their facilitator Qari Arif," were eliminated in the operation, it said. Ministry spokesperson Qais Mangal said slain militants were "members of Al Qaeda's Indian-subcontinent" branch and were bombed when they were preparing to move to another location in vehicles. Mangal said the Afghan and foreign forces conducted the operation between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. Ghazni, one of the most volatile provinces of Afghanistan, serves as a passageway for insurgents travelling between southwestern, southeastern and southern provinces. Amid ongoing peace talks between the US and the Taliban, Afghanistan has been experiencing unabated resurgence in violence since NATO ended its combat mission in the war-ravaged country in January 2015. After nearly 17 years of the armed conflict, the Afghan government controls around 55 per cent of the territory, while the Taliban control around 11 per cent, with the rest being disputed, according to the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. The US and the Taliban have held many rounds of talks in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to end the Afghan conflict amid opposition by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani's government, which insists on having a central role in the talks. The Taliban have, however, refused to hold talks with the Afghan government, insisting that they will only negotiate with the US. Chandigarh, March 13 : Nearly 85,000 disabled voters in Haryana have got themselves registered on the PwD mobile app of the Election Commission (EC), the state's Chief Electoral Officer Rajeev Ranjan said here on Wednesday. Through this app, disabled voters would be provided transport from residence to polling station, besides ensuring facilities like ramp, drinking water, lights, wheel chair and ballot paper/braille voter slip, Ranjan said. Ranjan said for the first time, the commission has launched PwD mobile app to provide maximum facilities for disabled voters. The CEO said eligible citizens, who are 18 years old or above as on January 1, 2019, and have not been registered, can apply by April 12 to get it done. He said the Commission has given special facility to students to get themselves registered with the poll panel. "Students living in hostel or as tenants and have no proof of residence can get themselves registered with the recommendation of the head of their institutions," he said. Voting in Haryana for 10 Lok Sabha seats will take place on May 12. Lucknow, March 13 : Uttar Pradesh's ruling BJP has launched its campaign for the coming Lok Sabha elections across the state while its rivals -- the Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party combine and the Congress -- are yet to begin. A senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader, who did not want to be identified, told IANS that the party has started programmes to connect with voters in all districts of the sprawling state which sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha. The BJP had secured 71 seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. BJP spokesperson Rakesh Tripathi said at least seven programmes have been planned in each Lok Sabha constituency, including interaction of party workers with members of various party wings. "During the interaction, the party workers are asked to go and spread the message of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the voters," he said. He said this programme was as per party President Amit Shah's vision for party booth workers to connect to at least 10 families under 'Mera parivar BJP parivar'. According to BJP leaders, the party has prepared a poll programme, starting from March 24 to April 7 in all the districts of the state. On the other hand, the Congress, which also plans to contest a bulk of the seats, has not decided on any voter connect programmes yet. Congress leader Surendra Rajput said, "Our electoral campaigns will be decided by the districts units once the candidates of parliamentary constituencies are decided." The Samajwadi Party, which is contesting the polls in alliance with Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party and Ajit Singh's Rashtriya Lok Dal, also said that its programme has not been finalised yet. SP spokesperson Sunil Sajan said that the party is preparing its programme schedule keeping in mind its alliances. He said the programme will be finalised within a week but the campaigning will start after the Holi. SP chief Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati will address several joint rallies across the state, he said. In 2014 elections, the Congress had won two seats, while the SP managed to win five seats and the BSP none. Abuja, March 13 : More than 100 children got trapped in the rubble of a three-storey building, housing a primary school, in the Nigerian city of Lagos on Wednesday, officials said. There was no word on casualties yet and the cause of the collapse was not clear. "Apparently the top floor of the building was home to a primary school, raising fears that students were killed or trapped," local broadcaster Channels said. According to authorities, teams of rescue workers were at the scene where fatalities could have occurred given that the children were attending classes at the time when the building came down, Efe news reported. "Rescue operations by the Lagos State Rescue Unit are on at the collapsed building in Lafiaji Area of Lagos Island," said the official Twitter account of the Lagos state government. The school was on the top floor of the building. THe accident took place on an island at the southwestern end of Lagos Lagoon, which is connected to the rest of the city by bridges. Prince Adams, a local resident, told local newspaper Punch he had seen as many as 10 pupils being take out from the rubble of the building. "It is terrible. Parents are crying. I can't withstand the gory sight," he was cited as saying in the paper's online edition. A video of the scene, published by Punch, showed two ambulances surrounded by a large crowd of people. Ibrahim Farinloye, a spokesman for the National Emergency Management Agency's southwest region, said there was no immediate information on casualties at the school. It was not unusual for poor quality buildings to collapse in Nigeria where rules governing constructions were often flouted, officials said. On March 8, 2016, a five-storey building collapse in Lagos killed 30 people. In December 2016, as many as 60 people were killed when church roof collapsed in the city of Uyo. In September 2014, 116 people, including 84 South Africans, were killed in Lagos when a six-storey building collapsed during a religious gathering where a well-known television evangelist was preaching. Jammu, March 13 : An air alert was sounded along the international border and the Line of Control (LoC) on Wednesday in Jammu and Kashmir after Pakistani fighter jets were detected close to the LoC. Defence Ministry sources said that Indian air defence systems detected the Pakistani jets 10 km inside the LoC on the Pakistan side in Poonch. "This is the first time after the Indian Air Force scrambled to push back Pakistani fighter jets which entered our air space in Nowshera sector on February 27 that Pakistani fighter jets flew this close to the LoC," an official said. India lost a Mig-21 Bison and its pilot, Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, was captured by Pakistan while a Pakistani F-16 jet was downed by Abhinandan before his fighter jet was shot down. New Delhi, March 13 : The GST Council will not announce any "beneficial decisions" like rate cuts or extensions of time period for any schemes or compliance to GST rules at its meeting scheduled on March 19. Sources said that the Council does not want that its decisions are seen as clashing with the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) that came into force post the announcement of the dates of the Lok Sabha election last Sunday. With this, the Council has also received permission from the Election Commission to hold its next meeting - the 34th - on the scheduled date. "The Council will desist from announcing any beneficial decisions including rate cuts and extension of time period for any compliance of rules of GST till elections are over to abide with the Model Code of Conduct. "We have received Election Commission of India's approval to hold the March 19th meeting on discussion and announcement of various issues including implementation of lower GST rates for the real estate sector as the decisions were already announced in the last meeting when the MCC was not in place," sources said. At its 33rd meeting, the Council had slashed tax rates for under-construction flats to 5 per cent and affordable homes to 1 per cent, effective April 1. As far as further lowering of rates are concerned under GST with an eye on on polls, after the Council's 31st meeting in December where it was announced that rates were being rationalised on a number of products and services, there are only 28 items left now in top 28 per cent tax bracket. Among the items consumed/used by the common man, only cement continues to remain, along with luxury and 'sin' goods, in the top bracket. This major tax rationalisation, ahead of the 2019 general elections, had come after Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to bring 99 per cent of the goods under the 18 per cent or lower GST slab. But all the rate cuts have had their impact on GST collections, which in February dropped to Rs 97,247 crore from Rs 1.02 lakh crore in the previous month. The government has lowered the GST collection target for the current fiscal to Rs 11.47 lakh crore in the Revised Estimates, from Rs 13.71 lakh crore budgeted initially. New Delhi, March 13 : The government has advised domestic airlines not to go in for predatory air fare pricing as several 737-MAX aircraft were grounded due to safety reasons in the wake of a plane crash in Ethiopia. The development comes after India suspended operations and overflight permission for all Boeing 737-MAX aircraft in India from 4 p.m. on Wednesday. Briefing the media, after a meeting between Civil Aviation Ministry officials with airlines' representatives, Civil Aviation Secretary Pradeep Singh Kharola said that all flights operated on Boeing 737-MAX had been grounded. "We have advised the airlines... that they should not use it (grounding) as a reason to jack up their fares," Kharola told reporters here. "They have promised they will go as per normal routine. DGCA has just said that it will be monitoring all the sectors very closely... and after monitoring if it is found that pricing is predatory, an advisory will be issued." However, airfares are already high. The current developments may further push them up. "The shortage of planes and high seat occupancies are expected to push airfares north in the short term. The fares were at least 15 percent higher this year compared to last year. Owing to the current situation, they are expected to rise further this season," said Sharat Dhall, COO (B2C) of Yatra.com. "At least 50 planes are out of action or grounded on the domestic front owing to multiple reasons. That is a significant reduction in domestic airline capacity. The additional capacity coming in is not likely to cover this in the short term, while demand is going to be robust over the next few months due to school holidays and surging leisure travel," said Dhall. The grounding led budget airline SpiceJet, which has 12 such aircraft, to cancel 14 flights on Wednesday. In India, SpiceJet and Jet Airways operate 17 Boeing 737-800 MAX aircraft -- Spice (12) and Jet (5). A part of Jet fleet has already been grounded due to various reasons. "We are evaluating options for augmenting capacity in the coming days through a mix of additional flights and aircraft inductions. We are sure our operations will be normal very soon," Spice said in a statement. "Complying with the DGCA directive, SpiceJet has grounded its entire B737 Max fleet. A majority of passengers affected as a result of these cancellations have been accommodated by SpiceJet on alternate flights." India joined the UK, Singapore, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Australia and the EU nations in the grounding. The global grounding of the Boeing fleet follows the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines' Boeing 737-800 MAX flight on Sunday killing all 157 people on board. BrasAlia, March 13 : Two teenagers opened fire on Wednesday at a school in Brazil's Sao Paulo state, killing at least eight people, including several children, officials said. A school employee and the two suspected teenage gunmen were also among the dead in the attack at the Professor Raul Brasil state school in Suzano, a Fire Department spokesman was cited as saying by Efe news. Sao Paulo state Governor Joao Doria tweeted that the victims had been "cruelly murdered". Beijing, March 13 : China on Wednesday slammed as "irresponsible" claims by the top American diplomat that Beijing was blocking access to energy beneath the South China Sea. China's Ministry of Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said that Beijing had started consulting Southeast Asian nations about resolving disputes in the South China Sea, and called on non-claimant nations to keep out of the discussions. "Nations in the region are capable of resolving and managing the disputes in their own ways," Lu said. "Nations outside the region should refrain from stirring up trouble and disrupting the harmonious situation." Without specifying, Lu said an "extraterritorial country" repeatedly tried to destabilise the region, working against the interests of the countries in the area. Lu was responding to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's suggestion that China was blocking energy development in the South China Sea through "coercive means", preventing Southeast Asian countries from accessing more than $2.5 trillion in recoverable energy reserves. Addressing top energy firm executives and oil ministers in Houston, Texas, on Tuesday, Pompeo criticised "China's illegal island building in international waterways", insisting that it was not "simply a security matter". "By blocking energy development in the South China Sea to coerce, it means China prevents Asean members from accessing more than 2A trillion in recoverable energy resources," he said. New Delhi, March 13 : Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday accused BJP President Amit Shah of using police force to detain call centre workers of Aam Aadmi Party for hours. "Amit Shah has got down to using his goon-like ways. It is at his behest that the Delhi Police is threatening to shut down our call centres. Names of millions of people have been struck off the voters' list. What wrong did we do in getting their names in the electoral roll? If they have to catch someone, catch us," the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader said on Twitter. The party also wrote to the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) complaining against the police officers who, it said, harassed its workers. "It's the duty of the Election Commission to get people to register as voters, but when this was not done, the Aam Aadmi Party worked to get people to register themselves by visiting them door-to-door and through call centers. "Doing this, we added 30,000 voters from south Delhi alone. This irked the Bharatiya Janata Party, which had earlier worked to striking off people's names from voters' list," Sanjay Singh, Member of Parliament from AAP, said in the complaint to the CEC. The BJP used police to harass these call centre workers by detaining them at Sunlight Colony police station and interrogating them for hours, he wrote in the letter. "Democracy is being stifled by BJP workers and the Delhi Police. Fear is being struck in the heart of common man and the opposition parties... We urge you to take action against the police officers by removing them from their posts and launching an investigation in the matter," he added. New York, March 13 : Actor Hugh Jackman will return to Broadway in an upcoming revival of Meredith Willsons "The Music Man". It marks Jackman's first musical role in more than a decade. His last one, "The Boy From Oz", resulted in a Tony Award for best actor. Jackman will play con man Harold Hill, a role made famous on screen and stage by the late Robert Preston. The show follows Hill's latest scheme, one that finds him posing as the head of boys' marching band. Scott Rudin will produce the revival, reports variety.com. On Twitter, Jackman said "The Music Man" will come to Broadway on October 22, 2020. Nairobi, March 13 : Pollution makes her heart throb and goosebumps erupt. She has every right to feel this way. After all, the future of the earth involves teenagers like her. "It is a topic that makes my heart throb, goosebumps come out of nowhere and sometimes I get really emotional, but I have every right to feel this way. The future of our earth involves me. And my future children. And my children's children," high school student Charlotte Wanja, 17, said on Wednesday in an emotional speech to delegates from 170 countries gathered for the week-long UN Environment Assembly, the world's highest-level decision-making body on the environment, in this Kenyan capital. "If nothing changes, pollution and global warming could become unstoppable. "We have faith, we have truth, we have hopes, and we have visions. And we have hard work. These are the things that will dig us out of the situation we have gotten ourselves into. Doing little things in a great way, that's how we're going to do it. Plant that one tree, pick up that one plastic bottle, the little things matter," said Wanja, who would like to study environmental engineering. Wanja and Shlok Sachdev, also 17, were invited to attend the Assembly after winning a Kenya-wide speechwriting competition on the theme "Our Earth in 2050". Wanja is a student at the Alliance Girls High School in Kikuyu outside Nairobi. Sachdev studies at Premier Academy in Nairobi. "I believe in a future where renewable energy is the new normal, where we cut down on fossil fuels and go electric, a future where we really learn to reduce, reuse and recycle," Sachdev said. Over 4,700 delegates, comprising tech experts, academics, scientists and civil society activists are here for the Assembly. The theme this year is innovative solutions for environmental challenges and sustainable consumption and production. Inspired by 15-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, hundreds of school and university students are observing a strike every Friday across the Europe to stand up for climate justice and demand action. Thunberg, in her address at the UN climate change plenary in Poland last December, condemned global inaction in the face of catastrophic climate change. A UN Environment report says the majority of the marine litter - between 60-80 per cent - is composed of plastic. Only nine per cent of the nine billion tonnes of plastic the world has produced has been recycled. The overwhelming majority of plastics - comprising drinking bottles, bottle caps, food wrappers, grocery bags, lids and straws - are designed to be thrown away after a single use, ultimately ending up in landfills and polluting the environment. Another student activist, Rebecca Freitag, 26, a UN delegate for sustainable development from Germany, told IANS that the youth should be given participation in environment talks as they comprise 25 per cent of the global population. Before coming to the UN summit, she collected the plastic waste from roadsides of Kenya, which introduced the world's toughest laws on single-use plastic bags two years ago, and got her dress stitched to spotlight solutions for the growing impact of plastics on the world's marine environment. (Vishal Gulati is in Nairobi at the invitation of UN Environment. He can be contacted at vishal.g@ians.in) London, March 13 : UK Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday said she will vote against a no-deal Brexit at the end of the month as she warned MPs that they faced "hard choices" after rejecting her deal for a second time. Battling a sore throat during Prime Minister's Questions, she insisted the UK can still leave the EU with a "good deal" and that she understood "the voice of the country" on Brexit, the BBC reported. UK MPs will vote at 19.00 GMT Thursday (12.30 a.m.) on whether to block the UK from leaving the EU without an agreement later this month. Wednesday's vote will only apply to the March 29 deadline and would not rule out the prospect of a no-deal exit later this year, if Parliament is ultimately unable to agree a way forward. After the House of Commons rejected May's Brexit deal by 149 votes on Tuesday, the EU warned the risk of a "disorderly" Brexit had never been higher. Its chief negotiator Michel Barnier said the EU "cannot go any further" in trying to persuade MPs to back the agreed terms of exit and the UK had to break the impasse. May on Wednesday faced renewed pressure from opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to abandon her "dead" departure plan. He called on the Premier to change course after the defeat. He said the deal had been "decisively rejected" and it was time for May to change her red lines. "The Prime Minister has been stubbornly declaring that the only choice is between her deal and no deal," Corbyn said. "Last night's vote finished off her deal. Tonight she's not even showing the leadership to whip on no deal." Corbyn asked which way May would vote on the government motion, for which Conservative MPs will have a free vote. She replied: "I will be voting for the motion standing in my name." Dismissing calls from Tory MPs to embrace a no-deal exit now, May said her deal remained the best way to honour the 2016 referendum result. "I may not have my own voice but I understand the voice of the country." "I believe we have a good deal. No deal is better than a bad deal but I have been working for us to leave on March 29 and leave with a good deal." The EU urged the UK to take "responsibility" for its actions. "Again the House of Commons says what it doesn't want. Now this impasse can only be solved in the UK," Barnier told the European Parliament. The EU, he suggested, had gone "as far as it possibly can" to satisfy MPs' concerns over the agreement, particularly in relation to the backstop, an insurance policy to stop a hard border on the island of Ireland. "If the UK still wants to leave the EU in an orderly manner, this treaty is, and will remain, the only treaty possible," he said. London, March 13 : The Aga Khan, the 49th hereditary Imam of the Ismaili sect of Shia Muslims, has been named the Global Founding Patron of the Prince of Wales's charitable trust. The Aga Khan, who also heads the Aga Khan Development Network, will now support the delivery of the work of The Prince's Trust in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and through local partners in India, Jordan, Pakistan, Malta, Barbados and Greece, the trust said in a statement. "Founded by His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales, The Prince's Trust has been helping vulnerable young people across the UK since 1976, and is now helping to tackle the global issue of youth unemployment, and supporting young people and their communities to have more positive futures," it said. The Aga Khan met Prince Charles at the Buckingham Palace, where he was thanked for his support. Supporters of the charity's work such as Amal and George Clooney, and long-term Ambassadors Benedict Cumberbatch and Sir Tom Jones were also present. The announcement comes at a time when the Prince's Trust is expanding its work and network of expertise globally. Itanagar, March 13 : The Congress in Arunachal Pradesh has decided to forge an alliance with regional party, the Peoples Party of Arunachal (PPA), and is working out options to rope in more parties, the Congress state unit said. "The Congress would have a pre-poll alliance with PPA in the state. Our party is ready to work with like-minded parties," state Congress President Takam Sanjoy said on Wednesday, adding talks are also on to ally with Janta Dal (Secular). Former Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister and senior BJP leader Gegong Apang joined the JD(S) last month. "We are ready to give up some seats to all like minded parties so that the BJP can be prevented for the greater interest of the state," Sanjoy said. Arunachal Pradesh will have the legislative assembly and Lok Sabha polls simultaneously. While there are 60 legislative assembly constituencies in Arunachal Pradesh, there are two Lok Sabha constituencies in the state. Meanwhile, the Congress, which was ousted from power in Mizoram, is also planning to contest the Lok Sabha polls along with the Zoram People's Movement (ZPM). The Congress will field the candidate for the lone Lok Sabha seat in Mizoram and ZPM will provide support. New Delhi: Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) chief B.S. Bhullar along with Civil Aviation Secretary Pradeep Singh Kharola, addresses a press conference in New Delhi, on March 13, 2019. The DGCA late on Tuesday ordered "grounding the Boeing Image Source: IANS News New Delhi/Mumbai, March 13 : Following a global trend of grounding Boeing 737-MAX aircraft, India finally suspended the plane's operations and over-flight permissions on Wednesday evening, even as hundreds of passengers were affected at airports. Further, the government tried to protect passengers from the double whammy of high fares and reduced flight operations. Advising airlines not to go in for predatory pricing, it said that it will be monitoring key sectors to detect any high fares. Briefing the media here, after a meeting between Ministry of Civil Aviation officials with airlines' representatives, Civil Aviation Secretary Pradeep Singh Kharola said that all flights operated on Boeing 737-MAX have been grounded before 4 p.m. In India, SpiceJet and Jet Airways operate 17 Boeing 737-MAX aircraft -- Spice (12) and Jet (5) -- though the latter's fleet was already grounded due to various reasons. "We have advised the airlines... that they should not use it (grounding) as a reason to jack up their fares," Kharola told reporters. "They have assured that they will go as per normal routine. The DGCA (Directorate General of Civil Aviation) has just said that it will be monitoring all the sectors very closely... and after monitoring, if it is found that pricing is predatory, advisory will be issued." Kharola said that SpiceJet cancelled 14 flights, out of the 500 plus flights it operates on a daily basis. The airline was able to take care of passengers on its cancelled flights. However, according to sector experts, airfares are already high and the current developments may further push them up. "The shortage of planes and high seat occupancies are expected to push airfares north in the short term. The fares were at least 15 percent higher this year compared to last year. Owing to the current situation, they are expected to rise further this season," Sharat Dhall, COO (B2C) of Yatra.com said. According to Aloke Bajpai, CEO and co-founder, ixigo: "Following the ban of Boeing 737 MAX in Indian airspace, international inbound flights have been affected. Post the DGCA announcement, 34 international flights flying into Mumbai and 12 flights bound for Delhi were cancelled." "Grounding of additional planes will further impact fares which were already high this season. Both domestic and international fares for flights to and from Mumbai and Delhi have seen an average increase of 40-50 per cent and we expect fares to rise further due to shortage of planes." Earlier in the day, the Ministry of Civil Aviation tweeted: "No B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600 hours." This came as a clarification and in continuation to its late Tuesday decision when the Ministry had tweeted: "DGCA has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately." The Ministry added on Wednesday: "B737Max operations will stop from or to all Indian airports. Additionally, no B737 Max aircraft will be allowed to enter or transit the Indian airspace effective 1600 hours Indian time or 1030 UTC." On its part, SpiceJet said that it is rationalising and optimising the use of its Boeing 737NG and Bombardier Q400 aircraft to address the current situation and minimise inconvenience to its passengers. "We are evaluating options for augmenting capacity in the coming days through a mix of additional flights & aircraft inductions. We are sure that our operations will be normal very soon," the airline said in a statement. "Complying with the DGCA directive, SpiceJet has grounded its entire B737 Max fleet. A majority of passengers affected as a result of these cancellations have been accommodated by SpiceJet on alternate flights." With the latest action, India joined the UK, Singapore, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Australia and the EU nations in the grounding. The global grounding of the Boeing fleet follows the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines' Boeing 737-MAX flight on Sunday killing all 157 people on board. Kabul, March 13 : As many as 31 Al Qaeda militants were killed in pre-dawn air attacks by Afghan and foreign troops in Afghanistan's Ghazni province on Wednesday, the Defence Ministry said. The air strikes were launched at a base of the militant group in the Giro district of Ghazni, Efe news reported citing a Defence Ministry statement. "Thirty-one terrorists, including nine suicide bombers and their facilitator Qari Arif," were eliminated in the operation, it said. Ministry spokesperson Qais Mangal said slain militants were "members of Al Qaeda's Indian-subcontinent" branch and were bombed when they were preparing to move to another location in ekhar Azad at Anand Hospital in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh on March 13, 2019. (Photo: IANS)' /> Meerut, March 13 (IANS) Congress general Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Wednesday met Bhim Army chief Chandrasekhar Azad and attacked the BJP, saying the government has become "arrogant" and it was trying to suppress the voice of the people. Priyanka Gandhi arrived at Anand Hospital here along with Western Uttar Pradesh in-charges Jyotiraditya Scindia and Uttar Pradesh party chief Raj Babbar. Speaking to reporters after meeting Azad, she told media, "Yeh ahankaari sarkaar hai (this is an arrogant government). The government wants to suppress the voice of the youth." She alleged that the government does not want to listen to the voice of the youth. "They have not given employment to the youth. So if they are raising their voice, let them do that. What is the use of suppressing their voice?" she questioned. Asked if Azad would be inducted into Congress, she said, "We loved the way he was raising the issue of employment and fighting for a cause." Pressed further she said, please do not give any political connotation to the conversation. Azad was arrested by Uttar Pradesh Police on Tuesday for allegedly violating the model code of conduct by using more than stipulated number of motorcycles at a political rally. However, Azad fell ill soon after being detained, following which he was admitted to a hospital. New Delhi, March 13 : The Centre on Wednesday told the Supreme Court that former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha, journalist-turned politician Arun Shourie and activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan are guilty of leakage of sensitive information having a bearing on national security and combat capacity of Rafale fighter jets. Citing "secrecy" in the matter, the Centre contended that the three petitioners - Sinha, Shourie and Bhushan - are "guilty of leakage of sensitive information, which offends the terms of the agreements" on the fighter jet. In an affidavit, the government said the leaked information was now available to the "enemy/our adversaries", adding those who have conspired in this leakage were guilty of penal offences punishable under Indian Penal Code. The offences include theft by unauthorized photocopying and leakage of sensitive official documents affecting national security, which relate to war capacity of combat aircraft, said the affidavit filed by the Defence Secretary Sanjay Mitra. The Centre's affidavit comes on the eve of a hearing on the plea for the review of the apex court's December 14 judgement giving a clean chit to the Centre by holding that the decision-making process on the Rafale jets was not in doubt. The matter is listed for hearing on March 14. An internal inquiry, started on February 28, is aimed at finding out where the leakage took place. "... It is of utmost concern so that in future the sanctity of decision-making process in governance is maintained", says the affidavit filed by the Defence Secretary. The Centre has contended that the four-page note annexed with the petition seeking a review of the December 14 judgement is a "secret" document. Similarly in the miscellaneous application by Sinha and others seeking perjury action against the officers allegedly for misleading the court consists of two notes of two pages and 8 pages which too are privileged. All the three documents - one annexed with the review petition and two with the miscellaneous applications -- have been authenticated by Bhushan. Contending that the documents attached to the review petition and miscellaneous application were "sensitive to national security which relates to the capacity of combat aircraft", the Centre asserted that this has put "the national security in jeopardy." Those who have "conspired in making the photocopies of these sensitive documents" without the "consent, permission or acquiescence of the Central government" have committed theft by unauthorised photocopying of such documents, says the affidavit. The Centre further said that "secrecy was envisaged in the various agreements that the Central government had entered into with the foreign government and others on matters of national security." The leakage of documents to relating Rafale has "adversely affected the sovereignty, security and friendly relations with foreign countries." The petitioners "unauthorisedly accessed the documents with the intention to present a "selective and incomplete picture of internal secret deliberations." "The documents presented by the petitioners fail to bring out how the issues were addressed and resolved and if necessary approval of competent authorities was taken", says the affidavit. The selective and incomplete presentation of facts and records by the petitioners, the Centre has contended, is "intended to mislead the court into driving wrong conclusions, which are very damaging to the national security and public interest." The government cited recent CAG report to back its contention. The Centre has contended that the documents which were unauthorisedly photocopied belonged to a class for which it was "entitled to claim privilege under Section 123 and 124 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872." Asserting that the petitioners had "no authority whatsoever to produce the same before the court without explicit permission" of the government, the government affidavit says that these documents are exempt from disclosure under Section 8(1)(a) of the Right to Information Act. Chennai, March 13 : The case of sexual-assault-cum-blackmail of women in Pollachi will have its echo in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, not only in that (Pollachi) constituency but also in the neighbouring seats, said a former AIADMK MP on Wednesday. "The Pollachi sexual assault case will have its impact not only in the Pollachi Lok Sabha constituency but also in neighbouring seats like Coimbatore, Erode, Nilgiris and Tiruppur," K.C. Palanisamy told IANS. According to him, the people of the area believe in self-respect and "will not go easy on this sordid episode in the polls," he said. He demanded a court-monitored time-bound probe and trial into the case. The people of the area may display their anger at the polls as the sordid episode has taken place when the state is headed by E. Palaniswami who belongs to that community, Palanisamy said. Referring to the expulsion of a local party official A. Nagaraj, Palanisamy said the ruling party should investigate on whose recommendation did he get the party post. The Crime Branch-Crime Investigation Department (CBCID) has launched a probe into the case. There will be an impartial probe and the culprit will be brought to book, said a CBCID senior official. Speaking to reporters in Pollachi, a town in Coimbatore district and about 535 km from here, a senior CBCID official said a special probe team has been formed and has started investigations. He said documents and other items related to the case have been collected from the police. "The number of people involved in the crime will be known only after the probe," he said. Tamil Nadu Director General of Police T.K. Rajendran had ordered transfer of the case to the CBCID on Tuesday. The four accused -- Thirunavukkarasu, Sabarirajan, Vasanthakumar, Satish -- have been arrested in connection with the case. The National Commission for Women has asked the Tamil Nadu police for the action taken in the sexual assault case. In Pollachi, college students staged a protest, demanding action against the culprits involved in the sexual-assault-cum-blackmail scandal. Similarly, college students in Thiruvannamalai, Thoothukudi and Villupuram also staged protests against the sexual assault and demanding action against the culprit. A mob damaged the bar run by expelled Nagaraj in Pollachi. Nagaraj was arrested and let out on bail after he and three others attacked the brother of the girl who had lodged the police complaint against sexual assault. Chennai, March 13 : Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday kick-started the party's Lok Sabha election campaign in Tamil Nadu promising to make the state a manufacturing hub that can compete with China and pledged to reserve jobs in central government for women and protect Tamil language and culture. Addressing a public rally, he also said that DMK President M.K. Stalin would be the next Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu and the Congress-DMK alliance was an alliance of minds to protect Tamil culture from the BJP-RSS assault. Stalin, who shared the dais with Gandhi along with leaders of other allies, reiterated that Gandhi would be the Prime Minister after the Lok Sabha polls. In his speech, Gandhi criticized Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the Rafale aircraft deal, demonetization and goods and services tax (GST) and promised fishermen a separate Ministry when the party comes to power in New Delhi. Gandhi said that at the back of mobile phones and even shirts one can see the 'Made in China' tag. When the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) returns to power, it will ensure that these products sport the 'Made in Tamil Nadu' tag. He said the UPA government will focus on young entrepreneurs and will give huge amounts to youths as loans to start business. The Congress leader said Modi gave Rs 30,000 crore loan to diamond trader Nirav Modi, only to default. Gandhi said the single biggest problem facing the country was acute unemployment as demonetization and the GST destroyed small and medium enterprises (SME) and informal sectors. "We will reform the GST to make it simple and have single low tax rate." The Congress leader said the UPA would introduce guaranteed minimum income scheme and decide the minimum income for all citizens. The government would help citizens with less than that income through direct cash transfer, he added. To attract the women voters, Gandhi promised 33 per cent reservation in government jobs for them and promised the passage of Women's Reservation Bill giving 33 per cent seats in Parliament. Slamming the central government, Gandhi said every state was being targeted by Modi to impose "one ideology" -- an oblique reference to Hindutva. Attacking Modi on the Rafale deal, Gandhi citED a couplet of Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar to say that truth will prevail. "The truth will set you free. But it will not be so for Modi as the truth will put him in jail." New Delhi/Mumbai, March 13 : Financially beleaguered Jet Airways faces another crisis as other airlines try to poach its commanders and co-pilots, luring them with lucrative offers with a stable monthly pay. According to industry insiders, the airline which is under massive financial strain has partly paid its employees for several months. "These circumstances have made it possible for the other airlines to poach its pilots. However, they have not met with much success as the company is on the verge of getting a reprieve," sources told IANS in Mumbai. "Additionally, the work-life balance at the company was regarded as the very best in the industry." Jet currently has 1,900 pilots on its rolls. This is now being looked by all other domestic airlines, especially those who are looking at international expansion. Vistara has been permitted to fly abroad while SpiceJet, IndiGo and GoAir all have bullish overseas plans. The development comes even as speculation is rife that Etihad Airways has set several conditions to extend a financial lifeline to save Jet. Still, the passenger carrier grounded four more aircraft over non-repayment of dues to lessors, taking the total to 32. The company in BSE filings has said that its 19 aircraft were grounded in February over non-repayment of dues to lessors, while 13 aircraft were grounded this month, taking the total to 32. The Jet Airways Group operates a fleet of 123 aircraft. However, around 50 planes are said to be non-operational due to a host of reasons, including lack of spare parts. With regular grounding of aircraft, sources said close to 50 per cent of the airline's fleet is not operational. Analysts said the situation is fast moving on the path taken by now-defunct Kingfisher Airline. "Further to our letter dated 7 March, 2019, we now write to inform you that an additional four aircraft have been grounded due to non-payment of amounts outstanding to lessors under their respective lease agreements," the airline said in a regulatory filing to the BSE on Tuesday. "The company also continues to provide required and periodic updates to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation in this regard." The development assumes significance as the Gulf-based Etihad Airways, which holds 24 per cent stake in the Indian airline, and a new partner, are said to have set several conditions to extend a financial lifeline to save Jet Airways. According to reports, Etihad Airways and a new partner will together invest around Rs 4,000 crore to revive the airline. The reports, based on an MoU apparently signed between Etihad and Jet, said that the company's founder Naresh Goyal and his wife will step down from the airline's board. On March 8, the cash-strapped Jet Airways' outgoing Chairman Goyal had sought an immediate funding of Rs 750 crore from Etihad. In a letter written to Etihad Aviation Group CEO Tony Douglas on March 8, he had sought the funding by early next week. Hassan : , March 13 (IANS) Karnataka's ruling coalition partner Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) supremo H.D. Deve Gowda on Wednesday said his grandson Prajwal Revanna will contest the Lok Sabha election from Hassan. Gowda, who hails from Holenarasipura in this district, about 180km west of Bengaluru, is a six-time Lok Sabha member from the constituency since 1991, when he first got elected to the lower House. "I have decided that I will not be contesting the Lok Sabha elections from here (Hassan constituency)," a teary-eyed Gowda told a party gathering, kicking off the political campaign for the elections. He announced that his grandson Revanna, son of state's Public Works Department Minister H.D. Revanna (brother of Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy), will be contesting from the constituency instead. Gowda, however, will be contesting the Lok Sabha elections from another constituency, which he is yet to announce. The JD-S leader had demanded at least 10 of 28 seats in Karnataka for his party from the coalition ally Congress in the ensuing Lok Sabha elections on April 18 and 23. Incidentally, another grandson of Gowda, Nikhil Kumaraswamy, son of the Chief Minister, is also likely to contest the upcoming Lok Sabha elections from Mandya seat. The party is yet to announce its seat-sharing arrangement with the Congress. Meerut, March 13 : Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Wednesday met Bhim Army chief Chandrasekhar Azad and attacked the BJP, saying the government has become "arrogant" and it is trying to suppress the voice of the people. Priyanka arrived at Anand Hospital here where Azad is undergoing treatment, along with western Uttar Pradesh in-charge Jyotiraditya Scindia and Uttar Pradesh party chief Raj Babbar. Speaking to reporters after meeting Azad, she told the media: "Yeh ahankaari sarkaar hai (this is an arrogant government). The government wants to suppress the voice of the youth." She alleged that the government does not want to listen to the voice of the youth. "They have not given employment to the youth. So if they are raising their voice, let them do that... Why suppress their voice?" she said. Asked if Azad would be inducted into the Congress, she said: "We loved the way he was raising the issue of employment and fighting for a cause." Pressed further, she said: "Please do not give any political connotation to the conversation." Azad, after the Congress leader left, said he will not seek support from the Congress or any other party and that he only wants the "rule of Bahujan Samaj". "I won't to seek support from any party. I was born in 'Bahujan Samaj' and I want the rule of 'Bahujan Samaj'. And I will defeat the dictator ruling the country by contesting against him from Varanasi, if he contests from there," he told the news channel NDTV. Asked again if he would seek support from the BSP and the SP, he said he will not seek anyone's support but if they want to defeat Narendra Modi, then they should support him. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the sitting MP from Varanasi constituency. Azad was arrested by Uttar Pradesh Police on Tuesday for allegedly violating the model code of conduct by using more than stipulated number of motorcycles at a political rally. However, Azad fell ill soon after being detained, following which he was admitted to the hospital. Nairobi, March 13 : French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Kenya on Wednesday in the last leg of his tour of three East African countries. He will also be attending the ongoing UN Environment Assembly, the world's highest-level decision-making body on the environment, here along with his Kenyan counterpart Uhuru Kenyatta, a day ahead of its culmination. Kenyatta received Macron at State House here and a guard of honour was also presented to the French leader, who had earlier visited Ethiopia and Djibouti. "I am delighted to host my friend...in his historic visit to Kenya. Kenya and France enjoy a cordial relationship that has helped spur growth in different areas for the benefit of our people," Kenyatta said in a rweet. On Thursday, Macron will be attending the One Planet Summit on reversing climate change, a spokesperson for the UN Environment told IANS. This will be the first regional edition of One Plant Summit, co-chaired by Macron and Kenyatta and also the World Bank. It is also being held around the edges of the Assembly, focusing on Africa's environmental challenges. The fourth UN Environment Assembly began on Monday under the theme "Innovative Solutions for Environmental Challenges and Sustainable Consumption and Production". It is the biggest gathering in the Assembly's short history, with attendance almost double the last event in December 2017. Bold decisions and outcomes are expected as the delegates will negotiate late into the night for five days, UN Environment said. Resolutions are on the table to push harder for sustainable consumption and production patterns, commit to the protection of the marine environment from plastic pollution, reduce food waste, and advance technological innovation that combats climate change, and reduces resource use and bio-diversity loss. This Assembly's status as the only UN body outside the General Assembly where all member states convene, and its power to bring together all sectors, means that the global environmental agenda is defined here. Decisions have a profound impact on the goals of the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as well as paving the way towards the UN Climate Change Summit 2019 and impacting the overall UN agenda. Ahead of the meeting, UN Environment's Acting Executive Director Joyce Msuya appealed to nations to step up and start delivering real change. "Time is running short. We are past pledging and politicking. We are past commitments with little accountability. What's at stake is life, and society, as the majority of us know it and enjoy it today," she wrote in a policy letter. (Vishal Gulati is in Nairobi at the invitation of the UN Environment. He can be contacted at vishal.g@ians.in) New Delhi, March 13 : The Election Commission on Wednesday issued a show-cause notice to Delhi BJP MLA Om Prakash Sharma for posting a picture on Facebook featuring him along with Indian Air Force officer Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman. The District Election Officer (East) asked Sharma to remove the post and submit a reply by 11 a.m. on Thursday. The Commission had also issued him a notice on Tuesday over the same issue. The said picture features the Vishwas Nagar MLA along with Wing Commander Varthaman and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and violates the Model Code of Conduct, the notice said. Referring to its December 2013 letter, the poll panel had last Saturday asked all political parties to refrain from making references to defence personnel in advertisements as part of their political campaign and had directed that any posts on Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter and YouTube violating these instructions must be deleted. New Delhi, March 13 : The BJP on Wednesday dragged Congress General Secretary and and Rahul Gandhi's sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra into alleged corruption involving land deal in Haryana's Faridabad. Addressing media, Union Minister Smriti Irani said the news reports have brought to the fore a relation between H.L. Pahwa, alleged to be on the payroll of C.C. Thampi, who is connected to both alleged arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari and Priyanka's husband Robert Vadra. "Gandhi (Rahul) has procured land from H.L. Pahwa through a conduit-representative Mahesh Nagar. Nagar also represented Vadra in land purchasing case under investigation in Haryana and Rajasthan," Irani said. She said H.L. Pahwa had a similar give-and-take with Priyanka Vadra as well. According to the documents issued by BJP, Priyanka bought 5-acre land in Faridabad from Pahwa in Amipur village for Rs 15 lakh. She sold this land back to Pahwa in Rs 80 lakh in June 2009. Irani said what was also brought to light was a connection between Pahwa and Vadra in the land purchase as news reports highlight the financial inability of Pahwa to get into a financial arrangement with Gandhi-Vadra family. "Hence to support the financial relationship, reports have suggested that Pahwa was suitably financed and supported by C.C. Thampi. Investigation have found a money trail between Thampi and Pahwa amounting to Rs 54 crore," Irani added. Pahwa's economic condition wasn't good enough to buy back the same land at an inflated rate which he had first sold to the Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. "That is why a person named C.C. Thampi gave him over Rs 50 crore," she said. New Delhi, March 13 : Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, here on Wednesday, launched "Kidney Care at Home", which aims to provide homecare services, like ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, continuous holter monitoring, care of catheter, dressing and wound care. "There will be dedicated staff to look after home peritoneal dialysis (CAPD & APD) and this APD machine will have software for monitoring therapy by the nephrologist," the hospital said in a statement. "Since chronic kidney disease runs in families, especially in patients with diabetes, hypertension and various other diseases, we will have a package under which patients families will be screened for early detection of kidney diseases. Many lives can be saved by doing the screening of families," D.S. Rana, Chairperson (Department of Nephrology) & Chairman (Board of Management), Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, said. Another service launched is an addition of Apheresis Unit in the department of nephrology, which will have dedicated apheresis machines and will cater to patients of ABO incompatible kidney transplant. New Delhi, March 13 : Indian and Pakistani officials will meet at Attari, near Amritsar, on Thursday to finalise modalities of the corridor to the Kartarpur Sahib gurdwara, with India keen for visa-free access to the pilgrims to the historic shrine across the border. The first-ever meeting on the issue, coming amid heightened tensions between both countries in the wake of Pulwama terror attack, will also discuss the alignment of the project as there is some mismatch in the coordinates. Officials from Home, External Affairs and other ministries concerned of the two countries will attend the meeting. Sources said that security aspect was of paramount importance and there will be no dilution in that. They also said that Pakistan will also be conveyed that places of pilgrimage should not be used for separatist propaganda by anti-India elements. There have also been reports that Khalistan separatist groups could use the corridor route to push terrorists. The meeting will take place exactly a month after the February 14 Pulwama terror attack in which 40 Central Reserve Police Force troopers were killed, triggering India-Pakistan tensions. India has made it clear that the meeting was in no way a resumption of a bilateral dialogue. It has said the issue was related to emotions and sentiments of the Indian citizens of the Sikh faith and its decision regarding the meeting reflects a strong commitment to operationalize the corridor on the occasion of the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev. The Kartarpur Sahib gurdwara in Narowal district of Pakistan's Punjab province, located 4.5 km from the border near the Dera Baba Nanak town in Punjab's Gurdaspur district, is significant for the Sikh community as it is here that the faith's founder Guru Nanak Dev spent 18 years of his life and was his final resting place. The governments of India and Pakistan are trying to facilitate the travel of pilgrims to offer prayers at the gurdwara - a demand made by the Sikhs for the past over 70 years. Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh wants "passport and visa-free 'khule darshan' for pilgrims". Meanwhile, the Indian government has already initiated development of the Passenger Terminal Building Complex at Dera Baba Nanak, with its design inspired by the symbol "Khand", which symbolises values of oneness and humanity. It will cater to about 5,000 pilgrims per day with provision to cater to additional 10,000 pilgrims during festivals. Kolkata, March 13 : Amidst opposition parties' skepticism over free and fair polls in West Bengal, the Election Commission will hold an all-party meeting here on Friday, an official said here on Wednesday. "Deputy Election Commissioner Sudeep Jain will arrive in Kolkata on March 15. He will conduct a monitoring meeting with all political parties of the state," Additional Chief Electoral Officer, West Bengal, Sanjay Basu told reporters. Jain will also hold meetings with the District Election Officers (DEOs), Superintendents of Police and others. Prior to this, West Bengal CEO Aariz Aftab will have a video conference with all the DEOs on March 15. "After the 'cVigil' app became operational on Tuesday, we have received 183 complaints out of which 56 have been dropped. As many as 48 complaints have been forwarded for investigation," Basu said. Also, there are around 47 complaints dropped by Returning Officers (ROs) after an investigation. There were 28 complaints which were correct and action have been taken on them. "Even today the complaints are mainly related to defacement of various places and there are no major complaints," he said. The Election Commission is working endlessly to see that all propaganda materials like banners and hoardings are removed. "Based on yesterday's update there were more than 10,000 hoardings all around the state. More than 8,500 of them have already been removed," Basu added. United Nations/New Delhi, March 14 : The UN Sanctions Committee on Wednesday did not come to a decision on naming JeM chief Mohammed Masood Azhar a global terrorist due to China putting the proposal on hold. India expressed its disappointment at the outcome. In a statement in New Delhi, the External Affairs Ministry said this has prevented action by the international community against the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a proscribed and active terrorist organization which has claimed responsibility for last month's Pulwama terror attack. It was the fourth attempt for international action against the JeM founder, all of which have been blocked by China since 2009. "The ISIL (Da'esh) and Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee (1267 Sanctions Committee), upon completion of the no-objection period on 13 March 2019, was not able to come to a decision on the proposal for listing Mohammed Masood Azhar Alvi under the UN Sanctions regime, on account of a member placing the proposal on hold. We are disappointed by this outcome," the statement said, without naming China. India expressed its gratitude for the efforts of the countries who moved the proposal and "the unprecedented number of all other Security Council members as well as non-members who joined as co-sponsors". The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee was moved by France, UK and the US on February 27 in wake of the horrendous terror attack in jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama that left 40 security personnel dead. "We will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens are brought to justice," the statement said. Rome, March 14 : The Italian government has no plans to revise a 2017 agreement with Libya aimed at halting the influx of boat migrants from the lawless North African country, Interior Minister and Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini told lawmakers on Wednesday. "Libya must be maintained as a priority country for the European Union's cooperation strategy," Salvini told a hearing at the lower house of parliament. "We are doing everything possible and more to ensure the presence of international organisations such as the UN refugee agency at official migrant camps in order to guarantee that human rights are upheld," he said. Ending people smuggling is the only way to wipe out human rights abuses that have been reported against migrants held in illegal camps, Salvini claimed. "Human trafficking is currently more profitable than arms and drugs trafficking." Libya's coastguard has been patrolling the Mediterranean since striking a deal with Italy in February 2017 that empowered it to intercept and bring migrants back to a country where aid agencies say they suffer torture and abuse. Salvini has reinforced the 2017 deal, which entailed Italy providing funds and equipment. The accord was made by Marco Minniti, the former Interior Minister from the centre-left Democratic party, in an attempt to stem the migrant flow. He also said that Italy pledges to ensure Libya's authorities fully respect migrants' human rights and vows to uphold the country's sovereignty and international law as well. "Our countries is committed to making sure than Libyan authorities act in full respect of human right and that conditions are improved for migrants and refugees in Libya," he said. "Italy, in full respect of Libya's sovereignty and international conventions has supported the internationally approved efforts of its authorities within the framework of the MoU on cooperation to fight illegal immigration and human trafficking," Salvini said. Thanks to the measures in place to fight people smuggling, migrant arrivals to Italy had plunged by 95 percent this year from 2018, and even sharper drop than was recorded last year from 2017, Salvini noted. Just 335 boat migrants reached Italy in 2019 compared with 5,938 in 2018, he said. Italy's Foreign Ministry is working with international organisations on voluntary repatriation programmes, which the government is especially eager to expand, Salvini told the MPs. Baghdad, March 14 : The Iraqi Civil Aviation Authority (ICAA) has announced barring all Boeing 737 MAX planes from flying across its airspace following the Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday. A statement by the ICAA on Wednesday said that permissions for Boeing 737 MAX planes to use Iraqi airports or enter its airspace are halted starting from Wednesday until further notice, Xinhua news agency reported. "The ICAA's flight safety department took the decision to ensure the safe use of this type of aircraft and to maintain safety in Iraqi airspace," the statement said. The decision to ban Boeing 737 MAX was taken in several countries after the crash of a similar jetliner in Ethiopia that killed 157 people, while the circumstances appeared similar to those in the crash of a 737 MAX operated by Lion Air, an Indonesian carrier, last October in which 189 people were killed. In both cases, the Boeing 737 MAX jets crashed just minutes after take-offs. United Nations, March 14 : China kept chief Masood Azhar, the chief of the terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), under its protective wings, vetoing a fourth attempt to declare him a global terrorist and sanction him. China was the only Security Council member to vote on Wednesday against the proposal spearheaded by France with British and US backing to at the al-Qaeda sanctions committee to declare him a global terrorist. The move to sanction him picked up steam after the Pulwama suicide car bomb attack by JeM, which killed 40 Indian Security personnel. Wednesday was the deadline for to take a decision and with Beijing's veto, the proposal will remain on hold. In New Delhi, the External Affairs Ministry expressed disappointment over the outcome. "This has prevented action by the international community to designate the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a proscribed and active terrorist organization which has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on 14 February 2019," the statement said. "We will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens are brought to justice," the statement said. The US had said on Tuesday that China's opposition to designating Azhar as an international terrorist runs counter to the mutual goal with the US of regional stability. As the founder and leader of JeM, Azhar "meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations" as a global terrorist subject to its sanctions, Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino said. (Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in) Washington, March 14 : US President Donald Trump has announced that the US will ground all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and 9 planes with immdediate effect. "All of those planes are grounded, effective immediately," Trump said, referring to the Boeing 737 Max variations, during a press event on Wednesday, Xinhua news agency reported. "The safety of the American people, of all people is our paramount concern," Trump said. The US becomes the last major nation to ban the fleet following the deadly Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane crash, which killed all 157 people on board. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said in a statement shortly after Trump's remarks it is ordering the temporary grounding of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft operated by US airlines or in US territory. The move came hours after Canada announced it is pulling Boeing 737 MAX aircraft from the sky, indicating that the US is bowing to the mounting pressure from the international community to ground the aircraft. The US is the last major country to halt operation of the questioned model, despite repeated calls from US lawmakers, experts, and the public in the past few days for the FAA to prioritise safety. An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane en route from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, Kenya crashed Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. In another unfortunate incident in October last year, a Lion Air plane of the same model crashed in Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board. New Delhi, March 14 : India and US have reaffirmed their commitment to work together to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems and to deny access to such weapons by terrorists and non-state actors. The two sides exchanged views on a wide range of global security and non-proliferation challenges during the ninth round of the India-US Strategic Security Dialogue held in Washington on Wednesday. The Indian delegation was led by Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale while the US delegation was led by Andrea Thompson, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. "The two sides reaffirmed their commitment to work together to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems and to deny access to such weapons by terrorists and non-state actors," an External Affairs Ministry statement said. It said the two sides committed to strengthen bilateral security and civil nuclear cooperation, including the establishment of six US nuclear power plants in India. The US reaffirmed its strong support of India's early membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Earlier, on Tuesday, Indra Mani Pandey, Additional Secretary for Disarmament and International Security Affairs and Yleem D.S. Poblete, US Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, co-chaired the third round of the India-US Space Dialogue, where they discussed trends in space threats, respective national space priorities and opportunities for cooperation bilaterally and in multilateral fora. GUEST OBSERVATION A rail line to the northwest growth areas of Sydney has been proposed many times. In 2010, the state government and bureaucracy sought discussions with Infrastructure Australia and the Commonwealth about funding an extension of the heavy-rail system from Epping on a North West RailHills District Line. In 2012, the new transport minister (and now premier), Gladys Berejiklian, changed the plan, opting for a single-deck robotic privatised metro similar to those proposed by property developer and rail operator Hong Kong MTR. The government decided to close the Bankstown line for Sydney Metro conversion and upzone surrounding suburbs for urban activation. OpenStreetMap Contributors, CC BY Days before Christmas 2018, we transport analysts received a gift: an update to the station barrier counts dataset. The government had not released this annual snapshot since 2014. (An interactive data visualisation tool is available here.) The below analysis uses average workday (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday) patronage to describe the changing demand across the Sydney rail network (click here for a map of the network) and determine where the need for transport infrastructure investment is greatest. The analysis clearly show that the metro conversion of the Bankstown line should not be Sydneys top-priority investment. The numbers make clear the need to invest the states limited funds in the western and southern corridors with matching investment in the CBD. The Bankstown project should be deferred. Demand on Sydneys western and Illawarra heavy-rail corridors has surged since 2004 (when barrier counts began). These are two of the citys most important transport trunks. The Bankstown line has much lower patronage with modest growth. Every transport infrastructure investment must deliver value for money by reducing operating costs and improving mobility. If we fail to invest wisely, Sydney risks becoming uncompetitive as talent and businesses leave for better-connected and more liveable cities. The Bankstown decision from a 2012 perspective To determine if the Bankstown conversion was the highest priority in 2012 we need to consider the information available to the minister at the time. Lets start with the obvious questions: in 2012 was the Bankstown line or its major stations under significant load or growing quickly? The above chart shows five of the top 20 stations were in the CBD, six were on the Eastern-Illawarra line, and nine were on the West and North lines. Bankstown line stations were not especially popular: Bankstown station was 27th most popular, Campsie 35th, Lakemba 53rd and Marrickville 63rd. Another reason to justify the Bankstown line conversion would be rapid growth. However, in 2012 the ten stations with the fastest growth since 2004 were in the CBD and on the West, South, North and Airport lines. From 2004 to 2012, Parramatta grew by 4,600 passengers on an average workday, and Hurstville by over 4,100. Growth at Campsie and Lakemba was a mere 1,000 passengers a day, and only half of that at Bankstown. So when the development decision was made the Bankstown line stations were not major stations, nor under significant load, nor growing quickly. This raises questions about the Metro conversion investment. The Bankstown decision from a 2018 perspective Passenger demand grows on a train line for many reasons. In 2012, Berejiklian might have been aware of a coming surge in patronage on the Bankstown line. In 2018, have we seen such a surge? Sydney railway patronage has indeed surged overall, growing by over 450,000 people on an average workday since 2004. By 2018, the distribution of these passengers had changed significantly. Ashfield, Epping, Hornsby and Kogarah slipped out of the top-20 stations to be replaced by Mascot (17th), Auburn (18th), Lidcombe (19th) and Museum (20th). Bankstown line stations had become less important: Bankstown slipped to 33rd most popular Campsie rose to 35th Marrickville was steady at 62nd Lakemba plummeted to 67th. From 2012 to 2018, Town Hall ranked first for patronage growth with a workday increase of 28,900 passengers. Parramatta was fourth with 15,400 and Hurstville 16th with 4,600. On the Bankstown line Campsie ranked 33rd with growth of 2,000 and Bankstown 49th with 1,400. Estimated patronage at four of the stations Wiley Park, Yagoona, Lakemba, Regents Park actually fell. After land around Canterbury was transformed into many massive apartments, patronage at the station grew by 1,300 workday passengers since 2012. Even with the development, it still had only 3,200 workday passengers, leaving the station 91st in the whole sprawling network. Comparing sections of the network Multiple stations operate in concert and to be thorough we also need to consider how sections of the network compare. The ten Bankstown line stations from Marrickville to Bankstown had 36,800 workday passengers in 2012. By 2018 this had grown by 7,000 to 43,800 workday passengers. It is still a relatively quiet line. The North line from North Strathfield to Epping had eight stations with 36,100 workday passengers in 2012. By 2018, this had grown by 12,700 workday passengers to 48,800. Over the same period, the 13 stations on the Illawarra line from Arncliffe to Sutherland grew by 15,600 to 79,400 workday passengers. The three Eastern Suburbs line stations from Kings Cross to Bondi had higher patronage in 2012 than the Bankstown line with 40,200 workday passengers. Patronage on those three stations alone also grew much faster, by 17,600 in six years to 54,800. Patronage on the Western corridor (Macdonaldtown to Blacktown) has grown by 58,000 to over 225,000 workday passengers. On the Illawarra corridor patronage grew 25,000 to over 103,000. Remember, patronage on the Bankstown line grew by only 7,000 in this 2012-18 period. Looking at key stations between 2004 and 2018: Bankstown patronage grew by 25% Stanmore, which doesnt have a lift and gets only one train every 15 minutes, grew by 33% Burwood grew by 64% Parramatta by 79% Newtown by 100% Homebush by 125%. In the Illawarra corridor: Hurstville station grew by 66% Erskineville by 97% Banksia, Carlton and Allawah stations all had over 100% growth. The City Circle from Redfern to Circular Quay and back grew by 159,000 workday passengers from 236,000 in 2004 to 395,000 in 2018 a 67% increase. In 2012, the citys first transport priority was another north-south harbour crossing. However, it was decided instead to build the Sydney Metro under the harbour and then take both of the CBDs north-south heavy-rail corridors. This significantly increased the cost and complexity of expanding the heavy-rail system. Sydneys second transport priority was always a western relief line. Every transport investigation since the 1971 Sydney Area Transport Study has identified this need. What next? On February 11, the state Labor opposition promised $5 billion for the Western Metro, in addition to $3 billion previously promised by the federal Labor opposition. On March 4, the state Coalition government announced $6.4 billion for a Western Metro, with the construction date to be brought forward. The government announcement was made after the caretaker period for the March 23 state election had begun, so no technical or financial documentation was released. The government statement said the final business case was not complete, indicating that the Western Metro project was still in the early planning stages. With a slowing economy and falling house prices there will be a post-election reprioritisation of NSW project spending. When this happens, the next government should give higher priority to the western rail corridor than the Bankstown corridor. Postscript Any discussion of infrastructure decisions should note the affected electorates. The seats around the Bankstown line and their vote tallies in the last state election are: Summer Hill (Labor 70.13% two party preferred in 2015) Canterbury (Labor 65.69%) Lakemba (Labor 71.56%) Bankstown (Labor 63.97%) Auburn (Labor 55.93%) Fairfield (Labor 67.79%). Mathew Hounsell, Senior Research Consultant, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. GUEST OBSERVATION With time running out for us to make deep reductions in greenhouse emissions, you may well be wondering what you personally can do to minimise your own greenhouse footprint. The average greenhouse emissions per Australian are the equivalent of 21 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. How can you offset or neutralise your personal share of these carbon emissions in the most cost-effective way? There are some places where the government is willing to take the necessary action on your behalf. The ACT government, for example, is on track to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions generated within Canberra by 2045, and indeed by 2020 will make its own electricity sector carbon-neutral. The latter feat was achieved by contracting several new zero-emission solar and wind farms to produce renewable electricity equivalent to Canberras consumption. Canberra retail electricity prices continue to be among the lowest in Australia. Take advantage of solar and wind If you dont live in Canberra, you need another way to neutralise your emissions. Fortunately, the cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind power have both fallen rapidly. Australia has long been in the midst of a boom in rooftop PV, and many Gigawatts of ground-mounted PV and wind farms are being built around the country. This has put Australia on track to reach 50% renewable electricity in 2024. Each Megawatt hour (MWh) of electricity generated by renewables reduces electricity from coal by a similar amount, and therefore avoids about 0.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. The above pie chart, based on federal government data, shows the various sources of Australian greenhouse emissions in 2017. Electricity production is the largest source and can be neutralised by substituting PV and wind for coal and gas. Emissions from electricity use in commerce and industry, the land sector, industrial processes and high temperature heat is largely beyond your control, however, so its perhaps best to focus your attention closer to home. Cost-effective action However, putting solar panels on your roof, switching to an electric car, and substituting electric heat pumps for gas water and space heating can (or soon will) be cost-effective steps that you can take to reduce your greenhouse footprint. And in the long term, these will either pay for themselves or even end up saving you money. A 10-kilowatt solar PV system installed on your roof will produce about 14 MWh of electricity per year. Since coal power stations produce 0.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide per MWh this save about 12 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. To offset your 21 tonnes of CO2 per year, you would therefore need to install 15kW of solar PV capacity for each person who lives in your house. So if four people live in your house, you would need a 60kW solar system. But a typical rooftop PV system now has a rating of 5-15kW, and many homes lack the roof space needed to install a larger system. Ways to address this are described below. Road to success A typical car produces about 190 grams of CO2 per kilometre of travel, and the average Australian car travels 15,500 km per year, thus producing 3 tonnes of CO2. Moderately priced electric cars are expected to be widely available in the early 2020s, which can travel about 6,000 km for each MWh of electricity consumed. Once the premium for an electric vehicle drops below about A$10,000, the lifetime cost of an electric car (including buying, maintaining and charging it) will be competitive with conventional cars. A 2kW PV panel on your house roof will produce enough electricity for 16,000km of electric car driving per year, thus offsetting your entire emissions from motoring (3 tonnes of CO2), assuming you drive an average amount each year and previously drove a conventional model. Off the gas Most natural gas use within a home is for water and space heating. Gas can readily be replaced by electric heat pumps, which move heat from the air outside the home into your hot water tank or reverse cycle air conditioning system. Heat pumps typically move four units of heat for each unit of electricity consumed and can be readily powered by rooftop solar panels, supplemented by electricity from the grid. For the average household, replacement gas with heat pumps can readily reduce household greenhouse gas emissions by up to 5 tonnes per year, at lower lifecycle cost than using gas. Replacement of gas cookers with electric induction cookers allows elimination of gas altogether from the home. Fly less Limiting air travel is one of the most effective tactics to cut your personal emissions. Short-haul flights or flights with few passengers increase the emissions intensity per passenger. A mostly full return trip from Australia to London (34,000km) will typically generate about 4 tonnes of CO per passenger. When you do decide to fly, think about how you can offset the emissions directly. Adding 1kW to your rooftop PV system can offset one return trip to London for one person every 3 years. Will it pay for itself? Now that weve looked at these various strategies, lets now consider a family home with three occupants and one car. A 10kW PV system on the roof can make a substantial reduction in their greenhouse footprint by offsetting 14 tonnes of CO2 per year. Switching to an electric car saves 3 tonnes per year and substituting electric heat pumps for gas saves a further 1- 5 tonnes per year. An additional 5 kW of rooftop PV is needed to neutralise an average amount of air travel, and to power the electric car and heat pumps. This 15kW system would cost about A$20,000 up front and would last 25 years. However, rooftop PV systems are now so cheap compared with the retail electricity tariff that the money invested is generally recovered within 10 years. The total emissions savings estimated above are about 25 tonnes per year, per household, which is still significantly short of the 63 tonnes (on average) that this family emits. To be fully carbon-neutral, one option is for the family to invest in a wind or solar farm. The required share of a wind farm or solar farm is about 10 kW or 20 kW respectively per three-person family, noting that a 3MW wind turbine produces nearly double the amount of electricity per year of a 3MW PV farm (single axis tracking), which in turn produces 40% more electricity per year than an equivalent amount of roof-mounted solar panels. The up-front cost of this investment would be about A$25,000 per family, and it would return a steady income sufficient to repay the initial outlay (with interest) over the 25-year lifetime of the system. So in summary, assuming that you have the means to meet the (not insubstantial) upfront costs, doing your part to preserve a living and vibrant planet for our children ultimately has a low or even negative net cost. Andrew Blakers, Professor of Engineering, Australian National University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The five storey longtime Northbridge home of the former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke and his wife Blanche dAlpuget has been sold reportedly for around $15 million. Hawke and his then wife Hazel paid $1.23 million for the three bedroom knockdown house overlooking Sugarloaf Bay in 1991, just seven months before he lost the prime ministership to Paul Keating who suggested at the time it signalled Hawke was preparing to move on from the top job. During construction on the 960 sqm block, the Hawkes stayed at Birchgrove in the townhouse of adman John Singleton and then lived at the then Ritz Carlton Hotel in Double Bay. It was completed in late 1993. In 2013 Australias longest-serving Labor Prime Minister secured Willoughby Council approval for his plans for a rooftop pergola, decking and synthetic turf entertaining area able to be used as a putting green. After their marriage ended the property was kept by Bob Hawke and transferred in Blanches name in 1999. No estate agent has yet taken credit for the sale - or its reported price by Domain - which ranks as the third highest in Northbridge, behind a $21 million top sale from 2017. Selling agent Chris Downie of Richardson & Wrench Northbridge declined to comment on the sale. The house set on the north shores Middle Harbour was constructed on a bushy block with views from one of the suburbs best streets. The original modest three-bedroom brick house came with jetty, sandy beach and harbour pool. Hawke and his then wife, Hazel had sold their 1940s Melbourne home in Sandringham in 1986 for $430,000, three years after the family moved to The Lodge in 1983. Hawke, Australias 24th Prime Minister, was born in South Australias Bordertown in 1929 and lived there until 1935. The downsizing couple secured their whisper quiet off market sale with plans to soon relocate to an apartment overlooking Hyde Park in the Sydney CBD. Hawke, who turned 89 last December, has said his health has been terrible. They are believed to have bought in the One30 Hyde Park development where off the plan settlements are due in coming weeks. The couple borrowed $4.25 million using the Minibah Road Northbridge home as collateral for the financing of the switch. The 38-storey tower has been developed by Hong Kong-listed developer Aoyuan Property Group in a joint venture with Ecove, the developer behind the controversial Opal Tower building at Olympic Park. Developer Aoyuan International subsequently sought assurances of quality of the build at One30 Hyde Park at 130 Elizabeth Street. Prices in the luxury development started for two-bedroom apartments from $2.1 million and three-bedrooms starting at $3.1 million. News of the move comes shortly before dAlpugets next book, The Lions Torment is published, which her agent described as Game of Thrones meets Hilary Mantel. This article was first published in the Daily Telegraph. Luciano Louis Charles Graziano was a small-town boy who had to grow up fast when he was drafted into the army during World War II. Now 95 years old, Graziano shares his personal story and photographs that document his experiences during the biggest and deadliest war in history. In A Patriots Memoirs of World War II (published by LifeRich Publishing), a memoir that reveals the good, bad and ugly of war and beyond, Graziano leads readers through his life experiences via personal stories and historical photographs that provide a candid glimpse into what it was like to be a young soldier before, during and after World War II. While revealing his experiences and thoughts, Graziano demonstrates how he exhibited courage amid heartbreaking loss, trusted God to protect him, and found love with a beautiful fellow soldier. Among Grazianos documented experiences were landing with the third wave on D-Day on Omaha Beach, fighting the Battle of the Bulge, and witnessing the signing of the Instrument of Surrender at the Little Red Schoolhouse. Included are personal letters and commendations as well as interesting historical facts. To purchase and to know more about the book, interested parties may visit https://www.liferichpublishing.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-001191102. As we focus on our country today, we must look back to our history to help us appreciate how we became the greatest power on earth and the men and women who fought to make this happen, says Graziano. I would like for readers to appreciate our country and the freedom she affords to her citizens. A Patriots Memoirs of World War II: Through My Eyes, Heart, and Soul By Luciano Louis Charles Graziano Hardcover | 5.5x8.5 in | 142 pages | ISBN 9781489720504 Softcover | 5.5x8.5 in | 142 pages | ISBN 9781489720481 E-Book | 142 pages | ISBN 9781489720498 Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble About the Author Luciano Louis Charles Graziano was born on Feb. 6, 1923, in East Aurora, New York. He lived there until he went into the service at the age of 20. He met his wife, a fellow soldier, in France. He came back to New York after the war and went back into his profession as a hairstylist. He and his wife started a family and had four children, born in New York. His wife was from the south and did not like the hard cold winters there, so they moved to Georgia to be closer to her sister. He took a job at Belk's in Augusta, Georgia as a hairstylist. Having so many customers from the surrounding areas, they decided to make Thomson, Georgia their home. He moved there in 1956 and opened a hair salon. Two years later, their fifth child was born. He has made Thomson his home for the last 63 years. Now at the age of 95, he is still a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), and active with the Knights of Columbus, Queen of Angels Catholic Church, and all his family. He still works part-time as a hairstylist. David Rosen, CEO & Founder of Kira Labs Kira Labs, Inc., is yet again receiving accolades for its outstanding growth, manufacturing and exporting business. In 2017, Kira Labs won the Florida Exporter of the Year award, then nabbed the coveted Presidents E-Export Award in 2018. Most recently, Kira Labs has been named as a finalist for the 2019 South Florida Manufacturers Association award. Founded in 2003, Kira Labs is a vertically integrated cosmetic manufacturing, design and sales company. Over the past 15 years Kira Labs has grown into a leading marketer and manufacturer of beauty innovations featured in 10,000+ stores and over 100 countries. Kiras products lines for men, women, salons, spas, and medical professionals are all made in house and bottled and distributed from their facility in Pompano Beach, Florida. The South Florida Manufacturers Association award is set to be given this Wednesday evening at The Recognition of Excellence Banquet held at the Signature Grand in Davie, Florida. This event signifies, celebrates, and awards excellence in manufacturing both from an operational and talent development standpoint. Kira Labs is honored to be part of an esteemed group of finalists, which include Lockheed Martin, Rotary and Mission Systems Palm Beach, Propulsion Technologies International LLC, and Paramount Mold and Tool among others. We are excited to have Brett Preston join our team" said Bob Preston, President and Broker/Officer at North County Property Group. His experience and skill set is exactly what our company needed in this role and he will be an outstanding community facing representative for the company. North County Property Group, one of the fastest growing and top rated San Diego property management companies, is proud to welcome Brett Preston as the its Business Development Manager in the Del Mar, CA, Corporate Headquarters office. Bretts primary role will be to spread the word about the companys San Diego Property Management services, network within the local Real Estate market and property investment community and acquire new clients for the Company. He brings his passion for customer service to the Company from many years in the hospitality industry, having worked as the Executive General Manager at The Barrel Room in Rancho Bernardo and Carmel Valley. He is a North County San Diego native, having attended Rancho Bernardo High School and subsequently earning a BA degree in Applied Sciences from San Diego State University. "We are excited to have Brett Preston join our team" said Bob Preston, President and Broker/Officer at North County Property Group. His experience and skill set is exactly what our company needed in this role and he will be an outstanding community facing representative for the company. About North County Property Group North County Property Group represents the interests of property owners and tenants with professional residential real estate sales & leasing, property management, and vacation rentals for exquisite homes in San Diego, CA and throughout the greater San Diego County area. For more information about North County Property Group, visit https://www.ncpropertygroup.com, or contact the company at 445 Marine View Ave STE 240, Del Mar, CA 92014, USA; Tel: 858.792.5797; Fax: 858.777.5451. "Corra Group offers background checks to the cybersecurity industry and related staffing groups for both their domestic talent but also employment screening for their international employment candidates," said Corra Group Co-Founder, Gordon Basichis. "We are a full service company." Corra Group attended the recent 2019 RSA Cybersecurity Conference, in San Francisco, CA. This is the third straight year that Corra Group had a presence at one of the most significant gatherings where an estimated 50,000 attendees viewed at the Moscone Center all things Cybersecurity. The RSA Cybersecurity Show is just a great even, said Corra Group Co-Founder, Gordon Basichis. Thousands of people and hundreds of vendors, from startups to long established companies in the cybersecurity space are on the floor. There are any number of tutorials, seminars, and interactive components. Since Corra Group is headquartered in El Segundo, California is part of what is called the Silicon Beach, a key center for advanced technology as well as defense and aerospace, we have a number of clients both there and the Silicon Valley. Corra Group conducts employment screening and due diligence for a number of clients in this sector as well as the staffing and recruiting agencies as well as the financial groups that also work in these channels. Basichis pointed out that Corra Group offers background checks the cybersecurity industry and related staffing groups for both their domestic talent but also for their international background checks for foreign employment candidates. He noted that the background searches apply not only to onboarding but so that clients can meet compliance obligations when they contract with the government or other entities. Needless to say, cybersecurity is an active space in a variety of different levels, said Basichis. There are partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, and great efforts to fulfill a larger number of open staffing positions within this industry. Corra Group is a full service company and works with companies at every level, including the fulfillment of background checks that meet contractual compliance standards when clients through contracts work for some of the larger global corporations. I really love the RSA Conference, said Basichis. I learn so much here and feel I am part of an expanding enterprise that is so vital in these volatile times. Its fun visiting with our clients and meeting new prospects. Everyone here is seeking to do business, but that business involves protecting the economic engines and the intellectual property of the global community. There are few things more vital in these times. BACKGROUND: Corra operates as Corra Group and Corra Global Research and specializes in employment screening and corporate research and due diligence. It is one of the few companies that will answer the phone. You can review the website at http://www.corragroup.com 2019 CMC Conference Sponsors Semiconductor manufacturing materials supply-chain experts will gather again for the annual Critical Materials Council (CMC) Conference, April 25-26 in Saratoga Springs, New York. Early-bird registration discount ends March 15. 4th Annual CMC Conference April 25-26 in Saratoga Springs, New York TECHCET reminds people who think materials matter that early-bird discount registration ends March 15th for the 4th annual Critical Materials Council (CMC) Conference happening April 25-26 at the Saratoga Hotel and Casino in Saratoga Springs, New York. The CMC Conference is where business visionaries and semiconductor manufacturing technologists gather to address current and future materials challenges. The latest forecasts on market drivers including trade issues, along with technical issues facing the global materials supply-chain, will be shown. The public CMC Conference follows private CMC face-to-face meetings to be held April 23-24, 2019 at GlobalFoundries in Malta, New York. Themes are centered around the needs of the Critical Materials Council and the global IC fabrication industry. While executive conferences typically focus on the "what" and "why" of materials technologies, this conference will discuss "how" new materials can be controllably, safely, and cost-effectively used in fabs. The CMC Conference this year will feature: KEYNOTE by Dr. John Pellerin, Deputy CTO and VP of Worldwide R&D, GlobalFoundries, on "International Supply-Chain Management Challenges," G. Dan Hutcheson, CEO, VLSI Research, on "Slowdown: When did it start? What drove it? and When will the recovery come?" and Scott Jones, Principal / Strategy, KPMG, on "M&A Trends and China's Influence," Dr. Karl Robinson, Director of Process Engineering, IMEC, on "Materials Engineering in CMOS and Beyond-CMOS Applications," Dr. Bryan Rice, VP of Product Integration, Inpria Corp., on "EUV Photolithography Materials Integration," and Tim Yeakley, ESH Policy Manager, Texas Instruments, on "Global Materials Regulation Issues." Attendees from fabs, OEMs, and materials suppliers alike will have the opportunity to interact with the presenters and colleagues, to gain insights into best-practices of the entire supply-chain. Register before March 15 at the early-bird rate of just $395: https://cmcfabs.org/cmc-events/ ABOUT CMC: The Critical Materials Council (CMC) of Semiconductor Fabricators (CMCFabs.org) is a membership-based organization that works to anticipate and solve critical materials issues in a pre-competitive environment. The CMC is a business unit of TECHCET, and includes materials supplier Associate Members. ABOUT TECHCET: TECHCET CA LLC is an advisory services firm focused on process materials supply-chains, electronic materials business, and materials market analysis for the semiconductor, display, solar/PV, and LED industries. Since 2000, the company has been responsible for producing the SEMATECH Critical Material Reports, covering silicon wafers, semiconductor gases, wet chemicals, CMP consumables, Photoresists, and ALD/CVD Precursors. For additional information about reports, market briefings, CMC membership, or custom consulting please contact info(at)cmcfabs.org, +1-480-332-8336, or go to http://www.techcet.com or http://www.cmcfabs.org. Rosie and the Treasure of the Three Nuns: A Historical Fiction for Youth: a compelling mystery story, is the creation of published author D. Boyd-Vodvarka, a grandmother with the curious and adventurous heart of a child. Boyd-Vodvarka writes, Rosie is a feisty redheaded thirteen-year-old who isnt afraid to speak her mind. When her police officer grandma hooks her into going on a treasure hunt in the mountains of California to find the treasure of the three nuns, she isnt thrilled. She would much rather spend her summer at home, indoors, with the company of her trusty canine companion, Mutt. Gramss friend Pete and his sons Dan and Mike joined her and Rosie on their adventure. Rosie soon finds herself enjoying the new company and looking forward to each new day of treasure hunting. When Rosie learns that an escaped convict from the Arizona state prison is in their area, she imagines him lurking behind every rock, just waiting to capture a feisty redhead. Grams and her new friends assure her they have nothing to fear, but Rosie isnt convinced. Will Rosies fears prove to be all for naught? Will Rosie and company find the treasure of the three nuns? Join Rosie on her exciting treasure hunt to find out! Published by Christian Faith Publishing, D. Boyd-Vodvarkas book is a captivating read that blends faith, fun, lively characters, and history trivia to entertain as well as educate as readers rush headlong into the secrets of the California mountains. View a synopsis of Rosie and the Treasure of the Three Nuns: A Historical Fiction for Youth on YouTube. Consumers can purchase Rosie and the Treasure of the Three Nuns: A Historical Fiction for Youth at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble. For additional information or inquiries about Rosie and the Treasure of the Three Nuns: A Historical Fiction for Youth, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919. Future trucking industry technicians watch as a fellow student uses augmented reality software We are proud to support efforts to raise awareness of career choices in transportation to students and to change the perception of parents and educators about these skilled professions Design Interactive Inc, providers of augmented reality fleet maintenance and training solutions for the transportation industry, today announced that it is utilizing its AUGMENTORTM software to help inspire middle and high school students to consider careers as maintenance technicians. We are proud to support efforts to raise awareness of career choices in transportation to students and to change the perception of parents and educators about these skilled professions, said Matt Johnston, division head of commercial solutions for Design Interactive. For example, Be Pro Be Proud, an initiative of the Associated Industries of Arkansas Foundation, is using our AR software in a mobile workshop that travels to high schools and middle schools so students can have a hands-on experience in professions they might consider. Design Interactive technology will be on display at the 2019 TMC Annual Meeting & Transportation Technology Exhibition in the Be Pro Be Proud mobile workshop. The trailer houses an air disc brake system inspection and assembly game driven by DIs augmented reality software. The faster and more accurately students complete each task, the more points they earn. While augmented reality may seem like a novelty, it is already in use by industrial firms for training and operations, and it is having a significant impact compared to traditional training methods, continued Johnston. For transportation companies, AUGMENTOR uses virtual reality and video- and computer-based technologies to more effectively train technicians in the environment where service and repair tasks are performed. That helps lower labor and parts costs, increases vehicle uptime and shop productivity, and makes it easier to attract new technicians. Design Interactive AR technology will be a part of Be Pro Be Proud in the 2019-2020 school year and a featured visualization when the program upgrades it mobile workshop in a 53-ft double expandable trailer. With Design Interactives augmented reality software, we can inspire students to consider a future as a technician, said Andrew M. Parker, director of governmental affairs at the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce and Associated Industries of Arkansas, and the Director of Be Pro Be Proud. By presenting an interactive representation of what they can expect if they join the workforce in that vocation, we can help companies attract the next generation of technicians they need. Launched in 2016, Be Pro Be Proud has identified 12 careers that are in high demand by transportation, construction and manufacturing companies and provides a road map for middle and high school students to go from the classroom to the training they need. Be Pro Be Proud is supported by Arkansas-based corporations, the Arkansas governors Workforce Cabinet and the Delta Regional Authority as its federal partner. For more information, visit http://www.beprobeproud.org. About Design Interactive Inc Design Interactive Inc (DII) develops and deploys augmented, virtual and mixed reality training and enterprise solutions for the transportation, medical, aerospace, manufacturing, and energy/oil/gas markets, as well the military. Design Interactives extensive research and development expertise in using augmented and virtual reality technologies delivers innovative solutions that keep people safe, improve efficiency, and achieve optimum performance. Founded in 1998 and based in Orlando, Florida, Design Interactive is a woman-owned business. Visit http://www.designinteractive.net All three of the newest Board members embody the sprit of community and bring talent, expertise and energy to the Board. We are very fortunate to have them representing our shareholders and providing insightful guidance as we continue to rapidly grow. Joining the Board of Directors are Merrimac Dillion and Venkatesan Kalanithi. All three of the newest Board members embody the sprit of community and bring talent, expertise and energy to the Board. We are very fortunate to have them representing our shareholders and providing insightful guidance as we continue to rapidly grow, said Alex Hutton, Corporate Secretary. Merrimac Dillion is the inventor and President of The Pillow Bar, providing high-end luxury sleeping pillows and bedding for over 380 retail store partners, 12 Pillow Bar kiosks locations and a variety of catalog and hospitality customers. Her success has been recognized by the Wall Street Journal as 10 Most Innovative Businesses and as Best Products in the Dallas Business Journal. Merrimac was also named as a 2016 Women in Business award winner by the Dallas Business Journal. Prior to The Pillow Bar, Merrimacs career included: authoring two books, co-founder of The Curtain Exchange franchise, Director of Public Relations for The Dallas Apparel Mart, Vice President of GO Magazine, Public Relations and Marketing Director for Doral Hotel, and starting a consulting firm in Germany to assist U.S. based firms with their European marketing and special events. Merrimac received her EMBA from Tulane University and received a BA from the University of Kentucky. Venkatesan Kalanithi is a Digital Transformation Strategy Consultant at ASKTech Inc. Venkatesan brings unique and valuable technical and business insights with over 28 years of heading industry verticals and multiple technology-based practices. He has an indelible record for managing end-to-end P&L for independent business units, starting businesses from the ground up, sales and business development, IT strategy, and delivering operational excellence. Venkatesans career also includes: being an Advisory Board Member to Southern Methodist Universitys SMU Digital Accelerator (Big Data - Digital Accelerator - leading through big data and intelligence, technology ecosystem, and data analytics), Managing Partner at PCB Apps, Founding Partner and President at CAPSCIENT Corporation, and an independent ERP Technology and Business Architect. Venkatesan studied Entrepreneurship at Babson College, received a Post Graduate Diploma from Bharathidasan University in Computer Science and Applications, and received a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Madras. eComchain is an international company that delivers a unique synergistic combination of B2B and B2C e-commerce stores with a cutting edge must have feature rich and scalable e-commerce store for organizations with multi-tiered and/or branded distribution that want to increase sales revenues and reduce costs. eComchains exclusive flexible B2B2C e-commerce model expands an organizations sales reach with unique customer data to develop and qualify sales leads. eComchain provides tools like: email campaigns, loyalty programs, wish lists, and promotional programs to turn prospects into customers and expand existing customer sales. eComchain also provides the latest features customers demand to enhance their e-commerce experience and increase the likelihood of placing an order. Our typical customer usually increases sales by 100% while saving up to 50% of their operational costs in less than a year. Customers typically realize a rapid ROI within months. For more information about eComchain Inc. call 800-409-9169 or visit http://www.ecomchain.com The ISO 27001 accreditation, certified by the British Assessment Bureau, has been achieved once more by this forward thinking company. But this is more than a simple renewal of a quality standard. The extent of the accreditation has been increased to acknowledge the data validation services the company delivers through the cloud. Back in 2017, Email Hippo became the first email verification company to be accredited to the internationally recognised quality standard for information security management systems. Since then, the companys growth rate has rocketed and it has gone on to provide cloud based data validation services to thousands of businesses worldwide. Rowland OConnor, founder and CEO of Email Hippo sees data security as the foundation for growth into new sectors. Identity theft and cyber crime were barely heard of when I created an email verification service back in the early 2000s. Since then, data security has moved to the heart of everything we do. We process our customers data securely and weve developed valuable new services that help people reduce the impact of fraud on their business. Data security doesnt have borders - and thats why we throw our weight into making sure our security systems reach the highest international quality accreditation in the world. NOTES TO EDITORS About Email Hippo Limited http://www.emailhippo.com Email Hippo makes data better. It is a Software as a Service (SaaS) company based in the UK, providing cloud-based data services to organisations worldwide. The majority of customers are in the USA and Europe. Email Hippo processes data from all over the world, focusing on data that is contained within email addresses and website domains. Email Hippo data services help businesses reduce fraud, maintain their databases and carry out effective communications. The company is owned by Rowland OConnor, an advanced programmer, who pioneered the ability to validate bulk email addresses. Email Hippo is based in the south west of England and uses cloud-based infrastructure to ensure scalable levels of speed and uptime. How Email Hippo services work Email Hippo delivers software as a service via an API that is accessed by licence key. It also provides bulk email verification services where customers upload data to Email Hippos servers for checking. Users can then consume the data into their systems, whether it is for augmenting entities on databases (filling in the gaps) or taking specific pieces of information to compile data for specific purposes. Use cases include; building profiles of companies removing disposable email addresses from systems identifying attempted sign-ups from individuals who appear to be acting suspiciously A note about Email Hippo and data security Email Hippo is trusted by companies to process data securely. Its systems are accredited to the international quality standard ISO 27001. The company is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office. Full information about the company security and compliance can be found here; http://www.emailhippo.com/compliance CONTACTS For more information about Email Hippo Limited please contact: Jo Shinner, Marketing Lead jo(dot)shinner(at)emailhippo(dot)com Tel: (0) +44 1566 701204 Email Hippo Limited, Tregallas House, Pipers Close, Pennygillam Industrial Estate, Launceston, Cornwall, UK PL15 7PJ http://www.emailhippo.com ATTACHMENTS Email Hippo Logo Email Hippo doing business with real people image Rowland OConnor - CEO Were thrilled to partner with our collegues at Whiteford, Taylor & Preston to bring local board members key information and best practices to help their community associations run in the best manner possible, said Trent Harrison, market president, FirstService Residential. FirstService Residential, the leading property management company in North America, will host an educational seminar for community association board members on Saturday, March 30, 2019, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at Harpoon Hannas in Fenwick Island, Delaware. Legal experts Chad Toms and Ray Via from the law firm of Whiteford, Taylor & Preston will address the following topics: Understanding the responsibility of the board of directors Running an effective board meeting Fair Housing and controlling rentals Delaware and Maryland legislative updates Were thrilled to partner with our collegues at Whiteford, Taylor & Preston to bring local board members key information and best practices to help their community associations run in the best manner possible, said Trent Harrison, market president, FirstService Residential. We look forward to meeting new board members and bringing them the key insights they are looking for. Brunch will be served during the seminar. To attend this complimentary event, RSVP to Marieclaire Odell by March 27, 2019, at Marieclaire.Odell@fsresidential.com or 732-963-0225. ~ http://www.fsresidential.com ~ About FirstService Residential FirstService Residential is North America's largest manager of residential communities and the preferred partner of HOAs, community associations and strata corporations in the U.S. and Canada. FirstService Residential's managed communities include low-, mid- and high-rise condominiums and cooperatives, single-family homes, master-planned, lifestyle and active adult communities, and rental and commercial properties. With an unmatched combination of deep industry experience, local market expertise and personalized attention, FirstService Residential delivers proven solutions and exceptional service that add value, enhance lifestyles and make a difference, every day, for every resident and community it manages. FirstService Residential is a subsidiary of FirstService Corporation, a North American leader in the property services sector. For more information, visit http://www.fsresidential.com. Rebecca Claxton of Sarasota, Fla., made history in February, when she became the first American woman to tandem skydive over the Great Giza Pyramids of Egypt. Claxton was one of roughly 120 individuals from around the world who gathered near Cairo for a special event billed as Skydive Egypt. The first-time skydiver jumped from an Egyptian military C-130 aircraft with tandem-master Ryan Jackson, of England. She and Jackson exited the rear cargo door of the C-130 from an altitude just over 15,000 feet and landed between two pyramids, on a drop zone marked by colorful Egyptian carpets. The jump was incredible! I had no idea the free-fall portion of the jump would literally take my breath away. My favorite part was when the chute opened and we just soared over the pyramids, watching them slowly get larger and larger, she said. Claxtons visit to Egypt started as a working holiday. She and her husband Greg are owners of Incredible Adventures, an international adventure company based in Sarasota. They traveled to Cairo to provide ground support to Incredible Adventures clients scheduled to skydive. They toured the pyramids, visited a Bedouin village, rode camels and went horseback riding in the Sahara with customers. When a spot opened up aboard the last C-130 flight, Rebecca was offered the opportunity to jump. With anyone else, I would have been nervous, but Ryan is one of the tandem masters for our Everest Skydive Adventure. He consults on special skydiving projects around the world, and hes a medical doctor. I still cant believe I was able to make my very first skydive over one of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World. Incredible Adventures offers a variety of extreme skydiving adventures, including military-style HALO jumps near Memphis and skydives over Mt. Everest, in Nepal. The company plans to offer another chance to jump over the pyramids in 2020. To date, most of the companys skydive clients have been male, but Claxton hopes her history-making jump will encourage more women to take the leap. More information about the extreme skydives offered by Incredible Adventures can be found at http://www.skydivehigh.com. The parent company of FocusOne Solutions has been recognized for its longevity as one of the Best Places to Work in Omaha. To be recognized for continued and sustained excellence represents what we strive for as an organization to attract, engage, and retain a talented team of employees who are the heart of C&A. The parent company of managed services & vendor management software provider FocusOne Solutions has been recognized for its longevity as one of the Best Places to Work in Omaha. An eight-time recipient, C&A Industries, Inc. has earned the Sustained Excellence Award which recognizes employers that have been ranked consistently for multiple years. The annual Best Places to Work initiative, sponsored by the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce and Baird Holm, recognizes a select number of companies based on the results of surveys completed by the employees of participating organizations. Surveys measure employee engagement, satisfaction, morale, opportunities for professional growth, and workplace culture. The Sustained Excellence Award honors those organizations that participate in the survey for four consecutive years and rank first, second, or third in three consecutive years or the organization ranks in the survey eight of the last ten years. C&A is a participant in the large company category of staffing firms with more than 200 employees. In addition to FocusOne Solutions, C&A is the parent company to workforce solution firms Aureus Medical Group, Aureus Group, AurStaff, and Celebrity Staff, as well as AurTravel and AurHomes. FocusOne streamlines the staff procurement process for healthcare facilities nationwide. Were proud and honored to once again be named a top employer in what is a growing and highly dynamic business community. To be recognized for continued and sustained excellence represents what we strive for as an organization to attract, engage, and retain a talented team of employees who are the heart of C&A, said Scot Thompson, President and CEO of C&A Industries. C&A is a leader in nearly every market it serves. Its industry-leading training and extensive professional development programs; award-winning health and wellness program; and community involvement and philanthropy are, according to Thompson, key factors in maintaining C&As high levels of employee engagement. He adds that employee recognition programs and focus on communication and idea sharing are also embraced company wide. Recently, C&A was named to the Training Top 125 by Training magazine, recognizing the top employer-sponsored training programs worldwide. To be among the very best in our industry requires a team thats dedicated, is passionate about our business, works collaboratively, and brings a mindset of excellence to work every day. Knowing the recognition weve received over the years has come as a result of their employee experience is very meaningful to us. C&A will be honored along with other Best Places to Work in Omaha recipients during a luncheon in May 2019. ABOUT C&A INDUSTRIES, INC. C&A is a national leader in staffing and recruiting. Through its affiliate firms, Aureus Group, Aureus Medical Group, AurStaff, and Celebrity Staff, C&A has provided Human Capital Management Solutions to a wide variety of industries for 50 years, including supplemental, contract-hire, and direct hire programs. Non-staffing divisions of C&A include FocusOne Solutions, a managed services provider; AurTravel, a full service travel agency; AurHomes, specializing in corporate housing; and its philanthropic arm, The Kim Foundation. C&A is headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, with subsidiary offices located in Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska; Kansas City, Missouri; and Des Moines, Iowa. ABOUT FOCUSONE SOLUTIONS: FocusOne Solutions is a leading provider of managed services solutions and vendor management software which simplifies the staffing process for healthcare organizations nationwide. Its managed services model which pairs web-based technology, FocusOne Connect, with the one-to-one personal service of a dedicated support team, improves the way organizations source clinical and non-clinical staff and manage workforce demands. FocusOne Solutions is headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska and is an affiliate of C&A Industries, Inc. Cornerstone Research has developed a formidable reputation in competition circles. The firm has consulted on some of the nations most consequential matters and works with some of the most promising academics in the field. - Bob Majure Cornerstone Research, a leading provider of economic and financial consulting and expert testimony, is pleased to announce that former U.S. Department of Justice Director of Economics W. Robert Bob Majure is joining the firm as a vice president, based in the firms Washington office, effective June 1. Majure retired from the DOJ in late 2018 following a career spanning nearly 25 years. He spent seven years as chief of the Competition Policy Section before being named Director of Economics in 2010, a position he held until his retirement from public service. Regarded within the DOJ as the linchpin of the Antitrust Divisions economic analysis program, Majure directly supported the U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General. In this position, he closely monitored merger enforcement and litigation matters and supervised all economic work underpinning the divisions wide-ranging enforcement and policy activities. Majure also helped to establish long-term working relationships with domestic and foreign agencies. Bob is one of the countrys foremost authorities on the economic analyses that are the basis of competition enforcement, said Michael E. Burton, Cornerstone Researchs president and CEO. We are thrilled to have Bob join us and add his superb expertise to our firms growing antitrust and competition practice. Cornerstone Researchs antitrust and competition practice provides economic analysis for litigation and government investigations involving proposed mergers and allegations of anticompetitive horizontal conduct or monopolization. The firm consults on class certification, liability, and damages issues in a range of industries. For more information, please visit the firms antitrust and competition webpage. Cornerstone Research has developed a formidable reputation in competition circles. The firm has consulted on some of the nations most consequential matters and works with some of the most promising academics in the field, Majure said. I am excited to apply my economics skills in a consulting setting as I embark on this new chapter of my career. About Cornerstone Research Cornerstone Research provides economic and financial consulting and expert testimony in all phases of complex litigation and regulatory proceedings. The firm works with an extensive network of prominent faculty and industry practitioners to identify the best-qualified expert for each assignment. Cornerstone Research has earned a reputation for consistent high quality and effectiveness by delivering rigorous, state-of-the-art analysis for 30 years. The firm has 700 staff and offices in Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Washington, D.C. Visit Cornerstone Researchs website for more information about the firms capabilities in economic and financial consulting and expert testimony. http://www.cornerstone.com Twitter: @Cornerstone_Res French Canal Boat Company announced their presentation about Vintage Luxury Barge Cruising in France to be held on Sunday, March 17, 2019 from 12:30pm to 1:00pm. Experts will discuss The Loire, Frances longest river, Burgundy, originally a watery super-highway connecting the rivers Yonne and Soane, and opportunities to see a private view of its hidden history. French Canal Boat Company announced their presentation about Vintage Luxury Barge Cruising in France to be held on Sunday, March 17, 2019 from 12:30pm to 1:00pm. The educational session will take place at the Destination Theater inside the Washington, D.C. Travel & Adventure Show. Kim Dickey, Sales and Marketing for French Canal Boat Company, will highlight why barge cruising is becoming increasingly popular. Im looking forward to educating attendees about how the barge, crew, itinerary, region, food and wine all combine together for a truly unforgettable luxury vacation experience, said Dickey. Destination Theater speakers discuss where to go, when to go, what to do and how to get there, providing attendees with the in-depth information required to travel like a local. French Canal Boat Company will also be exhibiting at the Washington, D.C. Travel & Adventure Show at booth #1005. They will have experts on site to meet with consumers interested in barge cruising and booking reservations. Experts will discuss The Loire, Frances longest river, Burgundy, originally a watery super-highway connecting the rivers Yonne and Soane, and opportunities to see a private view of its hidden history. The event will be held at Washington Convention Center (Hall C), 801 Mount Vernon Place, NW, Washington, D.C., 20001 with public show hours from 10:00am-5:00pm on Saturday, March 16 and from 11:00am-4:00pm on Sunday, March 17. To purchase tickets, visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2019-washington-dc-travel-adventure-show-tickets-50284869398?aff=tsweb About French Canal Boat Company: French Canal Boat Company provides luxurious cruises through the Burgundy Canal on board Le Papillon or through the Loire Valley on board Nymphea, offering an insiders view of this hidden aspect of France. With a gourmet chef onboard and crew providing impeccable service, guests are sure to experience history, adventure, culture, cuisine and wine. For more information visit: http://frenchcanalboatcompany.com About the Travel & Adventure Show: The Washington, D.C. Travel & Adventure Show provides its visitors with the ultimate destination to find, plan and book their next vacation. Thousands of destinations will be represented for guests to explore, with free on-site experiences. Some of the worlds top travel experts and celebrities including Samantha Brown (Host, PBSs Samantha Browns Places to Love), Andrew McCarthy (Award-Winning Travel Writer, Actor and Director), Peter Greenberg (Emmy Award-Winning Investigative Reporter and Producer and CBS News Travel Editor) and Patricia Shultz (Bestselling author of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die and 1,000 Places to See in The USA & Canada Before You Die) will be present to answer questions on all things travel. For more information visit: https://travelshows.com/shows/washingtondc/ BFE 20th Meeting Bio and neurofeedback are evidence based techniques which are utilized by many health professionals as part of their repertoire of interventions In the treatment of trauma helping their clients who had been suffering in silence to heal and empower themselves. Some years ago, when I was still a serving military officer, I was made aware of the success biofeedback had in Canada in preparing our military athletes for the annual competitions of the International Confederation of Reserve Officers, a competition involving Reserve Force officers from thirty-four different nations. I know also that today biofeedback is used to help servicemen prepare for battle and to help wounded veterans in Canada and the United States overcome the effects of their injuries, as well as in the treatment of those with PTSD, recalled General DeChastelain in a recent letter to the BFE. Most (if not all) of us have been exposed or will be exposed to at least one traumatic event in our lifetime; there can be many root causes of trauma and PTSD but, regardless of the cause, these disorders can take a toll on the physical, emotional and psychological well-being of individuals who suffer from them. Bio and neurofeedback are evidence based techniques which are utilized by many health professionals as part of their repertoire of interventions In the treatment of trauma helping their clients who had been suffering in silence to heal and empower themselves. Health professionals are invited to learn more about these techniques in a workshop co-instructed by Santiago Brand, BA, BCN, BCB and Linda Walker. MHR, LPC, BCN, BCB, on PTSD and trauma. I have been witness to the healing power of bio and neurofeedback in the many clients whom I have had the privilege of helping heal, irrespective oh what type of trauma or trauma(s) the have experienced and how long ago. They no longer have to suffer in silence, they no longer have to be victims of such tragic memories, remarked Santiago Brand who will co-instruct the workshop with Linda Walker. From Case Studies to Hands-on: A Practical Approach to Trauma and PTSD Santiago Brand, BA, BCN, BCB and Linda Walker, MHR, LPC, BCN, BCB Date: April 13, 2019 9:00-17:30 Location: Cardiff, Wales - April 13, 2019 9:00-17:30 Venue: Mercure Cardiff Holland House Hotel and Spa Register: https://meeting.bfe.org/registration/ About Santiago Brand, BA, BCN, BCB Santiago is a licensed psychologist in Colombia with a private practice. He has been using neurofeedback and biofeedback for the past 10 years and has worked in sport and clinical psychology for the past 15 years. He is a consultant for the Colombian Olympic Committee and Guatemalan Olympic Committee. Santiago is also a University professor in the areas of neurofeedback, biofeedback and neuroscience. Santiago is trained in biofeedback neurofeedback and qEEG and is BCIA board certified in both biofeedback and neurofeedback. Santiago also has a strong interest in trauma interventions and since 2016 has been trained in Brainspotting which he uses to treat trauma victims of the armed conflict in Colombia. Santiago has also done research in the field of trauma, psychophysiology and the EEG and is has authored a chapter on trauma and the EEG in the 2018 book The Power of Brainspotting: An international Anthology. He is also a neurofeedback consultant and trainer having delivered workshops in several countries in both English and Spanish. About Linda Walker, MHR, LPC, BCN, BCB Linda Walker is a licensed professional counselor and school counselor who holds a masters degree in Human Relations and Counseling from the University of Oklahoma and post graduate certificates in substance abuse and school counseling from Western Michigan University. In her private practice working with a general population, Linda integrates a variety of methods with an extensive focus on biofeedback, neurofeedback and QEEG. In addition, she teaches biofeedback and neurofeedback at Western Michigan University and served as past president of the Midwest Society of Behavioral Medicine and Biofeedback. BFE 20th Meeting The BFE meeting is an interdisciplinary biofeedback conference to nurture communication and education between specialists from different disciplines. The meeting offers a broad range of basic and applied psychophysiology and biofeedback workshops along with in-depth presentations (lectures, symposia, paper sessions, and posters) during the scientific program. About the Biofeedback Federation of Europe The Biofeedback Federation CIC is a community interest company based in the UK dedicated to increasing awareness about the benefits of biofeedback and providing education, training and certification to professionals. It is entirely supported by revenues generated in its online shop, through sponsorships and donations. For more information, visit the BFE Online Shop. Grant Cardone's Millionaire Booklet is being translated and given around the world The goal is to reach 195 countries with over 25 million books. Grant Cardone, NY Times bestselling author and international business expert, is on a mission to go global, and part of that plan includes what will be the largest free book giveaway in the history of the world. Cardone has already finished getting The Millionaire Booklet: How to Get Super Rich translated into 34 different languages with over 20 more in the works. There are only several books in existence that have been translated into more languages than the Millionaire Bookletincluding the Bible, the Quran, Sherlock Holmes, and Harry Potter to name a few. Cardone is already giving away the Millionaire Booklet for free in 34 different languages at http://www.grantcardone.com/global The goal is to reach 195 countries with over 25 million books. The Millionaire Booklet was written as a step-by-step guide to building new millionaires. With over 500,000 people reaching millionaire status in the US alone last year alone, Cardone encourages more people to get control of their finances and to get rich. The Millionaire Booklet explains that anyone can get super rich if they simply follow Grants plan. Readers come away with easy to digest concepts that they can use confidently and successfully to get rich themselves. Cardone, who has accumulated nearly a billion dollars himself, codified how he got rich and shows others exactly how they can duplicate it. No get rich quick. No overnight success. This isn't the lottery or some fantasy story. This is hard work, commitment, and repeated actions proven to work. According to Cardone, becoming a millionaire is a necessity in 2019. People now more than ever must get out of the middle class to take care of their families and finance their dreams. Cardone was inspired to write The Millionaire Booklet after attending a charity event where the goal was to raise $2 million, but only $1 million was raised. Everyone wanted to give more but nobody was able tothey just didnt have enough money to hit the mark. One individual at the event stepped up to personally donate the last million, and there was not a person in the room who didnt want to be the guy who gave that last million. I want to help you reach millionaire status, even get rich, if you believe that you deserve to be the person in the room that writes the check for a million dollars. Grant Cardone Here are the languages that The Millionaire Booklet has been translated into thus far: Arabic Armenian Bulgarian Croatian Danish Dutch Estonian Farsi Finnish French German Greek Gujarati Hindi Hungarian Italian Japanese Macedonian Malay Mandarin Marathi Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Tamil Telugu Zulu To get your FREE Millionaire Booklet, visit http://www.grantcardone.com/global About Grant Cardone: Grant Cardone is a New York Times bestselling author, the #1 sales trainer in the world, and an internationally renowned speaker on leadership, real estate investing, entrepreneurship, social media, and finance. His 5 privately held companies have annual revenues exceeding $100 million. Forbes named Mr. Cardone #1 of the "25 Marketing Influencers to Watch in 2017". Grants straight-shooting viewpoints on the economy, the middle class, and business have made him a valuable resource for media seeking commentary and insights on real topics that matter. He regularly appears on Fox News, Fox Business, and MSNBC, and writes for Forbes, Success Magazine, Business Insider, CNBC, and Entrepreneur. He urges his followers and clients to make success their duty, responsibility, and obligation. He currently resides in South Florida with his wife and two daughters. Adelaida Vasquez, a Shareholder in the Houston office of global law firm Greenberg Traurig, LLP, has been named a 2019 Fellow by the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity (LCLD). Vasquez joins a group of select attorneys who participate in a year-long, in-depth program devoted to relationship-building, in-person training, peer group projects and extensive contact with LCLD and legal profession education leaders. I am honored to have been selected and look forward to collaborating with such an impressive group of diverse professionals, said Vasquez about her participation in LCLD. According to the LCLD, selection in to the program involves a rigorous nomination process designed to identify lawyers from diverse backgrounds who have distinguished themselves within their LCLD member firms. Founded in 2009, LCLD has more than 300 members who are chief legal officers at major corporations and law firm managing partners personally committed to creating a more diverse and inclusive legal profession. Vasquez focuses her practice on international compliance matters and has considerable experience assisting clients throughout Mexico, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. Vasquez recently co-authored Get More Bang for Your Compliance Buck by Conducting Risk Assessments for a 2018 edition of The Texas Lawbook. For more information about LCLDs programs, visit http://www.lcldnet.org. About Greenberg Traurigs Diversity Initiative: From its inception, Greenberg Traurig has been committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Greenberg Traurig is a uniquely empowering and diverse firm built on a foundation of fairness, equality, and authenticity. The firm's efforts have been recognized by local, national, and global publications and organizations including, Chambers and Partners. About Greenberg Traurig, LLP Texas: Greenberg Traurig has more than 125 attorneys in Texas, serving clients from offices in Austin, Dallas, and Houston. About Greenberg Traurig, LLP: Greenberg Traurig, LLP (GT) has more than 2,000 attorneys in 39 offices in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. GT has been recognized for its philanthropic giving, diversity, and innovation, and is consistently among the largest firms in the U.S. on the Law360 400 and among the Top 20 on the Am Law Global 100. Web: http://www.gtlaw.com Twitter: @GT_Law. Erik de Bie and Marijn Bodelier of Greenberg Traurig, LLP Amsterdams office recently spoke at a Brexit masterclass Brace for Impact hosted by the Economic Development Board (Crossroads Limburg) on February 28, 2019, in Venlo, The Netherlands. Former European Council President Herman van Rompuy served as keynote speaker. The event focused on the impact of Brexit and how businesses can prepare for the upcoming changes. De Bie and Bodelier shared their latest insights on different possible scenarios for the Brexit date of March 29, 2019, and what may occur during the transition period until Dec. 31, 2020. De Bie discussed strategies to potentially mitigate the impact of Brexit on customs, VAT, and supply chain processes. Bodelier addressed the expected impact of Brexit on existing European Union regulations, including environmental and data protection. Erik de Bie focuses his practice on international trade, customs, and VAT matters. Erik counsels clients in European trade, export controls, sanctions, customs, VAT, and excise duty related matters, including litigation. He concentrates on developing and implementing European savings programs, setting up and restructuring European distribution and supply chains, improving and structuring customs, excise duty, and VAT related compliance, and limiting risks and liabilities. Given the developments in European legislation and the needs of his clients, Erik is frequently involved in cross-border matters, including obtaining certification as Authorized Economic Operator (AEO), implementing customs bonded warehouse regimes, and counseling on VAT issues. Marijn Bodelier focuses on public law, environmental law and real estate. Marijn has particular experience in litigation of regulatory and real estate related matters. He is regularly involved in international transactions and innovative projects where public law aspects are a key element. About Greenberg Traurig, LLP: Greenberg Traurig, LLP (GT) has more than 2,000 attorneys in 39 offices in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. GT has been recognized for its philanthropic giving, diversity, and innovation, and is consistently among the largest firms in the U.S. on the Law360 400 and among the Top 20 on the Am Law Global 100. Web: http://www.gtlaw.com Twitter: @GT_Law. (CNN) Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sentenced Wednesday to a total of 7.5 years in federal prison for financial crimes stemming from twin cases from the special counsel's office. Appearing at his second sentencing in as many weeks, Manafort switched gears from the contentious approach he and his attorneys had taken previously and apologized, asking for lenience and no additional prison time so he could take care of his wife. Instead, the judge gave Manafort a full rebuke for his public posturing and his crimes before delivering the sentence. "There was no question this defendant knew better and he knew exactly what he was doing," U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in the final minutes in court with Manafort Wednesday. Jackson ordered Manafort to serve an additional 43 months on federal conspiracy and obstruction charges, on top of a 47-month sentence he already received for financial convictions from a jury in Virginia. Manafort, 69, will get credit for nine months he's already served in jail, and if he gets credit for good behavior, could be released from prison in about six years. He will also serve three years on probation and pay millions in restitution for tax fraud. While some developments in Manafort's case and at other Mueller sentencings have been surprising and dramatic, the proceeding Wednesday was low-key, though it covered a wide range of legal arguments. After almost two hours of discussion, Jackson took a break then returned to the bench. She methodically outlined how the case took shape, landing her sentence after she described how Manafort deceived the American public, and how secret lobbying on behalf of foreign governments in the U.S. hurts democracy. Even after Manafort pleaded guilty and admitted to his crimes in September, he "backed away from the facts," Jackson said. "What you were doing was lying to members of Congress and the American public," she told Manafort. The biggest surprise came moments after the hearing adjourned, when the Manhattan district attorney revealed a new case against Manafort involving alleged business and mortgage fraud offenses in violation of New York state a set of 16 charges for which, if he is found guilty, could not be pardoned by President Donald Trump, who only has power over federal cases. Manafort has not yet appeared in court for that case. Collusion not part of this case After the sentencing, Manafort's attorney Kevin Downing criticized Jackson for what he perceived as hostility toward Manafort. Yet throughout the hearing, Jackson gave credit to Manafort for pleading guilty and admitting to his crimes last fall, and made clear she was not judging Manafort as a person on the whole. She would not factor in the political hubbub around the high-profile case either, she said. She did, however, acknowledge Manafort's work on the Trump campaign, saying he brought intelligence, "real structure" and skill to his most recent campaign work. Jackson noted several times during the hearing how Manafort's case interplayed with Mueller's investigation into Russian coordination with the Trump campaign in 2016 and how it did not. Collusion or conspiracy related to the election was "not presented in this case," Jackson said Wednesday, "Therefore it was not resolved by this case ... one way or another." She told Manafort that his lawyers' arguments about the absence of any collusion charges were "just one more thing that's inconsistent with the notion of any genuine acceptance of responsibility." In a plea cut in September 2018, Manafort admitted to money laundering, tax fraud and illegal foreign lobbying connected to his years of lucrative work for Ukrainian politicians, as well as defrauding banks to supplement his income with cash through mortgages. He pleaded guilty to two criminal charges: conspiracy against the U.S. and conspiracy witness tampering, which he committed after his arrest. Jackson also considered that he intentionally lied to investigators and under oath before a grand jury about his contact with a Russian associate and other topics, breaking his plea agreement. "Court is one of those places where facts still matter," Jackson said. "If the people don't have the facts, democracy doesn't work." An apology Manafort put on his glasses to read a prepared statement near the end of the hearing Wednesday. "I am sorry for what I've done," Manafort told the courtroom. "Let me be very clear, I accept the responsibility for the acts that caused me to be here today." He described how his time in jail had changed him, and how if released after serving time he will be a different man. "I pledge to do all I can to accelerate the healing process," he said. The statement was a departure from what he said to a different judge last week at his other sentencing hearing. In that proceeding, where he faced potentially more prison time, Manafort expressed regret but not remorse. (The judge in the Virginia case actually encouraged Manafort to show more remorse at his second sentencing in DC.) Manafort's court appearance came 17 months after the first indictment of Mueller's special counsel investigation brought him in to face a judge and five months after his help to Mueller's investigation fell apart. Manafort was wheeled into the courtroom Wednesday wearing a suit and purple tie rather than the green inmate jumpsuit he wore to some previous court appearances. He reminded the judge that he will turn 70 in a few weeks. "Please let my wife and I be together," Manafort said. Throughout the proceeding, he sat still and with a frown, often avoiding the eyes of others in the courtroom with his wheelchair angled toward a wall. (He has needed assistance walking for months because of gout in his legs, which developed since he's been in jail.) The breadth of Manafort's criminal activity and his own written agreement with prosecutors led to a recommended sentence more than double what Jackson gave him, for 10 years. Jackson also briefly revisited the long road with many twists that Manafort's case has taken over several hearings and more than 500 court filings. "He engaged in crime, again and again. He has not learned a harsh lesson," lead prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told the court on Wednesday, referring to the witness tampering charge. 'No collusion' Throughout the proceeding, Jackson highlighted how much spin Manafort's side had fueled political discussion over Mueller's investigation with even their court papers. She and prosecutors both accused him of using that approach to sidestep his crimes. "No collusion," Jackson said in court, was "a non-sequitur" used by the defense. After the hearing, when Manafort's attorney Kevin Downing criticized Jackson for "callousness" on the courthouse steps. "I think the judge showed that she is incredibly hostile towards Mr. Manafort and exhibited a level of callousness that I have not seen in a white collar case in over 15 years of prosecution," he said. His statement was nearly drowned out by protestors shouting "traitor" and "liar" outside the courthouse. Prosecutors and Manafort's defense team made their own arguments in court Wednesday for how harsh the judge should be. Manafort's lawyers sought to paint a sympathetic picture of their client as the target of the highest-profile Washington investigation in years. "It can be very harsh. The media attention that comes along with it. The political [situation] is so unreal," Downing said. "Everybody's going nuts over this." Jackson seized on his insinuation and asked him to clarify if he meant that the prosecutors had been politically motivated. No, they had not, Downing said in court. Even so, Manafort's lawyers had tried to make that point several times in past court papers. They even cited for Jackson before today's sentencing the lack of charges related to the 2016 presidential election. Jackson, who has seen confidential information about Mueller's investigation, acknowledged that the Russian collusion probe is not yet over. Some details in Manafort's court file before her remain sealed because of this, and prosecutors made clear they are interested in Manafort's contact with his longtime Russian associate Konstantin Kilimnik. Lobbying crimes Manafort's admitted crimes span a decade of lobbying activity but do not touch on his work as Trump's campaign chairman. His scheme, which he admitted to participating in with former Trump deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates and Kilimnik, took in more than $60 million from pro-Russian Ukrainians. He then avoided paying taxes on those payments by using offshore accounts to move the money and buy luxury goods and services for himself and his homes. He also admitted to deceiving accountants, a bookkeeper and banks. Manafort's illicit lobbying efforts in the U.S. largely involved the Ukrainian Opposition Bloc, the former Party of Regions and former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whose government jailed a political rival Manafort sought to smear in the U.S.. Yanukovych now lives in exile in Russia. At one point, he brought elite European politicians to the U.S. for a meeting in the Oval Office, without revealing they were advancing a foreign government's agenda, the judge noted Wednesday. Manafort's criminal prosecution has led to several related criminal cases and investigations and a multimillion dollar Justice Department settlement with a U.S. law firm for illegal lobbying for Ukraine. It's the second time in less than a week that Manafort's been through this process. His first sentencing, before federal Judge T.S. Ellis in the Eastern District of Virginia, concluded last Thursday with a term of about four years, which many critics of Manafort believed was too lenient. This story was first published on CNN.com "Manafort request for leniency met with a final sentence: 7.5 years" Amputation Prevention Centers of America Changes in practice can help reduce lower extremity amputations. The third annual Amputation Prevention Summit will be held on Saturday, March 23, 2019 at Memorial Hermann Greater Heights, 1635 North Loop West, South Tower, First Floor, Houston, Texas, drawing clinicians from Houston and surrounding region. Memorial Hermann is the only health system in the Houston area that is part of the Amputation Prevention Centers of America network. This CME event aims to highlight the urgent nature of the diabetes epidemic, the prevalence of peripheral arterial disease and diabetic foot ulcers, and how healthcare professionals can change and improve their practice in order to reduce lower extremity amputations. Diabetes is among the top 10 leading causes of death in Texas and the leading cause of non-traumatic lower extremity amputation. The risk of leg amputation for people with diabetes is 15 to 40 times greater than for a person without diabetes. Within two to four years of unilateral limb loss, one-third of all patients lose the other leg. Sadly, only about 50 percent of amputees survive within five years following a leg amputation due to ongoing complications of the chronic disease. With the future incidence of diabetes projected to rise to 550 million people worldwide by the year 2030, limb salvage is becoming a viable alternative, often producing better outcomes than amputation. This years summit will be led by Medical Director for Amputation Prevention Centers of America and recipient of the Americas Most Influential Podiatrist award Lee Rogers, DPM. Featured speakers include Founder and President of Save a Leg, Save a Life Foundation Desmond Bell, DPM, Medical Director for the Amputation Prevention Center at Memorial Hermann Greater Heights, Kourosh Keyhani, DO and Medical Director for the Amputation Prevention Center at Memorial Hermann Memorial City, Dean Chauvin, MD, as well as speakers across multiple disciplines, such as plastic surgery, interventional radiology, vascular surgery and family medicine. To register for the summit or for additional information, please visit http://www.apcofamerica.com/houston-summit/ About Amputation Prevention Centers of America Amputation Prevention Centers of America is an exclusive offering from RestorixHealth, the premier provider of wound center management solutions. An Amputation Prevention Center is a surgically focused inpatient/outpatient program operating in conjunction with the comprehensive wound center, that specializes in treating patients with limb-threatening conditions, such as diabetic foot ulcers. For more information, visit http://www.RestorixHealth.com or http://www.APCofAmerica.com. https://www.iiconsortium.org/ IoT, and especially Industrial IoT (IIoT) is critical to digital transformation. IIoT has clearly passed the hype stage. The IIC has already published results from our testbeds. Were thrilled to see so many of our members exhibiting and showcasing IIC testbeds at Hannover Messe this week. The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), now incorporating OpenFog, today announced that it is hosting a member pavilion at Hannover Messe, the world's leading trade show for industrial technology. IIC members and testbed participants will exhibit and demonstrate IoT technologies at the event, which runs from April 1-5, 2019 in Hannover, Germany. The IIC Pavilion in Hall 8, Stand D23, will showcase innovative companies from its global membership. The pavilion will also feature two IIC testbeds, where the innovation and opportunities of the industrial internet happen, and will showcase the IIC automotive security demonstration. IIC members exhibiting in the IIC Pavilion are: aicas, IIC German Regional Team lead, Ferdinand-Steinbeis-Institut, FogHorn, Fraunhofer IOSB, Lynx Software Technologies, NetApp, Tata Consultancy Services/NetFoundry and SAS. Many members from the IIC global membership base will also exhibit throughout Hannover Messe (see list). IIC Member, AASA, is also showcasing a Li-Fi technology solution throughout the pavilion. Demonstration includes: The Time Sensitive Networking for Flexible Manufacturing (TSN) Testbed, which provides enhanced Ethernet technology to support real-time control and synchronization of high-performance machines over a single, standard Ethernet network, supporting multi-vendor interoperability and integration. The Smart Factory Web Testbed, which forms a network of smart factories with a flexible adaptation of production capabilities and sharing of resources and assets with the goal of improving order fulfillment. Automotive Security - members of the IIC Automotive Security Task Group, led by LHP Engineering, have developed this demonstration to address the universal automotive pain-points of safety violations resulting from cybersecurity compromises. IoT, and especially Industrial IoT (IIoT) is critical to digital transformation, said IIC Executive Director Dr. Richard Soley. IIoT has clearly passed the hype stage, not to say there isn't still hype but there are serious technical and business process results to apply today the IIC has already published results from our testbeds. Were thrilled to see so many of our members exhibiting and showcasing IIC testbeds at Hannover Messe this week. About the Industrial Internet Consortium The Industrial Internet Consortium, now incorporating OpenFog, is the worlds leading membership program transforming business and society by accelerating the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The IIC delivers a trustworthy IIoT in which the worlds systems and devices are securely connected and controlled to deliver transformational outcomes. The Industrial Internet Consortium is a program of the Object Management Group (OMG). For more information, visit https://www.iiconsortium.org/. Note to editors: Industrial Internet Consortium is a registered trademark of OMG. For a listing of all OMG trademarks, visit http://www.omg.org/legal/tm_list. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Karla Jo Helms, CEO of JoTo PR, expands on Dr. Mark Trolice's devotion to addressing the decline of fertility rates worldwide. Dr. Mark Trolice has devoted his career to treating fertility problems in any patients holding to the dream of parenthood. His experience is diverse and deep and his dedication unwaveringsomething very much needed with fertility rates declining to all-time lows worldwide. Infertility rates have been rising steadily in the last few years. According to the CDC, about 12% of women[1] have continued difficulty becoming pregnant or staying pregnant in 2018 as of 2018. The year prior, overall fertility rates in the US reached a record low[2] for the second straight year. Leading Tampa Anti-PR agency JoTo PR has been engaged by Dr. Mark Trolice, the founder of Fertility CARE: The IVF Clinic in Orlando and one of the countrys top specialists in fertility care and genetic testing, to champion the latest advances in fertility treatments and technology. Dr. Mark Trolice has devoted his career to treating fertility problems in any patients holding to the dream of parenthood, says Karla Jo Helms, CEO of JoTo PR. His experience is diverse and deep and his dedication unwaveringsomething very much needed with fertility rates declining to all-time lows worldwide. Growing infertility comes at a time when more people from diverse groups across the US are attempting to have children. Over half of LGBTQ+ Millennials, for example, are looking to add to their family[3], while many older women are now looking to have their first child; the largest rise in birth rates over the past few years was from women in their early 40s[2]. Yet infertility rates are expected to keep rising moving forward[2]. Dr. Trolice is commonly at the vanguard of new fertility treatments and testing and implementing new technology. His dedication has made Fertility CARE the leading IVF clinic in Central Florida. In addition to specializing in IVF and fertility testing, Dr. Trolice has also recently established himself as a trailblazer in the use of genetic testing - prior to IVF treatments. Methods such as preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) allow infertility practitioners to screen for both common and rare genetic disorders, such as spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and cystic fibrosis. With an error rate of 1%, PGT can detect and diagnose conditions like these prior to embryo implantation and allows to make informed decisions when planning a family. Using PGT in conjunction with IVF greatly increases the chances of a successful pregnancy, ensuring only healthy embryos are used and reducing the risk of losing infants to preventable and detectable conditions. Dr. Trolices knowledge and unmatched devotion to helping his patients has also positioned him as the one of the top go-to fertility professionals in the U.S; in addition to helping thousands of people solve many of their fertility struggles, he is often invited to share his valuable insights at presentations across the country. He is frequently sought after for appearances as a guest on fertility by both local and national media outlets. Utilizing education and communication of breakthrough news to help consumers and prospective families gain the insight and knowledge to assist them in navigating scientific data is our mission, says Helms. As infertility rates increase, so does demand for treatments that lead the way for many. About JoTo PR: After doing marketing research on a cross-section majority of 5,000 CEOs of fast-growth trajectory companies and finding out exactly how they used PR, how they measure it and how they wanted the PR industry to be different, PR veteran and innovator Karla Jo Helms created JoTo PR and established its entire business model on those research findings. Astute in recognizing industry changes since its launch in 2009, JoTo PRs team utilizes newly established patterns to create timely PR campaigns comprising both traditional and the latest proven media methods. This unique skill enables JoTo PR to continue to increase the market share and improve return on investment (ROI) for its clients, year after yearbeating usual industry standards. Based in Tampa Bay, Florida, JoTo PR is an established international public relations agency. Today, all of JoTo PRs processes are streamlined PR services that have become the hallmark of the JoTo PR name. For more information, visit JoTo PR online at http://www.jotopr.com. About Karla Jo Helms: Karla Jo Helms is the Chief Evangelist and Anti-PR Strategist for JoTo PR. Karla Jo learned firsthand how unforgiving business can be when millions of dollars are on the lineand how the control of public opinion often determines whether one company is happily chosen or another is brutally rejected. Being an alumna of crisis management, Karla Jo has worked with litigation attorneys, private investigators and the media to help restore companies of goodwill back into the good graces of public opinionKarla Jo operates on the ethic of getting it right the first time, not relying on second chances, and doing what it takes to excel. Karla Jo has patterned her agency on the perfect balance of crisis management, entrepreneurial insight and proven public relations experience. Helms speaks globally on public relations, how the PR industry itself has lost its way and how, in the right hands, corporations can harness the power of PR to drive markets and impact market perception. 1. Staff Writer, Fertility. Center for Disease Control. 2018. Web. 2. Dallas, May Elizabeth. US Fertility Rates Hit Record Low in 2017. Healthday.com, May 17, 2018. 3. Family Equality Council, LGBTQ Family Building Survey. Familyequality.org, February 6, 2019. EthicOne logo To succeed in the age of trust, companies need to build trusted brands by starting on the inside, said David Herrick, Managing Principal of EthicOne. EthicOne and the Ethisphere Institute today announced the findings of a major ethics study of the marketing and communications practices of leading companies. Presented today at the 11th Annual Global Ethics Summit in New York, the study showed that CEOs of acknowledged ethics leaders are deepening their engagement in the areas of ethics, values, trust and transparency. The Ethics in Marketing & Communications study examined all 135 companies on the 2018 Worlds Most Ethical Companies list as well as a select survey group of eight large companies that provided a deep examination of their marketing and communications practices. Leaders Committed to Ethics A major trend identified in the study is that top leaders are becoming deeply engaged with the work of communicating about ethics and values. Every respondent company in our select survey group reported that their CEO, C-suite and Board of Directors was either more engaged or significantly more engaged than they had been three years ago on issues of ethics, values, trust and transparency. All of these companies reported that their CEO acts as chief spokesperson/voice for communicating the companys values, culture, and ethics expectations. The CEOs of companies in the select survey are heavily-engaged with their top marketing and communications leaders on matters of ethics, values, transparency and trust. More than half of the companies reported daily or weekly interactions between the CEO and their Corporate Communications/Public Relations leader and their Marketing/Brand leader on these issues. Strong Board Engagement in Ethics and Trust Boards of directors of leading companies are directly engaged with issues of ethics and compliance. Every company in the select survey indicated that their board receives reports on ethics and compliance at least quarterly, with several receiving monthly updates via dashboards or other mechanisms. Additionally, 71 percent of Corporate Communications/Public Relations leaders and 86 percent of Marketing/Brand leaders in the select survey have regular interaction with their companys board of directors, signifying the elevated importance of corporate and brand reputation at the board level. Of the full 135 companies, 96 percent maintain a documented compliance and ethics communications plan to ensure that ethics and values are a priority in their organizations. To succeed in the age of trust, companies need to build trusted brands by starting on the inside, said David Herrick, Managing Principal of EthicOne. Ethics and values must become a genuine part of your culture before anyone on the outside will believe in them. By taking a deep look at the internal practices of acknowledged ethics leaders, we are building a roadmap for all companies who want to create powerful ethical brands. The Worlds Most Ethical Companies have outperformed their large cap peers by more than 10 percent over the past three years, said Timothy Erblich, CEO, Ethisphere Institute. They achieve these results with executive teams and boards committed to building strong cultures of ethics internally, organizational structures and governance that advance their values, and marketing and communications leaders who know how to extend their authentic cultures externally. The Ethics in Marketing & Communications research was made possible by the commitment of Founding Participants who are all members of the Worlds Most Ethical Companies community: U.S. Bank, Voya Financial, ON Semiconductor and 3M. Additional participants included: Cambia Health Solutions, Lilly, Prudential and TE Connectivity. For Information about the study, licensing the full report, participation in future research, or strategic communications consulting, email us at info@EthicOne.com or visit https://www.ethicone.com. ### About EthicOne EthicOne helps the world's leading companies and organizations turn their commitment to ethical business practices into market leadership. In partnership with Ethisphere, we benchmark and advise clients on best practices in communicating and marketing ethics leadership and we build the strategies and programs to help them activate their ethics leadership with employees, customers, investors and regulators. For more information, visit https://www.ethicone.com. About Ethisphere The Ethisphere Institute is the global leader in defining and advancing the standards of ethical business practices that fuel corporate character, marketplace trust and business success. Ethisphere has deep expertise in measuring and defining core ethics standards using data-driven insights that help companies enhance corporate character and measure and improve culture. Ethisphere honors superior achievement through its Worlds Most Ethical Companies recognition program and provides a community of industry experts with the Business Ethics Leadership Alliance (BELA). More information about Ethisphere can be found at: https://ethisphere.com. Royal York Travel - Dream Vacations in Woodstock and TravelWolfe - Dream Vacations in Rancho Mirage, CA are thrilled to announce the merger of their businesses effective March 1, 2019. The newly combined business will operate under the name Valley Travel Associates - Dream Vacations. The combination of these two companies offers an exciting opportunity to strengthen and reinforce the high-quality service and experience proposition previously offered by these two successful franchises individually, as well as brings enhanced capabilities and coverage for existing clients whether in California or New York, or anywhere in between. Royal York Travel - DreamVacations was founded in 2015 by Norman Buchbinder and his business partner Derek Krabill. Both Buchbinder and Krabill each had decades of first-hand travel experience having traveled to more than 100 countries around the globe by air, land and sea and wanted to share their expertise with their clients while providing superior customer service. This means that Buchbinder and Krabill will often travel with their groups to ensure a top-notch experience. As consumers grow increasingly savvier and more aware of the many benefits of working with a travel consultant, finding a partner that is dedicated, knowledgeable, and has had first-hand experience makes all the difference in the world for a clients vacation, said Buchbinder. Dream Vacations - TravelWolfe founders Mark and Shirley Wolfe opened for business in 2007. Mark and Shirley have traveled to over 240 destinations around the globe. Providing exceptional customer service and matching our clients desires to their best possible dream vacation experience is a key goal of our agency. We are dedicated to providing our clients the best possible value for their vacation dollars by utilizing programs like our Cruise Fare Watch system, said Wolfe. A recent client commented, The service here is a throwback to a different time. Royal York Travel Dream Vacations has had three consecutive years of more than 100 percent growth in sales and revenues, while TravelWolfe Dream Vacations has also experienced tremendous growth since its inception 12 years ago. The newly combined agency Valley Travel Associates Dream Vacations will rank 18th out of 1,339 total agencies in the CruiseOne/Dream Vacations Network. Finding ways to continue growing the business while maintaining the high service levels our clients enjoy can be challenging, and finding partners who share a similar backgrounds and ethic is key, said Krabill. We found that Mark and Shirley share our values and service philosophy which is why this merger makes so much sense for us. With the merger, Valley Travel Associates Dream Vacations will offer extended hours by taking advantage of its presence on both the East and West Coasts. The additional resources and experience realized by this combination will be a tremendous benefit for clients. Buchbinder said, We look forward to this new chapter and to helping all of our clients make lasting memories with Dream Vacations. For more information or to book a dream vacation, please call (760) 880-9313 or visit http://www.GoValleyTravel.com About Dream Vacations Travel agents with the top-ranked home-based travel agency franchise Dream Vacations have the resources to plan and create seamless vacation experiences for their customers while offering the best value. A member of the International Franchise Association, Dream Vacations is part of World Travel Holdings and has received partner of the year, a top-ranking status, by all the major cruise lines as well as national recognition for its support of military veterans. M-Files Corporation, the intelligent information management company, today announced that TrustRadius, a popular business software review site, has recognized M-Files as the highest-rated Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software, with a 9.2 out of 10 score by end-users.* End-users commended M-Files for its ease of use, compliance support, integrations with leading business systems, and the ability to quickly and intelligently find the right documents and other information across different systems. M-Files, with its Intelligent Metadata Layer (IML), delivers a simple, unified experience powered by artificial intelligence (AI) for finding, accessing and managing information stored not only within M-Files, but also within other systems and storage locations in the cloud or on-premises, including network file shares, SharePoint, Box, Dropbox, OpenText, Salesforce and others. "Reviews from customers who are experiencing the benefits of M-Files first-hand carry tremendous clout, said Greg Milliken, senior vice president of marketing at M-Files. What makes the TrustRadius rankings so compelling is that they are based on direct experience in production environments. Real users provided the fuel that propelled M-Files to reach the top-ranked designation above every other ECM software provider on TrustRadius." A New Metadata-driven Approach to Information Management TrustRadius reviewers highlighted the M-Files metadata-driven approach to document management as a standout feature. M-Files uses metadata to automatically index and organize documents by type, such as a contract or invoice, as well as by customer, project, case, and essentially any other property or characteristic important to the organization to establish relevance and context when searching for information in M-Files and other repositories and business systems. With M-Files, users are no longer confined to managing information in folder-based systems and can intuitively organize and locate documents and other information based on why it is relevant to them. TrustRadius reviewers explained: M-Files allows you to search for what you need without knowing [the system] where its located. We have integrations with SharePoint, Salesforce, and our ERP. Our staff is able to use information from these business systems directly in M-Files. Compared to using regular folders on a computer, M-Files is worlds ahead. Streamlined Compliance and Security Also highlighted in TrustRadius reviews was the M-Files platform's ability to help organizations achieve and demonstrate compliance with regulations and industry standards, such as GDPR, when handling and protecting personal information, and ISO, FDA and EU Annex 11, related to quality management in manufacturing and life sciences. We are currently using the audit logs to manage who is accessing documents and what changes are being made, said a TrustRadius reviewer. We also encrypt our data at rest to ensure we have the necessary security for our employees and our customers. It is a great fit for any compliance or regulated organization that wants to enhance compliance or is working towards compliance, said another user. The TrustRadius user rating reinforces strong and accelerating momentum for M-Files, as well as a number of recent accolades. In January 2019, Business.com named M-Files the Best Document Management Software of 2019, recognizing its comprehensive features, including user-friendly and effective collaboration and workflow automation tools. The site also praised the solution's document imaging capabilities that incorporate optical character recognition (OCR) for automatic indexing and processing. Furthermore, Inc. Magazine recently named M-Files as the Best Document Management System for Law Firms, hailing its innovative technology, security, support for data compliance and ability to integrate with legal firm software. M-Files continued its rapid growth in 2018, adding over 1,000 new customers to bring the total number of customers using the platform to more than 9,000 worldwide, including global enterprises in manufacturing, professional services, construction, financial services, life sciences, energy, real estate, healthcare and other sectors. For more information on M-Files, please visit: http://www.m-files.com. *Every reviewer on TrustRadius is authenticated, and each review is vetted by the research team before publication. TrustRadius also ensures that product scores represent true customer sentiment by correcting for selection bias. About M-Files Corporation M-Files provides a next-generation intelligent information management platform that improves business performance by helping people find and use information more effectively. Unlike traditional enterprise content management (ECM) systems or content services platforms, M-Files unifies systems, data and content across the organization without disturbing existing systems and processes or requiring data migration. Using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in its unique Intelligent Metadata Layer, M-Files breaks down silos by delivering an in-context experience for accessing and leveraging information that resides in any system and repository, including network folders, SharePoint, file sharing services, ECM systems, CRM, ERP and other business systems and repositories. Thousands of organizations in more than 100 countries use M-Files for managing their business information and processes, including NBC Universal, OMV, Rovio, SAS Institute and thyssenkrupp. For more information, visit http://www.m-files.com. Media Contact: Danielle Calfo 10Fold for M-Files 708-927-0175 m-files(at)10fold(dot)com The brain chemical serotonin, a neurotransmitter long known for its role in passing signals between neurons in the brain, can also regulate expression of genes within neurons in an unexpected way, according to research conducted by neuroscientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published on March 13 in the journal Nature. The discovery may help scientists better understand a variety of brain disorders, including mood disorders, substance abuse/addiction, and neurodegenerative diseases. Our findings represent a dramatic divergence from the current dogma, which works primarily on the premise that neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine act solely through the activation of their membrane receptors in the brain to regulate brain cell activity, says Ian Maze, PhD, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, and Pharmacological Sciences, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and senior author of the paper. We found actions of these brain chemicals that are independent of neurotransmission but critically important to their overall signaling, suggesting that our current understanding of these molecules is incomplete and requires further investigation. The study revolves around DNA and how it works to form each persons individual biological map. Each cell in the body contains two meters of DNA, the blueprint for all functions of all cells in the body. This DNA is wound around spools of histone proteins (proteins that package DNA in the nucleus of cells, and are heavily prone to chemical modifications that aid in the regulation of gene expression) into structures referred to as nucleosomes. When DNA encoding a specific gene is wound tightly within the spool, that gene is less likely to be expressed. When the gene is not wound as tightly, it is more likely to be expressed. This can affect many functions of a given cell. Serotonin is a chemical that can transmit signals between neurons in the brain and is involved in the regulation of mood. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, known as SSRIs, alter the amounts of serotonin in the brain, which enables mood changes. When small packages of serotonin are released from a neuron, the resulting signals set up a chain reaction of communication between different parts of the brain. The research team discovered that a protein called tissue transglutaminase 2 can directly attach serotonin molecules to histone proteins (a process called histone serotonylation), which in turn loosens the spool to enable more robust gene expression. Specifically, they found that in developing rodent brains and human neurons, genes near the part of the spool loosened by the serotonin are more likely to be expressed. They also showed that a specific binding complex enables this process. The serendipitous discovery that serotonin can be chemically attached to histone proteins in the nucleus of cells to regulate gene expression raises many exciting questions, most of which are yet to be answered, says Dr. Maze. While this new discovery raises a whole new crop of questions that will need to be answered through more research, what is clear is that this work promises to fundamentally change the way the field interprets the biological activities of serotonin, and possibly other monoamines as well, phenomena that may contribute significantly to our understanding of human disease and inform new targets for therapeutic treatment. Some of the exciting questions to be answered include: does serotonins regulation of gene expression, in addition to serotonin neurotransmission, also play a role in the regulation of mood? Could this new knowledge be used to develop better medications to treat depression or other mood disorders? How else might it affect the brain? Can a related neurotransmitter like dopamine, which plays an important role in substance use disorders, also be attached to histones to regulate gene expression in the brain? These questions and many others related to the functional consequences of histone and non-histone protein serotonylation (and more broadly, protein monoaminylation, the chemical attachment of additional monoamine neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, histamine, and others) in the brain are currently being investigated in Dr. Mazes laboratory, as well as in the laboratories of his collaborators on this published project. This work is already beginning to shed light on diverse and critical activities for these novel chemical marks in the regulation of normal brain development, as well as in the precipitation of pathological states associated with psychiatric illness. Researchers from Princeton University, Tsinghua University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, The Rockefeller University, and the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine contributed to this research. This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, as well as awards from MQ Mental Health Research Charity, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the JPB Foundation, the Bob and Mary Jane Engman Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the National Natural Science Foundation in China. About the Mount Sinai Health System The Mount Sinai Health System is New York City's largest integrated delivery system, encompassing eight hospitals, a leading medical school, and a vast network of ambulatory practices throughout the greater New York region. Mount Sinai's vision is to produce the safest care, the highest quality, the highest satisfaction, the best access and the best value of any health system in the nation. The Health System includes approximately 7,480 primary and specialty care physicians; 11 joint-venture ambulatory surgery centers; more than 410 ambulatory practices throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, Long Island, and Florida; and 31 affiliated community health centers. The Icahn School of Medicine is one of three medical schools that have earned distinction by multiple indicators: ranked in the top 20 by U.S. News & World Report's "Best Medical Schools", aligned with a U.S. News & World Report's "Honor Roll" Hospital, No. 12 in the nation for National Institutes of Health funding, and among the top 10 most innovative research institutions as ranked by the journal Nature in its Nature Innovation Index. This reflects a special level of excellence in education, clinical practice, and research. The Mount Sinai Hospital is ranked No. 18 on U.S. News & World Report's "Honor Roll" of top U.S. hospitals; it is one of the nation's top 20 hospitals in Cardiology/Heart Surgery, Gastroenterology/GI Surgery, Geriatrics, Nephrology, and Neurology/Neurosurgery, and in the top 50 in six other specialties in the 2018-2019 "Best Hospitals" issue. Mount Sinai's Kravis Children's Hospital also is ranked nationally in five out of ten pediatric specialties by U.S. News & World Report. The New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai is ranked 11th nationally for Ophthalmology and 44th for Ear, Nose, and Throat. Mount Sinai Beth Israel, Mount Sinai St. Luke's, Mount Sinai West, and South Nassau Communities Hospital are ranked regionally. For more information, visit http://www.mountsinai.org/, or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. # # # MyWay Mobile Storage of Pittsburgh will be joining the REALTORS Association of Metropolitan Pittsburgh (RAMP) in their Community Service Committees Daily Bread event. The March 21st event is focused on making and serving lunch to those experiencing homelessness or under-employment. The food is served out of the kitchen at the New Hope Methodist Church on the North Side. RAMP community service committee volunteers will purchase the menu items, prepare the food, and serve a delicious meal. We really love to get out in the community and give back. Volunteering at the Daily Bread program (formally known as the Northside Congregate Feeding Program) is a terrific way to do that, said Michelle Schocker, an agent with Berkshire Hathaway. We want to have a positive impact on the community, Schocker continued, but the experience will have a positive impact on us as well. Ed Sickmund, MyWay Mobile Storage of Pittsburgh Market Owner and RAMP Affiliate member said, Helping those who may be experiencing homelessness in this way reminds us to see these people as real people. They are our neighbors. Sickmund continued, The Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank estimates that more than 14 percent of our community experiences food insecurity. Michelle Senko, a PPM Realty agent added, The Daily Bread program does a terrific job, together with other feeding programs on the Northside, making sure hot meals are available every day of the week. Hollie Hooper, a Howard Hanna agent, noted, Food insecurity, homelessness, and under-employment are challenges facing our neighbors all year round. Feeding programs are not just needed around the holidays, but every day. My Howard Hanna colleagues, Preston Moore, Emily Platts, and I are happy to do our small part. Mary Lynne Deets, RAMP Faculty, pointed out that, Anyone interested in volunteering for the Daily Bread program can sign up online. The program serves meals three times per week, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11:30 a.m. and Sundays at 4:00 p.m. About the Daily Bread Program of the United Methodist Church Union: The Northside Congregate Feeding Program has been serving meals on the Northside for more than a quarter of a century. More than 250,000 quality, nutritious meals have been served. The address is 114 West North Avenue, Pittsburgh, 15212. To volunteer, sign up online at http://www.umchurchunionpgh.org/daily-bread/ or call the office at 412-231-4900. About the REALTORS Association of Metropolitan Pittsburgh (RAMP): Since 1911, RAMP has served real estate professionals and the community as western Pennsylvanias most effective voice for private property and industry professionalism. RAMP began with 30 members and has since grown to include approximately 2,100 residential and commercial realtors. RAMP has remained at the forefront of public policy and member advocacy. With full-time government affairs and education programs, RAMP is uniquely positioned to provide its members with the tools they need to do business successfully and ethically. By shaping legislation and preparing REALTORS to serve their clients more effectively, RAMP has delivered the American Dream to five generations of Pittsburgh-area property owners. Visit http://www.realtorspgh.com/. About RAMPs Community Committee: RAMPs Community Service Committee is responsible for engaging with the general public by coordinating public service projects. This committee's activities provide a service or assistance to citizens who are less fortunate. The mission is to maintain and enhance RAMPs image and community awareness through community outreach projects. In addition to feeding the homeless and underemployed the 2019 calendar includes volunteering at the Light of Life Rescue donation center, Senior Curb Appeal Day. Hats/Gloves/Scarves/Sock Drive and Boys and Girls Club Career Day. About MyWay Mobile Storage of Pittsburgh: MyWay Mobile Storage of Pittsburgh is the leading provider of moving and storage solutions and located in a spacious 25,000 square foot facility in West Mifflin, PA to better service their customers in the metropolitan Pittsburgh area. They provide quick and easy do it yourself moving containers that can be delivered right to your door and stored in their climate controlled, secure storage facilities. MyWay Mobile Storage of Pittsburgh is a RAMP Affiliate Member and Market Owner, Ed Sickmund, was honored with their 2011 Affiliate of the Year award. Sickmund and MyWay Mobile Storage of Pittsburgh are also involved with the National Association of Productivity & Organizing Professionals, Business Networking International, Veterans Place of Washington Boulevard and the South West Communities Chamber of Commerce. To learn more about MyWay Mobile Storage of Pittsburgh, visit http://www.mywaystorage.com or call 888-336-9929 to speak with a Moving & Storage Consultant. DigDev, a multi-channel infomediary headquartered in Deerfield Beach, Florida, specializes in data and digital marketing services. With an industry experience spanning more than 10 years, DigDevDirect provides cohesive data marketing solutions combined with programmatic advertising and email marketing campaigns to customers across industries. Their data marketing targets people based on various parameters, including age, income, gender, marital status, political affiliations, shopping interests, children, homes, cars, financial status, and much more. With more 300 demographic and lifestyle attributes available, every business can reach out to their target audience systematically. No two businesses are alike and nor are their audiences. There is a dire need to segregate the target audience from a general audience. This will define a businesss success or failure. A supermarket needs to gather more footfall and will invest in display advertising via print media, social media websites, brochures, direct mail campaigns and much more. However, a designer boutique has a specific audience that they want to cater to. This can include women in the age group of 25 to 40 years with a certain income level. DigDev Direct provides you with the right data segregation to target this specific category only. We combine our display ads on social media websites as well as sift through a lookalike audience who will be interested in your product. As a designer boutique, you can set your audience based on age, income, gender, marital status, working or non-working, geography, shopping interests, behavioral patterns, etc. and derive the right set of people you want to target. DigDev Direct representative. Media Direct enables new data marketing strategies by utilizing various other sources of information that include federal records, state filings, websites, licensing records, telephone connects and disconnects, directories of corporate filings, entrepreneurs, company type, and much more. With a huge database of multi-sourced business references, clients can reach out to a wider target audience with minimum effort, cost-effectively. Using traditional and non-traditional marketing and advertising methodologies, DigDev Direct helps to create a sustainable marketing model for companies to grow successfully. For more information regarding this feature, please contact Dennis John at djohn(at)digdev.com. About DigDev Direct DigDev Direct utilizes a multi-channel marketing platform to cater to high-level services for customer acquisition and retention. Each channel comes with highly targeted strategies whether it be search engine optimization, pay per click, email marketing, mobile, data appending or more. Supporting the return of Ms. Superpark and contributing to the progression of female snowboarding aligns perfectly with our values at Nikita. Were always on the look-out for opportunities to rally our community and to support Girls Who Ride. - Jenna Kuklinski, Nikita Brand Manager Nikita Clothing is proud to announce their role in presenting Ms. Superpark for 2019. Along with SNOWBOARDER Magazine, Monster Energy and Big Boulder Park, the womens freestyle event kicks off on Monday, March 11 in Big Boulder, Pa. Widely viewed as the premier platform for the progression of female snowboarding, the four-day event will bring top talent from around the world to Big Boulder Park to reset the standard for creative and exciting park riding. Ms. Superpark offers a unique opportunity for snowboarding's up-and-coming amateur riders to shine alongside their peers as well as the industrys top professionals. The progression focused format sets the stage for the current generation to display their park prowess and to show what truly is possible when the best in women's snowboarding are given the opportunity to ride together. Superpark is an iconic event, one that every snowboarder drops everything to watch said Nikita Brand Manager, Jenna Kuklinski. Supporting the return of Ms. Superpark and contributing to the progression of female snowboarding aligns perfectly with our values at Nikita. Were always on the look-out for opportunities to rally our community, to foster the rebellious confidence in each of them and to support Girls Who Ride. Nikitas sponsorship of Ms. Superpark exemplifies the brands goal of promoting female athletes and creating opportunities for them to showcase their talent. From an event partnership with Exposure Skate to the global activation of the G.W.R. (Girls Who Ride) Tour, a grassroots, community based progression session for female skiers and snowboarders, to creating amateur skate and snow events at the Summer and Winter Dew Tours, Nikita is committed to building confidence in girls through positive experiences in action sports. SNOWBOARDER Magazines Ms. Superpark 2019 at Big Boulder, PA is made possible by the sponsorship support of Nikita Clothing and Monster Energy. To keep up with all the action, follow @nikitaclothing, @snowboardermag, @bigboulderpark, @monsterenergy and #mssuperpark for the latest imagery from this one-of-a-kind session. About Nikita Nikita is an iconic streetwear and outerwear brand that brings style and attitude to girls from the streets to the mountains. From our humble beginnings in the back of a skate shop, we started with a single purpose; to make clothes FOR GIRLS WHO RIDE. For more information, please visit http://www.nikitaclothing.com Ole Smoky, home of the worlds most visited distillery and most awarded moonshine, announced it has asked the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) to disclaim the term Mountain Dew from its pending federal trademark application for the mark OLE SMOKY MOUNTAIN DEW MOONSHINE under the application serial number 86762399. In the late 1800s, Kentucky distiller John W. McCulloch first began selling spirits under the Mountain Dew brand name. Ownership of John W. McCullochs trademark eventually passed to his present-day ancestor John Robert McCulloch, who revived the brand and sold spirits under the name in 2011. Ole Smoky acquired Mr. McCullochs rights to the Mountain Dew brand in 2015 and filed to register "OLE SMOKY MOUNTAIN DEW MOONSHINE" as a trademark for distilled spirits. PepsiCo objected via opposition number 91235107 soon after in response to Ole Smokys attempt to register this trademark. Given the legal actions necessary to further the case, Ole Smoky has now decided to release what it claims to be its exclusive rights to Mountain Dew in spirits. Ole Smoky Distillery was founded with the historical understanding that Mountain Dew means moonshine and we strongly believe that no single corporation, including Ole Smoky, should have a monopoly over its use for moonshine, said Joe Baker, Founder of Ole Smoky Distillery LLC. We know the term Mountain Dew evokes different cultural interpretations and references, but that does not void its original meaning and historical connection to spirits and moonshine culture. About Ole Smoky Distillery LLC Ole Smoky is the leading craft distiller in the US and the first federally licensed distiller in the history of East Tennessee. Founded in 2010, Ole Smokys roots can be traced to the Smoky Mountains earliest settlers, families who produced moonshine with enduring pride and Appalachian spirit. In 2009, Tennessee laws changed, and suddenly, it was legal to make, distill and sell the infamous and illicit moonshine the region had become known for and Ole Smoky was born, with products crafted from a century-old recipe. In 2016, Ole Smoky debuted its line of premium whiskeys, many of which have been launched nationally. Today, Ole Smoky retails globally and offers more than 25 creative moonshine flavors and 17 inventive whiskey flavors. Ole Smoky can be found at the companys distilleries, online, in grocery and liquor stores nationwide, as well as in on-premise establishments, including some of the biggest music and sporting venues in the country. Ole Smoky is the home to the most visited distillery in the world and in 2018 alone, more than four million people visited Ole Smokys three famed East Tennessee locations: The Holler & The Barrelhouse in Gatlinburg and The Barn in Pigeon Forge. In 2019, Ole Smoky will open a fourth location in Nashville. For more information, please visit olesmoky.com and follow Ole Smoky on social media @olesmoky. Women are excelling in the educational realm, are represented at historic rates in Congress and Chicago is on the cusp of electing its first black woman mayor. But, against that backdrop of progress, gender disparities persist. This latest study from Heartland Alliances Social IMPACT Research Center shows how gender, gender identity, and gender norms deepen poverty for women and gender minorities in Illinoisand how women who have other marginalized identities experience even more inequity. The Gender Disadvantage demonstrated that, on many measures of economic opportunity, women fare worse than men. Women in Illinois earn only 78 cents for every dollar earned by men for full-time, year-round work, and this pay gap gets wider for women of color. If we continue to do nothing, women in Illinois will not see equal pay until 2065. But if we do only one thingeliminate the gender wage gapworking womens poverty rates in Illinois would be more than halved. That would translate into a 16 percent increase in womens earnings, totaling $20.5 billiona huge potential boost for Illinoiss economy that would benefit 1.1 million children by reducing the poverty rate for children with working mothers by 43 percent. Women are a driving force in our society and economy, and yet they continue to experience inequitable outcomes in the workplace, at home, and in their health and well-being. These inequities are amplified for women who face oppression based on other aspects of their identity, says Evelyn Diaz, President of Heartland Alliance. In order to address the gender poverty and wealth gap, our solutions must also tackle inequities for people of color, immigrants, low-wage workers, LGBTQ people, and others. Key findings include: Women of color fare worse than white women on almost every domain: theyre paid less, have less wealth, are more likely to be low-wage workers in jobs, have poorer health outcomes, higher incarceration rates, experience domestic violence, and have worse economic outcomes when experiencing disability. In Illinois, black women have a poverty rate three times higher than their white counterparts. Women experience high rates of wage inequities and wage violations, and make up a larger percentage of the workforce in sectors that lack key benefits and make it difficult to balance caretaking and work. Though women have better education outcomes and lower unemployment rates than men, they are still more likely to live in poverty. Single mothers are deeply and uniquely impacted by poverty. They experience significant economic shocks after childbirth that linger throughout their lifetime, are pushed into poverty by child care costs, and are harshly penalized by the safety net. Workplace discrimination and harassment are key drivers of economic gender inequities. Women experience higher rates of discrimination and harassment on the job than men, and gender non-conforming people face higher rates of employment discrimination and harassment than cisgender people. The unequal distribution of unpaid care seeds many other disparities. Women spend significantly more time on unpaid care work than men, making it harder for women to engage in the labor force, pursue educational opportunities, or be more visible in public life. Gender discrimination and disparity extends beyond the gender binary. Gender minorities experience high rates of poverty, poor physical and mental health, workplace discrimination, violent victimization, sexual assault, homelessness, and trafficking. One in five trans Illinoisans live in poverty. This Womens History Month, its important to celebrate the progress towards gender equitywomen are excelling in the educational realm, are represented at historic rates in Congress, and Chicago is on the cusp of electing its first black woman mayor, said Katie Buitrago, Director of Research at Heartland Alliance. But, against that backdrop of progress, stark gender disparities persist. Women and gender minorities still fare worse than men on almost every indicator of well-being. In order to combat these disparities, The Gender Disadvantage calls for sweeping policy change, including: Addressing discrimination head on to increase opportunity and fairness Income to foster economic security Increasing wealth-building opportunities Changing the structure of work to foster stability and success Recognizing and valuing the vital role of caregiving for families and the economy Ensuring health care access, meaningful coverage, and support The Gender Disadvantage and related infographics are available for download at http://www.heartlandalliance.org/povertyreport. All data images are to be credited to the Heartland Alliance Social IMPACT Research Center. Contact IMPACT for assistance accessing and interpreting local data. In lieu of jail time, Jacob Kirkendall will be required to spend at least a year at Alpine Special Treatment Center in San Diego. Jacob Kirkendall was potentially facing life in prison without the possibility of parole. It was important to arrive at a fair plea deal that reflected that. After negotiations between California mental health attorney Ken Rosenfeld and Jacob Kirkendall's prosecutors, a plea deal was reached for a man with brain damage who shot an on-duty sworn law enforcement officer in Big Sur in December 2017. Jacob Thomas Kirkendall, 27, of Santa Cruz, pleaded guilty to two counts of assault with a deadly weapon and one count of resisting arrest and received 14 years probation and at least one year of treatment in a secure mental health facility for shooting U.S. law enforcement officer Peter Harris with a shotgun. Kirkendall, whose brain was damaged seven years ago in an electrocution accident, originally faced charges of attempted murder of a peace officer and assault with a deadly weapon, which carried the possibility of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Attorney Ken Rosenfeld of The Rosenfeld Law Firm, who defended Kirkendall, called the deal for his client fair. This was a unique case of a person with severe brain damage," said California criminal defense and mental health attorney Ken Rosenfeld. Kirkendall sustained damage to his brain seven years ago when he was electrocuted attempting to put out a fire with water, unaware of the presence of a live power line lying within the flames. Conducted through the water, the electric current that entered Kirkendalls body burned areas of his brain, leading doctors to keep him in a medically induced coma for more than three months following the accident. Certain areas of Kirkendalls brain were determined to be permanently damaged, including the area responsible for judgment. Its impossible to say what was going through my clients head at the time of the incident, said Rosenfeld. According to the documents from the Monterey County Superior Court Case # 17cr006035, Kirkendall opened fire on Harris with a shotgun in Big Sur on December 11, 2017, and after escaping in his vehicle, later threatened Monterey County deputies with the vehicle, leading them to open fire on him. Unhit, Kirkendall was ultimately arrested by the Monterey County Sheriffs Office. He was having a manic episode and mental breakdown, said Rosenfeld, who frequently handles California mental health law & criminal defense cases for the Rosenfeld firm. It was important to arrive at a plea deal that reflected that. Rosenfeld said that treatment, rather than typical punishments handed down for criminal offenders, is more appropriate for mentally ill clients. Kirkendall will spend at least one year at Alpine Special Treatment Center in San Diego. Ultimately, his release from the secure mental health facility will depend on approval from both Alpines medical staff and Monterey County Superior Court Judge Pamela Butler. If released, Kirkendall will continue treatment in an outpatient mental health program. He will be on formal probation for up to 14 years and eight months and will be permanently barred from driving and from owning a firearm. Rosenfeld, who said he's never before had a client receive a 14-year probation sentence, called the outcome highly appropriate and a relief to Kirkendalls family. They reached out to say how grateful they are to me and my team and just how thrilled and relieved they are with how things turned out, says Rosenfeld. Its very gratifying. Press release writing by WebSiteText Cold Water (NC) Volunteer Fire Dept. I would definitely say that it is and can be used as a retention tool. Ive seen an increase in participation in the last few months due to members feeling (more involved) and being informed of changes and updates within the department. -- Asst. Chief Jason Walker, Cold Water VFD Past News Releases RSS Aladtec Inc. scores five-peat... Aladtec announces a new integration... Aladtec Team Heading to APCO in... Cold Water Volunteer Fire Dept. may be neither the busiest nor largest fire department in the greater Charlotte area, but a new software application puts their members at parity with 10 of their neighboring agencies. Aladtec, a cloud-based scheduling and communications platform, has helped to bring fairness to Cold Water VFDs monthly scheduling process and a new level of transparency to the 34-member force. It has also shaved time off monthly payroll preparation, according to Asst. Chief Jason Walker. "Using this program allows everyone to see who is working via their phones, versus having to come to the station or taking a picture of the calendar," said Walker. Whenever a change is made "it automatically updates for all to see." Cold Water VFD responded to about 400 calls last year in the 19-square-mile region they cover. About 60 percent of those calls were medical-related, where members respond to assist paramedic-level Cabarrus County EMS. Walker, who is also a full-time Captain with neighboring Harrisburg Fire Dept., learned about Aladtec when then Harrisburg Captain -- now Chief -- Tim Wooten, subscribed to the program three years ago to help manage his 66 full- and part-time members. "Part-time members can put in their availability, and then the system allows us to select the people who are available quickly. It also allows us to see how many hours they have already worked in a certain time period to help us avoid unnecessary overtime, Wooten said. I estimate we save about 10 hours per week in scheduling time now. By controlling overtime, Harrisburg saved more money than the annual subscription fee invested in the Aladtec software, and scheduling errors dropped dramatically. They also harnessed Aladtecs forms feature to complete daily truck checks and requisition supplies, using a smartphone or tablet. Previously, forms could only be accessed using a department desktop computer. Assistant Chief Walker likes the fact that Aladtec allows him to post items like board meeting minutes and announcements so Cold Water members can stay up-to-date without having to visit the station. And part-time members now have an equal shot at signing up for available hours. "Before we had a sheet and it was a first-come, first served kind of deal. I felt this system would allow all members to have a chance at all the days of the month," said Walker, noting that members now know sign-ups open on a consistent day each month. "It also has saved time on completing payroll. I have payroll completed in less than 5 minutes." Firefighters at Cold Water range in age from the early 20's to the late '50s, Walker said. Younger members enthusiastically embrace smartphone technology. At a time when some volunteer fire services struggle to keep members and recruit new ones, Walker thinks Aladtec will be valuable. "I would definitely say that it is and can be used as a retention tool. Ive seen an increase in participation in the last few months due to members feeling (more involved) and being informed of changes and updates within the department." Walker says Aladtec "clarifies communication," as opposed to members hearing things word-of-mouth. "That can change from person to person." Nine other fire agencies in the greater Charlotte area also use Aladtec. Members of the Midland Volunteer Fire Dept., about 15 miles southwest of Concord, have been using Aladtec since early 2013. Deputy Chief Jason Cook said members appreciate how easily firefighters can sign up for shifts and request time-off, using their smartphones. They use the e-forms functionality for equipment checks and timecard submissions. Cook's "ah-HA" moment came when he figured out how to use Aladtec to display a two-week version of their schedule on a large monitor in the station house. Huntersville, a rapidly growing suburb on Charlotte's north side, is protected by the 130-member Huntersville Fire Dept. The agency staffs four stations, situated across its 63-square-mile coverage area. They responded to more than 6,500 calls last year. Chief Jim Dotoli studied about 12 different digital scheduling programs and visited Harrisburg to see Aladtec in action before deciding to subscribe in early 2016. Along with scheduling tools, he liked the fact he could use Aladtec for payroll reporting. "I also sign up our 110-member combination department by rank," Dotoli noted in an e-mail exchange last year. "As Chief, I feel a person's rank and seniority means something, and Aladtec allows me to put my officers in first then put my firefighter on the schedule based on the seniority-hire date. "Fire departments all over the world believe in a ranking system, and it's great that the Aladtec program can do this and to go even further, with a hire date if there are multiple members at the same rank," said Dotoli. Cold Water VFD Asst. Chief Walker has been pleasantly surprised by features, the more he uses the application. "Many of these were when I was designing a form for tracking purposes. Mainly too when I realized just what all the system can do, it seems to be endless to a point. "Using this program allows everyone to see who is working by using their phones versus having to come to the station or taking a picture of the calendar. If the calendar has to be updated, then it automatically updates for all to see. (Aladtec) has also helped address the use of paper copies on many items, including truck checks, training forms and repair requests to list a few. As mentioned earlier, it has overall streamlined many of the daily operations that have to take place." Other Charlotte-area departments using the program include Matthews Fire & EMS, Matthews; Flint Hill Fire Dept., Fort Mill, SC; Stallings Fire Dept. Indian Trail; Midland Volunteer Fire Dept., Midland; Georgeville Fire Dept., Concord; Waxhaw Fire Dept., Waxhaw; West Stanly Fire Dept., Locust; and Mount Pleasant Fire Dept., Mount Pleasant. Aladtec has 92 customers across all of North Carolina, including 52 fire departments. For more information, visit http://www.aladtec.com Madison, WI Agency Shine United Were excited for this next phase of growth. Shine United is pleased to announce three new leadership promotions: Joe Fisher to Director of Operations, and Nick Newlin and Emily Bohochik to the position of Group Account Director. Founded in 2001, Shine United is a 45-person full-service advertising, design, and digital agency based in Madison, Wisconsin. Shines portfolio of client work includes Harley-Davidson, Wisconsin Cheese, LaCrosse Footwear, UW Health, Quartz and Amazon.com. Much like its founders, Joe came to Shine with a wealth of big agency and big client experience. His deep understanding of the agency business made him a great Account Director and will serve us extremely well in his new role as Director of Operations, said Mike Kriefski, Shine Uniteds President and Executive Creative Director. We have a saying around here, Good is the enemy of great, meaning that doing good work is easy doing great work, well thats the hard part. Which is exactly why Emily and Nick have been promoted to Group Account Director. They understand exactly what it takes to do great work for clients and have been doing it at Shine for years. The role of Director of Operations is a new position at Shine and Joe Fishers previous experience as our Account Director make him uniquely qualified for this new role. He will oversee the day-to-day business of Shine, ensuring the agency is running smoothly and efficiently, making optimizations along the way. He will also oversee Shines full-service media team, which is tasked with developing and executing comprehensive media plans for Shines clients. Shine veterans Nick Newlin, who is celebrating 15-years with Shine, and Emily Bohochik, who has been at Shine for almost nine years, are being promoted to the role of Group Account Director. Together, they will oversee the Shines account service team. Previously, Nick served as Shines Digital Director and Emily was an Account Supervisor. Thanks to Joes leadership, the account service team and Shine as a whole is poised for success in 2019 and beyond, said Emily Bohochik. Were excited for this next phase of growth. About Shine United Shine United is a $41 million advertising, design and interactive agency located in Madison, Wisconsin. The privately held companys client roster includes national consumer brands such as Harley-Davidson, Wisconsin Cheese, GORE-TEX, Amazon.com, UW Health Quartz Health plans, Veridian Homes and LaCrosse Footwear. Shine is an environment where creativity, brilliance and teamwork are allowed to flourish part of the reason we have been included on the best places to work in America by Outside Magazine the past six years. Learn more at ShineUnited.com. Shine On. JA World is the largest Junior Achievement facility in the world, each year more than 21,000 5th grade and 20,000 8th grade students visit the facility I really like how with the upgraded system I can use motion detection alarms to hone in on exactly the video I need to reviewI bet weve cut the time for review easily in half, if not more. Leni Smith, Director of Operations for JASF 3xLOGIC, Inc., a leading provider of integrated, intelligent security solutions, and a three-time Deloitte Technology Fast 500 winner, working alongside Sonitrol of Fort Lauderdale, is pleased to announce the completion of a highly-anticipated security system upgrade for Junior Achievement of South Florida (JASF) at the organizations JA World Huizenga Center at the Lillian S. Wells Pavilion (JA World). JA World is located on the Broward College North Campus in Coconut Creek, Florida. With over 60,000 square feet of learning areas, rentable meetings rooms, and the Huizenga Catering Kitchen, JA World is the largest Junior Achievement facility in the world. Each year, more than 21,000 5th grade and 20,000 8th grade students from Broward and south Palm Beach counties visit the facility. The 5th graders learn basic economic concepts, workplace skills, and personal and business finances in a simulated city built for young students; the 8th graders focus on how their educational choices will impact their future earning potential, managing a budget and learn about high growth industries to help spark their career exploration. Each day, 450 students participate in JA BizTown and JA Finance Park simulations at JA World. Their safety and the safety of our volunteers, staff, and guests is of the utmost concern to us, said Laurie Sallarulo, President & CEO, JASF. Sonitrol of Fort Lauderdale started working with JASF in 2008, in the early design/build phase of the facility, and through its completion in 2009. The initial security system included remotely managed access control, verified audio intrusion detection, and analog cameras. At the time, IP cameras were considered too expensive. Previously, we had 18 analog cameras on the system, explained Leni Smith, Director of Operations for JASF. As time went on, it was clear that we needed to bring more areas inside and outside the building under surveillance, we wanted to access more cutting-edge IP camera technology, and we wanted to have all our surveillance under one Video Management System (VMS). Working in tandem, Sonitrol of Fort Lauderdale and 3xLOGIC designed a system upgrade that, through a combination of discounts and donations, JASF could afford. It also helped that John Ray, President of Sonitrol Fort Lauderdale, is a long-time, active JASF Board member. In order to fit JASFs budget, Sonitrol of Fort Lauderdale installed a 3xLOGIC hybrid NVR, enabling JASF to protect their analog camera investment, while adding in higher-resolution IP cameras for expanded coverage. The hybrid solution also creates a migration path, allowing JASF to continue improving visibility with new IP cameras over time as their budget allows. As part of ongoing security and safety improvements, our staff participates in an annual active shooter training, explained Monica McNerney, VP Operations, and during those trainings, two things became clear. We needed to cover more areas with surveillance, and we needed to partner more closely with local law enforcement to give them real-time access to our system in case of an emergency. JASF has a number of discrete areas under surveillance, and manages viewing them through use of the 3xLOGIC VIGIL server software. These include the reception area, two loading dock areas, other exterior doors, their large meeting rooms, and the student areas, known as JA BizTown and JA Finance Park, where 450 young people spend most of their time each day at JA World. The receptionist controls public access to the building by viewing who is requesting entry, and buzzing that person in. The receptionist also monitors the loading dock area and notifies the appropriate staff member when a delivery has arrived. Leni Smith, who manages day-to-day security matters, reviews video after an incident is reported to her. I really like how with the upgraded system I can use motion detection alarms to hone in on exactly the video I need to reviewI bet weve cut the time for review easily in half, if not more. I also really value how I can draw a box in a camera view and zoom into that area easily and quickly to find out exactly what happened. Monica McNerney expanded on how the upgraded system is positively impacting another aspect of the JASF security program. We work very closely with our community partners like Broward College security and local law enforcement to help them understand and access our facility and security system. We also routinely ask for their expert feedback on whether were managing our security effectively. So far, theyve told us were doing exactly what we need to be doing, and theyre excited about the expanded access they have to our camera views, although we hope that no event ever warrants that need. Jennifer Thomas, Vice President of Operations for Sonitrol of Fort Lauderdale, also discussed continued improvements that are planned for JA World. We are actively designing phase II of the camera upgrade, which will include improved coverage and image clarity for camera views outside the front doors. We are also ready to deploy our latest technology for the main lobby areaTotalGuard. TotalGuard is a great solution for emergency situations, it allows JASF personnel to alert the Sonitrol central station and transmit real-time audio and video to the monitoring center, for prioritized verified police response. Sallarulo had a final thought on how things have been going with the system upgrade, As for Sonitrol of Fort Lauderdale, they always provide us an amazing response. As a nonprofit, we could not do what we do without the help of partners like Sonitrol. We are very grateful for their support and service. About Sonitrol of Fort Lauderdale Sonitrol has been the leader in Verified Electronic Security for over 50 years. As the only company utilizing audio intrusion detection systems, we are able to provide real time information to authorities, decreasing false alarms, and maximizing apprehensions. Video monitoring, access control, and fire detection systems can also be integrated for the most complete security. Visit our website at http://www.SonitrolFortLauderdale.com for more information and to hear and see actual Audio and Video Intrusion detections. About 3xLOGIC 3xLOGIC Inc. has been a leading innovator in server and cloud-based security technology for 15+ years. The company is recognized for providing easy-to-use surveillance and business intelligence solutions that seamlessly integrate video, access control, and disparate data such as ATM, Point-of-Sale, analytics, and more. 3xLOGICs video surveillance solutions are engineered for ease of installation, scalability and affordability combined with a managed services portfolio that enables integrators to effectively evolve from dealers to high-value strategic partners. Follow 3xLOGIC on Facebook, Linked-in, or our Twitter account, and read our latest news at http://www.3xlogic.com. About Junior Achievement of South Florida Junior Achievement of South Florida (JA) inspires and prepares youth to succeed in a global economy. JA provides real-world training in financial literacy including budgeting, spending, investing and the use of credit; offers cutting-edge skill-building opportunities that enable young people to explore meaningful, productive careers; teaches students how to start businesses; and introduces entrepreneurial values that strengthen workplaces. Last year, with the help of over 7,100 trained corporate and community volunteers, JA delivered over 20 various programs to almost 50,000 students in classrooms throughout Broward and south Palm Beach counties and at JA World Huizenga Center at the Lillian S. Wells Pavilion, a first-class facility housing JA BizTown and JA Finance Park. For more information about Junior Achievement of South Florida, visit http://www.JASouthFlorida.org. For 3xLOGIC Media Queries: Bruce J. Doneff Public Relations 843.476.3022 doneff@verizon.net ### Steven Drexel, Cornerstone Staffing Solutions President and CEO The report was puzzling because the headline weak job growth was incongruent with signs of strength in the improving unemployment rate and accelerating wage growth. In retrospect, the moving average for job growth is more defining and suggests that the labor market remains strong. Steven Drexel, Cornerstone Staffing Solutions president and CEO, shares his February 2019 labor market observations following the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) press releases on March 8 describing The Employment Situation. The report was alarming and puzzling at the same time as employment growth fell to a paltry 20,000 positions but the unemployment rate remained low and even improved by two tenths to 3.8%. Average hourly earnings also accelerated to an impressive 3.4 percent year-over-year increase. As an economist and seasoned staffing industry professional, Drexel is regularly asked to participate in monthly surveys and discussions that predict key elements of labor market activity. Drexel says Februarys dramatically slower jobs growth was alarming because it was foreshadowed by some weaker economic results and suggests an overall negative outlook. The report was puzzling because the headline weak job growth was incongruent with signs of strength in the improving unemployment rate and accelerating wage growth. Job growth, while weak during February was exceptionally strong during January so, it is likely that a moving average is more defining and suggests that the labor market remains strong. Drexel points out that the separate, smaller and more volatile BLS Household Survey indicated that job growth was a robust 255,000 positions during February. Even further, the ADP National Employment report published last week indicated that payroll grew by 183,000 positions. ADP utilizes employment change information pulled anonymously from about 400,000 customers providing a credible alternative estimate of jobs growth. Finally, Initial Claims for Unemployment, a timely indicator of labor force dynamics, remained generally supportive during February suggesting that job growth is still healthy. On balance, while it is likely that job growth slowed somewhat during February, it is very unlikely the growth abated to the degree indicated by March 8s Employment Situation report. So, dont panic yet!, he comments. Drexel feels its not a coincidence that January was so strong, and February was so weak. Weather was a factor given that December through mid-January were mild while late January through February was fierce (think Polar Vortex), particularly during the survey weeks. This was evident in the state level initial claims data and the observation that the weather-sensitive Construction sector took the biggest employment hit during February. The other suspicious event was the partial Federal government shutdown which occurred during January. Intuitively, one might have thought that the shutdown would suppress employment, but it appears that some of the 300,000 idled government workers and additional private contractors found second jobs during the shutdown which inflated January and conversely deflated February. The industry sector data was interesting in that the share of the 258 detailed industries that improved during February was 57.2 percent, down from 60.7 percent during January. Given that job growth almost vanished, the observation that most of the detailed industries maintained some growth is reassuring, he states. Employment Situation Retrospective In summary, Drexel acknowledges the BLS Employment Situation Report for February was of great interest due to a high level of ongoing economic anxiety and to see if Januarys pace could be sustained. The February results were deflating and contradictory but after analysis, the result indicates that the labor market remains enduringly strong for the time being. The unemployment rate is quite low and reassuringly, relatively stable over the past year. Factors like the average hourly earnings showed some growth, average weekly hours drifted down mildly, labor force/employment participation rates and duration of unemployment statistics indicate that the labor market while solid and persevering, is not overheating and has room to continue growing. All eyes will be on next months report hoping to confirm this somewhat nuisanced analysis. The Outlook for 2019 While the broader economy is not as robust as it was during most of last year, the American consumer is in good shape with a continuing dose of fiscal stimulus (lower tax rates and increased federal spending) which supports sustained growth during 2019. The banking system is also healthy and is lending at an increasing and supportive pace. Drexel explains The current business cycle expansion has persisted into its tenth year (compared to an average expansion of five or six years). U.S. growth will be slower than 2018, but on balance, indications suggest that the expansion should continue through 2019. More About Cornerstone Staffing Cornerstone Staffing Solutions is among the largest staffing firms in America and received ClearlyRateds (formerly Inavero) Best of Staffing Client Award every consecutive year since 2016. Since 2003, Cornerstone has grown from a neighborhood staffing provider to a national firm that employs thousands of people at hundreds of companies from coast to coast. The Cornerstone family of companies also includes Dallas, Texas-based RightStone (http://www.rightstone.com), and Chicago, Illinois-based Arlington Resources, Inc. (http://www.arlingtonresources.com) and Casey Accounting & Finance Resources (https://caseyresources.com/). Providing candidate searching and job placement for administrative, industrial, technical, sales and transportation positions, Cornerstone truly is where talent and jobs meet. Visit Cornerstone at: http://www.cornerstone-staffing.com. STRmix the sophisticated forensic software used to resolve mixed DNA profiles previously thought to be too complex to interpret has won The Prime Ministers Science Prize, New Zealands top science award. Developed in New Zealand by two scientists at the New Zealand Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR), John Buckleton and Jo-Anne Bright, in conjunction with Duncan Taylor from Forensic Science South Australia, STRmix is now the most widely used DNA interpretation software in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and North America. Since its introduction in 2012, STRmix has been used to interpret DNA evidence in more than 100,000 cases worldwide. This includes numerous court cases and 28 successful admissibility hearings in the U.S. STRmix is currently being used by 43 federal, state, and local agencies in the U.S., including the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). It is in various stages of installation, validation, and training in more than 60 other U.S. labs. The Prize is for a transformative scientific discovery or achievement which has had a significant economic, health, social, and/or environmental impact on New Zealand or internationally in the last five years. The award will go toward supporting the ongoing work of the STRmix team, a group of 16 researchers, scientists, and software developers at ESR, many of whom also have a background in forensic science. Dr. Buckleton notes that before STRmix, complex mixtures of DNA any mixture of two or more persons were unusable. You could tell the evidence was there, but there was no manner to express that in court in a sustainable way, he explains. What STRmix does is draw an evidential inference from a more complex mixture, whereas previously there were just not the methods to draw any inference from such evidence, Dr. Buckleton continues. Using standard, well-established statistical methods to build up a picture of the DNA genotypes, STRmix can take a person of interest, compare him with a profile of a crime scene, and produce an inference whether that person is included or excluded. Describing the Prime Ministers Science Prize as a great honor, Dr. Buckleton concludes, We are told weve taken usable DNA evidence in the U.S. courts from 40 percent to 70 percent, so were not just exonerating more false donors and convicting more true donors. Were advancing the cause of justice in the U.S. and more broadly. ESR Chief Executive Dr. Keith McLea agrees, adding, The award shows were already at the cutting edge of DNA research. STRmix reinforces that ESR and New Zealand are right out in front of the world in forensic science. I see a very bright future for STRmix. STRmix introduced the latest version of the software, STRmix v2.6, in August 2018. The new version features a user interface that has been completely redeveloped and refreshed, providing users with vastly improved usability and workflow. Version 2.6 also enables a range of contributors to be entered when performing a deconvolution, and any type of stutter to be added and configured. For more information about STRmix visit http://www.strmix.com. How secure is blockchain technology, really? Rob Pope, CTO & Co-Founder of mobile app development company, Dogtown Media, aims to find out with his South by Southwest (SXSW) 2019 presentation, Crypto Crime: How to Steal Cryptocurrency. In recent years, blockchain has become synonymous with cybersecurity. Yet, each day brings news of another crypto exchange hack. And the consequences can be severein the first half of 2018 alone, according to CNBC, $1.1 billion in crypto assets were stolen from exchanges. Since the start of 2017, MIT Technology Review reported that hackers have made off with almost $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency. In Popes SXSW session, he will examine why this false sense of security exists with blockchain technology. Hell also show attendees why cryptocurrency is not as secure as the general public believes with a live hacking demonstration of how hackers are able to steal cryptocurrency. Pope will also cover processes and protocols which can be used to properly protect crypto assets. Founded in 1987, SXSW is a conference and festival that celebrates the interactive, film, and music industries. The convention is held in Austin, Texas each year and is considered the worlds largest gathering of creative professionals. This years event will be held from March 8-17. Rob Pope is a software engineer, cybersecurity expert, and four-time entrepreneur who has helmed the launch of over 200 digital products. He has over 20 years of experience as an ethical hacker, with clients including Barclays, HSBC, and the London Metropolitan Police Department. After an extensive tenure in cybersecurity, he got a little bored of breaking into things, [so] he decided to make them instead. He co-founded Dogtown Media in 2011 with the companys CEO, Marc Fischer. Headquartered in Venice Beach, California, Dogtown Media is a mobile technology firm that leverages disruptive design strategies and dynamic development to deliver industry-leading apps. To date, the company has created over 200 mobile apps in industries including FinTech, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and Healthcare app development. Rob Popes SXSW 2019 session will be held on March 15 at 5 PM in Hilton Austin Downtowns Salon K. Miguel Attias, MD The premier event for discussions of innovative treatments, alternative methods and state-of-the-art advancements in pain relief. Beginning on July 26th, expert physicians from a wide array of pain management and neuroscience fields will gather for the event to discuss innovative treatments, alternative methods and state-of-the-art technologies in relation to pain relief topics. Dr. Miguel Attias of Tampa Pain Relief Centers will be present as a speaking panelist on July 27th, in a discussion titled "My Most Difficult Case." The conference is a powerful opportunity for pain management experts to exchange ideas, expand awareness and gain additional knowledge about advances in pain relief. This years event will focus primarily on spine and nerve pain, with sponsor exhibits, courses, speakers and panel discussion. Topics discussed during the conference will fall under the following categories: Recent Innovations Establishing Protocols Neuromodulation: The Spine Neuromodulation: The Body Complicated Cases in Interventional Pain Practice Intrathecal Drug Delivery Fact or Fiction Debates Conflicting Evidence Breaking Research Florida Pain Relief Centers is proud to be represented one of our top pain management physicians, who will return from the conference with even more innovative tools to further benefit area patients who are living with chronic pain. In support of improving patient care, this activity has been planned and implemented by Dannemiller and ASPN PAIN, 2019. Dannemiller is jointly accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Edu-cation (ACCME), the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), and the American Nurses Cre-dentialing Center (ANCC), to provide continuing education for the healthcare team. Event details: Dates: Jul 26 - 28, 2019 Location: Loews Miami Beach, Florida Presented by: The American Society of Pain and Neurosciences (ASPN) and WVSIPP ABOUT FLORIDA PAIN RELIEF CENTERS: At Florida Pain Relief Centers, our board-certified, fellowship-trained physicians serve hundreds of patients daily while remaining committed to personalized care. Our physicians take a multidisciplinary approach to advanced pain management, addressing each patient's unique condition in order to customize an effective treatment plan that's right for them. FPRC believes that open communication between our specialists and referring physicians is key to becoming pain management partners and providing quality care for the patient. Our goal is for physicians to refer with confidence, knowing that our pain management specialists are dedicated to relieving your patients pain and restoring their quality of life. For more information, contact Florida Pain Relief Centers at (800) 215-0029 or visit http://www.YourPainReliefCenters.com. Terry Larkin, a US Navy veteran, volunteer fireman, and trucker who suffered a severed spinal cord when his rig hit black ice in 1992, has completed his book Huntin Trips #3-#7: a collection of fast-paced sequels to Deputy Wapitis earlier adventures. Join Deputy Wapiti on his action-packed quests in these five short stories: #3. Wapiti Rides Alone; #4 The Carpenter Brothers; #5 The Rustlers; #6 The Timmy Martin Gang; #7 The Big Escape Published by New York City-based Page Publishing, Terry Larkins book is a collection of five riveting short tales evoking the danger and romance of the American Old West. Readers who wish to experience this spellbinding work can purchaseHuntin Trips #3-#7 at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble. For additional information or media inquiries, contact Page Publishing at 866-315-2708. About Page Publishing: Page Publishing is a traditional New York-based, full-service publishing house that handles all the intricacies involved in publishing its authors books, including distribution in the worlds largest retail outlets and royalty generation. Page Publishing knows that authors need to be free to create - not overwhelmed with logistics like eBook conversion, establishing wholesale accounts, insurance, shipping, taxes, and the like. Its roster of accomplished authors and publishing professionals allows writers to leave behind these complex and time-consuming issues to focus on their passion: writing and creating. Learn more at http://www.pagepublishing.com. Wes Guckert, President & CEO, The Traffic Group Guckert will focus on what Americas cities must do to prepare for the new mobility, including electric vehicles and driverless cars and trucks. Wes Guckert, PTP, President & CEO of The Traffic Group, Inc. (TTG) one of the nations leading traffic engineering and transportation planning firms is again serving as an Instructor at Harvard University. Guckert will teach a class discussing the impact of self-driving cars on real estate as part of Harvards Advance Management Development Program (AMDP). AMDP is Harvards flagship Executive Education program for real estate leaders, CEOs, city planners, government officials, architects, and others practitioners in the built environment. About half the students are international. This year there is a class of 40 developers, CEOs, and finance experts. This is the third consecutive year in which Guckert has served as an Instructor at Harvard. This years presentation, which is scheduled for Wednesday, March 13, will focus on what Americas cities must do to prepare for the new mobility, including electric vehicles and driverless cars and trucks. With more than 40 years of industry experience, Guckert is a recognized and highly respected authority in the fields of traffic engineering and transportation planning. He has played a major role in nearly 8,000 urban and suburban area projects throughout the United States and internationally, providing expertise in transit planning, traffic impact analysis, traffic signal design, and traffic circulation. In addition to his work at Harvard, Guckert is a member of Texas A&M Transportation Technology Advisory Council, which advises Texas A&M Engineering on automated transportation research; RELLIS Campus Development for transportation technology research and testing; and the Texas A&M Campus Transportation Technology Initiative deployment. He is also Immediate Past Chair of the Urban Land Institutes (ULI) Public Development Infrastructure Council. A Fellow with the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), Guckert has also presented on the topic of self-driving vehicles at NAIOP, the International Council of Shopping Centers RECon, the Intelligent Transportation Societys ITS America, ITEs Annual Meeting, the National Parking Associations Convention & Expo, and numerous national and international ULI events. About The Traffic Group, Inc. Established in 1985, The Traffic Group, Inc. (TTG) is a Service Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) traffic engineering and transportation planning specialty firm headquartered in Baltimore County, Maryland. Through use of sophisticated technology and the in-house experience of more than 70 industry professionals, TTG offers services that help determine road improvements, signal and sign location, lighting plans, land usage, public facility and capacity issues, and security measures. With over 3,000 pieces of traffic data collection equipment, The Traffic Group has the largest inventory of such equipment in the U.S. and conducts more than 100,000 counts for clients annually. For more information about The Traffic Group, visit the companys website at http://www.trafficgroup.com or follow them on Twitter @TheTrafficGrp. transcosmos will deliver new digital marketing services based on 5As research methodology of Marketing 4.0. transcosmos inc. is pleased to announce that the company formed a business alliance with MarkPlus, Inc. (Headquarters Jakarta, Indonesia; Founder and Chairman: Hermawan Kartajaya), Indonesias premiere and pioneering marketing consulting company. Hermawan Kartajaya, the founder of MarkPlus is a world-renowned marketing specialist, who was named by the United Kingdoms Chartered Institute of Marketing on the list of 50 Gurus Who Have Shaped the Future of Marketing which included Philip Kotler in 2003. MarkPlus has given the exclusive rights to transcosmos to use the 5As research methodology based on Marketing 4.0: Moving from Traditional to Digital by Philip Kotler and two MarkPlus senior executives, Hermawan Kartajaya and Iwan Setiawan. Marketing 4.0 proposes that a customer path in this era of connectivity consist 5As, namely Aware, Appeal, Ask, Act and Advocate. It describes a consumer decision-making process as a group decision making based on various opinions of all individuals and groups that take part in the decision making process; not a process based only on one individuals opinion. Based on this idea, MarkPlus promotes two new attributes to measure brand strength: Purchase Action Ratio (PAR) and Brand Advocacy Ratio (BAR)a set of metrics that evaluate how well brands converts awareness into purchase and advocacy. This concept ultimately repositions the meaning of loyalty from past definition of repeat buying to new definition of advocacy. The co-authors of Marketing 4.0also well-known in Japan for Marketing 3.0: From Products to Customers to the Human Spirithave given the exclusive rights to a number of exclusive alliance members in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. For Japan, the rights were awarded to transcosmos, which will develop and deliver its proprietary loyalty marketing services to clients across extensive industries. transcosmos aims to launch the new services in June 2019. Iwan Setiawan, Deputy CEO of MarkPlus, who is also a co-author of Marketing 4.0, commented, Our proprietary Marketing 4.0 concept and expertise fit well with transcosmos excellent capabilities in the area of digital marketing. I hope Marketing 4.0 methodology can help accelerate the growth of transcosmos partners and clients. transcosmos will develop and deliver new services that combine its outsourcing services including digital marketing with the 5As measurement. Under this new alliance, transcosmos aims to offer the services to a wide range of industries such as the healthcare, pharmaceutical, medical, insurance, distribution, retail and more. transcosmos is a trademark or registered trademark of transcosmos inc. In Japan and other countries. Other company names and product or services names used here are trademarks or registered trademarks of respective companies. About MarkPlus, Inc. Established in 1990, MarkPlus, Inc. is a pioner in the area of marketing consulting and research in Indonesia. The firm serves clients across diverse industries, which includes a number of Japanese companies operating in Indonesia. Led by its Founder and Chairman, Hermawan Kartajaya, the firm constantly develops a number of world-class concepts and methodologies. Some of its well-known publications include Marketing 3.0: From Products to Customers to the Human Spirit (2010) and Marketing 4.0: Moving from Traditional to Digital (2017). Both were first published by John Wiley & Sons in the US and have been translated into 26 and 21 other language editions, respectively. A member of ESOMAR, a global association of market research agencies, MarkPlus is also a partner of Nikkei BP Consulting for Brand Asia research in Indonesia. http://www.markplusinc.com 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 optimization through our 171 locations across 31 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 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. https://www.trans-cosmos.co.jp/english/ Tru Optik, the leading audience intelligence and data-management platform across OTT and CTV, announced today that the Company has appointed Jonathan Bokor to the role of Chief Privacy and Business Affairs Officer, effective immediately. Mr. Bokor has nearly two decades of experience in the Advanced TV ecosystem across linear, digital and over-the-top (OTT) and Connected TV (CTV) targeted advertising. Mr. Bokor will report to Andre Swanston, CEO of Tru Optik. He previously served on the Companys advisory board. Jonathan was an early adopter and advocate of CTV advertising and one of the first agency executives to give Tru Optik an opportunity more than four years ago, said Andre Swanston, CEO of Tru Optik. He has served as a critical advisor to the Company, and now as a member of our executive leadership team will lead our privacy policies, partnerships and solutions to ensure that we are acting in the best interest of the consumers, publishers, ad tech platforms and agencies that are so critical to the success of OTT and Connected TV. In this position, Mr. Bokor will be responsible for Tru Optik's privacy compliance and enterprise business negotiations and will lead Tru Optik's OptOut.TV solution, enabling consumers to manage their participation in targeted OTT advertising campaigns. Tru Optik has become the leader in OTT data management, campaign validation, and measurement, and is one of the only data management platforms (DMPs) that is proactive in consumer privacy through its OptOut.TV solution, said Mr. Bokor. I look forward to joining the company and continuing to help drive its US and international growth while also ensuring that consumer privacy rights are respected and partners are California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) compliant. Mr. Bokor joins Tru Optik from Publicis Media, where he has served as Senior Vice President, Director of Precision Video, providing consultancy expertise to Publicis media agencies across addressable TV, data-driven linear TV, and OTT/CTV. He also held the role of Senior Vice President, Director of Advanced Media at MediaVest. Prior to that, Mr. Bokor was General Manager, iTV Solutions at Canoe Ventures where he led the companys interactive TV business. Mr. Bokor began his career at Debevoise & Plimpton, a New York law firm, and held legal roles at Qwest Communications and NBC Universal. About Tru Optik Tru Optik powers Connected TV / over-the-top (OTT) advertising, enabling brands to target and reach audiences, as well as measure and validate results of their campaigns. The Companys OTT Marketing Cloud and audience measurement and validation solutions are built specifically to leverage the power of OTT, working across hardware and publishers. Credited with leading the way to standardizing the OTT ad sector, Tru Optik is the preferred partner for many of the worlds largest media companies, brands, and agencies. The Company is a founding member of OptOut.TV, ensuring that consumers have options when it comes to Connected TV advertising targeting. Baxter Planning (Baxter), the pioneer and recognized leader in inventory planning and optimization solutions, today announced that two of its employees were selected as esteemed Supply and Demand Chain Executive 2019 Pros to Know. Both individuals work directly with Baxters clients and were recognized for their exceptional service and dedication to both the company and its clients. Baxters 2019 Pros to Know are: John P. Peterson III, CPIM Enterprise Solutions Consultant - 18 year Baxter veteran: As a supply chain professional, John Peterson has driven Baxter Implementation, Consulting, and Planning engagements utilizing his 30 years of hands-on supply chain experience, including 20+ years of Service Parts Management and Planning. John is a systems implementation veteran, having led planning systems integrations, within ERP implementations, for two different fortune 100 companies. Certified in Production Inventory Management (CPIM) by APIC/ASCM, John has served on the Board of the Dallas and Austin, Texas APICS chapters. Scott Magee, Director of Global Account Management - 5 year Baxter veteran: Scott excels at building executive relationships to better understand the customers business, challenges, and supply chain objectives. As an account manager, Scott is passionate about his customers and leverages his 10+ years of supply chain experience to ensure each customer is on a roadmap to meeting their key performance metrics. Scott fosters dynamic and productive relationships and is effective in cross-functional coordination to ensure customer needs are being met and his leadership has resulted in increased adoption of Baxter's supply chain planning technology to drive inventory optimization. Both nominees were recognized for their ability to develop strong relationships with customers across multiple industries and for their ability to propose tailored solutions that address complex service supply chain challenges. These relationships reflect Baxter's tagline: Your Partners In Planning. Using experience and in-depth knowledge of Baxter's software, these Pros to Know can identify opportunities for improvement and provide insights on a customers service supply chain. Every year we receive more submissions from outstanding supply chain leaders. Its evidence of the growth in the supply chain profession as well as the importance of the profession within companies. Supply & Demand Chain Executive congratulates the 2019 Supply & Demand Chain Executive Pros to Know recipients. Our Pros to Know listing showcases the leaders and innovators shaping the profession and making substantial impact on their companies, says John Yuva, editor for Supply & Demand Chain Executive. We commend this years recipients for their achievements in supply chain and for paving the way for the next generation of exceptional supply chain leaders. This years recipients embody the commitment to transformative supply chain tools and processes, earning these individuals a rightful place in this years Pros to Know listing. Supply & Demand Chain Executive received more than 500 entries for the 2019 Pros to Know Awards. Check out Supply & Demand Chain Executives website at http://www.sdcexec.com for the full list of all of the 2019 Pros to Know and Practitioner Pros winners. About Supply & Demand Chain Executive Supply & Demand Chain Executive is the executives user manual for successful supply and demand chain transformation, utilizing hard-hitting analysis, viewpoints and unbiased case studies to steer executives and supply management professionals through the complicated, yet critical, world of supply and demand chain enablement to gain competitive advantage. Learn more at http://www.SDCExec.com. About Baxter Planning Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with employees around the globe, Baxter Planning was founded in 1993 by Greg Baxter, who saw the need for a proprietary solution to address the lack of planning technologies in the market. Now a worldwide leader in aftermarket supply chain software, Baxter helps customers plan billions in service parts inventory every day. The list of Fortune 500 enterprises and growing startups deploying solutions from Baxter include Verizon, RICOH, Stanley Black and Decker, NetApp, SONY, Johnson & Johnson, and many others. Baxters differentiated combination of a SaaS platform featuring Planning as a Service (PaaS) enables supply chain organizations to deliver dramatic improvements in post-sales service levels while increasing profitability and cash flow. Baxter has been on SupplyChainBrains List of 100 Great Supply Chain Partners for 15 consecutive years and recognized multiple times as a Best Places to Work in Austin. For more information, visit http://www.baxterplanning.com or email us at info@baxterplanning.com. This academic program unites theory and practice to prepare graduates to become true agents of change in education, said David Garrick, Dean of the Graduate School of Education. University Child Development School (UCDS), the education hub driven by innovation, is now accepting applications for the new UCDS College for School Culture, Master of Education degree program. With courses beginning in August 2019, the program focuses on creating effective school cultures, professional reflection and innovative practice. Whether new to education or an experienced educator, the Master of Education degree program invites students to focus their educational lens on philosophies that promote inquiry, growing school culture and excitement for learning. Breaking away from the traditional degree program, enrolled students will participate in an immersive experience, learning inside UCDS design-centered school. Graduate students will gain the hands-on skills and knowledge to become leaders in education. This academic program unites theory and practice to prepare graduates to become true agents of change in education, David Garrick, Dean of the Graduate School of Education, explained. UCDS is an innovative hub for current and future educators, and this program advances that mission. For over 25 years, UCDS has promoted innovation and advancement in education through diverse professional development programs and partnerships. The UCDS College for School Culture, Master of Education program is designed to give educators the skills and dispositions to affect school culture in meaningful ways. Graduate students work in classrooms to test ideas and build the intangible assets of great teaching that are often missed in traditional programs including culture, differentiation and innovative curriculum design. For those who want to deepen their practice and passion for teaching, we encourage you to apply, Garrick continued. This program will bring a diverse cohort of educators together into a space where the faculty will facilitate meaningful learning opportunities and celebrate individual learning approaches. UCDS launched the Master of Education program in early 2019. The program is authorized by the Washington Student Achievement Council. The application period is currently open for enrollment for August 2019. The degree is designed as a two-year long experience, with 55 credits required for graduation. Interested in learning more? Attend an upcoming information session on the UCDS campus, March 28th or April 18th. For details and to RSVP, contact csc(at)ucds.org. To learn more about the program, visit ucds.org/csc. This program is not intended to lead to educator certification. Educators are advised to contact their individual school districts as to whether this program may qualify for salary advancement. About UCDS Established in 1911, University Child Development School (UCDS) is the Seattle-based education hub that designs a multi-dimensional culture of learning for children (newborn to 5th grade) and adults through innovative programs, educational partnerships and professional development. UCDS Schools, the UCDS Institute and newly launched Master of Education Program engage diverse perspectives and ignite positive change through an innovative learning model. Learn more about the UCDS network at http://www.ucds.org. There are millions of Americans who, over 75 years, have invested in UNCF and better futures for our students, and through that success, for all of us, said Dr. Michael L. Lomax, president and CEO of UNCF. During an historic nightin more ways than oneUNCF (United Negro College Fund) celebrated its 75th anniversary at its national UNCF A Mind is Gala in Washington, DC, March 7. The event helped the storied organization reach new fundraising heights, raising more than it ever has during a single event$3.4 millionfor UNCFs historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The event, whose title echoes the groups iconic motto, A mind is a terrible thing to waste, celebrated the founding of the organization by Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) president Dr. Frederick Douglass Patterson with backing from corporate leaders led by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Coca Cola President Robert W. Woodruff. There are millions of Americans who, over 75 years, have invested in UNCF and better futures for our students, and through that success, for all of us, said Dr. Michael L. Lomax, president and CEO of UNCF. Tonight, we raise the resources our HBCUs need to do their invaluable work. Tonight, we fund scholarships that narrow the gap between college costs and family resources. And together, we change the narrative of our HBCUs, who help strengthen and elevate a new generation of young, black and gifted students. The impressive evenings success was largely due to the overwhelming support from the gala attendees, including UNCF Presidents Award recipient Robert F. Smith, who announced a challenge match for funds raised on-site, and a special check presentation from UNCFs long-time advocate, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. The 2019 national honorees are notable UNCF donors and supporters from across the country who came together to celebrate this UNCF milestone and further advance the organizations mission to get students to and through college. The UNCF President's Award recipients included Smith, founding director and president of the Fund II Foundation, and The Ray Charles Foundation. Senior executives at Coca Cola, Exxon Mobil, and JPMorgan Chase, companies that have backed UNCF continuously since its founding, were honored with the UNCF Keepers of the Flame Award. And Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Chair U.S. Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA) accepted the UNCF Frederick D. Patterson Award on behalf of the CBC for its long and effective support of African American education. Since its founding, UNCF has raised more than $4.8 billion and has helped nearly half a million students earn degrees at UNCF-member HBCUs. Theres another message in UNCFs 75th anniversary celebration, Lomax added. In a country whose population is rapidly trending majority-minority, and at a time when a college education is more importantand more expensivethan ever, UNCFs biggest challenges are ahead. UNCF annually awards more than 10,000 scholarships, Lomax noted, but for every scholarship it awards, it must turn away nine potential leaders for lack of funding. We oweand our country owesthose nine the support they need to go to and through college, Lomax said. As we celebrate our 75th anniversary, we commit to fulfilling that obligation. More than 1,100 people attended the celebration, including UNCFs 37 member institution presidents; the Honorable Muriel E. Bowser, mayor, Washington, DC; Vernon E. Jordan, Esq., civil rights activist and former executive director of UNCF; Adrian Fenty, former mayor of Washington, DC; and Johnathan Holifield, executive director, White House Initiative on HBCUs. Also attending were members of the U.S. House of Representatives, including many from the Congressional Black Caucus. Members attending were: U.S. Rep. David Trone (D-MD) U.S. Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA) (chairwoman, Congressional Black Caucus) U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) (chairman, House Committee on Education and Labor) U.S. Rep. Alma Adams (D-NC) U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-GA) U.S. Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE) U.S. Rep. Anthony Brown (D-MD) U.S. Rep. Val Butler Demings (D-FL) U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-NC) U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D-IL) U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-CT) U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly (D-IL) U.S. Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-MI) U.S. Rep. Al Lawson (D-FL) U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (WI) U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) To view images from this event, visit UNCF.org/75th. Follow UNCF on social media @UNCF #UNCF75 #UNCF. About UNCF UNCF (United Negro College Fund) is the nations largest and most effective minority education organization. To serve youth, the community and the nation, UNCF supports students education and development through scholarships and other programs, strengthens its 37 member colleges and universities, and advocates for the importance of minority education and college readiness. UNCF institutions and other historically black colleges and universities are highly effective, awarding nearly 20 percent of African American baccalaureate degrees. UNCF awards more than $100 million in scholarships annually and administers more than 400 programs, including scholarship, internship and fellowship, mentoring, summer enrichment, and curriculum and faculty development programs. Today, UNCF supports more than 60,000 students at more than 1,100 colleges and universities across the country. Its logo features the UNCF torch of leadership in education and its widely recognized motto, A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Learn more at UNCF.org, or for continuous updates and news, follow UNCF on Twitter at @UNCF. The Stratto Participants asked for a traditional leather bifold with the WaterField Designs quality and style. WaterField Designs announces the Stratto, a slim, full-grain leather bifold wallet with convenient hidden slots for contactless cards so users can conveniently tap-and-go while cards remain safely inside. The Stratto is the third wallet unveiled by WaterField as part of its Wallet Month celebration, the culmination of a two-month crowdsourced design project for which the company harnessed the wisdom of over 2,000 customers to create new wallet designs. Every week in March, WaterField will unveil two additional new wallets, each handcrafted in WaterFields San Francisco sewing studio. Although we use our phones more and more to make financial transactions, we still need a wallet to carry cards like our ID and commuter cards as well as some cash, explained company owner Gary Waterfield. We tapped into our customers experiences and creativity to develop new wallets that address their pain points. A good number of our participants asked for a traditional leather bifold with the WaterField Designs quality and style. Bringing end-users into the creation process this way leads customers to feel a sense of ownership over the designs they then carry every day. The new Stratto Wallet is a classic leather bifold handmade from sumptuous full-grain leather. The slim wallet is ultra-soft to the touch and conveys a traditional elegance. The Stratto holds about eight to ten cards in two interior pockets and a stash of unfolded bills. Behind the cash compartment lie two hidden slots designed for users contactless cards. With work ID, metro or other such cards in place, users can use the Stratto to tap-and-go while leaving these cards securely inside. The classic bifold is available with or without RFID blocking and fits comfortably into a front-pants or jacket pocket. Last week, WaterField introduced two minimalist wallets to commence the companys March Wallet Month: the Minemo, a beautiful bare-bones cash and credit card carrier available in three leather and three Italian waxed canvas (vegan) colors, and, for use as a secondary wallet or as an everyday wallet for ultra-minimalists, the Clyff Wallet, a cash and card pouch with a simple, clean design and an ultra-compact footprint. WaterFields forthcoming new wallet pairs each center around a different theme week #1: wallets for minimalists, this week: wallets for classic carriers, week #3: wallets for specialized items and uses, and week #4: fresh upgrades to existing WaterField wallet favorites. Although customer suggestions have always inspired new WaterField products, the company initially formalized its unique community-sourced design process with the development of its https://www.sfbags.com/collections/cases-for-nintendo-switch Nintendo Switch case collection and has since engaged customers in the development of the Air Porter Carry-on, the iPhone Camera Bag, the Pro Executive Backpack, and a series of Gear Cases. Availability & Pricing The Stratto Price: Leather$79; with RFID +$10. One size: 4 x 3.125 x .5 in; 1.5 oz Colors and materials: Oil-tanned. premium full-grain leather in Black, Brown, and Blue. The Minemo. Leather$59; with RFID +$10. Italian Waxed Canvas$49; with RFID +$10. 4 x 2.6 x 0.375 in; .8 oz. Oil-tanned full-grain leather in Black, Dark Brown, Blue; Italian Waxed Canvas in Stone Red, Heritage Blue, Forest Brown. The Clyff. Price: $39; 4 x 2.5 x 0.25 in; .8 oz; Oil-tanned full-grain premium leather in Black, Dark Brown, and Blue. Pre-order now. Shipping March 22, 2019. WaterField Designs is an innovative San Francisco designer and manufacturer of bags and cases for tech-savvy consumers who want to transport their technology stylishly and responsibly. WaterField manufactures custom-fitted, high-quality cases and bags for a full-range of laptop computers, smartphones, tablets, gaming devices, and other digital gear. All products are manufactured to exacting standards entirely in San Francisco. More information at "Our Story. We liked Admiral's platform, results, team and VRM vision so much that we decided to be more than a reference customer, but also a long-term strategic investor and partner. - Jimmy Goodmon, President and Chief Operating Officer, Capitol Broadcasting Less than three years after Admiral (GetAdmiral.com) launched at the IAB Ad Blocking and User Experience Summit in NYC, Admiral has announced at this weeks 2019 AdMonsters Publisher Forum in Miami, an industry-leading installed base of 15,000 publishers worldwide and over $5.1M raised, including participation by Admiral customer and strategic investor Capitol Broadcasting Company, Mosley Ventures, New World, Gulfshore Capital, Birchmere Ventures, and others. Since its inception, Admiral has experienced rapid growth, helping more digital publishers worldwide size and solve adblock losses than anyone else. Through its Measure, Engage and Recover modules, Admiral helps publishers detect, engage, and build relationships with their adblocking visitors to unlock revenue via whitelisting, and consent-based ad experiences. Additional modules such as Transact and Consent allow publishers to optimize Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) by driving alternative revenue via paid subscriptions, personalized ad experiences, ad-free passes, email collection, social follows, sponsored sessions and more. We started with a focus on helping publishers size and solve revenue losses caused by adblockers with absolutely minimal dev lift -- by installing a single tag -- and thats still a core strength of our platform, says Admiral CEO Dan Rua. But weve always believed that adblocking is just one symptom of a broader breakdown in relationships between publishers and their visitors. Grow stronger visitor relationships and you will grow larger and more diversified visitor revenue -- we call that Visitor Relationship Management (VRM). Admirals platform does exactly that for publishers, quickly and more simply than anything on the market today, says Rua. Capitol Boadcasting President and Chief Operating Officer Jimmy Goodmon said I was surprised to see how much just one of our sites (WRAL.com) was losing to adblockers and how we might address this issue. We are now recovering thousands of dollars in what was once ad blocked impressions by installing a single tag. In fact, within weeks of our initial launch we asked Admiral how quickly they could power a paid, ad-free Supporting Membership we'd been kicking around for months -- and they took us live within 24 hours. Solid product, solid execution, solid results and all wrapped in a commitment to customer love that starts at the top. We liked Admiral's platform, results, team and VRM vision so much that we decided to be more than a reference customer, but also a long-term strategic investor and partner. Were honored to add Capitol Broadcasting alongside the venture capital funds invested in Admiral and incredibly proud of what weve accomplished so far for publishers, but were still just scratching the surface, said Rua. Every visit to a digital publisher that doesnt somehow grow that 1st-party relationship is a missed opportunity. Relationships drive revenue, and publishers that embrace that reality will survive and thrive for decades to come. ABOUT ADMIRAL Admiral is the industrys leading Visitor Relationship Management and adblock recovery platform, serving 15,000 sites worldwide. Our products empower publishers to engage users, grow visitor relationships, recover revenue lost due to adblocking, and diversify revenue with paid ad-free subscriptions and more. The Admiral platform includes the free Measure adblock analytics module, and a suite of engagement, compliance, subscription, and revenue growth tools including Engage, Recover, Transact, and GDPR/CCPA Consent modules. Interested publishers and partners are encouraged to learn more at GetAdmiral.com or chat with CEO Dan Rua this week at the 2019 AdMonsters Publisher Forum in Miami. If you are new to iQ you can schedule a demo and learn more about this opportunity. PSFK iQ - Where Innovators Turn for Research. Our professional-grade research platform is designed specifically for Retail and CX leaders who want to know whats next. Whether youre staying current on trends or need a real-time research partner to help you get ahead, count on PSFK iQ to deliver the info you need to make your next move. Governments around the nation are working to design the best vaccine policies that keep both their employees and their residents safe. Although the latest data shows a variety of polarizing perspectives, there are clear emerging best practices that leading governments are following to put trust first: creating policies that are flexible and provide a range of options, and being in tune with the needs and sentiments of their employees so that they are able to be dynamic and accommodate the rapidly changing situation. Independently published authors have seen tremendous growth in the last decade, and the trend is increasingly advantageous in the Christian market. Often shortened to indie publishing, this category is defined as authors who act as their own publisher, excluding vanity or custom published authors who pay others to produce books for them. Early challenges of indie publishing, such as acceptance and visibility, were even greater for Christian authors, according to Sarah Bolme, director of the Christian Indie Publishing Association (CIPA), which recently changed its name from the Christian Small Publishers Association to better accommodate the growing number of indie authors. The Christian market didnt [initially] embrace indies like the general market did, Bolme told PW. Stores knew that books from certain publishers were theologically sound, but retailers werent sure about indie books. Amid the shrinking Christian retail space of today, however, readers who shop online are more willing to try indie authors. This, coupled with the ease of publishing platforms such as CreateSpace and fewer openings on traditional publisher lists, has led to a growing number of Christian authors acting as their own publisher. Shannon Popkin and Kate Motaung are new to the indie market with Influence: Building a Platform That Elevates Jesus (Not Me), which released in January through CreateSpace and is available in print or Kindle e-book. Both authors were previously traditionally published. The primary positive we saw was the faster turnaround, said Popkin. We saw a need for [the book] and knew we needed to get to readers. Traditional publishing just takes so long. The pair paid $250 for a cover designer, and combined with an interior designer, the total cost of creating the book was less than $500. As of early March, they had made over $800 on Amazon alone, they said. Our target audience [of Christian writers and speakers] is quite narrow, and we knew where we wanted to promote this book, said Motaung, who spoke of guest blogs, podcasts, attending writers conferences, and connecting with online writing communities. We dont need a marketing person to do that for us. Heather Day Gilbert first went the indie route in 2013, and her most recent novel, Guilt by Association, was shortlisted for a Christy Award in 2018. On average, the cost to publish each of her eight books was around $300, according to Gilbert. She does all the marketing herself. My biggest struggle is marketing all the time instead of writing. But we indie authors know what worksBookBub feature ads, first-in-series permanently free, putting out new booksand what is a waste of time, Gilbert said. James Scott Bell, author of books on writing such as The Last Fifty Pages (Feb.) as well as novels under his Compendium Press, has used feature deals on BookBub to sell 30,000-40,000 units in a day. He has published 25 books with traditional publishers, and has self published 20 more. He bought back rights on most of his traditional titles and has since republished them himself. I started testing the indie waters in 2011 and was pleased with the results, Bell said. When it came time to decide between another traditional contract and going indie, I took the leap for three main reasons: I wanted to control my content, keep my rights, and receive 70 percent royalty. Bell said that while indie publishing remains his career path, its also a path toward traditional publishing. If being traditionally published is the authors goal, a good indie track record can help. Of course, the flip side is also true. A run of mediocre sales and/or bad customer reviews will hinder. Dave Lewis, executive v-p of sales and marketing at Baker Publishing Group, points to several indie authors who have made it onto BPGs Revell lists in recent years, including Lisa and Matt Jacobson (100 Words of Affirmation Your Husband/Wife Needs to Hear, Oct.), Lisa Bevere (Adamant, 2018), and Paul Stutzman (Hiking Through, 2012), which has sold over 120,000 in all formats for Revell, after the author sold 20,000 copies of his indie book. The idea of indie publishing has nearly always been a significant part of Christian publishing, said Lewis, citing Christian TV and radio personalities, pastors, and bloggers who indie publish. We can help them reach an even wider readership and take the burden of printing, shipping, marketing, and finance from their shoulders. Bringing such authors to traditional publishing requires excellence in the editorial, titling, cover, trade and consumer marketing, and promotion and sales processes, Lewis said. We [are] collaborative throughout, allowing for author input at every step. As the advantages mount for indie authors, Bolme of CIPA predicts that more and more authors will opt in. The growth will go both ways, she said, from authors with traditional publishers choosing to go indie due to a large fan base, more retail profit, and quicker publication, to indie authors with enough sales going with a traditional house. Scholarly research has always been a global affair, which is why, explained a panel of stakeholders at the London Book Fair on Tuesday, Brexit may hit the U.K. scholarly publishing community hardest of all. Brexit will rewrite rules governing partnerships with European colleagues, noted Copyright Clearance Centers Christopher Kenneally, who moderated the discussion. If the nature and even the timing of Brexit remain unclear, one may still confidently predict that Brexit will mean important changes for the U.K.s scholarly publishing industry. The session gathered just hours before the U.K. parliament, for a second time, overwhelmingly rejected Theresa Mays proposed Brexit deal. But the panelists agreed, deal or no deal, Brexit has already had a negative impact on the scholarly research enterprise. I think at the moment the most significant consequence comes purely from the currency exchange, said Outsells Hugh Logue, noting that the prospect of leaving the E.U. has hit the pound hard, something acutely felt by academic researchers, whose funding is fixed. When they are buying equipment or other consumables, those are already 20% more expensive. And that has a knock on effect for scholarly publishers, he said, because when trimming costs, scholarly publications are often the first cut. Its an easier cut to make than making people unemployed," Logue said, "or closing down departments. Logue also addressed the possibility of more acquisitions of scholarly publishers, or potential moves into Europe, to take advantage of the labor pool. He conceded that the weaker pound could mean some bargain-hunting for international publishers seeking to acquire British firms. And, though he said hes heard of some British firms (broadcasters, mostly) already planning to relocate to Europe to take advantage of the labor pool, U.K. publishers are largely staying mum on those kinds of plans as the political process plays out. Meanwhile, Logue said he has also heard anecdotally of British lead scientists being dropped from projects because the likelihood of getting renewed funding is diminished. Further, the issue of immigration looms as one of the biggest challenges of Brexit, he said, adding that around one-in-six researchers in the U.K. comes from outside the country. If I was coming out of Berlin having just finished my post-doc, would I come to London? Other panelists agreed that Brexit was complicating what has always been an international enterprise. I actually think at this stage its a psychological thing, observed Tim Britton, formerly of Springer Nature. Would you move your family here? Would you build a house here? Britton wondered. If I was coming out of Berlin having just finished my post-doc, would I come to London? Absolutely not. Britton said that the psychological effect on researchers, which is impossible to measure could potentially have a far bigger impact than any of the actual policies Brexit may eventually settle on, making it harder for U.K. institutions, including publishers, to recruit and retain the best talent. Offering an E.U. perspective, Petra Labriga from Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), in Germany, agreed. London is still London, she said, suggesting that whatever happens, London will surely retain an international flavor. But, without question, Brexit has impacted how European researchers view opportunities in the U.K., saying the drive to leave the E.U seems illogical to many in Germany. I think everyone is really tired. The Brits are really tired. I think the rest of Europe is very tired, too, she said. We feel its divisive, and thats whats hard to accept. Speaking at the London Book Fair just hours before the U.K. House of Commons voted on Tuesday night on the newest Brexit proposal, writer Ian McEwan described leaving the E.U. as a national tragedy. I would like the Prime Minister to revoke Article 50, a one-line email would do, although we know that's not going to happen. There's a possibility of a second referendum, but an extension is only going to be a couple of months. I think the Tories are going to look for a new leader, and the Labour party is in a state. So I'm feeling quite pessimistic, but I'll be marching on the 23rd for a second referendum. McEwan's comments came hours before Prime Minister Theresa May was heavily defeated in the House of Commons. Commenting after the vote went against her, she raised the prospect of a second referendum. Earlier in the day LBF had seen a session examining the processes that led up to the original decision to leave the E.U. in June 2016, entitled Contested Identities; Writing, Writers and the Brexit Enigma, which featured journalist-turned-novelist James Meek and Caryl Phillips, Author of The Day. If you are old, you actually are from another country, in fact from an empire, said Meek, who said he viewed Brexit partly as an inter-generational issue, and a shadow of a much more profound conflict between immigrants of the past and immigrants of the future, between the old and the young. Somehow, global free markets were going to replace the Empire, and Brexit is the same, the idea that we can swap the E.U. for some magical other place. Meek also blamed much of the groundwork for Brexit on Margaret Thatcher. We are now living in a different country, a country that Margaret Thatcher created. Somehow, global free markets were going to replace the Empire, and Brexit is the same, the idea that we can swap the E.U. for some magical other place. Phillips agreed that the folk memory of the Empire was a significant factor driving Brexit. He pointed out that the British Empire in 1945 ruled 760 million people; by 1991 that figure was 168 million. But there has not been a subsequent fall-off in the British people's sense of that Empire. They still think they have those 760 million. That's what has fed Brexit. But Empire is the ugly word that no one in Parliament will say today. Struggling to find any upside to Brexit, Meek said there is at least the hope" that the U.K. "will break out of the very restricted, white, fortified, post-Imperial space that is the E.U. and deal with the rest of the world on a more equal basis," and that "the shock of the reality of being outside fortress Europe will rid us of our post-Imperial delusions. Phillips was asked if he had a message for the 52% who voted to leave: his message was they should grow up. Would a great pro-Brexit novel ever be written? Someone will write a great Brexit novel, he said, but it won't be me!" TURKEY: Infrastructure manager TCDD announced on March 12 that it had awarded the contract for electrification of 231 km of single track on the Nenek - Sefaatli route to a consortium of domestic companies Ultra Teknoloji and Emeray Insaat Enerji. The contract is valued at TL699m. TCDD received two bids. Indian video streaming platform ZEE5 has unveiled a slate of new original series, set to debut around the world this month. Forming part of the 72 originals promised this year by ZEE5, The Sholay Girl follows the life of Reshma Pathan, the first stunt woman in the Hindi film industry who was the body double for Hema Malini.A Telugu original, Mrs Subbalakshmi concerns a woman who escapes life with a workaholic husband only to land in the middle of a diamond heist. Tollywood actor and TV host Lakshmi Manchu takes the staring role in the comedy.Sec 377, which will premiere on 19 March, follows the lives of five people from the LGBTQ community who join forces and campaign to abolish section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which until last year criminalised homosexuality in India.Also making its debut this month on ZEE5, Sex, Drugs and Theatre is described as a fast-paced Marathi original created by award-winning filmmaker, Sujay Dahake. The series is a coming of age tale about six college students on their journey to self-discovery.With the launch of these originals across multiple languages, were further strengthening our presence across global markets. We have a lineup of 72 originals this year, with definitive, edgy stories, and this will help us further build on the already phenomenal response we are getting across global markets, said Archana Anand, chief business officer, ZEE5 Global The video-on-demand (VOD) and live TV platform will also be showing new episodes of The Final Call (Arjun Rampal), Abhay (Kunal Kemmu) and Parchayee Ghost Stories by Ruskin Bond. ZEE5 Tamil Originals, Kallachirippu (produced by Karthik Subbaraj) and D7 are now also available in Hindi, Telugu, Bangla, Kannada, Marathi and Malayalam. Middle East video streaming platform Starz Play is celebrating 300% year-on-year growth as it passes the one million customer mark. The Dubai-based subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) platform, which launched in 2014, now offers Hollywood and Bollywood films, US series, and Arabic content in 20 countries across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).Its an exciting time for Starz Play - particularly our reaching one million subscribers this year. We look forward to continuing to build on our success as we progress with our expansion plans across MENA into 2019 and beyond, said Maaz Sheikh, CEO and Co-Founder at Starz Play.In an increasingly competitive space, we have managed to differentiate our offering to the benefit of the customer, through working closely with partner telecom providers to offer subscribers a payment method that does not rely only on online subscription, as well as by investing in world-class content that people want to watch and watch again.The SVOD platform has secured US$125 million in funding since inception in 2014. It counts Starz/Lionsgate and SSGA (formerly GE Asset Management) as major backers, each holding a 40% stake. Delta Partners and Founders/Management hold the remaining 20% share in Starz Play.Last year, Starz Play secured a five year partnership with UAE telco Etisalat, along with tie-ups with eXtra STC/Intigral and Mobily in Saudi Arabia.Spreading its geographic reach, the platform also launched in Pakistan in September 2018 through a deal with Cinepax.In 2019, we will continue to focus on the customer, and will seek to increase market share as well our subscriber base, with additional investments enabling further geographical expansion. In terms of the market, conditions are looking favourable for our sector, helping Starz Play go from strength to strength, with ** SVOD revenues in the MENA region predicted to reach US$2.1 billion by 2024 , added Sheikh.Although it faces competition from Netflix and MBC Shahid, Starz Play is currently the SVOD market leader in MENA in terms of online video subscriptions and online video revenues claiming a marketshare of 24% and 31.53% respectively. stated that California Gov. Gavin Newsom was fast-tracking legislation to require charter schools to follow the same transparency guidelines as public schools. He had already signed it in early March. When Barack Obama was first assembling his White House Cabinet in late 2008, one of his top candidates for education secretary was Linda Darling-Hammond, the Stanford University professor leading his education transition team. Her selection would have been a rebuke to the leading school reformers of the time -- charter school supporters who fought the teachers unions to advance policies like merit pay based on students' test scores.Darling-Hammond opposed merit pay , had a union-friendly focus on education funding, and was seen by charter school advocates as a threat to their movement. The pro-charter political action committee Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) worked to prevent Obama from picking her, deploying whatdescribed as a highly coordinated media campaign .In the end, the president-elect chose DFERs preferred candidate -- Arne Duncan, the leader of Chicago's public school system. But a decade later, the Democratic Party is increasingly turning against DFER-style reforms like charter schools and merit pay, and Darling-Hammond is getting another opportunity to directly shape education policy -- in the nations most populous state.California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, nominated Darling-Hammond last month to lead the State Board of Education. Education experts say her tenure will be closely scrutinized in policy circles and could end up influencing school systems across the country.Her fellow board members are expected to vote her in as president this week. The state Senate will then have a year to confirm her appointment, which so far hasnt produced any organized opposition.She's an ingenious choice by Gov. Newsom, largely because Professor Darling-Hammond has strong ties with the labor and the social justice communities, says Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley. This contrasts the Obama era, and even [former Gov.] Jerry Brown's reign, when one wing of Democrats was pitted against the other. Professor Darling-Hammond has the robust capacity to unite educators and activists intent on building equitable schools.Fuller says Newsoms selection suggests hes not warming to charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, unless they have the same regulations as traditional public schools. Indeed, he already signed a new law that will require charter schools to follow the same transparency guidelines as public schools. Like much of the the Democratic Party, Newsom's education approach has shifted to become less favorable toward charters, which he supported when he was mayor of San Francisco.Charters are intended to be innovative and free from bureaucratic red tape, but they divert taxpayer dollars from traditional schools, and many fail to outperform them.Charter school opponents have mixed feelings about Darling-Hammonds appointment.Until recently, I felt sure that Linda understood the damage charters and privatization do to public schools, says Diane Ravitch, a prominent education historian who served as U.S. assistant secretary of education under President George H. W. Bush and is a leading critic of the school choice movement. But she and her team recently published a report on choice accepting charters as part of the tapestry of American schooling. ... Im hoping she will insist on accountability for charters and speak for the 90 percent [of students] in public schools.Carol Burris, executive director of the anti-charter Network for Public Education, believes Darling-Hammond will at least crack down on for-profit charters, even if she leaves the nonprofits alone.We are hoping that the best of Linda Darling-Hammond prevails, she says.During his State of the State address , Newsom described "charter school growth" as one of California's education stressors, along with understaffed schools, overcrowded classrooms, pension pressures [and] the achievement gap. He noted that California ranks toward the bottom in per-pupil funding and said he wants to invest more state dollars in education.Darling-Hammond declineds request for comment but told EdSource that she would largely seek continuity with the policies of former Gov. Jerry Brown and former State Board of Education President Michael Kirst.Brown -- a founder of two charter schools -- vetoed the charter transparency legislation that Newsom is now pushing and was generally hesitant to regulate charters. He did, however, sign a bill last year meant to ban for-profit charters. But school choice critics like Burris question its effectiveness."No matter how well intended, [the new law] will not shut down Californias for-profit schools anytime soon. In some ways, it may make matters worse by obscuring the reality of what many charter schools are ... And whether they are for-profit or nonprofit, there will still be ample opportunity in the charter sector for profiteers to take advantage of the public treasure and trust," Burris wrote in The Washington Post. Under Brown and Kirst's control, the state also changed funding formulas to target low-income and high-needs students, created a new state accountability system, and expanded efforts to address teacher shortages, especially for math, science and special education.Brown and Kirst laid a strong foundation for a new approach to 21st-century learning, Darling-Hammond toldShe hopes to be continuing that very strong trajectory while taking it to the next level.Her nomination comes as education politics in the Democratic party are moving to the left. One of the ideas gaining traction is a moratorium on charters. But Rick Hess, one of the nations most prominent education scholars, who directs education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, doubts Darling-Hammond would adopt that policy. He says she's not the kind of "school-choice-hating, social-issue-crusading firebrand" he might have expected from Newsom.Linda looks positively Blue Dog compared to some of that stuff, Hess says. My sense is she's sympathetic to all of that, but .... I think for political and practical reasons, she would counsel against going nearly [that] far."Still, Hess believes Darling-Hammond's influence will extend outside California as Democrats chart a new course on education policy in 2020 and beyond. Find a great selection of commercial real estate, manufactured homes, timeshares and more for Sale Buy real estate. Find a great selection of commercial real estate, manufactured homes, timeshares and more for Sale in US and Canada. Search Real Estate Beyond Texas Austins Approach After a gunman shot and killed 10 people at Santa Fe High School last year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to make the states public schools safe for students and teachers.We need to do more than just pray for the victims and their families, he said at a news conference following the May 18 shooting. Its time in Texas that we take action to step up and make sure this tragedy is never repeated ever again in the history of the state of Texas.In August, Abbott issued a school safety action plan. And in his State of the State address in January he declared the issue an emergency item for the states biennial legislative session.But Abbott, a Republican, also made it clear that in gun-loving Texas, school safety measures wont include taking guns away from people considered a danger to themselves or others, known as red flag laws.Instead, the debate is over how much state money to invest in metal detectors, alarm systems and surveillance cameras versus school counselors and mental health assessments.So far, physical security measures are garnering the lions share of dollars in legislative spending proposals. But mental health advocates say theyre confident that the state will make the first substantial investment in school mental health services in decades.Thats a big step for a state that recently rated second to last in state mental health spending per capita, said Angela Kimball, policy director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Texas is finally putting its money where its mouth is.Nationwide, the trail of school shootings of the past five years has prompted more states to invest in school mental health initiatives than at any other time in recent history, she said. Mental healths time has come.Last year, two states enacted laws requiring public schools to include mental health education as part of their permanent curriculum. New York mandated mental health training for K-12 students, and Virginia required it for high school students in the ninth and 10th grades.This year, South Carolina and New Jersey are considering similar proposals, and Florida has enacted an initiative to raise awareness of mental illness in public schools.Minnesota and Washington state are considering legislation that would substantially increase publicly funded mental health services for adults and children.Whether they quell school violence, Kimball said, these new investments in child mental health services likely will result in higher graduation rates, lower incarceration rates and reduced spending for health care and social services.More than half of lifetime mental illnesses begin before age 14, according to NAMI, yet the average person waits 10 years after the first symptoms occur before getting treatment.Depression and anxiety are rising among U.S. teens, and whether they suffer from the conditions themselves or not, 7 in 10 say that that the mental disorders are major problems among their peers, according to a February survey by the Pew Research Center. (Both Stateline and the Pew Research Center are supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts.)The rate of adolescents experiencing major depression surged 30 percent from 2005 to 2014, according to a study in Pediatrics, rising to an estimated 2.2 million 12- to 17-year-olds reporting major depression, according to the most recent federal data.Teen suicides also have spiked. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the suicide rate among 15- to 19-year-old boys increased by nearly a third between 2007 and 2015; the suicide rate among girls the same age more than doubled.School shootings are considered both a symptom and a cause of teens deteriorating mental health.More than 221,000 kids experienced gun violence at their schools since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, according to an analysis by the Washington Post. And last year was the deadliest on record.Gunmen killed 56 people in U.S. school shootings in 2018, including eight students and two teachers at Santa Fe High School in Texas. It was the second-deadliest shooting that year behind one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which a gunman killed 17 people in February.Nationwide, more than a hundred others were wounded by gunfire in 2018, including 13 in Santa Fe and 17 in Parkland. The incidents launched a high-profile debate about how far to go with gun control, but they also ignited a new conversation about students emotional needs.Policymakers have been talking more about youth mental health and the effects of school shootings on kids, but its taken a long time to get the kind of traction were starting to see now, said Paul Gionfriddo, president and CEO of Mental Health America, a nonprofit that advocates for better mental health care.In weighing school mental health funding options, Abbott asked lawmakers to consider a program developed at Texas Tech University known as the Telemedicine Wellness Intervention Triage and Referral, or TWITR, project that uses psychological screenings to determine whether students in junior high through high school may be at risk of violence to themselves or others.Once identified, students are removed from school and offered treatment via telemedicine. Since it was developed in 2014, it has been used in a handful of mostly rural school districts and has resulted in dozens of middle- and high-school students receiving treatment.But mental health experts say that removing kids from school when they exhibit potentially violent behavior is not the best approach for the students long-term mental health.Here in Austin, students diagnosed with a mental disorder can receive treatment on school grounds.The Austin Independent School Districts mental health centers, developed eight years ago in collaboration with the city police, have become a model for the rest of the state.The program was created in response to near daily violent incidents at Austins schools that required police to intervene, said Tracy Spinner, health services director for the school district. Within a year after the program was up and running, violent incidents became a rarity, she said.Not all school districts in Texas likely can afford on-campus mental health centers staffed by licensed therapists like the ones in nearly every public school in Austin.High property taxes and home values here in Austin provide higher-than-average school funding, though much of Austins property tax revenue goes to fund the rest of the states school districts under a Texas school-revenue sharing program dubbed the Robin Hood plan.That program, too, is under debate as a top priority item on the governors agenda this legislative session.Regardless of any realignment of school funding, Austin is committed to maintaining its school mental health centers in which not just students, but also their parents and teachers, receive as many therapy sessions as needed to alleviate the symptoms of a wide range of mental disorders.Im hoping, Spinner said, that before lawmakers think about spending $200,000 to equip a school with metal detectors, theyll consider how many therapists that those same dollars would pay for. By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 03/13/2019 ADVERTISEMENT Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade. Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source! , We're sorry, this article is not currently available By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 11/24/2021 ADVERTISEMENT FOLLOW REALITY TV WORLD ON THE ALL-NEW GOOGLE NEWS! Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source! Which couples are still together and which MAFS couples have broken up and divorced? And where are they now? 's first twelve seasons featured 44 different couples getting married at first sight -- so which couples are still together, who has broken up and divorced, and where are they all now?Each season of -- which premiered in the United States seven years ago and is based on a Danish series -- features couples (previously three couples, but four couples on Seasons 8 and 9, and five couples beginning with Season 10) being matched together by relationship experts and agree to marry when they first meet.Complete strangers become husband and wife in a matter of minutes, and the couples' lives are then documented by TV cameras over the course of the next four to eight weeks (eight weeks, in the case of 's most recent seasons).The couples typically enjoy their first night together in a hotel after exchanging vows -- with some couples deciding to consummate their marriage immediately -- and then embark on a honeymoon, move in together, and simply attempt to deal with the struggles of daily life as man and wife.At the end of the extreme marriage experiment, each couple must decide whether they'd like to stay married or get a divorce on "Decision Day."has experienced very mixed results over the years. While a significant number of couples decide to stay together and continue their new marriage at the end of their season, the real world seems to hit them hard after the cameras leave, resulting in the couple splitting up only months later.Do cast members see a different side of their spouses once cameras are gone, or do the romances naturally fizzle over time?Some couples are still together to this day and are extremely happy. Jamie Otis and Doug Hehner from Season 1, for example, have had two children.Several other couples have also had children -- including Ashley Petta and Anthony D'Amico Shawniece Jackson and Jephte Pierre Danielle Bergman and Bobby Dodd Deonna McNeill and Greg Okotie , and Jessica Studer and Austin Hurd However, there are also relationships that ended badly. Jessica Castro from Season 2, for instance, accused Ryan De Nino of alleged death threats, and she went on to file a restraining order and lawsuit against him.Some couples have also never even made it to "Decision Day" and ended their marriage prematurely, including Season 4 couple Heather Seidel and Derek Schwartz as well as Season 6 couple Molly Duff and Jonathan Francetic Are the remaining couples now lovers, friends or enemies?! What about early season couples like Cortney Hendrix and Jason Carrion, Jaclyn Methuen and Ryan Ranellone, Vanessa Nelson and Tres Russell, Sonia Granados and Nick Pendergrast, and Lillian Vilchez and Tom Wilson?And how about more recent season couples like Danielle DeGroot and Cody Knapek Sheila Downs and Nate Duhon Jaclyn Schwartzberg and Ryan Buckley Dave Flaherty and Amber Martorana , and Tristan Thompson and Mia Bally Keith Dewar and Kristine Killingsworth , and AJ Vollmoeller and Stephanie Sersen Click thelink below to see photos of each couple and find out! BEGIN GALLERY >> Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade. By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 03/13/2019 ADVERTISEMENT FOLLOW REALITY TV WORLD ON THE ALL-NEW GOOGLE NEWS! Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source! ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade. 's Season 23 finale featured Colton Underwood reuniting with Cassie Randolph and winning her back, before the couple revealed the current status of their relationship months after filming.finale began where Monday night's episode had left off, with Colton showing up to Cassie's hotel room in Portugal to talk.Colton said he didn't want to end the night of their breakup the way they did and so he was hoping to have another conversation with her.Cassie was a little shocked and confused by Colton's visit, but Colton loved her and was ready to fight for their relationship. After all, Colton eliminated Tayshia Adams and Hannah Godwin for just "the possibility" of being with Cassie."I don't know if she can be in love with me, but I hope she's not at peace with her decision, because I'm not," Colton told the cameras.Colton then confessed to Cassie her choice to leave him was the hardest thing he ever had to watch and that's why he "sacrificed everything" for her.When Cassie asked for clarification on what that meant, Colton revealed he dumped Tayshia and Hannah for "a second chance" with her."[I eliminated] two women that could've given me a good life... and everything I want, but it wasn't with whom I wanted it to be with," Colton told Cassie."I'm not sitting here asking for marriage at the end of this. I'm asking for a second chance to take things day by day and figure it out."Cassie knew the other two women on the show were "further along" and could give Colton what he came on the show for, an engagement -- and she wanted that for him. Cassie explained she wasn't sure of her own feelings for Colton and he deserved a woman who was sure."I don't want you to give up things. I feel that could, in the future, make you resent me too," Cassie noted.But Colton said one sacrifices and compromises when he or she loves somebody, and he felt 100 percent certain and confident in his decision to give everything up for Cassie.Colton therefore assured Cassie they didn't have to follow the show's format and she was putting unnecessary pressure on herself in regards to their future together.Colton then asked Cassie to continue dating him while taking an engagement and marriage off the table. He also asked if she'd consider traveling to Spain with him to meet his family, where they were all waiting to meet Colton's Final 2 bachelorettes."I don't know what I'm ready for, but I feel good right now," Cassie said, before giving Colton a hug and a kiss.Cassie was "overwhelmed" and couldn't believe this was happening. She didn't know what to expect, but she was happy to be able to take things "one step at a time.""I guess I'll figure things out as we go," Cassie said in a confessional.Cassie and Colton then traveled to Mallorca, Spain, so she could meet his family.Colton knew Cassie was still "working through her feelings" for him, but he was okay with taking things moment by moment and day by day in order to potentially have a happy ending with her.Colton told his family before Cassie arrived that Fantasy Suites changed everything for him during the process, and while they were expecting to meet two women this week, they'd only be meeting one.Colton revealed to his loved ones that Cassie broke up with him but he chose her and ended up breaking up with Tayshia and Hannah G. for another shot with her."I'm in love with Cassie," Colton told his family, admitting however that she wasn't in love with him in return.Colton knew Cassie cared about him, and he hoped Cassie meeting his family would give her the clarity she needed. Colton predicted Cassie might be in love with him by the end of the week.Cassie, however, was "freaking out" ahead of the family gathering because she didn't want to let them down, knowing this outcome was probably not what they were expecting.Cassie wanted to tell Colton's family what they wanted to hear, but she wasn't there yet. She didn't want to disappoint or upset them, knowing her lack of love for the Bachelor was "a heavy thing."Colton's father didn't want to see his son "fall head over heels in love" with a girl who didn't reciprocate his feelings.When Cassie met Colton's loved ones, she confessed the journey had been really hard and she just wasn't sure if she'd be ready for an engagement by the end of this. Cassie was open and honest about her confusion, which was exactly what Colton asked her to do.Colton felt like his connection with Cassie was "a forever love," but his mother Donna could tell Cassie doubted their bond and chemistry. Donna was scared Cassie might leave Colton again and "set [him] up for another heartbreak."Donna hoped for "an equal partnership" for Colton, but he said he had hope Cassie would grow to match his feelings. Colton couldn't move on since Cassie was the first thing he thought about every morning and the last thing he thought about before going to bed.Meanwhile, Cassie told Colton's father she wanted Colton to be with someone who's "insanely in love with him" and she needed time to figure out if things were going to work between them.Cassie said if she didn't fall in love with Colton by the end of the week, they simply weren't meant to be given there would be no other woman standing in their way.Cassie also explained to Donna the pressure of format got to her but Colton's dedication made her want to pursue things further.Cassie acknowledged Colton was always a step ahead of her and they weren't on the same page, but she had hope she'd get to the point of being "all in."Colton thought Cassie had a kind and pure soul, but Colton's father asked his son if he just wanted what he couldn't have. Colton denied that was the case, saying he just loves hard and fast and he was totally sold on Cassie.Colton's dad started to cry because he didn't want to see his son get hurt again, but Colton was ready to risk a broken heart rather than risk losing Cassie. He just needed to figure out what was next and where they could go from here."I gave Cassie my heart; she is holding it. And it's up to her what she does with it," Colton told the cameras.The next day, Colton and Cassie explored Mallorca, Spain together with no distractions. Cassie was "so nervous" just because she and Colton had been through so much."I do love him, but Colton has been a step ahead of me. I feel like today I need to figure things out once and for all," Cassie noted.The couple enjoyed a picnic by the water -- but first, they had to rappel down a rock cliff in order to get there.Colton and Cassie faced a fear together and then she opened up about how she was more afraid of commitment in general than just a relationship with Colton. Cassie admitted her college boyfriend started to plan a marriage proposal but then he became "controlling."Cassie acknowledged she kind of lost herself in that relationship and people tend to change themselves for the sake of their relationships. Cassie didn't want to feel forced into becoming the person her partner wants or desires.Colton told Cassie that he trusted her and would want her to spend time with her girlfriends if they ended up together.Colton insisted she'd have space to play and grow, but she was still afraid of having a serious romance control her life.That night, Colton expressed how much he cared about Cassie and loved her. It appeared to be a do-over of what was supposed to be their overnight Fantasy Suite date.Cassie felt more like herself that night, and she told Colton that he had taught her a lot about what a good relationship looks like. Cassie was also proud of herself for trying to overcome her fears.Cassie then told Colton that she wanted to be "all in" with him after the show. With that being said, he asked her to join him in the Fantasy Suite, and Cassie gushed about being "excited.""More than ever, I'm ready for tonight. I can tell he loves and cares about me and that he wants me to be happy... It's not every day you feel that kind of love from someone," Cassie said in a confessional, adding that Colton "acted" on his love for her.The pair explored their hotel suite and Colton said he couldn't have been more excited to spend the night with her.Colton reiterated how he was always waiting for the right person to come along to lose his virginity, and he hoped Cassie was that person. Colton then kicked all of the cameras out of his room with a big smile on his face and asked production to remove the couple's microphones.Meanwhile, Cassie was giggling and blushing behind their hotel door as Colton shut the world out from his Fantasy Suite."If it's right for us to take the next step in our relationship and for me to lose my virginity, then it could happen tonight," Colton said in a confessional.So what happened in the Fantasy Suite?!Colton said he felt really good waking up and the night with Cassie was "absolutely incredible.""I feel like a new man. We had an amazing night. We did what was best for our relationship and we grew as a couple. We had a great time last night," Colton told the cameras."What happened last night was great for our relationship. A gentleman never kisses and tells, but I do want you to know that I am very happy and you can use your imagination."Colton told Cassie their night was "unbelievable" and they agreed they didn't get much sleep, but Colton wouldn't reveal whether he had lost his virginity.Colton was excited to see where his relationship with Cassie was going to go, and she said, "Me too."Colton felt he and Cassie were finally "on the same page," and he looked forward to waking up next to her "over and over again." Chris Harrison then welcomed Colton and Cassie live onstage together after footage of their final days in Spain together aired.Harrison asked Colton and Cassie where their relationship currently stands, and Colton said, "We're in love!""We're super in love," Cassie gushed, adding that they've even talked about an engagement.Colton, however, noted he's enjoying dating Cassie for the time being. Colton said they aren't going to rush anything but nothing is holding them back at the same time. They plan to travel together, have fun and just enjoy each other's company.Cassie also revealed she's "so happy" with Colton and he has become her best friend since the show.During one of the couple's secret visits post-filming, Cassie confessed she "absolutely" loved Colton in a sweet video she had put together for him."I love you more than anything and I feel like the luckiest girl in the world," Cassie shared in the video.In the video, Cassie read an excerpt from the journal she had kept during her time on , and she was apparently falling in love sooner than she realized. In fact, Cassie wrote at the time she had found a man who inspired her to stop being selfish.Colton then sweetly offered Cassie his final rose on the live special, saying he looked forward to spending more time with her.Afterward, Harrison gifted Cassie and Colton a seven-night, all-exclusive trip to Thailand, where they enjoyed their first romantic one-on-one date.But Colton was not forthcoming about whether he has lost his virginity to Cassie since they reconciled.Colton said he entered the Fantasy Suite thinking about nothing other than advancing his bond with Cassie and "since there are two of us now in this relationship, it's something we are going to keep to ourselves."Harrison, however, took Colton's response to be a "yes."finale concluded with Harrison officially announcing Hannah Brown from Alabama as ette's upcoming Season 15 star.Interested in more news? Join our The Bachelor Facebook Group Georgia state Rep. Dar'shun Kendrick is floating the idea that if men can legislate women's reproductive rights, women should have a vote on what men do with their bodies.In an email titled "Testicular 'Bill of Rights' Legislation" sent to fellow lawmakers with its level of importance marked "high," Kendrick proposed a bill to "ban vasectomies," classify sex without a condom as "aggravated assault" and require men purchasing Viagra to have their partner's consent.Her email is in response to the Georgia's House of Representatives approval last week of HB 481, which would forbid abortions from being performed once a fetal heartbeat is detected. Abortion rights activists argue that often comes around the six-week point of gestation, before women first realize they're pregnant.If Kendrick's proposal becomes a bill, it would require men to take paternity tests at eight weeks and to begin paying child support to the mother's immediately, because according to conservative lawmakers, the baby is already born at that point.The 36-year-old Democrat's idea would also require a 24-hour cooling period for men wishing to purchase pornography or sex toys in the state of Georgia, much the same way guns are sold.In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Kendrick conceded the bill won't pass anytime soon, partially because Georgia's 2019 legislative agenda has already passed. She also insisted she was "dead serious" about the tit-for-tat proposal.Kendrick says HB 481 is also no laughing matter and fears that it's an early step in the right-wing's agenda to overturn the abortion rights women first won in 1973."(HB 481) is a case to test Roe v. Wade. They're hoping that it gets up to the Court of Appeals," she said. "The Eleventh Circuit is one of the most conservative court circuits that we have, and they're hopeful that they will uphold part of it, and then they'll take it all the way to the Supreme Court."In his two years in office, President Trump has placed two conservative Justices on the Supreme Court, including Brett Kavanaugh, whose position on women's rights remain murky since his October inauguration.The 54-year-old Catholic was accused of several counts of sexual misconduct -- all of which he denied -- during his confirmation process. He also testified during that hearing that Roe v. Wade was an "important precedent of the Supreme Court that has been reaffirmed many times over the past 45 years." Videos Sorry, there are no recent results for popular videos. Every week, we select the best police reports from Athens and the University of Georgia for our website and newspaper. Today, were selecting the best of this year so far. From alien abductions to a nude dude, here are our favorite blotters from January to now. The Moonshine, a four-piece string band, performs at the Caledonia Lounge. The band opened for Rock Bottom String Band and Blood on the Harp for a night of foot-stomping bluegrass music which was enjoyed by a sparse but enthusiastic crowd in Athens, Georgia, on Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2019. (Photo/Erin Schilling, eschilling@randb.com) Athens, GA (30605) Today Considerable cloudiness. Occasional rain showers after midnight. Areas of patchy fog. Low around 45F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 60%.. Tonight Considerable cloudiness. Occasional rain showers after midnight. Areas of patchy fog. Low around 45F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 60%. Charlayne Hunter-Gault speaks at the Holmes-Hunter Lecture in The Chapel in Athens, Georgia on Thursday, February 15, 2018. The Chapel was full with people attending the lecture to hear Hunter-Gault, one of the first African American students to enroll at The University of Georgia, speak. (Photo/Emily Haney, emilyhaney.com) Past Racism Catches Up to Politicians 'I Regret What I Said' Worse Consequences for Public Workers? Last week, Shane Bouchard stepped down as mayor of Lewiston, Maine, after texts were revealed in which he shared racist and sexist jokes. What made this unusual was not that Bouchard was caught using offensive language but rather that he chose to resign.Hardly a day seems to go by without revelations that a public official somewhere has said something racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic. In many cases, they either apologize or bluster their way through the situation. Only some choose to bring their own careers to an end -- even when the calls for them to resign may be loud.Last June, Arizona state Rep. David Stringer, a Republican, turned back calls for him to step down after he referred to immigration as an "existential threat," saying there weren't "enough white kids to go around" in the state's public schools.He won reelection in November. That month, he faced renewed calls for his resignation after he told a group of Arizona State University students that, unlike European immigrants, African-Americans "don't blend in." But Stringer has kept his seat, despite the revelation that he was found guilty on multiple sex charges in 1983.Democratic Del. Mary Ann Lisanti was unanimously censured last month by the Maryland House for using the N-word when referring to a black-majority legislative district. But Lisanti apologized and has resisted calls to resign.In neighboring West Virginia, Republican Del. Eric Porterfield has also refused to resign over controversial comments he made last month. Unlike Lisanti, he did not apologize. After using the homophobic slur "f----t," he later defended himself, saying the LGBTQ community is "a modern-day version of the Ku Klux Klan, without wearing hoods, with their antics of hate and that he was being "persecuted" by the community, which he referred to as a "terrorist group."Attacking their critics like Porterfield did has become a fairly common technique for public figures who are found to have engaged in hate speech. After the liberal site Media Matters for America published audioclips of Fox News host Tucker Carlson making racist and homophobic statements, Carlson responded on his show: We will never bow to the mob.Of course the most prominent cases right now of politicians surviving revelations of racism are in Virginia and deal with behavior long before they were elected officials.Last month, Gov. Ralph Northam and state Attorney General Mark Herring, both Democrats, admitted donning blackface while they were students in the 1980s. The controversy started with a photo on Northam's medical school yearbook page of one person dressed in blackface and another as a member of the KKK.Both faced widespread calls to resign from leaders of their own party, yet both appear firmly ensconced in office at this point. Both apologized, and Northam has pledged to devote the remainder of his term to racial reconciliation.The situation in Virginia prompted reporters around the country to look at other old yearbooks. Soon after the Northam and Herring stories broke, the Virginian-Pilot reported that Tommy Norment, the top Republican in the Virginia Senate, edited a Virginia Military Institute yearbook that included racist language and photos of students in blackface.Norment issued an apology and also remains in office."The use of blackface is abhorrent in our society and I emphatically condemn it, Norment said in a statement. As one of seven working on a 359-page yearbook, I cannot endorse or associate myself with every photo, entry or word on each page.Shortly before the Northam story broke in Virginia, Florida Republican Secretary of State Michael Ertel did resign after photos surfaced showing him in blackface 15 years ago. But Florida GOP state Rep. Anthony Sabatini has refused to step down from office after a photo of him wearing blackface emerged, dismissing it as a silly high school prank.At a moment of seemingly heightened sensitivity, old pranks and posts continue to haunt politicians. During his ultimately successful campaign for a Virginia House seat in a special election last month, Ibraheem Samirah apologized for five-year-old Facebook posts in which he said that sending money to Israel is worse than sending money to the KKK.Not all examples of public figures' hateful speech are relegated to years past.Recent comments made by U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, were perceived by many of her colleagues as anti-Semitic and led to lengthy debate in the House about whether and how to condemn her. In the end, the House approved a broad anti-hate speech resolution.Omar has repeatedly made comments suggesting that the loyalties of American supporters of Israel are suspect. Omar has apologized for giving offense, releasing a statement last month that said, "I thank my Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes."Some of Omars own critics, it turns out, have made anti-Semitic comments themselves. While decrying Omar's comments about Israel during a radio interview on Monday, former Maine GOP Gov. Paul LePage said that the Jewish people in America supply the Democratic Party with most of its funding.LePage is known for making controversial comments. Last month, he criticized the National Popular Vote Compact, which is seeking to abolish the Electoral College, because he said it would mean that white people would have nothing to say. On Monday, Bennett Bressman, who was a junior staffer for Nebraska GOP Gov. Pete Ricketts reelection campaign, apologized for thousands of online posts, many of them anti-Semitic or anti-immigrant. Bressman once suggested it would be a good idea to run down Black Lives Matter protesters.I understand how they look really bad and are really bad on their face, Bressman told the Lincoln Journal-Star . I regret what I said."While many politicians are able to survive media storms triggered by hate speech, either by apologizing or denigrating their opponents, public servants appear to be more likely to pay a price. Firing a government employee can be easier than ousting an elected official who won't step down.Last month, the Portland Police Bureau in Oregon removed Lt. Jeff Niiya from a team that polices protests afterreported on hundreds of friendly texts he exchanged with Joey Gibson , a right-wing provocateur."The texts appear to unnecessarily encourage Joey Gibson, the leader of a group that perpetrates hate speech and violence," Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said in a statement. "Demonstrations that he has led have caused significant disruption and increased fear in our community."This past Sunday, Alex McBabb, an emergency medical technician in Patrick County, Va., was fired in the wake of reports that he compared black patients to gorillas on a podcast and said he took immense satisfaction when he terrorized an African-American boy with a needle. A few months ago, the world was shocked when Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced his experiment led to the birth of the first genome-edited babies. While the details of Hes experiment continue to unravel, the experts tell us not to be worried about the misuse of CRISPR, a powerful gene-editing tool. About 350 Boeing 737 Max 8 are currently in service with airlines around the world, with thousands more on order. Boeing insists it has no reason to pull the popular aircraft from the skies. India on Tuesday grounded Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft in light of the Ethopian Airlines crash, in which 157 people were killed. SpiceJet has around 12 '737 Max 8' planes in its fleet, while Jet Airways has five. "DGCA has taken the decision to ground the Boeing 737-MAX planes immediately. These planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations," the Ministry of Civil Aviation said in a tweet. "As always, passenger safety remains our top priority. We continue to consult closely with regulators around the world, airlines, and aircraft manufacturers to ensure passenger safety," it added. On Sunday, a 737 MAX 8 aircraft operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed near Addis Ababa killing 157 people, including four Indians. This was second such crash involving the 737 MAX 8 aircraft in less than five months. In October last year, an aircraft operated by Lion Air crashed killing over 180 people in Indonesia. The European Union aviation safety agency also said it was closing European airspace to Boeing 737 MAX aircraft The UK on Tuesday became yet another country to ban the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft from its airspace in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash involving the model. The UK's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said passenger airlines using the aircraft will not be allowed to operate in or over UK airspace "as a precautionary measure" until further notice. France and Ireland have taken similar steps. The UK Civil Aviation Authority has been closely monitoring the situation, however, as we do not currently have sufficient information from the flight data recorder we have, as a precautionary measure, issued instructions to stop any commercial passenger flights from any operator arriving, departing or overflying UK airspace, a CAA spokesperson said. "The UK Civil Aviation Authority's safety directive will be in place until further notice, it noted. British travel operator TUI confirmed that all of its 737 Max 8 fleet has been grounded. Norwegian Airlines, which flies planes out of the UK, has also suspended flights of its Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft. The UK joins Singapore, China, Malaysia and Australia, in grounding the jets after all 157 on board such an aircraft with Ethiopian Airlines died in a crash on Sunday. It was the second fatal accident involving the 737 Max 8 model in less than five months - the previous crash involving a Lion Air aircraft in Indonesia in October last year when it crashed into the sea off Indonesia and killed all 189 on board. US officials say the aircraft are still safe to fly. But the largest operator of 737 Max 8s in the US, Southwest Airlines, is offering passengers scheduled to fly on one of the Boeing planes the chance to change their bookings. Boeing said it had been developing a flight control software enhancement for several months since the Lion Air Flight 610 disaster last month. It said the software changes were designed to make "an already safe aircraft even safer". About 350 Boeing 737 Max 8 are currently in service with airlines around the world, with thousands more on order. Boeing insists it has no reason to pull the popular aircraft from the skies. Photograph: Matt Mills McKnight/Reuters The official liquidator said it would be in public interest that these properties are restored to him so that the interest of all creditors, including the applicant banks, can be "safeguarded". The official liquidator appointed by the Karnataka High Court on Wednesday opposed a plea by banks to restore the confiscated properties of fugitive economic offender Vijay Mallya to them. A consortium of banks led by State Bank of India had filed an application before the special court of MS Azmi in Mumbai to liquidate Mallya's assets so that they can recover Rs 6,203.35 crore with annual interest at 11.5 per cent payable since 2013. Earlier, the Enforcement Directorate informed the special court that it has no objection to restoring Mallya's properties to the lenders if they gave an undertaking to return the money recovered by them to the court later. However, opposing banks' plea, the official liquidator said, "at present there are several creditors, including workmen and financial institutions, other than the applicant the bank, who also have legitimate claim on these properties." These properties officially belong to United Breweries Holdings, which Mallya sold to the British liquor giant Diageo. These properties, both movable and immovable, are valued at over Rs 5,000 crore. The official liquidator further said it would be in public interest that these properties are restored to him so that the interest of all creditors, including the applicant banks, can be "safeguarded". "The restoration of these properties to the official liquidator would ensure that the claims of all creditors are accessed and distributed in a fair and transparent manner in accordance with the law under the supervision of the Karnataka HC," he said. The liquidator was appointed to take over UBHL, after a single-judge bench of the Karnataka HC had passed an order to wind up the company in 2017. Meanwhile, the court the adjourned the hearing on a plea to confiscate Mallya's properties to April 8, after a few non-original applicants raised objections that their plea challenging the order of the PMLA court to declare Mallya a fugitive economic offender is pending before the high court. In January, Mallya was declared a fugitive economic offender by a special court in Mumbai, making him the first such individual. Mallya had left the country in early March 2016 and is currently fighting off extradition proceedings in the London high court. Photograph: PTI Photo ED team managed to get several bank statements from Barbados, Dubai, Hong Kong etc. which prove vital overseas link and money trail relating to Nirav Modi and his aides. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has recovered bank token devices of the foreign dummy companies used by the fugitive diamond trader to transfer the fraudulent funds. The probe agency has found that Nehal Modi, brother of Nirav Modi has purportedly destroyed these devices and even secure server located at United Arab Emirates (UAE) soon after the scam broke out. These dummy firms have been receiving the fraudulent letters of undertakings (LoU) of Punjab National Bank (PNB) based out in British Virgin Island and other tax havens. The enforcement agency has so far seized movable and immovable properties to the tune of Rs 2362 crore in the PNB fraud case. Explaining the whole modus operandi, ED in its 122-page supplementary complaint said that Nirav Modi purchased an immovable property in US for $25 million in 2017. This property was purchased in the name of The Ithaca Trust which was settled by his sister Purvi Modi, and the beneficiaries of this trust were the children of Nirav Modi. The funds for purchasing this property was transferred from the fiduciary account of US-based the Commonwealth Trust Company. This fiduciary account in turn received funds from the accounts of Purvi Modi maintained in Bank of Singapore. The said amount gets credited from the accounts of Nirav Modi;s wife Ami Nirav Modi in her HSBC bank account in USA. Most of the funds of Ami Nirav Modi were credited from the account of Purvi Modi maintained in AmiCorp Bank & Trust, Barbados. This AmiCorp account got most of the funds from the accounts of Fine Classic FZE, a Dubai based dummy company of Purvi Modi i.e. from the fraudulent LOUs. obtained illegally from PNB. ED team managed to get several bank statements from Barbados, Dubai, Hong Kong etc. which prove vital overseas link and money trail relating to Nirav Modi and his aides. ED has gathered vital evidence against Nirav Modi which discloses owning another chain of jewellery naming Bailey Bank & Biddle in USA. Diversion of fraudulent LOUs to the tune of at least USD 47 Million to this company has also been formed during investigations. Further, a consultant from Dubai was holding the shares of two BVI companies namely Madison Capital Private limited & Moore Private Investments Limited on behalf of Purvi Modi and Neeshal Modi up to 2012. In the second layer 10 BVI companies were formed by the same consulting firm and in third layer, 8 onshore companies were incorporated in Dubai by the said firm as per instructions of Nirav Modi. These third layer companies were recipient of fraudulent LOUs from Punjab National Bank. "ED investigations tracked the officials of this consulting firm in Dubai and statements of these officials were recorded under PMLA. "Several incriminating documents have been obtained from the Dubai consulting firm showing role of the accused persons in this case," it said in the chargesheet. ED also highlighted that how Modi planned to rotate the Banks LoU funds and reinvest the same into Firestar India by showing it as FDI investment through two companies namely - Alecust Global Holding and Progress Investment at Mauritius and Cyprus respectively. These companies were supposed to' invest' $30 Million and $20 Million respectively. These two companies were supposed to receive funds from Lambasa Global opportunity Fund BV and Universal ventures fund SCC respectively. In turn these entities were supposed to received funds from two BVI companies namely Palmate Investments limited and Pristyn holdings which were owned by Purvi Modi. Photograph via Facebook An industry source said the Act would create high-entry barriers for new service providers and limit customer choice A recent amendment in the Goa Registration of Tourist Trade Act, which has made it compulsory for online travel aggregators and hotels to register their business to continue operations, has raised concern among the sector. The amendment, which has been notified in the official gazette, is expected to negatively affect online travel firms such as MakeMyTrip, Oyo and Airbnb, raising their compliance costs and setting a precedent that other tourism-heavy states may look to emulate. Companies said they were still studying the Act, which was passed on January 31. While we are taking up this bill through industry bodies, we are concerned about some of the onerous provisions around local registration, said a MakeMyTrip spokesperson. An industry source said the Act would create high-entry barriers for new service providers and limit customer choice. E-commerce businesses are having to register in every state under the new GST rules. "The ones that dont need to register because they dont meet the revenue threshold. "If the government is going to force them to register their business under the new Goa Tourism Act, it will lead to a loss of revenue for state while increase operational and compliance costs for small businesses, said the source. In January, a group of small and medium hotels had demanded an amendment in the existing laws to check low and aggressive pricing by online aggregators and also to regulate the conversion of residential property to boutique hotels and bed and breakfasts. We are studying the notification and will be keen to understand the details as they pertain to the bed and breakfast hotels and homestays segments. "We are committed to engaging with the states and all other stakeholders towards resolving any concerns as we move forward in our vision to create a perfect space in every place, said a Oyo spokesperson. The move is also part of the Goa governments larger effort to improve the quality of tourism and bring about discipline among tourists. According to a report by the India Brand Equity Foundation, 3.16 million tourists visited Goa in the first half of 2018 and received visitors from as many as 141 countries in the previous year. Companies like Airbnb, which host homestays, lodging and tourist experiences in a marketplace model, will also be affected by the law. Airbnb allows people to offer a part of their residential property for a short-term stay. The area is largely unregulated but allows for competitive pricing and greater choice for customers across all income groups. Airbnb did not respond to a request for comment. Online travel aggregators are internet based platform and are global service providers that allow customers to visit Goa. "Asking them to register will not only restrict service provision of these platforms but will end up alienating potential tourists. "Moreover any provision for regulating such online platforms/services come under the ambit of information technology regulation, said a senior industry leader, who did not wish to be named. Photograph: Punit Paranjpe/Reuters Approval was held up due to CBI investigation into international flying permit of Tata group-owned AirAsia India. In one of the last decisions taken by the government before the election code of conduct kicked in, it has approved the Tata-Singapore Airlines joint venture Vistara to fly on international routes. The approval will make Vistara the fifth carrier from India to fly on international routes. Vistara has been granted permission to operate on international routes, following suggestions from the Group of Ministers formed to look into the issue. The Ministry of Civil Aviation (MCA) has conveyed the same to Vistara on March 8, a senior official aware of the development told Business Standard. Following the approval, Vistara has sought permission to operate flights between Delhi and Colombo seven days a week. Vistara has sought bilateral rights to Sri Lanka and slots from Delhi Airport for the same. They will operate the flight with Airbus A320 aircraft, said an industry source. Currently, Air India and Sri Lankan Airlines connect Delhi and Colombo via a non-stop flight, while other Indian carriers like IndiGo, SpiceJet, and Jet Airways connect the city from south Indian cities like Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad. The approval comes after much delay. It was delayed due to an ongoing probe into AirAsia India for alleged lobbying and bribing government officials for international flight permits. Both AirAsia India and Vistara are owned by the Tata group. The government had formed an international committee of five Cabinet-ranked ministers headed by Arun Jaitley to decide if an international flying permit should be given to Vistara. This was the first time such a panel had been formed for granting an international flying permit to an airline. Normally, aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation has the final authority to grant a permit for international operations. The delay in approval had affected its business plan, as flying rights to Thailand, where it had initially planned to fly, are on the verge of getting exhausted amid low-cost airlines such as IndiGo and GoAir deploying new flights. The airline has recorded losses in three consecutive years. It has struggled to command higher fare on domestic routes because of competition from low-cost airlines. Its business plan is dependent on creating an identity on international routes, where it can command higher fares. The airlines chief executive officer Leslie Thng while saying the impact had been minimal said that due to the delay in approval, the airline was forced to deploy a plane earmarked for international routes is being used in the domestic market to increase frequency. The full-service carrier recently announced launch of 16 new daily flights, including to two new destinations Raipur and Dibrugarh, as part of its network expansion plans. After reaching the requisite 20 aircraft fleet size, Vistara applied to the MCA for an international permit in June and planned to start flights to Bangkok, Phuket, Colombo, and Male by the winter of 2018. Experts have called the delay a policy logjam. When Indias third full-service carrier launched, it did so with its eye on the opportunities in the international market. "More than three years later, Vistara remains a solely domestic carrier, thanks to Indian regulations, aviation consultancy firm CAPA said. Photograph: Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters 'Though the prime minister has talked somewhat needlessly of pilot projects and the real stuff to come, India cannot be sure of a clean victory in any full-fledged conflict -- even if there is reason to engage in such,' points out T N Ninan. IMAGE: Mirage-2000 jets took part in the Balakote air strike on the morning of February 26, 2019. Photograph: Kind courtesy Indian Air Force Perhaps the biggest positive takeaway from the military action over the last few days is the evidence of India's new diplomatic heft. People old enough to remember earlier conflict situations will recall how no non-aligned country spoke up for India during the wars of the 1960s -- though India had been a co-founder and leader of the non-aligned movement. Even in 1971, it was principally the Soviet Union that stood by India, as it had done more than once by using its veto in the UN Security Council. In comparison, today India enjoys the support of not just the leading western powers but also of middling powers like Australia, friendly engagement with Russia, and most remarkably some helpful intervention by Arab countries. To have the external affairs minister speak as a guest of honour at the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, even as the Pakistan foreign minister feels obliged to boycott it in protest, is something that few would have predicted. The change in the diplomatic situation began with Bill Clinton and Kargil in 1999, and has to be credited to the sustained diplomacy of successive governments and prime ministers, including the present one; India's increasing importance as a market; and changed perceptions about Pakistan as 'an international migraine', to quote a former US secretary of state. Husain Haqqani, the former Pakistan ambassador to the US, had to point out the uncomfortable truth to Islamabad that not one country had spoken out in its favour after India sent in its Mirages. The biggest negative takeaway has to be the news-distorting nationalism of ratings-hungry television news channels, with bellicose anchors screaming war from the safety of their studios while the wives of fallen soldiers pleaded for dialogue and peace--and got trolled for their pains. It is an old dictum that one should not fall prey to one's own propaganda, and it must be hoped that those in charge of national security and international relations have cooler heads than those venting on talk shows. It would be as well to remember the pressure that news television mounted on the Vajpayee government to yield to the Kandahar hijackers, leading to the freeing of (among others) the leader of the Jaish-e-Mohammed. The country is paying for that today. The truth about the military engagement over two days is that it was not a clear victory for India. The Modi government has taken a step forward by putting in place a more aggressive response to cross-border terrorism, and by striking targets in Pakistan, but the country has also lost a fighter plane. Though the prime minister has talked somewhat needlessly of pilot projects and the real stuff to come, India cannot be sure of a clean victory in any full-fledged conflict -- even if there is reason to engage in such. Indeed, the loss of the MiG-21 raises the inevitable question why the air force still has to fly such dated aircraft, putting both planes and pilots at risk. The failure to equip the armed forces with contemporary weapons in sufficient numbers, such as to offer a demonstrable deterrent, points to the hard fact that defence budgets (especially for weapons acquisition) have been squeezed for years together. The finance minister rightly asked why India should not do what the Americans did by taking out Osama bin Laden. The only reason why not, is the difference in capabilities. That is what needs to be addressed. There is one other domestic issue to consider: Is the policy on Jammu and Kashmir working? The figures show escalating violence and killings, while field reports talk of growing alienation in the Kashmir valley. The unusual experiment with a coalition government comprising polar opposites did not last, and the state is under President's rule. Terrorism in the state would not continue if it had no domestic roots. Ignoring this reality is not going to achieve anything. Instead, matters could get worse -- especially if there are more episodes of Kashmiri students and workers being driven out of other parts of the country. The Kashmir problem cannot be ended without winning over the Kashmiri. 'India is a strange place.' 'On the one hand we have the most advanced science working on our origins and our ancestry.' 'On the other we are at war with ourselves over a temple to a god whom our first ancestors knew nothing of,' says Aakar Patel. Vishwa Hindu Parishad supporters gather around a cutout of Lord Ram during the Dharma Sabha at the Ramlila Maidan to press for the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, New Delhi, December 9, 2018. Photograph: PTI Photo I read an interesting book this week, titled Which of us are Aryans? It has a series of essays by experts who analyse recent material from the fields of genetics, linguistics and archaeology to determine our origins. Till the 1920s, Indians did not know about the existence of the Indus Valley Civilisation, which was discovered in places like Harappa (Pakistani Punjab), Mohenjo Daro in Sindh and then elsewhere in India. In fact even the British officers who first examined the remains at Harappa did not fully understand what they were and many of the first-rate bricks that were found there were used to build the railways. This disinterest is also there today. The first time I went to Harappa, at the counter I was immediately issued the ticket that was meant for foreigners (meaning it was more expensive than for locals). I asked the man behind the counter how he knew I was a foreigner. He replied: "Yahan koi Pakistani nahin aate." That has been true of both times that I have visited. The place has been beautiful, but deserted. A village right next to it is populated by Punjabis who would have lived there for generations without any interest in the ancient ruins. Just like Ajanta and Ellora, which were 'discovered' by a British officer in 1819, but which had villagers living next to them without wonderment or curiosity for 2,000 years. The discovery of how old the Indus Valley Civilisation was changed the way people thought about the first Indians. It had been assumed that the beginning of our civilisation came with the Rig Veda, which was written about 3,500 years ago. However, now it has been conclusively proven that the Indus Valley Civilisation was not Vedic, and came before the Rig Veda. A sample recovered in 2015 from a Haryana village named Rakhigarhi which is from a male human who lived 4,500 years ago shows that he had no part of the same gene as the Aryans (which is known as R1A, and is common to people in northern and eastern Europe, Central Asia and South Asia). It has taken this long to determine this because DNA is not preserved well in our hot and wet climate. The Rakhigarhi finding shows that the Harappan culture and the Indus Valley Civilisation were not the source of the Sanskrit language. The Vedic people were pastoralists, moving around with their cattle (the word Aryavarta means the 'turning of the Arya', in a reference to a large herd being moved around). Whereas the Indus Valley Civilisation, including Lothal and Babar Kot in Gujarat, Rakhigarhi and the places today in Pakistan, was urban and built around planned cities, which also had drainage and sanitation. The theory of the Aryan 'invasion' has also been discredited. The Vedic pastoralists, whom we refer to as Aryans, were present in places as far west as Syria. They did not recognise the borders as we do today. They had engagement with the Harappan and Indus Valley people and interbred with them. As the name suggests, the Indus Valley Civilisation was primarily along the plains of the Indus river. The Vedic pastoralists coming from the West moved onwards and populated the Gangetic plains. The Indus Valley Civilisation is still a mystery to us, because their language remains undeciphered and we only have their artefacts to understand them. It is thought that climate change and perhaps a change in the way rivers flowed brought an end to their civilisation rather than a violent overthrow by an invasion. The caste system as we today know and practise is an invention and tradition of the Vedic pastoralists, not the Indus Valley. The genetic findings from Rakhigarhi and elsewhere show that all South Asians -- Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis -- have common ancestry that goes back to the Harappan and Indus Valley period (before the arrival of R1A). We also carry the genetic markers of the first humans who came out of Africa, and many of us also have R1A, particularly north Indians. The gods of our first ancestors who lived along the Sindhu river were different from the gods of those who came and mixed with them. Even the Vedic pastoralists, whom we call Aryans, worshipped different gods than the ones popular in India today. There are not many Indians who pray to Indra or Varuna. Today we worship newer gods from the Puranas (written after the Vedic period), like Ram and Krishna and Ganesh and Lakshmi. The American journalist H L Mencken once observed that no god survives and made a list of all the great ancient gods of Greece and Rome and Egypt, who are today no more. India is a strange place. On the one hand we have the most advanced science working on our origins and our ancestry. On the other we are at war with ourselves over a temple to a god whom our first ancestors knew nothing of. Aakar Patel -- winner of the 2018 Prem Bhatia Award for Political Reporting -- is Executive Director, Amnesty International India. The views expressed here are his own. As it has done in the past, Beijing put a technical hold on the proposal just as the deadline was about to end. IMAGE: Protesters raise slogans against Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar after the Pulwama terror attack. Photograph: PTI Photo China for the fourth time blocked a bid in the United Nations Security Council to designate Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed's chief Masood Azhar as a "global terrorist" by putting a technical hold on the proposal on Wednesday, a move India termed as disappointing. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, the United Kingdom and the United States on February 27, days after a suicide bomber of the Jaish-e-Mohammed killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force soldiers in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama, leading to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan. The Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee members had 10 working days to raise any objections to the proposal. The no-objection period deadline was scheduled to end at 3 pm local time (New York) Wednesday, (12:30 AM IST Thursday). Just before the deadline, China put a "technical hold" on the proposal, a diplomat at the UN said. The diplomat said China asked for "more time to examine" the proposal. The technical hold is valid for up to six months and it can be again extended by up to three months. Reacting to the development, the ministry of external affairs in New Delhi expressed disappointment. "We are disappointed. We will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that terrorists involved in attacks on Indian citizens are brought to justice," the MEA said. "We are grateful to all countries who supported the bid to designate Azhar as global terrorist," it said. India's Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations Syed Akbaruddin said in a tweet: "Big,Small & Many...1 big state holds up, again...1 small signal @UN against terror. Grateful to the many states - big & small - who in unprecedented numbers, joined as co-sponsors of the effort." The proposal was the fourth such bid at the UN in the last 10 years to list Azhar as a global terrorist. The committee makes its decisions by consensus of its members. All eyes were on China, which has in the past blocked India's bids to get Azhar listed as a UN-designated global terrorist thrice. According to the listing rules of the Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee, if no objection is received by the end of the no-objection period, the decision will be deemed adopted. As it has done in the past, Beijing put a technical hold on the proposal just as the deadline was about to end. An inkling of China's stand on the issue came during foreign ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang's press conferences on Monday and Wednesday in Beijing when he was asked about the proposal to list Azhar as a global terrorist by the UNSC. "The UN Security Council and its subsidiary bodies are run on strict rules. We already stressed China's position on the listing of terrorist organisations and individuals in the UN Security Council 1267 Committee on many occasions," Lu said on Monday. "China will continue to adopt responsible attitude and participate in the deliberations in the UNSC 1267 Committee," Lu said on Wednesday. On the issue of listing Azhar, he said, "I want to say that China always adopts a responsible attitude, engage in consultations with various parties and properly deal with this issue." "The discussions, I want to say must follow the rules and procedures of the relevant bodies and only the solution that is acceptable to all sides is conducive for resolving the issue," he said, indicating that Beijing may again block the move to list Azhar as a global terrorist. According to sources, the statement of the case of the latest proposal by France mentioned that JeM had taken responsibility for the Pulwama suicide attack on February 14 in which 40 Central Reserve Police Force personnel were killed. The statement also noted that Azhar is a former leader of the terrorist group Harakat al-Mujahadin and he had given a call to volunteers to join the fight in Afghanistan against Western forces. In 2009, India moved a proposal by itself to designate Azhar. In 2016 again India moved the proposal with the P3 - the United States, the United Kingdom and France in the UN's 1267 Sanctions Committee to ban Azhar, also the mastermind of the attack on the air base in Pathankot in January, 2016. In 2017, the P3 nations moved a similar proposal again. However, on all occasions China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Security Council, blocked India's proposal from being adopted by the Sanctions Committee. An assets freeze under the Sanctions Committee requires that all states freeze without delay the funds and other financial assets or economic resources of designated individuals and entities. The travel ban entails preventing the entry into or transit by all states through their territories by designated individuals. Under the arms embargo, all states are required to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale and transfer from their territories or by their nationals outside their territories to the designated individuals and entities. Hectic diplomatic and political parleys had preceded the closely-watched March 13 deadline as New Delhi reached out to the UNSC member countries. In the wake of the Pulwama terror attack, India launched a major diplomatic offensive against Pakistan, holding briefing for envoys of 25 countries, including those from the five permanent UNSC members -- the US, China, Russia, the UK and France -- to highlight Islamabad's role in using terrorism as an instrument of state policy. The fate of the proposal to designate Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed's chief Masood Azhar as a 'global terrorist' by the United Nations Security Council will be known on Wednesday and all eyes are on China, after it blocked the move thrice since 2009. Hours before the UNSC is to take up the resolution, China on Wednesday hinted that it may once again block the move, saying only 'the solution that is acceptable to all sides' is conducive to resolve the issue. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, the United Kingdom and the United States on February 27, days after the Pulwama terror attack carried out by a suicide bomber belonging to JeM that led to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan. The Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee members have 10 working days to raise any objections to the proposal moved by France, the UK and the US. The no-objection period deadline ends 3 pm local time (New York) Wednesday (12.30 am IST Thursday). The Committee makes its decisions by consensus among its members. China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, and an 'all-weather ally' of Pakistan, has blocked India's proposal from being adopted by the Sanctions Committee in 2009 and 2016. "I could reiterate that China will continue to adopt responsible attitude and participate in the deliberations in the UNSC 1267 Committee," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a media briefing in Beijing. Asked to clarify whether the issue has been listed for discussion for March 13 and China is in talks with all the parties concerned, Lu said, "First I want to clarify that I don't recall saying anything about the deadline about the UNSC committee and other UN subsidiary bodies". On the issue of listing Azhar, he said, "I want to say that China always adopts a responsible attitude, engage in consultations with various parties and properly deal with this issue." "The discussions, I want to say must follow the rules and procedures of the relevant bodies and only the solution that is acceptable to all sides is conducive for resolving the issue," he said. In 2017, Beijing also blocked a move by the US, the UK and France to designate Azhar as a global terrorist by the UN. According to the listing rules of the Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee, if no objection is received by the end of the no-objection period, the decision will be deemed adopted, meaning that Azhar will become a UN-designated global terrorist. A UNSC designation will subject Azhar to an assets freeze, travel ban and an arms embargo. An assets freeze under the Sanctions Committee requires that all states freeze without delay the funds and other financial assets or economic resources of designated individuals and entities. The travel ban entails preventing the entry into or transit by all states through their territories by designated individuals. Under the arms embargo, all states are required to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale and transfer from their territories or by their nationals outside their territories, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, of arms and related materiel of all types, spare parts, and technical advice, assistance, or training related to military activities, to designated individuals and entities. Hectic diplomatic and political parleys have preceded the closely-watched March 13 deadline as New Delhi reached out to member countries of the 15-member UNSC. In the wake of the terror attack in Pulwama, India launched a major diplomatic offensive against Islamabad, holding briefing for envoys of 25 countries, including from the five permanent UNSC members -- the US, China, Russia, the UK and France -- to highlight Pakistan's role in using terrorism as an instrument of state policy. India also handed over to Pakistan a dossier on 'specific details' of involvement of the JeM in the Pulwama terror attack. Days before the March 13 deadline on Azhar's possible listing, Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale met Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in New Delhi said in a statement that Pompeo expressed his 'understanding' of India's concerns on cross-border terrorism. "They agreed that Pakistan needs to take concerted action to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure and to deny safe haven to all terrorist groups in its territory. They also agreed that those who support or abet terrorism in any form should be held accountable," the MEA said. On Wednesday, the US said Azhar meets the criteria to brand him as a 'global terrorist' by the UN and China's opposition to the move to 'update' the designation list went against the interests of Washington and Beijing in achieving regional stability and peace. "The United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal," State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino said in response to a question on previous successful attempts by China to block the UN designation of Azhar. Black lawmakers are blocking a push to legalize recreational marijuana in New York, warning that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomos proposal could perpetuate the racial inequality fostered under current drug laws.The lawmakers say that unless people of color are guaranteed a share of the potentially $3 billion industry, there may be no legalization this year. They want to be assured that some of that money will go toward job training programs, and that minority entrepreneurs will receive licenses to cultivate or sell the marijuana.Ten states and Washington, D.C., have legalized recreational marijuana, and as lawmakers elsewhere consider their own laws, they seem intent on not repeating what they see as other states mistakes.They say one misstep, in particular, stands out: None of the 10 states or Washington ensured that minority communities would share in any economic windfall of legalization missing out on an opportunity to redress years of having a disproportionate number of African-Americans arrested on marijuana charges. The partys research department team, which Rajya Sabha member M V Rajeev Gowda heads, has sifted through the suggestions received in the last five months, and the manifesto is slated to be released later this month, reports Archis Mohan. IMAGE: United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Congress president Rahul Gandhi at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad to attend party's working committee meeting on March 12, 2019. Photograph: Courtesy @INCIndia/Twitter Minimum income guarantee for the poor, urban employment guarantee, agrarian reforms aimed at landless cultivators and ending farm indebtedness, setting up a bad bank for banking reforms, and a statutory calamity fund for states are some big ideas the Congress party has received as part of its over five-month long consultations with stakeholders to draft its manifesto for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The manifesto is slated to be released later this month. The manifesto consultation exercise, termed Jan Awaaz 2019, or Your Voice 2019, began in October under the leadership of manifesto drafting committee chief and senior party leader P Chidambaram. The 22 members of the committee held 174 consultations, including 121 public consultations and 53 with experts since October. The process covered 57 cities and 27 states and Union Territories. Congress president Rahul Gandhi attended the partys outreach to non-resident Indians by holding consultations with them in Dubai in February. The partys research department team, which Rajya Sabha member M V Rajeev Gowda heads, has sifted through the suggestions received in the last five months. For the Congress, it has been one of its largest manifesto drafting exercises. Party leadership said the suggestions were being studied, and only some of them would find place in the final draft of the manifesto. The team conducted consultations and received inputs primarily in Hindi and English, but also a significant number were in Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, and Nepali. The Congress had done similar, but smaller, exercises to draft its manifestos for the assembly polls in Gujarat in 2017, in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan in 2018. Rajasthan Engineers Ekta Association, Andhra Pradesh State Handloom Weavers Cooperative Society and hundreds of organisations of all hues sent in their inputs or met members of the manifesto drafting committee over the last five months. The bigger consultations were held in Aligarh with farmers on October 12 and on economic policy in Mumbai on October 27. Chidambaram chaired the Mumbai meeting. Former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Hooda chaired the meeting in Aligarh. Gowda held a meeting on start-ups in Bengaluru, while party leader Bhalchandra Mungekar held consultations on educational policy with academicians and teachers. Interesting suggestions came up during Congress training cell chief Sachin Raos consultations on unorganised sector and urban issues. Participants suggested an urban employment guarantee law, on the lines of Congress-led United Progressive Alliance governments Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act to provide guaranteed employment to the urban poor. Party leader Jairam Ramesh led consultations on environmental issues where participants suggested the need for green budgeting and preparing green national accounts to underscore the importance of sustainable development. Some of these ideas were part of the 2014 Lok Sabha manifesto of the Congress party. On economic policy, experts suggested instituting a bad bank to resolve the banking crisis and strengthening the institutional autonomy of the Reserve Bank of India. The Congress also received inputs that expressed concern at the dilution of anti-corruption laws in the last five years and the need to strengthen these, particularly the Prevention of Corruption Act. An interesting recommendation to do with judicial reform dealt with putting in place a cadre of young lawyers, who should be paid by the state for a couple of years at the start of their careers, to help the poor get access to justice. On the micro, small & medium enterprises sector, the Congress received feedback that the sector suffered because of demonetisation and hurried implementation of the goods and services tax. Experts suggested that number of people an MSME employs, and not turnover, should be the criteria to define MSME units. After the experience of Kerala floods and the difficulty the state experienced in accessing funds, there were suggestions that the Centre should institute a statutory calamity fund for states. On farm distress, the Congress was urged to commit to two bills moved by farmer organisations that deal with ensuring remunerative prices of their produce to farmers and freedom from indebtedness. Experts pointed out that farm loan waiver and Narendra Modi governments Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme helped only the landholding farmers, many of whom are absentee landlords, but ignored cultivators. The manifesto could look into suggesting ways to ensure better access to institutional credit to tillers. The Congress will contest 20 seats and the Janata Dal-Secular eight in the Lok Sabha polls in Karnataka under a deal finalised by the two ruling coalition partners on Wednesday after weeks of haggling. The deal was hammered out at a meeting between Congress president Rahul Gandhi and JD-S secretary general Danish Ali at Kochi in Kerala this evening, the JD-S said. The Lok Sabha constituencies that JD-S will contest are Uttara Kannada, Chikkamagaluru, Shivamogga, Tumkur, Hassan, Mandya, Bengaluru North and Vijayapura. The JD-S tweeted about the constituencies from where its candidates will be contesting from, on its official twitter handle. '@INCIndia @JanataDal_S seat sharing for Karnataka #LokSabhaPolls2019 is confirmed. 20 for Congress and 8 for JDS,' Karnataka Pradesh Congress President Dinesh Gundu Rao said. The JD-S had won Hassan and Mandya Lok Sabha seats in the 2014 general election. The Congress had bagged nine and BJP 17. However in the bypolls, the BJP had yielded the Bellary seat to Congress. During a recent meeting with Rahul Gandhi at New Delhi, JD-S supremo H D Deve Gowda had scaled down his party's demand and asked the national party to allot at least 10 out of the 28 Lok Sabha seats. The JD-S had earlier demanded that it be given 12 seats to contest, banking on two-third, one-third formula adopted in ministry formation and allocation of posts of heads of state-run boards and corporations. According to party sources, JD-S bagged Tumkur seat after a hard bargain as the grand old party had decided not to cede the constituencies where the party has a sitting MP to the regional partner. The Congress' S P Muddahanumegowda is current MP from Tumkur, and is a ticket aspirant. Mysore-Kodagu was another constituency that JD-S had demanded from the old Mysuru region, but could not bag it due to opposition from Congress Legislature Party leader Siddaramaiah as the seat is in his home turf, the sources said. Sharing of seats from old Mysuru region was an acid test for both the parties as the JD-S considers it as its bastion, and the Congress has its sitting members from most of the seats there. The Congress and JD-S, which fought bitterly against each other during 2018 assembly polls, joined hands to form the government as the election threw up a hung verdict. Among the eight seats that JD-S has got, in Hassan and Mandya the party has its sitting MPs, Tumkur is with the Congress, rest five constituencies are represented by the Bharatiya Janata Party. While the KPCC chief on Wednesday said the party will announce its first list of candidates on March 16, JD-S is too likely to announce its list in a couple of days. The JD-S has already announced Gowda's grandsons Nikhil Kumaraswamy and Prajwal Revanna as candidates from the party bastions of Mandya and Hassan respectively. While Nikhil is son of Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy, Prajwal is son of Gowda's eleder son and PWD Minister H D Revanna. Gowda has also announced former MLA Madhu Bangarappa as JD-S candidate from Shivamogga. Madhu is the son of former Chief Minister S Bangarappa and is likely to be pitted against another former Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa's son and sitting BJP MP B Y Raghavendra. IMAGE: Congress president Rahul Gandhi and DMK president M K Stalin join hands during the formal launch of their campaign in Tamil Nadu from Kanyakumari parliamentary constituency, at Nagercoil, in Kanyakumari district, on Wednesday. Photograph: R Senthil Kumar/PTI Photo Launching a frontal attack on the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance in Tamil Nadu, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday alleged the state government was controlled by the Prime Minister's Office, something that has never happened before. In his first public rally to launch the United Progressive Alliance poll campaign in the southern state, Gandhi said, "Today, the government in Tamil Nadu is controlled by the Prime Minister's Office." By levelling the accusation, the top Congress leader sought to strengthen the narrative being pursued by ally Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam to target the AIADMK and its coalition partner the BJP. He also touched every other issue being vigorously pursued by the DMK including the 'attack on Tamil language and culture', by the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance and the need for a push to the manufacturing sector in the state. The DMK has been alleging that the AIADMK government was being controlled by the BJP government at the Centre. The M K Stalin-led party has also been claiming that the AIADMK was pressured into going in for a tie-up with the BJP. "In the past DMK and AIADMK fought each other, there were big leaders on both sides. However, never was a government in Tamil Nadu controlled from Delhi," Gandhi said, kickstarting his campaign here in Kanyakumari district. Reciprocating DMK chief Stalin's gesture that he will be the prime minister, Rahul Gandhi said Stalin will be the chief minister of Tamil Nadu. "Within a few weeks, Rahul Gandhi will become the prime minister. In your (Gandhi's) hands the country will be safe we believe," the DMK chief said, sharing the stage with Gandhi at a grand UPA poll rally. The DMK believes that the bypolls to 18 assembly seats would usher in a regime change in the state. Bordering Kerala, Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu is the only district where both the Congress and BJP have a significant clout for decades. Gandhi said Prime Minister Narendra Modi felt he could 'capture' any Indian institution and control any state by 'blackmail' and that he can pressure different states from Delhi. The top Congress leader said Modi was absolutely wrong and none can pressure and control the Tamil people. In his first rally after his party inked a poll pact with the DMK, he said Modi had said he wanted to be 'chowkidar and not prime minister'. However, 'after saying that, the chowkidar gave Rs 30,000 crore to Ambani', he alleged. The prime minister's 'entire foundation is built on lies', he said and quoted Tamil saint poet Tiruvalluvar's verse on truth in Tamil, which meant that truth would triumph (apparently referring to the Rafale deal). "Tamil Nadu has always stood for truth.... and the truth will put Narendra Modi in jail," he said. Gandhi said leaders like late DMK patriarch Karunanidhi and former Congress Chief Minister K Kamaraj will continue to live on since they represented the people's heart. While attacking the Congress, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had recently said former Tamil Nadu chief minister Kamaraj always wanted a government in power which has zero tolerance towards corruption. Attacking the PM and the Hindutva ideology, Gandhi said, Modi was not only attacking 'Tamil people', but also every state and every language. "They believe that one idea should be imposed in the country, which cannot be done. We are not going to let Modi or RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) distort your language and culture...not going to allow them to change your history," the Congress chief said. He said the DMK-Congress alliance was not just political but the parties were wedded in the ideological sphere as well which was a meeting of 'hearts and minds'. While Tamil people were for truth, Modi only spoke lies, he alleged and listed the reported claim of the prime minister to 'deposit' Rs 15 lakh in bank accounts, and creation of two crore jobs. He vowed to give a push to the manufacturing sector in Tamil Nadu, if voted to power, and said the state could play a central role in competition with China in manufacturing and generate jobs. A brand 'Made in Tamil Nadu' will be developed, he said. The DMK has alleged that several industries had gone to neighbouring states in the AIADMK rule which was refuted by the government. "Today whenever you look at a cell phone or a shirt it says Made in China. When we have governments in Delhi and Tamil Nadu, behind cellphone, shirt and a pant, we have to write 'Made in Tamil Nadu'," he said. He assured 33 per cent quota for women in Parliament and state assemblies and a job quota to an equal extent. If voted to power, his party would carve out a separate ministry for fishermen welfare, Gandhi said. The NDA government has come up with a separate department for them. Citing the protests led by Tamil Nadu farmers in the past in Delhi, he said his party-led State governments had waived farm loans to assuage their pain. However, the prime minister has 'handed', the entire insurance sector to his friend Anil Ambani and everything was designed to help the richest in the country, Gandhi alleged. On the issue of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, (NEET), he earlier told reporters in Chennai that it was 'discriminatory', against youngsters in the state and that was something 'we will look into and I think it is resolvable'. The DMK had demanded taking Tamil Nadu out of the purview of the NEET to ensure social justice. Recreating scenes witnessed during Prime Minister Modis previous visits to Tamil Nadu when he faced black balloon protests from Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and DMK, Hindu Makkal Katchi staged a demonstration protesting Gandhi's visit near Nagercoil. HMK cadres claimed that it was due to the Congress partys alleged inaction that Tamils in Sri Lanka were killed during the civil war in 2009 in the neighbouring country. Also, the state was not getting its share of water in river water disputes, they alleged. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Wednesday said she conveyed to several countries post Pulwama attack that India will not escalate the situation with Pakistan but if there is any other terror attack from that country, then it will not remain silent. In an address at a think tank on Modi government's foreign policy, she said Pakistan was worried that India would escalate the situation and she was contacted by a number of foreign ministers over it. "I used to receive calls from foreign ministers who used to first condole the Pulwama attack, then express their solidarity and then they used to softly say that we think India will not escalate the situation," she said. "To which I used to reply that no, I assure you India will not escalate the situation but if there is any other terror attack then we will not remain silent as we cannot say Pulwama as our destiny," she said. Tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after Indian fighter jets bombed terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed's biggest training camp near Balakot deep inside Pakistan on February 26. Pakistan retaliated the strike by attempting unsuccessfully to target Indian military installations. However, the Indian Air Force thwarted its plans. Swaraj said India cannot have dialogue with Pakistan unless the neighbouring country acted against terror outfits on its soil, asserting that 'talks and terror cannot go together'. Talking on 'India's World: Modi Government's Foreign Policy', she stated that Pakistan needs to control the Inter-Services Intelligence and its army who are bent on destroying the bilateral relations time and again. "We do not want talk on terror, we want action on it. Terror and talks cannot go together," she said. Swaraj also questioned Pakistan's retaliation to the Indian air strikes in Balakot when, she said, India had specifically targeted the terror outfit JeM. "Why did the Pakistani military attack us on behalf of JeM? You not only keep JeM on your soil, but fund them and when the victim country retaliates, you attack it on the terror outfit's behalf. "If Imran Khan (Pakistan prime minister) is so generous and a statesman, he should give us Masood Azhar," she said. The external affairs minister said India can have a good relationship with Pakistan, provided the neighbouring country 'takes action against terror groups on its soil'. On her invitation to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meeting, she said India avenged the humiliation meted out to it 50 years ago by becoming the 'guest of honour' at the OIC meet this year. "In 1969, India was humiliated when it was not allowed to participate in the meeting even after reaching the venue after Pakistan protested against India's then foreign minister's participation. "But now, 50 years later, it was India that was on the seat of the guest of honour, while Pakistan's seat was empty," she said. Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi had expressed reservations about the invitation to Swaraj for the OIC meeting, and later decided to boycott the meeting of the 57-member Muslim grouping held earlier this month. Talking about the foreign policy of the current government, Swaraj said it was based upon the two principles of 'national interest supreme' and 'world is our family'. "People often ask us what we get by our frequent travel to countries. I want to tell them we do not travel to have fun, we travel to build our relationship with other countries and it is because of our ties with these countries that we were able to rescue 7,000 people from Yemen. "The strength of our bilateral ties was also reflected in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) elections," she said. "I have seen the strength of this relationship time and again," the senior BJP leader said, adding that at the ministerial level, Indian leaders have visited 189 out of 193 countries. Swaraj added that the country's global profile has improved in the last five years. In a poll-related advisory, the cops have been asked not to be seen or perceived as favouring a particular political party or candidate through their social media updates, reports Virendra Singh Rawat. With the model code of conduct coming into force for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Uttar Pradesh police, touted as the worlds largest single command armed police force, has advised cops to exercise restraint over their social media activities. UP Director General of Police O P Singh has underlined the uniformed cops ought not to be seen or perceived as favouring a particular political party or candidate through their social media updates. In the poll-related advisory issued on Wednesday evening, the cops have been asked not to accept any gift from any political party or candidate in light of the model code of conduct. Besides, the policemen have been directed to desist from posting politically coloured social media updates as well for the sake of being impartial and non-partisan during the polls. The state cops have also been advised against indulging in harassment of political functionaries at the behest of rival political party or leader, while ensuring that the policemen do not, through their conduct, express support for a political personality or formation. At the same time, the UP cops have been directed not to discuss topics related to the voting preferences for any political party or leader. Meanwhile, the UP DGP advisory also covered other heads pertaining to discharging their duties before and during the polling process in the state, which accounts for the maximum number of 80 LS seats. In October 2018, DGP Singh had issued a similar 17 point charter for cops seeking to censure such social media activities, which could potentially earn disrepute to UP Police or be deemed indiscipline. At that time, the UP Police, which has a strength of nearly half-million, was facing apparent disenchantment among a section of constabulary over the sacking of constable Prashant Chaudhary, accused of killing Apple executive Vivek Tiwari in Lucknow. The sacked constable had been garnering voices of support over social media with some lower ranked cops even soliciting funds from people for him to fight the court case. Tiwari was allegedly shot by Chaudhary in the early hrs of September 29 in the posh Gomti Nagar locality of Lucknow, when he was on way to drop his female companion. The accused cop claimed he had fired in self-defence after Tiwari allegedly tried to run him over with his SUV. A murder case was filed and Chaudhary was sacked from the service. On Sunday, the Election Commission of India had announced the schedule for polls, which would be held in seven phases between April 11 and May 19 with the counting of votes to be held on May 23. Votes would be cast on April 11, 18, 23 and 29 and May 6, 12 and 19, Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora had told newspersons in New Delhi. Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar meets the criteria to be designated as a global terrorist and not doing so is against regional stability and peace, the United States said on the eve of the United Nations Security Council making a crucial decision in this regard. The JeM, headed by the 50-year-old Azhar, carried out many terror strikes in India and was involved in the attack on Parliament, the Pathankot air force base, army camps in Jammu and Uri, and the latest suicide attack on Central Reserve Police Force in Pulwama which claimed the lives of 40 personnel. In the aftermath of the February 14 attack in Pulwama, three permanent members of the UNSC -- the United States, Britain and France -- have moved a resolution to designate Azhar as a global terrorist. Several previous attempts by these three countries inside the UN Security Council were blocked by China, the all-weather ally of Pakistan. China, which is one of the five veto-powered members of the Security Council, so far has been asserting that there is not enough evidence against Azhar to designate him as a global terrorist. Amidst a mounting global outrage in the wake of the Pulwama attack that led to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan, US, Britain and France hope that Beijing would act wisely and would not oppose their move this time to designate Azhar as a global terrorist. On the eve of the crucial decision by the UN Security Council, the Trump Administration made it clear that there is enough evidence against Azhar to designate him as a global terrorist. "Azhar is the founder and the leader of the JeM, and he meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations," State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino told reporters at his daily news conference. The JeM, he said, has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability and peace. The US and India work closely together on counterterrorism efforts, and that includes at the United Nations, he added, noting that their views on the Jaish-e-Mohammed and its founder are well known. However, he refrained from making a direct comment on the deliberations inside the UN on this issue. "The United Nations Sanctions Committee, their deliberations, are confidential, and as such we don't comment on specific matters, but we'll continue to work with the Sanctions Committee to ensure that the designation list is updated and accurate," Palladino said. "The United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal," Palladino said in response to a question on previous successful attempts by China to block the UN designation of Azhar. Political parties in Kerala were on Wednesday asked by the poll authority to refrain from soliciting votes in the name of Lord Ayyappa, the presiding deity of Sabarimala, in the coming polls. Sabarimala had witnessed frenzied protests over the women's entry issue after the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Democratic Front government had decided to implement the September 28, 2018 Supreme Court verdict, allowing women of all age groups to offer prayers at the hill shrine. The parties must not use the name of Lord Ayyappa for soliciting votes and creating disharmony, Chief Electoral Officer Teeka Ram Meena told an all-party meeting in Thiruvananthapuram. "Sabarimala is a religious place. If somebody is using the name of a temple or a mosque for soliciting votes, it is a clear violation of the model code of conduct," he said. Meena said political parties should be responsible enough to decide to what extent they should use the Sabarimala issue during the campaign in the April 23 Lok Sabha polls. "I cannot ban any action by a particular political party. I cannot ask any political party not to use the name of a particular religious institution. "But if anyone uses any picture, poster, video of any religious institution to solicit votes, it will be considered as an act against the model code of conduct," Meena told mediapersons after the meeting. The ruling Left Democratic Front, Opposition Congress-led United Democratic Front and Bharatiya Janata Party took part in the meeting. A political slugfest ensued after the poll authority allegedly gagged parties from raising the Sabarimala issue in the run up to the elections. The BJP and Congress had opposed the move, while the ruling CPI-M had backed it. Meena said he had asked political parties not to use the pictures, videos or statements which could create disharmony as it was a violation of the model code of conduct. BJP state president P S Sreedharan Pillai,who attended the meeting, said the CEO had said 'the Sabarimala issue must not be used to create hatred or disharmony in society. But we can use the issue related to the stand of the government, police, atheists', Pillai told reporters. He also said political parties can discuss Sabarimala during campaign in the manner the Babri Masjid, Ayodhya, triple talaq issues were being raised. The BJP chief also said his party workers know the 'lakshman rekha' while campaigning about the Sabarimala issue in the state. The CPI-M, however, said the BJP wants to focus on the Sabarimala issue alone as the party lacked any other topic to discuss in the polls. "We are not against any religious institutions. The BJP, which talks about faith, had asked the devotees not to give offerings to devaswom board temples, thus paving the way for their destruction. "Our focus will be highlighting the failures of the Modi government at the centre," CPI-M leader Anathalavattom Anandan said. The UDF, however, said it wanted the people to discuss all the issues faced by society. The UDF leaders said their party would not violate the model code and Sabarimala was one among the various subjects to be discussed in the state ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. The Opposition Congress, which had extended support to Ayyappa devotees at the time of the Sabarimala agitation, came out against Meena's directive, asking how such a grave issue should not be raised during the elections. Meena said on Tuesday that whether it was the Sabarimala temple, a church or mosque, these should not be used to solicit votes as it would be a violation of the model code of conduct. Reacting to the directive, BJP state general secretary K Surendran said on Monday that the state government's stand on the Sabarimala issue would surely be an election issue. Meena had on Monday said that 'inviting religious feelings, using any kind of Supreme Court judgement, invoking or soliciting votes in the name of religion or by inciting religious feelings is a clear violation of the model code'. The CEO also said the Election Commission would not allow any kind of violation that puts a particular political party at an advantage over the other. The BJP has already pinned its hopes on the Sabarimala issue as it believes that it was able to create a momentum among its workers. The party's central leadership brought back former BJP state chief Kummanam Rajashekharan, who was appointed as Mizoram governor nine months ago, to lead the party in Kerala. The Lok Sabha elections will begin on April 11 and continue for over a month till May 19 across seven phases, followed by counting of votes on May 23. Kerala will go to the polls on April 23. The British PM's EU withdrawal deal has been rejected by MPs by an overwhelming 149 votes, with just 17 days to go. IMAGE: British Prime Minister Theresa May was unimpressed as MPs voted against the terms of Britain's so-called divorce from the EU by 391 to 242. Photograph: Reuters British Prime Minister Theresa May on Tuesday suffered yet another massive Parliament defeat over Brexit when MPs overwhelmingly rejected her withdrawal agreement by 149 votes, leaving the March 29 deadline for the deal hanging in the balance. MPs voted in the House of Commons against the terms of Britain's so-called divorce from the European Union by 391 to 242. While this marked a smaller defeat than the 230-vote margin with which they rejected her deal back in January, it was a decisive rejection of government strategy even after May had claimed significant changes to the controversial Irish backstop clause had been achieved. The British PM made a statement to the Commons soon after the bruising result was announced to confirm that Parliament will vote on a new motion on Wednesday to decide if the UK should leave the EU within the March 29 deadline without any deal in place. In an unusual move, she revealed that all Conservative Party MPs will be given a free vote on the issue instead of being made to vote in a particular way by the government. She said: "This is an issue of grave importance for the future of our country. Just like the referendum, there are strongly held and equally legitimate views on both sides." "For that reason, I can confirm that this will be a free vote on this side of the House," she said. There is unlikely to be a majority in favour of a no-deal chaotic Brexit, which would then give way to a third parliamentary motion on Thursday to determine if the Brexit deadline of March 29 needs to be extended, which would then have to be ratified by the EU. May, visibly tired and struggling to speak as a result of a sore throat, admitted that Tuesday's vote confirms that there is no support for "this deal" and how the Brexit process moves forward remains all the more uncertain. Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn called for a general election to allow the British public to decide who should lead them into the next phase of Brexit. The EU's Chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, said in a Twitter statement: "The EU has done everything it can to help get the Withdrawal Agreement over the line. The impasse can only be solved in the UK. Our 'no-deal' preparations are now more important than ever before." IMAGE: British Prime Minister Theresa May has been trying hard to push her Brexit withdrawal agreement, but with little success. Photograph: UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor/Handout/Reuters Earlier on Tuesday, British PM May had made a final push for the UK Parliament to back her Brexit withdrawal agreement in the vote after she claimed to have secured "legally binding" changes to the draft rejected by the Home of Commons earlier this year. She had called on the Commons to get behind her enhanced agreement setting out the UK's exit strategy from the EU or risk going against the will of the majority that voted for Brexit in the June 2016 referendum. "This is the moment and this is the time. Back this motion and get the deal done... We cannot serve our country by overturning a democratic decision of the British people," she said, hours after she had claimed a breakthrough in negotiations with the EU to secure changes to the controversial Irish backstop to make it more acceptable to all sides of Parliament. Corbyn countered that it was the same "bad deal" MPs had rejected in January and that his party would be voting against it again because it risks people's living standards and jobs. The clash came soon after UK Attorney General Geoffrey Cox confirmed that the legal risk from the controversial Irish backstop "remains unchanged", leading to hard-Brexiteers from within May's own Conservative Party refusing to back the so-called "improved" divorce arrangement. In his official advice as the country's chief legal adviser, Cox said the extra assurances won by May do "reduce the risk that the United Kingdom could be indefinitely and involuntarily detained" in the backstop if talks on the two sides' future relationship broke down due to "bad faith" by the EU. However, he reiterated that the "legal risk remains unchanged" that if no such agreement can be reached due to "intractable differences", the UK would have "no internationally lawful means" of leaving the backstop without EU agreement. The Brexit-backing European Research Group within the Tory Party declared soon after that it will not be voting for the withdrawal agreement in the Commons later, in a major blow to May's leadership. In a statement, the ERG said: "In the light of our own legal analysis and others we do not recommend accepting the government's motion today." The Democratic Unionist Party, which provides May's government its majority, also declared they would vote against the deal as the changes did not alleviate their concerns over the backstop. The Irish backstop, an insurance policy designed to maintain an open border on the island of Ireland between UK territory Northern Ireland and EU member-state -- the Republic of Ireland -- has been the biggest sticking point for many MPs in the UK who voted against the withdrawal agreement tabled by Theresa May in January, by a massive margin of 230 votes. The historic bruising for May had led her to seek changes to the agreement in order to table a second "meaningful vote" before Parliament that she hoped would stand a better chance of being voted through. The March-end deadline had kicked in when the UK triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty following a referendum in favour of Brexit by nearly 52 per cent to 48 per cent in June 2016. The Congress president addressing women students at the Stella Maris College said that if his brother-in-law Robert Vadra can be probed for any alleged irregularities so can Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his alleged role in the Rafale jet deal. All photographs: @INCIndia/Twitter Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday promised 33 per cent reservation in government jobs for women and reforms in goods and services tax (GST) if the party-led United Progressive Alliance wins the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. Launching the UPA's campaign in Tamil Nadu during a hectic day-long visit to the southern state, Gandhi also asserted law must not be applied selectively and that if his brother-in-law Robert Vadra can be probed for any alleged irregularities so can Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his alleged role in the Rafale jet deal. Gandhi touched upon a range of issues during his informal interaction with students of Stella Maris College for Women and at a news conference in Chennai and a poll rally in Nagercoil. He listed unemployment and farmers distress as the key issues for the Lok Sabha polls. Congress has tied up with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu where 39 seats are at stake. Observing there were not many women in leadership positions, Gandhi said if his party comes to power it will reserve 33 per cent of all government jobs at the national level for women. "One of the things that we have decided that in 2019 we are going to pass the women's reservation bill in Lok Sabha, Vidhan Sabhas and we are also going to reserve 33 per cent of all government jobs at the national level for women. That is a starting point," he said in a response to a question by a student. Wearing a jeans and T-shirt, Gandhi also said he has 'genuine' affection for Narendra Modi and that is what he tried to show when he hugged the prime minister after watching him become 'very angry' in Parliament. During his interaction, he recalled the day he hugged Modi in the Lok Sabha and said he cannot hate him since love 'is in the country's grain, every religion, and the Tamil people'. WATCH: Call me Rahul, says Congress president to student When a student asked why he chose to hug the prime minister, Gandhi said he watched a 'very angry' Modi in Parliament running down his party, his late father Rajiv Gandhi and mother Sonia. However, deep inside, he said, he felt affection for Modi and he thought the prime minister was angry 'because he is not able to see the beauty of the world'. "So I thought that at least from my side, I should show him some affection." When Gandhi said, "I genuinely feel love for the prime minister," the students broke into laughter and raised their voices, to which he repeated 'I genuinely do (love him)'. Gandhi, who asked the students to challenge him and 'make him uncomfortable', also questioned whether the prime minister could stand in a large audience and answer people's questions. Exuding confidence that a Congress-led Opposition would emerge victorious in the Lok Sabha polls, Gandhi promised initiatives such as reforms in the GST, encompassing its simplest form, and a 'phenomenal and revolutionary idea' of a minimum income guarantee scheme. He also said economic growth is directly related to the mood of the nation and one cannot expect it to happen in a negative and fearful atmosphere. The Congress will change the mood of the country and make people feel happy and empowered, the Congress chief said. Gandhi, who asked students to refer to him as Rahul, said the law must apply to everybody and not be applied selectively. He said this in response to a question on Vadra, who is being probed in connection with a money laundering case related to purchase of assets abroad and a land case in Rajasthan's Bikaner district. During his interaction, he also brought up the issue of the Rafale deal and reiterated his allegations about the pricing of the aircraft and the process. "I will be the first person to say it... Investigate Robert Vadra but also investigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi," he said. Modi is a 'corrupt' man, he bypassed negotiations and ran parallel negotiations on the Rafale deal, Gandhi alleged while responding to the question. The Congress chief said the prime minister should have the guts to face the media and asked why Modi was 'hiding'. The Bharatiya Janata Party and the government have repeatedly rejected the Congress's allegation of corruption in the Rafale fighter jet deal. He also alleged that the BJPs idea is to capture every institution of the country and run them from Nagpur, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh headquarters. At his news conference, Gandhi said he harboured no hatred towards those convicted for the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and asserted that it was for the courts to decide on their release. On Rajiv's assassination in 1991, the Congress chief said it had two aspects. "While one was personal, which we have dealt with, the other was the legal issue, which has to take its course. Whatever course the legal issue takes, we are happy with it," Gandhi said. "We are quite forgiving people. We do not have animosity or hatred towards anybody and it is for the courts to decide (on the convicts' release)." Months ago, the Tamil Nadu government recommended the release of seven convicts in the case to Governor Banwarilal Purohit. The move was fully backed by all state parties. At his public rally, Gandhi launched a frontal attack on the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam-BJP alliance in Tamil Nadu, alleging the AIADMK government was controlled by the Prime Minister's Office, something that has never happened before. "In the past DMK and AIADMK fought each other, there were big leaders on both sides. However, never was a government in Tamil Nadu controlled from Delhi," Gandhi said, kickstarting his campaign in Nagercoil in Kanyakumari district. From handling the party organisation, finalising candidates, shooting the breeze with the media to pow-wows with diplomats and liaising with the PMO -- Arun Jaitley is the BJP's chief backroom manager in this election, reports R Rajagopalan. IMAGE: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley listens in as Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi interacts with visually-impaired children in New Delhi, March 7, 2019. Photograph: PIB/PTI Photo Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi has decided who will be Krishna to his Arjun in the heat and dust of the Lok Sabha election battle that is underway. It is Finance Minister Arun Jaitley who he has chosen as the points-man to coordinate his 2019 poll campaign. After Jaitley's surgery in January, doctors had advised that he avoid travel and also not to exert much, so not for him the heat and dust of electioneering. Hence, the proposal from Modi to serve as the backroom strategist was readily accepted by the 67-year-old Jaitley, who will be positioned at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi during the election. Since Sunday, March 10, when the election dates were announced, Jaitley has been arriving at the BJP hq at 3 pm daily and spends four to five hours, holding meeting with various party office-bearers and senior leaders. In 2013, Jaitley drafted the BJP's Goa national executive resolution to project Modi as its prime ministerial candidate so he is clearly someone who both Modi and BJP national President Amit Anilchandra Shah trust implicitly. He has also been visiting the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh hq in Nagpur once a month to brief RSS leaders of the implementation of various schemes dear to the Sangh. Jaitley is not only the link among the Union Cabinet, RSS and BJP, but also the party's face to the leadership of foreign nations. This is how Jaitley's typical day has been for the last couple of days. In the morning he is at the finance ministry in North Block, concentrating on government work, and his evenings are spent at the party office. For one hour or so every day, Jaitley brainstorms with the party's 35 official spokespersons and guides them on articulating the subject of the day on television news channels. He has also decided to post daily on his blog, so that BJP cadres know the mind of the BJP leadership. Jaitley also devotes an hour a day to meet journalists of various hues, a practice that is mutually beneficial as both sides get feedback from each other. Apart from this, he also meets three or four foreign diplomats daily. With elections looming, many countries are keen to know the political climate in the capital and the eventual outcome of the polls, and what changes in policy are likely going ahead. Jaitley briefs the diplomats as to what can be expected. Given his legal expertise, Jaitley liaises with the Election Commission on organisational and logistic matters. Given the wealth of experience and expertise Jaitley brings to the table -- he entered student politics through the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad in the 1970s, joined Jayaprakash Narayan's agitation and spent time in jail during the Emergency after which he joined the Jana Sangh, and later became a minister of state in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1999 at the age of 47 -- he has also been entrusted with the important task of processing and selection of candidates. This, apart from his organisational responsibilities, media outreach and liaising with the prime minister's office for the 400 mega rallies Modi plans to address in the run-up to the final phase of polling on May 19. And given his closeness to political opponents like Sharad Pawar, Sitaram Yechury and Mamata Banerjee, and frenemy Nitish Kumar, it is very likely that Jaitley's services will be in much demand even after the election results are out on May 23. Gov. Gavin Newsom is suspending the death penalty in California, calling it discriminatory and immoral, and is granting reprieves to the 737 condemned inmates on the nation's largest Death Row."I do not believe that a civilized society can claim to be a leader in the world as long as its government continues to sanction the premeditated and discriminatory execution of its people," Newsom said in a statement accompanying an executive order, to be issued Wednesday, declaring a moratorium on capital punishment in the state. "The death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian."He plans to order an immediate shutdown of the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison, where the last execution was carried out in 2006. Newsom is also withdrawing California's recently revised procedures for executions by lethal injection, ending -- at least for now -- the struggle by prison officials for more than a decade to devise procedures that would pass muster in federal court by minimizing the risk of a botched and painful execution.His actions, disclosed to The Chronicle by an administration source late Tuesday, come in the wake of a pair of close but unsuccessful efforts by death penalty opponents to repeal the state law at the ballot box. The initiatives, both endorsed by Newsom, garnered 48 percent of the vote in 2012 and 47 percent four years later, when supporters of capital punishment won passage of a rival initiative aimed at speeding up executions. While that measure has reduced review of the execution process in state courts, California's lethal-injection procedures are still being scrutinized in federal court.The governor lacks authority to change the state death penalty law, which was enacted by the voters in 1978 and can be repealed only at the ballot box.Newsom, elected to a four-year term last November, did not say whether he would support another repeal initiative in 2020. But he said he would grant reprieves to anyone sentenced to death while he holds office."The intentional killing of another person is wrong," he said. "And, as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual."Michele Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, criticized Newsom's decision."The voters of the state of California support the death penalty," she said. "That is powerfully demonstrated by their approval of Proposition 66 in 2016 to ensure the death penalty is implemented, and their rejection of measures to end the death penalty in 2016 and 2006. Gov. Newsom ... is usurping the expressed will of California voters."The announcement appears to contradict Newsom's public position during his campaign for governor. When The Chronicle asked candidates for their views on the death penalty, Dan Newman, a spokesman for then-Lt. Gov. Newsom, cited his long-standing opposition to capital punishment. But he added that Newsom "recognizes that California voters have spoken on the issue and, if elected governor, he'd respect the will of the electorate by following and implementing the law."The governor's statement lays out the case against the death penalty as biased, costly and pointless. While the state has spent $5 billion on trying, convicting, imprisoning and executing Death Row inmates since voters approved the current law in 1978, Newsom said, there is no evidence that the death penalty deters murder, and there has been no increase in homicides in states that ended capital punishment.The death penalty has also "discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or can't afford expensive legal representation," Newsom said. He said more than three-fifths of Califorina's Death Row inmates are people of color, while studies have shown that those convicted of killing whites are far more likely to be sentenced to death than killers of blacks or Latinos."But most of all, the death penalty is absolute, irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error," Newsom said. He noted that 164 condemned prisoners nationwide, including five in California, have been freed from Death Row since 1973 based on evidence that they were wrongfully convicted or sentenced.The reprieves granted by Newsom are temporary orders, in effect during his governorship, as opposed to executive clemency that would reduce an inmate's sentence to life in prison without parole. Clemency for any inmate with two or more felony convictions would require approval from a majority of the state Supreme Court.Governors in several other states have granted clemency to condemned prisoners, most notably Illinois' Republican Gov. George Ryan, who spared the lives of all 167 inmates on his state's Death Row in 2003. Illinois abolished the death penalty in 2011. Moratoriums on the death penalty are in place in Pennsylvania and Oregon, where a 2011 order by Gov. John Kitzhaber was extended in 2016 by his successor, Kate Brown.In December, six former Democratic governors in other states wrote a column in the New York Times urging outgoing California Gov. Jerry Brown to commute all death sentences in the state to life in prison. But Brown, despite his longtime opposition to the death penalty, never sought clemency for any Death Row inmates.The last inmate to be executed in California was Clarence Ray Allen in January 2006. Before the next scheduled execution, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose ruled that the state's capital punishment procedures were unconstitutional because of flaws in lethal injection procedures, equipment and staff training that could subject inmates to an agonizing death.For much of the past 13 years, the state has been searching for alternatives that would satisfy the federal judiciary. Newsom's order ends those efforts, at least for as long as he is governor. With the state pulling back its attempts to win judicial approval for an execution method, California has no legal method of putting anyone to death -- although supporters of capital punishment may argue that the voter-approved 2016 measure, Proposition 66, prohibits challenges to execution procedures at the state level.Of the 737 condemned inmates, 25 have lost all appeals of their convictions and death sentences. Their cases are still awaiting review in a San Francisco federal court, which has yet to approve a new single-drug execution procedure authorized by Brown's administration.But the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected similar challenges in other states, ruling that the possibility of a painful execution by injection does not violate constitutional standards. Had he not announced a moratorium, Newsom most likely would have faced decisions within the next year on whether to allow individual executions to proceed. (TNS) Miami Valley Hospital and its sister emergency rooms for the first time can share real-time information between emergency providers and first responders in the field thanks to new technology.This is groundbreaking that now it is including EMS or pre-hospital care in that continuum of care thats reflected in the record. So its bridging hospital care and pre-hospital care in a way thats never been done, said Dr. Randy Marriott, medical director of Premier Healths EMS Center of Excellence.The major change at Premier Healths ERs and hospitals Miami Valley, Atrium Medical Center and Upper Valley Medical Center comes at a time when both major hospital networks in the Dayton area are making major updates to their health data systems.Kettering Health Network just opened a $10 million command center that centralizes the networks transportation, patient bed placement and path of discharge.The software used by the new command center means workers can view the status of every patient bed in real time in every Kettering Health Network hospital and medical facilityPremiers new technology will make patient handoffs quicker and means patient information can be accessed in near real time by hospital workers. There used to be delays, sometimes for a few days, before the information was loaded into the electronic health records system at Premier, which meant the information was of no use to the people providing immediate care to that patient in the hospital.Marriott said the information the first responder gathers in the field is a critical piece of information for ER physicians. Under the new system, he said patients are helped by both the physicians and EMTs having better information.Patients win in both of these areas. They win by the treatment physician having immediate access to information that was gained in the pre-hospital arena and they the EMS provider and paramedics, they gain the knowledge of patients follow ups so they can better adjust their skill, Marriott said.Premiers software change affects the thousands of patients who visit the health networks busy emergency centers throughout the region, including Miami Valley Hospital which has the busiest ER in the region and is the regions only Level 1 trauma center, which takes the highest level of traumas. Miami Valley Hospitals main campus reported 90,380 visits in 2016.Premier said its cost for the new system was fairly negligible. The system integrates EMS charts into EPIC, which is Premier Healths electronic medical records system.Premier Healths new tech is now in a six-month pilot program. The first group of EMS agencies in Middletown, Brookville, Monroe, New Jasper, and Tipp City began the week of Jan. 28. Now Dayton Fire, Englewood, Trenton and Union Township Miami County have joined the pilot program.In addition to hospital caregivers receiving pre-hospital information, first responders will also receive information regarding the health of the patients whom they transported.Sharing data also helps fire departments and EMS agencies know the outcome of their efforts. The ability for emergency medical technicians and paramedics to receive feedback on the hospital outcome for their patients will enhance patient care in the field.The new interface allows first responders to directly enter medical information collected out in the field or during transport into a patients electronic medical record.Everything just speeds up the process its so much faster, said Dominika Kozlowski, firefighter and paramedic instructor with Dayton Fire.The change to make record sharing more convenient for first responders comes at a time when the number of emergency departments in the region has been growing and competitor Kettering Health Network has been adding more ER locations. After the Federal Bureau of Investigation released documents incriminating nearly 50 people in a college admissions scandal Tuesday, many wondered how applicants were able to cheat on standardized tests without raising eyebrows. Thirty-two parents, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, were named in the indictment, which alleged the defendants principally parents of high school-aged children conspired to use bribery and other forms of fraud to facilitate their children's admission to elite universities, including Stanford University, the University of Southern California, the University of California - Los Angeles and others. Particularly glaring in the 204-page indictment is that the majority of the children, whose parents were charged Tuesday, had seamlessly secured disability accommodations on their standardized tests. This enabled them to have additional time on the exams and to take them alone with the proctor at a private testing facility that was located, in some cases, thousands of miles from the test-takers' residences. LATEST: Click here for updates on the developing story Typically, the ACT and SAT are administered to large groups of students at their high schools on specific dates with strict time limits. Students with disabilities ranging from visual impairment to dyslexia and so on can request extended time on the tests and in some circumstances, can ask to take the test alone, under the supervision of a proctor employed by ACT, Inc. or the College Board, which administers the SAT. To verify the student's disability, the College Board requires the student submit proper documentation, such as the recommendation of a physician, school official or psychologist. According to the College Board website, the organization "will consider any accommodation for any documented disability." Accommodations include, but are not limited to, time extensions, a private testing room, extra breaks or a scribe who writes dictated answers. In the case of what the FBI are calling "The College Entrance Exam Cheating Scheme," parents would connect with a representative from the Key Worldwide Foundation, a nonprofit corporation based in Newport Beach, Calif. The founder of The Key is identified as Cooperating Witness 1 in the indictment. ALSO: How Stanford is wrapped up in the college scandal CW-1 allegedly instructed clients to purport their children had learning disabilities to obtain medical documentation that the College Board and ACT, Inc. typically require for granting time extensions. In one instance, CW-1 told defendant Gordon Caplan to instruct his daughter "to be stupid" when the psychologist evaluated her, the documents allege. Once the disability documentation was obtained and the students granted extended time, which often enabled them to take the exam over two days instead of one in a private setting, CW-1 reportedly instructed clients to change the location of the test center to one of the two test centers he claimed to "control": the West Hollywood Test Center, at a private college prep school in West Hollywood, or the Houston Test Center, located at a public high school in Houston. The complaint claims CW-1 instructed parents to "fabricate a reason," like a "bar mitzvah or a wedding," that required their children to take the test in Houston or West Hollywood instead of at their own high schools. CW-1 allegedly bribed test administrators at the test centers to allow a third party to take the exams in the place of the students, to serve as a proctor while providing the students with correct answers, or to review and correct the students' answers after completion of the exam. "In many instances," the complaint stipulates, "the students taking the exams were unaware that their parents had arranged for this cheating." ALSO: Tweets by Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin take on new meaning after scandal Clients paid CW-1 between $15,000 and $75,000 per test, with payments typically sent as "donations" to the KWF charity, documents show. Tuesday's revelations "are not surprising to any of us," said Kristen Hansen, Director of the College and Career Center at Piedmont High School in Piedmont, Calif. "I regularly see things that make my stomach turn," she said. Hansen noted a "recent trend" of students securing testing accommodations that allow for extended time. Often, "these students don't need to have severe learning differences to be eligible." "It looks like what happened here relates to schools not having the resources to accommodate all of the students who need additional time," she said. This, in turn, spurs the creation of private testing centers, which are regulated by the College Board. "The regulation of these centers is something that has to be looked into," she said. "Are they being monitored on video, and so on?" The College Board provided the following statement to SFGATE: "Today's arrests resulting from an investigation conducted by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Massachusetts send a clear message that those who facilitate cheating on the SAT - regardless of their income or status - will be held accountable. The College Board has a comprehensive, robust approach to combat cheating, and we work closely with law enforcement as part of those efforts. We will always take all necessary steps to ensure a level playing field for the overwhelming majority of test takers who are honest and play by the rules." Regulations only go so far. The underlining problem, Hansen said, is that "college admissions have become so competitive, people feel like they have to do something to get better scores." "Colleges have sort of created this," she continued. "A lot of schools still put a ton of weight on standardized testing," including the University of California. Some programs are trending away from testing requirements, acknowledging that a single-day exam can be influenced by a handful of variables, ranging from the student's access to test preparation services to the temperature in the testing room. "It's one day of testing that has so many inconsistencies and inequities associated with it," Hansen concluded. "This issue pre-exists the scandal." Read Michelle Robertson's latest stories and send her news tips at mrobertson@sfgate.com. Start receiving breaking news emails on wildfires, civil emergencies, riots, national breaking news, Amber Alerts, weather emergencies, and other critical events with the SFGATE breaking news email. Click here to make sure you get the news. TORRINGTON Torrington Public School Theatre and the Torrington Middle School Drama Club will present the classic musical Bye, Bye Birdie Young Performers Edition, March 21-23 at the Torrington Middle School auditorium. All shows begin at 7 p.m. Bye, Bye Birdie tells the story of Conrad Birdie, a 1960s rock n roll superstar played by 7th grader Cebastian Sontolongo, who has just been drafted into the U.S. Army. His producer, Albert J. Peterson,played by 8th grader James Butler, with help from his secretary, Rose Alvarez, played by 7th grader Abby Foulds, plan to write the soon-to-be hit song One Last Kiss and have Conrad kiss one of his loyal fans good-bye on national television before he leaves for basic training. The success of One Last Kiss will carry Albert and his company through the economic disaster of having their biggest star drafted, and allow Albert to return to school to become an English teacher and marry Rose. The fan chosen to be kissed Kim MacAffee, played by 7th grader Sofia Daddona, of Sweet Apple, OH. Kim and her boyfriend, Hugo Peabody, played by 7th grader Patrick Minnerly, just got pinned and Hugo is not happy about Conrad kissing his steady girl. Alberts mother, Mrs. Peterson, played by7th grader Caroline Sienkiewicz is not happy about her sons plan to dissolve their music producing company or his relationship with Rosie. The fans are not happy because Conrad is going into the army. As everyone prepares to see Conrad Birdie sing One Last Kiss and kiss his Number 1 fan goodbye on The Ed Sullivan Show, machinations are in place to interrupt the kiss and interfere in Alberts future plans with Rose. Conrads rendition of One Last Kiss is a hit - literally. Rose leaves Albert, singing What Did I Ever See in Him? The kids run away because they have A Lotta Livin To Do, and the adults express their frustration in the song Kids, led by 8th grader Launa Cook playing Mrs. MacAffee, and 7th grader Matt Hatayk playing Mr. MacAffee. How will all this end? Come and see this family-friendly show that is appropriate for all audiences. The show is about 2 hours including intermission. The show is directed by Veronica Gelormino with musical direction by Andrew Skinner, both teachers at Torrington Middle School. Teachers Paul DiPasquale, Tara Minnerly, James Springer and Danielle Valunas assisted with directing, properties, set, and costumes. THS senior Aubrie DellAgnese choreographed the production with assistance from 8th grader Annabel Fuller. Eighth grader Maria Fragione took charge of the sound for this production. TMS Drama Club alumni from both THS and Oliver Wolcott Tech stepped up to make this production special. Tickets are $5 for students/children and $10 for adults and can be purchased at the door. For more information, contact vgelormino@torrington.org. The next Torrington Public Schools Theatre production will be the THS Student Theatre presenting Oklahoma! May 2, 3, and 4. When Anne Hughes learned that her godson was in late stage kidney failure, she jumped on a train to Washington D.C. and volunteered for a round of testing. She was a match. But the transplant surgery she then underwent cost her two weeks of pay. Hughes, a state representative from Easton, recounted the ordeal to fellow lawmakers Tuesday as she pressed for paid family and medical leave. A measure that would allow workers to receive up to 12 weeks of paid leave per year to care for a sick family member is being weighed by the legislatures Labor and Public Employees Committee. Two similar bills have already cleared the committee; one is headed to the House and the other to the Senate. A vast group of concerned workers called Tuesday not only for passage of the proposal, but also for an expanded definition of what it means to be a family member. Hughes, who has no children, considers her 20-year-old godson a close loved one, or what advocates call chosen family. We never know when our chosen family and extended family will need us to save their lives, she said. When they call on us, we go. I think we owe the chosen family because they have been taking unpaid leave; they have been taking time off to care for their loved ones. Advocates urged legislators to revise the bills language to feature a more inclusive explanation of family - one that takes into account partners or friends who dont have legal or biological ties. Many of my constituents create chosen family - a close network of friends who serve as the equivalent of a family relationship, said Robin McHaelen, head of True Colors, an LGBTQ support group. This is true across the lifespan for LGBTQ folks. Youth are more likely to be homeless or rejected by their families of origin, compelling them to create chosen families. Older adults from the LGBTQ community are nearly twice as likely to live alone as people outside that community, she said. Many rely on close friends in an emergency. Paid family and medical leave should be accessible to all, which means supporting workers who may not fit into a traditional, nuclear definition of family, Liz Gustafson, an organizer and volunteer coordinator for NARAL Pro-Choice Connecticut, said. Ensuring the definition of family includes chosen family would mean no one is left behind. The pool of money set aside for paid family and medical leave would be financed by a 0.5 percent payroll tax and would reimburse employees at a rate equal to 90 percent of their base salary. The two other paid leave bills suggest benefits equal to 100 percent of workers pay - up to $1,000 per week. The tax would be levied no later than October 2020. Employee compensation would be available beginning in January 2022. Detractors of paid leave have raised concerns about the solvency of the fund established under the legislation, and business leaders said the bills would hurt companies by forcing them to deal with immense costs and prolonged absences. Eric Gjede, vice president of government affairs for the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, highlighted the pitfalls of a paid leave mandate during an earlier public hearing. What youre asking from us to take in terms of cost and burdens simply cannot be done by a significant number of Connecticuts small businesses, he said. Behind the scenes, the Lamont administration and legislative staff are working to ensure the sustainability of the program, relying in part on an actuarial analysis by the Institute for Womens Policy Research that was commissioned by the General Assembly in 2015. I think it gives us a great head start, said Jonathan Dach, the governors deputy chief of staff. We can rely on real actuarial math so we can look people in the eye and say this is what its going to cost. Paid family and medical leave programs essentially are disability insurance policies. The major variables under study are the number of employees who might use the benefit, how much time off would be covered, and the level of wage replacement. Dach said the governor has set one non-negotiable item: It would be funded by a payroll tax on employees that could not exceed one-half of one percent of weekly pay. The administration and legislature agree on a goal of providing up to 12 weeks off, with Lamont now considering wage replacement of as much as 90 percent for lower-wage workers and a lower percentage for higher-wage workers. Legislators are seeking a maximum replacement wage of 100 percent. The actual level of wage replacement most likely would be resolved by the continuing analysis by actuaries of how generous a benefit the fund could afford. Lindsay Farrell, the executive director of the union-backed Working Families Party, said she sees the administration working in good faith to provide the best benefits at an affordable and sustainable cost. A generous benefit that was actually unsound would serve no one, she said. The worst thing would be for the fund to go insolvent in four years, she said. But she said the wage-replacement benefit for lower-wage workers must be high or they will not be able to utilize the program. Under either version, the Connecticut program would be among the most generous in the U.S. California, New Jersey and Rhode Island were described in the 2015 study as providing no more than six weeks coverage for family care, paying replacement wages between 55 percent and 66 percent. Dach said the Connecticut benefits are tracking those of plans more recently approved in Massachusetts and Washington. California also has improved its benefits since the 2015 study, he said. We feel like were in line wit h the other states that have moved recently, Dach said. STAMFORD Members of the Board of Representatives Tuesday night voted 24-1, with eight abstentions, to censure Democrat Marion McGarry for posting anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant messages on her Facebook page. A crowd filled the boards Legislative Chambers, with TV crews rolling, as President Matthew Quinones described the measure before them as a motion of censure without formal disciplinary procedures. Seven members were absent, and those who abstained said they condemn the hate-filled posts but could not vote for censure because of how the matter was handled. They said a handful of representatives went to the media with a call for censure before all representatives had a chance to weigh in. McGarry, 75, a former Catholic nun who has represented District 12 for 12 years, did not attend the meeting. Rep. Rodney Pratt, D-9, the boards majority leader, said he was investigating according to Roberts Rules of Order, a procedural guide, which states that an organization should first attempt to resolve such matters internally. After he talked with McGarry she deleted some of the Facebook posts but needed help with the rest, Pratt said. While he was working on a resolution, some representatives went on a cable news station with the story, he said. It was grandstanding, Pratt said. The majority leader and the board clerk were handling it. How do you ignore that? I agree that the representative should be censured, but I abstained because it should have been handled according to our rules, after we all understood what had happened. Members then could have made the matter public as a board, Pratt said. Other representatives said it was handled appropriately. Quinones said he is satisfied the rules were followed. Their meeting was preceded by a press conference held by McGarrys attorney, Kenneth Sosnoski Jr., who said the colleague who discovered McGarrys Facebook posts cyber-stalked her and violated her right to privacy. Sosnoski said the colleague, Rep. Jonathan Jacobson, a fellow Democrat from District 12, conspired with the head of the Democratic City Committee and Mayor David Martin to target McGarry for voting against pro-development and pro-corporation policies. The problem is that Marion McGarry is an honest politician and its hard to be an honest politician in Stamford, Sosnoski said. He said McGarry is a former nun who did mission work in the poorest parts of the world, including serving people with leprosy. He would not answer questions about whether McGarry in fact posted the hate messages or why she might have done so. All he would reveal is that she was upset about her partys support of abortion. Some of McGarrys posts attacked Democrats. Afterward, Jacobson said, The unsubstantiated allegations of an exposed racist is of no concern to me. Democratic City Committee Chairman Josh Fedeli said no such conspiracy exists. The only reason she was so-called targeted was because of her hate-filled and incendiary views. Fedeli said. Its interesting that in her defense there was no mention of her behavior. Instead they pushed a narrative about widespread corruption in our government it does not hold water. She should have to answer to her behavior and she has not done that. One of McGarrys posts includes a photo of newly elected Muslim Americans being sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives alongside a photo of the 9/11 terror attacks with the caption, How quick we forget. Another post shows a judge ordering an illegal immigrant to leave the country and take your lawnmower with you. The posts came to light after Jacobson, who was a Facebook friend with McGarry, saw the hate messages and captured screen shots of them. Jacobson lead the censure effort. McGarrys posts have been denounced by the Interfaith Council of Southwestern Connecticut, the state Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the Mayors Multicultural Council of Stamford, which released a statement Tuesday. McGarry is a member of a faction of the citys Democratic Party called Reform Stamford, which won six board seats in 2017. McGarry was already a member of the board when she joined Reform Stamford. The group ran on a platform of questioning the entrenched political structure of the board and backing residents who were fighting to protect their neighborhoods from overdevelopment. Members of the group, along with other Democrats and some Republicans on the board, have cut Democratic Mayor David Martins budgets, rejected the reappointment of one of his cabinet members, and blocked zoning changes that would have allowed large projects in residential areas. Fedeli has said members of Reform Stamford are barely Democrats at all, and he supports McGarrys censure. Most people in Stamford dont think the city needs reform, Fedeli has said, and members of the group are anti-administration. Thats all they are. acarella@stamfordadvocate.com; 203-964-2296. 3 1 of 3 Contributed photo / Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Contributed photo / Show More Show Less 3 of 3 TORRINGTON A city man who was arrested after police found about 400 bags of fentanyl in his home on Feb. 1 will appear in Superior Court on April 16. Hansel Schneider, 53, of Red Mountain Avenue, is charged with possession of fentanyl with intent to sell and possession of fentanyl in a school zone. The possession charge is a felony and the school zone charge is a misdemeanor. WEST HAVEN Lawyers for the national charitable arm and local fundraising group of Fisher House a place where veterans families stay while loved ones are being treated at a VA Hospital are trying going to recoup a large sum of money they allege went missing through the hands of Attorney Kevin Creed of Litchfield, founder and former CEO of Fisher House in West Haven. Attorneys for Fisher House Foundation Inc. and Friends of Fisher House Connecticut Inc., are due to appear in court April 8 to ask a judge to appoint a receiver to take over the finances of Creeds law firm in order to repay the money that a judge ruled Creed owes the organizations. Neither attorney Monte Frank on the plaintiffs team nor Creeds attorney, Joseph Fournier, would comment on the pending case. Creed, whose law firm is located in Bristol, has not been criminally charged. The parties on both sides agreed Monday while at a court appearance in Superior Court in Litchfield to share the books and records of the law firm before the April 8 appearance. The court action states the foundation honors and supports our nations military personnel, veterans and their families by building Fisher Houses nearby to military hospitals and Veterans Affairs medical facilities in the United States and Europe, for family use while a loved one is a patient. The purpose of the friends group is to raise money to support the Fisher House in West Haven, which was built by the foundation. A spokesperson at Fisher House Foundation released a statement Tuesday: Fisher House Foundation is extremely disappointed that anyone would betray donors trust and misuse funds earmarked for veterans and their families and has never encountered an issue like this in its 29-year history. Fisher House Foundation continues to remain focused on the important work of serving our military and veteran community and hope this matter can be resolved swiftly and appropriately. Creed, who is a veteran and has a strong history of supporting veterans, established the friends group as a Connecticut nonprofit and operated it out of his law firm. Creed has since disconnected any affiliation, sources said. The court filing claims: Unbeknownst to the plaintiffs, Creed did not observe corporate formalities, misrepresented who its board members were, and misappropriated approximately $1.4 million. On Dec. 20, 2018, the court granted a prejudgment remedy for $4.3 million, consisting of the $1.4 million Creed allegedly misappropriated, trebled damages based upon the statutory theft claim, and attorneys fees. A previous court judgement authorizes the friends group to attach Creeds assets, but according to the recent court action, they have been unable to attach assets to satisfy even a small fraction of the prejudgment remedy. Attaching Creeds residence and bank accounts were not fruitful, the court filing claims. The Friends group only found one bank account with any funds in it and the amount was $3,000, the legal action states. Defendant Creeds interest in the Creed Law Firm, LLC is the only presently identifiable asset Creed has that could potentially result in a recovery of any significance to Friends and/or other creditors, the court filing states. As the sole member of The Creed Law Firm, Creed maintains complete control of the financial accounts and other corporate mechanisms of the LLC, the filing states. Defendant Creeds prior conduct establishes sufficient exigency in this case to appoint a temporary receiver, or person to run the finances of his firm, the court action states. According to the recent court action, in 2014 Creed was the subject of a professional disciplinary proceeding, arising out of the commingling his and clients funds. The receiver is necessary to assume control of the books and records, and financial accounts of The Creed Law Firm, LLC, and would be well-positioned to ensure that any funds The Creed Law Firm, LLC receives by way of legal fees earned for the provision of legal services, including contingency fees from its personal injury cases, shall be held for the benefit of Friends and/or other creditors, after payment to clients the funds due them. The filing by Franks team goes on to state: To be clear, this motion to appoint a receiver is not requesting any significant infringement on Defendant Creeds ability to practice law. However, the ugly circumstances presented in this case requires extraordinary relief, including the appointment of a receivership to protect Friends and/or other potential creditors interests, and to safeguard the funds which are owed to the law firms clients. Fisher House Connecticut offers free, private housing to families of patients at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. A source involved in the case said any actions by Creed did not affect Fisher House functioning or services. Construction of the 16 suites cost $6 million and was 100 percent covered by donations. Operational costs for the suites will be covered by the facility budget. A tech company has sought to change the law in statehouses across the country, using lobbyists to promote a controversial sea swell of legislation that would create a larger market for their services.TransparentBusiness has hired lobbyists to push nearly identical bills in more than two dozen states that would mandate the digital monitoring of government contractors engaged in high-end IT work.The company proffers that such work verification services would help state governments save millions of dollars by cutting down on fraud and waste, while critics contend that it would create unnecessary risks for state data.One of the companys primary products is software that captures regular screenshots and keystrokes on the systems it is installed on, making it a natural fit to supply the services required under the newly proposed laws.Related legislation has been introduced in at least 30 different states, according to Alex Konanykhin, the company's CEO. All of the legislation was modeled on language suggested by the company itself, and has been advocated for by the companys lobbyists, he added.As example, a new bill in Arkansas would require a contractor to procure and use software to verify the legitimacy of the hours billed for work performed on a computer under a contract with a state agency or a political subdivision for work in excess of $100,000, according to the text. Bills introduced in Hawaii, California, Texas and other states include similar language.Konanykhin, a former Russian banker with ambitions to create the next tech company that will, in his own words, change the world, has stated that his ambition is to use the transparent management paradigm to develop a "solution which can save tens of billions of dollars [for] government agencies and corporations."In an email, Konanykhin said that he felt the services his company were offering would help state governments save money while avoiding waste and fraud."In absence of transparent verification of billable hours, some contractors rob their government clients blind," Konanykhin said in an email, referencing alleged incidents in New York Pennsylvania and Maryland Konanykhin also provided with a manual he said had been used to "evangelize" to legislators about the benefits of transparency.The manual lists alleged examples in which state governments were cheated by contractors, while also describing the companys endeavor as part of [an] overall trend to transparency in business, like body cameras for police or fleet control for transportation companies.Konanykhin's vision has been hotly disputed by some who allege his model would cause unnecessary risk with nebulous payoff. The wave of bills recently caused the National Association of State Chief Information Officers to take the largely unprecedented step of issuing a statement condemning the legislation While NASCIO certainly supports contractor productivity, cost efficiency and successful project outcomes, legislation of this nature could introduce unnecessary risks to citizen data by essentially transferring ownership of private citizen data to a third party, the statement reads.NASCIO Executive Director Doug Robinson said that it is largely unheard of for the organization to come out against legislation the way that it has.In my tenure of 15 years as executive director, we have not issued any oppositional statements to state legislation its not something we generally weigh in to, he said.Reiterating points made in NASCIOs recent statement, Robinson said the biggest concerns were the potential impact on privacy and security." As state contractors are utilized more and more by states to do crucial work, the notion of transferring large amounts of their data to a third party seems an inherent security risk, he said.While being exceedingly broad in what we would consider to be some pretty key areas, its also extremely prescriptive in terms of what has to be done, he said of the language in the legislation.Indeed, of the over two dozen pieces of legislation that have been introduced, all of them refer to screenshot capture on a three-minute basis, and all but six refer to mouse and keystroke movement tracking. The majority also set the threshold for contracts at projects over $100,000.Robinson added that the information NASCIO had received from its state leaders implied that the legislation going around had been crafted to benefit only one company, TransparentBusiness. Meanwhile, he and other NASCIO officials felt they knew almost nothing about the technology that the company would use should it deliver these services. We have no direct knowledge of this software, its functionality or the efficacy of any of it, and thats a key challenge, he said.Proponents of the legislation have reiterated the companys stance that its services would save states money while also increasing efficiency.Michael McKeon, a partner with New York-based lobbying firm Mercury LLC, which represents TransparentBusiness, said he felt the criticism from NASCIO is likely to remain a major embarrassment for the organization for decades to come."Its based on a false premise, contradicts accepted practices and was issued without any semblance of due diligence, McKeon said in an email.McKeon further argued that the legislation could help save New York millions of dollars.He also disputed that the New York legislation would transfer data to a third party, as the bill states that data collected "shall be considered accounting records belonging to the contractor. The contractor must store, or contract with another to store, the data collected by the software for a period of seven years and provide the access to the contracting agency or state auditors on their request.If NASCIO had a genuine concern, theyd communicate it to the bill sponsors and proponents, requesting an explanation and/or modifications," McKeon added, claiming that NASCIO officials had made no such attempt.If there is a true need for the kind of services TransparentBusiness is offering, legislatures have largely failed to capitalize on it. Of the over two dozen bills that have been introduced, a fair number have died in committee and are no longer under consideration. None have been passed into law.In Hawaii, for example, legislation was pushed that would have required contractors to procure work verification software for projects upward of $100,000. A hearing for the bill was held, but a bevy of interest groups many representing contractors came forward to object to the legislation.One such interest group was the American Council of Engineering Companies of Hawaii, which represents many of the contractors that do work for the state. A representative for ACECH offered that the legislation is being pushed by a single firm solely motivated by the profit it could receive by getting states to require this software of all their professional and technical service providers and is not in the best interest of government agencies in Hawaii."Konanykhin has called such allegations "utter nonsense.""There are competing solutions on the market and there are thousands of software companies in America capable of producing new compliance solutions," Konanykhin said, while also adding he hoped TransparentBusiness would lead the way in developing such solutions.Konanykhin also compared his company's legislative efforts to those of other tech giants Uber and Airbnb."It's a typical situation," he argued. "Uber and Airbnb, for example, pushed through major changes in most jurisdictions and their valuations are now measured in tens of billions of dollars; however the legislators permitted those new practices because they benefited the public, not as a favor to Uber or Airbnb," he said. Bernie Ecclestone says both Williams and McLaren need new management. The once-great F1 teams are now struggling, and former F1 supremo Ecclestone thinks the problem is the people in charge. "They are no longer in the hands of super competitive men like Ron Dennis and Frank Williams," he told Corriere della Sera. "To come back strong, they have to find another Ron and another Frank." Today, Zak Brown leads McLaren, while Frank Williams' daughter Claire is in charge at Williams. When asked about other F1 teams, Ecclestone said he is looking forward to the new Red Bull-Honda collaboration. "I suggested this alliance to Red Bull three years ago," he said. "Honda is competitive by nature -- just look at the bikes." On the sport more generally, Ecclestone said F1 could survive without the FIA and its president Jean Todt. "Jean did a good job of convincing Liberty that they need the FIA to change things. But F1 could even exist without them. "The teams and promoters could write the rules themselves and race under another name," said Ecclestone. "Personally I'm not for democracy, we need a dictator who says 'here are the rules'." He also thinks it is possible Mercedes will not agree terms with Liberty for a 2021 Concorde Agreement. "I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have an official team anymore," said Ecclestone. (GMM) Daniel Ricciardo says he knows his old team Red Bull is likely to beat him this weekend in Melbourne. The Australian has returned to his native country with new colours and a new goal -- to help Renault join Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull in the fight for wins and titles. "The battle we are in, with the entire midfield, looks really tight," Ricciardo told Kleine Zeitung newspaper. "I was aware when I signed the contract that it is very likely that they (Red Bull) would be ahead, at least in Melbourne," he added. Ricciardo said he is determined that Renault succeeds. "I don't like promises, but I'll do anything I can to make it happen," he said. "Nobody is happy to be in the midfield. "Judging by what I've seen so far, I believe Renault has enough resources to do it. I think it's attainable for us. "It probably won't be this year, but it's not forever," said Ricciardo. (GMM) The case of jailed human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang has been erased from the computer system of a higher court ahead of his appeal, RFA has learned. Wang was handed a four-and-a-half year jail term on Jan. 28 by the Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court, which found him guilty of "subversion of state power." The verdict and sentence followed repeated delays, resulting in Wang being held in pretrial detention for more than three years with no access to a lawyer or family visits. Wang's lawyer Lin Qilei said his client had been intending to appeal his sentence at the Tianjin Higher People's Court, but when Lin, Wang's wife Li Wenzu and fellow rights activist Wang Qiaoling went there on Monday, they were told that there was no record of his case on the court's computer system. "The fact that there is no record of Wang Quanzhang's case at the Tianjin Higher People's Court means that there is no appeal," Lin said via social media at the time. "Another possibility is that the Tianjin high court is deliberately hiding the process of Wang Quanzhang's appeal through the court, so as to deny to his family and lawyer the right to know what is going on," he said. "They are continuing to deal with Wang Quanzhang in the manner of a secret, and illegal, trial." 'Unacceptable' U.S.-based legal scholar Chen Guangcheng said the loss of Wang's case files was "unacceptable." "Regardless of whether Wang was planning to appeal or not, the Chinese Communist Party can't go losing his details; that's just common sense," Chen said. "Wang has been persecuted by them for so many years now. There has been so much international concern for his case, and now the Tianjin high court just can't find them?" "This is inexplicable, whichever way you look at it," he said. Chinese rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang agreed. "If Lin Qilei is the appointed lawyer for the appeal of this case, then he naturally should be able to view the case files," Pu said. "What's not clear is whether the judgment on Wang Quanzhang, or his appeal, have taken effect or not." "The defendant has the right to appoint a lawyer to oversee the appeal process," he said. "Wang Quanzhang's case hasn't been carried out according to due process ... I have a lot of admiration for Lin Qilei." Concerns over torture Rights groups say there are concerns that Wang may have been subjected to torture or other mistreatment in detention, as he was detained incommunicado for such a long period of time, and that this may be the reason behind officials' insistence on secrecy. During that time, the authorities failed to provide a proper account of Wangs prolonged detention to the public, including Wangs family and family-appointed defense lawyers, Li and rights groups have said. The trial was held on Dec. 26 behind closed doors, with officials claiming that state secrets were involved in the case. The overseas-based Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) network has cited reports that Wang was tortured with electric shocks during interrogations. Reported by Xi Wang for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. A photo posted to the WeChat account of the Xinjiang Judicial Administration shows Uyghur detainees listening to a 'de-radicalization' speech at a re-education camp in Hotan prefecture's Lop county, April 2017. Chinas treatment of its Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities puts it "in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations," top U.S. diplomat Mike Pompeo said Wednesday as the U.S. State Department issued its global survey of rights conditions. U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo noted that the annual report highlighted abuses in Iran, South Sudan, Nicaragua and many other nations, including some U.S. allies. But then theres China, which is in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations, he said. In just 2018, China intensified its campaign of detaining Muslim minority groups at record levels. Today, more than 1 million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslims are interned in reeducation camps designed to erase their religious and ethnic identities, added Pompeo. A second U.S. official briefing reporters on the "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices," which covers 2018, had even sharper words for Chinas policies in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). "For me, you havent seen things like this since the 1930s," said Michael Kozak, the head of the State Department's human rights and democracy bureau, in an apparent reference to the policies of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. "Rounding up, in some estimations ... in the millions of people, putting them into camps, and torturing them, abusing them, and trying to basically erase their culture and their religion and so on from their DNA. Its just remarkably awful." "It is one of the most serious human rights violations in the world today," he said. authorities in the XUAR have detained more than one million Uyghurs and other Muslims accused of harboring strong religious views and politically incorrect ideas in the camp network since April 2017, often for common religious practices, including praying and attending services. Though Beijing initially denied the existence of re-education camps, Shohrat Zakir, chairman of the XUAR, told Chinas official Xinhua news agency in October 2018 that the facilities are an effective tool to protect the country from terrorism and provide vocational training for Uyghurs. A lot of international scrutiny Zakir said in Beijing on Tuesday that China was running boarding schools, not concentration camps, in the country's far western region Reporting by RFAs Uyghur Service and other media organizations, however, has shown that those in the camps are detained against their will and subjected to political indoctrination, routinely face rough treatment at the hands of their overseers. Kozak noted the denials and misrepresentations from Beijing, adding: "At least we're starting to make them realize there is a lot of international scrutiny on this," he said. The annual report said official repression of the freedoms of speech, religion, movement, association, and assembly of Tibetans in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and other Tibetan areas and of Uighurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang worsened and was more severe than in other areas of the country. Despite government denials that China holds any political prisoners, authorities continued to imprison citizens for reasons related to politics and religion. Human rights organizations estimated tens of thousands of political prisoners remained incarcerated, most in prisons and some in administrative detention, it said. China had no immediate response to the annual report. Beijing usually produces its own human rights report on the United States a day after the State Department document comes out. The reports section on Myanmar said press freedom had declined and self-censorship had increased in the wake of the jailing of Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. The two men were jailed for seven years after being convicted in September of breaking a colonial-era official secrets law while investigating the killing of 10 Muslim men and boys by security forces and Buddhist civilians in Myanmar's Rakhine State. Government blocks aid to Rohingya The report noted fallout from the previous years violence against Muslim Rohingya in Rakhine. Independent investigations undertaken during the year found evidence that corroborated the 2017 ethnic cleansing of Rohingya in Rakhine State and further detailed the militarys killing, rape, and torture of unarmed villagers during a campaign of violence that displaced more than 700,000 Rohingya to neighboring Bangladesh, it said. Some evidence suggested preparatory actions on the part of security forces and other actors prior to the start of violence, said the report, which said that an additional 13,764 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh between January and September. The government prevented assistance from reaching displaced Rohingya and other vulnerable populations during the year by using access restrictions on the United Nations and other humanitarian agencies, it said. The military also committed human rights abuses in continuing conflicts in Kachin and Shan States, the report added. The report said that vast majority of abuses by government soldiers went unpunished, but said non-state groups committed killings, unlawful use of child soldiers, forced labor of adults and children, and failure to protect civilians in conflict zones that rarely resulted in investigations or prosecutions. In Vietnams one-party communist state, police and plainclothes authorities routinely mistreated, harassed, and assaulted activists and those involved in demonstrating against the government, the report said. In Ho Chi Minh City last June, police beat and detained some 180 individuals at a stadium related to anti-SEZ and cybersecurity law demonstrations, said the report. There were also numerous reports of police mistreatment and assaults against individuals who were not activists or involved in politics, it said. As of November at least 11 deaths of persons in custody were reported; many were presumed to have been the result of abuse, added the report. Cambodias pervasive culture of impunity In Cambodia, which held an election last year after banning the only significant opposition party and arresting its leader for treason, security forcesoften threatened force against those who opposed Prime Minister Hun Sen and were generally perceived as an armed wing of the ruling CPP (Cambodia Peoples Party), it said. The government did not provide evidence of having prosecuted any officials for abuses, including corruption. A pervasive culture of impunity continued, said the report. In North Korea, it said, the total number of political prisoners remained unknown, but a South Korean think tank white paper reported the state detained between 80,000 and 120,000 in the kwanliso prison camps. NGOs and media reported political prisoners were subject to harsher punishments and fewer protections than other prisoners and detainees. The government considered critics of the regime to be political criminals, it said. The one-party communist government of Laos neither prosecuted nor punished officials who committed abuses, and police and security forces committed human rights abuses with impunity, said the report. There was no progress in the 2012 abduction of Sombath Somphone, a prominent civil society leader and retired founder of a nonprofit training center, it said, referring to the countrys most prominent disappeared figure. Sombath disappeared on the evening of Dec. 15, 2012, after his jeep was stopped at a police checkpoint outside the capital Vientiane, with video footage showing him later being forced into a white truck and taken away. Though police promised to investigate, Lao authorities soon backtracked, saying they could not confirm the identity of a man shown in the video driving off in Sombaths jeep, and refusing offers of outside expert help to analyze the footage. Before his abduction, Sombath had challenged massive land deals negotiated by the government that had left thousands of rural Lao villagers homeless with little paid in compensation. Six years after Sombaths abduction, the State Department said, the government denied knowledge of his whereabouts and claimed its investigation was continuing. Hundreds of students from the Tianmen Vocational College stage a peaceful protest over poor administration at their school in Tianmen, central China's Hubei province, March 11, 2019. Authorities in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan have ordered a probe into food hygiene in secondary schools following a street protest over mass food poisoning at a high school in the provincial capital, Chengdu. Parents of students at the private Chengdu Qizhong Experimental School on Tuesday protested poor food hygiene in the canteen after a string of food poisoning cases among students, a local journalist told RFA. Video of the protests seen by RFA showed a number of parents and students from the Qizhong Experimental School holding up banners on the street outside local government offices. In other clips, police used pepper spray and physical force to disperse protesters, detaining some parents. "This is the police. This is the government, which regards parents as violent elements," comments a parent in one of the video clips. Some parents were beaten by police, while the owner of school was protected, witnesses said. A local journalist surnamed Song said the protests came after many students got sick after eating canteen food at the 50,000 yuan (U.S. $7,500)-a-year school. "The students got sick and went to the hospital, where they were examined and tested," Song said. "Then the parents went to check [food preparation conditions] at the school, and found some problems, and asked the school to handle it." "But they just hid the food, and the parents found out about it, and ... a lot more problems at the site, so the whole thing escalated," he said. An official who spoke to parents on Wednesday said that city leaders were aware of the dispute and had "issued instructions." "Our [ruling Chinese Communist] Party secretary and mayor have sent out an urgent directive," the official said. However, there was no official response to questions raised by parents over the whereabouts of protesters detained by police on Tuesday. The Sichuan provincial department of education said in a statement on Wednesday that it had sent a "working group" to the Chengdu Qizhong Experimental School to investigate matters, alongside Chengdu municipal education bureau officials. "Relevant results of our investigations, verification, and follow-up will be announced in a timely manner," the statement said. "At the same time, the municipal education bureau is required to conduct investigations into the supply of raw materials in all school canteens, to further strengthen school food safety management," it said. We want our dreams The Chengdu protests came a day after a protest by hundreds of students at the Tianmen Vocational College in the central province of Hubei. The students said they had been denied the chance to participate in China's national skills-based college entrance exams owing to poor administration by their school. "We want our college entrance examination!" they shouted. "We want our dreams!" Students had found out that they hadn't been entered for the exam after paying three years' tuition fees to help them gain a higher education place, they told the Jasic Workers' Solidarity Group (JWSG). Police moved in to disperse the protests outside the offices of the Tianmen municipal government on Monday, beating many of the students, the group said. U.S.-based legal scholar Teng Biao said the students were likely victims of fraud on the part of the school. "[The school] formed a contractual relationship with the students when they charge tuition fees," Teng said. "The failure to ensure students could sit the test is a breach of contract on the part of the school, and the school is liable for compensation." "If the situation is more serious, for example, if they perpetrated a deception, it may constitute a crime," he said. Wang Qingying, a rights activist from Guangzhou currently living in the United States, said young Chinese people are becoming more and more aware of their rights. "Although [such protests] are based on growing awareness of personal rights rather than any political awakening, it is very encouraging that they are taking to the streets to defend their personal rights," Wang said. "It is a huge improvement, a qualitative leap," he said. Reported by Qiao Long and Han Jie for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by the Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. Plagued by underfunding and under state pressure to produce results, North Koreas National Academy of Sciences is selling chemicals and lab equipment to drug manufacturers. The academy is a central administrative agency affiliated with the North Korean cabinet and plays a key role in managing the overall scientific policy planning in the reclusive state, but due to budgeting shortages, the academy has been working with drug dealers to make ends meet. Technology policy became a priority for the regime a few years ago. Since then, the National Academy of Sciences has grown, but now it is selling raw materials and equipment for drug manufacturing to make foreign cash, said a source from South Pyongan province in an interview with RFAs Korean Service. The source said the academy sells a reagent called cyanbenzyline and scientific laboratory equipment that is useful for drug manufacturers. According to a North Korean defector in South Korea, cyanbenzyline is a source material for phenylacetate, which is used in the production of methamphetamine. Everything is done in secret. They sell the reagent and the lab equipment at a store for scientists located outside the academy, said the South Pyongan-based source. The state opened this store for scientists, but it has alcoholic beverages, oils and snacks on display. The materials for the drugs are piled up in storage and the manufacturers often visit the store [to buy raw materials or lab equipment,] the source said. Another source, from North Pyongan province said that after Kim Jong Un came to power, Pyongyangs Unjong district, where the academy is located, became North Koreas base for scientific development, and an integral piece of North Koreas economy. [Kim] inspected the National Academy of Sciences in January last year. He told them science and tech development is of the highest priority and ordered them to make strenuous efforts to achieve their research goals, the source said. The source explained that this newfound level of importance also brought with it more scrutiny from the authorities. [They] have to keep tabs on the performance of researchers and report to the Workers Party more than ever before, and they have been concerned about underfunding, said the source. The execs are now selling chemicals to drug dealers to raise funds, the source said, adding, [It] has become a corrupt institution that encourages drug manufacturing." North Korea is well known for utilizing the drug trade as a source of foreign cash, and had been doing so as far back as at least the 1970s under the direction of the Kim Il Sung regime. A report published in 2014 by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea details how in 1976, the country defaulted on international debts and its embassies were told to self-finance through drug-smuggling. The report also revealed that a major shift away from drug trafficking and towards state-sponsored methamphetamine production occurred in the mid-1990s signaling a change in strategy after Kim Jong Il came to power and the collapse of the Soviet Union. A 2014 article by NK News explained that between 2004 and 2005 North Korea decided to stop exporting narcotics and the workers of one of the regimes largest production facilities sold the technology to the public. This led to an accelerated spread of meth in the domestic market. RFA sources claim that meth, under the street name ice is so common in North Korea that it is exchanged as a gift during the Lunar New Year holiday. In some cases, private North Korean producers are now looking to expand their operations outside of the country. Reported by Hyemin Son for RFAs Korean Service. Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong. Seven high-ranking current or formal officials in Laos Vientiane province have been warned and publicly identified for their involvement in several fraudulent development projects. Dubbed ghost projects, the scheme involved pocketing government money for non-existent or overlapping developments, sources say. These malpractices happened a long time ago, as far back as 2017 in Vientiane province, said a member of the Government Inspection Agency who requested anonymity in an interview with RFAs Lao Service. The inspector said that about a half million dollars were lost to fraud in these projects. These officials just had plans but never carried them out. They just took the money and did nothing, the inspector said. The government-controlled Lao Pattana newspaper reported on March 4 that the Personnel Central Party Committee issued a disciplinary warning to the seven officials. The newspaper also identified each suspect, beginning with deputy governors Singkham Khongsavanh, Daohuang Nanthavong and former deputy governor Bounmy Phouthavong. Three others were current or former directors of provincial departmentsPhouvone Bounvilay from public works and transport, Dethxay Vilayfay from agriculture and forestry, and Soukan Vilaylath of planning and investment. Also named was the former head of the provinces administration office, Vilath Sisouvong. According to the announcement, these high-ranking Party members and state employees have been identified but not yet been dismissed, punished or formally charged with any crime. RFA was unable to reach Vientiane Provincial Administration Office to confirm the current status of the officials, but many state employees have recently been caught in similar schemes and fired. In one high-profile case on Sept. 6, the ministry of finance fired eight high-ranking officials including the director of the budget department and the general director of the ministry. In that case, the finance minister did not specify what ghost projects the fired officials were involved in, but in 2014, an official of the ministry told RFA that these eight high-ranking officials were in a scheme to build a $10-million infrastructure project that included an access road to the new stadium in Oudomxay Province. For that project, the funding was procured but the road was never built. Transparency International, a Berlin-based global anti-corruption coalition, ranked Laos 132nd among 180 countries for 2018, with a score of 29 on a scale where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean. The group said corruption remained endemic among most of the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), to which Laos belongs. Why is Asia Pacific making little to no progress in its anti-corruption efforts? One of the reasons is an overall weakening of democratic institutions and political rights, Transparency International said in January. Reported by RFAs Lao Service. Translated by RFAs Lao Service. Written in English by Eugene Whong. A group of Rohingya study at a hostel run by the Rohingya Literacy Program in New Delhi, March 11, 2019. Oblivious to the deafening noise of traffic outside, about a dozen Rohingya teens and young adults are engrossed in their textbooks a rare sight in India among the displaced refugees from Myanmar who largely are relegated to doing odd jobs for survival. Mohammad Yusuf, 23, is one of them. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, bent over a science book in a small apartment in New Delhi, he is studying for Indias 10th-grade exams next month that lead to the equivalent of a high school diploma in the United States. Usually, Indians are 14 or 15 years old when they sit for this test. I want to do well in these exams so I can study further and make a decent life for myself. I cant afford to waste more time, said Yusuf, who fled Myanmars Rakhine state during the 2017 exodus that followed a brutal offensive against his Muslim minority group. Along with Yusuf, 10 other Rohingya refugees live and study in this cramped two-room apartment, situated in the Zakir Nagar locality of south Delhi. All expenses, including food, materials and tuition, are borne by the Rohingya Literacy Program, a donation-run project founded last year by a fellow Rohingya, Ali Johar. Yusuf was among more than 700,000 Rohingya who crossed the Myanmar border to refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh after August 2017 to flee what the United Nations described as systematic ethnic cleansing by Buddhist-majority Myanmar. The crackdown followed deadly attacks carried out by a Rohingya rebel outfit against security forces in that country. I had attended school [in Myanmar] until the 9th grade. They dont allow us [Rohingya] to study beyond that, Yusuf told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service. When I entered Bangladesh, circumstances were such that I had to work, he added. Yusuf said security forces in Myanmar had arrested his parents during the crackdown and he fled with his brother and two sisters. He worked in a factory in Coxs Bazaar district for a year before crossing over to India, hoping to make a better living. I was struggling to get a job in Delhi. Then, through some friends I heard of the Rohingya Literacy Program. I always dreamed of studying further. So, I got in touch with the group, he said. Johar told BenarNews that the students living in the hostel were handpicked from more than 100 applications he had received from Rohingya who wished to pursue higher studies. The idea to start the hostel struck Johar, 24, when he was working as an interpreter with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in New Delhi, and realized that a shockingly low number of Rohingya were enrolled in higher education. A project associated with the U.N. agency is listed among sponsors of the Rohingya Literacy Program. Local NGOs, schools and individual donors supporting the program include the Rohingya Human Rights Initiative, the Human Welfare Foundation, the S.D.K, Foundation and the Woodstock School, Haryana. Of about 17,500 Rohingya registered with the U.N. refugee agency in India, only about 40 have studied beyond primary school, according to UNHCR. Johar and only one other were seeking to graduate from college programs. There are several reasons for this, said Johar, a political science major. A lot of our community members are not aware of the available opportunities. Then there is the language barrier, financial constraints, but, most importantly, documentation is a major problem, he said. Refugee cards not recognized Despite holding U.N.-certified refugee cards, Rohingya in India are unable to secure admission in regular schools because the government does not recognize them as refugees but as illegal infiltrators, he and others said. I want to ask the government why it refuses to accept U.N. refugee cards as proof of identification for Rohingya and admit them in government schools, said Ahmed Kamal, an Indian media consultant who helps tutor the students at the hostel. In 2017, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu nationalists party that leads Indias government, said Rohingya were a serious threat to national security as they were vulnerable to radicalization by terror outfits and warned that it would deport about 40,000 of them illegally settled in the country. Rohingya are most definitely not entitled to the refugee status. The government considers them illegal immigrants. They cannot claim fundamental rights that are available to non-Indians, an official of Indias Human Resource Development Ministry told BenarNews on condition of anonymity. But that does not deter Saiful Islam, 19, from pursuing his dream of one day receiving his masters degree in business administration. So what if we cant go to a regular school and attend classes? This hostel provides us with an atmosphere to study, which we otherwise would never get in the refugee camps, Islam told BenarNews. He plans to appear for the senior secondary exams (Grade 12) in September. We are used to facing hurdles. But that cannot be an excuse to not go after your dreams, said Johars sister, Tasmida, 21, who is set to become the only woman in the refugee community in India to appear for the senior secondary examinations. I want all Rohingya girls to study, Tasmida told BenarNews. And it is slowly happening. After seeing me, a lot of girls in the community have started studying through open school. UNHCR said that even though nearly half of the registered Rohingya population was younger than 18, very few had completed secondary education. The agency runs educational awareness campaigns in the refugee community. Families are also supported through other protection and livelihood initiatives to strengthen their social and economic capital, address child labor concerns and increase childrens school enrolment and retention, UNHCRs Ipshita Sengupta told BenarNews. Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service. A bus passes a sign marking the entrance to Mrauk-U township in western Myanmar's Rakhine state in an undated photo. The Myanmar military detained local aid workers and an ill man from Minbya township in volatile Rakhine state on Tuesday night as the volunteers transported him to a hospital in Mrauk-U for treatment, said their relatives and residents of Kyaung Daung village where the man lives. Six volunteers from a local funeral service organization were accompanying Hla Maung Win, a 23-year-old who works at Thabot Sar Taesu farm, from the village to the hospital after he came down with a severe illness, they said. Myanmar soldiers seized the seven along with their three drivers as they drove near Chaung Thit village about 9 p.m. local time Tuesday, their relatives and other villagers said. We have six members of our Funeral Service Association who went along with the patient after they were asked for help, said Khin Maung Myunt from Kyaung Daung village. All 10 of them, including three drivers, were taken away, he said. We havent had any phone contact [with them]. We were told that they were taken by the military. Family members and Thein Shwe Maung, the administrator of Kyaung Daung village, traveled to Mrauk-U to inquire about the incident, but they still do not know the whereabouts of Hla Maung Win, the volunteers, or the drivers, said Maung Maung Aye, a relative of one of the missing persons. We were told that they encountered the army on the way to Mrauk-U, and then were detained near Chaung Thit village, he said. We dont know which troops took them away or where they are being detained. RFA was not able to independently confirm accusations by relatives and villagers that Myanmar government soldiers had abducted the 10 people. A reporter who contacted the office of Colonel Win Zaw Oo, spokesman of the Myanmar militarys Western Command which is responsible for Rakhine state, was told that the colonel was not available to comment because he was in a meeting. RFA was also unable to reach Myanmar military spokesman Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun. The Myanmar military has been engaged in deadly clashes with the rebel Arakan Army (AA), a Buddhist Rakhine army fighting for autonomy in Rakhine state, in several townships, including Mrauk-U, since hostilities between the two sides reignited in late 2018. Arakan fighters attacked four police outposts in northern Rakhine in early January, killing 13 officers and injuring nine others. Another AA assault on a police outpost in Ponnagyun township on March 9 left nine officers dead and two others wounded. Regional violence from the fighting between the Myanmar Army and the AA has been punctuated by the disappearances, arrests, and murders of village heads and ordinary residents alike, with an unknown number of civilians killed by crossfire or unexploded ordnance. A severe violation of human rights Besides the 10 people now missing from Minbya township, four villagers from Kyauktaw township and two civilians from Mrauk-U have also disappeared since fighting occurred in those areas in February. Thein Shwe Maung contacted the Myoma Police Station in Mrauk-U on Wednesday, but police said the Minbya township residents were not in their custody. Tun Thar Sein, a lawmaker representing Mrauk-U in the Rakhine state parliament, said that authorities need to inform the families about their relatives. Any group or institution that arrests people must inform their families about where they were taken, he said. We need more transparency. Local villagers expressed concern for the patient who was unconscious when he and the others were detained. Making an arrest of an unconscious patient is a severe violation of human rights by the Myanmar Army, said AA spokesman Khine Thukha said. Rights groups have accused both government troops and ethnic rebel soldiers of human rights violations in Myanmars conflict zones, including Rakhine, Shan, and Kachin states. Cited violations include kidnapping, torturing, and killing civilians, and forcing them to work as laborers. The U.S. State Department noted in its latest country report on human rights practices in Myanmar issued Wednesday that the military has committed abuses in continuing conflicts in Shan state and in neighboring Kachin state. Among the human rights abuses cited are arbitrary killings by security forces, the use of child soldiers by the government, trafficking in persons, crimes involving violence or threats targeting members of national, ethnic, and religious minorities, and the use of forced and child labor. Although the government took some limited actions to prosecute or punish officials responsible for abuses, the vast majority of such abuses continued with impunity, the report said. Some non-state groups committed human rights abuses, including killings, unlawful use of child soldiers, forced labor of adults and children, and failure to protect civilians in conflict zones, it said. These abuses rarely resulted in investigations or prosecutions. Members of the Kholon Lishaw ethnic minority group from the Pansay area of Namhkam township in Myanmar's northern Shan state hold a press conference in Mandalay, March 13, 2019. Credit: RFA Ethnic villagers speak out Also on Wednesday, ethnic villagers held a press conference in the central Myanmar city of Mandalay to draw attention to civilians who have been abducted by the rebel Taang National Liberation Army (TNLA) in the Pansay area of Namkham township in northern Shan state. The township, home to ethnic minority Shan, Kachin, Palaung, and Kholon Lishaw residents, is in a major opium-growing area that is a hub for Myanmars illegal drug trade. The TNLA, a Palaung ethnic armed group, said it had apprehended locals involved in the illegal drug trade in Namkham, an area controlled by a Myanmar military-backed militia. The TNLA is abducting, detaining, and extorting money from Pansay locals, endangering the ethnic minorities who live in the region especially the Kholon Lishaw group and inciting interethnic conflict, Pansay locals said at the news conference. Theint Theint Tun from the Kholon Lishaw Information Committee said members of the ethnic group are now at risk since there is no one protecting them. She implored the government to ensure their safety and provide them with assistance. The Kholon Lishaw, who live in more than 100 villages in the Pansay region, are now living in fear after hearing about the abductions, she said. The TNLA is committing various acts of persecution in the region, Theint Theint Tun said. They are committing rights violations and abuses. These incidents are increasing. They arrest and abduct whoever they can find and extort money for their release, she said. They also seize livestock from the village. They demand as much as 3 million to 5 million kyats (U.S. $ 2,000-3,500) as ransom. They have arrested both young and old. The Kholon Lishaw people also want the government to ensure them equal rights, she said. We are begging the authorities not to ignore us, Theint Theint Tun said. We will not survive as an ethnic group. We need help to achieve rights equal to those of other major ethnic groups. Tens of thousands of the Kholon Lishaw have left the region in recent years for employment and out of fear of abduction by armed groups, she said. She also called for assistance from civil society groups, saying that the Kholon Lishaw population never receives any aid and that most incidents such as abductions are never reported. The TNLA told RFA that its soldiers arrested Pansay residents because they were involved in the illegal drug trade. Locals, however, rejected the TNLAs claim, saying that the soldiers had no cause to abduct children and seize pigs during the arrests. RFA could not independently confirm whether Pansay locals are involved in drug cases. Villagers also said that the TNLA has asked for ransom payments of more than 3 million kyats for the release of those it apprehended. It has made our lives difficult Other Pansay residents say the TNLA is arresting all people, regardless of gender or age. A woman whose three children had been abducted said she had to sell all the familys goats and cattle to pay for the 5-million-kyat ransom for her eldest child and 3.6 million kyats for the younger ones. It has taken a toll on our livelihoods, she said. It has made our lives difficult. TNLA spokesman Major Tar Aik Kyaw told RFA that the armys detentions of civilians are not based on ethnicity and that soldiers will apprehend anyone involved in drug cases in the region. We have arrested opium farmers, he said. We arrested them for growing, selling, and buying opium. We released them after a few months of captivity. We cannot keep them for years during this revolutionary period. RFA was unable to reach Shan state government officials for comment regarding the abductions. The TNLA has been fighting the Myanmar Army and the Restoration Council of Shan State/Shan State Army-South (RCSS/SSA-S) in the region since late November 2015, about six weeks after the signing of a nationwide cease-fire agreement (NCA) between the government and some of the countrys more than 20 ethnic armed groups. The RCSS is one of 10 signatories of the NCA, while the TNLA has been excluded from signing the accord because of its ongoing hostilities with Myanmars armed forces. Reported by Min Thein Aung and Khaymani Win for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Nandar Chann and Ye Kaung Myint Maung. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Tibetan villagers needing state help to overcome poverty in Tibets Markham county are being forced to memorize the names of top Chinese leaders and pledge their loyalty to the ruling Chinese Communist Party as a condition for assistance, sources in the region say. Villagers must also learn to sing the Chinese national anthem, a source in Markham told RFAs Tibetan Service this week. Those failing the test may not receive Chinese assistance, or may find that their assistance has been temporarily suspended, RFA source said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Launched in Markham at the beginning of this year, the campaign tying poverty alleviation programs for Tibetans to public displays of loyalty to China was started earlier in nearby Pashoe county, also in Chamdo, the source said. There, the leader of a local Tibetan womens group became famous for reciting the names of Chinas five previous national leaders and for describing thepurpose of Chinese policies in Tibetan rural areas, he said. This was then held up as an example to other Tibetans, and after this the drive to force Tibetans to memorize leaders names and to explain and support Chinas policies in the countryside has expanded in a big way. Villagers uneducated in Chinese find it difficult to pass the policies test, though, the source said, adding that many are then left without help and face financial hardships. 'More mouths to feed' Speaking in a video recently obtained by RFAs Tibetan Service, a young villager in Markham describes the procedure required to apply for state assistance, saying he first had to report his financial circumstances to a unit leader in his village. The unit leader then spoke to village officials, who came to inspect my house, and I told them that I had little grain for food, only a small parcel of land, and no livestock to rear, and that I had more mouths to feed than able-bodied family members to do any work, the villager said. The villager, a worker in the forestry department, was then granted 3,600 yuan (U.S. $537) in 2017, and 3,500 yuan (U.S. $522) last year, he said. In another video, also obtained by RFA, a Tibetan official working for China is seen telling local Tibetans they must repay Chinas generosity in providing them with food, clothing, and housing with love for the Communist Party and for Chinas leaders. However, poverty reduction schemes have been made necessary only because China has disrupted Tibetans traditional way of life by confiscating their land, another local source said, also speaking on condition he not be named. And those affected Tibetans are now enrolled in [the programs] to receive government aid, he said. Reported by Lobsang Choephel and Dawa Dolma for RFAs Tibetan Service. Translated by Dorjee Damdul. Written in English by Richard Finney. 1996 world champion Damon Hill has backed Daniel Ricciardo's Red Bull exit. Ricciardo's Australian countryman Mark Webber said Ricciardo deciding to join Renault for 2019 was "weird", but Hill says it actually reflects a deep desire to succeed. "He always has a massive grin on but deep down there is a burning desire to win and he knows that his clock is running," he told The Age. "He is 29 years old and, if you like, he might have felt the emphasis, the backing, has all gone to the younger guy in Max Verstappen -- and he is not having it," Hill added. "I think he is thinking 'I am not going to be parked up and I have one more chance at it'. You have got to keep putting yourself forward and giving yourself the option of being number 1. "You don't want to be marginalised in this sport and be happy at number 2. Daniel would hate himself forever if he accepted that." Ricciardo's former Red Bull boss Christian Horner thinks the Australian left the team because he was afraid of being beaten by Verstappen. But Hill said: "He still believes he can beat Max Verstappen. He went to Renault because it helps if you have a team looking at you and you can then draw in all the talent that they have in the team around you." He doesn't even think Renault's budget - which is smaller than Mercedes, Ferrari's and Red Bull's - will be a problem for the French works team. "They have huge resources if they want to," said Hill. "If the car is going well, they will then pour in money and they have a got a history in the sport -- it's not like they haven't done it before." (GMM) Amnesty International has accused the European Union of being "complicit" in the systematic, unlawful, and frequently violent pushbacks and collective expulsions by Croatian police of thousands of asylum seekers to neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, where they live in squalid and unsafe refugee camps. In a report published on March 13, the London-based human rights watchdog said that by prioritizing border control over compliance with international law, European governments are not just turning a blind eye to vicious assaults by the Croatian police, but also funding their activities. It warned of a growing humanitarian crisis on the edge of the European Union. The route through Bosnia and Croatia has become increasingly popular among migrants and refugees from countries in Asia and the Middle East including from Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan -- since Hungary erected fences along its borders. WATCH: Migrants Accuse Croatian Police Of Brutality At Border (from November 2018) While most managed to continue onward, around 5,500 women, men, and children are currently trapped in two Bosnian towns near the Croatian border -- Bihac and Velika Kladusa -- living in abandoned factories without basic amenities, Amnesty International said. For the report -- titled Pushed To The Edge: Violence And Abuse Against Refugees And Migrants Along Balkan Route -- the group said it surveyed 94 migrants stranded in the temporary accommodation camps in Bihac and Velika Kladusa between June 2018 and January 2019. Nearly all of them said that they were pushed back by Croatian police, and almost one-third of those interviewed described violence at the hands of police. Many described how they were beaten, had their documents destroyed and possessions stolen in what appears to be a systematic and deliberate policy by Croatian authorities designed to deter future attempts to enter the country, the report said. Reacting to the report, Croatian Interior Minister Davor Bozinovic said that his country has to prevent illegal migration as it is at the outer border of the EU. Bozinovic alleged in a statement that migrants often "falsely accuse" police officers of violence after they are prevented from entering Croatia. The Croatian police respect the migrants' fundamental rights and dignity and allow them access to systems of international protection if required, he said. Rights groups have in the past accused Croatian police of abusive tactics, with Zagreb denying the allegations. In Bosnia, the authorities cannot offer them adequate protection or living conditions and the improvised camps are unhygienic, lacking hot water, medical care, and sufficient food, Amnesty International said. The report said that potential asylum seekers are unlikely to get their asylum claims processed in Bosnia because of bureaucratic obstacles, inadequate legal assistance, and limited administrative capacity. Amnesty International urged the EU to "decisively" call on Croatia to halt police violence at its borders and use "appropriate measures to ensure Croatia's full compliance with international and EU law." The bloc also should provide additional assistance to Bosnia to improve the conditions for transiting and stranded people in the country. With reporting by AFP and Balkan Insight A Chechen blogger living in hiding in Poland has said the blood feud declared against him by a close ally of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov is nothing less than a death threat. Magomed Daudov on March 9 called Tumso Abdurakhmanov "an enemy to me and my brothers" after the blogger called Kadyrov's late father, former Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov, a traitor on his YouTube channel. Daudov, the speaker of the Chechen parliament, said he was "not going to kill" the blogger, but vowed to track him down and retaliate, using the Chechen term for "blood feud." "Let's settle this according to Muslim laws," Daudov said in an Instagram Live broadcast on March 12 as quoted by the AP news agency. "Daudov has issued a veiled threat: 'We will find you and kill you, punish you, kill you.' There's no other way to interpret the Chechen word 'chir,' which translates as 'blood feud,'" Abdurakhmanov told Current Time. Speaking from an undisclosed site in Poland, Abdurakhmanov said the threat resonated louder given his uncertain status there. "I have no kind of stability, I don't have any status, in fact, I'm illegal: at any moment they can apprehend me and expel me from the country, handing me over to Russia. It's a very dangerous situation. I struggle with it," the popular blogger explained. Having fled Chechnya in 2015, the 32-year-old has been unsuccessful in his attempts to be granted asylum in Europe. He has twice filed for asylum in Poland and has been turned down once already. He could face deportation if his current asylum application is rejected, despite strong opposition from human rights activists who warn he will face torture or death if he returns to Chechnya. 'Watch Your Back' Abdurakhmanov has continued to criticize the Kadyrov regime from abroad, focusing on human rights violations and corruption in Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim region in Russia's North Caucasus. His YouTube channel has more than 140,000 subscribers. Daudov warned the blogger to be vigilant in his Instagram message. "From now on, when you go to bed, make sure that you lock the door with a key. When you go outside, be vigilant. If you get a kick in the back, know that it's no accident," he said. It's not the first time the blogger has attracted Daudov's attention, according to Abdurakhmanov. In 2018, he claimed to have received a phone call from the Chechen official trying to convince him to return to Grozny. The blogger later released recordings of the conversation. Daudov has been described as a top ally of Kadyrov and has been linked to the 2017 "gay purge" in Chechnya. He and other Chechen officials deny any such suppression ever took place. Abdurakhmanov told Current Time that he was convinced Daudov's threat has the backing of many in Kadyrov's government. "I was threatened, and then I see how Kadyrov's officials comment among themselves, supporting the threat. High-ranking Kadyrov officials write about how they won't regret the means, or the forces, or the time needed to carry out this blood feud," he said. No Regrets Abdurakhmanov said he had no plans to issue any apologies for his remarks, as Kheda Saratova, a member of Chechnya's human rights council, suggested he should in comments to Current Time. "I didn't say anything that I need to apologize for. I only said what I think, I didn't insult anyone and didn't do anything for which I need to apologize," the blogger countered. "As for my insults, as they call them, I only expressed my opinion, I didn't offend anyone or call them names," Abdurakhmanov continued. "I called Akhmat Kadyrov a traitor, and I will repeat those words again: Akhmat Kadyrov and any of his followers serving the Russian authorities is a traitor to my people. And I don't plan to apologize for saying that." Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated by Chechen separatists in May 2004, was a controversial figure, having fought against Russia in 1994-96, but who later sided with Moscow. Asked about Daudov's threat, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on March 12 that there was "no such thing" as blood feuds in Russian law, although it is still widespread in Chechnya, according to an AP report on Peskov's comments. Peskov did not directly criticize the Chechen official. For his part, Daudov said his words were misinterpreted. Written by Tony Wesolowsky based on a report by Irina Romaliiskaya of Current Time BRUSSELS -- The European Parliament has endorsed a legal framework for cooperation between the bloc and Afghanistan, taking the agreement one step closer to ratification. A total of 513 lawmakers on March 13 backed the EU-Afghanistan Cooperation Agreement on Partnership and Development (CAPD), with 85 voting against it. The CAPD, described as the "first contractual relationship" between the EU and Afghanistan, was signed by the sides in February 2017, leading to its provisional application as of December that year. The full entry into force of the agreement is now subject to ratification by the national and certain regional parliaments of the EU member states. The CAPD provides the basis for regular political dialogue, including on human rights, as well as cooperation in areas such as the rule of law, health, and education, according to the European Parliamentary Research Service. The agreement also sets out actions to combat corruption, money laundering, the financing of terrorism, organized crime, and narcotics. The European Parliament also passed a nonbinding resolution on March 13 expressing concern over the "fragility and instability" of the Western-backed government in Kabul and the "lack of control it exerts in much of the country." The text calls on EU member states to "assist in efforts against the long-term trend of inter-ethnic tensions that contributes to the disintegration of central power and to support the rich multi-ethnic fabric of Afghan society." The vote took place the day after Taliban and U.S. negotiators concluded another round of talks in Qatar aimed at ending the nearly 18-year war in Afghanistan -- half of which is reportedly controlled by the militant group. Both sides reported progress during the latest negotiations. Nasrin Sotoudeh, an Iranian lawyer known for defending women's rights, has been sentenced to a lengthy prison term and 148 lashes, according to her husband. The charges include "colluding against the system" and "insulting" Iran's supreme leader. Amnesty International says Sotoudeh's case is part of an increasingly harsh crackdown on rights activists in Iran. WASHINGTON -- Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman for U.S. President Donald Trump, has been sentenced to an additional 43 months in prison, a ruling that will put the once-influential Washington lobbyist behind bars for 7 1/ 2 years on charges stemming from his work for Ukrainian politicians. Less than 30 minutes after the sentence was announced in Washington, D.C. federal court on March 13, one of the top prosecutors in New York City announced more than a dozen new charges against Manafort, on mortgage fraud and other related crimes. The new sentence, handed down by U.S. Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, D.C. federal court, was the culmination of two separate but overlapping prosecutions against Manafort, stemming from his work on behalf of pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmakers. The cases were among the first brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was appointed in May 2017 to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and interactions between Trump associates and Russian officials. Both Jackson and the judge in the earlier case repeatedly said that Manaforts prosecution was not about any alleged conspiracy to collude with Russian officials. Rather, Jackson said, it was about Manaforts decade of lobbying on behalf of Ukrainian politicians, and the efforts he made to hide his income and, according to prosecutors, launder money. It is hard to overstate the number of lies, the amount of fraud involved, Jackson said. There is no question the defendant knew better and knew what he was doing. "Saying 'I'm sorry I got caught' is not an inspiring plea for leniency," she said. In comments to court before his sentencing, Manafort, who was seated in a wheelchair and dressed in a suit and tie, expressed remorse, and asked the judge for leniency. "I am sorry for what the Ive done and for all the activities that brought us here today," said Manafort, who is 69. "This case has already taken everything from me." The Washington case stemmed from two conspiracy counts, each punishable by as long as five years in prison. One directly related to the work Manafort did for a decade for Ukraines pro-Russia Party of Regions. Funded in part by wealthy and powerful Ukrainian oligarchs, Manaforts political strategies helped resurrect party chief Viktor Yanukovych's political career and propelled him to the presidency in 2010. In 2014, however, Yanukovych was driven from office after months of massive street protests, and he fled to Russia. After that, Manaforts income dried up, and, prosecutors found, he resorted to lying on mortgage and bank loan applications, and hiding income for tax purposes. Prosecutors charged him with conspiracy to defraud the United States by, among other things, failing to register as an agent working for a federal government. 'Undermining American Ideals' The second charge stems from his conspiring with a shadowy Russian operative to influence witness testimony, including that of several prominent European politicians who were being questioned by U.S. prosecutors after Manafort had been charged. The operative, named Konstantin Kilimnik, has been accused by prosecutors of being a conduit to Russian intelligence agencies. Kiliminik is believed to be in Moscow, and is unlikely to ever face court proceedings in the United States. Manafort "served to undermine, not promote, American ideals of honesty, transparency, and playing by the rules," lead prosecutor Andrew Weissman told the court. In the earlier sentence, which was issued on March 7 in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, the case more narrowly focused on the tax and bank fraud allegations. The 47-month sentence he was issued in that case sparked outrage among some Democrats and other legal experts, who accused the judge of being overly lenient with Manafort. With the exception of the witness tampering, the charges in the two parallel prosecutions predated Manafort's time as Trumps campaign manager, in 2016. During both trials, Manaforts defense team had sought to raise the question of whether Special Counsel Mueller had been appointed legally, but both judges quashed that effort. Still, in his closing remarks on March 13, lead defense lawyer Kevin Downing again suggested that Manaforts prosecution was directly tied to his work for the Trump campaign. "But for a short stint as campaign manager in a national election, I dont think we would be here today," he said. After the hearing, Downing told reporters outside the courthouse that Jackson had been "hostile" toward Manafort. "I think the judge showed that she is incredibly hostile toward Mr. Manafort and exhibited a level of callousness that I've not seen in a white-collar case in over 15 years of prosecutions," Downing said. During the trials, Trump had expressed sympathy for Manafort, and some legal experts have suggested that Manafort might be hoping for a pardon from Trump -- something the U.S. Constitution grants him the authority to do. The presidents constitutional pardon power, however, only extends to federal crimes, not state offenses. Several hours after the new sentence, Trump again said he felt sorry for Manafort. "On a human basis, it's a very sad thing," he said. Asked whether he was considering considering pardoning Manafort, Trump said: "I have not even given it a thought as of this moment." On March 13, shortly after Manaforts sentencing hearing concluded, Cyrus Vance, the district attorney for Manhattan, announced more than a dozen new criminal charges against Manafort. The charges relate to mortgage fraud and similar fraud in the U.S. state of New York. The sentences against Manafort come amid growing anticipation of Muellers final report on his nearly two-year investigation. By law, Mueller is required to submit his report to the attorney general, but its unclear when that might happen and what exactly would be made available, to the public or to Congress. In all, Mueller has charged 34 people, including Manafort, along with three companies. Others who have pleaded guilty include former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who is set to be sentenced in the coming months. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said the United States is seeking to "bring Iranian crude oil exports down to zero as quickly as market conditions will permit." In a speech to oil industry executives in Houston, Texas, on March 12, Pompeo urged the industry to work with the administration of President Donald Trump to promote U.S. foreign policy interests and restrict "bad actors" in global affairs. The United States has reimposed sanctions against Iran after withdrawing from a landmark 2015 agreement under which Tehran agreed to restrictions on its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Pompeo also said Washington will use all economic levers to force a solution to the crisis in Venezuela, where the United States and other countries have called on President Nicolas Maduro to resign. And he warned Europe not to get "hooked on Russian gas through the Nord Stream 2 project." He said Russia's 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea and its military involvement in eastern Ukraine were an effort to control Ukraine's oil and gas reserves. "We need to roll up our sleeves and compete by facilitating investment, encouraging partners to buy from us, and by punishing bad actors," Pompeo told the oil executives. Based on reporting by Reuters and AP KYIV -- Ukraine's presidential election is less than three weeks away and instead of focusing solely on campaigning, incumbent Petro Poroshenko and his camp are scrambling to put out numerous fires and fend off protesters at campaign rallies. Still trailing in the polls but having gotten a small bump in late February, Poroshenko is fighting an uphill battle to finish in the top two in the March 31 first-round vote for a shot at reelection. The first political blaze erupted two weeks ago, following a TV report by Ukrainian investigative journalists that accused the family of a former Poroshenko business partner and top national-security official of embezzling millions of dollars meant for the military in a time of conflict. This week, in a separate case, a regional governor appointed by Poroshenko was accused by Ukraine's National Anticorruption Bureau (NABU) of taking some $1 million in bribes, a charge that he has denied. Now the president is also under fire from his interior minister and top cop, Arsen Avakov, with whom he's had a long and difficult alliance, for allegedly using state resources in a vote-buying scheme targeting mostly pensioners. The allegation comes after similar charges from his election opponents and civil-society watchdogs. Poroshenko's office declined to comment on the allegations when reached by phone and did not respond to an e-mailed request. With the motto "army, language, faith," Poroshenko has sought to position himself as a strong commander in chief, Ukraine's nationalist savior, and the candidate who built the rapport with the West that is needed to keep the country on a westward path. But that has not been enough to win support from much of the Ukrainian public, which sees him as having failed to tackle entrenched corruption. That includes many unruly far-right nationalists from the controversial Azov movement, who on March 9 clashed with police outside of Poroshenko's administration in Kyiv and later in Cherkasy, where at least 15 police officers were wounded. Azov's leaders said they came to protest corruption in the defense sector in connection with the scandal, which is thought to have involved profiteering from smuggled military parts during the current conflict with Russia-backed separatists. The next day, the protesters followed Poroshenko to Zhytomyr. And they have announced another antipresidential protest for March 16. A paramilitary wing of Azov called the National Militia, which was involved in the violence and has attacked minority groups in the past, has been granted permission to be official election monitors. Damage Control The tumult threatens to undo Poroshenko's progress in February, when he rose in the polls to second place behind comedian and political newcomer Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the wake of two big achievements: the creation of an independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine and an amendment to the constitution to include aspirations to join the European Union and NATO. A fresh Rating Group poll indicates Poroshenko has already taken a hit from the recent scandals. This week it placed him third with 16.8 percent support, behind Zelenskiy and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who jumped to 18.3 percent. Zelenskiy held onto his lead but fell about two points to 24.7 percent in the poll. In damage-control mode, Poroshenko fired the national-security official implicated in the military corruption scandal, Oleh Hladkovskyy, and ordered authorities to investigate the allegations made against Hladkovskyy's son and two other entrepreneurs. And the president asked the government to fire Governor Valeriy Holovko, who oversaw the central Poltava region since 2014, while he was under investigation by NABU. But the president has not commented on the public accusations of vote-buying by Avakov, who called the scheme "incredibly sleazy," nor reports from civil society groups documenting numerous election violations, including alleged vote-buying schemes, tied to his campaign. Speaking to the RBK news outlet in Kyiv, Olga Aivazovska, head of the civil-watchdog group Opora, said that her organization had documented how Poroshenko's campaign had carefully created "a structure that can be used to motivate voters by material means." Previously, Opora reported dozens of cases between June 2018 and January 2019 in which Poroshenko party members allegedly conducted "indirect campaigning activities with the alleged use of budgetary resources." Opora and similar groups have also catalogued alleged violations from the camps of other presidential candidates, but a majority of them are linked to Poroshenko's. Betting On Incumbency Instead of tackling the accusations head-on, the president and his campaign have lobbed their own at opponents -- predominately Tymoshenko, who has called for Poroshenko to abandon his reelection bid and whom the incumbent's team appears to regard as his chief opponent. The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), the Prosecutor-General's Office, and the State Bureau of Investigation -- all subordinate to Poroshenko -- even searched the Tymoshenko campaign's offices after accusing her of buying votes. Separately, investigative journalists reported that Tymoshenko's camp had registered numerous suspicious donations to her campaign. Ukrainian police have recorded more than 2,000 campaign violations in total and officially opened more than 100 criminal cases related to the election. Yet, despite all of this, "the president seems to have enough campaign cards up his sleeve to win the vote," wrote Balazs Jarabik, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with a particular focus on Ukraine. He argued that the high number of undecided voters is likely to work in favor of the president -- a tested politician and leader -- rather than the untested Zelenskiy and divisive populist Tymoshenko. And he said that, while polarizing, the "either Poroshenko or Putin" message allegedly being pushed by Poroshenko seems to be working on an electorate frustrated by the Russian president's continued approach to Ukraine and pleased with Kyiv's westward turn. Moreover, his base "are the most committed of the country's voters," Jarabik added. Oleksiy Haran, a professor of political science at Kyiv's Mohyla Academy and head of research at the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation, argues that the incumbent still stands a great chance of winning because Ukrainians will vote "rationally." "People who support Poroshenko, they are aware of corruption scandals," he tells RFE/RL. "But they consider him to be the lesser evil." Still, with the fresh corruption allegations still making headlines and widespread disillusionment among voters who feel reforms have been slow or largely failed them, Poroshenko has his work cut out for him. And there is one more thing that stands against him -- history. In Ukraine's 28-year independence, only one incumbent president -- Leonid Kuchma in 1999 -- has won reelection. The United States has condemned the new prison sentences reportedly imposed on Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh in the strongest possible terms. We are outraged to hear reports that the Iranian regime sentenced...Sotoudeh to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes, State Department spokesman Robert Palladino said on March 12. This sentence is beyond barbaric, he added. Meanwhile, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Javaid Rehman, accused the Iranian government of stepping up its repression of human rights activists, lawyers, and trade unionists. In the absence of an announcement from Iranian authorities, there have been conflicting reports and statements about the length of the sentences imposed on Sotoudeh. Her husband, Reza Khandan, said she has been sentenced to an extra 10 years in prison on top of the five-year term she is currently serving. Khandan told the AFP news agency on March 12 that the new 10-year sentence was the longest of seven verdicts totaling 33 years in prison and was communicated to Sotoudeh in prison. It brings the lawyers total sentence after what rights groups called two grossly unfair trials to 38 years. But Khandan said that "only the longest sentence [in the latest case] will be served. He said Sotoudeh had also been sentenced to a total of 148 lashes for appearing in court without a head scarf and for another offense. The lawyer had been found guilty of charges including 'encouraging corruption and debauchery, "colluding [and] propaganda against the system, and disrupting public order," according to Khandan. Earlier this week, a judge at Tehran's Revolutionary Court said that Sotoudeh had been sentenced in her latest conviction to five years for colluding against the system and two years for insulting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Sotoudeh, the co-winner of the European Parliament's 2012 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, was arrested in June 2018 and ordered to serve a five-year sentence imposed on her in absentia in 2016. The lawyer in 2018 represented several of the women detained for removing their head scarves in public to protest against the countrys Islamic dress code. An outspoken critic of the Iranian establishment, Sotoudeh previously spent three years in prison on security charges after representing dissidents arrested during mass protests in 2009 against the disputed reelection of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. She has denied all charges against her. Speaking at a press briefing in Washington, Palladino said that Sotoudeh was sentenced in absentia without a fair trial by the notorious revolutionary court, which is led by Judge Moghiseh, an accused human rights violator. He said that the United States is calling on all of our partners and allies to speak out and demand the release of this courageous human rights defender and all those arbitrarily detained immediately. The Iranian regime makes a mockery of the entire legal system in Iran, placing innocent people at the mercy of accused human rights violators, he added. Khamenei last week appointed Ebrahim Raisi, a controversial hard-line cleric accused of gross human rights violations, as head of the country's influential Judiciary. In Geneva, Rehman called the latest case against Sotoudeh "a crystal-clear illustration of an increasingly severe state response." Speaking on the sidelines of a UN Human Rights Council session, Rehman said that there was an increasing concern that the civil space for human rights lawyers and defenders is being reduced." "It is deeply concerning. There is deepening repression," he told journalists. A spokeswoman for the European Commission called for an immediate review of Sotoudehs case, saying that her trial featured "a number of other violations of the right to due process." Amnesty International condemned the case against Sotoudeh as an outrageous injustice, while Human Rights Watch called the it a threat aimed at every human rights advocate in Iran to stop defending human rights. With reporting by AFP The commander of NATO forces in Europe, U.S. General Curtis Scaparrotti, has said that Russia continues to be the "primary threat" to Euro-Atlantic security and voiced concern about Moscow's military modernization program. Speaking on March 13 at a hearing in the House of Representatives, Scaparrotti also said Russia seeks to undermine any steps toward Euro-Atlantic integration in the Balkans using disinformation and backing extremist forces throughout the region. "Russia has continued its reemergence as strategic competitor and remains the primary threat to a stable Euro-Atlantic security environment," Scaparrotti told the House Committee on Armed Services. "While the United States maintains global military superiority over Russia, evolving Russian capabilities threaten or erode our competitive military advantage, challenge our ability to operate uncontested in all domains, and diminish our ability to deter Russian aggression." Scaparrotti also said that, in the face of Moscow's drive to upgrade its armed forces, U.S. military dominance could only be maintained if America keeps investing in defense. "I am very concerned about their [military] modernization program. It's real and it's a good modernization program that [Russian President Vladimir Putin] has been able to keep on track by-and-large. And so while today -- as I noted in my opening [remarks] -- we have a dominant force, in the years ahead we won't unless we continue to invest as well," he said. Balkan Inroads The U.S. general voiced concern about Russia making inroads in the Balkans, a region where the United States has "invested heavily and is critical to the security of Europe." "Generally speaking, their efforts are to undermine any movement toward integration with the Euro-Atlantic [structures] -- EU, NATO, etc. That's their general objective in every case throughout the Balkans," Scaparrotti told the committee. "Primarily they do this through disinformation, they do it through funding and support for fringe parties -- they don't necessarily determine whichever side it might be on as long as it's undermining the present government in any forward movement within those governments. We see that and, as I said, that has stepped up in the past six or eight months within the Balkans." The NATO commander voiced concern about Russia's potential attempts to undermine North Macedonia's efforts to join the alliance. The Balkan country last year signed a landmark agreement with neighboring Greece that changed its name from Macedonia to North Macedonia, ending a 27-year naming dispute. The agreement has opened North Macedonias path to likely NATO and EU membership, which Greece had previously blocked. "I would also say that Montenegro's accession to NATO -- now the 29th member -- and North Macedonia, who would potentially be the 30th [member], I believe is exactly what Russia did not want to see. I think they'll continue to try and address this with North Macedonia just as they tried to interfere in Montenegro's accession [to NATO]." Authorities in Montenegro, which joined the alliance in June, have accused two Russian officers with the GRU military intelligence of organizing a failed coup plot to prevent the small Balkan nation from joining NATO. Moscow, which opposed Montenegros bid to join the military alliance, has denied the allegations. The URL has been copied to your clipboard The code has been copied to your clipboard. Russian prison authorities posted video of people happily dancing in the snow at a facility in Krasnoturinsk, 1,400 kilometers east of Moscow, four days after former inmates held a news conference alleging abuse there. Jean Todt says he would like F1 to have two more teams. The FIA president admitted he is in talks with Liberty Media about tweaking the next Concorde Agreement so that new teams are able and encouraged to enter. "At the moment we have ten stable teams," said the Frenchman. "As you know we are talking with the commercial rights holder about the renewal of the Concorde Agreement. And we are considering a lot of things. "For me, I think it would be better to have 12 teams. If you speak to the team principals they are not happy because it will change the financial distribution. "But it's a long debate and part of the discussion," Todt added. He says he has the support of Liberty Media. "At the end of the day the most important thing is not so much the number of teams but the quality of the teams and the show," said Todt. "So that's something we do fully agree together with formula one and Chase Carey." (GMM) Legislation enabling Russian authorities to block websites and hand out punishment for "fake news" and material deemed insulting to the state or the public is headed to President Vladimir Putin's desk for his signature. The legislation, which Putin's own advisory human rights council says would groundlessly curb the freedom of expression, was approved by the upper parliament house, the Federation Council, in a 149-3 vote on March 13. The bills would allow the authorities to block websites or Internet accounts that publish what they deem to be "fake news" and penalizing those who post material found to be insulting to state officials, state symbols, or Russian society. Critics contend that the legislation, which Putin is widely expected to sign, is part of a Kremlin effort to increase control over the Internet and stifle dissent. The Federation Council and the State Duma, which gave final approval to the bills on March 7, are both dominated by the ruling United Russia party. On March 11, the Russian Presidential Council for Development of Civil Society and Human Rights urged the upper house to send the bills back to the Duma to be reworked. The presidential council, whose advice is often ignored by Putin, cited the European Convention on Human Rights and said that freedom of expression cannot be restricted exclusively due to doubts about whether what is being expressed is true. The "fake news" bill would empower the prosecutor-general and his deputies to determine what constitutes fake news without a court decision, after which the state media and communications watchdog Roskomnadzor would block the site or account. The bill would set fines for publishing "fake news" at up to 100,000 rubles ($1,525) for individuals, 200,000 rubles for public officials, and 500,000 rubles for companies. The "fake news" bill says publications officially registered with Roskomnadzor, including online media outlets, would be given a chance to remove reports deemed as fake news before their websites are blocked. It says websites that are not registered with Roskomnadzor would be blocked without warning. The other bill would establish fines of up to 100,000 rubles for insulting the Russian authorities, government agencies, the state, the public, the flag, or the constitution. Repeat offenders would face bigger fines and could be jailed for up to 15 days. Roskomnadzor would give Internet users 24 hours to remove material deemed by the prosecutor-general or his deputies to be insulting to the state or society, and those that failed to do so would be blocked, the bill says. With reporting by Vedomosti, Meduza, and Dozhd The Russian parliament's upper chamber, the Federation Council, has rejected a bill that would prohibit the establishment of hotels, hostels, and home-sharing activities in residential buildings. At a March 13 session, 151 lawmakers voted against the bill, while two supported it and four abstained. Federation Council speaker Valentina Matviyenko said that most members of the chamber support the idea but want its endorsement to be postponed until January 1, 2020. According to Matviyenko, businesses involved in hospitality services and home-sharing in residential buildings need time to prepare "to implement the law properly." The parliament's lower chamber, the State Duma, adopted the bill last week. The proposed legislation says that problems related to registration and taxation require a ban on the establishment of hotels, hostels, and home-sharing activities in residential buildings. The chairwoman of a Duma committee that handles issues related to residential buildings, Galina Khovanskaya, told journalists that the lower chamber would continue to work on the legislation. It is rare for the Federation Council to reject legislation approved by the Duma. Both chambers are dominated by the ruling United Russia party. Based on reporting by TASS and Interfax Russian police say a 93-year-old World War II veteran was beaten to death by assailants who are suspected of stealing cash and combat medals from the victim. The Investigative Committee said on March 13 that four intruders beat the man severely after breaking into his apartment in Podolsk, a city near Moscow, on March 6. The attackers took money and valuables including military awards and medals belonging to the veteran, who was hospitalized with head wounds and died several hours later, the committee said. Two suspects were detained at a Podolsk pawnshop where they tried to sell one of the stolen medals, the Investigative Committee said. It said a third suspect was detained separately and a fourth suspect remains at large. The tabloid Moskovsky komsomolets identified the victim as Anatoly Borisovich and said he joined the Soviet Union's Red Army in 1942 at age 17. Elderly people living alone are particularly vulnerable to robbery and attacks. In January, Russian authorities arrested three men on suspicion of beating a 97-year-old female World War II veteran to death while robbing her home in the southern Stavopol Krai. With reporting by Moskovsky komsomolets Max Verstappen has matured over the winter. That is the view of his boss at Red Bull, Dr Helmut Marko. With the departure of Daniel Ricciardo, 21-year-old Verstappen is now the clear team leader. "Max is still very young, but mature," he told Algemeen Dagblad newspaper. "I already noticed it during the Barcelona tests. In other years he thought testing was boring and saw it as a chore, but this year I saw enthusiasm and concentration." Verstappen has also been accused of impetuousness in the recent past, but Marko adds: "We will also see a patient Max this year, who understands that he cannot win all the races. "Without that (approach), you will not become a world champion." (GMM) Mapo tofu, sans pork. Photo: Noah Fecks These are, no doubt, boom times for New York vegans especially if youre the plant-eating type who prefers restaurants over tinkering away with faux cheese experiments in your kitchen what with the beefless pho, mock-meat tacos, Indo-Chinese Manchurian cauliflower, vegan junk food, and so on proliferating around the city. In a sign of the times, if there was any, new-school cafes take inspiration from diners while going heavy on vegetables. Still, maybe you were thinking to yourself recently, I want my mapo tofu vegan and my dan dan noodles, too. You may not have known where to go, and decided to go back to Buddha Bodai for dim sum, but now theres an answer. Over in the East Village, Sichuan food has been given a meatless makeover at the tiny, Sichuan peppercornpowered Spicy Moon. Quietly opened on East 6th Street in January, Spicy Moon was packed on a recent Friday, with people biding their time in the cramped but lively space for chili wontons and cumin tofu. Previously, the storefront was home to a ramen spot called Zen 6, which was bought by Spicy Moons owners last fall and then converted into the new restaurant in January. Dan dan noodles with beyond beef. Photo: Noah Fecks That was not the original intention. We were going to run it as a ramen business, but ramen is difficult these days, says the restaurants co-owner Nick, who asked only to identify himself by his first name for privacy. I have a business partner who owns multiple Sichuan restaurants, and my wife is vegan, Nick adds. (Along with his last name, he asked not to identify what restaurants his business partner owns, because its a family business and thats always complicated.) But no one has done a vegan Sichuan, and I told them theyre both crazy. Were not master chefs with 20 years of experience, were not that type of people. Still, they went for it, testing different vegan versions of things like oyster sauce, and opting to create what Nick calls a pretty basic menu. (They do use some newfangled products, making mountain-yam puffs with vegan cheese and turning beyond beef into meatballs.) The space itself looks more Mission Chinese than Szechuan House, which comes through at night when its splashed in red light; there are blonde wood tables, a few tall plants, and walls decorated with old photos and local art. When you sit down at your table, youre presented with a menu thats dim sumesque (the check boxes) with a millennial (pink) makeover. As for the menu itself, it covers a lot of Sichuan standards, dishes you might miss if you went from bingeing on twice-cooked pork to tinkering with your twice-cooked yuba. There are dan dan noodles, cumin-style tofu, a vegetable or tofu dry pot, and of course mapo tofu. The vegetable wontons in chili oil stand out for being a particularly good representative of the classic (most famously served in New York at Flushings White Bear), and were the highlight of a recent meal. Other dishes are versions of Chinese-American standards, like the General Tsos mushroom (breaded, fried, and nugget shaped, with a dipping bowl of sauce), the cold sesame noodles, and a flaky scallion pancake. While standards make up most of the menu, there are also less conventional items like the fried pickles with Szechuan sauce and cumin fries seasoned with the namesake spice, Sichuan peppercorn, and salt. That dish is definitely not a Sichuan classic, but you might recognize it from one of the citys best Chinese restaurants, Little Pepper. Those little eccentricities make Spicy Moon a more interesting place, and show the owners are trying to bring something else to the citys fast-expanding universe of vegan restaurants. The wontons in chili oil. Photo: Noah Fecks Kung Pao tofu. Photo: Noah Fecks Spicy Moon is also open for lunch. Photo: Noah Fecks Four make off with safe from Cancun Hotel Zone restaurant Cancun, Q.R. Four armed men who arrived behind a restaurant by boat in the Cancun Hotel Zone have allegedly left with the safe. The robbery was reported Monday morning by staff at Harrys Restaurant when the security guard reported being tied up and put inside a storeroom while the men robbed the restaurant. According to the security guard, four men allegedly arrived armed with guns at the restaurant by boat from Laguna Nichupte. They entered the premises, tied him up and proceeded to make off with the safe and bottles of liquor. The 32-year-old guard was finally able to contact the Tourist Police of the Cancun Hotel Zone at 7:00 a.m. when employees began arriving for their shift. On site surveillance cameras were apparently tampered with prior to the men committing the robbery. La Fiscalia General del Estado has begun an investigation into the robbery. There have not been any arrests. 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Two crews from Rotherham station were called to the Brentwood hotel and pub in Moorgate Road at 6.30am and helped move guests to a different part of the hotel. A dangerous structure engineer also attended the scene, said a fire service spokeswoman. Luckily no-one was injured in the incident, she added. Brentwood manager Alison Sissons confirmed the tree had fallen due to the stormy weather. Ms Sissons said some of the hotel rooms were closed this morning but the pub was open to customers. The pilot told air traffic control operators that the woman refused to continue the flight. This is totally a new one for us, one of the air traffic controllers said. The situation was considered as an emergency case. Its rare for pilots to request to turn around unless its a medical or mechanical emergency. A video of the pilot requesting Air Traffic Control in Arabic and English for permission to return has gone viral on social media. The story ended happily, with the mother and baby reunited. The pilot has been praised online for his rapid response to the distressed womans request.There have been plenty of high-profile stories of people forgetting their kids. However its hard to believe someone ever be so forgetful as to leave baby in the terminal, board the plane, and take off before realizing your mistake. There are few details regarding how the mother managed to do this but after all is something generated by the limits of the human nature. Some newspapers remembered that former PM David Cameron once left his then eight-year-old daughter Nancy in a Buckinghamshire pub. Overland Park, KS The Agriculture Council of America (ACA) will host National Agriculture Day on March 14, 2019. This will mark the 46th anniversary of National Ag Day which is celebrated in classrooms and communities across the country. The theme for National Ag Day 2019 is Agriculture: Food for Life. On March 13-14, 2019, the ACA will host major events in the nations capital including an event at the National Press Club as well as a Taste of Agriculture Celebration. Additionally, the ACA will bring approximately 100 college students to Washington to deliver the message of Ag Day to the Hill. These events honor National Agriculture Day and mark a nationwide effort to tell the true story of American agriculture and remind citizens that agriculture is a part of all of us. A number of agricultural associations, corporations, students and government organizations involved in agriculture are expected to participate. National Ag Day is organized by the Agriculture Council of America. The ACA is a nonprofit organization composed of leaders in the agricultural, food and fiber community, dedicating its efforts to increasing the publics awareness of agricultures role in modern society. The National Ag Day program encourages every American to: - Understand how food and fiber products are produced - Appreciate the role agriculture plays in providing safe, abundant and affordable products - Value the essential role of agriculture in maintaining a strong economy - Acknowledge and consider career opportunities in the agriculture, food and fiber industry In addition to the events in Washington, DC on March 13-14, 2019, the ACA will once again feature the Ag Day Essay Contest. The winning essay will be presented on National Ag Day. Visit http://www.agday.org for more information on National Ag Day in 2019. The Long X Arts Foundation of McKenzie County will host Getting the Pen Moving on Wednesday, March 20 from 1-3 p.m. at the Pioneer Museum of McKenzie County. The workshop will be guided by North Dakota native and award winning essayist and poet, Taylor Brorby, currently based out of Ames, Iowa. Brorby has conducted a writing workshop in McKenzie County in the past to rave reviews. Getting the Pen Moving is open to all levels of writers and is focused on the creative process and techniques to get you started and keep you working toward your writing goals. Registration is $10 per person and is limited, so reserve your spot today by calling Jessie at 701-770-8659 or [email protected] or register online at longxarts.com/writing-workshop.html The event is sponsored by the North Dakota Humanities council in partnership with the Pioneer Museum of McKenzie County. A Red Cross Blood Drive will be held on Tuesday, March 26, from 12:30 to 6 p.m. at St. Matthews Parish Center, 310 7th St. SE, Sidney. Walk-ins are welcome, but appointments are strongly recommended. To make an appointment, call Red Cross at 406-868-0911 or visit redcrossblood.org. Hailed as "among the most gifted musicians of his generation" with a "dazzling natural keyboard affinity" who "made quite an impression" by the Washington Post, American pianist/composer/improviser CHARLIE ALBRIGHT has been praised for his "jaw-dropping technique and virtuosity meshed with a distinctive musicality" by The New York Times. This highly gifted young pianist will appear in Watford City on Tuesday, March 26 at 7 p.m. at the Watford City High School Auditorium. His appearance here is part of the Watford City Area Concert Series, where members have access to a four-concert series in Watford City as well as reciprocity with concert series events in Dickinson, Williston, Hazen and Crosby. Born in Centralia, Washington, Charlie began piano lessons at the age of three. He earned an Associate of Science degree at Centralia College while he was in high school and was accepted to Harvard College/New England Conservatory of Music joint program, where he completed his Bachelor's degree as a Pre-med and Economics major at Harvard in 2011 and his Master of Music degree in Piano Performance at the New England Conservatory in 2012. He has recently earned his Artist Diploma from the Juilliard School of Music. Performance highlights include concerts at: Alice Tully Hall, Aspen Institute, BBC Concert Orchestra, Boston Pops, Kennedy Center, Kymi Sinfonietta (Finland), Lansing Symphony, Phoenix Symphony, Salle Cortot (Paris), San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Victoria Symphony (Canada), and four concerts with Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, one of which was for a ceremony at which Sen. Ted Kennedy received an honorary degree from Harvard. His many awards include Steinway Artist/2014 Avery Fisher Career Grant and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Charlie completed a highly successful 48 concert tour in the mid-west in the 2013-2014 concert season under the auspices of Allied Concert Services, and returns to thrill audiences that didn't hear him then, plus many that did. Concert series memberships are $50 for an adult, $150 for a family and $25 for students and can be purchased online at longxarts.com/concert-series.html. Non-concert series members can purchase a Charlie Albright ticket for $35 at the door or online at longxarts.com/charlie-albright-concert.html. Or call Jessie at 701-770-8659. Charlie will also be performing for students at the Watford City High School as part of his visit, sponsored by the Watford City Veterinary Center. If you're interested in a bussing option or have questions, contact Jessie at 701-770-8659 or email [email protected] March is designated as National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month. During this month, hospitals and medical facilities across the nation focus their attention on preventing, treating and curing colorectal cancer. According to the CDC, colorectal cancer, which occurs in the colon or rectum, is the leading cause for cancer death in Montana and the United States. This March, Sidney Health Center Cancer Care and the Richland County Health Department are teaming up to host a free Mens Health Screening on Friday, March 15 from 3:00 5:00 p.m. at the Cancer Care Suite, located at 214 14th Avenue Southwest in Sidney. This free colorectal and prostate cancer screening for men between the ages of 55-75 years will include a PSA (prostate specific antigen) lab draw test, a DRE (digital rectal exam) by Dr. Ralf Kiehl, Radiation Oncologist and a complimentary FIT (fecal immunochemical test) take-home kit. No appointment is necessary to take advantage of the screening. In fact, getting tested for colorectal and prostate cancer could save a life. On average, the lifetime risk of developing colon cancer is about one in 23 for men and women combined. And according the American Cancer Society, about one in nine men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime. Prostate cancer can be a serious disease, but most men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not die from it. In fact, more than 2.9 million men in the United States who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point are still alive today. The key to improving healthcare outcomes is through routine screening and early diagnosis of cancer, states Dr. Kiehl. Typically in rural areas, patients do not seek medical attention until they are late in the course of their disease. I believe we must provide opportunities for people living in the MonDak region to get evaluated on a regular basis. The American Cancer Society encourages people who have no identified risk (other than age) to begin regular colorectal cancer screening at age 50. Regular screening can, in many cases, prevent colorectal cancer altogether. This is because some polyps, or growths, can be found and removed before they have a chance to turn into cancer. There are several different tests that can be used to screen for colorectal cancer. However, a colonoscopy is considered to be the gold standard for testing since all other tests have to be followed up with a colonoscopy if anything is discovered. This type of screening is recommended every ten years. The take-home FIT kit looks for tiny amounts of blood in the stool, because cancers in the colon and rectum sometimes bleed. To take this test, individuals will take the kit home and return a sample to the lab for testing. With recommended screening, colorectal and prostate cancer can be prevented or detected at its earliest stage. If you are 55 years or older, take time to attend the Mens Health Screening on March 15. All participants will receive a complimentary drink card to a local establishment. No appointment is necessary. Questions may be directed to Sidney Health Center Cancer Care by calling 406-488-2504. Legendary worship leader and songwriter Don Moen will be inducted into GMA (Gospel Music Association)'s hall of fame this year. This event will take place at the 6th Annual GMA Honors and Hall of Fame Ceremony set on Wednesday, May 8, 2018 at Lipscomb University's Allen Arena. "This year marks our 6th Annual GMA Honors Celebration," GMA President and Executive Director Jackie Patillo says. "The Gospel Music Association and our partners, Christian Healthcare Ministries and CCLI, are delighted to celebrate our deserving inductees and honorees who are true heroes of the faith. Those being inducted into the GMA Gospel Music Hall of Fame will forever be acknowledged as musical innovators and the architects of our industry. We are proud to recognize each honoree for their commitment to stretch beyond themselves to make the world a better place." A pioneer of the modern praise & worship movement, Don Moen has spent his career as a worship leader, producer, songwriter, and music executive. If you ask Don Moen why God put him on this planet, he will tell you, "To be an architect who designs products and events that help people experience God's presence in a new and fresh way." In more than three decades of ministry and having led worship on every continent except Antarctica, Don has spent his entire career fulfilling that purpose. Don grew up in northern Minnesota studying classical violin and trombone before moving to Tulsa, Oklahoma to attend Oral Roberts University. While a student at Oral Roberts, Moen began touring with evangelist Terry Law and the musical group, Living Sound. For 10 years, Don ministered in communist countries throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as well as Africa. During those 10 years, Don was responsible for much of the group's arrangements and musical productions while witnessing first-hand how the power of praise and worship opened closed doors and hearts, and lead enslaved people into the presence of God. In 1984, Integrity Music asked him to lead worship on the first Hosanna! Music album, Give Thanks. Give Thanks became one of Integrity's most popular recordings ever and a benchmark for the genre, achieving gold certification status and now nearing platinum certification. By 1986, Don was hired at Integrity Music. After 8 years at Integrity, Don released his first album as an artist, Worship with Don Moen. Don went on to serve as President of Integrity Music and executive vice president/creative director for Integrity Media. In these roles, he spoke into the production of hundreds of products including all of the CDs and worship resources produced by Integrity Label Group as well as producing more than ten Hosanna! Music titles. During his tenure at Integrity, he sold over 5 million units and signed worship leaders and songwriters such as Paul Baloche, Ron Kenoly, Darlene Zschech, and many others. Don spent over 20 successful years at Integrity Music until leaving to focus more time on touring and his own creative endeavors. In addition to his writing and recording, Don makes time to tour domestically and abroad, having performed with artists such as Chris Tomlin, Michael W. Smith, Sara Groves and Paul Baloche. Don has served as a keynote worship leader for the National Day of Prayer events and continues to serve as a music industry spokesperson, having been featured on Fox News, NPR and in USA Today. Don is as popular overseas as he is at home in the U.S. His concerts and seminars have taken him to Ghana, South Africa, across Southeast Asia, India, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Japan, UAE, Qatar, Rwanda, Nigeria and and many other countries around the world. His works reflect his passion to create resources for the church that lead people into an honest and intimate relationship with the Lord. His song "God Will Make a Way" was nominated for a Dove Award, and two years later he would receive a Dove Award, for the musical God With Us. In 2002, his peers recognized that lifelong commitment and presented him with the Ray DeVries Church Ministry Award. Don continues this commitment today. Today Moen lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife Laura, where he is president of Don Moen Productions, oversees his international non-profit ministry Worship In Action, and spends time with his five children and 7 grandchildren. For 40 years, the GMA Foundation has honored well-deserving individuals and groups through an annual induction ceremony into the GMA Gospel Music Hall of Fame. Artists are eligible for inclusion in the GMA Gospel Music Hall of Fame after 25 years of participation in music and ministry. Nominees are chosen by GMA's Hall Of Fame Committee which is comprised of historians & industry leaders from the various gospel music genres. Inductees are selected by electors from across the industry in four categories: CCM, Gospel, Southern Gospel and Non-Performing. Nominees can be submitted year-round for consideration by the public at www.gospelmusichalloffame.org. Tags : Don Moen don moen news GMA Hall of Fame Sidney Doctors spend their lives helping and healing others, and in 1990, Congress passed and President George H. Bush signed a bill into law proclaiming March 30 as National Doctors Day. Celebration of this day has grown from simply expressing our gratitude to our physicians to using this day as an opportunity to share some positive messages for the medical profession. As part of National Doctors day, the Fourndation for Community Care invites you to recognize a special physician who cared for you or a loved one. Let your physician know how nuch they are appreciated your words and support are the most powerful source of gratitude. In addition to the over 20 highly skilled physicians who are affiated with Sidney Health Center, the Foundation is proud to support doctors who ensure quality care for all of Richland County, from dentists to optometrists. Please send your message of appreciation to the Foundation for Community Care at [email protected], or call the Foundation at 406-488-2273. Community members may also make a contribution in honor of a physician at https://foundationforcommunitycare.org. Not only will the gift affirm the commitment of an exceptional doctor, it will also support the critical programs and lifesaving care provided every day at Sidney Health Center and across eastern Montana. Sidney, MT Community members in Sidney and Richland County may soon be receiving a survey form in their mailbox. This survey will be sent to a random sample of homes and will help Sidney Health Center identify the health services needed in the community. This information will be used for strategic planning, grant applications, new programs, and by community groups interested in addressing health issues. The Montana Office of Rural Health is assisting Sidney Health Center in the analysis of local community needs, use of local health care services and overall community health. This process was developed to maintain quality health care to serve the continuing and future needs of the community. The community healthcare assessment process promotes healthcare as a local affair. Citizens of rural counties can take responsibility for the health of their community by completing the survey they receive in their mailbox. Most communities face a large number of complex issues in providing high quality healthcare, but fortunately, Richland County can engage in effective problem-solving, which is the most important factor in the survival of rural health services. An accompanying goal of this process is to keep health care dollars within the local community. While the vast majority of health care can be provided locally, rural citizens often drive to large medical centers for care, spending money on health care and non-health care purchases that could be spent locally. It is estimated that within a typical rural community, millions of dollars of revenue is lost in this way. This revenue could be retained in the local community with stronger community-health care provider linkages. Sidney Health Centers campus includes an acute care (25-bed) hospital, clinic area, cancer care center, certified sleep center, retail pharmacy and an extended care facility, offering a complete range of services from birth through end-of-life. These primary areas are complemented by several outpatient services including radiology, laboratory and rehab services to name a few. The purpose of the survey is to obtain information from a wide range of participants to assist in planning our programs, services, and facilities to best serve the needs of our community and the surrounding area, stated Jen Doty, Sidney Health Center CEO. We are pleased to be able to bring some of the best community health resources to Sidney Health Center. The goal of this initiative is to assist forward-thinking rural hospitals and communities in aligning their resources, to address their present and future needs in the best way possible, said Natalie Claiborne, Assistant Director, Montana Office of Rural Health. Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra Ahmedabad, Mar 13: Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra Tuesday targeted the Modi government over "unfulfilled" promises and "destruction" of institutions and said she was saddened by what was happening in the country. Addressing her first political rally in Gujarat after assuming charge as Congress general secretary in early February, she advised people to be vigilant, treat their vote as a "weapon" and ask right questions. "Our institutions are being destroyed. Wherever you see, hatred is being spread. "Nothing matters more to us that you and I protect this nation, work for it and move forward together," the Congress leader said. "I am saddened by what is happening in our country today. I want you all to be more aware. That is the best sign of patriotism. "Your vote is your weapon. You are not supposed to harm someone with that weapon. But it will make you stronger," she said. Advertisement Congress president Rahul Gandhi Congress president Rahul Gandhi and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi were present at the rally near Adalaj village of Gandhinagar district. In her address, she asked people not to fall prey to "meaningless issues" and asked them to broach the right questions. "You are going to decide your future in this election. Don't fall prey tomeaningless issues. Focus on issues that will make you grow, like how youth will get jobs, how women will feel safe and what should be done for farmers," she said. Launching an attack on the Modi regime in the prime minister's home state, Gandhi Vadra said it did not "fulfil" its promises of providing jobs to crores of people. "You need to take decisions wisely. Question those who made tall promises. Ask what happened to the promise of creating two crore jobs. "What happened to the promise of depositing Rs 15 lakhs in your bank accounts?" she said. The Congress leader said it is the nature of this country to convert hatred into love and compassion. Advertisement UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi On the ensuing Lok Sabha polls, she said people should raise the right issues and take wise decisions. With this mega rally, the Congress sounded its poll bugle for the April-May Lok Sabha elections. Earlier in the day, a meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the party's highest decision-making body, was held in Gujarat after a gap of 58 years. The last CWC meeting in Gujarat was held at Bhavnagar way back in 1961 Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. CLIFTON PARK, N.Y. A Clifton Park woman was charged with assault, violating an order of protection and unlawful possession of marijuana following a domestic dispute. On March 9, State Police in Clifton Park arrested Victoria J. Maniscalco, 44, shortly after noon at a residence while responding to a domestic dispute. Maniscalco was charged with criminal contempt first degree, assault third degree and unlawful possession of marijuana. Upon arriving, troopers interviewed the victim who stated that they had been involved in an argument with Maniscalco during which she struck them in the head with a glass jar containing marijuana. The victim sustained minor injuries. During the investigation, it was discovered that the victim was currently the protected party in an order of protection against Maniscalco, who was subsequently placed in custody. Maniscalco was arraigned in Clifton Park Town Court on $1,500 cash bail or $3,000 bond. She is due back in court on a later date. SARATOGA COUNTY, N.Y. New York State Police investigators in Clifton Park and Brunswick, with the assistance of the Waterford Police Department, arrested a Waterford man for engaging in sexual contact and exchanging indecent content with the victim via text message. Jessie R. Mayeaux, Jr., 37, of Waterford, was charged with rape third degree, criminal sex act third degree, and disseminating indecent material to a minor first degree. State Police investigators received a complaint from the parents of the victim that Mayeaux was engaging in sexual contact with their child. Investigation revealed Mayeaux had sexual intercourse with the teenaged victim, and had exchanged indecent content with the victim via text message. Mayeaux was arraigned in the Town of Halfmoon Court and remanded to Saratoga County Jail in lieu of $15,000 cash bail or $30,000 bond. A good match Students at UofSC medical schools in Columbia, Greenville await their Match Day fate Fourth-year medical student Ashley McCaskill holding a baby she delivered during her clinical rotation at a hospital in Tanzania. When administrators at the hospital in Mbeya discovered the depth of clinical experience Ashley McCaskill had earned at the UofSC School of Medicine, they gave her greater responsibities in the obstetrics and gynecology department. The fourth-year medical student was in the African country of Tanzania for a monthlong clinical rotation before graduation. At first, the situation caused panic, which quickly turned into confidence as McCaskill delivered dozens of babies and placentas, repaired episiotomies and cared for the gynecological needs of hundreds of women. The hospitals lack of technology provided her with plenty of opportunities. With only one ultrasound machine at the hospital, she was forced to rely on her examination skills to accurately diagnose patients. I have a lot more confidence in my skills, McCaskill says. She hopes that confidence will be key when Match Day arrives. Thats the day each year this year on March 15 that medical students across the United States find out which residency program selected them. The decision or match determines where the new doctors will spend the next three to five years depending on the specialty. For McCaskill, who worked at womens clinics both in medical school and while an undergraduate at Furman University, the ideal situation would be a general OB-GYN position. I feel like I can relate to female patients," she says. I enjoy taking care of and advocating for women, specially because most of their obstetric or gynecologic complaints are so deeply rooted in their emotional and spiritual health. Ethan Brown opening his match letter in March 2018. Brown was selected for an emergency medicine residency at Greenville Hospital System. McCaskill interviewed at 11 hospitals, mainly in the Southeast, with the hope that shell get to stay close to her home in Columbia. The uncertainty may be nerve-wracking, but the payoff has the potential to be enormous. I was thrilled to finally open my letter, says Ethan Brown, who went through the match process last year as a student at the School of Medicine Greenville. Brown grew up in Pickens, S.C., and, like McCaskill, wanted to stay close to home. He was excited when he was selected for one of only 10 spots in the Greenville Health Systems emergency department. These are the people I grew up around. These are the people I want to take care of, Brown says. The selection was especially meaningful because Brown had gone through GHSs Medical Experience Academy, an initiative designed to head off an impending physician shortage in South Carolina, while an undergraduate at Clemson University. The MedEx program allows high school and college students to see firsthand what its like to work in the health care field. Prior service as a medic in the Army National Guard solidified Browns decision to choose emergency medicine as a specialty. It also helped that School of Medicine Greenvilles curriculum requires all first-year medical students to complete an EMT training course. Becoming a doctor has always been the goal. Giving back to my community has become a calling. To do both in the place I call home, thats more than I could have dreamed for, Brown says. The dream also may require some science for the 30,000 medical students who take part in the match process. Each student ranks their picks for a residency program at the same time that the residency programs rank the students. The scores are fed into a computer and calculated. I never imagined going into medical school that my residency would be based on a computer algorithm, McCaskill says. Share this Story! Let friends in your social network know what you are reading about Even if humans radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions soon, important crop-growing regions of the world can expect changes to rainfall patterns by 2040. In fact, some regions are already experiencing new climatic regimes compared with just a generation ago. The study, published March 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, warns that up to 14 percent of land dedicated to wheat, maize, rice and soybean will be drier, while up to 31 percent will be wetter. The study uses four emissions scenarios from low to high to predict time of emergence (TOE) of permanent precipitation changes, meaning the year by which precipitation changes remain permanently outside their historical variation in a specific location. The research shows that quick action on emissions -- in line with 2015's Paris Agreement -- would push TOE projections deeper into the future or reduce the size of affected areas. Drier regions include Southwestern Australia, Southern Africa, southwestern South America, and the Mediterranean, according to the study. Wheat cropland in Central Mexico is also headed for a drier future. Wetter areas include Canada, Russia, India and the Eastern United States. The four crops in the study represent about 40 percent of global caloric intake and the authors say that, regardless of how much mitigation is achieved, all regions -- both wetter and drier -- need to invest in adaptation, and do so urgently in areas expected to see major changes in the next couple of decades. However, in the scenarios with low greenhouse gas emissions, most regions have two-three decades more to adapt than under high-emission scenarios. Low-emission scenarios, the authors stressed, likely imply less need for potentially costly adaptation to new rainfall regimes. Wheat under heat Drier conditions are expected for many major wheat producers. In Australia, about 27 percent of wheat-growing land will see less precipitation, under a mid-emissions scenario. Algeria (100 percent), Morocco (91 percent), South Africa (79 percent), Mexico (74 percent), Spain (55 percent), Chile (40 percent), Turkey (28 percent), Italy (20 percent) and Egypt (15 percent) are other major producers that will be affected. Higher emissions mean a larger amount of land will become dry sooner, the study found. advertisement "These are definitely countries that will need to think rather quickly what they'd like to do with their wheat production," said Maisa Rojas, the study's lead author and climatologist at Universidad de Chile. Colleagues at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, the University of Leeds, Chile's Center for Climate and Resilience Research, and Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (UC) co-authored the study. "What we're predicting are probably conservative years for time of emergence," said Rojas. "Detectable precipitation changes are of course not only important for agriculture, but for water resource management more in general, so our results are relevant for other sectors as well." Speed of change One stunning aspect of the study is how quickly global precipitation is changing. The baseline for comparison is 20 years spanning 1986-2005. A handful of regions already have crossed that "historical" average into an entirely new rainfall regime, including Russia, Norway, Canada and the parts of the East Coast of the United States. The study projects that up to 36 percent of all land area will be wetter or drier under a high-emission scenario. "Farmers growing crops in those areas are going to experience significantly different conditions than what they are used to," said Julian Ramirez-Villegas, a scientist with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). "They're going to be completely outside their normal historical environments and many farmers are already struggling with historic variability." Areas not reflected in the study are likely to have precipitation changes as well, said Rojas. But because natural variation in those areas is high, extreme change is needed before researchers can detect their times of emergence. advertisement "Other studies have examined time of emergence in global temperature and precipitation," said Fabrice Lambert, a UC professor and co-author. "The interesting thing about this study is that we overlay the climatic results with spatial cropland distribution and growing seasons to show which agricultural production regions will be impacted by precipitation changes, and how much time they have to prepare." The world's most populous countries -- China and India -- are among those that will have much wetter fields for the four crops included in the study, under any emission scenario. Percentage of cropland that will extend into high double-digits. Asia's other big rice producers, including Japan, Korea and the Philippines will have TOEs for increased rainfall. Wheat fields northern Europe, the United States, Canada and Russia will have higher precipitation. More precipitation may mean higher production, but when coupled with rising sea levels, higher temperatures and increased potential for flooding, higher production is not assured, said the authors. "The precise nature of the changes is impossible to predict," said Andy Challinor, a co-author and Professor at the Priestley International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds. "What this study tells us is that adaptation needs to be agile. For the first time, we can tell what changes to be ready for -- and when they are expected -- in our major crop-growing regions. Prior to this study, the rainfall changes experienced by crops were thought to be so unpredictable that no real advice could be given." A cutting-edge blood test discovered by Indiana University School of Medicine researchers could help more accurately diagnose military veterans and other people experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, and potentially provide more precise treatments and prevention. A study led by psychiatry professor Alexander Niculescu, MD, PhD, and published this week in the high-impact SpringerNature journal Molecular Psychiatry, tracked more than 250 veterans in over 600 visits at the Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center in Indianapolis to identify molecules in the blood that can help track stress intensity. According to Niculescu's findings, the blood test can accurately identify people who are at risk of stress disorders or are experiencing them severely. "PTSD is a disorder that affects a lot of veterans, especially those involved in combat. It's also an underappreciated and underdiagnosed disorder among the civilian population, whether it be the result of abuse, rape, violence or accidents" said Niculescu, who worked with other Department of Psychiatry and VA researchers on the study, as well as collaborators at The Scripps Research Institute and University of California Irvine. "Countless people are underdiagnosed with stress disorders, which may manifest themselves by drinking more, other addictions, suicide or violence. Our research has broader relevance for not just veterans but the general public." The decade-long study looked at the expression of genes in the blood, starting with the entire genome, which has over 20,000 genes. Over the course of multiple visits, researchers tested participants in both low- and high-stress states -- their blood analyzed for detectable changes in expression of genes between those two different states that could serve as biological markers (biomarkers) for stress. Researchers were able to narrow the study's focus down to 285 individual biomarkers (related to 269 genes) that can objectively help diagnose patients with PTSD, as well as determine the severity of their stress and predict future hospitalizations. They also compared these biomarkers with other well-known markers of stress and aging, such as telomer length. The biomarker signature helped identify new potential medications and natural substances to treat stress disorders that could be paired in a personalized way with individuals. "There are similar tests like this in other fields, like cancer, where a physician can biopsy the affected part of the body to determine the stage of disease. But when it comes to mental health, biopsying the brain isn't an option," Niculescu said "Our research is applying similar concepts from other areas of medicine, but we're engineering new ways that will allow us to track mental symptoms objectively, including stress, using blood, or so-called 'liquid biopsies.'" Much like with his recent breakthrough in developing a blood test to measure pain, and his past work on suicide, Niculescu said this research could be life-changing for individuals who have been exposed to or are about to enter high-stress environments. Such biomarkers will allow doctors to classify people in terms of their current severity or risk for future stress disorders, which can guide career choices as well as treatment options. Additionally, the biomarkers could measure response to treatment in an objective, quantifiable manner. advertisement "Untreated pain and stress can lead to suicide, that's how we became interested in these disorders, and decided to move upstream and see if we can better understand, treat and prevent them," Niculescu said. "We think that one of the key uses of our research would be to test people before they have symptoms of an illness to see who's at risk and possibly treat them early. It's much better to prevent things for the person, and for the health care system, than to treat somebody who is in an acute crisis." With this study, Niculescu said the ultimate goal is prevention -- pairing the ability to better predict those predisposed to PTSD with a more targeted approach to medicating those suffering from its affects. It's preventive medicine done in a precise way, which aligns with the IU Grand Challenge Precision Health Initiative launched in 2016. "We want to prevent the needless tragedy and suffering in people's lives. By understanding in a biological way a patient's illnesses and their mental health challenges, we could treat what they have better, preventing future episodes," Niculescu said. "I have an excellent team and group of collaborators, and we are excited to partner with other groups of experts and people who can carry this forward. There is a lot of good work being done in the field right now." The study was supported by an NIH Director's New Innovator Award and a VA Merit Award. Moving forward, Niculescu's group looks to secure more funding through grants and private donations, as well collaborate with other institutions and organizations to advance these studies -- with the hope that ultimately the cutting-edge tests developed at IU School of Medicine be implemented in clinical settings. "If you treat a medical disorder in general, you improve someone's quality of life; sometimes you save lives. But if you treat a mental health disorder, you can change somebody's destiny," said Niculescu, who is also a practicing psychiatrist. "You can help change someone from being a person who suffers, is unhappy, is unemployed -- maybe goes down the route of addiction, violence or suicide -- to somebody who can become a happy, well adjusted, productive member of society. That's the challenge and the privilege -- we can really change people's destinies if we do our job." The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Award Number IDP20D007363 and VA Merit Award 2I01CX000139. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have created a hydrogel that could one day be made into a contact lens to more effectively treat corneal melting, a condition that is a significant cause for blindness world-wide. The incurable eye disease can be initiated by a number of different causes such as autoimmune diseases (like rheumatoid arthritis, Lupus, or Stevens-Johnson syndrome), chemical burns, or even some surgical procedures (like LASIK and cataract procedures). The patient's cornea melts due to the uncontrolled production of certain zinc-dependent enzymes called matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) by the patient's immune cells in the cornea. To help prevent this, the researchers developed a new hydrogel that deactivates those enzymes by removing the zinc ions. "Most of the current MMP inhibitors used to treat this condition work by binding to the zinc ions within the MMPs," said Kyung Jae Jeong, assistant professor of chemical engineering at UNH. "However, once injected into the body, the MMP inhibitors travel through the blood stream and entire body and can cause severe side effects because they are binding with and deactivating the zinc ions in other tissue. Our hydrogel works entirely differently because it is localized, just in the eye, and deactivates MMPs by eliminating the zinc ions from the cornea. And since it would be a contact lens, if there were any issues, the patient would simply remove it." In their study, recently published in the journal ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, the UNH researchers, along with researcher Jung-Jae Lee from the University of Colorado Denver Campus, outline how the hydrogel deactivates MMP-1, MMP-2 and MMP-9 which are the major factors in corneal melting. The research was done in vitro and ex vivo (on extracted cornea tissue) and suggests that the new hydrogel could be a viable therapeutic option for treating corneal melting. The end goal is to make the hydrogel into a contact lens that would allow more localized treatment of the eye and avoid side effects in the rest of the body. There is a pending patent which has been filed by UNHInnovation, which advocates for, manages, and promotes UNH's intellectual property. Funding for this research was provided by the National Eye Institute (NEI) (1R21EY02795301) and NIH Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) (CIBBR, P20 GM113131). Most deaths of children aged five to 14 in India, China, Brazil and Mexico arise from preventable or treatable conditions, suggests a new study published today in The Lancet. Led by Dr. Shaza Fadel, lead child health epidemiologist at the Centre for Global Health Research (CGHR) of St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, Canada, the study found that deaths from road traffic injuries, neurological conditions, drowning and childhood cancers were common in all four countries from 2005 to 2016. In India, death rates from communicable diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis and vaccine-preventable diseases were nearly 20 times higher than in China, and 10 times higher than in Brazil and Mexico. China saw more deaths by drowning than any of the other countries. Boys aged five to 14 had higher death rates than girls from nearly all injuries. There were substantial reductions in communicable diseases across all countries, with faster progress in girls than boys, narrowing the gender gap traditionally seen. "Most of these deaths are avoidable and for those caused by medical conditions, many of them are treatable," said Dr. Prabhat Jha, director of CGHR and Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and senior author of the paper. The research examined mortality from 2005 to 2016 in India, China, Brazil and Mexico using more than 240,000 interviews of families with a death or death certificates. These countries are home to 40 percent of the world's children aged five to 14, and with over 200,000 deaths represent just under a quarter of mortality at these ages. The investigators chose these countries also as they had at least 10 years of nationally representative high-quality data. "About one-million deaths occur worldwide at ages five to 14, and to address this unrecognized burden, it is crucial to understand the causes of these deaths," commented Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta, co-director of the Centre for Global Child Health at the Hospital for Sick Children, who was not affiliated with the study. He added, "This remarkable study provides us clear directions as to potential targets and interventions needed to reduce deaths at this age to complement the great progress made in younger children." Based on their findings, the researchers called for a broader set of interventions than those from the maternal and child health programs that target children under five. They hope to see more countries monitoring the deaths and investigating their causes in other settings, most notably countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In India, Dr. Jha leads the Million Death Study, one of the largest studies of premature deaths in the world. Because most deaths occur at home and without medical attention in India, hundreds of specially trained census staff in India knocked on doors to interview household members about deaths. Two physicians independently examined these 'verbal autopsies' to establish the most likely cause of death. "Death in children aged five to 14 should be rare around the world," added Dr. Jha. "With cost-effective, feasible and affordable interventions, substantial declines in deaths in this age group are possible." Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of the earliest large-scale celebrations in Britain -- with people and animals travelling hundreds of miles for prehistoric feasting rituals. The study, led by Dr Richard Madgwick of Cardiff University, is the most comprehensive to date and examined the bones of 131 pigs, the prime feasting animals, from four Late Neolithic (c. 2800-2400BC) complexes. Serving the world-famous monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury, the four sites -- Durrington Walls, Marden, Mount Pleasant and West Kennet Palisade Enclosures -- hosted the very first pan-British events, feasts that drew people and animals from across Britain. The results show pig bones excavated from these sites were from animals raised as far away as Scotland, North East England and West Wales, as well as numerous other locations across the British Isles. The researchers believe it may have been important for those attending to contribute animals raised locally at their homes. Before now, the origins of people that took part in rituals at these megalithic monuments and the extent of the population's movements at the time have been long-standing enigmas in British prehistory. Dr Richard Madgwick, of the School of History, Archaeology and Religion, said: "This study demonstrates a scale of movement and level of social complexity not previously appreciated." "These gatherings could be seen as the first united cultural events of our island, with people from all corners of Britain descending on the areas around Stonehenge to feast on food that had been specially reared and transported from their homes." Representing great feats of engineering and labour mobilisation, the Neolithic henge complexes of southern Britain were the focal point for great gatherings in the third millennium BC. Pigs were the prime animal used in feasting and they provide the best indication of where the people who feasted at these sites came from as almost no human remains have been recovered. Using isotope analysis, which identifies chemical signals from the food and water that animals have consumed, the researchers were able to determine geographical areas where the pigs were raised. The study offers the most detailed picture yet of the degree of mobility across Britain at the time of Stonehenge. Dr Madgwick said: "Arguably the most startling finding is the efforts that participants invested in contributing pigs that they themselves had raised. Procuring them in the vicinity of the feasting sites would have been relatively easy. "Pigs are not nearly as well-suited to movement over distance as cattle and transporting them, either slaughtered or on the hoof, over hundreds or even tens of kilometres, would have required a monumental effort. "This suggests that prescribed contributions were required and that rules dictated that offered pigs must be raised by the feasting participants, accompanying them on their journey, rather than being acquired locally." Dr Madgwick conducted the research in collaboration with colleagues at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Cardiff University, along with scientists from the NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory at the British Geological Survey, University of Sheffield and University College London. The project was funded by the British Academy as part of a post-doctoral fellowship and was supported by a NERC Isotope Geosciences Facility Steering Committee grant. New research from Cornell University sheds light on the types of statistical and narrative evidence that are most effective at persuading people to pay attention to global issues. Study co-authors Adam Levine, associate professor of government, and Yanna Krupnikov of Stony Brook University wanted to understand what makes people care about social and economic problems they may not necessarily face in their daily lives, and whether that concern is a function of how the problems are described. The team looked at several types of evidence showing that a problem exists. For example, statistics can describe the magnitude of the problem or they can be phrased in percentage terms -- such as the percentage of people facing a problem. They designed a series of studies to test which type of evidence increased people's engagement, either by making a donation, paying attention to an email or stating a concern. The research was conducted in collaboration with a nonprofit in Ithaca, New York, that strives to increase access to affordable health care, including funding for a free clinic. In the studies, likely new donors received solicitations by mail, members of the organization received a solicitation email, and study participants unaffiliated with the organization took a survey gauging their interest in access to affordable health care. The messaging used in solicitations included combinations of high percentages, low percentages, case studies and raw numbers to describe the magnitude of the uninsured who can't afford health care. For example, the potential donors received either a standard letter, one saying 57 percent of uninsured people couldn't afford the care they need, or one describing how a real uninsured person benefited from the nonprofit's services. Across the board, the percentage-based evidence and human interest evidence tended to drive engagement, but talking about the overall magnitude of the problem didn't. "When you talk about the millions of children who are starving, or the millions of refugees who are seeking out a better life, it fails to have this emotional connection that tends to then motivate people to pay more attention and to become engaged," Levine said. The study offers a model of what a meaningful collaboration between researchers and practitioners can look like. "Pull at people's emotional heartstrings," Levine said. "You can do it with certain forms of statistical evidence. You can do it with sympathetic case studies. And that will move behavior and move attitudes." Proposals have been made about the injection of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to help in fighting the rising warm air due to global warming. Recent studies have contradicted the fears that using solar geoengineering to help fight the harsh effects of climate change could dangerously alter that pattern of rainfall and storms in most part of the world. Published in the peer-reviewed journal, Natural Climate Change, the study showed the analysis that finds that cooling the Earth enough to eliminate at least half of the warming rather than targeting the whole of it would generally not bring about more intense tropical cyclones. Some studies showed that such a radical plan could worsen the availability of potable water or bring about extreme weather conditions that could may human survival a challenge. The recent development in such study showed otherwise. In fact, it said that only about 0.4% of the Earth might see the impact of climate change to worsen. Climate experts, however, expressed their concerns on the idea of cooling the Earth. They emphasized that keeping twice as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could put some regions of the Earth at greater risk. Its effects would have been worse than how industrialization destroyed the planet. One scientist who has read the study published earlier this week said that the information gathered by the study was not enough to conclude that the use of geoengineering methods to help cool down the earth was going to bring significant positive results. The process of geoengineering involved the spraying of sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere as if mimicking the gas emitted by volcanoes that reflects the sun's heat. He also expressed his concerns about its safety. Some climate advocates also expressed that banking on saving the world through this unproven technology could put the lives of humankind at greater risk. They suggested instead to deal with the problem on the ground by working on reducing the harsh effects of pollution from power plants and cars. David Keith, co-author of the study and a Harvard professor, said that "people should not dismiss the idea of using geoengineering to save the world." he expressed that the project may come with risks, but he believes that continued research should be done before it is ruled out. "I am not saying that it would be effective now or that we should do it now," he said. "But we should look at it with more certainty for the future." Alan Robock, a geophysicist professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, says that the study failed to examine the potential effects of doing the most radical of experiments so far: spraying aerosols into the atmosphere. "This may not be the best solution at the moment, but if global warming continues and we don't do anything from our end, it shouldn't come as a surprise that everyone's life is at risk," he said. Would geoengineering make things better or could it only make global warming worse for the people on earth? The easiest way is to try it, but it comes with a great risk that people should be prepared for. In truth, the answer to this question is another question -- how much of it do we actually know? Residents of Rincon Hill, South Beach, South Park and Mission Bay jammed Tuesdays Port Commission meeting in overwhelming opposition to Mayor London Breeds plan to build the citys largest Navigation Center on the Embarcadero just south of the Bay Bridge. The prospect of bringing a 225-bed Navigation Center to Seawall Lot 330 inspired more than two hours of often-impassioned public comment from dozens of San Francisco residents, who outlined a long list of concerns. And that was just the first community event about the center. A crowd of more than 200 people filed into a second meeting, organized by the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, at the Delancey Street Foundation. Many speakers attended both meetings. The 2.3-acre lot, directly across from Piers 30-32, is owned by the Port of San Francisco, so the city needs the commissions sign-off to build the center. A commission vote is expected on April 23, following more community outreach by the homelessness department and other agencies. Breed wants the center open by this summer. Under the mayors plan, the Navigation Center would operate for four years, though Jeff Kositsky, director of the homelessness department, said the city is still working out its final plan for the center, including the initial length of its lease. He added that feedback from the community was central to that process. Were in the beginning of a process of how to make this work best for your neighborhood, Kositsky said. The only way to provide people with assistance is to get them into a place of safety. While many of those opposed to the idea said they were sympathetic to the plight of the homeless, residents insisted the center would create a dirty, dangerous blotch on the housing-dense, tourist-heavy area. They expressed deep skepticism about the citys ability to effectively administer the intensive services that Navigation Centers offer. And they complained that theyd been blindsided by a proposal that felt imminent despite being introduced to the public just eight days earlier. Several also recounted sometimes violent altercations with homeless people a harbinger, they warned, of the kind of behavior the center would attract. The Navigation Center would act as a magnet for all the things normally associated with homelessness: criminal activity, drug usage and environmental pollution, both the visual kind and the physical kind, South Beach resident William Glasgow said at the port meeting. He wasnt the only speaker who implored the city to weigh the benefits of a Navigation Center against possible detrimental neighborhood impacts. This will be a disaster, attorney Robert Arns said at the port meeting. I ask you this question: Will you take legal responsibility for the ramifications that will occur from this? Were all for helping the homeless find a better life. It has to be solved with dignity and respect. But it cannot be dumped on us, either, Marcus da Cunha said in an interview before the port meeting. Were all for helping people, but why cant we find another neighborhood to host this Navigation Center? The Navigation Centers supporters were outnumbered at both meetings, but their message was clear: Finding shelter for the homeless was a moral imperative and one that trumps potential quality-of-life concerns. Every neighborhood says, not our neighborhood, Kelley Cutler, an organizer with the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, said at the port meeting. But the reality is, for the health of the community as a whole, we need to be creating resources and actually helping people. The centers supporters occasionally had to speak over jeers at the Delancey event. The people who are opposed to this are making me deeply, deeply sad, one woman told the crowd. Opposing the center means youre continuing to let elderly people die on the streets, she said. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. Bobak Esfandiari, a member of the San Francisco YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) organization, emphasized the citys need to build more housing and homelessness shelters. I want one of these in my neighborhood! he said. After public comment had ended and many of the port meetings attendees had moved on to the Delancey Street event, Kositsky countered that homeless people are much more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators of crime, and that a study had shown property values have not decreased around existing Navigation Centers, nor has crime increased. The new Navigation Center would be located in District Six, represented by Supervisor Matt Haney. Haney has backed the Embarcadero project and Navigation Centers in general. But hes hinging his continued support of the seawall lot project on conditions that hes discussed with Breeds office, which he said was receptive to his proposals. Specifically, Haney wants assurances that the center will focus on the waterfronts homeless population and not bring in homeless people from other neighborhoods. Hes also asked for flexibility in the length of the centers lease, round-the-clock security and indoor recreational facilities to minimize loitering during the day. Hes also seeking a promise from the mayor to find at least one other neighborhood to build shelters in, apart from districts Six, Nine and 10, where homelessness services are clustered. The three port commissioners present after public comment ended appeared to be in favor of the center. Commissioner Victor Makras said so explicitly, with the caveat that the city define how long the center would remain open. Everyone here in this city is responsible for this homelessness problem. We have to chip in and make some sacrifices, said Willie Adams, the commissions vice president. You can be against anything. But you have to come up with some thoughtful, intelligent solutions. Everybody needs to keep an open mind and give it a chance, Port Commission President Kimberly Brandon said. Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dominicfracassa The parents caught up in the sweeping college admissions cheating scandal had power, money and, in some cases, fame. What they wanted was a guarantee. A bribery and racketeering case announced by federal prosecutors on Tuesday netting 33 business moguls, movie stars and even a winemaker, as well as 17 others was shocking in its scope. But the idea that parents would try to buy their way into elite universities wasnt surprising, said former Ivy League admissions officers and college counselors across the country. Money has always mattered in the college admissions process, though these parents took it to a whole new and illegal level, said Casey Near, executive director of counseling at Collegewise, which provides a range of services to applicants. I think we, working in this industry, understand that admissions is not a meritocracy, she said. Once you understand thats true, this (scandal) becomes less surprising. Families with means have always been able to game the system, paying for tutors, college essay consultants, the best private schools, overseas community service stints and multiple attempts at the SAT test to raise scores, experts said. The ultra-rich have an additional advantage in their ability to donate large sums of money to universities, which can boost their kids chances of acceptance, said Maria Laskaris, former dean of admissions at Dartmouth College and now senior admissions counselor at Top Tier Admissions. Its not a guarantee of admissions for sure, but it is certainly something youre made aware of, she said. Colleges are always in fundraising mode. Ironically, the families caught up in the scandal likely already had an edge, including wealth, name recognition or both. Theyre already at a level where they have a lot of advantages, so it was surprising they would go that extra step, Laskaris said. They already have the name recognition, the kind of income and maybe charitable record that would get someone to look at them differently. That parents would resort to bribery and cheating, however, exemplify how crazy and stressful the admission process has become, said Megan Dorsey, founder of College Prep Results. Students are applying to 12, 15 or 20 colleges, Dorsey said, and even the best students face slim odds of getting into the elite universities like Harvard, Yale or Stanford. The desire to get into a top university becomes an obsession for some, a personal statement of value and prestige. I think an Ivy League degree has become kind of the ultra super car, said Joel Butterly, chief executive of Ingenius Prep. It is the prestige of having gone there. At the same time, top universities are looking to broaden the diversity of students who attend, so while money does matter in some cases, passion and drive are what admissions officers are looking for, Laskaris said. You look for students who have truly distinguished themselves relative to the opportunities and resources theyve had available to them, she said. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. That said, test scores and grades also matter. The parents charged in the scandal could have played by the rules to try to get their kids into Yale or the University of Southern California, ensuring they had the best education, the most opportunities, the most expensive tutors and college consultants to write those essays about hardships overcome, but decided they needed an even greater edge, Dorsey said. That is what it says about the state of college admissions right now, she said. Even what you can buy as an ultra-wealthy person still doesnt feel like enough. While bribery and cheating are still relatively rare, its clear families want that edge in the college admissions process, Butterly said. Take the family in Hong Kong that paid an admissions consultant $2 million to get their kids into an Ivy League school, then sued in 2012 when the two boys didnt get into Harvard. In other words, families are eager to buy their way into a top-notch college, through the front door or the back. It would be ridiculous to say that money does not matter in admissions, Butterly said. It matters in every form of social mobility in the United States. Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker In a blow to Airbnb, a federal appeals court upheld Santa Monicas strict vacation-rental rules, which ban home stays unless a resident is present. The beach towns regulations, among the strictest in the nation, prohibit rentals of whole homes to travelers for less than 30 days. Vacation-rental hosts in the 90,000-person city can only rent rooms to tourists and must be present throughout the stay. The ruling may have ramifications outside of Santa Monica. San Franciscos Airbnb and its Austin rival, HomeAway/VRBO, had joined forces to fight the regulations. Both told the court that they feared copycat laws outlawing vacation rentals. Airbnbs runaway success has spurred cities worldwide to clamp down on vacation rentals in homes out of fears that they will cannibalize permanent housing and change neighborhood character. Those regulatory battles cast a shadow over Airbnbs plans for a Wall Street debut this year or next. On Wednesday, co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk implied that the worlds third-most valuable company may wait until 2020. We have already said that we are taking the steps to be ready to go public in 2019. That doesnt mean we will go public in 2019, he told Business Insider in an email interview. Although Santa Monicas laws apply only to that city, the ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals could embolden other places to seek similarly severe curbs on home stays. New York state already forbids vacation rentals unless hosts are present. In November the city of South Lake Tahoe voted by a narrow margin to ban vacation home rentals in residential neighborhoods within three years. Despite our efforts, the city (of Santa Monica) insisted on an approach that was out of step with progress across the country, Airbnb said. Santa Monica welcomed the ruling. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes This critical local law prevents residences in our community from being converted into de facto hotels; it protects affordable housing and it helps residents stay in their homes, Lane Dilg, Santa Monica city attorney, said in a statement. Airbnb and HomeAway/VRBO argued that the Santa Monica law, which also required the companies to police their websites, violated their free speech rights under the First Amendment and the Community Decency Act, which shields web providers from liability for content on their sites. The companies used similar arguments when fighting a vacation-rental law in San Francisco. In both cases, courts rejected the companies contentions. Santa Monicas laws are stricter than those in Airbnbs home city of San Francisco, which allows whole-home stays for up to 90 days a year, but both cities require all hosts to register with the city and impose strict penalties on websites that process illegal stays. In San Francisco after a judge affirmed the citys right to require hosts to register, Airbnbs short-term listings plunged in half, although some hosts switched to 30-plus day rentals, which are exempt from the rules. As of 2015 when the City Council unanimously passed Santa Monicas law, about 1,400 of 1,700 local vacation rentals listed with Airbnb and VRBO/HomeAway were entire homes renting for less than 30 days and thus were illegal, the city said. Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday announced a proposal aimed at curtailing youth vaping that would ban some brick-and-mortar stores from selling flavored e-cigarettes. Stores would be allowed to sell the products only if they can prevent minors from entering, or can create a separate area for the products that cannot be accessed by minors. E-cigarettes typically heat a flavored nicotine solution into an inhalable vapor. Federal law bans their sale to those under 18, but 1 in 5 high school students report using e-cigarettes, according to the latest survey published last year. The FDAs proposal is a draft and will be followed by a 30-day comment period before it can become final. The soonest it could go into effect, if it advances, is in 60 days. It would apply to any physical store that sells flavored vapes, including gas stations, convenience stores and vape shops. The proposal also aims to restrict online sales of flavored e-cigarettes by requiring retailers to use age-verification tools before allowing the sale to go through. Many companies, including market leader Juul of San Francisco, already have age-verification protocols to buy online. Juul, which makes the most popular e-cigarette among teens, last fall took steps to get ahead of regulators crackdown, announcing it would stop selling most of its flavored nicotine pods in brick-and-mortar stores. The company continues to sell the flavors online with age-verification protocols. We are committed to reducing youth usage while preserving our opportunity to eliminate combustible cigarettes, Juul said. We support category-wide action including the responsible, restricted sale of flavored products and will review todays draft guidance as we continue to work with FDA, state attorneys general, local municipalities and community organizations. Companies that dont follow the requirements risk having their products pulled from the market, the FDA said. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes Anti-smoking activists have questioned whether the new FDA restrictions will be enough to stop the teen vaping surge. The FDA has little authority over how stores display and sell vaping products. Instead, critics say, the agency is essentially telling companies to self-police. FDA continues to nibble around the edges, and that will not end the epidemic, said Erika Sward of the American Lung Association, which has called on the FDA to remove all flavored e-cigarettes from the market. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Catherine Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cho@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Cat_Ho The former CEO of San Francisco startup Vungle sued the company Tuesday for alleged wrongful termination after felony charges against him were dismissed last year. Zain Jaffer filed suit in San Francisco County Superior Court and alleges that Vungle violated California labor law, which prohibits employers from firing employees because of arrests that dont result in convictions. Vungle declined to comment. Vungle fired Jaffer in October 2017 soon after he was arrested at his Hillsborough home. Jaffer was charged with five felonies and one misdemeanor, including allegedly committing a lewd act on a child and child abuse. Police arrived at his home and said they witnessed Jaffer allegedly abusing his son. A year later, all charges were dropped. The San Mateo County district attorneys office said that Jaffer had an undiagnosed bipolar disorder and was taking medication. We do not believe that there was any sexual conduct by Mr. Jaffer that evening and for this reason we dismissed the sexual abuse charges. The physical injury charges were separately dismissed because we believe that the injuries were the result of Mr. Jaffer being in a state of unconsciousness caused by prescription medication, the district attorneys office said last year. Jaffer alleges that Vungle also seized his company shares worth tens of millions of dollars and refused to pay him a bonus. Jaffer co-founded Vungle in 2011 and remains the second-largest shareholder. The company provides mobile video advertising services. More for you Child sex assault charges dropped against founder of SF tech startup Vungle Once I was absolved of any wrongdoing, I was looking forward to a friendly relationship with the company, Jaffer said in a statement. Instead, Vungle unfairly and unlawfully sought to destroy my career, blocked my efforts to sell my own shares or transfer shares to family members, and tried to prevent me from purchasing shares in the company. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes Louis Edleson and Joann Rezzo of San Diego law firm Edleson & Rezzo are representing Jaffer. They previously represented a Southern California man who won an $18.6 million judgment against Allstate Insurance last year in a wrongful termination case. The law is very clear: employers cannot fire employees because of an arrest that does not result in a conviction, Rezzo said in a statement, adding that Jaffers lawsuit could be one of the largest cases ever for wrongful termination of employment. Roland Li is a Chronicle staff writer. Email: roland.li@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rolandlisf Pacific Gas and Electric Co.s bankruptcy judge publicly wondered Wednesday about what would happen if another federal judge put the government in control of the embattled company. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Dennis Montali raised the hypothetical during a San Francisco hearing about PG&Es request to access the full $5.5 billion in credit and loans it has lined up from major banks. Montali said that U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who is overseeing PG&Es probation arising from the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion, could theoretically order a trustee to be appointed to run the company instead of its current leadership. Alsup, whose courtroom is just a few floors up from Montalis, is considering whether to impose new probation conditions on PG&E because of its role in recent deadly wildfires. Montali said he is mindful of how Alsups criminal proceedings could shape PG&Es efforts to reorganize itself under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. Im not here to criticize my upstairs colleague, but it could happen, Montali said. I cant ignore the risk of a Chapter 11 trustee. Montali wanted to know how PG&Es financing would be affected if a Chapter 11 trustee were appointed to the company a move the bankruptcy judge could also make himself. Earlier in the hearing, Montali questioned how the credit and loans PG&E has secured known as debtor-in-possession financing would be affected if another catastrophic wildfire breaks out while the company is still in bankruptcy court proceedings. Paul Zumbro, an attorney representing PG&E, said the possibility was taken into account when the company structured the deal with the banks. He did not believe it would constitute a default under the terms of the financing. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes Still, Montali indicated he had reservations about the proposal PG&E put before him. He was particularly concerned that the terms of the deal might not give the bankruptcy court enough of a say if some outside event potentially triggers a default per the terms of the financing. PG&E and its lenders wanted Montali to rule on the financing Wednesday, but he continued the matter until March 27 in order to get input from a committee in the case that includes fire victims with claims against the company. The judge said he will not require another hearing if the parties find they are in agreement before then. J.D. Morris is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thejdmorris Pacific Gas and Electric Co. will not face criminal prosecution from the district attorneys in four Northern California counties affected by the October 2017 wildfires. The office of Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch, whose county was the most harmed by the firestorm 17 months ago, announced Tuesday that it had decided not to file criminal charges against PG&E. The company still faces numerous civil claims, which are not affected by the prosecutors decision. A statement from Ravitchs office said insufficient evidence exists to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that PG&E acted with a reckless disregard for human life in causing the fires, the standard necessary to sustain criminal charges. District attorneys in Napa, Lake and Humboldt counties reached the same conclusion, the statement said. State investigators found the utilitys power lines sparked many of the October 2017 fires in Sonoma County and surrounding areas. But the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection recently said PG&E did not cause the Tubbs Fire, the worst blaze from that month, which ravaged neighborhoods in and around Santa Rosa and currently stands as the second-most destructive wildfire in state history. Ravitchs office said that it would have needed to prove that PG&E acted with criminal negligence in failing to remove dead and dying trees. Under California law, criminal negligence requires proof of actions that are reckless and incompatible with a proper regard for human life, and any charges must be proven unanimously to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, the statement said. Proving PG&E failed in their duty to remove trees was made particularly difficult in this context as the locations where the fires occurred, and where physical evidence could have been located, were decimated by the fires. PG&E said in a statement that safety is still its highest priority and the company will continue to focus on helping our customers and communities in these counties continue to recover and rebuild. One of the other major blazes from October 2017, the Redwood Fire in Mendocino County, was not referred to local prosecutors for review. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes PG&E already reached a settlement with Butte County prosecutors over a small 2017 wildfire that the utility was found responsible for igniting. A federal judge recently ruled that PG&E did not properly report that settlement as required by its probation arising from the 2010 San Bruno pipeline blast. Sonoma County prosecutors and their counterparts consulted with California Attorney General Xavier Becerras office before arriving at their decision, according to the statement from Ravitchs office. In the announcement, Ravitchs office noted that PG&E which is currently in bankruptcy court because of its wildfire liabilities is a defendant in a series of private cases arising from the 2017 fires, and Sonoma County is a party in one of them. J.D. Morris is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thejdmorris YOKOHAMA, Japan The chief executive officers of Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi have announced a new board to oversee the French-Japanese auto alliance, seeking a new start for the partnership after the arrest and dismissal of Nissans former chairman, Carlos Ghosn. This is a very special day for the alliance, Renault SAs chairman, Jean-Dominique Senard, told reporters after a meeting at Nissans Yokohama headquarters. He spoke to reporters along with Renaults chief executive, Thierry Bollore; Nissan CEO Hiroto Saikawa and Osamu Masuko, CEO of the smaller Japanese alliance partner Mitsubishi Motors Corp. The alliance did not announce any changes in mutual stake holdings. The new board, consisting of those four executives, will meet every month in Paris or Tokyo and oversee various projects, helping to make the companies operations more efficient, they said. Ghosn still is one of eight members of Nissans board. He had asked to attend the board meeting but was conspicuously absent after the Tokyo District Court rejected his request on Monday. He needed court approval to attend because conditions for his release last week on $9 million bail, after more than 100 days in custody, prohibit actions that may enable him to tamper with evidence. Ghosn has been charged with falsifying financial reports by under-reporting his income and with breach of trust. He says he is innocent. When questioned about Ghosns case, Senard said he believed that people are presumed innocent until proven otherwise. He declined comment on whether Ghosn, who remains on Renaults board, will be allowed to attend its meetings even if he is able to leave Japan. At the moment, as he awaits trial, he is barred from leaving the country. Renault owns 43 percent of Nissan, which makes the March subcompact, Leaf electric car and Infiniti luxury models. Nissan owns 15 percent of Renault, and a 34 percent stake in Mitsubishi Motors. Nissan has not yet named a new chairman to replace Ghosn. Senard said he would not pursue that post. Senard will be chairman of the new alliance board and hopes to become vice chairman at Nissan, he said. Doubts over the balance of power between Renault and Nissan had been growing after Ghosns departure. The Japanese automaker was on the verge of bankruptcy 20 years ago, when Renault sent Ghosn to help lead its turnaround. Nissan is now more profitable than Renault. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes Since Ghosns release, he has been seen in Tokyo on outings with his family. He released a statement reasserting his innocence and calling his detention a terrible ordeal, but has not commented since. A statement released on Ghosns behalf expressed disappointment over his inability to attend Tuesdays meeting. As an elected member of the board, Mr. Ghosn stands ready to fulfill his professional duties to the shareholders who elected him, it said. It is unfortunate that the meritless and unsubstantiated accusations against him have blocked his ideas and perspective from being deployed in service of the company he served for the past 20 years. Yuri Kageyama is an Associated Press writer. In 2019, The Chronicle uses drones to take photos from a birds-eye view. But in 1959, a staff photographer went up in a helicopter for a then-rare, but illuminating, view of San Francisco from above. While on the hunt in the newspapers basement archive for photos for a previous column, I found an otherwise nondescript folder filed under San Francisco Views. This latest find was about 10 packs of 4-by-5 negatives labeled Aerial photos of S.F. taken in July 1959 by Chronicle photographer Duke Downey, many of them not seen in 60 years. Most of the photos didnt appear to have run in the paper, but according to one of few captions available, Downey had taken the photos from a Bell helicopter. Dig deep into Chronicle Vault Like what you're reading? Subscribe to the Chronicle Vault newsletter, and get classic archive stories in your in-box twice a week. Read hundreds of historical stories, see thousands of archive photos, and sort through 154 years of classic Chronicle front pages at SFChronicle.com/vault. See More Collapse Were not sure why Downey had taken the aerial shots many of the photos feature highways. Maybe it was to see a half-built Candlestick Park from the air? But he took photographs of various parts of the city from high above at an auspicious moment for San Francisco. In 1959, decisions would be made that would shape the future of the citys skyline. At the time, the two tallest buildings were the Russ Building and the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. Building, both dating to the 1920s. But that was already changing the Bay Areas future was as bright as gold, Chamber of Commerce President Jack H. How said in a January 1959 Chronicle article, detailing planned construction across the city and the region. One of biggest plans on the horizon was the Golden Gateway Project, a combination of high-rise apartments and office buildings close to the Financial District. In July 1959, the Board of Supervisors approved the money to start the project, which bought up 18 blocks of buildings, including the old wholesale produce market. As Candlestick Park rose in Downeys aerial photos in 1959, another San Francisco landmark got a second chance at life. Originally constructed to be temporary, the Palace of Fine Arts needed extensive repairs. But the mayor wasnt sure it was worth the millions of dollars needed to restore it. In May 1959, local businessman Walter S. Johnson donated $2 million toward the project, after becoming alarmed when he heard it was going to be torn down. Just as the Eiffel Tower is a symbol of Paris, the Palace of Fine Arts can become a symbol of San Francisco and California, Johnson told The Chronicle. In November, voters would approve a bond measure to raise the rest. Not everything was about construction. In a surprise move in January, a Board of Supervisors committee recommended blocking the states plan to build the Western Freeway through the Panhandle and Golden Gate Park and four other superhighways, killing 15.4 miles of highway, amid cheering supporters and red-faced highway engineers. The freeway revolt was complete several days later, when the full Board of Supervisors backed ending the highway plan unanimously. I dont think well lose any money, Supervisor John Jay Ferdon said. All we have done is tell the freeway engineers to go back to the drawing board and give us some plans that are better than the ones we turned down. They never did. Duke Downey / The Chronicle 1959 More from the Archive The Vault Home of the San Francisco Chronicle's archive and more than 150 years of journalism covering the Bay Area and beyond. More from Chronicle Vault Embarcadero Freeway: An ode to the blight by the bay. Not Your Century: March 13, 1976 Gov. Moonbeam Throws His Hat in the Ring. Jerry Brown, the charismatic 38-year-old governor of California, announces that hes seeking the Democratic nomination for president. Chronicle Covers: When Willie Mays was gasp injured. Highway home run: The Giants ballpark that (thankfully) never got built. Summer of love: Paradise that never was lives on in legend. From the Archive is a weekly column by Bill Van Niekerken, the library director of The Chronicle, exploring the depths of the newspapers archive. Its part of Chronicle Vault, a twice-weekly newsletter highlighting more than 150 years of San Francisco stories. It is edited by Taylor Kate Brown, The Chronicles newsletter editor. Sign up for the newsletter here, and follow Chronicle Vault on Instagram. Contact Bill at bvanniekerken@sfchronicle.com and Taylor at taylor.brown@sfchronicle.com. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been accessing an automated license plate reader database with hundreds of millions of records to track U.S. residents, putting some local law enforcement agencies in potential violation of California law, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday. More than 9,200 ICE agents have had access to Vigilant Solutions license-plate reader database, which pinpoints drivers locations by collecting data from law enforcement and private sources, such as parking garages and tow trucks, said Matt Cagle, an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California. The scans are often used to find cars subject to repossession, he added, but the same data are uploaded to a server ICE agents can access to target undocumented immigrants. They privately collected data for one purpose: to find a car whose owners who didnt pay the bills and now its being used to target and deport immigrants, Cagle said. The ACLUs release of the records comes as ICE has ramped up detentions and deportations of undocumented immigrants in the two years since President Trump took office. ICE paid $6.1 million for access to the data collection service, owned by Thomson Reuters and Vigilant Solutions in Livermore, which contracts with more than 80 law enforcement agencies around the nation, according to documents obtained by the ACLU. Automated license plate readers have two cameras, said Mike Katz-Lacabe, a surveillance expert and research director of the Center for Human Rights and Privacy. One camera focuses on the plate and capturing a clear image of the number. The second snaps a shot of the vehicles make, color, model and, sometimes, its surroundings and whos inside the vehicle. Agents can type a license plate number into the database and pull up years-old records of where the car has traveled, Cagle said. Civil immigration queries are allowed to access scans within the past five years, and criminal investigation queries are limited to the statute of limitations for the specified crime. The ACLUs documents also show a step-by-step guide to request the data from individual departments. Vigilant Solutions database collects an average of 150 million to 200 million license plate scans a month, according to the documents. The ACLU and immigration activists have repeatedly called on Vigilant Solutions to end its contract with ICE, accusing the company of violating state privacy and sanctuary laws. Local law enforcement agencies handing license plate information over to ICE are violating SB54 by sharing personal information with federal agencies for immigration enforcement, Cagle said. They may also be violating SB34, which prohibits public agencies from sharing that information with out-of-state or federal agencies without a signed agreement. Chances are if an agency is sharing with other agencies, its not a conscious choice they made, Katz-Lacabe said. He also noted that any agency could access the database as long as they pay the fee, but its unknown if other federal departments have contracts with Vigilant Solutions. Drivers, regardless of their immigration status, are getting caught up in this mass surveillance dragnet that gives law enforcement far too much information about peoples lives, Vasudha Talla, an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, said in a statement. On Tuesday afternoon, ICE officials said they do not use the license plate data to track people outside of immigration investigations, and Vigilants database is just one tool authorities use before detaining an individual. ICE personnel check the information against other investigative information, including information from government systems, before taking any action against the individual, ICE spokesman Matthew Bourke said in a statement. How long Vigilant retains license plate data, combined with Californias law allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain drivers licenses, could make it easier to track undocumented immigrants, according to privacy experts. Youve basically detailed a mosaic of this persons life, Katz-Lacabe said. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. Union Citys Police Department is the only Bay Area agency that contributed license plate information to the database, according to the ACLU. The department denied the claim Wednesday, saying it does not use automated license plate readers. But documents obtained by the ACLU state that Vigilant had detections received from Union City police. Union City police Capt. Victor Derting said the department does not upload data to Vigilant Solutions. However, officers can access the database to read license plates if its necessary for a criminal investigation. We do not provide any data to ICE or any other law enforcement agency in regards to license-plate reader cameras, because we dont have any, Derting said. Union City police issued a follow-up statement Wednesday saying the department made a request to Vigilant Solutions to provide further details that may be of value to the media on how they manage their information. The department added that it complies with SB54 and does not share information with ICE. The ACLU said six other Northern California law enforcement agencies participate in the sharing of data with Vigilant: the Manteca Police Department, Merced Police Department, Tulare Police Department, Stanislaus County Sheriffs Office, Stanislaus County Auto Theft Task Force and Sutter County Sheriffs Office. Vigilant Solutions did not respond to requests for comment. Gwendolyn Wu is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: gwendolyn.wu@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @gwendolynawu Perhaps in response to our new restaurant critic Soleil Hos review of Chez Panisse, Tom Miller turned to Yelp to see what other people were thinking. Wherein he found the following, an excerpt from a lengthy essay: Chez Panisses offerings are formidably sexual in nature. Every glance and then a recovery of what had been occurring prior of the tease, due to the presence of stoic timidness, what have you, is almost as if a fawning had been required to prepare for the fragile savagery of the act that will follow. Quickly, a utopian stare develops, a physical stunning of the heaving lips coupling with the moistness of an April dew, is a prelude to a smother of a passion that is building, as the initial course is being lustingly enveloped. P.S.: Upon receipt of Millers note, I turned to Yelp, too, first to check out the veracity of what hed sent and then to see what other people had said. And it was amazing to see the length and erudition at least presumed erudition of many Chez Panisse commenters who submitted online reviews as detailed as doctoral theses. Most of the comments were positive, but Yelp always makes me wince. I think the restaurant staff ought to be able to critique the yelpers. Im not one to enjoy fine dining, began one commenter who felt qualified to review. The hook, the hook, give him the hook. To mark International Womens Day, on Friday, March 8, feminist artist Michele Pred (pictured in this column recently at the NARAL luncheon) hired a plane to fly over the Bay Area pulling a Feminist AF banner. It wasnt one of the well-promoted lollapalooza symphony blowouts, but in a less dramatic mode, members of the San Francisco Symphony performed two concerts in a Chamber Music Series on Sunday, March 10 one at the Gunn Theater at the Legion of Honor and the other at Davies Symphony Hall. We attended the second, and in a space that can accommodate more than 2,700 people, there were many unfilled seats. No matter. Thanks to the musicians fervor and the distilled sounds of a handful of instruments rather than a stageful, the concert had a feeling of intimacy, as though we were in, well, a chamber. The only thing that marred the pleasure of being there was knowing that we couldnt, at the same time, be at the Legion, too. I would have liked to hear it all. Wed been given a heads-up about the first offering of the Davies concert, I Am Matteo, written by Timothy Higgins, the S.F. Symphonys principal trombonist. The piece is a setting of a letter written by Matteo Musso, a 13-year-old boy with autism, to Christian Reif, who had conducted a family concert that Musso had attended. The teenager had learned to communicate only a year before, by pointing to letters in a stencil. The poetic words, sung by Sharon Rietkerk, are from that letter, in which Matteo rhapsodizes in passages like Gone are the days of my oversensitive sensory system and my soul rejoices. Notes are allowed to enter me and fill my spirits once again. (Matteo has also written books and is a motivational speaker, and even a food critic. His website seeks donations to help support his work.) P.S.: In introducing the piece, Higgins strode to the stage and began speaking, rather quickly and somewhat indistinctly. Many in the audience couldnt hear him, so there were shouts asking him to speak louder. This is the first time, he said, laughing, a trombone player has been asked to be louder in Davies Hall. (And an Overheard, uttered before the concert by a gentleman sitting behind me who was apparently reading the program: Harrumph! I never heard of a trombonist being a composer. Gee, they just cant get any respect.) Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. P.P.S.: As to other ad libs: Readers Marsha Cohen and Susan RoAne separately sent word of star Betty Buckleys response when a cell phone went off at a Saturday night performance of Hello Dolly! She stopped the music. Is that for me? she asked, interrupting her monologue, waiting a bit and adding, You know, there is a button to turn it off. When it was time for curtain calls, she briefly mimed talking on a phone, said Cohen. PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING The cat psychic told him his kitty hated being named Gordo. Woman overheard at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre by Larken Bradley Leah Garchik is open for business in San Francisco, 415-777-8426. Email: lgarchik@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @leahgarchik Gov. Gavin Newsom is suspending the death penalty in California, calling it discriminatory and immoral, and is granting reprieves to the 737 condemned inmates on the nations largest Death Row. I do not believe that a civilized society can claim to be a leader in the world as long as its government continues to sanction the premeditated and discriminatory execution of its people, Newsom said in a statement accompanying an executive order, to be issued Wednesday, declaring a moratorium on capital punishment in the state. The death penalty is inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian. He plans to order an immediate shutdown of the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison, where the last execution was carried out in 2006. Newsom is also withdrawing Californias recently revised procedures for executions by lethal injection, ending at least for now the struggle by prison officials for more than a decade to devise procedures that would pass muster in federal court by minimizing the risk of a botched and painful execution. His actions, disclosed to The Chronicle by an administration source late Tuesday, come in the wake of a pair of close but unsuccessful efforts by death penalty opponents to repeal the state law at the ballot box. The initiatives, both endorsed by Newsom, garnered 48 percent of the vote in 2012 and 47 percent four years later, when supporters of capital punishment won passage of a rival initiative aimed at speeding up executions. While that measure has reduced review of the execution process in state courts, Californias lethal-injection procedures are still being scrutinized in federal court. The governor lacks authority to change the state death penalty law, which was enacted by the voters in 1978 and can be repealed only at the ballot box. Newsom, elected to a four-year term last November, did not say whether he would support another repeal initiative in 2020. But he said he would grant reprieves to anyone sentenced to death while he holds office. Eric Risberg/Associated Press The intentional killing of another person is wrong, he said. And, as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual. Michele Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, criticized Newsoms decision. The voters of the state of California support the death penalty, she said. That is powerfully demonstrated by their approval of Proposition 66 in 2016 to ensure the death penalty is implemented, and their rejection of measures to end the death penalty in 2016 and 2006. Gov. Newsom ... is usurping the expressed will of California voters. Want more news from Sacramento? Subscribe to Political Punch, the thrice-weekly newsletter by The Chronicle's political reporters. See More Collapse The announcement appears to contradict Newsoms public position during his campaign for governor. When The Chronicle asked candidates for their views on the death penalty, Dan Newman, a spokesman for then-Lt. Gov. Newsom, cited his long-standing opposition to capital punishment. But he added that Newsom recognizes that California voters have spoken on the issue and, if elected governor, hed respect the will of the electorate by following and implementing the law. The governors statement lays out the case against the death penalty as biased, costly and pointless. While the state has spent $5 billion on trying, convicting, imprisoning and executing Death Row inmates since voters approved the current law in 1978, Newsom said, there is no evidence that the death penalty deters murder, and there has been no increase in homicides in states that ended capital punishment. The death penalty has also discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or cant afford expensive legal representation, Newsom said. He said more than three-fifths of Califorinas Death Row inmates are people of color, while studies have shown that those convicted of killing whites are far more likely to be sentenced to death than killers of blacks or Latinos. Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press But most of all, the death penalty is absolute, irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error, Newsom said. He noted that 164 condemned prisoners nationwide, including five in California, have been freed from Death Row since 1973 based on evidence that they were wrongfully convicted or sentenced. The reprieves granted by Newsom are temporary orders, in effect during his governorship, as opposed to executive clemency that would reduce an inmates sentence to life in prison without parole. Clemency for any inmate with two or more felony convictions would require approval from a majority of the state Supreme Court. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. Governors in several other states have granted clemency to condemned prisoners, most notably Illinois Republican Gov. George Ryan, who spared the lives of all 167 inmates on his states Death Row in 2003. Illinois abolished the death penalty in 2011. Moratoriums on the death penalty are in place in Pennsylvania and Oregon, where a 2011 order by Gov. John Kitzhaber was extended in 2016 by his successor, Kate Brown. In December, six former Democratic governors in other states wrote a column in the New York Times urging outgoing California Gov. Jerry Brown to commute all death sentences in the state to life in prison. But Brown, despite his longtime opposition to the death penalty, never sought clemency for any Death Row inmates. The last inmate to be executed in California was Clarence Ray Allen in January 2006. Before the next scheduled execution, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose ruled that the states capital punishment procedures were unconstitutional because of flaws in lethal injection procedures, equipment and staff training that could subject inmates to an agonizing death. For much of the past 13 years, the state has been searching for alternatives that would satisfy the federal judiciary. Newsoms order ends those efforts, at least for as long as he is governor. With the state pulling back its attempts to win judicial approval for an execution method, California has no legal method of putting anyone to death although supporters of capital punishment may argue that the voter-approved 2016 measure, Proposition 66, prohibits challenges to execution procedures at the state level. Of the 737 condemned inmates, 25 have lost all appeals of their convictions and death sentences. Their cases are still awaiting review in a San Francisco federal court, which has yet to approve a new single-drug execution procedure authorized by Browns administration. But the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected similar challenges in other states, ruling that the possibility of a painful execution by injection does not violate constitutional standards. Had he not announced a moratorium, Newsom most likely would have faced decisions within the next year on whether to allow individual executions to proceed. Bob Egelko and Alexei Koseff are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com, alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko, @akoseff Regarding Supergirl gets City Hall protest rules suspended (March 12): Kudos to Supergirl Shawn Sunshine Strickland for getting the city to suspend its policy requiring permits for individuals and small groups that seek to protest on the steps of City Hall. This building, which houses our local government officials, is not the Palace of Versailles. Those who wish to demonstrate there should have their free speech rights respected. San Francisco needs more civic-minded citizens like Strickland who, like any good superhero, proclaimed after her success: Justice is my mission, and the battle continues! Vivian Wexford, San Francisco Rely on fair science education Regarding School lessons are targeted by science doubters (March 7): These people do not doubt science; they fear it! They are afraid the solutions to climate crisis will impact their jobs, fortunes, business, religious beliefs, or they simply do not understand the scientific urgency we all face. That fear, however, is unwarranted because the solutions will create new businesses and jobs, reinvigorate old ones, protect their fortunes, and save their families from future distress, illness and losses they could suffer. The science is very much unbalanced toward warming; the counter views are inadequate to balance the overwhelming evidence that we have a crisis with our climate. We must deal with it through unbiased, fair and accurate education, not misinformed alternative ideas. Jere Lipps, Oakland Dont reap the benefits Concerning Opposing union dues (News of the Day, March 12): My question for the five California educators who filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the states top teachers union from collecting dues through mandatory paycheck deductions is this: Who do you think enabled Oaklands educators to successfully achieve an 11 percent pay increase last week? It was their union, of course. Teachers who dont want to pay union dues should have to negotiate their own contracts, and not reap the benefits of collective bargaining. Phyllis Ramirez, San Francisco NIMBYs resist construction Regarding Creating centers to help homeless is daunting task (Page 1, March 12): The answer to the question Why is it so hard to create more Navigation Centers in San Francisco? is an acronym: NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). Finding vacant buildings with adequate facilities to help the homeless is one matter, but another is the resistance of certain upscale neighborhoods to permit them to exist. Like the current housing crisis, in which the NIMBYs fight the construction of multiunit buildings, the current Navigation Center crisis is also hampered by the same mind-set. Such resistance reinforces the sad fact that San Francisco has become a city of haves and have-nots. Didier Dubois, San Francisco Shorten the work days There are only so many hours of daylight on any given day of the year. No amount of messing around with clocks is going to change that. It will always be darker at one end of the day or another than some people might prefer. How about shortening the length of the work day (and school day) when daylight hours are in short supply? Abigail Johnston, San Francisco Bias undermines solar efforts Regarding Solar firm accused of bigotry in sales (March 8): A story in last weeks San Francisco Chronicle reported on a lawsuit against a local solar company for allegedly discriminating against potential customers whose names sounded Middle Eastern or Indian. Racial and ethnic discrimination hurts our whole society. This case in particular highlights how discriminatory practices undermine our efforts to address the climate crisis. Earlier this year, a new study from Tufts University and UC Berkeley found that solar adoption is lagging in communities of color compared with neighborhoods where the majority of residents are white. Well never succeed in transitioning to clean energy without all our communities participating. The solar industry has taken strides in recent years to address diversity and inclusion in its workforce, but this case is a sad reminder that we must work harder to correct our individual bias and its impact on business practices. For a decade, the state of California has worked to make solar accessible to everyone by enacting a series of powerful programs. It is sad that we see this noble intention undermined by a misguided solar company. Renee Sharp, Executive Director, GRID Alternatives Bay Area, Oakland Not worth impeachment Im in complete agreement with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that its not worth initiating impeachment proceedings against President Trump. Such an action would not just be divisive, but would also fire up Trumps stubbornly loyal base in next years presidential campaign. In 2020, let Trump be scrutinized for his sorry record in office, the thousands of lies he has told, and his relentless attempts to consolidate his power and subvert our democracy. Richard Fairchild, Walnut Creek Option to clean the trains BART turnstile jumpers should be offered the option of paying off their fines by cleaning the stations and trains. Belinda Berry, Walnut Creek Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., have outlined their estimated $93 trillion plan for a Green New Deal. It aims to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in only a decade by transitioning to renewable energy sources. Despite its name, the Green New Deal isnt much of a deal at all. Here in California, aspects of the Green New Deal have substantially slowed housing construction, robbing Californias lower- and middle-class families of the wealth accumulation they might achieve through homeownership and forcing many state residents to live farther from work while simultaneously increasing the price they pay for gas and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. If you are wondering why California boasts the highest poverty rate (when housing costs are factored in) in the country, look no further than our states own Green New Deal. According to data compiled by the California Center for Jobs and the Economy, a 501(c)3 public benefit corporation, the average annual electricity bills for California residents have risen since 2010, when the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 was fully implemented, while electricity costs in Texas have gone down. While costs are up, we havent seen the types of job growth promised by the deals proponents. In fact, most green jobs are the result of simply reclassifying existing jobs, such as a bus driver who now drives a bus powered by natural gas. This makes it especially ironic that state regulators are doing their best to take natural-gas power plants offline across the state. Last year, state leaders committed California to a 60 percent renewable energy target by 2030 and zero emissions by 2045. What do they think will happen to energy prices? This shift toward renewable energy is coming at a time when many are already struggling to make ends meet. We must have an affordable and reliable energy supply. Keeping Californias lights on requires a grid that can ramp up electricity generation to quickly supply energy to those who need it. Without multiple energy sources that are up to these challenges, power blackouts and shortages are inevitable. That is why a diversified energy portfolio, including natural gas, is so important to the states energy future. Natural gas generates electricity that can be dispatched quickly by plant operators. It is also in abundant supply, thanks to an energy boom thats made America the worlds top natural-gas producer. The same cant be said about renewable energy sources such as wind and solar as both rely on natural elements that are impossible to predict. To see how this uncertainty can cause real problems, consider last summers heat wave. On July 6, energy demand peaked from about 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. at 45,000 megawatts, according to a Manhattan Institute scholar. However, wind-energy production had peaked at around midnight and solar was at its highest around 1:25 p.m. By 10 p.m., when electricity demand was still abnormally high at 40,000 megawatts, solar production and wind generation stood at zero and 2,700 megawatts, respectively. This is why many Californians are now subject to time-of-use rates, paying more for electricity during peak hours, when solar and wind production is decreased or nonexistent. Just as most working families are stepping in the door to cook meals and cooling their homes during the summer, they will be paying more for electricity. As California officials continue to push for more gas-fired plant closures, which used to provide power during these spikes in demand, costs will continue to increase for working Californians across the state. And while costs are going up, reliability is going down. Between 2017 and 2018, Californias natural-gas power-generation capacity decreased. This dropoff put the state and our economy at increased risk of power shortages, according to Californias grid operator. Of course, proponents of Californias move toward renewable energy maintain that batteries are the key to making wind and solar more reliable. But the mass energy-storage technologies they have in mind simply dont exist. And the most promising solutions along these lines are still cost-prohibitive. Heres a better idea: provide residents with the lowest-cost choices for power they need to keep their homes livable and their costs affordable. Dont make Californias poverty crisis a national crisis. Stop talking about the unrealistic Green New Deal and lets start talking about a realistic energy future that harnesses everything we have sun, wind and fuels like natural gas to provide the most reliable and lowest-cost energy for not just California, but the entire nation. Robert C. Lapsley is president of the California Business Roundtable, a non-partisan organization comprised of the senior executive leadership of the major employers throughout the state with a combined workforce of more than half a million employees. Though its been common for years, smoking cannabis at San Francisco events like 4/20 on Hippie Hill and Outside Lands in Golden Gate Park has never been legal. But the Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance Tuesday to create a special permit allowing people to sell and consume cannabis legally at public events that have historically attracted a lot of smoke. According to the Office of Cannabis, those events are: 4/20, Outside Lands, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, How Weird Street Faire, Clusterfest comedy festival, Carnaval and the annual Pride Parade. The law gives the Office of Cannabis the authority to grant temporary waivers to the citys no-smoking laws, which are some of the toughest in the country. We need to recognize the reality that people are going to be smoking cannabis whether or not we allow it, said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, sponsor of the ordinance. If we want to effectively regulate those events, we need a provision like this. The Cannabis Event Permits would authorize the sale and consumption of cannabis by those 21 and older. Permits would be limited to events that have been held regularly in San Francisco and have attracted a lot of unregulated cannabis use. Applicants will have to pay a nonrefundable permit application fee, which ranges from $500 to $3,000, depending on the projected number of attendees, each time the event is held. The permits would be part of a pilot program that would sunset Jan. 1, 2020, but could be extended by the Office of Cannabis until Dec. 31, 2021. The ordinance passed the board 9-2, with Supervisors Ahsha Safai and Gordon Mar opposed. This law comes after last years 4/20 event in Golden Gate Park, when 12 people were taken to the hospital. It was the first 4/20 celebration after California legalized recreational cannabis for adult use. Now that its legal, we have to make these choices to regulate it, said District Five Supervisor Vallie Brown, whose district includes parts of Golden Gate Park. They are going to smoke. And they will smoke at Hippie Hill and around it. Hippie Hill is the rise at Robin Williams Meadow near the eastern boundary of the park. Also at Tuesdays meeting, Mar called for a hearing to address the coming surge of initial public offerings from high-profile tech companies. In the next year, tech companies including Lyft, Uber and Pinterest plan to go public a financial boom that will likely mint thousands of millionaires in the city overnight. Mar asked the controller, treasurer, tax collector, and Office of Economic and Workforce Development to assess the potential impacts that this influx of wealth could have on business tax revenues, housing costs and gentrification. As a city with one of the largest wealth gaps in the world, we must better understand the consequences of this extreme inequality and a rapid injection of new wealth, Mar said. We have already seen this before. We have already seen new wealth pour into this city, to the benefit of the few and to the harm of the many. Trisha Thadani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadani SACRAMENTO Although his campaign promised last year that he would follow the will of the voters on capital punishment, Gov. Gavin Newsom says his decision to halt the death penalty in California should not come as a huge surprise to anybody. The laws of this state afford me the right to do this, said Newsom, who endorsed two failed ballot measures to abolish the death penalty, including the most recent attempt in November 2016. During the 2018 campaign for governor, spokesman Dan Newman told The Chronicle that Newsom recognizes that California voters have spoken on the issue and, if elected governor, hed respect the will of the electorate by following and implementing the law. But on Wednesday, Newsom said the reality of having to sign off on someones execution did not fully hit him until he took office. Ive had to process this in a way that I didnt frankly anticipate a few months ago, Newsom said at a news conference in the Capitol. Its a very emotional place that I stand. Facing a looming deadline to advance a new method for executions that will satisfy federal courts, Newsom said he had made a personal and moral decision to issue an executive order granting reprieves to all 737 inmates on Death Row at San Quentin State Prison, including 25 who have exhausted all appeals. This is about who I am as a human being. Its about what I can or cannot do. To me, this is the right thing to do, he said. At Newsoms direction, prison officials closed both the gas chamber and lethal injection facility at San Quentin on Wednesday. His office posted photos on Twitter of guards carting away a chair and a gurney where inmates were strapped down for execution. The governors executive order does not prevent local prosecutors from continuing to seek the death penalty in homicide cases or reduce the sentences of any current inmates. The state will continue to house the prisoners on Death Row. But Newsoms order does repeal a proposed single-drug lethal injection protocol that state prison officials had developed to try to satisfy federal courts objections to Californias previous method of executing inmates. A federal judge in San Jose ruled in 2006 that the states three-drug lethal injection method amounted to cruel and unusual punishment because of the possibility it could subject condemned inmates to tortured deaths. California has not executed anyone since then, but Newsom was facing an April 29 court deadline to defend the proposed new execution protocol. If that effort succeeded, Newsom could have faced imminent decisions on whether to allow the executions of numerous inmates to proceed. Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which favors capital punishment, said Newsom was abusing his reprieve power by placing a moratorium on all executions. Scheidegger helped write an initiative to speed up the death penalty that voters approved in the same 2016 election in which they defeated a competing measure to do away with capital punishment. The law that voters approved, Proposition 66, says state officials with the duty to execute judgments of death, shall maintain at all times the ability to execute such judgments. It also gives crime victims relatives the right to sue for enforcement. Scheidegger said those provisions could form the basis for a legal challenge to Newsoms order. He is spitting in the face of democracy, Scheidegger said. Its an outrage, and he should pay a political price. Republicans in the Legislature said Newsom was disregarding the pain and suffering of the families of murder victims. Theyre not forgotten by everybody in this legislative building, and were going to fight for the justice that they deserve, said Assemblyman Tom Lackey, R-Palmdale (Los Angeles County). Newsom was joined for his announcement by several of his fellow constitutional officers and dozens of Democratic lawmakers, who introduced a constitutional amendment Wednesday to put capital punishment on the ballot again in 2020. If passed by two-thirds vote of both the Senate and Assembly, the measure would be the third in eight years to ask voters to end the death penalty. Californias death penalty is a failed relic of a failed criminal justice system, Assemblyman Marc Levine, the San Rafael Democrat who is carrying the measure, said in a statement. Newsom declined to endorse the proposed constitutional amendment, but said, Ultimately, the way to handle the death penalty in California is to go to the ballot. The governor said he could not support efforts to resume executions in California knowing that some of the inmates put to death might be innocent. I cant sign my name to that. I cant be party to that. I wouldnt be able to sleep at night, he said. He said his views were informed by the case of Pete Pianezzi, who was convicted of murder in 1937, narrowly avoided being sentenced to death and served 13 years in prison before he was exonerated. Newsoms father, William Newsom, eventually led a campaign to have Pianezzi pardoned. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown did so in 1981. This has been a 40-year journey for me, Newsom said. Alexei Koseff is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @akoseff In our fair city, March 17 is only the culmination of our Saint Patrick celebrations. Many Irish American revelers greet the day with relief, since this March was overflowing with events. The frolics began March 1 at the United Irish Cultural Center, where United Irish Societies President Liam Frost hosted its Grand Marshal dinner honoring Mayor London Breed. On March 16, Breed is scheduled to lead a legion of pipers, step-dancers and Irish wolfhounds along Market Street for the societys 168th parade the nations longest-running St. Patricks Day parade west of the Mississippi. At the dinner, Breed, the citys first female African American mayor, noted this years theme, Women Breaking Barriers, by sharing her reflections on the similarities between the African American and Irish American communities. Some of the history of how our ancestors journeyed to America is unfortunate and tragic. And once here, both communities faced discrimination evidenced in signs reading Whites Only or No Irish Need Apply, she said. But when we landed in this city like early labor leader Kate Kennedy, who fought for equal pay for equal work we knew there was hope and possibility, continued Breed. Today, I stand before you as mayor of San Francisco because of that opportunity. The mayors grand marshal duties included numerous appearances draped in her official green, white and orange sash alongside the Irish Societies as they spread shamrock cheer to veterans, nursing homes and even more dinners. Catherine Bigelow / Special to The Chronicle Also in this mix were timely tributes to other Irish Americans and Irish natives: John Ring , Riordan High School development director, was named Hibernian of the Year at the Hibernian Newman lunch benefiting the S.F. Archdiocese campus ministry programs. The Triple I (Irish-Israeli-Italian) Society sang the praises of Martha Cohen ( the mayors director of special events), radio host Ronn Owens and SFPD Deputy Chief Ann Mannix at its St. Patricks Day lunch. And Colin Ryan , the Americas co-head for Goldman Sachs, was honored at the Ireland Funds annual dinner. But one of the most heartfelt cheers rose on March 8 at City Hall when Breed, joined by Mick Flynn, the lord mayor of Cork, Ireland, and local Irish American leaders raised the flag of the Irish Republic, declaring March Irish American Heritage and Friendship Month in San Francisco. The lengthy list of speakers included Irish Consul General Robert ODriscoll, who was also celebrating the recent birth of his first child. My wife ( multimedia journalist Caoimhe Ni Chonchoille ) and I named him Cuan , which means bay or harbor in Irish. My term here is up in about two years, and I imagine in about 10, my son will wonder where hes actually from, shared ODriscoll. Ill tell him hes from one of the great cities in the world: a city made great by Irish and Irish Americans who worked to build this special place, from laying down the streets to protecting those streets. Ill say, Son, youre damn lucky to be an Irish San Franciscan. Catherine Bigelow / Special to The Chronicle Asian Art + Fashion: Welcoming the sold-out crowd of supporters March 7 at the Asian Art Museums Art + Fashion gala, director Jay Xu advised the crowd he was keeping to theme. By the way, he said, with a laugh, tonight Im wearing Blanc de Chine. The glamorous soiree (led by chairwoman-museum trustee Michele Alioto and sponsored by jeweler Bulgari) featured a Dan Haute Couture fashion show that followed a McCalls dinner set in a swanky tent next to the museum. This fashion theme also celebrated the museums current exhibition, Kimono Refashioned, a beautiful survey showcasing 150 years of kimono-inspired ensembles from the Kyoto Costume Institute. Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more. Roaming the galleries during cocktails, guests marveled over exquisite creations spanning from the Victorian Age to the digital era, including those created by such European designers as Coco Chanel and Paul Poiret along with contemporary Japanese pieces from designers Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo. Fashion is self-expression. Its identity; its a language of communication and an artistic one at that, toasted Xu. With this exhibition, were adding a major new dimension at the Asian Art Museum. The gala raised more than $1.5 million for museum exhibition and education programs a number goosed by the online auction of one-of-a-kind couture created by designers Andrew Gn, Ashdeen, Blanc de Chine, Juun.J, Shiatzy Chen, Tolight and Victor Tung. Xu also spoke on the museums new 13,000-square-foot, $90 million expansion, made possible by donors such as Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and his wife, museum trustee Akiko Yamazaki, that is being overseen by architect Kulapat Yantrasast and is expected to be completed this summer. This expansion will transform our visitor experience and make Asian art essential for all, said Xu. Whether it was made thousands of years ago or is a cutting-edge, contemporary expression, connecting art to life is an essential part of who we are. Catherine Bigelow is The San Francisco Chronicles society correspondent. Email: missbigelow@sfgate.com Instagram: @missbigelow The distinct, high-pitched screeching sounds of BART, familiar to most riders going through the Transbay Tunnel and now, apparently, video game players is a well-worn topic of discussion. "Why Are BART Trains So Loud?" asked KQED's Bay Curious. "Will BART damage my hearing?" inquired KALW. The Chronicle also addressed this in 2010, asking, "Noise on BART: How bad is it and is it harmful?" Which is to say, noise is a complaint that BART hears (ahem) often. Despite the incoming new fleet of cars which the transit agency promises will be much quieter than the current trains BART has continued to make improvements on its legacy fleet in order to reduce the noise for riders in the meantime. In order to get that done, the crew at BART has taken on the laborious process of reshaping the wheel on every car, while also smoothing out more than 1,000 miles of track. There are more than 100 miles of BART tracks, but the tracks require 10 passes to smooth out for this project. The underground noise most riders hear is caused by wear known as rail corrugation, or "speed bumps that develop on the rail," as BART Principal Track Engineer Gregory Shivy described it. By reshaping wheels and the refinished tracks, BART rides are almost 20 decibels quieter than before, according to BART officials. As of February, BART has reached its goal of reshaping every wheel to the new, quieter, conical shape. And by all accounts the efforts seem to be working: The team tracked a 73 percent reduction in noise complaints by line, from the start of the project in July 2017 to October 2018. Informal tests done by SFGATE using the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) iPhone app does seem to show an improvement over noise measurements made by The Chronicle in 2010. HISTORY LESSON: Before BART opened the Transbay Tube, they let George Lucas film a movie inside "The silence is actually golden in this case, because we're not getting the complaints, and for a long period of time, almost nothing," said Ben Holland, manager of vehicle systems engineering with BART. "We've had some upticks [in complaints] here and there, [but] I think people that ride the system frequently, they remember how just incredibly loud the cars were and when the system gets quiet, they're gonna say, 'Oh my goodness, it's so much quieter.'" Relating a story of taking his own family on BART, Holland recalled everyone being able to chat with each other during a notoriously noisy stretch of BART. "I didn't even realize it, we were carrying on a conversation through the Transbay Tube, and partway through I'm like, 'Wow, I don't ever remember being able to do that.'" READ ALSO: Here are a few reasons why you should stop hating on BART quite so hard The improvements are all being done despite the fact that 775 new cars are scheduled to take over the tracks in 2022 and are built with quietness in mind. "First of all, the cars are new so, they're not rattling as much," said Shivy. "Second of all, just the materials that are used on the new cars, there's a much higher focus on selecting materials that reduce noise." "If you ride our existing cars, you'll hear the doors rattling, you'll feel air coming through them," Shivy added. "And wherever you feel air, that's where you're going to hear noise, because that's how the noise travels." Comparing the new to old cars, noise measurements drop anywhere from 3 decibels, to as high as 6 to 8 decibels "in certain conditions," said Shivy. Still, if you're riding on one of the older trains and things feel like it's in the 85-plus decibel range, the good news is that it shouldn't typically be an issue. According to Dr. Matthew Fitzgerald, Assistant Professor and Chief of Audiology at Stanford University, there isn't data to suggest the noise levels experienced when riding BART could result in permanent hearing loss. "[What] we know about sustained noise exposure is, at high intense levels, it can cause hearing loss," explained Fitzgerald. "We know that sometimes even short bursts of very intense noise, called an impact noise, can also be associated with hearing loss as well." "We don't have data suggesting that [BART will damage hearing], and that's not to say that it might not be a problem," he said, "[but] we don't have a lot of data showing that that has a permanent effect on hearing loss." So, in theory, with all the improvements to the BART trains and track as well as the new, quieter cars on its way to BART riders should feel fairly confident they aren't causing damage to their hearing via a BART ride. The one caveat to this all, however, is for those riders wearing headphones. "When people are not careful with the levels of music that they have, and they're listening to podcasts or music, and you're turning it up so that you can hear it over the noise in the tunnel, or other places," said Fitzgerald, "then you could run the risk of getting up to some pretty high levels that might be problematic." Fitzgerald said he's observed riders on the New York subway with "a bad set of earbuds" that don't isolate the ear, cranking up the volume to intense levels for an extended amount of time. To help protect hearing beyond the sage advice of keeping your headphone volume low Fitzgerald suggested investing in a good set of headphones, particularly over-the-ear, or closed-back kinds, or earbuds that form a tight seal from outside noise. (For those looking to lower the noise levels without music capabilities, Fitzgerald said custom ear plugs also work wonders.) "That's an easy way to kind of help protect your hearing, particularly when you're in a noisy environment, you won't have to crank up what you want as loudly to get over the external noise," Fitzgerald concluded. "I encourage people to be cautious and don't be afraid to plug your ears," he added. Read Dianne de Guzman's latest stories and send her news tips at ddeguzman@sfgate.com. Start receiving breaking news emails on wildfires, civil emergencies, riots, national breaking news, Amber Alerts, weather emergencies, and other critical events with the SFGATE breaking news email. Click here to make sure you get the news. The board of directors of the urban think tank SPUR has appointed Alicia John-Baptiste as its new president and executive director. John-Baptiste, who will be the first female president in the history of the 112-year-old organization, replaces Gabriel Metcalf, who led SPUR from 2005 to 2018. He left last year to lead an urban planning organization in Sydney. John-Baptiste, a former chief of staff for both the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and the San Francisco Planning Department, joined SPUR as deputy director in 2015. She has been acting director since Metcalf left. Search committee Chairwoman Lydia Tan, head of development for developer Bentall Kennedy, cited John-Baptistes transformational vision for SPUR, her inclusive leadership style, her deep knowledge of the Bay Area, as well as her truly unmatched ability to get things done. Our ambitious list of must-haves described someone who could take SPUR to the next level while expanding our tent to include the diverse representation that makes the Bay Area special, she said. During Metcalfs tenure the organization grew from four to 40 employees and opened offices in San Jose and Oakland. The nonprofit, which has a $7.5 million annual budget, also built a new headquarters on Mission Street in downtown San Francisco, where it hosts a full calendar of lectures and panel discussions. The Bay Area has the elements it needs to become a place of belonging and opportunity for all. It is with that vision in mind that I am excited to lead SPURs work, said John-Baptiste. SPUR is a nonprofit that works on finding solutions to problems faced by Bay Area cities, including issues such as transportation, infrastructure and housing. J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineen LONDON Apples powerful role as gatekeeper of the App Store has long frustrated the makers of apps who must abide by its rules or risk losing access to hundreds of millions of customers who own Apple devices. Now one of Apples biggest rivals, music streaming service Spotify, says Apple is abusing its position and violating European antitrust laws. In an aggressive attempt to undercut Apples power, Spotify said on Wednesday that it had filed a complaint with European regulators, accusing Apple of using its App Store to squash companies that compete with its services, including Apple Music. Spotifys complaint comes at a perilous moment for the worlds biggest tech companies, with scrutiny over Silicon Valleys power increasing in recent years. Presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has proposed breaking up the tech giants as a remedy to their unfair advantages. One of her ideas was to separate the App Store from Apple. Spotifys complaint is just the latest example of what can happen when these enormous companies abuse their power to undermine competition, Warren said in a statement Wednesday. We need a level playing field, and that starts by breaking up giant tech companies who both own a marketplace and operate in that same marketplace. A British government report also called for tougher antitrust laws for the tech industry. Apples role as a make-or-break arbiter has long frustrated app makers by imposing rules and charging a fee of up to 30 percent on anything sold through its App Store. Spotify, which has headquarters in Luxembourg and Sweden, said it told the European Commission, an aggressive regulator of the tech industry, that the policies are not just a costly nuisance, but a tax that violates competition laws and merits an investigation. The policies have been particularly vexing for companies, like Spotify, that compete with Apple. Spotify and Apple Music are the worlds largest music streaming services. They continue to give themselves an unfair advantage at every turn, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said in a message posted on the companys website. He said Apple is acting as both player and referee to deliberately disadvantage other app developers. Apple did not respond to a request for comment. Apples introduction of the App Store in 2008 revolutionized the mobile phone industry, creating a new marketplace for games, productivity tools and social networking services. There are now more than 2 million apps available on the App Store. Companies like Spotify have thrived on Apples service, which typically generates more money for app developers than Googles Play Store. Spotifys overall sales last year rose 29 percent to about $6 billion, but the company is not profitable and is under pressure from investors. The company paid about 74 percent of its revenue to cover music rights and related costs. Spotify has been a formidable competitor to Apple in attracting customers for music streaming. Spotify said that it ended 2018 with 207 million active users, including 96 million with paid subscriptions. In January, Apple said that its Apple Music service had 50 million paying users. Apples control over the App Store has been a source of tension as the company has focused more on services that compete with many of the apps it sells. As iPhone sales have leveled off, Apple has relied more on sales of software and services. Spotify said Apple continually changes its policies to harm competitors. Apps should be able to compete fairly on the merits, and not based on who owns the App Store, Ek said. We should all be subject to the same fair set of rules and restrictions including Apple Music. Adam Satariano and Jack Nicas are New York Times writers. YOKOHAMA, Japan The chief executive officers of Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi have announced a new board to oversee the French-Japanese auto alliance, seeking a new start for the partnership after the arrest and dismissal of Nissans former chairman, Carlos Ghosn. This is a very special day for the alliance, Renault SAs chairman, Jean-Dominique Senard, told reporters after a meeting at Nissans Yokohama headquarters. He spoke to reporters along with Renaults chief executive, Thierry Bollore; Nissan CEO Hiroto Saikawa and Osamu Masuko, CEO of the smaller Japanese alliance partner Mitsubishi Motors Corp. The alliance did not announce any changes in mutual stake holdings. The new board, consisting of those four executives, will meet every month in Paris or Tokyo and oversee various projects, helping to make the companies operations more efficient, they said. Ghosn still is one of eight members of Nissans board. He had asked to attend the board meeting but was conspicuously absent after the Tokyo District Court rejected his request on Monday. He needed court approval to attend because conditions for his release last week on $9 million bail, after more than 100 days in custody, prohibit actions that may enable him to tamper with evidence. Ghosn has been charged with falsifying financial reports by under-reporting his income and with breach of trust. He says he is innocent. When questioned about Ghosns case, Senard said he believed that people are presumed innocent until proven otherwise. He declined comment on whether Ghosn, who remains on Renaults board, will be allowed to attend its meetings even if he is able to leave Japan. At the moment, as he awaits trial, he is barred from leaving the country. Renault owns 43 percent of Nissan, which makes the March subcompact, Leaf electric car and Infiniti luxury models. Nissan owns 15 percent of Renault, and a 34 percent stake in Mitsubishi Motors. Nissan has not yet named a new chairman to replace Ghosn. Senard said he would not pursue that post. Senard will be chairman of the new alliance board and hopes to become vice chairman at Nissan, he said. Doubts over the balance of power between Renault and Nissan had been growing after Ghosns departure. The Japanese automaker was on the verge of bankruptcy 20 years ago, when Renault sent Ghosn to help lead its turnaround. Nissan is now more profitable than Renault. Since Ghosns release, he has been seen in Tokyo on outings with his family. He released a statement reasserting his innocence and calling his detention a terrible ordeal, but has not commented since. A statement released on Ghosns behalf expressed disappointment over his inability to attend Tuesdays meeting. As an elected member of the board, Mr. Ghosn stands ready to fulfill his professional duties to the shareholders who elected him, it said. It is unfortunate that the meritless and unsubstantiated accusations against him have blocked his ideas and perspective from being deployed in service of the company he served for the past 20 years. Yuri Kageyama is an Associated Press writer. WASHINGTON A last-ditch gambit to spare Senate Republicans a hostile showdown with President Trump over the Constitutions separation of powers was torpedoed Wednesday by the president himself, increasing the likelihood that the Senate will vote Thursday to overturn the presidents emergency declaration and force the first veto of his term. Hoping to avoid a confrontation with Trump over his declaration of an emergency to build his coveted border wall, Republicans tried to rally behind legislation to limit the power of presidents to declare emergencies in the future while allowing the current presidents end run around Congress. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly derided that idea and then Trump threw cold water on it himself, phoning the Republican author of the new legislation, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, during a Senate luncheon to inform him it was no deal. As a result, Lee said he would now vote to end the emergency declaration, the fifth Republican yes vote and other Republicans, with no alternative route, are likely to follow. Unfortunately, it appears the bill does not have an immediate path forward, so I will be voting to terminate the latest emergency declaration, said Lee, who had earlier said he did not think the presidents actions were unconstitutional. The outcome left Republicans with a difficult choice. They can back the president in what is widely seen as a surrender of Congress core power of controlling federal spending. Or they can join Democrats and break with a president who is popular within the party on his maneuver to build a wall that is also popular with Republicans. To Trump, the decision is not all that tough. I think anybody going against border security, drug trafficking, human trafficking, that is a bad vote, the president told reporters at the White House as he delivered another warning shot to Republicans who would dare to buck him. He also defended the constitutionality of his declaration despite the bipartisan refusal of Congress to fund the wall. I think it is bad for a Republican senator I also think it is bad for a Democrat senator to vote against border security and to vote against the wall, he said. I think to vote that way is a very bad thing long into the future. But Republicans are struggling with the vote. Conservatives such as Lee and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky another Republican who says he will vote for the resolution of disapproval believe that members of Congress have ceded far too much power to the executive branch over the years in an effort to avoid taking politically tough stances themselves. Republicans regularly accused President Barack Obama of executive overreach on issues such as immigration, health care and the environment, and now risk being accused of hypocrisy if they stand by while Trump ignores Congress. Carl Hulse is a New York Times writer. MIAMI Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz on Wednesday offered his vision for what an independent presidency could look like, even though he still hasnt decided whether to enter the White House race himself. In a speech at Miami Dade College, Schultz laid out his plans for protecting democracy and free enterprise and sought to show how a president elected outside the two-party system could repair the current dysfunction in Washington. Schultz also vowed to sign only legislation that has bipartisan support and to not put forward any Supreme Court nominee who cannot be confirmed by two-thirds of the Senate. The courts have become yet another battlefield in the ongoing war between Democratic and Republican leaders, Schultz said. These battles have undermined our faith in the rule of law and the impartiality of the entire judicial system. All of this has to change. Schultz also said that he would assemble a Cabinet that includes members from across the political spectrum and consists of a larger share of women than that of any previous president. In an explicit contrast to President Trump, Schultz argued that hell nominate the most qualified people, period and that he wont humiliate them on Twitter or make decisions so outrageous that they feel compelled to resign in protest. Trumps Cabinet has been plagued by regular turnover and scandal. The 65-year-old billionaire also highlighted his difficult upbringing in a New York City public housing project. Rothschild Toussaint, an economic major who attended Schultzs speech, said the former CEOs centrist message is one that could unify the country during a time of extreme divide. Although he is a registered Democrat, Toussaint, who immigrated to the U.S. from Haiti, said he is open to all possibilities for the upcoming presidential election. Schultz has been exploring a potential independent candidacy for months, to the dismay of some Democrats who say that an outside independent candidacy could have a spoiler effect, handing Trump a second term. Schultz, a lifelong Democrat who recently registered as an independent, has said he would do nothing to help re-elect Trump. He has said that Democrats and Republicans are equally to blame for repelling voters at the center of the political spectrum, and he has argued that an independent candidacy like his could re-engage them. Juana Summers is an Associated Press writer. WASHINGTON Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sentenced to a total of 7 years in prison on federal charges Wednesday, then was hit almost immediately with fresh state charges in New York that could put him outside the presidents power to pardon. In Washington, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson brushed aside Manaforts pleas for leniency and rebuked him for misleading the U.S. government about his lucrative foreign lobbying work and for encouraging witnesses to lie on his behalf. It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved in the crimes, Jackson told Manafort, 69, who sat stone-faced in a wheelchair he has used because of gout. She added 3 years on top of the nearly four-year sentence Manafort received last week in a separate case in Virginia, though hell get credit for nine months already served. The sentencing hearing was a milestone in special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election campaign. Manafort was among the first people charged in the investigation, and though the allegations did not relate to his work for candidate Donald Trump, his foreign entanglements and business relationship with an associate the U.S. says has ties to Russian intelligence have made him a pivotal figure in the probe. Prosecutors are updating judges this week on the cooperation provided by other key defendants in the case. Mueller is expected to soon conclude his investigation in a confidential report to the Justice Department. Minutes after Manaforts federal sentence was imposed, New York prosecutors unsealed a 16-count indictment accusing him of giving false information on mortgage loan applications. The new case appeared designed at least in part to protect against the possibility that Trump could pardon Manafort. The president can pardon federal crimes but not state offenses. In Washington, Trump said he felt very badly for Manafort but hadnt given any thought to a pardon. No collusion, the president added. On Wednesday, Judge Jackson made clear the case against Manafort had nothing to do with Russian election interference, and she scolded Manaforts lawyers for asserting that their client was charged only because prosecutors couldnt get him on crimes related to potential collusion with the Trump campaign. The no-collusion mantra is simply a non sequitur, she said. Manafort asked for mercy and said the criminal charges against him had taken everything from me already. He pleaded with the judge not to impose any additional time beyond the sentence he had received last week in Virginia. I am sorry for what I have done and all the activities that have gotten us here today, he said in a steady voice. While I cannot undo the past, I will ensure that the future will be very different. Eric Tucker and Chad Day are Associated Press writers. WASHINGTON The Defense Department has approved a new policy that will largely bar transgender troops and military recruits from transitioning to another sex, and require most individuals to serve in their birth gender. The memo outlining the new policy comes after a lengthy and complicated legal battle. It falls short of the all-out transgender ban that was initially ordered by President Trump. But it will likely force the military to eventually discharge transgender individuals who need hormone treatments or surgery and cant or wont serve in their birth gender. The order says the military services must implement the new policy in 30 days, giving some individuals a short window of time to qualify for gender transition if needed. And it allows service secretaries to waive the policy on a case-by-case basis. Under the new rules, currently serving transgender troops and anyone who has signed an enlistment contract by April 12 may continue with plans for hormone treatments and gender transition if they have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. But after April 12, no one with gender dysphoria who is taking hormones or has transitioned to another gender will be allowed to enlist. And any currently serving troops diagnosed with gender dysphoria after April 12 will have to serve in their birth gender and will be barred from taking hormones or getting transition surgery. The memo lays out guidelines for discharging service members based on the new policy. It says a service member can be discharged based on a diagnosis of gender dysphoria if he or she is unable or unwilling to adhere to all applicable standards, including the standards associated with his or her biological sex, or seeks transition to another gender. It adds that troops must be formally counseled and given a chance to change their decision before the discharge is finalized. In a statement Tuesday night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the ban cowardly. The Presidents revival of his bigoted, disgusting ban on transgender service members is a stunning attack on the patriots who keep us safe and on the most fundamental ideals of our nation, the San Francisco Democrat said. The Presidents years-long insistence on his cowardly ban makes clear that prejudice, not patriotism, guides his decisions. Lolita C. Baldor is an Associated Press writer. WASHINGTON The Senate voted Wednesday to end U.S. support for the Saudi Arabian-led coalitions war in Yemen, bringing Congress one step closer to a unprecedented rebuke of President Trumps foreign policy. Lawmakers have never before invoked the decades-old War Powers Resolution to stop a foreign conflict, but they are poised to do just that in the bid to cut off U.S. support for a war that has triggered a humanitarian catastrophe. The vote puts Congress on a collision course with Trump, who has already threatened to veto the resolution. The measure was co-sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Mike Lee, R- Utah. Next, it will move to the Democratic-controlled House, where it is expected to pass. The resolution passed by a vote of 54 to 46, with seven Republicans breaking with Trump to back the resolution: Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Steve Daines of Montana, Mike Lee of Utah, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Todd Young of Indiana. The bottom line is that the United States should not be supporting a catastrophic war led by a despotic regime with an irresponsible foreign policy, Sanders said on Wednesday from the Senate floor. He said a vote in favor of the measure would begin the process of reclaiming our constitutional authority by ending United States involvement in a war that has not been authorized by Congress and is unconstitutional. In its statement threatening a veto, the White House argued the premise of the resolution is flawed and that it would undermine the fight against extremism. U.S. support for the Saudis does not constitute engaging in hostilities, the statement said, and the Yemen resolution seeks to override the presidents determination as commander in chief. Susannah George is an Associated Press writer. A Southern California high school that has sought to quell outrage after photographs surfaced of students giving a Nazi salute at a party is reeling again after officials say flyers with Nazi swastikas were found on campus over the weekend. Late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, Nazi posters were placed on the campus of the school, Newport Harbor High, a spokeswoman for the school district, Adriana Angulo, said Wednesday. School officials immediately called the Newport Beach Police Department to report them, Angulo said. She described the act as vandalism. Officers responded to the school Sunday morning and discovered about 10 flyers, some with Nazi symbols on them,said Heather Rangel, a spokeswoman for the Police Department. Nobody is claiming responsibility, Rangel said Wednesday. There was no photo or video evidence for police to review, she added. It was not clear whether the appearance of the flyers was connected to the previous episode, she said, which involved students at a party giving a Nazi salute in front of dozens of red cups arranged in the shape of a swastika. Police created an incident report regarding the flyers, but no arrests have been made, Rangel said. Given the lack of physical damage, she said, police would need to know more about a motive to assess whether a crime had been committed. School and district officials were working closely with police, Angulo said. The situation left school officials denouncing anti-Semitism for at least the second time in recent weeks. Again we condemn all acts of anti-Semitism and hate in all their forms, Sean Boulton, the high schools principal, said in a statement Wednesday. We will continue to be vigilant with our stance, and the care of our students and staff. Newport Harbor students placed messages on campus Monday encouraging kindness, according to City News Service and The Los Angeles Times. Show kindness toward unkind people. Forgive people who dont deserve it, one message reportedly read. Then, Tuesday night, during the school districts board meeting, the school board approved the creation of a human relations task force, Angulo said. It will be focused on developing a districtwide plan to determine how we can best create a more positive school culture and provide improved curriculum in our schools that will assure that the past is understood and never repeated, she said. The Nazi flyers episode is the latest to unnerve the high school and the wealthy Orange County beach cities that surround it. Officials from the school and school district were forced to hold an emergency meeting March 3 to address the outrage over the photographs of students giving a Nazi salute that were shared widely on social media. The school has interviewed dozens of students in its investigation of the party. Officials have said they were weighing disciplinary action. The school district has also held two community meetings, and late last week, Eva Schloss a Holocaust survivor and Anne Franks stepsister visited the high school to speak with students about her experiences. Leaders on campus and in the community have appeared optimistic that the students involved had learned their lesson and that the situation offered a teachable moment of sorts. Newport Harbor student leaders united in a call to end hate; some students reportedly wrote open letters of apology; and even Schloss, 89, told reporters that after meeting with students, she thought they had learned a lesson for life." I think this school has got the message, she said last week. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. BROOKLYN NXIVM President Nancy Salzman pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of racketeering conspiracy, making her the first person convicted in the Justice Department's criminal prosecution of the Colonie-based organization's leaders. Salzman, 64, who appeared in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, faces 33 to 41 months in prison as a result of the conviction, and a maximum fine of $250,000 plus possible restitution and forfeiture. There was no public disclosure in court of whether Salzman has agreed to cooperate in the ongoing investigation by the Justice Department, which last year brought charges against Salzman as well as her daughter Lauren; NXIVM co-founder Keith Raniere; television actress Allison Mack; Clare Bronfman, the organization's operations director and an heiress of the Seagram's liquor empire; and Kathy Russell, a longtime bookkeeper for NXIVM. Salzman's plea came as the government filed a superseding indictment on Wednesday against the five remaining defendants. The new indictment severed Nancy Salzman from the case and added seven additional charges, most that center on Raniere's alleged sexual contact with at least two underage girls. The new racketeering charges include multiple counts of sexual exploitation of a child and possession of child pornography, and one count of visa fraud. If convicted of the child exploitation charges, which the government said are buttressed by electronic messages, photographs and witness accounts, Raniere faces a minimum of 15 years in prison. READ MORE TIMES UNION COVERAGE OF NXIVM. In the courtroom on Wednesday, Salzman broke down as she apologized to her daughter and her parents while pleading guilty. "It has taken me some time and some soul-searching to come to this place," she said. " ... I still believe some of what we did was good." Salzman admitted to conspiring to commit two criminal acts: hacking into email accounts of the group's enemies who were not named in court and altering a videotape of NXIVM instructional sessions during a federal civil lawsuit that pitted the group against the Ross Institute, which is operated by cult tracker Rick Ross, who works to alert the public to the dangers of cults. NXIVM sued the Ross Institute in 2003 after it published excerpts from a NXIVM training manual that had been provided by an insider who had signed a non-disclosure agreement. Courts initially determined the institute's quotations were covered by the fair use doctrine; the suit was dismissed in 2017. The government's computer-hacking allegation is not the first time leaders of NXIVM have been accused of illegally monitoring email accounts. The Times Union first reported in 2015 that Bronfman had been accused of conspiring with Raniere to secretly implant a "key logger" virus on the computer of her father, Edgar M. Bronfman Sr., who died in December 2013. The alleged hacking of Edgar Bronfman's computer was apparently carried out so that the NXIVM associates could monitor his emails, including his exchanges with world leaders and then-U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton. Last July, federal agents in Albany arrested Salzman and her daughter along with Russell. Bronfman was taken into custody that same day by federal agents in New York City. Raniere and Mack were arrested a year ago. A criminal trial is scheduled to begin April 29 in Brooklyn. The 30-page, 11-count indictment filed this week honed the government's case against the remaining defendants, adding the sexual exploitation and child pornography charges. One of two racketeering counts in the indictment lists 14 separate criminal acts, ranging from conspiracy to commit identity theft to money laundering. The new indictment also includes the initial charges leveled against the defendants last year, including extortion, sex trafficking, harboring of aliens for financial gain, forced labor, various conspiracy charges and wire fraud. The indictment seeks forfeiture of a Halfmoon townhouse that Raniere had called "The Library" and allegedly used as his private "sex lair," as well as more than $520,000 in cash that was seized last year from Nancy Salzman's Halfmoon residence. According to a person familiar with the case, Salzman's attorney Robert Soloway did not inform Raniere's attorneys that Salzman would be pleading guilty before the news was first reported Tuesday afternoon by the Times Union. The charges allege some of the defendants took part in recruiting and grooming sexual partners for Raniere, and of using "harassment, coercion and abusive litigation to intimidate and attack perceived enemies and critics of Raniere." A court filing from prosecutors on Tuesday outlined how Salzman and other co-defendants "were aware of and facilitated Raniere's sexual relationships with two underage victims ... (including) a 15-year-old girl who was employed by Nancy Salzman and who 10 years later became Raniere's first-line 'slave'" in a secret club he had created to groom women to have sex with him. The new indictment said Raniere's illegal sexual contact with one of the minors identified only as Jane Doe 2 took place in 2005. Prosecutors contend Raniere had formed the secret club, known as "Dominus Obsequious Sororium," which means "Master Over the Slave Women." The women in the group, they said, were lured into the club by other female NXIVM members including Mack, who considered Raniere her "grand master." According to the charges, the women were required to provide "collateral" sometimes damaging information about family members or close-up photographs of their genitalia in order to join. If they tried to leave, they were threatened that their collateral would be released. While Raniere's attorneys have characterized the allegations of his sexual relations with the 15-year-old girl as "inadmissible, unreliable, rank hearsay," prosecutors countered that their evidence includes "dated images of the victim, constituting child pornography, that were created and possessed by Raniere and electronic communications between the victim and Raniere reflecting their sexual relationship and indicating that it began when she was 15 years old." "As to Raniere's relationship with the second victim, the evidence demonstrates how members and associates of the enterprise were directed and expected to recruit and groom sexual partners for him ... (and) the government intends to introduce direct evidence, including witness testimony," the filing states. Prosecutors have described NXIVM as having been run as a type of pyramid scheme, noting the organization's leaders encouraged "associates and others to take expensive NXIVM courses, and incur debt to do so, as a means of exerting control over them and to obtain financial benefits for the members of the enterprise." The indictment of Raniere and his longtime confederates was a crippling blow to an organization that took shape in the Capital Region in the late 1990s. Under the direction of Raniere and Salzman, who had touted NXIVM's training curricula as a way for participants to improve their lives, the organization quietly built a following that included actors as well as the wealthy and politically powerful. NXIVM, which has been described by some experts as a cult, also developed a reputation for aggressively pursuing critics and defectors who broke from its ranks. The organization has been accused of using litigation to punish defectors who have criticized Raniere, the organization, or its training methods. NXIVM required its employees and devotees to sign non-disclosure agreements that were often used as weapons in their litigation against defectors or critics. Raniere remains in custody at a federal detention facility without bond. The other defendants have all been released on conditions that include home confinement. On Wednesday, Salzman and her attorneys left the courthouse without taking questions from reporters. She is scheduled to be sentenced on July 10. South Africa: Wanted Mamelodi suspect arrested Police Minister Bheki Cele has welcomed the arrest of wanted Mamelodi suspect Vusi Reginald "Khekhe" Mathibela. In a joint statement issued on Wednesday, Cele and National Police Commissioner General Khehla Sitole, said the arrest was effected after Mathibela handed himself over to the police in Germiston last night. On Monday, police in Mamelodi East had obtained a warrant for the arrest of Vusi Khekhe following cases of extortion, intimidation and assault levelled against him. Vusi Khekhe is alleged to have been part of a group "terrorising" the community of Mamelodi over a period of time. The Minister and the National Commissioner of Police engaged the community of Mamelodi East, firstly on the 25th of February 2019 during which time it emerged that Vusi Khekhe and the group have allegedly been terrorising the community of Mamelodi and surrounding areas. This was followed by a second visit on 1 March 2019 when a multidisciplinary stabilisation intervention was launched, the joint statement read. This intervention resulted in the arrest of six suspects on 8 March 2019, just a week after the launch of the stabilisation operations. Three of these suspects, Zwelibanzi Ngubane, Justice Khumalo and Asante Alfred were charged with possession of unlicensed firearms. The suspects on Monday appeared in the Alexandra Magistrate's Court and released on bail of R2000 each. Their case was postponed to April for further investigation. The 4th and 5th suspects, Elias Skosana and Kompi Stemmer Monageng were charged with extortion, intimidation and assault. They appeared at Pretoria Magistrate's Court on Monday, 11 March 2019 and they have been remanded in custody until 15 March 2019, the police said. The sixth suspect was released pending further investigations on a charge of possession of unlicensed firearm. The whereabouts of Vusi Khekhe could not be established initially. However, the net was closing in on Vusi Khekhe when he decided to hand himself over to police last night, read the statement. "We are confident that Vusi Reginald Khekhe Mathibela has cases to answer to," said Sitole. As part of the Turn-around Vision of the SAPS we will continue to stamp the authority of the State by arresting and prosecuting wrongdoers in all communities thus ensuring that people are and feel safe. The long arm of the law knows no boundaries, and will forever take its course no matter who you are. Residents of Mamelodi have been living in fear for far too long, the authority of the State will be felt and heard in all corners of South Africa, said the Minister. He added that the police would continue in its mission to prevent and combat anything that may threaten the safety and security of any community and investigate all crimes and further ensure that offenders are brought to justice. Vusi Khekhe will be brought before a magistrate in the Pretoria Court soon, not later than 48 hours from the time of his arrest. The police have urged the public with information on crimes that have been committed or is likely to take place to please contact our Crime Stop number on 086 00 10111. Callers may remain anonymous and all information will be treated with strictest confidence. SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2019-03-13. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. The Contra Costa County District Attorney has cleared the county's backlog of 1,246 untested rape kits that have accumulated from 1978 to 2016 with the assistance of a grant from the Manhattan District Attorney's office in New York. Untested kits were collected from agencies throughout the county and sent them to Sorenson Forensics in Utah for testing. The results yielded 182 new DNA profiles that have been entered into the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS database. There were 51 known offenders identified as suspects in those cases, and eight cases have been reopened for further investigation so far. "I want to express my gratitude for our partners working with our Office to end the backlog," District Attorney Diana Becton said today in a statement. "Testing these kits can help bring closure and justice to sexual assault victims," Becton said. "We are going to continue working on this issue to ensure we never have a backlog in our community again." State law requires law enforcement agencies to test rape kits within specified timeframes, or produce substantial reasons why they were unwilling or unable to do so. Becton said that going forward, her office will monitor law enforcement agencies throughout the county to ensure that rape kits are tested in a timely fashion. Nationwide, the Manhattan District Attorney's Sexual Assault Kit Backlog Elimination Grant Program has tested more than 55,000 rape kits, entering more than 18,800 DNA profiles into CODIS. Copyright 2019 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed an executive order that effectively ends the death penalty in the state, at least for the duration of his time in office. Newsom addressed his decision at a news conference in Sacramento and cited his own moral and fiscal objections to the practice. "I cannot sign off on executing hundreds and hundreds of human beings knowing that among them will be innocent human beings," Newsom said. "It's not an abstract question any longer. Twenty-five people have exhausted their appeals." Those 25 are among the state's 737 death row inmates whose lives will be spared by the order but who will remain in prison for their crimes. The law doesn't allow the governor to unilaterally abolish the death penalty, but the state constitution gives him the power to grant reprieves to condemned convicts. He also has the ability to order the state's execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison in Marin County to be dismantled, which Newsom said was happening as he spoke Wednesday morning. As part of his moral objection to the killing of convicted criminals, Newsom said that the death penalty is "unevenly and unfairly" applied to non-white people, people with mental health issues and the poor. The criminal justice system "is skewed against black and brown people," he said. Newsom also said that since 1973, 164 innocent people -- including five in California -- have been executed nationwide. He criticized the cost of the state's death penalty program, saying that it has cost California $5 billion to administer since 1978 and that only 13 people have been put to death during that time. Newsom said that he has met with crime victims over the course of many years, including about a dozen while contemplating his decision, and that he has heard passionate opinions both for and against the death penalty from those who have suffered at the hands of the condemned. "To the victims all I can say is that we owe you and we need to do more and better," Newsom said. "We cannot advance the death penalty in an effort to try to soften the blow of what happened (to victims)." The decision runs counter to what a majority of voters decided in 2016 when they rejected Proposition 62, which would have abolished the death penalty in the state. Some of the state's top law enforcement professionals voiced opposition to the effective end of death row. "Californians made it clear as recently as 2016 that they support maintaining the death penalty as an option in the most egregious homicide cases," said Stanislaus County District Attorney Brigit Fladager, president of the California District Attorneys Association. "It is unfortunate that this action will circumvent that will." Newsom said his views on the death penalty are well-established and that his decision shouldn't be a surprise to the state's citizens. "The will of the voters is also entrusted to me based on my right to grant a reprieve," he said. Many state and national political leaders weighed in to support Newsom's decision, with presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, echoing his moral and fiscal objections. President Donald Trump Tweeted out his opposition to the moratorium. "Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers," Trump said. "Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!" Because the death penalty is still legal in the state, the next incoming governor could reverse Newsom's decision, baring a successful ballot measure to permanently do away with it. Newsome hinted Wednesday that he would support such a measure and noted that one could be in the works for the 2020 election. "Ultimately the way to end the death penalty in California is to go to the ballot," he said. "It's not a question of ... whether or not people deserve to die for their heinous acts," Newsome said quoting Bryan Stevenson, a well-known social justice advocate. "The question is do we have the right to kill. I don't believe we do." Copyright 2019 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. SEASIDE (BCN) A 36-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of murder and arson after allegedly setting a house on fire on Presidio of Monterey property in Seaside last week and killing his uncle, authorities said. Erik Olson was arrested for the fire reported at 3:26 p.m. last Thursday at 412 Brittany Road, where 68-year-old Gregory Kolbo was found dead inside the home, according to the Peninsula Regional Violence and Narcotics Team. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other federal and local agencies investigated the fire and determined it was an act of arson. An autopsy on Friday also determined Kolbo's death was caused by homicide. Investigators learned that Olson also lived at the home and was present during the fire, but fled prior to the arrival of police. He was found on Friday along a dirt path near the 1200 block of Woodborough Drive in San Jose and was arrested, authorities said. Olson, who is in Monterey County Jail on $1.1 million bail, is believed to have used a ride-hailing service to travel from Seaside to the Santa Cruz area and then the San Jose area after the fire. Anyone who may have transported Olson or has information about the case is encouraged to contact the regional task force at (831) 646-6926. People wishing to remain anonymous can contact a tip line at (831) 646-3840. Copyright 2019 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. SAN JOSE (BCN) A 24-year-old man suspected of killing a 59-year-old San Jose woman in her home on Thursday was an undocumented immigrant and admitted gang member who had been arrested numerous times, San Jose police announced Tuesday. Bambi Larson was killed in her home in the 900 block of Knollfield Way on Thursday afternoon. Police responded to the address after her coworkers reported her missing to her son, and found her dead with at least one stab wound. The case was initially ruled as a "suspicious death" by police. The Santa Clara County medical examiner's office later determined she died of blunt force injuries to the throat and neck. On Monday, police announced they had arrested Carlos Eduardo Arevalo Carranza, who is believed to be homeless, and booked him into Santa Clara County Jail on suspicion of murder. Police Chief Eddie Garcia held a news conference Tuesday, saying police first made contact with Arevalo Carranza Monday at Foxworthy and Pearl avenues to arrest him for alleged methamphetamine possession. He was then cited and released. Meanwhile, an ongoing investigation returned DNA evidence from multiple locations around Larson's home, including a "bloody trail" of footprints left behind by the suspect, Garcia said. Arevalo Carranza's DNA taken during the initial arrest matched the samples, and police once again located and arrested him on suspicion of murder. On the day Larson was killed in her home, surveillance footage showed Arevalo Carranza "stalking" the area and later on leaving the residence after the killing, Garcia said. Police have not yet been able to find a connection between Larson and the suspect. An ongoing investigation revealed Arevalo Carranza had allegedly been detained by Homeland Security Investigations in McAllen, Texas in 2013 and deported, but he returned to the United States and was arrested numerous times on suspicion of offenses including burglary, battery, false imprisonment, possession of methamphetamine and prowling. Arevalo Carranza was arrested and released in Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties six times, and was most recently arrested on suspicion of possessing methamphetamine and paraphernalia in January. He is currently on probation for the charges, and Garcia said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had placed him under a detainer order that would allow him to be held in jail until federal authorities arrive. The order was repeatedly ignored by Santa Clara County due to its sanctuary policies. President Donald Trump has drawn attention to a handful of high-profile slayings by undocumented immigrants to vehemently criticize sanctuary city policies, but Garcia was quick to point out Tuesday that Larson's murder by a stranger was a rare occurrence and San Jose police will not take actions that cause immigrants to fear police. He said, however, that her murder demands police and the county have a conversation over its refusal to honor ICE detainer requests for violent criminals. San Jose police do not request immigration status when making an arrest or report or arrest undocumented immigrants living in the city, but Garcia said ignoring detainers and releasing inmates from custody who have committed serious crimes undermines the city's safety. "This isn't about politics, this is about public safety," Garcia said, adding that documented and undocumented immigrants should have no reason to fear police in the city. "He could have been turned over six times." San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo called Larson's death a "devastating tragedy" and doubled down on Garcia's statements, calling for a change in the county's policy that would benefit all residents, especially immigrants who are most often targeted by felons who should be deported. Sheriff Laurie Smith released a statement following the news conference siding with the city's position. "This is a senseless act, and very well may have been preventable," Smith said. "Carlos Arevalo-Carranza is a violent predator who should have remained in custody until officials with ICE had the appropriate time to evaluate his immigration status." She said she has long stood by a system of honoring ICE holds, and would advocate to change this county policy. "We will go to the end of the Earth to catch a predator like this," Garcia said, emphasizing that at the heart of the issue is a mother and coworker who was senselessly killed. Larson attended San Jose State University and the University of California at Santa Cruz, and was a manager at medical testing company Roche Sequencing Solutions in San Jose. "We are saddened by the sudden passing of our colleague and friend," company officials said in a statement last week. "Given the nature of the ongoing investigation, we cannot comment further, out of respect for the family as well." District 9 Councilwoman Pam Foley, whose district includes the neighborhood where Larson was killed, said she was "deeply saddened" by Larson's death. She also commented on a murder-suicide involving a mother and her two children last Wednesday. "I extend my sincerest sympathies to each family," Foley said in a statement. SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) San Francisco Mayor London Breed has apologized after signing a certificate of honor for a controversial figure in Irish history ahead of this weekend's St. Patrick's Day Parade in the city. Martin McGuinness was chosen by the United Irish Societies of San Francisco as one of five honorary grand marshals for the parade, which is happening on Saturday. McGuinness is known for his work with the Provisional Irish Republican Army, a paramilitary organization that sought to end British rule in Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom had previously considered the IRA a terrorist organization, with the organization being linked to bombings in Northern Ireland between the 1970s and 1990s. "San Francisco values means respect for the democratic process and non-violent political actions. The language on the Certificate of Honor should have taken more care to apply these values when reflecting the history of Mr. McGuinness' life toward peacemaker and his role in the peace process that resulted in the Good Friday Agreement," Breed said in a statement. "I apologize for the pain this certificate has caused." San Francisco Mayor London Breed will announce the appointment of a new Fire Chief at a news conference Wednesday morning, according to officials with the mayor's office. The news conference will take place at 8:30 a.m. at City Hall where Breed will name the replacement for current San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White, who announced she would be eventually retiring from her position on Oct. 22, 2018. "My time serving as chief of the department has been a distinct honor and has been incredibly rewarding," said Hayes-White at the time her retirement was announced. "I am proud to have advanced health, wellness, and safety initiatives in our workplaces." Breed was grateful to Hayes-White for staying on after announcing her retirement. "While we identify and select a new chief, Chief Hayes-White can continue to focus on what matters most to all of us - keeping our residents and visitors safe," Breed said in Oct. 2018. Hayes-White was first appointed as fire chief by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2004. Copyright 2019 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. VALLEJO (BCN) Vallejo police Chief Andrew Bidou is retiring April 30 but he has agreed to stay on board to assist the recruitment of a new police chief likely through the end of the year, city officials said. Joanna Altman, assistant to City Manager Greg Nyhoff, said Bidou will be compensated as acting police chief during the recruitment, and the City Council will determine the amount of his compensation. Bidou will not be working full-time, Altman said. Bidou was Benicia's police chief from 2010 until 2014 when he became Vallejo's chief. "I am honored to have served the Vallejo community and represent the men and women of the Vallejo Police Department since 2014 which has been the pinnacle of my career," Bidou said in a news release. "I feel privileged to have witnessed many acts of courage and compassion from so many members of the Vallejo Police Department during my time as chief. I am grateful for the benevolence and support shown to me and the Police Department by the citizens of Vallejo," he said. Nyhoff said Bidou built excellent relationships with a broad spectrum of citizens and organizations and instituted a state-of-the-art body-worn camera program and a best practices policy regarding their use. He said Bidou increased training for sworn and non-sworn personnel, including intensive training in verbal and tactical de-escalation, bias awareness and crisis intervention. During Bidou's tenure as police chief, Vallejo police and the city of Vallejo were sued for publicly accusing two kidnapping victims of a hoax in 2015. The suit alleged the city, a detective and a lieutenant accused Quinn of murdering Huskins while she was still in the kidnapper's custody and accused both victims of concocting the kidnapping story. After Matthew Muller, now 42, was arrested in South Lake Tahoe on June 8, 2015 for the kidnapping, the Vallejo Police Department issued an apology. Muller was convicted in federal court and sentenced to 40 years in prison. He currently is being tried in Solano County Superior Court on state charges of kidnapping for ransom, forcible rape and other charges in connection with the case. Vallejo police more recently have been criticized for alleged use of excessive force. They include three officer-involved fatal shootings between 2017 and 2019 and an assault on a man who was recording a traffic stop in his driveway this year. Copyright 2019 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. OAKLAND (BCN) Oakland police on Tuesday released the names of two men who recently were fatally shot in their city. A man who was killed in a shooting at a gas station in the 9700 block of Edes Avenue in the city's Brookfield Village neighborhood at about 5 p.m. on Feb. 28 was identified as 27-year-old Maurice Cooper of Oakland. Two women and another man were also injured in the shooting and survived their injuries. A man who died at a hospital after he was shot at the Liege Spirits Lounge bar at 481 Ninth St. at about 7:35 p.m. on Sunday was identified as 42-year-old Cassius Stroman of San Francisco. No one has been arrested for either fatal shooting and police haven't released information about suspects or motives. Copyright 2019 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. The Napa and Sonoma County District Attorney's Offices announced Tuesday they will not prosecute PG&E for the October 2017 wildfires in the North Bay. "After an extensive review, each office determined that insufficient evidence exists to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that PG&E acted with reckless disregard for human life in causing the fires, the standard necessary to sustain criminal charges," prosecutors said in a joint news release. Lake and Humboldt county prosecutors also said Tuesday charges would not be filed against PG&E for fires in their counties. The prosecutors said they consulted with the California Attorney General's Office during a review of the cases prior to their decision not to file charges. Cal Fire determined that PG&E's equipment caused numerous wildfires in four counties and referred their reports to the county prosecutors for possible filing of criminal charges. Cal Fire determined PG&E's equipment caused the Adobe, Norrbom, Pocket and Pythian/Oakmont fires in Sonoma County, but did not cause the Nuns Fire and the Thirty-Seven Fire along with the deadly Tubbs Fire that started in Napa County near Calistoga and spread to Sonoma County. Cal Fire said the Tubbs Fire was caused by a private electrical system adjacent to a residential structure near Calistoga. The Tubbs fire killed 24 people, destroyed 5,636 structures and burned 36,807 acres in Napa and Sonoma counties. Cal Fire said some of the other fires were caused when a tree fell onto PG&E power lines. The district attorneys said criminal negligence requires proof of actions that are reckless and incompatible with a proper regard for human life. "Proving PG&E failed in their duty to remove trees was made particularly difficult in this context as the locations where the fires occurred and where physical evidence could have been located were decimated by the fires," Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch's and Napa County District Attorney Allison Haley's offices said. The prosecutors said PG&E remains on federal probation and is a defendant in several private civil cases seeking financial compensation and other remedies for the fires. Copyright 2019 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) A federal appeals court panel in San Francisco appeared inclined on Wednesday to turn down a U.S. government bid to challenge three California laws aimed at protecting undocumented immigrants. The U.S. Department of Justice is asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a decision in which a federal judge in Sacramento refused to block most parts of the three laws enacted in 2017. A key law, Senate Bill 54, entitled the California Values Act, bars local officials from informing federal officials about immigrants' release dates from jail except in serious criminal cases. Justice Department attorney Daniel Tenny argued to a three-judge 9th Circuit panel that the law interferes with federal immigration enforcement. But Circuit Judge Paul Watford questioned, "Your argument is that it's an obstacle, but they're not required to be helpful, are they?" Circuit Judge Milan Smith similarly asked, "Where's the violation of federal law here in the failure to cooperate? Because it's an obstacle, that doesn't mean it's illegal, right?" The state contends that SB 54 merely prevents federal authorities from commandeering local officials to carry out their job. It claims all three laws are intended to preserve state resources and safeguard the health and welfare of California residents. The panel took the case under submission and will issue a written ruling at a later date. The Justice Department sued the state in federal court in Sacramento last year, calling the three laws "a deliberate effort by California to obstruct the United States' enforcement of federal immigration law." Another of the laws, AB 103, directs the California attorney general to inspect the county jails and private detention facilities that contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to hold undocumented immigrants during civil immigration proceedings. In the ruling being appealed, U.S. District Judge John Mendez refused to grant preliminary injunctions blocking SB 54 and AB 103. He granted a preliminary injunction prohibiting a section of a third law, AB 450, that fines private employers who voluntarily allow immigration agents to enter their workplace or review employee records without a court warrant. Mendez left in place another part of AB 450 that requires employers to let workers know when their business has received a three-day notice of an immigration inspection of employee records. Copyright 2019 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) San Francisco Deputy Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson, a 25-year veteran of the department, was named by Mayor London Breed on Wednesday as the city's new fire chief. Nicholson will be the city's first LGBT fire chief in San Francisco and the second woman to serve in the position, following her immediate predecessor Joanne Hayes-White, who announced in October that she was retiring. Breed made the announcement at a ceremony at City Hall on Wednesday morning, noting that Nicholson has suffered second-degree burns at an arson fire in 2009 as well as being a breast cancer survivor. "This woman is tough, this woman is resilient, this woman is a leader," Breed said. Nicholson currently serves as deputy chief of administration and has been a firefighter, paramedic, lieutenant, captain and battalion chief. The new fire chief said she was "honored and humbled" to be selected as the new chief. Nicholson will work with Hayes-White on a transition plan in the coming weeks, according to the mayor's office. Copyright 2019 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed an executive order that effectively ends the death penalty in the state, at least for the duration of his time in office. Newsom addressed his decision at a news conference in Sacramento and cited his own moral and fiscal objections to the practice. The law doesn't allow the governor to unilaterally abolish the death penalty, but the state constitution gives him the power to grant reprieves to condemned convicts. He also has the ability to order the state's execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison in Marin County to be dismantled, which Newsom said was happening as he spoke Wednesday morning. A federal appeals court panel in San Francisco appeared inclined on Wednesday to turn down a U.S. government bid to challenge three California laws aimed at protecting undocumented immigrants. The U.S. Department of Justice is asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a decision in which a federal judge in Sacramento refused to block most parts of the three laws enacted in 2017. A key law, Senate Bill 54, entitled the California Values Act, bars local officials from informing federal officials about immigrants' release dates from jail except in serious criminal cases. A Vallejo man was convicted of first-degree murder on Wednesday for his role in the fatal shooting in 2015 of a 17-year-old boy who Oakland City Councilwoman Lynette Gibson McElhaney considered to be her grandson. Jurors, who deliberated for less than two full days, also convicted Shiheim Johnson, who was 19 at the time and is now 22, of second-degree robbery and two counts of unlawfully possessing a gun, as he had prior conviction for robbery in 2012 and wasn't supposed to own one. Alameda County prosecutor Tim Wagstaffe said in his closing argument on Monday that Johnson and a boy who was 15 at the time had "a harebrained idea to commit an armed robbery" but it went wrong and led to the shooting death of Torian Hughes in the 900 block of Mandela Parkway in West Oakland at about 1:40 p.m. on Dec. 20, 2015. Gibson McElhaney had attended every day of Johnson's trial since it began on Feb. 19, but she has been absent this week because she was hit with another tragedy on Sunday when her 21-year-old son Victor McElhaney was fatally shot in Los Angeles in what police said was a botched robbery. San Francisco Deputy Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson, a 25-year veteran of the department, was named by Mayor London Breed on Wednesday as the city's new fire chief. Nicholson will be the city's first LGBT fire chief in San Francisco and the second woman to serve in the position, following her immediate predecessor Joanne Hayes-White, who announced in October that she was retiring. Nicholson currently serves as deputy chief of administration and has been a firefighter, paramedic, lieutenant, captain and battalion chief. Nicholson will work with Hayes-White on a transition plan in the coming weeks, according to the mayor's office. San Francisco Mayor London Breed has apologized after signing a certificate of honor for a controversial figure in Irish history ahead of this weekend's St. Patrick's Day Parade in the city. Martin McGuinness was chosen by the United Irish Societies of San Francisco as one of five honorary grand marshals for the parade, which is happening on Saturday. McGuinness is known for his work with the Provisional Irish Republican Army, a paramilitary organization that sought to end British rule in Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom had previously considered the IRA a terrorist organization, with the organization being linked to bombings in Northern Ireland between the 1970s and 1990s. The Napa County Sheriff's Office has identified a man who was killed in a wrong-way driving head-on collision Tuesday afternoon near Yountville as 47-year-old Lewis Alexander Ort of Angwin. Ort was driving a 1992 Toyota at a high rate of speed south in the north lane of Solano Avenue south of Hoffman Lane around 3:30 p.m. The Toyota collided with a 2004 Porsche driven by a 54-year-old Napa woman, CHP Officer Marc Renspurger said. Ort was pronounced dead at the scene around 3:50 p.m., sheriff's spokesman Henry Wofford said. The Porsche driver suffered minor injuries and was taken to Queen of the Valley Medical Center. A girl in the Porsche was picked up at the scene by her father, Renspurger said. Vallejo police Chief Andrew Bidou is retiring April 30 but he has agreed to stay on board to assist the recruitment of a new police chief likely through the end of the year, city officials said. Joanna Altman, assistant to City Manager Greg Nyhoff, said Bidou will be compensated as acting police chief during the recruitment, and the City Council will determine the amount of his compensation. Bidou will not be working full-time, Altman said. Bidou was Benicia's police chief from 2010 until 2014 when he became Vallejo's chief. A woman suspected of a fatal hit-and-run in May 2018 turned herself in Monday, a day after negotiating her surrender through her attorney, according to the California Highway Patrol. Andrew Bufka, a 63-year-old resident of Antioch, was found in the vicinity of Bixler Road and state Highway 4 on May 5, 2018, but investigators believe he died the previous day. The initial investigation did not turn up any leads or suspects, but authorities received a tip late last year that led them to the suspect vehicle. They were eventually able to secure a warrant for the arrest of 36-year-old Crystal Diane Lia, 36, of Discovery Bay. Lia was booked into jail with bail set at $300,000. She's been charged with gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, vehicular manslaughter with an enhancement for fleeing the scene, and hit-and-run resulting in death, according to court documents filed Friday. A homicide suspect who has been on the run from a $1 million warrant for more than eight months was tracked down and finally captured Monday, Pittsburg police said Wednesday. Rolando Aquino allegedly shot his roommate, 61-year-old Mark Gretler, at their Pittsburg home on Olivewood Drive on July 27, 2018. A family member called police to their residence around 10 a.m. that morning after finding Gretler suffering from a gunshot wound to the torso. He did not survive the injury, despite the efforts of medical personnel to save his life. Aquino was subsequently spotted in Pittsburg, San Pablo and San Leandro, but he was ultimately located in Oakland A 61-year-old woman was arrested Tuesday morning after leading authorities on a chase from Santa Cruz County to Monterey County and drinking from a large bottle of liquor at the end of the pursuit, according to the California Highway Patrol. Anne Figen, a Monterey resident, was arrested at about 11:05 a.m. Tuesday after a pursuit that started when she refused to yield to a suspected DUI stop by Capitola police on Soquel Wharf Road near Porter Street, just outside Capitola city limits, CHP officials said. Officers made two attempts to use a spike strip to stop the minivan and the second attempt was successful, deflating its tires near Del Monte Boulevard in Monterey County, according to the CHP. She then climbed into the back seats of the van, refused officers' commands to get out, and could be seen drinking from a large bottle that was later determined to be Cognac brandy, CHP officials said. CHP officers eventually broke the van's windows to gain access to Figen, who was arrested on suspicion of felony reckless evading and driving under the influence, according to the CHP. A Tesla crashed into a Danville restaurant Wednesday morning, but no injuries were reported and town officials said the building appears to be structurally sound. The crash, which occurred at the Fish on Fire restaurant located at 101 Town and Country Drive, was initially reported on Danville's official Twitter account around 7:30 a.m. In an update posted just before 10 a.m., town officials added that the crash appears to have been caused by pedal confusion, and the Tesla's self-driving and self-parking features do not appear to have been factors. Santa Clara County Superior Court has temporarily halted online payments for traffic infractions and misdemeanors because of a glitch in its fee system. Some online traffic tickets may be overcharging recipients, while others could be undercharging them, according to the county. In both cases, the fees do not reflect the actual amount due to the court. Anyone who received a courtesy notice or a completed a payment between Dec. 15 and this month can contact the court at courtesy@scscourt.org to determine if they were overcharged and receive a refund. If a recipient completed a payment that was undercharged, the court will accept the lower payment and the record will reflect a full payment. Copyright 2019 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. (Reuters) Hedge fund firm City Financial has agreed to transfer two funds, which run a total of $332 million in assets, to Garraway Capital Management, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday. City Financial had completed a restructuring of its business in December, including closing its New York office. Reuters had reported in December that City Financial and the chief investment officer of its Decca Fund had decided to wind down its credit-focused strategy. To read this article: With the parliamentary elections so close and the time to form a political government so limited, the parliamentary groups confirmed the situation that the current government will continue as a caretaker government, he said in a press conference on Tuesday. ANTTI KAIKKONEN , the chairperson of the Centre Parliamentary Group, has revealed that parliamentary parties have agreed on how to move forward following the resignation of the government of Prime Minister Juha Sipila (Centre) on Friday, 8 March. Kaikkonen added that the conclusion was approved by all parliamentary groups except for the Seven Star Movement. Paavo Vayrynen, the only member of the Seven Star Movement, on Tuesday contrastively stated that the parliamentary groups should have pleaded with the government to withdraw its resignation request. The situation, he argued, is problematic because also a caretaker government should enjoy the confidence of the Parliament. This means that [] the groups that have been in the opposition, against the government, will find themselves responsible [] for the policies of the caretaker government, said Vayrynen. The Finnish parliamentary elections will be held on 14 April. Chancellor of Justice Tuomas Poysti recently announced his determination about the responsibilities of the caretaker government, saying it can continue to issue government decrees and make administrative decisions that entail no significant considerations about their social appropriateness. The established view, on the other hand, is that a caretaker government cannot make decisions about appointing high-ranking government officials. The limits of the powers of a caretaker government must be considered separately at the ministry conducting the preparatory work in question, he outlined. Aleksi Teivainen HT Source: Uusi Suomi Over 40 Russia experts contributed to the report published in Finnish by the Ministry of Defence on Tuesday, 12 March. RUSSIA has become a fixed factor that has to be taken into consideration whenever scaling defence capabilities and conducting security assessments in Finland, concludes a report commissioned by the Finnish Ministry of Defence, Ministry of the Interior and Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The authors estimated that security assessments and military capacity-related questions have become an instrumental part of FinlandRussia relations, also in peacetime. Russia has used and will probably continue using its armed forces increasingly to communicate its own views, displeasures and the importance of its interests, they stated. The challenges for Finnish defence include the Russian armed forces increased readiness to quickly initiate military action under peacetime circumstances, the Russian states ability to sustain prolonged military conflicts and the use of armed forces in state-led information struggles and indirect action. Finland, they underscored, must continue to improve its overall security situation while ignoring its eastern neighbours attempts to influence the security policy debate and security policy-related decision-making. One of the influence activities identified in the report is sending two, somewhat conflicting messages: First, that Russia values its neighbourly and well-functioning relationship with Finland. Second, that Finland should not take the positive relationship for granted and should take its neighbours interests into consideration in political decision-making. The experts pointed out that the first message is communicated primarily in official statements and high-level meetings. The second, in turn, is conveyed primarily through more indirect and informal channels, as evidenced by the unexpectedly sharp increase in the number of asylum seekers arriving from Russia to Finland in 20152016. Hundreds of asylum seekers a month entered the country through the border-crossing points of Salla and Raja-Jooseppi in Eastern Lapland between November 2015 and January 2016. For Finland, the events serve as an important reminder that the established practices and long-standing co-operation that has continued without any problems for years can change abruptly and without explanation, the report states. Aleksi Teivainen HT Source: Uusi Suomi What do a shipping magnate, a Silicon Valley investor, a school, a cult, a group of San Francisco tech workers hoping to create a co-living space have in common? These are a few of the folks who've shown interest in buying a 106-year-old palatial Beaux Artsstyle mansion on three acres in the North Berkeley hills. Since 1960 San Antonio Ave. first went on the market in 2017 with an asking price of $7.5 million, there have been several offers and the home has been in contract three times. But listing agent Herman Chan of Sotheby's says none have come through, including the cult. This week, the price on the so-called 12,000-square-foot Spring Mansion was dropped to $5.995 million. "It is a very unique property and it will require a very unique buyer," says Chan. "We knew that from the very beginning. We knew that someone would need to have a certain wherewithal to absorb such a palace." He added, "The market has cooled since we hit the market. The global markets have become more volatile. It's a new market, a new landscape and a new price." ALSO: Why hasn't the San Francisco mansion once owned by Nicolas Cage sold? Modeled after an Austrian princesses' Corfu palace, the ostentatious estate was designated a City of Berkeley historical landmark in 2000. "There's nothing else like it," says listing agent Herman Chan of Sotheby's. "In the East Bay it's literally one-of-a-kind and like a piece of art. It's like Berkeley's version of Hearst Castle." Hearst Castle might be a stretch, but no doubt the home is noteworthy with a 30-foot-tall atrium flanked by Tuscan columns, a 15-foot-wide grand staircase, and a portico at both the front and back entrances. The living and dining room walls are covered in tapestries and heavy wrought-iron chandeliers hang from a boxed ceiling. The six-bedroom home was originally built in 1912 by business tycoon John Hopkins Spring who developed the town of Albany, invested in the Claremont Hotel and opened S.F.'s first department store, City of Paris in Union Square. Spring lived in the property for only a few years before he and his wife divorced, but the estate has always been known as the Spring Mansion. Educator Cora Williams purchased the mansion and turned it into a tony secondary school with an emphasis on the arts, poetry, language and literature, according to the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. Real estate investor Larry Leon purchased the home in 1975 and lived there until 2005, when John Park, the founder of a company Fortiss , which runs casinos, bought it with plans to live there permanently. But the Spring Mansion has sat empty ever since as Park moved to Los Angeles. Park hired a groundskeeper to care for the mansion and its grounds, and put the property up for sale in 2010 and then again in 2014, but nobody jumped on the opportunity. Now, 1960 San Antonio is back on the market after an upgrade led by interior designer and HGTV star Cora Sue Anthony. With many of the rooms receiving a fresh coat of paint, the property has a more modern handsome look. "The interior was yellow and turquoise and orange," Chan said. "It was like Taco Bell meets Cirque du Soleil. It was a disaster. We took out drapes and carpeting. Gave it a neutral color palette. It was by no means a full renovation, and we couldn't do all the rooms. The master bedroom is the showroom and now you can see what could be done with this property." Skylights and new mechanical systems were also installed. "We wanted to honor its past and pay homage to history and heritage, but we wanted to make it a more modern livable home," Chan said. More recently, the home served as a movie set for Oakland native, rapper and film director Boots Riley's 2018 movie "Sorry to Bother You," which tells the story of a Black telemarketer who adopts a white accent to succeed at his job. The New York Times profiled Boots during the filming and the writer spent a day on set at the Spring Mansion and described it as "sitting ostentatiously on three acres with balustraded terraces and a view through palm trees, out to San Francisco Bay." Today, the FAA finally ordered all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft out of US airspace, following the lead of airlines and aviation authorities around the world. This includes both the 737 MAX 8 and 737 MAX 9 aircraft flown by American, Southwest and United in the US, Air Canada and Westjet in Canada, and many other carriers overseas. (Note: This does NOT include the much more numerous 737-800, 737-900 jets.) While a raft of flight cancellations is not going to be pretty, it's not going to be disastrous. I predict the US airline industry will be able to absorb this much like it does when hundreds of flights are canceled by major winter storms. Eventually, everyone is going to get to where they need to be. But it could take some time. Unknown at this point is how long the grounding will last, and what could happen as we get into the busy spring break travel season. The effect of the grounding of the 737 MAX jets will likely be minimal when you consider the overall size of airline fleets. Southwest has 755 jets, of which just 34 are 737 MAX 8s. American flies a whopping 962 planes, of which 24 are 737 MAX 8s. United flies a slightly larger version of the Boeing jet, the MAX 9, but only has 14 in its fleet of about 775 jets. Currently, Alaska Air and Delta do not fly any MAX aircraft. US airlines are waiving change fees and providing full refunds for travelers on MAX flights that are canceled and they decide not to take the trip at all. Just be prepared to accept whatever alternative flights the airline comes up with, which could involve delays by a day or two, stops or even overnight layovers. Do not expect any other compensation from the airlines related to your MAX related delay or cancellation. Luckily, we are not yet deep into the heavy spring break travel season, so airlines do have some wiggle room and extra seats. In statement at 1 pm today, Southwest said: "Any customer booked on a cancelled MAX 8 flight can rebook on alternate flights without any additional fees or fare differences within 14 days of their original date of travel between the original city pairs." I've asked about getting a refund if alternate flights don't work and will update with SWA's answer. United Airlines released a statement saying, "Our MAX aircraft account for roughly 40 flights a day, and through a combination of repositioning other aircraft types and rebooking customers, we do not anticipate a significant operational impact as a result of this order. We will continue to work with our customers to help minimize any travel disruptions, and will proactively contact any customer whose travel may be impacted by this order." American's statement said, "On average, American operates 85 flights per day on the MAX 8, out of 6,700 departures throughout the American Airlines system...Affected customers can rebook by contacting our reservations team. If a flight is canceled, customers may request a full refund by visiting our website. Customers who booked through a travel agent are requested to contact their agency directly." Air Canada said, in part, "We typically operate approximately 75 737MAX flights daily out of a total schedule of approximately 1600 daily flights system-wide, representing less than six percent of our total flying. We have a total fleet of 400 aircraft (including 24 737MAX), comprising Air Canada mainline, Air Canada Rouge and Air Canada Express aircraft. We are making adjustments to our schedule to minimize the disruption to customers as much as possible, by optimizing the deployment of the rest of our fleet and looking at alternative options, including accommodating customers on other airlines." Regarding the grounding in the US and Panama, Copa Airlines said, "The airline will cover the flights that were planned to operate with MAX 9 aircraft using other aircraft in its fleet and will do everything possible to minimize the impact on passengers' itineraries." (Which means you won't get a lie flat seat in business class if that's what you are expecting.) A sad tweet from a traveler with the islands in his eyes who was expecting to fly to Maui today on a United MAX 9- his flight was canceled just before take off. Another question readers have asked is whether or not travel insurance covers any delays or cancellations related to the 787 MAX debacle. The short answer is no. "Due to the extreme circumstances, this event is a bit unchartered territory for travel insurance companies and claim validity may fluctuate by company and policy," said InsureMyTrip.com, a travel insurance comparison service. Daniel Durazo, the director of Marketing and Communications at Allianz Partners said, "As you may know, travel insurance covers unknown, unforeseen situations. As the issue with the Max 8 is now widely known, we consider this to be foreseeable and policies purchased on or after March 12 won't cover delays caused by the Max 8." But policies purchased before that will. Travel insurance comparison site, Squaremouth said, "If your MAX 8 flight is canceled, travel insurance policies likely will not provide coverage for flight cancellations due to the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max 8 planes. In order for a grounded flight to be covered by travel insurance, it must be due to a mechanical failure of the aircraft or inclement weather." Read all recent TravelSkills posts here Get twice-per-week updates from TravelSkills via email! Sign up here Chris McGinnis is the founder 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. In light of the recent crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets in Indonesia and Ethiopia, and the subsequent grounding of the aircraft in nearly every country in the world besides the US, passengers are understandably nervous. UPDATE 1 pm March 13: US, Canada ground 737 MAX fleets. Here's what to do if you are booked on one. Today, Canada grounded Boeing MAX jet. Its transport minister Marc Garneau stated: "I am issuing a safety notice. This safety notice restricts commercial passenger flights by any operator of Boeing 737 Max 8 or 9, whether domestic or foreign, from arriving, departing or overflying Canadian airspace." (Note: This does NOT include the more numerous 737-800 and 737-900 jets.) The likelihood of boarding a 737 MAX is quite small when you consider the overall size of airline fleets. Southwest has 755 jets, of which just 34 are 737 MAX 8s. American flies a whopping 962 planes, of which 24 are 737 MAX 8s. United flies a slightly larger version of the Boeing jet, the MAX 9, but only has 14 in its fleet of about 775 jets. Currently, Alaska Air and Delta do not fly any MAX aircraft. Here's how the airlines flying the MAX 8 in the US are dealing with the issue of fearful flyers: Southwest moves its all-737 fleet around so much that it's nearly impossible to predict what type of 737 you be flying on. Planes are switched and substituted with regularity, so even if you've done your homework and booked away from the MAX 8, you could still end up on one. If that happens to you, Southwest might work with you. Spokesperson Brian Parrish told us: "We remain confident in the safety and airworthiness of the MAX 8, and we don't have any changes planned to our operations. Additionally, we are not issuing refunds of non-refundable fares, but we are working with customers who wish to rebook their flight to another aircraft type on a case-by-case basis. As a courtesy, we will waive the fare difference for the new flight between the same city pairs." United says that its operations are continuing normally and its policies around changes and refunds remain in place. However, a spokesperson said, "Agents are empowered to support and care for our customers who reach out but we do not currently have a formal waiver policy." So if you find yourself booked on one of United's 737 MAX 9 jets and don't want to step onboard, you can try to work out an alternative with a United agent. But there are no guarantees. ALSO: Boeing's 767, 777, 787: Which one is best in economy? American Airlines' "standard ticket change policy is still in effect," according to a spokesperson, so there's no wiggle room there. She added, "The safety and security of our team members and our customers remains our top priority. We will continue to comply with all FAA guidelines, and believe the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft is safe and that our pilots are well-trained and well-equipped to operate it." Air Canada will stop flying its 24 MAX 8 aircraft after its government grounded it today, affecting 9,000 to 12,000 customers per day. Until today, the Canadian carrier offered two daily MAX 8 flights on both the SFO-Toronto and SFO-Montreal routes. (It also flies the 787 Dreamliner to Toronto.) A statement from Air Canada says that its "cancellation and rebooking policies are in place with full fee waiver for affected customers." MAX 8 flights are still showing up on its website, despite the grounding. United also flies nonstop once per day between SFO and Toronto using a 737-800, which is not the same as the 737 MAX 8. Don't miss a shred of important travel news! Sign up for our FREE bi-weekly travel alert emails. Copa Airlines introduced its new MAX 9 jets (with lie-flat seats in business class) on its two daily SFO-Panama City flights in December. We are still awaiting word from a spokesperson about any changes in its policies or schedules. See our post and slideshow about Copa's lie-flat rollout here. In Europe, where the 737 MAX is grounded, Norwegian Air announced today that it is substituting a 338-seat Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner on its Dublin-New York (Stewart) and Providence flights. Another question readers have asked is whether or not travel insurance would cover any delays, cancellation or simply fear of flying related to the 787 MAX debacle. The short answer is no. Daniel Durazo, the director of Marketing and Communications at Allianz Partners said, "As you may know, travel insurance covers unknown, unforeseen situations. As the issue with the Max 8 is now widely known, we consider this to be foreseeable and policies purchased on or after March 12 won't cover delays caused by the Max 8." Travel insurance comparison site, Squaremouth said, "While airplane safety concerns may leave travelers fearful of flying, being too scared to travel is never a covered reason to cancel a trip under standard travel insurance policies. There are still some options available for travelers who want to change or cancel due to fear, such as the Cancel For Any Reason upgrade. " But those policies come at a price-- typically around a 40 percent premium over standard policies. Additionally, "If your MAX 8 flight is canceled, travel insurance policies likely will not provide coverage for flight cancellations due to the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max 8 planes. In order for a grounded flight to be covered by travel insurance, it must be due to a mechanical failure of the aircraft or inclement weather," according to a statement from Squaremouth. Read all recent TravelSkills posts here Get twice-per-week updates from TravelSkills via email! Sign up here Chris McGinnis is the founder 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. TravelSkills on SFGGate is brought to you by Visa Executives from United and Delta have revealed that their companies are moving toward new policies that should make passengers' lives a little easier or less expensive in the future. United's change would help passengers make their flight when they're running late, and Delta's would give them free in-flight Wi-Fi. United President Scott Kirby told an investors' conference that his airline has started testing a policy at its Denver hub called Dynamic D-0 (D Zero). This is a twist on the industry metric called simply D-0, which refers to a flight that departs exactly at the scheduled time. United's test gives gate agents the authority to slightly delay a departure if they know that some connecting passengers booked on the flight are running a few minutes late, and if that lost time can easily be made up in the air. The experiment relies on new United software that combines two data sets: Whether a particular flight usually arrives ahead of its scheduled arrival time, and whether connecting passengers booked onto that flight from an arriving United flight are running late. When the airline's operations center finds a favorable match between the data, it alerts gate agents that they can delay the departure until the connecting passengers are boarded. Kirby told the conference that thousands of late-arriving passengers were able to make their connecting flights at Denver so far during the testing. About one-fourth of the airline's flights usually arrive at least 10 minutes before their scheduled arrival time, making them good candidates for a slightly later departure. Meanwhile, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in an interview with the financial publication Barron's that his airline is planning to improve the quality of in-flight Wi-Fi in its fleet and to remove the cost to passengers. "Our goal is to make Wi-Fi free with high-speed quality," Bastian told the publication. He added that it will take "another year or two" to realize that goal. Don't miss a shred of important travel news! Sign up for our FREE bi-weekly email alerts Delta already offers free in-flight text messaging through its Wi-Fi technology. The airline's current pricing plans for in-flight Wi-Fi on aircraft equipped with Gogo Internet access include a North America 24-hour pass for $16 (purchased before your flight), a global 24-hour pass for $28, a North America monthly pass for $49.95 and a North America annual pass for $599.99. Delta offers Gogo's 2Ku satellite-based Wi-Fi on most of its fleet, with speeds of up to 15 Mbps and connectivity available from gate to gate. Currently, the only U.S. airline that offers free Wi-Fi to all passengers is JetBlue. If Delta does the same, it would probably be just a matter of time until United and American matched the policy. Do you think we'll see the day when reliable inflight wi-fi is free? It would be great if the airlines could get the reliable part going first! Read all recent TravelSkills posts here Get twice-per-week updates from TravelSkills via email! Sign up here Chris McGinnis is the founder 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. HEJERE, Ethiopia The flight recorders from the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet that crashed and killed all 157 people on board will be sent abroad for analysis, an Ethiopian Airlines spokesman said Wednesday, as much of the world grounded or barred the model and grieving families arrived at the site of the disaster. Asrat Begashaw said the airline has a range of options for the data and voice recorders of the flights last moments. What we can say is we dont have the capability to probe it here in Ethiopia, he said, adding that it would be sent to a European country that he did not identify. An airline official has said one of the recorders was partially damaged. Forensic DNA work for identifications of the remains recovered so far has not yet begun, Asrat said. The dead came from 35 countries. The crash, which occurred six minutes after takeoff Sunday, was the second involving a Max 8 plane in just five months. And airline pilots on at least two U.S. flights have reported that an automated system seemed to cause their planes to tilt down suddenly. While aviation experts warn against drawing conclusions until more information emerges from the investigation, much of the world, including the European Union, has grounded the Max 8 or banned it from their airspace. Ethiopian Airlines, widely seen as Africas best-managed airline, grounded its remaining four models. Similar causes may have contributed to both events, European regulators said, referring to the Lion Air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 people in October. More countries took action Wednesday. Lebanon and Kosovo barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 from their airspace, and Norwegian Air Shuttles said it would seek compensation from Boeing after grounding its fleet. Egypt banned the operation of the aircraft. Thailand ordered budget airline Thai Lion Air to suspend flying the planes for risk assessments. Lion Air confirmed reports it has put on hold the scheduled delivery of four of the jets. More devastated relatives of victims arrived at the crash site Wednesday, some supported by loved ones and wailing. Others mourned in private. Dawit Gebremichael sat with a photograph of his only sister, Sara, a flight attendant on the plane. She left three children. It is customary for Ethiopians to have a body and a proper burial, he said. But we dont have the body here, and we dont expect anything now. Elias Meseret and Yidnek Kirubel are Associated Press writers. BIHAC, Bosnia-Herzegovina A leading rights group has accused European Union states of complacency in the systematic, unlawful and frequently violent pushbacks by Croatian border guards of thousands of asylum-seekers to squalid and unsafe refugee camps in Bosnia. Amnesty International said in a report released Wednesday that European governments are not just turning a blind eye to vicious assaults by the Croatian police, but also funding their activities. The report said that in doing so, they are fueling a growing humanitarian crisis on the edge of the European Union. Croatian authorities have repeatedly denied such reports in the past. In a response to the Amnesty International report on Wednesday, Croatian Interior Minister Davor Bozinovic said that the ministry has received more than 200 complaints issued by international rights groups of alleged illegal and violent pushbacks of migrants, but that after investigations no foul play was detected in a single case. Migrants in most cases falsely accuse police officials of violence, hoping that this will help them enter the Republic of Croatia the next time they try, he said in a statement. In Brussels, European Commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva said that the EUs executive body is concerned about the allegations made in the report and is taking them very seriously. Any form of violence against or abuse of migrants and refugees is unacceptable, she told reporters, adding that EU is contacting Croatian authorities about the matter. The commission expects Croatia to follow up promptly on these specific allegations and we will continue to closely monitor the situation, Andreeva said. Thousands of migrants have been stuck in Bosnia as they seek to move on toward Western Europe. Currently, around 5,500 women, men and children are trapped in two small Bosnian towns near the Croatian border, living in defunct former factories without basic amenities, the Amnesty International report said. Darko Bandic is an Associated Press writer. Herds of elephants tucked into sweet treats today (March 13) as Thailand celebrates National Elephant Day. Juicy watermelons, ripe pineapples, banana bunches and sticks of sugar were laid out on tables as the jumbos battled for space - their ivory tusks shining in the sunlight. As the national animal of Thailand, the Asian elephant is steeped in its culture - even its national flag used to feature an elephant. The Thai government decided to create an annual day of recognition to raise public awareness of the importance of elephants. Footage from the Maesa camp in Chiang Mai province, northern Thailand, shows elephants enjoying the lunch this afternoon. The celebration is part of National Elephant Day that has taken place around the country every March 13, since 1998. Mahout Khunseuk said: ''Riding elephants is a special honour, especially on a day like today. We look after them every day of the year and see them grow up. It's beautiful to see them being treated and having all the attention on them.'' The event, known as the Satoke, is celebrated by treating the beloved elephants to a large lunch. Thai Buddhists also believe it is a way to say thank you to the elephants and bring good luck for the year ahead. Elephants usually scoff grass, bananas, and sugarcane every day but the Satoke fairs see them also enjoying watermelons and pineapples. There are between 3,000 to 4,000 elephants left in Thailand. Around half of these are domesticated whilst the others live wild in the country's national parks. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. This includes cookies from third party social media websites and ad networks. Such third party cookies may track your use on Sharedots sites for better rendering. Our partners use cookies to ensure we show you advertising that is relevant to you. If you continue without changing your settings, we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies on Sharedots website. However, you can change your cookie settings at any time. Learn more A group of uniformed men and an elephant engaged in a game of tug-of-war at an elephant festival in south Vietnam. This is a game held during the elephant festival held on Monday (March 11), in Daklak Province, composed of three rounds. The first round will have 10 healthy men tugging against an elephant. The second round features 12 healthy men tugging against an elephant. If both the first and seconds rounds go in favour of the elephants, then there will be 15 to 17 healthy men attempting the third round. In the video, we can see the results of the second and third rounds with the participation of 12 men and 17 men. They all lost to the power of the elephant. The bank said its board of directors has approved the appointment of Makhija, an independent director, as the non-executive, part-time Chairman of the bank for three years. Rakesh Makhija, Chairman of SKF India, will take over from current Axis Bank Chairman Sanjiv Mishra, when his term comes to an end on July 17. The appointment will be effective from July 18, the bank informed stock exchanges in regulatory filings. We affirm that Rakesh Makhija is not debarred from holding the office of director by virtue of any order of the Securities and Exchange Board of India or any other regulatory/statutory authority, the bank added. Makhija has been an independent director on the board of Axis Bank since October 27, 2015. He is Chairman of the Nomination and Remuneration Committee, member of the Audit Committee, Acquisitions, Divestments and Mergers Committee, and the Special Committee of the Board for monitoring of Large Value Frauds of the Bank. Makhija is also a director on the board of Tata Technologies, Tata Marcopolo Motors and A.TREDS Ltd. "The Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy has indeed received a letter; there is no comment on its content from their side. There will be a quick reply," CNN quoted Matthias Wehler, spokesperson at the German embassy in Washington D.C., as saying on Monday. Washington: US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell has sent a letter to the German government threatening to curtail access to American intelligence if Berlin decides to issue contracts to Chinese tech giant Huawei to build their 5G communications networks, the media reported. Germany announced on March 7 that it wouldn't ban any company from bidding on 5G contracts. The State Department has not commented on Grenell's letter, but Garrett Marquis, a National Security Council spokesperson, outlined how Huawei's 5G networks could pose a constantly evolving and shifting threat. "Because 5G networks are largely software-defined, updates pushed to the network by the manufacturer can radically change how they operate," Marquis told CNN. "The 5G networks our allies buy won't be the networks that they eventually operate, as the software could be changed on a moment-to-moment basis by the manufacturer." The letter follows similar warnings by President Donald Trump's administration urging allies to ban or restrict Huawei products from their 5G networks due to its ability to compromise national security by selling equipment with "backdoors" that could allow for unauthorised surveillance. China and Huawei have vigorously pushed back on the US charges and the telecom giant last week filed a suit against Washington over the 2019 National Defence Authorization Act, which bans American federal agencies from buying Huawei products. The lawsuit is Huawei's most aggressive move yet to fight back against US claims. Germany's March 7 announcement follows a similar decision by the UK. Both countries argue they can mitigate any risks and their decisions could make it harder for Washington to convince smaller countries to follow suit. Security concerns have led Australia to completely ban the company's technology and New Zealand has moved to partially restrict it. The 5G network is the next generation of wireless networks that promises to be 100 times faster and more reliable than current technology. It is a market that will be worth billions, as 5G will require compatible new phones and communications equipment. An extortion racket involving a four-member gang and the dozens of women they sexually assaulted and blackmailed has been unearthed in Tamil Nadu. Dozens of women were befriended on Facebook and then lured by the gang and sexually assaulted. The men would film these incidents and then resort to blackmailing the victims to not report the incident otherwise threatening to release the video online. The members of the gang have been arrested after a complaint was filed by a 19-year-old girl who came forward and told her story of the incident. A police officer involved in the investigation said in part, They harassed women in moving vehicles, hotels and even a farmhouse near Anamalai forest. The victims are from Chennai, Coimbatore, Salem and many parts of Tamil Nadu. I have one request to media houses and social media accounts. Please stop forwarding the video of a woman from the Pollachi case. We don't know who she is, we don't know what trauma she is going thru. This can trigger many other women and make them feel helpless. Dhanya Rajendran (@dhanyarajendran) March 11, 2019 After reading through the blood curdling Pollachi rape - It is not in the least surprising why many didnt take a stand. Women empowerment Womens Safety are all good for speeches. But who is walking the talk please? Let me know :) Chinmayi Sripaada (@Chinmayi) March 11, 2019 The case has sparked outrage among politicians in Tamil Nadu after there were suspicions of a political link to the case. A local member of the legislative assembly V Jayaraman denied any links to the case. It came in response to reports that his son was allegedly involved in the crime network which included the gang in question regarding this case. Jayaraman while mounting his defence accused the opposition DMK of a conspiracy saying in part, The instigator behind all this is MK Stalin's son-in-law Sabareesan. I want to state with certainty that neither me nor my family are involved in this in any way. Meanwhile, the AIADMK has removed A Nagaraj, a person who is accused int he case, from the party for anti-party activities. He was arrested after threatening and assaulting the brother of one of the victims who came forward. In a report in Vikatan, Coimbatore District Superintendent Pandiarajan is quoted as saying there isnt another political or any large-scale political connection in this case. Based on the initial stages of the investigation, the police believe that these suspects have been doing this for a few years at least. This, after the suspects phones were confiscated. The DMK and MDMK have called for a CBI probe. The partys respective leaders MK Stalin and Vaiko threatened protests if the government and police did not take the necessary action. Stalin accused the ruling party of trying to influence the police probe in this case. DMK MP Kanimozhi is scheduled to lead a protest in Pollachi. Last week, the Tamil Nadu chapter of the All India Democratic Womens Association (AIDWA) held a protest at Pollachi demanding a CB-CID investigation. The shocking incidents of sexual assault & blackmail in Pollachi clearly shows that women are not safe in TN. This appears to be a big network. Govt should immediately crackdown such networks, and the people involved. Kanimozhi (@KanimozhiDMK) March 11, 2019 report in Vikatan regarding this case, revealed that this case is bigger in scope than initially thought. The report states that there may be 20 people involved in this network who lure and extort women through social media. It details how the men used Facebook to befriend women and gain their trust over a period of time and then convince them to an in-person meeting. The report states The men would then proceed to rape and sexually assault the women, record them and proceed to extort them if they were revealed. The four men arrested so far have been booked for sexual harassment, assault, and 66(E) of the IT Act and Section 4 of the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Harassment of Women Act. However, no rape charges were booked. The police so far, have not spoken of any far-reaching political connections with the case, though that hasnt stopped people from speculating that political implications might exist. The District Superintendent Pandiarajan also stated that there at least a dozen more men involved as the investigation into the case continues. A brother of one of the victims urged people not to spread rumours about any political parties or about the case as Maalaimalar reported From the initial reporting, its clear that there is more to this case than initially thought. The reach of the men involved in this is far wider than just the four who were arrested. Independent journalist Kavitha Muralidharan writes for The Wire on stigma around victims of sexual assault and the implications for the case in Pollachi Read related articles: Stories are abound about Azim Hasham Premji in the Indian business circles. He is credited with transforming the fledgling $2 million hydrogenated cooking fat company he inherited from his father at the age of 21 into a $2.1 billion IT Services organization serving customers from across the globe. A recipient of many awards and accolades primary among them being Time magazine's listing him as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2004 and the Padma Bhushan in 2005 Premji, unlike many others believes each one of them is recognition for all those who over the years have shared his thoughts and experiences on a host of issues ranging from India's meteoric rise in the world order to the importance of universal quality education. Here, we capture his advice to techies in ten simple commandments Premji's commandments.The first thought that crossed young Azim Premji's mind when he stepped into the Wipro factory at Almaner was take charge. The times decidedly were tough. His father had passed away and he was faced with the dilemma of coming down from Stanford University leaving his electrical engineering degree mid-way, to look after the family's vegetable oils business or as many people advised, taking up a nice, cushy job. At such times when you feel lost, he says looking back, there is a small voice inside you that tells you where to go. You can either amplify the voice to make it the purpose of your life or ignore it and turn if off.An essential component of taking charge is having a dream as to where we want to go. No doubt there will be setbacks in the pursuance of that dream, but still we must keep dreaming. Says Premji, What saddens me most is to see young, bright people getting completely disillusioned by a few initial setbacks and slowly turning cynical. What's worse is that some of them want to migrate to America hoping that it is the solution. Dreams are most needed when just about everything is going wrong. They provide the inspiration and ensure that one remains in charge of the situation.It is a common saying that a Rupee earned is of far more value than five found, says Premji. He recalls innumerable interviews when he asked the interviewees to narrate their most memorable achievements and they've recounted those which needed maximum effort on their part. It is almost as if the pain they faced is now an integral part of their pleasure, he says, adding, I guess we only know the value of what we have if we have struggled to earn it.It is impossible to generate a few good ideas without a lot of bad ideas. Failure should be forgiven and forgotten quickly, says Premji. If we encounter failure along the way, we should treat it as a natural phenomenon and not beat ourselves or any one else for that matter. In fact, as the following story illustrates, we could look at failures or pitfalls as the stepping stones to success.One day a farmer's donkey fell into a well. It cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do. Finally, he decided the animal was old and the well needed to be covered up anyway. So he, along with his neighbors, grabbed a shovel each and began to shovel dirt into the well. On realizing the motive behind the act, the donkey initially cried more loudly and then, to everyone's amazement, quietened down. A few shovel loads later, the farmer curiously looked down the well and came away astonished.With every shovel of dirt that fell on his back, the donkey would shake it off and take a step up. As the farmer's neighbors continued to shovel dirt on the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up. Pretty soon, it stepped over the edge of the well and tottered away.Life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt, says Premji. The trick is not to get bogged down by it. We can get out of the deepest wells by not stopping. Shake it off and take a step up!Even while practicing the shake off and step up act, we ought not to let success get into our heads. In other words, retention of humility is a must. He narrates another story to elucidate its importance.A lady and her husband, both dressed in faded clothes, walked in without an appointment into the office of the President of the most prestigious educational institution in America. After waiting for hours, they were allowed to meet the President who glared sternly at them. The lady said, Our son, who studied here was killed in an accident a year ago. She expressed her desire of erecting a building in memory of her deceased son in the University campus.A building exclaimed the President, looking at their worn out clothes. Convinced that they did not have the means to erect a memorial, he said, Do you have any idea that our buildings cost close to ten million dollars? With that, the President thought he get rid of them.The lady looked at her husband calmly. If that is what it costs to start a university, why don't we start our own? she queried. Her husband nodded. Mr. and Mrs. Leland Stanford walked away, traveling to Palo Alto, California, where they established a University as a memorial to their son, bearing their name - the Stanford University.As this story shows, the moment we allow success to build a feeling of arrogance, we become vulnerable to making bad judgments.Partly a corollary to his previous commandment, this one is centered around the fact that no matter how well we do something, there is always a better way to do it! Excellence is not a destination but a journey, quips Premji, adding that sometimes when we reach a plateau in our climb for perfection, we need to look sideways. After all, innovation oftentimes is inspired from other disciplines. It is probably not a coincidence that Einstein's interest in music was as much as his interest in Physics and Bertrand Russell was as much a mathematician as a philosopher.While success and finding better ways to reach its pinnacle are important, it becomes enduring only if it is built on a strong foundation of values. Premji, for one, is revered by his colleagues in the industry for insisting that Wipro will not pay bribes. He says that the fast propagation of the notion that values stand in the way of success holds no merit.According to him, values serve as a strong anchor in a turbulent sea of changes and provide faith at times when it seems we are surrounded by darkness. They provide the courage to stand up to any distractions along the way. Combined with a powerful vision, values can turbo-charge us to scale new heights and make us succeed beyond our wildest expectations, he quips.Wipro's head honcho notes that too many people are so enamored by the legacy of success in their current roles that they are afraid to look further. This, he opines, often leads to inertia. We must learn to look at change as an exciting adventure rather than a disruption. New avenues for learning always lie just beyond the shade of our comfort zone, he explains.Playing to win does not mean playing dirty or cutting corners to get to the goal. Instead, it has to do with bringing out the best in us; it involves the desire to stretch and achieve something that seems beyond our grasp. For this, we must learn the importance of playing as a team.The challenges ahead are so complex that no individual will be able to face them alone, says Premji, a winner in his own right. While most of our education is focused on individual strength, teaming with members is equally important. You cannot fire a missile from a canoe, he reasons, adding, Unless you build a strong network of people with complimentary skills, you will be restricted by your own limitations and winning will remain a distant dream.The aspect of playing in a team has also undergone a sea change in the last decade or so. Globalization has brought in people of different origins, upbringings, and cultures together. Today, playing as a team needs to include the ability to become an integral part of a cross-cultural team.Exercising and remaining fit is something that most techies take for granted in their youth. But they ought not, especially because exercise not only improves the health but also aids in better sleep while reducing the time needed for sleep itself. This assumes significance given the 24/7 rotation-oriented shift patterns most techies are required to follow. While stress will go on increasing in a global world, we must find our own mechanism to deal with it, says Premji, adding that there is enough literature to support the finding that exercise effectively reduces stress.It is essential that we understand the difference between responding and reacting. While we respond, we evaluate with a calm mind and do whatever is most appropriate. We are in control of our actions. But when we react, we end up doing what the other person wants us to do. In this context, Premji recalls, as a youth reacting to orders he did not resort to rebelling. Rebellion as a reaction is conformity to something else, he says thoughtfully.Oftentimes, when it comes to negative criticisms, he notes reflecting on his experiences, we make the mistake of reacting rather than responding. We must always welcome any form of criticism, for, as the story below illustrates, it helps us better ourselves.A boy enrolled in an art school dreamt of becoming a great artist. His aspiration however was pulverized by his teacher who would always find some fault with his work. The student improved on his work continuously, hoping that one day he would hear a word of appreciation from his teacher. But it never happened. Finally, in disgust, he bought a painting from an accomplished artist, touched it up with fresh paint and showed it to his teacher. The teacher smiled and said, Now this is really good work. Congratulations. Feeling guilty, the student confessed that it was not his painting. The teacher looked at him for a while and said, Till now, I thought you wanted to paint a great picture. But I realize now that you do not seek any further improvement; it means that the last painting you did was the best you will ever do. Remember you have set these limits to your talent, not me.As we see here, says Premji, criticism may actually be an expression of faith in us rather than a means of putting us down. If we react rather than respond to criticisms, we will only be limiting ourselves.The fact that the Wipro wizard has made a case for having a broader social vision many times over in numerous forums across the world explains how close it is to his heart.For decades we have been waiting for someone who will help us in priming the pump of the economy, he notes with a certain discomfiture. Many think that thinking and working towards social causes is the sole onus of the days government, but that is not the case. He elucidates how, in the millennium of the mind, knowledge-based industries like information technology are in a unique position to earn wealth from outside. This wealth, or a part of it, they must invest in bridging the immense inequality between India's rich and poor.Not limiting himself to just philosophizing, Premji set up the Azim Premji Foundation. The foundation works towards the universalization of Primary Education. The greatest gift one can give to others is the gift of education, he quips, reflecting emotionally on those who have educated him during his formative years, most of all, his father.The greatest legacy he endowed me with was the legacy of values. That is what has helped me become what I am today, signs off the new-age Indian plutocrat who incidentally loves hiking and insists on flying economy class. UPDATE: Mariners Harbor man identified as victim. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Police have arrested a 43-year-old Brooklyn man in connection with a hit-and-run Tuesday in East New York that left a Staten Island man pronounced dead in a nearby hospital. Rodney Mondesir, of the 700 block of Hendrix Street, faces charges of leaving the scene and illegal tint on the windows of the 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee he was driving, according to an NYPD spokesman. A law enforcement source described the victim as a 51-year-old male from Staten Island, though police have not yet released the mans identity, pending family notification. Mondesir lives two blocks from where he allegedly struck the victim, and does not have any known prior arrests in New York, police said. The incident occurred at about 11:55 p.m. Tuesday near Linden Boulevard and Barbey Street. Police said a preliminary investigation determined the pedestrian was attempting to cross Linden Boulevard when he was struck. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.-- A Staten Island man claims he didnt realize the Washington County pre-teen hes accused of having sexual relations with inside his Staten Island apartment was only 12 years old, but an upstate judge isnt buying it, according to a Post Star report. The trial could begin in Washington County state Supreme Court as early as April 1 for George Torres, 19, of Stapleton, in connection with the alleged September kidnapping of Malaya Johnson. Police said the girl willingly got in Torres car in September for a ride to New York City, but he was charged with kidnapping because the law states that, based on her age, she couldnt consent. Torres said the girl claimed in social media messages that she was 17. Judge Kelly McKeighan pointed to the fact that Torres knew he was picking her up after school and that he was helping her run away from home, according to the report. Authorities allege Torres, who is a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, picked the girl up in his hand-operated Ford Mustang and had sexual contact with the girl inside the URBY Apartment Complex, before learning of the Amber Alert and dropping her off at the Staten Island Ferry. Charges are pending against a second man, a 20 year old from Staten Island, who, authorities say, met up with the girl at the Staten Island Ferry and had sexual relations with her, according to the report. Torres defense lawyer, Robert Winn, had accused the Washington County District Attorneys Office of prosecutorial misconduct, claiming that prosecutors made a misleading, incomplete and grotesquely inaccurate depiction of evidence in the case. In May 2016, a group of national health experts issued an urgent plea in a private letter to high-level officials in the Obama administration. Thousands of people were dying from overdoses of fentanyl the deadliest drug to ever hit U.S. streets and the administration needed to take immediate action. The epidemic had been escalating for three years. The 11 experts pressed the officials to declare fentanyl a national public health emergency that would put a laserlike focus on combating the emerging epidemic and warn the country about the threat, according to a copy of the letter. The fentanyl crisis represents an extraordinary public health challenge and requires an extraordinary public health response, the experts wrote to six administration officials, including the nations drug czar and the chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The administration considered the request but did not act on it. The decision was one in a series of missed opportunities, oversights and half-measures by federal officials who failed to grasp how quickly fentanyl was creating another and far more fatal wave of the opioid epidemic. In the span of a few short years, fentanyl, a synthetic painkiller 50 times more powerful than heroin, became the drug scourge of our time. Fentanyl has played a key role in reducing the overall life expectancy for Americans. If current trends continue, the annual death toll from fentanyl will soon approach those from guns or traffic accidents. Among the dead are the anonymous and the famous, including musicians Prince and Tom Petty . It is so powerful that just a few flecks the size of grains of salt can cause rapid death. Between 2013 and 2017, more than 67,000 people died of synthetic-opioid-related overdoses exceeding the number of U.S. military personnel killed during the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. The number of deaths, the vast majority from fentanyl, has risen sharply each year. In 2017, synthetic opioids were to blame for 28,869 out of the overall 47,600 opioid overdoses, a 46.4 percent increase over the previous year, when fentanyl became the leading cause of overdose deaths in America for the first time. This is a massive institutional failure, and I dont think people have come to grips with it, said John P. Walters, chief of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy between 2001 and 2009. This is like an absurd bad dream and we dont know how to intervene or how to save lives. Federal officials saw fentanyl as an appendage to the overall opioid crisis rather than a unique threat that required its own targeted strategy. As law enforcement began cracking down in 2005 on prescription opioids such as OxyContin and Vicodin, addicts turned to heroin, which was cheaper and more available. Then, in 2013, fentanyl arrived, and overdoses and deaths soared. Fentanyl was killing people like wed never seen before, said Derek Maltz, the former agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administrations Special Operations Division in Washington. A red light was going off, ding, ding, ding. This is something brand new. What the hell is going on? We needed a serious sense of urgency. But for years, Congress didnt provide significant funding to combat fentanyl or the larger opioid epidemic. U.S. Customs and Border Protection didnt have enough officers, properly trained dogs or sophisticated equipment to curb illegal fentanyl shipments entering the country from China and Mexico. The U.S. Postal Service didnt require electronic monitoring of international packages, making it difficult to detect parcels containing fentanyl ordered over the Internet from China. CDC data documenting fentanyl overdoses lagged events on the ground by as much as a year, obscuring the real-time picture of what was happening. Facing hotly contested midterm elections in 2018, Congress finally passed legislation aimed at addressing the increasingly politicized opioid crisis, including a measure to force the Postal Service to start tracking international packages. Federal officials saw fentanyl as an appendage to the overall opioid crisis rather than a unique threat that required its own targeted strategy. As law enforcement began cracking down in 2005 on prescription opioids such as OxyContin and Vicodin, addicts turned to heroin, which was cheaper and more available. Then, in 2013, fentanyl arrived, and overdoses and deaths soared. Fentanyl was killing people like wed never seen before, said Derek Maltz, the former agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administrations Special Operations Division in Washington. A red light was going off, ding, ding, ding. This is something brand new. What the hell is going on? We needed a serious sense of urgency. But for years, Congress didnt provide significant funding to combat fentanyl or the larger opioid epidemic. U.S. Customs and Border Protection didnt have enough officers, properly trained dogs or sophisticated equipment to curb illegal fentanyl shipments entering the country from China and Mexico. The U.S. Postal Service didnt require electronic monitoring of international packages, making it difficult to detect parcels containing fentanyl ordered over the Internet from China. CDC data documenting fentanyl overdoses lagged events on the ground by as much as a year, obscuring the real-time picture of what was happening. Facing hotly contested midterm elections in 2018, Congress finally passed legislation aimed at addressing the increasingly politicized opioid crisis, including a measure to force the Postal Service to start tracking international packages. In Sununus state, Narcan, which delivers an opioid-overdose antidote, has become standard issue for some school districts. Addicts overdose on the sidewalks and in public parks of Manchester and are found slumped over the steering wheels of cars in traffic. Firefighters and paramedics are called nearly every day to fentanyl overdoses and have opened their station houses to addicts seeking treatment. In the city of Manchester, we saw 20 overdoses to 80 overdoses a month. We were like, What the heck is happening with these overdoses? said Manchester Fire Chief Dan Goonan. He said politicians and policymakers held numerous roundtable discussions to talk about solutions, but there was little action. I said, If I had to go to another roundtable, Im going to jump out the window myself because were going nowhere with these roundtables, he said. [What you need to know about fentanyl] Drug treatment experts compared the governments slow response to an earlier failure to face the AIDS epidemic. There was a stigma about being gay, said Luke J. Nasta, executive director of the largest drug treatment facility on Staten Island, N.Y. There is also a stigma about being addicted to drugs. The entire society is suffering and the government cant seem to get their arms around this epidemic. If its an epidemic, then treat it like an epidemic. GROUND ZERO The first wave of the opioid epidemic began in 1996 after drug manufacturer Purdue Pharma introduced what it claimed to be a wonder drug for pain OxyContin, a powerful opioid that was aggressively marketed to physicians as less addictive than other prescription narcotics. As the medical community embraced the new drug, it became a blockbuster for Purdue, generating billions in sales. Over the next decade, doctors and corrupt pain management clinics prescribed massive amounts of opioids. To meet the demand, drug manufacturers and distributors flooded communities across the country with opioid pills, including oxycodone and hydrocodone. Drug users and dealers diverted hundreds of millions of doses to the streets. The DEA started to crack down on the illegal trade in 2005. Two years later, Purdue paid $600 million in fines and its executives pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges for claiming the product was less addictive than other painkillers. The company agreed to make its marketing conform to federal rules and has launched programs to combat opioid abuse. It is deeply flawed to suggest that activities that last occurred 18 years ago are responsible for todays complex and multi-faceted opioid addiction crisis, the company said in a recent statement. The federal government also fined the largest drug distributors and pharmacies tens of millions of dollars over allegations that they failed to report suspicious orders of pain pills. As the supply of prescription opioids began to tighten, Americas pill addicts became desperate. Street prices soared. Mexican drug cartels saw an opening to sell more heroin, a cheaper, more potent way to get high. That set off the second wave of the epidemic by 2010 and a rise in overdose deaths. Then fentanyl hit the streets. A synthetic opioid developed in 1960 by a Belgian physician, fentanyl is normally reserved for surgery and cancer patients. It is up to 100 times more powerful than morphine, its chemical cousin. For traffickers, illicit fentanyl produced in labs was the most lucrative opportunity yet, a chance to bypass the unpredictability of the poppy fields that produced their heroin. The traffickers could order one of the cheapest and most powerful opioids on the planet directly from Chinese labs over the Internet. It was 20 times more profitable than heroin by weight. By lacing a little of the white powdery drug into their heroin, the dealers could make their product more potent and more compelling to users. They called it China White, China Girl, Apache, Dance Fever, Goodfella, Murder 8 or Tango & Cash. The third wave of the opioid epidemic was about to begin. Ground zero was Rhode Island, already reeling from a crippling prescription pill and heroin problem. The first signs were detected in the spring of 2013 when overdose deaths spiked at the state morgue in Providence. Then-Rhode Island Health Director Michael Fine wondered: What was killing so many so quickly? Fine was surprised to learn when the toxicology reports came back that 12 people who overdosed between March and May had died from fentanyl. They ranged in age from 19 to 57, and most were from the northern part of the state. Fine notified the CDC about the cluster. On Aug. 30, 2013, the CDC in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report highlighted the unusual spike in Rhode Island. It didnt attract much national attention. Eighteen days before the CDC issued its Notes from the Field, then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. traveled to the other side of the country to issue one of the biggest policy proclamations of his career. Standing before hundreds of lawyers gathered for the American Bar Associations annual conference in San Francisco, Holder announced that he was rolling back the aggressive prosecution strategy that had been launched to target the crack cocaine crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Calling the new policy Smart on Crime, Holder said he was directing federal prosecutors to stop bringing low-level, nonviolent drug charges that would trigger mandatory-minimum sentences. The charges had resulted in harsh sentences for first-time offenders, many of them young black men. Holder told his prosecutors to focus on large drug-trafficking organizations. He wanted a major reduction in the burgeoning federal prison population, but his initiative also was part of the Obama administrations strategy to favor drug treatment over incarceration. Our system is, in too many ways, broken, Holder said that day. A vicious cycle of poverty, criminality and incarceration traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities. Prison reform activists, civil rights groups and some federal prosecutors hailed the new policy, laid out in a three-page Department of Justice memorandum that became known as the Holder Memo. THIS HUGE SPIKE Tim Pifer and his team at the state crime lab in Concord, N.H., started to see the same pattern in 2014 that Fine had noticed in Rhode Island the previous year. We were thinking, why would anyone inject something thats so potentially deadly? Pifer, the veteran chief of the lab, said in a recent interview. We saw this huge spike in drug deaths. To get the word out, state health and law enforcement officials in New Hampshire and Rhode Island joined with the DEA, which had been seeing the same pattern across New England. In January 2014, the DEA issued a bulletin warning local authorities nationwide about killer heroin cut with fentanyl. First responders needed to exercise extreme caution because fentanyl could be absorbed through the skin. The bulletin resulted in a few local news stories. But, once again, there was little national attention. In March, a month after actor Philip Seymour Hoffmans heroin overdose generated national headlines, Holder released a video to notify the public of the rising number of heroin deaths across the country. He called heroin an urgent and growing public health crisis. Between 2006 and 2010, heroin overdose deaths had increased by 45 percent. Confronting this crisis will require a combination of enforcement and treatment, Holder said in the video. The Justice Department is committed to both. Holder made no mention of fentanyl; top officials in Washington were still focused on heroin and prescription pain pills. Former DEA agents said they provided Holder with a personal briefing that included a 30-slide PowerPoint presentation about the dangers of fentanyl in June 2014, three months after Holders video. Several DEA officials were present, including then-DEA administrator Michele Leonhart. The PowerPoint, which The Washington Post reviewed, warned that heroin was being laced with fentanyl and there had been an outbreak of fentanyl overdoses in the Northeast. It also noted that the drug was being ordered over the Internet. The agency had traced the source to Chinese drug-trafficking organizations. While raising red flags, the PowerPoint presentation itself did not request any particular action. We were hoping and expecting a briefing to the nations number one law enforcement official would not only raise the level of awareness, but would cause him to take action within the department to direct people to make this matter a high priority since people were dying, Maltz, the DEAs former agent in charge of the Special Operations Division, later told The Post. Maltzs division prepared and delivered the PowerPoint. He said he and his agents believed that a national problem like fentanyl was way bigger than the DEA, and the attorney general could have taken a leadership role, urging other agencies to focus on the emerging threat. Leonhart did not respond to requests for comment. Holder declined an interview request. His former spokesman said it was up to the DEA to ask the attorney general for specific action. It says something that the people pointing fingers at the attorney general cant point to a single action they recommended that he declined to take, said Matthew Miller, Holders former spokesman at DOJ. Eric Holder made fighting the opioid crisis a major focus, he strongly supported the DEAs work in this area, and if the officials trying to now lay the blame at someone elses feet had asked for more assistance, he would have given it, as he did in nearly every instance a law enforcement agency made such a request. Ten months after the briefing, Holder left the administration. By then, fentanyl was spreading across the country. Large increases in fentanyl seizures were being reported in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland and Virginia. At the same time, in the wake of Holders memo, federal drug cases were dropping. In a year, the number of people charged with federal drug crimes fell by more than 4,700 from 27,106 in 2013 to 22,387 in 2014. There was a dramatic decline in drug prosecutions, Rod J. Rosenstein, who served as the U.S. attorney in Baltimore during the Obama administration and is now the deputy attorney general, recently told The Post. That was a reflection of administration policy to de-emphasize imprisonment and to shift focus away from prosecution into treatment. Then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates said in 2016 that U.S. Sentencing Commission data showed that the number of serious drug prosecutions such as those involving firearms increased. But a report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz found that the sentencing data Yates used had significant limitations because it did not count the number of cases from drug agents that assistant U.S. attorneys turned down for prosecution. Horowitz concluded that there was no way to gauge the precise impact Holders memo had on drug prosecutions. Holders former spokesman said the memo did not take away tools from prosecutors. It gave them discretion, Miller said in a written statement. They have the same ability to charge cases they have always had, they are just supposed to use discretion and not automatically trigger mandatory minimums when they arent appropriate. There are many reasons for the increase in fentanyl abuse, but there is no evidence that the Smart on Crime initiative is one of them. But out in the field, some drug agents and prosecutors said they noticed an immediate difference, just as fentanyl started to show up on the streets. Dominick Capuano, a former veteran New York City narcotics supervisor who worked with federal task forces on Staten Island, said his agents traditionally launched their cases by arresting low-level dealers. Prosecutors would then offer plea deals for information about bigger traffickers. Law enforcement would work its way up to the kingpins. Federal laws carry long prison sentences and provide powerful incentives for people to talk. After the Holder memo, Capuano said federal prosecutors would no longer take the lower-level cases and morale among his drug agents plummeted as heroin and fentanyl overdoses soared. The low-lying fish is where you start the cases, said Capuano, who recently retired after 21 years on the job. Those are the people who flip, who give information, and thats what leads to these bigger cases. Utah U.S. Attorney John W. Huber, an Obama appointee who was renamed to the position by the Trump administration, said in a recent interview that the change in policy took the edge off drug prosecutions. The message, he said: This isnt so important anymore. In 2015, 9,803 people died from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. Jonathan Squire Jr., 25, a dry cleaning employee and part-time college student in Louisville, was one of them. He died on Jan. 12.'IT HITS YOU IN THE HEART' On March 18, 2015, nine months after its presentation to Holder, the DEA put out its strongest warning yet to law enforcement agencies and the public about the mounting threat, issuing a Nationwide Alert on Fentanyl. The alert was a distillation of what the agency had learned about the drug in the previous two years. It was intended to sound the alarm, not only to the agencys field offices, but also to federal and state officials, and to the public. The DEA warned that fentanyl was increasingly showing up in heroin. DEA agents said fentanyl was being ordered by traffickers and users over the Internet and the dark Web. They paid for the drug with bitcoin and other forms of cryptocurrency. The agency noted that Mexican cartels were smuggling fentanyl through ports of entry along the Southwest border, hiding it in wheel wells and secret compartments in cars and trucks. State and local labs reported that seizures had risen from 942 in 2013 to 3,344 in 2014. The rise in deaths was disturbing: 80 fentanyl deaths in the first six months of 2014 in New Jersey and 200 deaths in Pennsylvania over 15 months. The same month that the DEA issued its alert, Congress directed the Justice Department and the White House drug czar to convene a National Heroin Task Force to develop strategies to confront the heroin problem and curtail the escalating overdose epidemic and death rates. This was meant to be the administrations big effort, bringing together 25 agencies to develop a comprehensive national response to the crisis. The focus was still on heroin and prescription pills. The task force's 23-page report was delivered to Congress by the new attorney general, Loretta E. Lynch. Five sentences were devoted to fentanyl. The report said the surge in opioid deaths may be related to a rise in heroin being laced with fentanyl. It called for the creation of response teams to warn police and the public about overdoses, some of which may involve fentanyl, and said there should be more research into opioid use disorder, including the use of fentanyl. No mention was made of the role of China and orders of fentanyl over the Internet, the smuggling of fentanyl through the U.S. mail or the lack of resources devoted to fighting fentanyl trafficking at the border and ports of entry. In retrospect, it should have been a focus of the report, Michael Botticelli, the White House drug czar at the time, said in a recent interview. A task force leader saw fentanyl as an extension of the prescription pill and heroin crisis, not as the beginning of a new and far deadlier drug epidemic. It was not ignored and it was on the radar and we did talk about it, but it was sort of like another problem on top of everything else, said David Hickton, former U.S. attorney of the Western District of Pennsylvania, who co-chaired the task force. The big problem at the time was opioids in pill form. Fentanyl was episodic at that time. It looks so different to me today than it did then. Now, it looks like its own problem. At the time, it looked like a spike problem. Hickton said he was frustrated that the report didnt fault Congress for failing to provide funding to fight the epidemic. He said the task force believed that at least $1 billion was needed immediately for law enforcement efforts and treatment programs. We were very clear about what we needed, said Hickton, who later created his own state task force to focus on heroin and fentanyl traffickers. We didnt get half. We got zero. At the same time, the state of Rhode Island launched its own task force after newly elected Gov. Gina Raimondo (D) declared opioid overdoses to be a public health crisis in 2015. Two experts advising the task force visited the state morgue in Providence. Josiah Rich and Traci Green, epidemiologists from Brown University, pored over the autopsy reports that had so alarmed Michael Fine two years earlier. Theres a fentanyl, theres another fentanyl, Rich recalled in a recent interview. As they sifted through the reports and the photographs of the dead, one stood out: a pregnant woman, slumped over, surrounded by the presents she had recently received for her baby shower. It hits you in the heart, Rich said. You read through a two-foot stack of those and youre a different person. Rich and Green began to contact their colleagues around the country and discovered that others had also seen troubling spikes of fentanyl deaths. We said, Oh my goodness, this fentanyl is really starting to take off, Rich said. Nobodys doing anything about it. Nobodys saying anything about it. Lynch, the attorney general, did mention fentanyl in one sentence during a keynote address she delivered at the Opioid Misuse and Addiction Summit in Massachusetts that fall. Lynch said the DEA had recently taken several major actions against drug traffickers and was raising awareness about the growing presence of fentanyl in heroin sold on the streets, which substantially and tragically increases the risk of overdose. In Washington, Tom Frieden, the CDC chief during the Obama administration, notified several senior administration health officials about the increasing fentanyl overdoses, including a doubling of deaths in New Hampshire in one year. Frieden believed one of his roles was to alert government officials to dangerous trends in the field. In October 2015, the CDC issued a nationwide health advisory about the increasing dangers of fentanyl. It was up to the various agencies to take action, he said. I felt like I was a bit of a voice in the wilderness, Frieden recalled in a recent interview. I didnt have the sense that people got this as a really serious problem. One of the people Frieden contacted was Botticelli, the drug czar. I had many conversations with him, encouraging law enforcement to take rigorous action, Frieden said. He assured me they were. The drug czars office depended on overdose data from the CDC. But data from the field was sometimes a year behind, and local coroners and medical examiners were not always testing for fentanyl. Its incredibly frustrating when you feel like, given the resources of the United States, that we cant harness those resources in ways that help us see around the corner, Botticelli said. He said he pressed for faster overdose reporting from medical examiners. He also worked to increase funding for drug task forces around the country. That same year, Kemp Chester was named the associate director of the National Heroin Coordination Group in Botticellis office. Chester said the government was focused on pain pill and heroin overdoses; fentanyl was still seen as an outlier. There was not an interagency understanding of what this drug is, where its coming from and how its getting into the country, Chester recalled. Chuck Rosenberg, the DEA administrator at the time, declined a request for an interview. That November eight months after the DEA issued its national fentanyl alert the Obama administration sent its annual National Drug Control Strategy to Congress. The 107-page report devoted one sentence to fentanyl, noting that it was showing up in heroin. It caught a lot of people by surprise, said Jon DeLena, the associate special agent in charge of the DEAs New England Field Division. People didnt understand until it was really put in their face. People werent paying attention to how rapidly this evolved and they werent prepared for it. In 2016, 19,720 people died from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. Darwin Phillips, 50, a handyman in Chicago, was one of them. He died on July 15. A joint-raid executed upstate by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and New York law enforcement seized a massive amount of fentanyl and heroin from a suburban home. LIKE A LIGHT SWITCH On March 29, 2016, Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) joined President Obama on Air Force One for a trip to Atlanta, where both were scheduled to speak at the National Rx Drug Abuse & Heroin Summit. By then, Markey said, the fentanyl story was still masked in the prescription drug and heroin epidemic and he felt like Paul Revere, warning that even greater danger was coming. He and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had requested the previous year that the U.S. surgeon general provide Congress with a report to highlight the seriousness of the overall opioid epidemic. The senator used the rare one-on-one time to tell the president about fentanyl. I mentioned to him how this was morphing into increasingly a fentanyl epidemic and thats what was hitting Massachusetts and we were the canaries in a mine shaft, Markey recalled. He was very concerned about it. During Obamas hour-long appearance as part of a panel, the president discussed pills, heroin and efforts to provide treatment to opioid addicts. He made an oblique reference to fentanyl without mentioning the drug by name. We are now seeing synthetic opioids that are oftentimes coming in from China through Mexico into the United States, Obama said. Were having to move very aggressively there, as well. The situation had become so desperate that health experts from around the country banded together to make an impassioned plea to the highest levels of the Obama administration. On May 4, 2016, a month after Obamas Atlanta appearance, the 11 public health experts wrote to the six administration officials, requesting the emergency declaration. Among the experts were Rich and Green, the two Rhode Island epidemiologists who had seen the devastation firsthand. What was happening was not enough given the scale of the challenge, said another of the authors of the letter, Joshua M. Sharfstein, vice dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In their 14-page letter, the experts pointed out that the fentanyl epidemic appeared to be intensifying after two years. It was far more dangerous than an earlier fentanyl outbreak in several states between 2005 and 2007, when nearly 1,000 people died. In that case, quick action had saved lives: The DEA had traced the fentanyl to a clandestine lab in Toluca, Mexico, and shut it down immediately. Now, fentanyl deaths were spreading across the nation. In Maryland, the toll had jumped by more than 800 percent from 2013 to 2015. Like a light switch turning on, they wrote, referring to Maryland. Traffickers were now buying pill presses from China and lacing fentanyl into counterfeit pain pills such as Vicodin, Xanax and oxycodone. The experts asked the administration to take several steps to immediately address the crisis. To start, they requested an emergency public health declaration from the Department of Health and Human Services that would sound the alarm. An emergency declaration would clarify the public health nature of the crisis and bring needed focus to a new threat that is claiming thousands of lives, the experts wrote. But an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter dismissed the idea of a declaration, saying it would have been largely symbolic and required emergency funds from Congress. Sylvia Mathews Burwell was then the HHS secretary who would have had to approve the declaration. She declined an interview request. Two months after the emergency request, Burwell spoke at the National Governors Associations summer meeting on opioid addiction in Des Moines. She said she had put together a working group at HHS and asked the audience for help. Im sure you all know better than I do, fentanyl is the problem on steroids, she said. If youre seeing things that are working in your states, please let us know. Botticelli, the drug czar and another recipient of the request, said the Obama administrations priority was getting more money from Congress for treatment. Quite honestly, I think our focus at that point was not just to declare a public health emergency, but really to get additional resources out to states, he said. But many leading voices in the field feel an emergency declaration could have saved lives by shining a bright spotlight that would have galvanized the administration, awakened the public and warned users of the danger they faced. A great deal would have been done by the White House simply saying we have this horrible danger out there, said Walters, the earlier drug czar. We saw more action by the White House over an outbreak of tainted food, giving out news releases telling people what to look for, telling people to protect their friends and family, than you did for fentanyl. Its a little ridiculous that we dont use the bully pulpit to at least provide a national warning. In the summer of 2016, a few months after the fentanyl letter, the Obama administration declared the Zika virus to be a public health emergency and had already requested $1.9 billion from Congress to address it. Two people in the United States died of Zika-related illnesses. At the same time, the DEA warned, counterfeit pain pills laced with fentanyl were posing a global threat. That fall, with the presidential campaign in full swing, the White House proclaimed Prescription Opioid and Heroin Epidemic Awareness Week. It had been three years since the CDC issued the first fentanyl warning in its morbidity report. The administration announced several fentanyl initiatives. It would continue to work with China and Mexico to stem the flow into the United States, make the anti-overdose medication naloxone more widely available and give additional money to drug task forces. The administration said it was adding money to accelerate data collection on overdoses. Finally, it planned to hold a roundtable with grieving parents. As part of the awareness week, Attorney General Lynch traveled to the University of Kentucky, where she highlighted the rise of opioid overdoses and said more than a third were caused by fentanyl. Lynch said the Justice Department would fund research into fentanyl, and she directed her prosecutors to focus on the greatest threats, including but not limited to individuals and institutions responsible for the trafficking of heroin and fentanyl. A report issued much later highlighted five fentanyl cases federal prosecutors had brought across the country under Lynch. Lynch declined a request for an interview. Obama also declined to be interviewed. Katie Hill, Obamas communications director, said any story about our administrations fentanyl response should be put in the context of our comprehensive approach to the opioid crisis, which included passage of the Affordable Care Act, a push for funding to expand treatment and the updating of guidelines for prescribing opioids. Its impossible to divorce fentanyl from the broader opioid use epidemic and how we responded, Hill said. After the 2016 election, at the urging of Obama, Congress approved nearly $1 billion for opioid treatment programs. Drug policy experts called that figure a drop in the bucket. On Nov. 17, the surgeon general released the opioid report Markey and McConnell had requested the previous year. As the nation struggles with an unprecedented opioid epidemic, this report is a missed opportunity, Markey said in a statement at the time. The deaths caused by prescription drug, heroin and fentanyl overdoses are growing exponentially every year, yet this report fails to provide any detailed roadmap for how best to curb opioid addiction. On Jan. 11, 2017, in the waning days of the administration, Obama delivered his annual National Drug Control Strategy to Congress. Four years after the epidemic began in Rhode Island, the White House called fentanyl a national crisis. The report said fentanyl overdoses and seizures were soaring. Members of the outgoing administration said they had been meeting with Chinese and Mexican officials to stop the flow. The administration was also working to break up drug trafficking rings and trying to improve communication between agencies to fight the spread of heroin and fentanyl. On page 73 of the 76-page report, the drug czars office issued one of its strongest statements yet: The dramatic increase in the availability and use of heroin and fentanyl is a national security, law enforcement, and public health issue, and it has become the highest priority illicit drug threat to the Nation. There were no news conferences or releases to announce the reports findings. There were no news stories written about the report. No one in Congress issued public statements or calls for action. Nine days later, Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president and Obama officials stepped down from their posts, leaving the next administration to confront the deadliest drug crisis in American history. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Gap Inc. is among the first company to hire for sales, managerial and other positions at the St. George-based Empire Outlets, which will have a phased opening between April and the summer. Gap Inc. -- owner of Gap Factory, and Old Navy and Banana Republic outlets, which will each open at New York Citys first outlet center -- has posted a variety of job listings. The three outlets stores under the Gap brand are slated to open by the end of April and employ between 155 to 175 employees at three stores, according to a Gap Inc. spokeswoman. Gap listings include those for sales associate, loss prevention agent, stock associate, visual merchandizing specialist, brand associate, assistant manager, operations specialist and loyalty specialist. Located adjacent to the St. George ferry terminal, New York Citys first outlet mall will feature more than 100 designer retailers and a 1,250-space parking garage. GRAND OPENING APRIL 18 The majority of the public spaces will open on April 18, Joseph Ferrara, principal in BFC Partners, developers of Empire Outlets, told the Advance last month. There will be access throughout the site and down to the esplanade and into the ferry terminal, he said, noting the grand staircase leading to the ferry terminal will be open in April. In addition, the vast majority of parking will be open in April, said a spokesman for the outlets. The shopping center includes 780 spots that are reserved for commuter parking, said Ferrara. FOOD COMPONENT In addition to some food concepts opening in April, there will be " a robust food truck presence" until the MRKTPL -- a 12,723-square-foot artisanal food hall with a 3,000-square-foot outdoor dining space -- opens in the summer, said Travis Noyes, Empire Outlets senior vice president, marketing. There will be a significant opening event that will cater just to MRKTPL as well, said Ferrara. OUTLET RETAILERS Other retailers signed on to be part of Empire Outlets include: Nordstrom Rack, Nike, H&M, Ghirardelli Chocolate, Levis, True Religion, Cotton On, Francescas, Converse, Jockey, Starbucks, U.S. Polo, Crocs,White House Black Market, Columbia Sportswear Company, Guess Factory Store, Wilsons Leather, G.H. Bass & Co., Lids, Obey Your Body, Samsonite, Walgreens, Haagen Dazs and Krispy Kreme. Restaurants set to be part of Empire Outlets diverse group of dining options include: Mamouns Falafel, Wasabi Steak & Sushi, Shake Shack, Mighty Quinns Barbeque, Artichoke Basilles Pizza, Nathans Famous. FOLLOW TRACEY PORPORA ON FACEBOOK and TWITTER STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Honda is recalling approximately 1.1 million Honda and Acura vehicles in the United States to replace Takata air bag inflators that may rupture if the air bag deploys in a crash, which may cause an injury. Honda made an announcement Tuesday it would recall the vehicles to replace the Takata desiccated replacement driver front air bag inflators for free. If a recalled driver front air bag deploys in a crash, the inflator may rupture, potentially shooting sharp metal fragments at the driver and passengers. The vehicles involved in this recall were previously repaired using specific Takata desiccated replacement inflators or entire replacement air bag modules containing these inflators -- which were both not subject to recall at the time. Those replacement inflators are now deemed defective. Here are the Acura and Honda models included in this recall. 2003 Acura 3.2CL 2013-2016 Acura ILX 2003-2006 Acura MDX 2002-2003 Acura 3.2TL 2004-2006 and 2009-2014 Acura TL 2007-2016 Acura RDX 2010-2013 Acura ZDX 2001-2007 and 2009 Honda Accord 2001-2005 Honda Civic 2002-2007 and 2010-2011 Honda CR-V 2003-2011 Honda Element 2007 Honda Fit 2002-2004 Honda Odyssey 2003-2008 Honda Pilot 2006-2014 Honda Ridgeline Honda became aware of the issue after a single-vehicle crash involving a 2004 Honda Odyssey. The vehicles driver front air bag deployed and the Takata replacement inflator ruptured, causing injury to the drivers arm. An investigation found that the inflators were manufactured at a Takata facility that experienced manufacturing process errors that introduced excessive moisture into the inflator during assembly. Moisture within the sealed inflator can lead to accelerated propellant degradation over time and lead to higher than normal inflator pressure upon air bag deployment. Honda is encouraging owners of affected vehicles to schedule repair at an authorized dealer as soon as possible. Replacement parts are available, all from alternate suppliers, to begin free recall repairs immediately. A free rental car is available to the vehicle owner for the day of the recall repair or longer if the replacement part is unavailable. Mailed notification to owners of recalled vehicles will begin in early April. Car owners can also check their vehicles recall status at recalls.acura.com or recalls.honda.com or by calling 888-234-2138. FOLLOW ANNALISE KNUDSON ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. A Willowbrook contractor who illegally rented the home owned by a mentally challenged senior citizens family vowed to a judge Wednesday he would stay on the straight and narrow from now on. Im very sorry that all this happened, Emil Cipriano III, 64, told Justice Alexander Jeong at his sentencing. Ive never been in trouble before, and Ill never be in trouble again. Jeong told the defendant his appreciated his remarks and wished him good luck. The judge then sentenced Cipriano under a plea agreement to five years probation and ordered him to pay full restitution of $35,000 by Aug. 1. Cipriano has paid $15,000 thus far, according to statements made in court. A law enforcement said the defendant misrepresented himself as the owner or landlord of a house on the 500 block of Stewart Avenue. The source said the victims family actually owned the home. Cipriano became pals with the victim while performing contracting work on the property, said the source. Prosecutors said the defendant rented the residence to a woman between December 2015 and March 2017. He took cash payments of about $2,200 per month, plus a security deposit, said prosecutors. In all, Cipriano, whos also known as Sonny, unlawfully collected about $35,000, prosecutors said. He kept the money for himself, said the source. In November, Cipriano pleaded guilty in state Supreme Court, St. George, to a reduced felony count of attempted third-degree grand larceny to resolve the case. Attorney John M. Murphy Jr. represented the defendant. Assistant District Attorney Thomas Reilly prosecuted the case. BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- Congestion in New York City is nothing new, but a lamb running along the Gowanus? Now thats a story. The tiny animal was spotted roaming the busy Brooklyn thoroughfare around 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, according to initial reports and social media postings. Loose lamb on the Gowanus, said Twitter user @jamesh173, who tagged the Advance. Not trying to be Easter Dinner. Loose lamb on the Gowanus. Not trying to be Easter Dinner. @siadvance traffic alert pic.twitter.com/myBzyeZuNs JJH (@jamesh173) March 13, 2019 According to NBC New York, early reports indicated the animal may have been a baby goat, but the sanctuary that will be its new home says it is indeed a lamb. The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (New York City office) responded to the incident and assisted the NYPD on the call, according to a tweet from the local branch of the government agency. The lamb was in the care of the citys Animal Care Centers and will find a new home with Jon Stewarts Skylands Animal Sanctuary and Rescue, reported NBC. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A 58-year-old man sold drugs steps away from the YMCA preschool in West Brighton, authorities allege. Police saw the suspect, Darryl Koger, 58, selling heroin to another person in the vicinity of his home on the 600 block of Broadway on Monday at about 6:20 p.m., according to the criminal complaint. Koger also allegedly had cocaine on him when he was arrested. The alleged drug-sale location is within 1,000 feet of the YMCA Pre-K for All facility at 651 Broadway, the criminal complaint said. The location officers the citys free, full-day pre-K program, according to its website. Koger is charged with criminal sale and possession of a controlled substance, as well as a count of criminal sale of a controlled substance near school grounds. The suspect, who is being held at Rikers Island in lieu of $50,000 bail, is due back in Criminal Court in St. George on Friday, according to public records. An attorney for the suspect did not immediately respond to a request for comment. STATEN ISLAND -- More than 400 Staten Islanders packed into the Staaten in West Brighton on Tuesday to challenge the head of the nonprofit heading the 200-family homeless shelter planned for the North Shore and the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) about its plans. The contentious meeting drew shouting matches and skepticism from Staten Islanders who could not be appeased by the speakers as they demanded to know why the city chose to put a women and family shelter in a historically dangerous area that had missed out on major opportunities like the New York Wheel. Its the wrong site! residents shouted. Its too big! others said. The city plans to build a 200-family homeless shelter at 44 Victory Blvd. on the North Shore by next winter, in addition to a 22-bed all-female shelter at Mount Loretto on a site owned by Catholic Charities. Additionally, in documents obtained by the Advance, the city also indicated it plans to look for additional sites for 300 more beds over the course of our plan, specifically in the Mid-Island and South Shore areas. Its about 10 minutes into the CB1 meeting with WIN CEO @Chrisquinn and she is not getting a warm welcome from Staten Islanders. Many are asking why she opposed a 200 person shelter in her district pic.twitter.com/uhI9mTBAIa Sydney Kashiwagi (@SydneyKashiwagi) March 13, 2019 Islanders also wanted to know why the president and CEO of WIN, former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, had vehemently opposed a shelter in her previous Council district in Chelsea. WIN is the nonprofit thats running the shelter program Quinn argued the biggest difference between the shelter proposed her district and the one on Staten Island was the gender of the clients. She said the shelter she opposed was planned for mostly single men, while the one proposed in St. George was for mostly women and children. I think 200 single men is too big for one shelter, she said of the shelter she had opposed in her district. This is families which are a very different situation. Others wondered why the Islands North Shore always wound up as the prime site for social services. Christine Quinn, former New York City Council Speaker and current CEO of WIN (Women in Need), lists the positives of helping homeless families on Staten Island. (Staten Island Advance/Shane DiMaio)Shane DiMaio How did you decide to put 22 individuals on the South Shore and 200 families equaling 500 people on the North Shore, asked Priscilia Marco, president of the Van Duzer Street Civic Association. Do you know the history of the North Shore versus the South Shore and the inequities that have been inflicted on this community? How can you you build this entire facility in a year and a half when this community has been waiting 10 years to move the sanitation garage, to get Cromwell Center, and we don't have a single public hospital in the entire borough we build this in a year, year in a half and we cant get any of those services, another borough resident said. DHS First Deputy Commissioner Jacqueline Bray said the city had been clear about its plans to look for shelter sites across the entire borough. She said her agency had looked at a number of Staten Island sites for the last two years including at Bayley Seton Hospital, which was not interested in moving forward with the discussions. Bray vowed that the agency would open shelters across the whole Island. I would be happy and we intend to open shelters in CB2 in CB3 -- this one came first, she said. Last month, the North Shores Community Board 1 voted overwhelmingly in favor of suing the city to stop the homeless shelter from coming to 44 Victory Blvd. Not just CB 1, but the heads of the neighboring civic associations said if the Islands elected officials would not try to stop the shelter from being built, the community would figure out a way to stop it themselves. A group of Island elected officials also submitted a list of alternative sites for the city to consider before moving forward with the planned 200-family homeless shelter. However, they declined to say which sites they pitched. Nearly 420 attendees packed The Staaten in West Brighton for a Community Board 1 meeting focused on the proposal to build a homeless shelter along Victory Boulevard in St. George. (Staten Island Advance/Shane DiMaio)Shane DiMaio FOLLOW SYDNEY KASHIWAGI ON TWITTER. I am a lifelong Democrat, but I question the party for the following actions: 1) The representative from Minnesota should be censured and taken off any committee she is on because of her anti-Semitic statements. 2) Free medical care and free college education for all is a noble idea, but it is a pipe dream. Where is the money coming from? Taxes? Instead, they should fight for affordable health care and education based on income. 3) Poverty is not a crime and neither is wealth. Attaining wealth is part of the American dream. What is a crime is not paying your fair share of taxes. Talking about redistribution of wealth and property is not the answer. A fair taxation program is. 4) Stop talking about socialism. That is a system that has the government controlling the means of production. The U.S. is and will always be capitalistic. Talk about providing every American healthcare, education and opportunities for employment. The word socialist will scare more voters away than attract them. The Democrats must present a clear and realistic platform that their candidates can run on or the election in 2020 will be lost. (Bennett Cohen is a New Springville resident.) The headline story in the Staten Island Advance (March 10, 2019), concerning the diversity of students throughout our public school system in Richmond County, as shockingly revealing as it is, should not be a surprise, rather, a current defining document of how little we have come in fairly educating the children of our great Island families over decades. The diversity numbers in our schools are systemic of how our borough is segmented into economic zones, and how little is being done to foster neighbor cultural/ethnic equality from the North Shore to our South Shore. The blame for this decades-old phenomenon does not entirely land on the shoulders of our local public officials. Similar distributions can be found throughout the public school system of New York City. What is alarming is the following: * The continued debate about the quality of the delivery of education to all our public school students - federal, state and city, in the absence of concrete reform, which should be having an impact on our children and their families. * The ineffective relationship between parent involvement and our public schools. * The lack of family programs in our education system. Back in the 90s and 2000s, when I served as a local school board member, central school board member and concurrently on the Commission of the Department of Youth and Community Development, my mantra was consistent -- We will not achieve cultural/ethnic equality in our great City of New York, and most particularly our borough, until our education system enacts programs to: * Make our schools fully articulate in design and skills training with DYCD - school through after school programs. * Allow parents to be a part of the learning experience in our schools, offering them parallel instruction or training programs unique to their needs. * Have a one-stop shop city government office in every school to help parents with their struggle of finding health care, child care and other vital services (many need a personal touch, not a 311). Schools should be places where family life changes can percolate and be realized. Our schools should be concentrating on teaching life-long career skills and STEM to our parents and children, as well as seeing the family as its customer. Our schools on Staten Island are no different than those across the country. Promoting diversity in our classrooms will require a change in the way we look at our countrys greatest resource ever -- the family. The solution is clear to me. We must have a National Economic Conference, formulating the needs of our American families and putting them first -- not our businesses and corporations. When the family is first, our actions will include improved school systems, equal opportunity to all, and having the best child care system in the world -- all parents being eligible for paid family leave, and schools supporting that effort. Thus, the school data shown is a symptom of a much larger condition which is paralyzing the American Dream, resulting in a society of haves and have nots, violence, bullying, addiction, gender inequality in the workplace and in the home, and yes, inequality in the very neighborhoods of our magnificent Island. (Dr. Jerry Cammarata was appointed by President Carter to the White House Conference on Families in the 80s, was a member of the local school board, District 31, in the 80s and 90s, a member of the Central Board Of Education in the 90s, as well as concurrently commissioner of the Department of Youth and Community Development. He is currently the chief operating officer, dean of student affairs and an associate professor at Touro College Of Osteopathic Medicine.) STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. Sex offender Linden Beaton was free on parole for less than 11 months after serving an attempted-rape sentence when, prosecutors allege, he brutally beat a 57-year-old woman in Clifton walking to a prayer meeting in January. Now, Beaton, 32, potentially faces a 25-year prison stint after being indicted on assault and unlawful imprisonment charges in the latest case. Attorney Gillian Kress pleaded not guilty to the charges on the defendants behalf Wednesday at his arraignment in state Supreme Court, St. George. The stocky, bearded Beaton, who a law enforcement source said is considered a person of interest in connection with the death of a 69-year-old woman in late January, said nothing beyond stating his name and confirming Kress is his lawyer. Prosecutors allege the beating victim, Beatrice Kaliku, was walking on Bowen Street near Sobel Court Park in the early morning hours of Jan. 5 when Beaton savagely attacked her. Kaliku was en route to a prayer meeting. In an interview with the Advance, Kaliku said she didnt see her assailant approach her from behind and grab her neck in a chokehold. She said he punched and slapped her on the face, dragged her through the mud toward the park and slammed her against an iron entrance gate. The victim said she was bleeding profusely from her head. He beat me so senselessly, she said, describing injuries that included bleeding on the brain, a gash on her scalp that had to be closed with stitches, broken bones in her thigh near her hip, a black eye and other bruises and cuts. He told me he would kill me, Kaliku said when she first recounted the attack to the Advance. Fearing she would die, Kaliku said she bit one of his fingers. He had to force my mouth open to get it out, she said of his finger, which appeared to be badly wounded. Beaton was charged with felony counts of first- and second-degree assault and unlawful imprisonment. Hes also accused of misdemeanor counts of criminal obstruction of breathing, unlawful imprisonment and assault. Justice Alexander Jeong adjourned the case to April 22 for a conference. Kress, the defense lawyer, said she anticipates applying then to reduce Beatons bail. The defendant is being held in lieu of $500,000 bail. Kress has asked the public not rush to judgement. A law enforcement source said Beaton is a person of interest with regard to the death of Johynita Jordan. Jordans bruised corpse was found around noon on Jan. 27 inside a home on the 700 block of Van Duzer Street in Stapleton, said police. However, Beaton, and no one else for that matter, has been charged in the case. Beaton, meanwhile, has an unrelated case pending in Manhattan state Supreme Court. He was arrested Jan. 30 on felony charges for allegedly failing, as a sex offender, to update authorities when he changed his address last May, according to a criminal complaint. The defendant is on the state sex-offender registry stemming from a November 2010 conviction on Staten Island for attempted first-degree rape, in which he choked, hit, and threatened a woman, according to online records of the state Division of Criminal Justice Services. The sex offender registry indicates Beaton knew his victim but does not further identify her. The defendant has been deemed a Level 3 sex offender, those considered to have the highest risk of recidivism. Beaton was sentenced to seven years behind bars for the conviction and was paroled on Feb. 15, 2018, show online records of the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. To continue, please log in, or sign up for a new account. We offer one free story view per month. If you register for an account, you will get two additional story views. After those three total views, we ask that you support us with a subscription. A subscription to our digital content is so much more than just access to our valuable content. It means youre helping to support a local community institution that has, from its very start, supported the betterment of our society. Thank you very much! Australias lesser-known retail bank, ING, has produced earnings growth that leaves its big four competitors in the dust. This in large part is courtesy of the tailwind provided by the royal commission. The digital bank, which is owned by its Dutch parent, describes itself as Australias first fintech and has been quietly growing over the past two decades. But 2018 was a big year thanks to a 15 per cent rise in profit, a massive 57 per cent increase in primary bank customers and 11 per cent growth in loans. ING had a 15 per cent rise in profit in 2018. Credit:AP These percentage gains are numbers the big four could only dream about. The massive royal commission-led shift away from for-profit super into industry super funds follows the same disruptive pattern. Loading As things stand, neither party is promising to do what the royal commission recommended and abolish commissions altogether in favour of a borrower-pays model, in which the cost of mortgage advice could be amortised into their loan, spreading it out over many decades. It's a dramatic failure of our political system to deal with one of the most important hip-pocket issues facing most Australians. Buying a home and getting a mortgage remains the biggest financial decision many Australians will ever have to make in their lifetime. The penalty for getting it wrong, by either borrowing too much or failing to choose the cheapest loan available, can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and could end up in you losing your home. Being encouraged to borrow more than you can really afford also carries a hidden cost: the opportunity cost of all that interest paid, which is all the things you could otherwise have done if you didn't borrow so much, such as work less, travel more or enjoy time with family. Australians deserve mortgage brokers who are incentivised to not only ferret out the cheapest loan for potential borrowers, but also encourage them to adopt a prudent attitude to debt. It's not clear to me that this is always the case. Indeed, regulator surveys have consistently found borrowers who use brokers walk out with bigger loan amounts and are more likely to default. Brokers on Tuesday scored a three-year reprieve from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Australia's obsession with home ownership has landed us with one of the highest debt to income ratios in the world. We are a nation of mortgage slaves, who have borrowed to the hilt and inflated house prices beyond the reach of many young Australians. Loading There are many reasons for that, but having an army of mortgage brokers who pocket more money the more we borrow, through percentage-based commisions, has surely not helped. Just because we haven't seen widespread defaults on mortgages in recent years doesn't mean we've been going about home lending right. Australia's high debt burden is a risk to our economy, with the potential to make the next economic downturn truly nasty, as jobless borrowers are unable to pay up. Even if we continue to meet repayments, Australians have racked up huge opportunity costs from our mortgage obsession. Absent our monster mortgages, we could be working less and enjoying life more. Ensuring Australians have access to good quality and independent advice on how to borrow to buy a home remains a matter of huge national importance. The eve of an election is no time to be deciding such matters, of course. If anything, the ridiculous political debate over broker payments with backflips aplenty only serves to highlight everything that is wrong with our democratic process at the moment. The rejection of expert advice, from Commissioner Kenneth Hayne. The use of scare campaigns by noisy commercial interests that stand to lose out from reforms which would benefit the dispersed needs of many. Commissioner Kenneth Hayne recommended a move to upfront fees. Credit:Brook Mitchell The preference of today's crop of politicians to do what is politically optimal, rather than what is socially optimal. The announcement of policy on the run. I don't intend to add to this list the short attention span of the modern media, too keen to breathlessly move on to the next shiny topic. Australia, we need to keep talking about mortgage brokers and whether they're really looking after our interests. Despite defying the recommendations of the royal commisison on broker commissions, both political parties have agreed to revisit the topic in 2022 with reviews by the competition watchdog and the council of financial regulators. Sigma Healthcare's largest independent investor says the company's board must "live and die" by its decision to reject an indicative takeover offer from rival Australian Pharmaceutical Industries (API) on Wednesday. API has walked away from its bid after Sigma said its board, having completed a detailed assessment of APIs offer, concluded that the companys future as a stand-alone business offers better opportunities for investors. Sigma can go it alone, says chairman Brian Jamieson. Credit:Glenn Hunt The current API proposal does not reflect the long-term prospects and value inherent in Sigma having regard to the reset cost base of the business and our own growth agenda, said Sigma chairman Brian Jamieson in a statement to the ASX on Wednesday. API replied with its own statement around midday, stating that, in light of Sigma's decision, it is clear its proposal "is unable to be taken forward". Google's 2004 IPO created the model for founder control of public technology companies. It sold class A shares with one vote, while Page, Brin and Schmidt kept class B stock with 10 votes per share. Since then, companies including Facebook and Snap have used a similar concoction of super-voting stock to raise billions of dollars from investors while keeping decision-making in the hands of the original leaders. Another crop of tech IPOs is coming this year and the approach is being used again. Tech companies argue these structures help them focus on long-term strategy, rather than obsessing over quarterly results to please Wall Street. But the approach can also leave founders less accountable if things go wrong. Last year, Google came under fire for giving executive Andy Rubin a $US90 million ($127 million) exit package after an internal investigation determined he had an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate. Page allegedly granted a big stock award to Rubin. Directors signed off later, according to a recent lawsuit, but they had little say because Page, Brin and Schmidt still had voting control thanks to the class C stock. "Our voting structure is a huge benefit as it gives us greater ability to focus on long-term interests," a spokeswoman for Google parent Alphabet said. "Throughout the share restructure proposal process, the board operated with full autonomy and diligence in the best interests of all shareholders, as it has always done and continues to do." She also said the recent claim that Page bypassed the board's compensation committee when deciding Rubin's award was false. Page, Brin and several directors involved in the deliberations over the new stock didn't respond to requests for comment. Otellini died in 2017. The saga began in late 2010. Page was preparing to take the CEO role back from Schmidt, while Brin was tinkering with riskier moonshots at the Google X research lab. On December 23, 2010, Google lawyer Don Harrison sent the board a proposal for the new type of Google stock. The holiday email came with a timeline some directors considered aggressive, according to the documents: management would ask for approval at a meeting about three weeks later, so the change could be announced with Google's 2011 preliminary proxy statement. A week before the scheduled January 12 board meeting, Schmidt followed up with an email to the board suggesting a call ahead of time in case directors had any "final issues" about the proposal, code named Project School. "Please advise if this is okay,'' Schmidt wrote. "Thank you !!!" The board did not think it was OK. Instead of approving the change that day, they appointed a handful of directors, including Otellini, to a special committee to study it further. Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2008. Credit:AP "I feel like we are being rushed into making this happen for this year's proxy," Otellini wrote a few weeks later to the other directors on the new committee. "I am very uncomfortable with that, and I felt that the discussion at the board was equally nervous on that point." More than a year of sometimes-heated negotiations ensued. At the centre was a debate over whether one founder should be allowed to transfer his class B super-voting shares to the other in exchange for the new non-voting class C shares. That was a key part of the founders' original proposal and it would have let Page get Brin's class B stock without paying cash for it. A presentation from law firm Latham & Watkins that was unsealed in the case analysed this issue. Before the plan, if Page wanted to acquire 50.1 per cent of the voting control, he would have had to pay Brin $US8.2 billion, the document estimated. Under one of the founders' proposals, if one of them left, they could use the new non-voting shares instead of cash to transfer voting power. "Investors will quickly look to understand the inherent conflict in the proposal," the presentation said. "The proposal would seem to encourage the founders to stay fully engaged at the company, however it creates an incentive for one of the founders to leave in order for them to realise a significant liquidity benefit while maintaining voting control." In February 2011, Page continued to push Google's board, according to emails between director John Hennessy and other directors and advisers. "Larry called me to talk about the zero vote stock. He is worried that delaying it for a year will cause the company/him to be reluctant to consider large acquisitions because of the dilution of voting control," Hennessy wrote in a February 12, 2011, email. Hennessy said the board had two considerations to balance. First was the possible rejection of an acquisition. Second, the class C proposal coming so soon after Page took over the CEO role from Schmidt could affect the public's perception of Google and its leadership. "In my mind #1 is a real concern for the company and dominates #2," Hennessy wrote. Hennessy was right to highlight acquisitions: By August 2011, Google had agreed to buy Motorola for $US12.5 billion. The deal was done with cash, rather than stock. Loading However, Hennessy identified what he called a "more complex issue" in his February 12 email. "Larry is hoping to hold voting control even if Sergey and Eric sell," he wrote. "This a much more difficult proposition, since it makes the change benefit the founders even more strongly." The board's special committee drew up a list of questions for Otellini to ask Page at a dinner meeting in June 2011. The directors felt the proposal put them in a difficult position having to choose between the founders' desires and appropriate corporate governance. The group of directors, which included former Pixar Chief Financial Officer Ann Mather and early Google investor Ram Shriram, didn't understand why the founders needed to cement control right then. An analysis the board had commissioned suggested the status quo would keep the founders in control for decades. Buybacks could be used to shore up control, and acquisitions could be done with Google's cash hoard, the directors reasoned. "How should the board think about the proposal in light of potentially differing long-term objectives between the founders?" they wrote in the list of questions for Page. "Is there something else on your mind that needs to be addressed?" After his meeting with Page, Otellini reported back to Mather and Shriram in a June 17, 2011, email. "He laid out his arguments in a way that I had not internalised before. He also leveled a veiled threat in that 'why should I sacrifice and work so hard if I might not be in control' ... He is worried about Sergei's shares ending up in the market. He sees no ability to buy him out," Otellini wrote, according to the unsealed documents. A few days later, Mather responded. "From your email, it sounds as though a stock buyback program is not going to address the underlying issue for Larry, his concern about Sergei's shares." (Brin was born in Soviet Russia, and some directors used a Russian spelling of his name, Sergei, rather than Sergey.) Brin and Page still control 56.5 per cent of the company votes. Credit:Bloomberg Negotiations dragged on through 2011 and into 2012. Page met again with individual board members, but those encounters couldn't break the impasse quickly. Finally, in April 2012, the board won a partial but important victory, convincing the founders to accept stricter limits on how they could transfer shares to each other. Shirley Tilghman, another Google director at the time, described the benefits of the final deal in a later deposition: In the short term, it prevented Page, Brin and Schmidt benefiting from a "windfall sale" of the class C stock without affecting their voting control. It also ensured that one founder didn't end up with all the voting control. "The rationale for that was that we value the contributions of both of these founders and we want to keep both of these founders engaged with Google for the foreseeable future," Tilghman said. Google announced the new stock plan on April 12, 2012, and the class C shares began trading in 2014. The lawsuit, which claimed Page and Brin were taking more control without compensating shareholders, was settled after the duo agreed to beef up board scrutiny of their sales of non-voting shares. It's unclear if the board's goal keeping Page and Brin engaged with the company has been successful. Soon after, Page stopped presenting at many company events and earnings calls, having developed a medical condition that makes it hard for him to talk loudly. In 2015, he announced plans to make Google just one unit of the broader Alphabet. Page is CEO of Alphabet and Hennessy is chairman, which Google says allows Page to focus more on long-term, technical problems. Sundar Pichai was named Google CEO, overseeing a business that generates most of the sales and profit and employs the vast majority of Alphabet workers. Page and Brin have retreated further from public life and day-to-day operations, and Schmidt stepped down from his executive chairman role in early 2018. Meanwhile, they still control the company, holding 56.5 per cent of the votes, according to Alphabet's latest annual report. Theres spin and then theres spin. If you only read the Australian Taxation Offices response to a report into its use of garnishee notices, everything is hunky dory. Garnishee notices are a powerful tool that let the tax office take control of bank accounts when it believes money is owed. ATO Commissioner Chris Jordan. Credit:Andrew Meares Its use - or misuse - of the powers has been under the microscope since a damning investigation by The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and ABC's Four Corners. The ATO used the findings from the Inspector General of Taxation's report to give itself a clean bill of health. A review of the Australian Taxation Office's use of garnishee notices has found some small businesses were "disaffected" by inappropriately issued notices, but denied there was a systemic "cash grab" at play. The Inspector-General of Taxation and Taxation Ombudsman conducted a review into how the tax office issues notices ordering banks to hand over cash from taxpayers' bank accounts in order to cover tax debts. A review of garnishee notices says concerns had emerged in some areas with garnishee notices, but only for a "limited time". Credit:Louie Douvis The review comes after a joint ABC/Sydney Morning Herald and Four Corners investigation last April alleged the ATO's processes were resulting in inappropriate practices. The joint investigation heard allegations that the issuing of garnishee notices was tied to performance indicators for some ATO staff. Edda Goering, who has died aged 80, was the daughter of Hitler's deputy, Hermann Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe who cheated the hangman at Nuremberg by committing suicide shortly before he was due to be executed for war crimes. As a child, young Edda was a sort of Shirley Temple of Nazi Germany, a pet of the Nazi media. Her father also became notorious as the Third Reich's biggest art thief, infamous for plundering private and public art collections as the Nazis conquered swathes of Europe, and she was showered with an original Lucas Cranach and other stolen paintings as presents. Emmy Goering and daughter Edda greet their daily letter from Nuremberg while Hermann Goering sits day after day in the dock at Nuremberg, on trial for his life, 1946. Credit:Unknown She was seven when the war ended and although she was by no means alone among "Nazikinder" in having to bear the consequences of crimes she did not commit, unlike the sons of Hitler's No. 2 Martin Bormann and "Dr Death" Aribert Heim, who grew up to express horror at their parents' crimes, Edda never spoke of her father's activities during the war and claimed that she had only good memories of him and to whom she said she felt bound "by a great love". She also retained fond memories of "Uncle" Adolf, who always had liquorice stashed away for her in a desk drawer. About 60 kids had a sneak preview of the showbags from the Sydney Royal Easter Show on Wednesday, testing bags from the classic Bertie Beetle to one based on the charming Japanese egg yolk character Gudetama, which hails from the same company as Hello Kitty. The children came from The Children's Hospital in Randwick, Westmead Children's Hospital and the Royal Far West. Lilliana Wehbe nailed down as much unicorn gear as she could at the Easter Show showbag preview. Credit:Nick Moir Lilliana Wehbe, aged seven, made a beeline for any bag with a unicorn. She said she loves art and ended up with a colour-coordinated set of toys, clothes and art supplies in her favourite colours: pink, blue and purple. The most expensive bags at the show will cost $40 but Shane McGrath, who oversees the showbag program, said 130 bags cost $10 or less. Australian tech entrepreneur Zac Altman has landed himself the business deal of a lifetime after credit card giant American Express offered to buy his startup which facilitates airport lounge access worldwide, in a deal that will likely make him and his two co-founders multimillionaires. While terms of the acquisition made public on Tuesday haven't been disclosed, 26-year-old Altman's LoungeBuddy service was last valued at $US18 million ($25.4 million) in 2015 when Founders Fund, the venture firm founded by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, led a $US3 million ($4.2 million) Series A capital raising for the startup, bringing the total amount of money raised to $US4 million ($5.6 million). Zac Altman at the company's Mexico 'team retreat' in February 2019. Using its app, travellers can identify and book an airport lounge for one-time and last-minute use in over 450 locations worldwide, typically for a fee smaller than the one-time fees airlines charge. They can also use it to find out what access they may already be entitled to at over 3000 lounges via existing credit card or airline membership programs, as well as use it to compare, review and rate lounges. Formerly of Sydney's eastern suburbs before he decided to make the move to the US in 2013, Altman has been a quiet achiever in Australia's startup space, having previously found success in an app that allowed Australian consumers to seamlessly book taxis via an app before local cab companies had figured out how to do so. Called Taxi Pro, that startup was later acquired by Catch of the Day founders Gabby and Hezi Leibovich, Altman revealed in a podcast in 2016. A Brisbane City Council mechanic hit by a "heavy projectile" in an accident at a bus maintenance depot has been seriously injured. The man was working in the council's workshop on Sherbrooke Road in Willawong, on Brisbane's southside, when the accident happened. Emergency services were called just before 10am after the man, believed to be aged in his 60s, was "hit by a heavy projectile with force", according to the Queensland Ambulance Service. He was treated by critical care paramedics and taken to Princess Alexandra Hospital in a serious condition with head and facial injuries. Workplace Health and Safety Queensland has sent an inspector to the site and launched an investigation. July 29: Police divers search a stretch of the Maribyrnong River, approximately three kilometres from the Ristevski home. July 31: Borce Ristevski tells reporters that although the family home has CCTV cameras outside, they haven't been working for five to six months. August 23: Borce Ristevski makes a public statement, claiming that police had strongly recommended he not speak to the media. In the statement Borce claims that the argument between him and Karen, over the day's takings ($850) at the family's boutique, Bella Bleu in Taylors Lakes, had nothing to do with her disappearance. August 23: Vasko Ristevski, Karen's brother-in-law, claims Karen is alive and is living overseas. He claims she left the country using a fake passport. Vasko Ristevski arrives at his brother's home. Credit:Pat Scala August 28: It is reported that Karen's mobile phone was tracked to Gisborne and Diggers Rest on the day she disappeared. December 19: Over two days, police search a rural area at Toolern Vale, about 48 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, draining dams, scouring bushland and grassland and removing bags of evidence. Police scour scrub and grassland near Toolern Vale, north-west of Melbourne. Credit:Penny Stephens 2017 February 20: A bushwalker finds a badly decomposed body in bushland at the base of Mount Macedon. The remains are taken away for forensic testing. February 21: Police confirm the remains found at Mount Macedon are those of Karen Ristevski. Karen's aunt Patricia Gray and her cousin Lisa vow to help bring Karen's killer to justice. The site where Karen's body was found. Credit:Justin McManus February 22: Borce Ristevski visits the office of his high-profile lawyer Rob Stary. Mr Stary says police consider his client to be the "No.1 suspect" in the case. February 24: The Age reports that a tracking device was fitted by police to a vehicle used by Borce Ristevski in the months after his wife disappeared. But the device was either removed, or fell off the vehicle. March 6: Mourners gather to farewell Karen Ristevski at her funeral in Essendon. Borce Ristevski is one of the pallbearers, while daughter Sarah carries a framed photo of her mother to lead the procession. Borce Ristevski carries his wife's coffin. Credit:Joe Castro June 16: Police release fresh CCTV footage of a black Mercedes-Benz SLK coupe, similar to one owned by Karen Ristevski, travelling towards Mount Macedon. June 18: Borce Ristevski's brother Vasko is filmed walking in bushland at the Mount Macedon Regional Park near where her body was found. July 13: Police begin a new search of Mount Macedon after a witness reported seeing a black Mercedes-Benz like the model owned by Karen Ristevski in the area on the day she went missing. July 24: A black Mercedes-Benz is towed from the Ristevski's home. July 27: Detectives drive a black Mercedes-Benz from the Ristevski's Avondale Heights home towards the Calder Freeway, before moving onto the Melton Highway. December 13: Borce Ristevski is arrested in the north-western suburb of Keilor at 7.20am and charged with one count of murder. He faces Melbourne Magistrates Court shortly after 10am where his lawyer Rob Stary says his client intends to plead not guilty. Mr Ristevski is remanded in custody to face court again on April 18. 2018 May 17: A court hears Karen's autopsy could not determine how she died. July 16: Police raid the home of Anthony Rickard and arrest him, just days before he is due to give evidence at Borce's committal hearing. He had earlier said he did not want to take the stand. July 17: A two-week committal hearing to decide whether Borce will stand trial for the murder of his wife begins. It is revealed the couple was more than $1 million in debt when Karen went missing. August 3: Borce is committed to stand trial for the murder of Karen. He again pleads not guilty. August 7: Borce's trial is set for March 2019. A directions hearing is told the trial is likely to last for four to five weeks. His defence team tells the court the murder charge should be abandoned in favour of the lesser charge of manslaughter. 2019 March 13: Justice Christopher Beale rules that Borce's behaviour after Karen's death - his "post offence conduct" - cannot be used to prove murderous intent. Borce pleads guilty to the manslaughter of Karen in an extraordinary 11th-hour twist ahead of his murder trial. March 18: Borce and Karen's daughter Sarah writes a glowing character reference for her father saying he was "good dad and husband". March 27: Borce faces court for a plea hearing, where it is revealed he offered to plead guilty to manslaughter on September 10, 2018 one month after he was committed to stand trial but prosecutors rejected the offer at the time because he refused to disclose how or why he killed Karen. April 18: Borce is sentenced to nine years' jail for manslaughter, with a non-parole period of six years. With time already served, he could walk free from prison before his 60th birthday. May 13: The Department of Public Prosecutions lodges an appeal against Borce Ristevski's nine-year jail term, on the basis the sentence is "manifestly inadequate". A Personal Locator Beacon (PLB) is recommended for use on land. They're small, easy to transport and designed to be carried by individuals perfect for people planning a hike or bushwalk. If you're in a couple or a group, it's a good idea to have a beacon for each person in case you become separated. GPS will locate you to within 120 metres; non-GPS to within five kilometres. Searchers will be able to pinpoint your location much better if you use a GPS beacon (which uses a global positioning satellite) as opposed to a non-GPS beacon. GPS will locate you to within 120 metres; non-GPS are far less precise and will locate you to within five kilometres. With GPS, your location will be sent to the Australian Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre within 20 minutes, says AMSA, whereas if your beacon doesn't have GPS, the satellite receiving a signal has to pass over you twice and successfully detect your beacon to confirm your position. For the same satellite to pass overhead a second time can take anywhere between 90 minutes and five hours. To set off a GPS beacon, hikers should try to find the clearest area they can preferably with 180 degrees or more of visibility away from trees, buildings, mountains and any car, and at the highest point you can manage in a ravine or gully so the signal can get to the satellite. (And, even if they're in the midst of being flustered, they shouldn't forget to point it towards the sky.) Different beacons work for different settings. Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons (EPIRBs) are heavier than PLBs and are recommended mostly for maritime use. The third type of beacon is an Emergency Locator Transmitters (ELT), used by aircraft. When you hear search and rescue teams or aircraft, AMSA also suggests using torches or flares to alert rescuers to your presence but don't point flares towards the aircraft. And, of course, don't wander off after you've signalled your location. But despite the availability of beacons, bushwalking and hiking groups stress they are a last resort in cases of serious danger and not a substitute for preparation, good navigation and bushcraft skills. "They are quite expensive but life is priceless. Keep one on you but cover other things as well. Have a map, have another means to contact people and let people know where they are going," says Melbourne expert John Feeney, the owner and operator of The Hiking Society. Choose a personal locator beacon with GPS. What should you do to avoid getting lost in the bush? One of the bests way to avoid getting lost is good preparation, says Mr Feeney. Carry a map and familiarise yourself with the area beforehand. It's also advised to let someone know where you're going, so they can initiate a search if you don't return at the designated time. You should always carry mobile phones, but be aware many popular locations may not have reception. Water is one of the big ones. A minimum of two litres regardless of how long you are going for. "Water is also one of the big ones," he said. "A minimum of two litres regardless of how long you are going for." He also recommends bringing a rain jacket or some kind of cover in case the weather takes a turn. "I think also researching the area as much as you can, asking people questions there is enough information out there get a sound understanding of the area you are going into, particularly if you haven't been there." If you do get lost, what do you do? On Tuesday, the lost hikers told reporters that a few hours into their planned three-hour loop walk from Reservoir Track car park, near Mount Buffalo ranger station, they lost the track. "The track disappeared," Ms Bohan said. "Or we werent good at spotting the track, and we think we followed an animal track rather than a marked track, and we just got to the wrong spot." If you do get lost and cannot find your way back to a properly marked tracked, it's recommended you stop, assess the situation and stay calm. "The big thing straight off the bat is not to panic," says Mr Feeney. "When you panic, you have a heightened sense of adrenaline, your ability to be logical and calm can disappear. Sit down, have something to drink and eat," he says. "If you have a map, or have access to something on your phone, start going, 'OK, we are meant to be here but we believe we are here. Should we backtrack or keep moving forward?" he said. "I think [the couple's] decision to be calm and logical has been the differentiator between the result and what could have happened. It can happen to anyone, regardless if you've been hiking for 15 minutes of 15 years. A man is in a critical condition in a Perth hospital after he was found with serious injuries in Perth's western suburbs on Tuesday. The man in his 50s was found at a house on Mount Street, Claremont on Tuesday afternoon. Its understood hed sustained stab wounds. A woman known to him is in custody over the incident. There is no confirmation of any charges yet. The man's injuries are so serious he is in the intensive care unit of Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital. A Perth father accused of killing his six-month-old daughter has been found guilty of murder. The trial of Arron Martin, 37, finished early on Wednesday as a jury found the father guilty of murder after he shook his daughter Isabella and threw her on the ground in November 2017. Arron Martin (right) has been found guilty of murdering his six-month-old daughter Isabella in November 2017. Nine News Perth reporter Tegan Sapwell was in court for the verdict and said it took the jury about 3 hours to reach their decision. Martin showed no emotion as the verdict was read out, while outside court the babys mother only commented she was glad its all over. A son of former West Australian premier Colin Barnett breached a violence restraining order when he deliberately approached an ex-girlfriend in a shopping centre, a court has heard. Sam Barnett leaves Perth Magistrates has pleaded not guilty to breaching a violence restraining order. Credit:AAP/Rebecca Le May Sam Barnett allegedly did a U-turn when he spotted Dmitrie Zidar at the up- market Claremont Quarter mall on September 1, then jogged past her, coming within one metre of the 38-year-old despite the order prohibiting proximity closer than 20 metres. The pair had been in a six-month relationship that ended almost a year earlier, Ms Zidar testified in Perth Magistrates Court on Wednesday, and she didn't want to see him again "for a reason". "I just felt somebody rush up behind me and the next thing I knew, Sam Barnett was beside me," she told the court. The state government has revealed the first site where a medium-density hub will be developed as part of its Metronet plan to boost housing near train stations. Situated in Cannington, the site is one of five locations selected by the Department of Communities for between 15 to 40 dwellings to be built. The state government has chosen the first five sites for its Metronet hubs. Credit:Department of Communities Other hubs will also be built at sites identified in Claremont, Innaloo, High Wycombe and Highgate. Architects are being encouraged to consider innovative housing options for the hubs, including townhouses, apartments, Fonzie flats (studio apartments above garages), intergenerational homes and dual-key properties. The Coalition government is moving another 76 jobs from Canberra as the Murray Darling Basin Authority becomes the next agency relocating public servants to the bush. Staff could face a choice to make their new homes in Mildura, Griffith, Murray Bridge, or a town yet to be announced, after the Nationals announced the government would relocate another part of the federal bureaucracy from the national capital. The next phase of the Coalition's decentralisation push will transplant part of the Murray Darling Basin Authority's 288-strong Canberra office to the regions, and follows the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority's tumultuous move to Armidale, expected to finish by mid-2019. Labor wants to know what positions will move and flagged it would not support a relocation resembling the Coalition's decision forcing the pesticides authority to northern NSW. Addressing himself directly to Pell and the many victims of the church who would have tuned in, Judge Kidd said: As I directed the jury who convicted you in this trial, you are not to be made a scapegoat for any failings or perceived failings of the Catholic Church ... This leads me to say something to other victims of clerical or institutional sexual abuse and may be present in court today or watching or listening elsewhere. This sentence is not and cannot be a vindication of your trauma. Cardinal Pell has not been convicted of any wrongs committed against you. The painful ongoing struggle for justice by other victims of paedophile priests and their families is a separate issue, which must find resolution in a fair and efficient redress scheme, genuine remorse and rapid reform from the institutions that failed them and greater protections for the vulnerable now and into the future. The sentencing of Pell has prompted other victims of historic abuse by other clerics to come forward the current Archbishop of Melbourne Peter Comensoli said as much last week with greater confidence that they will be heard and believed. That such a senior figure in the church has been convicted of such terrible abuse should prompt the church both here and in Rome to have a root-and-branch overhaul of the systems that have protected and promoted those who abuse the vulnerable. It is not, alas, an isolated case of abuse by a powerful priest look to the cases in the US, Chile and France. They have begun their own investigation into Pells past, but will await the result of his appeal before making moves to defrock him. Pell maintains his innocence and has launched an appeal, as is his right in our courts where all decisions can face scrutiny in the pursuit of justice for all. Prime Minister Scott Morrison says the federal government will pay for the royal commission into disability abuse, which will be permitted to also scrutinise the massive National Disability Insurance Scheme. With time running out to get the royal commission set up before the federal election is called, draft terms of reference have been released for two weeks of public consultation. Last month, Mr Morrison wrote to the states asking for their support for a royal commission and raising the prospect of "any cost sharing arrangements that may be appropriate". But on Wednesday, he told reporters, "the Commonwealth will be fully funding the royal commission into disabilities". Prime Minister Scott Morrison says the federal government will pay for the disability royal commission. Credit:AAP Mr Morrison has previously indicated the disability royal commission should be of a similar size to the royal commission into child sexual abuse, which ran for five years and cost more than $400 million. The state government has recommitted to a $206 million contract with controversial Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei after seeking reassurances from the company it could deliver a mobile data network for Perth's public train system. Transport Minister Rita Saffioti ordered a review of deal after the United States Department of Justice revealed it had charged Huawei and its chief financial officer over breaching trade sanctions with Iran. Transport Minister Rita Saffioti and Premier Mark McGowan. Credit:Nathan Hondros Ms Saffioti told Parliament on Wednesday afternoon the company had confirmed it would be able to deliver the project, which was already under way. "In the January 7, 2019, at my request, senior PTA staff met with eight senior Huawei and UGL staff including John Lord, Huawei Australia chairman, to discuss the delivery of the contract," she said. Ive spent a fair part of the past two years in Great Britain. Summer in London is delightful. The boldness of the greens is striking, the days spill into mellow endless evenings. Winter is a tougher proposition. Each day you rise knowing hours of darkness lie still ahead of you. In the first hours of morning I allow myself to be comforted by hot porridge, and BBC Radio 4. I love radio, the sense of abiding community it gives you, but over the past two years I have found it increasingly hard to move past a specific irritant: Brexit stories. It cant be true, but it certainly feels true: each bulletin, each day, is led by Brexit. At some point there is an interview about Brexit. In Britain, these days, it feels as though it is all Brexit, all day, every day. British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks in Parliament on Tuesday when her bid for an orderly exit from the European Union was defeated again. Credit:AP But the truly strange thing about the constant accumulation of information on Brexit is that it never amounts to knowledge. It doesnt matter how many radio bulletins you absorb, how many long articles in however many newspapers you read, the shining light of finally understanding what is going on with Brexit only recedes further into the distance. At first, I blamed myself for this failure to understand. But slowly, perhaps self-servingly, I decided the problem lay elsewhere. How can you hope to grasp the meaning of a debate when the language in which it is conducted has been emptied of meaning? London: The UK parliament has ruled out a "no deal" Brexit by an unexpectedly narrow margin, after a chaotic evening that ended up seeing the prime minister vote for the losing side. And the government has hinted it wants to try again next week to pass the Brexit divorce deal that has been twice rejected by parliament even though there is just a fortnight until it is due to take effect. Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May in the House of Commons Credit:Mark Duffy/UK Parliament via AP On Thursday parliament will vote on whether to seek a short delay to Brexit, if the deal passes on the third attempt, or a longer delay if it does not. The revelation of a potential third vote on the rejected deal provoked fury from many MPs. And as an extra complication, it is within the Commons Speaker John Bercow's power to reject a third vote on the grounds it has already been voted on. A prominent Iranian lawyer who defended women arrested for protesting against the country's mandatory headscarf law has been sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes, according to her husband. Nasrin Sotoudeh, who has been imprisoned since being taken from her home on June 18 last year, is already serving a five-year sentence. One of the women in Iran protesting by holding their veils aloft on sticks in late 2017 and 2018. Credit:Facebook The 55-year-old human rights lawyer was sentenced to an additional 33 years - and the 148 lashes - after being convicted of several more national security crimes this month, her husband, Reza Khandan, wrote on Facebook. But the semi-official Islamic Republic News Agency reported that a judge at Tehran's Revolutionary Court said on Monday that, in addition to the five years of Sotoudeh's earlier sentence for "colluding against the system," she was sentenced to two years for "insulting" supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He apologised to the judge from a wheelchair to "all those negatively affected by my actions", acknowledging that he did not express such regret when sentenced days ago by Ellis for bank and tax fraud. Loading "Let me be very clear: I accept responsibility for the actions that led me to be here today, and I want to apologise for all I contributed to the impacts on people and institutions. While I cannot change the past, I can work to change the future," Manafort said from a wheelchair, turning to face Jackson. "I want to say to you now, I am sorry for what I have done and for all of the activities that have gotten us here today." He added that nine months in solitary confinement after being jailed when accused of witness tampering gave him "new self-awareness". Jackson said Manafort's crimes were "not just a failure to comply with some pesky regulations" but "lying to the American people and the American Congress ... It is hard to overstate the number of lies and amount of money involved." His motivation, she added, was "not to support a family, but to sustain a lifestyle that was ostentatiously opulent and extravagantly lavish - more houses a family can enjoy, more suits than one man can wear". But she agreed with Judge T.S. Ellis in Alexandria, Virginia, that sentencing guidelines in the case were excessive. She said that 30 months of her sentence must run concurrently to his Virginia term because the underlying conduct is the same. Loading Prosecutors questioned whether Manafort was capable of such change in remorse, depicting him as a a mastermind of a conspiracy in which he was paid $US50 million ($70.6 million) over more than a decade by a Russian-backed politician and party in Ukraine, and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to Russian president Vladimir Putin. "His work was corrosive to faith in the political process, both in the United States and abroad," prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said. "He served to undermine, not promote, American ideals of honesty, transparency, and playing by the rules." His attempts to cover up his crimes by asking witnesses to lie for him, Weissmann said, "is not reflective of somebody who has learned a harsh lesson. It is not a reflection of remorse. It is evidence that something is wrong with sort of a moral compass." He led a sophisticated scheme "to avoid a duty all Americans have" to pay their taxes, Weissmann said, hiding wealth in 30 foreign bank accounts containing more than $US50 million for his work for the government of Ukraine and Deripaska. Manafort (right), pictured with Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election campaign, stopped his offending shortly before becoming campaign manager. Credit:AP Manafort's defence attorney Kevin Downing said his client is genuinely remorseful and has already endured a "media frenzy" that few other defendants in this country have faced. Downing said all sides have sought to spin Manafort's predicament to their political advantage, adding, "But for a short stint as campaign manager in a presidential election, I don't think we would be here today. I think the court should consider that too." Jackson dismissed that argument, telling Manafort, "Saying 'I'm sorry I got caught' is not an inspiring call for leniency." The investigation into Manafort pre-dated Mueller's 2017 appointment, and it wasn't the special counsel's office that made Manafort lie to investigators, she said. Loading Manafort himself asked for mercy on more personal grounds, telling Jackson he is the sole caregiver to his 66-year-old wife. "She needs me, and I need her. I ask that you think of this and our need for each other as you deliberate today. Please let my wife and I be together," Manafort said. Jackson acknowledged Manafort's generosity and care for his family and other causes. She said his age, the money his forfeited, and the fact that his finances and career were "in tatters" minimised the chances he would offend again. The judge ruled earlier this year that Manafort breached his plea deal by lying to the FBI, prosecutors and grand jurors during more than 50 hours of interviews. Judge Ellis in the Eastern District of Virginia last week appeared moved by Manafort's claims, sparking a public backlash by going far below guidelines that recommended a sentence of about two decades in prison. "I think it's excessive," he said of those guidelines. "He's lived an otherwise blameless life." The second sentencing will cap a legal saga which began in October 2017 when Manafort and his longtime employee and campaign deputy Rick Gates became the first defendants publicly charged in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe. Gates later pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI. He agreed to cooperate with the investigation and has yet to be sentenced. Manafort faced two federal trials because he exercised his option to keep the tax and bank fraud charges in the state where he lived. At trial in Virginia in August, a jury found him guilty on eight counts and deadlocked on 10 others. But Manafort admitted guilt on all charges in his Washington plea. After two weeks of intensive training, the four new Metal Sharks were officially taken into service today by the Coast Guard St. Maarten. PHILIPSBURG:---The Director of the Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard, General Peter Jan de Vin, the Minister of Justice, Mr. Cornelius de Weever and the Head of the Coast Guard substation, Mr. Jocelyn Roberto Levenstone expressed their satisfaction with the project during the official ceremony where the commissioning of the four new Metal Sharks took place. These interceptors will become an asset to the Coast Guard with their fully-enclosed pilothouse which offers added protection for the crew, special glass which gives perfect visibility and full systems for night operations. The four new interceptors will collaborate to keep the beaches and seas safer. Among the guests present were officials from the St. Maarten and Saba government as well as the Governor of St. Maarten drs. Eugene B. Holiday, a group of 10 students of the Kidz at Sea program and local media members. After the inaugural ceremony, the guests were invited on board of the cutter Poema which sailed in Simpson Bay lagoon where the Metal Sharks gave a demonstration of agility and speed. With the delivery of these four Metal Sharks, the DCCG now has twelve Metal Sharks operating in the territorial waters of Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao, St. Eustatius, St. Maarten, and Saba, strengthen the DCCG presence in the Dutch Caribbean sea. Five Dead in Sheffield Structure Fire Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington at a press conference Wednesday at Sheffield Town Hall with State Police Detective Michelle Mason, left, Sheffield Fire Chief Brent Getchell Sheffield, State Police Det. Edward Culver and Police Chief Eric Munson. Multiple fire departments responded to the single-family home on Home Road. SHEFFIELD, Mass. Authorities are investigating a Wednesday morning structure fire on Home Road that left five people dead. "This is an extensive operation and investigation with multiple local and state agencies," said Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington at a brief press conference around 2:30 p.m. at Town Hall. "It's going to take us some time before we can get you more information." Harrington said the fire at 1343 Home Road was fully involved when responders arrived on scene and was knocked down at about 9:15 on Wednesday morning and determined extinguished an hour later. Preliminary search efforts uncovered "the presence of a deceased individual" and further recovery efforts found four more bodies, she said. The state fire marshal and the state police detectives assigned to the district attorney's office are working with local officials on the investigation. Harrington declined to take any questions, asking for patience as the investigation was made and promising to provide information as it became available. The identities of the deceased have not been released. The property is listed in the Registry of Deeds as being owned by Luke E. Karpinski and Justine Wilbur. Home Road, a thinly settle country road that parallels Route 7, will be closed near the single-family house through Thursday because of the investigation. The location is roughly at the midpoint of the road within the Sheffield town border. According to @CTNewsAlert , a breaking news site covering northern Connecticut, mutual aid was called in about 8 a.m. on Wednesday morning, with North Fork, Conn., firefighters being called to the scene. A second alarm and more tankers from Litchfield County were responded minutes later. Volunteer fire companies from around the region responded to aid the Sheffield Fire Department: Great Barrington, New Marlborough, Richmond, Egremont and Monterey, and Connecticut companies of North Fork and Canaan. Beth Regulbuto, superintendent of schools for the Southern Berkshire Regional School District, apprised the school community by email on Wednesday night that the crisis team would be meeting on Thursday morning "to discuss the best ways possible to provide support during school tomorrow." She said the district would have more counselors on hand and that faculty and staff would be providing "developmentally appropriate messages." The #Berkshire District Attorney's Office confirms that five people were killed in a house fire on Home Road in Sheffield on Wednesday morning. #Massachusetts State Police and first responders from across Berkshire County and beyond are investigating the scene. Berkshire County DA (@CountyBerkshire) March 13, 2019 PHILIPSBURG:--- All across the region eager young women filed into the branches and offices of regional bank CIBC FirstCaribbean to fill a variety of positions for the day on Friday, March 8. The job shadow was one of the banks key activities across its 16-member regional footprint to mark International Womens Day observed around the world on that date. It saw scores of female students from secondary and tertiary institutions joining meetings with senior managers and executives or going on the frontlines with retail staff as they got a feel for the various roles performed by the banks 3000 employees, seventy percent of whom are women. At the banks regional headquarters in Barbados, Chief Executive Officer Colette Delaney and Managing Director for Barbados and the OECS, Donna Wellington, welcomed three new assistants for the day when she was joined by Zwena Knight, 16, from Queens College, Alyssa Payne, from The Lester Vaughan School and Danielle Worrell, from The St. Michaels School. The three, who have a firm grounding in accounting and business studies, shadowed Ms. Delaney for most of the morning sitting in on meetings with her and Chief Administrative Officer Neil Brennen and other senior members of the bank. She noted that the students were engaged and fully participated and had a good input during one of her meetings. She said that the job shadow was intended to show the students that there was a whole lot more to banking that just the familiar retail functions. The students also spent time in the marketing, legal, risk and corporate banking segments at head office and were later taken on a tour of the Sunset Crest Branch by the CEO and Michelle Whitelaw, Director of Retail Banking Channels. They were also treated to lunch in the banks boardroom where they were joined by a number of senior female leaders. On St. Maarten, St. Dominic High IB students, Selena Wadhwani and Srishti Rajani assisted Customer Service Manager, Carolyn Langhorne and Senior Customer Service Representative, Miranda Hodge. They also had the opportunity to sit with a Credit Manager, Sales Specialist, and Customer Service Officer. Stepping into the world of banking, the students learnt of the many careers available within the industry, such as Human Resources, which was of special interest to them. In addition to the job shadow there were various activities to recognise and reward the contribution of women to business and the society as well as seminars and mentorship sessions and donations to women and girls charities. Mayor Linda Tyer pitched her plan to the City Council but faced reservations and will recraft some provisions in the program to gain support. Council Sends Tyer's 'At Home' Program Back For More Work PITTSFIELD, Mass. The City Council sent Mayor Linda Tyer's proposed home improvement program back for further consideration. The mayor had petitioned for $250,000 from the Pittsfield Economic Development Fund to start "At Home In Pittsfield," a program to help residents make exterior home improvements or purchase fixer-uppers and make those improvements. While supportive of the overall idea, multiple councilors didn't like the details of the program and the administration didn't have the votes for it to pass. "I don't know if this program is quite ready to be out there," said Ward 5 Councilor Donna Todd Rivers, adding that she supports the idea but that "the devil is in the details" and she still has reservations. The councilors had concerns over the source of the funding, the equitability of eligibility for those outside of the Morningside and Westside neighborhoods, the repayment timelines, unclear forgiveness measures, and that there are other programs that this could be duplicating. The first two were cited by multiple councilors and Tyer said she would be willing to come to a compromise on those terms. The program is designed to be open to residents and prospective home buyers throughout the city who make less than 135 percent of the area's median income, which this year means $87,480. It allows those residents to apply for zero-interest loans that can be up to 10 percent of the appraised value after renovations or a maximum of $20,000 for exterior repairs. However, for those living in the West Side or Morningside neighborhoods, the city will loan up to 20 percent or a maximum of $30,000. Councilors questioned why those two neighborhoods were eligible for more. Director of Community Development Deanna Ruffer said there are significant numbers of longtime West Side residents struggling to make repairs and the program wanted to target that area. For Morningside, Ruffer said 70 percent of the residents there are rentals and the program is eyed to incentivize people to look to become homeowners in that area. The two areas are the two lowest income sections of the city. "The purpose is to really encourage investment in those two neighborhoods," Tyer said. Ward 7 Councilor Anthony Simonelli, however, felt the program should be equitable across the board. He said there are people who could use the program throughout the city and it shouldn't be limited. "It is really only benefiting two specific neighborhoods," Simonelli said. Ward 2 Councilor Kevin Morandi, however, said while he doesn't like to pit neighborhood against neighborhood, Morningside is one that truly needs additional help. He said the city rolled out a similar program for storefronts on Tyler Street that benefitted six businesses and it made a difference. "This is so much needed. I feel this is going to uplift the neighborhoods," Morandi said. The mayor agreed to bring those percentages in line at 10 percent with a maximum of $20,000 for both areas of the city, choosing the lesser of the two percentages and maximums to allow more people to access some level of assistance. Rivers would later question a second provision that requires those outside of those two neighborhoods to go through a refinancing process or be purchasing a new home to be eligible, working with a bank to secure the financing. The program is in partnership with Pittsfield Cooperative Bank, Greylock Federal Credit Union, Lee Bank, and Berkshire Bank. When someone is looking to utilize the program outside of those two areas of the city would work with one of those lending institutions in putting together a funding package. "It fills a gap for the lenders, it helps bring new homeowners to the city," Ruffer said. But those two specific neighborhoods are also eligible to get the loans directly from the city without refinancing, an option not available in the rest of the city. Ruffer wouldn't commit to any changes on that provision but said it would be considered before the administration resubmits a new plan. Councilors also disagreed with the use of the Economic Development Fund, which was money given to the city by General Electric as part of an agreement with the city as the company left town. Simonelli said the intent of that pool of money was for economic development and he doesn't see this proposal as doing that. "Is replacing a roof what you think about when you think about economic development?" Simonelli asked his fellow councilors to consider. Simonelli read the guidelines to the fund of creating one job per $35,000 spent, or a large number of jobs at once, or an overriding public benefit. He said no jobs are being created so the first two guidelines are out and since only two neighborhoods were benefiting, there isn't an overriding public benefit. Tyer made the case that it is economic development even if it isn't directly creating jobs. She said the program is aimed to "stabilize" the neighborhoods. The mayor said often businesses will say the city's housing stock isn't up to par to support a workforce and that the city needs a more diverse type of housing options. She added that the program will help increase the quality of life, helping to attract both a workforce and business, and that there will be increased tax dollars coming back to the city because of increased value. Previously, the mayor and Ruffer had made points that it would stimulate the housing market and create work for existing contractors, some of which might bring on additional workers. Ward 4 Councilor Christopher Connell said there are other ways to fund it. He urged the mayor to use free cash, noting that the city recently went through a tax auction a few months earlier which should add a significant amount to the balance and that the request is a one-time expense. "This is not economic development. It is a feel-good program that I could support if it is using another funding source, provided it is an equal playing field," Connell said. The use of free cash has been heavily debated over the last few years. The mayor had reduced to use of free cash to offset the budget and bolster reserves, based on the auditor's recommendations. But, councilors have routinely argued over the exact amount that should go to reserves, how much to offset the budget, and what to spend it on. "I wasn't sure you'd be agreeable to using free cash because we are trying to build reserves," Tyer responded. Tyer said if the council wants to use free cash instead, she'd be willing to compromise on the front as well. The long-term stability of the program came under question as well. The program doesn't call for the loans to be paid back immediately, but rather when the home is ultimately sold. Some councilors didn't see the money coming back to the city in time to be a revolving program, so once the money runs out nobody else could get the benefit. Further, Tyer and Ruffer both said they were exploring a loan forgiveness aspect to it to help young professionals build equity but those parameters hadn't been determined. The administration was still working on those details but the intent is to forgive only if the resident lives there for the long-term. Rivers further questioned the risk involved with the city's money since the city would be last in line to get repaid should there be an issue with the mortgage. Tyer wouldn't completely rule out that she, nor a future mayor, would return to the council for more funding for the program. But, she sees it now as a one-time expense to pilot such a program. She said the state has shown interest in following how the program goes and could later establish another one for the other gateway cities, which have aging housing stocks. Or, she said a foundation or local banks could help fund the future expenses if it proves to be successful. Connell and Rivers also cited a number of other housing programs that are already in existence. The councilors didn't want to see the city's money simply replace a resource that is already available elsewhere, either through federal or state programs. Connell said he personally went through the FHA rehab loan program and was able to do all of the exterior repairs the mayor is proposing with her plan. The administration, however, said city staff will direct those who qualify for those programs to the appropriate place and reserve the city's funds for those who don't. The mayor's proposal has a higher income cap than many of the programs in existence so Tyer believes the city's money will help serve an additional group of residents. Councilor at Large Peter White said the proposed plan is yet an additional resource available to address an important problem facing the city. "This is something that won't take care of every problem but would be a good start," White said. "We need to build up our neighborhoods in order to attract people to the area." The council was somewhat shorthanded Tuesday with both Ward 1 Councilor Helen Moon and Councilor at Large Melissa Mazzeo absent. During this debate, Council President Peter Marchetti recused himself because of his employment at Pittsfield Cooperative Bank. That left eight councilors and such an appropriation needs a supermajority of the entire body, which is seven votes. It was clear early in Tuesday's meeting that it didn't have the votes. Yet, even councilors who didn't support the program as it was written had voiced support for the intent. The Council opted to voice its feedback and concerns Tuesday and ask the mayor to return with a revamped program. Ongoing Coverage: Save the date and mark your calendar to experience a bit of Slovakia at Eastertime on Pittsburghs South Side. On Saturday, April 13, 2019, Prince of Peace Parish will host the 29th Annual Slovak Mass and Easter Customs Breakfast. The celebration of Slovak religious culture begins at St. Adalbert Church, South 15th Street, with the recitation of the Holy Rosary at 10:45 a.m., followed by Mass at 11 a.m., with prayers and hymns sung in Slovak. After Mass, everyone is invited to the Prince of Peace Parish Center, 81 South 13th Street, to sample traditional foods one might enjoy in a typical Slovak home on Easter morning paska (sweet bread), sunka (ham), kolbasy (sausage) sirek (cheese), hrin (beets and horseradish) and kolace (nut and poppy seed rolls). Take some time to browse authentic Slovak treasures -- books, crystal, linens, dolls, pottery and costumesand learn a bit of the history, daily life and customs of our Slovak ancestors. Watch crafts people demonstrate their art, including decorating colorful Easter eggs (kraslice or pysanky), weaving palms or braiding bread. Take home homemade nut and poppy seed rolls, paska and cookies, or purchase unique handmade or imported gift items. Make plans to attend the 29th Annual Slovak Mass and Easter Customs Breakfast on Saturday, April 13 at Prince of Peace Parish. There is no charge for admission, but donations are sincerely appreciated. For more information, to sponsor a table or to make a donation, call Connie Zatek at 412-657-6364. Event Overview: Milestone Integration Platform Symposium Denmark 2019 is Milestone Systems partner event flagship, bringing together partners from the Americas, EMEA and APAC regions to collaborate, network and learn from the global tendencies within the video management software industry. The event is a unique opportunity to pool insights, share knowledge and meet Milestone Systems community of technology partners. The City Council voted to postpone a decision on the Mohawk Theater until the next meeting. North Adams Councilors Postpone Mohawk Theater Decision Superintendent Barbara Malkas asks the council for approval to submit a statement of interest for Greylock School. NORTH ADAMS, Mass. The City Council postponed once again an order authorizing the mayor to sell the Mohawk Theater. The decision follows a meeting of the Community Development Committee last Wednesday that drew dozens of attendees and focused on the council's ability to impose conditions on any sale. "What identified as our ideal course of action would be to postpone this paper until an RFP process has been concluded by the mayor's office," said City Councilor Benjamin Lamb, chairman of the Community Development Committee. "I do know that the mayor is waiting on legal counsel to review that suggestion to make sure it is in compliance everywhere it needs to be in compliance." The order will be back on the agenda in two weeks. Mayor Thomas Bernard proposed last month to dispose of the landmark but long-vacant movie house and in line with the actions of the previous administration in trying to divest the city of "surplus" properties. The theater, however, incurred far more angst among officials and residents than previous properties like Notre Dame church and the old City Yard. It has been in part driven by nostalgia but largely by a hope held for years that the dormant property can be transformed. The council spent two meetings debating the matter before sending it to committee, where residents, councilors and state Rep. John Barrett III, the mayor who acquired the property, weighed in. "It was the consensus of the committee that this is such an important property, we would prefer to see concrete options before adopting this order," Councilor Eric Buddington, a member of the committee, said. "That was the reason for recommending postponement." Councilors have wanted to ensure there are restrictions or limitations placed on the sale to avoid losing the marquee or allowing the structure to deteriorate. The City Council would have some say voting for or against if the bid proposal selected by the mayor was below the assessed value at $446,400. But anything over that would leave the selection to the mayor's discretion. The question is whether the council has the legal ability to restrict or limit the mayor's executive power to dispose of property the City Council has determined surplus, or unnecessary. Stephen E. Marsters Jr., an associate with the city's solicitor, KP Law, told the committee last week that certain restrictions could be placed in a purchase-and-sale agreement but not to the detail of a lease agreement. "If it goes above assessed value, then I think that you've already authorized the mayor to sell the property with the existive ordinance," he said. "The sale of a city property requires the City Council to authorize the mayor to sell the property and to the extent that you made that authority contingent upon something, I think the council could legally have the ability to do that." But, he added, there is an issue because it gets into the administrative duties of the executive in the city charter. Bernard, who was at the Drury boys' basketball game in Springfield on Tuesday night, had agreed with Marsters the week before. "I believe there are charter issues in this conversation that need to be brought up," he said at the Community Development meeting. "I won't speak to if the substance of an order were to be in violation of the charter. I don't how that would have to be resolved." The mayor also took umbrage at the time at councilors' suggestions he might not bring forward all proposals that might be received, noting he had done so in the past. (All bids received on municipal projects are by their nature public.) Council President Keith Bona at the committee meeting noted the council was could be making a precedent. "We're setting something up that down the road that they can say, that's the way they did it then," he said. In the end, the Community Development Committee recommended that the order authorizing the disposal of the Mohawk be postponed until the RFP process was completed, a recommendation that was accepted with little discussion on Tuesday night. The city solicitor is also expected to review any legal issues. The council also approved the submission of a statement of interest to the Massachusetts School Authority. Superintendent of Schools Barbara Malkas presented the request in the mayor's absence. She pointed out that submitting the SOI, which the city has done annually for more than a dozen years, does not require the city to enter into any agreements. The SOI and the supporting documentation of the votes of the City Council and the School Committee must be submitted by April 6. The School Committee has already approved the submission. NASA astronaut Nick Hague is in the unusual position of having to prepare a second time for his first spaceflight. He and two fellow crewmembers will climb aboard a Soyuz rocket in Kazakhstan tomorrow (March 14) and blast off for a six-month stay at the International Space Station , his first visit to the orbiting laboratory. But he's already been a rookie astronaut once before, in October, when the rocket carrying him and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin experienced a booster separation failure and the launch was aborted. "I went right back into training," Hague told Space.com in an interview last month. "There were things that were going to be different because of the change in timing for me being on orbit, so all of those changes, all of those deltas to the plan, were things that I needed to get trained on." NASA astronaut Nick Hague is in the unusual position of having to prepare a second time for his first spaceflight. He and two fellow crewmembers will climb aboard a Soyuz rocket in Kazakhstan tomorrow (March 14) and blast off for a six-month stay at the International Space Station , his first visit to the orbiting laboratory. But he's already been a rookie astronaut once before, in October, when the rocket carrying him and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin experienced a booster separation failure and the launch was aborted. "I went right back into training," Hague told Space.com in an interview last month. "There were things that were going to be different because of the change in timing for me being on orbit, so all of those changes, all of those deltas to the plan, were things that I needed to get trained on." For Hague, the months between launch failure and tomorrow's flight have been filled with family time as well as technical details. "There's also been adequate time to really process everything that happened with the family, and that's been important," Hague said. "Being able as a family to process what happened and getting ready to go for this next launch, it's been important to have that time to be able to talk about it." Ever since his October launch aborted, Hague has been vehement that he is ready to fly again and that his family supports him in that. He met his wife, Catie Hague, when both worked for the Air Force, he as a test pilot and she in the public affairs office, and where she first experienced hearing that something wasn't going quite according to plan during his flights. "[She and their two sons] are nervous leading up this launch, but I think every family member of anybody that's riding a rocket is nervous," Hague said. "But they're excited, and they continue to be excited, because they understand why we're doing what we're doing. It's important; it's a mission of discovery." The Nurse Who Hid Hundreds of Pregnant Women from the Nazis The Fellowship | March 13, 2019 Each week, we try to introduce you to some of the thousands of Righteous Gentiles who stood up for what was right during the Holocaust and risked their own lives to save the lives of their Jewish brothers and sisters. While many of these heroes have been forgotten, it is always nice when one of them is noticed and heralded for their heroism. Such is the case with Elisabeth Eidenbenz, The Times of Israels Rich Tenorio tells us, a Swiss nurse who saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish women and children, and who is being featured in a new film: When refugees fled the Spanish Civil War and World War II, a brave Swiss nurse provided crucial help in southwest France to a niche group of displaced persons pregnant women and their children. Despite hostility from Vichy France and Nazi Germany, Elisabeth Eidenbenz is credited with saving the lives of almost 600 children 400 Spanish refugees and 200 Jewish refugees through the Maternity of Elne, her maternity hospital in the French municipality of Elne. Relatively little-known, Eidenbenz (1913-2011) lived to be nearly 100 and was honored by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations in 2002. A new historical dramatic film aims to amplify her heroism Elisabeth was only 25 years old when she founded [and] opened [the] Maternity, Quer said. You have to be very brave to accept this work. The daughter of a Swiss Protestant minister, Eidenbenz initially volunteered to help the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War a cause that became desperate with the fall of Barcelona in 1938. In January and February of 1939, a half-million Republican refugees fled on foot to France. On the way, they were bombed by Nationalist and Italian planes an exodus, termed La Retirada (The Retreat), that is being commemorated this year, eight decades later The first pregnant woman arrived in January 1939. There would be many more under the care of Eidenbenz and her staff of 12. Expectant mothers arrived four weeks before their delivery date; they could stay up to four weeks after giving birth, after which Eidenbenz would look to place them in a job to keep them out of the camps. The hospital would see 20 births each month in 1940 and 1941 Elisabeth had many threats from the Gestapo but did not go down, Quer said. [She] hid Jewish women and their children when they were banned. Elisabeth faced the head of the police, fought for deported women. The Germans ultimately ordered the Maternity closed in 1944. Eidenbenz returned to Switzerland but continued fighting on behalf of unprotected children, according to Quer This annotated image is a cropped version of the last 360-degree panorama taken by the Opportunity rover's Pancam from May 13 through June 10, 2018. This annotated view is presented in false color to make some differences between materials easier to see. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU) A set of newly released photos shows what NASA's Mars rover Opportunity was looking at just before the killer dust storm hit. That storm boiled up in May 2018 and engulfed Opportunity shortly thereafter. The solar-powered robot couldn't get enough sunlight to recharge its batteries, and it went silent on June 10. NASA tried gamely to revive the long-lived Oppy but had no luck, finally declaring the rover dead last month . As the sky darkened around it last spring, Opportunity snapped many photos of its environs Perseverance Valley, on the rim of the 14-mile-wide (22 kilometers) Endeavour Crater using its panoramic camera. Related: Postcards from Mars: Amazing Photos by Opportunity & Spirit Mission team members have now stitched together 354 of these images, taken from May 13 through June 10, into a gorgeous panorama of the rover's final resting place. "This final panorama embodies what made our Opportunity rover such a remarkable mission of exploration and discovery," Opportunity project manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement Tuesday (March 12). "To the right of center, you can see the rim of Endeavor Crater rising in the distance," he added. "Just to the left of that, rover tracks begin their descent from over the horizon and weave their way down to geologic features that our scientists wanted to examine up close. And to the far right and left are the bottom of Perseverance Valley and the floor of Endeavour Crater, pristine and unexplored, waiting for visits from future explorers." A few frames of the panorama remain black-and-white, because the dust storm swept in before Opportunity could image those areas using all of its color filters, NASA officials said. The panorama is very large and zoomable; you can get the full effect via the mission team here. Also on Tuesday, the mission team released the very last photos Opportunity ever took two blurry, black-and-white thumbnails from June 10 showing a tiny, faint sun in a dark and dusty sky. These two thumbnails, with the faint sun near the middle of each, are the last images NASA's Opportunity rover took on Mars as a dust storm darkened the sky. Opportunity took the photos on June 10, 2018. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU) About 3 minutes earlier, Oppy had taken another photo of the dark sky, this image even noisier than the two thumbnails. But Opportunity beamed this super-speckly shot home after it sent the two thumbnails; indeed, the noisy pic was the last piece of data that Opportunity ever transmitted, NASA officials said. As the black bar at the bottom of the frame shows, the rover went dark before it could send the entire image (and before it could send the full-frame versions of the two thumbnails). Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, landed a few weeks apart in January 2004. Together, the two robots began a planned 90-Earth-day hunt for signs of liquid water activity. They found a great deal of such evidence, confirming that the Red Planet was much wetter, and potentially habitable, in the ancient past. Taken on June 10, 2018, this noisy, incomplete image was the last data NASA's Opportunity rover sent back from Mars. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU) Spirit and Opportunity both far outlasted their warranties. Spirit wasn't declared dead until 2011, and Opportunity was still going strong before the dust storm hit . No vehicle, crewed or robotic, has ever traveled farther on the surface of another world than Opportunity, whose odometer is forever frozen at 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers). And it took quite a storm to knock Oppy out; the maelstrom eventually grew to encircle the entire planet. A drive tube pounded into the lunar regolith by Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt collected a core sample that has remained sealed for almost 50 years. It will now be opened for scientific study using modern technology and techniques. NASA is about to open one of its last remaining lunar samples that was sealed by Apollo astronauts while on the moon nearly 50 years ago. The space agency on Monday (March 11) announced that it has selected nine science teams to study the still-pristine moon material using techniques that were not available when the samples were collected in the early 1970s. "When the previous generations did Apollo, they knew that the technology that they had in that day was not the technology that we would have in this day. So they made a determination that they were going to preserve samples, because they knew there would be a day when better technology would be able to better assess the history of the moon," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who revealed the selection during an address at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Related: With Vintage, Awe-Inspiring Footage, 'Apollo 11' Will Take You Back to the Moon "We have nine teams that will be examining unopened samples that have come back from the moon and we feel like we can do that because there are more lunar samples on the horizon," said Bridenstine, referencing NASA's efforts to resume sending probes and humans to the surface of the moon. The Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions returned a total of nine containers of sealed lunar material, representing 3.7 pounds (1.7 kilograms) out of their much larger hauls of exposed moon rocks . Only three sealed samples remain unopened today, one from each mission. (The six other samples were opened in the 1970s.) Six of the nine selected teams will look at 73001, an approximately 1.8-pound (809-gram) sample that was collected and placed into a vacuum-sealed tube by Apollo 17 astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Gene Cernan in 1972. The sample is still encased in a "drive tube" that was pounded into the lunar regolith (or soil) to collect a core of material, preserving the layers as they existed on the moon. "We're hoping the sealed sample will have never seen Earth's atmosphere, that the vacuum seals on the tube have held, so when we open it, the gas inside is gas from the moon," said Ryan Ziegler, NASA's Apollo sample curator at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, in an interview with collectSPACE.com. The other three teams will be studying samples from Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 that were delivered to Earth unsealed, but were either kept frozen or stored in helium. The majority of the 842 pounds (382 kilograms) of lunar rock and regolith returned by the six moon landing missions were opened and stored in nitrogen. "Rather than storing them in nitrogen for all these years, we have stored them in helium the helium samples came from Apollo 15. And the Apollo 17 samples, the frozen ones, were not frozen the entire time. They came back under normal temperature and pressure conditions, they were opened very quickly in the lab and within a week or two sub samples were frozen and have been sealed away frozen ever since," explained Ziegler. Teams from the NASA's Ames Research Center, the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory will look at the frozen and helium-held samples to see how volatiles like water are stored in the radiation environment of the lunar surface and how airless bodies are affected by exposure to the space environment. The other six teams studying the Apollo 17 sealed sample include scientists from Ames, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Arizona, University of California Berkeley, University of New Mexico, Mount Holyoke College and the Planetary Science Institute. The research will focus in part on how exposure to the space environment affects the moon's surface, how small organic molecules are preserved on the moon and how micrometeorite and meteorite impacts may have affected the geology of the lunar surface. The studies will also include looking at samples that may have been cold enough for water to freeze, called a "cold trap," a first for research inside a lab. The Apollo 17 sample at the bottom of the drive tube was raised from a depth below 9 inches (22 centimeters), where it may have been frozen (-10 degrees Fahrenheit [-23.15 degrees Celsius or 250 Kelvin]) at the time it was sealed. Before any of the studies can commence, though, the scientists need to meet to discuss the best way to open the sealed sample to avoid contaminating the lunar material and maximizing the science to be gained. "So that's the biggest question," Ziegler told collectSPACE. "How to open the sealed sample is the hardest question, and until the scientists had been selected and we knew the analyses they wanted to make, we couldn't work out the exact details on how to open the sample." "We have the engineering schematics for the containers and we have an idea of how we would do it, but while we are experts in curation and we are good scientists, these are also expert scientists. So we need to find out what they want to do and find the right way to do it," said Ziegler, adding that the group would likely meet at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference being held March 18 through March 22 in The Woodlands, Texas. The new studies, which NASA is underwriting at a total of $8 million, was originally proposed by Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science at the agency's headquarters in Washington, DC. "By studying these precious lunar samples for the first time, a new generation of scientists will help advance our understanding of our lunar neighbor and prepare for the next era of exploration of the moon and beyond," Zurbuchen said in a statement. "This exploration will bring with it new and unique samples into the best labs right here on Earth." Omega's Speedmaster Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Limited Edition celebrates the chronograph's history as the first watch worn on the moon. Omega is celebrating the golden anniversary of the first moon landing by going gold. The Swiss watchmaker on Tuesday (March 12) revealed the Speedmaster Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Limited Edition , an 18-karat gold chronograph modeled after the timepieces gifted to the astronauts after the Apollo 11 mission established the Speedmaster as the first watch worn on the moon. "Fifty years ago, mankind took its very first steps onto the surface of the moon. The Omega Speedmaster was there, strapped to the wrists of the astronauts, and this year, we're paying tribute to the mission's lasting legacy," Omega announced on its website. Related: Astronaut's Watch Worn on the Moon SellsFor Record $1.6 million Omega's Speedmaster Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Limited Edition features a lunar meteorite inlay representing the moon. (Image credit: Omega) Apollo 11 crewmates Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins each wore a stainless steel Speedmaster Professional chronograph on their July 1969 journey to the moon. Armstrong, though the first to walk on the moon, left his Speedmaster inside the lunar module to back up a broken timer. It was therefore Aldrin who wore the first wristwatch out onto the lunar surface. "The watch was a backup. If the astronauts lost the capability of talking to the ground, or the capability of their digital timers on the lunar surface, then the only thing they had to rely on was the Omega watch they had on their wrist . It needed to be there for them if they had a problem," said James Ragan, the NASA engineer who qualified the Speedmaster for spaceflight in 1965, in a statement issued by Omega. Four months after Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins returned from the moon, Omega hosted a celebratory "Astronaut Appreciation Dinner" in Houston, where a special gold edition of the Speedmaster was presented to the Apollo spacemen. The new 50th Anniversary watch reproduces the overall look of the 1969 model with a new "Moonshine gold" dial and burgundy-color bezel ring. "In a paler hue than the traditional 18K yellow gold, 'Moonshine' gold offers high resistance to the fading of color and luster over time," states Omega. The 2019 timepiece differs from the 50-year-old original though, when turned over. The 1969 gold watch (referred to by Omega as the Speedmaster BA145.022) had a solid caseback engraved with the inscription, "to mark man's conquest of space with time, through time, on time." (The 967 pieces that were sold to the public were inscribed, "The First Watch Worn On The Moon" and "Omega Speedmaster Apollo XI 1969.") The 2019 edition has a sapphire crystal caseback, revealing the Calbre 3861 movement, with an outer ring engraved "1969 - 2019" and an inner ring inscribed "Apollo 11 - 50th Anniversary " and "The First Watch Worn On The Moon." The inner ring also features a depiction of Earth centered over Apollo 11's Cape Canaveral launch site and the moon, represented by an actual sample of the celestial body in the form of a domed lunar meteorite inlay. Omega's Speedmaster Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Limited Edition (at right) is modeled after the gold Speedmaster BA145.022 (at left) that was presented to NASA's Apollo astronauts. (Image credit: Omega) "The Earth and the moon on the inner ring have been produced in true proportion (3.67 : 1 in diameter)," notes Omega. The Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Speedmaster comes packaged in a presentation box featuring a 3D printed lunar surface. Each of the boxes' grey ceramic panels are structured differently, so each box is unique. "Furthermore, the top panel of every box is printed with the image of the Sea of Tranquillity and the landing position of Apollo 11," describes Omega. Like the 1969 original, the Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Speedmaster is limited to 1,014 pieces. Arriving in Omega stores in July, the watch lists for 32,000 CFH, or about $32,000 US. Allyson Brady is a Postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University. This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Imagine astronauts on Mars, tasked with picking rock samples that will be used by scientists to search for signs of life. But they can only transport a limited number back to Earth. What should they look for? Are some types of rocks better than others? They could try to ask for advice from the team of geologists and biologists back on Earth, but due to the distance between Earth and Mars it could take roughly 40 minutes before they would receive a response. This isnt practical when time outside of the spacecraft can only last for a few hours. When humans are sent to Mars, it is important that these explorers have the support needed to help them do the best science possible. How do we explore and do good science given necessary operational constraints? This is an important question that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and other space agencies, including the Canadian Space Agency, are interested in answering. Analogue missions on Earth help researchers understand how to do their jobs while faced with the many challenges that arise because of the hostile environment of space. Mars on Earth The Biologic Analog Science Associated with Lava Terrains (BASALT) research program explores and collects samples from places on Earth that are analogous to Martian environments. Building off similar previous analogue studies in Canada and the U.S. , the BASALT program operates under simulated Mars mission conditions. Merging scientific, technical and operational research objectives, the insights gained during two major analogue mission deployments are detailed in a special issue of the journal Astrobiology . Human exploration of Mars adds in a dynamic that doesn't exist when using rovers. Unlike a rover, a human can make decisions and respond to new unexpected discoveries during an extravehicular activity (EVA). This flexibility is valuable for scientific discovery but presents some challenges for planning EVAs. An important aspect of Mars exploration will be making decisions about which rock samples to collect that will help answer scientific questions about the history of Mars. While crews will receive training in geology and biology, expert scientists on Earth are available to help them make those decisions. But dont forget the unavoidable communications delay between Earth and Mars. Communication time lag Simulated EVAs were conducted in two Mars analogue environments: Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park and Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve in Idaho. Scientists think that early Mars once had volcanic activity that could have created the kinds of habitats that we know contain life on Earth. These two field sites were chosen as they represent past and present conditions on Mars. Scientists can then try to understand the link between biology and the geological characteristics to identify sampling locations for astrobiological studies. Ideally, these would be geological features that can be seen from Earth's orbit, allowing Mars researchers to look for these same features and identify points of interest for future missions. A satellite image of the Craters of the Moon National Monument taken by NASA's Landsat program in 2000. (Image credit: NASA) Simulating the Mars environment Planning a mission to Mars, even a simulated one, is no easy task. First and foremost, the questions that guided the research were not simulated in any way: these were real questions asked about how microbes live in and interact with volcanic rocks. I am a geobiologist and my expertise is in organic geochemistry. I want to know what microbes do in the environment and, importantly for astrobiology, what signs they leave behind. Within the BASALT program my research required that the samples were collected in a sterile manner, adding another complex layer to an already complex series of activities that must be done while facing the challenges of being in space. Deviations from sampling protocols or not collecting enough contextual data about the sampling sites would have consequences for the validity of the results. The BASALT team spent months planning the field deployments down to the last detail, including how many photos to take and estimating how long it might take to sample each rock. Individual sample sites in Idaho and Hawai'i were selected based on remote-sensing information available to the team (akin to using orbital satellite data to select landing locations on Mars). At each site, people working on the surface (an extravehicular crew) gathered information and sent it to a crew in the who stayed in the space habitat (the intravehicular crew). Information gathered was then sent back to Earth. The intravehicular crew was the go-between, interacting in real-time with the extravehicular crew. On Mars, once astronauts are on the ground, they would follow pre-planned traverses and search for basalt rocks that would be used by the scientists for research. Communicating findings A great deal of thought went into not only the type of data that the Mars crew would collect and send back to Earth for the scientists to examine, but also how they would then work with it and come to a decision about which rock they wanted the crew on Mars to sample. This could be affected by the conditions for communications including the bandwidth available: if low bandwidth conditions exist that limit transmission of data, could photos be used in place of high-resolution video? Its like internet speed, if your connection is extremely slow you may rethink watching Netflix but you might still download those cat photos. The BASALT program showed that it is possible to receive useful input from an Earth-based team over time delay. At the end of the program we learned quite a bit about how to effectively do this. For example, while video is helpful, high resolution photos are the preferred choice under bandwidth restrictions. Text, rather than voice communications were best for relaying important decisions between Earth and Mars. These and other results will be used to plan missions so that when we send humans to Mars we are doing the best possible job to answer fundamental questions about whether life ever existed there. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 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. Technology developed at CERN and flown on the International Space Station is now at work helping art experts analyze paintings. That technology is small, supersensitive radiation detectors that can count and study particles, which CERN developed to track particles at the Large Hadron Collider. On the space station, it manifested as Timepix detectors, used to gather data about how much radiation astronauts are exposed to during spaceflight. InsightART's scanner based on space-flown technology analyzes a statue of an angel. (Image credit: InsightART) But on Earth, it can be used to create specialized X-ray images of artwork that can help experts determine the authenticity of the picture by precisely analyzing where certain pigments have been applied. "The art market is a jungle some say that around 50 percent of art pieces and paintings are either fakes or are incorrectly attributed," Josef Uher, chief technology officer of Czech company InsightART, which is spearheading the project, said in a statement released by the European Space Agency (ESA). "This has huge consequences for the value of such artworks." A painting called "La Crau Seen from Montmajour," which some suspect is the work of Vincent Van Gogh; plus four analysis views of the paintings showing certain elements, like lead, zinc and chromium. (Image credit: InsightART) This isn't the first partnership between particle physicists and art professionals, who have turned to circular particle accelerators known as synchrotron facilities to gather new data about artworks. These analyses can also be valuable for learning about archaeological finds and fossils. The company that has been spearheading the art applications is looking to expand how these detectors are used on the ground. "In future we want to combine our X-ray imaging with virtual reality to make it easier and more natural to use when scanning objects," Uher said. "Ultimate[ly] this could even be used for medical applications it will take time, but it holds so much potential." The particle technology isn't finished with spaceflight, either ESA wants to send instruments that would incorporate the particle detectors into orbit on upcoming communications satellites. WASHINGTON The Trump administration is proposing a $4.7 trillion federal budget for fiscal year 2020 that includes $750 billion for national defense a $34 billion increase, or about 5 percent, over what Congress enacted for fiscal year 2019. Of the $750 billion, $718 billion is for the Defense Department and $32 billion is for national security programs performed by the Department of Energy's nuclear laboratories and other agencies. To fund the large increase to defense spending, the administration is proposing cuts of 5 percent to non-defense programs and is pumping up the Overseas Contingency Operations account from $69 billion in 2019 to $165 billion in 2020. Past administrations have used the OCO account to boost the military budget, as OCO is not subject to Budget Control Act spending caps. But this year's OCO boost is unusually large, especially at a time when Trump is reducing overseas military presence. Related: Trump's 2020 NASA Budget Would Cancel Space Telescope, Earth Science Missions (Again) Office of Management and Budget Acting Director Russell Vought defended the OCO gambit. He told reporters at the White House on Monday that the administration sees OCO as a legitimate vehicle to fund national defense priorities. Congress in past budget deals agreed to add more money to defense only if it's matched by increases to non-defense agencies. Trump wants to "break that paradigm," Vought said. "Until that paradigm is broken we need to look for other opportunities to continue to rebuild the military." Within the $750 billion request, the administration is seeking $576 billion in the Pentagon's baseline budget the limit set by the Budget Control Act $165 billion in OCO funds and $9 billion in emergency funds for disaster relief and to partially fund the wall the president wants to build along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump's budget request will not be well received on Capitol Hill. With Democrats in control of the House, a budget that boosts military spending and slashes domestic programs is a political nonstarter, analysts said. "The FY20 budget is dead on departure as Congress won't agree with a defense increase that rely on OCO to sidestep the Budget Control Act nor will it support 5 percent cuts to non-defense discretionary funding," commented defense industry analyst Byron Callan, of Capital Alpha Partners. Congress also will challenge the idea that the 2020 budget top line is growing while the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and Syria is shrinking, noted Travis Sharp, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Pentagon officials will argue that savings from troop withdrawals are being invested in advanced technology to compete with China and Russia. "But Congress may oppose treating defense dollars so interchangeably, particularly when doing so includes gimmicks like the administration's proposal to evade the Budget Control Act spending caps by redirecting funds into the OCO account," Sharp said. Budget for Space Force The 2020 budget seeks funds to establish the U.S. Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces. Details of the Pentagon's space funding request will be released on Tuesday. SpaceNews previously reported that the administration will request $72 million to stand up the Space Force headquarters. DoD officials on March 1 detailed a five-year plan to establish a Space Force of 15,000 members, at an annual cost of about $500 million. In budget documents released on Monday, the White House said the Space Force will "initially realign existing space forces and materiel from the military services and will scale up responsibly and deliberately over the next several years." The budget also requests funds to create a Space Development Agency that will "foster innovation by leveraging the thriving domestic commercial space sector," the documents said. The budget also supports U.S. Space Command as the newest combatant command." SpaceNews previously reported that DoD will request $149 million for the Space Development Agency in fiscal year 2020. The Pentagon can stand up the Space Development Agency and U.S. Space Command without new legislation but needs Congress to authorize the Space Force as a new military branch. Despite the administration's full-court press, many lawmakers remain skeptical that a new military branch is needed, noted military analyst Dan Grazier, of the Project on Government Oversight. "History shows that the creation separate military service will add bureaucratic barriers and largely serve its own ends, making it more difficult for the other branches to get the support they need to achieve their missions on Earth." Mar 13th, 2019 Last year Vireo Systems the owner of Promera, and creatine HCl patent co-owner the University of Nebraska, filed a patent infringement lawsuit against GNC. Vireo alleged that some of the retailers products infringed on its patents including AMP Creatine HCl 189 and GNC Pro Performance Creatine Complex Chew. Vireo Systems along with the University of Nebraska, have shared a press release this week, announcing theyve reached a settlement with GNC. The major supplement retailer has agreed to license the patents, and moving forward will have all of its creatine HCl products made by Vireo or made using Vireos creatine HCl. In reaching a settlement agreement with GNC, we are pleased they are helping to set an example and fulfill their role as a leader in the health and wellness market, said Mark Faulkner, President of Vireo Systems. Our companies working together through this matter has been important in improving the overall ethics of the sports nutrition market. Legal cannabis in the U.S. is a billion-dollar industry, but high overhead and the complex requirements to stay compliant with state laws and regulations make it hard for small business owners to succeed. Following the rules requires navigating a complex and ever-changing labyrinth of cannabis regulations, a daunting task even for the most seasoned compliance officers. If something slips through the cracks, telling regulators that you forgot wont be enough to protect you from steep fines or maybe even jail time. Sometimes even simple mistakes are big mistakes. For those that are fretting about the compliance status of their cannabis dispensary, here are three often overlooked mistakes that you can fix right now. 1. Improper training. From production facilities to dispensaries, cannabis businesses have very specific operating procedures that must be followed to the letter or it can mean big trouble. Unfortunately, not everyone on the team understands this. One really big mistake is that employers don't actually make their employees read the rules or train them on what the rules are, says Stephanie Hopper, the Chief Compliance Officer of Canndescent, a luxury cannabis brand. They don't emphasize why it needs to be done every single day in the exact same way and that, if it's not done, what the impacts are to the company. For example, one of the easiest compliance mistakes a dispensary employee can make is improperly storing cannabis. If not properly stored, cannabis can gain or lose water weight depending on the humidity level of the room. In the highly regulated cannabis industry, stopping illegal diversion is a top priority for regulators. It is critically important for cannabis shipments to weigh as close as possible to the exact same amount as it says on the shipment manifest. A mismatch in weight between what the manifest says and what the dispensary has recorded could mean legal trouble for the dispensary owner, the cannabis supplier, or both. An improperly trained employee may not realize the importance of proper cannabis storage, become complacent, and end up costing the dispensary owner thousands of dollars in fines. According to Hopper, the easiest to way overcome this mistake is by taking the time to thoroughly explain the reason behind every rule and procedure in place. This may involve retraining employees. Tetraining may seem like a hassle, but it's better than a fine or losing your license. Related: Move Aside, CBD: New Data Finds THC Is the Real Medicine in Medical Marijuana 2. Bad recordkeeping. Another common compliance mistake that cannabis companies make is not keeping up with their paperwork. Cannabis may be laid-back but the cannabis industry is anything but. Working in the industry comes with a laundry list of recordkeeping requirements that must be strictly tracked. Every regulated state has some requirement to maintain a record of internal operations, inventory, orders and even the movement of product through state seed-to-sale tracking systems like Metrc, says Ryan Smith, CEO of Leaflink, a software company that facilitates wholesale cannabis purchases. Some states require physical paper records; others require both paper and virtual records, which can be requested during random inspections. Even if a cannabis company is 100 percent compliant with state regulations, it is still essential to keep the proper paperwork. In the eyes of regulators, it doesnt matter what you did; it matters what you can prove. The best way to keep from falling afoul of regulators is to go over your paperwork regularly and to use technology to help maintain a thorough record of every action that takes place in the supply chain. Related: Over 2 Billion Served: How This Cannabis Company Got There 3. Overselling Theres no such thing as too much success, right? Well, in the world of cannabis, selling too much can land you a one-way ticket to jail. In most states where cannabis is legal, there are rules in place that dictate how much cannabis a person can purchase in a day. What's the harm in accidentally, or even intentionally, selling someone a gram or two more to someone than theyre allowed to buy? State regulators take it very seriously. In Colorado, for example, two of the owners of the dispensary chain Sweet Leaf were recently sentenced to one year in prison for intentionally allowing customers to purchase more cannabis than legally allowed. However, even if dispensaries recognize the risks and liabilities that come with overselling cannabis, mistakes can still be made. Not only does each state have different restrictions on how much cannabis you can buy at a given time, but complicated equivalency laws also exacerbate the likelihood of overselling to a customer during a transaction, says Kyle Sherman CEO at Flowhub, a company that makes point-of-sale software for the cannabis industry. For example, a single gram of concentrate can equal 3.5 grams in the states eyes. Sherman recommends using software designed specifically for the cannabis industry, such as Flowhub or Treez. In many cases, these software systems have features in place to keep thorough records and avoid simple mistakes like overselling cannabis. Cannabis compliance is not once-and-done. Because of the fluid and complex state of cannabis regulations, there is always the risk of inadvertently falling to less than 100 percent compliant. Regulators know this. Ultimately, what matters most is that cannabis businesses continue to act in good faith, prevent major violations (like selling cannabis to minors), and build systems for avoiding simple mistakes. Related: 3 Compliance Risks Cannabis Dispensary Owners Can Eliminate Right Now Volunteer Coders Partner With San Francisco to Clear 9,300 Marijuana Arrest Records The Mooch Makes the Case for Cannabis Investment Copyright 2019 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved Einsteins Brilliance, Humor, and Connection to Israel The Fellowship | March 13, 2019 Einstein's Brilliance March 14 (also known as Pi Day) is also the 140th birthday of renowned scientist and intellectual, Albert Einstein. While we all know of Einsteins contributions to science, very few know about his connections to the Jewish state. JNS Israel Kasnett tells us some of what has recently been revealed about Einsteins contributions to his beloved Israel: One thing is for sure. While the writing on the pages lying on the table under a clear protective glass appeared as nonsensical gibberish or useless, mind-bending mathematical equations, they were anything but. These were some of Albert Einsteins original manuscripts110 pages in allrecently donated to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem by the Crown-Goodman Family Foundation, purchased from Gary Berger, a private collector in North Carolina. The pages, donated just before Einstein would have turned 140 (he was born on March 14, also commonly known as Pi Day, when mathematics is celebrated), are just further testament to Einsteins intellectual legacy. His contributions to science are world-renowned and far-reaching. However, not many people make the connection between the Jewish physicist and the State of Israel, and how his brilliant theories years ago contributed to the science behind Israels alleged second-strike nuclear capabilities, as well as SpaceILs lunar lander Beresheet, currently hurtling at 6.5 miles per second through space towards an eventual and hopefully successful moon landing. Einstein was one of the founders of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. To him, the university represented a combined commitment to a Jewish identity, the pursuit of truth and respect for all human beings. For these reasons, Einstein bequeathed his personal and scientific writings to the university, and the Albert Einstein Archives were born. As the Archives academic director Professor Hanoch Gutfreund shared, We at the Hebrew University are proud to serve as the eternal home for Albert Einsteins intellectual legacy, as was his wish Its no secret Big Tech is hard pressed when it comes to staffing vacant IT positions. Nearly 1.4 million computing job openings are expected to be available in the U.S. by 2020, while the top four tech companies -- Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon -- continue to expand with billion dollar investments in new campuses across the nation. The solution? Expanding hiring pools to underserved communities where they aim to build. But, as was made clear by Amazons withdrawal of HQ2 from Long Island City, having buy-in from local communities is not only ethical, it is critical. Research shows that tech talent exists everywhere; it merely needs to be supported to be successful. As someone who started a non-profit that develops the skills of untapped talent from underserved and veteran communities, I am encouraged that tech giants are committed to diversifying their workforce. Amazon has a military talent initiative promoting veteran hiring that pledges to employ talent from underserved communities at HQ2, now only in Virginia. From July 2016 to July 2017, half of Apples new hires in the US were from underrepresented groups in tech, such as women or Hispanics. Facebook and Google implement initiatives that educate underserved communities in tech skills. Related: Jeff Bezos Starts a $2 Billion Fund for Schools and the Homeless Though praiseworthy, these programs arent moving the diversity needle. Among the eight largest U.S. tech companies, only three percent of technical jobs are held by black workers, and women leave tech jobs at twice the rate men do. Why? Because creating systemic change in a corporation requires more than simply hiring diversity. Corporations need to provide support for diverse employees throughout their entire life cycle at the company. If properly implemented, diversity efforts could net the IT industry an extra $400 billion in revenue each year. How might Big Tech retain these demographics critical to mitigating their talent gap and diversity problem? Fix toxic culture. Major tech companies track retention data, but not all make it public. Perhaps for good reason. In the only study to track why people leave tech companies, nearly eight in 10 employees who left tech jobs reported experiencing unfair behavior or treatment, like stereotyping, harassment and microaggressions. Nearly a quarter of underrepresented men and women experienced stereotyping in the job they left and at almost twice the rate of White and Asian men and women. Reparations begin with a laser-focus on stripping toxicity from the workplace. Nearly two-thirds of tech leavers indicate they would have stayed if their employer fixed its culture. A popular solution, traditional diversity training, doesnt always work. Harvard Business Review found it can actually activate bias instead of preventing it. Related: Achieving Diversity Demands Less Talk and More Action. And Good Intentions Alone Won't Do It. Focus on efforts that frame solutions in a positive manner and increase contact with different demographics. Programs like mentoring and voluntary training on diversity (instead of compulsory courses) have the most impact. Prioritize surround sound support. Big Tech needs to partner with organizations that minimize barriers of entry to success, both at work and home. A new hire can experience a culture shock as acute as having never set foot in a corporate environment when they begin working at a major corporation in an office in midtown Manhattan. To be properly assimilated and retained, they need support from every angle. The key lies in working with workforce development programs that dont just act as talent pipelines but continue providing support once people from local, underserved communities are employed. These programs can provide soft-skills development, education on proper attire, and additional financial support for issues arising in their lives. Employees cant be successful in the workplace if they are embroiled with problems at home. Workforce Opportunity Services, the nonprofit I founded, partners with organizations dedicated to diversifying their workforce and functions as a support system for people in communities that typically lack one. Did a babysitter cancel? We provide childcare. Is an employee struggling to pay for gas, or do they live in areas without public transportation options? We ensure they get to work. Provide a clear pathway to promotion. A telling statistic: 83 percent of tech executives are white and are represented at a higher rate in the tech sectors executives category than the rest of the private sector. Other groups, such as African Americans and Hispanics, are represented at significantly lower rates in the executive category. Related: Here's Why Diverse Companies Are Better at Innovating Than Homogenous Companies Consider the tech leavers survey. Nearly a third of underrepresented women of color were passed over for promotion, more than any other group. To retain diverse talent, employees need a clear pathway to promotion into managerial and executive positions. For an underrepresented group like veterans, rank, hierarchy, and a visible ladder to success are engraved components of the military. Since military members are accustomed to recognition for their achievements, managers should acknowledge a job well done and frequently provide constructive feedback. Create a clear two- to three-year plan that outlines how employees can advance in the company and be successful. Be cognizant that promotion plans and support requirements look different for each underrepresented group. Strategically assign managers and mentors. Pair new hires from underserved communities with diversity champions. This matching process between a manager and new hire is critical, as systemic solutions occur through day-to-day management, not just at the executive levels. Big Tech should also consider a formal mentoring program to retain minority talent. In a study by Heidrick & Struggles, women and minorities were more likely than the average respondent to say mentoring was extremely important to their career. Mentor programs within organizations boosted minority and female representation by an average of 9 to 24 percent. Aside from human resources or a day-to-day manager, there should also be someone the employee can turn to at any time. Employees overwhelmingly do not report abuses or harassment to HR for fear of retaliation. Utilize a workforce development organization to provide another mentor who can act as a buffer and resource. Employees can turn to these critical middlemen even after they begin life as a full-time employee. Related: Big Tech Can Do Good and Do Well At the Same Time March of the Women in Asia Pacific This Women's Day, Focus on Gender-Equality at Workplace Copyright 2019 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved STAMFORD A Stamford judge on Wednesday refused to reduce the bond of a man accused of critically assaulting a 2-month-old girl so he could go to another prison where his attorney said he could get better health care. But Judge Gary White said Jeisson Garcia, 23, of Stamford was being held on serious allegations. It appears to me the bond is more than reasonable, White said. Some would argue that the bond is too low, but Im not going to raise it. Garcias attorney Alex Martinez argued that because his clients court-appearance bond of $1,750,000 is too high, Garcia is being held at the Northern Correctional Institution in Somers, New York. But he said prison officials there are doing nothing to address a growing health problem for Garcia. Martinez would not say what the ailment is, but suggested to White that while the reduction of bail would not get him released, it may get him moved to the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, where he would receive better health treatments. In February 2018, Garcia was charged with assaulting the mother of the girl and his bond was set at $750,000. Prior to that, his lawyer said, Garcia had no criminal record in his native Colombia or in the United States before he was arrested last November and charged with first-degree assault and risk of injury and held on a $1 million bond. Martinez also said the investigation that he undertook in the case raised serious doubts about his clients guilt in the matter. But Supervisor Assistant States Attorney Paul Ferencek called Garcias bond reasonable in this case, especially because the baby girl had been assaulted so badly and had multiple fractures. Despite Martinezs arguments, Ferencek said he could see no reason to reduce Garcias bond. White said he could not reduce the bond simply to send Garcia to another prison. According to Garcias 21-page arrest affidavit, police were sent with lights and sirens on to his home on Williams Street on Feb. 6, on the report of a 2-month-old baby girl who had stopped breathing. The baby had been revived by the mother performing CPR. At first, looking at the baby, who had no marks and appeared to be uninjured, it seemed the call was a simple medical assist with no signs of suspicious activity, according to the affidavit. But about two hours later, police were called to Stamford Hospital on a report that the baby had a skull fracture. Later, after being airlifted to Yale-New Haven Hospital, the baby was diagnosed with multiple brain bleeds, multiple fractures and swelling on her head. As well, a bruise was discovered on the babys back, making it very difficult for her to breathe without help. Yale Pediatric Specialists later determined the extent of the victims injuries to include: two skull fractures, cranial bleeding, six fractured ribs, two broken femurs, retinal hemorrhaging, stretched neck ligaments and assorted bruising, said Police Lt. Thomas Scanlon. She also had two healing rib fractures that happened at a different time. Femur fractures on both legs were also observed by doctors, and they happened at different times, likely caused by pulling on the childs legs, or shaken baby syndrome, the affidavit said. jnickerson@stamfordadvocate.com IDF Exposes New Hezbollah Cell in Golan The Fellowship | March 13, 2019 As always, the Israeli military is ahead of the many threats that constantly form on each and every one of the nations borders. This time, The Times of Israels Judah Ari Gross reports, the IDF has uncovered a new terror cell that Hezbollah created on the Israeli-Syrian border in the Golan Heights: The Israel Defense Forces said Wednesday that it had exposed a nascent Hezbollah terror cell established in a border village on the Syrian Golan Heights in recent months, and vowed to prevent the terrorist group from operating against Israel from Syrian soil, even at the risk of a sparking small-scale conflict. The Iran-backed, Lebanon-based group has been trying to create a front on the Syrian Golan for years, but was unable to gain a sufficient foothold in the area until now. However, Syrian dictator Bashar Assads conquest of the border area this summer gave the regime-allied group an opportunity to again try to establish the necessary infrastructure with which it could threaten Israel near the border. The network is new and currently focused on becoming familiarized with the Golan Heights area. It is intended to eventually control teams of Syrian operatives who will launch attacks against Israel, the military said in a statement. At this stage the Hezbollah plot known within the organization as the Golan File mostly involves collecting intelligence and recruiting operatives, but also has weaponry in its possession, namely explosives, light arms, machine guns and antitank missiles, according to the IDF. The military said the terror group may try to bring rockets, missiles and other weaponry into the area in the future, but is concerned that such munitions would be destroyed by Israeli strikes It is very significant, except for the fact this is not completely new. Hezbollah, in the past [few] years, has been trying a few times to establish a military infrastructure in the Syrian side of the Golan, and this is the most updated one that the IDF has decided to reveal, Zehavi said STAMFORD A Yonkers, New York man was charged with using a Stamford mans name to illegally open bank accounts that were then used to cash about $3,000 worth of bogus checks. Rahul Masih, 44, was charged with two counts each of identity theft, criminal impersonation and forgery and was released after posting a $10,000 court-appearance bond. Financial crimes investigator Michael Stempien said a Stamford man got statements from his bank in February 2018 saying two accounts had been opened in his name. The man contacted the bank, which told him to talk to police about them. Stempien said the bank turned over a really good picture of the unidentified man who opened the accounts with a forged license in the Stamford mans name. Because the suspect was unknown, police sent a picture around to other law enforcement agencies in the area and got word back from a Yonkers detective that the picture was of Masih. The detective told Stempien that he knew it was Masih because he knew him from a very similar arrest that occurred a few months after the Stamford complaint was made. Stempien said the mug shots of Masih matched the picture he got of him from the bank. Stempien said after the accounts were opened up, another man deposited three checks worth about $4,000 into the account. Before the bank was able to figure out the checks were forged, about $3,000 worth of the checks had already been cashed. Stempien said Mashih could not be charged with making the withdrawals. Police continue to investigate the case. jnickerson@stamfordadvocate.com STAMFORD A Manhattan man who tried to steal thousands of dollars worth of handbags from Saks: The Vault in Greenwich before assaulting a Greenwich police officer was sentenced to three years in prison by a Stamford judge Wednesday. Quandel Baldwin, 26, pleaded guilty before Judge Gary White of second-degree robbery and assault on a Greenwich police officer just before he was sentenced. His attorney Stephen Carriero said, Under the circumstances it was a fair disposition. Quandel just wants to pay his debt to Connecticut and move on with his life. Baldwin was picked up with another man and woman, who were grabbing ahold of dozens of purses as they raced out of Saks: The Vault on Greenwich Avenue on Sept. 21, 2017. But what would have been a simple larceny charge turned into a robbery when they injured a manager while fighting their way out of the store with the stolen goods. Then, when a Greenwich police officer arrived ,Baldwin and the other man, Hassan Carter, also of Manhattan, began fighting, pushing and kicking while trying to avoid being apprehended, a police report of the incident said. The security manager was punched repeatedly by Baldwin. The officer then took him to the ground ... to prevent any further injuries to the security manager. The officer was then set upon and kicked by the other suspects to try and help Baldwin escape, the report states. Meanwhile, Carter and the woman, Jennifer Nervil, 22, unlocked the rear door and fled before being caught by arriving police officers. The bags were worth $26,145, according to a police report of the incident. Nervil was sentenced to 30 months in prison for her part of the robbery and Carters charges are pending. Balwin has been in custody since his arrest in lieu of a $150,000 court-appearance bond. jnickerson@stamfordadvocate.com B alayage is here to stay. That's if the likes of Gisele Bundchen, Jessica Biel and Chrissy Teigen are anything to go by. But if you thought the colouring technique was reserved for the cascading locks of supermodels, think again, according to celebrity colourist and Schwarkopf global BlondeMe ambassador Jack Howard. We caught up with him at the swanky Paul Edmonds salon in Battersea which is so fancy it even has its own champagne and cappuccino bar. Howard began teaching balayage in the UK back in 2010 when it was relatively new, having learned the technique from balayage pioneer Nancy Braun across the pond in the States. Now, everyone has heard of balayage, but if anyone can persuade you to try it at your next hairdresser appointment, Howard can. The French word balayage means "to paint" or "sweep" and it's basically a freehand highlighting technique that can create that gorgeous natural sunkissed look for your tresses all year round. But, as Howard explains, there are much heavier versions of the technique possible too. The benefits of choosing balayage over classic foil highlights? For one, the process takes far less time. Howard can achieve a lifted, refreshed look with just 14 sweeps of his magic wand so no more spending four hours in the chair, hurrah! The technique is much lower maintenance as there are no harsh lines of contrast to deal with when the dreaded regrowth starts. Best of all, the technique can achieve a far more personalised look which is tailored to each curve and wave of your hair shape. Win, win? Here are a few things we learned from a morning spent with the man himself. You don't have to have long locks for balayage As someone who has been having my hair highlighted with foils for over a decade, I always presumed the balayage technique was reserved for those with long glossy locks, a la Elle Macpherson. But Howard explains that the colouring technique can suit anyone with bob length hair or longer. He created the look above which he calls "a cool girl blonde" using a much heavier application, a technique he calls "California balayage". This requires more upkeep than the more lived-in classic balayage you might be more familiar with, but will still give a much softer look than foils, he says. 'Negative space' is as important as the light streaks When Howard talks about balayage he uses the term "negative space" a lot. What is it? "It's the darker pieces (either your natural hair colour or darker pieces created with colour) that run alongside the lighter pieces and allow them to pop and shine," he says. Negative space is key to adding depth and dimension to your colour, which can, in some cases, add volume to your look. "You need contrast to stop the colour looking solid," he says, adding that you should think of it as a modern take on the old-fashioned lowlight. Think less box blonde and more harmonious honeys and caramels. If you're going from foils to balayage, strong face-framers are key If you're going from foils to balayage, strong face-framing slices are particularly important so that you don't suddenly feel much darker than you're used to. You don't want any negative space around the face, Howard says, instead you want lighter pieces "to highlight the eyes and cheekbones". Balayage is about flow rather than harsh contrast "Balayage is about flow the whole way through rather than large sections of contrast," Howard says. "When youve had lots of half heads, and not enough full heads it becomes darker underneath, if it's very heavy blonde on top you have a regrowth line which makes it really hard [and expensive] to maintain." He likes to soften up the hairline through the back with "ponytail pieces" so that if, say, you're at the gym and have your hair pulled back there's still flow. "For me it's very important that there's a flow throughout, whether it becomes lived in or maintained on regular basis." You can use balayage to make fun shades like copper appear more 3D If you're after something a little more punchy than shades of blonde and brunette, copper is already proving one of the most popular colours of 2019, and Howard explains that you can elevate these kinds of colours using the balayage technique. D ixons Carphone on Monday was slapped with a 30 million fine by the watchdog for mis-selling phone insurance to customers. The Financial Conduct Authority said the companys sales staff didnt have the right training and sold the Geek Squad insurance to people who didnt need it between 2008 and 2015. During that period, Dixons raked in 444.7 million from selling the insurance policies. FCAs Mark Steward said: Without whistleblowers coming forward these practices may never have come to light. The high-level of cancellations should have been a clear indicator to the management of mis-selling. The electrical and mobile phones seller, which discovered a huge data breach last year, today said it has put the episode behind it. Chief executive Alex Baldock, who took over from Sebastian James last April, said he was disappointed that the company fell short in the past but were a very different business today. The retailer said it had factored in the fine in its latest accounts, so it still expects to make a pre-tax profit of 300 million for this financial year. Baldock is trying to implement a new strategy after a slump in mobile phone sales in Britain, as fewer shoppers have chosen to upgrade their devices. So far, Dixons has refunded almost 1 million to customers who were mis-sold a Geek Squad policy and the compensation exercise is ongoing. The FCA said Dixons has taken significant steps to change its approach since 2015 but it was not out of the woods yet. It added: This choice of end date [2015] should not be taken to indicate that the FCA has determined that Dixons systems and controls and sales of Geek Squad were in fact compliant. O n Cannes La Croisette on Wednesday morning (March 13), thousands of people looked a little rough after an evening of party-hopping across yachts, hotels and pubs. Its nothing new for the wealthy town in March, when the worlds property industry congregates for the Mipim festival. But this year the hangovers felt worse for many of the 5900 Brits in attendance. They woke up to hear that MPs last night rejected Theresa Mays latest Brexit deal: quelle horreur! The vote adds further uncertainty to the UK property market, which has suffered since the 2016 referendum, with central London house prices plunging and would-be office tenants taking longer to sign leases. As veteran housebuilder Bob Weston puts it: Uncertainty is not doing UK businesses a favour. Slouched back into a mustard-coloured sofa on his yacht in the south of France, the boss of Weston Homes has a message for the Government: For Gods sake, just get on with it. Weston is one of a number of chiefs who has attended numerous Mipims (he has been to 18), and watched it change. Known for its conferences, deal-making, networking and champagne-soaked parties, the male-dominated industry get-together has seen less excess in recent years. Banks and estate agents have trimmed hospitality spending, and some exhibitors were worried about Mipim being in the spotlight last year for potential sexism in the wake of the notorious Presidents Club dinner (where property firms sponsored a number of tables). Now Mipim attendees are wondering if the jamboree could get even more tame once Britain leaves the bloc. For some investors, now does not feel like a time to celebrate. Vendors have seen slower demand for West End and City office blocks this quarter. Experts insist there are scores of buyers from Asia, the US and Europe waiting to spend in London and take advantage of the weaker pound. But, as one fund manager puts it, they are pissed off with the way Brexit is being handled. Property tycoon and chairman of Consensus Business Group Vincent Tchenguiz recalls the Mipim glory days, agreeing a deal on a yacht in 2000 to buy a 110 million office building in Victoria. Today he says: Dont expect big transactions to be announced this week from me. Like rivals, Tchenguiz is watching closely to see if prices will fall after March. Another firm which is deciding to wait and see is Ho Bee Land of Singapore. Executive director Ong Chong Hua warns: Until there is certainty and clarity, we will postpone our decision to invest further in the UK as there are very serious negative financial consequences if the UK were to crash out of the EU without a deal. However, Julian Sandbach, head of central London capital markets at JLL says that this uncertainty has benefited some deal-makers: There are many investors who recognise the reduced liquidity levels and competition for assets right now, and are capitalising on it. Joanne McNamara, Oxford Properties vice-president of investments, Europe, says there could be interesting near-term opportunities if investor sentiment is muted for a period. Steven Skinner, UK boss at property developer HB Reavis, is more upbeat: Available office supply has decreased at a rapid rate given the record level of pre-leasing of new buildings. Apache Capital Partners managing director Richard Jackson thinks London is still a good place to do business. He points to occupiers being attracted to the capitals global finance centre, transparent legal system, and convenient time zone. Walter Boettcher, chief economist at Colliers International, said: You could forgive investors for taking a step back given the uncertainty created by Brexit and the fact that we are in the mature part of the property bull market. However, we had our late cycle Lehman-type moment back in mid-2016, and the UK property market has displayed a remarkable underlying stability linked to the same forces that have propped up the UK economy since the EU referendum." Expect more Brits to be on the sauce tonight as they contemplate what the industry will look like when Britain imminently says au revoir to the EU. What international investors think about London amid Brexit uncertainty Ahead of the Mipim property festival in Cannes this week, Liam Fox, the secretary of state for international trade, said the UK is open for business, writes Joanna Bourke in Cannes. Fox said the event in the South of France provides the opportunity to attract essential investment into our world-class real estate sector to create new jobs and homes across the UK. Here, overseas companies that have previously invested in London property, share some thoughts about the market... SLOVAKIA: Steven Skinner is the UK boss of Slovakian developer HB Reavis which is constructing a 120 million office block in Farringdon. He notes the size of leasing transactions has increased since the Brexit vote. Skinner adds: We are on the look-out for more opportunities. SINGAPORE: Ho Bee Land last year spent 650 million on multi-let City office block Ropemaker Place. But the firms executive director Ong Chong Hua doesnt expect any more buys to be imminent. He warns: Until there is certainty and clarity, we will postpone our decision to invest further in the UK as there are very serious negative financial consequences if the UK were to crash out of the EU without a deal. QATAR Qatari Diar, which is redeveloping the Chelsea Barracks, says: "Not only are we confident and committed to London and the UK property market - both commercially and residentially - but we will continue to look at locations to invest in for the future. US Property investor Hines UK head Ross Blair thinks overseas buyers will continue to be attracted here thanks to Londons legal system, quality of physical real estate, length of occupational leases and diversity of occupier base. The company recently bought an Oxford Street redevelopment site. CANADA P roperty mogul Vincent Tchenguiz today revealed plans to invest $100 million (77 million) in prop-tech and alternative sectors away from conventional bricks and mortar. The chairman of investor Consensus Business Group, which has a 3 billion UK property empire, is not looking to buy any more buildings this year amid fears of Brexit denting demand. Instead he wants to back new prop-tech, insurance-tech and medical-tech firms. Speaking to the Standard on his superyacht Da Vinci in Cannes for the Mipim property festival, Tchenguiz said: The UK real estate market is fast-changing. I want to be at the forefront of when property meets tech. I predict big growth from companies that can speed up estate agency work using new digital techniques for surveying buildings, or firms that make drones to inspect property exteriors. Tchenguiz already invests in international startups that he wants to bring to Britain. A s I was reading Sir Tim Berners-Lees open letter to mark the 30th birthday of his invention, the world wide web, I couldnt help but think of babies having slices of cheese thrown at their heads. For those not in the know, this recent challenge involves parents or siblings uploading videos of themselves tossing squares of processed cheese onto the faces of their unsuspecting infants. Why? Who knows? But the original video raked up more than 10 million views. So others wanted in on the action. Its the perfect example of monumental online idiocy in the name of clickbait, in other words. When Sir Tim put forward his proposal at the Cern particle physics lab in March 1989 for an information management system, perhaps he could have predicted some of the misuses of his invention the digital criminals, the democracy-subverting hackers, the bullying trolls, the privacy swindlers but Id be surprised if he could have predicted the overwhelming infantile inanity of so much of life online. Sir Tims main suggestion in his letter is a contract for the web which would welcome contributions from governments, companies and citizens to draw up essential principles to help tackle cyber-attacks, the spread of misinformation and the polarised, cruel tone of online public discourse. This must be done, he maintains, while respecting the right to privacy and the need for innovation. Quite right. But there are still big questions regarding how such a code would be enforced. Sir Tim is correct to say that we, the everyday web users, have to want to change if we are to move from digital adolescence to a more mature, responsible and inclusive future. Do we have the will to grow up? Lets hope so. No one can force those cheese-chuckers to put down the cheddar. Bring Jackos story back down to earth The National Portrait Gallerys Michael Jackson: On the Wall exhibition is touring Europe. The London show featured a work by Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom with helium balloons holding up a pair of loafers so that only the toes touched the ground, enacting Jacksons freeze move. The balloons slowly deflate over time, inviting visitors to think about the effort needed to hold up a public image. The tour will go ahead despite the documentary on the sexual abuse allegations against Jackson maybe the curators should consider not refilling the balloons, so that by the time the tour ends the shoes are sprawling on the floor. Will Britain go wild for country music? Kacey Musgraves / Getty Images I used to have little interest in country music. I chiefly blame Keith Urban for this, as I do with so much else. Like any sane person with ears I love Johnny Cash, of course, but he was a rare exception. But then I married a woman from rural America and had little choice but to open my mind. So, as a new convert, I was pleased to discover that the UK is getting its first nationwide country music radio station, Country Radio Hits, starting next month. The question is whether or not it will be of wider interest in the UK. Kacey Musgraves dominated at the Grammys last month, winning album of the year for Golden Hour, which will help widen the genres appeal. And Londons annual three-day country festival, C2C, reliably sells well at the O2. But will that be enough to guarantee regular listeners to a new station? Unless we metropolitan country fans can prove ourselves to be dedicated listeners we are all hat and no cows, as the Montanans say. Unmasked, Titania is not so magical I was intrigued but also saddened a bit by last weeks scoop that the comedian Andrew Doyle is the man behind the woke keyboard warrior Titania McGrath the funniest spoof Twitter account bar none. T he Prime Minister increasingly resembles the character Mister Cellophane from the musical Chicago, because to adapt the song you can look right through her, walk right by her and never know shes there. And yet Theresa Mays Government, collectively, doesnt have a view. It is neither in favour, nor against. Ministers have all been given a free vote. As we report , the Cabinet are in open rebellion against an attempt by the PM to impose a whip on other amendments being tabled today. This isnt because these issues are ones of moral or religious conscience, such as abortion or the death penalty, which traditionally attract a free vote. This issue of our departure from the EU goes to the very heart of why we have governments: to promote our prosperity, ensure our safety and manage our relations with overseas powers. Ministers are being given free votes for a simple reason: Mrs May has no alternative. She has no power to impose a whip on her ministers, and no authority to secure a collective view from the Cabinet that she handpicked. There is, in some parts, sympathy for Mrs Mays predicament every prime minister, they say, would have struggled with the impossibility of a successful Brexit and every Tory leader, we know, has faced the treachery of the Right. We can all agree that the unfortunate loss of her voice added bathos to her personal defeat yesterday. But we elect our prime ministers to make the right decisions, and it is her consistently wrong decisions that have led her to cut such a powerless figure. Bathos added to defeat The disastrous red lines she imposed at the start of her premiership were hers and hers alone. The general election campaign she ran and which lost the Tories the majority David Cameron had won was, quite deliberately, a one-woman effort. The decision of Boris Johnson, who she chose to bring into the tent, to walk out of the Cabinet last July killed off her deal. Lots of those who remained, and who were constitutionally her closest advisers, like the Chancellor, Foreign and Home Secretaries, warned her in private to change course. She refused. When she was defeated in January she foolishly embraced a course of action proposed by backbench chief Graham Brady renegotiating her own withdrawal agreement which she knew would fail just weeks later. Now her deal, the raison detre of her entire time in Downing Street, that died last July has been buried. Simply re-tabling the motion again and again will bring defeat after defeat. The numbers to pass it arent remotely there, even if more hard Brexiteers blink which many wont. Note that only three Labour MPs supported her, when Downing Street thought there might be 10 times as many. As we observed before, Mrs May has no Plan B except now to give her ministers a free vote, and hand over the responsibilities of her office to others. It is the Tory MP Nick Boles and Labours Yvette Cooper, and those around them, who have crafted the series of votes the Commons is having this week, drafting the precise words that they insisted Mrs May read out from the Despatch Box. It is Tory junior minister Kit Malthouse who has developed a plan to deliver a form of deferred no-deal exit from the EU, which is why it is known deceptively for such an uncompromising course of action as the Malthouse compromise. If it is voted on today, some in Cabinet may back it. It is Conservative MP Oliver Letwin (interviewed by the Evening Standard today ) who has taken on himself the task of negotiating with Jeremy Corbyn to see if a majority exists for some kind of Norway-plus style arrangement for the UK. If thats voted on, some Cabinet ministers will support it. These should have been, and could have been, the tasks that the Cabinet collectively undertook. But they were never allowed to. So now it is each for their own. To stretch the dramatic metaphor, like a Shakespearean tragedy, the crown is lying on the ground and who can blame those who are trying to grab it? For if ever the country needed leadership, its now. TODO: define component type apester Y esterday was another super Tuesday in British politics. As in super-humiliating. Another devastating defeat for our beleaguered Prime Minister, or Poor Theresa, as shes known. I was speaking at a business conference in Edinburgh, and just before I went on stage I tuned into the Parliament channel so that I could update the audience on what was happening on this historic day. The ashen face. The same questions. The same vacuous non-answers. Even the dry throat and cracking voice didnt even provoke surprise or sympathy. It just sounded like C-3P0 needed a Strepsil or a reboot. At least nothing collapsed behind her. Well, only her grip, authority and any semblance of a functioning government. When I broke the news of another imminent historic defeat and bad cough, not an eyebrow was raised. Its standard now. Political hacks such as myself live for the drama. We love the twists and turns of parliamentary manoeuvres. We hang on every tweet of leading politicians, journalists and commentators. We study the body language of ministers at the Despatch Box. We are addicted to the Westminster soap opera. So we should be in clover with all the big Brexit beef going down in SW1. This should be the political geek equivalent of Hollyoaks Later. But were not. Even the most seasoned observer is in some way broken emotionally and physically (especially if theyve been anywhere near College Green outside Parliament, which is a muddy, dystopian hell somewhere between the Somme and Birdbox). Its now too much. The level of dysfunction, uncertainty and nihilism is too extreme. I could tell things were bad when I was on Sky News last night and found myself agreeing with the front page of a Right-wing, pro-Brexit newspaper which screamed HOW MUCH MORE OF THIS CAN BRITAIN TAKE? While the public may be fed up and bored, stress levels for businesses small as well as large are off the chart. Someone in my audience yesterday made the point about leadership and Brexit. He said that because politicians hadnt shown any, what were businesses meant to do? Should they have filled the gap? "Many sectors I have spoken with said they didnt want to derail the process and in good faith trusted our leaders" It was a good question. I felt the answer was no. This mess wasnt created by businesses. Most self-respecting ones try to steer clear of politics and normally get a kicking when they get involved. Many different sectors I have spoken with said they didnt want to derail the process and in good faith trusted our political leaders to sort things out. They diligently waited for news on Brexit from their relevant ministers. And waited Although they were panicking, they didnt want to jump the gun and be accused of scare stories. It always felt too soon for them to raise their head above the parapet. Now, with 16 days to go, they realise its too late as we could crash out. Westminster has been so preoccupied with its own drama that its ignored the looming horror facing our business community. Trust the train to get you on the right track Ive been cursed with bad travel luck this week. On Sunday, I found myself stranded at Dundee airport after a flying visit to the Scottish Labour Party conference. It had been a very late night and I was nursing a raging hangover. Some things in the Labour Party never change. I could tell things werent going well when the pilot tried to turn on the engine and there was this spluttering, wheezing sound, not unlike the one I had made first thing. We were marched on and off the tiny plane twice while some man faffed about with an Allen key and an elastic band. It wasnt looking good. But instead of losing it, I decided to turn adversity into adventure. I jumped on the Caledonian Sleeper at Dundee and headed back to London. It felt daring and exciting like I was on a cross between Take the High Road and the Orient Express so it was imperative that I sat in the drinks carriage people-watching, just in case there was a murder. It was like going back in time. I loved it and was well looked after by the train hosts, Sheena and Graham, who were like a couple running a B&B in the Highlands. After a good nights sleep, I was woken up by the sound of them banging on the door yelling yer breakfasts ready, hen. And suddenly, I was in Euston for 8am. Sometimes disaster can end up being triumph. And sometimes you have to enjoy the journey. *The news that actress Felicity Huffman had been arrested, alongside 50 other people, for allegedly bribing officials at prestigious American colleges to help their children get places is like a plotline from Desperate Housewives, the series which made her famous. Felicity Huffman / Getty Images for EMILY'S List I t is time, at last, to frame the argument honestly. The struggle is no longer between Leave and Remain: the battlelines of the 2016 referendum. It is between Brexit and Stop Brexit: persisting with a globally-humiliating shambles, or calling a halt to the madness. The distinction is not sophistry or word-play. Nearly three years ago, the country was told that it could stay in the European Union, or escape the supposed tyranny of Brussels, whilst retaining all the juiciest benefits of club membership. This was a wholly dishonest offer: but the voters, understandably unimpressed by the wretched Remain campaign and attracted by the promise of restored control over their lives and 350 million extra per week for the NHS, opted for Leave. The consequent pageant of delusion has had a long run: and even now, after last nights second thumping Commons defeat for Theresa Mays withdrawal agreement, there are still those who insist on the possibility of cake-retention-and-consumption. Brussels is now watching what the Westminster class does next, while accelerating EU preparations for a no-deal exit. The statesmanlike response to last nights extraordinary dramas would be for Government and Parliament alike to accept that the referendum result is undeliverable in the form that the Leave campaign promised; to acknowledge that the process has failed utterly; and to ask the electorate whether it shares this view, offering voters the chance to stop the whole damn nonsense in its tracks. The point, please note, is not to ask the public if it has changed its mind: a rerun of 2016. It is to ask if having observed the political fiascos, serial failures and consequent impasse of the past three years it truly wants to keep going with this plan for wilful national self-destruction. Of course, the offer of a public vote is still some way off if indeed if it is ever made. Matthew d'Ancona All the same, what has happened in the past 24 hours is unquestionably momentous. When the Prime Minister announced last night that she would allow a free vote on todays vote against a no-deal outcome, she essentially said to Parliament: all right, if youre all so clever, you sort it out. For once, I felt a bat-squeak of sympathy for the hoarse and exhausted May. The Commons will certainly vote against no-deal, though that will not be the end of the matter. Jacob Rees-Mogg made clear yesterday that he does not regard any motion passed by the House today as superior to the law of the land which does indeed retain a no-deal exit as the UKs default position should a withdrawal agreement not be passed. Lurking beneath this observation, one felt, was the potential for a judicial review demanded by the European Research Group or its surrogates, and the intervention once more of the courts in this parliamentary conflict. "The pageant of delusion has had a long run. There are still those who insist on cake-retention-and-consumption" If the judges were to support Rees-Moggs argument, would they still, I wonder, be classified by Brexiteers as enemies of the people? Just a thought. Meanwhile, the Commons will next be invited to vote for an extension to Article 50. But to what end? As Donald Tusks spokesman said on Tuesday, our 27 EU partners would only consider a reasoned request and would expect a credible justification for a possible extension and its duration. One plan, supported by Rees-Mogg, the Democratic Unionists and former Remainer Nicky Morgan, is to delay the date of departure from March 29 to May 22. This would give the Government time to strike so-called mutual standstill agreements a phrase of wondrous vapidity before a full and final move away from the EU on December 21, 2021. Presented as a cuddly compromise, it is the razor blade of no-deal concealed in cotton wool. Jeremy Corbyn, for his part, continues to market the cut-price unicorn of a Labour Brexit, persuaded, quite mysteriously, that Parliament and the EU long only for the chance to debate his magical answer to the great conundrum. But what might this answer be? On last nights Newsnight, Emily Maitlis represented the nation with her exasperated eye-roll as Barry Gardiner, shadow international trade secretary, declined, with gurning lack of embarrassment, to shed light on the matter. We must all, it seems, trust in Labours manifesto process and in Jeremy. Say Im cynical, but that doesnt quite cut it for me. Simultaneously, there is a gathering head of steam for the so-called Norway for Now option, pressed with conviction and intelligence by Nick Boles, and backed his Conservative colleagues Nicholas Soames and Rob Halfon, and Labours Stephen Kinnock and Lucy Powell. This would park the UK in the European Free Trade Area and European Economic Area, retaining single market access but bolting on a new customs arrangement. This compromise at least bears the mark of civic responsibility and considered patriotism. But I am unpersuaded by the assertions that it would command a majority in the Commons. A similar option was comprehensively rejected by MPs last June. The EU would require a very clear signal from Parliament that it was ready to endorse this plan and instruct the Government to negotiate accordingly. I simply dont see that happening, though it may be necessary for the Commons to consider this and other constitutional configurations before it confronts the need for a public vote. I n the 2016 London mayoral election, we called on the candidates to tackle the urgent public health crisis of toxic air. We wanted to see commitments to cleaning up the citys buses and taxis, and improving and expanding plans for an Ultra Low Emission Zone. We are therefore pleased that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, heard our calls and that in one months time the first stage of the Ulez will be implemented in the centre of the city. Along with new low-emission buses and taxis, the Ulez should start to bring Londons air quality below dangerous levels and into compliance with legal limits. It will plot a course to the cleaner environment that Londoners so clearly deserve. The performance of Londons Ulez, however, will have much wider implications across the country.Environmental standards in the UK are facing uncertainty in a post-Brexit world. Other city leaders are considering similar low-emission zones, while cities across the world face similarly urgent climate, environmental and clean air crises. As so often, all eyes will be on London. James Thornton, ClientEarth John Sauven, Greenpeace Beccy Speight, Woodland Trust Craig Bennett, Friends of the Earth Shaun Spiers, Green Alliance Crispin Truman, Campaign to Protect Rural England Darren Shirley, Campaign for Better Transport EDITOR'S REPLY Dear James, For those questioning what Sadiq Khan will have achieved in his four years as Mayor of London, one of the top answers should come from next month: the Ultra Low Emission Zone. Ulez, as it will be known, hardly trips off the tongue like C-charge. But its implications will be far wider especially if Khan wins next years City Hall election and extends it, as promised, to the North and South Circular Roads by October 2021. This is because suburban drivers of more polluting cars will have no option but to trade them in or face a 12.50 levy every day they move them, even if driving out of town. Conservative mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey opposes the expansion but he hasnt explained how he would otherwise cut emissions and improve Londons toxic air. The question is: which candidate will prevail? The air pollution crisis appears to be an accepted fact to many. The willingness of Londoners to pay financially to improve air quality or not to will indeed determine whether other cities also feel the environmental winds of change. Ross Lydall, City Hall Editor Religion does not breed intolerance AS A fairly religious member of a religion that does not try to convert others, I read Beryl Walls letter with interest [Religions do not respect our rights, March 11]. I find that among those who condemn religion there are just as many who are bigoted and intolerant of alternative views as the worst of the religious folk they condemn. The problem is people religious or not. What a tragedy. Leigh Stuart Brexiteers stoked fear of immigrants Call Me Mr Lucky 11 Southwark St, SE1 1RQ, twitter.com All the hidden bars at the Breakfast Clubs around the capital are popular, with perhaps The Mayor of Scaredy Cat Town being the best known. Call Me Mr Lucky, on Southwark Street, happens to be our favourite. Once youve flirted with the staff ask to get lucky youre taken through the restaurants kitchens to a lively bar decorated like some twisted take on a kids party. Have a go on the wheel of fortune, where youll really want to get lucky, and win a free shot, and then work your way through the cocktail list. Like any good-time bar worth its salt, this place is big on tequila, and the drinks are light-hearted fun, but here we go getting lucky again along with the quirks comes quality. By the of the evening, before youre porured back onto the street, youll swear tequila is your new favourite drink, and youll be singing the party hits they play all the way home. O ne of the most significant events in the UK film calendar takes place this month, with the BFI Flare festival celebrating LGBTQ+ storytelling in movies. BFI Southbank is putting on a host of screenings and special events to mark the occasion, shining a light on an inspiring roster of movies from all around the world. The festival takes place between March 21 31, beginning with a screening of Vita & Virginia and culminating with a spectacular closing night party. From powerful documentaries to moving dramas, these are the must-see films at this year's BFI Flare festival films fans won't want to miss. JT LeRoy Laura Dern and Kristen Stewart star in this big-screen retelling of one of the most audacious literary hoaxes ever staged. Between 1999 and 2005 American writer Laura Albert (Dern) published three novels under the nom de plume JT LeRoy, all purportedly autobiographical stories exploring the life of an abused and sexually confused teenage boy. When JT was invited to appear in public, Albert persuaded her sister-in-law Savannah Knoop (Stewart) to pose as her male alter-ego. Resulting issues of gender identity, ethics and sexual fraud are all examined by director Justin Kelly in this years Flare closing movie. March 31 Mapplethorpe Matt Smith makes a bold move from the gilded world of The Crown to play controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in director Ondi Timoners new biopic. The film charts Mapplethorpes rise from penniless Sixties student and boyfriend of Patti Smith (Marianne Rendon), to gay art-world star, whose explicit and overtly homoerotic photographs shocked conservative America in the Eighties. Early reports say the film has none of the coyness of Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, so expect plenty of X-rated action, as well as harrowing depictions of Mapplethorpes decline and death from an Aids-related illness in 1989. March 29 and 30 Jose Among this years international films about the queer experience (stories from Slovenia, Brazil, Argentina, Kenya and Israel all feature) is Jose, the tale of a 19-year-old gay man struggling to get by in Guatemala City. Jose (Enrique Salanic) works at a roadside cafe and leads a promiscuous sex life despite the constraints of living in a deeply religious and prejudiced society. Then he meets Luis (Manolo Herrera), a construction worker, and thinks he may have fallen in love. Director Li Chengs tender drama won him the Queer Lion at the 2018 Venice Film Festival. March 23 and 24 Making Montgomery Clift Two major biographies have portrayed Hollywood icon Montgomery Clift as a self-hating homosexual who destroyed himself with drink and drugs, dying in 1966 aged just 45. This new documentary, made by his nephew Robert Clift, uses remarkable family footage and audio tapes in an attempt to redefine him as a confident gay man, happy with his life and work. The result is not entirely convincing, but the Super 8 clips of a young Monty frolicking in the sea, together with recordings of his phone conversations with his brother, are a revelation. March 27 and 29 TransMilitary This eye-opening documentary follows the lives of four trans people in the US military in the run-up to Barack Obamas 2016 repeal of the ban on transgender troops. Among the subjects are Sergeant Logan Ireland, a trans man on duty in Afghanistan, and Captain Jennifer Peace, a trans woman who excels at her role in intelligence. Their touching stories and their commitment to their jobs make Donald Trumps 2017 decision to impose a new ban seem all the more shortsighted and unjust. March 27 and 30 The Way Things Are Flares short film strands give you a chance to see a diverse mix of works by emerging makers in one sitting. The Way Things Are, for example, features 10 films (each four to 20 minutes long) with titles including Listen (directed by Jake Graf), a documentary in which trans children discuss their lives, and Ladies Day, written and directed by Abena Taylor-Smith, about a young gay black woman dealing with homophobia at a Sheffield hair salon. March 31 V ita Sackville-Wests role as muse for the gender-swapping hero of Virginia Woolfs 1928 novel Orlando has never been a secret. The book was dedicated to Vita, and the trailblazing story of the handsome young aristocrat who wakes up one day to find himself in need of new pronouns (in future we must for conventions sake say her for his, and she for he) featured photos of her posing in period costumes. But rarely has the real-life love affair that inspired the book been explored so vividly as in Vita & Virginia, the opening movie at this years BFI Flare: London LGBTQ+ Film Festival. Chanya Buttons film, based on a 1992 play by Eileen Atkins, covers the period between 1922, when the women first met, and the publication of Orlando, which in Buttons interpretation marks the end of their physical relationship. Sackville-West (a gamine Gemma Arterton) is portrayed as a bobbed and scarlet-lipped seductress, while Woolf (a statuesque Elizabeth Debicki) is the frigid and mentally fragile beauty who succumbs to her charms. The setting has all the usual Bloomsbury tropes but the soundtrack (by Isobel Waller-Bridge, sister of Phoebe) is pumping electronica, which brings a postmodern edginess to proceedings. Button, 32, says she was drawn to the story through her love of Woolfs work, and her desire to shed light on a different side of the writers life. Role play: Elizabeth Debicki as Virginia Woolf and Gemma Arterton as Vita Sackville-West This is her sexual relationship with another woman, and Button isnt coy about showing Woolfs ecstasy when she and Vita make love for the first time. Our interpretation of the character is that she hadnt felt that pure, uncomplicated, very physical, totally non-intellectualised pleasure before and that was a profound moment of growth for her. For anybody interested in the original sources for these scenes, Button points to the letter Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell, in which she distilled experiences of that night, including the pearls Vita was wearing. There is also the apologetic letter Vita wrote to her husband, Harold Nicolson, in which she said of Woolf: I have gone to bed with her (twice) but thats all. Vita was a troublesome lover (Nicolson memorably described her as like a jellyfish addicted to cocaine during her affair with Violet Trefusis), and she betrayed Virginia with other women. The film shows the toll this took on Woolfs mental state but also the remarkable way that she channelled her feelings for Vita into Orlando. The novel stood as both a tribute and a form of resolution. From our sexually liberated, anything-goes age, the story of two privileged married women conducting an affair might seem fantastically archaic. But Button thinks there are still things to be learned from it. These are two women who bent the institution of marriage to their will, she says. They didnt burn the house down they made it work for them. Theyre rebellious and revolutionary and very, very clever. The story is interesting about how we can evolve institutions that we have previously found oppressive. Thats why I made the film and why Im excited for it to be at Flare because this kind of openness and fluidity is something were still having conversations about now. Vita & Virginia is at the BFI Southbank, SE1 (020 7928 3232; bfi.org.uk), March 21 and 22, and on general release from July 12. W hile the UKs festival scene is one of the strongest in the world, it's certainly not the cheapest. This years basic Glastonbury tickets come in at 248, and the likes of Reading and Leeds, Boomtown and Latitude are all charging over 200 a pop and thats before fans have even bought tents, wellies and a snazzy waterproof poncho to enjoy them with. Being priced out of the major festivals this summer doesnt have to mean forgoing a fantastic summer of live music. There are plenty of affordable options across the UK, meaning fans have the chance to enjoy the festival experience for less this year. Our picks are below make sure to check out our guide to how to get into festivals for free, too. Brixton Disco Festival Date: April 27 What is it? A celebration of four decades of disco in the heart of south London, with live music DJs, rooftop events and even a roller disco. Evelyn Champagne King, Greg Wilson and Francois K are set to bring the party at the event, while Horse Meat Disco headline. Where is it? Across Brixton Tickets: from 25 for all-day passes, brixtondiscofestival.com The Masked Ball Dates: May 3-4 What is it? A quirky, handcrafted party, taking place by the beach on the sunny Cornwall cast. The immersive event mixes theatricality with live music and DJs bring your face paint and your glitter for this one. Where is it? Beacon Crag, Cornwall Tickets: from 79.95 for weekend passes, maskedball.net Liverpool Sound City Dates: May 3-5 What is it? An independent festival, which places the emphasis firmly on championing bright young talent in the music industry. This summer features performances from the likes of Mabel and Loyle Carner. Where is it? Various venues, Baltic Triangle, Liverpool Tickets: from 39.50 for weekend passes, soundcity.uk.com The Great Escape Dates: May 9-11 What is it? Brightons finest festival, celebrating up and coming artists and the most exciting names breaking through in 2019. Lewis Capaldi, Body Type, Dayo Bello and Fuzzy Sun are all set to perform on the beach-side event this year. Where is it? Across Brighton Tickets: from 70 for three-day passes, greatescapefestival.com We Are FSTVL Brad Barket/Getty Images for Republic Records Dates: May 24-26 What is it? An Essex favourite, and one of the best events for house music anywhere in the UK. The likes of Andy C and Armand Van Helden take the stage at the Upminster festival this May. Where is it? Upminster, RM14 2TN Tickets: from 65.50 for day passes, wearefstvl.com All Points East Dates: May 24-June 2 What is it? The best new festival to arrive in London for years, All Points East is bringing some of the most exciting acts in the worlds of rock, pop and EDM to east London this year. The Chemical Brothers, Christine and the Queens, The Strokes and Bon Iver all perform over two weekends. Where is it? Victoria Park, E3 5TB Tickets: from 59.95 for day tickets, allpointseastfestival.com Love Saves The Day Matt Cowan/Getty Images Dates: May 25-26 What is it? Its strictly good vibes only at this Bristol festival, which focuses on pop and dance. Lily Allen, IAMDDB, Chase & Status and Ray BLK are the big names at this fun event in 2019. Where is it? Eastville Park, Bristol Tickets: from 65 for weekend tickets, lovesavestheday.org Gala Date: May 26 What is it? A dreamland for disco and house fans in south east London, welcoming some of the best DJs in the UK and from around the world to Peckham Rye Park. Honey Dijon, Midland, Sassy J and Horse Meat Disco all spin their stuff this summer. Where is it? Peckham Rye Park, SE15 3UA Jam on Rye Ross Silcocks Date: May 27 What is it? Peckham Rye Park is transformed for this great one-day festival, which celebrates live music and fantastic street food. Kelis and Jazzie B are among the performers on the day. Where is it? Peckham Rye Park, SE15 3UA The Ends Festival Dates: May 31-June 2 What is it? Nas, Wizkid and Damian Marley top the bill at this brand spanking new festival in Croydon. Expect lots of great music with a particular focus on street food. Where is it? Lloyd Park, Croydon, CR0 5RA Tickets: from 50 for day tickets, theendsfestival.co.uk Junction 2 Sam Neill Dates: June 7-8 What is it? A feast of hard-hitting techno from the very best DJs on the scene, playing beneath the M40 motorway bridge in west London. Expect performances from Bicep, Adam Beyer, Daniel Avery, Apollonia and Daphni. Where is it? Boston Manor Park, TW8 9JU Tickets: from 47.50 for day tickets, junction2.london Community Date: June 30 What is it? A gathering of Londons indie fans, welcoming the likes of the Kooks, Blossoms, Don Droco and Kate Nash to Finsbury Park the week before Wireless festival. Where is it? Finsbury Park, N4 Field Day Dates: June 7-8 What is it? One of the most admired London festivals for years, Field Day moves to a new north London site in 2019. Expect a typically eclectic and diverse line-up this summer, with Skepta, Jorja Smith, Diplo and Jungle all performing. Where is it? Meridian Water, N18 Tickets: from 67.50 for weekend passes, fielddayfestivals.com Lovebox Dates: July 12-13 What is it? One of the big players in Londons festival scene, welcoming some of the worlds biggest rap and pop acts. Chance the Rapper and Solange headline the two days of the festival in 2019. Where is it? Gunnersbury Park, W3 8LQ Tickets: from 49.50 for day tickets and 99 for weekend passes, loveboxfestival.com The best 2019 dance music festivals in the UK and Europe 1 /28 The best 2019 dance music festivals in the UK and Europe Re-Textured (March 28-31) Forward-thinking electronic music meets London's Brutalist and Modernist landmarks for a brand new festival, organised by Krankbrother. George Rex Brixton Disco Festival (April 27) Disco, disco and you guessed it more disco, all taking place across various venues in Brixton. We Are FSTVL (May 24-26) Can't make it South West Four this year? We Are FSTVL is a more than worthy alternative, with a line-up packed to the brim with hard-hitting DJs. Brad Barket/Getty Images for Republic Records Gala (May 26) A gathering of some of the best house and techno DJs around, all playing within a laidback, free-flowing environment. UNUM (May 31-June 3) A brand new beachside festival, proving that Albania might just be the next location of choice for dance music holidaymakers. Ricardo Villalobos is one of the biggest names on the line-up. Getty Images for Prada Gottwood (June 6-9) Celebrating its 10th year in 2019, Gottwood is a hedonistic retreat in the lush woodland of north Wales. It consistently pulls in the very best DJs around. Jake Davis for Here & Now Junction 2 (June 7-8) One for the techno obsessives, this festival brings together the finest DJs on the scene, based beneath the M40 motorway bridge in west London. Sam Neill Kala (June 12-19) It made a big splash when it landed on the Albanian Riviera last summer, and this time round the beachside festival is receiving a fair bit of hype. Getty Images for Panorama Hideout (July 1-5) One of the most popular festivals on the vibrant Croatian festival scene, promising plenty of beachside bangers. Hannah wants is among the headliners this year. Getty Images for Coachella Love International (July 3-10) Expect plenty of boat parties and sunrise DJ sets at this festival based within the idyllic settings of the Croatian coastline. Ray-Ban via Getty Images Hospitality on the Beach (July 11-15) The sunnier sibling of London festival Hospitality in the Park, this festival always draws a huge number of drum'n'bass fanatics across to Croatia. Getty Images for Coachella Tomorrowland (July 19-21, 26-28) One of the best known dance music events on the entire continent, this is something of a Mecca for EDM fans. Expect big names and bombastic stage production across two weekends. AFP/Getty Images Dekmantel (July 31-August 4) Always one of the shining highlights of the summer calendar, this Amsterdam festival is renowned for bringing together the finest selectors for a hedonistic few days. Getty Images 51st State (August 3) Dance music heroes from all musical backgrounds converge on north London for a gloriously eclectic day of boogying. Eastern Electrics (August 3-4) A line-up that is absolutely heaving with talent, from the DJs who have been plying their trade for decades to those who are on course to be the next big things. Getty Images for STUDIOCANAL Houghton (August 8-11) With a 24-hour license and a sprawling line-up, Houghton burst onto the festival back in 2017 and is already a classic. Jake Davis/Hungry Visuals Art's House (August 10) The formula is simple: one day, two DJs and lots of great music. It's all organised by the loveable party-starter Artwork. South West Four (August 24-25) The biggest dance music festival in London by quite some way, both in terms of its sheer scale and the artists it books. It's an August bank holiday staple. Luke Dyson Dimensions (August 28-September 1) ancy a rave-up in a 19th century fort? Of course you do. See a collection of cutting-edge DJs and musicians at this festival. Getty Images for Prada Hospitality in the Park (date TBA) A showcase of the very best in drum'n'bass. It's hosted by one the genre's most iconic labels, Hospital Records, whose Hospitality events travel the world. Jake Davis Southport Weekender (date TBA) A hugely popular, long-running dance party which made a triumphant comeback in 2018. Josh Hiatt for Here and Now Strawberries & Creem Date: June 15 What is it? Cambridges biggest celebration of hip-hop, r&b, grime and UK rap, as well as one of the UKs most impressive young festivals, having only started back in 2014. Stefflon Don, Ms Dynamite and Sean Kingston all perform in 2019. Where is it? Haggis Farm, Cambridge Truck Dates: July 26-28 What is it? The indie crowd flock here in their thousands to enjoy a great mix of established and up-and-coming-talent. Foals, Wolf Alice, Two Door Cinema Club and Slaves will all entertain the crowds at the idyllic Oxfordshire site this year. Where is it? Hill Farm, Oxfordshire Tickets: for 105 for weekend passes, truckfestival.com 51st State Date: August 3 What is it? A house lovers dream, welcoming some of the most influential contemporary DJs for a day of partying in north London. 2019 will see the likes of Louie Vega, David Morales, and Dimitri from Paris perform. Where is it? Trent Park, EN4 0PS Eastern Electrics Dates: August 3-4 What is it? MK, Orbital and Goldie are among the huge dance acts playing at Eastern Electrics this year a festival that champions legends and up-and-coming-acts alike in south London. Where is it? Morden Park, SM4 5JD Tickets: from 45 for weekend tickets, easternelectrics.com Arts House Date: August 10 What is it? One of the more charming events taking place across the UK this year, Arts House is organised by DJ Artwork. Its just him and DJ Harvey on the lineup at this lovely, low-key party in east London. Where is it? Three Mills Island, E3 3DU Victorious Festival Dates: August 23-25 What is it? One of the biggest events on the south coast, welcoming pop and rock acts like The Specials, James Bay, Clean Bandit, The Vaccines, Rudimental, Two Door Cinema Club and Bloc Party. Where is it? Southsea, Portsmouth Tickets: From 95 for weekend tickets, victoriousfestival.co.uk South West Four Luke Dyson Dates: August 24-25 What is it? London's biggest dance event, taking place at Clapham Common and marking one of the most significant weekends in the clubbers' diary. Chase and Status, Craig David, Mabel, Basement Jaxx, Andy C, Armand Van Helden, Martin Garrix, Plan B, Sigma, Tinie Tempah and Wiley perform in 2019. Where is it? Clapham Common, SW4 9DE Tickets: from 99 for weekend tickets, southwestfour.com Maiden Voyage Dates: August 25 What is it? A brand new London festival for 2019, organised by the Jazz Cafe and welcoming a suitably diverse and eclectic line-up of DJs and live acts, including the legendary Roy Ayers and Madlib. Where is it? Three Mills Island, E3 B ritish artist Adrian Wilson has sold the worlds most expensive skateboard on eBay for $20,000. He calls the board Supreme Mundi and it is made from a round artists palette which has the pillar box red Supreme logo emblazoned on the bottom. Its a fake, of course, and thats the point. This isn't just a usable novelty skateboard, says Wilson in his artist statement. This is a commentary on the 500 year wide artistic and financial hypebubble we are in right now. Supreme Mundi was inspired by the sale of Leonardo da Vincis Salvator Mundi in 2017 for $450 million and Sotheby's Supreme sale of a collection of skateboard decks to Canadian teenager Carson Guo for $800,000. "It seemed a perfect combination of two record sales of dubious artwork to roll them into one statement about art and, let's be honest, hyped up names," says Wilson. The board is fully functional and was ridden by skateboarders in the New York's Lower East Side before going on display at the public Con Artist Collective during the ten-day eBay sale. The board dropped, as the Supreme aficionados call it, on eBay on Monday morning and was bought by Jon Satin, a former gallery owner on behalf of a private client. Satin promised to blow (Wilsons) mind with a photo of the board next to the collectors famous artworks once it is installed. A police officer who tackled a gunman threatening staff at a London hospital has won a bravery award voted for by Londoners. PC Stevie Bull, 28, who confronted the suspect at University College Hospital in March last year was praised as courageous, selfless and brave at the Mets Excellence Awards. Pc Bull suffered a head injury after being thrown against a wall by the gunman, before managing to handcuff and arrest him. The gun was later found to be a starter pistol, though she did not know it at the time. Met Police commissioner Cressida Dick with PC Stevie Bull / Met Police Pc Bull, now a sergeant at Hackney, said: I just went for him. You just do not think about it, you deal with what is in front of you, that is what we are trained to do. She said : I did not see the firearm until I walked around and saw him pointing it at a nurse. I also clocked there was a giant suitcase next to him and there were various things running through my head because of the terrorist threat. She went on: We rolled around on the floor and he smashed me against the wall but then security came to help and I managed to get him in handcuffs and get the gun away. It is very touching that that the public have voted for me but there are many others doing things like this all the time. Other officers who were honoured at the Mets annual awards included the CCTV investigation team which tracked the suspects in the Salisbury nerve agent poisoning and who also reviewed footage following the Parsons Green bombing which led to the arrest of Ahmed Hassan. A Counter Terrorism Command team involved in an operation to foil a plot to kill Theresa May in Downing Street won the award for Investigators of the Year. College drop-out Naaimur Rahman, 20, was jailed for 30 years at the Old Bailey last year after he was trapped in a major surveillance operation in which an undercover officer supplied the suspect with a fake suicide vest. Scotland Yard said the operation was a first for counter terrorism policing in which a suspect was allowed to conduct reconnaissance on a target and then receive apparent explosive devices. The police mortuary team that identified victims of the Grenfell fire and helped families view their loved ones remains were honoured with a victim care award. The Police Officer of the Year award went to Detective Sergeant Arpan Vyas who helped set up the Violent Crime Task Force. There were also awards to members of the public who volunteer for the Met. Lorin LaFave, whose 14-year-old son Breck Bednar was murdered in 2014 by a paedophile he met gaming online, won volunteer of the year for her work in protecting children from online predators. T here people were stabbed when violence erupted at a US rappers concert in Brixton. Police and paramedics were called when three men in their twenties suffered knife wounds at a gig by Californian rising star Roddy Ricch at the Electric Brixton last night. They were taken to hospital before all were released after treatment. The violence erupted at the end of the set by Ricch, whose songs include Die Young and Area Codes. Video footage showed onlookers screaming and crowds fleeing the venue, and a man with blood pouring from his arm after apparently being slashed. A man told the Standard: I received a call from my daughter screaming and crying saying people have been stabbed. When I arrived there were police cars everywhere. I found my daughter, she could not stop crying, she was clearly in shock. She had seen two boys with stab wounds. A spokesman for the venue said: Electric Brixton has never experienced an incident like this in its history because we pride ourselves on our stringent and rigorous security procedures. The safety of our guests is paramount and as such, wand searches and body searches are used by security personnel before entry; these processes are in accordance with police guidelines. We will work with the authorities to examine what happened and if new measures need to be put in place. Scotland Yard said police were called at 10.30pm, adding: It is believed that a fight broke out in the venue during which three males are believed to have been stabbed. There have been no arrests. A 47-year-old woman in Florida shot her boyfriend in the armpit because he had allegedly been snoring too loudly. Lorie Morin, of Cocoa, is accused of firing a shotgun at her boyfriend, named by police as Brett Allgood, at their mobile home on Emerald Lake Drive in Brevard County, Florida. She was arrested on charges of attempted murder and aggravated battery, Brevard County Sheriffs Office said. Footage showed the victim being airlifted away from the scene on a stretcher after police were called around 10.20pm on Wednesday, March 6. Florida woman shot boyfriend for snoring too loudly Initial statements from both Morin and her boyfriend suggested the shooting was an accident, according to Brevard County officers. However, the ongoing investigation determined that the incident occurred because the man was snoring loudly. Police say the domestic altercation escalated before Morin retrieved the gun and shot her boyfriend with it. The couples neighbour, Samantha Bobier told ABC7: Ive talked to her a couple times and shes always been really nice, and so the news is kind of shocking on it, honestly. To hear that it was over him snoring is kind of shocking. Neighbour Robert Mason added: Its so stupid, so bizarre that I cant imagine that kind of behaviour. Brevard County Police said in a statement: Both parties had been drinking prior to and during the argument. A police cordon at the scene in Orlando / Click Orlando/News 6 They added: The investigation determined that an argument ensued between the two over a male snoring loudly." The dispute allegedly escalated to a point where Morin retrieved and fired a shotgun striking the victim." Court documents show the boyfriend had brought nasal strips with him that night to help his loud snoring, according to CTV News. The victim was taken to a local hospital and recent reports state he was in a stable condition, recovering from his injuries. A teenager is fighting for his life in hospital after he was attacked and stabbed outside a Tube station in east London. Leyton station was closed after the attack, which took place on Wednesday lunchtime. A heavy police presence was in place on Station Road, which was cordoned off. A Met Police spokesman said: "Police were called by LAS at 12.45pm on Wednesday, 13 March to Station Road, outside Leyton Station, following reports of a stabbing. The stabbing happened on Wednesday lunchtime at the east London tube station / Google Maps A male, aged 17, was discovered suffering from stab injuries. He has been taken to hospital by LAS; at this stage his injuries are being treated as life-threatening. Police are working to establish the circumstances. There have been no arrests. A London Ambulance Service spokesperson said: "We were called at 12:40pm this afternoon (13 March) to reports of an incident at Leyton Underground Station, E10. "We sent an ambulance crew, a medic in a response car and an incident response officer to the scene. We also dispatched London's Air Ambulance. "We treated a person at the scene and took them to hospital as a priority by road." London Knife Crime Victims 1 /13 London Knife Crime Victims Ayub Hassan Jodie Chesney Metropolitan Police David Martinez Metropolitan Police Che Morrison Kamali Gabbidon-Lynck Metropolitan Police Glendon Spence Metropolitan Police Dennis Anderson Metropolitan Police Bright Akinlele Metropolitan Police Lejean Richards PA Nedim Bilgin Jaden Moodie Metropolitan Police Charlotte Huggins Metropolitan Police Tudor Simionov Metropolitan Police The latest stabbing comes amid a spate of knife killings in the capital. There were eight murders in ten days earlier this month, with 20-year-old Florin Pitic murdered at Queensbury Tube station in the early hours of Sunday. An Ofsted report published on Tuesday found some headteachers in London were failing to alert police when pupils carry knives in school despite it being a criminal offence. A pharmaceutical consultant walked free from court after being cleared of raping a woman at his flat after a party. Rowan Nidd, 42, was accused of attacking the woman after she had drunk 12 glasses of Prosecco and gone with him in a taxi to his Islington home in December 2015. She claimed to have woken up to find Mr Nidd on top of her, but he told Harrow crown court the woman had been pursuing him and he rejected her advances. Mr Nidd, a University of Edinburgh graduate from St Albans, was unanimously found not guilty by a jury of rape, attempted rape, sexual assault and assault by penetration. S hameless star Tina Malone has been spared a spell in prison after she tearfully told the High Court she is extremely sorry for revealing the identity of James Bulgers killer. The 56-year-old actress admitted being in Contempt of Court when she posted the message on Facebook last February, breaking a court injunction protecting killer Jon Venables new identity. Before deleting the post, she told a reporter: You dont deserve a second chance how do we not get rid of these people and wipe them from the Earth? Im a devout Catholic, but the Bible says an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Ms Malone broke down in tears as she told the court today: I didnt know what I was doing was illegal had I known I wouldnt have done it. Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett sentenced the sobbing star to an eight-month prison term suspended for two years, saying she had candidly accepted in evidence that she appreciated anonymity given to protect Thompson and Venables from the public, to stop them being hounded, attacked, and run out of town. James Bulger was abducted and killed in Merseyside / PA Archive/PA Images He said: The risks against which the original injunction sought to give protection have, if anything, intensified as a result of todays social media. The judge pointed out that one man wrongly identified as Venables had in the past been subjected to abuse and forced to move house as a consequence. He added: It is sometimes not appreciated just how pernicious a breach can be, not only for the direct beneficiary of the order but for anyone who mistakenly gets swept up. But he agreed not to send Malone straight to prison after hearing about her personal circumstances and mitigation. The court heard Malone is the primary carer for her young daughter, she was diagnosed as bi-polar at the age of 28, and had suffered a mental breakdown just before the offending post was made. She said in a statement: Im extremely sorry for any distress I have caused I know now that what I did was wrong. She insisted she believed anything already on the Internet could be shared publicly, and said her words to the journalist were stupid, naive, and flippant. I am a devout Catholic, I believe in justice but I dont believe in inciting violence in any way, shape, or form on anyone, she said. Ms Malone, an ambassador of The James Bulger Memorial Trust, deleted the Facebook post once she realised it was in breach of an injunction. She initially fought the Contempt proceedings, but accepted in her evidence that she had known about the injunction and its purpose. She then accepted that she was guilty of contempt. Venables and co-accused Robert Thompson served eight years behind bars for the murder of two-year-old James Bulger, and a worldwide High Court injunction issued on their release bans any publication of their current identities or whereabouts. Anyone who breaks the injunction can face up to two years in prison for contempt of court. A third man has been charged in connection with the murder of 17-year-old Jodie Chesney, who was stabbed to death while listening to music with friends in a park in east London. Svenson Ong-a-kwie, 18, from Romford, was arrested on 10 March on suspicion of murder, police said. He was charged with murder today and will appear in custody at Barkingside Magistrates Court on Thursday, March 14. A 16-year-old teenager and man, 20, have also been charged with murder. Manuel Petrovic, 20, from Romford and the teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, will appear for trial at the Old Bailey in September. Another three people - a 50-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman, both from Dagenham, and a 17-year-old boy who were arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender have all been released under investigation. T he new head of the London NHS has vowed to crack down on gas-guzzling ambulances under a plan to reduce the number of people being driven to outpatient appointments. Sir David Sloman said patients being ferried to hospital by car or ambulance for non-emergency care accounted for one in 20 road journeys in the UK. He told a conference of London GPs he wanted to cut the 22.7 million outpatient appointments in London by 30 per cent in 10 years by using online and video consultations. This would be done alongside efforts to reduce toxic emissions, with NHS ambulances moving away from diesel over the course of the next two years. The London Ambulance Service, Met police and London Fire Brigade have been given an exemption until October 2021 from complying with Mayor Sadiq Khans ultra low emission zone, which launches in central London on April 8. LAS ambulances are used for emergency calls, with private ambulance firms contracted to transport patients to appointments. The service has about 450 ambulances. It received 140 new vehicles in 2017-18 which meet the Mayors new pollution targets and will be used in the Ulez. LAS has also begun using electric cars but electric ambulances remain some years away. Sir David set out a vision for making London the healthiest global city in the world and the best city to receive healthcare if you are unwell. He was on a recent trip to Bangkok when schools closed because the air quality was bad. We are not there, he said. But we are not in the right place. His goal is to increase how long people live free from physical or mental health disability and to reduce health inequalities, he told the Londonwide LMCs conference yesterday. Sir David told the Standard afterwards: To be fair to London Ambulance Service, they have a plan for how theyre going to move to eco-friendly ambulances. The reality is that there is a lot of traffic on Londons roads taking people to access their healthcare. A student who became a symbol of womens struggle for justice in Pakistan after being stabbed by her ex-boyfriend is to go into human rights law after graduating from a London university. Khadija Siddiqi, 24, was left fighting for her life after being ambushed and knifed 23 times as she collected her six-year-old sister from school. She suffered wounds to her throat, abdomen and arms in the attack by Shah Hussain, 24, in Lahore in May 2016. Ms Siddiqi, who was 21 and studying remotely for a law degree at the University of London at the time, finished her studies last summer. Today she told of her pride after graduating with a 2:1 in a ceremony held at the Barbican Centre on Tuesday. Its been such a long and tiring journey, but I finally have my degree. I feel great, she said. I want to pursue human rights and criminal law. Thats what Ive been struggling for over the past three years and its made me adamant and motivated to go into this field. The attack gave me the direction to lead and become a voice for others. Im hoping I can go to Cambridge for my masters in criminal and human rights law. Hussain was convicted of attempted murder in 2017 and jailed for seven years. But his conviction was quashed last year. Ms Siddiqi launched a social media campaign with hashtags #Justice forKhadija and #FightLikeKhadija. In January, the Pakistan Supreme Court overturned the acquittal, after the case prompted a debate on violence against women. Hussain was jailed for five years. Ms Siddiqi, who now lives in Islington, said getting her degree was an amalgamation of grief, studying, going to the courts I think it shows you can fight for yourself and achieve what you aim for. A measure of how square Sir Oliver Letwin was as a Cambridge undergraduate is this: Charles Moore, who went on to edit the Daily Telegraph and write Margaret Thatchers three-volume biography, found it amusing to spike his pipe with cannabis. He did. Letwin confirms, bushy brows lifting. Him and other friends. They singled him out because Im very prudish about these things and never had anything to do with drugs in my life. And they knew that. He supposes they wanted to discover what would happen to me. One can only imagine the gang gathered in Trinity College, waiting with sniggering anticipation for the effects of the prank on their cerebral friend. But I didnt inhale the pipe, says Letwin, so nothing happened to me whatsoever. Except that he was very cross and in later life had to confess the whole episode to the chief whip. Today, the accidental rebel is explaining why he is deliberately rebelling against the Government after a long and loyal political career (he worked for Margaret Thatcher, Iain Duncan Smith and David Cameron). Sir Oliver Letwin worked for Margaret Thatcher / Rex Features He now heads the rebel alliance, as its dubbed, a cross-party coalition of backbenchers including his Conservative colleague Nick Boles, Labours Yvette Cooper, Stephen Kinnock and Lucy Powell who want to seize control of the Brexit process to prevent what they see as the catastrophe of no deal. Its rebellious because their aim is to usurp the Government and force Theresa May to find a consensus for a Brexit deal. The option most likely to get a cross-party majority, he argues, is Norway plus (which he explained to Jeremy Corbyn last week in a very sensible, perfectly polite, perfectly friendly meeting at Labours office in Old Scotland Yard: We had beverages. Cant swear to biscuits.) He says Norway is an option following the defeat last night of the Prime Ministers deal which he voted for. Im optimistic that we will get to an agreement of a majority [of MPs] on some sensible deal that secures our prosperity and security and that can lead to our leaving by the summer. Tomorrow he, Boles and Cooper are planning to put down a motion that, if passed, would allow all backbench MPs to set the agenda on a day of debate next week. The purpose is to show that MPs can coalesce around a version of Brexit. The rebel alliance hopes the Government will co-operate, but if it doesnt, they will set the agenda themselves. It is said that the first rule of politics is knowing how to count, and Letwin can certainly count, says a former colleague. Hes also a formidable negotiator, strategist and peacekeeper, holding together the David Cameron- Nick Clegg coalition between 2010 and 2015. Cameron so admired him, colleagues say, that on complicated matters he would routinely say: Lets get Oliver in to explain. Sir Oliver Letwin pictured with former Prime Minister David Cameron / Alan Davidson In his office in Portcullis House shelves are stacked double-deep with books: Karl Marxs Das Kapital, the collected works of Hegel; Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Loeb classics, as well as a photograph of Margaret Thatcher (backlit, her hair a glowing halo). We were warned he would give full answers someone described popping into his office as like going to an Oxford University seminar but hes also incredibly polite like Michael Gove, without the red wine. He looks like a Georgian duke noble, with his hair in static flight except hes wearing a button-down shirt and fat red tie. His own view of his role is as a sort of political marriage guidance counsellor, because he seeks common ground among MPs very much like what people are told in relationship counselling. He advocates honesty (when people dont admit to their real views, resentments start boiling up) and persuades colleagues to focus on achieving something rather than everything. Its important in any relationship, political or personal, to be able to say to the [other] person, This is my view and thats yours. Now let me explain what it is that really matters to me about mine, and you explain what really matters about yours, and we may be able to get to a solution that gives each of us what we really most care about. This role wouldnt have been needed if May had adopted a more collaborative approach at the outset, and he cites Leo Varadkars approach in Ireland as superior to the way in which we went about handling it here. Why? He locked in at a very early stage a complete agreement between all parties in the Dail. He got to the point where there was a unified Irish view thats given him an enormous strength. I think even in July 2016 it wouldve been wise in retrospect to have sought a cross-party method of proceeding on this matter. TODO: define component type apester He doesnt blame May personally but says we have an adversarial system we dont meet in a round chamber we meet across the chamber. This is a disadvantage when it comes to Brexit because its not just a normal piece of legislation and shouldnt be treated as business as usual with a dialectic across the chamber. He does blame May for the other biggest problem today the establishment from a very early stage of certain red lines, which have ruled out things like a customs arrangement. Its critical to change the red line stumbling blocks, he says, and appears baffled that they were introduced at all. I dont think its a good idea in general when you are negotiating something very complicated to box yourself in excessively at the beginning. Of course you will have objectives, but you need flexibility if you are going to get to solutions. While Letwin is an obvious brain, he is an unlikely front man for the rebel alliance. Hes an anomaly in politics, says a colleague: He doesnt have the ability to be Machiavellian. And he tends to say things that are true, but not necessarily what a politician would say. For instance he admits endearingly to being a terrible cry-baby explaining that he is frequently moved to tears by music, literature, film and sometimes sunsets. What about Brexit? Oh no, no, no. Not political things. Certainly he is unworldly, which may explain his endless gaffes. I am subject to mishaps. I dont know why. Among them: throwing away Gov-ernment correspondence in the public bins in St Jamess Park where he went on bracing mornings to work and letting a stranger into his house at 5am, who turned out to be a robber. It was something many other people wouldve done, Letwin believes. But most people dont get visitations at that time in the morning. He was up having a bath before an early morning flight. A car outside was waiting to take him to the airport. The doorbell rang and this person who had his hands full of car grease because hed broken down, said hed talked to my driver and could I let them wash their hands and I said, Sure. What would you do? The amusement for the whole incident was, he concedes, derived in part because I was shadow home secretary and [also] wearing a bath towel. But what does one do when one is called out of the bath by someone ringing on the doorbell? He gave chase after taking the wise precaution of putting on a dressing gown. The chap then gave me back my credit cards. His wifes jewellery wasnt returned (very annoying). She is Isabel Davidson, a lawyer and senior civil servant and the most tolerant women in the whole world, which is why he has never been to marriage guidance counselling but I would happily go if I needed to. He remarks that their house is a great deal more peaceful than my parents ever was. His parents were Jewish American academics: William Letwin, emeritus professor at the London School of Economics, and Shirley Robin Letwin, the radical Conservative thinker and writer, who was close to Thatcher and taught at the LSE and Cambridge. He describes his mother as fiery. How did that affect him? I do know that I am a lover of peace. I think peace is more constructive and happier for everyone, almost always, at every level. Whether that has anything to do with my mother, how do I know? You need levels of introspection that I dont have. But while he talks about politics its in long gusty sentences that blow into paragraphs, on childhood hes clipped. Home was a ferment at all times of discussion and argument. The whole time. Non-stop. Marvellous. Great fun. He says he was a terrible coward. Afraid of heights. Lions. Spiders. You name it; Im full of fears. What was it like being a Jewish kid at Eton? It was weird but wonderful. I loved it. At university he grew a big red beard, smoked his pipe and earned the nickname Oliver Left-wing. He muses: I suppose there are people who think of me that way now. B oris Johnson today insisted he was making a valid point when he compared crossing the Irish border to moving between two London boroughs. He was accused of stupefying ignorance of the Troubles between 1968 and 1998 which cost more than 3,000 lives. But on an LBC phone-in show with Nick Ferrari on Wednesday, the former foreign secretary stood by his comments and drew on his experience chairing Transport for London (TfL) when he was Mayor of London. Boris Johnson defended his comparison of the Irish border to that of Islington and Camden / LBC A caller named Will asked why someone who is tipped as a future Prime Minister could not know the difference between the two sets of borders. He called on Mr Johnson to apologise to the people of Northern Ireland for trivialising a situation that cost hundreds of lives. Mr Johnson replied: I dont think anybody could conceivably want to trivialise or minimise the symbolic importance of that border. I have been there several times in my journalistic career. I have stood there. Boris Johnson attends Conservative Party Conference 1 /21 Boris Johnson attends Conservative Party Conference Johnsons' selife: Rachel Johnson and Stanley Johnson at the speech today PA Boris delivered a barnstorming speech to the Tory conference PA He labelled the PM's Chequers plans 'a cheat' Jeremy Selwyn He said: "I am afraid we will make it more likely that the ultimate beneficiary of the Chequers deal will be the far-Right in the form of Ukip. Jeremy Selwyn Mr Johnson timed his arrival in Birmingham to coincide with a keynote address by his reputed leadership rival Sajid Javid PA Mr Johnson smiles as he makes his way to the lectern to deliver his speech PA Some fans of Mr Johnson arrived as early as 9am Jeremy Selwyn His speech was received with rapturous applause AFP/Getty Images Mr Johnsons speech will be received as a brazen leadership pitch AFP/Getty Images Mr Johnson arrives to deliver his speech at the fringe event at the Tory conference AP AFP/Getty Images Mr Johnson was ushered in to the packed auditorium PA Stanley Johnson takes his seat for Boris's speech Getty Images The auditorium was packed with 1,500 supporters Getty Images People queued for hours for a place at the event Getty Images Boris Johnson was jostled as he made his way into the auditorium AFP/Getty Images It was a valid point. He continued: In a long career of giving offence, one thing you learn is that sometimes you say things that are taken in the wrong way. And you simply have to repeat yourself gently and explain yourself to try to get over that you meant no offence and its a shame that offence was taken. TODO: define component type apester All I am trying to get at, on alternative arrangements, to make sure we dont need any kind of hard border in Northern Ireland. That is the crucial thing. All I was trying to say, from my own experience of running a transport network [TfL] is that there are ways of identifying vehicles crossing borders without necessarily checking them and stopping them. Boris Johnson cosies up to a cheetah The caller said: Boris, all you need to do is hold your hands up and say: Im sorry, I got it wrong. Thats what I find politicians do not do any more, and has set a precedent for this country. Mr Johnson replied: If you took offence, then Im sorry, but sometimes you have got to get your point across. T he defeat of Theresa Mays Brexit deal has led the front pages of the UKs newspapers this morning. Many of the papers took the view that the rejection has left Britains departure from the bloc, Mrs Mays premiership and trust in Parliament in peril. "House of fools" is the verdict on the Daily Mail's front page, with the paper saying inside that the "Tory wreckers will not be forgiven". The paper also accuses the DUP of "abusing their power by trashing the May plan" and calls Labour's position "absurd and contradictory". "This was a black day for British democracy. No one can yet say what demons it may unleash. But we do know who to blame," the Mail said. The Daily Mirror said the "killer blow" means Brexit will not happen on March 29, running with the headline: "Brexit delay mayhem". Under pressure: Theresa May / AP "That is the fault of the PM and warring Brexit MPs, so they must take responsibility instead of blaming others, facing the wrath of those who will feel badly let down," the paper said. The Mirror reported that the PM is now on "borrowed time" and "MPs, parties and people uniting to find common ground is a good way forward". The Times said Mrs May has been left "on the brink", adding: "She is ill equipped to lead the country out of what is a political and constitutional crisis without parallel in modern times." "Mrs May's attempt at brinkmanship has failed. Without trust and authority it is hard to see what she has to offer, having been trounced twice," the paper reported. The Times concludes that the Tories may now have to find a new leader in order to get Brexit over the line. The Daily Telegraph reported that Britain must leave the EU on March 29. "That remains the default position under the law and, in the absence of a deal, we should leave without one," the paper said. It also claimed there will be "disruption" from a no-deal Brexit "but not the catastrophe that has been predicted". Remaining in the EU would be a "betrayal of the referendum vote", the consequences of which "would be felt for years to come", it adds. The Guardian said a no-deal Brexit needs to be voted down by MPs on Wednesday "to stop ruinous fantasies taking hold in our politics". "That cabinet ministers would vote to transform the current political and constitutional crisis into an economic one for the sake of their careers shows how deeply corrupting Brexit is," the paper wrote. The Guardian reported that delaying Brexit should give the UK long enough "to contemplate what Brexit means for this country", rather than being "hustled out of the door by a Conservative party on the verge of a nervous breakdown". Brexit: What happens next? The Sun suggested Mrs May's defeat represents a "catastrophic failure by a -Parliament of pygmies". "This great country is in the grip of chaos which is terrifying families and crippling businesses. Our politicians should hang their heads in shame," the paper said. It adds that Mrs May's deal "isn't great" but "would have got Brexit done", saying that if Brexiteers get a third chance at a deal they must accept it. The Financial Times said Mrs May's strategy "lies in ruins" and the PM must now pursue a new one, if she continues in office. The paper also backs MPs taking no deal off the table, saying: "There should be no prevarication here. Letting Britain crash out of the EU - as the Brexit ultras advocate - is not fulfilling the result of the 2016 referendum." It adds that while a second referendum may be "divisive", it would offer voters this time "a real choice, instead of the illusory Brexit they were sold in 2016". Meanwhile, the Daily Express suggests that any decision made by Parliament that blocks Britain leaving the EU, tries to seek a second option from voters, or significantly delays departure in the hope the national view of Brexit changes "will be treachery". "MPs must understand that the citizens of Britain voted to leave the institutions of the EU. If they reverse that in any way, there will be a crisis of trust in democracy greater than at any time in our history," the paper reported. Government should 'spell out need for backstop changes' Brexiteer Tory Marcus Fysh said on Monday that the Government should spell out to the EU the need to replace the Northern Irish backstop. He told BBC Radio 4's Today: "That really is all the evidence the EU should require. "I think it would be worth reiterating that and actually putting the detail of the proposals which we worked up with the Government over recent weeks on the table so that the EU could be fully aware and discuss what it was exactly we were proposing. A weakened Theresa May was forced by her Cabinet to give a free vote to MPs and ministers on a Plan B for Brexit in the wake of last nights shattering defeat of her own deal. A senior government source said the Prime Minister had agreed that there will be a free vote on the Malthouse Compromise. However, it looked as if Mrs May was holding out against a free vote on another amendment that would rule out a no deal on any date. In this mornings Cabinet meeting, at least four Brexiteer ministers Gavin Williamson, Chris Grayling, Andrea Leadsom and Liam Fox demanded a free vote for MPs and ministers on the so-called Malthouse Compromise. Other ministers were said to be pushing for a free vote on an amendment put down by former Tory chairwoman Dame Caroline Spelman and Labour MP Jack Dromey that sought to go further than Mrs May by ruling out no deal on any date. The chaos in Mrs Mays Cabinet erupted after a shattered Prime Minister told the Commons she would allow a free vote this afternoon for Tory MPs on a motion to rule out a no-deal Brexit on March 29, when Brexit is due. Brexit: What happens next? But it soon appeared that Mrs May had opened a Pandoras Box that quickly highlighted her ebbing authority. Mr Williamson warned of severe consequences for the Tories if MPs were barred from showing their support for the Malthouse blueprint, a form of managed no deal. Astonishingly, as Cabinet began there was still no decision from No 10 on whether MPs and ministers would be allowed a free vote on any amendments. In contrast to the confusion in Mrs Mays court, support was gathering behind a cross-party plan to take control and deliver a Plan B Brexit backed by both the Commons and the EU. In key developments: The architect of a cross-party bid to bring in a pro-business exit deal declared: We are ready. Interviewed by the Evening Standard, Sir Oliver Letwin said he believes there is a cross-party majority for a Norway-style deal to leave the European Union while keeping full access to the blocs market of 500 million consumers. Ministers leaving 10 Downing Street after a Cabinet meeting on March 13 / AFP/Getty Images In Brussels angry EU leaders demanded a clear answer about what Britain wants and were preparing to take a hard line if, as widely expected, the Prime Minister asks for a postponement of Brexit. Please make up your minds in London, because this uncertainty cannot continue, MEP Guy Verhofstadt said in the European Parliament. Businesses hit out bitterly at the chaos and uncertainty created by the Governments handling of Brexit. The Confederation of British Industrys Carolyn Fairbairn protested on Radio 4s Today programme: This is no way to run a country. Tory MP Andrew Bridgen told the BBCs Victoria Derbyshire show: I think we need a new prime minister and a general election. The disarray follows the second defeat by 149 votes last night of Mrs Mays Brexit blueprint after her DUP allies and 75 Conservative MPs rebelled. Brexit: Leave and Remain supporters gather in London on 29 January 1 /33 Brexit: Leave and Remain supporters gather in London on 29 January Pro-EU and pro-Brexit protestors discuss the vote and ongoing political processes as they demonstrate near to the Houses of Parliament Getty Images A man holds a 'Stop Brexit' sign aboard a campaign bus travelling down Whitehall in Westminster, London PA Pro-Brexit demonstrators chant slogans outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters Anti-Brexit demonstrators protest outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters A leave supporter vapes electronic cigarette in front of a group of remain supporters AP Pro-Brexit protestors dressed as suffragettes demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Images An anti-brexit supporter holds banners in London AP Pro and anti Brexit protestors discuss the vote and ongoing political processes as they demonstrate near to the Houses of Parliament Getty Images Pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit protesters hold banners in London AP A campaigner dressed as Charlie Chaplin walks by the Houses of Parliament PA A leave supporter holds banners at the parliament gates AP Pro-Brexit, left and anti-Brexit protesters hold banners in London AP Pro-Brexit demonstrators protest outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters A leave supporter holds banners in front of remain supporters during demonstrations in London AP Police officers stand near Pro-Brexit and Anti-Brexit posters outside the Houses of Parliament, in Westminster, London Reuters Leave supporters hold placards in front of remain supporters during demonstrations in London, AP A pro-Brexit protestor sets fire to a roll of toilet paper decorated with the EU flag as she demonstrates near the Houses of Parliament Getty Images A pro-Brexit protestor sets fire to a roll of toilet paper decorated with the EU flag as she demonstrates near the Houses of Parliament Getty Images Leave supporters hold placards as they take part in demonstrations near the parliament in Londo AP Leave and remain supporters hold placards as they take part in demonstrations near the parliament in London AP Pro-Brexit activists hold placards and wave flags as they demonstrate opposite the Houses of Parliament in London AFP/Getty Images A remain supporter, left and a leave supporter, center, discuss during demonstrations in London AP Pro-Brexit protesters demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster Getty Images v Reuters Anti-Brexit protesters demonstrate on a double decker bus outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster Getty Images Sir Oliver said he was not surprised by the numbers but was increasingly confident that MPs from across the Commons were ready to unite behind a pro-business alternative. Im optimistic that we will get to an agreement of a majority of members of the House of Commons on a sensible deal, which is a form of Brexit that secures our prosperity and security and that can lead to our leaving by the summer, he said. He said the crucial moment will come tomorrow when MPs are set to pass a backbench amendment allowing the cross-party group to take control of the Commons timetable and stage votes to assess the support for different plans. If it is necessary we are ready to use the Paul parliamentary devices that we have been ready to use before in order to make sure that the House has an opportunity to debate and vote on alternative solutions, said Sir Oliver. But I hope very much that that will not be necessary because I think the sensible thing would be for the Government ... to come forward with its own plan. In Brussels there was anger that Britain was still undecided with just 16 days to go until Brexit Day. Mr Verhofstadt, the European Parliaments Brexit co-ordinator, called on the UK to put queen and country before party politics, appealing for certainty from the House of Commons. He told MEPs in Strasbourg: That is what we need and so I am against every extension, whether an extension of one day, one week, even 24 hours, if its not based on a clear opinion of the House of Commons for something. That we know what they want. He added: Please make up your minds in London, because this uncertainty cannot continue. Not for us, not for Britain and certainly not for our citizens. TODO: define component type apester Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd, one of the ministers who might have quit if asked to back a no-deal Brexit, told Sky News: Leaving without a deal would be very bad for our economy, very bad for our security. Allies of Mrs May said they would support her in bringing her withdrawal deal back to the Commons for a third time next week. TINA, said one Cabinet ministers, using the acronym for Baroness Thatchers catchphrase There Is No Alternative. David Cameron warned MPs that failing to rule out a no-deal Brexit would be a disaster for Britain. The former prime minister said he backed Mrs Mays attempts to secure a deal but went on: I think she should feel free to look at other alternatives for partnership deals in order to solve this problem. But Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay said he would prefer a no-deal scenario to not leaving the European Union. M ichel Barnier says the risk of a no-deal Brexit has "never been higher" as he called upon the Commons to tell the bloc exactly what it wants at this "critical" point. Addressing an EU meeting in Strasbourg, the EU's chief negotiator said that a no-deal Brexit was "no a scenario we want" but that "we are ready" for it. His remarks come after Theresa May's deal was voted down in the Commons for a second time. He said: "We are at a critical point. The risk of no deal has never been higher. "I urge you please not to underestimate that risk or its consequences. "We are ready for this, we are preparing for this, it is not a scenario we want. "We have always worked towards finding an agreement." "But we are ready." Michel Barnier said the EU is "ready" for no-deal / REUTERS He also told the European Parliament that the Withdrawal Agreement reached last November "is and will remain the only available treaty". Of the documents clarifying the terms of the Agreement in Strasbourg, drawn up on Monday he said: "We went as far as we possibly could in order to help the UK Government get the support of the House of Commons." On the topic of an Article 50 extension, he said there is a need for clarification from Parliament on what this would achieve. TODO: define component type apester He said: "They have to tell us what it is they want for our future relations, what will their choice be? "What is the clear line they will take? That is the question we need an answer to. "Why would we extend these discussions because the discussion on Article 50 that is done and dusted, we have the withdrawal agreement and that is there." Another EU Brexit negotiator, Guy Verhofstadt also called for clarification from the Commons if Article 50 were to be extended. Speaking to Sky, he said: "I don't see any reason to give any extension if first of all we don't know the majority position of the House of Commons. "Why we should start to give even a short extension if there's no clear position of the House of Commons." While European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans told MEPs in Strasbourg the conclusion was "in the hands of the British political system. He said: "Brexit is very harmful to the United Kingdom and to the European Union, but it is our duty, on the basis of a vote of the British people, to work towards a Brexit that does as little harm as possible. "This position will not change, but today we are in the hands of the British political system. "They should tell us where they want to go from now. The solution will have to come from London and we will take it from there." In regards to the Withdrawal Agreement, he added: "I don't see any better solution than the Withdrawal Agreement with all the clarifications given." This reaction comes as MPs are set to vote on blocking a no-deal Brexit following Mrs Mays withdrawal plans being rejected in a humiliating defeat for the Prime Minister. On Wednesday evening, Conservative MPs will be given a free vote on whether they are willing for the UK to leave the EU without a deal at the end of the month. The vote will be on a motion stating this House declines to approve leaving the European Union without a Withdrawal Agreement and a framework on the future relationship on March 29". If MPs reject no-deal a third vote will follow on Thursday. M Ps have voted to ensure the UK cannot crash out of Europe without an agreement in place with Brussels. A vote to take no deal Brexit off the table 'under any circumstance' was passed by a margin of four votes 24 hours after Prime Minister Theresa May suffered a humiliating second defeat on her Withdrawal Agreement. MPs supported an amendment to the government's motion tabled by Dame Caroline Spelman by 312 votes to 308. She tried herself to withdraw the amendment hours before voting commenced - but she was blocked from doing so by Speaker John Bercow. They also voted against an amendment to extend Article 50 until 22 May. The amendment failed by 210 votes. MPs voted overwhelmingly against leaving the EU without a deal in place / @EmilyThornberry More votes will follow on Thursday on whether to authorise Mrs May to request an extension of the two-year Article 50 negotiation process. Earlier the Chancellor Philip Hammond used his Spring Statement to call on MPs to "put aside our differences and seek a compromise", warning the UK would face "significant disruption" from a no-deal Brexit. Loading.... But Brexit Secretary Mr Barclay said he would prefer a no-deal scenario - even though it risks economic harm and threatens to break up the United Kingdom - to the prospect of not leaving the European Union. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Between those very unpleasant choices, I think no Brexit is the bigger risk." Environment Secretary Michael Gove, standing in for Mrs May in the Commons after she lost her voice, told MPs: "If we do choose to leave without a deal on March 29 there'll be economic, political and constitutional challenges that this country will face. Theresa May earlier called a surprise cabinet meeting / PA "Now we are a great country, we would get through it, we would in due course ensure that this country was more prosperous, freer and successful and, of course, Government has been working hard in order to ensure that we can be prepared for any eventuality and we can mitigate the risks of leaving without a deal." Meanwhile, Irish premier Leo Varadkar has said that people who advocated for Brexit has been chasing unicorns for a "very long time". MPs voted to reject no deal Brexit / PA Speaking to the press at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington he said: "As we head into the next few weeks it should be blatantly obvious that unicorns only exist in fairy tales. "I would say to people who advocated Brexit - is this really what they wanted, protectionism, borders, tariffs, restrictions on trade. "Is this really what Brexit was all about. And for those who voted against the Withdrawal Agreement on the basis that they feared that Northern Ireland would be treated differently as a result of the backstop, it must be evident to them now that it's the UK Government's intention to treat Northern Ireland differently." Former foreign secretary Boris Johnson said he still expects Brussels to come up with a new deal, telling LBC Radio: "The horses always change places in the final furlong, it's always at five minutes to midnight that the real deal is done." He said it is "absurd" for Mrs May to grant a free vote on no-deal because it is a "fundamental" part of the Brexit negotiating strategy. In preparation for a no-deal outcome, the UK has set out its new tariff schedule, which would force up prices on EU imports including cars and many food products but could reduce costs on goods from elsewhere. The CBI warned the new tariffs would act as a "sledgehammer" to the economy. C ross-party MPs have hit out at the utter chaos of the Government after a vote to take a no-deal Brexit off the table. MPs voted to reject crashing out of the European Union without a deal "under any circumstance." Mrs May was defeated by 321 votes to 278, a margin of 43, on a motion to rule out a no-deal Brexit at any time and under any circumstance. Work and pensions secretary Sarah Newton quit after defying the whips to vote for the cross-party proposal. Speaking moments after her second significant Brexit defeat in the same number of days, Mrs May accepted that there was a "clear majority" against no-deal in the Commons. Mrs May speaking to Parliament after the vote / REUTERS But she insisted that despite the vote - which is not legally binding - no-deal remains the default option in UK and EU law unless a Withdrawal Agreement is reached. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn responded that Mrs May had repeatedly offered a choice between her deal and no deal, adding: "In the last 24 hours, Parliament has decisively rejected both." Mr Corbyn said: "Parliament must now take control of the situation. Myself, the shadow Brexit secretary and others will have meetings with members across the House to find a compromise solution that can command support in the House." Loading.... MP for Streatham Chuka Umunna said Westminster was broken. Speaking to Sky News, the Independent Group MP said: The Conservative Party has essentially become the no-deal party, whipping its MPs against motions and measures to design to stop no-deal from happening. He added: The place is brokenIts an embarrassment to the country and Britain deserves better. He said it was essential that MPs vote to extend Article 50 tomorrow. Conservative Brexiteer Bernard Jenkin called tonight's vote a "sad day for democracy". He tweeted: "Tonight, anti-Brexit MPs passed a motion they think will lead to Brexit being blocked: the first steps towards many MPs breaking their election promises to honour the EURef result are now being taken. "A sad day for democracy." Mayor of London Sadiq Khan accused the Government of being in chaos. He tweeted: I welcome the votes in Parliament today. Despite utter chaos from the Government, MPs have voted to rule out a catastrophic no-deal Brexit. The only sensible way to proceed now is to withdraw Article 50 and give the British public the final say on Brexit. Conservaitve Brexiteer MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, however, was adamant the UK was still heading towards a no-deal Brexit. He simply tweeted: The law still says we leave on 29th March. Like Mr Khan, Labour MP David Lammy called for the final say on Brexit to go to the public again. He said: This is good news for struggling families, manufacturing workers, our hospitals and schools, who would pay the highest price. Now we have rejected #NoDealBrexit, the public deserves a choice between the government's deal and Remaining in the EU. Labours Jess Phillips accused the Prime Minister of voting for no deal, hailing her as a disgrace. She said: I just watched the Prime Minister going in to vote for No Deal. I told her it was a disgrace. I hope she is gone by morning. She doesn't deserve her office." Some MPs claimed the Government was encouraging Conservative MPs to vote for a no-deal Brexit in the final vote of the evening. Loading.... Heidi Allen, who recently quit the Conservative party to join The Independent Group, tweeted: "Utterly desperate and historic in equal measure. The Conservatives are whipping for 'no deal'." And Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran wrote on Twitter: "SHAME on this government. They are whipping to vote FOR no deal. Reckless. Unbelievable. What madness." Labour's Luke Pollard tweeted: "So....Labour is now voting for the Prime Minister's amended motion and the Tories are now voting against the Prime Minister's motion. Hope you're all keeping up with this? What a mess." Green MP Caroline Lucas described the situation as "unbelievable" and "reckless self-indulgence", tweeting: "Unbelievable - even by this Government's standards... Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn speaks to MPs in the House of Commons, London after MPs have supported the amended Government motion which rejects a no-deal / PA "So now - against all their promises - they are whipping against the PM's own motion to rule out No Deal. There is no greater example of reckless self indulgence." "Just hope enough might find a spine & at least abstain ...." Labour MP Maria Eagle said Theresa May has "lost all authority" following the vote. M Ps are set to vote on blocking a no-deal Brexit after Theresa Mays withdrawal plans were rejected in a humiliating defeat for the Prime Minister. Conservative MPs will be given a free vote on Wednesday evening on whether they are willing for the UK to leave the EU without a deal at the end of the month. They will vote on a motion stating "this House declines to approve leaving the European Union without a Withdrawal Agreement and a framework on the future relationship on March 29". If MPs reject no-deal, as most Westminster observers expect, a third vote will follow on Thursday on whether to authorise Mrs May to request an extension of the two-year Article 50 negotiation process. MPs listen to Theresa May's statement after her Brexit plans were defeated for a second time / AFP/Getty Images Members of the Malthouse Compromise group of Tories from both Leave and Remain wings immediately tabled an amendment proposing a "standstill" agreement lasting as late as the end of 2021, during which the UK would observe EU rules and pay into Brussels budgets while a full trade deal is negotiated. Labour said allowing a free vote on no-deal showed Mrs May had "given up any pretence of leading the country". The DUP's Ian Paisley said he would like to see a no-deal option left on the table, telling BBC Two's Newsnight: "If you vote to remove this from the Prime Minister's arsenal essentially she will have to blink again." Loading.... And Education Minister Nadhim Zahawi said it would be "consistent for all of us in Government to leave no-deal on the table". Early on Wednesday, the UK will publish further details of its own no-deal plans - including tariff rates for imports. And the Cabinet is expected to meet in the morning, ahead of the Chancellor's Spring Statement to the Commons on Wednesday afternoon. Brexit: What happens next? It comes after MPs voted by 391 to 242 against the deal. The defeat followed the Prime Minister's assurance new agreements reached with Jean-Claude Juncker in Strasbourg would ensure the UK cannot be trapped in the controversial backstop arrangement indefinitely. Under pressure: Theresa May / AP Although the 149 margin was reduced from the record 230-vote defeat of the first "meaningful vote" in January, Mrs May was left far adrift from a majority with just 17 days to go to the scheduled date of Brexit on March 29. Some 75 Conservative MPs rebelled to vote against the deal, while just three Labour MPs and four independents joined the 235 Tories who backed it. Battling with a croaky voice, Mrs May said she still believed leaving with a deal was the best option for Britain and "the deal we've negotiated is the best and indeed the only deal available". Theresa May: I believe Brexit deal was best outcome for leaving EU She told MPs: "Let me be clear. Voting against leaving without a deal and for an extension does not solve the problems we face. "The EU will want to know what use we mean to make of such an extension and this House will have to answer that question. "Does it wish to revoke Article 50? Does it want to hold a second referendum? Or does it want to leave with a deal, but not this deal? "These are unenviable choices. Thanks to the decision that the House has made this evening, they are choices that must now be faced." Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said his party would once more put forward its own proposal for a deal and repeated his demand for a general election. "The Prime Minister has run down the clock and the clock has been run out on her," Mr Corbyn said. TODO: define component type apester An extension of Article 50 requires the unanimous agreement of all 27 remaining member states and Mr Juncker has warned it cannot stretch beyond May 23 unless the UK takes part in the European Parliament elections starting on that date. The European Commission president had already said if MPs turned down the package agreed in Strasbourg on Monday there would be "no third chance" to renegotiate. Following the vote, a spokesman for European Council president Donald Tusk said the EU had done "all that is possible" to reach an agreement and would require "a credible justification" from the UK for any extension. T heresa May finally conceded that Brexit faces a delay beyond March 29 after her authority was shredded by a major Cabinet rebellion and another crushing Commons defeat. Struggling to reassert herself, she said the delay was likely to be significantly longer unless MPs back her Brexit deal, which has been rejected twice. In a night of government disarray, the Prime Ministers authority was battered as four Cabinet ministers and over a dozen other ministers abstained in a vote to rule out no-deal, defying a three-line whip. The rebels included Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd, Business Secretary Greg Clark, Scottish Secretary David Mundell and Justice Secretary David Gauke. Theresa May in the Commons as voting was under way / PA Downing Street angered right-wingers by refusing to say they would be sacked. One minister resigned - Sarah Newton as a minister at the Department for Work and Pensions before joining in the rebellion. The abstainers who appeared to be keeping their jobs - included Foreign Office ministers Alistair Burt and Tobias Ellwood, Solicitor General Robert Buckland and clean energy minister Claire Perry, who attends Cabinet. Brexit backer Jacob Rees-Mogg said all 20 ministers who abstained had a duty to quit. Sarah Newton resigned as a minister at the Department for Work and Pensions / Getty Images In the big vote, Mrs May was defeated by a massive 321 votes to 278, a margin of 43, on a motion to rule out a no-deal Brexit at any time and under any circumstance. It was a disastrous night for Mrs May who was greeted with loud heckling in the Commons. Her grip over more key Brexit decisions is now being prised open by cross-party groups of MPs who are determined to force a vote on a soft-Brexit, such as a Norway solution. In his response, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn supported the search for a Plan B saying he would take part in cross-party talks. Parliament must now take control of the situation, he said. Theresa May in the Commons ahead of tonight's no deal Brexit vote / PA Mrs May responded by telling MPs they now had a stark choice between backing her unpopular deal, which has been defeated twice already, or accepting a Brexit delay. They would now have to choose between a short technical extension of a couple of months to pass a deal or a much longer extension if they could not agree one. A long delay will mean holding elections to the European parliament in June, she warned. "I do not think that would be the right outcome," said the Prime Minister. "But the House needs to face up to the consequences of the decisions it has taken." She confirmed that MPs will vote on Thursday on whether to ask her to request an extension of the Article 50 negotiation process, calling it a "fundamental choice". The PMs game-plan appeared to be to use the crisis to muster support for one last attempt to get her own Brexit deal through next week, possibly as early as Monday. The PM may be banking on the fear of a delay spooking right wingers into backing her. MPs voted overwhelmingly against leaving the EU without a deal in place / @EmilyThornberry Mr Corbyn said extending Article 50 was "now inevitable". He said: "In the last 24 hours Parliament has decisively rejected both her deal and no deal. "While an extension of Article 50 is now inevitable, responsibility for that extension lies solely and squarely at the Prime Minister's door." Calling on Parliament to "take control", Mr Corbyn said MPs must now find a "compromise solution" - including a People's Vote - as "that's what we were elected to do". Three big votes were held tonight. In the first, the Commons backed an amendment put down by Tory and Labour MPs that called on the Government to rule out a no-deal Brexit at any time by 312 votes to 308. Loading.... Next MPs voted on the so-called Malthouse Compromise plan a form of managed no-deal backed mainly by right wingers. Four Cabinet ministers backed the Malthouse Compromise, indicating they would prefer it to Mrs Mays deal. They were Home Secretary Sajid Javid, Commons leader Andrea Leadsom, International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt and Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson. Half of all Tory MPs backed the Malthouse plan but it was roundly rejected by the Commons in a by 374 to 164 a margin that suggests it has no hope of being a viable alternative. The rejection could improve Mrs Mays chances of persuading more members of the European Research Group to back her deal instead. In the final vote, on the no-deal issue again, the Government lost by 321 to 278 - a bigger margin of 43 - after many Tories abstained. Asked if ministers would have to resign for abstaining, No 10 sources said: We will have to have a look. Mrs Mays spokesman said any delay to Brexit must be agreed by the European Union, and the deadline would be the eve of next weeks summit starting on March 21. He denied the Government was shifting to backing indicative votes on rival plans. "We have no plans for indicative votes, I think I've said that on a number of occasions. "What you have seen in Parliament in recent weeks is a series of plans being put before Parliament by opposition parties and they have all been rejected." Labour MP Jess Phillips said she would back a 21-month extension to Article 50. She said: "I would want to see a purposeful, long extension that was for something, not just for more of the same." In a day of open Cabinet divisions, Chancellor Philip Hammond earlier used his Spring Statement to establish himself as the leading voice in Cabinet for a compromise Brexit, calling for any deal that could command the support of other parties in the Commons, such as a Norway-style arrangement. But Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay went in the opposite direction by claiming a no-deal scenario was better than cancelling Brexit, even though it would strain relations between the UK< Government and Northern Ireland and Scotland. Treasury Minister Liz Truss said earlier that Mrs Mays Brexit deal could yet win backing. I think it is still alive, I do, she told Radio 4s PM. Ultimately, when you look at the alternatives - which are a customs union, no Brexit or no-deal - Theresa Mays deal is more attractive than those other three options. Mrs May called a surprise informal Cabinet meeting ahead d of the votes to set out her strategy. B ritain will slash tariffs on the majority of products imported from outside of the EU in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Should the UK crash out of the EU without a deal, the number of items eligible for zero-tariff access will rise from 80 per cent to 87. But some products coming from the remaining 27 EU member states which are currently imported free of tariffs would face levies for the first time. The moves have been slammed by business leaders, branded a "sledgehammer for our economy" while there are warnings cheaper steel imports could "destroy" UK manufacturing jobs. Below, the Standard details some of the Government proposals. What will there be tariffs on? Under the plans the vast majority of imports would have tariffs set at zero, leaving just 13 per cent of products subject to them. These would include some sensitive imports such as food and cars. TODO: define component type apester Sensitive imports that would have tariffs include: Beef, lamb, pork and poultry and some dairy products which would protect UK farmers and producers from cheap imports A number of tariffs would be placed on finished vehicles to support the automotive sector - these will not apply to car parts imported from the EU to prevent disruption to supply chains Certain ceramics, fertiliser and fuel where the tariffs will protect UK producers against unfair practices like dumping and state subsidies Bananas, raw cane sugar and certain kinds of fish with tariffs used to permit preferential access to the UK market for developing countries The largest tariffs would impact poultry meat, 60 per cent, and beef, 53 per cent. Tariffs on finished cars would go down but still stand at 10.6 per cent. The tariffs would also affect EU products which could be subject to fees they had not been previously meaning prices could rise for consumers on those items. When would they happen? The tariffs would come into force from the current Brexit date of March 29, if Britain leaves without a deal and this is not delayed. They would at first apply for a period of 12 months. The tariffs would be in place from the Brexit date / PA During this time, a consultation and review would be taken to determine the steps for the future. After this, new tariff terms might be announced. What about Northern Ireland? Although Britain has announced added tariffs on certain EU products, these would not apply to those travelling from the Republic to Northern Ireland. The UK Government will not introduce any new checks or controls on goods moving across the land border into Northern Ireland if the UK leaves the European Union without a deal in the first instance. Under the 12-month plan, EU goods arriving from the Republic and remaining in Northern Ireland will not be subject to tariffs. However, tariffs will be payable on goods moving from the EU into the rest of the UK via Northern Ireland. This will be under the rates released on Wednesday. The Government insists this will not create a border down the Irish Sea because there will be no checks on goods moving between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Compliance and intelligence methods will be used to detect any traders attempting to abuse the system. Ministers accepted the new regime will cause "concerns" to Northern Irish businesses and farmers, about the impact on their competitiveness. However, they said these were the only steps which could be taken to deliver on the Government's commitment to avoiding a hard border in the case of no deal. What has the Government said about the plans? Trade Policy Minister George Hollingbery said the priority was to secure a deal and "avoid disruption" to trade relationships. However, he said there must be preparation "for all eventualities". He said: "If we leave without a deal, we will set the majority of our import tariffs to zero, whilst maintaining tariffs for the most sensitive industries. "This balanced approach will help to support British jobs and avoid potential price spikes that would hit the poorest households the hardest. "It represents a modest liberalisation of tariffs and we will be monitoring the economy closely as well as consulting with businesses to decide what our tariffs should be after this transitional period." How has the business community reacted? Confederation of British Industry director-general Carolyn Fairbairn slammed the plans and said the no-deal scenario could be a "sledgehammer" to the economy. She told BBC Radio 4's Today: "This tells us everything that is wrong with a no-deal scenario. "What we are hearing is the biggest change in terms of trade this country has faced since the mid-19th century being imposed on this country with no consultation with business, no time to prepare. "This is no way to run a country. "What we potentially are going to see is this imposition of new terms of trade at the same time as business is blocked out of its closest trading partner. "This is a sledgehammer for our economy." While Unite union's assistant general secretary for manufacturing, Steve Turner, said cheap steel could "destroy jobs". He said: "Theresa May and her Government need to stop the economic vandalism which is threatening jobs and livelihoods by properly taking a no-deal Brexit off the table and securing tariff-free frictionless trade with Europe. "The UK's steel industry has been pushed to the brink because of the dumping of cheap Chinese steel, while our tyre industry is fighting for survival in the face of inferior alternatives flooding the market from overseas. F urious business chiefs today warned this is no way to run a country as the Government published a no-deal tariff regime just 16 days before the long-planned Brexit day. Ministers rushed out the biggest shake-up of Britains trading terms since the mid-19th century just hours after MPs voted against Theresa Mays Brexit blueprint by a crushing 149-majority. The new levies, to be imposed the day after a March 29 no-deal Brexit, would force up prices on EU imports including cars and many food products, which could hit millions of families. The new levies would include 10.6 per cent on European cars, which would be a blow to German manufacturers, but potentially increasing the cost of a typical family hatchback in the UK by around 1,500. Car parts would face no extra tariffs in a bid to avoid disruption to supply chains. In a potential hit to French and other Continental European farmers, tariffs would be introduced on EU foods including beef, chicken, lamb, pork and Cheddar-style cheese. However, UK firms would face being hit by retaliatory tariffs imposed by Brussels. Tariffs would be reduced on imports from outside the EU, potentially lowering prices on goods from countries like the United States and China, in a move which unions warned would destroy jobs in manufacturing sectors like steel. Eighty-seven per cent of all imports to the UK by value would be eligible for zero-tariff access, up from 80 per cent, while many other goods will be subject to a lower rate than currently applied under EU rules. But in a move, which immediately sparked talk of opening up a smugglers route, the UKs temporary import tariffs would not apply to EU goods crossing the border into Northern Ireland from the Republic. Under pressure on Brexit: Theresa May / AFP/Getty Images Tariffs, though, would be payable on goods moving from the EU into the rest of the UK via Northern Ireland. Such arrangements fuelled suspicions that a new border could emerge down the Irish Sea which would mean different regimes in Northern Ireland and Britain, a situation which Mrs Mays Democratic Unionist Party allies strongly oppose. Business bosses reacted angrily to the Governments latest Brexit crisis move. Carolyn Fairbairn, director-general of the CBI, told Radio 4s Today programme: What we are hearing is the biggest change in terms of trade this country has faced since the mid-19th century being imposed on this country with no consultation with business, no time to prepare. This is no way to run a country. TODO: define component type apester Mike Hawes, chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, said: Its staggering that we are in this position with only days until we are due to leave. Every day no deal remains a possibility is another day companies pay the price in expensive contingency measures. No deal must be taken off the table immediately and permanently. Miles Beale, chief executive of the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, said: The rejection of the Prime Ministers flawed Brexit deal throws wine and spirit businesses into yet deeper uncertainty, and for longer. With the Brexit deadline only a fortnight away it is imperative that MPs vote this evening and then legislate to avoid no deal. Dr Adam Marshall, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, added: If the tariffs announced today were to come into effect, there would be winners and losers across UK industry overnight. The abruptness of changes to tariff rates in the event of a no-deal exit from the EU would be an unwelcome shock to many of the businesses affected. Brexit: Leave and Remain supporters gather in London on 29 January 1 /33 Brexit: Leave and Remain supporters gather in London on 29 January Pro-EU and pro-Brexit protestors discuss the vote and ongoing political processes as they demonstrate near to the Houses of Parliament Getty Images A man holds a 'Stop Brexit' sign aboard a campaign bus travelling down Whitehall in Westminster, London PA Pro-Brexit demonstrators chant slogans outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters Anti-Brexit demonstrators protest outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters A leave supporter vapes electronic cigarette in front of a group of remain supporters AP Pro-Brexit protestors dressed as suffragettes demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Images An anti-brexit supporter holds banners in London AP Pro and anti Brexit protestors discuss the vote and ongoing political processes as they demonstrate near to the Houses of Parliament Getty Images Pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit protesters hold banners in London AP A campaigner dressed as Charlie Chaplin walks by the Houses of Parliament PA A leave supporter holds banners at the parliament gates AP Pro-Brexit, left and anti-Brexit protesters hold banners in London AP Pro-Brexit demonstrators protest outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters A leave supporter holds banners in front of remain supporters during demonstrations in London AP Police officers stand near Pro-Brexit and Anti-Brexit posters outside the Houses of Parliament, in Westminster, London Reuters Leave supporters hold placards in front of remain supporters during demonstrations in London, AP A pro-Brexit protestor sets fire to a roll of toilet paper decorated with the EU flag as she demonstrates near the Houses of Parliament Getty Images A pro-Brexit protestor sets fire to a roll of toilet paper decorated with the EU flag as she demonstrates near the Houses of Parliament Getty Images Leave supporters hold placards as they take part in demonstrations near the parliament in Londo AP Leave and remain supporters hold placards as they take part in demonstrations near the parliament in London AP Pro-Brexit activists hold placards and wave flags as they demonstrate opposite the Houses of Parliament in London AFP/Getty Images A remain supporter, left and a leave supporter, center, discuss during demonstrations in London AP Pro-Brexit protesters demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster Getty Images v Reuters Anti-Brexit protesters demonstrate on a double decker bus outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster Getty Images MPs, though, are set to vote tonight to block a chaotic no-deal departure from the EU in just over two weeks. The immediate threat of a no-deal appeared to be low but concerns remained that the UK could still plunge out of the EU in the months ahead if there is a delay to Brexit. The temporary schedules would apply for up to 12 months ahead of a full consultation and review of a permanent approach. Proposed tariff rates on a range of food products were announced as a proportion of the so-called most favoured nation (MFN) currently imposed by the EU on imports from countries which do not have a free-trade agreement. Rates include beef (53 per cent of MFN), poultry (60 per cent), lamb (100 per cent), pork (13 per cent), butter (32 per cent), Cheddar-like cheese (13 per cent), protected fish and seafood products (100 per cent) and milled and semi-milled products (83 per cent). Countdown to Brexit: 16 days until Britain leaves the EU Tariffs on finished cars and trucks will be set at 10.6 per cent, down from the EU MFN rate of 11.3 per cent, while for finished buses the rate will remain unchanged at 12.6 per cent. The Government insisted the new regime would not create a border down the Irish Sea, as there will be no checks on goods moving between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Instead, normal compliance and intelligence methods will be used to detect smuggling and traders abusing the system. T heresa May has called a surprise informal Cabinet meeting amid intense in-fighting over the Brexit process. Cabinet ministers have begun meeting at the Commons ahead of the first of several key votes where MPs are trying to take over key decisions. No 10 would not discuss the session while it was going on, but there have been hints through the day that Mrs May will change tack and announce that she will oversee votes designed to explore whether there is a potential Commons majority behind a Plan B, such as a Norway style deal. Some ministers are demanding a free vote tomorrow when MPs will vote on whether to postpone Brexit Day beyond March 29. Mrs May is also believed to be determined to bring her own deal back to the Commons for a third attempt, despite losing by 149 votes last night and by 230 votes in January. Some MPs think Mrs May will stand a chance of winning the support of the pro Brexit European Research Group if right wing Tories think rebel MPs are on the way to pushing for a soft Brexit. Rebels aim to seize control of the Commons agenda in votes tomorrow, in order to hold indicative votes unless Mrs May caves in and stages such votes herself. Cabinet divisions were on open display today. Chancellor Philip Hammond established himself as the leading voice in Cabinet for a compromise Brexit that could command the support of other parties in the Commons, such as a Norway-style deal. But Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay went in the opposite direction by claiming a no-deal scenario was better than cancelling Brexit, even though it would strain relations between the UK< Government and Northern Ireland and Scotland. Treasury Minister Liz Truss said earlier that Mrs Mays Brexit deal could yet win backing. I think it is still alive, I do, she told Radio 4s PM. Ultimately, when you look at the alternatives - which are a customs union, no Brexit or no-deal - Theresa Mays deal is more attractive than those other three options. B rexit negotiations remain on a knife edge as UK and EU leaders scramble to secure an eleventh hour deal. The Prime Minister and Ms von der Leyen agreed that a "firm decision" about the future of the negotiations should be made by Sunday. However, in a statement following three hours of dinner and discussions in Brussels, a senior Number 10 source said it was unclear whether the differences between the two sides could be bridged as large gaps remain between the two sides. So with optimism around an agreement growing ever dimmer, what exactly would a no-deal Brexit look like? And what would it mean for the British public? Firstly, whats the difference between the Brexit deal and the Withdrawal Agreement? The Withdrawal Agreement was passed on January 31, 2020, marking the UKs formal exit from the EU. A transition period was created for both sides to work out the rules of their new relationship it is this that will come to an end on December 31. Both sides have been trying to secure the terms of Britains future relationship with the Bloc: the elusive Brexit deal. Brexit Day at Parliament Square - In pictures 1 /22 Brexit Day at Parliament Square - In pictures Anti-Brexit protesters in Parliament Square, London PA Police presence at anti-Brexit protests in Parliament Square, London PA The Winston Churchill statue and Union flags in Parliament Square, London PA Pro Brexit supporters hold placards at Parliament Square as people prepare for Brexit Getty Images A man carries an EU themed wreath at Parliament Square Reuters Anti-Brexit demonstrators in Parliament Square, London, ahead of the UK leaving the European Union PA Pro Brexit supporters hold placards at Parliament Square as people prepare for Brexit Getty Images A man wears a President, Donald Trump mask and holds an American flag at Parliament Square as people prepare for Brexit Getty Images People hold placards in Parliament Square opposite the Houses of Parliament in London AFP via Getty Images A man holds up a President, Donald Trump, American flag at Parliament Square as people prepare for Brexit Getty Images A Red Viking apple with the Union Jack is displayed and given out for free to promote British produce as an Anti-Brexit demonstrator waves the European Union flag in Parliament Square AP Joseph Afrane in Westminster Jeremy Selwyn Pro-EU anti-Brexit protesters hold placards in Parliament Square AFP via Getty Images A man takes a photo of political artist Kaya Mar's paintings in Parliament Square Getty Images A man in an oversized 'Keep America Great' hat and draped with a US flag holds a Union Flag in Parliament Square opposite the Houses of Parliament AFP via Getty Images A woman holds a newspaper at Parliament Square Reuters A woman wears a face mask in Parliament Square PA Whats no deal and what impact would it have on daily life? A no deal would take a number of key forms: Tariffs and quotas A no-deal would mean that at the end of the Brexit transition period the UK would crash out of the single market and the customs union and default to World Trade Organisation (WTO) terms. This means that from January 1, 2021, Britain would have to apply tariffs and quotas to goods entering the country from the EU, and the EU would apply its third-country levies to the UK. This would see the UK slapped with greater taxes for trying to sell products to the EU. Medicines are not subject to tariffs under WTO rules, but there could still be significant delays to shipments. Tesco chairman John Allan warned that leaving the EU without a trade deal could see supermarkets face substantial tariffs on certain products. He suggested food bills could rise by as much as 5 per cent as a result of the tariffs and disruption from a no-deal Brexit. Borders and customs The EU will begin imposing border checks on UK products from January 1, 2021 if a deal is not reached. The Government has admitted that long queues and persistent delays are likely to last six months or longer at key border crossings in the event of a no-deal. HMRC estimates suggest British businesses could spend an extra 15 billion a year on paperwork in the event of a no deal, according to the Financial Times. Holidays and living abroad Britons travelling to the EU will not need a visa for stays of up to 90 days out of any 180-day period. However, a visa may be required for longer stays or for work or study. Mobile roaming charges A no-deal could mean an end to automatic free roaming for Brits travelling in the EU so you could be charged while using your phone across its member states. However, UK and EU operators could reach bilateral deals to prevent roaming charges. Brexit briefing: 24 days until the end of the transition period Anything else? Yes. A lot. Some of the other key areas that would be affected by a no-deal are: International data sharing and security; Access to fishing waters; Aviation standards and safety; Licensing and regulation of medicines. Is there anything I need to do by December 31? The Government is urging the public to prepare for the end of the transition period by following its "Check, Change, Go" slogan. A questionnaire on the dedicated gov.uk website is designed to offer tailored advice on how to prepare for the looming deadline. For individuals this may include registering your residency rights, it states. Meanwhile businesses are encouraged to start "preparing for a new approach to trade with our partners in the European Union." So whats going to happen at the end of the transition period? If there is a deal, it will have to have been approved by both Houses of Parliament in the UK and by the European parliament, although there may be just a bit of wriggle room. EU law would allow the provisional application of the agreement from January 1, provided it has been signed off by leaders. T heresa May has threatened to delay Brexit beyond March 29 after another crushing Commons defeat. The Prime Minister was defeated by a huge 321 vote to 278, a margin of 42, on a motion to rule out no-deal on Wednesday. Mrs May's authority was shredded as four Cabinet ministers abstained in the vote. Her grip over more key Brexit decisions is now being prised open by cross-party groups of MPs. So what happens now? Thursday's vote on delaying Brexit MPs will vote on a motion tabled by the Government that states Brexit will be delayed for a short period even if Mrs Mays deal is agreed in order to pass vital laws that are behind schedule. The motion states that a much longer delay may be required if Mrs Mays deal is not approved. Mrs May has stressed that a delay would not resolve the divisions in the Commons and could instead hand Brussels the power to set conditions on the kind of Brexit on offer "or even moving to a second referendum". The motion will be amendable, meaning MPs may try to gain a majority for the length of the delay or type of Brexit as part of the extension. MPs are also set to vote on amendments tabled by cross-party MPs led by Sir Oliver Letwin and Yvette Cooper which seek to take control of the Commons agenda to pursue a soft Brexit deal, such as Norway arrangement. Jeremy Corbyn: Parliament must take control of Brexit situation Third 'meaningful vote' Mrs May has signalled a third "meaningful vote" on her EU Withdrawal Agreement could be held after MPs voted to rule out a no-deal Brexit on Wednesday. The Prime Ministers deal could be put to a vote again next week, despite being rejected twice already. How could Brexit be delayed and for how long? To secure an extension to Article 50, Mrs May would need the support of the 27 other EU states. They are likely to agree to an extension as long as there was a prospect of a deal being reached - or a referendum or general election which could change the political landscape at Westminster. European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said that Brexit should be completed before the European elections which take place between May 23 and 26. "If the UK has not left the EU by then, it will be legally required to hold these elections," he said. If a longer extension was sought, that would mean taking part in the elections, something likely to fuel Eurosceptic anger - and potentially see Nigel Farage standing for the new Brexit Party What have the EU 27 leaders said? Ahead of the no-deal vote, German Chancellor Angela Merkel refused to say how long she thinks a possible delay to Brexit should be, but said it was in "our mutual interest that we achieve an orderly departure". French president Emmanuel Macron said Britain needed a clear reason for requesting an extension and extra time could not be used to renegotiate the withdrawal. The EU's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said London must decide what it wants from Brexit before Brussels will consider a delay. Loading.... Will the Prime Minister seek further changes in Brussels? Mr Juncker was clear during his meeting with the Prime Minister in Strasbourg that there was no more room for movement. "In politics, sometimes you get a second chance. It is what we do with this second chance that counts. Because there will be no third chance," he said. "There will be no further interpretations of the interpretations; and no further assurances of the re-assurances." But a European Council summit on March 21 could give Mrs May one last chance to persuade her fellow leaders face-to-face that she needs extra help to get a deal over the line. Theresa May suffered another crushing defeat in the Commons on Wednesday / AFP/Getty Images So what happens on March 29? It is still impossible to say. If a deal is somehow reached and legislated for then, although the UK will formally leave the EU at 11pm, very little will change as a transition period will smooth progress to the UK's new future. If there is a delay, the UK will still be in the European Union until the extension period expires. M Ps will today vote on whether Britain should leave the European Union without a deal just a day after Theresa Mays Brexit withdrawal plans were rejected in a humiliating defeat in Parliament. Conservative MPs will be given a free vote on a motion stating: "this House declines to approve leaving the European Union without a Withdrawal Agreement and a framework on the future relationship on March 29". The House of Commons has a packed schedule on Wednesday beginning at 12pm with Prime Ministers Questions. At 12.45pm Chancellor Philip Hammond is due to present the Spring Statement. At 2.30pm the motion on no deal Brexit will be put forward with a vote taking place any time after this. It is likely to occur in the early evening at about 7pm. Speaker John Bercow could also select amendments for MPs to vote on. If MPs vote for no deal, the UK will leave on the March 29 by automatically reverting to World Trade Organisation trade rules. If they vote against a no deal and move to vote on extending Article 50 on Thursday, Mrs May will formally ask European leaders for the process to be extended. A ncient Britons travelled hundreds of miles for rave-like mass celebrations around Stonehenge, according to a study. They brought home-reared pigs to the feasts, whose discarded bones have been analysed by scientists. The results show that people travelled from as far away as Scotland to attend the ritual "parties" in Wiltshire more than 4,000 years ago. Researchers examined the bones of 131 pigs from four Late Neolithic sites serving the famous stone circle monuments at Stonehenge and Avebury. Chemical signals in the bones from the food and water the animals consumed identified the geographical areas where they were raised. The scientists were surprised to find that the pigs had come from as far away as Scotland, north-east England, and west Wales. Lead researcher Dr Richard Madgwick, from the University of Cardiff, said: "This study demonstrates a scale of movement and level of social complexity not previously appreciated. "These gatherings could be seen as the first united cultural events of our island, with people from all corners of Britain descending on the areas around Stonehenge to feast on food that had been specially reared and transported from their homes." Pigs were the prime source of meat for Neolithic feasting, said the scientists. The team focused on the henge complexes of Durrington Walls, Marden, Mount Pleasant and West Kennet Palisade Enclosures. Dr Madgwick added: "Arguably the most startling finding is the efforts that participants invested in contributing pigs that they themselves had raised. Procuring them in the vicinity of the feasting sites would have been relatively easy. "Pigs are not nearly as well-suited to movement over distance as cattle and transporting them, either slaughtered or on the hoof, over hundreds or even tens of kilometres, would have required a monumental effort. "This suggests that prescribed contributions were required and that rules dictated that offered pigs must be raised by the feasting participants, accompanying them on their journey, rather than being acquired locally." The research is reported in the journal Science Advances. A British woman has claimed she was told to cover up and leave a flight for wearing inappropriate clothing while wearing a top and trousers. Emily OConnor said she was told she was causing offence while on board a Thomas Cook flight from Birmingham to Tenerife and was surrounded by four flight staff who tried to remove her. Ms OConnor said she was left physically shaking following the alleged incident. The holidaymaker took to social media afterwards to voice her complaints about it, posting a poll about whether her outfit was considered inappropriate. Thomas Cook said it was sorry to have upset Ms OConnor and said its clear we should have handled the situation better. She wrote: Flying from Birmingham to Tenerife, Thomas Cook told me that they were going to remove me from the flight if I didnt cover up as I was causing offence and was inappropriate. They had 4 flight staff around me to get my luggage to take me off the plane. I informed the staff that there is no appropriate wear policy stipulated online. I stood up on the flight and asked if anyone was offended, no-one said a word. To top it off they allowed a man hurl abuse at me whilst the Flight manager and 4 air staff stood and said nothing. Asked the plane (as they were all listening now anyway) if I was offending anyone, no-one said a word. The manager then went to get my bag to remove me from the flight. A man then shouted Shut up you pathetic woman. Put a f***ing jacket on- the staff said nothing to him. Thomas Cook have apologised for making Ms O'Connor upset / Shutterstock / jremes84 I was given a jacket by my cousin sitting at the front of the plane and they did not leave until I physically put it on. They made comments over the speaker about the situation and left me shaking and upset on my own. Ms OConnors tweet has attracted a lot of support online, including from Love Island star Gabby Allen. The reality star wrote: Its safe to say, I will never fly with Thomas Cook again. Jade Charlotte, who claimed to be a crew worker, wrote: Im crew myself and would not think twice to ask you to cover up, there is no policy on what you can and cannot wear! That is awful to see that the crew on board made you feel that way, disgusting. A spokesman for the airline said: We are sorry that we upset Ms OConnor. Its clear we could have handled the situation better. In common with most airlines we have an appropriate attire policy. This applies equally to men and women of all ages without discrimination. Our crews have the difficult task of implementing that policy and dont always get it right. Thomas Cooks Appropriate Attire guidelines reads: Customers wearing inappropriate attire (including items with offensive slogans or images) will not be permitted to travel unless a change of clothes is possible. P rince Charles greeted the Queen of Spain with a warm embrace and a kiss - even though she had kept him waiting for 20 minutes. She blamed London traffic for her tardiness at the opening of Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light at the National Gallery, but the Prince of Wales didnt seem to mind. A spokesman said her arrival time had been affected by traffic. Charles had waited in the foyer of the Sainsbury Wing for her, before he eventually decided to get a sneak peek of the Sorolla exhibition himself before she eventually arrived. When she walked down the steps, the pair greeted one another with a smile and a double kiss on the cheek. Charles greets the Queen of Spain at the National Gallery / Getty Images The two have jointly celebrated the opening of a National Gallery exhibition of works by a Spanish impressionist, in an evening hailed as a moment of European unity. Queen Letizia and the Prince, who spoke warmly throughout the hour-long visit, were shown dozens of works by Sorolla, described as the master of light in a glamorous evening at the London gallery. They were shown around by Dr Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the gallery, and curator Christopher Riopelle, and accompanied by a large entourage including Lady Sarah Chatto. The royal pair appeared to get on famously, with the Queen regularly touching the Princes arm to guide him towards a favourite painting or to navigate through the gallery. They were heard to ask about the provenance of paintings, and who the subjects were. They were at the opening of Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light / PA Told by Dr Finaldi that curators had brought in a portrait of Princess Beatrice of Battenberg, the great-great-grandmother of Philip VI of Spain and sister of the great-great-grandmother of Prince Charles on loan from the National Portrait Gallery next door, Queen Letizia said: I recognise it! In a large reception, where champagne and canapes flowed for hundreds of guests, Queen Letizia and the Prince were thanked in a speech by Hannah Rothschild, the chairman of the gallery, who praised their symbolic unity during difficult political times. At time when it feels like Britain is turning its back on Europe, it is particularly pleasing to see you here, Your Majesty, she said. Art always has and always will transcend borders. British art owes a huge debt of gratitude to the Royal Family of Spain. Charles and the Queen spent time touring the exhibition / REUTERS The Queen and Prince spent around 15 minutes mingling with guests, being introduced to donors, those involved in bringing the exhibition together, and Spanish guests including Tamara Rojo, the ballerina. Speaking afterwards, Christopher Riopelle said: She [Queen Letizia] had perfect English. She knows the artist very well and so it was in many ways like greeting an old friend. We talked about him, and she in turn talked a lot to Prince Charles about him, sharing her knowledge. It seemed to be a very relaxed evening. They seemed to be very friendly. The majority of the works for the exhibition, the first solo show of works by Spain's Impressionist Sorolla in more than a century, have been loaned from Spanish institutions. Other Spanish private collectors were persuaded to loan their paintings after hearing of the prestigious exhibition, with the attendance of the Queen helping to convince them. A spokesman for the National Gallery said: In 1990, the National Gallery was honoured to welcome Her Majesty Queen Sofia of Spain to open our exhibition Painting in Spain in the later 18th Century, and again in 2006 Her Royal Highness Infanta Cristina to open Velazquez. Both were historic occasions for the National Gallery and it is with this in mind that our Director, Dr Gabriele Finaldi, invited Her Majesty Queen Letizia of Spain to attend the opening Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light. S ixty-four rapists have been convicted in the US after old rape kits finally got tested. Detectives were able to settle the convictions after Manhattan District Attorneys office provided grants to clear backlogs of untested rape kits. $38m was provided by District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr to help several jurisdictions test old rape evidence kits. Since these grants first began to be distributed in 2015, the evidence kits have led to 165 prosecutions in cases that were shelved or forgotten. In total, 64 of those have resulted in convictions. The initiative has paid to get about 55,000 rape kits tested in 32 law enforcement agencies across 20 states, including police departments in Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Austin, Miami, Memphis and Kansas City. About 9,200 of those matched with DNA profiles in the system, providing new leads and evidence for dead-end investigations. The grant helped find a match for victims like Maisha Sudbeck, who was raped in Tuscon, Arizona by a man she met online. She told The New York Times that after five years she had made peace with the idea she would never get justice. Manhatten District Attorney Cyrus Vance / AP However, a detective then knocked on her door, saying her rape evidence kit had finally been tested and that police had found a match. In February, Nathan Loebe was convicted of sexually assaulting Ms Sudbeck and six other women. She said: "My chapter was reopened. Having my kit finally tested was a catalyst for hope." At a news conference on Tuesday, victims whose kits had found a match with the help of the grant recalled how local police had initially dismissed their claims or questioned whether the encounter was consensual. There are still backlogs of untested rape kits in many US jurisdictions, and police continue to come under fire from rape victim advocates amid the #MeToo movement across the country. Mr Vance said at the press conference: I believe fundamentally there was a gender bias at issue. He added: A crime mostly involving women was simply not viewed as important to solve. Mr Vance launched the scheme in 2015 after the intense criticism over thousands of untested rape kits. Joanie Scheske, from St Louis, waited 18 years for her rapist to face justice after evidence in a separate eight-year old sexual assault was tested in 2009 and matched her attackers DNA. She told USA Today in 2015: I had a really difficult time wrapping my head around why that rape kit was never tested. B ritish backpacker Catherine Shaw died from a blow the head, a post-mortem report has found. The 23-year-olds body was found on Monday near a Guatemala highland lake popular with travellers. In a statement, the National Institute of Forensic Sciences of Guatemala said she had died four to six days earlier. A doctor performing the examination said the body showed signs of trauma but no apparent gunshot or stab wounds. "In the preliminary findings, there are no wounds from bullets or sharp weapons," Miguel Angel Samayoa told the Associated Press. "There are blows to the body." Catherine Shaw (AP) / Catherine Shaw/Lucie Blackman Trust Neither Dr Samayoa nor the institute said what might have caused the trauma. Ms Shaw, from Witney, Oxfordshire, was reported missing after she left Hotel Mayachik near Lake Atitlan on March 5. Her body was discovered unclothed and in a state of decomposition in undergrowth near a mountain overlook. The Lucie Blackman Trust, which has been assisting Ms Shaw's family, issued a statement urging people not to speculate about her death and saying it may have been a "tragic accident" not involving foul play. It added that Ms Shaw had been fasting for days before her disappearance and "disposing of possessions, including clothing". "She was very much a nature lover and adored sunrises, so it seems quite conceivable that she went up the mountain to greet the sunrise, shedding clothing as she went, and due to her lack of intake of food and fluid may have passed out or fallen, causing the wounds to her body," the statement added, cautioning that not all the facts were known and nothing could be ruled out. "Catherine just loved mountains and sunrises," the family was quoted as saying. "She died doing what she loved." C alifornias governor has said he will pause the use of the death penalty until the end of his tenure giving a reprieve to the states 737 death row inmates. Gavin Newsom plans to sign an executive order on Wednesday placing a moratorium on executions. He is also withdrawing lethal injection regulations, already tied up in courts by death penalty opponents, and shuttering the new execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison that has never been used. "The intentional killing of another person is wrong and as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual," Mr Newsom said in prepared remarks. California governor Gavin Newsom / AP He called the death penalty "a failure" that "has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or can't afford expensive legal representation." Mr Newsom added that innocent people have been wrongly convicted and sometimes put to death. California has not executed anyone since 2006 when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor. In 2016, voters narrowly approved a ballot measure to speed up the punishment, however, no condemned inmate faced imminent execution. The interior of the lethal injection facility at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin / AP Since California's last execution, its death row population has grown to house one of every four condemned inmates in the United States. They include Scott Peterson, whose trial for killing his wife Laci gripped the country, and Richard Davis, who kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas during a slumber party and strangled her. Michele Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy (Los Angeles County) District Attorneys criticised the move, saying Mr Newsom was usurping the express will of California voters and substituting his personal preferences via this hasty and ill-considered moratorium on the death penalty. Lonnie Franklin Jr., a convicted serial killer known as the "Grim Sleeper," is sentenced to death in Los Angeles Superior Court. / AP But Alison Parker, US managing director at Human Rights Watch, praised Newsom's "great courage and leadership in ending the cruel, costly, and unfair practice of executing prisoners." She called for other states to follow California's lead. The American Civil Liberties Union called it "a watershed moment in the fight for racial equity and equal justice for all." Justin Brooks, director of the California Innocence Project, lauded Newsom for ending the risk of executing someone who is innocent. A condemned inmate walks along the east block of death row at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin. / AP Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which has been fighting in court to force the state to resume executions, said blocking Newsom's move may be difficult. "Reprieves, the governor does have the power to do that. That doesn't make it the right thing to do," Mr Scheidegger said. "At this time I don't see a legal challenge to the reprieve." However, he said prohibiting corrections officials from preparing to carry out executions "is patently illegal" under the 2016 ballot measure. Other governors also have enacted moratoriums. Illinois Republican George Ryan was the first in 2000 and later was followed by Pennsylvania, Washington and Oregon. Illinois ultimately outlawed executions, as did Washington. Mr Newsom said the death penalty is not a deterrent, wastes taxpayer dollars and is flawed because it is "irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error." Richard Allen Davis has been on death row at San Quentin State Prison since his 1996 conviction in the kidnap-murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas. / AP It is also costly - California has spent $5 billion since 1978 on its death row, he said. More than six in 10 condemned California inmates are minorities, which his office cited as proof of racial disparities in who is sentenced to die. Since 1973, five California inmates who were sentenced to death were later exonerated, his office said. Seventy-nine condemned California inmates have died of natural causes since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1978. Another 26 committed suicide. California has executed 13 inmates, while two were executed in other states. A man inspecting what is believed to be wreckage at the crash site of an Ethiopia Airlines aircraft near Bishoftu, a town some 60 kilometres southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A Nairobi-bound Boeing 737 crashed six minutes after an early-morning takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, killing all 149 passengers and eight crew on board, Ethiopian Airlines said as world leaders offered condolences to distraught next-of-kin. People holding passports from 32 countries and the UN were on board the plane which ploughed into a field just 60 kilometres (37 miles) southeast of Addis Ababa, the carrier's CEO Tewolde GebreMariam told journalists in the capital, lamenting this "very sad and tragic day." AFP/Getty Images Y oung children who have not been vaccinated have been banned from attending schools in Italy after a surge in measles cases. Children up to the age of six will be excluded unless their parents can prove they have had their jabs under the Lorenzin law, named after the former health minister who introduced it. Parents will be fined up to 425 if those over six, who cannot be banned from attending, have not been protected against measles, mumps, and rubella, among other vaccinations. Health Minister Giulia Grillo told La Repubblica: "Now everyone has had time to catch up. No vaccine, no school. File photo: A vial of measles, mumps and rubella vaccine / REUTERS In Bologna, around 300 children have been suspended, with 5,000 found to have out of date documents. According to EU health officials, 165 measles cases were reported in January almost twice as many as the previous month. The law came after it was revealed that Italys vaccination rate was below 80 per cent, despite a World Health Organisation target of 95 per cent. It is the threshold at which herd immunity kicks in, making the spread of diseases unlikely and protecting those unable to receive vaccinations for medical reasons. The anti-vaccine movement has grown in popularity since 2000, aided by the rise in social media. More than 100 cases of measles were confirmed in the US last month, leaving teenagers scrambling to get themselves vaccinated after their parents had refused. The movement has also caused an "alarming drop" in the number of children in London having the MMR jab, with just 81.2 per cent of children receiving the first immunisation by age two. Many parents in the movement fear that vaccinations can cause autism, despite Andrew Wakefield's paper linking the two having been discredited. O pposition leader Juan Guaido vowed to take Nicolas Maduros place in the presidential palace very soon as thousands of protesters took to the streets of Caracas. We need an office to work in, so very soon, and when we have the armed forces totally on our side, well go to find my office there, Mr Guaido told supporters, who chanted back: Yes, you can! Demonstrators banged pots and sounded car horns and many waved banners calling on President Maduro to go. With courage and strength I asked you to believe in yourselves, that Venezuela would emerge from the darkness, that the end of the usurpation is very close, they were told by Mr Guaido, 35, who is recognised as interim president by more than 50 countries. Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro / AFP/Getty Images State prosecutor Tarek William Saab told reporters he would place Mr Guaido under investigation for his alleged involvement in the sabotage of the Venezuelan electric grid. T he daughter of late US actor Luke Perry has hit back at social media trolls who criticised her grieving process. Sophie Perry said since her father died she has received a lot of attention online but did not ask to be thrown into a virtual spotlight. Answering commenters who shamed how she was mourning as well as her language and wardrobe, she said: Just unfollow. The 18-year-old posted a picture on Instagram and wrote: Yes I am hurt and sad and crying and beside myself with what happened to my dad." Its the worst thing to ever happen in my life. But Im not going to sit in my room and cry day in and day out until the internet has deemed it appropriate for me to do otherwise, she added. If you knew my dad you would know he wouldnt want me to. So you shouldnt either. The US actor died in California, less than a week after suffering a massive stroke at the age of 52. He appeared on shows like Riverdale but rose to fame playing Dylan McKay in Beverly Hills, 90210. She said: I am also not going to cater to anyone elses needs and beliefs. I swear like a sailor and sometimes I dress like a hooker. So to those of you shaming me for my language and my wardrobe and most disgustingly, my grieving process, do us both the favour and just unfollow. On International Womans Day, the teen praised her mum, Minnie Sharp as the family mourned her fathers death, writing on Instagram: she is the rock for everybody grieving in this family right now. "She's the toughest and sweetest and most amazing woman, she added. E ight people have died after a three-storey building that contained a primary school in Nigeria collapsed with at least 100 students inside. A major, frantic rescue operation was under way and rescuers have carried about 37 people out from the rubble. Video from the scene in the country's commercial capital Lagos on Wednesday showed at least one dust-covered child being carried out of the wreckage. Onlookers crowded around in the densely populated neighbourhood in Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital, cheered as the child was lifted out. The crowd again celebrated as another child was pulled from the rubble. National Emergency Management Agency spokesman Ibrahim Farinloye said 37 people had been pulled out alive while eight bodies were recovered from the ruins. An unknown number remained missing. People help a child after he was rescued from the scene of a building collapse in Lagos, Nigeria / AP It was not immediately clear why the building collapsed but such disasters are all too common in Nigeria, where new construction often goes up without regulatory oversight and floors are added to already unstable buildings. Lagos state governor Akinwunmi Ambode said the building, which had been marked for demolition, was classified as residential and the school was operating illegally on the top two floors. Thousands of people swarmed the rescue site, with people standing in narrow streets and on rooftops of rusted, corrugated metal as a single yellow excavator scooped at the ruins. A number of shirtless, barefoot men jumped in to offer assistance with hacksaws and mallets in hand. It is not yet clear how many children have been pulled from the rubble, and how many have survived. Management Agency's southwest region, adding that casualty figures were not yet available. People gather as rescue workers search for survivors at the site of a collapsed building containing a school in Nigeria's commercial capital of Lagos, Nigeria. / REUTERS Building collapses are common in Nigeria, where new construction often goes up without regulatory oversight The collapse comes as President Muhammadu Buhari, newly elected to a second term, tries to improve groaning, inefficient infrastructure in Africa's most populous nation. "Nigeria's infrastructure is generally less than half the size than in the average sub-Saharan Africa country and only a fraction of that in emerging market economies," the International Monetary Fund has noted. Rescue workers and emergency teams work at the scene of a building collapse in Lagos, Nigeria / AP "The perceived quality of the infrastructure is low." D onald Trump has hit back at a "fake news" conspiracy theory that his wife Melania has a body double. Some people are convinced that a body double is being used to "play" Mrs Trump during TV appearances when she has to accompany her husband on trips. Images of the First Lady are often circulated on social media by people who claim she has a stunt double. At a press conference in autumn 2017, Mrs Trump wore huge sunglasses and said nothing as her husband spoke to the cameras prompting speculation that it was not really her standing beside him. And fresh speculation surfaced last Friday when the couple visited the Providence Baptist Church in Smiths Station. The US President hit back today, writing on Twitter: The Fake News photoshopped pictures of Melania, then propelled conspiracy theories that its actually not her by my side in Alabama and other places. A Spanish aid worker living in London was today named as a victim of the Ethiopian Airlines disaster. Pilar Martinez Docampo, 32, who taught English in Kenya, was among 157 passengers and crew killed in the crash on Sunday. According to Spanish media, Ms Docampo, from Galicia, had been in London with her boyfriend for about seven years. A LinkedIn profile in her name said she lived in Brentford and had worked as a chef for the group that owns restaurant chains Zizzi and Ask since 2015. A Zizzi spokesman said: Pilar Martinez Docampo worked with us for almost 3 and a half years and was Assistant Chef in Chiswick before choosing to leave in February 2019. We are very saddened to hear of the loss of Pilar and our thoughts are with her friends and family at this time. Her death has led to three days of mourning in her hometown of Cangas do Morrazo, where a friend told local media: She was very happy and liked to travel a lot. Ms Docampo is understood to have visited family in the town in the days before the flight. It is thought to be the first time she had travelled with a non-governmental organisation to work as a volunteer. Another of the nine Britons killed in the crash was named last night as humanitarian worker Oliver Vick, 45, who helped bring parliamentary elections to Afghanistan. The father of two, from Wargrave in Berkshire, was travelling to a posting with the UN in Somalia. He died with his girlfriend, Canadian Jessica Hyba. A wholesome viral challenge has seen people from all over the world hunting down piles of other people's rubbish before cleaning it up. The trending hashtag Trashtag has taken over social media recently in a challenge inspiring people to go to locations littered in filth and pick it up, posting before and after pictures of their efforts online. So far, there are more than 28,000 posts tagged on Instagram as countless people take part in the clean-up challenge. People who take part are being hailed for their efforts to clean up some of the world's filthiest beauty spots. The challenge urges people to tidy up natural spaces and has seen pictures posted of beaches, parks and rivers cleaned. The original Trashtag idea had started in 2015 when outdoor clothing company UCO launched the #TrashTag project. But a recent post on Reddit has brought the trend back and seen it blow up on social media. The post urged individuals to make the world a better place in an attempt to take the challenge global. Image Credit: UNI New Delhi, Mar 13(UNI): India on Wednesday expressed hope that forward movement will be made in talks with Pakistan for the Kartarpur Sahib corridor on Thursday. 'We are going with a positive mindset and hope Pakistan will also reciprocate in the same manner,' a senior government official said here. He said the government of India has identified 50 acres of land for the corridor 'which has immense national importance'. In the first phase, 15 acres of land will be developed and a state of the art terminal building will be setup. In Thursday's meeting to be held at Attari, issues related to passports for pilgrims and necessary security protocol will also figure. Image Credit: UNI G ood things come in small packages will always run true when it comes to jewellery. While chunky resin hoops and bedazzled ear cuffs may be more Insta-worthy, size doesnt matter when it comes to a perfectly curated ear. For those like myself who appreciate a delicate approach, mini hoops and studs are your saviour. Perfectly teamed with multiple piercings, mini earrings are your one-way ticket to an edgy organised ear or a minimal standalone statement. Dreamy images of beautifully styled ears with multiple piercings may dominate our Pinterest feeds, but where can we find these baby jewels? True to their understated aesthetic, it requires a serious search to find these hidden gems. Lucky for you, weve saved you the trouble. For the perfectly curated ear, these mini hoops and studs are begging to be snatched. 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The first year student previously revealed that her parents made her go to college, and faced backlash after saying: I dont really care about school. One user commented on a photo of Miss Giannulli with friends, saying: You didnt earn your success. You stole it from someone more hardworking and deserving than you. Another wrote: It must be nice to have a rich momma that gets you into elite colleges. Loughlin and her fashion designer husband, Mossimo Giannulli were handed an affidavit on Tuesday, which alleged that the couple paid $500,000 in exchange for having their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team. Olivias older sister, Isabella Rose, 20, also attends the school, but neither daughters participated in USC crew, which helped facilitate their admission. Restoration of services on Ambae to be prioritised on safe zones: COM Kolkata, Mar 13 (IBNS): The Anti-Trafficking-in-Persons Youth Champions Conclave, hosted by the U.S. Consulate General in Kolkata and the New Delhi based NGO Shakti Vahini on March 13-16 at the American Center in Kolkata, is the eighth international gathering of stakeholders of over 130 youth leaders and stakeholders from the U.S., India, Nepal, and Bangladesh to focus on one goal- ending human trafficking. The U.S. Consulate General hopes synergies between stakeholders at the conclave will lead to real world action after all the participants return to the communities in their respective communities In her inaugural address, U.S. Consul General Patti Hoffman said, Trafficking in persons (TIP) remains a global issue, and the United States is committed to continuing to working together with international partners to end trafficking. It is not enough merely to denounce this horrific assault on human dignity; we must actively work to prevent and end this barbaric exploitation of innocent survivors. The United States and India, as enduring global partners in the 21st century, are committed to working together to end human trafficking. The Founder of Shakti Vahini Ravi Kant noted, The role of youth is important in the fight against trafficking. Youth leaders are the drivers of social change and they are the most affected by this crime. Anti-TIP issues need to be addressed on Indian campuses. The youth can contribute significantly to the cause by raising awareness that can lead to real impact. As internet-connectivity has opened up new threats to today's young people, the youth need to be ever more vigilant and aware to combat the scourge of TIP in their communities. The U.S. Consulate General believes that, when we empower young leaders, we see change. In West Bengal, there is an example of positive change with the Swayamsiddha campaign, started as a pilot project in the South 24 Parganas district by the West Bengal Police. This initiative has focused on strengthening response mechanisms in partnership with students and community groups, which has created a battalion of young women peer leaders. In fact, the model will now be replicated in all districts of the state. Last year, it was a privilege to showcase the Swayamsiddha success story at our anti-TIP Conclave, and we will continue to work with the West Bengal government to share this model with other states in India. This years conclave will also cover the growing menace of online sexual exploitation and highlight the importance of engaging the private sector as a key partner. Dr. Vanessa Bouche and some of her students from Texas Christian University in the United States will lead workshops on campus activism, community activism, and professional activism throughout the conclave. On Mar 15, the U.S. Consulate General will host a womens empowerment festival at 2:30 p.m. at the American Center, where the general public can learn about the inspiring work of anti-TIP activists, explore ways to engage with over 20 NGOs working to end trafficking, and purchase various handicrafts and items made by members of the NGOs. The Consulate will also host a presentation comprising digital and live performative storytelling at the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) starting at 6:30 p.m., all our welcome. March 12, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - The United Nations postponed last week for the third time the publication of a blacklist of Israeli and international firms that profit directly from Israels illegal settlements in the occupied territories. The international body had come under enormous pressure to keep the database under wraps after lobbying behind the scenes from Israel, the United States and many of the 200-plus companies that were about to be named. UN officials have suggested they may go public with the list in a few months. But with no progress since the UNs Human Rights Council requested the database back in early 2016, Palestinian leaders are increasingly fearful that it has been permanently shelved. That was exactly what Israel hoped for. When efforts were first made to publish the list in 2017, Danny Danon, Israels ambassador to the UN, warned: We will do everything we can to ensure that this list does not see the light of day. He added that penalizing the settlements was an expression of modern antisemitism. Both Israel and the US pulled out of the Human Rights Council last year, claiming that Israel was being singled out. Israel has good reason to fear greater transparency. Bad publicity would most likely drive many of these firms, a few of them household names, out of the settlements under threat of a consumer backlash and a withdrawal of investments by religious organizations and pension funds. The UN has reportedly already warned Coca-Cola, Teva Pharmaceuticals, the defense electronics company Elbit Systems and Africa Israel Investments of their likely inclusion. Israeli telecoms and utility companies are particularly exposed because grids serving the settlements are integrated with those in Israel. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter There is an added danger that the firms might be vulnerable to prosecutions, should the International Criminal Court at The Hague eventually open an investigation into whether the settlements constitute a war crime, as the Palestinian leadership has demanded. The exodus of these firms from the West Bank would, in turn, make it much harder for Israel to sustain its colonies on stolen Palestinian land. As a result, efforts to advance a Palestinian state would be strengthened. Many of the settlements contrary to widely held impressions of them have grown into large towns. Their inhabitants expect all the comforts of modern life, from local bank branches to fast-food restaurants and high-street clothing chains. Nowadays, a significant proportion of Israels 750,000 settlers barely understand that their communities violate international law. The settlements are also gradually being integrated into the global economy, as was highlighted by a row late last year when Airbnb, an accommodation-booking website, announced a plan to de-list properties in West Bank settlements. The company was possibly seeking to avoid inclusion on the database, but instead, it faced a severe backlash from Israels supporters. This month the US state of Texas approved a ban on all contracts with Airbnb, arguing that the online companys action was antisemitic. As both sides understand, a lot hangs on the blacklist being made public. If Israel and the US succeed, and western corporations are left free to ignore the Palestinians dispossession and suffering, the settlements will sink their roots even deeper into the West Bank. Israels occupation will become ever more irreversible, and the prospect of a Palestinian state ever more distant. A 2013 report on the ties between big business and the settlements noted the impact on the rights of Palestinians was pervasive and devastating. Sadly, the UN leaderships cowardice on what should be a straightforward matter the settlements violate international law, and firms should not assist in such criminal enterprises is part of a pattern. Repeatedly, Israel has exerted great pressure on the UN to keep its army off a shame list of serious violators of childrens rights. Israel even avoided a listing in 2015 following its 50-day attack on Gaza the previous year, which left more than 500 Palestinian children dead. Dozens of armies and militias are named each year. The Hague court has also been dragging its feet for years over whether to open a proper war crimes investigation into Israels actions in Gaza, as well as the settlements. The battle to hold Israel to account is likely to rage again this year, after the publication last month of a damning report by UN legal experts into the killing of Palestinian protesters at Gazas perimeter fence by Israeli snipers. Conditions for Gazas two million Palestinians have grown dire since Israel imposed a blockade, preventing movement of goods and people, more than a decade ago. The UN report found that nearly all of those killed by the snipers 154 out of 183 were unarmed. Some 35 Palestinian children were among the dead, and of the 6,000 wounded more than 900 were minors. Other casualties included journalists, medical personnel and people with disabilities. The legal experts concluded that there was evidence of war crimes. Any identifiable commanders and snipers, it added, should face arrest if they visited UN member states. Israels prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, dismissed the report as lies born out of an obsessive hatred of Israel. Certainly, it has caused few ripples in western capitals. Britains opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn was a lone voice in calling for an arms embargo on Israel in response. It is this Israeli exceptionalism that is so striking. The more violent Israel becomes towards the Palestinians and the more intransigent in rejecting peace, the less pressure is exerted upon it. Not only does Israel continue to enjoy generous financial, military and diplomatic support from the US and Europe, both are working ever harder to silence criticisms of its actions by their own citizens. As the international boycott, divestment and sanctions movement grows larger, western capitals have casually thrown aside commitments to free speech in a bid to crush it. France has already criminalized support for a boycott of Israel, and its president Emmanuel Macron recently proposed making it illegal to criticize Zionism, the ideology that underpins Israels rule over Palestinians. More than two dozen US states have passed anti-BDS legislation, denying companies and individual contractors dealing with the government of that particular state the right to boycott Israel. In every case, Israel is the only country protected by these laws. Last month, the US Senate passed a bill that adds federal weight to this state-level campaign of intimidation. The hypocrisy of these states urging peace in the region while doing their best to subvert it is clear. Now the danger is that UN leaders will join them. (A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.) Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israels Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle. Visit his website www.jonathan-cook.net. Countries & Areas Search for country or area A Afghanistan Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan B Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Brunei Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burma Burundi C Cabo Verde Cambodia Cameroon Canada Central African Republic Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Costa Rica Cote dIvoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czechia D Democratic Republic of the Congo Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic E Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia F Fiji Finland France G Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Grenada Guatemala Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana H Haiti Holy See Honduras Hungary I Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy J Jamaica Japan Jordan K Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Kosovo Kuwait Kyrgyzstan L Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg M Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Micronesia Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Mozambique N Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria North Korea North Macedonia Norway O Oman P Pakistan Palau Palestinian Territories Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Q Qatar R Republic of the Congo Romania Russia Rwanda S Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Sweden Switzerland Syria T Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Timor-Leste Togo Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Tuvalu U Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Uruguay Uzbekistan V Vanuatu Venezuela Vietnam Y Yemen Z Zambia Zimbabwe Only a few weeks ago, German politicians and media were up in arms protesting to the Trump administration for interfering in Berlins internal affairs. There were even outraged complaints that Washington was seeking regime change against Chancellor Angela Merkels government. Those protests were sparked when Richard Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany, warned German companies involved in the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline with Russia that they could be hit with American economic sanctions if they go ahead with the Baltic seabed project. Earlier, Grenell provoked fury among Berlins political establishment when he openly gave his backing to opposition party Alternative for Germany. That led to consternation and denunciations of Washingtons perceived backing for regime change in Berlin. They were public calls for Grenell to be expelled over his apparent breach of diplomatic protocols. Now, however, Germany is shamelessly kowtowing to an even more outrageous American regime-change plot against Venezuela. Last week, the government of President Nicolas Maduro ordered the expulsion of German ambassador Daniel Kriener after he greeted the US-backed opposition figure Juan Guaido on a high-profile occasion. Guaido had just returned from a tour of Latin American countries during which he had openly called for the overthrow of the Maduro government. Arguably a legal case could be made for the arrest of Guaido by the Venezuelan authorities on charges of sedition. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter When Guaido returned to Venezuela on March 4 he was greeted at the airport by several foreign diplomats. Among the receiving dignitaries was Germanys envoy Daniel Kriener. The opposition figure had declared himself interim president of Venezuela on January 23 and was immediately recognized by Washington and several European Union states. The EU has so far not issued an official endorsement of Guaido over incumbent President Maduro. Italys objection blocked the EU from adopting a unanimous position. Nevertheless, as the strongest economy in the 28-member bloc, Germany can be seen as de facto leader of the EU. Its position on Venezuela therefore gives virtual EU gravitas to the geopolitical maneuvering led by Washington towards the South American country. Whats more, the explicit backing of Juan Guaido by Germanys envoy was carried out on the express order of Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, according to Deutsche Welle. It was my express wish and request that Ambassador Kriener turn out with representatives of other European nations and Latin American ones to meet acting President Guaido at the airport, said Maas. We had information that he was supposed to be arrested there. I believe that the presence of various ambassadors helped prevent such an arrest. Its staggering to comprehend the double-think involved here. Guaido was hardly known among the vast majority of Venezuelans until he catapulted on to the global stage by declaring himself interim president. That move was clearly executed in a concerted plan with the Trump White House. European governments and Western media have complacently adopted the White House line that Guaido is the legitimate leader while socialist President Maduro is a usurper. That is in spite of the fact that Maduro was re-elected last year in free and fair elections by a huge majority of votes. Guaidos rightwing, pro-business party boycotted the elections. Yet he is anointed by Washington, Berlin and some 50 other states as the legitimate leader. Russia, China, Turkey, Cuba and most other members of the United Nations have refused to adopt Washingtons decree of recognizing Guaido. Those nations (comprising 75 per cent of the UN assembly) continue to recognize President Maduro as the sovereign authority. Indeed, Russia has been highly critical of Washingtons blatant interference for regime change in oil-rich Venezuela. Moscow has warned it will not tolerate US military intervention. Russias envoy to the UN Vasily Nebenzia, at a Security Council session last month, excoriated the US for its gross violation of international law with regard to Venezuela. Moscows diplomat also directed a sharp rebuke at other nations complicit in Washingtons aggression, saying that one day you will be next for similar American subversion in their own affairs. Germanys hypocrisy and double-think is, to paraphrase that countrys national anthem, uber alles (above all else). German politicians, diplomats and media were apoplectic in their anger at perceived interference by the US ambassador in Berlins internal affairs. Yet the German political establishment has no qualms whatsoever about ganging up only weeks later with Washington to subvert the politics and constitution of Venezuela. How can Germany be so utterly uber servile to Washington and the latters brazen criminal aggression towards Venezuela? It seems obvious that Berlin is trying to ingratiate itself with the Trump administration. But what for? Trump has been pillorying Germany with allegations of unfair trade practices. In particular, Washington is recently stepping up its threats to slap punitive tariffs on German auto exports. Given that this is a key sector in the German export-driven economy, it may be gleaned that Berlin is keen to appease Trump. By backing his aggression towards Venezuela? Perhaps this policy of appeasement is also motivated by Berlins concern to spare the Nord Stream 2 project from American sanctions. When NS2 is completed later this year, it is reckoned to double the capacity of natural gas consumption by Germany from Russia. That will be crucial for Germanys economic growth. Another factor is possible blackmail of Berlin by Washington. Recall the earth-shattering revelations made by American whistleblower Edward Snowden a few years back when he disclosed that US intelligence agencies were tapping the personal phone communications of Chancellor Merkel and other senior Berlin politicians. Recall, too, how the German state remarkably acquiesced over what should have been seen as a devastating infringement by Washington. The weird lack of action by Berlin over that huge violation of its sovereignty by the Americans makes one wonder if the US spies uncovered a treasure trove of blackmail material on German politicians. Berlins pathetic kowtowing to Washingtons interference in Venezuela begs an ulterior explanation. No self-respecting government could be so hypocritical and duplicitous. Whatever Berlin may calculate to gain from its unscrupulous bending over for Washington, one thing seems clear, as Russian envoy Nebenzia warned: One day you are next for American hegemonic shafting. Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Masters graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. This article was originally published by " Strategic Culture Foundation " - Public Finance Minister Eugen Teodorovici stated on Wednesday after Parliament rejected President Klaus Iohannis's request for the reexamination of the 2019 state budget law, by passing the bill as originally sent to the President for promulgation, that all the payments pledged for both projects and the "social area" will be secured. "Categorically, all the payment obligations, from projects to payments in the social area, will be ensured, as we did it every year. Even though, each year, there are the same talks, that there is no money, we proved every time that the money is ensured," the Minister told the press at the Palace of Parliament. In respect to the criticism brought to the budget draft by the Presidential Administration, Teodorovici replied that, at the end of the year, one will be able to see "who was right." "So, lingering in a discussion that is very much prolonged, we don't do anything else but block any kind of project, payments for persons, for the Romanians. All the economy is basically blocked. And, in addition, the country's image, because there are many elements that are related to the budget of a country, to be approved as soon as possible. (...) Perhaps, we will try this year to prepare the budget for next year, although the law says very clearly that there are steps, stages to be taken. But, I even talked to my colleagues at the Finance to start such a process earlier, in order to have a much more applied discussion, much more substantiated, discussions with parliamentary groups, the presidency, if it wishes ... (...) No one wants to have a budget in advance, but the way this year's political debates have taken place over the budget, I think they already exceeded any limit, Teodorovici stated. He labeled President Iohannis's statement as "exaggerated," as he stated the budget bill is one "of national disgrace." The Minister underscored that, according to the law, the President must promulgate the budget. "If I were him, I would have asked for a discussion with the Finance Minister in order to clarify myself, in order to see exactly if what I claim is correct. Taking into account that this discussion didn't take place, I find it to be an exaggerated statement. (...) The law stipulates that [he] must promulgate it. If he doesn't promulgate, on the very first day that he receives this budget, it means that this is another clear desire to delay any kind of development of this country," Teodorovici added. In respect to the dissatisfactions of local authorities, the Minister stated that he will seek solutions for the punctual issues that emerged, but recommendations will be made, including in respect to the management of city halls. "Let us talk concretely, let's see precisely the case, if there are such situations, if it is the best approach, the management of a budget which a city hall has - because, perhaps, there are recommendations to be made by us for the mayors - but as it is dimensioned as a budget and as a way of using it, things will be done at the end of the year as it should. But if there are punctual situations, we will talk at the Finance [Ministry] and see what is the solution," Teodorovici said. The flight FZ 1796 from Fly Dubai due to depart from Bucharest to Dubai on Tuesday night at 23:30hrs was canceled, the air operator ensuring for the 60 passengers a rescheduling with a flight on March 13 and hotel accommodation after the flights with Boeing 737 MAX 8 and Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft were suspended in Romania for an indefinite period in both the national airspace and the airports according to the directives of the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), informs the National Company Bucharest Airports (CNAB). Read also: Senate's Tariceanu: Fighting corruption cannot be achieved with illegal, unconstitutional methods, as has happened in Romania "The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has issued two directives: an airworthiness emergency directive and a safety directive. The airworthiness emergency directive has imposed the suspension of commercial air transport operations of the two Boeing 737 (MAX 8 and MAX 9) across the European Union, and through the safety directive, commercial flights with the two types of Boeing aircraft previously specified to, from and above the European Union airspace were banned. Thus in Romania, flights with Boeing 737 MAX 8 and Boeing 737 MAX 9 were suspended for an indefinite period from 21:00hrs local time on March 12, 2019, both in the national airspace and at airports following the EASA directives," reads a CNAB statement. Fly Dubai is the only company to operate regular flights to Bucharest with B737 MAX aircraft. AGERPRES . Indonesia's Ambassador to Romania M. Amhar Azeth on Wednesday stated in Targu-Jiu that Gorj County has a very high potential in energy field and animal breeding, pointing out that there are good premises for a collaboration in the two fields. "We brought nine Senators from Indonesia to discuss with our Romanian partners about the collaboration potential existing between our countries in the economic and investments fields. We saw that Gorj County has a very high potential in energy field and animal breeding, and the Senators were very serious when saying that once returned to Indonesia they will prepare the future collaboration. (...) The next step will be for a Romanian delegation to go to Indonesia, probably in June and probably the Minister of Healthcare and the Minister of Culture will be part of it," M. Amhar Azeth said. President of the Gorj County Council Cosmin Popescu said he discussed with the Ambassador about the collaboration opportunities existing in the mining field. "We discussed about such areas of common interest, the mining area, about the companies producing mining equipment subassemblies, for we are alike in this field, both countries are exploiting coal. We also had two discussions that we wish will materialize in what concerns certain material needed for the mining industry, and I mean here natural rubber, through mutual exchanges between companies from Indonesia and the Gorj County. We will take the necessary steps so that the companies producing mining equipment and rubber producer Artego to open a collaboration and discuss about certain fields of a common interest," Cosmin Popescu mentioned. Other discussions carried out by the authorities in Gorj and the Indonesian ones referred to the agricultural field. After the meeting in Targu-Jiu, the Indonesian Ambassador to Romania specified that he will pay two more visits to the Gorj County, to the Rovinari and Turceni cities. Pilots of the 53rd Fighter Squadron of the Romanian Air Forces on Tuesday and Wednesday carried out air refueling missions for F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft, a Ministry of National Defence (MApN) release informs. Read also: UDMR's Kelemen: 'I believe Laura Codruta Kovesi must be European Chief Prosecutor' They used a KC-135 Stratotanker tanker aircraft for the mission, which belongs to the 100th Air Refueling Wing of the United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE), and it's a special aircraft designed for air refueling of jet aircraft. The flights altitude ranged between 7,000 and 10,000 meters. The flight autonomy of the F-16 Fighting Falcon is of approximately 3 hours and after air refueling, which only takes a couple of minutes, the flight duration increases by another two hours. The Romanian pilots received certification for such procedures as part of their training in Portugal for piloting F-16 Fighting Falcon. AGERPRES . Tell me who you cannot criticize and I will tell you who is your master. (Attributed to Voltaire). March 12, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - Saying anything negative about Israel has long been the third rail of US politics and media. Israel is our nations most sacred cow. Any questioning of its behavior brings furious charges of anti-Semitism and professional oblivion. I keep in my bookcase a cautionary book, They Dared Speak Out written by US senators and congressmen who all lost their positions after rebuking Israel for its mistreatment of Palestinians or daring to suggest that Israel had far too much influence in the US. Journalists learn this first commandment very early. Criticize, or even question, Israel at your own peril. Until recently, we journalists were not even allowed to write there was an Israel lobby. It was widely considered Washingtons most powerful lobby group but, until lately, mentioning its name was seriously verboten. Now, young Democratic stars Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a feisty congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, have suddenly broken the taboo and said what dared not be said: there is too much rightwing Israeli influence and there must be justice for Palestine. Presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have come to the defense of Ilhan Omar against the usual charges that she is anti-Semitic. So have black groups and smaller liberal Jewish groups. The Democratic Party, that once received half its financial support from Jewish sources, is badly split over the Palestine crisis. Its old guard is retreating and does not know what to do beyond issuing fiery denunciations of the heretical Miss Omar. The Democratic Party split comes just at a time when it is trying to bring down President Donald Trump. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter Many people seem unaware that Islam is now Americas third largest religion and may soon surpass the number of Jews. In Canada, Muslims are already the second religion. Ilhan is not anti-Semitic. I grew up in New York and New England where vicious anti-Semitism abounded. I know real anti-Semitism when I see it. But she is quite right in charging that vast amounts of pro-Israel money have bought Congress and the media. Sheldon Adelson, the pro-Israel casino tycoon, has given well over $100 million to the Republican Party and its leaders. This money comes from legal gambling, a sickness that preys on addicts and the unfortunate. In the 1700s, Dr. Samuel Johnson well defined lotteries and gambling as a tax on fools. Such is the source of Adelsons billions and his influence over the US political process. He is also the primary financier of Israels prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, who now faces serious charges of corruption. Interestingly, Britain faces a similar political storm. Its left-leaning Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, has called for justice for the Palestinians and a viable state for them. Britains pro-Israel groups and media have launched furious counterattacks on Corbyn and his allies, barraging them with false accusations of being anti-Semitic. This is utter nonsense. To find real anti-Semitism in Britain you need look into the recesses of the Conservative Party. Ive seen its ugly face. Israels brutal repression of Palestinians has sparked bitter anti-Israel sentiments across Europe. Not so much in America, where media leans far over to Israels side and evangelical Christians have been bamboozled into believing that a Greater Israel is somehow necessary for the Second Coming. But young Americans, and even more so Europeans, are increasingly hearing the call of justice for Palestine. They want no truck with Israels right-wingers, whom many leftist Israelis, including the late great writer, Uri Avnery, brand fascists. The prescient and courageous Pat Buchanan said it years ago: the US Congress was Israeli occupied territory. His political career was ruined. So was my mothers career. She was one of the first American female journalists to cover the Mideast in the early 1950s. After extensively reporting the unknown fact that there were nearly one million Palestinian refugees driven from the new state of Israel, she was silenced by advertisers pulling ads from the papers she wrote for and, finally, threats to throw acid in my face. Her career was ruined. So I say to Miss Omar and the other brave ladies, full speed ahead. Damn the torpedoes. Do what is good for the world and your country. Break the hold of big money over our republic. Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times, Nation Pakistan, Hurriyet, Turkey, Sun Times Malaysia and other news sites in Asia. ericmargolis.com The opening of the National Museum of Jewish History and Holocaust in Romania was the main topic for discussion at the Wednesday meeting of Prime Minister Viorica Dancila with Radu Ioanid, the Director of International Archival Programs at US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Participating in the meeting there were also US Ambassador to Romania Hans Klemm and the head of the "Elie Wiesel" Institute in Bucharest, Alexandru Florian, reads a release of the Government sent to AGERPRES. "The main topic for discussion was the opening of the National Museum of Jewish History and Holocaust in Romania. Thus, the head of the Executive reiterated on this occasion the full support granted by the Romanian Government to this project designed to contribute to the promotion of education on Holocaust at the level of the entire Romanian society. The meeting took place in the context of today's conference in Bucharest called "The Future of Memory: the National Museum of Jewish History and Holocaust in Romania," an event organised by the Romanian Presidency at the EU Council, under the auspices of the Romanian Prime Minister," reads the release. President of the Romanian Senate Calin Popescu-Tariceanu welcomed on Wednesday visiting Speaker of the Assembly of the Republic of North Macedonia Talat Xhaferi to emphasise that North Macedonia's joining NATO is a guarantee for its future. "Mr Calin Popescu-Tariceanu pointed out that the accession to NATO of the Republic of North Macedonia is a guarantee for the future of the country as a result of its effects on the national and, implicitly, regional stability and security. He added that the Prespa Agreement' that changed the name of the country is a remarkable example of reconciliation and good neighborly relations for the entire region," the Romanian Senate reported on Wednesday in a press statement. The meeting was held as part of Xhaferi's visit to Romania to attend a plenary vote session of the Romanian Senate that passed a bill ratifying a protocol on the accession of the Republic of North Macedonia to NATO. According to the statement, the talks highlighted the significance of the signing of the protocol, the importance of the process of North Macedonia's transition to a market economy and the consolidation of the rule of law for the country's success in the process of joining the EU. Tariceanu hailed the presence of his Macedonian counterpart at the plenary session of the Romanian Senate, indicating that the ratification of the Accession Protocol for the future Republic of North Macedonia is a historic moment for North Macedonia and Romania, underlining the constant support lent by Romania to the accession process. Chairman of the Hungarian Democratic Union of Romania (UDMR) Kelemen Hunor said on Tuesday in a televised show that Laura Codruta Kovesi must be left to hold the position of chief prosecutor of the European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO) if she ranked first among the candidates. Read also: Net average monthly wage drops to 2,936 lei in January (official data) "I believe that she must be chief prosecutor where she is running for office. That is what I think. (...) So, if she has this expertise, if they say it is okay, after the hearings, after the vote, I have nothing against this," said Kelemen Hunor at private broadcaster Digi Tv. AGERPRES . On Wednesday, March 13, 2019, the 10PW (ten millions of billions of Watts) performance of ELI-NP's High Power Laser System was officially released as a world first and a demonstrative test was presented. That is "a tenth of the entire Sun's power on Earth concentrated in a ray of light," according to ELI-NP project manager Nicolae Zamfir. An event was organized to mark this moment on the same day. "This is a great day for us, an important day. We are unveiling the results of the power tests of the ELI-NP [Extreme Light Infrastructure - Nuclear Physics] laser system at Magurele, and I can tell you that it has reached more power than we have dreamed of - 10.88 petawatts, or ten millions of billions of Watts; a tenth of the entire Sun's power on Earth concentrated in a ray of light; a great scientific achievement that is a world first. With this laser we can create new phenomena, watch the behavior of matter under extreme conditions unheard of so far on Earth, but probably existing elsewhere in the Universe, and we are attempting to unravel some of the mysteries of the Universe. Today, a dream has come true that started less than a decade ago, when under a political decision Romania was to build, to join this world race to achieve the most powerful laser in the world. It was a dream of researchers from all over the world. They would all dream of there being such an instrument. Ten years ago, the greatest power was under one petawatt. Meanwhile, the field has exploded; a race ensued in which many of the developed countries participated. Today, there are over ten labs capable of generating more than a petawatt of lase power. There is a serious competitor in South Korea. We have over ten today," Zamfir said. Laser team leader Ioan Dancus indicated that the ELI-NP is currently capable of producing the most powerful light pool on the planet. "This is the accomplishment of a complex and complete team. (...) We used the largest sapphire crystal with titanium ions ever grown on Earth, a crystal that is 20 centimeters in diameter (...) For this system to work an incredible infrastructure is needed. The entire laser system, along with the experiments, is placed on an anti-vibration plate that completely disengages us from external vibrations. From a technical point of view we are dealing with a fantastic system," Dancus explained. According to him, the system contains thousands of optical and electronic components. "We will use this laser to respond to two of our great calls: curiosity - to better understand what happens to the Universe around us and creativity - to develop something that will help humanity live better lives," he said. Education Minister Ecaterina Andronescu says the Magurele project undoubtedly represents a very important moment in the history of science. "All the stages we've been through have not been easy at all. There were times when we almost did not think we would get here (...) If I'm glad for something I'm glad for the younger generation because it has what to learn here and whom to learn from, and I am convinced that it will not be long before the results. Romania, through the research here, will gain renewed visibility, will have renewed scientific production and, undoubtedly, by the start of the project, this is an international one," the minister said. In his turn, Minister of Research and Innovation Nicolae Hurduc congratulated the Magurele team of researchers and said that their achievement demonstrates that Romanian scientists can achieve results that will place them at the highest levels in the world. "I want to congratulate first of all the team at Magurele alongside the Thales Group on this great success, which at this moment is making you the best in the world. Behind this achievement there is hard working, a lot of tenacity, all of which has brought us to where we can report the most powerful laser in the world, which is fortunately found in Romania (...) I am happy because this laser is in Romania and because it demonstrates that Romania is able to do very important things despite many naysayers. This performance demonstrates that scientists in Romania, researchers, can get results that will place Romania at the highest levels in the world," the minister said. Ilfov County Council President Marian Petrache talked about the importance of this moment as well. "I would like to congratulate the Magurele team. The Gods did their duty; it is up to us, the mortals, to be able to benefit from what they give us. That is entirely up to us. This is not an event that is important to Romania or Europe alone; I believe this is a very important event in the history of mankind," he said. March 12, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - On a recent delegation to Iran, we experienced first-hand the legendary Iranian hospitality. Iranians are particularly thrilled to meet Americans, but as we discovered, our governments policies are hurting the very people who want to be our friends. As our 28-person delegation traveled through the country wearing messages on our jackets proclaiming Peace with Iran in English and Farsi, we were surrounded by peoplefrom schoolchildren to storekeeperswho wanted to practice their English and talk to us. Their eyes lit up when they heard we were from America. We were constantly posing for photos and exchanging Instagram accounts. We were offered endless cups of sweet tea and showered with more gifts than we could fit in our suitcases. A frequent refrain we heard was, Americans good, Trump bad. We did meet a few Trump supporters. At one roadside shop outside Tehran, we were shocked to find an entire collection of Donald Trumps books for sale, in Farsi. One book buyer said Trump was good because would help get rid of the awful clerics who were running Iran. Most people, however, whether they liked or hated their own government, complained that US policies were not hurting the government or the wealthy, but the middle class and the poor. In May 2018, President Trumps unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement, followed by an imposition of draconian sanctions that not only prohibit U.S. companies from doing business in Iran, but threaten all foreign companies and international banks that trade with Iran. The sanctions also severely limit Irans ability to sell its major source of revenue: oil. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter The U.S. sanctions, along with mismanagement and corruption, has decimated the value of the rial and sent the prices of consumer goods soaring. As one of our guides told us, Our bank savings have been wiped out, rents go up every month, and the price of food increases every single day, while most salaries stay the same. At a roadside stop outside the Tomb of Cyrus the Great, the wife of the tea vendor told us how her familys standard of living has plummeted in the past year. We used to be able to afford a car, now we cant even afford a refrigerator, she lamented. Visiting a school for poor children in the southern part of Tehran, we learned that the number of street children has increased, particularly in households headed by single women. Sanctions are suffocating peoples life choices. A young woman who had been accepted to college in London with a full scholarship had to decline the offer because her family could no longer even afford her plane ticket. I had so many hopes and dreams, she said. Now I have nothing. A young man told us he cancelled his plans to get married because the couple cant afford the wedding costs. He is not alone. The families of many girls cant afford a decent dowry, which is our custom here, he explained, while many young men feel their salaries are no longer sufficient to provide for a family. The US government says medicines are exempt from sanctions but with banks, shipping and insurance companies unwilling to risk doing business with Iran, certain life-saving drugs have become scarce. Our interpreter teared up when an elderly man in the marketplace told us his wife has cancer and he can no longer find the interferon she desperately needs. A man with diabetes said he cant find the medicine to lower his glucose levels and now must undergo painful dialysis treatments to stay alive. If Trump thinks he is hurting our government, he is wrong. Rouhani can eat meat every day and so can the clerics, a father of three told me. Im lucky if I can give my children a decent meal once a week. It is one thing for governments to have differences, but why impose hardships on innocent people? The Trump administrations gamble that tough sanctions will either topple the government or force it to change its regional policies is not working. It certainly seems like the Islamic government, which just celebrated 40 years in power, is not about to fall. Caught between a well-oiled repressive apparatus and fear of a Syria-type upheaval, most people we met preferred reforms within the present system to an abrupt regime change that might plunge the country into chaosand they certainly did not want a US-military intervention. Trumps policies, however, are putting the reformers under siege. When our group met with Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on February 25, the day before his short-lived resignation, he made it clear that he was under intense pressure to show positive results from his outreach to the West. Trumps economic strangulation is hurting all those who, like Zarif, staked their reputations on negotiations and it is shoring up hardliners who always insisted that talks with the West were futile. With new parliamentary elections coming up on 2020, these hardliners may well take power. U.S. warhawks like John Bolton, and Trumps Israeli and Saudi allies, could use their return to power as a reason to push for a U.S. military attack on Iran. Rejoining the Iran nuclear agreement, lifting sanctions, and developing normal trade and diplomatic relations with Iran would empower the reformists and engage Iran in solving the conflicts that continue to plague the region. It would also ease the hardships affecting the extraordinarily gracious people who welcomed us with such open arms. The truth is out about Israels lethal actions in Gaza. Will the world listen? By Saeb Erekat The UNs damning verdict on the 2018 Gaza protests should prompt the international community into ending Israeli occupation March 12, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - A UN investigation into the 2018 Gaza protests has concluded that Israeli officers and their leaders may have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity. The human rights councils commission of inquiry found that soldiers intentionally used live ammunition against civilians, who included children, women, journalists, health workers and people with disabilities. The figures are telling: more than 6,000 people injured by Israeli bullets, with 183 killed. Renowned human rights organisations such as Human Rights Watch, BTselem and Al-Haq had already denounced this policy, with BTselem calling on Israeli soldiers not to follow orders to shoot civilians. The people of Palestine still wonder whether such findings will be used by the international community to implement policy aimed at ending the Israeli occupation, or whether it will be business as usual. The killing of Palestinian civilians during 2018 is part of a long list of ongoing Israeli crimes and violations. Israel, the occupying power, often denounces any reporting on its treatment of the people of Palestine going as far as pushing for the expulsion of the representative of Human Rights Watch and refusing UN commissions of inquiry or special rapporteurs access to the occupied territories. Israel has long been targeting Palestinian civil society organisations and human rights activists for exposing its ongoing policies of colonisation that deny the right of the Palestinian people to be free. Sadly, if members of the international community dont act, the results of this commission of inquiry will eventually be added to other investigations including the recently released EU report on Israeli settlement construction and Israel will continue to violate international law and UN resolutions through the complicity of a number of UN member states. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter The EU, Israels main trade partner, has a consistent position for ending Israels occupation of Palestine reaffirmed in a statement from the Arab-EU summit at Sharm el-Sheikh last month. But Israel also knows that, among its main trade partners, and particularly within the EU, products coming from illegal colonial settlements in the occupied territory are not being labelled, let alone banned. And while Israeli settlers enjoy the benefit of visa-free entry to Europe, Palestinians living only a few metres away still require them. Indeed, none of the countries who claim to be concerned about fairness have taken any significant step towards holding Israel accountable for its decades-long crimes and violations. What we see on the ground reflects a deep culture of impunity. We see international companies working in Israeli settlements; countries continuing to sell arms to Israel despite its repeated violations of international humanitarian law; an increase in settler tourism, which contributes to the illegal colonial-settlement enterprise. Alongside this, Israels theft of natural resources and effective control over all aspects of Palestinian life, including the population registry, clearly show how the Palestinian right to self-determination is violated on a daily basis. There is a legal and a moral responsibility for the international community to take decisive action towards respecting international law, UN resolutions and human rights in Palestine. This is most important now, while the Trump administration in the US is escalating its policies against our people. Among other steps, and in accordance with resolution 31/36, we have reiterated our call for the UN human rights commissioner to release the database of companies involved in the Israeli occupation. There is now an opportunity to send the right message about the Israeli occupation in the upcoming human rights council discussions and to take long-overdue steps towards a just and lasting peace by affirming the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people. Dr Saeb Erekat is secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation This article was originally published by " The Guardian " - March 13, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - In simulated World War III scenarios, the U.S. continues to lose against Russia and China, two top war planners warned last week. In our games, when we fight Russia and China, blue gets its ass handed to it" RAND analyst David Ochmanek said Thursday. RAND's wargames show how US Armed Forces - colored blue on wargame maps - experience the most substantial losses in one scenario after another and still can't thwart Russia or China - which predictably is red - from accomplishing their objectives: annihilating Western forces. "We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary," he warned. In the next military conflict, which some believe may come as soon as the mid-2020s, all five battlefield domains: land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace, will be heavily contested, suggesting the U.S. could have a difficult time in achieving superiority as it has in prior conflicts. The simulated war games showed, the "red" aggressor force often destroys U.S. F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters on the runway, sends several Naval fleets to the depths, destroys US military bases, and through electronic warfare, takes control of critical military communication systems. In short, a gruesome, if simulated, annihilation of some of the most modern of US forces. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter In every case I know of, said Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense with years of wargaming experience, the F-35 rules the sky when its in the sky, but it gets killed on the ground in large numbers. So, as Russia and China develop fifth-generation fighters and hypersonic missiles, things that rely on sophisticated base infrastructures like runways and fuel tanks are going to have a hard time, Ochmanek said. Things that sail on the surface of the sea are going to have a hard time. "Thats why the 2020 budget coming out next week retires the carrier USS Truman decades early and cuts two amphibious landing ships, as weve reported. Its also why the Marine Corps is buying the jump-jet version of the F-35, which can take off and land from tiny, ad hoc airstrips, but how well they can maintain a high-tech aircraft in low-tech surroundings is an open question," said Breaking Defense. Meanwhile, speaking purely hypothetically of course, "if we went to war in Europe, there would be one Patriot battery moving, and it would go to Ramstein. And thats it, Work complained. The US has 58 Brigade Combat Teams across the continent but doesn't have anti-air and missile-defense capabilities required to handle a barrage of missiles from Russia. RAND also war-gamed cyber and electronic attacks in the simulations, Work said; Russia and China tend to cripple US communication networks. "Whenever we have an exercise and the red force really destroys our command and control, we stop the exercise," Work said without a trace of humor. Beijing calls this system destruction warfare, Work said. They aim to attack the American battle network at all levels, relentlessly, and they practice it all the time. The Air Force asked RAND to formulate a plan several years ago to improve the outcomes of the wargames in favor of the US, Ochmanek said. We found it impossible to spend more than $8 billion a year" to fix the problems. "Thats $8 billion for the Air Force. Triple that to cover for the Army and the Navy Department (which includes the US Marines)," Ochmanek said, "and you get $24 billion." Work was less concerned about the near-term risk of war, and he said, China and Russia aren't ready to fight because their modernization efforts have not been completed. He said any major conflict is unlikely for another 10 to 20 years from now. He said "$24 billion a year for the next five years would be a good expenditure" to prepare the military for World War III. RAND offers a sobering assessment that America could lose a multi-front war in the future, which is quite shocking considering that the US spent nearly three times as much as the second biggest war power, China, did in 2017. With the defense budget stuck around $700 billion per annum for the remainder of President Trump's term, America's Warhawks are inciting fear through simulated wargames with one purpose only: demand more taxpayers' money for war spending. This article was originally published by " Zero Hedge " - There is a saying in the worlds of politics and business that most people who come to prominence are those who in defeat bear malice and in victory seek revenge. It is therefore unsurprising that President Donald Trump displays both characteristics in international as well as domestic affairs, although his targets vary erratically between friend and foe. His near-psychotic concentration on achieving the destruction of Iran is understandably malicious and revengeful, given the nature of the man, but his latest exhibitions of would-be superiority involve allies, which even for Trump is dramatically misguided. The Trumpian United States has few friends, mainly because in his two years in the White House Trump has gone out of his way to belittle, demean and insult long-standing partners and antagonise those who may have been considering seeking closer ties with Washington. His announcement last December that America is respected again was wide of the mark, because, unfortunately, America has become a global joke but a dangerous joke whose president may be a raving booby, but is still powerful and appears intent on upsetting what little tranquillity remains in this turmoil-stricken world. One recent diatribe was unprecedented in length, vulgarity and volatility. When he spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 2 he set a new low for absurdity in what the commentator Stephen Colbert described as being an epically weird harangue which was the longest presidential oration in history. Moving on from this bizarre performance, Trump turned to international affairs and, as Politico reported on March 5, kicked India and Turkey out of a decades-old US program that allows developing countries to export thousands of goods to the United States without paying duties, in a scheme known as the Generalized System of Preferences or GSP. The reasons given by the US Trade Representative for Trumps orders were that India had failed to provide the United States with assurances that it will provide equitable and reasonable access to its markets in numerous sectors while Turkeys termination from the GSP follows a finding that it is sufficiently economically developed and should no longer benefit from preferential market access to the United States market. In the case of India, Washington has been trying for years to wean India away from its defence and trade association with Russia, concurrent with encouraging it to join the Pentagon in confronting China. The US Defence Department stated in September 2018 that A decade ago, US arms sales to India amounted to virtually nothing. Today, the United States is the second-largest arms supplier to India, and US officials say they hope to increase that business, and the US focus on China has resulted in stronger military ties, with a joint statement last December indicating the intention to further strengthen bilateral defence cooperation as a key pillar of the strategic partnership between India and the US. Washington has been intensifying its confrontation with China in the South China sea, where in addition to overflights by nuclear-capable bombers it conducts what are absurdly called freedom of navigation patrols in waters where there has never been a single case of interference with any of the vast number of merchant ships that pass though every year. The rationale is given as support for the Convention on the Law of the Sea which, most ironically, Washington refuses to ratify. Nevertheless, the US has been trying hard to persuade the Indian government that it should contribute warships to join US patrols in the South China Sea, which, so far, India has refused to do. So it might be thought that the Trump Administration would do its best to encourage India to buy more US weapons and to cooperate in its anti-China antics (however unwise that would be) by keeping their relationship friction-free. But this isnt the way Trump works. Washingtons unfortunate timing of the announcement that it will penalise India in trade arrangements extends to Indias domestic circumstances, because there are national elections due in May, and the party of Prime Minister Modi (an arch-nationalist and no mean war-drummer himself) was already having difficulties, and is looking shakier day-by-day. Indeed the whole bizarre affair was well summed-up by Professor Harsh Pant of Kings College London when he said the discourse in this country has been that America needs India to balance China, and the question will be: Why is America doing this to India? But there doesnt seem to be a sensible answer to that question. The same holds for Washingtons treatment of NATO ally Turkey, whose President said on February 26 that Ankara might buy the US Patriot missile system if you [the US] provide us good conditions. But its blindingly obvious that the US declaration that Turkey should no longer benefit from preferential market access to the United States market is not going to make President Erdogan keen on buying Patriot missiles or anything else stamped made in the USA. There is a Russia factor in the US-Turkey relationship, because Ankara has placed an order for world-beating S-400 surface-to-air missiles, which has riled Washington, as has Indias forthcoming acquisition of the same system. The Military-Industrial Establishment in Washington made its feelings known on March 8, when chief Pentagon spokesman Charlie Summers told reporters that If Turkey takes the S-400, there would be grave consequences in terms of our relationship, military relationship with them. But this doesnt seem to worry President Erdogan, who had already made it clear that The S-400 is a done deal, there can be no turning back. We have reached an agreement with the Russians. We will move toward a joint production. Perhaps after the S-400, we will go for the S-500. The signals are that Turkey is moving further away from the US and is possibly considering leaving NATO. After all, the US has torn up favourable trade arrangements, and NATO has done nothing for Turkey which is working with Russia in many spheres. The most recent example of regional military cooperation was on March 6-8 when four Turkish and Russian vessels conducted a minor exercise in the Black Sea, aimed at demonstrating and sharing techniques involved in mine-avoidance. Trust is fostered by cooperation based on preparedness to understand differing viewpoints. Even more importantly, it is stimulated by adopting pragmatic policies aimed at establishing confidence, rather than by ceaselessly confronting and confounding others. For so long as Trump considers that Make America Great Again depends on demonstrating malice and arrogant superiority then his country will achieve neither trust nor cooperation world-wide. And when he casts aside allies with sneering condescension, taking revenge for what he considers to be unwarranted favouritism in the past, he is destroying Americas path to Greatness. In February 2018 India ordered another 54 Harop (Harpy 2) UAVs from Israel. India already has 110 of these and is obviously pleased with their performance. India purchased 110 of them for about $910,000 each back in 2009, soon after Harop was introduced for SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defense) and other dangerous work. In early 2016 the recently introduced Israeli UAV, Harop, had its first combat use. Harop is a small hybrid design UAV that can either be used for reconnaissance multiple times or once as a cruise missile. Harop is a conventional small aircraft with a cranked delta wing with the propeller in the rear. Harop is actually a UCAV (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle) controlled by a remote operator and capable of flying more than 1,000 kilometers or loitering for up to 6 hours while carrying a 23 kilogram (51 pound) high explosive warhead. It can be launched from an aircraft or from a sealed storage/launch container mounted on vehicles or ships. Developed in 2005 from the earlier (1990s) Harpy UCAV, the Harop improves on the original design by achieving better performance because it is a little longer with added outer wing extensions and a canard. Harop is 2.5 meters (8 feet, 2 inches) long, has a 3 meter (9 feet, 10 inches) wingspan and weighs 135 kg (298 pounds). Top speed is 185 kilometers (115 miles) per hour. The first combat use of Harop did not involve Israeli troops, although the latest one, against Syrian forces, did. The first combat use took place in the Caucasus during another outbreak of fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan is one of five current users of this Harop, the others being India, Turkey, Germany and Israel. The Harop was used against a bus carrying Armenian soldiers to the frontline, killing at least seven soldiers and destroying the bus. Another time a Harop was used to destroy an Armenian command post. Unlike the original Harpy design, which was primarily designed to operate autonomously on SEAD missions, the Harop has was designed to either operate autonomously (like many UAVs) or under remote control. When operating autonomously it cannot be jammed and it is sent out to detect and home in on radar signals from specific types of enemy aid defense radars. In this respect it is like the classic HARM anti-radiation missile, using an anti-radar homing system to cripple enemy air defenses. Unlike Harpy, Harop can also be remotely controlled. This enables the operator to find and select static or moving targets using an onboard vidcam or FLIR (Forward Looking Infra Red) heat-sensing camera. While under remote control targets can be hit whether their radar is on or not. The remote control operation uses line-of-sight communications that are effective at up to 150 kilometers from the operator. That range can be extended using another aircraft or UAV to relay the control signals farther. Even when sent out with a warhead Harop can return and land if it did not find a target and be reused. Harop also is a stealthy design which, in addition to its small size and quiet engine, makes it very difficult to detect by radar or infrared (heat detecting) sensors. This stealth feature was meant mainly for SEAD missions because most air defense systems have sensors meant to detect approaching hostile aircraft. If these sensors detect an approaching unidentified aircraft the radar can be promptly turned off to avoid a HARM missile or other SEAD airstrike. Modern HARM missiles get around that by capturing the location of a radar signal and them homing on where it came from, not the signal itself. The early 2018 Israel used Harop against a Syrian Pantsir mobile anti-aircraft system. This was the first known SEAD use of Harop. India apparently plans to use many of its Harops against Pakistani or Chinese air defenses in wartime. Now Russia, Syria and Iran know that Harop works quite well in the role and more export orders may follow because of that. The original Harpy is still in use because when you need a SEAD capability you need as much of it as you can get. Harpy and Harop are inexpensive to maintain as reserve weapons, can easily be updated and are known to be effective. In Egypt, the government has completed the first phase of building the new town of Rafah. The original Rafah was torn down starting in 2015 because it was on the Gaza border and a popular place for smuggling tunnels into Gaza. There were nearly 2,000 buildings and structures there that could serve as the Egyptian end of a smuggling tunnel. Over 1,500 structures were torn down to create a buffer zone of cleared land over 1,000 meters wide. The new Rafah is two kilometers from the border and apparently too far to build smuggling tunnels. Moving Rafah caused a lot of anger among the thousands of people living there. Although they received new homes and assistance in moving the Rafah population had their lives disrupted and were forced to accept new homes in high rise apartment buildings. Using the apartment buildings made it easier to check basements for any smuggling tunnel activity. Another complaint was that many Rafah residents lost income from Hamas for having a tunnel exit in their home or business. But the ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) terror attacks in northern Sinai proved to be even more unpopular and the Rafah move proceeded without any major civil disorder. Hamas admitted that the loss of the smuggling tunnels was a major defeat for them, in part because Hamas had been getting over $200 million a month from fees and taxes it imposed on those operating the tunnels (to bring goods in and get people in and out). Now Gaza was no longer a safe sanctuary for ISIL or any other Islamic terrorists attacking Egyptian forces and killing lots of local civilians in the process. The elimination of nearly all smuggling tunnels on the Egyptian/Gaza border demonstrated that Egypt was most definitely at war with Hamas, mainly because, despite many warnings, Hamas had allied itself with Iran, which had become the only major foreign aid donor Hamas had left and Iran was also eager to send weapons to Gaza as well. Despite this Egypt still acts as a mediator in continued efforts to form a common Palestinian government by merging Fatah (ruler of the West Bank) and Hamas. These negotiations have never succeeded, despite several signed agreements, because there are radical factions in Hamas that will never agree to Hamas losing sole control (to Fatah) of Gaza. With most Western and Moslem aid donors no longer providing cash, Hamas is broke and the economy of Gaza fading fast because of the Egyptian/Israeli blockade (except for basics like food and medicine). Hamas has two options; make peace and lose control of Gaza or trigger another war with Israel which Hamas believes, like the last one in 2014, will lead to a lot of destroyed housing in Gaza and thousands of civilian casualties and cause an aid crisis that will compel foreign donors to resume sending large quantities of materials and cash, which Hamas can divert to its military needs. The only problem with this strategy is that the Israelis are now well aware of it and made it clear they have some new ideas for how to handle another Hamas war. Israel is not disclosing how this would go but the more lucid Hamas leaders fear it means that Hamas will not benefit from the next war as much as they did from the last one. Hamas continues staging a growing number of violent demonstrations along the Gaza border which attempt to get Hamas fighters into Israel. That has not worked out as planned and after a year of this two Israeli soldiers have been killed along with over 250 Palestinians. Hamas calls this lopsided casualty toll a war crime and many UN officials and Western politicians agree without presenting any viable alternatives for the tactics Israel is using to defend itself. Syria Stalemate There are a number of complications in Syria that have led to a stalemate. Iran has problems with Israel in Syria, as well as its own allies. The Iranians want the Syrian government (controlled by the Assad clan) to accept Iranian domination (as Hezbollah does in Lebanon) and agrees with Turkey that the Syrian Kurds should not get autonomy and should accept rule by the Iran backed Syrian government as well as Turkish control of border areas. Iran has a major problem in that no one wants them in Syria much less acting as an occupying military force in Syria dedicated to starting a war with Israel. The Russians would prefer that the Turks and Iranians got out of Syria and that the Assads and Kurds worked out a compromise (which the two seem willing to do). The Americans, Israelis and most other Middle Eastern nations agree with this approach. Israel wants Iran out of Syria and would prefer that the Kurds got their autonomy. Israel is willing to make a peace deal with Syria and Turkey. Israel has successfully attacked Iranian efforts to build a military infrastructure (bases, arms factories, forces on the Israeli border) in Syria and this has made the Iranian leadership angrier and very frustrated. Iran is seen as even more unstable and unpredictable than Turkey. Russia has taken the lead in brokering agreements that would solve most of these disagreements. So far there has been limited success with only Israel willing to work with Russia. Israel and Russia have been cooperating in Syria for years but Turkey and Iran are determined to have their way despite the opposition they are encountering. March 12, 2019: In the West Bank, a Palestinian man was shot dead as he came at soldiers brandishing a knife. In another incident, a Palestinian throwing rocks at soldiers was shot dead. March 11, 2019: In the south, Israeli police bomb disposal teams were sent to deal with two explosive devices attached to balloons Hamas had sent over the border. In Gaza Hamas ordered its senior military commanders take extra precautions because of fears Israel was planning a major event against Hamas before the upcoming April 9th Israeli parliamentary elections. The Hamas commanders must not travel alone at night, avoid using smartphones that have not been checked for Israeli modifications and not take gifts from anyone they do not know. Hamas forces were ordered to be more alert to the presence of Israeli agents, who often operate in Gaza for extended periods by passing themselves off as Palestinians. March 10, 2019: In the south, Israeli warplanes attacked a Hamas base and two boats used by Hamas naval commandos. This was in retaliation for Hamas border violence yesterday. March 9, 2019: In southern Israel, balloons, apparently from nearby Gaza, were found with explosives attached. Police warned hikers and others to stay away from the wooded area so it could be searched for similar items. Later in the day, a mortar shell was fired from Gaza into Israel. Egyptian mediators have brokered another ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel. This one will include a halt to all border demonstrations and fire balloon attacks. March 8, 2019: In the south, Israeli warplanes attacked several Hamas targets in Gaza in response to a rocket fired into Israeli earlier in the day. There were the usual Hamas Gaza border clashes today that left one Palestinian dead and over 40 wounded. Two Palestinians got into Israel and were captured by police, who found them carrying a grenade and a knife. Egypt brokered a ten-day de-escalation agreement between Israel and Hamas. This deal had Hamas gradually halting violence against Israel in return for a partial lifting of economic sanctions. This agreement is not expected to work as it is apparent that Hamas has lost control over many smaller Islamic terror groups in Gaza and many Hamas leaders want an Israeli invasion as that would get foreign aid flowing again. This deal does not prohibit any other ceasefire deals. March 7, 2019: In Egypt (outside Cairo), a policeman was wounded and seven Islamic terrorists killed as they tried to fight their way past a checkpoint. Egypt has become self-sufficient in natural gas. This was accomplished by making deals with foreign oil companies to come in and get the newly discovered natural gas fields producing. Many bureaucrats wanted the government to do this but it was no secret that many Egyptian officials preferred a government-run natural gas industry even though that sort of approach would take a lot longer to achieve self-sufficiency for Egypt and the natural gas would be more expensive. But a number of government officials would get rich and have access to high paying jobs that required little effort. Using foreign companies makes it more difficult for the government to replace key management and other personnel with political appointees who know little about the oil and gas business but are loyal political allies of someone in power. March 6, 2019: In Egypt (near Cairo) police carried out two raids against locations used by Hasm, a radical faction of the Moslem Brotherhood. In one raid there was a gun battle. The two raids left seven Islamic terrorists dead, including a group that was caught driving a truck to where a bomb was to be placed. In southern Israel Hamas mobilized several hundred civilians for a night time demonstration at the border fence. One Palestinian was killed as the noisy demonstrators taunted Israeli troops and sought to terrorize a nearby Israeli village. Elsewhere along the Gaza border a mortar shell was fired into Israel, causing no damage. Israel responded with airstrikes against Hamas bases in Gaza. Israel informed Egypt and Hamas that the many ceasefire agreements with Hamas had all been quickly broken by Hamas and Israel was considering a major military operation against Hamas to at least reduce the Hamas violence. Israel sees little possibility of getting Hamas to agree to or actually enforce any ceasefire or peace deal. In one recent case a deal was agreed to that, if complied with, would include Israel repairing the electrical transmission line between Gaza and Israel, expanding the fishing zone for Palestinian fishermen and allowing some foreign aid projects to continue. Hours after the agreement was signed someone in Gaza fired a mortar shell into Israel. March 5, 2019: In Gaza, Israeli warplanes attacked a Hamas base in retaliation for increased Hama used of balloons carrying incendiaries or explosives into southern Israel. March 4, 2019: The United States and Israel conducted a military exercise that involved the U.S. flying in a THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missile battery and setting it up for use. This includes integration with the Israeli missile defense radar system. Back in 2014 Persian Gulf Arabs began buying more anti-aircraft weapons that can stop ballistic missiles. There is one major flaw in all this. The Americans pointed out that all those Patriot (in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar and Kuwait) and THAAD (on order for UAE and Saudi Arabia) anti-missile systems could be a lot more effective if they were part of a joint system. At that point, the United States could add its Patriot batteries and Aegis equipped ships stationed in the Gulf to the joint system. Adding Israel would be useful for all concerned and while that was unlikely back then the situation is different five years later. Meantime the Israelis are the only ones with long-range missile warning and tracking radars. This Arab aversion to cooperation led to none of them seeing a reason to buy long-range radars but recent Iranian missile attacks on Saudi Arabia, from Yemen, have changed that. Now cooperation is seen as a possibility, even a necessity. Currently, the U.S. has seven THAAD batteries and the UAE has two. The U.S. has built about 200 THAAD missiles so far. THAAD is, next to the Israeli Arrow, the most effective system for intercepting long-range ballistic missiles like those Iran has aimed at Israel. In the West Bank, two Palestinians were shot dead as they attempted to run over some Israeli soldiers. This incident is part of a Fatah terror campaign started in 2015 in which West Bank Palestinians were urged to attack Israelis any way they could. Fatah assured those who did that their families would receive a large cash payment it the attacker died and those who were sent to prison would receive a monthly salary. This violence continues at a low level but since 2015 fifty Israeli civilians and security personnel have died along with 260 Palestinians. Hundreds of other Palestinians have gone to prison. Many foreign donors, including the United States and some European nations, have cut their aid to the West Bank in protest against the Fatah payments to Palestinians who carry terrorist attacks. March 3, 2019: Israel revealed that a recent meeting, in Russia, between the Russian and Israeli leaders there was an agreement to carry out a joint effort to get all foreign forces out of Syria. Everybody wants the Turks and Iranians gone but the Syrian Kurds want some Americans to stay and Russia has treaty rights with Syria to operate an air base and a naval facility staffed with Russian personnel. This new agreement does not ban continued Israeli airstrikes against Iranian forces in Syria. March 2, 2019: In the south Israeli warplanes attacked a Hamas base in Gaza as retaliation for balloons flown into Israel the day before. Some of the balloons were rigged to set fires when they landed. At night Hamas resumed nightly demonstrations at the main border crossing in an effort to wear down Israeli security forces at the Rafah crossing. These nightly efforts began a month ago as seemingly random small, but noisy, demonstrations of a few hundred people at various parts of the border. February 28, 2019: Egypt released four Hamas members it had imprisoned. This was a goodwill gesture to persuade Hamas to agree to and abide by a ceasefire with Israel. Several ceasefire agreements have already been arranged and all were soon violated by Gaza based Islamic terrorists. February 27, 2019: In the south, Israeli warplanes attacked several Hamas facilities in Gaza as retaliation for a balloon flown into Israel earlier in the day that carried explosives that went off and damaged an Israeli home near the border. February 26, 2019: In southern Israel, the army completed a three-day unannounced drill to test the ability of reserve troops to mobilize and carry out combat operations. The exercise included live fire events as well as practicing tactical operations against Hamas forces inside Gaza. February 23, 2019: In Syria, the commander of Iranian forces in Syria said that 90 percent of Iranian goals had been achieved and Iran was now concentrating on rebuilding the Syrian armed forces. Not mentioned was any efforts to destroy Israel and this was deliberately downplayed in an effort to avoid more Israeli airstrikes. Iran has withdrawn its forces from the Israeli border and has greatly reduced weapons shipments to Syria. The Israelis are still watching and apparently still willing and able to launch airstrikes on Iranian forces. February 22, 2019: In the south, Hamas mobilized several thousand civilians for the weekly demonstrations at the border fence. One Palestinian was killed and 30 wounded as they sought to force their way into Israel. February 20, 2019: In Egypt (Sinai), soldiers raided an Islamic terrorist hideout and killed eight Islamic terrorists believed to have been involved in recent attacks. February 19, 2019: In the south, there was also a resumption in the use of fire balloons by Hamas. One landed on the Israeli side and caused a brush fire. This was the first use of fire balloons since early December. In Egypt (northern Sinai) soldiers raided two locations used by Islamic terrorists and killed ten of them after an exchange of gunfire. Troops found large quantities of weapons and bomb-making materials. Qatar, an Iranian ally that has provided Hamas with over $1.1 billion in aid since 2012, has told Hamas that it is halting its $10 million monthly payment to keep the Gaza electrical supply system operating. Over the last year, Qatar has cut most cash aid to Hamas. Partly this is because it is so difficult to get the cash into Gaza but the main reason is that Qatar wants the cash to go towards improving the economy and living standards for Gaza residents. Iran backs Hamas in preferring to use most aid, especially cash to improve military forces and the ability to carry out terror operations in Israel and Egypt. Qatar continues to provide cash for Gaza, but only if Qatari officials can supervise the use of that money. This restricts the ability of Hamas to divert the aid to military projects. February 18, 2019: In Egypt (Cairo), a suicide bomber was intercepted near a marketplace popular with tourists. The Islamic terrorist detonated his explosive vest, killing himself and three policemen. A nearby civilian was wounded. It is common for Islamic terrorists to attack foreign tourists in order to reduce tourism. This is unpopular with the hundreds of thousands of Egypt who make a living from tourism. February 17, 2019: In the south, an Israeli soldier was wounded by a bomb thrown by a Hamas fighter who had gotten close enough to throw it because of hundreds of civilian demonstrators Hamas mobilized to do just that. Once again the demonstration was violent and aggressive enough to get many Palestinians right up to the fence. February 16, 2019: In Egypt (northern Sinai), fifteen soldiers were killed or wounded during a major clash with Islamic terrorists. In Cairo, the Egyptian government issued a warning that the number of ISIL members coming to Egypt from Syria and Iraq was increasing, and the threat of these Islamic terrorists carrying out attacks sooner rather than later was the result. The government also revealed that ISIL in Sinai was getting more involved in Sinai based drug smuggling in order to finance their operations. This actually began a year ago but has now reached the point where ISIL is a major operator in the drug smuggling business throughout Sinai. The drugs include marijuana, methamphetamine heroin and opium. In Gaza, Hamas began its use of nightly efforts to wear down Israeli border guards seemingly random small, but noisy, demonstrations of a few hundred people at various parts of the border. February 15, 2019: In the south Hamas mobilized 11,000 Gazans for the weekly protests and attacks near the main border crossing. At least twenty Gazans were wounded. In Egypt recently released data shows that the unemployment rate is now what it was (8.9 percent) before the Arab Spring revolution in 2011. The population has grown since then and the labor force now consists of 28 million. A growing number of women (currently 19 percent of the workforce) want to get jobs and that has put more pressure on the government to keep the economy healthy and expanding. The Divisional Police Command at Afuze, headquarters of the Owan-East Local Government Area of Edo, was on Tuesday attacked by armed men leaving the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) and three other officers on duty, killed. Speaking to journalists on Wednesday, Godwin Ikpekhia, a witness said the attack on the police station took place around 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday. He revealed also that the office of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC in the area was burnt along with election materials, while police officers on duty that night, were shot at by the hoodlums. We only heard gunshots and nobody knew what actually happened until Wednesday morning, he said. The divisional police officer, alongside three other officers who were on duty were killed on the spot, inside the building. The hoodlums didnt just stop at that; they went to the INEC office and were shooting sporadically at policemen who were on duty there. Election materials and a police van at the INEC office were burnt by the hoodlums, he added. The offices killed in the Tuesday attack are Supt. Tosimani Ojo, the DPO of the station; Sgt. Justina Aghomon, a pregnant woman, Insp. Sado Isaac and Cpl. Glory David. Muhammed Danmallam, the states commissioner of police, while visit the crime scene said investigation into the case will state immediately to bring culprits to face justice. Urgent steps will be taken to curb the increasing cases of criminality in the Owan axis of the state, he said. The Nigerian Police has shared that one arrest has been made in connection to the House of Representative Member, Hon. Temitope Olatoye Sugar, who was murdered during the March 9th Gubernatorial and House of Assembly elections in Oyo. Assistant Inspector General of Police in charge of Zone 11, Leye Oyebade, made this known while fielding questions from journalists yesterday. He, however, said details about the arrest would be made public later. He won the Oyo Central Senatorial district under the Action Democratic Party (ADP) Boeing has announced it will release new flight control software in the wake of a second crash involving its 737 Max fleet. New Zealand's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has suspended the operation of Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft to or from New Zealand. It follows similar moves from other aviation regulators internationally after the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed all 157 people on board. Boeing expressed its condolences to those who lost loved ones in the Ethiopian crash and said it had been developing the flight control software enhancement for the 737 MAX to improve safety since the October crash in which a Lion Air plane plunged into the sea killing 189 people. "Boeing has been working closely with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on development, planning and certification of the software enhancement, and it will be deployed across the 737 MAX fleet in the coming weeks," the company statement says. There will also be updates to pilot displays, operations manuals and crew training. The aircraft company said there were already procedures in place to safely handle the unlikely event of false data being sent to the autopilot. CAA say on Wednesday that Fiji Airways was the only operator flying the Max 8 aircraft into New Zealand, and the airline is promising to minimise disruption by using replacement aircraft. CAA director Graeme Harris says the next scheduled flight was not due until Thursday afternoon, giving CAA time to thoroughly review concerns about the B737 Max series aircraft after the tragic accidents involving the type in Indonesian and Ethiopia "The decision to suspend operations by the aircraft follows recent discussions with other aviation authorities, including the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) which have responsibility for oversight of the design of the aircraft. "The CAA's assessment has taken into consideration the level of uncertainty regarding the cause of the recent Ethiopian Airlines accident plus its review of the aircraft design." Harris says the temporary suspension would remain in place while CAA analysed information as it came to hand to determine the safety risks of continued operation of the Boeing 737 Max to and from New Zealand. Transport Minister Phil Twyford says he is confident in the aviation authority's response. "The civil aviation community is highly networked. These decisions are made very collaboratively, and while it's always a judgement call, I think the CAA has handled it fine," Phil says. After initially opting to continue its New Zealand flights, Fiji Airways said that, in line with the stance taken by aviation regulators, it had decided to temporarily ground its fleet of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft until more information was known about the cause of the Ethiopian accident. The airline says it runs 17 to 21 flights a week to and from New Zealand. Of that only about 4 or 5 were operated by the Max 8s, and it would instead use its Boeing 737 NG aircraft as well its Airbus A330 fleet. "Fiji Airways is hopeful of a smooth transition with minimal disruption to passengers. We will have the capacity to manage the change of aircraft type. "This process has gone into immediate effect and we intend to operate schedules as planned. Any changes will be communicated to passengers," says a Fiji Airways spokesman. Fiji Airways started flying the Max 8 aircraft from Nadi to Wellington in December last year and said continuous flight data monitoring had not identified any issues were that cause for concern. "However, out of deference to the position taken by regulators in our region, and in response to the concerns expressed by the general public, both Fiji Airways and the Civil Aviation Authority of Fiji have agreed that the most appropriate course is to impose this temporary grounding. "We will continue to monitor developments closely, and this decision will be reviewed in light of any new information," the airline says. House of Travel commercial director Brent Thomas says leading up to the CAA decision agents had received a growing number of calls from New Zealanders due to fly to Fiji on the aircraft. "It's a less than 100, but more than a handful." Most of the Fiji bookings were for the April school holidays and later in the year. Agents were also assisting customers all over the world who were due to fly legs on 737 Max 8s with other carriers that have now had their aircraft grounded by aviation authorities. Brent says the Under Fair Trading Act and the Consumer Guarantees Act, the airline would have to reimburse customers if it could not provide the service they had paid for. Other costs incurred through rebooking accommodation and transfers might be covered by travel insurance, but policies would vary. "But they [travellers] cannot now take out insurance for it because it's a known event." Brent says Fiji was a very popular destination which attracted 100,000 Kiwis annually, and an estimated 40 per cent of those travelled on Fiji Airways flights out of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. "Given the number of aircraft and movements it's going to be thousands in a week." Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority say late on Tuesday that it was banning airlines from using the planes in the country. Fiji Airways announced it would change the aircraft type operating to/from Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide until further advised. Fiji Airways currently flies two 737 Max 8s aircraft and has three on order for 2019. The airline flies the aircraft to Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Kiribati, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu. The United States' Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has given the Max 8 a green light to keep flying. US aviation experts have joined the investigation into the crash in Ethiopia. The aircraft, which has been the fastest-selling airplane in Boeing's history, was recently at the centre of another investigation after the October crash involving Indonesian airline Lion Air. Aviation authorities in Europe, including the UK, Germany, France, Ireland, Belgium, Poland, the Netherlands and Austria, all grounded the aircraft in their countries early on Wednesday morning, NZ time. The UK was the first European nation to place restrictions on the Boeing 737 Max 8. The country's civil aviation authority said the move was a "precautionary measure" because it did not have sufficient information about the crash. Just five Max 8 planes operate in Britain, but those operated by other carriers will no longer be allowed into its airspace. The world's biggest planemaker, which has seen billions of dollars wiped off its market value, says it understood the decisions but retained "full confidence" in the 737 Max and had safety as its priority. Singapore temporarily suspended Max 8 flights on Tuesday, which will affect SilkAir, an arm of Singapore Airlines, as well as China Southern Airlines, Garuda Indonesia, Shandong Airlines and Thai Lion Air. The civil aviation authority of Singapore says in a statement that the suspension will be "reviewed as relevant safety information becomes available." Australia's national carriers don't currently use the Max 8 planes. Virgin Australia had previously ordered 30 of the Boeing 737 Max 8s and 10 Boeing 737 Max 10s, but they are not yet in service - the first of the new aircraft are due to be delivered at the end of the year. Qantas also considered adding the Boeing Max to its fleet, but instead ordered 99 Airbus A320neo planes. The Australian suspension instead affects Singapore's SilkAir - which flies into Darwin and Cairns but has already grounded its fleet - while Fiji Airways will have to substitute two 737 Maxs which fly into Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne for other craft. Malaysia and Oman also suspended flights on the aircraft in and out of their countries on Wednesday (NZ time). Aviation authorities in China, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Morocco and Mongolia had ordered airlines to ground their Boeing 737 Max 8 planes over Monday and Tuesday. Some airlines have cited worried customers for grounding the planes, as experts chase details on why the latest flight crashed. The Ethiopian Airlines aircraft's blackbox was found partially damaged. Indonesian investigators are examining whether faulty readings from a sensor might have triggered the automatic nose-down command to the Lion Air plane, which the pilots fought unsuccessfully to overcome. The Lion Air plane's flight data recorder showed problems with an airspeed indicator on at least four previous flights, although the airline initially said the problem was fixed. Boeing has said it has no reason to pull the popular aircraft from the skies, but delayed its the launch of its 777X airliner jetliner launch this week. - With agencies -Stuff.co.nz/Anuja_Nadkarni/Debrin_Foxcroft/Amanda_Cropp 11.30pm Update: Power has now been restored to more than 3200 homes across Tauranga after an unexpected power cut this evening. There are still 52 properties in Hairini without power. PowerCo have updated their information about the power cut, which was caused by damaged equipment. Power is expected to be restored to the remaining houses by 3.25am. Earlier: Power is out to more than 3000 properties in Tauranga this evening. Around 3291 homes are powerless following reports of a transformer in Ohauiti being blown about 10.13pm, Wednesday night. An Ohauiti resident saw the neighbourhood light up on Poike Road near Egmont St. "The top of the power pole lit up in sparks, the entire neighbourhood was bright. The brightness extended so far cops turned up before anyone even rang them. It went on for about 15 seconds. "Literally everyone came out of their houses. Fire trucks are now out there. People are saying that two went off." Nikki Bollen also reported two going off. "There were two - one in Awaiti St, and one in Egmont St. Both blew up at the same time. Egmont St one was huge!" says Nikki. Teesh Stock was sitting on a friend's balcony on Egmont Street when the sky lit up. She caught it on video. "It was a power station or something, there was a loud buzzing sound and then a few loud bangs and then that happened," says Teesh. "Fire crews were there when I was driving home." A Welcome Bay resident also reported seeing the glow in the sky from the end of Welcome Bay. Residents in Ohauiti are reporting that there is no power outage around Egmont St, however there are reports coming in to SunLive that Tauriko is experiencing a power outage. Power is expected to be restored by 3.13am. At the scene? Call 0800 SUNLIVE or email photos to newsroom@thesun.co.nz Solution for Mathew and Hunter could rest with Chagos and Timor Leste Reports have it that the Lagos State rescue team has recovered eight dead children from the rubbles of the collapsed building while forty have so far been rescued alive. The school is said to have close to 150 students on its register. Lagos state Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, is also at the scene of the ongoing rescue operation. Our thoughts and prayers are with them More details shortly Pictures: Some homes in Hairini this morning are still without power after a transformer reportedly blew overnight. About 56 properties are still in the dark this morning, according to the Powerco website. Powerco reports that damaged equipment is the cause of the outage. At about 10.30pm, more than 3000 home were left without power following a blown transformer in the area. An Ohauiti resident saw the neighbourhood light up on Poike Road near Egmont St. "The top of the power pole lit up in sparks, the entire neighbourhood was bright. The brightness extended so far cops turned up before anyone even rang them. It went on for about 15 seconds. "Literally everyone came out of their houses. Fire trucks are now out there. People are saying that two went off." Read more here. Seeka Limited has announced that is has agreed to purchase kiwifruit orcharding, packing and coolstore business and assets of Aongatete Coolstores Limited in the Bay of Plenty for $25m. Seeka Chief Executive, Michael Franks says the acquisition is aligned to the company's growth strategy and builds on Seeka's kiwifruit foundation. "Aongatete's kiwifruit packhouse and coolstore facility processes around 4.5m trays of green and gold fruit, providing Seeka additional market presence in a growth industry. "The acquisition compliments our existing business with further infrastructure in a great growing location." In addition to increasing Seeka's catchment, the purchase is expected to increase business performance and deliver sustainable EBITDA of between $3.5m and $4.5m. Aongatete is an integrated kiwifruit orcharding and post-harvest company operating across the Bay of Plenty. The assets acquired are of excellent quality and the people and operation are renowned for their excellent performance for growers, grower focus and furthering technology. Seeka plans to retain all permanent staff and will continue to provide services and support to growers who have been supplying fruit to Aongatete, says Michael. "The facilities and team have a considerable reputation for efficiency and innovation. This season's harvest is underway with orchards already being picked and it will continue to operate under the existing experienced team. Our focus will be to deliver support to the team as they need it." Managing director at Aongatete Allan Dawon says growers futures stand in good stead with Seeka, Seeka brings its own skills and economies of scale and recognises the Aongatete site will remain a centre of excellence and innovation for the kiwifruit industry. Seeka is committed to the local area and sees benefits for both existing and new staff and grower partners. "Seeka's significant size and scope brings increased capacity and ability to support the Aongatete site during peak harvest times," says Michael. "With Seeka's geographical spread throughout the Bay of Plenty transport distances can be reduced with fruit processed closer to where it is grown." Another benefit is Seekas Grower Shares Scheme and Employee Share Scheme will be offered to new associates. The Scheme is an opportunity for growers and staff to benefit from being part of Seeka and share in returns generated by the business. The purchase is anticipated to settle on 18 March 2019 and the facilities will be rebranded as Seeka Aongatete. Deji Adeyanju, former Peoples Democratic Partys social media strategist on Wednesday announced his resignation from civil rights group Our Mumu Don Do. Adeyanju took to social media to express his resignation from the group. He said he was no longer confident in the leadership of the organisation and accused Charles Oputa, popularly known as Charly Boy of betraying the aims of the movement. He said; DRYDEN, N.Y. -- State troopers are looking for a Dryden man who fired a gunshot from a house and escaped a shelter-in-place, according to a Tuesday night release from New York State Police. Eric McLaurin, 31, of Dryden, is suspected of firing a shot from a house in the 1100 block of Dryden Road, police said. Troopers were dispatched to a shots fired call at 2:41 p.m., according to police. Police say a woman and child were reportedly in the house at the time of the call, but they left before troopers arrived. Troopers closed Dryden Road between Turkey Hill and Baker Hill roads and issued a shelter-in-place for residents in the area that lasted several hours, police said. They were unable to contact McLaurin, who they believed to be in the house, for those several hours, police said. A special operations response team entered the house and didnt find McLaurin, police said. McLaurin stands 5-feet, 10-inches tall, weighs approximately 160 pounds and has hazel eyes, police said. The shelter-in-place was lifted and the road has been reopened, according to police. A new indoor exhibit at the Beaver Lake Nature Center is making it easier to explore the outdoors while staying warm. The exhibit explores the different habitats found around the center, interactive elements like a sniff-and-smell wall and a life-size beaver lodge. Heidi Kortright, Director of the Beaver Lake Nature Center, said the exhibit is the first of its kind in the center because it doesnt focus on a specific species and changes by season. The idea of the exhibits is to expand on the outdoor experience, said Kortright. Continue learning by coming into the center and reading a bit more." Walking into the center, visitors can read about Beaver Lake and the surrounding forest on a wall painted with trees, bushes and animals, and discover the mammals living in the lake with an interactive animal pelts of the lake sign. Other features of the interactive exhibit include a station where visitors can learn about and feel the different tree barks in the forest, a wheel that spins to different actions people can take to help preserve their nature world and a lodge that people children can venture into. This is a way of expanding our visitors days, said Kortright. Yes, we want them on the trails, but this was a way of coming in and this time of year warming up and learning a little bit more if they werent able to participate on a walk. They can come here and say, Oh, thats what I was seeing there. Its a way of giving that information to our visitors. By next month, Kortright said the winter theme will change to spring and in May the center will have live bees that will fill a glass box where visitors can see them working. Because Beaver Lake has a lot of repeat visitors, there are seasonal components, she said. "So if youre visiting day to day, itll give you a bit of change, and if youre a guest or youve come on your own for the first time, it will be appropriate for that season. In 2016, Friends of Beaver Lake, a nonprofit support group for the center, hired Taylor Studios Inc. from Illinois to spearhead the construction of the new exhibit. Kortright said the company was chosen over local candidates because they had the most experience with nature center design and natural history information. The exhibit was the second and final phase of renovations for the center. The first phase consisted of a new front desk, new monitors with programs, panels and accents on walls, a larger trail map and 20 interpretive signs to go around the front of the center and on two trails. Altogether, Kortright said the the project cost $600,000, which was funded by the Friends of Beaver Lake, a grant from the Baldwinsville Rotary club and other community organizations. The Beaver Lake Nature Center is open daily from 8 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. and admission is $5 per vehicle. SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Opponents of a community grid to replace Interstate 81 in Syracuse say they have some secret state information and it just so happens to make their point: That without a high-speed path through Syracuse, city streets will bottleneck. The grid critics, a group called Save 81, have used this like a secret weapon to try to win support for their side, which favors a tunnel or a rebuilt elevated viaduct. Theyve bought billboards and social media posts, warning of the coming community gridlock. The secret report was cited in news conferences led by suburban politicians, letters to the editor and leaflets circulated at public meetings. Only a very select few have it," said Kerry Mannion, deputy supervisor for DeWitt, during a recent news conference. The group says it has a draft environmental impact statement from December 2016 that has never-before-released data on the way plans to replace Interstate 81 will affect traffic congestion. Without providing the document, the group is warning of clogged streets and a failing traffic system. The grid supporters are incensed about the strategy. They question why Save81 wont share the elusive report with the public. They suspect the group is cherry-picking information to mislead the public. And if no one else has the report, they say, who can challenge Save81s analysis of it? They keep referring to this data that is not public information, said Barry Lentz, a grid advocate. To me, thats disingenuous." State transportation officials, whose office compiled the report, previously said Save81 is drawing the wrong conclusions and taking information out of context. The state has its own analysis of its numbers for 260 intersections in the city, and the state shows its work. The number of congested intersections would be essentially the same under the grid, the viaduct and rebuilding the overpass, according to data the department publicly released. But, for now, the state officials arent talking or responding directly to the anti-grid groups claims. Without an unbiased review of the state report used by anti-grid advocates, its hard to know whos right. But its a contentious battleground in the war for public opinion as the state nears its next big decision on the way to tear down I-81 in downtown Syracuse and replace it in some way. Its the biggest construction project here in decades, with the potential of more than $1 billion spent on the project. Soon, the state Department of Transportation will reveal its latest analysis of the options, called a draft environmental impact statement. And well also learn if Save81 sounded a needed alarm as pro-grid momentum was built. Or the public will learn if the group used its secret weapon to promote fake engineering. This is the preliminary draft environmental impact statement that Save81 says it obtained via public records request. The group included a photo of it in a lobbying document, but has refused to release the draft EIS. The state is finishing the draft statement, which will include estimated impacts of the grid option, rebuilding the raised viaduct or building a tunnel. The document will set in motion a process to eventually decide the highways fate. The $1.3 billion grid option calls for tearing down the elevated highway through downtown Syracuse and rerouting through traffic on Interstate 481 around the city. Traffic going into the city would be routed on to the street grid. The state is also considering a $1.7 billion option to rebuild the elevated highway or $3.6 billion for building a tunnel. Six Onondaga County legislators cited the exclusive document in a recent letter to the editor: It is the most legitimate source for factual information about the I-81 project, untainted by headlines and press releases... (It) demonstrates the total inadequacy of any street grid-only alternative. The letter even charged the DOT has masked and distorted their own engineers analyses." What Save81 is claiming The document Save81 says it has is a review of the environmental impacts of the grid option and rebuilding the raised viaduct, including effects on congestion and travel times. The December 2016 document does not look at a tunnel option, because it was produced when a tunnel was not considered a plausible option. The group included a photo of the report in a lobbying document provided to Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard by John McBride, an Onondaga County legislator, who was among six legislators who signed a letter to the editor repeating the claims. The DOT released the draft DEIS in December 2016 to partner agencies like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Save81 has said it took six months of public records requests to obtain it. (The Corps has refused to release the document to others, including Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard.) The document slated to be released soon officially by the state will be an updated version of the review of the grid and viaduct options, and it will contain of review of the environmental and other effects of a tunnel option. Save81 is a group that represents local elected officials, suburban residents and businesses along the existing I-81 corridor, including Destiny USA and hotels along Seventh North Street. It formed in 2014. When Save81 got a copy of the draft in July 2017 -- a document thousands of pages long -- the group handed it over to John Shafer of a consulting firm, Spectra Engineering, Architecture and Surveying. Save81 paid Shafer, a former chief engineer with the DOT, about $5,000 to analyze the document, he has said. He spent about two weeks and produced a 17-page report that concluded a grid was not appropriate to replace the viaduct and took issue with several assumptions made by the DOT. He said 18 intersections in the city would have wait times increased to an amount generally accepted as too long for an efficient traffic system, though he did not say where they are. Shafer, citing the draft documents obtained from the Army Corps, said the DOTs engineers had underestimated the number of vehicles that would end up on city streets if I-81 was taken down. The document shows 100 intersections in the city would have increased congestion, he said. He described the increased congestion with so-called Level of Service estimates, which rank intersections between "A" and F, with "E" and "F" considered unacceptably bad congestion or wait times for drivers. So-called "F" levels of service at intersections with traffic signals are those where drivers wait for 80 seconds or more. "E" intersections are where drivers wait for between 55 and 80 seconds. The flyer shown at U.S. Rep. John Katkos town hall meeting on I-81 on Feb. 21 gives a glimpse of what Save81s document looks like: It shows a photo of an official-looking document with three South Salina Street intersections and estimated wait times. The largest wait is 183 seconds at northbound South Salina Street at Adams Street during morning peak traffic. The group claims that estimate comes from the December 2016 draft DEIS. This was included in Save81's flyer. In addition to the earlier Spectra report, Save81 has recently updated its claims with more analysis from Spectra. The group now says that 61 intersections in the city will be reduced to the "E" or "F" levels and that nearly 100 intersections would be slower than current conditions. The estimate of 61 intersections includes the states projections for both the years 2020 and 2050. It does not specify what time of day the congestion is supposed to occur, but most of the analysis of traffic flows shown publicly by the DOT only considers peak hours in the morning and evening, when traffic is at its heaviest. Also, reducing the flow of 100 intersections might not be a huge deal, as most intersections in the city are hardly congested, according to a 2011 study by the Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council. To Lentz, the grid supporter, warning of the reduction in 100 intersections is a scare tactic, because it doesnt say how many are already operating without any congestion at all. Moving from an "A" to a "B" could be unnoticeable, he said. Thats exactly what theyre doing here. Its taking the worst case data point and pulling it out of context to scare people in the suburbs, Lentz said. The councils 2011 analysis looked at existing traffic flow along the area affected by I-81, examining 80 intersections in the city, including how long drivers waited in each direction. Of several hundred wait times analyzed, 10 intersections had wait times at levels "E" or F" in 2011, the council concluded. Of those 10, six are along Almond Street, which now runs under the I-81 viaduct. Two others are at the northbound I-81 on- and off-ramps at Exit 17. One is at Pearl and Salina streets, and another is at Genesee and Clinton streets. The Save81 lobbying document also does not include the states estimates on how rebuilding the viaduct would impact traffic on city streets. The DOT has said rebuilding the highway would have similar effects on traffic as the grid. At the time of the first report from Spectra, a DOT spokesman said it was largely speculative and based on outdated designs and that it contains inaccuracies and statements taken out of context. A DOT official has also said the documents findings were too preliminary as to be useful for the type of analysis Spectra did. Reached recently to comment on Save81s claims about congestion and continued use of the Spectra reports findings, DOT spokesman Joe Morrissey said it would be premature to comment ahead of the DEIS release. Lentz, the pro-"grid" activist, said Save81 is exploiting the DOTs reluctance to comment by pushing its hand-picked data on the public and elected officials. I want to hear what DOT has to say about their data, Lentz said. The letter to the editor was signed by county legislators including McBride, James Rowley, Ken Bush, Debra Cody, Kevin Holmquist and Casey Jordan. McBride did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the lobbying document after he provided it to Syracuse.com. What the DOTs analysis shows This analysis by the state says fewer than 6 percent of intersections would experience "D" congestion. In public documents and meetings, the DOT has said its analysis has shown minor differences in congestion between what would occur with either a community grid or rebuilding the viaduct. And both of those options arent too different from current conditions, the states analysis suggests. The DOT has a computer model that has rebuilt Syracuses street grid and traffic patterns, reviewing 260 intersections in the city during what are projected to be the busiest traffic periods in the mornings and evenings in the city in 2020 and in 2050. The findings were first shown to the public in October 2016 and havent been updated publicly since. That analysis showed: There were no substantial differences in traffic flow between rebuilding the viaduct or the community grid option. Results of the DOTs analysis of the impacts of a tunnel on traffic flow have not yet been released. Fewer than 6 percent of intersections would have a Level of Service D" or worse, which the DOT said was well within the acceptable range for the I-81 project. Just 1 percent of intersections were at an "F" during peak evening traffic under a grid." Fewer than 1 percent were level "F" under the viaduct alternative. Similar results occur when the model is projected forward to 2050. The DOT records do not show which intersections are projected to be slowed down under each I-81 replacement option. City officials and grid supporters have touted other benefits from taking the highway down, including re-knitting the center of the city for potential development and property taxes, helping de-concentrate poverty among 2,000 public housing residents who live by the raised viaduct, and to make the city more pedestrian and bicycle friendly. They have said a tunnel option would limit the amount of east-west connections in the city, take too long to build and be difficult to pay for and maintain. Why wont the anti-grid advocates release the state draft? The group Save 81 has declined numerous requests from Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard to provide the document in full that they said supports their claim, despite touting it publicly. Mannion and others also would not produce excerpts when a reporter repeatedly requested them after the news conference. Mark Nicotra, Save81s former spokesman who now is executive communications director for Onondaga County, has previously said that the group had spent six months getting the public document and more time analyzing it". So thats why they wont provide it for public review and criticism. I hope you can understand our reluctance to simply release it, he said in September. And Tony Mangano, the current Save81 spokesman, called the document large and complex" in a statement Wednesday morning, saying it took six months to get via a public records request. He also declined to provide it for public review. Nicotra, then the Salina town supervisor, said the group received the document via a public records request from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The same agency later declined to provide it to Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard, citing a provision of the Freedom of Information Act that exempts some records if they are preliminary or part of the deliberations needed to arrive at a decision. The Department of Transportation has also denied the request of Michael Stanton, a pro-"grid" activist, in January, citing a similar provision of the state FOI Law, according to an email he provided. Read Save81s lobbying document HOWES CAVE, N.Y. -- Is going naked in a cave on your 2019 bucket list? Well, nows the time to sign up for the second annual Howe Caverns Naked in a Cave event set for Sept. 14. Howe Caverns has announced that there will only be 350 tickets available. Reservations are now being accepted by calling 518-296-8900. Right now were about two-thirds sold out, said Anne-Marie Galasso, a Howe Caverns staff member. This years event, which will again stress body positivity, will also feature some additional clothed and clothing-optional activities. In addition to the naked stroll in the caverns (where the temperature is 52 degrees year-round), participants can check out the new glass blowing exhibit and sign up for a dinner on the premises (clothing required) or sign up for a gentle yoga session (clothing optional). Howe Caverns in Schoharie County is the largest cave open to the public in the Northeast, and the second most visited natural attraction in New York State after Niagara Falls. Last year, there were nearly 300 participants for the first Naked in a Cave event on July 14, which was held in conjunction with International Nudity Day. This years event has a different focus: Come celebrate the Harvest Moon with your Full Moon. Like last year, no cameras or phones will be allowed. Footwear and reservations will be required. Cost is $75 for the naked stroll in the cave (you get a free bathrobe to keep); $20 for the gentle yoga session and $130 for the dinner and the stroll. For more information and updates, follow the Naked in a Cave Facebook page. WASHINGTON President Donald Trump plans to award a posthumous Medal of Honor to a Fort Drum soldier killed in Iraq in 2007. The late Staff Sgt. Travis W. Atkins will be honored March 27 for saving the lives of three soldiers by throwing himself on top of a suicide bomber, the White House said. His son, Trevor Oliver, and other family members plan to join Trump for the ceremony in the White House, officials said. Atkins served with the 10th Mountain Divisions 2nd Brigade Combat Team south of Baghdad when he ended up in hand-to-hand combat with a suspected insurgent on June 1, 2007. When Atkins realized the insurgent was about to trigger a suicide vest, Atkins tackled him and sacrificed his own life to save other soldiers in Company D, 2d Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, officials said. Atkins was 31. In 2008, Atkins was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor for recognition of valor in battle. Atkins had previously served in Iraq in 2003 while assigned to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. After attending the University of Montana, he re-enlisted in the Army in 2005 and deployed for a second time to Iraq in August 2006. Contact Mark Weiner: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751 Laurie Kellogg, the Seneca County woman convicted in the 1991 killing of her husband, will soon be free. A parole board ordered March 8 that Kellogg be freed by April 16, according to the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. She has been in state prison for over 26 years. Her husband, 43-year-old Malcolm "Bruce" Kellogg, was shot to death at the couple's cottage on Cayuga Lake in Seneca County on June 9, 1991. Kellogg, then 26, and four teens who were neighbors of the cottage were charged in the killing two days later. One of the teens, Denver A. McDowell, pleaded guilty to shooting Bruce Kellogg and testified that Laurie Kellogg seduced him into killing her husband. Kellogg said her husband abused her, according to the D&C. Kellogg also said she did not expect McDowell to actually kill her husband. McDowell was sentenced to 25 years to life and remains in state prison. The case inspired a made-for-TV movie in 1994 called "Lies of the Heart: The Laurie Kellogg Story." Jennie Garth and Gregory Harrison starred. The parole board granted Kelloggs release because of her seemingly sincere remorse, generally good behavior in prison and the fact that she has no other criminal record, according to WHAM in Rochester. The board also found Kellogg did well in rehabilitation programs. "I wish I could turn back the hands of time and make different decisions," Kellogg told a parole board during an earlier hearing in 2016, according to the D&C. "I can tell you that we make choices and decisions we don't realize are going to lead to a chain of events, the domino effect, if you will, that not only change lives, but ruin lives, that take lives." Kellogg married her husband when she was still a teen, according to WROC in Rochester. A judge ordered Kelloggs release in 2017, but the move was later halted after the state appealed the decision. Read more on the case: Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-282-8598 Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has been indicted for 16 felonies in New York state, shortly after receiving a second prison sentence from a federal judge. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced 16 state charges against Manafort, including residential mortgage fraud and falsifying business records to commit fraud. An indictment unsealed Wednesday accuses the 69-year-old Manafort of conducting a yearlong residential mortgage fraud scheme that netted millions of dollars. According to the Associated Press, Manafort wont be eligible for a pardon by President Donald Trump if convicted on NYS charges. Vox reports presidents can only issue pardons for federal crimes, not state and local crimes. Vance said an investigation began in March 2017, roughly six months after Manafort was fired as Trumps campaign chairman amid allegations of a covert lobbying operation on behalf of pro-Russian interests in Ukraine. No one is beyond the law in New York, Vance said in a statement, pointing to "serious criminal charges for which the defendant has not been held accountable. Trump has repeatedly defended Manafort and floated the idea of granting a pardon, but such a pardon would only apply to federal crimes. Manafort was sentenced to 43 additional months in prison on conspiracy charges related to his foreign lobbying work and witness tampering Wednesday, on top of a nearly four-year prison sentence Manafort received last week in a separate criminal case in Virginia. Manafort and Rick Gates were the first to be charged in special counsel Robert Muellers probe into possible ties between Trumps presidential campaign and Russia. Both men were accused in 2017 of funneling tens of millions of dollars in payments through foreign companies and bank accounts. It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson told Manafort Wednesday before his sentencing. WASHINGTON (AP) The U.S. is issuing an emergency order Wednesday grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft effective immediately, in the wake of the crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people, President Donald Trump said. Many nations had already barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 from their airspace, but until Trumps announcement, the Federal Aviation Administration had said that it didnt have any data to show the jets are unsafe. Trump cited new information that had come to light in the ongoing investigation into incident. He did not elaborate. "All of those planes are grounded, effective immediately," Trump said during a scheduled briefing on border security. Trump said any airplane currently in the air will go to its destination and then be grounded. He added all airlines and affected pilots had been notified. Trump said the safety of the American people is of "paramount concern," and added that the FAA would soon put out a statement on the action. Trump said the decision to ground the aircraft "didn't have to be made, but we thought it was the right decision." The president insisted that the announcement was coordinated with aviation officials in Canada, U.S. carriers and aircraft manufacturer Boeing. Boeing is an incredible company, Trump said. They are working very, very hard right now and hopefully theyll quickly come up with an answer. Syracuse, N.Y. -- The pot of soup that Paul Edems wife made Sunday was too hot, so, given this is Central New York in March, he stuck it in the snow for awhile to cool down. Edem walked outside the next morning and saw tiny black bugs covering much of his quarter-acre patch, centered on that spot where the soup pot had been. I thought, what in the world was all this black all over the top of the snow? said Edem, who lives in the Madison County town of Sullivan. There were millions of them out there. Baffled, Edem shot a photo, and emailed it today to Syracuse.com, asking if anybody knew what they were. We were baffled, too, so we forwarded Edems picture to an expert: Melissa Fierke, a forest entomology professor at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Her response was immediate: Snow fleas. Theyre super cool, Fierke said. Theyre a natural phenomenon. When you stumble across something like that, youre like, thats amazing. Snow fleas arent fleas, or even insects, for that matter. They belong to a separate group of six-legged creatures called collembolans, or springtails, so-called because they have a spring-like structure that vaults them away from danger. They can emerge in winter, Fierke explained, because they produce an antifreeze similar to the green stuff that keeps your car from overheating. They have that antifreeze compound, and the idea is theyre out there eating fungal spores and things that were deposited with the snow, she said. The snow fleas have a feast. Because theyre not actually fleas, they wont bite your ankles or your pets. Collembolans live in high densities in soil, breaking down leaf litter that improves the soil and helps plants grow. There are thousands in each square meter of soil, she said. Collembolans are super, super common," she said, but almost nobody ever sees them. Unless theyre on snow, of course. Fierke said she rarely sees snow fleas, and was hoping to take a look at the colony in Edems yard. But, alas, the bugs had disappeared by Tuesday morning. They were here that one day, Edem said, and then they were gone. Sign up now to have the Good Morning, CNY" newsletter.Syracuse.coms most important headlines will be delivered to your inbox for free by 7 a.m. Monday through Friday. Vanguard Coalition of United Political Parties, CUPP, Nigerias biggest opposition coalition, claimed, yesterday, that it was in possession of a five-man list of justices approved by the President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Zainab Bulkachuwa, to hear the petition of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, against the results of the February 23 presidential elections. The Sun The above quote from Robert McNamara, former American Secretary of Defense, may be apt in situating the current quest by the South-East zone to produce the next Senate president ahead of the inauguration of the ninth Senate. Daily Times INEC erred declaring govship poll inconclusive Adamawa PDP The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) says the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) erred in declaring the governorship election in Adamawa State inconclusive because the margin of lead was lower than the number of registered voters in places where voting was cancelled. Leadership Justice Folashade Ogunbanjo-Giwa of the Federal High Court sitting in Abuja, has advised a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Abdullahi Mustapha, to produce the Director General of National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), Ishaq Modibbo Kawu, on the next adjourned date. Daily Trust The ruling APC has won 15 of the 24 seats in the Plateau State House of Assembly so far, Daily Trust reports. The Nation A war of words broke out yesterday between the two major political parties ahead of the March 23 supplementary elections to decide who will control power in six states. Tribune Umbrella body for all socio-cultural associations in Ilorin, Kwara state, Ilorin Emirate Descendants Progressive Union (IEDPU) has commended the fascinating spirit of patriotism and statesmanship exhibited by the Senate President, Dr Abubakar Bukola Saraki on the outcome of the just concluded general elections in the state. Google engineers have identified a vulnerability in a Chrome patch that cyberterrorist can exploit to gain illegal access to devices. Clement Lecigne, a member of Google's Threat Analysis Group, posted an article on the company's blog revealing that a Chrome zero-day patch was used together with a zero-day patch for Windows 7 in cyber attacks. Attackers used both zero-days to launch malicious code and take over vulnerable systems. Google discovered the vulnerability was related to CVE-2019-5786, a security flaw that was included in the Chrome 72.0.3626.121 version patch released on March 1. The second vulnerability was linked to a local privilege escalation in the win32k.sys kernel driver, which Lecigne said can be used as a security sandbox escape. "We strongly believe this vulnerability may only be exploitable on Windows 7 due to recent exploit mitigations added in newer versions of Windows," the Google engineer wrote. "To date, we have only observed active exploitation against Windows 7 32-bit systems." Google said Microsoft is already working on a fix to address the vulnerability but no word yet on when it will come out. Meanwhile, Chrome Security and Desktop Engineering Lead Justin Schuh urged users to update their web browsers to the latest 72.0.3626.121 version to prevent security issues. This can be done using Chrome's built-in update tool. "Seriously, update your Chrome installs... like right this minute," Schuh wrote on Twitter. What Are Zero-Day Exploits? In February, Microsoft security engineer Matt Miller revealed that around 70 percent of patches the company released over the past 12 years were meant to fix memory safety bugs. He explained that this is because Windows was built mostly using C and C++ programming languages that are considered "memory-unsafe". Both provide developers with better control over memory addresses where codes can be executed. However, one mistake in the management of memory codes can result in a multitude of safety errors. These can then be exploited by cyberterrorists to create havoc in systems such remote executions of codes or elevation of privilege flaws. Miller said attackers often make use of use-after-free programs and heap corruption vulnerabilities to exploit safety errors. They tend to capitalize on the availability of these errors in many systems. Here are some examples of zero-day exploits that have already been identified: CVE-2017-8759 - a SOAP WSDL parser code injection believed to be linked to Microsoft Office RTF documents. CVE-2017-0261 - a "restore" use-after-free vulnerability related to Encapsulated PostScript (EPS). CVE-2016-0167 - a local privilege escalation exploit that victimized hundreds of Windows users in North America CVE-2016-1019 - a critical security flaw related to Adobe Flash Player and earlier Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and Chrome OS versions. How To Prevent Zero-Day Exploits Anti-virus developer Norton advises consumers to follow a checklist to ensure that information on devices are safe from security risks and zero-day vulnerabilities. Make sure to download the latest software and security patches for devices. Installing updates help keep systems up-to-date and free from potential bugs. Maintain safe and effective personal online security habits. Keep operating systems, internet browsers, and softwares secure by configuring their protection settings. Install a proactive and comprehensive protection software for devices to block all potential threats and vulnerabilities. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Toyota aims for the moon as the Japanese automotive company joins forces with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to build a fuel cell rover for lunar explorations. The rover is projected to be launched in 2029. Toyota, JAXA Envision Powerful Six-Wheeler For The Moon Toyota's six-wheel concept rover can carry two passengers (four in emergencies) and travel more than 6,214 miles (10,000 kilometers) on the moon's surface, according to an official report released by Toyota. Passengers will also be able to live in the pressurized vehicle for a fixed amount of time without having to wear their space suits. The living space is approximately 13 square meters. The rover will land on the moon before the humans get there and travel over the surface to meet them, Endgadget reports. During a symposium on Tuesday, March 12 in Tokyo, Toyota executive vice president Shigeki Terashi expresses his excitement at the automotive company's new project and explains the value of state-of-the-art fuel cell technology. "Fuel cells, which use clean power-generation methods, emit only water, and, because of their high energy density, they can provide a lot of energy, making them especially suited for the project being discussed with JAXA," Terashi says, adding that the this type of vehicles emit lower amounts of harmful substances. The use of fuel cells allows the rover to travel over a great distance on the lunar surface as well as maintain mobility that's necessary in exploring the moon. With this rover, astronauts will enjoy a good amount of freedom as they look around the moon. Only The Beginning Of 'Team Japan' Toyota and JAXA's concept of the rover has been in the works since May 2018. JAXA Vice President Koichi Wakata says that such a vehicle is crucial in the agency's goals in the future. With the moon's complex terrain and the challenge of radiation and temperature conditions, a pressurized rover that can move with ease on the surface is an absolute necessity. Toyota's concept of space mobility is ideal for this mission, he adds. Of course, the space agency is only starting to tap into the country's great wealth of expert knowledge, technological capabilities, and human resources. JAXA plans to collaborate with others as "Team Japan" sets their sights on the space exploration. "Through our collaboration with Toyota as the starting point, we can further expand the resources of 'Team Japan' in the continued pursuit of international space exploration," Wakata says. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The Nigerian Army (NA) has released pictures of individuals arrested for impersonating military men. According to the press release, these men were thugs working for politicians to disrupt the peaceful conduct of the poll. The statement read thus; Credible intelligence available to the NA has confirmed the kitting of political thugs with military uniforms and arming of same, to impersonate soldiers and perpetrate various crimes in the furtherance of the activities of their political bosses. See pictures below; More than 250 scientists have signed a petition calling for international public health organization to create stronger guidelines on wireless devices. Health Effects Of EMF Exposure In a letter addressed to the heads of the United Nations and the World Health Organization, a group of scientists expressed concern over the public's increased exposure to non-ionizing electromagnetic fields (EMF) generated by electric and wireless devices. They cited scientific studies that showed the ill effects of EMF, which include increased cancer risk, genetic damages, neurological disorders and learning deficits, among others. Apple's Airpods Emit EMF Radiation The scientists' appeal comes amid increasing popularity of wireless devices such as Apple's Airpods, which use Bluetooth technology and emits EMF radiation. The Airpods has become Apple's most popular accessory. In 2017, Apple sold between 14 and 16 million pairs of AirPods and analysts expect the number will reach 50 to 55 million this year. "Over 1 billion iPhone users worldwide offer great potential growth opportunities for AirPods," TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote in a research note released last year. Airpods and similar devices comply with the legal limits for EMF radio waves but the scientists who signed the petition worry that the guidelines are too lax. They called for stronger guidelines and demanded that the public be informed about the risks posed by radio waves. "By not taking action, the WHO is failing to fulfill its role as the preeminent international public health agency," the experts wrote. Dangers Of Using Wireless Headphones Experts say the use of wireless earphones such as the Airpod is particularly concerning because the device is worn in the ear canal. University of Colorado biochemistry professor Jerry Phillips, who is one of the scientists who signed the petition, explained that placing the Airpods in the ear canal exposes the tissues in the head to high amounts of radio-frequency radiation. Phillips said this poses a risk for tumors and other conditions linked to abnormal cell functioning. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Facebook is suing two Ukranian men for running a years-long hacking scheme that ended up stealing personal data from social media users through quiz apps. The Menlo Park-based company accused Gleb Sluchevsky and Andrey Gorbachov of scamming Facebook users into installing malware to their browsers. These malicious plug-ins hid in the form of "character and popularity" quizzes or horoscopes. Facebook said it discovered the hackers' scheme "through an investigation of malicious extensions." The company promptly suspended all affected the accounts in October. It then contacted browser makers to have the malware removed. Malicious Browser Plug-Ins Sluchevsky and Gorbachov reportedly used four popular web apps including FQuiz and Supertest. Through this malware, the two men were able to victimize as many as 63,000 Facebook accounts, most of which were owned by Ukrainian and Russian users. The scheme worked by presenting Facebook users with interesting quiz titles such as "What Kind of Person Do People Think You Are?" or "What Does Your Eye Color Say About You?" These quizzes would then ask users to allow them to connect their profiles to third-party apps via the Facebook Login feature. Once a user profile was connected, Sluchevsky and Gorbachov would then send and install malicious plug-ins to their victims' browsers. This would allow the hackers to mine accounts for private data, including personal information on the victims and everyone else on their friends' lists. The culprits also used malware to forcibly "inject unauthorized advertisements" to Facebook News Feeds or other social media websites whenever victims of the scam go online. Facebook's complaint said Sluchevsky and Gorbachov caused the company to suffer to "irreparable reputational harm." The company has accused the Ukrainian duo of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by illegally accessing Facebook data. The two culprits are also facing charges of fraud and breach of contract for misrepresenting themselves as legitimate developers. Private Data For Sale Sluchevsky and Gorbachov's hacking scheme is likely connected to an incident last year, where 81,000 private Facebook messages were compromised and offered for sale. Hackers had put up an advertisement claiming that they would allow access to the accounts for 10 cents a piece. However, the ad was later taken down. Facebook denied having cybersecurity breach, though it did contact browser makers about potential threats. "We have contacted browser-makers to ensure that known malicious extensions are no longer available to download in their stores," a Facebook spokesman said. "We have also contacted law enforcement and have worked with local authorities to remove the website that displayed information from Facebook accounts." The BBC later confirmed that more than 81,000 of the Facebook accounts being offered by hackers indeed contained private messages. Some 176,000 additional profiles were also made available, though these were said to be taken from accounts that had some personal information, such as phone numbers and e-mail address, open to the public. The case against Sluchevsky and Gorbachov is different from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where Facebook allegedly gave developers access to user information. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, is sharing its orbit with a vast ring of fine cosmic dust that has never been observed before. Guillermo Stenborg and Russell Howard, a pair of solar scientists from the Naval Research Laboratory, found evidence of the existence of a 9.3 million mile-wide dust ring around the sun located in the orbit of Mercury using data from NASA's STEREO (Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory). Their findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal on Nov. 21, 2018. Mercury's Dusty Orbit The two scientists discovered the new dust ring within the inner solar system while searching for a dust-free region near the sun. Previous models predicted that at some point, the extreme heat from the yellow dwarf would immediately vaporize cosmic dust, leaving a clean stretch of space. However, searching for the theoretical dust-free region around the sun has been a challenge. All the dust floating between the Earth and the sun is obstructing the view of scientists. Stenborg and Howard found a way around the problem by creating a new model based on the photos of interplanetary space from STEREO. When they tested the new model, two lights showed up: one from the sun's corona and the sunlight reflecting from cosmic dust. The scientists wanted to devise a technique to separate the light coming from the corona and the light reflected by the dust. Removing the light from the corona would reveal the dust-free space they have been searching for. They found the dust ring in the orbit of Mercury while working on the new model and their technique. Looking at the STEREO images, they noticed a pattern of enhanced brightness along the area. "It wasn't an isolated thing," explained Howard. "All around the Sun, regardless of the spacecraft's position, we could see the same five percent increase in dust brightness, or density. That said something was there, and it's something that extends all around the Sun." The Story Of The Formation Of The Solar System Scientists believe that finding the boundary where the heat of the sun would vaporize cosmic dust would reveal their composition. Dust is a remainder from asteroid collisions and blazing comets. However, dust is also remnants from the early history of the solar system. Scientists believe that cosmic dust is the raw material from which planets are formed. The study of cosmic dust could reveal how planets, including Earth, formed billions of years ago. Stenborg and Howard will continue to look for the dust-free region around the sun. The solar scientists are hoping to use their new model and technique on the data beamed back by the Parker Solar Probe that continues to explore the corona of the yellow dwarf in the heart of the solar system. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Nollywood actress, Adesua Etomi-Wellington has revealed what she does, whenever she feels like giving up. According to the wedding party actress, while speaking via her Twitter handle on Monday said, she reads about the most inspirational human beings and her faith in humanity is restored whenever she is about to give up. She wrote: Just when Im about to give up, I read about the most inspirational human beings and my faith in humanity is restored. There is hope. The Lafayette City-Parish Council won't seek an attorney general opinion on whether a vote of the people is needed to correct new city and parish district lines. But Mayor-President Joel Robideaux is undecided if he'll seek an opinion. "Asking for an attorney general opinion is simply showing good faith we're trying to make the best decision possible," he said at a council meeting Tuesday. Meanwhile, the council introduced two ordinances Tuesday to correct precinct and district line problems introduced as part of a home rule charter amendment approved by voters Dec. 8. The ordinances return to the council March 26 for final adoption. On Dec. 8, voters approved a home rule charter amendment splitting the nine-member city-parish council into a five-person city council and five-person parish council for the first time since consolidation in 1996. Opponents say the measure was rushed to the Dec. 8 ballot without sufficient input from the council or public, despite several town hall meetings on the topic. In the past, home rule charter ballot items were produced after charter commissions spent months debating the proposed changes. A charter commission was not appointed in this case and, some say, was not necessary. It was learned after the Dec. 8 election that some district and precinct line descriptions didn't match maps drawn prior to the election. At issue is how best to correct the problems: an election of the people or a council ordinance. Four council members proposed a resolution Tuesday asking for an opinion from the Louisiana Attorney General despite a thoroughly researched opinion from the city-parish legal team that an ordinance of the council is the best way to correct the problems. The resolution failed. Either way, a lawsuit is likely, Councilman William Theriot said. "I believe that by not asking for an AG opinion it gives the public the opinion you dont want hear what the AG has to say," Robideaux said. Top stories in Acadiana in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up City-Parish Attorney Paul Escott, who spent many hours drafting an 11-page opinion that concludes a council ordinance is the best way to solve the problems, said the attorney general opinion won't protect city-parish government from a lawsuit unless the opinion concurs with the city-parish legal team's opinion. You ask for a (second) medical opinion when you dont believe the one you got," Councilman Kenneth Boudreaux said. It's the same with asking for an AG opinion, he said. When residents voted in December, Councilman Kevin Naquin said, they voted in the correct precincts. They voted on whether they wanted to amend the charter to create a city and a parish council. "Because a few precincts don't match with a map people want to blow the whole thing up," he said. Councilman Jay Castille said asking for an attorney general opinion "is just a political stall tactic." A delay in correcting the precinct and new council district boundaries could delay the election of new city and parish council members this fall. Qualifying is Aug. 6-8 for the Oct. 12 election. Some supporters of the separate city and parish councils fear asking for an attorney general opinion will delay the fall elections. If that happens, the current council terms, which are set to expire at the end of the year, could be extended a year. Four of the nine council members Boudreaux, Castille, Theriot and Council Chairman Jared Bellard cannot run for the city-parish council or for the new city or parish councils because they are term limited. Other city-parish officials and opponents of the charter change want a re-vote on the Dec. 8 charter amendment with the corrected precinct and district lines. But the home rule charter prohibits placing a charter amendment on the ballot within a year of a vote on the same issue, so a re-election couldn't be held until December, which would automatically delay city and parish council elections. Voting to seek an attorney general opinion were council members Jared Bellard, Nanette Cook, Pat Lewis and Theriot. Voting against involving the attorney general were council members Kenneth Boudreaux, Jay Castille, Bruce Conque, Liz Hebert and Kevin Naquin. HAMMOND The city council approved the mayor's appointment for chief of police Tuesday night despite controversies over a use-of-force video and a rape case lawsuit that have shaken some residents' confidence in his choice. The Hammond City Council voted 4-1 in favor of Edwin Bergeron, a 19-year department veteran who was the sole candidate offered by Mayor Pete Panepinto, making Bergeron the mayor's third chief during slightly more than four years in office. Council member Kip Andrews cast the lone "no" vote. During about an hour of public discussion, Bergeron received strongly worded endorsements and denouncements. But the council members revealed little of their opinions. Leaked use-of-force video, rape lawsuit forces public hearing on Hammond PD chief pick A slew of controversial background findings surrounding Hammonds top police chief pick including a leaked use-of-force video and decade-old "The video, we all saw it. You all got your opinion," said council member Devon Wells. "I known this guy from seeing him, from him dealing with me, and from him working around me and being in the community." Panepinto said Bergeron has a proven record of innovation and leadership, the ability to understand different perspectives, and the knowledge that comes with having served on the civil service board. The mayor noted Bergeron had turned down opportunities in the past to leave for other jobs. Bergeron received endorsements from a string of officers who described him as a devoted and highly regarded officer who has the support of the department. Lt. Wayne Scivicque said he supervises Bergeron now, and he can rely on Bergeron all the time. He said Bergeron would make a great chief. "Brother, we love you, and we stand by you," Scivicque said, eliciting a round of applause from the audience. Some residents criticized Bergeron based on a leaked 30-second video posted recently on social media. The video shows two officers, including Bergeron, speaking with a handcuffed suspect in an interview room when the suspect appears to lunge across the table. The officers struggle with the suspect on top of the table for several seconds before the table breaks and the suspect falls through. "Im disturbed by the video I saw," said Ronald Valentine, a minister who spoke at the meeting. "Whether it was cut-and-pasted, the video was real and to see a man being beaten, handcuffed; I have a problem with that." Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up The incident was reviewed by internal affairs and the FBI, according to a number of people who spoke at the meeting, and Bergeron was cleared. The mayor has described the video as an incomplete account. Other residents mentioned a 2002 lawsuit that accused Bergeron, a Hammond police officer at the time, of trying to dissuade a college student from filing rape charges against one of Bergeron's fraternity brothers. The woman died by suicide two months after the rape. The suit was settled for a confidential sum. Bergeron said at a public hearing Monday that he can definitely understand the concerns surrounding the suicide but said he took multiple lie detector tests at the time. Its unfortunate it happened; I feel for the family but I didnt have anything to do with it, he told the crowd. Council President Carlee White Gonzales said she took the lawsuit seriously. But she did her own investigation and felt confident in voting for Bergeron. She added in an interview after the meeting that she would have liked to see additional candidates. But she was impressed by the support Bergeron had from residents and officers. Bergeron said after the meeting that he will focus on community policing. The police chief position was vacated in January when Panepinto met with former chief James Stewart, citing philosophical differences. The mayor said at the time that Stewart wasnt fired but refused to characterize his departure. Stewart has since sued the city for wrongful termination. Hammond police chief out after mayor summons him to discuss 'philosophical differences' Hammond Police Chief James Stewart is out as the citys top law enforcement officer following a meeting Thursday with Mayor Pete Panepinto at Stewart replaced longtime police chief Roddy Devall, whom Panepinto fired in November 2015 following an investigation into his handling of an officer's arrest. Devall sued the city over his termination, which a district judge overturned. The case was ultimately settled, but Devall did not return to his old job. Purchases made via links on our site may earn us an affiliate commission ALEXANDRIA Former Cottonport prison warden Nate Cain abruptly entered a guilty plea Wednesday afternoon on the third day of his federal trial on corruption charges, cutting the proceedings short as his ex-wife prepared take the stand to testify against him. Cain pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud related to gun purchases he made on the state's dime while serving as warden of Avoyelles Correctional Center, now Raymond Laborde Correctional Center. David Joseph, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, said he expects Cain, 51, to serve time in federal prison and pay restitution for the crimes. +2 Before trial of ex-prison warden Nate Cain, former employee pleads guilty to concealing felony Days before former prison warden Nate Cain faces trial on federal charges that he made thousands of dollars worth of improper purchases on the We werent giving him anything, Joseph said. "Hell pay for it. I cant tell you what the judge will sentence him to, but I can tell you prison time will be recommended under the guidelines. The deal marked a sudden end to a trial in which Cain had faced 17 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The former warden, who resigned in 2016, took the plea before the jury heard from his ex-wife, Tonia Bandy, and corrections secretary Jimmy LeBlanc, both of whom were scheduled to testify. Bandy had already pleaded guilty in the case. Cain and Bandy were accused of spending thousands of dollars meant for the Cottonport prison's operations on a slew of personal purchases from flat screen TVs and Yeti coolers to toilet paper and coffee, as well as construction supplies to quietly build a new home on prison property while shielding the fraudulent transactions from any state oversight. The counts to which Cain pleaded guilty Wednesday pertained only to certain purchases of gun and gun accessories, which amounted to less than $1,000, according to Cain's attorney, John McLindon. Cain admitted to those limited purchases, and apologized to taxpayers. "The government treated me very fairly and I take responsibility for the two counts I pled to," Cain said Wednesday after his plea deal. "I'm very thankful and happy for what happened. McLindon said Cain plans to reimburse the state for the purchases he admitted were fraudulent, but does not think Cain should pay much more. The remaining money Nates not responsible for that," McLindon said. But federal prosecutors argue that Cain should be on the hook to pay back as much as $150,000 -- the total value of the purchases they alleged were fraudulent -- because federal sentencing guidelines allow judges to consider all the relevant conduct. "Even though hes only pled to two counts, it wouldnt be uncommon for the judge to consider the entire scheme," said Dane Ciolino, a professor at Loyola Law School. The odds are the judge is going to use the larger number; thats what usually happens. Ciolino said that amount the judge decides on will be a key factor in Cain's sentence. Ciolino noted the guidelines will add time because Cain stole from the public, but Cain's decision to take a plea will weigh in his favor. He declined to estimate how much time Cain will serve in the end. "He will get the benefit of a reduction because hes pleading guilty and accepting responsibility," Ciolino said. "He would have gotten more (of a reduction) had he done it well in advance of trial." Cain's sentencing was set for June 17, and he will remain free on bail until that date. Bandy's sentencing is set for April 12. Can't see video below? Click here. Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Cain pleaded guilty after three days of testimony. The jury heard damaging accounts from several former employees who said Cain and Bandy completely changed the culture of spending at the prison, frequently violating Department of Corrections rules to buy personal items with state credit cards. They said he made them feel their jobs were at risk if they did not go along with the scheme. Before Cain's plea, the jury heard testimony from Mark Monroe, who worked in the prisons business office. Monroe said he first became concerned by Cains leadership when Cain berated him for talking to friends about his work at the prison, including how he makes purchases. Monroe said Cain told him that loose lips sink ships, while poking him repeatedly in his chest in a threatening way. He also testified that when prison officials realized they were under investigation, Cain called Monroe into his office and told him to change the name on the DirecTV account at the wardens house from Cain's name to the Avoyelles Correctional Center because the state had been paying for it. Another former employee, Thomas Heptinstall, then a lieutenant colonel under Cain, said he found out through the investigation that a wedding present Cain had given him a $80 pressure cooker had been bought with state funds. He said he returned it to the state when he learned of its origin. Cain is the eldest son of storied Louisiana jailer Burl Cain, who himself was forced to step down from his longtime perch as warden of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in late 2015 amid revelations that he had significant business dealings with the stepfather of an inmate under his supervision. The younger Cain resigned months later, amid investigations into his questionable purchases and other alleged misconduct at his prison, citing his health. Bandy, then still his wife, resigned at the same time, saying she was going to care for her husband, who she said suffered from a medical condition. The two divorced shortly afterward. Both Cains left during a time of intense scrutiny into nepotism and self-dealing at the Department of Corrections. Though the scrutiny prompted several critical probes and audits, and led to some departures, Nate Cain and several underlings, including Bandy, were the only correctional employees to face criminal charges as a result. Can't see video below? Click here. Gov. John Bel Edwards retained LeBlanc, who had been named corrections secretary by Gov. Bobby Jindal, despite the scandals, saying he has full confidence in him. Joseph acknowledged there have been other instances of misconduct at other state prisons, but in this case investigators and prosecutors were able to get concrete evidence of corruption. "A lot of our prisons in Louisiana are in remote places, so the warden kind of has the run of the mill," Joseph said. "Weve seen, I think, that in several cases in Louisiana. In this case we were able to pinpoint expenses that were being charged to taxpayers that were for personal use. Nate Cain said he had not been in contact with his father during, or after, the trial, though Kenny Norris, a relative who figured in the 2015-16 prison scandals, did attend the trial. Norris said Burl Cain was traveling with his prison consulting work. Louisiana Inspector General Stephen Street, whose office led the investigation into Nate Cain along with the FBI, called the manner in which the former warden operated a "staggering sense of entitlement." Justice was done today, Street said. He abused his power as warden and hes now going to be held accountable for that. But justice in two other cases involving Cain and Bandy remain on hold in the Avoyelles Parish District court, as officials there waited for the federal case to play out. Cain was indicted in February 2018 on obstruction of justice, stemming from a 2016 investigation by state corrections officials that found the former warden undermined a probe into a rape allegation at his Cottonport prison. The allegations involved a sexual relationship between an inmate and a corrections officer at the lockup, which is considered rape under federal law, even when both parties consent. A year prior in January 2017, Bandy was charged with theft of $25,000 or more, malfeasance and injuring public records in the state court following a legislative auditors report that found Bandy was to blame for $30,000 of missing state funds, which were supposed to benefit five clubs to help rehabilitate inmates. WASHINGTON (AP) President Donald Trump says the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people. Many nations in the world had already barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 from its airspace, but until now, the Federal Aviation Administration had been saying that it didn't have any data to show the jets are unsafe. Questions and answers about the Boeing 737 Max 8, 9 after US grounds plane models There are still more questions than answers about an Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed shortly after taking off for Nairobi on Sunday, kil Trump said Wednesday that the FAA would be making the announcement soon to ground the planes. He says any plane currently in the air will go to its destination and then be grounded. Trump says pilots and airlines have been notified. He says the safety of the American people is of "paramount concern." GULFPORT The crowd applauded and even cheered when the new tourism slogan and brand for South Mississippi was announced Monday after a year of research and testing. Now its time to stop working on the brand and let it start working for the Coast, said Richard Chenoweth, chairman of the Coastal Mississippi board, formerly Visit MS Gulf Coast. He called the launch such a pivotal moment for the Coast as a tourist destination. Most people at the unveiling said they approved of Coastal Mississippi: The Secret Coast. Some were underwhelmed by the choice of slogan and said Its OK and Well see how it goes. Forty billboards touting the slogan will be will be placed in locations within a five-hour drive, including Louisiana and Alabama, according to the Associated Press. Facebook also had mixed comments. One person said, Scratching my head in confusion.. I dont get it. Whats so secret about us? He said the Coast once was third in the nation for casino revenue. The Seawolves won the Kelly Cup and the Shuckers were featured on ESPN during their epic road trip. Robin Roberts is from the Pass and the commenter said she made sure everyone knew it after Hurricane Katrina. And Jimmy Buffet is from Pascagoula and writes songs about the Coast. Another person said, That land mass between New Orleans and Mobile really is a secret place. Im torn between keeping it our little secret and letting people know so they can enjoy it, too. Search the internet for Coastal Mississippi and it shows the area isnt all that well-known by potential visitors. What is there to do in Biloxi besides gamble? is one of the frequently asked questions, according to Feedback. This might be one of the most underrated stretches of coastline in America, the Matador Network said in a 2017 article in conjunction with Visit MS Gulf Coast. Vogue magazine reported in 2017, The Mississippi Gulf Coast is lesser known as a tourist destination, but its slowly becoming a hotbed for art, music, and style. For the original version of this story from The (Biloxi) Sun Herald, click here. Many Nigerians including the president of the senate, Bukola Saraki have expressed concerns regarding the collapsed 3-storey building, which housed a school. The building collapse occurred on Wednesday at Ita Faaji area on Lagos Island, leaving many pupils, among those trapped within the rubbles. There is currently a rescue exercise at the scene of the collapse to save victims including the young school children. Speaking on Wednesday, the senate president expressed his concerns about the trapped school children and sending his hear felt prayers to families of the victims. His words: My heartfelt prayers are with all the families affected by todays building collapse in the Ita-Faaji area of Lagos Island, particularly the young school children who are reportedly trapped inside. I pray for their safe rescue. A 2-year-old boy died after being found unconscious in a pond in New Orleans East on Sunday afternoon, according to officials. Roman Trufants cause and manner of death remained under investigation Tuesday, said the New Orleans Police Department and the Orleans Parish Coroners Office. But, at this early stage of the case, there is no reason to suspect foul play, NOPD spokesman Gary Scheets said. Paramedics were dispatched to a pond at an apartment complex near Lake Kenilworth Drive after the boy later identified as Trufant was discovered unresponsive in the water about 4 p.m. Sunday, said Lt. Jonathan Fourcade of New Orleans Emergency Medical Services. Police who arrived at the scene first brought Trufant to New Orleans East Hospital for treatment, Fourcade said. Scheets said the boy was pronounced dead after arriving at the hospital. Coroners Office spokesman Jason Melancon released Trufants identity. In other matters recently handled by local authorities: A 14-year-old boy was shot on the right side of his face after at least two people approached him in the 2700 block of Almonaster Avenue on the edge of St. Roch about 11:30 p.m. Monday, New Orleans police said. The victim took his own ride to the hospital while the attackers fled, police said. A man was stabbed in the stomach after refusing to hand over his belongings to a man mugging him in the 800 block of St. Louis Street in the French Quarter about 1:20 a.m. Tuesday, New Orleans police said. The stabber approached a 36-year-old man and a 51-year-old man and demanded the belongings of one of them, according to police. Without specifying which victim, one rebuffed the demand and was stabbed in the lower abdomen, police said. The wounded victims condition wasnt specified, and the attacker fled. Aside from the stabbing, four robberies were reported between Monday and early Tuesday, New Orleans police said. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up About 4:55 p.m. at the corner of Chef Menteur Highway and Dodt Avenue in New Orleans East, a 64-year-old man was punched in the face, knocked to the ground and robbed after a man and woman who had summoned him there, police said. About 8:45 .m. at the corner of Felicity and South Liberty streets in Central City, a 48-year-old man was robbed of money after being approached by four other men and punched, police said. Two 22-year-old men then surrendered unspecified items to a man who approached them and demanded their belongings in the 1000 block of Elysian Fields Avenue in the Marigny about 10 p.m. Then, about 2:40 a.m. in the 13600 block of North Lemans Street in New Orleans East, a 57-year-old man retrieving his mail was robbed at gunpoint of his black 2007 Chevy Corvette as well as money by two men who approached him, according to police. The cars Louisiana license plate reads 474AZX., police said. Five women are wanted in connection with an incident during which a person was sprayed with pepper spray and cut in the face with a box cutter about noon Saturday at a gasoline station in the 5800 block of Chef Menteur Highway in New Orleans East, police said Tuesday. The women allegedly followed the victim in a black Audi SUV with a Louisiana license plate reading 527CYB. Police identified the suspects in the case as Sharlinda Hayes, 23; Shadasha Hayes, 21; Robertnisha Hayes, 18; Shalinda Hayes, 42; and Rajohna Moore, 22. All are wanted on a count of simple battery, except for Shadashar Hayes, who is accused of aggravated battery. Anyone with information can call Crimestoppers at (504) 822-1111. Tipsters may be eligible for a cash reward. Ian Petty, 34, is accused of breaking into his ex-girlfriend's home in the 2800 block of South Liberty Street in Central City, tossing her onto a bed and fighting with her before fleeing on March 1, New Orleans police said. It was only the latest in a series of domestic abuse battery incidents, both documented and undocumented, involving Petty and the victim, who broke up roughly two years ago, police said. About 4:15 p.m. Monday in the 6400 block of Derbyshire Drive in the Seabrook neighborhood, an underage girl reported being raped by a male she knew, New Orleans police said. New Orleans police on Tuesday released a surveillance camera image of an unidentified woman accused of throwing a metal drink shaker into a person's face in the 800 block of Bourbon Street in the French Quarter about 11:30 p.m. Saturday. The attack happened after the suspect was upset about the small amount of liquor she had been poured, and the victim had two cuts to the left eye, police said. Anyone with information can call Crimestoppers. Dexus Property has cemented its standing as the biggest office landlord in the country after buying a half share of the MLC Centre skyscraper in the heart of Sydney. Dexus already owns 50 per cent of the tower and had first right of refusal over the remaining stake, which was sold by the GPT Group. The acquisition will be done jointly by Dexus and its unlisted Dexus Wholesale Property Fund, with each taking a 25 per cent interest. MLC Centre, Sydney is now owned 100 per cent by Dexus Property. Dexus bought its initial 50 per cent stake in July 2017 and with GPT has undertaken significant upgrades within the tower and the retail precinct underneath. A New Mexico non-profit that's assembled gift bags for the Oscars and Grammys is facing a class action lawsuit brought by disabled employees who say it pays as little as 25 cents an hour. The suit is the latest to challenge a little known, but often legal practice in the US of segregating disabled workers and paying them less than the federal minimum wage. Sam Rockwell (best supporting actor for his role in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri") and Viola Davis at last year's Oscars ceremony. The Hollywood glamour didn't reach disabled workers behind the scenes. Credit:AP In it, current and former employees accuse the Adelante Development Center of underpaying its developmentally disabled employees in violation of Albuquerque and New Mexico wage laws. "Plaintiffs and their coworkers perform rote, repetitive tasks in a setting where they are isolated and entirely segregated from the broader community," alleges the complaint filed by the advocacy group Disability Rights New Mexico and the legal non-profits Towards Justice and Public Justice. Energy minister Angus Taylor said small businesses struggling with energy costs need to look to innovative contracts. "Entering into innovative contracts is increasingly important and the challenge is seeing risks managed," he said as he toured Melbourne manufacturer ANCA on Tuesday. "That is why we are firming renewables which is what we are doing with Snowy Hydro and the Battery of the Nation [in Tasmania]. The risks have got to be managed." Energy Minister Angus Taylor. Credit:Simon Schluter ANCA switched last year to renewable power after receiving a quote for a 200 per cent increase in its power bill. Students at an eastern suburbs primary school were given free popcorn if their parents paid their fees early, in a move the P&C Federation has slammed as "public shaming of children". The popcorn was handed out with canteen lunch orders on Monday to children at Bondi Public School whose parents had paid the fees, which range from $436 for years 1 to 6 up to $460 for kindergarten, by February 25. Some students missed out because their parents had not paid, leaving at least one child in tears. In one class, only three students did not receive popcorn. In another, six missed out. Parents were reluctant to comment on the record to protect their children. Bondi Public School principal Michael Jones said the "popcorn initiative" had been a great success. Credit:Danielle Smith In a letter from the principal Michael Jones that accompanied the invoice, parents were told that the fees were mandatory, except for a voluntary component of $46. A broken-down truck on the Monash has topped off a terrible morning for city-bound motorists from Melbourne's south-east. The truck, which has inconveniently come to a halt just before the Punt Road exit, has blocked two left lanes and traffic is now heavy right back to the South Gippsland Highway. A VicRoads spokesman said there had been no other major incidents, it had just been a slow build-up of traffic throughout the morning. Eastlink is now clear after an earlier collision involving a car and a truck near the Monash, and the traffic jams are slowly clearing. And there were two collisions on the Westgate, one near the Todd Road exit and the other near Power Street. Both are now clear. Make sure to visit the Capital Region Farmers Market on Saturday to help celebrate its 15th birthday. Head out to the Capital Region Farmers' Market for birthday celebrations. There will be a chance to win one of 20 bags of fresh market produce and there will be a big birthday cake on site. Many of the organisations which have benefited from the markets will also have stalls on Saturday. The first Capital Region Farmers Market was held in March 2004, with just 15 stalls and around 850 customers. It now has 100 stalls and about 6000 customers a week. A 56-year-old Tuggeranong man has died after an Irwin and Hartshorn truck he was driving rolled on the Federal Highway on Wednesday morning. The semitrailer, which was carrying a generator, was travelling in the northbound lane at about 5.22am, near Thornford Road in Yarra, when it left the road and crashed. A truck driver has died after crashing on the Federal Highway on Thursday morning. Credit:Louise Thrower The vehicle careered up a slight embankment beside the highway and travelled for about 100 metres before landing on its driver side in a paddock, police said. Chief Inspector John Sheehan said the man, who lived in Richardson, died at the scene. He was not treated by paramedics. Nigerian bestselling author and former presidential aide, Reno Omokri has said that Christians must do every thing in their power to avoid divorce, even if their partners physically and/or emotionally abuse them. The writer, who is very popular and vocal on Twitter said this, this afternoon while defending his stance against divorce. Omokri notes that God hates divorce and as such, married people can not divorce on any other ground except their partner commits adultery. He states further that emotional and physical abuse are only grounds for separation and not divorce. See part of what he shared on the online platform A celebrity called me yesterday and was not too happy I said adultery is the ONLY ground for divorce. I stand by those words. Sometimes, even me, I struggle with the Word of God. Yet, I still ACCEPT it, because Gods Word is superior to my opinion. Again I repeat, IF and only IF you are a Christian, PHYSICAL and EMOTIONAL abuse are not grounds for divorce. They are grounds for separation. The ONLY ground for divorce for a believer is ADULTERY. There is no wriggle room. But even if your wife or husband commits adultery, you DONT have to divorce them. God HATES divorce. If you can forgive them, forgive them. After all, God has forgiven you of so much. But if you choose to divorce after adultery, it is not a sin. Even If your wife is a WITCH you cant divorce her. If your husband is a RITUALIST, you cant divorce. Only ADULTERY is ground for divorce. But if they ABANDON you because of your faith, then by virtue of 1 Corinthians 7:15 you are free to remarry. A group of Queensland dairy farmers will travel to Brisbane to protest Coles' ongoing refusal to stop selling a dollar-per-litre milk. More than a dozen farmers from the Darling Downs, Sunshine Coast and Gympie region, and the Scenic Rim, will hold a rally on Wednesday at the Coorparoo Coles to demand it support farmers by increasing the price of milk. Coles says it will not be raising the price of its $1-a-litre milk. Credit:AAP In February Woolworths bumped up the cost of its own-brand milk by 10 cents a litre, with the money to go to drought-affected farmers. However Coles refused to follow suit over concerns it would impact customers struggling with the cost of living. Despite many finding relief from soaring temperatures in airconditioned offices, a study has challenged the accepted wisdom that a cool office is more productive. Setting the office aircon at about 22 degrees has become standard practice across Australia and indeed the world. However research from Griffith Universitys School of Engineering and Built Environment has found the reality is more complex - and warmer. It's either too hot or too cold - office temperature is a source of workplace complaints. Credit:Shutterstock Griffith University architectural science lecturer Fan Zhang said, after conducting an extensive review of all studies relating to airconditioning and productivity, they found 22 degrees was probably a little chilly, even at the height of summer. A Melbourne man who murdered his 73-year-old landlord in a "spontaneous and intense" attack, leaving his victim with 38 rib fractures, has been jailed for 18 years. Alexander Astbury, 44, and his partner had been living in a bungalow at Coburg, next door to his landlord Rafet Demirel. But in February 2017, Astbury and his partner began arguing and Mr Demirel asked them to calm down. About 2pm on February 11, Mr Demirel invited Astbury into his bungalow to speak to him, but what happened next remains unclear. "For whatever reason, you assaulted Mr Demirel," Supreme Court Justice Rita Zammit said, while sentencing him on Wednesday. Mason Friedl, a carpenter, was camping in the forest over the Labour Day long weekend when two new tyres on the driver's side of his vehicle were punctured. Police are investigating after the steel spikes, more than 10 centimetres long, were found concealed under leaves and bark on the Breakoday Track in the Toolangi State Forest. A number of steel spikes have been discovered hidden on tracks in bushland north-east of Melbourne, angering locals and emergency services who labelled the behaviour "reckless and dangerous". When he got out of the car to have a look, he found two thick metal spikes which had been hidden under leaves along a 20-metre stretch of the road. Mr Friedl later found two other spikes a short distance away. "It was the second day into the trip when we ran over the spikes and that cut it pretty short," he said. Mason Friedl was driving along tracks in Toolangi on the long weekend when two of his tyres were punctured by steel spikes. Credit:Mason Friedl "I found the first two, I got out and thought it must have been a stick but then I saw one in the ground and saw another right behind me and thought 'what's going on here?' "My main concern about the whole thing is it's dangerous for everyone out there. If there's a bushfire going there, and a truck is grounded for something like this, it won't make it out. " For more than two and a half years, everyone thought it was him. He denied it. But he was lying. Just one day before the most anticipated murder trial of the year was to begin, Borce Ristevski has sensationally pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of his wife Karen. The killer's admission, so late that a jury was being empaneled, finally provides an answer to the mystery that has gripped Melbourne since Karen vanished in June 2016. Until Wednesday in the Supreme Court, Borce had staunchly maintained, in the face of intense scrutiny, that he had nothing to do with Karens death. The couple's only daughter Sarah, who gave favourable evidence for her father at an earlier court hearing, now has to cope with the reality that it was him all along. EDITOR'S NOTE: The High Court overturned Cardinal George Pell's conviction for historic child sex offences in a judgment handed down April 7, 2020. In a unanimous decision all seven High Court judges found Victoria's Court of Appeal should not have upheld Pell's conviction. It found the evidence could not support a guilty verdict. The sentencing of Cardinal George Pell to six years in prison, with a minimum of three years and eight months, for the sexual assault of two choir boys in 1996 may seem to some like a light sentence, considering the horror that such crimes provoke, but the broadcast of the judges remarks demonstrates the sober and thoughtful reasoning behind the term handed down. An artist's sketch of George Pell at the County Court on Wednesday. Credit:AAP The sentence could not take into account the weight of history of Pells conviction. The cardinal is, after all, a prince of the Catholic Church, its most senior figure convicted of sexually abusing children, a man who dominated the church in Australia for two decades before being called to Rome. Many peoples faith in the church has been traumatically shaken by news of such an abuse of power and trust. The presentation to the court by the sentencing judge, County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidd, was broadcast live for well over an hour. It contained graphic and harrowing details, and stressed the tragic impact on Pells victims and the arrogance and sense of entitlement that the cardinal showed. Given the scepticism of many who cannot bring themselves to believe Pell has been convicted of such horrors, providing the public with direct access to the reasoning was a fine thing to do. This should be done more often. EDITOR'S NOTE: The High Court overturned Cardinal George Pell's conviction for historic child sex offences in a judgment handed down April 7, 2020. In a unanimous decision all seven High Court judges found Victoria's Court of Appeal should not have upheld Pell's conviction. It found the evidence could not support a guilty verdict. Cardinal George Pell sat unmoving and unknowable as the words of his earthly judge crashed around the otherwise silent court, words declaring him a publicly vilified figure, words reciting in ghastly detail his crimes against two choirboys in St Patricks Cathedral more than 22 years ago and eventually, the judge having listed with agonising precision his reasoning, words consigning him to years of imprisonment. Pell wore no clerical collar. His black shirt hung open at the throat, though the fawn jacket, familiar now to everyone who has charted his path to ruination, had made the journey with him from his cell. He was not a cardinal here. He was the prisoner. Five uniformed officers sat around him. They, like the prisoner, offered no hint of their thoughts. Pell even maintained his heavy composure as a clerk brought to him papers to sign: papers that mean he will be registered as a sex offender for the remainder of his life. Construction union boss John Setka has been charged with more than 20 additional offences of breaching a court order. Mr Setka, the Victorian state secretary of the CFMMEU, was already facing charges of recklessly causing injury and using a carriage service to harass a woman. Union boss John Setka outside Melbourne Magistrates Court last month. Credit:Joe Armao He is alleged to have injured the woman on July 30, 2017, while the other charge relates to October 29 last year. Senior police prosecutor Paul Brookes told the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Wednesday that an additional 27 charges of breaching a court order have been laid after more allegations were made by the same complainant. You cant change geography Perth is the worlds most isolated capital city and there is no problem having that tag associated with it unless youre the tourism minister. Last week Paul Papalia said that tag was outdated, encouraging all West Australians to talk up and brag about where they live. It's not Perth's isolation, but its price tag that may hinder tourists from coming. Credit:Illustrations Photography I reckon we already do that. West Aussies are WA first, parochial and very proud of their home. SYDENHAM, ON (March 12, 2019)- Some people get together with friends for a softball game after work or on the weekends, while others enjoy swearing a little white ball for an afternoon of golf. From his first ever laps, back around the 2005 season, Andy Lloyd has found strapping in behind the wheel of his DIRTcar Small Block Modified the perfect way to relax. The 45-year-old from Sydenham, Ontario who works as a driver/labourer with the City of Kingston is a throwback to a time when weekly racing was less about the pressure of getting to the front of the pack and more about the pure love of the sport. Lloyd who has only good friend and former driver Lawrence Austin as his raceday pit crew is grateful for the help and support of fellow racers; including Danny OBrien and his crew who scale the car, along with Randy and Bobby Herrington who pitch-in with assistance and advice behind the scenes. He says the Mike Blok/Engine Research powered Bicknell Racing Products machine he brings to the weekly wars at Brockville Ontario Speedway is a definite low budget operation that gets more from less year-after-year. Its all about the people and Ive made some great friends over my years in the sport, said the driver, whose car carries #31x in tribute to the memory of his mother, who was killed in an automobile accident in 1986. I dont have a garage, so I have to wait for the nice weather to work on my car. Or take it to a friends shop where we can get things ready for the weekly action. Its a bit of a struggle, but nothing we cant overcome. Andy Lloyd who scored the only feature event win of his more than 15 year career on August 3rd, 2013 is a long-time supporter of the annual Kingston Area Racing Preview Show and is looking forward to this years edition, which takes place March 29th and 30th at Frontenac Mall. Hell show-off his ride for the upcoming season at Brockville Ontario Speedway, with returning sponsors Wylie Electric, Mega Bus Cincinnati, Len Corcoran Excavating, Collins Trucking/Clarks Water and Wilson Stables. The team is also proud to welcome new partners 401 Limousine, Catch All Bait & Tackle and DPH Service Station Maintenance to the fold for the upcoming schedule. Potential sponsorship inquiries can be sent to Andy Lloyd, 31Crazy@hotmail.ca. Like all of the other drivers at the track, I enjoy the chance to talk to the fans and answer their questions about the car, Andy Lloyd said. We all have to do our part to help introduce some new people to the sport and this a good way to begin that process and maybe meet some new sponsors along the way. Brockville Speedways 2019 50th anniversary season gets underway Saturday, May 11th. Full schedule details can be found anytime, by visiting www.brockvillespeedway.com or check the tracks Facebook and Twitter social media platforms. Prepared by: Jim Clarke, Clarke Motorsports Communications/First Draft Media clarkemotorsports@hotmail.com, www.facebook.com/clarkemotorsports 613.968.6410 It was nearly a masterly performance. On his first day in the job, Ambassador Arthur B. Culvahouse Jnr did a magnificent impersonation of one of those great but solid batsmen who can block for days - but who then tripped over his own stumps. Ambassador Culvahouse arriving back at the embassy after presenting his credentials to the Governor-General. Credit:Karleen Minney The press pack tried googlies. He blocked them. Then they brought on spin. He blocked that, too. It was magnificent. But then the mis-hit. As he told of his pleasure at being in Canberra, he referred to Burley Campbell. He might have meant Burley Griffin, the American architect who designed the Australian capital and whose name lives on in the lake at its heart. It was a slip by a newbie still feeling his way. Dakar, Senegal: Eight people been confirmed dead and 37 rescued alive from the wreckage of a three-storey building housing a nursery and primary school that collapsed in Lagos, Nigeria. A woman cries as the body of a child is recovered from the rubble of a collapsed building in Lagos, Nigeria. Credit:AP Ibrahim Farinloye, a National Emergency Management Agency spokesman, confirmed the toll, as emergency crews continued to sift through debris overnight. Hundreds of people were gathered at the site, on Lagos Island, wailing as motionless children were removed from the rubble and spirited by ambulance to a nearby hospital. Lagos, one of the world's largest cities, with an estimated population of 23.4 million, has suffered a number of building collapses. Citizens have long raised concerns about shoddy construction and the need for better building inspections. Washington: The Democratic-controlled House passed a series of bills on Tuesday pushing back on the Russian government, demanding accountability for corruption, human rights abuses and aggression. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Representative Eliot Engel. Credit:AP The legislation demands accountability for the slaying of a Russian opposition leader, prohibits recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, calls for investigations of Russian President Vladimir Putin's finances and requests assessments of Russian influence campaigns. All four bills passed with overwhelming Republican support. Countering Russian aggression has quickly become a foreign policy priority for the newly Democratic-controlled House. Critics of President Donald Trump say his administration is not doing enough to counter Russian aggression and say Congress is obligated to step in. Rio de Janeiro: Two former police officers have been arrested in connection with the murder of outspoken Rio city councillor Marielle Franco and her driver, Rio de Janeiro prosecutors said, claiming a breakthrough in a crime that drew international condemnation and sent shock waves through Brazil, a country numbed by rising violence. Slain: Rio de Janeiro Councilwoman Marielle Franco in January 2018. Credit:AP The arrests came just days before the first anniversary of the deaths of Franco, a black, openly gay and progressive councillor, born in a poor Rio neighbourhood and considered a hero by many, and the driver, Anderson Gomes. Loading Franco was a vocal critic of Rio police for their often-deadly gang-busting operations in the city's slums, and took stands against paramilitary militias, made up of current and former police, who are de-facto bosses across wide swaths of the city. Volkswagen Brand To Cut 7000 Jobs To Save Money SEE ALSO: Electric Vehicles - Solution or Diversion? WOLFSBURG, Germany March 13, 2019; Edward Taylor writing for Reuters reported that Volkswagen will cut up to 7,000 positions, aim to boost productivity and deliver 5.9 billion euros ($6.7 billion)of annual savings at its core VW brand by 2023, in its latest attempt to raise profitability at its top-selling division. The plan, announced on Wednesday, comes a day after the German automaker warned it would cut jobs as it speeds up the rollout of electric cars, which are less complex to build and require fewer workers. Volkswagen has struggled to raise profitability at the VW brand for years. Last year, the brands operating margin fell to 3.8 percent, lagging peers such as Peugeot which delivered a margin of 8.4 percent. Complete Article Photo: W. Steve Shepard Jr./Getty Images When I heard that Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, among about 40 others, had allegedly bribed colleges to admit their children, I wasnt surprised. Working in college admissions for five years taught me that only one factor really matters: Will you be able to pay the full cost of tuition? Basically: Are you rich? I worked at two different schools as an admissions counselor. The first, a small, private liberal arts college with a student body under 5,000. It was a tuition-driven institution, so our (relatively) small endowment meant we relied heavily on the financial security that students would pay their tuition. One of the most appealing things about applying to this school was that we were test optional, meaning you were not required to submit your ACT or SAT scores in order to be admitted. Our office had less than ten admissions counselors assigned to read applications. I read about 350 of these applications a year, and the acceptance rate was around 60 percent. The other school was a large public D-1 research institution with an undergraduate population of around 25,000. It was a state school, so, feasibly, a majority of the admitted students needed to be residents of that state. Our office had around 40 admission counselors. I read about 1,500 of these applications a year, and the overall acceptance rate was around 50 percent, even though the in-state acceptance rate was probably closer to 75 percent, and out of state 25 percent. Most colleges and universities tout a holistic application-review process, including both that I worked at. This means we looked at every piece of information that was submitted in order to make a decision, as opposed to looking solely at GPA and test scores. When youre first trained to read applications holistically, youre given a lot of information about the kind of student who would be a great fit on campus. Fit was the combination of the rigor of their academic schedule (were they taking honors/AP/IB classes?), plus their academic performance (were they maintaining good, A/B grades?), plus their extracurricular involvement (were they balancing multiple priorities?), plus their expressed interests in their essays (do they think theyre a good fit for this campus? What sets this school apart?). At first, it seemed exciting to comb through a list of applications and hand-select those who I believed would be a great fit and find success on campus. But the longer I read applications, the more holes I saw in the so-called holistic process, and the more I discovered how much it came down to money. Not infrequently, I would pull up a students file, see my Defer or Deny recommendation, and then a second reviewer recommending the same thing, and then a high-ranking admissions staff member would flip the decision to admit. Usually, the justification would be a brief couple of sentences with purposefully vague language, like Student has struggled with math sequence but should be fine with on campus tutoring resources, ADMIT. I saw these decisions flipped frequently for students from affluent backgrounds, and rarely for students whod applied for financial aid. Once, I saw a student who fell far below our clearly outlined admissions requirements admitted this student was heir to a popular processed-meat companys fortune. Although our school advertised our holistic review process, our director typically used test scores to screen applicants. His rationale was that these were riskier students. The only time he didnt? If the student could pay full price to attend our institution, or a full pay student. He was not coy about this fact, and would frequently make comments about how students from Silicon Valley could afford to come here. When I planned my recruitment trip in California, I was given an Excel spreadsheet that listed high schools by average household income. There were a variety of ways of gleaning if a student was full pay from an application. Firstly, on the Common Application, there is a place where students can indicate if they intend to apply for financial aid or not. My directors instinct was always to see what we could do to admit the students who checked that they were not intending to file for aid, regardless of the students academic achievement. I had one student from Northern California who was, by all metrics, an outright deny. I remember vividly that he had several Cs and Ds on his transcript, plus a test score well below our average range, and an essay that consisted of two sentences (really, just two). He visited campus twice, once before applying, and later once he was admitted. He paid full tuition with no aid for four years. Stay in touch. Get the Cut newsletter delivered daily Email This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Terms & Privacy Notice By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us. A gate of what is officially known as a vocational skills education center under construction in Dabancheng, in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China on Sept. 4, 2018. (Thomas Peter/Reuters) 1.5 Million Muslims Could be Detained in Chinas Xinjiang: Academic GENEVAA leading researcher on Chinas ethnic policies said on March 13 that an estimated 1.5 million Uyghurs and other Muslims could be held in so-called re-education centers in Xinjiang region, up from his earlier figure of 1 million. China has faced growing international opprobrium for what it says are vocational training centers in Xinjiang, a vast region bordering central Asia that is home to millions of ethnic minority Muslims. Beijing has said the measures are needed to stem the threat of Islamist extremism. Adrian Zenz, an independent German researcher, said that his new estimate was based on satellite images, public spending on detention facilities and witness accounts of overcrowded facilities and missing family members. Although it is speculative it seems appropriate to estimate that up to 1.5 million ethnic minoritiesequivalent to just under 1 in 6 adult members of a predominantly Muslim minority group in Xinjiangare or have been interned in any of these detention, internment and re-education facilities, excluding formal prisons, Zenz said at an event organized by the U.S. mission in Geneva, home of United Nations human rights bodies. The Chinese states present attempt to eradicate independent and free expressions of the distinct ethnic and religious identities in Xinjiang is nothing less than a systematic campaign of cultural genocide and should be treated as such, Zenz added. The U.S. State Department on Wednesday sharply criticized human rights violations in China, saying the sort of abuses it had inflicted on its Muslim minorities had not been seen since the 1930s. Omir Bekali, a Kazakh Uyghur, told a panel at the event that he had been tortured by Xinjiang police and held in a camp for six months in a small room with 40 people. We had to applaud the Communist Party, sing songs about (Chinese leader) Xi Jinping and say thanks for the government. We had no right to talk, he said. A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers complained to the Trump administration this week that its response to rights abuses against Chinas Muslim minority was inadequate, months after it said it was looking into imposing sanctions. At the Geneva event, U.S. ambassador Kelley Currie, of the State Departments office of global criminal justice, was asked about imposing such sanctions on China. We are always looking at all of the mechanisms and the tools that we have available to us to identify those who are responsible for serious and gross human rights abuses and to ensure that they dont benefit from opportunities to travel to the United States and that we dont give them access to the U.S. financial system, she told reporters, declining to be specific. By Stephanie Nebehay 1,500-Year-Old Mummy Found in Mongolia With Unusual-Looking Shoes Archaeologists say they have found an ancient mummy in Mongolia from 1,500 years ago in the Altai Mountains. The remains, which were wrapped in felt, are being called the first Turkik burial found in Central Asia, reported the Siberian Times. B. Sukhbaatar, a researcher at Khovd Museum, told the paper: This person was not from elite, and we believe it was likely a woman, because there is no bow in the tomb. Mummy was wearing over-the-knee fashion boot, not Adidas boots GoGo Mongolia 2017416 Now we are carefully unwrapping the body and once this is complete the specialists will be able to say more precisely about the gender, Sukhbaatar added. However, some media outlets and people on social media claimed the shoes looked modern. More specifically, they looked like Adidas shoes, as one put it. The mummy had on some Adidas in the first pic, wrote one person on LiveLeak before a number of tabloid sites picked it up. Near the remains were a bridle, a clay vase, a bowl, an iron kettle, the remains of an entire horse, different types of Mongolian clothes, and a saddle. There were also pillows, a sheeps head, and a travel bag. Two mummies and their belongings are being shown at the National History Museum starting today GoGo Mongolia 201753 We can see clearly that the horse was deliberately sacrificed. It was a mare, between four and eight years old. Four coats we found were made of cotton, Sukhbaatar said. He added: This is a very rare phenomenon. These finds show us the beliefs and rituals of Turkiks. Based on the items found in the cave, researchers dated the mummy back to the 6th century AD. New Egyptian Burial Site In February 2019, about 50 mummies were found in Minya, south of Cairo, Reuters reported Those mummies, according to researchers, dated back to the Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt. The mummies, 12 of which were of children, were discovered inside four, 40-foot burial chambers in the Tuna El-Gebel site. The identities of the mummies are not yet known, stated Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Mostafa Waziri. The archaeological finding was the first of 2019 and was unearthed through a joint mission with the Research Centre for Archaeological Studies of Minya University. We have not found names written in hieroglyphics, one official told Reuters about the February finding. Visitors, including ambassadors from a few countries, gathered at the site where 40 of the mummies were exhibited in an announcement ceremony, according to the news outlet. Other details are not clear. 3-story Building Collapses in Nigeria With Children Inside LAGOS, NigeriaFrantic rescue efforts were underway in Nigeria on Wednesday, March 13, after a 3-story school building collapsed while classes were in session, with scores of children thought to be inside. Witnesses said nearly a dozen students had been pulled from the ruins, but it was not yet clear if any were dead. Associated Press video from the scene showed a few dust-covered children carried from the rubble, to cheers. But the crowd quieted as other children were pulled out and slung over rescuers shoulders, limp and dangling. Onlookers crowded around in the densely populated neighborhood in Lagos, Nigerias commercial capital and a city of some 20 million people. It was not known how many students had been in a primary school located on the buildings top floor. Some witnesses estimated as many as 100 children. It is not immediately clear what caused the structure to collapse. Hundreds of people stood in narrow streets and on rooftops of rusted, corrugated metal. A single yellow excavator scooped at the ruins, a nest of rebar and dust. Later it began nosing at large concrete slabs. Emotional, a number of shirtless men jumped in to offer assistance, hacksaws, and mallets in hand. Some were barefoot. One held a water bottle in his teeth. Sani Datti, a spokesman with Nigerias National Emergency Management Agency, told The Associated Press that officials from the agency and other emergency services were at the site. For now we dont have any word on casualties as we are still busy with rescue work, he said. Building collapses are all too common in Nigeria, where new construction often goes up without regulatory oversight. The collapse comes as President Muhammadu Buhari, newly elected to a second term, tries to improve groaning, inefficient infrastructure in Africas most populous nation. Nigerias infrastructure is generally less than half the size than in the average sub-Saharan Africa country and only a fraction of that in emerging market economies, the International Monetary Fund has noted. The perceived quality of the infrastructure is low. There was no immediate comment from Buharis office. Instead, as the rescue work continued, the presidents personal assistant posted on Twitter a photo of a gleaming new terminal at the airport in the capital, Abuja. By Sam Olukoya Cardinal George Pell leaves the Melbourne Magistrates' Court on Mar. 5, 2018 in Melbourne, Australia. (Michael Dodge/Getty Images) Cardinal George Pell Sentencing Broadcast Live Around the World Cardinal George Pell will be sentenced for child sexual abuse offences in a hearing broadcast live from a Victorian court. The worlds most senior Catholic to be found guilty of such crimes is due to be sentenced in the County Court by Chief Judge Peter Kidd on Wednesday. The court has confirmed the ABC will broadcast footage and audio of the sentencing live, but only Judge Kidd will be visible. LIVE: Cardinal George Pell sentenced LIVE: Watch County Court Judge Peter Kidd as he sentences George Pell for sexually abusing two choirboys when he was Catholic archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s. ABC News 2019312 The County Court is committed to the principles of open justice. Chief Judge Peter Kidds sentencing remarks in this matter will be broadcast live, a court spokesman said in a statement on Monday. Pell was found guilty in December of five offences against two choirboys at St Patricks Cathedral in East Melbourne in 1996. He denies any wrongdoing and the Court of Appeal will consider a challenge in June. An ambulance lies on its side after colliding with a black Audi at the corner Custom St West and Lower Albert St in Auckland, New Zealand on Nov. 2, 2010. (Hannah Peters/Getty Images) Ambulance Slammed by Taxi While En Route to Hospital, Flatbed Truck Finishes Journey An ambulance rushing to a hospital was slammed in the side by a taxi, flipping the ambulance over. A passing by flatbed truck then helped to carry the patient to the hospital, with the doctor and other helpful citizens holding the stretcher onboard. The ambulance was carrying a man suffering a heart attack in Henan, China, on Feb. 23, according to the Beijing Youth News. The patient has successfully recovered. In an act of modesty, the driver of the truck left the hospital after delivering the patient without letting anyone know. The Backup Ambulance A nurse named Yuan Lingling told the Beijing Youth News that she was riding in the ambulance with the patient. Yuan said that after the ambulance got off the highway, it passed through the intersection where the accident happened. In a video published on Weibo, Chinas version of Twitter, on March 12, the ambulance enters an intersectionthe footage was likely caught by a traffic camera. A taxi crossing into the intersection slams on its brakes, but is too late to prevent the collision. The ambulance flips over onto its left side. In a flash, the ambulance was hit and flipped over, everyone inside was tossed around, Yuan told the Beijing Youth News. After the ambulance was knocked over, Yuan said people came from outside to open the back doors. Yuan said that just as they were gathering themselves together and trying to figure out how to send the patient to the hospital, a flatbed truck pulled up to them. The video includes a telephone interview with a man claimed to be the doctor who was riding in the ambulance. The doctor, named Yang Changbao, said that a flatbed truck that was passing through the intersection stopped next to them. [He] told to get on the back of the truck, Yang said. Other kindhearted people jumped on the truck to help. Others helped move the stretcher onto the back of the truck. According to Yuan, the whole process from the accident to transferring the patient took less than two minutes. Some who helped to load the stretcher also held it down as they all drove to the hospital. When they arrived, Yuan says she was with the patient until midnight. Only then did she and Yang start noticing the injuries they sustained from the crash. The Truck Loaded With Kindness After the patient was taken into the hospital, some of the staff went outside to thank the truck driver for his kindness. However, the driver left without a word. On Feb. 25, the Beijing Youth News made contact with the driver, named Qi Yongyao. Qi said that when he saw the ambulance flip over, he get out of his truck. When he saw the patient, he decided to take action. Hurry and get him onto my truck, weve got to go! Qi had shouted, according to the report. Qi was honking his horn the whole way, and made it through the traffic. I knew I had to hurry up. If we get to the hospital earlier, itll be better for the patient, Qi said. I wasnt thinking of anything else. At the hospital, Qi helped take the patient off the back of the truck. Without waiting too long, he got back into his truck and left. He didnt tell anyone at the scene, and didnt even mention it to his own family. Traditional Modesty Traditional influences from Confucianism has given Chinese people an emphasis on modesty. Qis actions in helping to save the patient and not wanting recognition is an example of Chinese modesty. Modesty also takes the form of not showing off ones accomplishments or abilities. If a Chinese individual receives praise, often they will brush it off. This is another way such traditional modesty manifests in the East. Appeal Court Hears Saskatchewans Case for Funding Non-Catholic Students REGINAA lawyer for the Saskatchewan government has told the provinces top court that the government interprets religious neutrality as providing funding for schools without requiring a religious test. Tom Irvine presented the provinces case Tuesday in its appeal of a judges ruling that prohibits funding of non-Catholic students attending separate schools. Irvine told the Appeal Court that separate schools and public schools are both part of Saskatchewans education system, and separate schools have more constitutional protection than public ones. A judge ruled in 2017 that provincial funding for non-minority faith students attending separate schools infringed on equality rights and religious neutrality. Justice Donald Layh said the key issue was a policy of funding separate schools based solely on student enrolment without regard to students religion. Irvine said that ruling means the government is required to ask families and students attending separate schools what their religion is and to consider religion when it comes to distributing funds. That is not religious neutrality, he said. Because school attendance is closely tied to access to funding, the ruling would result in religious segregation, Irvine argued. This conception of religion neutrality would require the government to restrict access to a publicly funded school based solely on religion, he said. The government should not be asking people their religion as a condition of accessing a public service. The Appeal Court is set to hear arguments over two days. The dispute began in 2003 when the Yorkdale School Division, now called the Good Spirit School Division, shuttered its kindergarten-to-Grade 8 school in the town of Theodore because of declining enrolment. The division planned to bus its 42 students to the community of Springside, 17 kilometres away. In response, a local group created its own Catholic school division and opened St. Theodore Roman Catholic School. Good Spirit School Division filed a lawsuit in which it argued that the new school division was not created to serve the communitys Catholics, but rather to prevent students from being bused to a neighbouring town. The 2017 ruling caused concern among parents and with former premier Brad Wall, who at the time warned it could lead to over-populated public schools and possibly empty some Catholic schools. Dwight Newman, who teaches law at the University of Saskatchewan, says he wouldnt be surprised if the case ends up in the Supreme Court. These questions on how to read religious freedom today, alongside other parts of the Constitution, are a challenging legal question. He says the province wants to win in court, so it doesnt need to rely on the notwithstanding clause in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to keep funding students who attend Catholic schools, regardless of their religion. The Saskatchewan Catholic School Boards Association believes the charter is being used to force the government to discriminate based on religion. The Alberta Catholic School Trustees Association and the Ontario Catholic School Trustees Association are interveners in the appeal. Both provinces fund separate Catholic schools. Appeals Court Takes Major Step Toward Unsealing Epstein Documents A federal appeals court is on the verge of unsealing hundreds of documents that could provide new evidence against alleged child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and many of his potential cohorts. On March 11, a three-judge panel at the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York City gave all parties involved in a multi-year attempt to unseal court documents from a 2015 defamation case until March 19 to establish why the documents should remain sealed. Failure to do so will result in more than 1,000 sealed or redacted documents becoming public. The case was brought by one of Epsteins alleged victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, and levied against his former partner, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. According to a lower court ruling, Giuffre alleged that she was a victim of sexual trafficking and abuse while she was a minor child, and that Maxwell helped facilitate the abuse, which allegedly occurred over a decade at numerous locations around the world, and with prominent and politically powerful men. The lawsuit asserted that Giuffre was subjected to public ridicule, contempt, and disgrace when Maxwell publicly denied her allegations. The two settled before trial in 2017. However, Judge Robert Sweet of the District Court for the Southern District of New York said the case involved a lengthy and tumultuous discovery process with extreme sensitivities and privacy interests. As a result, he placed a protective order on the summary judgment and discovery documents spanning 18 hearings and 15 related decisions. The Miami Herald has since spearheaded an attempt to unseal those documents. Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz and conservative filmmaker Michael Cernovich have also filed motions to unseal them, while only Maxwell remains opposed. On March 6, the Herald offered oral arguments before the federal appeals court with the support of 32 other media organizations, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News, and The Associated Press. Judge Sweets previous ruling to keep the documents under wraps was challenged by the media coalition. According to a joint amici brief, the court severely undervalued the powerful public interest in this case and vastly overstated the asserted countervailing interests in favor of secrecy. It further argues that the district court should have done an individualized right of access analysis on each judicial record, rather than authorizing blanket sealing and redaction, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said in a statement. So far, the appeals court is signaling agreement. Following the March 19 ultimatum, Sanford Bohrer, the attorney representing The Miami Herald, was optimistic. Were grateful that the court ruled the summary judgment papers are open and they are moving to expedite having them unsealed, he said. Epstein, a wealthy 66-year-old financier, has been accused of molesting dozens of underage girls at his Palm Beach, Florida, mansion, and 72-acre private island estate in the Caribbean. The alleged abuses involved girls as young as 13 years old and took place over a period of years beginning nearly two decades ago. In 2007, the politically connected former hedge fund manager received a stunning plea deal from federal prosecutorsnow under investigation at the Department of Justice. While facing the possibility of life in prison under human trafficking laws, Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to two state charges of soliciting prostitution and spend only 13 months in the Palm Beach County jail. He was also afforded a work-release program that allowed him to leave the jail for 12 hours a day six days a week and work unsupervised at his downtown West Palm Beach office. A federal judge ruled on Feb. 21 that prosecutors at the Attorneys Office for the Southern District of Florida broke the law when arranging the plea deal, because they failed to notify Epsteins alleged victims during plea negotiations, in violation of the Crime Victims Rights Act. While the government spent untold hours negotiating the terms and implications of the non-prosecution agreement with Epsteins attorneys, scant information was shared with victims. Instead, the victims were told to be patient while the investigation proceeded, the ruling stated. The plea deal has also gained the recent attention of high-ranking government officials. On Feb. 6, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) issued a statement after the Department of Justice announced an internal investigation of the 2007 plea. Jeffrey Epstein is a child rapist and theres not a single mom or dad in America who shouldnt be horrified by the fact that he received a pathetically soft sentence, said Sasse. The victims of Epsteins child sex-trafficking ring deserve this investigationand so do the American people and the members of law enforcement who work to put these kinds of monsters behind bars, he said. Apply a Double Standard and You Have No Standards at All Commentary One of the hallmarks of civilized society is standards. Its a sweeping concept. Standards can apply to engineering, to fire prevention, to the safe handling of chemicals, and to dozens of other aspects of everyday life. In the same vein, standards of behavior apply to the way people conduct themselves in general, and the way our elected representatives conduct themselves in particular. When the House passed a resolution condemning hate speech in general, rather than censuring the open bigotry of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), it willingly and knowingly lowered the standards of behavior that ought to apply to members of Congress. In passing a resolution that said, in effect, everyone should be nice to each other, rather than directly addressing the very thinly veiled bigotry of one of its own members, a majority of the House opted to engage in a pointless exercise, in lieu of issuing a pointed rebuke. It is, of course, their right to do so, just as its Omars right to make offensive remarks. However, the fact that Congress is free to pass frivolous resolutions and every American is free to make bigoted remarks makes this episode no less embarrassing or disheartening. Historical Parallels There are, unfortunately, many parallels in U.S. history, times when one party or the other defended the outrageous behavior of one of its members, so as not to offend a critical voting bloc. One of the more famousor rather infamousexamples occurred in 1856 when Rep. Preston Brooks (D-S.C.) beat Sen. Charles Sumner (R-Mass.) half to death with a walking stick. Sumners crime was daring to speak out against the institution of slavery in a way that offended Brookss sensibilities. To Brookss way of thinking, Sumner engaged in hate speech directed at the South, and no Southern gentlemen could allow such an insult to pass unnoticed. So, he pulled out his cane and beat Sumner senseless. Did Brookss behavior trouble other members of his party? Not especially. In their eyes, to criticize Brooks was to criticize slavery, and that just wouldnt do. The Democratic-controlled House gave Brooks a free passvoting against his expulsionand South Carolina Democrats duly re-elected the thug at their first opportunity. Now, Im not attempting to equate Brookss violent attack to Omars anti-Semitic jibes. Until and unless Omar votes to send arms and ammunition to Hamas, a wide gulf separates the practical effect of Brookss actions and Omars rhetoric. But there is a parallel: Both members of the House engaged in behavior that was clearly reprehensible, and that was far below the minimum standards of behavior expected of a member of Congressand I am morally certain that the majority of members of both parties, then and now, believed that. Yet, in each case, members of the party in charge chose to effectively ignore the boorish behavior of one its own. Racist President Democrats are incredibly quick to pull the trigger on the political assault rifle labeled racism any time President Donald Trump ventures into an area that may be distantly, tortuously assumed by his opponents to secretly include a racial component. Yet Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) et al. are perfectly happy giving Omar a free pass, even though her rhetoric is so clearly unambiguous. Trumps opponents often accuse him of employing so-called dog whistles to communicate racist messages to supporters. Yet this same group is ready, willing, and able to excuse Omar, who employs a steam-whistle to deliver anti-Semitic messages that dont require one to purchase a decoder ring to understand. During the 2016 campaign, Trump famously noted that the people illegally crossing the border between Mexico and the United States werent always the sort of migrants that a civilized nation would desire. Some, perhaps many, were criminalsdrug dealers, rapists, and worse. Trump never said that he believed all illegal immigrants were criminals. He never said that all Latinos were criminals. An unbiased observer (if any exists these days) should have been able to easily recognize that Trump was speaking about equal application of the law. Unless one is in favor of open borders, every civilized nation has an obligation to screen immigrants in order to prevent criminals, drug dealers, and rapists of any race from entering. Trump being Trump, the message was delivered somewhat clumsily. Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media wasted no time twisting it into another supposed example of Trumps racist heart. The Trump is a racist narrative has gone on ad nauseam ever since, along with its companion message describing the evil tendrils of white privilege that we are told extend into every part of American society. Now, Im not trying to portray Trump as perfect, nor am I attempting to claim that Omar is a horrible person. Im rather pointing out that Democrats, some Republicans, and most of the mainstream media apply a double standard to the pair. And thats the funny thing about standards. When you try to apply a double standard, you end up with no standards at all. Richard Trzupek is a chemist and environmental consultant, as well as an analyst at the Heartland Institute. He is also the author of Regulators Gone Wild: How the EPA Is Ruining American Industry. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. As Mueller Reaches His Inevitable Conclusion, Trump Is Primed to Respond Commentary Over the next several weeks, youre going to see desperate people struggling to explain whyafter a two-year exhaustive investigationspecial counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. These people will bend over backward in an effort to not swallow the bitterest of bitter pills: That Donald Trump won the election over Hillary Clinton fair and square. He did not, in fact, cheat with Russian help; instead, Trump beat Clinton all on his own. For more than two years, Democrats and the mainstream media have peddled what I refer to as The Collusion Delusion to the American public. And the bill for all that deliberate peddling of fake news is about to come due. Many fake news media outlets literally picked Trump-Russia collusion as the hill to die on. They dont have enough credibility left to pay this bill not even close. As the Trump-Russia collusion narrative is coming to an end, and Democrats are desperately making an attempt to shift focus to new House investigations, we can expect Trumps counterassault to begin. While Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), and Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) are wildly waving their empty, clenched fists and claiming that they have mountains of evidence proving crimes by Trump, nobody is going to be paying any attention. Trumps counterassault is literally going to grab the nations attention and not let go. Muellers Conclusion Was Inevitable There was never a Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy for Mueller and his crack team of highly motivated political prosecutors to find becauseare you sitting down?it never existed. As much as this will blow the minds of those who drank deeply of the sweet, sweet collusion Kool-Aidbeing dispensed by the gallon via fake news leaks in the mainstream media for the past couple of yearsPresident Trump has, in fact, been telling the truth on his Twitter account and in numerous interviews, in which he repeatedly insisted there was no collusion and that the Mueller probe was a witch hunt. With both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz looking over their shoulders, the chance that Mueller and his team would get creative and try to manufacture a case for collusion, after they realized they would never be able to make a real case, was always nonsense. It must be remembered that it was demonstrated to Mueller and his team very early on that they were being watched and that parallel investigations into Spygate were going on at the same time. That demonstration involved two members of Muellers newly formed team being removed after the DOJ Inspector General uncovered a series of highly incriminating text messages. Although Rosenstein gave Muellers team a huge scope within which to search, the outcome of that search was never in doubt, as long as Mueller and his team were kept honest. And they were kept honest. You can thank Rosenstein for that. Why Trump Held Back Declassification Trump has had to wait until Mueller showed all his cards. All the drama you are seeing about Muellers results being hidden from the public are nonsense. Trump and his administration want that report released to demonstrate there was no Russia collusion or any other crimes. Trump masterfully trolled the Democrats and the media into loudly and repeatedly demanding that Muellers full report be made public. And he had them doing that even before they realized that Mueller was, in fact, about to vindicate what Trump has been saying all along, that there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russian government. Whats the loudest talking point the Democrats, the DNC Media, and Never Trumpers would have had if Trump didnt wait until Mueller was finished to launch his counteroffensive against the Spygate plotters? They would have said: Trump is interfering with and obstructing the Mueller special counsel probe and hes only going after these people to stop the evidence of his collusion with Russia and his other crimes from being found and made public! If Mueller ends his investigation and releases a final report exhaustively detailing how he didnt find any Trump-Russia collusion, they have lost that talking point forever. Thats why Trump waited. Nobody is going to be able to say with a straight face that Trump was pushing the DOJ into going after the people who were working hard to expose his Russian collusion. That talking-point narrative is now more dead than Elvis. Mueller looked high. Mueller looked low. Mueller looked near. Mueller looked far. You know he tried. He and his team of 12 Angry Democrats they tried, folks. They tried so very, very hard. You know they did. Well, guess what? Mueller doesnt have the goods after all. And people who spent all this time selling a narrative that he did, now have some explaining to do. As these people make their desperate segue to talk of campaign finance law violations or obstruction of justice charges or some new crime they are fishing frantically for, theyre about to find themselves in a huge amount of trouble. Democrats Used Fake Leaks; Trump Will Use Evidence To keep the narrative that the walls were moving in on Trump and his family alive over the past two years, the Democrats worked in concert with the mainstream media. They rolled out one anonymously sourced story after another, all proving how Mueller was closing in on Trump. Well, guess what? When the time is there to respond, Trump and his people wont be using anonymous leaks to the media that fall apart on examination. DOJ Inspector General (IG) Horowitz, U.S. Attorney John Huber, and the hundreds of investigators and prosecutors working in their offices have spent more than a year exhaustively and meticulously compiling actual evidence of crimes. This isnt going to be an anonymously sourced official familiar with the matter speaking off the record to The New York Times or The Washington Post. Its going to be official DOJ IG reports. Its going to be unsealed DOJ indictments. U.S. Attorneys will be presenting this stuff inside courtrooms, not calling up media reporters on the sly for anonymously sourced leaks in the newspapers. The contrast couldnt be starker. The bad guys took their best shot at Trump, and all they had was hand-waving fake news leaks that strung people along for two years. Now, it will be Trumps turn, and his people will be presenting evidence both in courtrooms and at official press conferences. Official DOJ reports and official DOJ indictments will lay out the evidence that Horowitz and Huber have been collecting. And these wont be breathless fake news scoops in The New York Times or The Washington Post or BuzzFeed that fall apart after a few days. And you can quote me on that. Brian Cates is a political pundit and writer based in southern Texas and the author of Nobody Asked For My Opinion But Here It Is Anyway! He can be reached on Twitter at @drawandstrike Australian Fishermen Reel In ALIEN-Like Fish, and They Have No Idea What It Is The content is not available due to expiration. Nacogdoches, TX (75965) Today Cloudy skies this evening followed by isolated thunderstorms overnight. Low 67F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.. Tonight Cloudy skies this evening followed by isolated thunderstorms overnight. Low 67F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%. Acting Director of Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought speaks during a news briefing at the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington on March 11, 2019. (Alex Wong/Getty Images) Budget Chief Defends Spending Cuts, Strong Growth Projections WASHINGTONThe White Houses top budget official defended the presidents new budget proposal on March 12, saying that the problem is not that American tax is too little; it is that Washington spends too much. President Donald Trump unveiled his third budget resolution on March 11, titled A Budget for a Better America: Promises Kept. Taxpayers First, calling for significant cuts to both discretionary and mandatory spending in fiscal year 2020. The proposal aims to cut the budget deficit by about $2.7 trillion over 10 years and balance the budget in 15 years. According to the White House, about $1.9 trillion of the savings will be to mandatory spending that is on autopilot outside of the discretionary spending. And about $517 billion in savings will come from Medicare. Russ Vought, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the budget helps achieve savings through lowering drug prices, rather than cutting Medicare benefits to seniors. These are programs that will continue to increase every year. So these are not cuts, these are savings over the life of the 10-year window, he said at the House Budget Committee hearing on March 12. Many of the numbers that youve seen out in the press in the last 24 hours are inaccurate. According to Vought, other major goals of the administration are to achieve more than $200 billion in savings through streamlining and improving student loan repayment and more than $300 billion through welfare reform. The administration proposes uniform work requirements for Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), and certain housing programs. By strengthening work requirements, the administration wants to end peoples dependency on government benefits. The presidential budget also includes reductions to non-defense discretionary spending, requesting a 5 percent cut to the 2019 cap level. Trumps spending cuts will most likely get rejected in the Democratic-controlled House or even in the Senate, where Republicans would need votes of Democrats to pass a new budget deal. It is obviously a tough sell because of a divided government and a clash over the priorities of our nation, House Budget Committee ranking member Steve Womack (R-Ark.) told The Epoch Times, adding that the Republicans have done their job well in articulating the fiscal condition of the country. Weve got to make some tough choices and these tough choices are going to step on some toes. As part of the spending-cut initiative, the administration also has identified a number of wasteful and ineffective programs, such as Job Corps. Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, applauded the administrations efforts to tackle these inefficient programs. If we can squeeze out waste and inefficiency in the government that would be great, as this is taxpayers money and we want to use it well, she said. But keep in mind that one mans waste is another person payout. So it usually tends to be much more difficult than it sounds like it should be. According to Democrats, the presidents budget is dead on arrival. These cuts in the Trump budget arent a tightening of the belt or a trimming of the fat, or even a serious attempt at reining in spending, House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) said during the hearing. Yarmuth criticized proposed spending cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, nutrition assistance, student loans, and the Environmental Protection Agency. He called the proposal malicious. The presidents budget asks for $750 billion for overall defense spending, an increase of 5 percent from the 2019 level. About $718 billion of that would go to the Defense Department. The budget also includes $8.6 billion for the completion of a wall to secure the southern border. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) made it clear that they would not approve the wall money. I think the Democrats arguing against border security is a losing argument for them, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) told The Epoch Times. Theres going to be a lot of things that even Republicans disagree with within the budget, he said. But I do appreciate the presidents signaling that he wants to actually balance the budget. Reliance on Strong Growth According to critics, the White Houses budget proposal sets high expectations for economic growth. The budget forecasts the economy will grow about 3 percent annually over the next decade, relying on the assumption that the deregulation and tax cuts will have a long-lasting impact on the economy. Over the next 10 years, we are confident that the economic policies of this administration will more than pay for the costs of the tax cuts, said Vought. He noted that a high growth rate would be achieved if the administrations policy proposals become law, which are not taken into account in the forecasts of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). According to the CBO, the growth in the economy will be 2.3 percent this year, down from 3.1 percent in 2018, as the effects of the new tax code on the growth of business investment wane. And after 2019, growth is projected to slow further to an average of 1.7 percent through 2023. According to Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), the growth rates in the administrations budget are reasonable. Look at the 1980s, look at the 1990s, he said. If we can reduce the regulatory state and get health care costs down, we can get the economic engine going, and then restrain spending. That will be fine, he told The Epoch Times. If were going to continue to spend recklessly while having policies that restrain growth, theres no chance to get out of the fiscal malaise we find ourselves. Finance Minister Philip Hammond leaves Downing Street to go to Parliament to deliver his Spring Statement in London on March 13, 2019. (Matt Dunham/AP Photo) Business Leaders Angered By UKs No-Deal Brexit Tariffs LONDONThe British government has frustrated business leaders after revealing its plans for temporary tariffs should the UK leave the EU without a deal. The new tariffs could lead to higher prices on products imported from the continent, such as cars, clothes, and beef, although many imports wont face increases. Carolyn Fairbairn, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, called the tariffs a sledgehammer for our economy. What we are hearing is the biggest change in terms of trade this country has faced since the mid-19th century being imposed on this country with no consultation with business, no time to prepare. This is no way to run a country, she told The Associated Press. Announcing the measures on March 13, the Department for International Trade said in a statement that the tariffs would apply for up to 12 months after a no-deal Brexit and were designed to minimise costs to business and consumers while protecting vulnerable industries. Trade Policy Minister George Hollingbery said in the statement that the majority of tariffs would be set to zero, but would be retained for the most sensitive industries. It represents a modest liberalization of tariffs and we will be monitoring the economy closely, as well as consulting with businesses, to decide what our tariffs should be after this transitional period, Hollingbery said. Full of Anomalies However, business groups accused the plan of being full of anomalies. For example, sheep farmers will be protected under the new tariffs, but vegetable growers will not. Complete cars will incur tariffs, but car parts wont, in a bid to maintain the supply chains for British automakers. Under the current system, all imports from the EU are free of tariffs, whereas under the new proposals, 82 percent of imports would be tariff-free. However, 92 percent of imports from the rest of the world would pay no border duties, an increase from 52 percent now. Mike Hawes, chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, said the announcement doesnt resolve the devastating effect that no deal would have on the industry. No policy on tariffs can come close to compensating for the disruption, cost and job losses that would result from no deal, he said in a statement. Its staggering that we are in this position with only days until we are due to leave. Every day no deal remains a possibility is another day companies pay the price in expensive contingency measures, he added. Damaging Our Reputation The announcement came as lawmakers prepared to vote on whether to exit the EU without a deal. Whatever the result, the UK could still exit without a deal depending on the outcome of future negotiations. Prime Minister Theresa May has said she doesnt want Britain to leave without a deal. Finance Minister Philip Hammond also warned of the consequences of a no-deal Brexit when he delivered his Spring Statement on the UK budget on March 13. We are not where I hoped we would be today, Hammond said. Our economy is fundamentally robust, but the uncertainty that I hoped we would lift last night, still hangs over us. We cannot allow that to continue: It is damaging our economy and it is damaging our standing and reputation in the world. Jose Guzman (L), the man who saved his pit bull from a burning house, thanks GoFundMe donors in the wake of the incident. Guzman's house (R) on fire in San Diego, Calif., on March 9, 2019. (Roxana Martinez/YouTube/GoFundMe) California Man Runs Into Burning House to Rescue Pit Bull A California man risked his life and suffered injuries when he rushed past fire crews into a burning house to save his dog. Firefighters were hosing down a property engulfed in flames in Pala, San Diego, on March 9, when a frantic Jose Guzman rushed onto the scenehis house on fire. Shocking footage published by KUSI shows Guzman sprint past the fire crewhesitate for a momentand then disappear behind a wall of smoke and flames. This shocking cellphone video captures Jose Guzman rushing past firefighters and into his burning home looking frantically for his dog. Just moments later, both of them run out. : Adam Guzman pic.twitter.com/kqln3v56VN KUSI News (@KUSINews) March 12, 2019 As the firemen huddle, apparently discussing whether to go in after him, Guzman emerges with his beloved pit bull, about 30 seconds after charging into the flames. Video shows Guzman leading the dog to safety. As he walks by the camera, he checks his arm for burns. Ow! Guzman calls out as he looks at his arm, while someone says Hey, he got hurt, man! Astonished neighbors and onlookers are seen standing outside, with someone expressing shock at Guzmans actions. He [expletive] rescued his dog, he went in for that someone says as the footage cuts off. I Couldnt Leave Her Guzman told People he didnt think about the danger to his life, he just wanted to save his beloved pit bull, Gabbana. I knew something couldve happened to me or both of us, but it didnt go through my mind at the time, Guzman told People. That dog is part of my family. Shes been with us through downs and ups and I couldnt leave her there. I would do it again if I had to; I would do it for anybody in my family. Guzman said he and his family were at a barbeque at his parents house when it came to his attention there was a fire in his neighborhood. I didnt think it was mine because we had just left the house about an hour ago, but I decided to get in my truck and drive over there, Guzman said. The father of three knew Gabanna was still inside the house, and he leaped into action. I wasnt gonna let her die like that, he told People. He told ABC10 News: When I ran through the curtain of fire where my van was and fence, I didnt know what was behind that. I knew my dog was here, I knew she was here. I ran through the curtain of fire and made my way through the smoke to the back of the house, where I had her chained up, he told People. It was hard for me to get her leash unhooked, but I managed to get her loose and we both ran out towards the driveway. His landlords son-in-law, Adam Guzman, unrelated to Jose, captured the very emotional scene on video. He told People he thought the incident would end tragically. I thought hes a goner. The flames were hot and I couldnt imagine running through those flames. That was it, that was the last time Id see him, he told PEOPLE. When he came running out with the dog, it was a big relief that he was alive and brought out the dog at the same time. Guzman suffered second-degree burns to his face, right side, arm, and left ear, according to the report. He said Gabanna had burns to her nose and paw. His home, possessions, and two cars were lost in the fire, he said. He and his family have been living with his sister Roxana Martinez, who set up a GoFundMe page to help them out. The campaign has since raised over $16,800. Martinez posted a video on YouTube, with Guzman thanking people for contributions. I am here right now at my sisters house because this is the only place I could go, I had nothing else, I lost everything, Guzman says in the video. From the bottom of my heart I thank every single personI wish I could do it in person, but I cantI thank you from the bottom of my heart, that you dont know me, but youre willing to donate for me and my family. Guzmans fiancee and mother of his three children, Adriana Lopez, told People she wasnt surprised by his heroic actions. Hes that person that would do that for anybody, said Lopez. Hes a loving dad, a loving son, a loving brother. This is not out of character for him, this is something that he would do. Hes always been very spontaneous and very caring, and he would give his life for anyone, said his sister. An Air Canada Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft is shown next to a gate at Trudeau Airport in Montreal on March 13, 2019. Canada restricted Boeing 737 Max 8 aircrafts from its airspace on March 13. (The Canadian Press/Graham Hughes) Canada Grounds Boeing 737 Max 8 Airplanes Over Safety Concerns Canada has restricted all Boeing Max 8 and Max 9 aircrafts from its airspace, Transportation Minister Marc Garneau announced this morning. The decision comes in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed all 157 people aboard, including 18 Canadians, on Sunday. A safety notice was released that restricts passenger flights on Max 8 and Max 9 planes from flying into, out of, or through Canadian airspace and it will affect all Canadian airlines as well as foreign airlines. At a press conference this morning, Garneau said the decision to issue the notice is a precautionary measure as a result of new data received and examined earlier this morning as well as on the advice of experts. The safety notice is effective immediately until further notice. While he had previously said he saw no reason to ground the aircrafts, Garneau says the new information from this morning changed things. Satellite tracking data, which is collected when certain aircraft take-off, provides data on course, vertical profile, and fluctuations in flight. Based on that data, the Transport Ministry compared flight data from the recent crash in Ethiopia to the LionAir Flight 610 crash from October 2018, which also involved a Boeing Max 8 aircraft, and noticed some possible concerning similarities which warranted the safety notice. There areand I hasten to say not conclusivebut there are similarities, Garneau said. My departmental officials continue to monitor the situation and I will not hesitate to take swift action should we discover any additional safety issues. The transport minister also said it was too soon to speculate about the exact cause of the accident in Addis Ababa as the investigation has just begun, and they are waiting to see the data and voice recordings. Garneau said Canadas Transport Ministry has been in touch with Air Canada, WestJet, and Sunwing throughout the process, and he says there was no pushback from Canadian airlines when the restriction was made this morning. Toronto-based Sunwing Airlines was Canadas first carrier to temporarily ground its Max 8 aircrafts late Tuesday but said the decision was made for commercial reasons rather than for safety issues, reports the Canadian Press. Sunwing said in a written statement that they support Transport Canadas decision and will be revising their schedule with no plans of cancelling any flights. Air Canada released a statement saying they fully support Transport Canadas decision and are working to rebook impacted customers as soon as possible. They say that customers should expect delays as their 737 MAX operations carry nine to twelve thousand people a day. According to The Canadian Press, Air Canada was one of a handful of major airlines that initially resisted grounding the planes. WestJet, who has 13 MAX aircraft in their fleet, also released a statement saying they will comply with the new restriction and that they are working to rebook affected customers. Many nations around the worldincluding the European Union, U.K., and Australiahave already grounded the Max 8 or banned them from their airspace. Garneau says he is happy to share the data with others nations, and that he notified the United States of Canadas decision earlier this morning as well. U.S. President Donald Trump later issued an emergency order to ground all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft as well. The safety of the American people, and all people, is our paramount concern, the president said during a briefing this afternoon. Shortly after the meeting, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a statement saying they were temporarily grounding the planes. The decision is based on new evidence gathered from the site of the crashwhere an FAA team is assisting the investigation thereas well as newly refined satellite data they received in the morning. Class Conflict: Communist Inversion of Morality Commentary At its core, communism inverts society in two ways: The firstby distorting elements of truth. The secondby outright lies that reverse morality. Once we understand that, its easy to see why communist ideology always ends up siding with criminals, miscreants, psychotic personalities, professional victims, and others that mask their true intentions behind deceit. Sometimes, its because they revel in the suffering of others, and sometimes, its because if they cant have it, no one can. This inversion can only be understood by establishing how people are convinced into following the communist piper into oblivion, over and over again. A con man never reveals his true intentions. Even if you catch him after the fact, hell usually admit no wrongdoing. Its no surprise, then, that communists are notorious for leaving disaster in their wake, claiming no responsibility for what theyve done. Though there have been well over 100 million victims of communist democide through starvation and cold-hearted brutality, it does nothing to stop communists from blaming capitalists, class enemies, counter-revolutionaries, fascistsanyone but themselves. The reason they get away with this is because people sympathetic to communist ideology despise personal responsibility. They want the world to be an idealistic paradise where they dont have to face the consequences of their actionsa utopia driven by a total disregard for causality. Those pulling the strings, however, arent so idealistic. Nay, its their cynicism that makes them feel its acceptable to manipulate others, because if they dont, others will. Tall Poppy Syndrome Kernels of truth are entwined with such pessimism, perpetuated by a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rather than aspiring to be better, communist sympathizers surround themselves with others who wallow in their misery, and as the saying goes, misery loves company. Like crabs in a bucket, whenever one of them almost reaches the top, the others drag it back down. This is also described as tall poppy syndrome, a concept that originates with Herodotuss account of Thrasybulus cutting off the tallest ears of wheat until he destroyed the best part of the crop. Communism eliminates talent and ability in precisely the same manner, to which society quickly eats itself in a cacophony of envy. Ability is replaced with jealousy of success that makes everyone equally miserable, creating low-trust societies notorious for political repression aided by citizens reporting on one another, much like the growing culture of political correctness around us. This demonstrates why envy was considered one of the seven deadly sins by the medieval Catholic Church. Today, these sinslust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and prideare treated as badges of honor within a hierarchy of leftist victimhood called the progressive stack. According to communist ideology, suffering can only possibly be explained by the struggle against the haves by the have nots, in whats known as class conflict. This is, however, a distortion of truth, as I initially described. People do suffer, and this can involve the actions of others, but what makes all the difference is how we interpret this suffering. Do we use this an excuse to do what thou wilt, as occultist Aleister Crowley once said, or do we turn this into a life lesson that makes us wiser and stronger? Furthermore, there is no end to suffering in an imperfect world, and as Christ said, You will always have the poor with you. The inability for communists to accept such imperfection is rooted in the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism. Hence, there is no comfort beyond the physical. Being an atheist ideology, this explains why communism creates such unrealistic expectations about what can be achieved in an imperfect world. While theism can bring internal peace and harmony, communists will never be satisfied until theyve created heaven on earth. Without the ability to temper expectations with reality, the more communists fail, the more they invert morality and truth with rebellion. Communists talk of class consciousness, where the masses become aware of their servitude, rising up against their masters. Conversely, false consciousness brainwashes the masses into embracing their slavery, instead of fighting for their liberty. Communists believe that the only way to attain liberty is if class victims rise up against their oppressors to take power, like Lucifer rising up against God. Much like Lucifer, communists believe theyre completely justified in whatever it takes to attain power, corrupting anyone who will listen to their inversions of reality. A Delicate Butterfly Truth tells a different story, however. There will always be tyrants, just as there will always be poverty. No amount of promises of security from con men can change that. We must be conscious of the fact that freedom is a delicate butterfly that can easily be crushed if we hold it too tightly. Karl Marx said, From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, but resentment of ability, coupled with the yearning for all needs to be securely met, will make us no better than slaves. Benjamin Franklin summed this up well when he said, They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Communists may delude themselves into believing their intentions are noble, but their fruits tell a different story. People are stripped of their earnings because property is considered theft, when taking property by force is the true theft. Criminals are told that the only reason theyre prosecuted by the law is because theyre victims of society, when the targets of their illegal actions are the true victims. Modern cultural Marxism, while differing slightly from the classical economic variety, takes this inversion so far as the fat-acceptance movement, where obesity should be celebrated, in an endless sea of identity politics that inverts every virtue and vice imaginable. As all conventional morality is inverted in our modern society, we must ask ourselves where this will end. Do we continue down this road until only law-abiding, morally upstanding people are turned into pariahs and enemies of society? Communism is the result of a society that fails to realize that the material must be tempered with something greater than what we see and touch. Until we return to a culture that respects this, the moral inversion will never end. Cid Lazarou is a blogger, writer, and freelance journalist from the UK. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. A young girl uses a cellphone in this file photo. In a statement made March 12, 2019, Ontario Education Minister Lisa Thompson said the Ontario government is planning to ban cellphones in classrooms. (Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP/Getty Images) Classroom Cellphone Ban to be Introduced by Ontario Government TORONTOThe Ontario government will be introducing a ban on cellphones in the classroom to create a better learning environment for students, said Education Minister Lisa Thompson. Ontarios students need to be able to focus on their learning, and not their cell phones, she said in a written statement Tuesday, March 12. Cellphones will no longer be allowed in the classroom unless they are required for educational purposes, health and medical purposes, or to support special needs. The Conservative government conducted the largest education consultation in the provinces history last fall, where it received feedback on a wide range of education-related topics and issues. About 97 percent of respondents said they would support some form of a ban on cellphones. Smartphones have become a huge distraction in classrooms, making it impossible for students to learn effectively. We conducted the most extensive education consultations in Ontarios history, and 97% of respondents agree its time to put the education of our students first. https://t.co/qeALUs3YOo Doug Ford (@fordnation) March 12, 2019 Banning cellphone use in primary and secondary school classrooms was also one of Premier Doug Fords education campaign promises to maximize classroom learning. By banning cellphone use that distracts from learning, we are helping students to focus on acquiring the foundational skills they need like reading, writing, and math, Thompson said. In a statement to The Canadian Press, the Ontario Principals Council said school boards already have policies around cellphone use and the council would not support a further ban. The formal announcement of the ban is expected in the near future. Current Ontario Policies Most, if not all, schools and school boards already have cellphone and technology related policies in place. Many of those policies allow teachers to set the terms of when and how cellphones can be used in class. For example, in Canadas capital, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board has an Appropriate Use of Technology policy. It states that personal electronic devices, like cellphones, should support classroom activities and that teachers would guide and monitor student access to their use. In 2017, a Toronto middle school implemented a ban on the use of cellphones in classrooms. The school introduced the rule to help students focus in class rather than be tempted to check their devices. There seemed to be a consensus that, yeah, the school should adjust their current policy when it comes to cellphones. So theyve taken the step of saying cellphones are not permitted in class, Toronto District School Board spokesman Ryan Bird told CTV Toronto. And the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) even used to have a ban on cellphones, but lifted the ban in 2011 after student trustees argued that technology had become a pervasive part of student life, CBC reports. Instead, teachers would decide on whether cellphones would be allowed in their classroom or not. In London, the Thames Valley District school board (TVDSB) already has a similar policy in place, but would welcome the ban if it allowed phones to be used for teaching purposes within a classroom, the London Free Press reports. It certainly aligns with our current practice and board procedure, TVDSB education director Laura Elliott told the London Free Press. We allow cellphones in a classroom when teachers want to use them for instructional purposes and we do have a formal procedure on that, so we do recognize the valuea phone is actually a computerand used quite often bt our classroom teachers. What I think is problematic is when people use their phones to text their friends either within the classroom or outside the classroomand would not be condoned for use [by] the teacher. Elsewhere in the World Just across the country, a Victoria middle school became the first school in its district to ban cellphones in school when it implemented the policy for the 2018-19 school year. British Columbia does not have a provincial policy on cellphone use in classrooms, so schools set their own rules. According to Central Middle School Principal Christopher Macintosh, the decision to ban cellphones was because it was impeding student learning, reports Global News. Across the Pond, France has banned phones in classrooms since 2010. However, since students still used cellphones in class, as of 2018, France implemented a nationwide ban on student cellphone use in primary, elementary, and middle school, or for students aged 6 to about 15. Danske Laundering Contagion Feeds a New Fear in Borderless EU First it was subprime mortgages, then European debt. Now, its money laundering. In Denmark, where the latest crisis first grabbed the publics attention thanks to Danske Bank A/S, the government has some worrying observations on what went wrong and what the scandal might mean for European ambitions to build a single market for financial services. In an interview in Copenhagen, Danish Business Minister Rasmus Jarlov said confidence in doing business across borders suffers when efforts to police suspicious money flows fall short. It obviously doesnt do a lot of good for the trust between banks that operate in different markets [when you have] cases like this, he said. Thats quite obvious. One of the problems with free trade is that something that starts one place spreads to other countries, Jarlov said. Its slowly dawning on legislators in Europe that a money-laundering crisis they thought was limited to the Baltic and Nordic countries has spilled into the rest of the EU. A picture is emerging in which criminals, mostly from Russia, sought out the weakest links in the chain surrounding the EU to gain access to the wider Western financial system. Jarlov says that it remains a struggle for legislators to keep up with the perpetrators. The financial system is so complex that there could be so many ways of exploiting it that we have not even thought of, he said. According to Bill Browder, the co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management best known for his work chasing Russian money launderers, their entry point into the EU is the Baltic countries and Cyprusthe transit zone, as he characterizes it. From there, the dirty money makes its way to the rest of Europe. Its going to places where people want to spend it, Browder said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. He says the U.K. has traditionally been a magnet for such funds. Though many banks all across Europe have now been implicated in the complex web of illicit flows, Danske remains at the center of the scandal. Its tiny Estonian branch allegedly handled about $230 billion in questionable funds between 2007 and 2015. Danske recently announced a full retreat from the Baltics and Russia in response to the scandal. Part of the problem is the lack of a coordinated effort to fight money laundering in the EU. Another problem is confusion about the roles of national supervisors in monitoring foreign bank operations in their backyards. The European banking union was designed to protect taxpayers from having to bail out banks, not to prevent illegal flows from the East. Europe is using directives to push through broader anti-money laundering tools and has given more powers to the blocs regulator, but the responsibility to catch and stop the practice still lies mostly with national authorities. Browder estimates that theres roughly $1 trillion in dirty money trying to make its way from Russia into the West, meaning the Danske scandal represents just a fraction of the puzzle. Jarlov says theres a lesson to be drawn from the Danske case. He also welcomes efforts to get national FSAs in the European Union to work together. I think thats absolutely necessary, he said. Fitch Ratings recently pointed out that, when it comes to fighting money laundering, there are different national approaches potentially leading to uneven monitoring, compliance and regulatory cooperation. Thats problematic because the extent of suspicious transactions may not be fully visible to a single regulator and investigations may be hindered by a lack of effective cooperation between regulators in the jurisdictions concerned, Fitch said. In the case of Danske, the Danish and Estonian regulators have disagreed over who should have done what. Danske is now the target of criminal investigations in the U.S. and several EU states. Investors are bracing for fines potentially in the billions of dollars and the banks share price has plunged by almost half over the past year. Numerous high-ranking people have been removed from the bank, including the chief executive and the chairman. The Danish government is operating under the assumption that the total amount that Danske may be facing in fines probably wont exceed about $1.5 billion, which represents an additional capital requirement set by the regulator to deal with the fallout of the scandal. Jarlov says the case raises some fundamental questions about the financial industry. Its obvious that they have not been enough in control of their business and not aware enough of their customers and their transactions, he said. Jarlov has taken several steps to tighten Danish anti-money laundering rules since last year. These include raising potential penalties eight-fold so that Denmark will in future have the ability to fine banks up to about $4.5 billion. Parliament is now looking into more measures, Jarlov said. Theres a lot of anger in the public, he said. And for a good reason. By Frances Schwartzkopff Private-Sector Talent Needed for AI Innovation, Senators Told Chinas detailed strategy in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) technology and Russias efforts to catch up demand a response by the United States and a need for collaboration with the private sector to accomplish that, Department of Defense (DOD) officials told lawmakers at a Senate hearing on March 12. Participants in the hearing noted that an executive order issued in February by President Donald Trump to maintain the United States AI leadership had signaled the need to push forward in developing this technology. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, observed that AI was expected to affect every corner of the DOD, and the United States needs to move quickly to adopt these capabilities so that we dont lose the technological edge. Likewise, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) repeatedly emphasized the need for research and innovation, saying there are policies that we need to put in place to encourage that. Michael Brown, director of the DODs Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), testified that the Chinese government has outlined a comprehensive, whole-of-government strategy to become the global leader in AI and that Russia is similarly focused on building its AI capacity, but is behind the United States and China in terms of overall AI investment, research, and startups. Directed by Trumps executive order, issued Feb. 11, and the DIUs AI Strategy, the unit will seek solutions and new capabilities in AI by working with commercial sources and talent, Brown said. Cultural divides and ethical differences are often blamed for the lack of closer cooperation between DOD and Silicon Valley, but more often than not the true deterrent is misaligned economics, he said. Emphasizing this point, Air Force Lt. Gen. John N.T. Shanahan, the director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, expressed the need to communicate the U.S. governments (including DODs) demand for AI. What I dont want to see is some of the best intellectual talent we have out there being funded with VC [venture capital] money from places like China but if were not giving them an opportunity, thats whats going to happen, he said. Efforts such as the executive order and the National Commission on AI established by Congress in August 2018 would contribute with weighty recommendations on how were looking at artificial intelligence, Shanahan said. Peter T. Highnam, the deputy director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), also described a new initiative called the Artificial Intelligence Exploration (AIE) program as a series of high-risk, high-payoff projects where researchers work to establish the feasibility of new AI concepts. The program was instituted to both incentivize research and produce quick results, he said. Brown, Shanahan, and Highnam all stressed the importance of attracting private-sector talent and businesses to provide AI to the Defense Department, as the Cold War Manhattan Project model of defense research is no longer relevant in todays research and technological environment. In the 1960s, a third of the global R&D was U.S. defense-related. Now, that number is 3.7 percent, so it just speaks to the need to look outside [government], Brown said. Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) raised ethics concerns about the use of AI. Shanahan responded by saying that the algorithms weve fielded are light years away from SkyNet and fully autonomous weapons systems (presumably referring to the fictional military AI system from the Terminator motion pictures). He described the rigorous ethical tests and evaluations that all DOD technologies are subject to while in development. Peters noted that adversaries may not be similarly constrained as an additional factor for consideration in AI development. Highnam added that ethical considerations are part of the technical discussions at DARPA, describing a recent colloquium led by former Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig, as well as other research programs focused on issues such as implicit bias in data sets. Dennis Oland heads from the Law Courts as he continue his testimony in Saint John, N.B., on March 7, 2019. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press) Dennis Oland Joins Lawyers, Judge for Visit to Scene of Fathers Murder SAINT JOHN, N.B.Dennis Oland revisited the office where his father, Richard, was bludgeoned to death eight years ago as evidence wrapped up Tuesday at his second-degree murder trial. Sheriffs guarded the entrance to the crime scene in uptown Saint John, allowing only the main participants in the dramatic trial into the small, second floor office where 69-year-old Richard Oland was killed on July 6, 2011. News reporters, camera crews and a few curious onlookers lined up on the narrow, one-way street across from the office as Dennis Oland, accompanied by defence lawyer James McConnell, quickly entered through a street-level door. Dennis Oland and defence lawyer Jamie McConnell were the first to arrive. Michael Lacy arrived a short time afterward. Alan Gold was not present. @Global_NB #Oland pic.twitter.com/4Sa2VR8n62 Andrew Cromwell (@Andrew_GlobalSJ) March 12, 2019 Crown prosecutors and the judge in the case, Justice Terrence Morrison, also entered. No members of the public or news media were allowed to take part in the visit, which was purely a visual inspection of the scene as requested by the defence. Dennis Oland,defence lawyer,crown and Justice Morrison have all left the Richard Oland crime scene from July 6,2011 pic.twitter.com/5VBx40xH2P Kevin Worrell (@kevinhworrell) March 12, 2019 The retrial is now adjourned until May 9, when the Crown and defence will give closing arguments. There wont be a verdict in the trial, which is before judge alone, until mid-June or later. The office still bears the name Richard Oland gave his investment businessthe Far End Corp. Lead defence lawyer Alan Gold told Morrison the defence wanted him to get a first-hand look at the cramped office so he could appreciate their argument that Richard Olands killer was a perfect target for blood spatter during the violent attack. The businessman and former executive of the family-owned business, Moosehead Breweries Ltd., was struck more than 40 times, mostly on the head, with an axe-like weapon that was never found. Blood spatter, brain matter and bone fragments radiated in a circle around the body, but only a few small specks of blood were connected to Dennis Oland. The jacket Dennis was wearing when he visited his father on July 6, 2011, was found to have four tiny bloodstains on it and Richard Olands DNA. He is the last known person to have seen his father alive. Tuesday was day 44 of Olands retrial for murder. His 2015 conviction was overturned on appeal and the new trial ordered. The defence took only five days. The star witness for the defence was Dennis Oland himself, who took the stand and swore he was not that kind of monster who would hurt his dad, or anyone. The final witness on Tuesday was Jack Connell, Dennis Olands maternal uncle. He told the court about a family logbook Oland retrieved from his fathers office on July 6, 2011. The defence said it is telling the book had no blood on it, but prosecution lawyers contend Oland removed it from the office before he returned for a third visit when they say he killed his father. Oland, 51, has pleaded not guilty to the crime. He was supported throughout the trial by members of the Oland family, including Connell and his paternal uncle, Derek Oland, executive chairman of Moosehead. I asked Dennis Oland what he thought of his testimony: pic.twitter.com/KvScXvELGL Brett Ruskin (@Brett_CBC) March 8, 2019 The family has maintained that Dennis Oland was wrongly accused of the killing. Driver In Deadly Bus Crash Indicted on Statutory Rape Charges A former Tennessee bus driver who was convicted of killing six children in a school bus crash has been indicted on multiple charges of rape. Johnthony Walker, 26, was indicted by a Davidson County Grand Jury on eight counts of aggravated statutory rape and one count of sexual exploitation of a minor, reported News 4. Johnthony Walker, who was convicted for his part in the deadly Chattanooga bus crash, was indicted last week in Davidson County on statutory rape charges. WSMV News 4, Nashville 2019311 Walker was arrested in June 2018 at a 14-year-olds home in Davidson County after her parents called the police. He was out on bond staying at Nashville at the time while appealing his criminally negligent homicide and assault conviction relating to the 2016 bus crash. The 26-year-old allegedly admitted to having sex with the girl while he was staying with the family, reported the news station, citing an affidavit. Moreover, during a court hearing in 2018, a sergeant testified that Walker had admitted to having sex with the girl five times. The sergeant reportedly told the court that Walker appeared to be concerned about the girls age and that he found it repulsive that this has happened. The man convicted in the deadly Woodmore school bus crash has been indicted by a Davidson County, Tennessee, grand jury on charges of statutory rape. Chattanooga Times Free Press 2019311 Walker told authorities that his relationship with the victim, who lived at the home, began in April or May of 2018. A sex-crimes officer told the grand jury that Walker wrote a one-page apology to the victim as well as turn over his cellphone, which contained text messages and a photo between Walker and the minor, reported Times Free Press. If found guilty of statutory rape, Walker faces a maximum of 12 years in prison and a fine, not more than $5,000. An aggravated statutory rape charge is used when a victim 13-17 years old and the defendant is 10 years older than the victim. Deadly Crash In March last year, Walker was found guilty after the school bus that was carrying 37 children crashed in Chattanooga on Nov. 21, 2016. Prosecutors said the 25-year-old was using his phone while speeding before he drove into a ditch, hitting a mailbox and electrical pole, finally crashing into a tree, according to the news station. More than 20 of the school children were injured, and six died from the injuries sustained in the crash. The victims aged between 6 and 10. During the trial, prosecutors argued the bus was driving at a speed of 50 mph, which was too fast to properly navigate on a narrow road. As a result, the bus drifted into an oncoming lane after which Walker overcorrected and the bus crashed, reported the news station. Johnthony Walker Trial Prosecution Rebuttal Closing Argument#JohnthonyWalker https://t.co/Kcz45yQDTS Law & Crime Network (@LawCrimeNetwork) February 28, 2018 However, the 25-year-old said he was only traveling 35 mph when he reached the curve of the road and another vehicle encroached his lane, according to Fox news. Chattanooga police officer Joe Warren said there was no evidence of the second vehicle in Walkers lane. Prosecutor said the 25-year-old driver was speeding when he drove into a ditch, hitting a mailbox and electrical pole before crashing into a tree. ABC News 201831 The jury found Walker guilty on 27 of 33 chargessix counts of criminally negligent assault, 11 counts of reckless aggravated assault, seven counts of assault, one count of reckless endangerment, one count of reckless driving, and one count of use of a portable electronic device by a school bus driver. He was later sentenced to four years in prison. Erick Jones from the University of Texas at Arlington is the third of five finalists in consideration to be the next dean of Iowa State's College of Engineering. European Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen listens to China's Premier Li Keqiang (not pictured) during a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on June 25, 2018. (Fred Dufour/Pool via Reuters) EU Sets Out 10-Point Plan to Balance China Economic Ties BRUSSELSThe European Commission set out a 10-point plan on March 12 for more balanced economic relations with China, urging EU leaders to back its ideas to curb Chinese state-owned enterprises and increase their guard against cybersecurity threats. The action plan marks a shift in the blocs stance toward its top trading partner and will be put to EU leaders to discuss at their next regular summit meeting in Brussels on March 21-22before an EU-China summit on April 9. The Commission, the EUs executive, said the European Union should cooperate more with China in areas such as climate change and peace, but should also push for a more reciprocal economic relationship and take steps to protect its industry. The European Union shares many of the United States concerns over Chinese market distortions, overcapacity and technology transfer. But it has avoided taking sides in a multi-billion dollar trade war between Washington and Beijing. Europe has also been increasingly frustrated by what it sees as the slowness of Chinas opening of its economy, a surge of Chinese takeovers in critical EU sectors and U.S. pressure to shun China, and notably telecoms equipment maker Huawei over espionage concerns. Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen told a news conference that Chinese state financing and state-owned enterprises distorted EU markets. For example, EU rules limited subsidies EU governments could give to European companies, but did not apply to foreign companies, he said. A German EU diplomat described the paper as a comprehensive and courageous stocktaking of relations with Beijing, highlighting a lack of reciprocity and growing protectionism and also broaching difficult issues, such as human rights. If backed by EU leaders, the European Union would urge China to agree to reforms of World Trade Organization rules, notably regarding subsidies and forced technology transfer, and conclude a deal with the EU on investment rules by 2020. The Commission urged EU nations to revive a stalled proposal known as the International Procurement Instrument that would require foreign countries to open up their public tenders in return for access to Europe. The EU executive believes Chinese bidders for EU public contracts should meet high labor and environmental standards and wants to adapt EU law to limit the state-owned enterprises and state subsidies in the EU market. It also believes EU countries should find a common line on the security of planned high-speed 5G telecoms networks. China is the EUs biggest source of imports and its second-biggest export market after the United States, with trade between the two worth more than $1 billion per day. Chinas trade surplus in goods with the European Union was 177.7 billion euros ($200.4 billion) in 2017. ($1 = 0.8869 euros) By Philip Blenkinsop Former White House National Security Advisor Michael Flynn arrives at the Prettyman Federal Courthouse in Washington on Dec. 18, 2018. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Flynn Asks for Another Delay in Sentencing to Cooperate With Related Criminal Case Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, once called by his supervisor easily the best Intelligence professional of any service, has asked a federal judge to further delay his sentencing for lying to the FBI. Flynn had a sentencing hearing on Dec. 18 where U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan agreed with the defense to give Flynn more time to continue in his cooperation with a case in Virginia against two of his former associates, who face charges for concealing that they lobbied in the United States on behalf of Turkey. Back then, Sullivan asked both sides to give him a status report on March 13. In the report, Flynn requested a further delay. At this time, the defendant continues to request a continuance since the case in [the Eastern District of Virginia] has not been resolved, and there may be additional cooperation for the defendant to provide pursuant to the plea agreement in this matter, according to the status report. The prosecutors, from the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, took no position on the request, and said that while the defendant remains in a position to cooperate with law enforcement authorities, and could testify in the [Virginia] case should it proceed to trial, in the governments view his cooperation is otherwise complete. Flynn has extensively cooperated with government prosecutors on multiple investigations and further cooperation will give him yet more grounds to ask for a lenient sentence. Even before the delay, the prosecutors were asking for a low sentence, including no prison time, while the defense wanted no more than a year of probation and community service. Charges Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that took place when President Barack Obama imposed additional sanctions on Russia in December 2016. He also pleaded guilty to lying about asking Russia to vote against or delay the vote on a U.N. Security Council resolution. Finally, he pleaded guilty to lying about his foreign lobbying disclosures regarding the extent to which his work benefiting the Turkish government was overseen by that government. Foreign lobbying paperwork violations are seldom prosecuted. Flynn said the work started in August 2016. He shut down his lobbying firm in November 2016. As part of the deal, Flynn was only charged with lying to the FBI and not with lying about the lobbying disclosures. His two associates in the Turkey deal, Bijan Rafiekian and Kamil Ekim Alptekin, face charges for conspiring to act as unregistered foreign lobbyists and for lying about foreign lobbying disclosures. Alptekin was also charged with lying to the FBI. Flynn Jr. Flynn ran his lobbying company, Flynn Intel Group, with Rafiekian. His son, Michael Flynn Jr., also worked for the company, but he isnt mentioned in the Virginia case. In November 2017, NBC News reported that Flynns son was implicated in the Turkey lobbying case and could be indicted separately or at the same time as his father, according to three sources familiar with the investigation. If the elder Flynn is willing to cooperate with investigators in order to help his son, two of the sources said, it could also change his own fate, potentially limiting any legal consequences, the report stated. Flynns plea agreement includes no mention of Flynn Jr. The Mueller team may have used the threat of indicting the son as leverage and cut Flynn an under-the-table deal on the matter, opined former FBI agent and Epoch Times contributor Marc Ruskin. It would be done with a wink and a nod, he said in a phone call, later adding that it wouldnt be binding, but it would be like an understanding. Such a deal would be unethical, Ruskin said. To twist the fathers arm with regard to his child is a pretty low thing to do, but weve seen low things done in these cases. Federal Transport Minister Marc Garneau announces new rules to fly a drone in Canada during a news conference in Montreal on Jan. 9, 2019. (Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press) Garneau Meeting With Expert Aviation Panel, Has No Plans to Ground Boeing 737 MONTREALTransport Minister Marc Garneau has cleared his schedule for the day in order to meet with his civil aviation expert panel on how to deal with the issue of Boeings 737 Max 8 aircraft, which is being grounded or banned from a growing number of countries. The 737 Max 8 continues to fly in North American skies, but faces grounding orders or airspace bans from all of Europe as well as Australia, China and other states in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 people Sunday. Garneau said Tuesday that he has no plans to ground Canadas fleet of 737 Max 8 aircraft, but that all options are on the table. That could include grounding the planes, but at the same time I will evaluate all possibilities and not jump to conclusions before we can clearly evaluate the situation, Garneau said, stressing he would not be influenced by emotions. The Ethiopian Airlines crash, which killed everyone on boardincluding 18 Canadianshas raised concerns over parallels to a Lion Air crash of the same model of aircraft in Indonesia that killed 189 people last October. Earlier Tuesday, authorities from the U.K., France, Germany and Ireland announced grounding orders or airspace bans on the aircraft. They were followed by similar orders from the Netherlands and Poland. Turkish Airlines also announced Tuesday it is grounding all Boeing 737 Max aircraft in its fleet until further notice. A grounding order in Canada would prove costly for Canadian airlines, says Karl Moore, a professor at McGill Universitys Desautels Faculty of Management. It would have a considerable impact on both of them, because thats a lot of flights every day, he said. And theyre new planes that dont require a lot of maintenance. Youd have to cancel some flights. Youd try to use other planes, which are suboptimal. A Q-400 is too small. You could use two big planes, which means that youre wasting money on fuel and youre not making money. The airlines are also confronting passengers who want to re-book their flights to avoid the vexed plane. Flight Centre travel agency said Canadian airlines are not waiving flight-change or cancellation fees for passengers who want to switch to another aircraft. The stance from Air Canada and WestJet Airlines Ltd.which collectively tout 24 Max 8s in their fleetscomes amid a wave of requests from worried travellers so far excluded from goodwill policies. Air Canada and WestJet did not respond to requests for comment on fee waiving. We continue to monitor the situation and based on current info, and recommendations by government safety regulators, Transport Canada, the FAA, and the manufacturer, we will continue to operate our normal B737 schedule and our current re-booking policies remain in place, Air Canada said in a tweet Tuesday. At least one of the airlines flights has been affected. Air Canada Flight 860, scheduled to arrive in Halifax at 3 p.m. and return to London at 9:21 p.m. tonight, was cancelled. Garneau said Monday that his department is working with the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority to determine if action is required. Boeing said late Monday the FAA has told the U.S.-based aircraft manufacturer it must install safety-related software updates to the 737 Max 8s. Cardinal George Pell Receives 6-Year Prison Sentence for Historical Sexual Abuse Charges MELBOURNE, AustraliaA worldwide audience watched as Australias highest-ranking Catholic and a former top adviser to Pope Francis was sentenced to a maximum of six years in prison for sexually abusing two choirboys in the 1990s. County Court Chief Judge Peter Kidds sentencing of Cardinal George Pell was broadcast live from Victorias County Court in Melbourne on March 13, just a few blocks away from the maximum security prison where the former archbishop was being held. Kidd said he was aware that he was passing his sentence at a time where, in recent years, there has been the exposure of child sexual abuse within institutional settings, including within the Catholic Church. Pell was found guilty by a jury of 12 in December 2018. The jury was the second to hear the case after the first had to be discharged when they failed to reach a unanimous decision. I am required to sentence you today in accordance with the rule of law independently of any outside influences, Kidd said. I must, at law, give full effect to the jurys verdict. The County Courts largest courtroom was filled with abuse survivors, advocates, and a global television audience. In sentencing Pell, Kidd said he had dismissed mental impairment as a factor in Pells decision to offend. What you did was so egregious that it is fanciful to suggest that you may not have fully appreciated this, Kidd said. The judge took into account the victims emotional well-being and the impact the abuse has had on their relationships, culminating in an immediate and profound impact on their lives. Kidd also addressed the relationship of trust between Pell and the victims, and the context of power imbalance. I think you did give thought or reflection to this offending and the only reasonable inference from the brazen circumstances of your offending is that you had a degree of confidence that the victims would not complain either immediately by running out or at some later stage, he said. You were a pillar of St. Patricks community by virtue of your role as archbishop. Kidd said that as a result of Pell maintaining his innocence, which is his right to do so, there was no evidence of any remorse or contrition to reduce your sentence. Pells age and health were significant factors in Kidds sentencing. The judge also ruled that the 22-year delay in sentencing since the offense occurred had also given Pell the opportunity to demonstrate the capacity to lead an otherwise blameless life. Kidd said it was his conclusion that Pell had effectively reformed. He added that, although he was persuaded that Pell was not a risk to the community, factors like Pells advanced age were balanced in his sentencing by the need to properly reflect the purposes of general deterrence, denunciation, and just punishment. The court must demonstrate the grave consequences of violating the law and deter would-be offenders, Kidd said. The offenses you, Cardinal Pell, have committed, were each intentional offenses. Pell is considered to be a serious sexual offender in relation to two of the charges. The prosecution did not seek a disproportionate sentence, Kidd said. Guilty Finding The Melbourne jury found Pell, 77, guilty of five charges on Dec. 11, 2018one of orally raping a child and four of committing indecent acts with children. The cardinal was charged with the 1996 raping of a choirboy and molesting another in the priests sacristy of St. Patricks Cathedral in East Melbourne, where Pell was archbishop at the time. His victims were two 13-year-old boys on scholarship to the prestigious St. Kevins College. The jury also found Pell guilty of assaulting one of the boys a second time in early 1997 when the archbishop pushed the boy against a corridor wall after a Sunday Mass and groped him briefly. One of the two victims died of a heroin overdose in 2014, while the other, now in his 30s, brought the allegations to police after years of struggling to understand what he had experienced as a child. Suppression Order Lifted The verdict was first made public on Feb. 26 after a court suppression order on the trial that prevented media reporting had been lifted. The suppression order had been issued by Kidd on June 25, 2018, as a second jury considered separate abuse allegations against Pell that have since been dropped by the prosecution, who said there wasnt enough evidence to suggest that Pells touching of a young boy was deliberate. Kidd said at the time that the suppression order was to prevent a real and substantial risk of prejudice to the proper administration of justice. Shortly after the suppression order was lifted, the victims lawyer released a statement on behalf of the victim. Thank you for your interest in this case, he wrote. Like many survivors, I have experienced shame, loneliness, depression and struggle. Like many survivors it has taken me years to understand the impact on my life. At some point we realise that we trusted someone we should have feared and we fear those genuine relationships that we should trust, he added. I would like to thank my family near and far for their support of me, and of each other. I need space and time to cope with the ongoing criminal process. I understand this is a big news story but please dont reveal my identity. Pells lawyers also released a statement on his behalf. Cardinal George Pell has always maintained his innocence and continues to do so. An appeal has been lodged against his conviction and he will await the outcome of the appeal process, the statement said. Although originally the Cardinal faced allegations from a number of complainants, all charges except for those the subject of the appeal have now been either withdrawn, discharged or discontinued. He will not be commenting in the meantime. The hearings in the Court of Appeals are scheduled to be heard June 5 and 6. According to Pells barrister Robert Richter QC, Pell will argue that the jury relied too heavily on one victims evidence and that it didnt constitute proof beyond reasonable doubt that the claims are true. He has also put forward that Kidd erred in preventing the defense from displaying moving footage supporting Pells version of events. One of Pells supporters, leader of the National Civic Council Peter Westmore, told The Epoch Times that public opinion in Victoria has been totally prejudiced against a fair hearing because, in part, of the crimes committed by other people in the Catholic church. And they are crimes. The Melbourne court allowed the live broadcast of Kidd reading out his sentencing remarks in a commitment to the principles of open justice. It is rare for Australian courtrooms to allow live broadcasts. Pell is the worlds most senior Catholic leader to be found guilty of such crimes. In sentencing you today, Cardinal Pell, I am not sitting in judgment of the Catholic religion or the Catholic Church, Kidd said. It is George Pell who falls to be sentenced. Kidd acknowledged the extraordinary and widespread publicity and public comment surrounding Pells case and observed examples of a witch-hunt or lynch mob mentality in relation to Cardinal Pell. I utterly condemn such behavior. You are to be punished only for the particular wrongdoing you have been convicted of of sexually abusing two boys in the 1990s, Kidd said. If the sentence stands, Pell will be a registered sex offender for life. The sentence has a non-parole period of three years and eight months. Catholic Community Responds Previously, Archbishop Mark Coleridge, president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, issued a public statement in response to Pells conviction on Feb. 26. We respect the Australian legal system, he said. Our hope, at all times, is that through this process, justice will be served In the meantime, we pray for all those who have been abused and their loved ones. However, this may not be enough to placate other members of the community who are furious with the institution of the Catholic Church for not adopting a zero tolerance approach to pedophiliac priests and those who cover up such acts. Child sexual abuse scandals have rocked not only Australia but the United States, Chile, Germany, Ireland, and more. I think this is a tipping point for the Catholic Church, Fiona Patten, who leads the Reason Party, told The Epoch Times. I would be so disappointed if the Catholic Church did not remove the secrecy of the confession. I would be so disappointed if the Church did not accept mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse, which to date they have not. You can read Judge Kidds full sentencing here. With reporting by Rita Li Queensland Member of Parliament for Bonney Sam O'Connor saw Shen Yun at the Gold Coast's Home of the Arts, in Australia, on March 13, 2019. (Jenny Lai/NTD Television) GOLD COAST, AustraliaA Queensland Member of Parliament has extended his deepest gratitude to Shen Yun Performing Arts for sharing the magical world of ancient China with the Gold Coast, at the citys third and last performance on March 13, 2019. Queensland Member for Bonney Sam OConnor thanked the entire Shen Yun dance company for showcasing 5,000 years of Chinese civilization at the Gold Coast Home of the Arts on March 12 and 13. Thank you for coming and putting on such a great show, it was very professional and I thought they were all exceptional in what they did and we look forward to having them back, said OConnor, who is the shadow assistant minister for youth and to the opposition leader. It was wonderful, it was an extraordinary display and it was fantastic to have something like that here on the Gold Coast this is a real honor for our city to host this and [I am] very proud to see it today. When asked how he would rate New York-based Shen Yuns world-class classical Chinese dance, live orchestra music, and 3-D animated backdrops, he could not fault the show. A hundred percent, they did a fantastic job of conveying that and showing that spirituality through the art, OConnor said. The whole thing was just mind-blowing, especially some of the acrobatics, it was extraordinary to see. It was a very impressive performance and especially with that moving backdrop. That was great to see how that linked-in with all the dancers and everythingit was wonderful. He commended Shen Yuns mission to revive Chinas lost traditions. Oh wonderful, its a fantastic mission [to revive Chinas lost culture], he said. Good to see at our show with audiences all around the world. OConnor also found the performance to be valuable in discovering the divine origins of Chinese culture. Ive never seen anything like that, so it was fabulous to see, he said. I wouldnt have even known that that existed without this sort of a show. I wasnt even aware that it was being lost. He felt compelled to see the performance when he learnt the show was being presented by local Falun Dafa practitioners, a peaceful spiritual group in his electorate that he and the Gold Coast City Council has supported many times in the past. To see some of the Falun Dafa there was incredible to see just what goes on over in China, to show that to an audience I believe is very important, OConnor said. High-profile members of the citys business community were also captivated by the beauty of the performance. Neumann Contracting Founder John Neumann loved watching Shen Yun. I just love the beauty of it all, actually. The colors and the acrobatics, the whole show was very, very well done, he said. His wife Gabriele, who works as a house manager at the family business, had seen performances in China before but never saw anything quite as elegant as Shen Yun. We have seen ballet shows in China and their performances were much more acrobatic than ballet, and here Im very surprised how beautiful and elegant the [Shen Yun] dancers are, and meaningful, she said. Its a wonderful show, and it should stay here longer than just for a few performances. She said Shen Yun lives up to the promise of being a world-class performance. Definitely. I would say its very much worthwhile seeing. It is very artistic, it is very sweet and tender and reminds me much more of real ballet than the acrobatic ballet I know from some performances I know in China, Gabriele said. John, whose company is currently renovating a small picture theater in Italys Tuscany region, said he would be very honored to host a show of such high caliber as Shen Yun. If we could afford to get them there it would be marvelous, he said. We [will] get some of the leading artists from Florence and Pisa and they are all in that general area there we [are] just hoping that we can do something special there. Gold Coast City Brass Band Musical Director Denise Collins commended Shen Yuns combination of Chinese and Western musical instruments for creating a beautifully unique sound. Chinese music is always written in the pentatonic scale and that was very evident but it was beautiful, it makes it a very special sound, she said. The [erhu] was beautiful. Very interesting that theyre playing on just the two stringsthat was fascinating the harpist was beautiful [too]. I grew up with a harpist, Im a flutist myself, so I was listening a lot to the flutes. Collins also enjoyed the solo song towards the end of the show. I was very interested in the soloist, she said. It was beautiful. She applauded Shen Yuns creative storytelling in introducing Chinas divine origins. I thought it was very tastefully done and told its story very clearly, Collins said. The dance is beautiful and it leaves itself open for that sort of interpretation. Collins revealed she also used to practice interpretive ballet and found Shen Yun to be valuable in gaining a deeper understanding of classical Chinese dance. I have always realized the diversity within Chinese dance. Its very acrobatic as well that went beyond my abilities, she said. What I love most was the total unanimous movement, arms, legs all at the same height. Its beautiful and so smooth, their whole body movements are so smooth. Very beautifully done. For anyone wanting to see Shen Yun for the first time, Collins recommends sitting there with an open mind and let it wash over you. With reporting by NTD Television, Nina Yan, Mary Yuan, and Richard Szabo. The Epoch Times considers Shen Yun Performing Arts the significant cultural event of our time and has covered audience reactions since the companys inception in 2006. J&J Labeled `Kingpin of Opioid Drug Epidemic by Oklahoma Johnson & Johnson was at the center of the burgeoning opioid-addiction crisis in America, operating like a drug kingpin by selling its version of the powerful painkiller as well as the active ingredient, according to newly unsealed court filings. J&J, through subsidiaries based in Tasmania, grew opium poppies used in its Nucynta medication and sold to other drugmakers for use in their opioid-based products, court filings in Oklahoma show. The New Brunswick, New Jersey-based company also wrongfully targeted children and the elderly in its marketing, the state contends. Those actions made J&J a kingpin behind the public-health emergency, profiting at every stage, lawyers for Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter said in a February state court document. Oklahoma is slated to be the first state to bring claims against opioid makers such as J&Js Janssen unit and Purdue Pharma LP to trial in May. The state is seeking more than $25 billion in damages and penalties over what it says was the illegal marketing of the painkillers. There are 36 states and more than 1,600 U.S. cities and counties suing drugmakers and distributors seeking to collect billions of dollars spent to address the fallout from the public-health crisis tied to opioid addiction. The Axios news service first reported on the Oklahoma filing. J&J officials said March 11 that U.S. health regulators oversaw its operation of the opium units, which were later sold. Importantly, as a supplier, we did not have any role in the manufacturing, development, sales, and marketing of other manufacturers finished products, Andrew Wheatley, a J&J spokesman, said in an emailed statement. J&J, Purdue, and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. failed last week to persuade a judge to delay the Oklahoma trial so the companies could complete pretrial information exchanges with the state. Now, Hunter is asking a judge to unseal material J&J turned over for trial that details the companys role in producing opium used in drugs and scientific tests. In 2016, J&J agreed to sell its opium-poppy processing business in the Australian state of Tasmania to U.S. private equity firm SK Capital Partners LP. The former J&J unit, Tasmanian Alkaloids Pty Ltd., is one of a limited number of companies granted permission to process poppies to make opiates for medical and scientific needs. The documents in the Oklahoma case also focus on whether J&J officials improperly marketed its opioid-and-fentanyl-based painkillers to vulnerable populations, such as children, the elderly and veterans. Those groups have a right to the information to protect themselves from becoming the next victims of addiction/death courtesy of J&J, Hunters lawyers said in the filing. In these filings, J&J countered Hunter, was seeking to use sensationalistic headlines and to poison potential jurors against Jansen in advance of trial. J&Js Janssen unit sold the U.S. rights to Nucynta in 2015 to DepoMed Inc., renamed Assertio Therapeutics Inc., for $1.05 billion. J&J still sells Duragesic, a fentanyl-based pain patch. By Jef Feeley Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) speaks to reporters after announcing her candidacy for President of the United States, at Howard University in Washington on Jan. 21, 2019. (Al Drago/Getty Images) Kamala Harriss Socialist Ties Part 1: Red diaper baby Commentary Democratic presidential primary front-runner Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) recently told reporters at a campaign stop in New Hampshire that she is not a democratic socialist. The next question should have been obvious: Well, then, what kind of socialist are you? Harris has been surrounded by socialists and communists her entire lifebeginning with her staunchly Marxist father. Harris is the older child of two 1960s Berkeley radicals: Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher from the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India, and Donald J. Harris, an economist from Jamaica. Gopalan and Donald Harris were very active during the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests of the era, often taking baby Kamala to protests in a stroller, according to a recent article in San Jose daily newspaper The Mercury News on the Harris family. The couple separated after Donald Harris took a professorship at the University of MadisonWisconsin. Gopalan filed for divorce in 1971 and won custody of her two daughters in 1973. Kamala and her younger sister, Mayanow her presidential campaign chairregularly visited their father during school holidays. In 1972, Donald Harris left the University of MadisonWisconsin to begin a visiting professorship of economics at Stanford University. On Nov. 3, 1976, an article published in the Stanford Daily newspaper claimed that more than 250 students were clamoring for more Marxist perspectives. Shortly thereafter, a letter was published in the Stanford Daily on Nov. 12, 1976, signed by the Stanford branch of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), with signatures from members Bill Dittenhofer, Ari Cohen, Eric Berg, David OConnor, Arthur Slepian, Sandy Thompson, and Tracy Mott: The program in Marxian economics would be much weaker than it is today if had it not been for massive student efforts in the form of petitions, open meetings [It] was only after a divisive one and a one-half year struggle that the opposing elements in the department gave into student pressure and conceded to the appointment of Prof. Donald Harris. Thus the presence of Marxian economists here simply indicates the success of the student struggle. The recent addition of course offerings in Marxian economics is again a direct result of student pressure, not departmental benevolence. After an 18-month campaign by the union, Harris was offered and accepted a permanent professorship. The URPE (which last year celebrated its 50th anniversary) began in 1968 as a spinoff of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). URPE has overlapped considerably with Americas largest Marxist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), since its founding in 1982. One of professor Donald Harriss Stanford supporters and URPE letter signatories, Mott, is now a professor at the University of Denver, where he works with local DSA activists. During the summer and fall of 2006, the DSAs Political Action Committee helped DSA activists around the country host house parties to raise funds that helped Bernie Sanders become the sole socialist in the U.S. Senate. According to DSA magazine Democratic Left: Boulder, Colorado, guests braved a downpour to attend the party at the home of Leslie Lomas and hear a talk about giving money by economics professor and socialist Tracy Mott. According to The Mercury News: Several of his former students said it wasnt accurate to describe him [Donald Harris] as Marxist, although he might have been a lot more sympathetic to Marx than a lot of other economists were at the time, said Tracy Mott. Mott was being disingenuous. Several Stanford Daily articles at the time described Donald Harris as Marxist, and Mott and his friends made it very clear that Harris was hired specifically for his radical ideology. Donald Harris wrote papers such as The Black Ghetto as Colony: A Theoretical Critique (1972) and Capitalist Exploitation and Black Labor: Some Conceptual Issues (1978). Harriss Marxism was never questioned or denied at any stage of his career. URPE also was very close to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), once the largest and most influential of the far-left think tanks in Washington. Since its founding in 1963, the IPS has consistently followed a pro-Marxist line on foreign policy, defense, and economic issues. To put its policy recommendations into action, the IPS built networks of contacts among congressional legislators and their staffs, academics, government officials, and the national media, according to the book The War Called Peace: The Soviet Peace Offensive. The IPS also was on very close terms with representatives of communist Cuba and the former Soviet Union. In 1978, in an article in National Review, Brian Crozier, director of the London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict, described IPS as the perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB. In the 1988 book Winning America: Ideas and Leadership for the 1990s, edited by IPS leaders Marcus Raskin and Chester Hartman, the IPS and DSA affiliate Sean Gervasi recommended a slate of radical colleagues as potential appointees in a hoped-for new Democratic administration after the 1988 election. Gervasis wish list including the following: Barry BluestoneSDS founder, DSA affiliate, URPE member. Served as a member of the senior policy staff of former Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.). Gar AlperovitzIPS, DSA, Brookings Institute. Robert BrowneSDS, IPS. Jeff FauxDSA affiliate. Faux has worked as an economist with the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity and the U.S. Departments of State, Commerce, and Labor. Carol OCleireacainDSA member, Brookings Institute. In 2014, she became Detroit deputy mayor for economic policy, planning, and strategy. Howard WachtelIPS, URPE member. Art MacEwanURPE member, DSA affiliate. And, of course, Donald Harris, Marxist professor and Kamala Harriss father. Republican George H.W. Bush won the 1988 election, so professor Harris stayed on at Stanford until his retirement. Ironically, Kamala Harriss most formidable opponent in the Democratic primary so far is Bernie Sanders, a favorite of professor Harriss old URPE and DSA colleagues. When Sanders drops out of a very crowded Democratic primary, will his supporters cross over to support Kamala Harris? I believe they will. In fact, I believe it has already been decided. Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Members of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's HSI gang unit carry out an operation in Maryland on May 20, 2016. (ICE) Maryland Democrats Pushing for State to Become Sanctuary for Illegal Immigrants Sheriff Chuck Jenkins ended up with two suspected cartel hitmen in his Frederick County, Maryland, jail last week. Maryland State Police made the arrests after discovering drugs and guns in their vehicle. Jenkins said the only way that jail officers were able to determine the two men were in the United States illegally and were alleged hitmen was through his countys cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But, Jenkins said, that cooperation could soon be blocked if a raft of new bills pass the Maryland legislatureeffectively rendering Maryland a sanctuary state for illegal aliens, by shielding them from immigration authorities. Jenkins said that if he was prohibited from communicating with ICE and honoring a detainer from the agency, the alleged hitmen could have been released on a bondwith no one knowing their cartel connections. The sheriff serves in one of three Maryland countiesalong with Anne Arundel and Harfordthat currently cooperates with ICE through its 287(g) program. The program allows for ICE to be alerted when an illegal alien is booked into a county correctional facility. The only inquiries that we make are once an individual is arrested and taken to our booking center at the jail. Everybody is asked two questions: Where were you born? and, What country are you a citizen of? If the detainee answers anything other than the United States, an immigration status check is conducted using the federal database. Deputies never ask for an individuals immigration status while responding to an incident, during a traffic stop, or while conducting an investigation, Jenkins said. Severing ICE The bill that Jenkins is most concerned about is House Bill 913 (HB 913), which would essentially sever communication between local or state law enforcement and ICE. Theyve got these laws written so tightly, you couldnt even pick up the telephone and make a call to ICE, Jenkins said. HB 913 would also prohibit cooperation with an ICE detainer, which is a request by the immigration agency to hold an illegal alien until an agent can pick him or her up. Detainers also ask a local or state jail to alert ICE when an illegal alien is to be released from custody. Under HB 913, ICE would have to instead produce a federal judicial warrant. Both require probable cause, but a judicial warrant requires a judge to sign off. The bill would also prevent correctional officers from supplying ICE the address of a person released from jail and their time of release, said Maryland House Delegate David Moon, a Democrat and HB 913 sponsor. However, they would not restrict ICE from accessing this information, Moon said. Fifty-six Democrats co-sponsored the bill. I do not consider this as a sanctuary bill, Moon said. Jenkins disagrees. He said ICE doesnt have any information on illegal aliens who have never been apprehended before, and HB 913 would prevent immigration authorities from knowing about those aliens. There is no way for ICE to really know, unless they cooperate with local law enforcement, he said. ICE doesnt necessarily know if an arrestee is an illegal alien. If hes never been encountered by law enforcementeither in the interior or on the bordertheres no way to know because theres no record of them. Jenkins said the safest way is the current method, in which most of the cooperation and transfer of custody takes place through the corrections system. He said he doesnt view ICE detainers any differently than those issued from agencies such as the FBI, the U.S. Marshals, or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. We will detain someone for any other federal agency. So why not ICE? he said. Jenkins testified against the bill on March 5 on behalf of all 24 elected sheriffs in Maryland. Public Safety Gary McElhaney, assistant secretary with Marylands Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, said the implications of the sanctuary bills are particularly pertinent for Department of Corrections (DOC) inmates. Twenty-five percent of the undocumented immigrants in the DOC system are there for murder; 30 percent for sex crimes. So over half our undocumented population in the DOC is in for serious crimes. And we do alert the Department of Homeland Security when those folks are to be released, he said. Under the new bill, that alert would be forbidden. And the bill goes even further, to prohibit detainers and warrants from other states being honored. The state would be obligated to release a detainee or an inmate who does not have a federal judicial warrantwhich excludes detainees and inmates who have outstanding state warrants, McElhaney said during a bill hearing on March 5 in Annapolis. This would result in an inordinate amount of erroneous releases and would severely jeopardize public safety. However, he said, the inmate wouldnt be released if they are a U.S. citizen. If an inmate is a U.S. citizen, and was about to be released after serving a murder sentence, for example, but another state had issued a detainer or warrant for that inmate, the inmate would be turned over to that state. Another way the bill would shield illegal immigrants from ICE is for charges that dont require fingerprinting. For DUI arrests or other arrests related to traffic or other infractions, there are no fingerprints taken, and therefore, ICE would not automatically be notified, said Tom Williams, legislative liaison for the Maryland State Police, at the bill hearing. California, which enforced statewide sanctuary policies at the beginning of 2018, has come under fire for several high-profile cases, in which illegal aliens were released instead of being turned over to ICE and then went on to commit serious crimes. For instance, police officer Ronil Singh was killed while conducting a traffic stop early on Dec. 26, 2018, in Newman, California. Gustavo Perez Arriaga, the illegal alien who has been charged with Singhs murder, had twice been arrested on drunk-driving charges, but not turned over to ICE. Enforcement-Free Zones While law enforcement officers testified vehemently against the bills, advocacy groups argued that they are essential. Aside from HB 913, two other bills have been introduced to the House of Delegates. One, HB 1165, says that unless its required by law, no government agent can inquire about an individuals immigration status. The other, HB 1273, requires hospitals and schools to develop policies restricting ICE from operating on their premises, in conjunction with the states attorney general, Brian Frosh. Delegate Jheanelle Wilkins, sponsor of HB 1273, said the bill would provide illegal immigrants enforcement-free zones. Our hospitals and our schools really should be safe places that are protected. And its critical for the health and educational outcomes of our residents that everyone is welcome and safe, Wilkins said on March 5. She accused ICE of not fully enforcing its 2011 policy of avoiding enforcement operations in sensitive locations such as schools, hospitals, and churches. Nora Eidelman, deputy director of Community Legal Services of Prince Georges County, said she wants the scope of the bill expanded to include courthouses. Several illegal immigrants testified, saying they are scared they will be asked about their immigration status. Im scared to go around and go about my business with the fear of being labeled as illegal, one woman said through a translator. Vicky Cutroneo, who spoke on behalf of the Board of Education for Howard County, said her board adopted a set of policies in 2017 that rejected immigration enforcement on school property. Even after we made that resolution, families really are afraid to come to meetings, to advocate. I know that when we give away laptops, theyre afraid to come and get the laptop, Cutroneo said. But Jenkins said HB 1273 is totally unnecessary. Boards of Education, higher learning institutions, and hospitals dont participate in immigration enforcement whatsoever; at all, he said. And thats certainly by their own policy, we all understand that. There is no enforcement in those locations. Those locations are not targeted by ICE. Chilling Effect Nicholas Katz, a lawyer for advocacy group Casa de Maryland, said he estimates around 1 million foreign-born immigrants live in Maryland. However, he didnt clarify whether he lumped legal and illegal immigrants together in that number. Casa de Maryland receives about 40 percent of its funding from Maryland state and local governments, according to a report by Jim Simpson. Every year, CASA helps thousands of Maryland residents apply for benefits and access services, Katz said. A 2017 report published by the Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates illegal aliens and their children residing in Maryland cost taxpayers $2.3 billion per year, when including medical, education, justice system, and welfare costs. If those individuals fear that their interactions with government agents are going to lead to a pipeline to deportation, or that they or a family member will be asked about their immigration or citizenship status, theyre going to choose to not to access those benefitswhich they desperately need, Katz said. This bill strengthens public safety, because it ensures people feel safe accessing law enforcement, reporting crimes, and victims arent afraid to report whats happened to them because they think theyll be questioned about their immigration status. Jenkins argued that politicians and activists deliberately mislead the public about the so-called chilling effect in immigrant communities where law enforcement cooperates with ICE. Law enforcement officers dont ask the immigration status of witnesses and victims of crimes, unless they themselves have been arrested for a crime, he said. And protections such as the U-visa already exist for illegal aliens who are victims or witnesses of crime. Thats why I dont buy this argument [of] the chilling effect, Jenkins said in a previous interview. The local immigrant communities want to make them safer. They dont want to be victims in their own communities. And we find that, by and large, the immigrant community cooperates with us because they know those protections are there. Safer With ICE Jenkins goes one step further and says his county is safer specifically because he cooperates with ICE in the 287(g) program. I truly think theres a direct correlation. We have one of the lowest crime rates in the region. And we dont have the magnitude of gang crime. MS-13 gang crime is up [almost] 70 percent in Montgomery County, he said. Montgomery County, which introduced sanctuary policies in 2014, is a hotbed for MS-13. Many MS-13 gang members have entered the country by crossing the southwest border illegally and being granted unaccompanied minor protections. Gang members also target other unaccompanied minors for recruitment, often in local schools. In the past five full fiscal years, almost 260,000 unaccompanied minors have been apprehended by Border Patrol at the southwest border and more than 182,000 have been released to sponsors around the country. Maryland has absorbed more than 14,000 unaccompanied minors over the past five fiscal years. We probably run into more transnational gang members, especially over the last two to three years, after the surge of undocumented children from the border into our county, Jenkins said. So weve seen an increase in MS-13 coming through our system. They came here, say at 14, 15 years old; its four or five years later, theyre adults committing serious crimes. But, he said Frederick County has had five consecutive years of double-digit decreases in its serious crime rate, including homicides, rapes, robberies, and sexual assault. In the past 11 years of working with ICE in the 287(g) program, Frederick County has placed 1,496 criminal aliens into removal proceedings, including more than 106 criminal gang members, Jenkins said. Theres no one who would argue and say thats not beneficial to public safety in Frederick County, he said. Frank Madrigal, who is the Baltimore deputy field office director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, says cooperation and information sharing among law enforcement agencies is critical to public safety. The notion that local officers might be legally barred from such cooperation with a federal law enforcement agency could put the public they are both sworn to serve and protect at greater risk, Madrigal said. Sanctuary policies like those proposed in Maryland could permit dangerous criminal aliens, with no lawful basis to remain in this country, to be released and to potentially re-victimize the communities to which they are returning. ICE spokesperson Justine Whelan said having to produce federal judicial warrants in place of the current immigration detainers to gain custody of an illegal alien is difficult for ICE. Officers often need to conduct an in-person interview with a suspected illegal alien in order to establish probable cause for an immigration detainer, she said. These interviews are routinely conducted in correctional facilities, which many sanctuary jurisdictions bar ICE from entering. The Fourth Amendment has long permitted civil immigration arrests and detention, regardless of the fact that the probable-cause determination for such violations are made by executive branch officials rather than a magistrate, Whelan said. There is no known mechanism for a federal judge or magistrate to issue an arrest warrant in civil and administrative matters. Outcome Maryland would join California as a sanctuary state if the bills passwhich seems likely, considering the spread of 99 Democrats and 42 Republicans in the House. The same result is likely in the Democratic-controlled Senate. If signed by the governor, the bills will go into effect on Oct. 1. Mom Arrested After Driving Around With Dead Daughter in Florida A woman accused of stabbing her daughter to death pulled up to an Orlando hospital on March 10 to ask for help for her daughter, but the girl was already dead from multiple stab wounds, Florida authorities said. Rose Alcides Rivera, 28, confessed to repeatedly stabbing her daughter Aleyda multiple times while they were in a vehicle and then driving around until the 11-year-old died from her wounds. The child had 15 stab wounds to her back and a defensive wound on her right arm, ABC News reports. Rivera ultimately drove to the Orlando hospital where she was taken into custody. She has been charged with first-degree murder in her daughters death. As for motive, Rivera told investigators she killed the 11-year-old to keep her from having sex, but the Orange County sheriffs office believes her claims to be unfounded. Based on what we know and what weve found so far, we believe that part to be false, Sheriff John Mina told reporters on March 11. Again, we are doing everything we normally do in those types of allegations and investigations to unfound that completely, but we dont believe thats credible. The sheriffs office also said that Rivera had no known substance abuse issues and no known history of violence. Mina says that his office believes the stabbing did actually happen in the vehicle, and that Rivera did drive around with the girl afterward. He also confirmed that at some point after the stabbing took place and before they arrived at the hospital, Rivera took her daughters body out of the car and then put her back in the car. Detective Dorothy Rivera told reporters that Rivera was originally from Florida, moved to Texas 12 years ago, and had moved back to Florida in December. The detective went on to say, up until a few days before the incident, Rivera had been living with another family member. It is unclear where she spent the days leading up to the death of her daughter. While at the hospital, Rivera was treated for a wound to her wrist, the detective confirmed. She added that, while Rivera claimed it was an attempt at suicide, the wound was only superficial. Mina also said these types of cases can be quite hard on the community and detectives who work the case, especially a case like this one where the child was killed by her mother, but the sheriffs office would remain professional. It is very difficult to investigate, but you have to stay with a clear mind to make sure you prepare the best case that you can to the State Attorney in order for this to get justice, Detective Rivera said. Abuse behind closed doors is difficult to prevent if nobody speaks up, which is why the sheriffs office urged anyone who is aware of domestic violence or any kinds of abuse to call the authorities. A Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane being built for TUI Group sits parked in the background at right at Boeing Co.'s Renton Assembly Plant in Renton, Wash., on March 11, 2019. (Ted S. Warren/AP Photo) More Boeings Grounded Amid Global Probe Into Ethiopia Crash HEJERE, EthiopiaBritain, France, and Germany on March 12 joined a rapidly growing number of countries that have grounded a new Boeing plane involved in the Ethiopian Airlines disaster or turning it back from their airspace, while investigators in Ethiopia looked for parallels with a similar crash just five months ago. Pressure grew on the United States to take action over the Boeing 737 Max 8 as Asian, Middle Eastern, and then European nations and carriers gave in to concerns. Some cited customers frightened by the sight of the March 10 crash in clear weather that killed all 157 people on board. Ethiopian Airlines had issued no new updates on the crash as of nightfall as 35 countries that lost citizens waited for answers. Some insights into the disaster and its cause could take months, aviation experts said. Indicating possible trouble with a reportedly damaged flight data recorder, British regulators said they based their decision on the fact that we do not currently have sufficient information from the flight data recorder we have. Turkish Airlines, Oman, Norwegian Air Shuttle, and South Korean airline Eastar Jet were among the latest to halt use of the Boeing model. Ireland, the Netherlands, Malaysia, Australia, and Singapore suspended all flights into or out of their countries. Already, some were turning the planes away. A Turkish Airlines official said two Britain-bound planes returned to Istanbul after British airspace was closed to the aircraft. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. The U.S.-based Boeing, however, has said it has no reason to pull the popular aircraft from the skies. It doesnt intend to issue new recommendations about the aircraft to customers. Its technical team joined American, Israeli, United Arab Emirates, Kenyan, and other aviation experts in the investigation led by Ethiopian authorities. The Federal Aviation Administration said it expects Boeing would soon complete improvements to an automated anti-stall system suspected of contributing to the deadly crash of another new Boeing 737 Max 8 in October 2018. Some U.S. airlines expressed support for the Boeing model, and American Airlines and Southwest continued flying them. A vice president for American, the worlds biggest carrier that has 24 Max 8s, said they had full confidence in the aircraft. Safety experts cautioned against drawing too many comparisons too soon with the Lion Air crash in Indonesia in October that killed 189 people. But others in the United States began pressing for action. The Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which represents more than 26,000 flight attendants at American Airlines, called on CEO Doug Parker to strongly consider grounding these planes until an investigation can be performed. Consumer Reports called on airlines and the FAA to ground the jets until a thorough safety investigation is complete. Even President Donald Trump weighed in, tweeting that additional complexity creates danger in modern aircraft and hinders pilots from making split second decisions to ensure passengers safety. He did not specifically mention the crashes but said that I dont know about you, but I dont want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. The Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed six minutes after taking off for Nairobi, killing people from 35 countries. It should take five days before victims remains are identified, Ethiopian Airlines spokesman Asrat Begashaw told the AP. A pilot who saw the crash site minutes after the disaster told the AP the plane appeared to have slid directly into the ground. Capt. Solomon Gizaw was among the first people dispatched to find the plane, which was discovered by Ethiopias air force. There was nothing to see, he said. It looked like the earth had swallowed the aircraft. We were surprised! He said it explained why rescue officials quickly sent bulldozers to begin digging out large pieces of debris. Ethiopian Airlines, widely seen as Africas best-managed airline, grounded its remaining four 737 Max 8s until further notice as an extra safety precaution. The carrier had been using five of the planes and was awaiting delivery of 25 more. As the global team searched for answers, a woman stood near the crash site and wailed. Kebebew Legess said she was the mother of a young Ethiopian Airlines crew member among the dead. She would have been 25 years old but God would not allow her, she wept. My daughter, my little one. By Elias Meseret and Yidnek Kirubel Opinion Policies Editorials are longer opinion pieces that are written by a group of community members recruited across campus who address relevant issues on a local, national and international level. Editorials are research-based. The purpose of the Editorial Board is to promote discussion concerning relevant issues in the community while advising on possible solutions. Topics are chosen via relevancy and interests of the members, which are then discussed by the Editorial Board in order to reach a general consensus concerning the topic or issue. 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These contain similar research-based content and need to be at least 400 words in length. The following requirements should be met: first and last name, email and relation or position to Iowa State. Emails must be tied to the submitted guest column or it will not be accepted or published. Pseudonyms are prohibited and the writer will be banned from submissions. Read our full Opinion Policies here. Updated on 10/7/2020 Most Democratic 2020 Candidates Reject Socialist Label But Back Socialist Agenda News Analysis As President Donald Trump and his allies ramp up criticism of socialism, most of the Democrats running for president in 2020 are going out of their way to clarify that they are not socialists. But despite distancing themselves from the label, at least four of the leading candidates are running on platforms largely consisting of socialist policies. A March 3 poll by The Wall Street Journal and NBC News shows that less than one in five Americans view socialism in a positive light, making the socialist affiliation political suicide. Despite that, running for president on a platform consisting of socialist policies still appears to be a safe bet, with five of the leading 2020 Democratic candidates having co-sponsored the Medicare for All bill by socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the Green New Deal resolution by socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), and Sanders sponsored both the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. In early polls, Sanders, Harris, Warren, and Booker lead the pack of 2020 Democrats who have officially announced their candidacy. Of the five, all but Sanders have officially rejected the socialist label. None are on the record describing Medicare for All and the Green New Deal as socialist policies even though both measures rely on government expansion, wealth redistribution through heavy taxation, and state encroachment on private property and enterprise. In an interview aired on March 10, Warren told CBS that its just wrong to label her as a socialist. Booker and Gillibrand are, likewise, not calling themselves socialists, and Harris said during a campaign stop in New Hampshire on Feb. 18 that she is not a democratic socialist. While Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez describe themselves as democratic socialists, there is little distinction between democratic socialism and socialism in the literature of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the group both are affiliated with. The groups constitution describes its members as socialists who reject an economic order based on private profit. The group backs both Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. DSA is allied with the Communist Party USA, which also backs the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. Polling indicates why the Democratic 2020 candidates running on socialist policies wont call themselves socialists. Many polls have shown that the majority of Americans reject socialism, but show strong support for socialist policies because neither polls nor politicians provide much detail about the policies beyond sweet-sounding labels like Medicare for All and free universal health care. As a result, while 63 percent of Americans dont want to live in a socialist country, 66 percent believe the government should provide free universal health care, a purely socialist policy. [The Democratic candidates] are playing a very delicate game because they have to appeal to their progressive socialist base, the people who get out and campaign for them, but they also dont want to frighten middle America into the hands of the Republicans, said author and Epoch Times contributor Trevor Loudon, who has spent 30 years researching radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements. They know enough to say the right words to middle America so as to not frighten them, but to promote the exact same policies that have been promoted by the Communist Party USA and the Democratic Socialists of America, which are both Marxist-communist groups. In an example of how people react to socialist policies once they learn more about them, only 13 percent of Americans told Harris in February that they would support Medicare for All if it meant the end of private health insurance. In its current form, Medicare for All would eliminate the private health insurance industry with niche exceptions for covering procedures like cosmetic surgery. Another study, conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, showed that support for Medicare for All dropped from 62 percent to 44 percent once the policy is described as socialized medicine. Another fact seldom mentioned by proponents of socialist policies is the cost of programs such as Medicare for All, which is estimated at up to $32 trillion over 10 years, according to an independent assessment by the left-leaning Urban Institute. The Green New Deals 10-year mobilization could cost up to $93 trillion, according to an assessment by the center-right American Action Forum. The universal healthcare goal of Medicare for All is part of the Green New Deal. For a sense of scale, the combined $93 trillion cost for 10 years of the Green New Deal dwarfs the current $60 trillion projection for all government spending over the next decade. The astronomical costs of these socialist programs would fall on the shoulders of American taxpayers. The Green New Deal could cost up to $650,000 per household. Ocasio-Cortez suggested that the Federal Reserve issue credit to cover the costs. Sanders, Harris, Booker, Warren, and Gillibrand will need to provide voters with a better plan than merely printing more money. Trump appears well aware of the socialist agendas of the Democratic 2020 candidates. The president said on March 11 that socialism is easy to campaign on, but leads to empty promises. When you tell people free medical, free education, no more student loansall of the different things that you sayits a great thing to campaign on, but then, 10 years later, the country is down the tubes. Its gone, Trump said. So, you always have to be careful with it, because you know you talk about single-payer, it sounds very seductive, he added. But it means youre not going to have good healthcare, it means the country is not going to be able to afford it. Since taking office, Trump has lambasted socialism and communism on the world stage. His criticism of socialism shifted to the domestic front this year. At the State of the Union address, the president said that America will never be a socialist country. Vice President Mike Pence followed with a major speech opposing socialism at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, telling the audience that in 2020 Americans will be choosing between freedom and socialism. Under the guise of Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, Democrats are embracing the same tired economic theories that have impoverished nations and stifled the liberties of millions over the past century. That system is socialism, Pence said. What Medicare for All really means is quality health care for none, he added. The only thing green about the so-called Green New Deal is how much green its going to cost taxpayers if these people ever pass it into law. To the conservatives gathered, the message was particularly poignant. The Green New Deal calls for massive government expansion into energy, housing, farming, transportation, and other industries. The resolution also calls for the removal of all gas-engine cars in favor of electric vehicles and the refurbishment or replacement of every building in America, an encroachment on private property unprecedented in American history. If implemented in its current form, Medicare for All would hand government officials a monopoly over the healthcare industry. Shortly after Sanders entered the 2020 race, the Trump campaign pointed out in a statement that Sanders has already won the debate in the Democrat primary because every candidate is embracing his brand of socialism. But the American people will reject an agenda of sky-high tax rates, government-run health care, and coddling dictators like those in Venezuela, Trump campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said. Correction: this article has been updated to reflect that universal healthcare is part of the Green New Deal proposal. The associated projected costs have been updated accordingly. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivers remarks in the press briefing room of the State Department March 13, 2019 in Washington. (Alex Wong/Getty Images) Pompeo Calls Out Iran, Nicaragua, China, South Sudan in Annual Human Rights Report The United States on March 13 released its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices documenting violations in nearly 200 countries and territories, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo singling out by name Iran, South Sudan, Nicaragua, and China in his preface. The 2018 global human rights report compiled by the State Department paints a dark picture of appalling violations of human life, liberty, and dignity that happen every day in many parts of the world. The department has exposed such occurrences every year since 1977. In his opening remarks, Pompeo said he wished the countries evaluated in this years report had spotless or even improved records, but he noted that it was simply not the case. Even some of our friends, allies, and partners around the world have human rights violations. We document those reports with equal force, Pompeo told reporters. Our aim is always to identify human rights challenges and use American influence and power to move every nation toward better, more consistent human rights practices. Pompeo called out Irans Islamic regime for killing more than 20 people last year and arresting thousands of protesters, adding that it continues the pattern of cruelty that the regime has inflicted upon the Iranian people for the last four decades. He then mentioned South Sudan, whose military forces have used sexual violence against civilians based on their political allegiances and ethnicity, and Nicaragua, where civilians were met with sniper fire for peacefully protesting over social security benefits, and critics of the government faced a policy of exile, jail, or death. But Pompeo said China was in a league of its own when it came to human rights violations. Today, more than 1 million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslims are interned in reeducation camps designed to erase their religious and ethnic identities, he said. The government also is increasing its persecution against Christians, Tibetans, and anyone who espouses different views from those or advocates those of governmentor advocates change in government. Michael Kozak, head of the State Departments Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, told the same briefing that abuses like those currently being committed against Chinas Muslim minority had not been seen since the 1930s. The report also detailed how practitioners of Falun Dafa have been victims of systematic torture in custody by the Chinese Communist Party. Additionally, some activists and organizations continue to accuse the government of involuntarily harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience, especially members of Falun Gong, the report stated. Falun Dafa is a meditation practice which includes gentle exercises and moral guidance based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. The communist regime banned the practice in 1999 and orchestrated a nationwide crackdown on practitioners which continues to this day. Venezuelas illegitimate dictator, Nicolas Maduro, was reelected through a deeply flawed political process, the report noted, detailing human rights issues in the country, including extrajudicial killings and torture by security forces and deplorable prison conditions. The collar of a priest is seen at St. Adalbert Catholic Church March 29, 2002, in Chicago. (Tim Boyle/Getty Images) Priest Accused of Sexual Abuse Found Shot Dead in Nevada Home A defrocked priest accused of sexually abusing children over decades was found dead in his Nevada home with a single bullet wound to the neck. The name of John Capparelli, 70, was recently published on a list along with 187 other clergy that have been been credibly accused of abusing minors in Newark, according to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark. Capparelli died of a single bullet shot to his neck, the Clark County Coroners Office in Nevada said, according to reports. Police found his body in the kitchen of his home in Henderson during a welfare check on the morning of March 9, reported NBC. He had been accused of groping teenage boys in lawsuits but had never faced criminal charges related to the allegations. He was permanently removed from ministry in 1992, then defrocked. His teaching license was subsequently revoked in a settlement, according to USA today. He had never publicly acknowledged wrongdoing. He fled to his new home after he was accused of molesting children..but it looks like someone tracked him down Daily Mail 2019313 In 2016, he moved from New Jersey to the town of Henderson, about 15 miles away from Las Vegas, in Nevada, where his body was found on March 8. Henderson Police Department said that investigators have not identified a suspect, according to the New York Times, but they were following up on developed leads and cited suspicious circumstances surrounding his death. Robert Hoatson, who runs a nonprofit, which aids sexual abuse survivors, said he has helped some of Capparellis alleged victims. The murder of the former priest John Capparelli is shocking and sad, Hoatson told USA Today. Thats not the way we want people to be handled. We want them to go through the proper procedures. We hope the victims are taking care of themselves and that the murderer is brought to justice. Capparelli operated a porn website featuring young men wrestling for several years, according to the Star-Ledger. One of those alleged victims, Rich Fitter, told the Newark Star-Ledger, The world is a safer place without him. A former N.J. priest accused of groping young boys was found shot to death in his Nevada home. One of his alleged victims says the world is a safer place now that he's gone. NJ.com 2019312 The guy had a 40-year record of abuse. Whatever lead to his death, its a certain amount of karma. The local Star-Ledger had covered Capparelli extensively for years in the city of Newark. A lawsuit was filed against Capparelli in July 2011 by Andrew Dundorf, who accused him of abuse spanning over a decade, including at trips to Disney World and a Boy Scouts camp where Capparelli worked. The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed amount. In the same year, the Star-Ledger uncovered the fact that back in 1989 Capparelli was sent to a New Mexico treatment center that specialized in alcoholism and pedophilia. The Star-Ledger revealed that he had been hired as a math teacher at a public high school in Newark in 2011 when allegations against him began to surface again. Fitter wants to know if Capparelli continued his alleged abuses after he moved to Nevada in 2016. I cant see a change, Fitter said. Ill be very interested to see what police find in his house I dont see that type of sociopath and predator changing. I cant say that I feel sorry for him, he told KTVN. I cant say that I feel any sort of loss. Im just kind of numb. I dont want to sound cold, but the world is a safer place without him. Reports: 8 Dead, Including 5 Children, in Brazil School Shooting A school shooting in Brazil has left five children and three adults dead, according to reports on March 13. According to reports, two shooters were killed in the incident, which occurred in the Suzano area of Sao Paulo. Joao Doria, the governor of Sao Paulo, wrote on Twitter that he canceled his agenda for the day and will head to the area, according to Fox News. There was a school shooting today in Brazil, in Sao Paulo state: 2 teenager shooters entered and killed at least 8 people, including 5 students and 3 school employees. Just happened so details are still sketchy https://t.co/mQbuIsEtOg Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 13, 2019 Two armed and hooded adolescents carried out the attack, said police, reported the BBC. Doria also wrote that the victims had been cruelly murdered. Other details about the incident are not clear. A terrorist attack at a school in Suzano, Sao Paulo metro area #Brazil has left 9 dead, including the 2 face-covered terrorists who committed suicide after killing 7 people. MO, Motivation and recruitment stinks like imported even if perps are locals.https://t.co/hv1mAXf7mt Rey Damy-Castro (@Rey_Brazil) March 13, 2019 According to The Guardian, which reported that nine people were killed in total, another 17 people were injured. The gunmen, described as young men, entered the school building and fired weapons, the report said. Police said that the suspects were masked and began shooting at 9:30 a.m. local time. They ultimately turned their guns on themselves. Brazil experiences the most murders in the world, although school shootings are rare. Police said about 1,000 children attend the school, which was described in reports as an elementary school. Women Killed Every Day Four women have been killed every day so far this year in Brazil, a rate the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) called alarming on Monday, Reuters reported. The IACHR, the human rights arm of the 35-member Organization of American States, said more must be done to prevent and prosecute femicides in Brazil. Femicide is the killing of a woman by a man because of her gender. The Commission calls on the Brazilian State to implement comprehensive strategies to prevent these acts, fulfill its obligation to investigate, prosecute and punish those responsible, as well as to offer protection and comprehensive reparation to all victims, the Washington-based IACHR said in a statement. To stem femicide, Brazil passed a law in 2015 giving a legal definition of the crime, with tougher jail sentences of up to 30 years for convicted offenders. Brazil, along with about 15 other countries in Latin America, has introduced laws against femicide in recent years. The region has the worlds highest rates of femicide, according to the United Nations. Commissioner Margarette May, IACHR president and rapporteur for womens rights, said Brazils 2015 law on femicide was a crucial step in making murders of women more visible. However, it is now essential to strengthen prevention and protection measures, May said in a statement. Reuters contributed to this report. The Confucius Institute Building on the Troy University Campus in Alabama, U.S. on March 16, 2018 (Kreeder13 via Wikimedia Commons) Republicans Push Legislation to Protect US Universities From Foreign Spying Republicans are introducing new legislation that would seek to protect U.S. universities from the theft of sensitive information by foreign nations such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. A bill dubbed the Protect Our Universities Act of 2019, introduced by Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) on March 12, would establish a Department of Education-led interagency task force to address the vulnerabilities currently present on college campuses across the nation. The task force would manage a list of sensitive research projects that have links to the Commerce Control List, and the U.S. Munitions List. It would also manage other foundational principles developed for advanced military technologies. Banks specifically singled out spying tactics used by the Chinese Community Party (CCP). Countries like China may use subversive tactics to gain footholds in major STEM programs in U.S. universities to create a pipeline of data and information back to the mainland, he said in a statement. China is also using telecommunications giants Huawei Technologies and ZTE as entry points into the United States data networks, both on and off university campuses. In June last year, Banks wrote to Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos about the threat that China and other adversarial nations pose to universities in America. At the time, a working group was requested to find a solution, but Banks said the departments response failed to adequately address the issue. The Department of Educations lack of an adequate response to this request prompted me to craft legislation on the issue, he wrote. We must get tough against these covert threats on college campuses and limit the effectiveness of their information-gathering missions. Banks noted that the CCP has a long record of methods used to get information back to Beijing. Chinese nationals who study abroad in America are manipulated and pressured to be information collectors for the communist government and military in Beijing. Under the new bill, students from the four nations deemed to be a threatChina, Russia, Iran, and North Koreawould have to apply for a waiver to be allowed to participate in sensitive research projects funded by the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and Department of Energy. The waiver would need to be granted by the Director of National Intelligence. The legislation would also prevent technology developed by companies that have been recognized as bad actors such as Huawei, ZTE, Kaspersky, and others from being used in sensitive research projects funded by the government. In June last year, a senior official in the Defense Department said they are investigating research partnerships between Chinese companies and American universities, especially on U.S. campuses. A Senate report released in February by Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chairman Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and ranking member Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) stated that the Beijing-backed Confucius Institutes on American campuses should be closed if no major changes in their operations occur. The 93-page bipartisan report pointed to the language and culture at the institutes as a threat to academic freedom and said that many U.S. colleges have failed to disclose money received from the CCP, despite guidance from the Education Department that foreign gifts be reported. The CCP has spent over $156 million on U.S. schools since 2006. NEW YORKActress Jessica Russo found something powerful in Shen Yun Performing Arts: she witnessed the power of true arts ability to remind us of our humanity. I thought it was magical and something really needed right now, people need to remember their own inner beauty, and to overcome things, and it was just extraordinary. It was beautiful and uplifting, and really joyful, said Russo, who experienced Shen Yun at Lincoln Center on March 12 together with her husband, Jason Micciche. Micciche had similar thoughts. I thought it was spectacular, I love the message, it was a terrific, incredible visual treat, fantastic showhad an amazing time, he said. For the couple, New York-based was both profound and intimate, showing deep human truths while at the same time providing a sort of solace. Shen Yun is the worlds premier classical Chinese dance company, touring the world each year to revive 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, which is said to be divinely inspired. Within the arts and traditions of this divinely inspired culture, people from all cultures and backgrounds seem to find universal values and truths. The couple delighted in the terrific, incredible visual treat and the technical and artistic marvel of the production. But even more meaningful was the messages they felt they glimpsed in the art. For Russo, one of the biggest takeaways from Shen Yun was the idea of faith. That Im not the only one who believes in God intervening in our lives and angels coming down to help us, she said. Sometimes you feel like youre alone in that thinking, but to see that theres others who know it. Russo spoke of beautiful costumes and elegance in every step, stories that bridged heaven and earth, and mythical beings like fairies and the goddess of the moon. Traditional Chinese culture was built on the idea of harmony between Heaven, Earth, and humankind. In the story-based dances and historical vignettes, the touch of the divine is ever-present. In these stories, Russo said she saw themes like how something that seems bad or like a curse can be a blessing in disguise, and that even when you dont know why something happens, if you find the good in yourself, and in a higher power, everything finds its way of working out for the best. For many audience members, including Russo and Micciche, this revival of traditional values resonates deeply. I think its vital, I think its vital and necessary, and unless someone does it we wont go forward, Russo said. Micciche added, Spirituality is such and important part of being human. And to not have that, I think were robbing ourselves. So its the utmost importance. The spiritual message was great because its something that were losing, and its so important for us to hold onto, Micciche said. Micciche said the performance went by so quickly, and part of that might be because of the good feelings that it portrays. I think when youre really enjoying something, you really feel great about it, it just feels like it goes like lightning; thats exactly how this felt, Micciche said. Russo said there was so much beauty in Shen Yun that it put her into a beautiful place, too. Peaceful, clarity, joy, easiness, makes you more patient with people around you, she said. Well be back again. With reporting by Dongyu Teng. The Epoch Times considers Shen Yun Performing Arts the significant cultural event of our time and has covered audience reactions since the companys inception in 2006. Russell Yergin saw Shen Yun at the George Mason University Center for the Arts Concert Hall, on March 12, 2019. (Jenny Jing/The Epoch Times) FAIRFAX, Va.When Victoria and Russell Yergin saw Shen Yun Performing Artss revival of 5,000 years of ancient Chinese civilization on stage, they saw universal truths that transcend culture. [Its] communication without words, a spirituality that is, whether youre Chinese, American, it has a universality that presents itself quite well, said Mr. Yergin. You can close your eyes and I can put anyone in the roles, because it communicated so well and the stories are universal. The couple saw the New York-based company perform at the George Mason University Center for the Arts Concert Hall on March 12. Shen Yun aims to revive the divinely inspired traditional Chinese culture through performing arts, and the companys foundation is the expressive, millennia-old art form of classical Chinese dance. All of the work they do in order to perform like that is traditional. All the stories they tell are historical, traditional stories, so they keep the history of the culture with the dancesjust beautiful, said Mrs. Yergin. Mere beauty is not enough, there has to be meaning behind it, Mrs. Yergin explained, and Shen Yun has that5,000 years of it. How did they get on that stage? They didnt get on that stage because they are young and they just forgot everything from the past. They got on that stage because they took everything from hundreds of years of history and put it on the stage, Mrs. Yergin said. I hope people get that. I dont know if theyll get that or not, but I hope they get that. The Yergins understood the importance of Shen Yuns mission. For thousands of years, the Chinese believed in the divine and virtues stemming from Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism made up the cornerstone of civilization. The five cardinal virtues of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and faithfulness, were the product of these three religions and found throughout thousands of years of history and culture. But in the past century, everything changed. The communist regime preached struggle and shunned any power higher than itself, and systematically uprooted culture and tradition through violent campaigns like the Cultural Revolution. Mrs. Yergin said that many people in America may be unaware of what China has lost, or that the modern communist state we see on the news today once had this rich cultural past. She said Shen Yun was a beautiful window into the traditional Chinese culture, and a much needed reminder that the communist regime of China is still persecuting Chinas people for their beliefs, as there is no freedom of speech or religion. Mrs. Yergin said that despite the bad situation that is the reality today, Shen Yun presents the topic artfully, with a silver lining and hope for a way back. So the optimism and the faiththings will get better, or things can be better, and you can be spiritual and keep that close to you and tight to you. It came through, she said. Mr. Yergin added that hope was never given up. They never give up hope; thats tied together with faith, Mr. Yergin said. And it wasnt just that the stories were optimistic themselves, but the artists passed on this optimism in their own effort to revive this traditional culture. [They] let people know the heart is still there, Mr. Yergin said. The Yergins felt the messages of these universal values present in the traditional culture, like the benevolence one character had for another, or the faithfulness in relationships, had value for our modern audiences as well. Maybe wake them up, Mr. Yergin said. We all carry these phones, but youve got to stop and be human. We have a soul, we are human beings. Whether you are from China or I am from America, the values, all values always come through. Many are transient, but old values, the basics of helping a fellow when he falls down that didnt go away and it never does. Theres got to be a real awakening every few years now. I think its time. Maybe thats whats happening, he said. With reporting by Jenny Jing. The Epoch Times considers Shen Yun Performing Arts the significant cultural event of our time and has covered audience reactions since the companys inception in 2006. "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett (C), at the Leighton Criminal Court Building for a hearing to discuss whether cameras will be allowed in the courtroom during his disorderly conduct case, in Chicago, on March 12, 2019. (Matt Marton/AP Photo) Smollett Team: Court Cameras Would Show States Flimsy Case CHICAGOA lawyer for Jussie Smollett said Tuesday, March 12, that she would welcome cameras in the courtroom during the Empire actors trial on charges accusing him of lying to the police, saying there has been a lot of leaked misinformation and cameras would allow the public to see the evidence and the lack thereof. Attorney Tina Glandian made the comments during a brief hearing Tuesday in Cook County criminal court during which both sides agreed that cameras would be allowed at the next hearing in the case, which is scheduled for March 14. During that hearing, the case will be assigned to a trial judge who will then likely ask Smollett to enter a plea. With regards to his acting abilities, this will be his finest hour! https://t.co/LrsYQjYS51 #tcot #maga Chris Krok (@chriskrokshow) March 12, 2019 During the hearing, which was held after local news organizations requested that cameras be allowed in the courtroom, Judge LeRoy Martin, Jr. said that the new judge will decide whether or not to allow cameras in the courtroom during subsequent hearings and the trial. After the hearing, Glandian told reporters that evidence has been presented against Smollett that is demonstrably false. We welcome cameras in the courtroom so that the public and the media can see the actual evidence and what we believe is the lack of evidence against Mr. Smollett and we look forward to complete transparency and the truth coming out, she said. Smollett was charged last month with one count of misconductthe felony in Illinois that people are charged with when accused of lying to policebecause he allegedly lied to police about being the victim of a racist and homophobic attack by two masked men in downtown Chicago on Jan. 29. Last week, a grand jury indicted him on 16 counts of the same crime. Prosecutors allege that Smollett, who is black and gay, enlisted the help of two other black men and staged the Jan. 29 attack because he was unhappy with his salary and wanted to promote his career. Those men have admitted to police that they took part in the staged attack for Smollett, who paid them $3,500. Smolletts attorneys have called 16 counts prosecutorial overkill. The actor, who is free on bond, maintains his innocence. By Don Babwin Robin Roberts Said Jussie Smollett Interview Was a No Win, Hesitated to Do It ABC reporter Robin Roberts said that the interview she conducted with Empire actor Jussie Smollett regarding an alleged attack against him was a no win. Roberts admitted on March 4 that she initially resisted doing the interview because Smolletts storythat he was assaulted by two white men in downtown Chicago at 2 a.m. in freezing temperatures and that he held onto his Subway sandwichdidnt seem to be real. Smollett also claimed that one of the alleged attackers shouted This is MAGA country, in an apparent reference to Make America Great Again, a slogan of President Donald Trump and his supporters. Ill be completely honest, I was like I dont know if I want to do the interview or not, Roberts told the crowd at an event in New York City on Monday, reported the New York Post. I said, I dont want to sit down with him if hes going to lawyer up. And then I was told, He wants to speak with you, [because] he was outraged by people making assumptions about whether it had happened or not. Roberts, 58, said she was promised she could challenge Smollett, 36, on the red flags in his story. She finally relented. They said, He wants to say things that he has not said and Im like, As a journalist, as a newsperson, this is newsworthy, hes going to go on record for the first time, yes Ill do the interview, she said. The subsequent interview was slammed by many as soft, with Roberts seemingly attempting to cast Smollett in a favorable light. It didnt help that two days after the interview, when it aired, Chicago police arrested two Nigerian-American brothers who detectives said later revealed that Smollett orchestrated the attack, making it a hate crime hoax. Roberts said she was cognizant of identity politicswith both her and the actor being black and gayand knew she would be criticized by people who thought she wasnt hard enough on Smollett while also facing questions from those supporting the actor. It was a no-win situation for me, she said. At the time, since Smollett was still considered a victim, she framed her questions to acknowledge that context. It was one of the most challenging interviews Ive ever had to do, she said. After the brothers were arrested, ABC News legal analyst Dan Abrams said during a Good Morning America segment that comments Smollett made during the interview with Roberts could be used against him if the story does indeed turn out to be false. Among them was Smolletts confidence that the two people seen in surveillance footage walking near the scene of the alleged attack about 30 minutes before it reportedly took place were the same people that attacked him. In that interview, [Smollett] specifically says, Yeah, those two guys on the surveillance footage, those are the guys that attacked me, so now hes sort of boxed in, Abrams said. Police identified the two people as the brothers, Abel and Ola Osundairo, supporting the case that they were the attackers. When they informed police that Smollett paid them $3,500 to carry out the alleged hoax, officials began looking at Smollett as a suspect. The actor was eventually arrested on Feb. 21 for filing a false police report. In a statement in March, the brothers said they regretted helping Smollett perpetrate the alleged attack. My clients have tremendous regret over their involvement in this situation, and they understand how it has impacted people across the nation, particularly minority communities and especially those who have been victims of hate crimes themselves, said Gloria Schmidt, the brothers attorney, in a statement obtained by CBS Chicago. Previously, the Osundairos, who met Smollett while acting on Empire and one of whom became the actors personal trainer, said in a statement that theyre not racist. We are not racist. We are not homophobic and we are not anti-Trump. We were born and raised in Chicago and are American citizens, they said on Feb. 18. In due course, all the facts will reveal themselves, and at the end of the day, my clients are honest and credible, added the brothers attorney, Schmidt. The Epoch Times reporter Zachary Stieber contributed to this report. Carlos Eduardo Arevalo Carranza (R) was arrested in connection with the murder of Bambi Larson in San Jose, Cali., on March 11, 2019. (Facebook/ San Jose Police Department) Suspect In Brutal Murder of California Woman Is Previously Deported Illegal Alien Police in California have arrested an illegal alien with a criminal history and gang ties in connection with the murder of a San Jose woman. Carlos Eduardo Arevalo Carranza, 24, was arrested on Monday, March 11, as a suspect in the February slaying of 59-year-old Bambi Larson. Carranzaa transient and self-admitted gang memberhad previously been deported from the United States, according to ABC7. He also had at least six detainer requests filed against him via Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), CBS SF reported, which were ignored. San Jose police are continuing their investigation into the murder of 59-year-old Bambi Larson last week, saying evidence may point to a crime of passion. https://t.co/hCfRJKH9h1 KPIX 5 (@KPIXtv) March 7, 2019 Larson, a manager at a Bay Area medical testing company, was found bludgeoned and stabbed to death on Feb. 28 in her home. Suspicions were raised when she failed to show up for work. Her son and a co-worker did a welfare check and found her body in the bedroom, according to Fox. 24-year-old transient Carlos Carranza is accused of stabbing to death 59-year-old Bambi Larson in her San Jose home https://t.co/lZ0KTJqNxl pic.twitter.com/64DgRtCIP3 KRON4 News (@kron4news) March 12, 2019 Jose Police Chief Eddie Garcia said at a press conference Carranza stalked Larsons neighborhood before allegedly killing her with a knife and blunt force trauma. The coroners office was cited by KPIX as saying Larson died from sharp force injuries to the neck and torso. Larson is the mother of two adult children. Heres a look a the memorial outside of Bambi Larsons San Jose home. Police say the man arrested for killing her is in the country illegally and has a long criminal history. @abc7newsbayarea pic.twitter.com/9uhRPXJ8JO Jobina Fortson (@JobinaFortson) March 13, 2019 DNA Match Leads to Arrest Evidence against Carranza includes surveillance video that places the suspect at the scene of the crime. The home security cameras showed an unidentified male wearing a backpack, pants and a long-sleeve sweater or shirt as he approached and later left the victims residence, Garcia said. Video from neighbor of Bambi Larson, who was killed Feb. 28th at her San Jose home near Pearl and Branham. Man was captured on surveillance cameras walking down Knollfield Way between 4:30am-5:30am. 24 year old transient arrested yesterday for murder. pic.twitter.com/Pr7p2cr08u Matt Keller (@MattKellerABC7) March 12, 2019 Detectives found a T-shirt containing the DNA of both the victim and the suspect. Larsons phone and e-reader were also found in Carranzas possession, Fox reported. Police initially arrested Carranza on March 10 on charges of methamphetamine possession and took a DNA sample. They released Carranza, however, due to lack of evidence linking him to the murder because DNA results from Larsons case had not yet come back from the lab. Garcia said when the results finally came in on Monday and a positive DNA match was made, police tracked Carranza down and took him into custody. Carranza was booked into the Santa Clara County Jail for murder. The suspect, Carlos Eduardo Arevalo Carranza, stalked this San Jose neighborhood and his victim, Garcia said at the press conference. He is a San Jose transient and is a self-admitted gang member. A Broken System Speaking to the press, Garcia declined to name the gang Carranza is accused of being affiliated with but listed the suspects long criminal history. His criminal history convictions consist of in February 2013 he was detained by the Department of Homeland Security at the border near McAllen, Texas, and deported, noted Garcia. In 2015, he was arrested for drug paraphernalia. In 2015 he was convicted of burglary in San Jose. In 2016, battery of an officer, resisting arrest, and entering a property. In 2016, he was arrested for battery in Los Angeles. In 2017, he was arrested and convicted of false imprisonment in San Jose. In April of 2018, arrested for paraphernalia again. In May, he was arrested for possession of methamphetamine, he continued. Garcia also said Carranza had six detainer requests from ICE. ICE detainers are requests for law enforcement to hold people suspected of being in the country illegally for longer than their jail terms until they can be questioned by federal immigration authorities. Garcia was critical of the sanctuary policies that kept Carranza from being handed over to immigration officials. The city of San Jose and our police department has no control over how the county interacts with federal immigration enforcement in the deportation of violent or serious felons like Carlos Arevalo Carranza, he said. When we have violent or serious offenders that are preying on our community we must have the ability to protect our residents. We will go to the ends of the earth to find a predator like this. Paul Kelly, president of the San Jose Police Officers Association, was cited by CBS SF as calling for changes to immigration policies. We have to change the laws that protect monsters like this suspect, said Kelly. If you have dreamers that are just trying to survive and make a better life for themselves, thats not what were talking about here. Were talking about changing the laws that protect criminals that will violently attack women. ICE Acting Field Office Director Erik Bonnar was cited by CBS SF as saying his agency had nearly a dozen detainer requests for Carranza that went unheeded. All nine known previously lodged detainers have been ignored and have allowed Arevalo-Carranza back onto our streets to reoffend, Bonnar said. How many more people have to be killed or injured before California lawmakers will open discussions to revise the state policy prohibiting local law enforcement agencies from working with ICE to apprehend dangerous criminal aliens? he asked. Its unfortunate that our communities face dangerous consequences because of inflexible state laws that protect criminal aliens. These sanctuary policies have unintended, but very real, and often tragic consequences to public safety. BREAKING: ICE statement on illegal alien suspect arrested for murdering 59 yr old Bambi Larson in San Jose. #FNR pic.twitter.com/DLD4Suhs74 Jessica Rosenthal (@jessicafoxnews) March 13, 2019 Mayor Sam Liccardo criticized the Santa Clara County sanctuary policy in a statement. It is long overdue for the County to reconsider its current policy of ignoring ICE hold requests for predatory felons, which undermines the safety of the very immigrant communities we collectively seek to protect, said Liccardo. The countys policy has nothing to do with the Citys decades-long policy of declining to have police engage in federal immigration enforcement, which was implemented to protect public safety. In contrast, the current County policy of ignoring detainer requests for individuals arrested for strike offenses and convicted of multiple felonies undermines public safety, and violates common sense. I hope we can restart this conversation to make progress where we all agree: we can both keep our City safe from violent criminals and protect our law-abiding immigrant community. JUST IN: #SanJose Mayor statement on arrest of a homicide suspect in the murder of Bambi Larson. Carlos Eduardo Arevalo Carranza was arrested Monday. SJPD said he is an undocumented immigrant w/ a criminal history. SCC & LA released him from jail 6 times w/out notifying #ICE. pic.twitter.com/ugl0lNKsoa Grace Hase (@grace_hase) March 12, 2019 Apple is looking to adopt Samsungs touch-integrated OLED display in its future flagship iPhones. Apple has so far used a separate touch layer on top of iPhone displays but it is now looking to change that. The switch will allow Apple to design thinner and lighter iPhones. Whats interesting is that this potential move from Apple has led Chinese OLED maker BOE to build production lines for OLED displays with integrated touch layer as well which have been internally dubbed as Y-Octa. Samsung has so far been the only display maker to offer OLED display panels with an integrated touch panel. BOE is looking to challenge that as it is setting up a production line by refurbishing some of its existing lines at the B11 plant in Mianyang, Sichuan. The company is looking to win some OLED panel orders from Apple with this move. Having seen Samsung create a highly profitable market with the product incorporating the touch sensor, BOE has decided to follow suit, said an industry source. The lines are now being built in Mianyang as far as I know. Last year, BOE ran a project called L6 to win OLED panel orders from Apple. While that did not happen, it did manage to win orders from Huawei for its flagship smartphone. This year, BOE is going ahead with its L7 project with the aim to once again provide OLED panels to Apple. Apple has so far exclusively sourced OLED panels from Samsung despite rumors of LG also joining the OLED supply chain every year. Our Take What the report does not mention is just how good BOE OLED panels are. While BOE did manage to supply OLED panels to Huawei for its Mate 20 series, the panels power consumption left a lot to be desired. Compared to OLED panels from Samsung, BOEs OLED panel had an absurdly high power requirement and even then, its performance was not as good as the OLED panel on the Galaxy S9 or Note 9. For BOE to supply OLED panels to Apple, it needs to up the quality of its panel significantly which is no easy task as despite being the market leader, Samsung continues to improve its OLED panels at a rapid pace. [Via The Investor Vice President Mike Pence (second from left) listens while presumptive Speaker, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (L), President Donald Trump, and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) argue before a meeting at the White House in Washington on Dec. 11, 2018. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images) The Real Divide In America Democrat and Republican labels no longer sufficient to define Americas degenerating, postmodern social and political landscape Are Americans either Republican or Democrat? Red or blue? Thats what voting patterns show, but thats not the whole picture by a long shot. Theres a lot more to our differences than simple binary political party distinctions. In fact, politically speaking, America is not really a true red/blue society. In 2017, 42 percent of American voters identified themselves as independents. Only 29 percent admitted they were Democrat and even fewer, 27 percent, said they were Republicans. Given the rise in popularity of self-identifying socialists politicians such as Corie Booker, Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and all the rest, it seems likely to stay that way. In fact, more Millennials identify with socialism than they do with capitalism. Why is this? The Scourge of Postmodernism Its apparent from the stream of insipid pronunciations from the rafter of Democratic presidential candidates that what most Americans thought they knew, aint necessarily so. Socialism is good and capitalism is bad, those candidates appeal to Millennials and the older generations desperately missing Obama. But where or when is true socialism really good?, one may ask. Where does it work? Venezuela? Cuba? The old Soviet Union? Albania? How about China? Are folks scaling the Great Wall to become a part of the Chinese Dream? What in the world is causing such a blindness to reality? In a word, what were seeing is a result of postmodernism. That may sound like a pseudo-intellectual term youd find in a grad school philosophy lecture and it certainly is that. But its also the driving idea behind the current thinking of many of our elite scholars, educators, cultural leaders, and politicians. Postmodernism is a way of seeing the world and understanding reality. Its a world view based on deconstructionism, a post-war philosophy concocted by French philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, who had way too much time on his hands and perhaps too much absinthe on his tongue. The essence of Postmodernism is a visceral distrust of tradition and thus seeks to destroy formal social structures, such as religion, social moral standards, and political institutions. In a nutshell, in postmodernism, everything we think, know and believe can and ought to be critiqued under a deconstructionist lens, where everything is not only relative, but can be interpreted in unlimited ways. In such a context, there is no real, universal meaning in anything. Its All About Power If theres no validity in America and the ideas of liberty, personal responsibility, and limited government upon which it was founded which is the message the left is selling then whats left? The answer, of course, is statism. Thats the anvil upon which the left has beat on traditional values, Christianity, and conservatives to reshape the very idea of America itself for the past century. Enter the new leftists of AOC and company. Theyre not ideologues in the traditional sense. Theyre the children of indoctrinated thralls who embrace a broader statist idea globalism. In their own arrested intellectual development, they excoriate against America without the slightest idea or care of that vast territory known as history, economics, political philosophy that they know nothing about. But then, theyre too entitled to worry about stuff like that. It stretches credulity to say that they have more than a rudimentary grasp of the concept of supply and demand. Nor do they really care about racism, sexism, antisemitism, or any other ism. All are used as needed to divide and tear down the American culture and the country itself. The goal, to quote Barack Obama, is to fundamentally transform the country. Isnt that what all patriots say? The only thing that really matters to them is power and the quickest path to attain it. For the latest revolutionaries on Capitol Hill, the Democratic party is their shining path to political primacy. Even Nancy Pelosi is getting a taste of whats to come from these young Stalinists. Before long, shell be (politically) devoured just like Uncle Joe devoured Bukharin. Purges are a big part of progressive ideals. An Axis of Ignorance Ignorance has long been an ally of the left. The Communist Party leadership used to call turncoats from the West useful idiots. Maybe they still do. But getting the ignorant and misinformed masses to support leftist ideologies has been their modus operandi from the beginning. That said, what other reason could there be for the left wanting to let in millions of illegal, uneducated immigrants who immediately become recipients of American taxpayer dollars? Or seeking, as the Democratic-led House of Representatives just did, to lower the voting age to 16? Are they looking to fill the voting booths with the best and the brightest? Not likely, is it. The playbook is thug democracy run by proto-totalitarians who are anything but democratic. Its destruction by dilution. But hey, get enough non-Americans into the country, and promise millions of Americans free stuff, and voila! Youve taken power. Globalism Versus Americanism What really divides Americans today is the lefts big idea that America the Deplorable doesnt deserve its place of pre-eminence in the world and must be punished for its unending list of sins. America, they tell us in film, academia, and the news media, has gained from unjust privilege, intolerable prejudice, the usurpation of the fruits of others labor, and unearned wealth. Come to think of it, arent all those things precisely what AOC and her ilk wants to achieve for themselves? Except for the criticism, of course. There will be special camps for complainers. No, the AOCs of the Democratic party seek to overthrow America in a way that Barack Obama could only dream about. But its not all about self-aggrandizement; theres globalism thrown in for cover. And in a very real way, Trumps America First policies are a direct result of the lefts success in bringing America closer to their goals the past several decades. This, then, is what really divides America: the choice between being a sovereign country with its traditions and political structure intact, or one that is subject to international regulations that strip us of our liberties, our economic power and our way of life. Trump know this and has worked to reverse the globalist tide by rejecting treaties and agreements that would certainly swamp America and our ability to maintain our top position in the world. The left in all its social forms are doing everything to change that. The struggle, therefore, is keeping not just our country, but our identity, dictated not by our race or creed, but by our culture and our sovereignty. James Gorrie is a writer based in Texas. He is the author of The China Crisis. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Then Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao attends the closing session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference at the Great Hall of the People on March 13, 2015 in Beijing, China. Li's doctoral dissertation plagiarized from other's. (Photo by Feng Li/Getty Images) Top Chinese Communist Party Officials Plagiarized Doctoral Theses, Report Says Six top Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials plagiarized parts of their university theses, according to a review by the news agency AFP, in the latest instance of academic fraud exposed in recent weeks. AFP reported March 8 that it obtained and reviewed 12 top Chinese officials masters and doctoral theses, and found half of them were copied from other peoples theses without citation. Among the officials were former Chinese Vice Chair Li Yuanchao; Chen Quanguo, the top official in the tightly controlled region of Xinjiang; Supreme Peoples Court Vice President Zhang Shuyuan; and Shi Jun, vice chief of the United Front Work Department, the party organization tasked to carry out influence operations abroad. This development comes as the regime attempts to ward off concerns of rampant academic fraud after a recent plagiarism scandal involving a popular actor sparked widespread criticism of fake qualifications on Chinese social media. None of the six who plagiarized could be reached for comment, or replied to questions sent by AFP. The cases were uncovered after AFP ran plagiarism detection software over the research papers, which were obtained from China National Knowledge Infrastructure, a database run by Beijings Tsinghua University and supported by several Chinese ministries. Former Deputy Auditor General Chen Zhaoyu and former head of the State Intellectual Property Office Xiao Xingwei also were flagged by the outlets plagiarism review. Academic Misconduct The outlet reported that Li, Chinese vice chair from 2013 to 2018, wrote a doctoral dissertation titled Some Issues Concerning the Production of Socialist Culture and Art in 1998. It found that 20 paragraphs in the paper are identical to a 1991 thesis titled On the Spiritual and Cultural Needs of the Masses of the Socialist Society, by Zhang Mingeng. According to state-run media Xinhua, Li earned a doctor of law from the CCP Central Party School in 1995 while he worked full-time as a deputy head in the partys propaganda department. Li also received a master of science from Peking Universitys Economic Management Science Center in 1991 while he was secretary of the Communist Youth League, an party organization considered a stepping stone for budding Communist officials. Xinjiang party chief Chen was also found to have plagiarized his doctoral work. Chen is also a member of the politburo, the partys elite decision-making body. Chen has presided over a sweeping crackdown in the northwestern province, where an estimated 1 million Uyghur and other Muslim minorities are detained in internment camps, where they undergo political indoctrination and are forced to denounce their faith. The CCP has used the narrative of fighting extremist threats to justify this mass incarceration. AFP reported that Chens 2004 doctoral dissertation, titled Research on the Correlation between Human Capital Accumulation and Economic Development in Central China, contained more than 60 paragraphs copied without citation from Zhu Yimins 2002 thesis Human Capital and its Contribution to Economic Growth: An Empirical Study of Guangdong Province, as well as Mo Zhihongs 2002 thesis Economic analysis of Human Capital. According to Xinhua, Chen obtained a master of economics from Wuhan Automotive Polytechnic University in 1997, while he worked full-time as mayor of Luohe city of central Chinas Henan province. He then received a doctor of management from Wuhan University of Technology in 2004, while serving as CCP deputy secretary of Henan province. According to Gao Xin, a commentator for Radio Free Asia, getting fake degrees or pseudo-degrees is an accepted practice to gain promotions within party ranks. Having a higher degree of education can mean gaining a higher position within the CCP. The CCPs policy encourages officials to earn a pseudo-degree, even to get a fake degree, he said in a 2016 article. Studying Overseas A number of senior CCP officials also have claimed to have studied overseas, implying that they have received an elite education. However, scrutiny by Chinese netizens has revealed that many claims have been exaggerated. For example, Li Hongzhong, CCP secretary of northern Chinas Tianjin city, is frequently reported by state-run media to have studied at Harvard University. In fact, Li attended a training program at Harvard Kennedy School in 1999. Harvard Kennedy School has been dubbed by some Chinese as the second CCP Party School, because its two- or three-week training programs have long been a favorite study option among senior CCP officials. According to the schools website, four types of programs are available for CCP officials and Chinese business leaders. State-run newspaper Peoples Daily reported in 2006 that 300 director-level or higher-level officials received training at Harvard Kennedy School from 2002 to 2006. Academic Scandal Academic misconduct has existed in China for a long time, but the issue didnt gain widespread attention until Zhai Tianlin, a famous movie star, was recently revealed to have failed to produce the required academic articles for his masters and doctoral degrees. Then, netizens found out that not only Zhai, but also his professor, Chen Yi, and Zhang Hui, the dean of the performance school at Beijing Film Academywhere Zhai received his higher degreeswere involved in academic fraud. The subject was serious enough that the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang addressed academic fraud during his speech to the Chinese regimes rubber-stamp legislature, the National Peoples Congress, in Beijing on March 5. Chinas Ministry of Education also announced that tackling misconduct would be one of its key tasks in 2019. Tornado Destroy 10 Homes in New Mexico, 5 People Injured DEXTER, N.M.Authorities say a tornado has destroyed 10 homes in a small southeastern New Mexico community and five people suffered non-life threatening injuries. National Weather Service meteorologist Chuck Jones said the tornado touched down on March 12 in Dexter for about five minutes, but that its strength hasnt been determined. The agency is sending a team to survey the damage. Chaves County Mike Herrington in a statement says cleanup wont start Wednesday because heavy winds of up to 70 mph are blowing debris around. He told the Roswell Daily Record that five people were taken to hospitals with what appeared to be non-life threatening injuries. The newspaper says roofs were ripped off buildings. A Native American Tribe Will Cover the Costs of the Funerals for All of the Alabama Tornado Victims Often times the worst situations will bring out the best in people. Thats proving true once again, this time in southeastern Alabama, where residents are still reeling from an outbreak of tornadoes that killed 23 people this week. But their loved ones wont have to worry, at least about the costs of the funerals. A Native American tribe says it will cover the funeral and burial expenses for all the victims of Sundays tornadoes. The Poarch Band of Creek Indians tribe will be making a $184,000 donation to cover the costs, Lee County Coroner Bill Harris confirms to CNN. Thank you to all individuals and organizations who have donated to the EAMC Foundation Lee County Disaster Relief Fund. East Alabama Medical Center 201938 The Tribe Increased its Commitment Thats more than the tribe had originally agreed to, but it increased its commitment when another donor that had agreed to split the costs backed out of the arrangement. The original donation made by the tribe was going to be $50,000. However the other group stopped returning Harris calls, he said. When he explained that to the tribe, it asked what it would take to cover everything. The check will be hand delivered by the tribe early next week. My goal was to be able to provide what the families wanted for this casket or this service without having to scrimp because they didnt have the money, Harris said. These folks have stepped up for a community need, and I appreciate that. Harris did not name the company that didnt follow through on its commitment. The money will be donated to the East Alabama Medical Center Foundation so that none of the money is spent on administration costs. It is at times of greatest need that we often see our communities coming together to help one another, this is one of those times, Stephanie A. Bryan, the tribes CEO, said in a Facebook post. Our thoughts and prayers are with all of those affected. The Tribe is making a $184,000 donation to the East Alabama Medical Center Foundation to assist in the burial of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians 201937 Tam Yvonne, who lost 10 family members to the Tornado, replied to Bryans post: Thank you so very much for this generous donation. 10 of my family members were lost I will be forever grateful for what you and your tribe have done for not only our family but, everyone affected by this horrible event. The Tribe Has Been in Alabama for Generations Harris said he delivered the news personally about the funerals and burials being covered to the grandparents of Armando AJ Hernandez, the youngest victim. He said the two were thankful. I spoke with AJs family, his grandma and granddaddy, they were very humbled and very appreciative, he said. I feel so bad for them. I told them, yall dont worry about that (the cost), I have it covered. This is the kind of healing and compassion that should be coming out of Washington as well. Instead, were getting hate-mongering, blame and the politics of division and disunity. https://t.co/x2eOT2SlUE Djelloul Marbrook (@DelMarbrook) March 11, 2019 Other local organizations have also come forward and donated toward the fund for the funerals, according to Harris. Additionally, a notable person from AlabamaHarris isnt sharing the mans name just yetis donating $10,000 for foot markers for the graves. The Poarch Band of Creek Indians is the only federally recognized Native American tribe in Alabama, and it operates a number of businesses, including casinos and hotels, in the region. The tribe descends from the original Creek Nation that once resided in Alabama and Georgia. The tribe was never removed from its lands and has kept a presence in the area for 200 years around the Poarch, Alabama reservation. The Tribe is making a $184,000 donation to the East Alabama Medical Center Foundation to assist in the burial of the victims from last Sundays devastating tornado in Lee County, AL. Read the full statement here: https://t.co/kMmem5pebJ Photo credit: Robert Harris, Technapex pic.twitter.com/O3IHzHKors Poarch Creek Indians (@PoarchCreek) March 7, 2019 NTD News reporter Venus Upadhayaya contributed to this report. President Donald Trump makes an announcement in the White House Rose Garden in Washington on Jan. 25, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times) Trump Flips Federal Appeals Court to Republican Majority With Matey Confirmation President Donald Trumpfor the first time in his presidencyflipped an appeals court to a Republican majority of appointed judges with the March 12 confirmation of a nominee to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Paul Matey was confirmed by the Senate in a 5445 vote, which now gives the court a 76 majority of Republican appointees, with one more pending vacancy. The switch in the 3rd Circuitpreviously dominated by nominees appointed by Democrat presidentscomes amid a Republican effort to reclaim the federal judiciary after President Barack Obama tipped the scales in Democrats favor in 2013. Mateys confirmation marks the 35th appeals court nominee who has been confirmed under Trumpa historic number at this point in the presidency. In the Senate vote, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) was the only Democrat who crossed the aisle to vote with the Republicans for Matey. Previously, Trump successfully appointed Stephanos Bibas and David Porter to the 14-member court of appeals. Matey, of New Jersey, will now have a lifetime seat in the 3rd Circuit. His nomination faced opposition from two home state senatorsBob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.). Previously, Matey served as the deputy chief counsel to former Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie before joining University Hospital in Newark as senior vice president and general counsel, according to his LinkedIn account. In September 2018, he joined as a partner for law firm Lowenstein Sandler. Neomi Rao, Trumps nominee to take Justice Brett Kavanaughs previous position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, will also face a Senate vote on March 13. Democrat Obstruction Trump has accused Democrats of delaying his nominations. As of this writing, 131 positions in the U.S. District Court and U.S. Court of Appeals are still vacant, the nominees for which are waiting to be confirmed, according to Partnership for Public service, a political appointee tracker. The number of vacancies is more than twice as many than there were under Presidents Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, according to conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. In January, Trump took to Twitter to vent his frustration about the slow-moving nominations. For FAR TOO LONG Senate Democrats have been Obstructing more than 350 Nominations, he wrote. These great Americans left their jobs to serve our Country, but cant because Dems are blocking them, some for two years-historic record. Passed committees, but Schumer putting them on hold. Bad! For FAR TOO LONG Senate Democrats have been Obstructing more than 350 Nominations. These great Americans left their jobs to serve our Country, but cant because Dems are blocking them, some for two years-historic record. Passed committees, but Schumer putting them on hold. Bad! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Jan. 2, 2019 Near the end of 2018, Senate Democrats vowed to reject any end-of-year deal on judicial nominations, a signal that they will actively block, or at least slow, any nomination in the Trump administration. In February, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) introduced a resolution to speed up the confirmation process. The resolution would seek to reduce the 30 hours of post-cloture debate time to two hours for most nominees. Blunt is the chairman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee. The president deserves to have his team in place, regardless of whether or not one party agrees with the election results, said Blunt. Instead, Senate Democrats spent the first two years of the Trump administration dragging out the confirmation process to not only deny the president his team but also to waste hours of floor time that should have been spent focusing on the American peoples priorities. US Expands Return of Asylum Seekers to Mexico to New Ports of Entry WASHINGTONThe United States is expanding its program to send asylum seekers back to Mexico to wait out their U.S. court proceedings and so far has returned 240 people since starting the program in January, U.S. officials told reporters on Tuesday. The officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the policy, which was rolled out at the San Ysidro port of entry in San Diego, has been expanded to the Calexico port, which is also in Southern California on the U.S.-Mexico border. In addition, migrants who attempt to cross illegally and then ask for asylum in the U.S. border patrols San Diego sector will now also be subject to return to Mexico, the officials said. Mexicos foreign ministry issued a statement confirming the programs expansion to the Calexico port. Mexican officials have been in touch with U.S. immigration authorities about the migrants returning to Mexico, the ministry said. One official said border authorities had only started turning back people who crossed between ports this past week. He said that a very low number of people who crossed illegally have been returned so far, while the vast majority of those who were sent back presented themselves at legal ports of entry to claim asylum. The policy is the latest effort by the Trump administration to try to curb a sharp increase in the number of Central Americans that are arriving at the border and claiming asylum. Administration officials say even though many of the asylum claims are ultimately denied, applicants end up living in the United States for years while their court cases are processed. But immigration advocates say that returning migrants to dangerous border cities is illegal and violates U.S. obligations under international treaties. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups sued in federal court to halt the program. President Donald Trump, whose administration has worked to curb illegal immigration, said in an interview with Breitbart that Mexican drug cartels should be considered terrorist organizations. He highlighted the danger of Mexican cities close to the U.S. border as a result of those cartels and said Mexico is considered one of the most unsafe countries in the world. U.S. officials have previously argued that their policy of making asylum seekers wait in Mexico does not put them at any greater risk, and refer to the return policy as the Migrant Protection Protocols. DHS officials said the U.S. government is working closely with Mexican authorities to clear the expansion plans. Were not going to open a location if the Mexicans arent ready and able to process and provide the humanitarian protections that they agreed to, one official said. DHS said the return policy does not apply to Mexican citizens, unaccompanied minors or people with serious medical conditions or disabilities. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks to the media at the Department of Foreign Affairs in Pasay City, Metro Manila, Philippines on March 1, 2019. (Eloisa Lopez/Reuters) US Says Chinas Treatment of Muslim Minority Worst Abuses Since the 1930s WASHINGTON The U.S. State Department on March 13 slammed human rights violations in China, saying the sort of abuses it had inflicted on its Muslim minorities had not been seen since the 1930s. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo highlighted abuses in Iran, South Sudan, Nicaragua and China in the departments annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, but told reporters that China was in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations. For me, you havent seen things like this since the 1930s, Michael Kozak, the head of the State Departments human rights and democracy bureau told the same briefing, referring to abuses of Chinas Muslim minority. Rounding up, in some estimations in the millions of people, putting them into camps, and torturing them, abusing them, and trying to basically erase their culture and their religion and so on from their DNA. Its just remarkably awful. Kozak said China had initially denied there even were camps, and is now saying there are camps, but theyre some kind of labor training camps and its all very voluntary. The governor of Xinjiang said on Tuesday that China is running boarding schools, not concentration camps, in the far western region of China. The vast area bordering Central Asia is home to millions of Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities. That does not match the facts that we and others are saying, but at least were starting to make them realize there is a lot of international scrutiny on this, Kozak said, adding: It is one of the most serious human rights violations in the world today. The report said that in the past year, the Chinese regime had significantly intensified its campaign of mass detention of members of Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang region. It said authorities there were reported to have arbitrarily detained 800,000 to possibly more than two million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs and other Muslims in internment camps designed to erase religious and ethnic identities. The State Department report said government officials in China had claimed the camps were needed to combat terrorism, separatism and extremism. However, international media, human rights organizations and former detainees have reported that security officials in the camps abused, tortured and killed some detainees, it said. By Lesley Wroughton & David Brunnstrom A late-winter storm system is forecast to affect much of the central United States starting on Wednesday, March 13, with some describing it as a bomb cyclone. (NWS) Winter Storm Brings Heavy Snow and High Winds Across Central US A major late-winter storm system is expected to affect much of the central United States starting on Wednesday, March 13, with some reports describing it as a bomb cyclone. The Weather Channel has dubbed it Winter Storm Ulmer, and says its bringing dangerous conditions, high winds, and possible structural damage, such as power outages and downed trees. A large swath of the U.S. was under a variety of warnings, advisories, and warnings. For the Dakotas, Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado, a blizzard warning was issued by the National Weather Service. Snow and gusty winds from Ulmer continue from the Colorado Rockies to western South Dakota and much of Wyoming. Snowfall rates of 2-3 inches per hour have been reported in eastern Colorado along with thundersnow, according to the Weather Channel. The website reported that conditions are starting to deteriorate, including blizzard conditions, in the High Plains. Meanwhile, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Denver, Colorado, are slated to get hit with blizzard conditions soon, said the news outlet. Very high winds will also affect large portions of the Southern to Central High Plains where high wind warnings have been issued by the National Weather Service offices across these areas, the NWS Weather Prediction Center wrote. Sustained wind speeds of 30 mph to 40 mph with gusts of more than 60 mph are expected over most of New Mexico, western Texas, central and western Oklahoma. Parts of Kansas and southeastern Colorado will also see high winds. Folks, this is a serious storm. Heres a video taken just now from our office. Please stay safe! #wywx #newx pic.twitter.com/4pfsEjh0zX NWS Cheyenne (@NWSCheyenne) March 13, 2019 This is potentially a dangerous wind event, the NWS Midland office wrote. This will be one of the strongest wind events in years for West Texas and Southeast New Mexico. According to the Weather Channel, the storm is currently going through the process of bombogenesis, dropping from 994 mb Tuesday evening to 969 mb this afternoon. Bombogenesis is the process of rapid intensification that a winter storm system can go through. Bombogenesis is defined as a 24 mb drop in atmospheric pressure in 24 hours. Fox News Senior Meteorologist Janice Dean noted, 70 million people will potentially be affected by this storm system across the Plains states, bringing blizzard conditions, potential tornadoes and flash flooding. This can happen when a cold air mass collides with a warm air mass, such as air over warm ocean waters, according to the National Ocean Service on its website. The formation of this rapidly strengthening weather system is a process called bombogenesis, which creates what is known as a bomb cyclone. Quick overview on the powerful winter storm headed for Colorado. Please cancel any travel plans Wednesday afternoon and evening especially east of I-25, and stay tuned for further updates! #COwx pic.twitter.com/sogNBlfxWs NWS Boulder (@NWSBoulder) March 12, 2019 According to Reuters, officials issued alerts to close schools and government buildings across Denver and nearby areas. They typically do get strong systems this time of the year in that part of the country, but this one is maybe a notch stronger than what you typically see, said meteorologist Marc Chenard of the weather service told the news outlet. Tracking website FlightAware said that hundreds of flights have been canceled. Woman and Baby Die After She Tries to Give Birth Alone With Youtube Tutorials A woman and her baby died after she tried to give birth with only Youtube tutorials to assist her. Authorities in India believe the 25-year-old woman may have been attempting to deliver the baby herself due to the fear of the social stigma attached to being an unmarried mother. Her death was discovered after neighbors saw blood seeping out from under the door of her room in the apartment building in the city of Gorakhpur in northern India. Police said that her smartphone showed she had been watching videos on how to deliver babies by self. A pair of scissors, a blade and some thread wasfound near the womans body, according to local reports. The woman, who has not been named in reports, was found dead on March 11, according to Cantonment Police Officer, Ravi Rai. Her landlord Ravi Upadhyay broke open the door and found the woman and a newborn baby boy lying dead, Rai told the Hindustan Times. He immediately informed the police, who reached the site and sent the body for post-mortem. A 26-year-old unmarried pregnant woman attempted self-delivery while watching a video on YouTube both dies. Hindustan Times 2019312 Her smartphone revealed that she was watching How to deliver baby by self and other similar safe delivery processes on YouTube, Rai said. According to News 18, the woman had moved into the accommodation just 4 days before in order to take competitive exams in the area. After post-mortem, the body was handed over to the family. The family has declined to initiate legal proceedings, and has remained tight-lipped about the affair. According to some reports, the woman was 26, and the incident occurred on March 10, not March 11. Woman Gives Birth in Secret, Baby Rescued From Trash In South Africa earlier this year, a woman secretly gave birth at home and then dumped her newborn, inside a plastic bag, on a pile of trash that was awaiting collection. Seconds before the garbage truck arrived, the baby boy was rescued from inside the trash bag after a scrap collector happened to hear his cries. First responders in Durban, South Africa, posted a video of the moment that medics picked up the baby boy after unwrapping him from inside a knotted plastic bag. The baby, weighing 4 pounds, 6 ounces and was uninjured. He was taken to a hospital in Verulam on Jan. 14, where he received treatment for an infection. The babys mother was tracked down the same day, and according to the security unit that found the baby, she was charged with child abandonment and attempted murder. According to local reports, her attorney said that she had been undergoing treatment for depression. The newborn was found by members of a private security firmReaction Unit South Africathat operates in parallel with the police. A passerby reported the cries of a baby coming from piles of trash. We received a call from a member of the public requesting assistance after a local scrap collector heard a baby crying in a bin packet that was tied and dumped on the side of the road, said police spokeswoman Col. Thembeka Mbele, according to Times Live. Upon arrival medics found the baby in the bin packet wrapped in a denim garment. They cut the umbilical cord, which was still attached to the placenta. The child was examined and found to be free of injury. After committing late last year to a big expansion of services in Connecticut, the fitness membership club ClassPass has expanded to more than 80 venues, the bulk of them in the triangle formed by Greenwich, Bridgeport and Danbury, but extending as far east as New Haven and north to Hartford. ClassPass members have access to traditional CrossFit workouts, martial arts, yoga, dance, fencing and even rowing. Members can download an app as well that will recommend other studios for them to try based on their history and preferences. Nationally, members have booked more than 70 million classes to date; the company does not disclose its membership count. In southwestern Connecticut, rates range from $29 a month which ClassPass estimates covers anywhere from three to five sessions depending on the studio; to a $79 package with credits good for as many as 16 classes. Members can purchase extra studio time if they run through their monthly allotment, and the company will roll over a limited number of credits to a following month if left unused. More Business A food-delivery app saves the day for an ailing food critic Besides getting the word out about its existence, ClassPass biggest challenge early on was a dynamic pricing model designed to cater to members by giving them discounts on off-peak workout hours, according to Kinsey Livingston, the companys senior director for partner development. Many gyms had flat pricing in place, requiring them to change their own revenue model to adopt ClassPass. The biggest change that we have made to our revenue model is dynamic pricing, similar to the hotel industry, Livingston told Hearst Connecticut Media. The fitness industry had never really utilized dynamic pricing models. Weve helped them with that. The New York City-based company also offers corporate memberships for companies to extend ClassPass as a benefit to their workers. The company also has gift cards that can be cashed in regardless of whether an individual belongs to ClassPass but the gift giver must provide the recipients credit card number to cover any late fees, and the company automatically rolls that recipient into a regular monthly membership that can be canceled. ClassPass financed its growth in part with backing from L Catterton, a private equity fund in Greenwich focused on consumer products and services that contributed to an $85 million investment last year in ClassPass. This week, L Catterton sold the CorePower Yoga chain to TSG Consumer Partners, with the firms not disclosing financial terms, with prior L Catterton investments having included Equinox and Peloton. Were category investors first, so we focus on categories with strong growth, said Michael Farello, a managing partner who put together L Cattertons investment in ClassPass, during a Bloomberg interview last year. The average category that we are investing in ... is growing over 30 percent, and then we look for brands within that, that are distinctive. Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman Google Chrome 73 has been released by Google and it adds Dark Mode support to the browser. The feature is integrated with the dark mode in macOS Mojave so enabling dark mode at an OS level will switch Chrome to a dark theme as well. Sadly for Windows users, the dark mode support is nowhere to be found. As for the Dark mode in the macOS version, it looks very similar to how Chrome looks when used in incognito mode. If you dont enable the system-wide dark mode in macOS Mojave, you wont be able to enjoy the dark mode in Google Chrome as well. In addition, the release contains over 60 security fixes. Plus, the update brings Progressive Web Apps support to desktops which should further help in the uptake of PWAs among developers. Chrome 73 also adds support for keyboard media keys on Windows, macOS, and Linux. This means you can use the media keys on your PC to control media playback on sites like YouTube. Other new features that are a part of Chrome 73 include enhanced spell check, Safe browsing extended reporting features, a Skip ad button for videos played in picture-in-picture mode, and more. If you are already using Chrome, it will automatically update itself in the background. If not, you can also go to Chrome -> About Google Chrome and trigger the update manually. Do you use Chrome on your Mac? Or do you prefer Safari because it is lighter on system resources? Drop a comment and let us know! NEW YORK - Surely, he must be here somewhere. We've traveled to deepest Brooklyn by bus, rail, and ride-hailing services, subsisting on complimentary water and mints, all in hope of glimpsing a curious species that has been in hibernation for nearly three years. If our calculations are correct, he will be just rising from his slumber - checking his Twitter feed and preparing to unleash a primal scream heralding his own return and that of his muse, Bernard Sanders, the 77-year-old junior senator from Vermont who is kicking off the sequel to his 2016 presidential campaign on this very day. We are, of course, in search of the Bernie Bro. Online agitator. Millennial misogynist. Leftist know-it-all clothed in self-righteousness and also some sort of stupid hat. Have you seen this man? You must remember him, at least. During the last Democratic primary, the Bernie Bro emerged as the unwanted mascot of the Sanders campaign. He represented the senator's most strident supporters, painted in broad strokes as unwashed anti-capitalists with bad manners and a mob mentality. Some people argued that the Bernie Bro was just a myth, or at least an overblown stereotype, but one way or another he became a figure the Sanders camp had to resist as it tried to focus a campaign on economic inequality. It is the second day of March, and roughly 13,000 people have come out for the first Sanders rally of 2019. Bernie is back. Has the Bernie Bro returned, too? We know what to look for - sort of. The original Bernie Bro field guide, published by The Atlantic in October 2015, informs us that the Bernie Bro is male, "very male." That he is white, well-educated and may have worn a toga to a party in college. He is aware of NPR podcasts. Moreover, he "might loathe one NPR podcast in particular." A Google image search offers more clues: He will be 25, maybe 35, with meticulously ungroomed facial hair. Even in pictures, one can tell that a Bernie Bro will always smell of last night's home brew. He'll wear a gray pullover or a horizontally striped tank top. It is snowing the day we arrive. What is the subfreezing equivalent of a horizontally striped tank top? A horizontally striped tank top, probably. Bernie Bro don't care. At 9:30 a.m., two hours before the rally's official start time, a line of shivering supporters stretches for several blocks. Near the front we spot a bearded, bespectacled man wearing a fleece-lined cap with ear flaps. "I fit the demographic of Bernie Bro-ness. Sure," he says. His name is Cooper Miller. He is 36 and lives here in Brooklyn. He once had a Bernie Sanders-themed birthday party where guests could take photos with a life-size cutout of the senator. And just like that our quest is over, because this guy is a total Bernie Bro, right? "Do I self-identify? With irony, for sure," Miller says as the wilderness of Brooklyn suddenly seems to close in on us. "It was funny because my critique of Republicans at the time was that they're all clowns, and I myself was a kind of pastiche of what Bernie Bro-dom is," he continues. "Can you ironically make fun of the thing that ultimately is going to be a critique of the person you really support? Yes. I've done it." Oh. Um, huh. So, you're saying you're Faux Bro? "Am I faking you out?" Miller says. "Totally." Perhaps this will be more complicated than we initially thought. Let us pause to consider the possibility that our mission was doomed from the start. Even before the first Democratic primary, there were questions about the veracity of the Bernie Bro. Was he real, or just a trope pumped up by Hillary Clinton backers to malign their opponent? By then, it almost didn't matter. Like Bigfoot, the Bernie Bro loomed large in the public imagination. Except really he was more like a werewolf: a creature into which otherwise benign young men of the left were said to transform under a full moon - or in the glow of a computer screen. And because the Bernie Bro was an amalgamation of real traits, everyone seemed to know exactly who he was, even if they didn't actually know him. Sanders himself recently found a way to shun the Bernie Bro without saying his name. "I want to be clear that I condemn bullying and harassment of any kind and in any space," he wrote in an email to more than 100 of his surrogates days after declaring his 2020 candidacy. It wasn't just the online behavior of some of his supporters that Sanders was talking about. There have been reports that female staffers faced sexual harassment by co-workers and pay inequities while working for the 2016 Sanders campaign. In recent months, the senator publicly apologized to "any woman who felt that she was not treated appropriately" and held a closed-door meeting with female staffers seeking to voice their concerns, but the news seemed to support the idea that Bernieworld was beset by bro-ness. In advance of our quest, we raised the question of the Bernie Bro with several women who've worked with the senator since 2016. "Sexism is real," Winnie Wong, co-founder of the grassroots group People for Bernie, told us. "The patriarchy is real. So we can start by framing it like that." Wong thinks the Bernie Bro hype overlooks the fact that, while older black voters favored Clinton in the 2016 primaries, Bernie attracted a majority of voters under 30 of all races. She is sure the Bernie Bro will stick around - whether in the flesh, online, or in the public imagination - for the 2020 campaign, and perhaps the best the Bernie camp can do to combat it is to set a tone from the top and keep showing up. "You're going to tell me that a few thousand men with facial hair are going to erase the body of work that I've helped create?" says Wong. "I'm an Asian-American woman. So there's something particularly hilarious about that." Linda Sarsour, a Sanders supporter who is also co-chairwoman of the Women's March, says the elevation of the Bernie Bro as a symbol has come at the expense of the many women in the Vermont senator's base. "I think the whole conversation has been offensive," she says. "I feel erased and unseen." We are sitting with Wong and Sarsour in a Brooklyn coffee shop on the eve of the kickoff rally. Between bites of avocado toast, Sarsour continues: "For me, there is a criticism of the campaign from 2016 that is valid, about how do we talk about class and economic justice and racial justice in a more cohesive framing?" Sarsour says she has seen Sanders evolve on those issues, and she points to the constituency of his current campaign as evidence of that evolution. Sanders picked Faiz Shakir, a Muslim, as his new campaign manager. In addition to Ben of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, who is white, the campaign co-chairs are Ro Khanna, an Indian-American congressman from California, Carmen Yulin Cruz, mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Nina Turner, a black former state senator from Ohio. For Turner, Bernie Bros are "nothing but a remake of the Obama Boys" - caricatures designed to make the campaigns seem more anti-feminist than they really are. She says she has been heartened in recent months to see women and people of color reclaim the term by posting photos of themselves online with the hashtag #BernieBro or #JustAnotherBernieBro. It seems Cooper Miller, our bearded friend from the Brooklyn rally, is not the only Sanders fan with a sense of irony. Back to the task at hand. We move on from Miller and his riddles and wade into the crowd in search of a more clear-cut example of a Bernie Bro. Chris Dols stands in a knit cap, writing utensils in his pockets, 4-month old daughter Edie strapped to his chest. He stops us short. "I think the whole notion is intentionally misleading, like, to try to peel off women, people of color," he says, echoing Wong and Sarsour. "Whenever you have a campaign that involves millions of people in a country that's really sexist, in a lot of ways, I think there are going to be sexist people in that campaign," adds his friend Gary Lapon. Yes, that's what we're looking for, the sexist people. So how do we spot them here in the crowd? "I don't know how many of them are going to self-identify, if they're real," Lapon said. "Kevin insists he knows some," Dols chimes in. "Our friend Kevin. He's here somewhere." Alas, Kevin and his Bernie Brolodex are nowhere to be found. Catherine Curran-Groome also says she knows some Bros. Or she did, at least, last year as a student at the University of Vermont. "They would go at you on a topic," she explains. "Certain issues in politics we actually would agree on, but I would know not to talk about it because it would go on for a 45-minute conversation that I wasn't in the mood for." That sounds right. Yet the crowd here, as they wait for their champion to speak, seems awfully subdued. Maybe they're too cold to get belligerent. Or maybe a Bernie Bro can't exist here, among the converted. Maybe he only emerges when someone's wrong opinion needs correcting. Or only when stripped of inhibition, either by alcohol or online anonymity. "I don't believe in Bernie Bros," says Malachy Labrie-Cleary, a 25-year-old holding a climate crisis sign. "There's only Bernie people. Beautiful Bernie people." And yet, he continues, "there is one reality where I would have said, 'I am a Bernie Bro.' That is one reality. . . . Like, you could have been colloquial. Like, 'Hey, Bro, are you a supporter of Bernie?' That might technically make me a Bernie Bro. But it's all semantics at that point." Semantics, right. There is one characteristic so many of these non-Bernie Bros seem to share: a willingness to talk . . . and talk . . . and talk . . . about why they're not Bernie Bros. And then, as if bathed in golden light from refracted healing crystals, he appears before us. Hair mussed. Converse kicks faded and wet from snow. "I'm a Bernie Bro," he said. "For sure." His name, he says, is Zander Carlman. He is 26 years old, lives in Manhattan and would describe his profession only as "professional." "I'm a homosexual, I'm here with my boyfriend. His name is Darryle," Carlman tells us. Oh, huh. The field guide didn't mention anything about sexual orientation, or Darryle. But please, continue. "I'm a dirtbag," he says. "I'm part of the dirtbag left that came into renaissance in 2016." Sorry - what? "All of the other candidates start from a position of compromise. And they're not going to achieve anything. Bernard, my dear friend from Vermont, he starts from an uncompromising position. And people respond to values. I think he could win. Also, all the other candidates are women. And can you even think of a woman being president?" He stares us dead in the eyes as we contemplate the weight of his words, the significance of the Bernie Bro and the meaning of our own unknowable existence. "I'm being ironic," Carlman says, breaking into laughter. "That was a joke. A joke." A joke. Of course. And with that, our search has ended. NORWALK The Common Council voted 13-1 to adopt the Wall Street-West Avenue redevelopment plan that has been the subject of many meetings, hearings and debates since discussions on it began in 2017. I remember a vibrant neighborhood full of life, Councilman John Kydes, who serves as the Planning Committee chairman, said about the Wall Street area. Now I drive through that area...I realize how much of a shell (it is) of what it once was. Kydes called the plan a vision for the area in the form of a document that can outline development in the area for the next 10 years. Councilman Douglas Hempstead was the lone no vote on the plan stating that while overall he would give it a B-plus, there were some areas that raised concerns. Some of those concerns were also raised by neighborhood members, business owners and developers weighed in once again on the Wall Street-West Avenue redevelopment plan at the Common Council meeting on Tuesday evening. You have stakeholders in an area who are up in arms, including me, Jason Milligan, a developer in the Wall Street area. I urge you to vote no tonight or table it, if not for just because of all the questions. Milligan argued that because the previous redevelopment plan for the area expired, there was no need for another. We are not under a plan we dont need a plan, he said. I urge you to take a pause, invite the Wall Street Neighborhood Association see if theres not something that can bridge the divide. Hempstead said that it was a little shocking to see members of the neighborhood oppose it so strongly. This is the first time I can recall any kind of passion that came out and went the other way, he said. Ive never seen a group of people fight the designation of blight. That has been the main point of dispute, however, in the plan is over the classification of the area as one that is blighted or deteriorating. According to the Regional Plan Association analysis in the plan, which worked with the Norwalk Redevelopment Agency to develop it, 205 out of 385 properties meet one or more state and federal criteria for blight determination. The plan lists that 41 parcels on the site are contaminated or potentially contaminated sites, 147 have suspected lead paint because they were built before 1978 and have not been improved and 44 parcels partially or fully within an 100-year floodplain. In order to qualify as a redevelopment area, in the eyes of the state, 20 percent of properties must meet these criteria. On the federal level, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development requires that 25 percent of the properties within that designated zone to qualify. Michael McGuire, principal at the Austin McGuire Company, which provides real estate appraisal and consulting services and is located on Wall Street, prepared a report in advance of the meeting to dispute the plans claims of blight and deterioration in the area. The purpose of this report is to provide the Common Council members a more accurate picture of the overall health of the Wall-West Avenue Plan area, McGuire said in his report. Our reason for providing (Common Council) members with empirical, accurate data to balance the misinformation being submitted by the RDA about the Plan Area. McGuire said, according to his overall property analysis, which looked at the number of vacancies and the market rental rates, the rate of vacancies in the area was less than 10 percent and had seen rents increase since 2013. As such, we are formally requesting that the Wall Street-West Avenue Neighborhood Plan be tabled until such a time as an accurate depiction of level of blight/deterioration can be determined in the plan area, McGuires report reads. McGuire said hes all for redevelopment and revitalizing the area, but said he believed the blight and deteriorated data is flawed. Others welcomed the citys desire to intervene in the area, a sentiment that was shared by many council members who voted in favor of it. There has been growth and movement over the last few years, Common Council President Tom Livingston said. Unfortunately, were just not there yet. The overarching vision for the area is a healthy and vibrant Urban Core Neighborhood with a strong economy driven by innovation and collaboration that is accessible, authentic, lively and affordable for residents and businesses. The plan lays out recommended actions such as collaborative planning, developing designated opportunity sites, improving connectivity and mobility and laying out design guidelines for the area, which stretches from the intersection of I-95 at the south end to Route 1 and Main Avenue at the north end. One of those sites is the former YMCA site that Western Connecticut Health Network Vice President Morris Gross said Norwalk Hospital plans to redevelop into ambulatory outpatient services and senior living. Norwalk Hospital wholeheartedly supports the plan, he told the Common Council. Its a beautiful building that will anchor that site. Other neighborhood business owners and community members spoke out in favor of the plan, asking the Council to support it. Our company has seen parts of Norwalk grow and parts of Norwalk stay stagnant for a long time, said Alan Webber, the chief financial officer for M.F DiScala and Company, which has property in the redvelopment area. Our company is very much for the redevelopment plan and hopes this goes forward. Without more development, more people its not going to become the vibrant area its supposed to be. The area just needs people, the most important thing. Some residents argued that the area is one that is redeveloping naturally and doesnt need this plan. Others said that they wished council would pump the brakes on the plan since the latest revisions were made public less than two weeks ago, according to resident Diane Lauricella. I know theres a need to plan for this area, she said, stating the area has been a discussion point for more than 30 years. Its just not ready for primetime...It appears that we are going too quickly. The full plan was officially released in November and has been edited a few times, with the latest updates coming in February. There were multiple public hearing sessions on the plan throughout the process. Lisa Brinton, who is also running for mayor this year, said she believed there was a shroud of secrecy surrounding the plan and other land use decisions by this situation. The lack of transparency with this administration with land use cannot be overstated, she said. Those most directly impacted ... have valid concerns about eminent domain takings. kelly.kultys@hearstmediact.com NORWALK The city has a new chief of operations and public works. The Common Council voted Tuesday night to appoint Anthony Robert Carr to the position, which oversees both public works and city parks management. The post is new, created as a part Norwalks recent government reorganization. Carr comes to the city from White Plains, N.Y., where he served as the deputy commissioner of public works and city engineer. Before that, Carr was the commissioner of public works for the village of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. I possess a dedicated work ethic and believe in applying multiple approaches and resources to solve the problem, Carr said in a letter to Mayor Harry Rilling. I am open-minded, eager to take on complex projects and challenges for personal and professional development. Carr said that he would like to play a role in executing the vision of the City of Norwalk Administration in this new job. He is a licensed professional engineer in Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania, according to his resume submitted to Common Council. He also is a certified floodplain manager. Carr is also an officer in the Coast Guard Reserve. Department of Public Works Director Bruce Chimento retired in September after a 50-year engineering career. Members of the Common Council praised Carr for his resume and previous work experience. It looks like the perfect fit, Councilman Michael Corsello said. Common Council President Tom Livingston said that he endorsed the pick, especially because of Carrs experience dealing with flooding. I had the opportunity to meet him as well, Livingston said. I found him and his resume excellent. I was impressed by his work ethic as well as his management style. The position is one of multiple senior manager roles that report directly to the mayor, including chief financial officer, chief of police, fire chief, chief of human resources and personnel and chief of economic and community development. The goal of the reorganization create highly responsible senior staff to assist the mayor in coordinating departments, offices and agencies, and give those staff a better understanding of the needs and challenges facing each department, and how to assure that services to residents are being delivered well and cost-effectively. Councilman Douglas Hempstead was the lone vote against the appointment, due to his stated disagreement with the process. Hempstead said that they missed the mark because all applicants should go through the personnel committee before coming to the full council. I find it a little unfair that a chosen few get the chance to talk to somebody or interview versus the committee that is earmarked to at least pass this onto the council, he said. Rilling said that his administration followed the same process as previous administrations when it came to hiring for this position and others. Carr will earn $160,000 annually as the chief of operations and public works. In his new position will organize and direct civil engineering, road maintenance, solid-waste collection and disposal, wastewater collection and treatment, and department equipment maintenance as well as public property maintenance. He starts on Monday, March 18. kelly.kultys@hearstmediact.com NORWALK Norwalk High School teacher Samantha DeMatteo is on a quest to make chemistry less scary, teaching hands-on lessons with real-world applications. Shes teaching her students about stains and how to most effectively remove them using different cleaning products. DeMatteo distributed T-shirts stained with chocolate, hot sauce and tea and asked students to determine why some cleaning products were more effective than others. Its a more modern way of studying molecular shape and chemical bonding and helps students learn with a purpose instead of learning it for the sake of learning it, she said. I think that chemistry can be scary. To look at the reactions and the elements and to see all of those symbols and things can be intimidating, she said. But when we start to break it down and to bring it into real life phenomenon and to try to make sense of it, its not as hard as you think. The 25-year-old Penn State graduate is one of six teachers chosen nationwide to participate in creating Next Generation Science Standards lessons with other educators at the University of Colorado Boulder in July. The standards, developed and published in 2013, exist in kindergarten-through-12th-grade classrooms across the country, and work to improve science education for all students by giving local educators the flexibility to design hands-on learning experiences that stimulate students interests, according to nextgenscience.org. Succeeding in the competitive selection process means, for one week, DeMatteo will work with Inquiry Hub, a research team of educators from Northwestern, University of Colorado Boulder and Denver Public Schools to develop chemistry units eventually used by teachers across the country. To prepare, DeMatteo has begun brainstorming about and adding to a list of phenomena provided by Inquiry Hub. The group must then brainstorm ways students can explore the topics using real-world examples and life experiences. Part of what I committed to when I accepted this offer is after I work on this work in the summer, I will pilot one of the units next school year, DeMatteo said. So, for 2019 to 2020, I will be piloting the unit that I helped to build the storyline for. I dont know what that looks like yet but its exciting to know Ill have the chance to actually bring that back and use it in the classroom. Chemistry, the science of identifying substances which compose matter, is exciting to some but terrifying to many. Before NGSS, traditional teaching was rampant, with many educators asking students to memorize science facts or read about ancient scientists and their feats. With the new standards, DeMatteo is finding students are less resistant and more open to learning. I think I find with my kids they have really good ideas, but theyre scared to put them on the paper because they dont know if theyre right, she said. But it doesnt matter if theyre right. I just want to know what theyre thinking. Its that light-hearted approach that makes DeMatteo believe she was selected to participate in the workshop. Bill Penuel, professor at University of Colorado Boulder and director of the project, confirmed that. Some of her commitments to NGSS, being student-centered in her teaching to really thinking about how curriculum could help students and teachers make the shift toward more meaningful science instruction, is what led him to offer her the opportunity. DeMatteo is looking forward to working with seasoned educators. I think that I have a lot to bring to the table just from the experience that Ive had these past four years being a teacher. Ive been trying to infuse this type of teaching into my classroom ever since I became a teacher, she said. I think that even though I am young and I only have four years of experience, the experience I have is quality NGSS experience. So, Im coming to the table with things to talk about, with student work I can bring up, with ideas about phenomenon and how they can all work in the classroom. DeMatteo and the others in the group are expected to develop lessons throughout the summer and into the fall. A small group will pilot the lessons in their own classrooms before all the curricula is accessible to teachers nationwide within one year. tatiana.flowers@thehour.com Eight newborn puppies were recently found in a garbage bag in a trash can. Police said it happened last month in Wisconsin. Authorities said they were called for a complaint of the sound of kittens coming from a garbage can. When officers arrived, they found the puppies and took them to the Marshfield Area Pet Shelter. A 56-year-old man was arrested, and police have recommended he be charged with mistreatment of animals and abandonment of animals. Police said the puppies are doing well and may be up for adoption in the coming months. This report originated from WISN-TV. A man brought an AK-47 to his son's middle school in Florida on Monday, according to a Palm Beach County School District report. Christopher Freeman, 28 of West Palm Beach, was arrested at Bear Lakes Middle School around 4 p.m. after an incident at the school involving his son. Freeman told school police he had received a FaceTime phone call from his son during school hours. Freeman told police that when he answered the phone, his son was crying and told him a teacher had "slammed him," according to Freeman. While speaking with his son, Freeman observed his son being grabbed by an adult and stated that he saw "his son's phone flying from his son's hand." According to the report, Freeman stated he was very upset and headed straight to the school to check on his son. When Freeman arrived at the school, he threatened violence to school officials because of what happened to his son, according to a Palm Beach County School District report. School district police immediately arrested Freeman. The school was secured after police placed the school on a Code Red lockdown. Police say the gun was loaded with one round in the chamber. The magazine has a 30-round capacity and appeared to be fully loaded, according to police. Freeman appeared in court Tuesday morning and his bond was set for $75,000. He was ordered to stay off the grounds according to court documents. Freeman was also ordered to wear a Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office ankle monitor. His next scheduled court appearance is April 4. A message was sent by phone to parents who have children at the school: Good afternoon Bear Lakes Middle School parents. This is principal Kirk Howell with an important message. This afternoon, our school was placed on lockdown after a parent became hostile in our front office. Once School Police was notified, it was discovered that the angered parent was in possession of a hand gun. School Police immediately confiscated the gun, and the inidividual will face criminal charges. The parent never brandished the gun or threatened the office staff with it at any time. I want to thank the quick action of our own school police, in cooperation with the West Palm Beach Police Department, for their cooperation in removing this individual from our campus. Once the parent was removed, our campus returned to an "All Clear" for a regular dismissal. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the school at 561.615.7700. NORWALK It was a more subdued crowd than the one at the same time in City Halls Common Council Chambers speaking on the citys potential Wall Street-West Avenue Redevelopment Plan. But roughly 40 residents attended an hour-long question-and-answer session Tuesday hosted by local members of the state legislature in the Community Room. The Community Conversation was hosted by state Sen. Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-25, and state Reps. Lucy Dathan, D-142, Chris Perrone, D-137, and Travis Simms, D-140, and had no set agenda. Dathan, Duff, Perone and Simms each began with an overview of the legislative session up to this point, including the areas they represent and bills on which they are working, then opened up the forum to questions from the crowd. Topics included historic preservation, the Walk Bridge and other Department of Transportation projects, tolls and school regionalization, the last two of which got the most attention Tuesday night. In response to a question about the fairness of regionalization to suburban districts, Duff explained that his school regionalization bill states that districts with under 2,000 students about half of those in the state would be forced to consolidate cooperate with another district, or explain to the Department of Education why it cant be done. None of this has been about closing schools, none of this has been about forced busing, none of this has been about taking away power from boards of education. None of this has been about losing local control, Duff said. Ive said publicly, and Im committed to this, I would not raise that number. Gov. Ned Lamonts polarizing proposals that could add tolls to major highways in Connecticut also generated several questions. Norwalk Public Library Director Christine Bradley, who described herself as a rabid Democrat, asked, What is the Democratic thinking in the Assembly about tolls? Were getting to a point here where were starting to get past the political aspects of this and getting into basically what the math is telling us, said Perone, who is a member, with Simms, of the Transportation Committee. We have a special transportation fund thats going to be solvent in two years. Simms, for his part, said he was undecided on the issue, but would support it if it was determined as a necessary step to boost infrastructure. The question is, how do we develop a sustainable revenue stream going forward, to not only keep our roads and our bridges in a state of good repair, but also how do we plan for the future? Perone said. justin.papp@scni.com; @justinjpapp1; 203-842-2586 Since the 2004 Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London, the nation has gone through a period of soul searching regarding the proper use of the power of eminent domain. An essential question in this debate is What is the right balance in eminent domain between governmental needs on the one hand and property owner rights on the other? When eminent domain is used for a purely public purpose say a school or highway it is more easily defended both in the Court of Law and in the Court of Public Opinion. When eminent domain is used to transfer privately owned property to a for-profit developer, there are potential problems, and the law has changed to reflect this acknowledgment of the inherent conflicts between the rights of property owners and the rights of governmental entities to seize properties. Typically, a Redevelopment Agency first creates a plan in order to revitalize economically stressed or deteriorated urban areas. The old term for this practice was urban renewal, a term decried by James Baldwin as a means of removing poor African Americans from their homes. In 1961, Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a strong critique of urban renewal. The Rondout neighborhood in Kingston, New York on the Hudson River was essentially destroyed by a federally funded urban renewal program in the 1960s, with more than 400 old buildings demolished, most of them historic brick structures built in the 19th century. Similarly ill-conceived urban renewal programs gutted the historic centers of other towns and cities across America in the 1950s and 1960s. Now Norwalks Redevelopment Agency an entity accountable to no one has set its sights on the historic Wall Street-West Avenue corridors again. The plan area is awkwardly bundled to include Norwalk Hospital and the site of the old Norwalk YMCA in what amounts to redevelopment gerrymandering. Strict compliance with state statute is necessary to adopt a redevelopment plan. The existence of deteriorated or deteriorating conditions (i.e. blight) must be established. Blight determination is necessary to unlock state and federal funds. Labeling areas as blighted should be done carefully. Blight determinations provide the justification for commercial tax abatement. Tax abatements for redevelopers often divert money from schools, social services and the taxpayers. But defining blight is a thorny issue. Too often developers with government connections seek blight determinations to win access to tax abatements. Blight and redevelopment then are shaped not by public purpose, but by private interests seeking public subsidies. (JHM, POKO, others). Redevelopment policies originally intended to address unsafe or insufficient urban housing are now routinely employed to subsidize the building of luxury apartments. These policies are the silent, slow killer of small business and small development, which would proceed organically if cities focused their efforts on infrastructure improvements and allowed business and property owners to work with market forces to reawaken underutilized city centers. The Wall Street area has been under the influence and control of the Redevelopment Agency for decades with sometimes terrible consequences. The Tyvek Temple, aka POKO, is a grim monument to failed redevelopment plans endorsed by our highest elected officials in cooperation with the agency. In the case of Wall Street, the area has improved despite the involvement of the agency and not because of their involvement. According to recent testimony of Redevelopment Agency Director Tim Sheehan, the Wall Street Redevelopment Area plan expired in June of 2018. There is no current redevelopment plan for the area, which may explain the haste with which the Planning Committee and the agency are driving this plan forward to the council for a vote Tuesday, March 12. Despite claims to the contrary from the Redevelopment Agency and some Planning Committee members, the agency is literally starting from scratch to create a new plan area with ever-shifting criteria for determining blight, which as noted, opens the door to eminent domain takings and taxpayer subsidies to connected developers. Whatever the term blight, slum, deteriorated or deteriorating the bar for taking one persons property and giving it to someone else must be high. The Wall Street area has improved significantly in the past few years, making blight determinations impossible without strict guidelines, not loose ones created to support connected developers and an opaque agency that operates with little oversight and no voter accountability. Jason Milligan is a real estate broker and Norwalk developer. SPRINGFIELD LGBTQ advocates say they are deeply disturbed by legislation that would ban some forms of health care for transgender persons under the age of 18. Filed by GOP Rep. Tom Morrison of Palatine, House Bill 3515 would add certain medical services such as sex-change procedures or the delivery of puberty-suppressing drugs to the list of acts punishable by revoking or suspending a doctors license. Myles Davis, spokesperson for LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Illinois, called the bill an attack on families; the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community; and child health care in a news conference Tuesday, where various transgender persons stood alongside House Leader Greg Harris, a Democrat from Chicago, to voice their opposition to the bill. This bill takes health care options away from Illinois children just because of their identity, Davis said. Harris agreed. [The bill] is harmful physically, it is harmful mentally, it is anti-science, and it seems to be designed to be personally hurtful to a group of people very intentionally, Harris added. I just dont know why this would be before the Legislature. The bills sponsor, however, says hes been hearing from many parents who say their children are moving too swiftly to seek such medical services, which they might later regret. What were talking about here is life-changing surgeries or drugs that are given to minors, before we really have any deep studies about their long-term or short-term effects, Morrison said. And they are permanent effects. Morrison referenced an anecdotal story of a teenage girl who received a double mastectomy because she believed she was born in the wrong body. At age 22, she realized what a mistake she made, and she regrets she wasnt given all the information she needed, Morrison said. Nor was she mature enough to make that kind of decision. Those at the news conference rebutted this by saying the choice to have such treatments and procedures is strictly between an individual, their family and their doctor. [The bill] takes away from a family the right to work with their children and medical professionals, Harris said. Government should not be interfering in these decisions, much less outright banning them. Asked whether it was necessary to make the medical procedures illegal, rather than promoting outreach efforts and ensuring accurate information available, Morrison said, I need to give that more thought. Reach reporter Grant Morgan at gmorgan@capitolnewsillinois.com Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Inforial (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta, Indonesia Thu, March 14, 2019 00:03 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81cf174 4 Inforial Free The government continues to encourage provincial and regency/municipality administrations across Indonesia to consistently implement the school enrollment zoning system policy to ensure the equal distribution of access and quality education across the country. The Education and Culture Ministry's director general for secondary education, Hamid Muhammad, said in Jakarta on Monday that all regulations/policies related to education were aimed to enhance the quality of education, which had become the governments focus when it came to education. We started to boost the quality of education in 2016 when we launched the school enrollment education system policy. 2019 is the third year that we are implementing the zoning system, he said in the opening of the coordination meeting on promoting the implementation of regulations/policies on elementary and secondary education in Jakarta. Representatives of education agencies across Indonesia took part in the meeting, which ends on Wednesday. Following three years of implementing the school enrollment system policy, it is high time to evaluate and re-manage the regulations/policies regarding elementary and secondary education and to come up with a national education standard. According to Hamid, the zoning system was more than just a school enrollment issue, but it also addressed other issues, including collecting data (on school-age children), the management of institutions, redistribution of teachers, development of students and assessment. In early January, the Education and Culture Ministry issued Education Ministerial Decree No. 51/2018 regarding the school enrollment zoning system policy for 2019. Under the decree that is implemented by regency/municipality administrations and provincial administrations for elementary and secondary schools, respectively, they are obliged to use three channels, one of which is zoning (90 percent). The other two are achievement (5 percent) and parent or guardian moving to a new region. In general, there is no significant difference between Education Ministerial Decree No. 51/2018 and Education Ministerial Decree No. 14/2018 that regulates the school enrollment zoning system for the previous school year. Through the new regulation the decree strives to drive the implementation of a non-discriminative, objective, transparent, accountable and just school enrollment. We have to safeguard the implementation of the zoning system for elementary, junior high and senior high school level in order to avoid possible overlapping, said Hamid. According to him, education agencies, either in the regency/municipality and provinces, could discuss together through the School Headmaster Working Discussion (MKKS) to map out the estimation regarding the number of students that pursue education at schools/Islamic schools or Paket (junior or senior high-school equivalency diploma) in one zone. In this way, the target for 12-year compulsory education can be easily achieved, he said. Education agencies are obliged to expand the zoning when necessary to allow for each student attend a school. Under Article 23 of Education Ministerial Decree No. 51/2018, the zoning system must be applied in all regions, except for those frontier, outermost and least developed regions often referred to as terdepan, terluar, tertinggal (3T) regions. Education and Culture Minister Muhadjir Effendy affirmed earlier that the new regulation on the 2019 school enrollment reinforced and refined the previously developed zoning system. The zoning system will become a blueprint that the ministry will use in its bid to identify problems pertaining to education, especially in the formal and non-formal education sector. Apart from that, it will also be used to seek solutions, he said. The implementation of the school enrollment system this year is expected to prompt schools to be proactive in collecting data on prospective students based on the data on the spread of school-age children. The major consideration in selecting new students is the distance from home to school, instead of grades or the result of the National Examination (UN). In determining the zoning at every school level, the regency/municipality administrations should also consider the schools capacity to accommodate students and the number of school-age children there are in the respective region, according to the technical guidance on the school enrollment system. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Ni Komang Erviani (The Jakarta Post) Bali Wed, March 13, 2019 17:38 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81c8245 1 Art & Culture art,bali,India,New-Delhi,art-and-culture,Wayan-Redika Free Strong cultural ties between Bali and India have existed for centuries. This is explored in Art[i]Factual, an exhibition by six Balinese artists that examines the richness and similarities of the two cultures. In collaboration with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), the exhibition is being held at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi from March 13 to 20. The Balinese artists are Djaja Tjandra Kirana, Wayan Redika, Made Wiradana, Made Duatmika, I Ketut Suwidiarta and IGM Wisatawan. Wayan Redika said the theme centered on a fusion of art, artifacts and facts. Read also: Japanese, Balinese artists celebrate friendship "It's an attempt to explore the greatness of artwork and culture in the past as footprints with a huge impact on the creation process of present artwork," he said. He also said that the ICCR, through its representative in Bali, gave Balinese artists the chance to explore the heritage of the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics. As 80 percent of the Indian population identifies as Hindu, the country has become a religious reference for Balinese Hinduism, which is practiced by the majority of Balinese locals. The rich cultural heritage of both places acted as inspiration for the exhibition. "Then, how does that inspiration turn into a visual idea? That's the goal of this Art[i]Factual exhibition," Redika said. The artist said that the exhibition could also be seen as a way for Indian artists and art enthusiasts to share ideas. (wng) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Devina Heriyanto (The Jakarta Post) London Wed, March 13, 2019 15:38 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81c3f41 1 Books Turkey,democracy,writer,Elif-Shafak,Literature,#LondonBookFair,London-Book-Fair,Book,#book,author Free Elif Shafak has ticked all the boxes that make a writer a writer. She has penned 17 books, in both English and Turkish, won numerous awards for her works and gained recognition as a person who would make the world better by Politico in 2017. She actively speaks out against persecution and oppression by authoritarian governments and, being a female, faces gender-based discrimination. Shafak was at the London Book Fair for the launch of the International Literature Showcase (#LitShowcase) a two-year partnership between the National Center for Writing and the British Council supported by the Arts Council England. The Jakarta Post talked to Shafak about politics and literature, gender discrimination in the publishing industry and Rumi. You talked about how identity politics affected the way stories were read, especially those written by non-Western authors. Have things changed? The world we are living in today is deeply divided, polarized and shaped by tribalism. Art and literature need to move beyond political tribes. Beyond information ghettoes or cultural islands. Storytellers connect people and cultures across borders. To me, it is very important that writers refuse to be pigeonholed down into narrow identity politics. I do not have a single, monolithic identity. Instead, I have multiple belongings. Your books and their readers are highly diverse. You said in the same talk about identity politics that a writer should be free to write beyond their own identity. How do you write beyond your own cultural identity without falling into the trap of cultural appropriation? What about political correctness? I believe as human beings we all embody multiplicity inside. We have many layers, many sides. Literature is not always about telling your personal story to the world. Sometimes it is like that and I respect this. But what excites me much more than telling my autobiographical story is understanding, feeling, hearing the other. For me, one of the most powerful aspects of literature is about transcending the boundaries of identity politics. In my books there is a consistent desire to bring the periphery to the center, to make the invisible more visible, to give more voice to the silenced. This is why I am not only interested in stories, I am also interested in silences. I question taboos. I question the things we find difficult to talk about. All extremist ideologies polarize humanity and they dehumanize the "other", but a storyteller does the exact opposite: Stories rehumanize those who have been dehumanized. For a storyteller there is no us versus them. There is only human beings East and West, we are all deeply connected. Read also: 'London welcomes Indonesia': 2019 London Book Fair marks 70 years of Indonesia-UK bilateral relations Do you think a writer must always be political? Or is it just inevitable? If you happen to be a writer from a wounded democracy, such as Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Venezuela -- and the list of such countries is sadly getting longer -- you do not have the luxury of being apolitical. There is always a political edge to my writing. However, I do not like it when writers preach or try to teach. A writers job is not to give the answers, but only to ask the questions. In my books, I ask questions and I always leave the answers to the readers because every reader is different and unique and they will come up with their own answers. I respect that. You faced criticism for writing in English since it is not your mother tongue. What do you think about this? What keeps you going? I am very critical of ultranationalism and I am very critical of any ideology that divides human beings into antagonistic camps. I do not think along nationalistic lines or tribalistic lines. Why cant a poet or a novelist write in more than one language? Who decides? If we can dream in more than one language why shouldnt we be able to write in more than one language? For so many years now I have commuted between Turkish and English, just like I commute between cultures, between East and West. If there is sorrow, melancholy, longing in my writing I find it easier to express these in Turkish. When it comes to humor, irony, satire, I find it much easier to express them in English. So I feel attached to each language in a different way. It is intriguing that you are one of the most widely read writers in Turkey and yet in my country Indonesia your works are hardly known. What are your thoughts about this? Id love my novels to reach readers, storytellers and book lovers in Indonesia. Thatd make me happy. I am always intrigued by Indonesias history, culture and society. I find lots of similarities as a Turkish writer and I follow the debates in Indonesia about identity, faith, womens rights and public space. There are so many overlapping themes. So its a country thats close to my heart and I hope through stories and storytelling we can connect better. As elsewhere, women in the publishing industry face discrimination and prejudice because of their gender. What is your experience? What is the most striking discrimination that you have personally faced? How do you fight against gender inequality as a writer? The publishing industry looks modern and very open-minded at first glance. However, underneath it can be quite patriarchal. There is a big gap between the number of reviews for women writers and the number of reviews for male writers. The industry treats women differently, but its very subtle and we need to talk about it. But I have faced so much discrimination in Turkey as a woman writer for so many years. In my motherland a male novelist is primarily a novelist. No one talks about his gender. But a female novelist is primarily a woman and then a writer. So you are treated differently from the very beginning. The elite are mostly conservative men and I was always belittled, looked down upon and slandered by many conservative and nationalist male elite. But what keeps me going is my love for the art of storytelling and the readers. Book readers are amazing! In countries where there is no freedom of speech perhaps books matter even more and when a reader likes a novel she shares it with her friends, with her aunt, with her sister-in-law. To me that is very precious. If books survive and thrive it is thanks to the love of their readers. A must-ask question: Why Rumi? Rumi has a special place in my heart -- ever since my youth, my university years. Also, Shams. I am interested in mysticism in general. I like mystical philosophy and I love reading mystical poetry. My work and my world combine Eastern and Western sources of knowledge and understanding. I also want to bridge oral culture and written culture. That, too, matters to me. (kes) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Jessicha Valentina (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13, 2019 14:32 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81bd8b7 1 Lifestyle wedding,wedding-dowry,investment,stocks,mutual-fund,investors,millenials,#wedding Free Teja Amanda Putra, 28, and Chintania Intan Rosaline, 26, tied the knot on March 9 at Padang State Universitys (UNP) auditorium in Padang, West Sumatra. Unlike most brides who receive gold, money or the latest brand name bags as a dowry, Intan received a diamond necklace set and mutual funds published by nine different asset management companies. I chose mutual funds as a dowry because our passion is to invest in our future. We also know that the Indonesian capital market generated the biggest return in the past 10 years, said Teja as quoted by tempo.co. Speaking to The Jakarta Post on Tuesday, Teja said he and his wife worked in the capital market industry and it was his idea to give mutual funds as a dowry. Fortunately, [Intan] agreed to it, said Teja. My wife is also a [stock] trader, so shes used to opening stock trading apps and buying capital market products, said Teja, She personally chose the mutual funds. The stock market enthusiast shared that he had initially planned to buy stocks instead of mutual funds but his employer did not allow him to do so. However, among the nine mutual funds, the majority are equity funds. Teja hoped he could educate the public about stock savings through his wedding. Read also: How millennials can help Indonesia's financial market Since the wedding went viral, Teja has been receiving messages from strangers on Instagram, asking him to teach them about stocks and mutual funds. Teja shared that there were plenty of opportunities to learn about the capital market, such as through the Indonesia Stock Exchanges (IDX) representative offices in each province and various Instagram accounts. [You can take] the capital market classes. You will get knowledge, a learning module and even free snacks and lunch, he said. As for avid social media users, Teja recommended following @ngertisaham and @pahamsahamon Instagram as the two accounts frequently shared information about the capital market. If you are still confused [do not hesitate] to send a direct message to the admin, he said. In addition to the two platforms, Teja shared that many investor communities could help aspiring investors. There are securities companies in [other provinces] that can help guide aspiring investors, he said. (kes) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Rome Wed, March 13, 2019 19:02 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81cabfb 2 Art & Culture exhibition,Leonardo-da-Vinci,rome,Italy Free A major exhibition dedicated to the scientific genius of Leonardo da Vinci opens in Rome on Wednesday, part of festivities to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of the artist and inventor. The show at the Scuderie del Quirinale palace, entitled "La scienza prima della scienza" (the science before science), traces the technological and scientific work of da Vinci and reflects on how "the myth of Leonardo" was developed. More than 200 pieces will be on display including some of his most famous works, which are credited with developing the parachute, helicopter and tank, the museum said ahead of the launch. Da Vinci was a "European citizen of the world," said exhibition curator Claudio Giorgione. The polymath was a driving force behind the Renaissance and worked in numerous fields, including painting, sculpture, architecture, science, mathematics and astronomy. His most recognisable artworks include the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Read also: Nude 'Mona Lisa' may be by Leonardo, say experts The exhibition devotes an entire room to da Vinci's "military genius" with several reproductions of his designs, including his famous "giant crossbow". Da Vinci was born in the Medici-ruled Republic of Florence in 1452. He died in France in 1519 and is the most famous left-handed painter in history. French President Emmanuel Macron has said he will host his Italian counterpart Sergio Mattarella at Amboise, central France, on May 2 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of da Vinci's death "with French and Italian youth". Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Agus Dermawan T. (The Jakarta Post) Bali Wed, March 13, 2019 18:22 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81c98f0 1 Art & Culture bali,art,hindu Free As Bali celebrates the once a decade event of Panca Wali Krama, the islands art community is reminded of I Gusti Nyoman Lempad, a celebrated artist who died during the Balinese Hindu ritual period in 1978. Lempad was a one of a kind Balinese artistic maestro. Born in 1847, the renowned painter and sculptor was also known for his designs of traditional Balinese buildings and talent for crafting ritual objects, such as barong and ngaben towers. Lempad was also a major supporter of Pita Maha (Big Creativity), an art organization founded by Walter Spies, Rudolf Bonnet and Tjokorda Gde Agung Sukawati in 1936. Given his amazing achievements, it is surprising that only a small group of people knew when Lempad passed away at the age of 131 in Ubud, Bali, on April 25, 1978. It was strange but true. I got the news about Lempads passing only in the middle of May, recalled Anak Agung Made Djelantik, a doctor and cultural expert who was good friends with Lempad. When Lempad was pronounced dead, the Ubud community was calm, there was no knocking of bamboo to signal his death and no one paid any condolence calls. This was because when Lempad breathed his last breath, Panca Wali Krama was underway in Bali, so Lempads death was kept secret. Maestro: Aside from painting and sculpting, I Gusti Nyoman Lempad was also known for his designs of traditional Balinese buildings and talent for crafting ritual objects. (JP/Agus Dermawan T) Panca Wali Krama, held once every ten years based on the Balinese calendar, is the islands second largest ritual after Eka Dasa Rudra, which is held once every 100 years. Balinese Hindus are currently observing Panca Wali Krama, which runs from Jan. 20 until April 4. One of the rituals, Karya Agung Panca Wali Krama on March 6, is a grand ceremony at the Pura Agung Besakih temple in Karangasem aimed at achieving harmony in nature and society. Panca Wali Krama is the only time Hindu adherents on the island are forbidden to die, as written in the Bhama Kerthi manuscript. People are prohibited from conducting purification activities connected with death, including the cremation ceremony of ngaben. The rules say that if the person who dies during this time is an ordinary resident of a lower caste, a burial can be carried out silently at night by using small torches as the only source of light. The night funeral is aimed at preventing any sadness from tarnishing Panca Wali Krama. The family is also not allowed to announce the death. If the deceased has a high position in society, such as being a sulinggih or pemangku (priest), a funeral is forbidden, let alone a ngaben ceremony. The body is to be laid out in the home and preserved with herbs. The only ritual permitted is the spraying of tirtha pemarisudha, sacred water from Pura Besakih, by family members. In the whole world, only Panca Wali Krama of Balis Hindus can defer somebodys death, said Garrett Kam, a Hawaii-based researcher and author. Lempads death during Panca Wali Karma has long been a subject of discussion among those interested in the cultural history of Bali. Every time Karya Agung Panca Wali Krama is in progress, I always remember Lempad, said Suteja Neka, the founder of Museum Neka in Ubud, which has a pavilion dedicated to Lempads work. The official date of Lempads death is May 9, 1978, several weeks after he passed away. His body was given a pelebon (grand ngaben) ceremony in Ubud, which was widely covered by international media. Tens of thousands of Balinese people and artists from around the world attended the funeral. Among them was French and Spanish fashion designer Paloma Picasso, the daughter of 20th century painter Pablo Picasso. Maestro Lempads funeral ceremony is much grander than that for my father, Paloma said at the time. Australian filmmakers John Darling and Lorne Blair recorded the significant event for their acclaimed documentary, Lempad of Bali. Matinya Dursasana : Mahabharata (The death of Dursasana: Mahabharata) by I Gusti Nyoman Lempad (JP/Agus Dermawan T.) During his life, Lempad received numerous accolades for his artistic achievements. Among them are Anugerah Seni from the Indonesian government in 1970 and Dharma Kusuma from the Bali administration in 1982. His works are displayed in numerous museums around the globe, including Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, the Netherlands. The maestro is remembered through the Lempad Prize, an art award granted by the Sanggar Dewata studio to Indonesian visual artists with outstanding achievements. After his death, his house in Ubud was turned into a museum, but sadly the property is poorly managed, prompting calls for the government to support the museum. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Wening Gitomartoyo (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13, 2019 11:35 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81b170f 1 Books The-Little-Prince,Prabu-Anom,Syauqi-Stya-Lacksana,books,translation Free A passion for words and a beloved tale have taken Syauqi Stya Lacksana on a journey of self-discovery. The Little Prince, penned by French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery, offers observations about life and human nature and is one of the most-translated works globally. I first read it in 2012 in English and loved it immediately, Syauqi said. I became more interested as I found new meanings when I read the translated version in Indonesian." He went on to say that he thought the book offered profound messages. "It would never be boring even if you read it over and over. Theres always something new to learn." He was feeling agitated, though, after finding the translated version in an ancient Egyptian language. I was quite upset at the time, knowing that Indonesia has so many regional languages and yet there was not any translated version of the book in those languages, he said during a recent phone interview with The Jakarta Post. Graduating as an English major from the Indonesian University of Education (UPI) in Bandung, West Java, the 22-year-old works as a freelance translator. He lives in Bandung and speaks Sundanese, the language widely spoken in many parts of West Java. Syauqi Stya Lacksana works as a freelance translator and intends to translate more books into Sundanese. (Courtesy of/Syauqi Stya Lacksana ) Syauqi decided to translate the book from French into Sundanese, titled Prabu Anom. He began by contacting book collectors for references and eventually got in touch with Fondation Jean-Marc Probst pour Le Petit Prince, which acquired the rights for the books illustration. The foundation assists the acquisition and expansion of different editions of The Little Prince. It also funded the cost of the translation, proofreading, layout and publishing for Prabu Anom. For the latter, Syauqi collaborated with Bandung-based Kiblat, which publishes Sundanese books. Out of 4,000 copies printed, 3,000 were then freely distributed to schools and libraries in West Java. Read also: Indonesian publishers short-listed for London Book Fairs Excellence Awards Syauqi said the foundation initially insisted that the books should not be sold commercially. However, after my TEDx Talk I received requests from people who wished to buy them, he said. So I asked the foundations permission to sell the remaining 1,000 books. Marked with a different cover, they are now available on online marketplaces such as Tokopedia and Shopee for Rp 65,000 (US$4.50). Admitting this was his first time translating a book, Syauqi was assisted in the process by a friend who is a Sundanese language major graduate from the UPI. There were some things I found difficult to translate to Sundanese. I was afraid of losing the symbolism or the meaning in the origin language. For instance, the Sundanese language doesnt recognize foxes. My uncle then suggested using sero (otter) that could also work for foxes, he recalled. Another thing he found challenging was to make the books language familiar to Sundanese speakers. Sundanese literature involves numerous proverbs and phrases. Putting them word by word [in Prabu Anom] wouldnt translate well. All the while, I wouldnt want to change the initial message of the book. The inside pages of 'Prabu Anom'. (Courtesy of/Syauqi Stya Lacksana ) There are about 40 million Sundanese speakers in Indonesia, but according to Syauqi, literacy was considered terribly low. People tend to use the language merely to converse, he said. Syauqi said the Sundanese have responded well to the book, including academics from the UPI and Padjajaran University (Unpad) in Bandung who praised his work. This encouraged him to consider translating more books into Sundanese. Im interested in Animal Farm, a book thats stayed with me since university days, he said of the George Orwell book. Another book he mentioned was The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. The story revolves around self-discovery and taking an adventure. What I gathered from literature journals is that classic Sundanese literature also examined those themes. Its a perfect match, he said. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Laurent Banguet (Agence France-Presse) Austin, United States Thu, March 14, 2019 01:00 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81cfa28 2 Science & Tech music,artificial-intelligence,technology,SXSW Free They may never be able to fill a stadium for a rock concert, but computers are making inroads in the music industry, capable of producing songs -- and convincingly so -- as illustrated at the South by Southwest festival in Texas. Already, an album featuring eight tracks has been produced entirely with artificial intelligence, an unprecedented feat. "I Am AI" was released last fall by YouTube star Taryn Southern, who doesn't know how to play any instruments. "For my first music video in 2017, I had a lot of friction as a non-musician," the young artist told a panel discussion on Sunday at the festival running from March 8-17. "I wrote lyrics, I had a melodic line but it was difficult to compose and record the actual music." The pop artist said she began experimenting with AI two years ago, working with Amper, an artificial intelligence music composition software. "In two days, I had composed a song that I could actually feel was mine," Southern said. "It means that I don't necessarily have to rely on other people." Founded in 2014 in New York by a group of engineers and musicians, Amper is part of about a dozen start-ups using artificial intelligence to break with the traditional way of making music. The company's co-founder and CEO, Drew Silverstein, said the aim is not to replace human composers but rather to work with them to reach their goal. He said the company relies on tons of source material -- from dance hits to classical music -- to produce custom songs. "The idea of Amper is to enable everyone to express themselves (through) music regardless of their background and skills," Silverstein said. The Amper app allows a user to pick a genre of music (rap, folk, rock) and a mood (happy, sad, driving) before spitting out a song. The user can then change the tempo, add instruments or switch them out until the result is satisfactory. Read also: Dating apps use artificial intelligence to help search for love Two songs created by Amper at SXSW -- using the public's choice of pop and hip hop as the genres and tender or sad for the mood -- clearly aren't likely to top the charts. But the pieces were pleasant enough to the ear and perfectly usable as background music to illustrate a video or a computer game. Such songs are described by Amper as "functional music" as opposed to "artistic music." "A creative tool" Southern said she reworked the music in her own album dozens of times before she got the right tune. "For me, it's just a tool I can use in my creative process: I'm still the editor, I'm still in the driver's seat," she said. She acknowledged, however, being terrified her album would be panned when it came out, as was the case with other innovations in music, like synthesizers or software to help artists sing right. Jay Boisseau, a computing technologies leader and strategist, predicted that more and more music will be generated by computers in the future but the machine was unlikely to totally replace the human touch. "We're going to hear a lot of music composed by computers and there's nothing wrong with that," he said. "But computers are not very good at creativity ... they are 0 and 1. "They can find patterns, but they're not, like humans, particularly good to go beyond what they've been trained for. They are tools." For Lance Weiler, an American filmmaker and writer who uses AI in his work, the collaboration between machine and artist should not be sneered at. "It mainly enables you to improve the way you work, to augment your skills in expressing creative thoughts," he told the panel discussion. He added there was no question that AI had its limits and inevitably fails somewhere. "It's like interacting with a toddler," he joked. "It can be very temperamental. You need to put patterns so it doesn't hurt itself." Silverstein underlined that while AI was useful to experiment with an objective goal, "a yes or no answer," when it came to artistic experimentation, it was far from perfect. For some, such arguments are not convincing, as attested by a British musician at SXSW who didn't appear happy with the competition and questioned whether the word creativity even applied when speaking about music generated by a computer. "It's still an algorithm," Boisseau conceded. "It's doesn't mean people won't enjoy it, but it's not completely new. "With the current state of the art, it cannot be 'creative,'" he added. To which Silverstein quickly replied: "Not yet." Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13, 2019 07:30 1003 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81a6fd3 1 Business Bukit-Asam,antam,power-plants,mining,coal-mining,extractive-industry Free State-owned coal mining firm PT Bukit Asam plans to diversify its business by establishing a joint venture with state-owned diversified miner PT Aneka Tambang (Antam) to build steam and diesel power plants in East Halmahera, North Maluku. Bukit Asam president director Arviyan Arifin told a press briefing in Jakarta on Monday that his company would hold a 75 percent stake in the venture and Antam the other 25 percent. The joint venture would invest US$350 million for the development of a steam power plant with a generation capacity of 3x60 megawatts and a diesel-fueled plant with a capacity of 3x17 MW, both for the supply of electricity to Antam's ferronickel factory in East Halmahera, he said. The plants are estimated to consume 650,000 tons of coal per year, supplied by Bukit Asam. "We are conducting feasibility studies at the moment. We expect the power plants to begin operations by 2023," Arviyan said. Bukit Asam, which started its business with the Air Laya mine in Tanjung Enim, South Sumatra, in 1919, has diversified its business into coal briquette manufacturing, coal railway transportation, electricity generation and methane production. It is also entering the downstream industry this year by developing coal gasification projects. We have been mining and selling coal for the past 100 years. We expect to start a new era for the next 100 years by processing coal into value-added products, Arviyan said. He said his company had inked an agreement with state-owned energy holding company Pertamina and American corporation Air Products to build a plant in Peranap regency, Riau Islands, where the companies would convert coal into dimethyl ether (DME), a substitute of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), to cut down LPG imports. Bukit Asam has also secured another coal gasification project with state-owned fertilizer producer Pupuk Indonesia, chemical manufacturer Chandra Asri Petrochemical and state-owned energy holding company Pertamina to build a plant in Tanjung Enim, where the companies will convert coal into urea, polypropylene and DME. We are still involved in discussions on the planned investments for the two projects, Arviyan said. The Peranap project will possibly need $2.7 billion and the Tanjung Enim project $3.1 billion. He added that his company was currently in talks with its project partners regarding the shareholdings. Bukit Asam booked Rp 5.02 trillion ($351 million) in net profit last year, a 12.23 percent rise from Rp 4.47 trillion in 2017. The company attributed the growth to its increased coal exports and improved efficiency. It exported coal worth Rp 2.44 trillion last year, contributing 41 percent to its total coal sales. Total coal sales increased 5 percent year-on-year to 24.7 million tons in 2018 from 23.6 million tons in 2017, in spite of some obstacles in its domestic and export markets. Arviyan conceded that amid unstable global prices of coal, the domestic coal price set by the government at $70 per ton, lower than international market prices, posed a challenge for the company. However, Bukit Asam commerce director Adib Ubaidillah said the company would consider adjusting the volume of its domestic sales and exports depending on the development of global prices. We will principally allocate 50 percent of our sales for the domestic market and the other 50 percent for exports this year. However, we will spare 20 percent either for domestic sales or exports, depending on price developments, he said. The company is also facing obstacles following China's ongoing coal import quota policy, he said, as China had been the companys biggest market, along with India. However, the company was upbeat it could export 14.1 million tons of coal this year by penetrating new markets, such as Hong Kong, Laos, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam, Arviyan said. The company produced 26.4 million tons of coal last year, up 7 percent from 24.5 million tons in 2017. It is targeting to increase its production to 27.26 million tons this year. Arviyan said his company had allocated Rp 6.47 trillion for investment this year, of which Rp 5.34 trillion would go to business development, including logistics improvement, while the remainder was earmarked for routine investment. (ars) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Riza Roidila Mufti (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13, 2019 07:34 1003 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81a7319 1 Business flights,ticket,online-booking,AirAsia,traveloka,tiket-com,business-to-business Free The recent case of low-cost carrier AirAsia withdrawing its tickets from an online travel agency (OTA) should be a lesson for any business-to-business partnership to minimize disputes, a marketing expert has said. AirAsia tickets temporarily disappeared on Traveloka and Tiket.com from Feb. 14 to 17 before reappearing again on Feb. 18, but they again disappeared on March 2 and without any explanations. The Malaysian airline then withdrew all tickets from Traveloka on March 4. Business-wise, this should have not happened, as no one will benefit from it, whether Traveloka, AirAsia or customers, said digital marketing expert Yuswohady recently, adding that the action negatively affected customer perception. He said that the case was hopefully just a misunderstanding that could be settled through discussion between the two parties. AirAsia tickets were still unavailable by Tuesday afternoon on at least three local OTAs: Traveloka, Tiket.com and Pegipegi.com. However, the airline's tickets were still available on another local platform, Nusatrip. Yuswohady said both AirAsia and Traveloka would suffer potential losses in sales from the incident, as partnerships with OTAs like Traveloka and Tiket.com were intended to be mutually beneficial. Basically, the more channels an airline operator uses to sell its tickets, whether online or offline, the wider and stronger its outreach to potential customers will be, he said. At the same time, [...] of course it would also be better for [OTAs] to provide more [airline] choices for its customers. Offering more airlines, prices and schedules was better for customers, he said, suggesting that transparency and a wide range of options provided a better bargaining position for OTAs. The reason behind the incident remains a mystery, as Traveloka and AirAsia seem to be playing the blame game. When the tickets first disappeared from Traveloka, the company attributed it to the airline's system upgrade. Tiket.com did not issue a statement. AirAsia held a press conference on March 4 to explain the situation, while Traveloka stated it would prioritize sustainable partnerships with its stakeholders and expressed regret over the incident. We have asked for time to hold a dialog with AirAsia to determine the best solution to this problem, Traveloka public relations director Sufintri Rahayu said in a statement. AirAsia Indonesia CEO Dendy Kurniawan recently told The Jakarta Post that the company had withdrawn all tickets from Traveloka and had held the March 4 press conference to give customers accurate information and clarification on its decision. I guess if we are not giving clear information to the public, is is the customers that continue to be disadvantaged by this issue, said Dendy. If customers use Traveloka, for example, and if we did not hold a press conference, they might think that our tickets are sold out and even more customers would be disadvantaged, he said. Some customers have expressed regret over AirAsias withdrawal of its tickets from Traveloka. Frequent flyer Yunita Absary, 26, found it more difficult to search for tickets, as she needed to compare ticket prices and flight schedules on several websites. "It's just more complicated now. Before, I just needed to browse Traveloka and I got [the complete] list," said Yunita, who flies from Jakarta to Bali and from Surabaya to Bali two to four times a month. I still hope AirAsia tickets will be available on Traveloka, as it is more efficient for me, she said. Meanwhile, Kediri resident Della Cahaya has followed Dendy's suggestion to customers: go directly to the AirAsia website. "When AirAsia tickets disappeared from Traveloka, I was pretty confused. But because I was impatient, I went straight to AirAsias website to book a ticket, she said. Dendy said AirAsia was not worried about removing its tickets from Traveloka, as it was not the only OTA the carrier partnered with. The number of visitors to the AirAsia website is increasing. Nowadays, I think customers are also smart about comparing ticket prices. Although they use OTAs to compare one ticket [price] to another, many still browse the airlines' websites afterward, he said. Dendy said 65 percent of AirAsia's bookings were made through its website, while the rest came from other sales channels. He stressed that AirAsia's doors were open to collaboration with any party, including online booking platforms, as long as the prospective partners could fulfill their obligations. But so far, we have yet to receive any official statement from Traveloka, he said. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13, 2019 07:13 1003 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81a68cd 1 Politics Prabowo-Subianto,Batam,campaign,2019-elections,#2019GeneralElections,#2019PresidentialElection Free Presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto is scheduled to meet his supporters in Ocarina, Batam, Riau Islands, on Wednesday afternoon. It will be his second visit to the region as a presidential candidate after campaigning in Medan, North Sumatra, last month. Rachmat Nasution, the leader of the #GantiPresiden (ChangePresident) movement in Tanjung Pinang, said hundreds of people in the province have been making a number of preparations, including banners and posters, to welcome the presidential hopeful. Our presidential candidate, Prabowo, is scheduled to arrive at 1 p.m., he said as quoted by Antara. Rachmat expressed hope that the event would convince the volunteers to vote for Prabowo next month. We pray that Prabowo and his partner, Sandiaga Uno, win in the upcoming election, he added. Rachmat also expressed hope that the event would go down smooth and peaceful. We must be the pioneers who create peaceful campaigns because we dont like to spread fake news and attack supporters of the other presidential candidate, he said. (das) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Stefanno Reinard Sulaiman (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13, 2019 07:41 1003 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81a7497 2 Business LNG-export,LPG,Badak-LNG-plant,jargas,gas-network,energy-and-mineral-resources-ministry,SKKMigas Free The government is looking to increase liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to counterbalance the high imports of oil and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), which have been blamed for causing the continuing trade deficit. The government recently gave the green light for United Kingdom-based oil giant BP to export 84 cargoes of LNG from its Tangguh LNG project in West Papua to Singapore, with the first shipment scheduled for next year. The government was also in the process of selling another 40 cargoes of LNG from 2021 to 2025, said Djoko Siswanto, the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry oil and gas director general. We still have [so] many cargoes that havent been sold yet. [] for 2021 to 2025, we have 40 unsold cargoes of LNG from BP and Bontang [Badak LNG Plant in East Kalimantan], he said at an LNG workshop for investors in Jakarta recently. LNG is different to LPG, more than 70 percent of which is still imported because of an insufficient supply of gas that has LPG characteristics. Furthermore, the country also plans to sell 10 cargoes of LNG on the spot market from March to June. The LNG will come from Badak LNG Plant in Bontang, BPs Tangguh Plant and the Donggi-Senoro LNG Plant in Central Sulawesi. Of the countrys LNG production last year 28.37 percent was exported, while 25.25 percent was used for industry, 25.25 percent for electricity and 10.94 percent for fertilizer, respectively. The average volume of LNG exports in 2018 reached 1,907 billion British thermal units per day (bbtud), or almost five times the average volume of domestic LNG utilization at 405.2 bbtud. The major consumers of Indonesias LNG are Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China and the United States. Indonesia is Japans fifth largest LNG supplier, according to Japans deputy ambassador to Indonesia Keiichi Ono. Data from the Upstream Oil and Gas Regulatory Task Force (SKKMigas) show that Indonesia was one of the top five LNG exporters in 2017 and held 1.53 percent of the worlds gas reserves. However, Keiichi said at the same event that Indonesia would face a new challenge when it become a net importer of LNG in the near future. Both Indonesia and Japan will be LNG importers, with the US being our source of supply, he said, adding that the US had an LNG export capacity of about 30 billion cubic meters. In line with Keiichis statement, data from the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry show that the demand for natural gas has gradually increased since 2003 at an average 8 percent per year. SKKMigas chairman Dwi Soetjipto said the country was trying to increase the domestic use of gas, including of LNG, through the nationwide gas network program (Jargas), among other measures. Domestic gas utilization by December 2018 reached 59.9 percent of the total monetized gas, he said. Boosting demand for natural gas is a way to accelerate domestic gas use. Dwi said there were several factors that hampered the use of gas domestically, namely underdeveloped gas infrastructure, production decline in several blocks and delayed gas projects. [.] production decline has occurred in several blocks in West Java, East Java and South Sumatra, while several gas field development projects have been delayed, he said. Therefore, he said, the agency was in the process of integrating gas infrastructure and finding an innovative solution through the development of 18.322 kilometers of transmission and distribution lines this year. The Jargas program, which can use certain types of gas like LNG, began in 2009. As of 2018, it had connected at least 300,000 houses across 31 regions. The government plans to connect almost 5 million houses to the Jargas network by 2025. The average use of LNG in the domestic market last year totaled only 405.2 bbtud, 21.2 percent of the amount exported. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Ni Komang Erviani (The Jakarta Post) Badung, Bali Wed, March 13, 2019 18:58 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81ca27e 1 National bali,farming,millennial-farmers,Agriculture-Ministry,Indonesia,IFAD Free I Made Agus Wijaya, 29, spends most of his day in front of his computer at an elementary school in Bangli village, Tabanan, Bali. From 8 a.m. to 4 p.m, Monday to Friday, he works at the school. Once his working hours are done, he changes into a T-shirt and shorts, takes a sickle and heads out into the rice fields. "My father was a farmer. I should continue what he did," Agus said. Agus was taught to farm by his late father since he was 6 years old. He is used to getting dirty and working under the scorching sun. "It doesn't matter. I enjoy it," said Agus, who now manages a 7,000 square meter plot of land he inherited from his father. Agus also allows parts of the land to be managed by other farmers who share their profits. Agus said he was proud of being a farmer although many do not aspire to take up the profession these days. "Most young people in the city think becoming a farmer would lower their status. They don't know that many farmers send their children to university. If done seriously, farming is a fruitful endeavor," he said. The only thing that worries Agus is the decreasing value of harvests. Although he is confident he can continue farming and would never sell his fathers land, Agus said he could not leave the school. He is also pursuing an undergraduate degree at a local university. "I just need something that keeps me informed but I would never stop farming. I am the son of a farmer and I will preserve my fathers legacy," he emphasized. Agus is one of a small number of young people in Bali who are still eager to work as farmers. The rapid growth of tourism on the island has not only led to massive urbanization but has also seen many young Balinese born into farming families decide to work in tourism, leaving many plots of land abandoned, which are eventually converted into tourism areas. "This problem not only occurs in Bali and Indonesia. Its a problem all over the world," Agriculture Ministry official Syukur Iwantoro said. In an attempt to encourage young people to continue farming, the ministry has launched a farming training program in Badung regency with the goal of educating more than 12,000 young millennial farmers from across the island. More than 500 farmers from nine regencies and cities joined the first phase of the program this month. Syukur said similar programs would be developed in all provinces in the country. The government has declared 2019 the year of the Indonesian farmers revival and has attempted to improve farmers access to capital, markets and technology to improve their productivity. "Millennial farmers will be the backbone of agriculture in the future," he said. Syukur added that Indonesia had also been appointed as the worlds pilot project for farmer regeneration. The program is supported by the International Food Agriculture Development (IFAD), which has given US$50 million for the program in Indonesia for three years. The program focuses on fostering young, productive and modern farmers. Agus, who has also joined the program, said he was very happy to be able to take part. "The most important thing for me is how to keep the prices of our products steady. Thats our greatest concern as farmers," he said. As the trend of economic activities continues to shift from the West to the East, the onus is on ASEAN member states to attract funding in a way that serves Indo-Pacific integration, a forum of regional stakeholders hears. Experts on the Indo-Pacific say that ASEAN should figure out how to integrate various schemes for infrastructure projects in its backyard, so it may improve its standing among regional players and attract those with deep pockets to the region. Lee Ying Hui, a senior analyst for the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said that while there was still no specific data set that looked at the Indo-Pacific context, there was a growing demand for infrastructure in the region. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Apriadi Gunawan (The Jakarta Post) Medan Wed, March 13, 2019 16:34 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81c5b04 1 National #Indonesia,#OrangUtan,orangutan,injury,baby,died,human-animal-conflict Free The Medan-based environmental organization Yayasan Ekosistem Lestari (Sustainable Ecosystem Foundation) in North Sumatra has said it will take care of the badly injured Sumatran orangutan whose baby recently died from malnutrition, allegedly after attacks by workers from a plantation near a protected forest in Aceh. The foundation's veterinarian Yenny Saraswati, said her organization planned to take the 30-year-old orangutan to its Orangutan Haven, a project developed by the group along with the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP) and PanEco Foundation. The project will take care of those orangutans unable to be returned to the wild for whatever reason, Yenni told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday. Previously, the Aceh Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA) rescued the critically endangered orangutans on Sunday after receiving a report from a villager about the badly injured orangutans in Bunga Tanjung village, Subulussalam, two days earlier. Inilah induk orangutan Sumatera yang tubuhnya luka parah krn benda tajam & ada 74 peluru senapan angin. Anak orangutan umur 1 bulan mati krn kekurangan nutrisi berat dan trauma berat. Sungguh biadab orang yang menyiksanya. Saat ini dalam perawatan BKSDA Aceh.@KementerianLHK pic.twitter.com/MU6kPdsYA7 Sutopo Purwo Nugroho (@Sutopo_PN) March 13, 2019 The veterinarian found 74 pellets and wounds caused by sharp weapons in many parts of the mothers body. The baby died shortly after the rescue. The orangutan mothers eyes were badly injured by air gun pellets. We decided to remove her eyes, Yenny Saraswati. She said the one-month old baby died from dehydration and malnutrition as some plantation workers had chased the mother with the baby for around three days. The mother couldnt find food for her baby as she was already injured following the chase, Yenny said. She said the baby was buried in the orangutan quarantine center in Sibolangit in Deli Serdang regency. The protected animals live only in select parts of Sumatra and Kalimantan. Their population is declining because of poaching and forest conversion, which often leads to human-animal conflict. Sapto Aji Prabowo, the head of BKSDA Aceh, told the Post that it was currently in coordination with the legal team of the Environment Ministry to investigate the case. He also said the agency would coordinate with the regional police to stop the spread of unauthorized air rifles among the public. (das) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Depok Wed, March 13 2019 Depok municipality in West Java is experiencing a civil servant shortage because many of its officials have retired, its Staffing and Human Resources Development Body has revealed. The body head, Supian Suri, said that currently there were 6,212 civil servants in the municipality, while it actually needed another 6,000 people to operate optimally. We need twice the number we have today, from 6,000 to 12,000 civil servants. Weve concluded the data from analyzing positions and workloads, Supian said on Tuesday, kompas.com reported. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin A. Muh. Ibnu Aqil (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13 2019 Green city: A farmer waters his vegetables in Semanan, Kalideres, West Jakarta, recently. Many farmers rent idle land in Jakarta owned by big companies and turn it into productive plots by planting rice and various vegetables. Such a land, however, is getting more and more scarce.(JP/ R. Berto Wedhatama) Asdedi, 37, has been planting rice in Semanan, Kalideres, West Jakarta, since he arrived in Jakarta in 1997, after his goldfish business in Subang, West Java, went bust. I have been here since 1997, and straight away farmed rice, Asdedi told The Jakarta Post on Monday. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13 2019 The Makassar District Court in South Sulawesi has sentenced Meilania Ritali Dasilva to 18 months in prison for confining her three adopted children. Presiding judge Rika Mona Pandegirot said Meilania had violated the 2002 Child Protection Law. The defendant is guilty of child abuse and neglect. The defendant is required to pay a fine of Rp 50 million (US$3,504) or spend an additional two months in prison, Rika said on Monday, as quoted by news agency Antara. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13 2019 Bandung Police have confirmed a report of a man allegedly raping a therapist working for Go-Massage, a service provided by app-based services company Go-Jek. Bandung Police crime unit head Adj. Sr. Comr. Moh. Rifai said the therapist, identified as L, had reported the incident to police on Wednesday, saying she had been raped by a customer at a room in a boarding house on Tuesday evening. L said she was raped after giving the man a back massage, Rifai said on Monday, as quoted by kompas.com. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13, 2019 13:01 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81b9aff 1 City sharks,sighting,Jakarta-Bay Free A 5-meter-long leopard shark was spotted in Jakarta Bay on Tuesday, some 3 miles from the popular Ancol Beach in North Jakarta. An internet user captured the shark in a video, which then went viral after being reposted by Instagram account @jktinfo. "Tuesday, March 12, a leopard shark was spotted in Jakarta Bay by patrol officers from Thousand Islands Police," the account wrote in the caption. Thousand Islands water police boat 204 captain Chief Brig. Syahroni said the sighting occurred when the boat was carrying passengers, heading from Pramuka Island to Marina Harbor in Ancol. "We were on our way back to Jakarta from a social event. Suddenly something that looked like a log appeared at the surface of the water. Apparently it was a shark," he said as quoted by kompas.com. Syahroni added that the passengers, who were mostly women and doctors, were surprised by the sighting of such a rare sea creature. With the urge to enjoy the moment a little longer, Syahroni decided to circle the area where the shark appeared. "As I circled my boat around the shark, the shark didnt appear as if it was going to attack us and it didnt seem frightened by us," he said. According to Syahroni, he had seen a leopard shark several times before. The creature is believed to appear when sea water warms after the rain. (vla) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13, 2019 10:33 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81adfa9 4 Business Lippo-group,Meikarta,development,fundraising,rights-issue,divestment Free The Lippo Group has expressed confidence that the Meikarta township in Bekasi, West Java, which was under a spotlight because of a high-profile corruption case, would soon get back on track as the group was committed to pouring fresh money into the project. The group says the commitment to Meikarta was part of its business revitalization plan following a recent reshuffling of its boards of directors and commissioners. PT Lippo Karawaci chief executive officer (CEO) John Riady said he was not ready to explain the details of the plans for the Meikarta project, including the funds that would be disbursed for it. What is sure is that the Meikarta development will be 100 percent completed, John said on Tuesday as reported by kontan.co.id. Previously, the Lippo Group announced that the company would attempt to raise US$1.01 billion, $730 million of which was expected to come from the rights issue of PT Lippo Karawaci, while another $280 million was expected to come from asset divestment. The Riady family, through PT Inti Anugerah Pratama, would act as a standby buyer for the corporate action. The rights issue is to be completed in the first half of this year, John said, adding that the divestment process was expected to be completed in the second half. He said PT Lippo Karawaci would sell Mall Puri in West Jakarta to the Lippo Malls Indonesia Retail Trust, whose agreement had been signed on Monday. John said if the fundraising was successful, Lippo would carry out expansion and repay some of its debts, including buying back up to $150 million of its $410 million in senior notes that would mature in 2022 and $425 million in senior notes that would mature in 2026. Apart from using the proceeds to carry out buyback and to finance the expansion plan, they would also be used to pay interest on the companys debt. John said Lippo Karawaci planned to boost the performance of its three business segments property, retail business and healthcare services. On property, he added, the company would no longer focus on luxury apartments, but it would also develop residences for middle-income people. (bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Karina M. Tehusijarana (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13, 2019 17:20 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81c72f6 1 National Pemuda-Pancasila,FBR,Jokowi,Jokowi-Maruf,Prabowo-Sandiaga,2019-elections Free President Joko Jokowi Widodos already buoyant reelection bid has received a further boost in the past few weeks with major mass organizations declaring their support for his presidential ticket. Volunteers from Pancasila Youth (PP) branches in Jakarta, Karanganyar and Surakarta, Central Java, including PP chairman Japto Soerjosoemarno, publicly announced their support for Jokowi on March 3. On Sunday, meanwhile, the Jakarta-based Betawi Brotherhood Forum (FBR) also proclaimed their backing of the former Jakarta governor. The move was an about-face for the FBR, which had previously backed Gerindra Party chairman Prabowo Subianto in the 2014 presidential election, as well as Anies Baswedan and now-vice presidential candidate Sandiaga Uno in the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election. FBR chairman Lutfi Hakim said that Jokowi's closeness with the Betawi people since his time as Jakarta governor was the main reason for the switch in allegiance. As one of the most basic examples, when he was governor, PakJokowi made traditional Betawi clothing the uniform of the provincial administration, he told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday. He is also the only Indonesian president to ever attend Lebaran Betawi [a traditional post-Idul Fitri festival in Jakarta]. Lutfi also mentioned the organizations disappointment with Anies administration as a factor. We feel that Anies has been half-hearted in preserving Betawi culture, he said, citing the governors failure to produce gubernatorial regulations to implement the Betawi culture preservation regional regulation that had been passed in 2015. He added that the FBR hoped Jokowi would continue to listen to the aspirations of the Betawi people if he was reelected president. If a Betawi person gets a cabinet position, that would be a bonus, he said. PP Jakarta secretary Embay Supriyantoro, who is also an executive in the PP Jakarta volunteer group, said that while the PP's national central executive board officially remained neutral in the election, volunteer groups in various regions have decided to support Jokowi because of his "closeness" to the PP and his achievements in developing infrastructure. Although our chairman Pak Japto is very close to Prabowo personally, Jokowi has been closer to the PP as an organization and has attended our birthday celebrations and invited us to the presidential palace, he told the Post. Both Lutfi and Embay said that their organizations would use their respective networks to help mobilize more votes for Jokowi and his running mate Maruf Amin in the campaign periods final stretch. We will help fight against hoaxes and fake news because we are in direct contact with the people, Lutfi said. We will talk to people in guard posts and coffee stalls and make sure that the people are not easily manipulated. For his part, Jokowi has lavished praise on both organizations, saying that the PP was a stalwart guardian of the state ideology of Pancasila and calling Jakarta a miniature of Indonesia. Meanwhile, the Prabowo-Sandiaga campaign sought to play down the importance of the two groups joining Jokowis camp. Prabowo campaign spokesperson and Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) executive Suhud Aliyudin shrugged off the FBRs disappointment with the Anies-Sandiaga administration, saying that whatever the reason for supporting Jokowi, it was just a normal thing in a presidential election. The FBR is just one of many ethnic Betawi mass organizations in Jakarta, he told the Post. The PP is also just one of many mass organizations. We remain focused on the strategy that we designed by campaigning directly to the people like Pak Sandiaga has done all across Indonesia. Prabowo himself has also received the support of several mass organizations, mainly religion-based ones such as the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and the 212 Alumni Brotherhood. Mass organizations have had significant political sway in Indonesia during and after former president Soehartos New Order regime. In his 2015 book The Politics of Protection Rackets in Post New-Order Indonesia, Murdoch Universitys Ian Wilson wrote that while organizations such as the PP had become less openly violent, the role of ormas and militias in electoral politics have far from diminished. For political parties and aspirants for seats in national and regional legislatures, the value of alliances with these organizations and networks lies in several key areas: their ability to mobilize the masses at critical junctures such as during campaign periods, the access provided to the grass-roots public and the ability to shape populist discourse as representatives, claimed or actual, of particular constituencies, he wrote. Indonesian Institute of Sciences political analyst Siti Zuhro said that the main strength of the mass organizations lay in their large followings spread across the country. Organizations such as the PP and FPI have regional infrastructure up to the district and subdistrict level that can have significant influence on the local populace, she said. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Veeramalla Anjaiah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13 2019 Moroccans in Indonesia: Moroccan Ambassador to Indonesia Ouadia Benabdellah (center background) poses with members of the Moroccan Association in Indonesia during the celebration of International Womens Day in Jakarta on March 9. Members of the Moroccan community in Indonesia celebrated International Womens Day (IWD) with joy and a renewed commitment to womens empowerment at Fez-Kiniara Dining & Lounge in Jakarta on March 9. Thanks to Moroccan King Mohammed VIs vision of gender equality and womens empowerment, Moroccan women are in a better position in society today. Moroccan people hold women in high esteem and appreciate their contribution to society. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13, 2019 12:58 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81b8ed1 4 Business OSS-online-single-submission,Darmin-nasution,regional-administrations,implementation,comments Free Even as the government boasts about the important role of the Online Single Submission (OSS) system for accelerating the issuance of investment licensing arrangements, most regencies and municipalities are not ready to implement it. One of the problems is that most of the regions do not have the digitalized detailed spatial plans (RDTR) for quickly identifying the project locations that badly need to accelerate the process of licensing arrangements. Coordinating Economic Minister Darmin Nasution said the availability of digitalized RDTR in each region was badly needed for the optimal operation of the OSS system. With the availability of digitalized RDTR, potential investors only need to point to the coordinates of their project locations and the OSS system could immediately identify the location, Darmin said as quoted by kontan.co.id. The OSS system has been operated by the Investment Coordination Board since early January after previously being operated by the Economic Coordinating Ministry since it was launched in July 2018. Therefore, the minister proposed disincentives for regencies and municipalities that do not have the digitalized RDRT. He said out of the 514 regencies and municipalities in the country, only 50 already have RDTR and only 10 percent already have digitalized RDTR. The requirement for regions to have standardized RDTR was stipulated in Article 59 of Government Regulation No. 15/2010 on the implementation of spatial planning. Darmin said that to encourage the regions to create the digitalized RDTR, its availability should become one of the factors for the central government to determine the amount of funds to be disbursed to the regions. We will require the regions to have digitalized RDRT as otherwise we will never move, he added. (bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Nurul Fitri Ramadhani (The Jakarta Post) Wed, March 13 2019 While no longer in command or leading troops, former military top brass is still seen as very influential in the April presidential election. The two presidential tickets running in the 2019 election are competing for support from former military generals, with each camp claiming it has stronger backing than the other. The recent decision of former general Muchdi Purwoprandjono who is also a former commander of the Armys Special Forces (Kopassus) to declare his support for President Joko Jokowi Widodo has added to the long list of former military generals taking part in the incumbents coalition. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13, 2019 17:31 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81c81bf 1 National prostitution,Papua,public-shaming,ICJR Free The Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (ICJR) on Tuesday called for the National Police chief to investigate police officers in Wamena, Papua, for "arbitrarily" shaming alleged sex workers. The rights group also urged the Home Ministry to assess Jayawijaya Regent Jhon Richard Banua, who had condoned "the violation of human rights". Police arrested 11 women on suspicion of prostitution on Monday in Wamena. It was reported that the police then "dunked" the women, along with their alleged pimp, into a large muddy pond on the premises of the regent's office in front of a crowd. "We also arrested several students during the sting operation. They had not had sex yet," said Jayawijaya Police chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Tonny Ananda Swadaya as quoted by local news portal ceposonline.com. He added that the police regularly shamed people who indulged in morally questionable activities. Jhon, the Jayawijaya regent, witnessed the punishment and said the local administration and police force took stern measures to end "such behavior". The ICJR, a Jakarta-based rights group, condemned the police's action as "inhumane". What they did was an arbitrary action carried out without any legal basis. It violates human rights, ICJR executive director Erasmus Napitupulu said in a statement sent to The Jakarta Post, stressing that no Indonesian law existed that criminalized sex workers. Even if there are indications of the criminal act of sexual exploitation involving child victims, all legal proceedings must be based on criminal procedural law, which protects human rights, Erasmus said. Jhon said on Monday that the the shaming was intended "for the public good", adding that if the "prostitutes" were not punished in some way, it would be impossible to change their behavior. "We are not only punishing the prostitutes, but also the pimp, who runs a kiosk as a front. We will revoke his business permits," he said, adding that the Jayawijaya administration had also returned dozens of women suspected of prostitution to their homes in December 2018. "This time, the pimp must send them home," Jhon said. The National Police spokesman did not respond when the Post contacted him for a comment on the incident. (das) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13, 2019 17:23 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81c7a7a 4 Business Boeing-737-MAX,grounding,safety,Jokowi,comments Free President Joko Jokowi Widodo is stressing that the decision to ground Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft was made because the government regarded the safety of passengers as its first consideration. The most important thing is the safety and security of passengers. It should be our first consideration, Jokowi said in Jakarta on Wednesday as quoted by kompas.com. Previously, the government, through the Air Transportation Directorate General, had decided to temporarily ground 11 373 Max 8 airplanes, 10 of which are owned by the Lion Air Group and one by flag carrier Garuda Indonesia. Indonesia is one of several countries that grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft following an Ethiopian Airlines crash in Addis Ababa on Sunday. Other countries include the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, Australia, Singapore, South Korea, Mongolia, Malaysia, Oman, Mexico, Ethiopia and Argentina. Sundays crash was the second accident involving the aircraft recently. In October last year Indonesia lost a Boeing Max 8 when Lion Air flight JT 610 crashed into the Java Sea. (bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Panca Nugraha (The Jakarta Post) Mataram Wed, March 13 2019 The West Nusa Tenggara (NTB) administration denied on Tuesday a report that a number of cruise ships would cancel visits to Lombok Island because of garbage in the waters near its beaches. There has been no cancelation of trips to Lombok until now, and certainly not because of garbage, the provinces Tourism Agency head, Lalu M. Faozal, told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday. He said that at least 26 cruise ships had registered to make a stop in Lombok throughout 2019. In January, a German-flagged cruise liner docked in Lombok with 1,800 passengers. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Kharishar Kahfi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, March 13, 2019 19:45 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81cb7b2 1 National Batang-Toru-dam,batang-toru-ecosystem,Tapanuli-orangutan,Batang-Toru-forest,Medan,North-Sumatra,environment Free Environmental group Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi) has appealed a court verdict rejecting their lawsuit challenging the issuance of a permit for a hydropower project in the Batang Toru ecosystem in North Sumatra. On March 4, the Medan State Administrative Court rejected Walhis lawsuit challenging the North Sumatra administrations decision to issue a permit for the Rp 22 trillion (US$1.5 billion) project because of its potential impacts on the environment, especially on the critically endangered Tapanuli orangutans that live in and around the ecosystem. The appeal petition was filed on Wednesday by Walhis North Sumatra office director Dana Prima Tarigan, who was accompanied by a number of lawyers. This is our attempt to continue the fight for environmental justice for the sake of the ecosystem and the animals and humans living within it, Dana said on Wednesday in a statement. He added that the organization would also use other legal methods to ensure the project was scrapped. This is also a way for the provincial administration to fix their permit issuance mechanism, so that information will be more transparent and accessible to the general public, Dana said. Environmentalists and activists argue the project, which will produce 510 megawatts of electricity for North Sumatra and has been touted as environmentally friendly, will threaten the rare Tapanuli orangutans. According to scientists, only 800 remain in the wild. The power plant operator, PT North Sumatra Hydro Energy, has denied the allegations. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Apriadi Gunawan (The Jakarta Post) Medan and Jakarta Wed, March 13, 2019 11:08 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81af0fd 1 National JAD,suspected-terrorists,explosive,Sibolga,SibolgaPort,Jokowi,Densus-88,National-Police Free The National Police have said the wife and children of suspected terrorist Husein, aka Abu Hamzah, blew themselves up early on Wednesday in the familys residence in Sibolga, North Sumatra, following Huseins arrest. We have received information that the wife blew herself and the children up at 1:30 a.m., National Police spokesman Brig. Gen. Dedi Prasetyo told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday. He said police had yet to enter the scene to gather forensic evidence as they needed to ensure there were no more explosives inside the residence. They suspect some explosive materials are still there. Its dangerous for the personnel, Dedi added. The explosion occurred while the police were negotiating with the wife, encouraging her, along with the children, to surrender to the police. Abu Hamzah is suspected of being affiliated with the outlawed homegrown pro-Islamic State (IS) movement terror group Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD). He was arrested after the police's Densus 88 antiterror squad received information from another terror suspect, identified as Ro, in Lampung last weekend. Another suspect was also arrested after Ro. The police had used Husein to persuade his wife to surrender by talking to her through a mosque loudspeaker. "Peace be unto you. Its me. I am all good here. Please give up. Love our children, Husein said in a local language. A police officer was injured on Tuesday after an explosive device went off during a terror raid at Huseins house. The incident took place only days before President Joko Jokowi Widodos scheduled visit to Sibolga to inaugurate a port on Sunday. (das) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin A. Muh. Ibnu Aqil (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, March 14 2019 Gliding through: A commuter train travels past Bukit Duri, South Jakarta, on Wednesday. The Jakarta-Bogor line has returned to normal after a derailment accident at Kebon Pedes, Bogor, West Java. The National Transportation Safety Committee is investigating the incident.(JP/Ricky Yudhistira) With the rail-based MRT and Greater Jakarta light rapid transit (LRT) to begin operations in the near future, a new era in the citys public transportation is set to dawn. In the meantime, the existing commuter line network is straining to serve the more than 1 million commuters who travel to and from Jakarta and its satellite cities each day. So, when an accident such as Sundays train derailment occurs, the mobility of many thousands is immediately impacted. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Ati Nurbaiti (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, March 14 2019 A little over a month is left for the presidential and legislative election campaigns, with women candidates facing even harder challenges than those in the 2014 elections, candidates, lawmakers and women activists say. Those challenges range from a highly divisive presidential candidates contestation to the fact that thousands of candidates will be faceless. Unlike in 2014, ballot sheets for over 192 million eligible voters will not contain the faces of legislative candidates, including almost 3,000 women. Only candidates for the Regional Representative Council (DPD) will have their pictures on the ballot sheets for the first simultaneous elections on April 17. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Emilianus Yakob Sese Tolo (The Jakarta Post) Melbourne Thu, March 14 2019 In the 2016-2017 Global Competitiveness Report, Indonesia ranks 60th of 138 countries for infrastructure. One of the factors dragging the country down is poor infrastructure development in eastern Indonesia, which consists of relatively poor territories, namely Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores, Timor, Sulawesi, Maluku and Papua. The majority of disadvantaged villages in Indonesia, which number around 39,000 or 52 percent of the total, are located in these territories. Therefore, eastern Indonesia has so far only been able to contribute 20 percent to national economic growth. This is why, since the beginning of his term in office in 2014, President Joko Jokowi Widodo promised to build 225 priority infrastructures, especially in eastern Indonesia, such as 1,000 kilometers of roads, 24 piers, 35,000 megawatts of power plant capacity, 33 dams, 29.8 km of bridges, airports and internet networks. to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content e-Post daily digital newspaper No advertisements, no interruptions Privileged access to our events and programs Subscription to our newsletters We accept Register to read 3 premium articles for free Already subscribed? login Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Hla-Hla Htay and Richard Sargent (Agence France-Presse) Narmakhor, Myanmar Wed, March 13, 2019 14:12 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81bb74a 2 SE Asia #Myanmar,#violence,civilians,victims,Myanmar,Rakhine-state,violence Free With artillery exploding around her village in Myanmar's northeast, 70-year-old Nan Nyunt fled to a monastery, one of thousands of civilians trapped between rebel groups who are fighting for influence as a China-driven economic boom looms. "Houses were on fire and a buffalo died," she told AFP, huddled on the floor with other elderly displaced people. She is one of several thousand forced to flee their homes -- many multiple times -- since fighting flared up in November in this normally peaceful area popular with tourists, who arrive by train from Mandalay to explore the hills. "I'm still scared but I just want to go back home," she said. Swathes of Shan state -- like many of the country's restive borderlands -- have been embroiled in conflict for decades. The unrest is fiendishly complex, with a web of ethnic armed groups fighting Myanmar's military for land, resources and autonomy. Shan is also the hub of Myanmar's multi-billion dollar drug trade. Beijing, which already invests heavily in ports, pipelines, dams and mines across Myanmar, is now looking at scaling up projects in the border area of Shan. Special economic zones are planned, while a high-speed rail link and expressway are expected to bisect the country, reaching the Chinese-built port of Kyaukphyu in Rakhine State on the Bay of Bengal. The potential riches of controlling the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) is a "huge factor" behind the current clashes, said Yangon-based independent analyst David Mathieson. "(It) is going to be astonishingly lucrative and they (ethnic armed groups) all want their cut," he explained. There have been cyclical attempts by Shan rebel factions to encroach on rivals' territory, but now they are turning on each other with increased ferocity. China is pumping investment into infrastructure schemes across the region and all the way to Europe as part of its "One Belt, One Road" project. But Myanmar, one of Southeast Asia's least developed countries, has a complicated relationship with investment from its northern neighbour. A Chinese-funded dam at Myitsone on the Ayeyarwady river in northern Kachin state was mothballed in 2011 after widespread protests over the environmental damage likely to be wrought while returning little to local people. But Myanmar is now under pressure to revive the scheme. If completed, the $3.6 billion project would flood an area twice the size of Singapore and displace thousands. The Kyaukphyu port also riled locals fearing Myanmar debt would pay for a project beneficial to China. It was eventually signed off in November, but scaled down to a cost of $1.3 billion. Factional fighting One of the rebel groups now on the offensive is the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS). Its stronghold is in the south of Shan state, but it is eyeing territory in the north, the bastion of the Taaung National Liberation Army (TNLA) and Shan State Army (SSPP). Meanwhile, the still-powerful military -- known as the Tatmadaw -- has declared a temporary ceasefire in Shan. Observers believe curbing operations in Shan also helps show China that Myanmar is committed to their joint projects -- even if rebel groups continue to fight among themselves. "The Tatmadaw can just sit back, build up its forces and watch them kill each other," said Mathieson. Back in the monastery civilians are caught between factions warring over a bonanza they are unlikely to ever benefit from. Young children learn a song through animal actions while the older kids chant through a Shan language lesson, hoping to be able to return home to take upcoming exams. Most people here claim they do not know who is fighting -- forced recruitment by armed groups is common and nobody wants their family to become a target. Tin Sein, 60, leader of the displaced community at the monastery, said they have sent letters to "both sides" imploring them to stop the violence. "We just want to live peacefully," he said. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Carlo Jacob Molina (Inquirer.net/Asia News Network) Wed, March 13, 2019 12:01 1002 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81b4f6e 2 News Ethiopian-Airlines,plane-crash,Ethiopia,airplane-crash Free When Antonis Mavropoulos knew he missed the flight after arriving two minutes late on the boarding gate, the Greek man said he was initially enraged. Running to catch flight ER 302 Addis Ababa Nairobi I had my nerves because there was no one to help me go fast, Mavropoulos wrote on now-viral Facebook post translated from Greek. I lost it for two minutes, when I arrived, the boarding was closed and I watched the last passengers in tunnel go in I screamed to put me in but they didnt allow it, he continued. But it took also just minutes for Mavropoulos to realize how lucky he was. Mavropoulos is president of the non-profit organization International Solid Waste Association and was reportedly bound to Nairobi, Kenya, to attend an annual UN environmental assembly. He could have also been on the Ethiopian Airlines plane bound for Nairobi that crashed six minutes after takeoff Sunday, killing more than 150 people on board. Grief has engulfed the world as victims, mostly humanitarian workers, ambassador, and international experts, came from more than 35 countries. In the same emotional post entitled My Lucky Day, Mavropoulos shared a photo of his boarding pass and said, I lost the flight the moment I made that thought I collapsed because then exactly I realized how lucky I stood. As of this writing, the post has amassed more than twenty thousand reactions and above six thousand shares. Read also: Both black boxes from crashed Boeing recovered: Ethiopian Airlines The Greek man narrated that he was transferred to the next flight but was informed by airport authorities that he couldnt board again because of security reasons". He said he was taken to the airport police department to verify his identity and was questioned for being the lone passenger who did not board the doomed flight. He told me gently not to protest and say thank you to God because I am the only passenger who did not enter the flight ET 302 which is missing, Mavropoulos said. He said a friend from Nairobi confirmed that the flight crashed and that the news had been out in the media. He immediately contacted his people and informed them that for two small random circumstances, he lost the flight. Mavropoulos added he was sharing his story to tell the world that invisible and nematidia of fortune, the out-of-plan circumstances knit the web in which our life is taken". Its millions of small threads we almost never feel but one to break is enough to feed the whole web instantly, he further said. He also thanked his friends for their love and warm support and apologized to his family for the shock, saying that he is grateful to live". Maybe not too old to rock n roll but certainly too young to die, he concluded. Topics : This article appeared on the Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper website, which is a member of Asia News Network and a media partner of The Jakarta Post Mid Michigan College is hosting their annual College Day between 9 a.m. until 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. until 2 p.m. at their Mt. Pleasant Campus, located at 2600 S Summerton Rd., on Friday, according to a news release sent out on Tuesday. The event, located at the Mt. Pleasant campus on Broadway east of Mt. Pleasant, will allow students to learn more about options after they are done with high school, including going to a college or a university, or going into one of several branches in the military. Transfer opportunities, application deadlines and campus life will be discussed. The event will have representation from several Mid-Michigan schools, such as Central Michigan University, Alma College, Northwood University and Mid Michigan College itself. Other universities and military branches that will be represented include: Adrian College, Albion College, Aquinas College, Art Institute of Michigan, Concordia University, Eastern Michigan University, Ferris State University, Finlandia University, Grace Bible College, Grand Valley State University, Great Lakes Christian College, Kirtland Community College, Kuyper College, Lake Superior State University, Lawrence Technological University, Madonna University, Michigan State University, Michigan Tech University, Northern Michigan University, Northwood University, Oakland University, Ohio Technical College, Olivet College, Protege Academy of Cosmetology, Rochester College, Robert Morris University, Saginaw Valley State University, Siena Heights University, University of Detroit Mercy, University of Michigan Flint, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, U.S. Military Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force, Michigan National Guard Army, Air Force, Western Michigan University, Youth For Understanding, and State of Michigan Student Scholarships and Grants (SSG). The event is open to any current high school, college student and/or interested parents of students and is free for all attendees. As we approach March 15, we should recall that on the Roman Lunar calendar date corresponding to that in 44 BCE Brutus, et al slipped it to Julius Caesar. Idus Martiae, or the Ides of March goes as far back as 753 BCE. In 46 BCE Julius Caesar reformed the calendar by adding ten day and adding a leap year every four. He became Dictator Perpetus, leading some senators, including Marcus Brutus to assassinate him. During March, people would gather on the banks of the Tiber River with wine, food and music to celebrate a Happy New Year offering sacrifices to their goddess, Anna Perenna. The CBS 60 Minutes show of March 3 included a segment on the case Juliana vs. United States. In 2018, 21 young people filed a lawsuit in the Oregon district court. The case was against the United States, President Donald J. Trump, and various government agencies. They sited the nations climate system as critical to their rights of life, liberty and property and that the federal government has violated their due process allowing fossil fuel production, consumption, and combustion at dangerous levels; and that the government has failed to fulfill its obligations under the public trust doctrine. As a remedy, the plaintiffs asked the court to compel the government to develop a plan to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions so that atmospheric CO2 concentrations will be no greater than 350 parts per million by 2100 a science-based target consistent with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C. US District Judge for the District of Oregon Ann Aiken has been instrumental in shepherding the case. She rebuked the Trump administration, saying the suit falls under the Administrative Procedures Act for claims against a federal agency. She wrote, Plaintiffs do not contend that any single agency action is causing their asserted injuries nor could they, given the complex chain of causation involved in climate change. They seek review of aggregate action by multiple agencies, something the APAs judicial review provisions do not address. Later she added, Plaintiffs submit evidence that fossil fuel emissions are responsible for most of the increase in atmospheric CO2 and that increasing CO2, in turn, is the main cause of global warming, and that the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses, due to fossil fuel combustion, are increasing quickly such that planetary warming is accelerating at rates never before seen in human history. The Executive Director and Chief Legal Counsel of Our Childrens Trust Julia Olson agreed with the ruling saying, The District Court continues to provide well-reasoned decisions that narrow and appropriately frame the heart of this case for trial. Today the parties are filing with the court their witness lists and their pretrial memoranda. We are finalizing exhibits for trial and our experts and plaintiffs have booked their tickets to Oregon. We are ready to bring all of the facts forward and prove these youths case once and for all. Federal defendants have admitted that from 1850 to 2012, CO2 emissions from sources within the United States including from land use comprised more than 25% of cumulative global CO2 emissions. The Trump administration has tried unsuccessfully to dismiss the case. Headlines: 270 mph tornado flattens Alabama town 23 dead; Rising sea-level sinking islands in Indian Ocean ? inhabitants seek higher ground. Facts tell us of reality. Climate deniers cant face facts. Some are simply short-term profiteers who never consider the consequences of their actions. Others are Trumpaholics who only listen to the Masters voice. The rest of us must act soon before it is too late. On Tuesday, March 19 be sure to watch Nina Totenbergs interview with Supreme Court Justice and all-round good sport Ruth Bader Ginsburg on WCMU at 8pm. Werewolf alert: this months full moon is March 20 with the start of Spring. Ooooohw! Ed Fisher writes a weekly column for The Morning Sun. Recipients humbled by award Two weeks ago, the Mount Pleasant Area Chamber of Commerce put the spotlight on our communitys new William and Janet Strickler Non-profit Center with the awarding of this years Citizen of the Year Award. The two of us are the humble recipients of this award. The Strickler Center is truly a metaphor for our Mount Pleasant Community. It reflects teamwork, passion, creativity, commitment and an unabiding desire to help others. Literally hundreds of individuals and many organizations were involved over a five-year period in making the Center a reality. Collectively, we experienced potential, frustration, hope, disappointment and ultimately success. Prior to opening the Strickler Center the excitement centered around the old Mid Michigan College classroom building on Pickard St. east of town. While this option did not materialize, it was instrumental in allowing the community to formalize the overall concept of the Center. It also brought together the team that ultimately started the new Center. This experience prepared us, as a team, to act when the old Victory Church building became available. Thank you MMC. Clothing INC, The Care store, The Community Compassion Network, and the Isabella County Restoration House were the first tenants. These agencies took the risk of investing in the initial lease down payment and of being the first tenants. And their reward was significant: more guests, volunteers, and donations. Now all of these agencies need more space to better serve our neighbors. This is truly success! And the underpinnings of the Center were provided by The Mt. Pleasant Area Community Foundation (MPACF) and the United Way of Gratiot and Isabella Counties. The MPACF gave financial credibility to the Center and Amanda Shaffer personally led the fund-raising campaign to purchase the building. Again, success. Annie Schafer of United Way (and her predecessor Tom Olver) accepted the responsibility of holding the lease from Victory Church until the purchase is complete. Annie helped deal with snow plowing, internet problems, and a million other unexpected issues. And even with all the snow this winter success. Special thanks to both Amanda and Annie their teams. One of the unsung heroes of the Center is I-Ride. Providing County wide transportation to and from the Center is an invaluable service. The dedication of the drivers helping our guests on and off the buses makes them key parts of our team. Over its first 18 months the Center has become an integral part of our very special community. But, keep watching, there is more to come. On behalf of the founding agencies, the hundreds of volunteers, the many supporting agencies and companies, and especially on behalf of our grateful guests thank You Mount Pleasant Area Chamber of Commerce for supporting the William and Janet Strickler Non-profit Center with this award. Mount Pleasant is a special community and we are proud to be a part of it. Peggy and Charlie Burke Mt. Pleasant Chiang Mai air pollution worst in the world CHIANG MAI: Forest fires have sent air quality in nine provinces to a level considered harmful to peoples health, as cities in the North like Chiang Mai registered air quality that was among the worlds worst. agricultureenvironmentpollutionweather By Bangkok Post Wednesday 13 March 2019, 08:59AM The afternoon view from Doi Suthep and the world air-quality index at midnight on Tuesday (Mar 12) show Chiang Mais plight, as the Rose of the North hit top of the scale as the worst polluted city in the world. Photo: Bangkok Post The air quality index (AQI) in Chiang Mai as of 4am Tuesday stood at 230, compared with 170 in the Bangladesh capital Dhaka and 164 in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to Air Visual, an app that monitors air quality. At midnight Tuesday, in slightly cooler night-time temperatures, Chiang Mai still was listed as the worlds worst, with air quality in the high-danger zone for all residents. The AQI measures a broad spectrum of air pollutants including PM2.5, PM10 and carbon dioxide. Information from the Pollution Control Department (PCD) confirmed the haze in the North had reached worrying levels. PM2.5 refers to atmospheric particulate matter (PM) with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometres, which is about 3% the diameter of a human hair. It can lodge in the lungs and enter blood vessels, leading to respiratory and cardiovascular disease. According to PCD-supplied information taken from 17 air-quality-monitoring stations in nine provinces as of 9am Tuesday, the level of PM2.5 ranged from 70-124 microgrammes per cubic metre (g/m), exceeding the safety standard of 50 g/m or lower. Chiang Rais Mae Sai district had the worst recorded level (163 g/m), followed by Phrae, Lampang, Nan and Chiang Mai. The pollution has become such a pressing concern that Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha is scheduled to visit Chiang Rai this Saturday, eight days before the national election. Prime Minister Prayut will take a field trip to Chiang Rai with the purpose of following up on measures to deal with the haze in the North, Pralong Damrongthai, director-general of the PCD, told the media Tuesday. Dr Rangsrit Kanjanavanit, a Chiang Mai resident who serves as a lecturer and cardiologist at the Faculty of Medicine at Chiang Mai University, said the smoggy skies show how the governments campaign to eradicate forest fires and open burning has yet to prove a success. Dr Rangsrit, who also holds the post of vice president of the Seub Nakhasathien Foundation, said the government should come up with more sustainable and comprehensive measures, instead of just arresting farmers who start fires or firing water to try to control dust levels. It should find a way to dissuade farmers from burning [waste] by giving them incentives, he said. Some of the haze has been attributed to neighbouring countries like Laos and Myanmar. As such, critics say Thailand should work more with other governments to tackle the widespread practice of open burning. Haze has been a seasonal problem in the North for over a decade. It usually appears from January to April but peaks in March as the extremely dry conditions increase the magnitude of forest fires. This is compounded by farmers burning waste to clear land for the next harvest season. Read original story here. Phuket, Andaman coast issued Summer Storm Warning PHUKET: The Thai Meteorological Department Southern Meteorological Center (West Coast), based near Phuket International Airport, has issued as Summer Storm Warning for all provinces along the Andaman coast. weather By The Phuket News Wednesday 13 March 2019, 05:51PM People were urged to check the radar loops for nearby areas, such as Krabi, while the work is being carried out on the Phuket weather radar station. Image: TMD The warning, issued for tomorrow through next Monday (March 14-18) is for Ranong, Phang Nga, Phuket, Trang and Satun. Image: TMD A high pressure system from China will cover upper Thailand and the South China Sea. In Thailand, temperatures will be hot, which can cause summer storms in many areas, the warning said. Image: TMD The warning, issued for tomorrow through next Monday (March 14-18) is for Ranong, Phang Nga, Phuket, Trang and Satun. A high pressure system from China will cover upper Thailand and the South China Sea. In Thailand, temperatures will be hot, which can cause summer storms in many areas, the warning said. The Southern West Coast region (along the Andaman coast) will have thunderstorms. These storms will be very windy and heavy rain, and possibly hail in some areas, the warning added. The Phuket office of the TMD (Phuket Met) urged people to beware of any impending storms and to avoid open areas where people may be exposed. Beware taking cover under big trees, and poorly constructed buildings and big signs and billboards. the warning added. Also be careful of dangerous lighting, the warning said. Farmers were urged to take what measures they could to prepare for the storms. All boat captains were also urged to exercise caution as waves during thunderstorms were forecast to reach up to two to three metres. Fisherman please sail the boat carefully, the warning said. All people are urged to please closely follow all announcements by the Thai Meteorological Department, the warning added. Phuket police wait as Greek murder suspect remains at large abroad PHUKET: The Chief of the Cherng Talay Police today confirmed that he has yet to be informed of any updates on the international hunt for Greek national Dimitrios Chairopoulos, who is wanted for the murder of local beautician Niramon Aewkaew in Phuket last month. murdercrimedeathpolice By Waranya Prompinpiras Wednesday 13 March 2019, 07:05PM Dimitrios Chairopoulos. Photo: Immigration Bureau Chief Col Serm Kwannimit told The Phuket News today (Mar 13) that he has also yet to be informed of any explanations as to why his request for an Interpol Red Notice be issued for Chairopouloss arrest has not yet been granted. The request was submitted on Feb 19. (See story here.) However, Interpol has yet to post a Red Notice for his arrest. (See Interpol website here.) I still do not know where Mr Dimitrios Chairopoulos went. I know only the last place that he had entered, Dubai airport, Col Serm told The Phuket News today. But if he does come back to Thailand, he will be arrested, Col Serm assured. Col Serm noted that the arrest warrant for Chairopoulos has been forwarded to every Immigration Bureau office throughout Thailand, as well as to Interpol and to the Greek embassy in Bangkok. "The Greek embassy has contacted me. They inquired about the details of the case and told me that they will have a meeting about this special case, because this case is very serious, he said. I have already submitted all the details of the case to the Foreign Affairs Division of the Royal Thai Police. Now the Foreign Affairs Division is currently processing the case, and they will send the case details to the Office of the Attorney General. After that, the Office of the Attorney General will proceed with the arrangements needed in order to have Chairopoulos arrested, Col Serm said. The warrant for Chairopouloss arrest was issued after Cherng Talay Police confirmed through CCTV footage that Chairopoulos, 42, was seen leaving the room at a guesthouse in Bang Tao where Ms Niramons body was found on Feb 16. Ms Niramon, 43, originally from Phatthalung, had been battered to death. When Ms Niramons body was discovered, by her sister, her hands and feet were still bound and she had a black cloth stuffed into her mouth. (See story here.) Police confirmed that they had obtained CCTV footage showing the couple leaving the room in the afternoon of Feb 11 the last time that Ms Niramon was seen alive. The couple returned to the room that evening, but Chairopoulos was seen leaving the room alone that night. Chairopoulos was reported as clearing Immigration to exit the country at Phuket International Airport at 10:14pm that same night. Ms Niramon and Chairopoulos were married at the time of her death. However, one year earlier, in 2016, Ms Niramon filed a report at Cherng Talay Police Station alleging that Chairopoulos, in a jealous rage, had threatened to kill her if she ever left him. Regardless, Ms Niramon went on to marry Chairopoulos the following year. Thailand bans Boeing 737 MAX flights for 7 days BANGKOK: The Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand said today (Mar 13) it is suspending the use of the Boeing Cos 737 MAX 9 due to safety concerns. accidentstransporttourismdisasters By Bangkok Post Wednesday 13 March 2019, 06:27PM Boeings first 737 MAX 9 jet is seen at the companys delivery centre before a ceremony transferring ownership to Thai Lion Air, in Seattle, March 21, 2018. Inset: Debris of the crashed airplane of Ethiopia Airlines, near Bishoftu, a town some 60 km southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on March 11, 2019. Photo: Bangkok Post The regulator said it will temporarily suspend the use of Thai Lion Airs Boeing 737 MAX 9s for seven days, starting on Thursday and will continue to investigate safety measures. Thai Lion Airs three MAX 9 jets will be affected. Its parent company, Lion Air, has confirmed reports it has put on hold the scheduled delivery of four Boeing 737 Max 8 jets while it waits for the outcome of the Indonesian investigation into its October crash that killed 189 people. Speaking at a transport ministry news conference in Jakarta about the grounding of Max 8 planes, Lion Air executive Daniel Putut said the airline needs to know the root cause of the accident. Lion Air ordered 222 Boeing Max planes, including 218 of the Max 8 model and four Max 9 planes. It currently has 10 Max 8 planes in its fleet. Thailand is the last country in Asia where the jets are registered to issue a suspension, following the fatal crash of a MAX 8 jet in Ethiopia on Sunday (Mar 10). Thai airlines do not operate MAX 8 jets. Earlier today, Hong Kong barred Boeing 737 MAX airliners from its airspace. Despite Boeings assurances in the wake of the disaster, the European Union, Britain and India joined China and other countries grounding the plane or banning it from their airspace as they await the results of the crash investigation. The semi-autonomous Chinese citys Civil Aviation Department (CAD) said it was imposing a temporary suspension from 6 pm local time (5pm in Thailand) on Wednesday until further notice on operation of Boeing B737 MAX aircraft into, out of and over Hong Kong. The ban is solely a precautionary measure to ensure aviation safety and protect the public, a CAD spokesman added. The department added it had been in close contact in the past few days with the US Federal Aviation Administration and relevant organisations, including two airlines Indias SpiceJet and Globus Airlines of Russia that have recently used the 737 MAX for flights to Hong Kong. SpiceJet had defended the jet on Tuesday, describing it as a highly sophisticated aircraft. Hong Kong flag carrier Cathay Pacific does not have any 737 MAX aircraft in its fleet. On Sunday, a new Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 8 went down minutes into a flight to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board. The crash came after a Lion Air jet of the same model went down in Indonesia in October, claiming 189 lives. Several airlines have grounded the MAX 8s in their fleets, but many others are continuing to fly the plane pending an investigation into the crash and possible guidance from Boeing itself. Read original story here. Man's body found after firefighters respond to Wednesday call Fire department personnel found a dead body after after responding to a possible structure fire. The call was at 8:29 a.m. Wednesday to a duplex. Civil police officers arrive to the Civil Police headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Police in Brazil have arrested two suspects in the killing of Rio de Janeiro councilwoman Marielle Franco and her driver. The brazen assassination of the two on March 14 last year led to massive protests and widespread anger in Latin America's largest nation. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo) NORRISTOWN A former Pennsylvania state police trooper who served prison time for sexually abusing women and teenage girls while on duty two decades ago faces a probation violation hearing in Montgomery County Court now that hes been accused of having indecent contact with an underage girl in Berks County. A violation hearing for Michael K. Evans, 51, formerly of the 1100 block of Belleview Avenue in Pottstown, was postponed March 7 and Montgomery County prosecutors explained they are awaiting the outcome of Evanss new case in Berks before proceeding with the violation hearing before Judge William R. Carpenter. Evans, according to county prosecutors, potentially faces a sentence of 1-to-2-years in prison for the alleged probation violation. Authorities alleged Evanss new arrest in Berks is a violation of the probationary period he is still serving in connection with his 2000 conviction for sexually abusing three teenagers and three women while on duty. Court records indicate Evans faces a hearing in Berks County Court on April 4 on new charges of corruption of a minor, indecent exposure and indecent assault of a person under 16 in connection with alleged incidents that occurred between June and August 2018, including at his most recent residence in Longswamp Township. Evans remains in jail while awaiting court action. Evans first captured headlines when he was arrested Feb. 15, 2000, on charges that he engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior with three teenage girls while on duty between July 1997 and September 1999. Evans, then 33 and a trooper since 1995, was assigned to the Skippack barracks at the time. Two of the teenagers were runaways Evans was ordered to transport. Another victim was a 16-year-old Perkiomenville girl who Evans propositioned while investigating a burglary in her parents home in July 1997, asking if she would pose for naked photographs to be his locker girl, prosecutors alleged at the time. At the time of Evanss arrest, the Montgomery County District Attorneys Office held a press conference asking any other victims to come forward. More women did come forward and Evans was re-arrested in April 2000 on charges involving incidents with three adult women who accused the trooper of using his badge to coerce them into sexual relations in exchange for protection or leniency. At the time, then Assistant District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman, who is now a county judge, alleged Evans was a predator who used his badge to victimize females. Ferman argued preying upon six different victims while on duty as a trooper was the ultimate abuse of authority. After months of highly publicized legal wrangling between Ferman and Evans defense attorney Marc R. Steinberg, the onetime trooper accepted a plea agreement and on Oct. 3, 2000, he pleaded guilty to multiple counts of indecent assault, corruption of minors and official oppression. As part of that plea agreement, Judge Carpenter sentenced Evans to five to 10 years in state prison, to be followed by 10 years probation, and Evans was forced to resign from the police force. The criminal case against Evans also resulted in an internal investigation into how the state police addressed sexual misconduct complaints against troopers and other employees. Evans was released from prison on parole in April 2008. However, with the consecutive probationary period, Evanss court supervision isnt set to expire until February 2020. Evans allegedly was still serving his probationary period when he was arrested by state police at Reading last August and accused of having inappropriate contact with a 15-year-old girl at his Mertztown area home. The victim reported to authorities that she met Evans in late June or early July and that he fondled her and asked her to pose for photographs on his motorcycle, according to a criminal complaint. The girl reported that several weeks later Evans took photos of her while she was wearing a bra and shorts on his motorcycle inside his garage, according to court documents. Authorities alleged Evans also fondled the girl while he and an adult woman in the garage engaged in a sex act. The girl eventually got dressed and left the home with the adult woman, according to court papers. If hes convicted of the latest charges in Berks County Court, Evans faces a possible maximum sentence of 7-to-14-years in prison. President Trump often complains that he is the victim of presidential harassment or, as he sometimes puts it, PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT! After more than two years of Presidential Harassment, the only things that have been proven is that Democrats and others broke the law, Trump tweeted on March 3. Presidential Harassment by crazed Democrats at the highest level in the history of our Country, he added later. PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT! It should never be allowed to happen again! he tweeted Feb. 7. The presidents adversaries, of course, dismiss his protests as self-interested whining. But the fact is, Trump has a point. He is the target of an extraordinary combination not just of federal law enforcement and congressional probes, but a long list of less-discussed but potentially consequential investigations by state and local prosecutors and regulators. Together, it adds up to a pile-on of unprecedented proportions by and large the work of blue-state Democrats who stand to gain politically if their investigations succeed in crippling the president. Recently the New York State Department of Financial Services, the agency that regulates the insurance business, issued what The New York Times called an expansive subpoena to Aon, the insurance broker for the presidents companies. The agency leaped into action after former Trump fixer Michael Cohen told the House that Trump had at some point inflated his assets to an insurance company. Cohen, who has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and faces serious questions about the truthfulness of his latest testimony, supplied no details. None were needed. The subpoena that was served on Aon contains no indication that the company or any of its employees engaged in misconduct, the Times reported. Nor does it specify any possible wrongdoing that is the focus of the inquiry by state regulators. The subpoena demanded a broad range of materials related to Trumps dealings with Aon going back a decade, the Times said. Also in New York, the State Department of Taxation and Finance announced last October that it is investigating Trumps taxes going back at least 20 years. Speaking of state law enforcement, the recent New York attorney general race was virtually a contest to see which candidate could vow to go after Trump the most aggressively. In her victory speech, new AG Letitia James said of Trump, I will be shining a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings, and every dealing, demanding truthfulness at every turn. Outside of New York, the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia are suing Trump, accusing him of violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution. Then there is the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, based in Manhattan. Prosecutors there are said to be investigating the Trump Organizations finances, the funding of the Trump inauguration, and the funding of the Trump super PAC Rebuilding America Now. The SDNY investigations hold a large place in the hopes of Trump opponents who fear Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller might deliver an underwhelming report that does not make the case that Trump colluded with Russia to fix the 2016 election or that he obstructed justice in the aftermath. Indeed, a number of observers believe the SDNY probes pose a more serious threat to Trump than Mueller. Does there seem something odd about that? In a recent email exchange, I asked Andrew Coan, a University of Arizona law professor, who is the author of the book Prosecuting the President, whether there is precedent for a U.S. attorneys office conducting a wide-ranging, open-ended investigation of a sitting president. The short answer is no, Coan responded. I am aware of no comparable prior investigation. On Capitol Hill, Democrats have long viewed Trumps tax returns his refusal to release them broke 40 years of precedent as a sort of Holy Grail of Trump investigations. We have to have the truth, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said before the election. Now, the House Ways and Means Committee is reportedly preparing to demand the Treasury Department turn over the returns. The demand is based primarily on suspicion that Trump must have done something wrong with his taxes or he would have long ago released the returns. If Democrats get the returns and that is not guaranteed given the expected legal fight its likely they will start even more investigations. Beyond that, there is the House Judiciary Committees recent decision to demand documents from 81 people associated with Trump a request so wide-ranging that even some Democrats worry that their partys investigators have overreached. The point is, the scrutiny directed at the president from all sides not oversight of his administration or even investigations into his election so far exceeds anything in the past that it could well qualify as presidential harassment. Democrats would no doubt respond that Trump is singularly corrupt, or that he brought it all on himself. He did not. What has happened is that Democrats, in Congress and in some key blue states, saw investigation as a way to weaken a president they never thought would be elected and want to ensure is not re-elected in 2020. And Trump, with the most extensive business history ever brought to the presidency, presented a lot of avenues of investigation. When he complains about harassment, he has a legitimate case to make. (Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner.) FILE- In this Nov. 14, 2018, file photo Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes are parked near Boeing Co.'s 737 assembly facility in Renton, Wash. Investigators were rushing to the scene of a devastating plane crash in Ethiopia on Sunday, March 10, 2019, an accident that could renew safety questions about the newest version of Boeing's popular 737 airliner. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File) Oilsands producers including MEG Energy Corp. and Imperial Oil Ltd. are reconsidering oilsands expansions as new export pipelines are delayed and the provincial government limits production. MEG had planned to ramp up output at an expansion of its Christina Lake oilsands project in the second half of the year. Now, the probability of that going ahead this year has decreased after Enbridge Inc. announced a year delay on its Line 3 expansion, Derek Evans, MEGs chief executive officer, said March 8. In November, Imperial Oil Ltd said it would push ahead with the 75,000 barrel-a-day Aspen project. Last month, CEO Rich Kruger said the company is re-evaluating its assumptions about Aspen after Albertas oil curtailment introduced new risk. Nearly five years after oil prices collapsed and companies slashed spending, some oilsands producers had been looking to grow again. But pipeline shortages that sent Canadian heavy crude to $50 (U.S.) a barrel below West Texas Intermediate futures late last year and the government-mandated output cuts that followed have tempered the new-found optimism. We dont want to be building capacity into a system where we dont have the ability to move it, MEGs Evans said in a conference call last week. Expansion Projects Cenovus Energy Inc.s Christina Lake phase G expansion is scheduled to be ready for production in the second quarter but the timing of the start-up will depend on sustained improvements in market access and heavy oil pricing, Sonja Franklin, a company spokeswoman, said in an email. Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. could defer the start up of the Kirby North project and has flexibility with its Primrose site if Canadian prices collapse again or there is going to be a problem, Tim McKay, chief executive officer, said in a conference call March 7. Its just too early to say whether wed start those projects up or delay them, he said. We have that optionality. Canadas oil producers have struggled to export crude to the U.S. and other international markets after projects to expand pipelines were delayed and existing pipelines filled up. The Alberta government ordered producers to curtail supply in order to ease the glut and boost prices. Pipeline Delays Enbridge announced that its expanded Line 3 from Alberta to Wisconsin would start operation at the end of 2020, a year later than planned, because the permitting process wont be finished before November. The Trans Mountain pipeline to Vancouver was delayed by at least a year after a court decision last summer forced a new regulatory review. Prior to the decision, the pipeline was purchased by Canadas federal government after Kinder Morgan Inc., the previous owner, threatened to cancel it amid environmental opposition. A third pipeline project, TransCanada Corp.s Keystone XL pipeline to the U.S. has yet to receive a final go-ahead from the company amid similar hurdles. SASKATOON - The organization that represents rural communities in Saskatchewan says Ottawa must do more to sort out a trade dispute with China that is affecting some Canadian canola exports. The canola impasse is top of mind for delegates attending the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities annual convention in Saskatoon. Most delegates are farmers and their main cash crop is canola. Canada exported about $3.6 billion worth of canola seed, oil and meal to China in 2017. Ray Orb, the associations president, says Chinas decision to restrict sales from Winnipeg-based Richardson International Ltd. has negatively affected prices and created market uncertainty. He says they will be asking federal Trade Minister Jim Carr if he plans to meet with Chinese officials to resolve the problem. We think that is what their plan should be, Orb said Tuesday. The federal government should have this as one of its highest priorities. It has a huge impact, not only to Western Canada and Saskatchewan, but to the Canadian economy because of the jobs and spinoffs. Carr is to speak to the association Thursday. Some delegates believe China is using the tactic to pressure Ottawa over the arrest in Canada of a senior official from a Chinese telecommunications company. Chinas foreign ministry has said it is blocking imports from Richardson International due to fears of insect infestation. Canada supplies about 40 per cent of Chinas canola imports. (CJWW, The Canadian Press) MONTREAL - Canadian travellers and airlines are in for a turbulent ride after Canada and the U.S. announced a ban on all Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft from Canadian airspace due to safety concerns. For a week or two, it will be bedlam and chaos, said Marvin Ryder, an assistant professor of marketing at McMaster University. Transport Minister Marc Garneau told reporters Wednesday morning the decision to ground the planes was a precautionary move that was made after a review of the available evidence, three days after the Ethiopian Airlines disaster that killed all 157 people on board, including 18 Canadians. Hours later, U.S. President Donald Trump announced an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in that country, effectively closing the skies to the more than 375 Max 8s currently in service across the globe. More than 40 countries have now grounded or banned the Max 8 from their airspace over safety concerns and possible parallels to an Oct. 29 incident which saw the same type of aircraft plunge into the Java Sea, killing 189 people. The latest suspensions come as thousands of Canadians are away on March break, stoking fears of stranded passengers and rebooking delays. Adeel Khamisa said his familys United Airlines flight from Montreal to Los Angeles on an Air Canada-operated Max 8 plane was full last Saturday. All those people need to get home, said the Ottawa resident. Im getting passed around back and forth between two airlines, [each] saying its the others responsibility. Jason Scarrotts, a father of two young children, said he was on the phone with Air Canada for 90 minutes before speaking with an agent to rebook their Max 8 flight from Vancouver to Palm Springs, only to be disconnected. Please help, he tweeted. Air Canada and WestJet Airlines Ltd. confirmed Wednesday they were in the process of grounding their Max 8s. Air Canada said it will grant affected customers on its roughly 75 daily Max 8 flights a full fee waiver though that may not cover higher fares for a rebooked flight along with the ability to obtain a full refund. We are working to rebook impacted customers as soon as possible but given the magnitude of our 737 Max operations, which on average carry 9,000 to 12,000 customers per day, customers can expect delays in rebooking and in reaching Air Canada call centres and we appreciate our customers patience, the company said in a statement. WestJet said the grounding order will affect about 1,400 customers daily. The Calgary-based company said it will attempt to rebook guests for no additional charge, but is sticking to a policy that could see passengers pay the difference in fares or fees for the changed ticket. Air Canada has 24 Max 8s and WestJet has 13 six per cent and seven per cent of their fleets of 400 and 175 aircraft, respectively. The carriers use the commuter planes daily to ferry passengers on routes that include Vancouver-Calgary and Vancouver-Montreal as well as March break favourites such as Toronto-Puerto Vallarta and Vancouver-Honolulu. Sun destinations for WestJets Max 8s which make about 35 flights each day include the Florida hot spots of Tampa, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale. Ryder estimates the ban could cost the two airlines $100 million collectively in the first 10 days. They dont have another 24 jets just sitting parked somewhere that they can bring into service to cover it...Theyll have to cancel flights, he said. Ryder explained the airlines may try to cut the number of flights on some routes and replace the Max 8 jetliners with larger planes. Air Canada plans to swap in other aircraft on flights to Hawaii, Martinique and Guadeloupe, reroute some passengers through different airlines and cancel other flights, including those from Halifax and St. Johns to London, all of which comes at a cost. Air Canadas customer service line is 1-888-247-2262. Travellers are advised to check their flight status at aircanada.com. WestJets customer line is 1-888-937-8538, with flight status available at westjet.com. Companies in this story: (TSX:AC, TSX:WJA) In the months before an Ethiopian Airlines crash killed 157 people on Sunday, the second recent deadly crash of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 jetliner, American pilots complained to authorities about perceived safety problems with the same aircraft. Two pilots reported their aircraft unexpectedly pitched nose down after engaging autopilot following departure. Another pilot reported a temporary level off triggered by the aircraft automation. The captain of a November 2018 flight called part of the aircrafts flight manual inadequate and almost criminally insufficient. The fact that this airplane requires such jury rigging to fly is a red flag, that captain who is not identified by name wrote in a report to the federal Aviation Safety Reporting System. The captain added that part of the planes flight system is not described in our Flight Manual. Records show that federal aviation authorities received at least 11 reports concerning the Boeing 737 MAX 8 from professional aviators logged between April 2018 and December 2018. Sundays crash in Ethiopia followed an Oct. 29, 2018, crash of Lion Air Flight 610, in which 189 passengers and crew died when it plunged into the Java Sea outside Indonesia. Both flights crashed after experiencing drastic speed fluctuations during ascent, with their pilots trying to return to ground after takeoff. Regulators and industry experts suspect that MAX 8s Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, may have caused the jets to make unwanted dives. Read more: Boeing chief personally appealed to Trump as countries grounded jets Transport minister to update Canadas position on Boeing 737 Max 8 More nations ground Boeing 737 Max 8s after Ethiopia crash Flight data recovered from the Indonesia crash indicated pilots repeatedly tried to get the planes nose up before impact. After the crash, Boeing issued a service bulletin warning pilots that erroneous flight data fed into the MCAS could force the aircraft into a dive for up to 10 seconds. Following the crash in Ethiopia, the company said it had no new guidance. The pilot complaints, first reported Tuesday by the Dallas Morning News, emerged as aviation regulators around the world were hustling to respond to the two crashes in five months. In one documented complaint, a pilot said the planes downturn triggered the ground proximity warning system, which is designed to alert pilots when their planes are in immediate danger. The complaint states an alarm sounded dont sink, dont sink before the captain disconnected the autopilot and manually adjusted the plane to climb. This week, the European Union, United Kingdom, China, Australia, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Malaysia grounded the MAX 8 over safety concerns. Airline officials in the United States have so far resisted pressure to follow suit, although regulators have acknowledged that there were reports of similar issues in both doomed flights. FAA spokeswoman Lynn Lunsford declined to comment on the specific pilot complaint reports, which are logged by the Aviation Safety Reporting System. Lunsford noted the reports do not discuss MCAS, the feature suspected to have played a role in both crashes. Kristy Kiernan, an assistant professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical Universitys College of Aeronautics in Daytona Beach, Florida, cautioned against drawing conclusions from the MAX 8 aircraft complaint reports, which she reviewed for USA TODAY. Theres nothing that really struck me as a pattern, Kiernan said. I just dont think theres anything you can draw from it at all. Although the reports involve the MAX 8, the issues are different than those flagged about the MCAS system in the Lion Air crash, Kiernan said. For example, two pilots raised concerns about issues after engaging the planes autopilot, but Kiernan noted that the MCAS system is disengaged when the autopilot is turned on. Another of the reports focused on a different system, the aircrafts auto throttles. The anonymous reports are submitted by pilots on a voluntary basis to capture safety concerns and are used by regulators to support policies aimed at decreasing the likelihood of accidents. As aviation regulators around the world this week suspended the MAX 8, the FAA stated that its investigation has just begun and to date we have not been provided data to draw any conclusions or take any actions. Boeing has sold nearly 400 of the airliners, including 74 to domestic carriers, and has taken orders for thousands more. A company spokesperson stressed full confidence in the safety of the planes Tuesday. The Federal Aviation Administration is not mandating any further action at this time, and based on the information currently available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators, Boeing said in a statement. TORONTO - The cannabis company backed by members of the Tragically Hip band has agreed to a friendly takeover by Quebec-based HEXO Corp. in an all-share transaction valued at $263 million, sending shares of both companies higher. The companies say in a joint statement the deal would give HEXO the capacity to produce about 150,000 kilograms of cannabis annually and to realize $10 million of annual synergies. HEXO chief executive Sebastien St-Louis, who co-founded the company, said the addition of Newstrike would to take HEXO to the next level on its journey to become one of the largest cannabis companies in the world. Were extremely proud of our record of execution, and today are committing to achieving over $400 million in net revenue in 2020, St-Louis said in a statement. Shares of HEXO in Toronto were up nearly six per cent in afternoon trading to $7.83 after the deal was announced. On the TSX Venture exchange, Newstrikes stock was up more than 11 per cent in afternoon trading to 50 cents a share. The deal announced on Wednesday is the latest sign of consolidation in Canadas cannabis sector. In December, cannabis company Aleafia announced a deal to acquire licensed producer Emblem Corp. Last year, Aurora Cannabis Inc. acquired rivals MedReleaf Corp. and CanniMed. In November 2017, CanniMed had announced an all-stock deal to acquire Newstrike. However, Aurora later launched a hostile-takeover bid of CanniMed and after a months-long battle, the two companies signed a friendly deal, abandoning the plans to acquire Newstrike. As part of the deal announced Wednesday, Newstrike shareholders are being offered 0.06332 of a HEXO common share in exchange for each common share held. Based on the value of HEXO shares at the close on Tuesday, the offer would be worth nearly 47 cents per share. The transaction is unanimously supported by the directors of both companies but requires approval by Newstrike shareholders. RBC Capital Markets is acting as the financial adviser to Newstrike, the latest evidence of Canadas largest banks warming up to the pot sector. Newstrike also has the right to accept a superior proposal in certain circumstances, with HEXO having the right to match any proposal within five business days. The proposed deal would result in Newstrike shareholders owning 14 per cent of the combined company, with the rest owned by HEXO shareholders. Thats about four per cent above Newstrikes closing of 45 cents per share at the close on Tuesday. The two companies also have established distribution agreements in eight provinces, excluding New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador. Our strength in Ontario and English Canada clearly complements HEXOs strong position in Quebec and creates an industry leader, Newstrike chief executive Jay Wilgar said in a statement. I believe this transaction is beneficial to our shareholders, customers, and employees. We look forward to working closely with the leadership team to complete this transaction. Companies in this story: (TSX:HEXO, TSXV:HIP) VANCOUVERWhen flooding last year broke open a fish ladder that allowed spawning salmon to get upriver near Cache Creek, B.C., locals trained as guardians from the nearby First Nation responded to the disaster first. Theyd been warning about a growing hole in the critical fisheries structure which looks like a stairway covered in water for years. When it tore open, they followed their training and jumped into action. One of our group saw the hole escalate, recalled Art Antoine, demonstrating the size of the breach by holding his arms out wide. A guardian watchman with Bonaparte First Nation, Antoine spoke to the Star wearing a collared forest-green shirt emblazoned with Protector on the back and Territorial Patrol patches on the arms. You wouldnt believe the power of the water, he recalled. We put in a fish fence to catch the fish, but the flash floods wiped out the nets and washed our fence out; we reset it but that broke too. We lost about 10,000 fish last year. The flash floods, which have been worsening every year from melting snow, washed away salmon that had swam for weeks to get inland from the sea. Damn right, our fish are our life, Antoine lamented. And after all the moose population we lost to the Elephant Hill Wildfire, were at the front line of climate change. His bands patrol and monitoring group is just one of many that have blossomed across B.C. and, more recently, Canada. The idea behind the growing guardian watchmen movement is to maintain eyes on the land. Indigenous communities send teams out on Indigenous territories and waters to monitor and respond to emergencies, ensure laws are followed and collect data on the local effects of climate change. It was Coastal First Nations guardians who were first on-scene when a tugboat sunk off Heiltsuk Nation territory in 2016. But at the second-ever conference of the National Indigenous Guardians Network, held in Vancouver on Tuesday, a series of leaders intimated that their movement has its sights set beyond simply monitoring emergencies and land use. They aim to one day enforce Indigenous law, which they said is a key element of sovereignty. Were tired of what were seeing, Antoine said, and were taking back control. We need to know where the next flash flood is going to be and understand how to stop it. That point was echoed by another guardian, Dave Porter of Kaska Dene Nation, who told more than 300 delegates from across the country that Indigenous Peoples are best placed to watch over their lands because theyve known their territories for millennia. We are part of the land and water and have been for thousands and thousands of years, Porter said. With our history as strong, independent nations from coast to coast to coast, its our responsibility in turn to look after the land. The guardians are the eyes of the land, combining traditional knowledge and modern science. And with climate change the defining issue of our time Indigenous guardians must be our first line of defence against the destruction from climate change and to help rebuild our nations. Haida Nation pioneered the idea decades ago with the B.C. First Nations land-patrol program. The model has now spread to every corner of the country. One of the largest guardian teams is that of the Coastal First Nations of B.C., an alliance of bands on the West Coast that have combined their training and resources, with the aim of protecting the environment, fostering sustainable development and enhancing community well-being. Elodie Button is a stewardship training co-ordinator for Coastal First Nations Great Bear Initiative, a training program in partnership with Vancouver Island University. She said students receive a series of university-accredited certificates in courses including environmental monitoring, leadership and natural-resource management. Future plans include archeology and enforcement and compliance training, she said. Its hands-on, experiential learning in the field, Button said. For the past few years, this program has really been our life. Were talking about a lot more than a technical training program, though. Students really have the opportunity to learn from the land. Australia pumps millions of dollars into Indigenous patrols in its arid northern region, which is traditional territory to Indigenous Peoples. Guardians across Canada want the Crown here to see the benefits and to follow suit with increased funds. With lofty long-term goals, the program is appealing to many First Nations as well because it is an immediate way to create jobs in remote areas often faced with high unemployment. These alliances are all about the lands, which are under pressure everywhere, explained Valerie Courtois, director of the Indigenous Leadership Institute, the Guardian Networks founding organization. This matters so much, because there absolutely is a significant return on investment, that turns into improved literacy and education, reduced rates of incarceration and even reducing violence against women, said Courtois. Courtois, who is Innu from Mashteuiatsh First Nation in Quebec, explained that after the success of the Haidas program, the Innu followed suit with the second pilot project. It has since become well-established and expanded. Another successful training program that has been running for several years brought leaders from the north down to Vancouver for the national conference. Were bringing community members back onto the land, said Corrine Porter, executive director of the Dena Kayeh Institute, which brings together Indigenous Peoples spanning the northern B.C.-Yukon border to learn and experience wildlife management, scientific data collection and elders knowledge. Her guardian watchmen program, called Dane nan ye dah, patrols the land but also engages young people directly in the wilderness, something she described as a transformative experience for many of them. To have young people training with elders, she said, theyre engaging as true stewards of our lands. Correction March 14, 2019: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated the titles of Elodie Button and Corrine Porter. Read more about: Across the country, overheated housing markets have brought more scrutiny on foreign ownership as people seek answers for the gap between home prices and local incomes. Governments have been slow to gather information on the issue. In 2016, B.C. started collecting data about the citizenship of real-estate purchasers. The following year, the federal government earmarked money for a data-collection effort by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and Statistics Canada. Since its first release in December 2017, the joint Canadian Housing Statistics Program has examined the impact of non-residents that is, someone whose principal residence is not in Canada on the countrys markets. Home ownership has slipped beyond the reach of many, particularly in Vancouver. Andy Yan, an urban planner who is the director of Simon Fraser Universitys City Program, noted in July that Vancouver has the third-highest housing prices among cities in North America, despite ranking 50th for median income. British Columbia responded to public outrage by introducing a foreign buyer tax in 2016, later raising the rate from 15 to 20 per cent. In 2017, Ontario introduced its own 15-per-cent foreign buyer tax levied on businesses and buyers who arent permanent residents or citizens of this country. Still, CMHC analysts caution that foreign demand is just one factor in rising home prices: low interest rates, not enough housing being built and strong local demand are also playing a part. In its third report, released Tuesday, the Canadian Housing Statistics Program looked at B.C., Nova Scotia and Ontario, widening its tracking for the first time to include properties held by multiple owners. Here are the highlights: British Columbia What do you think? Out of 1,719,670 properties surveyed, 1,613,220 were owned by residents while 212,900 were owned by non-residents or by a mix of resident and non-resident owners. The figure includes both condominiums and detached homes. Tuesdays release shows that Vancouver has a higher percentage of non-resident-owned properties than Toronto or Halifax, as well as a higher difference in property value. The University of British Columbia endowment lands near Vancouvers Point Grey neighbourhood has the highest rate of non-resident ownership in Canada: one in five residential properties are owned or part-owned by someone who does not live primarily in Canada. In Richmond, a Vancouver suburb, the figure is one in 10. In Vancouver, the difference in ownership is most extreme when it comes to new condos: 19.2 per cent of condos built in 2016 and 2017 are owned by non-residents. Non-residents own less than 6 per cent of condos built between 1961 and 1990. Like any other home ownership group such as first-time buyers or empty nesters non-resident buyers have certain characteristics. The data shows they prefer to buy newer and therefore more expensive properties, said Eric Bond, a CMHC analyst based in Vancouver. In Vancouver, non-residents own condos that are on average worth $96,000 more than residents condos. In Toronto, the difference was $37,000. For single detached homes, the value gap in British Columbia between non-residents and residents was $236,000. For single detached homes in Ontario, the gap was $35,000. After an extraordinary property price spike in 2016 drove home prices far out of reach of local incomes, Vancouvers city council and B.C.s provincial government have been attempting to rein in speculation through a variety of new taxes and regulations. Starting in early 2018, prices and sales have dropped, especially in Vancouvers high-end market. However, CMHC and Statistics Canada analysts explained Tuesday that the data the agencies have collected so far doesnt yet cover enough time to see whether those policies are having the desired effect. CMHC has not so far analyzed whether non-resident owners are letting units sit empty or renting them out, Bond said in a telephone interview, but it hopes to measure this in the future. Ontario Homes owned only by non-residents of Canada accounted for 2 per cent of residential properties in Ontario. StatsCan and CMHC looked at 4.8 million homes in the province. The majority by far 98 per cent, or 4.7 million homes were Canadian resident owned. The report noted that 3.3 per cent of homes in the province have at least one non-resident owner. Condominiums were the most popular type of property when it came to non-resident ownership, the report found, with 6 per cent of condos in Ontario belonging to at least one non-resident owner. The report also noted a sharp rise in non-residents who own newly built homes in Toronto. The study found that 6 per cent of all properties in Torontos census metropolitan area constructed between 2016 and 2017 had at least one non-resident owner. Thats up from 4 per cent for the periods 2011 to 2015 and from 1961 to 1990. Looking at houses, non-resident ownership rates are higher for newer properties with greater assessment values. For example, 1.4 per cent of detached single-family homes were owned by non-residents last year, yet the value differential the median assessment value of those homes compared to resident-owned properties was $109,000 higher. Nova Scotia In Nova Scotia, foreign buyers arent interested in the city, with picturesque places like Cape Breton Island and the provinces south shore driving up overall rates of non-resident ownership. Of the 449,685 residential properties in Nova Scotia, as of December 2017, a total of 17,440 were majority-owned by non-residents. Thats a rate of 3.9 per cent higher than Ontarios and even slightly higher than British Columbias. But in Halifax, the rate of non-resident ownership is only 2.5 per cent. The municipality of Digby on the Bay of Fundy, a tourist destination boasting the worlds highest tides, also boasts the provinces highest rate of non-resident ownership. Nearly one in 10 properties (9.9 per cent) in Digby is majority-owned by non-residents. On Cape Breton Island, the rate is 5.6 per cent. In Lunenburg, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the south shore, the rate is 6 per cent. In Yarmouth, the provinces southern tip, the rate is 7.4 per cent. Statistics Canada and CMHC attribute the higher numbers in rural areas to the provinces tourism promotion, its proximity to the United States and even the ferry between Maine and Yarmouth. Nova Scotia is prime territory for people to want to vacation and an affordable area to vacation as well, Robert Kopersiewich, senior analyst at Statistics Canada, said in a media briefing on Tuesday. Read more about: YELLOWKNIFEOttawa and the Northwest Territories have reached a deal on protecting threatened caribou. But one environmental group calls so-called Section 11 agreements draft versions of which have been reached with other provinces plans to keep planning. I would have liked to have seen some more concrete actions, said Florence Daviet of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. On Wednesday, the federal government and the N.W.T. made an agreement that the territory would file range plans to conserve several herds of boreal caribou, which live in forested regions along the territorys western edge. Those herds are some of Canadas healthiest totalling 6,000 strong on habitat that is almost 70 per cent undisturbed, well above the federal threshold of 65 per cent. Were not going to wait until its a situation where were reacting instead of being proactive, said territorial Environment Minister Robert C. McLeod. Thats why were doing this right now, so we dont get to that point. Ottawa has agreed to give the territory $4.5 million to develop range plans, as well as determine sustainable harvest limits. The first of those plans is due as early as late summer. Such agreements, allowed under Section 11 of the Species At Risk Act, have also been signed by Yukon and in draft form by Saskatchewan and British Columbia. Other provinces with caribou populations are in negotiations. Such agreements were developed after all provinces failed two years ago to meet a five-year deadline to come up with firm plans for how they would keep caribou on the landscape. Some herds, especially in Alberta and B.C., are down to a few dozen animals, while others have disappeared entirely. Legislation allows the federal minister to impose protection plans. Instead, said Daviet, officials turned to Section 11. When you read the documents, they rarely if at all identify very concrete measures of protection, she said. Its more process and plans to get to plans. It is kind of disappointing. Sean Fraser, the parliamentary secretary to Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, said theres more to them than that. Its not just stick a date on it and hope you cross it. We actually help provide the resources required to carry out the implementation of those range plans. Ottawa hasnt ruled out using its power to step in and impose protection on vulnerable herds, he said. There are live conversations about whether those rather extraordinary remedies are going to be necessary. My strong preference would be to reach an agreement. Talking is good, said Daviet. Action would be better especially in jurisdictions where herds dont have much time. How long are they going to try to get more positive agreements with the provinces before theyre willing to step in with something? Read more about: VAUGHAN, ONT.A Toronto-area lumber company has been fined $75,000 after a worker was critically injured while unloading large beams from a delivery truck more than three years ago. The Ministry of Labour says Argo Lumber Inc. pleaded guilty this week to one charge under the Occupational Health and Safety Act failing to provide information, instruction and supervision to protect the health and safety of a worker. It says the charge stemmed from an incident that took place in September 2015 at a home in Vaughan, Ont. The ministry says the worker was delivering lumber that was loaded in a truck with a 5.5-metre bed, which included two 8.5-metre beams of lumber placed at an angle on top of the other pieces. It says the two beams alone weighed about 111 kilograms. It says that on arrival, the worker climbed on the truck bed, removed the strapping keeping the beams in place and tried to push them off the side of the truck. The ministry says the worker lost balance and fell off the truck onto the driveway, a roughly 2.2-metre fall. The two beams also fell. An investigation by the ministry found the worker had received some training on how to deliver lumber to homes, but had not received adequate information on how to safely unload beams longer than 6.7 metres. As a result, it says the worker tried to do so by hand, which is unsafe. Read more about: Eighteen Canadians died Sunday when an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 157 aboard. Heres what we do and dont know about the crash: What happened: Ethiopian Airlines confirmed all 157 people 149 passengers and eight crew on board were killed when the plane crashed six minutes after takeoff from Ethiopias capital, Addis Ababa, on Sunday. Eighteen of those victims were Canadian citizens, although several others were foreign nationals living in Canada. It is not yet known what caused the plane to go down in clear weather shortly after departing Bole Airport on its way to Nairobi, the capital of neighbouring Kenya. The airline said it would be investigating the cause of the accident. Before the crash, the planes pilot sent out a distress call and was given clearance to return to the airport in Addis Ababa, the airlines CEO said. The airline confirmed that the plane was a Boeing 737 Max 8 model, a plane that has been commonly used since it came on the market in 2017. Read more: Ottawa considers all potential actions as it weighs safety of Boeing 737 Max aircraft Forcing passengers to fly on Boeing 737 Max 8 unethical, passenger advocate says More coverage on Ethiopian plane crash Weve seen this before The accident was similar to Lion Air jet crash that plunged into the Java Sea, killing 189 people just six months ago. Both crashes involved the Boeing 737 Max 8, and both happened minutes after the jets became airborne. The Canadian victims A 9-month-old girl from Hamilton was among the 18 Canadian victims. As reported by the Star, Quindos Karanja said 9-month-old Rubi Paul was travelling to Kenya with her mother, grandmother and older siblings to meet Karanja her grandfather for the very first time. Pauls 60-year-old grandmother, Ann Wangui Karanja, her 34-year-old mother Carolyne Karanja, and her siblings, 7-year-old Ryan and 4-year-old Kerri were also on board. The baby girl, born in Canada, was the only one with Canadian citizenship in the family. Danielle Moore, a 24-year-old woman from Winnipeg, was reportedly among the victims. Prior to her flight, Moore posted on Facebook Saturday morning that she would be travelling to Nairobi, Kenya, for the United Nations Environment Assembly. Stephanie Lacroix, 25, of Timmins, Ont., was also on board the flight. She was a board member of the African Community Fund for Education Canada and previously volunteered with Free the Children. According to her LinkedIn profile, she was also working with the United Nations Association in Canada. Edmonton native Darcy Belanger, 46, was also on his way to the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi when his plane crashed. He was attending the assembly as part of his volunteer work with Parvati.org, a non-profit organization dedicated to the environmental and social welfare of the planet. Micah Messent, a Metis environmentalist who grew up in Courtenay, B.C., was also on his way to the United Nations Assembly of the Environment in Kenya. Jessica Hyba, 43, of Ottawa, was identified by UNHCR as one of its Canadian-born employees on board the plane when it crashed. At the time of her death, she was working as a senior external relations officer with the UN Refugee Agency in Mogadishu, Somalia. Recent Dalhousie University graduate and member of the Canadian Conservation Corps Angela Rehhorn was on her way to Nairobi to participate in the United Nations Environmental Assembly. She originally hailed from Orillia, Ont. Kosha Vaidya, 37, her husband, Prerit Dixit, 45, their daughters, Ashka Dixit, 14, and Anushka Dixit, 13, and his parents Pannagesh Vaidya, 73, and Hansini Vaidya, 68, were also among the victims. Manant Vaidya, brother of Kosha Vaidya, told the Star that the Brampton family was travelling on a March break trip to Kenya. Mohamed Hassan Ali said his sister, Edmontons Amina Ibrahim Odowa, and her five-year-old daughter, Safiya, were on board the jet. He told the Star they were travelling to visit relatives. Derick Lwugi, an accountant with the City of Calgary, was on his way to Kenya to visit both his and his wifes parents, who live in the west of the country. Carleton University confirmed Pius Adesanmi, a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the Institute of African Studies, was also killed in the crash. Dawn Tanner, of Hagersville, Ont., was also among those on board the flight. A high school teacher from the Hamilton area, Tanner was the department head for special education at Hagersville Secondary School where shed taught since 2005. Peter deMarsh, of New Brunswick, was en route to a conference on financing for small farms as chairman of the International Family Forestry Alliance, an international group based in Luxembourg that represents more than 25 million forest owners worldwide. Ameen Ismail Noormohamed, 72, of Toronto was identified by the Ismaili Centre of Toronto as one of the passengers on the plane. The centre said his family are in the midst of making funeral arrangements in Kenya. Whats next? By Tuesday, much of the world, including the entire European Union, grounded the Boeing jetliner involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash or banned it from their airspace. By Wednesday, both Canada and the United States joined in, leaving entire fleet of Boeings popular 737 Max 8 and Max 9 planes grounded in an unprecedented global response to two deadly plane crashes in the last six months. Tuesday evening, Sunwing Airlines released a statement saying it was temporarily suspending the operations of its four Boeing 737 Max 8 planes. We are in the process of revising our flying schedule to accommodate the temporary removal of our MAX aircraft from service, the statement read. Late Wednesday morning, Canada announced it had issued a rare safety order to ground an entire series of planes 41 jets operated by Canadian airlines. The U.S. followed in quick succession with President Donald Trump telling reporters at the White House that the two models of commercial jets from the American aviation company will temporarily be banned from flying in U.S. airspace. According to a third-party flight tracking site, Air Canada had 49 flights using the 737 Max 8 scheduled on Wednesday, while WestJet had 38. As of Tuesday, the companies hadnt committed to waiving change or cancellation fees for customers worried about flying on the 737 Max. Chinas civilian aviation authority also ordered all Chinese airlines to temporarily ground their Boeing 737 Max 8 planes following the crash, amid safety concerns because of its resemblance to the Indonesian crash in October of last year. The Civil Aviation Administration of China said the order took effect at 6 p.m. on Monday. With files from The Canadian Press. Emerald Bensadoun is a breaking news reporter, working out of the Stars radio room in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @twerk_vonnegut Read more about: Ontarios physicians regulator has dismissed dozens of complaints against a Toronto trauma surgeon who had been targeted by a Canadian gun lobby group for her advocacy on gun control. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) had received more than 70 complaints against Dr. Najma Ahmed, the co-chair of an advocacy group called Canadian Doctors for Protection from Guns, a spokesperson confirmed last week. The complaints stemmed from a campaign led by the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights (CCFR), which posted a step-by-step guide encouraging members to file complaints against Ahmed on its website in February. I hate to say it, but stay in your lane, Doctor, the post reads. Ahmed, who was on call at St. Michaels Hospital following the Danforth mass shooting, confirmed to the Star Tuesday shes received a letter from the college informing her it will not investigate the complaints and no further action will be taken. Both parties have 30 days to make written submissions as an appeal. I respect the CPSO and the CPSO process, Ahmed told the Star in an email. Physician advocacy remains an important function that doctors fulfil on behalf of the public. Rod M. Giltaca, the CEO and executive director of the CCFR said in an email that filing complaints through the college was a reasonable course of action. Our reading of the CPSO determination shows that the complaints were not dismissed as without foundation, only that they have decided that their organization is not the forum for this issue, he said, adding it is up to the people who made the individual complaints to decide whether to appeal. The gun lobby group last month posted a call to action urging members to flood the college with complaints against Ahmed, even if they have never been her patient. The post provides a detailed guide on how to do this, complete with a link to the complaint form. The college has a mandate to focus on complaints about clinical care or professional behaviour, said CPSO registrar and CEO Dr. Nancy Whitmore in a statement last week. Spokesperson Shae Greenfield said he cant comment on the case during the appeals period. He confirmed the colleges standard process for dealing with complaints deemed to be frivolous, vexatious, made in bad faith, moot or an abuse of process is to inform both parties in writing that no further action is being taken. Ahmed told the Star last week her gun control advocacy is informed by a career treating gunshot victims, saying that in many cases she has seen, harm, injury and death could have been avoided with stricter legislation governing civilian access to guns. She said she sees her role is to inform policy-makers. Physicians, she said, have had a long tradition of advocating for the public good, on things like sanitary water conditions, nicotine, and vaccinations. Canadian Doctors for Protection from Guns was formed in February to argue that guns are a public health issue and to push for the passage of Bill C-71, a bill to reform Canadas gun laws. In an emailed statement to the Star, the organization said it approved the CPSOs decision. Canadian Doctors for Protection from Guns is very pleased to announce that the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario has decided not to pursue the more than 70 complaints made against Dr. Najma Ahmed related to her advocacy on the public health impacts of guns, said a spokesperson. The Toronto police officer who was captured on video pepper-spraying a man handcuffed in the back seat of a police car has been charged with professional misconduct stemming from the 2016 incident an Ontario judge called obvious police brutality. Const. Matthew Brewer is also facing misconduct charges in a recent unrelated incident, in which hes alleged to have used profane, abusive or insulting language with a senior officer, and yelled abusive, threatening things at a woman inside a Whitby gym before throwing her belongings against a wall and kicking over a garbage can on the way out. Brewers case consisting of four misconduct charges, including using unnecessary force against a prisoner was briefly heard at the Toronto police tribunal Tuesday. No hearing date has been set and the officer has not entered a plea. Brewer, who is currently on administrative duties, was recently found guilty of discreditable conduct stemming from a 2016 incident in Durham Region in which he brought a handgun into the bedroom where his spouse was sleeping and then followed her through the home holding the gun. According to a summary of the incident in a court ruling, Brewer put the gun in his mouth before going outside and firing it multiple times into the air. Court heard Brewer was at the time suffering from depression, alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder. In his November 2018 written disciplinary decision, the hearing officer said Brewers actions constituted serious misconduct but noted that extensive medical documentation outlining his PTSD provided insight into his actions. The hearing officer docked Brewer five days pay, The incident involved the actions of a good man who was experiencing an acute and severe mental health crisis, wrote Toronto police Insp. Peter Callaghan. Brewer was also charged criminally and given a suspended sentence and two years probation after pleading guilty to unauthorized possession of a firearm and common nuisance. On Tuesday, the Toronto Sun published an article quoting an anonymous Toronto police officer accusing Brewer of using his PTSD to justify bad behaviour and urging the Toronto police to fire him. David Butt, Brewers lawyer, told the Star in a statement Wednesday that the sentiment of the letter demonstrates a deeply troubling, outdated, and discriminatory attitude toward those who through no fault of their own encounter mental health challenges. This sort of outdated and discriminatory thinking is highly destructive because it silences those suffering from mental health challenges at a time when everyone truly informed about the serious problem of first responders and PTSD is encouraging those suffering to speak up, and seek help, Butt said. Last year, Ontario Court Justice Richard Blouin stayed four charges against Toronto man Tyrone Hines after an in-car camera captured disturbing footage of what the judge called excessive force during a September 2016 arrest. The video captured Hines screaming out in pain and asking for help after Brewer pepper-sprayed him shortly after arresting him following a late-night fight. Before he pepper-sprayed him, Brewer can be heard on the video telling Hines, who was handcuffed in the back seat, to stop kicking the f---ing door. He can then be heard telling Hines to get his f---ing feet in the car. He then says: get your pepper-spray, guys, and sprays Hines, who cries in pain. Please, please, Im begging you guys, Hines can be heard saying in the video as police record him during the drive to the police station. This hurts really bad. Brewer claimed he pepper-sprayed Hines to stop him from escaping, an explanation Blouin called demonstrably false. Surprisingly, two police officers made disturbing attempts under oath to justify or explain obvious police brutality that was exhibited toward Hines after he was arrested and contained in that back seat, Blouin said in a written decision released last year. According to the police documents outlining the allegations against Brewer, the officer is accused of using unnecessary force against a prisoner and acting in a disorderly manner. He does not face any misconduct allegations stemming from the judges comments about his false testimony, according to the documents. None of the allegations have been proven at the tribunal. The two most recent professional misconduct charges relate to conduct alleged to have happened after the pepper spray incident allegations of abusive communication over a two-day period in July 2018. According to police documents detailing the allegations, Brewer sent profanity-laced text messages and made inappropriate remarks on the phone to a Toronto police staff sergeant, including: Im going to f--- you three ways from Friday. The following day, he allegedly went into an LA Fitness, approached a woman who is not named in the police documents and began yelling abusive, threatening language at her. You threw her keys and her water bottle against a wall, states the police document outlining the allegations. On your way out of the building you kicked over a garbage can, damaging the can and scattering garbage on the floor. With Star files With more countries grounding Boeing jets and with lawmakers, aviation workers and consumers calling on the United States to do the same, the head of the aerospace giant Tuesday made a personal appeal to U.S. President Donald Trump. Boeings chief executive, Dennis A. Muilenburg, called from Chicago and expressed to Trump his confidence in the safety of the 737 Max 8 jets, according to two people briefed on the conversation. Two of the planes flown by overseas carriers have crashed in recent months in similar accidents. The brief call had been in the works since Monday, but it came shortly after Trump raised concerns that the increasing use of technology in airplanes was compromising passenger safety. Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly, he wrote on Twitter. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. Soon after the conversation ended, Muilenburg received more bad news. The European Union suspended all flight operations of the Boeing 737 Max 8 model, a striking move by one of the industrys important regulators. At the end of the day, the Federal Aviation Administration said that it was continuing with its review and that the planes could keep flying. Yet the decision in Europe means roughly two-thirds of the Boeing Max 8 aircraft in the world have been pulled from use in the two days since the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that killed 157 people. The swift actions by authorities around the world were driven in part by concerns about a connection to a similar disaster involving a Max 8 in Indonesia last October. By Tuesday afternoon, the United States was nearly alone among major countries still allowing the jets to fly. Read more: Relatives grapple with loss of six family members from Brampton in Ethiopian Airlines crash Teacher, 9-month-old baby latest Canadians identified in Ethiopian Airlines crash Ethiopia to send planes black box abroad, as grief grows Boeing reiterated in a statement late Tuesday that it had full confidence in the 737 Max 8. It noted that the FAA had taken no action and based on the information currently available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators. Two U.S. airlines fly the 737 Max 8 aircraft, and both said they planned to keep flying. Southwest Airlines has 34 of the planes, and American Airlines has 24. The airlines have said they have analyzed data from thousands of flights with the jets and found no reason to ground them. Read more about: In the wake of Sundays fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash, Transport Minister Marc Garneau has suspended all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 planes from Canadian airspace. Shortly following Garneaus statement, U.S. President Donald Trump additionally announced that the U.S. would ground the jets. Now, Boeing is facing a worldwide temporary ban on the late-model jets. The areospace company has come out in support of the suspensions, stating in a press release issued Wednesday that they recommended its 371 Max planes be grounded out of an abundance of caution. Still, the company maintains it has full confidence in the jets safety. The Star has compiled answers to some questions surrounding the crash, the plane and what comes next. What does grounding mean? If a plane or flight has been grounded, it means that aircraft have been prevented from departing from or landing in a specific location. In this case, Garneau issued a safety notice restricting commercial passenger flights of the Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9. Any flights operating using those planes are not permitted to depart, land, or fly over Canadian airspace. Why did Canada decide to ground the 737 Max jets? Garneau stated in a press conference Wednesday that the safety notice followed advice from Transport Canada Civil Aviation experts, and was a precautionary measure, effective immediately. The advice the experts have provided is based on the information they have been receiving; the requirements for new procedures and training for Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 flight crews they have already put in place; and the latest information available from the incidents, Garneau said. Garneau said there is evidence about multiple 737 Max flights, suggesting a correlation between the Ethiopian Airlines crash and a similar incident in Indonesia less than five months ago. Both flights were slow to gain altitude and crashed shortly after takeoff. However, Garneau stressed that such similarity is not the proof that this is the same root problem. Nonetheless, concerns about the plane had crossed the threshold and convinced him to order the Boeing 737 Max including the 41 jets used by Canadian airlines out of Canadian airspace. What countries have grounded the plane? In total, 38 countries have grounded the plane this includes Canada, the U.S., all 29 countries comprising the E.U., Australia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Turkey and India. Which Canadian airlines operate the Boeing 737 Max 8? Sunwing, WestJet, and Air Canada all operate flights using this plane. Air Canada has 24 such planes in their fleet, WestJet flies 13, while Sunwing operates four. Im scheduled to fly on a Max 8. Now what? Airlines are set to rebook customers that were to fly on 737 Max planes. Air Canada noted on Twitter that its working to rebook customers but warned of delays due to the magnitude of passengers that travel on these planes. Air Canada estimated 9,000 to 12,000 customers fly on a 737 Max daily. Air Canada will offer a full fee waiver for customers affected by the grounding. WestJet noted that they are complying with the grounding order issued by Garneau, writing in a release that they respect the decision made by Transport Canada and are in the process of grounding the 13 MAX aircraft in our fleet. The company is working to rebook customers scheduled to fly via a 737 Max plane, and are contacting guests to make arrangements. In a statement to the Star, Sunwing confirmed that they are finalizing a revised schedule to accommodate the temporary removal of our MAX aircraft from service and we appreciate the patience of our retail partners and customers while we work to communicate these updates. We will endeavour to minimize the impact of these schedule changes and we will not be cancelling any flights as a result. Whats wrong with the plane? While Garneau stated he felt it was too soon to speculate on the cause of the crash in Ethiopia, pilots have repeatedly flagged issues about the plane to U.S. authorities. At least five complaints were filed in the U.S., and involve an issue with the planes autopilot system, causing it to descend instead of gaining altitude. If the captain disconnected the autopilot, the plane would again climb. The same report also notes that pilots were concerned that the flight manual was inadequate and almost criminally insufficient. A letter issued to the the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) from the U.S Senate on Tuesday states that Boeing modified the flight control system in the 737. The Max 8 and 9 planes have larger engines than previous models, so a new computer program was added to the planes. The program, called MCAS, is meant to counter any destabilization caused by the large engines. The letter to the FAA suggests that a sensor error may have caused Lion Air flight 610 itself involved in a fatal crash to pitch up and down in a way the pilot could not control. The letter argued that the FAA should ground all Max 8 and 9 planes until they can determine if the plane can be flown safely. What happened to Lion Air flight 610 in October? The flight, which was also a Boeing 737 Max 8 plane, crashed into the sea shortly after takeoff from Jakarta. The crash killed all 189 people on board, including eight crew members. A report on aviation-safety.net, a website from the Aviation Safety Network that tracks airline incidents, states that the plane had several problems in the days before the flight. The pilot reported a flight control problem, and stated they were flying the plane manually. The investigation after the crash found that the pilot reported a flight control problem, and the plane had descended in altitude, dropping more than 60 metres in seconds. Air traffic control lost connection with the plane approximately 13 minutes after takeoff. The 737 Max 8 plane involved in the Lion Air crash was added to the airlines fleet on Aug. 18, 2018 just over two months before the crash. Despite apparent similarities between the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, Garneau stressed that its too soon to speculate about the cause of the accident in Addis Ababa, and to make direct links to the Lion Air accident in Indonesia in October. How old is the 737 Max 8 plane? The plane was first flown in 2016, and introduced into airline fleets beginning in May 2017. The plane is a reengineered version of the 737, and includes changes to the engine and aerodynamics. The plane operated in the Lion Air flight was new, having been delivered to the airline only two months prior to the crash. The plane involved in Sundays crash in Addis Ababa was delivered to the airline in November, making it approximately four months old. This file will be updated as new information becomes available. With files from Alex Boutilier Read more about: ALGIERS, Algeria - Algerian opposition leaders called for continued mass protests Wednesday against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika as key figures in his new government attempted to appeal for calm. The opposition accuses the 82-year-old president of flouting the constitution to cling to power. This week he abandoned plans to seek a fifth term, but he also cancelled next months presidential election without setting a new date and replaced key ministerial posts, including that of prime minister, with loyalists. Teachers took to the streets to keep up pressure on the longtime president, as political uncertainty grips this gas-rich North African country. A broad swath of opposition figures met Wednesday at the headquarters of the Islamist party El Adala and issued a statement saying: At this historic, decisive moment, the Algerian opposition is at the side of the people. They called the election delay unconstitutional, and appealed for the unprecedented revolt against the ailing Bouteflika to continue. Nationwide, potentially decisive protests are expected Friday, after millions have come to the streets in recent weeks. Algerias new deputy prime minister and foreign minister, Ramtane Lamamra, tried to appeal for calm on Public Radio Wednesday, saying the new government is fully fledged and will ensure political and economic institutions function normally. We want the transition (to new elections) to be as short as possible, he added. Former foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi, who is close to Bouteflika, said, we want to organize successful elections in a climate of serenity to preserve the stability of Algeria. Brahimi denied reports that he would chair a conference planning Algerias future, adding: I say to the young Algerians who protest, do not destroy Algeria, like Iraq and Syria. Algerians have barely seen their president since he suffered a stroke in 2013, and question his fitness for office. Protesters are also angry about corruption and secrecy in Algerias power structure. Wednesdays opposition gathering included prominent Islamists and rival secular parties, two former prime ministers and others who have served in Bouteflikas governments but have since turned against the countrys leadership. However it didnt include all opposition forces, and overall the opposition has failed to come together around a single figure seen as a viable alternative to Bouteflika. Meanwhile, teachers protested Wednesday outside the central post office in Algiers, and Algerian media reported teachers protests in other cities too. The demonstrators demanded that Bouteflika step down now, or at the latest when his current term ends next month. Bouteflika returned Sunday from two weeks in a Geneva hospital. A fighter in Algerias war for independence from France, he is notably appreciated for reconciling his deeply damaged nation after a decade-long Islamic insurgency in the 1990s left some 200,000 dead. ___ Thomas Adamson and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report. LAGOS, NIGERIAEmergency crews scrambled to rescue dozens of children Wednesday morning from the wreckage of a three-story building housing a nursery and primary school that collapsed in Lagos, Nigeria. Officials said that several people had been killed, but offered no death toll. Hundreds of people were gathered at the site, on Lagos Island, wailing as motionless children were removed from the rubble and spirited by ambulance to a nearby hospital. Sunday Adeyemo and his family lived in the building that collapsed. He left early Wednesday morning and found out only hours later that his home was in rubble and his 7-year-old daughter, Taiwo Adeyemo, had died in the collapse. Im totally devastated, said Adeyemo, who was on the way to the hospital to collect the body of his second-grader. Adebola Kolawole, the chairwoman of the Red Cross in Lagos state, said 36 people had been pulled from the rubble so far, including some who were dead. Lagos, a rapidly growing city and one of the worlds largest, with an estimated population of 23.4 million, has suffered a number of building collapses. Citizens have long raised concerns about shoddy construction and the need for better building inspections. Fashanu Kudos, who lives in a house overlooking the rescue site, said in an interview that he had watched the building collapse. We just heard wham, and the three-story building was reduced to rubble, Kudos said. The building had been marked with an X for demolition but not long ago was refurbished, according to some onlookers and neighbours. Residents of the building, which contained apartments as well as the Ohel Nursery and Primary School, had complained about shoddy construction and exorbitant rents. Akinwunmi Ambode, the governor of Lagos state, said the school had been operating illegally in a residential building, according to a statement. He added that most of the buildings in the area had been marked for demolition. Among those who died in the rubble was Bolanle Johnson, who was 6 years old, according to Jumoke Bashua, a friend of the girls mother. The mother, Madupe Johnson, who is 38, was so shocked by the death of her daughter that she was hospitalized, and friends worried she may not survive the trauma of the news. A cover was pulled over the body of an adult man, indicating that he was dead, a local reporter said. Workers were concentrating on a classroom where they believed 30 children were trapped. Local officials said at least 70 people, and possibly many more, were inside the building when it came down about 10 a.m. Wednesday. Dozens of traumatized parents gathered in the compound outside the General Hospital in Lagos, close to the collapsed school. Some wept and collapsed to the ground, while others called out for help amid a lack of information from the hospital staff. Titi Goncalvin, the minister of health for Lagos state, said the General Hospital had received 20 patients from the site but did not elaborate on their conditions. Todays a really tragic day for us, said Goncalvin, speaking to reporters outside the hospital. We want to ensure the citizens of Lagos we are on top of the situation. One father clung to a lamppost while relatives tried to console him. His 8-year-old son had died, they said. My child! My child! he shouted over and over. What will I do? Adegoke Sharafa, one of the onlookers at the collapse site, said it took more than an hour for crews to arrive after the building fell. We started the rescue efforts and had rescued over 20 children alive before the emergency agencies came, he said. One video on social media showed a dazed-looking, dust-covered child being carried on an orange stretcher as hundreds of onlookers cheered and patted rescuers on the back. Other videos from the scene posted on social media showed piles of giant slabs of broken concrete. By early afternoon, the top two collapsed floors had been removed by a bulldozer and rescuers stood atop the rubble, throwing aside childrens backpacks and other school equipment in hopes of reaching children underneath. One rescuer said he saw 20 children inside and feared the debris would collapse on them before they could be saved. Some workers demanded oxygen masks from an ambulance but none were available, as onlookers became increasingly angry that rescuers were ill-equipped. Lagos is a rapidly growing city where construction is regulated poorly, if at all, residents say. Some occupied buildings have cracked foundations and tilted floors. Experts have warned that rising sea levels could cause more problems in the future. The Gulf of Guinea runs along the southern border of the city, which also includes several islands. Lagos Island, in Lagos Lagoon, is one of them. Nigerians have experienced a spate of collapsed buildings in recent years. In 2016, a church collapsed in Uyo, southeast of Lagos, and officials at a local hospital put the death toll at 160, though government agencies cited lower figures. The same year, a five-story building collapsed while under construction in the Lekki District of Lagos, killing at least 34 people. Seven people were killed when a private residence collapsed in a poor neighbourhood called Ebute-Meta in 2013. Read more about: HEJERE, Ethiopia - The Latest on The Latest on Ethiopian Airlines crash (all times local): 11:45 p.m. Boeings stock has halted a two-day skid after turning higher in the final minutes of trading on Wall Street. The about-face came shortly after President Donald Trump issued an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people. The Federal Aviation Administration followed with a statement saying it was ordering the planes grounded based on new evidence from the crash site. While the U.S. grounding is not good news for the company, it did serve to eliminate a major element of uncertainty, which can often weigh on a stock more than bad news itself. Many nations had already barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 from their airspace this week following Sundays Ethiopian Airlines crash. A similar Lion Air plane crashed in October, killing 189 people. Shares in Chicago-based Boeing ended up $1.73 or about 0.5 per cent, at $377.14 Wednesday after they lost more than 11 per cent in the first two days this week. The stock is still up 17 per cent for the year. ___ 11:10 p.m. The Federal Aviation Administration says new evidence from the Ethiopian Airlines crash site coupled with its own data gathering led it to order the grounding of Boeing 737 Max planes. The agencys order Wednesday said new information had been uncovered from the wreckage of the Ethiopian Airlines jet. That, taken together with data from satellite-based tracking of the planes flight path, pointed to similarities with an October crash of a Lion Air 737 Max in the Java Sea. The FAA said it was ordering the jets grounding while investigators determine whether there was a shared cause of the two crashes. The agencys move Wednesday came after it had faced mounting criticism for backing the airworthiness of the 737 Max jets as countries around the world were grounding them. For its part, Boeing said it supported the FAAs move out of an abundance of caution and to reassure the flying public of the aircrafts safety. But it said it continues to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 Max planes. ___ 9:45 p.m. President Donald Trump says the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian Airliner that killed 157 people. Many nations in the world had already barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 from its airspace, but until now, the Federal Aviation Administration had been saying that it didnt have any data to show the jets are unsafe. Trump said Wednesday that the FAA would be making the announcement soon to ground the planes. He says any plane currently in the air will go to its destination and then be grounded. Trump says pilots and airlines have been notified. He says the safety of the American people is of paramount concern. ___ 8:20 p.m. A spokesman for Germanys Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation is telling The Associated Press that the agency was asked by Ethiopian authorities to analyze the black boxes from Sundays plane crash but declined because it lacked the necessary software. Spokesman Germout Freitag said Wednesday that he doesnt know where the black boxes will be sent next. An Ethiopian Airlines spokesman said flight recorders from the jet will be sent to a European country for analysis because Ethiopia lacks the technology to examine them. The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft crashed shortly after takeoff Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. The disaster is the second with a Max 8 plane in just five months and has set off a wave of groundings of the planes around the world. ___ 7:45 p.m. A Nigerian official says the country has closed its airspace to the Boeing 737 Max 8. President Muhammadu Buharis personal assistant in a Twitter post cites Nigerias aviation minister as saying the model involved in Sundays Ethiopian Airlines crash is barred until the cause of the disaster is determined. And in Mauritania, civil aviation authorities say Mauritania Airlines has halted its use of the model. ___ 12:05 p.m. Canadas transport minister says the country is closing airspace to the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jetliner that killed 157 people. Canada becomes the latest country to bar the Boeing 737 Max as the investigation into the latest crash, the second in just over five months, is underway. Transport Minister Marc Garneau said new information they received Wednesday morning in the form of satellite data shows a possible but unproven similarity to a previous Max 8 crash. Boeing has said it has no reason to pull the popular aircraft from the skies and does not intend to issue new recommendations about the aircraft to customers. Given the proximity to the U.S Canadas decision to ground the planes may cause problems for U.S. airlines. ___ 3:05 p.m. An Ethiopian Airlines spokesman confirms that the black box from Sundays crashed plane will be sent to Europe. Asrat Begashaw has declined to tell The Associated Press which country will be analyzing the voice and data recorders of the flight. The plane crashed six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa en route to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board. ___ 12:45 p.m. Lion Air has confirmed reports it has put on hold the scheduled delivery of four Boeing 737 Max 8 jets while it waits for the outcome of the Indonesian investigation into its October crash that killed 189 people. Speaking at a transport ministry news conference in Jakarta about the grounding of Max 8 planes, Lion Air executive Daniel Putut said the airline needs to know the root cause of the accident. Lion Air ordered 222 Boeing Max planes, including 218 of the Max 8 model and four Max 9 planes. It currently has 10 Max 8 planes in its fleet. Many countries worldwide have grounded Max 8 jets after one operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed on Sunday, killing 157 people. ___ 12:40 p.m. The Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand says it has ordered the budget airline Thai Lion Air to suspend flying its Boeing 737 Max planes for seven days while it conducts risk assessments and special training for pilots. The agency says it will consult with the planes maker and designer about safety measures. The suspension begins Thursday. It comes after Sundays Ethiopian Airlines crash. Thai Lion Air is the only Thai airline flying B737 Max models. The airline is an associate company of Indonesias Lion Air, which lost a B737 Max 8 in October shortly after takeoff from Jakarta in a crash that killed 189 people. ___ 12:30 p.m. Egyptian aviation authorities have banned the operation of all Boeing 737 Max aircrafts, citing safety concerns. The Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority says in a statement it has barred flying over, landing and takeoff of Boeing 737 Max aircrafts. It also says Egypt doesnt have these aircraft and that they are not part of its future plans. The announcement cites the Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday that killed 157 people on board. ___ 12:05 p.m. Lebanons state news agency says the countrys civil aviation authority has barred flights by Boeing 737 Max aircraft from landing or flying in Lebanese skies following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jetliner that killed 157 people. Lebanon becomes the latest country to bar the Boeing 737 Max as investigation into the latest crash, the second in just over five months, is underway. The decision by Lebanons head of civil aviation doesnt elaborate on the reason for the banning or the duration. The national air carrier mostly operates Airbus. ___ 11:50 a.m. Kosovo has barred the Boeing 737 Max 8 and 738 Max 9 airplanes from its airspace following the crash of a similar jetliner in Ethiopia on Sunday in which all 157 on board were killed. Kosovos Civil Aviation Authority said in a Wednesday statement the decision was taken because of the investigation of the equipment of the planes, adding that it is effective immediately. Many airlines around the world have grounded the Boeing jetliner and many countries, including the entire European Union have barred the plane from their airspace, leaving the United States as one of the few areas where the plane can fly. Two Max 8 jets have had deadly crashes in just five months. ___ 11:40 a.m. Norwegian Air Shuttles says it will seek compensation from aircraft maker Boeing after the low-cost carrier grounded its fleet of 737 MAX 8 aircraft. Carrier spokeswoman Tonje Naess told The Associated Press Wednesday that the Oslo-based airline should not have any financial burden for a brand new aircraft that will not to be used. On Tuesday, Norwegian Air Shuttles grounded its 18 Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft on recommendation from European aviation authorities after Sundays Ethiopian Airlines crash in which 157 people were killed. ___ 11:20 a.m. An Ethiopian Airlines spokesman says the black box from the crashed Boeing jet will be sent overseas for analysis but no country has been chosen. In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Asrat Begashaw says the airline has not decided where to send the data and voice records of the flights last moments. He says that we have a range of options. What we can say is we dont have the capability to probe it here in Ethiopia. The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft crashed shortly after takeoff Sunday, killing all 157 people on board. The disaster is the second with a Max 8 plane in just five months and has set off a wave of groundings of the planes around the world. ___ 10:55 a.m. Hong Kong will ban the operation of all Boeing 737 Max aircraft into, out of and over the key Asian aviation hub beginning at 6 p.m. (1000 GMT) Wednesday. The announcement from the Civil Aviation Department cited the crash of two of the planes within less than five months and said the ban would continue until further notice. The statement said: The CAD has been closely monitoring the developments, the investigation progress and the information from relevant aviation authorities. It said the CAD had noted that the U.S. Federation Aviation Administration has affirmed the planes airworthiness and that investigations were ongoing. It said the department has been in close contact with the FAA and other the relevant organizations, including the two airlines, SpiceJet of India and Russias Globus Airlines, that use the aircraft to operate flights into and out of Hong Kong International Airport. ___ 10:45 a.m. Much of the world, including the entire European Union, grounded the Boeing jetliner involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash or banned it from their airspace, leaving the United States as one of the few remaining operators of the plane involved in two deadly accidents in five months. The European Aviation Safety Agency took steps to keep the Boeing 737 Max 8 out of the air, joining Asian and Middle Eastern governments and carriers that also had safety concerns in the aftermath of Sundays crash, which killed all 157 people on board. Referring to the Lion Air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 people last year, European regulators said Tuesday that similar causes may have contributed to both events. British regulators indicated possible trouble with a reportedly damaged flight data recorder. ___ This story has been corrected to fix a headline that should have referred to the 737, non the 747. SAO PAULO, BRAZILAt least five students were killed in Brazil on Wednesday when two assailants, both former students, broke into a school and opened fire, police officials said. The attackers also killed two employees at the Professor Raul Brasil school in Suzano, a satellite city of Sao Paulo, and injured at least nine other students. Police said the assailants fatally shot the owner of a nearby car rental outlet on their way to the school. The attackers killed themselves after their rampage. Police said the students killed were all about 15 years old. Its the saddest scene Ive witnessed in my whole life, the Sao Paulo governor, Joao Doria, said after visiting the school. He declared three days of mourning. The president, Jair Bolsonaro, expressed his condolences via Twitter, calling the attack a monstrosity and cowardice without comparison. Police identified the assailants as Luiz Henrique de Castro, 25, and Guilherme Taucci Monteiro, 17, who was enrolled as recently as last year. Officials said they were still investigating possible motives. Security video footage showed the attackers pulling up to the front gate of the public school, which has more than 1,000 students. The assailants entered the campus at about 9:30 a.m. local time, when students would have been on a snack break. According to police, the assailants most likely did not arouse suspicions because they were both former students. The attackers wore masks during the attack and were armed with a handgun outfitted with an automatic reloader, a crossbow, a hatchet and fake explosives, police said. This is an incredibly sad episode for the families, for Suzano and Sao Paulo and all of Brazil, the state secretary of public security, Gen. Joao Camilo Pires de Campo, said at a news conference. While gun violence is common in Brazil, school shootings are relatively rare. One of the most tragic happened in 2011, when a former student shot and killed 12 children at a school in Realengo, in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Critics of Bolsonaro, Brazils new right-wing president, pointed out that Wednesdays attack came as he has made it easier for Brazilians to have firearms. Amateur video of the attack posted on social media showed bodies on the ground and students screaming and running. One distraught mother told Globo News, a Brazilian television network, that her 12-year-old daughter called her in the middle of the shooting. She said, Mom, come quick. Theres been a lot of shooting. People are injured, people are dead. A school cook serving snacks said she hustled about 50 children into the kitchen as soon as she realized what was going on and pushed the freezer in front of the door. We had to remain calm because we had children inside with us, the cook, Silmara Cristina Silva de Moraes, told Globo News. But it was nerve-racking because there was a lot of shooting, a lot, and a lot of panic. Read more about: MEXICO CITY - A new human rights report says Mexican marines improperly used a helicopter-mounted minigun that fires 3,000 rounds per minute in a 2018 border city shooting that killed three civilians. The rotating-barrel machine-gun is a powerful weapon that according to Mexican guidelines should be used proportionately, that is, to counter an equivalent threat. But the National Human Rights Commission said in a report Wednesday that drug cartel gunmen didnt present a threat to the helicopter when the gunship opened fire. A woman and two children were killed when they drove through a running gun battle between marines and cartel gunmen in the northern border city of Nuevo Laredo. One marine was also killed in the gun battles and 12 were wounded. Four gunmen also died. SUZANO, Brazil - Two young men who stormed their former school in southern Brazil armed with a gun, crossbows and axes, killing seven people, were trying to emulate the 1999 Columbine attack in Colorado and had been planning the assault for months, police said Thursday. Friends and former classmates told investigators that 17-year-old Guilherme Taucci Monteiro and 25-year-old Henrique de Castro were obsessed with the attack on Columbine High School, Sao Paulo civil police director Ruy Ferraz told a news conference. He said the pair had been planning the attack since at least November. Ferraz said the acquaintances said they didnt believe the attack would actually happen, or feared that telling anyone would make them targets. The Colombine attack, also undertaken by two heavily armed young men, left 13 dead. And as in Wednesdays rampage, the Columbine assailants took their own lives. Monteiro and de Castro wanted to prove they could act like in Columbine High School with cruelty and with a tragic character so they could be more recognized than even the Columbine killers, Ferraz said Ferraz said a third person, a 17-year-old former student at the school, had been involved in planning but was not present at the school when the attack happened. He did not identify the accomplice but said police have asked a judge to issue a warrant for the teens arrest. The developments came hours after classmates, friends and relatives of the victims began saying goodbye during a mass wake in the Sao Paulo suburb of Suzano, where the attack happened. Before launching the school assault, police said the assailants shot and killed Monteiros uncle, who owned a used-car dealership nearby. Monteiro had worked at the dealership, but had been fired by his uncle for petty crimes. What happened next at the K-12 school, partially caught on surveillance camera footage at the buildings entrance and widely distributed in Brazil, was stomach-churning. It showed Monteiro entering and shooting several people in the head as they tried to run away. De Castro followed, first striking wounded people with an axe and then swinging it wildly while scores of students ran past him. De Castro then armed his crossbow and walked farther into the school. The dead included five students, a teacher and a school administrator. Nine others were wounded in the attack, including seven still hospitalized Thursday. I couldnt sleep. I have two children in school and they are about the age of the victims, said Wanda Augusta, a 46-year-old homemaker attending the wake. If only we could have identified the difficulties of these boys before the attack, said Rossieli Soares, the state education secretary, who attended the wake at a volleyball arena. This is a problem in our society. Police seized computers and notebooks from the homes of the two attackers, who were neighbours and lived less than a mile (kilometre) from the school. They also took computers from an arcade near the school that the attackers frequented. While Latin Americas largest nation has deep problems with violence its the world leader in annual homicides school shootings like those in the U.S. are rare. Wednesdays attack reminded many Brazilians of an attack in 2011, when a gunman roamed the halls of a Rio de Janeiro school and killed 12 students. Joao Camilo Pires de Campos, Sao Paulo states public security secretary, summed up what was on the minds of many Brazilians. The big question is: What was the motivation of these former students? he told reporters Wednesday. Monteiros mother, Tatiana Taucci, offered a possible partial answer, saying that her son had been bullied at the school. Bullying, they call it. ... He stopped going to school ... because of this, she told the Band News TV network. Still, she said she was as surprised as anyone by her sons involvement in the attack, which she said she heard about on television like everyone else. Ferraz, the police director, said that while bullying had been mentioned in some testimony from acquaintances, they did not believe it to be meaningful to the investigation. Minutes before the school rampage, Monteiro posted 26 photos on his Facebook page, including several with a gun and one that showed him giving the middle finger as he looked into the camera. In some of the photos, he wore a black scarf with a white imprint of a skull and cross bones. No text accompanied the posts. During the attack, Monteiro opened fire with a .38 calibre handgun and de Castro used a crossbow, de Campos said. The attackers were also carrying Molotov cocktails, knives and small axes, authorities said. One of the wounded, Jose Vitor, ran to a hospital close to the school with an axe still lodged in his right shoulder. He is an agile adolescent, his mother, Sandra Regina Ramos, told reporters outside the hospital. He reacted quickly. The assailants were trying to force their way inside a room at the back of the school where many students were hiding when police arrived. Instead of facing the officers, Monteiro shot de Castro in the head and then shot himself, authorities said. Katia Sastre, a police officer who was elected to Congress after a video showed her gunning down an armed robber outside her daughters school went viral last year, called on authorities to provide better security at schools. This could have been prevented if upstanding citizens were able to defend themselves and bear arms, said Sastre, who is a former student at the school attacked Wednesday. The debate over whether to expand access to guns, a priority of President Jair Bolsonaros administration, was present in many of the public statements by politicians. Soon after his Jan. 1 inauguration, Bolsonaro issued a decree making it easier to buy a gun. His party plans to put forward legislation that would go even further, loosening restrictions on carrying and the number and types of firearms Brazilians can own. ___ Prengaman reported from Rio de Janeiro. Anna Jean Kaiser contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro. SINGAPORE - Airlines and countries around the world have grounded Boeing 737 Max jets or banned them from their airspace following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed 157 people on Sunday, five months after a similar Indonesian Lion Air jet plunged into the ocean, killing 189. A look at those countries and airlines: ___ AUSTRALIA Australia has announced a temporary ban on flights by 737 Max aircraft, although none of its airlines currently operate them. The Civil Aviation Safety Authority said Tuesday that the ban will affect two foreign airlines SilkAir and Fiji Airways that use them for flights to Australia. ___ BRAZIL Brazils Gol Airlines has suspended the use of seven Max 8 jets. The airline said it hopes to return the aircraft to use as soon as possible. Gol said it has made nearly 3,000 flights with the Max 8. ___ CANADA Canadian on Wednesday closed its airspace to the Max 8. Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau said a comparison of vertical fluctuations found a similar profile to the Lion Air crash that killed 189 people in October. Canada lost 18 of its citizens in Sundays crash, the second highest number after Kenya. ___ CAYMAN ISLANDS Cayman Airways, a Caribbean carrier, has stopped using its two Max 8 jets. President and CEO Fabian Whorms said the move starting Monday will cause changes to flight schedules. Cayman is the flag carrier of Cayman Islands, a British overseas territory. ___ CHINA China has 96 Max 8 jets in service, belonging to carriers such as Air China, China Eastern Airlines and China Southern Airlines. The civil aviation authority directed the planes to be grounded indefinitely on Monday. There were eight Chinese citizens on the Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed shortly after taking off on Sunday. ___ ETHIOPIA A spokesman for Ethiopian Airlines said it grounded its remaining four Max 8 jets as an extra safety precaution while it investigates Sundays deadly crash. The airline is awaiting the delivery of 25 more Max 8 jets. ___ EUROPE The European Aviation Safety Agency has issued a directive grounding all 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft. EASA said in its emergency airworthiness directive Tuesday that at this early stage of the most recent investigation, it cannot be excluded that similar causes may have contributed to both events. The grounding applies to all European Union airspace. ___ FIJI Fiji has suspended all Max 8 flights in and out of the country. The decision only affects one operator, Fiji Airways. ___ HONG KONG Hong Kong has banned the operation of all 737 Max aircraft into, out of and over the key Asian aviation hub beginning Wednesday evening. The announcement from the Civil Aviation Department said the ban would continue until further notice. It said the department has been in close contact with the two airlines, SpiceJet of India and Russias Globus Airlines, that use the aircraft to operate flights into and out of Hong Kong International Airport. ___ ICELAND Icelandair Group has temporarily suspended operations of its three 737 Max aircraft until further notice. President and CEO Bogi Nels Bogason said Tuesday that the temporary suspension wont impact the companys operations, as it only affects three aircraft out of a fleet of 33. ___ INDIA India has grounded all 737 Max 8 planes. A statement late Tuesday said the planes will be grounded till appropriate modifications and safety measures are undertaken to ensure their safe operations. The statement did not say how many planes were affected. ___ INDONESIA Indonesia has temporarily grounded Max 8 jets to inspect their airworthiness. Director General of Air Transportation Polana B. Pramesti said the move was made to ensure flight safety. A Lion Air model of the same plane crashed in Indonesia in October. Indonesian airlines operate 11 Max 8 jets. Lion Air, which owns 10 of them, said it will try to minimize the impact of the decision on operations. The other Max 8 jet belongs to national carrier Garuda. ___ NEW ZEALAND New Zealand has suspended Max 8 flights in and out of the country. The decision only affects one operator, Fiji Airways. No New Zealand airlines use the Max 8 planes. ___ MALAYSIA The Civil Aviation Authority said no Malaysian carriers operate the Max 8, but that foreign airlines are banned from flying the plane in Malaysia, and from transiting in the country, until further notice. ___ MEXICO Mexicos civil aviation agency announced Wednesday night that it is suspending immediately all flights by Max 8 and 9 jets in its airspace. ___ OMAN Oman and the United Arab Emirates have barred flights by Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft. Omans Public Authority for Civil Aviation made the sultanates announcement, without elaborating on its reasoning. State-owned Oman Air operates five Max 8 aircraft and said it was rescheduling other planes for its flights. ___ PANAMA Copa Airlines has temporarily suspend operations of its six MAX 9 planes until the cause of the Ethiopian crash is known. ___ SINGAPORE Singapore has temporarily banned Max 8 jets and other models in the Max range from entering and leaving the country. SilkAir, a regional carrier owned by Singapore Airlines, has six Max 8 jets. It said the ban will have an impact on some of the airlines flight schedules. ___ SOUTH AFRICA Comair, the operator of British Airways and Kulula flights in South Africa, has grounded its Max 8 while it consults with Boeing, other operators and technical experts. Its statement did not say how many planes were affected. It said the decision was made without intervention from regulatory authorities. ___ SOUTH KOREA South Korean airline Eastar Jet has suspended operations of its two Max 8 planes and replaced them with Boeing 737-800 planes starting Wednesday on routes to Japan and Thailand. The airline said it hasnt found any problems, but is voluntarily grounding the planes in response to customer concerns. ___ TURKEY Turkish Airlines has suspended all Max flights. In a statement Tuesday on Twitter, CEO Bilal Eksi said the suspension would continue until the uncertainty affecting safety is cleared. ___ UAE The UAEs General Civil Aviation Authority has banned the aircraft from its airspace in what is said was a precautionary measure. The Max is the workhorse of the Dubai government-owned budget carrier FlyDubai. It operates 11 Max 8 and 2 Max 9 jets. Its total fleet is around 60 aircraft, including other models of the 737. ___ UNITED STATES The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration grounded the MAX Wednesday, saying new information indicated some similarities with a Lion Air crash in the Java Sea that killed 189 people in October. The agency suspended the jets while investigators determine whether there was a shared cause of the two crashes. The FAA had been criticized for allowing the planes to fly while dozens of countries suspended their use. ___ VIETNAM Vietnam has banned Max planes from flying into its airspace. The ban lasts until further notice. None of Vietnams four airlines uses the Max model planes in their fleets, but Koreas Eastar Jet, Thai Lion Air and Malaysias Malindor Air fly those planes to Vietnamese destinations. ___ This story has been corrected to fix references to the death toll in the Lion Air crash. It was 189, not 187 ISLAMABAD - Pakistans air force says one of its fighter jets successfully test-fired a locally developed missile, described as a smart weapon. The announcement follows recent skirmishes with rival India over disputed Kashmir during which Pakistan said it shot down two Indian planes and captured a pilot, who was later returned to India. An air force statement says a JF-17 multi-role fighter aircraft on Tuesday fired the new missile, which has day-and-night capability to engage a variety of targets with pinpoint accuracy. A smart weapon is typically military language for a guided missile. Air Force chief Mujahid Anwar was quoted as saying that Pakistan is a peace-loving nation but if subjected to aggression by adversary, we will respond with full force. There was no further information on the type of missile fired. MANILA, Philippines - A U.S. Navy flagship has sailed through the South China Sea with its commander renewing an American vow to sail, fly and operate wherever the law allows us to amid Chinas objection to U.S. military presence in the disputed sea. Capt. Eric Anduze, commander of the USS Blue Ridge, told reporters on board the U.S. 7th Fleets command and control ship, which anchored at Manila Bay Wednesday, that the visit was the latest affirmation of the strong U.S.-Philippine alliance. We have a long history ... were here to let you know that that partnership is stronger than ever, Anduze said. Asked if his contingent has encountered the Chinese navy in the region, Anduze said without elaborating that it has, adding that all of our interactions were safe and professional. We sail, fly and operate wherever the law allows us to, he said. Navy Vice Adm. Phil Sawyer, commander of the Japan-based 7th Fleet, said in a statement the Blue Ridges Manila visit strengthens our shared commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said during a visit to Manila early this month that the United States is committed to ensuring the South China Sea remains open to all kinds of navigation and that China does not pose a threat of closing the disputed sea lanes. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang reacted in Beijing by saying that China and countries around the South China Sea are committed to maintaining regional peace and stability, citing efforts to negotiate a code of conduct aimed at preventing disputes from escalating. If countries outside the region, such as the United States, really keep in mind the peace and well-being of the regional people, they should not stir up troubles in the region, Lu said. TIRANA, Albania - The leaders of both Albania and North Macedonia say they believe that the European Union will decide in June to open membership talks with them. North Macedonias Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, who on Wednesday was in Tirana to meet with his counterpart Edi Rama, said they expect the EU to take a positive stand on our two countries ... so that we fulfil this strategic goal. Brussels decided last June that membership talks with Albania and Macedonia recently renamed North Macedonia may open if the two nations continue with the progress of reform. The two prime ministers said their Cabinets have complied with all requests, including reforms in their judiciaries and public administration. . LONDON - In a tentative first step toward ending months of political deadlock, British lawmakers voted Wednesday to block the country from leaving the European Union without a divorce agreement, triggering an attempt to delay that departure, currently due to take place on March 29. Parliament is scheduled to decide Thursday whether to put the brakes on Brexit, a vote set up after lawmakers dealt yet another defeat to Prime Minister Theresa May amid a crisis over Britains departure from the EU. The lawmakers 321-278 vote has political but not legal force, and does not entirely rule out a chaotic no-deal departure for Britain. But it might ease jitters spreading across the EU after lawmakers resoundingly rejected Mays divorce deal on Tuesday. Exiting the EU without a deal could mean major disruptions for businesses and people in the U.K. and the 27 remaining EU countries. Speaking with a raspy voice after weeks of relentless pressure, May hinted that she plans to make a third attempt to get lawmakers to support her Brexit deal, which they have already rejected twice. She said Parliament faced a fundamental choice a short, technical extension if lawmakers approve a divorce deal with the EU in the next week, or a much longer delay to Brexit if they dont. The EU warned that voting against no-deal Brexit wasnt enough to stop it. By law, Britain will leave the EU on March 29, with or without a deal, unless it cancels Brexit or secures a delay. There are only two ways to leave the EU: with or without a deal, a European Commission official said. The EU is prepared for both. To take no deal off the table, it is not enough to vote against no deal - you have to agree to a deal. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the unresolved situation. Earlier, chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier warned that the risk of a no-deal has never been higher. As Britain teeters ever closer to the edge of the Brexit cliff, lawmakers are trying to seize control from the divided and squabbling government, although its far from clear if they can agree on a way forward. There are competing factions that support Mays deal, a softer deal that would keep close ties with the EU, a no-deal Brexit, or even a new referendum on Britains EU membership. Parliament likely will agree to delay Brexit, but it would need EU approval. The bloc openly exasperated by Britains continuing Brexit crisis warned that the U.K. would need to present a strong reason for any extension. I am against every extension whether an extension of one day, one week, even 24 hours if its not based on a clear opinion of the House of Commons for something, said the European Parliaments chief Brexit official, Guy Verhofstadt. Please make up your minds in London, because this uncertainty cannot continue. The bloc is also reluctant to consider a delay that goes beyond elections to the European Parliament in late May, because it would mean Britain would have to participate in the polls even as it prepares to leave. Both Britain and the EU have ramped up planning for a no-deal Brexit, which would rip up decades of rules for travel and trade between Britain and the bloc. Economists say it could cause huge upheaval, with customs checks causing gridlock at U.K. ports, new tariffs triggering sudden price increases and red tape for everyone from truckers to tourists. The U.K. government announced its plans for the Irish border in the event of a no-deal Brexit, saying it wouldnt impose new checks, duties or controls on goods coming from EU member Ireland into Northern Ireland. It also said it wouldnt slap tariffs on 87 per cent of goods coming into Britain from the EU though there would be new levies on imports of some items including meat and cars. The tariffs, intended to be temporary, wouldnt apply to goods crossing from Ireland to Northern Ireland, raising fears the plan would spark a rise in smuggling. Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said under the proposals, Northern Ireland will become a backdoor to the European single market and I think that in a matter of months that will lead to the need for checks at Northern Irelands ports. I dont think the U.K.s proposals will be workable for very long, he said during a visit to Washington. In Irish border communities and U.K. ports, no-deal anxiety was mounting. Potentially it is going to be a nightmare, said Michael Eddy, a district councillor who lives in the aptly named town of Deal, a few miles from the major Channel port of Dover on Englands south coast. He says local authorities have modeled potential disruptions and believe that even a two-minute delay for every truck going through the port of Dover would lead to a 50-mile (80-kilometre) traffic jam. What then happens with local people wanting to go about their business, wanting to get to hospitals, wanting to get their kids to school, all of that kind of stuff? he said. The European Parliament approved measures Wednesday to ameliorate the immediate hardships of a no-deal Brexit. It backed emergency plans to provide continuity for everything from air, port and road traffic to foreign students to the fishing industry. The U.K. Parliament has twice rejected the withdrawal agreement that May spent two years negotiating with the EU, and the bloc insists there will be no more talks. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas warned British lawmakers that whoever rejects the (Brexit) agreement plays with the welfare of their citizens and the economy in a reckless way. Yet May has not given up on a third attempt to get her deal through Parliament again. U.K. Treasury chief Philip Hammond said he was confident that we will do a deal in the next few weeks. Many Britons wish they could share his optimism. I think that a bit of unity would be helpful now, said Katharine Beaugie, an artist in Dover. It would be much better if we could have found some sort of decision. ___ Casert reported from Strasbourg, France. Renee Graham in Deal, England, Gregory Katz and Danica Kirka in London, Frank Jordans in Berlin and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed. ___ Follow APs full coverage of Brexit at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit GENEVA - Israeli authorities have opened criminal investigations of the deaths of 11 Palestinians who were killed by Israeli fire during protests along the Gaza border in the past year, a senior Israeli official said Wednesday. Israeli officials briefed journalists in Geneva to rebut allegations contained in a U.N. human rights report issued last week. The report alleges Israeli soldiers intentionally fired on civilians and could have committed crimes against humanity at the border, where live ammunition killed 189 people dead and injured more than 6,000 in violence that began last March. The senior official said full-fledged criminal investigations in such cases are opened if reasonable grounds of suspicion of criminal misconduct are found. Critics say such investigations rarely result in prosecution of soldiers. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. Gazas Hamas rulers have sought to use the demonstrations as a way to press Israel to ease a crippling blockade, imposed after the Islamic militant group seized control of the territory in 2007. Israel has defended its tactics during the protests, saying it is protecting its sovereign border. It accuses Hamas militants of using the crowds for cover, and notes that demonstrators have launched firebombs, flaming tires and incendiary kites across the border. But it has come under heavy criticism for the large number of unarmed people who have been shot, often far from the border. The U.N. report said 35 children were among those killed. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized the report, which was mandated by the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council, after its release and accused the 47-member body of an obsessive hatred of Israel. Diplomatic efforts could lead to another of the Human Rights Councils many resolutions critical of Israels treatment of Palestinians. The councils current session ends March 22. Israeli officials are also concerned the one-year anniversary of the upsurge of border protests on March 30 could spark new demonstrations. KABUL, AFGHANISTANFor the second time in a few days, an Afghan army base was destroyed Wednesday but this time by U.S. airstrikes that followed a firefight between the Afghans and Americans, Afghan officials said. A local Afghan official said six soldiers were killed and nine others badly wounded, out of 17 soldiers at the base. Qais Mangal, a spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry, confirmed that the airstrikes had taken place after another Afghan unit attacked a joint convoy of Afghan Special Forces and U.S. troops. He put the death toll at five soldiers, with 10 wounded. A U.S. military spokeswoman said personnel at the Afghan army post, which she described as a checkpoint, had opened fire on the convoy first. This is an example of the fog of war, Sgt. 1st Class Debra Richardson said. The U.S. conducted a precision self-defence airstrike on people who were firing at a partnered U.S.-Afghan force. The Defense Ministry spokesman said one Afghan commando had been wounded. There were no reports of U.S. casualties, although the U.S. military rarely releases details on wounded soldiers. In western Afghanistan on Monday, a Taliban attack wiped out a company of Afghan soldiers in their base in Badghis province, killing or capturing more than 50 soldiers. Analysts have said that the Afghan forces tendency to stay penned up in fortified bases rather than going on offensives has hurt their effectiveness and led to a devastatingly high rate of casualties. The airstrikes Wednesday happened while U.S. soldiers were patrolling on the outskirts of Tirin Kot, the capital of southern Uruzgan province, near an Afghan National Army base, according to Mohammed Karim Karimi, the deputy head of the Uruzgan provincial council. Karimi said the U.S. forces believed that they had heard gunfire coming from the base, and a firefight broke out between the Americans and the Afghan forces at the base. The long-established outpost, known as Satarman Base, guards the approaches to Tirin Kot, which has been repeatedly attacked by Taliban insurgents who dominate much of the surrounding province. It is still not confirmed who fired first, but then they both engaged in a firefight, Karimi said. The fight lasted four hours, until 3 a.m., when U.S. warplanes carried out airstrikes that destroyed the base, he said. There was a misunderstanding between both sides, Karimi said, adding that in the darkness of the area both forces thought they were engaging the Taliban. The insurgents often steal Afghan and U.S. military vehicles and uniforms to launch their attacks. The Afghan and U.S. partnered force tried to de-escalate the situation but in the fog of war they continued to be fired upon, Richardson said. We are operating in a complex environment, Afghans included, where attacks come from fighters who do not wear their uniforms. Two Afghan soldiers who fled during the fight were apparently unhurt, Karimi said, but the nine soldiers who were wounded were in critical condition. It was a mistake between them, said Mangal, the Defense Ministry spokesman. The Afghan army outpost opened fire first on a unit of Afghan and foreign forces headed to a military operation. In a separate attack Wednesday, the Taliban again attacked Afghan National Army bases in the Bala Murghab district of Badghis province, where the 50 soldiers were killed or captured Monday. This time, seven soldiers were missing, either captured or killed, officials said. Read more about: DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - A prominent opposition politician in Bahrain faces up to six months in prison for a tweet about Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. Bahraini prosecutors have long targeted Ebrahim Sharif over his outspokenness in an island kingdom in the grips of a yearslong crackdown on dissent. Both Amnesty International and the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy reported the court ruling Wednesday. Sharif must pay bail of over $1,300 to remain free pending a possible appeal. His tweet in December 2018 called for al-Bashir to leave office. The Sudanese president has faced months of protest over his rule. Authorities in Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navys 5th Fleet and a British naval base, did not respond to a request for comment. CAIRO - Sudans prime minister on Wednesday announced a new Cabinet packed with supporters of President Omar al-Bashir, who is digging in after nearly three months of protests against his long rule. Al-Bashir disbanded the government last month and declared a state of emergency. Sudan has been gripped by nationwide protests since Dec. 19, and opposition parties and professional unions have called on al-Bashir to step down after three decades in power. Mohammed Taher Eyla, who al-Bashir tapped to form the new government, kept the defence and foreign ministers in place. Gen. Awad Mohammed Ibn Auf, the defence minister, was named vice-president last month. Activists say most of the new ministers belong to the ruling National Congress party. A Sudanese appeals court meanwhile overturned a sentence of flogging and imprisonment against nine women who took part in anti-government protests, an opposition group said Wednesday. The Democratic Lawyers Alliance said the court ordered their release Tuesday. The women were arrested Saturday and an emergency court in the capital, Khartoum, sentenced them to a month in prison and 20 lashes each. The court later waived the flogging amid pressure from families of the women, who rallied outside the courthouse on Saturday. The lawyers alliance is part of an umbrella organization that has spearheaded the protests across Sudan demanding al-Bashirs ouster. The emergency courts were set up to investigate violations under the state of emergency. Al-Bashir has banned unauthorized public gatherings and granted sweeping powers to the police since imposing a state of emergency last month, and security forces have used tear gas, rubber bullets, live ammunition and batons against demonstrators. Activists say at least 57 people have been killed in the protests. The governments latest tally stands at 31 killed, including police officers, but figures have not been updated in weeks. Al-Bashir, who seized power in an Islamist-backed military coup in 1989, says he plans to seek a new term in next years elections. BEIRUT - The Latest on developments in and related to Syria (all times local): 9:25 p.m. Activists say Russian airstrikes have hit the central prison in rebel-held Idlib in northwest Syria, leading to the escape of dozens of prisoners. Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes Wednesday were among the heaviest in recent weeks and hit the citys central prison, which is controlled by a militant group linked to al-Qaida. The Observatory says nearly 80 prisoners escaped and the militants declared an emergency and deployed to search for the escapees. Other strikes killed four people, the Observatory said. The activist-operated Sham News Network said the strikes targeted the central bank, killing some prisoners while others escaped. The Russian Defence Ministry said earlier Wednesday it had hit a weapons depot belonging to al-Qaida-linked group. ___ 7:20 p.m. The Russian military says its warplanes have destroyed a weapons depot in Idlib in northwestern Syria. Russias Defence Ministry said Wednesdays airstrike targeted a depot belonging to the al-Qaida branch in Idlib. It said the attack was co-ordinated with Turkey. The ministry said the raid was launched after Russia had received a tip about the delivery of a big shipment of drones to the depot, which were to be used for an attack on the Russian base. Russia and Turkey brokered a cease-fire in September for Idlib, the last major stronghold of Syrias rebels. The agreement averted a Syrian government offensive, but it has come under strain as al-Qaida-linked militants have seized territory from rival insurgents. The two countries have pledged to co-ordinate their operations in Idlib. ___ 11:35 a.m. U.S.-backed Syrian forces say Islamic State militants are putting up a desperate fight against their advances and have staged a counterattack from the tiny speck of land the extremists still hold in eastern Syria. A commander with the U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces says the IS counterattack began overnight, from the west of a riverside pocket in the Syrian village of Baghouz where the Islamic State group has been making its last stand. The commander says clashes were underway on Wednesday and that the Kurdish-led forces are repelling the IS counterattack. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. A spokesman for the U.S.-backed forces, Adnan Afrin, says IS militants are putting up a fierce resistance, firing mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades. DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - The United Arab Emirates says seven Emiratis and two Egyptians held by Iran since January after being detained in the Persian Gulf have been freed. The Emirati Foreign Ministry said in a statement Wednesday the nine were detained while on a fishing trip. It said those detained were released into the care of the UAE Coast Guard. Iranian media quoted Emirati media on the release, without elaborating on the case. WASHINGTON - Former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn is not ready to be sentenced yet because there may be additional co-operation he can offer as he tries to reduce his potential punishment, according to a court filing Tuesday night. Flynn has been co-operating with prosecutors in Virginia in an ongoing case against two former business associates accused of illegally lobbying for Turkey. That case is scheduled for trial in July, and because of Flynns continued co-operation, his lawyers asked in a court filing Tuesday to be able to submit another status report in 90 days. In the same filing, prosecutors with special counsel Robert Muellers office took no position on Flynns request for a continuance but said they viewed his co-operation as otherwise complete. Flynn, President Donald Trumps first national security adviser, was supposed to be sentenced last December for lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States. But after the judge appeared poised to send him to prison, Flynns lawyers asked for a postponement so he could continue co-operating with investigators and earn credit toward a lighter sentence. The filing is part of a flurry of expected activity this week in Muellers investigation into potential co-ordination between the Trump campaign and Russias interference in the 2016 presidential election. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday, and prosecutors later in the week are expected to update a judge on the co-operation given by Manaforts business partner Rick Gates, another defendant. Mueller is expected to conclude his investigation soon and submit a confidential report to Attorney General William Barr. LOS ANGELESThe boyfriend of the mother of a 9-year-old girl whose body was found in a duffel bag on a Hacienda Heights trail has been charged with murder in the girls death, prosecutors said Tuesday. Emiel Hunt, 38, was arrested Saturday in Santa Fe Springs and is being held in lieu of $2 million (U.S.) bail pending a scheduled appearance in a Pomona courtroom, the district attorneys office said. Hunt is accused of killing Trinity Love Jones on or about March 1, according to the criminal complaint. The girls body was discovered on an equestrian trail March 5. She was identified over the weekend. Antonio Jones, the girls father, identified Hunts arrest record on a sheriffs website and on social media accounts. Barbara Jones, Trinity Love Jones grandmother, said they were told detectives think Hunt is responsible for the girls death. Read more: 9-year-old Los Angeles area girl found in duffel bag IDd We going to be at court in Pomona tomorrow, she said Monday. Court records show Hunt was convicted of child abuse in San Diego County in 2005 and sentenced to 12 years in state prison. The girls mother, Taquesta Graham, was also arrested over the weekend, but no charges have been filed against her. Court records show she also has a prior conviction for involvement with a minor in prostitution. LOS ANGELES - Health officials warn that travellers at Los Angeles International Airport may have been exposed to measles last month. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health says a passenger who had a layover at LAX on Feb. 21 was diagnosed with the highly contagious illness. The department says people who were in Terminal B and Delta Terminal 3 between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. that day may have been exposed. However, theres no current known risk of measles at the airport. Measles is spread when an infected person coughs or sneezes. It can remain in the air for up to two hours in an isolated space. Officials say people who havent been vaccinated are the most at risk. ANCHORAGE, Alaska - The Army National Guard says its continuing to search for a pilot missing since last week. The pilots hunting partner reported March 6 that the pilot and his Cessna 172 were overdue northwest of Anchorage. Inclement weather including turbulent wind and low clouds has hampered the search, which Tuesday focused on the Rainy Pass area. A Guard UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter was joined by a fixed-wing airplane. Four Civil Air Patrol aircraft also searched. The Coast Guard, Alaska State Troopers, National Park Service and multiple good Samaritans have assisted in searching. Alaska Air National Guard Lt. Col. Keenan Zerkel, the director of the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center, says Steve Perrins of Rainy Pass Lodge has provided weather reports, fuel, a ground search and other assistance. WASHINGTON - The Latest on President Donald Trumps declaration of an emergency at the southwest border(all times local): 8 p.m. The White House and Republican senators are seeking compromise on a plan to limit future presidential powers to unilaterally declare national emergencies. Chances seem to be improving that President Donald Trump might avoid an expected rejection by Congress of his effort to divert more money to building barriers along the Mexican border. If Trump commits to signing legislation handcuffing future emergency declarations, more GOP senators might vote Thursday against a separate bill blocking his border emergency. The Democratic-run House voted last month to block Trump. Senate passage of the resolution rejecting the border emergency would send it to the White House, where it would face a certain veto. Still, it would call attention to congressional opposition to one of his chief campaign pledges: building the wall. __ 6:15 p.m. The White House is labouring to prevent a high-profile congressional rejection of President Donald Trumps declaration of a national emergency at the southwest border, or at least reduce the number of Republican senators joining Democrats to thwart him. Vice-President Mike Pence has met privately at the Capitol with five GOP senators as Republicans sought a way to bolster support for Trump in a showdown vote set for Thursday. Since the Democratic-run House voted last month to block Trump, Senate passage would send the resolution to the White House, where it would face a certain veto. Congress would be highly unlikely to muster the two-thirds majorities needed to eventually override a veto. ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A young Pete Kaiser had the drive to learn about racing sled dogs and the family and community to support his passion. Years later, he won the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Growing up, Kaiser had plenty of sled dogs to choose from at his parents kennel in Bethel, a rural community in southwest Alaska. He got his first taste of success as a senior in high school when he won a 65-mile (105-kilometre) race. From there, the competitions and prizes kept getting bigger. On Wednesday, the 31-year-old captured the crowning glory in the sport, the Iditarod, a grueling test against the wildest terrain Alaska has to offer. Kaiser crossed the finish line in the Gold Rush town of Nome after beating back a challenge from the defending champion, Joar Ulsom of Norway. Ulsom finished the race just 12 minutes after Kaiser, who took 9 days, 12 hours, 39 minutes and 6 seconds to complete the 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometre) journey over two mountain ranges, along the frozen Yukon River and across the treacherous, wind-swept Bering Sea coast. Its Kaisers first Iditarod victory in his 10th try. He said he wasnt sure what made everything come together for him this year. Just years of knowledge gained and trying to put it all together to have a better race, better dog team this year every little detail coming into play, he said in a post-victory interview televised from the finish line. Kaiser became the fifth Alaska Native and first Yupik musher to win the worlds most famous sled dog race. Veteran Iditarod musher Mike Williams Sr. has been friends with the Kaiser family and watched Petes career progress. His victory lifts up not only the Yupik people but all southwest Alaska, Williams said. Its going to make 35,000 people proud, Williams said. I think hes going to be a great representative for us. A large group of residents from Bethel, Kaisers hometown, flew in to see his victory. Alaska Native dancers and drummers performed near the finish line as they waited for Kaiser to arrive, even though it was past 3 a.m. Kaiser called the support extremely humbling, and it motivates me every day to perform to my best, and I just want to thank them for coming out here tonight. When he was young, Kaiser went to races like the Kuskokwim 300, an annual mid-distance race in Bethel, to learn everything he could from the mushers. That includes Ed Iten, a veteran musher whose best Iditarod finish was second place in 2005. He was a young boy then and came over and helped me feed the dogs, Iten said. Then he went from helping out when I was in Bethel feeding my dogs to eventually whipping my butt in the Kusko 300, so hes a quick study. Kaiser, who counts Iten as his mentor, went on to win four Kuskokwim 300 races. It just couldnt be better, Iten said of Kaisers Iditarod victory. Weve been waiting for this. Theres been no doubt in my mind that he was going to get it sooner or later. Dogs are in the Kaiser familys blood. Petes father, Ron, raced dogs for a few years and then kept an active kennel. His mother, Janet, managed the Kuskokwim 300. Kaiser, who is married with two children, mushes in the winter and gets seasonal summer jobs on top of managing the kennel. Sled dog races dont have lucrative jackpots Kaiser picked up about $50,000 and a new truck for winning the worlds premier competition. The prize money is down about $20,000 from what the 2017 winner received. This years race was marked by the stunning collapse of Frenchman Nicolas Petit, who was seemingly headed for victory as late as Monday. He had a five-hour lead until his dog team stopped running. Petit said one dog was picking on another during a rest break, and he yelled at the dog to knock it off. At that point, the entire team refused to run. He had to withdraw. Fifty-two mushers began this years race. Petit was among 10 who withdrew. The 2019 race came during a bruising two-year stretch for the Iditarod that included a dog doping scandal and the loss of national sponsors amid protests by animal rights activists. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is the biggest critic. Hundreds of dogs (including six from Pete Kaisers team) were so sick, exhausted, or injured that they were pulled from the race, forcing the ones remaining to work even harder, struggling on in what is a grueling test not of human endurance but of a dogs ability to survive extreme cruelty, PETA Executive Vice-President Tracy Reiman said in a statement after Kaisers victory. LeVeon Bell, the superstar running back who sat out last season in a salary dispute with the Pittsburgh Steelers, has agreed to a free-agent deal with the New York Jets. Bell, 27, is considered one of the most versatile offensive players in the NFL. After ESPN broke the news early Wednesday that he had come to terms with the Jets, Bell confirmed it on Twitter and Instagram. ESPN has reported that the deal is for four years and $52.5 million (U.S.), with $35 million guaranteed. The deal cannot be officially completed until the NFLs new league year begins Wednesday afternoon. Bells anticipated average salary of $13.25 million would make him the leagues second-highest paid running back, behind Todd Gurley of the Los Angeles Rams. But that could be a bargain with Bell, as other than the question marks created by a year away from the game he represents a dramatic upgrade for the Jets, a team that ranked 26th in the NFL in rushing last year. Selected by Pittsburgh with the 48th pick of the 2013 draft, Bell had a solid rookie campaign before exploding in 2014 with 2,215 yards from scrimmage and 11 touchdowns. While his time on the field has been limited somewhat by drug and substance abuse suspensions along with his full-season holdout he has 7,996 yards from scrimmage in 62 career games. With the Jets he will be the centrepiece of an offense designed by the teams new coach, Adam Gase, the mastermind of a Denver Broncos offense that averaged 37.9 points a game with Peyton Manning in 2013. (Under Gase, the Miami Dolphins finished in the bottom half of the league in scoring the past three seasons.) Bell will serve as the Jets top running back, but he also will be one of its most talented receivers. That will help take some of the burden off quarterback Sam Darnold, who is still developing after being selected with the No. 3 overall pick last year. In Darnolds uneven rookie season, the Jets had a running back surpass 100 rushing yards in a game only two times. In Bell, the Jets are anticipating production out of the backfield unlike anything the team has seen since Curtis Martin retired. Martin, a Hall of Fame running back, twice surpassed 1,800 yards from scrimmage in a season for the Jets the only two times in franchise history that a player has done so. Bell easily topped that figure in three of his past four seasons. Bells decision, which had been eagerly anticipated since the leagues so-called legal tampering period opened Monday, officially ends a stalemate that resulted in the unusual choice by a player to give up an entire season of his prime. While Bell had consistently thrived on the field in Pittsburgh, he regularly clashed with the front office off it, believing he was being dramatically underpaid once his versatility was considered. After a strong 2017 season, in which he rushed for 1,291 yards and led the NFL with 406 touches, Bell turned down a contract offer that was reported at five years and $70 million, citing the small amount of guaranteed money in the deal. He then refused to play on a franchise tag that would have paid him $14.5 million in 2018, hoping that his conviction could earn a shot at unrestricted free agency. The gambit paid off, as the Steelers decided they would not use the franchise tag on him again, making him a free agent. In exchange for his signing with the Jets, Pittsburgh will receive a compensatory pick in this years draft. The Steelers, who adequately replaced Bell with James Conner and then barely missed the playoffs, have now lost two All-Pro offensive players this off-season. On Saturday the team agreed to trade Antonio Brown, its top wide receiver, to the Oakland Raiders for two midround draft picks. Bell, who grew up in Ohio and starred in college at Michigan State, will not have to wait long to get a chance to prove himself against his former team. The Jets are scheduled to host the Steelers at some point during the season, although an exact date has yet to be announced. WASHINGTON - When John Hickenlooper announced his Democratic presidential campaign, he vowed to sit down with the Senates top Republican if he wins in 2020 the kind of milquetoast pitch for bipartisanship that White House hopefuls have made for generations. But for some Democrats, Hickenloopers pledge landed with a thud. Still stung by President Barack Obamas fierce battles with Republicans and at odds with nearly every policy the GOP has pursued during the Trump administration, some Democrats say they have little interest in talk of cross-party co-operation. They increasingly view Republicans as immovable obstacles on everything from health care to the economy and are challenging presidential candidates to blow past their GOP opponents instead of bringing them into the fold. Happy talk about coming together with the Republicans is not going to fly, said Brian Fallon, who advised Hillary Clintons 2016 presidential campaign. Fallon is pushing White House hopefuls to support overhauling Senate rules that typically require some level of bipartisan support for big-ticket legislation. The take-no-prisoners approach represents a new test for Democratic presidential candidates eager to harness the energy of the partys liberal base without alienating moderates who may be more open to compromising with the GOP. It also marks a significant shift in strategy and tone for a party whose last two nominees, Obama and Clinton, each made explicit appeals to moderate Republicans and vowed to work across the aisle. There are some very angry people who have watched the events of the last 10 years and watched Donald Trump and their attitude is hell no, said David Axelrod, one of Obamas closest political advisers. And their voices are very loud. That new reality poses a dilemma for White House hopefuls like Joe Biden, who is expected to launch a 2020 campaign in the next few weeks. The former vice-president has worked closely with scores of Republicans during more than four decades in politics, was Obamas point man in numerous negotiations with congressional Republicans and will likely make that experience a cornerstone of a 2020 campaign. Last week, Biden found himself at the centre of a liberal firestorm after he called Vice-President Mike Pence a decent man the kind of offhand remark Biden has made about countless Republicans over the years. Liberal activists said Pences support of anti-gay measures made even that mild praise unacceptable, and Biden apologized. But on Tuesday, Biden bemoaned a political climate in which speaking kindly about the other party is considered offensive. If you notice, I get criticized for saying anything nice about a Republican, Biden said during a speech Tuesday to a firefighters union. Folks, thats not who we are. While partisan infighting is nothing new in Washington, Obama and Bidens eight years in the White House left some Democrats particularly pessimistic about the partys ability to work with Republicans. Party leaders still seethe over Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnells now-infamous pledge to make Obama a one-term president and contend GOP lawmakers repeatedly moved the goalposts on health care, budget battles and Supreme Court nominations. Democratic strategist Maria Cardona said its not that Democrats wouldnt prefer working with Republicans, its that Democrats tried it and got screwed. Although Obama remains broadly popular among Democrats, some in the party now suggest he spent too much time trying to forge compromises with Republicans who had little interest in helping him achieve his agenda. Even as he campaigned for re-election in 2012, Obama said his victory would break the GOP fever a prediction he and his advisers later conceded was overly optimistic. Cardona said she hopes a future Democratic president is a little bit more eyes wide open about the likelihood of forging compromise with the GOP. Polling shows just how far apart the two parties priorities are heading into the 2020 race. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted last month, Democrats list health care costs, education, the environment, Medicare and assistance for poor and needy people as their top policy priorities. None of those issues landed among the top priorities for Republicans, who cited terrorism, immigration and the military among their most pressing priorities. Democrats like Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado, say theyre well-aware that simply sitting down and talking with Republicans will not suddenly break Washingtons logjam. But they say its equally naive to suggest Democrats can simply go it alone. Saying that we shouldnt even try is exactly why we have constant gridlock in Congress, Hickenlooper spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said. What do we expect will happen in 2020 the Republican Party is going to dissolve? Even if Democrats were to take back the White House, maintain control of the House and retake the Senate, their majority in the upper chamber would almost certainly be narrow. Thats prompted a groundswell of support among Democratic activists for abolishing the filibuster, the Senate procedure that requires 60 votes to pass big-ticket legislation instead of a simple majority. Rarely do presidents have Senate majorities so large that they can clear 60 votes with only the support of their own party. Jay Inslee, the Washington state governor running on an ambitious agenda to combat climate change, was the first Democrat to call for abandoning the filibuster. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a favourite of many progressive Democrats, has also said shes open to making the change. Its all on the table, baby, Warren said when asked about the filibuster during a campaign event in New York. Warren said Democrats have sometimes been too timid in power and declared, I wont be one of those. ___ Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC RENO, Nev. - Two rural Nevada counties have agreed to pay $250,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a former Las Vegas entertainer who was wrongfully jailed for 18 days for a burglary he didnt commit in an apparent case of mistaken identity. Sean Laughlin filed a federal lawsuit suit against Nye and Lyon counties in October accusing them of violating his constitutional due process rights and Nevada law requiring that jailed suspects see a judge within 72 hours. His ordeal began in December 2016 when a state trooper stopped him for a minor traffic offence in Carson City. A routine warrant check showed a different Sean Laughlin was wanted for failing to appear in court for a residential burglary in Pahrump, 385 miles (620 kilometres) away. His Reno lawyer, Terri Keyser-Cooper, said Wednesday they are elated with the settlement. IOWA CITY, Iowa - Two Iowa county treasurers recently vacationed with a businessman they have supported for a lucrative tax website contract, staying at his Florida beach property for free in an apparent violation of state ethics law. Dubuque County Treasurer Eric Stierman and Winneshiek County Treasurer Wayne Walter confirmed the trip to The Associated Press, highlighting a long, cozy and ethically questionable relationship between county officials and an important vendor. The longtime elected officials flew to Florida last November. There they met Marc Carr, founder and CEO of GovTech Services, which hosts the website used by most Iowa counties to collect property and motor vehicle taxes. For three nights, the trio stayed at a Florida home with Stiermans brother-in-law. For two nights, they stayed at Carrs condominium in St. Pete Beach, a resort town on a barrier island near St. Petersburg. Stierman and Walter denied any wrongdoing, describing Carr as a friend with whom they had previously vacationed in Florida. Just three buddies going on a trip, said Stierman, who acknowledged sending Christmas cards featuring a photo of the men to other county officials. But the treasurers have long wielded their influence to benefit Carrs company, which has collected millions since 2011 under a contract with the Iowa County Treasurers eGovernment Alliance. Stierman was a board member for the alliance when the contract now worth $460,000 annually was awarded. Both have served as alliance president and have known Carr since he was Adams County treasurer in the 1990s. Since 2014, Stierman has appeared in an online testimonial praising GovTechs work as wonderful and Carrs customer service. Would I hesitate to ever go with them again? No, I would not. Im extremely happy with the service that we get from them, he says. Marc calls you back or he answers the phone directly and your problems are taken care of. Building on his exclusive contract with 88 of Iowas 99 counties, Carr, 48, has expanded his business into other states. He said that he believed the use of his condo by county treasurers was legal but that hed ask a state panel for an opinion. State Auditor Rob Sand said Wednesday that his office recently opened an investigation into the matter. The Iowa ethics law bans public employees from accepting gifts and favours worth $3 or more from restricted donors, who include vendors, lobbyists and others affected by their official actions. Vendors are barred from offering gifts, and the law doesnt contain an exception for friends. Even where there is a genuine personal friendship, the acceptance of personal benefits from those who could gain advantage by influencing official actions raises suspicions that tend to undermine the public trust, it warns. St. Pete Beach condos rent anywhere from $100 to $200 a night in November. Carr and his wife, who live in Glenwood, Iowa, purchased the condo in 2015. Stierman said he had stayed there once previously. Walter said the stay last November was his only but that the trio previously vacationed together in Daytona Beach. Stierman and Walter suggested that the free lodging did not amount to a gift because they accepted it in exchange for the free stay that Carr received from Stiermans brother-in-law. Walter later claimed that he bought drinks and other stuff for Carr during the vacation to offset the free lodging, adding that he paid cash and couldnt remember details. Im convinced, appropriately so to my personal satisfaction as an honest person, that I did not take anything free from Marc, he said. Gov. Kim Reynolds recently appointed Walter to a second six-year term on the investment board for the Iowa Public Employees Retirement System. Walter, who has held office since 1984, faces an upcoming Senate confirmation. Stierman, who has held office since 1994, said he wasnt that familiar with ethics law. The Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board previously ruled that another perk funded by GovTech Services for county treasurers is illegal. The board issued an opinion in 2015 concluding it was a gift law violation for the company and another vendor to sponsor a college scholarship program that is only open to the children and grandchildren of treasurers and their staffs. Despite the advisory, the program has continued. Floyd County Treasurer Frank Rottinghaus, who has called the scholarships unethical, said that vacationing with the vendor was also problematic. I certainly have a problem with the appearance, he said. The law tells us that we should avoid the appearance of any type of relationship that would affect decisions that we would make on behalf of our citizens. Anyone who knowingly violates the law is guilty of a serious misdemeanour and can be removed from office, but enforcement action is rare. Complaints against local officials are handled by prosecutors where they reside. County attorneys in Dubuque and Winneshiek had no immediate comment. The governor has known Walter, Stierman and Carr since she was the Clarke County treasurer in the 1990s. She and her now-disgraced ally, Dave Jamison , were involved in forming the alliance, which initially contracted with ABC Virtual to host the website. Reynolds was hired by ABC Virtual immediately after leaving the treasurers office in 2008. Carr also worked for ABC Virtual, which lost the contract in 2011 amid financial difficulties. He then founded GovTech, which was awarded the deal and has kept it since. WASHINGTON - A government watchdog says former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke didnt engage in illegal political activity when he went to Pennsylvania about a year ago to announce federal grants shortly before a special House election. The Office of Special Counsel released its finding this week clearing Zinke, saying the coal dump site where he announced the nationwide grants, including $55 million for Pennsylvania, to clean up mines was an appropriate choice. A federal law known as the Hatch Act bars executive branch officials from engaging in some kinds of political activities. Federal officials were asked to examine whether Zinke made the trip to boost the GOP candidate, Rick Saccone, who ended up losing the congressional election to Democrat Conor Lamb. President Donald Trump announced Zinkes resignation in December amid a series of ethics investigations involving the interior secretary. Other investigations stemming from Zinkes tenure are continuing are continuing. FAIRBANKS, Alaska - A 17-year-old Fairbanks boy has been sentenced to two years in prison for robbing a man outside the citys main public library. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reports Elijah Rutherford was charged as an adult for the Aug. 21 robbery of a man at a bus stop outside the Noel Wien (ween) Library. Rutherford pleaded guilty Monday. An accomplice, 19-year-old Caden Agli, previously had pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three months in jail. Prosecutors say Rutherford was not armed but pretended to be by holding his hand in a sweater pocket. He threatened to shoot the victim if he did not give up his wallet. The victim told police he feared he might die. After his release, Rutherford faces four additional years of suspended prison time if he violates probation. ___ Information from: Fairbanks (Alaska) Daily News-Miner, http://www.newsminer.com NEW YORK - A case featuring sensational claims that followers of a New York self-help organization were forced to become sex slaves took a new turn on Wednesday with one key defendant pleading guilty and another being hit with child pornography charges. Nancy Salzman, who once ran the group NXIVM, told a judge in federal court in Brooklyn that she teamed up with self-styled spiritual leader Keith Raniere, because she wanted to help people improve their lives. But she admitted that she later lost her way when she joined efforts to spy on perceived enemies seeking to expose the Albany-based group as a cross between a pyramid scheme and a cult. It has taken some time and soul searching to come to this place, said Salzman, choking back tears. I accept that some of what I did was not just wrong, but criminal. ... If I could go back and do it all over again, I would. But I cant. About two hours after the guilty plea, prosecutors unsealed an indictment against Raniere accusing him of twice inducing a minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing one or more visual depictions of such conduct in 2005. In a statement on Wednesday, defence attorney Marc Agnifilo denied the new allegations and questioned the timing with his client nearing trial on other charges. The new charges serve only to taint the jury pool, Agnifilo said. If the charges were legitimate, they would have brought them a year ago. Salzman, a registered nurse who was known as Prefect within NXIVM, was involved in stealing identities of the groups critics and hacking into their email accounts from 2003 to 2008, prosecutors said. They also alleged that she conspired to doctor videotapes showing her teaching NXIVMs lessons before the tapes were turned over to plaintiffs in a New Jersey lawsuit against the group. The plea comes about six weeks before Ranieres trial, expected to detail allegations that a master-slave society within NXIVM brainwashed women into having unwanted sex with him and had them branded with his initials in initiation ceremonies. Among those also charged along with Raniere are Salzmans daughter as well as Seagram liquor fortune heiress Clare Bronfman and actress Allison Mack, best known for playing a teenage friend of Superman on the Smallville TV series. They have all denied the charges. Salzman apparently wont testify for the government: There was no agreement to co-operate as part of the guilty plea to a conspiracy charge that carries an estimated maximum term of 41 months in prison under sentencing guidelines. Raniere, 58, was arrested in Mexico in 2018 and is being held without bail in Brooklyn on sex-trafficking charges. At the time of his capture, Mack was living with him at a luxury villa in Puerto Vallarta, according to court papers. An NXIVM bio of Salzman posted on the internet says she was a consultant to New York state and major corporations until she met Keith Raniere and discovered an approach to personal growth that yielded powerful and permanent results. Sentencing for Salzman was set for July 10. ST. PAUL, Minn. - Minnesotas legislative auditor said Wednesday that an investigation found no proof that money defrauded from a state child care program found its way to terrorist organizations overseas. Lawmakers asked Legislative Auditor James Nobles to look into the issue after KMSP-TV reported last year that the Minnesota Child Care Assistance Program was defrauded out of as much as $100 million per year. The station, partly citing unnamed sources, also reported that state and federal agents had determined that some of the ill-gotten money had gone overseas and that they believed at least some of it likely ended up with terrorists. The stations reports, which also cited Scott Stillman, a former computer forensics expert for the state Department of Human Services, which administers the program, suggested that fraudulently obtained money had gone to the Somali-based terrorist group al-Shabab. In his report, Nobles said investigators couldnt substantiate that any of the money ended up with terrorists. He also said that while fraud in the child care program is a problem, investigators couldnt establish a reliable estimate of how much money has been defrauded from it, though they believe its more than the $5 million to $6 million that prosecutors have been able to prove was stolen. A separate review into whether the departments oversight of the program is adequate to safeguard its financial resources is due early next month. The Minneapolis area is home to the countrys largest Somali-American community, and Nobles noted in his report that its common for Somali-Americans to send money back to the East African country to help family and friends. He said its possible that some money defrauded from the program made its way overseas, but that there is no proof. It is possible that the individuals who sent the money sent it intending to provide support to a terrorist organization, the report states. It is also possible that individuals in Minnesota sent money to Somalia and other countries to help their families and friends pay for food, medicine, or shelter, but terrorists obtained the money through theft or extortion. All of these are possibilities, but for none of them did we find evidence to substantiate a connection between CCAP fraud money and support for a terrorist organization. The Child Care Assistance Program provides federal money to help low-income families afford child care while parents work or attend school. Some daycare centre operators allegedly overbilled for children who werent really there. Prosecutors have charged at least a dozen Minnesota residents, including several with Somali connections, and child care centres with defrauding the program. Following the allegations of a terrorist connection, local Somali leaders objected to what they considered a rush to judgment against their community. On Wednesday, Minnesota House Majority Leader Ryan Winkler, a Democrat, said any misuse of public funds is serious, but using unsubstantiated allegations as an excuse for Islamophobic attacks on an entire community is reprehensible. Republican leaders focused Wednesday on the need for stronger actions to root out fraud. Sen. Mark Quran, who is vice chairman of the Legislative Audit Commission, and several colleagues called for the resignation of the Department of Human Services inspector general. Nobles said his office interviewed department officials, program investigators, law enforcement officials and prosecutors. His office subpoenaed Stillman and interviewed him under oath. Investigators also reviewed court records from about two dozen terrorism-related cases in Minnesota. To obtain some information from prosecutors, investigators and law enforcement, they agreed not to disclose certain details and to protect identities of individuals who provided information, his report states. We are confident that given the history and expertise of investigating and prosecuting terror-related cases in Minnesota, if there were any allegations of CCAP fraud money going to terrorist organizations, investigators would certainly follow up and prosecutors would prosecute them for providing material support to terrorist organizations, the report states. Human Services Commissioner Tony Lourey said his department is committed to fixing the problem of fraud in the child care program, and that it has asked the Legislature for money to beef up oversight efforts. ___ Follow Steve Karnowski on Twitter: https://twitter.com/skarnowski NEW ORLEANS - The Latest on the appeal of a federal judges ruling that the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act is unconstitutional (all times local): 1:30 p.m. Opponents of a 1978 law governing Native American adoptions have told a federal appeals court in New Orleans that the law is an unconstitutional threat to the well-being of children and families. The Indian Child Welfare Act gives preference to Native American families in adoptions involving Native American Children. Opponents told the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday the law is a race-based intrusion on individual states adoption procedures. They also fear that a decision upholding the law could endanger adoptions already completed. Indian tribes say the law is needed to preserve Native American families and culture. A federal district judge in Texas struck down the law last year. The tribes want a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit to overrule that judge. Its unclear when the panel will rule. ___ 9 a.m. A federal appeals court in New Orleans is set to hear arguments on a 1978 law giving preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings involving Native American children. A federal district judge in Texas last year struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act. That was a victory for opponents who say it is racially motivated and unconstitutionally discriminatory. Backers of the law, including numerous tribes and the federal government, say that if the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds that decision, many Native American children will be lost to their families and tribes. Backers of the law say its definition of Indian child is based on tribal affiliations that are political, not racial. A three judge 5th Circuit panel was to hear arguments Wednesday morning. LAS VEGAS - The Latest on a trial for a Nevada jury to decide how much Las Vegas Sands owes a Hong Kong businessman for helping the U.S. casino company open its first resort in Macau in 2004 (all times local): 4:45 p.m. An attorney for Las Vegas Sands Corp. says a Hong Kong businessman deserves a fraction of the $347 million hes seeking for breach-of-contract because he abandoned Sands in 2001 to find other advice to open a Macau casino in 2004. Sands attorney Richard Sauber countered figures offered by Richard Suens lawyer on Wednesday, telling a Nevada jury that Suen and his company, Round Square Co., earned no more than $3.76 million. Suen says he introduced billionaire Sands chief Sheldon Adelson and company executives to Chinese officials with influence to grant a coveted Macau gambling license. The jury will decide how much Suen gets because Sands appealed jury judgments against the company in 2008 and 2013. The Nevada Supreme Court called in 2016 for a new jury to again decide the damages question. ____ 1:20 p.m. A Hong Kong businessmans attorney says his client deserves almost $347 million for helping Las Vegas Sands Corp. open its first casino in Macau in 2004 even though the client did not have a contract with the company. Attorney John OMalley told jurors that Richard Suen (SOO-ehn) provided Sands executives including billionaire company chief Sheldon Adelson with key introductions to Chinese officials who granted Sands a Macau gambling license. Lawyers for the U.S. casino company are expected to counter on Wednesday with a figure near $1 million. A jury will decide how much Suen gets in the case that could last seven weeks. Juries ruled in favour of Suen and his company in 2008 and 2013. The Nevada Supreme Court upheld those decisions but ruled in 2016 that a new jury should decide how much in damages Suen should be awarded. ____ 7:55 a.m. A jury in Nevada is set to decide how much Las Vegas Sands Corp. has to pay to a Hong Kong businessman for helping the company open its first Macau resort 15 years ago. Attorneys for Richard Suen (SOO-ehn) and Sands are due to provide overviews Wednesday of a trial that could take seven weeks. Billionaire Sands chief executive Sheldon Adelson isnt expected to testify. Hes battling cancer. This is the third go-around for the case in state court in Las Vegas. Suen won breach-of-contract judgments in 2008 and 2013, arguing he provided Sands executives with key introductions to Chinese officials. The Nevada Supreme Court upheld those jury findings but ruled in 2016 that a jury should decide again the damages question. Suen says he deserves $328 million. Sands says hes due $1 million. WASHINGTON - The Latest on U.S. involvement in the Yemen war (all times local): 5:30 p.m. The Senate has voted to end U.S. support for the Saudi Arabian-led coalitions war in Yemen. The bipartisan vote Wednesday is another strong rebuke of President Donald Trumps support for Saudi Arabia, which has been a point of tension with Congress since the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year. If the legislation passes the House, it would be the first time lawmakers have invoked the decades-old War Powers Resolution to halt American military involvement in a foreign conflict. The White House has already threatened to veto the legislation, which it says is flawed and could undermine the fight against extremism. The measure in the Senate was co-sponsored by independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah. __ 4 p.m. The Senate is poised to vote Wednesday on ending U.S. support for the Saudi Arabian-led coalition fighting in Yemen, legislation the White House has threatened to veto. The measure is co-sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Mike Lee, R- Utah. If it were to pass Congress, it would be the first time lawmakers have invoked the decades-old War Powers Resolution to halt American military involvement in a foreign conflict. It would also be another strong rebuke of President Donald Trumps support for Saudi Arabia, which has been a point of tension with Congress since the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year. In its statement threatening a veto, the White House argued the premise of the resolution is flawed and that it would undermine the fight against extremism. ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - A tornado that ripped roofs from buildings and injured five people in a tiny New Mexico town has left a trail of debris that authorities said Wednesday they would wait to clear because of high winds still sweeping through the region. The tornado touched down outside of Dexter on Tuesday evening before quickly barrelling into the town about 18 miles (or 29 kilometres) south of Roswell, where the injured were taken to a hospital. They had suffered non-life threatening injuries, authorities said. Chaves County Sheriff Mike Herrington said the tornado took out about 10 homes on one street in the town of about 5,000 people. A dairy was forced to put down about 150 cows that were injured, he added. Schools are expected to be closed for the remainder of the week, and all entries into the town have been closed as 60 to 70 mph winds continue to stir scrap and other tornado wreckage. Its flying around like shrapnel, Herrington said in a phone interview. Its blowing in a circle ... Its just not a good, safe environment. The strength of the tornado has not yet been determined by a team the National Weather Service sent to the area, meteorologist Chuck Jones said. The tornado came amid a strong storm system that was not expected to relent as it moved toward the northeast, Jones said. Its deepening and strengthening very quickly, he said. About 200 miles (or 322 kilometres) northeast of Dexter, authorities said high winds had derailed a train on the high desert plains near Logan, a town of about 1,000 residents. New Mexico State Police photos of the derailment showed shattered train cars scattered across a mostly dry riverbed. There were no reported injuries in the derailment, state police said. In total, about 40,000 Xcel Energy customers in the region that spans much of eastern New Mexico and the Texas panhandle were without electricity, the company said. In Dexter, Herrington said he believed there would have been more tornado injuries had more people been home when it touched down. But luckily, it occurred at a time when many people were at work or returning home from work, he said. A severe weather warning was issued earlier in the afternoon for hail, lightning, high winds and multiple tornadoes, with authorities urging residents to stay off roads and shelter animals. Another tornado also touched down in nearby Hagerman on Tuesday, destroying the citys water system, the Roswell Daily Record reported . SAN FRANCISCO - A U.S. appeals court appeared inclined Wednesday to reject a request by the Trump administration to block a California law limiting police co-operation with immigration officials. But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals raised concerns about another state law extending protections to people in the country illegally. The Trump administration has sued California over three such laws, saying they obstruct federal immigration efforts and urging the 9th Circuit to block them. Judge Milan Smith said at a hearing that U.S. officials might find it frustrating that local authorities cant help them take custody of people in the country illegally. But because its an obstacle doesnt mean its illegal, right? he asked an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. The law prevents law enforcement agencies in the state from providing release dates and personal information of jail inmates information administration officials say they need to safely remove dangerous people who are in the country illegally. Judge Andrew Hurwitz said it doesnt allow local officials to interfere with federal efforts to take immigrants into custody, it just forbids them from affirmatively helping. Theyre not required to be helpful, are they? he asked. Smith and Hurwitz, however, expressed concerns about another state law requiring inspections of facilities where immigrants are detained. The panel did not immediately issue a ruling. The inspection law also calls on the state attorney general to review the legal rights immigrants are afforded and how they are being apprehended. Hurwitz said he had trouble understanding how the conditions under which immigrants were apprehended were any of Californias business. He also raised concerns that the authority to evaluate the due process immigrants receive may be too broad. Smith questioned whether the state could require more of federal detention facilities than it does of state facilities. More than 50 immigrant advocates protested outside the federal courthouse before the hearing, some holding signs saying ICE out of California, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Trump administrations 2018 lawsuit was part of its broader efforts to crack down on so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that it says allow criminals to stay on the streets. It is among numerous legal fights between the White House and Democrat-dominated California. California has sued the Trump administration dozens of times, mostly over immigration, the environment and health. California officials say their policies limiting co-operation with U.S. immigration authorities promote trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement and encourage witnesses and victims to report crime. An attorney for the state, Aimee Feinberg, said Congress did not require in an immigration law that states assist with immigration enforcement. Its purely voluntary, she said. The three laws were aimed at preserving state resources for state priorities and to safeguard the health and welfare of state residents, the California attorney generals office said in a brief to the 9th Circuit. Nothing in the Constitution or federal immigration law divests the state of the authority to make those choices. Daniel Tenny, an attorney with the Justice Department, said all three laws interfere with federal immigration enforcement. The Justice Department argued in court documents that the Constitution gives the federal government pre-eminent power to regulate immigration. The bills, individually and collectively, mark an extraordinary and intentional assault on the federal governments enforcement of the immigration laws, Justice Department attorneys said in a filing. U.S. Judge John Mendez in Sacramento ruled in July that California could limit police co-operation with immigration officials and require inspections of detention facilities where immigrants are held, but the state could not bar private employers from allowing immigration officials on their premises without a warrant. The 9th Circuit judges spent little time on Wednesday discussing the third law. WASHINGTON - The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee suggested on Wednesday that former Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker may have had conversations with President Donald Trump about Michael Cohens legal troubles, saying that Whitaker did not deny the conversations during a private meeting on Capitol Hill. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., did not get into the specifics of what Whitaker said when he met with Nadler and the top Republican on the panel, Georgia Rep. Doug Collins. Collins said he heard Whitakers comments differently and maintained that Whitaker said he had not talked with the president about Mr. Cohen at all. Two Republican staff members in the room backed up Collins version. The aides spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the confidential meeting. There was no transcript taken at the meeting, according to the Republican aides, so it wasnt clear exactly what Whitaker said, and it may never be clear. But the dispute could have high stakes, as Democrats have voiced concerns that Whitaker was a Trump loyalist whose appointment, they suspect, was aimed at suppressing investigations of the Republican president. Whitaker returned to Capitol Hill on Wednesday after Democrats said they wanted him to clarify his open testimony before the Judiciary panel in February. One thing that Nadler said he had questions about was whether Trump had lashed out at Whitaker after Cohen, Trumps former personal lawyer, pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and lying to Congress. News reports said Trump did lash out at Whitaker, but Whitaker said in the hearing that he did not. In a letter to Whitaker asking for him to return and clarify his comments, Nadler said that the committee has identified several individuals with direct knowledge of the phone calls you denied receiving from the White House. After Wednesdays meeting, Nadler said that unlike in the hearing room, Mr. Whitaker did not deny that the president called him to discuss the Michael Cohen case. Nadler also said after the meeting that Whitaker was directly involved in conversations about whether to fire one or more U.S. attorneys he did not say which ones and that he was involved in conversations about the Southern District of New Yorks case against Cohen and whether it might have gone too far. Nadler did not give details on those conversations. Collins said that Whitaker suggested the conversations about district attorneys were normal personnel issues, and to characterize those comments otherwise were an overreach and a stretch. Collins added that Whitaker said he hadnt had any conversations with officials in the Southern District of New York. According to the Republican aides, Whitaker said that those conversations were among other Justice Department staff and that Whitaker said he thought some of the claims in the campaign finance case were specious from a legal standpoint. Nadler said he wasnt sure what the next steps would be after hearing from Whitaker. He said the committee would analyze the revelations and see where they lead. At the February hearing, which was held while Whitaker was still acting attorney general, Democrats confronted him on his past criticism of special counsel Robert Muellers work and his refusal to recuse himself from overseeing it, attacked him over his prior business dealings and challenged his credentials as the countrys chief law enforcement officer. Nadler said after the public testimony that his answers were unsatisfactory, incomplete or contradicted by other evidence. In the letter sent to the Justice Department, Nadler said Whitaker didnt offer clear responses about his communications with the White House and was inconsistent about what questions he refused to answer. Whitaker left the Justice Department after Attorney General William Barr was confirmed Feb. 14. Trudeau apologizes for governments past mistreatment of Inuit with tuberculosis, March 8 Thousands of Inuit people suffered tuberculosis 40 to 50 years ago in Nunavut, largely the result of government indifference, and were forcibly removed, key indicators of the Canadian governments traditional genocidal policy against Indigenous people. The government forcibly separated and moved thousands of Inuit people south to various sanitariums in Ontario and Quebec. Today, very few Inuit know where their TB-stricken relatives are buried, and the government hasnt told them. I hasten to point out that TB is largely caused by overcrowding in substandard housing and inadequate or nonexistent health care. These Third-World conditions continue to exist in Nunavut and on most First Nation reserves across Canada. The Inuit and other Indigenous peoples dont need another apology and broken promise from Trudeau. They need and deserve action: liveable and affordable housing, safe drinking water, first-rate and accessible health care for themselves and their children. However, it appears unrealistic to expect this from Trudeau and his self-serving, neoliberal cabinet, who dont seem to give a damn. Don Weitz, Toronto Apologies are fine, but Ottawa should address high rates of TB in north now, editorial, March 11 Heres an idea to perhaps solve a couple of issues facing the Trudeau government. Your editorial said that $109 million over 10 years to eliminate tuberculosis in Inuit communities isnt good enough. And you are quite right. The prime minister has struggled to make the case that a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with SNC is preferable to criminal charges. Maybe the way out of both matters is to propose a DPA fine of $250 million, with $109 million of that going immediately to fund the TB fight. The balance of $141 million could be used to get immediate action on the need for 3,000 new public housing units in Nunavut. Your editorial says current levels of funding will take 60 years to complete that task. The only problem could be the word immediate. Governments are often unfamiliar with the sense of urgency that implies. According to Gerald Butts, the prime ministers former top aide, there were 9,000 jobs at risk if there was a successful prosecution of SNC-Lavalin, as the engineering company could lose its ability to contract with the federal government for 10 years. Somehow, I think the smart people at SNC-Lavalin would not have all their eggs in one basket, even when that government basket tends to have golden eggs. However, if that number is true, it means that Canada is giving one company hundreds of millions of dollars each year, and more likely billions of dollars. The real scandal here is not that there might have been improper pressure on the attorney general to make a decision, but rather the insane amount of tax dollars that are going to one company, at least according to what the prime minister and Butts have said. Robert Prior, Prince Edward County As the father and uncle of an engineer, I found Gerry Buttss and Justin Trudeaus excuse that they were protecting middle-class engineering jobs at SNC-Lavalin a bit rich. In fact, their policies of blocking Canadas biggest infrastructure project in history (the Energy East pipeline) due to Quebec politics, and indeed blocking energy industry initiatives at every turn, has directly killed many thousands more engineering and ancillary jobs in the Canadian oil patch, the steel pipeline business and their related suppliers. SNC-Lavalin has been found corrupt well beyond Libya, including the McGill superhospital and bridges in Quebec. Without contrition and consequences of bad behaviour, they should not be able to engineer an escape plan based on who they know (and lobbied) in the PMO. Richard M. Tattersall, Toronto Read more about: Most movies in the disaster genre involve two themes. The first is avoiding gruesome death at the hands of a world-ending force (aliens, infectious disease, whatever the hell that thing was in Bird Box). The second is family. In A Quiet Place, real-life and onscreen married couple John Krasinski and Emily Blunt must remain virtually silent in order to avoid being disembowelled by a species of gigantic insect-like creatures with hypersensitive ears. But you have to wonder if the pair would just give up and give themselves over to their bug invaders, were it not for their growing family: two kids and another one on the way. Blunts character is pregnant. Similarly in Bird Box, Sandra Bullock tries to prevent her blindfolded brood two petrified children from taking a peek at the outside world, an act tantamount to suicide. In The Day After Tomorrow, Dennis Quaid plays a climatologist who practically walks across the country amid the dawn of a new ice age in order to save his teenage son and, hopefully, repair their troubled relationship. The moral of these stories, it seems, is that apocalypse time is family time. And Ill admit, having grown up watching a lot of disaster movies, its difficult for me to imagine experiencing the end of the world without a couple of kids shouting are we there yet? from the back seat of a stolen car as we speed away from impending doom, toward a bunker of some kind. Its a good thing then that I dont belong to the growing movement of millennials who refuse to have children on account of real-life impending doom: climate change, and the long-term consequences thereof. Droughts, extreme heat, stronger hurricanes, food shortages, evermore wildfires, declining water supplies, panic: this is whats in store for us. Its not alien bugs but it will kill a great many people all the same. You have to be a fool (or the President of the United States) to deny it. Some would say you have to be a fool to procreate in the face of it. This week the Guardian profiled Blythe Pepino, founder of BirthStrike, a movement whose ethos will disappoint a lot of wannabe grandparents. From the groups Tumblr page: We, the undersigned, declare our decision not to bear children due to the severity of the ecological crisis and the current inaction of governing forces in the face of this existential threat. Many BirthStrikers say they want kids badly, but cant bring themselves to procreate when the future is so grim. They may not be alone. This month Business Insider released the results of a poll indicating nearly 30% of Americans either strongly agree, agree, or somewhat agree that a couple should consider the negative and potentially life-threatening effects of climate change when deciding whether or not to have children. Recently, Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez echoed these fears in an Instagram Live video: Theres a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult, she said. And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question: Is it okay to still have children? Probably not. But, God willing, Im going to have them anyway. Im going to have them because its never OK to have children, nor has it ever been OK. It wasnt OK during the Black Plague. It wasnt OK during the Spanish flu. It wasnt OK in times of famine and war, nor even during the Cold War. It certainly wasnt a good idea for my ancestors to have kids during the various pogroms in 19th-century Russia. But they did it anyway because thats what human beings do. Against logic, we breed. Or maybe there is some logic in it. Ironically, some of the most passionate, promising climate change activists today are kids themselves, whose parents clearly did not have qualms about procreation. This is why its hard not to question the motives of those who claim to want children but who refuse to have them in the face of climate change. Would they ever have kids, under any circumstance? Or is this a convenient excuse to put off what frightens them, irrespective of looming disaster? Or is it just virtue signalling plain and simple? The members of BirthStrike are adamant that their choice to abstain from procreation in light of climate change is personal, not judgmental. But if their official position is that abstaining from procreation is an ethical choice, doesnt it follow that choosing to have a family is an unethical one? Their stance is almost passive aggressive: Im not having kids because I want to spare my offspring immense pain in a dying world, but you do you. On the other hand, they could be on to something. Maybe theyre smart to forfeit one of lifes greatest joys if not for the sake of the planet, then for the sake of peace and quiet at the end of the world. Read more about: In the future, people will probably continue to marvel at how creatures with tiny brains once stalked the Earth unchallenged. For now, however, billionaires reign supreme, with only a small stirring of dissent, led by the impressive U.S. congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC. Still, that small stirring is noteworthy. It could catch on. The notion that it is somehow legitimate for a tiny group of humans to cordon off the bulk of the worlds bounty for themselves leaving billions of people begging on the street or scrounging through garbage dumps is fairly astonishing, on the face of it. The unfairness is compounded by the fact theres no evidence billionaires are particularly smart or talented, given that some 60 to 70 per cent of them inherited their wealth, according to the French economist Thomas Piketty. Todays extreme concentration of wealth is so palpably unfair the richest 26 individuals have as much wealth as the poorest half of humanity that it cries out for a powerful justification. Mega-billionaire Bill Gates seemed to produce a pretty powerful justification last month at the annual elite gathering in Davos a spectacular infographic showing that the world poverty rate had plummeted over the past two centuries, from 94 per cent to just 10 per cent today. This stunning finding, developed by economist Max Roser of Our World in Data, certainly casts billionaires in a more sympathetic light, as mere byproducts of an economic system that has significantly helped the worlds people, lifting most of humanity out of poverty. The finding has been keenly promoted by the Davos crowd as well as by high-profile commentators like New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. An upbeat Gates tweeted the infographic to his 46 million followers, adding: A lot of people underestimate just how much life has improved over the past two centuries. Easy for him to say. In fact, the claim that life has improved for most people collapses pretty quickly under scrutiny. Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, points out that poverty data before 1981 is sketchy, and data going as far back as the 1820s is meaningless. Thats because in earlier times, most people lived in subsistence economies; they had little or no money but had access to the rich natural resources of the common lands. But over time people were forced off the land by wealthy interests, and obliged to work for wages in mines and factories. Hickel notes that the new income people earned from wages didnt come anywhere close to compensating for their loss of land and resources. In other words, far from being a great boon, the arrival of modern capitalism has resulted in vast numbers of people being forced to give up a self-supporting existence and ending up as impoverished labourers, often malnourished and housed in grim, toiletless shacks. (Some 2.4 billion people lack a decent toilet, according to the World Health Organization.) Even in the four decades since 1981, theres been no decline in global poverty, Hickel insists. On the contrary, he says if we use a more meaningful poverty measure $7.40 U.S. a day, rather than the absurdly low $1.90 U.S. a day used by Roser the number of people living in poverty has dramatically increased, to 4.2 billion today, more than half the worlds population. The real story of todays global capitalism is better captured by Piketty. In his epic 577-page treatise, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he makes the case that capitalism leads to ever-increasing inequality. Depressing as Pikettys case is, it also includes a ray of hope. He notes that an exception occurred in the period following the Second World War (1945 to 1975) when equality actually increased. This was particularly true in the Anglo-American countries, largely due to the very progressive tax systems enacted by governments, notably in the Anglo-American countries, including Canada. So the campaign stirred up by AOC calling for a tax system similar to the early postwar years could actually make a difference, if the public started paying attention. Certainly, billionaire claims about capitalism heroically lifting humankind out of poverty turn out to be easily debunked. Imagine if that news got out. Read more about: OTTAWAAir Canada and WestJet are flying the new Boeing 737 Max aircraft exempt from regulatory standards meant to minimize passenger injuries in the event of an accident, the Star has learned. Transport Canada granted temporary exemptions in 2017 to allow the airlines to launch services with the Boeing 737 Max models and in December, extended the exemptions for both airlines for more than a year. The issue centres on new standards for the design of cabin furnishings, notably the seats, to reduce injuries to passengers during an accident. New commercial aircraft operating in Canada including the 737 Max aircraft are required to comply with what is known as head injury criterion (HIC). The rules were introduced to provide a higher level of safety for passenger protection in the event of a survivable aircraft accident, according to a Nov. 27, 2017 briefing note to Transport Minister Marc Garneau obtained through access to information. Questions have been raised about the safety of the Boeing 737 Max in the wake of two accidents. Following the latest crash on Sunday in Ethiopia, aviation regulators around the globe have grounded the aircraft until more is known about the cause of the crash and whether the two incidents are linked. On Tuesday, Garneau said he was looking at all potential actions about the operation of the aircraft in Canada. Read more: Boeing 737s continue to fly Canadian skies despite being grounded abroad Transport Minister Marc Garneau says he would board a Boeing 737 despite Ethiopian Airlines crash Ottawa considers all potential actions as it weighs safety of Boeing 737 Max aircraft The head injury criterion is meant to minimize casualties in the event of an accident, not to address the sort of concerns raised in recent days about the Boeing 737 Maxs autopilot system. Air Canada, WestJet and Sunwing have placed orders for a total of 120 Boeing 737 Max models but because of the timing of production, 26 of the aircraft would not comply with the design rules at the time of delivery. In August 2017, Transport Canada issued an exemption, valid until Jan. 1, 2019, to allow time for WestJet and Air Canada to bring their aircraft into compliance with the rules, which are harmonized with those in the U.S. and Europe. But the briefing note expresses frustration that carriers didnt appear to know about the looming changes. (Transport Canada) has consistently upheld HIC standards as part of our certificate regulations since the 1990s, it stated. The new Boeing 737 Max will be the backbone of Canadian airlines for the next several decades and will replace older aircraft now in use that dont meet the head injury criteria. Asked about the exemption this week, Transport Canada revealed that it has given the two carriers more time to comply. WestJet was given until June 30, 2020 and Air Canadas exemption was extended to Dec. 31, 2021. Sunwings single-class configuration already complies with the standards. The department said that such exemptions are only issued if they are unlikely to reduce the level of aviation safety. It said that alternative requirements or procedures are put in place to address any safety concerns. In a statement to the Star, the department blamed the problem on a difference in requirements between the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority and Transport Canada that was identified late in the production planning, after the affected operators had placed their orders. Boeing could not produce aircraft conforming to the Transport Canada-specified design for a multi-class cabin in time for delivery of the aircraft, it said. Air Canada placed its order for the Boeing 737 Max in 2014 and took delivery of its first aircraft in 2017. At the time the aircraft were ordered they did meet the standard, but the standard was subsequently changed and we have now been given time to retrofit the planes, spokesperson Peter Fitzpatrick said. WestJet did not respond to requests for comment. Transport Canada did reject the request from one of the carriers the airlines name is censored from the document for a permanent exemption from the new regulations for its Boeing 737 Max fleet. The company claimed they were not told when the new rules would come into effect when it signed its contract for the aircraft with Boeing. But Transport Canada shot back that the carrier in question should have known the rules. TC maintains that had many opportunities to become aware of and comply with Canadian certification and operating standards, and should have included HIC standards on their Boeing B737-MAX fleet, the note said. It bluntly stated that in a regulated environment, it is the responsibility of the regulated party to ensure that the fleet meet all regulatory requirements. The department is not prepared to accept as the only operator in North America flying a version of the 737-8 MAX that is less safe than all their Canadian and American competitors, the note said. Excusing one carrier from the regulation would give it unfair economic advantage over its competitors, it said. The new standards also affect how many flight attendants are on board. Only aircraft that comply with the new design standards will be allow to fly with fewer flight attendants one for every 50 passengers, compared with one to 40. It is expected with the added safety benefit of HIC seating, there will be fewer passenger injuries, which offsets the reduced number of attendants, the note said. Read more about: The SNC-Lavalin scandal shows no signs of dying down and neither does readers appetite for more details about what went on, why and how. We asked what you still want to know about the controversy and got hundreds of emails and messages in response. Here are the answers to some of the most common questions we received. We will update this story often. What is SNC-Lavalin accused of doing? It all started on Feb. 19, 2015, when the RCMP charged SNC-Lavalin and two subsidiaries with fraud and corruption over its actions in Libya, where the company made billions of dollars over years through public contracts. Police allege that between 2001 and 2011, the company bribed Libyan officials to the tune of nearly $47.7 million and defrauded various Libyan organizations of about $129.8 million. SNC-Lavalin pleaded not guilty. Read more: SNC-Lavalin spent $1.95M on escorts, booze for Libyan dictators son Fraud and bribery case thrown out against former SNC-Lavalin executive Arthur Porter says alleged SNC-Lavalin bribes were actually consulting pay What would a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) mean for SNC-Lavalin? A DPA would allow the corporation to avoid criminal prosecution if it pays fines and co-operates with authorities, similar to a plea deal for individuals charged with crimes. It was introduced in the Liberals omnibus budget bill last year. If an attorney general decides to intervene to offer a company a DPA, that decision or directive must be published in the Canada Gazette, the governments official record of decisions. Without a DPA, SNC-Lavalin would face a 10-year ban on federal contracts if convicted of the criminal charges it faces. The companys CEO, Neil Bruce, who took over in 2015, says it has turned over a new leaf and a prosecution would only punish innocent employees. Read more: Deal for SNC-Lavalin could still be on the table, says Trudeaus public services minister Heres what a 10-year ban on federal contract bids would mean for SNC-Lavalin Would 9,000 people actually lose their jobs if SNC-Lavalin were convicted of these criminal charges? Very likely not. SNC-Lavalin employs roughly 9,000 people in Canada, in a variety of roles. All of them would not disappear, experts say; the company pulling out of Canada entirely would be a worst-case scenario. Employees dedicated to projects other than federal contracts would be obligated to finish that work. Plus, experts say, even if thousands of Canadians lose their jobs at SNC-Lavalin, most of them would probably be hired by other companies. Read more: So, about those 9,000 SNC-Lavalin jobs What makes SNC-Lavalin so special? What about jobs lost at other companies? For one, a lot of jobs (theoretically see above) are at stake. For another, the Quebec-based company that employs so many people is a point of pride in the province a province whose votes are critical to any party that wants to win a federal election, particularly the Liberals who may lose seats in Alberta. Experts suggest there was more of an appetite for offering a DPA to SNC-Lavalin in Quebec, which would suffer the brunt of potential job losses. SNC-Lavalin is also a frequent lobbyist in Ottawa and was pushing for deferred prosecution agreements to be introduced to begin with. According to Bloomberg, CEO Neil Bruce or other executives had 59 meetings, calls or encounters with Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus inner circle over the past 12 months, according to Canadas lobbyist registry. That group included Finance Minister Bill Morneau and his chief of staff, Ben Chin, and Mathieu Bouchard, a senior adviser to Trudeau. All three were among the people Wilson-Raybould said had contacted her or her staff to advocate for SNC-Lavalin. Bruce also wrote to Public Services Minister Carla Qualtrough on Oct. 13, 2017, pressing the need for DPAs to put the Canadian company on equal footing with those in other countries that already had such legislation. The company was among the stakeholders involved in public consultations on the remediation tool. Bruce also wrote a letter to Trudeau about DPAs on Oct. 15, 2018. Read more: Meet SNC, the company that Trudeaus risking his career to save Why SNC-Lavalin is so important for Quebec and why Quebec matters so much to the Liberals SNC-Lavalin chief urged minister to change anti-corruption rules quickly Companies like SNC-Lavalin must be monitored for shady donations across Canada, B.C. watchdog says Canadas former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould said she was pressured by the Prime Ministers Office on the issue of SNC-Lavalin. What actually constitutes illegal pressure? First, Wilson-Raybould said she believes the pressure on her was inappropriate but not illegal. However, in February Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer called on the RCMP to investigate whether anyone broke the law in the SNC-Lavalin scandal. He pointed to two sections of the Criminal Code: one that prohibits conduct meant to provoke fear in the attorney general, and another that says its against the law to try to obstruct justice. Its a major allegation but its unclear whether any laws were actually broken in the SNC-Lavalin case. Read more: In the SNC-Lavalin affair, did anyone break the law? Was it interference? We asked experts to analyze Jody Wilson-Rayboulds statement on SNC-Lavalin What would the opposition parties have done in this situation? No one can say for sure, of course, but NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said in early March that he would never have let SNC-Lavalin hold sway over his government. Scheer, meanwhile, has been hammering the Trudeau government over the scandal, calling for a police investigation to determine whether there was illegal pressure on the attorney general. However, Scheer did meet with SNC-Lavalin CEO Neil Bruce in May 2018 to discuss the deferred prosecution agreement the company sought. Brock Harrison, Scheers director of communications, said the meeting was one of several SNC-Lavalin sought out and held with MPs from all parties during the budget debate. But when asked if Scheer thought SNC-Lavalin should get such a deal, Harrison would only say that Scheer is opposed to politicians interfering to get charges dropped for accused corporate criminals. Read more: Singh says he wouldnt have let SNC-Lavalin hold sway over him Andrew Scheer met with SNC-Lavalin chief over criminal charges How are other countries likely to react to this scandal and its implications? The allegations that Trudeau and senior officials tried to interfere in the criminal case against SNC-Lavalin have already caught the eye of an international economic organization that oversees global anti-bribery efforts. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) pointedly warned Canada about its obligations to safeguard independent prosecutions. We are not so much interested in the decision of the prosecutor, this agreement or not. That has to be an autonomous decision of the prosecutor which should not be influenced by anybody, said Drago Kos, the chair of the OECD working group on bribery. Read more: SNC-Lavalin scandal has global anti-bribery watchdog warning Canada What do you still want to know about the SNC-Lavalin affair? What do you hope our journalists will look into and report back to you? And what are you still confused about and wish was explained better? Ask us, and well try to find the answers. Email social@torstar.ca or leave us a message on Twitter or Facebook. Sahar Fatima is a Toronto Star digital producer. Follow her on Twitter: @sahar_fatima With files from Toronto Star staff, The Canadian Press, The Associated Press and Bloomberg Read more about: No one will accuse Transport Minister Marc Garneau of having rushed to judgment on whether to ground Boeing 737 Max 8 planes from Canadian air space until more is known about the causes of last Sundays Ethiopian Airlines crash. By the time Garneau appeared on Wednesday to announce he was reversing his earlier stance that the aircraft was safe to fly, just about every international ally of Canada with the exception of the United States had already grounded the plane. Garneau said he changed his mind on the basis of new information drawn from comparing the satellite-tracked paths of the two Max 8s that crashed. Perhaps, but sometimes fresh data can double as a fig leaf. For it is also a fact that by the time Canada joined most of the rest of the planet in grounding the aircraft, the federal position had become untenable. The plan to keep the planes airborne really started to falter as of the moment the European Union banned them from its airspace. That happened about 24 hours before Garneau held his news conference. Read more: New data on Boeing 737 Max 8 crossed the threshold in decision to ground planes, Garneau says Booked a flight for future travel? Heres how you can tell if you were on a Boeing 737 Max 8 and what you can do about it Whats the trouble with Boeing 737 Max planes? Heres what we know Based on information that Canada almost certainly had in hand at the time, countries with comparable air safety standards came to a very different conclusion. As of that point, hopes that Transport Canadas assurances would be enough to shore up the faith of rattled Canadian air travellers vanished. Any plan to use Garneaus scheduled press briefing to reinforce the message that there was nothing to fear from flying on 737 Max 8 aircraft was not going to cut it. With every passing hour the question became not if but when Canada would pivot to a different position. Indeed, the U.S followed suit a few hours later. By reversing his stance Garneau only narrowly avoided flying his government into a zone of political turbulence it is less than well equipped to navigate in the current crisis-mode state that has resulted from the SNC-Lavalin affair. He also spared himself what would likely have been a very acrimonious news conference. Given the grounding of the Boeing plane by just about every other international jurisdiction, he would have had a hard time defending Canadas outlier status. Reversing his position had become the path of least resistance and the only palatable option. That is not to say that Garneaus initial call was not the result of due diligence or even that in different circumstances at home and abroad, he might not have been inclined to stick to his guns. As an engineer and a former astronaut, the transport minister knows more about flying than the vast majority of Canadians, starting with those who sit alongside him in Justin Trudeaus government. This is not a politician who needs his officials to dumb down technical briefings so as to make them intelligible or who has to take lessons on air safety from his ministerial colleagues. But the rationality that Garneau exhibits in his tasks as a minister is combined with relatively short political antennas. Spatial intelligence is commonly defined as an ability to visualize with the minds eye. The transport minister undoubtedly brings an abundance of that intelligence to the task of assessing the expertise he is presented with but not so much to anticipating the political viability of his judgment calls. In this he is not alone in the current government. A regular feature of the political management, or in this case mismanagement style of the current Liberal team, has been an apparent incapacity to assess the probable consequences of a selected course of action. That inability has been front and centre in the ongoing SNC-Lavalin crisis, starting with the cabinet shuffle that set the affair off and including the Liberal stonewalling that prevented the justice committee on Wednesday from voting on whether to reinvite former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould for a second round of testimony. That stonewalling may well only delay the inevitable at a cost to the governments already fragile narrative that it has nothing to hide. The same lack of political foresight has been in evidence in the shovelling forward to an early grave of Justin Trudeaus signature promise of electoral reform; the small business revolt over a poorly communicated tax reform that was allowed to simmer until it boiled over and the prime ministers ill-fated staged trip to India, to name just those. In each and every case what has been most striking has not been the shortfalls of Trudeaus teams end game but the apparent absence of one. This is not as it is turning out a great way to run a responsive government. Looking at the upcoming campaign, a systemic inability to think ahead of the curve could well be a recipe for electoral disaster. Chantal Hebert is a columnist based in Ottawa covering politics. Follow her on Twitter: @ChantalHbert Read more about: Premier Doug Ford says Ontario is going back to the basics when it comes to education. While he wouldnt commit to keeping class sizes at their current levels, he said I think the people of this province will be quite thrilled when they see his governments education reforms, which are expected to be unveiled Friday. Ford made the comments in a wide-ranging press conference that touched on a number of things including the appointment of Thomas Carrique as OPP commissioner, the premiers request for a van, ousted PC MPP Randy Hillier and the upcoming changes to education. Were focusing on the students were making sure the students get the best education they can, Ford said at the press conference held Wednesday in Cambridge. I can tell you we are going back to the basics. Were going to make sure our students understand math, reading, arithmetic We need to put more training with our teachers, and focus on our students. Provincial math tests show scores have been dropping in recent years, which is part of a larger, global trend. Read more: Ford government bans cellphones from classrooms for noneducational purposes Opinion | Heather Mallick: The results show education is enemy number one for Premier Ford Ford government to boost school funding to deal with influx of students with autism Education Minister Lisa Thompson is set to announce changes to the math curriculum on Friday, which will fully come into effect in September 2021. Boards will hire a math learning lead, and the province will support 1,000 schools roughly one quarter of all elementary and secondary schools with extra numeracy help. It will also require all new teachers to pass a math knowledge exam before they can be certified to work in public schools, and require the provinces 16,000 middle-school teachers to earn additional qualifications in math. The government will also direct teachers to focus on fundamental concepts and skills and move away from discovery math. It will also boost online resources for students and parents. Thompson will also formally announce that as of this fall, cellphones are banned in classrooms unless teachers are using them for instructional purposes. On Wednesday, Ford was also asked about controversial appointment and recent withdrawal of family friend Ron Taverner to head the Ontario Provincial Police. The new commissioner, Carrique, was announced Monday. Sure, Im disappointed, about Taverner stepping down, the premier said. But we have a great commissioner in his place Ron is an incredible, incredible person. Hes going to continue working with Toronto police and do a great job like he always has. But were moving forward, we have a great commissioner and I wish him all the best. When asked about his offices request for a van, with modifications, to travel around in, Ford said reporters are the only ones talking about this the media just wants to keep dragging on and dragging on about a used van. A used van. He said previous premiers have made use of a plane, which he doesnt, but that means long hours in a vehicle. Im going to be in the car for nine hours today, he said. Id love to bring the media in the back of one of those cars, bent up like a pretzel for four or five hours. The OPP typically transport premiers in a Chevrolet Suburban SUV. On the turfing of Hillier from the PC caucus after it was alleged he made disrespectful comments to parents of children with autism though Hillier says they were directed at an New Democrat MPP Ford said I cant say I want him out, but I think we need a little time to run through a few things with Randy. Ill sit down with him and talk to him. Supporters of Hilliers have been advocating for the return of the Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston MPP to the Tory caucus. Read more about: The college admissions fraud scandal, which led to charges against more than 30 parents accused of cheating their children into elite universities, sparked a rare moment on social media Tuesday: thoughtful analysis and self-contemplation. Many Twitter personalities wrote that they didn't need a "fancy" college degree to succeed in life; others acknowledged the immense privilege that enabled them a spot at a top school. "The whole system of college admissions is broken," wrote Laurens Gunnarsen, one of many people tweeting about the inequity of the college admissions process. ALSO: How were students in admissions scandal able to cheat on SAT so easily? "Even after decision-makers have imposed (unreasonably) stringent threshold SAT and GPA requirements," he continued, "they're left with many thousands of applicants they cannot distinguish objectively." Actress Zoe Kazan issued a "casual reminder," raising the issue that "lots of upper middle class parents (perfectly legally) improve their kids' SAT scores by paying tutors to teach them to game the system." "Mine did," she added. Soul-searching aside, the scandal also inspired you guessed it hilarious memes, generally featuring actors Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, who were indicted Tuesday for their participation in the corrupt scheme. ALSO: Tweets by Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin take on new meaning after scandal One tweet features the opening sequence of "Full House" Loughlin appeared on the show as the aunt character, Rebecca, between 1988 and 1995 with the text, "If you squint, you can see Alcatraz." Another clever meme-maker created a March Madness-style bracket to determine who will play Felicity Huffman in the "College Cheating Film." Some jokes were more self-directed. Wrote journalist Ben Dreyfuss, the son of actor Richard Dreyfuss, "I got into college the old fashioned way: by letting my father's celebrity speak for itself." You can see more memes and reactions in the above gallery. Read Michelle Robertson's latest stories and send her news tips at mrobertson@sfgate.com. Start receiving breaking news emails on wildfires, civil emergencies, riots, national breaking news, Amber Alerts, weather emergencies, and other critical events with the SFGATE breaking news email. Click here to make sure you get the news. ALTON The RiverBend Growth Association (RBGA), the Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development Agency for the area known as the Riverbend, will host the next in its series of Economic Updates lunch meetings at the Alton Square Malls lower level beginning at 11:30 a.m. on March 20 concluding by 1 p.m. John Mulherin, Vice President of Government Relations with the Hull Property Group, the owners of Alton Square Mall, will be the guest speaker at the event. These are exciting times for the Alton Square Mall. I look forward to being able to share with you several items of interest and good things coming to the Mall. The transformation of the Mall is not yet complete and we have some good news to report along those lines, Mulherin reported. The Cookie Factory and Olgas are teaming up to serve lunch to those in attendance. The cost to attend will be $15 to members of the Growth Association and $18 to potential members. This will be a very informative meeting on the future of the Alton Square Mall and should answer a lot of the questions that folks have been asking about the site, I encourage you to attend and also ask any questions that you may have, said John Keller, President of the RBGA. You must RSVP to the luncheon on or by Monday, March 18 by visiting our website at www.growthassociation.com and clicking on the Economic Updates tab on the homepage, or by calling the RBGA at 618-467-2280. The Hull Property Group is a full service retail real estate company headquartered in Augusta, Georgia. Founded in 1877 by James M. Hull, the company has grown to be one of the largest privately owned real estate companies in the United States with an owned portfolio of in excess of 14.5 million-square-feet. Courtesy of Jan Dona | L&C Media Services GODFREY Lewis and Clark Community College will host its annual Job Fair this spring, hoping to match students and community residents with employers from throughout the region. The fair is open to the public and will be held from 9 a.m. to noon, Wednesday, April 3, in The Commons on the colleges Godfrey Campus. WASHINGTON - Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee will allow Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to answer questions in writing about his inaccurate financial report rather than face public questioning on the matter at an upcoming hearing. Democrats agreed to the billionaire's request about his 2018 financial disclosure form that the U.S. government's top ethics watchdog said violated his ethics agreement, according to correspondence between the two parties, which was obtained by The Washington Post. The oversight entity, known as the Office of Government Ethics, ruled in mid-February that Ross had inaccurately reported stock holdings on his 2018 financial disclosure form, claiming he had sold them when he had not. Democrats on the panel asked Ross, one of President Donald Trump's wealthiest Cabinet officials, for more information about those inaccuracies in a February letter. But Ross told the panel he's not ready to answer questions on the matter. Democrats may try anyway, but they'll allow him to submit responses for the record. "If you believe you are not prepared to answer questions related to your own financial disclosures, the committee will allow you to provide responsive information for the record, and I will make a statement to this effect at the hearing," Cummings wrote to Ross in a March 6 letter. Oversight panel Democrats, according to the letters, were also interested in asking Ross about the top Trump administration officials' move to sell nuclear power plants to Saudi Arabia over the objections of top national security officials. Ross asked not to speak of that topic. Ross also tried in recent days to postpone the Oversight hearing to April 9, according to the correspondence. But Oversight investigators responded that the hearing had been scheduled for months and that Ross had plenty of time. "The committee invited you to testify on January 8, 2019 - more than nine weeks ago - and you have had more than enough time to prepare," Cummings wrote to Ross, listing six dates and separate conversations in which Democrats say Ross' staff confirmed his appearance. The Commerce Department and a spokesman for the Oversight Committee declined to comment. House Democrats are expected to question Ross on Thursday about the Trump administration's decision to add a citizenship question on the 2020 census. Cities and states have sued the administration, declaring the addition of the citizenship question unconstitutional. The Supreme Court decided last month to take up the issue. A lower federal court in California ruled against the citizenship question days ago. House Democrats worry that the move is aimed at intimidating immigrants and will have a chilling effect on reporting, giving the census an inaccurate picture of population. Such depressed response rates would likely affect Democratic-leaning areas and could mean fewer seats for the party in the House. Additionally, Democrats want to question Ross about why he originally blamed the Justice Department for the new census question. Court records, they say, suggest Ross personally coordinated on the matter with ex-Trump official Stephen Bannon, an immigration hard-liner. A flight was forced to turn around after a passenger claimed to have left her baby in the terminal. The Saudia plane returned to the airport not long after taking off when a woman claimed her child was still on the ground, according to Gulf News. According to the mother, her baby was still in the boarding area of the terminal at King Abdul Aziz International Airport. Pilots for Flight SV832, from Jeddah to Kuala Lampur, spoke with air traffic controllers about the return making sure it was safe. May God be with us. Can we come back or what? said the pilot to the air controller. In video, that has since gone viral, the operator can be heard chatting with someone. This flight is requesting to come back. A passenger forgot her baby in the waiting area, the poor thing, the operator says in the video, according to Gulf News. Confused the operator asks the pilot again for the reason. We told you, a passenger left her baby in the terminal and refuses to continue the flight, the pilot says. Then the operator says, OK, head back to the gate. This is totally a new one for us. The flight was able to return to the terminal. A Jacksonville man has been sentenced to 10 years after pleading guilty to a criminal sexual assault charge. Joseph T. Wisniewski, 46, of Jacksonville entered into an agreement March 5 in which he pleaded guilty to criminal sexual assault of a family member under age 18, States Attorney Gray Noll said Wednesday. He withdrew his plea of not guilty and entered into a guilty plea for 10 years in the Department of Corrections, Noll said. Wisniewski will be required to serve 85 percent of his sentence, Noll said. The sentencing range was four to 15 years. He will receive credit for 102 days served, according to court records. Jacksonville Police investigated Wisniewski and charges were filed by the states attorney Nov. 26, Noll said. According to the information filed by Assistant States Attorney Chad Turner, Wisniewski committed the offense of criminal sexual assault around June through October when he committed an act of sexual penetration with the victim. Wisniewski originally faced a charge of unlawful possession of child pornography that was dismissed as part of the plea agreement. According to Noll, Wisniewski has one prior felony conviction, but no prior sex offenses. Wisniewski will be required to register as a sex offender. He will be on mandatory supervised release for at least three years when he has finished serving his sentence, Noll said. For sex offenses, the state Department of Corrections does an evaluation at the end of three years to determine whether an offender should remain under supervision for longer. Wisniewski was also fined $500 fine and must pay court costs. At a tumultuous special session of its General Conference held last month in St. Louis, delegates voted to strengthen the United Methodist Churchs ban on same-sex marriage and ordination of LGBT clergy. The Traditional Plan, which upholds this ban, passed 53 to 47 percent. About 43 percent of the Conferences delegates were from abroad, particularly Africa where LGBT rights have little support. Their votes, combined with those of American conservatives, ensured the passing of the Traditional Plan. Many American members of the UMC, which is our nations second-largest Protestant denomination, had hoped their church would become a more welcoming place for members of the LGBT community. Methodists In New Directions (MIND), which describes itself as a grassroots organization of United Methodists working to end our denominations doctrinal prejudice and institutional discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, now regards itself as more relevant than ever. Its Facebook page features news about Church of the Village, a UMC congregation in New York City. Church of the Village has proclaimed, We denounce the immoral decision of the global United Methodist Church at General Conference. Church of the Village intends to continue to stand with LGBTQI+ persons. If the UMC indeed splits apart, it wont be the first time this denomination has splintered over a volatile issue. Although John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, opposed slavery, American Methodists split over this very issue in 1844. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, members of the Methodist Episcopal Church North fought for the Union, while members of the Methodist Episcopal Church South fought for the Confederacy, which had slavery as its cornerstone. While the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, Northern and Southern Methodists didnt reunite until 1939. Just a year after the Methodist church split, the Baptist denomination also divided along regional lines over the issue of slavery. Unlike the Methodists, however, the Baptists have never reunited. The Northern Baptist Convention became the American Baptist Convention in 1950. In 1972, it changed its name to American Baptist Churches USA. Throughout much of its existence, the Southern Baptist Convention strongly opposed racial equality and civil rights. A 2015 article in The Economist noted that members of First Baptist Church in Oxford, Mississippi on April 21, 1968 voted to exclude black people from their congregation. Ironically, these devout Christians made this decision just a few weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. They also refused to allow their church bus be used to carry black children. Tragically, this church was by no means unique. Wayne Flynt, professor emeritus in the history department at Auburn University, descried the Southern Baptist denomination as our nations last bastion of segregation. Americas largest denomination eventually mustered the courage to admit that it had been wrong and took measures to atone for the harm it had done. The Southern Baptist Convention in 1995 denounced its racist origin and publicly apologized for its longtime support for segregation and opposition to civil rights. Seventeen years later, the Southern Baptists elected their first black president. The Southern Baptist Convention showed us that an organizations history neednt determine its future and that policies seemingly etched into stone can be erased. Will the United Methodist Church someday drop its opposition to same-sex marriage and ordination of LGBT clergy? Its more than merely possible. In fact, its quite likely. In the meantime, Methodists who were disappointed by the St. Louis vote have the option of joining the United Church of Christ, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Episcopal church or some other LGBT-friendly denomination. They can even create a breakaway Methodist church that embodies their values. Frankly, I hope they choose to remain in the UMC and continue to speak truth to power. They can be the catalysts that eventually transform an entire denomination. John J. Dunphys latest book, Unsung Heroes of the Dachau Trials, includes interviews with veterans of the U.S. Army 7708 War Crimes Group, who apprehended and prosecuted Nazi war criminals after World War II. The InternationalWomens Coffee Alliance (IWCA) Uganda Chapter is part of a global network ofself-organized, self-governing women aimed at advocating for the reduction ofbarriers for women in coffee producing countries by providing access toresources while creating a forum through which women connect with othersthroughout the coffee value chain. IWCA Uganda Chapter started in 2010, withthe goal developing a strong and visible network of women in the coffeeindustry who can share their experiences, resources and contacts with othersthroughout IWCA chapters in producing and consuming countries. This internship is intended to familiarize theintern with the organizations system.It will also benefit the intern with an understanding ofmultidimensional activities in the field of climate resilience, environment andsustainable development. The placement will impart practical knowledge andskills to the interns theoretical knowledge of international developmentissues climate resilience and the environment. The PetroleumAuthority of Uganda (PAU) is a statutory body established under Section 9 ofthe Petroleum (Exploration, Development and Production) Act 2013, and in linewith the National Oil and Gas Policy for Uganda which was approved in 2008. ThePAUs mandate is to monitor and regulate the exploration, development andproduction, together with the refining, gas conversion, transportation andstorage of petroleum in Uganda. This includes ensuring that petroleumoperations in Uganda are carried out in accordance with the relevant laws,regulations, guidelines, statutes and in line with international best practicefor the petroleum industry. Oxfam is aninternational confederation of 17 affiliates networked together in more than 90countries committed to ridding the world of poverty and injustice. To achievethis, we support local projects in developing countries, we lobby governmentsand companies to take into account the interests of the poorest people and wecampaign to involve citizens in our work. We implement our programs by workingwith local NGO partners and civil society organizations and engaging withprivate sector and governments. Oxfam employs over 6,000 people worldwide inmore than 90 countries. In Uganda, our program is anchored on three broadthemes deliberately focused on Womens Rights: Resilient Livelihoods,Governance and Accountability and Humanitarian Preparedness and Response. Touched by the compassion of the nurses who tended to her... Saryu Nayyar, CEO of Gurucul Saryu Nayyar is the CEO of Gurucul, a company that specialises in user and entity behavior analytics, identity analytics, fraud analytics and cloud security analytics. Nayyar is an internationally recognised cyber security expert, author, speaker and member of the Forbes Technology Council. She has more than 15 years of experience in the information security, identity and access management, IT risk and compliance, and security risk management sectors. She has held leadership roles in security products and services strategy at Oracle, Simeio, Sun Microsystems, Vaau (acquired by Sun) and Disney. Nayyar also spent several years in senior positions at the technology security and risk management practice of Ernst and Young. She is passionate about building disruptive technologies and has several patents pending for behavior analytics, anomaly detection and dynamic risk scoring inventions. She talks to THE WEEK about how critical insider security threats are and also about the importance of fraud analytics in controlling them. What are the latest trends with regard to the insider security threats in an organisation? How easy is it detect such threats? Insider threats are the biggest cyber security problem for companies today because they can cause the most damage and are much harder to detect and prevent. Insiders are just thatinsiders with keys to the kingdom. They know where the sensitive company or customer data is and who has access to it, so they know exactly where to strike if they decide to take action. Cyber criminals use automated hacking tools continuously to attempt to breach an organisation. And, when they do break in, they still need to surveil the network to find the data worth exfiltrating. Insiders are already in the network and know where the proverbial gold bars are stored and who has the keys. All they need to do is find a way to access those keys or use the ones they have. Earlier companies would put in Data Loss Prevention (DLP) systems and web proxies. These restrict users from being able to email attachments, use USB drives and from going to cloud based file sharing sites. Unfortunately, security officers found out that applying these controls to every employee would have catastrophic impact to their business. Imagine not being able to send wire information between banks, or sharing a list of new employees with your insurance provider. We would have to go back to FAX machines or the USPS, and business would be slowed to a snails pace. Our organisation has worked on a behaviour and risk analytics solution that allows you to apply different controls to different risk profiles within your organisation and automate front line security controls. Despite so much foolproof security, breaches still do happen? Do you feel that organisations need to do something extra in order to make their systems secure? Yes, organisations need to triage: they need people, processes and technology to fight the cyber criminals. People need to be aware of the pitfalls and provide insight into their own behaviours. There is one capability that uniquely provides for insider threat and detection and deterrence: the self-audit. Users are provided a self-audit much like a credit card statement to view their own risk-ranked anomalous activities, identities, access, devices and other key data points in an easy to use web portal. What kind of frauds are happening of late which are difficult to catch and are resulting in heavy financial losses for the customers? We see cyber criminals recruiting insiders to execute fraudulent tactics. Insiders already have access to the 'keys to the kingdom'. Criminals prey on vulnerable insiders to get them to provide privileged access to financial systems or data, and to execute fraudulent transactions on their behalf. They may get insiders to execute small transactions that fly under the radar since the amounts are not enough to set off alarms with the legacy fraud detection systems. However, Fraud Analytics will flag these high volume, low amount transactions as anomalous and risky, thereby triggering an investigation. One needs to be able to marry legacy fraud detection solutions with machine learning based fraud analytics to detect and stop cross channel fraud attempts by cyber criminals or insiders. As they say there is no end to human greed which despite all the security systems in place will surely result in financial or online frauds? Does technology have an answer to this? Sadly, there is no single answer, no silver bullet. There is no single solution. You absolutely need to use multiple technologies to address the fraud problem. We recommend combining legacy fraud solutions with machine learning based fraud analytics for detecting fraud across siloed channels. In addition, you need to detect and stop insider threats as insiders can perform the most damage. We like to say you can steal an identity, but you cant steal behaviour. Behaviour is the tell. We have developed machine learning models that detect the intent for an insider to commit fraudulent activity. Our models look for the smallest change in behaviours and start monitoring anomalous activities by insiders to stop fraud before it happens. You need machine learning and security analytics to be able to detect and stop such fraudulent behaviour at scale. How vulnerable are the new connected systems such as IoT, Machine Learning and AI? Will more digitization result in more security threats in the future? The future use cases we are discussing with our customers are on the IoT (Internet of Things) side. Threat intelligence feeds need to be integrated with other monitoring systems to detect anomalies in a better, more effective way. With User and Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA), you can detect threats or vulnerabilities around the IoT platforms since IoT devices are entities. We have developed and deployed machine learning models around detecting IoT-related vulnerabilities or threats. Prior to that it was almost manual. What kind of new security threats which we may see in the near future that may prove to be detrimental to organisations and the general public? There will always be new ways of breaching organisations. However, they will all be based on security threat vectors we have already seen: ransomware, zero day threats, account compromise, malware, phishing schemes, malvertisements, call center fraud, insider threats and the like. We anticipate there will be a greater volume of security threats being delivered at an exponential pace since criminals will be leveraging machine learning to execute their campaigns. With this in mind, one absolutely needs to be fighting machine-based threats with machine-based defenses. Behaviour based security analytics is at the forefront of machine-based defenses. Cyber criminals are continuously trying to breach your defences. You need to put in place technologies that deliver continuous defence. Hollywood actor Johnny Depp had been embroiled in a controversy after his ex-wife Amber Heard accused him of domestic abuse last year, in an op-ed penned in the Washington Post. Things seem to have turned around, however, with Depp suing Amber for $50 million for defamation. Depp's lawsuit referred to Heard's allegations as a 'hoax' and has presented new evidence that it was actually Depp who was physically abused in the marriage, and not the other way around. "Ms. Heard also knew that her elaborate hoax worked: As a result of her false allegations against Mr. Depp, Ms. Heard became a darling of the #MeToo movement, was the first actress named a Human Rights Champion of the United Nations Human Rights Office, was appointed ambassador on women's rights at the American Civil Liberties Union, and was hired by L'Oreal Paris as its global spokesperson," the lawsuit stated. Depp's legal team have provided fresh evidence alleging Heard punched Depp in the face and and chopped a part of his finger. The new video and photographic evidence submitted show Depp's face with a huge bruise, and one of his fingers severed. Depp also submitted 87 surveillance camera videos to the court and 17 depositions of witnesses, including police officers. This new development has brought around a change in attitude towards Depp on social media. Fans have been apologising to the actor for accusing him of abuse. According to reports, Depp is 'overwhelmed' with this outpouring of support. Jawaharlal Nehru University students leader Shehla Rashid Shora is all set to join the political party being launched by Shah Faesel, a former IAS topper from Jammu and Kashmir. Reliable sources told THE WEEK that Shora, who hails from Srinagar, has decided to join Faesal's party after serious negotiations. According to sources, the new party will be launched during a function at Srinagar's Indoor Stadium on Sunday. ''We are expecting around 20,000 people to attend the launching ceremony,'' sources close to Faesal told THE WEEK. ''Our party will be named as J&K People's Movement.'' Faesal and Shora were first expected to join the National Conference (NC), but sensing discontent among his supporters over the move, Faesal later decided to float his own party. He, however, delayed the launch even as his move for crowd funding for the party received a good response from his supporters. Sources said Shora will be given an important position in J&K People's Movement and will be involved in key decision making. She has been tasked with mobilising support for the party among the youth in Kashmir, especially Srinagar. Shora would be the front runner candidate from J&K Peoples Movement for Lok Sabha and assembly polls, said sources. The 31- year-old is a former vice-president of the JNU Student Union. At present, she is pursuing a Ph.D in Technology and Citizen-State Relations at the premier institute. She came into limelight after JNU students Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya were arrested in February 2016 for protesting against the execution of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru. The three were accused of shouting anti-national slogans on the campus. Shora led the students agitation demanding the release of the students. She has been a bitter critic of the Bharatiya Janata Party government at the Centre and its policies towards minorities and Kashmir. She has also been vocal on social media about various issues, especially the human rights situation in Jammu and Kashmir. Union Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal, on Wednesday, appealed to the Sikh community to stand by PM Modi and the BJP. "Finally we're getting justice for 1984. Finally, we're getting Kartarpur Sahab corridor, if you don't stand by PM Modi and this government, I can assure that the Congress and the Gandhi family will derail this on some pretext of talks and terror," she told ANI. "If Punjab was divided, it was Jawaharlal Nehru's decision. That border could easily have been 2km more. To suppress the Sikhs and to demoralize them, after Jawaharlal Nehru broke Punjab, Indira Gandhi came and attacked the Golden temple. "[Indira Gandhi] killed thousands of innocents there. Then comes her son Rajiv Gandhi who then for his political reasons massacres millions of Sikhs all over. And now Rahul Gandhi speaks the language of Pakistan," she said. In December, PM Modi had said that Kartarpur was in Pakistan today because then Congress leaders had no idea about the importance of Guru Nanak Dev and had no respect for Sikh sentiments. "The credit of the Kartarpur corridor goes to your vote. Correcting Congress mistakes was my destiny," he said. The foundation stone for the much-awaited corridor linking Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Pakistan's Kartarpur the final resting place of Sikh faith's founder Guru Nanak Dev to Dera Baba Nanak shrine in India's Gurdaspur district was laid the same month. -Inputs from PTI Nepal's newly appointed Ambassador to India, Nilambar Acharya, presented his credentials to President Ramnath Kovind in New Delhi on Wednesday. The seat of Nepal envoy was lying vacant for a long time ever since Deep Kumar Upadhyay resigned from the post in 2017. Acharya, like Upadhyaya, is a political person. He was the minister for law, justice and parliamentary affairs, as well as labour and social welfare in the interim government of 1990. A graduate from Moscow University, Acharya has also served as Nepal's envoy to Sri Lanka. He was a member of the Eminent Person's Group on India-Nepal Relations when his name was proposed for ambassadorship. Acharya's appointment as the ambassador to India last month came as a surprise given that the left leaning politician had joined the Nepal Congress which is not part of the ruling coalition. The government had first considered Nepal's former chief election commissioner Neelkantha Uprety, but there were reservations with his associations with certain organisations. The post of ambassador to New Delhi is important for Nepal, given the importance of India to the Himalayan nation's economy and security. However, it remained vacant for long. Upadhyay had two tenures, the first one ended in the summer of 2016, when prime minister O.P. Sharma Oli felt he was plotting against him. When Prachanda became prime minister some months later, Upadhyay was reinstated. But Upadhyay, who is from Nepal Congress, resigned in October 2017 to return to Kapilvastu, his home in the Terai region of Nepal and concentrate on his political career. Apart from Acharya, envoys of five other countries also presented their credentials to the president. These include Juan Monsalve of Chile, Eleonora Dimitrova of Bulgaria, Asein Isaev of Kyrgyz Republic, Thomas Selby Pillay of Seychelles and Zoran Jankovic of Montenegro. Pakistani jets went supersonic while flying across PoK's Poonch, almost 10km from the LoC, ANI reported on Wednesday. The movement was caught on Indian radars, and the defence systems are all on high alert, the news agency reported, quoting government sources. THE WEEK could not independently verify the claims. Indian air defence radars detected two Pakistani Air Force jets go supersonic 10KM from LoC (within their territory) in the Poonch sector, loud bangs heard last night in the area were due to sonic booms. All Indian air defences and radar systems are on high alert pic.twitter.com/PHmKAuPtvc ANI (@ANI) March 13, 2019 Tensions escalated between the two nuclear-armed neighbours after a suicide attack in Jammu and Kashmir resulted in the death of more than 40 CRPF soldiers. The IAF, using its Mirage 2000 fighter jets, carried out a retaliatory strike on a major training camp of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) days after. This resulted in a tense stand-off and aerial engagement between the two nations. Japanese space agency Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is planning a moon landing by 2029 and wants its astronauts to explore the lunar surface in a Toyota. JAXA and Toyota on Tuesday announced that they will collaborate on international space exploration. The Japanese auto major is developing a manned, pressurised rover that uses Toyota's fuel cell vehicle (FCV) technology. Koichi Wakata, JAXA vice president, said that the agency is aiming to launch the rover into space in 2029. An FCV is a type of electric vehicle that uses a fuel cell of oxygen and compressed hydrogen instead of using a battery. Oxygen and compressed hydrogen react with each other to generate electricity. The zero-emissions technology is already used on Toyota's Mirai sedan. Toyota's proposed lunar rover will use zero-emission electric fuel cell technology | JAXA & Toyota Motor Corporation Toyotas space mobility concept for the pressurised rover is the size of two microbuses. It envisions a 6-metre by 5.3-metre vehicle standing 3.8-metre tall, which is enough for two. The rover would have a total lunar surface cruising range of more than 10,000 km. The moon presents many special challenges for any vehicle like gravity which is one-sixth of Earth's, and the lunar surface is full of craters, cliffs, and hills. Toyota is known for its all-terrain vehicles, which are considered to be one of the best. However, one has to wait to till 2029 to know what a Toyota "all-terrain moon rover" is like. New Delhi, Mar 13 (PTI) In a scathing attack on the Congress party's first family, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday said if a forensic audit of their "capital creation" is conducted, the facts will speak for themselves. Referring to a report on a web portal on "unjust enrichment of the extended Gandhi family", Jaitley said while conventionally many may have relied on straightway corruption through bribery, a new methodology has now been established. "Wheeler-dealers and fly-by-night operators give you the privilege of 'sweetheart deals'. With very little investment, windfall profits are thrust on a few privileged ones to enable them to create a capital. " 'Political equity' results in buying goodwill. It enables you to influence decisions," said Jaitley who heads the BJP's publicity committee for the ensuing general elections. Without elaborating, Jaitley in his blog said, "When exposed", the beneficiaries hide behind the shield of 'clever business decisions'. "If the 'capital creation' of the Congress Party's first family is subjected to a forensic audit, facts will speak for themselves. Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones," the senior BJP leader wrote. He made these remarks in a blog titled 'Is Prime Minister Modi's First Five-Year Tenure a Turning Point on Corruption?'. This was his third blog in the series 'Agenda 2019'. Endorsing Jaitley's blog, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a tweet said, "No place for middlemen. No tolerance for corruption. No fake beneficiaries swindling away recourses. This is a New India. We have worked hard to remove corruption and punish the corrupt." Earlier in the day, the BJP dragged Congress president Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra into alleged corruption involving land deals, claiming the opposition party known for "institutionalising" graft, has now come to define "family corruption". Citing a media report, Union minister Smriti Irani told reporters that Robert Vadra is "merely a mask" in the controversial land deals and his brother-in-law Rahul Gandhi is the "real face". Dismissing the allegations, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said, "Facing imminent defeat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his favourites are resorting to levelling completely baseless and fake allegations". At a press conference, Irani said, "The country has come to know that the brother-in-law (Rahul) is also involved with his 'jija' (Robert Vadra) in this family package of corruption". Referring to the online report, Irani claimed that Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra purchased land in a deal involving H L Pahwa, who was raided by the Enforcement Directorate, and Mahesh Kumar Nagar, who also had a role in land transaction involving Robert Vadra. The five-year term of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Jaitley said, will be regarded by future political historians as a turning point where a movement to free India from corruption began. He said that during the Congress-led UPA regime India was considered, by both domestic and international investors, as one of the most corrupt nations in the world. "The government (led by Modi) and its ministers have conclusively proved that it is possible to run an honest government in India. Not a single charge of any substance has been made against the government," Jaitley said. He further said India has understood that corruption follows the law of Newtons gravitational pull. "It travels from top to bottom and not the other way round. If the leader at the top is honest and has the capacity to ensure similar ethical standards from his colleagues, the moral authority of the Government to ensure integrity travels through the system," he said. The message today to those who operated improperly in the system are getting to realise that it is safer to be clean, he said while adding that is the difference between Modi's NDA government and its predecessor UPA. Also in sharp contrast to the Commonwealth Games held here in 2010, which were marred by allegation of corruptions, the just concluded Kumbh in Prayagraj is an "excellent illustration" of how public funds can be effectively and honestly used, Jaitley remarked. PTI NKD CS MR MR London, Mar 13 (AFP) Britain will slash import tariffs in case of a no-deal Brexit and will not apply customs checks on the border with Ireland, the government said on Wednesday. Under the new system, which would come into force if Britain leaves the EU on March 29 without an agreement, tariffs would be retained but reduced for some agricultural products to protect British producers. The new regime is aimed at avoiding a jump in prices of EU imports for consumers and a disruption of supply chains, and is intended to be temporary for up to 12 months pending negotiations on a more permanent system. "If we leave without a deal, we will set the majority of our import tariffs to zero, whilst maintaining tariffs for the most sensitive industries," Trade Policy Minister George Hollingbery said. "This balanced approach will help to support British jobs and avoid potential price spikes that would hit the poorest households the hardest," he said. Tariffs on beef, lamb, pork, poultry and some dairy would be reduced but retained in most cases. In the auto sector, the government said carmakers reliant on European Union supply chains would not face additional tariffs for car parts imported from the EU but tariffs would apply on imported cars. The new regime would not apply to countries with which Britain already has a free trade agreement and to around 70 developing countries that have preferential access to the British market. The government said it would not apply a tariff regime and customs border on goods transiting across the land border from Ireland to Northern Ireland but admitted that this created a "potential for exploitation" if those goods are then transported across the sea to mainland Britain for sale. "This regime is only temporary as we recognise that there are challenges associated with this approach, including the unmonitored flow of goods into the UK and the potential for exploitation of any new system," the government said in a statement. "The government is committed to entering into discussions with the European Commission and the Irish government as a matter of urgency," it said. (AFP) RUP (Eds: Disclaimer: The following press release comes to you under an arrangement with PR Newswire. PTI takes no editorial responsibility for the same.) CHENNAI, March 13, 2019/PRNewswire/ -- A mega B2B gem and jewellery extravaganza by UBM India, with a special focus on South India's repertoire The March edition of the three day expo, Chennai Jewellery and Gem Fair ( CJGF ) organized by Chennai Jewellers Association and UBM India, the nation's leading B2B events organizer, successfully concluded on 10th March 2019, at the Chennai Trade Centre. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/675607/UBMLogo.jpg ) (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/828492/CJGFMarchLogo.jpg ) (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/832873/UBMCGF2019Inauguration.jpg ) (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/834851/CJGFMarch_edition.jpg ) Chief Guest Shri Vishal Krishna, Actor, Producer, Secretary General for Nadigar Sangam, and President of Producer Council, Anti - Piracy Activist; along with key dignitaries Mr. Yogesh Shah President, Chennai Jewellers Association; Mr. Uday Vummidi Vice President, Chennai Jewellers Association; Mr. Rajesh Vummidi, Honourable Secretary and Chairman of Chennai Jewellers Association; Mr. Sultan Mohideen, Vice President, Chennai Jewellers Association; Mr. Yogesh Mudras, Managing Director, UBM India and Mr. Abhjit Mukherjee, Group Director, UBM India inaugurated the show amidst an august industry gathering. The fair is recognised as an integral part of the jewellery sector by the 600+ associations from Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, and other Indian states and the industry at large, with support from eminent associations namely CJA, the Diamond Association Bangalore ( DAB ), All Kerala Gold & Silver Merchants Association (AKGSMA), Surat Jewellery Manufacturers Association (SJMA), Gems & Jewellery Association of Rajkot and the The Jewellers's Association ( JAB ). The three-day expo is South India's largest International B2B show that saw participation of over 100 exhibitors and over 30 luxury brands, showcasing the latest trends in this glittering domain. It was represented by wholesalers, retailers, importers and exporters, jewellery manufacturers, machinery manufacturers, diamond, gemstone and pearl suppliers and traders, precious metal and jewellery mounting traders and suppliers, and trade and governmental bodies. Speaking on the successful completion of CJGF, Mr. Yogesh Mudras, Managing Director, UBM India said, "Opportunities are plentiful in the Gems and Jewellery sector which is also export-oriented and labour intensive, making India the hub of the global jewellery market. Hence, we plan to foray into this sector in an even more comprehensive manner. As South India's mega B2B jewellery extravaganza, UBM India through CJGF takes pride in its role of providing a micro ecosystem for jewellery professionals and creating an international trading platform enabling jewellery, diamond, pearl and gemstone suppliers to congregate, interact and network with stakeholders, both local and international." "This edition too, we received an overwhelming response and we would like to further express our gratitude to all the jewellery associations in the South who have sincerely and readily provided complete support to our endeavour," he further added. A stunning array of heritage jewellery that included Temple Nakshi Jewellery, Stone Studded Jewellery, and Bridal Jewellery such as Manga Malai, Kasu Mala, and Pachhi Designs modified by the contemporary touch was on display. CZ Jewellery, Casting Jewellery, Hollow chains, exclusive Men's jewellery and seasonal trending jewellery such as pearls, multi layered neckpieces, arm cuffs, and bejewelled brooches along with the latest machinery used in the manufacturing process and other related products and services were also showcased. Some of the key highlights of the expo were the Artisans' Zone that featured innovative creations of artisans and designers who made distinctive jewellery including miniature products. The expo also showcased a 'Hall of Fame' which displayed unique products and designs. Knowledge seminars included discussions on topics such as 'Identifying the Colour Stones' and 'Awareness on Natural and Synthetic Colour Stones' by All Gem Lab London LLP. A number of world-class features such as Gold, Silver, Gem Stones, Machinery and Luxury Pavilions were graced by key stakeholders and celebrities. The CJGF is one of the five-city jewellery shows (Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi) that will be hosted throughout the year by UBM India. Internationally, UBM plc organises the World's Biggest Jewellery Trade Event - The Hong Kong Jewellery & Gem Fair. About CJGF: CJGF is a bi-annual event, strategically taking place in October and March every year will be organized by UBM, which in June 2018 combined with Informa PLC to become a leading B2B information services group and the largest B2B Events organiser in the world. Please visit https://chennai.jewelleryfair.in/mar for more information on the CJGF and http://www.ubm.com/global-reach/ubm-asia for our presence in Asia. About UBM Asia: UBM Asia recently became part of Informa PLC, a leading B2B information services group and the largest B2B Events organiser in the world. Please visit http://www.ubm.com/asia for more information about our presence in Asia. Source: UBM India Pvt. Ltd. PWR PWR (Eds: Disclaimer: The following press release comes to you under an arrangement with Business Wire India. PTI takes no editorial responsibility for the same.) Photo Caption: Utkarsh Bansal receiving WCRC Best Brand Award 2018 Mumbai, Maharashtra, India Business Wire India Inheriting the family business is one thing but securing its future is another, and this is precisely what Utkarsh Bansal has addressed after joining his familys infrastructure conglomerate. Utkarsh Bansal, the director of Utkarsh India, has pushed boundaries and come up with exemplary ways to progress his business. After graduating in Industrial Engineering Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley, Utkarsh immediately joined the business with the roles in marketing, building their nascent export division and the rebranding of Utkarsh India for the PVC division. Post his MBA from the Indian School of Business, he took an active role as a director, focusing on transiting the company from a steel pipes manufacturer to a manufacturer of engineering products for the infrastructural industry as well as building a sustainable growth model for carving a new image of Utkarsh India in the infrastructural sector. Taking the family legacy forward, Utkarsh is responsible for many milestones the company has achieved: 1. Won WCRCs Best Brand Award amidst Industry stalwarts 2. Made 35% growth in topline in 2017-2018 and expected 40% growth in topline in 2018-2019 3. Witnessed more than 50% growth in the bottom line in both years 4. Became the highest supplier of railway electrification structures to the Indian Railways as acknowledged by CORE 5. Became the highest manufacturer of poles (both octagonal and steel tubular poles) in India 6. Top 10 manufacturing firms award 7. Expanded the dealer base by 1.5X Utkarsh attributes his success majorly to the business values he inherited from his father at an early age. Considered as one of the creative minds of the younger generation, he introduced smart factory concepts, dynamic strategies, technical excellence and improved manufacturing techniques to make the company more efficient, more sustainable, and more profitable. He believes that since he entered an already established business with a huge turnover, his task was to help the company grow to make it more extensive and more diverse than it currently is. He aims at becoming a market leader in all the seven verticals and making Utkarsh India anRs. 5000 Crore infrastructure conglomerate in the next five years. With his wealth of experience and knowledge, his mission is to become a go-to brand from for all infrastructural companies in our country. About Utkarsh India Serving and facilitating the availability of the basic demands of life such as water availability, power availability, light, transportation (via railways), safety etc Utkarsh India via their products which deals in PVC pipes, poles, steel tubes, towers and Railways electrification has become one of the leading and recognized manufacturers of infrastructural products in the country. About Utkarsh Bansal Utkarsh Bansal the Director of Business Strategies at Utkarsh India has a degree in Bachelor of Science specializing in Industrial Engineering & Operations Research from UC Berkeley, USA along with Post Graduation in Business Administration from Indian School of Business. Utkarsh Bansal always had the Entrepreneurial bug bitten him having a family business from the last 40 years in an area which had huge growth & potential in Infrastructural products. Having worked through various start-ups in his college years, Utkarsh aims to have a foresight and see the needs and challenges of the future along with having a thorough understanding of various areas of business and the infrastructure Industry. PWR PWR (Eds: Disclaimer: The following press release comes to you under an arrangement with NewsVoir. PTI takes no editorial responsibility for the same.) Mumbai, Maharashtra, India(NewsVoir) The revolutionary eyewear brand, Scott, is proud to introduce its Spring/Summer 2019 collection in partnership with popular actors, Anil and Sonam Kapoor. Featuring sun glasses and opticals, the collection is perfectly complemented by the dynamic father-daughter duo, as a first ever shoot featuring them both. Scott has curated a wide selection of frame shapes, exclusive accents and alluring combinations to add to your style quotient this summer. The excellent craftsmanship with unique contours in hues of black, blues, pink etc. make the shades a must have accessory this summer. The exciting designs are further enhanced with functional properties, including UVA and UVB protection, polarized lenses, anti-reflection coating, double gradient mirrors, light weight and much more. With regards to the fashion forward association with Scott Eyewear, says Sonam Kapoor, This campaign is extremely special to me because its a first for me, with my dad. I believe cool accessories are what set you and your style apart from others, I love the new summer range from Scott. One of my most important accessories are a good pair of glares and optics, be it travel or outdoors or a style statement, shades are equally important for men and women. Says Anil Kapoor, The first thing you'll notice about Scotts collection is the staggering variety of options that are available! There's something for all kinds of faces, ages and across a range of designs. Colour and print have inspired the collection and been interpreted into a style that is modern, fashionable and contemporary. Scott Eye wear is definitely the ultimate choice for anyone looking for fresh & trendy sunglasses this summer. Adds Sonam Kapoor, Scott Eyewear appealed to me due to the range of creativity and diversity, the collection showcases. Each piece has been designed to perfection, offering a compelling blend of contemporary lifestyle and modern fashion that suits consumers across all ages. The wide range also ensures that one has a trendy option for every look. With their constantly evolving designs, Scott has blurred the lines between retro and modern. About Scott eyewear A part of the renowned Sterling Group, Scott Eyewear has become the epitome of quality and technology. With over 33 years of experience in distribution of international brands in India, they have become the pioneers in innovation and fashion. Says Amit Parikh - Director, Sterling Group - There is a lot of potential for young, aspirational and trendy brands in India, a country which boasts of having the worlds youngest population. Scott is here to do just that; a fashion forward, innovative and an iconic brand for the young and the young at heart. When it comes to capturing that segment, we could think of none better than Sonam Kapoor and Anil Kapoor. The association enriches our current portfolio and strengthens our desire to be a coveted accessory in every consumers wardrobe. The entire campaign was conceptualized, executed and produced by Bottomline Media Pvt. Ltd., headed by Tanaaz Bhatia. Image: Anil and Sonam Kapoor 1st Look PWR PWR (Eds: Disclaimer: The following press release comes to you under an arrangement with Business Wire India. PTI takes no editorial responsibility for the same.) Mumbai, Maharashtra, India Business Wire India The Board of Directors Board of Foods & Inns Limited at its Meeting held on March 11th, 2019 recommended Bonus Issue of Equity Shares in the ratio of 2 (Two) Equity Shares of Re.1/- each for every 1 (One) Equity Share of Re. 1/- each held by the shareholders of the Company as on the record date, subject to the approval of the shareholders. This bonus was approved by the board as the company had recently monetized its prime commercial factory land in Chembur, Mumbai for approx. Rs. 148 crores in the month of October 2018 and had repaid the debt of over Rs. 100 crores in the same month. The directors also felt that it is appropriate to reward the shareholders with a bonus issue given the successful monetization of the company asset. The record date for the same will be decided post approval in AGM. Foods & Inns Limited declared its Q3 financial results last month. Q3 revenue for the current financial year is Rs. 8,463.01 lakhs and first nine months revenue stands at Rs. 22,233.99 lakhs. Net Profit for the Q3 for the current financial year is Rs. 10,618.08 lakhs. About Foods and Inns Foods & Inns is in the business of food processing & is one of the leading mango pulpers in the country having marquee clients like Coca-Cola, Pepsi Co, Unilever, Haagen Dazs, Nestle, Kraft Heinz, Paper Boat etc. Finns Frozen foods ltd. a subsidiary of the company has been merged into Foods & Inns by virtue of a recent NCLT order and is engaged in the business of manufacturing, marketing & trading of frozen snacks, vegetables, fruit pulps & purees. The company is a govt. recognized export house in the Food processing category. It has three state-of-the-art food processing plants (at Nashik, Valsad and Chittor) with world class hygiene and a logistic centre at Chennai. The infrastructure is designed such that processing is done in a unidirectional way from raw material to finished goods that protect products from cross contamination. Foods and Inns Limited has been consistently recognized by the Indian Agricultural and Processed Food Product Export Development Authority (APEDA) via consecutive awards since 2012. Website: https://www.foodsandinns.com/ PWR PWR (Eds: Disclaimer: The following press release comes to you under an arrangement with Business Wire India. PTI takes no editorial responsibility for the same.) Bengaluru, Karnataka, India Business Wire India Photo Caption: RavitejaDodda - CEO - MoEngage at #Growth19 MoEngage, the Intelligent Marketing Automation Platform, today launched two new products at #GROWTH19 Conference. They launched MoEngage Analytics, an industry-first product that lets marketers run & optimize their campaigns in one place and On-Site Messaging that lets marketers craft consistent and personalized messages on their websites. MoEngage Analytics isnt just another Analytic tool. Marketers have to switch between multiple tools and constantly follow up with other teams to measure and improve their campaigns. This is not-only time consuming, but data is also lost while transitioning between multiple tools and teams. MoEngage Analytics lets marketers analyze data, create multi-channel campaigns, measure results and optimize all from within the same screen. Marketers want the ability to identify specific user segments that are dropping off and instantly take action by sending a personalized communication to retain those users. Till now, marketers were forced to spend time moving back and forth between their marketing platform and analytics tools while users continued to drop off, said Raviteja Dodda, CEO of MoEngage. With MoEngage Analytics we want to empower marketers to rapidly iterate, improve and personalize their marketing campaigns. Carrying forward the theme of personalization, MoEngage also launched On-Site Messaging product, that lets marketers deliver consistent and personalized messages to website visitors. Most marketers just deliver the same message to all website visitors in the form of pop-ups. As a result, customers see different messages across email, app and web channels from the same brand. But todays customers expect a consistently personal experience and brands that deliver a generic one-size fits all experience miss out, said Nalin Goel, VP Products at MoEngage. With On-Site Messaging, marketers can deliver consistently personalized messages across email, sms, app and website to their users. We choose to work with MoEngage for their innovative product roadmap. At Treebo Hotels, we keep pushing boundaries and setting new standards when it comes to customer experience. We needed a partner like MoEngage who invests in product innovation that enables us to stay ahead Said Rana Vishal Singh, Head of Marketing at Treebo Hotels We have been beta users of MoEngage Analytics and On-Site Messaging Products and I must say that early results have been encouraging. The team at MoEngage is open to any feedback and quick to act on it. I am excited by their product roadmap and look forward to partnering with them to further enhance our customer experience. About MoEngage MoEngage provides an Intelligent Marketing Automation Platform for leading consumer brands across eCommerce, Retail, Telecom, Travel, Hospitality and Digital Media in 35+ countries. Featured in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Automation Platforms, MoEngages platform lets marketers create AI powered, multi-channel marketing campaigns that drive higher customer engagement and loyalty for leading digital brands. PWR PWR Colombo, Mar 13 (PTI) The Sri Lankan Government appeared to be at loggerheads over the country's representation at the 40th session of the UN Human Rights Commission where a resolution to address the human rights concerns in the island nation will be taken up next week. Colombo is once again under international pressure to implement fully the measures identified by the UNHRC in 2015 to address human rights concerns after the United Kingdom and Germany on Tuesday tabled a resolution at the UN body in Geneva. The UN rights office calls for international investigations into alleged war crimes and encourages member states to prosecute Sri Lankans suspected of war crimes in accordance with universal jurisdiction principles. The resolution which Sri Lanka is expected to co-sponsor was also endorsed by Canada, Germany, Montenegro, North Macedonia, the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. There is a clear division within the government over its representation and the approach as was evident in Parliament on Wednesday. The leader of the House of Parliament and senior minister Lakshman Kiriella probed if President Maithripala Sirisena was sending his own delegation to attend the UNHRC sessions . An announcement from Sirisena said that he was sending his own men as part of the government delegation. Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who are from different political parties, are at loggerheads over governance. In October last year, Sirisena sacked Wickremesinghe in a move declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The prime minister was later restored after the apex court intervened. The government has come under fire from the main opposition for agreeing to co- sponsor the resolution. The government's defence has been that this strategy will prevent international war crimes allegations being continuously levelled against Sri Lankans through strengthened ownership of the implementation process. Kiriella asked Mahinda Samarasinghe, a Sirisena loyalist who had been named as a member of the team to Geneva, if Sirisena was sending his own men. Samarasinghe replied that even though he had pulled out from it, three others representing Sirisena will be attending. The aim is to show the consensus within the government, Samarasinghe said. However Sirisenas public statement made last month on the Geneva resolution said that the president wanted the UNHRC to grant Sri Lanka a reprieve to mind Sri Lankas own business without any interference. Notwithstanding Sirisenas public statement on rights accountability sought by the UNHRC, the foreign ministry which is under Wickremesinghe's control reiterated the government's commitment to implement the UNHRC resolution. The main Tamil party legislator Tamil National Alliance (TNA) MA Sumanthiran questioned Sirisenas intentions in sending his own men who are in effect opposition representatives. The resolution presented in the UNHRC session calls for accountability to alleged human rights violations committed by both government troops and the LTTE during the last phase of the conflict in 2009. PTI CORR RUP RUP RUP Islamabad, Mar 13 (PTI) Pakistan was facing a "challenging situation" on the western frontiers with Afghanistan as well as the eastern front with India, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said on Wednesday. Addressing the Business Leaders Summit in Islamabad, he said, the topmost priority of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government is to revitalise the cash-strapped country's economy. But Qureshi said the country faced challenging situation on its western and eastern borders, Geo News reported. "We have a challenging situation on the western front in Afghanistan and we have a situation brewing on the eastern front. You saw what happened in the last few days post-Pulwama," he said, referring to the recent tensions between India and Pakistan after the February 14 terror attack carried out by a suicide bomber belonging to the Pakistan based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). Both India and Afghanistan have blamed Islamabad for not doing enough to curb terrorism and allowing terror groups operating in Pakistan to carry out cross-border attacks. On relations with India, Qureshi said, Prime Minister Imran Khan had offered a hand of friendship towards New Delhi after assuming office. "Prime Minister Imran reaffirmed that Islamabad will take two steps if New Delhi takes one. Pakistan wants to solve issues with India through negotiations," he was quoted as saying by the report. The foreign minister said that the ruling PTI's economic team has taken many steps for economic uplift of the country during the first six months of the government. "The government is taking steps to create investment opportunities in the country and these steps have already paid the dividends," he said. "When Prime Minister Khan came into power six months ago he inherited a lot of challenges, including corruption and other socio-economic ills, which had to be overcome." "PTI has been elected on the agenda of change and the people will see a change by the end of the tenure of the present government," Qureshi said. The priorities of the government are clear. The government's leadership is very clear on its priorities. "We do not have Swiss bank accounts and Canadian passports," he said. Speaking about business opportunities, he said the government plans to make Pakistan a hub of business and investment in the region. He said the government is focused on economic diplomacy and to increase bilateral trade as Pakistan has a geo-strategic location. "We are increasing bilateral trade with Iran, China and other countries of the region," Qureshi said. "China is our strategic partner and we want to transform this relationship into an economic partnership. We are negotiating with China to help Pakistan in the agriculture sector and in establishing of economic zones," he said. PTI AKJ AKJ Islamabad, Mar 13 (PTI) Pakistan on Wednesday expressed disappointment over India's decision to not issue visas to Pakistani journalists to cover the first meeting between the two countries on the Kartarpur Corridor. The meeting will take place on the Indian side of the Attari-Wagah border on Thursday. "Regrettable that India has not given visas to Pakistani journalists for the Kartarpur meeting tomorrow," Dr Mohammad Faisal, spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tweeted. It is not known how many journalists had applied for visas to cover the meeting. "Hope the #PakKartarpurSpirit and meeting tomorrow will bring a change for the better for people of both countries," he added. A Pakistani delegation will visit India on Thursday for the meeting, which would be followed by an Indian delegation's visit to Islamabad on March 28. Faisal also pointed out that the groundbreaking ceremony of the Kartarpur Corridor in Pakistan last year was covered by over 30 Indian journalists. "They also met Prime Minister Imran Khan and were hosted by Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi for a dinner during their stay," he tweeted. India and Pakistan agreed to open up a special border crossing linking Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Pakistan's Kartarpur - the final resting place of Sikh faith's founder Guru Nanak Dev - to Dera Baba Nanak shrine in India's Gurdaspur district. The corridor will facilitate the visa-free travel of Indian Sikh pilgrims to Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur. PTI SCY/SH SCY Maputo, Mar 13 (AFP) At least 115 people were killed in Mozambique, Malawi and South Africa after heavy rains affected 843,000 people across southeast Africa, officials and the UN said, prompting calls for emergency aid. At least 66 people have been killed in Mozambique, 45 in Malawi and four in South Africa following torrential rains that have triggered flash floods. Mozambique cabinet spokeswoman Ana Comoana said the "government has decreed a red alert due to the continuing rains and the approach of the tropical cyclone Idai, expected to reach the country between Thursday to Friday". She spoke to reporters late Tuesday after a cabinet meeting in Maputo to discuss the emergency. The floods in Mozambique, one of Africa's poorest countries, have already destroyed 5,756 homes, affecting 15,467 households and 141,325 people. In neighbouring Malawi, floods have left over 230,000 people without shelter and affected around 739,000 people, according to the UN. Malawi's Meteorological Department has warned of more rains and flooding in the country's south between Thursday and Sunday. In Mozambique, 111 people have been injured, 18 hospitals destroyed, 938 classrooms destroyed and 9,763 students affected. More than 168,000 hectares (415,000 acres) of crops were destroyed, the government spokeswoman added. Authorities there have ordered the compulsory evacuation of people living in flood-prone areas. "Sixteen accommodation centres have been opened in the provinces of Zambezia and Tete to accommodate the displaced," Comoana said. "The government needs 1.1 billion meticais (USD 16 million) to assist 80,000 families affected by the rains". Mozambique is prone to extreme weather events. Floods in 2000 claimed at least 800 lives while more than 100 were killed in 2015. "Tropical Cyclone Idai, which formed over the Northern Mozambique Channel on March 9, is expected to make landfall near Beira (eastern Mozambique) on March 14 or 15," said the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. "The cyclone was located over the Mozambique Channel on March 12 and is expected to strengthen into intense tropical cyclone status (Category 4 equivalent) again prior to making landfall." (AFP) SCY SCY Caracas, Mar 13 (AFP) China on Wednesday offered to help Venezuela bring its collapsing power grid back online as President Nicolas Maduro sought to stave off rising public anger that is bolstering his US-backed rival Juan Guaido. A vast blackout that struck Venezuela nearly a week ago -- the worst in its history -- has deepened the South American country's already grave economic crisis, especially by disrupting the supply of drinking water. Although electricity has since been restored to most of the capital Caracas, water was having to be trucked in, and western swaths of the country remain without power. "No water, no power, no medicine, no cash, no transport. This has been dreadful," one Caracas resident, Victoria Milano, 40, told AFP. Guaido, an opposition leader whose claim to be Venezuela's interim president is backed by the US and 50 other countries, told supporters on Tuesday he expected to have military chiefs on his side and take over the presidential palace "very soon." "This desperation and darkness is caused by the dictatorship," Guaido said, alleging that around 20 people had died in hospital because of the power cut. Venezuela's pro-Maduro prosecutor's office has hit back with a criminal investigation against Guaido for "sabotage," alleging he had a hand in the blackout. But the opposition leader remains free after the US warned of "consequences" if he were arrested. Maduro has accused Washington of waging "cybernetic" and "electromagnetic" attacks against Venezuela's Guri hydroelectric plant, which provides power to 80 percent of the country's 30 million inhabitants. As he declared "victory" on television late Tuesday, claiming power had been restored "in almost all" the nation, Caracas residents in formerly middle-class neighborhoods banged pots in the street in protest. Experts said an attack by a foreign state actor on Venezuela's grid was possible, but unlikely. "Knowing Venezuela, it was likely an internal failure," Jeff Middleton, the chief technology officer at The Vault Foundation, a company that secures crypto currency transactions, told AFP. Venezuela's infrastructure has degraded over years because of lack of investment, a significant brain drain, and the government's practice of putting the military in charge of key civilian facilities and companies. That has impacted not only the electricity grid but also the country's vital oil industry. The situation has worsened with successive rounds of US sanctions against Maduro's regime, including steps that have severely curbed its oil exports. While much of Latin America and Europe have thrown their weight behind Guaido with a view to forcing presidential elections in Venezuela, Maduro has the support of Russia and China, major creditors and buyers of Venezuelan oil. China on Wednesday said it stood ready to help Venezuela get its electricity up and running again. "China hopes that Venezuela can quickly find the cause of this accident and restore normal power and social order," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said at a regular briefing in Beijing. "China is willing to offer assistance and technical support to Venezuela to restore the power system," Lu said. The spokesman said China was "very concerned" about reports of a cyber attack, but declined to directly blame the United States. Spain, one of the EU countries strongly backing Guaido, also offered help to fix Venezuela's "badly deteriorated" electricity system. According to Ecoanalitica, an economic analysis firm, the blackout had by Tuesday cost Venezuela USD 875 million. "There is major paralysis in many critical areas in the oil sector," it said, estimating that up to 70 percent of the one million barrels of oil a day Venezuela still managed to produce could end up being affected. (AFP) SCY SCY Washington, Mar 13 (AFP) President Donald Trump's former campaign chief Paul Manafort, already facing 47 months in prison for tax and bank fraud, was sentenced to an additional 43 months in prison Wednesday on conspiracy charges. "The defendant is not public enemy number one," US District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in delivering the sentence in a hushed courtroom. "But he is not a victim either," Jackson said, adding that the veteran Republican lobbyist had shown little remorse and had lied repeatedly. Manafort's case is the highest-profile yet stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. (AFP) CPS Washington, Mar 13 (AFP) President Donald Trump's former campaign chief Paul Manafort, already facing 47 months in prison for tax and bank fraud, was sentenced to an additional 43 months in prison Wednesday on conspiracy charges. "The defendant is not public enemy number one," US District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in delivering the sentence in a hushed Washington courtroom. "But he is not a victim either," Jackson added, stressing that the veteran Republican lobbyist and political consultant had shown little remorse and had lied repeatedly. Manafort's case is the highest-profile yet stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Jackson stressed to the court that the case had nothing to do with the 2016 vote but was connected to political consulting and lobbying activities he performed for pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians. She said the question of whether any members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia was "not presented in the case. Period." "Therefore it was not resolved in this case either," Jackson said. She ridiculed defense arguments that Manafort's prosecution only came about because of the Mueller probe. "That argument falls flat," Jackson said. "The Department of Justice was already looking into this matter." Before his sentencing, Manafort, who was brought into court in a wheelchair, pleaded to the judge not to sentence him to more time other than the 47 months he was given last week in a separate case. "I am sorry for what I have done and all the activities that have got me here today," Manafort told the court. "Let me be very clear I accept responsibility for the acts that have got me here today," he went on. "For those mistakes, I am remorseful." But Jackson dismissed his plea for no more prison time on the charges of conspiring to launder money and tamper with witnesses. She added 43 months to the 47 months he already received, making the total 90 months. She gave him credit for the nine months he has already spent in prison, reducing the term facing him to 81 months -- a little under seven years. Manafort is one of a half-dozen former Trump associates and senior aides charged by Mueller, although none of them have been accused so far of direct collusion with Moscow to get Trump elected to the White House. (AFP) CPS Nairobi, Mar 13 (AFP) Britain's Brexit divorce deal with the European Union is "not negotiable", French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday, urging London to break an impasse over its looming exit from the bloc. "The withdrawal deal is not negotiable," Macron told journalists on a trip to Kenya, adding that any request to delay Brexit would have to be justified. "We cannot renegotiate an accord that we negotiated over several months and which we have said is not renegotiable." (AFP) SCY SCY Washington, Mar 13 (PTI) Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar meets the criteria to be designated as a global terrorist and not doing so is against regional stability and peace, the US said Tuesday on the eve of the UN Security Council making a crucial decision in this regard. The JeM, headed by the 50-year-old Azhar, carried out many terror strikes in India and was involved in the attack on Parliament, the Pathankot air force base, army camps in Jammu and Uri, and the latest suicide attack on CRPF in Pulwama which claimed the lives of 40 personnel. In the aftermath of the February 14 attack in Pulwama, three permanent members of the UNSC - the United States, Britain and France - have moved a resolution to designate Azhar as a global terrorist. Several previous attempts by these three countries inside the UN Security Council were blocked by China, the all-weather ally of Pakistan. China, which is one of the five veto-powered members of the Security Council, so far has been asserting that there is not enough evidence against Azhar to designate him as a global terrorist. Amidst a mounting global outrage in the wake of the Pulwama attack that led to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan, US, Britain and France hope that Beijing would act wisely and would not oppose their move this time to designate Azhar as a global terrorist. On the eve of the crucial decision by the UN Security Council, the Trump Administration on Tuesday made it clear that there is enough evidence against Azhar to designate him as a global terrorist. "Azhar is the founder and the leader of the JeM, and he meets the criteria for designation by the United Nations," State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino told reporters at his daily news conference. The JeM, he said, has been responsible for numerous terrorist attacks and is a threat to regional stability and peace. The US and India work closely together on counterterrorism efforts, and that includes at the United Nations, he added, noting that their views on the Jaish-e-Mohammed and its founder are well known. However, he refrained from making a direct comment on the deliberations inside the UN on this issue. "The United Nations Sanctions Committee, their deliberations, are confidential, and as such we don't comment on specific matters, but we'll continue to work with the Sanctions Committee to ensure that the designation list is updated and accurate," Palladino said. "The United States and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal," Palladino said in response to a question on previous successful attempts by China to block the UN designation of Azhar. PTI LKJ CK London, Mar 13 (PTI) The UK Parliament on Wednesday rejected a chaotic no-deal Brexit by a narrow margin, preventing Britain from crashing out of the European Union without any transition phase. The House of Commons voted against the deal by 312 votes to 308. British MPs will now vote on Thursday on whether to ask for delaying Britain's departure beyond March 29 by extending Article 50 - the legal mechanism that takes the UK out of the 28-member economic bloc. This would have to be ratified by the EU and the length of extension will become the next focus on both sides. However, how the EU will react to an extension request remains unclear at this stage, given that it is preparing for its own EU elections towards the end of May. Brussels has already made it clear that it will not renegotiate the deal thrashed out with the UK over two years of prolonged talks. Unless agreed otherwise, Britain leaving the EU by March 29 remains the default Brexit option by law. "Today we are in the hands of the British political system. They should tell us where they want to go from now. The solution will have to come from London," European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans told the European Parliament earlier in the day. Tuesday's vote was triggered after British Prime Minister Theresa May suffered another shattering loss in parliament on Tuesday, with lawmakers voting against her Brexit deal by 391 to 242. Her Brexit divorce bill was defeated by 149 votes despite a final push by her to try and convince hard-Brexiteers that the concessions she had won to the controversial Irish backstop clause would not see the UK tied to the EU rules indefinitely. The March-end deadline kicked in when the UK triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty following a referendum in favour of Brexit by nearly 52 per cent to 48 per cent in June 2016. PTI SCY SCY SCY Keep close watch on EVMs during polling: Pawar tells partymen Thane, Mar 13 (PTI) NCP chief Sharad Pawar Wednesday asked his party workers to keep a close watch on the EVMs during the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. He said despite putting in lot of efforts, many times the candidates are not able to win the election due to EVM tampering. "Despite putting in lot of efforts, candidates get defeated only due to the tampering of the EVMs. During the Bhandara Gondia LS bypoll, 700 EVMs were found to be malfunctioning. It was brought to the notice, following which the EVMs were changed and polling time was also extended due to which (NCP candidate Madhukar) Kukde won the seat," Pawar said. He was addressing the party workers in Thane via video-conferencing from Mumbai. The former Union minister said the party workers should keep a close watch on the EVMs. "Due to the EVM tampering, we might get defeated. Therefore, you should visit the polling booths around 6 am on the day of polling and check the machines," the veteran politician told the party cadres. He demanded that 50 per cent of voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) slips should be counted. Coming down heavily on the BJP government saying it gave false assurances and failed on all the fronts. "There has been no progress on the memorials of Chhatrapati Shivaji and Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. There was a big announcement of Samruddi Mahamarg, but land is yet to be acquired for it. Wherever land acquisition was completed, proper compensation was not paid. The promise of reservation given to the Dhanghar community has not not been fulfilled," he said. Slamming the Modi government over demonetisation, he said, "Around 100 people lost their lives during the exercise by standing in bank queues. Modi promised to give jobs, but due to note ban, over 15 lakh people lost their jobs. In the last four years, as many as 11,998 farmers have committed suicide," he said. Promises of waiving farm loans were made, but 50 per cent farmers are yet to get the benefit, he said. Pawar also called for a probe into the Rafale fighter jets deal saying, "The Rafale aircraft is now being purchased at Rs 1,660 crore each by this government, which is a much higher rate than what was decided in 2007. Hence, an inquiry into the Rafale deal should be carried out on the lines of the Bofors," he said. PTI COR NP NP Kolkata, Mar 13 (PTI) The CPI(M) leadership in West Bengal is in a fix over choosing between the Congress and its Left Front allies, who are not willing to leave the seats they have been contesting for decades. The Congress is keen on contesting Purulia and Barasat Lok Sabha constituencies which Left Front members Forward Bloc and CPI have traditionally been contesting. The development comes a week after the CPI(M) and the Congress resolved the impasse over Raiganj and Murshidabad Lok Sabha seats, following the intervention of Sitaram Yechury and Rahul Gandhi. The Congress has given up its demand for the two seats in the deal, but demanded Purulia and Barasat. This has led to a situation which has delaying the announcement of candidates of both the sides. Purulia and Barasat are currently held by the Trinamool Congress. "The Congress wants those two seats as they have a strong presence there. But the Forward Bloc and the CPI are not willing to leave the seats. Let's see what happens. Talks are on," said a senior CPI(M) leader. Forward Bloc state secretary Naren Chatterjee, who is averse to the CPI(M)-Congress seat sharing adjustment, said the party, as part of the Left Front, fights only three seats and there is no question of leaving them to the Congress. CPI(M) central committee member Rabin Deb held a meeting with state Congress president Somen Mitra to resolve the impasse. According to sources, another round of talks between the two parties is likely to take place on Thursday. While the Congress had bagged four seats in the state in the 2014 general election, the CPI(M) had won only Raiganj and Murshidabad. The TMC got 34 seats and the BJP two. PTI PNT NN SOM SOM Guwahati, Mar 13 (PTI) The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has finalised its alliances in the Northeast, setting a target of winning at least 22 of the 25 Lok Sabha seats from eight states of the region, party general secretary Ram Madhav claimed on Wednesday. Madhav, the BJP's incharge of the Northeast, held a series of discussions here on Tuesday till past midnight and sealed the alliances with the Asom Gana Parishad, Bodoland Peoples Front (BPF), Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura (IPFT), National People's Party, Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party and the Sikkim Krantikari Morcha. The BJP leader will be holding a meeting with Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb and leaders of the IPFT in Agartala on Wednesday. The alliances have been finalised under the North East Democratic Alliance (NEDA), the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance's political coalition with the regional parties of the region. "This alliance has the potential of winning not less than 22 out of 25 seats in the region and play an important role in seeing Modi-ji as the PM once again," Madhav posted on Facebook. On Tuesday, Madhav had met Nagaland Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio, Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma, Manipur Chief Minister Biren Singh, Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu and NEDA convenor Himanta Biswa Sarma. Madhav also met a delegation of the AGP, the led by party president Atul Bora, and finalised reunion of the former allies. "It was a hectic day of parlays yesterday in the North East. Sustained negotiations at Dimapur and Guwahati with different senior leaders. Have finally sealed the alliance and electoral understanding between the BJP and all major parties in the North East," he added in the post. "The BJP, NPP, NDPP, AGP and BPF will fight together in Assam, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh with the mission of defeating Congress party at the hustings. In Tripura, the BJP will fight the elections together with IPFT, our alliance partner," Madhav said. In Sikkim, BJP's alliance will be with the main opposition party, Sikkim Krantikari Morcha, he added. "While the Opposition is still talking and talking about 'Mahagatbandhan' (grand alliance), we already have ours in place in the North East and the rest of the country. The NDA is a much stronger coalition today than before," Madhav said. PTI TR JM HMB New Delhi, Mar 13 (PTI) External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj Wednesday said she conveyed to several countries post Pulwama attack that India will not escalate the situation with Pakistan but if there is any other terror attack from that country, then it will not remain silent. In an address at a think tank on Modi government's foreign policy, she said Pakistan was worried that India would escalate the situation and she was contacted by a number of foreign ministers over it. "I used to receive calls from foreign ministers who used to first condole the Pulwama attack, then express their solidarity and then they used to softly say that we think India will not escalate the situation," she said. "To which I used to reply that no, I assure you India will not escalate the situation but if there is any other terror attack then we will not remain silent as we cannot say Pulwama as our destiny," she said. Tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after Indian fighter jets bombed terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed's biggest training camp near Balakot deep inside Pakistan on February 26. Pakistan retaliated the strike by attempting unsuccessfully to target Indian military installations. However, the IAF thwarted its plans. The Indian strike on the JeM camp 12 days after the terror group claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on a CRPF convoy in Kashmir, killing 40 soldiers. PTI UZM MPB ZMN New Delhi, Mar 13 (PTI) The seat-sharing deal between grand alliance members in Bihar has been "almost finalised" and the Congress is likely to contest 11 seats in the state, sources said. Intensive negotiations were held among grand alliance constituents here as top leaders of the formation sought to settle the issue of seat-sharing for the 40 Lok Sabha seats in the state. "The seat-sharing deal has been almost finalised. The RJD has agreed on 11 seats for the Congress," a senior Congress leader said on condition of anonymity. All parties in the grand alliance will be given full respect and the decision would be announced in the next few days, the leader said. The RJD will get the lion's share of seats - about 20, sources said. The general election is scheduled to begin on April 11 and will continue till May 19. Polling on the different seats will be held in Bihar in seven phases. The 'mahagathbandhan', as the grand alliance is called, comprises old allies like the Congress and the RJD, besides new entrants such as Upendra Kushwaha's RLSP, Jitan Ram Manjhi's Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM), Sharad Yadav's Loktantrik Janata Dal (LJD) and the Vikashsheel Insaan Party (VIP), a fledgling outfit floated by former Bollywood set designer Mukesh Sahni. The RJD had fought 27 seats in the 2014 general elections, though it managed to win only four. PTI ASK ASK TIR TIR New Delhi, Mar 13 (PTI) Air India Wednesday announced that it is suspending its flights on Delhi-Madrid and Delhi-Birmingham routes from March 16 till further notice due to "operational reasons". As Pakistan has kept its airspace closed since February 26 due to the Balakot air strike by Indian air force, Air India's expenditure on flights to Europe and the US have significantly increased. In a tweet, the national carrier said, "Due to operational reasons, the following Air India flights are suspended with effect from March 16, 2019, till further notice." The airline then said that AI135 Delhi-Madrid flight and AI136 Madrid-Delhi flight would be suspended. It added that AI113 Delhi-Birmingham flight and AI114 Birmingham-Delhi flight would also be suspended. The airline said that AI117 Delhi-Amritsar-Birmingham flight and AI118 Birmingham-Amritsar-Delhi flight would be suspended too. "We sincerely regret the inconvenience caused to our valued passengers and request passengers to collect full refund," the airline said. PTI DSP SOM SOM New Delhi, Mar 13 (PTI) Amid flip-flop over alliance with the Aam Aadmi Party(AAP), the Congress has sought view of its Delhi unit workers over the issue through an audio clip released on its mobile app. "The Congress through its Shakti app has uploaded an audio clip by AICC in-charge PC Chacko who is asking party workers in Delhi their view on alliance with the AAP," said a senior party leader. The survey on Shakti app was launched Wednesday and will wrap up Thursday, he said. In the message sent to the party workers through its mobile application, the Congress is trying to untangle the contentious issue of alliance with AAP. Congress insiders said the alliance with AAP is "almost certain" and will be finalised by end of this month. "The result of the survey through Shakti app will be sent to the high command of the party that will take a final call on the issue," said the party leader. The development comes amid Delhi Congress chief Sheila Dikshit, after a meeting with Congress national president Rahul Gandhi, claiming there is unanimity against alliance with the AAP. Sources said the grand old party is ready for alliance if the AAP agrees to leave New Delhi, Chandni Chowk and North West seats for the Congress. Earlier wednesday, AAP national convener Arvind Kejriwal had offered alliance with the Congress in Haryana to Gandhi, saying his party needed no partnership in Delhi. "This is a pressure tactic. The reality is AAP is ready for an alliance with the Congress at any cost in Delhi. Even Kejriwal knows this. He had earlier floated 3-3-1 formula, three seats each for Congress and AAP, and one for a consensus candidate, through opposition leaders Mamata Banerjee and Sharad Pawar. It's only a matter of days before alliance is announced," said the Congress leader, who is in the thick of things. Reacting to the development claimed, A senior BJP leader, "Our party is well prepared to tackle the situation even if they go together in Delhi," he said. Delhi will go to the polls on May 12. Counting of votes will take place on May 23. PTI VIT PR VIT TIR TIR Srinagar, Mar 13 (PTI) One person was arrested and arms and ammunition, including grenades, were seized by security forces from a militant hideout in Jammu and Kashmir's Kulgam district, police said Wednesday. "On credible input, a joint party of police and other security forces busted a hideout in a residential house at Kulgam district's Yaripora area, and recovered arms and ammunition, including grenades and live rounds, last night," a police spokesman said here. Mohammad Ayoub Rather, a resident of Yaripora, was arrested, he said. Police have registered a case and an investigation has been initiated, the spokesman said. PTI SSB ANB ANB New Delhi, March 13(PTI) The ruling AAP and the BJP engaged in a tug of war on Twitter on Wednesday, with Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia questioning the saffron party why it failed to keep its electoral promise of granting full statehood to Delhi. In a series of tweets in Hindi, Sisodia argued with Delhi BJP spokesperson Harish Khurana, who challenged the deputy chief minister for a public debate on the issue of full statehood for Delhi. Naming his father, former Delhi Chief Minister Madan Lal Khurana, AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal also slammed Khurana and claimed that he was "speaking against his father who had martyred for full statehood to Delhi." A furious Khurana also challenged Kejriwal for an open debate if he had "courage" to face his questions. Sisodia asked Khurana, why Delhi was deprived of full statehood despite BJP promising it in its election manifesto. "Harish Khurana ji what I understand was also comprehended by late Madan Lal Khurana Sahab, but its sad that you have still not understood the anti-Delhi politics of Modi ji. Do not betray Delhi...just tell if Delhi should have full statehood or not ?" Sisodia tweeted. Khurana replied by saying issues are solved through discussion and added many departments that did not come under Delhi government came under it due to his father's talks with the Centre. "You are crying over what you do not have. You could have done much with what you have. The powers of Delhi government were known when you came to power. "Excuses are being made because promises were not fulfilled. Why you did not demand full statehood before election time?" Khurana hit back at Sisodia. He also challenged Sisodia for a public debate at a place and time of his choice over the issues of AAP government's achievements and full statehood. Sisodia, however, did not accept the challenge and sought to corner Khurana over his party's promise of full statehood. "We can discuss the issues one by one here (Twitter)...I am raising the first issue..what did your government do on full statehood promised by you (BJP) in 2014 manifesto," Sisodia asked Khurana, pointing over 1.7 million Twitter users who were following their debate. Khurana replied back saying Sisodia was avoiding a public debate on the issue because he had no answers for his questions. The two leaders also sparred accusing each other for not taking initiatives for full statehood to Delhi. Khurana asked Sisodia about process for achieving full statehood. "Brother, your party promised full statehood in its manifesto. People voted believing in Modi's manifesto....you (BJP) formed the government. Now, you are asking me about process of a promise made by you," Sisodia replied. The ruling AAP is campaigning for Lok Sabha polls in Delhi, by aggressively raising the issue of full statehood. The AAP leadership including Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, Sisodia, and others burnt copies of BJP's 2014 manifesto at the party office on Wednesday. PTI VIT VIT TDS TDS TDS Lucknow, Mar 13 (PTI) The chiefs of Uttar Pradesh alliance partners SP and BSP met here Wednesday hours after Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi paid a surprise visit to Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad at a Meerut hospital. SP president Akhilesh Yadav met BSP chief Mayawati after newly appointed Congress general secretaries Priyanka Gandhi and Jyotiraditya Scindia met Azad. When contacted, Samajwadi Party spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary said the two leaders met to discuss joint public meetings and rallies, being planned for the Lok Sabha polls. Meetings are being held constantly as the election is round the corner and the poll campaign has to be launched full scale after Holi next week, he said. The alliance has left two seats for the Congress in the state and will honestly support it on them, said Chaudhary. Meanwhile, a senior SP leader, who did not wish to be named, claimed Priyanka Gandhi's visit to the Bhim Army chief was in reaction to the BSP president ruling out any alliance with the Congress. "But Mayawati is not someone who will yield to any kind of pressure. This alliance will not come under pressure. It has already given two seats to the Congress," he added. Mayawati had Tuesday snubbed the Congress by slamming doors on it for any electoral alliance for the Lok Sabha polls anywhere in the country. The SP and the BSP recently forged an alliance on 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state. As per the deal, the SP will contest 37 Lok Sabha seats in UP and the BSP 38, leaving three for the Ajit Singh-led Rashtriya Lok Dal and two for Sonia Gandhi (Rae Bareli) and Rahul Gandhi (Amethi). The seven-phase Lok Sabha elections begin on April 11. PTI SAB SMI ANU RAX RAX New Delhi, Mar 13 (PTI) Young Army officer Lt Ummer Fayaz, who was abducted and killed by terrorists nearly two years ago, in his NDA days had once ran a cross-country race with an injured leg in the searing heat of July while observing fast during Ramzan, according to a new book. After the launch of 'Undaunted: Lt Ummer Fayaz of Kashmir', author Bhaavna Arora announced that royalty earned from the book will be used for an annual scholarship named after Fayaz, which will benefit students of the high school he attended. "We all lost a soldier... Ummer was loved by his fellow cadets, and now as officers they still recall him, and the time spent with him in the NDA. They still remember the time when Ummer had run a cross-country race while observing 'roza' (fast) during the month of Ramzan," she said. Arora said not only he finished the race in the scorching summer, but he did that nursing a "stress fracture" in his leg. "In the NDA (National Defence Academy), his instructor, batchmates and seniors encouraged and supported him and boosted his morale. He also go to see the secular face that NDA truly has," she said. In the thirteenth chapter of the book, the author, who belongs to family of Army officers, quotes one of his seniors, "...People talk of secularism in India, but the NDA truly practices it." Fayaz, 23, was abducted and murdered by militants in South Kashmir's Shopian district on May 10, 2017, where he had gone to attend the wedding ceremony of a relative. Five to six militants had abducted the 2nd Rajputan Rifles officer from his relative's house late night on May 9. His bullet-riddled body was found in the Harmain area of the district the next morning. The book was launched at an event held at the Rajputana Rifles Regimental Centre at Delhi Cantonment here, which was attended by former senior army officers Lt Gen (retd) Syed Ata Hasnain, Lt Gen (retd) Satish Dua and former Delhi police commissioner Neeraj Kumar, and former colleagues and friends of the slain Kashmiri officer. Army chief Gen Bipin Rawat, in a foreword in the book, says, "Ummer epitomises 'Kashmiriyat' in its truest sense and will go down in history as a hero who chose to serve the nation, against all odds." Arora said Fayaz had to face resistance from many of his friends when he had decided to join the Army. Lt Gen (retd) Hasnain, former general officer commanding for the 15 and the 21 Corps, said, "During my posting in Kashmir, we tried to engage with the youth." "And, though people showed angst, many also showed inclination to join the armed forces," he said. "Ummer created that amazing spirit. So, we need to talk to the Kashmiri youth, as many as we can, have conversations without thinking of outcomes. Because, it will not happen overnight," the former GOC of Srinagar-based Chinar Corps said. Lt Gen (retd) Dua, who has previously led the Army in Kashmir, also recalled the anecdote about Fayaz running the cross-country race during the NDA days. "As NDA folks, we really take pride in our legacy. And, Ummer by running that cross-country race despite his 'roza' in summers displayed that toughness that Army teaches you," he said. Hailing from Kulgam district of Jammu and Kashmir, Fayaz was posted in the Akhnoor area in Jammu. He was commissioned in the 2nd batallion of the Rajputana Rifles, the oldest rifle regiment in the Army in December 2016, just five months before he was killed. Arora announced that the 'Lt Ummer Fayaz Scholarship' will be made out of the "corpus of Rs 2 lakh, coming from royalty that we handed in cheque today to the Rajputana Rifles". "Besides the scholarship, there would also be a rolling trophy. And, the interest earned from this amount will perpetuate the scholarship for successive years," she said. "Ummer did his schooling, from class 5-12, at the Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya (JNV), Anantnag," she said. PTI KND AQS AQS Srinagar, Mar 13 (PTI) Moderate Hurriyat Conference chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq was willing to cooperate with any investigation, but accusing him of terror funding was "ridiculous and political vendetta", its former chairman and executive member Abdul Gani Bhat said Wednesday. The Hurriyat Wednesday held an emergency meeting at party headquarters in Rajbagh here where it discussed the present political scenario, especially the summoning of its chairman to Delhi by the National Investigation Agency (NIA). Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Bhat, on the summoning of Mirwaiz by the NIA, said a "hostile environment" was being "wilfully generated to cause harassment". "Mirwaiz has made it absolutely clear that he is willing to cooperate with any investigation but what is upsetting is that a hostile environment is being wilfully generated to cause harassment," he said. The Hurriyat leader said Mirwaiz represents an office which is "so sacred" that interference in any form or at any level with his position "is extremely likely to inflict a wound deep into the collective political consciousness of Kashmir". "Let there be no mistake about it that Hurriyat as a forum is democratic in essence and does not therefore believe in violence in any form or manifestation let alone so called terror-funding," he said. Bhat said Mirwaiz himself was a victim of violence and as a matter of fact, the forum has all along been actively supporting efforts aimed at building abiding relations between India and Pakistan "which is where our position to resolve the dispute through talks needs to be appreciated". "To accuse him of having anything to do with so called terror funding is ridiculous and nothing more than political vendetta," the former Hurriyat chairman said. Batting for talks to resolve issues between India and Pakistan, Bhat said the people in both the countries can hardly afford to live with tension, acrimony and ill-will. "India and Pakistan as nuclear powers can hardly exhibit laxity towards tomorrow. We have to live together and live peacefully to ensure prosperity and development. What constitutes an obstacle will have to be addressed. Talks are the call of times. Let's take the call and move ahead towards a brighter future and a better region," the separatist leader said. PTI SSB SNE SNE New Delhi, Mar 13 (PTI) The Supreme Court Wednesday reiterated that it will not extend the July 31 deadline for publication of the final National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam and said the NRC work and Lok Sabha polls can go on simultaneously in the state. The Centre informed the top court that 167 companies of Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) deployed in the state will not be diverted for poll duty. A bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice R F Nariman said requisite manpower and technology needed for publication of final NRC by July 31 will be provided. "We will not extend the deadline for publication of final NRC on July 31, 2019. Lok Sabha polls and NRC work can go on simultaneously," the bench said after state NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela submitted that some of the officials engaged in the NRC exercise have been assigned poll duty. Hajela also said he needs them back to join the NRC exercise post-poll in order to meet the deadline. "Till elections in the state are over, I have to work with current set of people. But after the polls, more people will be needed for the NRC work. I will also be needing IT people for quality checks and data entry to meet the deadline of July 31," Hajela said. The bench said, "All we are concerned is meeting the deadline of July 31. After the polls more manpower and technology support will be provided. How you do the work is your concern," the bench told Hajela. Attorney General K K Venugopal, appearing for the Centre said that the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has passed an order by which 167 companies of CAPF currently engaged in NRC work will not be withdrawn from the state. The top court posted the matter for further hearing on April 10 and said that in case of any difficulties faced in the publication work the bench would meet every month for 10 minutes to take stock of the situation. On February 5, the apex court had observed that the Centre is "hell bent" on stalling the Assam NRC work while rapping it for seeking suspension of the process during the polls citing non-availability of security forces. The court had reiterated it would not extend the deadline of July 31 and also directed that 3,457 state government officers be kept free for NRC work and asked the Election Commission to "examine the case of exemption of officers, in the rank of District Magistrates, Additional District Magistrates...from transfers which are likely to be made in view of the elections". The Centre had said that in 2014 Lok Sabha polls, 2,500 CAPF companies were deployed and this year, around 2,700 would be needed to ensure law and order. It had said 167 CAPF companies, which are presently overseeing NRC works in Assam, would be sent to other parts of the country during elections. The top court had said on January 24 that the July 31, 2019 deadline to finalise the NRC cannot be extended. The draft National Register of Citizens for Assam was published on July 30, 2018 in which the names of 2.89 crore of the 3.29 crore people were included. The names of 40,70,707 people did not figure in the list. Of these, 37,59,630 names have been rejected and the remaining 2,48,077 are on hold. The first draft of the NRC for Assam was published on the intervening night of December 31, 2017 and January 1 in accordance with the top court's direction. Names of 1.9 crore people out of the 3.29 crore applicants were incorporated then. Assam, which had faced influx of people from Bangladesh since the early 20th century, is the only state to have an NRC, first prepared in 1951. PTI MNL ABA MNL TIR TIR Ghaziabad (UP), Mar 13 (PTI) Three bike-borne men, on their way to allegedly loot a businessman, were nabbed on Wednesday following a brief exchange of fire in which one of the accused and a constable suffered bullet injuries, police said here. Afsaar, Muzahid and Hashmat from Tyodi village under Bhojpur police station area were going to Hapur when a police team signalled them to stop in Patel Nagar area here, Superintendent of Police Shlok Kumar said. The accused sped away and the police team flashed alert on the wireless, for other patrol units in the city, he said. When they reached Nand Gram area police teams surrounded them. Finding no way to escape, one of them opened fire at a police team, which retaliated in self defence, Kumar said. Afsaar, and constable Pravesh Kumar were injured in the firing, and they have been admitted to hospital, the police officer said. During interrogation, the accused confessed they they were on their way to loot a businessman in Hapur's Pilkhuwa town, the SP said, adding motorcycles, three country-made weapons and cartridges have been seized from them. Afsaar had previously been booked in seven cases of loot and attempt to murder in Hapur, Meerut and Gautam Buddh Nagar districts, the officer added. PTI CORR AD NSD NSD Ghaziabad, Mar 13 (PTI) Police have arrested a man here for allegedly kidnapping and killing his girlfriend following a heated argument, an official said Wednesday. Based on a complaint lodged by the victim's mother, an FIR was registered against Deepak Kumar, said DIG Upendra Agarwal. Geetika Verma, a school teacher by profession, had gone missing at around 11 am on Friday, he said. Police nabbed Deepak Kumar, a native of Modinagar, on Tuesday, the DIG said, adding that during interrogation, Kumar confessed to his crime. Later, police recovered the woman's body from near Nahal village, the DIG said. PTI CORR SNE SNE CHARIHO: Charihos girls and boys soccer teams both won Division II titles in dramatic fashion. The girls won in penalty kicks and the boys in the final two minutes of double overtime. The football team reached the D-III title game, as did the field hockey team. The girls volleyball team played in the D-II semifinals. Erin vonHousen was All-State in girls cross country. STONINGTON: Stoningtons boys soccer team earned its second straight Class M state title, closing the season with 21 straight victories. The field hockey team lost in the Class S title game. WESTERLY: Westerlys girls volleyball team reached the Division III semifinals, losing to eventual champion Scituate. The football team played in the D-II semifinals. The girls soccer team reached the D-III semifinals. Jake Serra and Kaya West were All-State in cross country. WHEELER: Wheeler boys and girls soccer teams qualified for the Class S state tournament. Vote View Results Yum Jung-ah seen in the film "Another Child" / Courtesy of Showbox By Park Jin-hai Yum Jung-ah, star of JTBC's hit drama "SKY Castle," who impressed viewers with her strong mother character, returns to the big screen to play another mother role. In the film with "Another Child," directed by actor-turned-director Kim Yun-seok, the 46-year-old actress plays the role of Young-ju, whose happy normal life is suddenly turned upside down. The film revolves around two families whose two underage daughters discover their parents' infidelity. While Young-ju's daughter tries to deal with her father's cheating on her own to save the family, Mi-hee, the daughter of her father's cheating partner, spills the beans and things come crashing down. "It is a film that makes people think (about life). If my previous mother roles focused more on motherhood and maternity, my new role depicts more of her 'woman' side faced with the family crisis," said Yum during a press conference at a local theater in Seoul, Wednesday. "Although it was not an easy role to take, I was more than pleased to accept my new challenge." With the film, veteran actor Kim is making his directorial debut. Kim, with over 30 years of acting experience, said a little part of an omnibus theater play demonstrated at a workshop in 2014 attracted his attention. After a discussion with the playwright and five years of preparation, the debut film has finally come to light. "Going through their parents' problems, the two teens sometimes fight and sometimes get together. Their coming-of-age story was very touching. Together with the roles of two actresses, I was confident that I could create a film with both compelling drama and characters," the director said explaining why he decided to use the story for his directorial debut film. Following the five respective views of each character, audiences can see their different ways of unraveling the crisis. "People usually think one's age parallels one's inner growth. But this film shows adulthood and maturity are different," he said. "With that message heard, movie fans will be able to realize the broad-spectrum those veteran actresses Yum and Kim So-jin have in acting as well." In the film, Kim also plays the timid cheating father Dae-won. "Playing a double role as actor and director was like I was going between DOS and Windows systems in an instant. I should be thinking as an actor but then I'm required to quickly move into thinking as a director," he said. "I had my own worries before taking the job, but in retrospect, I think it was a good decision. I'm still working on the final touches on the film, but the result has been beyond what I'd expected." The film will hit local theaters in April. We dutifully pay for insurance so we are protected if the worst happens. Yet as we report here, firms are repeatedly letting their customers down just when you need them most. In the case of Paul Webb, the doctors have been painfully clear: he is dying. As with many illnesses, it is nearly impossible to predict exactly how long he has left. False security: Insurance firms are repeatedly letting their customers down just when you need them most Despite this, his lung disease specialists have confirmed Paul is deteriorating rapidly and may have less than 12 months to live. They say that even if he is lucky enough to receive a lung transplant, he still may survive for just five years. Yet instead of spending what little time he has left with his ten-year-old son, Paul has been forced to fight his insurer for the past three months. According to anonymous pen-pushers at Legal & General, he does not qualify for a payout under his policy's terminal illness clause because he may yet survive more than 12 months. Has Legal & General lost its mind? Why on earth is one of Britain's biggest insurers quibbling over what may be only a matter of months? The whole point of the policy is to make Paul's life easier and remove any financial pressure. Instead the insurer is only making his life more stressful. The promised 200,000 payout is a drop in the ocean for a company that made 2.1 billion in 2018. And its chief executive, Nigel Wilson, earned 3.5 million in 2017. At that rate it would take Mr Wilson less than a month to earn the life-changing sum Paul was owed. What's more, the insurer would have to pay the claim on Paul's death anyway so why make his life a misery by making him wait? Thankfully, cases such as these appear to be relatively rare. But they are so distressing that even one is one too many. It is morally bankrupt to rely on technical loopholes buried in policy documents to reject claims and insurers know it. Power failure Yet another small energy supplier bit the dust this week. Brilliant Energy was the 11th to collapse in just 12 months and the third this year. Customers do not need to worry in that they will not lose their power supply, and any credit balances will be honoured by the new supplier appointed for them. But untangling the mess is proving tricky for those who take on the defunct firm's customers. As we reveal today, some former customers of Economy Energy which collapsed in January are still waiting for refunds after ditching the firm last summer. It is vital that watchdog Ofgem carries out stringent checks to make sure the replacement firms are providing their existing customers with excellent customer service before allowing them to take on more. Experts say we should expect more firms to go under before the year is out so we must be prepared. The regulator also needs to toughen up its licensing regime urgently to ensure new firms are financially robust in the first place. Name & shame Finally, it is excellent news that banks and building societies are compiling blacklists of rogue firms so they know when to block our card payments. But it would be even more helpful if they would let us have sight of these secret lists, too, so we don't fall foul in the first place. It would also be a good idea to introduce one big industry-wide blacklist so everyone benefits from the same level of protection. The only way to beat the scammers once and for all is if we share information. So in the meantime, I would urge all scam victims to report rip-off companies to their bank. Even if you don't get your money back, you may be able to help prevent someone else losing theirs. If your bank has stopped you losing money to scammers, email me at v.bischoff@dailymail.co.uk When father-of-one Paul Webb was told that he may have less than 12 months to live, he took some solace in the fact that he had life insurance with terminal illness cover. The 200,000 payout would allow him to reduce his hours at work and spend more time with his ten-year-old son. But, when the 47-year-old came to claim, his insurer Legal & General refused to pay because there is a chance that Paul could live longer. The insurance giant, which made 2.1 billion profit in 2018, acknowledged he is terminally ill, but said he could live for up to five years if he has a lung transplant. Dismissed: Father-of-one Paul Webb was refused a payment from his life insurance firm after he was told that he may have less than 12 months to live Paul is on the transplant list, but there is no guarantee he will survive long enough to receive one. Money Mail can today reveal how Paul is just one of many desperate insurance customers being forced to fight for payouts in their darkest hours. Our investigation has found life and travel insurers have been repeatedly rebuked by the Financial Ombudsman after wrongly snubbing sensitive claims. The findings come just months after Money Mail reported how Aviva denied fathers Steven Jackson and Steven Huddleston critical illness payouts because they both had a cardiac arrest, rather than a heart attack. Paul has paid 20 a month for life cover with Legal & General since November 2015. Under the policy terms, the insurer will pay out 201,448 in the event of his death or if he is diagnosed with a terminal illness where he has a life expectancy of less than 12 months. The former Navy submariner was told he had between two and three years to live after he was diagnosed with interstitial lung disease in September last year. But, after a decline in his condition, the account manager from Oldham has now been told that he could have less than 12 months to live. Yet, when Paul tried to claim on his life insurance policy, Legal & General dismissed his claim. In a letter, the insurer said: 'We do not dispute the severity of your illness. However, the opinion of the doctors who are treating you suggests that initially life expectancy was one to two years without a lung transplant and you were prioritised for an early lung transplant.' It added: 'While we recognise not everyone on a transplant waiting list will be successful, we have to consider that there is a potential for a transplant. 'Therefore the doctors who are treating you, our medical officer and the third medical expert are all unable to confirm a definite life expectancy prognosis of less than 12 months at this time.' Legal & General said Paul could live for up to five years if he has a lung transplant. Paul is on the transplant list, but there is no guarantee he will survive long enough to receive one There are currently more than 330 people on the national lung transplant list, according to NHS Blood and Transplant. The latest figures show that in a year, 65 people either died while waiting or came off the list because they were too ill. One of Paul's respiratory specialists said in a letter: 'It is difficult to predict prognosis in interstitial lung diseases.' He acknowledged that while Paul's prognosis could be between one and two years, it may only take a chest infection to see this drop to less than 12 months. Three months when you've only got 12 is a long time and patients should never be treated like this After Money Mail intervened, Legal & General agreed to pay out three months after Paul first tried to claim. Paul, who is still on the transplant list, says: 'It has been handled in a disgusting way. 'I feel that Legal & General was using the lung transplant as a get-out clause. Three months when you've only got 12 is a long time and patients should never be treated like this.' The Ombudsman has ruled in favour of more than 150 customers who were initially denied insurance payouts after the death of a loved one since April 2013. Experts say decisions should be made on what is fair and reasonable. L&G says its policy requires the treating specialist and its own medical officer to agree life expectancy is less than 12 months Esure was forced to pay a widower his home insurance claim in 2014 after arguing his wife's death following a violent attack in public did not meet its policy definition of 'an assault in the street'. One woman was denied a payout under serious illness benefit as she had allowed her husband's life support to be withdrawn 13 days after a stroke to donate his organs. ReAssure Ltd said had he survived 28 days, she would have been entitled to a payout, but it was told to pay in 2013. Travel insurer Mapfre was forced to pay up in 2015 after it denied a couple whose young nephew died the day before their holiday because he was not considered a 'close relative' under the policy. Martyn James, of complaints site Resolver, says: 'Quibbling over the number of weeks people have left to live or looking for reasons not to pay, rather than how best to support people facing this impossible situation, is unacceptable.' Legal & General says it has 'every sympathy' with Paul, but its policy requires the treating specialist and its own medical officer to agree life expectancy is less than 12 months. A spokesman adds: 'If a customer is on a waiting list that will extend their life beyond 12 months, the circumstances would not usually meet the terms of our policy definition. 'If the treating specialist and our medical officer agree an individual's condition is changing, they may agree a life expectancy of less than 12 months.' An Association of British Insurers spokesman says: 'Nearly all (97 per cent) of life insurance, critical illness and income protection claims are paid, with insurers paying out nearly 14 million every day on these policies to help families cope financially at a very distressing time.' b.wilkinson@dailymail.co.uk Giant technology companies have become too powerful and must be reined in with tougher competition rules, a hard-hitting report warns today. The review, presented to Chancellor Philip Hammond, says the dominance of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple is hampering choice and tipping the scales against smaller competitors. It warns the big Silicon Valley tech firms have amassed unprecedented troves of data and are restricting rivals' access, to crush them. Tech bosses, including Facebook's billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg, pictured, have been accused of ignoring concerns over the behaviour of their businesses Hammond is expected to respond to the findings today when he gives an update on the economy in his Spring Statement. The report also: Warns existing competition rules are not fit for the digital age. Calls for an inquiry into the murky online advertising market dominated by Google and Facebook. Says a new unit should be set up within the Competition and Markets Authority to properly police technology firms. The review, produced by Harvard University professor Jason Furman and a panel of experts, will pile further pressure on America's technology titans as they face growing scrutiny around the world. Merkel bites back German Chancellor Angela Merkel has hit back at the US after being urged to ban Chinese telecom firm Huawei. In a clear rebuke to US officials, who have threatened to cut Germany out of intelligence-sharing arrangements if they use Huawei kit for a 5G mobile network, she said: 'We are defining our standards for ourselves. We will also discuss these questions with our partners in Europe, as well as the appropriate offices in the US.' The US warning was made by Berlin-based ambassador Richard Grenell last week. The embassy said: 'This could in the future jeopardise nimble cooperation and some sharing of information.' Furman, a top adviser to former US president Barack Obama, said: 'The digital sector has created substantial benefits but these have come at the cost of increasing dominance of a few companies, which is limiting competition and consumer choice and innovation. 'Some say this is inevitable or even desirable. I think the UK can do better.' The review comes after the House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport committee last month likened Facebook and its executives to 'digital gangsters', accusing them of brazenly breaking competition rules. Bosses, including Facebook's billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg, pictured, have been accused of ignoring concerns over the behaviour of their businesses. The report said technology giants were now so powerful that they act as 'gatekeepers' between businesses and customers. It also said the huge amount of data they gathered created a 'feedback loop', helping them attract more customers and develop products faster and then hoover up even more data. Google and Facebook's iron grip on advertising was singled out the two rake in more than half of the 11.6billion spent annually on digital ads in the UK. And it pointed to evidence that Amazon had become 'the default online option for many shoppers', with a third of all UK e-commerce transactions going through the company last year. The finding contradicted claims made last year by Amazon, which told MPs that it was a 'very small' part of online retail. The review flagged a series of 'problematic' takeovers, which it said reduced competition. It highlighted Google's 1.3billion takeover of video service YouTube in 2006, Facebook's 765million swoop on Instagram in 2012, and Apple's 2.3billion takeover of headphones firm Beats Electronics in 2014. Furman said current UK competition rules were not fit for the modern age. Hammond said: 'The work of Jason Furman and the panel is invaluable in ensuring we're at the forefront of delivering a competitive digital marketplace. I will carefully examine the proposals put forward.' Former Indian central bank chief Raghuram Rajan said that faith in the global economic system must be restored urgently Capitalism is failing because it no longer helps ordinary people, says a top economist seen as a frontrunner to lead the Bank of England. Raghuram Rajan, who is the former head of India's central bank, said that faith in the global economic system must be restored urgently. He added that it was once possible to get a good job with a relatively modest education, but success is now reserved for people who went to top schools. The 56-year-old said: 'I think capitalism is under serious threat because it's stopped providing for the many, and when that happens, the many revolt against capitalism. 'It's not providing equal opportunity and in fact the people who are falling off are in a much worse situation.' Rajan, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, has been widely tipped to succeed Bank of England Governor Mark Carney when he leaves in 2020. In a break with Carney's often gloomy predictions about Brexit, the Indian criticised the European Union's 'profoundly undemocratic' centralisation of power. Asked if the UK's future might be brighter outside the European Union, he told The Times: 'It could be, but it does require a lot of things to go right. 'The big Brexit debate is, can you, in a short span of time, re-engage with the world on equal terms while getting more sovereign powers? 'I have no doubt that there is a scenario in which that can happen and I have no doubt there are other scenarios where it flops miserably.' UK economic growth was 0.5 per cent, better than the 0.2 per cent expected by economists The British economy grew more rapidly than expected in January as shoppers kept spending and firms stockpiled goods ahead of Brexit. Growth was 0.5 per cent, better than the 0.2 per cent expected by economists, driven by a stronger performance in services, which includes everything from retail to banking. There was also heavy demand at wholesalers, thought to be driven by firms buying extra products ahead of possible disruption should we leave the EU without a deal. Alastair Neame, of economics group Cebr, said: 'Wholesalers will have benefited from continued stockpiling in January following the Government failure to win a vote on the Brexit withdrawal.' Growth for the three months to January was more subdued, largely because of a tough December. The economy grew only 0.2 per cent in the period, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Separate ONS figures show Britain imported 10.4billion more goods and services than it exported in the three months to January, up 1.3billion on the previous month. This deficit leaves the country reliant on overseas nations and means household spending ends up as profits for foreign firms. Cindy Rose, the chief executive of Microsoft UK, will join WPP in April as a non-executive director Advertising giant WPP has recruited the most powerful woman in British tech as a board member as it tries to boost its digital credentials. Cindy Rose, the chief executive of Microsoft UK, will take up her post in April as a non-executive director. The 53-year-old American has run Microsoft's business since 2016 and holds British citizenship. Before joining the US technology giant, she led the consumer division at telecoms firm Vodafone. Her appointment comes as WPP battles competition from internet giants such as Facebook and Google, with advertising shifting online. It also follows disappointing annual results after the FTSE 100 firm posted a hefty drop in profits in January and warned the tough conditions were expected to continue. Roberto Quarta, WPP's chairman, said: 'Cindy is one of the most admired and respected figures in the technology industry, and we are delighted to welcome her to the WPP board. Her deep understanding of the role of technology in business transformation will be invaluable.' Rose said: 'WPP has set out a bold new vision for its future. 'I look forward to supporting the team and making a contribution at such an exciting and important moment in the company's development.' WPP is in the process of axing 3,500 jobs under plans to slash costs by 275million a year as it looks to turn around its fortunes. It was rocked by the sudden departure of founder and chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell last year over allegations he paid a prostitute with company expenses. Sorrell denies the claims. WPP shares dipped 0.2 per cent, or 2p, to 853p. By Park Hyong-ki The number of people who have lost or can't find jobs remained above 1 million in February, according to Statistics Korea, Wednesday. This is because manufacturers are letting go of employees, and are still reluctant to invest amid lingering uncertainties over the government's labor policy, say local analysts. However, the country did see 263,000 jobs created last month compared to a year ago, the highest increase in 13 months But most of these were offered to the elderly via a state program launched early this year. Also, jobs in welfare and social services, backed by government spending increased. This means the administration is leading in work creation, and leaves the analysts questioning the viability, sustainability and quality of a job market driven by the government, rather than the private sector. They say sooner or later, it will face limits to creating jobs through fiscal stimuli, and further policy adjustments will be needed to get the private sector to invest and hire. "The job market will become very unsustainable should the government keep on spending and leading in job creation," said Sung Tae-yoon, an economist at Yonsei University. "The hiring numbers may have increased, but most people would not perceive them as positive because, most importantly, the private sector is missing in action." The number of unemployed reached a two-year high of over 1.3 million last month, up 380,000 from February 2018. The unemployment rate increased 0.1 percentage points to 4.7 percent in the same period, as those in their 20s, 30s and 40s continue struggling to find jobs. The 40-something group, in this case, is trying to re-enter the employment market after losing jobs mostly in manufacturing. More than 151,000 people lost manufacturing jobs last month. This is lower than the 170,000 lost in January, but manufacturers have been firing more than hiring now for 11 straight months. For these people, the unemployment rate would "feel more like" it is over 10 percent, rather than at 4.7 percent. "I would say this is very serious," Sung said. The reasons for continuous job losses in manufacturing include slow innovation, the government's top-down policy approach and increasing labor costs following rapid minimum wage hikes, according to analysts. Job losses in manufacturing have led to an increase in employment in agriculture and fisheries. In February, agriculture and fisheries created 117,000 jobs, following 107,000 in January. However, analysts say this isn't all good news. "It seemed those who lost their jobs in manufacturing mostly crossed over to the rural areas. This may not be a good sign because they went to agriculture looking for jobs to survive, not with a particular interest in the sector," said Yun Chang-hyun, an economist at the University of Seoul. Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki acknowledged in an economy-related meeting that private investment remains slow and low. The ministry will seek to launch infrastructure projects worth 13 trillion won, including roads and railways, with the private sector within this year to revitalize the economy and create more jobs. Up to one million British children are owed 1.5 billion of public funds but are now at risk of losing the money. Six million children aged nine to 17 are entitled to cash under the now defunct Child Trust Fund (CTF) scheme, which was designed to give youngsters a nest egg as they embark on adult life. Under the scheme, children born from September 1, 2002 to January 2, 2011 received between 200 and 500 to put in a tax-free Child Trust Fund account. Lost funds: Six million children aged nine to 17 are entitled to cash under the now defunct Child Trust Fund scheme Those at the older end of this age range were also given a second payment on their seventh birthday, which meant that children from poorer backgrounds, who received 500 each time, were entitled to up to 1,000 of Government funds. However, MPs have now warned that one in six of those youngsters is set to miss out on the cash because the Government has 'lost' track of them. HMRC claims that 700,000 accounts are now dormant, while other analysts estimate closer to one million were 'lost'. Analysis by stockbrokers The Share Centre shows that accounts whose owners can't be traced are worth nearly 1.5 billion. It also found around half of that money is owed to children from the poorest families. Labour MP Helen Goodman says: 'Whereas only 6 per cent of wealthy children are losing out: for those on child tax credits, four in ten have been lost.' Miss Goodman, who will debate CTFs with Treasury ministers today, says the Government needs to 'sort this out now so that every young person gets their money'. She adds: 'The amounts per child will be as much as 1,600 enough to pay for a course or a student's rent for several months.' People can check if they or their children have a Child Trust Fund by searching for it via the HMRC website. HMRC denies the accounts are 'lost'. A spokesman says: 'All CTFs are being managed by CTF providers either by the original provider or a subsequent provider where the funds have been transferred.' He adds: 'HMRC have developed an online tracing tool and amended the National Insurance number notification letter to 16-year-olds to include details about how CTFs can be located. The Government is also working with industry to encourage CTF holders to re-engage with their accounts. If any account holders are unable to retrieve account details online, they are encouraged to contact HMRC .' Retirees are boosting their pensions by working as professional house-sitters. Pensioners can pocket as much as 29 a day keeping a watchful eye on people's property and caring for their pets. Clive Noble, 72, and wife Yolande, 67, have made hundreds of pounds a year staying in empty care homes, bungalows and even a Gothic property rumoured to have belonged to the Marquess of Queensbury. Sue Cabrelli, 70, from Loughborough, Leicestershire, has been a house-sitter for ten years On their first job they spent their silver wedding anniversary looking after a goldfish called Mary. Yolande applied to Homesitters Ltd about 15 years ago after a house-sitting stint for her sister. The Nobles, who live in Shropshire, regularly return to a stately home in the Midlands where they look after a Bernese mountain dog. In the winter of 2017 they stayed for four-and-a-half months in a Liverpool care home. Before their second career, the couple had run shops selling fishing tackle and outdoor clothing. Yolande says nothing has gone dramatically wrong in their 15 years of house-sitting, but it is important to prepare for what might happen. She says: 'We thoroughly enjoy house-sitting, it has taken us to places we never would have gone to before. It makes us feel useful and keeps us active. While we are retired we don't just want to sit around doing nothing.' Clive says: 'It's not just about making savings on gas and electricity house-sitting allows us to travel without expense. 'We can go and stay in a nice part of London and drive down to Richmond Park, which is beautiful and full of deer. How much would that cost us if we were to come here on holiday?' ...Other ways to boost your pension Home-sitting is not the only way to boost income in your retirement. You can let out spare rooms to lodgers or use Airbnb, which connects holidaymakers and weekend-breakers with homeowners. For example, a double room near the centre of Bristol is listed on the Airbnb website for 35 a night. You can earn 7,500 a year tax-free under the Governments Rent a Room scheme. Language school EF pays 85 a week to host families taking in foreign students. Unused space such as a loft, attic or garage, can be let out on sites such as Storemates. Rent your drive or parking space for up to 200 a month on JustPark, Park Let and Your Parking Space. Old mobile phones can be traded in on sites such as Compare My Mobile, Sell My Mobile and Compare and Recycle. Compare My Mobile offers 83 for an iPhone 6 16GB. Zapper, Music Magpie and We Buy Books will pay cash for unwanted books, CDs, DVDs and games. Two months of the year spent looking after homes and animals could make you 1,122, according to Homesitters Ltd. Managing director Alan Irvine says: 'Home and pet-sitting is a role that is increasingly popular with older people looking to continue working flexibly during their retirement.' He adds: 'Most retired people are on a fixed budget and many look to supplement their retirement income. 'Home and pet-sitting is a great option that many won't have thought of, which is flexible and offers a modest remuneration. 'Our clients truly value the skills, reliability and experience that retired people have.' He also says house-sitters will usually save on their own heating and water bills by being away from home. The easiest way to find homeowners willing to pay you to stay is via websites such as Homesitters Ltd, House and Home Sitters and Animal Angels. Buckinghamshire-based Homesitters Ltd says it saw a 14 per cent increase in applicants between 2017 and 2018, with the average sitter now aged 60. Most websites are free to join but you will need to attend a face-to-face interview that could last a few hours. Applicants need to be fit and active. Being a lover of animals is important and having experience with them is a bonus. You will need to provide references from previous employers and acquaintances who have known you for at least five years. Homesitters Ltd pays 11 a day plus a daily food allowance of just under 9. You can only leave the property for three hours at a time and for just one hour after it gets dark. Animal Angels, in Hampshire, pays sitters 29 a day and extra for animals. If you looked after a dog, two cats and a goldfish for ten days you would earn 344 plus travel expenses at 40p per mile. Dogs' life: Applicants need to be fit and active. Being a lover of animals is important and having experience with them is a bonus And Portsmouth-based House and Home Sitters pays an average of 20 a day. Trusted Housesitters will not pay you a fee. Instead members pay 89 a year and in return can stay in properties in 130 countries across the world. Experts recommend keeping the owner's mobile number close to hand, requesting a spare set of keys, keeping information about the surrounding area and contact details of someone local, in case of an emergency. You should also ask for a copy of their home insurance policy. And you should double-check the house-sitting firm has insurance in place in the event that something goes wrong. Housesitters Ltd, for example, will cover you for up to 10million if you are injured on a job. You should also check your own home insurance policy as some insurers will only allow you to leave your property empty for a few weeks at a time. Ryan Fulthorpe, of comparison site GoCompare, says: 'It's important to agree all responsibilities you will be expected to undertake. 'This includes financial responsibilities, bills, deliveries and whether you'll have access to a vehicle, WiFi and landline. 'If you're expected to look after any pets, it's crucial you check with the owner they have a suitable level of pet insurance in place, should there be any unforeseen emergency veterinary care required.' Sue Cabrelli, 70, from Loughborough, Leicestershire, has been a house-sitter for ten years. She was devastated when a Labrador she was caring for died after suffering a heart attack. She says: 'Looking after someone else's beloved pet is quite a lot of responsibility. 'Older ones may have health problems and you are in charge of their medication.' a.murray@dailymail.co.uk ZURICH, March 13 (Reuters) - Assets under management at Swiss private bank EFG International dropped to 131.2 billion francs ($130.21 billion) at the end of 2018, missing analysts' expectations, as tough markets and exchange-rate swings weighed. However, assets under management rose to 135.4 billion francs by February-end and hit 146.4 billion francs, when including Shaw and Partners, an Australian group in which EFG International is acquiring a majority stake, the lender said on Wednesday. EFG reported underlying net new assets of 2.5 billion francs, although Switzerland and Italy missed its growth target of 3-6 percent "due to de-risking impact". Zurich-based EFG had acquired troubled Swiss bank BSI from Brazil's BTG Pactual in 2016 in a deal that nearly doubled EFG's size, but also saddled it with challenges. BSI's involvement in the scandal-hit Malaysian sovereign fund 1MDB prompted the closure of BSI's Singapore branch as well as an order from Switzerland's financial watchdog for it to disgorge tens of millions of dollars in profit. EFG's full-year net profit swung to 70.3 million francs from a loss of 59.8 million in 2017, and the private bank proposed raising its dividend by a fifth to 0.30 francs per share. The company set 2022 financial targets including average net new asset growth of 4-6 percent over the period, a revenue margin of at least 85 basis points, a cost/income ratio of 72-75 percent and a return on tangible equity above 15 percent by end-2022. It aimed to return 50 percent of underlying profit to shareholders, while maintaining a minimum CET1 capital ratio of 14 percent. ($1 = 1.0076 Swiss francs) (Reporting by Michael Shields; Editing by Thomas Seythal and Sherry Jacob-Phillips) ALGIERS, March 13 (Reuters) - Algeria's government is ready for dialog with the opposition, its Deputy Prime Minister said on Wednesday, after President Abdelaziz Bouteflika reversed a decision to seek a fifth term in the face of mass protests. "Dialog is our duty. Our top priority is to bring together all Algerians," Ramtane Lamamra told state radio. Earlier, Armed Forces Chief of Staff and deputy defense minister Ahmed Gaed Salah told Ennahar TV the army would preserve Algeria's security "in all circumstances and conditions." The initiative by Bouteflika, who also delayed elections and said a conference would be held to discuss political changes, has failed to satisfy many Algerians who continue to want the country's stale political system dismantled quickly. Tens of thousands of people from all social classes have demonstrated almost daily against a political system dominated by the military and veterans of the 1954-62 independence war against France. Bouteflika has ruled for 20 years but has rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013. (Reporting by Hamid Ould Ahmed; writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Michael Georgy) Enbridge Inc. operates as an energy infrastructure company. The company operates through five segments: Liquids Pipelines, Gas Transmission and Midstream, Gas Distribution and Storage, Renewable Power Generation, and Energy Services. The Liquids Pipelines segment operates pipelines and related terminals to transport various grades of crude oil and other liquid hydrocarbons in Canada and the United States. The Gas Transmission and Midstream segment invests in natural gas pipelines, and gathering and processing facilities in Canada and the United States. The Gas Distribution and Storage segment is involved in natural gas utility operations serving residential, commercial, and industrial customers in Ontario, as well as natural gas distribution and energy transportation activities in Quebec. The Renewable Power Generation segment operates power generating assets, such as wind, solar, geothermal, and waste heat recovery facilities; and transmission assets in North America and Europe. The Energy Services segment provides energy marketing services to refiners, producers, and other customers; and physical commodity marketing and logistical services in Canada and the United States. The company was formerly known as IPL Energy Inc. and changed its name to Enbridge Inc. in October 1998. Enbridge Inc. was founded in 1949 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada. Read More Boliden AB, a metals company, explores for, mines, smelts, and recycles metals. It operates in two segments, Business Area Mines and Business Area Smelters. The company mines for zinc, copper, lead, gold, silver, nickel, and tellurium deposits. It operates the Aitik, the Boliden Area, and Garpenberg mines in Sweden; Tara mine in Ireland; and Kylylahti and Kevitsa mines in Finland. The company also produces zinc and lead ingots, copper cathodes, and gold bars and silver granules; sulphuric acid, zinc clinker, sulphur dioxide, and palladium concentrates; copper, lead, nickel, and zinc concentrates; and by-products comprising copper sulphate, zinc clinker, iron sand, copper telluride, selenium, nickel matte, crude nickel sulphate, and platinum group metal concentrates. In addition, it recycles copper and precious metals from electronic scrap; lead from used lead-acid batteries; and metals from waste products. Further, Boliden AB extracts silver from zinc concentrates. The company sells its products principally to industrial customers, as well as to base metal dealers and international metal stocks, such as the London Metal Exchange in Sweden, other Nordic region countries, Germany, the United Kingdom, other European countries, North America, and internationally. Boliden AB was founded in 1924 and is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. Read More This Dec. 5, 2018 image provided by DigitalGlobe provided on Tuesday, March 5, 2019 shows a satellite image of North Korea's Sohae facility. AP-Yonhap North Korea's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs have remained intact as the country has developed new means to evade sanctions, a United Nations panel said Tuesday. North Korea's main nuclear facility in Yongbyon has remained active, with its 5-megawatt reactor in operation since December 2015, according to an annual report by a panel of independent experts for the U.N. Security Council committee monitoring sanctions implementation on the North. It said satellite imagery of the complex from February to November 2018 showed the excavation of water channels and the construction of a building near the reactors' water discharge facilities. A new building could also be seen on the west side of the light water reactor, the panel said. In Pyongsan, the site of uranium mines, the panel said it observed the removal of spoil piles, which indicated possible mining activity. But in Kangson, there was no significant change around its possible uranium enrichment facility, other than the periodic movement of oversize trucks. The United Nations flag flies at half-mast in memory of the UN staff members killed in the Ethiopian air crash at the UN headquarters in New York, March 11, 2019. Xinhua-Yonhap In this Feb. 28, 2019, file photo, U.S. President Donald Trump, right, meets North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, Vietnam. AP-Yonhap A South Korean official in charge of the peace regime issue will head to the United States on Wednesday for a "working group" meeting, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. Rhee Dong-yeol, director general of the ministry's Korean Peninsula peace regime bureau, plans to meet with Alex Wong, deputy assistant secretary of state for North Korea, in Washington, D.C. on Thursday (local time). They will be joined by several other officials of the two sides handling North Korea affairs in the first face-to-face working group session since the unsuccessful Hanoi summit between the U.S. and North Korea late last month. Top agenda items include ways to revitalize the denuclearization process and Seoul's pursuit of a sanctions waiver for the planned video reunions of separated families living on the other side of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Some equipment needs to be brought into the North for the humanitarian project. The allies are also expected to touch on Seoul's push for inter-Korean economic cooperation, such as the resumption of the Kaesong Industrial Complex and Mount Kumgang tour program. But they won't likely go into detail about the sensitive issue, with Washington-Pyongyang nuclear talks stalled. North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump attend the extended bilateral meeting in the Metropole hotel with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, White House national security adviser John Bolton, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho and Kim Yong-chol, Vice Chairman of the North Korean Workers' Party Committee, during the second North Korea-U.S. summit in Hanoi, Vietnam February 28, 2019. Reuters-Yonhap Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga speaks during a press conference at the prime minister's official residence in Tokyo, Japan, 26 December 2018. EPA-Yonhap The Japanese government announced Wednesday it won't submit a North Korean human rights resolution to a U.N. panel this month as part of efforts for a quick resolution to the abduction issue. It marks a break from more than a decade of Japan's practice of playing a leading role, along with the European Union, in the adoption of such resolutions against Pyongyang by the 47-member U.N. Human Rights Council. Tokyo cited a review of all related circumstances, including the results of the Hanoi summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last month. "In the second North Korea-U.S. summit, there was a serious discussion on the abduction issue," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said at a press briefing. Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (R) meets Shigeo Iizuka (C), leader of a group of families of Japanese abducted by North Korea, Sakie Yokota (2nd L), the mother of Megumi Yokota, one of the Japanese abductees, and its members at Abe's official residence in Tokyo on March 30, 2018. AFP-Yonhap Britney Spears is the latest pop star throwing her fedora onto the stage. Producers of the new musical stage comedy "Once Upon a One More Time" say their show will use Spears' hit songs, which include "Oops! ... I Did It Again," "... Baby One More Time," "Toxic" and "Stronger." The show will have its world premiere this fall in Chicago at the James M. Nederlander Theatre. Previews begin in October. The show's story centers on classic fairy-tale princesses like Cinderella and Snow White learning that being happy ever after may take some work. In a statement, Spears says: "This is a dream come true for me!" Associated Press JT's Pilgrimage fest hoping for dry days After rain and lightning caused a cancellation last year, the Pilgrimage Music and Cultural Festival is hoping for a rebound in its fifth year with headliners The Foo Fighters, The Killers and Keith Urban. The festival, which is co-produced by Justin Timberlake, is returning to a park in Franklin, Tenn., about 20 miles south of Nashville, on Sept. 21-22. Severe weather last year resulted in evacuations and refunded tickets. Most of the scheduled headliners last year, including Dave Matthews, didn't perform. Additional performers this year include Leon Bridges, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, The Head & The Heart, Live, Jenny Lewis, Lauren Daigle, Lukas Nelson and the Promise of the Real. Associated Press Smollett laywer OK with court cameras A lawyer for Jussie Smollett said Tuesday that she would welcome cameras in the courtroom during the "Empire" actor's trial on charges accusing him of lying to the police, saying there has been a lot of leaked misinformation and cameras would allow the public to "see the evidence and the lack thereof." Attorney Tina Glandian made the comments during a brief hearing Tuesday in Cook County criminal court during which both sides agreed that cameras would be allowed at the next hearing, which is scheduled for Thursday. During that hearing, the case will be assigned to a trial judge who will then likely ask Smollett to enter a plea. Judge LeRoy Martin Jr. said Tuesday the new judge will decide whether to allow cameras in the courtroom during hearings and the trial. Smollett was charged last month with one count of misconduct the felony in Illinois that people are charged with when accused of lying to police because he allegedly lied to police about being the victim of a racist and homophobic attack by two masked men in downtown Chicago on Jan. 29. Last week, a grand jury indicted him on 16 counts of the same crime. Prosecutors allege that Smollett, who is black and gay, enlisted the help of two black men and staged the Jan. 29 attack because he was unhappy with his salary. Those men have admitted to police that they took part in the staged attack for Smollett, who paid them $3,500. The actor maintains his innocence. Associated Press Hawking's nurse barred from the job British regulators on Tuesday barred one of Stephen Hawking's former nurses from practicing after finding she failed to provide appropriate care to the late physicist. The Nursing and Midwifery Council struck off Patricia Dowdy, 61, who faced multiple misconduct charges, including financial misconduct, dishonesty, not providing appropriate care, failing to cooperate with the council and not having the correct qualifications. Dowdy worked for Hawking between 1999 and 2004 and again from July 2013 until being handed an interim suspension in March 2016. "The panel has found Mrs. Dowdy failed to provide the standards of good, professional care that we expect and Professor Hawking deserved," said Matthew McClelland of the council. "As a result, Mrs. Dowdy will no longer be able to practice." The best-known theoretical physicist of his time, Hawking wrote so plainly about the mysteries of space, time and black holes that his book "A Brief History of Time" became an international best-seller. Though suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, Hawking stunned doctors by living with the normally fatal illness for more than 50 years. Hawking died a year ago at the age of 76. Hawking's family thanked the council after the verdict. Associated Press If you're of Irish heritage, a fan of the music and culture or just have a long memory for bands of Capital Region past, this St. Patrick's Day weekend should be right in your wheelhouse. Acclaimed Celt-folk trio Donnybrook Fair is reuniting for a bunch of shows this weekend. From 1978 to 1985, Donnybrook Fair was one of the most-popular acts in the Capital Region and made a name for itself nationally on the Irish pub circuit. The four shows they're playing together from Thursday through Sunday are the first since a couple of well-received gigs last summer and a smattering of one-off shows over the past decade. While the group of Kevin McKrell, Jeff Strange and David McDonnell are all involved in artistic projects and on great personal terms with each other, geographic constraints make a more regular schedule of Donnybrook Fair shows unfeasible. Not that McKrell, a ubiquitous presence in the local folk and roots music scene, minds. "Davey lives in Ireland and does his own shows there," he said. "Getting all of us in the same spot takes more effort, like 'Hey, what are you doing on so and so?' "It's very haphazard, which works for me," McKrell added. Due to the inconsistent nature of Donnybrook Fair gigs, there isn't any significant rehearsal time. Prior to last summer's shows at The Egg and the Parting Glass in Saratoga, McKrell was worried about the group being a bit rusty. But he found that they gelled together again pretty quickly. "It makes me nervous in that you want to put on the best performance," he said. "You're counting on muscle memory to get you through." Recalling last August's performance at The Egg, the first of two Donnybrook shows last year, McKrell noted, "It was very satisfying. After the first song, we looked at each other and went, 'Oh, that didn't suck.' " McKrell did note that, because the trio doesn't "play in the same unit, the tempos wandered a little bit." This time around Arlen Greene, bassist for McKrell's renowned eponymously named band, will be playing with the group to provide a rhythmic anchor. Of course, if Donnybrook Fair's upcoming performances get a little loose and ragged that's part of the charm. In contrast to the tightly composed structure and instrumentalism of McKrells, Donnybrook Fair developed its sound over years of rowdy, lengthy pub shows. "In the McKrells, everything is thought out it's a lot of guys, such wonderful players (so) everything is rehearsed to the nth degree," McKrell said. "That's not to say that Donnybrook isn't wonderful players, but Donnybrook went on guts. "We'd play from 9-to-3, six nights a week, for $50 and all you could drink," he continued. "Someone would throw out a song and off you'd go." Donnybrook Fair is returning at a time when Irish music and Irish bars are more prevalent than when McKrell and Strange, high school friends, bonded over the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem's seminal 1962 LP "In Person at Carnegie Hall" over 40 years ago. After meeting McDonnell, then a recent arrival from Ireland, at a bar on Central Avenue, the group was formed and gigging all over. "We came together over a summer and played our first show in East Durham," McKrell said. The owner knew a place in Chicago, so then we went to Chicago and played. Then that owner knew a guy who owned a club in St. Paul. You'd end up playing a month in a club, then moving on to the next one. There'd be 8-to-10 places we'd put on a loop and play all year. "There'd really only be one Irish bar in each city," he continued. "It's not like it is now, where there's a few. So the mood (of each show) was that of an Irish bar. We were known as an Irish band, it was like St. Patrick's Day every day of the week." McKrell is excited about the upcoming shows. He knows having them occur over the St. Patrick's Day weekend "enhances it as far as attendance," but that's not the ultimate appeal of these performances for him. It's getting to play with his friends of four decades and appreciate the experiences they shared. "It's an absolute joy (getting together now), better than it was back in those days," McKrell enthused. "You don't lose sight of how good it is, it's reminder that it was very special, what we did. "I'm really thrilled with the whole thing again; I'm getting goosebumps right now talking about it and thinking about it," he added. "Friendship, just being able to spend that time together again. It's just such a joy." Jim Shahen Jr. is a frequent contributor to the Times Union. Veteran bartender Kris Noel, who has welcomed customers and poured drinks at bars including Hill Street Cafe in Albany and the former Tommy's Place in Colonie, is the owner of the new Kris' Mid City Tavern. The new eatery opens Friday, March 15, at 327 Broadway in Menands, home for about 40 years to the bar Poppy's Place, which closed at the end of last year. This April 2018 photo shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-un preparing to write in a guestbook with his sister, Kim Yo-jong, in the Peace House at the Truce Village of Panmunjom inside the Demilitarized Zone. Korea Times file By Jung Da-min North Korea's major diplomatic figures have been elected as new parliamentary members, while its leader Kim Jong-un did not run in the election. The list of members elected to the 14th Supreme People's Assembly (SPA) was announced on the sate-run Korean Central Television broadcast, Tuesday afternoon, two days after a nationwide election. A total of 678 deputies have been elected, one from each constituency. Kim Yo-jong, Kim Jong-un's sister and first director of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK), was elected to constituency No. 5 in the capital Pyongyang's Mangyongdae district, which is considered the home neighborhood of the country's founder, Kim Il-sung. Kim Yo-jong has been assisting her brother on the country's diplomatic stage with South Korea as well as with the U.S., receiving the spotlight for waiting on her brother hand and foot. The North's Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho and Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui, who played an active part behind the scenes of the Hanoi summit between Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump, were elected as SPA members for the first time. Other diplomatic figures newly elected to the SPA included Ri Su-yong and Kim Yong-chol, vice chairmen of the WPK central committee, as well as North Korea's ambassador to the United States Kim Song, and Ri Son-gwon, chairman of the North's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland. Kim Yo-jong has been elected in Constituency No. 5 in the capital Pyongyang's Mangyongdae district, said to be the home neighborhood of the country's founder Kim Il-sung. KCTV-Yonhap According to an analysis of the North's election results by the South's Ministry of Unification, Tuesday, 50 percent of the SPA members have been replaced. The ministry said it was noteworthy that Kim Jong-un's name was off the list. "This is the first time since the foundation of the North Korean regime that the country's leader has not been named as a member of the Supreme People's Assembly," the ministry said. "Further observation is needed to figure out the specific situation behind it." The fact that Kim Jong-un's name was off the list means he did not run in the election, which is an unprecedented move in the North Korean dictatorship, a North Korean watcher said. "It seems that Kim Jong-un does not like the idea of idolization, unlike his father and grandfather Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, and wants to shape his figure as a pragmatic and realistic man," said Chon Hyon-joon, head of the Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Institute. A photo released by the official North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) shows North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un casting his vote as he takes part in the election of deputies to the 14th Supreme People's Assembly at a polling station in Pyongyang, March 10. KCNA-EPA-Yonhap Duanesburg brewery opens tasting room Back Barn Brewing, said to be the only woman-owned brewery in New York state, opened its tasting room a few weeks ago in its renovated barns in Duanesburg. Open 4 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, 3 to 9 p.m. Thursday, noon to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday (extended Sunday hours this weekend for St. Patrick's Day), the tasting room features the brewery's beers, food from a rotating roster of food trucks and live music. See its Facebook page, facebook.com/backbarnbrewingco, for schedules. Back Barn Brewing is at 7082 Western Turnpike, between Duanesburg and Delanson. Call 518-709-8423. Ten Broeck Mansion bringing back wine club Ten Broeck Mansion in Albany, home to one of the oldest wine cellars in America, has announced dates for the second year of its wine club. Set to meet quarterly, the club will gather in the circa-1798 mansion's wine cellar, which was bricked over during Prohibition and forgotten, still holding drinkable historic wines, for half a century. The club is led by Krysta Dennis, a wine educator and Siena College professor. The first meeting is set for 7 p.m. Thursday, March 21. Future meetings will be on Thursday nights in May, September and November. Attendance costs $40 per session ($35 for Albany County Historical Association members, discounts for purchasing the series) for wine tastings and small-plate fare. Background, class details and ticket link are at tenbroeckmansion.org. The mansion is at 9 Ten Broeck Place. Albany's Sandwiches to Go closes after 38 years Sandwiches to Go, which had served lunch to Albany's downtown workers since 1981, closed recently after the founding owners, Jim and Susan Donohue, retired. Originally located on Columbia Street, the business moved a couple of blocks to the cobblestone Maiden Lane in 1986. The Donohues completely renovated the four-story brick building, which has kitchen and takeout on the first floor, dining space on the second; the upper two floor are empty and could be used for offices or residential. The 8,600-square-foot building is for sale for $599,000. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Dining for Justice event aids family reunification An event called Dining for Justice which will raise funds for Immigrant Families Together, a network of Americans committed to reunification of families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. Sunday, March 24, at Nighthawks restaurant in Troy. There will be feature chef stations, live music, appearances by elected officials and an auction. Tickets are $99 per person. Details and ticket link may be found by searching for the dinner on eventbrite.com. Compiled by Steve Barnes. Items to be considered for publication must be submitted to sbarnes@timesunion.com. Visit his blog, blog.timesunion.com/tablehopping. ALBANY Could a perpetrator of domestic violence possibly get paid time off in Albany County as a result of their abuse? The Capital Region Chamber is taking issue with a safe time provision within the countys proposed paid sick time law that provides paid time off for employees who are victims of abuse or who have a family member who is a victim of abuse arguing that as worded the proposal could allow an employee who abused a family member to take time off as a result of that abuse. There is no specific provision within the proposal that prevents this from occurring, said Thomas OConnor, vice president of government relations for the chamber. It should have a notwithstanding clause. OConnor's concern expressed to county legislators and leaders late last month in an email was rebuked by proponents of Local Law C who argue the provision is being misinterpreted, and that no court would read it in the way the Chamber is suggesting. Providing the benefit to perpetrators of violence is clearly not the intent of the law, said Blue Carreker, campaigns manager for Citizen Action. It takes a real strange interpretation to go there. Carreker, who is working with legal advocacy organization A Better Balance on the proposal, said the group has written similar legislation for many communities across the country and has never come across this type of argument. Debate over wording in the proposal highlights the hurdles the proposal has faced in coming to the legislature for a full vote. It was first introduced in early 2018 but has languished in legislative committee since revisions were made after a May public hearing. The law would allow both full- and part-time workers to earn paid sick time at the rate of one hour for every 30 hours worked with limits on total time accrued dependent on the size of the employer. Since it was introduced, the business chamber has opposed the measure, believing benefits such as paid sick time should be determined between employers and workers. While we do not oppose paid sick leave, we do oppose a government-mandated paid sick leave, OConnor said. One size does not fit all, and you have different requirements both on the employer and employee. He also said any regulation of this magnitude should occur on the state or federal level. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Opposition originally focused on the cost of paid sick leave for employers, its impact on small businesses and some nonprofits, and whether it makes Albany less competitive as it tries to attract business. The current proposal allows businesses with fewer than five employees and nonprofits with fewer than 200 workers under a single contract to provide unpaid sick days. It also reduces the number of required paid sick days for employers with five to 100 employees to five days, rather than seven. Carreker said the proposal also gives the county executive the right to craft regulations for the law, which would allow for clarifications that presumably would address the chambers concerns. She questioned the sincerity of the chambers concern for domestic violence survivors, noting how the business advocacy group has been opposed to the proposal from the start. I feel it is a bit obstructionist, she said. Theyre seeking to have a change that would draw out the process that would require more hearings and other things. Gloversville police GLOVERSVILLE City police are asking for the public's help as they attempt to locate a 15-year-old who hasn't been in contact with his family since the end of February. Michael S. Bates III was reported missing on Feb. 18th by members of his immediate family, but remained in contact with several of them until the end of the month, Gloversville police said. TROY Bargain hunters searched through surplus college property in a sale on Wednesday at Hudson Valley Community College. The property included assorted tables and chairs, shredders, computer equipment and accessories. All items cost $1. The sale, put on by the Purchasing and Procurement Department, is held about three times a year. It has been going on for over 30 years, with a goal of reusing items instead of throwing them away. For information, check the HVCC Purchasing and Procurement Department website. BROOKLYN NXIVM President Nancy Salzman pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of racketeering conspiracy, making her the first person convicted in the Justice Department's criminal prosecution of the Colonie-based organization's leaders. Salzman, 64, who appeared in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, faces 33 to 41 months in prison as a result of the conviction, and a maximum fine of $250,000 plus possible restitution and forfeiture. There was no public disclosure in court of whether Salzman has agreed to cooperate in the ongoing investigation by the Justice Department, which last year brought charges against Salzman as well as her daughter Lauren; NXIVM co-founder Keith Raniere; television actress Allison Mack; Clare Bronfman, the organization's operations director and an heiress of the Seagram's liquor empire; and Kathy Russell, a longtime bookkeeper for NXIVM. Salzman's plea came as the government filed a superseding indictment on Wednesday against the five remaining defendants. The new indictment severed Nancy Salzman from the case and added seven additional charges, most that center on Raniere's alleged sexual contact with at least two underage girls. The new racketeering charges include multiple counts of sexual exploitation of a child and possession of child pornography, and one count of visa fraud. If convicted of the child exploitation charges, which the government said are buttressed by electronic messages, photographs and witness accounts, Raniere faces a minimum of 15 years in prison. READ MORE TIMES UNION COVERAGE OF NXIVM. In the courtroom on Wednesday, Salzman broke down as she apologized to her daughter and her parents while pleading guilty. "It has taken me some time and some soul-searching to come to this place," she said. " ... I still believe some of what we did was good." Salzman admitted to conspiring to commit two criminal acts: hacking into email accounts of the group's enemies who were not named in court and altering a videotape of NXIVM instructional sessions during a federal civil lawsuit that pitted the group against the Ross Institute, which is operated by cult tracker Rick Ross, who works to alert the public to the dangers of cults. NXIVM sued the Ross Institute in 2003 after it published excerpts from a NXIVM training manual that had been provided by an insider who had signed a non-disclosure agreement. Courts initially determined the institute's quotations were covered by the fair use doctrine; the suit was dismissed in 2017. The government's computer-hacking allegation is not the first time leaders of NXIVM have been accused of illegally monitoring email accounts. The Times Union first reported in 2015 that Bronfman had been accused of conspiring with Raniere to secretly implant a "key logger" virus on the computer of her father, Edgar M. Bronfman Sr., who died in December 2013. The alleged hacking of Edgar Bronfman's computer was apparently carried out so that the NXIVM associates could monitor his emails, including his exchanges with world leaders and then-U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton. Last July, federal agents in Albany arrested Salzman and her daughter along with Russell. Bronfman was taken into custody that same day by federal agents in New York City. Raniere and Mack were arrested a year ago. A criminal trial is scheduled to begin April 29 in Brooklyn. The 30-page, 11-count indictment filed this week honed the government's case against the remaining defendants, adding the sexual exploitation and child pornography charges. One of two racketeering counts in the indictment lists 14 separate criminal acts, ranging from conspiracy to commit identity theft to money laundering. The new indictment also includes the initial charges leveled against the defendants last year, including extortion, sex trafficking, harboring of aliens for financial gain, forced labor, various conspiracy charges and wire fraud. The indictment seeks forfeiture of a Halfmoon townhouse that Raniere had called "The Library" and allegedly used as his private "sex lair," as well as more than $520,000 in cash that was seized last year from Nancy Salzman's Halfmoon residence. According to a person familiar with the case, Salzman's attorney Robert Soloway did not inform Raniere's attorneys that Salzman would be pleading guilty before the news was first reported Tuesday afternoon by the Times Union. The charges allege some of the defendants took part in recruiting and grooming sexual partners for Raniere, and of using "harassment, coercion and abusive litigation to intimidate and attack perceived enemies and critics of Raniere." Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. A court filing from prosecutors on Tuesday outlined how Salzman and other co-defendants "were aware of and facilitated Raniere's sexual relationships with two underage victims ... (including) a 15-year-old girl who was employed by Nancy Salzman and who 10 years later became Raniere's first-line 'slave'" in a secret club he had created to groom women to have sex with him. The new indictment said Raniere's illegal sexual contact with one of the minors identified only as Jane Doe 2 took place in 2005. Prosecutors contend Raniere had formed the secret club, known as "Dominus Obsequious Sororium," which means "Master Over the Slave Women." The women in the group, they said, were lured into the club by other female NXIVM members including Mack, who considered Raniere her "grand master." According to the charges, the women were required to provide "collateral" sometimes damaging information about family members or close-up photographs of their genitalia in order to join. If they tried to leave, they were threatened that their collateral would be released. While Raniere's attorneys have characterized the allegations of his sexual relations with the 15-year-old girl as "inadmissible, unreliable, rank hearsay," prosecutors countered that their evidence includes "dated images of the victim, constituting child pornography, that were created and possessed by Raniere and electronic communications between the victim and Raniere reflecting their sexual relationship and indicating that it began when she was 15 years old." "As to Raniere's relationship with the second victim, the evidence demonstrates how members and associates of the enterprise were directed and expected to recruit and groom sexual partners for him ... (and) the government intends to introduce direct evidence, including witness testimony," the filing states. Prosecutors have described NXIVM as having been run as a type of pyramid scheme, noting the organization's leaders encouraged "associates and others to take expensive NXIVM courses, and incur debt to do so, as a means of exerting control over them and to obtain financial benefits for the members of the enterprise." The indictment of Raniere and his longtime confederates was a crippling blow to an organization that took shape in the Capital Region in the late 1990s. Under the direction of Raniere and Salzman, who had touted NXIVM's training curricula as a way for participants to improve their lives, the organization quietly built a following that included actors as well as the wealthy and politically powerful. NXIVM, which has been described by some experts as a cult, also developed a reputation for aggressively pursuing critics and defectors who broke from its ranks. The organization has been accused of using litigation to punish defectors who have criticized Raniere, the organization, or its training methods. NXIVM required its employees and devotees to sign non-disclosure agreements that were often used as weapons in their litigation against defectors or critics. Raniere remains in custody at a federal detention facility without bond. The other defendants have all been released on conditions that include home confinement. On Wednesday, Salzman and her attorneys left the courthouse without taking questions from reporters. She is scheduled to be sentenced on July 10. Suspects accused of forging checks, stealing alcohol, and driving while intoxicated are among the people State Police say they are searching for as part of their Warrant Wednesday effort to enlist the public's help finding fugitives. Ciara C. Westervelt, 23, is wanted by the State Police in Ellenville on a charge larceny charge that accuses her of altering and trying to cash a check for $2,409. Thomas L. Pruett, 38, is wanted by State Police in Massena for failing to pay a fine tied to a burglary at a Norwood tavern where he stole beer and liquor. Troopers said Pruett has ties to Alabama and Kansas. Raymond P. Copp, 40, is wanted by State Police in Whitney Point on a burglary charge that accuses him of stealing tool boxes and tools from a local business. Morgan J. Congdon, 29, is wanted by State Police in Elbridge on a third-degree burglary charge that accuses him of breaking into a business in the town of Lafayette to steal several items. Edward Donaldson, 28, is wanted by State Police in Niagara for failing to appear in court to answer charges he tried to enter the U.S. from Canada with 26 fraudulent credit cards. Jessika L. Turner, 31, is wanted by State Police in Albany on misdemeanor drug possession and a violation of marijuana possession. Turner was arrested May 28, 2014 on the Thruway. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Michael Verno, 50, is wanted by State Police in Rochester on a charge of driving while intoxicated that stems from a traffic stop on University Avenue in Rochester. Rashan T. Yates, 19, is wanted by State Police in Clifton Park on charges of misdemeanor assault and child endangerment. Troopers said the charge are tied to a confrontation that left Yates' victim with injuries. Troopers believe Yates lives in Albany. State Police said members of the public should avoid contact with any of the suspects if they think they've seen them and instead call the local State Police barracks. A 37-year-old Waterford man faces several felony sex-crime charges involving a teenager, State Police said. Jessie R. Mayeaux Jr. was charged with rape, criminal sex act and disseminating indecent material to a minor, all felonies. Troopers, with assistance from the Waterford Police Department, arrested Mayeaux on Monday. Investigators received a complaint from the parents of the victim. State Police said the investigation revealed Mayeaux had sexual intercourse with the teen and exchanged indecent content with the victim via text message. Mayeaux was arraigned in the Town of Halfmoon Court and sent to Saratoga County Jail on $15,000 bail. A digital expert known for introducing the concept of "the right to be forgotten" to South Korea fell to his death Wednesday in an apparent suicide amid a police investigation into allegations he assaulted a colleague. Song Myung-bean, head of Marker Group, was found dead on the ground outside his apartment in Goyang, just north of Seoul, at about 4:40 a.m., according to police. Police said they found a six-page suicide note in Song's home. Song lived on the 12th floor of the building. Song, 50, was being probed over a complaint filed by the former head of the company, who claims that he was repeatedly beaten by Song with various tools, such as a steel pipe, over the past three years. Police have sought an arrest warrant for Song and a court hearing was due to be held Wednesday to decide on his detention. He has denied the allegations, accusing the partner of framing him to conceal his own crimes, including embezzlement of company money. Song became known for his expertise in digital and multimedia fields. He first introduced the concept of "right to be forgotten," which refers to allowing individuals to have certain data about themselves permanently removed from the Internet so as to secure privacy and remain untraceable. (Yonhap) [March 13, 2019] BPU International Collaborates with SEVA Technology to Build AI Medical Application The Two Companies Will Apply BPU International's Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI) Technologies to Treat Delirium and Dementia Patients LAS VEGAS, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- BPU Holdings' entity in the US, BPU International, has partnered with SEVA Technology to collaborate on research and implementation of AEI Framework -- an Artificial Emotional Intelligent (AEI) platform. The project will focus on creating an Artificial Intelligent (AI) mobile application to aid hospital patients with the detection and potential treatment of Delirium and Dementia. Both companies are collaborating to effectively apply AEI Framework technology within hospitals; starting in Arizona. Seva Technology is an American company founded in 2018 in Tucson, Arizona. It was founded by Dr. Salim Hariri, Full Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the College of Engineering at the University of Arizona, and Dr. Nimit Agarwal, Division Chief of Geriatrics at The University of Arizona-College of Medicine Phoenix and Banner University Medical Center-Phoenix. Seva's Mission is to devise innovative and intelligent software solutions for improving patient outcomes. The project includes building an AE-based chatbot, framework and interactive applications using human conversational scripts, developed by BPU. The application will be designed to track patient's moods as well as interact and engage with patients on emotional levels, which are intrinsically tied to their physical status. AEI Framework will be able to track and learn their routine patterns and set reminders for medication and assess both psychological and physical symptoms outside the doctor's office. Using IoT devices, the technology has the ability to detect unwanted falls and high distress levels that will immediately alert hospitals and the patient's doctor. Medical experts expect the application to be particularly beneficial for long-term care and for seniors who show early signs of delirium and dementia. Dr. Nimit Agarwal explains, "Amid the rising demographics of the aging population, the growing number of patients who require special care is rising. We are finding smart ways to assist already taxed nursing care services through the use of AEI. There is a direct correlation between a patient's emotional status and their well-being. Dr. Agarwal further notes, "With AEI and AEI Framework, we can cater to this growing patient population through the whole spectrum of healthcare, including acute, post-acute and long-term care facilities". From BPU Holdings, CEO Oh SangGyoon states, "We are thrilled to bring AEI Framework to life. SEVA is a perfect partner for us as we both have the same vision to bring AEI technology into hospitals. This is just the beginning of what AEI can do for improved healthcare, self-care, and betterment of life." The prototype will be single-user based, while eventually expanding to a multi-user system. Patient privacy will be HIPAA compliant as all patient records and data will be made private and accessible only to the patient and medical personnel. Records will be cloud-based and encrypted -- accessible only by authorization. The application will be built as a commercially viable prototype to be deployed to hospitals as part of the research. Clinical trials are in motion and the project is expected to be ready within two to three years. About BPU International BPU International is a subsidiary of BPU Holdings located in Las Vegas, Nevada. BPU International is dedicated to generating the most advanced, usable, secure and innovative Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI) technology in the world. Artificial Intelligence (AI) emulates how people think -- AEI emulates how people feel. AEI technology advances the human condition by providing rigorous tools to improve emotional intelligence. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bpu-international-collaborates-with-seva-technology-to-build-ai-medical-application-300811574.html SOURCE BPU Holdings [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Cymulate's Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) Platform Raises Series A Funding Led by Vertex Ventures and Dell Technologies Capital RISHON LEZION, Israel, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Cymulate, a leading SaaS-based BAS platform, today announced an A funding round of $7.5M led by Vertex Ventures and Dell Technologies Capital, the investment arm of Dell Technologies; additional funds came from Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE) and Eyal Gruner, who previously led the Seed rounds. The company has now raised $11M total. Cymulate's BAS platform enables organizations to automatically assess their overall security posture, continuously validating that security measures and controls are working as expected. The Cymulate platform is deployable within minutes and the simulated attacks provide immediate results that include vulnerabilities and mitigation procedures to close each gap. The platform offers the largest range of attack vectors in the industry covering pre-exploitation, exploitation and post-exploitation stages of an attack kill-chain: Email, Web Gateway, Web Application, Phishing, Endpoint, Lateral Movement, Data Exfiltration and Immediate Threats. Cymulate will use the funding for expanding its operations in the United States, adding key leadership positions and investing further in the research team to enhance the platform's functionality. "The fast adoption of our platform by organizations optimizing their protection against attacks has enabled Cymulate to consistently surpass revenue and sales targets with triple growth which permits us now to focus on innovation and outreach," said Eyal Wachsman, Co-Founder and CEO of Cymulate. "We've been very strategic about the amount of funding we've raised in this round. This new funding will ensure that we remain ahead of the curve with the best Breach and Attack Simulation platform in the industry, while broadening strategic partnerships as we scale up research and operations to increase market share in 2019 and beyond." "We're impressed with Cymulate's technology and product market fit which has already resulted in a large customer base," said Emanuel Timor, General Partner at Vertex Ventures. "Their easy to use SaaS platform is proving invaluable to CISOs by providing insight tat helps maximize security investments whilst minimizing security gaps. As cyber attacks such as data exfiltration, email attacks and phishing continue to be of prime concern to companies, we believe Cymulate has the potential to be the leading BAS company." "Enabling data-driven decisions for cyber security implementations and investments is critical for organizations of all sizes. We believe Cymulate is taking the right approach and has built the right end-to-end platform to enable this vision at scale." said Alon Weinberg, Director at Dell Technologies Capital. "Looking ahead, we are very pleased to be able to support Cymulate and help build the company wider vision." Cymulate was founded in June 2016 by cyber security veterans Avihai Ben-Yossef and Eyal Wachsman, alongside Eyal Gruner, a serial entrepreneur and investor in cybersecurity startups. In less than three years, Cymulate has successfully launched its technology in key markets across all industry verticals, with customers in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. In 2018, Cymulate was recognized as a Cool Vendor in Application and Data Security by Gartner.* In addition, Cymulate was distinguished in 2018 with the Gold Global Excellence Award from Info Security Products Guide, the Fortress Cyber Security Award, and Winner of the InfoSec Awards from the Cyber Defense Magazine. About Cymulate Cymulate helps companies to stay one step ahead of cyber attackers with a unique breach and attack simulation platform that empowers organizations with complex security solutions to safeguard their business-critical assets. By mimicking the myriad of strategies hackers deploy, the system allows businesses to assess their true preparedness to handle cyber security threats effectively. For more information, visit www.cymulate.com and register for a Free Trial . About Dell Technologies Capital Dell Technologies Capital is the investment arm for Dell Technologies. We've invested in over 100 companies that push the envelope on digital technology for enterprises and consumers. We are a team of world-class investors who help our companies succeed. We focus on early-stage investments with passionate founders and often lead rounds. Our companies gain unique access to the go-to-market capabilities of Dell Technologies. Dell Technologies is the parent company of Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks, Virtustream, and VMWare. Dell Technologies is a unique family of businesses that provides the essential infrastructure for organizations to build their digital future, transform IT and protect their most important asset, information. About Vertex Ventures Vertex Ventures is a leading global venture capital group supporting entrepreneurs to transform their innovative ideas into world-class businesses. With cumulative committed capital in excess of $2.5 billion, Vertex invests in early-stage IT and healthcare opportunities in Silicon Valley, China, India, Israel, and Southeast Asia. Since 1988, Vertex is honored to have partnered with the founders of global leaders such as Waze, 91, Grab, IGG, CyberArk, Reebonz, SolarEdge, Force10, FirstCry, Yatra and Changba. Vertex Ventures Israel is one of the pillars of the Vertex Group's network of Funds focusing on early stage opportunities in the Information Technology sector in Israel. Learn more here. *Gartner, Cool Vendors in Application and Data Security, 4 May 2018 NOTE: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] FICO Survey: Canadians are still most comfortable receiving auto financing from dealerships The convenience of one-stop shopping continues to keep Canadian consumers offline and in-stores when it comes to purchasing their next vehicle TORONTO, March 13, 2019 /CNW/ - Highlights of Findings in FICO's 2019 Canadian Consumer Survey of Vehicle Finance Perceptions: FICO commissioned its second global consumer survey on the automotive finance experience Nearly 7 in 10 (66%) Canadian consumers applied for automotive financing directly at the dealership when they purchased their vehicle, with 58% planning on using this method next time Respondents indicated that the convenience of one-stop shopping (46%) and the expectation for promotions and discounts (42%) made dealerships the top choice for financing destinations Globally, Canadian consumers are the most likely to only consider one lender before making their financing decision (70%) World-renowned analytic software organization, FICO, today announced the findings of its second annual global survey on consumer perceptions of the automotive finance process. The study looked at how consumers perceive the financing aspect of their auto purchase for new and pre-owned vehicles, as well as if the services and options offered by providers (banks, captive finance providers, credit unions, dealerships, and start-ups) are currently meeting customer expectations. Key findings from the survey indicate that when it comes to auto financing, Canadians are most comfortable leaving it to the perceived experts. In fact, more Canadians sought financing directly from the dealership than any other participating country (66% versus 56% global average). In addition, Canadians were the least willing to seek financing online (9% versus 16% global average). Regarding future automotive loans, 17% of Canadians would consider using an online application process in comparison with 27% of glbal participants. In accordance with the trends seen from last year's survey results, globally, consumers continue to take a proactive approach to financing auto purchases. The survey showed that 73% of Canadian respondents initiated the financing discussion when purchasing a vehicle, with 27% responding to an offer from a company. While still relatively low, the numbers show that comparatively, Canadian consumers are responding to financing offers more than most other countries, only being surpassed by Germany (29%). Additionally, Canadians were the most likely respondents to report only considering one financial lender before making their decision (70% versus 49% globally). "In a time where many consumer decisions are being made independently online, when it comes to automotive financing, Canadians still want direction," said Kevin Deveau, vice president and managing director, FICO Canada. "More than any other market, Canadian consumers are trusting dealerships to make them an offer, and in most cases, they don't feel the need to shop around. This means there is an obligation and opportunity for financing providers to streamline their processes to ensure they can provide the right offers to customers, quickly, and without damaging relationships." Other data points of note for Canada: There's always wiggle room Cumulatively, 81% of Canadians negotiated at least a little bit on the terms of their lease or loan. Cumulatively, 81% of Canadians negotiated at least a little bit on the terms of their lease or loan. Monthly payments trump APR For Canadians, monthly payment amount was a more important factor than APR when deciding on automotive financing (93% and 90% respectively). For Canadians, monthly payment amount was a more important factor than APR when deciding on automotive financing (93% and 90% respectively). Patience is a virtue 52% of respondents said that it took less than 30 minutes to complete the financing transaction, while 48% took longer than 30 minutes, implying that there is still significant manual work that takes place during the financing process. 52% of respondents said that it took less than 30 minutes to complete the financing transaction, while 48% took longer than 30 minutes, implying that there is still significant manual work that takes place during the financing process. Overall, consumers fully understand the terms of the financing and feel they got a good deal 80% of Canadian respondents fully understand the terms of the financing (up from 76% last year). Further, the clear majority of consumers around the world feel that they are receiving at least a good deal in during their financing experience. FICO's independent research surveyed 2,000 adult consumers across nine countries including Canada, Australia, Germany, the U.S., Mexico, Chile, New Zealand, Spain, and the UK. The respondents were between the ages of 18-64 and had acquired a loan on a new/used vehicle within the last three years. More information on the survey results can be found at: https://www.fico.com/en/latest-thinking/ebook/2019-global-consumer-survey-vehicle-finance-perceptions-canada About FICO FICO (NYSE: FICO) powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956 and based in Silicon Valley, the company is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 190 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, manufacturing, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in more than 100 countries do everything from protecting 2.6 billion payment cards from fraud, to helping people get credit, to ensuring that millions of airplanes and rental cars are in the right place at the right time. Learn more at www.fico.com. Join the conversation on Twitter at @FICOnews_APAC. FICO is a registered trademark of Fair Isaac Corporation in the US and other countries. SOURCE FICO [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Citizens pass by the Sewol ferry disaster memorial site at Gwanghwamun Square in central Seoul, Tuesday. The tents will be taken down as early as next week and an alternative memorial space will be set up before the fifth anniversary of the disaster on April 16. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul Tents at Sewol memorial site to be taken down next Monday By Lee Suh-yoon The Sewol memorial space in central Seoul its tents and yellow ribbons now landmark fixtures at Gwanghwamun Square will not be around for the fifth anniversary of the Sewol ferry disaster next month. Families of Sewol victims and the Seoul Metropolitan Government finalized their agreement to remove the tents and replace them with a smaller wooden structure, Tuesday. The 14 tents will be The city government will set up a 20-meter-long rectangular wooden structure on one side of Gwanghwamun Square before the anniversary on April 16 to display visual records of the Sewol ferry tragedy and other major accidents that left painful imprints on Korean society, most notably the 1994 Seongsu Bridge collapse and the 1995 Sampoong Department Store collapse. By Lee Suh-yoonThe Sewol memorial space in central Seoul its tents and yellow ribbons now landmark fixtures at Gwanghwamun Square will not be around for the fifth anniversary of the Sewol ferry disaster next month.Families of Sewol victims and the Seoul Metropolitan Government finalized their agreement to remove the tents and replace them with a smaller wooden structure, Tuesday.The 14 tents will be taken down next Monday , following a special memorial rite the day before to honor the victims before their pictures are moved from the memorial altar.The city government will set up a 20-meter-long rectangular wooden structure on one side of Gwanghwamun Square before the anniversary on April 16 to display visual records of the Sewol ferry tragedy and other major accidents that left painful imprints on Korean society, most notably the 1994 Seongsu Bridge collapse and the 1995 Sampoong Department Store collapse. Photos of Sewol victims are hung on a small archway in the middle of the Sewol memorial site. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul A man stands in front of a small memorial altar at the Sewol tent site in Gwanghwamun Square last April 16. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul "It won't be an exhibit just for the Sewol ferry tragedy, but for safety issues in general," Ko Wang-woo, a city official, said in a phone interview. "We first thought of using a shipping container box but settled on wood instead to create a more relaxing setting for visitors. As for the content, we are still working out details with the victims' families, but it will likely involve rotations of image- and video-based works." The exhibit will be organized along a timeline, Ko added, dealing with the past events of the Sewol ferry tragedy, the present state and preparations for the future. The Jeju-bound Sewol ferry sank off the southwestern coast on April 16, 2014, after it set sail "in an overloaded and defective state," according to a court verdict that ordered compensation to the victims' families last year. The government's response in the first crucial hours of the sinking was slow and botched even telling the press at one point that all 475 passengers onboard had been rescued. Later, the public was presented with the harrowing figure 304 dead or missing, most of them Danwon High School students on a field trip. Visitors write messages and take photos at a special exhibit that was set up last April 16 to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the Sewol ferry disaster. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul A box of small yellow foam ribbons at the Sewol memorial site, Tuesday. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul Set up in July 2014 by civic groups and victims' families to remember the tragedy and call for improved government investigations and safety rules, this site of collective mourning in the square first started with just three tents. The conservative bloc asked the city government to take them down for being "illegal structures," but Mayor Park Won-soon allowed them to stay, saying it was the least the city could do to help the citizens remember and mourn the tragedy. It later grew into a space lined on both sides by seven white tents, one of which held a small memorial altar filled with photographs of the smiling faces of the Danwon students. The site, and the yellow ribbons distributed here, also became political symbols for change. For many, the ferry disaster became synonymous with the conservative Park Geun-hye administration's incompetence and corruption, and this anger later fueled the massive candlelit protests that shifted power to the more liberal Moon Jae-in government. Pope Francis consoles bereaved families of Sewol victims during their hunger strike after his mass at Gwanghwamun Square on Aug. 16, 2014. Korea Times file On a drizzling Tuesday morning, the tents were largely empty except for a few tourists who wandered by on their way through the plaza. "You should have seen it in 2014, when all the Ilbe and other neoliberal group trolls were hanging around," a volunteer who was looking after the site for the day said, referring to when conservatives mocked the fasting families of the Sewol victims by holding a grotesque binge-eating protest in front of the tents. In front of the quiet site on Tuesday, environmental activists were staging a small rally calling for better protection of national parks. One of the participants, Lee Kyoung-ho, seemed shocked by the news of the site's imminent closure. Group photos of Danwon High School students -- the majority of victims of the Sewol ferry disaster -- hang inside one of the tents. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul A woman takes a photo of a yellow ribbon in front of one of the tents at the Sewol memorial site during the fourth anniversary of the disaster last year. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul "Korea's sensitivity to safety has become totally different after the Sewol ferry disaster," he said, as he hoisted on a backpack, a yellow ribbon dangling from its side zipper. "I know this is supposed to be Gwanghwamun Square, but it is also Sewol Square now. I hope they adequately preserve the meaning of the Sewol ferry disaster here." Work still remains on uncovering all the facts about the Sewol disaster. Earlier on Monday, victims' family members held a small rally in front of the tents, demanding the prosecution form a special investigative team and arrest main opposition Liberal Korea Party leader Hwang Kyo-ahn, who was the prime minister under the impeached President Park, for sealing the presidential reports given to Park in the first seven hours of the sinking during which the former president's whereabouts were unclear. "We're not getting rid of the original memorial space, just remodeling it so it's more accessible to citizens," Bae Seo-young, head of the April 16 joint civic committee, told The Korea Times, Wednesday. "We hope the new structure will help people better remember the Sewol ferry disaster and uncover the truth so we can avoid a repetition of such suffering." A yellow ribbon badge is seen on a visitor's chest at the fourth anniversary event at Sewol memorial place last year. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul A man at the memorial site in Gwanghwamun Square, Tuesday, wipes a billboard bearing the faces of five Sewol ferry victims whose bodies have not been recovered. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul [March 13, 2019] Jaleesa Webster Named Vice President of Account Management at RxEOB RICHMOND, Va., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- As a reflection of its recent growth and expansion plans, RxEOB, the company that helps health plans significantly improve member engagement by using healthcare-specific big data analytics and expertise to target members more precisely so payers can deliver the right message to the right members at the right time, today announced that Jaleesa Webster has been named the company's first-ever vice president of account management. To download a photo of Ms. Webster, please click here. The newest member of the RxEOB executive team will be responsible for enhancing relationships with the company's current health plan, third party administrator (TPA), pharmacy benefit manager (PBM), pharmacy benefit administrator (PBA), and other clients. She will also be charged with generating more awareness of the company's products and services, working with industry groups that focus on patient engagement issues, and contributing ideas that will help the executie team set the strategic direction for the company in the future. "Jaleesa has been a rising star and valuable contributor to RxEOB since she joined the company a few years ago, so we are proud to appoint one of our own to this critical position," said Robert Oscar, CEO at RxEOB. "Ensuring members are actively engaged in their own care has always been one of the biggest barriers to achieving a successful transition to value-based care because it's the most difficult to control. RxEOB has developed technology that enables health plans, TPAs, PBMs, and other organizations to target members more precisely with messages that are timely and relevant, improving their ability to drive action. We know from experience that Jaleesa has the passion and skillset to help us bring that message to our clients, prospects, and the industry at large." Webster joined RxEOB as a business analyst after determining she could do more good for more people working in health IT than as a physician, which was her original plan. She quickly rose through the ranks, and in two years was appointed acting director, client support. As a result of her performance the position was made permanent after three months, and she has continued to serve in that capacity until receiving this most recent promotion. During that time she managed more than 15 health plans for clients with a total of more than 32 million members. "I am a true believer in RxEOB's mission because I have seen the value the company brings to its clients," Webster said. "I now want to use my knowledge and experience to help the company accelerate its growth. The work we are doing is critical to delivering better health outcomes, controlling costs, and ensuring member satisfaction, and I'm excited to take on these new challenges." Webster received her bachelor of arts in cognitive science with a concentration in neuroscience from the University of Virginia, where she also minored in anthropology. She is currently finishing her master's in public health from the University of California at Berkeley. Webster has also received extensive additional healthcare industry training including CMS Medicare Parts C and D Compliance Training, HH-102 HIPAA HITECH Security (HTML5), and the HIPAA Privacy and Security Training Bundle. About RxEOB RxEOB helps health plans deliver better member health outcomes while lowering their internal costs by using its big data analytics platform to significantly improve member engagement. The company's more than 20 years' experience integrating clinical and claims data from internal and external sources eliminates the need for large-scale requirements gathering exercises while simplifying the process of cleaning data from disparate sources. As a result, payers can quickly and easily segment members based on multiple, detailed criteria, enabling them to direct highly targeted messages to very specific audiences at exactly the right time to create immediate actions. For more information please visit www.rxeob.com. Press Contact: Rachael Britnell Amendola Communications (for RxEOB) Email: [email protected] Phone: 309-212-0661 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/jaleesa-webster-named-vice-president-of-account-management-at-rxeob-300811608.html SOURCE RxEOB [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Kount Announces Inaugural Digital Protection Summit featuring keynote Daymond John of Shark Tank Kount, a leading fraud prevention solution, announced its first annual Digital Protection Summit will be held April 16-17, 2019 in Austin, Texas. In addition to a lineup featuring experts in fraud prevention and digital innovation, Kount revealed Daymond John of ABC's four-time Emmy Award-winning show "Shark Tank" will give a keynote address. The Digital Protection Summit hosts industry leaders, executives, and front-line technology architects who are shaping the digital protection experience. Featured speakers include Kount founding CEO Brad Wiskirchen, an expert in digital commerce and financial technology. His expertise spans beyond his 12 years with Kount; Wiskirchen previously served as Chairman of the Board of the Salt Lake City Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Senior Vice President of Product and Strategy, Tricia Phillips, will also present on Kount's fraud prevention solution, drawing from her previous experience as Gartner's (News - Alert) Research Director for the fraud protection industry as well as her role as Vice President for V.me Product Design and Strategy at Visa. Attendees will select from three tracks regarding digital innovation, growth and innovation, or fraud trends. Discussions include customer engagement through mobile, social, and other channels, strategies for internationalizationand product expansions, and overcoming emerging and persistent fraud trends. John's keynote address will kick off the summit on April 16, 2019. In addition to his role on "Shark Tank," John is widely recognized for his accomplishments as an entrepreneur and branding expert following the success of his groundbreaking lifestyle brand, FUBU. He was named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship under the Obama Administration and is a two-time New York Times Best Selling Author, most recently for his book "Rise and Grind." John remains committed to helping aspiring entrepreneurs, which landed him the affectionate nickname of "The People's Shark." In recognition of his impact in the entrepreneurial space, John has been bestowed the NAACP Entrepreneurs of the Year Award, the Congressional Achievement Award for Entrepreneurship and more. "As businesses work to grow, innovate and expand, it is essential for entrepreneurs to be proactive in fraud prevention. It is easy to underestimate just how prevalent fraud can be," said John. "Kount's Digital Protection Summit features leaders in digital innovation," said Wiskirchen. "The partners, companies, and guests leading sessions will share insights into how the right fraud prevention strategy can be a revenue driver for businesses." To register, view a full list of speakers, or learn more about Kount's Digital Protection Summit, visit www.kountsummit.com. About Kount: Kount's award-winning digital fraud prevention solutions are used by 6,500 brands globally, helping them to reach their digital innovation goals. Kount's patented technology combines device fingerprinting, supervised and unsupervised machine learning, a robust policy and rules engine, self-service analytics, and a web-based case-management and investigation system. Kount's solutions stop fraud and increase revenue for digital businesses, acquiring banks, and payment service providers. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005171/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] More Staten Islanders Choose MetroPlus Health Plan MetroPlus Health Plan today announced that more Staten Islanders have enrolled in its affordable health insurance coverage, an important step in supporting New York City's commitment to guarantee health care to all New Yorkers. NYC's public option health insurance plan reported a jump in membership on Staten Island by nearly 250% in one year. More than 5,200 Staten Islanders chose MetroPlus as their preferred plan of choice by the end of 2018, compared to 1,500 at the end of 2017. The five-star health plan also expanded its provider network to 400 physicians and specialists on Staten Island to offer comprehensive coverage for primary and preventive care, mental health services, and other specialty care that meets the health needs of the community, including the comprehensive outpatient services available at the new NYC Health + Hospitals/Gotham Health, Vanderbilt center that opened last year. MetroPlus is the low-cost, high-quality health insurance plan of the NYC Health + Hospitals and growing its membership is part of the public health system's comprehensive, multi-year redesign to build a competitive, sustainable organization that will continue to offer high-quality and accessible health care to the people of New York City. "Too many Staten Islanders are still living without health insurance or guaranteed health care," said Mitchell Katz, MD, President and CEO, NYC Health + Hospitals. "We will continue to step up our efforts to engage more Staten Islanders who are eligible but uninsured to get them connected to the affordable insurance options available through MetroPlus and ensure access to quality care in their community." "There is no question that MetroPlus was embraced by Staten Islanders because of our caring representatives, our membership benefits, and the amazing care they can receive from our growing network of providers," said Roger Milliner, Chief Growth Officer of MetroPlus. "We are committed to improving the health and well-being of Staten Island families, and providing the quality and affordable health insurance that brings peace of mind." "Since moving to the US and joining MetroPlus, the health plan has put me and my children first," said Aishat Yemi Akinwale of Mariner's Harbor, MetroPlus member since January 2018. "Enrolling was simple and stress free. My children were able to get their immunizations and start school right away. We are able to go to various doctors and the best facilities in NYC, including the Gotham Health center right here on Vanderbilt Avenue. I am tankful and blessed to be a MetroPlus Member." "Our strong collaboration with MetroPlus allows us to offer a seamless integration of health services and health coverage," said Dr. Edward Bailin of NYC Health + Hospitals/Gotham Health, Vanderbilt. "Our clinical team and the MetroPlus staff work very closely to coordinate the care that is needed at our facility. It's a true partnership that greatly benefits our patients and the Staten Island community we serve." "The increasing number of Staten Islanders signing up for MetroPlus' quality, affordable insurance is good news for the health of individuals, good new for our strained emergency rooms, and good news for the health of our borough as a whole," said New York City Council Member Debi Rose. MetroPlus Medicaid and Child Health Plus products became available on Staten Island in the spring of 2017, with Medicare added to the portfolio in the fall of 2018. MetroPlus partners with many local organizations, including schools, community-based organizations, city agencies, the College of Staten Island/CUNY, Jobs Plus, Workforce 1, Get Covered NYC and IDNYC, to help Staten Islanders enroll in affordable health insurance coverage. MetroPlus offers eligible New Yorkers a wide selection of health insurance options, with affordable fees and copays based on income and family size. The most popular plans include: Medicaid - low or no cost plan for low income children and adults up to 64 yrs old - low or no cost plan for low income children and adults up to 64 yrs old Medicare - low or no cost plan for adults 64 yrs old+ - low or no cost plan for adults 64 yrs old+ Child Health Plus - low or no cost plan for children under 19 regardless of immigration status - low or no cost plan for children under 19 regardless of immigration status Essential Plan - for adults 19-64 yrs old not eligible for Medicaid, offering monthly premiums of $0 - $20 based on income - for adults 19-64 yrs old not eligible for Medicaid, offering monthly premiums of $0 - $20 based on income Qualified Health Plan - for eligible New York City residents, offering cost share reductions that lower out of pocket costs - for eligible New York City residents, offering cost share reductions that lower out of pocket costs Partnership in Care (HIV Special Needs Plan) - for children and adults who are New York City, Medicaid-eligible residents living with HIV/Aids for children and adults who are New York City, Medicaid-eligible residents living with HIV/Aids MetroPlus Gold - for New York City employees and their families, with no copays, no deductibles. MetroPlus also offers special membership benefits that include: Gym Reimbursement - members of select plans and their spouses can save up to $1,000 in gym fees every year - members of select plans and their spouses can save up to $1,000 in gym fees every year Member Rewards program - members can earn points for completing health and wellness activities and redeem them for hundreds of popular items from our catalogue members can earn points for completing health and wellness activities and redeem them for hundreds of popular items from our catalogue Annual Wellness Visits - annual exam that helps members and their providers collaborate on a personalized plan of care. MetroPlus earned an overall rating of five stars, the highest possible score, in the New York State Department of Health's recently released "2018 Consumer's Guide to Medicaid and Child Health Plus Managed Care Plans in New York City." The State's guide is an annual rating of managed care plans on quality of care delivered and members' satisfaction with the care and services they receive. MetroPlus is one of only two plans serving New York City to achieve the highest state rating this year. About MetroPlus Health Plan Since 1985, MetroPlus Health Plan has built a reputation for providing access to affordable, quality health care to residents of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. A wholly-owned subsidiary of NYC Health + Hospitals, the nation's largest public health system, MetroPlus is the plan of choice for over half a million New Yorkers. The health plan's robust network of primary care doctors and specialists includes many independent community providers. Culturally sensitive, and fluent in more than 40 languages, MetroPlus staff is as diverse as the great city it serves. For more information about MetroPlus plans, benefits, and services, visit www.metroplus.org and join the conversation at facebook.com/metroplushealth and twitter @metroplushealth. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005783/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 12, 2019] British American Tobacco: Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd. Files for CCAA British American Tobacco p.l.c. has today been informed by its Canadian subsidiary, Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd (ITCAN), that ITCAN has obtained an Initial Order from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice granting it protection under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act ("CCAA"). This has the effect of staying all current tobacco litigation in Canada against ITCAN and other Group companies. ITCAN's decision to file for protection under the CCAA follows the Quebec Court of Appeal judgment holding the industry jointly and severally liable for a maximum of CAD$13.6 billion, and the recent decision by one of the other Canadian tobacco companies, JTI-Macdonald, to seek, and subsequently obtain, CCAA protection. If ITCAN had not also obtained court protection, it could have been required to pay for all or part of JTI-Macdonald's share of the Quebec judgment, in addition to its own. In addition, across Canada, other tobacco plaintiffs and provincial governments are collectively seeking significant damages which substantially exceed ITCAN's total assets. In seeking protection under the CCAA, ITCAN will look to resolve not only the Quebec case but also all other tobacco litigation in Canada under an efficient and court supervised process, while continuing to trade in the normal course. It will remain business as usual for ITCAN, its employees, customers and suppliers and during the CCAA process, ITCAN's management will continue to focus on growing its current cigarette and potentially reduced risk products business. The Group will continue to consolidate the results of ITCAN, in line with IFRS 10 "Consolidated Financial Statements", and ITCAN's CCAA filing will not negatively affect the Group's adjusted net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio. The 2.3 billion of goodwill relating to ITCAN on the Group's balance sheet at 31 December 2018 will continue to be reviewed on a regular basis. Any future impairment charge would result in a non-cash charge to the income statement that will be treated as an adjusting item. Since 2014 the Group has received no dividends from ITCAN and expects that this situation will continue whilst ITCAN remains under CCAA protection. Notwithstanding this, there will be no impact on the BAT Group's dividend payments or policy. A British American Tobacco spokesperson said: "Imperial Tobacco Canada has informed us that it disagrees with the Court's judgment. However, we understand that CCAA protection will provide Imperial Tobacco Canada an opportunity to settle all of its outstanding tobacco litigation under an efficient and court supervised process whilst continuing to run its business in the normal course." Quebec Class Action Update Following the upholding of the Quebec Superior Court's judgment on 1 March 2019, ITCAN's share of the judgment is a maximum of approximately CAD$9.2 billion. Following the first instance judgment, ITCAN made an initial deposit of CAD$758 million into escrow. As announced on 5 March 2019, an amount of approximately 436 million (CAD$758 million) will be chared to the Group's consolidated income statement in 2019 in respect of this sum and treated as an adjusting item. ITCAN continues to disagree with the judgments of the Quebec Court of Appeal and the Quebec Superior Court. Canadian consumers and governments have been aware of the health risks associated with smoking for decades, and ITCAN has always operated and sold its legal products within a regulatory framework prescribed by successive governments. Notes to Editors CCAA is the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, and it refers to the Canadian Federal Act that allows corporations the opportunity to restructure their affairs. An organisation that files for court protection under CCAA continues to operate and maintain business that is "in the ordinary course" or business as usual. About British American Tobacco British American Tobacco (BAT) is one of the world's leading, multi-category consumer goods companies, providing tobacco and nicotine products to millions of consumers around the world. It employs over 55,000 people, with market leadership in over 55 countries and factories in 48. Its Strategic Portfolio is made up of its global cigarette brands and a growing range of potentially reduced-risk products. These include vapour, tobacco heating products, and modern oral products as well as traditional oral products such as snus and moist snuff. In 2018, the Group generated revenue of 24.5 billion and profit from operations of 9.3 billion. Forward looking statements This announcement contains certain forward-looking statements, including "forward-looking" statements made within the meaning of Section 21E of the United States Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These statements are often, but not always, made through the use of words or phrases such as "believe," "anticipate," "could," "may," "would," "should," "intend," "plan," "potential," "predict," "will," "expect," "estimate," "project," "positioned," "strategy," "outlook", "target" and similar expressions. These include statements regarding our intentions, beliefs or current expectations concerning, amongst other things, our results of operations, financial condition, liquidity, prospects, growth, strategies and the economic and business circumstances occurring from time to time in the countries and markets in which the Group operates. All such forward-looking statements involve estimates and assumptions that are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual future financial condition, performance and results to differ materially from the plans, goals, expectations and results expressed in the forward-looking statements and other financial and/or statistical data within this announcement. Among the key factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements are uncertainties related to the following: the impact of competition from illicit trade; the impact of adverse domestic or international legislation and regulation; changes in domestic or international tax laws and rates; adverse litigation and dispute outcomes and the effect of such outcomes on the Group's financial condition; changes or differences in domestic or international economic or political conditions; adverse decisions by domestic or international regulatory bodies; the impact of market size reduction and consumer down-trading; translational and transactional foreign exchange rate exposure; the impact of serious injury, illness or death in the workplace; the ability to maintain credit ratings and to fund the business under the current capital structure; the inability to develop, commercialise and roll-out Potentially Reduced-Risk Products; and changes in the market position, businesses, financial condition, results of operations or prospects of the Group. It is believed that the expectations reflected in this announcement are reasonable but they may be affected by a wide range of variables that could cause actual results to differ materially from those currently anticipated. Past performance is no guide to future performance and persons needing advice should consult an independent financial adviser. The forward-looking statements reflect knowledge and information available at the date of preparation of this announcement and the Group undertakes no obligation to update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. No statement in this communication is intended to be a profit forecast and no statement in this communication should be interpreted to mean that earnings per share of BAT for the current or future financial years would necessarily match or exceed the historical published earnings per share of BAT. Additional information concerning these and other factors can be found in the Company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC (News - Alert)"), including the Annual Report on Form 20-F filed on 15 March 2018 and Current Reports on Form 6-K, which may be obtained free of charge at the SEC's website, http://www.sec.gov, and the Company's Annual Reports, which may be obtained free of charge from the British American Tobacco website www.bat.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190312005949/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 12, 2019] Trax Scoops 2019 Artificial Intelligence Excellence Award for Innovative Retail Tech Solution PHILADELPHIA, March 12, 2019 /CNW/ -- Trax, the leading provider of computer vision and analytics solutions for the retail industry, has been named a winner of the Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards program . The Business Intelligence Group recognised Trax as a leader in AI excellence, alongside big names like Capgemini, for innovative use of the emerging technology in retail. Based in Singapore, Trax has revolutionized the global retail industry by delivering a single source of shelf truth for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies and retailers. Its offering provides in-store execution, market measurement and analytics services for CPG brands and retailers by harnessing its cutting-edge computer vision platform which uses AI, image recognition and data analytics to process photos taken in store to deliver near real-time, granular shelf and store-level insights. Trax' retail solutions offers CPGs and retailers including Coca-Cola, AB InBev and Diageo among others the opportunity to benefit from never-before-accessible insights from the shelf. Using Trax insights, clients can better understand how their products are performing in the market and make informed commercial decisions o drive top line growth. Yair Adato, CTO at Trax, said: "This recognition as a leader in AI is a testament to our technological innovation and the immense talent here at Trax. We have worked hard to build a powerful AI, machine-learning and IoT platform that is truly digitizing the physical world of retail." "We are so proud to name Trax as a winner in our inaugural Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards program," said Maria Jimenez, chief nominations officer for Business Intelligence Group. "It was clear to our judges that Trax was using AI to improve the lives of their customers and employees. Congratulations to the entire team!" About Trax Trax is the leading provider of computer vision solutions and analytics for retail. It recently was selected as a Red Herring Top 100 Global and ranked in the top 25 Fastest Growing Companies on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 list. The company enables tighter execution controls in-store and provides clients with the ability to leverage competitive insights through its in-store execution tools, market measurement services and data science to unlock revenue opportunities at all points of sale. Many of the world's top brands and retailers leverage Trax globally in more than 50 countries to manage in-store execution and increase revenues at the shelf. Trax is headquartered in Singapore with offices worldwide. To learn more about Trax, please visit www.traxretail.com. About Business Intelligence Group The Business Intelligence Group was founded with the mission of recognizing true talent and superior performance in the business world. Unlike other industry award programs, these programs are judged by business executives having experience and knowledge. The organization's proprietary and unique scoring system selectively measures performance across multiple business domains and then rewards those companies whose achievements stand above those of their peers. www.bintelligence.com View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/trax-scoops-2019-artificial-intelligence-excellence-award-for-innovative-retail-tech-solution-300811073.html SOURCE Trax [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 12, 2019] The global tactical data link market generated a revenue of $XX billion in 2018 and is projected to reach $85.66 billion by 2027, at a CAGR of 6.33% through the forecast years of 2019-2027 NEW YORK, March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- KEY FINDINGS The tactical data link is turning into an essential part of military communication systems. It provides strong support for all three assets of the military (air, land, and sea) under one roof, creating an efficient and seamless networking system. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05753497 The global tactical data link market generated a revenue of $XX billion in 2018 and is projected to reach $85.66 billion by 2027, at a CAGR of 6.33% through the forecast years of 2019-2027. The market is primarily driven by increasing geopolitical tension and threats occurring across the world. MARKET INSIGHTS With increasing adoption of Tactical Data Link (TDL), there have been newer challenges budding in the market such as the stringent military standards, slowing defense spending, data security, and loss of data across different link types create some heavy restraints for the global TDL market to expand further. The global tactical data link market is segmented on the basis of the application, platform, and component. The adoption of a portable waveform software system for easy and quick communication and the elimination of moving time-sensitive targets will be favoring several opportunities for market growth. REGIONAL INSIGHTS The global tactical data link market is segmented on the basis of geography into expases of North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and the Rest of World regional segment. North America accounts the largest share with a total share of XX% in the market owing to high military spending by the government of United States and presence of big companies operating on the market, which holds a considerable share in the market and strategies adopted by these companies such as government collaboration are expected to propel the market revenue. COMPETITIVE INSIGHTS Rockwell Collins , Aselsan A.S., Leonardo, Bae Systems Inc., Telefunken Radio Communication Systems GmbH & Co. Kg (RACOMS), Leidos, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Iridium Communication, Thales Group, Raytheon Corporation, SAAB, ViaSat Inc., Tactical Communications Group, LLC, General Dynamics Corporation and L3 Technologies, Inc. are the major market players in the global arena, where they employ organic strategies such as merger & acquisition, partnership, contracts, agreements, and new product launch to gain a competitive edge over the other. Companies mentioned 1. ASELSAN A.S. 2. BAE SYSTEMS INC. 3. GENERAL DYNAMICS CORPORATION 4. IRIDIUM COMMUNICATION 5. L3 TECHNOLOGIES, INC. 6. LEIDOS 7. LEONARDO 8. NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORPORATION 9. RAYTHEON CORPORATION 10. ROCKWELL COLLINS 11. SAAB 12. TACTICAL COMMUNICATIONS GROUP, LLC 13. TELEFUNKEN RADIO COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS GMBH & CO. KG (RACOMS) 14. THALES GROUP 15. VIASAT INC. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05753497 About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place. __________________________ Contact Clare: [email protected] US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001 View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-global-tactical-data-link-market-generated-a-revenue-of-xx-billion-in-2018-and-is-projected-to-reach-85-66-billion-by-2027--at-a-cagr-of-6-33-through-the-forecast-years-of-2019-2027--300810939.html SOURCE Reportlinker [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 12, 2019] The robotics and automation actuators market size is expected to grow from USD 15.8 billion in 2019 to USD 30.9 billion by 2024, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 14.37% NEW YORK, March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Technological advancements in actuators and rising demand for robots are the major factors driving the growth of the robotics and automation actuators market, globally Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05753560 The robotics and automation actuators market size is expected to grow from USD 15.8 billion in 2019 to USD 30.9 billion by 2024, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 14.37% during the forecast period. The market for robotics and automation actuators is driven due to the increased use of electric actuators and compact pneumatic actuators in robotics and automation applications across the globe. However, formulation and stringent implementation of various regulations to ensure increased safety, reduced power consumption, and noise and leak elimination in robotics and automation actuators are expected to restrain the growth of the robotics and automation actuators market across the globe. Electric actuation to grow at highest CAGR during the forecast period in robotics and automation actuators market On the basis of actuation, the robotics and automation actuators market has been segmented into pneumatic, hydraulic, and electric.The electric actuation segment is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. Electric actuators are expected to replace hydraulic and pneumatic actuators due to their higher efficiency and greater levels of control. Major manufacturers of electric actuators include Thomson Linear, SMC, ABB, Rockwell Automation, and Curtiss Wright, among others. Process automation segment is estimated to account for the largest market share in the robotics and automation actuators market in 2019 The application segment of global robotics and automation actuators market has been further segmented into robotics and process automation.The automation of parts includes various application areas across different industrial verticals where automation actuators are used. The robotics part includes the robotic actuators requird for industrial robots and the service robots which are used across different industrial verticals.The demand for factory automation is increasing across industries due to the changing consumption patterns, and production of goods and services. For example, in the food & beverages industry, manufacturers are employing mass customization capabilities to address the changing needs of customers. The robotics and automation actuators market in Asia Pacific is projected to grow at the highest CAGR The Asia Pacific region is estimated to lead the global robotics and automation actuators market in 2019, and is expected to continue to lead during the forecast period.This region is upgrading various capabilities by undertaking developments in the field of actuators. China and India are primarily investing in robotics and automation to enhance and gain a tactical edge. This is an excellent opportunity for robotics and automation actuator manufacturers to strengthen their businesses in the Asia Pacific region. . Break-up of profiles of primary participants in the robotics and automation actuators market: By Company Type: Tier 1 35%, Tier 2 45%, and Tier 3 20% By Designation: C-Level Executives 35%, Directors 25%, and Others 40% By Region: North America 45%, Europe 20%, Asia Pacific 30%, Rest of the World 5% The robotics and automation actuators market includes key players, such as ABB ( Switzerland ), Rockwell Automation (US), Altra Industrial Motion (US), Moog (US), SMC ( Japan ), Curtiss Wright (US), and MISUMI ( Japan ), among others. Research Coverage: The market study covers the robotics and automation actuators market across segments.It aims at estimating the market size and the growth potential of this market across different segments, such as application, type, industry, actuation, design characteristics, and region. The study also includes an in-depth competitive analysis of the key players in the market, along with their company profiles, key observations related to product and business offerings, recent developments, and key market strategies. Reasons to buy this report: The report will help market leaders/new entrants in this market with information on the closest approximations of the revenue numbers for the overall robotics and automation actuators market and the subsegments.This report will help stakeholders understand the competitive landscape and gain more insights to better position their businesses and to plan suitable go-to-market strategies. The report also will help stakeholders understand the pulse of the market and provide them with information on key market drivers, restraints, challenges, and opportunities. Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05753560 About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place. __________________________ Contact Clare: [email protected] US: (339)-368-6001 Intl: +1 339-368-6001 View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-robotics-and-automation-actuators-market-size-is-expected-to-grow-from-usd-15-8-billion-in-2019-to-usd-30-9-billion-by-2024--at-a-compound-annual-growth-rate-cagr-of-14-37-300810950.html SOURCE Reportlinker [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 12, 2019] Atos announces contract with Western Australian Department of Health for Major Flagship Digital Transformation Project Atos to support the transition and transformation of the Western Australian (WA) public health system's ICT infrastructure into a fully managed Hybrid Digital Cloud Service. HealthNext transition and transformation program uses GovNext-ICT services including a fully managed Oracle Cloud Platform. Atos is the GovNext-ICT provider selected to enable Health Support Services (HSS) utilise public cloud services on demand. PERTH, Australia, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, has signed an AUD124 million (approx. EUR78.2 million) five-year contract with the Western Australian Department of Health (WA Health) to transition and digitize its ICT systems to better support the WA public health system. Atos will work with the WA health system's ICT service provider, Health Support Services (HSS), to transition the current legacy infrastructure from the incumbent provider to Atos Cloud platforms. The digital transformation will utilize GovNext-ICT services to provide a Hybrid Cloud and a recurrent consumption model which scales and shrinks as required, providing WA Health with new agility that will enhance operational processes and reduce costs while improving the patient experience in the public health system. The scope of services is to provide Private Cloud, Managed Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud Orchestration, co-location and managed services for 2,000 servers, over 1,000 applications, and a fully managed Oracle Cloud platform. The Fully Managed Oracle customer environment will be supported by both Oracle and Exadata cloud machines orchestrated into an Atos Hybrid cloud environment hosted on an Extreme Performance Pod, Digital Private Cloud utilizing Atos' powerful BullSequana computing platform and supported by a suite of fully managed services. These services include data center housing, capacity management, monitoring and reporting, backup, disaster recovery and OS management. The Atos Managed Public Cloud (MPC) solutio, leveraging an Atos-managed ServiceNow platform, provides a single "pane of glass" for cloud consumption. MPC provides additional virtual infrastructures and operating systems to facilitate the consumption of public cloud environments, removing the burden for HSS to operate these infrastructures as well as OS, backup, DR, routing, firewall and communications dependencies. In addition, WA Health will gain governance over cloud consumption, security and compliancy. The transition will deliver the following benefits: The ability to scale on-demand operational costs based on changing demand in WA Health Infrastructure needs; The ability to provide services with a minimum amount of process overhead regarding both time and cost; The ability to adopt a "pay-as-you-go" framework and avoid capital expenditure models The ability to leverage new technology and innovation without undertaking large-scale upgrades to infrastructure platforms; The ability to transform WA Health applications to modern architectural frameworks that support greater levels of availability, capacity, performance and scalability. Shirley Ngu, Head of Information and Data Management for Atos in Australia said: "WA Health is a highly valued and strategic client we are proud to work alongside. Over several years, Atos has developed a reputation within the Government marketplace for our success of transforming key services and infrastructure workloads into the cloud. We look forward to working with the government and WA Health on their new digital journey improving healthcare services." Holger Kaufmann, Chief Information Officer, Health Support Services said: "The HealthNext transition program represents an opportunity to improve the way WA Health utilises and delivers ICT services to support the provision of healthcare to the WA community. A modern and contemporary cloud-based ICT system will enable us to respond better to innovation that will help improve patient care and reduce unnecessary duplication." About Atos Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with 120,000 employees in 73 countries and annual revenue of EUR13 billion. European number one in Cloud, Cybersecurity and High-Performance Computing, the Group provides end-to-end Orchestrated Hybrid Cloud, Big Data, Business Applications and Digital Workplace solutions through its Digital Transformation Factory, as well as transactional services through Worldline, the European leader in the payment industry. With its cutting-edge technologies and industry knowledge, Atos supports the digital transformation of its clients across all business sectors. The Group is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic & Paralympic Games and operates under the brands Atos, Atos Syntel, Unify and Worldline. Atos is listed on the CAC40 Paris stock index. About Health Support Services Health Support Services (HSS) is WA Health's shared services centre providing ICT, supply, workforce and financial services to support the WA public health system. This includes the provision of ICT services to health services including Child and Adolescent Health Service, North Metropolitan Health Service, South Metropolitan Health Service, East Metropolitan Health Service, Pathwest and WA Country Health Service. About GovNext-ICT GovNext-ICT is a WA State Government ICT Procurement Reform initiative that has established a competitive marketplace for agencies to procure managed ICT services including cloud and telecommunications. The goals of GovNext-ICT are to simplify ICT procurement, increase competition and drive value through economies of scale, and to deliver a secure connected, stable and reliable Government ICT environment as the foundation for digital citizen services and data analytics. Press contact: Global: Laura Fau | [email protected] | +33-6-73-64-04-18 | Twitter: @laurajanefau Australia: Rhoda Dinesen | [email protected] | +65 (0) 67308524 Logo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20180716/2187572-1LOGO SOURCE Atos [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 12, 2019] MAXAR 72 HOUR DEADLINE ALERT: Approximately 72 Hours Remain; Former Louisiana Attorney General and Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC Remind Investors with Losses in Excess of $100,000 of Deadline in Class Action Lawsuit against Maxar Technologies Inc. - MAXR Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC ("KSF") and KSF partner, the former Attorney General of Louisiana, Charles C. Foti, Jr., remind investors with large financial interests that they have only until March 15, 2019 to file lead plaintiff applications in a securities class action lawsuit against Maxar Technologies Inc. (NYSE: MAXR), if they purchased the Company's securities between March 29, 2018 and January 7, 2019, inclusive (the "Class Period"). This action is pending in the United States District Court for the District of Colorado. What You May Do If you purchased securities of Maxar and would like to discuss your legal rights and how this case might affect you and your right to recover for your economic loss, you may, without obligation or cost to you, contact KSF Managing Partner Lewis Kahn toll-free at 1-877-515-1850 or via email ([email protected]), or visit https://www.ksfcounsel.com/cases/nyse-maxr/ to learn more. If you wish to serve as a lead plaintiff in this class action by overseeing lead counsel with the goal of obtaining a fair and just resolution, you must request this position by application to the Court by March 15, 2019. About the Lawsuit On January 7, 2019, the Company revealed that its WorldView-4 satellite, which generated revenue of roughly $85 million in FY 2018 and had a net book value of about $155 million, could no longer produce usable imagery due to a failure in its control moment gyroscopes causing loss of stability and that it would likely not be recoverable. On this news, the price of Maxar's shares plummeted. The case is Durant v. Maxar Technologies, et al., 19-cv-00124 About Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC KSF, whose partners include the former Louisiana Attorney General Charles C. Foti, Jr., is a law firm focused on securities, antitrust and consumer class actions, along with merger & acquisition and breach of fiduciary litigation against publicly traded companies on behalf of shareholders. The firm has offices in New York, California and Louisiana. To learn more about KSF, you may visit www.ksfcounsel.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190312005973/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 12, 2019] Vestas and Danish Export Credit Agency unlock Vietnamese wind energy project through innovative financing structure that can be used in other emerging markets SINGAPORE, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- With emerging markets looking to renewable energy to fuel their growth, securing competitive financing solutions play a key role in ensuring projects achieve attractive financial returns. With challenges associated with project bankability, the cost of local lending, and risk allocation, innovative financial solutions are a key enabler to unlock projects and drive further renewable energy development around the globe. Recently, Vestas' Structured Finance function demonstrated its ability to provide customised renewable energy solutions by assisting Vietnamese developer Tan Hoan Cau Joint Stock Corporation (THC) to secure foreign-denominated project funding that made possible the 33 MW Huong Linh 1 Wind Farm in late 2018. Vestas was instrumental in coordinating with the involved parties -- which included the Danish Export Credit Agency (EKF), a leading offshore bank, and one of Vietnam's largest banks -- and leading a joint effort to identify the challenges and develop a workable solution. By having a thorough market and customer understanding, Vestas was able to lead a collaborative effort in developing an innovative solution that featured structuring a local bank guarantee to the offshore bank, who in turn received a further guarantee from EKF. The result was a better business case and return on investment for THC, thus creating a more bankable project with a lower cost of debt, for a longer term and higher amount of borrowing than would have been otherwise achievable. "Achieving the financial close for this deal with EKF, the Danish Export Credit Agency, is a significant milestone in Vietnam's wind industry. With Vestas' proven track record in the Asia Pacific region and its ability to provide customised solutions, we are glad they connected us with the right partners to finance our project," said Nguyen Trung Thanh, Deputy Director of Tan Hoan Cau Joint Stock Company. "Securing this order underlines Vestas' expertise in Structured Finance to offer our customers customised financing solutions based on their specific requirements. This project also demonstrates THC's continuous confidence in us since our cooperation in Huong Linh 2 Wind Farm which started generating clean energy in September 2017," said Clive Turton, President of Vestas Asia Pacific. "Vietnam is a country with increasing energy needs and good conditions for wind energy. EKF has participated in wind farm financing worldwide, and our guarantees makes it possible to attract project funding from international banks. We see a great potential in Vietnam and are very proud to be part of the financing of the Huong Linh 1 wind farm. EKF is ready to cover more wind farm financings in Vietnam in the years to come," says Kirstine Damkjaer, CEO, EKF Danmark's Export Credit Agency. The Huong Linh 1 Wind Farm is the first project of this nature in Vietnam, and Vestas was instrumental in bringing this unique financing concept that will help to open a new path for financing wind projects in Vietnam and support the Vietnamese government to achieve its targets for Renewable Energy generation. Furthermore, this solution works to incentivise foreign investment into Vietnam, allowing for further Export Credit Agency support for future renewable energy project. And although this was a solution for a specific Vietnamese project, the solution can -- with some modifications -- easily be applied to other developing/emerging wind energy markets. The Huong Linh 1 Wind Farm is located at Huong Hoa town in Quang Tri province and includes supply and installation supervision of 15 turbines of the 2 MW platform as well as a 10-year service agreement AOM 4000 including a Vestas Online Business SCADA solution. The project achieved financial close in December of 2018, with turbine installation expected to commence around the end of first quarter of 2019. About Vestas Vestas is the energy industry's global partner on sustainable energy solutions. We design, manufacture, install, and service wind turbines across the globe, and with 101 GW of wind turbines in 80 countries, we have installed more wind power than anyone else. Through our industry-leading smart data capabilities and 86 GW of wind turbines under service, we use data to interpret, forecast, and exploit wind resources and deliver best-in-class wind power solutions. Together with our customers, Vestas' more than 24,600 employees are bringing the world sustainable energy solutions to power a bright future. For updated Vestas photographs and videos, please visit our media images page on: https://www.vestas.com/en/media/images. We invite you to learn more about Vestas by visiting our website at www.vestas.com and following us on our social media channels: www.twitter.com/vestas www.linkedin.com/company/vestas www.facebook.com/vestas www.instagram.com/vestas www.youtube.com/vestas https://plus.google.com/+vestas SOURCE Vestas [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Rep. Na Kyung-won of the main opposition Liberty Korea Party speaks with the party's key members at the National Assembly, Mar. 13. Yonhap The ruling Democratic Party (DP) requested the parliamentary ethics panel Wednesday punish the floor leader of the main opposition party over her derisive remarks about President Moon Jae-in's engagement with North Korea. In a parliamentary speech on Tuesday, Rep. Na Kyung-won of the main opposition Liberty Korea Party (LKP) called on Moon to behave in a way that would prevent "compromising talk that South Korea's president is Kim Jong-un's top spokesman." The DP filed a petition against Na with the special parliamentary committee on ethics alleging she violated parliamentary law that bans insulting remarks. Na's speech sparked political tension at a time when the National Assembly managed to open its extra session last week after a two-month hiatus. After Rep. Na Kyung won, bottom, criticized South Korean President Moon Jae-in by calling him "Kim Jong-un's top spokesman" in a parliamentary speeech on Tuesday, ruling Democratic Party's floor leader Hong Young-pyo goes up to the National Assembly Speaker's seat to object to the inappropriateness in her speech. Yonhap [March 13, 2019] Ferntech Raises Seed Investment from Factor[e] to Bring Visual Programming Control to Microgrids BERLIN and FORT COLLINS, Colo., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Ferntech GmbH today announced a seed investment from Factor[e] Ventures to fuel the development of the company's microgrid monitoring and control platform. Ferntech's technology allows microgrid developers to connect components from any manufacturer, monitor a fleet of systems from a single dashboard, and add smart behavior to their grids with simple visual programming tools. These features reduce the cost and complexity of deploying new microgrids and create new possibilities in addressing global access to energy with off-grid and hybrid power systems. "Current solutions for monitoring off-grid and hybrid power systems were missing a crucial component: the ability to act on the information being collected," said Patrick Cousins, CEO of Ferntech. "Our platform gives operators that capacity, in turn helping ease the burden of maintenance costs and simplifying future deployments." Ferntech's platform securely centralizes component data onto a single, web-based dashboard. System operators can view the status of their grids and take actions that improve performance and stability. Operators can easily change parameters of connected hardware, create their own control algorithms using Ferntech's visual programming tool, or apply pre-loaded optimizations developed by Ferntech. Unlike other microgrid controllers which are custom-built and only accessible to skilled programmers Ferntech has embedded their expertise into a set of intuitive tools for the everyday operator. For example, Ferntech customers can remotely create status-based alerts for on-the-ground agents, enable productive use applications, or intelligently dispatch excess energy to deferrable loads. "Microgrid developers know what they want their grids to do, but don't have the tools to turn those ideas into reality. Ferntech enables exactly that process," said Dr. Morgan DeFoort, co-founder and Managing Principal of Factor[e] Ventures. "Our investment is based on the thesis that remote monitoring and control is foundational to the future of microgrids, and we're confident that we've picked the best team to create that solution." Ferntech previously operated as Infinite Fingers GmbH. The total funding amount was not disclosed. About Ferntech Ferntech has developed a universal controller for off-grid, hybrid, and microgrid power systems. Ferntech's technology makes it possible for developers and operators of these systems to connect components from any manufacturer, monitor a fleet of systems from a single dashboard, and easily program behaviors to improve performance. These features reduce monitoring and maintenance costs and improve returns on grid deployments. For more information, visit https://ferntech.io/ . About Factor[e] Ventures Factor[e] is a venture development firm with a mission to improve lives in the developing world through increased access to sustainable energy and related services. Factor[e] finds, validates, funds, de-risks, and grows a rich pipeline of social ventures that aim to solve profound global problems, and supports early stage entrepreneurs through a unique blend of risk capital and world-class technical resources. For more information, visit http://www.factore.com . View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ferntech-raises-seed-investment-from-factore-to-bring-visual-programming-control-to-microgrids-300811311.html SOURCE Ferntech [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Telia Carrier and Telxius Announce Major Network Capacity Agreement Telia Carrier and Telxius announced today a landmark agreement for multi-terabit capacity services combining transatlantic capacity from Telxius in the new 6,600 km MAREA cable system and Telia Carrier's European backbone network. The combination of Telia Carrier's extensive terrestrial European and North American footprint and Telxius' newest transatlantic cable assets will not only provide both parties with additional network muscle and reach, it will also create a natural and vital bridge linking the US with other cable systems connecting to Northern Europe, Africa and Asia. "This is one of the largest European capacity projects in recent years and by combining our extensive European network across 100 PoPs in Europe with Telxius' Spanish footprint and the Marea cable system, this is a perfect, end-to-end fit,' said Ivo Pascucci (News - Alert), VP of Sales, Telia Carrier. 'Apart from the obvious benefits of additional capacity and lower latency within Europe and towards the US, we are delighted to work with such a strong partner in this and other projects." "MAREA is the highest capacity cable system in the world offering a key diverse route across the Atlantic. Telxius and Telia Carrier both work with the world's largest operators, content providers and enterprises, who will now also benefit from this deployment," said Enrique Valdes, VP of Sales, Telxius. "This partnership was perfect for us and we're confident that our combined strengths will contribute to realising the full potential of the Marea sea cable system." The MAREA subsea cable system provides unmatched route diversity and the lowest latency across the Atlantic. MAREA runs from Sopelana in the north of Spain to Virginia Beach in the US, on a more southerly route than other transatlantic cables which are mostly located further north. The Sopelana landing is connected to an existing fiber network corridor in Europe, linking major hubs like Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and London. MAREA consists of 8 fiber pairs, with an initial design capacity of 160 Tbps which recent technological developments have increased up to 200 Tbps. Top-ranked global backbone Telia Carrier owns and operates the world's #1 backbone (according to Dyn (News - Alert) Research) and provides critical network infrastructure, services and cloud connectivity to operators, content providers and enterprises alike. With customers in more than 115 countries, their global network footprint connects more than 280 Points of Presence with 65,000 km of fiber across Europe, The Americas, Asia and the Middle East. The highest-capacity cables in the world Telxius owns and operates the two highest-capacity submarine cables in the world, MAREA (200 Tbps) and BRUSA (138 Tbps) within its 87,000 km international network of fiber optic subsea cables. MAREA is the transatlantic cable jointly owned with Microsoft and Facebook (News - Alert). BRUSA effectively provides the lowest latency route between the US and Brazil. Telxius provides the latest generation IP, capacity, colocation and security services over its extensive network, always enabling the best communication for customers all over the world. About Telia Carrier Telia Carrier owns and operates one of the world's most extensive fiber backbones. Our mission is to provide exceptional network infrastructure and services - empowering individuals, businesses and societies to execute their most critical activities. By working close to our customers, we make big ideas happen at the speed of fiber. Discover more at teliacarrier.com. About Telxius Telxius is the telecommunication infrastructure company of the Telefonica (News - Alert) Group managing a unique combination of over 16,700 towers and an international 87,000 km network of high capacity fiber optic submarine cables. For more information on Telxius, please visit www.telxius.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005082/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Health Strategy Associates' Joe Paduda to Discuss the Impact of "Medicare for All" on Work Comp in Keynote Address to CSIA Joe Paduda, principal of Health Strategy Associates, will deliver the keynote address at the California Self Insurer Association (CSIA) 2019 Employer Seminar and Educational Conference, kicking off the conference at 1:30 p.m. on April 8. Paduda will explore the potential for the adoption of a single payer health plan in California and what that would mean to workers' compensation. He will share how workers' compensation is handled in countries that have a single payer healthcare system - that is, pretty much every developed country except the US. Most of these systems separate occupational medical care and its reimbursement from healthcare. Paduda will describe in detail the four general ways occupational medical care is dealt with, how governments keep employers focused on safety and return to work and dig into lessons learned from Vermont's stillborn effort to implement a single payer healthcare plan. CSIA will hold the conference on April 8 and 9 at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. For more information and to register, please see https://www.caself-insurers.com/2019-annual-meeting-attendee-information-registration. About Joe Paduda Paduda is a managed care expert with extensive experience in workers' compensation. In addition to consulting with medical management organizations, insurers, employers, health care providers, private equity firms, he regularly surveys workers' comp payers on managing workers' comp pharmacy care and costs, opioid use, bill review systems, utilization review programs, and claims systems. He is also the prolific author of the thought-provoking www.ManagedCareMatters.com blog. For more information, please see www.healthstrategyassoc.com and www.ManagedCareMatters.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005104/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] 5G Infrastructure Market to Reach $58.17 Bn, Globally, by 2025 at 95.8% CAGR, Says Allied Market Research PORTLAND, Oregon, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Allied Market Research published a report, titled, "5G Infrastructure Market by Communication Infrastructure (Small Cell, Macro Cell, Radio Access Network, and Distributed Antenna Network), Network Technology (Software Defined Networking & Network Function Virtualization, Mobile Edge Computing, and Fog Computing), Chipset Type (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuit, Millimeter Wave Technology Chips, and FPGA), and Application (Automotive, Energy & Utilities, Healthcare, Retail, and Others): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 20182025." The report provides a detailed analysis of key investment pockets, changing market trends, impacting factors, market size & estimations, and competitive landscape. According to the report, the global 5G infrastructure market garnered $371.4 million in 2017 and is expected to reach $58.17 billion by 2025, registering a CAGR of 95.8% from 2018 to 2025. Growing penetration M2M/IoT connections and surge in demand for mobile broadband services drive the global 5G infrastructure market. However, huge initial investment, implementation challenges regarding technology & infrastructure, and increase in security and privacy concerns limit the market growth. On the other hand, increase in government initiatives for building smart cities in emerging economies create new pathways in the industry. For Purchase Enquiry: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/5196 Small cell segment to maintain its dominance by 2025 Based on communication infrastructure, the small cell segment contributed nearly two-fifths of the total market share in 2017 and will maintain its dominance by 2025. This is due to surge in demand for mobile broadband service and its ability to efficiently offer high-speed broadband. However, the radio access network segment would grow at the highest CAGR of 108.0% during the forecast period, 20182025, owing to its evolution and support for multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) antennas, multi-band carrier aggregation, large spectrum bandwidths, and Distributed Antenna System. Based on chipset type, ASIC held the major share in 2017, accounting for nearly half of the total market share and is expected to maintain its leadership status by 2025. This is due to increase in demand for custom chips. On the other hand, FPGA is expected to register the highest growth rate with a CAGR of 109.6% from 2018 to 2025, owing to its reprogramming characteristics that led to wide adoption. Request Sample Report at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/5196 Asia-Pacific to maintain its dominant position by 2025 According to report Asia-Pacific accounted for more than one-third of the total share in 2017 and will maintain its dominant position by 2025, owing to huge adoption of smart technologies in the region. However, LAMEA is expected to grow at the highest rate, with a CAGR of 119.4% from 2018 to 2025, owing to high rate of adoption of advanced systems and solutions in different industry verticals in the region. Leading market players Leading market players analyzed in the report include AT&T, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., Ericsson, Intel Corporation, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Nokia Corporation, Mediatek Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and Verizon. Access KNOWLEDGE TREE (Premium on-demand, subscription-based pricing model) at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/knowledgetree Knowledge tree is a cloud-based intelligence platform that offers more than 2,000 selective, off-the-shelf reports on niche markets to enable our clients gain deep insights on the latest trends, dynamic technologies, and emerging application areas. Similar Reports: 5G Chipsets Market Expected to Reach $22,929.0 Million by 2026 In 2020, in terms of revenue, ASIC segment is expected to dominate the global 5G chipset market in the IC type category. By industry vertical, the consumer electronics segment is anticipated to dominate the market throughout the forecast period (2020-"2026). The key players are adopting new techniques to provide advanced and innovative products to the customers. Smart Transportation Market Expected to Reach $237,701 Million by 2022 Smart transportation system is a necessity, owing to the rising demand for efficient transportation networks worldwide. These systems have witnessed the highest growth in cloud services segment, due to the advancement in technology and increased demand for storage, access, and management of data remotely. In addition, parking management systems are expected to increase their market share at a notable rate. Asia-Pacific and Brazil possess enormous opportunities for the players operating in the smart transportation systems market. About Us Allied Market Research (AMR) is a full-service market research and business-consulting wing of Allied Analytics LLP based in Portland, Oregon. Allied Market Research provides global enterprises as well as medium and small businesses with unmatched quality of "Market Research Reports" and "Business Intelligence Solutions." AMR has a targeted view to provide business insights and consulting to assist its clients to make strategic business decisions and achieve sustainable growth in their respective market domain. We are in professional corporate relations with various companies and this helps us in digging out market data that helps us generate accurate research data tables and confirms utmost accuracy in our market forecasting. Each and every data presented in the reports published by us is extracted through primary interviews with top officials from leading companies of domain concerned. Our secondary data procurement methodology includes deep online and offline research and discussion with knowledgeable professionals and analysts in the industry. Contact: David Correa 5933 NE Win Sivers Drive #205, Portland, OR 97220 United States USA/Canada (Toll Free): +1-800-792-5285, +1-503-894-6022, +1-503-446-1141 UK: +44-845-528-1300 Hong Kong: +852-301-84916 India (Pune): +91-20-66346060 Fax: +1(855)550-5975 [email protected] Web: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] KoreConX Partners With Global Investment Bank Entoro NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- KoreConX, the first all-in-one platform for private companies, is joining forces with Entoro Capital, a global investment bank. The partnership will allow KoreConX's users to get even more support during the capital-raising process. Entoro provides advice and services to a wide range of established and growth-oriented businesses around the world. Their experienced professionals offer deep sector expertise across a full range of services in investment banking, equities and fixed income in the Americas, Europe, South America, the Middle East and Asia. They provide financial and strategic advisory services which include capital formation, mergers and acquisitions, acquisition and development, leveraged finance, equity/equity-linked financing, restructuring and recapitalization solutions. "We are very careful in the process of selecting our KorePartners. And Entoro is a great choice. They actively agree and promote our governance standards, as they also take investor protection very seriously," said Oscar Jofre, co-founder and CEO of KoreConX. "As a global investment bank, we partner with companies that have a presence in the most important cities in the world and share our core values," said Entoro Capital Managing Partner James C. Row. "And KoreConX does just that with its relentless work in making business easier for both issuers and investors worldwide." About KoreConX KoreConX is the world's first highly secure permissioned blockchain ecosystem for fully compliant digital securities worldwide. To ensure compliance with securities regulation and corporate law, the KoreConX all-in-one, AI-based blockchain platform manages the full lifecycle of digital securities including the issuance, trading, clearing, settlement, management, reporting, corporate actions and custodianship. KoreConX connects companies to the capital markets and secondary markets facilitating access to capital and liquidity for private investors. KoreConX is the first secure, all-in-one platform for private companies to manage their capital market activity and stakeholder communications. Removing the burden of fragmented systems and inefficient tools across multiple vendors, KoreConX offers a single environment to connect companies, investors and broker/dealers. Leveraged for investor relations and fundraising, private companies can share and manage corporate records and investments including portfolio management, capitalization table management, virtual minute book, security registers, transfer agent services and virtual deal rooms for raising capital. www.KoreConX.io Media Contact: KoreConX Oscar A Jofre [email protected] Related Links KoreConX View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/koreconx-partners-with-global-investment-bank-entoro-300811466.html SOURCE KoreConX [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Apstra Showcases Intent-Based Data Center Automation with SONiC in Multi-Vendor, Open Source Showcase at OCP Summit Apstra will be demonstrating Intent-Based Data Center Automation at the OCP (News - Alert) Conference with support for SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud), as part of a multi-vendor solution. Apstra will also showcase full life cycle data center automation and Root Cause Identification capabilities. Apstra will present the session titled Unlocking SONiC's Potential for Intent-Based Data Centers: Three Easy Steps which will highlight industry innovations in automation. Apstra Intent-Based Data Center Automation for enterprises, cloud providers, and telcos increases application reliability and availability, simplifies deployments and operations through automation, and reduces OpEx and CapEx costs. Apstra enables vendor-agnostic data center lifecycle automation and is deployed by many businesses around the world including Fortune 100 Enterprises. These companies are taking advantage of game-changing agility, reliability and significantly lower TCO with complete flexibility to deploy the hardware and network operating system of their choice. "Apstra is a strong advocate of network disaggregation. Our ission is to deliver massively automated turnkey infrastructure operations that are hardware independent, and we continue to add new network operating systems to our hardware compatibility list based on customer demand," said Mansour Karam, CEO and Founder of Apstra. "We are showing a demonstration of Apstra Intent-Based Data Center Automation with SONiC, an open source container-based cloud networking stack solution, that represents expanded options for companies deploying Intent-Based Networking solutions." Yousef Khalidi, Corporate Vice President for Azure Networking, Microsoft (News - Alert) Corporation said, "We are pleased to see Apstra play a key role in helping the SONiC ecosystem grow and establishing SONiC as an enterprise-class solution. The Apstra solution supports industry needs for automation and analytics and will help bring the benefits of SONiC to enterprise data center deployments." OCP 2019 - March 14 - 15, 2019 - San Jose Convention Center - Booth #B21 Schedule to meet with Apstra CEO Mansour Karam and CTO Sasha Ratkovic and the Apstra team at OCP. About Apstra Apstra Intent-Based Data Center Automation increases application availability and reliability, simplifies deployment and operations, and dramatically reduces costs for Enterprise, Cloud Service Provider, and Telco data centers. Apstra empowers Intent-Based Data Centers through its pioneering Intent-Based Networking, distributed system architecture, and vendor-agnostic overlay. Headquartered in Menlo Park, California and privately funded, Apstra is a Gartner (News - Alert) Cool Vendor and Best of VMworld winner. For more information visit: www.apstra.com or follow us on twitter @ApstraInc. Apstra Blog LinkedIn Facebook Tweet This: @ApstraInc announces #OpenSource demo of #Microsoft #SONiC extending #MultiVendor #IntentBasedNetworking to open alternatives #IntentBased #DataCenter #Automation. See #Apstra at @OpenComputePrj #OCPSummit19 @MSpartner Apstra and the Apstra logo are registered trademarks of Apstra, Inc., Self-Operating Network and Intent-Based Analytics are trademarks of Apstra Inc., and other trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005203/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Esri Demonstrates Location Intelligence for Business Insights at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2019 Gartner (News - Alert) Data & Analytics Summit - Esri, the global leader in location intelligence, will showcase the beta release of its Python and R integration within the company's ArcGIS for Insights product at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2019. Insights fuses location analytics with data science and business intelligence. It helps users answer questions they didn't know to ask, analyze data completely, and unlock new insights. WHO: Arthur Haddad, Chief Technology Officer, Location Analytics, Esri Linda Beale, Spatial Data Scientist, Esri WHAT: Theater Session: Maps-The Power of Location Analytics Uncover opportunities and possibilities that only location analytics can expose. In this session, users will get acquainted with data analytics fused with location and learn how to unlock new insights. WHERE: Theater 1, inside Exhibit Showcase Orlando World Center Marriott 8701 World Center Drive, Orlando, FL 32821 WHEN: Tuesday, March 19, 2019, 6:25 p.m.-6:45 p.m. WHY: The new integration of Python and R allows analysts to solve a diverse set of problems using powerful methods such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. Additionally, this integration is bidirectional. The new Python and R console allows users to script and bring datasets or charts in and out of Insights with a single line of script. Insights connects to an existing Python or R setup through either Jupyter or Anaconda, with no need for a new deployment. This bring-your-own (BYO) model also means that Insights can work with any library users choose. LEARN MORE: Visit Esri at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2019, booth #904. About the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2019 Data and analytics leaders are fueling digital transformation, creating monetization opportunities, improving the customer experience, and reshaping industries. The Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2019 provides the tools to build on the fundamentals of data management, business intelligence (BI), and analytics; harness innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT); and accelerate the shift toward a data-driven culture to lead the way to better business outcomes. About Esri Esri, the global market leader in geographic information system (GIS) software, location intelligence, and mapping, offers the most powerful geospatial cloud available. Since 1969, Esri has helped customers unlock the full potential of data to improve operational and business results. Today, Esri software is deployed in more than 350,000 organizations including the world's largest cities, most national governments, 75 percent of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. With its pioneering commitment to geospatial information technology, Esri engineers the most advanced solutions for digital transformation, the Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced analytics. Visit us at esri.com. Copyright 2019 Esri. All rights reserved. Esri, the Esri globe logo, The Science of Where, ArcGIS, Insights, esri.com, and @esri.com are trademarks, service marks, or registered marks of Esri in the United States, the European Community, or certain other jurisdictions. Other companies and products or services mentioned herein may be trademarks, service marks, or registered marks of their respective mark owners. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005250/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] DataStax SVP and Chief Product Officer to Discuss Hybrid Cloud Data Strategies at Gartner Data & Analytics Summit DataStax, the leading provider of the always-on, active everywhere distributed hybrid cloud database built on Apache Cassandra, today announced that SVP and Chief Product Officer Robin Schumacher will present a talk around data strategies for a hybrid and multi-cloud world at the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit on March 18, 2019 in Orlando, Florida. Click to Tweet: Join @DataStax at #GartnerDA to learn the enterprise data management strategies for hybrid cloud (DataStax booth #923) Read all about it here: https://bit.ly/2EB9Aot #cassandra #hybridcloud #multicloud WHAT: Speaking Session: Data Strategies for a Hybrid and Multi-Cloud World Moving to hybrid cloud-easy decision. Finding a data management strategy that works best for hybrid and multi-cloud? Not so easy. This session will address best practices for data management in a hybrid cloud and multi-cloud world, including pros and cons of commonly used strategies and the most important technologies required for seamless hybrid cloud deployments. WHO: Robin Schumacher, SVP and Chief Product Officer at DataStax WHERE: Room - Theater 2 Orlando World Center Marriott 8701 World Center Drive Orlando, FL 32821 WHEN: Monday, March 18, 2019 6:55 p.m. - 7:15 p.m. ET If you are a Gartner (News - Alert) Data & Analytics Summit attendee, please visit us at the DataStax Booth, #923. To learn more or to register for the event, please click here. Learn more: To learn more about DataStax and DataStax Enterprise, please join DataStax at DataStax Accelerate, the world's premier Apache Cassandra conference, May 21-23, 2019, in the Washington D.C. area. To register, please visit: www.datastax.com/accelerate About the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2019 Data and analytics leaders are fueling digital transformation, creating monetization opportunities, improving the customer experience and reshaping industries. The Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2019 provides the tools to build on the fundamentals of data management, business intelligence (BI), and analytics; harness innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT); and accelerate the shift toward a data-driven culture to lead the way to better business outcomes. About DataStax DataStax delivers the always-on, active-everywhere distributed hybrid cloud database built on Apache Cassandra. The foundation for personalized, real-time applications at scale, DataStax Enterprise makes it easy for enterprises to exploit hybrid and multi-cloud environments via a seamless data layer that eliminates the issues that typically come with deploying applications across multiple on-premises data centers and/or multiple public clouds. Our product also gives businesses full data visibility, portability, and control, allowing them to retain strategic ownership of their most valuable asset in a hybrid/multi cloud world. We help many of the world's leading brands across industries transform their businesses through an enterprise data layer that eliminates data silos and cloud vendor lock-in while powering modern, mission-critical applications. For more information, visit www.DataStax.com and follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) @DataStax. 2019 DataStax, All Rights Reserved. DataStax, Titan, and TitanDB are registered trademarks of DataStax, Inc. and its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. Apache Cassandra, Apache, Tomcat, Lucene, Solr, Hadoop, Spark, TinkerPop, and Cassandra are trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation or its subsidiaries in Canada, the United States and/or other countries. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005214/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Intercontinental Exchange Sets Date for 2019 Annual Meeting of Stockholders Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE:ICE), a leading operator of global exchanges, clearing houses and provider of data and listings services, will hold its 2019 Annual Meeting of Stockholders on Friday, May 17, 2019 at 8:30 a.m. ET at The St. Regis Atlanta. The proxy statement and admission procedures will be available in early April for stockholders of record as of March 19, 2019. A live audio webcast and replay of the annual meeting will be available on the company's website www.theice.com in the investor relations and media section. About Intercontinental Exchange Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE) is a Fortune 500 company formed in the year 2000 to modernize markets. ICE serves customers by operating the exchanges, clearing houses and information services they rely upon to invest, trae and manage risk across global financial and commodity markets. A leader in market data, ICE Data Services serves the information and connectivity needs across virtually all asset classes. As the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, the company is the premier venue for raising capital in the world, driving economic growth and transforming markets. Trademarks of ICE and/or its affiliates include Intercontinental Exchange, ICE, ICE block design, NYSE and New York Stock Exchange. Information regarding additional trademarks and intellectual property rights of Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. and/or its affiliates is located at http://www.intercontinentalexchange.com/terms-of-use. Key Information Documents for certain products covered by the EU Packaged Retail and Insurance-based Investment Products Regulation can be accessed on the relevant exchange website under the heading "Key information Documents (KIDS)". Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 -- Statements in this press release regarding ICE's business that are not historical facts are "forward-looking statements" that involve risks and uncertainties. For a discussion of additional risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, see ICE's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC (News - Alert)) filings, including, but not limited to, the risk factors in ICE's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2018, as filed with the SEC on February 7, 2019. ICE-CORP View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005132/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] LENSEC Announces Fleet Management in Perspective VMS v3.5.0 HOUSTON, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- LENSEC is announcing the release of our next generation software, including fleet security management as a new software feature. Perspective VMS provides a hardware-agnostic version of security management using modern megapixel cameras and hardened network video recorders on board vehicles. The LENSEC team is experienced at developing solutions for transportation deployment. The development team integrates hardened devices with a wireless infrastructure and advanced software to identify and store video data from vehicles in the field. Since 2009, LENSEC has helped security integrators serve fleet customers with legacy software, LENSEC VMS. Customers use LVMS to manage hundreds of buses across large regions. The legacy software provides capabilities for monitoring buses and retrieving video from buses when they return to the depot. However, LVMS has limitations and customers have expressed interest in new features available in Perspective VMS. As an integrated security management system, Perspective VMS acts as a common operating interface to send and receive communication between field devices in vehicles and security personnel. As critical as real-time status notification can be, just as important is archive history and "linking" of events to forensic video. This integration of sub-systems allows security staff to see the entire story. Perspective VMS Fleet Security Management features advanced capabilities: GIS-Mapping for locations associated with archived recordings is provided. So, system users can monitor bus locations remotely or track location of incidents after they occur. for locations associated with archived recordings is provided. So, system users can monitor bus locations remotely or track location of incidents after they occur. Multiple Megapixel Cameras installed in crucial locations see inside or outside of the vehicle. Higher resolution video captures details missed previously. installed in crucial locations see inside or outside of the vehicle. Higher resolution video captures details missed previously. Integrated Vehicle Equipment Metadata is collected from brakes, bus stop arms, blinkers, speedometers, etc. The metadata displays in PVMS alongside live or recorded video. is collected from brakes, bus stop arms, blinkers, speedometers, etc. The metadata displays in PVMS alongside live or recorded video. Built-in Cellular Communication provides remote access to users monitoring vehicle actions, and live or recorded video before the returning to the depot. provides remote access to users monitoring vehicle actions, and live or recorded video before the returning to the depot. Built-in Wi-Fi allows offload of video to the central system archives when the bus returns to the depot. Users can turn the server on or off and retrieve video from the server remotely. Fleet Management works inside of Perspective VMS - not as a standalone software product. LENSEC includes Fleet in Professional and Enterprise editions of PVMS for no additional licensing fee. Jeff Kellick, LENSEC Chief Product Officer, says users managing building security with PVMS can continue security management in the same software that is handling fleet management. This offers ease-of-use for system users and lower overhead for system administrators, further unifying the physical security footprint being managed by Perspective VMS. Kellick says, "We want to ensure users of Perspective VMS can leverage the same intuitive, easy-to-use, centralized management system they already depend on for securing dozens to hundreds of sites with thousands of cameras. With Perspective VMS Fleet Management, they can provide surveillance for all their fleet vehicles as well. Managing multiple video sources from fleets of any size can be a logistical challenge, whether it's for buses, trains, trucks, or any fleet vehicle. Using PVMS for reviewing incidents, and automatically correlating the video with intelligent signaling from turn signals, bus stop-arms, accelerometer, GPS, and other vehicle equipment, brings the security information together. All of it can be retrieved wirelessly and combined into a central user interface that can be accessed from any browser. This provides much needed flexibility and efficiency for our customers." Fleet Management in PVMS includes: Vehicle Control Page: Controls Vehicle-Installed Hardware Controls Vehicle-Installed Hardware Archive Browser/Viewer Page: Playback Archives and Import Videos as Vehicle Incidents Playback Archives and Import Videos as Vehicle Incidents Vehicle Incident Panel: Forensic Investigation of Imported Videos and Image Extraction Forensic Investigation of Imported Videos and Image Extraction Image Extractions Panel: View or Download Video View or Download Video Live-Map Interface: Vehicle location and metadata is displayed with a timestamp. The vehicle's map location is displayed in real-time or an archived map location matching archived video. If you are interested in learning more about Perspective VMS Fleet Management, we have details on our website transportation page, https://lensec.com/transportation/. Call the LENSEC team for more information and to request a software demonstration. Contact: Keith Harris, LENSEC LENSEC Marketing & Communications Manager 3151 Briarpark Drive #125, Houston, TX 77042 Email: [email protected] Website: https://lensec.com/ Phone: (512) 913-3907 Phone: (713) 395-0800 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lensec-announces-fleet-management-in-perspective-vms-v3-5-0--300811351.html SOURCE LENSEC [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] A booth offering sandwich boxes and water bottles to international journalists covering the Hanoi summit inside the International Media Center in downtown Hanoi, Vietnam, is seen in this file photo. Courtesy of SPC Group By Kim Yoo-chul Though the failure of the U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi has been considered a major disappointment, the summit was a "brand booster" for South Korea's food giant SPC Group. During the Hanoi summit, SPC Group, which operates bakery franchise units of Paris Baguette and Paris Croissant, supplied 7,500 snack boxes, each of them holding handcrafted sandwiches made with specialty breads and rolls, and 10,000 water bottles to the International Media Center (IMC). "Events provide marketers like us with a number of great chances to actively engage with audiences, at the same time creating increased brand awareness," Lee Yong-seok, chief of SPC's Vietnam subsidiary, said in an interview with The Korea Times. "Events that provide meaningful experiences with meaningful timing allow brands to forge emotional connections, creating deep chances for personal engagement." Lee said Group Chairman Hur Young-in initially raised the idea of supplying them to the IMC, as Huh, who was born in North Korea, wanted to provide a kind of charity contribution to Hanoi, hoping for a successful outcome. SPC supplied lunch boxes and water bottles last year to press centers for summits with President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Panmunjeom and Pyongyang, as well as the first U.S.-North Korea summit in Singapore. According to Lee, Chairman Huh is a longtime supporter of the peace process on the Korean Peninsula. SPC Group plans to supply any further summits between the leaders of the two Koreas or the United States and North Korea, if held and open to the public. SPC opened its first Paris Baguette bakery in Southeast Asia in Cao Thang, Vietnam, in March 2012. As of March this year, it operates 15 branches in Vietnam. It was able to open over 1,000 stores overseas because of its successful localization strategy, in which it modifies its menu to fit local market preferences. "We have been focusing on Korean customers overseas but will be tailoring menus to the broader local markets," the executive said. [March 13, 2019] Planbox Completes SOC 2 Type II Audit of its Security, Availability, & Confidentiality Controls MONTREAL, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Planbox, the pioneering provider of cloud-based AI-powered Agile Innovation solutions, announced today it successfully completed an American Institute of Certified Public Accountants' (AICPA) Service Organization Control 2 (SOC 2) Type II audit, demonstrating compliance to strict information security, availability, and confidentiality standards. The follow SOC 2 framework includes trust services principles were audited: Security of the service provider's system Availability of this system Confidentiality of the information that the service provider's system processes or maintains for user entities Outcome of the audit confirms that Planbox policies and strategies suitably protect customer data and fully meet SOC 2's stringent standards. "The successful completion of this audit without any deviation demonstrates our commitment to protecting our customer's data, ensuring system availability and maintaining effective internal controls," explained Karell Ste-Marie, Chief Technology Officer at Planbox. The SOC examination provides customers and auditors with an understanding that the description of Planbox Innovation as a Service provided by Planbox are fairly presented and suitably designed. The Type 2 component of SOC provides an objective evaluation that Planbox's controls were operatin effectively throughout the audit period of July 1, 2018 to December 31, 2018. About Planbox Planbox is the pioneering provider of cloud-based AI-Powered Agile Innovation Management solutions from creative ideas to winning projects. Our mission is to help organizations thrive by transforming the culture of agile work, continuous innovation, and creativity across the entire organization. Our family of products includes Collaborative Innovation Management, Team Decision Making, and Work Management applications. Planbox is designed to provide agile innovation tools for everyone, built for companies and teams of all sizes and trusted by some of the world's most recognized brands including Honeywell, Great-West Life, Ontario Power Generation, Sun Life Financial, Whirlpool, Willis Towers Watson and Verizon with millions of internal and external users. To learn more, visit: www.planbox.com and unleash your innovation potential. Additional Links Planbox on Twitter ( www.twitter.com/planbox ) Planbox on Facebook ( www.facebook.com/planbox ) Planbox on LinkedIn ( www.linkedin.com/companies/planbox ) Contact information Jelena Milacic [email protected] 514-788-4703 extension 610 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/planbox-completes-soc-2-type-ii-audit-of-its-security-availability--confidentiality-controls-300811387.html SOURCE Planbox [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] UCLA Study Quantifies How JoVE Videos Improve Undergraduate Science Education CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Using JoVE educational videos to supplement face-to-face scientific lectures significantly boosts student learning, concludes a study from the UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry and the UCLA Center for The Advancement of Teaching. Appearing February 22 in the Journal of Chemical Education , the study analyzed 501 UCLA undergraduate life science/non-chemistry majors predominantly studying under the same teacher in a general chemistry course. After attending lectures and taking a quiz on each topic, students watched a corresponding educational video developed by JoVE. The average student performed significantly better on each post-video quiz, according to the study. Highlights: Average test scores in a winter semester Rate Laws class, for example, rose from 38.6% after attending only the lecture, to 90.4% after then viewing the video. After excluding perfect test scores, results revealed even larger learning gains, such as in a Rate Laws class, where scores rose from 28.2% to 89.5 %, quantifying how the videos benefited students who had not yet mastered the material. Even when a previous teacher had inadequately covered a topic (Le Chatelier's Principle), students showed large post-video test gains. This led the study's authors to conclude that high quality educational videos can efficiently aligning a group of students who start a class at different proficiency levels. Gains also occurred in high-scoring topics: Despite high pre-video scores in Entropy, for example, post-video scores still showed significant improvement, rising in a winter semester class from 86.4% to 96.1%. Scores rose whether students took the test just after watching the video, or two days later, underscoring that thevideos reinforced conceptual learning, according to the study. Though most students found the videos useful, even naysayers and students who felt neutral about the video's impact showed meaningful post-video test gains. Roshini Ramachandran , the study's principal investigator. "The UCLA study provides compelling evidence that supplementing face-to-face instruction with videos can play a key role in helping students learn science," said JoVE co-founder and CEO Dr. Moshe Pritsker. "We believe JoVE's state-of-the-art research and educational tools can also help educational institutions meet the challenging demands of their diverse constituencies -- to control costs, provide students a first-rate education, and fuel the next generation of scientific breakthroughs." About JoVE JoVE https://www.jove.com is the leading producer and publisher of videos that increase the productivity and efficacy of scientific, medical, and engineering research and education. Since its founding in 2006, JoVE has produced over 9,000 video articles demonstrating experiments filmed in laboratories at top research institutions, and delivered online to millions of scientists, educators, and students worldwide. Today, JoVE has 1,000-plus institutional subscribers, including universities, colleges, biotech, and pharmaceutical companies, including Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, JoVE maintains offices in the United States, Europe, India, and Australia. About UCLA UCLA Chemistry & Biochemistry Department The UCLA Chemistry & Biochemistry Department https://www.chemistry.ucla.edu/ ranks among the top university departments for chemistry and biochemistry in the U.S. The Department is a leader in cutting-edge research and innovative educational programs on topics ranging from the synthesis of complex natural products and new nano-materials to solve health and environmental crises, to the illumination of the molecular mechanisms that regulate the decoding of genetic information. UCLA Center for The Advancement of Teaching UCLA Center for The Advancement of Teaching (formerly Office of Instructional Development) https://teaching.ucla.edu fosters and champions effective teaching, grounded in sound pedagogy and innovation, to promote successful learning for the University's diverse student population. The Center collaborates with faculty and other campus partners, drawing on its expertise in pedagogy, educational technology, assessment, learning spaces, and curricular research. Media Contact: Tim Stone Communications Director, JoVE T: 617-699-2554 | [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ucla-study-quantifies-how-jove-videos-improve-undergraduate-science-education-300811389.html SOURCE JoVE [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Newsela Secures $50 Million Series C from TCV for Growth and Expanded Content NEW YORK, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading instructional content platform, Newsela, announced today a $50 million C investment from growth equity firm TCV, who has a history of backing successful content platforms, including Netflix and Spotify. Newsela will use these funds to accelerate its rapidly expanding footprint in schools across the country. With over 20M students and 1.8M teachers on the platform, Newsela is now being used in 90% of U.S. schools. Newsela sources and curates rich, engaging digital content from hundreds of partners, making it accessible and personalized to student interests. Teachers rely on Newsela as a trusted source to help them move past lecturing and deliver a more modern social learning approach that fosters deeper connections with every student in the classroom, piques their curiosity, and enables discussion. The investment from TCV will also fuel expansion of Newsela's new Custom Collections offering, allowing districts to customize materials that match their unique curriculum standards. "At TCV, we focus on finding transformative EdTech companies, and Newsela has proven to be a tool that boosts learning outcomes," said Woody Marshall, General Partner at TCV. "Our investment will help extend the platform and make it more accessible and even more valuable to students, teachers, and administrators. We are especially excited by the great engagement and feedback that Newsela already has with their users." As part of the transaction, Woody Marshall, a General Partner at TCV, has joined Newsela's Board of Directors. "Today's digital-savvy kids have unprecedented access to content they care about. But in the classroom, they're often limited to textbooks and other outdated, inflexible materials that aren't engaging. Most teachers resort to piecing together content found in web searches, which is not sustainable. This lack of relevant, safe, reliable and accessible materials has created a massive engagement gap in our schools. The future of education lies in closing this gap," said Matthew Gross, CEO of Newsela. "With high-speed broadband now ubiquitous and 1:1 computing (a non-shared laptop available to every student) the norm in classrooms, school istricts are actively seeking solutions to this problem. They're increasingly choosing Newsela to provide safe, trusted, accessible and engaging content and assessments, while giving teachers the freedom to personalize for their students' interests and needs. With this investment from TCV, we will scale efforts to help districts turn their technology infrastructure into quantifiable results that improve learning outcomes." As a company, Newsela has grown significantly, increasing staff 50% in the past 12 months. It was in the top 50 (#35) recipients of Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 of 2018, and was named to Fast Company's list of World's Most Innovative Companies in 2017 and 2018. For more information about Newsela or to join the team, visit Newsela.com . About Newsela Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that combines engaging, leveled content with integrated formative assessments and insights to supercharge engagement and learning in every subject. Students and teachers use Newsela to find digital content from 100+ of the best sourcesfrom National Geographic to NASA, Biography.com to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Washington Post to the Wichita Eagle. Content is instructionalized to meet students where they are, with interactive tools and analytics to take them where they want to go. Newsela has become an essential solution for schools and districts, with a presence in over 90% of U.S. K-12 schools. Newsela is the content platform for the connected classroom. www.newsela.com About TCV Founded in 1995, TCV provides capital to growth-stage private and public companies in the technology industry. Since inception, TCV has invested over $11 billion in leading technology companies and has helped guide CEOs through more than 115 IPOs and strategic acquisitions. TCV's investments include Airbnb, Altiris, AxiomSL, Believe, Dollar Shave Club, EmbanetCompass, EtQ, ExactTarget, Expedia, Facebook, Fandango, GoDaddy, HomeAway, LinkedIn, Netflix, OSIsoft, Rent the Runway, Sitecore, Splunk, Sportradar, Spotify, TourRadar, Varsity Tutors, WorldRemit and Zillow. TCV is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, with offices in New York and London. For more information about TCV, including a complete list of TCV investments, visit https://www.tcv.com/ . Media Contact: Kristen Marion 623-308-2638 [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/newsela-secures-50-million-series-c-from-tcv-for-growth-and-expanded-content-300811659.html SOURCE Newsela [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Philips Photonics Selects ClassOne's Solstice S4 for Wafer Cleaning Semiconductor equipment manufacturer ClassOne Technology (classone.com) announced the sale of its Solstice S4 system to Philips (News - Alert) Photonics, one of the industry's leading providers of VCSEL (Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser) devices. The announcement was made by Byron Exarcos, ClassOne Group CEO, and Hans Peter Ehweiner, General Manager at Philips Photonics. The new ClassOne equipment will be installed at the Philips facility in Ulm, Germany. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005157/en/ Solstice S4 wet processing system from ClassOne Technology (Photo: Business Wire) "We will be using the new Solstice S4 for wafer cleaning applications," said Mr. Ehweiner. "So its unique processing flexibility and high performance are especially useful to us, as well as its small footprint. ClassOne's responsiveness and support for us in Germany are also significant factors in this purchase decision, thus we are looking forward to a fruitful and longstanding relationship." "Solstice initially built its reputation on quality electroplating," said Exarcos. "But with its ?Plating-Plus' capabilities, Solstice is now recognized as a powerful multiprocessing tool that can handle everything from plating to wafer cleaning, high-pressure metal lift-off, resist strip, UBM etch and more. Phillips Photonics is a perfect example of next-generation fabs that are using Solstice primarily for those additional wet processes. It's also notable that Slstice is becoming the tool of choice for VCSEL manufacturers around the world." The Solstice family of wet-processing tools includes the 4-chamber Solstice S4 and the 8-chamber Solstice S8, for 75wph, automated wet-processing production, as well as the 2-chamber Solstice LT for semi-automated process development. The platform was specifically designed for =200mm wafers, which are used in compound semiconductor and many emerging technologies. With its special Plating-Plus multi-processing capability, Solstice is able to reduce the number of different tools that many users need to purchase. Solstice equipment is also known for being priced significantly lower than similarly configured systems from the large manufacturers. It has been described as providing "Advanced Wet Processing for the Rest of Us." With 20 years of history in VCSEL technology, Philips Photonics produces VCSEL-based solutions for data communications, consumer and industrial applications - for security, surveillance, night vision and a range of sensing applications. The company has enabled the introduction of laser-based PC mice, high bit-rate active optical cables, and has introduced VCSEL-based Laser Doppler Technology to consumer applications. TRUMPF to acquire Photonics On December 17, 2018, the high-tech company TRUMPF announced that it is acquiring 100 percent of Photonics GmbH from Philips. The transaction is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2019. The authorities still have to approve the acquisition. Nevertheless, this transaction will not have any impact on the relationship between Philips Photonics and Class One. About ClassOne Technology ClassOne Technology (classone.com) produces innovative new wet-chemical semiconductor equipment, including multiprocessing electroplaters, spin-rinse-dryers, spray solvent tools and more. The company focuses especially on emerging markets and users of =200mm substrates, who traditionally have been underserved by the larger equipment manufacturers. Based in Kalispell, Montana, ClassOne Technology is built upon decades of experience from industry veterans delivering advanced performance and quality at an affordable price. Sister company, ClassOne Equipment (ClassOneEquipment.com), has long been respected as the industry's premier provider of quality refurbished processing tools, with over 2,500 systems installed worldwide. 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 generated 2018 sales of EUR 18.1 billion and employs approximately 77,000 employees with sales and services in more than 100 countries. News about Philips can be found at www.philips.com/newscenter. Solstice and Plating-Plus are trademarks of ClassOne Technology. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005157/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Jumio Named Winner in Business Intelligence Group's 2019 Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards PALO ALTO, Calif., March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Jumio, the leading AI-powered trusted identity as a service provider , today announced it has been named a winner of Business Intelligence Groups 2019 Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards. The awards program recognizes organizations, products and people who bring AI to life and apply it to solve real-world problems. Jumio today announced it has been named a winner of Business Intelligence Groups 2019 Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards. Jumio is the leader in AI-powered digital identity verification, completing more than 300,000 ID verifications daily and over 170 million verifications to date. A leader in online identity verification, Jumio uses a unique hybrid approach of augmented intelligence, AI, machine learning, face-based biometrics, certified liveness detection, computer vision technologies and human review to thwart fraud, simplify compliance and determine if users are who they claim to be. Jumio recently launched AI Labs in Montreal dedicated to the creation, experimentation and at-scale deployment of machine learning and deep learning technologies. Jumios AI Labs are developing deep learning models to dramatically improve identity verification accuracy and verification speed. Weve spent the last several years developing AI models that push the boundaries that help us to reliably extract key data from government-issued IDs, find anomalies in manipulated IDs, and ensure the person is physically present, said Labhesh Patel, Jumio CTO and chief scientist. Weve invested in AI to quickly and accurately verify the authenticity of an ID, a document or real-world identity n seconds. Through our AI-powered technology, we are taking the necessary steps to fight fraud and dramatically speed up the identity verification process. In 2018, Jumio grew its customer count by 60 percent and sales 70 percent year-over-year. Jumio recently launched Jumio Authentication , the first to market video-selfie authentication tool enabling users to verify themselves during high-risk transactions and unlock everything from online accounts to rental cars on any device. This continued momentum speaks to the significant market opportunity and demand for AI-powered identity verification and Jumios ability to help enterprise clients reliably and quickly verify a digital user is who they claim to be. We are so proud to name Jumio as a winner in our inaugural Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards program, said Maria Jimenez, chief nominations officer for Business Intelligence Group. It was clear to our judges that Jumio was using AI to improve the lives of their customers and employees. Congratulations to the entire team! This award win highlights a momentous 2019 for Jumio. Jumio was recently named one of Fast Companys Most Innovative Companies , Best Product in Biometrics , Best Product Fraud Prevention and Market Leader in Compliance by the InfoSec Awards , a Best Place to Work by Business Intelligence Group , the Fastest Growing Cybersecurity Company in the 2019 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards and one of the Best Places to Work in FinTech by SourceMedia . To learn more about Jumio, visit www.jumio.com . To learn more about Business Intelligence Groups Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards, visit www.bintelligence.com . About Jumio When identity matters, trust Jumio. Jumios mission is to make the internet a safer place by protecting the ecosystems of businesses through cutting-edge online identity verification and authentication services that quickly and accurately connect a persons online and real-world identities. Jumios end-to-end identity verification solutions fight fraud, maintain compliance and onboard good customers faster. Leveraging advanced technology including augmented intelligence, AI, biometrics, machine learning, certified 3D liveness detection and human review, Jumio helps organizations meet regulatory compliance including KYC, AML and GDPR and definitively establish the digital identity of their customers. Jumio has verified more than 170 million identities issued by over 200 countries and territories from real-time web and mobile transactions. Jumios solutions are used by leading companies in the financial services, sharing economy, digital currency, retail, travel and online gaming sectors. Based in Palo Alto, Jumio operates globally with offices in the North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia Pacific and has been the recipient of numerous awards for innovation. For more information, please visit www.jumio.com . About Business Intelligence Group The Business Intelligence Group was founded with the mission of recognizing true talent and superior performance in the business world. Unlike other industry award programs, these programs are judged by business executives having experience and knowledge. The organizations proprietary and unique scoring system selectively measures performance across multiple business domains and then rewards those companies whose achievements stand above those of their peers. Media Contact Jake Kasowski 10Fold Communications [email protected] (360) 635-8646 A photo accompanying this announcement is available at //www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/f270def7-3efd-4aa4-8e0c-7a24195c40b8 [March 13, 2019] PotNetwork Magazine Goes Out To Thousands of Cannabis Industry Investors MIAMI, March 13, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via OTC PR WIRE -- Interest in PotNetwork Magazine is surging, as the premier issue of the cannabis industry's number one outlet for financial, political, and industry news now reaches thousands of entrepreneurs, retailers, and other B2B leaders. To date, the first issue of PotNetwork Magazine, which features an exclusive interview with former Mexican President Vicente Fox has reached a subscriber base of approximately 30,000 individuals and consumer outlets. PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. (OTC Pink: POTN), the parent company of PotNetwork Media Group, attracted an unprecedented number of early subscribers to the magazine while adding thousands more through distribution to offices, newsstands, and magazine retail shelves worldwide. With nearly 3,000 preorders, the early buzz was warranted, as readers heaped praise on the magazine for its hard-hitting news stories and in-depth exclusives. (To learn more about PotNetwork Magazine go here.) "We've had a great response to the magazine since it launched in February, both online and at recent trade shows like the Tobacco Plus Expo and CHAMPS," said Brandon A. Dorfman, Editor-in-Chief of PotNetwork News. "People see a lot of opportunity for both individuals and communities in the cannabis and hemp-extract industry and are hungry to read more in-depth stories and insight from the men and women that are at the forefront of its growth." PotNetwork Magazine offers readers a unique 360-degree view of the cannabis industry, from small retail businesses to publicly traded companies on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. Born from the same grit and hard-hitting unbiased daily news delivered every day on PotNetwork News, the magazine is a natural offline extension that promises to delve deeper into the untold stories of an industry that is already generating billions of dollars for investors. "The cannabis industry's future is limitless and so is PotNetwork Magazine's," said Kevin Hagen, CEO of PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. "It's clear that readers want the kind of in-depth, on the scene expert knowledge that our reporters provide online and in print." With over 300,000 page views and over 150,000 unique visitors per month, PotNetwork News is the cannabis sector's leading news and information website, outpacing similarly focused online platforms. (Go here for an exclusive digital copy of PotNetwork Magazine.) In the coming months, PotNetwork magazine plans to explore every sector of the cannabis industry from cultivation to ancillary companies to financial services and more. Ample advertising space is also available to cannabis businesses, offering them a prime opportunity to connect with one another and potential customers as well. With a circulation of 30,000, PotNetwork Magazine rivals competitors like MG Magazine (25,000), Marijuana Business Daily (15,000), and Marijuana Venture (12,000). And like its companion daily news website, PotNetwork Magazine also offers advertisers a diverse readership base made up of individual investors in the cannabis stock market, entrepreneurs in the cannabis industry, and high-level executives and CEOs centered on the Canadian and U.S. cannabis markets. For information on how to advertise in the magazine, contact [email protected] . About "PotNetwork" With over 300,000 page views and over 150,000 unique visitors per month, PotNetwork News is the cannabis sector's number one news and information site, covering the latest in financial, political, and industry news. Looking at the cannabis industry from the outside in, PotNetwork diligently reports on everything from recreational cannabis to medical marijuana, the CBD industry, and more. PotNetwork News is published by PotNetwork Media Group, Inc., a subsidiary of PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. and can be found on the web at www.potnetwork.com. About PotNetwork Holdings, Inc . (OTC Pink: POTN) is a publicly traded company that acts as a holding company for its principal subsidiaries, First Capital Venture Co., the owner of Diamond CBD, Inc., the maker of Diamond CBD products, and PotNetwork Media Group, Inc., the publisher of PotNetwork News and PotNetwork, the magazine. For more information, please visit the website at www.Potnetworkholding.com . Safe Harbor: Forward-Looking Statements are included within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All statements regarding our expected future financial position, results of operations, cash flows, financing plans, business strategy, products and services, competitive positions, growth opportunities, plans and objectives of management for future operations, including words such as "anticipate," "if," "believe," "plan," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "could," "should," "will," and similar expressions are forward-looking statements and involve risks, uncertainties and contingencies, many of which are beyond our control, which may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from anticipated results, performance, or achievements. We are under no obligation to (and expressly disclaim any such obligation to) update or alter forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Contact: PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. Investor Relations: Marisol Elwell 1-800-915-3060 [email protected] [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Dragos Expands U.S. Operations with New Houston Office to Answer High Demand for Industrial Cybersecurity in Energy and Manufacturing Dragos, Inc., provider of the industry's most trusted industrial threat detection and response platform and services, announced today the opening of a new office in Houston, TX, located at 2500 Summer Street, Suite 3204. Dragos' Houston office was selected to accommodate the company's growing customer and employee base in the South, as well as to provide a more centralized location for Dragos' training services the company provides to customers nationwide. This expansion also further strengthens Dragos' rapidly-growing presence in the industry and enables the company to provide industrial threat detection and response products and services to a growing community where industrial cybersecurity is in high demand. "Houston and Texas, in general, is home to many of our employees and is also home to many passionate about our industrial infrastructure," said Robert M. Lee, CEO and Founder of Dragos. "This new office ensures our team members, services, and training opportunities are even more accessible to the region." Dragos' mission to safeguard civilization is achieved by empowering its customers and the community with the tools to build effective holistic ICS cybersecurity strategies. The Dragos Platform provides security teams with unprecedented knowledge of their industrial control system (ICS) assets and activity, the threats and adversaries they face, and th tools and knowledge to defend against them. Codified by the industry's most experienced team of ICS practitioners, the Dragos Platform transfers the knowledge its team builds first-hand in the field to its customers and the community, so actionable education can continue to be the forefront of defensible ICS cybersecurity. The company will celebrate the opening of its Houston office with an open house scheduled for Monday, April 15th, from 2 PM to 7 PM. Attendees are invited to tour the office, which includes workspaces for local employees and training facilities that will double the number of training opportunities available to the community. Members of the ICS community are invited to meet the Dragos team, learn more about Dragos' industrial threat detection and response platform and services, and register for upcoming training courses. For further details of Dragos' Houston office or open house, please contact [email protected] About Dragos The Dragos industrial cybersecurity platform distills decades of real-world experience from an elite team of ICS cybersecurity experts across the U.S. intelligence community and private industrial companies to provide OT and IT practitioners unprecedented visibility and prescriptive procedures to respond to adversaries in the industrial threat landscape. With the Dragos platform, ICS cybersecurity personnel can independently identify ICS assets, detect ICS threats, and determine ICS cybersecurity-specific responses. Dragos' offerings include: the Dragos Platform for ICS threat detection and response; Dragos' Threat Operations Center for ICS threat hunting and incident response services; and Dragos ICS WorldView for weekly threat intelligence reports. Visit dragos.com for more information, or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005456/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Cycles Devinci to pursue its scale-up through the acquisition of digital equipment The Government of Canada awards over $770,000 in funding to the Saguenay company SAGUENAY, QC, March 13, 2019 /CNW/ - Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions (CED) Cycles Devinci is a highly innovative manufacturing company that designs, manufactures and markets high-end bicycles. To remain competitive and pursue its growth, the company will receive a $696,375 repayable contribution from Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions. The funding will allow the company to acquire state-of-the-art digital equipment. Cycles Devinci will also receive a $74,800 non-repayable contribution under the National Research Council of Canada's Industrial Research Assistance Program for R&D relating to the automation and robotization of its manufacturing processes. The funding was announced today by Richard Hebert, Member of Parliament for Lac-Saint-Jean and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Small Business and Export Promotion. Specifically, the Government of Canada's assistance will enable Cycles Devinci to acquire innovative digital equipment, such as an 8-axis robotic welding cell and a laser tube cutting cell. Founded in 1987 by two students who wanted to create a recumbent bike, Cycles Devinci quickly turned to the production of high value-added aluminum frames. The frames are handcrafted by the company's employees, who pay great attention to detail in order to meet the expectations of even the most demanding cyclists. Cycles Devinci develops innovative bicycle designs using a structured and scientific method. The company's products fall into two categories: Devinci-brand bicycles (road, leisure and mountain bikes) for cyclists of all ages, and urban self-service bicycles ('Bixi' type SSBs) offered for rental by cities to optimize urban mobility. The Government of Canada is committed to supporting innovative Canadian businesses. A driving force of the economy, innovation is the key to success because it generates growth that benefits both businesses and communities. This is why we are cmmitted to ensuring that businesses can count on adequate resources to create and market innovative products. Quotes "The Government of Canada firmly believes that innovation and the adoption of new technologies foster the productivity and competitiveness that will create tomorrow's growth. It is with great enthusiasm that we support Cycles Devinci, a fine example of innovation right here in Saguenay. CED's support will allow the company to take full advantage of business opportunities that arise and enable it to excel in this specialized market." Richard Hebert, MP for Lac-Saint-Jean and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Small Business and Export Promotion "As Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, my goal is to help businesses grow and innovate so that they can increase their market competitiveness and create good-quality jobs and wealth for Canadians. This is why we support businesses like Cycles Devinci, whose success reflects on the region and on the Canadian economy as a whole." The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister responsible for CED "To grow, it takes passion, determination and visionbut also the means to achieve that vision. We are pleased to be able to count on the support of CED, which is giving us a valuable helping hand with our projects." Felix Gauthier, President, Cycles Devinci Quick facts Today's announcement was made on behalf of the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister responsible for the Innovation, Science and Economic Development portfolio, which is made up of 17 federal departments and agencies, including CED and the other five regional development agencies. The funding was provided under CED's Regional Economic Growth through Innovation program. To find out more about CED and its priorities, see the 20182019 Departmental Plan or visit www.dec-ced.gc.ca. The Regional Economic Growth through Innovation program targets entrepreneurs who leverage innovation to grow their businesses and make them more competitive, as well as regional players who help create an entrepreneurial environment conducive to innovation and inclusive growth in all regions. The National Research Council's Industrial Research Assistance Program provides business counseling to small and medium enterprises, helps them build relationships, and provides funding to assist them in being more innovative and commercializing their ideas. Industrial Research Assistance Program provides business counseling to small and medium enterprises, helps them build relationships, and provides funding to assist them in being more innovative and commercializing their ideas. For 50 years now, the Government of Canada has been actively involved in regional economic development in Quebec : half a century of concrete action targeting the growth of Quebec's regions and businesses. Stay connected Follow CED on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube Follow Cycles Devinci on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook Follow the NRC on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn SOURCE Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Chulalongkorn University Teams Up with Tezos Southeast Asia to Launch Thailand's Leading Blockchain Academic Initiative BANGKOK, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Tezos Southeast Asia ("TSA") will be working with Chulalongkorn University to create the nation's premier blockchain education and research programme. This partnership follows Elevated Returns' ("ER"), a New York-based financial group focused on digitizing traditional financial assets, announcement to partner with Thai financial services firm Seamico Securities Plc ("ZMICO") to use blockchain platform Tezos to expand into Thailand. ER plans to digitally securitised the global real estate market, targeting US$250 million in transactions this year, with US$100 million in Thailand alone. The partnership will allow ER and ZMICO to digitize traditional assets using the Tezos platform, through a Thai Securities and Exchange Commission approved portal, and will enable multiple parties the ability to share in the ownership of high-value assets. This approach will let investors access investment opportunities that have previously been beyond their financial reach and introduce a regulated method for raising money via digital securities. The Tezos platform, built specifically for administering smart contracts, allows ER to issue fully compliant real estate securities. This partnership is a good opportunity to showcase how the core merits of Tezos' technology can be readily integrated into a real world business case. The acomplishment of this expected collaboration will bring about deep economic and social impact, and also position Thailand as a major regional center for blockchain. TSA will further augment ongoing efforts by ER, Securitize and ZMICO to facilitate technology knowhow transfer, starting with this strategic partnership to build local capability in Thailand through renowned Chulalongkorn University. In addition to expanding its business in the Thai market, ER also aims to build a sustainable support network for the blockchain ecosystem through this partnership. TSA will work with Chulalongkorn University to specially design the curriculum for new programmes to be launched in the academic year 2019. TSA endeavours to create awareness and an accurate understanding of Tezos as well as advanced computer science technologies. In addition to scholarship opportunities, students will also get the chance to apply for internships at start-ups supported by tzVentures, a Tezos-specific incubator programme for start-ups to develop their business on the Tezos blockchain technology. The implementation of a curriculum targeted at education and research aspects of advanced computer science technologies, like the ones used by the Tezos blockchain, is crucial for Thailand's campaign towards an economy driven by innovation, technology and creativity, as part of their Thailand 4.0 vision. On their agenda is the reformation of the Thai education and research system which recognises the importance of universities as the foundation of the development of technology and innovation. "As Thailand strives towards an innovation-driven economy, there is a necessity to empower future generations in Thailand to equip them for the future. TSA aims to support this with the curriculum developed together with Chulalongkorn University and pioneer the blockchain ecosystem in the region," said Caleb Kow, President, Tezos Southeast Asia. The syllabus will be designed to introduce students to the concepts and fundamentals of advanced computer science, with a focus on Tezos blockchain technology. Upon completion, students will acquire the skillset required to create advanced applications running on the Tezos blockchain, along with a deeper understanding of the Tezos blockchain technology. TSA aims to build local capability in Thailand so that innovation can take place in a localised manner, adapting to unique business cases specific to the Thai market. For more details, please contact Tezos Southeast Asia: Petrina Tan Email: [email protected] Contact Number.: +65 6717 5551 Mobile: +65 9002 8552 About Tezos Southeast Asia Tezos Southeast Asia ("TSA") is an independent non-profit organisation based in Singapore dedicated to promoting Tezos blockchain in Southeast Asia. Tezos is a world-leading blockchain technology which offers a platform for smart contracts and decentralised applications. TSA seeks to empower individuals and entities within the region to create a decentralised digital commonwealth. TSA has dedicated itself to further develop the regional Tezos community and advance the project globally through education, R&D and partnerships. Since its establishment, TSA has hosted meetups and masterclasses, and are in talks to support and develop educational programmes and other initiatives in pursuit of its goals. Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20190313/2402080-1 SOURCE Tezos Southeast Asia [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Express Logic's X-Ware IoT Platform Crypto Library Achieves FIPS 140-2 Certification Express Logic today announced that thanks to its collaboration with one of the world's leading security labs, atsec information security, its industrial-grade X-Ware IoT Platform NetX Crypto library has achieved Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 cryptographic certification. The certification authority for this effort, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), issued the FIPS 140 Publication Series in May 2001 to align the requirements and standards for cryptography modules that include both hardware and software components. FIPS 140-2 was instituted to protect sensitive or valuable U.S. government data, and data from commercial industries such as financial and health-care institutions that is collected, stored, shared, and disseminated electronically. With billions of devices expected to be on the IoT by 2020, security has become the primary concern of the embedded industry. To address this concern, Express Logic has established itself as the safety and security leader in the embedded IoT space with its industrial-grade approach, including pre-certification to SIL 4 and ASIL D safety standards and EAL4+ security common criteria certification for X-Ware IoT Secure Connectivity (SC), TLS/DTLS, and IPsec security protocols and standards. The FIPS 140-2 certification effort represents another significant step forward in focusing directly on IoT security needs of the embedded industry. Industrial-Grade Performance, Connectivity, and More The X-Ware IoT Platform powered by the popular ThreadX RTOS, with over 6.2 billion deployments, is more than just an RTOS with connectivity capabilities. In addition to the ThreadX RTOS and NetX Duo, the X-Ware IoT Platform includes the safety-certified FileX embedded FAT-32/exFAT file system, the GUIX GUI development and embedded runtime framework, and the USBX embedded host/device USB stack. This enables embedded developers to leverage the entire X-Ware IoT Platform solution to solve IoT applications that need to do more than just communicate with other devices and/or networks. "Security is a major concern in the embedded IoT community, and at the same time, securing the IoT is technically very challenging for embedded developers," said William E. Lamie, President, Express Logic. "This X-Ware IoT Platform FIPS 140-2 certification helps our customers meet stringent government security requirements, thus improving time-to-market and greatly improving the security profile of their device." About Express Logic and ThreadX Headquartered in San Diego, CA (News - Alert), Express Logic offers the industry's most advanced run-time solutions for deeply embedded applications, including the popular ThreadX RTOS, the high-performance NetX and NetX Duo embedded TCP/IP stacks, the FileX embedded FAT-compatible file system, the USBX Host/Device embedded USB protocol stack, and the GUIX embedded graphical user interface development toolkit. Express Logic products include full source code and are available free of run-time royalties. For more information about Express Logic solutions, please visit www.expresslogic.com, call 1-888-THREADX, or e-mail [email protected]. ThreadX, TraceX, FileX, GUIX, GUIX Studio, and USBX are registered trademarks, and Safety-Critical Certification Pack, NetX, NetX Duo, X-Ware IoT Platform, LevelX, preemption-threshold, picokernel, and UDP (News - Alert) fast path technology are trademarks of Express Logic. All other brands or product names are the property of their respective holders. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005141/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha speaks in a National Assembly seminar on March 7, organized to discuss the result of the recent summit between the U.S. and North Korea. / Yonhap By Lee Min-hyung South Korea and the United States will hold a working group meeting in Washington Thursday (local time) to seek a breakthrough in the nuclear impasse between Washington and Pyongyang, the South's foreign ministry said. Seoul and Washington plan to exchange up-to-date information on inter-Korean and Washington-Pyongyang relations during the meeting in response to the breakdown of the Hanoi summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last month, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Rhee Dong-yeol, director-general of the ministry's Korean Peninsula peace regime bureau, will head the South Korean delegation for talks with his U.S. counterpart led by Alex Wong, deputy assistant secretary for North Korea. The meeting comes at a critical juncture when Washington and Pyongyang need to bring their now-suspended nuclear talks back on the right track for peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula. "Seoul will update Washington on recent exchanges with North Korea during their upcoming meeting, and vice versa," a ministry official said. "The South will also hold an in-depth discussion with the U.S. over inter-Korean cooperation and other pending issues on the North." Washington had in recent months been on friendly terms with Pyongyang, before the much-anticipated Hanoi summit in Vietnam ended up in fiasco. The optimistic pre-summit atmosphere raised hopes for Trump and Kim to sign a possible deal that can move forward their denuclearization talks in a smooth and rapid way. But with both sides declaring "no deal" in their second meeting, South Korea was flustered by the unexpected outcome. Calls have since grown for Seoul and Washington to hold the meeting as soon as possible to come up with countermeasures for the failed Hanoi summit. Moon Chung-in, security adviser to President Moon Jae-in, also underlined the need for Seoul, as a "peace facilitator," to actively engage in talks with Washington and Pyongyang. "It is not desirable for Washington and Pyongyang to be in a rush to resume their nuclear talks, but both sides will lose their dialogue momentum if they delay the talks for a long period of time," the adviser said in a recent forum. To prevent such a scenario from taking place, South Korea should make efforts for the U.S. and the North to keep in touch with each other, according to him. Aside from affairs related with the North's denuclearization, the two delegations will also discuss their views on the resumption of inter-Korean economic projects. They include the reopening of the Gaeseong Industrial Complex and resumption of tourism to the North's Mount Geumgang. But South Korea cannot push ahead with such inter-Korean economic engagements, as North Korea is under heavy sanctions from the United Nations Security Council. The Ministry of Unification, the authority handling inter-Korean economic cooperation, said it would continue to discuss details with the U.S. and other relevant parties before taking specific actions for the projects. Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung said Tuesday all the inter-Korean economic projects will be reviewed under close negotiations with other countries due to sanctions on the North. [March 13, 2019] DCM Announces CannTech - Silicon Valley's First Major Cannabis Technology Summit Today, DCM (News - Alert), an early stage global venture capital firm and the first investor on Sand Hill Road to invest in the cannabis market, announced its inaugural Cannabis Technology Summit, CannTech. The highly-curated event features CEOs from world-leading companies, and discussions on salient topics at the intersection of cannabis, technology, and capital. In addition, the event will feature a startup pitch competition with a $30,000 grand prize. Following the legalization of recreational cannabis in Colorado in 2014, DCM became the first venture fund on Sand Hill Road to invest in the cannabis industry with their seed round investment in Eaze. Today, 34 states (including DC) have legalized medical or recreational adult-use cannabis, representing more than 50% of the US population. In 2018 alone, 21 states considered bills that would legalize recreational adult-use cannabis. "The cannabis market is a booming industry and has captured the attention of tech innovators, bringing forth the evolution of a new segment: Cannabis Technology," said David Chao, Co-Founder and Partner of DCM. "With all signs pointing to 2019 being the year of cannabis, we created CannTech to be a platform for emerging cannabis and technology professionals to come together to get funded, educated, and connected," said Kyle Lui, Partner at DCM. CannTech attendees will have the opportunity to learn from cannabis and technology CEOs and investors from companies including Eaze, Pax Labs, Dosist, K-Zen, Atrium, Rose Capital Partners, Poseidon Asset Management, Casa Verde, and Lime, with talks and panels on topics including regulation, branding, financing, and distribution. CannTech welcomes any cannabis entrepreneur or technology startup in North America to apply to the pitch competition, from farm management software to CBD spritzers to synthetic cannabinoids. Applications are now open, and due by Wednesday, April 17. Shortlisted applicants will be invited to interview between Monday, April 22 and Monday, April 29, with finalists invited to attend and pitch the esteemed panel of judges for the chance to win the $30,000 grand prize. CannTech will commence on May 7th from 11:30 am to 5:30 pm at The Pearl located at 601 19th Street, San Francisco; more information can be found at this link. DCM is offering a number of complimentary tickets to technology professionals and aspiring cannabis founders interested in learning more about the space. Those interested in attending the event can apply for an invite. About CannTech CannTech is DCM and Silicon Valley's first annual technology summit focused on the cannabis industry. The event aims to accelerate the cannabis industry within the Bay Area and beyond by connecting startups and entrepreneurs with leading professionals in the cannabis and technology markets. This half-day event will feature major cannabis and technology CEOs and investors from companies including Eaze, Pax Labs, Dosist, K-Zen, Atrium, Rose Capital Partners, Poseidon Asset Management, Casa Verde, and Lime, with talks and panels on topics including regulation, branding, financing, and distribution. CannTech is also proud to feature a startup pitch competition with a $30,000 grand prize, judged by an esteemed group of leading CEOs, VCs and industry players. CannTech will commence on May 7th from 11:30 am to 5:30 pm at The Pearl located at 601 19th Street, San Francisco. Event and submission information is available at canntech2019.com. To apply for the pitch competition apply here. To apply to attend the CannTech Summit apply here. About DCM DCM is a global venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, Beijing, and Tokyo with nearly $4 billion under management. DCM has invested in more than 300 early stage technology companies across the United States and Asia, and provides hands-on operational guidance and a global network of business and financial resources. DCM has backed industry leading companies including 51job, 51Talk, 58.com, BitAuto, Dangdang, Fortinet (News - Alert), Happy Elements, Houchebang (ManBang), Musical.ly (TikTok), Kakao Talk, Sling Media, TanTan, Tuniu, Vipshop, UCloud and Uxin. DCM has also invested in exciting, up and coming startups such as Eaze, Lime, SoFi, Bill.com, Careem, Plenty, Hims, FiveStars, FuboTV, Maimai, Pony.ai, Freee, Kuaishou and SanSan. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005215/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] 'Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: The Podcast' Launches Its Second Season, Featuring All New Celebrity Narrators and Immersive Adventures LOS ANGELES, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- From award-winning media company, Timbuktu Labs, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: the Podcast is back with Season Two, diving into the lives of the real-life heroes featured in both volumes of the book series, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls. Season One of the podcast was a phenomenal success, with over one million downloads, features in the top charts of six countries, and a mention in Time Magazine's list of the "50 Best Shows to Listen to Right Now." Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: The Podcast is a fairy tale podcast about the extraordinary women who inspire us. The new season features a new cast of eleven contemporary female narrators. Listeners will join renowned philanthropist Priscilla Chan as she tells the story of Ruth Bader Ginsburg becoming a tour-de-force on the Supreme Court of the United States. Justin Machadostar of popular shows One Day at a Time and Jane, the Virginrelates the legacy of Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa; and Orange Is the New Black actress Jackie Cruz recounts the bravery of the Mirabel Sisters, freedom fighters from the Dominican Republic. Additionally, mini-episodes feature interviews with each narrator so that the audience can learn more about the women who are changing the world today. These interviews, conducted by listeners, are released every other week. Elena FavilliCEO of Timbuktu Labs, the company that created Good Night Stories for Rebel Girlssays, "The podcast is about creating a rich bedtime experience for girls that will allow them to dream without limits. I hope that the remarkable women we feature give girls all over the world the power and confidence to make their wildest dreams a reality." Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, the book series, has been inspiring millions of girls and women around the world to dream bigger, aim higher, and fight harder. The mission is simple: to empower the next generation by helping them see the Rebel Girls all around them. The women featured in the books are from every corner of the world; they are of different ages; they are past and present heroes; their achievements are varied. More than 3.8 million books have been sold and the series is the highest funded publishing project in crowdfunding history. Since initial publication, the books have been translated into nearly 50 languages and are available in over 70 countries worldwide. About Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: "Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls" is a two-volume collection, each comprised of 100 stories of inspirational women who have changed the world. Find "Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls" online (rebelgirls.co), on Facebook (Facebook.com/rebelgirls), Instagram (@RebelGirlsBook), and Twitter (@RebelGirlsBook). View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/good-night-stories-for-rebel-girls-the-podcast-launches-its-second-season-featuring-all-new-celebrity-narrators-and-immersive-adventures-300811462.html SOURCE Good Night Stories For Rebel Girls [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] EagleView Secures Significant Appeal Win In Ongoing Patent Litigation Against Xactware And Verisk BELLEVUE, Wash., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- EagleView, a leading technology provider of aerial imagery and data analytics, announced a significant appellate victory regarding the validity of the EagleView patents and technology in its ongoing patent litigation against Xactware and Verisk. As previously reported, Xactware and Verisk filed over a dozen petitions with the United States Patent Trial and Appeals Board in an effort to invalidate nine of EagleView's patents. EagleView defeated those challenges, a win previously covered by Law360 in an article titled "Xactware Challenges to Rival's Patents End with a Whimper," https://www.kirkland.com/news/in-the-news/2017/08/xactware-challenges-to-rivals-patents-end-with-a-w. Xactware and Verisk subsequently appealed its losses to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, contending that the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeals Board incorrectly upheld the validity of the EagleView patents. A panel of three Federal Judges heard arguments on Xactware and Verisk's appeal this week, on March 4, 2019. Two days later, on March 6, 2019, the Federal Circuit affirmed the Patent Trial and Appeals Board's findings that EagleView's patents were valid over Xactware and Verisk's contentions, once again shutting down Xactware and Verisk's serial attempts to challenge the validity of the very technology they previously tried to purchase. The court explained that there was "substantial evidence" supporting the Patent Office's view that the EagleView patent claims are valid and expressed that Xactware's arguments to the contrary were "unpersuasive." "EagleView has faced a sries of serial attacks on its patents by Xactware and Verisk, and once again, a Court has upheld the validity of our intellectual property," EagleView CEO Rishi Daga said. "This is simply the latest in Xactware and Verisk's years-long attempt to illegally and unfairly compete by copying our innovations. Courts have repeatedly rejected Xactware and Verisk's arguments, and we are looking forward to presenting our case to a jury at our trial starting on June 10. We strongly believe that a jury will agree that Xactware and Verisk are intentionally using our patented technology and that they must pay for their wrong behavior." Background In late 2015, EagleView filed a lawsuit against Xactware Solutions, Inc. ("Xactware") and Verisk Analytics, Inc., ("Verisk") for their willful infringement of EagleView patents covering key technologies. The lawsuit (EagleView Technologies, Inc. and Pictometry Int'l Corp., v. Xactware Solutions, Inc. and Verisk Analytics, Inc., case number 1:15-cv-07025) is currently in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey. This lawsuit is necessary to hold Xactware and Verisk accountable for their actions. The Defendants long coveted and publicly lauded EagleView's industry-changing technologies, but when the Defendants' attempt to purchase EagleView failed, the Defendants resorted to copying EagleView's technologies rather than competing fairly by developing their own solutions. Xactware and Verisk have taken numerous steps to prevent EagleView's claims from reaching a jury, including repeatedly arguing that EagleView's successful and widely-praised technology is not entitled to patent protection. Xactware and Verisk have twice asked the District Court to invalidate the asserted claims in the six EagleView patents at issue under 35 U.S.C. 101, arguing that each patent claimed abstract ideas and lacked any inventive concept. On Tuesday, January 29, 2019, the Court again rejected the Defendants' arguments and denied their motion for summary judgment, clearing the way for EagleView's case to go to trial. The Defendants earlier challenged the validity of EagleView's patents with the U.S. Patent Office, where EagleView also defeated Xactware and Verisk's efforts to invalidate nine of EagleView's patents (six of which are at issue in the 101 decision) in the Patent Trial and Appeal Board or PTAB. Those wins were previously covered by Law360 in an article titled "Xactware Challenges to Rival's Patents End with a Whimper," https://www.kirkland.com/news/in-the-news/2017/08/xactware-challenges-to-rivals-patents-end-with-a-w. Defendants appealed these decisions, and the Federal Circuit heard arguments on March 4, 2019. Two days later, on March 6, it issued a decision affirming the Board and confirming the patentability of almost 30 claims of the '454, '152, '770, and '737 patents. About EagleView EagleView is transforming the way you work by bringing you the highest level of accuracy in a constantly changing world. EagleView combines imagery that reveals the finest and most important details with computer vision to help you identify insights into any locationfrom anywhere. By delivering timely, comprehensive answers to complex questions, we help professionals across industries improve people's lives and make informed decisions for the present and future. For more information, call (866) 659-8439, visit eagleview.com and follow @eagleviewtech. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eagleview-secures-significant-appeal-win-in-ongoing-patent-litigation-against-xactware-and-verisk-300811791.html SOURCE EagleView [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] The Cyber Security Insurance Market to 2024 - Cases of Unauthorized Stealing or Accessing Sensitive Business Data on the Rise DUBLIN, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Cyber Security Insurance Market - Growth, Trends, Forecast (2019 - 2024)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The cyber security insurance market was valued at USD 5.48 billion in 2018, and is expected to reach USD 20.72 billion by 2024, registering a CAGR of 24.3%, during the forecast period (2019-2024). The trending digitalization, such as the cloud, Big Data, mobile technologies, IoT, and artificial intelligence (AI), in ever more areas of business and society, and the growing connectivity of everything, have increased the workload of already strained IT teams. Cases of unauthorized stealing or accessing sensitive business data, like intellectual properties, employees' personal information, or even financial records, have been rising, which, in turn, is driving the cyber security insurance market. Cloud computing is one of the most rapidly growing recent technologies, eliminating the traditional boundaries of IT, creating new markets, spurring the mobility trend, enabling advances in unified communications, which is another driver for the cyber security insurance market. According to Kaspersky Lab, in the foreseeable future, around 75% of companies are expected to move applications to the cloud. This rising adoption of cloud solutions, by companies operating all over the world, often faces a lack of attention to the levels of security offered by adopted solutions. Also, cloud applications are more prone to cyber risks. Key Market Trends Healthcare Segment is Estimated to Hold a Significant Share of the Market Studied Due to data proliferation, healthcare is emerging as a significant market for the global cyber security insurance market. Digitization has exponentially increased the volume and speed of healthcare data generation. As much as 80% of the data generated by the healthcare industry is likely to be in the cloud by 2020. Security is also becoming a major concern. According to the HIPAA report, 2018 witnessed a 157.67% year-over-year surge in the number of exposed healthcare records in the United States. Accenture's 2018 Healthcare Workforce Survey on cyber security found that almost 18% of healthcare employees were willing to sell confidential data to unauthorized parties, for as little as USD 500 to USD 1,000. This has increased the need for internal cyber security as an immediate solution. In one Telehealth survey, 69% of the patients expressed that they prefer gettig medical care without visiting the hospital. The telemedicine market is expected to grow at a healthy rate, since more insurance companies are now offering coverage for these visits as well. United States to Hold the Major Share in the North American Region The United States is the largest market for cyber security insurance. Moreover, the country has a strong foothold of cyber security insurance vendors, which adds to the growth of the market. Some of them include XL Group Ltd, American International Group Inc., Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Security Scorecard, and Lockton Companies Inc., among others. The growth in the number of data breaches is pushing many organizations to take cyber security insurance policies. For instance, Equifax, one of the largest credit agencies in the country, in 2017, suffered a breach that affected approximately 143 million consumers. JPMorgan also witnessed one of the biggest bank breaches in history, as hackers got access to the financial information of 3,500 customers. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, in 2016, around 1,093 data breaches were recorded in the United States, with 36.6 million records exposed. On the other hand, approximately 1,579 data breaches were reported in 2017, with at least 178.96 million total records exposed, thereby, indicating an exponential increase in breaches. Competitive Landscape The cyber security insurance market is fragmented, with major players offering superior technology and fostering their growth through their existing distribution channels. These technology leaders are investing in innovation, mergers and acquisitions, and partnership activities, to maintain a competitive edge in the market. For instance, RedSeal and XL Catlin, in March 2018, announced a dynamic approach to cyber insurance, which uses an objective measurement of a network's resilience to help underwriters more thoroughly evaluate their clients' risks over time. This allows clients to continue to improve their cyber security and potentially improve their insurance terms. Chubb entered into a strategic partnership with PICC Property and Causality Company of China. The agreement leverages Chubb's global capabilities in support of PICC's customers and other Chinese affiliated companies around the world. Aon PLC and Hewlett-Packard Co. are collaborating to provide enhanced, integrated cyber coverage tailored to meet the rising needs of the middle market. The solution is expected to extend from a portal-based risk assessment by Aon through the deployment of devices, software, and services from HP, if it becomes necessary for post-incident response and recovery services from Aon. Topics Covered 1 Introduction 1.1 Study Deliverables 1.2 Study Assumptions 1.3 Scope of the Study 2 Research Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Market Dynamics 4.1 Market Overview 4.2 Market Drivers 4.2.1 Increasing Adoption of Cloud-based Services 4.2.2 Rising Data Security Breaches 4.3 Market Restraints 4.3.1 Difficulties in Implementing Cyber Insurance and High Costs 4.4 Value Chain / Supply Chain Analysis 4.5 Porter's Five Forces Analysis 5 Market Segmentation 5.1 By Organization Size 5.1.1 Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) 5.1.2 Large Enterprises 5.2 By End User Industry 5.2.1 Healthcare 5.2.2 Retail 5.2.3 BFSI 5.2.4 IT and Telecom 5.2.5 Manufacturing 5.2.6 Other End-user Industries 5.3 Geography 5.3.1 North America 5.3.2 Europe 5.3.3 Asia-Pacific 5.3.4 Rest of the World 6 Market Opportunities and Future Trends 7 Competitive Landscape 7.1 Company Profiles 7.1.1 XL Group Ltd 7.1.2 American International Group Inc. 7.1.3 Lloyds Bank PLC 7.1.4 Zurich Insurance Co. Ltd. 7.1.5 The Chubb Corporation 7.1.6 AON PLC 7.1.7 Beazley Group 7.1.8 Lockton Companies Inc. 7.1.9 Security Scorecard 7.1.10 Allianz SE 7.1.11 Munich Re Group 8 Investment Analysis 9 Market Opportunities and Future Trends For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/wmc5p2/the_cyber?w=5 Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research. Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-cyber-security-insurance-market-to-2024---cases-of-unauthorized-stealing-or-accessing-sensitive-business-data-on-the-rise-300811767.html SOURCE Research and Markets [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces Schedule for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019 SAN FRANCISCO, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation , which sustains and integrates open source technologies like Kubernetes and Prometheus, today announced the session line-up for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe on May 20-23, 2019, in Barcelona. The event features real-world case studies using Kubernetes and other cloud native technologies from experts at ADMIRALTY, Booking.com, British Telecom, Carnegie Mellon, eBay, Engel & Volkers Technology, ING, LinkedIn, LSST & French National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics (IN2P3), Mediakind, McKesson, VTT, and more. After the largest ever KubeCon last December in Seattle with more than 8,000 attendees, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe will bring together more than 10,000 technologists from thriving open source communities across the world to further collaboration around cloud native computing. Maintainers and end users of CNCF's hosted projects including Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, CoreDNS, containerd, OpenTracing, Fluentd, gRPC, rkt, CNI, Jaeger, Notary, TUF, Vitess, NATS, Rook, Harbor, etcd, Linkerd, and Helm and other cloud native technologies will gather for four days to share insights and encourage participation in this fast growing ecosystem. Register for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe by March 20 to save up to $300. "It's amazing that we're on track to grow from the 8,000 in Seattle last December representing the largest open source developer conference ever to even more in Barcelona this May," said Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. "Cloud native computing has crossed the chasm so that developers from hundreds of end user organizations are eager to collaborate with the rest of the community." A program committee of 110 experts led by conference co-chairs, VMware's Bryan Liles and Google Cloud's Janet Kuo , reviewed 1,535 submissions to help create the show's diverse content slate. The agenda features an impressive mix of topics, including technical sessions, deep-dives, and case studies covering application & development (includes Helm & Telepresence), CI/CD, customizing & extending Kubernetes, fostering the community, machine learning & data, networking (includes NATS, CoreDNS, CNI, and gRPC), observability (includes Jaeger, OpenTracing, Fluentd, and Prometheus), operations, performance + scalability, runtimes (includes containerd and rkt), security, identity & policy (includes OPA, SPIFFE/SPIRE, Notary, and TUF), serverless (includes CloudEvents), storage (includes Vitess and Rook) and more. "While reviewing the Barcelona submissions, we were amazed by the broad adoption of cloud-native technologies throughout the community, and across all verticals from research organizations to banks. We were also impressed by the new tools and technologies built in this fast-growing ecosystem," said Janet Kuo, Software Engineer at Google, Co-Chair of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. "We hope this year's attendees walk away with new knowledge they hear first-hand from the experts and project maintainers, as well as the hands-on experience of using those technologies in the wild." "It's a huge honor to represent such a fast-growing and diverse community that is fundamentally changing the way we build software and digital experiences," said Bryan Liles, Senior Staff Engineer at VMware and Conference Co-chair. "This year's schedule features some of the most innovative and informative sessions we've seen, and we look forward to the members coming together to share their knowledge." The community-curated schedule will feature sessions from leading open source technologists, including: "How Spotify accidentally deleted all its Kubeclusters, with no user impact" - David Xia , Spotify , Spotify "Getting Started in the Kubernetes Community" - Lucas Kaldstrom & Nikhita Raghunath, Independent "Reperforming a Nobel Prize Discovery on Kubernetes" - Ricardo Rocha & Lukas Heinrich , CERN & , CERN "From COBOL to Kubernetes: A 250 Year Old Bank's Cloud-Native Journey" - Mike Ryan , Epitech BV & Laura Rehorst , ABN AMRO Bank NV , Epitech BV & , ABN AMRO Bank NV "Panel Discussion: GitOps & Best Practices for Cloud Native CI/CD" - Moderated by Laura Tacho , CloudBees , CloudBees "Kubernetes the new Research Platform" - Lindsey Tulloch , Brock University & Bob Killen , University of Michigan , & , "From Snowflake Servers to Snowflake Clusters - The GitOps Journey" - Allison Richardet , Asteris, LLC & Fabio Giannetti , MasterCard , Asteris, LLC & , MasterCard "Panel Discussion: Democratizing HPC & AI: Startups Scale up with Cloud Native" - Moderated by Emily Tanaka-Delgado , Oracle , Oracle "Kubectl Apply 2019: Defense against the Dark Arts" - Phillip Wittrock & Jennifer Buckley , Google & , Google "Helm 3: Navigating To Distant Shores" - Bridget Kromhout , Microsoft & Jessica Deen , Microsoft , Microsoft & , Microsoft "Sharing is Caring: Your Kubernetes Cluster, Namespaces, and You" - Amy Chen , VMware & Eryn Muetzel , VMware , VMware & , VMware "Panel Discussion: Going Multi-cloud for realz. Stories from media, retail, & infrastructure" - Moderated by Lisa-Marie Namphy , Portworx Monday, May 20 KubeSec Enterprise Summit hosted by Aqua Security A Linkerd in Production Workshop hosted by Buoyant Continuous Delivery Summit hosted by CDF Cephalocon Contributor Summit Serverless Practitioners Summit hosted by CNCF CNCF End User Partner Summit Cloud Native Storage Day hosted by CNS Ecosystem Kubernetes Operator Framework Workshop hosted by Red Hat OpenShift Commons Gathering hosted by Red Hat Intro to Containers & Kubernetes hosted by VMware The full KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe program, please visit the schedule . Thank You Sponsors KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is made possible with support from Diamond Sponsors: Cisco , IBM Cloud , Microsoft Azure , Oracle , Red Hat and VMware ; Platinum Sponsors: AWS , Ballerina , CloudBees , Google Cloud , Mirantis , Pivotal , Rancher , Sysdig and Ubuntu . and many more Gold, Silver, Start-Up, and Media Sponsors. More information on sponsorship is available. Registration and Accommodations Register by March 20, 11:59 pm PT to save $300 on conference passes. Additionally, hotel room rate discounts are available on the Venue/Travel . Section of the conference website. Please book early, as the discounted rate is based upon availability. Additional Resources About Cloud Native Computing Foundation Cloud native computing uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices, packaging each part into its own container, and dynamically orchestrating those containers to optimize resource utilization. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of cloud native software stacks, including Kubernetes and Prometheus. CNCF serves as the neutral home for collaboration and brings together the industry's top developers, end users and vendors including the world's largest public cloud and enterprise software companies as well as dozens of innovative startups. CNCF is part of The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. For more information about CNCF, please visit www.cncf.io . The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage . Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Media Contact Natasha Woods The Linux Foundation [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cloud-native-computing-foundation-announces-schedule-for-kubecon--cloudnativecon-europe-2019-300811575.html SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation [March 13, 2019] Dearman Selected to Present at CleanEquity Monaco 2019 LONDON, March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- London-based Dearman Engine Company will present at CleanEquity Monaco 2019 on 14th & 15th March at the Fairmont Monte Carlo. CleanEquity is an annual invitation-only event hosted by Innovator Capital, the London based specialist investment bank. The conference provides an intimate and collegiate setting for inventors and entrepreneurs to share their stories with delegates - key decision makers looking to assist them with reaching their commercial and strategic goals. Other partners and sponsors include Prince Albert II of Monaco's Foundation, APCO Worldwide, Cision, Covington & Burling, Cranfield, Hobbs & Towne, Monaco Economic Board, Parkview International and Reliance Industries. Dearman has been identified by an expert panel as one of the world's most innovative sustainable technology companies and has been selected to present to selected sovereign, corporate, family and professional investors & acquires, policy makers, end users and international trade media. Dearman is a technology innovation company commercialising the development of clean, cold power aplications based on liquid air, for major improvements in resource efficiency, and to combat air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and food waste. At the heart of the company's technology portfolio is the innovative Dearman engine- piston-driven by the expansion of liquid air/nitrogen- which generates both cold and power. The engine powers systems that keep food and medicines cool through the supply chain, and also keep people cool, especially in transit. Dearman's first application, a transport refrigeration unit, has already been deployed by major food retail brands, such as Sainsbury's, Unilever and Marks & Spencer. Applications under development are in: AgriTech- pre-cooling fresh produce to reduce waste and associated carbon; and in electric buses, cooling occupants and powertrain with zero emissions, extending range and clean-tech deployment viability. Future potential applications are in zero-emissions cooling in the built environment; and in harnessing waste cold from the Liquid Natural Gas supply chain. Commenting, Dearman CEO Scott Mac Meekin said: "We're very much looking forward to presenting at CleanEquity Monaco 2019. This is a premier event for highly innovative technologies and investors who can help realise the potential of these technologies. Dearman has already shown what our technology can achieve and we look forward to further discussing our ambitions with investors who share a passion and commitment to a more sustainable future." For more information, contact Mo Saqib (Policy & Communications Officer, Dearman) at [email protected] About Innovator Capital Innovator Capital, established in 2003, is a specialist investment bank advising emerging technology companies on corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions. Its expertise includes intellectual property and multi national strategic partnering. www.cleanequitymonaco.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dearman-selected-to-present-at-cleanequity-monaco-2019-300811715.html SOURCE Innovator Capital [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] INVESTIGATION ALERT: The Schall Law Firm Announces it is Investigating Claims Against Mobile TeleSystems PJSC and Encourages Investors with Losses in Excess of $100,000 to Contact the Firm The Schall Law Firm, a national shareholder rights litigation firm, announces that it is investigating claims on behalf of investors of Mobile TeleSystems (News - Alert) PJSC ("Mobile TeleSystems" or "the Company") (NYSE: MBT) for violations of 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The investigation focuses on whether the Company issued false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose information pertinent to investors. The DOJ announced on March 7, 2019, that Mobile TeleSystems and its wholly-owned subsiiary agreed to pay $850 million in penalties to resolve charges in a $420 million bribery scheme in Uzbekistan. The bribes were to facilitate the Company's entrance to the Uzbekistan market and gain various telecom assets. Based on this news, shares of Mobile TeleSystems fell more than 3% the same day. If you are a shareholder who suffered a loss, click here to participate. We also encourage you to contact Brian Schall, or Sherin Mahdavian, of the Schall Law Firm, 1880 Century Park East, Suite 404, Los Angeles, CA (News - Alert) 90067, at 424-303-1964, to discuss your rights free of charge. You can also reach us through the firm's website at www.schallfirm.com, or by email at [email protected]. The class in this case has not yet been certified, and until certification occurs, you are not represented by an attorney. If you choose to take no action, you can remain an absent class member. The Schall Law Firm represents investors around the world and specializes in securities class action lawsuits and shareholder rights litigation. This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and rules of ethics. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005646/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] StarPoint Properties Announces the Sale of 0.79-Acre Silicon Beach Commercial Land for $65 Million StarPoint Properties, a real estate investment and operating company that acquires and repositions undervalued properties to deliver above-market returns, has sold 34,195 square feet of prime land at 1733 Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, California. The improved parcel, which is subject to a ground lease, is 1 blocks from the Pacific Ocean and within walking distance of the Downtown Santa Monica Metro Expo Line light rail station at 4th Street and Colorado Ave. The buyer was an institutional real estate private equity investment group. Bob Safai of Madison Partners handled the sale as the listing broker. "The offering was broadly marketedand received deep institutional investor interest, including competitive bids from publicly-traded REITs, pension fund advisors, opportunity funds, and high net worth private investors," said StarPoint CEO Paul Daneshrad. Daneshrad commented further that, "The price achieved for the sale of the land at 1733 Ocean Avenue is in line with a string of recent high-profile land sales in West Los Angeles and is indicative of the superior supply/demand fundamentals of Santa Monica and Silicon Beach and tremendous investor appetite for a rare generational land opportunity." About StarPoint Properties StarPoint Properties (www.starpointproperties.com) is a real estate investment and operating company founded in 1995 focused on the acquisition, development and redevelopment of undervalued commercial properties in high-growth sub-markets throughout the United States. StarPoint has acquired more than 10 million square feet of commercial and residential properties with a current portfolio valued at about $800 million. Since inception, StarPoint has delivered an average annualized return to its investors over of 35 percent. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005687/en/ [March 13, 2019] Keller Rohrback: Fiat Chrysler Recalls Nearly 900,000 Vehicles, Admitting They Fail Emissions Standards Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) has admitted that nearly 900,000 gasoline cars and SUVs fail to meet U.S. emissions standards, and will be recalled, according to reports from the company and the Environmental Protection Agency. This announcement comes on the heels of Fiat Chrysler's multimillion-dollar diesel emissions settlements announced this winter. Consumer advocates at the law firm of Keller Rohrback are investigating these reports. Attorneys are monitoring how any changes in emissions systems will affect the vehicles' driving characteristics (i.e., MPG and power figures) and resale value. The recall includes 2011-2016 Dodge Journeys, 2011-2014 Chrysler 200s and Dodge Avengers, 2011-2012 Dodge Calibers and 2011-2016 Jeep Compasses. In its press release, the EPA states, "EPA will continue to investigate oher FCA vehicles which are potentially non-compliant and may become the subject of future recalls." According to consumer advocate Gretchen Freeman Cappio, "Consumers are experiencing the worst kind of deja vu, dealing with the fallout from yet another FCA emissions scandal. They want their vehicles to live up to the representations made when they bought or leased them, without dealing with the hassles of broken promises, reduced performance, and recalls." Please contact attorneys Gretchen Freeman Cappio or Ryan McDevitt at 800-776-6044 or [email protected] to discuss our investigation and your potential legal claims. Keller Rohrback has a track record of successful advocacy on behalf of consumers whose vehicles do not perform as advertised. About Keller Rohrback L.L.P. Keller Rohrback L.L.P. has been appointed by courts to leading roles in the "Dieselgate" cases against Volkswagen and Fiat Chrysler related to diesel vehicles' emissions systems. With offices in Seattle, Phoenix, New York, Montana, and Santa Barbara, Keller Rohrback serves as lead and co-lead counsel in class actions throughout the country. Our Complex Litigation Group is proud to offer its expertise to clients nationwide, and our trial lawyers have obtained judgments and settlements in excess of $23.25 billion. Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Not licensed to practice law in all states. Please refer to www.krcomplexlit.com for details. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005755/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Trinseo and AIChE Center for Chemical Process Safety Bring the First Workshop to Engineering Students in China Trinseo (NYSE: TSE), a global materials solutions provider and manufacturer of plastics, latex binders and synthetic rubber, through its partnership with the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS), a subsidiary of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), hosted a one-day process safety workshop for undergraduate chemical engineering students in China on March 9, 2019. Chemical engineering students from Nanjing Tech University attended the workshop at Trinseo's manufacturing site in Zhangjiagang, China (ZJG). The curriculum of the workshops will be designed and delivered by CCPS, the authoritative global organization providing the technical community with expertise and proven curriculum materials on process safety. Part of the "Doing a World of Good" campaign, this is the first student workshop outside the U.S. of the AIChE/CCPS Undergraduate Process Safety Learning Initiative, which combines process safety theory and real-world cases taught by process safety experts. Mr. Luke Lee, Site Leader at Trinseo ZJG site, started by providing a short introduction. Mr. Guangqi Lu then introduced Trinseo's corporate culture in safety and sustainability. Mr. Byron Sun, a safety expert and CCPS staff consultant, conducted the workshop presentation to 32 chemical engineering students and three faculty members from Nanjing Tech University. The risk-based process safety presentations were both informative and inspirational to the students, and will build their expertise and commitment to safety for their future careers as chemical engineers. In addition, the human resources session "Preparing for Your Successful Employment" - conducted by Esther Huang, Trinseo's Human Resources Director, Asia Pacific - provided practical tips to attendees on the skillsets required for future job interviews, characteristics of high-potential employees, etc. The tour of the in-house laboratory as well as the Trinseo ZJG ABS (News - Alert) and latex binders plants were also eye-openers for the students. "The first workshop in the partnership has been a great success in that the attendees from Nanjing Tech University do benefit a great deal from it, which can be clearly sen in the positive interaction between them and the speaker Mr. Bryon Sun," said Luke Lee, Site Leader. "Mr. Sun is a very effective communicator, very knowledgeable on the topic, and has been able to engage the students. The students are of high caliber and have enjoyed the sessions immensely. Credits also go to two of our production engineers who assisted in the tour of the production facility. The fact that they are also alumni of Nanjing Tech University has further inspired the students." One of the students sent a short instant message to a Trinseo staff member after leaving the Trinseo ZJG site, indicating that all the attendees were thrilled to take home the knowledge they have learnt from the workshop, adding "we have now found a direction to devote our efforts toward." Trinseo has been a supporter of the AIChE's Undergraduate Process Safety Learning Initiative and "Doing a World of Good" campaign since 2016 in the U.S. To support the program's expansion in China, the company made an additional $50,000 donation and provide in-kind support from Trinseo employees in China. In emphasizing the importance of the process safety workshop series, Shakeel Kadri, Executive Director of CCPS, noted that chemical engineering schools around the world have not yet developed a standard process safety curriculum, and that employers have told AIChE and CCPS that they need engineers who are better-informed about process safety techniques when they enter the workforce. "Through CCPS's collaborations with organizations such as Trinseo, the Undergraduate Process Safety Learning Initiative is helping to ensure that every chemical engineering graduate acquires a basic knowledge and appreciation of process safety principles," Kadri said. "Trinseo is proud to be part of this effort to educate future generations of chemical engineers, and in particular to help bring the successful Undergraduate Process Safety Learning Initiative to China for the first time," said Catherine Keenan, Vice President, Public Affairs, Sustainability and EH&S for Trinseo. "Our employees in China are highly committed to process safety and training, so they really enjoyed passing on their knowledge to the next generation of chemical engineers. This partnership with CCPS and AIChE is in line with Trinseo's company values, our commitment to Responsible Care, and our dedication to work safely in everything we do." About Trinseo Trinseo (NYSE:TSE) is a global materials solutions provider and manufacturer of plastics, latex binders, and synthetic rubber. We are focused on delivering innovative and sustainable solutions to help our customers create products that touch lives every day - products that are intrinsic to how we live our lives - across a wide range of end-markets, including automotive, consumer electronics, appliances, medical devices, lighting, electrical, carpet, paper and board, building and construction, and tires. Trinseo had approximately $4.6 billion in net sales in 2018, with 16 manufacturing sites around the world, and approximately 2,500 employees. For more information visit www.trinseo.com. About the Center of Chemical Process Safety CCPS is a not-for-profit, corporate membership organization within the AIChE that identifies and addresses process safety needs for a variety of facilities involved with handling, storing, using or processing, and transporting hazardous materials. CCPS brings together manufacturers, government agencies, consultants, academia and insurers to lead the way in improving industrial process safety. CCPS leads the development of useful, time-tested guidelines that have practical application within industry. About AIChE AIChE is a professional society of 60,000 chemical engineers in 110 countries. Its members work in corporations, universities and government using their knowledge of chemical processes to develop safe and useful products for the benefit of society. Through its varied programs, AIChE continues to be a focal point for information exchange on the frontiers of chemical engineering research in such areas as energy, sustainability, biological and environmental engineering, nanotechnology and chemical plant safety and security. More information about AIChE is available at www.aiche.org. Note on Forward-Looking Statements This press release may contain "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "expect," "estimate," "project," "budget," "forecast," "anticipate," "intend," "plan," "may," "will," "could," "should," "believes," "predicts," "potential," "continue," and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this press release may include, without limitation, forecasts of growth, revenues, business activity, acquisitions, financings and other matters that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to differ materially from results expressed or implied by this press release. As a result of the foregoing considerations, you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005756/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] President Moon Jae-in, left, shakes hands with Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad at the start of their summit at PM's office in Putrajaya, Wednesday afternoon. Yonhap By Kim Yoo-chul President Moon Jae-in and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad decided to push for a bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) at their meeting in Putrajaya, Wednesday. "The leaders of the two countries agreed to sign an FTA by the end of this year, at the earliest. With the increase in the volume of trade between South Korea and Malaysia, the consensus was establishing a fresh trading framework was needed," the presidential office said in a press release. "Working-level discussions will begin soon. The leaders agreed in principle to sign the FTA on the sidelines of the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir's possible participation to a special South Korea-ASEAN summit later this year." Moon planned to hold the summit later this year to mark the 30th anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations. Cheong Wa Dae officials said the FTA, if realized, would give people in South Korea more chances to work in the Southeast Asian country. The deal is expected to benefit South Korea's tourism-related industries. At the meeting, Moon and Mahathir signed four memoranda of understanding involving industrial cooperation, transportation, the development of a "smart city" in Malaysia and the halal food industry. Malaysia is one of the leading economic powerhouses among ASEAN member countries. The business potential of smart city-related technologies are expansive, there, with the country operating a smart city-designed government agency called PLANMalaysia. "The MOU will help South Korean companies, which have patents and technologies in areas of transportation, healthcare, energy, platform and water management, explore new growth opportunities there," according to the release. Bilateral trade volume between the two countries has grown from $15.76 billion in 2017 to $17.98 billion last year with South Korea becoming Malaysia's eighth-largest trading partner, globally, according to the South's trade ministry. Cheong Wa Dae said other issues discussed at the meeting were the preparations of the upcoming 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Malaysia in 2020 and the enhancement of ties between South Korea and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Moon arrived in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur Tuesday evening for a three-day state visit. His trip to Malaysia is aimed at strengthening South Korea's relations with ASEAN member countries under his signature New Southern Policy. Malaysia, along with Brunei and Cambodia, are members of the 10-member ASEAN. Moon will end his visit to Malaysia, today, to head for Cambodia, the third and last leg of his three-nation state visit. [March 13, 2019] ZEROSPAM signs distribution agreement with Ingram Micro - Highly efficient, easy to use cloud email security solution to be available in Q1 MONTREAL, March 13, 2019 /CNW Telbec/ - In the fast-growing cybersecurity market, resellers are constantly looking for cloud solutions to add to Office 365. ZEROSPAM is happy to announce that it's email security solution will be available on the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace in Canada and the US. As a result of this signed agreement, Ingram's MSPs and resellers will be able to provision themselves on Ingram Micro's Cloud Marketplace for a fully Office 365-compatible cloud email security solution with just a few clicks. "With email being the vector of choice for cyberthreats, MSPs around the world are actively searching for ways to offer their customers better protection, says David Poellhuber, President and CEO of ZEROSPAM Security. Our presence on the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace now gives resellers the combined convenience of on-line purchass and automated provisioning." ZEROSPAM offers superior detection of all email-borne threats, including ransomware and spearphishing, and is the ideal Office 365 add-on. ABOUT ZEROSPAM The AI-driven email security solution ZEROSPAM is a 100% cloud AI-driven email security solution. Deadly accurate and utterly simple, it has a proven catch-rate of 99.9% against all forms of email-borne threats and includes a unique spearphishing module that offers unmatched protection against CEO fraud. ZEROSPAM delivers efficient detection of all email-borne threats and superior protection against advanced threats including ransomware, phishing and spearphishing. It has very low FP (False Positive) rate, and it is very user-friendly, in addition to being backed by Elite technical support through a large global network of partners. To learn more about ZEROSPAM, visit www.zerospamsecurity.com. About Ingram Micro Ingram Micro helps businesses realize the promise of technology. It delivers a full spectrum of global technology and supply chain services to businesses around the world. Deep expertise in technology solutions, mobility, cloud, and supply chain solutions enables its business partners to operate efficiently and successfully in the markets they serve. Unrivaled agility, deep market insights and the trust and dependability that come from decades of proven relationships, sets Ingram Micro apart and ahead. Discover how Ingram Micro can help you realize the promise of technology. SOURCE ZEROSPAM Security [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Health New England Announces New Board Members Health New England is pleased to announce the appointment of three new members to its Board of Directors. Joining the Board are Robert Bacon, James Conlon and William Webber. "Bob, Jim and Bill bring tremendous health care and finance experience and leadership to our Board and will assist us in advancing our mission to improve the health and lives of the people living in our community," said Jody Gross, interim president and CEO of Health New England. Robert Bacon is president of Elm Electrical, Inc., an electrical engineering and construction company located in Westfield, Massachusetts. Bacon serves as Vice Chair of the Baystate Health Board of Trustees, chairs the Baystate Health Board Strategy Committee and is a member of several key Baystate Board committees. Previously, Bacon served as trustee and Chair of the Noble Hospital Board of Trustees. Bacon is an alumnus of the Senior Executive Program at Columbia University and has a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Western New England University. James Conlon is the retired owner of J.F. Conlon & Associates, Inc., an independent Employee Benefitsand Financial Services agency in Amherst, Massachusetts. Previously, Conlon worked at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, where he served in a number of field and leadership positions, including Regional Director of the Springfield and Worcester offices. Conlon brings 40 years of experience in the health care insurance industry to his board position. He is a graduate of the University of Rhode Island and earned distinction as a Certified Health Consultant from the Krannert Graduate School of Management at Purdue University. Conlon has served on a number of local boards in the community and held various leadership positions throughout his career. William Webber of Andover, Massachusetts is a retired partner of Ernst & Young, LLP. Webber is a licensed Certified Public Accountant and member of the American Association of Certified Public Accountants and the Massachusetts Association of CPAs. He is a member of the Baystate Health Board of Trustees and serves on the Baystate Board Audit and Compliance Committee. Webber has 32 years of experience serving clients in the health care and insurance industries throughout New England. Webber attended Bowdoin College and earned a Master of Science Degree in Accounting from Northeastern University (News - Alert). Based in Springfield, Massachusetts, Health New England is a nonprofit health plan serving members in Massachusetts and Connecticut. A wholly-owned subsidiary of Baystate Health, Health New England offers a range of health care plans in the commercial, Medicaid and Medicare markets. Visit www.healthnewengland.org for more information. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005787/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Summit Partners Announces Global Promotions Summit Partners, a leading alternative investment firm, today announced the promotion of five professionals globally across the firm's growth equity, credit and public equity teams. Peter Francis was promoted to Managing Director; Matt Curtis was promoted to Portfolio Manager; Gus Phelps was promoted to Principal; and Chris Bon and Jono Pagden were promoted to Senior Associate. "We are proud to recognize the contributions of Pete, Matt, Gus, Chris and Jono with these well-deserved promotions," said Peter Chung, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Summit Partners. "These talented professionals have served our limited partners and our portfolio companies with distinction. We look forward to their further development as investors and leaders in the years to come." Peter Francis was promoted to Managing Director. Peter joined Summit's Boston office as a Senior Associate in 2011, moved to the firm's Menlo Park office in 2012, promoted to Vice President in 2015 and has served as a Principal since 2017. Focusing primarily on the healthcare & life sciences sector, Peter's board and investment experience includes BluePearl Veterinary Services (acquired by Mars Petcare), Healthline Media, HealthSun (acquired by Anthem) and Solutionreach. Prior to Summit, Peter worked for Jefferies & Company and UBS Investment Bank on the global healthcare team. He holds a BA in economics from Cornell University. Matt Curtis was promoted to Portfolio Manager. Matt joined Summit's Boston office as a Portfolio Analyst for Summit Partners Public Equity in 2015 and was promoted to Associate Portfolio Manager in 2018. Matt focuses primarily on the echnology, media and telecommunications sectors. Prior to joining Summit, Matt was a Senior Equity Analyst at Summit Public Equity's predecessor firm, Alydar Capital. He holds an AB from Harvard University and is a CFA Charterholder. Gus Phelps was promoted to Principal. Gus joined Summit's Boston office in 2014 as a Vice President with Summit Partners Credit Advisors, and today leads the firm's credit origination activities and manages business development for financial sponsors and investment banks. Prior to Summit, Gus was a founding partner at Seacoast Partners, and worked for Wachovia Securities and Tucker Anthony. Gus holds a BA from Trinity College and an MBA from Cornell University. Chris Bon was promoted to Senior Associate. Chris joined Summit's London office as an Associate in 2016, and he is a member of the firm's growth products & services team. His investment experience includes Normec, OnRobot and Sipartech. Prior to Summit, Chris worked in M&A advisory at J.P. Morgan in London. He holds a BCom in economics with high honors from the University of Toronto and an MSc in finance with distinction from HEC Paris. Jono Pagden was promoted to Senior Associate. Jono joined Summit's London office as an Associate in 2016, and he is a member of the firm's healthcare & life sciences team. Jono's investment experience includes Advance Medical (acquired by Teladoc) and zahneins. Prior to Summit, Jono worked on the Retail/Healthcare and U.K. M&A teams at Goldman Sachs. He holds a Bachelor of Business Science, with honors, in accounting and finance from the University of Cape Town. About Summit Partners Founded in 1984, Summit Partners is a global alternative investment firm that is currently managing more than $19 billion in capital dedicated to growth equity, fixed income and public equity opportunities. Summit invests across growth sectors of the economy and has invested in more than 475 companies in technology, healthcare and other growth industries. These companies have completed more than 140 public equity offerings, and more than 190 have been acquired through strategic mergers and sales. Summit maintains offices in North America and Europe, and invests in companies around the world. For more information, please see www.summitpartners.com or on Twitter (News - Alert) at @SummitPartners. In the United States of America, Summit Partners operates as an SEC (News - Alert)-registered investment advisor. In the United Kingdom, this document is issued by Summit Partners LLP, a firm authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Summit Partners LLP is a limited liability partnership registered in England and Wales with registered number OC388179 and its registered office is at 11-12 St. James's Square, London, SW1Y 4LB, UK. This document is intended solely to provide information regarding Summit Partners' potential financing capabilities for prospective portfolio companies. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005776/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] QTS Realty Trust, Inc. Appoints Wayne Rehberger to Board of Directors OVERLAND PARK, Kan., March 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- QTS Realty Trust, Inc. ("QTS" or the "Company") (NYSE: QTS), a leading provider of hybrid colocation and mega scale data center solutions, today announced the appointment of Wayne Rehberger to its Board of Directors as a new independent director, effective immediately. With Mr. Rehberger's appointment, QTS' Board of Directors now comprises ten directors, nine of whom are independent, underscoring QTS' commitment to regular Board refreshment and independence. Wayne Rehberger has over 35 years of diversified financial, operational and sales management experience. Most recently from 2015 through January 2019, Mr. Rehberger served as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Engility Holdings, Inc. Mr. Rehberger previously served as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of TASC, Inc. from June 2010 to 2015. "I'm pleased to welcome Wayne to the QTS Board and am confident his deep financial and operational expertise will be a tremendous asset to QTS," said Chad Williams, Chairman and CEO QTS. "We anticipate Wayne's experience leading the financial organization for multiple leading communications infrastructure and technology companies will provide valuable insight and perspective in support of QTS' approach to capital allocation and overall financial maagement." About Wayne Rehberger Wayne Rehberger has over 35 years of diversified financial, operational and sales management experience. Mr. Rehberger served as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Engility Holdings, Inc. following Engility Holdings, Inc.'s acquisition of TASC, Inc. in February 2015. Mr. Rehberger had previously served as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of TASC, Inc. from June 2010. Prior to joining TASC, Inc. in June 2010, Mr. Rehberger was the Chief Operating Officer of XO Communications, a facilities-based telecommunications services provider. Before assuming the role of Chief Operating Officer in May 2004, Mr. Rehberger had served as XO Communications' Chief Financial Officer from November 2000. Mr. Rehberger began his corporate career with the KPMG consulting business in Washington, D.C., where he worked primarily with U.S. government agencies and aerospace companies. Mr. Rehberger also served for 10 years in the United States Army and Army Reserve, achieving the rank of major. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration at Bucknell University and a Master of Business Administration at the University of South Carolina. About QTS QTS Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: QTS) is a leading provider of data center solutions across a diverse footprint spanning more than 6 million square feet of owned mega scale data center space throughout North America. Through its software-defined technology platform, QTS is able to deliver secure, compliant infrastructure solutions, robust connectivity and premium customer service to leading hyperscale technology companies, enterprises, and government entities. QTS owns, operates or manages 25 data centers and supports more than 1,100 customers primarily in North America. QTS Investor Relations Contact Stephen Douglas Vice President Finance [email protected] Media Contact: Carter B. Cromley (703) 861-8245 [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/qts-realty-trust-inc-appoints-wayne-rehberger-to-board-of-directors-300811894.html SOURCE QTS Realty Trust, Inc. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] CENTURY 21 Commercial Everest Prepares to Launch 1031 Exchange Website Solution Century 21 Commercial Everest Senior Vice President Randall Barondess announced today that the company is preparing to launch a new website platform designed to educate and assist commercial property owners who are concerned about the proposed changes to Prop 13. National organizations International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) and the California Association of Realtors, along with many concerned members of the real estate community are sounding alarms about the possible adverse effects of the proposed "Split-Roll" tax measure which has enough signatures to be introduced on the 2020 ballot in California. "Hopefully here in California we can enjoy the benefits of proposition 13 for many more years to come," Barondess said. "But if you're like many commercial property investors, perhaps it's time to consider relocating your equity and commercial assets to more lucrative real estate opportunities. We can assist you with that option." In response to this important issue that has raised concerns for many commercial property owners, Randall J Barondess, SVP, C21 Everest Commercial eam created ExitCA1031Exchange.com and Exit1031Exchange.com to educate owners on the issues and provide opportunities & options for replacement properties while leveraging the power of over 600 office locations through the nationwide Century 21 Commercial network. "This is a troubling and often complicated issue for many commercial investors," Barondess said. "Even the most skilled commercial property owners may not be fully aware of the IRS 1031 rules surrounding the sale and acquisition of properties that qualify under 1031 exchanges. There are so many factors to consider including depreciation, vesting and time limits. It is in the best interest of a property owner to make sure they have a trusted advisor to guide them through the process." According to I.C.S.C., the California Attorney General and the California State Legislative Analyst are expected to Release Title Summary for the measure sometime this year. The measure has already obtained over 850,000 signatures which is more than enough to qualify for the 2020 ballot. For property owners concerned about this issue, ExitCA1031Exchange.com and Exit1031Exchange.com can provide logical & educational options for 1031 replacement properties throughout our Nationwide Century 21 Commercial offices, as well as offerings of alternative properties within California. We provide comprehensive service from marketing your California assets to acquisition of replacement properties to maximize holdings. Barondess can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected] prior to Site Launch scheduled for April, 2019. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005859/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Piper Jaffray Adopts 2019 Employment Inducement Award Plan Piper Jaffray Companies (NYSE: PJC), a leading investment bank and asset management firm, today announced that it has agreed to issue equity awards under the Piper Jaffray Companies 2019 employment inducement award plan. Piper Jaffray established the inducement award plan to issue restricted stock awards to new hires in connection with the acquisition of Weeden & Co. L.P. ("Weeden & Co."). Under the terms of the acquisition, Piper Jaffray will issue an aggregate of $7.5 million of restricted shares to 42 employees who had been employees of Weeden & Co. The shares will be issued immediately following the closing of the acquisition and will be valued based upon the closing price of Piper Jaffray common stock on the closing date. The awards are intended to aid in the retention of Weeden & Co. employees and were approved in connection with the definitive transaction agreement signed on February 24, 2019. The inducement award plan was approved by the Piper Jaffray board of directors in connection with the acquisition of Weeden & Co. Under the plan, Piper Jaffray may isue awards to new employees in the form of stock options, stock appreciation rights, restricted stock, restricted stock units, dividend equivalents or similar awards. The awards will be granted in reliance on the employment inducement exemption under the NYSE's Listed Company Manual Rule 303A.08, which requires public announcement of inducement awards. Pursuant to the requirements of that rule, Piper Jaffray is issuing this press release. Piper Jaffray Companies (NYSE: PJC) is a leading investment bank and asset management firm. Securities brokerage and investment banking services are offered in the U.S. through Piper Jaffray & Co., member SIPC and FINRA; in Europe through Piper Jaffray Ltd., authorized and regulated by the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority; and in Hong Kong through Piper Jaffray Hong Kong Limited, authorized and regulated by the Securities and Futures Commission. Asset management products and services are offered through five separate investment advisory affiliates?U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC (News - Alert)) registered Advisory Research, Inc., Piper Jaffray Investment Management LLC, PJC Capital Partners LLC and Piper Jaffray & Co., and Guernsey-based Parallel General Partners Limited, authorized and regulated by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission. Follow Piper Jaffray: LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter 2019 Piper Jaffray Companies. 800 Nicollet Mall, Suite 1000, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55402-7036 View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190313005044/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [March 13, 2019] Minister Sohi Promotes Canada as Prime Investment Destination During CERAWeek Visit HOUSTON, TX, March 13, 2019 /CNW/ - Canada continues to demonstrate leadership in the global energy transformation. We are maximizing our energy advantage and diverse energy mix to grow our economy, develop sustainable communities and create good jobs. The Honourable Amarjeet Sohi, Canada's Minister of Natural Resources, today concluded a successful trip to the Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) Week 2019 conference in Houston, Texas, reiterating Canada's commitment to sustainable resource development and to becoming the world's energy supplier of choice. In his discussions with many of the international industry executives in attendance, Minister Sohi promoted Canada as a preferred partner for trade and investment, as well as a reliable and sustainable supplier of energy products, technologies and services. He highlighted the need for the U.S. and Canada to expand cross-border energy infrastructure and underlined how triffs on products like steel and aluminum work against our goals of building a more integrated North American economy and energy sector. While in Houston, Minister Sohi also participated in a trilateral North American Energy Ministerial Meeting with his counterparts Rick Perry, U.S. Secretary of Energy, and Rocio Nahle, Mexico's Secretary of Energy, which focused on increasing collaboration and strengthening our already prosperous and integrated continental energy market. Minister Sohi raised the importance of the Keystone XL and Line 3 pipelines. The Minister reaffirmed these points as part of a panel discussion with Bento Albuquerque, Minister of Mines and Energy of Brazil, Maria Fernanda Suarez, Minister of Mines and Energy of Colombia, and Secretary Nahle of Mexico. Throughout the CERA Week conference, Minister Sohi conveyed Canada's energy vision with his global counterparts. Canada is uniquely positioned to provide cleaner fossil fuels and technologies to a world that increasingly values sustainable practices and low-carbon processes. Quotes "Canada is open for business. By developing our resources in the most sustainable way, Canada can be the supplier of choice for the world. And with historic investments in clean technology and a focus on enhanced regulatory certainty, there is no better time to invest in Canada." Amarjeet Sohi Canada's Minister of Natural Resources Follow us on Twitter: @NRCan ( http://twitter.com/nrcan ) SOURCE Natural Resources Canada [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] If you're disposing of old documents such as bank statements or tax forms, security experts recommend shredding the paperwork so it can't be used by identity thieves. It's a practice everyone should be familiar with, since it may be the top recommendation for preventing identity theft. (Image credit: Oleg Golovnev/Shutterstock) However, many consumers and organizations are turning to a paperless world, and records once held in filing cabinets are now stored on computer hard drives. But computers eventually get replaced, and old computers get donated, recycled, handed down or refurbished often with personally identifiable information (PII) still on the machine. Pick up any old computer being tossed out on the street, and odds are its hard drive will still be in it and will have a wealth of information about its previous owners. MORE: How to Protect Yourself from Data Breaches The basics Simply deleting the data by emptying the "trash" folder won't totally wipe all that information away. Before you dispose of an old personal computer, the experts recommend that the very least you do is fully reformat your hard drive and reinstall the operating system. A better bet is to wipe your hard drive clean. "With computers, it isn't difficult to wipe data, if you understand what you are doing and do it correctly," said Greg Kelley, chief technology officer with Vestige Digital Investigations in Medina, Ohio. "The most important thing to consider is that to be certain that you got all of your data, you need to wipe the entire hard drive," Kelley said. "Programs such as BCWipe and Eraser can perform this work." An even easier way to do this, provided the user has Windows 7 or better, is to create a system repair disk and then format the hard drive using the standard format command, said Matthew Kinney, executive vice president of research and development with staffing-software maker BWSI in Phoenix. "This also uses the write-zero approach, overwriting each block with binary zeroes, and is super easy," Kinney said. "I have recommended this to many of my friends who aren't tech people and have them use the instructions on About.com." However, not every attempt to clean off the hard drive is 100 percent successful. If that's the case, and if you want to keep the hard drive with the computer, Kelley recommended taking the machine to a qualified computer technician to perform the work. "Make sure that the computer technician is one [who] understands that deleting a file, formatting a hard drive or reinstalling an operating system doesn't render the data unrecoverable," Kelley said. "Those technicians will know enough to identify the proper tools to wipe your drive." If you have a solid-state-drive (SSD) in your PC instead of a traditional spinning hard drive, most SSDs included disk-wiping utilities that should do the trick. Consult your SSD maker's website for instructions. If you're sending your computer to be recycled, or you're donating it to a relative or a charity, the best way to protect your personal data is to simply remove the hard drive and physically destroy the drive. Off the premises Eliminating personal data from personal computers kept at home is relatively easy. The real problems lie with mobile devices and work computers. Smartphone and tablet owners now store a great deal of personally identifiable information on these devices. Apps are available to "wipe" the devices if they are lost or stolen, but the technology is still relatively new and some data can be left behind. "Many cellphones have a 'restore to factory defaults' option that will delete data, but in many instances, it has been shown that this does not always work," said Adam Wosotowsky, messaging data architect at Santa Clara, Calif., digital-security firm McAfee. "Additionally, they are not overwriting the data multiple times to prevent forensic equipment from being able to recover it." If you intend to never use the phone again, the best option is to physically destroy it. However, if you want to recycle the phone, your safest option may be to sell it to a company that refurbishes phones for re-sale. The reason to follow this path, said Kyle Marks of Retire-IT, a Columbus, Ohio, firm specializing in computer disposal, is because these companies could end up being liable if your personal data is found on a device they refurbished and sold. In this case, it is in their best interest to make sure your data is safe. MORE: Mobile Security Guide: Everything You Need to Know Do you trust your boss? Businesses also have an interest in making sure personal data is kept secure. But Marks pointed out that while most companies have a strict record of incoming inventory, they are more lax when it comes to disposal of equipment. If your computer is being replaced, or if you are leaving the company, you will want to make sure that you have at least deleted everything that holds your personally identifiable information, including temporary files and browsing histories. You can also ask your IT support staff about what happens to old equipment, and whether the machines are wiped clean or the hard drives are reformatted. "A mature, well-run company should have a formal procedure in place for computer disposal," Marks said. "But you have every right to be concerned if your IT support takes a 'we'll take care of it, don't worry' attitude when you ask about computer disposal." Unfortunately, there might be nothing you can do about that. "Once that data is on the computer, depending on company policy and local laws, you may no longer have ownership to that data," Kelley said. Instead, Kelley said, leave your banking, personal emailing and social networking to your home computer. That way, you can control what happens to your personally identifiable information when the time comes to get rid of your old equipment. By Kim Hyun-bin Should employees be penalized for the wrongdoings of their CEO or executives? This question is up for debate as the government is seeking to establish stricter punishment for local airlines following numerous abuse of power scandals by owner families in recent years, mostly involving Korean Air. Cho Hyun-ah, former Korean Air executive vice president After close coordination with the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, Rep. An Ho-young of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea proposed a revision bill to the Aviation Law, Wednesday, that would punish the company for its executives' misbehavior. Under the revision, a carrier will be banned from operating on a new route for three years when an executive is found guilty of abuse of power or assault. Initially the ban was for one to two years, but the revision has extended the period. The move raises questions because the airline's employees will be the hardest hit from the restrictions. "Restricting new routes for three years pretty much means shutting the airline down and carriers will be forced to let employees go. The executives who cause the problem definitely need to be punished for their actions, but why is the government trying to punish hardworking employees?" an employee from a local carrier said. Both Korean Air and Jin Air, which are owned by Hanjin Group, have been embroiled in abuse of power scandals in recent years. In April last year, Cho Hyun-min, Hanjin Group Chairman Cho Yang-ho's youngest daughter and also the senior vice president of Jin Air at the time, threw water at an ad agency manager. She was later cleared of the charges because the manager did not want her to be punished and refused to testify. Cho Hyun-min AUSTIN, Texas As the floor rumbled beneath my feet, I pulled back a dart in my right hand and paused before releasing it at the video screen in front of me. "HIT!" the screen in front of me shouted in all caps text, as I popped a moving virtual balloon, and pumped my hand in the air. I was playing Flash Darts, a game still in the concept stage, at SXSW's Sony Wow tent, where the electronics giant sets up shop annually to showcase how its technologies could be applied in the future. I was in the second of three rounds of darts, where the difficulty of hitting the moving targets increased sequentially, and the haptic vibration in the floor below me rose as well. MORE: SXSW 2019: The Best Tech, Movies and Shows So Far Using projection and object detection, canvas and the original '01 dart game, Flash Darts was a demo that felt ready for a bar near me. Because this technology is still in development, I knew the technician running the experience would have no answers about release date. So as I aimed another dart this time at a moving flaming cube, and the floor moved even more, I simply said (to no one in particular), "I need this in my life!" I missed the cube, and went on to tie the round with another guest. The bark is back In news you can use, though, Sony announced that its latest Aibo robot dog is finally back on sale again (at the hefty price of $2,899), after having sold out by January. In a brief amount of time I had with the metallic pooch, I saw a bit of joy in the light-emitting diodes in the eyes of an Aibo that was stretching and "waking up." More future tech In another room, Sony demonstrated how AI could be used to write music, with a tool called Flow Machines. While the app looked like a normal music creation suite such as Pro Tools, a few clicks selecting the chord progression allowed Flow Machines to provide four samples for the harmony to be sampled. This proof of concept seemed interesting, and I could see artists using it as a tool to help break songwriter's block. In other rooms at Sony's venue, I saw even odder technologies, including a giant wall where myself and eight others had lights and imagery projected on our backs. This became interesting as other images were projected at the shadows in front of us, and it all became interactive, based on our movements. I'm not sure about the practical application for that one. Lastly, Sony took me and three others into a pitch-dark room, and had us play on toy bongos, which we all plugged open-back headphones into. The experience was a sensory overload at times, filled with echoes and reverberations. (Image credit: Shutterstock) The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced that HP expanded its recall of the batteries used in some of its notebooks and mobile workstations due to "fire and burn hazards." HP announced the expanded recall in January. Because of the U.S. government shutdown--which at 34 full days was the longest in American history--the CPSC wasn't able to discuss it on its website until March 12. Now that it has, more people should know about the recall. The original recall was announced in January 2018 and affected 50,000 battery units. The CPSC said HP received "eight reports of battery packs overheating, melting, or charring, including three reports of property damage totaling $4,500 with one report of a minor injury involving a first degree burn to the hand." Since then, according to the CPSC, HP received "eight new reports of battery packs in the U.S. overheating, melting, or charring, including one report of minor injury and two reports of property damage totaling $1,100." So the recall has been expanded to "about 78,500" battery units that consumers need to have replaced by HP. Here are the affected products listed in the expanded recall: "The batteries were shipped with or sold as accessories for HP ProBooks (64x G2 and G3 series, 65x G2 and G3 series, 4xx G4 series), HPx360 (310 G2), HP Pavilion x360 11inch Notebook PC, HP 11 Notebook PC, HP ZBook (17 G3, and Studio G3) mobile workstations. The batteries were also sold as accessories or replacement batteries for the HP ZBook Studio G4 mobile workstation, HP ProBook 4xx G5 series, HP ENVY 15, HP Mobile Thin Clients (mt21, mt22, and mt31), or for any of the products listed above." The CPSC said the batteries were "shipped in notebook computers and mobile workstations sold from December 2015 through April 2018 for between $300 and $4,000 and were also sold separately between December 2015 and December 2018 for between $50 and $90." HP has set up a site with more information about the recall process. Update 3/21/19, 8:30 a.m. PT: Microsoft has released an update to Windows 7 Service Pack 1 whose sole purpose is to enable the reminders about the operating system's end of life schedule as outlined in the original article. The update is available via Windows Update, and if automatic updates are enabled, this one will be installed in the background. Because it doesn't require a system restart to be installed, the notification about Windows 7's looming demise will probably be the first indication many Windows 7 users will have that their systems just got one of their last updates. Original article, 3/13/19, 7:35 a.m. PT: Microsoft said yesterday that it plans to make sure people know Windows 7 won't receive any updates after January 14, 2020, by repeatedly notifying them of the looming deadline throughout 2019. Here's how Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows, Matt Barlow, described the planned notification process in a blog post: "To help our customers get advanced notice of this change, we are reaching out with information and resources. Beginning next month, if you are a Windows 7 customer, you can expect to see a notification appear on your Windows 7 PC. This is a courtesy reminder that you can expect to see a handful of times in 2019. By starting the reminders now, our hope is that you have time to plan and prepare for this transition. These notifications are designed to help provide information only and if you would prefer not to receive them again, youll be able to select an option for 'do not notify me again,' and we will not send you any further reminders." The notifications will also include a "learn more" button through which Windows 7 users can "learn more about the latest line-up of modern PCs and information for moving from Windows 7 to Windows 10." This information is also available on Microsoft's website. Microsoft previously said that it would only release updates for Windows 7 to January 2020. Then it will finally be time for people using the operating system to decide if they'll update to Windows 10 or stick with a completely abandoned platform. That news was followed by Microsoft ending metadata support for Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player on Windows 7. (And, for Windows Media Center, Windows 8 and 8.1 as well.) The programs simply weren't used often enough to warrant their maintenance. Microsoft actually stopped updating the base version of Windows 7 in 2013, when it required users to install Windows 7 Service Pack 1. Then it stopped mainstream support for that release in 2015; January 2020 marks the end of Windows 7 SP1's extended support. That seems like a reasonable length of time to support an operating system. Windows 10 is currently installed on 800 million active devices, too, so it's clear why Microsoft would rather not have to maintain a Windows release from a decade ago. Oh, and if the cost of Windows 10 is what's holding Windows 7 users back, there are some ways to get the operating system for free. (Or at least under $30.) They should just make sure their hardware can run the operating system first. Rain in KC this week will lead to rising water levels KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Following a busy winter and ahead of heavy rain forecast for this week, crews monitored metro rivers on Tuesday with rising waters expected over the next few days. Misplaced priorities from City Hall & local leadership organizations have created pothole crisis soon to be followed bythat poses a clear & present danger to residents almost every time in rains . . . Sadly, corporations and touting support for the "Green New Deal" is more socially acceptable than talking about the curious decisions from the City Manager's office. Take a look: KMXV (Mix 93.3)/Kansas City Ups Dave O To MD, Tara To Join Morning Show STEEL CITY MEDIA Top 40 KMXV (MIX 93.3)/KANSAS CITY has promoted afternoon host DAVE O to MD and makes TARA a full-time member of the ROCKET & TERESA SHOW. "I've been obsessed with Top 40 music since I was a kid, and to earn this title at a heritage station like KMXV means the world to me," said DAVE O, who also hosts syndicated ROUND TRIP WITH DAVE O. Here's a quick look at the last denizens of terrestrial tunes attempting to justify their gig because they still make clock radios and technically that puts a "radio" in everybody's house . . . Whilst most people listen to streaming or satellite subscription services without much dj chatter. Checkit: Public television powers this town's alcoholics with some of the latest booze news funded by taxpayers and viewers like you. Take a look: The other day we published a post about some Brookings Institution data suggesting the Kansas City was doing well with millennials. The data was not specific to Kansas City, Missouri but rather the entire 14-county metropolitan area. There is reason to think that outer areas such as Olathe and Overland Park are doing well attracting millennials, but what about Kansas City proper? By now, the global travel industry is fully aware of the massive scale of the market in Asia. Across the region, more than $30 billion in annual online travel spend is in play, according to a report by Google and Temasek. "Asia's corporate travel market is booming," according to Amadeus. "Driven by China, India, and the emerging economies of Southeast Asia, spending on business trips is expected to soar to $900 billion by 2025 from the current $400 billion," the firm said. And that same year, corporate travel spending in the region will "account for half of the world's total," the report continued. Full Article See Now: The U.S. had the highest number of Most Wanted properties, dominating the Hotels.com Loved By Guests Awards 2018 Singapore suspended operations of all Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in and out of Changi airport on Tuesday, and Indonesia and China grounded their fleets of the U.S. plane maker' s latest model after it suffered a second fatal crash in less than five months. The scare has wiped billions of dollars off the market value of the world's biggest plane maker, as the Boeing Co share closed 5 percent down on Monday having fallen by as much as 13.5percent at one point. A day after a Ethiopian Airlines passenger jet plunged to the ground, killing all 157 people aboard, the United States stressed it was safe to fly the planes. But a statement issued by Singapore's Civil Aviation Authority (CAAS) showed question-marks hanging over the aircraft after Sunday's disaster could not be dispelled so fast. "During the temporary suspension, CAAS will gather more information and review the safety risk associated with the continued operation of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft into and out of Singapore," the aviation regulator said in a statement. It is the first major regulator to order such an action, but the anxiety was also evident among air travellers, who rushed to find out from social media whether they were booked to fly on737 MAX planes - the same model involved in the Lion Air crash off Indonesia that killed 189 people in October. There has been no information yet to link the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines incidents. Investigators in Ethiopia found two black box recorders that will provide information about what happened before the plane plunged into farmland minutes after take-off from Addis Ababa. So long as the recordings are undamaged, the cause of the crash could be identified quickly, although it typically takes a year to fully complete an investigation. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a "continued airworthiness notification" for the 737 MAX late on Monday to assure operators, and detailed a series of design changes mandated by Boeing. Boeing issued a statement as well, saying it had been working with the FAA in the aftermath of a Lion Air crash to develop enhancements to flight control software that will bedeployed across the 737 MAX fleet in coming weeks. The improvements include updates to the manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system, pilot displays, operation manuals and crew training. SUSPENSIONS MOUNTING Democratic U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein urged the FAA to ground Boeing's 737 MAX 8 fleet. "Until the cause of the crash is known and it's clear that similar risks aren't present in the domestic fleet, I believe all Boeing 737 Max 8 series aircraft operating in the United States should be temporarily grounded," Feinstein wrote. The new MAX 8 variant of the 737, the world's best-selling modern passenger aircraft, has bigger engines designed to useless fuel. It entered service in 2017, and by the end of January Boeing had delivered 350 of the new jets to customers. With another 4,661 on order, and 737 Max 8s could become the workhorses for airlines around the globe for decades. Ethiopian Airlines, which has four other 737 MAX 8 jets,said it was grounding them as a precaution. Gol in Brazil temporarily suspended MAX 8flights, as did Argentina's state airline Aerolineas Argentinas and Mexico's Aeromexico. Singapore Airlines, whose SilkAir brand operates 6Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, said it has temporarily withdrawn its fleet and would re-accommodate affected customers. Other airlines that operate Boeing 737 MAX aircraft to Singapore - China Southern Airlines, Garuda Indonesia, Shandong Airlines and Thai Lion Air - are also affected. The country's Changi Airport said Shandong had cancelled its flight to and from Jinan but other airlines had replaced the jet with another type. China on Monday ordered its airlines to suspend the use of their 737 MAX 8 jets. The country's aviation regulator said it would notify airlines when they could resume flying the jets, after contacting Boeing and the FAA. The current scare could jeopardise a potential commitment by China to buy more Boeing-made aircraft as part of a deal being negotiated to end a trade war with the United States. India's regulator ordered additional maintenance checks on737 MAX 8 aircraft operating in the country and said a review found "no significant concern". Still, major airlines from North America to the Middle East kept flying the 737 MAX on Monday, though Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau said he would not hesitate to take action once the cause of the crash is known. Southwest Airlines Co, which operates the largest fleet of 737 MAX 8s, said it remained confident in the safety of all its Boeing planes even as it fielded queries from customers. "Our customer relations team is responding to these customers individually, emphasizing our friendly, no-change fee policy," the fourth largest U.S. airline said in a statement. Former U.S. Federal Aviation Administration accident investigator Mike Daniel said he believed the decision by regulators to ground the planes was premature. "To me it almost surreal how quickly some of the regulators are just grounding the aircraft without any factual information yet as a result of the investigation," he told Reuters. However, he said more groundings were now likely due to a "snowball effect" unless Boeing or the FAA released more information. (Reuters) Check out these photos of a surprise 10-mile lake that popped up in Death Valley, California Death Valley is knows for a lot of things. Given its morbid moniker by 19th-century gold prospectors who lost colleagues there when heading west, the area has the lowest elevation in North America. The national park is one of the country's driest places, and it boasts the highest official recorded temperature on the planet (134F on July 10, 1913). What it is not known for, however, is lakes which is why the recent appearance of one is so notable. On March 7, photographer Elliott McGucken started on his way to Badwater Basin (pictured above), hoping to photograph vestiges of the recent trains. Due to the flooding though, he was unable to get far ... and instead stumbled upon the massive, pop-up lake near Salt Creek. "It's a surreal feeling seeing so much water in the world's driest place," McGucken told SFGate. "There's an irony even though I couldn't get down to Badwater Basin. Overall, I think these shots are probably more unique." The images show the lake with the Panamint Range and snow-capped Telescope Peak reflected in the water. SF Gate explains that the lake came by way of a storm packed with tropical moisture that soaked Southern California, triggering floods on several of the park's roads. The park service estimates that the lake stretched an expansive 10-miles. In an email to McGucken, a park employee wrote, "I believe we would need aerial photos to accurately determine the size. From the road, it looks like it stretched from approximately Harmony Borax Works to Salt Creek right after the rain, which is a little less than 10 road miles. But, the road does curve a bit, so it's not an entirely accurate guess." Park employees say that a lake this large in this location is rare. And no wonder: Usually the Furnace Creek rain gauge sees a scant 0.3 inches of rain for the entire month of March. In a mere 24 hours last week, the gauge recorded 0.84 inches while the surrounding mountains saw up to 1.5 inches. And if an inch of rain doesn't sound like much, in such an arid place, that's all it takes. "Because water is not readily absorbed in the desert environment, even moderate rainfall can cause flooding in Death Valley," according to meteorologist Chris Dolce. "Flash flooding can happen even where it is not raining. Normally dry creeks or arroyos can become flooded due to rainfall upstream." So what other tricks might the world's hottest place have up its sleeve? The National Park Service provides a hint. "In this below-sea-level basin, steady drought and record summer heat make Death Valley a land of extremes. Yet, each extreme has a striking contrast. Towering peaks are frosted with winter snow. Rare rainstorms bring vast fields of wildflowers..." Superbloom, anyone? Sen. Kamala Harris of California became the first major presidential candidate to ever come out in support of decriminalizing prostitution. I say shes not going far enough. Prostitution should be legalized. Period. End of story. The biggest reason is also the most obvious: People should be allowed to use their bodies as they see fit. If I want to put myself on the market (bids starting at $5) and someone is willing to pay, and no one is being coerced, there should be zero issue. Really, I could end my argument there. Theres nothing I hold more dear than this simple principle: What any adult wants to do, so long as no one is getting hurt, should be allowed. And prostitution falls squarely in that box. Under a legal system of prostitution, youd have to assume the quality control on all ends goes up. The Yelp reviews would be priceless. But really: The women (and lets face it, it will be mostly women) will have legal protections, both small and large. The men will also have protections. There will be layers of protection, literally and figuratively. Besides, criminalizing sex is kinda weird, no? Eight countries in Europe have legalized prostitution, and the world hasnt ended as a result. Its better for the sex workers, better for the johns, better for police, better for everyone. Theres little doubt in my mind that in a few decades time, in all the free countries in the world, prostitution will be legalized. Its the weird mixture of progressive and libertarian that makes it so. Look at the arc of history on all social issues. They all bend toward permissiveness. Our grandkids will laugh at us for living in a time when even discussing this was a thing. So anyway: Five bucks. Any takers? By Steven L. Shields I was talking the other day with a friend in Bangkok. He was complaining about the plight of drivers in that big city. He told me how difficult it was for him to get things done. He said he had four places he needed to go to take care of important business. Because of the traffic, though, he was only able to get to one place out of the four. He was discouraged because he feared it might take two more days to get his tasks carried out. The traffic in Bangkok is famously congested, but big cities around the world all share similar problems. Years ago, on a road trip in Europe, I experienced driving in various settings. The most memorable was spending three days driving around Rome. Parking challenges aside, the traffic there seems unusually chaotic to the outsider. On that same road trip, I was told to avoid driving in Lisbon; the traffic and driving patterns being incomprehensible to an American. I drove there anyway and found it to be easier than Rome. Everyone has their understanding of what is chaotic when it comes to traffic customs and congestion. Korea has its driving customs, too. But those have changed over the past few decades. When I first arrived in Korea, the government was on a campaign to encourage drivers to stay in the painted lanes. Streets in Seoul were a free-for-all. If there was space to fit a car, the driver aggressively took it. These days, the streets and highways of the country are orderly. Living for many years in Kansas City, Missouri, I often chuckled at the daily traffic reports during commute times. Why it might take as long as 15 minutes to get through downtown! Traffic congestion is relative. In the American Midwest, most buildings are no more than two or three stories except for the extreme downtown business areas, where there are a few skyscrapers. Workers commonly take a 45-minute commute from their homes to downtown traveling 25 to 40 kilometers. Of course, they drive a personal car. The lack of population density makes public transport impractical. Kansas City covers about 800 square kilometers, with a population of about 500,000. Seoul is about 600 square kilometers, with a population of about 10 million. One can quickly see the difference. My friend in Bangkok has a good complaint. The city covers 1,500 square kilometers, with a population similar to Seoul. But the public transport is not nearly as extensive as in Korea. Because of the high water table (Bangkok is in a river delta), underground railways are a challenge, so the city is building an elevated train network. The elevated train is great, but not extensive as needed. Lines continue to be built. Traveling through the city by car is difficult. It can take an hour to go a couple of kilometers. On a trip there, I needed to travel from downtown to my hotel. The streets were a gridlocked parking lot, so I took a motorcycle taxi. The ride was pretty hair-raising, as the driver wildly wove in and out of cars on the street. I arrived safely, only to be chastised by friends about how I had foolishly risked my life. I never took a motorcycle taxi again. Seoul's streets and the expressways carry heavy traffic during special seasons and some hours of the day. The city has a marvelous public transit networkto combat the congestion. For pocket change, I can travel across the city by subway or bus quickly, safely, and comfortably. I like the subway because it's fast and efficient. A friend prefers the bus because there are fewer steps to climb up and down and the rider can get a view of the city. I use the bus sometimes, and I enjoy looking at the shops and buildings as we travel. There are some wonderfully artistic and beautiful buildings in Seoul. Sometimes I want to get off the bus to take a closer look. There are some interesting sculpture installations at many of the large buildings, too. (I know, there is some controversy about the art). Yes, big cities have traffic congestion and parking challenges, but in Seoul, and throughout Korea, there are some great ways to beat the congestion and reduce stress by leaving the driving to a professional. Steven L. Shields has lived in Korea for many years, beginning in the 1970s, again in the 1990s and into the 2000s. He served as copy editor of The Korea Times in 1977. He is a retired clergyman and vice president of the Royal Asiatic Society-Korea Branch. He can be reached at slshields@gmail.com. By Gwynne Dyer The slogans of the "Arab Spring" are being heard again in the Arab world. "The people want the fall of the regime," chant the protesters in Sudan, where almost three months of popular demonstrations challenge the power of long-ruling dictator Omar al-Bashir. He acknowledges the parallels himself, condemning the demos as "an attempt to copy the so-called Arab spring for Sudan." At the other end of the Arab world, in Algeria, the demos began only last month, when President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in power for the last 20 years, announced that he will run for a fifth term in the forthcoming elections. He is 82 years old and so badly affected by a stroke six years ago that he can hardly walk or talk. Bouteflika's last public speech was in 2014, and the most common poster in the street protests just shows a wheelchair with a big red X over it. As Algerian writer Kamel Daoud put it, by offering a candidate "who is almost dead," the regime is showing its contempt for the young people in Algeria (where more than 30 percent of people aged under 30 are unemployed). The real reason for putting up Bouteflika once again is that the various elements of "le pouvoir" (the power), as everybody call the regime, could not agree on any other candidate. But it is an insult to the public, and the regime is frightened by the reaction. Algerian Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia praised the demonstrators for using strictly nonviolent tactics (as in the time of the Arab Spring), citing an incident where they gave roses to the security forces policing the protests. But, he pointed out, the nonviolent pro-democracy demonstrations in Syria in 2011, which triggered a ghastly civil war, also "started with exchanges of roses." So is the Arab Spring coming back so soon? Probably not. You couldn't find two Arab countries with much less in common. Algeria is a reasonably well-educated, middle-income country; Sudan is a very poor country where the literacy rate is actually falling. Sudanese are black; Algerians are white. The varieties of popular Arabic spoken in Algeria and Sudan are mutually incomprehensible. But they do have two things in common. They are both dictatorships of very long standing. The National Liberation Front has ruled Algeria since 1962, with Bouteflika as its front man for the past 20 years. Bashir came to power in a military coup 30 years ago. And both countries largely missed out on the original Arab Spring: There were scattered demonstrations, quickly appeased or crushed, but nothing more. As in the Arab Spring, the protests this time are really fuelled by falling living standards. A dictatorship that was tolerated while living standards were rising becomes intolerable when there are not enough jobs and it's getting hard to put food on the table. In Sudan this time, it was a cut in the subsidy for bread that set off the protests, but that was the last of many cuts over the past decade. Sudan lost three-quarters of its oil income when South Sudan became a separate country in 2011, and the regime can no longer afford to buy the population off with subsidies of various sorts. Algeria still has its oil, but has been hurt badly by the sustained fall in oil prices since 2014. This doesn't mean that Sudanese and Algerians would love their rulers if there was more money in their pockets. They have never more than tolerated them, but the cost of trying to do something about the situation seemed too high. Now it doesn't seem that high any more, at least not compared to the alternative. The protests in Sudan may actually succeed in unseating Bashir, although not necessarily the military-dominated regime he leads. The regime in Algeria has already made a key concession, with Bouteflika promising to hold a referendum on a new constitution and then call fresh elections (in which he will not run) before the end of his next five-year term. The regime is hoping that will be enough to let it stay in power, and it may be right. Algerians are deeply scarred by the terrible civil war of the 1990s, when Islamists waged a 10-year campaign of terror after their impending victory in a free election was cancelled by the military. People remain frightened of anything that could bring back that time, maybe even including too-free elections. And nobody else in the Arab world is ready to pick up the torch just yet. The Syrian and Yemeni civil wars, both triggered by the popular, initially nonviolent revolutions of the Arab Spring, may finally be stumbling toward an end, but the whole tragic sequence of events is still too fresh in people's minds for them to want to try again. Gwynne Dyer (gwynne763121476@aol.com) has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years. He is the author of "Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy (and Work)." editorial@tribune.com Parvesh Sharma Tribune News Service Barnala, March 12 Family members of a Prisoner of War (PoW) lodged in a Pakistan Jail on Tuesday wrote a letter to the President, seeking his help to take up the matter with the Pakistan authorities. At present, there are 55 PoWs from India lodged in various jails of Pakistan. Maha Singh from Karmgarh village, son of Sepoy Lal Singh, has never seen his father after the 1965 war with Pakistan. After that, he had gone missing. Initially, the family thought that he had died, but in August 2013, Satish Kumar, a resident of Ferozepur, informed them that his father was in the Kila Attack Frontier Jail. Satish has spent 12 years in a Pakistan jail. On Tuesday, family members and we wrote a letter the President with all details and requested him to take up the matter with Pakistan for the release of all 53 PoWs said, Gurjinder Singh Sidhu, state chief of the ex-servicemen wing of the SAD. Maha Singh has also served in the Army and retired as a Head Constable in 2001. My mother has struggled a lot in her life. I was born in 1966 and whenever we came to know about any news of PoWs, we always try to get any information about my father. But nothing positive has happened. The release of Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman has again revived our hopes. Hopefully, after the forthcoming elections, the new Indian Government will take up the matter with the Pakistan government, he added. Maha Singh added that he, along with some other relatives of PoWs, has filed a petition in the Punjab and Haryana High Court, seeking its intervention for the release of PoWs. The next date of hearing is in April, he said. We have all required evidence to prove that our relatives are lodged in different jails of Pakistan. In the coming hearings, we will share all evidences, he said. rchopra@tribunemail.com Hyderabad, March 13 Officials of the Central GST have unearthed an alleged tax fraud of Rs 224 crore and detected fake invoices worth Rs 1,289 crore by a group of eight companies involved in the trade of iron and steel products. A key suspect involved in the racket had been arrested and Rs 19.75 crore was recovered from him, a press release from the Hyderabad Central GST Commissionerate said on Tuesday night. Several documents were recovered during the simultaneous searches conducted at the residential and business premises of these companies on Tuesday night. The companies had been generating fake invoices without actual supply of TMT bars, MS bars, MS flat products among others, and were passing on the input tax credit to other taxpayers within the same group, besides some other taxpayers since July 2017, it said. The fake invoices generated by them involved about Rs 1,289 crore of value and input tax credit of about Rs 224 crore. Five out of these taxpayers are operating from the same address and many of the Directors/Partners/Proprietors of these firms/companies are common, the release said. These companies were also found to be indulging in circular fake trading to inflate their turnover, besides supplying such fake invoices and e-way bills to some others, the GST officials said. Investigation, prima facie, reveals that the above modus operandi is also being adopted to defraud the banks for claiming ineligible credit facilities or Letters of Credit (LCs), without any collateral securities, it added. PTI editorial@tribune.com Sandeep Rana Tribune News Service Chandigarh, March 12 The PGI wont have a helipad anytime soon. The proposal for building a helipad for speedier transportation of critical patients has been put on the back burner for now. Officials said the proposal was never in writing and had not been sent to the Centre for approval. Our first priority is to build several health centres, including a mother and child care centre, a neuroscience centre and other recently approved projects. After that, we will see to the helipad project as it is not in the first priority list, the PGI Director, Prof Jagat Ram, told Chandigarh Tribune. The proposal, which has been hanging fire since 2015, is aimed at lifting critical patients by an air ambulance from far-flung areas such as Lahaul and Spiti and border areas near Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir. The idea for making a helipad at the PGI for emergency cases was floated in 2009. Thereafter, it was again taken up in 2015 and 2017, but now the PGI authorities are in no hurry to expedite it in view of other ongoing projects. It was earlier planned to be built atop the building of the Advanced Trauma Centre. However, the authorities are now considering building it in Sarangpur where the Union Cabinet approved a proposal for the transfer of 50.76 acres to the premier hospital last month. An open ground near the Advanced Paediatric Centre is also being explored for the project in the future. The project has been under consideration for long. However, there no document or proposal has been sent to the Centre. It does not seem to be materialising anytime soon, said an officer. MK Bhadrakumar MK Bhadrakumar Former Ambassador The low-key visit by Foreign Secretary (FS) Vijay Gokhale to Washington and his talks with the US State Department officials on Monday, with focus on terrorism, signals that the Trump administration is caught in a cleft stick it wants to stay out of the India-Pakistan conundrum. The readout of the FS call on State Secretary Mike Pompeo said the two officials discussed the importance of bringing those responsible for the (Pulwama) attack to justice and the urgency of Pakistan taking meaningful action against terrorist groups operating in its soil. But it was silent on any concrete step by Washington to help India. Pompeos predecessor Rex Tillerson was willing to use far tougher language during his visit to Delhi last July. Terror havens will not be tolerated, he said at a joint press conference with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj. Tillerson said he had asked the Pakistani leadership to take action against terror groups and said an enhancement in their capabilities might pose a threat to the government in Islamabad. Not that it made any difference to the Pakistani policies but he was willing, nonetheless, to stand up and be counted as Indias ally. Of course, this is not a matter of style between the burly Texan and his Bible-reading successor of Italian ancestry. The point is, much has changed in the past eight months. The US-Pakistan-India triangle has transformed under the magical touch of the Afghan endgame. It wasnt probably a coincidence that the day before Pompeo received the FS in Washington, Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said Pakistan-US relations were improving. To quote Qureshi, Our relations with the US are going to take a new turn. US-Taliban peace dialogues are underway in Doha and positive results are expected India wants Pakistans isolation on diplomatic level but it has failed. Washington took note of Qureshis upbeat remarks and it probably prompted a call to him by US national security adviser John Bolton on Monday. At any rate, all that Pompeo would tell the FS was, according to the US readout, he affirmed that the US stands with the people and Government of India in the fight against terrorism. The MEA press took note that Secretary Pompeo expressed his understanding of Indias concerns regarding cross-border terrorism. They (Pompeo and FS) agreed that Pakistan needs to take concerted action to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure and to deny safe haven to all terrorist groups in its territory. They also agreed that those who support or abet terrorism in any form should be held accountable. What emerges out of all this is that, firstly, the US will not want to be seen bandwagoning with India to browbeat Pakistan, since at the present juncture, it has its own chestnuts roasting in a woodburner in Rawalpindi, and self-interests come first. Secondly, an India-Pakistan military escalation is to be prevented at all costs, which means that dialogue between the two adversaries is the only way out. Three, importantly, Washington has severe limitations in coercing Beijing (or Moscow) to shift its stance on Masood Azhar in a direction that might negatively impact Pakistani interests, but below that threshold, it will do what it can to promote the Indian project in the UN Security Council 1267 committee when it comes up today (March 13). However, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesmans sharp remarks in Beijing, while replying to an Indian reporter regarding Azhar, left hardly any scope for optimism. The Wuhan spirit has evaporated. Nonetheless, the Chinese truculence should be a rude awakening and prompt us to rethink the Azhar project. It is going to be diminishing returns from now on. Beyond as an act of atonement for the BJP governments abject surrender of Azhar in Kandahar some 20 years ago, with a VIP escort to boot, the ongoing enterprise in the UNSC never really made sense. What do we hope to gain by doggedly pursuing it? There is a big picture that has emerged in the past month since the Pulwama attack Indias growing diplomatic isolation. Even in the New Cold War conditions, Washington is in unison with Moscow and Beijing to avert the immediate danger of an India-Pakistan war and to ensure that the Pulwama-Balakot chapter gets closed at the earliest. (The Russian media already estimates that the chapter is over.) For Washington, there is great urgency to move on with life. In fact, very little has been divulged about Boltons call to Qureshi. The scheduling of Imran Khans visit to Washington seems to be under discussion. What comes as a total surprise is in regard of the Russian attitude. Moscows mediation offer is not the point here, but its demonstrative attempt to be neutral. The mega multi-billion dollar arms deals that the Modi government presented to Russian vendors, defying the threat of US sanctions, have apparently not placated the Kremlin. Curiously, the Kremlin-funded news channel RT featured a half-hour interview only last week with former Pakistani foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar fulminating against Modi, Indian media and politics, and Hindutva meta-nationalism. Why are Russians so mighty upset? It must have something to do with money. Is it about Essar Steel not going to the Russian bidder? Or, about Saudi Aramco likely trumping Gazprom in the race for the highly lucrative Indian retail energy market? Or, about some pending arms deal? No matter the notorious Russian avarice, Moscows choice to balance between India and Pakistan when Delhi needed its support most is the unkindest cut of all. ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM Eighteen terrorists, 14 from the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), have been gunned down over three weeks in the Valley. These include the second-in-command and key commanders of the terror outfit that planned and executed the lethal February 14 Pulwama attack, killing over 40 CRPF personnel. Violence begets violence and there was a response which came fast, and expectedly, all guns blazing. Not losing any time, the Ministry of Home Affairs ordered the immediate movement of the armed forces and the deployment of an additional 100 companies of the paramilitary forces in the Valley. There was pressure to deliver: Jaish operatives had to be wiped out in the Valley. Simultaneously, they had to be eliminated across the border. What followed was the daring success of the February 26 airstrikes unleashed on JeM training camps at Balakot. After the Pulwama attack, with an iron hand and a new resolve, the security forces have determinedly dealt a major blow to JeM, taking out key conspirators one by one. The Sunday encounter saw the killing of 25-year-old main Jaish coordinator of the Pulwama attack, besides a Pakistani national and the groups operational chief. Operations will continue till we eliminate all of them, declared the Army during a joint briefing. In attendance were the IGP and the CRPF IG (Operations) in Kashmir. The coming together of the forces on intelligence sharing, seamless communication and rapid action is clearly a reason for the successful operations that have liquidated Jaish leadership in the Valley. Hizbul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Taiba are on the radar, too. The objective being that there is no recurrence of a Pulwama or Uri. In what underpins Indias declaration on Balakot, a videotape quotes the PoK police and civilian population as claiming that four Pakistani soldiers were killed in the airstrikes and infrastructure had, indeed, been damaged. Foreign media had in a rush undermined Indias claim of having effected substantial damage, but did admit later to limited assessment. The IAFs claims of success stand vindicated. Balakot action has struck the message home: India will not think twice before penetrating the borders of its adversaries to avenge the killings of its soldiers. editorial@tribune.com Pratibha Chauhan Tribune News Service Shimla, March 12 Senior Congress leaders from Himachal will hold a crucial meeting in Chandigarh tomorrow to shortlist the names of possible candidates for the Lok Sabha elections ahead of the AICC Screening Committee meeting in Delhi on March 17. Even though the State Election Committee has already forwarded the names of 41 candidates who had applied for ticket to the AICC short listing of the names is yet to be done. Sources said that the meeting will be held in the presence of AICC in-charge Rajni Patil, co-in-charge Gurkirat Kotli, Congress president Kuldeep Singh Rathore, Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader Mukesh Agnihotri, former Congress president Sukhwinder Sukhu, former minister GS Bali, among others. The high command is keen that stalwarts like Virbhadra Singh, Mukesh Agnihotri and Asha Kumari should contest elections rather than fielding relatively weak candidates, said sources. Even though there is reluctance on the part of Virbhadra and Agnihotri to contest the high command wants to field the strongest possible leaders. Sources said that Patil is keen to hold deliberations with the senior leaders to take their feedback and forge consensus on the names. This will result in unanimity on the names and eliminate chances of any undercutting by disgruntled leaders, said a senior leader. Even though no formal screening of the 41 applications received has been done the views of the members of the State Election Committee have been taken. Each one of them was asked to provide first three preferences of names from each of the four Lok Sabha seats who they feel would give a formidable fight to the BJP. Party sources also said that the high command was open to field sitting MLAs so that the Congress can win back the seats it lost in previous parliamentary elections. Besides, the ticket can be given to anybody, irrespective of whether he has applied for it or not. The consensus among the party is that fielding Virbhadra from Mandi would prove to be a tactical move as the former chief minister will get confined there to ensure victory. Besides, it is felt that Agnihotri will prove to be the strongest candidate from Hamirpur even though names Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu and Col Dharmender Patyal (retd) are also doing the rounds. In case of Kangra, names of Asha Kumari, GS Bali and Sudhir Sharma are doing the rounds. However, party will have to tread cautiously to avoid chances of under cutting due to intense factionalism in Kangra. The probables The consensus is on fielding Virbhadra from Mandi. It is being felt that Agnihotri will be the strongest candidate from Hamirpur even though names Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu and of Col Dharmender Patyal (retd) are also doing the rounds. The names of veteran leaders like Asha Kumari, GS Bali and Sudhir Sharma are mentioned from the Kangra segment. From the Shimla (reserved) segment, names of Col Dhani Ram Shandil (retd) and Vinod Sultanpuri are doing the rounds. In Chamba, 19 booths hyper-sensitive Chamba: Nineteen polling stations have been declared hyper-sensitive and 88 sensitive out of the total 617 polling stations in Chamba district, said District Election Officer (DEO) Harikesh Meena, who is also Deputy Commissioner of Chamba. The DEO said there were total 3,62,101 electors which included 1,77,914 females in five Assembly constituencies of the district. He said that 24 polling stations had been set up. Tepa is the highest polling station. OC editorial@tribune.com Dipender Manta Tribune News Service Mandi, March 12 Lobbying for party ticket has become hectic among Congress and the BJP contenders in Mandi parliamentary constituency after declaration of the Lok Sabha election dates by the Election Commission of India. New faces are keen to take a plunge in the Lok Sabha elections to gauge their popularity among masses. Many of them have already expressed their desire to contest the election. In Congress seven contenders had applied for party ticket in advance, though the party top brass is contemplating fielding the winning candidate from Mandi. In the BJP, a tussle for party ticket is going on between sitting MP Ramswaroop Sharma and Ashray Sharma, son of Power Minister Anil Sharma. Sources told The Tribune that Ashray Sharma is trying to exploit the political connection of his grandfather, former Telecom Minister Pandit Sukh Ram to grab party ticket directly from the Central BJP leadership because in state there is dissent among BJP cadres in the state over his name. BJP leader Maheshwar Singh, scion of Kullu Royal family, is lobbying hard to get party ticket. He is, however, not on a strong wicket as he lost the Assembly election in 2017. He is close aide of Union Health Minister JP Nadda. A victory is very important for the BJP because Mandi is home district of Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur. Congress workers of Mandi parliamentary constituency want former Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh as Congress candidate for the Lok Sabha elections. The party believes that he will be a strong contender to defeat the BJP. However, Virbhadra has not yet given his nod to contest the election. Party sources said that the Congress High Command will try to persuade Virbhadra Singh to contest the elections from here. If Virbhadra remains reluctant, a decision can be taken in favour of senior Congress leader Kaul Singh Thakur. editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Shimla, March 12 The Himachal Pradesh Congress Committee (HPCC) today launched its Jan Chetna Yatra to mobilise party cadres for the ensuing Lok Sabha elections. Addressing HPCC secretaries and mandal presidents of the Shimla parliamentary segment, HPCC president Kuldeep Rathore said the workers must make the rural populace aware of the failures of the Modi government. The workers should launch a door-to-door campaign and highlight the failed promises made by the government so that they can make the right choice, Rathore said. The rally was flagged off by Sunita Devi, wife of a martyr Garja Ram from Bilaspur, who died in 2000 in Srinagar. Rathore said the nation could not forget the sacrifices made by valiant soldiers and would always remain indebted to their families. On the contrary, secret files pertaining to defence purchases have gone missing from the Defence Ministry, he said. The 10-day Jan Chetna campaign would be undertaken in all four Lok Sabha segments. The yatra will be led by AICC in-charge Rajni Patil in Hamirpur and CLP leader Mukesh Agnihotri in Kangra. If voted to power, the Congress will treat the Army and paramilitary forces martyrs on a par, the HPCC said. The success of the rally addressed by Rahul Gandhi in Kangra has rattled the BJP, which was confident of the partys poor show. Winds of change are blowing across the country and people want change, which only the Congress can bring, he said. Congress MLA Col Dhani Ram Shandil (retd) accused the BJP of politicising the action by the Army. The Modi regime made a major cut in the defence budget, which resulted in great hardships for the armed forces. The Congress has always honoured and taken care of soldiers, ex-servicemen and their families, Rathore added. Opposition floor leader slams Moon's efforts for peace Liberty Korea Party (LKP) floor leader Rep. Na Kyung-won has come under fire for scathing remarks about President Moon Jae-in's North Korea policy. During a speech at the National Assembly Tuesday, Na claimed the Moon administration was deceiving the people by continuously explaining that North Korea is actively pursuing denuclearization. After the collapse of the U.S.-North Korea summit in Vietnam last month, Pyongyang is reportedly rebuilding a missile site it had begun to dismantle last year. Amid such reports, some South Koreans are beginning to have more doubts about North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's sincerity toward denuclearization, particularly as he continues to be relentless about the relief of sanctions against his country while refusing to commit to more concrete steps to denuclearize. She also criticized Moon's recent appointment of Kim Yeon-chul, head of the Korea Institute for National Unification, as unification minister. Kim has been a proponent of lifting sanctions and has shown eagerness toward economic projects with North Korea despite the rising concerns that it is not the time to pursue them. Against such a backdrop, some South Koreans cannot help but side with Na's negative views about the Moon administration's policy. But as floor leader of the main opposition, Na's speech contained serious flaws. The most controversial moment of the speech came when she called Moon "chief spokesman for Kim." The remark triggered an uproar among the lawmakers of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) and Na had to pause her speech due to a racket among the rival parties. The description of Moon as Kim's spokesperson triggered an angry response from Cheong Wa Dae. In a statement, the presidential office strongly condemned Na's remarks, calling them an insult not just to the President, but also to the people's desire for peace on the Korean Peninsula. She explained later she was quoting foreign media reports when she used the term "Kim's spokesperson." It is true that some foreign media outlets have described Moon as someone who speaks up for Kim in an effort to persuade the international community of Kim's sincerity for doing his part for peace on the peninsula. But domestically, such a term should not be used to describe the head of state. The ruling party has brought the case to the National Assembly's special committee on ethics. Na should apologize for mocking the President and his endeavors to open a new path of peace for the two Koreas. Na's speech was full of malicious criticisms on not just North Korea, but all the main policies of the Moon administration. The main opposition will not be able to regain public support if it fixates on old politics instead of providing effective policy alternatives. harinder@tribunemail.com Aruna Singh Are you interested in biology, medicine and disease prevention and also want to figure out how diseases affect the human body? Then a career in histology may be the right choice for you. Since laboratory tests have become increasingly important in the detection, diagnosis, and treatment of many illnesses and diseases. Histology, a field closely related to cellular biology, focuses on the microscopic study of the human body, animal and plant tissues. Work profile Histology technicians and histo-technologists are specialisd medical lab workers. They play a crucial role in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases by turning body tissue samples into microscope slides. When they prepare the slides with a patient's tissue, they work with dyes and chemicals to make abnormalities visible with a microscope. Histologists examine how cells process various nutrients, interact with other cells and get rid of waste. They also look at how abnormal or malignant cells function so that they can prevent or treat diseases. They will also be responsible for cleaning the equipment and general infection control. Work environment A majority of histologic technicians work in pathology laboratories in hospitals and clinics. These people are also work in medical or research laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, doctor's offices, or government agencies. Individuals usually work a 40-hour week and may be required to work nights or weekends depending on a place of employment. Education requirements Sometimes, a diploma and certificate course is the minimum education required to become a histology assistant. However, many employers prefer those with an associate's or bachelor's degree. Common majors for this profession include life science and medical laboratory technology. Histo-technician education directly prepares individuals for jobs, and students may be able to increase their future employment opportunities by working part-time in a laboratory while attending school. Remuneration Like most other professions, the earning potential of a histology technician increases with time and experience. While salaries vary according to the employer and location of employment, the minimum salary for the histology technician can start from Rs 15,000 per month. Skill set These technicians frequently work directly with patients, pathologists, insurance providers and other medical staff, which require the ability to communicate in a pleasant, knowledgeable and tactful manner. A histology technologist needs to be extremely patient and careful to assist in the identification of abnormalities in the tissue sample. Individuals interested in histology should be detail oriented and be able to work as a team. Safety precautions must be taken when working with potentially infectious samples. Histology technician should also have excellent organisational and office skills, including those associated with filing, computer data entry and recordkeeping. Institute watch Christian Medical College, Vellore www.cmch-vellore.edu Delhi Paramedical and Management Institute www.dpmiindia.com Osmania Medical College, Hyderabad www.osmaniamedicalcollege.org Gajra Raja Medical College, Gwalior www.grmcgwalior.org The writer is Principal, Delhi Paramedical and Management Institute harinder@tribunemail.com Pervin Malhotra email your queries to careers@tribunemail.com Q.After completing my Class XII (PCM), I have taken admission in BCom. Will it be possible for me to become an Air Force Pilot or Officer? Jaspreet Bali A.As a matter of fact, women graduates (any discipline) with maths and physics in +2 can join the flying wing of the Indian Air Force through the Short Service Commission which has now been extended to 14 years i.e.an initial period of 10 years, extendable by 4 years. While women engineers have been serving as ground duty officers as well as fixed wing aircraft and helicopter pilots, they havent been part of the air crew. Actually, the Flight Engineers branch was only opened to women officers in 2018. Just recently, Flight Lt Hina Jaiswal from Chandigarh became the first woman flight engineer in the IAF. As a member of the flight crew, flight engineers monitor and operate complex aircraft systems. Posted in a helicopter unit, be prepared to undertake fling missions in varied geographical and climatic conditions ranging from Siachen Glacier to coastal regions and burning hot deserts. Not just that, young men and women between 20-25 years who did not have science in Computer XII or at the bachelors or post-graduate level are eligible to enrol for the Ground Duty Officer course for entry into administration, logistics, accounts or education wings of the Air Force. Check out: www.careerairforce.nic.in Q.I will be taking my Boards this year. I am very keen to work in the hotel industry, particularly in a five star hotel. I am smart and can speak English, but due to financial problems at home, I may not be able to pursue a 3 or 4-year course in hotel management. Is there any other way I can achieve my goal? Yash Khaneja A.Yes there is! The Oberoi Groups STEP (Systematic Training & Education Programme) may be just the thing for you. This 3-year programme which commences in August gives you an opportunity to acquire specific and specialised training and knowledge in 4 operations departments: Front Office operations Housekeeping operations Food & Beverage service operations Kitchen Operations (Indian & Western) Alongside, students pursue a Bachelor of Tourism degree from IGNOU. Eligibility: you just need to have completed Class XII. No percentage is mandated. Additionally, youll be enrolled in Bachelors in Tourism Studies (BTS) from IGNOU (assistance is provided in the form of a dedicated study day once a week, IGNOU fees, reference books and additional three weeks leave to take the exams. Besides a monthly stipend, students are provided accommodation, meals on duty, uniform and medical insurance). Selection to the programme comprises 3 Rounds, each focusing on different aspects between 4-16 April 2019 (depending on the test centre requested) Round 1: Candidates are evaluated for grooming, poise & spoken English. Round 2: One-on-one meeting with a faculty led panel to know the candidate better and assess aptitude for hospitality. Round 3: Activities and questionnaires including a final interview with panel (May be on a different day & city than the 2 previous rounds). The application process for these programmes which begins in October each year is still open. Check out the details & fill in the application form online: www.oberoigroup.com/careers/join_us/step.htm?Step=Admission The Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) - School of Vocational Education & Taj Hotels offer a 3 year Bachelor of Vocation Degree in Hotel Mgt (B.Voc), that combines academics with on-the-job training to equip you to become a hospitality professional. Eligibility: Class 12 class pass (in all subjects) Age: 17 21 years Youll be awarded a BVoc degree from TISS-SVE upon completion of 6 sems The fee will be provided as scholarship by Taj along with surplus for pocket expenses Deserving students will be offered career placements with Taj upon graduation Youre not required to fill any bond. You are free to pursue any opportunities coming your way Youll receive Practical learning in Taj hotels in Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Goa Theory classes in TISS Centres in above cities Also, check out the WELCOMLEAD undergraduate programme that develops young professionals to deliver exceptional hospitality service. Wwholly financed by ITC Ltd, the programme includes a handsome stipend and a structured academic & on the job training curriculum. The program is conducted at all ITC prefixed hotels (ITC Hotels). Trainees become get a Bachelor of Arts (Tourism Studies) degree from IGNOU) apart from getting the WelcomLEAD Certification & experience from ITC Hotels. Details: www.itchotels.in/hmi/programmes/welcomlead.html shriaya.dutt@tribuneindia.com Mumbai, March 13 Actors Akshay Kumar and Ayushmann Khurrana, on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's behest, have urged people to cast their vote in the upcoming Lok Sabha Election 2019. Indirectly quoting films like Ayushmann's "Dum Laga Ke Haisha" and Akshay's "Toilet: Ek Prem Katha", On Tuesday Modi tweeted: "Dear Akshay Kumar, Bhumi Pednekar and Ayushmann Khurrana, The power of a vote is immense and we all need to improve awareness on its importance. Thoda 'Dum Lagaiye' aur voting ko 'Ek Superhit Katha' banaiye." Dear @akshaykumar, @bhumipednekar and @ayushmannk, The power of a vote is immense and we all need to improve awareness on its importance. Thoda Dum Lagaiye aur Voting ko Ek Superhit Katha banaiye. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) 13 March 2019 After this, Akshay replied: "True hallmark of a democracy lies in people's participation in the electoral process. Voting has to be a superhit prem katha between our nation and its voters." Well said @narendramodi ji. The true hallmark of a democracy lies in peoples participation in the electoral process. Voting has to be a superhit prem katha between our nation and its voters :) https://t.co/rwhwdhXj1S Akshay Kumar (@akshaykumar) 13 March 2019 Ayushmann wrote: "Honourable PM Narendra Modiji, as aware citizens and opinion leaders it is the duty of every public figure to spread this awareness. We need to vote in maximum numbers and restore faith in the world's largest democracy. Jai Hind." Honourable PM @narendramodi ji, as aware citizens and opinion leaders it is the duty of every public figure to spread this awareness. We need to vote in maximum numbers and restore faith in the worlds largest democracy. Jai Hind. https://t.co/IcMU9AQA1w Ayushmann Khurrana (@ayushmannk) 13 March 2019 Earlier this week, actor Rajkummar Rao had also tweeted a video in which he said that people can change the shape of the future by choosing the right people by voting. He wrote: "Voting gives us the power to choose who is going to run the country. There is no point complaining because it is us who have chosen them. Voting day is the only day when we are the most powerful. We can change the shape of our future by choosing the right people". The Lok Sabha elections are scheduled to be held in seven phases from April 11 to May 19. Counting of votes will take place on May 23. IANS rchopra@tribunemail.com Coimbatore, March 13 Six members of a family, including two minor girls, drowned after their car fell into a canal near Pollachi here in the early hours of Wednesday, police said. The accident occurred when the family, hailing from Masakalipalayam in the city, was returning after visiting the Palani hill shrine. The car plunged into the canal at Kedimedu, after the driver lost control of it, they said. Senior district and police officials had rushed to the spot and operations are on to retrieve the bodies, they added. PTI uttara@tribuneindia.com Ananya Panda Tribune News Service New Delhi, March 13 Aam Aadmi Party has accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of harassing employees of call centres the party has hired to inform voters about names being deleted from electoral lists. As the party prepares to mount an aggressive campaign against rivals BJP in the mammoth Lok Sabha elections next month, the party claims the BJP, as well as the partys national president Amit Shah, is using the Delhi Police to harassing employees of call centres to intimidate AAP before elections. The development comes in the back of Election Commission of Indias order to take police action against misleading calls about voter deletion. AAP Member of Parliament Sanjay Singh, who, along with some other party workers are learnt to have courted arrest at Sunlight Police Station in south east Delhi, has asked Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora to take action against police officers supposedly involved. AAP national convenor Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi, said in a tweet on Wednesday: We enrolled the names of the people in the voters list so your Amit Shah is intimidating to close down the call centres. The Delhi Police at his behest is threatening. Stop your Amit Shah and Delhi Police (from doing so) or your appeal to voters is false (sic). Kejriwals tweet was in response to the prime minister asking for voter awareness programmes to be strengthened to encourage people to vote. AAP has accused the BJP of deleting peoples names from voters lists. On Tuesday, Two senior leaders of the partyAtishi and Raghav Chadhamet officials of Delhi Police over complaints of harassment. Chadha, who spoke to the press gathered outside police headquarters on Tuesday, claimed the BJP had been trying to destroy AAP" in the past four years. "The people who fund AAP are being harassed by authorities and they are being probed because they support AAP. The agency which AAP uses for ensuring fair elections is being harassed too. This is because BJP is scared about it," Chadha said. Chadha, in a series of tweets, lashed out at Delhi Police and the BJP. "BJP got more than 30 lakh votes deleted in Delhi and when Aam Aadmi Party started talking about this issue in the media the Election Commission removed this list from their website!," she said in a tweet. "Aam Aadmi Party went door-to-door to check this list and found wrongful voter deletions on a very large scale. We then hired a call centre to inform voters about their names being deleted from voter list," she said. Atishi meanwhile claimed voter deletion was BJPs strategy to help get an advantage in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. "Voter deletion is a strategy that is used by the BJP in elections! This is exactly what happened in Telangana, where it was brought to light by badminton player Jwala Gutta, whose name was wrongfully deleted from voter list," she tweeted on Tuesday. "The BJP is now worried that their strategy is being exposed! So they are now using Delhi Police to intimidate the call centres that have been hired by Aam Aadmi Party to inform voters about voter deletion. Call centres hired by Aam Aadmi Party are being harassed and intimidated by Delhi Police; they are being called everyday to the Crime Branch for questioning. They are now being taken for questioning to police headquarters," she alleged. "Since BJP's strategy of voter deletion has been exposed, they are now trying to use Delhi Police to harass call centres! When Aam Aadmi Party is saying openly that we have hired the call centres to inform voters, then why are call centres being called for questioning?" Atishi said in another tweet. "BJP knows that they are going to lose in the upcoming general elections, so now they are trying to intimidate call centres who are working with opposition party," she said. "If BJP and Delhi Police think that anything illegal has been done, then why don't they question Aam Aadmi Party? Why are they trying to intimidate call centres working with Aam Aadmi Party? Is it so that call centres get scared of working with opposition parties," she said in another tweet. The Election Commission of India had asked Delhi Police to take "necessary action" against people making misleading phone calls over voter deletion, leading to an FIR in the case. This came after the BJP met Chief Election Commissioner Arora accusing AAP of making such phone calls. A senior police official claimed on Tuesday that police were investigating the case and questioning call centre employees about the calls they made about voter lists. The developments come in the backdrop of AAPs allegations that the BJP leadership had manipulated voter lists through the Election Commission. The party claims that the BJP has had names lakhs of voters, especially belonging to poorvanchali and trader communities as well as minorities, deleted from voters lists in Delhi fearing backlash of its various policy decisions. Both BJP and Election Commission deny the allegations. With PTI rchopra@tribunemail.com Washington, March 13 India and the United States on Tuesday called for Pakistan to address global concerns regarding terrorism, including that emanating from across the border. The concern was raised in a statement by the Indian Embassy here after Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale and his American counterpart Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale held Foreign Office Consultations at the Foggy Bottom headquarters of the State Department. Both sides called on Pakistan to meaningfully address the concerns of the international community on terrorism, including cross-border terrorism, the statement said. Reaffirming their commitment to the Indo-US Strategic Partnership, the two diplomats reviewed progress made since the Ministerial 2+2 meeting last September and discussed ways to further expand cooperation. While cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region formed an important part of their deliberations, they also discussed counterterrorism cooperation and a range of global and regional issues of mutual interest, including the current situation in Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran and Venezuela, the State Department said in a readout of the meeting. They affirmed the vitality of the US-India strategic partnership and the importance of joint leadership to strengthen the rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region, the State Department said. The Indo-Pacific is a biogeographic region, comprising the Indian Ocean and the western and central Pacific Ocean, including the South China Sea. During the meeting, Gokhale and Hale affirmed their support for increased cooperation to include advancing initiatives undertaken as part of the 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue process. Recognising that the US and India share complementary visions for the Indo-Pacific, they agreed to deepen cooperation towards their joint goals in the region, including in conjunction with other Indo-Pacific partners, the State Department said. According to the Indian Embassy, the two officials exchanged views on building convergence in the Indo-Pacific and agreed to work with each other and regional partners to promote inclusivity, stability, peace and prosperity in the region. PTI amansharma@tribunemail.com New Delhi, March 13 The National Green Tribunal on Wednesday directed the Rajasthan government to conduct a complete medical test of villagers in Nagaur district who have been affected due to air pollution caused by stone crushers. A bench of Justice Raghuvendra S Rathore directed the director of medical health, Government of Rajasthan, to constitute a team of at least three doctors from Jaipur, in consultation with the principal of Sawai Man Singh medical college and hospital, relating to pulmonary disease. The team so constituted shall immediately visit the villages namely Koliya, Naka ke Dhani, Nozalo ke Dhani and Bandolai ke Dhani, in Tehsil Didwana, District Nagaur and conduct a complete medical examination and prepare a report of all the persons affected, the bench said. The said team should inform in advance the Tehsildar, Tehsil Didwana, about the date of their visit. The report of the joint committee of medical experts should be submitted through the Director Medical Health within three weeks, the bench also comprising expert member S S Gabrayal said. The tribunal also directed the environment secretary to comply with the recommendations made by a joint inspection team of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Central Pollution Control Board and the Rajasthan Pollution Control Committee and submit a report before the next date of hearing. The NGT had earlier rapped the Rajasthan government for its failure to curb pollution caused by stone crushers in the states Nagaur district and sought a report on their functioning. The tribunal was hearing a plea by local resident Bhanwara Ram, seeking implementation of September 2, 2015 order of the NGT, which had directed the closure of illegal stone crushers in Nagaur district. It had also directed the joint inspection team to inspect the stone crushers and submit a report on whether they have taken all anti-pollution measures and installed relevant devices. They shall take ambient air quality at a particular area and of nearby colonies located in Kolia village and Nagaio Ki Dhana, Nagaur district in Rajasthan, the NGT had said. PTI rchopra@tribunemail.com Sandeep Dikshit Tribune News Service New Delhi, March 13 The US has suggested that the Qadrilateral, a grouping of four democracies that purports to take on China in the disputed South China Sea, is alive. Recognising that the US and India share complementary visions for the Indo-Pacific, they agreed to deepen cooperation towards their joint goals in the region, including in conjunction with other Indo-Pacific partners, said a US State Department readout after a meeting between Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale and US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale in Washington. Indian read-out The Indian read-out too said both sides agreed to work with each other and regional partners to promote inclusivity, stability, peace and prosperity in the region. The affirmation of Indo-US synergy on Indo-Pacific along with other partners comes a fortnight after a US Admiral appeared pessimistic about the future of the Quad, a US-led grouping that includes India in the second prominent role besides Japan and Australia. Fitful existence The Quad has had a fitful existence for over a decade and intends to preserve the existing order in the main sea lanes of communication in the region. Its sole military outing together was in 2007 but officials have kept it alive at the political level by meetings and frequent airing of the concept. The Indian readout further said the two sides exchanged views on building convergences in the Indo-Pacific. The emphasis on Indo-Pacific in both Foreign Office statements comes shortly after the US twice sent long-range bombers over the disputed shoals in South China Sea. Cross-border terrorism The Indian statement said both sides called on Pakistan to meaningfully address the concerns of the international community on terrorism, including cross-border terrorism. But there was no mention of Indias number-one priority in the US State Department statement. Gokhale and Hale also discussed counterterrorism cooperation and several global issues, including the current situation in Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela. India is searching for a role in Afghanistan and is under pressure from the US to substantially cut back its ties with Iran and Venezuela. The two sides also decided to intensify work on advancing initiatives undertaken as part of the 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue process. rchopra@tribunemail.com United Nations, March 13 In yet another setback to India's bid to designate Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed's chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, China on Wednesday put a technical hold on a proposal in the UN Security Council to ban him following the Pulwama terror attack. A diplomat at the UN told PTI that China put a "technical hold". The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, the UK and the US on February 27, days after a suicide bomber of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) killed 44 CRPF soldiers in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama, leading to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan. Reacting to China blocking the bid at UN to list JeM chief Masood Azhar as global terrorist, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in Delhi said, We are disappointed. We will continue to pursue all available avenues to ensure that terrorists involved in attacks on Indian citizens are brought to justice. We are grateful to all countries who supported the bid to designate Azhar as global terrorist, MEA added. The Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee members had 10 working days to raise any objections to the proposal. The no-objection period deadline was scheduled to end at 3 PM local time (New York) Wednesday, (12:30 AM IST Thursday). Just before the close of the deadline, China put a hold on the proposal. The diplomat said China asked for "more time to examine" the proposal.The proposal was the fourth such bid at the UN in the last 10 years to list Azhar as a global terrorist. The Committee makes its decisions by consensus of its members. All eyes were on China, which has in the past blocked India's bids to get Azhar listed as a UN-designated global terrorist thrice. According to the listing rules of the Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee, if no objection is received by the end of the no-objection period, the decision will be deemed adopted. As it has done in the past, Beijing put a technical hold on the proposal just as the deadline was about to end. An inkling of China's stand on the issue came during Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kang's press conferences on Monday and Wednesday in Beijing when he was asked about the proposal to list Azhar as a global terrorist by the UNSC. "The UN Security Council and its subsidiary bodies are run on strict rules. We already stressed China's position on the listing of terrorist organisations and individuals in the UN Security Council 1267 Committee on many occasions," Lu said on Monday. "China will continue to adopt responsible attitude and participate in the deliberations in the UNSC 1267 Committee," Lu said on Wednesday. On the issue of listing Azhar, he said, "I want to say that China always adopts a responsible attitude, engage in consultations with various parties and properly deal with this issue." "The discussions, I want to say must follow the rules and procedures of the relevant bodies and only the solution that is acceptable to all sides is conducive for resolving the issue," he said, indicating that Beijing may again block the move to list Azhar as a global terrorist. According to sources, the statement of the case of the latest proposal by France mentioned that JeM had taken responsibility for the Pulwama suicide attack on February 14 in which 40 Central Reserve Police Force personnel were killed. The statement also noted that Azhar is a former leader of the terrorist group Harakat al-Mujahadin and he had given a call to volunteers to join the fight in Afghanistan against Western forces. In 2009, India moved a proposal by itself to designate Azhar. In 2016 again India moved the proposal with the P3 - the United States, the United Kingdom and France in the UN's 1267 Sanctions Committee to ban Azhar, also the mastermind of the attack on the air base in Pathankot in January, 2016. In 2017, the P3 nations moved a similar proposal again. However, on all occasions China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Security Council, blocked India's proposal from being adopted by the Sanctions Committee. An assets freeze under the Sanctions Committee requires that all states freeze without delay the funds and other financial assets or economic resources of designated individuals and entities. The travel ban entails preventing the entry into or transit by all states through their territories by designated individuals. Under the arms embargo, all states are required to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale and transfer from their territories or by their nationals outside their territories to the designated individuals and entities. Hectic diplomatic and political parleys had preceded the closely-watched March 13 deadline as New Delhi reached out to the UNSC member countries. In the wake of the Pulwama terror attack, India launched a major diplomatic offensive against Pakistan, holding briefing for envoys of 25 countries, including those from the five permanent UNSC members -- the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom and France -- to highlight Islamabad's role in using terrorism as an instrument of state policy. India also handed over to Pakistan a dossier on "specific details" of involvement of the JeM in the Pulwama terror attack. PTI Private tutoring expenditure increases for six years in a row Spending on children's private education is ever increasing, forcing parents to dig deeper into their pockets. This has put them, particularly those in the low-income brackets, under greater financial pressure. Official government data showed Koreans spent a combined 19.5 trillion won ($17.2 billion) on private tutoring last year, up 4.4 percent from 2017. The data testifies to the weakening of public education, as nearly 73 percent of 5.58 million students received private lessons and other extracurricular programs at hagwon, or cram schools, last year. Each student elementary, middle and high school cost parents an average 291,000 won per month for private tutoring, up 7 percent from 2017. This marked an upward march for the sixth straight year. The frequently changing college entrance exam formula is mainly responsible for the increase. Precarious college admissions policies also contributed to rising costs, while parents' zeal to send their children to prestigious universities further encourages the private education boom. Noteworthy in the data compiled by the Ministry of Education and Statistics Korea is the steep rise in the number of relatively poor households whose monthly income is less than 2 million won. About 47.3 percent of them, a 3.3 percentage point increase from the previous year, spent 99,000 won a month on their children's private lessons. This means the next generation's opportunity to receive private education of a high standard largely depends on their parents' income. The data showed rich families spent more than five times that of poor ones. It is unthinkable that the educational authorities do not have an answer to this situation. The government must strengthen school education to solve this chronic problem. The key is in reforming the college entrance exam. A new system would help reduce the burden of private education. The government is set to launch the National Education Commission to be composed of experts from all spectrums of life. The new apparatus aims at hammering out a forward-looking comprehensive plan. Needless to say, this should focus on how to normalize public education. gspannu7@gmail.com Bengaluru, March 13 The Congress will contest 20 seats and JD(S) eight in the Lok Sabha polls in Karnataka under a deal finalised by the two ruling coalition partners on Wednesday after weeks of haggling. The deal was hammered out at a meeting between Congress president Rahul Gandhi and JD(S) secretary general Danish Ali at Kochi in Kerala this evening, the JD(S) said. The Lok Sabha constituencies that JD(S) will contest are Uttara Kannada, Chikkamagaluru, Shivamogga, Tumkur, Hassan, Mandya, Bengaluru North and Vijayapura. JD(S) tweeted about the constituencies from where its candidates will be contesting from, on its official Twitter handle. @INCIndia @JanataDal_S seat sharing for Karnataka #LokSabhaPolls2019 is confirmed. 20 for Congress and 8 for JDS, Karnataka Pradesh Congress president Dinesh Gundu Rao said. JD(S) had won Hassan and Mandya Lok Sabha seats in the 2014 General Election. The Congress had bagged nine and BJP 17. However in the bypolls, the BJP had yielded the Bellary seat to Congress. During a recent meeting with Rahul Gandhi at New Delhi, JD(S) supremo H D Deve Gowda had scaled down his partys demand and asked the national party to allot at least 10 out of the 28 Lok Sabha seats. The JD(S) had earlier demanded that it be given 12 seats to contest, banking on two-third, one-third formula adopted in ministry formation and allocation of posts of heads of state-run boards and corporations. According to party sources, JD(S) bagged Tumkur seat after a hard bargain as the grand old party had decided not to cede the constituencies where the party has a sitting MP to the regional partner. The Congress S P Muddahanumegowda is current MP from Tumkur, and is a ticket aspirant. Mysore-Kodagu was another constituency that JD(S) had demanded from the old Mysuru region, but could not bag it due to opposition from Congress Legislature Party leader Siddaramaiah as the seat is in his home turf, the sources said. Sharing of seats from old Mysuru region was an acid test for both the parties as the JD(S) considers it as its bastion, and the Congress has its sitting members from most of the seats there. The Congress and JD(S), which fought bitterly against each other during 2018 assembly polls, joined hands to form the government as the election threw up a hung verdict. Among the eight seats that JD(S) has got, in Hassan and Mandya the party has its sitting MPs, Tumkur is with Congress, rest five constituencies are represented by the BJP. While the KPCC chief on Wednesday said the party will announce its first list of candidates on March 16, JD(S) is too likely to announce its list in a couple of days. The JD(S) has already announced Gowdas grandsons Nikhil Kumaraswamy and Prajwal Revanna as candidates from the party bastions of Mandya and Hassan respectively. While Nikhil is son of Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy, Prajwal is son of Gowdas elder son and PWD Minister H D Revanna. Gowda has also announced former MLA Madhu Bangarappa as JD(S) candidate from Shivamogga. Madhu is the son of former Chief Minister S Bangarappa and is likely to be pitted against another former Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappas son and sitting BJP MP B Y Raghavendra. PTI rchopra@tribunemail.com New Delhi, March 13 The Supreme Court on Wednesday clarified its last year order on police reforms saying officers who had a minimum of six months tenure left in service should be considered for the post of director general of police (DGP). A bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi said the recommendation for post of DGP by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) and preparation of the panel should be purely on merit. The apex court passed the verdict on a modification plea filed by former Uttar Pradesh DGP Prakash Singh. Singh had alleged that the July 3, 2018, directive was being misused by state governments which were ignoring competent senior officers for appointment as DGPs. The court had in July last year passed a slew of directions on police reforms and restrained all states and union territories from appointing any police officer as acting DGPs to avoid favouritism and nepotism in such high-level appointments. PTI vinaymishra188@gmail.com Tribune News Service New Delhi, March 12 India has asked its oil companies to cut back on their purchase from Venezuela even as US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked New Delhi to stop being the economic lifeline for the Maduro regime. The Indian decision could sound the death knell for the Nicolas Maduro regime because New Delhi is Caracas second largest customer after the US. The Venezuelan economic crisis will intensify once both countries stop buying its crude. At its peak, India was purchasing 4 lakh barrels per day of Venezuelan oil, of which Reliance accounted for 75 per cent of the heavy sulphur crude. Indias total purchases have now whittled to 3 lakh barrels a day. The Indian government is warning companies to halt purchases of Venezuelan oil or face undisclosed consequences, agencies quoted MM Kutty, Petroleum and Natural Gas Secretary, at an event in Houston, US. The issue had also figured in talks between Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale and US State Department officials. After the meeting, Pompeo said, In the same way that India has been incredibly supportive of our efforts on Iran, I am confident that they too understand the real threat to the Venezuelan people. So, we had a good conversation around that. India does not have much interest in engaging with the current regime after its major investment in the San Cristobal oil field turned dud due to poor management. India had been giving around $600 million every year for meeting working capital expenses and in return received oil of the same amount. But for the past two years, there has been no economic activity at the oil field. rchopra@tribunemail.com Tribune News Service New Delhi, March 13 India has accused Pakistan of wrecking any chance of a resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir discord by failing to act on the UN resolutions. Misplaced demand It also rejected Pakistans demand for self-determination, an oft-used phrase by Kashmiri separatists, by pointing out that the exercise of this option is applicable to colonial territories and cant be misused as an instrument to erode territorial integrity and sovereignty of any member state. A reply filed by the Indian Permanent Representative in Geneva at the ongoing 40th Session of Human Rights Council said the UN resolutions on resolving the Kashmir problem were sabotaged by Pakistan when its army failed to vacate the territories under its control. Pakistan in the dock India tried to turn the tables in its first right of reply by accusing Pakistan of a range of human rights violations, including harassment of minorities through blasphemy law, forced conversions and marriages of minorities, suppression of political dissidents and legitimate criticism in Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Pakistan is known to the international community for its acts of aggression, harbouring safe havens for terrorists, military courts trying civilians, mass cases of enforced disappearances in north western Pakistan, state-sponsored extreme prejudices, religious intolerance and attacks on Muslim minorities such as Shias, Ahmadiyas, Ismailias and Hazaras. India accused Pakistan of misusing the Human Rights Council for raking up malicious propaganda against India. The matters that need to be addressed are Pakistans illegal occupation of a part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir and the continued suffering of the people of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir who are victims of sectarian conflict, systemic army persecution, violence, terrorism, extreme economic hardships, discriminatory policies and denial of even basic rights, said the statement. Main challenge It said the main challenge to protecting the human rights in J&K was the Pakistani support to cross-border terrorism and cited several former and serving members of Pakistans security apparatus in this respect. Pak used JeM The confirmation of using UN proscribed terror organisation, Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), as an instrument of state policy by Pakistani military or political leadership is already in public domain. Pakistans former NSA Asad Durrani, former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf had already admitted Pakistani complicity in creating disturbances in J&K. Musharraf has admitted this month that JeM chief Masood Azhar carried out terror attacks in India on the instructions of the ISI. The current Foreign Minister has reaffirmed the presence of the JeM on Pakistani soil, it pointed out. editorial@tribune.com Aditi Tandon Tribune News Service Ahmedabad, March 12 Congress president Rahul Gandhis sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra made her much awaited political debut from PM Narendra Modis bastion here today. She exhorted people to choose the next government carefully and raise right issues in Lok Sabha elections. Speaking before her brother, Priyanka made an emotional appeal to the voters of Gujarat, urging them to raise the cry for change from here as this was the state from where Mahatma Gandhi started the struggle for Indias freedom. An entire galaxy of Congress leaders including former PM Manmohan Singh on stage, Priyanka, the recently appointed Congress general secretary in charge of Uttar Pradesh, said in her maiden political speech that there was no greater patriotism than awareness. This was the first time she was visiting Gujarat. The occasion was the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting earlier in the day. Equating the 2019 LS poll with the struggle for Indian independence, Priyanka exhorted the voters to decide the next government cautiously and not get swayed by frivolous issues the ruling party raises. The Congress has been struggling to pull the election narrative back from BJP driven nationalism to fundamental bread and butter issues. Theres no greater patriotism than awareness. Your vote is a weapon. Use it to choose your future....decide cautiously, take the right decision, raise the right questions, she said. She didnt name PM Modi, but took several veiled jibes at him saying those who talk boastfully ask them where are two crore jobs they promised, where is Rs 15 lakh that was to come into your accounts, wheres womens security? Rahul Gandhi later attacked PM Modi for alleged corruption in the Rafale deal and also asked him to tell people who released JeM chief Masood Azhar and escorted him to Kandahar in 1999. monicakchauhan@gmail.com Aditi Tandon Tribune News Service Ahmedabad, March 13 Tweeting for the first time since she joined the Congress organisation in January officially, AICC general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra quoted Mahatma Gandhi. She posted two tweets after a long day that saw her attend the first meeting of the CWC and address her first political rally in Gandhinagar. In the simple dignity of Sabarmati, the truth lives on, she said. In the simple dignity of Sabarmati, the truth lives on. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra (@priyankagandhi) March 12, 2019 Her second tweet quoted Mahatma Gandhi and read: I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent. Mahatma Gandhi. Priyanka had opened her Twitter account last month. rchopra@tribunemail.com Vibha Sharma Tribune News Service New Delhi/Chennai, March 13 Congress president Rahul Gandhi said on Wednesday that law should apply equally to all citizens of the country, and not selectively. At an interaction with women students at a college in Chennai, Gandhi, in response to a question on a money laundering case in which his brother-in-law Robert Vadra was being investigated, said: I will be the first person to say it...Investigate Robert Vadra but also investigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he said. He was referring to allegations of manipulation against Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the controversial Rafale deal. Asking students to call him Rahul instead of sir, he reiterated his allegations about the pricing of the aircraft and the process. Modi is a corrupt man, he bypassed negotiations and ran parallel negotiations on the Rafale deal, Gandhi alleged while responding to the question. He said Modi should have the guts to face the press. He spoke about the prevailing mood of fear in the country, saying economic growth was directly related to the mood of the nation and one could not expect it to happen in a negative and fearful atmosphere, Congress president Rahul Gandhi said on Wednesday. He also alleged that the BJPs idea is to capture every institution of the country and run them from Nagpur, the RSS headquarters. Gandhi said the Congress would pass the womens reservation bill if it came to power. Dont see enough women in leadership positions. You cannot have women in power in India until the attitude towards them changes, he told the cheering crowd. In response to a question, he said he had learnt the lessons of humility and love from his mother Sonia Gandhi. He asked the gathering, Did you like demonetisation? When the audience answered, No, he said, I think its pretty clear the damage the demonetisation did. The PM should have taken your advice. Gandhi, who asked the students to challenge him and make him uncomfortable, wondered whether the Prime Minister could stand in a large audience and answer peoples questions. Referring to Modis policies on Jammu and Kashmir, he said these were setting fire to the state and blamed the Centre for not strategically and systematically handling terrorism. As soon as Modi assumed power, he made a huge mistake of forging an alliance with the PDP just for the sake of power. Today, Narendra Modi jis policies are actually setting fire to Kashmir, he said, alleging that it was his policies that were allowing Pakistan to carry out terrorist acts in India. Gandhi underscored the need to engage the people of Kashmir and bring them on our side. The Prime Ministers policies push the people away so you cannot fight terrorism with one-off gestures, he said. Noting that it was our responsibility to stop the neighbouring country from carrying out terror strikes and save our people, Gandhi said, It is not good enough to say that 45 CRPF men died and now we will do something. He sought to know why the attack (in Pulwama) was not stopped in the first place. Forty CRPF personnel were killed and five injured on February 14 in one of the deadliest terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir when a Jaish-e-Mohammad suicide bomber rammed a vehicle carrying explosives into their bus in Pulwama district. Claiming that the Congress pursued a policy of systematic and strategic approach in Jammu and Kashmir, he said the NDA government had not followed a similar policy. We actually crushed terrorism, he said and referred to the drastic fall in the number of soldiers and people killed during the UPAs tenure. The Congress followed a multi-pronged approach when it came to power in 2004 and toed both systematic and strategic lines, he said. And it was successful, he said, adding it had led to diplomatic isolation of Pakistan. Gandhi also called his partys minimum income guarantee scheme a revolutionary idea. What about Vadras links with arms dealers The BJP hit back with allegations of links between Gandhi-Vadra family and arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari. Union Minister Smriti Irani cited documentary evidence to establishing transactions between them and Bhandari as well as some others saying facts available with the press showed Gandhi-Vadra family defined paarivarik bhrashtachar (dynastic corruption), and now the Gandhi family had exploited the 70 years. Rahul Gandhi is the real face of corruption. He should explain this by calling a press briefing and also clarify his connection with Sanjay Bhandari, she said, also shooting down Gandhis claim that the prime minister was hiding from media. Sanjay Bhandari, an arms dealer with close links to Robert Vadra, is also under investigation for defence deals and his desperate desire to be party to ill-gotten fruits of corruption during UPA regime. Irani said reports suggested that HL Pahwa was suitably financed and supported by CC Thampi, who also figures in the probe with regard to a petroleum deal under UPA and a financial violation with regard to a land transaction in Delhi-NCR. The relationship between CC Thampi and arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari is publicly known. Hence, the nation has come to a conclusion that Rahul Gandhis intervention in the defence preparedness of our country stems from his pursuit not only of individual politics but his personal commercial interests, his personal family interests, said Irani. According to reports Gandhi had purchased 6.5 acres of land located at Hassanpur at a subsidised rate from Pahwa. Bhandari was booked by the ED in 2016 based on an Income Tax Department and Delhi police complaint of his alleged indulgence in dubious defence deals and land deals. Meanwhile earlier, the Congress chief said the PM should have guts to face the media and asked why he was hiding. In response to a question on his brother-in-law Robert Vadra, he said I will be the first person to say it... Investigate Robert Vadra but also investigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Frustrated In its reaction to BJPs response, Congress said Rahul Gandhi bought Hassanpur land with his own money and his own account. Priyanka later gifted the land to spiritual organisation. The Congress said that facing imminent defeat in the general elections and finding no answer to the rampant joblessness, agrarian crisis, economic slowdown, all pervading corruption and social unrest, a frustrated Modi Government and its perpetually peeved Union Ministers like Smriti Irani, have lost their balance and equilibrium. Blinded by unprecedented revenge against Congress President and Congress leaders, they are resorting to manufacturing fake and fanciful lies and web of deceit on a daily basis as was done today by Smt. Smriti Irani. The entire set of allegations is the figment of Modijis imagination being hurled to divert peoples attention. They must know that they the entire set of false of false mudslinging will expose them before the people of India. The Congress statement said: 1. On March 3, 2008 Shri Rahul Gandhi purchased 51 Kanal 13 Marla (= 6.456 acres) of Sailab Land in Hassanpur Village, Tehsil Hodal, District Palwal in Haryana. The land was purchased for a total purchase price of Rs. 26,47,000 (Rupees Twenty-Six Lacs and Forty-Seven Thousand) paid for by cheque, which is the equivalent of Rs. 4,10,006 (Rupees Four Lacs Ten Thousand and Six) per acre. The prevailing Collector Rate for Sailab Land in Hassanpur Village, Tehsil Hodal for 2007-08 and as of 3 March 2008 (the date of purchase) was Rs.1,50,000 per acre. Shri Gandhi paid Stamp Duty of 6% amounting to Rs. 1,58,820 (Rupees One Lac and Fifty-Eight Thousand Eight Hundred and Twenty) on the purchase price of Rs. 26,47,000 at a rate of Rs. 4,10,006 per acre (i.e. at over 2.7x the prevailing Collector Rate). 2. On 26 July 2012, Shri Rahul Gandhi gifted this 6.4 acres of land to Smt. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra through a registered gift deed, registered in the office of sub-registrar. They also paid Stamp Duty of Rs 1,93,700 on the registered gift deed. 3. On 12 August 2014, Smt. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra gifted this 6.4 acres (51 Kanal 13 Marla) in Hassanpur Village, Tehsil Hodal, District Palwal in Haryana to Vipassana Sadhna Sansthan, a not for profit spiritual organisation. 4. Purchase of land was done by Shri Rahul Gandhi out of his own funds paid from his Bank Account. At no point of time, this purchase of a small piece of land and consequent gift to a spiritual organization has any connection with any individual, whatsoever. rchopra@tribunemail.com United Nations, March 13 The fate of the proposal to designate Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist by the UN Security Council will be known in less than 24 hours when the deadline to raise objections to the bid expires. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, the UK and the US on February 27. It was under the no-objection period and Committee members had a period of 10 working days to raise any objections to the proposal. The no-objection period deadline ends 3 pm on Wednesday (12.30 am IST). The Committee makes its decisions by consensus of its members. All eyes are on China, which has in the past blocked Indias bids to get Azhar listed as a UN-designated global terrorist. According to the listing rules of the Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee, if no objection is received by the end of the no-objection period, the decision will be deemed adopted, meaning that Azhar will become a UN-designated global terrorist. The proposal is the fourth such bid at the UN in the last 10 years to list Azhar as a global terrorist. In 2009, India moved a proposal by itself to designate Azhar, whose JeM had taken responsibility for the suicide attack against Indian security forces in Pulwama on February 14 in which 40 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were killed. In 2016 again, India moved the proposal with the P3--the United States, the United Kingdom and France--in the UNs 1267 Sanctions Committee to ban Azhar, also the mastermind of the attack on the air base in Pathankot in January 2016. In 2017, the P3 nations moved a similar proposal again. However, on all occasions China, a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, blocked Indias proposal from being adopted by the Sanctions Committee. A UNSC designation will subject Azhar to an assets freeze, travel ban and an arms embargo. An assets freeze under the Sanctions Committee requires that all states freeze without delay the funds and other financial assets or economic resources of designated individuals and entities. The travel ban entails preventing the entry into or transit by all states through their territories by designated individuals. Under the arms embargo, all states are required to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale and transfer from their territories or by their nationals outside their territories, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, of arms and related materiel of all types, spare parts, and technical advice, assistance, or training related to military activities, to designated individuals and entities. Hectic diplomatic and political parleys have preceded the closely-watched March 13 deadline as New Delhi reached out to member countries of the UNSC. In the wake of the February 14 terror attack in Pulwama, India launched a major diplomatic offensive against Islamabad, holding briefing for envoys of 25 countries, including from the five permanent UNSC members--the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom and France--to highlight Pakistans role in using terrorism as an instrument of state policy. India also handed over to Pakistan a dossier on specific details of involvement of the JeM in the Pulwama terror attack. Just two days before the March 13 deadline on Azhars listing, Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale met Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in New Delhi said in a statement that Pompeo expressed his understanding of Indias concerns regarding cross-border terrorism. They agreed that Pakistan needs to take concerted action to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure and to deny safe haven to all terrorist groups in its territory. They also agreed that those who supported or abetted terrorism in any form should be held accountable, the MEA said. The State Department said in a statement that Pompeo affirmed that the United States stood with the people and Government of India in the fight against terrorism. Pompeo and Gokhale discussed the importance of bringing those responsible for the attack to justice and the urgency of Pakistan taking meaningful action against terrorist groups operating on its soil, according to a statement by Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino. On Monday, Americas National Security Adviser John Bolton tweeted that he had spoken with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi to encourage meaningful steps against JeM and other terrorist groups operating from Pakistan. Bolton said Qureshi assured him that Pakistan would deal firmly with all terrorists and would continue steps to deescalate tensions with India. An inkling of Beijings view on the issue came during Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lu Kangs press conference on Monday in Beijing when he was asked about how China would respond to the proposal to list Azhar in the UNSC. The UN Security Council and its subsidiary bodies are run on strict rules.We already stressed Chinas position on the listing of terrorist organisations and individuals in the UN Security Council 1267 Committee on many occasions, Lu said. PTI rchopra@tribunemail.com Lucknow, March 13 Exuding confidence that the voters of Uttar Pradesh would deliver their final strike in favour of the BJP in the Lok Sabha election, Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya said on Wednesday that the saffron party would win more than 300 seats across the country. Not only the voters of Amethi and Rae Bareli (the Congress bastions in UP), but voters of Uttar Pradesh will deliver their final strike in favour of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in all 80 Lok Sabha seats and give an overwhelming majority to him, Maurya told PTI in an interview here. The main issues in this election will be development, nationalism, eradicating poverty, wiping out corruption, ending terrorism and making the country number one in the world, the BJP leader said in an interview. Describing the alliance stitched by the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal as opportunistic, Maurya said: It is an alliance with vested interests. It has become redundant for the people as the public has made up its mind that instead of voting for the SP and the BSP on caste lines, it will vote for the BJP, which is toeing the line of development, nationalism and working to eradicate terrorism. The Deputy Chief Minister also made light of the formal entry of Priyanka Gandhi Vadra in politics. I dont feel that her entry into UPs electoral politics will have any impact on us. She was earlier also a leader of the Congress. I am of the opinion that the SP, BSP and Congress are all one entity. If not, then the SP and BSP should clarify as to why have they left two seats for the Congress in Amethi and Rae Bareli. And the Congress, on its part, should tell why it has taken their (SP and BSP) support in these two seats, Maurya said. Asked whether the issue of construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya had taken a backseat as a poll issue, Maurya asserted: There is no question of it being on the backfoot. As for the BJP, the issue is not electoral, but is a matter of faith and devotion. We do not make issues pertaining to our faith and devotion poll-related. PTI By Bernard Rowan I am a student of Korea. Thanks to my friendship with a fellow graduate student from South Korea, I began a journey to Korea in 1998 that has meant everything for my lifelong learning, professional development and personal fulfillment. One regret, despite having tried in earnest over years, is that I never mastered the Korean language. I can read and speak and understand a bit but only just. I've worked hard in English to learn more about Korean politics, society and culture. I share that knowledge with others, including through this column. But I can't do so in Korean. With the pride Koreans show in their language, culture, customs, and practices, I've marveled over how South Korea encourages the study and use of the English language. It's more than a result of English's current status. Children learn English, hagwons abound, and entire curricula in universities occur in English. This all hastens the advance of South Korea today. Today there is software to help to learn and use plain English more effectively. Some examples are Grammarly and Editor. I also want to encourage the work of another colleague. Jung Ku-jong, a Korean expatriate living in Australia, has published a work entitled Native English. This compiled guide to English is suitable for a wide variety of English-learning and English-speaking audiences. It's a compendium of useful and practical English and interpretation for Korean native language speakers who've begun to learn English. The work is published on Amazon.com in paperback and as an eBook. The number of Koreans studying overseas peaked several years ago. The Korean Ministry of Education has banned teaching English in first and second grades. My thinking about these developments is not about any "retreat from English", though I don't for the moment think English will forever remain the international language of choice. It's expensive to study abroad, and many Koreans worry about unemployment for young adults at home. As for schoolchildren, I don't think it's clearly better to learn two languages at once early on. I've heard arguments and experts on both sides. Bilingual curricula impact hiring and costs of instruction in any country. Nonetheless, compared with perhaps most countries on earth, South Korean students from elementary grades onward learn English. South Korea's embrace of English isn't unlike its embrace of Chinese and Japanese languages in days gone by. Of course, I'm not speaking about the evils of Japanese colonization. I'm speaking to what I've noticed and commented on as the syncretism of Korean culture. Korea has survived and thrived by "taking on" internationalist habits in a thoroughgoing way. It's been a part of Korean history for centuries. It's a strength and a disposition to copy. And it's too simplistic and inexact to name it a token of the country's "small size" or relative power as primary explanations. I will make one critical comment. I'd like to encourage Koreans not to act in a condescending way to native English speakers learning their language. I've experienced one or two good people tell me flatly, "You'll never be Korean." I never wanted to be and don't, but we need to value those who learn our languages and to celebrate and encourage their learning. Native English speakers should bear with those whose speed of pronunciation, inflections, and accents make it harder to understand. I've always taken pride in being able to understand my English-speaking Korean friends and act positively and diplomatically in conversation. I admire people who can read, write, and work in more than one language. Even more so, I admire societies that encourage bilingual education as a pillar of their society. That description fits South Korea to a great extent. South Koreans believe in and practice bilingual education, in Korean and English. That adds to the posterity and happiness of Koreans as citizens of an increasingly connected global society and humanity. Bernard Rowan (browan10@yahoo.com)is associate provost for contract administration and professor of political science at Chicago State University. He is a past fellow of the Korea Foundation and former visiting professor at Hanyang University. ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM As Punjab goes to polls on May 19, the Congress in the state is hopeful of a clean sweep. The Tribune reporter Rajmeet Singh speaks to Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee (PPCC) president and sitting Gurdaspur MP Sunil Kumar Jakhar to know his views on the partys prospects. Excerpts of the interview: Punjab will go to the polls in the last phase. Were you expecting it early? We were expecting polling in the first phase. Certainly, taking elections to mid of May has raised doubts. The opposition parties are questioning the move of the Election Commission to stagger the election schedule. It is creating doubt about the intention of the Narendra Modi-led NDA, not confidence. We are ready to meet any challenge. However, the BJPs intention to keep the issue of airstrikes alive till last is clearly visible. Why the conduct of elections in the last phase is worrying Congress? As Punjab is an agrarian state and wheat harvesting is likely to be delayed due to weather, we were expecting early elections. The elections have been scheduled when the harvesting season will be at its peak. It will affect the polling percentage. Will the Pulwama attack and subsequent airstrikes have its effect in Punjab? The Pulwana issue has settled down. Being a border state, people understand the implications of the entire issue. The Congress will question Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the intelligence failure in the Pulwama terror attack. The BJP is silent on as to why the terror attack happened. Rather, it is glorifying the issue. The Prime Minister is playing with the sensitive and emotive issue. You seem to be confident of sweeping the elections. What are the core issues? We will clean sweep in Punjab as stated by Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh. First, there is hardly any opposition. The BJP is nowhere. The anti-minority face of the BJP stands exposed. Be it GST on langar or speeding up the work on the Kartarpur corridor, the BJP failed to act swiftly. Now, they will try to take credit for the Kartarpur corridor by falsehood. The RSS agenda is clearly visible in the appointment of Takht Hazur Sahib Nanded Board president against Sikh sentiments. The Akalis will have to explain the conduct of its alliance partners for hurting the Sikh psyche. The Congress is taking the investigations in sacrilege incidents and related firing incidents to its logical conclusion. Compared to Congress initiative on loan waiver, the BJP has not done anything for debt-ridden farmers of the state. No special package has been given to the border state, whereas same has been done in Himachal Pradesh. When will the party announce its candidates? So far, discussions have been held in the meeting of the state screening committee. However, nothing has been finalised so far. On some seats, the candidates will be finalised after seeing the candidature of the opponents. The Congress has an edge, irrespective of BJP stalwarts landing in the state to campaign. The anti-minority face of the BJP stands exposed. Be it GST on langar or speeding up the work on the Kartarpur corridor, BJP failed to act swiftly. Now, they will try to claim credit for the Kartarpur corridor by falsehood. Sunil Jakhar, PPCC Chief editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Chandigarh, March 12 Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will not contest the Lok Sabha elections, said Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh here today. This puts to rest all speculation of Dr Singh contesting the election from Amritsar. Talking to mediapersons here today, Capt Amarinder made it clear that the former PM was never in reckoning for candidature as he had made it clear that he was not interested in contesting the elections. He described his meeting with Dr Singh in Delhi on Saturday as a courtesy call, during which he briefed him on the Congress plans in Punjab. Some Congress leaders from Punjab had reportedly made a fervent appeal to Dr Singh to contest the polls from his birthplace (Amritsar), telling him that Punjabis would be delighted if he represented them in Parliament. The Congress did not need any alliance in Punjab, nor was it in talks with any party on the same, Capt Amarinder said in response to a question while talking informally with mediapersons after meeting Raj Kumar Verka, Chairman, Punjab Warehousing Corporation, at his office. Exuding confidence about the Congress prospects in the upcoming elections, the CM said the party was gung-ho about these polls, as was evident from the fact that it had chosen Ahmedabad the home turf of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the CWC meeting. This clearly showed the level of enthusiasm in the party, which was literally ready to take the BJP by its horns, he added. In response to a question on the Punjab Congress candidates, Captain Amarinder said the next meeting was likely to be held in Delhi around the end of this week. There was no hurry, he said, pointing out that the polling date was more than two months away, giving the party lot of time to select its candidates. No tie-up on cards Neither does the Congress need any alliance in Punjab, nor is it in talks with any party for the same.Capt Amarinder Singh, CM gspannu7@gmail.com London, March 13 British Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday said the case of British Sikh murder suspect Jagtar Singh Johal, alias Jaggi Johal, lodged in an Indian jail for over a year was being actively dealt with by ministers. Johal, from Dumbarton in Scotland, was arrested by Indian authorities in November 2017 on charges of fanning communal disturbance in Punjab. His constituencys MP, Scottish National Partys (SNP) Martin Docherty-Hughes, has been lobbying for his release along with his family members and raised the issue in the House of Commons during the weekly Prime Ministers Questions. On Monday (March 18), my constituent Jagtar Singh Johal would have been incarcerated for 500 days without trial. He would have suffered trial by media, sanctioned, some would say, by the Indian state, Docherty-Hughes said, calling on May to direct her foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt to take up the case with the Indian Government. Ministers are dealing with this. They have been actively involved in this case, May said. One of the ministers is actually dealing with this case and will I am sure will be pleased to meet with him, she said, in reference to the request for a ministerial meeting. Johal, a 31-year-old Scottish-born Sikh, was in Jalandhar with his family for his wedding in October 2017 when he was arrested by plainclothes police officials in the city. The Punjab Government claimed he was among a group of suspects arrested in relation to the murder of Hindu leaders in the state. While the Indian Government maintains that due process is being followed in the case, British MPs have repeatedly taken up the case in the UK Parliament. Mr Johal alleges he has been subjected to torture at the hands of the Indian security forces, Preet Kaur Gill, a Labour Party MP and Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for British Sikhs, noted in a letter to Downing Street last year. The APPG and other MPs have continued lobbying for the release of Johal, with some Sikh groups in the UK organising a Free Jaggi drive. The British Sikh community is disgusted that Jagtar is being treated as a second-class citizen by the Foreign Office, said Bhai Amrik Singh, Chair of Sikh Federation UK. PTI editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Sangrur, March 12 Alleging betrayal after the state government refused to give them complete debt waiver, widows of the farmers who committed suicide have joined indefinite protests in front of banks in the district, demanding return of blank cheques. My husband ended his life as he was under Rs6-lakh debt after three consecutive crop failures. He had borrowed Rs5 lakh from private lenders and the remaining Rs1 lakh from a bank. But I have not got any waiver from the government as officials did not include my name in the beneficiaries list without giving any valid reason. The government cheated us, said Balwinder Kaur of Sunam. Farmers are sitting on an indefinite protest since yesterday in front of Sunam, Dirba, Longowal and Moonak banks, demanding that banks return their blank cheques taken as collateral against the loans extended to them. My son Kulwinder Singh is only 14 years old and is under Rs12-lakh debt. Despite repeated claims of stopping our harassment, banks are continuously insulting us to recover their loan, alleged Jangir Kaur, another widow. Besides cheques, protesters are demanding the release of farmers arrested on the complaints of banks after they failed to repay loans. Today we ended our protest at Moonak after a bank returned blank cheques of farmers. But the protests at Longowal, Dirba and Sunam will continue till banks meet our demand, said Dharminder Pashore, Lehrgaga block president of BKU Ugrahan. The government has failed to help farmers. We will stage more intense protests against banks soon if our demands are not met, said BKU Ugrahan president Joginder Singh Ugrahan. editorial@tribune.com Saurabh Malik Tribune News Service Chandigarh, March 12 The Punjab and Haryana High Court has taken note of a complainants affidavit accusing the police of concocting a story and registering an FIR in a rape case on wrong premises before granting bail to Harvinder Singh Harpalpur, a senior SAD leader and a relative of SAD MP Prem Singh Chandumajra. Harpalpur, also former vice-chairman of the Punjab Khadi and Industrial Board, had relied upon the affidavit which, among other things, said the police took the complainants thumb impressions on blank papers and misused the signed papers. Implication at the behest of local MLA, belonging to the ruling party, was also alleged. Justice Hari Pal Verma asserted the affidavit furnished by the complainant could not be ignored lightly at the current stage. The petitioner was in custody since January 10 and the affidavit was furnished on January 29. Besides, the execution of affidavit had been duly accepted by counsel for the complainant. The question as to whether the affidavit has been obtained under duress is required to be adjudicated during trial, Justice Verma ruled. Allowing the petition, Justice Verma added the petitioner was ordered to be released on bail on furnishing adequate bail and surety bonds. Harpalpur had moved the High Court through counsel Jasjit Singh Bedi for regular bail in FIR dated November 1, 2018, for cheating, gangrape and other offences. Appearing before Justice Vermas Bench on the petitioners behalf, Bedi added that Harpalpur was in custody since January 10; and challan had already been presented on March 11 and the conclusion of trial would take a long time. rchopra@tribunemail.com New Delhi, March 13 India will ask Pakistan to insulate Sikh pilgrims visiting the Gurdwara Kartarpur Sahib through the Kartarpur corridor from Khalistani separatist propaganda, official sources said. India will raise the issue during the first meeting with Pakistan to finalise the modalities for the Kartarpur corridor on Thursday. The meeting will take place on the Indian side of the Attari-Wagah border, they said. Last year in November, India had lodged a strong protest with Pakistan over the alleged harassment of Indian High Commission officials in Islamabad and the denial of access to Indian Sikh pilgrims visiting the country. India had also expressed grave concern over reports of attempts during the pilgrims visit to incite communal disharmony and promote secessionist tendencies with a view to undermining Indias sovereignty and territorial integrity. There were reports that pro-Khalistan banners were shown to the Indian pilgrims while they were on their way to the two Sikh shrines. PTI rchopra@tribunemail.com New Delhi, March 13 A member of the banned terrorist group and an associate of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was killed by the Army in Operation Bluestar in 1984, was nabbed by the Delhi Police, officials said on Wednesday. The accused Gursewak Singh (53) is a member of Khalistan Commando Force (KCF) and was planning to reconstitute his organisation on directions of KCF chief Paramjeet Singh Panjwad, who was based in Pakistan, the police said. Singh was also in touch with Jagtaar Singh Hawara and other terrorists lodged in various jails in India, including Tihar jail, the police said, adding Gursewak was arrested by the crime branch from ISBT Delhi on March 12 where he had come to meet one of his contacts. Gursewak was previously involved in more than 50 cases of terrorist activities, murders of police officials and informers, robberies in banks and police station among others, said Ajit Kumar Singla, Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime). He remained in jail for more than 26 years in different cases and was in regular touch with some Pakistan-based terrorists. The police said Singh was born in a farmer family residing in Raikot village in Punjabs Ludhiana district. His elder brother Swaran Singh was a member of terrorist group led by Bhinderwale in Punjab in the 1980s. Gursewak joined the group in 1982, the police official said. In 1984, when Bindranwale was killed, most of his associates fled to Pakistan where they were trained and supported by the ISI. During that time, Gursewak joined the newly formed KCF constituted by terrorist Manveer Singh Chehdu and actively participated in anti-national activities, he said. Gursewak along with his associates remained involved in dozens of murders of suspected informers of security agencies and bank robberies in Punjab, Delhi and Rajasthan. In May 1984, the accused along with his associates Labh Singh, Gurinder Singh and Swaranjit Singh, had also killed group editor of Hind Samachar newspaper Ramesh Chander in Jallandhar, Singla said. In 1986, Singh along with his associates attacked the residence of Julio Riberio, former DGP of Punjab in Jallandhar. In the same year, the accused along with his associates killed eight police personnel of the Punjab Police while freeing the KCF chief Jarnal Labh Singh and terrorists Gurinder Pal Singh Bhola and Swaranjit Singh from police custody in court complex in Jallandhar after a shootout, the officer said. The accused persons had also attacked on a police station in Punjab and robbed 16 rifles, six carbines, cartridges, two revolvers, police jeep and a Fiat car. The accused along with his associates had also killed all nine members of a family in Punjab, he said. Singh remained in jail and most of the time in the High-Risk Ward of Tihar Jail till 2004 for period of about 18 years. While in Tihar Jail, he planned to smuggle arms, including AK-47, and explosives from Pakistan in order to carry out an attack in Delhi. However, this conspiracy of the accused persons was foiled by the Crime Branch of the Delhi Police, which arrested two terrorists from Punjabi Bagh area on July 9, 1998, the officer said. After coming out of jail in 2010, he remained involved in several cases of robbery and was arrested thrice by the Ludhiana Police in 2014, 2015 and 2016, respectively. During this period, he remained in contact with Paramjeet Singh Panjwad. He was again arrested by the Delhi Police in 2017 under the Arms Act. He is facing trial in a case in Patiala House Court and was not attending the court, following which the court had issued non-bailable warrants against him, the police said. PTI editorial@tribune.com Our Correspondent Ludhiana, March 12 The Court of Special Judge Rashmi Sharma has convicted Balvir Singh alias Lalli of Rattan village, Jodhan in the district, for the rape of his relative, a 14-year-old girl. He has been ordered to undergo rigorous life imprisonment till death. A fine of Rs 2.10 lakh has also been imposed upon him. Out of the fine amount, Rs 2 lakh will be paid to the victim as compensation. A case against him was registered at the Jodhan police station on January 31, 2017, following the statement of the victim. The complainant had told the police that in childhood, her mother left for some unknown place along with her younger sister and brother. Her father also abandoned her and she was brought up by her grandparents. Till Class V, she stayed with them. Thereafter, her paternal aunt and her husband took her to Rattan village for further studies. There, the younger brother-in-law of her paternal aunt, who was a bachelor, started abusing her. She brought the matter to the notice of her paternal aunt and uncle, but they did not help her. Thereafter, the accused continued to sexually exploit her for some more time till a police complaint was filed. The accused, however, pleaded innocence. But after appreciating the evidence on record, the court found him guilty and ordered his conviction. Abandoned by parents The victims mother had left the home along with her younger sister and brother and her father too abandoned her in the childhood She was brought up by her grandparents till Class V. Later, her paternal aunt took her to Rattan village, where the aunts younger brother-in-law, a bachelor, sexually exploited her . rchopra@tribunemail.com Washington, March 13 Sikh-Americans have urged the Indian Government to ensure that the work on the landmark Kartarpur Corridor is not impacted by the tension between India and Pakistan in the aftermath of the Pulwama terror attack. Tensions between India and Pakistan flared up after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed killed 40 CRPF personnel in Jammu and Kashmirs Pulwama district on February 14. India launched a counter-terror operation in Balakot on February 26. The next day, Pakistan Air Force retaliated and downed a MiG-21 in an aerial combat and captured its pilot, who was handed over to India on March 1. A delegation of eminent Sikh-Americans from various parts of the US, gathered in Washington DC on Tuesday to present a memorandum to the Indian Embassy here. The delegation, under the banner of California-based United Sikh Mission, also met nearly half a dozen lawmakers, including two Senators and Congressman Greg Pence, elder brother of the US Vice President, Mike Pence, urging them that the US play a role a role in ensuring peace in the region. Leaders of various Sikh organizations, including SikhsPAC from Indiana, Gadhar Memorial Foundation from Oregon, Sikh SEVA from Virginia, Sikh Religious Society from Illinois, Lets Share a Meal from New Jersey and those from various gurdwaras formed part of the delegation. The ongoing tension between India and Pakistan should not slow the progress that has been made on the implementation of the Kartarpur Corridor, said Rashpal Singh Dhindsa, founder of United Sikh Mission in a memorandum submitted to Indian Ambassador to the US Harsh Vardhan Shringla. The approval of the peace corridor is a great step in the right direction for all parties affected by this conflict. Now is the time to continue our efforts to create a peaceful resolve to this situation, the memorandum said. PTI Refugees studying in Teach North Korean Refugees Global Education answered questions about tourism to North Korea. Part 2 quotes several refugees who expressed opposition to tourism to North Korea in several ways. ED. Nina (Escaped North Korea in 2011, Arrived in South Korea in 2011). I'm ashamed that people go to North Korea, it is so disappointing. The trips organized or approved by North Korea only show what North Korea wants them to see. Tourists might see 1 percent of North Korea, but they won't see how most North Koreans live. North Korea is a big propaganda machine, so everything they do will have propaganda in mind. They won't allow anything that will embarrass them unless they think they can get some foreign aid out of it. The area I lived is in the far west; there are many fields producing rice. It is like the countryside there. Some foreign tourists visited there. All of the foreigners would stay in the city, in a nice hotel reserved for them. There are human rights abuses nearby, but they can't see that. So many foreigners and media are fascinated by the Mass Games, but they don't see that so many young people suffer physically and mentally, and are starving, but they must keep going through drills for the amusement of the North Korean government and visitors. Because of the money, the North Korean government keeps holding those festivals. Foreigners are helping to subsidize that abuse. Mi-hyang (Escaped North Korea in 2002, Arrived in South Korea in 2010). I understand foreigners want to see things there. But if they want to get to know North Korean refugees, they should meet North Koreans who have escaped to South Korea. They can't get a deep understanding by going to North Korea, it will be superficial. Business people and academics visiting might see a little more, but many of them are so supportive of North Korea or they don't want to lose their business or academic deals, so they will be like blind people allowing North Korea to lead them around. Even if oppression is right before their eyes, they will ignore it or find an excuse to explain it away. They have become part of North Korea's killing machine. I'm opposed to any money going to a regime run by a dictator. It is better to isolate and starve the country to death. Some people hope that some of the money will trickle down to the people, but North Korea is not a normal country. There are better ways for people to learn about North Korea. They can have much deeper conversations with North Koreans who have escaped and can give their real opinions. I understand people are curious, but they won't see the real North Korea. Nayeon (Escaped North Korea in 2011, Arrived in South Korea in 2012). I envy them. I can't go there, I don't have the freedom to do so. Unfortunately, I can't go back because I would be in danger. I don't know what would happen to me, but I would be caught, probably sent to prison or killed. How can such a system be defended or subsidized? North Korea's regime must be destroyed before people go there. Tourists are having fun while people nearby are forced to be slaves for them or getting tortured. Hyuna (Escaped North Korea in 2009, Arrived in South Korea in 2015). It is so dangerous. They can become hostages to the regime. I can't understand why they want to go there. Even if they go, they can't see the real North Korea. They get monitored, they can't know the reality. There is a peaceful mood, but North Korea doesn't respect the basic rights of individuals, so if relations break down, then anybody who goes there is at risk of being held hostage. They can go, but I wish they would not. What is more important than tourism is for Kim Jong-un to leave his cave more often. I hate it because it can make him look like a normal leader, but it is also good because there will be more opportunities for him to be embarrassed on the international stage. People can see he is just a little guy who got lucky, that his power comes from his grandfather, and that he doesn't have any magical powers. I was so happy to see some North Korean refugees protesting against Kim Jong-un when he was in Vietnam. I wanted to cry when one screamed at Kim Jong-un that he should stop blocking her from seeing her family. It is important for Kim Jong-un to leave his country, and I hope more North Korean refugees and other people will protest against him, and that the next time he comes to South Korea, people should be allowed to protest against him. Yuna (Escaped North Korea in 2006, Arrived in South Korea in 2006). I respect everyone's freedom to go where they want, but I'm also biased about this because I have met many people who have gone to North Korea. For some reason, they get surprised when I respond negatively to their trips to North Korea. Some only visit Pyongyang, then they return home saying, "North Korea is a great place. I don't understand why North Koreans escape." They think they know, but they are blind and ignorant. I am really bothered by people like that. I ask if they know why people escape from North Korea. It is an abnormal country that demands loyalty and controls people. I was loyal, my family was loyal, and I believed what they said. The turning point for me was when I saw some South Korean dramas. I realized that South Koreans have freedom to think. I had to risk my life to get out of there, and there are people going there like it is a vacation. Casey Lartigue Jr., co-founder of the Teach North Korean Refugees Global Education Center, was the 2017 winner of the "Social Contribution" Prize from the Hansarang Rural Cultural Foundation and the winner of the Global Award from Challenge Korea 2017. TNKR co-founder Eunkoo Lee translated most of the remarks of refugees from Korean to English. ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM WHATEVER one may think of the merits of Mr. Chandas resolution, asking for the appointment of a mixed committee to enquire into the administration of the Delhi Province, most well-informed persons will agree that Sir William Vincent made an unwarranted statement when he said he did not think it could be said that the pressure of public opinion in Delhi was not felt as it was felt elsewhere. For our part we have been looking in vain, ever since the Delhi Province was created, for any evidence of the pressure of Delhi opinion on either the Delhi administration itself or the Government of India. And one reason why the pressure has not been felt is that Delhi is without any representation either on its own administration or in the Viceroys Council. It is perfectly true, as Sir William stated, that in many cases when a public question had stirred the people of Delhi there had been found a number of members of the Council ready to take it up. But this is clearly no substitute for direct representation. pardeepdhull@gmail.com Kabul, March 13 An Afghan journalist, who has long received death threats, was seriously injured in a bombing in the countrys south, while in the western province of Farah, the Taliban stormed an army checkpoint and killed 10 soldiers, officials said on Wednesday. Also in Farah, a local official was gunned down outside his home on Wednesday, a councilman said. The attacks were the latest violence in war-torn Afghanistan even as the Taliban and the US concluded another round of negotiations held in Qatar, with both sides reporting progress in the talks. Radio and TV journalist Nesar Ahmad Ahmadi was wounded when a sticky bomb attached to his car exploded as he was heading to work in Helmand province. Omar Zwak, the Governors spokesman, said the attack happened on Tuesday in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital. Ahmadi had a leg wound and was transferred to Kabul for further treatment, the spokesman said. He runs the Sabahoon radio station and is also a reporter for Sabahoon TV in Helmand. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in Helmand, the Taliban heartland. Afghan journalists are often targeted in attacks. In January, the Afghan Journalist Safety Committee said in its annual report that it had recorded a total of 121 cases of violence against journalists and media workers in 2018. It also said 17 journalists and media workers were killed last year, once again placing Afghanistan as the worlds most dangerous country for journalists. The International Federation of Journalists and its Afghan affiliate condemned the attack on Ahmadi in Helmand and called for an immediate investigation. In the attack in western Farah province, the Taliban stormed an army checkpoint along the main highway in Gulistan district on Tuesday, killing 10 soldiers, said Abdul Samad Salehi, a member of the provincial council. Reinforcements were sent and the area was retaken and brought under control but five or six other troops remain missing, Salehi added. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack in Farah. On Wednesday, also in Farah, Mohammad Salim Farahi was shot and killed near his home in the provincial capital, Farah city. He was an engineer and the head of the public works department, said Salehi. Despite intensified negotiations between the US and the Taliban to end the 17-year was in Afghanistan, the insurgents have been carrying out near-daily attacks across the country, mainly targeting the government and security forces and causing staggering casualties. The nearly two weeks of talks in Qatar produced two draft agreements between the Taliban and the US government on a withdrawal timeline and effective counterterrorism measures, American envoy Zalmay Khalilzad wrote on Twitter. The Taliban also issued a statement, saying progress was achieved on both of those issues. However, the Taliban have consistently refused to talk with the government in Kabul, describing it as a US puppet. The talks concluded late Tuesday. It wasnt immediately clear when the next round of talks would take place. AP pardeepdhull@gmail.com Washington, March 14 The United States issued an emergency order to ground all Boeing 737 Max aircraft, a decision a number of countries, including India, have taken following the second deadly crash of the plane in less than five months in Ethiopia. "All those planes are grounded immediately," US President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. The United States is one of the major last countries to have taken a decision to ground Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft. These planes would be grounded till further orders, he said. Several other countries, including India, China and all of Europe, have ordered the jets off air after the crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 in Ethiopia on Sunday. The aircraft crashed minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people on board. Four Indians were among those killed. That crash was the second involving the jet, after a 787 Max operated by Lion Air, an Indonesian carrier, crashed into the Java Sea in October similarly and 189 people died. Trump's announcement came as political and international pressure on the airliner started to build. He said all 737 Max planes currently in the air would be grounded upon reaching their destination. Boeing, the company, agree with the action, he added. "Safety is our paramount concern," Trump added. He expressed hope that Boeing will get to the bottom of the problem with the planes, but until then the jets will remain grounded. Boeing said "out of an abundance of caution", it has decided to recommend to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) the temporary suspension of operations of the entire global fleet of the jets. "On behalf of the entire Boeing team, we extend our deepest sympathies to the families and loved ones of those who have lost their lives in these two tragic accidents," said Dennis Muilenburg, president, CEO, and chairman of Boeing Company. "We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution. Safety is a core value at Boeing for as long as we have been building airplanes; and it always will be. There is no greater priority for our company and our industry. We are doing everything we can to understand the cause of the accidents in partnership with the investigators, deploy safety enhancements and help ensure this does not happen again," he said. The FAA has ordered the temporary grounding of Boeing 737 Max operated by US airlines or in US territory. The agency made this decision as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analyzed ann Wednesday. This evidence, together with newly refined satellite data available to FAA, led to this decision, it said. The grounding will remain in effect pending further investigation, including examination of information from the aircraft's flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders. The FAA had said a tweet earlier Wednesday that its "review shows no systematic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft". It, however, had added that it will take "immediate and appropriate action" if issues affecting the airworthiness of the aircraft were identified. An FAA team is in Ethiopia assisting the National Transportation Safety Board as parties to the investigation of the Flight 302 accident. The agency will continue to investigate. PTI vinaymishra188@gmail.com Washington, March 12 Pakistan has assured the US it will deal firmly with all terrorists operating from the country and take steps to de-escalate tensions with India, according to National Security Adviser John Bolton. Such an assurance was given by Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi during a phone call on Monday, Bolton said in a tweet on a day when Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale called on US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo here. The FM (Qureshi) assured me Pakistan would deal firmly with all terrorists and will continue steps to de-escalate tensions with India, he tweeted. Tensions flared up between India and Pakistan after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad killed 40 CRPF personnel in Pulwama on February 14. In Islamabad, Pakistans Foreign Office said the purpose of Qureshis call was to provide Bolton Pakistans perspective on the recent regional developments. Qureshi said that Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan decided to hand over the Indian pilot as a gesture of goodwill towards India. Pakistan wished peace and stability in the region, he was quoted as telling the US National Security Adviser. PTI NSA talks to Qureshi Spoke with Pakistani FM Qureshi to encourage meaningful steps against JeM and other terrorist groups operating from Pakistan John Bolton, US National Security Adviser vermaajay1968@gmail.com Islamabad, March 12 Pakistan has been elected deputy chairman of the general body of the Parliamentary Union of Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), an influential grouping of 57 countries, majority of which are Muslim-dominated. According to an official announcement, Pakistan was elected deputy chairman of the general body of the Parliamentary Union of the OIC member States (PUIC) on Monday in Rabat, Morocco, the Dawn newspaper reported. The PUIC is composed of parliaments of member states of the OIC and was established in Iran on June 17, 1999, with its head office situated in Tehran. The PUIC conference also adopted two resolutions presented by Pakistan related to Kashmir. The election of Pakistan to the forum comes after External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj attended the inaugural plenary of the 46th session of the Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) of the OIC in Abu Dhabi on March 1. She was the first Indian minister to address the OIC meeting. PTI vermaajay1968@gmail.com London, March 12 Britains Parliament rejected Prime Minister Theresa Mays deal to quit the European Union for a second time on Tuesday, deepening the countrys worst political crisis for generations, 17 days before the planned departure date. Lawmakers voted against Mays amended Brexit deal by 391 to 242 as her last-minute talks with EU chiefs on Monday to assuage her critics concerns ultimately proved fruitless. Seventy-five Conservative MPs rebelled against their party's position by rejecting Mays deal. Three Labour parliamentarians rebelled against their leader by voting in favour of the agreement. The vote puts the worlds fifth largest economy in uncharted territory with no obvious way forward: exiting the EU without a deal, delaying the March 29 divorce date, a snap election, or even another referendum are all now possible. May might even try a third time to get parliamentary support in the hope that hardline eurosceptic lawmakers in her Conservative Party, the most vocal critics of her withdrawal treaty, might change their minds if it becomes more likely that Britain might stay in the EU after all. While she lost, the margin of defeat was smaller than the record 230-vote loss her deal suffered in January. If this vote is not passed tonight, if this deal is not passed, then Brexit could be lost, a hoarse-voiced May told lawmakers before her deal was defeated. Lawmakers are now due to vote on Wednesday on whether Britain should exit the worlds biggest trading bloc without a deal, a scenario that business leaders warn would bring chaos to markets and supply chains, and other critics say could cause shortages of food and medicines. Declaring Mays Brexit deal as dead, opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn called on the government to adopt his proposals for a softer Brexit. Their deal, their proposal, the one the Prime Ministers put is clearly dead, the Labour Party leader told the House. Allowing a free vote on no deal shows Theresa May has given up any pretence of leading the country. Once again, she's putting her party's interests ahead of the public interest, a Labour spokesman said. Agencies vermaajay1968@gmail.com Ottawa, March 12 The trip of a lifetime to a safari park in Kenya turned into a nightmare for six members of a family from India in Canada, who perished when the Nairobi-bound Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed minutes after take-off from Addis Ababa. The victims included Pannagesh Vaidya, 73; his wife Hansini Vaidya, 67; their daughter Kosha Vaidya, 37; her husband Prerit Dixit, 45; and their two children Anushka and Ashka Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown was quoted as saying by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. While the Surat-based Vaidya couple were Indian nationals, their daughter, her husband and two children were Canadians of Indian-origin. This is an unbelievably tragic situation for this family, Brown said in a statement. Its a huge tragedy, Manant Vaidya, son of Pannagesh, said. I lost my parents, I lost my sister. I dont have anyone else now. Manant said his sister, who became a Canadian permanent resident in 2003, wanted to take her children to Kenya to visit her birthplace. They thought March break was the perfect time for them to go over there, have fun, he said. According to the Indian Embassy in Ethiopia, four Indian nationals were killed: Pannagesh Vaidya, Hansini Vaidya, Nukavarapu Manisha, a doctor based in the US, and Shikha Garg, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) consultant attached with the Environment Ministry. PTI vermaajay1968@gmail.com Caracas, March 12 Venezuela ordered American diplomats to leave the country within 72 hours on Tuesday after President Nicolas Maduro accused US counterpart Donald Trump of cyber "sabotage" that plunged the OPEC nation into its worst blackout on record. Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza said US diplomats on Venezuelan soil must leave within three days, after talks broke down over maintaining diplomatic "interest sections" in the two countries. "The presence on Venezuelan soil of these officials represents a risk for the peace, unity and stability of the country," the government said. The US State Department had announced on Monday it will withdraw its staff from Venezuela this week, saying their presence had become a constraint on US policy. Washington has taken the lead in recognising opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela's rightful president after the 35-year-old Congress chief announced an interim presidency in January after declaring Maduros 2018 re-election a fraud. Most countries in Europe and Latin America have followed suit. Maduro, who retains control of the military and other state institutions as well as the backing of Russia and China, has denounced Guaido as a puppet of the US. Julio Castro, of nongovernmental organization Doctors for Health, said on Twitter on Monday night that 24 people have died in public hospitals since the start of the blackout. With the blackout in its sixth day, hospitals struggled to keep equipment running, food rotted in the tropical heat and exports from the country's main oil terminal were shut down. Maduro blamed Washington for organising what he said was a sophisticated cyber attack on Venezuela's hydroelectric power operations. Donald Trump is most responsible for the cyber attack on the Venezuelan electricity system, Maduro said in a broadcast from the Miraflores presidential palace on Monday night. This is a technology that only the government of the US possesses. Reuters